George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  “I’m sure some people didn’t think we were going back to Houston till the house was built, the curtains hung, and George and I were in the kitchen, cooking tacos,” barbed Mrs. Bush, who like her husband, simply loved the place. First, the presidential library would be in Texas. Second, Bush had moved into a roomy presidential office within the Park Laureate Building on Houston’s Memorial Drive. Third, like the parents, their children largely lived in the South. Last, as anyone who has spent time in Texas knows, it is unpretentious, patriotic, religious, and hooked on family, work, and friends—a good definition of the former First Couple. By 1993 it fit like a glove.

  The site of Bush’s new Houston home stemmed from his 1981 sale of the Tanglewood property, which made a profit and began a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). To resolve the scuffle, Bush signed an affidavit in 1985 in which he agreed to build his retirement home on the lot at 9 West Oak Lane South, within the West Oaks Addition subdivision—but within the Tanglewood area. A 1992 Houston Chronicle review called the area “charming” and redolent of Connecticut—Bush’s childhood home. That year a New York Times story called Bush’s 5,280-square-foot lot “a postage stamp of a vacant lot, and most associates doubt that Mr. Bush intends to build a home there.”

  The Times was as wrong about Bush’s intent as it had been earlier that year about his supposed ignorance of a checkout counter. Once again the record gave Bush the last laugh. As part of the sale, completed around 1989, the family had an option to buy an extra 4,320 square feet of land, which the Times should have checked and which the Bushes exercised in 1992. Annoying the media, the family moved from a friend’s temporarily rented Tanglewood home into their new residence in late 1993.

  That year the Bushes invited my future wife, Sarah, and me to their new house shortly before Christmas. Enough decorations populated the residence to conjure past holidays at the White House. Mrs. Bush again reminded me of Angela Lansbury. The former president justified his marquee as America’s oldest teenager by offering a glass of wine and then guiding us to the kitchen.

  “You guys like pretzels?” he said, yanking a huge plastic barrel from a cabinet. “Ever see anything like this? This is a great deal, just got it at Sam’s Club. I love these things.” We returned to the den, where we drank and munched. Bush and a group of friends then went to a Rockets pro basketball game, where we watched the crowd proudly welcome its friend and ex-president home.

  Next morning I perused the Times, as I did daily for the heck of it. Typically, the newspaper never printed a retraction about the Bushes having built their lovely home in Texas after all.

  Each president must choose a postpresidential model. Jimmy Carter became a humanitarian; Richard Nixon, best-selling author; Bill Clinton, globe-trotting sage. Bush 41 intended for his life to help others. That would only peripherally include, he thought, leaving office, a public life. “Bill, I want to tell you something. When I leave here, you’re going to have no trouble from me,” Bush told Clinton in November 1992. “The campaign is over, it was tough, and I’m out of here. I will do nothing to complicate your work, and I just want you to know that.” Bush was through with politics. The 1992 campaign had been rough, even vicious. His family would take longer than Poppy to forgive. If you had said that real friendship would bloom between Bush and Clinton, most would reply that Jupiter had just aligned with Mars.

  Postpresidential speeches that Bush gave to build his library inevitably critiqued 1989–93. “Think about the kaleidoscope of social and political change during our four years,” he began. “The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification of Germany; the dismantling of the Soviet state; the historic coalition that ejected Saddam Hussein from Kuwait; the good-faith dialogue of a lasting peace between age-old enemies in the Middle East. We faced a new world every day, it seemed, and the archives will help show how we answered the call to lead as no other nation could.” Inevitably, the litany impressed the audience. As Henry Kissinger said, it had the ancillary advantage of being true.

  Bush’s speeches almost always discussed the decision not to go to Baghdad in 1991. About ninety-two hours after the ground war began, the president ordered his leadership team to the Oval Office: Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Brent Scowcroft, Bob Gates, Dan Quayle, and Jim Baker. “Colin said the time had come to end the fighting—the U.S. does not slaughter people along a highway of death for the sake of killing people,” Bush stated, asking if Norman Schwarzkopf agreed. Powell said yes, “but walked over to the Oval Office desk and pulled the secure phone out of the drawer—you remember that classic photo,” 41 recalled. Powell said, “Get me Schwarzkopf.” Thirty seconds later, he was on the phone. “The question put to him was direct,” said Bush. “So was his answer. He said, ‘Our mission is complete.’”

