-"Counselor's Confidential Report" on George H. W. Bush, Phillips Academy, 1940 You are leaving Andover in what is certainly a very dark hour for the civilized world. But as I look into your faces and realize your responsibilities, I am filled, not with pity for you in what you are facing, but with a desire to congratulate you on your great opportunity.
-HENRY L. STIMSON, to the Andover graduating class, June 1940 It was a red, white, and blue thing. Your country's attacked, you'd better get in there and try to help.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH on his reaction after Pearl Harbor ANDOVER WAS A GOOD SCHOOL for curbing cockiness among the children of the American elite. The headmaster in Bush's years, Claude M. Fuess, was determined that Andover would fight, not perpetuate, social snobbery. Fuess had been made head of the school in 1933; Alston Hurd Chase, a graduate and teacher, wrote that a common Andover joke had it that "Fuess, Roosevelt, and Hitler all came to power" in the same year. Bush remembered Fuess as a distant, godlike figure. He was nicknamed "Iron" and "Bald Doctor."
Founded in 1778 by Samuel Phillips, Jr., the school itself was the product of Puritan New England. One of the institution's tasks, Phillips had said, was to teach "the fall of Man-the Depravity of Human Nature-the Necessity of Atonement." Andover long predated the creation of St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire (1856), Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts (1884), and Prescott Bush's St. George's near Newport, Rhode Island (1896). The popular image of the boarding school world has been shaped largely by fictional portraits: John Knowles's A Separate Peace, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and Louis Auchincloss's The Rector of Justin. In the imagination, everything is green, everyone is rich, and nothing is impossible in such schools. E. Digby Baltzell, the University of Pennsylvania sociologist who played a key role in making the term "WASP" a familiar one (his works include 1964's The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America) listed Andover as one of the sixteen American schools that "serve the sociological function of differentiating the upper classes from the rest of the population."
With Andover, the truth is slightly more complicated, for the school from its beginnings sought, albeit in a relative way, to educate, in the school's phrase, "youth from every quarter." In a Saturday Evening Post piece on the school, Fuess was quoted listing his "seven deadly sins of independent schools," taking on the image of a boarding school as hopelessly insular and elitist: snobbishness, bigotry, provincialism, reaction, smugness, stupidity, and inertia. "During a fortnight's visit to the school," the magazine reported, "we saw few, if any, indications of the seven sins cited by Dr. Fuess." While Groton and other schools modeled themselves on Eton, the fabled English school in the shadow of Windsor Castle, Andover self-consciously sought to be more democratic and more Puritan than elitist and Anglican. Groton's Latin motto translated as "To serve Him is to rule"; Andover's as "Not for Self."
- For Bush, life at Andover in the autumn of 1937-he had turned thirteen that summer-had not begun well. Young for his class-the result of following his brother Pres Jr. to Greenwich Country Day a year early-Bush struggled at first. He was off his stride. "Have-Half" Bush, so generous and gracious at home in Greenwich, was, according to a counselor's report, "not well measured in all respects." He reacted to the stresses of his new life in an uncharacteristic way. "Parents of wealth and social position," the school report said, "cocky and 'high hat'...Very mediocre performance."
The author of the comments, Frederic H. Stott, an instructor in English and public speaking, suspected this was a phase, not a pattern. He was right. "Markedly a gentleman," Bush's evaluating teacher wrote in his second year. He was also a markedly sick boy. Bush, at fifteen, checked into the infirmary five times in the 193940 school year, missing a total of thirteen days. He had tried to do too much, too fast, going out for baseball when he was still recovering. As his academic rank fell, he contracted a staph infection serious enough for his parents to withdraw him from school on Saturday, April 13, 1940, and take him for treatment at Massachusetts General, the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston. By the next academic year, Bush's evaluating teacher would write: "Not a strong boy. Serious illness. Nice boy, popular, friendly, gets on well with adults, very polite. Slow but a hard worker. Illness put him at a great disadvantage this year. Can analyze well [but] is slow in doing it....Ambitious and self-confident but perhaps not self-assertive enough. Real interests are athletics...Always a gentleman, responsible, courteous, generous. WATCH: should not attempt too much outside work this year. Not a neat boy."
Bush's illnesses in the 193940 year at Andover were consistent with his parents' worries about his "tendency to overdo" and their concern that their driven, emotional son needed "plenty of sleep" to keep his equilibrium. He understood the code of his social class enough to affect an air of indifference about life's worries, so much so that an Andover teacher noted that Bush "has the typical attitude of not appearing to care one way or the other." His air of indifference, crucially, was affected about his studies and his own achievements, not about friendships or the feelings of others. Other students were drawn to him; they felt protected and secure in his orbit. Yet there was a dark moment at Andover, notable largely because of its rarity in Bush's life. When he was thirteen, he used an anti-Semitic epithet to describe a Jewish friend. Thinking of the moment more than seven decades later, Bush volunteered the story and cried, shaken by guilt over a remark made in the 1930s. He shook his head in wonder at his own insensitivity. "Never forgotten it. Never forgotten it." (The classmate remained a Bush friend and supporter for many years.) Much more typical is the story of Bruce Gelb, a younger Andover boy who was being harassed one day by an older student when he heard a voice say, "Leave the kid alone"-and the bully let Gelb go. Who was that? Gelb asked. "That was Poppy Bush," a student told him. "He's the greatest kid in the school."
