After the Philadelphia convention, George W. Bush will not join the family on its annual August pilgrimage to Walker’s Point. He’ll be going to his new ranch. “It’s my property, my place,” he declared to a pair of NEWSWEEK reporters with a slightly defiant edge in his voice. “I know it’s going to be a hundred degrees out there, but I like it.” The subtext was not subtle: George W is a Texan, not a Northeasterner. More to the point, he is his own man, not just his father’s son. Bush reveres his father, but he takes pains to play down the “son of” label. “My father,” he says, “did not try to mold me with a life plan.” In his jokey, animated way, Bush imitated for a moment the blowhard expression of a pompous Old Blue instructing his son: “Now, boy, you have to join Skull and Bones,” the elitist and secret society at Yale that is an incubator for the Eastern establishment. “Never happened,” said Bush.
Yet Bush has faithfully, even doggedly, followed in his father’s footsteps–to Andover and Yale (and Skull and Bones), to become a fighter pilot, a Texas oilman and now, perhaps, a president. It has been said that Bush surpasses his father in only one arena, albeit a crucial one: as a pol. The younger Bush appears to have a better common touch, at least in Texas, where Bush Sr. lost two races for the U.S. Senate and Bush Jr. has been elected governor twice. “Dubya’s” twang seems more genuine than Bush Sr.’s love of country music and pork rinds. George W himself has fostered this perception by commenting that the difference between him and his father is that “he went to Greenwich Country Day School and I went to Sam Houston Elementary” (sometimes he says “San Jacinto Junior High,” his other Midland, Texas, public school).
It’s a flip line, as George W is the first to concede, and obscures a deeper and more subtle truth. In fact, Bush’s father can be a very deft politician when he wants to be. Just as he learned the basic values of loyalty and honor by watching his father, George W could not miss his father’s skill at ingratiation–the easy jokes, the tolerance and ability to listen, the funny, warm notes Bush writes by the score. In the clan there is a remarkable adaptability, a knack for overcoming class and region and the burden of inherited wealth that saps many once illustrious families. Despite their Social Register pedigree, the Bushes have for decades managed to largely mirror American manners and morals. Sen. Prescott Bush embodied midcentury Republican moderation: he played golf with Ike and actively supported Planned Parenthood. George H.W. Bush eagerly, if sometimes clumsily, signed on to the Reagan Revolution in the ’80s. With his loose and ironic manner, his preppy populism, George W is a comfortable figure to many Americans in this bull-market age, from soccer moms to good ole boys.
But there are crucial differences between George the father and George the son. Their roots were planted not just in different regions, but, more important, in different eras. George Herbert Walker Bush came of age in the 1930s and ’40s, when the old WASP establishment was still on top, assured of its pre-eminence, secure in its values. In 1986, during the Iran-contra scandal, the then Vice President Bush could stoutly write his mother, “These are not easy times here, but these are times that the things you and Dad taught me come to the fore. Tell the Truth. Don’t blame people. Be strong. Do your Best. Try Hard. Forgive. Stay the Course. All that kind of thing.” Bush Junior, by contrast, reached maturity in a more unsettled time, when the WASPs were beginning their long, slow decline, battered by social mobility and the mistakes of the Best and the Brightest in Vietnam. When George Bush Sr. was a schoolboy, the beau ideal was still Dink Stover, the hero of Owen Johnson’s novel “Stover at Yale,“about a fictional Yale football hero who is brave, clean and humble. By the time George W was in prep school, the great antihero–subversive and sarcastic–was Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.“Their war experiences were significantly different.George Sr. joined up to fight in World War II, “the Good War,” and won a medal for bravery. George Jr. sidestepped Vietnam by flying for the National Guard, defending, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd acidly wrote, “Texas against Oklahoma.”
