Only pilots with extensive flying time – at the outset, 1,000 hours were required – were sent overseas under the voluntary program. The Air Force, moreover, was retiring the aging F-102s and had ordered all overseas F-102 units closed down as of June 30, 1970.
After basic training at Lackland and his commissioning as a second lieutenant in 1968, Bush got what amounted to a two-month-plus vacation that enabled him to head to Florida to work for a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Edward J. Gurney. Put on inactive duty status, Bush arrived in early September and stayed through Election Day, riding the press plane, handing out releases, and making sure traveling reporters woke up in time. He occasionally returned to Houston for weekend Guard duty.
In late November, Bush was sent to Moody Air Force Base outside Valdosta, Ga., for year-long undergraduate flight school.
Bush impressed fellow* trainees with the way he learned to handle a plane, but he became a celebrity for something else. In the middle of his training, President Richard M. Nixon sent a plane down to fetch him for an introductory date with his older daughter Tricia, according to fellow trainee Joseph A. Chaney. It did not lead to another date, but the story lives on. So does memory of the graduation ceremony: Rep. Bush gave the commencement speech.
In December 1969, George W. returned to Houston to hone his skills and eventually fly solo on the all-weather F-102, firing its weapons and conducting intercept missions against supersonic targets.
He learned with a verve that impressed his superiors, becoming the the first hometown graduate of the 147th's newly established Combat Crew Training School. The group's public relations office celebrated his solo flight in March 1970 with a press release that began:
"George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation who doesn't get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed. . . . As far as kicks are concerned, Lt. Bush gets his from the roaring afterburner of the F-102."
Brig. Gen. John Scribner, director of the Texas Military Forces Museum in Austin, said it was only natural that the Guard would have publicized Bush's service with special ceremonies and press releases. "That's how they do things, play it up big, especially since he was a congressman's son. That was important to the Guard," he said.
No Career in Mind, No Rush to Settle Down
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Bush graduated from Combat Crew Training School on June 23, 1970, having fulfilled his two years of active duty. But he still flew the F-102 Delta Daggers a few times a month; his unit kept two of the fighters, fully armed, on round-the-clock alert and needed the pilots to man them. With no career in mind, Bush was still "looking," as his mother said – looking for work and looking for his road. He seemed to be in no rush to settle down, which his mother said was fine by his parents.
Barbara Bush said she recalled that her father-in-law, Prescott Bush, came to Yale in the late 1940s and told her husband that " 'you don't have to make up your mind now what you're going to be when you grow up.' " She added: "I think we told our children that. . . . I'm sure George did."
George W. promptly took a one-bedroom apartment at one of the most attractive complexes in Houston at the time, the Chateaux Dijon. A popular spot for singles, it offered fancy street lamps and striped awnings and six pools filled with ambitious secretaries, students and young businessmen. Bush relished his bachelor life there. He played hard, plunging into all-day water volleyball games,
but left frequently for 24-hour flight duty in the alert shack at Ellington Field.
"
He did some night-flying as I recall," said Don Ensenat, a Yale classmate who lived with him in Houston. "No alcohol 24 hours before. They had to keep planes on alert all the time."
Bush had to be ready to scramble in his F-102 after any flying objects that Air Force radars couldn't figure out.
Coincidentally, Bush's future wife, Laura Welch, a public school librarian, lived at the Chateaux Dijon too, but they didn't meet. Bush dated other women frequently, but none steadily.
"He had a couple of girls that were more than one date, but nothing that looked like a serious romance," Ensenat said. "Dates and the opposite sex were always high on the agenda. He was always enjoyable to be around. But we didn't do anything anybody else in their twenties didn't do."
Ensenat said he never saw Bush use illegal drugs.
That fall, as his father raced Bentsen for the Senate seat, both Bush and Ensenat, who had already entered law school at the University of Houston, applied for admission to the University of Texas law school. Both were rejected, though Ensenat later became a lawyer. Then, after losing to Bentsen, Bush's father was named ambassador to the United Nations by President Nixon. The Bushes moved to New York, leaving their eldest son to rely on his family's old school and corporate ties to find a job.
