This particular conceit may be a bad omen for President Bush. The cowardly, acid-tongued Henry
III was defeated by France's Louis IX (Saint Louis) in Henry's grab for powmuch of Europe. Henry's own barons at length revolted against his blundering arrogance, and hiser over France and (^)
power was curbed.
As the 1930s economic crisis deepened, Americans experienced unprecedented hardship and fear.
The Bush children were taught that those who suffered these problems had no onethemselves. to blame but
A hack writer, hired to puff President Bush's heroic military background, '' wrote these lines from material supplied by the White House: Prescott Bush was a thrifty man.... He had no sympathy for the nouveau riches who flaunted their
wealth--they were without class, he said. As a sage and strictly honest businessman, he had often
turned failing companies around, making them profitable again, and he had scorn for people who
went bankrupt because they mismanaged their money. Prescott's lessons were absorbed by young
George.... ''@s5
When he reached the age of five, George Bush joined his older brother Pres in attending the
Greenwich Country Day School. The brothers' lives were charted from birth. Their father had determined that his sons would be ... educated and trained to be members of America's elite.... Greenwich Countprivate secondary schools.... ry Day School [was] an exclusive all-male academy for youngsters slated for Alec, the family chauffeur, drove the two boys to school every morning after dropping Prescott,
Sr. at the railroad station for the morning commute to Manhattan. The Depression was nowhere in
evidence as the boys glided in the family's black Oldsmobile past the stone fences, stables, andswimming pools of one of the wealthiest communities in America. ''@s6
But though the young George Bush had no concerns about his material existence, one must not
overlook the important, private anxiety gnawing at him from the direction of his mother.
The President's wife, Barbara, has put most succinctly the question of Dorothy Bush and her effect
on George: His mother was the most competitive living human. ''@s7 If we look here in his mother's shadow, we may find something beyond the routine medical explanations for President Bush's driven '' states of rage, or hyperactivity.
Mother Bush was the best athlete in the family, the fastest runner. She was hard. She expected
others to be hard. They must win, but they must always appear not to care about winning.
This is put politely, delicately, in a biography '' written by an admiring friend of the President:She was with them day after day, ... often curbing their egos as only a marine drill instructor can.
Once when ... George lost a tennis match, he explained to her that he had been off his game that
morning. She retorted, You don't have a game.' ''@s8 According to this account, Barbara was fascinated by her mother-in-law's continuing ferocity: George, playing mixed doubles with Barbara on the Kennebunkport court, ran into a porch and injured his right shoulder blade. `` His mother said it was my ball to hit, and it happened because I didn't run for it. She was probably right, '' Barbara told [an interviewer].... When a discussion of someone's game came up, as Barbara described it, `` if Mrs. Bush would say,She had some good
shots,' it meant she stank. That's just the way she got the message across. When one of the