A Tiny, But Telling, Bush LIe?

by tristero

So I’m reading this obit about William Sloane Coffin in the Times, and when I was least expecting it, I run into Crawford’s Own Messiah:

Another Yale man of the time, President Bush, has spoken of a less affectionate memory: After Mr. Bush’s father lost a Senate race in 1964 to Senator Ralph Yarborough, Dr. Coffin told the young man, then a freshman, student that he knew his father and that the better man had won. (Dr. Coffin disputed the anecdote.)

Awwww, poor George. But then I started to think: Who y’gonna believe? So I thought I’d do some elementary googling.

Those who only care about Big Issues can safely skip this post. But for some reason this story gnawed at me a bit. Perhaps it just seemed so childishly wrong to have read about poor little W in the obit of a man who truly did great things (and a few he had the character to understand he would regret doing until he died). I’m not sure Bush lied here, but…well, here’s what I found.

The earliest telling of this anecdote that I found was 1998 in the NY Times:

Several months after his father lost the 1964 Texas Senate campaign to Ralph Yarborough, the incumbent Democratic populist, Bush said he met Yale’s prominent campus chaplain.
”I ran into William Sloane Coffin, who was the preacher at Yale, supposedly the guy that was there to comfort students,” said the Governor. ”I introduced myself and he said, Yeah, I know your father, and your father lost to a better man.”

Even today, 33 years later, Bush is clearly offended by the statement, and it is one of the many reasons, he says, that he couldn’t wait to get back to Texas, after his graduation in 1968: ”Texas people are more polite. I don’t think a Texan would do that to a son.”

No mention is made of Coffin’s denial. By the way, taken as whole, the Bush puff piece from the Times is a nauseating read. Bush, jokingly described as a “grizzled veteran of the sexual revolution.” Ah, ha ha ha! Like he survived a war rather than (perhaps) managing to avoid the clap as he plowed his way through as many availabe partners he could, which the Times couldn’t quite come out and say that bluntly because, well, because then people might think Bush was a fetid swamp of immorality no different than President You Know Who. But I digress.

Another interesting occurrence is this 1999 Bush puff from WaPo

When George W. Bush arrived in New Haven in the fall of 1964, his father was in the closing days of his first political race. Running against Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat, he was the beneficiary of the largest Republican turnout in Texas history that November, but it was not enough. Riding the coattails of his fellow Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Yarborough defeated his Republican challenger by 300,000 votes.

Not long afterward, Bush decided to look up someone has father had told him he should go see, one of his contemporaries, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain later famous for his anti-war activities.

The greeting he received was hardly what he expected. “I knew your father,” Bush remembers Coffin saying, “and your father lost to a better man.”

Coffin says he has no recollection of his conversation with Bush and says if it happened, he was making a joke. But for Bush it was a jarring signal that Yale was going to be different, a place where he might not effortlessly fit in, where his father’s values were not universally admired.

“You talk about a shattering blow,” said Barbara Bush in a recent interview. “Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I’m not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel].”

And now, Coffin is permitted a denial (Note: there may be an earlier denial, possibly in a letter to the Times, but I didn’t find it) or a dismissal of the thing as a joke. Apparently, Coffin liked to joke around with Yale students so that’s plausible.

But the story’s not adding up as a joke, and oddly enough, Barbara Bush’s seeming confirmation of Bush’s little diss tale is one of the reason the story rings more and more false. Y’see, Bush the Elder (falsely being remembered as the “Good” Bush, rather than the Truly Awful But Probably Not As Dreadful As His Sons Bush) and Coffin were often friends as well as often enemies according to this biography. Indeed Bush The Elder told his son to say hello to Coffin. All this makes me think that if this incident actually happened, then I would imagine that George would have taken a break from all his balling and instead bawled his eyes out to Mama who would have cried to Papa who, in a huff would have gotten on the horn to Coffin and complained. Especially since both George and the Reverend were Skull and Bones (as later was George). And Coffin would have remembered this. Yes, it’s still possible that Coffin forgot. It just doesn’t seem that likely, given how well everyone knew each other, and how influential they were, even in 1964.

What’s also interesting , en passant, is that in this biography we encounter a taste of Bush the Elder’s Texas-style polite, gentlemanly style of campaigning:

In 1964, Bush ventured into conventional politics by running against Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, making an issue of Yarborough’s vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which almost all Southern politicians (including the Republican Sen. John Tower of Texas) opposed. He called Yarborough an “extremist” and a “left wing demagogue” while Yarborough said Bush was a “carpetbagger” trying to buy a Senate seat “just as they would buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.” Bush lost in the 1964 Democratic landslide.

But I digress.

Needless to say this story has been repeated by the right many times. Here’s John Tierney, but without extending the courtesy of Coffin to reprint his denial:

[George W.] soured on the Northeastern establishment his freshman year, when Yale’s famously activist chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, brusquely informed him that his father had lost to “a better man” in the Senate race in Texas against Ralph Yarborough.

To sum up, I dunno if this story is true, but if my life depended on it, I’d say Bush was flat-out lying about Coffin. The story is too pat. For Bush is too innocent a victim of a devilish East Coast liberal lefty whatchamacallit. (Let’s pass over that Young Churchill himself was born in Connecticut.) And it seems to me highly unlikely that any chaplain, even one that prided himself on his hail-fellow-well-met attitude with students would say this.

But again, I don’t know. I”d be curious to hear from anyone who knew Coffin and could speak about his personality. Or anyone who has some information on this little incident. It’s not that important in the scheme of things, but if I’m right and Bush lied about it, it tells us a great deal about his character, namely the extremes he will go to claim victimization. And if the story is true, it does provide insight into the pathological length of time Bush will hold a personal grudge and the truly troubling extremes to which he amplifies what was surely a petty poke in the ribs at Bush The Elder from a longtime friend into a 33 year-long angry, hurt-filled obsession.

To bring all this up to the present: Whether the story is a lie or true, just imagine in either case how psychologically unbearable it must be right now for him if he would dare to peek out of his bubble and realize that he’s loathed by most of the world. The poor guy, it must be eating away at him all the time. No wonder he can’t bear to read newspapers.

I feel sorry for him. Not.