by Curt Smith
In the 1973 film The Way We Were, the leading man is a novelist who loves sports and collects friends. “In a way,” Robert Redford wrote as Hubbell Gardner, “he was like his country. Everything had always come too easy for him.” In a way, everything came too easy for Bush until “the date which will live in infamy”—pivoting his life and World War II.
December 7, 1941, was a Sunday. “It was duty, honor, country,” Bush later said. “It is our country that had been attacked.” Next day George, seventeen, tried to enlist at the Navy draft office but was told to return at age eighteen. In June 1942 he graduated from Phillips. A half century later, Poppy could still recite how the commencement speaker, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, defined the U.S. soldier as “brave without being brutal, self-confident without boasting”—a mot that seemed to apply to Bush himself.
In his 1989 note to Winston, Bush observed that it might be
more appropriate [for him, revisiting Andover] to read brief remarks in Chapel. It was in this very place in June 1942 that . . . Stimson spoke. In those days Chapel was compulsory . . . and yes, there was [a] lot of restlessness, squirming, yawning at the boring sermons, listening when a good one came along . . . But somehow what I got out of it all here was a sharpening of my own faith—belief in God—and perhaps more subtly, the recognition of our Country being one Nation under God. As president I know for [a] fact already that one cannot be President without Faith in God.
In 1942 Stimson had also urged Andover’s graduating class to get a college education before putting on a uniform.
“George, did the secretary say anything to change your mind?” his father said about enlisting.
“No, sir, I’m going in,” said Bush. “I listened to what he had to say, but I’m not taking his advice.”
Bush “went on into Boston” and enlisted in the Navy as a seaman second class. He was sworn in the day he turned eighteen.
In 1942 Bush trained with, among other aviators, baseball titan Ted Williams at the Chapel Hill Naval Air Station. On June 9, 1943, completing a ten-month course, he got wings and his commission as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve at Corpus Christi, becoming the nation’s then-youngest naval aviator. Bush was assigned to a torpedo squadron (VT-51), which in 1944 was placed on the destroyer USS San Jacinto as a member of Air Group 51. Mates looked at Bush’s lanky skin and bones and coined a nickname: “Skin.” Little came “easy” any more. In the Pacific theater, now-lieutenant Bush flew missions over Wake Island, Guam, and Saipan.
On September 2, 1944, he piloted a VT-51 Grumman Avenger aircraft to destroy the radio transmission center on Chichi Jima. The Avenger was struck by Japanese antiaircraft flak and its engine set on fire, yet Bush completed his run, emptied the tonnage, and scored dead-on hits. Each wing burning, Bush flew out to sea to give himself, RM2 John Delaney, and Lt. (j.g.) William White a better chance to parachute. One crew member—it is unknown which—was trapped on the plane; the other’s chute didn’t open; both died. Piloting a low-wing plane with a high tail, Bush hit his head against the elevator, pulled his rip cord early, jumped out, and braved more fire. “I had this huge gash on my head as I hit the water,” he told David Frost. “It was about as close to death as you can get.”
Bush landed near an island controlled, he feared, by the Japanese. He waited four hours in an inflated raft, had his opened parachute wash onto the beach, and “paddled like hell, I mean, set a world record trying to stay away from that island.” Glad to be alive, blaming himself for the loss of his crew, he was courageous under tension, facing death with stark resistance. Finally, Bush was spotted by U.S. fighters, who circled above till the lifeguard submarine USS Finback arrived. A bearded ensign climbed up the conning tower. “A lot of other guys came around, pulled me out of the water, and down we went,” he said to Frost. In 1960 John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign ballyhooed his wartime PT-109 boat heroism. In 1988 Bush barely mentioned his Avenger attack on the Japanese. Even that triggered Dorothy, still averse to self-importance.
“George, I understand you’re bragging about your war record,” she said in her son’s telling.
“No, ma’am,” he insisted. “I’m not bragging.”
“Well, you be careful about that,” Mother said. He was.
Bush stayed aboard the Finback for a month, helping rescue other pilots. “I went on deck at night, stood watch on the tower, and looked out at the dark. The sky was clear. The stars were brilliant.” As a boy he had heard “Mother or Dad give a Bible lesson each day at breakfast.” Now, alone, Bush felt “calm, inner peace—God’s therapy.” Dorothy and Prescott Bush’s son grew up in a hurry. He soon returned to the San Jacinto, the Philippines, and then, his squadron replaced, America in late 1944. His scorecard listed fifty-eight combat missions, a Distinguished Flying Cross for completing his mission under fire, three Air Medals, his destroyer’s Presidential Unit Citation, and a reverence for Lincoln’s “last full measure of devotion.”
