by Curt Smith
Bush père “was the last president of a great generation,” W. said. “Now the question comes to [its] sons and daughters. . . . What is asked of us?” Bush Jr.’s answer was “compassionate conservatism”—to some, a Trojan horse for greater spending, ever-larger government, and social engineering in rightist garb. His philosophy didn’t defeat Al Gore in November. Not being Gore and Bill Clinton was enough—barely. In September I interviewed Bush Sr. at Kennebunkport for my Rochester, New York, CBS TV affiliate series Perfectly Clear. He was friendly but preoccupied: the campaign was going badly. Ironically, the following debates pivoted the election, Gore losing more than Bush won—sighing and rolling eyes in one, seeming numb in another, crowding Bush physically in the last. The Old Man—W.’s affectionate moniker—viewed every minute. Mrs. Bush, the house Cassandra, would not watch.
Election Day came, stayed, and wouldn’t leave. Early that night the networks gave Florida to Vice President Gore and thus, it seemed, the presidency. Jeb, the Sunshine State’s governor, was aghast, having thought it solid for his brother. The Bush clan was in Austin, Bush Sr. feeling like the baseball announcer of a bad team who turned fifty in August. “I don’t mind that,” the broadcaster said. “It’s just that when the season began I was forty-three.” As Florida, mocking early projections, seesawed back toward Bush, then Gore, then Bush, then “undecided,” the former president, seventy-six, told a friend, “I feel twice my age.” Early in the morning, Florida was declared for Bush, giving him the 270 electoral votes needed to become president. That decision, laughed a friend, lasted “about as long as it takes to recite the oath of office.”
Gore closed the gap. Florida again turned undecided, the networks throwing up their hands. Prince Al led by about 500,000 popular votes nationally—but neither candidate had a majority of the Electoral College. For thirty-six days neither would, as lawyers on behalf of each side took over, honorary family member James Baker leading Bush’s. A recount began and continued until the U.S. Supreme Court Bush v. Gore ruling ended it. Bush the Elder no longer felt 152—seventy-six times “twice”—years old.
The night of the Supreme Court verdict, Al Gore conceded in a memorable speech. Bush 41, knowing political victory and defeat, called the White House switchboard to congratulate the vice president. He then saw the televised image of his son, about to address the nation from the Texas State Legislature. As the camera “focused on George and Laura walking into the chamber,” he wrote in All the Best, George Bush, his body “was literally wracked with uncontrollable sobs. It just happened. No warning, no thinking that this might be emotional for a mother or dad to get through—just an eruption from deep within me where my body literally shook. Barbara cried, too. We held hands.”
On January 20, 2001, the new president took the oath of office, gave his inaugural address, and went to the Oval Office, where he wanted his first visitor to be someone who had been there before. The visitor was already in the family quarters of the White House having a hot bath when he learned that “the president wants to see you.” The guest rose, dried, and dressed quickly, because he knew that a president’s time is precious. He made his way to the Oval Office, to be greeted by his son.
“He knew how much this would mean to his dad, and he wanted to share his first moments in this revered office with him,” said Barbara Bush, later describing how George W. poignantly set the scene. He also wanted the world to know that his father had been visitor number one. For his part, to show respect for W., erase confusion with his son, and write finis to his political career, Dad said that he should now be called George H. W. Bush, restoring the patrician name he had dropped when he entered Texas politics. George W. would be known as W., Junior, or Bush 43. Dad would be dubbed Bush 41, Senior, or George H. W. The gymnastics both did to honor the other did honor to each.
The Bushes were America’s first presidential father-son combination since the early nineteenth-century Adamses. A more intriguing comparison was 43 vs. 41. At first their terms differed on, among other things, the role of foreign vs. domestic policy; the urgency of tax cuts vs. need for a balanced budget; the efficacy of 43’s defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and whether the Strategic Defense Initiative had largely won the Cold War—fils was more sure than père. These and other fissures faded in 9/11’s wake.
