TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073189/07318900.049

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.3 KB | 235 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 60

Junior Is His Own Bush Now


In a new venue and new career, the eldest First Son, GEORGE W.
BUSH, swings for the fences as the Texas Rangers' owner and a
future candidate

By Laurence I. Barrett


    Game time is almost two hours away in cozy Arlington
Stadium as the Texas Rangers take batting practice. Along the
baseline, hefting a bat like a mace of office, George Walker
Bush ambles through his own pregame drill. He chats up players
and reporters and makes small talk with fans, using a down-home
twang and slang that belie ten years of New England schooling.
They seek his autograph as eagerly as they do the players'. Bush
scribbles on a baseball, a hat, a scrap of paper. On this warm
summer evening, not one sportswriter or spectator asks about his
relative with the extra middle name, George Herbert Walker Bush.
In Arlington the White House feels about as far away as
Tiananmen Square, both in distance and in culture.

    During the 18 months that he labored in his father's
campaign headquarters, acting as the family enforcer among the
hired handlers, Bush was often a bristly presence. "Junior," as
Washington insiders called him, was out of his element back
East, uncomfortable in his father's shadow once again. Of the
five Bush children, George, the eldest, had always been the most
drawn to Dad's patterns of endeavor. What rebellion he waged was
stylistic. He became the real Texan in the family -- chewing
tobacco, using barnyard humor, settling in the state's western
corner -- the one harboring what his aunt Nancy Ellis calls a
"slightly outrageous streak."

    When he returned to the state last December, he chose a new
venue, Dallas, and a new career. With an alchemy of
serendipity, energy and a famous family name, he fused two
groups of investors into a combine that bought the American
League's Texas Rangers this spring. Says his youngest brother
Marvin: "This is a real opportunity for him to be George W. Bush
and not George Bush Jr."

    Bush's role as a managing partner includes being the
visible front man. Sitting through nine sweaty innings is part
of his strategy to improve the image of a club whose fortunes
had been waning. No air-conditioned sky box for this owner. "I
want the folks to see me sitting in the same kind of seat they
sit in," he says, "eating the same popcorn, peeing in the same
urinal." So he is quite happy when fans chirp to him about the
team's improved won-lost record. He saves his broadest,
Hollywood-handsome grin for the occasional urging that he run
for Governor in 1990.

    That possibility was on his mind for months, well before
the Rangers deal came down at him with the speed of a Nolan
Ryan fastball. And why not? The Republican incumbent is
retiring, and George W. has inherited his father's genes for
ambition and seizing opportunities. He stumped Texas extensively
for his father last year, delivering standard conservative
scripts with energy if not eloquence. His name would make fund
raising easy. No single rival for the G.O.P. nomination
dominates the field.

    Then doubt set in; 1990 could well be a Democratic year,
advisers told him. His mother Barbara said in a newspaper
interview that he should not run this time. If he ignored her
admonition, he would have to give up active management of the
Rangers this fall. So he is likely to defer politics, though it
remains indelibly on his agenda. In a sports-crazed state,
success as a baseball operator is a political plus. "My biggest
liability in Texas," he says in his twang-free interview voice,
"is the question `What's the boy ever done? So he's got a famous
father and ran a small oil company. He could be riding on
Daddy's name if he ran for office.' Now I can say, `I've done
something -- here it is.'"

    The "boy," 43 this month, has in fact done a fair amount by
ordinary standards. Despite the vagaries of the energy
business, he cajoled his first million from it when he sold out
to a larger enterprise in 1986. But the world measures the
children of the great by different standards. And George W., as
he is sometimes tagged to distinguish him from "Big Bush,"
compounded that problem by using Dad's resume as the road map
of his early life. He followed that path through Andover and
Yale, then learned to fly combat aircraft. Alone among the Bush
offspring, he returned to Midland. There, where he had been a
fanatic Little League player, he replicated his father's
oil-field ventures.

    Such filial fidelity is hardly unique, but Junior's respect
for his father grew to reverence. Says his first cousin John
Ellis: "The whole key to understanding George W. is his
relationship to his father." It was a loving one with both
parents. But with Barbara Bush he developed a joshing
comradeship that still has them punching each other's hot
buttons. "We fight all the time," the Silver Fox says with a
laugh. "We're so alike in that way. He does things to needle me,
always." With his father, awe never left the equation.

    When the children were young, Barbara was the magistrate
for misdemeanors while her husband judged felonies. "I would
scream and carry on," she remembers. "The way George scolded was
by silence or by saying `I'm disappointed in you.' And they
would almost faint." Young George was most vulnerable to the
"disappointed in you" line. "He could be made to feel," Marvin
says, "that he had committed the worst crime in history."

    One offense that lives in family lore occurred after the
parents moved to Washington. While visiting, George took Marvin
on an outing that included too much beer for both. Driving
home, George clipped a neighbor's trash can. Alcohol fueled what
the family calls his feisty side. Confronted by his father, he
remembers his attitude as, "`O.K., what are you going to do
about it?' Real smart. I was drunk." Eventually, he turned
totally dry. "I would tend to talk too much when drinking. If
you're feisty anyway, you don't need any reason to be more
feisty."