Serene on the outside, reaching out to smooth others' paths through life, the adolescent and the adult George H. W. Bush churned inside, fretting about the world and his place in its many contests. Unhappy and shaken by his battle against the staph infection, he made his eagerness to get back to Andover clear to his teachers. "He loves the school and is most anxious to return and make a good record next year," a teacher wrote of him in the weeks after his hospitalization in Boston. Bush spent a large part of the rest of his life overstretched and sometimes exhausted but hungry to keep moving, to stay in the game, to hit the next mark-at an often-hidden price.
Credit 4.1 "Poppy" Bush loved baseball, playing first base at Andover and later at Yale.
- For "Iron" Fuess, the ideal model of an Andover man in the arena was Henry L. Stimson. Born in 1867, the son of a surgeon, Stimson attended Andover, Yale College, and Harvard Law School and became a leading figure in the Republican Party. Stimson embodied the world in which Prescott Bush moved: Republican and antiNew Deal but also, in terms of foreign policy, given to internationalism and bipartisanship. President Taft's secretary of war prior to World War I, Stimson rejoined government as secretary of state under President Hoover and, in retirement in the 1930s, accepted Fuess's invitation to be president of the Andover board of trustees.
Stimson addressed the commencement exercises at Andover on Friday, June 14, 1940. (Bush himself would graduate two years later.) In Cochran Chapel, Stimson-who had warned the headmaster that he planned to "speak out"-made the moral case against totalitarianism. "Today our world is confronted by the clearest issue between right and wrong which has ever been presented to it on the scale in which we face it today," Stimson said. "The world today cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." Within a month of his Andover speech, the old Republican joined President Roosevelt's cabinet, returning to his former post as secretary of war.
Bush and his classmates absorbed the story of their times through the prism of a legendarily difficult class required of Andover seniors: the American history survey course taught by Arthur B. Darling, an Andover and Yale graduate who had taken his PhD at Harvard. One year Darling failed twenty-three boys out of a class of seventy, yet he always polled high in "Best Teacher" surveys, and, Frederick Allis, an Andover alumnus and faculty member, noted that "for those who could get his message, the experience was unforgettable." Bush was one such graduate; he recalled Darling's History 4 warmly. Darling, said one Andover alumnus, "was the greatest teacher I ever had." Asked why, the graduate replied, "Because he was so god-damned unreasonable," which prepared the graduate for a life full of unreasonable things. Darling taught his students, including Bush, that America was a unique nation whose idealistic origins and aspirations required realistic defenders. To him, history was not a heroic fairy tale but the story of a people struggling to balance instincts of light and dark in a complicated world.
The George H. W. Bush of the fall and early winter of 1941 was a lovely, popular boy whose vision was fixed on his immediate surroundings-and no farther. In a report sent to Yale, where Bush hoped to enroll in the tradition of his father and his wider family, Andover wrote that Bush was "an extremely pleasant, well-built, athletic, good-looking, well-bred young man. He is a rather slow reader, his health habits are good, he comes from a fine home of culture and refinement." It continued: He is very much of a gentleman, is thoroughly honest, has a high sense of cooperation, and is very responsive to suggestion. He tries hard to do a good job, is intellectually honest, and disciplines himself well and with ease. He is popular, and exerts a first-rate influence on the school....Despite his extracurricular activities he does a consistent job which places him at about the middle of his class. To expect much more of him would be unfair at this time. He is considerably younger than the average of his class, is somewhat lacking in self-confidence when in the presence of adults, but he is entirely at home with his mates under all conditions. There is little evidence that he is greatly interested in any of his studies, but he works conscientiously and regularly. At the moment he is intellectually immature for his powers of reasoning are not entirely developed and he is easily confused in recitations. Nevertheless, he is willing to do his best, takes active interest in class discussions, seems to be on the ball consistently. He is socially inclined in a thoroughly attractive way. A first-rate individual in every respect, and highly recommended.
