HILADELPHIA - They were so confident then, and worldly. It was 1964, the spring of senior year at Andover, and the boys, already accepted into college, were ready to let their hair down. A group of them trooped into Boston, mostly to hang out or, in the phrase of the time, to hang loose.
Then one of the kids said his father was in town, and maybe they ought to go over to say hello. And so in the middle of this lark, this schoolboys' holiday, all those high-school seniors, almost but not quite men, went over to a downtown hotel, and there in the lobby, in front of all his friends, George W. Bush greeted his father, George H.W. Bush.
''I remember this: He hugged his dad,'' says John E. Kidde, who was George W. Bush's roommate at Phillips Andover that year. ''I remember standing there saying: `Gee, I don't remember if my dad has hugged me for years.'''
This week, here in the First Union Center, the son will receive the embrace of the Republican Party and the presidential nomination that the GOP twice has bestowed on his father. It is both the party's gift and the family's inheritance. And the candidate who will accept it Thursday night will take pains to make clear that he is both his own man - and his father's son.
Tonight the father appears before a party that for the fifth time in two decades will place a Bush on a national ticket. And though the father has remained in the background, he still is leaving footprints on the landscape of American politics. He played an integral role in the selection of Dick Cheney, his former defense secretary, as the Republicans' vice-presidential candidate. His friends and advisers are the spine of his son's policy team. His profile and performance are the buoys by which the son navigates his own passage.
''My life has been affected by my dad,'' the governor said in a conversation earlier in the campaign. ''I love him a lot, admire him. I've seen a good man go into politics and been by his side as he lost three times, and he's still a good man.''
The father was president during the dawn of the contemporary era, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Communist bloc, and the son is running in the first presidential election of the new millennium, and yet there is nothing new age about the ties between the two of them. Victorians with a romantic strain, the Bushes are not a postmodern family.
The only man to follow his father into the presidency, John Quincy Adams, was more intellectual than his father; he mastered seven languages and, according to William Henry Harrison, gathered all that he knew from books. Not so George W. Bush.
The governor is more intuitive than intellectual. He was no student in college - his route through Yale resembles nothing so much as a glide pattern - but his father believes he learned a lot at home. They were lessons, the father said in an exchange of letters over the past year with this Globe writer, that ''are the same ones I learned from my parents, the same ones so many families try to teach their own sons and daughters.''
Then the former president listed those lessons:
''Be honest. Give the other guy credit. Work hard. Be kind and caring. Be willing to learn. On and on go these almost cliche-like values, but they are real. They guided me. They will guide our sons and daughters.''
Of course, the father wasn't always a former president, and the son wasn't always an aspiring president. But in the early days, when they were just Dad and George (or Georgie, as his father called him then), their relationship wasn't much different than it is today, a mixture of affection and epigrams that even the Bushes' greatest detractors do not believe is artificial or confectionary.
In a letter the father wrote to a friend in 1948, when the son was but 2, he said: ''You should see Georgie now, nothing like bragging about one's own kid. ... Whenever I come home he greets me and talks a blue streak, sentences disjointed of course but enthusiasm and spirit boundless.''
That could have been written yesterday.
The father and the son had the usual confrontations about bad behavior, the worried talk about girls, the searching questions designed to give the father some insight into what the son was planning to do with his life. ''Georgie aggravates the hell out of me at times,'' the father wrote to his father-in-law, Marvin Pierce, in the spring of 1955, when the son was only 8. But he added: ''At times I am so proud of him I could die.''
Proud, but a little worried. On the son's 29th birthday, the father, then the US delegate to China, wrote to a friend about George W.'s intention to move to Midland, Texas, and, ''starting a little later in life than I did,'' try his hand at the oil business. ''He is able. If he gets his teeth into something ... he will do just fine.''
Which is what happened, more or less. The son may not have walked the straight path but generally speaking he kept to his father's route, which is no surprise to the people who knew them both at a time when everybody thought the New England family that would spawn a political dynasty was the Kennedys, certainly not the Bushes.
Young George was not much of a reader, but when his father sent him a copy of ''The Conscience of a Conservative,'' by Barry Goldwater, he read it. When his father spoke, he listened. One of the things the father said came from his own father, Senator Prescott Bush, a Connecticut Republican, and he transmitted it in a letter to the four Bush boys two weeks before President Richard M. Nixon resigned in the middle of the Watergate scandal: ''My Dad felt strongly the firm obligation to put something into the system,'' said the father, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee under Nixon. ''He felt compelled to give, to be involved, and to lead.''
There was often a whisper of destiny in the family, and not only when George H.W. Bush was the family patriarch. Senator Bush once told a French diplomat that his son, then a young man, would be president someday; it would be a quarter-century before anyone else would take that notion seriously. Indeed, George H.W. Bush would be defeated in a high-profile Senate race in Texas in 1970 and then in a presidential nomination campaign in 1980 before finally winning in 1988.
''You are putting too much emphasis on the importance to my family of my defeats,'' the former president said in an earlier exchange of letters with the Globe. ''We are a strong family in victory or in defeat. No one likes to lose but time and again our sons and Doro [his daughter] have shown that they never felt we were `owed' one darn thing and that adversity in the political arena could not weaken our family in any way.''
But even outsiders thought the Bush family was special.
''His father was an inspiration to me, and I know he was an inspiration to George,'' said Randall M. Roden, a trial lawyer who knew the governor both in West Texas and at Andover. ''His father is the way you see him: an energetic, likeable, patriotic person. He played with us. He joked around with us. He did things with us. This was a more interesting family than most in West Texas in those days. They treated kids seriously. They would ask us questions and listen to the answers.''
Several of the governor's boyhood friends tell of being invited to the Bush home and seeing pictures on the wall of his grandfather with presidents. ''It was no big deal,'' said Don Vermeil, another onetime Andover roommate. ''George is that way in general. He doesn't make a big deal about anything.''
But part of being George was knowing that his family was such an important part of his life. The public knows it, too. Both major-party presidential candidates carry the names of their famous fathers. And yet nearly five times as many Americans believe that George W. Bush relied on family connections to get ahead than believe that Al Gore did, according to a poll released last week by the Pew Research Center. As a result, former transportation secretary Andrew Card, the onetime Bush Cabinet member who is running the convention here, has said the party is being careful not to let the Philadelphia festivities look like a Bush family celebration.
Now that the father is a former president, his role seems outsized. But it wasn't only him. It was George W.'s mother, too. Indeed, many Bush watchers believe that the governor's blithe spirit and personal style come directly from Barbara Bush.
''It's impossible to distinguish between the effect of Big George and Bar,'' said Alexander ''Hap'' Ellis, a Boston merchant banker who is the governor's cousin. ''They're both hugely important, which is why George W. is an extraordinary guy.''
Even so, the father's achievements set a high standard for the son.
''People wonder whether George suffered in the shadow of his accomplished father,'' said Roden, the friend from West Texas and Andover days. ''I don't think so. I do not think George feels insecure or suffered in any way. I think he was loved and honored, and the fact that he admired his father was a positive, not a negative.''
This summer the father was asked in the exchange of letters whether there was any motive of vindication in the son's effort to succeed the very man who defeated his father. Here is the father's answer:
''George's quest is not about vindication - not at all. He doesn't need to help `make things right for the Bushes.' Things are right for Barbara and me, indeed for our whole family. Would we be happy if he won? Of course, but it is not about vindication or getting even. Believe me.''
