Not that Hugh was going to show up. Bill Liedtke would play football with the guys, or tennis, even golf, but brother Hugh, the fellows used to say, only thought about deals: probably worked up deals in his sleep. Hugh and Bill Liedtke, as the ad said, operated as a law firm, but the only legal business they ever did was to bail a few of the Yalies out one night after they got liquored up in someone’s apartment and went after the miller-moths with croquet mallets—busted up the walls pretty good. Anyway, three or four of the boys ended up at Sheriff Darnell’s jail—and Big Ed’s jail was not a place to spend a night, if you could help it. So Bill Liedtke came down to spring them. Of course, Hugh wasn’t going to come ... probably busy thinking up deals.
It wasn’t that Hugh was unfriendly. Just seemed like when he was friendly, he always had something in mind. No, to be fair, it was the other way around: he always had something in mind; if he was friendly, that was just bonus. Anyway, you learned pretty quick that behind the deep drawl and jowly grin was a mind that was two or three sharp steps ahead of you, maybe a step or two ahead of what he was telling you. The Liedtke boys had grown up in the business—their father was a lawyer for Gulf, in Tulsa, and well connected there—and the way Hugh thought about the game was different from the rest of the Yalies. With the money from Tulsa, Hugh put Liedtke & Liedtke right into operation of wells. Hugh was buying and selling oil when most of the boys were hustling leases that might get drilled, and might have oil. Hugh Liedtke was building equity. He didn’t talk about the Big One, the quick strike and a gusher of cash. He had a long-term, corporate view of the business. Hugh didn’t mind buying into someone else’s production. He’d try to work out a deal where he’d pay for the purchase, down the line, with proceeds from the oil he bought. Hell, if it came to that, Hugh wouldn’t mind calling a broker in New York, to buy the stock of the company that owned a share of the partnership that owned the oil. He always saw five ways to skin the same cat. One of Hugh’s stops in the Ivy League was the Harvard Business School, and what he brought to the West Texas oil fields was not romance, but a genius for finance.
The Liedtke brothers had an office across the street from Bush-Overbey, and, of course, George Bush made friends. Still, it came as a surprise in Midland when Bush let out word that he and Hugh—or, to be precise, the Liedtkes and Bush-Overbey—were going into business together. “I’ve been talking to Hugh,” is the way Bush said it, “and we’re going to go the corporate route.” It seemed to the other fellows in Midland that with less than two years in the business, George Bush was a bit dewy for Hugh to pick as a partner. As usual, Liedtke had a different view. What he saw was a man who worked hard, who would work with him—maybe he wouldn’t bring to the firm long experience, or deep knowledge of the business, but that would come. Hugh had the long haul in mind, and what Bush would bring, right away, was access to East Coast money. That was in the nature of Hugh’s proposition: the Liedtkes would raise a half-million dollars, and Bush-Overbey would do the same. What they’d have was a real oil company—a million-dollar outfit—some staff, maybe a geologist ... in the argot of the game, which Bush so enjoyed, “a little more muscle, a little more stroke.”
That they did, when they joined up in March 1953, with Hugh Liedtke as the new company president. George Bush would be vice president. ...
“What should we call it? ...”
President Hugh said it had to stand out in the phone book: “It oughta start with A ... or a Z.”
There was a movie playing that week in downtown Midland: Viva Zapata!, with Marlon Brando ... so that’s what they fixed on—Zapata, the name of a Mexican rebel comandante.
Hugh was right: it did stand out. And at twenty-eight, George Bush was not just in the game, he was on the map. In The Spot, or at the Ranch House, where the guys would kick back over dinner with a couple of drinks, people talked about Bush now in a different tone of voice. Zapata was a player—a clean million in equity. But Bush? ... For the first time in his life, people talked about George Bush as a man whose résumé may have outpaced his attainments.
“Smartest thing he’s done was to hook up with Hugh ...” someone would say.
“Yep. Ol’ Hugh, though: he’s the one who makes the snowball ... and he throws it.”
“Yeah ... bring s’more snow, George.”
