With Jeb Bush announcing in December 2014 that he'll explore a run for president in 2016, his entry into the race will add an interesting dynamic. He hasn't held public office since 2006, but with his family legacy and his successful two-term tenure as Florida's governor, he could make life difficult for the other potential Republican primary candidates.
Though the American people know his father and his brother quite well, here are eight facts that you might not know about Jeb Bush:
1. Though he served two terms as the governor of Florida, Bush spent his formative years in Texas. He attended the University of Texas, earning a degree in Latin American affairs, and he spent time in the central Mexican city of Leon teaching English while on a three-month exchange program in high school. It was there that he met his future wife, Columba Garnica. He eventually moved to Florida in the early 1980s to become a real estate developer.
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2. The courtship between Bush and Garnica was an old-fashioned one. "For the first two weeks, he did not even hold my hand,"
she told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. Since they lived in different countries, they wrote letters to each other every day. Two years later, he proposed marriage. Said Garnica: "He said he wanted to start his adult life as my husband."
3. Bush spent the early part of his marriage living in Venezuela, but he returned in 1979 to help manage his father's presidential campaign in Florida. He worked full time on the campaign, and he did it for free. That was Jeb Bush's way of saying thanks to the man who paid his tuition at the University of Texas. But the then-27-year-old Bush was so broke at the time that,
as the St. Petersburg Times wrote in 1998, he had to use his American Express card to pay his MasterCard bill.
4. The dynamic between Jeb and George W. Bush is an interesting one. George W. Bush is six years older, and they didn't spend much time together as children because George W. was away in school.
In a 2003 Washington Post story, the reporter described how George W.—five inches shorter than his younger brother—called Jeb my "big little brother" during appearances. Jeb would retort by calling George W. "my older, smarter, and wiser brother." The Post also reported that Jeb "dutifully plays the goofy sidekick."
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5. Jeb Bush speaks Spanish fluently, and his ability to connect with the Latin American community — Republicans and Democrats — could be an important facet in a potential presidential run.
“Culturally, Jeb is even more Hispanic than many in the young generation of Hispanics in America today,” Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union,
told The Washington Post in 2013. “He’s totally bilingual and bicultural in every sense.”
6. Bush also takes Latin American cuisine seriously. When he was Florida's governor, he sometimes cooked the family meal on Sunday nights, and he was adept at making a spicy guacamole from scratch. "It wasn’t unusual to spot Bush grocery shopping for cilantro on a Sunday afternoon while he was governor," The Washington Post wrote.
7. In 2006, the Florida governor was privately approached by Patrick Rooney — brother of Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney — about possibly becoming the commissioner of the National Football League. "I met with Mr. Rooney and I said, 'I'm doing my job until I'm finished and then I'm going to consider other things,' "
Bush said at the time.
8. If Jeb Bush were elected president, he'd be the first brother of a former president also to gain that high office. Jeb Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, also would become the first former president to have two sons who were elected after him, breaking a tie with John Adams, whose son John Quincy Adams was also elected president.
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