George H.W. Bush's journey to the White House

HOUSTON George Herbert Walker Bush s journey to the White House did not begin at his family's compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Nor did it begin with his first campaign for public office in Texas.

It actually began four generations earlier, in the gold fields of California, when a man named Obadiah Bush caught gold fever and rushed west to seek his fortune.

That fortune never came, and he eventually gave up on the dream.

On the trip back to be reunited with his family, he died at sea.

But a grandson, Samuel Prescott Bush, would find the family s first gold, working as a master mechanic, a railroad man and an industrialist who befriended and worked alongside the Rockefeller family.

That gave his son, Prescott Sheldon Bush, a wealthy running start. He got his education at Yale, became a railroad executive, then a Wall Street banker, then a U.S. Senator from Connecticut.

So when Prescott's son, George Herbert Walker Bush, arrived in 1924, the family finances and the political stage appeared to be set.

Born into privilege and wealth, his path was already paved for him.

But American blue blood wasn t enough George H.W. Bush s journey would still be uniquely his own.

Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on his 18th birthday, George H.W. Bush volunteered to fight in World War II. When he got his wings, he was the youngest pilot in the Navy.

On a bombing run near a now-infamous Pacific island called Chi Chi Jima, Japanese bullets very nearly ended Bush s story altogether.With their engine on fire, he and the other crewmen bailed out. But as fate would have it, only one of their parachutes opened. Only the future president survived.

He came home to marry his sweetheart, Barbara Pierce, and kept the Yale family tradition alive.

In college, he captained the baseball team and graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Then, he set out to find his own fortune in Texas.

The fortunes came with the then-revolutionary business of drilling for oil offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

But family tragedy found the Bushes there, too.

After their first son, George W. Bush, was born, the family welcomed a little girl, Robin Bush.

But she fell ill with leukemia near her third birthday.

The Bushes rushed her to the best medical experts they could find on the East Coast, but she died in October of 1953.

She s now buried at the presidential library in College Station, where she ll be joined by her famous father.

Even after the tragedy of losing a child, the former Navy aviator soldiered on, becoming the Chairman of the Harris County Republican Party.

He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate, but served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, as Ambassador to the United Nations, Director of the CIA, and Vice President of the United States before his journey brought him all the way to the Oval Office.

For all his success, he often credited his mom--Dorothy Walker Bush, a devoutly religious matriarch who drilled humility and modesty into her sons --with having the biggest impact on his life.

His life was not defined by the political system he navigated, Bush s daughter, Doro Bush, wrote. [It was defined] by the set of beliefs his mother taught him.

And by his remarkable life, it s clear she taught him well.