Dad was serious when needed, but our household was full of laughter. Dad loved to tell jokes to us kids: “Have you heard the one about the airplane? Never mind, it’s over your head.” He came up with nicknames for family and friends. At one point he called me Juney, short for Junior. My brother Neil was known as Whitey, which morphed into Whitney, because of his blond hair. Dad’s dear friend James Baker became Bake. In his crowning achievement, Dad dubbed Mother the Silver Fox.
Dad’s wonderful sense of humor continued throughout his life. When he was president, he created the Scowcroft Award—named for National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft—for staff members who fell asleep during meetings. Now, in his eighties, he shares jokes via email, rating each on a scale of one through ten. A few years ago, Dad was recovering from hip surgery at the Mayo Clinic. When the nurse came to check on him, he asked, “Are my testicles black?” She was taken aback. “Excuse me, Mr. President?” He repeated his question, “Are my testicles black?” As she reached for the sheet, he quipped, “I said, ‘Are my test results back?’ ” His medical team roared with laughter.
Over the years there has been a lot of speculation about my relationship with Dad. I suppose that’s natural for the first father-and-son presidents in 172 years. The simple truth is that I adore him. Throughout my life I have respected him, admired him, and been grateful for his love. There is an infamous story about me driving home late one night, running over the neighbor’s trash can, and then smarting off to Dad. When some people picture that scene, they envision two presidents locked in some epic psychological showdown. In reality, I was a boozy kid, and he was an understandably irritated father. We didn’t think much about it until it came up in the newspapers twenty years later.
Moments like these are a reminder that I am not just my father’s son. I have a feisty and irreverent streak courtesy of Barbara Bush. Sometimes I went out of my way to demonstrate my independence. But I never stopped loving my family. I think they understood that, even when I got on their nerves.
I finally saw things from my parents’ perspective when I had children of my own. My daughter Jenna could be sassy and sharp, just like me. When I was running for governor in 1994, I accidentally shot a killdeer, a protected songbird, on the first day of dove hunting season. The blunder produced headlines but quickly faded. A few weeks before the election, Laura and I campaigned with the girls at the Texas State Fair in Dallas. Twelve-year-old Jenna won a stuffed bird as a prize at a carnival game. With the TV cameras rolling, she held the plush animal in the air. “Look, Dad,” she said, giggling. “It’s a killdeer!”
In the fall of 1972, I went to visit my grandmother in Florida. My college friend Mike Brooks was in the area, and we played golf. Mike had just graduated from Harvard Business School. He told me I should consider going there. To make sure I got the message, he mailed me an application. I was intrigued enough to fill it out. A few months later, I was accepted.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to school or to the East Coast. I shared my doubts with my brother Jeb. I didn’t know Jeb very well when he was growing up—he was only eight when I moved out for boarding school—but we grew closer as we got older.
Jeb was always more serious-minded than I was. He was intelligent, focused, and driven in every way. He learned to speak fluent Spanish, majored in Latin American Affairs, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas. During his senior year in high school, he lived in Mexico as part of a student exchange program. There he met a beautiful woman named Columba Garnica. They were both young, but it was obvious Jeb was in love. When we went to the Astrodome together, I’d watch the ball game and he’d write letters to Colu. They got married two weeks after his twenty-first birthday.
One night, Jeb and I were having dinner with Dad at a restaurant in Houston. I was working at a mentoring program in Houston’s poverty-stricken Third Ward, and Dad and I were having a discussion about my future. Jeb blurted out, “George got into Harvard.”
After some thought, Dad said, “Son, you ought to seriously consider going. It would be a good way to broaden your horizons.” That was all he said. But he got me thinking. Broadening horizons was exactly what I was trying to do during those years. It was another way of saying, “Push yourself to realize your God-given talents.”
For the second time in my life, I made the move from Houston to Massachusetts. The cabdriver pulled up to the Harvard campus and welcomed me to “the West Point of capitalism.” I had gone to Andover by expectation and Yale by tradition; I was at Harvard by choice. There I learned the mechanics of finance, accounting, and economics. I came away with a better understanding of management, particularly the importance of setting clear goals for an organization, delegating tasks, and holding people to account. I also gained the confidence to pursue my entrepreneurial urge.
The lessons of Harvard Business School were reinforced by an unlikely source: a trip to visit Mother and Dad in China after graduation. The contrast was vivid. I had gone from the West Point of capitalism to the eastern outpost of communism, from a republic of individual choice to a country where people all wore the same gray clothes. While riding my bike through the streets of Beijing, I occasionally saw a black limo with tinted windows that belonged to one of the party bigwigs. Otherwise there were few cars and no signs of a free market. I was amazed to see how a country with such a rich history could be so bleak.
With my sister, Doro, in China, 1975.
In 1975, China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution, its government’s effort to purify and revitalize society. Communist officials had set up indoctrination programs, broadcast propaganda over omnipresent loudspeakers, and sought to stamp out any evidence of China’s ancient history. Mobs of young people lashed out against their elders and attacked the intellectual elite. The society was divided against itself and cascading into anarchy.
China’s experience reminded me of the French and Russian revolutions. The pattern was the same: People seized control by promising to promote certain ideals. Once they had consolidated power, they abused it, casting aside their beliefs and brutalizing their fellow citizens. It was as if mankind had a sickness that it kept inflicting on itself. The sobering thought deepened my conviction that freedom—economic, political, and religious—is the only fair and productive way of governing a society.
For most of my time at Harvard, I had no idea how I was going to use my business degree. I knew what I did not want to do. I had no desire to go to Wall Street. While I knew decent and admirable people who had worked on Wall Street, including my grandfather Prescott Bush, I was suspicious of the financial industry. I used to tell friends that Wall Street is the kind of place where they will buy you or sell you, but they don’t really give a hoot about you so long as they can make money off you.
I was searching for options when my Harvard classmate Del Marting invited me to spend spring break of 1975 at his family’s ranch in Tucson, Arizona. On the way out west, I decided to make a stop in Midland. I’d heard from my friend Jimmy Allison, who had become publisher of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, that the place was booming. He was right. The energy industry was on the upswing after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The barriers to entry in the industry were low. I loved the idea of starting a business of my own. I made up my mind: I was headed back to Texas.