The official United Nations ambassador’s residence is located in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel—at Fiftieth Street and Park Avenue—on the very top floor. Our apartment was number 42A, on the forty-second floor, and the apartment itself was big and beautiful, consisting of nine rooms, five of which were bedrooms, and a forty-eight-foot living room that was used to host large official receptions. There were high ceilings, handsome old woodwork, working fireplaces, and big windows with beautiful views of New York City. One thing I remember about the apartment was that the flagship store of Steuben glass loaned Mom a stunning collection of Steuben to display in the ambassador’s residence.
Having never lived in an apartment before, I genuinely felt like I was living as Eloise at the Plaza—from the Kay Thompson book. Eloise lived at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, and her rule was, “Getting bored is not allowed!”—and that sounded good to me. I rode the elevators constantly and made friends with Lettie and Mary, two of the elevator operators. I remember doing my homework sitting on the pull-down stool in the Waldorf elevator. Lettie and Mary would even let me turn the elevator crank now and then. I also remember eating hamburgers at Oscar’s, the hotel coffee shop that’s still there today, and bringing my friends there for snacks.
It was just one big adventure. My visiting girlfriends and I would explore the hotel and check out the parties and whatever else was going on. As a young and impressionable girl, of course, being around all that high fashion at the Waldorf had an effect on me. One day, for example, I decided I needed to buy a particular pair of red and green suede shoes that had a bit of a platform heel. I thought they were the greatest. Soon after, one of my cousins, Peggy Peters, a buyer for Bonwit Teller, came to visit. She took one look at them and told me they looked like bowling shoes. I loved them anyway.
During this tour of duty at the Waldorf, one of my best friends, Jodie Dwight, came to stay with us. Jodie’s house was near ours in Kennebunkport, and during the summers Dad would pull up in the boat outside her house and honk the foghorn. She’d come running down the beach, dive into the water, and swim out to us. We’d haul her into the boat and off we’d go—the three of us.
By the time Jodie came to visit us in New York, she and I were at that precocious age when you pull innocent pranks on people like calling up random stores and asking them if they’ve got Prince Albert in a can (well, let him out!). Of course, this was well before the days of caller ID. Can you imagine being asked if your refrigerator was running, and seeing the caller ID: “UN Ambassador’s Residence”?
Another key detail about our apartment at the Waldorf: it was U-shaped, so if you were to stand in one arm of the U and look across and down, you could see right into the apartment below on the other arm of the U. I mention this because, one particular day, Jodie and I just happened—very innocently—to look across and down into the apartment below ours, and there, lying on the bed, was a naked man.
Naturally, two sixth-grade girls found this to be hysterically funny. Quickly, we got a piece of string, a Magic Marker, and a piece of cardboard and made a sign that said “Hi there.” We ran around to the arm of our apartment directly over his window and dropped our sign-on-a-string out the window. Jodie began lowering it down while I ran around to the windows on the other side of the apartment to see what would happen.
Just then a woman—I assume the naked man’s wife—encountered the sign, then hurried over to their window and shut the shades in a panic. By now we were laughing so hard we were crying. When we finally calmed down, we went and found Dad and confessed our anonymous little prank. He sounded stern: “Do you realize that everyone knows the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations lives on the forty-second floor?” We could tell he was trying to keep a straight face.
When I didn’t have friends like Jodie visiting, however, life got a little lonely. It was hard to make new friends, and sometimes I felt like an only child. It was the first time I was without at least a couple of my brothers. Despite that, I loved our time in New York because I got to do so many fun and interesting things with my parents, like go to the theater. One of the biggest stars on Broadway, Carol Channing, also lived at the Waldorf during this time, and I was fascinated by her long fake eyelashes and wigs. Carol came to our apartment several times for parties, and because I knew she had been in Hello, Dolly! and Thoroughly Modern Millie, I became hooked on musicals. During our year in New York, I saw No, No, Nanette; Pippin; and A Little Night Music, among others.
