George Herbert Walker Bush, born in 1924, 41st president of the United States (1989-1993), president at the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Bush also organized an unprecedented global alliance against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War of 1991, but he was less successful in dealing with U.S. domestic problems and was defeated after one term by Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. (Greene, 2000)
Bush graduated from Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, in 1942, and joined the United States Navy to fight in World War II. He became a pilot, flying bombing missions against Japan. On one mission his plane was shot down over the Pacific Ocean. Two crewmen died, but Bush survived unharmed and was rescued by a passing submarine within a few hours. Bush returned to the United States in late 1944. Two weeks later, in early 1945, he married Barbara Pierce, a Greenwich woman whose father was a magazine publisher. The couple had six children: sons George, John, Neil, and Marvin, and daughters Robin and Dorothy. Robin died of leukemia at the age of three. (Bush, 1998)
Bush entered Yale University in 1945. He majored in economics, became captain of the varsity baseball team, and graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1948. He moved his young family to west Texas where, helped by his father's business connections, he went into the oil business, working as an equipment clerk. In 1953 Bush co founded the Zapata Petroleum Corporation, which drilled for oil in the Permian basin in Texas and elsewhere in the West. The next year, he became president of the Zapata Offshore Company, which specialized in offshore drilling equipment. Bush was a millionaire by the time he was 41................
