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According to Burke’s Peerage, there is hardly a family of any American president, however humble its domestic origins, that is not related in some convoluted manner to British royalty. Of them all, however, the Bush family is unquestionably the most regal, tracing its ancestry back to crowned heads in the fourteenth century. As biographer J.H. Hatfield notes, George Herbert Walker Bush is a fourteenth cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. Securely rooted in America’s Eastern establishment, merging ancestry with affluence, this inheritance has been more a challenge than a boon to the Bushes. In three generations of elected leadership, they have consistently downplayed their pedigree and their wealth. Although heritage is no bar to achievement, American voters tend to favor those who “made it” on their own. What was this prototypical Connecticut WASP, so preppy that his nickname is “Poppy”, doing in Texas in the first place? Perhaps there was an element of escape involved — although, unlike Richard Nixon’s longing after train whistles or Bill Clinton’s transcending of a dysfunctional family, Bush’s desire was not so much to leave behind the circumstances of his childhood as to create his own new chapter. Although his father could sometimes be forbidding and his mother more than a bit blunt, Bush loved and respected both his parents and appreciated the foundation they had provided him. When his new life in Texas turned to politics, that, too, was a family tradition. His father, a model of moral rectitude, had left his lucrative Wall Street career to serve in the United States Senate. Public service is valued on both sides of the Bush family. It was a maternal Walker uncle who told a reluctant young George W. Bush that “politics [is] the only occupation worth pursuing.” America has changed a lot since John Adams felt obliged to engage in politics so that his sons and their sons might be able to follow more elevated professions. Despite its aura of scandal and the