Even a year later, when the other independents learned, to their shock, to their admiration, and later still, to their envy, that Liedtke and Bush had bet it all on one roll of the dice—$850,000 on one lease—no one made much point of crediting Bush’s steady faith, his assiduous work, his hyperactive friendliness ... or even the good fortune that had followed him through three decades.
They leaned back in lawn chairs, around the barbecue in someone’s backyard, and shrugged: “Well,” they said, “that’s Hugh ...”
Of course, by that time, no one who’d been close to Bush would have talked about his Great and Good Godly fortune—not that year ... not at all.
They called her Robin, but her full name was Pauline Robinson Bush—named for Barbara’s mother, who died in 1949, in a car accident, with her husband at the wheel. Marvin and Pauline Pierce had left home together one morning. Pauline took along a cup of coffee. As he drove, Barbara’s father saw the coffee start to slide on the dash. He lunged to steady the cup, but he lost control of the car, hit a stone wall. He was hospitalized with broken ribs. Pauline was killed.
Bar did not go to New York for the funeral. She was seven months pregnant, and her father insisted she stay home and take care of herself. It was five days before Christmas when Bar gave birth to Robin. She would always remember the sight: it was the only birth for which Bar was awake, to watch, as her daughter came into the world.
Robin was still an infant when the Bushes moved back to Texas, just a toddler when George Bush swung full-time into business as an independent. Bar took care of the two kids, Georgie and Robin, in the house on Easter Egg Row, and then, in 1953, another child arrived, John Ellis Bush, whose name father George initialized: J.E.B. They called him Jebbie.
Among the Yalies in Midland, everybody kept having kids. It seemed the natural way of things: at the time, Bar didn’t think twice about her choices in life. It was decades later, when she looked back and labeled her state of mind in Midland as “dormant ... just dormant.” Or when, with a shrug, she dismissed all the might-have-beens and ought-to-have-beens with a smile of ironic self-mockery. “In a marriage,” Bar said, “where one is so willing to take on responsibility, and the other so willing to keep the bathrooms clean ... that’s the way you get treated.” (Of course, by that time, too. Bar had perfected her own power of mindset: she could have gone back to college, she said. George would have applauded. But she did not go back, and did not look back. ... “I think,” Barbara Bush said, “people who regret something they did not do are liars.”)
At the time, 1953, what she knew was, she was plenty busy, getting Georgie off to school in the morning, and getting Robin, who was still home all day, set up for play, and feeding the baby, Jebbie. ... She’d wonder later, if she hadn’t been so busy, would she have noticed sooner?
She never saw the little bruises on Robin’s legs, or never observed them—every child got banged up playing. What she noticed, what worried her, was when Robin would not play. “What are you going to do today?” Bar asked her little girl.
“I’m either going to lie on the bed and look at books, or I’ll lie on the grass, and watch the cars ...”
That’s when Bar took Robin to the pediatrician: Why should a three-year-old want to lie around all day? The doctor, a family friend, Dorothy Wyvell, didn’t tell Bar her diagnosis. “Why don’t you come back this afternoon, with George?” That rattled Barbara, sure enough.
She tracked down George at the Ector County Courthouse, where he was digging into land records. That afternoon, Dr. Wyvell told them that Robin was very sick. She had leukemia.
It didn’t sink in with George—not at first. He said: “Well, what do we do?”
Dr. Wyvell started to cry.
“Well, what’s the next step?” he insisted.
She told him there was no next step. Or, at least, she offered her advice, which was: do nothing. And tell no one. Just make Robin’s time the best she could have. The child only had weeks to live.
George Bush, young man about business, could not believe it. He refused to believe it. He called his uncle, John Walker, a cancer specialist in New York, president of Memorial Hospital.
“I just had,” Bush said, “the most ridiculous conversation ...” and he told Johnny Walker what Dr. Wyvell said.
“Why don’t you bring her up here ... have her looked at,” Dr. Walker said. He’d arrange treatment by cancer specialists at the Sloan-Kettering Foundation. But, he warned his nephew, Dr. Wyvell might be right: leukemia was a killer. In ’53, doctors had no sure way ... in fact, little hope, of reversing it.
