The night before, Bush, his wife and a half-dozen close friends from Midland, Texas, had enjoyed a festive dinner at the elegant Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, Colo., ordering five or six bottles of a pricey Cabernet Sauvignon as they raised their glasses in successive toasts. They were there that July 1986 weekend to celebrate the 40th birthdays of Bush and a pal, Midland oilman Don Evans.

The evening, which came after 18 holes of golf and a visit to the Air Force Academy's chapel, was "nothing crazy," Evans recalled, just a group of friends, fueled by wine, taking sentimental stock of their lives.

"We just had a loud, long dinner that night," said childhood friend Joe O'Neill. "We weren't asked to leave or anything."

But the aftereffects dogged Bush's footsteps the next day. "This run was different," he recalled in his recent autobiography.

About halfway through, he made a decision: He would quit drinking.

When he told his wife Laura, she was skeptical. "I'm not sure she believed me, at first," said Bush, who was known for being the life of the party since his days as a frat boy at Yale.

A spiritual awakening that had begun a year earlier "helped me quit drinking," Bush, 53, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. So did a growing realization that drinking could jeopardize his relationships, his health and his career. Bush's Texas oil business was going through tough times as well, with severely depressed oil prices bringing an uncomfortable level of debt.

Friends have suggested that Bush's decision was driven partly by concern that he not do anything to embarrass his father, George Bush, the vice president who was gearing up for a run for the White House. Months after the Broadmoor dinner, the younger Bush would uproot his family from Midland and move to Washington to serve as his father's "loyalty enforcer" and the campaign's link to religious conservatives.

The younger Bush, now in the midst of his own campaign, offers a different explanation.

"I am a person who enjoys life, and for years, I enjoyed having a few drinks," the Texas governor wrote in his book. "But gradually, drinking began to compete with my energy. I'd be a step slower getting up. My daily runs seemed harder after a few too many drinks the night before."

Bush, who had a fondness for bourbon and beer, also had some awkward run-ins while drinking.

In one episode, The Wall Street Journal's then-Washington bureau chief, Al Hunt, recalled being accosted by a "clearly lubricated" Bush in a Dallas restaurant in 1986, and sworn at for some perceived slight against Bush's father. Bush called Hunt to apologize after the anecdote surfaced in a Bush biography, "First Son," published in 1999.

Bush credits his wife, who had been nudging him to quit drinking, with helping him. But Laura Bush says he is solely responsible.

"Everyone quits everything by themselves," she said in an interview. "So he did that. George is very disciplined."

The decision, which Bush describes as a turning point in his life, came during an unusually introspective period.

The previous summer of 1985, a fireside chat about religion with the Rev. Billy Graham at the Bush family retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine, launched Bush on a spiritual quest that friends say sharpened his interest in public service. Graham had been staying with the family for a weekend, and one night the elder Bush asked the evangelist to answer questions on faith.

"I don't remember the exact words. It was more the power of his example," the younger Bush wrote.

Bush long had attended church, taught Sunday school and served on church committees. But it wasn't until the meeting with Graham that he began to deepen his faith in what one Bible study classmate, Don Jones, called "a long struggle up a steep hill."

"I think George sensed that there was a spiritual void in his life," said Jones, a Midland oil and natural gas company executive. "I think a lot of people who are Christians or proclaim to be Christians really and truly haven't been converted."

Bush, who describes Graham as his religious mentor, said the famous evangelist "planted the seed in my heart that grew over time."

In an interview at his Austin campaign headquarters, Bush said: "I was a married man, raising kids, prior to forty. I'd been a Sunday school teacher, I'd been a Little League coach, running a business. I had a life that was a responsible life. But there was something missing.

"My acceptance of Christ has provided kind of a sense of comfort and strength, a renewed purpose that I hadn't had in my life prior to that."

Bush, who has been faulted by some for injecting religion into politics by stating that Jesus Christ was the most influential thinker in his life, rejects the criticism.

"If people want to know me, they've got to know that's an integral part of my life -- my acceptance of Christ. It changed me," he told a reporter. "But I want people to hear this: That's not a reason to vote for me, and it wasn't a reason for people to vote for me for governor. .... It's just a part of my life, it's just part of the calculations that people are going to have to make about me."