by Kitty Kelley
The next day the student newspaper blared: “We stand as a unit against the common foe—the yellow peril of Nippon.”
Andover’s regimented life suddenly plunged into daily air-raid drills, first-aid classes, radio and signal courses. Students rushed to enlist, though the headmaster urged them to stay in school.
“They couldn’t take us all at once,” said classmate Ken Keuffel. “We wanted to volunteer. We were so patriotic.”
“The attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized everybody,” said Henry See. “We all wanted to serve our country. We felt like serving was our duty.”
“My reaction was one of shock, almost disbelief,” recalled George Bush. “I didn’t fully comprehend world affairs. My interests were our undefeated soccer season just finished, basketball-baseball just coming up. Christmas vacation was only a couple of weeks away and then graduation. Then I guess that was followed by the typical American reaction that we had better do something about this. I remember the country’s instant coming together for a common purpose, and my own gut feeling was the same as that of many young Americans—we wanted to fight for our country.”
Poppy wrote to his parents that he planned to join those dashing young men in helmets, goggles, and leather jackets. “I made up my mind to go into the service and be a naval aviator,” he said. “I knew I wanted to be a pilot. I don’t know why, because I’d never flown.”
His mother and father pleaded with him to stay in school and go on to Yale, saying there would be time later to serve the flag. Although two of his classmates had already enlisted, he promised his parents that he would at least wait until graduation.
His father was named the national chairman of the USO War Fund Campaign to raise money for the United Service Organizations. “We were given a goal of $32 million to raise . . . shortly after Pearl Harbor,” he said. “This seemed like a staggering sum to me, but Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. felt that the task was not insurmountable . . . I recall that, as we were about to start our big drive going to the office of our organization one morning and finding a letter addressed to me from Mr. Rockefeller. I opened it, and out of it fell a check for $1 million.”
Prescott superseded the goal and raised $33 million ($377 million in 2004) for the USO. He was honored for his efforts in 2001 when the Prescott Bush USO Building at Camp Casey in South Korea was unveiled. His son George Herbert Walker Bush was present for the dedication ceremony.
When Poppy came home from Andover for the Christmas holidays in 1941, he attended a dance at the Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich. There he spotted a pretty brunette and asked a friend to introduce him. He and Barbara Pierce then sat out the next two dances talking, because he didn’t know how to waltz. She had learned at Miss Covington’s Dancing School in Rye, New York, but she only knew how to lead. “My mother would say, ‘You must not be the boy every time.’ But I didn’t want to be left [out]. Not me. I was five feet eight at the age of twelve and already weighed 148 pounds.”
Barbara was sixteen and slender by the time she met Poppy Bush. Neither had dated anyone else before nor even been romantically kissed; they came to their instantaneous attraction fresh and full of hope. Relatives remember them as two young colts chasing each other around a ring. “They were two tomboys, locking each other in closets,” said George’s aunt Mary Carter Walker. “They were just real tomboys.”
Barbara played soccer at Ashley Hall, the girls’ school she attended in Charleston, South Carolina; she also played tennis and said she could hold her breath and swim two laps underwater, all of which validated her with the rampagingly athletic Bushes. Her own mother discouraged her interest in sports as “unladylike.” Pauline Robinson Pierce would have preferred a more feminine daughter, less rambunctious than the clumsy overweight youngster who was forever knocking into antique tables and breaking precious pieces of Chinese porcelain. Barbara, the third of four children, had spent most of her life as the ugly-duckling daughter of an elegant beauty. Her older sister, Martha, slim and stunningly glamorous, had made the cover of Vogue in 1940. Barbara, unfortunately, was built like her large-boned father. Her mother treated her like a discarded refrigerator. As a defense, she ate constantly and developed a caustic tongue.
“I thought she was really mean and sarcastic [when we were growing up],” said June Biedler, a childhood friend whom Barbara teased for having a painful stammer. This cruelty, Biedler suggested, may have been the result of having “a mother that was a little mean to her.”
