Born to Run
What’s in a name? How about the Republican nomination for governor. Now the highly confident, but untested George W. Bush has to convince voters that he’s more than just a chip off the old block.
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Bush does have a casual style that’s rarely seen in his patrician parents. When he strides into his office in Dallas, he throws his inexpensive Haggar sport jacket on the floor—he has no coatrack—and eats from a bag of popcorn as he answers phone calls and shouts at his secretary through the always open door. His office is decorated like a dorm room. Baseball gloves and baseball bats and replicas of Bowie knives are scattered about. A Texas flag lies on top of a counter, half buried under some books. A personalized Texas license plate—reading BUSH—is on another table. The Baseball Encyclopedia is near his chair. Although a few photos have made it to the wall—an autographed shot of Nolan Ryan; Mom in a Rangers Jacket; him and his father fishing; his wife, Laura, and his twelve-year-old twin daughters—a large stack remains on the floor, in a corner.
Something Bush has inherited from his father is a kind of manic energy. He ran a marathon in Houston after the 1992 presidential race (finishing in a respectable 3 hours and 44 minutes). He prefers to spend his lunch hour running and sometimes lifting weights at Dallas’ tony Cooper Aerobics Center. At the end of the day, in his comfortable one-story North Dallas home, Bush sits at his desk in an office just to the right of the front door, simultaneously talking on the phone, flipping through television channels with his remote control, and helping his daughters, who attend Hockaday, the most exclusive private girls’ school in Dallas, with their homework. Sometimes he leaps up and heads out to the front yard with his springer spaniel, Spot (a daughter of the former first dog, Millie), and throws a tennis ball for her to chase.
“I wouldn’t say that patience is one of George’s greatest qualities,” says Laura, a soft-spoken former public school librarian, the yin to Bush’s yang. She is neat and thoughtful, while he is exactly the kind of guy librarians are always telling to stop talking. On the day of my visit, she had been preparing a report for her women’s book club on Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate.
Laura initially felt reluctant about Bush’s entering the governor’s race. “She wanted to be sure I was running for all the right reasons,” Bush tells me, “and that I wasn’t running because I felt I had something to prove.” It is a striking admission, for it suggests that even those closest to Bush have wondered about his need to become governor. Ambition, of course, is a tricky matter: All politicians are motivated to run for office through some mixture of private needs and public desires. But because Bush is the son of a famous man, and especially because he is trying to prove he can succeed at his father’s profession, his drive to become governor is perhaps a little more perplexing. Is this campaign his grand attempt to win his father’s approval? Is George W., the loyal son, running out of spite against Ann Richards, who has never hesitated to take potshots at the Bush family, as in her famous 1988 Democratic Convention speech, when she said that the elder Bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth? Or is it because he has a plan, as he says in every campaign speech he gives, to turn Texas into “a beacon state, a place where other people say, ‘That’s what I want my state to be’”?
Bush makes a point to tell me, over and over, that he has never had long-range political ambitions. “I’ve never been a long-term planner about anything,” he says. “I have lived my life with more of a short-term focus—on the theory that other interesting things would come up for me to do.” If there is a theme that runs through Bush’s adult life, it’s that of a man who quickly, sometimes impulsively, seizes the opportunities that are put before him. He admits he never considered becoming an oilman until the day he stopped in Midland for a brief visit in 1975 and decided to stay there. He says he never planned to buy a major league baseball team until a friend gave him a tip in late 1988 that the Rangers were for sale. And he swears he didn’t make up his mind to run for governor until June 1993, “when everything began to feel right and when everything that Ann Richards was doing, or not doing, began to feel so wrong.”
All of his friends say in interviews that Bush is sincere in his concerns about the deteriorating state of education and the widespread fear of crime in Texas. But, they add, to understand the candidacy of Bush, it is important to understand what it means to be a Bush in Texas, a member of Texas’ most famous political family. Congenial and close-knit, the Bushes are far from a tortured clan like the Kennedys, with their scandals and their obsessive drive toward power. The Bushes obviously feel imbued, however, with an invincible sense of self-confidence, a kind of family faith, a conviction that they are the right people to lead.