The elder Bushes had left Houston early on September 11 to fly to St. Paul, Minnesota, to speak before returning home at night. Their private plane was diverted to Milwaukee, the Secret Service saying that their eldest son and daughter-in-law were safe in Florida and DC, respectively. That night the Bushes talked to people at a mall in Milwaukee, where they were to buy walking shoes, go for a walk, and eat at a family restaurant. Next day, terrorist strategy still murky, U.S. airspace was closed. An exception was the Bushes, flown to Kennebunkport.
Overnight 43’s presidency changed from an emphasis on domestic policy—the environment, cell research, and education, working together with Democrats to pass “No Child Left Behind”—to an officially undeclared war on terrorism. “He can run, but he can’t hide,” Bush, quoting boxer Joe Louis, said of Osama bin Laden, leader of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, which had planned and implemented the attack on the Pentagon and New York’s Twin Towers. W. fingered the Taliban regime, Osama’s sanctuary in Afghanistan, then eyed Saddam Hussein, Dad’s bête noire, as a force behind Al-Qaeda. Usually Bush the Elder and Rumsfeld treated each other as the price you pay for entering politics. Independently, though, they now reached the same conclusion. In January 2002, 43 included Hussein’s Iraq with North Korea and Iran in an “axis of evil.” Pop would have agreed, saying, “I don’t hate a lot of people. I don’t hate that easy.” Hussein, though, who Bush wrongly thought would be overthrown after the Gulf War, would have to involuntarily retire—or worse.
As W. debated whether to attack or not—in effect, “nation build,” what he vowed not to do in the 2000 campaign—the media wondered if 41 was advising him on Hussein. In 2002 Scowcroft wrote a Wall Street Journal article suggesting Bush not invade and occupy Iraq. Would he have done so without 41’s consent? Would the United States inherit a quagmire, sans exit plan, violating 41’s three criteria to invade? Bush Sr. was nowhere to be heard. In an interview with journalist Bob Woodward, W. raised as many questions as he answered: “I don’t remember” what, if any, advice he got from pop. “You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher Father that I appeal to.” Most Americans, unlike elite journalists, grasped Bush’s final sentence. What made no sense is that 43 wouldn’t consult 41 about Hussein, Iraq, and the U.S. military. After 1991 who knew more about the region? Why wouldn’t W. consult his dad?
Ultimately, 43 anchored a far smaller UN coalition—less than half the number of nations and 250,000 of the 300,000 troops of the initial invasion force vs. 1990–91’s 800,000 troops, including half a million Americans—than his father assembled. The attack’s rationale—Hussein had nuclear “weapons of mass destruction”—was never proved. Hussein was found, tried, and later killed. The U.S. military victory’s “shock and awe” helped W. beat Massachusetts senator John Kerry in the 2004 election, stamping the Bush clan as a political “dynasty,” another term Poppy hated—two presidents of three terms, two governors, one U.S. senator, and a U.S. congressman. “I want our kids to be proud, not intimidated, by what came before,” said Bush Sr. “Just go where their interests are, follow where your hearts lead you, as we did when Bar and I were married.”
For the former First Couple, the autumn of their lives together led to honors in full bloom. Three primary schools and two middle schools in Texas and an elementary school in Mesa, Arizona, were named for Barbara Bush, as were the Barbara Bush Library in Harris County, Texas, and the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine. Mrs. Bush joined the Board of AmeriCare and the Mayo Clinic, though busy with the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. This left little time for, among other things, television. With CBS’
s Murder, She Wrote series canceled in 1996 and the last Murder TV-movie aired in 2003, perhaps she had little to miss. In March 2003 the United States invaded Iraq—to her another reason not to watch. When ABC’s Good Morning America asked Barbara about the tube, to quote W., “she let ’er rip”:
“I watch none,” she bristled. “He [Bush 41] sits and listens and I read books, because I know perfectly well that, don’t take offense, that 90 percent of what I hear on television is supposition when we’re talking about the news. And he’s not, not as understanding of my pettiness about that.” Perhaps the viewer would be. “But why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many this or that or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it’s not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that, and watch him suffer?”
