My Father, My President

by Doro Bush Koch

  One time, Uncle Lou and my Aunt Grace were in Antigua with some friends, and Donald Trump’s yacht came into the harbor to moor. Uncle Lou came up with the idea of seeing if the group could board The Donald’s yacht. Everyone agreed, so they piled into a motorboat and sped off. As they neared the yacht, Uncle Lou started yelling up to the deck, “Ahoy there!”

  Getting the attention of one of the crew members, Uncle Lou said, “I’d like to come aboard.” When the deckhand inquired who he was, Uncle Lou said unabashedly, “I’m the uncle of the president of the United States and I’d like to come aboard with my friends and see the yacht. Is Mr. Trump there?”

  The deckhand then answered the “uncle of the president of the United States”: “Shove off, fella.”

  Each time a new president enters office, particular attention is paid among the media, on Capitol Hill, across the country, and around the world to what he does during his first one hundred days. This presidential benchmark was first applied to Franklin Roosevelt, who entered office in 1933 during the height of the Great Depression, a period of genuine national crisis. Since then, however, this “first one hundred days” yardstick has been used in the United States and even abroad to measure a national leader’s initial progress.

  In Dad’s case, his first hundred days could be summed up in one word: bipartisanship. Dad counted among his friends dozens of Democrats on Capitol Hill, including his old friend Sonny Montgomery from Mississippi, House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, and others. It helped a great deal to have friends on the other side of the political aisle when you consider that the Democrats controlled both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate for all four years of Dad’s presidency. Compromise would be essential to achieving any meaningful legislation.

  To emphasize his desire for bipartisanship, Dad declared that he wanted his presidency to be known as “the age of the offered hand” in his inaugural address. For much of his first two years in office, both Dad and Congress tried to make good on that pledge.

  In his first hundred days, in fact, Dad and Democratic leaders in Congress managed to reach a bipartisan budget agreement, as well as a key bipartisan agreement on foreign policy in Central America.

  The former Democratic whip in the U.S. House, Tony Coehlo, recalled Dad’s first meeting with the congressional leadership:

  After I was elected majority whip [the third-ranking Democratic member in the U.S. House] in 1987, I started attending these leadership meetings—with the top Democratic and Republican leadership of the House and the Senate meeting with the president, the vice president, the chief of staff, and some cabinet officers but not the whole cabinet.

  I’m just a dumb little Portuguese kid who milked cows in California, very poor family—and the first time I walked in the room I was overwhelmed, sitting there at the cabinet table with all these people and the president.

  When President Reagan came in, we all stand up, of course. He sat down, the rest of us sat down. Then he reached into his breast pocket and he pulled out some three-by-five cards. And he started reading from the three-by-five cards. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember him saying, “Good morning. It’s nice to have all of you here this morning. Today, we’re going to discuss three items. One of them is health . . .” at which point he turned the conversation over to whoever the expert at the table was. President Reagan, that I saw, never led the discussion. He always turned it over to other people.

  When the conversation on the first item finished, President Reagan continued referring to his notecards. “The second item is on trade,” he said, still reading. “I know that you’ve put in your own bill—and it’s a big bill that you intend to push—but we have some ideas and our own legislation. I hope you will listen to it and hopefully we can have some compromises. Leading the discussion on the trade bill will be Secretary of the Treasury Jim”—still reading, turning over the notecard—“Baker . . .”

  I’m just sitting there watching all this, and I don’t think I said anything. I was just overwhelmed.

  Now skip forward two years, to January of 1989—and the first meeting of the leadership for the government. President Bush walks in, and we all stand up. He sits down, and we sit down. He reaches into his breast pocket, and I’m going, “Oh no.” He read some notes, then he put them back into his breast pocket and said, “Now I want to sort of set rules for these meetings, and I hope that you will agree with it. We’re going to come here, and let’s use the hour effectively. There are some things that I want to discuss with you, and there will be things that I’m sure you’ll want to discuss with me. And I will lead these discussions. But don’t feel restricted. Let’s get into a real dialogue. Let’s see if we can solve problems.”

  At that very moment, he got a round of applause from everybody at the table. It was refreshing. President Bush would make sure he knew the subjects that he needed to bring up, then he’d put them back in the pocket—and we’d start a free-flowing discussion. It wasn’t always pleasant. We had our share of disagreements, but President Bush moderated the whole thing, and I always felt we got things done.

  It worked so well that first year that one time he called a meeting at five in the afternoon. After we assembled, he said, “When we have these meetings, I hope they can remain confidential. That’s hard to say in Washington; but if we’re really going to be effective, we’ve got to be open and trust our colleagues not to go out and repeat them.” Everybody basically agreed with that.

  Then the president said, “The reason I’m calling this meeting is because I’m about to do something, and I want to let you know before I do it. The critical thing here is that we keep it confidential to maintain the element of surprise.”

  President Bush wanted us to know he was going into Panama after Manuel Noriega. The great thing is: not only did everybody support him, but after everybody left that meeting nobody said a word. The operation started the next day, and at the next meeting he was extremely complimentary of everybody. We felt good about it. We felt good that people in the room honored that trust and it didn’t get out. After that, people felt freer, more open to say things because they trusted the president and he trusted us.

