Part 2

George Herbert Walker Bush
by Tom Wicker

(Page 2 of 4)

Bush then joined many another young World War II veteran as part of a significant postwar migration out of the cities into the suburbs, and from the old northern industrial belt into the South and West. At much the same time, thousands of blacks - superseded by the mechanical cotton-picking machine - were moving in the other direction: out of the sharecrop South into old industrial cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore. The major long-term results of these contramigrations included changes in the nature of such cities, including the growth of black ghettos, and the gradual transformation of the old "Solid South," a Democratic stronghold since Reconstruction following the Civil War, into first a two-party and ultimately a new Republican "Solid South."

After graduation from Yale, Bush decided not to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship on the strange grounds that his small family could not afford to live in England (although he had three thousand dollars5 in savings from the navy, a not inconsiderable sum in the forties). If this meant that he did not want to call on Bush or Walker family wealth, neither did he turn easily to family business connections. After Procter & Gamble, the big soap company, turned him down, he declined an opportunity to work with his father (and the prominent Democrat Averell Harriman) at Brown Brothers Harriman, and he also rejected an offer from G. H. Walker and Company, his grandfather's private Wall Street banking firm. But enough was enough; Prescott Bush, a member of the board of directors of Dressen Industries, a Texas oil-drilling supply company, then intervened.

Prescott's old friend Henry Neil Mallon, Dressen's president (for whom George and Barbara later named their youngest son), was a sort of "surrogate and father confessor" to Prescott's children.6 Mallon offered the well-bred young Yalie a lowly clerkship at Ideco, a Dressen subsidiary, in Odessa, Texas (somewhere, as most easterners might have thought, between Kennebunkport and the moon). The booming oil industry looked good, however, and - like millions of other veterans who were pulling up their roots - George H. W. Bush seized the opportunity to begin a new life. Save for a brief transfer to California, the patrician New Englander was to make the rest of his business career - and the beginnings of his political life - in flourishing, boastful Texas.

Bravely, optimistically, he drove south in the new Studebaker his father had given him as a graduation gift, to a new and promising life. "Bar," as Bush always called his wife, and George junior waited at the Walker's Point estate in Kennebunkport until George found a house for them in Odessa - half of a divided "shotgun" structure, with a shared bathroom, on East Seventh Street. They flew to Texas, not only to a different life but to a strange land - drilling rigs, the smell of oil everywhere, and a culture of young would- be entrepreneurs, among whom there was a kind of classless, fences-down comradeship not common among wealthier, more privileged families in the East, even Bushes and Walkers. Above all, however, postwar Texas was perfumed with the sweet scent of opportunity.

George Bush, though he took to his Ideco duties readily enough, was not long in following that scent. Why not, with his connections? At first he had little status - as a rich-kid hired hand from the East, not yet in the promising lease-and-drill business. But, as always, he made friends quickly, and lots of them - with one of whom, a more experienced neighbor named John Overbey, he soon formed Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company. The new firm was partially financed by Brown Brothers, and old George H. Walker himself put in five hundred thousand dollars; other investors, reassured by Prescott Bush's senatorial stature, included Eugene Meyer, publisher of the Washington Post. Prescott's son was on his way - no longer a mere wage worker but part owner of a new player in the sky's-the-limit Texas oil game.

Bush-Overbey did well, and things were beginning to look up for the transplanted Bushes in their intriguing new world, when three-year-old Robin Bush, the little family's secondborn, was diagnosed in 1953 with incurable leukemia. Barbara Bush and the distraught father - probably never before, or at least since his two hours on a raft in the Pacific, faced with a situation about which he could do nothing - still tried to do what they could. They provided Robin with the best medical care in Texas and New York; they tried experimental drugs; they authorized a last-hope surgery - but none of it worked. Robin died a few weeks short of her fourth birthday.

At first it seemed that Barbara Bush could not survive the blow. Though she had suffered Robin's illness in stoic silence, her daughter's death seemed, finally, too much. So lost was she in her grief that she appeared not to want to go on. In later years she often said that, in those terrible times, George Bush saved her - with his never-ending faith and optimism, his assurances that life had to go on, his ability to keep moving, go ahead. Life was still good, he believed, and it was certainly for the living.