Unlike George, Barbara was not close to any of her siblings. She couldn’t compete with her older sister, five years her senior, and she was squeezed between two brothers. Jim, the older, had behavioral problems, and Scott, the younger, had physical problems (a cyst in the bone marrow of his shoulder), which preoccupied their parents. Barbara felt deprived of their attention and affection. She compensated in scratchy ways, developing a prickly and feisty personality.
Exploring the attraction between Barbara Pierce and George Bush, Marjorie Williams wrote in Vanity Fair: “Most of their friends are at a loss when asked what so quickly cemented this couple. The answer often boils down to social class—that they were, as George’s redoubtable mother put it, ‘sensible and well-suited to each other.’”
Their so-called social class, based on nothing more than private schools and country clubs, did give them a common meeting ground, but the bonding sprang more from their own emotional needs.
They probably didn’t realize when they met how much they complemented each other. Both had experienced feelings of rejection from a cold, austere parent. Barbara, who had a ruptured relationship with her mother, and George, who was not close to his father, found emotional refuge in each other. In fact, over the years Barbara reinvented herself in the image of George’s mother.
“George recognized the type of person Barbara was when they first met,” said his friend Fitzhugh Green. “He had seen the same characteristics in his mother: a woman of strong character and personality, direct and honest; one who cares about the outdoors and people, especially children, and is oriented to home life . . . Anyone who has met both mother and wife can see they belong in the same category.”
Both George and Barbara were accustomed to corporal punishment, George from his father’s leather strap and Barbara from her mother’s wooden coat hanger.
Both had been exposed to the ravages of alcoholism; in an eerie coincidence, each had an alcoholic uncle named Jim whose marital breakups caused their families no end of grief and consternation. Even Barbara’s most illustrious relative, her fourth cousin four times removed, Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth President of the United States (1853–57), was an alcoholic. The insidious disease with its genetic predispositions had already wrapped its tentacles around the roots of both family trees.
Politically, both came from Republican households that despised the Roosevelts; George’s parents detested Franklin, while Barbara’s could not abide Eleanor.
On the more elementary level of attraction, Barbara and George made each other feel special: she felt pretty for the first time in her life, and he felt adored. As his brother Jonathan said: “She was wild about him. And for George, if anyone wants to be wild about him, it’s fine with him.”
After the Christmas holidays, when the teenagers returned to their schools, they started corresponding. Poppy invited Barbara to his senior prom and to his graduation on June 8, 1942.
The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, gave the commencement address, beseeching Andover’s men to go to college and wait for the war to call them. He made the inevitability of battle all too real for them and their parents when he announced the deaths of four young alumni tragically lost in training maneuvers, and Andover’s first casualty from combat, who was shot down while serving in the Royal Air Force. Still, some in the class of 1942 wanted to serve their country sooner rather than later, and of 215 students 68 had enlisted by the end of the year.
Following Stimson’s speech, Prescott Bush asked his son if the Sec
retary had said anything to change his mind about enlisting.
“No, sir,” said Poppy. “I’m going in.”
Four days later, on his eighteenth birthday, George Herbert Walker Bush broke the parental yoke. He went to Boston and enlisted in the Navy one week after the Battle of Midway, the first decisive U.S. naval battle in which surface ships played no combat role at all. The age of the aircraft carrier had dawned. The Navy now needed pilots, and needed them fast. Bush was sworn in as a seaman second class.
“I was a scared, nervous kid,” he said years later.
He had just made the first independent decision of his young life—and possibly his best.
CHAPTER FIVE
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan became the heart of darkness. The war metastasized from Europe to the Pacific, and benign little islands that once conjured up pretty native girls in fitted sarongs and hibiscus blossoms suddenly filled with the dead bodies of American soldiers as the Japanese bombed their way across the South Pacific, hell-bent on reaching the United States. To that end, Japan had mobilized suicide boats and human torpedoes; later it sent in kamikaze pilots who revered their Emperor as the Son of Heaven and dived to their deaths in glory while blowing up any vessel flying the Stars and Stripes. “We are prepared to lose ten million men in our war with America,” said Japanese General Masaharu Homma.
