George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  In 1987 Bush inherited Gamble, soon happy that he did. “Despite my critics, I have good reason to be confident,” the vice president would say. “Shirley MacLaine told me recently that I was Martin Van Buren in another life.” After Bush’s election, speechwriter Joshua Gilder gave Gamble credit second only to Bush. Gamble wrote many of 41’s best one-line jokes for use by his writers. A decade later, with teachers from other colleges joining Toronto’s faculty in demanding that Bush’s honorary degree be revoked, Gamble scored again in his “home and native land.” Poppy spoke before an imminent Canadian postal strike, which coincided with the possible teacher walkout. One Gamble line explored a reason for the professors’ conduct: “I can only assume they’re walking out in sympathy with the postal workers.” Another line referenced the Toronto hockey team’s hated 1970s and ’80s owner: “I haven’t seen such a mass exodus from an arena since Harold Ballard bought the Maple Leafs.” As usual, Bush chose the Gambleism with which he felt most comfortable: “Sometimes I’m too optimistic. When they first got to their feet I thought I was getting a standing ovation.”

  In fact, only a few teachers walked out during Bush’s talk. Sadly, 41 never had to use a zinger. Afterward, though, students devoted to free speech and higher learning turned over what they believed was the former president’s official car. It wasn’t. Bush’s real auto left, undisturbed, by another route. Hating student violence, Gamble had seen it in Canada before moving south. Living in Carmel, California, he now continues to dispense good humor to Republicans across the land.

  Bush’s 1990s return to public life was as unexpected as Gamble’s 1980s entrance. In late summer 1993, we devised a running joke to lace 41’s speeches. Bush said that he had vowed not to criticize Clinton for a full year after the November 1992 election. He then said, “And I’ve kept my promise.” Chuckles. “But, you know, I checked the calendar this morning.” More laughter. “Only __ days to go.” Applause. The criticism was gentle. Bush backed democracy in Haiti but called U.S. ground forces there “a tremendous mistake.” Unlike Clinton, he did not support the overthrown president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At home, Bush attacked Clinton’s bid for health-care reform. Poppy’s interest was becoming less his party than his sons. In 1994 George W. and Jeb ran as Republican candidates for governor of Texas and Florida, respectively. Suddenly, Poppy was back in politics, agreeing to campaign for both.

  W. was said to be his mother’s son: direct and acerbic. “I have my father’s eyes and my mother’s mouth,” he often said, to laughter. Jeb was closer to dad, soft-spoken and sensitive. Bush found it harder to be a member of the candidate’s family than the candidate: “As the front guy you slug back. The family has to take it, be resigned. It’s the worst thing in the world.” Worse is to lose, which Barbara, urging W. not to run, thought he would do against Ann Richards, loathed by the clan since her acidic 1988 convention speech: “Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Early polls in Florida showed Jeb ahead of Lawton Chiles, Election Day proving the saw that “a week in politics is like a year anywhere else.” Jeb lost to Chiles amid charges of vote fraud similar to 1960 Chicago. W. showed discipline veiled for most of his forty-eight years, Bush’s on-message campaign burying Richards by 334,066 votes. The family victory was almost as fulfilling as 1988’s.

  In April 1995 an incident widened the gulf among how Bush père was viewed by wings of the Republican Party. White supremacists exploded the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168, among them former Secret Service agent Al Whicher, on Bush’s protective detail when Poppy was vice president and president. When a GOP angel, the National Rifle Association (NRA), refused to repudiate attacks on federal law enforcement after the bombing, Bush resigned his NRA life membership, saying, “Al Whicher was no Nazi. He was a kind man, a loving parent, a man dedicated to serving his country—and serve it well he did.” Bush would not abide this diatribe against a friend. “Your broadside against federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor,” he wrote NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. Some NRAers responded, heatedly: 41 raised our taxes, gave us Clinton, and now this—what was next?