Although living at the Waldorf had its Eloise-like moments, that time period wasn’t totally idyllic. Reality set in when my grandfather—my father’s father, Prescott Bush, who lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and worked in New York—began to get a bad cough. Within a short time, my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer and admitted to Memorial Sloan-Kettering, where Mom was a volunteer and where Robin had been treated. This was before CAT scans, MRIs, and all the other diagnostic tools we have today.
In my grandfather’s case, there was almost no hope from the start.
Dad visited him nearly every day at the hospital and would come home heavy with grief. One night, he told me that he ran his fingers through his father’s thin hair and how sad that made him feel because he always had such thick hair. Less than a month after his symptoms emerged, he died, on October 8, 1972—almost eighteen years to the day after Robin. I remember watching Love Story on TV right after he died and crying my eyes out, just sobbing, because of all the sadness in our home.
Recently, Dad told me that shortly after his father’s death, a family friend committed suicide after receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer. His wife said to Dad, “Why couldn’t he die with courage, like Prescott Bush did? Why did he have to take the selfish way out?” Dad explained to her that her husband had spared his family the agony of a long-drawn-out cancer death. “But she put Dad up as the example of how you do it, how you face death with courage,” my father said.
Richard Nixon had been an admirer of my grandfather’s—some said he considered my grandfather a “political mentor.” When his nomination for vice president in 1952 was in jeopardy, for example, Nixon consulted my grandfather before giving his famous “Checkers speech.” On the occasion of my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1971, President Nixon sent a nice note mentioning Dad: “I welcome the opportunity to tell you personally what you undoubtedly hear not only from friends in Connecticut but across the country about the strong leadership that George provides in his sensitive and demanding duties at the United Nations. He is indeed his father’s son.”
For my grandfather’s funeral, President Nixon once again reached out—sending flowers from the White House and a warm note, written the day after my grandfather had died. Given my grandfather’s illness and death, we were all even more grateful for Dad’s appointment to the United Nations, as it allowed us to be so close to him at the end.
I recently came across my grandmother’s eulogy of my grandfather, in which she said, “When he stood at the altar fifty-one years ago and promised to ‘keep thee only unto her as long as you both shall live’ he was making a pledge to God that he never for one moment forgot, and gave to his wife, the most joyous life that any woman could experience. As a father, he believed in necessary discipline when the occasion demanded, but was always loving and understanding. As the children grew older he respected each as an individual, ready to back any decision thoughtfully reached, and giving advice only when sought.” That statement is equally true of my father.
The United Nations job turned out to be the perfect posting for Dad. Today, he still holds a U.N. record: the “hat trick” of attending Security Council meetings as ambassador, vice president, and president. Clearly, he not only enjoyed it—he also thrived in such settings because of his natural ability to connect with a broad diversity of people.
Years later, General Brent Scowcroft looked back on Dad’s tenure at the U.N. and how it helped him later in life. “What did he learn there? He learned the perspective of ab
out 150 smaller states, all of whom had problems that most of us don’t even realize. And he used to visit them, he used to talk to them. He used to get their points of view. He used to cultivate them. So when he came to the Oval Office, he knew what they were thinking about, he understood what they were thinking about, and he could empathize and work with them.”
This penchant for personal diplomacy began when he started taking individual ambassadors and their wives to Broadway shows, or Mets games, or even to a John Denver concert at Carnegie Hall. At one point, Mom and Dad took the British foreign minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and his wife and the British ambassador, Sir Colin Crowe, and his wife to an Audubon Society bird sanctuary for some bird-watching, only to find it closed for the day. Dad helped Mom, Lady Crowe, and Lady Home over the fence, along with the rest of the group. They were accosted by security men and their dogs but were not arrested.
Dad’s friend Spike Heminway remembers when Dad took a group to a Mets game, and Spike became worried when Dad went for a hot dog and never came back. He got up to investigate, only to find Dad alongside the busy hot dog vendor, helping him hawk hot dogs to hungry Mets fans.
