AMONG THE SEVEN FRAMED PHOTOGRAPHS of family that stood on a table behind George W. Bush’s Oval Office desk—and later behind the desk in his post-presidential office—was a well-known color shot of him with his parents and paternal grandparents, Pres and Dottie, smiling in the brilliant Houston sun in front of a corporate prop plane in 1949. If George W. wondered why his father left East Coast privilege to venture out on his own in Texas, the answer may have been right there. Pres looks the very picture of the starched, patrician East Coast investment banker and future U.S. senator that he was, dressed in a tan suit and solid blue tie, a handkerchief sprouting jauntily from his breast pocket and a fedora atop his head. His son, the young oilman, stands informally at the center of the photo in a checkered open-collared shirt and an unzipped tan jacket holding his toddler son, clad in shorts and cowboy boots. George H. W. Bush wanted something different, an alternative to the traditional and safe path from the Ivy Leagues to moneyed Manhattan. He found it in a state aggressive in its independence—its Capitol dome in Austin, at 302.6 feet, pointedly stands twenty feet taller than the nation’s Capitol in Washington—a place where self-discovery and reinvention is as commonplace as dust storms on the West Texas plains, and where opportunity is as boundless as its sky.
Moreover, his success would be his success, far beyond the shadow cast by his father half a continent away. He went for one reason, as he said sixty-five years later: “To make it on my own—and I never looked back.” Regardless of the experience of war, which had tested and expanded him, he believed later that he still would have found his way to Texas; he simply “didn’t want to go to Wall Street” like his father and members of his family. Here, for Bush, there was filial symmetry between him and his immediate forebears. In finding his own way he was beginning to follow a pattern of tacit expectations in the Bush family: Chart your own course; establish yourself; make some money; take care of your family. Then do some good—serve others, serve your country. It’s what Pres had done, and it’s what Pres’s father, Samuel P. Bush had done before him.
Samuel P. Bush, “S.P.” as he was known, had migrated from the New York City area to Columbus, Ohio, where he rose to become the president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Company, director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, and an adviser to Republican president Herbert Hoover as an appointee on his President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief after the Great Depression struck. The latter association was apt; the spirit of Hoover’s rugged individualism was in keeping with the tacit up-from-the-bootstraps tenet that marked the Bush family and its conservative ideological underpinnings.
Pres had found his own way, too. Despite growing up with every advantage, much in the manner of his own children, he refused to ride his father’s coattails into the corporate world. After graduating from Yale, he broke free from his father financially, establishing himself as a hardware salesman, selling Keen Kutter tools, in Saint Louis, where he met and married Dorothy “Dottie” Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, who had made his own fortune as a banker. Despite a distant and sometimes glacial relationship with S.P., Pres would work briefly with his father at his behest, helping in vain to turn around a Buckeye Steel subsidiary. Later he would go on to work with his father-in-law in establishing the prosperous Brown Brothers Harriman. But he never took a penny from either his father or father-in-law. Even after S.P. died, Pres made sure that his father’s substantial estate was divided between his two sisters.
While Poppy may have wanted to prove himself to his father in making his own way, he also may have set his own course to honor him. Pres Bush was hardly a cuddly family man. His ramrod straight posture, which at six feet four made him all the more imposing, was matched by a rigid formality. Pres asked his grandchildren to call him “Senator.” George W., his first grandson, recalled him as “a very dignified person. When we went to dinner at his house, we wore a tie. I never wore a tie, only to church, barely.” But Poppy looked to his father’s example even if he never felt he quite measured up; as Pres Bush’s biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, wrote, “He’ll say, ‘My father was a great man.’ Even after he became president, he never felt he topped what his father had.”
As the second of his middle names suggested, George Herbert Walker Bush was as much a Walker as a Bush. If the Bush family was characterized by a WASP Midwestern modesty, frugality, and egalitarianism, the Walkers were marked by bravado, extravagance, and clannishness. The Walkers convened each summer at George Herbert Walker’s compound in Kennebunkport, vying against each other in an endless series of competitions—tennis, golf, boating, fishing—while establishing familial traditions and rites of passage, like skinny-dipping in the icy Atlantic, that bound them to each other.
Warm and compassionate, Dottie Walker grew up among four brothers and a sister in a household where competition played out over everything big and small. George later called his mother “a real fighter and a great competitor,” while Bar did him one better, labeling her “the most competitive woman I’ve ever known.” Dottie encouraged the same spirit in the sprawling nine-bedroom Bush home—a Ping-Pong table stood in the front hall awaiting family matches—and urged her children to always play to win.
Winning was looked upon as a quiet virtue, but it came with implicit directives: In victory, be neither boastful nor aggrandizing; let humility be the hallmark of your triumph. Give credit to others. Extend your hand to the vanquished—make a friend, if you can. “Don’t be a braggadocio,” Poppy heard his mother say over and over, and it lodged in his psyche. Losing was to be handled with grace, and if not shameful, was looked upon as something to overcome. Poppy would personify his mother’s spirit in youth and beyond, and along with her strong sense of family togetherness, would later instill it in his children. “He talked all the time about his mother, rarely about his father, and the principles he learned at her knee, and that he would cite all the time,” recalled Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s longtime friend and national security adviser during his presidency.
