The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  On February 26, 1991, coalition forces entered Kuwait City and the al-Sabahs, Kuwait’s ruling family, promised political reforms. But, to date, they have not been implemented. The monarch with forty wives would not return to his country until March 15, 1991, when he was assured of safety. Upon his arrival, he knelt, his white kaffiyeh flopping on the tarmac, and kissed the ground that had been liberated by 293 U.S. deaths, 100,000 Iraqi deaths, and 300,000 Iraqi wounded.

  And so President Bush emerged victorious from the tenth major war America had ever waged. Although it was not a noble war, and proved to be far less pure and antiseptic than presented, Desert Storm reaffirmed U.S. leadership and demonstrated U.S. technology, which fostered flag-waving patriotism across the country. There were ticker-tape parades in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York City, where more than 4 million spectators poured out to cheer General Norman Schwarzkopf and the troops who fought in the Persian Gulf. Bush’s approval ratings soared to 88 percent, higher than any President ever to hold the office. Polls also showed that a majority of Americans felt frustrated that the coalition had not captured Baghdad and destroyed Saddam and the power structure that supported him. General Schwarzkopf told a TV interviewer that the President did not heed his advice to crush the Iraqi army in “a battle of annihilation.” The general later apologized for his “poor choice of words.” Assuming that Saddam would be toppled by his own military, the President maintained he had acted in accordance with the mission of a limited war: to have gone further would have destroyed America’s standing among its allies. As commander in chief, he was saluted as a hero. Yale presented him with an honorary degree, and, despite facing a barrage of student protesters, George Herbert Walker Bush felt for the first time in his life that he could stand alongside his father as “big, strong, and highly respected.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In the Rose Garden on March 29, 1991, it was hard to tell which was the President riding the highest polls in history and which was the President smarting under the scandal of Iran-contra. The current President was known to hate standing in his predecessor’s shadow. Yet he reflexively surrendered the spotlight, not so much as a gracious host deferring to a distinguished guest, but more like a stand-in bowing to the star.

  Still looking robust at the age of eighty, Ronald Reagan had come to Washington to accept an honorary degree from George Washington University. The Doctorate of Public Service was presented to him on the tenth anniversary of the assassination attempt that almost took his life. He had returned to the nation’s capital as much to be honored as to honor the medical team that had saved him. At the time of the shooting only his wife and his doctors knew how close to death he had come.

  “It was kind of an unspoken agreement that none of us would let the public know how serious it was, how close we came to losing him,” said Nancy Reagan, who was honored with a permanent plaque installed in the hospital’s emergency room that recognized “her courage, strength and dignity at the side of her gravely wounded husband.” The emergency room was renamed the Ronald Reagan Institute for Emergency Medicine.

  After accepting his honorary degree, President Reagan delivered a speech that brought the audience of 1,450 to their feet:

  I want to tell all of you here today something that I’m not sure you know. You do know that I’m a member of the NRA. And my position on the right to bear arms is well known. But I want you to know something else, and I’m going to say it in clear, unmistakable language. I support the Brady bill and I urge the Congress to enact it without delay.

  It’s just plain common sense that there be a waiting period [seven days] to allow local law enforcement officials to conduct background checks on those who wish to buy a handgun.

  The applause was deafening. The former President had just endorsed a bill named in honor of his press secretary James Brady, who was forever disabled by the handgun aimed at the President and his party in 1981. It was a bill that the current President, George H.W. Bush, opposed.

  The Bushes did not attend the GWU ceremony only a few blocks away, but had invited the Reagans to the White House after the convocation. President Reagan accepted; Mrs. Reagan declined. She was not about to subject herself to any further abuse from “the Silver Fox.” Citing a prior commitment, Nancy attended a tea in her honor to which Barbara Bush pointedly was not invited.

  The White House press corps gathered to witness the Rose Garden reunion of the two presidents. When they shouted “Mr. President,” George Bush, ever the smiling host, deferred to Ronald Reagan like an acolyte to his more accomplished mentor. Even with two hearing aids, the former President could not understand the first question; as much as the query galled Bush, he repeated it for Reagan.

  “On gun control,” Bush said, “the Brady Bill.”

  “I don’t think it would be proper for me or any other ex-president to stand and tell an acting president what he should or shouldn’t do,” Reagan said. But then he added: “I happen to believe in the Brady Bill because we have the same thing in California right now.”

  Another reporter asked if he was pressuring Mr. Bush to change his stand and endorse the bill.

  “I don’t put pressure on anybody,” said Reagan.

  He was asked why he had opposed all gun-control measures while he was President.

  He shook his head. “I was against a lot of the ridiculous things that were proposed with regard to gun control.”

  “Do you think you’ll persuade President Bush to change his position?”

  “I’m trying to,” said the former President.

  George Bush quickly ushered his predecessor toward the Oval Office. “I’m going to discuss all this and other weighty subjects with President Reagan right now,” he said.

  The former President visited the White House telephone operators fabled for their ability to reach anyone in the world, and he was taken to the main house, where the residence staff had gathered in the Diplomatic Reception Room. He was applauded every step of the way.

