When the 60-year-old Vice President went to the Old Timers baseball game at Mile High Stadium, he donned the Denver Bears uniform and slapped a single into right field. GBPLM/David Valdez
On the sunny morning of January 20, 1989, George H.W. Bush was sworn in as the forty-first President of the United States. As I watched him raise his right hand and repeat the oath, I felt a wave of immeasurable pride. GBPLM/Carol Powers
Playing horseshoes with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at Camp David in 1990. Dad’s strategy was to develop their friendship while encouraging Gorbachev to allow the Soviet Union to unwind peacefully. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev signed paperwork disbanding the Communist regime. GBPLM/David Valdez
Dad was a prolific writer of personal letters. Today there are thousands of people around the world who can reach into a desk drawer and produce a thank-you note from George Bush. GBPLM/David Valdez
I once asked my mother how she and my father have managed to stay happily married for almost seventy years. “Both of us have always been willing to go three-quarters of the way,” she said. GBPLM
President George H.W. Bush’s record includes a number of major domestic accomplishments. One of his proudest is the Americans with Disabilities Act. GBPLM/Joyce Naltchayan
Waiting with Laura for the First Lady to throw out the first pitch at a Texas Rangers game. Dad never had to worry about whether Mother could handle the pressure of the presidency while holding our family together. I was blessed that Laura gave me the same peace of mind. GBPLM/Carol Powers
Meeting with General Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Chief of Staff John Sununu, and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. “This will not stand,” Dad told the press, “this aggression against Kuwait.” Those were not hollow words. GBPLM/Susan Biddle
As a combat veteran, Dad understood the agony of war firsthand and felt a special connection to the troops as Commander-in-Chief. In 1990, Mother and Dad spent Thanksgiving Day with service men and women deployed to Saudi Arabia. GBPLM/Susan Biddle
NUMBER 41
AFTER SPENDING TWO DECADES in senior government posts and watching President Reagan in the White House for eight years, George Bush understood the job of the President. And he didn’t waste time getting started. The day after the election, he announced his nomination of James A. Baker to be Secretary of State. Soon after, he named John Sununu to be White House Chief of Staff. He followed up by naming his National Security Adviser: Brent Scowcroft, a savvy former Air Force general who had also served as National Security Adviser to President Ford. (Scowcroft remains the only person to hold that critical job for more than one President.)
Dad used his transition as an opportunity to continue outlining his vision for the country. He addressed issues ranging from the economy to the Cold War with substance and command. His performance impressed journalists who had underestimated him during the vice presidency. As one TV anchor put it, it was “as if Clark Kent became Superman.”
The day after the election, Mother and Dad invited our family to a church service at St. Martin’s Episcopal in Houston. They asked me to lead the congregation in prayer. “Please guide us and guard us on our journeys—particularly watch over Dad and Mother,” I said. “We pray that our lives be beacons to you by remembering the words of David: ‘May that which I speak and that which I have in my heart be acceptable to thee, oh Lord.’ ” As I walked back to the pew, the exhausted and humble President-elect continued to pray.
That moment reflected my father’s quiet faith. He was a religious man, but he was not comfortable espousing his faith in the public square. I was less restrained. At a Republican presidential debate in late 1999, the moderator asked the candidates which philosopher we most identified with. I said, “Christ, because he changed my heart.” It was not a scripted answer; I just blurted out the truth. Dad called shortly after the debate, as he often did. “Good job, son,” he said. We discussed some of the key moments. Then he said, “I don’t think that answer on Jesus will hurt you too much.” It was telling that his first instinct was to think that the comment would hurt me. The reaction reflected his reluctance to do anything that might be seen as imposing religion on others. In hindsight, the moment might have been Dad’s way of reminding me of one of my favorite Bible verses for politicians (from the Book of Matthew): “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”
Mother and Dad generously invited Laura, our girls, and me to fly to Washington with them later that day. To my horror, I learned that Barbara and Jenna had stopped up the toilets on Air Force Two by stuffing them full of toilet paper. To this day, Mother needles the girls about whether they did it on purpose. Fortunately, no one seemed to mind. Everyone was still riding high on Dad’s victory.
Our family celebrated Christmas that year at the Vice President’s residence, the last one that we spent at that wonderful house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory. Dad was just weeks away from becoming President, yet he showed no signs of stress. The only drama that I remember surrounded a horseshoe match pitting Dad and me against a Naval aide and the Sports Illustrated writer George Plimpton. Plimpton jumped out to an early lead, but Dad threw a ringer to complete a comeback win. “Nerts!” Plimpton exclaimed. He went on to write a fine article about the experience that captured Dad’s energy, humor, and enthusiasm for life. It is one of my favorite profiles of George Bush.
