Americans keep odd things up on the mantelpiece, or in the fridge: Dad’s ashes in a biscuit tin or, in Barbara Bush’s case, as her eldest son has just disclosed on national tv, the foetus she miscarried, put in a mason jar and then handed to the teenage George Jr, to take to the hospital. “George, honey, could you hold this while I get the car keys.” “What is it, mom?”
I interviewed Barbara Bush in 1979, when George Sr was vainly challenging Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination. This was a time when her image handlers were trying to get round the fact that with her defiant white hair she looked like her husband’s mother. They sold her as “the Silver Fox” – America’s matriarch.
She was horrible. Bitterness seeped out of her like blood from an underdone ribeye. Every banal question elicited a hiss of derision and contempt.
Years later, some time in the middle of George Jr’s first term, maybe 2003, I was driving west across Texas and decided to swing north from Interstate 20 and visit Midland, where George Jr was partly raised, as was the lovely Laura Welch.
My intention was to visit the crossroads where around 8pm, November 6, 1963, two days after her 17th birthday – yes, she’s a Scorpio — Laura’s Chevy slammed into a ’62 Corvair driven by her friend, some say erstwhile boyfriend, Michael Douglas, who died in the collision, thrown from the car, neck broken. Had he stiffed her as her birthday date and when she saw Michael’s Corvair – new model, novel in contour — crossing her path on the Texan plain, treeless back then — she’d put the pedal to the metal? Chevys in those days were fairly well built and the Corvair a lighter car. Would she have known it was him? The headlights on the Corvair were in a novel configuration, but that’s a stretch. Maybe she was gabbing to her 17-old girl friend in the passenger seat. Still, Michael was part of a two-car cavalcade, with his dad in a car right behind him. That’s a lot of headlight power coming at a 90 degree angle that Laura missed as she shot across the Stop sign.
After paying homage, I went off down to the Midland public library where I thought Laura had once worked. A Texan friend of mine had murmured to me that in her single days Laura “had cut a wide swath through Texas” and I thought I might pick up some gossip from the librarians. The Midland library had two vast sections: “geology” – filled with maps and data pertaining to that wondrous source of so many fortunes, the oil-rich Permian basin. The other big section was “Genealogy”, whither the new oil millionaires went to prove ancient lineage and, in the case of the women, to seek evidence that they were eligible to be a Daughter of the American Revolution.
“Didn’t the First Lady work here?” I asked one of the old battle axes. (Actually, no. The libraries she served were in Houston and Austin.) There was a short silence, and then, in a contemptuous drawl, she called out to her colleague, “He’s asking about the Welch girl.”
I found a small room devoted to press cuttings and memorabilia about the Bush clan. There was a color photo from the early 1950s which told all. It showed George Sr and Barbara at the Midland/Odessa airstrip, greeting Bush’s father, US Senator Prescott Bush and his wife Dorothy. The senator was dressed in formal black suiting and homburg hat, his wife arrayed with matching formality. His son had a cheapo red slicker. Barbara, unsmiling, looked like someone in a photo by Walker Evans of the Okies fleeing west from the Dustbowl.
I remembered what one of the Bush cousins had told me, back in Massachusetts. “We always looked on George as the complete dud of the family. He went to Texas, he never found oil, he stuck Barbara in a trailer park and then gallivanted across the state.” Her daughter Robin died of leukaemia at the age of 4. George Sr spent more and more time on the road, in Mexico and regions south. Her hair turned white.
This is the furious woman who handed the foetus to young George. If George Sr hadn’t been on the road she would probably have thrown the jar at him.
George Jr, by the time he met Laura, was a complete mess, coked up, a heavy drinker. Laura lived at the other end of the Austin condo. Somehow she detected promise and three months later, one day after her 31st birthday, one day before the anniversary of the terminal encounter with Michael Douglas, they married. George was 31 too. “What do you do? ” Barbara asked Laura when George introduced them. “I read and I smoke,” Laura famously replied. KO for the Welch girl!
I saw Barbara on the tv on October 30 of this year, part of a full turn-out by the Bush clan at Arlington stadium for the third game in World Series, the only one the Texas Rangers managed to win, as they went down to defeat by the San Francisco Giants. Barbara looked as bitter as ever, stabbing away at a crossword. Laura seemed bored. George Jr was happy enough. What a family! Brendan Gill, the great New Yorker writer, told me he’d once spent the night in the Bush manse in Kennebunkport, Maine. Sleepless, he descended from his bedroom in search of reading matter. The only volume in the house he could lay hands on was The Fart Book. A tacky family, except for the Welch girl.
Now I’m going to give you four teasers from our latest, subscriber-only newsletter.
“‘Which side are you on?’ is the piercing, distinguishing question of the labor movement and the civil rights movement too. And I never doubted the answer of my friend and collaborator, the great African-American photographer Ernest Withers. Friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and other leaders, Withers covered the movement from Emmet Till’s trial in 1955 through the Poor People’s March in 1968, making images that have been called ‘supreme examples of photography being used to enact social change.’
“So when a headline in the Memphis Commercial Appeal on September 12 of this year proclaimed Withers an ‘FBI mole’ – and Marc Perrusquia’s story was picked up nationally and internationally – I wanted to know the facts. Was he, as The New York Times said in its Week in Review, ‘for many years … a paid informant?’ ‘A guy,’ as activist Dick Gregory told the Washington Post, ‘hired by the FBI to destroy us’? And was this, as the Memphis paper wrote, ‘a covert, previously unknown side of the beloved photographer?’
Read Daniel Wolf’s dissection of the so-called case against Ernest Withers.
“‘Every anti-cannabis law on the books today will remain unchanged if Prop 19 passes,’ attorney Bill Panzer explained on the eve of the vote, ‘with a single exception: a new offense is added.’”
“Another section of Prop 19 prohibited ‘smoking cannabis in any space while minors are present.’ How ambiguous can you get? What if the minor is in the next room? The floor above? An upstairs apartment?”
Read Fred Gardner’s dissection of what was wrong with Prop 19, and the failed bid to make marijuana “legal” in California.
“Is Dr. Paul the pawn of corporate interests or a populist with a genuine mandate from the people? …An in-depth analysis of the donor records for the Rand Paul campaign at the Federal Elections Commission reveals that the vast majority of Dr. Paul’s backers were a motley mix of oil interests, billionaires and millionaires who resided outside the state of Kentucky. Try as I might, in terms of financial support, I could find no populist mandate for Dr. Paul. According to the Kentucky secretary of state’s office, there are 2.9 million Kentuckians registered to vote. As of October 13, 2010, according to the Federal Election Commission’s website, Dr. Paul had received a measly 2,813 contributions from individuals, or less than one per cent of registered voters in Kentucky. Of those contributions, the vast majority of the money raised came from out of state.”
Read Pam Martens on the best senator out-of-state millionaires could buy.
“Steven Emerson, a self-styled terrorism expert, is a guy who has had a profound and corrosive impact on the national dialogue about the Middle East for two decades. His brand of smear jobs has targeted a wide range of individuals and groups across the nation – more with the intent of silencing voices than anything else.”
Read John Sugg on the Rise and Fall of Steven Emerson, “terror expert.”
All this in our latest newsletter, just off the press. Subscribe now and have it your inbox, prontissimo, as a pdf, or – at whatever speed the US Postal Service first-class delivery system may muster – in your mailbox.
I urge you strongly to subscribe now!
ALEXANDER COCKBURN can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.