by Curt Smith
“When Ronald Reagan’s favorite president died in 1945, the New York Times wrote, ‘Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House,’” said Bush. “Well, Mr. President, it will not take a hundred years; millions thank God today that you were in the White House. You loved America, blessed America, and with your leadership helped make America that shining city on a hill.”
Listening, I was struck not for the first time but more forcibly than ever by Bush’s attitude toward Reagan. It cannot have been easy to succeed the Gipper—following a John Wayne or Louis Armstrong, an American Original. Yet Bush never showed anything but generosity—a true tenderness of tone. Reagan was, as Bush said, “only the third president to receive the Medal of Freedom—the first to receive it in his own lifetime.”
Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease was not diagnosed for another year. Thus, it is likely that the Gipper grasped Bush saying, “And I consider him my friend and mentor, and so he is. And he’s also a true American hero”—which more than ever he remains.
The term “Points of Light” originated in Bush’s 1988 acceptance speech—Reagan’s grand last full year as president. It became synonymous with Poppy’s presidency, but what did it mean? Some “say it’s religion,” said Bush. “Others say, well, it’s a patriotic theme, like the flag, and others think it’s an image of hope.”
To Bush, Points of Light were all of the above, and more—“what happened when ordinary people claimed the problems of their community as their own—the inspiration and awakening to the God-given light from within, lit from within, and it’s the promise of America.”
In January 1993 Points of Light assembled from all fifty states at the White House, “each of you finding within yourselves your own special genius for helping others,” said Bush. “Each discovered the imagination to see things that others could not; the human dignity in the eyes of a homeless man; the musicians and business leaders in an inner-city gang; the light and laughter in the shadows of a shattered life.”
That day Bush recognized the 1,014th Daily Point of Light, the Lakeland Middle School eighth-grade volunteers from Baltimore, showing that “somewhere in America, every serious social problem is being solved through voluntary service, for therein lies the greatest national resource of all.” It didn’t matter who you were. “Everybody’s got something to give: a job skill, a free hour, a pair of strong arms.” This is what Bush meant by saying that any definition of a successful life must include serving others.
He and Mrs. Bush would soon leave Washington, but the president, still honorary chairman of today’s Points of Light Foundation, an international nonprofit, had a final thought. “If I could leave but one legacy to this country, it would not be found in policy papers or even treaties signed or even wars won; it would be return to the moral compass that must guide America through the next century, the changeless values that can and must guide change.” He meant “a rekindling of that light lit from within to reveal America as it truly is, a country with strong families, a country of millions of Points of Light.”
That compass had lost direction, Bush knew, families ravaged, Americans’ collective fire dimmed. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville is alleged to have said, “America is great because she is good.” If Bush could wave a wand or strike his brightest Point of Light, he has said, it would be to make America good so that America could remain great.
“Perspective is all,” a teacher told me. Bush revealed his perspective about leaving the presidency his last weekend at Camp David, which he loved, as all presidents do. Reagan’s closest personal ally was, without question, Thatcher. Bush’s was his last guest that last weekend, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, with whom he had developed an almost brotherly rapport.
“For me and for Barbara, this is a fond farewell as we leave this job,” Bush said at a press conference with his neighbor up north four days before leaving office. “And it’s most fitting, in our way of looking at things”—which was inevitably personal, for him and Barbara, both as the First Couple and as individuals—“that Prime Minister Mulroney and his wonderful family are with us here today.”
Mulroney hailed his host’s stance on free trade; the Clean Air Act, which enabled the Canadian-American treaty on acid rain; and Bush’s “remarkable assembling of the coalition in terms of the Gulf War probably without precedence, certainly in recent decades.”
Bush then talked about turning out the lights. “It’s going to be low-key. There’s no point in trying to continue something that isn’t”—the presidency. “And I’m trying to conduct myself with dignity and hopefully in a spirit of total cooperation with Governor Clinton.” He continued, “No bitterness in my heart. January 20th when I walk out of that capitol, I’m a private citizen. And I hope I’ll be treated as a private citizen by my neighbors in Houston.”
