I was in the middle of my college studies the day Mom and Dad moved in, back in school for the winter semester. “Moving into the house was just wonderful and exciting—a whole new dimension in our lives,” says Dad. “It was mind-boggling in a sense. And then getting the office in the White House, the one right down the hall from the president in the West Wing; and the great big ceremonial office in the Executive Office Building; and the one up in the Capitol as president of the Senate. So we had all that to get started. It was great.”
During the transition, Dad and President-elect Reagan visited Capitol Hill, paying a courtesy call on the congressional Democratic leadership in House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill’s office. When they walked into the room, Dad spied his old friend Dan Rostenkowski and brought President-elect Reagan right over. Dad and Congressman Rostenkowski had served together years earlier on the House Ways and Means Committee, when Dad was a congressman. “Listen, you’ve got to know this guy,” Dad said to Reagan about Congressman Rostenkowski. “He’s going to be chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.”
At that point, Tip O’Neill was deciding between making Rostenkowski the chairman of Ways and Means or the majority whip and was leaning toward the latter. When Dad introduced him as the next chairman of Ways and Means, Rostenkowski said, Tip O’Neill “almost died.” As soon as the meeting was over, O’Neill pulled Rostenkowski aside and said, “What’s George Bush doing, saying you’re going to be chairman of Ways and Means? You better talk to me first,” followed by a tongue-lashing about who was in charge.
Rostenkowski then called Dad and told him about the pickle he was in with the Speaker, and Dad explained that Rostenkowski would be far better off as chairman of Ways and Means than as majority whip, in line behind Jim Wright, who was a young man and would probably be around for a while. “Danny, it’s all going to be the economy and it’s going to be taxes,” Dad predicted about the Reagan agenda. Rostenkowski agreed with him, but asked Dad not to tell anyone else he’d be chairman in public anymore. “He says, well, what’s done is done,” Rostenkowski said to me. Sure enough, Dan Rostenkowski took the chairmanship shortly after that day, and served for fourteen years, during the Reagan, Bush, and part of the Clinton administrations.
As the 1981 inauguration approached, Mom had gowns made for her by New York designers Arnold Scaasi and Bill Blass. The former had met Mom at an earlier event and told her, with a slightly disdainful eye on her outfit, that he could “make a prettier dress for you.”
On inauguration night 1981, Mom and Dad had to appear at each of nine inaugural balls around town, traveling by limo with the Reagans. They’d get introduced to the crowd and then take a little spin on the dance floor. Dad, frankly, has never been much of a dancer—but Mom says at the inaugural he “danced very sweetly at all nine balls, because he knew he should. They were short spins!”
During the inauguration, our entire family was invited to the White House with the Reagans. It turned out to be one of several times that we would be invited to the White House during those eight vice presidential years, mostly for state dinners and other events. We didn’t see much of the Reagan kids over the years, though Maureen was very friendly and campaigned a lot for her father. Jeb spent some time with her on the campaign trail and admired her loyalty and tenacity. “She was a great speaker,” he remembers. Just like President Reagan.
The Reagan and Bush children shared the common bond of having their fathers become president. All of us know how hurtful it is to have family members criticized publicly, so I’ve been surprised and taken aback—to say the very least—at how inexplicably bitter Ron Reagan Jr. has been toward my brother George. Ron Jr. seems to go out of his way to express his contempt for our forty-third president.
As far as our mothers go, Mom and Mrs. Reagan got on quite well, though they are very different people. When I asked Mom if they were fast friends, she replied, “Not fast friends, but friends.” Because Mrs. Reagan had never lived in Washington before, Mom instinctively felt she should protect the new First Lady. Soon after President Reagan and Dad took office, in fact, some senators’ wives had a meeting to tell Mrs. Reagan how to “skin a cat.”
In particular, Mom remembered Strom Thurmond’s wife telling Mrs. Reagan what exactly they wanted her to do at some event. “I could see it was irritating her just slightly,” Mom recalls. “And I said, ‘This is ridiculous. She was a governor’s wife and she knows exactly what she’s doing.’”
