I did not mean this letter to be a preachment and nothing that I have said is either original or new, but it is the truth and it is the unmutable law . . .
Herbie, you have come along in fine shape and I know you are going to continue.
Jim, you have always been gentle and you too will continue to come along.
John, my boy, your character is in the making and a great part of your future depends on how you control yourself now. Make your mind control and think before you act and I am sure that you too will come along.
Louis, you are still too young to judge, but remember this, old man, no boy will ever be what I wish him to be unless he knows what the truth is and sticks to it, through thick and thin.
I love you all dearly and I am proud of my boys. I send to each of you a heart full of love, ever yours through trouble and through life. Devotedly, Father.
My father forwarded this letter to all of us when he came across it a few years back—thinking we’d get “a great big kick out of it.” Reading it brought a smile to my face. I particularly liked the part about not being “muckers.” My Uncle Louis, the youngest one listed at the end, turned out to be the wild one of the bunch—and also gave our family many warm and funny memories.
For example, after my grandfather Prescott had graduated from Yale, he continued to be active in the Yale Glee Club Associates. They had an annual dinner at which they’d all sing. Uncle Louis couldn’t carry a tune, but he considered the dinner a big deal and was dying to attend. According to Uncle Johnny, Lou kept pestering my grandfather to bring him to the dinner—but to no avail.
“Absolutely not, Lou,” my grandfather firmly stated. “It’s for former Glee Club members only.”
The night of the dinner came, and at one point a waiter tapped my grandfather on the shoulder to offer him a drink. Prescott turned around to find Uncle Lou in a waiter’s suit, working at the dinner!
Years later, in 1940, while Dad was in his junior year at Andover, he got a bad staphylococcus infection in his arm that nearly killed him—there was no penicillin available in those days. According to his sister, Nan, Dad would have graduated at age sixteen but for his six-week stay at Massachusetts General Hospital and a long recovery afterward.
The headmaster called Dad’s parents and suggested he repeat the year, so Dad spent a fifth year at Andover and graduated at age seventeen. This gave him more time for sports, as well as an easier year in terms of his classes. Dad became captain of the baseball team and of the soccer team, and was manager of the basketball team. (That is, until one day when he was shooting baskets and the coach, Frank “Deke” DiClementi, turned to Dad and said, “Forget being manager—I think I can use you on the team.)”
“That year was the making of George, a changing point,” Aunt Nan said years later. “It was a brush with death, brush number one. It was also his fifth year at Andover, where he was the great man—not The Great I Am, but he grew into this great leader on the campus. He was captain of soccer and captain of baseball and did wonderfully in his studies. People admired him. I was terribly popular for a while—everybody wanted to come to our house because they might run into George.”
By the way, what Aunt Nan means by “The Great I Am” is a sort of family shorthand we have. “Nobody likes the big I Am, George,” my grandmother would say to him. “Don’t be talking about yourself.” Or, “There were too many ‘I’s’ in that sentence.”
Once, Dad told his mother that he’d scored three goals in soccer. She replied, “That’s nice, George, but how did the team do?” This grew out of a New England Yankee sense of modesty, and in Dad it evolved into a reluctance to speak in the first person, and eventually into a revulsion against appearing to brag in any way or make himself the center of attention.
It’s why, years later, he’s never written his own memoirs.
Chapter 2
A WARTIME WEDDING
“When you read about the fact that he survived and the others didn’t, it’s almost like there was some divine hand in what was happening.”
—Norman Schwarzkopf
On December 7, 1941, Dad was walking across the Andover campus with friends when he heard the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and killed some 2,400 Americans. Like everyone, he was stunned.
In the two years since the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the United States had walked the line of neutrality—and the debate over our role in the emerging conflict had divided our country. After the ninety-minute attack in Pearl Harbor, however, the American people were totally, immediately united. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt asked for—and the U.S. Congress passed—a declaration of war against the aggressors.
The “sleeping U.S. behemoth” had finally been stirred awake.
