In the fall of 1992, many in the campaign were banking on the presidential debates to change the dynamics of the race. That was not a good sign. Presidential debates are easy to lose but hard to win. I thought the first debate, held in St. Louis, was essentially a draw. Ross Perot got off the best line of the night when he ended an answer on his deficit reduction plan by saying, “If there’s a fairer way, I’m all ears.” (Perot’s ears were a prominent feature.)
The second debate, in Richmond, was the first presidential debate to adopt a town hall format. Most of the questions came from members of the live studio audience. Instead of standing behind podiums, the candidates had chairs and were encouraged to roam the stage. Once again, I did not attend the debate. But on TV, it seemed that Dad was uncomfortable in the new format. He struggled with an awkwardly worded question about how the national debt had affected him personally. He stayed relatively anchored to his chair as he gave a defensive answer. Clinton, by contrast, sauntered across the stage, looked the questioner in the eye, and spelled out his economic message. The most memorable moment of the night came when Perot was giving a long-winded answer and the cameras caught Dad checking his watch. The image that came across to most voters was one of boredom. (Al Gore did not learn a lesson from Dad’s mistake, because he “lost” a debate in 2000 as a result of his loud sighing during my answers. Of course, I didn’t learn the lesson either, since I “lost” a 2004 debate because I was grimacing during John Kerry’s answers. It is a sign of the shallowness of the presidential debate process that their most memorable moments have centered not on issues but on gestures or quips.)
By the third debate, the story line was set. Clinton was the front-runner, Perot remained a curiosity, and George Bush was in serious trouble. His diary entries show that he had started to contemplate defeat by mid-October. He wrote, “If we should lose, there’s great happiness over the horizon—but it will be a very painful process—not for losing but letting people down.” Despite his doubts, George Bush was not a quitter. He would finish strong. In the last month of the campaign, he finally got some good economic news. The third-quarter estimates showed that the economy had grown by 2.7 percent, the strongest quarter in two years. The polls started to narrow. Dad was making progress head-to-head against Clinton, and Perot supporters were beginning to have second thoughts. With a week to go, many polls were close to the margin of error. The momentum was on Dad’s side.
Then came one final blow. On the Friday before the election, Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh announced an indictment against Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, for making false statements to Congress related to the Iran-Contra investigation. On the day the story broke, Dad was scheduled to appear on Larry King’s talk show. Instead of focusing solely on the positive economic news, Dad had to rehash Iran-Contra. And then there were the call-ins. “We have a call from Little Rock,” Larry King announced, “from George Stephanopoulos.” If there was any doubt about the media’s preferences in the 1992 campaign, it was resolved when Larry King’s producers aired a call-in question from Bill Clinton’s communications director. A polite Stephanopoulos proceeded to hammer Dad about Iran-Contra. That was a fitting capstone to the campaign. From Buchanan to Perot to Hurricane Andrew to Perot (again) and now to Iran-Contra, Dad had faced one distraction after the next. He might have been able to overcome any one of those in isolation. But together they were like that perfect storm that battered Walker’s Point on Halloween 1991.
—
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1992, was the last day of the last campaign of George Bush’s public career. I accompanied him on Air Force One as he barnstormed from one battleground state to the next. I tried to stay upbeat, but I had a sinking feeling that this good man would go down in defeat. Dad’s favorite country music group, the Oak Ridge Boys, joined him on the plane. On the descent into one of our last stops, Dad and the campaign team gathered to hear the Oaks, as Dad called them, sing “Amazing Grace.” By the end of the song, all of us were wiping our tears. I remember thinking that the song—a mainstay at funerals—was a way to help us get our hearts ready for bad news.
On Election Day, George Bush was physically spent. He seemed relieved that the campaign was over. And, characteristically, he was optimistic about his prospects. After voting in Houston, he and Mother camped out at the Houstonian Hotel, where our extended family had gathered. When campaign manager Bob Teeter called me with the first round of exit polls, I knew that it was going to be a tough night. When he called back with the second round, I knew that it was over. I went to Mother and Dad’s hotel suite. They were the only two in the room.
