The Raising of a President by Doug Wead

Author:Doug Wead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

George and Barbara Bush: Raising a President

I was gone all the time, busy with my job

It was Barbara who really raised him. 1

—George H. W. Bush

George H. W. Bush, the only president in American history to witness, in person, the inauguration of his own son as president, was born in Milton, Massachusetts, on June 12, 1924. He was Prescott and Dottie Bush’s second son. Since their firstborn had been named after the father, this new son was given a name from the mother’s side of the family. He was named George Herbert Walker Bush, after Dottie’s irrepressible father, “Bert.” The Walker sons, amused by the little boy who shared their “Pop’s” name, started calling their nephew “Poppy.” It was a moniker that stuck.

From the very beginning, young George Bush would be seen as a conciliator. He was two years old when his parents bought him a pedal car. Little George was ecstatic. And then in his moment of joy he hesitated, remembering his older brother and loyal playmate, Prescott Bush, Jr., or “Pressy.” In a scene etched in family lore, little George offered to share his new treasure with his brother. “Have half, have half, have half,” he insisted. The two would play together for hours, with George deferring to his elder brother when it was demanded. One game, practical during inclement weather, could be described as “baseball in a bedroom.” The two boys would roll up their father’s socks and bat them around the room, racing around the bases on their knees.

While Pres worked, Dottie raised the boys, and soon the family found itself absorbed into the greater Walker clan. Summers included annual visits to Kennebunkport, where the grounds were filled with Walker cousins. Each Christmas, they journeyed to Bert Walker’s South Carolina plantation, where black servants in white gloves slipped into the children’s bedrooms just before sunup to light the fireplaces and take the chill off the early morning. In the afternoon, the men went hunting.

But if Dottie was the principal figure in the raising of the children, the family philosophy was pure Bush. Dottie had always held an aversion to high-handed haughtiness. Even as a child she had rebuked a snobbish neighborhood queen bee who had tried to turn their playtime on the street into a social contest. The added generational emphasis of the Bushes must have been extraordinarily reaffirming. “We were taught that brotherhood was more important than winning an argument,” said Bucky Bush. 2 In the spirit of James Bush, Poppy’s great-grandfather, the children were told never to boast, unless it was about the accomplishments of another. When a teenage George began to pass Pressy in his tennis game, the older brother bragged about Poppy as if he were his son instead of a younger sibling.

Pressy and Poppy were sent to Greenwich Country Day School. Founded in 1925 by an impressive group of locals, including one of the Rockefeller wives, it had elementary-age schoolchildren learning Latin. The Bush boys, in the family tradition, were allowed to choose their own prep school.

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