George Herbert Walker Bush

    Father Bush and his older brother Prescott Junior were so close that, for a Christmas present, they both asked to be able to share a bedroom again after each had been given separate rooms, and George even started school a year early so he could be with his older brother. Both Pres Jr. and Father Bush attended Greenwich Day School through elementary grades, and then both went on to boarding school at Andover in 1937. At Andover, Father Bush made only C+ grades, but when he graduated he was a legend with 25 “distinctions” including captain of the baseball and soccer teams, and president of the Senior class. He also had no demerits, absences or even tardy marks!
Interestingly, a staph infection in his Senior year was so severe he spent 2 weeks in hospital and many more at home, and as a result he repeated his Senior year... which meant he spent 5 years at Andover and graduated in 1942. This extra year undoubtedly allowed him to mature and make up for starting school a year early.
   When he graduated in the Spring of 1942, instead of going on to Yale as his father and brother had done, he wanted to enlist as a Navy pilot, and despite a plea by the commencement speaker that the graduates could best serve their country by going on to college, and against his parents’ wishes, he was sworn into the Navy Air Corps on his 18th birthday. Of course Father Bush was not alone in wanting to enlist just a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. But perhaps he was also partly motivated because his older brother Pres was not able to serve
because of some physical infirmity; part may have been to make up for his father’s embarrassment over the Union Bank affair; and he may also have thought, correctly as it turned out, that he would miss the war if he waited until after he graduated from college. More of a mystery though is why he was accepted since until that time the Navy pilot program only took older candidates. In any event Father Bush remembers seeing tears in his father’s eyes for the first and only time when he accompanied him to Penn Station to see him off to start his training in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
   Father Bush not only became a very good pilot, especially given his age, he adjusted to living and working with people who did not share his very patrician and privileged background. Indeed, one of WWII’s most profound effects was how it broke down class distinctions. After completing his training and becoming the youngest person to receive the Naval Wings, he spent some time in Kennebunkport before shipping out for duty in September 1943. By the Spring of 1944 he was in the Pacific theater, where he flew 58 dangerous combat missions and was shot down twice... and like so many others, he rarely talked about his experiences, or courage during that time. The last time his plane was shot down he parachuted out after trying to get his 2 crew members to also bail out, and was dramatically rescued hours later by a submarine after becoming quite sick from swallowing sea water. In the confusion of war neither his memory, or the memory of others in the area, were consistent on important points... and later some accused Father Bush of not doing enough to save his crew -- in an amazing foreshadowing of
similar accusations by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” against John Kerry when he ran against Son Bush... but thoughts of this last mission and his lost 2 crew members naturally haunted Father Bush for the rest of his life.
      Father Bush met a vivacious red head named Barbara Pierce at a Round Hill County Club dance a couple of years earlier when he was home from Andover for Christmas break and she was home from Ashley Hall, a girls school in Charleston South Carolina. It is surprising both that when they first met she was only 16 and he was only 17 years old, and that by all accounts the attraction was immediate, strong, and lasting.
    Barbara was the daughter of Marvin Pierce, who was related to the 14th president of the United States, Franklin Pierce. Marvin graduated from Miami University in Oxford Ohio, not far from Prescott's family home in Columbus, Ohio, and then earned graduate degrees in engineering from MIT and architecture from Harvard. Since his family lost their fortune Marvin became a corporate officer with McCalls magazine, rising eventually to be its publisher and president. Barbara’s mother, the former Pauline Robinson, was from Marysville, Ohio, only 25 miles northeast from Prescott's family home in Columbus, Ohio. Pauline’s father was a long-time justice on the Ohio Supreme Court, and she had been a beauty at Oxford College, in Oxford Ohio when she and Marvin met. Barbara had a weight problem when younger and never felt she could compete with her older sister who was considered the beauty of the family. And although Barbara got along well with her father, her relationship with her mother was more problematic. Indeed, when her mother was killed in a freak automobile accident in 1949 she did
not travel from Texas for the funeral.
