George Bush has never met a person he couldn't make like him. His two thousand closest friends, five children, four siblings, wife, present staff, and former aides and servants left behind from the U.N. to China are all eager to say nice things about him. "George is a truster.'' "Dad is thoughtful to a fault." "He was a very, very impressive big brother." "He was beautiful when I met him at sixteen; he still is—without those dam glasses." "A good soldier." "Fun guy, lovely man, great friend." "A lot of politicians talk about family values, but Bush's family is a true living example."

One of the people George Bush has tried hardest to please is Ronald Reagan. His need for Reagan's approval came through loud and clear when I interviewed the vice president last fall. Bush had campaigned through three states and a twelve-hour day; his hair was mussed and his clothes were an incongruous combination of banker's pin-striped pants and baseball jacket—the embodiment of bicoastal man. He put his stocking feet up on the couch in the private cabin of Air Force Two and spoke emotionally of the president and "the closeness we have." I asked him how he had cultivated such trust from Reagan. Bush replied that he was bom with an innate sense of loyalty. "It took a while, but the president knows now, which he probably didn't know, that I'm not going to betray him." Suddenly George Bush's voice filled with conviction. "I know I'm right. I know that this is the right way to approach this relationship."

In all of his baseball-crazed boyhood Bush had only one hero, and it wasn't Babe Ruth. It was the man who played in his shadow, Lou Gehrig. Why the Iron Horse and not the star? Because, as Bush's son George junior remembers the message, Lou Gehrig was consistently good at his job, never tried to steal the limelight, and was humble enough to wait until the end of his life before being recognized as the best first-baseman in the game. Like his model, Bush takes the stingers and keeps on playing. When the Iran debacle hit the front pages, he hid out for weeks, and then couched his defense of the president in terms of personal affection and gratitude—"There's no pulling away from support for a president who has been so fantastically good to Barbara and me.''

Bush wouldn't know a photo opportunity if it hit him over the head.

Even before the crisis of Reagan's presidency, the charge of weakness and lack of leadership pursued Bush, and hurt his chances for taking the White House in '88. An unpublished G.O.P. survey warned in autumn '85 that "Bush needs to find opportunities to demonstrate leadership and to develop an image less dependent upon his connection to Reagan.'' The Lou Gehrig of politics admits that his refusal to separate himself from the president has "cost me something. Politically.'' Now that the president's magic has worn thin, Bush has no identity of his own to fall back on.

The Iran-contra arms scandal has put the vice president under relentless examination. The deeper mystery surrounding this man, who has assiduously cultivated private access to the president, is why he failed to protect his boss from making so many mistakes. Does he not really have the president's ear? Or has his need for approval kept him from confronting Reagan on his more dangerous ideological obsessions? He has maintained that "I'm for Mr. Reagan— blindly,'' which may now lead the American public to wonder if this relationship isn't a case of the blind leading the intentionally blind. Bush's devotion to Reagan may turn out to be his political downfall.

But this need for approval is a pattern that has been revealed throughout George Bush's life. It's the central defining mark of his character. The mental and moral distinguishing marks of character can be left by birth, parental imprinting, the manners of one's social class, the soil in which one grew up; by the teachers and coaches or books and ideas that made an unforgettable impression; by what one does as new stages of life change one's perspective on the original choices of career and marriage; by how one deals with failure and the first shock of mortality. Character is also marked by where a person stood at great divides in his nation's history: the Depression, W.W. II, the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate. In evaluating any presidential candidate, Americans look increasingly at character. They want someone they can believe in as strong and sincere, someone to whom they can leave the responsibility for making the right judgment and taking the necessary action when the time comes.

To explore the character of George Bush I traveled extensively with him on the campaign trail and talked with forty of his friends and family, aides and close observers. There are far deeper shadings in George Bush than he is given credit for, but what comes through first and foremost is that he is an uncommonly nice man.

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As a father, he belongs to the sink-or-swim school of child rearing. He would compete with his kids at anything—checkers, tennis, bat-and-ball games, fishing, video games—but always Bush spoon-fed his children with confidence. He shoved his four sons off into the world without big trust funds, but with splendid educations. He reserves a special tenderness for his only living daughter, Dorothy, who never did compete academically with the boys. "Dad is the most sensitive human being I know," says his oldest son, George junior.

He is no less a model son. "Mum," Mrs. Dorothy Walker Bush of Greenwich, Connecticut, abhors arrogance and demands honesty. Son George has had an excellent record on both. And when, as president of the Senate, he had to cast the deciding vote for nerve gas, knowing of his mother's deep concern, he asked Ronald Reagan to call her for him and explain the vote.

He is a storybook grandfather. When his second son, Jeb, took off on an Andover program to do good works in Mexico and came home in love with a Mexican woman who could barely speak English, Bush was stunned. "I'm not going to lie to you and say we were thrilled," admits Barbara Bush. But anyone who has heard George Bush speak of the grandson from that union, anyone who has watched the two of them spinning fantasies of sailing the coast of Maine as they sit on a rock "boat" at high tide, would sense that more important to the vice president than any presidential primary is the duty of protecting that little Hispanic boy's future.

Is there anyone who wouldn't want to be George Bush's friend? "I've come to know George well," says Senator Al Simpson, who enjoys the informality of weekends at Bush's place of recreation and re-creation in Kennebunkport, Maine. Simpson describes a round of stories after dinner, then padding into the living room with a piano player and half a dozen couples to beat the devil out of the rug. Some of the world's unfunniest people suddenly feel, in Bush's presence, like true wits. The secret to his sense of humor is that he plants the punch line in someone else's mouth.

