George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

There was one serious hitch in this plan. It was illegal. Though he would be 18 years old
on June 12, he would not have the two years of college the Navy required for its aviators.
Well, if you had an urgent problem, perhaps the law could be simply set aside, for you
and you alone, ahead of all the five million poor slobs who had to go in the mud with the
infantry or swab some stinking deck--especially if your private school's president was
currently Secretary of War (Henry Stimson), if your father's banking partner was
currently Assistant Secretary of War for Air (Robert Lovett), and if your father had
launched the career of the current Assistant Navy Secretary for Air (Artemus Gates).
And it was done.
As a Bush-authorized version puts it, `` One wonders why the Navy relaxed its two years
of college requirement for flight training in George Bush's case. He had built an
outstanding record at school as a scholar [sic], athlete and campus leader, but so had
countless thousands of other youths.
``Yet it was George Bush who appeared to be the only beneficiary of this rule-waiving,
and thus he eventually emerged as the youngest pilot in the Navy--a fact that he can still
boast about and because of which he enjoyed a certain celebrity during the war.
''@s2@s9
Notes for Chapter V
1. Nicholas King, George Bush: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980), pp. 13-14.
2. Ibid., p. 19.
3. Ibid.
4. Joe Hyams, Flight of the Avenger: George Bush at War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch,
1991), p. 14.
5. Ibid., p. 17.
6. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
7. Donnie Radcliffe, Simply Barbara Bush (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 132.
8. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 16.
9. Radcliffe, op. cit., p. 133.
10. King, op. cit, p. 14.