Prescott Bush adhered to the creed that when you give your word, you keep it. In 1963, Nelson Rockefeller divorced his wife and married a former campaign volunteer who had left her husband and children to be with him. Even though he and Rockefeller shared a political party, my grandfather denounced him in a speech at a Greenwich girls’ school that Time magazine described as “one of the most wrathful public lashings in memory.” My grandfather asked whether the country had “come to the point in our life as a nation where the Governor of a great state—one who perhaps aspires to the nomination for President of the United States—can desert a good wife, [the] mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the Governor.” Clearly Prescott Bush was not afraid to express his beliefs. I can only imagine what he would say if he saw what our society looks like today.
While my grandfather held strict views on moral issues, he had a lighthearted side as well. He loved to sing, and some of his happiest times came at family sing-alongs or rehearsals with the quartets he organized. He had a booming laugh and loved a good joke, although it had to be a clean one. More than once, he stormed out of a room when he was offended by someone’s attempt at off-color humor. In 1959, my grandfather was nominated as the “presidential candidate” of the Alfalfa Club, a fixture of the Washington social scene. His acceptance speech brought down the house.
“Of my staff I have demanded the same devotion to duty that I have shown,” he said. “Indeed, everyone in my office shoots under eighty. Carrying on the great tradition of Thomas Jefferson, we have endeavored to prove the axiom that the government that governs best governs least.” When he talked about the sacrifices that my grandmother had made to move to Washington, he paraphrased Nathan Hale in lamenting, “I regret that I have but one wife to give for my country.” Years later, my father, my brother Jeb, and I all followed in his footsteps as Alfalfa Club presidential nominees.
Dad idolized his father. In many ways, he patterned his own life after Prescott Bush’s: volunteering for the war, excelling in business, and then serving his fellow citizens. I remember the look of pride that would light up Dad’s face when he told his friends that his father was a United States Senator. I suspect one of his first thoughts after he took the oath of office as President in 1989 was how much he wished he could have shared the moment with his father. That made it all the sweeter for me to embrace my dad at my presidential inaugurations in 2001 and 2005.
—
AS A LITTLE BOY, Dad loved to share with his older brother, Pres (Prescott Bush Jr., named after my grandfather). Any time he received a gift or a toy, my father would run after Pres, offer up the item, and say, “Have half.” When he got a new bike, he tried to give half of it to Pres by letting him push one of the pedals. My grandfather took to calling him “Have half.”
Prescott and Dorothy Bush insisted on a rigorous education for their children. Dad spent his first eight school years at Greenwich Country Day School, a private school founded by local families. His early schooling experience stood in stark contrast to mine. At Greenwich Country Day, many kids arrived in a car driven by the family chauffeur. At Sam Houston Elementary in Midland, Texas, most kids walked or rode their bikes.
For high school, Prescott and Dorothy Bush sent their two oldest sons to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. My grandparents chose the school because of its academic excellence and because they wanted their sons to get to know boys from different parts of the country.
Andover proved to be a valuable experience, as it did for me when I attended the school a generation later. Both my father and I benefited from the discipline and challenge of the academics. And we both learned important lessons outside the classroom. As teenagers on our own for the first time, we both learned to be independent, to work hard, and to make friends.
At Andover, Dad displayed a natural leadership ability. People gravitated to him and wanted to follow him. His teammates chose him as captain of the baseball and soccer teams and playing manager of the basketball team. He headed up the school chapel’s fund-raising efforts and was elected President of the senior class.
Even though my father was a so-called big man on campus, he didn’t let his reputation go to his head. One day a younger student named Bruce Gelb was getting hazed by some upperclassmen, possibly because he was one of the school’s few Jewish students. When Dad saw the upperclassmen picking on him, he told them to knock it off. They listened. George Bush went on his way and never thought much of it. Bruce Gelb did. He always remembered that one of the most popular boys on campus didn’t turn a blind eye to his suffering. He became a strong supporter of Dad’s throughout his life, and my father later appointed him to several important government positions, including Ambassador to Belgium and Director of the United States Information Agency.
—
ANDOVER LIKED TO stress its motto, “The end depends on the beginning.” George Bush was blessed with a good beginning. His family loved him, provided him with a great education, and instilled in him good character traits. He had made a large group of friends, impressed his teachers, and excelled in sports. He had also lined up his next step. He had been accepted to Yale, where he would follow in his father’s footsteps.
Then, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, everything changed. Dad and some classmates were walking across the Andover campus near the chapel when they learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, long lines of volunteers formed outside recruiting stations across the country.
Every boy my father’s age faced the same choice: enlist for the war, or continue with life as planned. The advice Dad received all pointed in the same direction. Andover’s commencement speaker his senior year was Henry Stimson, President Roosevelt’s secretary of war and an Andover alumnus. He urged the graduates to go to college, assuring them that they would have their opportunity to join the military later. Prescott Bush strongly agreed. He told Dad to go to Yale and find his own way to serve from there.
There was another reason for my father to stay close to home. During Christmas vacation of his senior year in high school, he attended a dance at a country club in Greenwich. While chatting with friends, he was struck by the beauty of a girl across the room. Barbara Pierce was sixteen; he was seventeen. He wanted to ask her to dance, but there was a problem: He couldn’t waltz. So they sat out the dance and just talked. He learned that she was from Rye, New York, and that she was home from a boarding school in South Carolina. They hit it off and agreed to meet the following day at a Christmas party at the Apawamis Club in Rye.
That night, the band did not play a waltz, and George H.W. Bush got Barbara onto the dance floor. There was instant affection, and they agreed to stay in touch. They saw each other again at the Andover senior prom, after which he gave her a good-night kiss. (She insists it was her first.) Neither of my parents can recall much of what they talked about in those early days, but they remember making each other laugh. Before long, they had fallen in love.
One thing they discussed was his decision to join the military. As my father described to Mother, he was outraged by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The murder of more than 2,400 innocent people created in him the same sense of righteous indignation that many Americans—
