The Family by Kitty Kelley Page A

Kennebunkport, George met his match in an equally competitive youngster named Bill Truesdale, who was the best sailor in the eleven-foot class of boats known as catboats, which had two sides, a bottom, a mast, and a centerboard. Bill Truesdale was the perennial winner, summer after summer, in an annual competition. One night before a big race George went down and tied a bucket to Truesdale’s centerboard. The next day the boats, about fifteen of them, were towed up the Kennebunk River to the starting line offshore. The warning gun went off, and everyone put up his sail.
    “There was a light breeze and Truesdale’s boat barely moved,” recalled Jonathan Bush. “At first he thought something was wrong with the boat, and in frustration he began to beat it with a paddle. Whack! Whack! When he got ashore he found out what George had done. He chased him for days. George would be sitting on the porch, and we’d hear ‘Here comes Truesdale!’ and off he’d go. That was a shout we heard all summer: ‘Here comes Truesdale!’”
    To the Bushes, the anecdote illustrates George’s love of practical jokes. Others might see the story of sabotaging a friend’s boat to deprive him of victory as something more than an adolescent caper (and, as a way of dealing with competition, something that came to fruition in George’s later political campaigns). But no one would deny that the children learned from their parents to play to win.
    The competitive atmosphere between the Bushes and the Walkers at Kennebunkport was often tense, sometimes terrifying. “I can remember some very earnest rock throwing up there,” said Louise Mead Walker, who married John Walker, George Herbert Walker Jr.’s son. “At my own family’s Sunday dinner in Dayton, whenever the men came in from golf, the question always was, ‘Did you have a good game?’ At Kennebunkport, the question always is, ‘Did you win?’”
    When George was older, his youngest brother, Bucky, was given a new ball-in-a-labyrinth game and beat George easily. Bucky went to bed proud of besting his older brother, who had been to war, married, and become a father himself. The next day George casually suggested a rematch. George won with a perfect score. Family members, in on the joke, howled with laughter. George had stayed up late perfecting his game to ambush his baby brother, who was fourteen years younger.
    “My mother and father were both fierce competitors,” said Prescott junior, “and it was extremely important that you compete and do the best you could [but] that you learn to be a good loser . . . In other words, to lose with dignity, even though you hated it . . . even though it made you mad as the devil, you had to maintain your composure and not throw your racket . . . or if you’re in tiddledywinks, and you miss the shot that cost you the game, you couldn’t throw the bowl.”
    And if you did?
    “Well, we’d get the strap or we would spend a lot of time sitting in our rooms or something like that.”
    Prescott and Dotty also forbade cursing and bragging. As Mrs. Bush told an interviewer: “I just couldn’t bear braggadocio.”
    The hell-bent prideful pursuit of winning had to always be accompanied by gracious modesty. “You could never come home and say you played well in a game,” said Jonathan Bush. “You just didn’t talk about yourself. Bad taste.”
    George Bush remembered being slapped down for arrogance when he was eight years old. He had said he thought he was off his game. “Mother jumped all over me. ‘You are just learning—you don’t have a game! Work harder and maybe some day you will.’”
    The Bushes raised their children to win and assume their superiority as winners but to mask the assumption at all times. Enforced humility, like keeping secrets, was considered the epitome of good breeding. Chances are the Bushes might not have appreciated the perceptiveness of Mark Twain, who said, “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we