My Father, My President

by Doro Bush Koch

  Adams reported that “in some cases the officers took out the livers of selected victims and participated in cannibalistic ceremonies to prove their worthiness as soldiers of the Empire.”

  Dad wrote back to Lieutenant Adams, thanking him, for “without your covering support I would undoubtedly have been captured, executed and cannibalized.” Sure enough, in a war crimes tribunal held after the war, the Japanese officer in charge of Chi Chi Jima was tried and executed, and among the charges was cannibalism. (Dad observed in hindsight that since he only weighed 160 pounds at the time, “I’d have been like an hors d’oeuvre for the poor guy.”)

  After the fighter planes took out the small flotilla of Japanese boats heading toward Dad, the pilots were concerned they’d run out of fuel, so they returned to their carrier as it headed south to join Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey’s Task Force 38. A periscope came up in the shark-infested waters near Dad’s raft, and years later he joked that he “broke the world’s hundred-yard freestyle paddling record” as he paddled his raft toward the American submarine that surfaced. The crew of the Finback submarine soon rescued him, along with several other pilots from other runs. The remarkable thing about this is that when he was pulled onto the submarine deck from the water, a crew member filmed the rescue.

  The next day, Dad typed a letter to his parents telling them of his second brush with death. He sounded so young—he was only twenty—and so worried about his friends John Delaney and Ted White: “There was no sign of Del or Ted anywhere around . . . It bothers me so very much. I did tell them [to evacuate] and when I bailed out I felt that they must have gone, and yet now I feel so terribly responsible for their fate so much right now. Perhaps as the days go by it will all change and I will be able to look upon it in a different light.”

  Once he received Dad’s letter, my grandfather wrote a long letter to Ted White’s mother, saying, “Your son was such a wonderful lad and I am so glad that my boy knew him. His letters spoke so highly of him previous to this disaster; and also, of course, his letters written on the submarine are just heart-breaking . . . I can’t possibly tell you how unhappy Dorothy and I are about Ted and how deeply we feel for you and your husband.”

  Dad also wrote to Mom: “I hope my own children never have to fight a war. Friends disappearing. Lives being extinguished. It’s just not right. The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off.”

  Back then, Dad thought that his guilt about his friends would ease with time, but it didn’t. I think it bothered him for years that somehow it was his fault or that there was more he could have done to save them. He has great difficulty—to this day, over sixty years later—talking about it with anyone.

  John Magaw, Dad’s lead Secret Service agent for many years, immediately noticed Dad’s difficulty in discussing this traumatic episode when asked about it early in the 1980 campaign. “I just sensed the emotion in him. So I made a mental note to myself: I’m going to call him wherever he is every year” on the anniversary of being shot down—September 2—“as long as he’s alive and I’m alive.”

  As much as he doesn’t like to talk about it, when I asked Dad, he said, “Certainly, you wonder why God spares your life. Why should my two crewmen be killed? And you wonder, why me? Why should my life be spared?”

  After being rescued, Dad remembers sitting in the wardroom of the Finback with the other pilots while the Japanese dropped depth charges all around the sub. There was a steward as well—“the other guys were scared, but that guy was really panicked,” he remembers. They were told to sit there and be still. The Japanese listened for any sound that would give away the sub’s location. The real submariners, the ones with “ice water in their veins,” weren’t that worried about it; but to Dad, this was brush with death number three: “It was scarier for me than being shot at in a plane. I mean, in the airplane, you could control your destiny to a degree and you could see the puffs of smoke, and you knew what the problem was. But in that submarine, we just sat—of course, we hadn’t been through it, we hadn’t been trained as submariners.”

  They were just kids, and they didn’t have ice water in their veins.

  Back home, Dad’s family heard he had been rescued before they heard he had been shot down. But the confusion was nerve-racking as they all waited for news of his condition. Mom was very distracted at Smith College and enlisted her father’s help with teachers: “My poor father . . . was a self-made man, worked his way through college, Phi Beta Kappa, brilliant . . . he would call Ms. Corwin, the student adviser, and say, ‘Barbara’s fiancé is overseas; and she’s so worried . . .’ Long story short: I didn’t go to class much.”

