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When George H. W. Bush moved into the White House in 1989, he had the portrait of Calvin Coolidge replaced with one of Theodore Roosevelt. “I’m an Oyster Bay type of guy,” Bush told a visitor. “Maybe I’ll turn out to be a Teddy Roosevelt.”1 The two men did have a number of similarities. Born to the manor, both delighted in outdoor sports, and both had distinguished war records. As Roosevelt went west after his >rst wife Alice died, Bush migrated to Texas following his graduation from Yale. Though Bush made his fortune and began his political career in his newly adopted state, he never entirely shed his eastern image. Like TR, he had a resume of appointive positions—most of them more prestigious than Roosevelt’s. Both men had served as vice-president—Teddy’s eight months far briefer than Bush’s eight years. For all TR’s bluster and gusto, George Bush was probably a better athlete, and he came by it naturally. His father, Senator Prescott Bush, at six foot four, played >rst base for Yale’s baseball team as well as competing in golf and hockey. Prescott Bush had a scratch—zero—handicap (his score of 65 was a record at the Cape Arundel golf course near the family’s vacation home in Maine). While senator from Connecticut in the 1950s, he was a favorite golf partner of President Dwight Eisenhower. Bush’s mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, was a nationally ranked tennis player as a teenager who continued to play into her eighties. Once, George as a boy con>ded to her that he was having trouble with his tennis game. “You don’t have a game,” she scowled. “Get out and work harder and maybe someday you will.”2 Poppy (Bush’s nickname) learned to boat and >sh with his grandfather, George Herbert Walker, who had bought Walker’s Point near Kennebunkport , Maine. Like the Bushes, Walker was originally from the Midwest and had been the heavyweight boxing champion of Missouri. “He was a tough father, a tough old bastard,” one of his grandchildren once remarked. The 21 George H. W. Bush TR Revisited ★ ★★ ★★★★★ ★ ★★ tough old bastard was also a sportsman who thrived on gambling, horses, yachts, >shing—and golf. At the suggestion of his friend Dwight Davis (father of the Davis Cup), he donated the Walker Cup to the winners of an amateur golf match between the British and Americans.3 At Andover, Poppy Bush captained both the soccer and baseball teams. When he attended Yale after World War II, he played soccer and, like his father, was >rst baseman on the baseball team. For the two years that Bush played, Yale went to the >nals of the college world series. With his ?awless play at >rst base, Bush brie?y attracted the attention of major league scouts. With his athletic and combat resume, it comes as a surprise that Bush as a presidential candidate was regarded as a “wimp.” As a candidate in the primaries in 1980 and as the Republican nominee in 1988, the “wimp” factor was a drag on his candidacy—and it persisted as an undercurrent running through the four years of the Bush presidency. Six years after leaving o;ce, Bush made a parachute jump to celebrate his seventy->fth birthday. These two images were too disparate to describe a single individual. So, why was Bush—not only a talented schoolboy athlete but also an enthusiastic and active former president—imprinted as a political >gure with the scarlet letters wimp? ★ Preppy Poppy: A Study in Contrasts George Bush’s elite origins, never a problem for the Roosevelts or Kennedys, turned into a presidential liability; critics sco=ed that he succeeded because of privilege, or, in sports lingo, because he had been born on third base. Yet his athletic credentials were genuine. He exhibited them in his sense of con- >dence, in his athletic demeanor, and in the way he related to both friends and to the public. In order to understand Bush the hyperactive sportsman, we have to begin with the schoolboy, the combat aviator, and collegiate athlete. In his senior year at Phillips Andover Academy, Poppy Bush compiled a remarkable athletic record. As captain of “one of the most astounding soccer teams” in school history (from the Andover yearbook), Bush played every minute of every game. In addition to its prep school rivals, Andover defeated the freshmen teams of four colleges—Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, and...

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