  Thus, Desert Storm ended after a hundred hours, Bush said. “And because of it, ancient enemies of the Middle East sat across the table from one another to talk peace for the first time in centuries.” In 1992 Secretary of State Baker oversaw a regional peace conference in Madrid that Bush had promised Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 between Israel and Arab entities, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). “History will recall Madrid as a major turning point toward peace,” Bush continued. “The historic peace meeting held in Washington in September 1993 would not have occurred without the Madrid meeting, which stemmed from Desert Storm, which stemmed, in turn, from U.S. leadership.”

  Clinton invited the Bushes to spend the night in the White House, then attend the signing of the peace accord between Israel and the PLO. Mrs. Bush, believing that her husband had lost to a lesser man, refused. Bush, feeling that the accord was largely his, went. Still sorting out as an ex-president what next to do, he accepted straightaway an April 1993 offer to return with Mrs. Bush to the scene of his greatest triumph, receiving a royal tour of Kuwait at the invitation of its people. The Kuwaitis gave the library a generous gift—and Bush the chance to forget Election Day. “To see the nation we liberated from the terror of occupation, there’s no way to express the power of those feelings,” said Bush, truly moved.

  Mrs. Bush’s diary recounted the response: “We drove to Bayan Palace and all along the way were people cheering and waving George Bush posters and American flags and Kuwaiti flags.” Over and over, Kuwaitis thanked the president. “One little kid touched my heart when he told me: ‘If it weren’t for Desert Storm, I would have no country.’ What a moment.” Looking back, Bush would tell an audience in 1993 that the perception of “being a ‘foreign policy’ president wasn’t too helpful last November. But you know something? I have no regrets. I did what was right—for your [the audience’s] kids and my grandkids.”

  The Kuwaiti trip was a family affair: in addition to Barbara, sons Jeb and Marvin and George W.’s wife, future first lady Laura. Also along: Baker and former treasury secretary Brady. Later, 41 found what a price they almost paid. Profoundly grateful to Bush, the Kuwaitis wanted nothing to spoil his visit—especially an Iraqi plot to kill the ex-president that they found days before the U.S. delegation’s April arrival. Locating a Toyota Land Cruiser with almost ninety kilograms of plastic explosives, the Kuwaitis arrested seventeen people, some of whom admitted to coming from Baghdad, but didn’t tell their guests or the U.S. Secret Service, which might have canceled the trip. When the party left, U.S. authorities were told, experts examining the device and interviewing captives. Ultimately, the Clinton administration found that Saddam Hussein had approved Bush’s murder. Its retort: a June 26 cruise missile strike at the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Next day America’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, gave proof of the Iraqi plot to the Security Council. Hussein may not have got the message, but it is assumed that a grateful Bush did.

  Back home, Poppy spurned advice that he embrace this or that cause. Too soon. Not his style. Don’t be a braggadocio, he could hear mother Dorothy saying. “I need more time, more quiet time, more grandchild time, more time to forget and to remember [his emphasis],” Bush
is quoted in Timothy Naftali’s George H. W. Bush: “I don’t have myself cast as a big and important person. I want to be a tiny point of light, hopefully, a bright point of light, but I don’t crave sitting at the head table; nor do I burn with desire to see that history is kind to us.”

  This is where and how I hope Bush’s circa 1993–96 speeches helped. They helped build—if not his legacy, a word he loathed—the bricks and mortar of nearly forty-five thousand feet of archival and office space and almost twenty-five thousand feet of public exhibition space, created by the architectural firm of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (now HOK), enhanced by the George Bush School’s curricula, offering four, including two master’s degree, programs. The speeches also let Bush, eschewing I, detail what his team had achieved.

