"A Good-Time Guy"

The family of George W. Bush had prospered since the nineteenth century on its close connections, first to American manufacturing and finance and then, eventually, to politics. George W. Bush's great-grandfather Samuel Bush was a railroad and steel executive. His grandfather Prescott Bush was a prominent Wall Street investment banker who was later elected to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut in 1952. His father, George H. W. Bush, became an oil executive in his early adult years, prior to entering politics, at first unsuccessfully, before finally rising to be president of the United States.

At the time George W. Bush was born, his father, then twenty-two years old, was still an undergraduate at Yale University, completing his college education after service in World War II. His twenty-one-year-old mother, a former debutante named Barbara Pierce, had had a difficult pregnancy, having gained more than sixty pounds, and was unable to deliver until, on her mother-in-law's advice, she finally took some castor oil. It worked. George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, a town that would years later come to symbolize his lifetime resentment of East Coast elites and intellectuals.

The baby was nicknamed Georgie. He became, in his mother's words, "a much beloved and slightly spoiled little boy." When he was two, his parents moved to West Texas as his father forsook Wall Street to pursue a career in the oil business. He was offered a job as a trainee in Texas by one of his own father's business partners.

The Bushes moved first to Odessa, Texas, and then settled in 1950 in the town of Midland, a hot, dusty city that lay over the mammoth oil and gas fields of the Permian Basin. They spent the entire decade of the 1950s in Midland, participating fully in its weekly rituals: Friday nights at the high school football games, Sunday mornings at church, Mondays on foot to the local public school.

For his parents, raised in privileged enclaves in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Rye, New York, relocation to Texas was simply a career move and stepping-stone. By contrast, for George W. Bush, who spent his entire childhood there, Midland carried far deeper significance, lodging itself at the core of his personality, his worldview, his cultural outlook, and, eventually, his political identity. The younger Bush portrayed himself to the public as someone distant from the sophisticated lands of the East and West Coasts. In his own self-image, growing up in Midland was what distinguished him from his father. Even as George W. attended private schools and elite Eastern universities and benefited from his family's name and connections, he always emphasized his West Texas roots. As a rising politician, when he was asked how he was different from his father, he would often reply: "I went to Sam Houston Elementary School in Midland, Texas, and he went to Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut." On occasion, he even portrayed Texas's biggest cities as outside his realm. In 1995, on his first day as governor, Bush told a Texas state legislator, "Just remember, I'm from Midland, not Dallas." He became skilled, indeed shrewd, at assuming the role of the small-town Texas country boy.

The event that shaped Bush's childhood was the death of his sister Robin. Three years younger than George W., she was diagnosed with leukemia in early 1953, not long after the birth of the Bushes' third child, Jeb. The Bush parents hurriedly brought Robin to New York City for advanced care and proceeded to shuttle back and forth regularly for her tests and treatment, leaving seven-year-old George W. in Midland with friends. He was spared the details on how sick Robin was. "We thought he was too young to know," Barbara Bush later explained. After seven months, Robin died in New York. The Bushes flew home, drove to their son's elementary school, brought him out to the car, and told him the news. He was stunned, asking his mother several times, "Why didn't you tell me?"

In the months that followed, George W. seemed to take on the job of consoling his parents, particularly his mother. George H. W. Bush, rising in the oil business, was working long hours and was often on the road. Barbara Bush, whose hair turned white during Robin's illness, was home alone with George W. and the infant Jeb. "I must say, George Junior saved my life," she told an interviewer years later. Once, when one of George W.'s friends asked him to play outside, he said he had to stay home to take care of his mother. Years later, Bush reflected that his mother's response to Robin's death had been "to envelop herself completely around me. She kind of smothered me and then recognized it was the wrong thing to do."

The result was that George W. looked up to his father as a model, yet was closer to his mother and identified with her. "I picked up a lot of Mother's personality," he wrote in his memoir. He and his mother had similar senses of humor, similar habits of teasing and needling; they took similar delight in being blunt and irreverent. Later in life, George W. would joke to audiences that he possessed his father's eyes but his mother's mouth.

His father was by nature driven, high-achieving, respectful and respectable, controlled, prudent, loyal, polite, and dutiful. As a teenager and young man, George W. had the opposite traits. He was less driven than his father, less serious in his approach to life, and far less eager to convey an air of gravitas. Instead, he was cocky, mischievous, fun-loving, garrulous, and hotheaded—a curious blend of charm and cynicism. He admired his father but was disdainful of the established, East Coast–oriented world from which his father arose.

In 1959, as George H. W. Bush's oil ventures began to shift from inland Texas to offshore drilling, the family moved to Houston. George W. attended a local private school, Kinkaid, for two years and was then sent off to the Northeast to get a traditional Bush family education. His parents enrolled him at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, one of the country's leading prep schools, where his father had stood out as class president and captain of the baseball and soccer teams. George W. was given no choice; his father brought him to Andover for a tour, and, months later, his mother told him he had been accepted and would go there. His friends in Texas thought he was somehow being punished and sent away to boarding school for doing something wrong.

For George W., the school was at first terrifying. "Going to Andover was the hardest thing I did in my life, until I ran for president," he later wrote. One of his early assignments in English class was to describe a significant emotional experience; Bush, not surprisingly, chose to write about Robin's death. After using the word "tears" once in his essay, he looked...