“Why me?” he still asks six decades later. “Why was I spared?”

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in World War II magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Despite that question that still tortures him, George Bush is militantly unreflective. He has always bridled at the psychological inquiries of younger generations. Years ago he told me, “I’m not going on the couch for anybody.” I always liked that about him, but he clearly has spent time pondering the meaning of his war years.

I ask: “You felt, ‘Why has God spared me?’”

“I think that’s there, but I think that’s overly dramatic,” he replies. “Maybe that’s one of the points I was trying to make earlier on, about how history can be distorted by your subjective judgments. As of today, I feel that strongly. Whether I went around talking to the chaplain about it the day after I was picked up on the submarine, I don’t know. I can’t recall.”

Yet he does recall his night watch duties on the deck of Finback as an awakening to the grandeur of existence and his place in its web.

“You’d get on there at 2 or 4 in the morning to do a couple hours’ watch, and the sky was just lit up,” he says, a tone of wonder still in his voice. “I remember the flying fish. You could see them off the florescent wake of the ship, and the majesty of nature. I do remember that very well. But whether it linked into the Creator, I don’t know.”

In the public realm, George Bush’s war years have been telescoped to the tight image of his diving Avenger being hit, his hours in the water, his rescue, and his feelings of grief and responsibility over the deaths of John Delaney and Ted White. Yet those experiences were only a piece of a much larger frame that forever changed his life.

“I wasn’t naive enough not to know that going to private schools and all was elite,” he says. Even the Great Depression had little impact on Bush’s boyhood. The rambling house in wealthy Greenwich, Conn. Maids, a cook, a chauffeur named Alec. Christmases at the South Carolina estate, summers at the Kennebunkport, Maine, estate. You would think all that privilege would have made the young George believe he was better than the rest of the rabble when he stepped onto that troop train in Penn Station. That’s not how he remembers feeling.

Years ago he said, “I was thinking, ‘Will I be accepted?’”

Today he says, “It was, in a sense, kind of scary.”

Was he going to be able to hold his own with toughs from the Bronx or farm kids from Alabama or cowboys from Montana? Could he make it in a world outside his insular bubble of pedigree and privilege?

I ask if he found himself wondering, “Can I compete when I’m not protected?”

“That’s right,” he says. “But I was trying to say, ‘I’m as good as they are in terms of being able to compete and rub elbows with the real problems, get decent marks in squadron or gunnery or whatever it is.’ I mean, I was driven to demonstrate I was as good a pilot as anybody else from whatever background.”

It turned out that George Bush did get along with the boys from all different backgrounds—a boy who worked in a mill making pencils before the war, a boy whose father owned a gas station, a boy who never finished high school. Bush didn’t talk much about his background, but word spread, if only because his oddly aristocratic name was just too tempting a target and became his nickname: “GeorgeHerbertWalkerBush,” always said in one breath. “Hey, GeorgeHerbertWalkerBush, good morning.”

He gave nicknames back, made up song lyrics to gibe a buddy, played practical jokes. While aboard Finback, he became famous for his drop-dead imitation of a bellowing elephant, which earned him a second nickname, “Ellie.” Officers were discouraged from mingling with crewmen, but George mingled. Against regulations, his gunner, Leo Nadeau, painted “Barbara” on the side of their plane, and GeorgeHerbertWalkerBush left it there. Men noticed that he was, you could say, different. He never told bawdy stories about his sweetheart. He didn’t try to pick up women on nights in town. And quite out of tune with the bravado spirit of young men off at war, he didn’t smoke or drink or cuss.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to