Bush called Robert H. Gow, a Yale man who had roomed with the senior Bush's cousin Ray in college and who had been an executive at the senior Bush's Zapata Off-Shore Co. In 1969, Gow left Zapata and started Stratford of Texas, a Houston-based agricultural company with diverse interests: from cattle to chickens to indoor, non-blooming tropical plants.
"We weren't looking for someone, but I thought this would be a talented guy we should hire, and he was available," Gow said. In early 1971, Gow gave Bush a job as a management trainee. He was required to wear a coat and tie and dispatched around the country and even to Central America, looking for plant nurseries that Stratford might acquire. The newly buttoned-down businessman also moved into a garage apartment that he shared with Ensenat off Houston's North Boulevard, an old 1920s neighborhood close to downtown.
"We traveled to all kinds of peculiar places, like Apopka, Florida, which was named the foliage capital of the world," said Peter C. Knudtzon, another Zapata alumnus who was Stratford's executive vice president and Bush's immediate boss.
Once or twice a month, Bush would announce that he had flight duty and off he would go, sometimes taking his F-102 from Houston to Orlando and back. "It was really quite amazing," Knudtzon said. "Here was this young guy making acquisitions of tropical plants and then up and leaving to fly fighter planes."
Bush learned the ropes quickly, putting in long hours, and fitting in smoothly – but this wasn't the place for the impatient young man. He would later refer to his time at Stratford as a dull coat-and-tie job. Within weeks he was talking to Gow and Knudtzon about his future, questioning, searching – but never coming to any firm conclusion. His bosses recall today that he was weighing whether he should pursue public service or stick it out in the business arena to build some security.
Bush stayed at Stratford only about nine months, and by fall 1971 he was flirting – albeit very briefly – with running for the state legislature. The Houston Post reported the possibility in a story that misnamed him "George Bush Jr."
In the late spring of 1972, Bush was again looking, when he joined another political campaign. This time he helped longtime family friend Jimmy Allison work in Alabama on the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Winton M. "Red" Blount against longtime Democratic incumbent John J. Sparkman. Bush moved to Alabama and worked until November as political director for Blount, who lost by a wide margin.
By the end of 1972, Bush's father was mulling over a new job offer from Nixon – to be chairman of the Republican National Committee. With his parents back in Washington, Bush went to stay with them for the holidays and was involved in one of the most notorious incidents of his "nomadic" years. He took his 16-year-old brother Marvin out drinking, ran over a neighbor's garbage cans on the way home, and when his father confronted him, challenged him to go "mano a mano" outside.
There was no fight, and Bush was apparently able to mollify his father with the news that he had been accepted for the following fall at Harvard Business School. But with nothing to do until then, his father decided it was time to give this restless young man some broader exposure to real life.
Shortly after Christmas, Bush began working as a counselor with black youngsters in Houston's Third Ward in a program called PULL (Professionals United for Leadership) for Youth. The brainchild of the late John L. White, a former professional football player and civic leader, it was set up for kids up to 17 in a warehouse on McGowen Street and it offered sports, crafts, field trips and big-name mentors from the athletic, entertainment and business worlds.
Bush and his brother Marvin, who tagged along for the summer weeks, were the only whites in the place. "They stood out like a sore thumb," said Muriel Simmons Henderson, who was one of PULL's senior counselors. "John White was a good friend of their father. He told us that the father wanted George W. to see the other side of life. He asked John if he would put him in there."
Dressed in khaki, with his pants torn at the knees, Bush managed to fit right in. He "came early and stayed late," in the words of one former employee, playing basketball and wrestling with the youngsters, taking them on field trips to juvenile prisons so they could see that side of life and resolve not to end up there themselves. He also taught them not to run when a police cruiser came by.
"He was a super, super guy," said "Big Cat" Ernie Ladd, a 6-foot-9, 320-pound pro football great and PULL luminary who stopped by frequently. "If he was a stinker, I'd say he was a stinker. But everybody loved him so much. He had a way with people. . . . They didn't want him to leave." One little boy in particular, a 6-or-maybe-7-year-old named Jimmy Dean, made a special connection with Bush. "He was an adorable kid," said Edgar Arnold, PULL's operating director. "Everybody liked him, but he bypassed all these famous athletes, all these giants, and picked out George Bush, and vice versa." The two became inseparable. If George was a little late, Jimmy would wait for him on the stoop. "At business meetings," Arnold said, "that kid would be on top of George, head on his shoulders." When Jimmy showed up shoeless, George bought him shoes.
