My Father, My President

by Doro Bush Koch

  “I always wished I had gone home,” Mom recalled. “My dad was in the hospital when the funeral service was held. My mother and I loved each other, but I was not her favorite. Mummy and Daddy had just moved into her dream house. She waited a year after they bought it while it was being made totally perfect. My mom always wanted more . . . She felt that the grass was always greener, and would talk about when her ship would come in. She died when her ship had come in. I have always felt comforted by that.”

  A few months later, Mom gave birth to her first daughter, Pauline Robinson Bush—named for her mother and nicknamed Robin—on December 20, 1949. “Your oldest brother was three and was looking forward to Christmas. He was a joy,” she remembered, but “we had moved so much that year that I met the doctor for the first time on the night the baby was born.” What a difficult time that must have been for my mother, only twenty-four years old, grieving for her mother, giving birth to her own daughter.

  The following year, 1950, Dad transferred back to Texas to be a salesman for Ideco, the company he started out with in 1948. They settled in Midland and began making a life there for their growing family. Another friend and fellow Yale graduate, Earle Craig, recalls a group of young families that started socializing together, gathering on Sunday afternoons on the practice athletic field adjacent to Midland High School. The boys and men would play touch football while the girls and young mothers would spread blankets on the grass and gossip and cheer for their team. Mom used to push Robin in a beautiful perambulator, and four-year-old George would hold on to the pram’s handle.

  Uncle Bucky recalls how many friends they made: “He’s always had a gazillion friends. I don’t remember when he didn’t. The only difference now is that they’re famous actors and baseball players and presidents and prime ministers, which they didn’t have in Midland, Texas.”

  He also remembers their ranch house on a nice suburban street that backed up to the Little League park. Uncle Bucky lived with my parents for a while, when George and Robin were little. Bucky would work in the oil fields as a roughneck on a drilling rig, from eleven o’clock at night until seven o’clock in the morning. He’d then go home to sleep and then head over to the park and umpire George’s Little League games.

  About that same time, the Midland touch football team Dad played on challenged a team from Lubbock to what became known as the Martini Bowl, for obvious reasons. One of Dad’s friends, John Ashmun, remembers it well: “The Lubbock group . . . responded with eleven players, plus wives and others, riding to Midland in a beer-loaded bus. This conditioning as well as the highly prejudiced hometown refereeing . . . was the only means by which a Midland victory was claimed.” Lubbock also brought three All-American football players, some of whom had gone pro—Bobby Layne, Glenn Davis, and Mal Kanter—but Midland prevailed. There was a barbecue afterward, and Mr. Ashmun remembers “we poured the Lubbockians back on the bus as great losers.”

  Mom and Dad went to many high school football games. Dad called the Odessa-Midland game “a total experience in itself.” He later wrote about it for America West magazine: “Whole towns would travel by caravan to neighboring towns to settle bragging rights for the coming year. When the Odessa Broncos took on Abilene or Midland—there wasn’t much point trying to talk about anything else.”

  He also helped coach my brother George’s Little League team, the Cubs. Joe O’Neill, who was on my brother’s team, says his mother could tell who was playing for the Cubs because they’d always have head injuries. He explained that my dad went out one time to the outfield during practice, “and as the ball would approach he would put his gloved hand behind his back, duck his head, and catch the ball in his glove behind his back. Naturally, we all thought this was the neatest thing and we all tried to imitate it. That is where the bloody scabs on the tops of our heads came in.” The kids were getting beaned on the head while trying to catch the ball behind their backs, just like Dad had done.

  In 1953, my brother Jeb was born. He was named John Ellis Bush, after my father’s brother Johnny and my Aunt Nan and Uncle Sandy Ellis. (My brother’s initials, JEB, became his nickname.) The year 1953 proved to be a bittersweet one, however, because the same year Jeb was born, three-year-old Robin was diagnosed with leukemia—which in that day was considered very much an exotic, and incurable, disease.