Once Hugh Sidey asked John F. Kennedy, born in 1917, what he recalled of the Depression. “Really nothing,” said JFK, his family worth north of $400 million, making the Bushes look like hired help. “It didn’t have an effect. But ask me about the war—that’s what I remember.” Bush remembered too. Until then he had lived a sheltered life in Greenwich and Andover: tended grounds, catered personnel, a chauffeur to and from the Country Day School. Many friends and their families thought, in Mike Huckabee’s hand grenade of a phrase, that “summer is a verb,” placing portfolio stock above human stock.
“You’d see it at Newport, the Hudson Valley near Hyde Park, today the Hamptons and Nantucket,” said a friend. “Their ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ goes ‘seven yachts a swimming, six homes a owning, five golden rings.’” It would have been easy for Bush to graduate from poor little rich boy to upper-class swell—a hedge fund manager, stock overseer, less working stiff than aging golden boy—someone who never dirtied his hands, sweat a mortgage, or fret about a bill. That didn’t happen. Why?
Later, in the White House, I asked Bush how politics had taught priorities. Did perks and prerequisites matter? Power’s promise— potential or achieved? Instantly, he answered, “What matters? Faith, family, friends.” Sidey, the journalist who with Newsweek’s Tom DeFrank perhaps knew him best, understood. “What is left [when power passes] is the infinite tenderness and love within a caring family. He had the best. So much of George Bush is family.” Above all, Bush’s parents bequeathed a fierce belief in equality, theirs the Puritan canon of inner-directedness. I did not grasp this for a long time, knowing Bush, like the vast majority of Americans, from afar.
Bush’s postwar biography typified his generation’s, and especially an adopted Texan’s. It personalized his new state’s beauty of bluebonnet fields and peach orchards and distant scrub brush and vastness to the landscape—a sense of impatience with limits of any kind. In December 1944 Bush was reassigned to Norfolk Navy Base, put in a training wing for new torpedo pilots, then assigned as a naval aviator in a new torpedo squadron, VT-153, at the naval air station in Grosse Ile, Michigan. On January 6, 1945, Bush, on leave, married Barbara Pierce, daughter of Pauline and Marvin Pierce, the latter ultimately president of McCall Corporation, publisher of the enormously popular women’s magazines Redbook and McCall’s. The wedding was at the First Presbyterian Church in Rye, New York.
Born June 8, 1925, Barbara attended Rye Country Day School (1931–37) and boarding school (1940–43) at Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina. She first met Bush at a 1941 Christmas dance in Greenwich, then was invited to Andover’s 1942 spring prom. “Dear Poppy, I think it was perfectly swell of you to invite me to the dance and I would love to come or go or whatever you say,” she replied. “I wrote Mother yesterday or the day before and rather logically, I haven’t heard from her, but I’m sure she is going to let me come or go, etc. I’m really all excited but scared to death too. If you hear a big noise up there, don’t worry, it’s just my knees knocking.” They were engag
ed less than two years later. He was the first boy she ever kissed.
George had named three wartime planes for her—Barbara I, II, and III. She dropped out of Smith College to marry. They then shared their first home in a tiny apartment in Trenton, Michigan, near Poppy’s assignment in Grosse Ile. The Bushes’ marriage outlasted the typewriter, long-playing record, carbon paper, mimeograph machine, vacuum tube, flashbulb, eleven American presidencies, four major U.S. wars, and half a century of losing for the Chicago Cubs. Their six children were George Walker Bush (born 1946), Pauline Robinson “Robin” Bush (1949), John Ellis “Jeb” Bush (1953), Neil Mallon Bush (1955), Marvin Pierce Bush (1956), and Dorothy Bush Koch (1959). In September 1945 the Japanese surrender ended the war, Bush honorably discharged.
