THE BUSH FATHER AND HIS eldest son lived separate lives during the bulk of George’s vice presidential years. As Laura wrote later of herself and George W. during her father-in-law’s first term as vice president, “[W]e were outliers on the family curve. We were not with them for Christmas, only for summer visits in Maine, with all the other cousins and meals for a small army of Bushes and wet beach towels strewn about the Kennebunkport house.” When Barbara made a rare visit to Midland in 1984 as part of the Reagan-Bush reelection campaign she was greeted by her granddaughters as “Ganny,” the traditional name for Bush grandmothers, for which Barbara expressed gratitude to Laura. “Thank you for teaching your girls to know me,” she said.
In early 1983, George brought all his sons together for Washington’s annual Alfalfa Club dinner, stag at the time, after which he wrote to them wistfully, “My heart was filled with pride when I got to introduce you to my friends at Alfalfa . . . I’m getting a little older. I’m not sure what the future holds. I don’t worry about that. Win or lose, older or younger, we have our family.” Otherwise, George and George W. kept in touch through frequent phone calls. “George would call young George for advice,” said Shelley Bush Jansing, a Bush cousin. “He always appreciated George because he knows George’s strength. He would call him when he had to make tough decisions. Reagan made George do some hatchet jobs that George didn’t want to do. He didn’t like to do them, so he used to call young George [W.] for bolstering up. They’ve always had that kind of relationship.” When Reagan was shot, George W.’s secretary saw her boss uncharacteristically shaky as he told her to hold his calls in the event his father wanted to connect with him. George was itinerant for much of his two terms under Reagan, traveling more than a million miles to seventy-four countries, including manifold funerals for heads of state and other VIPs, which prompted Jim Baker to offer an unofficial vice presidential motto, “You die, I fly.”
As Vice President Bush pursued his duties, George W. was settled into life in Midland, where he and Laura lived in a $200,000 one-story brick home on the tree-lined Country Club Drive. After looking into adoption when they had difficulty conceiving, the couple discovered in the summer of 1981 that Laura was expecting twins. It wasn’t an easy pregnancy. In her last trimester, she was diagnosed with toxemia, an affliction with symptoms that can include spikes in blood pressure, blurred vision, and pronounced swelling. She was admitted to Dallas’s Baylor Hospital, a five-hour drive from Midland, where her condition could be better monitored. When it posed the threat of kidney failure, she underwent a cesarean section five weeks before her due date. Barbara and Jenna, named for their grandmothers, were born on November 25, 1981. The media delighted in the news of the arrival of the vice president’s twin granddaughters, who appeared at their first press conference two hours after their births. The vice president himself would meet them during a visit to Midland at the end of the calendar year six weeks later.
“Laura and I didn’t know anything about babies, and suddenly we had two,” George W. wrote later. Both rose to the challenge. Wrote Laura later of her husband, “He changed diapers. He got up at night to help feed them their bottles. He would come home and think of adventures for them.” Coached by their mother, the first word spoken by both girls was “Daddy.” Bush quickly recognized fatherhood as the “most important responsibility” he would ever have, and as it had for George H. W. Bush, it came easily to him.
Business success did not. After his failed congressional push, George W. recommitted himself to building Arbusto, the company he established in 1977, and began actively operating in early 1979. Politics, though, was never far from his mind. “Running came up a lot,” said Mark Owen, a geologist who went to work for Bush as the company grew. “After ’78, he consciously decided to concentrate on his business and family, but he was always a politician. When his dad was vice president, he didn’t want to get in on that because the ‘dad’s coattails’ thing would come up. He was waiting for the right time.” Despite no immediate outlet for his political ambitions, Bush’s talent was put to use as he sought to raise capital to build his erstwhile one-man operation and enhance his small company’s drilling capacity. “The politician was in him. He was a great promoter and a great money raiser,” recalled Jim McAninch, who ran Bush’s drilling operation. The Bush family network helped. George W.’s uncle Jonathan Bush, who had followed his father, Prescott, to Wall Street where he became a trusted stockbroker and money manager, teed up prominent East Coast investors who poured money into the company, now a full-fledged operating company called Bush Exploration Company, which garnered $4.67 million from limited investors. “George was an easy sale,” Jonathan Bush said of his nephew. “I mean the people who met him would say, right away, ‘I want to drill with this guy.’”
But in spite of George W.’s hope of finding a “company maker,” a gusher that would propel Bush Exploration Company into the big time just as his father had at Zapata, the company never rose above an average performance. “I had some success in the oil business,” Bush said later. “Not much.” Of the ninety-five wells Bush drilled in the company’s first five years of operation, about half yielded petroleum, nothing more than standard production in a capricious industry where fortunes are often made from rolls of the dice and blind luck. It was a far cry from his father’s run of seventy-one consecutive profitable well drillings during Midland’s fabled 1950s oil boom.
George H. W. Bush’s ascent to the vice presidency was a mixed blessing for George W., eliciting pride in what his father had accomplished and pressure because the bar had been set higher—expectations were greater. He was “totally inebriated in hitting the big one,” but it eluded him. While he lacked ambition earlier in his life, his company—mocked by some Midland oil insiders as “Ar-bust-oh”—was his concerted effort to prove himself in the business world, just as he had hoped to launch himself in the political world in 1978. It wasn’t the money or the prospect of material gain that motivated him. Bush was hardly avaricious, as his shoddy wardrobe would attest, eschewing the conspicuous trappings of wealth even when he had the means. During what she described as Midland’s “doodah days,” Jan O’Neill recalled, “a lot of people couldn’t resist—jets, boats, cars. George didn’t go for that.” Tangible achievement was what he wanted, proof that he had done something with all that was given to him. It was part of being a Bush. Andy Card, who would work for both of the Bush presidents, observed, “The competitive nature of the family is an underlying burden they all carry.”
Now George W. worried about poor yields for his investors, which returned only $1.55 million in distributions, and what it would do to his standing in the industry—in addition to any future he hoped to have in politics. “Let’s face it, George [W.] was not real happy,” recalled Joe O’Neill of Bush. “It’s the first-son syndrome. You want to live up to the very high expectations set by your father, but at the same time you want to go your own way, so you end up going kicking and screaming down the same path your father made.”
Success proved more elusive as the industry went into bust mode in 1982, with an ominous dip in oil prices. A dim harbinger came the following year with the failure of Midland National Bank, awash in red ink from bad loans. Bush’s prospects were bolstered in 1984 as he merged the Bush Exploration Company with Spectrum 7, a Cincinnati-based oil-drilling company run by supporters of his father, doubling the size of his operation. As Spectrum 7’s president, Bush would oversee the drilling of 180 wells during his three years with the company. With each came the hope of a turnaround. “Stay alive till ’85,” went the saying among the oil community in Midland—but all the signs pointed to tougher times ahead.