In the wardroom he drank coffee and made toast with butter and jam; at mealtimes the stewards set the table with white cloths and silver. He read books his mother had given him, nurtured an interest in Russia (curiously becoming "pretty much interested in that end of our diplomatic relations"), and played volleyball (he was a popular choice when teams were forming). He bellyached about the food. The ship's steaks, he said, "have a great deal in common with an old sneaker sole." He would lie in his bunk at night and let the tensions of flight ease into images of home, of his parents, and "of Bar-our wedding."
Bush always remembered the first sight of the bursts of antiaircraft fire from the attack on Wake Island. "It is quite a feeling, Mum, to be shot at I assure you," Bush wrote on Wednesday, May 24, 1944. "The nervousness which is with you before a game of some kind was extremely noticeable but no great fear thank heavens."
Back on the San Jacinto, Bush was consumed with worry: his roommate, Jim Wykes, had disappeared with two crewmen while on a mission, never to be found. He and Bush had known each other for a year in the closest of quarters, sharing the pressures of learning to fly in wartime. One of Wykes's crew, Bush recalled, "had just become a father." Alone in his bunk that night Bush cried in grief. Another pilot, Roland R. "Dick" Houle, was killed in action. Bush knew that he could not afford to grieve too much, and he found some refuge in thinking about his youngest brother, William "Bucky" Bush, who was about to enter the first grade. "I get such a kick out of Buck-I picture him so clearly at all times-He is sort of a symbol to me in a way," Bush wrote his parents. "I remember how Bar & I used to play with him. We'd pretend he was our little boy. I don't know why, but little old Buck so often is brought to my mind-even when I'm up flying I'll burst out laughing at times....Perhaps it's because he's so young and innocent." Everything lay before Bucky in a way that it never could again for George. On any flight on any given day, Jim Wykes's fate could be his own.
- Dawn, Saturday, September 2, 1944. Bush was scheduled to fly in a strike code-named "Baker," an assault on the Bonin island of Chichi-Jima, a Japanese outpost 150 miles from Iwo Jima and only 500 miles from the mainland. The mission was to destroy a radio tower on the peak of Mount Yoake. Chichi-Jima was heavily fortified, a communications-and-supply point for the Japanese.
The aviators of VT-51 were on their second day trying to take the tower out. Bush had flown the day before, on Friday, September 1, but each of the planes that had made a run at Mount Yoake had missed the target amid Japanese flak. Early on Saturday morning, the squadron was briefed again in the small ready room aboard the San Jacinto. A lieutenant junior grade, William G. White, known as Ted, wanted to come along. A gunnery officer and Yale alumnus, White had long hoped to see the Avenger and its guns in action. Prescott Bush knew White's father. Bush warned White that the flight was not going to be an easy hop, but the squadron commander agreed that White could join the mission. Lee Nadeau surrendered his turret as gunner, and White climbed aboard. There were jokes about whether they'd have to bail out.
Bush took off with White and Del Delaney at a quarter after seven in the morning. The weather, Bush recalled, was clear. A little more than an hour after taking off from the San Jacinto, Bush was within range of the tower. The Japanese guns filled the air with flak. Flying at a thirty-five-degree angle to the surface, Bush zeroed in on the target and went straight for it. Racing ever closer to the island, the plane was hit. As the Avenger jolted forward, Bush was able to keep it on target. Smoke filled the cockpit. Flames raced along the wings. "My God," Bush thought, "this thing is going to blow up." Bush radioed White and Delaney to put their parachutes on. The Avenger, he knew, "was going down." Bush, who was choking on the smoke, kept the plane on course, dropping his bombs-this time he scored, damaging the radio tower-and then gave the plane as much speed as he could as he roared off, out to sea. "I realized I couldn't keep the plane in the air very long because of the severity of the fire, and told our guys to get out," Bush recalled. His words that day: "Hit the silk!" He could not be sure that they had heard him; no one answered, Bush reported to his parents, though "we had talked not long before." He looked back, he recalled, but could not see White, so he assumed the guest gunner had gone below to put on his parachute.
Bush did what he had been trained to do. "I turned the plane to the starboard so it'd take the slipstream off the escape hatch [for the two crewmen] and then figured, 'Well, I hope to hell they got out,'" Bush recalled. Relating the story to his parents, he wrote: "After that I straightened up and started to get out myself. At that time I felt certain that they had bailed out." Other squadron fliers on the mission heard Bush's order to the crewmen to bail. His own parachute straps fastened, his hatch opened, Bush struggled up and out of the cockpit. The wind struck him full force, essentially lifting him out the rest of the way and propelling him backward into the tail. He gashed his head and bruised his eye on the tail as he flew through the sky and the burning plane hurtled toward the sea.
