George W. Bush: The American Presidents Series: The 43rd President, 2001-2009

by James Mann

  The event that shaped Bush’s childhood was the death of his sister Robin. Three years younger than George W., she was diagnosed with leukemia in early 1953, not long after the birth of the Bushes’ third child, Jeb. The Bush parents hurriedly brought Robin to New York City for advanced care and proceeded to shuttle back and forth regularly for her tests and treatment, leaving seven-year-old George W. in Midland with friends. He was spared the details on how sick Robin was. “We thought he was too young to know,” Barbara Bush later explained. After seven months, Robin died in New York. The Bushes flew home, drove to their son’s elementary school, brought him out to the car, and told him the news. He was stunned, asking his mother several times, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  In the months that followed, George W. seemed to take on the job of consoling his parents, particularly his mother. George H. W. Bush, rising in the oil business, was working long hours and was often on the road. Barbara Bush, whose hair turned white during Robin’s illness, was home alone with George W. and the infant Jeb. “I must say, George Junior saved my life,” she told an interviewer years later. Once, when one of George W.’s friends asked him to play outside, he said he had to stay home to take care of his mother. Years later, Bush reflected that his mother’s response to Robin’s death had been “to envelop herself completely around me. She kind of smothered me and then recognized it was the wrong thing to do.”

  The result was that George W. looked up to his father as a model, yet was closer to his mother and identified with her. “I picked up a lot of Mother’s personality,” he wrote in his memoir. He and his mother had similar senses of humor, similar habits of teasing and needling; they took similar delight in being blunt and irreverent. Later in life, George W. would joke to audiences that he possessed his father’s eyes but his mother’s mouth.

  His father was by nature driven, high-achieving, respectful and respectable, controlled, prudent, loyal, polite, and dutiful. As a teenager and young man, George W. had the opposite traits. He was less driven than his father, less serious in his approach to life, and far less eager to convey an air of gravitas. Instead, he was cocky, mischievous, fun-loving, garrulous, and hotheaded—a curious blend of charm and cynicism. He admired his father but was disdainful of the established, East Coast–oriented world from which his father arose.

  In 1959, as George H. W. Bush’s oil ventures began to shift from inland Texas to offshore drilling, the family moved to Houston. George W. attended a local private school, Kinkaid, for two years and was then sent off to the Northeast to get a traditional Bush family education. His parents enrolled him at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, one of the country’s leading prep schools, where his father had stood out as class president and captain of the baseball and soccer teams. George W. was given no choice; his father brought him to Andover for a tour, and, months later, his mother told him he had been accepted and would go there. His friends in Texas thought he was somehow being punished and sent away to boarding school for doing something wrong.

  For George W., the school was at first terrifying. “Going to Andover was the hardest thing I did in my life, until I ran for president,” he later wrote. One of his early assignments in English class was to describe a significant emotional experience; Bush, not surprisingly, chose to write about Robin’s death. After using the word “tears” once in his essay, he looked for a synonym so as to avoid repetition. Pulling out the thesaurus that Barbara Bush had packed for him, he put it to use: “The lacerates ran down my cheek,” he wrote. It was an early sign of the weakness for malapropisms for which he would become famous. The teacher not only gave him a failing grade on the essay but told Bush his writing was terrible. He reacted by calling home and saying he was unhappy at Andover. His parents persuaded him to stay.

  Gradually, he decided to play a different role at Andover from that of his father. George H. W. Bush had excelled at athletics and formal activities like Student Council. By the account of Clay Johnson, George W.’s lifetime friend, fellow Texan, and Andover classmate, the younger Bush determined that his own mission would be “to instill a sense of frivolity” at the school.

  His own gift lay in his social skills. He made friends easily. He gradually emerged at the center of an in-crowd, one that walked around the school with “a little swagger.” It was also at Andover that those around him first remarked on his distinctive smirk, the smile, mouth turned down, that reflected bemusement or sarcasm or self-deprecation.

  He became Andover’s lead cheerleader. At one point, he was photographed in a skit posing as a girl in a sweater to ridicule a rival team. In his senior year, he was known above all for organizing a stickball league with elaborate rules; it even issued its own registration cards, sometimes with phony ages that could be used for fake IDs. In a poll of his Andover classmates, Bush came in second in the category of “big man on campus.”

  His grades were not outstanding. His college board scores (566 in verbal skills, 640 in math) were similarly unimpressive. When George W. told Andover’s dean that he wanted to go to Yale, the dean advised him to be sure to apply as well to some colleges where he would be more likely to gain admission. George W. took a tour with his father of the University of Texas in Austin and began to envision himself as a student there. But the cautious Andover dean had overestimated the degree to which Yale had become a meritocracy. In 1964, when George W. was applying to the college, his grandfather had recently stepped down after two terms as a U.S. senator from Connecticut, Yale’s home state, and his father was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate in Texas. Besides his father, grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, so many uncles and cousins from both sides of his family had gone to Yale that, when one written form asked applicants if any relatives had gone to the school, George W.’s list was so long he had to write on the back of the page. There was simply no way that Yale was going to refuse to admit George W. Bush, even if his academic credentials were less than outstanding.

