There in Maine, my grandmother Dorothy taught my father and his siblings sailing and tennis and bridge. Aunt Nan remembers the sound of the surf on the Maine coast lulling them to sleep at night, and she thinks it continues to help Dad relax. When they were thirteen and eleven, Dad’s grandfather George Walker let him and Uncle Pres take out an old boat named the Tomboy for hours on end, which began my Dad’s love of being on the water. Aunt Nan says that for Dad, spending time in Kennebunkport became “a very deep and important thing in his life, a real touchstone place.”
Dad calls Walker’s Point his “anchor to windward.”
The famous nor’easter of 1978 damaged thousands of homes along the New England coast, including the Big House. At the time of the storm, Uncle Herbie—George Herbert Walker Jr., my grandmother’s brother—owned the house, but when he died shortly afterward, my Aunt Mary decided to sell the house to Mom and Dad.
Since Dad had left the CIA and moved back to Houston, he and Mom had the time and energy to fix up the storm-damaged house. Previously, we had a gray house on Ocean Avenue, facing Walker’s Point, which had terrific ocean views as well.
By the time Dad became vice president, he and Mom started entertaining on Walker’s Point. At one event, they hosted a dinner for a group of diplomats who had come to visit. Tim McBride, one of Dad’s personal aides, recalls that when the group arrived—probably a dozen people—Dad remembered quite a few from his U.N. days, but there were some new faces to him, and he had trouble putting names with them. As he tried to decide where everyone would be seated for dinner, he was having a hard time.
“Go get my Polaroid camera,” he said to Tim, referring to the one he had used in China, “and run around and take pictures of all the guests, and those will be the place cards.” Tim did exactly that, and Dad carefully arranged the guests by photo.
On one of his first weekends in Kennebunkport as vice president, Dad decided he needed a haircut. Previously, a local barber named Emile Roy had sent a letter to Dad’s presidential campaign, volunteering to help after he read an article about Mom and Dad’s time in China. After reading Emile’s letter, Dad called him up for a haircut (of course, Emile didn’t believe it was really Dad on the phone!), and the two have been friends ever since.
“George invited me fishing one time and it turned out to be a chilly day,” Emile told me. “I was in a short-sleeved shirt and George ran back to the house to get me a jacket. He came back with a hat as well and said that he did not want me to lose my head over it. I think he was referring to my toupee!”
In 1983, Mom and Dad invited all of the nation’s governors and their families over to Walker’s Point for a cookout, when the National Governors’ Association held its annual meeting in nearby Portland, Maine. In a scene that could have been right out of the movie Groundhog Day, both Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts and Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas were guests.
“Our daughter, Chelsea, then was three years old,” remembers President Clinton. “I took Chelsea up to meet the vice president. I thought, ‘Boy, I have such a smart, well-behaved daughter. She’ll be great.’ I said, ‘Chelsea, this is Vice President Bush.’ And she shook his hand and she said, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ And he just laughed. He took her by the hand, introduced her to his mother, and took her to the bathroom. He didn’t have to do that. He could have had somebody else take her. He could have pointed it out to me. He did it himself. I never forgot it.”
During the spring of 1984, Dad was campaigning for the reelection of the Reagan-Bush ticket in Colorado. As Dad walked through the lobby of the Denver hotel where he was staying, he noticed a group of retired baseball Hall of Famers such as Hoyt Wilhelm and Juan Marichal and Whitey Ford. They were there to play in an Old Timers exhibition game that night at Mile High Stadium.
Sean Coffey, Dad’s personal aide at the time, remembers Dad stopping to chat with the players assembling for the photo. The players, in turn, started talking baseball with Dad—who had played first base in two College World Series in 1947 and 1948, while at Yale.
The rap against Dad was that he was “all field and no hit,” but during a 1948 game in Raleigh, North Carolina, Dad happened to hit a single, a double, and a triple—with a few pro scouts looking on. The scouts approached Dad’s coach, Ethan Allen, after the game, but “unfortunately, Coach Allen told them the truth, so the scouts never talked to me much after that,” Dad later said. Six of his teammates were signed by the pros instead.
