THE FIRST MEMORIES OF GEORGE W. Bush all revolve around his father, whom he saw as “a heroic figure.” His impressions, he surmised, had much to do with his mother’s devotion to her husband. “Mother adored him, and as a result, she imparted that adoration to me,” he recalled. It helped that George H. W. Bush had all the qualities of a midcentury American hero in the Jack Armstrong vein; tall, handsome, athletic, humble, and squeaky-clean, he looked and acted the part. Little George would pore over scrapbooks his mother had carefully assembled chronicling her husband’s life, everything from photos and the box scores she kept meticulously during his days as Yale’s first baseman and team captain to a piece of the yellow rubber life raft he desperately clung to in the Pacific after getting shot down in the war.
George—also focused and scrupulously ambitious—was the very picture of a young man in a hurry. Busyness defined him. “George was a great father,” Barbara bragged after their children were well into middle age, to which George responded wistfully, “I was busy, though.” It was always a special occasion for George W. to steal childhood moments with his dad. “Keep in mind when analyzing this guy’s life that he was really busy,” he said. “Therefore, when he made time for you, it meant a lot.”
Two of George W.’s early memories involving his father portended his professional future in the oil business and later in Major League Baseball. He recalled the “so-called camping trip,” when his dad took him on a drive across the desolate plains of West Texas to visit pumping units, stopping at a diner on the way. Then there were his recollections of playing baseball with his dad and neighborhood friends in his tiny backyard on West Ohio Avenue—though not so small to him then—as his father, who also served as their Little League coach, threw to them and caught pop-ups behind his back, a trick he mastered at Yale. Baseball held particular significance for father and son. Though football dominated West Texas sports culture, it was baseball that captured young George’s imagination. He remembers his pride swelling when his father, after the two played catch, said, “Son, you’ve arrived. I can throw it to you as hard as I want.”
His starkest memory, though, is far darker: the day in second grade, when his parents pulled up to his school unexpectedly in their pea-green Oldsmobile and he climbed in as his mother, holding him tight, told him that his sister, Robin—just two months shy of her fourth birthday—had died. Georgie had been lugging a bulky wooden Victrola down a covered walkway on an errand to the principal’s office when he saw the car coming up Sam Houston Elementary School’s gravel driveway. Racing toward it, he had thought he saw Robin’s blond curls in the back seat. As the three of them drove to their home on West Ohio Avenue less than a mile away, he watched helplessly as his parents wept.
Just seven months earlier, Robin had been diagnosed with advanced leukemia. Barbara suspected something might be wrong with her after Robin woke up enervated on a late-winter morning and said, “I don’t know what to do this morning. I might go out and lie on the grass and watch the cars go by, or I might just stay in bed.” Tests quickly revealed her condition, which in 1953 was largely untreatable and meant almost certain death. George and Barbara made the decision to take her back east to the hospital that would later be known as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where George’s uncle John Walker worked as a doctor. Walker thought every effort should be made to extend her life if a research development might offer hope, and the Bushes agreed.
The next seven months would find Barbara and Robin in New York for weeks on end, as George went back and forth on weekends while contending with a heavy travel schedule as he built his professional future. In 1950, he had made the decision to leave IDECO and the tutelage of Neil Mallon to form an oil development company with a neighbor, John Overbey, raising more than $350,000 in investment capital by tapping into connections on the East Coast, including his father and uncle Herbert Walker. His talent for making friends led him and Overbey to Hugh and Bill Liedtke, a pair of brothers who ran a small oil-drilling business. Just before Robin’s diagnosis, he and Overbey merged their company with the Liedtkes’, forming Zapata Petroleum (named after the 1952 movie Viva Zapata! starring Marlon Brando as Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, which was playing in Midland’s local cinema) with the prospect of striking it rich as wildcatters.
With their parents and sister gone for extended periods, Georgie and Jeb spent much of 1953 in the care of neighborhood friends or a family nurse dispatched to Midland by Dottie Walker, who had once again come to the aid of George and Barbara. The only time Georgie would see his sister for any length of time was when the Walker and Bush families made their annual summer pilgrimage to Kennebunkport. Even then, he was ordered by his parents not to play with her due to their concern that rough play would lead to bruising. She passed away at Sloan Kettering on October 11, 1953, with her parents at her bedside, a picture of her brothers Georgie and baby Jeb taped above the headboard of her hospital bed. George and Barbara left the grim task of burying their daughter to Dottie Bush and George’s Yale classmate and friend, Lud Ashley, and returned to Midland to break the news to Little George.