A friend of mine shook his head. “Too mentally healthy to be a politician,” he observed of the president. Leaving office, Bush had a Gallup approval rating of 56 percent, up 19 percent from Election Day 1992. “Where were they when we needed ’em?” another friend said. Probably out voting for Perot.
As we have seen, Bush’s emotions generally were kept in check, as a successful politician learns—see Reagan. They rose to the surface, however, for anything that involved the military, his love lifelong and deep down. It evoked Bush’s youth, friendship and loyalty, embrace of country, the heroic and awful grandeur of World War II, perhaps guilt for having lived, surely joy for life itself.
On January 14, 1993, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell hosted an Armed Forces Salute to the President. Bush’s ad-lib open and close etched his quintessence, in a way matched by no writer’s text.
“I am honored by this salute,” Bush began. “But you guys have got it backward. I came over here to thank all of you, past and present of our armed forces. There is no doubt that the all-volunteer force is one of the true successful stories of modern-day America.”
He ended, “Let me speak not as president and not as commander in chief, but as a citizen, as an American. I look back on my service to this great nation with pride. I think my three years in the Navy did more to shape my life than anything that’s followed on. And I’m very honored to stand with you all here, today, honored that we share this sacred bond of duty, honor, country.”
Ironically, the all-volunteer force, replacing the draft, had made that service less common to the country, less unifying as a force. Not to the bomber pilot–turned–president, though. Like his generation, George Bush will always feel that sacred bond. “Duty, honor, country” is what he was—and will forever be.
THIRTEEN
America’s “Vision Thing”
An old adage says, “When God closes one door, He opens another.” I am not sure whether this is so, though I think it more often true than not. I am sure that you haven’t lived until you’ve been fired by the American people. This happened to President Bush and hundreds of his friends—White House appointees, including me—on Election Day 1992. Overnight, we had to decide what to do, if not for the rest of our lives, at least for the next chapter.
For the president, as we shall see, it meant a personal rejection, a painful adjustment, and the knowledge—to the last, Bush had expected to win—that he would leave the presidency in two months, not four years. Like other aides, my timetable was upset too. I had hoped to leave the White House midway through a second term, forgetting the ancient Czech proverb “Plan for next year and make the devil laugh.” Now, I would be, if not thrown in the street, at least forced to show Hemingway’s “grace under pressure”—fast.
The first imperative was to grasp, as Bush did instantly, that the White House was over—done that, look ahead. It is true that, at any age, working for the president—in his case, being president—is the greatest honor you could have, or would. It is also true that life involves different chapters—and you don’t read a book by starting at the end.
I knew that I would not miss argument for argument’s sake—the ego and gossip that fuel White House politics. I knew I would miss almost everything else, and have: the building’s history, grounds, architecture, and wonder; tourists who rightly expected us to act mannerly; colleagues who shared a devotion to Middle America; the library that held or could find any book relative to the presidency; ghosts whose footprints still patrol the halls. I miss what Nixon writer Bill Gavin called “Bush’s talented speechwriting team” and our researchers. I loved Air Force One, the West Wing bustle, the Oval Office quiet as a church mouse on a weekend, past White House writers most gracious with their time, the knowledge that no matter what you later did—books, academe, political office—to a speechwriter, this was the summit. Virtually every once presidential writer that I know concurs.
As is often true, the answer of how to follow this involved, as Bing Crosby sang, “eliminat[ing] the negative.” I knew I would largely spurn, say, corporate speechwriting. “There is nothing smaller,” Richard Nixon said, “than a big businessman.” This did not mean that I wouldn’t occasionally write for a good company. (They do pay well.) It did mean that 1992 had so seared my consciousness that I would—could—not work only for one employer. Many colleagues—Sununu, Demarest, Snow, other writers—had been treated shabbily by the crass profession of inside politics. The lesson stung.