Buffeted by the wind, Bush pulled his rip cord too soon, and several panels of the silk chute were ripped away. He had bailed at about two thousand feet above the waves; as he floated down he saw his plane crash into the ocean and disappear into the depths. He unfastened the buckles of his chute before he hit the water, shaking the harness loose with about twenty feet to fall.
Bush plunged deep into the ocean, involuntarily gulping down bitter salt water. He fought his way to the surface, kicking off his shoes to reduce his weight and inflating his life jacket-what navy men called a "Mae West." It was a struggle. His khaki flight suit was soaked and heavy, his head was bleeding, his eyes were burning from the cockpit smoke, and his mouth and throat were raw from the rush of salt water.
Bobbing along the surface, he looked up and saw the squadron's commander, Don Melvin, signal the location of an uninflated life raft that had fallen from Bush's life jacket and landed in the water. Bush swam the fifty feet, inflated the raft, and flopped aboard. But there was no time to rest, or even catch his breath. The wind was blowing back toward Chichi-Jima-back toward the enemy. There was no paddle-it had been lost in chaos of the crash-and so Bush hunched forward and paddled with his arms. Doug West, a fellow VT-51 pilot, flew close by, and Melvin summoned the USS Finback, which was on what was known as "lifeguard duty."
The submarine was ten miles away, however, and Bush, in his tiny raft drifting in the wrong direction, needed help now. Stung by a Portuguese man-of-war, he was relieved only by the sight of American planes above him. Doug West dropped down some medical supplies, and Bush applied Mercurochrome to his head wound. To increase his visibility to the pilots above, Bush sprinkled dye marker around the raft. The Americans, however, weren't the only ones who could make out his position. A Japanese boat set out toward the downed pilot, prompting West to open fire with a .50-caliber machine gun. West's strafing bought some time, but the wind and tide were not in Bush's favor. "For a while there I thought I was done," he recalled. Either the Japanese would find him or he would be taken back to Chichi-Jima by the tide. The best he could hope for was being captured as a prisoner of war.
All he could do now was paddle, and wait.
- On the tiny raft, pausing now and then to vomit over the side-the salt water had hit his stomach, which, in addition to the stress of the hour, made him ill-Bush sensed that White and Delaney had not made it. There was no sign of anyone else on the open water. Soon he could tell that the American planes had stopped searching for others. Unable to move for a time, Bush sat in the raft in tears. He thought of Delaney and of White, of Barbara, of home. Minutes passed, then one hour, then two. It was nearing noon when Bush heard the zooming of American planes again, tipping their wings toward the raft. It was a signal. It wasn't for Bush; he knew where he was. It must be for someone else. And that meant someone was coming.
- The Finback was commanded by Robert R. Williams, Jr., an Annapolis graduate. It was a 311-foot submarine, patrolling the Bonins to pick up downed American fliers. As the Finback rose out of the water, Bush recalled, "I thought maybe I was delirious." Four enlisted men came out of the interior of the sub and dove into the water. Chief Petty Officer Ralph Adams swam to Bush's raft, and the team pulled the pilot out of the raft and onto the Finback.
"Welcome aboard, sir," said Don Kohler, a torpedoman second class.
"Happy to be aboard," Bush said.
"Let's get below," Kohler said. "The skipper wants to get the hell out of here."
It was four minutes shy of noon. Lieutenant Junior Grade George H. W. Bush was safe. The Finback crew shot his raft to pieces and left the debris in the sea. According to the submarine's log for the day, Bush's first priority was to tell his rescuers about his crew. He had not seen any other parachutes, the log reported, "and believed that they had jumped when [the] plane [was] still over Chichi Jima, or they had gone down with the plane. Commenced search of area on chance they had jumped over water." It was fruitless.
An American pilot and the Japanese account of the episode confirmed that a second chute was seen coming out of Bush's plane. It had opened, or "streamed," but did not billow out, and neither White nor Delaney was ever recovered. "All in all it is terribly discouraging and frankly it bothers me a good deal," Bush told his parents in a letter from the Finback. "My heart aches for the families of those two boys with me."
He was physically fine-the cuts and bruises were minor, as was some brief soreness in his back and one leg-but emotionally fragile. He had barely escaped death or capture. He later learned that Chichi-Jima was the scene of horrific war crimes against American prisoners of war, including cannibalism.
