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George W. Bush's Relationship with his Parents
by Steffan Vanel 7/16/04
Here is the next installment in my on-going interpretation of the Astrological Karma of George W. Bush. See my April Column, May Column, and June Column for the first three installments of this series.I have stated earlier in this book that when there is an Astrological complex involving difficult aspects to Neptune it will create what I call a victim/victimizer program. A program such that if you don’t want to be a victim you have to be a victimizer. And if you don’t want to be a victimizer you have to become a victim. George W.’s experience of this dynamic is a major Astrological theme in his life and a major concern in his performance as president today. It is a theme synchronous with the Neptunian karmic lessons affecting the United States at this time in its history.
Childhood is where these Astrological complexes are usually first created. We then have to deal with the various ways that we unconsciously manifest these complexes in our adult lives. There is one theme evident in relation to the role of the elder George Bush in George W.’s childhood. That theme is resonant with this difficult Neptune/Sun aspect. Hilarion says Neptune in difficult aspect to the Sun indicates lessons in relation to the individual’s experience of the masculine principle. This lesson normally manifests in some difficulty or confusion in the relationship to the father in the childhood. (The Sun is often seen to represent the father in a birthchart.)
There is a recurring theme of a certain Neptunian vicitmhood and vulnerability in George W.’s childhood in his experience of his father. For starters, throughout the years that George W. was growing up his father was gone a lot. At first, when the young family moved from New Haven, Connecticutt to Texas and for a time in California, he was a traveling salesman selling drills to oil rigs, traveling up to 1,000 miles a week. Then he started into the oil business himself, searching for property to buy adjacent to where oil strikes had occurred. For this he would also be away for days at a time. Later George H. W. Bush started his own oil company for which it has been noted that as an independent oilman moving into offshore drilling he traveled even more. Indeed Jeb Bush reflected: “Even when we were growing up in Houston,...Dad wasn’t at home at night to play catch. Mom was always the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline. In a sense, it was a matriarchal family.”
This had to have been tough on Barbara as the family increased to five children. The Moon being square to the Sun in George W.’s birthchart would resonate with a tension between the parents. Any sense of victimhood experienced by Barbara Bush would, however, remain unexpressed or unapparent because of the Moon in Libra’s tendency to manifest a home life which is: ‘superficially smooth and tranquil but with a cauldron of unresolved conflict and turmoil beneath the surface.’
In looking back Barbara has begun to express more of how she felt at that time:
"This was a period, for me, of long days and short years,” she would recall. “Of diapers, running noses, earaches, more Little League games than you could believe possible, tonsils, and those unscheduled races to the hospital emergency room...of feeling that I’d never, ever be able to have fun again; and coping with the feeling that George Bush, in his excitement of starting a small company and traveling...was having a lot of fun."
With George the elder’s absence and the fact that George W. was the oldest child, George W. took on more and more the role of surrogate parent to his siblings and surrogate partner to Barbara.
“I look back on those years in West Texas,” Barbara recalled, “and I wonder how I would have ever made it without my oldest son. Thee was never any groaning or moaning on his part [although he did call her the ‘Gray Fox’ under his breath when she angered him]. I probably put more responsibility on him than I should have, especially for a boy his age,” she confessed. “But whom else could I turn to, with his father gone so much in those days?”
George W.’s own relationship to his father was more distant, but psychologically more intense:
“If Mom handled misdemeanors, then it was left to the “ultimate enforcer” to prosecute felonies. “I would scream and carry on,” Barbara said. “The way George scolded was by silence or by saying, ‘I’m disappointed in you.’ And they would almost faint.” Georgie would become particularly upset at the mere suggestion that he might have failed his father. “He could be made to feel,” Georgie’s brother Marvin said, “that he had committed the worst crime in history.”
This particularly acute vulnerability to the reality and presence of his father is a major psychological/karmic dynamic with George W. Bush’s experience of himself and life. George W.’s Sun, representing the father in a psychological sense, is in difficult aspect to Neptune, the Moon and Jupiter. Neptune would relate to the sense of victimhood and vulnerability. The Moon would involve the mother. And Jupiter would relate to the elder George Bush having such a major expansive, successful, prominent role in the world around them.