Dad confessed his shortcomings thirty-six years later to the assembled Hall of Famers. Nevertheless, they invited Dad to come to the game that night, and the next thing Dad knows, he’s in the locker room at Mile High Stadium. They had him suited up in a uniform, and he was swinging a bat when Pete Teeley found him. “I looked at him and I said, ‘What are you doing?’” Pete said. “‘These guys play baseball every day even at the age of sixty. You haven’t played in years. I don’t want you to go out there and make a fool out of yourself.’ He got mad as hell about that.”
Meanwhile, over the stadium address system, they announced there was a “mystery guest” playing with the team, and Dad came out. The crowd had no idea who he was until the announcers said Dad’s name as he went up to bat. Milt Pappas, the great All-Star pitcher, pitched to Dad. Then Dad hit a sharp single to center field and made it to first base.
“The players were delighted, and he was really happy,” remembered Sean, who watched from the third base side. Dad was eventually forced out at second to end the inning—at which point he put on a glove and headed out to first base, his old position at Yale.
“The best was yet to come,” said Sean, because “who comes up but Orlando Cepeda, who was known for hitting line drives. Sure enough, he hits a rocket down the right field line. If it had hit somebody in the head, it would have taken their head off. As it was, it looked like it was going into the right field corner for a double—but that was before first baseman Bush jumps to his left. He dives for it, knocks the ball down, gets up, scrambles into foul territory, turns around, and lobs a perfect underhand pitch to the pitcher covering first. Orlando Cepeda is out. Mile High Stadium erupted in cheers.”
“A Walter Mitty night for me,” Dad told one of the interviewers as he came off the field with a smile, referring to James Thurber’s mild-mannered character who daydreams of being the fearless hero.
In 1983, Joe Hagin went to Dad and told him that while he’d do anything in the world for him, he couldn’t travel anymore—together, they’d been on the road for three years without a break. Dad understood, thought about it, and called Joe back to suggest the job of assistant to the vice president for legislative affairs. Worried that he was young and inexperienced in the world of legislation, Joe told Dad he wasn’t sure it was the right job for him. The more he found out about it, in fact, the more shocked he was—“a two-rung promotion,” Joe called it, with a beautiful office in the Capitol, a good-size staff, and a driver.
“Nonsense, you’ll do fine,” Dad reassured Joe, explaining that the job involved not much travel but a lot of congressional hand-holding. Then Joe discovered why my father wasn’t concerned: “I found out several months later that he had written all one hundred senators a personal letter about me . . . he really invested a lot of time doing all those handwritten notes. People totally welcomed me.”
While Joe was working with Democratic senators and congressmen back in Washington, the Democratic Party held its convention in San Francisco, nominating former vice president Walter Mondale for president and Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro for vice president. Ms. Ferraro was a three-term member of Congress and a former public school teacher who had gone to Fordham Law School at night while raising three children. She was the first woman nominated for the vice presidency by a major party. It was a bold stroke by the Mondale campaign, and it presented a tricky challenge for Dad.
“He was complimentary of my nomination,” Ms. Ferraro told me. “One, because it was the politically right thing to do;
and two, because your father was a very gracious man.”
Looking back, Dad says now, “I was very surprised at her nomination. She had limited experience on the national scene beyond being a congresswoman from New York. I got to know her a little bit during the campaign. I haven’t seen her in a while, but I do like her.”
There were stories at the time about a tenfold increase in total media coverage of the vice presidential race from 1980 to 1984. What Dad remembers was the challenge of making appearances with Ferraro, because of the crowds she drew.
Ms. Ferraro agreed: “It was mind-boggling to see. Certainly, I didn’t expect the response that the candidacy had. It was more the candidacy than it was me. I think probably any woman who got the nomination would have been received very much the same way—and that’s in either party. My audiences were as large as President Reagan’s and in some instances larger. Forty thousand people would show up—it was the most amazing thing.”
