At least get it right:
Bush's Life-Changing Year
By Lois Romano and George Lardner Jr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 25, 1999; Page A1
First of seven articles
On July 28, 1986, George W. Bush woke up with a hangover. It had been a loud, liquid night at the venerable Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs as he and friends from Texas celebrated their collective 40th birthdays. Now, as he embarked on his ritual morning run through a spectacular Rockies landscape, Bush felt lousy.
Forty: A symbolic halfway point, a moment of appraisal. For the eldest son of the then-vice president of the United States, it had been a year of business crises and personal drift. Bush had closely hewed to his father's path through life – Andover, Yale, flying warplanes, then into the Texas oil business – but so far he had enjoyed very little of his father's success.
The past six months had been a near-disaster. Oil prices in West Texas, as high as $37 per barrel a few years earlier, had plummeted to $9 by the time of Bush's birthday, tipping his company into a spiral of debt and shaky payrolls, forcing him to enter merger negotiations. And his personal life was clouded by drinking.
A charismatic partier since his school days, Bush liked to drink what he called the four Bs – beer, bourbon and B&B; But he had begun to realize that his drinking was jeopardizing his relationships, his career and his health. Although friends say Bush did not drink daily or during daylight hours, even those closest to him acknowledge privately that if not clinically an alcoholic, Bush sometimes came close to the line. Sometimes he would embarrass himself; more often, he didn't know how to stop.
"Once he got started, he couldn't, didn't shut it off," said Bush's friend Don Evans. "He didn't have the discipline."
Bush himself acknowledged in a recent interview: "I realized that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people. . . . When you're drinking, it can be an incredibly selfish act."
That July day, Bush officially swore off alcohol. But his decision was about more than getting sober. Stirred in part by what he describes as an intense, reawakening Christian faith, Bush sought to seize control of his life. By doing so he would finally begin to close the gap between what was expected of him and what he had achieved.
Today, as Bush launches his presidential campaign as the anointed Republican front-runner, a sense of inevitability infuses his candidacy. In truth, his sudden rise to political prominence would have been very difficult to predict during much of the first half of his life. He was the swashbuckling fraternity president, raw and fun, who people loved to be around. But unlike almost any other serious presidential candidate in modern memory, no one who knew him envisioned George W. Bush in the White House.
"If I had to go through my class, and pick five people who were going to run for president, it would never have occurred to me he would ever run," said Robert Birge, who went to Yale with Bush and knew him well when both were members of Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society. "He did not carry himself like a statesman. He had good useful opinions but there were others in the class who came across as born leaders."
In 1986, however, something began to change. Bush himself marks it as a critical year, and so do dozens of friends, family and business associates interviewed for this series of articles. It was the year Bush started down the road to somewhere, leaving some baggage behind. It was the year he found God and found a future......
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