When George W. was born his father was already from a prominent East Coast family, a war hero, a baseball star, and member of Phi Beta Kappa at Yale. When they moved to Midland, Texas, the Bushes were the ‘first family’ among the other Yankees who had moved to that area. One former friend remembered how everyone called the elder George Bush ‘Big George,’ and how he “was always the quarterback of the football team, he was immediately in charge and it was so clear that he was the leader of our group, socially and intellectually.” Of course later the elder George Bush became an oil millionaire, a congressman, an ambassador to the U.N. and China, head of the CIA, Vice President and then President. A lot to live up to for an eldest son with Leo Ascendant trying to look stronger than he is.
George W. was often the victim of this difficult comparison with the legacy of his father. He followed in his footsteps but, until much later, never as successfully as his father. This path would take him to Andover, the prestigious preparatory school in Massachusetts his father attended. At George W.’s twentieth reunion at Andover he confessed that during his time there he was terrified of failing because of how much Andover meant to his father.
George W. then followed his father’s path to Yale, another of his father’s alma maters, although his acceptance there has been speculatively linked to family influence. This path also brought him into training as a pilot like his dad. Unlike his father, however, he was spared any real combat. His promotion to lieutenant was on the day of his father’s successful election. This path also brought him to the oil business where he never succeeded like his father, and what success he did have was probably, again, due to family connections.
One of George W.’s ways of dealing with his insecurities was through his overindulgence in alcohol. The negative effects of this in relation to his father manifested one night when he drove home inebriated with his brother Neil, crashing into the neighbors trash can. His father was waiting for him, but rather than listen to his father’s lecture: “W. burst into the room and confronted his father. “I hear you’re looking for me,” Junior shouted, shaking his fist....”You want to go mano a mano right here?” As one biographer has stated: “Maybe it was just the alcohol talking. Or maybe it was the nagging frustration of a young man who had come to realize how hard it was to measure up and come to worry about how easy it was to disappoint.”
Later George W. claimed that he finally gave up alcohol because it was competing with his affections for his wife and family. These are definitely valid reasons for someone with the Sun in Cancer. Other observers, however, have stated that his motives had more to do with not wanting to disappoint or cause problems for his father, especially as his father started to express ambitions for the presidency.
The experience of the roles of victim and victimizer became more complex in George W.’s relationship to his father when he had to witness the successful, bigger than life George Herbert Walker Bush experiencing his own humiliating defeats and victimizations. He had to witness the abuse and accusations his father had to deal with in his Texan political campaigns. At Yale his father, who supported the war in Vietnam, was condemned by the anti-war students and the liberal faculty.
Later George W. took on more and more the role of victimizer of those whom he felt had victimized his father. He was known to be the strong arm man in his father’s 1988 presidential campaign, letting reporters have a ‘piece of his mind’ if they wrote unflattering or critical articles about his father. Unhappy with one journalist’s comments, George W. accosted the reporter and his family during their dinner in a restaurant and yelled: “You no good fucking son of a bitch! I will never fucking forget what you wrote!” What this journalist had written was simply that he thought that Jack Kemp was going to get the Republican nomination for president in 1988. He didn’t even mention George Bush in the article. This may seem a minor incident, but I think it is symbolic of a profound psychological dynamic within George W. Bush. It has been conjectured that at least one of George W.’s motivations in running for Governor of Texas was to get back at the incumbent Governor, Ann Richardson, who had stated at the Democratic National Convention nominating Bill Clinton in 1992 that George Herbert Walker Bush was ‘born with a silver foot in his mouth.’ When George W. announced to his mother that he was running against Ann Richardson her first reaction was ‘Go get her.’
It is also speculated that George W.’s run for the presidency was, at least in part, to get back at Clinton and the Democrats for what they did to his father in 1992. I am sure that George W. has his own sense of service and duty and it has been noted that there were others who put pressure on him to run. One has to ask in the present political climate, however, what really motivates someone to run for president? And, how will those, perhaps, unconscious motives affect their choices and performance as president? Was George W. Bush’s attack on Saddam Hussein somehow connected with a festering malice resulting from Saddam’s threat to assasinate his father the first President George Bush?
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