Bush had been accepted by Yale University, Dad’s alma mater, before he joined the Navy. As Timothy Naftali’s book George H. W. Bush notes, the young man in a hurry now began the school’s accelerated program to graduate in less in three years, not in four. Again his schedule rivaled Phillips Academy’s: member, later president, Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity; member, Phi Beta Kappa and, like Dad, the cheerleading squad and the secret society Skull and Bones; Yale’s baseball captain, a good-field, no-hit left-handed first baseman. A famed photo shows Babe Ruth, dying of throat cancer, giving Bush the manuscript copy of The Babe Ruth Story for the Yale library before a 1948 game at Yale Field. The yearbook includes Bush, in uniform, with a description: “Captain of championship college baseball team [making the first two (1947 and 1948) College World Series finals], while completing college in 2 1/2 years after war service. Phi Beta Kappa—Economics.”
In lore, Bush, graduating from Yale, closed his eyes, threw a mental dart at a 1948 map, and chose remote rural Texas to forge an oil wildcat niche. In fact, Poppy had already found his example—Dad’s. Business became a self-sufficient means to the end of entering politics. (Prescott was 1947–50 Connecticut Republican Party finance chairman, barely losing a 1950 U.S. Senate bid.) “Yes,” George said, “it’s what he taught me. Make some money so that you can serve.” He spurned a possible 1948 Rhodes scholarship, “figuring I couldn’t afford to bring Barbara and George [now two] to England.” Instead, packing their red Studebaker, Bush accepted family friend Neil Mallon’s offer to start in Texas oil as an equipment clerk with Dresser Industries, a subsidiary of Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott had been a board director for twenty-two years.
The oil-field supply company transferred Poppy to California as a salesman, then back to Midland, Texas. Bush’s Navy squadron training also shipped him from one base to another, from Michigan to Maryland. The Bushes became happy wanderers; by 1989, on entering the White House, they estimated having lived in twenty-eight houses. “They were can-do, like the age. Anything was possible, because there weren’t any limits,” said J. Roy Goodearle, a postwar wildcatter and Bush’s first campaign manager for 1962 Harris County (Houston) Republican chairman. (Goodearle, now deceased, was also my father-in-law.) “You had to be agile, a lot of rivalries”—think TV’s Dallas. “Background meant a lot less than ability.” To the natives’, and perhaps Bush’s own, surprise, the Yalie found that skill and gift for friendship could dwarf even lacking a Texas drawl.
“Lived the dream,” Poppy said of the postwar boom. “People from other states as neighbors, barbecues, helping each other. My four boys playing baseball. I coached it. And Barbara—there were tens of thousands of kids in Little League. There were times I thought she car-pooled ’em all.” In 1953 their first daughter, Robin, became ill of leukemia. The Bushes called doctors in Houston and New York, tried every medical treatment, held Robin, and wept with her, said Barbara Bush. Nothing worked. In 1988, sensing that David Frost felt he had made her cry by referencing the illness, Mrs. Bush said, “I’m not sad. I only cry when I am happy. I think of Robin as a happiness now, so please don’t feel uncomfortable.”
Barbara’s husband reacted to, then later recalled, the almost unbearable differently—still Dorothy Bush’s son. Barbara had always been independent—as a child, swimming, tennis, bike riding, a rabid reader. Strength now yielded to depression—and to brown hair that became the white color it remained. As his wife anguished in a way only death can cause, Bush, stoic and protective, held her, “wouldn’t let me go, saved me from falling into a dark hole,” she told Frost. “I think we grew closer because of Robin.”
Unable to save their only daughter—Daddy’s girl, as any papa knows—Bush buried grief deep inside, immersed in how “it was inexplicable to me—why an innocent child?” At the same time, he believed that “God works in wondrous, mysterious ways.” Instantly, the tragedy could resurface. More than half a century after Robin’s death, describing her, Bush’s voice caught, choking, unable to proceed.
“We felt helpless,” Bush said about Robin. When she was diagnosed with leukemia in early 1953, the Bushes had never heard of the word. Eight months later they donated her body to science and began giving time and millions of dollars to cancer research. Robin is buried at the Bush Library at Texas A&M University next to where her parents will one day lie.
At least business allowed a measure of control. In 1951 Poppy and a neighbor, John Overbey, founded the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company, an independent firm into which Bush parlayed heart, work, curiosity, and Wall Street family capital. Uncle George Herbert Walker Jr. contributed nearly $500,000. Other investors included Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer, a family friend. In 1953 the firm merged with another independent to form Zapata Petroleum, Bush choosing the name of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, portrayed in the 1952 Oscar-winning film Viva Zapata! Poppy evidently liked the crew: Marlon Brando in the lead; Anthony Quinn, Oscar-winning supporting actor; Elia Kazan, director; and John Steinbeck, writer.