It came as a shock. Prior to her death, the Bushes chose to let Georgie know only that Robin was sick but that everything would be okay. He heard it repeatedly when he asked his father where his mother and Robin were. “He didn’t forgive us for quite a while,” Barbara recalled. “But how do you tell a six-year-old, ‘Your sister is going to die’? It just doesn’t work that way.” Their posture reflected their own hope, however distant, that Robin would pull through; George initially refused to accept the doctors’ prognosis and visited Midland’s First Presbyterian Church to pray every morning at six thirty when he wasn’t on the road.
Neither George nor Barbara had yet reached thirty when their daughter died, and it took its toll. Years later, George W. would joke that it was his reckless youth that resulted in turning his mother’s hair its signature shade of white. In truth, her hair transformed from light brown to shock white throughout the torturous days of 1953. While she had been a rock before Robin’s death, she “fell apart” upon her return to Midland. One of the ways she dealt with the agony was to throw herself into Georgie’s life. “Mother’s reaction was to envelop herself totally around me. She kind of smothered me, then realized it was the wrong thing to do,” George W. said. It occurred to her when she overheard Georgie decline to play with a friend because his mother needed him. That did it. “I was thinking I was there for him,” Barbara said. “But the truth was he was being there for me.”
George struggled, too. Dear God, he thought, why does this child have to die? She was the epitome of innocence to us, and there was no explanation. At the same time, he believed “these things contribute to your life, your character, what you stand for.” He spoke little about Robin, keeping it inside and moving on stoically much as he had after the war. Later he saw it as a weakness. “For forty years I wasn’t able to talk about it,” he said. “I was too weak.”
While contending with nightmares about Robin’s death, Little George dealt with the loss by peppering his parents with questions about her—Where is she? If the earth is rotating, where is she buried? Is she standing on her head?—bringing the issue out in the open and making it a little easier for them to bear over time. During a Friday night high school football game with his father and some of his father’s friends, he commented that he wished he were with Robin. When George asked why, he replied “I’ll bet she can see the game better up there than we can from down here.” His parents believed the loss changed him; it revealed his compassion and sensitivity. Known eventually as the “family clown,” Little George tried to ease his parents’ minds by making them laugh. As Barbara recalled much later, “After Robin died, George was wonderful to us. Sort of comforting for both of us. But he’s got more heart than people give him credit for.” The ability to buoy the spirits of those around him would come to bear throughout his life—leading cheers for the Phillips Andover football team in high school; lifting campaign staffers after his father lost the all-important Iowa caucus in his 1988 presidential bid; ascending a pile of wreckage at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan and rallying the nation through a bullhorn after 9/11. It became part of his best self.
Gradually in the wake of his sister’s death, George W. would move back into the normal patterns of boyhood, though one less innocent, less pliant to his will. But Robin’s absence made him feel like an only child—Jeb, only eight months old when she died, was almost seven years younger. In many ways, with Robin gone, George W.’s childhood was his alone, devoid of shared memories with his siblings. The years in Midland, with its chapter of loss and heartache, bound him uniquely to his parents. It also made him different from his siblings, more aware of life’s capriciousness, imbued with palpable energy poured into living life in the moment.
Shortly after George’s mother, Dottie, died in 1992, George’s brother Jonathan found a letter to her written in 1959 by George, then a father of four boys, which read in part: “There is about our house a need. 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 dollhouse to stand firm against our forts and rackets and thousand baseball cards. 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.”
The need was eventually met. The last of the Bushes’ children, Dorothy Walker or “Doro,” was born in August 1959. By that time, the family had moved from Midland to Houston, the hub of the oil business, as the family’s fortunes climbed with the success of Zapata; every one of the seventy-one wells the company had drilled in the Permian Basin gushed with oil. The Bushes, now a family of seven, settled into a four bedroom, 4,300-square-foot home at 5525 Briar Drive on an oversized lot in Houston’s posh Tanglewood neighborhood.
Still, Robin remained a presence in the Bush family. A large portrait of her would hang prominently in the Bush family living room throughout the balance of their lives. George said her death made “every child more valuable.” All the Bush children, even Neil, Marvin, and Doro, who weren’t born when she died, would later say that she was a factor in their lives. Protective of their parents, they grew up conscious of how harrowing the loss of Robin had been. Though her death became a hole in their lives that could never be filled, she became a symbol of family love and loyalty.
“I love you more than tongue can tell,” Robin whispered to her father shortly before she died. George could hear her voice as though she were right there, even well after she was gone. Years later, when all his children were grown, he was able to talk more easily about her loss as the Depression-era stoicism and Yankee emotional repression that marked the world he grew up in had given way to the openness of his children’s generation. By then, he was far more expressive and demonstrative with his children. He hugged them more readily and cried easily, allowing himself permission to let the tears flow; “I stopped being a sissy about it,” he said. In regular “check-in” telephone conversations during his son’s presidency, George W. would invariably end their calls by saying, “I love you,” to which his father, invoking the family’s most hallowed memory, would often respond, “I love you more than tongue can tell.”