- On the evening of Saturday, December 6, 1941, Claude Fuess and his wife were guests at a dinner party in Boston. Over cigars, a man Fuess recalled as "a high-ranking officer in the navy" spoke confidently of American superiority in the Pacific. "It would be impossible for the Japanese to accomplish anything in the Pacific," the officer said. The others in the room-a Harvard Law School professor, an industrialist, and the host, "a well-informed attorney"-agreed. The next afternoon, Sunday, December 7, Fuess was interrupted by a call from a member of the Andover faculty. "Have you the heard the news over the radio? The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor." Like so many other Americans, the headmaster of Phillips Academy Andover had to ask: "Where's that?" The reports from the Pacific had moved over the Associated Press wire at 2:22 P.M. eastern time. Radio networks began breaking into regular programming between 2:25 and 2:30 P.M. Bush was walking past Cochran Chapel with a friend when a passerby called out the news. "My God," Bush recalled thinking at the time. "This changes everything." Bush's blood was up. As the hours passed on that Sunday afternoon and evening, he decided to join the fight as soon as humanly possible. "After Pearl Harbor, it was a different world altogether," he recalled. "It was a red, white, and blue thing. Your country's attacked, you'd better get in there and try to help."
Bush recalled Prescott's example. "Dad had served in the field artillery," Bush thought at the time. The son knew the outlines of his father's story: that he'd signed up, trained with his friends, and shipped out to serve at the front. He knew what there was to live up to and surpass, since that's what Bushes did when they competed. They went farther, faster. In his address to Congress and to the nation on Monday, December 8, 1941, President Roosevelt cast the struggle against Japan in epic terms. America, he solemnly announced, would fight its way to victory with its "righteous might." To a seventeen-year-old entranced by the drama of Pearl Harbor and driven, in part, by an elemental desire to avenge an attack on his country, joining the military was the most natural thing in the world. The war became his central reality. There were air-raid drills on campus in the event of an enemy attack on the homeland; the student newspaper called the war "a desperate life and death struggle" and cast Andover men in a heroic role: "If the government fails, we will fail, and likewise if we fail in our duty at the present time we jeopardize the steadfastness of the government's cause."
Bush quickly decided that he wanted to be a pilot, a choice likely inspired by a small program at Andover in which some boys had begun taking flying lessons in the fall of 1941. In the dormitories and on the fields and around the dining tables of Andover, the prospect of serving as military aviators was irresistible. It was new, thrilling, and competitive-all things that appealed to young Bush and his friends. For him in particular, speed was essential. He even briefly considered enlisting in the Royal Air Force in Canada (RCAF), because, Bush recalled, you "could get through much faster." On the Tuesday after Pearl Harbor, the Canadian Member of Parliament and diplomat Sir Herbert Ames gave a lecture in Andover's George Washington Hall entitled "Training of Royal Canadian Air Force Fliers"; that same week, an Andover alumnus who had enlisted in the RCAF, R. W. Clifford, wrote about his training in a letter to the editor of the school newspaper.
An older interest, the U.S. Navy, won out as Bush weighed his options. Naval service had been on his mind for some time; a trip to New York for Fleet Week in 1937 had made "a real, profound impression," and Bush had thought of seeking an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. The sight of big ships, of the men in their uniforms, at once serious and cool, left Bush with an overall sense of the navy's power and camaraderie and purpose as he returned north to school. After Pearl Harbor, the combination of the two-aviation and the navy-made perfect sense to Bush. The prewar military requirement of two years of college before you could become a pilot was repealed, which meant he could start training as soon as summer. Bush was not quite seventeen and a half years old, and with the certitude of youth he was convinced he had found his mission.
"I knew what I wanted to do," he remembered. "It was an easy call-no second-guessing, no doubts." He grew more serious about his schoolwork, too, in preparation for what lay ahead, rising in class rank from fifty-ninth in the fall to thirty-third in the winter. As the 1941 holidays approached, Bush boarded the train to ride down from Massachusetts to Connecticut. He was determined to make the most of Christmas. It would be his last out of uniform.
FIVE.
That's Barbara Pierce
I have never felt toward another girl as I do towards her.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH on Barbara Pierce, 1942 SHE WAS, HE SAID LATER, "a strikingly beautiful girl." It was the 1941 Christmas dance at the Greenwich Country Club; the band was playing Glenn Miller numbers. Turning to a fellow guest named Jack Wozencraft, Poppy Bush asked if Wozencraft happened to know the girl in the pretty red-and-green holiday dress. He did: "That's Barbara Pierce."
Born in New York City in 1925, she had grown up in Rye and was in boarding school at Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina. Her father, Marvin-a tall, kind man-was an executive at the McCall Corporation, a publishing company; her mother, Pauline Robinson Pierce, was beautiful but occasionally difficult, archly monitoring Barbara's intake of food. Barbara was the third of the couple's four children.
Did Bush want to meet her? Wozencraft asked. "I told him that was the general idea, and he introduced us," Bush recalled. Wozencraft cut in on Barbara's partner and, as she recalled it, "took me to meet a wonderful-looking young boy he said wanted to meet me, a boy named Poppy Bush."