Bush Senior, who enjoys ribald jokes, is not as pure as Dink Stover, and Bush Junior, a devout churchgoer, was never as alienated as Holden Caulfield. But George Jr., by his own description, is “anti-elitist.” He discovered his political skills by making fun of the establishment, not by defending it. His ironic, just-a-regular-guy manner is more accessible and comfortable to the average Joe than his father’s sometimes goofy, yet still somehow reserved manner. Bush Junior seems more comfortable at seeking higher office; his father, at occupying it.
As America weighs whether it wishes to elevate the first father-son dynasty to the White House since the Adams family (John Adams, 1797-1801; John Quincy Adams, 1825-1829), it is possible to show how George W became the skilled politician he is today. The keys to certain attributes of his character–his irreverence, his disdain for “arrogant liberal intellectuals,” his complex admixture of superficiality and self-discipline–lie half-hidden in Bush’s formative years, in his schooling and especially in his loving but demanding relationship with his parents. Some of it comes from living in Texas until he was 15. And much of it comes from spending nine of the next 13 years at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School.
Growing up in Midland, then a small town of dust storms and sudden oil wealth, seems to have been a kind of idyll for young George. He played baseball and killed frogs and in some visceral way became Texan, though not entirely. His mother would not put up with the casual racism of the Midland of that time and washed out his mouth with soap when he used the N word. Driving the family to Maine in the summer with their maid, Mrs. Bush took picnics, rather than eat in segregated restaurants. Midland had a sizable community of Ivy Leaguers (streets are named after Harvard and Yale as well as oil companies) who maintained ties to the East. But young Bush apparently had little sense of dynastic duty. “I didn’t know Andover from Adam,” he says of his father’s old school, where he was shipped at the age of 15.
A year after George Bush arrived at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., in the fall of 1961, the school was featured on the cover of Time magazine under the headline intensity and excellence at U.S. prep schools. Andover was “very competitive, very competitive,” Bush recently recalled. He described the school as “dark, cold, could be lonely, and hard.” His own experience, at the beginning, was “forlorn.” On his first English paper the teacher wrote, “disgraceful.” As an athlete, Bush warmed the bench on the basketball and baseball teams.
Bush knew he would never measure up to his father, who had been voted “Best All-Around Fellow” at Andover. But the son had other gifts. From his mother, he says, he had learned how to be a “quipster.” At home managing a family of five children while her husband often traveled, Barbara Bush had developed a quick and sometimes caustic wit that she used on her eldest when he acted up. “Georgie” learned to dish it right back. At Andover, Bush became known as “the Lip.” Sarcasm was the argot of the day for many prep schoolers. (Almost everyone had a derisive or gross nickname, like “Guano,” “Gangrene,” “Tinkerbell” and even “Chink.”) The era when admission to Andover virtually guaranteed admission to Harvard or Yale was coming to a rude end by the mid-’60s. Suddenly insecure, preppy teenagers used cynicism as a defense. Life magazine found the trend so disturbing that it ran a feature article on what one Exeter student labeled as “negoism,” a self-conscious mocking of the Old School Tie. After a while, it became “hard for me to speak a simple declarative sentence,” recalled one of Bush’s classmates, Tom Seligson. If anyone was gauche in the dorm or dining room, his schoolmates would sneer, “Quite the guy.”
Some of his classmates date Bush’s “smirk” to Andover days. He was “in there” with a popular crowd that affected a kind of shabby chic, wearing taped-up loafers and faded madras jackets. At a school where “sink or swim” was the informal motto, few points were handed out for being kind to the weak. Still, Bush was generally regarded as democratic, willing to occasionally sit with the nerds at lunch, even ask their opinions. Bush was not hardhearted. As a 7-year-old, he had endured the unthinkable tragedy of losing his little sister, Robin, 3, to cancer. For all the barbed teasing between mother and son, Barbara Bush could recall the day, less than a year after Robin died, when she overheard little Georgie tell his playmates, “I have to be with my mother–she’s so unhappy.”
