41: A Portrait of My Father

by George W. Bush

  My father could have mentioned that he’d been shot down by enemy fire in World War II, or that he had almost died of a staph infection in high school. Instead he stared at the reporter and asked, “Have you ever sat and watched your child die?”

  The journalist said no.

  “I did, for six months,” Dad said.

  That ended the interview. Anyone who had ever lost a child knew exactly what he meant.

  My father never stopped thinking about his daughter. For as long as I can remember, he has kept a three-by-five framed photo of her on the desk in his office. Late in his life, as he contemplated his own mortality, Dad asked his minister whether he would meet Robin and his mother in heaven. It was telling that those were the two people who he wanted to see. He asked whether Robin would still look like a child, or whether she would have “grown up” over the sixty years since her death. That’s part of the great mystery. But I think Dad knows in his heart that he will see his daughter again.

  HAT IN THE RING

  BY THE AGE OF TWENTY-FIVE, George Bush had passed up the safety of college to serve his country as a naval aviator during World War II. He had passed up the financial security of Wall Street to learn the oil business in West Texas. His spirit of adventure and zeal for new challenges made it impossible for him to stand still. Over the next two decades, he pushed himself from one frontier to the next. In his business career, he went from an employee to an entrepreneur, from a small city to a big city, and from onshore oil to the new horizon of offshore drilling. His financial success made it possible for him to push himself again, from private business into public service, and from local politics to the national stage. Not every risk my father took in those years paid off. That taught him another lesson: If you refuse to give up, opportunity can arise not only from victory, but also from defeat.

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  AS AN EMPLOYEE of Dresser Industries, George Bush saw the oil business up close, and he had learned a lot. One thing that he learned was that he wanted to enter the business on his own. Soon he set a new goal: to become an independent oilman.

  Before my father could strike out on his own, he had to inform Neil Mallon that he planned to leave Dresser. As Dad would later tell the story, he was nervous about his meeting with Neil. He didn’t want to abandon the man who had given him his first shot in the business. When Dad broke the news that he was leaving, Neil was silent. Then he grabbed a yellow legal pad and spent thirty minutes telling my father how he ought to set up the business. Neil’s handling of the situation set a good example for Dad and later for me. Rather than harbor resentments or stand in the way of a talented employee, he chose to encourage and mentor. My father remained grateful for the rest of his life. Just ask my younger brother Neil Mallon Bush.

  My father approached a friend and neighbor on Easter Egg Row, John Overbey, with the idea of starting a new partnership. Overbey was a University of Texas graduate who was savvy in the world of oil leases and royalties and had a good nose for finding information from old-time ranchers, scouts at oil companies, and fellow independents. My father brought a different set of skills. He had good relationships with prospective investors, especially on the East Coast.

  By the spring of 1951, Bush-Overbey was up and running. Dad frequently traveled to the East Coast to look for money. Several of the company’s first major backers were family members or friends, including his father and his uncle George Herbert Walker, Jr., who was eager to take a bet on his favorite nephew. He also raised money from people like Eugene Meyer, then the President of the Washington Post newspaper corporation. Unfortunately, the paper wasn’t always so keen to support anyone named George Bush in later years.

  My father was aggressive in raising money but cautious in spending it. Bush-Overbey took small stakes in a variety of projects, which offset risk but limited the chance of a big payout. On most mornings, Dad would get into the office early, fire up his typewriter, and write letters. He wrote to people he had met around town or on his trips, potential lessors, and investors. Over the years, he would apply his assiduous letter writing to politics and diplomacy. Today there are thousands of people around the world who can reach into a desk drawer and produce a thank-you note from George Bush.

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  NOT FAR FROM the one-room Bush-Overbey office in downtown Midland was the law firm of Liedtke and Liedtke. Bill and Hugh Liedtke were brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where their father was a lawyer for Gulf Oil. The Liedtkes had plans to build a large independent oil company, and they needed an ambitious partner to help. George Bush was the perfect fit, and Dad was eager to join forces. John Overbey wasn’t interested in the corporate life, so after a two-year partnership with Dad, he went his own way on good terms and became a successful independent oilman.