The loss of White and of Delaney remained with Bush for the rest of his life. "It worries me-it terrifies me," he said decades later, reflecting on the proposition that he could have done something differently, something that would have ensured their survival on that desperate Saturday in September. Bush's fundamental question: "Did I do enough to save them?"
He had handled the crisis correctly, but that was only partly consoling. "My mother and dad had drilled into us the lesson that we were never to let anyone down, and here I was, alive while they were gone," Bush recalled. "Their families..." He stopped, tearing up. "I wondered-wonder still-whether I did all I could. Could I have made a water landing? But I couldn't have-we were too damaged. I know I did the right thing, telling everyone to bail out. But that doesn't make the suffering of the other families any less."
Aboard the Finback, Bush slept more than usual, and he attempted to make sense of the shootdown in nearly daily letters to his parents. "I try to think about it as little as possible, yet I cannot get the thought of those two boys out of my mind," he wrote home a week after the disaster. Bush kept his anguish largely to himself. Aboard the Finback he reverted to type, deploying his extroverted charm on the officers and crew. One officer, Lieutenant Geraldyn Redmond, wrote home to his stepfather, a Wall Street executive, reporting that the submarine had "picked up a few aviators who were mighty glad to find an American at that moment. They were quite some characters and kept us well entertained." Bush, Redmond said, "was the most fun of all the lot and kept us in stitches for over a month, which is quite a feat in a sub. We usually just get on each other's nerves after a while."
Bush's good cheer was a mask. In his head he constantly replayed the episode over Chichi-Jima. "It was transforming," he recalled of the incident. "Transforming in the sense that you realize how close death can be. You realize, painstakingly so, the responsibility you had for the life of somebody else."
A submarine created a different kind of stress than a carrier. In some ways being a passive player-underwater, the Finback could only do so much when depth charges fell-was worse for Bush than flying, which allowed the illusion of some measure of control. Bush stood watches (two a day) in order to occupy himself and get some fresh air when the submarine was on the surface. The food was excellent (Bush was pleasantly startled to find good steaks and strawberries on the Finback), but each man could shower only once a week. He felt a bit claustrophobic, too, occasionally battling insomnia caused, he thought, by a lack of exercise.
Credit 7.1 Bush is rescued at sea by the USS Finback off Chichi-Jima in the Bonin Islands, Saturday, September 2, 1944. When Bush, who was in a life raft on the open seas, saw the submarine appear, he thought he was "delirious," he recalled.
By Saturday, September 16, 1944, his eye was healed and the only sign of the accident, he told his parents, was a bare spot where his eyebrow needed to grow back in. The other men on the boat joked that without a scar Bush might have trouble getting his Purple Heart, but the ribbing only made him gloomier. To pass the time on the Finback, he pitched in as a censor for the enlisted men's letters, reading them for anything sensitive about military matters. Bush would always remember that their stories and their concerns offered what was, for him, a rare glimpse into the lives of ordinary Americans.
Books, especially novels, were an escape. On the Finback he read C. S. Forester's Captain from Connecticut, Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe, Paul Hughes's Retreat from Rostov, and John Dos Passos's Number One. After a month's stay on the submarine, Bush got off at Midway Island and flew to Hawaii. He was eligible to return stateside for shore duty but refused. "I didn't want to go home," Bush recalled. "I wanted to finish my mission. It never occurred to me not to rejoin the unit, get back in the fight, back in the air."
The Texas flag was flying when Bush returned to the San Jacinto. As relieved as he was to be back aboard, he was anxious for word from home. "All during the time I was talking to the boys I kept eagerly eyeing my sky-high stack of mail," he wrote on Friday, November 3, 1944. One note, from his mother's brother Herbie Walker, provided a welcome glimpse of a possible future. "He offered me a job with G. H. Walker after the war-it was the nicest letter and really made me happy," Bush wrote. Politics was on his mind, if only slightly. "By the time this gets to you the election will be over-perhaps we will have a new and vigorous administration, perhaps four more years of FDR." Always there were concerns about the immediate tasks before him. "I am a little anxious over my first flight off the ship," Bush wrote. "I have flown so little lately that I will probably be as rusty as can be."
He worried, too, over writing the White and Delaney families. "I think you had better not mention the fact that Ted White was with me to anyone who could possibly let it get to the Whites unless for some reason you know that they have definitely been notified by the government," Bush told his parents. "As soon as I find out that they have been notified I shall write to them." He did write at the appropriate time.
Not long afterward a letter arrived from Providence, Rhode Island. It was from Delaney's sister, Mary Jane, and reading it he was suffused with relief and gratitude.