  One was Grover Norquist, an NRA director, who founded the influential advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform in 1985—Darth Vader and Banquo’s ghost to the Left and Right, respectively. Since the 1990s each Republican presidential nominee, most governors, and almost every congressional candidate had signed Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge—the tie that bound the scattered GOP. Its genesis was Bush breaking his 1988 convention pledge: “Bush managed the collapse of the Soviet Union, kicked Iraq out of Kuwait, had a 90 percent approval rating. However, he agreed to a tax-increase deal [consisting of] two dollars of spending cuts for every one dollar of taxes. And he lost the Presidency.” To the Right’s elite, Bush raising taxes made all that he did suspect. That was not the view of his Secret Service detail, which idolized him—nor most conservatives, furious here at the NRA—nor those helping to dedicate the Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M in College Station, the eleventh presidential library to open to the public.

  To reach it, a visitor travels Highway 290 north from Houston to Hempstead, keeps north on Highway 6 to Bryan, takes Business 6 at College Station to the second light and turns left on FM 2919, then sees George Bush Drive at A&M. You turn right and proceed to the Bush library, which links a museum, archives, Centers for Presidential, Leadership, and International Studies, and classroom space for the Departments of Economics, Sociology, and Political Science. Also visible at the November 6, 1997, opening were a Gulf War exhibit, replicas of Air Force and Camp David offices, Bush exhibits, and a display of family books, videos, and computer goings-on, as well as five presidents—the current (Clinton), three past (Bush, Carter, and Ford), and a future (George W.)—and their wives, plus Lady Bird Johnson and Nancy Reagan.

  The guests of honor arrived by train the day before. Huge flags bannered “Welcome to College Station,” “Aggies 4 Bush,” and “Gig ’em George.” A bronze statue put every visitor in freedom’s saddle: The Day the Wall Came Down, by Veryl Goodnight, showing horses jumping over pieces of the Berlin Wall. An estimated fifty thousand people heard Governor Bush proclaim, “Here, objective historians will look at his record and conclude President Bush was a man who knew his priorities and never wavered from them. President Bush was a man who entered the political arena and left with his integrity intact. President Bush was a leader who stared tyranny in the face and never blinked. George Bush was a great president of the United States because he is first and foremost a great man.”

  Increasingly, tentatively, W.’s “great man” began to leave his cocoon. In 1997 the International Parachute Association invited Bush to be guest of honor at an annual meeting, during which he recalled bailing out of the Navy Avenger in 1944 as his two crewmates stayed behind. “As I recounted these errors, something happened,” Bush next day wrote his children. “For some reason, I went back to a thought I had way in the back of my mind. It has been there, sleeping like Rip Van Winkle, alive but not alive. Now it was quite clear. I want to make one more parachute jump!” He expected Barbara to object, but as he continued, “in the final analysis I will convince her (1) that it is safe and (2) that this is something I have to do, must do.” Colin Powell was incredulous. “Are you planning to jump from a plane?” he asked. “It’s the talk of the Pentagon. I know you look forty-five, but you’re seventy-two. How are your ankles, knees, etc.?” Bush went ahead anyway. Eleven days before the jump—J-day—he called each of his children. All gave consent, though not carefree advice.

  Finally, on March 25, 1997, “caught up in the spirit of it all, totally hyped”—wearing his Desert Storm boots, white helmet, and white gloves—Bush termed it his “White Elvis suit”—and having learned the jumpers’ secret handshake, ending with index fingers pointed at each other, a signal to pull the rip cord, Bush jumped with the U.S. Army’s famed Golden Knights—su
ccessfully. To 41, it was almost surrealistic. “The floating to death took longer than I thought, but I wish it could have gone on twice as long,” he said. “I didn’t hit hard, but a gust of wind seemed to pull me back . . . I was down. It had gone well. I had lived a dream.”

  Mrs. Bush hugged him. To millions of Americans, this was the most appealing Bush since the Persian Gulf. The media covered it around the world. That year, discussing a speech, he suddenly told me, “You know, it’s the damnedest thing. I was worried people would laugh at me. I did it to honor my mates, and to prove that old guys can still do things.” Bush started laughing. “I go abroad, and even foreign leaders ask, ‘Tell me about the jump!’” They were still asking in 2009 and 2014 when incredibly he jumped to celebrate turning eighty-five and ninety, respectively.

