by James Mann
It was a raw, tense confrontation. In his memoir four decades later, George W. reflected, “I was a boozy kid, and he was an understandably irritated father.” Those words were a fitting summation of his life in the early 1970s. George W. Bush was drifting. He dabbled in politics, thought of going back to school, moved from Texas to Alabama and back, tried one job and then another. Throughout the period, his self-description as a “boozy kid” remained apt.
Bush would later describe the aimlessness of these early-adult years as a matter of choice. He said he viewed the decade after college as a time to explore, explaining that he did not want to be tied down or to look for a career. Yet the fuller explanation is that this period of rootlessness was also a partial reflection of his own shortcomings. Sometimes he sought to establish his footing in a career but was unable or unwilling to do so.
In 1971, while still in the National Guard, Bush applied to law school at the University of Texas. His application was rejected. Later that year, Bush flirted with the notion of running for the Texas legislature, even floating the possibility in the Houston newspapers. After discussing the idea with his father, he backed away.
Finally, in late 1972 George W. was admitted to Harvard Business School. He hadn’t even told his parents he was applying. Instead, Jeb broke the news to their father as he was trying to defuse the “mano a mano” confrontation, apparently to show their father that George W. was not the ne’er-do-well he may have seemed.
George W. entered Harvard in the fall of 1973 and spent the next two years there studying management, finance, and the other elements of the school’s curriculum. He stood out among his more buttoned-down classmates by chewing tobacco, wearing his National Guard jacket to class, and leading expeditions to the Hillbilly Ranch, a country-music bar in downtown Boston. Many of his classmates spent their time putting together résumés and applying to Wall Street or to Fortune 500 companies. Bush had no interest in that sort of career. He left business school with as few commitments as when he entered and with as little a sense of what he wanted to do in life.
On the spring break before he graduated, on his way to visit a friend in Arizona, he passed through Midland, Texas, the town where he had grown up. An old family friend encouraged him to come back and start his own oil business there. Bush quickly took to the idea and decided to move there in the fall.
He was once again following the path of his father: passing up Wall Street, moving to Texas, hoping to make money in oil. The summer after business school, George W. spent a month visiting his parents in Beijing, where his father was now serving as the head of the U.S. liaison office there. On July 6, 1975, George H. W. Bush wrote in his diary: “Today is George’s twenty-ninth birthday. He is off to Midland, starting a little later in life than I did, but nevertheless starting out on what I hope will be a challenging new life for him. He is able. If he gets his teeth into something semipermanent or permanent, he will do just fine.”
In the mid-1970s, Midland was recovering from a prolonged economic slump. Oil prices were shooting upward, thanks in part to the impact of the Arab oil embargo. Once again, it made economic sense to explore and to drill, much as it had when Bush’s father made his money there in the 1950s. George W. moved into a tiny apartment and soon began to cultivate old-timers in the oil business, including his father’s friends. He began as a land man, studying deeds and other records to see who owned the mineral rights to various parcels of land.
He drove from courthouse to courthouse in West Texas, gaining a toehold in the business. In June 1977, he incorporated his own company, whimsically calling it Arbusto, the Spanish word for “bush.” Over the following years, that name would eventually spawn a series of jokes. When the company’s explorations hit some dry holes, some in the oil industry pronounced Bush’s firm “Are-bust-o,” meaning “bust,” as in “out of money.” Meanwhile, Texas journalists noticed that Spanish-English dictionaries give another English word for arbusto—“shrub”—and the newspaper columnist Molly Ivins eventually turned “Shrub” into a lasting nickname for George W. Bush.
Before Arbusto had even commenced operations, Bush put the oil business aside to try his hand at politics. Bush’s grandfather and father had both run for office in middle age, after having become wealthy businessmen. George W. had no desire to wait so long. In 1977, George Mahon, the Democratic congressman representing West Texas, announced that he was stepping down from the House seat that he had held for more than four decades. Although Bush had been back in Midland for less than two years, he announced his campaign for the seat. He positioned himself as a defender of Texas oil interests, denouncing the federal government, proclaiming the virtues of private enterprise, supporting free trade and, above all, deregulation of government controls in energy markets.
Bush campaigned hard, traversing the district for more than a year. But he lost because he was not as experienced as he thought. His Democratic opponent, Kent Hance, repeatedly painted Bush as an outsider. He reminded audiences that Bush had gone to Andover and Yale. “We don’t need someone from the Northeast telling us what the problems are,” said one Hance campaign ad. When Bush, who was an avid jogger, put on a bland TV ad that showed him jogging, Hance told voters, “The only time folks around here go running is when somebody’s chasing ’em.”
Bush sought to defuse these attacks with a sense of humor. When one critic said Bush was not a native Texan, he replied, “No, I was not born in Texas because I wanted to be close to my mother on that day.” But he generally refrained from launching his own counterattacks. The campaign taught him an important lesson about politics: he vowed that he would play rougher in future campaigns. He would not sit back and let his opponents define him but would seek to define them first. Bush never lost another campaign.
