POPPY BUSH HAD MET BARBARA Pierce just before Christmas of 1941 at a dance in her hometown of Rye, New York, an affluent, leafy New York City suburb in Westchester County on the Long Island Sound just south of Greenwich. Dressed in white tie and tails, Poppy knew he was no Fred Astaire but screwed up the courage to ask the sixteen-year-old high school junior to dance after being introduced to her by Jack Wozencraft, a mutual friend. Barbara wore a new brightly colored red-and-green dress in keeping with the season. Her suitor later recalled her as “the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen.” As the band played strains of Glenn Miller, they danced, talking idly before Bush suggested they sit out the next dance, a waltz he didn’t know. They talked further, fifteen minutes or so, enough to lead to a meeting at a dance in Rye the following night and on to courtship and love.
The two were a good social match, comparable shades of blue blood. Barbara’s mother, Pauline, quickly confirmed as much with several phone calls after first hearing about the young George Bush, much to her daughter’s mortification. Social standing mattered to Pauline Pierce, a woman not given to maternal warmth and to whom Barbara was not particularly close. Her father, Marvin Pierce, whom Barbara adored, was the president of McCall Corporation, a magazine publisher of the popular women’s titles McCall’s and Redbook, and could trace his family roots back to the fourteenth president, Franklin Pierce. (The latter wasn’t a point of pride for Barbara, who was “humiliated” upon learning in elementary school that Pierce had achieved no great distinction in the White House.)
By the summer of 1943, while Bush was on a seventeen-day leave, the pair became “secretly engaged” during a holiday at his family’s summer retreat on Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport, Maine. The place had a special significance to Bush, holding as many family memories for him as there were jagged rocks on its craggy coastline. His maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, bought the plot of land in 1902 and later built a compound of homes including a bungalow that he gave Bush’s mother as a wedding present. Later that summer, Barbara—now teasingly nicknamed “Bar” after Barsil, a family horse, by Bush’s older brother, Pressy—accompanied her fiancé to Philadelphia where he slipped her an engagement ring before shipping off to the Pacific on board the USS San Jacinto, as she went on to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The young couple married at the First Presbyterian Church in Rye on January 6, 1945, shortly after Bush returned stateside, where he would spend the remainder of the war. The bride was twenty; the bridegroom, twenty-one.
Like thousands of American soldiers returning home after the war, Poppy came back older than his years. He was a man now, six feet two, fit and trim at 160 pounds, and no longer the judgmental, protected child of privilege who boarded the train for basic training three years earlier. “Although my childhood was very happy, my upbringing was also strict, indeed, puritanical,” he wrote later. “As a result my world was very narrow. Like most young people, my horizon needed expanding.” He had flown fifty-eight combat missions and barely eluded death. But as with the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, and two Gold Stars he earned and put away upon becoming a civilian, he quickly put the formative experience of war behind him and moved on—except for the memory of John Delaney and Ted White. “I think about those guys all the time,” the former president said more than five decades after seeing them for the last time.
After being discharged, he and Barbara, who left Smith College to tend to her new husband, went to New Haven, where he enrolled at Yale in the fall of 1945 as part of the GI Bill. Bush had thought about skipping college altogether, much to his father’s distress. It may just have been an ambitious young man’s fancy to get out in the world as quickly as possible to make his mark. Eventually Bush came to his senses but fast-tracked college, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in two and a half years with an economics degree while, despite a heavy course load, actively pursuing a spate of extracurricular pursuits. Among other things, he played first base on Yale’s varsity baseball team, becoming the team’s captain in his senior year, served as chapter president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and raised funds for the United Negro College Fund. He was also tapped into the exclusive Skull and Bones secret society, becoming one of only fifteen members enrolled at the time, just as his father had nearly three decades earlier.
Part of moving on with life meant raising a family, which the newlyweds were eager to do. Just after their Little George’s birth in the summer of 1946, they moved into a one-family dwelling that had been converted into apartments for veterans in answer to the postwar housing shortage. Thirty-seven Hillhouse Avenue became George W. Bush’s first real home, and he had plenty of company. A dozen families crammed into the house, each with one child except for the one with twins. George and Barbara lived happily though sparingly among the throng on the nest egg they had squirreled away from Bush’s navy pay. Though the home stood in a tony section of town—Yale president Charles Seymour lived next door—the modest accommodations belied the means for a bigger space Poppy could have secured through his father’s bank account. But making his own way meant financial independence.
Like most things, fatherhood seemed to come easily to Poppy. “George loved that baby, he was a cute little fatso,” recalled Bar. A pattern emerged then that would hold throughout George W.’s years under his parents’ roof: As Bar played the role of hands-on mother, Poppy went freely about the business of building his future, unencumbered by the day-to-day, often mundane, routines of parenting that fell to his wife. Though their roles were largely traditional for their generation, Poppy’s frenetic pace and far-reaching ambitions would often mean long days and absences from his family as Barbara zealously minded the Bush home. Her children and grandchildren would come to refer to her as “the enforcer.”
Family and friends descended on New Haven to meet Little George, attending his christening and a lawn party in his honor. But Barbara’s mother, Pauline, expressed a nagging reservation: “My mother hated to be in the same room with the baby,” Bar said, “for if she took her eyes off him, [he] looked hurt.”
The baby needn’t have fussed. As the first son of the next generation of the Bush family, eyes would be on him for the foreseeable future.