The Republicans

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Bush loves Hynes' book, and sent him fan letters, though they have never met, saying the only difference between his war (Navy Air Corps) and Hynes' (Marine Air Corps) was clean linen. Navy carriers have decorum as well as dangers. But onshore, Bush lived in the world vividly described by Hynes as full of booze, womanizing and raunchy songs. Bush, describing the book to me, singled out this aspect of it as extraordinarily accurate -- "the experience in the bars, and the experience in the singing, and the experience of his ((Hynes')) macho guy." But I relayed Hynes' difficulty in imagining George Bush singing round after round of The Fing Great Wheel. Bush is amazed that this image should amaze people: "I do sing it -- I did sing it. And how I correct public misperceptions I don't know, and I really don't think I've got time to try. But, you know, ask the guys I was with in the Navy. That's the way to do that. Go to the oil fields and talk to them. Don't believe the inside-the-sophisticated-boardroom perception of somebody fitting into a mold." It is hard to fit George Bush into a mold. The riddle is not merely that he is both unnecessarily nice and improbably tough, but that he can rise to genuine nobility of performance and sink to casual ruthlessness.

His parents, Phillips Andover Academy and the war -- the three being much the same thing for him -- made George Bush what he is. His family was made up of fiercely competitive athletes. Golfing's Walker Cup is named -- like George Herbert Walker Bush himself -- for the polo-playing grandfather who established that event. George's mother, still alive and energetic (like her four siblings), was a championship tennis player and determined swimmer. His father, Senator Prescott Bush, silent at the family table, was already thinking ahead to the golf course he attended with the same dutifulness he brought to Greenwich, Conn., town meetings. Hart Leavitt, a retired master who taught George and his older brother Prescott at Andover, says he found Senator Bush, a Wall Street banker, too imposing to address with ease. The Bush children were even more intimidated. I asked Bush if he found it hard to differ from his father. "It never occurred to me to differ. I mean, he was up here ((lifts right hand as far as he can)), and I was this little guy down here." Frank DiClemente, a coach and friend to both "Pressy" and "Poppy" (as George was known then), wanted to exchange anecdotes with the father about Pressy's sports adventures, but "all he wanted to know was, Is he toeing the mark?" The most revealing thing George has ever said about his father occurs in the letter he wrote to Hynes, where he compares his own father with Hynes' for being unable to express love. Bush, 6 ft. 2 in., would never consider his own feats the equal of his father's -- who was 6 ft. 4 in., of commanding presence and with a record in wartime, at Yale, and in Washington that seemed to transcend criticism. The utter probity of his father is so obvious to Bush that even when the older man went into partisan politics, it was -- according to his son -- for nonpartisan reasons. He ran as a Republican, during a time of Democratic dominance, to keep the two-party system alive.