The 1978 race left one other enduring legacy. Bush turned to a young political operative in Austin named Karl Rove for some informal help, and Rove became Bush’s closest political adviser for the remainder of his career. The two men had first met briefly at the Republican National Committee in Washington several years earlier while Bush’s father was serving as the RNC chairman and Rove was the president of the College Republicans organization. In the late 1970s, George H. W. Bush took on Rove as an adviser in his campaign for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. But Rove also assisted George W.’s congressional race from a distance, and they became good friends and allies: Rove was much closer, in age and way of thinking, to George W. than to his father.
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Bush remained single and unattached through his twenties. But in the late 1970s, his personal life altered dramatically. The changes started in 1976, soon after he turned thirty. He had gone out with a group that included the tennis star John Newcombe near the family vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and locked into a prolonged drinking contest. While driving home, he was stopped by a local policeman who discovered that Bush was unable to walk in a straight line. He was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and pleaded guilty. Bush took this as a sign that it was time for him to settle down. At a party in Texas the following summer, his friends introduced him to Laura Welch, a librarian working in Austin who had also grown up in Midland. Bush asked her out to play miniature golf the following day and began to commute to Austin to see her. They were married within four months in a small ceremony in Midland. Four years later, Laura gave birth to twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna.
His choice of a spouse was revealing. Laura came from the town where he grew up; she had no connection to any of the elite institutions where he had gone to school nor to the spheres of politics or business in which he spent most of his working days. She was also considerably more reserved and humble than his mother. Indeed, for the first decade after their marriage, Laura considered Barbara Bush to be distant, imperious, occasionally insulting, and “ferociously tart-tongued.”
Following his failed congressional race, Bush turned his energies to his fledgling oil venture. He raised several million doll
ars for Arbusto, relying heavily on the contacts of his uncle Jonathan Bush, a money manager with extensive ties to Wall Street and Greenwich. In 1982, he renamed his company Bush Exploration, a change that enabled him to capitalize more directly on the family name at a time when his father was serving as Ronald Reagan’s vice president.
George W. kept on looking for a big strike, but he never found it. During the 1980s, the price of oil collapsed, leaving Midland a city adrift. A local bank folded; offices and vacation homes were left empty; luxury automobiles were returned to car lots. Laura Bush recalled how one popular bumper sticker in West Texas at the time said: “Please Lord, let there be another boom. I promise I won’t piss it away next time.” In 1984 Bush merged his company with Spectrum 7, a firm owned by William DeWitt Jr., the son of the owner of the Cincinnati Reds. Bush served as chairman of the new firm, with a staff of fifteen. Yet this new company was soon in worse shape than Arbusto or Bush Exploration, and in 1986 Bush and his partners sold out to Harken Energy Corp., a Texas firm, which kept him on the board of directors.
During Bush’s decade in the oil business, his investors lost millions of dollars amid the slump in oil prices. In some instances, however, those who gave money to his businesses later received appointments in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. George W. himself did not lose financially, because he was doing business primarily with other people’s money. He started Arbusto in 1976 with his own $15,000 investment. He finally left the business with $840,000.
Questions were later raised about how he left the business. In 1990, while he was still a board member and at a time when the stock price of Harken was falling, Bush sold his shares in the company, but he did not file the required forms disclosing this fact for eight months. His action triggered a formal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of whether Bush had violated the rules governing insiders, but in the end the SEC closed the probe without taking any action against him.
For George W., as for his father, the oil business in Texas proved to be merely a stepping-stone, not a lifetime career. As he entered his forties, he was ready for something else.
2
The Rising Politician
The turning point in George W. Bush’s life came in the mid-1980s, when during a two-year period he turned forty, gave up alcohol, and gravitated increasingly toward religion.
His driving-under-the-influence arrest ten years earlier had prompted him to get married and settle down but not yet to give up drinking. By Bush’s own account, drinking had become a regular staple of his evenings: generally the “three B’s of bourbon, beer, and B&B” [Benedictine and brandy]. “I was drinking routinely, with an occasional bender thrown in,” he later acknowledged. It was not enough to disrupt his workdays, and he was usually able to burn off the impact of the alcohol by going out for a run. But his drinking had become an embarrassment. “When he’d poured enough, he could be a bore,” his wife, Laura, recalled. At one polite dinner with his parents’ friends in Maine, he froze the table conversation by asking one woman, “So, what is sex like after fifty?”
In the summer of 1986, George and Laura Bush and their closest friends decided to celebrate his fortieth birthday at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. He drank heavily well into the night and woke up the next morning with a severe hangover. Later that day, he told his wife he had decided he would never have another drink. Afterward, he admitted he “craved alcohol” for a while, and he began to eat more and more chocolate, thus requiring him to run even more often. But he kept his vow and stayed sober.
During this same period, Bush also turned toward religion, not the established Episcopalian beliefs of his parents but evangelical Christianity. The change started, he said, with a meeting in Kennebunkport with Billy Graham, a longtime friend of the Bush family, and with regular meetings of a Bible study group back home in Midland. Barbara Bush was less than pleased with her son’s evangelism, at one point objecting when her son told her that only those who had accepted Christ as their savior could go to heaven.