  Mom remembers Jeb being a newborn, and Robin waking up one morning and saying, “I don’t know what to do this morning. I may go out and lie on the grass and watch the cars go by, or I might just stay in bed.” Mom didn’t think that sounded like a normal three-year-old, so she took her to the pediatrician, who ran some tests and soon gave them the results: leukemia.

  Dad explained to an interviewer years later, “I said, ‘What does that mean?’ The doctor said, ‘Well, it means that she can’t . . . she can’t live. You can treat her, or you can let nature take its course.’ So we treated her. She was very precious.”

  The diagnosis was bleak from the beginning, and almost immediately, Mom and Dad took Robin to Sloan-Kettering in New York for treatment. Mom stayed with Robin, and Dad commuted back and forth because of his business and of course to be home with George and Jeb.

  Looking back, I don’t know how they did it. But Dad’s college buddy Lud Ashley was a tremendous friend to them. “Where I was working at Radio Free Europe,” Lud remembered, “I was just a couple of blocks away from Sloan-Kettering, so I would go there . . . and see if the door to Robin’s room was closed. If it was, well, then I figured something was going on in there, and I’d wander around to a nice waiting room overlooking the East River. I’d go out there for half an hour or so and then go check the room again. It was an easy thing to do.”

  Robin knew who Lud was, he said, “but in all truth, she was a sick little girl. Her eyes didn’t sparkle or anything of that kind . . . she had things sticking out of her and really, she wasn’t in good shape at all. It was really tough going for her.”

  “Lud came every night to the hospital,” Mom remembered. “He would come up and check on Robin. And he was a huge friend, to a point that a nurse said, ‘Well, I saw Mr. Bush last night.’ I said, ‘You did what?’ She said, ‘I saw Mr. Bush. He comes every night to visit the baby.’ It was Lud; George was in Texas. A couple of times I caught him when I would go out on the porch to have a cigarette—and there would be Lud.”

  When Robin died on October 12, 1954, my parents gave her body to research. Years later, Dad would still remember that decision, writing about it in his presidential diaries. He recalled how, during Robin’s sickness, the family next door—who had also lost a child—turned on the doctor when he asked if they’d donate the child’s body to research, in order to save other children’s lives. The family’s grief came out as bitterness toward the doctor, and Dad and Mom learned a valuable lesson from it.

  So after giving Robin’s body to science, they stayed for a memorial service, then left immediately for Texas to be with George and Jeb. Later, the hospital unexpectedly contacted them about Robin’s cremated remains, which Lud and Ganny went and picked up.

  “It may seem strange,” explained Lud, “but it didn’t seem strange to me, and I don’t think it seemed strange to Dorothy either. They had been through a hell of a lot, and it was just a little box of ashes that we’re talking about and getting them into the ground. There had been a church service . . . I think they just thought they probably weren’t quite up to that.”

  Robin’s death had been devastating to my parents. So they all agreed that Lud and Ganny would bury Robin’s ashes in the family plot in Connecticut, which was a tremendous comfort to Mom and Dad. Nearly half a century later, Mom and Dad re-buried Robin’s ashes in the plot at the Bush Library in College Station, Texas, where they will be buried as well.

  At the time, Dad was teaching a Sunday school class for teens in Midland. One friend, Melinda Cox, remembers that many times, “he arrived disheveled and unshaven, to teach his class. Having no time to prepare the lesson, he would share wi
th these young people his feelings on life, death, war, faith, hope, and despair.”

  Somehow, after Robin’s death, Dad and Mom got past their profound grief. I don’t know how except that they turned to each other and clung tightly. They reminded themselves to count their blessings, and at the very top of that list was “faith, family, and friends.”

  “I have stopped asking ‘why?’” Dad wrote to Lud Ashley afterward. “One thing I do know is that when one is worried or suffering or troubled that there are only two things that help—friendships and faith . . . We will have many wonderful memories of people who helped us, but none will exceed in my mind your many gestures of true friendship.”