    Father Bush and Barbara corresponded while he was in training, and she spent time with Father Bush at Kennebunkport in August 1943, and they considered themselves engaged when he left in September for the Pacific. The pressing and very real dangers of war speeded up may timetables, including perhaps theirs. While Barbara attended Smith College for one semester, she wasn’t into studying and soon dropped out, and waited until they were finally married on January 6th 1945. She says she married the first person she kissed, and remarkably that seems to be true.
    By September 18, 1945 Father Bush was out of the service and off to Yale where he joined 8,000 other ex-servicemen in a special program for returning veterans that allowed them to get their degree in 2 ½ years by going year-round. Their first child, a son named George Walker Bush, was born in New Haven on July 6, 1946, and while Father Bush he did better at academics (Phi Beta Kappa) at Yale than at Andover, he also graduated with numerous distinctions including captain of the baseball team. He was also one of only 15 Juniors tapped, as his father had been, for the Skull & Bones society. After playing in the collegiate baseball World Series in the Spring of 1948 in Kalamazoo, Michigan he was ready to start a career. He interviewed for a job with Proctor & Gamble but was not offered a position, which was a severe disappointment. But as noted in his father Prescott’s history, it seems highly unusual that Proctor & Gamble couldn’t find a job for an Andover standout, a war hero, an outstanding Yale graduate and Bonesman... especially since his father personally knew P&G’s President, and was on P&G’s board... that is unless Grandfather Bush let them know he preferred that Father Bush join him in his investment banking firm which had made an exception to their anti-nepotism rules to allow Father Bush in!
    In any event, just as Father Bush surprisingly had bucked his father’s wishes to stay in school and went instead to war, so to here he and Barbara surprisingly decided to leave the East Coast and its “obvious opportunities” and instead go to work for another family friend, Neil Mallon’s Dresser Industries, in Texas where he hoped to learn the oil business. Father Bush -- and Barbara -- didn’t want the Connecticut Wall Street life, and more significantly he said he “did not want to be in the shadow of” his “very powerful and respected” father, and Barbara made similar comments about wanting to make a break from her mother. Surely this break with their parents' lives was one of the most interesting and significant turns in their own lives. Certainly Texas was about as far geographically and culturally as one could get from Greenwich, Connecticut. Indeed, Barbara had never been further west than Ohio and had never met a Texan... and thus it also was a place neither family would likely visit.
    Interestingly, Father Bush’s jobs were menial in the extreme, including painting oil rigs and sweeping floors, which again raises speculation that either Neil Mallon was trying to take the edge off Father Bush’s wealthy background... or that Prescott was still hoping Father Bush would return to his "proper place" in the Brown Brothers Harriman firm. Post-war housing was so difficult that Father Bush’s new family shared a bathroom with two ladies of the evening at the first place they lived in Odessa, Texas; and in April 1949 they left for Huntington Park California where Father Bush worked as a laborer on a pump assembly line of another Dresser company -- and even joined the Steelworkers of America. Indeed it wasn’t until Father Bush had paid his tough dues and left Dresser to seek his own way in the oil fields that Neil Mallon finally offered him good advice and help in starting his own oil exploration company in Midland, Texas.
    As Father Bush was building his business he was traveling out of town most of the time... and never took Barbara along. Rather Barbara stayed home to raised the children and admitted to feeling jealous of Father Bush's travels and his more interesting business and traveling companions. Certainly this was not unusual for the time, nor was the fact that Barbara had 2 domestic helpers to help her run the household.
