Chapter 3

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

“Midland doesn’t have any mountains, it doesn’t have any oceanfronts, it doesn’t have any fishing holes or other similar niceties; what it did have were caring transplanted citizens, like the Bushes, who pitched in on every effort, from the Boy and Girl Scouts to the United Way and most everything in between. You can do a lot in a small town if you are willing, and the Bushes were—in spades.”

—Martin Allday, Dad’s first campaign manager

Mom and Dad, with George in tow, took Uncle Neil’s advice to heart when he said, “What you need to do is head out to Texas and those oil fields. That’s the place for ambitious young people these days.” (Years later, Dad would also give credit to Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune publisher whose famous advice to the unemployed was, “Go west, young man.”)

By the time he arrived in Texas—via the red 1947 Studebaker Dad’s parents gave him as a graduation gift—he was ready for the challenge of making his way in the oil business. Dad started at Dresser Industries as an equipment clerk, which he later described as “the very bottom of the corporate ladder.” He painted oil well machinery and swept warehouses. He had come out to Odessa alone, sending for Mom and one-year-old George as soon as he found them all a place to live—which turned out to be a small two-room duplex with a bathroom they shared with their neighbors.

One neighbor—a thirty-eight-year-old woman, who had a twenty-year-old daughter and a three-year-old grandchild—made her living by “questionable means,” entertaining a steady stream of men all hours of the day and night.

Dad explained, “I think she was selling her favors and she’d forget to unlock the bathroom, so we would be locked out and we’d have to pound on the door . . . ‘Just a minute!’ She was not a charming person but not altogether unfriendly. It was a broadening experience. Here comes Barbara Bush out of Rye, New York, and me out of our sheltered environment in Greenwich, Connecticut—except for the navy—and you’re knocking on the door, hoping some lady of ill repute lets you into your own bathroom.”

Mom noted that they considered themselves lucky in that several of their other neighbors only had outhouses. I guess everything’s relative!

Dad worked hard, and as he did, he was absorbing crucial information about the oil business. He wrote home to one friend that “fortunes can be made in the land end of the oil business, and of course can be lost . . . If a man could go in and get just a few acres of land which later turned out to be good he would be fixed for life.”

He liked Odessa a lot, he wrote later. “There was an unspoken community code that had to do with the value of a person’s word. More often than not, a handshake was all that was needed to conclude a business deal.”

After just a year in Odessa, however, Dad was transferred to a job with another Dresser subsidiary, meaning they were moving to California. While in California, they lived in Whittier, Huntington Park, Bakersfield, and Compton. During this time Mom was pregnant with Robin, and Dad was working seven days a week.

While they were in Bakersfield, Mom’s brother, Jimmy Pierce, got engaged to Margy Dyer, and upon receiving word of it, Dad wrote to Margy to welcome her into the family. He enclosed a fake “proxy” for her to sign, voting for him as president of the P-I-L Club. It stood for the Pierce-In-Law Club, whose current president was Walter Rafferty, the husband of my mother’s sister, Martha Pierce. Dad felt that Walter hadn’t provided the kind of leadership that was needed in the club. “I feel under new vital leadership we might progress beyond all horizons . . . We could have uniforms, chartreuse T-shirts, with amber P-I-L in letters on the back and numbers on the front. We could wear ’em at Sunday lunch at the Pierces. We would form demolition squads to harass the unruly in-laws. See, there are thousands of possibilities IF we have the right leadership.” He ended by saying that Mom and he were “hoping against hope” to get to the wedding, which they did.

But shortly after the wedding, tragedy struck. Mom’s parents were in a horrible car accident, instantly killing her mother, Pauline. Her father was hospitalized, but he later recovered.

Mom had just been to Margy and Jim’s wedding in Ohio, and her father advised her not to make the arduous trip home, for fear that something might happen to the baby. Mom took that advice and did not go to her mother’s funeral. Dad was able to get the day off from work, and she spent the day with him and their friends the Jenkinses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And with that, we were on our way.

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

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

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

When we first started, however, we couldn’t get circulation—presumably due to the porous, coral-like material we were dealing with just below the ocean floor. Finally, we got the well down and it was probably the most expensive dry hole that Standard ever drilled.

During my brief time in the offshore business, we also had some international projects of some note.

For example, we drilled the deepest offshore well at the time off the coast of Kuwait. This was also an over-the-side, floating rig effort. Shell drilled it, and we were partnered with Bill Clements’s company, SEDCO. This too was a dry hole—but the pay was good, and in a sense we were pioneers there as well.