At least for a time, no one person would control my—what?—fate, future, bank account. I would sell the only asset I had: me. In spring 1993 I began writing stories for Reader’s Digest. Its managing editor, Bill Schulz, was one reason for the magazine’s then-nonpareil 17.5 million circulation. I also hosted a series at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, did talk radio for Baltimore CBS Radio affiliate WBAL, wrote speeches for Anheuser-Busch Brewery’s legendary public relations guru Mike Roarke, and signed a contract with Macmillan to write The Storytellers: From Mel Allen to Bob Costas, Sixty Years of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth.
About this time I heard that George Bush, though not despondent, was adrift about the loss to Clinton. Tales about former aides blaming the president for losing the election likely reached and hurt him too. I have never grasped how hirelings can turn on politicians who stoked their career. Schulz, a friend, told me that spring that he admired my loyalty. Taken aback, I said that Bush made it easy. What wasn’t easy was to raise $43 million to pay for the 69,050-square-foot George H. W. Bush Library and Museum, with 44 million pages in such traditional papers as memos, letters, and reports, flanked by an academic curricula at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service. Each would open in 1997 on ninety acres of Texas A&M University.
My interest in the library may have stemmed from my grandmother, who earned her college degree in the 1920s, an act then deemed Bolshevik. It reflected my parents, both teachers, especially my mother, a high school librarian for a quarter century. I also wanted to help someone I admired, knowing that Bush’s library funds would largely accrue from speeches—and keeping overhead down would keep their remainder up. On behalf of ex–White House writers Mary Kate Cary (née Grant), Beth Hinchliffe, Mark Lange, and Ed McNally, I wrote Bush on June 3, 1993, “to say that if you need speeches, opinion/editorials, or other commentary in the years ahead, we would like to freely volunteer our time to help you in any way we can.”
Poppy replied next week comically, and typically. “The answer, before you change your minds: I accept your offer!!!!” He invited those of us on the East Coast to Maine “to get things moving. Inasmuch as Ed and Mark are out west maybe you and Les Girls, make that politically correct—‘Les Women,’ can come up here first. If that makes sense let me know and the plane tickets will be in the mail.”
Seals and Crofts sang, “We may never pass this way again.” I already had.
My mother was born two hours southwest of Kennebunkport. Decades later, our family tried to vacation each year in Blue Hill, Maine, three hours northeast of Bush’s home. The tiny shops and fishing community had it all: the Boston Globe, the Red Sox on the radio, nautical art, model ships, coffee brewing in every diner, and the Atlantic close by.
In June 1993 Mary Kate, Beth, and I met in Boston, drove to Kennebunkport, and traveled up the strip of land called Walker’s Point jutting into the ocean onto the estate used for family holidays, weddings, and receptions—also to host leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Mikhail Gorbachev. We then passed through the checkpoint on Walker’s Point Road, gated and guarded by Secret Service officers, near the driveway leading to the main house and a circular driveway. In the middle of that driveway was a huge flagpole flying the American flag.
“When either President Bush was present while in office, the Presidential flag was hoisted just below the U.S. flag,” said then–Newsweek White House correspondent Tom DeFrank, the longtime 41 friend who covered both presidencies. During père’s term TV journalists used the flagpole as a backdrop. “It was beautiful, evocative of New England, so different than [Bush] 43, vacationing at the [Crawford, Texas] ranch,” laughed DeFrank—as different as the presidents. “Bush 41 was more cerebral, comfortable with the issues, and experienced. Forty-three was more instinctive, decisive, acted from the gut, didn’t lose much sleep when he’d made a decision.”
Covering Bush in Kennebunkport meant “lobster every day, balmy weather, civilized and sophisticated, old-line money; Bush’s Brahmin and patrician, which is not to say elitist, side,” said DeFrank. “After all, he’d get up there and first thing he’s playing golf on a public course.” DeFrank had covered Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, whose nearest hotel, Best Western, the press dubbed Worst Western. Tom was from small-town Texas, yet felt Crawford had “such an utter lack of civilization, looked like a grasshopper plague, that it made Plains look like Kennebunkport.”