    A daughter Robin was born in 1949, followed by Jeb in 1953, Neil in 1955, Marvin in 1956, and finally Doro in 1959. However, the big family trauma was the death of Robin of leukemia in 1953 when she was 4 years old and older Son Bush was 7. Although when their family doctor diagnosed this terminal illness, he also said the best thing they could do was not tell anyone and try to live the final 6 months as normally as possible. Instead, George and Barbara sought out the best doctors in New York where heroic, invasive, but futile efforts were made to prolong Robin’s life. Barbara’s hair started turning white after Robin’s death, and she was depressed. A picture of Robin was hung in a prominent place in their home thereafter, and indeed they continued to have children until they finally had another daughter, Doro, in 1959. Interestingly, while Son George knew his sister was sick, he didn’t know how sick until he saw his parents drive back home after being gone for months with Robin in New York and when he looked in the back seat to see his sister, she wasn’t there. Barbara wondered if they did the right thing with Robin, and by not telling Son George... who also carried scars from this trauma.
    Midland was not the Texas outpost of Odessa, but rather was a haven for many East Coast Ivy League graduates who had come Midland to seek their fortunes. And while Father Bush had help from Uncle Herbie obtaining financing for his oil ventures, he was a good and lucky businessman who was the first in his group to “bag the elephant” i.e. make a million dollars. After Father Bush’s success in the oil fields he moved his family to Houston in 1959 where he pursued success in the new off-shore drilling platforms. Father Bush was still frequently away from home, and as Jeb said: “Even when we were growing up in Houston Dad wasn’t at home at night to play catch. Mom was always the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline. In a sense it was a matriarchal family.”
    After “securing his family’s finances,” Father Bush turned to Texas politics although at the time Republicans in Texas were a distinct minority. He campaigned hard in his first race for the U.S. Senate in 1964 and took some policy positions he later regretted including being opposed to LBJ’s civil rights bill, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, increases in foreign aid, and spending more money on anti-poverty programs. He also supported the war in Vietnam and the U.S. withdrawal from the UN if China was admitted – which of course was ironic since he later
became Ambassador to the UN, and then under Gerald Ford, the head of the US Liaison Office in China. Although everyone in the family helped on the campaign, and Barbara was so organized that she had carefully wrapped Christmas presents in the summer, Father Bush was devastated when he lost as LBJ won in a landslide.
    He ran again in 1966 for a new Republican safe House seat in Houston in 1966. This time one of his father's friends who was an executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency came to Texas to help with the campaign and after some initial polling confirmed what Barbara had found during the 1964 campaign, i.e. that "because probably more more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect," he should focus not on the issues, but on his likeability -- and that in the new media age, politicians were "celebrities." After Father Bush won, Barbara joined Father Bush in moving to Washington, D.C., leaving 14 year old Jeb in Houston so he could finish ninth grade. But the move didn’t mean the family was together since Father Bush traveled back to Houston every week that first term. In Washington, Barbara enrolled sons Neil (who had been diagnosed with a dyslexia) and Marvin in St. Albans, an exclusive Episcopal boys’ school, and Doro in the National Cathedral. Grandfather Bush meanwhile worked his connections to get Father Bush a prime committee assignment on the House Ways & Means Committee. Although Father Bush didn’t admit his father’s help in getting this plum assignment, attributing it to “luck” and “being in the right place at the right time,” no freshman had served on this Committee since 1904.
    Since he campaigned against civil rights everyone expected he would oppose the Fair Housing Act which prohibited discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. But after the assassination of Martin Luther King in the spring of 1968, and knowing he would not face opposition for re-election, he voted with nine other Texas Republican congressional representatives and the House majority for the bill. His vote was also influenced by a trip to Vietnam where he saw so many black soldiers putting their lives on the line in Southeast Asia while knowing that they were still treated as second-class citizens in their own country. Many of his constituents fiercely opposed the open housing bill and immediately after his vote the Bush family home was flooded with hate mail and crank calls. A week later Father Bush flew back to Texas to give a speech. The crowd started hooting and screaming as he spoke, but instead of pandering to the crowd Bush took a stand. “Some how it seems fundamental that a man – if he has the money and the good character – should not have a door slammed in his face if he is a Negro or if he speaks with a Latin American accent,” he said. The catcalls gave way to applause and soon George Bush was looking at a sea of standing supporters. He later described the event as the greatest moment in his political life.
