Many times after tennis or running, Dad checked his weight after showering. Ralph Basham, one of his Secret Service agents who went on to become head of the Secret Service and subsequently U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, remembers one time in the locker room. “He would go over and get on the scale. He didn’t want any extra weight on him, so he wouldn’t even put his glasses on. Then he couldn’t read the scale. ‘Ralph, come here. I can’t read. What does this say?’ he’d ask. Of course, then I’d say, ‘Well, sir, it’s two hundred.’ He’d reply, ‘Oh no, it can’t be. Read that again. It’s got to be a bad scale.’”
During the first Reagan administration, my brother Neil and his wife, Sharon—who had met and fallen in love during the New Hampshire primary in 1980—welcomed their first child, Lauren, into our family.
Dad wrote Lauren a note when she was three days old that referred to a photo of her in the paper, “smiling right out there in front of all the world, just like your wonderful Dad has done all his life—even when it hurt.” Like Lauren, Neil was always smiling, even though he went through a terrible struggle with learning disabilities as a child. I remember one time in the mid–1980s a letter arrived from a junior high school teacher asking Mom to share some of Neil’s struggles with the students, because “they feel like failures.” Mom immediately asked Neil to help, and Neil wrote a candid and inspiring note to the teacher:
People probably thought I was lazy or didn’t care or that I just wasn’t very bright. Despite the learning disability, I knew deep down inside I wasn’t dumb. The root of my difficulty was a reading problem known as dyslexia . . . I learned that through hard work I could overcome my handicap. I also developed other skills that “smarter” people sometimes have trouble with—a desire to fight for my goals and an ability to get along with people . . . As your students know, life is not always easy and for me it sure didn’t seem fair. With the combination of a strong desire to learn, the willingness to work hard, and support from family, friends and teachers, every human has the potential to climb any mountain.
Neil was diagnosed with dyslexia and got the proper help while he was in high school. Learning to deal with dyslexia changed his life. Today as a result, he works harder, cares more, and enjoys life like few people I know. Although he was working at an energy exploration company when he wrote that letter, he now heads an educational software company.
Neil credits “the magic of Dad’s support—combined with Mom’s— and they never let me feel like I was different or less able.” Mom and Dad found Neil’s strengths—basketball, for example—and played to those strengths. “Mom took me to all the assessments and evaluations, but they both gave me the shot-in-the-arm confidence I needed to go through life. Half the battle of a learning disability is not to personalize it—to feel like you’re stupid or use it as an excuse.”
My brother George agrees that Mom and Dad’s love was crucial to his success in life. “I used to tell our girls: ‘I love you. There’s nothing you can do to make me stop loving you, so stop trying.’ In other words, Dad made sure his kids understand that there’s this great well of affection available no matter how awful things get.”
“Everybody had a shared experience,” explains Marvin. “It killed us all when we’d read some nasty article about Dad. And in a way that became a rallying cry for all of us to help defend each other, help each other through some very difficult elections. It’s been inculcated into our family by virtue of the fact that we spent a lot of time with Dad’s family and his siblings. They were very cohesive, very close to each other.”
As Marvin explains it, “I think there were fathers who were around more and, to a certain extent, were stifling to friends of mine. Always around and judging the kids. One of the greatest attributes of both of our parents is that they gave us enough rope to make a lot of decisions, and they knew how to pull that rope in when we abused the privilege.”
How has our family remained intact despite the constant glare of publicity and Dad’s long hours? “You can analyze it all kinds of ways. It’s love, period,” said my brother George. “If we didn’t love each other as much as we do, and love Mother and Dad as much as we do, it would be harder to circle the wagons. People would be going their own way.”
After the assassination attempt, President Reagan didn’t travel much, at least internationally, and Dad stepped in to help in this regard. As a result, his relationships with leaders around the world grew not only in number but in importance.
For example, Dad began a great friendship with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who explained, “When we were in a meeting, President Reagan was in charge. Your dad did what a strong, loyal vice president is supposed to do: he kept his own counsel and shared it only with the president. But then when I’d go to the vice president’s house to see him, it was different. He had opinions on everything. I found him entertaining and funny and fascinating, a wonderful guy.
“One day my wife, Mila, and I were there, and we were sitting there having a glass of Coke and a couple of sandwiches,” Mulroney continued. “All of a sudden, the doors open and the grandchildren came in. They were crawling all over him. He never missed a beat. He kept talking to me. He enjoyed every second of it. The dogs were running around and, I said to myself, this guy’s got his values in the right place.”
One of Dad’s first official trips as vice president was to size up François Mitterrand, the newly elected president of France. Don Gregg, Dad’s national security adviser, was sitting with the two leaders in a very formal dining room when suddenly he spotted two dogs up on their hind legs outside the French doors, pawing to get in. Dad suggested they finish lunch and take the dogs for a romp outside the Elysée. “Your dad was wonderful with the dogs and it was a very, very humanizing moment with Mitterrand, who was otherwise rather cold and withdrawn.” With that, another solid relationship was born.
After the Mitterrand meeting, they flew to London to meet with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (as well as her husband, Denis, one of Dad’s favorite people, who passed away in June 2003). They then flew back to Andrews Air Force Base to spend the night in Washington.
