George Bush: World War II Navy Pilot

By Walt Harrington | World War II  | 2 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

In the old man George Bush, you can still find shadows of the boy who enlisted on his 18th birthday in 1942 in high hopes of becoming a Navy pilot. The thatch of unruly brown hair. The crooked, ingratiating smile. The clear blue eyes and the long, angular face. The disjointed sentences that don’t always parse. The oddball sense of humor he became known for after he earned his wings and was floating in the Pacific on the carrier USS San Jacinto and flying torpedo bomber runs off its short deck. He reaches into his office desk in Houston and pulls out a copy of one of his favoritecartoons. It’s a man ordering a meal in a fine restaurant at a table across from a giant fly: “I’ll have the gazpacho, leeks vinaigrette with shrimp, marinated zucchini, orange mousse, a bottle of Cotes du Rhone Rouge ’59. And bring some shit for my fly.” We laugh at the joke, but he laughs harder.

As his old crew mates on the San Jac might say, “Same old George.”

It was so long ago, those three years of war. In the 62 years since, he has been an oil entrepreneur, U.S. congressman, U.S. liaison in China, ambassador to the U.N., head of the CIA, vice president and president of the United States. He presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union. He won Desert Storm, scored among the highest approval rating of any president ever, then lost in his reelection bid. He told me only weeks after his 1992 defeat, “It’s just so embarrassing.” But that’s only his public life. He lost a three-year-old daughter to leukemia, raised five kids, two of whom are, famously, the former governor of Florida and the current president of the United States. And, although it was never in doubt, he stayed forever married to his wartime love, Barbara, the Silver Fox.

That’s a lot of living in 82 years.

But those three years at war, well, as a piece of life experience, they still top it all. Without that war, America no doubt would have heard from George Bush, whose great ability and family wealth assured him great opportunities, but he would have been a far different George Bush.

“Was it a shock to go off to war from your background?” I asked him 20 years ago for a Washington Post Magazine article on his life.

“It was the shock,” he answered.

The former president is just off hip replacement surgery at the Mayo Clinic, and this morning is the first time he has been in the office in two weeks. He has a walker by his desk and his leg propped up on an open drawer. He leans forward in his chair, reaches for his leg around the knee with both hands.

“Could you lift my leg a little?” he asks. “It’s kinda personal, I know, but it’d help me out.” I lift and he adjusts. “Thanks.”

I call him an old man because, chronologically, he is. But there’s nothing “old” about George Bush. Despite his hip surgery, he went out to the finish line of a marathon race in Houston the other morning and shook hands with the runners. He globe-trotted with former President Bill Clinton to raise money for disaster relief. He’s doing mental exercises to keep his mind and memory sharp. He took up e-mailing a while back and has started bolstering his famous penchant for personal letters with personal e-mails.

As they say, young is where you find it.

“They were a huge effect on me,” he says of his war years. “I was a kid that came out of a very closed environment, relatively privileged in the sense of growing up. My dad could send us to good schools. He could take care of us if we got sick. Most of the guys that were signing up for World War II couldn’t do that. So it was an eye-opener for one thing, in terms of just interaction of my privileged life with those from all walks of life.”

“Showing to myself that I could do it, compete, hold my own…was very, very important in terms of my own being.”

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: Aviation History, Historical Discoveries, Historical Figures, World War II

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.