In late 1991, a time of political turmoil for Bush 41, Kennebunkport’s large central home built in 1903 was severely damaged by a series of nor’easters. Bush had it totally rebuilt, in a clean New England shingles mode: nine bedrooms, four sitting rooms, an office, a den, a library, a dining room, a kitchen, and various patios and decks. Next door were a four-car garage, a pool, tennis court, dock, boathouse, and guesthouse, with spacious lawns on either side of the house ready for baseball, horseshoes, and other sports of the day.
Today President Bush and the three writers sat on the deck overlooking the Atlantic, talking shop and watching grandchildren toddle by. Mary Kate, Beth, and I wore hats in the sun because Mrs. Bush told us to. The Harry Walker Agency in New York handled Bush’s speaking schedule with him and Chief of Staff Jean Becker. We decided that memoranda, letters, and assignments would go from Kennebunkport and Houston through me to the writer—say, Beth Hinchliffe or Mark Lange. The writer would research, write a draft, and fax it—e-mail began about 1993—to Bush, who edited a finished product. The schedule remained intense into 1996, after library construction had begun and an official dedication set. Bush was unfailingly gracious, quick to edit and revise, and glad to have one postpresidential job resolved.
Looking back, Becker artfully balanced each volunteer writer’s schedule. I was writing three books and an ESPN TV series based on another, Voices of The Game. Leaving DC, I returned to Upstate to do National Public Radio affiliate analysis, receiving an Associated Press award for “best commentary” in New York State—“Great going on the big award,” Bush wrote in the kind of personalized note he loved. “Well deserved, say I!”—and teach English, specifically, Presidential Rhetoric and Public Speaking at the University of Rochester. “Dear Professor—Rochester is the winner here—so are the students, who will learn how to speak English,” said Bush, who reinvented it regularly. My last Bush speech was his 2004 eulogy to President Reagan, though if he needed a quote or phrase I would drop everything today.
Anticipating a reader’s question, it inevitably was a jolt to hear the president by phone, no matter how often. That was also true of getting a handwritten note, often signed “Georg
e Bush, Older #41.” An early letter to the speech team read, “Yeah team!!! Thanks for all the work so far. You said ‘No pay’, but that cannot be.” In reply, I thanked Bush for the chance to get to know him better than I had as a White House writer while he busily managed the Free World—his obsession with outdoor sports of every shape and kind; a reluctance to criticize Clinton even privately; how each family home in Maine and Texas was put together but not put on, in the old-money New England Protestant way; and 41’s easy and loving repartee with Barbara, born of a marriage most would kill for—sixty-nine years in 2014, the longest-ever-wed presidential couple.
Working, it also struck me that not only but especially in America could people so different in status, family, and background develop a close working relationship—this was true too of Bush with many others—based not on class but strains of an individual. In my case that meant work and lifelong love of politics and literature; faith; interest in animals and baseball; love of New England, Bush’s and my mother’s home; and Texas, his, my wife’s, and a sister’s adopted home. Up close, I saw, as much of the nation hadn’t, Bush’s amalgam of gentleness and steel. Once he spent forty-five minutes looking for a grandchild’s stuffed animal. Bush would end a phone call by making you feel as if he didn’t want to waste more of your time, not his. He refused, whatever the cost, to curry favor with what he felt the more demagogic elements of his party. All this—and to get paid. I told him it would go toward our “house fund.”
It is a fact that many—especially but not exclusively Democrats—thought that upon leaving the presidency Bush would never return to build or buy his house in Texas. He had used the Lone Star State simply as a backdrop for his career, they sneered, noting that his voting residence in 1988 and 1992 had been the Houstonian Hotel. Born in the foreign East, educated in the alien Ivy League, Bush seemed to them a pseudo-Texan—not coarse enough for Longhorn politics. In spring 1980, when his candidacy for president collapsed, Bush put his Tanglewood house on sale and bought his family’s manse at Walker’s Point. If he were going home, cynics carped as 1993 approached, it would be there—except it wasn’t. Texas had long ago become home.