Dear Lt. Bush, I must apologize for not writing sooner. It isn't that I did not try-I just could not.
You mention in your letter that you would like to help me in some way. There is a way, and that is to stop thinking you are in any way responsible for your plane accident and what has happened to your men. I might have thought you were if my brother Jack had not always spoken of you as the best pilot in the squadron. I always had the greatest confidence and trust in my brother Jack's judgment....
I want to thank you for your beautiful letter and the kind things you said about Jack. It was a message of sadness, but you made it much easier to bear.
With every wish for your continued safety.
Very truly yours, Mary Jane Delaney - Did he ever dream about Chichi-Jima? "No, not dreaming," Bush recalled in his late eighties. "Well, I don't know. Maybe I do....I wouldn't be surprised."
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for the mission but was ambivalent about the decoration. "I finished the bombing run, which was no 'heroic' thing," he recalled late in life. "They wrote it up as heroism, but it wasn't-it was just doing your job."
On Monday, November 13, 1944, with Leo Nadeau as gunner and Joe Reichert as radioman, Bush flew a combat mission over Manila Bay. Flying-and diving-through Japanese flak, Bush dropped the plane's bombs on some enemy light cruisers. Returning to the San Jacinto, the plane was low on fuel and the seas were rough, but Bush executed a perfect landing on the carrier. "Well," Bush said to his men as they climbed out of the plane onto the deck, "we made it." Nadeau noted a tone of "relief" in his pilot's voice; there may also have been a hint of redemption. Bush had proven he could bring his crew to safety.
By late November 1944, Bush had orders that allowed him to return stateside before he and his VT-51 colleagues were reassigned for new duty in the Pacific. Finding transportation to San Diego from Hawaii on a troop ship, Bush began the long journey home. He knew he soon would be back in the Pacific to fight in the seemingly inevitable invasion of the home islands of Japan. For the moment, though, all he wanted was to head east. He had a wedding to get to-his own.
EIGHT.
Life Lay Ahead of Us
V-J Day arrived, and the rejoicing in the streets...was loud, wild, and fairly liquid. And why not? There was a lot to cheer about.
-BARBARA BUSH I'll always wonder, "Why me? Why was I spared?"
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, on his combat experience THE PIERCE HOUSE on Onondaga Street in Rye was elaborately decorated for Christmas. Mrs. Pierce, who was fond of the season, saw to that, sparing neither expense nor effort. Barbara was there, at home, on Sunday, December 24, 1944, when the telephone rang. Her fiance, fresh from a cross-country flight, was calling from New York City with the best news she could imagine: He was boarding a train for Rye. Within an hour he would be at the station in Westchester County. Barbara raced to get dressed, hurried to meet the train, and fell into Bush's arms. They went on to Greenwich together.
On a cold Saturday in January 1945, wedding guests filled the First Presbyterian Church in Rye. Barbara wore what The New York Times described as "a gown of ivory satin, made with a fitted bodice embroidered with seed pearls and a full skirt." Her veil-"of heirloom princess and rosepoint lace"-had been Mrs. Bush's at her Kennebunkport wedding in 1921. George wore his dress blue uniform. George's sister, Nancy, and Barbara's sister, Martha, were maids of honor, and Prescott Jr. served as best man. The Pierces hosted a large reception afterward at the Apawamis Club about a mile away-"a party of women," Barbara recalled, "not of men, because of the war"-and the new couple left that evening for New York City. There the newlyweds watched the Judy Garland movie Meet Me in St. Louis and took a sleeper train down the East Coast to the Cloisters at Sea Island, Georgia, for some sun. They were just about the only young couple there. Wartime meant that the hotel was largely populated by older guests, insofar as it was populated at all. There were dance lessons, which bored Bush. Barbara would be doing the rhumba and turn around to find that her new husband had disappeared midstep.
- As part of a new combat squadron, VT-153, Bush was beginning an eight-month odyssey as the pilots trained for new deployment to the Pacific. At Naval Air Station Grosse Ile in Michigan, he and Barbara took a room in town for fourteen dollars a week, but without kitchen privileges. "It is sort of a lonely existence for poor Bar," Bush wrote home to Greenwich, "but she doesn't complain at all, and I am just in heaven having her here."
