The Republicans

• Share

(6 of 12)

After graduating from Yale, Bush succumbed to an itch of the Eastern privileged that Nelson Aldrich has recently described in his book Old Money -- the Teddy Roosevelt yearning to go West and do something physical. Bush presented the matter to himself less as an opportunity than an ordeal -- he thought first of farming, and only then of physical work in oil fields. It was a way of continuing the effete cure on a grander scale; the ironic thing in Bush's case is that the cure would just confirm, in some people's eyes, the ailment. Luckily, Bush had enough money to indulge his urge, under the pretext that it was done in order to make money. How little that motive was actually at work appears from the easy way he gave up the enterprise when it promised to bring in serious returns. In his autobiography, which plays down Andover and the East, the move to Texas is described in terms of the physical work he undertook when the natives were too shrewd to get caught doing it.

THE SPIRIT OF THE SUMMER JOB

Like many outsiders after the war, he went first to Odessa and then to ) Midland, in the raw western part of Texas where the Permian oil pool was being divvied up by eager investors. So many Ivy Leaguers were moving onto the dusty fields that new streets were being laid out with names like Princeton Avenue. Bush brought his air of civic duty to places that did not have exactly the ethos of Greenwich town meetings. He was clearly interested in politics from the outset, and Playwright Larry L. King, then working for the local Congressman J.T. Rutherford, kept an eye on Bush as a Republican threat, "You know, just to load up and be ready." That Bush would consider running from Midland, soon to become a center of John Birch activism, might seem strange, given his father's patrician Republican background, but Bush, who never convincingly took on Texas mannerisms, accepted the values of Midland County as unquestioningly as he had those of Andover. When he had acquired the minimum fortune for a Texas businessman (under a million) and moved to Houston, he ran for the Senate in Barry Goldwater's year, 1964, berating the villains of Midland and Odessa, as well as of Houston -- Walter Reuther, the U.N. and Martin Luther King.