He may be the most amiable pol ever to work a rope line, and he loves mix-'n'-mingles: "Bar and I will never forget how we got where we're at—it's because of people like you." If there's one wallflower left after he's squeezed four hundred hands and posed for dozens of pictures, he'll dive over to draw her out: "I haven't met you yet, glad to see you." And he is. After the last gasp on a campaign trip, Bush will always make time to go up to local staff headquarters and shake the hand of every lowly volunteer. George Bush genuinely likes people, and he wants everyone to like him back.

He is the kind of guy who would step out in his pinstriped suit in the middle of a downpour to help his chauffeur fix a flat. The kind who stays in Washington on Christmas Eve so that his Secret Service men can go home to their families. The kind who saw a friend, Jim Baker, in despair after his wife's death and brought the Democrat into politics, where he presides today, a staunch Republican, over the Treasury. Bush practices what he calls the Eleventh Commandment—tolerance—refusing to say a nasty word about an opponent.

His wife says, "George Bush—and maybe this is a fault—but George Bush looks for the best in everybody. He doesn't question motives." Curiously, Mrs. Bush speaks of her husband in the third person, as if he were an image rather than a person. She is tough and smart and strongly opinionated, and she loses no chance to let George Bush know what she thinks about the issues. "But when I disagree with him," she tells the press, "I'll never tell you."

It seems apparent that George relies on the motherly figure of Barbara to protect him from his boyishly ebullient faith in the fairness of others. Though she commands great respect, Barbara Bush can be a terror with the staff. "If something negative appears about her George in the media with your name on it, you're dead," says a staffer who shall remain nameless. Mrs. Bush admits, "I can always find a tricky reason someone did something, because I could have done it myself. George can't."

Indeed, during the Watergate scandal, when Bush was G.O.P. chairman, even his mother tried to persuade him that Tricky Dick was lying. But Bush was the last man in the party to believe ill of Richard Nixon. Sometimes his amicability borders on the ridiculous. One story has it that, when Bush found out that Democratic candidate Gary Hart was going to be in Maine for the 1984 caucuses, he suggested that Hart stay with the Bushes in Kennebunkport.

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Not only is he a nice man, George Bush is a brave man. In W.W. II he flew torpedo bombers over the Pacific, fifty-eight missions, 126 carrier landings. He saw a man, a buddy, standing not six feet from him on a carrier deck, hacked up like lunch meat by an antic propeller. Before he reached thirty there was another brutal shock, a daughter, an angelic child of three, stricken by leukemia. These are life accidents that define a person's humanity and can make or break a marriage.

When I first interviewed the vice president, on Air Force Two, he looked relaxed and remarkably virile for a man of sixty-two. He had changed after a day of campaigning into his Autry jogging shoes, a polo shirt, and baggy sweatpants. I was not prepared for how familiar he feels on first meeting. There is no fanfare, no invoked aura. George Bush is halfway through greeting you before you really notice he's there.

"So, this is gonna be a deal on where I'm coming from, a psychiatric layout?" he asked. He told me that he's terrible at telling stories about his past, and that there are some sacred family moments he cannot share; if that makes him dull as a candidate, if that's the price of being president, well then, it isn't worth it. So I got him talking about his war experiences.

What went on in his mind, I wondered, when that eighteen-year-old string bean of a pampered suburban boy, the youngest pilot in the U.S. Navy, climbed into his barrelchested bomber and sat on top of two thousand pounds of TNT? In seconds he'd rev up his single engine, then reach over to signal the tower and push forward on the throttle and— swooock—he'd be catapulted into the Pacific mist. Minutes later he'd be grinding through heavy anti-aircraft fire.

"I thought I was kind of a macho pilot," he says. "You were trained, you knew what to do. There wasn't any 'Wonder if it's going to work this time' feeling to it."

On the morning of September 2, 1944, the young fliers on the San Jacinto were readied to hit Japanese installations on Chichi-shima. They were warned that their ship wouldn't be around to pick up anyone who went down—it was turning south. Bush was in the second pair of Avengers to go in. He looked out and saw fluffy little clouds all around, but they were black, not white, and he knew there was an American plane incinerating inside each one. "I was aware the antiaircraft fire would be heavy, but I was not afraid. I wasn't thinking, This next one's going to hit me."

But it did. Suddenly the plane slammed forward. Black oily smoke belched out of the engines and fumed through the cockpit, and for the first time George Bush was scared. ''We were going down. I never saw what hit me, but I felt this thing. I had to finish my bombing run."

Bush continued his dive and hit his target. Pulling out over the ocean he saw flames chewing the wing folds, right over the gas tanks. "This damned thing is going to blow up any minute," he shouted, and he tried to talk to the two men in his crew. One jumped out ahead of him, one was slumped over.

"My God, get your own ass out of here," Bush remembers thinking. He bailed out but pulled the rip cord too early. The slipstream caught his body, all 152 pounds of it, and flung it at the tail of the plane. He hit his head. His chute tore, then pulled free. Sheer luck. He was falling fast. But he managed to get out of his harness before his boots smacked the water. He climbed into his tiny life raft and began paddling like crazy, but the wind was carrying him toward the enemy island. He began vomiting violently. "I was scared. I didn't know whether I'd survive, didn't know what happened to my friends... It seemed like the end of the world."

Bush is at his best talking like this, spontaneously, emotionally, although talking publicly about his war experiences for political reasons exacts a psychic price he wasn't willing to pay until recently. "I get in trouble with my mother if I talk about being in combat."