  After Andover, Yale was easy. George W. had already made the transition from living at home. He roomed with two of his prep school friends, along with a fourth student whose father had also gone to Yale. He majored in history but didn’t take academics particularly seriously; for a class on oratory, he drafted a speech nominating Red Sox star Carl Yastrzemski to be mayor of Boston.

  He became known above all as “a good-time guy,” as his college friend the football star Calvin Hill later put it. He eventually became a member of Skull and Bones, the exclusive Yale secret society to which his father and grandfather had both been admitted. But that was merely a senior-year activity; for most of George W.’s college career his campus life centered on Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE), one of Yale’s (nonresident) fraternities. DKE was known on campus as the fraternity for athletes and a haven for drinking and parties; Bush became its president, its top prankster and instigator, the organizer of its first toga party.

  The first time George W. Bush’s name ever appeared in the New York Times, it was to defend his fraternity. In 1967, amid the turmoil of antiwar protests sweeping college campuses, the Yale Daily News reported that DKE had “branded” forty of its new recruits by applying a hot coat hanger to their backs in a way that singed into the flesh the Greek letter delta. Bush minimized the significance of the episode, telling the Times that the branding caused “only a cigarette burn.”

  Campus pranks led to a couple of minor run-ins with the police. Once, Bush and his friends seized a Christmas wreath from a local hotel to decorate the DKE house for a party; they were charged with disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. Years later, after he entered politics, Bush developed a clever tautology to deflect questions about these and other episodes from his college days and early adulthood. “When I was young and irresponsible,” he said, “I was young and irresponsible.”

  But there were a few aspects to life at Yale that left Bush unhappy and embittered, then and for decades afterward. They centered on intellectuals, national politics, and the views exp
ressed on campus about his father. In the fall of George W.’s freshman year, his father ran for the U.S. Senate in Texas against the incumbent Democrat, Ralph Yarborough. It was one of the most prominent Senate races that year, covered on the front pages of national newspapers and the Yale Daily News, so that most students knew who George H. W. Bush was and could identify George W. as his son.

  Although Bush’s father would later become known as a moderate Republican, in that 1964 campaign he ran as a hard conservative and was a strong supporter of the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. (He gave Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative to George W. with instructions to read it.) In that campaign, George H. W. Bush also took a strong position against the historic legislation that became the 1964 Civil Rights Act, opposed the nuclear test ban treaty, and called for U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations if Communist China were admitted.

  George W. went home to Texas to help his father in the final days of the campaign. His father lost, and the result was a profound disappointment to the entire family. Upon his return to Yale, however, George W. found that many of his fellow students were happy with the election results. In one encounter he remembered for decades, Bush ran into the college’s famed chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr., an Andover and Yale classmate of his father. Coffin had been actively involved in the Freedom Rides and sit-ins of the civil rights movement. Appalled by George H. W. Bush’s opposition to civil rights legislation, Coffin told George W. that his father had lost to “a better man.” The younger Bush was infuriated.

  It was one of many such slights Bush perceived at Yale, both to his father and to the traditional, fraternity-centered life he was leading. Yale was not a meritocracy; Bush’s very presence on campus was testimony to that fact. But the college was becoming more so than it had ever been in the past, and as a result the climate at Yale was shifting. Amid the upsurge in student activism of the 1960s, quite a few students looked down upon the drinking, party-loving culture of Bush and his friends. Bush’s father went on to win a congressional seat from Houston in 1966 and became a supporter of the war in Vietnam; so, therefore, did his son. But the younger Bush was not so much politically conservative at college as he was apolitical.

  Bush told an interviewer a quarter century later that he had been irritated by the “snobs” at Yale. “What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous,” he said. He harbored a grudge against Yale for decades and did not attend college reunions. This disdain was his own, not a sentiment shared by his friends. At the time of Bush’s twenty-fifth reunion in 1993, his old roommate Clay Johnson was fund-raising for the college and called to ask Bush how much he wanted to give. “I want to give nothing,” Bush told him.

  Only after Bush became president did he seek to make amends. In May 2003, only two months after the invasion of Iraq, Bush opened the White House to his Yale classmates for a night in honor of their thirty-fifth reunion. Despite the passions over the war, the event went surprisingly smoothly. Some of those who had looked down on Bush at Yale came away surprised by how adept he was in a social setting. One of Bush’s classmates was Leilani Akwai, a transsexual whose name at Yale had been Peter Akwai. Approaching the president in the White House receiving line, she introduced herself and said, “I guess the last time we spoke, I was still living as a man.” Bush replied graciously, “But now you’re you.”

