by Nancy Gibbs
That ended that. But what did the father think? One top official who supported the war explained that in the period leading up to the invasion, the father avoided all interviews and speeches, certain that anything he said about any aspect of the war or its implications would explode into its own sideshow. Whether he supported or opposed the war apart from his son, the official said, is moot, because the father could never separate the one from the other. Instead, the father believed that his son had plenty of advisors who were far more clued in than he was; but he had only one father to offer unconditional support when everyone else had doubts. And so even if the father had his reservations, he decided what role he would play. “With 41, it was, I’m supporting this guy 100 percent,” this official said. “No distance.”
Where he did speak out, he did so according to club rules. “I want the US president to have as much worldwide support as possible,” Bush 41 said in a September 2002 interview with Time. “But I want to do it the way the President wants it done. If he decides we must act alone, I’m with him all the way.”
Those who spoke to the father said he worried less about the policy than the burden on the son. The two did discuss the looming war at Camp David on Christmas 2002 and the gist of that conversation, at least as the son related it in his memoirs, amounted to a blessing. “For the most part, I didn’t seek Dad’s advice on major issues,” Bush wrote. “He and I both understood that I had access to more and better information than he did.” But what is also clear is that the father was very troubled. It’s not that the decision was unpopular at the time: polls were running 63 percent in support of an invasion in February 2003; it’s that he couldn’t ignore the critics. The static level was very difficult for the father to bear. Laura Bush told her father-in-law to stop watching the television; the president told his father not to worry. But he worried anyway. “It’s my job to worry,” he told Time’s Hugh Sidey in early March. Few better understood how paralyzing the pressure of the decision could be. Before sending troops to Panama in 1989, the elder Bush had lain in bed the night before, literally unable to move his neck or arms. “The tension had taken hold, the responsibility for those lives, even though I had been in combat myself,” he said. “The decision on the war cannot finally be made by a committee or a general. It must be made by one person—the President.”
It was that burden—more than the merits of the enterprise itself—that the two men discussed when the decision was actually made. Bush signed off on the war on March 19, 2003, with the words “for the peace of the world and the benefit and freedom of the Iraqi people, I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. May God bless America.” He left the Situation Room, walked up one flight of stairs, through the Oval Office, and out on the South Lawn for a walk and prayer. His father had done much the same thing in 1991 when he launched the Gulf War. When Bush returned, he sat down in the Treaty Room and wrote his father a letter, he said later, because “There was one man who understood what I was feeling.”
Dear Dad,
In spite of the fact that I had decided a few months ago to use force, if need be, to liberate Iraq and rid the country of WMD, the decision was an emotional one. . . . I know I have to take the right action and do pray few will lose life. Iraq will be free, the world will be safer. The emotion of the moment has passed and now I wait word on the covert action that is taking place. I know what you went through.
Bush faxed the letter to his father in Texas; a few hours later, his father replied, invoking the most sacred name in the family to bolster the commander in chief.
Your handwritten note, just received, touched my heart. You are doing the right thing. Your decision, just made, is the toughest decision you have had to make up until now. But you made it with strength and with compassion. It is right to worry about the loss of innocent life be it Iraqi or American. But you have done that which you had to do. Maybe it helps a little bit as you face the toughest bunch of problems any president since Lincoln has faced. You carry the burden with strength and grace. . . . Remember Robin’s words: I love you more than tongue can tell.
Well, I do.
Devotedly, Dad
The Father-Son Thing
The familial comfort the two men shared became more valuable when the substance became more uncomfortable.
The senior Bush, who had been known to spend entire mornings at his computer scanning the Internet for news, gossip, criticism, and even wild conspiracy theories if they amused him, sometimes took it on himself to wage a quiet one-man campaign against his son’s critics. He would often start the day by firing off an angry letter to some columnist or pundit who had disapproved of something his son had done or said, sometimes letting the offender have it for several paragraphs before deleting his message entirely or just saving it to DRAFT. But he sometimes hit SEND. Exactly eleven years after the head of the Episcopal Church criticized him for invading Kuwait (Bush had held his tongue at the time), he fired back in private letters when the new head of the church opposed his son’s intervention in Iraq.
The president, sensing his father’s agitation, fell into a predictable pattern. “I would call him and mother would answer the phone and [she would] say, ‘Your father . . . I can’t believe he’s listening to all this stuff. George, you need to talk to your Dad.’ And I became the comforter. I’d say, ‘Hey Dad, I’m doing great. I know it’s tough out there, but don’t worry about me.’ And so our roles got reversed.” The elder Bush explained later that “watching your son take a pounding from his critics was much, much harder” than being president. “Barbara quit reading the papers and watching the news, but I couldn’t do that.”
Bush often called his parents first thing in the morning, when they were still in bed in Houston or Maine, drinking coffee and sharing the newspapers as they had done for years. The phone would ring, and they would put their son on speakerphone. Ever sensitive to charges of puppeteering, Mrs. Bush let it be known that certain restrictions were observed. “The rules are: no repeating what he tells you and no giving unsolicited advice and no passing on things that people ask you to give the President . . . gifts or advice or ideas or wanting jobs,” his mother recalled. “We just have made that deal because we were there. We know what it’s like.”