    The garbage-can caper punctuated, at 26, what George W.
calls his nomadic period. Prepping at Andover had presented
cultural and educational shock for the kid from San Jacinto
Junior High in Midland. At Yale, where his father had earned
both a Phi Beta Kappa key and a place on the varsity baseball
team, the son was an average student who discovered that his
baseball prowess had peaked in prep school. His gregarious
nature got him elected president of his jock fraternity.

    Many members of the class of '68 were figuring how to avoid
Viet Nam. His fraternity brother and later business partner,
Roland Betts, says that George faced a special pressure: "He
felt that in order not to derail his father's political career
he had to be in military service of some kind." A 53-week
program in the Texas Air National Guard qualified him in F-102
interceptors. Lieut. Bush signed up for a program that rotated
Guard pilots to Viet Nam, but he wasn't called. Instead he held
short-term jobs, including a stint at Pull for Youth, a Houston
program serving ghetto youngsters. "I wasn't interested in
taking root," he says. "I was having fun." Once, with Marvin as
company, he decided to take a few of the Pull for Youth kids on
a plane ride. One of them became abusive and refused to be
hushed. So George used a simple pilot's trick: he momentarily
stalled the engine, scaring his passengers into white-knuckled
silence.

    In his late 20s, still single, he decided to attend Harvard
Business School. The curriculum appealed to him far more than
Cambridge's liberal atmosphere. Watergate was nearing its
climax, and Bush pere was in a defensive crouch as Republican
national chairman. The son sympathized from afar, then decided
to take his M.B.A. back to Midland, to learn the oil business
as a "landman," one who researches mineral and land records.

    Initially this meant a two-room apartment off an alley and
a lot of generosity from old pals. During this period he
reinforced a reputation for frugality. At Midland's annual golf
tournament, one of the gag trophies is the George Bush Dress
Award, shaggy plaid trousers bestowed on the competitor sporting
the worst attire. Its eponym still buys bargain threads at a
factory outlet. Despite his recent affluence, he continues to
describe himself as "all name and no money." Thrift is a virtue
for someone trying to build his own business without capital.
Bush became known as a shrewd dealmaker who could attract
investors without incurring debt. As the energy business
flourished in the late '70s, he built a small, solvent outfit
of his own. He also married Laura Welch, a librarian, just three
months after they met. She explains the courtship's brevity by
saying, "We were both 30, and had had a lot of single years. We
were glad to find each other."

    With an open congressional seat beckoning, George decided
to try politics in 1978. He won the Republican primary over a
more experienced rival. But in the general election Bush faced
a Democrat as conservative as he and one who had spent his
entire life in the district. Bush's Ivy League education became
a cultural liability. He lost by 6 points. By the mid-1980s the
oil industry's downward cycle had made capital increasingly
difficult to come by for smaller operators. So he agreed to
merge his outfit with Harken Energy.

    As Big Bush's presidential efforts accelerated in early
1987, George and the second oldest son Jeb had doubts about Lee
Atwater as campaign manager. To allay those concerns, Atwater
invited one of the brothers to join the campaign organization
full-time. So George, Laura and their twin daughters moved to
Washington for the duration. After a dozen years of
independence, he was back in his father's orbit being called
Junior.

    He remembers finding Washington a "hostile environment."
The campaign operation was often a mud wrestle among contending
egos. "I was the loyalty thermometer," he says. Frequently he
cut through bureaucratic inertia to get necessary decisions
made. And he was ever leery of leaks and resentful of the
personal ties to reporters that Atwater and other heavyweights
had. Yet it was Junior who went on the record with a Newsweek
correspondent to deny salacious gossip about the candidate. It
was a brash act that both got the adultery rumor into print and
choked off its circulation. Occasionally Atwater used him as an
emissary to the candidate when the mission was delicate. It fell
to Junior to present the idea that Bush would strengthen his
image by "swinging the ax" on Don Regan at a time when the White
House chief of staff was about to topple. The Vice President
said no.

    According to one associate, George was "terribly insecure
around his father," apparently unsure of his standing. Not so,
the son insists: "In the campaign, he and I attained a new level
of friendship." Then, in a tone sounding more conjectural than
convinced, he adds, "I know there were times -- I could just
tell -- when he respected my opinion." But he had to guess when.

    He did not have to guess about his destination after the
election. With Midland suffering hard times, his connection
with Harken offered a Dallas base from which to look for a new
business and think about politics. But around Thanksgiving he
learned from a former partner that a group attempting to buy the
Rangers probably would fail to get American League approval.
Always fascinated by baseball, Bush hesitated not a moment. Well
before opening day in April, he had assembled a syndicate of
investors far wealthier than he.

    "Being the President's son puts you in the limelight," he
says. "While in the limelight, you might as well sell tickets."
So on a typical evening recently, while going through his
personal pregame drill, he eyeballed the stands. "Looks like
around 25,000 tonight," he estimated. That's the number the club
needed to break 1 million in attendance, a milestone that came
later in previous seasons. Later the gate was announced: 26,244.
Though the Rangers were losing a close game, the new owner
beamed. "I like selling tickets," says Bush the businessman.
"There are a lot of parallels between baseball and politics,"
says Bush, the once and future politician.