The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

by Nancy Gibbs

  This was a bond that should have been tighter than any club. But families are more complicated than politics.

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  “I Love You More Than Tongue Can Tell”

  —GEORGE H. W. BUSH

  George W. Bush carried a much bigger burden into the Oval Office than his father had.

  His father was the burden. How would he measure up?

  It was commonplace in liberal circles to explain nearly everything about the second Bush presidency in the context of a mad, Oedipal mission that went like this: Bush so longed for his father’s approval that he spent the early part of his life trying to be just like him. And when that didn’t work out so well, he spent the next part of his life trying to defy him, overlearning the lessons of his presidency, overreaching overseas to come up with a cogent foreign policy of his own—only to lead the nation into a disastrous, unnecessary war and ultimately an economic disaster. And all this supposedly happened because once upon a time there was a distant and distracted father, perpetually disappointed in a son who consistently underperformed the family’s expectations.

  It would be easier to dismiss that idea as too tidy if the son did not occasionally seem to acknowledge it. “I know there is a lot of psychobabble out there, that you know he and I compete and was trying to overshadow the father and all this,” George W. Bush said in 2010. “Look, I think people would be surprised to learn that this relationship is based on love. It’s not as complex as some would like it to be. I admired him. And he never disappointed me. He was always a great father. He was always a man who gave unconditional love. And so when it came time to run for president, I was motivated in large part—look I wanted to run. I had an agenda. You know I had a team of people I was coming with. The truth of the matter is that the final motivating factor was my admiration for George Bush and I wondered whether or not I had what it took to get in the arena like he did.”

  But the notion that the relationship between father and son defined the younger man’s presidency has it backward. It was the younger man’s presidency that defined the father-son relationship.

  Two Men, Two Visions

  Inside the Bush clan, George W. had always been larger than life. He was the firstborn, the biggest personality of the five children, the one with the “slightly outrageous streak,” said his aunt Nancy Ellis. He smoked cigarettes as a teenager, whacked golf balls at cars along the coast road in Kennebunkport, and was arrested for drunk driving at the age of thirty. Because he was seven years older than the next surviving child, he was the leader of a large brood of brothers and cousins, the Spanky of his gang, the one they all looked up to. He was, a cousin recalled, “a very broad personality but he always kept just within the lines of truly offensive. The parents would roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh my God, you didn’t,’ but there was some appreciative eye rolling in that.”

  But like most young men, he could stray over the line too. His critics would make much of the fact that he once squared off with his father after banging up the family car; years later, the encounter sounds more banal than formative. “There is an infamous story about me driving home late one night, running over the neighbors’ trash can and then smarting off to Dad. When some people picture that scene, they envision two presidents locked in some epic psychological showdown. In reality, I was a boozy kid and he was an understandably irritated father.”

  What was different was that being the oldest and sharing (most of) his father’s famous name meant that George W. faced challenges his siblings never did. He simply took his parents—and their expectations—more seriously than the children who followed him. “The others almost felt, ‘That’s W’s job,’” said a cousin. “‘We don’t have to measure up. We’re just living our lives here.’” That was partly because George carried scars the others did not: he alone among his siblings had lived at age seven through the death of his younger sister Robin from leukemia in 1953. That childhood trauma made the eldest son live much more in the moment, search for the fun in everything—and bound him even more closely to his blunt-spoken mom. He took his role as protective oldest brother seriously, which sometimes meant playing the role of family clown. “Half the time,” recalled brother Marvin, “he acts younger than all of us combined.” If George took after his mother, he revered his father, which meant that when he was hauled in for discipline, even a mild verdict of “disappointed” from the father could be crushing to the son. He once skipped out a week early on a summer job; when his father called him to his Houston office for a dressing-down, the young man found the experience devastating. His siblings watched the oldest boy collapse at such moments. George “could be made to feel that he had committed the worst crime in the world,” Marvin once said.

  He followed his father’s path through early life: to Andover and then Yale, into the military as a pilot, and then to graduate school at Harvard. But the old investments no longer paid the same dividends: coming from West Texas instead of Greenwich, he found Andover and Yale to be a culture shock; he wore defiantly cowboy boots and a bomber jacket around Cambridge, which was far less hospitable to legatees in the 1960s and 1970s than New Haven had been to his father’s generation in the 1940s and 1950s. After business school, he scratched out a living in the oilfields of the Permian Basin, where his father had prospered and eventually made millions. He made a lunge at a congressional seat at the age of thirty-two, won the primary, and then lost to a seasoned Democrat who painted him as an Eastern-educated carpetbagger who was simply trading on his father’s name. He married a librarian from Midland named Laura Welch, had twins in 1981, and waited for daylight.