“How’s it going, son?” he asked cheerfully.
“Not so good,” I said gently. “The exit polls are in, and it looks like you’re going to lose.”
He became very quiet. It seemed like he was steeling himself for the disappointment ahead. He had done his best. He had given it his all. But this was not meant to be. After his decades of public service, eight years as Vice President, and four years as President, the American people had rejected George Bush. Of all the elections he had lost, there was no question that this one hurt the most.
As always, Dad was gracious. He called Clinton shortly after the polls closed on the West Coast, conceded defeat, and gave a warm speech thanking his supporters and congratulating the President-elect. When the tally was complete, Bill Clinton won 43 percent of the vote. Dad took almost 38 percent, while Ross Perot claimed 19 percent. In all, nearly twenty million people had voted for Perot. There is no way to know how those twenty million people would have voted in a two-man race. I believed then, and I still believe today, that if Ross Perot had not been on the ballot, George Bush would have won the 1992 election. I know that Dad felt the same way. He is not a man to hold grudges. Yet when asked about Perot in a documentary aired in 2012, Dad said, “I think he cost me the election and I don’t like him.” (Interestingly, despite the 1992 campaign, I went on to become good friends with Ross Perot’s son, Ross Jr., and with Bill Clinton.)
Of course, Perot alone was not to blame. After twelve years of George Bush as President and Vice President, the American people were ready for a change. The baby boom generation increasingly dominated the electorate, and Bill Clinton epitomized the fresh face that many voters sought. And then there was the economy. Bill Clinton was wrong when he said that George Bush didn’t get it or didn’t care. Dad understood the economic anxiety facing the country. He had taken action to address it. And in 1993, the Commerce Department revised its estimates for the prior year. It turned out that the economy grew in all four quarters of 1992, including a growth rate of 5.7 percent in the pivotal final quarter, when the election was held. That growth laid the foundation for the economic boom of the 1990s, which was largely credited to Bill Clinton. In one of the ironies of history, Bill Clinton passed on to me an economy that appeared strong but was actually heading into recession. The lesson was that timing is an important part of politics, and by the time the facts about the economy came in, time had run out for George H.W. Bush.
—
JUST OVER TWO weeks after his defeat, Dad flew to Greenwich, Connecticut. He was still down about the election, and now he faced more bad news. His beloved mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had entered her final hours. For almost all of her ninety-one years, my grandmother had been an active, vigorous, seemingly ageless woman. She swam and played golf well into her eighties. She never lost her competitive edge, her abiding faith, or her capacity to love. Dad and my sister Dorothy, my grandmother’s namesake, sat quietly by her bedside while she slept. At one point his mother asked him to read to her from her Bible. As he opened the well-worn book, a bundle of papers tumbled out. They were letters that he had written her more than fifty years earlier. She had saved them all that time in her Bible, and every day she had prayed for her son. He prayed with her for the last time, said his good-bye, and flew back to the White House. A few hours later, she died. That night he wrote in his diary,
“Mum, I hope you know how much we all love you and care. Tonight she is at rest in God’s loving arms and with Dad.”
Amid his grief and disappointment, George Bush was determined to make the most of his final days in office. Characteristically, he wanted to use his power to help others. When the Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, asked the United States to help address a starvation crisis in Somalia, Dad agreed. He sent U.S. Marines to the war-torn East African nation to help secure infrastructure and allow food shipments to enter the country. In early January, Dad traveled to Somalia to visit the service members carrying out the mission. He was a devoted Commander-in-Chief, and he wanted to use his last trip abroad as President to thank the troops.