Bush says he heard many years later that little Jimmy Dean was killed by gunfire as a teenager. "He was like my adopted little brother."
In keeping with family tradition, Bush did not boast of his pedigree, or even mention it, to others at PULL. "I didn't know he was of a silver spoon nature," Henderson said.
His car, like his clothes, carried no hint of it. "He had a bomb of a car," she remembered. "It was the pits . . . always full of stuff, clothes, papers. No one could ride in it with him. . . . He never put himself in the position of looking down his nose at someone, like, 'I've got all this money, my father is George Bush.' He never talked about his father. He was so down to earth. . . . You could not help liking him. He was always fun."
Back to New England And Another School
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To start at Harvard, Bush needed early release from Guard duty in Texas, and he got it easily, about eight months short of a full six years. A Bush spokesman, Dan Bartlett, said early departures were quite common and, in Bush's case, appropriate because his unit had phased out the F-102s. Bush was transferred to a reserve unit in Boston for the rest of his time, Bartlett noted.
Arriving in Cambridge in September 1973 in his spray-painted Cutlass and scruffy clothes, Bush was not at all what his classmates expected when the word spread that he was indeed the son of the Republican National Committee chairman.
"One of my first recollections of him," says classmate Marty Kahn, "was sitting in class and hearing the unmistakable sound of someone spitting tobacco. I turned around and there was George sitting in the back of the room in his [National Guard] bomber jacket spitting in a cup. You have to remember this was Harvard Business School. You just didn't see that kind of thing."
Classmates vividly remember Bush as an iconoclast and a character, someone who didn't fit the tailored mold of business students in the nation's premier graduate program. Many of the students who arrived that fall, like Bush, had been out of college and working a few years. But unlike Bush, a good number were returning to school with a road map of where they were heading: Wall Street.
Bush's entry into the program came five years after his graduation from Yale, and after a series of dead-end or unfulfilling jobs. He was 27 and clearly had not found his niche yet. "A lot of people went to Harvard Business School . . . for a job and all that. I went there to actually learn. And did," says Bush.
Indeed, many of those closest to him, including his mother, believe Harvard's rigorous academic demands brought his life and potential career into focus. "Harvard was a great turning point for him. I don't think he'd say that as much as I would," said Barbara Bush. "I think he learned what is that word? Structure."
Bush shrugged off the trappings of Harvard and avoided the official clubs that would showcase him in the yearbook and look good on his resume. Instead, he showed up for class looking like he had just rolled out of bed in the morning, often sat in the back of the room chewing gum or dipping snuff and made it clear to everyone he had no interest in Wall Street.
He was one of the few people who posed for his yearbook mug shot in a sports shirt, a wrinkled one at that. The other prominent picture of him in the book showed him sitting in the back row of class with longish hair blowing a huge bubble.
"This was HBS and people were fooling around with the accouterments of money and power," recalled April Foley, who dated Bush for a brief period and has remained friends with him. "While they were drinking Chivas Regal, he was drinking Wild Turkey. They were smoking Benson and Hedges and he's dipping Copenhagen, and while they were going to the opera he was listen to Johnny Rodriguez over and over and over and over."
What Bush wanted to get out of Harvard were some practical business fundamentals. He wanted to do something entrepreneurial, he told his pals, but he wasn't sure what. He mused about running for office but told friends he had to make some money first. Of this everyone was certain: George W. Bush would never end up on the East Coast. He was going back to Texas.
Staff researchers Nathan Abse, Madonna Lebling and Mary Lou White contributed to this report.
© 1999 The Washington Post Company
With emphasis added for those who may have forgotten that it was posted on The High Road in another thread in which they participated. 
Please note the date of the article.
*That means there was more than just Bush present. For those who may not know what "fellow" means when used in that context.
HERE:
http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=63412&highlight=elite+classrooms