We talked about his faith. Raised as a country-club Episcopalian, he'd prayed only by rote before that day in the life raft. "But this was the occasion to pray to God to save you." He had hope. He knew a submarine was out there. He whipped out a .38-caliber pistol, a bit dramatically he admits, and just kept paddling. After a few hours he saw a periscope break the monotony of the sea. For a moment he feared it was the Japanese. But suddenly American sailors swarmed over the deck, and the frightened flier was fished up onto the Finback. Then the fun really began. For the next month the sub was depth-charged and surface-bombed, and Bush knew what fear really was. But six weeks later, although he had the option of rotating home, Bush elected to return to combat.

Bush lives the values so dear to conservatives; Reagan mouths them and winks.

I had to ask Barbara Bush to describe the other great test, the year their third child suddenly became ill. The Bushes live in the gracious vice-presidential residence, behind whitewashed anchors at the Naval Observatory in Washington. Barbara was arranged prettily in a big flowered skirt on a brocade sofa, with a book open before her. It was, appropriately, The Path to Power, Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. She exudes confidence from every pore, this rock of a woman with the nimbus of white hair who still wears White Shoulders perfume. As we talked above the purr of lawn sprinklers, her deeply grooved face moved easily between game smiles and a grave determination.

In March 1953, George had just started a new business in Midland, Texas, he and Barbara weren't yet thirty, and they had three children—it was a spring full of promise. One morning their three-year-old, Robin, woke up and said, "I'm either going to lie on the grass and watch the cars go by or lie in bed and read a book." Thinking these were the symptoms of spring fever, her mother took the child to a woman doctor who did a few tests. She said, "I think you'd better come back this afternoon and bring your husband with you." When the couple returned, the doctor dabbed her eyes and said a word neither of them had ever heard. Leukemia.

"Well, do something about it," demanded George.

The doctor said, "George, you can't do anything about leukemia."

With all the certainty of a privileged young man, George fired back, "There's nothing you can't do something about!"

The doctor told them Robin had the highest white count she had ever seen. "My advice to you would be, don't tell a living human, take her home, and live a normal life. She'll be dead in two weeks."

Bar was speechless. George muttered, "No way," and before they reached home, he had stopped the car and was out calling on friends to say they needed help. By the time their minister arrived that night, the house was filled with friends having drinks. The next day, they flew Robin to New York's Memorial Hospital, where Bush's uncle was a doctor.

"I hated the chemotherapy, for her," Mrs. Bush said, forcing herself to revisit that important period, "but it was very good for us. We had a chance to work out, to"—her eyes trickled tears—"tell her we loved her."

Over the next eight agonizing months, the little blonde, blue-eyed, pug-nosed angel of a girl became a pincushion for blood transfusions and still the blue smudges under her skin kept multiplying. Barbara Bush made a rule that no one could cry in front of Robin. "George and his mother are so softhearted, I had to order them out of the hospital room most of the time," she remembers. George Bush, nervous about keeping his new investors happy, went right on taking the night plane to be by his daughter for several days at a time. He bent over her bed and helped her to blow her nose. He watched, helplessly, while she died inch by inch.

Barbara Bush begins to turn blue when she hears the word wimp.

The morning after his daughter died, George Bush went over to Memorial Hospital to find everyone who had worked on his child's case, to thank them. He waited until he returned home to Midland before he broke down. "It brought us much closer," Mrs. Bush says fervently, pointing out that the majority of families are shattered by the same experience. "Afterwards, George Bush was unbelievable. So strong. He held me in his arms a lot. Let me weep away, and not be so nice to people." She knew she was being overprotective the day she heard her little boy George junior tell a friend he couldn't come over, because he had to go home and play with his mother. A year later, her son Neil was born and Barbara Bush came back to normal. "All of our children were planned," she admits. "By me."

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I asked Bush what spiritual lesson he drew from his war experience. "I consider it God's will that I'm alive," he said. He wondered aloud why his friends were killed and he wasn't. "It gives you a perspective of war and peace, what the world is like. I don't know what the message is. .." His voice trailed off.

About his second confrontation with devastating loss, Bush expressed the same philosophical tentativeness. "We couldn't understand why this child—" he told me, breaking off. "I mean, what's God's message? Why?" He has told others it would have been the greatest experience of his life if the ending had been different.

He seems incapable of drawing conclusions from defeat or learning much from failure. He hides those nicks, unprocessed, under his thickly plastered optimism. Many people still wonder what Bush's own message is. They search for some defining marks in the margin of his spectacular resume, but it is said that he never left his fingerprints on a job. As he seeks the Republican nomination for the second time, he concedes—and so do his aides—that his vision of the future is unclear to voters.

I asked everyone I interviewed if they knew of a gut issue with George Bush, something for which he has consistently stood. Most answered like Malcolm Baldrige, secretary of commerce, who said, "I dunno. He probes everybody about what they think before he makes up his own mind." Neither his present nor his past speech writers could think of an issue that consistently excites him. Jim Baker, who is Bush's unofficial campaign manager, suggested it was fairness. Barbara Bush said "equality." George Bush, speaking for himself, thought a moment and said "peace."

Presumably no living American is indifferent to fairness, equality, and peace, so I pressed for specifics. Barbara Bush thought about it, and described one time when Bush did stand up for something specific: as a congressman in 1968, he was the only member of the Texas delegation to vote for open housing. He was booed and hissed at G.O.P. rallies. In these conservative times, Bush himself never mentions that chapter from his political life. And Mrs. Bush writes it off: "Did it change anybody's life? I'd have to be honest and say absolutely not.''

For all his superior education, George Bush cannot remember a single book that influenced him. He told me he vaguely recalls reading The Robe (a biblical potboiler). Nor does he project that easy, self-confident mellifluousness common to Ivy Leaguers. He rarely uses a word with more than three syllables, scrambles his syntax, speaks in fits and starts. Clearly, Bush is not fired up by ideas.

