Biography

After George Bush’s honorable discharge at the end of World War II, he enrolled in Yale University, and the newlyweds moved to New Haven, Connecticut. There, the couple's first child, George Walker Bush, was born on July 6, 1946. Mr. Bush graduated from Yale in 1948, and immediately set out for Texas and the oil business – sending for his young family once established in Odessa. The first of their 30-plus residential moves during their marriage took them to various towns in southern California before they settled in Midland, Texas.

Tragedy struck twice early in the Bushes’ marriage: first in 1949 when Barbara’s parents were involved in a car crash that killed her mother, Pauline; and again in 1953 when the Bushes’ second child, three year-old Robin, succumbed to leukemia. They welcomed four more children – John Ellis or “Jeb,” Neil and Marvin. In August of 1959, the Bushes moved to Houston and welcomed their second daughter, Dorothy or “Doro,” that same month.

"The boys all became very active in Little League and school activities," she wrote of her life after the move to Houston. "I spent half of the next ten years doing what every mother in America does: taxiing children to the doctor, the dentist, birthday parties, baseball games, tennis matches, and so on. When I look at my date book entries from those years, they're all baseball games and what fields they'll be played on. The boys were good players, and I felt torn in two, racing from game to game. When they weren't playing organized ball, they were in our backyard. We had a pool, a small baseball field, trees to climb, and tires hung for all the children to swing on."

The dawn of George H. W. Bush’s career in elective politics in 1962 introduced the Bushes to the campaign trail that she would relentlessly tread for the next 54 years on behalf of her husband, her friends and political allies, and her family. The family moved to Washington, DC in 1966 following Mr. Bush’s election to the U.S. House from Texas’ seventh congressional district; and to New York and the Waldorf Hotel in 1971 following his appointment by President Nixon as Ambassador to the United Nations. Other presidential appointments, and family moves, followed: Chairman of the Republican National Committee back in Washington; Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing (then Peking); and Director of Central Intelligence in northern Virginia.