“Got up the next morning, flew to California, went to the Reagan ranch, briefed the president on the Mitterrand visit, and then flew to the Far East,” recalled Joe Hagin, who traveled to sixty-two countries with Dad during the vice presidential years. “In a matter of eight days, we were in eighteen of the twenty-four time zones in the world.”
When I asked my father what he liked most about being vice president, he said, “I liked being around Reagan, and I liked traveling abroad . . . He was very generous about my traveling to different places. He’d let me take the initiative.” Mom’s back-of-the-envelope accounting of all of my parents’ travel during the vice presidential years comes to 1,629 days spent out of Washington, traveling an estimated 1.3 million miles—about fifty-four times around the world.
During the eight years he was vice president, Dad attended many funerals. In fact, Jim Baker used to joke that my father’s slogan as vice president should have been “You die, I fly.” But none were more important in terms of relationship-building than those of the Soviet Union’s three leaders: Presidents Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, who died within twenty-eight months of each other.
Each time there was a state funeral in Moscow, there would be a long receiving line in one of the grand halls of the Kremlin. Once they reached the end of the receiving line, each world leader would be brought into a private meeting room for bilateral discussions. When Dad would go into the room, no aides or Secret Service were allowed in with him. As a precautionary measure, Secret Service Agent John Magaw would slip a little hand alarm to Dad—a small remote alarm that would transmit a wireless signal to the Secret Service in the hall—to keep in his pocket in case he began to choke on a piece of food, or some other similar situation.
It was assumed that the room in which these bilateral meetings were held was bugged. A
s other leaders entered the room, they would look at each other and occasionally pass little notes, cleverly working out a sort of code to use when they had to speak out loud. And they got better at it each time, so that they were able to have a conversation without allowing the KGB to know what they were actually talking about. My father enjoyed that enormously—he got a big kick out of seeing these world leaders develop ways of circumventing the audio surveillance.
When President Brezhnev died unexpectedly in November 1982, my parents and the VP staff were on a tour of Africa. They left Nigeria for Moscow, and warmer clothes were sent from Washington with Secretary of State George Shultz—“the highest-ranking deliveryman in the world,” Dad said later. Mom and Dad soon found themselves in front of Brezhnev’s coffin, paying their respects to Mrs. Brezhnev.
Dad recalled, “The flowers were spectacular. The setting awesome. The music Chopin. Superb.” Suddenly, the three hundred strings that had played so beautifully gave way to a military march, and Brezhnev’s coffin was positioned behind Lenin’s tomb by a tank-puller. “There was no mention of God. There was no hope, no joy, no life ever after, no mention of Christ and what His death has meant to so many,” Dad recounted. “So discouraging in a sense, so hopeless, so lonely.”
On the way back to Africa, Dad wrote a cable to President Reagan in midair from Moscow to Frankfurt on November 15, 1982, outlining how the funeral had become an opportunity for a bilateral meeting with Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov. And then, vintage Dad, he described the funeral itself to Reagan in terms of their own families: “I at first saw only hostile troops and hostile power. We had a little wait, and I watched the changing of the guard and looked at the faces, and then I saw my sons and yours: George, Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Mike and Ron.”
Dad and Mom returned to Zambia after the funeral. Shortly after, they sat down for lunch with their African hosts, and an African clergyman got up and offered a blessing before they began the meal. Dad said, “Oh, I can’t tell you how good it feels to have a meal blessed!” He continued, “I’ve just come from this very dark ceremony in Moscow watching Brezhnev be buried, and the only sign of anything religious was when Mrs. Brezhnev was given a last look at her husband before his coffin was closed and she bent over and kissed him on the cheek and then crossed herself.” Back here in the States, I remember how her seemingly tiny religious gesture made headlines—and how it gave many in the West hope for commonality and even peace.
After just fifteen months in office, Leonid Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, died of kidney failure at the age of sixty-nine on February 9, 1984, and once again, Dad found himself attending the funeral of a Soviet leader. As he had before, he went to the Kremlin for the burial and stayed for a series of bilateral meetings with the new Soviet leader. Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was also in failing health when he assumed office and died at age seventy-two just thirteen months later, in March of 1985. He was the last of the Soviet “old guard” leaders, and had already turned over many of his day-to-day responsibilities for running the Soviet empire to a fifty-four-year-old former Politburo member named Mikhail Gorbachev. It was at Chernenko’s funeral that Dad met Gorbachev for the first time.
“The minute I met him, I said to myself, ‘This man is different,’” Dad recalled years later. “You could tell he wanted a dialogue in a different way from the others. He was his own man; he was charismatic.”
He continued: “I remember once Gorbachev flared up when we were talking about human rights . . . and then he calmed down and said, ‘We ought to talk about these things. Tell President Reagan I want to discuss any subject he wants.’ It was quite a breakthrough, because I was the first one from our country to see him in action in this powerful new job.”