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ON THE SUNNY morning of January 20, 1989, our family took our places on the inaugural platform. Billy Graham delivered the invocation, and Alvy Powell of the U.S. Army Chorus sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A few minutes after noon, Dad walked to the podium for the swearing-in. Mother held the Bible that George Washington had used to take the oath of office two hundred years earlier in 1789. Chief Justice William Rehnquist asked Dad to raise his right hand and repeat the oath. As I watched my father, I felt a wave of immeasurable pride, along with a touch of apprehension about what might lie ahead.
Perhaps the most excited relative on the platform that day was eighty-seven-year-old Dorothy Walker Bush. My grandmother’s health was so fragile that she had to fly to Washington on a plane staffed by health professionals. Nothing would stop her from witnessing this moment. Her only regret was that my grandfather, who would have been so proud of his son, could not be there to share in the joy. Dad asked her about the many inaugurations she had attended over the past fifty years. “Of course this is the best,” she said, “because I’m sitting here holding the hand of my son, the President of the United States.” That was about as close to bragging as Dorothy Walker Bush ever got.
The country had come a long way since Ronald Reagan stood at the inaugural platform eight years earlier. In 1981, President Reagan had begun his address by describing the “longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history.” Thanks in large part to the Reagan administration’s policies, Dad took office with the economy growing at 3.8 percent and unemployment at 5.3 percent. Nevertheless, the stock market had crashed in October 1987, and some industries were struggling. On the world stage, President Reagan and Gorbachev had taken steps to ease the tension of the Cold War. They had signed the INF Treaty, and the Soviet Union was withdrawing from Afghanistan. Yet the Soviets still dominated Eastern Europe, still meddled in Latin America, and still posed an existential threat because of their nuclear arsenal. And other international problems loomed, from the terrorists who had bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a month earlier to instability in the Middle East.
As he began the biggest challenge of his career, George Bush’s first action was to express gratitude. He thanked President Reagan for his service to the country. Then he led the nation in prayer: “Heavenly Father, we bow our heads and thank You for Your love.” He concluded, “There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people. Help us remember, Lord. Amen.”
“I come before y
ou and assume the Presidency at a moment rich with promise,” he continued. “We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better.” He expressed his optimism about the future: “For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn. For in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.”
Then he turned to his goals at home. “My friends,” he said, “we are not the sum of our possessions. They are not the measure of our lives. In our hearts we know what matters. We cannot hope only to leave our children a bigger car, a bigger bank account. We must hope to give them a sense of what it means to be a loyal friend, a loving parent, a citizen who leaves his home, his neighborhood and town better than he found it.” He continued, uniting his foreign and domestic goals, “America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle,” he said. “We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.”
After the speech, Mother and Dad escorted the Reagans to their final departure aboard the presidential helicopter. Then they attended a luncheon on Capitol Hill and made their way down the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue. That night they attended twelve inaugural balls before returning, dead tired, to the White House. Fortunately, the residence is spacious enough that they did not hear the joyous shrieks of their ten grandchildren, all of whom they had invited to spend the night. The next morning, Dad was up early, ready to get to work as the forty-first President of the United States.
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GEORGE BUSH TOOK naturally to the presidency, especially the foreign policy aspects of the job. His first major diplomatic decision was to attend the funeral of Japanese Emperor Hirohito. His choice drew fire from some of his fellow World War II veterans, who remembered the atrocities committed under Hirohito. My father understood their reaction; after all, he had fought the same enemy. But Dad believed that a nation, like a person, can change. And Japan had changed in a fundamental way. After the war, Hirohito had helped oversee Japan’s transition to democracy. By 1989, Japan was one of America’s closest allies, and Dad wanted to honor the relationship between the two democracies. Japan’s leaders were grateful for his gesture of respect. And during my presidency a dozen years later, one of my closest friends on the world stage was Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
Unfortunately for Dad, most of the media attention during his Japan trip had little to do with foreign policy. Reporters had their eyes on the United States Senate, where John Tower, the nominee for Defense Secretary, was locked in a tough confirmation battle. Tower had made some enemies on the other side of the aisle, and they came out during the hearings. The raucous debates were full of innuendo about Tower’s personal life. George Bush was rightly upset that his friend was being treated so unfairly, and he tried to stand up for his nominee. In spite of Dad’s strong defense of Tower, however, the Senate voted down a Cabinet nomination for the first time in thirty years. In a decision that would affect us both for years to come, the House Minority Whip, a Congressman from Wyoming, was nominated to take Tower’s place. The Senate promptly confirmed Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.
The next stop on Dad’s Asia trip was China. As one of the nation’s most experienced and knowledgeable China experts, he knew all the relevant players in Beijing. My parents received a warm welcome from Chairman Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng, who gave them a set of bicycles—a reminder of their favorite activity during their time in the Liaison Office fifteen years earlier. On a Sunday morning, my parents attended services at the church where they used to worship and where my sister Doro had been baptized in 1975. As Dad later reflected, the church service reminded them of how much they had enjoyed their time in China—or as he called it, their “home away from home.”
