Born to Run

This sounds, well, un-American to George Jr., and he rages that it is crap from the '60s. Nobody thinks that way anymore! But his father cuts him off. "No, I want to understand what he's saying." He seems genuinely interested -- and relieved that I don't plan to call him snotty. But the amazing thing is that Bush finds these ideas so novel. He seems baffled that I could see America in this way. People who work the hardest -- even though some have a head start -- will usually get ahead, he says. To see it otherwise is divisive.

I confess: I think a lot of Americans see it otherwise.

No matter, the secret to what makes George Bush tick is not philosophical. It is somewhere here at Walker's Point, a boot of rocky land jutting austerely into the Atlantic. The place has been in the family since 1899, and it's home to the Bush family values. The Bushes are big on values. They exude them, impose them on each other and themselves, use them to judge friend and foe. And in his grandfatherly role, George Bush has become the keeper of these values.

A few years ago, for instance, he wrote a letter to his oldest grandson, George Prescott, who was then 6. It is a surprising letter, surprising for its warmth and for its nostalgic recall -- traits not associated with Bush's sometimes graceless persona. Yet the letter also evokes the Bush family expectations for the next generation, the generation in training. The letter consciously binds young George Prescott's very senses to the family, past and present, and to the objects that surround him at Walker's Point, as they did his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. It transforms these objects -- a rock, a boat, a great-grandparent -- into talismans for the family values of tradition, empathy and loyalty. It's not a letter meant for a boy, but a letter meant to be read again and again as the boy becomes a man.

"Dear 'P'," the letter begins, to distinguish the child from the vice president and George Jr. (In the Bush family, everyone seems to be named after everyone else in the family.)

"I've been thinking a lot about this summer. I had a very good time. . . . It was fun going out in the Fidelity -- remember the day we caught all those greasy pollock. . . . That was a good day. . . . You and Noelle liked the Beach a lot, but I don't like going there. Now I am too old for that. If I get cold I get all stiff, just like my own Dad used to do. . . . This year for the first time I felt a little that way. . . . Another thing that was fun for me but wasn't too much fun for you and Noelle. It was when we went over to see My Mother -- 'Ganny to your Dad and Mom, Great Ganny to you.' I loved checking up on her -- wasn't she nice? She always cares how the other guy feels.

"But, 'P', I've been thinking about it a lot -- the most fun was the big rock boat, climbing out on it. . . . Watching you and Noelle playing on it. Near the end of the summer when the moon was full the tides were higher, and there was that special day at high tide when it almost seemed like the boat was real. . . .

"No, I think the most fun was that rock boat. . . . Don't ask me why this was the most fun. Maybe it's cause just at that moment I turned a corner in my life. I could see down the road with no fear and I suddenly had great happiness because I felt that in 50 years or so, you'd be there out on that rock boat -- loving the ocean as I do, surrounded by family love -- aching a little bit when it gets cold. I can't wait til next summer -- Love, Gampy."

This is what makes George run. It was bred in his bones. "It was a, uh, very enjoyable, a very unnoteworthy existence. We were very lucky." -- George Bush, on his childhood THE HOUSE ON GROVE LANE HAD NO number when George Bush was a boy. People just called it the Bush house, and everyone in Greenwich knew. The town, about 45 minutes from Manhattan via the New Haven train line, was among the wealthiest communities in America. With its endless miles of stone fences and homes visible from the road only when the leaves were off the trees, Greenwich was the proverbial world apart. Its great summer estates, those of the Rockefellers and the Milbanks, had been subdivided by the '30s, but the bankers, brokers and businessmen who bought Greenwich's new miniature estates assured its affluence. The Great Depression raged, but the children of Greenwich would grow up without even a memory of it.

"Did you talk about the issues of privilege versus underprivilege, the haves and the have-nots?" George Bush's younger brother Jonathan is asked.

"No, no, no," he answers.

George Bush attended the private Greenwich Country Day School in his elementary years. It was the kind of place where students could joke about how their chauffeurs had gotten them to school on time during even the worst of blizzards. The Bush chauffeur, Alec, was among the best. At home, there were maids and a cook, golf and tennis lessons, the whole nine yards. Christmases were spent in South Carolina, where Mrs. Bush's father, George Herbert Walker, owned a plantation named Duncannon. On their visits, the children awoke in the freezing mornings to the sound of the black servants building crackling pine fires in their bedrooms.