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The mediocrity that roared | page 1, 2, 3, 4
And Bush's path to politics took him through alcohol troubles, too, mostly of his own making. At Yale, his drinking drew notice, but wasn't a problem -- it was part of the curriculum for a member of the rowdiest fraternity on campus. But the partying continued when he joined the Air National Guard and didn't let up when he left. He bounced around, working on a couple of Republican Senate campaigns and signing on as a management trainee for an agribusiness company in Houston, then quit. His favorite job, he reveals in his autobiography, was sporting goods salesman at Sears. (There is an entry in the index to
"Charge" for Sears Roebuck and Co., by the way, but not for Securities and Exchange Commission.) Bush apparently reached his nadir around Christmas 1972. Home for the holidays, worrying his parents by working too little and partying too much, he got carried away at a party with his 15-year-old brother Marvin, and drove the boy home drunk, smashing into a neighbor's garbage cans and infuriating his parents. His father asked to see him in the den, and a drunk George W. burst in: "I hear you're looking for me. You wanna go mano a mano right here?" Jeb Bush broke the tension by announcing to his unhappy parents that George had been accepted to Harvard Business School. (Would that all domestic crises on the verge of violence could be diffused so easily!) But the angry young George insisted he didn't plan to go to Harvard, he just wanted to prove he could get in (no mean feat given his solid C's at Yale). After the drunk-driving incident, his worried father got him a job at Project PULL (the placement Hatfield would insist was community service to expunge his alleged cocaine bust). And Bush may be counted among the many young people the inner-city project saved from self-destruction. Bush himself would say he found a "mentor" in PULL founder John White, a former Houston Oiler turned community activist in Houston's African-American Third Ward. It was White who urged him to accept the entry to Harvard Business School. "If you really care about these kids as much as I think you do, why don't you go and learn more and then you can really help," Bush says White told him, and he took the advice. After the Hatfield firestorm, Jay Leno would make fun of the fact that the Bush campaign was denying a cocaine arrest preceded his Project PULL stint, when the truth was it was only a drunk driving incident -- as though the latter wasn't scandal enough. Even Minutaglio's softer version of the nomadic years provokes the reader to wonder what was eating at the affable son of privilege, driving him to squander his advantages on alcohol and a badly controlled anger. And none of the books resolve it. It's easy to see he spent most of his adulthood trying, and failing, to measure up to his father, struggling to go "mano a mano." Ultimately, though, he did what his father was never able to do: find acceptance as a Texan and win statewide office. And his personal troubles paradoxically make him a far better politician than his father could dream of being. While Bush hasn't publicly reckoned with his demons and how he gained control over them, the semi-public struggle has become part of his legend, giving him what depth he has and a sympathetic, instinctive identification with the underdog. He, his handlers, the media and the voters all know that's the most interesting thing about him. It also threatens to ruin him, as time and again, he faces questions about his past and flubs them with a series of lame non-denials, leading the public to the inescapable conclusion that sometime more than 25 years ago he did some kind of illegal drug. Odds are he'll face the questions again, because Americans don't like mysteries, and they don't like unfairness. Everybody knows that hard-drinking, drunk-driving, angry C students from Houston's Third Ward don't grow up to become governor, after all -- let alone president.
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About the writer Table Talk Sound off Related Salon stories Publisher halts George W. Bush bio As J.H. Hatfield's credibility crumbles, St. Martin's Press stops distribution of his new book, which says the GOP front-runner was arrested on drug charges in 1972. Bush: As compassionate as he has to be Just how far will George W. reach out to minorities? As far as he can without alienating any bigots. President of what? George W. Bush led the Delta Kappa Epsilon branding regime at my university. Now he wants to lead the free world. Homeboy in the 'hood In the Democratic bastion of Harlem, George W. Bush further outlines his education plan while taking a swipe at the GOP. The real Bush drug scandal Texas Gov. George W. Bush has presided over a crackdown on first-time drug offenders from poor neighborhoods like Houston's Third Ward Bottoms. Louder than words George W. Bush, who refuses to answer questions about his own drug use, slashed drug rehabilitation programs for inmates while ushering in tougher sentencing laws. George W.'s California swing The Texas governor meets the GOP gilded on his first campaign trip to the Golden State. On the road with George W. Bush Where never is heard a discouraging word for the goofy cowboy who would be president. "I'm a uniter, not a divider" George W. Bush talks with David Horowitz about going from patrician to populist -- and from party boy to presidential front-runner. Prodigal son How will George W. Bush -- and the GOP -- confront the whispers about his past?
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