"Service to country underlies everything,'' asserts Baldrige. An old buddy from Greenwich, Barrington Boardman, explains that George Bush goes from one job to another because it's a logical extension of his desire to serve. When Bush read an analysis along these lines in a Washington Post Magazine piece by Walt Harrington, he said, "Perceptive.'' It's all part of the eastern patrician tradition among fine old families who don't have to worry about getting and spending the way others do. It is the noble obligation of George Bush. He was bom to serve.

But his noble ideals have failed to win him much popular respect. On the Today show last fall, Bryant Gumbel was popping names at political veterans Robert Squier and John Sears to get a reaction. "George Bush," he said. The name shot around Squier's brain grooves like a pinball and stuck in the giggle slot. While Squier squirmed, Gumbel turned to Sears for an answer. But Sears was laughing, too.

Barbara Bush begins to turn blue when she hears the word wimp. She can't wait now to retort, "Did you ever risk your life for your country? Did you ever build a business? Churches, YMCAs?" She says the answer is always "no."

And George Bush himself is getting pretty fed up with being skunked. He is "thin-skinned," everyone agrees, especially with the press. He even declined the pleasure of lunching with the columnist who called him a "lapdog," which refusal the imperious George Will found "astonishing." Will told me, "If a single newspaper column can rattle a professional politician, the man is not at ease with himself. If there's one thing we know after Carter and Johnson and Nixon, we don't want people working out their inner anxieties in public." It would hardly be thought unusual for a man to refuse an invitation from someone who had just pitched at his head, except that George Bush has made a career out of nicing people to death.

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His water boys (Lee Atwater, his foxy PAC chairman, and Marlin Fitzwater, his panda-bearish press secretary) blame many of his problems on the fact that he's vice president—a job that is traditionally a national joke. One of his handlers observes that Bush has surpassed Hubert Humphrey to reach nearly the level of humiliation and degradation attained by Richard Nixon when he was vice president. And for all his pains, Bush is not even going to get the president's endorsement for the nomination. Reagan has said repeatedly he will remain above politics, and by now even Bush's advisers believe it.

It seemed fair to ask, Why doesn't George Bush fight back? Senator Simpson had to think hard. "The president can get fed up with magnificent pizzazz," lie said, recalling confrontations at the White House with Tip O'Neill, "but that's the president. George's training and background is more on diplomacy and kindness." Brick walls were made for Jack and Bobby Kennedy to walk through, and L.B.J. humiliated people to make certain they were afraid of him. Nixon, always one to exaggerate, had to write down his enemies list. But nobody seems to be scared of George Bush. Writer Christopher Buckley, who spent a year and a half as Bush's speech writer, says regretfully, "His problem is he lacks steel."

I asked the vice president's younger brother Jonathan if he had ever seen Bush tackle anyone head-on. "No, and I don't see him tackle head-on now. I've never seen George tackle head-on."

Some say he suffers too many fools. "It's a classic example of where a team player is criticized for being too collegial," comments Dr. Leonard Spearman, the recently retired president of Texas Southern University, who has worked with Bush for years on funding for private black colleges. He adds, "I would like to see the vice president tell a few people to go to hell." presidency, several lives: he's the plucky lad from Yale who fought a war and lost an offshore rig in the wild and woolly oil business; he tangled with the Texas electorate as county chairman, congressman, and senatorial candidate; he served three presidents—as U.N. ambassador, G.O.P. chairman, envoy to China, director of the C.I.A.—and finally, in 1980, he ran for the presidency. I went back to his childhood in search of the reasons for his inflexible amiability.

His father was austere, a towering man with a basso profundo voice who invited no argument and brandished a belt to punish his children. "As children, we were all afraid of Dad," says Jonathan Bush, "every one of us." George's older brother, Pressy, might argue with the father, but George, never. The vice president affirmed that "Dad was really scary."

Prescott Bush, a financier who followed his father-in-law into the investment bank that became Brown Brothers Harriman, presided over a breakfast table where children were to be seen and not heard. A maid silently ferried robust meals made by a cook. Before eight, Alec, the chauffeur, would have the car waiting to drop Mr. Bush at the station before taking George and Pressy on to the private Greenwich Country Day School. The Depression was nowhere in evidence as the Bushes' tasteful black Oldsmobile glided past the stone fences and stables and swimming pools of one of the wealthiest communities in America.

But it nettles Bush to be criticized as a rich man's kid. "Life has been good to me," he readily concedes, "some of it by virtue of our birth, and I hope a lot of it by working for a living and trying to do your best." His father set the example. Everyone else's dad would come out on the tired commute from New York, go home, and wolf down a couple of drinks. Prescott Bush would go directly to run the town meeting of Greenwich, or the hospital board, or the church board. He instructed his boys never to look down on others. To be kind, serve their country, and give something back.

Mum was different, a petite drill sergeant who was always exhorting her children in games: "You can do it, you'll get it." She exuded a warm, blithe spirit—"very much the inspiration of our family," says Bush. He was amazed when one of his friends in eighth grade told George he wished he had a mother like that. ''I just thought everybody loved his mother as we Bush kids did."

George was never a bully. "Too little," he told me. He carried a big name—George Herbert Walker Bush— for the littlest guy in his class, and was "a real, real teacher's pet," according to Jonathan. But he was also an athletic little devil, and he shot up in ninth or tenth grade. Always sensitive to others, George developed a disarming style very early and defused tense situations by being funny. In church he could get his mother giggling so uncontrollably the whole family would have to leave. And when the boys brought home their report cards, George never failed to get "Excellent" in one rating by which his mother set great store: Claims no more than his fair share of time and attention. It became a family joke—George always did best in "Claims no more."

