Dad was director of Central Intelligence from January 1976 to January 1977. On April 26, 1999, more than twenty years later, I attended the ceremony when they named the CIA complex in Langley, Virginia, for Dad. He joked that Mom had said the only reason they name buildings after people is if they are really, really old or are already dead. In reality, he was deeply touched by such a meaningful honor.
The way my father was treated that day at the CIA ceremony was overwhelming. Former congressman Rob Portman, who sponsored the legislation that named the CIA complex for Dad, said that one CIA official told him that Dad’s coming back “will be like Elvis has returned.” Dad stayed in close touch with many of his CIA colleagues for years and continued to receive regular intelligence briefings long after he left public office.
Looking back on it years later at the dedication ceremony, Dad said, “I left here some twenty-two years ago after a limited tenure, and my stay here had a major impact on me. The CIA became part of my heartbeat back then, and it’s never gone away.” He wondered out loud why previous directors had not been chosen as the namesake, instead of him, then started to get emotional when recalling certain agents—Richard Welch and William Buckley—who had died very violent deaths in the line of duty.
Then he said something that, to me, speaks volumes about him: “It has been said by others that patriotism is not a frenzied burst of emotion, but rather the quiet and steady dedication of a lifetime. To me, this sums up CIA—Duty, Honor, Country. It is an honor to stand here and be counted among you.”
That day—and every day he was director—Dad walked past “the wall of stars” at CIA headquarters, which commemorates all those who gave their lives in the line of duty. I asked him about it.
“That’s the thing about the CIA,” he said. “People who serve never sit at the head table or get recognition, and are serving for the right patriotic reasons—belief in service to country. Belief in country.” He told me he’d gone to visit a CIA training camp in 2004 and was seated next to an attorney who was in her twenties. “She woke up one day and said, ‘I’m not doing anything for my country.’ A few months later, she was overseas in a very delicate undercover situation, risking her life. So people are still there who serve for the right reasons. And that’s what I love about the CIA.”
Later, Dad looked back on his departure from the CIA: “I was sad to leave the CIA, a job that I loved. But it was great to get back to Texas. Now my main challenge was to figure out what came next in my life.”
Chapter 10
AN ASTERISK IN THE POLLS
“He was truly an asterisk in the polls. I asked to spend some of our campaign money on political ads during the election for city council and mayor of Boston, so that people would associate the Bush name with something other than Busch Beer. You wanted people to put his name in the context of an election, rather than a beer bash at college.”
—Andy Card
It was 1977, and Karl Rove called Dad in Houston wanting to stop by and get some job-hunting advice. When Dad was Republican National Committee chairman in the early 1970s, Karl had been chairman of the College Republicans while Lee Atwater served as its executive director. “We were the nineteen-year-old reprobates in the subbasement of the National Committee,” remembers Karl, and Dad had laid down the law with the two of them, telling them “not to do anything stupid.”
Now it had been a few years, and Karl, married and back in Texas, came to see Dad. “I’ve got an idea,” said Dad. “Why don’t you come to work for me?” Dad had just started a political action committee called the Fund for Limited Government to raise money for other candidates, travel around the country, and lay the foundation for a presidential bid in 1980.
Karl accepted Dad’s offer; the fund had its first paid employee; and Dad’s first campaign for the White House came to life.
Dad and Mom had returned to Texas in 1977 after the Carter inauguration; and Jim Baker had also returned to Houston, after having served as national campaign manager in the 1976 Ford campaign. Mr. Baker had remarried, to the former Susan Winston, and had just run unsuccessfully for attorney general of Texas when Dad called him in 1978 and said, “Let’s get going.” Jim said he’d love to help but had one problem. He was carrying a $150,000 deficit after his statewide race. Baker was very worried about it: “I need to get rid of that somehow.”
Dad reassured him, “We’ll take care of that later.”
A few months later, during the general election, Dad wrote a letter on Jim’s behalf that was sent out to all Baker supporters in Texas. In response, those supporters actually sent in more than the defunct campaign needed to pay off its debts. As he considered what to do with the extra cash, James Baker thought back to the time when his own father had contributed to Senator Prescott Bush’s reelection campaign in Connecticut. When Prescott Bush decided not to run for reelection in 1962, he actually returned the leftover campaign money to everyone who had contributed to him.
“My dad was profoundly influenced by that,” Baker said. “He used to tell me all the time, ‘That’s the only politician I’ve ever known that ever sent any money back.’”
And so James Baker decided to send all the extra contributions back to his donors. “I was really taking a page out of Senator Prescott Bush’s book,” he said.
With his campaign debt taken care of, Baker signed on as Dad’s campaign manager for the presidential campaign. During the 1970s, Baker had paid his political dues, working for the Texas GOP, then entered national politics with the 1976 Ford-Dole campaign. By the time Dad approached him, “I was the only living Republican who had run a national presidential campaign and not gone to jail,” Mr. Baker joked. He was referring to John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, who served nineteen months in a federal prison after he was convicted for his role in the Watergate scandal.
