A Newsweek profile observed that young George "seems to have majored in beer drinking at the Deke House." Whenever he had some free time, Bush was spending it getting drunk and/or laid, when he wasn't busy playing competitive sports, and doing whatever the hell it is they do in those twice-weekly meetings at Skull and Bones.
And besides, George had become acclimated to simply coasting through life. Experience taught him that there was no problem that couldn't be solved with a little money, or a couple of well-placed phone calls from his father George HW Bush. So why should he kill himself to get straight A's? It was just completely unnecessary. The basis for this outlook on life was never illustrated more clearly than when George was confronted with the specter of the Vietnam War.
After Yale, Bush successfully dodged the draft by volunteering for a six-year hitch in the Texas Air National Guard. This required some serious string-pulling, but the Bushes had lots of friends in high places. Evidently hoping to avoid winding up in Southeast Asia, on his application George checked the box labeled do not volunteer under the heading "overseas assignment."
Bush was immediately accepted into the Guard, where he got promoted in record time. He was also fast-tracked into the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, which involved skipping over a waiting list full of qualified applicants. And then for four years he did as little work as possible, just the minimum required to remain in the unit, which was based in Houston.
Then in May 1972, with two years left on his enlistment, George headed off to Alabama and requested reassignment to an inactive postal unit there. This request was a little odd for an Air National Guardsman, seeing that the outfit had no airplanes. Bush's request was denied. But for some reason he decided to stick around Alabama for a few months and didn't return to his Houston post until he was required to receive an annual physical.
Then, for some reason, Bush was grounded by his commander for "his failure to accomplish annual medical examination." Either he never showed up, or he flunked it. We don't know for certain because his military records are sealed, and can only be made public with the subject's assent. Bush has never chosen to make them available.
The most plausible theory is that George ran into a problem with the compulsory drug testing. If he did show up for the physical, maybe he flunked the urinalysis. If he didn't show up, maybe it was out of fear of what the drug test would reveal. Whatever the reason, Bush never flew again. And he still had another two years to go on his enlistment. So he just sat around. In fact it's unclear exactly what, if anything, he did during those two remaining years. The only thing we know for sure: whatever it was involved neither flying planes nor getting shipped off to Vietnam.
The Party Animal
After he just sort of wandered away from military service, Bush's partying lifestyle resumed with a vengeance and it continued to cause him trouble. According to a friend, he and George spent a lot of their free time boozing it up at parties:
"We did drink... we drank what people gave us to drink... And if we went to a party and they were serving liquor, then we would drink it, and we would drink it until it was gone."
Sometime around Christmas in 1972, George drove home drunk with his teenaged brother Marvin and plowed into a neighbor's garbage can. When daddy said he wanted to have a talk, George tried to pick a fight with his old man, challenging him to go a few rounds "mano a mano" outside.
As Bush well knew, there's really no better place for a drinking man than college. So that's where George headed next. In 1973 he enrolled in Harvard Business School and spent the next two years earning his MBA. He spoke fondly of the institution in his 1999 autobiography, declaring: "Harvard gave me the tools and the vocabulary of the business world."
In 1974, George spent Superbowl Sunday at a party hosted by Hunter S. Thompson. When asked decades later if he remembered whether Bush had used any drugs at his party, Thompson replied:
"I can't be expected to remember what every drug-addled yuppie hanger-oner who wanted to get close to me during a football game twenty-five years ago digested. There were so many dope fiends milling about, I don't remember what some Yalie named Bush, whose father was a factotum in the Nixon Administration, was doing. But he strikes me as the sort of person I would have thrown out of the room. A rich, beer-drunk yahoo with a big allowance who passes out in your bathtub. ... I don't want to become the Deep Drug Throat. ... I won't do it."
Bush continued his life of hard drinking and was finally arrested for drunk driving in October 1976, this time with his teenaged sister Dorothy in the car. But it would be another decade before he finally realized that alcohol was a problem for him.
Despite episodes like these, Bush continued abusing alcohol for another decade before finally quitting cold turkey in 1986. But even though he acknowledges that he could never seem to stop after just one drink, George has always maintained that his problem was nothing more than simple overindulgence:
"I don't think I was clinically an alcoholic; I didn't have the genuine addiction. I don't know why I drank. I liked to drink, I guess."
Years later, Bush reflected on his substance abuse days for a New York Times reporter:
"The signal we ought to send to our children is that in spite of what happened in the '60s and '70s, we have learned some lessons. And the lessons ought to be: don't be using drugs and alcohol."