His life as an adult began like some wonderful Frank Capra movie: 1944, and so many American boys are still fighting "over there." Our dashing naval pilot arrives home on Christmas Eve, painfully handsome, and stands in his sweetheart's doorway, a light snow melting on his nose...

It has been written that Barbara Pierce saw George at a dance when she was sixteen, and made up her mind to marry him. "No," she snaps, "he saw me," and proceeds to give Barbara's version, which will from this moment on be the official version. George, gorgeous in black-tie, asked another boy if he knew the girl in the red-and-green dress. They were engaged before George went to war. Bar returned to Smith College, where her dream for their marriage was simply "Oh, God, let him come home."

Barbara had grown up in Rye, New York. While not superrich (her father had started as a messenger and ended up president of the McCall Corporation), she, like George, had been insulated from hands-on work and raw language. "Words like shit?" I asked her. "Yes, it was just not what we said in Rye, New York, exactly."

"Don't you think it was a shock for us to see their homes?" says Mrs. Bush about the mind-boggling six months she and George spent traveling across the country as a naval couple, staying in people's basements. But it was the destruction of her entire trousseau of silk lingerie that really got to her. The woman they were staying with showed Barbara how to use the washing machine, then marched upstairs to crow over the telephone, "I wish you could have seen her; she put all those handmade beautiful things into the machine and ruined them, every one!"

After the war, everyone was in a hurry. George had been a mediocre student in high school, but finishing Yale in two and a half years was common in 1945 as veterans were ground through the degree mill year-round. He earned a B.A. in economics, but didn't consider going to graduate school. "I didn't even have a career dream then," Bush told me.

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His dad and his Uncle Herbie both offered him jobs, but George was looking for a way to get out from under the shadow of his awesome father. "I want something I can see, something I can feel," he used to tell Bar. They looked at farming, but that was a little too hands-on. There was an oil boom gushing out of West Texas—now, that was about as far away from the concrete canyons of Wall Street as a young man could get. The couple set up in Odessa, near Midland, on a street of what Bar called "Easter-egg houses," and shared a common wall with a hooker.

"Didja go to college, Bush?" asked his boss, Bill Nelson, a tough old oilfield worker, figuring the new trainee with baby-smooth hands would last about a week.

"Yes, I went to Yale," said Bush. "Too bad."

The Bushes laughed a lot and worked hard and lived simply, on his income. Still, "George and I never thought we were poor," Barbara has told others. "We knew if something terrible happened to us, we had family." And it was family that tapped investors for the half-million dollars that put Bush in business as an oil-deal promoter. Together with a well-connected Westerner, Hugh Liedtke, he formed Zapata Petroleum in 1953, leased some land with two oil wells on it, and scored 128 hits.

He had no political ambitions as a young man. Barbara says all that stuff one reads about George wanting to be president from the time he was a boy is bunk. It was only after his father was elected to the Senate in 1952 that George began to take any interest in politics. But for the next ten years, he was swept up in the high-stakes oil business.

The offshore-oil-drilling business was pure adventure, and Bush had always loved the sea. It was risky, though, and before long he had bleeding ulcers. Liedtke wanted to build a huge oil company (and did—today it's Pennzoil). Bush had never been driven to amass an enormous fortune, and now that he had the solid family connection in politics to back him up, he thought about starting another career, one perhaps better suited to his temperament. In 1959, he dissolved the partnership with Liedtke and moved the family to Houston. By 1963, Bush was Harris County G.O.P. chairman. Politics was a game in which he could glad-hand and enjoy constant affirmation, but also follow Dad's commandment to give something back.

A year later, at the age of forty, a man in a hurry, he plunged straight into a Senate race. But the wrong Democrat won the primary—the conservative Lloyd Bentsen—and Bush was beaten badly. Two years later he came up to bat again, selling his stock in Zapata for $1.8 million to run for a congressional seat as a moderate-to-liberal Republican from a silk-stocking district. He won two terms in the House, where he voted for withdrawal from Vietnam and for the controversial open-housing legislation.

The first time he stood up to his father was in 1970. Bush had reached the middle of his life—age forty-six—and perhaps needed to make a stand as his own man. Against his father's advice, he gave up his congressional seat to reach again for the Senate. "It was a long shot, but he wanted to get into position to run for president," says Jonathan Bush. And, despite his father's strong conviction that American involvement in Vietnam was a terrible mistake, George took a more conservative stand in his Senate race, playing the hawk on Vietnam and opposing civilrights legislation. He lost.

George later told an Episcopal Church official that he regretted having gone that far right, and would never do it again. "The implication was he had to do it to get elected," the Reverend John F. Stevens has said. Bush grew so quiet about Vietnam in the early seventies family members don't know what he thought about it. "But I don't think you'd have heard George opposing Dad on it,'' says Jonathan.

After a decade in electoral politics, trying and failing, succeeding modestly, and trying and failing again, Bush found his whole game plan had been knocked into a cocked hat. He took it hard. There were times he'd say to Bar, "I could have made $7 million if I'd held on to that stock..."

Listlessly, he accepted the job of ambassador to the United Nations in 1970. The way he figured it, according to Jonathan, "Run those Senate races, drop back three spaces; move to the U.N., advance one space." Thus began a decade of taking good-soldier jobs, waiting and hoping to get back on the presidential playing field. 