At the time, Baker recalled, “Many people came to me and asked, ‘What are you doing? John Connally and Howard Baker and Bob Dole will blow this guy [Dad] away. Why are you doing this?’ And I said, ‘I’m doing it because he’s my friend and because I think he’d make an extraordinarily good president.’”
Together, the two of them traveled to California, calling on President Ford first. Dad told President Ford of his plan to run for president, and Baker asked for his blessing as campaign manager. If President Ford had decided to run again—which was still an option at the time—Baker would have felt obligated to help. Ford assured them he would not be running for president and said the whole idea was “perfectly fine.” Next, they went to see Governor Reagan. “I can’t tell you what I’m going to do,” the governor said, “but thank you for the courtesy of coming out and telling me.”
Satisfied, Dad and Baker returned to Texas.
Meanwhile, the team Dad had already been quietly putting together began to take shape. Along with Karl Rove, he hired Pete Teeley as his press secretary, an off-the-boat British immigrant who had survived the bombing of London during World War II, moved to Detroit, and graduated from college attending night school. At the time, Pete had just finished a stint as press secretary for Senator Jacob Javits of New York.
My brother Jeb, meanwhile, served as Dad’s original traveling aide—a twenty-four-year-old father of two out on the road five days a week. (Eventually, Dad hired David Bates, who was a tennis buddy of Jeb’s from Houston just out of law school, and Jeb began traveling on his own, campaigning for Dad in forty-eight out of fifty states.) Another close friend and fellow Texas oil man, Bob Mosbacher, soon became the finance chair. This core group traveled all over the country, testing the waters for a run at the presidency. No cell phones, no faxes, no fancy planes. They crammed into coach seats on airplanes, with their twenty-eight-year-old scheduler, Margaret Tutwiler, sending the itineraries and arrangements by overnight mail along the way.
Even before he was elected to national office and had access to government aircraft, Dad hated waiting in airports. At one point, much to Margaret’s chagrin, Dad got a copy of the p
aperback listing of all airline flights—it was called the OAG—and he would call in suggestions for other flights to Margaret. “It went on all the time,” she said.
At first, Dad’s candidacy struggled. “It never got anywhere . . . no notoriety or public knowledge because, once in a while, my name would be in a poll and there was an asterisk,” Dad told me. The front-runners would typically be listed by name in poll results—Reagan, Dole, Howard Baker, Connally—but then the survey listed 4 percent for “other candidates,” Dad being one of them. He was an asterisk at the end of the poll results.
But with more trips into key early states, more local Republican “Lincoln Day” dinners, more state party events, things slowly started to change.
During this time, Dad went to a lunch that James Lilley, his old friend from the CIA, hosted at his home for the chief of the Chinese mission to the United States. Dad knew the Chinese diplomat from his time in China and said to him, “I’ll tell you something. I’m running for president.” Lilley thought this impressed the Chinese, especially given Deng’s feeling that Dad was someone who “mattered” in Republican politics. Shortly afterward, Dad decided to take Deng Xiaoping up on his invitation to return to China for a visit.
The traveling party for this return trip to China consisted of Mom; James Baker; Lowell Thomas, the globe-trotting CBS Radio reporter and his wife, Marianne; Chase Untermeyer, a good friend who had volunteered on Dad’s 1966 congressional campaign and today is ambassador to Qatar; Dean and Pat Burch, who had been friends since Dad’s days at the RNC; David Broder, the Washington Post reporter, and his wife, Ann; Hugh Liedtke, his partner from Zapata Petroleum, and his wife, Betty; and Jim Lilley. They went to Tibet as well and then down the Yangtze River.
The group met with Deng, who was back in power after being purged in 1976. Their meeting took place in the Great Hall of the People, which was where Dad had last met with Deng before leaving to head the CIA. The purpose of the meeting was to offer the Chinese “risk contracts” for offshore oil, which would allow the Chinese government to share the risks of offshore drilling with American companies in exchange for a share of the profits. Ambassador Lilley told me that it was an important symbolic meeting, because it was the first successful linking of American technology and management with Chinese resources and labor, all within the context of offshore oil exploration. It was a breakthrough, and very relevant to the revolutionary economic reforms Deng began to implement the following year.
Dad remembers that it was the first time that the Chinese called him lao pengyou, which means “old friend.” “They’d toast me as an old friend of China,” he explained. “I don’t want to come off as bragging, but I really do have a special standing in China . . . They all consider me a friend of China. It’s very nice.”
Back home, my brother George, a businessman in the Texas oil industry, decided to mount a campaign of his own, running for Congress in Texas’s 19th District, which stretched from the scrubby desert of the Midland-Odessa region northward into the farm country around Lubbock. The local congressman there, George Mahon, had announced his retirement after forty-three years in office.
My brother remembers meeting early on with the former governor of Texas, Allan Shivers, who flat out told my brother he couldn’t win. When George asked why, Shivers explained that he would be facing a strong opponent in Kent Hance, a well-respected man who was more suited to the district than George was.
“I listened to him, said okay, and decided to run anyway,” my brother recalled.