To Barbara, her eldest had always been a sensitive child who demanded attention. In her memoirs Mrs. Bush wrote, “My mother said she hated to be in the room with the baby, for if she took her eyes off him, George looked hurt.” Robin’s loss was felt more intensely by George W than by his brothers, the oldest of whom was an infant when Robin died. He was bound closely by grief to his mother, who was having a difficult time coping with the death of her adored baby daughter. At Andover, Bush’s sensitivity was hidden beneath the wisecracks, but he was alert to changing moods and eager to lighten up dark moments.
During senior year, Bush finally earned Big Man status as head cheerleader (hard to explain back in Texas, where cheerleaders were girls). Bush found his role as a showman. He was more comfortable with flamboyance and acting outrageously than his father. George Sr. had been repeatedly instructed by his formidable mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, never to show off in public, that actions speak louder than words. George Jr. does not remember similar lectures from his father. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, he could recall his parents whispering “ssshh” when he acted up and occasional stronger interventions, like his father trying to teach him about sportsmanship after he hurled a bat in frustration in Little League. But his more vivid memory is of being left alone to grow up his own way while his father traveled the world on business, then politics.
George Bush Sr. freely owns up to being a father of the 1950s, not the ’90s. In an interview with NEWSWEEK he recalled, “I didn’t think, ‘Well, I’ve got to get home tonight to do my stamp collection with George W’.” Bush Sr. talked plenty about baseball at the dinner table, but rarely, if ever, about politics. Just as his father, Prescott, did not deliver heavy sermons about the “duty to serve,” George Sr. imposed no noblesse oblige on his children. That is, not overtly. The example of grandfather and father was obvious to young George, or, as he was called by some in Midland, “Little George.” In some ways the discretion and ease of manner of the Bush forebears made their high standard even more difficult to live up to. “Effortless grace” was the informal code of conduct of the old WASP establishment. Achievement was supposed to be made to look easy. Only strivers and arrivistes sweated.
This was partly a facade, of course. President Bush strained and grasped as he climbed up the political ladder. While George W has more braggadocio than his father and grandfather, they were not above a little showing off. Both Bushes describe the patriarch, Prescott Bush, as “scary.” Barbara, not easily intimidated, was so frightened of Prescott that when she heard him yelling at young George W for pulling the dog’s tail, she hid. “I backed in my room and thought, ‘The kid is on his own’,” she recalled. Tall and formidable, the Wall Street investment banker usually preferred to be formal and reserved. Yet even Prescott could be a ham: a devoted member of the Yale singing group, the Whiffenpoofs, Senator Bush was known to burst into song on the campaign trail.
At Andover, George W. Bush was “unembarrassable,” recalled classmate Sam Allis. As a cheerleader, the Lip dressed in drag and wore a wig. He mocked Andover’s competitive atmosphere in the spring of his senior year by emerging as a self-appointed High Commissioner of Stick Ball, a pickup game played on the lawn with a tennis ball and broom handle. Posing as “Tweeds” Bush (a takeoff on Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed) in a top hat and shades, he could get 800 sullen teenage boys laughing and roaring with his japes and riffs. “It was during the spring of my senior year that my political talents first blossomed,” Bush wrote in his campaign book, “A Charge to Keep.” Spoofing schoolboy games is not exactly winning the South Carolina primary, but at Andover Bush developed the confidence to cajole and lift a crowd.
Bush’s humor was subversive, but he was hardly a revolutionary. He made the school’s stodgy dean uncomfortable with racy skits, but his goal, after all, was to boost spirit for the Exeter game, not to overthrow the administration. He was an entertainer, not a visionary. Andover students may have been cynics, but they were conformists.
