Junior Is His Own Bush Now

By Laurence I. Barrett

Game time is almost two hours away in cozy Arlington Stadium as the Texas Rangers take batting practice. Along the baseline, hefting a bat like a mace of office, George Walker Bush ambles through his own pregame drill. He chats up players and reporters and makes small talk with fans, using a down-home twang and slang that belie ten years of New England schooling. They seek his autograph as eagerly as they do the players'. Bush scribbles on a baseball, a hat, a scrap of paper. On this warm summer evening, not one sportswriter or spectator asks about his relative with the extra middle name, George Herbert Walker Bush. In Arlington the White House feels about as far away as Tiananmen Square, both in distance and in culture.

During the 18 months that he labored in his father's campaign headquarters, acting as the family enforcer among the hired handlers, Bush was often a bristly presence. "Junior," as Washington insiders called him, was out of his element back East, uncomfortable in his father's shadow once again. Of the five Bush children, George, the eldest, had always been the most drawn to Dad's patterns of endeavor. What rebellion he waged was stylistic. He became the real Texan in the family -- chewing tobacco, using barnyard humor, settling in the state's western corner -- the one harboring what his aunt Nancy Ellis calls a "slightly outrageous streak."

When he returned to the state last December, he chose a new venue, Dallas, and a new career. With an alchemy of serendipity, energy and a famous family name, he fused two groups of investors into a combine that bought the American League's Texas Rangers this spring. Says his youngest brother Marvin: "This is a real opportunity for him to be George W. Bush and not George Bush Jr."

Bush's role as a managing partner includes being the visible front man. Sitting through nine sweaty innings is part of his strategy to improve the image of a club whose fortunes had been waning. No air-conditioned sky box for this owner. "I want the folks to see me sitting in the same kind of seat they sit in," he says, "eating the same popcorn, peeing in the same urinal." So he is quite happy when fans chirp to him about the team's improved won-lost record. He saves his broadest, Hollywood-handsome grin for the occasional urging that he run for Governor in 1990.

That possibility was on his mind for months, well before the Rangers deal came down at him with the speed of a Nolan Ryan fastball. And why not? The Republican incumbent is retiring, and George W. has inherited his father's genes for ambition and seizing opportunities. He stumped Texas extensively for his father last year, delivering standard conservative scripts with energy if not eloquence. His name would make fund raising easy. No single rival for the G.O.P. nomination dominates the field.

Then doubt set in; 1990 could well be a Democratic year, advisers told him. His mother Barbara said in a newspaper interview that he should not run this time. If he ignored her admonition, he would have to give up active management of the Rangers this fall. So he is likely to defer politics, though it remains indelibly on his agenda. In a sports-crazed state, success as a baseball operator is a political plus. "My biggest liability in Texas," he says in his twang-free interview voice, "is the question 'What's the boy ever done? So he's got a famous father and ran a small oil company. He could be riding on Daddy's name if he ran for office.' Now I can say, 'I've done something -- here it is.' "

The "boy," 43 this month, has in fact done a fair amount by ordinary standards. Despite the vagaries of the energy business, he cajoled his first million from it when he sold out to a larger enterprise in 1986. But the world measures the children of the great by different standards. And George W., as he is sometimes tagged to distinguish him from "Big Bush," compounded that problem by using Dad's resume as the road map of his early life. He followed that path through Andover and Yale, then learned to fly combat aircraft. Alone among the Bush offspring, he returned to Midland. There, where he had been a fanatic Little League player, he replicated his father's oil-field ventures.

Such filial fidelity is hardly unique, but Junior's respect for his father grew to reverence. Says his first cousin John Ellis: "The whole key to understanding George W. is his relationship to his father." It was a loving one with both parents. But with Barbara Bush he developed a joshing comradeship that still has them punching each other's hot buttons. "We fight all the time," the Silver Fox says with a laugh. "We're so alike in that way. He does things to needle me, always." With his father, awe never left the equation.

When the children were young, Barbara was the magistrate for misdemeanors while her husband judged felonies. "I would scream and carry on," she remembers. "The way George scolded was by silence or by saying 'I'm disappointed in you.' And they would almost faint." Young George was most vulnerable to the "disappointed in you" line. "He could be made to feel," Marvin says, "that he had committed the worst crime in history."

One offense that lives in family lore occurred after the parents moved to Washington. While visiting, George took Marvin on an outing that included too much beer for both. Driving home, George clipped a neighbor's trash can. Alcohol fueled what the family calls his feisty side. Confronted by his father, he remembers his attitude as, " 'O.K., what are you going to do about it?' Real smart. I was drunk." Eventually, he turned totally dry. "I would tend to talk too much when drinking. If you're feisty anyway, you don't need any reason to be more feisty."

