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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Moments after enemy fire punctured the fuselage, smoke filled the cockpit of George Herbert Walker Bush's plane, the Barbara III. The twenty-year-old Navy pilot and his two-man crew had not yet carried out their mission, which was to bomb the island of Chichi Jima. But the plane was plummeting, and flames were nearing the fuel tank. Finally, the payload was dropped, and Bush ordered his crewmen, Ted White and John Delaney, to bail. Hearing no reply, he jumped out himself--pulling the parachute's rip cord early and banging his head on the plane, but recovering in time to hit the water safely. Swimming to an emergency life raft that had opened with his jump, he waited to be rescued. Around him, in the swells of the Pacific, White and Delaney were nowhere to be seen. "I cannot get the thought of those two boys out of my mind," Bush confessed years later.
In 1999, Bush celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday by jumping out of another airplane. (He jumped again last month, to celebrate his eightieth.) This time, he forgot to pull the rip cord; fortunately, another jumper had the presence of mind to do it for him. On landing, the former President was euphoric. Some noted echoes: it seemed that the birthday display of bravura had allowed him to revisit, perhaps even master, his Second World War trauma.
If George H. W. Bush had long viewed that wartime episode with dismay, his son George W. had always viewed it with awe. According to "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty" (Doubleday; $27.95), an admiring history of the family by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, George Walker Bush, as a child, had leafed through photograph albums of his father in uniform and stolen glimpses of his medals. "I want to be a fighter pilot because my father was," Bush told Colonel Walter (Buck) Staudt, of the Texas Air National Guard, in 1968, and Staudt helped the new Yale graduate leapfrog the waiting list to enter the pilot program. Four months later, young Bush pulled off a neat trick for a draft-age man during the Vietnam War: he had his second-lieutenant wings, yet he faced almost no risk of having to go and fight. The only price was that he took home no medals like his father's.
Three decades later, on May 1, 2003, George W. landed in an S-3B Viking jet on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, where he delivered a speech hailing the end of "major combat" in Iraq. For most of his life, he had followed in his father's footsteps--Andover, Yale, military flying, the oil business, politics--only to come up short at each milepost. The father prospered when his company, Zapata Petroleum Corporation, struck oil in seventy-one Texas wells in 1953 and 1954; when the son, at roughly the same age, formed his own firm, Arbusto, not even infusions of family cash could keep it from tumbling into debt. "I'm all name and no money," he said after it foundered. But last year, when he strode triumphant on the carrier deck, no one could dispute that, by chasing Saddam Hussein from his Baghdad palace, the son had finished one job his father had left undone.
Along with the Schweizers' book, Kevin Phillips's "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush"...
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