Father and son joined forces on one project: keeping Mom from unleashing her famously wicked tongue. While the former president knew how to mince his words in public, the former first lady was not as reliable. So husband and son conspired against her; specifically, they worked on her individually to make sure she didn’t sound off when a microphone was nearby. “It took a joint effort to keep her quiet,” one key advisor explained. Sometimes, she was a useful early-warning system. After Bush called in 2002 for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that did not include PLO leader Yassir Arafat, his mother phoned one day with a question: “How’s the first Jewish president doing?” Bush later said he “laughed off Mother’s wisecrack,” but guessed that if she was unimpressed by his speech, so was his father.
When Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004, he snapped the family’s one-term curse. Bush finally reached his father on the telephone the next day. “I could tell he was happy I would not have to go through what he did.” But by then, the father was well over his own defeats. “I am not trying to build a legacy,” he explained in late November 2004. “I will leave that to the historians. If I get a good shake, then fine. If I don’t, I’ll be in heaven.” And he came back to those who imagined he was somehow pulling strings, secretly guiding policy—or as his son’s liberal critics imagined, being shut out of the conversation altogether. Those critics, he said, “do not, maybe cannot, understand what it is like for a father who wants to stand by his son, close up, cheering him on, arguing his case, being there for him if he gets down. We can talk on issues, but it’s not real in depth. It’s not his saying to me, ‘What do I do now?’ It’s the pride of a father in a son and it transcends or avoids the issues. You know, the idea that George wanted t
o redeem me after my loss, all this crazy stuff like that, it has nothing to do with that.”
Just as likely, something subtler was also going on. The elder Bush’s foreign policy had been a constant crusade against instability; he, Baker, and Scowcroft worked at every level, but particularly in the Middle East, to slow the pace of change and build in hedges, usually well out of public view, against an unknown future. They got little credit for keeping bad things from happening. But they kept the ship in the channel.
But after 9/11, the younger Bush’s team looked at the old order as managed by the father’s generation and said, “That won’t work; we need something new.” They then set out to change it, first in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and ultimately with a highly public “freedom agenda” across the globe that was as bold as it was unsustainable. It is likely that the father watched this unfold desperately hoping the son was right, and that times had changed, that the era of quiet diplomacy had ended and something new was needed, all the while fearing that the new strategy might be wrong. Meanwhile, the son was thinking that no one from his father’s generation could really grasp the risks and perils that now beset the United States, that their outlook was great for its time but obsolete in this newer age; and that U.S. strategy, whatever the risks and uncertainties, had to move quickly to embrace the change.
Between father and son, it was virtually impossible to reconcile the two worldviews, which meant there was no point in talking about it and so they fell back on family—a safer place anyway, where everyone knows what to say. “What people can’t possibly imagine,” George W. Bush explained, “is what it’s like to have two presidents who have a relationship as father and son—they envision us sitting around the table endlessly analyzing the different issues and strategies and tactics. It’s much simpler than that and more profound.”
In all families, some things are just better left unsaid; in the Bush family, the subjects that were off-limits sometimes included their two presidencies.
As the roadside attacks on American troops in Iraq increased in 2005 and 2006, the father struggled to keep his balance. In November 2006, a woman rose to question him after a speech in Abu Dhabi. “We do not respect your son,” she said. “We do not respect what he’s doing all over the world.” While other members of the crowd expressed their agreement with whoops and whistles, the father fought back. “This son is not going to back away,” he replied, his voice catching. “He’s not going to change his view because some poll says this or some poll says that. You can’t be president of the United States and conduct yourself if you’re going to cut and run. This is going to work out in Iraq. I understand the anxiety. It’s not easy.”
He went on: “I have strong opinions on a lot of these things. But the reason I can’t voice them is, if I did what you ask me to do, tell you what advice I give my son, that would then be flashed all over the world. If it happened to deviate one iota, one little inch, from what the president’s doing or thinks he ought to be doing, it would be terrible. It would bring great anxiety not only to him but to his supporters.”
Having made this candid admission, he then asked for mercy. “He is working hard for peace.” It takes a lot of nerve, he said, “to get up and tell a father about his son in those terms when I just told you the thing that matters in my heart is my family.”
A Model for the Afterlife
As Bush’s second term wound down, the old taboo against joint appearances lifted. They began to talk about each other in public more; they occasionally even referred to each other by number, a signal that they no longer had to pretend that the other didn’t exist. “It’s quite an honor to be introduced by your dad,” Bush said as he opened a new embassy in China in mid-2008. “This has got to be a historic moment, father and son, two presidents, opening up an embassy. I suspect it’s the first, although I must confess I haven’t done a lot of research in the itinerary of the Adams boys.” It was a rare reference to the other father-son dynasty. “My dad was a fabulous president. And I tell people one reason why was not only did he know what he was doing. He was a fabulous father.”