  He was a fabulous leader that way.

  Even during Dad’s so-called honeymoon period, open, frank exchanges in the Cabinet Room were not enough to keep partisanship from rearing its ugly head on occasion.

  For example, while most of Dad’s cabinet appointments sailed through to an easy confirmation by the U.S. Senate, one was not so fortunate: Dad’s nominee to be the secretary of defense, his 1988 campaign cochairman and longtime Texas ally Senator John Tower. Senate Democrats decided to oppose the Tower nomination, tearing into their colleague based on horrible rumors that Tower was very fond of women and alcohol.

  Despite the risk of an early political defeat in the Senate, Dad continued to support his nominee, writing a friend at the time: “I have never seen such a campaign of innuendo, vicious rumor and gossip in my entire life.”

  In fact, about the best thing to come of the entire Tower nomination was the active, positive support Dad received from Bob Dole, the Senate minority leader, who did everything he could to help lead the fight for Senator Tower. Meanwhile, the ugly attacks prompted the nominee to take the extraordinary step of forswearing alcohol if confirmed. Since they were both staying at the Jefferson Hotel during their respective confirmation hearings, Senator Tower went to Transportation Secretary Sam Skinner’s room at 11:00 one Saturday night and asked Sam to witness Tower signing a written pledge that he would not drink alcohol if he was confirmed as secretary of defense.

  “Senator Tower said he was going on the ABC Sunday show the next day with Sam Donaldson and was going to announce the pledge on national TV,” Secretary Skinner recalled.

  Senator Tower then took out a piece of paper where he had written down his pledge, and Skinner agreed to sign it. He noticed there was a second signature line, for Dr. Narva, the Senate doctor.

 
“After he left, I called Boyden Gray and gave him a heads-up,” Sam added. “The next morning I watched as he announced the pledge and took it out of his pocket on national TV. I held my breath hoping he would not mention that I had signed it, and when he did not, I breathed a sigh of relief. I could just imagine what the president would say if he heard that his newest cabinet member had witnessed ‘the pledge.’ ”

  Sadly, the Tower nomination was voted down in the Senate on March 9, after which Dad nominated Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney to replace Senator Tower. Dad had first met Cheney in 1969, when Cheney worked for Congressman Bill Steiger, a second-term House member from Wisconsin. Dad got to know him better when Cheney served as President Ford’s chief of staff.

  “By 1988, I had just been elected the Republican whip at the House, the Republican leader, and I had planned to spend my career in the House of Representatives hoping to someday be the Republican leader,” Vice President Cheney recalled. “Then President Bush came along and asked me to be secretary of defense, and I haven’t regretted it for a minute.”

  “He changed my life.” The vice president added:

  With the Democrats outnumbering the Republicans on the Hill, it was risky for Dad to take a leading Republican House member out of action, but my father clearly believed Cheney would be accepted by his colleagues—and, more important, would do a great job. Cheney subsequently breezed through the Senate confirmation process, served as secretary of defense throughout Dad’s administration, and has since gone on to serve with distinction as President George W. Bush’s vice president.

  Before the Tower nomination battle even began, however, General Scowcroft began a thorough review of U.S. policies around the world, and found that National Security Council internal policies needed improvement. As the NSC and Dad debated the results, it became clear that Dad was uncomfortable with the formal structure of the NSC.

  “He wanted to discuss issues more frankly, without a bunch of back-benchers sitting around taking notes,” said Scowcroft, so he set up an informal group, which he called the Gang of Eight. The Gang of Eight was comprised of Dad, Vice President Quayle, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of Defense Cheney, Governor Sununu, General Scowcroft, a note-taker from the NSC staff, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Colin Powell.

  Dad also encouraged open debate, letting his very strong policy officials argue out something in front of him. Between Scowcroft, Baker, Cheney, and Powell, this was not a group of shrinking violets.

  “We would argue with each other and get mad at each other,” former secretary Powell told me. “Scowcroft and I would be shouting at each other, and Cheney would be mad at me because I’m supposed to be his subordinate—but I’ve been asked my opinion and I would say something with which he didn’t necessarily agree. But the beauty of it was that even though we would have these disputes and arguments, we never lost sight of the fact that we were a team and we worked for the president. And he was good enough to let us argue in front of him without stopping us and without holding anything against us, and then he’d make the necessary decision.”

  Dad never micromanaged his Gang of Eight, and he purposely chose people who were compatible with each other. “He selected the team not only because of their knowledge and their skills, but because he knew that he could trust them and that they could work with each other,” said General Scowcroft. “That’s very rare, because most presidents select their cabinet and their NSC and they have no idea how it will work because they’re dealing with people who’ve never worked together.”

  This foreign policy review prompted criticism from some in the media that the new administration lacked “vision,” and also elicited concerns in Moscow.

  “At first, I was somewhat concerned that President Bush’s administration took ‘time out’ to reassess relations with the USSR,” President Gorbachev told me. “I still believe that we would have been better off without it, for relations between our two countries were already on a firm foundation, which George Bush had helped to create. There were probably some internal reasons for that pause. Be that as it may, subsequent contacts confirmed that the policy of building up U.S.-Soviet relations would continue.”

