Few men have arrived at the White House with a longer CV than George HW Bush. Besides his wartime exploits, he ran an oil company and the CIA and had been US ambassador to the United Nations as well as serving as US vice-president for eight years.
It was in 1948 when George Herbert Walker Bush, newly graduated from Yale and the scion of an eastern establishment family, rode into Odessa, Texas, in a red Studebaker car to start a new career as an oilman.
Initially, he worked as a salesman for Dresser Industries, a company which manufactured oil drilling equipment and which was owned by a friend of Bush’s father.
The years following World War II were a boom time for both the US economy and the Texas oil industry and, despite slumming it for a time in a shotgun shack, Bush and his family soon found their feet, developing a taste for Texan food and country and western music.
Within three years, he had founded his own firm, the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company, the first of a number of highly successful drilling ventures.
The transition from wealthy Connecticut boy to wealthy Texan had been accomplished. Now Bush looked to secure himself a political career.
In 1964 he ran, unsuccessfully, for a US Senate seat in Texas, which was then solidly Democratic. At the time, Bush was a radical Republican who supported the right-wing firebrand and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, denounced civil rights and backed military action in Cuba.
Two years later, running on decidedly more moderate policies, he was elected to the US House of Representatives as member for Texas’s 7th District.