From his earliest days, George Bush was a man who valued courage, loyalty, and service. Those were the traits that his mother and father had instilled in him. And the United States of America, especially its citizens in uniform, embodied those ideals. That was the country that Dad risked everything to defend. And that was the country he would one day lead.

HEADING WEST

I ONCE ASKED MY MOTHER how she and my father managed to stay happily married for almost seventy years. “Both of us have always been willing to go three-quarters of the way,” she said. She meant that each of them was more committed to their marriage than they were to themselves. They were both willing to alter their own needs in order to satisfy the other’s.

Throughout my life, Mother and Dad exhibited that selfless love. In their early married years, Mother showed it most. After all, she was willing to go three-quarters of the way across the country.

The decision to move from New Haven, Connecticut, where my father graduated from Yale in 1948, to West Texas shaped my parents’ life. By driving his red Studebaker away from the opportunities waiting on Wall Street, George H.W. Bush defied convention, took a risk, and followed his independent instincts. My parents learned that they could survive and thrive amid a harsh climate and unfamiliar people. They took to a competitive industry notorious for its booms and busts. They laid the foundation for a strong marriage—a lasting, lifelong partnership that endured profound trials, produced great joys, and set an inspiring example for my siblings and me. They gave me another gift. All my life, I have been grateful to George and Barbara Bush for raising me in West Texas.

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IN NOVEMBER 1945, George H.W. Bush stepped out of uniform and enrolled at Yale. Like many of his generation, college had been delayed by the war. Many incoming freshmen were parents. Mother and Dad joined their ranks on July 6, 1946, when I was born at Grace–New Haven Hospital. They named me George Walker Bush, after my father and great-grandfathe

r—minus the Herbert. I recall asking Mother why I wasn’t a Junior. “Son, most forms don’t have room for five names,” she said. I took my time to arrive, entering the world only after my grandmother Dorothy Walker Bush administered a healthy dose of castor oil to Mother. (It was my first taste of the oil business.)

Mother and Dad lived less than an hour from his parents in Greenwich, but life in New Haven must have felt worlds away from Prescott and Dorothy Bush’s house on Grove Lane. My parents first rented a tiny apartment on Chapel Street with their black standard poodle, Turbo. When I arrived, they had to move out because the landlord allowed dogs but not babies. They found a place on Edwards Street, where the owner allowed babies but not dogs. Fortunately, I made the cut and Turbo went to live at Grove Lane. In their final year in New Haven, my parents moved to a large house on Hillhouse Avenue occupied by about a dozen families with children. Mother still laughs about hanging my diapers out on the clothesline in plain view of the Yale President, who lived next door.

My parents enjoyed their New Haven years. Any stresses of college paled in comparison to what my father had endured during the war. That’s not to say that Dad took it easy. As usual, George Bush threw himself fully into the task. He worked hard in the classroom, earning Phi Beta Kappa academic distinction and graduating in two and a half years. He was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He was very outgoing and made a lot of friends. On their first Thanksgiving at Yale, Dad learned that some of his classmates could not travel home to be with their families. So he invited ten friends over for dinner. Mother reminded him that they did not have a dining room. That did not matter. My parents and their friends sat on the couches and the floor and enjoyed the first Thanksgiving turkey that Mother had ever prepared. That impromptu meal was a preview of things to come. Throughout the years, my parents’ many homes were open to family and friends. While Mother occasionally complained about the endless stream of visitors, she was always a gracious hostess.

Not only did my father make friends, he kept them. Decades later, he was in regular contact with his college friends. One of his friends was Lud Ashley from Toledo, Ohio. Like Dad, Lud eventually went into politics. Unlike Dad, Lud was a liberal Democrat. In Washington, they were on the opposite sides of some of the most heated political questions of their times. That did not affect their relationship. They spent time together and shared laughs just like they had at Yale in the 1940s. Once you were a friend of George Bush’s, you had that status for life.

My father’s favorite collegiate pursuit took place on spring afternoons at Yale Field. As he later put it, he majored in economics and minored in baseball. He was captain of the team and, like his father, played first base. Mother and I attended nearly all his home games. During her pregnancy, she sat in an extra-wide seat designed for former Yale law professor William Howard Taft. She loved to keep score, and one of my favorite things to do as a little guy in Texas was to read her box scores of Dad’s games. The Yale team reached the College World Series in 1947 and 1948. They finished second to the University of California

–Berkeley the first year and to the University of Southern California the next year. (For true baseball aficionados, the Cal Bears were led by Jackie Jensen, the American League MVP in 1958, and the USC Trojans were managed by the legendary Rod Dedeaux.)

My father’s most famous moment as a college ballplayer took place on the pitcher’s mound. There he met Babe Ruth during the spring of his senior year to receive a signed copy of Babe’s autobiography for the Yale library. A photographer snapped a picture that would later become iconic: one great man near the end of his life, another just embarking on his.

It’s hard to imagine how Dad managed to do it all—to be a top student, a star athlete, a man with a huge group of friends, and a devoted husband and father. As Mother put it with characteristic bluntness, “He worked hard.” That’s true. George Bush did not waste time. He filled every minute of every day with activity.

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WHILE DAD’S MOST famous moment on the diamond featured Babe Ruth, his baseball hero was Lou Gehrig. Dad admired Gehrig’s ability, consistency, and modesty. He dreamed of following in Gehrig’s footsteps as a major league ballplayer. After one Yale game, a few interested scouts reached out. While my father’s fielding was excellent, he didn’t have a big enough bat to make the major leagues. His coach, Ethan Allen, described Dad with classic managerial brevity: “Good field, no hit.”

My father ruled out other options as well. In June 1948, he received a surprising letter from a childhood friend, Gerry Bemiss. Evidently, Bemiss had heard that Dad was entering the ministry. While my father was always a religious man, he did not envision a career in the clergy. “I have never even thought about the cloth—only a tablecloth or a loincloth,” he wrote.

One option was to go work for his uncle George Herbert Walker Jr., known as Herbie. Herbie adored my father. In later years, I sensed that the attention he showered upon Dad came at the expense of the love he gave to his own sons. He assured my father that he would have a prominent place at his Wall Street firm. Similarly, executives at Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott Bush’s firm, made a serious recruiting pitch for my father.