His Great Gift, to Blend In : Team Player Bush: A Yearning to Serve

He is a man of many Americas, North and South, new money and old, the refined manners of the Connecticut upper crust and the brash spirit of the Texas oil fields.

There he is in the photos, one of history’s great survivors: ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, director of the CIA. He was nearly Nixon’s choice for vice president, nearly Ford’s, finally Reagan’s.

But there is something fuzzy in the grain, as if all this adaptability has caused things to blur. The quintessential team player, George Bush is indistinguishable from the team.

Devoted to Good Conduct

By temperament, that is his very impulse. He is not in government so much to lead as to serve. He is politic, cautious and glad to be of use.

A genteel upbringing has left its enduring stamp. His deep devotion is to good conduct, not the power of ideas. His urge is to accommodate, his great gift to blend in.

And it is the darndest thing, for what a singular life! Chapter by chapter, it is epic stuff. Top athlete. War hero. Yale man. Wildcatter. Millionaire. Off into politics. George Bush, born to privilege and blessed with ability, has lived what others merely dream.

Where many politicians have to manufacture and reinvent themselves, Bush is the genuine article. He was a star baseball player while Ronald Reagan only played one in the movies. He was a daring fighter pilot in the Pacific while Reagan flew simulated missions on the back lots of Culver City.

Bush has been married to the same woman for 42 years and has five children who adore him; Reagan is divorced, with children he rarely sees. Bush is a devoted churchgoer; Reagan seldom feels the need.

Yet it is Reagan who so naturally marches in step to the cadences of God, family and country, Reagan who is the courageous sheriff busting through the saloon doors to meet a dare.

And it is George Herbert Walker Bush, seven years the faithful sidekick, who is maligned for merely tagging along, George Bush reviled from the left and the right as a lap dog, a preppy and a wimp.

Character unfolds across a map of generations and geography, and to understand George Bush is to locate him along the crowded avenues of an eventful lifetime.

Directions come from boyhood pals and Navy buddies, roughnecks and executives, partisans and rivals, family who love him and family who don’t.

“What you’ll find about George Bush is that his life is almost too good to be true,” says his eldest son, also named George.

And, up to a point, the son is right. It is a life of almost uninterrupted success, of good deeds, lasting friendships and inner peace. But it is also a life so satisfied with its marrow that it has largely closed itself to reflection.

Accepts American Myths

“He has spent a lifetime thinking in conventional terms, never reaching beyond them, never even wanting to,” says Thomas (Lud) Ashley, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio and Bush’s close friend of 40 years.

The myths of America were accepted without inspection. Religion provoked no conflicts. Morality was as simple as common sense.

“There is a Christian innocence to George,” says psychoanalyst Ray Walker, Bush’s cousin. “His life has been without moral ambiguity. He feels he has been granted goodness and that his success proves the goodness was warranted.

“But this has all come to him without introspection, without any grappling about right or wrong. George plays it safe. . . . He plays for the status quo.”

George Bush, at 63, is a grown-up version of a model high school class president, the popular choice of students, teachers and principals. He is an “A” pupil and a jock and a nice guy. He makes no waves. He fits in.

He is a leader because he follows so well.

On Oct. 12, George Bush formally declared as a candidate for President. This began a long-promised if very careful unveiling, Bush freeing himself from the tethers of the vice presidency to be his own man.

“It has been so long since he has been able to say what is on his mind,” says Nancy Ellis, his sister, the regret heavy in her voice.

“Even if it gets him creamed, I can’t wait for the day he just stands back and says: ‘I want to do this and I want to do that.’ ”

For the longtime faithful, that is the great expectation, that a steely and magnetic candidate is rising up from seven years of temporizing.

But just what is it that Bush aches to say to America? What issues hit him square in the gut?

Ask those closest to him and their answers curiously turn toward matters of comportment, not national policy: fairness, loyalty, humor, manners.

“The gut issues for him are simple decency and public service,” says Rep. G. V. (Sonny) Montgomery (D-Miss.). “Bush runs for President because that’s what he thinks a good man should do.”

It is not that Bush lacks political convictions. He is dedicated to a traditional notion of mainstream Republicanism--a friend to big business and a skeptic of big government. But it is a shallow enthusiasm. He will follow that stream wherever the prevailing currents take it.

“The big decision Bush made as vice president was to salute the flag, and when the Administration jumped, he jumped too,” says former White House aide Richard Williamson.

Loyalty is what a President wants, and absolute loyalty to the President is what George Bush considers the right thing to do: no leaks, no tiffs, no saying no.

Rarely has he spoken up to disagree with Administration policy. When he has, he has done so only in private meetings with Reagan. He steadfastly refuses to discuss these talks, even with his staff.

In return for this constancy, he has come to seem like an adopted son, in line to inherit the family business. Polls show him to be the Republican front-runner. His campaign strongbox far outweighs those of his rivals.

But there is also a tax on the inheritance: the perception that he has been too obedient. Loyalty to the boss has not always seemed loyalty to the nation.

In the comic strip Doonesbury, he is portrayed as so spineless he is invisible, a yes man whose political manhood has been placed in a blind trust.

But the satire is too simplistic. George Bush is no wimp, certainly not in any sense of cowardice. On the contrary, he is astonishingly resilient and persevering.

Nor has he been untrue to his own sense of political ethics. For seven years, he has displayed the very essence of them--team play, tireless service, a practiced nod to the corporate pecking order.

Of his loyalty, George Bush says: “I think it’s good for the country and I think it’s good for the office of the vice presidency itself, and, if it isn’t good, well, that’s just too bad because that’s the way I was brought up.”

Exactly so. He is half Bush and half Walker, a pedigreed child of the Eastern Establishment. And that is where the map begins.

The big brown-shingle house on Grove Lane rests on a steep hillside and it was a fun place for the children. They could sled down the slope toward the trees or wander out back to explore the brook.

The long driveway curved into a canopied entrance. A broad veranda circled nearly clear around. There were quarters inside for the servants.

But by the standards of Greenwich, Conn., 28 miles from New York, this turn-of-the-century home was nothing lavish. There were many finer in a town among America’s wealthiest.

George, his sister and three brothers were often reminded that most youngsters did not live so well, but it was a hard point to make amid the magnificent estates near Long Island Sound.

“We never felt that Dad had any kind of wealth at all,” recalls Jonathan Bush, the youngest. “We had a cook and a maid and a chauffeur, but other kids had a lot more.”

Prescott and Dorothy Bush favored Greenwich for its convenience and serenity. There were private golf courses, where Prescott was a local champ. There was a well-kept tennis club, where Dorothy whipped all comers.

Most of all, Greenwich was a divine place to raise a family. The Bushes were known as active and close-knit and exceptionally happy. “Our childhood was like a beautiful dream,” says Nancy Ellis.

