My Father, My President

by Doro Bush Koch

The four of them enjoyed a lively lunch, and Dad afterward showed them the desk in the vice president’s office with his predecessors’ initials carved in the woodwork.

  “It’s amazing,” Ms. Ferraro said later. “I don’t think women would do that to the furniture.”

  Chapter 13

  MASTER OF THE SMALL GESTURE

  “Dad invented quality time, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a busy guy, but he’s such a magnetic personality and so fun to be around that—even though he may have worked fourteen hours that day—it’s the one hour you’re with him that really makes your day.”

  —George W. Bush

  Because January 20, 1985, fell on a Sunday, the public ceremony for President Reagan’s and Dad’s second inauguration was scheduled for Monday, January 21. That Monday dawned a bright but bitterly cold day—with windchill temperatures reaching as low as twenty below zero. As a result, the public inauguration ceremony was moved indoors to the Capitol Rotunda and was forced to become a semiprivate ceremony. Even the parade had to be canceled.

  I remember squeezing inside the Rotunda for the ceremony, with far more people than the fire marshal would have normally allowed. I felt the same sense of swelling pride and emotion as I had four years prior. After the festivities, I remember going back out into the winter cold—back to my life in New England, where I was working in an art gallery.

  About an hour after that indoor ceremony, Democratic congressman Marty Russo, a friend of Dad’s who was on the House Ways and Means Committee, was going back to his office by way of the House gymnasium. Dad had been sworn in, attended a luncheon, and then decided he had time for a quick game of paddleball that afternoon. He was about to play with Marvin and a cousin when they realized they needed a fourth.

  “You and I are going to take these young kids on and we’re going to show them,” Dad said to Marty, “so suit up.” Marty did, and they beat the young men two out of three games.

  Once the inauguration weekend was over, Dad settled back into work. Because he was an early riser, Dad would regularly arrive at the White House at 7:00 a.m., while the rest of the White House didn’t get started until closer to 9:00. Tom Collamore, the Winnebago driver during the Connecticut primary, had been promoted to the vice presidential staff a few years earlier, and now was on the road constantly with Dad, as assistant to the vice president and staff secretary.

  “If it wasn’t foreign travel,” Tom recalled, “it was strategically picked domestic travel. And so it was six workdays, and then Sunday you were back in Washington to change your laundry and pick up the new materials and go out again. It was that way pretty much [in] ’86, ’87, ’88. It was at least three and a half years. Always a frantic pace.”

  Tom also remembers that any staff member with any relative in any small town across the country was invited to bring family members to the holding room, prior to an appearance by Dad, just to chat with my parents for a few minutes—“and that filled the staff member’s gas tank for another six months.”

  Ray Siller, a comedy writer who wrote jokes for both Bob Hope and Johnny Carson, came to spend a weekend at the vice president’s residence with Mom and Dad. Ray arrived in a cab with heavy suitcases in the trunk. Dad grabbed the luggage and carried them up to the house (“Pretty amazing to have this man as a bellhop,” Ray thought) and got him settled in a guest room. At the end of the weekend, my parents stopped by his guest room and Dad asked if the room was okay. Ray said it was.

  “Bar, he didn’t notice it,” Dad said, dejected. Ray had noticed it, but was just too polite to say anything. What was “it”? Dad had put fake dog poop in the closet.

  On a more serious note, Shirley Green, who worked in Dad’s press office for Pete Teeley, went home from work one night to find her home not only burglarized but ransacked. After calling the police, she called Pete Teeley to let him know she wouldn’t be in the next day. Pete called Dad, who called Shirley to make sure she was okay. He said, “You aren’t going to stay there by yourself tonight, are you? Come stay with us.” Shirley said she guessed it was like getting back on a horse after a fall, and she might as well stay there and get used to it. Dad insisted again that she come over to the vice president’s residence, and she declined again. “No, really, Shirley,” Dad said, “Bar and I’ll jump in the car and come get you right now!”

