“I don’t think he ever got any further than being a dime-store Santa Claus,” joked one of his Yale roommates, “but at least he tried.”
A former song-and-dance man, Jonathan had starred in prep-school plays at Hotchkiss. His mother was dazzled by his ability. Watching him perform several years later in
Bus Stop
at the Southern Playhouse, Dorothy Bush shared her maternal pride in one of her columns. “No Broadway show ever held me more spellbound,” she wrote, “and I must confess I got a great thrill out of seeing Jon give a true to life characterization of Bo Decker.” When Jonathan landed the role of Will Parker in an off-Broadway production of
Oklahoma
,
The New York Times
reviewed him as “a first rate hayseed.”
Unfortunately, Jonathan’s talents could not support his tastes. “He wanted the Walker lifestyle,” said one of his Yale roommates, “and make no mistake, the Walkers felt they were every bit as important as the Bushes. After all,
they
had the money. Not the Bushes.”
Making money was the first commandment of both families, and Jonathan struggled with his decision to forgo finance for the stage. In the end, the money ruled, and so, according to his roommate, the family took him in. In 1960, Jonathan joined G. H. Walker and Company. He was the only Bush, aside from his uncle James Smith Bush, to be listed in the Social Register. Jonathan joined the River Club in New York City and lived what his brother George called “the luxe life.”
“Too bad in a sense,” said his cousin Ray Walker, “because Johnny has the capacity to see the truth and tell the truth, more so than anyone else in the family.”
With a master’s in business administration from New York University, Jonathan eventually opened his own financial firm. With the Walkers’ moneyed contacts, he stepped into the shoes of Uncle Herbie and became the family’s financier. Jonathan would do for little George and his oil ventures what Uncle Herbie had done for big George. When Junior started a small oil company, Arbusto, in Midland, Texas, he turned to his uncle, who brought him some of the most powerful businessmen in America as his initial investors. Partnership documents show that George W. relied extensively on his uncle’s ties to raise seed money. In later years, Jonathan also shook the money tree for all of his brother’s political campaigns as well as those of his nephews.
“Being the adult child of a U.S. senator, especially in the 1950s, when politics was not so polarized, was a great luxury,” said Ymelda Chavez Dixon, whose father, Dennis Chavez, was a New Mexico senator from 1935 to 1962. “You were invited everywhere . . . The velvet cords got lifted, the stanchions were moved and the ‘Do Not Enter’ signs taken down. You were swept into the corridors of power along with your parents. Suddenly the names you only saw on the front pages of
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
were your dinner partners. You danced with diplomats, cabinet members, and Supreme Court justices. You listened to the Secretary of Defense debate the Secretary of State over coffee. You inhaled this closeness to power like an aphrodisiac, and before you knew it, you had come down with what they call Potomac Fever—and that, as you know, is incurable.”
All of Prescott’s children were affected by this political malady, but none more so than George, who was bewitched by his father’s new life and visited Washington every chance he got. Dorothy sent her newspaper columns to all her children, and her weekly reports of Georgetown dinner parties, embassy balls, and White House soirees made Washington, D.C., look like the crossroads of the world, especially to her son and daughter-in-law stuck in the sandpile of Midland, Texas. When George read about his father playing golf with the President of the United States, meeting prime ministers, introducing legislation on the floor of the Senate, and debating foreign policy with heads of state, he decided that he, too, wanted the same kind of life. After one of his visits to Washington in 1959, when he met the commander of the Atlantic Fleet and listened to his mother converse in French with a UN diplomat, he returned to Midland and told his friend C. Fred Chambers: “I don’t know if I want to be a politician, but I’d like to hold office, like my father. That’s what I’d like to do with my life.”
George seemed impressed by the aura surrounding a U.S. senator and the respect accorded to those who held high office. He was taken more with the power than with the ideological desire to serve. In later years, he would claim that he wanted “to give something back in the way of public service to the nation,” but his cousin suspected that what George really wanted was a position of importance that would give him the respect his father enjoyed. George talked about it with his Uncle Herbie, and they agreed on what was most important to them in life.