  But the oil business turned sour, his drilling ventures languished, and his drinking problem continued until his wife put her foot down. Once he got sober, he still needed a way out from under his father’s shadow and he found one by stepping into it again. In 1986, he moved his family into a townhouse in Washington, where he began work on his father’s 1988 presidential campaign. Bush didn’t much like D.C., but around the campaign’s 14th Street headquarters, where everyone called him Junior, he needed no introduction. He established himself as the family enforcer and took responsibility for bringing in the fast-growing and elusive evangelical vote, memorizing names of religious leaders across the Midwest, sometimes giving seven speeches a day, and realizing for the first time that he might actually be good at the family business. Inside the New Orleans Superdome in August, the son took the microphone to deliver the votes of the Texas delegation that put his father over the top.

  They turned out to be a better team than either man expected. Where his father was methodical, thoughtful, sometimes slow to act, the son was instinctive, impulsive, and famously impatient. If the old man gave all newcomers an even chance, the son regarded strangers as guilty until proven innocent. The incoming president was quick to forgive; his son could hold a grudge forever. “I tend to be a quick judge of people,” he said in 1989. “I don’t know how accurate I am, but all that matters is what I think.” The father delighted in creating an imaginary panel called the Ranking Committee to judge his aides on how well they golfed or played tennis or even slept through important meetings, all in order to keep things light and breezy. By contrast, the son created a truly genuine and completely secret board when his father was elected in 1988 called the Silent Committee, which he convened to make sure that the most ardent Bush loyalists found government jobs. By the time the campaign was over Bush felt that he had expunged any doubts about his utility and won his father’s appreciation. “In the campaign, he and I attained a new level of friendship,” he said afterward, somewhat awkwardly. “I know there were times—I could just tell—when he respected my opinion.”

  Somehow that success freed Bush to go his own way. After his father was sworn in, the son moved his family back to Texas and recruited a team of investors to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team. Bush was laying the foundation for his first genuine business success as well as another run at political office. And, for once, he was not
rushing things. The Dallas Morning News caught him one morning in early 1989 in his office, too busy with backroom negotiations to talk to his father, who was calling from Tokyo. “Dad, I’m fixin’ to give a speech,” he said, just slightly annoyed. “Everything is fine. Call me when you get back from Japan.” He raised millions, did the big deal, took over as general manager—and became a fixture in the Metroplex by prowling the old Arlington Stadium at every home game, sometimes with a bat in hand. “I want the folks to see me sitting in the same kind of seat they sit in, eating the same popcorn, peeing in the same urinal,” he said. More than anything else, said brother Marvin, baseball was “a real opportunity for him to be George W. Bush and not George Bush, Jr.”

  The son stayed away from his father’s White House, except for the occasional family visit, and stuck to the baseball diamond instead. He kept tabs by phone, and he had a few old friends working at key choke points in the White House who kept him up to speed on office politics. When his father asked him in mid-1991 to speak to John Sununu about stepping aside as chief of staff, the suggestion from the son did not budge the president’s top aide. Around the Bush White House, the son was still widely known as “Junior.”

  He bragged in late 1991 that there was no way that the Democrats could defeat his father in 1992 but otherwise had little to do with the reelection campaign. When Bill Clinton prevailed in that contest, both father and son were devastated, though the son was less surprised. Still, it made his 1994 victory over Texas governor Ann Richards all the sweeter and set the stage for his own run for the White House.

  Four years later, he was openly running for president, raising record amounts of money, and acting as if his father didn’t exist. The first two years of the first Bush’s presidency had delivered solid bipartisan achievements at home: a new clean air measure, a historic civil rights act for disabled Americans, and a landmark deficit reduction deal. But each was anathema to the party’s right wing. Which meant the younger Bush would need to take a harder line on economic and social issues while signaling to uncertain independent voters that he wasn’t a hopeless ideologue. Hence the mantle of the “compassionate conservative.” He campaigned for lower taxes, greater participation in government programs by churches and other faith-based groups, and tougher educational standards in the public schools. If his father had run as a kinder and gentler successor to Ronald Reagan, the son would instead run as Reagan.

  At the heart of the son’s strategy was a belief that the first Bush’s presidency had failed because the father didn’t properly manage intra-party politics and, as a result, had failed to win a second term. Bush and his top strategist, Karl Rove, were determined not to make the same mistakes. The first Bush’s record, over time, would come to be recognized for its many successes: the older man dramatically revised the nation’s finances and put them on a path toward a balanced budget; he deftly managed the fall of the Soviet Union, the main enemy of the United States for nearly forty years; he reduced the footprint of U.S. forces overseas and, using overwhelming military force, he ousted Manuel Noriega from power in Panama in a matter of weeks and pushed Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait and back to Iraq in a matter of days.

  His recession lasted two quarters only.

  But it was an article of faith in conservative circles that the presidency of Bush 41 was a failure at best and a betrayal of conservatism at worst—mainly for raising taxes and losing to Clinton. And so while many of the same people who helped the older man in office all pitched in to get the son elected, there was some unspoken awkwardness from the start; the record of the older Bush was never brought to bear to help the younger.

