Chapter 2

A WARTIME WEDDING

“When you read about the fact that he survived and the others didn’t, it’s almost like there was some divine hand in what was happening.”

—Norman Schwarzkopf

On December 7, 1941, Dad was walking across the Andover campus with friends when he heard the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and killed some 2,400 Americans. Like everyone, he was stunned.

In the two years since the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the United States had walked the line of neutrality—and the debate over our role in the emerging conflict had divided our country. After the ninety-minute attack in Pearl Harbor, however, the American people were totally, immediately united. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt asked for—and the U.S. Congress passed—a declaration of war against the aggressors.

The “sleeping U.S. behemoth” had finally been stirred awake.

Dad was not unique in that he was outraged and wanted to enlist immediately—to join the fight, to do his part. Because he was not yet eighteen, however, he couldn’t enlist, so he had to remain in school until graduation. He was so eager to join the fight, in fact, that for a brief period he considered signing up in the Royal Canadian Air Force, where one could get in sooner.

Another fateful event took place a few weeks after Pearl Harbor when Dad went to a Christmas dance with some pals and spotted an attractive girl across the room.

“She was very beautiful,” Dad said of the first time he saw Mom. “She stood out—the most beautiful girl out there on the dance floor. I asked somebody who that was. They said, ‘Barbara Pierce, from Rye.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d sure like to meet her.’ She was wonderful.”

According to Mom, Dad “breezed in, asked me to dance. My brother, Jim [Pierce], cut in immediately—never danced with me once in his life before—and said, ‘Aren’t you Poppy Bush? Do you want to play in a basketball game on Thursday night? The prep school boys against the locals?’ And the end of the story is, the locals whipped them, but I was so mad at Jimmy Pierce. He said [to Dad], ‘When you get rid of her, come over and talk to me.’ I mean, it was really terrible.”

Mom went to the game that Thursday night, and she and Dad instantly hit it off.

Spike Heminway grew up with Mom in Rye, New York, and he remembers, “Everybody in Westchester County was after her. She was the most popular girl, the best-looking girl you’ve ever seen in your life. And I’d always heard about George Bush. Then he comes in and sweeps her off her feet, and off they go.”

Back at the Bushes’ house, Dad’s sister, Nan, heard all about Mom. “He said he met a wonderful girl last night, and she was beautiful and funny.” She was in a green dress for the holidays, with beautiful brownish-red hair. As their relationship grew, according to Uncle Johnny, “they would just laugh about everything and he would kid her. She always has been a great audience for him, because it takes great confidence to be funny.”

Looking back on their courtship, Dad remembered the things he loved most about her: “Her sense of humor. As my mother would say, she was interested in the other guy. She had a great propensity for friendships. She had good friends around, and loved sports.”

He added with a smile, “She has strong opinions now. She didn’t used to have that so much when she was younger. She didn’t express her opinions like she does these days.”

As the spring came and Dad was finishing up at Andover, he asked Mom to the senior prom. She wrote him a note in response, from South Carolina, where she was in boarding school:

Dear Poppy,

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 wrote Mother yesterday or the day before and rather logically, I haven’t heard from her, but I’m sure she is going to let me come or go, etc. I’m really all excited, but scared to death, too. If you hear a big noise up there, don’t worry, it’s just my knees knocking.

“We were starry-eyed puppies,” Mom recalled. There were many trips to Rye to call on her. Junie O’Brien, a fellow player on the Andover baseball team, remembers a lull in practice one day when he and Dad were standing just off first base. Dad reached into his right pocket and produced a photo of Mom to show him.

Junie said, “I told him she was a winner, and he said, ‘You’re telling me. I’m going to marry her.’ ”

The families heard more and more about each other, and the two fathers got to know each other on the commuter train into New York City, where Marvin Pierce, Mom’s father, was president of McCall’s Publishing.

After Pearl Harbor, Dad’s father went to Andover because my father was thinking of joining the navy. “His father begged him to go on to college and he didn’t,” Mom recalled. “His father said, ‘You can go for a year to Yale like everyone else.’ But everyone else from different schools did [enlist], and George went right in. You felt like you just had to do your part.”