Dad was not unique in that he was outraged and wanted to enlist immediately—to join the fight, to do his part. Because he was not yet eighteen, however, he couldn’t enlist, so he had to remain in school until graduation. He was so eager to join the fight, in fact, that for a brief period he considered signing up in the Royal Canadian Air Force, where one could get in sooner.
Another fateful event took place a few weeks after Pearl Harbor when Dad went to a Christmas dance with some pals and spotted an attractive girl across the room.
“She was very beautiful,” Dad said of the first time he saw Mom. “She stood out—the most beautiful girl out there on the dance floor. I asked somebody who that was. They said, ‘Barbara Pierce, from Rye.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d sure like to meet her.’ She was wonderful.”
According to Mom, Dad “breezed in, asked me to dance. My brother, Jim [Pierce], cut in immediately—never danced with me once in his life before—and said, ‘Aren’t you Poppy Bush? Do you want to play in a basketball game on Thursday night? The prep school boys against the locals?’ And the end of the story is, the locals whipped them, but I was so mad at Jimmy Pierce. He said [to Dad], ‘When you get rid of her, come over and talk to me.’ I mean, it was really terrible.”
Mom went to the game that Thursday night, and she and Dad instantly hit it off.
Spike Heminway grew up with Mom in Rye, New York, and he remembers, “Everybody in Westchester County was after her. She was the most popular girl, the best-looking girl you’ve ever seen in your life. And I’d always heard about George Bush. Then he comes in and sweeps her off her feet, and off they go.”
Back at the Bushes’ house, Dad’s sister, Nan, heard all about Mom. “He said he met a wonderful girl last night, and she was beautiful and funny.” She was in a green dress for the holidays, with beautiful brownish-red hair. As their relationship grew, according to Uncle Johnny, “they would just laugh about everything and he would kid her. She always has been a great audience for him, because it takes great confidence to be funny.”
Looking back on their courtship, Dad remembered the things he loved most about her: “Her sense of humor. As my mother would say, she was interested in the other guy. She had a great propensity for friendships. She had good friends around, and loved sports.”
He added with a smile, “She has strong opinions now. She didn’t used to have that so much when she was younger. She didn’t express her opinions like she does these days.”
As the spring came and Dad was finishing up at Andover, he asked Mom to the senior prom. She wrote him a note in response, from South Carolina, where she was in boarding school:
Dear Poppy,
I think it was perfectly swell of you to invite me to the dance and I would love to come or go or whatever you say. I wrote Mother yesterday or the day before and rather logically, I haven’t heard from her, but I’m sure she is going to let me come or go, etc. I’m really all excited, but scared to death, too. If you hear a big noise up there, don’t worry, it’s just my knees knocking.
“We were starry-eyed puppies,” Mom recalled. There were many trips to Rye to call on her. Junie O’Brien, a fellow player on the Andover baseball team, remembers a lull in practice one day when he
and Dad were standing just off first base. Dad reached into his right pocket and produced a photo of Mom to show him.
Junie said, “I told him she was a winner, and he said, ‘You’re telling me. I’m going to marry her.’ ”
The families heard more and more about each other, and the two fathers got to know each other on the commuter train into New York City, where Marvin Pierce, Mom’s father, was president of McCall’s Publishing.
After Pearl Harbor, Dad’s father went to Andover because my father was thinking of joining the navy. “His father begged him to go on to college and he didn’t,” Mom recalled. “His father said, ‘You can go for a year to Yale like everyone else.’ But everyone else from different schools did [enlist], and George went right in. You felt like you just had to do your part.”
A few days after graduation from Andover—on his eighteenth birthday, June 12, 1942—Dad enlisted in the navy. He remembers how his father took him down to Penn Station in New York to put him on the train, and told him to write his mother. It was very difficult both for Dad and for his father, who had served in World War I. In fact, my grandfather helped launch the USO organization and became its first chairman at the request of President Roosevelt in 1941.