Meanwhile, in a bar in Sterling, Illinois, then-Congresswoman Lynn Martin was trying to earn an endorsement from some steelworkers in a late-morning meeting. She paid no attention when the phone behind the bar rang, but then the bartender announced that some wise guy had just called and said he was the vice president of the United States. And then the phone rang again, and the bartender realized, actually, that it was the vice president.
“It’s for you,” he said to the congresswoman.
“So I went to the phone and it was your dad,” Ms. Martin told me. ‘What are you doing in a bar?’ And I said, ‘Trying to get votes. What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m calling you because I’m going to debate Representative Ferraro and I’d like you to help me prepare.’”
Congresswoman Martin suspects she was chosen because she and Congresswoman Ferraro served on the same House committee, and were both “sharp—if you were being kind, you could say we were ‘sharp-witted,’ but maybe occasionally just ‘sharp.’”
Mom thought that Dad might not have been taking the whole thing seriously enough, partly because many of his staff members were telling him everything would be fine. But things might not be fine—“she’s going to be tough,” Ms. Martin recalled Mom saying to her about Ms. Ferraro in a phone call.
“Your mom said, ‘Listen, he’s full of himself right now. Cut him down.’ I said, ‘That’s easy for you to say—he’s vice president of the United States. This is my career, too, you know.’” Here she was, a young mother and a new member of Congress. But somebody had to be tough—and help Dad get ready for a difficult debate.
One of the things Congresswoman Martin observed is that she had always debated men—but when men debated women, they primarily debated their wives or mothers. They are seldom in the situation my father was in at that time in America. He had to learn to walk the line between his extraordinary politeness and his competitive side. Boyden Gray, head of the debate prep team, remembers, “It was very, very tricky . . . the strategy was he had to win, but he couldn’t win too strongly. He couldn’t be seen as ganging up on her.”
Boyden remembers the first debate rehearsal, which was to have a television camera, a stage, podiums, chairs, the whole set, in a large auditorium in the Executive Office Building. Dad had specifically said he didn’t want anyone in the session other than Congresswoman Martin and essential staff.
“I ignored his instruction and invited everybody I could think of,” Boyden said. “So we had the place practically filled with Reagan’s staff and everything else. When he came in and saw the auditorium two-thirds full, he was furious. Absolutely furious. But it was the right thing to do, because it made him take the task seriously. And you know, Lynn Martin gave him a pretty hard time.”
Ms. Martin says Mom concedes that Dad was not ready for the first practice debate. He was better by the second, and “he cleaned me up by the third.”
A few days later, the two vice presidential candidates met in Philadelphia for the real debate, and no matter what Ms. Ferraro said, Dad kept his cool. He’s participated in one vice presidential debate and five presidential debates over the years; nonetheless, he says the one with Ferraro was the most tense.
“I think the press was automatically divided,” Dad said. “A lot of the females in the press corps said this was one of us. You could hear ’em clapping.”
In fact, there was a press room behind the stage, filled with people whom Dad would call the spinmeisters—the political guys from the Reagan-Bush campaign, like Lynn Nofziger and Lee Atwater. (They were waiting for the end of the debate and one of the rituals of American politics to start—reporters interviewing political operatives in the “spin room.” Supporters of each campaign would hold a sign over their head with their candidate’s name on it, then roam the room giving sound bites to reporters as to why their candidate won the debate.) While the debate was still going on, Dad’s political staffers actually saw the journalists clapping for Ferraro.
“It was a tough one,” Dad said.
After all the spin had been captured by the reporters, the media analysts that night declared the debate a tie—which came as a relief to both candidates.
The day after the only vice presidential debate, however, Dad made an appearance before a group of longshoremen, one of whom kept waving a sign that read “You kicked a little ass last night, George!” He kept yelling that same comment at Dad, over and over, from the crowd.
