WWW- The 41st and 43rd Presidents of the United States nearly came to blows over a drunken-driving debacle, but Harvard Business School saved the day, according to a book due out in February.

Isn’t that always the way it ends?

In his exposé “The Raising of a President,” Doug Wead reports a Christmastime incident in 1972 when George W. Bush came back to his parents’ house drunk. Junior had plowed “into a neighbor’s trash can and dragged it noisily through the street.”

Poppy Bush was still awake when his son stumbled through the door and ready for a confrontation, Wead says.

Dubya was belligerent when he met his dad in the study.

“I hear you’re looking for me,” the book quotes the current President as saying. “You want to go mano a mano right here?”

As they stood face to face, the always promising but underrated Bush son Jeb came rushing in and stopped the confrontation – with the announcement that his brother had just been accepted into Harvard’s MBA program.

His father let his guard down, the book says, but not before W could snap, “I’m not going. I just did it to show you that I could.”

Must’ve been the liquor talking. George W. Bush did go to Harvard, where he earned an MBA.