There was a seasonal rhythm to their lives. In the summers, the family awakened to the sound of the surf at Walker’s Point, Grandpa Walker’s oceanside house in Kennebunkport, Me.

The boys piloted their own small lobster boat. They played touch football in the sand. They chased up and down the craggy shoreline, splattering each other with rose apples.

At Christmastime, the scene changed to Duncannon, Grandpa Walker’s shooting lodge in the woods of South Carolina. On icy mornings, servants lit the bedroom fireplaces, the dawn brightening to the crackle of pine cones.

The children hunted on horseback. Clarence, the dog keeper, led the way with the hounds. The dogs scattered quail from the underbrush. A chuck wagon rolled behind with picnic lunches of finger sandwiches and hot consomme.

All this activity orbited around Dorothy, the mother. A warmhearted, religious woman, she was both recreation director and disciplinarian--the font of the family’s terrific energy.

She quoted the Bible at breakfast and never let the family skip a Sunday at the Episcopal Church, though they sometimes slipped away to the tennis courts before the sermon.

To her, the most unforgivable sin was boredom. She staved it off with relentless play, encouraging her children into golf, tennis, baseball, backgammon, charades. Name the game, the Bushes excelled.

Recreation was their cheerful heritage. Dorothy’s father, George Herbert Walker, was a champion polo player. He founded amateur golf’s Walker Cup. He headed the New York state racing commission.

Games--far more than literature or the arts--prepared one for life, or so went the premise. The goal was to be the best, though never to brag about it.

In victory, there was only one proper thing to say: “I was lucky.” Humility, politeness, sociability: These were insisted upon, applied purposefully day after day, like a sculptor’s pats.

And George, the second oldest, was the star of the brood. He was handsome and witty and agile. By disposition, he seemed his energetic mother’s replica. He was nicknamed Poppy, just like Grandpa Walker.

On the athletic field and in the classroom, he was the better of his older brother, Pressy. But George never rubbed it in. He was too thoughtful.

“Adults responded to him immediately,” says Betty Holden, a cousin. “George was simply exceptional. Everyone wanted to be with him.”

Betty’s father, the late Herbie Walker, favored this promising nephew even over his own sons. George craved acceptance from everyone he met, and liking him came effortlessly.

He was enough the sprite to enjoy a good prank, but there seemed little meanness in him. He never said anything smutty. He was the strong boy who kept the bullies off the weaker ones.

“When we were teen-agers, he was never interested in going out for a beer or trying to pick up some cutie-pie,” recalls Fitzgerald Bemiss, a boyhood friend. “He wasn’t preachy about it. He just said no.”

George Bush always had about him a sense of bearings. It kept him from going astray. He was a good boy from a good family, headed for good things.

If Dorothy Bush provided George with a winning personality, Prescott Bush passed on the blueprint for a well-rounded career.

An investment banker, Prescott was the family’s model of achievement and respectability. He was broad shouldered and 6-foot-4, charming in his own way, but also quite formal.

In the evenings, he took the train home from his office in Manhattan, a 45-minute ride. He did not like to miss the family dinner. Alec, the chauffeur, met him at the station.

“Hurry up, now, straighten up the library,” Lizzie Larkin, one of the maids, would scold the children. “Your father will be home soon.”

Her words held the lilt of an Irish brogue. She occasionally warned the boys: “Not one of you will ever be the gentleman your father is.”

At the dinner table, Prescott would question his children about their day. His voice carried the boom of an artillery officer. They did not dare ask him about his day. They simply reported.

The son of a successful Ohio businessman, Prescott had gone to prep school and then to Yale. He was captain of the baseball team. He was picked for the legendary secret society Skull and Bones, a much sought-after shortcut into the Eastern Establishment.

His business career led him to the investment firm of Brown Brothers Harriman, which boasted its share of Bonesmen. It handled the finances of some of America’s richest families. Prescott Bush rose to managing partner.

Though stocks and bonds busied his days, this stiff, dignified man was not one to talk about money at home. To him, the lust for it was unseemly.

His evenings filled up with civic duties. He was always dashing off to one meeting or another--the church, the hospital, the Community Chest.

For 20 years, he moderated the town meeting, Greenwich’s local government. He was a power in state Republican politics. At age 57, he went to the U.S. Senate, serving 10 years before retiring in ill health.

“We had a father who taught us to . . . put something back in, do something, help others,” George Bush said in an interview with The Times.

A good man should never permit wealth to become its own carefree refuge, Prescott insisted. Noblesse oblige, that was the thing: with privilege come obligations.

But while Prescott talked of social responsibility, he sheltered his children from all that was ugly and unfair, snug as larvae in a cocoon.

His son George did not make friends with anyone outside his social class until he met the few scholarship students at Phillips Academy, the prep school in Andover, Mass.

Psychoanalyst Ray Walker, Uncle Herbie’s boy, says the Bushes and Walkers never made the leap from their sense of noble obligations to genuine empathy. They are unconflicted by social guilt.

“Does anyone from the family understand what it is to be poor? No,” he says. “And the bigger question is: Do they understand their own ignorance?”

Walker, too, grew up in Greenwich, summered in Kennebunkport, played baseball at Yale. He has an admitted bias. He came to find the Bush-Walker clan stifling. He has not spoken at length with his cousin George in many years, though he has followed his career closely.

He says, “The family misses the point that all this altruistic public service is also serving you. It gives you power and a sense of goodness. . . . That’s the complexity of the thing. God help us from people who think they are going around exercising their goodness!”

But time is a great tutor. Maybe the years have educated a well-meaning man beyond the insularity of his youth. Bush’s sister Nancy and her husband, Alexander (Sandy) Ellis, tried to surmise.

Nancy: “I think George would be marvelous with the poor, don’t you think?”

Sandy: “Certainly, he cares in the religious sense. He knows it’s right to have that concern. But I’m not sure what kind of feeling he has for the poor. It wouldn’t be a priority with him. It wouldn’t be where the resources go.”

Nancy: “Well, I didn’t mean to say he’d be as dedicated as, say, Ted Kennedy. But, really, he’d be marvelous.”

Other young men had seemed heroes at Andover, but few left as remarkable a record as Poppy Bush. He was president of most everything, captain of the baseball and soccer teams, chairman of the student deacons.

At commencement in 1942, U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson--himself an Andover alum--told the graduates there was no need to rush into uniform. World War II had begun, but it would be a long ordeal.

It was the same argument Bush’s parents had tried, but George could not wait to sign up. He wanted to be a flier. He enlisted on June 12, 1942, his 18th birthday. When he got his wings, he was the youngest pilot in the Navy.

