There was another cause that got his goat at Yale, though he wouldn't be able to articulate his outrage for some years: the spectacle of privileged youth protesting the institutions of their privilege. This utterly cheesed the young Bush, first at Yale, then at Harvard. Minutaglio quotes him later, describing his sense of anger at his left-wing classmates: "These are the ones who felt so guilty that they had been given so many blessings in life -- like an Andover or a Yale education -- that they felt they should overcompensate by trying to give everyone else in life the same thing."

He would find solace, years later, in the works of David Horowitz, a '60s radical who would become famous for denouncing the decade in the same outsized rhetoric that he earlier used to promote it. George W. resonated to the critiques of Horowitz and other reformed radicals, who gave him solace that his inherited privilege should be enjoyed, not resisted, or -- God forbid -- redistributed. (Ironically, his discomfort with Yale's prevailing liberalism helped the son of privilege craft an unlikely self-image as an oppressed Texas outsider, which would serve him well personally and especially politically in the years to come.)

Despite how many others have covered it, it's still worth spending some time on those entrepreneurial years. These authors, as well as reporters for the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the New York Times and, yes, Salon, have sniffed around Bush's vaguely dodgy investments, stock trades, buyouts and mergers, and none has come up with a blockbuster story to tell.

Here's the story in a nutshell (the narrative comes from Minutaglio, since Bush is mostly silent on these issues and Hatfield's book, which hews to essentially the same story, was withdrawn by the publisher and thus shouldn't be relied on for factual accuracy): Bush mostly cleaned up his act, went to Harvard Business School ("the West Point of Capitalism," a Cambridge cab driver told him) and became a loyal foot soldier for the profit motive. He drove out to Midland in a 1970 Cutlass to be a "land man," a glorified paralegal who researched the ownership of the mineral rights beneath certain plots of land, and hooked them up with those who wanted to drill. He then founded Arbusto Energy (the name means "bush" or "shrub" in Spanish), and began to attract investment to fund his own drilling.

Bush would later call it "entrepreneurial heaven ... one of the few places in the country where you can go without portfolio and train yourself and become competitive." Of course he wasn't exactly without portfolio. His uncle Jonathan Bush, a stockbroker, would tell Minutaglio, "I introduced him to clients. I marketed his firm. I think I was probably pretty helpful." One of his best friends, Charlie Younger, added: "He could get into doors with his name that you and I couldn't -- with oil people. His Dad had friends, and he didn't mind calling on them."

Even with those advantages, it wasn't easy for Bush to strike it rich in Midland. He got distracted by an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978, though he won the Republican primary, an amazing reach for a 32-year-old without a résumé. But thanks to Uncle Jonathan, the money-losing Arbusto attracted a growing list of investors, including William Draper and John Macomber, who would later become presidents of the U.S. Export-Import Bank under the Reagan and Bush administrations; James Bath, a front man for shady Saudi investors, including the father of Osama Bin Laden; and, when times were really tough, Philip Uzielli, an old Princeton pal of James Baker, George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign manager, who invested $1 million and lost almost all of it.

Ultimately the firm -- whose name was changed to the snazzier sounding "Bush Exploration" after Bush's father became vice president -- never made a profit; the number of dry holes it drilled would just about equal the number that yielded oil. Bush Exploration was rescued, first by investments from a firm called Spectrum 7, then by Harken Energy, which bought Spectrum and was awarded rights to drill off the shores of Bahrain, beating out giants like Amoco even though the Texas firm had never drilled overseas, or under water.

Six weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait, the son of the U.S. president dumped two-thirds of his Harken stock, earning almost $850,000, or two-and-a-half times its original value, on the eve of Harken announcing a huge quarterly loss. Bush faced accusations that he'd traded on insider knowledge to time his stock sale. Unhappily, he had neglected to file insider trading forms on the sale, triggering a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and the issue would dog him through his run for governor. Ultimately, though, the SEC declined to file charges.

In the end, baseball was where Bush ultimately struck oil, so to speak. In 1989 he invested $606,000 -- or 1.8 percent of the sale price -- in the Texas Rangers, and became the team's managing partner. When the ownership group sold the Rangers in 1998, Bush's stake would be worth $14.9 million. He was already governor; he had finally made his fortune; all that was left was the pursuit of the presidency, Minutaglio says, and finally Bush felt worthy to pursue it.

All three books make clear that Bush is to his party and his era what Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were to theirs -- a peerless politician who unites his followers by virtue of his charisma and personal power, and frees them from the tyranny of ideological hairsplitting and circular firing squads. But whereas Clinton and Reagan came to their political personas by way of dysfunctional, working-class homes and absent, alcoholic fathers, Bush was handed everything his predecessors had to work for. And yet they all found redemption the same way, in the endless orgy of approval-seeking known as American politics. Do they have more in common than is apparent from their lineage?

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