As Dad was getting into his car to leave, the man repeated it again to Dad, this time right next to him. Unfortunately, Dad actually repeated the comment back to the man—not noticing an intrusive boom mike as he climbed into his limo. It was all over the news in no time.
Compounding the situation, shortly afterward my mother was joking with some reporters on the campaign plane, thinking she was “off the record.” (Note to reader: never assume you are “off the record” with a reporter.) Mom remembers that one “had needled the president about his elite, rich vice president. It really had burned me up because we all had read that Geraldine and her husband, John Zaccaro, were worth at least $4 million, if not more. The press were teasing me about it, and I said something like, ‘That rich . . . well, it rhymes with rich . . . could buy George Bush any day.’”
By the time it was on the radio news, Mom had called Ms. Ferraro to apologize. By the time it was on the television news, she had called Dad to apologize.
At that point, the media were ready to ambush Mom en route to the next appearance, but before they could, Dad called back with a friend’s advice: “Remember Halloween.” The poet laureate (we call her the poet laureate of our family because of her skill with rhyming words) marched out smiling and said she had talked to Ms. Ferraro and had apologized for calling her a “witch”—and that the apology had been graciously accepted.
Even today, Geraldine Ferraro is very understanding and gracious about the incident. She says, “Your mother was not the candidate. She was very protective of your father. It didn’t figure into the top ten things I worried about. We still kid about it. More than once my girlfriends will remind me, ‘You know, Gerry, you rhyme with witch!’ It’s very funny.”
A night or two later, Dad went to a campaign event, and as he got to the podium, he sheepishly apologized to the crowd: “Sorry we’re late, but Bar and I were upstairs cleaning our mouths out with soap.”
There were other memorable moments from that fall campaign—the critics calling President Reagan the Teflon President; the “Bear in the Woods” ad campaign reminding voters of the Soviet threat; President Reagan not realizing a microphone was live when he joked that the “bombing will begin in five minutes.” But in November, President Reagan and Dad won in a landslide, carrying every state except Vice President Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. The Reagan-Bush ticket took 525 electoral votes to Mondale-Ferraro’s 13.
“My mother was the only person in the entire country who didn’t know we were going to lose,” Ms. Ferraro remembered. When she called my dad that night to concede the election, Dad unexpectedly invited h
er to lunch. At her suggestion, Dad brought “his Geraldine Ferraro,” Lynn Martin, and she brought “her George Bush,” meaning Bob Barnett, a Democratic lawyer who is married to Rita Braver of CBS News.
“I’d have preferred to be the host today, but under the circumstances, I’ll take what I can get,” Ferraro said. Dad said, “It’s a free lunch.”
The Washington Post reported afterward that they enjoyed salmon steak, asparagus with potatoes, and brownies for dessert, in Dad’s ceremonial office in the Executive Office Building.
Bob Barnett remembered that Ms. Ferraro told them she’d lost her luggage on the way back from vacationing in St. Croix after the election. Dad replied that he was very experienced at losing luggage and was, in fact, a fan of bad lost-luggage jokes, and shared this one: A woman comes up to the counter at United Airlines in Washington with three pieces of luggage. She asks the ticket agent, “Can you send one to New York, one to Los Angeles, and one to Hawaii?” The ticket agent replied, “We can’t do that!” The woman says, “Why not? You did it last time.”
Dad knew that in order to prepare for the debate, Bob had not only researched his speeches and issue papers but had read The Preppy Handbook. He’d even bought those striped ribbon watchbands that Dad sometimes wore. When Dad noticed Bob had on a plain leather watchband during lunch, he took his own watch off its watchband and gave the striped one to Bob as a souvenir. He later sent photos of them comparing watchbands, inscribed “To Bob, you preppy, solid watchband stand-in.”
“On the day of our lunch,” Bob told me, “George Bush was gracious in victory.”
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