  “What a funny moment,” Shirley told me, looking back. “He and Bar hadn’t ‘jumped into the car’ to drive anyplace in years! But George Bush’s automatic kind and thoughtful—though funny—reaction to a friend in distress was also the only time I nearly broke down in tears.”

  Marlin Fitzwater, Dad’s press secretary during the second Reagan administration, put it this way: “His instinct has always been to do good things without considering political or public benefits. He is the master of the small gesture. I used to call it the small gesture with the grand results.” To be sure, little touches went a long way toward building a tremendous amount of loyalty and, I think, were part of a larger effort on my father’s part to bring out the best in his staff. And the “grand result” was an effort on everyone’s part never to let Dad down or disappoint him in any way.

  Chris Buckley, Dad’s speechwriter, remembers a morning when there had been a leak to Time magazine from someone on the VP staff. The staff knew very well that Dad’s cardinal rule was No leaking. At the daily staff meeting, Dad began by saying how disappointed he was, then adjourned the meeting on the spot. “We all started looking at the floor. It was like being back in school when the headmaster was saying, ‘Buckley, it’s not that you let the school down, it’s that you let yourself down.’”

  Trust me, I have been there. My brothers and I never ever wanted to disappoint Dad. One time, Jeb had to confess to something he’d done as a kid—“the statute of limitations has run out so the details aren’t as important,” he jokes now—but Dad told Jeb he was disappointed in him.

  “It was like silence,” Jeb recalled. “It was the worst thing he could have said.”

  My brother George agrees: “There are some basic rules . . . a young person needs to be told there are these rules. He told me that when I was a young guy. He’s a man of enormous integrity and great values, and there is no question that you will disappoint him if you do not live up to certain basic standards . . . On the other hand, he’s an incredibly forgiving person. He doesn’t hold grudges and that’s very important.”

  Mom and Dad visited China in 1986 and were enjoying seeing old friends again. Chinese leaders threw a large banquet in their honor in the third-floor ballroom of one of the newest hotels in the city. My parents and the Chinese dignitaries sat at a long head table, elevated on a riser, across one end of the ballroom. The head table overlooked perhaps fifty or more round tables of Chinese guests, with perhaps two or three Americans, from the vice president’s staff, the American embassy, or American businesses, at each table.

  The tables were heaping with food and white bottles of Moutai, a special Chinese wine that supposedly had the power to fell a horse in midstride. As the courses began, the Chinese host at each table proposed a toast to their new American friends. The American delegation was immediately fearful. The briefing papers had warned the Bush delegation that Moutai was designed to loosen tongues and embarrass guests. The idea was to toss one’s head back and take the entire drink in two gulps, thus complying with the hosts’ shouted command, “Gambe!” As dinner went on, a lot of Moutai was consumed in this fashion.

  By midevening, after Dad and the mayor had exchanged very warm toasts, the conviviality was going so well that Don Gregg picked up his glass of Moutai, left his table, and went to toast his counterpart at another table. Seeing this, a few others around the room followed suit. Unfortunately, among them was a young staffer who picked up an entire bottle of Moutai and began going table to table, or so it seemed, with special toasts for his new Chinese friends. After about three tables, it became apparent that his gait was unsteady, his voice louder than necessary, and calamity could
be at hand.

  Anyone who knows my parents knows the dangers of that situation. First, any public embarrassment by a staff person that detracts from the success of the mission, or embarrasses the country, is a career-ending move. Second, behavior and protocol are serious parts of diplomacy. And third, Dad believes that good manners are essential, and bad manners are unacceptable. The young aide was about to violate all three.

  Marlin Fitzwater noticed that Mom, from her elevated vantage point at the head table, had been watching with obvious disdain as the young man moved from toast to toast. When he arrived at Marlin’s table, Marlin pulled him aside and suggested he return to his table and stay seated.

  The young man never said a word. He just turned and walked a little unsteadily back to his seat. At the end of the dinner, my parents headed to the elevators as they returned to their room. Dad had sent a message to the aide during the dinner, ordering him to join them at the elevator after the meal. Mom hadn’t been the only one watching the “Gambe!” performance.

