Decision Points

by George W. Bush

  For most of our time at Yale, civil rights dominated the campus discussion. By our senior year, another issue weighed on our minds. The war in Vietnam was escalating, and President Johnson had instituted a draft. We had two options: join the military or find a way to escape the draft. My decision was easy. I was going to serve. I was raised by a dad who had sacrificed for his country. I would have been ashamed to avoid duty.

  My attitude toward the war was skeptical but accepting. I was skeptical of the strategy and the people in the Johnson administration executing it. But I accepted the stated goal of the war: to stop the spread of communism. One day in the fall of my senior year, I walked by a recruiting station with a poster of a jet pilot in the window. Flying planes would be an exciting way to serve. I checked in with the recruiter and picked up an application.

  When I went home for Christmas, I told my parents about my interest in the Air Force. Dad referred me to a man named Sid Adger, a former pilot who was well connected in the aviation community. He suggested that I consider joining the Texas Air National Guard, which had pilot slots available. Unlike members of the regular Guard, pilots were required to complete a year of training, six months of specialized instruction, and then regular flying to keep up their status.

  Serving as a Guard pilot appealed to me. I would learn a new skill. If called, I would fly in combat. If not, I would have flexibility to do other things. At that point in my life, I was not looking for a career. I viewed my first decade after college as a time to explore. I didn’t want anchors to hold me down. If something caught my attention, I would try it. If not, I would move on.

  This was the approach I had taken to summer jobs. In 1963, I worked on a cattle ranch in Arizona. The foreman was a grizzled fellow named Thurman. He had a saying about well-educated folks he knew: “Book smart, sidewalk stupid.” I was determined not to let that phrase apply to me. I spent other summers working on an offshore oil rig in Louisiana, behind the trading desk of a stockbrokerage house, and as a sporting goods salesman at a Sears, Roebuck. I met some fascinating characters along the way: cowboys and Cajuns, roughnecks and roustabouts. I’ve always felt I received two educations in those years: one from fine schools, and one from solid people.

  In the fall of 1968, I reported to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia for pilot training. We started with about one hundred trainees and graduated with about fifty. The washouts were early and frequent. I remember one guy from New York who came back from his first flight in a Cessna 172 looking as green as his flight suit—except for the part on which he had spilled his lunch.

  My early experiences in the air were only slightly better. My instructor could smell insecurity, and he did not believe in quiet counseling. On one of my first flights, he suddenly grabbed the yoke, pulled back as hard as he could, and stalled the aircraft. The nose went up, and the plane shuddered. He then shoved the stick forward, and down went the nose. The plane recovered. The trainer had shown me my first stall recovery maneuver. He looked at me and said, “Boy, if you want to be a pilot, you must control this machine and not let it control you.”

  I took his advice seriously. I mastered the basics of flying, including loops, barrel rolls, and instruments. When Dad came to pin on my wings, I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment. After flight school, I moved to Houston, where I learned to fly a fighter jet called the F-102 at Ellington Air Force Base. The F-102 was a single-seat, single-engine air interceptor. When you taxied to the end of the runway, put the throttle in afterburner, and felt the engine kick in, it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, you had better pay attention to the moment.

  During my service in the Air National Guard.

  I loved flying, but by 1972, I was getting restless. I was logging my flight hours during the evening or on weekends, and working during the days at an agribusiness. My duties at the office included conducting a study of the mushroom industry in Pennsylvania and visiting plant nurseries that the company had acquired. It was not exactly captivating work.

  One day, I got a call from my friend Jimmy Allison, a Midland political operative who had run Dad’s successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966. He told me about an opportunity on Red Blount’s campaign for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. It sounded interesting, and I was ready to move.

  My commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, approved my transfer to Alabama on the understanding that I would put in my required hours there. I informed the Alabama Guard commanders that I would have to miss several meetings during the campaign. They told me I could make them up after the election, which I did. I didn’t think much about it for another few decades.

