My Father, My President

by Doro Bush Koch

  Harry Thayer also said that the Chinese would have kept a record of Dad’s interactions with the Chinese officials at the United Nations. Every conversation that Dad had and everything he did in New York would have been chronicled in that Chinese record, and available to people in Peking who were going to be dealing with him. Luckily, they must have liked what they read in those dossiers: the Chinese and the diplomatic community welcomed him very politely and graciously.

  Dad’s style was a bit different than that of his sole predecessor, David Bruce, who was more reserved. Before Bruce arrived in Peking, he had been the United States ambassador to France, West Germany, and Great Britain. “Though greatly respected, Ambassador Bruce was discouraged from attending any National Days—every country represented in China had its own national celebration— and we changed that policy,” my father said. While Dad, too, had great respect for protocol, he was also very outgoing and eager to make connections with people on a personal level, regardless of rank.

  For instance, my father took some heat when he invited one of the CIA’s China bureau communications officers to lunch the second day he was there. Some members of the foreign service community grumbled about this, saying, in effect, “You can’t do that, you have to have us first.” But even those overly preoccupied with protocol couldn’t help warming up to Dad pretty quickly.

  Harry Thayer remembers bicycling around Peking with Dad, to various national holiday celebrations and assorted occasions, and to church, which was a fifteen-minute bike ride from the embassy. One day, Harry got into a taxicab. When the driver saw that he was American, he made a thumbs-up sign and said, “Bush good!” The word had gotten around among the locals—especially the taxi drivers who would see Dad riding his bike around town and eating at the half a dozen restaurants that were available to foreigners in Peking—that Dad was a good guy, a friend of the Chinese people. Dad brought parties of staff, visitors, and diplomats to all the restaurants open to foreigners, and Harry said it helped build the image that Dad was “as much as an American can be, the man-about-town.”

  “President George Bush is an old friend of the Chinese people,” Jiang Zemin, former president of the People’s Republic of China, told me. “He knows China very well and has made enduring efforts to push forward China-U.S. relations and friendship between the two peoples. In the fall of 1974 . . . he made a lot of Chinese friends. Many people were deeply impressed by the photo of President Bush and Mrs. Bush riding bicycles in the streets of Peking. President Bush later assumed many other important positions, but his interest in the growth of China-U.S. relations never receded. He is a main participant in and witness to the process of the bilateral ties over the past thirty-odd years.”

  Dad devoured everything he could about China: the politics, the history, the culture—and even tried to learn the language, practicing on everyone from the waiters in restaurants to fellow tennis players on the court. He and Mom took very seriously their daily language lessons with Miss Tang, their Chinese language tutor. Because she had been educated in the West, Miss Tang knew her life was in danger during the Cultural Revolution.

  “So she was back in her shell,” Dad said, because she was afraid of radical students who were known for beating people like her in the streets. “She was wonderful, but very reluctant to talk about herself at first. We stayed in touch with her.”

  Mom was relishing the fun of a foreign posting together—just the two of them—and saw it as an opportunity to have Dad “all to herself.” His previous work schedules hadn’t allowed much time for each other: first back in Texas, when he worked so hard to build his business; then in Washington, keeping up with the hectic life of a congressman; and finally as RNC chairman during Watergate. In China, they would be alone for the first time since George W. had been born twenty-eight years earlier.

  The older “boys,” George and Jeb, were now adults—George studying to earn his master’s degree at Harvard, and Jeb married and settling down with Colu in Texas. Marv and Neil were off at boarding school, and soon I would be as well, entering tenth grade.

  I followed in the footsteps of my grandmother, my Aunt Nan Ellis, and several cousins and chose Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. I had applied before my parents knew they were going to China, so my family thought the timing worked out well. Still, I was nervous. When Mom dropped me off, I could barely let go of her. It wasn’t just that I was leaving home: it was also that my parents were leaving the country.

  While I wanted to go away to school—my brothers had all gone to boarding school—I quickly realized it was not for me. It was an awkward age. I was shy and never really felt I fit in—and though I stayed for three years, most weekends were spent wishing I were with my family.

  During that time, Mrs. Freeze, my art history teacher, suggested I study Chinese art, which in a way kept me in touch with what my parents were going through. When I eventually went to China, I was able to identify with much of what I saw because of this art course. Looking back, I appreciate Mrs. Freeze’s thoughtful attempt to help me experience China with them from a distance. She must have sensed how much I missed them.

  They missed us, too. Even though he was halfway around the world, my dad had a way of making me feel like I was the most important person in his life. Whenever I spoke to him by phone—which wasn’t too often, with long-distance calls at five dollars a minute in those days—he always sounded so glad to hear my voice, and it made me feel so loved. To this day, the sound of his voice makes me feel the same way.

  When they left for China, our family had to work harder to stay in touch. As a result, we became much closer. Despite the fact that we were all spread out—China, Virginia, Texas, Connecticut, Washington, D.C.—the ties that bind were fast and firm.

  The fifteen months my parents spent in China, from October 1974 until December 1975, were a very happy time for them personally. There they enjoyed entertaining new friends and immersing themselves in all things related to the “Middle Kingdom.”

  My father kept a diary, now some thirty years old, which I read for the first time in researching this book. During his time in China, he dictated his thoughts just about every night into a tape recorder. When those tapes were transcribed, the material filled more than three hundred typewritten pages.

  While some wondered why Dad would want to go to China when he could have chosen a more comfortable or prominent posting, Dad never regretted his choice for a moment. He saw the glass half-full in one of his first diary entries, where he recounts conversations he had with Henry Kissinger about the posting:

  I think in this assignment there is an enormous opportunity of building credentials in foreign policy, credentials that not many Republican politicians will have. Kissinger has mentioned to me twice, “This must be for two years, George. You will do some substantive business, but there will be a lot of time when you will be bored stiff.” I thought of Henry and I am sure [of] his role in having Nelson Rockefeller get the VP situation, but I will say that he was extremely generous in telling Chiao Kuan Hua [the chairman of the Chinese delegation to the United Nations when Dad was there, and who now served as Mao’s foreign minister] that I was close to the President.

  In another of the early entries, Dad asks himself the questions many others must have had on their minds:

  In going to China I am asking myself, “Am I running away from something?,” “Am I leaving what with inflation, incivility in the press and Watergate and all that ugliness?,” “Am I taking the easy way out?” The answer I think is “no,” because of the intrigue and fascination that is China. I think it is an important assignment, it is what I want to do, it is what I told the President I want to do, and all in all, in spite of the great warnings of isolation, I think it is right—at least for now . . . hyper-adrenaline political instincts tell me that the fun of this job is going to be to try to do more, make more contacts . . . the fun will be in trying.

  Dad’s diaries from China are full of entries that begin
with phrases like “another beautiful day in Peking,” “almost euphoric in my happiness,” and “lots to do and lots to learn.” Dad noted that his first visitor upon arrival was the head of the Kuwaiti mission. There are many references to new friends at various embassies, “movie nights” at their residence with popcorn and popular American films, and plenty of laughter resulting from language difficulties.

  It helped that our cocker spaniel C. Fred went with them, along with seventeen cases of dog food. Dad relates that C. Fred arrived from quarantine upon their entry into the country looking “damned confused” and dirty. (It turned out the more they washed him, the grayer he got. His blond coat turned gray because of the hard water and pollution in the air, as did my parents’ clothes and linens.) On the day of the dog’s arrival, “four of the help in the back ran away when they saw C. Fred. Bar called him over and had him do his tricks and they were soon out watching him and laughing. Initially they were scared.”

  The locals were scared because, in those days, dogs were outlawed in Peking—for sanitation reasons, supposedly. I didn’t believe it, and assumed that the number of dogs was inversely related to the number of Chinese restaurants there (more on this in a minute). Dad loved to go on morning runs with C. Fred, while Mom frequently took him around town despite all the stares.

  Together, my parents explored Peking on foot and on bicycle. They were reluctant to take limos everywhere—especially for short distances—out of consideration for the staff and, really, a sense of adventure. Their stay in China was particularly adventurous when it came to the food. There are references in the diaries to eating sea slugs—a delicacy at twenty-five dollars a pound—chicken blood soup, swallow’s spit, and worst of all, upper lip of dog (hence my brilliant theory on the lack of dogs). They loved the food in China and served only Chinese food in their residence. Their favorite restaurant was called the Sick Duck, because it was located next to the hospital. Here’s an entry:

  Dinner on the twenty-third at The Sick Duck. Course after course of duck including the webbing and the feet, the brain served handsomely.

  As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.

  Mom had a daily tai chi session at 6:00 a.m. and says she did it for several reasons, one of which she described as follows: “It was a way to interact with the Chinese, as well as the people who were below the rank of ambassador. There was almost a caste system. Amazingly old-school.”

  One of Mom’s first outings was to procure bicycles and, subsequently, government licenses for them. The first week, Dad and one of his deputies, John Holdridge, went to a sporting goods store to get a Ping-Pong table “for the kids.” They brought back the “Double Happiness” model, which cost $125, compared to the world championship table the salesmen were pushing for $250. Although Dad said the Double Happiness table was for us to use when we visited, he had grown up with a Ping-Pong table in the front hall of his childhood home in Connecticut. He was good.

  As Dad began his initial series of diplomatic calls on the Chinese officials and other embassies in Peking, he tried to set a different tone. He made his first call on the acting chief of protocol for the Chinese, telling him that the United States would prefer “frank, informal discussions if possible, that Chiao Kuan Hua [the foreign minister with whom Henry Kissinger had put in a good word] ought not to feel that he should have a formal kind of reception for me of any kind, that I would much prefer a very small meeting where we could talk more frankly. I knew Chiao had many banquets and I felt he didn’t need yet another one.”

  He explained his motives for approaching the protocol chief in this way: “What I was attempting to do was to establish a frank relationship and to try to move out of the normal, diplomatic, stiff-armed, stilted deal. It may be difficult. It may be impossible but I want to keep pushing for it. What I have got that can be helpful in this approach is having been in politics . . . I said that if they wanted to talk about the American political scene I would be prepared to do it from the unique vantage point of having run one of our parties”—something that carried a lot of weight in one-party Communist China. At one point, a Chinese official even referred to him as Chairman Bush, before Dad set him straight about what it meant to be head of the RNC, to great laughter.

  The U.S. Liaison Office in China was “a reporting post more than an action post,” Dad explained to me recently. “Our experts—there weren’t that many of us, just fifteen or so there—would get as much information from other embassies as they could, or any other way they could, and they would report when they came back.” So while there were broader policy reasons for the U.S. to open relations with China—promoting free markets and democratic principles, as well as addressing security concerns—the goal of the USLO was to listen and learn, and then report.

  Just as Dad’s tenure began, the cover of a CIA operative named James Lilley was exposed by columnist Jack Anderson in October 1974.

  “It was very embarrassing for me, for him, and for everybody,” Lilley said, looking back. “He took it in good stride. I said, ‘Boss, I don’t think my utility here is going to be indefinite; I think I should eventually leave.’ He said, ‘Don’t rush, take it easy.’ So I finally left six months later, on routine home leave. We didn’t want these guys who play games in the newspaper to intimidate us.”

  Lilley added that his final memory of that trip was leaving on the train with his wife, Sally. As the train pulled out of the station, Lilley opened the letter that Dad had written. He and Sally read it, and she began to cry. “It was a very nice note, very moving,” he said.

  Lilley was chosen by Dad fifteen years later to be ambassador to China, and he has vivid memories of what it was like in 1974 when my father first met Deng Xiaoping, later the leader of the Chinese communists. Americans had a hard time winning the trust of the Chinese, and the feeling was mutual. So much was riding on making some sort of a personal connection, and my father instinctively knew this.

  Ambassador Lilley recalled, “When these two men met, Deng—the short, tough revolutionary from Sichuan in central China—and Bush—the tall, ambitious, and smart elitist from America’s Northeast—the chemistry was immediate. Deng saw Bush as an American who someday would lead his country, and Bush saw in Deng a major force in China’s future. Deng could be very acerbic and your father was very enthusiastic and he couldn’t be put down. I think Deng realized your father mattered in Republican politics and he mattered a lot. It was not an intellectual appreciation but a visceral one.”

  Dad and Mom quickly realized that they wanted to send a message, of sorts, to the Chinese. They wanted their inclusiveness and warmth, their openness, and their casual, friendly attitude to be symbolic of the U.S. attitude toward China. “We were out—the United States was out being active,” Dad told me. They saw how some missions—especially those from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—were isolated and, likewise, so were the countries they represented. In his diary, Dad refers at one point to Ambassador Vasily S. Tolstikov of the USSR:

  Most interesting fellow but he is kind of isolated, living in this massive white marbled palace. There is no thaw there between the Soviet Union and China, or if there is, he damn sure hasn’t been clued in on it.

  He enjoyed the Africans and was convinced that one way to learn more about China was through them. Members of the African delegations often came to diplomatic soirees, as he did, “tuxedoless,” and were anything but remote:

  That evening we went to a dinner dance given by Ambassador Akwei of Ghana. He apparently has been a leader in the diplomatic community via dancing. He has a Hi Fi set rigged up, a table overflowing with Western food, a young son whose eyes sparkled . . . and seemed like one of our kids when asked to run the tape recorder or something.

  As he worked to forge friendships with the Chinese, Dad relied on his love of sports—something he counted upon many times over the course of his career. He played a lot of Ping-Pong and tennis with the Chinese—horseshoes came later—and he attended spectator spo
rts on a regular basis, including a very exciting game of hockey between the Soviets and the American kids, a few years in advance of that miraculous game during the 1980 Olympics. “Sports really are marvelous for getting across political lines,” he writes, and his own sportsmanlike conduct and athletic charm went a long way toward reinforcing the message he was trying to send. (By the way, he still uses a phrase in his tennis games that he picked up in China: “unleash Chiang”—a reference to Chiang Kai Shek, the nationalist leader exiled on Taiwan—as slang for Let’s start the game and serve the big one. He had a bit of a weak serve, and it was his way of making fun of it: Time to unleash Chiang!)

  That year, we still gathered as a family for Thanksgiving, without Mom and Dad. It was too far for either us or them to travel just for Thanksgiving. My brothers and I came from boarding school or college and gathered at the Greenwich home of Spike and Betsy Heminway. “Quite a rowdy Thanksgiving,” Spike recalls. “A lot of football watching, everyone on the den floor.” We were excited knowing that Mom was coming to join us for Christmas in a few weeks.

  Throughout his time in China, Dad was very impressed with the curiosity and friendliness of the Chinese people, yet he also saw their reticence and unreasonableness at times. “It is hard to equate the decency, kindness, humor, gentility of the people of China with some of the rhetoric aimed against the United States,” he wrote. As many times as he was approached with respect and humor, he was also assaulted with anti-American, anti-imperialist propaganda.

  He called it “the land of contrasts,” and the polarity of life there went beyond just the words and slogans:

  The beauty in many ways. The courteous friendliness of the individuals with whom you do talk. The desire to please in so many ways. And then that is contrasted with the basic closed society aspect of things. Lack of Freedom. Discipline of people. Sending them off to communes. No freedom to criticize.