  Dad agreed to raise half of the money to capitalize the new company. The Liedtkes would raise the other half. Once again, my father turned to his uncle Herbie and his Wall Street friends. They had seen decent returns from Bush-Overbey, and Dad convinced them that he could deliver even more. He lined up a half million dollars in capital. The Liedtkes did too.

  Before they started making deals, they had to choose a name for the new company. The partners decided that their name should start with either an A or a Z, so that they wouldn’t get lost in the middle of the phone book listings. By chance, the movie Viva Zapata!, starring Marlon Brando, was playing at Midland’s downtown theater. The bold Mexican revolutionary general captured their independent, risk-taking spirit. Plus his name started with the right letter. In 1953, Zapata Petroleum was born.

  It didn’t take long for the firm to live up to its daring name. Hugh Liedtke proposed that Zapata take $850,000 and invest it in one place, the Jameson field in Coke County. Some early exploration by another operator had proved that the field contained oil, although nobody knew how much. Betting the company on one investment was the opposite of the strategy of Bush-Overbey. But the prospect of hitting a big find was what made my father love the oil business.

  The gamble paid off. By the end of 1954, Zapata had drilled 71 holes, and all 71 produced oil. Eventually, they went 127 for 127. Dad and the Liedtkes delivered a healthy return to their investors and walked away from the project with a lucrative payout. George Bush was too modest—and too smart—to spend wildly. He had a growing family to support, and he knew how unpredictable the oil business could be. We did move to a new, three-thousand-square-foot house on Sentinel Drive on the outskirts of Midland. The house had a swimming pool and backed up to Cowden Park, where I played my Little League games. For a little guy, that was about as good as it could get. Before long George Bush had another business idea, and soon we were on the move again.

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  THE OCEAN HAS always fascinated my father. His favorite place in the world is Walker’s Point in Maine. As a boy, he spent his summers swimming, sailing, and fishing in the Atlantic. His grandfather Bert Walker introduced him to speedboats, which became a lifelong passion. Well into his eighties, he loved to take his powerboat, the Fidelity, on the water and crank her up as fast as she would go. In the 1950s, the future of offshore oil exploration was bright. So as a young oilman, George Bush was intrigued by underwater drilling.

  The first oil exploration in the shallow waters off the Gulf of Mexico began in the late 1930s. Geologists believed that deeper waters could contain bigger deposits. Accessing those deposits required an offshore drilling platform that was big enough to reach the ocean floor, stable enough to withstand the waves and winds, and mobile enough to explore multiple locations. That kind of equipment required significant up-front capital expenditures. In 1954, Zapata Petroleum decided to create a new venture, Zapata Offshore, to build rigs and lease them out to oil operators. The new subsidiary was led by George Bush.

  My father’s first big move was to bet on a brilliant but unconventional engineer, R.G. LeTourneau. LeTourneau—whose formal education ended in seventh grade and who was known to sketch his mechanical designs on legal pads rather than draw up b
lueprints—had an idea for an offshore drilling platform. Unlike other models in use at the time, it would include three legs and multiple motors, which would provide greater stability and speed. Dad and the Liedtkes were intrigued, but the cost was steep: three million dollars.

  LeTourneau had enough confidence in his design that he offered to build the drilling platform if Zapata would advance him four hundred thousand dollars and promise a stake in the company if the rig worked. The venture was risky, but Zapata decided to bet on the eccentric engineer.

