Born to Run

With the hot months of summer, the Bushes left Greenwich for Maine, where Grandfather Walker also owned Walker's Point. The Walker family, in the dry goods business in St. Louis, had bought the place to escape the summer polio epidemics of the city. George's father, Prescott Bush, a New York financier, would arrive in Maine by sleeper car on Saturday mornings and return Sunday nights. The children had a small motorboat, and the neighbor kids always marveled that George and his older brother, Pressy, were allowed to take it out alone.

"There wasn't much 'heavy weather' in those days," recalls FitzGerald Bemiss, an old George Bush friend from the years their families summered together in Maine. George and his friends -- the children of other white, rich and successful fathers -- fished and swam and heaved ripe rose hips at each other along the rocky waterfront. And at night, George and Pressy climbed into their bunk beds on the screened-in porch and fell asleep to the sound of the pounding surf.

If all this sounds a little Old Worldly, it was. George's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, 85 and still living in Greenwich, chuckles self-consciously at the memory, especially the thought of George and Pressy being driven to school by Alec the chauffeur. "It seems unbelievable now," she laughs.

Yet all this gentility harbored a fierce competitiveness. Grandfather Walker, after whom George Bush is named, was a champion polo player and the donor of golf's Walker Cup British-American amateur competition. Grandfather Bush was a fine golfer and George's father was the Yale baseball team captain and Ohio's amateur golf champion. Mrs. Bush's brother, Herbert, called Uncle Herbie in the family, was an avid golfer and a Yale letterman in baseball. Prescott and Herbie, the reigning family patriarchs, were fierce competitors, and a guest on the golf course was once shocked to see a virulent argument break out between them when the guest declared a 10-inch Prescott putt a "gimmie."

"You can't give him that putt!" Herbie fumed. The guest didn't.

George's mother was competitive, too, but delightfully so. A superb golfer and tennis player, she never lost her temper at a bad shot or a muffed putt or criticized poor play in others. Her young sons might be storming around the court, throwing tennis rackets, kicking the net, but she would ignore them, and calmly call out the score. Dorothy Bush was a lithe, beautiful, vivacious woman with a marvelous sense of humor. A devout Episcopalian, she seemed to live by the Bible's pieties effortlessly. "I didn't ever say anything disagreeable about anyone in front of her," recalls FitzGerald Bemiss. Behind her gentleness, though, Mrs. Bush also took her games seriously. Visitors discovered, for instance, that she wouldn't pair them with their spouses at say, tennis, unless the couple was well-matched. Feckless adult athletes found themselves playing children.

The Bushes competed at everything -- golf, tennis, tiddlywinks, backgammon, blackjack, bridge, anagrams. Anything that measured one person against another. When George was a young man, his teen-age brother, nicknamed Bucky, was given a new ball-in-a-labyrinth game and beat George handily. Bucky went to bed proud and awoke to George's casual challenge to a rematch. George won with a perfect score. Family members, in on the joke, howled with laughter: George had stayed up late perfecting his game to ambush Bucky.

Yet the competitiveness remained good-natured. The concept of "family" was so powerful that it sometimes seemed to friends that the Bush children functioned as a single mind rather than as five kids fighting for parental affection. No doubt some of that grew from a unique quirk of Mrs. Bush's, who tempered her children's hell-bent, prideful pursuit of victory with this ironclad rule: No one could brag! "I just couldn't bear braggadocio," she says.

The Bush kids did not automatically get respect; they earned it. George Bush's son Jeb, 33, would later say that he and his siblings believed they "weren't crap" until they'd gone out and proven themselves on their own. Says George Bush: "That's exactly the way I felt 40 years ago." Bush is terrible at recalling childhood stories, but one sticks clearly in his mind. At 8 years old he came home from tennis and told his mom he'd been "off his game." With uncharacteristic anger, she snapped, "You don't have a game! Get out and work harder and maybe someday you will."

"You just didn't talk about yourself," recalls Jonathan Bush. "Bad taste."

Aimed at shaping humility in proud, rich children who could easily come to think they were "better" than others, this attitude kept the Bush kids from acting self-important. Yet there's also a tension between craving recognition and enforced humility. "These people regarded themselves as 'better'," Nicholas King, author of a sympathetic 1980 Bush biography, says of New England's patrician class. "Bush has neutralized this. But at one time he would have had to be this way." Indeed, Bush's inbred reluctance to "blow on" about himself now seems constantly at war with his prideful craving for admiration.

"You could never come home and say you played well in a game," Jonathan Bush says. "I think it was a mistake, frankly. . . . You're really suppressing your joy in achievement." The result: Pressy could brag that George had played well or George could brag that Pressy had played well. A child could bask in success only through the eyes of admirers. At this, George became the master. All the Bushes liked the limelight, says Bush's boyhood friend George de B. Bell, whose family also summered in Maine, but George liked it the most. "He wanted to be the Number 1 guy," Bell says. "It was in his makeup." With George's father around, that was difficult. He was an imposing 6 feet 4, a stiff, stern man, gracious and friendly, but formal even with his children. "At one point I said I never heard him fart," says Jonathan Bush, laughing. You'd never find Prescott on his knees giving horseyback rides or putting together a toy train set. He rarely joined the family games, which seemed to swirl around him. And he was very sparing in his praise.