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Jim McAninch's daughter frequently baby-sat for the Bushes' twin girls Barbara and Jenna, "and George would drive her home late at night, after his social events," McAninch says. "I never saw him drunk. If I had, I wouldn't have let him drive my girl." Charlie Younger, who jogged three or four miles with Bush most every day, allows that "George would have more fun than the average guy at the party." For Bush, it was too much fun. "I didn't drink every minute of the day," he says, "but I drank too much."
He confronted the problem once and for all during a three-day weekend in late July 1986 at the Broadmoor, a grand old resort in Colorado Springs. The Bushes and their closest friends had gone there to escape the Oil Patch and celebrate a communal 40th-birthday party: George and Don Evans both turned 40 that month, and their wives would reach the milestone in the fall. Joe and Jan O'Neill (she was also nearing 40) were there as well. The men made for the links--"George plays golf like it was soccer," says O'Neill, "chasing after the ball and trying to hit it again before it stops rolling"--and everyone went to chapel at the Air Force Academy. One night Neil Bush came in from Denver for dinner, and the friends stayed up late, laughing and drinking.
"We weren't that loud," says O'Neill. "But the next morning, nobody felt great." Contrary to some reports, Bush made no dramatic breakfast-table declaration about quitting. He said nothing--at first, not even to Laura. "It's easy to say, 'I quit,'" he says. "But this time I meant it." It wasn't until they got home that he told her he was finished with alcohol. "He just said, 'I'm going to quit,' and he did," Laura remembers. "That was it. We joked about it later, saying he got the bar bill and that's why."
Part of what prompted him to give it up, a friend says, was that "he didn't want to do anything under the influence that might embarrass his father," who was preparing to run for President. George W. was also experiencing a religious awakening, one that began with his now famous 1985 encounter with evangelist Billy Graham, at the Bush-family compound in Kennebunkport, Me. After praying privately with Graham--"It was a real personal religious visit," he says--he joined a men's Bible-study group in Midland, "taking inventory of himself," his friend Donald Ensenat says. As the economic crisis deepened, so did his faith. "The words took on a new meaning," he told TIME. "It's not simple, and each person's walk is different. I have sought redemption, and I believe I have received it. And now it's up to me to live the life."
As he did so, his friends and family say, he became less edgy, less angry, more comfortable with himself. "George was already disciplined in a lot of ways except for drinking. He was a great runner," says Laura. "And when he was able to stop, that gave him a lot of confidence and made him feel better about himself." While Bush was working on these issues, in the summer of 1986, something else happened that would also have a profound impact on him, allowing him to leave Midland with his head up. A corporate savior appeared.