  Chapter 16

  GREASING THE SKIDS

  “I don’t think the Oval Office was ever occupied by someone with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of foreign policy than President George Herbert Walker Bush.”

  —Brian Mulroney

  In late February 1989, Mom and Dad made their first major foreign trip together, going to Japan for the funeral of Emperor Hirohito, followed by a return visit to China, then Korea. The presidency is an institution steeped in symbolism, and this particular trip made Dad the first president to travel to Asia before Europe. Whether it was intentional or not, this trip set a new tone reflecting Dad’s long-held view of Asia in general and China in particular as emerging world powers.

  As it turns out, neither the trip to Japan nor the one to China was free of controversy. For example, when the White House announced Dad would attend the Hirohito funeral, veterans’ groups around the country were outraged, citing the emperor’s actions in World War II. Of course, Dad was also a veteran; and like the fervent anticommunist Nixon going to China in the early 1970s, my father similarly had the moral standing to go to Tokyo in 1989. Dad argued that it was the right thing to do. He wrote in his diary the night of the funeral:

  My mind raced back to the Pacific. I did think of my fallen comrades . . . here I was President of the United States, paying respects to the man who was the symbol of everything that we hated. A man whose picture was always shown to keep us all together, fighting hard. Endless pictures of Japanese soldiers cutting off the heads of prisoners, or firing the coup de grace against thousands as they were dumped into the graves alive, all in the name of Hirohito. And there we were, paying tribute to him, a gentle man indeed.

  Emperor Hirohito had helped democracy take root in postwar Japan by renouncing his divinity and backing the new constitution; and over the course of Hirohito’s sixty-two-year reign, Japan became one of the world’s great economies and one of our strongest allies. After the emperor’s funeral in Japan, Mom and Dad continued eastward to China for a brief two-day visit. It was a warm homecoming for them, seeing old friends and even returning to the church where I had been baptized over a decade before.

  Actually, I had been baptized in a little church atop the old Bible Society building, but, happily, the congregation had since grown so large that they had to move into a bigger space. Mom and Dad remember that the church leaders and members recalled my being baptized there, and that they considered me to be a member of their parish, even though I was not along on the trip. The choir sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” which must have been an emotional experience for them.

  This visit to China also afforded Dad a chance to renew his acquaintance with Deng Xiaoping and to express his hope for improved relations between our two nations. While Dad has been a frequent visitor to China since leaving the White House—making some sixteen post-presidential visits to date—this February 1989 visit would be his only trip to China as president. Little did he or even China’s leaders know, but events there would soon spiral out of control, making official contacts between China and the United States very difficult.

  In late spring of 1989, I was asked to go on a delegation to Taiwan, as a guest of the Taiwanese government. Dad didn’t like the idea of a foreign government picking up the tab for a presidential son or daughter, so he said no. But shortly afterward, he asked me to serve on my first U.S. presidential delegation, going to Paraguay for the inauguration of President-elect Andrés Rodríguez. It was an exciting proposition, as Paraguay had been under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner for thirty-five brutal years. Stroessner had been accused of torturing and murdering his political opponents.

  Then General Andrés Rodríguez, the army leader, overthrew Stroessner and won the first multicandidate election in many years. (In fact, a n
ew constitution was adopted in 1992.) So these were hopeful times. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would visit Paraguay, a landlocked country about the size of California surrounded by Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia.

  Our delegation consisted of Senator Larry Pressler (R-SD), Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt (R-AR), Peace Corps Director Paul Coverdell, Tony Salinas of Texas, Elsie Vartanian of New Hampshire, and Jodie Dwight, my childhood friend from Maine.

  Jodie and I stayed at the embassy in Asunción with Ambassador Timothy Towell and his family, who could not have been more gracious hosts. While in Paraguay, we also rode the last wood-burning train; we visited a Peace Corps outpost to view an irrigation project; and we went to an asado—a Latin barbecue—at a ranch on the outskirts of Asunción. The ranch was reminiscent of Texas—the same vegetation and landscape. There we were treated to delicious Paraguayan fare with lots of sizzling beef.

  In fact, the ranch was famous for raising a particular kind of bull, the pride of this ranch. Jodie and I went on a much-anticipated tour to view the bulls; and when we got there, the bulls were the biggest I’d ever seen. (They were so big their “units” were almost touching the ground.) At that moment, immaturity descended and Jodie and I got the dreaded “giggles,” which seems to happen to me at the most inappropriate times. We were able to regain a semblance of control and finish our visit, but it’s funny after seventeen years the things one remembers.

  Far more important, I remember the inauguration of President Rodríguez—and the feeling of freedom that was in the air that day. The Rodríguez family treated us like family, and our delegation sat in the best seats with family and friends everywhere we went. I remember clearly the parade with the military marching by, the flags and the fanfare. The city was dusty and in need of repair, but ripe for the new administration to begin anew. It was a proud moment of political stability in Paraguay, which still has its struggles today.