Bush kept replaying that conversation where he heard it was helpless, hopeless ... he could not do anything for his daughter. ... It was incredible. What was he supposed to do? Just take it? Sit on his hands?
“You’ll never live with yourself if you don’t treat her,” John Walker told him over the phone. George, Bar, and Robin were on the plane for New York the next day.
That began a roller-coaster ride that went on for months. Bar was in New York, full-time, and George was father and mother in Texas, until the weekends, when the boys would stay with neighbors while George flew to New York to join his wife and daughter. The doctors at Sloan-Kettering gave Robin an experimental drug—it was new that year ... no one could promise ... but she got better ... she could eat, she sat up, she could play ... doctors called it remission. And after a couple of months, Bar and Robin were home in Midland. ... But then the child started to sink again, and the drug was no help, the roller-coaster screamed downhill, Robin and Bar went back to New York, and George was flying back and forth.
It was hell for all of them, but George was the one who just could not stand it. Bar made a rule that there would be no crying in front of Robin: Bar meant to make her daughter’s days happy ones. And she did: Bar stayed with Robin hour after hour, playing with her, reading to her, tickling her, talking, holding her as she slept, smoothing her blond hair. Barbara Bush stayed with her daughter through it all. Like an oak in the wind, she was tossed, but she would not be moved. No one in Midland, or in New York at the hospital, ever saw Barbara Bush cry, through seven months, while her daughter slipped away. George could not sit and take it like that. He marveled at his wife’s strength—it was beyond strength, it was heroic, an act of will and love that he could not match. He could not look at his daughter without fighting tears, and a helpless rage, or despond that he could not bear. He was so grateful to have work to do, places to be, people to see. He’d burst out of that house in the morning like a man trapped in smoke lunges toward fresh air. Sometimes, he’d stop at church to say a prayer. Then he’d immerse himself in the game, the cares of the living.
Of course, he could not follow Dr. Wyvell’s counsel of silence, either: everyone in Midland knew ... all their friends, and their families. Some of the friends in Midland gave blood for Robin’s transfusions. When Bar and Robin were home from New York, Betty Liedtke, Hugh’s wife, would come to the house almost every day. And she’d cook, hoping to tempt Robin to eat ... and tempting Barbara, who might not have thought of food for herself. In New York, Barbara had her own family to support her. She stayed with George’s grandparents, just blocks from the hospital. Her old friends, and George’s, were everywhere around. From Greenwich, George’s mother, Dorothy Bush, sent a nurse to Texas, to be with George and the boys. And Prescott Bush, newly elected to the United States Senate, called Bar one day, to come out with him in Connecticut. He said he wanted her help, picking out his gravesite. And gently, he led her through the cemetery, until they found a lovely spot ... a place, Prescott said, where he would be comfortable ... and there he planted a hedge, a bush ... of course, that was just his tender way of making a place for Robin.
Uncle Johnny Walker was at the hospital every day. He was more than counsel, he was inspiration: his own career as a surgeon had been cut short, a few years before, by polio, and doctors said he’d never walk again, but John Walker not only made a second career in business at the G.H. Walker firm, he also served medicine as president of Memorial Hospital—and with crutches he got around New York, every day, on the subway. In the end, in October, it was Dr. John Walker who tried to tell Bar: she could let Robin go. The girl was failing, the cancer drugs had eaten holes in her stomach. She was bleeding inside. She was very weak. The Sloan-Kettering doctors wanted to operate: they thought they might stop the bleeding ... anyway, they knew so little about these cases, they wanted to try. ... Bar was twenty-eight years old, and this, she had to decide alone. George was in the air, on his way to New York.
“You don’t have to do it,” Dr. Walker told Bar.
But Bar felt she had to. Those doctors were half killing themselves, trying to save Robin. And there was always hope—wasn’t there? She gave the go-ahead, and the surgeons went to work.
But Robin never came out of the operation. George was there that night, when Robin died. She was two months short of her fourth birthday. George and Bar did not bury her, but left her for the doctors at Sloan-Kettering. They wanted her death to mean something for other children who would face this, in years to come.