  Unfortunately, the record keeping was shoddy, and the documentation of my attendance was not clear. When I entered politics, opponents used the gaps in the system to claim I had not fulfilled my duty. In the late 1990s, I asked a trusted aide, Dan Bartlett, to dig through my records. They showed that I had fulfilled my responsibilities. In 2004, Dan discovered some dental records proving I had been examined at Dannelly Air National Guard Base in Montgomery, Alabama, during the time critics alleged I was absent. If my teeth were at the base, he wisecracked to the press, they could be pretty sure the rest of my body was, too.

  I thought the issue was behind us. But as I was landing in Marine One on the South Lawn late one evening in September 2004, I saw Dan’s silhouette in the Diplomatic Reception Room. As a general rule, when a senior adviser is waiting to meet the president’s chopper, it is not to deliver good news. Dan handed me a piece of paper. It was a typewritten memo on National Guard stationery alleging that I had not performed up to standards in 1972. It was signed by my old commander, Jerry Killian. Dan told me CBS newsman Dan Rather was going to run a bombshell report on 60 Minutes based on the document.

  Bartlett asked if I remembered the memo. I told him I had no recollection of it and asked him to check it out. The next morning, Dan walked into the Oval Office looking relieved. He told me there were indications that the document had been forged. The typeface came from a modern computer font that didn’t exist in the early 1970s. Within a few days, the evidence was conclusive: The memo was phony.

  I was amazed and disgusted. Dan Rather had aired a report influencing a presidential election based on a fake document. Before long, he was out of a job. So was his producer. After years of false allegations, the Guard questions finally began to abate.

  I will always be proud of my time in the Guard. I learned a lot, made lifelong friends, and was honored to wear our country’s uniform. I admire and respect those who deployed to Vietnam. Nearly sixty thousand of them never came home. My service was nothing compared to theirs.

  In 1970, Dad decided to run for the Senate again. We felt good about his chances in a rematch against Ralph Yarborough. But Senator Yarborough had become so unpopular that he lost his primary to Lloyd Bentsen, a conservative Democrat. Dad ran a good race, but again came up short. The lesson was that it was still very tough to get elected as a Republican in Texas.

  Soon there was another lesson. Defeat, while painful, is not always the end. Shortly after the 1970 election, President Richard Nixon made Dad ambassador to the United Nations. Then, in 1973, President Nixon asked Dad to head the Republican National Committee. It turned out to be a valuable lesson in crisis management when Dad guided the party through the Watergate scandal.

  Mother and Dad were in the White House the day President Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford took the oath of office. Soon after, President Ford offered Dad his pick of ambassadorships in London or Paris, traditionally the two most coveted diplomatic posts. Dad told him he would rather go to China, and he and Mother spent fourteen fascinating months in Beijing. They came home when President Ford asked Dad to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Not a bad run for a twice-defeated Senate candidate. And of course it didn’t end there.

  I admired Dad’s accomplishments. Since my teenage years, I had followed his path closely—Andover and Yale, then service as a militar
y pilot. As I got older, I had an important realization: Nobody was asking me to match Dad’s record, and I didn’t need to try. We were in completely different situations. By age thirty, he had fought in a war, married, fathered three children, and lost one of them to cancer. When I left the Guard in my late twenties, I had no serious responsibilities. I was spontaneous and curious, searching for adventure. My goal was to establish my own identity and make my own way.

  For their part, my parents recognized my buoyant spirit and did not dampen it. They did tell me when I got out of line. One of the sternest conversations I ever had with Dad came when I was twenty years old. I was home from college for the summer and roustabouting on an oil rig for Circle Drilling out of Lake Charles, Louisiana. I worked one week on, one week off. After a lot of hot, hard work, I decided to blow off my last week to spend time with my girlfriend in Houston.

  Dad called me into his office. I told him nonchalantly that I had decided to quit my job a week early. He told me the company had hired me in good faith, and I had agreed to work until a certain date. I had a contract and I had violated it. I sat there feeling worse and worse. When he ended with the words “Son, I am disappointed,” I was ashamed.