     After eighteen months of service in the House, Father Bush had his sights set on higher office and with Grandfather Bush’s help, started a campaign to be Nixon’s Vice Presidential running mate in 1968. Nixon never considered Father Bush to be a serious candidate since he had limited experience in government and hadn’t won a statewide office... and inexplicably picked Maryland’s Governor, Spiro Agnew as his running mate. Trying to move up the ladder, Father Bush decided to run for Senate for a second time against Yarborough in 1972, but
when Benson beat Yarborough in the Democratic primary Father Bush was faced with a much more formidable opponent and lost.
    Father Bush’s next stops were Ambassador to the UN and head of the first Liaison to China where he was impressed that the Chinese Foreign Service assigned some of its best people not to substance, but to protocol. The Chinese believed that a congenial negotiating atmosphere could compel foreigners to relax pursuit of their own interests. Nixon and Henry Kissinger thought this absurd, but Bush thought it ingenious. Twenty years later he would cite the relationships he had built through informal visits, handwritten letters, and telephone calls with such leaders as Honsi Mubarak of Egypt and Francois Mitterrand of France as crucial in building the international coalition in the first Gulf War.
    Father Bush went on to serve as Chair of the Republican Party during the depths of the Watergate scandal (and when Son Bush was at Harvard!), then head of the CIA (where he tried to improve accountability and management by breaking down communication "silos," which according to many old-timers, also critically broke down secrecy and security), and then Reagan’s Vice President for 8 years. Father Bush had supported abortion rights and called Reagan’s economic plan of increasing the defense budget while cutting taxes to be “voodoo economics;” but when Reagan asked him to serve as his Vice President Father Bush said he could support Reagan’s platform “wholeheartedly,” and at one point said “I’m for Mr. Reagan blindly.”
    In preparing for his own run for president in 1988, he was described as a “compassionate conservative,” he and Barbara met with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at the Vice-President’s mansion and told them they liked watching the Praise the Lord (PTL) Club, and he appeared at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and talked about his Christian life-changing experiences. And during his 1988 presidential campaign against Massachusetts's governor Mike Dukakis he won the race by following Lee Atwater’s attack politics and using the infamous Willie Horton ads that greatly upset his mother. After he won and after the swearing-in ceremony, when he first entered the Oval Office as President, his first visitor was his mother Doro, who was wheeled in in a wheelchair. When someone asked if this was "the greatest experience of her life," with her indomitable spirit she nodded and said "The greatest thing in my life... so far."
    Unlike Son Bush, Father Bush drew a stark distinction between governing and campaigning, saying “The American people are wonderful when it comes to understanding when a campaign ends and the world of business begins.” Although mostly bored with domestic policy he made a very pragmatic decision to go along with raising taxes to balance the budget... despite his “read my lips” campaign pledge not to do so. Few Reagan appointees held over to Father Bush’s presidency and Reagan appeared in the White House exactly twice during his term.
    And although arguably the U.S. sent mixed signals to Saddam Hussein before he invaded Kuwait, Father Bush built a very broad and strong coalition to successfully remove Saddam’s troops. For numerous reasons his record popularity after the Gulf War eroded enough for Bill Clinton to win in 1992 -- aided by the Third Party run by Ross Perot. Father Bush and his family took this defeat to a “morally inferior" man very hard. But while he left the White House with an estimated $4 million in personal wealth, through lucrative speaking, board, and consulting fees as well as some inside investments, he soon increased that wealth to an estimated $20 million. As Barbara Bush said: “Politics has been very good to this family.”

[Post Note: GHW's unhappiness with his son's policies was dramatically evident by his significant work with Clinton to raise relief money for various causes -- and to the extent that GW somewhat ruefully noted that Bill Clinton had become his father's "new best friend." Jaws also dropped when GHW gave an award to his son's most outspoken critic, Ted Kennedy.]