Not all aspects of the China visit went so smoothly. A barbecue that my parents hosted for Chinese officials produced an unexpected crisis. Ambassador Winston Lord invited a long list of guests from Chinese society, including the human rights activist Fang Lizhi. Dad later learned that Chinese security had prevented Fang from attending the event. The next day, the incident dominated the headlines. As with the Tower nomination, the news of the day overpowered the intended message of the visits.
The Fang Lizhi episode was a preview of troubles to come in China. A few months later, Chinese democratic activists decided to demonstrate for their freedom in Tiananmen Square. The protests drew worldwide attention in part because they coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to China. The Chinese government declared martial law and deployed tanks to crush the demonstrations. The world watched the drama unfold in real time. A photo of a young Chinese man standing alone in front of four oncoming tanks became the iconic image of the impending loss of innocent life.
The Tiananmen incident put the President in a delicate position. On one hand, he supported democratic reform in China. On the other hand, he saw the strategic importance of maintaining a close diplomatic and economic relationship with an emerging power. He believed, as I do, that economic progress in China will lead to political progress. And he knew from his tenure in Beijing that the Chinese government would be highly sensitive to any American action that it considered meddling in its internal affairs.
Dad struck a careful balance in response to Tiananmen. He denounced the Chinese government’s use of force and imposed limited economic sanctions. At the same time, he rejected congressional calls to revoke the trade preferences that had opened up new flows of commerce and capital. The Chinese refused to respond to official diplomatic overtures. So Dad drew on his personal connections and wrote a private letter to Deng Xiaoping. “I write in a spirit of genuine friendship,” he began, “this letter coming as I’m sure you know from one who believes with a passion that good relations between the United States and China are in the fundamental interests of both countries.” He went on to propose sending a personal emissary to Beijing to discuss ways to lower tensions.
Within twenty-four hours, Deng had accepted Dad’s offer to send an emissary. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger were dispatched to Beijing, where they met with senior Chinese officials. Dad followed up with another letter to Deng, whom he addressed as his “dear friend.” He wrote, “We can both do more for world peace and for the welfare of our own people if we can get our relationship back on track…. If there is to be a period of darkness, so be it; but let us try to light some candles.”
No one knew about Scowcroft and Eagleburger’s trip until they returned to China several months later and were filmed clinking glasses with Chinese leaders. The image hurt Dad in some circles, and Bill Clinton criticized him for being soft on China during the 1992 campaign. In the long run, however, George Bush’s handling of the crisis proved deft. By guiding America’s relationship with China through a very challenging period, he helped pave the way for two decades of economic growth that has benefited both our nations. China’s growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in China and created an enormous new market for American goods and services, while also increasing the prospect of political reform in China. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, President Hu Jintao hosted a lunch in honor of a man who had been highly respected in China for more than thirty years, George H.W. Bush.
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RELATIONS WITH CHINA posed one test during the first year of Dad’s presidency. The Soviet Union posed another. From the beginning, Dad was hopeful about his counterpart in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev. As Vice President in 1985, Dad had been the first senior American official to meet the new Soviet leader. Dad admired Gorbachev’s fresh approach, openness to the West, and commitment to reform the Soviet system—what Gorbachev called perestroika. When he took office, Dad had his national security team conduct a thorough review of American policy toward the Soviet Union. In a speech outlining his strategy in May 1989, he announced that the
United States would move beyond “containment”—beyond the negative implications of mutually assured destruction—and toward a more cooperative relationship with a changing Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s commitment to change was tested by dramatic events in Eastern Europe. In Poland, the Solidarity movement, led by Lech Wałesa—and inspired by Pope John Paul II, the first-ever Polish pope—organized strikes in the shipyards of Gdansk. In Hungary, large protests honored a democratic leader, Imre Nagy, who had been martyred after Hungary’s brief revolution in 1956. In Czechoslovakia, playwright Václav Havel organized artists and other citizens to reject communism in what would later be called the Velvet Revolution. And in East Germany, anticommunist groups held weekly prayer sessions in big-city cathedrals.
As the remarkable events of 1989 unfolded, the question was whether Gorbachev would violently suppress the freedom movements, as the Soviet Union had done in Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968—and as China had just done in Tiananmen Square. Dad recognized that his response to the revolutions could affect the Soviet reaction. In July 1989, he traveled to Hungary and Poland, where he spoke to massive crowds. He avoided any statements that might provoke the hard-liners in those countries or in the Soviet Union. And he immediately reached out to Gorbachev to reinforce his desire for a close relationship. “Dear Mr. Chairman,” he scribbled aboard Air Force One. “I am writing this letter to you on my way back from Europe to the United States. Let me get quickly to the point of this letter,” he continued. “I would like very much to sit down soon and talk to you.”
41: A Portrait of My Father Page 17