We also helped Japan Petroleum drill in the Sea of Japan. We had a consulting contract with them, and they came and swarmed all over our rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Then we went over there as consultants, to help them drill their first hole. They had built a three-legged rig called the White Dragon that bore a tremendous resemblance to the Scorpion, and after they drilled that first well using our expertise we parted ways. They were very nice, and that also proved to be a good contract for us.

We sought contracts in Libya unsuccessfully—this was during the time before Qaddafi. I remember going there. We almost built a drilling rig in Greece. We drilled in Brunei, also partnering with SEDCO on that project. We drilled in Venezuela, in the Gulf of Paria. That was long before Hugo Chavez—the government was more hospitable in those days—then we moved the rig over to Trinidad, where we drilled for Rio Tinto in Trinidadian waters.

It was there in Trinidad that we ended up in a lawsuit with the company we were drilling for, and I went over to England with our lawyers to try and work something out. So much of our money was tied up in this deal, and I was so worried at the time, that I ended up passing out cold on the floor of a hotel room in London. I pushed the button for help, which was conveniently located down near the floorboards, and thankfully a man appeared because I had passed out stark naked—I was shaving at the time, and suddenly felt sick.

The valet came in and helped me into bed, then called a British doctor who said, “You have a bit of food poisoning, old boy.” He prescribed that I drink a bit of Coca Cola—which is the exact opposite of what I should have been doing, since in reality I had a bleeding ulcer. The doctor missed the diagnosis.

Unaware of my true condition, I went to my meeting at Lloyd’s of London that afternoon feeling very weak, where we conducted our business and I had a touch of sherry with lunch—again, not what I should have been doing given my situation. That night I flew back to New York on the slow-poke planes we had back then, transferred and flew to Dallas; and eventually I made my way back to Midland.

When I got to my doctor, he said, “You’re lucky you didn’t die. You have a hemorrhaging ulcer.”

I learned how to deal with that condition, which was good when other agonizing events would come along—such as trying to be elected president of the United States.

Other memories from my oil days: We always dreaded the onset of hurricane season. Our rigs were not nearly as weather-ready as they are today. When Hurricane Betsy slammed into New Orleans in 1965, it totally wiped out a rig where we had a third of our assets tied up. This was before GPS. I went out with our drilling engineer and rented a little Piper to look for it, but it had completely vanished.

They did eventually find part of it using sonar, but by then it was of no use to us; fortunately, the insurance company made good.

In the fall of 2005, after President Clinton and I surveyed the havoc wreaked in New Orleans and across much of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina, I continued on to the small town of Cameron, Louisiana—which had been totally leveled by Hurricane Rita, which had followed in the wake of Katrina.

When I got there, I found one building left standing, which had been built with Works Progress Administration money back when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States. Every house, every warehouse, every library, every school, everything in Cameron was totally flattened. It was a very emotional experience for me, because my mind immediately shot back to 1957 and Hurricane Audrey, which nearly destroyed the town with a twelve-foot tidal surge that killed 600 people who were never told to evacuate. That was my first exposure as a drilling contractor to the devastation caused by hurricanes.

I saw dead bodies being taken out of homes and thrown on a work boat. I saw animals stranded on tiny strips of land, totally trapped by the water. That experience left a real impression on me.

During this same time, Dad’s father ran for, and won, a special election to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut.

Without question, my grandfather’s example of public service throughout his life inspired Dad later to run for office himself. Wherever he went, whatever he did, Prescott Bush had plenty of admirers.

“Senators respected him, whether they agreed with him or not. He had friends on both sides of the aisle. He was a gentleman with great dignity,” Dad says of his father’s public service. During the early 1950s in Midland, Dad ran into Senator Lyndon B. Johnson at a hotel, meeting him for the first time. He introduced himself as the son of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, and Senator Johnson replied that Dad’s father was the best thing that happened to the 83rd Congress. Dad boldly teased that he was glad to hear that from a staunch Democrat. “Your father and I don’t like to be thought of as Republican or Democrat, rather as good Americans!” Johnson said.

Prescott Bush ran for the Senate after a successful career on Wall Street. He didn’t start out in life as a politician—and neither did Dad or my brothers Jeb and George. It’s just not the way our family looks at politics. My grandfather Prescott passed down the idea that you would only run for office after you had built a financial base—then it was time to give back and go into public service.

When Prescott Bush first ran for the Senate in 1950, he lost by only a thousand votes. Then the man who beat him in the Senate race and became senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, died in office. Prescott won the special election to fill that seat in 1952—the year Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in a landslide—and then served out the rest of McMahon’s term and was reelected in 1956.

