Where She’s From 
Younger. Wilder?
He lived it up for a while—but maybe not as much as we think.
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By 1973, however, Bush realized it was time to get serious. He had applied to the University of Texas law school and had been rejected. (“I think that got under his skin a little bit, because I don’t think he was used to not doing what he wanted to do,” his mother said.) Without telling anyone in his family, he then applied to and was accepted at Harvard Business School. “He went there for the same reason a lot of us did,” says Clayton Day, Jr., one of his Yale classmates. “I had a lot of degrees, but I couldn’t do anything. It was like trade school.”
Two years later, driving a 1970 Cutlass, Bush retraced much of the same route his father took in 1948 to get from the East Coast to Odessa. He had decided to get into the oil business even though he knew next to nothing about it. “I said to myself, ‘Things would take care of themselves,’ and they did,” he recalled. Not that he’ll go down in history as one of Midland’s great oilmen. Living in a small, cluttered apartment that one friend described as a “toxic waste dump,” wearing notoriously unfashionable secondhand clothes (a prize was established in his honor at the Midland Country Club for the worst-dressed golfer), he started out as a landman, working for about $100 a day with independent producers like Buzz Mills, who nicknamed him Bush Boy. He spent his days going to courthouses around West Texas, looking through deeds to see who had the mineral rights to certain pieces of property. Later he started sniffing around the oil patch, trying to acquire some leases for potential ventures of his own. He named his first exploration company Arbusto Energy (pronounced “ar-boos-to,” the word is Spanish for “bush”). After he drilled a few dry holes, his friends sarcastically began calling the company “Ar-bust-o.”
Bush maintained his life-of-the-party reputation on the social circuit, though his Midland friend Joe O’Neill says he was always the first to leave a party. In 1977 O’Neill set Bush up on a date with Laura Welch, who was visiting her hometown of Midland. “He was struck by lightning when he met her,” Barbara Bush said, recalling how he spent a summer in Kennebunkport “calling back to Midland every minute. And then one day he said he was going home. I think he had called [Laura’s house] one day and a man had answered.” (Bush told me that he doesn’t remember the story.) Eventually, he brought Laura to meet his parents, and unlike the other women, she lasted longer than a day—much longer. Three months after they met, Bush married her.
Laura clearly had an effect on his life. Thoughtful and quiet, with a sly sense of humor, she was the yin to his yang, the quiet pool to his water volleyball. He began attending the Methodist church in Midland with her, and soon after their wedding, he decided to run for Congress. After his defeat, he decided to raise money for a drilling fund, much of it coming from prominent friends of the Bush family willing to take a chance on the relatively inexperienced oilman. But Arbusto was still unable to “bag the elephant”—the oilmen’s phrase for making a significant oil strike. When oil prices plummeted in the early 1980’s, Bush merged his company with another; then that company merged with the publicly held Harken Energy Corp. of Irving. As part of the sale, Bush received shares of Harken stock—a good deal, considering that Arbusto had reportedly lost $400,000 in the six months before the merger—which has led his critics to suggest that the company made the deal for purely political reasons: as a means of getting in good with his famous father and landing a contract to drill for oil off the coast of Bahrain. (Harken had no previous experience in Persian Gulf oil and gas exploration.) Government regulators later scrutinized the deal as well as the decision by Bush to sell his 212,140 shares of Harken, then worth $848,560, just before the company announced poor quarterly earnings. But he was never charged with any wrongdoing. Nor was he found to have used his political connections to help Harken win the Bahrain contract.
Still, after his lucky survival in the oil business, many people—including some in his own family—wondered what he would do next. His own first cousin, John Ellis, once told the New York Times that Bush was “on the road to nowhere at age forty.” And he might have been, had it not been for a trip he made to the family’s Kennebunkport compound on a day that evangelist Billy Graham had stopped by. “It was this beautiful Maine night,” Bush told me, “and Billy just sat there and talked to us, and we asked him questions and shared our thoughts. He and I had a visit afterward—it was just a real personal religious visit—and I started reading the Bible.”
At that point, Bush said, the Bible began to take on a far more significant role in his life. His theology was conservative: He believed (and still does) that there is no place in Heaven for those who do not accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. He also began making changes in his lifestyle: He stopped smoking and chewing tobacco, and most important of all, he quit drinking. In the summer of 1986 he and a couple of his Midland friends took their wives to the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs to celebrate Bush’s fortieth birthday. After he awoke one morning with a wicked hangover, he suddenly vowed never to touch the stuff again. Although he has insisted that he did not consider himself an alcoholic—“I drank sometimes beyond the amount that I should have,” he told me, “but I never drank during the day”—others had worried about his behavior under the influence. Laura herself once said that she sometimes would ask her husband to give up drinking “after some night that wasn’t particularly great.”
When Bush returned from Colorado, he didn’t attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Nor did he seem to struggle, at least publicly, with whatever psychological need drove him to drink. Just like that, he stopped—and according to his friends, he has never been seen with a drink in his hand again. Almost impulsively, with little thought attached to his decision, Bush was headed in a new direction. No one could have predicted where that new direction would take him.
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