IN HIS LATE EIGHTIES, LONG after his memory for specifics had begun regularly failing him, George vividly recalled an episode from George W.’s childhood: his obdurate young son enflamed in a fit of temper aimed at him while he and Barbara walked with him on a street in Midland. As Georgie’s arms flailed away attempting to land a blow, George impassively held him at bay by placing his hand on Georgie’s flushed forehead. As his father laughed, Georgie became angrier, his arms swirling like a windmill. Eventually, tuckered out, Georgie’s head cooled, and the two walked on with Barbara as though nothing had happened.
It was George’s expression of disappointment, not anger, that was his strongest and most effective weapon as a parent. Used sparingly, it could send any of his children reeling with shame. “He was hands-off except to the extent that he set boundaries—humility, honesty, hard work, share credit,” George W. observed, adding, “I wasn’t always good at ‘share credit.’” They were boundaries inherited from George’s own background, mainly from his mother, and overstepping them was tantamount to letting him down. “I think all of us would tell you the biggest words we didn’t want to hear were ‘You’ve disappointed me,’ which speaks to an interesting way of being a father, doesn’t it?” observed George W., while Jeb recalled, “I can remember screwing up and my dad telling me he was disappointed. I can still feel the emotion well up. Just his disappointment was enough to wreck one for weeks.”
That’s not to suggest that George W. didn’t ever get to his father. “George [W.] aggravates the hell out of me at times. I am sure I do the same for him,” he wrote of his nine-year-old son to his father-in-law, whom he referred to as “Mr. Pierce,” even after his marriage to Barbara. “But then at times I am so proud of him I could die.” From an early age, George W. exhibited a recalcitrance that was outside the Bush mold. A schoolmate of George W.’s, who would go on to work for George, said, “It’s not that W. rebelled; he just was wilder than the old man expected—it was a rowdiness. Not doing well in school when you could, being class funnyman—those were detours from the code.” George recalled his son as “a rambunctious lad, full of piss and vinegar,” a nod to his brashness and penchant for mischief making, while Barbara called him “a wonderful, incorrigible child who spent many afternoons sitting in his room waiting for his father to come home to speak with him about his latest transgression.”
As a preteen, he pilfered his mother’s cigarettes, puffing away in public before occasionally getting caught, as was the case in an alleyway by the middle school football coach and in the dining room of the Nonantum Hotel in Kennebunkport by his paternal grandparents. During an outing at church, rather than greet Mrs. Witherspoon, a parishioner, with an appropriate salutation, it was “Hiya, little lady, lookin’ sexy!” He was sentenced to three whacks of the principal’s “board of education” when, egged on by the laughter of his classmates, he penned a beard, mustache, and long sideburns on his face. While Barbara at first objected to the principal’s use of corporal punishment, she came around to his side when he explained that George W. had “swaggered in as though he had done the most wonderful thing in the world.”
If George expressed disappointment around his son’s wrongdoing, it fell to Barbara to rein him in. “I don’t remember [my dad] ever striking my brothers or sister,” Jeb recalled. “I don’t ever remember him getting angry. My mom got angry regularly.” Indeed, George W. was often the target of his mother’s wrath including the time he urinated in the bushes outside his home and his mother paradoxically washed his mouth out with soap. They clashed often, their swords crossing in part because they were so much alike: tart-tongued, headstrong, quick-witted. “I have my father’s eyes and my mother’s mouth,” George W. would later say. His mother, he reflected, was “easier to vent with” than his father because she would “fire right back.”
Mild antagonism would suffuse their relationship even well after George W. left the nest. Andy Card, who served in both father and son Bush administrations, quipped later, “George W. Bush is the most disciplined person I’ve ever met, but when I met him most of the discipline came from his mother.” He would long remember first meeting George W., just as he knew George W. had long forgotten it. An early supporter of George’s 1980 presidential campaign, Card drove the elder Bush from Card’s native Massachusetts to the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport after a long day of campaigning. “He was all excited because his son was going to be there,” Card recalled, painting a vivid picture of what followed. “And he gets out of the car and bounds up the stairs to go into the house . . . and there was George W. Bush having an argument with his mother and the language was pretty crass. And he’s got a Styrofoam cup in one hand and he’s wearing a flannel shirt that I remember being misbuttoned, and jeans with a tear in the left knee, and brown drool was creeping out of the side of his mouth and he was getting ready to spit in a cup, and his mother was yelling at him, ‘You’re not going to do that in this house!’ His mother was giving him the ‘what for.’”
But as exasperated as his parents may have been at times, their pride in their son, as George suggested to his father-in-law, abounded. George W., like his father, was loyal, good-natured, and quick to make a friend. “He does these amazingly loving things when someone is in need that nobody knows about, and it’s sort of always a surprise,” Barbara observed. Also like his father, he was a natural leader as he showed in his last year of school in Midland, when he was elected class president of his seventh-grade class. His father’s exasperation would wane in time; the pride was constant.