A significant shift seems to have taken place in the Bushes' marriage at that time. The story came out as I asked Mrs. Bush about her hair. It is snow white, and people endlessly remark that she looks like the vice president's mother. The fact is, she went gray very young.

"My mother-in-law, who I love more than life, asked me to dye it." Dutifully, Bar did. Every time she swam, the brown turned green, but she kept it up. I asked her when she finally stopped. She spat out the date precisely, as one does only with significant events. 

"I remember the day, in the summer of 1970. We were in Maine. And we were going to the U.N." But why then, in her mid-forties, I wondered aloud, at a time when many women step up their efforts to remain sexually attractive?

"George Bush never noticed," she said almost bitterly. "So why had I gone through those years of agony?"

As ambassador to the U.N., Bush was once again tirelessly social and spectacularly popular. Yet one of his peers there says he was not regarded as a heavyweight, as someone who could get things done in Washington for small countries. Presumably bored, he had frequent tete-a-tetes at the Palm Restaurant and went out with Bo Polk, a notorious bachelor and party giver.New Yorkmagazine voted Bush one of the Ten Most Overrated New Yorkers. Stylishly, he threw a party for the snubbed ten, but Bar nailed the editor at the door and bitterly chewed him out.

After the U.N. came the G.O.P. chairmanship, another good-soldier job, but Watergate ruined that. A new job was created for Bush—first U.S. envoy to the People's Republic of China—but this was getting even farther off the main track. Nicholas Brady, chairman of Wall Street's Dillon, Read, who has known Bush socially for the last ten years, remembers getting a note from Beijing urging him to stop by and talk: "I'm sitting out here trying to figure out what to do with my life," wrote Bush.

In 1975, he came home from China to head the C.I.A. because President Ford asked him to. The agency needed a clean-jeans person to repair its tarnished image and morale. Bush never talks about the year he spent as C.I.A. director, nor does Bar. It seemed to have left no mark on him, nor he on it.

Bush has, in fact, the perfect resume for someone seeking appointive office. He has always been an ideal Number Two: he does what he is trained to do, never challenges, never initiates. But why take such jobs if one's game plan is to run for president? "It's an interesting look at George's character," says Brady. "There are small jobs which may seem beneath your dignity, but if you're learning, it's not so damn important if you're rewarded or not."

In 1980, Bush put all that learning on the line. He came out of the dugout in great form and gained enough momentum to crow about having "the Big Mo." But after Reagan took the microphone away from him in New Hampshire, he went from Big Mo to No Mo. Jim Baker had a time trying to get him off the mound; Bush is nothing if not a stubborn competitor. (Once his team pulled the plug in June, after running up a campaign debt of $1.5 million, Bush, running true-blue to form, vowed, "I will go anywhere in the country to pay off that debt." And in three months he had paid off every dime. By comparison, two years after his 1984 campaign Gary Hart still owed $2.5 million.)

Something happened to George Bush's perspective between then and now. For one thing, he turned sixty. When we spoke, I suggested that is a stage where many people feel a new detachment from goals about which they may have felt intensely only a few years before. "I think there's something to that, yeah," said Bush. "The things that are important aren't how you get from point A to point B, but your values, what's gonna happen to this little kid that I love so much, what's his life gonna be like? It's more than 'Now I gotta really get near the end here, and in this primary plot this and do that.' I mean, I'm past all that."

Brady remembers a remark that came out of the blue about a year ago. Bush said if he did run and lose in '88, he'd like to be editor of a small-town newspaper. "I get a sense of inner calmness about the thing that wasn't there before," says Brady.

"If my father died tomorrow," says his son George junior, "as his soul ascended to heaven, he would be content, knowing he'd never done anything he wasn't proud of to accomplish his aims."

And if he's still alive in 1988, but not president?

"He's told me he'd be perfectly happy being a college president."

Is George Bush preparing to run only because it's a game that's out there to be played, and everyone expects it of him? Bruised by the criticism he took in '84 even as Reagan's running mate, he was not at all enthusiastic about stumping on his own again. Neither was Bar, according to their friend Barry Boardman. "She knows he doesn't need to tack on any more for his Who's Who listing." And it's been twenty years since he won an election on his own. He'll work hard at it, though; he always does. Whether it's tiddlywinks or a presidential race, once Bush gets in, it's hard to pull him off. He loves to win.

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George Bush's biggest problem right now is Ronald Reagan. When Reagan's popularity drops, so does that of his yes-man. But even when the president enjoys high popularity, Bush— playing Tonto to his Lone Ranger—has a major image problem. When you have a guy who says, "We're in deep doodoo, kemo sabe.

Comparisons of style between the vice president and his boss have always been murder for Bush. His voice is the squeaky piccolo to Reagan's mellow cello. Reagan is western boots and chopping wood to Bush's Lacoste shirts and tennis shoes. Reagan never permits a picture to show him in his reading glasses; Bush is constantly nagged about his prissy spectacles. (George has tried contacts, says his wife, but his eyes are too square.) Reagan has used his origins—bom to ordinary working people in a banal midwestem town—to play to conservatives' preference for an anti-intellectual, macho style of administration with middle-to-low-brow western orientation. He makes all those in the lumpen electorate who also went to a mediocre college feel better. Then along comes George Bush, who is everything they're not—Greenwich, Andover, Yale, captain of the Yale baseball team, Skull and Bones—and because he cannot be identified with any issue, people focus on the manners of his class.

