The Life of George H.W. Bush

World War II Hero

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Soon after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, an 18-year-old George H.W. Bush enlisted in the U.S. Navy and trained to fly combat missions in the Pacific theater. On September 2, 1944, he flew one of four Grumman TBM Avenger aircraft that attacked Japanese installations at Chichijima. Resistance was fierce, and Bush’s plane engine caught fire. He nonetheless completed the mission before parachuting into the ocean. He floated in a raft for hours before he was rescued by an American submarine. By the end of 1944, he’d flown 58 combat missions. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross “for heroism and extraordinary achievement.”

Beliefnet Contributing Editor G. Jeffrey MacDonald is a journalist, ordained minister and author of Thieves in the Temple: The Christian Church and the Selling of the American Soul . For more information visit www.thievesinthetemplebook.com and www.gjeffreymacdonald.com .

On Prosperity's Purpose

“Prosperity has a purpose. It is to allow us to pursue ‘the better angels,’ to give us time to think and grow. Prosperity with a purpose means taking your idealism and making it concrete by certain acts of goodness. It means helping a child from an unhappy home learn how to read - and I thank my wife Barbara for all her work in literacy. It means teaching troubled children through your presence that there's such a thing as reliable love. Some would say it's soft and insufficiently tough to care about these things. But where is it written that we must act as if we do not care, as if we are not moved? Well, I am moved. I want a kinder, gentler nation.” – Nomination acceptance speech, Republican National Convention, Aug. 18, 1988