The navy needed pilots, and had recently changed its requirement for aspiring aviators. They’d only need a high school diploma, rather than completion of two years of college. Dad gladly signed up to be a pilot. “I think I always wanted to fly, and the navy always appealed to me,” he told me. “I wanted to go into combat; everyone did back then. It was one of the best decisions I ever made, and yet I was only seventeen at the time.”
It was during that first year that he was gone, while he was in basic training in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that my parents got “secretly” engaged. Actually, my mother said, “Everybody in America knew, except we didn’t think so.”
They had gotten engaged in the fall during a visit to Kennebunkport and tried to keep it a secret, because they thought people would think they were too young. But as Mom’s brother, Jimmy, said to her, “You’ve got to think we’re idiots. I mean, one look at the two of you.”
Eventually, their secret came out when a classmate of Mom’s at Smith College kept pressuring her to go out on blind dates with boys from Amherst College. Mom kept declining, and finally, she had to admit she was engaged to Dad. She called him and explained, and they decided to “go public.”
In 1943 when Dad’s ship, the USS San Jacinto, was commissioned, Mom and Ganny traveled together on the train to Philadelphia for the ceremony. “Do you like diamonds?” Ganny asked her, and it began to dawn on Mom that Ganny was bringing an engagement ring to Dad. (It turned out to be a star sapphire with diamonds around it.) They had a good time together, and Aunt Nan remembers Ganny returning home and saying, “That girl could talk to absolutely anybody.”
The Bush family liked my mom from the start.
“I think they thought, ‘We want him happy,’ ” Mom recalled, and they saw in her that same sense of humor we all enjoy. When Dad told his father of his intentions to marry Mom, Prescott’s eyes welled up with tears, one of the few times my father ever saw him cry.
She was only seventeen in the fall of 1942, and Aunt Nan says, “She was just so pretty and tall and slender and funny. They were a twosome.” Mom remembers going to visit Dad, who was the youngest among the navy pilots in training. “He said, ‘Please tell everyone you’re eighteen.’ You know how many people asked me how old I was?” she asked me, laughing. “No one.”
Shortly after, Dad was shipped out to the Pacific with Mom’s name painted on the side of his plane, and their engagement—secret or not—lasted for over two years. “It was very scary when he went, very scary,” Mom remembered. “It was particularly terrible for his mother.”
The family prayed for Dad at every meal during grace, and at church. And, of course, Ganny would read his letters out loud when they arrived.
After flight training, Dad was assigned to Torpedo Squadron (VT–51) where he flew an Avenger (TBM). He was also VT–51’s aerial photographic officer in September 1943—and in the spring of 1944, his squadron was based aboard the newly commissioned San Jacinto. The San Jac was part of Task Force 58 that participated in operations against Marcus and Wake islands in May and then in the Marianas during June, which included one of the largest air battles of the war. Returning from that mission, in fact, Dad was forced to make a water landing. The crew survived, but the plane did not.
For his book The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw spoke with Dad about his obligation as an officer to read the outgoing mail of the enlisted men, so that no sensitive military information would be compromised. Dad recalled, “As I did my duty and read the other guys’ mail, I learned about life—about true love, about heartbreak, about fear and courage, about the diversity of our great country. The sailors would ask about the harvest or fishing or the heat in the cities. When I would see a man whose letter I had censored, I would look at him differently, look at him with more understanding. I gained an insight into the lives of my shipmates, and I felt richer [for the experience].”
The first casualty in Dad’s squadron was his best friend and roommate, Jim Wykes. Jack Guy, who was also in the squadron, explained to me, “Jim went out and just never returned. And we never could find him, never could see him. He just left the radar screen, that was it.”
As part of his duties as an officer, Dad often wrote to the families of crew members who were missing or killed in the line of duty. When Dad wrote to the Wykes family to give them the awful news, Anna Wykes, Jim’s mother, wrote back to Dad:
The Good Lord answered our prayers. We prayed and hoped that Jimmy’s roommate or one of his friends would write to us. Nothing in the world could bring us more comfort than receiving your letter . . . My heart was very sad and it ached and pained. I have lost hope of ever seeing Jimmy again . . . Your sincere friendship and your faith in him brightened things for me. I will remember you in my prayers—I asked the Lord to give you health and strength, protect you always, and bring you home safe. I shall never forget you.
