George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  Even in transition, events intruded. In 1992 Bush had declined to involve America in possibly keeping Yugoslavia from breaking up: too regional, not vital to self-interest. By contrast, he ordered an airlift to get needed supplies to the interior of the East African nation of Somalia after its government fell in 1991 and rival warlords prevented their delivery by truck. When airfields were attacked, U.S. forces withdrew. The UN sent Pakistanis to move the supplies, but they soon retreated. On November 24, 1992, UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali asked Bush for military aid to open the truck routes. The president and Colin Powell thought the job could be done quickly, with few casualties, then given to the UN.

  By December “over a quarter million people, as many people as live in Buffalo, New York, have died in the Somali famine,” Bush said in a nationwide TV address, announcing a substantial American force to move into Somalia. Our objective would be limited: “To open the supply routes, to get the food moving, and to prepare the way for a UN peacekeeping force to keep it moving.” As in Desert Storm, America would “not stay one day longer than is absolutely necessary.” Instead, Clinton inherited the deployment.

  One year earlier, on December 7, Bush’s voice had caught aboard the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Now Bush lay a wreath at the U.S. Navy Memorial and hailed two new ships in the U.S. naval fleet: USS Ross, lauding Medal of Honor recipient Donald Ross, whom Bush met a year before and who died the following May, and USS Pearl Harbor, its name evoking the mountaintop conflict of our time.

  Trying to lighten the leaden mood of loss, Bush also asked his favorite impersonator, Dana Carvey, to help launch Christmas at the White House by importing his “Wouldn’t be prudent” shtick. “He said to me on the phone, ‘Are you sure you really want me to come there?’” said Bush of Carvey. “And I said, yes. And he said, ‘I hope I’ve never crossed the line.’ As far as I’m concerned, he never has.” For the final time, the Bushes proceeded to guide staff and guests through their favorite season—the People’s House at Yuletide—more magical than songs crooned by Bing Crosby via Karen Carpenter to Perry Como.

  On December 8 Bush released his annual Christmas message. Two days later he presented congressional medals to Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, lauding arguably the greatest U.S. military victory since Inchon in 1950. Next day Medals of Freedom were awarded to, among others, David Brinkley, Richard Petty, Elie Wiesel, Isaac Stern, Ella Fitzgerald, Audrey Hepburn, and TV’s Johnny Carson. “Johnny,” said Bush, “I don’t care what you say, I still think Dana Carvey does a better impersonation of you than he does of me.” Carson and his family stayed overnight, among 120,000 visitors to see the 1992 Christmas decorations: thirty trees placed around the White House, each decorated with icicles, tinsel, and white lights, needlepoint, toy trains, eleven-foot-tall toy nutcracker soldiers, the gingerbread house transformed into Santa’s Village, and the massive eighteen-foot-high Blue Room tree, with eighty-eight ornaments representing eighty-eight different gift givers.

  Mrs. Bush began planning Christmas at the White House in February each year. Her first theme as First Lady was 1989’s “A Storybook Christmas.” Next year’s was “Nutcracker,” in honor of Jacqueline Kennedy’s first motif. Like the holiday, the White House fused past and present. The East Room boasted a baroque crèche originally given to Lady Bird Johnson. In the East Colonnade, Mrs. Bush re-created Pat Nixon’s red poinsettia tree. She also used a collection of official presidential Christmas cards, starting with President Eisenhower’s. One year Mrs. Bush read that most DC shopping stores had inexplicably begun prohibiting Salvation Army ringers. You didn’t need proximity to hear her hit the roof.

  “Who can think of Christmas without Salvation Army bell ringers?” she huffed, heading in a White House car for the only mall allowing bell ringers on their property. That night TV viewers saw a very public First Lady donate, effectively saving Christmas for the army. Donations soared when the ringers were reinstated. Mrs. Bush so loved the group that it joined White House entertainment for public tours, choirs, and individual singers. Andrew Jackson said, “One man with courage makes a majority.” Barbara Bush showed that one woman with courage can right a wrong. Years later she affectionately recalled her grandchildren quietly leaving family functions to hear the bell ringers in the Grand Foyer, making beloved carols even better. As First Couple, the Bushes “had enjoyed four fabulous White House Christmas seasons and had awakened to four Christmas mornings at Camp David,” read the book Christmas with the First Ladies, published in 2011. “They had entered the White House with two grandchildren to spoil with Christmas cheer and left with twelve.”