  In 1956, LeTourneau’s revolutionary rig, nicknamed “the Scorpion” or “the three-legged monster,” made its debut in the gulf. Mother and I flew out on a small prop plane with three of Dad’s fellow oilmen to witness the christening. I was amazed by the size of the rig. The platform measured 185 feet by 150 feet, each leg extended 140 feet, and the contraption weighed nine million pounds. Many years later in Midland, I was reminded of Dad’s entry into the offshore oil business when I ran into one of the other fellows aboard the prop plane that day. He informed me that I owed him a new hat. “Why’s that?” I asked. “Because you vomited in my old one on the flight over,” he said.

  Over time, George Bush and the Liedtkes decided to split Zapata into two separate companies. My father would take the offshore assets; Bill and Hugh Liedtke would keep the onshore assets. The Liedtkes went on to phenomenal success, merging with South Penn Oil and creating one of the world’s great energy companies, Pennzoil. Dad made a lot less money in the offshore business, but he was thrilled that his friends had done so well. He loved the work that he had chosen. And he never judged his worth by the size of his wallet.

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  IN 1959, SHORTLY after the division of Zapata, my father moved our family five hundred miles east across the state to Houston, where most offshore drilling companies were based. I’m sure it was tough on my parents to leave Midland, where they had made so many friends. But they were confident about their ability to adjust to a new home. And we did, thanks in large part to Mother. Despite the fact that she was raising four children (me; Jeb, born in 1953; Neil, born in 1955; and Marvin, born in 1956) and pregnant with a fifth (Dorothy, born later in 1959), she coordinated all the moving logistics and oversaw the construction of a new house on Briar Drive. Mother made sure the house quickly became a home.

  Houston was a bustling big city that opened up new horizons—for Dad’s business career and for me. I remember the first time we were hit by one of Houston’s famous torrential rainstorms. It felt like living in a tropical jungle compared to our time in Midland. I started at a new school, Kinkaid, that offered more options than my schools back in West Texas. And unlike Midland, Houston had professional sports. I remember watching the Houston Oilers play the Dallas Texans in one of the first AFL championship games. In 1962, the city attracted a major league baseball team, the Colt .45s. They would soon be renamed the Astros and play in the Astrodome, known at the time as the eighth wonder of the world. For a sports-minded kid, Houston was heaven.

  The offshore business involved serious financial risk. Without drilling contracts, Zapata’s rigs and workers would be idle. Dad traveled the world to drum up new business. His experience working with foreign businessmen and government officials laid an important foundation for his later diplomatic positions. Running the company also taught him key management principles. He learned the importance of hiring knowledgeable people and listening to their advice, of delegating responsibility and holding people accountable, and of making tough decisions and accepting the consequences. When things went right, he shared the credit. When things went wrong, he took the heat. This experience helped him develop the leadership style that he would employ for decades to come.

  Although the oil business was filled with uncertainty, my father rarely showed stress. Any problems he had were kept inside. His vigorous exercise regimen helped. There were times when my father’s tireless pace caught up with him. On a business trip in England in 1960, he collapsed on the floor of his hotel room. Fortunately, he managed to push the help button on the way down. The British doctor told him that he had food poisoning, but when he got back to Texas his doctor diagnosed him with a bleeding ulcer. The cause may have been stress, or it may have been exhaustion. Either way, the doctor told my father that he was lucky to be alive.

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  IN HIS EARLY YEARS, George H.W. Bush did not appear to be a very political person. He followed the news and voted when he was of age, but he didn’t belong to any political organizations. Aside from his race for senior class President at Andover, he had never been involved in a campaign.

  That began to change in 1950, when my grandfather decided to run for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. My father was twenty-six and launching his career in the oil business, so he couldn’t do much to help his dad. Nevertheless, he followed the race closely, and his father’s decision to run got him thinking about whether he might like to do the same in the future.

  Prescott Bush was not a typical politician. At fifty-five years old, the only public office he had held was moderator of the Greenwich town meeting. He considered himself a Republican based largely on his pro-business beliefs, and he had been an active fund-raiser for the party in Connecticut. Party officials had approached him about running for Congress in 1946, and my grandfather was interested. But his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman discouraged him. They considered their investment house more important than the House of Representatives.

