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So, here's a trick question: what's President Bush's approval rating in the US now that he is safely out of office? Fifty per cent? Thirty? Somewhere in the mid-teens?

Actually: no, no... and no.

As unlikely as it may sound, the opinion of George Bush in the US is 63 per cent positive these days - and he has the highest net approval of any living ex-president, including Bill Clinton.

If this seems like an impossible feat for the former baseball-club owner who started two wars and left a smoking crater where the global economy used to be... well, it is. Because these aren't the numbers for George Walker Bush, they're for his father: George Herbert Walker.

The soaring popularity of HW - or "41" as he is known, after his number in the line of US presidents - isn't a result of the usual rose-tinted lens applied to the careers of most former American presidents, however. Instead, he has been the beneficiary of a relentless PR campaign that began during the grimmest days of the post-George W hangover and continues to gain momentum as the 2016 election approaches. There has been a fawning biography of HW on the cable channel HBO; a three-day celebration to mark the 25th anniversary of his presidency; and a new bronze statue outside his presidential library in College Station, Texas. Not to mention countless photographs of HW - who celebrated his 90th birthday in June with a parachute jump - beaming from his wheelchair at public events.

HW even turned up to welcome President Obama on the runway of Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston in April, when Air Force One landed for a visit. Unable to get up, HW patted Obama's legs as they talked.

The none-too-subtle message conveyed by all of this is a powerfully nostalgic one: remember when the US could win a war against Iraq in just a few weeks? Remember when deficits were measured in billions, not trillions? And remember when both sides of Congress - right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats - worked together to reach deals instead of making apocalyptic threats about a defaulting on the national debt?

Even the line that cost HW his second term - "Read my lips, no new taxes!" - has been cast in a new light. The broken promise is now held up as an example of heroic pragmatism, earning a Profile In Courage Award from the John F Kennedy Presidential Library earlier this year. After all, raising taxes was the only way HW could get both sides to sign off on his 1990 budget.

Which brings us to the reason for this frantic burnishing of 41's legacy. Some might argue that it's what political dynasties do when one of their elders is reaching his final days - or that it is all a part of America's longing for a return to the era when it was the world's sole, uncontested superpower. But there is another theory: that the renaissance of George HW Bush is an effort to obliterate all memory of George W and reset the family brand back to the late Eighties, when the Bushes were considered the closest thing Americans had to a royal bloodline.

As for the orchestrator of this Don Draper-worthy media strategy: look no further than John Ellis Bush, George W's younger brother by seven years, and - as most seem to agree - HW's favourite son. Whenever HW is seen in public, "Jeb" (he goes by his initials) is never far behind. There he was with dad in the Oval Office during a recent visit to the White House; there he was giving a speech at a reunion of dad's old cabinet; and there he was after the launch of that HBO documentary (titled 41), telling the Bloomberg news service that the Republican Party of today - in large part a product of the hyper-polarising George W years - bears little resemblance to the one that both Ronald Reagan and HW once led. "My dad and Reagan sacrificed political points for good policy," he later tweeted, conspicuously failing to mention his elder brother.

While the sibling rivalry between Jeb and George W has never been a secret, there is no suggestion of any feud. In fact, the Bush brothers are said to be on cordial, albeit distant, terms.

They even recently appeared together on CNN in a show of dynastic solidarity.

Indeed, George W - who has maintained an almost complete silence since he left office - probably understands better than anyone the strategy that is now underway. That is, to prepare the US - and the world - for a Jeb Bush presidential candidacy in the 2016 Republican Party primaries, followed by a run against Hillary Clinton for The White House. Yes, that's right. Brace yourselves, everyone, for President Bush: The Threequel.

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Of all the five Bush children - George, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy - Jeb was always the one who seemed destined to follow his father into the world's most powerful job.