  “Do you miss the White House, Mr. President?”

  “We have a standard answer,” said Reagan, “and we mean it from the heart. We miss the people.”

  The Bushes walked the former President to the Colonnade when he was leaving. As they said good-bye, Barbara Bush waved. In a voice loud enough for reporters to hear, she said, “Give Nancy my love.”

  A few days later the current President confided to a congressman that he wanted to see the former President go down in history as “the man who preceded George Bush.”

  Many years later, a Bush aide recalled that presidential reunion and shook his head. “It was Nashua, New Hampshire, all over again—only ten times worse,” he said, remembering the night in 1981 when Reagan had grabbed the microphone and propelled himself to the presidency, leaving George Bush in the dust.

  Anyone else but Ronald Reagan might have been publicly thumped for rudeness. After all, his public support for the Brady Bill had put the current President on the defensive. And Bush scrambled to let it be known that he might be willing to accept a waiting period for handgun purchases if Congress accepted his anticrime legislation. He hoped to glom on to the popularity of the Brady Bill to get a crime bill passed that would get him reelected.

  “We are going to win on the three K’s,” said White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. “Kuwait, quotas, and crime.”

  The gun lobby had been whip-lashed for years trying to follow the President’s flip-flops. As a Texas congressman, Bush voted for a bill that included a limitation on handguns. Yet he opposed licensing and registering his personal firearms as a resident of the District of Columbia. When he ran for President in 1988, he plunked down five hundred dollars to become a “lifetime member” of the National Rifle Association. He then opposed a ban on imports of semiautomatic weapons, for which he received the NRA’s endorsement—and their $6 million expenditure for him in the general election. Four weeks into his presidency he changed his position. After five children were mowed dow
n by an assault rifle in a California school yard, he announced that he supported a ban on the importation of semiautomatic weapons. A few weeks later he backed down and said he supported a ban only on imported guns with more than ten bullets in their ammunition clips.

  After President Reagan announced his support for the Brady Bill, President Bush seemed to waffle on his opposition, which quickened the hearts of gun-control advocates. In the end, their hopes were dashed. He refused to sign the Brady Bill by itself, despite its overwhelming support in both houses of Congress. He said he would sign it only if it were attached to a crime bill of his liking.

  “He had no intention of either signing or vetoing any bill with the Brady measure in it,” said Mollie Dickenson, author of Thumbs Up: The Life and Courageous Comeback of White House Press Secretary Jim Brady. “Under the Bush administration murders increased more than 25 percent from 8,915 in 1988 to 12,090 in 1991 . . . In defeating the Brady bill . . . Bush . . . probably sold out his principles and contributed to the deaths of innocent people.”

  The President had held out on the Brady Bill to appease the NRA, but by then he had alienated the powerful gun lobby as well as its opponents. In 1992, all fled from him. The NRA withheld its endorsement, which so angered Bush that he placed a call from Air Force One to Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president, to demand the NRA’s support. But it was to no avail. The Bradys left the Republican Party and endorsed Bill Clinton, who promised to sign the Brady Bill, which he did in 1993.

  George Bush exacted his revenge in May 1995, when he read about an NRA fund-raising letter from LaPierre that described federal agents as “jack-booted thugs” who wore “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” to “attack law abiding citizens.” Ripping up his NRA membership card, the former President wrote a letter of resignation, which his office made public. He said he was mourning the Oklahoma City death of a Secret Service agent who had protected the Bush family for years, and he accused the NRA of slandering dedicated officials “who are out there day and night laying their lives on the line for all of us.”

  Bush’s act of principle received national publicity but not national respect. Gun-control advocates were unhappy that he had not resigned from the NRA when he could have made a difference, and the gun lobby dismissed his resignation as an act of pique, nothing more than petty payback. “George Bush has been feuding with the NRA since 1992, when we decided we couldn’t back him,” said NRA vice president Neal Knox. “He’s been biding his time since then, waiting for the right time to kick us in the shins.”

  The gun issue illustrated the domestic part of the Bush presidency, which was careening like a sailboat in distress, tacking from one side to the other in a stormy sea with an unhinged mainsail flapping dangerously and an inexperienced crew trying to bail before they capsized. When the President’s post–Gulf War poll numbers fell, his Triple K strategy for reelection was endangered. Then his political spark plug died.

  Lee Atwater’s death had been expected for many months. Doctors had diagnosed a malignant brain tumor. In 1990, before he collapsed, the chairman of the Republican National Committee had traveled to Arkansas to lay the groundwork for a political assault against Governor Bill Clinton, whom he saw as the President’s most dangerous potential opponent for 1992. With the party apparatus at his disposal, Atwater was gearing up for his biggest mudslinger. Eighteen months later he was dead. His funeral was held on April Fools’ Day in Columbia, South Carolina, where the state’s senior senator, Strom Thurmond, delivered the eulogy for the forty-year-old bad boy of Republican politics.

  “He was loved and admired by his friends and respected and feared by his opponents,” said the senator, who introduced the Vice President and many members of the Bush cabinet. “This is the largest number of Cabinet members who’ve attended a funeral that I am aware of. Why? Because they hold Lee in such high esteem.”

