All the Best, George Bush
My Life In Letters and Other Writings
Excerpt
Chapter One: Love and War
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior at Phillips Academy, Andover. I could hardly wait to get out of school and enlist. Six months later, Secretary of War Henry Stimson delivered our commencement address and advised my class to go to college. He predicted it would be a long war, and there would be plenty of time for us to serve. My dad, Prescott Bush, with whom it was not easy to disagree, hoped I would listen to Secretary Stimson and go on to Yale. After the ceremony, Dad asked me if I had changed my mind. I told him no, I was "joining up." Dad simply nodded his okay. On my eighteenth birthday, June 12, 1942, I enlisted in the Navy's flight training program as a seaman second class.
My mother kept all the letters I wrote to her and Dad during World War II, so most of these come from her collection. You will find only one letter to a Barbara Pierce of Rye, New York. Barbara lost her "love" letters during one of our many moves after we got married.
This first group of letters was wr ... read full excerpt from: All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings ebook
