Books about Barbara Bush slavishly rehearse the same details from the same printout.
Here is the relevant excerpt from the warmly admiring Simply Barbara Bush: A Portrait
of America's Candid First Lady, written by Donnie Radcliffe and published after Bush's
1988 election victory:
With $3,000 left over after he graduated in June, 1948, he headed for Texas in the 1947
red Studebaker his father had given him for graduation after George's car died on the
highway. [fn 7]
We see that Bonhorst is acutely aware of the symbolic importance assumed by the red
Studebaker in these hagiographic accounts of Bush's life.
What is finally the truth of the matter? There is good reason to believe that George Bush
did not first come to Odessa, Texas, in a red Studebaker. One knowledgeable source is
the well-known Texas oilman and Bush campaign contributor Oscar Wyatt of Houston.
In a recent letter to the Texas Monthly, Wyatt specifies "when people speak of Mr. Bush's
humble beginnings in the oil industry, it should be noted that he rode down to Texas on
Dresser's private aircraft. He was accompanied by his father, who at that time was one of
the directors of Dresser Industries." "I hate it when people make statements about Mr.
Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry. It just didn't happen that way," writes Mr.
Wyatt. [fn 9] Dresser was a Harriman company, and Bush got his start working for one of
its subsidiaries. One history of Dresser Industries contains a photograph of George Bush
with his parents, wife, and infant son "in front of a Dresser company airplane in West
Texas." [fn 10 tris] Can this be a photo of Bush's arrival in Odessa during the summer of
1948? In any case, this most cherished myth of the Bush biographers is very much open
to doubt.
Fawning biographies of bloodthirsty tyrants are nothing new in world literature. The red
Studebaker school goes back a long way; these writers of today can be usefully compared
with a certain Gaius Velleius Paterculus, who lived in the Roman Empire under the
emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and who thus an approximate contemporary of Jesus
Christ. Velleius Paterculus was an historian and biographer who is known today, if at all,
for his biographical notes on the Emperor Tiberius, which are contained within
Paterculus's history of Rome from the origins down to his own time.
Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, gave a very favorable treatment of Julius Caesar, and
became fulsome when he came to write of Augustus. But the worst excesses of flattery
came in Velleius Paterculus's treatment of Tiberius himself. Here is part of what he writes
about that tyrannical ruler:
Of the transactions of the last sixteen years, which have passed in the view, and are fresh
in the memory of all, who shall presume to give a full account? [...] credit has been
restored to mercantile affairs, sedition has been banished from the forum, corruption from
the Campus Martius, and discord from the senate- house; justice, equity and industry,
which had long lain buried in neglect, have been revived in the state; authority has been
given to the magistrates, majesty to the senate, and solemnity to the courts of justice; the