  Someone once asked Dad how he reconciled a loving God with what had happened to Robin. He answered by quoting the Gospel: “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” After a moment, he continued, “It was inexplicable how this could happen to an innocent child . . . but faith that God works in wondrous, mysterious ways. You get strength from that, strength to cope.”

  Years later, after I was born, Dad shared memories with me of Robin’s brief life, and although I never knew her, she seemed to come to life before my eyes. Many nights my dad would tuck me in, and we would stay up talking about her. “Tell me about Robin,” I would say. Tears would stream down his cheeks as he described her blond hair and her curls and how sweet Robin was. I’d ask about when she died, and he’d tell me about going up to New York where she was being treated at Sloan-Kettering and seeing her in the hospital.

  He always ended by saying, “She’s in heaven now.”

  More than telling stories, however, my parents turned their pain into something positive. Mom and Dad became active in raising money for cancer research, serving for years—and still do today—on the board of the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, which is now a world leader in cutting-edge cancer research. There are several different programs and projects named for Robin, such as the Robin Bush Child and Adolescence Clinic at M. D. Anderson and the Robin Bush Children’s Reading Room in the Barbara Bush Library in Spring, Texas.

  Dad thinks that if Robin had been diagnosed with leukemia today she would have lived, because of the tremendous advances in cancer research. Childhood cancers like the one that killed Robin have shown some of the largest improvements in the last few decades—today, the five-year survival rate is over 75 percent.

  Back in Robin’s day, however, almost every childhood cancer was fatal.

  My mother says that Robin’s death instilled in both her and Dad a compassion that has stayed ever since. There is a sad part of my mom and dad that those of us who have never lost a young child could never understand. There is also a part of them that appreciates every man, woman, and child all the more because of their loss.

  Right after I was born in 1959, my father, who was thirty-five at the time, went to meet me in the hospital nursery. Peering through the nursery window, his face pressed up against the glass, he looked at me and began to sob. Tears of happiness over my arrival, as well as, I’m sure, a wave of sadness over the loss of my sister, Robin, who had died six years earlier. Though he was blessed with four healthy sons, there was still a hole left by Robin’s death in my father’s heart. Mom only told me about this first meeting at the nursery on my birthday in 2005.

  I had an inkling of it in an old letter my father had written to his mother, several years after Robin had died and before I was born. My grandmother had kept it until her own death in 1992, when it was given to my mother. It reads in part:

  There is about our house a need. The running pulsating restlessness of the four boys as they struggle to learn and grow; their athletic chests and arms and legs; their happy noises, the world embraces them . . . all this wonder needs a counterpart. We need some starched crisp frocks to go with all our torn-kneed blue jeans and helmets. We need some soft blond hair to offset those crew cuts. We need a doll house to stand firm against our forts and rackets and thousand baseball cards. We need a cut-out star to play alone while the others battle to see who’s “family champ.” We even need someone . . . who would sing the descant to “Alouette,” while outside they scramble to catch the elusive ball aimed ever roofward, but usually thudding against the screens.

  We need a legitimate Christmas angel—one who doesn’t have cuffs beneath the dress. We need someone who’s afraid of frogs. We need someone to cry when I get mad—not argue. We need a little one who can kiss without leaving egg or jam or gum. We need a girl . . .

  Eventually, they had me, their only living daughter. It’s a strange thing to mourn someone you’ve never met, but my heart still feels heavy when I think of what might have been. As much as I love and cherish all four of my brothers, having a sister would have been wonderful. Nine years older than me, she would have been someone to share all sorts of things with, someone to look up to and seek the kind of advice that only a sister can give.

  Perhaps because I grew up without Robin, I was overjoyed to find out that my second child, Ellie, was a girl. On an early prenatal visit, my husband, Billy LeBlond, left the room because the doctor was going to do an ultrasound, which would reveal the baby’s sex, and he wanted it to remain a surprise. When he returned and I was smiling and crying, he instinctively knew the doctor had told me I was going to have a girl.

  In the years after Robin’s death, my parents continued to live in Midland. In 1955, my brother Neil Mallon Bush was born; and in 1956, Marvin Pierce Bush came along, named after Mom’s father.