Mrs. Bush’s decision to “read books” should have brought down the house. Instead, the dissonance of a “beautiful mind” and “body bags” helped the ceiling crash. In late August and early September 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and southern Mississippi, displacing thousands of vagabonds from New Orleans to Houston. Visiting a relief center, Mrs. Bush “ripped” again. “I’ve heard almost everyone I’ve talked to say, ‘We’re gonna move to Houston,’” she told the radio program Marketplace. “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. [Many did.] Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality, and so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this”—she chuckled softly—“is working very well for them.” That humor briefly worked less well for her.
A year later it was revealed that she donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund on the condition that the charity work with an educational software company owned by son Neil. Later, Barbara was hospitalized for abdominal pain, an ulcer, and aortic valve replacement surgery. In a 2010 interview with Larry King, she was asked about former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. “I sat next to her once, thought she was beautiful, and I think she’s very happy in Alaska, and I hope she’ll stay there,” she said, curtly. Palin was even colder. “I don’t want to, sort of, concede that we have to get used to this kind of thing [Palin felt it condescension], because I think the majority of Americans don’t want to put up with the blue-bloods.” It was, said a Bush family friend, less that they came from two wings of the party than from two different orbs.
Sacred Heart University and Dartmouth College gave Yale ’48 honorary degrees, the latter a doctor of law. The trek to Hanover evoked a pivotal campaign of George Bush’s long career, the 1988 New Hampshire primary, without which Poppy could not have become president. In 2004 and 2007, he and Mrs. Bush attended the state funeral of Presidents Reagan and Ford, respectively. A month after the Ford funeral, Bush received the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award from Nancy Reagan. Taft and Wilson, Hoover and FDR, Truman and Ike—the list swells of a president and his successor barely speaking to one another, at the inaugural or later. By contrast, Bush’s growing affinity with Bill Clinton truly astonished each other’s staff.
Most forget the illegitimacy many Republicans and independents attached to Clinton during and after his presidency. In late December 2004, responding to a horrific tsunami that killed nearly 300,000 in Asia, W. recruited his dad and Clinton to raise money and relief. Each traveled to the site. Both cut TV ads showing them jointly requesting help. In June 2005 Clinton vacationed in Kennebunkport, causing incredulity, double take, and murmuration. Clearly, they liked each other. Moreover, their budding friendship showed that two foes had turned the page—something our politics in state capitals and especially Washington DC seemed constitutionally incapable of. “This is a great example of the wonderful role former presidents and their libraries can play,” said pollster John Zogby. “In a time of disunity, they remind us of unity—the many things that bring Americans together.”
In 2005 both Presidents Bush, Laura Bush, foreign policy aide Condoleezza Rice, and Chief of Staff Andrew Card traveled with Clinton to attend Pope John Paul II’s funeral at the Vatican. That fall local, state, and federal relief for Hurricane Katrina was slow and bungling. Stores were smashed, businesses looted; more than a thousand people died. Again W. asked 41 and Clinton to head a charitable campaign to help the victims, many homeless, their houses wrecked or gone. America reacted gallantly, sending money and supplies. The campaign further fused the two ex-presidents. In one letter Bush confessed, “I encouraged him to make [another] trip as I thought it would be fun to have him along. It was.”
Once, video caught Clinton falling asleep during a Martin Luther King Day sermon. Bush wrote him, saying, “I could indeed ‘feel your pain’”—Clinton’s aphorism. Bush said that “I don’t remember if I ever told you about the prestigious [Brent] Scowcroft Award,” given in 1989–93 to the person “who fell asleep most soundly during an Administration meeting.” Points were added for “recovery,” waking from a sound sleep and, nodding in agreement to something just said, feigning that you had been awake all along. Joking, Clinton began calling Barbara Bush “Mom.” At Bush fils’s 2013 library dedication at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Clinton called himself “the black sheep of the Bush family.” Even partisans laughed—because of or despite themselves.