Meanwhile, settling into his office at the Old Executive Office Building, Dad gathered together everyone whom he had hired up to this point. My father put together a great staff, including Admiral Dan Murphy, his chief of staff; Pete Teeley, his press secretary; Boyden Gray, his legal counsel; and later, Don Gregg, his national security adviser. Dad and Boyden didn’t know each other yet, but clearly he liked and respected Boyden, as he ended up serving as Dad’s chief legal counsel throughout the twelve years of his vice presidency and presidency—a White House record.
That morning, Dad welcomed everybody and gave a little talk. At the end, he said, “One thing I want you all to always remember is this: the first day that you walk through that gate and you don’t get a special feeling about where you are and what you’re doing, that’s the day that you need to go find something else to do.”
He was also very serious about supporting the president and his staff. Dad admonished the group never to leak information in the press or say anything against the president’s policies. As far as he was concerned, they were one team—and everyone was there to support President Reagan and his agenda.
From the start, Dad and President Reagan began to have lunch together every Thursday, which succeeding presidents and vice presidents have continued to this day. “No agenda. No written notes. Just the two of us,” Dad explained to me. “A lot of people would say, well, you’re going to see the President, tell him this, tell him that. But I didn’t do that, and one of the reasons it continued in a very frank way is that he knew I wasn’t going to say, by the way, Mr. President, so-and-so wants you to do this. It was very informal—I felt totally free to say whatever I wanted. Bring in the latest jokes or talk about what he was going to do, like going to the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany.”
They’d also share Mexican food, which they both loved—chips and salsa, tortilla soup, or chile con queso.
Joe Hagin watched the Thursday lunches develop into something bigger. “He provided a very trusted voice to the president, and he supported the president, who did not have a lot of foreign policy experience. He served as an honest broker and an honest sounding board for the president, because I think the president understood that nothing that the two of them said to each other would ever leak. And that was very important . . . in short order, President Reagan grew to trust him.”
Jon Meacham, the presidential historian and Newsweek editor, explained to me the impact of what Dad and President Reagan were doing, slowly but surely. “President Reagan was in the midst, with your father’s help, of really reorienting the country from what had been a center-left country from 1960 to 1980 to a center-right country, where we still are. When you look at what President Kennedy, President Johnson, President Nixon, President Ford, President Carter were doing, it was all slightly to the left of center. It wasn’t crazy liberal, but that’s where the dial was. Reagan pushed it back center right, and your father held it there.”
On March 30, 1981, Dad was off on a day trip, this one to Fort Worth. It was his first visit back to Texas since he had become vice president. Back in Washington, President Reagan had just delivered a speech at the Hilton Hotel across town, and as they were leaving the building to return to the White House, six shots rang out. Not only was President Reagan shot, so was Tim McCarthy, a Secret Service officer; Jim Brady, President Reagan’s press secretary; and Thomas Delahanty, a D.C. police officer. John Hinckley Jr., the twenty-five-year-old shooter, was arrested on the scene.
Air Force Two had just taken off from Fort Worth
heading to Austin when the word came in about the shooting. They were flying in an old Boeing 707—it had been President Eisenhower’s Air Force One—and the onboard television would go black whenever the pilot communicated with ground control, adding to the confusion and suspense about the president’s condition. Chase Untermeyer, who was on the VP staff at the time, remembers that after they had decided to return to Washington, a call came in from the president’s counsel, Ed Meese, that Reagan had come through the surgery successfully and was out of danger. However, the Secret Service was still uncertain whether there was a larger plot behind the attempted assassination, and wanted Dad to helicopter directly to the South Lawn of the White House for safety.
While Dad was still in the air, Secretary of State Al Haig made his now-famous announcement to the press, “I am in control here,” which had something to do with why Dad decided not to take the helicopter to the White House from Andrews Air Force Base. Instead, he choppered to the vice president’s house first and then drove to the White House in a secure motorcade.
