LeTourneau had enough confidence in his design that he offered to build the drilling platform if Zapata would advance him four hundred thousand dollars and promise a stake in the company if the rig worked. The venture was risky, but Zapata decided to bet on the eccentric engineer.

In 1956, LeTourneau’s revolutionary rig, nicknamed “the Scorpion” or “the three-legged monster,” made its debut in the gulf. Mother and I flew out on a small prop plane with three of Dad’s fellow oilmen to witness the christening. I was amazed by the size of the rig. The platform measured 185 feet by 150 feet, each leg extended 140 feet, and the contraption weighed nine million pounds. Many years later in Midland, I was reminded of Dad’s entry into the offshore oil business when I ran into one of the other fellows aboard the prop plane that day. He informed me that I owed him a new hat. “Why’s that?” I asked. “Because you vomited in my old one on the flight over,” he said.

Over time, George Bush and the Liedtkes decided to split Zapata into two separate companies. My father would take the offshore assets; Bill and Hugh Liedtke would keep the onshore assets. The Liedtkes went on to phenomenal success, merging with South Penn Oil and creating one of the world’s great energy companies, Pennzoil. Dad made a lot less money in the offshore business, but he was thrilled that his friends had done so well. He loved the work that he had chosen. And he never judged his worth by the size of his wallet.

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IN 1959, SHORTLY after the division of Zapata, my father moved our family five hundred miles east across the state to Houston, where most offshore drilling companies were based. I’m sure it was tough on my parents to leave Midland, where they had made so many friends. But they were confident about their ability to adjust to a new home. And we did, thanks in large part to Mother. Despite the fact that she was raising four children (me; Jeb, born in 1953; Neil, born in 1955; and Marvin, born in 1956) and pregnant with a fifth (Dorothy, born later in 1959), she coordinated all the moving logistics and oversaw the construction of a new house on Briar Drive. Mother made sure the house quickly became a home.

Houston was a bustling big city that opened up new horizons—for Dad’s business career and for me. I remember the first time we were hit by one of Houston’s famous torrential rainstorms. It felt like living in a tropical jungle compared to our time in Midland. I started at a new school, Kinkaid, that offered more options than my schools back in West Texas. And unlike Midland, Houston had professional sports. I remember watching the Houston Oilers play the Dallas Texans in one of the first AFL championship games. In 1962, the city attracted a major league baseball team, the Colt .45s. They would soon be renamed the Astros and play in the Astrodome, known at the time as the eighth wonder of the world. For a sports-minded kid, Houston was heaven.

The offshore business involved serious financial risk. Without drilling contracts, Zapata’s rigs and workers would be idle. Dad traveled the world to drum up new business. His experience working with foreign businessmen and government officials laid an important foundation for his later diplomatic positions. Running the company also taught him key management principles. He learned the importance of hiring knowledgeable people and listening to their advice, of delegating responsibility and holding people accountable, and of making tough decisions and accepting the consequences. When things went right, he shared the credit. When things went wrong, he took the heat. This experience helped him develop the leadership style that he would employ for decades to come.

Although the oil business was filled with uncertainty, my father rarely showed stress. Any problems he had were kept inside. His vigorous exercise regimen helped. There were times when my father’s tireless pace caught up with him. On a business trip in England in 1960, he collapsed on the floor of his hotel room. Fortunately, he managed to push the help button on the way down. The British doctor told him that he had food poisoning, but when he got back to Texas his doctor diagnosed him with a bleeding ulcer. The cause may have been stress, or it may have been exhaustion. Either way, the doctor told my father that he was lucky to be alive.

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IN HIS EARLY YEARS, George H.W. Bush did not appear to be a very political person. He followed the news and voted when he was of age, but he didn’t belong to any political organizations. Aside from his race for senior class President at Andover, he had never been involved in a campaign.

That began to change in 1950, when my grandfather decided to run for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. My father was twenty-six and launching his career in the oil business, so he couldn’t do much to help his dad. Nevertheless, he followed the race closely, and his father’s decision to run got him thinking about whether he might like to do the same in the future.

Prescott Bush was not a typical politician. At fifty-five years old, the only public office he had held was moderator of the Greenwich town meeting. He considered himself a Republican based largely on his pro-business beliefs, and he had been an active fund-raiser for the party in Connecticut. Party officials had approached him about running for Congress in 1946, and my grandfather was interested. But his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman discouraged him. They considered their investment house more important than the House of Representa

tives.

Another opportunity arose four years later when Connecticut’s junior U.S. Senator, Raymond Baldwin, resigned to accept a seat on the state supreme court. In November 1950, the state held a special election to choose a Senator to serve out the final two years of Baldwin’s term. Connecticut Republicans convinced my grandfather to run. This time his Wall Street partners supported the decision.

As a formal man who had spent most of his life in the boardroom, my grandfather had to adjust to life on the campaign trail. He worked hard, traveled throughout the state, and enlisted the singing talents of the Yale Whiffenpoofs to lighten up his campaign events. He ran television ads, a relatively new technique at the time that he had learned about while serving on the board of directors of CBS.

A few days before the election, the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson broadcast a false report that my grandfather was President of the Birth Control League. The charge hurt with the state’s heavily Catholic population, which opposed birth control so strongly that it was illegal to sell contraceptives in Connecticut. My grandfather lost the election by just over a thousand votes, less than one-tenth of one percentage point. It wouldn’t be the last time that suspicious election-eve maneuvering affected a candidate named Bush.

I’m sure my grandfather was disappointed to lose, but he had run a strong campaign and grown more comfortable on the stump. He ran again for the same Senate seat in 1952. This time he lost in a close primary. After the defeat, Prescott Bush resolved that he was done with politics. He had given it his best shot, and a career in the Senate was not to be.

Then fate intervened. Less than two months later, Connecticut’s other U.S. Senator died unexpectedly. State Republicans again urged my grandfather to run, and he agreed to do it. His perseverance paid off, and he won the special election by a healthy margin. Prescott Bush, whose political career had seemed doomed a few months before, was sworn in as a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. George Bush learned an important lesson: Do not allow defeat to extinguish your dreams. If you keep working and remain optimistic, opportunities can come your way.

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THANKS TO HIS character and his contacts, Prescott Bush became a highly respected Senator. He had served on the Yale Board of Trustees with the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. He also made friends with Senators on the other side of the aisle, including Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, who became Majority Leader in 1955, and a fellow member of the New England delegation, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Back in the 1950s, the Senate was a lot more collegial than it is today.