  A few hours later, the phone rang at the house. It was Dad. I worried I was going to get another lecture. Instead, he asked, “What are you doing tonight, George?” He told me he had tickets to the Houston Astros game, and he invited me and my girlfriend. I immediately accepted. The experience reinforced the importance of honoring my word. And it showed me the depth of my father’s love.

  Dad was serious when needed, but our household was full of laughter. Dad loved to tell jokes to us kids: “Have you heard the one about the airplane? Never mind, it’s over your head.” He came up with nicknames for family and friends. At one point he called me Juney, short for Junior. My brother Neil was known as Whitey, which morphed into Whitney, because of his blond hair. Dad’s dear friend James Baker became Bake. In his crowning achievement, Dad dubbed Mother the Silver Fox.

  Dad’s wonderful sense of humor continued throughout his life. When he was president, he created the Scowcroft Award—named for National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft—for staff members who fell asleep during meetings. Now, in his eighties, he shares jokes via email, rating each on a scale of one through ten. A few years ago, Dad was recovering from hip surgery at the Mayo Clinic. When the nurse came to check on him, he asked, “Are my testicles black?” She was taken aback. “Excuse me, Mr. President?” He repeated his question, “Are my testicles black?” As she reached for the sheet, he quipped, “I said, ‘Are my test results back?’ ” His medical team roared with laughter.

  Over the years there has been a lot of speculation about my relationship with Dad. I suppose that’s natural for the first father-and-son presidents in 172 years. The simple truth is that I adore him. Throughout my life I have respected him, admired him, and been grateful for his love. There is an infamous story about me driving home late one night, running over the neighbor’s trash can, and then smarting off to Dad. When some people picture that scene, they envision two presidents locked in some epic psychological showdown. In reality, I was a boozy kid, and he was an understandably irritated father. We didn’t think much about it until it came up in the newspapers twenty years later.

  Moments like these are a reminder that I am not just my father’s son. I have a feisty and irreverent streak courtesy of Barbara Bush. Sometimes I went out of my way to demonstrate my independence. But I never stopped loving my family. I think they understood that, even when I got on their nerves.

  I finally saw things from my parents’ perspective when I had children of my own. My daughter Jenna could be sassy and sharp, just like me. When I was running for governor in 1994, I accidentally shot a killdeer, a protected songbird, on the first day of dove hunting season. The blunder produced headlines but quickly faded. A few weeks before the election, Laura and I campaigned with the girls at the Texas State Fair in Dallas. Twelve-year-old Jenna won a stuffed bird as a prize at a carnival game. With the TV cameras rolling, she held the plush animal in the air. “Look, Dad,” she said, giggling. “It’s a killdeer!”

  In the fall of 1972, I went to visit my grandmother in Florida. My college friend Mike Brooks was in the area, and we played golf. Mike had just graduated from Harvard Business School. He told me I should consider going there. To make sure I got the message, he mailed me an application. I was intrigued enough to fill it out. A few months later, I was accepted.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to school or to the East Coast. I shared my doubts with my brother Jeb. I didn’t know Jeb very well when he was growing up—he was only eight when I moved out for boarding school—but we grew closer as we got older.

  Jeb was always more serious-minded than I was. He was intelligent, focused, and driven in every way. He learned to speak fluent Spanish, majored in Latin American Affairs, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas. During his senior year in high school, he lived in Mexico as part of a student exchange program. There he met a beautiful woman named Columba Garnica. They were both young, but it was obvious Jeb was in love. When we went to the Astrodome together, I’d watch the ball game and he’d write letters to Colu. They got married two weeks after his twenty-first birthday.

  One night, Jeb and I were having dinner with Dad at a restaurant in Houston. I was working at a mentoring program in Houston’s poverty-stricken Third Ward, and Dad and I were having a discussion about my future. Jeb blurted out, “George got into Harvard.”