Dad explained his decision this way: “I didn’t want to look like I was president of the United States. I don’t know whether they had actually transferred the power to me as president, but clearly, I was next in charge. Al Haig had come up to the press room and said he was in charge here, and it was important to get back and keep the regular order”—which is Dad’s nice way of saying that under the Constitution, the “regular order” for succession would be vice president, then Speaker of the House, then secretary of state.
Years later, Don Gregg looked back on the whole scene: “The contrast between the way your dad behaved, which was to just move in unobtrusively and there was the sense of continuity, and Al Haig, who was rushing in saying, ‘I’m in charge’—it just couldn’t have been more striking. A man with a huge ego, in the case of Haig, and a man with great compassion and a great sense of proportion, your father.”
Chase observed that from that day forward, many Reagan staffers who had previously treated Dad with “limited enthusiasm” came to trust him.
Dad’s concern was with how President Reagan was doing. He wanted to go to George Washington Hospital right away to see the president, but when he heard about the pandemonium there, he decided to send Joe Hagin to check it out first. “I went down that night and it was chaos at the hospital,” Joe remembered. “I sent word back that I thought it was not a good time for a visit.”
“So we went the next day to the hospital to see President Reagan,” said Joe. “The vice president was very concerned about Nancy and the appearance of the whole thing. I was impressed with how calm and collected he was, how determined he was to handle it in the right way and not to be seen as stepping into the limelight.”
Pete Teeley went along, too. “We went upstairs and the VP said, ‘Well, come on, you can go see President Reagan,’” Pete told me. “I was kind of reluctant to do it—Mrs. Reagan was there and I thought to myself, ‘Hell, she’s not going to want a bunch of staff guys wandering through.’” So when Dad went into President Reagan’s room—he didn’t stay long, just enough to say hello and be able to reassure everyone back at the White House that the president was fine—Pete went to visit Jim Brady, a very good friend of his and the president’s press secretary. John Hinckley had shot him in the head during the assassination attempt.
“His [Brady’s] condition was shocking,” Pete told me. “It looked like he had just suffered a terrible beating. And Sarah [Jim’s wife] said to me that the doctors wanted him to start recognizing sounds and voices and names, and she had me whispering to him . . . He wasn’t making any movements. It was a very sad situation.”
The day of the assassination attempt, Rich Bond, Dad’s deputy chief of staff, had his own personally devastating experience. Rich and his wife, Valerie, were at Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., visiting their baby son, Patrick, who had been born prematurely back in December. Patrick had been fighting for his life every day for three months, but then sadly, he died that morning at the hospital. Rich and Valerie were returning to their home with Valerie’s parents when Rich got an emergency call through the White House switchboard to report to the office because of the shooting.
“Shock on top of sorrow,” Rich summarized, “a long, stressful afternoon and evening.” By 11:00 at night, everything was just beginning to calm down and Dad called Rich into his West Wing office, saying he’d just heard the news about Patrick. “I started to cry and he gave me this long, fierce hug, telling me it was going to be okay,” Rich remembers. It was okay—the president survived, and another son, Michael Thomas, was born to the Bonds in the fall of the following year.
As 1981 progressed, my parents read in the paper that a cross had been burned in the front yard of a Cameroonian couple serving in Washington with their country’s embassy. Without any announcement or press contingent, Mom and Dad just went over and rang the doorbell, expressing their regrets and support to the scared couple.
“I think Dad is drawn to people who are hurting,” Marvin added. “He’s a natural healer. He doesn’t profess to be that, but he has an amazing innate sense of when people are hurting and that’s when he’ll turn on that attention—whether it’s in the form of a beautiful letter or a hug or some unsolicited advice.”