They danced briefly, but then Bush came to an awkward juncture. The band was moving from a fox-trot to a waltz, and Bush did not waltz. It turned out to be a fortuitous change of tempo, for the two sat down and talked. The conversation lasted fifteen minutes-an eternity in dance time-and ended with a tactically shrewd question from Bush: He asked Barbara what she was planning to do the next evening. She replied that she was due at another dance, in Rye, and the two parted. Neither, though, could get the other off their minds. Bush told his mother that he had met "the niftiest girl at the dance," and, after the five-mile trip home from Greenwich to Rye, smitten by the tall, charming boy who had sought her out, Barbara kept a standing appointment to see her mother before retiring for the night. "We always had to go into Mother's room and talk when we got home," Barbara recalled. "Otherwise, she could not sleep and, I believe, she was smart enough to know that in the night, you are willing to tell all. If she waited until the next day, she knew she'd get one-syllable answers." Barbara's father, Marvin Pierce, would grumble, "Can't this wait until morning?"
In the darkness in the Pierce house on Onondaga Street in Rye, sitting on her mother's bed, Barbara reported that she had met "the nicest, cutest boy, named Poppy Bush." There was an intensity to Barbara's report that night, and Mrs. Pierce-no fool-picked up on her daughter's enthusiasm. "By the time I got up the next morning," Barbara recalled, "Mother-who should have been an FBI agent with her superior intelligence network-knew that Poppy was a wonderful boy who came from 'a very nice family.'"
Bush contrived to show up at the Rye dance the next night, bringing along his sister, Nancy, and a few friends. He asked Barbara to dance again, but just as they began, Barbara's brother Jim interrupted. "Are you Poppy Bush?" Jim asked. "I want to talk to you when you're done with her." Jim Pierce had an invitation. Would Bush like to play in a basketball game pitting the Rye High School team against vacationing prep-school boys? Bush happily accepted, asking Barbara out for a postgame date. At the game, the Pierces turned out in force-"to my horror," Barbara recalled, for she was certain they were there not for the basketball but "to look over my new friend." After Rye won the scrimmage, Bush met the Pierce clan and then took Barbara out.
He was driving the Bush family's Oldsmobile by design. He later confessed to Barbara that he had "begged his mother to let him use the Oldsmobile" since it had a radio. Thinking ahead, Bush was hedging against uncomfortable silences. "He was so afraid we would sit in stony silence and have nothing to say to each other," Barbara recalled. (She added: "For years he has teased me that there was no silence that night and I haven't stopped talking since.") The date went well, and after the holidays the two exchanged letters through the winter months of 1942. At spring vacation their schedules put them at home at the same time for only a single day. They double-dated to a movie (Citizen Kane), and Bush asked Barbara to come to Andover for his senior prom.
She was thrilled. "Dear Poppy," Barbara wrote on Ashley Hall stationery from Charleston, "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 really am excited, but scared to death, too."
Credit 5.1 Born in 1925, Barbara Pierce grew up in Rye, New York; her father was head of the McCall publishing company. Barbara graduated from the all-girls boarding school Ashley Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, and then attended Smith College before marrying George H. W. Bush in 1945.
Over the prom weekend in Massachusetts, Barbara stayed with a housemaster who was friends with her sister, Martha. Excited to show off his date, Bush did what he did best. Mixing among his classmates and their girls, he introduced Barbara to everyone he could. After the dance, Bush walked Barbara back to her quarters and, as she recalled it, kissed her on the cheek "in front of the world." She could not sleep: "I floated into my room and kept the poor girl I was rooming with awake all night while I made her listen to how Poppy Bush was the greatest living human on the face of the earth."
- For Bush, there had been other crushes, but at a kind of distance. "Pressy and I share a view which few others, very few others even in Greenwich share," Bush wrote his mother during the war. "That's regarding intercourse before marriage. I would hate to find that my wife had known some other man, and it seems to me only fair to her that she be able to expect the same standards from me....Daddy has never discussed such things with us-of this I am very glad. But we have learned as the years went on by his character what is right and what is wrong."
This did not mean, however, that Bush was monastic. In his mideighties, he offered a lighthearted but fairly detailed accounting of the girls who had interested him before he met Barbara. He recalled being twelve when he became aware of the "charms" of Beatie Thurston. "She was beautiful and a well endowed lass," he said. "She had a formfitting rubber (discreet in those days) bathing suit. I fantasized. Ours was a one-sided friendship. I innocently lusted. She teased. I never went out with her, of course. Had I gotten up my nerve to ask her to a movie, she would have undoubtedly giggled. I doubt she ever knew of my fleeting passion. I was just one bedazzled little guy in what must have been a long line."