In 1959 the company divided operations between inland, drilling in Texas’s Permian Basin, and offshore oil and gas. Bush headed Zapata Offshore Co., moving his firm and family to Houston. He was white, like Texas’s hierarchy; Protestant, like most of the populace; slim, with an athlete’s gait; and had manners Miss Manners would envy, with a self-mocking way, not newly formed, that was neither bogus nor offensive. All this drew a stranger to him in oil and later politics, making you forget his less hardscrabble than privileged youth. It also explains—this is crucial—why except for Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the Orion of the Grand Old Party (GOP), Bush is the only Republican of our time to become beloved in the autumn of his life.
In 1940 presidential nominee Wendell Willkie—to Franklin Roosevelt aide Harold Ickes, “a simple barefoot Wall Street lawyer”—was a supernova, a preternatural creation of Republican newspapers and businessmen. He died in 1944, largely a non-person in his party.
Bush, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford each told me that Thomas Dewey, the 1944 and 1948 Republican nominee, was the one person of their lifetime who should have been but wasn’t president. “Dewey would have been a fine president,” Bush said. “A stiff and formal candidate, but his record as [1943–54 New York] Governor and as a prosecutor was superb.” He died in 1971, still easier to admire than like.
Another New York governor, Nelson Rockefeller, essence of the Eastern establishment, welcomed conservatives’ hatred, wrapping his portfolio in arrogance: “I’ve never found it a handicap to be a Rockefeller,” Rocky barbed. Long before his death in 1979, many said Rockefeller’s handicap was that he wasn’t a Republican. Barry Goldwater spent the last third of his life a GOP pariah for losing the 1964 election so badly that it made the liberal Great Society possible. Unfairly, Bush 41 vice president Dan Quayle became a late-night TV punch line. Ironically, two-term President George W. Bush aided Dad’s rehabilitation.
Republican 2008 nominee John McCain earned his fortune— estimated net worth, more than $100 million, surpassing either Bush— the old-fashioned way: marrying it. His daughter Meghan also made Madonna appear square. Mitt Romney and Joe Average were Venus and Mars. Only Bush 41 wore so durably that he survived his own
annus horribilis—the 1992 campaign, which cast him as more dilettante than family and working man—to become revered by Americans “who give birth and grow and love and laugh and die, bonded and sustained by the land,” wrote Hugh Sidey, “which is the oldest way of life Americans know.”
In December 2012, brooking severe bronchitis, Bush was hospitalized in Houston at eighty-eight, Chief of Staff Jean Becker saying that “most of the civilized world” had contacted her after he had been placed in intensive care. “Someday President George H. W. Bush might realize how beloved he is, but of course one of the reasons why he is so beloved is because he has no idea.” Bush’s response was typical, advising Becker, “Tell people to put the harps back in the closet.” He left Methodist Hospital in January 2013.
What explained what Bill Clinton, by then Bush’s improbable charity tag-team frère, called 41’s “capacity for giving and receiving love? I guess it’s surprising because we opposed one another. But George Bush is a man I love.” Some of Poppy’s traits were deep down, thus initially hard to spot; others superficial, yet telling. The most obvious denoted an old upper-class family. Only later were his middle-class values grasped, building a bridge that Willkie through Rocky to Romney and McCain never crossed. To me—my youth forged by Middle America—Bush’s background had at first seemed so different as to inhabit a separate globe.
TWO
Finding the Water Fine
I was born in 1951, the first of a thirteen-year storybook of unusual national harmony. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Theodore H. White observed, “I cannot now deny my recognition that the Eisenhower [later, Kennedy] years in Washington were the most pleasant of our time.” Among other things, they began with Joseph Stalin’s death, Mount Everest’s conquest, and the birth of I Love Lucy, starring Charlie Chaplin’s lineal heir. They ended on a sun-glint Texas afternoon in November 1963. “Just another era?” said a friend. “Maybe. But somehow I think those years meant more.” Even now, something remains, if but a vague recollection, of the oneness that Ronald Reagan, among many from an earlier steppe land generation, felt with his childhood. “Everyone has to have a place to go back to,” Reagan said of his heartland Pleasantville. “Dixon [Illinois] is that place for me.”
