able. His head was throbbing, and he feared he wouldn’t be able
to complete his usual three miles.
“About halfway through, I decided I would drink no more,”
Bush later wrote. “I came back to the hotel and told Laura... ‘I’m
quitting drinking.’ I’m not sure she believed me at first.” And the
decision stuck. Indeed, as he has stated publicly many times, he
has not touched alcohol since.
That moment in 1986 has proven to be significant. Bill Min-
utaglio, whose biography First Sonchronicles how Bush often felt
he fell short—from his average grades in the Ivy League to his
enlistment in the Texas Air National Guard, to his bad luck in the
oil business—writes, “It’s pretty clear that stopping drinking was
a real turning point for Bush, because it gave him the energy to
study politics at the highest level, and it alerted him to his own
political possibilities. It changed him. He realized that if he
straightened up, the sky was the limit.”
Years later, when he had ascended to the presidency, Bush
asked some religious leaders to pray for him by saying, “You
know, I had a drinking problem. Right now I should be in a bar
in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am
in the Oval Office and not in a bar. I found faith. I found God. I
am here because of the power of prayer.”
■ ■ ■Planting seeds also includes sticking to one’s guns and maintain-
ing integrity in the face of conflicting pressures. Who knows who
will be watching and who will represent soil on which good seed
might fall?
In 1959, Billy was planning meetings in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The timing couldn’t have been more volatile. Less than a year ear-
lier, voters in Little Rock had voted 19,470 to 7,561 “against racial
integration in all schools in the district.” The vote meant the city’s
four high schools could not open as public institutions with any
blacks in attendance. The school board attempted to lease the
schools to a private corporation to permit segregated classes to
Sowing Seeds in All Seasons