There was Shirley Flower. "We did go to a movie or two, 1937 to maybe 1940. Her parents were friends of my parents. Shirley was good fun and like Beatie Thurston her body matured early, as Mother might say. In those days no one ever said 'boobs' or even 'breasts' but looking back my fascination may have been heightened by the fact, to use modern parlance-they both had nice racks. Fun nice girls, yes, but both 'matured early.'"
There was Joan Kilner, who lived in Greenwich. "I don't recall ever going out with her," Bush said. "I do recall giggling around the fringes with her at Calf Island in Long Island Sound, where we'd go swim a lot. She was cute, pretty and I'd say, retrospectively, flirtatious. Everyone was mad about her." There was Mary Mathiesson-"very pretty, very flirty I thought," said Bush. "Fine body. Cute sense of humor." He was a frequent caller during the chaperoned visiting hours at Abbot Academy, the girls' school on School Street in Andover. In his second to last year, he had what he called "a minor crush" on Betsy Fowler, an Abbot girl. "She came from Massachusetts," said Bush. "I liked her a lot. Never even copped a feel, though." As he read over his own account, Bush acknowledged the obvious. "As I look at the above it sounds like I might have been obsessed with 'bodies'-'boobs' they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I."
- After Pearl Harbor, giggling at Calf Island or on Friday nights at Abbot seemed to belong to another era. Bush saw and understood his own life as bound up with, and defined by, the drama of war. The rapidity of his courtship with Barbara was in keeping with the tempo of the times. War and love came in the same season, and in his mind-and in his heart-both required ultimate commitment.
Bush's last months at Andover passed quickly. The debate among the young men of Bush's milieu was not whether to serve but when. Fuess and others argued that some collegiate education would make the men more valuable to the war effort, a point Henry Stimson echoed in a brief address to Bush's graduating class. Prescott Bush raised the issue with George, asking if Stimson's remarks had given him any pause about going straight into the navy rather than to Yale. The answer was no: The son was determined. By his own account he was "headstrong."
May 1942 was the critical month for his enlistment paperwork. From his rooms at Day Hall at Andover on Friday the fifteenth, Bush had written to the Naval Aviation Cadet Selection Board in Boston to announce his plans. He had asked for, and received, his father's permission to enlist-a requirement for those under the age of twenty-one. With a fountain pen, Prescott had filled out the single-page form in a strong, sure hand authorizing "George Herbert Walker Bush" to serve for the "duration." The chief of police of Greenwich, John M. Gleason, provided a character reference, and Claude Fuess told the naval authorities that Bush was "one of the ablest boys I have ever known in this school, and can recommend him without reservation for any form of active naval, military, or aviation service."
On Friday, June 12, 1942, Bush celebrated both his eighteenth birthday and his graduation from Andover. After the commencement exercises he went to Boston, to the naval aviation offices on Causeway Street, to be sworn into the navy. He was met there by Walter Levering, a Yale football star and naval officer, who administered the oath and arranged for Bush to take flight training beginning in September in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Orders for Bush, officially a seaman second class, to report to North Carolina came through on Wednesday, July 22, 1942. He was assigned to the Sixth Battalion, Company K, Second Platoon.
Barbara was working that summer at the Lord & Taylor department store in Greenwich, preparing to return to Charleston for her final year at Ashley Hall. As a farewell present Bush bought her a small watch. She pinned it on her dress with a gold bow set when he presented it to her. And there was a real kiss. "I don't believe she will ever regret it or resent it, and I certainly am not ashamed of it," Bush told his mother. "I kissed Barbara and I am glad of it." It was a first for both.
On the August 1942 day Bush left New York City for Chapel Hill, his father saw him off. They walked together into Pennsylvania Station, then a huge Greek temple sitting between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and Thirty-First and Thirty-Third streets. It was the first time Bush had ever seen his father cry. "So off I went, scared little guy," Bush recalled. "Got on the train, didn't know anybody." He was eighteen years old, and he was going to war.
PART II.
War and Marriage.
1942 to 1948.
Mum, it's a very funny thing. I have no fear of death now.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH.
Bar, you have made my life full of everything I could ever dream of.
-BUSH to Barbara Pierce, 1943.
Credit p2.1.
Newlyweds Barbara and George Bush on their wedding trip to the Cloisters on Sea Island, Georgia, January 1945.
SIX.
Off I Zoomed.
I knew, of course, they would hate me.
-BARBARA PIERCE, on anticipating meeting the Walker-Bush clan.
