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The office towers of Midland are monuments to the high hopes and short memory of man. The downtown buildings, which rise 20 stories above the West Texas scrub, sprang up during the good years--mid-'50s, late '70s, early '90s--and stand half-empty during the bad. In 1973, Midland's most feverish era was touched off by the Arab oil embargo, and suddenly everyone who had ever lived in or passed through the place came looking for oil. When George W. showed up in 1975, not yet 30, he was a curious amalgam of West Texas and East Coast--a Midland childhood mixed with schooling at Phillips Academy and Yale, then a succession of jobs, parties and girlfriends in Houston, none of which fired his imagination. After being rejected by the University of Texas law school in 1973, he applied to Harvard Business School--without telling his family he was doing so--and was accepted. M.B.A. in hand, he headed for a buddy's ranch in Tucson, Ariz., and stopped to visit friends in Midland. There he met one old pal after another who was getting into oil, and "it occurred to me that Midland was the place. I needed to go," he says. "There was excitement in the air. People were beginning to get the scent."
His friend O'Neill told him he should learn the oil business by working for an established company a few years. George was too impatient for that. He hired himself out for $100 a day as a landman, searching mineral-rights titles in county courthouses around West Texas. "I basically taught myself," he says. Bush's move to Midland is at the heart of his official myth. Driving out in an old Cutlass with $20,000 and a dream, scraping by in tatty chinos and beat-up shoes. It's as close as the son of a President can get to calling himself a self-made man. The details may be true, but the message is bogus, because it ignores Bush's extraordinary family connections. He tried hard to be a regular guy but wasn't; he was famously frugal--"so tight he damn near squeaked," says a colleague--but didn't really need money. Rich friends of his father backed his business ventures.
They also backed him when he decided to run for Congress in 1977, after only two years in town. (Yet George W. didn't want his father to campaign for him; he wanted to do it himself.) The decision to run violated a basic family tenet: First make your mark and your fortune, then run for office. Only those who knew him well had seen it coming. "He wasn't obsessed with politics, but it was always there," says Charles Younger, a Midland surgeon and longtime Bush jogging partner. A famously eligible bachelor, Bush had also surprised friends by courting and marrying--in just three months--a librarian named Laura Welch, who was as reserved and knowing as he was brash and noisy. She made him promise that she would never have to give a speech. (So much for that vow.) "We campaigned the whole first year of our marriage," she says.