In 2006 Bush was feted by the National Italian American Foundation for working to better the lives of all Americans. In 2008, accompanied by W., still in office, Bush met Chinese president Hu Jintao in Beijing, a final trip to the China he loved and whose bona fides had helped make him president. On January 10, 2009, each President Bush and his wife shared a special day—the commissioning of USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77), the U.S. Navy’s tenth and last Nimitz-class supercarrier, a craft that in a different form and age had helped save Poppy’s life. Ironically for Bush, who didn’t learn how to use a computer until he was seventy, this carrier was the first to rely primarily on a computer-based platform, automatically accounting for winds and currents, instead of the paper charts that ships traditionally had used.
The ship’s historian, CMC J. D. Port, used a traditional tribute room to make sure “everyone has a sense of who our namesake was.” Bush’s naval career was recalled, especially his flying of torpedo bombers off the carrier San Jacinto. At the opening a visitor among the eighteen thousand would find a letter from Vice Adm. John S. McCain, the senator’s grandfather, awarding Bush the Distinguished Flying Cross for his mission over Chichi Jima, and nearby in the hangar bay a statue of a young Bush in his flight suit. “We have a feeling that this is our grandfather,” Port said. On January 9 Bush toured the ship for several hours, then next day was escorted down the pier by commanding officer of the aircraft carrier, Capt. Kevin E. O’Flaherty. “I’m feeling very excited, unbelievable, very emotional,” Bush said, “very proud of the kids on this ship.” The pride was reciprocal, Bush back where he belonged.
Turnabout is fair play. In 2003 Senator Edward Kennedy received the third annual Bush Library Foundation’s George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service, causing conservative jaws to drop and liberal throats to chortle. In 2014 Poppy was awarded the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation’s Profile in Courage Award for “risking his reputation and ultimately his political career” by breaking his “No New Taxes” pledge to lower the deficit and fuel prosperity. On February 15, 2011, Bush, having given the Medal of Freedom to, among others, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, received it himself, President Obama saying, “Those of you who know him, this is a gentleman, inspiring citizens to become points of light.”
In July 2013 the ex-president and First Lady were invited back to the White House in recognition of the five thousandth daily Point of Light Award. Later that month, 41 asked why each member of his Secret Service detail had shaved his head. Bush learned that a member’s two-year-old son, identified by his family as “Patrick,” was ill with leukemia, which in 1953 killed the Bushes’ daughter Robin. Bush promptly shaved his head in solidarity with the agents and Patrick, who had lost his hair. Sinc
e 1977 George and Barbara had embraced Houston’s famed M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, helping to raise money for research. In 2004 the center created a clinic in Robin’s name. Now a photo of Bush, smiling and holding Patrick, appeared around the world. A caption might have read, “Points of Light Are Ageless.”
About three years earlier, a form of Parkinson’s disease known as Parkinsonitis, a loss of balance and mobility in the legs, had begun to affect 41. Bush increasingly relied on a cane or motorized wheelchair, “President of the United States” emblazoned on the back. Dispirited, he took heart, I hoped, from America’s response to his 2012–13 stay at Methodist Hospital in Houston. Bush entered November 23, 2012, for a bronchitis-related cough. Supposed to be home by Christmas, he was moved December 23 to the intensive-care unit because of a persistent fever. Family members flew to Houston to be with Bush, the prognosis grave. In critical condition for several days around Christmas, he rallied. By December 30, several weeks before 41’s January 2013 release, family spokesman Jim McGrath said that Poppy was singing with his doctors—endearing, unself-conscious, arguably more beloved than any other elder statesman of his time.
Hospital officials were stunned by the avalanche of people trying to contact the ex-president—in person and by phone, telegram, e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter—apt, since Bush, once so technically challenged that he lampooned his inability to learn Nintendo from his then-ten-year-old grandson, had improbably become e-mail and Twitter taught—his playful e-mail address ending “@flfw.com” for “former leader of the free world.” What appeared so crucial in 1992—entertain, even transport, a crowd—seemed almost irrelevant a quarter-century later. What Bush did worst—glad-hand, attack—is what polling says Americans now disdain. Instead, his forte—honor and competence, a person to admire, even dub a hero—is what we say matters. America’s vision of the man who coined “the vision thing” had profoundly changed in the twilight of his life.