  The Finback eventually dropped Dad back on Midway Island. He flew in a transport plane to Oahu and then hitchhiked out to rejoin his squadron aboard the San Jac, operating over the Philippines. Jack Guy, Dad’s friend in the squadron, told me, “When he went back to Hawaii to be reassigned, they gave him the option to go back to the United States or to go back to his old squadron out in the middle of the Pacific and finish up the tour there. He elected to come back out to where we were. We thought he was absolutely crazy. Of course, we told him that. But it showed us this guy had a real dedication to duty.”

  Then, later, came the news everyone wanted to hear: Dad sent a letter to his parents on December 1, 1944, saying he was coming home. He asked his mother to tell my mom to set the wedding date, and also very politely asked his mother for help planning the honeymoon, saying he’d “hate to fail Bar in my initial effort as an efficient husband.” He suggested to Ganny that “Cuba would be nice”—this was almost twenty years before the Cuban missile crisis, and Americans could still travel there freely—but they ended up going to Sea Island, Georgia, instead.

  Dad arrived home on Christmas Eve, 1944.

  “There were tears, laughs, hugs, joy, the love and warmth of a family in a holiday setting,” he remembered. “No reunion could have been scripted more perfectly.”

  Two weeks after Christmas, on January 6, 1945, Mom and Dad were married in Rye, New York.

  “I remember us all in our bridesmaid dresses—in green—and Bar, beautiful, coming down the aisle wearing our family veil and George, so handsome in his uniform,” recalled Aunt Nan. Everyone in the family attended the wedding.

  They returned from their honeymoon to Connecticut. Mom recalls her early impression of her new father-in-law: “His [Dad’s] father was scary. He was six foot four, a very successful businessman.” She remembers sitting at the Bush home as a newlywed, chatting with my grandfather Prescott as she was smoking a cigarette. My grandfather said to her, “Did I ever tell you that you could smoke?” Mom was so taken aback by that, she blurted out, “Well, did I marry you?”

  My grandfather burst out laughing.

  Not long after that, Dad was assigned to a new squadron, and my parents were stationed in a number of posts—Florida, Michigan, Maine, and finally Virginia. Dad’s new squadron, VT–153, had received orders to go back to the Pacific, but before they were deployed, World War II officially ended, on August 15, 1945. It was VJ Day, and the streets of Virginia Beach—where my parents were stationed—filled with cheering crowds. “Boy, there was some jubilation around this world,” Mom remembered.

  She and Dad decided to return to New England so my father could enroll at Yale as part of the largest freshman class in the school’s history—about eight thousand students, five thousand of whom were veterans, many of them married.

  Dad met a fellow veteran named Lud Ashley there, and eventually, they both became members of a secret society called Skull and Bones. When I asked if people at Yale were aware that Dad had been shot down, Lud explained, “You couldn’t turn around at Yale without bumping into guys who had had experiences of that kind. It wasn’t big news because that’s what happens in a war. Of the fifteen guys in the Bones club we were in, seven were pilots. I’m not sure if five of them weren’t shot down somewhere along the line. Your dad’s situation was one that most of us
said, ‘Well, he’s lucky to get out alive.’ That’s the way we thought of it.”

  That’s the way Dad thought of it, too—not that he was some sort of war hero, but lucky to be alive. To this day, he feels that the true war heroes are the ones who give their lives.

  While Dad and Mom were at Yale, Uncle Johnny was at a boarding school nearby at the time, not yet in college, and he remembers how much they enjoyed those years. “Life was really fun. They were living in an infinitesimally small apartment at 37 Hillhouse Avenue, and I went and visited them, slept on the couch . . . they were the class of ’48, and it was a great football team in the fall of ’46, one of Yale’s great football teams, and they had all these wonderful veterans playing—big, handsome, rugged guys—and they all knew your dad—all of them. All the couples, the married couples, all kind of centered around them at Yale.”