When I was welcomed into the Commerce Department office of "Mac" Baldrige, I remarked that he resembled Bush. The rangy plainsman recoiled. "Nobody calls me preppy." To hang Bush with the old button-down jokes is too old even for comedians, but Baldrige kept coming back to "the preppy thing" as the source of his friend's political problems. Baldrige would love to see George throw around some spicy language, but Wasp humor is usually bland as bread pudding. "And he can't swear," laments Baldrige. "He muffs it every time." (Bush's father forbade cursing.) Others wince at the words he does use. "Getting into deep doodoo," "nifty," "zip-a-dee-doo-dah." (But Bush's father, who wore two-tone summer shoes and bow ties in the U.S. Senate, spoke like that, too.)

Can the man help it if he was shaped until the age of eighteen to conform to the Eastern Wasp Patrician Sensibility? The mold is old and solid. It has gone to Groton/Andover and Yale/Harvard; it has studied Proust (albeit punctuated by paddle tennis and table puzzles), cut its teeth on competition, and developed a fetish about fairness. It has learned to read stock tables at Granny's knee and to navigate steadfastly through Atlantic squalls in small boats. It has trudged uncomplainingly through the Pitti Palace in the hammering heat of August. It is unfailingly polite. Following the vice president's campaign feels like one long night at the country club, with Bush as the quintessential toastmaster.

Yet nobody gave F.D.R. a hard time for Groton and Harvard, and John Kennedy made New England prep schools and Harvard a national emblem of glamour. So it is more than a problem of background or style.

I think of it as the Tinker Bell problem. Ronald Reagan is an ideologue, a true believer. He talks about his "visions," about the "miracle" that is America. Bush gave a revealing look into his concept of Reagan's miracles in an ad-lib to a speech for Senate candidate Ed Zschau: "Ronald Reagan and I believe in the miracle that is America. But the funny thing is, when you look at miracles, they're nothing. It's hard work.''

Reagan, on the other hand, has been able to make us believe that he really believes what he reads off the TelePrompTer. When his deep voice quivers with conviction, it is as though some divine afflatus has descended upon him to show us all the way. Suddenly he isn't addressing the criticism at all, but invoking his magic to give us an economic fantasy or something called a nuclear shield. Until he stumbled over his rationale for dealing arms to the Devil, Reagan had only to clap his hands and Tinker Bell would appear.

But what happens when you clap your hands for Tinker Bell and you don't believe? You look like George Bush—as if you had strings attached.

What's more, Bush can't act. On TV, without glasses, he looks unfocused and quizzical. And giving a speech he's so gung ho, he gets so pumped up with national pride, his voice comes loose from the diaphragm and floats higher, higher, until at the peak of his pique it becomes ... a pip-squeak. Here is Bush hopping about on a podium, cheerleading for a western candidate:

"I'm greatly appreciative of you-all's being here. [Groan].. .And I'm glad to be here in Nevaah-dah" (like Ramada —wrong, out here it rhymes with Whatsamatta). "America is back! And we want to keep it that way! .. .The president and I know the best way to negotiate is keep America strong. ... And we'll hit Qaddafi again!"

One can almost see the gold braid and squeaky-clean boots of The Very Model of a Modem Major General.

And he refuses to change. Bush wouldn't know a photo opportunity if it hit him over the head, according to his own staff photographer, David Valdez. If Valdez had a dollar for every time he's caught the vice president's shirt out or handed him a comb before he made an appearance, Valdez could probably afford Andover, too. Bush would rather die than use hair spray, say his aides. And, on one of the rare occasions when he exploded, during the 1980 campaign, the issue was appearance. His supporters had deputized a Bush family member to lobby George about persuading Bar to dye her hair. Bush threw the relative out of his office.

What is never mentioned in comparisons between the president and the vice president is the disparity in how they actually live. Bush has been married to the same woman for forty-two years; Reagan has been divorced. Bush says the proudest accomplishment of his life is that his kids still come home; only one of Reagan's children bothered to show up at his seventy-fifth-birthday patty. Bush spends weekends in Kennebunkport pushing his grandchildren to row across the pond and giving them the confidence to do it; Reagan never sees his grandchild and takes no one with him for weekends at Camp David except Nancy and the dog. George Bush was a genuine hero in W.W. II; Ronald Reagan was in Culver City making movies about it. The irony is that Bush really lives the eternal values so dear to conservatives' hearts, while Reagan mouths them and winks.

As vice president, Bush never oversteps. Right off the bat, in the January 7, 1981, meeting that brought the president-elect's senior officials together for the first time, Reagan began by telling stories to illustrate the point that they were there to remake the fiscal world. He turned to Bush to ask if his vice president had anything to add.

"Bush replied with a firm negative," wrote David Stockman in The Triumph of Politics. "Then he proceeded to rephrase every single one of the generalizations the President had just made."

For the first six months Bush was frozen out by Reagan's inner circle of Californians. But they praise the day he showed his true colors, the day the president was shot. Instinctively, Bush made the judgment, as he flew back from Texas, not to land on the White House lawn. Instead, he went home and took a limo to the White House, where he said only a few words and left. While Alexander Haig was grandstanding—"I'm in charge here"—Bush charmed the Cabinet and showed he was not a man to be afraid of. Result: Haig was axed, while Bush was given command of the Special Situations Group, to operate whenever the president was away during an emergency. It may have sounded like a job that carried a great deal of authority, but when the Korean Air plane was shot down by the Soviets, and Bush called his group together because Reagan was at Santa Barbara, Secretary of Defense Weinberger didn't even bother to show. "George Bush isn't going to make any decisions,'' scoffed Weinberger, according to Seymour M. Hersh's book ' 'The Target Is Destroyed. ' '

Bush has had some triumphs too, though his finest moments go unseen by the public. He is said to be superb at delivering tough messages in a diplomatic manner; not only does he know most of the world's leaders, says adviser Donald Gregg, "he knows what their sensitivities are, and he does not inadvertently twang those sensitivities, as a great many Americans do.''