Barbara and George were stationed in the Lewiston-Auburn area of Maine when the news broke of FDR's death at his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, on Thursday, April 12, 1945. Though both were Republicans, the Bushes experienced feelings of loss and nostalgia. "I remember crying, I remember weeping, even though I had not been raised in a pro-Roosevelt household by a long shot," Bush recalled. Barbara never forgot Bush's coming home that day to tell her what had happened. "We were sick," Barbara recalled. "Neither one of us had ever voted-we were too young-and we probably would have voted for the other fellow, but Roosevelt was our President, the Commander-in-Chief of a country at war, and we joined the world in mourning. We felt truly lost, very young and alone. Who had ever heard of Harry Truman?"
Bush was scheduled to report for duty on Saturday, September 15, 1945, to sail out to take part in the invasion of mainland Japan. "Everything I'd experienced in my year and a half of combat in the Pacific told me it was going to be the bloodiest, most prolonged battle of the war," Bush recalled. "Japan's war leaders were unfazed by massive raids on Tokyo. They seemed bent on national suicide, regardless of the cost in human life."
In August 1945, word of the American atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki arrived when the Bushes were stationed at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Then, at ten P.M. eastern time on Saturday, September 1, 1945, President Truman announced Japan's unconditional surrender. In Virginia Beach, the reaction was instant and immense. "Within minutes our neighborhood streets were filled with sailors, aviators, their wives and families celebrating late into the night," Bush recalled. The festivities, Barbara recalled, were "loud, wild, and fairly liquid. And why not? There was a lot to cheer about." The Bushes slipped off at one point to say a prayer in a nearby church.
One image from the war stayed with him through the years. A Hellcat fighter was coming in to land on the San Jacinto from Guam. Bush was standing on deck. The Hellcat pilot missed the arresting wires and tried but failed to get his plane back up in the air to come around again. It spun and crashed on the deck, killing the four-man gun crew. "Just a few yards away was a crewman's leg, severed and quivering," Bush recalled. "The shoe was still on." Standing with two other VT-51 pilots, Bush was stunned, immobile. It took a chief petty officer to break the shock. "All right, you bastards," the man yelled. "Let's get to work. We still have planes up there and they can't land in this goddamn mess."
There was no logic to the costs of combat, Bush realized, no real rhyme nor reason. All you could do was your best, and take what came. In the warm September night in Virginia Beach the Bushes prayed for those who would not come home or have families or build lives. They knew-they both knew-that there but for the grace of God, Bush could be dead in the depths of a distant sea. "I'll always wonder, 'Why me? Why was I spared?'" Bush recalled. He spent the rest of his life striving to prove that he was worthy of being saved when others were doomed.
Always a charmed figure, the post-Chichi-Jima Bush was now, to his family and friends, truly the most special of men. On a summer day in 1945, Bush piloted a plane into Sanford, Maine, near Kennebunkport. His youngest brother, Bucky, who turned seven that season, remembered the scene. The Bushes and the Walkers had driven over to meet a "very, very skinny and suntanned" Poppy, who climbed out of the cockpit with a wide grin and a big wave. "I thought he'd conquered the world," Bucky Bush recalled. "Nobody-nothing-could ever hurt Pop after that."
- He was, finally, safe. On Tuesday, September 18, 1945, Bush was discharged from active duty. He had served for just over a thousand days, flying 58 missions, making 126 carrier landings, and recording 1,228 hours of flight time. Bush was decorated with gold wings, the Distinguished Flying Cross, an Air Medal with Gold Stars, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with Three Battle Stars, the World War II Victory Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and the Selective Service Medal.
Only a year before, in September 1944, he had been clinging to life in the wind and the tide of Chichi-Jima. Even after the Finback surfaced and took him in, death in the Pacific was a constant possibility, a reality men dealt with by avoiding outward displays of concern about the subject. For all the world could see, men like Bush flew their missions and then played volleyball on the deck of the San Jacinto and cards in the wardroom. When they worried, they did so in their bunks, alone. They mourned their dead quietly, anxious to keep the grief and the fear in check. They felt they had no other choice: to have engaged the horror they faced fully would have immobilized them at just the hour when they had to focus on doing the jobs they had been trained to do. Then, with Truman's announcement, the war was over. "We were still young, life lay ahead of us, and the world was at peace," Bush recalled. "It was the best of times." Survivors like Bush were no longer preparing to die, but to live.
- It was far from a typical freshman class. In the fall of 1945, Yale enrolled 8,500 men; more than half of the student body, about 5,000, were rotating out of military service. When Bush matriculated in November 1945, he was twenty-one and a half years old and anxious to get on with things. He had toyed with the idea of skipping Yale altogether-Uncle Herbie Walker had promised a job at the family firm, degree or no degree-but Bush's father, who strongly believed his son should go to college, prevailed.