  Bush graduated in 1968, just as the Vietnam War was reaching its peak. That year, American troop deployments surpassed 500,000, and more than 16,000 Americans were killed. Speaking at Bush’s graduation, Yale president Kingman Brewster criticized the military draft, asserting that it forced students into “a cynical, evasive gamesmanship” to avoid military service. Some of Bush’s classmates became conscientious objectors, went to Canada, or obtained medical deferments to keep from being sent to Vietnam.

  Bush pursued a different plan. During his Christmas vacation in 1967, he began to ask about joining the Texas Air National Guard’s 147th Fighter Group and learned there might be some openings for pilots. He took a pilot’s aptitude test that spring, received a low but passing grade, and formally enlisted in the unit in Houston in late May, less than two weeks before his graduation from Yale made him eligible for the draft.

  The National Guard unit Bush joined was responsible for defending Texas and neighboring states from the unlikely possibility that the United States could be attacked from the South, through Mexico or the Caribbean. Members of the 147th Fighter Group were not assigned to Vietnam unless they volunteered. During this era, the Texas National Guard became known as a “champagne” unit. Along with Bush, its ranks included the sons of three of the state’s other leading political figures, Governor John Connally, Senator John Tower, and Representative Lloyd Bentsen, along with at least seven members of the Dallas Cowboys.

  Bush obtained a slot in this Guard unit with help both from his father’s friends and from another of Texas’s most powerful political figures, Ben Barnes, the speaker of the Texas legislature. Bush would later assert that neither his father, then a congressman, nor any other member of the Bush family ever directly contacted anyone in the Guard. This statement appears to be true. However, a Houston oil executive named Sidney Adger, who was a friend of Bush’s father, contacted Barnes, who in turn got in touch with National Guard officials to urge that George W. be given one of the slots for a pilot. Guard officials had plenty of reasons to accommodate a congressman’s son. One Guard leader, Colonel Walter “Buck” Staudt, who was active in helping George W. land a position in the Guard, traveled to Washington a few months later to lobby Congressman Bush for more money for Houston’s Ellington Air Force Base.

  In the fall of 1968, after completing basic training, George W. was given time off to go to Florida and work in the Senate campaign of the Republican candidate Edward Gurney before continuing on to flight school. It was merely one of several occasions when Bush was accorded treatment that went beyond that of an ordinary guardsman. On one occasion, while Bush was in flight training in Valdosta, Georgia, President Richard Nixon dispatched a plane to bring George W. to Washington for an introductory date with his daughter Tricia. (There was no second date.) When George W. graduated from flight school, George H. W. Bush gave the commencement address and pinned first lieutenant wings on his son.

  * * *

  In 1970, once his two years of active duty were completed, George W. settled in Houston, where he continued his Guard obligations by flying F-102 jets at Ellington Air Force Base. That year, his father ran for the Senate again against the Democratic candidate Lloyd Bentsen. George W. helped out when he could, occasionally appearing on the campaign plane in his flight jacket. But his father lost again. Soon afterward, Nixon appointed George H. W. Bush to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and he and Barbara moved to New York City.

  George W. remained in Houston. He lived in a singles complex and worked at a local agribusiness run by one of his father’s associates. The job was boring; he would later recall that at one point he found himself conducting a study of the mushroom industry. In the spring of 1972, Jimmy Allison, a family friend who had run George H. W. Bush’s successful campaign for Congress, recruited George W. to work as the political director for the Senate campaign of former Postmaster General Winton Blount in Alabama. Texas National Guard officials permitted Bush to move to Montgomery, with the stipulation that he should continue his Guard duty there. But while he worked on the Blount campaign, his attendance with the Alabama National Guard was infrequent at best. He did not resume his duty with the Texas National Guard for a year. A few months after his return, he was granted an expedited release from his Guard obligations so that he could go to business school.

  His father had been a pilot, shot down over the Pacific in World War II. George W. Bush was a pilot, too, but his stint in the National Guard became a political liability, an issue that would become the subject of repeated investigations, first in his father’s presidentia
l campaign in 1988 and then in George W.’s own campaigns for governor of Texas and the presidency.

  The accusations of favoritism always lingered. Bush was clearly given greater leeway than an ordinary Guard member, though perhaps no more than the sons of other prominent political figures like Bentsen and Connally.

  * * *

  In December 1972, George W. Bush, then twenty-six years old and nearing the end of his National Guard duty, gathered with his family in Washington for the Christmas holidays. His parents had just moved there from New York City so that George H. W. Bush could start a new job as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

  One night, George W. brought his fifteen-year-old brother Marvin with him to a party, where both of them were drinking. On the way back, George W.’s car hit a neighbor’s trash can and carried it down the block. Once they were home, his father sent word that he wanted George W. to come see him in the den. George W. was in no mood for a polite lecture. “I hear you’re looking for me,” he told his father. “You wanna go mano a mano right here?” The confrontation ended without a fight when George W.’s brother Jeb interceded to calm him down.