“I still remember a dinner when they said that people in politics are the most important people in society,” said George’s cousin Ray Walker, “and that people in business are the second most important . . . They couldn’t come up with a third. Power and money . . . That’s all that mattered to them. I was so disgusted. I got up and left the room.”
Neither George nor his uncle noticed Ray’s departure. Nor would they have understood why Ray felt dismayed that they did not value anyone but politicians and financiers. “I tried to do the family thing [work for G. H. Walker and Company] for five years,” said Ray, “but then I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit, went back to school, entered medicine, and became a psychiatrist . . . I always say that my family drove me into psychiatry.”
Becoming what his father had become became George’s goal in life. First financial success; then politics. He needed no other focus beyond scaling Mount Prescott. Eventually he would achieve both, but, according to many who knew him, he would never feel that he had lived up to his father’s accomplishments. “Even after he became President of the United States, he felt diminished by his old man,” said a deputy assistant from the first Bush White House. “Maybe it was because he knew he’d only made it to the White House on Reagan’s coattails. Whatever it was, we all knew, or I should say we all sensed from what he’d said, that he felt he hadn’t risen to the level of his dad.” George’s own son George Walker Bush would never suffer the same crisis of confidence.
Big George began his serious ascent toward financial success from 1955 to 1959, running Zapata Offshore Company as a subsidiary of Zapata Oil. Based in Midland, the offshore company drilled wells on contract in the Gulf of Mexico. George’s Uncle Herbie, a major stockholder and a member of the board of directors, sold the bonds that paid for Zapata’s mobile deepwater drilling rigs, each of which cost approximately $3.5 million to build. George paid himself a salary of $30,000 ($192,000 in 2004) a year and oversaw all the company’s operations from sales to contracts. He negotiated with oil companies to lease Zapata equipment, which, he explained in a letter to his stockholders, brought the company revenue whether or not they struck oil. His biggest responsibility during those years was chasing money.
As the financial cartographer, Uncle Herbie drew the treasure map that led George to rich investors. These investors needed the large tax write-offs that risky oil investments provided. They did not need George’s company to succeed; they simply needed to like him and trust him enough to invest their money with him. For both sides, it was a no-lose situation, and George filled his end of the bargain admirably. He made an excellent first impression on all these men and usually came away with their financial commitment. He followed up each visit with a personal letter, a habit instilled in him early by his father. Zapata Offshore started with a $1.5 million stock offering. Among the stockholders were most of George’s Skull and Bones class from Yale.
The company invested in the technology of R. G. LeTourneau, who invented a mobile three-legged drilling barge. Zapata Offshore was LeTourneau’s first customer, and the barge was christened
The Scorpion
on March 20, 1956, in a ceremony in Galveston that George attended with Barbara and their nine-year-old son, Georgie. That summer George’s youngest brother, Bucky, arrived in Midland with his prep-school classmate Fay Vincent, later to become commissioner of Major League Baseball. Bucky, the Bush “baby,” stood six feet five and weighed 280 pounds; Vincent was about the same size. Both had played football at Hotchkiss and upon their graduation came to work for George as “roughnecks,” laying pipes in the oil fields. In Midland, they got their first exposure to hard work, hot sun, and redneck Texans.
Fay Vincent recalled the summer as his passage into manhood. “I got a crash course in racism,” he said, “and it was life-changing . . . It was my first trip to the South. The landmark Supreme Court case
Brown
v.
Board of Education
had been decided in 1954, and as a result ‘separate but equal’ was no longer lawful. But in 1956 in Texas, separate and unequal remained the guiding principle in the oil fields. There were no blacks in those fields; no black roughnecks, no black suppliers, vendors, or drivers . . .”
By the end of its first fiscal year, Zapata Offshore reported earnings of $325,779 ($2.3 million in 2004); by 1957, the company had increased its earnings to $776,345 ($5.1 million in 2004). The following year the company lost $524,440 ($3.4 million in 2004) but recouped its losses the next year. George did not have the stomach for the high-stakes risk of offshore drilling. “I’d be a nervous wreck every time I’d hear about a hurricane out there [the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico],” he said. The constant worry of placing a $3.5 million drilling barge into stormy waters exacerbated bleeding ulcers that would plague him the rest of his life.