Just as he did after the first Soviet funeral, Dad wrote a cable to President Reagan from Air Force Two. Gorbachev was about to become the leader of the Soviet Union, and what strikes me about Dad’s letter is his take on Gorbachev’s charisma and the effect it might have on members of Congress:
One has got to be optimistic that Gorbachev will be better to work with . . . hopefully one will truly “start anew” . . . there is the possibility that his attractive personality will be used to divide us from our allies and to attract more support for old views and themes. I can just see some of our Members of Congress eating out of his hand in wishful anticipation of achieving détente, but giving away too much in the process as we try to figure out who this man really is. It will be an interesting trip, but as the monkey said when he was shot into outer space, “It beats the hell out of the cancer research lab!”
In 1983, Dad and Mom went on an official trip to Europe, to visit the allies and negotiate with the Russians on the issue of intermediate-range missiles. This important trip is memorable not only for the international stakes involved but also because of the massive protests, including two attacks on Dad’s motorcade—one in Germany and the other in the Netherlands.
But Dad would not be intimidated or back down.
On June 26, 1983, for example, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl hosted Mom and Dad at an anniversary celebration in the city of Krefeld (North Rhine-Westphalia) commemorating the first wave of emigration from Germany to America 300 years ago.
“For us Germans, and for me as German chancellor, it was a great honor that none other than the American vice president and his wife, Barbara, came to Germany for this occasion,” Chancellor Kohl told me. “This occurred at a time when the stationing of midrange weapons was being discussed intensely in the Federal Republic of Germany and was also being protested against in many places. In Krefeld as well, the atmosphere was heightened, and the commemoration was not without disturbances. The lights even went out at times in the hall where we were gathered. But George Bush did not let himself be irritated by it and he gave a splendid speech about German-American relations. What impressed me was the great composure with which George Bush reacted to the disturbances, which were very embarrassing.”
Chris Buckley, Dad’s speechwriter for two years who today is the editor of Forbes FYI magazine and a best-selling author, was also on that trip and remembers events this way:
“He was sent to Europe to about eight or nine European capitals in as many days to persuade the Europeans to accept the placement of Pershing and ground-launched cruise missiles that they themselves had requested. But the Russians had whipped up a big propaganda campaign, and there were marches in European capitals with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against America for ‘forcing’ these missiles on poor little Europe.
Chris continued: “It was a very important trip and he gave one speech in Berlin when we arrived and it basically made the case. The Times of London did an editorial about him and said, not a bad speech—which for the English is very good. It was a very testy time. We had to drive through a jeering crowd in London—people giving me the finger, and I gave it right back!! Special relationship? Special relationship this! We drove to the Guildhall in London and your father gave the speech and then there was a question-and-answer session. These lefty Brits stood up, most of them with clerical collars on, saying, ‘How can you force these missiles on Europe? You’re trying to blow up the world and make everything dangerous.’ You know, the old pacifist rant. And your dad just looked at this guy and said, ‘Wait a minute. Believe it or not, I care about this. I have kids, too, you know.’ And he absolutely disarmed the crowd. At that moment, standing in the Guildhall, I could tell he was angry, and yet there was even something gentle about his anger. That’s how I think of his leadership. He led gently. There’s not an ounce of bluster or inauthenticity about him.”
Early in the morning on October 23, 1983, a suicidal terrorist drove a Mercedes truck, loaded with explosives equivalent to six tons of TNT, at high speed into the headquarters building of a U.S. marine battalion at Beirut International Airport. The explosion killed 241 American servicemen, mostly marines, who were stationed there as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.
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President Reagan directed the Marines into Beirut in August 1992 at the request of the Lebanese government to assist, together with French and Italian military units, in supervising the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The multinational force was also there to serve as peacekeepers, attempting to help the Lebanese government achieve political stability after years of factional fighting. Sadly, the mission would fail, and Lebanon would again descend into deadly chaos.
The day of the bombing, Dad told President Reagan that he would like to go to Beirut himself. President Reagan agreed, and the next day, accompanied by General P. X. Kelley, then the commandant of the United States Marine Corps, Dad made the trip to Lebanon. They stood there, side by side, in the rubble, watching young marines as they clawed at twisted steel and broken concrete in an effort to find their comrades—hopefully alive.
“It was a sad but meaningful manifestation of Semper Fidelis,” notes General Kelley. “When we subsequently visited the wounded aboard the USS Iwo Jima, I could not help but see compassion and pain on the face of a true hero—one from another war and another generation.”
When there were breaks in Dad’s travel schedule, he and Mom would head to Kennebunkport, Maine, to our family home, which would eventually become known around the world as Dad’s summer White House. In the late 1890s, my great-great-grandfather Dwight Davis Walker and my great-grandfather George Herbert Walker bought the peninsula of land that today is called Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport. In 1901, they built a big Victorian home on the tip of the land and named it Surf Ledge. These days we all call it the Big House. A second, smaller house built next to it, called the Bungalow, was given to my grandparents Dorothy and Prescott as a wedding present the year after they were married. From the turn of the century onward, the Walkers would escape the summer heat of St. Louis by heading to Kennebunkport; by the 1930s, my grandparents brought their children there for the summer from Greenwich, with Prescott Bush commuting weekends on the overnight train from Greenwich.
My Father, My President Page 20