Word: sonly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hear you're looking for me," the son told the father. "You wanna go mano a mano right here?" It was Jeb who tried to ease the tension by announcing to the Bush parents that W. had just been accepted at Harvard Business School. They hadn't even known he had applied, but they leaped at the idea until he told them, "Oh, I'm not going. I just wanted to let you know I could get into...
...middle ground between the family code and the times he grew up in." He didn't enlist and head for Vietnam. But "leaving the country to avoid the draft was not an option for me," he explains in his book. "I was too conservative and too traditional." Like many sons of prominent pols, W. found a place in the National Guard, spending nearly two years learning to fly fighter jets. By that time the F-102 was increasingly obsolete, so there was not much chance he would ever be called to serve overseas. The duty left him time to work...
...Bush children seemed capable of making a name for himself the old-fashioned way, it was brother Jeb. He was the one on the fast track, the serious son, the Phi Beta Kappa, the one with the ambition and focus that W. disdained. A family adviser explains the relationship this way: "W.'s kind of like the guy who spends the night before the test in his Corvette, running around with two cheerleaders, and drives by the brainiac's house and says, 'Jeb, can I have your notes?' The brainiac gets an A, but W. slides by with...
...interesting thing about all this acting out was that to any stranger watching the Bush children grow up, W. still looks like an awfully faithful son, a much more faithful Xerox of his father than Jeb, who after all went to the University of Texas, not Yale, then married his Mexican wife, Columba, and settled in Florida rather than back home. W. followed his father step for step. "He is always anxious to please his father," one of the President's oldest and closest counselors said a few years ago, "and he has done it by emulation. He went...
Back at Yale after the election, a famous story goes, W. ran into the school's high-profile chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, himself a blue-blooded Yale alum and contemporary of W.'s father's. "I knew your father," he told the son, "and your father lost to a better man." It was an appalling thing to say, Barbara Bush later noted, especially to a freshman, who would hardly be likely to darken the chapel doors after an encounter like that. But that was not the last time W. found himself defending his father in a climate in which...