The attempted assassination marked a turning point in Dad’s relationship with President Reagan. For example, Don Gregg remembers meeting with Dad one Saturday morning after the assassination attempt, when Dad said he found out that the president would be at the White House on a summer Sunday—a prisoner of the “bubble” that presidents tend to live in. Don quoted Dad as saying, “He just feels like a bird in a gilded cage down there. I may ask him to play golf.”
When I asked Jim Baker about Dad’s relationship with President Reagan, he said, “Well, it matured. At first, it was a little bit shaky. Reagan went to your dad not because he wanted to, initially, but because there wasn’t any other possibility. Why? Because your dad had delegates at the convention, and the best way to bring the party together would be to put George Bush on the ticket.
“But your dad quickly overcame any reservations that Reagan had by being an absolutely perfect vice president,” Secretary Baker added. “I’ve said to people over and over, nobody ever performed that job better than your dad, because he knew that he was never supposed to be juxtaposed against Reagan. He was an absolutely superb vice president for Reagan, and they really got along extremely well. It was a very, very close friendship, and I’d say that began the first year.”
Jim Baker, President Reagan’s chief of staff, was in a good position to watch the relationship grow—he was in the office next door to Dad’s in the West Wing, near the Oval Office. He followed Dad’s lead to ensure that the normal rivalries between the presidential and vice presidential staffs never took root.
“It didn’t happen in our administration,” said Baker, “because I was the chief of staff and I know I satisfied the Reagans that I was totally loyal to them; and yet I was in a position to see that the vice president was included in meetings.”
As the 1982 midterm elections approached, Dad began to campaign for Republicans in closely contested districts. His very close friend Lud Ashley, a Democrat, was running for reelection for his congressional seat in Ohio, which he had held since 1955. Republicans in Washington had identified Lud’s seat as winnable and decided to devote resources—including the vice president—to unseat the incumbant.
“He came out to Toledo and campaigned against me!” Lud laughingly told me. Dad went to the Toledo Blade for a meeting of their editorial board, whose members all knew that he and Lud had a long history together—but that didn’t stop them from trying to bait Dad into saying something against Lud. Dad looked at them and explained that of course he was campaigning for a Republican-controlled Congress, but added, “If you think I’m going to say one word against Lud Ashley, you’re crazy. Have I made myself clear?”
Lud lost the election, and Dad hasn’t he
ard the end of it since.
Dad was very happy that the vice president’s house was adjacent to a tennis court. He played tennis regularly. He also played paddleball in the House gym with some of the congressmen on the Hill who were involved in the administration’s tax reform legislation: Sonny Montgomery, Dad’s friend and regular paddleball partner (who would yell “Kill Bubba!” when he tried to put the ball away); Bill Archer, who replaced Dad as the congressman representing Houston and later became chair of the Ways and Means Committee; and Marty Russo, the congressman from Illinois, who was also on Ways and Means.
“We kicked butt,” Marty Russo remembers. “Your dad does not like to lose.”
On a trip to Australia in 1982, Dad was playing tennis with his old friend John Newcombe and Tony Roche, the former Wimbledon doubles champs, at an indoor court in front of a few dozen spectators. Several times in a row, Tony would lob it to Dad, who would smash it back, and then Tony would drop it right at Dad’s feet. The third time, Dad tripped over his own feet and fell down, blood streaming down his elbow.
“You could hear a pin drop,” recalls John Newcombe. “The Secret Service wanted to laugh but dared not. Suddenly, George sprung to his feet and said in a loud voice, ‘Don’t shoot him! I’m okay.’”
During a trip to Mexico, Dad spied Jim Burch and several of his fellow Secret Service agents playing tennis on their off-duty hours. Dad approached their supervisor, asking if Jim would be allowed to play with him and a pair of local tennis pros. Jim was allowed, and Dad made sure Jim received autographed, official photos of the match when they returned home. Later, Dad tipped Jim off when Dad was scheduled to play different matches with Bjorn Borg, Ivan Lendl, and Tony Roche, so that Jim could arrange to be on duty then and watch the match.
My Father, My President Page 19