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Then doubt set in; 1990 could well be a Democratic year, advisers told him. His mother Barbara said in a newspaper interview that he should not run this time. If he ignored her admonition, he would have to give up active management of the Rangers this fall. So he is likely to defer politics, though it remains indelibly on his agenda. In a sports-crazed state, success as a baseball operator is a political plus. "My biggest liability in Texas," he says in his twang-free interview voice, "is the question 'What's the boy ever done? So he's got a famous father and ran a small oil company. He could be riding on Daddy's name if he ran for office.' Now I can say, 'I've done something -- here it is.' "
The "boy," 43 this month, has in fact done a fair amount by ordinary standards. Despite the vagaries of the energy business, he cajoled his first million from it when he sold out to a larger enterprise in 1986. But the world measures the children of the great by different standards. And George W., as he is sometimes tagged to distinguish him from "Big Bush," compounded that problem by using Dad's resume as the road map of his early life. He followed that path through Andover and Yale, then learned to fly combat aircraft. Alone among the Bush offspring, he returned to Midland. There, where he had been a fanatic Little League player, he replicated his father's oil-field ventures.
Such filial fidelity is hardly unique, but Junior's respect for his father grew to reverence. Says his first cousin John Ellis: "The whole key to understanding George W. is his relationship to his father." It was a loving one with both parents. But with Barbara Bush he developed a joshing comradeship that still has them punching each other's hot buttons. "We fight all the time," the Silver Fox says with a laugh. "We're so alike in that way. He does things to needle me, always." With his father, awe never left the equation.
When the children were young, Barbara was the magistrate for misdemeanors while her husband judged felonies. "I would scream and carry on," she remembers. "The way George scolded was by silence or by saying 'I'm disappointed in you.' And they would almost faint." Young George was most vulnerable to the "disappointed in you" line. "He could be made to feel," Marvin says, "that he had committed the worst crime in history."
One offense that lives in family lore occurred after the parents moved to Washington. While visiting, George took Marvin on an outing that included too much beer for both. Driving home, George clipped a neighbor's trash can. Alcohol fueled what the family calls his feisty side. Confronted by his father, he remembers his attitude as, " 'O.K., what are you going to do about it?' Real smart. I was drunk." Eventually, he turned totally dry. "I would tend to talk too much when drinking. If you're feisty anyway, you don't need any reason to be more feisty."
The garbage-can caper punctuated, at 26, what George W. calls his nomadic period. Prepping at Andover had presented cultural and educational shock for the kid from San Jacinto Junior High in Midland. At Yale, where his father had earned both a Phi Beta Kappa key and a place on the varsity baseball team, the son was an average student who discovered that his baseball prowess had peaked in prep school. His gregarious nature got him elected president of his jock fraternity.