ARRIVING IN CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina, in the summer of 1942, Bush moved into 317 Lewis Hall, a dormitory on Raleigh Street, and immersed himself in preflight training. The curriculum was a combination of academic work in classes such as Nomenclature and Recognition of airplanes and ships, Essentials of Naval Service, and mathematics and physics, along with obstacle courses, hikes, hand-to-hand combat lessons, and swimming tests. Cadets also had to be able to tread water for five minutes. It was Bush's first prolonged exposure to the South save for his wintertime hunting trips to G. H. Walker's Duncannon estate, and the high summertime temperatures were ferocious. "At some meals we actually drink as much as two and three quarters quarts of liquids," Bush reported in a September 1942 letter to Claude Fuess at Andover. "Fellows have passed out right in ranks on the street from the heat." From reveille at half past five each morning to taps at half past nine each evening, Bush was on the move or at study. Though he found it monotonous-he loved constant motion but disliked relentless routine-he was confident he had been right to enlist. "I have maintained an average of 3.85 out of a possible 4.0, so you can see it is not a very difficult course," Bush wrote Fuess. It was a typical Bush point, made in typical Bush style, mixing pride and humility.
He was living in a new reality, far from Greenwich, far from Andover. "I have never appreciated little things before," Bush wrote his parents. "It is amazing how our moods change here. So many little things affect us. A cold Coke after drill can do more for one than you can imagine....Ice cream, movies, a 15 minute rest, a letter, a compliment to our platoon. All these little things amount to so much in your mind and it is fun." There was a five-hour hike ahead, and he was already thinking about the "swallow of cold water" that was his "greatest luxury." The physical stress was compounded by the emotional pressure he put on himself to succeed. "After having been here just one month my desire to win my wings and become an officer is tremendous," Bush wrote his sister, Nancy, from Chapel Hill. "I'm afraid if I fail for any reason my disappointment will be very deep."
The possibility of dying was now assumed, stipulated. Training for combat in the company of other men whose lives were also on the line gave him an air of understated fatalism. A Walker in-law, George H. Mead, Jr., a marine officer, was killed on Guadalcanal in August 1942. According to the posthumous citation awarding him the Navy Cross, Mead was leading a platoon under fire from a Japanese sniper. Alone, Mead made his way through the jungle, found the sniper, and killed him with a .45 pistol. "He died the way all of us would like to die when our time comes," Bush wrote home.
With his mother's help, Bush prevailed on the Pierces to allow Barbara to pay a call at Chapel Hill. (Mrs. Bush had told Mrs. Pierce that a visit was a "grand idea.") He met her at the Carolina Inn on Pittsboro Street. "She looked too cute for words-really beautiful," Bush wrote his mother. Bush, who admitted he was "self-conscious" about being (and looking) younger than his contemporaries, asked Barbara to "stretch the calendar, add a few months to her age, and tell anybody who asked that she was eighteen, not seventeen."
No one asked. The two were, in any event, in their own world. They had a sandwich together and walked the campus, winding up at the university's Kenan Memorial Stadium in a grove of pine trees about a mile away from the inn. A sudden storm drove them into the canvas-covered press box. "We laughed at everything," Bush wrote, grateful for the stolen hours. He reported back to training at six o'clock, and Barbara boarded a bus back to Raleigh, where she spent the night before returning to school in Charleston. He hated to see her go. "If she 'fluffed me off'"-dropped him as a suitor-"without warning I would be absolutely sick no kidding," Bush wrote his mother.
- In the autumn Bush headed north for flight training at Wold-Chamberlain Field in Minneapolis. On Saturday, November 21, 1942, in a Boeing N2S-3 Stearman (a biplane with two seats, one for the pilot and one for an instructor), Bush noticed that his legs were quaking. Taking off in foggy weather with his instructor on board, he soon forgot to worry. He successfully executed one practice landing. A second, he thought, was "rather rough." Roaring off into the fog again, Bush faced two thousand-foot "emergencies"-exercises in which the instructor shut off the plane's gas, forcing the pilot to maneuver the plane back to land by gliding through the air and finding a safe field on which to come to rest. Again, one test went well, but the second was "pretty rough." The instructor, Ensign J. A. Boyle, told Bush to head back to the base. The weather was briefly disorienting. "For a minute I was lost-couldn't see the field through the mist, but luckily I located it," Bush wrote. Taxiing to a stop, he grew fretful once more. "My nervousness, which had subsided after the first takeoff, came on again."
"Okay, take it up yourself," Boyle told Bush, who sat alone in the plane, ready for his first solo flight.
It was the moment he had dreamed of and worked for since the news from Pearl Harbor had come to Andover nearly a year before. The blocks ("chocks," in the vernacular of aviation) in front of the plane's tires were pulled aside, and Bush felt a sense of calm. The Stearman aircraft, painted yellow, was nicknamed "the Yellow Peril" and, by anxious cadets, "the Washing Machine" since would-be pilots who failed to fly it well "washed out" of the program. For Bush, though, the nerves of the previous flight were gone. His legs were steady, his grip on the controls firm. In the cold and the fog he taxied through rows of army bombers, then "Off I zoomed," he recalled, reflexively doing all the things that his instructors had taught him to do. "Everything seemed so free and easy and really wonderful," he wrote. "Mum, it was the first time I have climbed out of the plane without worrying or having a touch of discouragement." In the fog he had found his way.