Dad was not the only one disappointed by his defeat. In the weeks after the election, members of the White House staff were despondent. In hopes of lifting their spirits, he decided to invite a surprise guest. Throughout his presidency, he had been portrayed on Saturday Night Live by the comedian Dana Carvey, who had honed an impression of Dad that exaggerated his speech patterns, hand gestures, and reputation for “prudence.” To the comedian’s astonishment, Dad called him a few weeks after the election and invited him and his wife, Paula, to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom and then appear at a White House event. The staff was told to gather for an important message from the President. As “Hail to the Chief” played, Dana Carvey walked into the East Room, took the podium, and regaled the audience with his trademark routine. Among other jokes, he created a scene of Dad informing the Secret Service that he planned to go jogging in the nude. The room roared with laughter. The idea was vintage George Bush: He was thinking of others, laughing at himself, and bringing joy to people who were hurting.
I too was hurting. It stung to see a good man rejected by the voters. As a way to move past the election, I decided to run the Houston marathon the next January. During the eighteen-mile training runs, I was able to begin dealing with the pain of defeat. I also found a sense of liberation after Dad left the White House. I no longer had Secret Service protection, and I was able to drive my Lincoln Town Car on the streets of Dallas for the first time in four years. I did so for two years, until I was elected Governor. I haven’t driven a car on any street since 1995.
—
MOTHER AND DAD hosted the whole family for Christmas at Camp David in 1992. It was a bittersweet trip. We enjoyed the beautiful setting, and we all assumed that this would be the last time that we stayed at Camp David. Dad did his best to stay upbeat and never complained. In a letter to his brother, he recalled the story of a runner in the Olympics who limped across the finish line far behind the winners. He remembered the runner saying, “My country didn’t send me all this way to start the race. They sent me here to finish it.” Dad felt the same way. “I didn’t finish the course,” he wrote, “and I will always regret that.”
We all reminded him that he had a lot to be proud of. He had accomplished more in one term than many Presidents had in two. History would remember him as the liberator of Kuwait and the President who oversaw the peaceful end of the Cold War. In some ways, he was like Winston Churchill, who had been tossed out of office in 1945 just months after prevailing in World War II. The British voters felt that Churchill had completed his mission and that they wanted someone else for the next phase. Ultimately, that’s what happened to George Bush in 1992. In Britain, the people regretted their decision and returned Churchill to office. That would not be the case for Dad. Yet his defeat in 1992 opened up new possibilities for others, including Jeb and me. And while it seemed hard to believe at the time, that Christmas at Camp David would not be the Bush family’s last.
THE AFTERLIFE
Now, I no longer pursue happiness…I have found happiness. I no longer pursue it, for it is mine.
George H.W. Bush, August 2001
ON JANUARY 21, 1993, George H.W. Bush woke up at a rental house in Houston. For the first time in twelve years, he had no morning intelligence briefing and no packed schedule to review. Everyone who has ever had the privilege of living in the White House confronts an adjustment after leaving—a transition to what Laura once called “the afterlife.”
The transition was especially tough on Dad because his departure was premature. The sting of defeat lingered long past Bill Clinton’s inauguration. For the most part, Dad did not let his disappointment show. He had been raised to lose with grace, and he detested self-pity. When Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived at the White House on Inauguration Day, Mother and Dad received them with genuine kindness and warmth. Years later, I asked him how he found the strength to conduct himself that way. “I had no choice,” he said. But the truth of the matter is that he did have a choice. He could have chosen to be bitter or resentful. Instead, as he wrote in a letter that he left for President Clinton on the Oval Office desk, he was rooting hard for his successor.
The adjustment to private life did not come naturally to Dad. My father was sixty-eight years old, with the energy of a man half that age. It seemed that his earlier health issues had abated. He had spent his entire life pushing himself from one mission to the next. For the past four years, he had held the most mentally stimulating, challenging, and exhilarating job in the world. For the past thirty years, he’d poured all his energy into different pursuits. Then, all of a sudden, he had nothing to do. As I would later put it, leaving the presidency feels like going from a hundred miles per hour to about five.
In Houston, Dad would arrive at his new office at seven a.m. and spend most of the day shuffling through mail. He made phone calls to raise money for his presidential library. He hit the paid speaking circuit, a pursuit that he jokingly called “white-collar crime.”