Within three months of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had captured the American islands of Guam and Wake. They had seized the Philippines, grabbed the British colony of Hong Kong, and conquered Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Malay Peninsula, and Burma.
There was no twenty-four-hour coverage of the carnage in those days, only newspaper and radio reports that were subjected to strict censorship. Americans did not know the full extent of the enemy’s brutality until after the war. But enough news of savage death marches, beheaded soldiers, and bayoneted prisoners seeped into the Fox and Pathé newsreels shown in movie theaters each week to inflame U.S. hatred of “Nips,” short for “Dai Nippon,” the Japanese word for their homeland. The Land of the Rising Sun was so reviled that American citizens of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were rounded up and thrown into “resettlement” camps. In all, 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned. The “slumbering giant,” as Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto had referred to the United States before Pearl Harbor, was aroused and angry.
“We must hate with every fiber of our being,” exclaimed Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair in a 1942 broadcast to all U.S. troops. “We must lust for battle, our object in life must be to kill. There need be no pangs of conscience, for our enemies have lighted the way to faster, surer, crueler killing. They were past masters. We must hurry to catch up with them if we are to survive.”
Admiral William F. Halsey ordered a huge billboard, visible to passing ships in the Pacific, with his version of the Japanese short verse known as haiku:
KILL JAPS KILL JAPS.
KILL MORE JAPS.
You will help to kill the yellow
bastards if you do your job well.
Jukeboxes across America blared “Goodbye, Mama (I’m Off to Yokohama),” and schoolchildren jumped rope to the singsong racism of “I’m going to slap a dirty little Jap, I’m going to slap a dirty little Jap.”
As men roared off to war, women tossed their aprons and jumped into slacks to go to work in factories. In 1942, the darkest year of the war, 2 million women picked up wrenches and assembled plane parts, giving rise to Rosie the Riveter, the national symbol of women in the workforce. The rest of the country, including schoolchildren, committed themselves to the war effort by selling war bonds, staging paper drives, and collecting scrap iron. Night baseball was canceled to save electricity. Car manufacturing was stopped to save on rubber and gasoline. Sugar, meat, and eggs were rationed and could only be purchased upon presentation of coupons from rationing books. All metal and rubber had to go to the war effort, and razor blades were supposed to be cut to one a week for each shaver. There was a shortage of hair curlers, wigs, girdles, nylon stockings, shoes, rubber diapers, hoses, bronze caskets, even flyswatters.
The rigorous prohibition on the sale of gasoline and tires forced the Walkers and Bushes to stop driving at Kennebunkport and resort to a horse-drawn wagon. The beast of burden was named Barsil. Prescott junior joked about seeing a strong resemblance between the heavy dray horse and George’s girlfriend, so he called both Bar. After the horse died, the nickname stuck to the girlfriend.
During the summer of 1942, when eighteen-year-old Poppy Bush could have been splashing around the family estate in Maine, getting ready to go to Yale, he elected instead to fight what his parents called “Mr. Roosevelt’s War.” Standing on the platform of Penn Station in the sweltering heat of August, he waited with his father for the train that would take him to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he would learn how to fly torpedo bombers. Hours earlier he had kissed his mother, his brothers and sister, his aunts and uncles, and his Walker grandparents, Ganny and Gampy, good-bye. He was leaving behind his first (she would say only) girlfriend, Barbara Pierce, and his best friend, George “Red Dog” Warren, who was heading to Yale. Although Poppy had been away at boarding school for five years, he admitted feeling nervous about leaving home because “I didn’t know a soul where I was going.”
As the train rumbled into the station, he grabbed his duffel bag and shook his father’s hand. Prescott Bush, whose boys called him “The Big One,” could barely speak. With tears in his eyes, he wished his young son Godspeed.