Bush was assigned to the San Jacinto, a small, fast carrier built on a cruiser hull. The pilots flew TBM Avengers, big, sluggish machines that never quite banked up fast enough as the bombs spun toward the ground.

Over the targets, the flak was awful. All around, the sky filled with puffs of white smoke. “It made your toes curl up and throat go dry,” says Leon Nadeau, who was usually Bush’s gunner.

One time, poised on the launch deck, Bush noticed that his oil gauge showed no pressure. He signaled to abort, but it was too late. The catapult pitched the plane into the mist. The engine sputtered.

“I was scared as hell,” Nadeau remembers. “We had to take it into the drink, riding down with four 500-pound depth charges in the bomb bay.”

Bush made his landing into a choppy sea. The tail hit first, then bounced along until the nose dropped and water cascaded all over. The crew escaped in a life raft, clearing away just before the charges exploded.

Months later, Bush came even closer to death over Chichi Jima, one of the Bonin Islands. The mission was to hit a Japanese radio installation, but midway into his dive, anti-aircraft fire chewed across the engine.

“Smoke poured into the cockpit, and I could see flames rippling across the crease of the wing, edging toward the fuel tanks,” Bush wrote, describing it in his autobiography.

He continued toward the target anyway, dumping the bombs before turning back over the ocean. By his account, he ordered the radioman and gunner to jump. The plane was about to explode. He bailed out himself.

Most likely, he pulled his rip cord too soon. Before he was free and clear, the plane’s tail hit him in the forehead. Then it snagged the parachute. When the canopy finally tore free, it was sliced with holes.

Bush splashed down, blood trickling across his face. He swam to a tiny raft that had broken free of his shoulder harness. Jellyfish stung his arms. There were no signs of his crew. They had not made it.

Stunned and nauseated, he paddled desperately with his hands, but the current was pushing him back toward the island. The Japanese sent gunboats to get him. Another Avenger swooped low and chased them away.

Bush’s only hope was to be picked up by a friendly ship. He stared toward the horizon and he prayed. After 90 minutes, a thin dark fin pierced the surface, maybe 100 yards away.

He saw a periscope, then a conning tower, then the full shape of an American submarine.

Yale had plenty of war heroes. The freshman class of 1945 was its biggest ever, more than half of them returning soldiers. It took months before the khakis gave way to gray flannels.

Bush did not arrive on campus alone. In January, while on leave, he married a girl he had met at a prep school party before going into the service.

He had spotted her across the room in a red-and-green party dress. He asked another boy to make the introduction. They danced once, then sat the next one out. It was a waltz, and he had not mastered the step.

Barbara Pierce was from Rye, N.Y., the well-mannered daughter of the president of the McCall’s publishing empire. “I married the first man that kissed me,” she says.

And that made things even. George was not terribly experienced himself. In just a few months’ time, the couple assumed their marriage inevitable. George never did pop the question. They merely began planning ahead.

At Yale, they had their first child. Barbara took the baby to the baseball games. George was team captain: a flawless first baseman if a little slack with the bat.

Back then, Yale was most often a rung on the ladder of high society; three of every five students had gone to prep school.

Politically, most lined up with the eastern, more liberal wing of the Republican Party--defenders of free trade and active foreign commitments.

But Bush cared little about postwar politics. He was not among Yale’s young activists or its intellectuals--the ones impassioned by the guest lectures of Sartre and Toynbee and Eliot.

He was a studious economics major, speeding through his academic credits in 2 1/2 years and making Phi Beta Kappa at that. His mind was untroubled by great awakenings or ideological free-for-alls.

“He wasn’t terribly well-informed, but he was such a congenial guy,” says Lud Ashley, who became his friend. “If anyone was predicting successes, Bush was at the forefront. He had this specialness about him.”

Like his father, George was tapped for Skull and Bones. He was seen as another acolyte for the Establishment--the old-line banks, the blue-blooded law firms, the gentlemen of government.

Behind the triple-padlocked door of the Bones’ windowless crypt, he was initiated into the society’s secret rituals. By custom, he was asked to confess his dreams and shames and sexual adventures.

Then he went off into the world, to get on with the destiny of his charmed life.

The way the story often gets told, plucky George spurned a chance to join Brown Brothers Harriman and lit out for roughnecking West Texas in a red Studebaker. “Breaking away” from the family, he calls it.

He had no interest in “cut-and-dried jobs, with everybody just like everybody else, getting a job with Dad’s help and through Dad’s friends,” he told Fortune Magazine 30 years ago.

But the truth is less sensational. Unsure what to do next, Bush talked to a recruiter from Procter & Gamble. He considered going off to study at Oxford. He and Barbara even thought about farming.

The most fetching opportunity came from the oil conglomerate Dresser Industries, where Prescott Bush served on the board. Neal Mallon, its chairman, was Prescott’s dear friend, and he had always liked his son George.

“Neal invited George to come down and start with Dresser and said, ‘You’ll have a chance to run it someday,’ ” says Pressy, George’s brother.

So Bush departed for Odessa, Tex., in the shiny car Dad had bought him, off to take advantage of a job from Dad’s friend.

Not that the work was supposed to be easy. The young man was to learn from the ground up. He began as an equipment clerk, then moved up to salesman, peddling drilling gear along a route that included Muleshoe, Pecos and Wink.

West Texas, with its god-awful sandstorms and tumbleweeds, was a far cry from the Connecticut shore. Barbara remembers that her greenhorn husband wore Bermuda shorts on an errand and got whistled off the road.

The Bushes bought a small house in Midland, an old cow town that had found itself in the heart of a boom. Unlike the oil fields of East Texas--dominated by big landowners and Big Oil--this basin was split among small ranchers.

Speculators were feverishly buying up mineral rights to the land. Most of them were young carpetbaggers, college men from someplace else, dizzy with the dream of making a quick fortune.

Many became supper guests at the affable Bushes. There was always another hamburger to throw on the barbecue. The newcomers partied and played sports and talked endlessly of hitting it big.

In 1950, Bush himself surrendered to the overpowering fever. He quit Dresser and teamed up with John Overbey, his neighbor across the street.

The new entrepreneurs chose the highfalutin name Bush-Overbey Oil Development, but the company was as seat-of-the-pants as the rest.

“We spent our time in the county courthouses, checking land records,” Overbey says. “Then you’d go talk to a farmer, who usually thought you looked suspicious and was busy with his cattle anyway.

“Just when you’d get him convinced to sell his rights, somebody else would show up. Pretty soon, you were bargaining among six guys and the price kept going up.”

The work was a lot of poking around--and also wonderful fun. The future appeared as promising as the next Texas gusher.

In the midst of such hopefulness, the essential frailty of life was too far off for notice. But on a spring day, the Bush’s 3-year-old daughter, Robin, woke up pale and listless.

