At the beginning of his long and well-lived life, George Herbert Walker Bush, who in politics was always prosaic, acquired, by way of a grandfather, the name of a British poet and priest (George Herbert, 1593-1633). He acquired much else from family inheritance.
The future 41st president was descended from a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland — from financier George Herbert Walker, whose name is on golf's Walker Cup — and from a U.S. senator — his father Prescott, of Brown Brothers Harriman, the Wall Street investment house whose partners included Robert Lovett, a future secretary of defense.
This was the world from which Bush came into a life whose trajectory often left him caught between the worlds of the old East Coast Republicanism of banks, railroads and good works of noblesse oblige, and the New Right Republicanism of the Sun Belt. He had an easy social grace imparted by Greenwich Country Day School, Andover and Yale, yet seemed forever uneasy about where he was and how he got there.
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