My brother campaigned nonstop and won the Republican primary. One of Dad’s rivals in the upcoming Republican primaries, Governor Reagan, had endorsed Odessa Mayor Jim Reese, George’s Republican opponent. “Dad wasn’t particularly pleased about that,” my brother recalled. But then Governor Reagan called to congratulate George after he won. George lost that fall, however, receiving 47 percent of the vote in a district that had never elected a Republican to Congress.
Shortly after declaring his candidacy, George also met a librarian and schoolteacher named Laura Welch at a cookout at the home of mutual friends. They only dated for three months before they married, and most of us met her at the wedding. Laura had grown up in Midland, and we all instantly loved her. Marvin said that Laura coming into our family was like Audrey Hepburn arriving at Animal House, yet she fit right in. An only child, she adapted to our family with grace, charm, and humor. George had to promise her that she would never have to give a campaign speech for him. That didn’t last very long. Now she’s one of the best speakers in our family. As First Lady, she comforted our nation in the wake of 9/11, and her work on education and helping young people has had a positive impact all across our country. Just as important to me, she’s a great mom and a great friend.
During this time, I was majoring in sociology at Boston College and got to know John Anderson Jr. His father was a Republican congressman from Illinois who also ran in the 1980 Republican primaries, dropped out, then returned in the fall as an independent. John Jr. and I were friends, and our mutual friends chose sides—in my view, of course, the discerning students chose to support my father. But what are the chances of two college classmates both having dads run for president of the United States?
Riding the bus one day across the campus at Boston College, I noticed a young woman who looked friendlier than my school-assigned roommate from Asbury Park, New Jersey. (My roommate was a follower of the Grateful Dead band whose need for privacy with her boyfriend caused me to spend a tremendous amount of time at my Aunt Nan’s house in nearby Lincoln, Massachusetts.)
Wendy West and I became fast friends. When I told her a few months later that I wanted to take a year off from school to volunteer on my dad’s campaign, she offered to join me. Worried about how her parents would react, she said to me, “You’ve got to come with me to tell my parents about your dad and about the campaign. It’ll really help my case if you come.”
We went to dinner with her parents, and Wendy announced that my dad was running for president. They responded, in unison, “President of what?” We laughed because they hadn’t even heard of him. It took some convincing, but eventually, Wendy’s parents let her take the year off.
Wendy and I joined the campaign team in Massachusetts, whose ranks included state legislator Andy Card, secretary of transportation for my dad and my brother’s former chief of staff; Ron Kaufman, a local campaign worker at the time who eventually headed up the Political Affairs Office at the White House during my father’s administration; and Andrew Natsios, until recently administrator of USAID. They made me a college coordinator, and I took off on a tour of college campuses—mainly on the East Coast—where I handed out campaign literature and talked to anyone who would listen about why my father would make a great president.
As time passed, I got more comfortable talking to people, at least one-on-one, and that led to the next step: public speaking. In fact, the very first public speech I gave was in Brainard, Massachusetts, at a Republican women’s club where the youngest member had to have been in her seventies. It was the friendliest, least intimidating audience you could imagine. From a college student’s perspective, of course, they looked really old—all contemporaries of my grandmother—and there couldn’t have been a heckler in the crowd.
Nevertheless, when I got up to speak, I literally experienced the sensation of choking. By that, I mean not being able to breathe. I opened my mouth to try to talk about my dad, but was so overcome by emotion and fear that nothing but a few unintelligible sounds escaped my lips. So I had no other choice but to sit down. Thus went was my very first speaking engagement!
In early 1979, Dad responded to a note from President Nixon: “I am determined to make an all-out effort for 1980. I start with no name identification and I realize that. I will, however, continue to keep a ‘low profile.’ I am determined to organize, and organize well, before escalating the candidacy to high levels of public attention.”
Why did Dad decide to run for pres
ident? Dad had a speech he used to give at the time titled “Why I Want to Be President,” in which he said, “Jimmy Carter is not the first president who has failed to provide the strong, inspiring leadership that we so badly need . . . We are now in the late 1970s, and when they end, many will happily say goodbye—goodbye to Vietnam, to Watergate, to recession, to inflation, to the ‘me’ decade, and to the decline of American influence.” Dad talked about the need for new leadership with integrity and enthusiasm, and his desire to be a new kind of president.
“I rather arrogantly felt that I had the credentials,” Dad said. (Hugh Sidey, who covered the presidency for years for Time magazine, agreed, saying, “He was the most experienced man to be president since the founding fathers, in my judgment.”)
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham looked back on Dad’s decision and his credentials: “Can you name a former director of the CIA who’s a plausible presidential candidate? No, you can’t. George Bush knew what he wanted to do and never gave up. To be chairman of the Republican National Committee during Watergate . . . to lose two Senate races, which is so painful. To emotionally keep going—to keep getting back up. The great politicians always do that. Churchill is a great example—he lost more elections than we’ve had lunches—yet George Bush kept getting back up and running, always with dignity, always with grace. He had no enemies, which is amazing when you think about it. One of the things that’s always interested me is with both Nixon and Ford, it never seemed to be in the cards that he wouldn’t get an important job. It was always, what important job can we find for you? Because he was a very loyal, intelligent man.”
My Father, My President Page 16