Bush doesn’t seem to have even noticed the first student radicals. They were few and far between when he arrived at Yale in the fall of 1964, but their numbers steadily increased, fed by disaffection over the Vietnam War and the growing restlessness of the ’60s. Bush became the quintessential frat boy, president of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the preppy-jock house that boasted the “longest bar in New Haven” and a party-hearty reputation. Bush’s memories of the rising unrest over the war are vague. Yale was changing with the country, taking more public-school students, with higher SAT scores and more serious intellectual pursuits, but Bush cruised along with a Gentleman’s C. He was not a social snob. His Skull and Bones classmate Donald Etra invited Bush to meet his family in New York. “He was as comfortable and interested being in an Orthodox Jewish home as he would have been in Kennebunkport,” recalled Etra. At the same time he was out of step with the growing seriousness of the Yale campus. Fraternities and even the revered senior societies were fading into what the yearbook called a “benign irrelevance.” Undergraduates were starting to look down their noses at fraternity high jinks. “There was a liberal orthodoxy that pervaded the place, and if you challenged that it wasn’t that you had a point of view, but that you were dumb,” remembered Bush’s Yale roommate Terry Johnson.
Bush was caught in a strange limbo, trying to catch up to his father at a time when the traditional measures of success counted for less and less. One of George W’s classmates at Yale, Robert Reisner, recalls running into the younger Bush on “Tap Night” at Yale in April 1967. Bush was visibly anxious that he would not be among the 15 Yale juniors chosen by Skull and Bones when the clock tower struck 8 that evening. He seemed to be trying to reconcile himself to not following his forebears, including his father and his grandfather, into the society’s mausoleum-like “Tomb.” Young Bush suggested instead that he might join a less self-serious senior society, one more in keeping with his frat-boy image, called Gin & Tonic. As it turned out, he was duly tapped by his father’s old society. “I was honored,” Bush recalls today. Still, the honor was slightly diminished in the eyes of many of his classmates at the time. An unusual number of Yale men turned down Skull and Bones’s tap that year; senior societies had begun to seem anachronistic in that anti-elitist age.
Bush today insists that he had a great time at Yale and doesn’t recall any unpleasantness. But somewhere along the way he developed a sizable chip on his shoulder. He would later carp about the “self-righteousness” and “intellectual superiority” of the East Coast liberal establishment that took over institutions like Yale in the ’60s. As early as 1964, he had a run-in with one of the avatars of the new order, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain who had turned on his own Andover-and-Skull-and-Bones past to become a fiery radical, advising students to resist the draft. Bush bitterly recalled Coffin’s telling him, after his father had lost the 1964 Senate race in Texas to Ralph Yarborough, “I knew your father, and he lost to a better man.” To Bush, Coffin embodied the “heaviness” and “guilt” of the liberal East.
At a time when Yale students agonized endlessly over what to do about the draft, Bush does not appear to have talked much about his own choice. To volunteer for Vietnam would have required an act of boldness and outright defiance. Seeking battle was almost unheard of among undergraduates: it was said that more Yale students were dying in motorcycle accidents than in combat in 1969. At the same time, according to his Yale friend Roland Betts, Bush did not want to politically embarrass his father. Bush Jr. took a respectable but easy way out, joining the Texas National Guard.
Bush seems to have been somewhat bored and restless after college, finding only limited meaning in learning how to fly obsolete jets (F-102s) for the Texas Guard. He tangled with his father one night after driving, drunk, into some garbage cans outside their house in Washington. “Want to go mano a mano?” Bush challenged his dad. The father did not need to fight his son. The mere utterance of the words “I’m disappointed” was chilling to the younger Bush, who still visibly winced as he recalled his father’s quiet scorn in an interview with NEWSWEEK. Barbara Bush said that her husband often gave the children the “silent treatment” when they misbehaved, peering over his reading glasses with cold disapproval. Still, the father gave his children room to grow up on their own. When George W got his driver’s license, his father was willing to let him drive from Texas to Maine, despite Barbara’s strong misgivings. The Bush children “knew their father trusted them and their mother didn’t,” Mrs. Bush archly recalled with a laugh.