  By and large, Bush enjoyed speaking three or four times a week to political, economic, and civic groups. They helped him to remember what went right—what he had done that would last. He grew more relaxed and funny, increasingly, the private man on display. Like any effective speaker, Bush referenced subjects both in the news and in the audience’s specific field. He also loved to quote household names from his (here, World War II) generation—Bing Crosby saying of Bob Hope, “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for Hope, and there is nothing he wouldn’t do for me. We spend our lives doing nothing for each other.”

  As president the time-challenged Bush played robo golf, somehow squeezing a full round into half an afternoon. Involuntarily retired, he poked fun at himself: “I’m adjusting just fine. Now I can really lay back and enjoy a relaxing hour playing eighteen holes of golf.”

  By now two members of the Bush family had written New York Times best-selling nonfiction books. “I’m glad to be here,” 41 told one group, “though I admit I’m still recovering from the call to our office inviting the two most popular and eloquent Bushes to conclude this conference. I told my assistant to say, ‘I’d be delighted.’ She said, ‘They want Barbara and Millie.’”

  Both Bush adults often spoke to the same group. “I understand Barbara told you she’s up each morning at 5:30 to work on her latest book,” he said. “She didn’t tell you that when she takes a break, she terrorizes our neighbors—because after all those years of backseat driving in government cars, she’s now the proud owner of a Mercury Sable and a driver’s license. If you visit Maine in the summer, or Houston the rest of the year, here’s a warning: give that blue Merc station wagon plenty of room to roam.”

  Many speeches involved an award. In October 1993 Bush returned to Washington to receive the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) George Marshall Award. “I loved it when I was here, but I do not miss Washington,” he told the AUSA. “I don’t miss the press. I am enjoying trying to stay out of their first strike zone. But what I do miss is dealing with our great military.” The Marshall Award was both a tribute and metaphor, named “for a man who made a difference—not wishing it, but willing it.”

  As democracy triumphed in the 1980s, some called it “accidental.” It wasn’t, Bush said. “It’s just that men like George Marshall made its victory seem providential.” First, he believed in peace through strength. In 1918, as operations officer responsible for World War I tactical plans, Marshall helped Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing acquire artillery, flamethrowers, and something called “tanks,” then emerging. The material let the “famed First Division prepare for a local offensive at Cantigny in France, where our troops won the first battle ever won by Americans fighting in Europe.”

  In World War II, as Army chief of staff, Marshall taught a second lesson: “America thrives when, in Arthur Vandenberg’s words, ‘Politics stop at the water’s edge.’ To this day, I don’t know whether he was a Democrat or Republican. I do know that he helped us win World War II [ending in 1945].” Finally, Marshall taught that America must be engaged, not merely strong. In 1947 the then secretary of state announced his plan to help Greece and Turkey: “Our policy is directed not against any country but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Bush said, “Think of 1918, 1945, or foreign aid in General Marshall’s plan. Each showed a strong, bipartisan, and fully-engaged America”—Bush’s what-if goal in a second presidential term.

  Instead, Bush increasingly was frustrated by Clinton’s seesaw on Somalia. On October 20, 1993, the Washington Post editorialized as Army Rangers were withdrawn, “In all since the Oct. 3–4 firefight in which 18 U.S. soldiers were killed and scores were wounded, the Clinton Administration has [now] added troops to or withdrawn them from Somalia at least five times. ‘This whipsawing of the force package and the description of what we think we’re doing is fairly typical of this administration so far,’ said one senior officer. ‘The MTV generation doesn’t seem to have much of an attention span.’” Bush was honored at a CARE dinner in New York for his humanitarian work in Somalia. A day later Edward Ney, chairman of Burson-Marsteller and Bush’s former ambassador to Canada wrote, “Having a standing, clapping, cheering crowd for five to ten minutes at the end of your speech must have made you feel great.”

  Bush did when in 1994 he received the Sylvanus Thayer Award at the U.S. Military Academy. Surveying the soldierly audience, he said, “Now I know how Bob Hope feels.” He then thanked the group for inviting a Navy man to speak at West Point. “I didn’t want to press my luck, so I left the goat outside.” Bush said that he knew the meaning of Douglas MacArthur’s “‘In the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.’ For Barbara and me, call this the twilight of our memory. We are proud to be honorary members of the Long Gray Line.”