  Acting against type, Bush jump-started his popularity with the jump—but what about his legacy? Refusing to write a memoir—too many Is—he finally agreed to collaborate with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, whom Bush trusted implicitly, and James McCall, a young staffer and historian, on a book about his administration’s record, the Gulf War, and the Soviet Union. In 1998’s A World Transformed, Bush and Scowcroft wrote first-person passages, including excerpts from Bush’s diaries, which relatively few then knew existed. A year later other diary entries and letters from childhood to the present were published in All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings. The entries and letters largely affirmed the Bush I thought I knew and had written for on that assumption for a decade—kind, sentimental, stoic. They form a revealing window on Bush’s mental and emotional world.

  Another window was even clearer: a father’s regard for his sons, and nation’s regard for him. The current Gallup Poll says that most Americans view Bush père favorably, many very, giving him a 60 percent approval rating. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan writes, “He is increasingly acknowledged as a great diplomat, a patriot, a steady and sophisticated president, an exemplar of the greatest generation.” Many in Bush’s own party, especially conservatives, however, still bay for the Gipper.

  In 2008 such GOP presidential candidates as Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Mitt Romney spoke at a regional convention in Tennessee. Its largest-selling button read, “I Miss Ronald Reagan.” Bush told W., “The Far Right will continue to accuse me of ‘Betraying the Reagan Revolution’—something Ronald Reagan would never do.” Bush did not betray the Reagan Revolution as much as politically he failed to strengthen it. In 1998 W. and Jeb again ran for governor. This time both won, partly because of a remarkably selfless dad.

  Pop wrote each that August:

  So read my lips—no more worrying. At some point both of you may want to say, “Well, I don’t agree with Dad on that point,” or “Frankly I think Dad was wrong on that.” Do it [author’s emphasis]. Chart your own course, not just on the issues but on defining yourselves. No one will ever question your love of family—your devotion to your parents. We have all lived long enough and lived in a way that demonstrates our closeness, so do not worry when the comparisons might be hurtful to your Dad for nothing can ever be written that will drive a wedge between us—nothing at all.

  In effect, George Bush was freeing each son to further his career by using him as a foil.

  The amazing fact, thought Tom DeFrank, is that George W. Bush’s triumph, which his dad helped make possible—a two-term presidency, something that escaped the father—ultimately helped resurrect Bush Sr. in America’s and the world’s sight. “One of the great ironies of their relationship is that the performance of the son helped remake the father’s image,” DeFrank believed. “Bush 43 talks compellingly about his father’s ‘unconditional love’, and that must be true since he opposed much of what 41 did. His stewardship helped rehabilitate the father’s relationship with the American people and with history.”

  To Noonan, Bush was a foreign-policy “realist.” He was “prudent after the end of the Soviet Union, he was tactful, and when he said he had to go to war in Kuwait he built a world-wide coalition, did the job he said he would do, and stopped when that job was done.” Increasingly, she felt Bush deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for “his work in the days after the [fall of the] Soviet Union” and his help making Germany whole and free. In response, friends were “no longer startled and usually nod in agreement.”

  DeFrank understood, thinking Poppy the “last great Republican moderate” and the “best human being in the White House since Gerald Ford.” The result: George H. W. Bush was much more “respected, and in many cases, truly revered” than on leaving office in 1993.

  An example of 41’s “unconditional love” was religion. George H. W. Bush was intensely, but privately, religious. Antipodally, as Timothy Naftali wrote, “following a hard-drinking, hard-partying adolescence that stretched until age 40, George W. Bush embraced evangelical Christianity” in a most sincere but public way.

