Poppy

On June 12, 1924, a second son was born to Prescott and Dorothy Walker Bush of Milton, Massachusetts. Named after his fabulously wealthy and entrepreneurial maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker (the namesake of golf's Walker Cup), little George Herbert Walker Bush was soon called "Poppy" to distinguish him from his grandfather, who was "Pop" to his extended family. Less than two years later, Prescott Bush took an executive position with U.S. Rubber in New York City, and the young family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. Prescott was on a corporate fast track, helped in part by friendships he had formed and family connections. His first job came as the result of an offer from a fellow member of Skull and Bones, Yale College's oldest and most legendary secret society. Not long after reaching New York City, Prescott left U.S. Rubber to begin a long and distinguished career with the international investment house W. A. Harriman and Company, owned by the family of his Yale classmate Roland "Bunny" Harriman and managed by his father-in-law, Bert Walker.

The Bushes were High Church Episcopalians. They went to church regularly, but they considered a person's relationship to God, as indeed one's own emotions, to be a private matter. Pres and Dottie were strict and formal and expected the same from their children. Self-discipline, however, was not synonymous with lacking a sense of fun. Their home was full of music; Pres loved to sing. And from the moment he could walk Poppy Bush was encouraged to play games and to have a passion for competition. Both of his parents were good athletes and always played to win. Pres and Dottie enjoyed tennis together and Pres, like his father-in-law, was an accomplished golfer, and in 1926 he became chairman of the United States Golf Association's Championship Committee.

In the family, which ultimately grew to four boys and one girl — Prescott Jr., George, William, Jonathan, and Nancy — the children were taught early on to take responsibility for themselves. It was up to each one to decide where he or she would go to prep school. Since his adored older brother, Prescott Jr., had chosen Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, George followed in 1937. He excelled at baseball and soccer and became the captain of both teams. He was also a leader off the field, eventually becoming the president of his senior class and a member of the editorial board of the student newspaper, the Phillipian, and — a mark of one of his interests to come — chairman of the annual charity drive on campus. As a senior he nearly died from a staph infection in his right arm. Surviving this ordeal, which required a lengthy stay in the hospital, may have given him a sense of mission, if not destiny.

Even as a young man, Poppy had a strong sense of self, and more than any of his siblings he internalized the family's culture of competition. (When Prescott Bush was a Republican senator from Connecticut in the 1950s, he became notorious for never allowing President Dwight Eisenhower to win at golf.) Yet as success brought yet more success for Poppy, his mother would remind him not to be self-centered, whenever possible not to use the pronoun I, and to avoid, at all costs, patrician pretension, which she colorfully termed the La-Dee-Dahs. Years later, when Bush was president, his aides would explain his peculiar speaking style as the effect of a lifetime of motherly admonitions not to claim credit for himself alone.

To an even greater extent George Bush drew upon his father, whom he idolized, for life lessons. Most significantly, George embraced Prescott's strong sense of service. Prescott Bush had signed up for the Yale battalion in the U.S. Army in 1917 and saw action with the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1918. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, his senior year at Andover, Poppy hungered to follow in his father's footsteps and enlist as soon as he could in the great war of his generation. Even an admonition from Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Andover's graduation speaker in 1942, who advised the young men to stay in school, did not deter George from joining the military as soon as he turned eighteen in June. Nor did similar advice from his father. George Bush chose to become a naval aviator, earning his wings in June 1943 and becoming the youngest pilot in the entire U.S. Navy.

On a Christmas break his last year at Andover, Bush had met Barbara Pierce at a country club dance. Pierce, who was home from a girls' school in Charleston, South Carolina, was the daughter of Marvin and Pauline Pierce. Marvin was a director of McCall's Publishing Company, which produced mass-market women's magazines. After a brief courtship, Barbara would become the "girl back home" that George Bush would write to from his bunk and after whom he would name his airplane, for good luck. Before he left for the Pacific in 1943, he asked her to marry him

The U.S. Navy trained Bush in photographic intelligence, and it also matured him. "Coming out of a privileged background," Bush wrote forty years later, "I had had little exposure to the real world — to people from very different backgrounds. I went into the service as a gung ho kid, scared at times, becoming a Naval Aviator." He would fly a torpedo bomber that was also equipped with cameras. In early 1944 Bush reached Pearl Harbor onboard the San Jacinto, a converted light carrier. His first bombing run came in May against the Japanese positions on Wake Island. These bombing runs were extremely dangerous, and before long Bush would lose two of his close friends in action.

With the capture of Guam in August 1944, the U.S. military turned to the island barriers of Japan. Bush's squadron was given the responsibility for knocking out the radio transmission center on Chichi Jima, to blind Japanese intelligence to the steady forward movement of U.S. forces. On September 2, Bush flew his Avenger with its four 500-pound bombs into Japanese antiaircraft fire as he had done by now dozens of times. This time, however, some flak hit his plane. "There was a jolt," Bush later recalled, "as if a massive fist had crunched into the belly of the plane." Despite a cockpit that was filling with smoke, Bush steadied his throttle and continued aiming for the target. Dropping his bomb load, Bush then headed out to sea. He radioed to his two crewmen, John Delaney and Ted White, to get out of the plane and use their parachutes. Without hearing anything in response from the other side of the armor plate at the back of the cockpit, Bush unstrapped himself and climbed onto the wing. Failing to make a clean jump, Bush hit his head on the back of the plane and ripped his chute. Tumbling 2,000 feet into the water — moving faster because of the hole in his chute — Bush nevertheless escaped major injury. He deployed a small life raft and began paddling. A pilot seeing him in distress strafed Japanese ships on their way to capture Bush. A few hours later a U.S. submarine fished the...