A revealing biography of the elder George Bush, from one of the most respected political writers of our time.

No one is more qualified to give a fully rounded, objective portrait of our forty-first president than Tom Wicker. A political correspondent for The New York Times for more than thirty years, Wicker was a first-hand witness to and reporter of George H. W. Bush's political rise and presidential reign. In George Herbert Walker Bush, Wicker provides a richly drawn and succinct overview of Bush from his New England roots, his decorated service in World War II, and his successful oil businesses to his shift to politics and rapid rise within the Republican party. As he describes changes within the Republican party in recent decades, Wicker charts Bush's career, including in-depth analysis of his campaign tactics and his gift for creating friendships and inspiring loyalty which, Wicker argues, has been the key to Bush's success. The result is a fascinating, timely glimpse into one of the most powerful families in America today, complete with insights into the current reign of George W. Bush, the continued legacy of the Bush family, and contemporary American politics.

Chapter 1

Not long after George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first president of the United States, left office in 1993 and returned to Texas, an old acquaintance found himself at loose ends in Houston. Out of courtesy and curiosity, he called on the former president at his retirement office in the city's federal building.

Cordially and immediately, as befitted long association, the old acquaintance was ushered into a replica of the president's Oval Office in the White House. George Bush, known to family and friends as "Poppy," sat smiling behind a huge executive desk on which there was not a scrap of paper - not a note, a letter, or even a message slip.

While the two men chatted inconsequentially, the former president with his usual grace and friendliness, the phone never rang; no buzzer disturbed the conversation; no secretary or clerk opened the door; no request or notice of any kind was placed on the empty desktop. Their talk of old times was interrupted only when Bush escorted his visitor to a window and pointed out a house he and the former first lady were building in a nearby Houston neighborhood.

"Well, Mister President," Bush's friend finally thought it proper to say, "I just wanted to say hello, but now I'm afraid I'm taking too much of your time."

"No, no!" his host exclaimed. "You're not taking too much time at all. I'm really enjoying our conversation."

Whereupon the old acquaintance stayed for another session of pleasant small talk, during which - again - no sign of any other activity appeared in the ersatz Oval Office. It finally dawned on the visitor that the former president of the United States could take so much time with him because - like thousands of former executives who had retired full of years and honor - he had nothing else to do. But surely a man who had spent most of his life in high government office, including a term in the White House - who had in fact presided over the end of the Cold War - must have many ideas and plans, now that his time was his own?

Many years before, the old friend remembered, he and George H. W. Bush had served together on the board of trustees of Phillips Andover Academy, of which they were alumni. During their long joint tenure, the man who would later be president was popular, a helpful figure to his colleagues, supportive of their ideas, willing to take on any task asked of him, doing such jobs well - but he had put forth not a single serious proposal of his own, or any weighty opinion, or even a significant statement. On the Andover board Bush had not seemed to want or need to do anything in particular for the school; he had offered no plans to improve its performance or the lives of its students - just as now, in the Houston Oval Office, behind the clean desk, the former president seemed to have nothing urgent on his mind.

As the visitor finally departed, despite hearty exhortations to stay and talk some more, he could not help wondering if that pleasant hour and his memories from Andover suggested a sort of caretaker mentality - if during George H. W. Bush's life and presidency he had seldom had stronger purposes than he had disclosed on the Andover board, or revealed needs more pressing than maintaining gracious relations with his friends - except, of course, what must have been a burning desire to become president of the United States.

George Herbert Walker Bush based his presidential campaigns on his extensive résumé as a leader of experience and character. Like Dwight D. Eisenhower before him, Bush, as was pointed out by the historian Michael Beschloss, did not offer himself as a proponent of certain issues or of a definite ideology or of any particular policy - such as, say, helping most Americans achieve affordable health care.

In a long prepresidential political career, Bush often used family and political connections to accumulate the experience that supposedly qualified him for the White House. Despite an almost sacrificial devotion to the Republican Party, he sometimes exhibited chameleonlike changes of coloration within its spectrum of opinion, and never overcame the suspicions of its most conservative elements. Throughout Bush's political life, however, his willingness to take on even thankless jobs and his ability to do them well, together with his gift for friendship and his loyalty to the countless friends he had made and kept - sometimes to the point of political risk - lay at the core of his achievement. George Bush, the public man, was preeminently the product of family, friendship, his sense of loyalty, his capacity for service - and the patronage of three presidents.