- On the ground, Bush was learning about the men with whom he flew and fought. His letters from the navy have the tone of an explorer observing a new culture for the first time. He is respectful, mainly, and intrigued. "It was the first time I'd been anyplace but the playing fields of Greenwich Country Day or Andover," Bush recalled. "I have gotten to know most of the fellows in the platoon," he wrote home. "They are a darn good-hearted bunch....There are so many different types here."
After his demure lust for pretty girls who had "matured early," Bush was struck by his fellow cadets' cavorting in town, and by the women with whom they cavorted. "Most fellows here-true some are engaged and some believe as I do-but most fellows take sex as much as they can get," Bush wrote his mother. "This pertains...to every town in the country, to college campuses-yes, even to Yale University. Boys you know-boys I like very much-and even boys I admire have had intercourse with women." (He signed the letter to his mother "Much love, Pop professor 'sexology' Ph.D.") Christmas came and went as Bush racked up flying hours. The Bushes sent him new goggles and a bathrobe; Gampy Walker-the Walker grandparents were known as "Gampy" and "Ganny"-mailed a check for twenty-five dollars; the Pierces dispatched a box of food; and Barbara, he wrote, "is sending me soon what I asked for; namely a decent picture of her." She was also knitting him socks, though she managed expectations, telling him beforehand that they "don't look at all like socks." Bush observed to his mother that he could make a neck protector from them if they were too big.
On a night flight in Minneapolis, trying to land amid crosswinds on a narrow strip near a stand of woods, Bush nearly died. He was coming in to land when his plane's wheels scraped a tree. He throttled back up in the air, circled the field, and made it down safely. Yet he knew how close he had come to a fatal crash. "I just thanked my lucky stars I wasn't 2 or 3 feet lower," Bush wrote home.
Next stop: the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi, Texas. He was moving from the snow of Minnesota to the heat of the Gulf of Mexico. He knew, too, that he was stepping closer to war itself. On Wednesday, June 9, 1943, George Herbert Walker Bush became an officer of the United States Naval Reserve and received his wings as a naval aviator. A navy band played "Anchors Aweigh" and "Wild Blue Yonder" at the Corpus Christi ceremony. His parents sent him a set of additional wings and a pair of cuff links. At eighteen, just about to turn nineteen on the twelfth of June, he was likely the youngest flying officer in the navy. Ensign Bush was to ship out soon. His assignment: to fly torpedo bombers off aircraft carriers in the sprawling Pacific war.
- Barbara Pierce was terrified. Bush had a seventeen-day leave in the summer of 1943, and his mother had asked Barbara to Kennebunkport for the break. "I guess Mrs. Bush had all sorts of reasons to invite me, but I suspect they wanted to see as much of their son as possible before he went off to war," Barbara recalled. "By having me there, it meant Pop would spend less time going back and forth." Bush sometimes referred to Barbara as "Bobsie" around this time, and he worried about holding on to her. "I do still love (I honestly feel sure of it) Barbara, Mum, yet I know that there is such a chance of her meeting some other guy," he had written his mother from Corpus Christi in the spring of 1943. "She is so very young and so darn attractive and I could hardly expect her to keep caring about me for years." A three-and-a-half-week period during which he received only a single letter from her while he was in Corpus Christi nearly drove him mad.
Credit 6.1 Bush with two crewmen-radioman Joe Reichert (left) and turret gunner Leo W. Nadeau (right). Two others-Ted White and John "Del" Delaney-were killed in action over Chichi-Jima.
Barbara understood that Kennebunkport was going to be a trial by fire. As Bush described the clan to her on the train north, he was "scaring me to death," Barbara recalled. "I knew, of course, they would hate me." The gathering of Walkers and Bushes at the Point was "overwhelming," she recalled. "The teasing was enormous from everybody, except George's mother." The family liked her, finding her resilient under the edgy banter. "When they were courting, they had an act-he could kid her, and she could take it and give it right back," recalled Jonathan Bush. Because of gas rationing, G. H. Walker had rented a horse named Barsil to pull wagons to and from town and the Point. The shared first syllable of the two names-Barbara and Barsil-gave rise to a new nickname. Barbara became "Bar," after the horse.
Barbara Pierce and Poppy Bush became engaged on the rocks along the Atlantic on a moonlit night. She was funny and pretty and frank; he was dashing and handsome and kind. It had been roughly a year and a half since Bush had asked to be introduced to her at the Greenwich Country Club Christmas dance. He was nineteen; she was eighteen.
