George H.W. Bush Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals, George H.W. Bush summary: George H.W. Bush was the 41st president of the United States of America. He was born in Massachusetts in 1924, and he was the son of a senator. He joined the United States Navy and was a pilot during his service in World War II. When he returned home from the war, he attended Yale University. After his graduation, he moved to Texas. In 1966, Bush was elected to the House of Representatives after an unsuccessful bid for a senate seat in 1964. He served in the House for two terms. He held other positions, including United Nations ambassador, before setting his sights on the White House.
Bush was unable to secure the Republican nomination for president in 1980, but he was chosen as Ronald Reagan’s running mate. Regan defeated Jimmy Carter in the election, and in 1984, he was re-elected. Bush served as vice president through both terms. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis in 1988 and won the election, becoming the 41st president of the United States. He is a member of the Republican Party and was active in promoting the War on Drugs.
His son George W. Bush became president of the US years later. During George H. W. Bush’s presidency, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Mauel Noriega lost his hold as dictator of Panama. He acted swiftly after Suddam Hussein, former president of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. However, his presidency was marred by the country’s economic instability, and he lost the election of 1992. He currently resides in Texas.
In the old man George Bush, you can still find shadows of the boy who enlisted on his 18th birthday in 1942 in high hopes of becoming a Navy pilot. The thatch of unruly brown hair. The crooked, ingratiating smile. The clear blue eyes and the long, angular face. The disjointed sentences that don’t always parse. The oddball sense of humor he became known for after he earned his wings and was floating in the Pacific on the carrier USS San Jacinto and flying torpedo bomber runs off its short deck. He reaches into his office desk in Houston and pulls out a copy of one of his favoritecartoons. It’s a man ordering a meal in a fine restaurant at a table across from a giant fly: “I’ll have the gazpacho, leeks vinaigrette with shrimp, marinated zucchini, orange mousse, a bottle of Cotes du Rhone Rouge ’59. And bring some shit for my fly.” We laugh at the joke, but he laughs harder.
As his old crew mates on the San Jac might say, “Same old George.”
It was so long ago, those three years of war. In the 62 years since, he has been an oil entrepreneur, U.S. congressman, U.S. liaison in China, ambassador to the U.N., head of the CIA, vice president and president of the United States. He presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union. He won Desert Storm, scored among the highest approval rating of any president ever, then lost in his reelection bid. He told me only weeks after his 1992 defeat, “It’s just so embarrassing.” But that’s only his public life. He lost a three-year-old daughter to leukemia, raised five kids, two of whom are, famously, the former governor of Florida and the current president of the United States. And, although it was never in doubt, he stayed forever married to his wartime love, Barbara, the Silver Fox.
But those three years at war, well, as a piece of life experience, they still top it all. Without that war, America no doubt would have heard from George Bush, whose great ability and family wealth assured him great opportunities, but he would have been a far different George Bush.
“Was it a shock to go off to war from your background?” I asked him 20 years ago for a Washington Post Magazine article on his life.
“It was the shock,” he answered.
The former president is just off hip replacement surgery at the Mayo Clinic, and this morning is the first time he has been in the office in two weeks. He has a walker by his desk and his leg propped up on an open drawer. He leans forward in his chair, reaches for his leg around the knee with both hands.
“Could you lift my leg a little?” he asks. “It’s kinda personal, I know, but it’d help me out.” I lift and he adjusts. “Thanks.”
I call him an old man because, chronologically, he is. But there’s nothing “old” about George Bush. Despite his hip surgery, he went out to the finish line of a marathon race in Houston the other morning and shook hands with the runners. He globe-trotted with former President Bill Clinton to raise money for disaster relief. He’s doing mental exercises to keep his mind and memory sharp. He took up e-mailing a while back and has started bolstering his famous penchant for personal letters with personal e-mails.
As they say, young is where you find it.
“They were a huge effect on me,” he says of his war years. “I was a kid that came out of a very closed environment, relatively privileged in the sense of growing up. My dad could send us to good schools. He could take care of us if we got sick. Most of the guys that were signing up for World War II couldn’t do that. So it was an eye-opener for one thing, in terms of just interaction of my privileged life with those from all walks of life.”
“Showing to myself that I could do it, compete, hold my own…was very, very important in terms of my own being.”
