Change

By RON SUSKIND
NYT Magazine

George and Laura Bush poked around the George W. Bush Childhood Home, going room to room through the carefully restored bungalow on West Ohio Avenue in Midland, Tex. The 41st president bought this three-bedroom house in 1951 for $9,000. The 43rd president, a rambunctious boy — a catcher on the Midland Cubs Little League team — grew up in a small bedroom with walls of knotty pine.

It was Oct. 3, 2008, the first time Bush had been in Midland since he was elected president. He didn’t return here with the rest of his family, including his father, mother and wife, when the house was formally dedicated two years ago. But with his light public schedule during this year’s campaign season, he made an executive decision to finally say yes to the standing invitation from Midland.

There are many presidential birthplaces or childhood homes dotting the nation’s landscape, but few have the density, the historical significance per square foot, of this little clapboard in Texas. Bush’s gifted younger brother, Jeb, was born eight months before their sister, Robin, died of childhood leukemia. “Georgie” bonded powerfully with his grieving mother, and the Bush family dynamics — a driving force, eventually, in national and global life — locked into place.

A few reporters waited for the first couple to emerge from the house, and Bush, far away from earthshaking events, talked with them for a moment outside about how surprisingly heartwarming it was to be back and how it was here that he “learned a lot of values that I hold dear.”

When a reporter asked if things had changed since he left town, Bush said: “You know, I’ve told my friends here, I said, ‘You know, I’m not going to change as a person because of politics or Washington’ — that’s what I said when I left. I think they appreciate that. I want them to know that, you know, even though I had to deal with a lot of tough issues, that I’m still the same person that they knew before and that, you know, I’m wiser, more experienced, but my heart and my values didn’t change.”

(More here.)