Born to Run

"You might get a note at school," George Bush recalls.

"And what would he say?"

" 'I was very proud to see that you were elected captain of the team.' "

"How would he sign it?"

"Devotedly, Dad."

Prescott Bush had gone to private high school in Newport, R.I., then to Yale, where he was inducted into the prestigious secret society Skull and Bones, a direct pipeline to America's Eastern Establishment. At Yale, Prescott became friends with E. Roland Harriman. A few years out of college, Prescott married Dorothy Walker, whose father had left his finance firm in St. Louis to head a Wall Street investment firm being started by Roland Harriman's brother, Averell, who eventually became the quintessential member of the Eastern Establishment -- financier, ambassador and adviser to presidents. Prescott Bush followed his father-in-law to the firm that eventually became Brown Brothers Harriman.

Despite these powerful connections, Bush family folklore held that Prescott's own father had given him only $ 300 after college, which meant Prescott was a self-made man. Prescott worked long hours. He was forever taking important calls in his study. He was a Greenwich hospital board member and for 20 years served in the Greenwich government. He was home only a few nights a week. On Saturdays, he played golf.

"We were all terrified of him as boys," says Jonathan Bush.

The kids never knew it, Mrs. Bush says, but Prescott wanted to enter politics as a young man. He didn't enjoy business much and rarely talked about it -- he talked politics. He believed, however, that he first had to put his five children through their de rigueur private educations, elementary through college -- costing literally hundreds of thousands of dollars even then. So he was 57 before he became a U.S. senator; 67 when he retired in failing health. With pride and sadness, Mrs. Bush hints at a failed ambition: "He would have been the president of the United States if he'd gone into politics earlier."

Prescott Bush became the family's idealized image of achievement, propriety and duty. He talked constantly of the need to "give something back" to the society that had treated him so well. And if the Walker side of the family contributed its fun-loving spirit to the family, it was Prescott who contributed its stoic sense of noblesse oblige.

In personality, though, George took after his ebullient and empathetic mother. He liked pleasing people, and it was often said that he'd someday become a minister. "He was the easiest child to bring up, very obedient," says Mrs. Bush. She and George were great friends, sometimes even getting under the skin of the stiff-necked Prescott. George and his mother often broke into giggles at Sunday service, earning Father's glare. She also told the children that when Prescott joined the Elks, he sat naked on a huge cake of ice as his initiation. The idea of Father naked on a cake of ice put them in stitches -- if Father wasn't around. Says Jonathan: "Dad was no laughing matter."

Yet George rarely got in trouble with Dad, skirting the edge of his temper so that Prescott had to chuckle. Even then, George's intuition was sharp, and everyone came to recognize his magic. Young George was like a laboratory clone of his mother's personality and his father's values. He acquired his father's ambition but also his mother's enchantment. He was so kind, always watching out for the fat kid who couldn't keep up. He was the most popular boy with the kids -- and with the grown-ups.