The university still had a wartime feel. Army and navy units were billeted in Trumbull, Branford, and Saybrook halls. Rows of Quonset huts were built near the Yale Bowl and the Peabody Museum to create instant housing. Slowly, old military uniforms gave way to what the writer Emerson Stone, of the class of 1948, later described as the "de rigueur...mark of the official Yale man: khaki trousers (gray flannels for dressier or cooler times) and scuffed white buck shoes."
Yale was Yale when Bush arrived-a leafy, Gothic Revival enclave in which members of the American upper and upper-middle classes prepared for lives of influence by spending four years among other members of the same classes. Yet it was not quite the Yale of Bush's forebears. The war had changed that, as it had changed so many other things. "Some of us are tottering veterans in our early and mid-twenties trying to keep up with the impertinently mature minors we found when we came back," a Yale yearbook editor wrote about the class of 1948.
Bush knew his university experience was not going to be the same as his family's-that of his father ('17) or of his uncle James ('22) or of his Walker uncles, George H. Jr. ('27), John M. ('31), and Louis ('36). The usual undergraduate gripes about, say, the food in the dining hall were out of the question for the class of 1948. Still, they wanted to have a good time. Tired of war, they savored the football and the fraternities and the campus camaraderie. Wartime had increased their metabolisms. Accustomed to a world in which any moment could be your last, Bush's generation played hard, worked hard-and looked resolutely ahead.
The chief difference between a theoretical prewar Bush Yale experience and the reality of the postwar Bush Yale experience was speed and seriousness. Everything in Bush's life now moved faster-having children, making a living. He had been spared, and he believed there was not an hour to waste. Bush finished his four-year degree in two and a half years. Though he never wanted to be seen as an intellectual or even as a very serious student, he enjoyed his studies. "I was majoring in 'the dismal science,' economics, but didn't find it dismal at all," Bush recalled. As an economics major with a minor in sociology, he took enough care with his coursework to graduate Phi Beta Kappa.
Yale offered the attentive student a selection of great professors. There was F.S.C. Northrop in philosophy (Bush took his logic course), Samuel Hemingway in Shakespeare, and Paul Hindemith in music. A favorite course (Barbara audited it as well) was History of Art 36, a class in American furniture and silver that was informally known as "Pots and Pans." Bush took French, too, which he had begun at Andover. He lettered in soccer his first year in New Haven-the only year he played-and in baseball, which he played all three years, serving as captain in his senior year. He was secretary of the budget drive in 1946. Bush joined Delta Kappa Epsilon (serving briefly as chapter president). In 1947 he served on the Undergraduate Athletic Association, the Undergraduate Board of Deacons, and the Interfraternity Council, and was elected to the Triennial Committee. He was also inducted into the Torch Honor Society and was awarded the Francis Gordon Brown Prize (for "intellectual ability, high manhood, [and] capacity for leadership") in 1947.
Most important, perhaps, Bush followed his father into the most elite of the undergraduate organizations at Yale and beyond. He won a fabled honor: He was the "last man tapped" for the secret society Skull and Bones, a distinction reserved for the leading Yale undergraduate of his day. In the forbidding "tomb" of the clubhouse on High Street in New Haven, the initiated few often forged lifelong bonds amid a culture of candor about one's hopes and fears. It was counterintuitive: a society of Yale men usually seen as at least somewhat repressed speaking openly to one another amid mystical rituals and customs.
Bush's success at Yale was as much, if not more, about his character than it was about his name or his prep school. Being the son of Prescott Bush and a Walker on his mother's side did not hurt, but plenty of children of privilege fail to make the leap from prominent name to accomplished figure. S. P. Bush's old worries about Prescott's sliding into a gin-soaked country-club life rather than becoming a man in the arena and earning the respect of the world were not irrational. Boys who had been given everything could wind up doing nothing. The Bush code demanded both success and service.
- The Cold War was taking shape in Bush's New Haven years, but he declined to be drawn into contests or contentions other than those on the baseball diamond. It was not, Bush recalled, that he and many of his contemporaries "didn't care what was going on in the world, only that after four years of war we had a lot of catching up to do. I came back to civilian life feeling that I needed to get my degree and go into the business world as soon as possible. I had a family to support." William F. Buckley, Jr., was two years behind Bush at Yale and was, Bush recalled, "getting ready to stir the pot with his first book, God and Man at Yale. But aside from following the front-page news-the beginnings of the Cold War, from the Russian takeover of Eastern Europe to the Berlin Blockade-I wasn't politically involved. Most of the other veterans on campus felt the same."