  Conspicuously missing were the President and the First Lady. The Bushes would not interrupt their vacation to go to the funeral. They were ensconced on Islamorada, a resort in the upper Keys of Florida, where the President went every year to bonefish. On this trip he was accompanied by Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates, and Deputy Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

  Not attending the funeral of the man whom many credited with getting him elected President was so uncharacteristically discourteous of George Bush that it shocked many people, including Atwater’s widow, Sally, who was particularly hurt. “The President does not go to funerals,” said an inept White House aide, “but he will attend the memorial service scheduled later in Washington, D.C., at the National Cathedral.” Months later the President would interrupt a campaign trip to fly to Texas to attend the funeral of Betty Lyn Liedtke, the wife of his onetime business partner Pennzoil chairman Hugh Liedtke.

  Bush had visited Atwater during his hospitalization and at home during the months he battled inoperable brain cancer. In his final days, Atwater became a born-again Christian and tried to square himself with those he had shamelessly wronged while playing gutter politics. He even expressed regret to Michael Dukakis for the scurrilous campaign he had waged against him in 1988. The Bushes felt Atwater’s public apology reflected poorly on them, because they had never disavowed the race-baiting Willie Horton ads. “Lee had nothing to apologize about, ever,” Barbara Bush wrote in her memoir, adding, “George Bush truly loved him.”

  When John Brady, author of Bad Boy: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater, contacted the President for an interview, Brady was told to fax his questions. “I asked President Bush why he did not go to the funeral,” he said, “but he did not answer the question.”

  The President’s political meltdown did not start with the death of Lee Atwater—it began with the economic downswing and his inability to do anything about it—but without the frenetic bogeyman by his side, Bush had to work the high wire without a net. Even his mentor Richard Nixon predicted he would fall.

  “The White House is in total disarray,” Nixon told his policy assistant Monica Crowley, “because it still believes it has a communications problem and if it could just put together a slick photo op, he’ll be back to seventy percent approval. The problem is deeper; it’s something that Lee Atwater could sense. I knew him. He was a tough southern son of a bitch, and we needed him. Bush will miss him this election. He just doesn’t have it without Atwater. Frankly, he’s a poor campaigner.”

  The sixty-six-year-old President had always relied on manic energy to propel him through a campaign, but now he complained to friends of “wearing out and getting older.” In May 1991, during a jog on the wooded trails of Camp David, he was stricken with fatigue and shortness of breath. His Secret Service agents assisted him to the infirmary, and from there he was helicoptered to Bethesda Naval Hospital. The White House press secretary announced that the President had suffered atrial fibrillation, also known as an irregular heartbeat.

  Suddenly there was a collective national gasp. As Time noted: “Public concern about Bush, one of the most popular chief executives in U.S. history, was probably intensified by the fact that his constitutionally designated successor is not highly regarded as a potential President.”

  A week later the President was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, the same thyroid ailment affecting the First Lady. In addition to medications he took for his arthritic hip, ulcer, and hay fever, Bush took heart and anti-stroke pills, plus allergy shots for anaphylactic reaction to bee stings. Now he began thyroid treatments with radioactive iodine, which sapped his energy and made him so tired he required frequent naps. The days of hard tennis and heavy martinis were over.

  This was a body blow for a man who had placed his worth in the world of action and believed that constant physical motion demonstrated his manliness. In the White House the hyperactive Bush identified with Theodore Roosevelt, who as an asthmatic boy had willed himself to become the embodiment of energy. Having experienced a childhood illness that kept him ou
t of school for a year, Bush so admired the rugged Rough Rider that he placed a portrait of the Republican Roosevelt in the Cabinet Room. He also put two sculptures of the twenty-sixth President in the Oval Office as reminders of the most intellectual athlete to ever hold the office.

  “President Bush never liked to admit to reduced stamina,” said his press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, “but to those of us who watched him carefully, the old zip was gone.”

  With his polls slipping every day, Bush decided to address the U.S. recession by embarking on a twelve-day trip to Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan. He took the chairmen of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler to make the case for more U.S. auto sales and, in his words, to generate “jobs, jobs, jobs.” As he said before his departure in January 1992, “I’ll do what I have to do to be re-elected.” As always, George H.W. Bush’s thoughts were not on ideology. They were on winning.

  In Tokyo, Bush sat down for a series of unproductive trade talks, then joined the U.S. Ambassador Michael Armacost in a losing tennis match. That evening the President and the First Lady arrived for Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s state dinner in the dining room of his residence. During a reception before dinner, the President had to quickly excuse himself; he rushed into a nearby bathroom, throwing up on himself on the way in. He changed his shirt and returned in time for the formal dinner, but before the first course was cleared away, he turned to the Prime Minister. “I don’t think I’m going to make it,” he said, slumping in his chair. His head collapsed on the Prime Minister’s shoulder, and before he could turn away, he vomited into Miyazawa’s lap. The President’s Secret Service agents rushed forward, as did the White House physician. The Prime Minister cradled the President’s head as he slipped slowly to the floor. “Why don’t you just roll me under the table and let me sleep it off?” Bush said, before losing consciousness.