During that special election in 1952, a photographer arrived at the Bush home in order to take some campaign publicity shots of the family. Uncle Johnny remembers how the man suggested that Prescott and Dorothy pose in the kitchen together, with Dorothy preparing dinner and Prescott peeling potatoes. “That’s a great idea,” teased my dad, who was visiting from Texas. “Somebody show Dad where the kitchen is.”

An interesting footnote: When I spoke to former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis for this book, he told me that while he was an undergraduate at Swarthmore, he attended the Washington semester program at American University. It was the fall of 1954, and he was in the gallery of the United States Senate the day that Senator Joe McCarthy was censured. He saw my grandfather Prescott stand up and speak out against McCarthy.

“That was not an easy vote, let me tell you, and he stood up,” remembers Dukakis. “He was active in Planned Parenthood in the late forties in Connecticut, too. That was not an easy thing to do, in a heavily Catholic state. My sense of your family really started with him.

“Joe McCarthy may be the single most important reason I got into politics, because I couldn’t stand the guy. I thought what he was doing was terrible,” Dukakis continued. “I cannot exaggerate how tough it was for good people in politics to stand up and take this guy on. In some cases they were defeated—Millard Tydings was a Democratic senator from Maryland and he took McCarthy on and got beaten, because of it. It was hysteria sweeping the country. To have some folks—particularly on the Republican side of the aisle—stand up and say, ‘This is wrong,’ was very, very important.”

My grandfather was a popular senator, known as an advocate for fiscal responsibility including the line-item veto for the president. He had other firm convictions as well.

“When he was first elected in 1952, he vowed to get out of the Senate before he turned seventy,” said Dad. True to his word, in 1962, at the age of sixty-seven, Prescott Bush announced he would not seek reelection to the Senate and returned to Wall Street.

In 1959, right before I was born, Zapata Off-Shore split from Zapata Petroleum Company. My dad took control of Zapata Off-Shore, and our family moved to Houston. By this time, my mother was an expert in packing and moving a household, but with four boys and another child on the way, it couldn’t have been easy.

Soon after arriving in Houston, Dad joined the Houston Country Club and paired up with a recent University of Texas Law School graduate named James Baker as his doubles partner in tennis. Another lifelong friendship—one that would help influence the course of global events in the decades to come—was forged.

Secretary Baker remembers with a smile how the tennis pro at the club, Hector Salazar, “would throw points so that it looked like we were doing a lot better than we were. He would play ‘customer tennis,’ and I’m not sure your dad ever really accepted the fact that that was happening. He’s competitive.”

Even if Dad was in denial over Hector’s generosity on the court, Secretary Baker recalled how Dad more than returned the favor off the court.

“Hector didn’t have much money, and the rest of us didn’t have much either,” Mr. Baker said. “Your dad decided we needed to get a pot together to buy a car for Hector. I remember thinking that I couldn’t afford to pay the upkeep on my car, but anyway, I think he was successful in getting a car for Hector.”

Dad passed the hat quietly among Hector’s many fans so the tennis pro wouldn’t have to take the bus to work anymore.

After settling into our new life in Houston, Dad began to actively pursue another interest of his—politics. Mom was not surprised when Dad agreed to run for Harris County Republican Party chairman in the fall of 1962 after a group of his contemporaries urged him to do so.

In the early 1950s, Dad had actually gotten his first taste of local politics in Midland. “There were no Republicans in those days in West Texas,” Dad told an interviewer once. “I mean, there just weren’t any. Barbara and I ran the first primary ever held in Midland, Texas. Republican primary. And as God is my witness, three people voted all day long in the primary: Barbara, me, and some drunk Democrat, saying, ‘Is this where you go to vote?’ ”

The campaign was covered by, among other media outlets, a neighborhood newsletter hand-printed by my brothers: Jeb (ten) was editor, and Neil (eight) and Marvin (six) were reporters. “Mr. Bush is running for chairman of the Republican Party,” the newsletter reported matter-of-factly. “He has four sons and a daughter. He urges everybody to vote for him.”

Harris County, being very large, was comprised of more than 270 precincts, and Dad insisted on visiting every last one of them. That race marked the beginning of my father’s signature style of campaigning—leave no hand unshaken, no letter unwritten, no speech unspoken.

Thankfully, it paid off: My brothers were able to report that “Mr. Bush wins unanimously as head of Harris County Republicans.”

He was on his way.

The staff of the Neighborhood Round-Up was able to report that Dad was elected chairman of the Harris County Republican Party.