Younger Bush took own path

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, August 29, 2004

NEW YORK – By the time he arrived at Yale University in 1945, George H.W. Bush had been the Navy’s youngest pilot and was a decorated combat veteran. He made Phi Beta Kappa and captain of the baseball team. A famous photograph captured him, dressed in his college baseball pinstripes, shaking the hand of Babe Ruth.

When his son, George W. Bush, landed at Yale 19 years later, he quit baseball after his freshman year, calling himself only “mediocre.” A hellion fraternity president, he earned average grades and became known for such pranks as tearing down Princeton’s goalposts. When his name appeared in The New York Times, he was defending the practice of branding fraternity pledges with red-hot coat hangers.

From Yale to military service, from the Texas oil business to politics, George W. Bush traveled the same route as his accomplished father, but with a very different style.

‘A love-hate relationship’

The first President Bush chose to limit his pursuit of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and famously broke his campaign pledge against new taxes. The current President Bush has cut taxes so consistently that even some allies complain about the resulting budget deficits. His approval ratings, sky high after Sept. 11, 2001, have fallen steeply as the war against Iraq has dragged on.

Doug Wead, an aide in the first Bush White House, has seen up close how the son was formed by competition with his father. “The word that keeps coming to me is irritation – maybe positive as well as negative – the way a pearl is formed with a piece of sand,” he said. “It’s very much a love-hate relationship.”

Though he is not technically a “junior,” George W. Bush has been called that for much of his life. The first time he ran for office, in 1978, he spent a good deal of time reminding people that he was neither his father nor that he was a “junior,” going so far as to photocopying his birth certificate for reporters to prove their names were different. At 15, Bush left Texas for the same Massachusetts boarding school his father attended, before following his father’s route to Yale.

While his father enlisted in the Navy at age 18 and became a war hero, Bush joined a unit of the Texas Air National Guard that was considered “safe” for young men wishing to avoid combat in Vietnam and learned to fly a kind of jet that was being phased out of combat operations.

His father was a casual drinker, but George W. Bush’s biography as a young adult is punctuated with unpleasant alcohol-related incidents. In 1972, at 26, he tried to pick a drunken fight with his father after bringing his younger brother home from a party and running over garbage cans on the way into the driveway.

Despite earning a Harvard MBA, success eluded Bush. He ran for Congress and lost. He founded an oil company that lost money and was saved only by a merger.

The son steps up

On the verge of 40, his marriage strained by alcohol, Bush became a born-again Christian. He attended a weekly men’s Bible study group in Midland, Texas. And then, he abruptly stopped drinking.

Politically, however, the big change in Bush’s life came in 1988, when his father ran for president. Bush worked full-time on the campaign. For the first time, he not only followed his father’s path but was able to use his own skills and connections to shore up his father’s political weaknesses, including smoothing relations with the newly emerging evangelical movement that was deeply distrustful of the elder Bush.

Still, he was in his family’s shadow. Bush mused about running for Texas governor in 1990 but was shot down publicly by his mother, who thought he should not take on a campaign when he had just become managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team.

Although it was a heartbreaking moment for the family, the elder Bush’s 1992 failure to win a second term as president would pave the son’s avenue to political success. Despite the family’s low expectations for the first-born son who had struggled so hard to be just like his father, Bush would never again have to worry about how his own aspirations would affect his father’s career: His father’s public life was over.

Bush was elected Texas governor in 1994 and was easily re-elected in 1998. By the time George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, there would be no mistaking him for his blue-blooded father.

Not his father’s president

He would clear brush in his jeans and cowboy boots. He would make his second home not on the coast of Maine with his family but in dusty West Texas. He would cultivate his twang.

Unlike his parents, he would wear his religion on his sleeve, declaring June 10, 2000, “Jesus Day” in Texas, and even going so far as to tell friends and family on the day of his second gubernatorial inauguration that he thought God wanted him to be president.

According to people who know them, the elder and younger Bush talk frequently, and their relationship operates on two levels – father to son and ex-president to president.

But this week, as he accepts the Republican nomination for a second term, President Bush is clearly more than his father’s son. The man who will stand before the nation on Thursday is a product of his father’s example, his high expectations and expansive advantages – but also someone who has grated at them enough to establish his own style: openly religious, politically combative and aggressive in his approach to foreign policy and tax cuts.

But if he loses in November, Bush would be repeating his father’s destiny as a one-term president at least in part because he has worked so hard in the White House to cut a different path.