One benefit of involuntary retirement was that Mother and Dad got to take some leisurely trips. Shortly after he left office, they went on a commercial cruise on one of the Love Boat ships. Every time they left their cabin they were mobbed by starstruck shipmates. Dad was particularly amused when he walked out of the sauna naked one day and a man blurted out, “Do you mind if I take a photo?” On the positive side, it was nice to know that he still had a fan base. As a follow-up to that trip a few years later, Dad planned a surprise fiftieth-wedding-anniversary party for Mother at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. As Mother said, “Your father has a way of planning events without seeking my approval.”
Dad also spent some time writing. He decided to coauthor a book about his foreign policy with Brent Scowcroft. The decision to write a joint book was revealing. No President had ever split his byline with an aide. But Dad wanted to share credit with his friend. He also wanted to avoid a memoir that was focused on himself. I suspect that the disappointment about his defeat played a role as well. At that point, he may not have been able to summon up the energy to write a book that had an unhappy political ending. He never did write a presidential memoir.
Although the speeches and writing filled George Bush’s time and bank account, they did little to fill the void of intensity and excitement left by his departure from the presidency. And they didn’t heal the pain left by his defeat. To make matters worse, Dad’s beloved dog Ranger died a few months after he returned home to Houston. Shortly thereafter, Dad and James Baker visited President François Mitterrand in Paris. At the beginning of his presidency, relations between French and American leaders had been frosty. That started to change when Dad invited the French President to Kennebunkport. The personal diplomacy paid off, and the two leaders became close friends. At the dinner in France in 1993, Mitterrand offered a toast to Dad and to their warm relations. When George Bush stood up to return the toast, tears flowed. The moment had reminded him how much he loved the presidency. I think the outpouring of emotion that day—and on other occasions soon after he left the White House—reflected a sense of despondency. I felt a letdown when I left office, and I am sure that other Presidents have as well. For Dad, the pain of rejection made the feeling worse.
For her part, Mother seemed to handle the challenge more smooth
ly—and with her usual bluntness. Shortly after the election, she announced to the family, “Well, now that’s behind us. It’s time to move on.” She did. She stayed busy planning the construction of their new house in Houston. She started work on a memoir, which eventually became a bestseller. And she bought a Mercury Sable station wagon and drove herself for the first time since the late 1970s. As Dad joked, the most dangerous place in America was on the roads in their neighborhood.
Mother even did some cooking. I was the recipient of one of her first meals the night before the Houston marathon, which I ran four days after my parents returned from Washington. To carbo-load for the race, I asked Mother to make pasta. She generously agreed. She boiled the water successfully. In went the noodles. Then she tried to put a lid on the boiling pot, which sent the water and spaghetti spraying out. As Dad observed, the dish was pretty good, as long as you like your pasta rare. The next day, my parents came to cheer me on during the marathon. As I ran past them, Dad yelled out, “That’s my boy!” Mother tried a different form of encouragement. “Keep moving, George,” she shouted. “There are some fat people ahead of you.”
—
IN THE SUMMER of 1993, I called my parents with some news: “I’m going to run for Governor of Texas.”
Mother’s response was swift. “You can’t win against such a popular opponent,” she blurted.
Dad was quiet. I was not surprised that Dad did not have much to say. Throughout my life, he never tried to steer me in one direction or another. His approach to parenting was to instill values, set an example, and support us in whatever we chose to do.
In spite of his silence on the matter, George Bush had a big influence on my decision to run for Governor. Through his words and his life, he had taught all of his children the value of public service. By helping him over the years, I had learned a lot about campaigns. And by watching his presidency, I had learned that good policy is good politics, not the other way around. I had developed strong convictions about policy changes needed in Texas, especially in the areas of education, tort reform, welfare, and juvenile justice. The only question was whether the timing was right.
41: A Portrait of My Father Page 22