The diagnosis was leukemia, and all the thrill of the oil fields quickly drained away. Ahead were blood transfusions and chemotherapy. Encouraging remissions gave way to heartbreaking relapses.

Both of the Bushes describe this ordeal as the great sorrow of their lives. George wept often. “You could just see him tighten up,” says friend John Ashmun.

The girl was moved to Memorial Hospital in New York, where George’s uncle was on staff. She died in the winter.

The next day, Bush returned to the hospital. In the deepest of his grief, he still remembered his manners. He thanked everyone for being so nice.

In the cutthroat world of high-stakes oil, Bush had a leg up on the others. Drive and brains: They helped. But his great edge was connections.

Uncle Herbie, an investment banker, tapped his clients for $300,000 to get his favorite nephew started with Bush-Overbey.

Though the company did little better than break even in three years, Herbie was there with more financing the next time around.

Capital allows an upstart oilman to buy equity in a well. Dealing mineral rights is fine for starters, but the big money is in controlling the rights, the rigs and all that shoots out of the ground.

“George would’ve been just another carpetbagger if he hadn’t rode in on a silk carpet,” says old-timer J. C. Williamson.

Most people in Midland are more charitable about Bush’s business savvy, but the fact is nimble partners came along because George had a pipeline to money.

Bush coached Little League, helped build the YMCA and was a church elder--the all-around civic leader. But Hugh Liedtke was the boy genius of West Texas oil.

In 1953, the Liedtke brothers, Hugh and Bill, proposed to go partners with Bush and Overbey. The plan was to raise $1 million, half from Liedtke connections in Tulsa, half from Bush with the help of Uncle Herbie.

The new company was named Zapata Petroleum, after the Mexican hero portrayed in a Marlon Brando movie. Its owners plunked all their start-up cash into a patch of sandy prairie called the Jameson Field.

The gilded folklore is that these pipsqueak wildcatters hit on an amazing 127 of 127 wells. But no one had expected these holes to be dry. It was more a matter of whether they would pump enough oil to cover costs.

“We came up with a first-rate second-rate oil field, not the mother lode but certainly enough to start an oil company,” Hugh Liedtke says.

In 1959, the going still good, the partners split up. The Liedtkes took the company’s land operations, Bush the offshore.

It was largely an amicable parting. Hugh may have been miffed by Uncle Herbie’s meddlesome ways, but he says George himself was a shrewd, tough, compatible partner.

Liedtke went on to form Pennzoil and deal his way to phenomenal wealth. Bush moved to Houston, where he fit in just fine.

George might never have belonged in the Texas of the Stetson, the six gun and the rebel yell. But he was well-suited for the New Texas: with a mild ulcer, a level backswing and memberships in the best country clubs.

By his mid-30s, he was a millionaire oilman and the father of five. But deep down he was also Prescott Bush’s admiring son, and Pres Bush had gone on to public office.

In the spring of 1962, the oil business was slow, Bush was bored and the Harris County Republican Party was in a dreadful mess.

The chairman had quit, and party stalwarts were trying to keep power from right-wing extremists, including a faction from the John Birch Society.

The stalwarts believed Bush would be a fine replacement. The others often noted his Eastern roots, branding him a Rockefeller-type liberal at best and a flat-out communist at worst.

“They had people who slipped hate literature under our door every morning,” Barbara recalls. “Under your door! That’s pretty close!”

Bush was elected chairman anyway, and he immediately set out to show there were no hard feelings. He enlisted those who distrusted him, extremists or not. He offered them committee posts. He wanted all the help he could get.

His aim was to run for the U.S. Senate in 1964, a lofty goal for a political beginner, but, after all, the Senate was where Pres Bush had begun.

The biggest problem was Texas itself. The state resisted the custom of two-party politics. Republicans were scarcer than good moonshine and often harder to swallow.

In the primary, Bush bested candidates who wanted to abolish the federal income tax, deplete the power of the Supreme Court and invade mainland China.

By such standards, he seemed downright moderate, and his adversaries on the far right continued to attack him for just that.

Many would end up snubbing Bush for a liberal Democrat, the incumbent Sen. Ralph Yarborough: Better the evil they knew than the evil they did not.

To Bush, all this was bewildering. His own impulse was always toward conciliation. He had no passion for ideology. Zealots perplexed him.

A weather vane in the political wind, he wanted merely to find the Republican center, wherever the center was shifting.

At the time, conservative Barry Goldwater was on his way to the Republican presidential nomination. Bush declared himself a “Goldwater Republican.”

Like the Arizona senator, he opposed a nuclear test ban treaty and, according to a wire service dispatch, favored use of atomic weapons in the Vietnam War if “militarily prudent.”

He called Medicare “socialized medicine” and Martin Luther King Jr. “a militant.” In the crucible of the day, he stood against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which struck at the heart of Jim Crow segregation.

“I still favor the problem being handled by moral persuasion on the local level,” Bush said then, taking to the road with a country music band that sang of “chasing the liberals from Washington.”

Had the main liberal demon still been President John F. Kennedy, an Easterner, the strategy might have worked. But the new President was Lyndon B. Johnson, as Texan as the Alamo. Yarborough had coattails to ride; Bush none.

Extremist, snot nose, brat from back East: Yarborough used most every slur. He lumped Bush with Goldwater, saying neither objected to firing off nuclear weapons that “would create leukemia and cancer in babies.”

In the campaign’s closing days, Bush’s friend Martin Allday suggested he counterpunch with the story of Robin’s leukemia. “I said, ‘George, you can turn this to your advantage,’ ” Allday recalls.

But Bush said the family tragedy was out of bounds. The outcome would not have changed, anyway. He lost, 56.2% to 43.6%.

Actually, for a Republican, it was a notable showing. Bush polled 1.13 million votes, a record for a GOP candidate in Texas. He ran ahead of Goldwater by 200,000.

The Connecticut Yankee had been accepted deep in the heart of Texas, just as the old money of Uncle Herbie had been converted to new, basking in the Sun Belt.

Bush quit the oil business, selling his stock for $1.1 million. The market was low, and had he waited months longer, he could have gotten a lot more.

But he was done with it. He was no carpetbagging oilman any longer. He was an up-and-coming politician from the Lone Star State.

Bush, then 42, was elected to Congress in 1966, carried to victory by a heavy turnout in the silk-stocking neighborhoods of his Houston district. It was a slugfest between conservatives, each candidate parrying to the right.

“I will back the President no matter what weapons we use in Southeast Asia,” Bush said, jabbing at “faint-hearted Americans” who dared quarrel with America’s part in the Vietnam War.

In Washington, he was far more than a mere freshman. He was one of only two Republican congressmen from Texas. Such an engaging sort. Pres Bush’s son. A real comer.

