Another time, Dad explained that he’d lost a tennis match because he’d been off his game.
“You don’t have a game,” his mother shot back. “If you work harder, maybe you’ll get one.”
His mother’s early lessons in humility stayed with my father his entire life. During his 1988 presidential campaign, I accompanied him to the National Press Club in Washington, DC. He was there to share his knowledge of world affairs and answer questions from the audience. George Bush knew the policy issues cold. His handling of questions on Soviet relations and Central America was a tour de force. As a lighthearted finale, the moderator asked, “Why are you wearing a red tie?”
The question caught him off guard. From my chair next to the podium, I could see him struggling for an answer. I stage-whispered, “Because I spilled gravy on my blue one.”
Dad grabbed the verbal lifeline, and the room erupted in laughter at his self-deprecating quip. Then he ruined the moment by blurting out, “That’s what you have a son for.” That was typical of my father. Proper attribution of the gravy line made no difference to me; I just wanted him to look good. But George Bush was just too humble to fake it.
Dorothy Walker Bush was a woman of strong faith. She read Bible verses to her children over breakfast every morning. One of her favorites passages was Proverbs 27:2: “Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth.” Every Sunday, she expected the family to go to church, usually Christ Church in Greenwich or St. Ann’s in Kennebunkport.
While religion played a central role in her life, she never used her beliefs to judge others harshly. Her faith was solid and enduring, and it gave her an enormous capacity to love. When I think of her, the words angelic and saintly come to mind. One of my favorite memories is of visiting her and my grandfather in Greenwich when I was little. She would tickle my back as we knelt down to say prayers before bed: “Now I lay me down to sleep.”
My grandmother reserved a special kind of love for my dad. As his brother Jonathan once told me, “Mum loved us all, but she loved your father more.” He continued, “The amazing thing is, none of us resented that. We loved him too.” It says a lot about my grandmother and my father that their family felt that way. When Dorothy Walker Bush died at age ninety-one, Dad called her “the beacon of the family…the candle around which all the moths fluttered.” Of all the influences in his life, nobody did more to mold his character than his mother.
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IN THE FALL of 1919, shortly after she celebrated her eighteenth birthday, Dorothy Walker met Prescott Bush in her hometown of St. Louis. He stood six foot four and weighed well over two hundred pounds, without a trace of flab. He had dark black hair, a deep baritone voice, and a big, bright smile. He had come to my grandmother’s house to visit her older sister, Nancy, whom he had recently met at a St. Louis social club. When he saw Dottie Walker stride into the room from an afternoon tennis match, he was smitten. Before long, so was she.
Like Dorothy Walker, Prescott Bush had grown up in the Midwest. His father, S.P. Bush, ran a manufacturing company in Columbus, Ohio, called Buckeye Steel. An avid sportsman, S.P. had helped organize a local baseball league, served as an assistant coach on the Ohio State football team, and cofounded Scioto Country Club, which featured a Donald Ross–designed golf course where Bobby Jones won the U.S. Open in 1926 and a young Jack Nicklaus learned to play.
After spending his childhood in Columbus, Prescott Bush went east to Rhode Island for boarding school at St. George’s. He excelled in the classroom and, like his father, was a fine athlete. His best sports were baseball and golf. While my grandfather wasn’t exactly the Golden Bear, he remains the best golfer ever to tee it up in our family. He held a scratch handicap for most of his life, competed in the U.S. Senior Open, and more than once shot his age.
For college, Prescott Bush went to Yale. (His grandfather James Smith Bush had started the family tradition of attending Yale.) A star first baseman on the baseball team, he was also such a solid golfer that the golf team recruited him for their toughest matches. On some spring days he would hit the links in the morning and the ballpark in the afternoon. He also had a great voice. He sang with the Yale Glee Club and the Whiffenpoofs. While we inherited some of Prescott Bush’s traits, my father’s branch of the Bush tree did not acquire his vocal talents.
In 1916, just before he began his senior year, my grandfather was one of a handful of Yale students to volunteer for active duty with the Connecticut National Guard. When America entered World War I, Lieutenant Bush shipped off to France as a field artillery officer. He spent ten weeks on the front lines under the command of General John “Black Jack” Pershing. When Germany surrendered, he served as part of the occupation force before returning home with the rank of captain. His decision to volunteer made a profound impression on my father, who would face a similar choice a generation later.
After the war, Prescott Bush took an assistant manager job with Simmons Hardware in St. Louis, where he soon met Dorothy Walker. They married in August 1921 at St. Ann’s in Kennebunkport. (At the time, I doubt they could have envisioned the parachute jump there ninety-three years later.) As a present for the new couple, Bert Walker built them a bungalow on the grounds of Walker’s Point. The house still exists and is now occupied by my sister Dorothy, who is named for our grandmother.
My grandparents spent their early married years on the move. Prescott Bush took on business assignments in St. Louis; Kingsport, Tennessee; and Columbus, Ohio. Eventually he accepted an executive position with a rubber company called Stedman Products in South Braintree, Massachusetts. My grandparents found a house in Milton, Massachusetts, on Adams Street, named for the political family that produced Presidents John and John Quincy Adams. There, on June 12, 1924, George Herbert Walker Bush entered the world.
It wasn’t long before Prescott Bush was on the move again. In 1925, he accepted a new job at the U.S. Rubber Company in New York City. He moved his family to Greenwich, Connecticut, about thirty-five miles northeast of Manhattan. Greenwich was the town where my father would grow up and my grandparents would live for the rest of their lives.
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ONE OF THE lessons that my father and I learned from Prescott Bush was the value of making and keeping friends. During his time at Yale, Prescott Bush had befriended Roland Harriman, known as Bunny. (I have never understood how a man got the nickname “Bunny.”) Shortly after my grandfather arrived in New York, Bunny floated the idea of his joining him at the W.A. Harriman investment house, which his older brother, Averell, had founded and Bert Walker had joined as President. My grandfather accepted the offer. His trust of Bunny overcame any reluctance that he might have felt about working for his father-in-law. A well-tended friendship thus opened the door to my grandfather’s thirty-year career in investment banking. Eventually he became one of the leading partners at the firm, which merged with Brown Brothers to become Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the most respected and successful firms on Wall Street. The firm was also bipartisan. Averell Harriman, a Democrat, later became Governor of New York and a leading member of the Roosevelt and Truman administra
Prescott Bush taught his children that the measure of a meaningful life was not money but character. He stressed that financial success came with an obligation to serve the community and the nation that made prosperity possible. Although he was busy with his Wall Street career, he always made time to serve causes that mattered to him. He was an early leader and prolific fund-raiser for the USO, which supports our military and veterans. He served as an official in the United States Golf Association, eventually becoming its President (a position that his father-in-law, Bert Walker, also held), and he was a strong supporter of the United Negro College Fund. For two decades he served as moderator of the Greenwich Representative Town Meeting, a position that paid nothing and required huge amounts of time. While his friends were out at dinner parties or playing cards, he was on the phone trying to persuade homeowners to grant easements for the Merritt Parkway, an important highway that connects Connecticut and New York. A devotion to serving others was one of the most important values that Prescott Bush instilled in his children—and that my father passed along to my siblings and me.