A coveted ticket at the time was for the first Godfather film. Mom remembers the long lines of people in Manhattan waiting to see it—“miles long around every theater, the big thing to do.” So Dad got one of the theaters to host a special screening, and he invited all the ambassadors and their wives—essentially the entire General Assembly.
“I was shocked at the movie,” said Mom, who was surprised and upset at the glorification of the Mafia and the portrayal of a violent, high-crime America. “Here we are inviting all these foreign dignitaries. So we came out of the theater saying to them, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a movie.’”
But as Mom and Dad were downplaying the film, the guests left the theater to find a newsstand in front carrying an early edition of the next day’s paper. The headline read “Five Mob Members Killed in New Jersey.”
“Right in front of the whole theater,” Mom laughed. “How could we have done that?”
It was a busy year at the U.N. for Dad, featuring several highly publicized Security Council debates on air hijackings, apartheid in South Africa, the Cold War, the U.S. contribution to the U.N. budget, and the Israeli attack against Lebanon.
Adding to the drama of that year, shots were fired into the Soviet mission to the U.N., hitting an apartment where a young family was living. The Jewish Defense League, which was led at the time by a radical rabbi named Meir Kahane, issued a press release the next day applauding the shooting. As Dad prepared to walk to the U.N. building shortly afterward, Rabbi Kahane, standing in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy, approached him, saying he wanted to “talk.” He wanted Dad to listen.
“I told him when they condoned the shooting that I had ‘heard’ enough,” Dad recalled. “I stepped past him and was led across to the U.N. by security people.” Kahane eventually took his extremist followers and moved to Israel, but returned to New York in 1990 and was assassinated by his political opponents.
Also in 1971 was the India-Pakistan War, which was very important policywise because of the Cold War. “India was much closer to Russia, and Pakistan was much closer to us,” Dad recalled. “It was kind of tense. I think the Pakistanis always felt that we were a little shaky. They knew that Washington was where the decisions were made, not at the U.N. The question we faced at the time was whether we were tilting in favor of Pakistan or India. Kissinger was driving the policy and said we were tilting toward Pakistan.”
Dad remembers the then-president of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, addressing the General Assembly during the war. Bhutto gave a “very strong” speech, then “took his speech out, ripped it apart, threw it down, and stormed out. Real powerful. I got to know Bhutto. In fact, later when I was in China, on the way back to Washington one time for consultations, we flew west from China toward Pakistan. We were Bhutto’s guests and stayed in a little guesthouse there.”
Sadly, Bhutto was thrown out of office during a 1977 military coup and executed two years later. His daughter, Benazir, later became prime minister of Pakistan.
Without a doubt one of the most important U.N. votes during Dad’s tenure took place on October 25, 1971, when the People’s Republic of China was admitted and Taiwan was kicked out of the United Nations. Until that vote, Taiwan had held the China seat, representing the communist mainland, known as the People’s Republic of China, as well as the nationalist Republic of China on Taiwan.
The compromise my father supported was called the dual representation policy, in which there would be one China but with two votes. It failed 55–59, and my mother remembers being in the General Assembly audience that day and seeing the Taiwanese ambassador walk out of the United Nations, “back straight and head held high,” while people from one of the missions at a third world country turned to Mom, jeering and spitting at her.
Tom Lias, one of Dad’s aides who watched the vote from the gallery of the General Assembly, witnessed the Taiwanese ambassador’s exit as well. “He had, from the standpoint of international politics, been humiliated, and so had his country. The world organization was really throwing them out.” As the ambassador made his way across the Assembly hall, Dad “ran to get around to the back of the hall so he could go to that ambassador and put his arm around him and sympathize with him . . . It’s another example to me of the kind of compassion that Ambassador Bush had at a time of stress.” Lias continued, “There was not as much blood spilled at the United Nations as there might have been if some really nasty, really pro-Red China U.S. ambassador had been sitting there, who would have let the Nationalist China guy walk out and sort of diplomatically thumb his nose at him as he left. That’s not in the Bush character to do that.”
