(C) Common Dreams
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THE REPUBLICANS IN NEW ORLEANS: Man in the News; A Self-Effacing Nominee: George Herbert Walker Bush [1]

['R. W. Apple Jr.', 'Special To The New York Times']

Date: 1988-08-18

This morning, to the surprise of many of those who have criticized him for what they perceive as ''un-Presidential'' behavior, Mr. Bush seemed to take a firm grip on himself and on his party at a news conference with Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, whom he chose on Tuesday as his running mate. Mr. Quayle looked young, slight, inexperienced; Mr. Bush's answers seemed crisper, his demeanor more commanding, his voice deeper than they had in the campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination.

There was no shortage, before or after the Vice President spoke, of Republicans who said he had looked weak in choosing not someone with an independent power base, like one of his defeated rivals, but an unknown who would be beholden to him and to him alone. Nonetheless, few people failed to notice that all of a sudden it was George Bush, not Ronald Reagan, expressing the nation's regret on national television over the death of the Pakistani President, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq.

Mr. Bush's choice of Mr. Quayle had caught his best friends off base. They had predicted that in this, as in so many other things, he would do the predictable, the politic, the prudent thing. Instead, he took a chance.

But he has done that sort of thing before. A product of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., an elite private school, Mr. Bush became at the age of 18 the youngest commissioned pilot in the Navy in World War II; he was fighting the Japanese while Ronald Reagan was making movies to show people how to fight them. Captain of the baseball team and a member of Skull and Bones, the most illustrious of the ''secret societies'' at Yale, Mr. Bush chose not to follow his father into the comfortably remunerative world of investment banking, and set out instead for the problematical oil fields of Texas.

In everything, however, he was undergirded by the solidarity of his family, headed by the formidable, wealthy, autocratic Prescott Bush, who was sent to the United States Senate by the voters of Connecticut in 1952. When George Bush went to Texas with his wife, the former Barbara Pierce, whom he had married in 1945, they traveled in a new car bought by his father. His first job was provided by a friend of his father's. And when he helped to found a new oil company, a rich uncle raised most of the requisite capital.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/18/us/republicans-new-orleans-man-self-effacing-nominee-george-herbert-walker-bush.html

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