A few days after graduation from Andover—on his eighteenth birthday, June 12, 1942—Dad enlisted in the navy. He remembers how his father took him down to Penn Station in New York to put him on the train, and told him to write his mother. It was very difficult both for Dad and for his father, who had served in World War I. In fact, my grandfather helped launch the USO organization and became its first chairman at the request of President Roosevelt in 1941.

The navy needed pilots, and had recently changed its requirement for aspiring aviators. They’d only need a high school diploma, rather than completion of two years of college. Dad gladly signed up to be a pilot. “I think I always wanted to fly, and the navy always appealed to me,” he told me. “I wanted to go into combat; everyone did back then. It was one of the best decisions I ever made, and yet I was only seventeen at the time.”

It was during that first year that he was gone, while he was in basic training in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that my parents got “secretly” engaged. Actually, my mother said, “Everybody in America knew, except we didn’t think so.”

They had gotten engaged in the fall during a visit to Kennebunkport and tried to keep it a secret, because they thought people would think they were too young. But as Mom’s brother, Jimmy, said to her, “You’ve got to think we’re idiots. I mean, one look at the two of you.”

Eventually, their secret came out when a classmate of Mom’s at Smith College kept pressuring her to go out on blind dates with boys from Amherst College. Mom kept declining, and finally, she had to admit she was engaged to Dad. She called him and explained, and they decided to “go public.”

In 1943 when Dad’s ship, the USS San Jacinto, was commissioned, Mom and Ganny traveled together on the train to Philadelphia for the ceremony. “Do you like diamonds?” Ganny asked her, and it began to dawn on Mom that Ganny was bringing an engagement ring to Dad. (It turned out to be a star sapphire with diamonds around it.) They had a good time together, and Aunt Nan remembers Ganny returning home and saying, “That girl could talk to absolutely anybody.”

The Bush family liked my mom from the start.

“I think they thought, ‘We want him happy,’ ” Mom recalled, and they saw in her that same sense of humor we all enjoy. When Dad told his father of his intentions to marry Mom, Prescott’s eyes welled up with tears, one of the few times my father ever saw him cry.

She was only seventeen in the fall of 1942, and Aunt Nan says, “She was just so pretty and tall and slender and funny. They were a twosome.” Mom remembers going to visit Dad, who was the youngest among the navy pilots in training. “He said, ‘Please tell everyone you’re eighteen.’ You know how many people asked me how old I was?” she asked me, laughing. “No one.”

Shortly after, Dad was shipped out to the Pacific with Mom’s name painted on the side of his plane, and their engagement—secret or not—lasted for over two years. “It was very scary when he went, very scary,” Mom remembered. “It was particularly terrible for his mother.”

The family prayed for Dad at every meal during grace, and at church. And, of course, Ganny would read his letters out loud when they arrived.

After flight training, Dad was assigned to Torpedo Squadron (VT–51) where he flew an Avenger (TBM). He was also VT–51’s aerial photographic officer in September 1943—and in the spring of 1944, his squadron was based aboard the newly commissioned San Jacinto. The San Jac was part of Task Force 58 that participated in operations against Marcus and Wake islands in May and then in the Marianas during June, which included one of the largest air battles of the war. Returning from that mission, in fact, Dad was forced to make a water landing. The crew survived, but the plane did not.

For his book The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw spoke with Dad about his obligation as an officer to read the outgoing mail of the enlisted men, so that no sensitive military information would be compromised. Dad recalled, “As I did my duty and read the other guys’ mail, I learned about life—about true love, about heartbreak, about fear and courage, about the diversity of our great country. The sailors would ask about the harvest or fishing or the heat in the cities. When I would see a man whose letter I had censored, I would look at him differently, look at him with more understanding. I gained an insight into the lives of my shipmates, and I felt richer [for the experience].”

The first casualty in Dad’s squadron was his best friend and roommate, Jim Wykes. Jack Guy, who was also in the squadron, explained to me, “Jim went out and just never returned. And we never could find him, never could see him. He just left the radar screen, that was it.”