He was assigned to the powerful Ways and Means Committee, a rare thing for a new arrival. “His father asked me to help,” recalls Wilbur D. Mills, the Arkansas Democrat who was chairman.

He made friends as fast as a small boy collects baseball cards. Sunday afternoons at the Bushes drew a crowd: congressmen, ambassadors, a Supreme Court justice. He seemed to know the whole town.

“He was clearly the leader among the young guys,” says Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt (R-Ark.).

Richard M. Nixon considered asking him to be his running mate in 1968. Bush made it to the short list. “Too bad he was so new,” recalls a Nixon aide.

In Congress, he usually sided with conservatives, though--like the Republican Party itself--he was drifting back from the right flank where Goldwater had encamped.

Bush was a friend to Big Oil and an enemy of busing. He wanted to balance the budget and bomb Vietnam. His rating with conservatives was a high of 87% in 1967, though it dropped to 58% in 1970.

He sponsored an ethics bill for congressmen and often sided with environmentalists, though his rating with liberals was never higher than 12%, with labor 25%.

His pet project was birth control. “The subject is sensitive--I know that--but in my estimation we need to have some (federal) earmarking of funds for family planning,” he said.

And his great controversy, as for so many others, was civil rights. By 1968, his views had changed. He voted for a bill that included an open-housing provision fiercely opposed by the rich white people who elected him.

Back home, the anger fanned into hate mail and crank calls. Bush was hooted by a crowd that had come to hear him explain himself. Firmly, he reminded them that black soldiers were fighting for freedom in Southeast Asia:

“Somehow it seems fundamental that a man--if he has the money and the good character--should not have a door slammed in his face if he is a Negro or if he speaks with a Latin American accent.”

It was a gutsy performance, and he turned the hissing and catcalls into a standing ovation.

But George Bush was not a man out front on civil rights. When his support came, it was tardy and unexceptional. Nine of 23 Texas congressmen voted for the bill; so did a majority of House Republicans.

At the same time, Bush maintained memberships in the exclusive private clubs of Houston, where the elite lunched and played tennis and, most of all, traded business secrets in the restricted confines of a Good Old Boy world.

Bush belonged to three--the Bayou Club, the Ramada Club and the Houston Country Club. None had black members, according to a survey by the American Jewish Committee.

Did it occur to him--with the civil rights movement vivid around him--that these clubs ought to be something other than lily-white?

“No,” George Bush says, “I always believe people should associate with their friends in things like that.”

As a rule, President Nixon disliked blue-blooded Ivy Leaguers, with their snooty manners and hand-me-down money. But he got along fine with the Bushes.

Prescott was an occasional golf partner, and George was good company too. The younger Bush had the confidence of a successful businessman, but he was humble enough around his betters in politics. Nixon predicted a big future. He urged George to make a second try for the Senate. To Prescott, this seemed a risky notion. His son had a safe House seat; he had run unopposed for his second term.

But George was eager. He asked some political pros to sniff around Texas. They reported back that Yarborough, the liberal, was ready to be had in 1970.

The President was wonderfully reassuring. Though Bush tartly denied it at the time, Nixon promised him a soft landing in the Administration if he fell on Election Day.

So Bush jumped into the race, blind to this coming hurdle: Yarborough would be beaten in the Democratic primary by a man named Lloyd Bentsen, a combat pilot, country club regular and conservative Houston businessman.

Overnight, the campaign changed into a ho-hum bout between men so similar the press portrayed them as Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

“If Bentsen is going to try to go to my right, he’s gonna step off the edge of the Earth,” Bush declared.

There was little for him to do but boast of close ties to the White House. “He can do more,” his campaign banners read.

Nixon tried to help. He dispatched Republican heavyweights to Texas. He also sent along $106,000, mostly in cash. It came from a secret White House fund for his favorite candidates, known as the “Townhouse Operation.”

But Bush lost, 53.4% to 46.6%. Right then, his political future might have turned to vapor had its substance not been assured. He had a marker to call in from the President of the United States.

Like a collector of gift coupons, Bush considered what he might redeem. Finally, he decided. According to Nixon aides, he relayed his request through friends to the Oval Office.

Or, as Bush himself pleasantly recalls it: “My name had come up in connection with the United Nations job.”

In the next six years, Bush would change jobs four times, moving through government like a management trainee learning the ropes in each department.

He served as ambassador to the United Nations (22 months), chairman of the Republican National Committee (20 months), chief of the liaison office in Beijing (16 months) and director of the CIA (12 months).

He left no great legacies and committed no great blunders. He is remembered fondly at each place: Oh yes, George Bush. Terrific guy. A soothing presence. No scholar, but a quick study. Good listener. Competent.

At the United Nations, he shunned the stuffy protocol. He made swings through the delegates’ dining room, slapping backs and pumping hands. He remembered first names.

He invited scores of delegates to family picnics in Connecticut. He bused them to the Mets’ games and fed them hot dogs. Uncle Herbie owned a piece of the team; Bush could always get the best seats.

“All these foreigners thought they had finally met the quintessential American--Randolph Scott and Gary Cooper rolled into one,” says Robert Rosenstock, the U.S. delegation’s legal counsel.

He understood the chain-of-command. He was not the quarterback of American foreign policy, just one of the blockers. He defended America’s role in the Vietnam War, and there are no signs that this ever troubled him.

Even now, he insists America’s mistake was not fighting hard enough to win. “I think the problem with the Vietnam thing was not the immorality of our position but the way in which the policy lost public support,” he says.

To his misfortune, he will be best remembered as the poor guy who valiantly tried to preserve Taiwan’s membership in the United Nations against all the tides of history.

For years, official U.S. policy had been to keep Taiwan seated as the legitimate government of China instead of the communists from the mainland. It was a view Bush had advocated since his days as a Senate candidate.

But one summer morning in 1971, he picked up the newspaper to find that National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger had made a secret mission to Beijing. The two nations were talking.

“He was surprised, but he stayed very calm,” says Christopher Phillips, Bush’s deputy. “He said this upsets our plans, but a decision had obviously been made by the President and in the long run it might make sense.”

The team player gamely played on. He made his excuses, then went about supporting the new official U.S. position: membership for both Chinas.

After weeks of debate and often-fruitless arm-twisting, China was admitted and Taiwan expelled. America had been embarrassed. Whoops of joy filled the usually decorous assembly. Bush rushed off to comfort the Taiwanese.

Then he rallied his staff. He used the same slogan they had heard over and over. It was the cheer of a relentless pragmatist. “On to the next event!” he said.

When the President invited Bush to Camp David, Barbara had a suspicion. Word was out. Nixon wanted a new man to head the Republican National Committee.

“Do anything but that!” she pleaded.

“Oh, no,” George assured her.

