In the fall of 1968, I reported to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia for pilot training. We started with about one hundred trainees and graduated with about fifty. The washouts were early and frequent. I remember one guy from New York who came back from his first flight in a Cessna 172 looking as green as his flight suit—except for the part on which he had spilled his lunch.
My early experiences in the air were only slightly better. My instructor could smell insecurity, and he did not believe in quiet counseling. On one of my first flights, he suddenly grabbed the yoke, pulled back as hard as he could, and stalled the aircraft. The nose went up, and the plane shuddered. He then shoved the stick forward, and down went the nose. The plane recovered. The trainer had shown me my first stall recovery maneuver. He looked at me and said, “Boy, if you want to be a pilot, you must control this machine and not let it control you.”
I took his advice seriously. I mastered the basics of flying, including loops, barrel rolls, and instruments. When Dad came to pin on my wings, I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment. After flight school, I moved to Houston, where I learned to fly a fighter jet called the F-102 at Ellington Air Force Base. The F-102 was a single-seat, single-engine air interceptor. When you taxied to the end of the runway, put the throttle in afterburner, and felt the engine kick in, it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, you had better pay attention to the moment.
During my service in the Air National Guard.
I loved flying, but by 1972, I was getting restless. I was logging my flight hours during the evening or on weekends, and working during the days at an agribusiness. My duties at the office included conducting a study of the mushroom industry in Pennsylvania and visiting plant nurseries that the company had acquired. It was not exactly captivating work.
One day, I got a call from my friend Jimmy Allison, a Midland political operative who had run Dad’s successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966. He told me about an opportunity on Red Blount’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. It sounded interesting, and I was ready to move.
My commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, approved my transfer to Alabama on the understanding that I would put in my required hours there. I informed the Alabama Guard commanders that I would have to miss several meetings during the campaign. They told me I could make them up after the election, which I did. I didn’t think much about it for another few decades.
Unfortunately, the record keeping was shoddy, and the documentation of my attendance was not clear. When I entered politics, opponents used the gaps in the system to claim I had not fulfilled my duty. In the late 1990s, I asked a trusted aide, Dan Bartlett, to dig through my records. They showed that I had fulfilled my responsibilities. In 2004, Dan discovered some dental records proving I had been examined at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery, Alabama, during the time critics alleged I was absent. If my teeth were at the base, he wisecracked to the press, they could be pretty sure the rest of my body was, too.
I thought the issue was behind us. But as I was landing in Marine One on the South Lawn late one evening in September 2004, I saw Dan’s silhouette in the Diplomatic Reception Room. As a general rule, when a senior adviser is waiting to meet the president’s chopper, it is not to deliver good news. Dan handed me a piece of paper. It was a typewritten memo on National Guard stationery alleging that I had not performed up to standards in 1972. It was signed by my old commander, Jerry Killian. Dan told me CBS newsman Dan Rather was going to run a bombshell report on 60 Minutes based on the document.
Bartlett asked if I remembered the memo. I told him I had no recollection of it and asked him to check it out. The next morning, Dan walked into the Oval Office looking relieved. He told me there were indications that the document had been forged. The typeface came from a modern computer font that didn’t exist in the early 1970s. Within a few days, the evidence was conclusive: The memo was phony.
I was amazed and disgusted. Dan Rather had aired a report influencing a presidential election based on a fake document. Before long, he was out of a job. So was his producer. After years of false allegations, the Guard questions finally began to abate.
I will always be proud of my time in the Guard. I learned a lot, made lifelong friends, and was honored to wear our country’s uniform. I admire and respect those who deployed to Vietnam. Nearly sixty thousand of them never came home. My service was nothing compared to theirs.
In 1970, Dad decided to run for the Senate again. We felt good about his chances in a rematch against Ralph Yarborough. But Senator Yarborough had become so unpopular that he lost his primary to Lloyd Bentsen, a conservative Democrat. Dad ran a good race, but again came up short. The lesson was that it was still very tough to get elected as a Republican in Texas.
Soon there was another lesson. Defeat, while painful, is not always the end. Shortly after the 1970 election, President Richard Nixon made Dad ambassador to the United Nations. Then, in 1973, President Nixon asked Dad to head the Republican National Committee. It turned out to be a valuable lesson in crisis management when Dad guided the party through the Watergate scandal.
Mother and Dad were in the White House the day President Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford took the oath of office. Soon after, President Ford offered Dad his pick of ambassadorships in London or Paris, traditionally the two most coveted diplomatic posts. Dad told him he would rather go to China, and he and Mother spent fourteen fascinating months in Beijing. They came home when President Ford asked Dad to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Not a bad run for a twice-defeated Senate candidate. And of course it didn’t end there.
I admired Dad’s accomplishments. Since my teenage years, I had followed his path closely—Andover and Yale, then service as a military pilot. As I got older, I had an important realization: Nobody was asking me to match Dad’s record, and I didn’t need to try. We were in completely different situations. By age thirty, he had fought in a war, married, fathered three children, and lost one of them to cancer. When I left the Guard in my late twenties, I had no serious responsibilities. I was spontaneous and curious, searching for adventure. My goal was to establish my own identity and make my own way.
For their part, my parents recognized my buoyant spirit and did not dampen it. They did tell me when I got out of line. One of the sternest conversations I ever had with Dad came when I was twenty years old. I was home from college for the summer and roustabouting on an oil rig for Circle Drilling out of Lake Charles, Louisiana. I worked one week on, one week off. After a lot of hot, hard work, I decided to blow off my last week to spend time with my girlfriend in Houston.
Dad called me into his office. I told him nonchalantly that I had decided to quit my job a week early. He told me the company had hired me in good faith, and I had agreed to work until a certain date. I had a contract and I had violated it. I sat there feeling worse and worse. When he ended with the words “Son, I am disappointed,” I was ashamed.
A few hours later, the phone rang at the house. It was Dad. I worried I was going to get another lecture. Instead, he asked, “What are you doing tonight, George?” He told me he had tickets to the Houston Astros game, and he invited me and my girlfriend. I immediately accepted. The experience reinforced the importance of honoring my word. And it showed me the depth of my father’s love.