In the Brokaw book, Dad also remembers an incident when he was standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier when a plane made a bad landing. As the plane spun out of control, a crew member standing nearby got chopped up by the propeller. A leg landed right next to Dad. A chief petty officer sprang into action, ordering the sailors to swab the deck and get ready for the next incoming plane. Dad still remembers the officer as someone who was able to take charge and function despite enormous stress.
In August, the San Jac launched operations against Japanese forces in the Bonin Islands, a volcanic island group five hundred miles south of Tokyo. Dad flew a few sorties as the operation began.
Then came September 2, 1944.
The first eyewitness account ever published of what happened that day came from Lieutenant (jg) Nathaniel Adams. In it, Lieutenant Adams talked about the mission on that hazy morning to knock out key Japanese radio towers on Chi Chi Jima, about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima. Four Avengers went in to bomb the communications center, followed by several Hellcat fighters with machine guns to protect the bombers from antiaircraft fire:
The sky was now filled with smoke from the exploding shells. In this caldron of fire, Bush took a fatal hit just before he was set to release the four 500–pound bombs. He continued his 200–mile-an-hour dive on the target and released his volley of explosives. I could see his engine flame and then spread to the fuel tanks housed in the wings. As he leveled off and cleared the target area, I followed from above. His plane continued to spew black smoke. It was apparent that the shrapnel had punctured a fuel line. “Get out,” I thought, “before you blow up.” Our planes were rigged not only to hear communication between planes, but any talk between the pilots of the torpedo bombers and their crews. Just then I heard, “Hit the silk! Hit the silk!” It was George telling Ted White and John Delaney [his wingmen] to bail out. [“Hit the silk” refers to their sil
k parachutes, and was an expression for evacuating.]
A tremendous amount of black smoke and fire continued to trail from the stricken plane. Even through the smoke, I could see one of the crewmen jump through the exit door near the rear of the plane. George actually was able to turn the plane for that moment to shield the jumper from the slipstream. Whoever jumped had a faulty chute. He drew one of those streamers that furled and never opened. I could see him all the way down as he fell to his death. Whether it was Ted White or John Delaney, we will never know. One thing I do believe is that whoever remained in the plane was dead. He had time to get out. Shrapnel could very well have killed him during the dive to the target.
Next, Lieutenant Adams described how Dad escaped the burning plane just before it hit the water and exploded in a ball of fire. He was able to get free of his ripped parachute before landing in the ocean, and swam over to a little raft that had been his seat cushion in the cockpit:
His problems were still far from over. The wind and the tide were moving the raft toward Chi Chi Jima. I think he was only a couple of miles off the south shore. About that time, I saw a number of these little Japanese boats take off from the beach. I guess they were about twenty feet long. My God, it looked like a flotilla coming out to capture George. The raft was drifting right towards his captors. They were closing fast. That’s when our four Hellcats took action. I tell you, we dove with all of our 50–caliber guns blazing in each plane and just blew at least a dozen of those boats right out of the water. The rest of them fled for shelter. That put a stop to that threat in one big hurry. It was a hell of a shoot-out.
While Dad had been told about the possibility of being taken prisoner by the Japanese, the odds were against it. Very few airmen ended up as POWs. (It was more common in the army, with soldiers on the ground.) But clearly, Lieutenant Adams was concerned about those boats heading toward Dad for a reason. Years later, rumors of Japanese atrocities were found to be true. In fact, the commanding Japanese general on Chi Chi Jima gave his soldiers the following order: “Worship your emperor with a deep bow. Practice with your bayonet; open the heart and the lungs and let the enemy bleed. As they take their last breath, take out the sword and behead them.”
My Father, My President Page 3