But Nixon, as usual, found Bush an easy fellow to persuade. The RNC was pivotal to the party, he said. He needed a strong hand over there for the 1974 elections.

“Don’t tell me!” Barbara scolded him when he got home.

“Boy, you can’t turn a President down,” he replied.

It would be the worst time of his career. The scandal of the Watergate break-in, then just a rattle in the distance, would soon thunder and boom until there was no peace.

While Nixon and his men hunched down in the bunker--with new revelations exploding each day--Bush was left to control damage on the perimeter.

Let the system work things out, Bush protested to nettlesome reporters; remember, the Republican Party is not on trial.

“You can’t imagine the tension,” recalls Eddie Mahe Jr., who was the RNC’s political director. “There was never any good news.

“Bush was the epitome of the good trouper. At staff meetings, he’d tell everyone to hang in there. Then, privately, he’d be very distressed. He would just moan: ‘What is going on?’ ”

Angry letters poured in, and donations dried up. The staff was cut back. Bush gave each the sad news himself.

In the meantime, Nixon’s knavish lieutenants made demands. They wanted Bush to be their point man in a counterattack, to light a few hotfoots on those smart alecks walking all over the President.

By Bush’s account, he refused. If Nixon himself had asked, that might have been different. But he told those others to get lost.

Instead, he busily crisscrossed the nation. When any Republican group needed a guest speaker, George Bush was there for them.

Then, finally, the sagging beams gave way and the ceiling caved in. The so-called “smoking gun” tape was released.

Nixon had lied to everyone. He had personally ordered a cover-up of the break-in. The President was forced to resign.

Bush despaired like a toddler meanly told the truth about Santa. Pres Bush had died in 1972, and George said he was glad his father was not around to see the party’s shame.

Much more than a good trouper, George was a true believer. “This is very naive, I realize, but Nixon really fooled us,” Barbara says.

Bush’s great loyalty had supplied a blindfold. With the handwriting on the wall, he wrapped it around his eyes and simply chose not to look.

He says: “I’m inclined to give someone the benefit of the doubt in life, you know.”

The way Bush felt about it, the Republican Party owed him. He had led the brigades through the artillery fire of Watergate, and there ought to be a reward.

The best job available was the vice presidency, and Bush was among the front-runners. President Gerald R. Ford liked him. So did White House political advisers. They ranked him tops on their own scale of points.

But while Bush waited for news, the tense days filled with old ghosts. Newsweek magazine detailed the secrets of Nixon’s “Townhouse Operation.”

Bush had never reported most of the $106,000 gift to his 1970 campaign. There was nothing illegal about that. Laws were looser then. Still, Watergate was in the air, and this had the same foul smell.

Whatever the effect, former New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller was named vice president. He was a longtime bogeyman to conservatives, but he had considerable clout in Ford’s inner circle.

Bush was furious and disappointed. “He thought he had it,” Mahe says. “He said they could shove the RNC job.”

Of course, he made the point tactfully. And, much as expected, there was a generous offer in consolation: the ambassadorship to Paris or London.

Bush baffled Ford with his answer. He preferred to be envoy to the small liaison office in Beijing. Henry Kissinger warned him he would be bored beyond belief, but Bush said he found the Chinese intriguing.

Besides, he needed time away from the maelstrom. He wanted to plot the arc of his career. This would be both adventure and sabbatical.

In Beijing, the Bushes lived in a modest house in the yellow-brick U.S. compound. Westerners were a rare sight, but the Bushes rode their bicycles through the streets. They picnicked by the Ming Tombs.

Chairman Mao Tse-tung was ailing. The scramble for succession had already begun. For foreigners, patience was essential. Days often went by without a single diplomatic contact.

“We were really just marking time, waiting for the Chinese to sort things out,” says John Holdridge, who was Bush’s deputy.

Bush enjoyed the mystery. Still, for him, China was only a way station, a respite until his ambition kicked back in. He wrote Ford that he wanted to come home, and this was fine.

The White House had a personnel shuffle in mind. Bush would take over at Commerce, and Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams would be offered the CIA. When Williams said no, the CIA job went to Bush.

To some of George’s close friends, this seemed a bad turn. The CIA was reeling from newspaper exposes and congressional hearings.

Excesses had been revealed, including assassination plots abroad and spying on peace groups at home. A rogue elephant, the agency was called.

But Bush was glad for the chance. “I’m a tame elephant,” he said.

The idea of George Bush’s running the CIA made many people nervous. The top spot in U.S. intelligence was no place for a partisan appointee.

During confirmation hearings, Democratic senators argued he might use the agency as a political springboard. To calm things down, the President was forced to pledge Bush would not be his running mate in 1976.

The biggest skeptics were in the demoralized CIA itself. They wanted a career man who knew the spy business, not some fair-haired amateur.

Much to their surprise, Bush instead proved just the right tonic. He knew about the recently excavated skeletons, but he told the staff that it all sounded like a lot of hype.

“He said he’d taken a good look around and liked what he saw: a dedicated bunch of professionals,” says E. Henry Knoche, who became the deputy director. “The message was: Carry on.”

Although Bush dismissed some top assistants, he filled the jobs from within. The rank-and-file approved. Bush was no dragon slayer, just an amiable new guardian of the labyrinth.

Each morning, he took the main elevator upstairs, not the private one that rose directly from the garage to his office. Sometimes he ate in the employee cafeteria. He jogged on the tiny track in the basement.

“He got out to the parishes; he wanted to know everyone,” says John Waller, who was the CIA’s inspector general.

Bush learned fast, even the technical stuff. Aides recall he was alert to snow jobs. “Oh, c’mon now,” he would say.

Mostly, he tended to the mammoth CIA bureaucracy and brokered its interests on Capitol Hill. In less than a year, he testified 51 times as Congress wrote new guidelines about oversight of covert operations.

If there is criticism of his stint, it is that he was little more than a caretaker who sloughed aside the tough choices.

The agency was over-staffed. All the studies showed it. But Bush left office without taking action. “(He) had not rejected it, but neither had he faced up to it,” says Adm. Stansfield Turner, who replaced him.

In another, more controversial matter, conservative hard-liners thought the CIA was underestimating Soviet military intentions. To placate them, Bush approved a highly unusual exercise called the “Team B Study.”

The idea was to pit the conclusions of agency analysts, or Team A, against those of a panel of outsiders, or Team B. The handpicked outsiders were all staunch conservatives. They were given access to top-secret data.

Predictably, Team B’s judgment was grim: The Soviets were seeking not just parity, but superiority. Some of the report was leaked to the press.

CIA analysts were irate. They felt the conclusions distorted the evidence, though they had to remain publicly silent.

The furor went on and on--the Team B study often cited in arguments for America’s defense buildup during the next decade.

