THE BUSHES SPENT THEIR EARLY YEARS IN NEW ENGLAND AND WEST TEXAS.
George Herbert Walker Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Mass., to Prescott and Dorothy Bush, the second of five children, four of them boys. His childhood was spent among the nation’s economically privileged, with numerous trips to family estates in Maine and South Carolina.
Although the Depression did not severely affect the Bushes, his parents tried to stress that good fortune should not be taken for granted, insisting on modesty at all times, along with concern for those going through hard times. Work mattered. Life, they insisted, was no country club affair.
Bush attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., where he excelled academically and athletically. He was a favorite of his classmates, often chosen to captain the teams he was on and known to call out bullies who bedeviled the less popular students.
As he grew to adulthood, he soaked up the history of the Walkers and the Bushes and began to understand the expectations for those of his class — a demand for service to the public good largely divorced from personal gain.
“Bush was a figure of an older, fading order of American power,” wrote Bush biographer Jon Meacham in “Dynasty and Power,” a 2015 authorized biography. “When his family and … friends looked at him, they saw a man who could have spent his life making and spending money, but who had chosen to obey the biblical injunction, drilled into him by his parents, that to whom much is given, much is expected.”
Bush’s first great test came as his days at Andover were ending, graduating in the face of a world succumbing to a widening war.
He might have been able to use connections for a service academy appointment or a plum job that didn’t place him in harm’s way. Like others of his class, including Joseph and John Kennedy, he chose the opposite path.
Bush enlisted in the Navy upon finishing high school in 1942 and hoped to become a pilot. He earned his wings and was commissioned an ensign before his 19th birthday. His wartime duty was spent in the Pacific flying a three-man Avenger torpedo bomber.
Bush piloted 58 combat missions from the carrier USS San Jacinto, but one stood out. During a Sept. 2, 1944, attack on Japanese positions on Chichi-Jima, one of the Bonin Islands, his Avenger was badly hit by flak.
He was able to complete the bombing run but ordered the other two crewmen to “hit the silk” as the plane headed toward the water. He did likewise and was able to haul himself into a life raft after popping up from the sea. His crew was never found.
Bush was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, yet never considered himself a war hero.
“They wrote it up as heroism,” Bush said late in his life of the paperwork leading to the decoration, “but it wasn’t — it was just doing your job.”
In January 1945, while on leave, Bush wed his pre-war fiancee, Barbara Pierce. The two had met at a dance when he was at Phillips and she at a tony boarding school in South Carolina.
Her family, like his, came from old money, and among her ancestors were early New England settlers. A distant relative, Franklin Pierce, was the 14th American president.
After the war, Bush and his new wife moved to New Haven, Conn., where he would begin at Yale, the alma mater of his father and four other relatives.
He graduated in less than three years because of an accelerated program offered to veterans eager to make up for lost time.
He again excelled at sports and captained the baseball team. He was just as adept in the classroom, gaining Phi Beta Kappa distinction and an economics degree. Yet, what should have been idyllic college years had been altered by the war. The class of 1948 were serious men intent on getting out and getting going.
As graduation approached, Bush balked at an offer to join an investment bank started by his maternal grandfather. To a friend he wrote that it bothered him to take advantage of “the benefits of my social position.”
A close family friend encouraged him to think of the oil business, which would take him to Texas.
In summer 1948, Bush loaded up his new Studebaker, a graduation gift, and pointed it southwest, ending up in Odessa several days later. Barbara and their new baby, George, flew down after he had found lodging in a weathered duplex, their first Texas home.
The family friend had provided an entry-level sales position with an oilfield tool company, the bottom rung on the ladder. It should be noted this was no ordinary friend — Neil Mallon was the head of Dresser Industries, a leading oilfield equipment company.
By 1950, he, Barbara and their two children were living in Midland, where he had formed an oil company with a neighbor, John Overbey. Financial backing came from Bush’s father and some of his father’s friends and business contacts. With no geologic or engineering background, Bush learned the business from the ground up, “walking fields, talking to people, and trying to make deals,” Overbey later recalled.
Three years later, he and Overbey joined with brothers Hugh and William Liedtke, to form Zapata Petroleum. An offshore subsidiary was formed a year later.
Zapata raised more money and gambled on an interest in a field in Coke County that skeptics claimed was played out. William Liedtke, said years later that the company drilled 130 wells and never had a dry hole.
In Midland, Bush learned a business, tended to a growing family and made friends who would prove important later.
The closeness of the city’s business community was evident when the Bush family’s life was interrupted by tragedy. The second of the children, daughter Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia in 1953, before the disease became largely curable.
His fledgling business career was all but put on hold for more than six months as he, Barbara and Robin made repeated trips to Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Barbara tried to approach their new circumstances with stoic resolve, to the point of booting visitors out of Robin’s hospital room if they cried. Her husband became increasingly emotional and often was the one who had to leave the room. Robin died later in 1953.
“I hadn’t cried at all when Robin was alive, but after she died, I felt I could cry forever,” she recalled in a 1988 interview with Texas Monthly. “George had a much harder time when she was sick. He was just killing himself, while I was very strong. That’s the way a good marriage works. Had I cried a lot, he wouldn’t have. But then things reversed after she died. George seemed to accept it better.”
The Bushes lived in Midland for almost a decade. It was where he made his first real money — his own money — and where he established his image as a true, if transplanted, Texan, one who could down a bowl of chili at lunch and a chicken-fried steak at dinner, snacking in between on pork rinds.
Everyone in town knew George Bush — “Poppy,” his childhood nickname, had been jettisoned along with the Brooks Brothers suits — but isolated West Texas was not where he needed to be.
A disagreement over the direction of the company led Bush to buy out the other investors in Zapata Offshore in 1959. He soon moved the company to Houston, the city he would adopt as his hometown.
“Whatever you do, live a life of adventure and meaning so brilliant that, like a Roman candle, it lights up the world. Dazzle us. Astonish us. Be extraordinary.” — President George H.W. Bush, in UT commencement address, 1990
“America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.” — Bush speech, 1989