We weren't looking for someone, but I thought this
would be a talented guy we should hire, and he was available," Gow
said. In early 1971, Gow gave Bush a job as a management trainee. He
was required to wear a coat and tie and dispatched around the country
and even to Central America, looking for plant nurseries that Stratford
might acquire. The newly buttoned-down businessman also moved into a
garage apartment that he shared with Ensenat off Houston's North
Boulevard, an old 1920s neighborhood close to downtown.
"We traveled to all kinds of peculiar places, like Apopka, Florida,
which was named the foliage capital of the world," said Peter C.
Knudtzon, another Zapata alumnus who was Stratford's executive vice
president and Bush's immediate boss.
Once or twice a month, Bush would announce that he had flight duty and
off he would go, sometimes taking his F-102 from Houston to Orlando and
back. "It was really quite amazing," Knudtzon said. "Here was this
young guy making acquisitions of tropical plants and then up and
leaving to fly fighter planes."

Trippi is nearly hysterical when he calls Campaign
Manager Bob Beckel and Deputy Manager Mike Ford in Washington. "He
speaks so fast, it was hard to keep up," Beckel recalls. "I said, 'Joe,
What's the bottom line? What do you need?' He said, 'I just need
permission to do whatever I need to do.' ... I just said OK." But there
isn't a lot Trippi can do. He can try to get the Iowa Democratic Party
to sell him more tickets. But there's no way they're going to sell him
$275,000 worth, which is what Trippi estimates Cranston has bought.
And, even if they would, there's no way he can afford to drop that kind
of cash on an off-year event. When it comes down to it, Trippi is going
to have to get his hands on tickets that have already been sold.
Cranston tickets. Lots of them. And yet, once he accepts that
proposition, the solution is almost elegant in its simplicity: What's
to stop him from just marching right up to Cranston's people and asking
for them?
"We started really early in the day," Trippi remembers, reflecting on
how he and an Iowa colleague named Tom Cosgrove solved their JJ
problem. "They stopped about three miles out [from] the staging
area--the Mondale buses coming from Minnesota or wherever they were
coming from." What follows is one of the most ambitious political
makeovers in history. A team of Mondale aides, led by Cosgrove,
plasters the bus with Cranston paraphernalia--stickers, posters,
buttons, everything. Three miles down the road, the bus pulls up to the
Cranston tent, where a Mondale/Cranston supporter gets out and tells a
real Cranston aide he has 52 people on the bus. The aide looks up at
the bus, surely admiring the military-like discipline that has brought
a busload of Cranston supporters from "Los Angeles or wherever" out to
the middle of Iowa this early in the day, and quietly congratulates
himself. He promptly hands over 52 tickets. And it continues like this,
through bus after bus of Mondale supporters: Stop three miles up the
highway, lather the bus in Cranston paraphernalia, drive on to the
Cranston tent, claim your tickets. And the Cranston campaign just keeps
forking them over. Happily. Hell, the more buses that show up, the more
impressed the Cranston people are by their own handiwork. Never does it
occur to them that these busloads of supporters aren't the genuine
article. At least not until the real Cranston buses start showing up.
"Twenty buses pull up, and they're out of tickets," Trippi says, still
amused at the spectacle almost 20 years later. "More Cranston buses
keep pulling up, and they don't have the tickets anymore." Score one
for Walter Mondale.