  In 1991 the man often termed the “Education President” chose Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas, as the site for his presidential library over Yale, his alma mater; Rice University, in Houston, his home; and the University of Texas, in Austin, the state capital. In mid-December 1992 Bush gave a speech on foreign policy at A&M, observing that “in thirty-six days we will have a new president.” Like Mrs. Bush, he was shifting gears.

  Back at the White House, the president said, “This is about as much fun as I’ve had since the election,” welcoming the first non-U.S. World Series titlist, the 1992 Toronto Blue Jays. Bush, however, said he wished U.S. trade representative Carla Hills was there to explain herself: “I thought she understood that our free-trade agreement with Canada didn’t mean that the United States would trade away the world’s championship.” He continued, “I was playing baseball some forty years ago, hitting [a lowly] eighth, ‘second cleanup,’ we called it.” The audience laughed. Bush smiled, wryly, perhaps recalling his .224 overall college batting average. He then asked Jays manager Cito Gaston to “come over here. This is a rookie ball player who needs a job,” 41 confessed, showing Cito his special Topps Co. Bush baseball card. “And I’m going to give you this baseball card. Take a look at him. You need a good-fielding first baseman? I’m your man.”

  Humor eased the transition, as did weightier material, like NAFTA, among Canada, Mexico, and the United States, which Bush signed December 17. “Today, for the first time in years,” he said, “more capital is flowing into the Americas for new investment than is flowing out. Every major debtor nation, from Mexico to Argentina, has negotiated a successful agreement to reduce and restructure its commercial bank debt under the Brady plan.” Nick Brady was secretary of the treasury. Bush told him, “Okay, we’ll call it the Brady plan, but if it’s successful we’re going to call it the Bush plan.” Tongue in cheek, both agreed.

  Bush signed NAFTA at the Organization of American States, which he often visited as vice president and president. He was “thrilled” that his final visit would build what he called “a better future for our children and for generations yet unborn.” The agreement spurned tariffs on products traded among the countries; restricted patents, copyrights, and trademarks; and hailed “the combined energies of our 360 million citizens trading freely across our borders.” He thought that NAFTA would link America “in a permanent partnership of growth with our first- and third-largest trading partners”—and that new President Clinton would build on its beginnings.

  Bush couldn’t know that support for free trade would be hurt by twenty-first-century illegal immigration—or that millions of Americans would temporarily regard NAFTA less as a tool of national sovereignty than of pluralism gone mad. A banner “Reconquista”—California-plus is Mexico’s—flew under Mexico’s flag in a citizenship-for-illegal-aliens parade in California. “Open the borders!” read another. Marchers shouted, “Our land! Not yours!,” trashed compromise, and called law abiders “nativist,” “racist,” and “xenophobic.” The American flag was inverted, taken down, even burned.

  Bush 41 hadn’t intended such narcissism; instead, hoped to save what works. What worked were relationships in which allies helped each other. John Major paid a December 1992 visit, the Bushes “inundat[ing]” the British prime minister and his wife at Camp David with Christmas carols, said Poppy. Major,
closer in temperament to Bush than the theatric Margaret Thatcher, said, “The last two years have been remarkably good not just for the United Kingdom but for Europe to know we’ve had such a good friend here in the White House.”

  Bush referenced UN aid from the Persian Gulf to the former Yugoslavia: “When it comes to taking decisions that affect the lives of troops, I would view a British [or any allied] soldier the same as I would if these were United States soldiers there. We owe them prudence in making these decisions.” Dana Carvey—not to mention the troops’ parents—would agree.