Typically, when they came back from the East and Robin's death to Midland, Texas (where, after their brief side assignment to California, they'd moved, into a boxlike house in a tract called Easter Egg Row), George Bush took his wife first to their friends' houses, scattered around town, to thank them for their help and concern during Robin's illness.

It's impossible for parents completely to get over the death of a child. But recovering from Robin's death was easier (though never easy) for George Bush than for his wife, because at about that time he was moving beyond Bush-Overbey. He'd been making friends with one of the boldest and brightest wannabe entrepreneurs in the Texas oil patch - Hugh Lietke Jr. - a Harvard Business School graduate and the son of a well-connected oil-company lawyer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lietke saw in Bush, if not a lot of business experience, the great virtue of access to eastern money. And both were willing to take risks - at that time the name of the game in the Texas oil business.

Lietke raised half a million dollars, Bush-Overbey put in the same, and they merged into a single company called Zapata Petroleum - after the Mexican revolutionary portrayed by Marlon Brando in a movie then being shown in Midland. Bush was Zapata's vice president, and half the money had come from his and his family's connections, but contemporary observers in Texas never doubted that Hugh Lietke, with his brains and experience, made most of the decisions.

Whoever deserves the credit, one of those decisions led to a ten-strike. Zapata laid out $850,000 - close to its total capital - to lease a huge stretch of land in Coke County, to the east of which Sun Oil had producing wells. If the oil pool Sun was tapping extended to the west, Zapata might have a winner. If it didn't - well, risk was the name of the game. But betting nearly everything in one plunge, as Zapata had done, was unusual even in those days in Texas. The partners, moreover, had to put down at least another hundred thousand dollars to drill their first well. If it didn't come in...but it did.

So did the next well they drilled. And the next. They drilled seventy-one holes in the Coke County lease - and every one poured black gold out of the Texas earth. By the end of 1953 Zapata was pumping more than a thousand barrels of oil a day, worth at the time more than a million dollars a year. Later even more wells produced even more oil, and the Zapata partners became the first Midland independents to reach a net worth of one million dollars apiece.

John Overbey was not one of them. Hardly a corporate type, he had dropped out of Zapata before the Coke County wells brought in their gushers of wealth (but of course he and George Bush - ever loyal to an old friend - remained close). Newly flush, Bush expanded, investing some of his Zapata gains in a partnership that opened a new business, the Commercial Bank and Trust Company. For his family, money meant a succession of new and bigger houses and what was probably the first backyard swimming pool anybody in the Midland crowd ever had built - a great place for George Bush's many friends to gather at the end of a hot and profitable Texas day.

Bush's career as an entrepreneur continued to flourish with Zapata Petroleum during the 1950s - but underneath financial success he was suffering the gnawing feeling, perhaps bred of Prescott Bush's teachings and example, that he should be giving something back, doing something for the community that was so richly rewarding him.

That attitude had little to do with the division of Zapata in 1958; the problem, if there was one, was more nearly that Hugh Lietke was interested in production and corporate acquisitions while Bush preferred the more adventurous, risk-taking aspects of the oil business. So the 1958 split was a natural. They spun off a second company, called Zapata Offshore, to dig wells in the ocean floor; and George Bush - who believed that undersea drilling was where the future lay - bought the new firm from his partners, became its president, and moved to Houston.

The remains of the original Zapata Petroleum continued to prosper mightily; Hugh Lietke eventually controlled Pennzoil. But most of the eastern money and influence Bush had brought to Texas went with him to Zapata Offshore. G. H. Walker & Company underwrote most of Offshore's public offerings. Its legal work was done by Endicott Davison, a Skull and Bonesman with George Bush at Yale in 1948. Even the Texas company that underwrote the initial stock issue, Underwood, Neuhaus, had an old Andover classmate, Robert Parish, on its staff. And when a Gulf hurricane blew away one of Offshore's three- million-dollar oil rigs, G. H. Walker and Company quietly handled the financial side of the matter back east. On the scene in Houston, George Bush proved a competent manager - and, in his usual pattern, made lots of new friends, some of them influential.

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

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.