Politics

George W. Bush: A Texas Blue Blood

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

December 7, 2000 / 6:39 PM EST / CBS

The son of a president, grandson of a senator and brother of a governor, George W. Bush comes to the White House with a peerless political pedigree. But despite this impressive lineage, President-elect Bush didn't take easily or quickly to the political life, steering clear of the family business for many years, and instead trying to distance himself from his patrician roots and remake himself as a Texas Everyman.

Born July 6, 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut, President-elect Bush was raised in Houston and Midland, Texas, a dusty oil boom town, until age 15, when he was sent to Phillips Academy, an elite prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. He earned his bachelor's degree as a history major from Yale University in 1968.

After college, at the height of the Vietnam War, Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard and spent five years flying F-102s for the Guard's 147th Fighter Wing, 111th Fighter Squadron. Although he received the lowest acceptable grade on a pilot aptitude test, Bush has insisted he got no special treatment in the Guard because of his father, future president George Bush, who was then a United States congressman from Texas.

Upon completing his active-duty requirement, Bush settled in Houston and drifted through a series of lackluster jobs, a period he has called his "nomadic" years. In 1973, he obtained an early release from Guard duty in Texas, and headed back to the East Coast to enter Harvard Business School, receiving his MBA in 1975.

Bush then returned to Texas to seek his fortune in the oil business, as his father had done before him, but most of the son's efforts came up dry. When oil prices declined in the 1980s, his modest venture, Bush Exploration, was bought out by Harken Energy Corp. That sale provided the cash he would use a few years later to invest in the Texas Rangers baseball club.

In 1978, at the age of 31, Bush ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress, losing to Democratic State Sen. Kent Hance, who seized on Bush's youth and blue-blood heritage, portraying him as an East Coast interloper with no real Texas roots.

In the midst of his congressional campaign, Bush met Laura Welch, a 30-year-old librarian, at a backyard cookout in Midland. The couple was married three months later. They have twin 19-year-old girls, Barbara and Jenna.

Bush has in the past admitted that he had a problem with alcohol in his twenties and thirties. He has said he quit drinking the day after his 40th birthday, July 6, 1986. Alcohol "was beginning to compete for my affections," he told an interviewer in September.

A week before this year's presidential election, Bush was forced to acknowledge a previously unrepored 1976 drunk-driving arrest after reporters learned of the incident. Bush was pulled over by police near his family's Maine summer home and failed a road sobriety test and a second test in the police station.

In 1987, Bush moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an adviser for his father's presidential campaign. Upon his father's election, Bush again moved back to Texas where he helped assemble the group that purchased the Texas Rangers. He served as managing general partner for the team until 1994, and although the Rangers never made it to the World Series, Bush did play a key role in the building of the team's new stadium, The Ballpark in Arlington, Texas.

In 1993, Texas Republicans pressed Bush to challenge popular Democratic Governor Ann Richards. Focusing his campaign on welfare reform, education, tougher juvenile justice laws and tort reform, Bush narrowly defeated Richards, becoming only the state's second GOP governor since Reconstruction.

He was easily re-elected in 1998, with a record 69 percent of the vote - the first time a Texas governor has ever won consecutive four-year terms. During Bush's six years as governor, he earned a reputation for reaching across the aisle to Texas Democrats - a skill he'll need to draw on as president to work with the deeply divided U.S. Congress. Under his leadership, the state enacted its two largest tax cuts in history and passed significiant education, welfare and criminal justice initiatives. The state has also annually led the nation in executions, including a record 40 this year.

Bush launched his campaign for the presidency in March 1999, and after a tough challenge from Sen. John McCain, captured enough primary delegates to win the GOP nomination on Super Tuesday, March 7, 2000. His campaign spent a record $150 million on the presidential race.