“I’ve thought for a very long time about this,” says Midland orthopedic surgeon Charlie Younger, one of George W. Bush’s closest friends for nearly twenty years. “I know that he likes competition and that he relishes the battle of going against Ann Richards. I think—and this is pure speculation—that he didn’t like what Richards did to his dad and he wanted to make some amends.”
Younger thinks for a few moments, considering whether to say more. “I also know this desire to run is in his blood,” he finally says. “It’s part of being a Bush. He has come around to seeing himself as the oldest and heir apparent to the clan.”
George W. Bush has often joked that the key difference between him and his father is that “my dad went to Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut and I went to San Jacinto Junior High in Midland.” The elder Bush was raised in a home with three maids and a chauffeur. He went to tea dances. At home, he had to wear a coat and tie to the dinner table. George W. grew up in a nice but unpretentious neighborhood with a bunch of brash, rough-and-tumble oilmen’s sons—and he fit right in. Early photographs of George W. show a boy with a rakish gleam in his eye, an amused look on his face—”A wonderful, incorrigible child,” says Barbara, “who spent many afternoons sitting in his room, waiting for his father to come home to speak to him about his latest transgression.”
Perhaps because the elder Bush felt it so difficult to shake loose from the influence of his own stern father, U.S. senator Prescott Bush, he never played the role of the fierce disciplinarian with his own children. “I can’t exaggerate to you what wonderful parents George and Barbara Bush were,” George W. says. “They were liberating people. There was never that oppressiveness you see with other parents, never the idea that their way was the only way. My dad went out of his way to make sure that I felt accepted by him.”
If such fatherly support helped instill in the younger Bush a sturdy self-assurance, his mother gave him her tart tongue and free spirit. To this day, they tease each other mercilessly. Once, George W. had been forewarned by another family member that his mother was grieving over the death of her beloved dog C. Fred. “So he came through the front door,” remembers Barbara, “and shouted, ‘Hey, Mom,where are you, doggone it?’”
When Bush talks about “the family as the backbone of Texas” and “Texas as a wonderful way of life” in his gubernatorial campaign speeches, what he’s referring to is his own Midland childhood. This is not the Midland that Clayton Williams, the last Republican gubernatorial candidate, described during his 1990 campaign. Williams’ Midland was a world of flamboyant wildcatters and cowboys. Bush’s Midland, however, was a world full of people like his parents, Ivy Leaguers who had come to West Texas to make their fortunes. The families got together for golf at the country club. They had backyard barbecues in their neighborhood—a neighborhood no different, really, than any upscale neighborhood in Houston or Dallas. They went to First Presbyterian and joined the board of the United Way and sent their kids off to private schools back East. Although the younger Bush saw his parents mingle with poor people, theirs was a world devoid of hardship.
Like his father, George W. attended the exclusive prep school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts. He distinguished himself early. His English teacher, a Mr. Chips type, asked the class to write an essay on emotion. Wanting to impress his teacher, the young Bush looked up synonyms for “tear” (as in “droplets from eyes”). Unfortunately, he looked up “tear” (as in “to cut”). Bush wrote, “Lacerates ran down my cheeks.” The professor gave him a zero.
In the mid-sixties Bush went off to Yale to major in history. “I wasn’t exactly an Ivy League scholar,” he says with a good-natured grin. “What I was good at was getting to know people.” Considering Bush’s collegial nature today—his styled casualness, his tendency to greet male friends with the phrase “Hey, buddy”—it should come as no surprise to learn that at Yale he was president of his fraternity, the Delta Kappa Epsilons. Although he did not graduate Phi Beta Kappa as his father had, he did follow his father into the university’s Skull and Bones Club, a secret society for the males of prominent families.
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