George W, after all, was an unpredictable character. Neil was even more disaster-prone, getting himself involved in a billion-dollar Eighties financial scandal and a messy divorce that involved squalid tales of hotel-room sex with women from Thailand and Hong Kong. (Not to mention his friendship with the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead last year in a bathtub at his Berkshire mansion.) As for Marvin and "Doro", neither seemed to like attention. Marvin is now a hedge-fund partner - and a cult figure among 9/11 conspiracy theorists thanks to his time on the board of a company with links to both United Airlines and the World Trade Center - while Doro is a philanthropist.

Jeb, on the other hand, seemed born to inhabit high office.

Known as "the smart one" in the family, he was enrolled in kindergarten a year early due to his precocious intelligence, and later graduated from the University of Texas in just over half the four years it usually takes. By then he was a towering 6ft 4in - two inches taller than HW, and a full five inches above his elder brother.

Yet there was also a softness to Jeb - a subtle yet doe-eyed vulnerability - that worried even his father. "Jebby is a deeply sensitive kid with lots of compassion and love in his heart," HW wrote in a 1971 diary entry, later made public as part of a collection of his letters. "But I worry that he may take on some crazy idea."

As far as George W was concerned, meanwhile, Jeb had no conception of what true suffering really meant.

Jeb had been a newborn, after all, when their three-year-old sister, Robin, started to develop bruises on her legs that turned out to be the first signs of terminal leukaemia. George W, on the other hand, was a seven-year-old boy: mature enough to be affected not only by the decline of Robin, but also the distress it caused his mother, Barbara - then just 28 - whose hair turned prematurely grey overnight. George W was so worried about "Bar" after his sister's death it is said he would refuse to go out and play because he didn't want her to be lonely.

The standard armchair psychologist's theory is that George W's clownishness was a response to that period, when he felt that it was his responsibility to cheer everyone up.

But it's also clear that George W - unlike his younger brother - developed a sense of contempt for the almost comically grandiose expectations that came with being a Bush.

Hence his Vietnam-dodging stint as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard; his years of heavy drinking and all-day water volleyball at an apartment in Houston; and the time when he drove home drunk with Marvin (then 16) and challenged his father to a "mano a mano" on the front lawn. After which came his mediocre stint at Harvard Business School - he would wear cowboy boots to class and spit tobacco into a cup - and the troubled oil ventures that preceded his lucrative period as an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. (His initial $800,000 stake rose in value to $15 million.)

Jeb also rebelled, of course. But in a distinctly less charismatic way.

He joined a socialist club in high school; tried smoking pot; let his hair grow long(ish); and at the age of 17 went on a foreign-exchange programme to Mexico where he fell in love with a girl named Columba, known as "Colu". Three years later, he announced they were going to marry. At the time, Colu barely spoke a word of English. More importantly, neither HW nor Bar had ever met her. "I hope that my kids don't do to me what I did to my parents,"

Jeb told the Bush family biographers, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. "My dad didn't meet her until the small dinner before the wedding, which wasn't very nice of me."

Adding to HW's discomfort, Jeb also considered registering as a "conscientious objector" to Vietnam. The Bushes, after all, are a family of war heroes, not pacifists. HW flew 58 combat missions over Japan during the Second World War, including one in which he completed a bombing raid in a burning plane before ditching it into the Pacific and being rescued by a submarine. All of his fellow crewmates died.

Jeb eventually came around to the idea of serving his country.

But by the time he signed up for the draft, the Vietnam War was pretty much over, and his turn to fight never came.

Instead, he flew south to Caracas, Venezuela, where he took a job with Texas Commerce Bank that he'd landed through the Bush family network. He stayed there for two years before volunteering to return to the US and work - without a salary - for HW's 1980 presidential campaign... only to see his dad crushed in the Republican Party primaries by a former B-list actor from Illinois named Ronald Reagan.

The race wasn't for nothing, though: after his victory in the general election, Reagan asked HW to be his vice president.