Bush's patrician background, combined with his propensity for verbal stumbles (once, when recalling being shot down over the Pacific during World War II, he concluded: "Lemme tell ya, that'll make you start to think about the separation of church and state"2), earned him from Governor Ann Richards of Texas in 1992 the stinging remark that he had been born with "a silver foot in his mouth." Four years later Bush got revenge of a sort when his son George W. Bush defeated Richards's reelection attempt. But the foot was silver indeed; Bush's father was Senator Prescott Bush, Republican of Connecticut, formerly president of Buckeye Steel Castings Co. in Ohio, later a vice president of the New York brokerage firm Brown Brothers Harriman, a founder of the USO during World War II, a president of the U.S. Golf Association, and a frequent golfing companion of President Eisenhower.

In 1921 Prescott Bush married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George H. Walker, a wealthy businessman, sports enthusiast, and founder of the Walker Cup for golfers. Dorothy was a tennis champion herself and the favored daughter in a highly competitive family. As Mrs. Prescott Bush, she became the mother of five children, the second and favorite of whom, born January 12, 1924, was George Herbert Walker Bush (named for "Dottie's" hard-charging father). George Bush grew up steeped in sports in Greenwich, Connecticut, and spent most summers even more deeply immersed in sports (land and water) at grandfather George H. Walker's 176-acre estate on the seashore at Kennebunkport, Maine.

Not unnaturally, therefore, grandson George H. W. Bush "prepped" at Andover, intending to follow his father to Yale. But after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 ("a date that will live in infamy," President Franklin Roosevelt intoned when asking Congress for a declaration of war), seventeen- year-old George ignored whatever family tradition and connections might have done for him. On his eighteenth birthday, January 12, 1942, he was sworn into the U.S. Navy, in a speedup program to train flyers. After earning his wings in less than a year, he became the youngest aviator in the navy.

More than two years later, on September 7, 1944, after Bush had flown numerous missions off the baby flattop San Jacinto, his torpedo bomber took a solid hit while flying through heavy flak to attack the island of Chichi Jima. Bush dropped his bomb load to complete the mission, then kept the clumsy old Avenger briefly aloft - long enough to give the crew a chance to bail out. But one of them was trapped aboard; another's chute failed to open; and in the end, like Ishmael, Bush "escaped alone to tell thee." Two hours later his raft was fished out of the water by the submarine Finback; typically, he reports in a campaign biography, even aboard the Finback, "I made friendships that have lasted a lifetime."

Bush's war was not yet over. He rejoined his squadron in the Philippines for three more months of combat missions (he logged a total of fifty-eight for the war), and finally, in December 1944 - three years after Pearl Harbor - was sent home wearing the Distinguished Flying Cross. A few months later, soon after American A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war in the summer of 1945, he was a civilian again.

Demobilization meant much the same to George Bush as to millions of other young Americans who had fought and survived the "good war" - college on the GI Bill (in his case, Yale in September 1945), enjoying civilian life, and marriage. Two weeks after his return to the States, Bush married an old girlfriend, Barbara Pierce (his downed plane had been named "Barbara") in Rye, New York. Their union has lasted for fifty-seven years and produced six children* (including two sons who became state governors: George junior of Texas, sworn in as the forty-third president of the United States in 2001, and Jeb of Florida).

After getting his "ruptured duck" (a pin signifying a discharged veteran) in the summer of 1945, Bush finally matriculated at Yale. As might have been expected from his family heritage, he excelled in athletics (as captain and first baseman of the college baseball team that played for but lost the national title in 1947 and 1948) and was chosen for the exclusive social society Skull and Bones; he also did well in his studies, being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He and Barbara could celebrate the birth of George junior, their first child, in July 1946; they "made some close and lasting friendships" while living off campus in New Haven;4 and they seem to have avoided the liberal activism that so frustrated George's fellow student William F. Buckley Jr.

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© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

Tags: Biographies & Memoirs

About the Author

Tom Wicker covered American politics at The New York Times from 1960 to the early 1990s, when he succeeded Arthur Krock as writer of the "In the Nation" column. He is the author of several books of nonfiction, including One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, and JFK and LBJ, as well as several novels. More