  But if the father was rarely visible, direct criticism of him would not be tolerated. After Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel turned up in Austin to take Bush’s measure in person, he announced to waiting reporters that the younger man was tougher, more conservative, and more disciplined than his father. And though that was exactly the message Rove was hoping to send to the party’s ever-suspicious rank and file, Hagel’s remarks upset the son because they impugned the father. Bush might criticize his father’s way of doing business, but no one else could.

  These protective feelings traveled in both directions. By 2000, with the younger man on the verge of capturing the nomination only eight years after his father had done so, the older man’s feelings of pride surpassed his ability to actually say them out loud. When the time came for the father to shoot the Republican Party’s official biographical video about his son, he broke down on camera and the session had to be halted. On January 21, 2001, the younger Bush was sworn in as the forty-third president wearing the same cuff links his father had worn twelve years earlier. When they finally met alone in the Oval Office later that day, now as club members, neither man could speak. “The moment,” the new president recalled, “was more moving than either of us could have expressed.”

  The Son Becomes the Comforter

  For most of the campaign, an unspoken rule had been observed: the father would be seen and not heard. It followed that any reports of the two men trading tips and pointers were routinely denied. After Bush had secured the nomination—and suddenly needed independent and moderate voters to give him a chance—a few exceptions to that rule were made. “I’m a warrior for my Dad,” he said before the Philadelphia convention during one particularly wide-ranging interview with Walter Isaacson of Time. “My Dad gives me advice when I ask for it,” like when he inquired about how to pick a vice president. “If someone says no,” W. asked his father, “do they mean it?” They talked specifically about the merits of Dick Cheney; the older man knew Cheney’s strengths and weaknesses and believed he would make a good match. (In fact, the younger man’s second choice for the vice president’s job, Senator John Danforth, had been high on his father’s short list in 1988 as well.)

  But after the 9/11 attacks, when Bush was under pressure to be seen as the confident commander in chief, the father stepped back and you could be forgiven for thinking the older man was in another line of work entirely. “Now and then George will ask me about something,” he said, “but I am out of the line. I’m not up on things any longer. And I don’t want to get crossways with his people.” The father knew the battle against Islamic terrorists would be harder and more complicated than those he had waged as president. He urged his son to reach out to Muslims in the United States after 9/11, mindful, he said, of how many American leaders mishandled the Japanese internment issue during World War II. He also told his son that the unity of 9/11 would not last forever. But beyond that, he said, his role was limited to something more basic: “What I can do these days is kind of put my arm around him from hundreds of miles away.”

  “As for making the tough decisions—I knew George could handle it,” Bush recalled to us. “So I didn’t worry too much about that. But on 9/11, I couldn’t quit thinking about George and what he was facing. The whole world changed the minute that the second plane hit the second tower. None of George’s recent predecessors faced a moment like that. None of us.”

  When the president decided in early 2002 that he was going to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, he was undertaking the grandest deviation from his father yet. The elder man had faced the same question in 1991 and pointedly decided trying to overthow Saddam was military folly as well as a diplomatic nightmare. He and Brent Scowcroft had said as much in their joint memoir. Even the son thought his father had done the right thing at the time. But this George Bush believed that times had changed: that 9/11 made the world a more dangerous place, that al Qaeda could either join forces with Saddam to threaten the region or conspire with him to develop nuclear weapons.

  Bush’s march toward war split Bushworld in half in 2002. Many of the father’s advisors were skeptical of war, fearing it would cost billions, distract the United States from its focus on terror, and lead to a military quagmire. The son’s A-team—Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz—were all gung ho, overconfident, uninterested in dissent. James Baker wrot
e an op-ed in the New York Times in August urging prudence (but stopping short of opposing an invasion). Scowcroft wrote a commentary in the Wall Street Journal that flatly opposed military action. The two articles were widely seen by both those who backed Bush and those who opposed him as a coded message from father to son: I wouldn’t do this if I were you.

  What made Scowcroft’s piece remarkable wasn’t that he opposed the invasion; it was that he, alone in the realm of Bush retainers, came out and said what so many of them were privately thinking. Much of the realist Republican cosmos opposed the idea of invading another country on a hunch but was either too conflicted or too scared to take on the popular president a year after 9/11. But Scowcroft, having worked for Nixon, knew too well the dangers of just saluting the commander in chief. “We need to think about this issue very carefully,” Scowcroft wrote. “There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks.”

  When the piece appeared, Bush 43 was furious. Though Scowcroft had never sworn an oath to the son, Bush felt he had violated the family’s code of loyalty. “I was angry that Brent had chosen to publish his advice in the newspaper instead of sharing it with me,” he recalled. “I knew critics would later exploit Brent’s article if the diplomatic track failed.” As for the popular notion that the op-ed was a smoke signal from father to son, Bush said, “that was ridiculous. Of all people, Dad understood the stakes. If he thought I was handling Iraq wrong, he damn sure would have told me himself.”

  When the son complained to his father, the older man put Scowcroft in a different category from all other retainers—and granted him the immunity that came with it. “Son,” he said, “Brent is a friend.”