After graduating from Yale in 1968, Bush moved back to Texas and joined
the Air National Guard. Bush has said that he wanted to learn how to fly,
and the position had another merit: it kept him away from the war in
Vietnam. There are many murky aspects to Bush's service in the Air
National Guard, and critics believe that his family pulled strings to get
him the position and that once in he did not complete his requirements. He
denies the charges and insists that he applied for a program that could
have sent him to Vietnam as a pilot; in fact, his plane was being phased
out, and there was almost no chance that his application would be
accepted.
What followed were what Bush has called his "nomadic years,"
when he partied hard, held a series of jobs, showed little ambition, drank
too much, and worried his parents. In one incident, he drank before
driving and?when reproached by his father?challenged the
elder Bush to a fight. He applied to law school at the University of Texas
and was rejected, but Harvard Business School accepted him. And so in the
fall of 1973 he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and buckled down to
study. This seems to have been a turning point, for afterward he seemed to
settle down to some degree and worked reasonably hard in his studies.
After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1975?he is the
first president with an MBA?Bush moved back to his childhood
stomping ground in Midland, Texas, and entered the oil business. He worked
hard, impressed people, and lived so frugally that, according to his
friends,his bed was held together with an old necktie. Friends set him up
with a young woman whom he had been dimly acquainted with in the seventh
grade, Laura Welch, and after a whirlwind courtship, they were married on
5 November 1977. Instead of a honeymoon, they set off together on
Bush's next project, to run for an open congressional seat.
Bush campaigned hard and did well in winning the Republican nomination
against a prominent local man who had run two years earlier. But in the
general election, Bush found himself matched against a popular state
senator, Kent Hance, who was from the more northern populous part of the
district and who portrayed Bush as an alien from Yankee country. At
candidates' forums, Hance would tell the following yarn: As he was
working in a field along a rural road, Hance saw Bush driving along in a
Mercedes. Bush rolled down the window and asked for directions to a
certain ranch. Hance gave Bush directions, telling him to turn right after
the cattle guard (a metal grate, ubiquitous on rural Texas roads, that
keeps livestock from straying). The yarn ends with Bush asking:
"What color uniform is that cattle guard wearing?"
In retrospect, Bush ran an energetic but deeply flawed campaign. He chose
a race that may have been unwinnable from the start, and then he muffed up
and allowed himself to be portrayed to many voters as an overeducated
phony out of touch with ordinary voters?ironically, a bit the way
Bush supporters perceived Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign.
For example, there was the television commercial Bush dreamed up to show
how energetic he was: it showed him jogging on a track. In those days,
joggers were about as common in West Texas as Martians, and the commercial
reinforced the perception of Bush as an affable alien. "The only
time folks around here go running," Hance told audiences,
"is when somebody's chasing 'em."
The audio text of one of Hance's most effective radio spots is as
follows: "In 1961, when Kent Hance graduated from Dimmitt High
School in the Nineteenth Congressional District, his opponent George W.
Bush was attending Andover Academy in Massachusetts. In 1965, when Kent
Hance graduated from Texas Tech, his opponent was at Yale University. And
while Kent Hance graduated from University of Texas Law School, his
opponent"?the announcer's voice
plunged?"get this, folks, was attending Harvard. We
don't need someone from the Northeast telling us what our problems
are."
When the election came, Hance defeated Bush by a solid 53 percent to 47
percent. The defeat seemed to cause Bush to lose interest in public
service, but many years later when he returned to politics he remembered a
lesson from that election. As Hance put it in an interview with
The New York Times:
"He wasn't going to be out-Christianed or
out-good-old-boyed again. He's going to be the good old boy next
door."
After the electoral defeat, Bush threw himself into the oil business. At
first he called his company Arbusto (
arbusto
is Spanish for "bush"), but when times grew difficult there
were too many jokes about the company going ar-BUST-o. So he renamed the
enterprise Bush Exploration. Any assessment of his time in the oil
business would be mixed: he proved effective at recruiting investors, but
had difficulty running a company profitably. Then as now, he was a
brilliant fund-raiser, and through his family and father's friends
he raised millions of dollars to drill for oil. But he never found much
petroleum, and oil prices virtually collapsed, so that his
investors?like many others?did poorly. Bush raised $4.67
million from his limited partners, but his company returned only $1.55
million in distributions (plus hefty tax write-offs). Meanwhile, Bush
structured the deals in part to give himself certain financial advantages:
His longtime friend and accountant, Robert A. McCleskey, says that his net
worth rose from $50,000 in 1975 to more than $1 million by 1988.
But those were tough years for the oil business, and the strains showed in
Bush's private behavior. He drank too much, and he often came
across as more offensive than amusing. The "bombastic
Bush-kin," as friends called him, sometimes seemed out of control.
While visiting the family retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, he was cited
for drunken driving, and he also managed to insult an old friend of his
parents, a prim, well-dressed matron who had recently turned fifty. He
wobbled up to her at a cocktail party and, according to a relative, asked
her by way of conversation: "So, what's sex like after
fifty, anyway?"
It was a vintage Bush moment, the kind that made Bush's friends
laugh and cringe at the same time. He could be hilarious company, but also
often outrageous and childish. Some acquaintances were offended by what
they saw as Bush's arrogance and immaturity, by his penchant for
drinking too much and thinking too little. Even Laura wanted him to grow
up, old friends say, and by some accounts she signaled that she was so
sick of his boorish behavior that she might leave him and take his twin
daughters with her. Bush himself has said that he does not know whether he
was an alcoholic, and old acquaintances generally concur that he was a
borderline case. But he did get drunk regularly, and while he was not a
mean drunk, he could be loud and obnoxious.
These pressures, instead of breaking Bush, changed him. There is no neat
one-sentence explanation for how he came to terms with himself. It was a
gradual process, stretching from his arrival at Harvard Business School in
1973 until after his fortieth birthday in 1986. One turning point, by
Bush's own recollection, came in the summer of 1985 when he met
with the evangelical religious leader Billy Graham in Kennebunkport. Bush
was inspired to begin reading the Bible daily, and back in Midland he
began attending a Bible study class. Ever since then, Bush's
Methodist faith has been a pillar of his life. Then in July 1986, the
Bushes went with a half-dozen friends to celebrate their collective
fortieth birthdays at the luxurious Broadmoor Hotel resort in Colorado
Springs, Colorado. On one evening, they all stayed up late, drinking a bit
too merrily. The next morning, Bush woke up feeling befuddled?and
quietly resolved that he would never touch alcohol again. As far as
anybody knows, he never did. After that, Bush worked harder and mellowed a
bit, so that while he remained mischievous he was less likely to offend
people. He did better at controlling his temper. He became a better
father. He grew up.