  Another opportunity arose four years later when Connecticut’s junior U.S. Senator, Raymond Baldwin, resigned to accept a seat on the state supreme court. In November 1950, the state held a special election to choose a Senator to serve out the final two years of Baldwin’s term. Connecticut Republicans convinced my grandfather to run. This time his Wall Street partners supported the decision.

  As a formal man who had spent most of his life in the boardroom, my grandfather had to adjust to life on the campaign trail. He worked hard, traveled throughout the state, and enlisted the singing talents of the Yale Whiffenpoofs to lighten up his campaign events. He ran television ads, a relatively new technique at the time that he had learned about while serving on the board of directors of CBS.

  A few days before the election, the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson broadcast a false report that my grandfather was President of the Birth Control League. The charge hurt with the state’s heavily Catholic population, which opposed birth control so strongly that it was illegal to sell contraceptives in Connecticut. My grandfather lost the election by just over a thousand votes, less than one-tenth of one percentage point. It wouldn’t be the last time that suspicious election-eve maneuvering affected a candidate named Bush.

  I’m sure my grandfather was disappointed to lose, but he had run a strong campaign and grown more comfortable on the stump. He ran again for the same Senate seat in 1952. This time he lost in a close primary. After the defeat, Prescott Bush resolved that he was done with politics. He had given it his best shot, and a career in the Senate was not to be.

  Then fate intervened. Less than two months later, Connecticut’s other U.S. Senator died unexpectedly. State Republicans again urged my grandfather to run, and he agreed to do it. His perseverance paid off, and he won the special election by a healthy margin. Prescott Bush, whose political career had seemed doomed a few months before, was sworn in as a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. George Bush learned an important lesson: Do not allow defeat to extinguish your dreams. If you keep working and remain optimistic, opportunities can come your way.

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  THANKS TO HIS character and his contacts, Prescott Bush became a highly respected Senator. He had served on the Yale Board of Trustees with the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. He also made friends with Senators on the other side of the aisle, including Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, who became Majority Leader in 1955, and a fellow member of the New England delegation, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Back in the 1950s, the Senate was a lot mor
e collegial than it is today.

  My grandfather’s most influential friend in the capital was President Dwight Eisenhower. One key to developing the friendship was my grandfather’s golf game. Ike loved to play golf, and there was no better golfer in the Senate than Prescott Bush. Ike especially liked that the Senator, unlike most politicians, refused to let the President win. Years later, my brother Marvin invited me to play a round at the Burning Tree Club in Maryland, one of the places where my grandfather and President Eisenhower used to play. Marv introduced me to our caddie, who told me he had carried the bag for my grandfather decades earlier. After watching me play about five holes, he delivered his assessment. “Your grandfather was a hell of a lot better than you are,” he said. “He could shape it left, shape it right, make it move. When you hit it good, you’re just lucky.” The fellow wasn’t afraid to speak the truth.

  One of Prescott Bush’s fellow Senators was Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. At the time, McCarthy was very popular with a certain segment of the country for his fervent anticommunism, which included making (often baseless) allegations that communists had infiltrated the top levels of the government. During his 1952 Senate campaign, my grandfather appeared at a campaign event with McCarthy. The other Republican candidates at the event lauded McCarthy, earning big cheers from the crowd. My grandfather considered McCarthy a demagogue and a bully. Prescott Bush was last to speak. “While we admire his objectives in the fight against communism,” he said, “we have very considerable reservations concerning the methods which he sometimes employs.”

  The crowd booed lustily, but my grandfather was not intimidated. He later rejected a campaign contribution from McCarthy. Years later, when I learned about my grandfather’s stance, I admired his willingness to stand up to extremism. Boston Mayor James Michael Curley once summarized the philosophy of many politicians as, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” Prescott Bush had the courage and integrity to reject that view.