  I asked him why that was, why their house was the center of activity—full of football players, even though Dad played baseball and soccer, not football. Uncle Johnny answered, “He was enormously popular. He has that ability to make everybody else funny. It’s a unique gift and it kind of centers around being unselfish. He has the ability to tell jokes, but he didn’t tell as many jokes as he did create humorous situations in which others would participate.”

  Mom and Dad spent their weekends going to football games and parties—“we did go to chapel, too,” Mom adds—and Mom watched Dad play soccer and baseball.

  Soon Mom was pregnant with my brother George. She was working at the student bookstore and brought their dog Turbo to work. With the new baby coming, they knew they’d need to move across campus. “Turbo went to live with the Bushes when we moved,” Mom said. “The place we moved to would not take dogs. Now, the place we had lived before wouldn’t take babies, and we chose the baby. We decided that was better. We lived in the house with thirteen babies and eleven couples. Our baby, George Walker Bush, arrived on July 6, 1946.”

  The postwar conditions at Yale—overcrowded and hastily arranged for such a big incoming class of veterans—do sound pretty ramshackle. Three families shared one kitchen with my parents, and unfortunately, somebody in the crowd was obsessed with germs. According to Mom: “We were the mediators in the whole performance, and one would put their child out in the hall on the potty seat, and that just drove the germ person almost to have a stroke.” She also remembered one very nice couple with whom they shared these very close quarters: “Half the dining room was our living room, and half the dining room was their bedroom. So we spent quite a lot of time knocking on the wall.”

  Dad’s teammates on the baseball team made him captain in 1948, after Yale had played in the first baseball College World Series in June 1947. So in the spring of 1948, when Babe Ruth presented a manuscript of his book to the Yale Library, Dad, as captain of the baseball team, accepted the manuscript on behalf of the university. Uncle Bucky went up for the occasion and remembers that the Babe looked “real sick.”

  Dad told one reporter later, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” which is what happened to Babe Ruth only a few months later (on August 16, 1948).

  Babe Ruth’s teammate Lou Gehrig had died a few years earlier, in 1941, and was another of Dad’s favorite players. Years later, when a postage stamp was issued in Gehrig’s name, Dad sent one to his oldest grandson, Jeb’s son George P., with a note that read, “This guy was my baseball hero. Of good character, his decency showed through. He was a team leader—courageous and able. He was a dependable guy—his teammates all respected him . . . You’re a Lou Gehrig kind of guy. Devotedly, Gampy.”

  Dad received academic credit for parts of his military training and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948 after two and a half years. Then he had to decide what to do about a career. He had an offer from his father’s Wall Street firm, Brown Brothers Harriman. In fact, Roland Harriman went to my grandfather and said, “We want to make an exception to our policy about nepotism, and we want your permission to talk to your son George.” Prescott Bush said okay, but when they asked Dad if he’d like to have a job there, he politely declined.

  “He wanted to do something,” Uncle Johnny later explained. “He’d been in the service and he’d been in all of the challenges that that offered. And he saw himself sitting behind a desk and balancing somebody’s checking account. He just didn’t want to do it.” While Dad did not follow his father into banking, years later, of course, he did follow his father’s example by going into public service.

  Mom thinks he made the decision long before graduation, while he stood night watch on the Finback after being rescued in the Pacific. “Your dad did not want to work in a bank. He wanted to work with something he could put his hands on . . . He decided that on the submarine when at night he’d be on duty looking at the stars. He decided that he wanted to be able to touch it. And so Neil Mallon offered him a job to be trained by Dresser Industries. He could start out at Ideco, a subsidiary of Dresser that sold oil equipment in Odessa, Texas,” she said.

  Dad took the offer—and soon two future presidents and a First Lady were bound for the frontier.