George thought the treasure of the oil business lay in foreign offshore drilling, whereas Hugh Liedtke saw the future in mergers and acquisitions. In 1959 they agreed, amicably, to separate their ventures, and George decided to move his family and Zapata Offshore to Houston to be closer to the Gulf of Mexico.
“Hugh was a different kind of guy [from George],” recalled Hoyt Taylor, a Zapata engineer from 1954 to 1972. “Hugh’s a guy that wants to make money. George Bush don’t really give a damn. I mean, yeah, being successful is important to him. He definitely wanted to make enough money that his family could live well and provide education and all that. But as far as pilin’ up a big pile, George didn’t give a damn. It didn’t interest him . . .
“He was real conservative about his spending . . . [but] . . . he set good examples. Just the little things. Like he bought his own stamps. He didn’t run his damn personal mail through the company’s stamp machine. Hell, I used to sign his expense accounts, and when he went to New York, he [put in] for 250 bucks or some silly thing, and I said, ‘Hell, there ain’t no way you could go to New York City for $250’ . . . He said, ‘That’s all the time I spent on company business; the rest of the time was my own damn business so sign this son of a gun and shut up’ . . .
“He drove an old two-door Plymouth automobile that was kind of a disgrace, and I drove a damn Buick Limited, and I stayed nervous for fear that he’d decide that I hadn’t ought to be driving that big damned old car, but he’s the kind of guy that when times were boomin’ he’s liable to get on you a little bit about being loose with the company money . . . and yet when the boom was off and times was tough, he’d tell you go get you some damn money and gather some of those customers up and take ’em out and entertain ’em.”
What some admired as George’s Yankee frugality, others saw as mean stinginess. When he was on the GI Bill at Yale as a young married, he insisted his wife get a job to pay for her cigarettes. So Barbara worked at the Yale Co-op to finance her cigarette habit. Dotsie Wheeler Adams, another young bride on campus, recalled that when Barbara brought home some old books she had bought at a secondhand store, George told her she would have to return them because they couldn’t afford to keep them. Kenneth Raynor, the golf pro at Kennebunkport’s Cape Arundel Golf Club, recalled George Bush as the kind of guy who “loves to look for [free] balls. We’ll be playing along and all of a sudden he disappears. We find him reaching down into the water to rescue a golf ball” that someone has lost. George constantly pleaded poor; in a 1952 letter to Neil Mallon, he wrote: “Bar is urging me to take her to Dallas sometime this fall for a Christmas shopping trip. My check book keeps insisting that we not make this trip.” The Bush family maid, Otha Taylor, recalled the day that Barbara had let her go home an hour early. The next day Barbara nervously pulled her aside. “Mr. Bush came in last night and he was saying you weren’t there . . . ‘Where’s Otha? She’s supposed to stay here until her hour is up, regardless if she has anything to do or not.’” Mrs. Taylor was angry at the elder Bush, and told her brother, “He’s a really mean man. He was telling his wife not to let me go.”
George’s penuriousness exacerbated the financial anxiety that Barbara developed as a child. After attending Rye Country Day School for a couple of years, she was pulled out during the Depression and sent to public schools. She grew up with a spendthrift mother whose bedside drawer was always filled with unpaid bills. As she told Donnie Radcliffe of
The Washington Post
, when she wanted to buy a coat, her mother would caution, “Now, don’t go to Best & Co. when you buy that coat, go over to Lord and Taylor’s because I owe Best.” Barbara’s paternal grandfather, Scott Pierce, had come from a wealthy family but lost his fortune in the 1890s, which forced his son, Marvin, to work his way through college. “My grandfather never recovered,” Barbara said. “He sold insurance in Dayton, Ohio . . . Daddy and his sister, my aunt Charlotte, supported Grandfather and Grandmother Pierce financially for years.” Barbara’s mother, Pauline, was not pleased with her reduced circumstances and constantly criticized the elder Pierces. Although Barbara’s family lived comfortably and even had domestic help, finances were strained because of the medical problems of her youngest brother. Barbara remembered her mother always talking about “when her ship came in.”