With the campaign over, Jeb settled with Colu in Miami. In presidential elections, Florida is a critical state due to its huge yet evenly divided population, which means it can swing right or left. But a part of it was also personal. Unlike George W's blandly perfect wife, Laura, Colu didn't like Texas and didn't get along with Bar - and she didn't seem to make much of an effort to, either. Jeb has also acknowledged that Colu was the victim of "subtle" racism in Houston's virtually all-white Republican high society. HW didn't help matters by referring to Jeb and Colu's children - George P, John Ellis and Noelle - as "the little brown ones" while trying to point them out to Reagan at a crowded naval base.

All of which left Jeb in an odd position: he was still clearly HW's favourite son - after serving on his dad's staff, they were closer than ever - but as time went on, his family became partially estranged from the wider dynasty.

Nevertheless, Jeb stuck closely to his mother's First Rule of Politics: make money *before * you run. And in this he had the help of one of HW's friends, Armando Codina, a wealthy Cuban exile who today sits on the boards of companies from American Airlines to Merrill Lynch.

Codina cut Jeb in on a lucrative property venture while he built up his local political connections - the latter including many right-wing Cubans who fled Fidel Castro's regime. Jeb became so close to the Cubans that he would lobby his father to release from prison the anti-Castro militant Orlando Bosch, who was accused (and later acquitted, due to inadmissible evidence) of bombing Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 from Barbados to Jamaica in 1976, killing 73 passengers and five crew members. Among the victims were several teenage members of the Cuban fencing team. It was thanks only to the quick-thinking of the pilot that the plane crashed in the ocean and not on a crowded beach.

According to a 2006 file released by the FBI, one of the bomb makers phoned Bosch after the attack with a message: "A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed."

It's a line that will almost certainly be repeated by Jeb Bush's Democratic adversaries should he decide to run in 2016.

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To both Jeb and George W - and indeed the Bush family as a whole - the one-term early-Nineties presidency of HW was a terrible humiliation. How had a man who had once been gunned down over the Pacific allowed himself to be characterised as a wimp by the press, most infamously on the cover of Newsweek magazine? More to the point: how had a man capable of leading the US to its most spectacular military victory in recent memory - the Gulf War - been outmanoeuvred by William "Bill" Jefferson Clinton, a pink-faced young cad from some festering backwater of Arkansas?

Whatever the reasons, the Bushes were determined to right the wrong of the 1992 presidential election. And in Jeb's mind, he was the family's natural avenger.

Within a year of his father leaving office, he'd made enough money and shaken enough hands to announce his candidacy for the governorship of Florida - and the news was enough to lift HW out of the gloom he'd sunk into after being thrown out of the White House.

During a speech at a fundraiser for Jeb, the former US commander-in-chief broke down in tears of fatherly pride, prompting his son to bound up and bear hug him.

The audience cheered as they both sobbed.

There was a problem, however. And his name was George W.

Out of nowhere, the eldest Bush also decided to run for a governorship in the 1994 elections - but in Texas, not Florida. To say this came as a shock to the Bushes would be an understatement. After all, they didn't want to spread their resources - ie, their biggest donors - too thinly. Besides, George W's previous attempt to get into politics, when he ran for Congress in 1978, had been a disaster, due to his opponent portraying him as a clueless rich kid from Connecticut with a fake cowboy accent. (Unlike his siblings, George W isn't a Texan by birth, although he has the most pronounced drawl.) Bar greeted George W's announcement to run in the same year as Jeb not with tears of pride, but with a blunt message: "You can't win."

Jeb complained that with two Bush sons running for two governorships at the same time, they'd end being a "cute People magazine story". But George W wasn't having any of it. He was running for the Texas governorship.

He was going to win. And that was that.

As Jeb predicted, the situation turned farcical.

HW seemed to spend all time weeping at his favourite son's events, while George W went it alone in Texas, often shamelessly stealing his brother's best lines.