  Bush had said on November 2, 1992, “I love it when that national talking-head media take me on. I love it, because I like a good fight. There’s no reason my holding back anymore.” The campaign crowd in Akron roared. “Every time somebody holds up one of those bumper stickers, it says, ‘Annoy the Media. Re-elect Bush,’ and everybody in this country knows what it means. You know what it means. Everybody knows what it means.” That day he gave mock amnesty to campaign photographers—to Bush, “photo dogs”—against any charge of bias. On December 23, leaving for Christmas at Camp David, Bush did the same for “Helen Thomas [United Press International] and all the rest of you guys. So have a wonderful Christmas and a very happy new one.” Two days later, six years after the arms-for-hostages scandal that threatened his candidacy for president had begun, Bush gave a real pardon to six officials from the Reagan administration: former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger; former national security adviser Robert McFarlane; Elliott Abrams, former assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs; and former CIA officers Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers Jr., and Clair George.

  Weinberger was to stand trial on January 6, 1993, on charges that he had lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and attempt by other countries to subsidize the Nicaraguan rebels. Iran-Contra independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s October 30, 1992, re-indictment of him was an election eve ploy widely viewed as meant to hurt Bush, especially since Walsh did not learn of the Bush diary till December 11. Had Weinberger gone to trial, the diary’s Iran-Contra contents, if any, would have been public. Bush, however, obsessed not over that but Reagan aides’ “patriotism”—a word he used in the pardon statement; to him, the incident was a policy error, not crime. The president returned from Camp David with other things on his mind: a January 1 recognition of the Czech and Slovak Republics; a next-day state dinner hosted by Russian president Boris Yeltsin in Moscow; and a news conference with Yeltsin, signing the treaty on further major cuts in strategic offensive arms of Russia and the United States—START II.

  “Today, the Cold War is over, and for the first time in history an American president has set foot in a democratic Russia,” Bush said on January 3. “This historic opportunity would simply not have been possible without our combined common effort.” He recalled how in August 1991, defying a coup against the government, Yeltsin climbed atop a turret of a tank to speak to the crowd, defending “Russia’s democratic destiny.” Bush also wanted “to salute the heroism of the Russian people themselves, for it is they who will determine that Russia’s democratic course is irreversible.”

  Bush flew home to give a January 5, 1993, speech at a place of victory and memory. As a boy, I loved Douglas MacArthur’s elegiac 1962 farewell at the U.S. Military Academy: “Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps.” I first visited West Point in 1991, writing President Bush’s commencement speech. The World War II Navy hero and Yale ’48 had often been there, most recently a month after Army edged the football Middies, 25–24, in December 1992. “Let me begin with the hard part,” Bush now said. “It is difficult for a Navy person to come up to West Point after that game.” Laughter. “Go ahead, rub it in.” Laughter. “But I watched it.” The moral, he said, is that “losing is never easy. Trust me, I know something about that.”

  It seems improbable now, but for a long time, Sunday was not America’s football day. “When we grew up, pro football players were . . . a bunch of pot-bellied longshoremen,” broadcaster Vin Scully has recalled of the 1930s and ’40s. By contrast, Auburn played Alabama, Penn State met Syracuse, and Ohio State confronted Michigan. Saturday was our day, bub, and don’t you forget it. Few forgot in 2012, as Bush and millions of others watched an Army-Navy spectacular worthy of the term. No Bowl Championship Series berths were decided. No Heisman Trophy candidates prowled the late-autumn turf. No future NFL star paraded his résumé. It didn’t matter. It never does.

  Navy’s Midshipmen entered the game 7-4-1. Army’s Black Knights of the Hudson—perhaps sport’s greatest moniker—were 2-9. Worse, they had lost to Navy ten-straight times. Each team’s corps marched into the pregame stadium at Philadelphia, a sight NBC voice Dick Enberg, now seventy-nine, still calls “chilling.” The game then began: a brio of West Point rushing (370 yards) and Navy leading (17–13) and din rising above the field, crashing against the seats, and ricocheting off the tiers.