The garbage-can caper punctuated, at 26, what George W. calls his nomadic period. Prepping at Andover had presented cultural and educational shock for the kid from San Jacinto Junior High in Midland. At Yale, where his father had earned both a Phi Beta Kappa key and a place on the varsity baseball team, the son was an average student who discovered that his baseball prowess had peaked in prep school. His gregarious nature got him elected president of his jock fraternity.

Many members of the class of '68 were figuring how to avoid Viet Nam. His fraternity brother and later business partner, Roland Betts, says that George faced a special pressure: "He felt that in order not to derail his father's political career he had to be in military service of some kind." A 53-week program in the Texas Air National Guard qualified him in F-102 interceptors. Lieut. Bush signed up for a program that rotated Guard pilots to Viet Nam, but he wasn't called. Instead he held short-term jobs, including a stint at Pull for Youth, a Houston program serving ghetto youngsters. "I wasn't interested in taking root," he says. "I was having fun." Once, with Marvin as company, he decided to take a few of the Pull for Youth kids on a plane ride. One of them became abusive and refused to be hushed. So George used a simple pilot's trick: he momentarily stalled the engine, scaring his passengers into white- knuckled silence.

In his late 20s, still single, he decided to attend Harvard Business School. The curriculum appealed to him far more than Cambridge's liberal atmosphere. Watergate was nearing its climax, and Bush pere was in a defensive crouch as Republican national chairman. The son sympathized from afar, then decided to take his M.B.A. back to Midland, to learn the oil business as a "landman," one who researches mineral and land records.

Initially this meant a two-room apartment off an alley and a lot of generosity from old pals. During this period he reinforced a reputation for frugality. At Midland's annual golf tournament, one of the gag trophies is the George Bush Dress Award, shaggy plaid trousers bestowed on the competitor sporting the worst attire. Its eponym still buys bargain threads at a factory outlet. Despite his recent affluence, he continues to describe himself as "all name and no money." Thrift is a virtue for someone trying to build his own business without capital. Bush became known as a shrewd dealmaker who could attract investors without incurring debt. As the energy business flourished in the late '70s, he built a small, solvent outfit of his own. He also married Laura Welch, a librarian, just three months after they met. She explains the courtship's brevity by saying, "We were both 30, and had had a lot of single years. We were glad to find each other."

With an open congressional seat beckoning, George decided to try politics in 1978. He won the Republican primary over a more experienced rival. But in the general election Bush faced a Democrat as conservative as he and one who had spent his entire life in the district. Bush's Ivy League education became a cultural liability. He lost by 6 points. By the mid-1980s the oil industry's downward cycle had made capital increasingly difficult to come by for smaller operators. So he agreed to merge his outfit with Harken Energy.

As Big Bush's presidential efforts accelerated in early 1987, George and the second oldest son Jeb had doubts about Lee Atwater as campaign manager. To % allay those concerns, Atwater invited one of the brothers to join the campaign organization full-time. So George, Laura and their twin daughters moved to Washington for the duration. After a dozen years of independence, he was back in his father's orbit being called Junior.

He remembers finding Washington a "hostile environment." The campaign operation was often a mud wrestle among contending egos. "I was the loyalty thermometer," he says. Frequently he cut through bureaucratic inertia to get necessary decisions made. And he was ever leery of leaks and resentful of the personal ties to reporters that Atwater and other heavyweights had. Yet it was Junior who went on the record with a Newsweek correspondent to deny salacious gossip about the candidate. It was a brash act that both got the adultery rumor into print and choked off its circulation. Occasionally Atwater used him as an emissary to the candidate when the mission was delicate. It fell to Junior to present the idea that Bush would strengthen his image by "swinging the ax" on Don Regan at a time when the White House chief of staff was about to topple. The Vice President said no.

According to one associate, George was "terribly insecure around his father," apparently unsure of his standing. Not so, the son insists: "In the campaign, he and I attained a new level of friendship." Then, in a tone sounding more conjectural than convinced, he adds, "I know there were times -- I could just tell -- when he respected my opinion." But he had to guess when.

He did not have to guess about his destination after the election. With Midland suffering hard times, his connection with Harken offered a Dallas base from which to look for a new business and think about politics. But around Thanksgiving he learned from a former partner that a group attempting to buy the Rangers probably would fail to get American League approval. Always fascinated by baseball, Bush hesitated not a moment. Well before opening day in April, he had assembled a syndicate of investors far wealthier than he.

"Being the President's son puts you in the limelight," he says. "While in the limelight, you might as well sell tickets." So on a typical evening recently, while going through his personal pregame drill, he eyeballed the stands. "Looks like around 25,000 tonight," he estimated. That's the number the club needed to break 1 million in attendance, a milestone that came later in previous seasons. Later the gate was announced: 26,244. Though the Rangers < were losing a close game, the new owner beamed. "I like selling tickets," says Bush the businessman. "There are a lot of parallels between baseball and politics," says Bush, the once and future politician.