After Robin died, the world changed for Barbara Bush. All at once, the unfairness, the pain and loss, came crashing down on her and she was without strength, without will. It was George now who took her in hand. And he did what he thought best: the day after Robin died, it was George who went to the hospital, to thank everybody who had worked on his child. And then, in Rye, he took Bar to the club, and they played golf.
Barbara was lost in her grief. It was only George who kept her going. After Robin’s death, he was released, to act, to keep moving. He knew so well how to do that. And he would not let his wife sink into her mourning. They had to go on, he told her. But for a while, she did not know how. He was like a man holding on to her at the cliff edge: they had to keep moving, to live—there were the boys ... there was him! There was their life, still, to live! ... In later years, she always gave him credit for saving her, for saving them. Somewhere, she learned a statistic: two-thirds of the couples who lose a child, as they did, end up divorced from the strain and the grief, the guilt and blame ... but not George and Barbara Bush. They were stronger, and she always blessed him for that. Sometimes, when she thought back, she would tell of the critical moment for her ... it was so strange, and small, when she told it, she was sure no one would quite understand, but that was the instant she turned away from the cliff edge.
It was the day of the memorial service, and the house was filling with friends and family, and Bar was upstairs getting ready, in the bedroom ... but she wasn’t getting ready. She could not. She could not get herself to go down those stairs, to face all those people, and have the sad wound in her opened to them ... she just could not go down there. Did he know? Hard to say. He was not urging her, or even looking at her. George was standing at the window, looking over the yard and the walk, his lanky form silhouetted in the light ... as he watched Bar’s sister, Martha, and her husband, Walter Rafferty, coming toward the front door. And he said, as if to himself, just one of his wry play-by-plays ... with a hint of an Irish brogue: “Ah, here come the O’Raffertys. It’s goin’ to be a helluva wake!”
With that, somehow, it came to her, penetrated her pain: there he was, her George, and he was so ... all right. They both were. They had so much. ... It didn’t stop the pain. Back in Texas, the pain would be a physical presence, an ache inside ... but she would go on.
As for George, he seemed never to doubt, never to waver, from the instant Robin was lost to them. He always seemed to have the articles of faith he’d taken from his mother’s breakfast readings. Life was good. Life was for the living. Good things happened to good people. It w
asn’t so much what he said, as how he lived. The point was, to keep moving, doing, turned ever outward: when Bar and he flew back to Midland, George Bush did not take them home, but directly from the airport to the houses of their friends—all over town, visiting friends. ... He said it would be hard for people to come to them, in that situation, and he wanted so much to tell people, thank you.
And he was moving. That was the moment he and Hugh Liedtke rolled the dice. There was a big swatch of land in Coke County, about eighty miles from Midland, and Sun Oil had wells, producers, on a parcel just to the east. Zapata bet $850,000—for all practical purposes, Hugh and George bet everything—on the proposition that a huge pool of oil extended west under eight thousand acres of sand.
Two-thirds of that lease, called the Jameson field, was owned by a Wichita Falls outfit called Perkins-Prothro. But the other third was held by an oilman named Green, who worked out of San Angelo. When Green wanted to sell his interest, Hugh Liedtke wanted that lease. Problem was, a couple of independents out of Midland beat him to it. Bob Wood and Leland Thompson got in there and made a deal with Green a week ahead of Zapata. But Hugh always saw five ways to skin the same cat: he and George Bush worked out a deal to pay Wood and Thompson $50,000 and then carry them for a quarter interest. ... Zapata had its deal.
How could they be so sure? They could not. You never really knew until you drilled each hole. They had some geologists working for them now, and there was a senior geologist, just retired from Gulf, whom George and Hugh kept taking to lunch ... but still, you could never know. Call it instinct, or faith (good things happen ...), but no one among the independents in Midland ever bet it all like that. No one in their crowd had done that before.
So they drilled—Perkins-Prothro was the official operator on-site—and probably sank another hundred or a hundred twenty-five thousand on that ... and they hit.
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