"Jeb, desperate to appear tough, says he's a

'head-banging conservative'"

Jeb, who was desperate to appear tough, declared himself a "head-banging conservative". George W, who was desperate to appear responsible, spoke of how a visit by the preacher Billy Graham to the Bush family retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, had led him to Jesus.

Democrats mocked them as "Tweedledum and Tweedledee".

As time went on, however, something became clear: George W was a natural. He also had a secret weapon: a young advisor named Karl Rove, known for his below-the-belt campaign tactics. (Rove met George W through HW and developed an almost homoerotic crush on him. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow," he later gushed.) When election night came, the next 20 years of history were set in motion. George W won by a landslide. And Jeb lost in what Americans term "a squeaker" - a tight race - casting him out in a wilderness from which he has never returned.

HW was so devastated by the result in Florida - caused in large part by a last-minute "robocall", a prerecorded message from the opposition accusing Jeb of being a tax cheat whose running mate wanted to abolish public pensions - it was the only thing he could talk about when he rang George W after the final tallies came in. "Why do you feel bad about Jeb?" an obviously hurt George W shot back, according to one well-circulated report from the time. "Why don't you feel good about me?"

The period of introspection that followed for Jeb has in many ways defined him. To the generation that watched the Bushes go at it in 1994, he will forever be thought of as the tortured little brother, unfairly thwarted by his dimmer but more likeable sibling.

But Jeb's anguish was more than just a punch line.

Within months of his defeat, his family began to implode. His son, George P, was investigated for burglary and criminal mischief after allegedly trying to climb in through the window of his ex-girlfriend's house at 4am and then driving his car through her family's front garden. His daughter, Noelle, was developing a drug problem. Colu, meanwhile, accused her husband of ruining her life by dragging her through the ritual character assassination of a high-profile election campaign - even the subject of Colu's abandonment by her father at the age of three was seen as fair game - while she was left to deal with their family issues alone. In an effort to reconcile, Jeb converted to the Catholic faith of Colu and their children, in spite of his Anglican upbringing.

And then, in 1998, he ran for the governorship again. This time, he won. But things were not getting any easier at home.

A year after his victory, Colu returned from a Paris shopping trip and declared $500-worth of items when her flight landed in Atlanta. In her bags, however, officials found a haul of clothing and jewellery worth close to $19,000. The press, unsurprisingly, couldn't get enough of the tale of a multimillionaire politician's wife being caught trying to dodge her taxes - a sin for which she was detained and fined. "I did not ask to join a famous family,"

Colu later declared, after apologising for her bad judgment. "I simply wanted to marry the man I loved."

Added Jeb, "My wife is not a public person. She is uncomfortable with the limelight. I don't want a political wife - I want someone who... I can have a normal life with."

Normal has never been a Bush family strength, however.

In 2002 Noelle was arrested in Tallahassee on charges of writing herself a fake prescription for the popular anti-anxiety drug Xanax. She was later found with crack cocaine at a rehab centre.

John Ellis also had issues: in 2000 he was caught naked from the waist down with his girlfriend in a parked Jeep at a shopping centre (also in Tallahassee). Five years later, in a separate incident, he was charged with public drunkenness and resisting arrest in Austin, Texas. His police mug shot can still be found on Google today.

For George W, meanwhile, Jeb's 1998 election victory in Florida had been a gift. Having a key family member in the highest office of the biggest US swing state, he calculated, could be a deciding factor in his planned run against Al Gore in 2000 for the White House.

In the end, however, Jeb made a lacklustre effort to support his brother - which became all too apparent when he failed to deliver a clear win in the state on election night. Hence the botched re-count and Supreme Court battle that followed, resulting in the leadership of the most powerful country on earth being decided by all of 537 votes.

Family sources have claimed Jeb redeemed himself in George W's eyes with his work during the re-count process - although for Jeb his brother's victory was bittersweet.

