HAT IN THE RING
BY THE AGE OF TWENTY-FIVE, George Bush had passed up the safety of college to serve his country as a naval aviator during World War II. He had passed up the financial security of Wall Street to learn the oil business in West Texas. His spirit of adventure and zeal for new challenges made it impossible for him to stand still. Over the next two decades, he pushed himself from one frontier to the next. In his business career, he went from an employee to an entrepreneur, from a small city to a big city, and from onshore oil to the new horizon of offshore drilling. His financial success made it possible for him to push himself again, from private business into public service, and from local politics to the national stage. Not every risk my father took in those years paid off. That taught him another lesson: If you refuse to give up, opportunity can arise not only from victory, but also from defeat.
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AS AN EMPLOYEE of Dresser Industries, George Bush saw the oil business up close, and he had learned a lot. One thing that he learned was that he wanted to enter the business on his own. Soon he set a new goal: to become an independent oilman.
Before my father could strike out on his own, he had to inform Neil Mallon that he planned to leave Dresser. As Dad would later tell the story, he was nervous about his meeting with Neil. He didn’t want to abandon the man who had given him his first shot in the business. When Dad broke the news that he was leaving, Neil was silent. Then he grabbed a yellow legal pad and spent thirty minutes telling my father how he ought to set up the business. Neil’s handling of the situation set a good example for Dad and later for me. Rather than harbor resentments or stand in the way of a talented employee, he chose to encourage and mentor. My father remained grateful for the rest of his life. Just ask my younger brother Neil Mallon Bush.
My father approached a friend and neighbor on Easter Egg Row, John Overbey, with the idea of starting a new partnership. Overbey was a University of Texas graduate who was savvy in the world of oil leases and royalties and had a good nose for finding information from old-time ranchers, scouts at oil companies, and fellow independents. My father brought a different set of skills. He had good relationships with prospective investors, especially on the East Coast.
By the spring of 1951, Bush-Overbey was up and running. Dad frequently traveled to the East Coast to look for money. Several of the company’s first major backers were family members or friends, including his father and his uncle George Herbert Walker, Jr., who was eager to take a bet on his favorite nephew. He also raised money from people like Eugene Meyer, then the President of the Washington Post newspaper corporation. Unfortunately, the paper wasn’t always so keen to support anyone named George Bush in later years.
My father was aggressive in raising money but cautious in spending it. Bush-Overbey took small stakes in a variety of projects, which offset risk but limited the chance of a big payout. On most mornings, Dad would get into the office early, fire up his typewriter, and write letters. He wrote to people he had met around town or on his trips, potential lessors, and investors. Over the years, he would apply his assiduous letter writing to politics and diplomacy. Today there are thousands of people around the world who can reach into a desk drawer and produce a thank-you note from George Bush.
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NOT FAR FROM the one-room Bush-Overbey office in downtown Midland was the law firm of Liedtke and Liedtke. Bill and Hugh Liedtke were brothers from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where their father was a lawyer for Gulf Oil. The Liedtkes had plans to build a large independent oil company, and they needed an ambitious partner to help. George Bush was the perfect fit, and Dad was eager to join forces. John Overbey wasn’t interested in the corporate life, so after a two-year partnership with Dad, he went his own way on good terms and became a successful independent oilman.
Dad agreed to raise half of the money to capitalize the new company. The Liedtkes would raise the other half. Once again, my father turned to his uncle Herbie and his Wall Street friends. They had seen decent returns from Bush-Overbey, and Dad convinced them that he could deliver even more. He lined up a half million dollars in capital. The Liedtkes did too.
Before they started making deals, they had to choose a name for the new company. The partners decided that their name should start with either an A or a Z, so that they wouldn’t get lost in the middle of the phone book listings. By chance, the movie Viva Zapata!, starring Marlon Brando, was playing at Midland’s downtown theater. The bold Mexican revolutionary general captured their independent, risk-taking spirit. Plus his name started with the right letter. In 1953, Zapata Petroleum was born.
It didn’t take long for the firm to live up to its daring name. Hugh Liedtke proposed that Zapata take $850,000 and invest it in one place, the Jameson field in Coke County. Some early exploration by another operator had proved that the field contained oil, although nobody knew how much. Betting the company on one investment was the opposite of the strategy of Bush-Overbey. But the prospect of hitting a big find was what made my father love the oil business.
The gamble paid off. By the end of 1954, Zapata had drilled 71 holes, and all 71 produced oil. Eventually, they went 127 for 127. Dad and the Liedtkes delivered a healthy return to their investors and walked away from the project with a lucrative payout. George Bush was too modest—and too smart—to spend wildly. He had a growing family to support, and he knew how unpredictable the oil business could be. We did move to a new, three-thousand-square-foot house on Sentinel Drive on the outskirts of Midland. The house had a swimming pool and backed up to Cowden Park, where I played my Little League games. For a little guy, that was about as good as it could get. Before long George Bush had another business idea, and soon we were on the move again.
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THE OCEAN HAS always fascinated my father. His favorite place in the world is Walker’s Point in Maine. As a boy, he spent his summers swimming, sailing, and fishing in the Atlantic. His grandfather Bert Walker introduced him to speedboats, which became a lifelong passion. Well into his eighties, he loved to take his powerboat, the Fidelity, on the water and crank her up as fast as she would go. In the 1950s, the future of offshore oil exploration was bright. So as a young oilman, George Bush was intrigued by underwater drilling.
The first oil exploration in the shallow waters off the Gulf of Mexico began in the late 1930s. Geologists believed that deeper waters could contain bigger deposits. Accessing those deposits required an offshore drilling platform that was big enough to reach the ocean floor, stable enough to withstand the waves and winds, and mobile enough to explore multiple locations. That kind of equipment required significant up-front capital expenditures. In 1954, Zapata Petroleum decided to create a new venture, Zapata Offshore, to build rigs and lease them out to oil operators. The new subsidiary was led by George Bush.
My father’s first big move was to bet on a brilliant but unconventional engineer, R.G. LeTourneau. LeTourneau