These two changes were inherently personal in nature, and they have frequently been portrayed as a trade-off: Bush gave up drinking and took up religion. Yet to put it in this simplistic fashion misses the larger political context in which both changes occurred. A fuller explanation would be that George W. gave up drinking and took up evangelical religion at a time when his father was preparing to run for president.
In April 1985, a few months after Ronald Reagan’s reelection, George H. W. Bush, who was then vice president, summoned his entire family to a gathering at Camp David. Before the assembled Bush clan, the political strategist Lee Atwater outlined plans for a presidential campaign in 1988. The family was put on notice that all of them could be subjected to scrutiny by the press or by rival campaigns.
Laura Bush later pointed to the imminence of his father’s presidential campaign as one of the factors behind her husband’s decision to quit drinking. One of George W.’s closest friends in Midland, Joe O’Neill, confirmed this point, noting that Bush “looked in the mirror and said, ‘Some day, I might embarrass my father. It might get my dad in trouble.’”
George W.’s turn to evangelical religion took place against this same backdrop. During the 1980 and 1984 elections, Reagan had succeeded in winning over large numbers of evangelical Christians who had earlier supported President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. Under Reagan, evangelical voters grew in influence, particularly within the Republican Party. On television, Christian leaders such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jim Bakker gained a nationwide following. As vice president, George H. W. Bush tried to court these evangelical leaders, but they remained mistrustful of his establishment leanings, and the vice president and his wife seemed similarly ill at ease with them. (At one point, Barbara Bush referred to some evangelical leaders as “these fakes.”)
Gradually, their eldest son took on a role within the Bush campaign as the contact person in dealing with the Christian right. A former Assembly of God minister named Doug Wead, who had long been close to Bakker, began sending unsolicited memos to the Bush staff and Atwater about evangelicals as a voting bloc and about possible strategies for winning them over. Eventually, the vice president and his family decided to bring Wead on staff, where he was assigned directly to George W. When he reported for work, George W. told him, “You’re mine. You report to me.” Wead proceeded to arrange meetings with evangelical groups and leaders, seeking to persuade them to support George H. W. Bush instead of Pat Robertson, who had decided to run for president himself in 1988.
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The Bush family was at first uneasy about George H. W. Bush’s choice of Lee Atwater to run his 1988 presidential campaign. Atwater was a political pro who moved from candidate to candidate and had no strong or long-standing ties to the vice president; indeed, others in Atwater’s consulting firm were working for a rival Republican presidential candidate, Jack Kemp. Upon first meeting Atwater, George W. and Jeb Bush expressed skepticism about how loyal he would be.
“How do we know we can trust you?” George W. asked Atwater. Jeb Bush added, “What he means is, if someone throws a grenade at our dad, we expect you to jump on it.” Taken aback, Atwater countered with an invitation: one of the Bush brothers should come to Washington, D.C., to work alongside Atwater and observe what he was doing. However casually this offer may have been made, George W. decided to accept it. In 1987, he and his family packed up and moved to Washington, leaving Midland for good.
Bush took an office near Atwater’s at campaign headquarters and, to his surprise, he and Atwater proceeded to become close friends. Both men shared the view that politics was a rough business in which candidates had to attack their opponents without mercy. Bush had no specific title or responsibilities; in his own words, he served as a “loyalty enforcer.” Reporters covering George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign portrayed George W. as a political version of Sonny Corleone, the tempestuous son in The Godfather, who was quick to act against percei
ved enemies. “Junior was the Roman candle of the family, bright, a sparkler—and quick to burn the fingers,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in his book What It Takes. When Newsweek published a cover story on George H. W. Bush with the belittling headline “The Wimp Factor,” George W. called the magazine to vent the family’s collective anger. For a time, he cut off the magazine’s access to the vice president.
Under Atwater’s tutelage, George H. W. Bush ran a negative, mudslinging campaign against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis and won the election easily. Afterward, with his parents moving into the White House, George W., Laura, and their daughters returned to Texas, settling in a new home in Dallas.
At this point, George W. had no company to run; he was free to find something new. He already had an idea in the back of his mind: one of his former business partners, William DeWitt Jr., told him late in the 1988 campaign that he had heard the Texas Rangers baseball team might be for sale. Bush didn’t have enough money to purchase the team on his own, but during his first months in Dallas he assembled a group of investors, some of them from Texas and others brought in by DeWitt from Cincinnati. By the spring of 1989, the deal was concluded: Bush became the new managing partner for the Rangers. The investors paid $75 million for 86 percent of the team; of this sum, Bush’s own investment was $606,000.
For Bush, running the Rangers was a dream job. In childhood, Bush had been a baseball card collector, a Willie Mays fan, and a memorizer of baseball statistics. For the following five years, he spent his days supervising the Rangers’ business operations, including payroll, trades, salary negotiations, and the construction of a new ballpark in Arlington. He let others handle the details while he served as the public face of the team, promoting it to Rotary Clubs and chambers of commerce throughout the state and representing it in dealing with other club owners and the baseball commissioner. He attended most of the team’s home games, chatting with players, fans, vendors, and ticket takers. In the process, he gained visibility and favorable publicity throughout Texas.