As part of his duties as an officer, Dad often wrote to the families of crew members who were missing or killed in the line of duty. When Dad wrote to the Wykes family to give them the awful news, Anna Wykes, Jim’s mother, wrote back to Dad:

The Good Lord answered our prayers. We prayed and hoped that Jimmy’s roommate or one of his friends would write to us. Nothing in the world could bring us more comfort than receiving your letter . . . My heart was very sad and it ached and pained. I have lost hope of ever seeing Jimmy again . . . Your sincere friendship and your faith in him brightened things for me. I will remember you in my prayers—I asked the Lord to give you health and strength, protect you always, and bring you home safe. I shall never forget you.

In the Brokaw book, Dad also remembers an incident when he was standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier when a plane made a bad landing. As the plane spun out of control, a crew member standing nearby got chopped up by the propeller. A leg landed right next to Dad. A chief petty officer sprang into action, ordering the sailors to swab the deck and get ready for the next incoming plane. Dad still remembers the officer as someone who was able to take charge and function despite enormous stress.

In August, the San Jac launched operations against Japanese forces in the Bonin Islands, a volcanic island group five hundred miles south of Tokyo. Dad flew a few sorties as the operation began.

Then came September 2, 1944.

The first eyewitness account ever published of what happened that day came from Lieutenant (jg) Nathaniel Adams. In it, Lieutenant Adams talked about the mission on that hazy morning to knock out key Japanese radio towers on Chi Chi Jima, about 150 miles north of Iwo Jima. Four Avengers went in to bomb the communications center, followed by several Hellcat fighters with machine guns to protect the bombers from antiaircraft fire:

The sky was now filled with smoke from the exploding shells. In this caldron of fire, Bush took a fatal hit just before he was set to release the four 500–pound bombs. He continued his 200–mile-an-hour dive on the target and released his volley of explosives. I could see his engine flame and then spread to the fuel tanks housed in the wings. As he leveled off and cleared the target area, I followed from above. His plane continued to spew black smoke. It was apparent that the shrapnel had punctured a fuel line. “Get out,” I thought, “before you blow up.” Our planes were rigged not only to hear communication between planes, but any talk between the pilots of the torpedo bombers and their crews. Just then I heard, “Hit the silk! Hit the silk!” It was George telling Ted White and John Delaney [his wingmen] to bail out. [“Hit the silk” refers to their silk parachutes, and was an expression for evacuating.]

A tremendous amount of black smoke and fire continued to trail from the stricken plane. Even through the smoke, I could see one of the crewmen jump through the exit door near the rear of the plane. George actually was able to turn the plane for that moment to shield the jumper from the slipstream. Whoever jumped had a faulty chute. He drew one of those streamers that furled and never opened. I could see him all the way down as he fell to his death. Whether it was Ted White or John Delaney, we will never know. One thing I do believe is that whoever remained in the plane was dead. He had time to get out. Shrapnel could very well have killed him during the dive to the target.

Next, Lieutenant Adams described how Dad escaped the burning plane just before it hit the water and exploded in a ball of fire. He was able to get free of his ripped parachute before landing in the ocean, and swam over to a little raft that had been his seat cushion in the cockpit:

His problems were still far from over. The wind and the tide were moving the raft toward Chi Chi Jima. I think he was only a couple of miles off the south shore. About that time, I saw a number of these little Japanese boats take off from the beach. I guess they were about twenty feet long. My God, it looked like a flotilla coming out to capture George. The raft was drifting right towards his captors. They were closing fast. That’s when our four Hellcats took action. I tell you, we dove with all of our 50–caliber guns blazing in each plane and just blew at least a dozen of those boats right out of the water. The rest of them fled for shelter. That put a stop to that threat in one big hurry. It was a hell of a shoot-out.

While Dad had been told about the possibility of being taken prisoner by the Japanese, the odds were against it. Very few airmen ended up as POWs. (It was more common in the army, with soldiers on the ground.) But clearly, Lieutenant Adams was concerned about those boats heading toward Dad for a reason. Years later, rumors of Japanese atrocities were found to be true. In fact, the commanding Japanese general on Chi Chi Jima gave his soldiers the following order: “Worship your emperor with a deep bow. Practice with your bayonet; open the heart and the lungs and let the enemy bleed. As they take their last breath, take out the sword and behead them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dad arrived home on Christmas Eve, 1944.

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

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

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

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

My grandfather burst out laughing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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