  With a minute left, Army, still behind, reached Navy’s 14-yard line, first down and surging. Senior quarterback Trent Steelman, already thrice losing to the Middies, gave the ball to his fullback, who mishandled it, causing Army’s third fumble, Navy recovering. Steelman, the only Knight to ever run and pass for 2,000 yards, his record 44 rushing scores topping even Glenn Davis’s 43, went to the bench, sat by himself, and began to cry.

  Teammates left the son of Bowling Green, Kentucky, whose grandfather served in World War II and uncle in the Persian Gulf, alone. Disconsolate, he put his jersey over his face. Traditionally, the losing Army-Navy team sings its alma mater first. For four years Steelman, Army’s captain, had vowed to “sing second.” Now he sat, sobbing, as Army’s alma mater began. Hundreds of practice hours and thousands of dreams and one battle plan—“Beat Navy!” shared by plebes and cadets and millions who relished MacArthur’s “friendly fields of strife”—had crashed around him. It broke your heart to watch.

  In the postgame melee his mates, 2012 Army coach Rich Ellerson and Army’s chief of staff hugged him. Somehow Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo found Steelman, put an arm around his shoulder, and whispered that this too shall pass—a less random than common act of kindness showing why the military is Gallup’s most admired institution. In World War II, Gen. George C. Marshall was asked if he had a secret weapon to win the war. “We do indeed,” he said. “The best damn kids in the world.” As Army-Navy shows, they still are.

  Those kind of kids heard Bush discuss the presidency at West Point in January 1993. “Any president has several functions,” he told them. “He speaks for and to the nation. He must faithfully execute the law. And he must lead. Leadership, well, it takes many forms. It can be political or diplomatic. It can be economic or military. It can be moral or spiritual leadership. Leadership can take any one of these forms, or it can be a combination of them.” It was essential to his most important role—commander in chief—and to anyone who might join the military. “There is no higher calling, no more honorable choice, than the one that you here today have made. To join the armed forces is to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for your country and for your fellow man.”

  Bush recalled how Secretary of War Stimson had urged his class at Andover to complete its college education before entering the service. “A half century has passed since that day when Stimson spoke of the challenge of creating a better world. You will also be entering a new world, one far better than the one I came to know, a world with the potential to be far better yet. This is the opportunity of your lifetimes. I envy you for it, and I wish you Godspeed. And while I’m at it, as your commander in chief, I hereby grant amnesty to the Corps of Cadets.”

  If you were a cadet, a Navy man had saved the best for last.

  Leaving the presidency, Bush seemed to want to meet the turning points of his past. On January 8 he visited the CIA at Langley, Virginia, which had swelled his foreign policy curriculum v
itae in the mid-1970s and, as we have seen, whose headquarters now bear his name. Bush’s remarks to CIA employees began at 1:15 p.m.: “Anything to keep from having to go back to work,” he said to laughter. “I know how it is.” The president vowed “to be a voice after I leave for keeping this intelligence community the strongest, the best in the entire world, which it is now.” He then gave CIA Director Bob Gates, “my right-hand person and trusted adviser when at the White House,” the National Security Medal, the highest medal a president can give for the nation’s defense. (Adm. Jonathan T. Howe also received it on January 13.)

  Five days later the East Room of the White House bulged with fellow feeling, time passing, and the memory of the man who helped George Bush become president, learn about leadership, and remake the world. This morning Bush welcomed the fortieth president back to “give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with distinction.” It reminded the forty-first president of another morning—Inauguration Day of 1981—“and how the clouds . . . gave way as he began his speech.” Ronald Reagan turned America’s winter of discontent, said Bush, “into a springtime of possibility.”

  It was common to say that Reagan championed liberty. As Bush observed, Reagan also saw its triumph coming. “We recall your stirring words to the British parliament [in 1982]. Here were the words: ‘The march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.’”

  Bush mentioned Reagan’s restoring American military strength and morale: “When I became president, [he] passed on to me the most dedicated and best-equipped fighting force that the world has ever seen.” Reagan also signed the INF Treaty, “the first agreement to eliminate a whole category of nuclear weapons.” This, in turn, led to START I and then START II, which Bush and Boris Yeltsin had signed ten days earlier.