From Boys To Men
In a year that rocked America, two scions of famous families came of age
The Delta Dagger could reach speeds of 650 miles per hour. Bush's unit sometimes flew in formation, wing tips just a few feet apart. The duty was dangerous. The Texas Guard suffered a handful of pilot fatalities in the 1970s. "Being a single-engine fighter pilot was prestigious--if your engine blew out, you'd have to bail. Other planes had two engines, and we looked down our noses at that," says Richard Mayo, a pilot in the 111th. "There was a sense that we were the top of the pyramid." The jocks of the 111th had "a real swagger, a real cockiness," observed Hannah, Bush's friend.
After evening flights, Bush sometimes stopped by the officers' club, where NASA crews stationed at Ellington had begun a tradition of Thursday night "splashdown" parties to celebrate successful astronaut missions. The nights featured live music, cheap beer, and lots of slim young ladies from Houston. Friends say Bush was not a heavy drinker, but he held his own in a drinking game called Dead Bug. When someone shouted "dead bug!" everyone had to drop to the floor, belly up, twitching their arms and legs. The last man down bought the next round. Recalls Bath: "It alarmed the hell out of visiting officers and their wives."
Serving stateside. Though its pilots flew frequently to maintain proficiency, and the flights were hardly risk free, the 111th was a relatively comfortable place to serve in the final years of the Vietnam War. Bush asked about volunteering for "Palace Alert," a program that rotated Guard pilots into Vietnam, but he had too few flying hours to qualify. And since the Air Force was phasing out the F-102s, there was virtually no chance he'd be activated. Bush has denied his decision to join the Guard was an attempt to avoid Vietnam. "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment," he told a Texas newspaper in 1990. "Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."
Bush has also denied personally tapping connections to get into the Guard, though his flight instructor, Maury Udell, tells U.S. News he recommended Bush to the 147th Fighter Group's commander, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, only after learning that George H. W. Bush was the youngest commissioned officer in the Navy during World War II and had been shot down and rescued by a submarine. "It was almost like saying one of your family members had been killed in the war--they'd give you a break," says Udell. "It gave him a leg up."
While Bush generally stood by the U.S. government in the Vietnam War, he was hardly outspoken. "He wasn't sure it was so great we were in the war but thought since we were in there, we ought to see it through," says a friend from the time.
More broadly, Bush was gradually developing an interest in politics. Later in 1971, he flirted with running for the Texas Legislature but was discouraged by his father, who thought he needed to establish himself in business and grass-roots politics first. So, Bush again looked to a well-placed family friend: a Texan who was managing Republican Winton "Red" Blount's Senate campaign in Alabama; Bush arrived there in spring 1972 to lend a hand. The year would later become the focus of allegations about a lapse in Bush's Guard service (when critics say he was AWOL--a charge Bush denies) and would end with his acceptance to Harvard Business School.
Bush kept the application secret until he was accepted. He wanted to spare himself any embarrassment in case he was turned down. In the end, it wasn't necessary. Bush would go on to Harvard, earn his M.B.A., and eventually do all right for himself.
With Nancy L. Bentrup
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