  At one point, Dad wrote his father-in-law an update from Texas:

  Georgie aggravates the hell out of me at times (I am sure I do the same to him) but then at times I am so proud of him I could die. He is out for Little League—so eager. He tries so very hard. It makes me think back to all the times I tried out. He has good fast hands and even seems to be able to hit a little. I got as much a kick out of watching him trying out as I do out of all our varied business efforts. Jeb, the clown, is fine and Neil brings us nothing but happiness. We still miss our Robin. At times Bar and I each find ourselves vividly recalling the beauty and charm of our little girl. Time has not dulled these happy memories at all. I guess if we had Robin now we would just have too much happiness.

  Dad and Mom had their hands full—raising kids, coaching sports, and working in the oil industry. Dad had decided toward the end of 1950 that it was time to take what he had learned working for other people and put it to use for himself. He went to Uncle Neil Mallon and told him of his plans. Uncle Neil supported him in his decision and made suggestions for starting a new business in the royalty and production end of the oil business. Uncle Neil was quiet and kind, and brilliant in business. On his advice, Dad formed Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company with a neighbor, John Overbey.

  As our family grew up, so did Dad’s company. That same year, in fact, he merged his company with two brothers, Hugh and Bill Liedtke. The Liedtkes, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, were also a part of the young crowd in Midland who wanted in on the West Texas oil boom. They called their new company, which specialized in land deals, Zapata Petroleum Corporation.

  Zapata hit it big when they struck oil at Jameson Field in Coke County, which is still producing oil today. Looking back on that find, Dad wrote, “It was my big break in the business world and the thing that permitted me to finance our kids’ education and gave me the financial base to risk going into public life.”

  By 1954, at the age of thirty, Dad became cofounder and president of a third firm, Zapata Off-Shore, a contract drilling company which was a pioneer in experimental offshore drilling equipment. They named both companies Zapata after the 1952 movie Viva Zapata! in which Marlon Brando plays the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

  Dad recently recalled the birth and growth of his offshore company:

  In a way, we were pioneers with Zapata Off-Shore, because we made a deal with a man named RG LeTourneau who had designed a revolutionary three-legged offshore drilling rig with rack and pinion design. It was unique. A lot
of companies took a look at Mr. Le Tourneau’s plans and didn’t want to take a chance on it.

  That first rig was called the Scorpion, and it was built in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1956, along the Mississippi River. I’ll never forget going there, and watching these giant earth-moving machines trying to push that rig into the river. It was such a spectacle, in fact, that the entire undertaking drew a crowd—some of whom laughed at what, for a time, appeared to be an exercise in futility. But we got it in the water at last, and took it down to New Orleans for a ceremonial launch, and then out into the Gulf she went.

  On the Scorpion’s very first location, however, one of the thirty-foot cans at the bottom of one of the legs collapsed. So what did we do? We called Mr. LeTourneau, mildly complaining about all of this. We got him out to the rig, where he stood on the deck to assess the situation. Then he took out a piece of chalk, made a few lines right there on the deck, and told his metal cutters to take out about fifteen feet of the can—basically to cut it in half—which did work.

  And with that, we were on our way.

  From there, we also pioneered a floating rig, converting a ship for drilling purposes. The first one was called Nola 1. This was in the days before GPS. You couldn’t get any positioning to keep it on location, but it worked reasonably well. We sent it down to Mexico, where we did some drilling for PEMEX, the Mexican national oil company. You had to have partners there, so we formed a partnership called PERMARGO and drilled a well.

  If you want to see the Nola 1 today, go down now to the Gulf of Campeche. Sixty years after the well was drilled, what’s left of the rig is still on the beach, the victim of a hurricane.

  After that, we drilled the deepest offshore well at the time between Cuba and the United States for Standard of Cal. For that project, we were based out of Marathon, Florida, in the Keys. The roughnecks were thrilled with this particular location, so we had no problem getting good hands on this project.