  It was no doubt the longest elevator ride of the young man’s life. Three people got on. Only two got off. Dad fired the young man and instructed him to take a commercial flight back to Washington. Unfortunately, there were no commercial flights available, so he rode back on the cargo plane with all the equipment.

  Marlin looked back on the incident: “It’s a reality of the presidency and vice presidency that their personal values and sense of propriety are watched like a hawk by thousands of people throughout the government. Standards are set, limits applied, and codes of conduct are established by the personal actions and attitudes of the officeholder. In this case, it became accepted wisdom that Vice President Bush was a man who countenanced good manners, appropriate behavior, and civilized conduct. It was also understood that if you crossed the line, you would not get off the elevator. George Bush was not afraid to fire people.”

  Dad never tried to embarrass people with their mistakes. I’ve never once heard Dad talk about this incident and only learned about it myself from others. As a matter of fact, Dad made sure that it never went on the aide’s permanent record. Dad still keeps in touch with the young man, and although the aide was reluctant to speak with me about this incident, he shared many other wonderful memories about Dad. This former aide went on to great success in life.

  On a Saturday in July 1985, President Reagan was undergoing surgery on his colon. It was not an emergency, but nevertheless, presidential power had officially been transferred to Dad—but just for the few hours that the president would be unconscious. That same day, coincidentally, Dad invited David Bates and two other friends of his, Jack Sloat and David Cunningham, to the VP residence for a tennis match. At one point in the set, Dad was playing up at the net when Cunningham lobbed a shot to him, causing Dad to back up toward the baseline to get it.

  What happened next was never reported at the time: Dad stumbled and fell on his back, bumped his head, and blacked out. The United States may have been without any president at all for a few moments! As he lay on the court not moving, Secret Service agents and a doctor jumped out of the bushes around the court, where they had been covertly watching the whole thing, as his tennis partners rushed across the court.

  “He might have had a small blackout. Whether he knew who he was or what he was doing for fifteen or twenty seconds, I wouldn’t swear to it,” remembers Cunningham. The agents drove him up to the house—they wouldn’t let him walk—with Dad apologizing for breaking up the tennis game.

  One staff member told me Dad always believed in the better side of us, and I think that was true not only of his family but of his staff, his friends, and his fellow world leaders. The Secret Service, for example, felt that way. Dad had tremendous respect for them and their abilities. He made it a point to thank his agents every night before he turned in, which I’m told is unusual. Dad also protected the agents from unwitting people who asked them to carry bags for him or pass notes to him, telling the unknowing individuals that it wasn’t the agent’s job.

  One time our dog C. Fred got sick in Dad’s limo, and as the car pulled up to the vice president’s residence, Dad hopped out and the car pulled away. Dad yelled for it to come back, and when it did, he immediately began pulling out the floor mats that C. Fred had soiled. “Sir, we’ll take care of that,” said Agent Magaw. “No, you won’t, absolutely you will not!” replied Dad. “He wouldn’t let us touch it,” John Magaw said. Dad cleaned off the mats.

  Similarly, my cousin Debbie Stapleton remembers fishing with Dad on his boat Fidelity one afternoon when some buoy lines became snagged on the propeller. Dad immediately cut the engine, stripped off his shirt, and dove into the cold Maine water—leaving the Secret Service agent “somewhat aghast,” she said. He had the propeller clear before the agent could do a thing.

  The agents also remember Dad’s punctuality. He never wanted to keep anyone waiting for him—whether it was a world leader, a security detail, or a mom stuck in a traffic jam waiting for the motorcade to race by. Dad thought keeping people waiting was the height of rudeness. My brother George says it’s one of the lessons he’s learned from Dad. “Be on time. Don’t make people wait. If you’re late, it’s like you’re the most important person on the face of the earth. Whether it be on the campaign trail or in personal relationship, it’s flat rude.”

