Word: fathered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...true, but the message is bogus, because it ignores Bush's extraordinary family connections. He tried hard to be a regular guy but wasn't; he was famously frugal--"so tight he damn near squeaked," says a colleague--but didn't really need money. Rich friends of his father backed his business ventures...
They also backed him when he decided to run for Congress in 1977, after only two years in town. (Yet George W. didn't want his father to campaign for him; he wanted to do it himself.) The 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...
Bush went back into oil. He started hiring for his own company, Arbusto (Spanish for bush), raising money from a network of East Coast backers who were close to his father and uncle, money manager Jonathan Bush. Among them were drugstore tycoon Lewis Lehrman, who lost a bid for Governor of New York in 1982; venture capitalist William H. Draper III, who would become president of the U.S. Export-Import Bank during the Reagan Administration; and Celanese CEO John Macomber, who later landed the same post...
...Bush merged his company with Spectrum 7, an oil-drilling firm run by two supporters of his father, Bill DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. It was a good fit. Arbusto had oil prospects; Spectrum had a network of investors. The merger doubled the size of Bush's operation, and the Spectrum people wanted to upgrade his image with fancy furniture and a company car, but Bush wouldn't hear of it. "Those were the doodah days in Midland," says O'Neill's wife Jan, "and a lot of people couldn't resist--jets, boats, cars. George didn't go for that...
Part of what prompted him to give it up, a friend says, was that "he didn't want to do anything under the influence that might embarrass his father," who was preparing to run for President. George W. was also experiencing a religious awakening, one that began with his now famous 1985 encounter with evangelist Billy Graham, at the Bush-family compound in Kennebunkport, Me. After praying privately with Graham--"It was a real personal religious visit," he says--he joined a men's Bible-study group in Midland, "taking inventory of himself," his friend Donald Ensenat says...