GEORGE BUSH Excerpted from an essay by Michael R. Beschloss More than any other leader portrayed in this book save Eisenhower, Bush based his three campaigns for the presidency less on issues and ideology than on his persona as a leader of experience and character. Born in Milton, Massachusetts, in 1924, Bush matured in Greenwich, Connecticut, a setting that gave him little inkling of the political culture in which he would spend his adulthood. The boy was surrounded mainly by Anglophile, moderate Repubicans, for whom politics was Good Government and the town meeting, who minimized partisan confrontation and overstatement. As Bush's mother, Dorothy, admonished, one did not brag about oneself.... Had Bush in 1948 stayed in Connecticut after his heroism in the Pacific War and graduation from Yale, he would have been well poised to succeed his father in politics . As senator from Connecticut, George Bush would have been temperamentally and ideologically in tune with his state and party. Instead, eager to hack out his own business career, the young man took his wife, Barbara, and son, George, to the oilfields of Texas. This meant that from the day he entered politics, he would have to submerge many of his views and instincts to please an electorate that was notably more conservative than he. Politics was easier for Ronald Reagan: for every minute of his political career, he had the luxury of being in natural harmony with his party. Not Bush. The first harbinger of this was in the spring of 1962, when Houston friends persuaded him to run for chairman of the Harris County Republican Party, whose slogan was "Conservatives Unite!" The local party was in imminent danger of takeover by the | |
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