Determined to make it on his own, Bush did not tell his father that he was applying to Harvard Business School. The “West Point of Capitalism” was not inundated with applicants in the anti-business early ’70s, so Bush got in, despite mediocre grades that kept him out of his first choice of grad schools, the University of Texas Law School. Bush posed as a redneck rebel at Harvard, wearing his National Guard flight jacket and cowboy boots and chewing tobacco as he sat at the back of the class, spitting into a paper cup. But he showed early signs of the self-discipline that would become more characteristic as time went on. He kept up with the grueling casework, particularly in a course called Human Organization and Behavior. Here were formal lessons in organizing and managing people that Bush had only intuited as an Andover cheerleader. He developed his basic approach to leadership at Harvard’s training ground for future CEOs. The essence was to think Big Picture, don’t get caught in the details, delegate and decide. Bush whizzes through briefing books today, preferring to listen rather than read, but his friends say he has an ability to cut to the chase. If Bush seems less substantive than a Bill Clinton–or an Al Gore–he can blame a Harvard education.
Bush hardly mentions Harvard today. He loathed what he saw as the university’s liberal, intellectually pretentious atmosphere. On weekends at the home of his aunt Nancy Ellis, who lived in Boston, Bush railed against the “smugness” of Cambridge. He pined to get back to Texas. While Bush’s classmates headed for Wall Street, Bush went to look for a job in the oil patch, again following his father, whose portrait hangs in Midland’s Petroleum Hall of Fame.
Bush has talked incessantly about the “entrepreneurial” spirit of Midland, where a geology degree from the University of Oklahoma counted for more than a Harvard or Yale education, and Andover was scoffed at by his friends as “Bendover.” But Bush was hardly self-made. In many ways, he found sanctuary in Midland, where his old friendships and connections made for a much easier, safer life than bucking the Eastern intellectual snobs. He likes to praise the risk-taking gumption of the oil “wildcatters,” but Bush himself got most of his seed money from his father’s friends and old Skull and Bones mates. He was a fairly cautious oilman. He drilled near established wells–in effect looking for singles and doubles, not home runs. Even then, he was unlucky. Unlike his father, who arrived in Texas during a boom time and rode the wave, Bush suffered some serious downturns in the business and had to put up with friends calling his business, Arbusto Co., “Ar-bust-o.”
The ’70s and early ’80s are seen as Bush’s years in the wilderness, a time when he was drifting about in a sort of restless, perpetual adolescence. He certain-ly dressed like a sophomore, shuffling around town in Chinese slippers and his friends’ castoff clothes. “If you were going to throw a shirt away, he’d say, ‘Hey, are you getting rid of that?’ " recalled a buddy, Charlie Younger. Bush liked to down beer around the barbecue. Yet he had a goal. He seems to have sensed from the beginning that politics was his calling. He toyed with running for Congress from Houston in 1971 until his parents and other wiser heads discouraged him, and he mounted an uphill campaign for the House of Representatives in 1978. He lost, narrowly, to Kent Hance, a good ole boy who made fun of Harvard and Yale and Bush’s fondness for jogging. “I got out-countried, and it’s not gonna happen again,” says Bush, who has since been known to act like he has a “chaw” in his cheek.
Bush ran without any particular qualifications beyond his last name. He was somewhat oblivious to the political power of his family ties. At Andover, he never boasted about his family’s prominence, but when a friend expressed surprise at learning that Bush’s grandfather was a U.S. senator, Bush said with a shrug, “I thought you knew that.” Before his ‘78 congressional race, he went to a “candidate’s school” set up by the Republican Party. David Dreier, now a Republican congressman from California, recalls young Bush’s excitedly telling him, “I’ve got the greatest idea of how to raise money for the campaign. Have your mother send a letter to your family’s Christmas-card list. I just did, and I got $350,000!” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Bush that not everyone has Barbara Bush’s Rolodex full of senators and statesmen and GOP fat cats.