For his part, Bush stayed quiet. “In effect, he said: I take no position. We’ll just have two views,” says one former CIA analyst. “It just tied everyone up in knots.”

By then, he was a short-timer. Jimmy Carter had been elected President. For years, George Bush had been a name near the top of all the lists. He was so trustworthy: a scout with an eagerness for merit badges.

But now the Republicans were out. In a word of parting, Bush regretted never being vice president. He had come so close. Now, as 1977 approached, he was unsure what to do next.

“There’s a certain luxury to beginning again,” he said. “I don’t know for sure, but it’s likely that I’ll save some time for politics.”

A wild run for the presidency is what he had in mind: The pursuit would be good for him, and he was good for America.

“I mean, like, hasn’t everybody thought about becoming President for years?” he would later tell a reporter for the New Yorker.

There was no problem about how to do it. Jimmy Carter had just brilliantly rewritten the book: the political asterisk’s compleat guide.

An obscure candidate must spend three years hopscotching across America, no time to tarry, except in the early primary states.

By the fall of 1977, Bush was already at velocity. He bounded from one plane to another, a flight guide in the pocket of his rumpled suit.

His RNC days had left him with friends. He knew every county chairman, and they knew friendly George. For him, the mikes were open.

He sometimes hit three cities in a day. He was glad to be here and glad to meet you, glad to be back and glad you came.

Back in the air, he wrote a zillion thank-yous: the motel desk clerk, the man who met him at the airport, the lady who baked the carrot cake. In 1979, he was on the road 329 days.

James A. Baker III, the prominent Houston lawyer who is now Treasury secretary, handled the strategy. Bush had urged his tennis buddy into politics a decade before.

Baker would become known as one of the shrewdest of political operators. In 1976, he had been tardily enlisted to save the steamless Ford presidential campaign.

This time, he was managing a desperate long shot. To catch on, Bush would have to appear a sensible alternative to all of the rest.

And why not? He seemed so moderate beside Ronald Reagan and Phil Crane, so conservative beside John B. Anderson, so good-natured beside John B. Connally and Bob Dole, so refined beside Howard H. Baker Jr.

In those early days, Bush fretted most about Connally, the strapping former governor of Texas. To him, Reagan was just a doddering old actor. “The age thing is going to get him,” he told his aide, Karl Rove.

But in time, Reagan became the man to beat. Bush subtly took on him and Carter in a single swipe. Both had been governors who never held national office. So Bush sold himself as the candidate of experience.

His fast-paced TV spots skipped over the issues, featuring instead an energetic man briskly moving through the crowds. “George Bush,” the announcer said. “A President we won’t have to train.”

Never mind that Bush himself had spent less than 10 years in public life. Recite his many jobs, he seemed a sage professor: Dr. Curriculum Vitae.

Still, convincing the voters was difficult. Bush lacks a compelling stage presence. Something gets diluted when the private man goes public.

His voice is so reedy it almost squeaks when he is nervous. His gestures lag a second behind the words they belong to. His wit clumsily lapses into sarcasm.

“TV is not kind to this man,” says Robert Goodman, who was Bush’s media adviser. “In person, his eyes are so attractive; they dance. I’m very sorry he wears glasses on TV.”

Bush did not respond warmly to cosmetic suggestions. Goodman lost the battle for contact lenses. So did those who wanted Barbara to dye her hair from its fluff of white.

She looked older than her husband. Even strangers let her know it. “I was very much interested in your views about my hair,” reads her form response to critical letters.

Bush did visit a speech coach. He might never be terrific on the stump. His brain too often outraced his mouth, the thoughts piling atop each other like flatcars in a train wreck.

But Lilyan Wilder persuaded him to stress key words and phrases. He quit poking the air with his index finger, if only to replace it with a kind of karate chop.

In the end, he managed to come across as likable and sincere, a bit of a preppy but no sissy. The hard sell about experience worked.

Steadily, Bush began to climb in the polls. The asterisk took on light, like the sparkle above a wand.

In the deep frost of January, he burst from the pack in the Iowa caucuses. The victory was stunning. It was just what Jimmy Carter had done.

Suddenly, Bush was the hot story. “We’ve got the momentum,” he boasted. “Big Mo is on our side!”

Attention. It is the narcotics of politics. Always too much of it--and never enough. There is the pressure to catch the camera’s fickle eye, the pressure not to be caught looking stupid.

In the giddy days after Iowa, reporters were everywhere. They were like seismologists, monitoring the faults, recording every quake and slip.

“How would you define yourself ideologically? Moderate or conservative?” one of them asked.

“I don’t want to be perceived as either,” Bush replied.

“Well, how do you want to be perceived? You can’t be both.”

“How do you know I can’t.”

Another reporter suggested a compromise. “Well, would you like to be known as a moderate conservative?”

Bush hesitated. “Yes,” he said. Then he took it all back. Oh, these darn labels! He is reasonable. Isn’t that enough?

He was frustrated, and so was the press. This petulant man hated to be pinned down. An interview with him was like dancing without touching: What would he do? He would do his best. Best at what? Whatever came up.

Unlike Bush, these reporters did not understood the purity of his noblesse oblige: He was willing and bright and capable. America was a thriving corporation. He would be its CEO.

Instead they wanted to know his opinion about every this and that. He told them as best he could.

No, he opposed a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Yes, he favored the equal rights amendment. No, he thought the tax cut Reagan wanted was inflationary. “Voodoo economics,” he called it.

But every day was a tiptoe through a mine field. There were many answers he had not thought out.

Asked about strategic weapons, he said nuclear war could be fought to win. Then, he denied he said that. Then, he denied he meant what he said.

Worse yet, reporters demanded to hear about grand themes and visions. He had none. There had been no time. “Big Mo” was what Bush preferred to discuss.

Later, amid the debris of failure, Jim Baker would ruefully admit: “We established the George Who, but we never established the George What.”

Voters moved on, like sale shoppers discovering that the merchandise did not look as good in the store as it had in the window.

Iowa’s phenom turned into New Hampshire’s bust. The coup de grace came in the town of Nashua, where the local newspaper had arranged a debate.

There was a flap backstage about whether all the Republican candidates would take part--or just front-runners Bush and Reagan.

Reagan, who had paid for the hall, wanted everyone aboard. Newspaper editor Joe Breen, the sponsor, preferred the drama of a one-on-one showdown.

Bush sided with Breen, who, after all, was the host. George left the rest to argue, strolled onstage alone and sat down.

Reagan and the others marched in behind. “George, stand up,” Reagan angrily commanded, seizing control.

Bush did so. Then, as Reagan tried to explain things to the crowd, Breen ordered the technicians to shut off his microphone.

The former actor ad-libbed. “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Breen,” he said with all the grit of a wrangler come to collect his pay. The crowd cheered.

