As an eighteen-year-old kid who loved his dad, I took the loss hard. I felt like getting out of the hotel ballroom as quickly as I could. My father showed me a different way to deal with defeat. He gave a gracious concession speech and spent the night shaking hands and thanking supporters and campaign staff.

When the final vote tally came in, George Bush had something to be proud of. While LBJ had beaten Goldwater by 700,000 votes in Texas, Dad lost to Yarborough by only about 300,000 votes. More than 1.1 million Texans voted for my father—the highest statewide total that any Republican had ever received, including Dwight Eisenhower in his two presidential campaigns.

The LBJ landslide was unstoppable across Texas. After the 1964 election, there were no Republicans in the state senate and only one Republican in the 150-member state house, Frank Cahoon of Midland. In hindsight, it’s hard to see what more Dad could have done. The lesson of 1964 was there are some races that you just can’t win. Two years later, however, he found one that he could.

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BETWEEN 1950 AND 1960, Texas’s population expanded from 7.7 million to 9.6 million. Houston grew from under 600,000 to almost a million. In 1965, Houston’s one congressional district split into three. My parents lived in the newly created Seventh District. As a former Chairman of the county party and a strong candidate in 1964, Dad would have a good shot at that new seat. The loss in the Senate race stung, but (like Prescott Bush’s losses in 1952) it didn’t dampen my father’s enthusiasm for politics or his desire to serve. He announced his candidacy for Congress in January 1966 and ran unopposed for the Republican nomination.

The Democrat in the general election was Frank Briscoe, the District Attorney for Harris County. Unlike Ralph Yarborough, Briscoe was a conservative. Since he and Dad agreed on most policy issues, the race turned on personality. Dad ran billboard ads that showed him carrying his suit jacket casually over his shoulder, a youthful and energetic image. His campaign’s official slogan was “Elect George Bush to Congress and Watch the Action.” He gave more than one hundred speeches in the fall campaign. Former Vice President Nixon and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford both came to Houston to campaign for him.

Briscoe took a personal approach too—he personally attacked George Bush. Like Ralph Yarborough, he called him a carpetbagger. But Dad turned the provincialism into an advantage. He repeated the mantra he had adopted in 1964, “Texan by choice, not by chance.” That attitude appealed broadly, since a majority of the voters in the district were new Texans. Dad’s memorable phrase, along with his billboards, provided my introduction to messaging in politics. Then, as now, a catchy and accurate slogan can help a candidate grab the attention of busy voters, especially those who are open-minded enough to consider crossing party lines. I like to think that I picked up a few supporters by describing myself as a “compassionate conservative” in the 2000 campaign.

As a college student on the East Coast, I didn’t have the chance to give Dad much help on the 1966 campaign. I did fly down from Connecticut for the election-night party in Houston. This time the victory party lived up to its name. Dad won 57 percent of the vote. George Bush was headed to Congress as the representative of Texas’s Seventh District—a district that has remained Republican ever since.

MAN OF THE HOUSE

UNLIKE SOME MEMBERS of Congress, Dad decided to move his family with him to Washington when he was elected. He was a family man first, and he wanted to be around as much as possible while my younger brothers Neil and Marvin and my sister Dorothy grew up. (Jeb and I did not live with our parents in Washington; I was finishing college, and he was in high school at Andover.) My parents sold their house in Houston, bought a town house there for Dad’s trips back to his district, and moved into a home in Washington’s Spring Valley neighborhood. They purchased the house sight unseen from Senator Milward Simpson of Wyoming, whose son Alan later followed his father into the Senate and became a lifelong friend of my parents’.

I didn’t see my parents all that often in the late 1960s. I was in college and then figuring out what I wanted to do with my life—a transitional period that I once described by saying, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsi

ble.” One thing I’m sure of is that I tested my father’s patience during those years. After a hard-fought tennis match in Washington, Dad’s friend Jimmy Allison and I became quite inebriated. I later drove my tennis partner, my brother Marvin, back to my parents’ house. Everything went fine until I struck our neighbor’s garbage can, which had been placed on the curb. I then zoomed into the driveway. Mother had watched the scene unfold. She was furious.

“Your behavior is disgraceful,” she said. I stared at her blankly. “Go upstairs and see your father,” she said.

I defiantly charged upstairs and put my hands on my hips. “I understand you want to see me.”

Dad was reading a book. He lowered his book, calmly slid off his reading glasses, and stared right at me. Then he put his reading glasses back on and lifted up the book.

I felt like a fool. I slunk out of the room, chastened by the knowledge that I had disappointed my father so deeply that he would not speak to me.

That was as close as we got to an argument. Dad was not the kind of man who engaged in verbal fisticuffs. He would let my siblings and me know when we were out of line, and he expected us to correct the problem. Eventually, we did.

George Bush’s great gift to his children was unconditional love. No matter how we expressed our individuality, no matter how badly we misbehaved, he always loved us. Over time, that love itself became a powerful source of independence. There was no point in competing with our father—no point in rebelling against him—because he would love us no matter what. I took that lesson to heart when I became a parent. When Barbara and Jenna were teenagers, they had independent streaks that reminded me a lot of times past. I used to tell them, “I love you. There’s nothing you can do to make me stop loving you. So stop trying.”

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DAD ENJOYED serving in Congress. In the Capitol, he earned a reputation as a hardworking Congressman. He frequently flew back to Houston, where he stayed in close touch with his friends and constituents in the district. Like his father, he worked six days a week and spent most Saturday mornings signing letters and writing personal notes. Sundays were reserved for church in the morning and hamburger lunches in my parents’ backyard in the afternoons. The lunches, which became somewhat legendary, featured an eclectic blend of invitees: family members, staffers, fellow Members of Congress, neighborhood friends, visiting constituents, and Washington insiders like the journalist Charlie Bartlett. Dad also included friends that he had met in earlier phases of his life. One of my father’s most impressive qualities was his ability to make new friends while keeping old ones. No matter how high he rose in business or politics, George Bush never discarded old friends. The hamburger lunches were a great illustration of Dad’s range of friends. The diverse group of guests would mingle on the lawn, chatting and drinking beer, while Congressman Bush flipped the burgers.

Mother was a willing hostess. She took to Washington quickly, setting up the new house and helping my younger siblings settle into their new schools. She easily made a circle of close friends, and she loved to organize tours of the Capitol and other Washington landmarks for visiting family and guests. Whenever my younger siblings had free time, she made sure they took advantage of the opportunity to experience the history and culture of the nation’s capital.