In January 1967, two Republicans entered the U.S. House of Representatives and became friends. They couldn't have been more different.
George Herbert Walker Bush, born in June 1924, was a native of Massachusetts and the son of a former U.S. senator, Prescott Bush. He graduated from Yale University, where he was the president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, captain of the baseball team, on the cheerleading squad, and in the Skull & Bones secret society.
Bush moved his family to west Texas after graduation and entered the oil business, becoming a millionaire by age 40. He moved from Midland to Houston in 1958 and lost a U.S. Senate race in 1964 to the Democratic incumbent, Ralph Yarborough. Two years later, Bush was elected to Congress, becoming the first Republican to represent Houston in the House. He was a blue blood in the truest sense of the word.
John Paul Hammerschmidt, born in May 1922, was raised in a family of German descent in a modest home on the outskirts of Harrison. He headed to South Carolina following graduation from Harrison High School in 1938 to attend the Citadel. After a year there, Hammerschmidt received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy but requested a change to allow him to attend the U.S. Military Academy with a friend from Harrison. During the interim, he enrolled at the University of Arkansas. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hammerschmidt joined the Army Air Corps and began pilot training rather than starting school at West Point.
One thing Bush and Hammerschmidt had in common was their admirable service record during World War II. Bush joined the Navy after graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and became an aviator at age 18. He was commissioned as an ensign in June 1943 after 10 months of training. It was three days before his 19th birthday, making him the youngest naval aviator to date. Bush flew 58 combat missions and received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
After being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, Hammerschmidt volunteered for overseas missions. He flew an amazing 217 combat missions, many of which took place over the area of the eastern Himalayan Mountains known as the Hump. Hammerschmidt received four Distinguished Flying Cross medals, the Air Medal with four oak-leaf clusters and three battle stars. He served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves from 1945-60. Hammerschmidt enrolled after the war at what's now Oklahoma State University before being called back home to help run Hammerschmidt Lumber Co. due to an illness in the family. He married Ginny Sharp of Bellefonte in October 1948 and served on the city council in Harrison from 1948-54 and 1961-62.
Hammerschmidt, who died last week at age 92, was active in the Republican Party and eventually was elected state chairman. Winthrop Rockefeller, who had lost his race for governor in 1964 to Orval Faubus, was going to give it another try in 1966 and wanted a strong field of GOP candidates for other offices. He urged Hammerschmidt to take on Congressman Jim Trimble, a Carroll County native who had served the district as a Democrat since 1945. The Almanac of American Politics once described the area this way: "The hills of northwestern Arkansas have always harbored more Republicans than any other part of the state, and for most of the 20th Century this was the only part of Arkansas with two-party politics. The Republicanism here was the ornery type, often encountered in Southern hill country, a vestige of opposition to slavery and the Civil War."
Hammerschmidt forged a coalition of the mountain Republicans and Democrats who were looking for change, defeating Trimble with 53 percent of the vote. In Washington, he befriended Bush, who loved to race up and down the Potomac River in his speedboat with Hammerschmidt as a passenger. Years later, Hammerschmidt would delight in telling how Bush would drive up next to the presidential yacht Sequoia while President Lyndon Johnson was entertaining dignitaries.
The two freshmen established a tradition of getting together occasionally in the House members' dining room of the U.S. Capitol for a lunch of salty country ham from Virginia, grits and turnip greens. Bush served in Congress until 1970, when President Richard Nixon convinced him to run for the Senate again. A moderate Democrat, Lloyd Bentsen, defeated Bush. Even after leaving Congress, Bush kept up the tradition of country ham lunches with Hammerschmidt. He did so as ambassador to the United Nations, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, as director of the CIA and even as Ronald Reagan's vice president.
I was the Washington correspondent for the Arkansas Democrat when Bush was elected president in 1988. About a week after the election, I called Hammerschmidt to ask if he thought the new president might continue the lunch tradition. In that familiar Ozarks drawl, the congressman said: "No. It would be too hard as president. They would have to do a security sweep of the Capitol and shut down Pennsylvania Avenue for the motorcade. The president only comes here for the State of the Union address."
Within weeks of Bush's inauguration, the phone rang in the Capitol Hill basement where I worked. It was Hammerschmidt. He got right to the point: "Well, what I told you back in the fall was wrong. The White House just called. The president will be here at noon for ham, grits and greens." Obviously, we ran the story on the front page the next day.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas' Independent Colleges and Universities. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 04/08/2015