In New Haven, the Bushes first lived in a "shotgun apartment" two doors away from a funeral parlor on Chapel Street. At Thanksgiving 1945, Bush invited ten old Andover friends over for dinner. Barbara recalled that it took her "days" to wash all the dishes. Then came a stay on Edwards Street before they moved into 37 Hillhouse Avenue, next door to the Yale presidential residence. The Hillhouse address was filled with families living under one roof-estimates now range from twenty-nine people to forty-but the Bushes luckily scored their own tiny bathroom.
During his first year, while Bush jumped into his classes, played soccer, and manned first base for the baseball team, Barbara was pregnant with their first child. Loyal and devoted, she kept score at Yale Field from behind third base. As the 1946 season progressed through the spring, she gained sixty pounds. "The baby did not come and did not come," Barbara recalled. Ethan Allen, the Yale baseball coach, told her that it would make him feel better if she would take a seat behind home plate-and behind a safety net. "I was huge and weighed more than a Yale linebacker," Barbara said, acceding to Allen's kindly request.
On Saturday, July 6, 1946, at GraceNew Haven Community Hospital on York Street, Barbara gave birth to their first child, a son they named George Walker Bush. "George's mother finally gave me a good dose of castor oil and [the] baby came all right-I'm tempted to say covered with glory," Barbara recalled. The young parents were smitten and believed the world should be, too. Mrs. Pierce said that the elder George seemed wounded if she took her eyes off little "Georgie" for even a moment.
- With the exception of his young family, baseball was arguably Bush's greatest passion at Yale. He was not given to hero worship, which made his longtime admiration of Lou Gehrig, the great New York Yankees first baseman, all the more notable. As a youngster Bush had "looked up to" Gehrig, impressed by Gehrig's "standard of quiet excellence, on and off the field." Known as "the Iron Horse" for his historic streak of playing in 2,130 straight games, Gehrig projected a grace and a dignity that captured the young Bush's imagination.
There were other, more dramatic players, chiefly Babe Ruth, the hard-drinking home-run king who had played right field behind Gehrig. On the afternoon of Yale's 1948 home game against Princeton, Ruth came to New Haven to present the manuscript of his memoirs to the school. As captain, Bush was tasked with accepting the gift on the field before the game. It had rained all morning; with Ruth's appearance the sun came out. Stricken with the cancer that would kill him, Ruth was fragile.
A grand moment, but the quiet Gehrig fascinated Bush more than the bombastic Ruth. "Nothing flashy, no hotdogging, the ideal sportsman," Bush recalled of Gehrig. "He could field, hit, hit-with-power, and come through in a clutch." Bush appreciated steadiness over sizzle.
Morris Greenberg, Yale's head groundskeeper, wrote Bush a note during the 1946 season, slipping it under the door of the Chapel Street apartment. "Dear Sir," Greenberg wrote: After watching you play since the season started, I am convinced the reason you are not getting more hits is because you do not take a real cut at the ball. I am confident that if you would put more power behind your swing, you would improve your batting average 100%. I notice at the plate you are not going after any bad balls, and with the good eye which you have, I would suggest that the above be tried out.
Credit 8.1 Accepting, on behalf of Yale, the manuscript of Babe Ruth's memoir. Meeting Ruth was a "great thrill," Bush recalled, but Bush's true baseball hero was Lou Gehrig, the quiet, indefatigable Yankee first baseman.
Bush knew that he was "swinging defensively," playing it too safe at the plate. Greenberg's insight rang true: "No risk, no gain. So I decided to take Morris's advice and put more practice time into attacking the ball." The counsel to swing harder, to take more chances, worked. Bush was hitting .280, a fine average, by the time his Yale career-which included appearances in the 1947 and 1948 College World Series-was over.
Yale had been good to Bush. As he had done at Andover and in the navy, he had mastered the world around him, won the respect of others, and been decorated for his efforts. It was time for the next thing.
- But what, exactly, should the next thing be? Bush weighed applying for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford but decided against it on the grounds that he did not have the personal means to support his wife and son in England. (Though there were family means, it was customary for Bushes to pay their own way once out of school. There were no huge trust funds to underwrite a leisurely life.) He interviewed with a recruiter from Procter & Gamble but did not get the job. He was offered, but declined, a position in the advertising department of Bates Fabrics in New York. And for a brief moment in the spring, both Barbara and George were intrigued by Louis Bromfield's book The Farm and became infatuated with the idea of striking out on their own in the Midwest as farmers. They had romantic visions of golden fields and blue skies. But the Bushes found, as Bush put it, that "George and Barbara Farms came off as a high-risk, no-yield investment."