Finally, it is a measure of how much changed in eight years that, though Bush was not inclined to credit his father for helping him win the White House, he was quick with praise for teaching him how to leave it. He studied the post-presidencies of Reagan and Truman; during a trip to New York in his final year in office, he told aides he did not want to spend his time hanging around the United Nations the way Bill Clinton did. Instead, he looked once more to his father. He went back to Texas and began to tell some of the same daily stories of housework and chores that his father had retailed after he left office in 1993. “I watched him carefully and how he moved on with his life. He didn’t linger. He didn’t have a sense of needing to hang on to the presidency. I learned from him that when it’s over, it’s over. . . . Once you’re off the stage, you’re off the stage.”
25
“Tell 41 and 42 That 43 Is Hungry”
—GEORGE W. BUSH
George Herbert Walker Bush was wrapping up some meetings in Manhattan late in 2006 when he learned that the private jet that was to take him home needed some unscheduled maintenance.
Restless even at age eighty-two and suddenly footloose in the city for a couple of hours, Bush turned his small motorcade around and headed toward Harlem to see his new best friend. “I’m gonna visit Bill,” he told an aide. “Can you let him know we are coming?” As Bush sped north toward 125th Street, his Secret Service detail scrambled to alert their counterparts shadowing Bill Clinton that his predecessor was on the way over for a spontaneous howdy-do.
Clinton wasn’t in the office that day; in fact, he wasn’t even in New York. But that did not prevent the forty-first president from favoring the forty-second with a visit. Bush’s motorcade pulled up in front of Clinton’s offices in a federal building on Harlem’s main thoroughfare, where Bush and his entourage got out and headed to the fourteenth floor. Undeterred by Clinton’s absence, Bush made the rounds in Clinton’s suite anyway, posing for pictures, signing autographs, chatting up staffers. And when he came to Clinton’s office, he walked in, sat down, put his feet up on the massive desk, and said, “Let’s call Bill!”
Soon a connection was made: “Hey Bill, nice office up here in Harlem! Great view! Nice people! Where are you, anyway?”
Through the ages, the Presidents Club has seen its share of rivalries, alliances, even some true friendships. But no relationship is quite like the bond between George H. W. Bush and the man who defeated him in 1992. The connection surprised both men, and astonished many of their longtime aides. Bush would go so far as to suggest more than once that he might be the father that Clinton had always lacked—a notion that the younger man did not dispute. And if the closeness of the relationship surprised people, so did its origin: it was Bush’s actual son who made it happen.
Rescue Mission
Fifty-eight minutes after midnight on December 26, 2004, a tremor erupted thirty miles below the surface in waters off the coast of Sumatra. Though earthquakes in that region are a normal occurrence, tremors of this size were not; at 9.0 on the Richter scale, the Boxing Day quake was at the time among the two or three largest ever recorded. Two massive tectonic plates gave way, shifting in some places twenty meters or more. That sudden wrinkle in the earth’s crust roared upward through the sea, creating a series of massive tsunamis, some more than twenty meters high, which began barreling toward the coasts of more than a dozen countries. When these waves came ashore hours later, parts of towns and cities—and their residents—along the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand were swept away.
The tsunami left more than 165,000 dead, tens of thousands missing, and millions homeless. The sheer number of corpses choked morgues and medical facilities and raised fears of famine and disease. Dramatic videos, shot by awestruck tourists, turned up on the Internet. Millions of dollars in aid pledges poured in from all over the world, including more than $350 million from the U
.S. government. Back in Washington, George W. Bush and his advisors searched for an appropriate way to coordinate and direct the outpouring of aid from private sources, which would quickly grow to dwarf anything governments could bring to bear. It was the president who came up with the idea of asking his two predecessors to work together. Both were proven fund-raisers in very different realms and both had world-class Rolodexes.
Bush and Clinton were described many times as the Oscar and Felix of American politics, one proper and prudent, the other all appetite and instinct. Clinton’s presidency tested the question of whether you could run the country like a series of all-night bull sessions while one of Bush’s favorite questions—what if we do nothing?—defined the best and worst of his presidency. Their hard-fought 1992 campaign had left scars. Clinton, then forty-six, made repeated reference to Bush’s age, and called the incumbent president “old.” Bush had called Clinton a “bozo,” and at one point suggested that his dog knew more about foreign policy than Clinton did. Bush assumed he was going to win right up to the end and when he lost, took the defeat hard.
But Bush the younger had good reason to think, ten years on, that the scars had healed. It helped that both men were now former presidents. At the opening of the Clinton library in Little Rock in November 2004, the elder Bush delivered gracious remarks about Clinton that delighted the huge crowd gathered in a driving rainstorm. “It has to be said that Bill Clinton was one of the most gifted American political figures in modern times. Believe me, I learned that the hard way. He made it look too easy and oh, how I hated him for that.” Inside the museum, the two paired off: while touring the modern, glass-wrapped facility that overlooks the Arkansas River, Bush and Clinton got lost in conversation and fell far behind the main party of dignitaries. Bush 41 peered at one point outside a window and asked Clinton what he was going to do with all the empty property that lay fallow to the east of the library. When Clinton seemed uncertain, Bush urged him to think about making it his gravesite; and to decide soon, so that he could oversee arrangements for the media and crowds. It’s the kind of thing a president has to think about—or be reminded to think about by another president: that your death, your funeral, and your burial ground are very public matters.