"Why would Americans ever want to elect a third Bush to the Oval Office?"

After all, when George W was sworn in, Jeb knew that his life's mission to succeed his father was surely doomed. Why would Americans ever want to elect a third Bush to the Oval Office? No matter how George W performed in office, it could be decades before another Bush candidacy would be viable. By which time Jeb's son, George P - now a rising political star in spite of his early indiscretions - might be the next in line.

If Jeb was upset about all this, HW seemed even more distraught at the thought that his failure to get Jeb elected in 1994 meant the wrong son had ended up as president. In 2006 as the Iraq War entered its third awful year, HW sobbed when recalling Jeb's loss in Florida during a speech to the state's house of representatives. The video of it is difficult to watch.

The demise of Jeb's presidential ambitions seemed confirmed a year earlier when his second term as governor came to an end. Asked what his plans were, Jeb was heard muttering in Spanish, "Yo no tengo futuro."

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Translation: "I have no future."

How long ago that seems now.

Six years into the post-Bush era, Barack Obama's approval ratings are currently only four points higher than George W's miserable second-term average of 37 per cent.

The economy seems in a permanent near-stall. The president's healthcare overhaul is a gigantic mess. And the US seems like an innocent bystander in world affairs.

Meanwhile, the memory of George W's administration is beginning to fade now that he appears in the press only when he's volunteering in Africa - where he sent vast quantities of aid as president to treat HIV and malaria - or putting his childlike paintings on display at his library in Dallas. The library, incidentally, has won praise for its balanced presentation of the choices George W faced after the 9/11 attacks.

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Adding to the opportunity for a Bush family comeback has been the sudden implosion of Jeb's leading "establishment" rival in the Republican Party: New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whose travails over a traffic jam on the George Washington bridge were detailed in the May issue of this magazine. There is a good chance that Christie is already finished as a candidate. What's more, if predictions are correct and Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic Party's nominee in 2016, then Jeb will be immunised from the charge that the last thing the US needs is another political dynasty.

Americans will instead have to choose which dynasty they like better. And while Clinton has a popular husband and gender on her side - she'd be the first female US president - Jeb has fluency in Spanish and a half-Mexican family, both assets of huge value in a country where Latinos now make up close to a fifth of the population. Jeb also has a strong record as Florida's governor, a job he left with an approval rating of just under 60 per cent, not far from where he started.

A harder-to-call factor in Jeb's election prospects is the Republican Party's lurch towards radical zero-government libertarianism, as personified by Rand Paul, a borderline isolationist who has been surging in popularity of late.

In Jeb's favour, the trend makes his "head-banging" conservatism of 20 years ago seem moderate to the average voter. At the same time, however, it could make him unelectable by his own party.

Indeed, at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering for conservatives, the very mention of Jeb's name was enough to prompt boos due to his support of common educational standards and his recent claim that illegal Mexican workers sometimes cross the border into the US as an "act of love" to support their families.

Other signs of trouble also lurk, such as the unnamed Bush family confidant who used a profile of Jeb in New York magazine to describe Karl Rove as a "shithead" (a comment Jeb later distanced himself from with an angry letter to the editor); or Jeb's lucrative post-governorship jobs at scandal-tainted companies, including the mother of all banking failures, Lehman Brothers. And then there's the issue of Colu, who'd rather never go near a podium again.

Even George W referenced his younger brother's personal life during a CNN interview in May. "I hope Jeb runs," he ventured, carefully. "Of course... he knows full well what a run for the presidency can do to a family."

Jeb's mother, Bar, has been less diplomatic. When asked recently about Jeb's prospects in 2016, the 89-year-old former First Lady thundered, "He'll get half of our friends and all of our enemies.

There are other people out there who are very qualified. We've had enough Bushes."

[Editor's note: since this article was published Jeb Bush has announced he "will actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States".]

© Getty Images

Originally published in the November issue of

GQ