For all his late-night carrying on in this period, Bush was clearly looking for some order and stability in life. He found it in his wife, Laura, a quiet, pretty librarian with a calm, sure manner. She was unfazed by the competitive frenzy of the Bush family. When the matriarch and chief-of-games, grandmother Dorothy, coolly eyed Laura at Walker’s Point and inquired, “What do you do?” Laura responded just as coolly, “I read.” Laura soon had Bush attending church suppers, and reportedly helped end his drinking by giving him a choice: “Jim Beam or me.” It may also be revealing that the man described as his “closest friend” today is a teetotaling, Bible-studying pillar of the community, Don Evans.
Bush’s newfound faith did not squelch his natural irreverence. In church one Sunday, the congregation around him was distracted during the sermon by a beeping sound: he had been impatiently clocking the preacher with his watch. Bush has hardly rounded off all his rough edges. He still “bounces off the walls,” says a family friend, who adds, “Laura will say, ‘Oh, George, will you just go for a run?’ " His own family understands that his sobriety has been a test of will. “He could easily be out of control,” his sister, Dorothy, told NEWSWEEK. “He has said that there is a fat person inside him who is trying to get out. He has tremendous discipline.” Bush has not entirely tamed his temper, and when his naturally squinty eyes narrow to slits, he can be surly. He has been known to snarl at reporters who have written unflattering pieces about the Bush family.
Bush has never stopped trying to please his father. Some friends believe that he quit drinking in part to avoid embarrassing his parents. At one dinner party at their home, an inebriated George W supposedly turned to the matron at his side and inquired, “So, what’s sex like after 50?” When his father began gearing up to run for president in 1987, Bush moved his family to Washington to help. Within the campaign, he enforced loyalty to “the Man,” as he referred to his father, sometimes a little too hotly. He was well matched with Lee Atwater, the brilliant bad-boy political operative who masterminded Bush’s ‘88 campaign, and whose subversive, edgy humor would have made him right at home in Bush’s crowd at Andover.
Though George Bush Sr. sometimes disapproved of his son’s footloose and, as he put it, “feisty” ways, he was patient about letting him find his own way and was intensely proud when he did. While he was being interviewed for the GOP video that will play at the convention this week, Bush Sr. was asked, “Are you proud of your boy?” President Bush began to cry and the camera had to be switched off. Both Bushes are sentimental men. Bush Jr. was intensely moved on the morning of his inauguration as governor of Texas when his father passed on to him the same cuff links his own father had given him after he won his Navy wings in 1943. As he recounted that story to NEWSWEEK, George W’s eyes filled with tears.
George Bush Sr. was always loving and trusting of his son. Yet one senses that their relationship has become more easygoing over time. As a boy, George W was too impatient to go fishing with his father for more than a few minutes. In his interview with NEWSWEEK, Bush imitated his boyish restlessness on fishing expeditions with Dad: “There are no fish! Take me in!” Now he can float along for hours, talking politics and tapping his father’s experience and wisdom. Example: as he was mulling over a running mate–and possibly thinking of Dick Cheney–George W recently asked his father, “If someone says no, do they mean it?”
But the son is at his best and most natural when he is away from his father and not feeling his shadow, when he allows himself to be a looser, slightly more outrageous figure. A couple of weeks ago Bush was chatting up reporters, as he does almost every day at the back of his campaign plane. “Were you drinking last night?” he greeted a female network producer he likes. “Why are you wearing dark glasses?” She just laughed. (He also teases her about her love life.) With a profile writer, he turned a question about his Harvard Business School experience into a riff about M.B.A.s. “We’re gonna get out the M.B.A. vote! M.B.A.s unite! M.B.A. chain across America!” he cried, raising his fists in mock triumph. He deftly handled the press regulars, joking and teasing with them (he has nicknames for most, like “Panchito” for Frank Bruni of The New York Times). He was warm and funny and quick, and though the jaded reporters try not to like him, they do. Most family sagas peter out after a couple of generations. But the Bushes seem to carry on, each in his own way, joined by a certain goofy charm, a muted but powerful call to serve and a keen desire to win.
