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twenty-first birthday.
    One night, Jeb and I were having dinner with Dad at a restaurant in Houston. I was working at a mentoring program in Houston’s poverty-stricken Third Ward, and Dad and I were having a discussion about my future. Jeb blurted out, “George got into Harvard.”
    After some thought, Dad said, “Son, you ought to seriously consider going. It would be a good way to broaden your horizons.” That was all he said. But he got me thinking. Broadening horizons was exactly what I was trying to do during those years. It was another way of saying, “Push yourself to realize your God-given talents.”
    For the second time in my life, I made the move from Houston to Massachusetts. The cabdriver pulled up to the Harvard campus and welcomed me to “the West Point of capitalism.” I had gone to Andover by expectation and Yale by tradition; I was at Harvard by choice. There I learned the mechanics of finance, accounting, and economics. I came away with a better understanding of management, particularly the importance of setting clear goals for an organization, delegating tasks, and holding people to account. I also gained the confidence to pursue my entrepreneurial urge.
    The lessons of Harvard Business School were reinforced by an unlikely source: a trip to visit Mother and Dad in China after graduation. The contrast was vivid. I had gone from the West Point of capitalism to the eastern outpost of communism, from a republic of individual choice to a country where people all wore the same gray clothes. While riding my bike through the streets of Beijing, I occasionally saw a black limo with tinted windows that belonged to one of the party bigwigs. Otherwise there were few cars and no signs of a free market. I was amazed to see how a country with such a rich history could be so bleak.

    With my sister, Doro, in China, 1975.
    In 1975, China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution, its government’s effort to purify and revitalize society. Communist officials had set up indoctrination programs, broadcast propaganda over omnipresent loudspeakers, and sought to stamp out any evidence of China’sancient history. Mobs of young people lashed out against their elders and attacked the intellectual elite. The society was divided against itself and cascading into anarchy.
    China’s experience reminded me of the French and Russian revolutions. The pattern was the same: People seized control by promising to promote certain ideals. Once they had consolidated power, they abused it, casting aside their beliefs and brutalizing their fellow citizens. It was as if mankind had a sickness that it kept inflicting on itself. The sobering thought deepened my conviction that freedom—economic, political, and religious—is the only fair and productive way of governing a society.

    For most of my time at Harvard, I had no idea how I was going to use my business degree. I knew what I did not want to do. I had no desire to go to Wall Street. While I knew decent and admirable people who had worked on Wall Street, including my grandfather Prescott Bush , I was suspicious of the financial industry. I used to tell friends that Wall Street is the kind of place where they will buy you or sell you, but they don’t really give a hoot about you so long as they can make money off you.
    I was searching for options when my Harvard classmate Del Marting invited me to spend spring break of 1975 at his family’s ranch in Tucson, Arizona. On the way out west, I decided to make a stop in Midland. I’d heard from my friend Jimmy Allison, who had become publisher of the
Midland Reporter-Telegram
, that the place was booming. He was right. The energy industry was on the upswing after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The barriers to entry in the industry were low. I loved the idea of starting a business of my own. I made up my mind: I was headed back to Texas.
    I pulled into town in the fall of 1975 with all my possessions loaded into my 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass.