At another point, he writes, “You respect the discipline, you respect the order, you respect the progress but you question the lack of gaiety, the lack of creature comforts, the lack of freedom to do something different.” He wrote about the daily life: “The contrasts are enormous. There will be a waft of marvelous odors from cooking and then a few yards further some horrendous stench from garbage or sewage.” He describes loudspeakers blasting angry propaganda at happy children on the playground, who continued their games with their hands clapped over their ears.
Nowhere was the contrast more clear than when Henry Kissinger came to visit. “He is a man of great contrasts,” wrote Dad when the secretary of state arrived in November, along with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Brent Scowcroft, who was then the national security adviser, and a few other aides:
There is too much entourage feeling. Too much kind of turmoil. Is he coming? Is he coming? Is he late? Is he late? Nobody is willing to bite the bullet and speak up. Amazing—mixed feeling. Great respect for the man and his accomplishments and yet concern about some of the trappings and some of the ways of handling people. Everyone with him talks about how difficult it is, and yet he can be extremely charming. Pressures on him are immense and the accomplishments immense so one forgives the eccentric things . . . No question about it. People quake, “He’s coming. He’s coming.”
Another entry reads:
Kissinger is an extremely complicated guy. He is ungracious, he yells at his staff . . . and yet all those petty little unpleasant characteristics fade away when you hear him discussing the world situation. He comes alive in public . . . He literally is so alive within, you can see it on the outside very clearly. He is like a politician with the roar of the crowd on election eve, or the athlete running out at the 50-yard line just before the kick off. The public turns him on.
Dad notes Kissinger’s “bitching” about the press, but then sidling right over to the press corps to chat. His demands for work to be done, then a lack of follow-through. To Dad, the man was an enigma. Later on, he writes:
I remember one big argument I had with Kissinger the time of the China vote [presumably as to whether Kissinger’s secret trip to China had pulled the rug out from under Dad during the dual representation vote] and yet at lunch he graciously turned to Barbara and said that “George is the finest ambassador we’ve had up there anytime since I’ve been in government.” Very pleasant. Unsolicited and I might add, totally unexpected.
Kissinger was very curious as to what Dad’s plans would be after China, politically speaking, and even asked if he was going to run for president in 1980. Dad replied that he couldn’t see that far ahead and just wanted to do a good job in China. I noticed that within a few months, however, he has a diary entry that toys with running for governor of Texas:
I have time to think these out. The plan might be to go home after the elections in ’76, settle down in Houston in a rather flexible business thing, shoot for the governorship in ’78, though it might be difficult to win. Should I win it, it would be an excellent position again for national politics, and should I lose, it would be a nice way to get statewide politics out of my system once and for all.
When Kissinger left just after Thanksgiving, Mom traveled back to the United States to spend Christmas with us. Dad was lonely without her, but his mother traveled to China with her sister-in-law Marge Clement to spend Christmas with him. He took them to embassy dinners and bike riding, which they loved to do—in fact, my grandmother continued to ride well into her late eighties. As he relates their adventures, you can just hear his voice in the Dictaphone:
Gave her a nice twenty minutes or so to shape up, and then we took a long bicycle ride down past the Great Hall of the People. You should have seen the people stare at old momma on the bicycle.
After his mother left, Dad wrote one particularly sad entry, when President Nixon was gravely ill with phlebitis:
Dinner alone. Early to bed, troubled by the VOA [Voice of America] report that President Nixon is in critical condition. I remember my last two phone calls with him, the only two I had since he left the White House. I felt like I was talking to a man who wanted to die. Here we are in China largely because of him, and the whole damn thing is sorry.
My brothers and I made plans to visit China in the summer, and I couldn’t wait. For my parents, the winters in China were long and difficult. Everything turned gray and drab. At one point, Aunt Nan went for a visit and spent ten days bicycling around Peking with Mom, before the two of them traveled to the countryside. It was the first time my mother and my aunt really spent any time together, and it cemented a lifelong friendship.
Away at boarding school, I got homesick. On weekends, my friends went home to their parents. Occasionally, I’d get invited along. I missed my parents and my brothers. Dad writes of a letter that arrived from Marvin, saying things were great, but it made Mom sad:
Bar sat and cried as she read it . . . I miss the children a lot every day and yet they seem to be holding together. They seem to be getting strength from each other. They spell out their love for their parents. We are very lucky.
Over the cold winter months, Mom and Dad entertained plenty of people, despite the fact that in those days, you couldn’t just travel to China. There were no visas. Any travel by foreigners had to be at the invitation of the USLO. So my dad decided to take advantage of this restriction and bring in the best of the United States and show them the best of China. He invited the heads of Coke and Pepsi, for example, for visits. He found a way to get people into China who couldn’t have done it on their own, no matter who they were.
As friendly and easygoing as Dad was, the when-in-Rome maxim could only be carried so far. One day, the Chinese guard posted at the entrance of the liaison office compound refused entry to one of Dad’s expected guests. She was the wife of our consul general to Hong Kong, an American citizen who happened to be ethnic Vietnamese. Despite the American passport, the guard refused to allow her to enter.
As his deputy, Harry Thayer, remembered, when Dad found out, he “absolutely blew his stack” at the Chinese for the effrontery of refusing the admission of an American diplomat. Dad went to the gate and blasted the officer for not letting in this woman, but his tirade did no good. Finally, the Chinese foreign minister was called, and within a few minutes the guard relented. Dad just couldn’t tolerate this sort of behavior, particularly when it affected an American citizen.
Summer finally came. George arrived in China a week before Marvin, Neil, and I did. Jeb was not able to join us because of a new job at the Texas Commerce Bank—and he and Colu were expecting a baby. Neil, Marvin, and I arrived on June 12, Dad’s fifty-first birthday. It was an amazing trip. Dad’s diary entry that day reads:
Doro, Marvin and Neil arrived . . . They looked great, giggling, bubbling over with enthusiasm—having enjoyed Honolulu, tired, not seen anything of Tokyo, only one night there and into Peking. They were great. They rushed down and played basketball, rode down to the Great Square. Marvin played tennis and then off we went to the Soup Restaurant, where we had eel and they all loved that. Neil Mallon bought the dinner and it was all pretty good.
Dad’s mentor Neil Mallon and his wife, Ann, were visiting, and on the first Sunday we were there, we all went to church. Despite the fact that the Chinese did not allow their own people any freedom of worship, the government did allow foreign diplomats to attend church services every Sunday. My parents were regulars at a tiny church that had a congregation of fourteen people and was located atop the old Bible Society building. The services were conducted entirely in Chinese—except when the foreigners sang the old familiar hymns in the languages of their own countries, with the Chinese ministers singing the same hymns at the same time in Chinese.
While we were there, my parents decided it might be a good idea to have me baptized at the Bible Institute, since I had not been baptized yet. It sounds a little unusual that I was fifteen and still not baptized—but remember,
I was the youngest of five in a frenetic family.
Arranging for a baptism in a communist country is no small feat. Dad and Mom were grateful that the Chinese government allowed the service, but that was only after an official meeting. The authorities wondered—understandably—why we wanted to do this, as did I. Mom explained that we wanted the family together for the occasion and just hadn’t been able to do it earlier. But I soon discovered a great reason for being baptized at fifteen: you get to pick your own godfather. So I picked one of Dad’s funniest and most handsome friends, Spike Heminway. I sent him a telegram right away inviting him immediately to China for the baptism, though I didn’t expect him to come.
Spike remembers it as “that wonderful Chinese telegram which we didn’t understand.” “We were sitting there, in Maine,” he said, “and this telegram arrived and it was in Chinese. We said, ‘What in God’s name is this?’” I had no idea that the telegram would be sent in Chinese. Somehow Spike and his wife, Betsy, found a way to translate it and wrote back—in English—that he couldn’t make it. So I telegrammed back a message asking if my brother Marvin could stand in for him. Of course, Spike said okay.
So there we were that day at the service, two awkward teenagers standing up as replacement godfather and goddaughter. I remember one of the three ministers was from the Church of England and another was a Baptist. There were a number of elderly Chinese people, taking pictures and smiling, despite the language barrier. Mom remembers it as a very special, spiritual hour. “A very special day,” Dad recalls fondly now, thirty years later.
Welcoming a child into the church is always a joyous occasion; but welcoming a child into an underground church in a communist country is unforgettable—not only to the parents and the child but also to all those who witness it. It sent a glimmer of hope to the Chinese people who were there and to the many others who heard about it. If this little ceremony inspired just one of them to hold out hope that perhaps someday they’d have the freedom to be baptized, that’s great. To me, it was one more unique thing about my life—embarrassing at the time, but remarkable looking back on it now.
George, Neil, Marvin, and I took a train ride with Mom to Wuxi and then Shanghai and then to Peitaiho (now known as Beidaihe), a beach resort. Back in Peking on bicycles, we went to Mom’s favorite place, the Forbidden City. She knew every nook and cranny. And we visited the Summer Palace and the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. It reminded me of the days when Dad was in Congress and Mom took us all to see the sights.
One thing that sticks out in my mind regarding all this sightseeing was that my brothers were complete oddities to the locals—they towered over the Chinese, and Neil’s blond hair made him even more exotic-looking.
A week later, we celebrated George’s twenty-ninth birthday before he left China by himself to go back to Harvard. After graduation, he was thinking about returning to Midland, Texas, to try his hand in the oil business. When George left, Dad noted in his diary that George was starting out a little later in life than Dad had, “but nonetheless starting out on what I hope will be a challenging new life for him. He is able. If he gets his teeth into something semi-permanent or permanent, he will do just fine.”
Shortly before Neil, Marvin, and I left, my parents threw a wonderful Fourth of July party, complete with hamburgers and hot dogs (ordering hot dog buns all the way from Japan), American beer, and even American cigarettes. Dad spent months preparing for it. “Hot as Hades,” Mom remembers, and “the children of Harry Thayer and George Bush cooked and served with complaints.” We also helped decorate, with lots of red, white, and blue. It was held at the USLO compound, and quite a big crowd came.
It was not your usual Peking party. The Fourth of July had been celebrated in years past by Dad’s predecessor, but Dad’s party was reportedly noisier and more active than in prior years. The sound of pounding could be heard throughout the compound on July 3, and when worried staffers came to investigate, they found Dad up on a ladder hammering away, securing American flags and balloons. Dad loves a good party.
At the end of our trip, Dad came up with the idea to send us—just the kids—on the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Peking to Moscow. Dad thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Besides, how much trouble could a bunch of teenagers get into on a slow train through Siberia?
We boarded the train in China on July 16 for a five-day trip through Mongolia and Siberia and then on to Moscow. Our traveling party was composed of Marvin, Neil, myself, and a friend of mine visiting from school. We had two tiny rooms with two berths, one stacked on top of the other. The very first night, we left our windows open and woke the next morning covered in black soot. The train burned coal, and we were covered in it.
We shared a bathroom with the entire car, and when I went to freshen up, I turned on the faucet and out came the water . . . one drip at a time. I then realized that leaving the window open the first night of the five-day trip was a big mistake.
We traveled through China with Chinese personnel on board and a Chinese dining car. When we got to Mongolia, everything switched over to Mongolian personnel and a Mongolian dining car. While this was being changed over, our rooms were searched and we were asked to show our passports. All of this by Chinese authorities first, then Mongolian, then Russian—in very loud and aggressive voices. All the train personnel—especially in Mongolia and across Siberia—seemed angry and always searching for stowaways or something else. I was very nervous and worried, but nobody else seemed to be.
The train would stop for five or ten minutes at a time in tiny train stations in what looked like the middle of nowhere. (Actually, it really was the middle of nowhere. It was the farthest reaches of Siberia, after all.) At one point, my friend got off the train to buy a loaf of bread and I was a wreck as the train was about to leave without her. She did make it back after some very real angst, but I was too scared to get off at any point along the way. We were told to bring snacks (crackers and peanut butter) and thankfully we did, as we experienced firsthand how food in the Siberian gulags must have tasted.
Neil spent the whole trip studying guidebooks and reading maps and giving us history and culture lessons. I took comfort in peanut butter and crackers. My friend took comfort in Marvin, who by now had a crush on her. Together, the four of us traveled through the countryside in China, across the Gobi Desert and out of Mongolia, then around Lake Baikal—the deepest freshwater lake in the world and nearly four hundred miles long—then across the steppes of Siberia and through the Ural Mountains until we reached Moscow. (When he saw the deepest lake in the world, Neil remembers thinking, “Wow, this is cool . . . but after four days on a train, I guess anything is cool.”)
Once we arrived in Moscow, English-speaking Russian “intel” agents met us and we toured the sights they allowed us to see, like St. Basil’s Cathedral and Lenin’s tomb. “It was surprising that we had the freedom to move around,” Neil recalls, adding that it was not nearly as oppressive as China had been. We stayed overnight in an apartment provided by the state, “plain furnishings, simple but clean,” Neil remembers, and that we were accompanied by an English-speaking Russian woman who worked for the Soviet domestic security agency.
Before we left, Neil has a vague recollection of Marvin negotiating with the locals to swap Levi’s. “American jeans were a hot commodity,” he said. (Marvin—whose recollection of this is even more vague than Neil’s—is a very successful businessman today, to no one’s surprise.)
Russia was gray, and, to my mind, the people at that time looked sour and unhappy. Then we went to Leningrad and saw the beautiful pastel-colored buildings and the Hermitage. While on the train, Neil had announced that his dream was to see the Swiss Alps while drinking wine—underage drinking was legal in Europe—and eating cheese and chocolate in the shadow of the Matterhorn. I think all that Siberian food inspired this vision. When Marvin and my friend decided to head back to the United States together, I was left with Neil and his alpine dream.
Wh
en I think back on it, I’m amazed we were allowed to do this on our own. It was typical of the spirit we grew up with—having a mom and a dad who loved a good adventure. I think it was something they would have liked to do, and thought it would be a great idea to send us instead. “I was the oldest of the three of us, and it wasn’t like we had an adult companion,” Neil recalls. “It was a great experience to feel empowered, to be responsible. The fact that they would allow us to go and encourage us to explore and see the world, in a way, is a metaphor for the way they raised us. They allowed us to grow wings and fly in different directions.”
Looking back on my parents’ fifteen months in China, I see it as a positive period of growth for my family. The photo albums of that time show my parents both looking healthy and happy, in front of the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace. It was a time for my Dad to recharge his political batteries after the difficult, drawn-out months of Watergate, and an opportunity for my parents to be alone together.
Though it was many, many years ago, they still light up when they talk about their time there. The memories are a little less crisp now, but still vivid. Not just the sights, but the smells, tastes, and sounds of China. In one of his final diary entries, Dad tried to record it all, as though he was afraid he might someday forget:
Sounds that I will not forget. The early morning singing in the park—loud and usually very good tenor voices for the most part. The organized cadence of kids marching. The never ceasing honking horns downtown in Peking, the jingle of bicycle bells, the laughter of the children as they play near the park, the blaring of the loudspeakers with the excesses of the propaganda whether it’s on a train, in a park, at a building site, wherever. The July and August sound of the crickets.
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