  After some thought, Dad said, “Son, you ought to seriously consider going. It would be a good way to broaden your horizons.” That was all he said. But he got me thinking. Broadening horizons was exactly what I was trying to do during those years. It was another way of saying, “Push yourself to realize your God-given talents.”

  For the second time in my life, I made the move from Houston to Massachusetts. The cabdriver pulled up to the Harvard campus and welcomed me to “the West Point of capitalism.” I had gone to Andover by expectation and Yale by tradition; I was at Harvard by choice. There I learned the mechanics of finance, accounting, and economics. I came away with a better understanding of management, particularly the importance of setting clear goals for an organization, delegating tasks, and holding people to account. I also gained the confidence to pursue my entrepreneurial urge.

  The lessons of Harvard Business School were reinforced by an unlikely source: a trip to visit Mother and Dad in China after graduation. The contrast was vivid. I had gone from the West Point of capitalism to the eastern outpost of communism, from a republic of individual choice to a country where people all wore the same gray clothes. While riding my bike through the streets of Beijing, I occasionally saw a black limo with tinted windows that belonged to one of the party bigwigs. Otherwise there were few cars and no signs of a free market. I was amazed to see how a country with such a rich history could be so bleak.

  With my sister, Doro, in China, 1975.

  In 1975, China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution, its government’s effort to purify and revitalize society. Communist officials had set up indoctrination programs, broadcast propaganda over omnipresent loudspeakers, and sought to stamp out any evidence of China’s ancient history. Mobs of young people lashed out against their elders and attacked the intellectual elite. The society was divided against itself and cascading into anarchy.

  China’s experience reminded me of the French and Russian revolutions. The pattern was the same: People seized control by promising to promote certain ideals. Once they had consolidated power, they abused it, casting aside their beliefs and brutalizing their fellow citizens. It was as if mankind had a sickness that it kept inflicting on itself. The sobering thought deepened my conviction that freedom—economic, political, and religious—is the only fair and productive way of governing a society.

  For most of my time at Harvard, I had no idea how I was going to use my business degree. I knew what I
did not want to do. I had no desire to go to Wall Street. While I knew decent and admirable people who had worked on Wall Street, including my grandfather Prescott Bush, I was suspicious of the financial industry. I used to tell friends that Wall Street is the kind of place where they will buy you or sell you, but they don’t really give a hoot about you so long as they can make money off you.

  I was searching for options when my Harvard classmate Del Marting invited me to spend spring break of 1975 at his family’s ranch in Tucson, Arizona. On the way out west, I decided to make a stop in Midland. I’d heard from my friend Jimmy Allison, who had become publisher of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, that the place was booming. He was right. The energy industry was on the upswing after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The barriers to entry in the industry were low. I loved the idea of starting a business of my own. I made up my mind: I was headed back to Texas.

  I pulled into town in the fall of 1975 with all my possessions loaded into my 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass. I had a lot to learn, so I sought out mentors. One of the first people I visited was a local lawyer named Boyd Laughlin, affectionately known as Loophole. He set up a meeting with Buzz Mills, a big man with a crew cut and years of experience in the oil business. I found Buzz and his partner, a cigar-chomping man named Ralph Way, playing gin rummy. I couldn’t tell how much money they were betting on the game, but it was a hell of a lot more than I had.

  Behind their friendly country demeanor was a shrewd understanding of the oil business. I told Buzz and Ralph that I wanted to learn to be a land man. The job of a land man is to travel to county courthouses and research who owns the mineral rights to potential drilling sites. The keys to success in the job are a willingness to read lots of paperwork, a sharp eye for detail, and a reliable car. I started by tagging along with seasoned land men, who showed me how to read title books. Then I made trips on my own, checking courthouse records for day fees. Eventually I bought a few royalties and small working interests in Buzz and Ralph’s wells. Compared to the big-time oilmen, I was collecting the crumbs. But I was making a decent living and learning a lot.