  On December 13, 1999, the Iowa Caucus only six weeks away, each GOP candidate in a presidential debate in Des Moines was asked by moderator John Bachman to name his favorite political philosopher or thinker. Bush answered, “Christ, because he changed my heart,” later saying he thought the question to mean, “Who’s had the most influence on your life?” To many, it was a thoughtful, even inspired, choice. It won Iowa, helped W. survive later primary defeat, and almost surely made his presidency possible. Elites went hysterical. Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, foamed about W.’s coalition living “under a tent.” Reverend C. Christopher Epting, bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Iowa, hissed in a nasty December 15 New York Times article that a profession of faith by candidates “could be a turn off for those who fear a heavy-handed Christianity in the White House.” Apparently, it was worse for the more than 80 percent of Americans who call themselves Christian—his own flock—to profess their religion too openly than not to profess it at all.

  Bush the Elder was sufficiently moved by this to write Epting, starting, “This is not a political letter. It is simply a letter from a father about one of his sons. It is written from the heart. Certainly it is not intended to be offensive in any way.” He noted that he had felt uncomfortable as president wearing “my religion on my sleeve” but that “what he [George] said was true. Jesus Christ did turn our son’s life into something virtuous. Christ as revealed in the Bible has taught him to love God and love people and that’s what he is doing.” Bush observed that fils had read the Bible twice, from cover to cover, “respected all faiths, and never tried to impose his views on others.” Moreover, Bachman had asked Bush to “expand on his views only after George made a simple statement about Jesus Christ.” The camera switched to the next candidate, missing what “those in attendance tell me . . . was a tear in our son’s eyes.”

  Epting wrote back, substituting “Mr. Bush” for the more polite “Mr. President,” saying the “awkwardness” he had cited in the Times dealt with Jesus being called “a political philosopher or thinker.” This seems extremely curious, since even those sans a Christian or any faith concede philosophy pervades the Sermon on the Mount, the Last Supper, and other teachings. More curiously, Epting ended with a nauseous assault against “a narrow fundamentalism . . . far from . . . Christ.” I myself feel awkward around fundamentalism’s public profession of faith. However, there is little narrow about its huge appeal, as even a cursory glance at membership shows. Instead, narrow better describes the appeal of liberal Protestant sects like the reverend’s Episcopalianism or my boyhood Presbyterianism. Bush wrote as a loving father seeking understanding for his son. Perhaps Epting, now assisting bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, might try to understand why so many people are no longer buying what denominations like ours are trying to sell.

  A month later Bush addressed the Nixon library, saying, “My time for contributing to this work in the public arena is now past. I had my chance, and did my best, and hopefully got a few things right,” he said, modestly. “Of course, 1992 did not work out the way we hoped, but I have tr
ied not to criticize my successor—understanding that he has a hard job to do, and that there are plenty of good people in the loyal opposition out there fighting for many of the beliefs that I share.” Bush’s belief in bipartisanship was as rare as his humility in the 2000 public square. “They don’t need one more back-bencher in Houston, Texas, saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I used to do it this way.’ My sons don’t need me doing that, either.” What they, especially W., needed was less for Dad to speak on their behalf than to raise money: first in the older son’s primaries vs. John McCain; then the general election vs. Al Gore—to Bush Sr., still “the Ozone Man.”

  After W.’s victory in Iowa, Bush introduced him in New Hampshire by saying, “This boy of ours will not let you down.” McCain made sport of the fact that it took a man to be president, whereupon W. lost the primary by nineteen points, after which Dad seldom introduced him again. Instead, he utilized his network for money and personnel; appeared, like Barbara, wherever the campaign thought useful; and after eight years of Bill Clinton, including an affair in the Oval Office with an intern only seven years older than his daughter, reminded Republicans, then the general electorate, what it had liked about Bush—someone worthy of the office. The South Carolina primary was fils’s pivot, Karl Rove his Atwater. After McCain later withdrew, Junior chose the Senior Bush’s defense secretary, Dick Cheney, as vice president. At the convention, parents sat, beaming, as W. said, “Mother, everyone loves you and so do I. Growing up, she gave me love and lots of advice. I gave her white hair. And I want to thank my father—the most decent man I have ever known. All my life I have been amazed that a gentle soul could be so strong. And Dad, I want you to know how proud I am to be your son.”