- Bush was sure Barbara was, as he told his mother, "so perfect a girl," and the public announcement of the engagement was published on Sunday, December 12, 1943. When he read the news in the paper, Bush wrote Barbara, who was in her first semester at Smith College. (It is one of the very few wartime letters between the two to survive.) "I love you, precious, with all my heart and to know that you love me means my life," he wrote, continuing: How often I have thought about the immeasurable joy that will be ours some day. How lucky our children will be to have a mother like you- As the days go by the time of our departure draws nearer. For a long time I had anxiously looked forward to the day when we would go aboard and set to sea. It seemed that obtaining that goal would be all I could desire for some time, but, Bar, you have changed all that. I cannot say that I do not want to go-for that would be a lie. We have been working for a long time with a single purpose in mind, to be so equipped that we could meet and defeat our enemy. I do want to go because it is my part....Bar, you have made my life full of everything I could ever dream of-my complete happiness should be a token of my love for you....
Goodnite, my beautiful. Everytime I say beautiful you about kill me but you'll have to accept it- At Fort Lauderdale, he was introduced to the plane in which he was to spend the war: the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, manufactured by the Grumman Corporation (and later by General Motors). The plane was 40 feet long, 16 feet high, and had a 52-foot wing span-20 feet longer than the "Yellow Peril" trainers. With his training group, which was known as Flight 44, Bush practiced bombing runs over Lake Okeechobee. After Florida, Bush learned how to make carrier landings aboard the USS Sable on Lake Michigan in August 1943. The next month he joined his new squadron, VT-51, in Norfolk, Virginia.
Bush and his squadron were assigned to the USS San Jacinto. Dorothy Bush and Barbara came to the new carrier's commissioning ceremony in Philadelphia on Wednesday, December 15, 1943. Dorothy had a mission of her own that day: to deliver a star sapphire ring of her sister's, Nancy Walker, to her son. On the train to Philadelphia, Mrs. Bush asked what kind of ring Barbara might like-did she want a diamond? Barbara said she didn't have any strong feelings-anything would be wonderful. Mrs. Bush pressed once more-was Barbara sure she would be all right without a diamond? Barbara again said it did not matter. In the shipyard, Bush gave the sapphire ring to Barbara, sealing the engagement.
The ship left the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on that cold, cloudy Wednesday, cruising down the Delaware River to the Chesapeake and then to the broad Atlantic. Lunch on the day they set out into open seas was spaghetti and meatballs-an unfortunate choice, it turned out, when the water proved so rough that, as fellow Bush pilot Lou Grab recalled, "we had a complete puke-up fore and aft." At a stop at Trinidad in the Caribbean, Bush and his fellow pilots piled into a taxi-Bush's best friend Jim Wykes sat on the floor of the cab to make room for everyone-and merrily consumed planter's punch cocktails at the Macqueripe Officers Club in the port city's hotel. Fortified by drink and song, the group offered their shipmates off-key renditions of calypso on returning to the ship. The San Jacinto sailed through the Panama Canal, called at San Diego, and reached Hawaii on Thursday, April 20, 1944. Bush took some time off the ship to go swimming along a secluded beach protected by barbed wire. Thirty-one days later, on Sunday, May 21, after the ship joined the fleet at Majuro Harbor, in the Marshall Islands, Ensign Bush suited up for his first combat mission.
SEVEN.
I Wanted to Finish My Mission
My God, this thing is going to blow up.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, on being struck by antiaircraft fire over the Pacific THE TARGET WAS WAKE ISLAND, an American possession first claimed for the United States in the last years of the nineteenth century. About 2,500 miles west of Hawaii, Wake had been home to a U.S. naval base but was now occupied by the Japanese, who had attacked it on the same day they had struck Pearl Harbor. Bush was to fly his Avenger through antiaircraft fire from the island and bomb enemy installations. Training was over. This was the real thing.
His crewmen were Leo "Lee" Nadeau, twenty-two, who served as the gunner, and John "Del" Delaney, twenty-three, the radioman. "We were all tense because it was our first bombing mission over an active target, and we didn't know what to expect," Nadeau told Joe Hyams, the writer whose book Flight of the Avenger is a definitive account of Bush's military service. "I don't think there was any time we were in the air when the adrenaline wasn't flowing, but much as we dreaded that first flight, we knew we had to do it. Luckily, George seemed confident, which relaxed Del and me somewhat." One day that summer after his plane had lost all of its oil, Bush executed a dangerously difficult water landing, earning even more respect.
They also liked Bush, who, after Andover, was accustomed to the camaraderie of an all-male environment and knew how to make himself agreeable. He played games-usually acey-deucey, a version of backgammon-and loved what were known as "gedunks," the term used on board for ice cream sundaes. He doled out nicknames, and his own among the officers was a play on his privilege-he was called Georgeherbertwalkerbush, said fast. One casualty of the war was the widespread use of "Pop" or "Poppy" as a nickname for Bush. An old friend in the Pacific startled Bush in October 1944 by calling him "Pop." It was, he said, "the first time in ages" he had heard that. "With everyone it's George and I really have grown used to it," Bush wrote his mother.