  Chapter 3

  GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

  “Midland doesn’t have any mountains, it doesn’t have any oceanfronts, it doesn’t have any fishing holes or other similar niceties; what it did have were caring transplanted citizens, like the Bushes, who pitched in on every effort, from the Boy and Girl Scouts to the United Way and most everything in between. You can do a lot in a small town if you are willing, and the Bushes were—in spades.”

  —Martin Allday, Dad’s first campaign manager

  Mom and Dad, with George in tow, took Uncle Neil’s advice to heart when he said, “What you need to do is head out to Texas and those oil fields. That’s the place for ambitious young people these days.” (Years later, Dad would also give credit to Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune publisher whose famous advice to the unemployed was, “Go west, young man.”)

  By the time he arrived in Texas—via the red 1947 Studebaker Dad’s parents gave him as a graduation gift—he was ready for the challenge of making his way in the oil business. Dad started at Dresser Industries as an equipment clerk, which he later described as “the very bottom of the corporate ladder.” He painted oil well machinery and swept warehouses. He had come out to Odessa alone, sending for Mom and one-year-old George as soon as he found them all a place to live—which turned out to be a small two-room duplex with a bathroom they shared with their neighbors.

  One neighbor—a thirty-eight-year-old woman, who had a twenty-year-old daughter and a three-year-old grandchild—made her living by “questionable means,” entertaining a steady stream of men all hours of the day and night.

  Dad explained, “I think she was selling her favors and she’d forget to unlock the bathroom, so we would be locked out and we’d have to pound on the door . . . ‘Just a minute!’ She was not a charming person but not altogether unfriendly. It was a broadening experience. Here comes Barbara Bush out of Rye, New York, and me out of our sheltered environment in Greenwich, Connecticut—except for the navy—and you’re knocking on the door, hoping some lady of ill repute lets you into your own bathroom.”

  Mom noted that they considered themselves lucky in that several of their other neighbors only had outhouses. I guess everything’s relative!

  Dad worked hard, and as he did, he was absorbing crucial information about the oil business. He wrote home to one friend that “fortunes can be made in the land end of the oil business, and of course can be lost . . . If a man could go in and get just a few acres of land which later turned out to be good he would be fixed for life.”

  He liked Odessa a lot, he wrote later. “There was an unspoken community code that had to do with the value of a person’s word. More often than not, a handshake was all that was needed to conclude a business deal.”

  After just a year in Odessa, however, Dad was transferred to a job with another Dresser subsidiary, meaning they were moving to California. While in Cali
fornia, they lived in Whittier, Huntington Park, Bakersfield, and Compton. During this time Mom was pregnant with Robin, and Dad was working seven days a week.

  While they were in Bakersfield, Mom’s brother, Jimmy Pierce, got engaged to Margy Dyer, and upon receiving word of it, Dad wrote to Margy to welcome her into the family. He enclosed a fake “proxy” for her to sign, voting for him as president of the P-I-L Club. It stood for the Pierce-In-Law Club, whose current president was Walter Rafferty, the husband of my mother’s sister, Martha Pierce. Dad felt that Walter hadn’t provided the kind of leadership that was needed in the club. “I feel under new vital leadership we might progress beyond all horizons . . . We could have uniforms, chartreuse T-shirts, with amber P-I-L in letters on the back and numbers on the front. We could wear ’em at Sunday lunch at the Pierces. We would form demolition squads to harass the unruly in-laws. See, there are thousands of possibilities IF we have the right leadership.” He ended by saying that Mom and he were “hoping against hope” to get to the wedding, which they did.

  But shortly after the wedding, tragedy struck. Mom’s parents were in a horrible car accident, instantly killing her mother, Pauline. Her father was hospitalized, but he later recovered.

  Mom had just been to Margy and Jim’s wedding in Ohio, and her father advised her not to make the arduous trip home, for fear that something might happen to the baby. Mom took that advice and did not go to her mother’s funeral. Dad was able to get the day off from work, and she spent the day with him and their friends the Jenkinses.