For Poppy Bush, finding his own success on his own terms was a by-product of the competitiveness that permeated the Walker-Bush household. Though he pointedly forged a career path outside of his father’s, he had plenty of connections to take on the role of sponsor. Among them was Neil Mallon, a Yale classmate of Pres’s and a fellow Skull and Bones man, whom Pres held in the highest regard. Mallon had been tapped by Pres to head up the oil conglomerate Dresser Industries, an interest in which Pres and his investors had taken a lead position. It was Mallon who counseled Bush on his career on a plane ride to Columbus, Ohio, for the funeral of S. P. Bush in 1948. Mallon, who according to Bush’s brother Bucky, could “charm the fangs off a cobra,” pointed Bush toward the prospect of riches in the oil patches of Texas, while holding out the promise that if he came to work at International Derrick and Equipment Company (IDECO), a Dresser subsidiary, and applied himself, he could someday run the company. (George and Bar’s affection for Mallon became evident when they named their third son Neil Mallon.)
The decision hadn’t come easy. “Right now I am bewildered to say the least,” Poppy wrote in 1948, to Gerry Bemiss, a friend in Richmond, Virginia, whose family also summered in Kennebunkport. “I want to do something of value and yet I have to and want to make money—after Georgie goes through three squares a day, one’s wallet becomes thin and worn.” He considered other professions, rejecting going to work for his mother’s oldest brother, his uncle Herbie. Poppy didn’t want to “capitalize completely on the benefits I received at birth—that is on the benefits of my social position.” He also entertained becoming a teacher, but believed it would be “too confining and not challenging enough.” Likewise, he thought about farming, even, along with Barbara, reading Louis Bromfield’s The Farm, but abandoned the idea when he realized it wouldn’t lead to riches. He told Bar the oil business was something he could “touch and feel,” and that offered him the chance to prove himself.
With that prospect brimming in his mind in June 1948, he hopped in his brand-new red 1947 Studebaker, a graduation gift from his parents, and drove from Kennebunkport 2,200 miles—west on Route 80, then south—to West Texas, past Pearl Beer signs that glowed in the desert, where he would begin the next chapter of his life in Odessa. Bar and Little George followed him there a couple of weeks later by plane, enduring a twelve-hour ride from Maine. Bar “would have followed George Bush anywhere,” even to hot, flat, hardscrabble West Texas. “I’ve always wanted to live in Odessa,” she replied dryly after he first presented the notion. She later said of the move, “It was the first time in our lives that we lived in a place where nobody said, ‘You’re Marvin Pierce’s daughter or Pres Bush’s son.’ It’s pretty nice to be judged on your own.”
Still, from the standpoint of two Brahmins in their early twenties, Odessa might as well have been Neptune. In answer to the housing shortage that came with the town’s booming oil business—62,249,000 barrels of oil were extracted from county lands in 1948—they moved into a two-bedroom apartment on East Seventh Street, half of a duplex, the other half of which they would eventually occupy with a mother-daughter team of prostitutes who had gentleman callers coming and going at all hours. Occasionally, the Bushes would find themselves locked out of the Jack-and-Jill bathroom they shared with the working pair when one of their clients used the facilities and neglected to unlock the Bush’s access door. George W. said later that his family’s 1948 living arrangement should have dispelled the “myth” that his father was a spoiled rich kid, saying flatly, “Trust fund babies don’t share duplexes with prostitutes.” Bush’s Ivy League pedigree only went so far with the Odessa natives. When asked by a coworker at IDECO if he had gone to college, he replied that he had graduated from Yale. “Never heard of it,” the man replied. The town was “as different from Rye, New York, as any place imaginable,” wrote Barbara later. “Nothing comes easy in West Texas.”
And yet, despite the differences—maybe because of them—fitting in did come easy for George and Barbara. “It was the people,” Bush said later. “They were accepting, friendly; didn’t care about your background or your heritage.” Fittingly perhaps, Bush became known in Texas by his given name, George, shedding the nickname Poppy by which he had been known to that point in his life and starting fresh.
Adapting and thriving in a new place were characteristic of the Bush family. Bush’s grandfather had done it, pulling up stakes in the New York City area and finding success in Ohio, and his father had left the Midwest for the green pastures of the East Coast, settling prosperously in Greenwich. Texas proved to be a fit for George and Barbara, a good place to build their lives and George’s career. A good place to raise a family, too. In a letter to Gerry Bemiss in Kennebunkport a few weeks after settling in Odessa, Bush wrote of his two-year-old boy, “You should see Georgie now, nothing like bragging about one’s own kid. He really is cute, I feel. Whenever I come home he greets me and talks a blue streak, sentences disjointed of course but enthusiasm and spirit boundless. He is a real blond and pot-bellied. He tries to say everything and the results are often hilarious. How he would love to be there in K’port. The great thing is that he seems to be very happy wherever he is.”
Texas would smile on George and Bar. But the move proved to be particularly fortuitous for Little George, who was New Haven born but West Texas bred and branded. Texas would shape him in a way that the East Coast couldn’t, defining him in a way that would distinguish him from his namesake.