Barbara Bush was more determined than ever to see her daughter re-marry. She believed that only through marriage could Doro and her children find their safest haven. To that end Barbara encouraged Doro to date.
 "We spent a weekend up at Camp David with the Bushes...They had two dogs up there at the time and the divorced daughter," recalled one congressional wife. "Barbara told me she was concerned because Doro had dated Representative David Dreier for a year and he never touched her...'Never laid a hand on her,' said Barbara...I think Doro had better luck when she started dating a Democrat."

 After five years of dry holes and middling wells, George was in trouble. He decided to rename his company and showcase the family name so that he could attract more people to limited partnerships. He wanted to go public, expand his company, and raise $6 million. Hence, Arbusto became Bush Exploration Company, but George failed miserably. He raised only $1.3 million. Worse, he drilled only dry holes, and his investors lost 75 percent of their money.
 "I really realized I had made somewhat of a strategic error," he admitted later.
 "I was called in to handle the name change," recalled the Midland attorney Robert K. Whitt, "and I jumped at the chance. I wanted to get to know George better. That was in May 1982. He was already throwing around that vice presidential stuff. To really impress us, he'd say 'When Dad and the President...' or 'When the Vice President and Reagan get together...' That was pretty heady stuff in a little Texas town of about seventy thousand people.
 "After I did the name change for George, he called and asked us to prepare an agreement to sell 10 percent of his company for $1 million to Phillip A. Uzielli...'Keep it bland,' he said. 'Phil will bring in the money.' I've never done a deal like that...The deal smelled.; it really smelled., but it wasn't illegal.  Still, I couldn't figure out why someone would spend $1 million to buy 10 percent of a company that was worth only $382,386. In other words, Uzielli paid $1 million for assets that were worth $38,237.
 "I became even more suspicious when Uzielli walked in, slid a blank check across the table for $1 million, and said 'Where do I sign?' He had no attorney. he asked no questions. He requested no information. So strange for a $1 million tranaction, even in the high-flying oil and gas business.
 "'Don't you want to read the agreeement?' I asked
 "'It's not my money,' he said. 'I'm not concerned.'
 "The stock was issued in the name of a Panamanian corporation named Executive Resources, of which Uzielli was chairman and CEO...George didn't want me to include wording in the legal papers that stated the corporation was organized under the laws of Panama and the sale was consummated with a cash purchase of $1 million, but I had to."
 George, who gave everyone a nickname, called the lawyer "Dim wit." When Robert Whitt, then with the law firm of Cotton, Bledsoe, Tighe, and Dawson, asked George why he was doing business with a Panamanian corporation, he replied: "Dumb question, Dim wit."

 He pushed the Justice Department to prosecute the WASHINTON POST reporter Bob Woodward for publishing the the first account of CIA electronic surveillance of government representatives in Micronesia. Bush maintained that Woodward had violated the Signals Intelligence Act, which makes it a felony to publish any classified information. Yet Bush withheld the CIA files that would have proven the agency's involvement. So the Justice Department dropped the case againt the journalist.

He refused to cooperate with the investigation into the Washington, D.C., bombing of the car of the former Chilean Ambassador to the United States, Orlando letelier, that killed Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, a colleague from the IInstitute of Policy Studies. The murder was directed by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's secret service, and the CIA knew that two of the assassins were in the United States at the time of the bombing. Needing to cover up the CIA's involvement with the Chilean secret service, George directed the agency to leak the story that the bombing was the work not of the obvious supects but of leftists looking to create a martyr for their cause.

 Red Blount's nephew C. Murphy Archibald, an attorney in Charlotte, North Carolina, remembered George telling stories about how the New Haven police always let him go, after he told them his name, when they stopped him "all the time" for driving drunk as a student at Yale in the 1960s. Bush told this story - "what seemed like a hunded times" - to others working in the campaign, said Archibald.
 "He would laugh uproariously as though there was something funny about this. To me that was pretty memorable, because here he is, a number of years out of college, talking about this to people he doesn't know. He just stuck me as a guy who really had an idea of himself  as very much a child of priviledge, that he wasn't operating by the same rules."

 George's position at the Republican national Convention did nothing for the social aspirations of his wife, and Barbara did not hide her disappointment from the President. The writer Gore Vidal recalled a conversatin with his friend Murray Kempton shortly after one of the journalist's periodic lunches with Richard Nixon. Kempton had mentioned George Bush, and according to Vidal, Nixon had responded: "Total light-weight. Nothing there - sort of person you appoint to things - but now that Barbara, she's something else again! She's really vindictive!" Vidal characterized the comment as "the highest Nixonian compliment."

George's first English assignment was to write an essay about an emotional experience. He chose his sister's death.
He struggled to find the right words. He wanted to write "and the tears ran down my cheeks," but he had already used the word "tears" several times. So he turned to the the thesaurus  his mother had given him when he left home. He searched for another word for "tears". He wrote: "And the lacerates ran down my cheeks."
 The essay was returned to him with a big red zero. Scrawled across the top were the words: "DISGRACEFUL. See me immediatley." George was so scared, he asked his friends, "How am I going to last a week?"
 Years later he told the "lacerates" story to illustrate how poorly prepared he was for the rigors of Andover. Neither his previous education nor his home life had fostered any kind of appreciation for learning. He did not realize that most fifteen-year-olds of his social and educational level would have known the difference between "tears" as a noun and "tears" as a verb.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's (R-Tenn.) top aide on judicial nominees is expected to announce his resignation at the end of this week -- a sacrifice offered by the GOP leadership in hope of persuading the Democrats to wind down the fight over leaked Judiciary Committee memos.

The aide, Manuel Miranda, had spearheaded the Republican effort to push President Bush's judicial nominees through the Senate in the face of fierce Democratic opposition.

Miranda declined a request for comment. But The Hill has learned that he agreed to resign under pressure from Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). The Democrats have not agreed to scale back their demands for wide-ranging punishments following a full-blown leak inquiry.

...

 Miranda admitted to the sergeant at arms that he had read Democratic memos that a Republican staffer on the Judiciary Committee accessed through a glitch on the panel server. But it is unclear what rules if any Miranda broke. His defenders say that the files were openly available to Republicans through their desktop computers and that there is no such thing as a property right to a federal document.

Sergeant at Arms Bill Pickle's investigation of how internal Democratic memos were leaked to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times has halted the momentum Republicans built last year on judicial nominees. It has also generated bad publicity for Republicans.

 Frist's staff told The Boston Globe two weeks ago that Miranda had been placed on paid leave pending the results of the investigation. But Miranda's fate may have been sealed by Pickle, who urged Frist chief of staff Lee Rawls to sack him, according to several Senate aides.

Miranda confronted Pickle in an e-mail last week.

"Do you think that it is appropriate to go to the GOP bicameral [retreat] today and lobby Frist staff and senators to have me fired, as I am told you have been doing? Do you think that will at all taint the report which you are soon to issue? Do you think it is proper?" Miranda demanded of the sergeant at arms.