  Tim McBride knew one way to make sure Dad stayed on time at official events. “With eye gestures, I could tell if he’d had enough,” Tim said. “But if we were at a big mob reception and he’s shaking hands, it’s hard to free him up. People want to see him. I’d say, ‘Mr. Vice President, we really have to go.’ ‘Okay, Tim,’ he’d say. Then ‘Mr. Vice President, we really have to go.’ Finally, I’d say, ‘Sir, the agents have blocked the streets. The traffic is backing up along the motorcade route.’ He would run to the car, because he was extraordinarily concerned about not inconveniencing all the people out there. ”

  Funny things happen in motorcades. Dad and Mom had a running joke with the agents whenever people on the side of the road made an obscene gesture at the motorcade. “Look, that man says we’re number one!” Or: “Bar, let’s put that guy’s vote down as undecided.”

  Throughout this time, my brother Marvin had been getting sick and not telling anyone. His wife, Margaret, knew, but the rest of our family had no idea. Finally, he got so sick that he ended up in the hospital, hemorrhaging and losing weight, with a severe case of colitis.

  Marvin remembers being so sick that he thought he was hallucinating in his hospital room, seeing Dad outside the door and “this white hair going by in the front and that was Mom.” That’s when he knew it was serious—they were out in the hall discussing his options so they wouldn’t scare him. His organs were shutting down and his vital signs were bottoming out. We were all very worried.

  At the hospital, Margaret was by his bedside around the clock. She remembers Dad staying all day in the hospital room, with a stack of briefing papers and a phone, working from a chair in the corner and keeping an eye on Marvin.

  They were newlyweds, practically, and this happened before they had children. Margaret had had her own brush with death years earlier as a child—when she was only five years old, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She told her parents she had a tummy ache, and they believed her. They did exploratory surgery and found cancer in her ovaries and liver. After chemo and radiation, she miraculously survived—but without her ovaries.

  When Margaret and Marvin got engaged in 1981, she worried about telling him that she would not be able to conceive and deliver a child. Marvin didn’t bat an eye. He immediately said it was no problem: they’d adopt. Ever since, she’s been a committed advocate of both early detection of cancer and the joys of adoption. Margaret is, in a word, remarkable.

  Marvin meanwhile had a long recuperation in Maine, with Mom and Margaret and the rest of the family taking care of him. The doctors had removed most of his colon, and for the rest of his life, he’d have to wear a colostomy b
ag on the outside of his body. Marvin was understandably bitter and depressed about the bag, so Dad asked Rolf Benirschke, the former place kicker for the San Diego Chargers, to call Marvin. Rolf had had the same surgery in 1979—and actually wore two colostomy bags—but then played seven more seasons of professional football and retired as the team’s highest scorer.

  A friend of Rolf’s also came to the hospital, a man who was a runner like Marvin. He announced he’d just run a marathon, but Marvin thought, “So what? Who cares?” Then the man lowered his trousers to reveal his colostomy bag. “That was a turning point,” Mom said, and soon enough Marvin was up and walking, playing tennis with friends, and reading some terrific books. To this day, Marvin credits that recovery period with his love of reading.

  “Margaret and I were on the waiting list to adopt a child. After my surgery, one of the biggest concerns I had was that my surgery would hinder our chances of being able to adopt. And ironically, I was just getting back to work at my office at Shearson Lehman Brothers and Rolf had come over. That was our first chance to really meet each other face-to-face. It was while he was sitting in the office that I got the call from our baby adoption agency that our daughter, Marshall, was born.” She had been born on Father’s Day, which added to Marvin’s joy.

  Marvin was well enough to go to Texas and pick up Marshall, who was the first of two wonderful children he and Margaret adopted. Marvin has now helped many other victims of colitis and Crohn’s disease, reaching out as Rolf did for him. Knowing that the Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, was going to have a colostomy, Marvin called him and helped him on several occasions. In fact, Tip once told my father that Marvin had saved his life.

  Marvin explained, “There are a lot of people who can’t deal with it. They think they are in a hopeless position after having the surgery. And I’m in the position to help them understand it’s just the beginning of their life, not the end of an old one, but the beginning of a new life.”