II.

Early Life

George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, the first child of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce Bush. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a Wall Street financier who was elected to the Senate of the United States from Connecticut in 1952. Although George Herbert Walker Bush began his career in the oil industry, he eventually served as a congressman, head of the Republican National Committee, ambassador to the United Nations, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and vice president and president of the United States.

At the age of two, Bush moved with his parents from Connecticut to Odessa, Texas, where his father embarked on a career in the petroleum business. After a year in Texas, the family relocated to California for business reasons. A year later, the family moved back to Texas and settled in Midland, a town in western Texas located about 500 km (300 mi) from Fort Worth. Bush lived in Midland from 1950 to 1959. In 1953 his younger sister Robin, the next oldest child in the family, died from leukemia. After her death, Bush grew especially close to his mother. He had four other siblings: brothers Jeb, Neil, and Marvin, and a sister, Dorothy. In 1959, again for business reasons, the family moved to Houston, Texas. In 1961 Bush left Texas and went to Andover, Massachusetts, to attend Phillips Academy, a boarding school that his father had also attended.

At Phillips, Bush played basketball, baseball, and football. He was best known for being head cheerleader and commissioner of an intramural stickball league. In 1964 he enrolled at Yale University in Connecticut; his father and grandfather had also attended Yale. That same year, Bush campaigned for his father in his unsuccessful bid to win a U.S. Senate seat from Texas.

At Yale, Bush was considered an average student, but he was popular with his classmates. He was head of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and a member of the exclusive Skull and Bones, a secret society that his father and grandfather had also joined. During Bush’s time at Yale, college students all over the country began to hold protests about a variety of issues, including protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). Bush was uncomfortable with the growth of the student protest movement, and he generally refrained from participating in campus politics. In 1968 he campaigned on behalf of his father, who was running for reelection for a seat in the House of Representatives that he had won in 1966.

Bush graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1968. Upon completing college, he became eligible for the military draft. To meet his service obligation, Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard in 1968. He told the admitting officer that he wanted to become a pilot like his father, who was a highly decorated Navy flier in World War II (1939-1945). He did his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and entered a pilot-training program at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia. He received favorable reports from his superiors, attained the rank of second lieutenant, and was certified to fly the F-102 jet fighter during training missions in the South and along the Gulf Coast. After Bush failed to take a required annual physical examination in 1972, however, he lost his certification to fly. Bush remained in the Air National Guard until 1973.

During the early 1970s, Bush worked on U.S. Senate campaigns for Republican candidates in Florida and Alabama. He also worked for a Houston-based firm that specialized in large-scale agricultural operations. In addition, Bush was involved in a mentoring program for children in inner-city Houston. During this time, he flirted with the idea of running for state representative in Texas but decided against it. In 1973 he was admitted to Harvard Business School in Massachusetts.