Anti-Americanism was running high. Arthur Fletcher, a former member of the U.S. delegation, looked back on the situation: “Ambassador Bush had to face the music, so to speak, and take the brunt of the bitterness that had built up over some twenty years because the People’s Republic of China had not been able to join. They felt that we had kept them out. And although George certainly hadn’t had anything to do with keeping them out, he had to stand in front of the gun when the final decision was made.
“When the vote was taken,” Fletcher continued, “well over two-thirds of the delegates really showed their wrath toward the U.S., with some of them coming down in front of our area of the U.S. and hissing at the American delegation. I thought George handled himself superbly that night, and in fact, throughout that entire period. He proved to me that he could function under the gun without showing any signs of stress or strain. He seemed to anticipate that it was going to be a rough ride for a while, but that he could ride it out. He was a source of inspiration for the rest of the American delegation at that time.”
What was complicating the situation was that while Dad was trying to round up votes in support of our longtime ally, Taiwan, President Nixon was secretly seeking to improve relations with mainland China. Nixon was motivated by two goals: to contain a potential nuclear threat and to take advantage of the animosity between the Chinese and the Soviets and basically open another front in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. (Canada and other Western allies had opened diplomatic relations with Communist China earlier during the Nixon administration, so the tide was changing internationally.)
In July 1971, President Nixon directed Secretary of State Kissinger to embark on a “secret trip” to Peking, to pave the way for a public visit by the president in February 1972. It was between these two trips, in October 1971, that the dual representation vote had taken place, giving the People’s Republic of China a seat at the United Nations.
In notes dictated a week after the vote, my dad thought the warming relations between the United States and Mao Zedong had something to do with losing the Taiwan vote. “The minute the president announced his trip to Peking, the race to Peking was on,” Dad wrote, referring to other countries who saw how the tide w
as turning toward China and away from Taiwan.
I asked Dad about Kissinger’s secret trip. “It made my job rounding up votes for the status quo—for our dual representation policy—almost impossible,” he said. “Kissinger kind of got angry with me when he got back, asking, ‘What happened with the vote?’ I told him, ‘It was very difficult, when you were over there.’ He knew that. Everybody in the General Assembly knew it. When they heard [that Kissinger was in China], it affected their vote.”
Fifteen countries abstained from that historic vote, many after assuring Dad of their support.
The press was also a factor in the vote, alleging “undue pressure” and arm-twisting by the American delegation, which Dad felt was completely untrue. As it was, he felt terrible about losing the vote, like he’d let the Taiwanese people down, and was dismayed at the level of anti-American sentiment that had come about as a result.
As seriously as Dad took his work, he has never taken himself too seriously. In late 1970, New York magazine published an article by ABC sportscaster Dick Schapp with the headline “The Ten Most Overrated Men in New York.” The ten men were: McGeorge Bundy, who had been national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson; Terence Cardinal Cooke, archbishop of New York; Ralph DeNunzio, head of the New York Stock Exchange; Sanford Garelik, New York City Council president; Senator Jacob Javits; Gabe Pressman of NBC; Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times; Steve Smith, husband of Jean Kennedy Smith; Broadway producer David Merrick; and finally, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, George Bush.
Dad was amused to be named on such a list, and decided it would be fun to throw an “overrated party.” So he promptly sent a letter to each of his listmates—addressing each as “Dear Most-Overrated Mr. Garelik” or whatever—inviting them to cocktails at the U.N. ambassador’s residence. He told them he thought it might be fun to get together, adding, “I’d like the chance to look you over to see why you are so ‘overrated.’ ” He also included the article’s author, Dick Schapp (who was brave enough to attend), and a few friends and fellow diplomats “so we can have an international judgment as to who is indeed the most overrated of them all.”
My Father, My President Page 9