In this season of uncertainty, FitzGerald "Gerry" Bemiss, a Bush friend from Richmond who also spent summers in Kennebunkport, had heard a rumor that Bush was thinking about following in his great-grandfather James Smith Bush's footsteps and becoming an Episcopal clergyman. "I can't imagine where you ever heard that I was going into the ministry," Bush wrote. He was in a candid, even confessional, frame of mind. Though Bush could be inarticulate when speaking, dropping pronouns and making obscure references, he usually made himself clear on the page, expressing emotions and explaining difficult questions that eluded him in speech. His verbal exploits could be awkward and often confusing.
The root of the problem was likely threefold. First, he was always hearing his mother's admonitions to avoid talking about himself, which created an ambivalent relationship between himself and the first-person pronoun. Second, Bush was, by nature, a man who disliked confrontation. It could be unpleasant, and he had been raised to make himself agreeable. His garbled conversation, then, was simultaneously in the service of-and the result of-avoiding uncomfortable topics. Third, he was a very bright man who appreciated complexity and tended to think ahead to possible objections to, and elaborations of, the points he was expressing even while he was still speaking. Those objections and elaborations would seep back into the main flow of what he was trying to say, complicating his speech.
Letters afforded him the opportunity to put his thoughts down in a more sustained and coherent way. To be sure, his correspondence reflected his somewhat loopy style of speaking. In the main, however, Bush's letters offer a window into his mind and heart. Writing to Bemiss in 1948, he was frank about his hopes-and fears.
He had thought of teaching, he wrote, but "right now it seems to me that it would be confining and not challenging enough. Besides teaching would require further study almost immediately, and I am not prepared to study textbooks right now-perhaps later but not now." Bush was, therefore, a bit at loose ends. He could not quite talk himself into taking that long-offered job with Herbie Walker at G. H. Walker & Company. "I am not sure I want to capitalize completely on the benefits I received at birth-that is on the benefits of my social position," Bush wrote. "Doing well merely because I have had the opportunity to attend the same debut parties as some of my customers does not appeal to me."
Then there was Texas. Prescott Bush's friend and associate Henry Neil Mallon, who was the head of Dresser Industries, had first suggested the possibility. Mallon, an Ohio native who had been a fellow Bonesman of Prescott's, was "Uncle Neil" to Dorothy and Prescott's children. Of average height (five foot nine) and unassuming manner, Mallon was a quiet but powerful force. He endeared himself to the children early on one day when he was outside watching Poppy and Pressy play catch. A wild ball went astray and smashed a car windshield, bringing Prescott Bush roaring out of the house. Mallon saved the day, saying that he, not one of the boys, had thrown the offending ball.
Now "Uncle Neil" stepped in with the notion of going west. "What you need to do is head out to Texas and those oil fields," Mallon advised young Bush. Mallon remembered that Bush knew a bit of the territory from the Corpus Christi posting during the war, and he also sensed the scope of Bush's energy and drive. "Texas would be new and exciting for a while-hard on Bar perhaps-and heaven knows many girls would bitch like blazes about such a proposed move," Bush wrote Bemiss. "Bar's different though, Gerry. She lives quite frankly for Georgie and myself. She is wholly unselfish, beautifully tolerant of my weaknesses and idiosyncrasies, and ready to faithfully follow any course I cho[o]se....I haven't had a chance to make many shrewd moves in my young life, but when I married Bar I hit the proverbial jackpot. Her devotion overcomes me and I must often stop in my mad whirl around college etc. to see if I am considering her at all." Bush thought Mallon's offer of a job in Texas had "great appeal," he wrote. "I would be seeing new people, learning something of basic importance." He would be beyond the daily shadow of his Wall Street father and of Grandfather Walker, two dominant figures in the financial world, yet could, ultimately, call on their connections if he needed to raise capital. He was breaking away, but not irresponsibly. It was perfect.
His parents had splurged on a graduation gift: a two-door red Studebaker. After commencement, Bush packed the car, kissed Bar and Georgie, who was about to turn two, goodbye-they would follow by plane-and set out from New Haven. He had two thousand miles to cover. In West Texas, a job and a future awaited.
PART III.
Texas and Tragedy.
1948 to 1966.
I have some bad news for you. Your daughter has leukemia.
-DR. DOROTHY WYVELL of Midland to Barbara and George Bush, 1953.
Credit p3.1.
Dorothy and Prescott Bush with Barbara, George, and George W., in Odessa, Texas, 1949, where the younger Bushes had moved the year before..
NINE.