Word: bushed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...late bloomer is a rare but recognizable presidential type. Think Harry S Truman or Ulysses S. Grant. No one can say whether George W. Bush will join their ranks, but it is possible to trace how he changed his life and made such a thing possible. The answers are in West Texas in 1986, Washington in 1988 and Dallas...
Within a few months of his encounter with Dickey, Bush quit drinking. Soon after, he sold his ailing company for a miraculous profit and moved his family to Washington, where he worked on his father's 1988 presidential campaign and, he has said, "earned his spurs" in the old man's eyes. He helped put together the group that bought the Texas Rangers baseball team and plotted a run for Governor. It was as if someone had thrown a cosmic switch and his future came into focus. "Let's face it, George was not real happy [in Midland]," says oilman...
...should learn the oil business by working for an established company a few years. George was too impatient for that. He hired himself out for $100 a day as a landman, searching mineral-rights titles in county courthouses around West Texas. "I basically taught myself," he says. Bush's move to Midland is at the heart of his official myth. Driving out in an old Cutlass with $20,000 and a dream, scraping by in tatty chinos and beat-up shoes. It's as close as the son of a President can get to calling himself a self-made...
...decision to run violated a basic family tenet: First make your mark and your fortune, then run for office. Only those who knew him well had seen it coming. "He wasn't obsessed with politics, but it was always there," says Charles Younger, a Midland surgeon and longtime Bush jogging partner. A famously eligible bachelor, Bush had also surprised friends by courting and marrying--in just three months--a librarian named Laura Welch, who was as reserved and knowing as he was brash and noisy. She made him promise that she would never have to give a speech. (So much...
Like his dad, Bush had no patience running for small-time local offices; no one gave him much chance of winning his race. But he was a natural--handsome, "not the smartest guy in the world but smart enough," as Younger says, blessed with an honest love of pressing the flesh. He won the G.O.P. primary, then ran against state senator Kent Hance, who used a populist tactic Bush would never forget. Hance compared his own West Texas "credentials" with Bush's Andover-Yale-Harvard ones. When Hance got through with him, Bush smelled like some exotic houseplant...