Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

Harry Treleaven was a TV-obsessed nerd who perennially bored people by rhapsodizing over the technical details of his craft. Militantly indifferent to ideology, his last triumph was rewiring the image of George Herbert Walker Bush, the new congressman from Houston who’d lost a Senate race as a Goldwater Republican in ’64. Men-on-the-street in Houston had thought George Bush likable, though “there was a haziness about exactly where he stood politically,” Treleaven wrote in a postmortem memo. Treleaven thought that was swell. “Most national issues today are so complicated, so difficult to understand,” he said, that they “bore the average voter.” Putting 85 percent of Bush’s budget into advertising, almost two-thirds of that into TV, he set to work inventing George Bush as a casual kind of guy who walked around with his coat slung over his shoulder (he was actually an aristocrat from Connecticut). Since the polls had him behind, Treleaven also made him a “fighting underdog,” “a man who’s working his heart out to win.” His ideology, whatever it was, wasn’t mentioned.