Bush also has his weekly tete-a-tetes with the president. (Much of the time is spent swapping jokes, according to those in the know. It's good therapy for the president.) In playing to the president's view of himself as a world-class communicator, Bush deserves much of the credit for softening Reagan's coldwar rhetoric.

After the Iran crisis exploded, George Bush could no longer maintain his low profile. He ducked for a month. Then, as the public's incredulity turned to revulsion, Bush was constantly on the phone, getting advice from everybody, reacting as he always does when pushed to the wall. He finally surfaced to make a longscheduled speech before the American Enterprise Institute. His natural empathy came through in a contrite tone that contrasted with the president's bitterness and defiance. Bush conceded that mistakes had been made and the public trust damaged. It was a White House-approved dress rehearsal for a shift in rhetoric that the president made several days later. But while Bush repeatedly raised one of the questions left unanswered by the president—"how the administration could violate its own policy of not selling arms to Iran"—he offered only a multiple-choice answer: "Call it leadership.. .call it a mistaken tactic." Once again, this time with the credibility of his elected office at stake, George Bush had no message of his own.

Operatives for his political rivals were quick to portray this as a lose-lose situation for Bush. Not so the vice president's own domestic political adviser, Lee Atwater, who chose to see Bush's speech as another example of loyalty: "Reagan will be a deity with Republican-primary voters. People will see who were Reagan's fair-weather friends, and Bush's loyalty will look better than ever."

Bush may gain some points on loyalty; he'll also have a lot of questions to answer between now and then. He has assured the public and his friends that he had nothing to do with the contra-fund diversion. But he has echoed in his public rhetoric the same obsessive urgency heard in the president's voice whenever Reagan talks about supporting the "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua. On a videotape made last April to send to Christian evangelical groups, Bush opined, "I get emotionally involved on that issue, the need to give Nicaragua what every country around it has—democracy—and that's what this contra thing is all about. But I still haven't done my job to perfection, because the American people still don't understand the importance of this. The president does, and he's leading."

Shortly after the scandal broke I asked Bush's national-security assistant, Donald Gregg, if Bush would have supported Oliver North's secret diversion of money and arms to the contras. Gregg, who has been accused of knowing about North's activities all along, gave an intriguing answer. "He would not have taken a position without looking into the laws that might apply. And I personally," said the man who advises Bush on such matters, "think he wouldn't have found North was breaking any law."

Just about everyone has tried to get George to stand up for himself, to engage conflict. His aunt, a Common Cause liberal, stands on her head to provoke him. Nothing. His sister, Nancy, will say, "Damnit, George, why won't you say what you really think!" But, according to his brother Jonathan, "you just can't get him in there fighting." George junior says sympathetically, "Dad's instinct is always for the thoughtful thing, and that's probably to his detriment in the world of cutthroat politics."

"Niceness shouldn't be a disqualifier for the presidency," Jim Baker insists. "It certainly wasn't for Reagan." Yes, but. There is a dramatic difference between Bush niceness and Reagan niceness. Reagan, while always amiable, keeps a distance from everyone. People who mistake his amiability for softheartedness challenge him at their peril. "Reagan's a really tough politician," says Bush's former press secretary Pete Teeley. "He'll leave them hanging."

Out of the forty people I interviewed for this story, only two could come up with an instance where George Bush had challenged someone. He once made a retort to his close friend Nick Brady, when Brady pushed him on a point: "Then how come I'm vice president and you're not?" This was in private, and Brady can't remember the point.

Senator Simpson was privy to the other occasion. It was a private dinner for six at Simpson's home in 1985, with George and Barbara and Rosalee and David—David being McCullough, the eminent historian, also Yale, also a Bonesman.

"I want to ask you if my perception of this administration is wrong," McCullough began, as Simpson recalls the scene. The historian made a measured challenge of its attitude toward the poor, the homeless, and minorities, an attitude he felt was thoughtless and obnoxious. Since the president and vice president serve as models, McCullough argued, their sense of fairness ought to be apparent in whom they associate with and what they say.

Barbara Bush said several times, "You know, dear, he's right."

"How do you defend that?" McCullough wound up.

George Bush, according to one account, was courteous but powerful in responding to the challenge. By another account he was inadequate and often insensitive, insisting that everyone knows the homeless are all crazy. He did not respond by articulating the wisdom of the president's policies or ideas, but only with a defense of Ronald Reagan as a caring person. He never rose above the personal to engage the debate on an intellectual level.

George Bush's habit of a lifetime is to avoid at virtually any cost tackling anyone head-on. And never a person in authority or power. The parallel between his relationships with his father and with Reagan seems palpable. To put it in an archetypal context, George Bush will do anything to keep from making the father angry.

But at some point a leader must clearly stand for something or he stands for nothing. In a world where issues have become so complex, where terrorism has become another means of foreign policy, where the Soviet leader is a modem political marketing man, no one can be certain of what is right and wrong. We elect a leader because we believe his character best reflects our national character, and we put the great decisions to his judgment. If he cannot bear to offend people, if he hasn't got the outer strength to pursue a lonely course, if he feels comfortable only when doing what he's been trained to do, might he not, as a president, become paralyzed?

I asked Bush if he had regrets about remaining steadfastly in Ronald Reagan's shadow. He wrapped one arm in another and rubbed it.

"I know I'm right. Even if it wasn't the right way to approach this relationship, the respect and the affection I have from Ronald Reagan would"—his voice was deep and flooded now with feeling— "would dictate to me that I couldn't do it any other way if I wanted to."