“It was the first time I’d ever seen my dad cry,” George said many years later.
Piling on board with other cadets, George, who would no longer introduce himself as Poppy, was headed for the Naval Aviation Pre-Flight School. He immediately wrote to his mother that Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox was in his cadet class. The baseball great would go on to become what George said he had wanted to be—a Marine fighter pilot who received a commission of 2nd Lt. rather than Ensign. “The reason is they fly a lot in attack bombers—fly low and strafe as well as bomb,” he wrote. “They clear the way for advancing troops. This or long range bombing appeals to me more than anything else.”
George never did make it into the Marines. Instead, he spent the next ten months training at naval air stations across the country for two-month stints in Minneapolis; Corpus Christi, Texas; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia; and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. He learned first to fly, and then to pilot an enormous TBM Avenger from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The Avenger could drop five-hundred-pound bombs on target.
“You cannot imagine the unnatural state flying can get you in,” he wrote to his mother. “I have experienced it on several occasions already and haven’t even flown blind yet. It’s an utterly depressing and demoralizing feeling—much worse than getting beat at tennis. You get mentally confused and it’s really terrible.”
Having been forced to play sports with his right hand, George wrote with his left in a crabbed scrawl that looked like chewed toothpicks scattered higgledy-piggledy across the page. In one of his “Darling Mum” letters he apologized for his pulverized penmanship. He said the problem was that, in school, he was never taught to “write script.”
He filled his letters with longing for the girl he’d left behind. Barbara, then a high-school senior, planned to go to Smith College. “She’s really the one, Mum. I just know it . . . I only hope she doesn’t give me the fluff.” He wondered about his future: “Any job where I could make enough money to have the few basic things I desire would be most welcome. I often think and worry about it—I now know exactly what I want. No college, I’ll have to do without, just a job anywhere with a fairly decent salary.” Like other cadets, he fantasized about earning his wings and was thrilled when his mother offered to buy him a pair:
On our blues and greens we have them embroidered right on. They are included in the price of the suit just like braid and stars, but on khakis and whites we wear the pins so—if you rea
lly do want to give me my wings that would be nice . . . Most of the ones you buy here are imitation and quite cheap $2.50 but if you want to get me a good pair—$10.00 I imagine you could probably get them at Brooks or some such place. If you do, make them a graduation and birthday present ’cause I’d love nothing better. Just be sure they are regulation size etc. . . . If you happen to be in Brooks or something you could look. Nothing would make me prouder than to wear a pair of wings given me by you. Maybe you could slip a GWB on the back or something.
When his mother wrote that her sister-in-law’s brother George Mead had been killed in combat, George responded like a soldier. “He died the way all of us would like to die when our time comes—Mum, it’s a very funny thing. I have no fear of death now. Maybe it’s because I am here safely on the ground that I say this. I do not think I will change. All heroics aside, I feel, and every fellow here I’m sure feels, that the only part of the whole thing of any worry would be the sorrow it might cause to our families.”
His mother saved all his letters. They showed how her son’s small, insular world had suddenly expanded because of associations with “so many different types of fellows whose backgrounds are not like mine.” Always signing himself “Your devoted and loving Poppy” or “Ever lovingly, Pop,” he told his mother that “the intelligent officers” like himself did not believe the “crude propaganda here. It is really sickening . . . Stuff like ‘Kill the Japs—hate—murder’ and stuff like ‘You are the cream of American youth.’ Some fellows swallow it all. These are the fellows many whom [sic] are below average intelligence, 2 of my roommates, for example, get a big kick out of hearing it . . . All the well-educated fellows know what they are fighting for—why they are here and don’t need to be ‘brainwashed’ into anything.” He later added: “Though I know I can never become a killer, I will never feel right until I have actually fought. Being physically able and young enough I belong out at the front and the sooner there, the better.”