  That year the British media focused on a passage in Margaret Thatcher’s new book, The Downing Street Years, in which Thatcher cited a need to “stroke” Bush’s ego. At a London dinner, the former president jibed, “Barbara can’t understand why. She said that yesterday while telling me how great I am.” Bush then picked out four passages to defuse tension and lightly show, as Paul Harvey would say, “the rest of the story.”

  On page 768 Thatcher wrote, “I had breathed a sigh of relief when George Bush defeated his Democrat opponent in the U.S. Presidential election.” Bush read this, then told the dinner, “Margaret, so did I.”

  Bush read how on page 763 Thatcher wrote of the G-7 summit, “It was chaired by President Bush, who was now imposing . . . his own style on the U.S. Administration.” To this he added, “Margaret, my style being praised by you is like being called Man of War by Secretariat.”

  On page 820 Thatcher described their meeting at Aspen in the first days of the Gulf War: “He was firm, cool, showing the decisive qualities which the Commander in Chief of the greatest world power must possess.” Bush, too, would never forget that week, being told by Thatcher never “to go wobbly.”

  Finally, Thatcher wrote of “the President and [her husband] Denis playing 18 holes of golf in the pouring rain—a very British occasion.” Bush eyed Mr. Thatcher, saying, “Only one thing has changed on the course. Now that I’m no longer President, it’s amazing how many people beat me.”

  In Manchester, England, Bush recalled George Bernard Shaw terming Britain and the United States two countries separated by a common language. “That’s funny,” Bush added. “Some say English is my only foreign language.” Speaking to the Joint Israel Appeal, he said that the tiny nation, at forty-six younger than the Bushes’ marriage, recalled a verse he once read on a little stone church in Sussex: “A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision with a task is the hope of the world.”

  Bush referenced criteria for U.S. involvement abroad that we used in dozens of speeches during his presidency and beyond. “When I committed forces to the Persian Gulf in late 1990 and early 1991—as I had in Panama earlier and would later in Somalia—I needed answers to three questions. One, What is the mission? Two, How to reach it—how do we win? Three, How and when do we get out once the mission’s achieved? If I could satisfy those criteria, I acted. If not, we did not—must not.”

  As we hav
e previously seen, when the United States overran Iraq in 2003, Colin Powell summarized the reality of not having an exit strategy: “You break it, you own it.” By contrast, Bush 41 told me that all three of his criteria, especially the third, kept him from seizing Baghdad in 1991. It is safe to say that his “vision with a task,” to quote the little stone church in Sussex, was and remains clear.

  It would be incorrect to say that 41’s postpresidential speech parade passed without incident. In 1997 Bush was to appear at the University of Toronto to receive a doctor of laws degree, where, we learned, several dozen professors, flaunting liberal tolerance, were prepared to walk out during the first few minutes of his speech. Their “beef,” to use a favorite Reagan word: Bush’s CIA stint, Iran-Contra role, and invasion of Panama had flaunted, as Toronto English professor David Galbraith said, “a contempt for legality and democracy.” Another university professor, political science’s John Kirton, thought that a bit unhinged. “Bush’s contribution was truly historic,” he said. “He presided over the end of the Cold War, and accomplished it peacefully, which is quite a feat.”

  As Bush’s appearance neared, I did what I always did when Bush needed to be funny: called Doug Gamble, who has graced this narrative for his humor in the 1988 acceptance speech. Born in Montreal, Doug moved to Hamilton, Ontario, at age eight and Toronto at eighteen; became a Toronto Star humor columnist; and crossed the border to LA in 1980 to soon write one-line phrases for Joan Rivers, Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, Rodney Dangerfield—and Ronald Reagan. After Walter Mondale had accused Reagan of government by amnesia, the president replied, “I thought that remark accusing me of having amnesia was uncalled for. I just wish I could remember who said it.” Another: “For the last four years, I’ve been urging the press to be more positive. Today I picked up the Washington Post and saw a story that said, ‘We’re positive the president will lose the election.’” Another: “The other side’s promises are like Minnie Pearl’s hat. Both have big price tags hanging from them.” (TV writer Ray Siller was Reagan’s other brilliant humorist.)