"Bush is the latest if not the last Bull Moose, one of those elite easterners who renew their spirit and make a career in the West. He was born in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Prescott Bush, an investment banker and U.S. senator. Bush easily imbibed the values of his parents and teachers at Phillips Andover Academy: propriety, service and an Episcopalian version of muscular Christianity. A navy pilot in the Pacific in World War II, he was shot down and narrowly escaped death. Afterward, he graduated from Yale University, married, and moved to Texas to learn the oil business.

Bush took quickly to such Texas ways as pitching horseshoes and eating chicken-fried steak, but he remained a devout Episcopalian, socialized with other transplanted Ivy Leaguers, and used family connections to finance his petroleum exploration and equipment companies. Ultimately settling in Houston, he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1964, but won a House seat in 1966. In Congress he opposed most Great Society legislation but voted for some civil right measures.

After losing another Senate race in 1970, Bush served in succession as ambassador to the United Nations, where he enjoyed verbal duels with the Soviet delegate: chairman of the Republican National Committee, where he defended Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal: U.S. representative to the People's Republic of China, where he established enduring ties with Communist leaders; and director of the C.I.A., where he tried to improve morale and public relations. In 1980, running as a moderate, Bush lost to Reagan but was then nominated and elected as vice-president.

Bush had a slight influence on policy while serving as vice-president. He apparently had no advance knowledge of the illegal diversion of funds in the Iran-Contra scandal. His loyalty, propriety, and boyish enthusiasm led critics to label him a "wimp," but they underestimated his ambition, shrewdness, and occasional unscrupulousness. He wooed the Republican Rights, established himself as Reagan's heir apparent, and won the presidency in 1988. In the campaign he echoed Richard Nixon's earlier appeal to the "silent majority," questioned Democratic opponent Mike Dukakis's patriotism and commitment to fighting crime, and exploited racial fears.

Bush abandoned these demagogic tactics after the election, perhaps because he privately found them embarrassing, but certainly because he preferred to govern by consensus. Indeed, the first years of his administration called to mind not Nixon or Reagan but Ford (whom Bush had served in two posts) and Eisenhower (who was a friend of his father's). Key appointments went to Washington and Wall Street insiders. Bush enjoyed high approval ratings, though the long range consequences of Reagan era fiscal policies and precipitous deregulation posed potential threats to the economy. Like his fellow moderate Republicans, Eisenhower and Ford, Bush pursued both detente with the Soviet Union and a policy of old fashion intervention in the third world, as the invasion of Panama and declaration of an international "drug war" illustrated. In 1990-1991, while proclaiming the advent of "new world order," Bush organized an international coalition and sent 540,000 American troops to liberate Kuwait after an Iraqi invasion. Appropriately, he displayed in the cabinet room a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, the first Bull Moose to wield a big stick."

Above info is reprinted from pages 138-139 from the book The Reader's Companion To American History

1. George's book
2. Bush Libary
3. Achievements

   --Charles Cremens, student at Nobles & Greenough, 1999
   --history teacher: Don Allard