The Bush Years: Family, Duty, Power

Okay, gang.

male narrator: One extraordinary family...

Fueled by ambition...

driven by duty.

Jeb Bush! Jeb Bush! Jeb Bush!

They fought for power.

George W. felt a sense of competition

with my brother...

He's my boy.

And he felt that,

"Yeah, I can do that if he can do it."

narrator: They've made friends,

as well as enemies...

Forged the history of America...

I can hear you!

narrator: And the world.

The president asked, "How good is the intelligence

on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction?"

And the director of the CIA said,

"It's a slam dunk, Mr. President.

It's a slam dunk."

Narrator: They've lived in the spotlight,

yet remained intensely private.

We told him he was gonna lose,

and that he was gonna ruin our life,

while both sobbing uncontrollably.

Hello, everybody.

narrator: One senator...

two governors...

Ooh, made it.

narrator: Two first ladies...

I'm my husband's biggest fan.

narrator: And two presidents.

I think it's hard to imagine

any family that have been more significant

to American politics.

narrator: These are the Bushes.

June 12th, 1942 is a monumental day

in the life of George Herbert Walker Bush.

He not only turns 18 on that day.

He graduates from prep school from Phillips Andover,

and he's about to make one of the most momentous decisions

of his life.

The United States has been at war for six months,

after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor

on December 7th.

There was a great sense that

many Americans were going to die,

many Americans were going to have their lives changed

fundamentally forever.

The speaker at the graduation

is Henry Stimson,

the secretary of war for Franklin Roosevelt.

And his message to these young men was,

"We will need you,

"but we need most of all are leaders,

"and to be good leaders, you need a good education,

so, please, don't rush out and enlist right now."

Bush's parents, Prescott and Dorothy Bush,

would like for their son to go to Yale,

and to do at least a year or two of university,

before going into the service.

And afterward, Prescott Bush asks him,

is he going to wait and enroll into college?

And George Bush says, "No, sir, I'm going in."

My father clearly had a sense of

needing to defend our homeland,

and I think it may have evolved out of

his own family's commitment to service.

George Bush was born into the pinnacle

of American society

in Connecticut.

This was a family of privilege.

This was a family of wealth.

This was a family of status.

This was Greenwich, Connecticut,

the center of the W.A.S.P. establishment.

This was the era when white Anglo-Saxton Protestants

really did run the United States.

And they felt the privilege,

but also the duty to serve.

George Bush's father, Prescott Bush,

is from Columbus, Ohio,

where his father ran a very successful

metal manufacturing company.

But Prescott decides that he will make money on his own,

and becomes the head of Brown Brothers Harriman,

a huge financial institution on Wall Street.

He was an austere fellow.

All five of us were afraid of him growing up.

He was always off on some mission or other.

And he would sort of wolf down dinner,

and we all had to be quiet.

Then 8:00 o'clock, out the door he'd go to another meeting.

And...very busy guy.

Dorothy Walker Bush comes from

the privileged and powerful Walker family,

a highly competitive go-get-'em family,

and she herself is extraordinarily competitive.

We would call her today a tiger mother.

She really pushed the kids to do better,

but also pushed George Bush in particular,

who always had a spark of charisma

and a spark of achievement.

He was a superstar. Absolutely.

I mean, all the kids in the neighborhood

wanted to be with George.

They just loved him.

He always was the one that was the leader.

narrator: George is the second of

Prescott and Dorothy's five children.

His eldest brother is Prescott Jr.,

two years George's senior.

His younger siblings are Nancy, Jonathan, and William,

who was born when George was 14.

Kennebunkport, Maine is the home of Walker's Point,

the Bush family compound.

George Bush and his brothers and sister

went there every summer,

and were constantly competing in sports.

They always wanted to win,

but the story in the family was not to brag about victory.

George comes home from a soccer game, says,

"Mom, I scored a goal."

She says, "That's great, but, George, how did the team do?"

This is essential.

You do not understand George H.W. Bush

unless you understand the tension between

his need to win the big prizes,

to be number one,

and at the same time, not to show off,

not to be too proud, but to do both.

narrator: Just two months after graduating,

George H.W. Bush joins the navy

to train as a pilot.

My father writes that his father saw him off

at the train station,

and for the very first time in my father's life,

he saw his own father cry,

which showed there was a deep father-son connection.

He must have been deeply proud of my father.

George H.W. Bush became the youngest pilot

in the United States Navy,

and he flew off aircraft carriers.

narrator: By the fall of 1944,

George has flown over 50 combat missions.

What courage, what determination,

what patriotism.

How could you ask for more from any individual?

narrator: George H.W. Bush is about to embark on

his most dangerous operation yet.

The order is for him to fly towards

the Japanese-held island of Chichijima.

There's a radio tower that he and his two crewmen,

Ted White and John Delaney, are charged with bombing.

They close on the target,

and there's anti-aircraft fire.

Bush's plane is hit.

The wings are enflamed.

There's smoke in the cockpit.

He was able to control the plane,

dive, and drop the bombs...

And then turn back over the Pacific.

But the plane was clearly going to crash.

He told his comrades,

"You guys bail out, and then I'll bail out."

He cracks open the cockpit.

The wind sucks him out.

He smashes his head on the tail,

injuring himself.

He plummets under the water,

and gulps in gallons of seawater,

and then bobs back up...

And he has a life raft, but no paddle.

He's bleeding, he's in the open ocean,

and, far worse, the tide and the wind

are pushing him towards Japanese hell territory,

and there's a Japanese patrol boat coming out to get him.

His life is in mortal danger.

Shot down, George Bush is in the middle of the Pacific,

and he's being blown toward Chichijima,

where he's almost certainly going to be tortured

and killed by the Japanese.

George Bush was in the water for over three hours,

and this is where some of the Bush family luck

came to play.

There was in the vicinity

a U.S. submarine, the Finback,

which spotted Bush alone in his raft,

took him aboard.

And amazingly enough,

a crewmember has a Kodak movie camera,