• December 25, 2000
• Vol. 54
• No. 27

George W. Bush

Although It Took Him Time to Find Himself, He Now Finds Himself on the Brink of the Presidency

Now more than ever, as President-in-waiting—and waiting and waiting—George W. Bush must be an intriguing man even to himself. Again and again he has set out to discover if he had capabilities to match the expectations that came with his famous name. And when Election 2000 was finally drawing to a close, as we all climbed from the rubble of the court rulings and recounted recounts, there he was, still standing after every twist and turn, every legal cliff-hanger and thunderclap reversal.

Could this be the man who appeared to be washed up by age 40? Whose oil business had gone nowhere, whose run for Congress had ended in defeat and whose best friend was a bourbon on the rocks? We all know what happened next, how he stopped drinking, found God and the Texas Rangers. Buying a share of that baseball team made him rich, then Texas made him governor. When he was reelected just two years ago by a soul-satisfying 69 percent of the vote, he was finally a Republican star in his own right and the man whose charm and congeniality his party knew would contrast well against the more formal—okay, lackluster—Al Gore.

You could say that Bush, 54, was born to run for President, with a father who got there first, a grandfather who was senator from Connecticut and a brother who is governor of—who can forget it now?—Florida. But he knew very well that it's not enough just to come from a family with high expectations. Soon after his father gained the White House in 1988, George W. secretly commissioned a 44-page report on what had become of the children of past American Presidents. Too many had ended in mediocrity, failure, even suicide. He had all extra copies destroyed, but he must have taken the message to heart.

And heart was something he displayed all this year. He has the good humor you would expect of a man who was president of his fraternity at Yale. If he lost people with his occasionally fractured English and his incomplete command of world affairs, he could win them back with his winking good nature. "My mother taught me not to be a know-it-all," he once said. "I didn't let her down." His cousin Billy Bush, a morning show host for WWZZ radio in Arlington, Va., promises "a fun White House. It'll involve Tex-Mex and good brisket off the grill." It will also involve Bush's twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, 19, and his wife, Laura, 54, a onetime librarian who long ago presented him with the ultimatum that got him to quit drinking.

Now he stands on the threshold of the Presidency, a prodigal son waiting to fill, almost literally, his father's shoes. He has tested himself all his life. But this was an election that no one emerges from looking altogether good; not Bush, not Gore, not the courts or the Florida legislature or the unreliable ballot machinery. When George W. becomes the first President since 1889 to take the White House after losing the popular vote, he will be tested as never before. And at last he will learn—as will we—just who he is and who he might become.