Like so many World War II vets, he came home and rarely talked about what he had seen and felt and learned about love, faith, family, fate, bravery, fear, death and grief. Yet even among his naturally reticent generation, he was particularly reticent to talk about himself and his experiences. It was all part of his family’s brand of Eastern, Episcopalian, patrician, puritanical values. It seems too quaint for some to accept as anything but myth today, yet Bush’s parents inculcated in their children an old-fashioned noblesse oblige that encouraged public service, empathy and personal modesty. His mother, Dorothy, the family enforcer on this score, demanded that her children never “blow on” about themselves. “George, nobody likes a braggadocio,” she told him again and again, and George listened well.
It wasn’t until he entered politics in the 1960s that he had no choice but to break his mother’s rule and market his war story like a suit off the rack, as did every other politician who could claim the crucible of that war on his resumé—Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Robert Dole, to name a few.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, George Bush was the biggest man on campus at one of America’s great male bastions of private high school privilege, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., known to the initiated as “Andover.” Captain of the baseball and soccer teams, student council secretary, senior class president. He was a BMOC who, following his mother’s teachings, was kind to everybody, no matter his social pedigree, the kind of kid who helped the fat guy in gym.
At Bush’s graduation ceremony that spring, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, himself an Andover graduate, told the boys they should go to college and let the draft do its work. Young George, already accepted at Yale, would hear none of it. His father, Prescott, a partner in the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, asked if Stimson had changed his son’s mind.
“Not a bit,” said George.
Years later, he said simply, “I wanted to serve—duty, honor, country.”
Soon after, Prescott Bush put George, who would go on to become the Navy’s youngest pilot, on a train out of New York’s Pennsylvania Station. It was the only time George had seen his stoic father cry. After nearly a year of training, Bush landed on San Jacinto.
Then came September 2, 1944. As he and his two-man crew dove their Avenger bomber through anti-aircraft fire toward a Japanese radio tower on the volcanic island of Chichi Jima, 150 miles north of Iwo Jima, his plane was hit at 8,000 feet and caught fire. He finished his dive, dropped his four 500-pound bombs successfully on target and headed out to sea. He could have tried to make a water landing, something he had done once already when another Avenger he was flying lost power. That day, he and his crew got out of the plane and into the life raft before the plane sank. But this time, the burning Avenger could blow up before they got to the water. He ordered his radio operator and gunner, neither of whom he could see from the cockpit, to “hit the silk,” an order heard on the radio by crewmen in other U.S. planes. No response. He remembers banking his plane steeply to the right to lessen the slipstream pressure on the rear door and help his crew mates exit. Then, at about 3,000 feet, Bush bailed out and hit his head on the plane’s tail. He landed in the ocean and freed himself from his chute. Another Avenger dived to signal the location of his life raft, which he swam to and climbed in.
His head was bleeding and he was throwing up from having gulped seawater. He secured his revolver and started hand-paddling furiously away from Chichi Jima, where Japanese gunboats had already headed out to get him. Avengers and the Hellcat fighters that protected them strafed the boats but soon had to return to San Jacinto. Young George, who would later be awarded the Navy’s Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions that day, didn’t feel much like a hero. He feared correctly that his crew mates were dead. In that life raft, he began asking himself the question that still haunts him in his Houston office at age 82: “Did I do all I could to save them?” In the raft, he cried. It seemed like a miracle when more than two hours later the periscope of the submarine USS Finback appeared.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” a sailor said as Bush was hauled on deck while the sub’s photographic officer recorded the scene on his 8mm camera.
Aboard Finback that night, Bush slept fitfully and had the first of many nightmares about his Chichi Jima mission and the fate of his crew mates, John “Del” Delaney, who had been his radio operator the whole time aboard San Jacinto, and William “Ted” White, the son of a Bush family acquaintance and the ship’s ordinance officer, who had repeatedly asked Bush to take him on a bombing run for the experience. That morning, White had won approval from Bush and his squadron leader to replace Bush’s regular gunner, Leo Nadeau, on a single mission. Although Bush didn’t know it just after the crash, one crewman on his plane, according to the squadron commander’s action report, also had bailed out, but his parachute didn’t open and he fell to his death. The bodies of Delaney and White were never found.
Remarkably, the letter Bush wrote to his parents the next day from Finback was saved by his mother: “Yesterday was a day which will long stand in my memory….I will have to skip the details of the attack as they would not pass the censorship, but the fact remains that we got hit….There was no sign of Del or Ted anywhere around. I looked as I floated down and afterwards kept my eye open from the raft, but to no avail….I’m afraid I was pretty much a sissy about it cause I sat in my raft and sobbed for awhile….I feel so terribly responsible for their fate, Oh so much right now. Perhaps as the days go by it will all change and I will be able to look upon it in a different light….Last night I rolled and tossed. I kept reliving the whole experience. My heart aches for the families of those two boys with me.”