In this single indelible moment of the campaign, Reagan was forceful, Bush lamely cowed. George fidgeted in his chair, skunked at poker.

“You have to understand, George had given Breen his word,” says Johnnie Bush, reliving his brother’s painful evening. “With George, manners are his compass, his unfailing guidance system.”

That was the difference. One man had antennae for showmanship, the other for gentility. Any smart studio would know how to cast them.

They were the cowboy and the dude.

Bush won six primaries--the only candidate besides Reagan to win any. He wanted to fight on till the convention, but Baker coaxed him from the ring lest his political future collapse in the flailing.

The campaign manager knew this: Reagan did not like Bush. Some of it was simply the combustion of rivalry. Then there was Nashua. Reagan thought Bush had choked.

If there was any chance for Bush to be picked for the ticket, he needed to genially hop on the bandwagon. Even then, there seemed little hope. Reagan certainly preferred others.

In a bizarre convention intrigue, with emissaries scooting back and forth, former President Ford was considered for the second spot. But the “perfect couple” never agreed on the vows.

Instead, Reagan was left to reluctantly arrange a marriage of convenience. Bush was eating popcorn and drinking a beer when he got the call.

It was not an outright proposal. First, Reagan wanted to know if Bush would change his position and support a constitutional ban on abortion.

Yes, sure.

The deal was on. The next morning, they met the press together. Bush was asked how he could accept the Republican platform, which opposed the ERA and favored the ban on abortion.

“I’m not going to say I haven’t had differences at some point with Gov. Reagan,” he answered. “But what I will be doing is emphasizing the common ground. . . . I’m not going to get nickel-and-dimed to death with detail.”

Had he changed his mind overnight about the tax cuts he once called “voodoo economics”?

“Listen, let me enthusiastically support the proposal,” he said. “And please do not keep reminding me of differences I had.”

Bush could not abide these sticklers. He was too thrilled with events.

Without Reagan’s nod he would have been just another beaten man who had made his run--a Romney, a Lindsay, a Scranton--some hot political tune the public had tired of before it got to No. 1. Instead, his career sparked with promise.

Of course, vice presidents have few official duties. The President can include them in the inner circle--or treat them as house eunuchs, dispatching them at whim to funerals and county fairs and Boy Scout jamborees.

Many chafed under the job’s restraints. As strong a man as Lyndon Johnson was made to seem a pantywaist.

But there are beams of limelight, however flickering.

“You have the staff, the security, you fly in Air Force Two,” says Bob Teeter, Bush’s longtime adviser. “You become one of the few men the public regards as presidential.”

Bush, like Walter F. Mondale before him, devised a way to stay in the huddles even if he could not call the plays.

He took an office in the West Wing of the White House. He was promised a private meeting with Reagan each week and access to all briefing papers.

Beyond that, he would practice a strategy of self-denial. He would never disagree with Reagan, even in Cabinet meetings.

Differences would be aired in the sanctuary of their private hour. Even then, dissent would be sparing. There was only one President, and with abnegation, Bush would keep his ear.

“Don’t expect me to make policy,” Bush told Rich Bond, his top political aide. “I’ll take some hits on this, but my job is to cement my relationship with Ronald Reagan and articulate his policies.”

Bush wanted the White House to know the depths of his fealty. He told some Reagan aides he had purposely selected a weak staff.

“He did not want anyone who’d try to compete with the President’s people,” said a former Reagan assistant.

During his second term, Bush said, his approach would be different. He would need sharper political minds to help with his own presidential bid.

But not yet. For now, the team player had teammates to win over. He was in transition from suspected moderate to trusted Reaganite.

An early demonstration of the overhauled image took place in the terrible aftermath of an assassination attempt.

On March 30, 1981, Reagan was shot outside a Washington hotel. At the time, Bush was above Texas in Air Force Two.

As the jet touched down in Washington, the Secret Service wanted Bush to take a helicopter to the White House pad.

He refused. He did not want to appear to be muscling in. Besides, he said, the helicopter makes a racket and Nancy Reagan might be resting.

Later, in the White House situation room, Bush reportedly told Cabinet members: “The President is still President. . . . I’m here to sit in for him while he recuperates. But he’s going to call the shots.”

He was neither brash nor timid, just an understudy doing his job. In later meetings, he left the executive chair empty and calmly presided from his own.

“He played it about as right as you could play it,” said a Reagan confidant. “He won over a few hearts with that.”

The Reagan bunch surely had felt misgivings. They doubted anyone who had not been with them in the long march to the White House.

To them, Reagan was a populist hero, Bush an Establishment opportunist--and a weak-kneed one at that.

But time and charm would convert most disbelievers. Bush’s competence was so handy, his loyalty so unflinching, his manner so ingratiating.

They had heard he was a super-nice guy, but he was even nicer than that. Somebody died? George already knew. He had placed a call, written a note, gone to visit.

Send him a memo, he replied immediately. He answered thank-you notes with thank-you notes. His Christmas list had 8,000 names.

Big assignment or small, he was obliging. His only concern was that Reagan had approved it. “He was very careful not to upstage the President, almost deferential to a fault,” says Larry Speakes, Reagan’s former spokesman.

Bush’s buddy, Jim Baker, had become the President’s chief of staff. He helped bring the two men together, and they got along fine.

Reagan appreciates a good joke and Bush always knew the latest. “George, why don’t you tell everyone that one you told me this morning,” the President would begin a Cabinet meeting.

Play a melody, Bush hummed along. Besides, his strengths complemented Reagan’s. Bush was a tireless traveler. He had the patience to read intelligence summaries. He enjoyed schmoozing on Capitol Hill.

On Thursday afternoons, when Bush had his private lunch in the study by the Oval Office, he knew plenty of gossip to tell the boss.

It is hard to say how often the conversations then plunged into substance. No outsiders have much sense of these meetings, other than that they never produced any dramatic policy shifts.

Adm. Daniel Murphy, Bush’s first chief of staff, prepared briefs for the discussions. He thought it was the most important duty he had.

“It took me months to figure out Bush never used them,” Murphy recalls. “I think I found out in the press. The vice president told some reporter he never uses papers for that meeting.

“No one had a clue what went on in those meetings. I mean, not a clue.”

For years, Bush’s staff insisted this: He was a key player. A foreign policy expert. Plugged in as anyone. Terrific radar. Reagan trusts him.

Then, last fall, the Iran-Contra scandal rocked the White House, and important men began to scramble as if they had been caught in a whorehouse fire.

The vice president was in the dark, he said; he had been “unaware . . . denied information . . . not in the loop.”

There was a Dec. 7, 1985, meeting at which Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger vigorously opposed the arms sale to Iran. Bush missed it.

“I was off at the Army-Navy football game,” he told the Washington Post, “and none of them ever came to me”