Dad and Mom first stopped in Poland, where together they had visited two years prior. The Solidarity labor movement had continued to achieve a great deal of progress on reforms, and Dad and our ambassador, John Davis, had arranged a luncheon at the ambassador’s residence in Warsaw attended by Wojciech Jaruzelski, the chairman of the Polish Council of State, as well as Bronislaw Geremek, a parliamentary opposition leader and Solidarity member. After Dad spoke, both leaders offered toasts.
“It was the first time those two guys had ever sat together,” Bob Gates observed. “It was fairly remarkable for him to put the head of the communist government, Jaruzelski, at the same table with one of the dissident leaders. The president showed that he was a great bridge-builder in this respect. Because he engendered such goodwill from all parties, particularly as it relates to Poland, he essentially greased the skids on which the communists were slid from power.”
The following day, Dad addressed a joint session of the Polish Sejm and the Senat at the Polish National Assembly building; during the session, the entire parliament sang to him the Polish ceremonial song “Sto Lat”: “Good luck, good cheer, may you live a hundred years!” Afterward, General Jaruzelski told Dad that the assembly had never done that for any other visiting world leader—not de Gaulle, not Khrushchev, not Brezhnev. The day after that, Mom and Dad traveled to Gdansk—the birthplace of Solidarity—for a truly memorable lunch with Lech and Danuta Walesa at their home. The lunch was in a tiny house with a breakfast nook; the table was covered with many wineglasses and silver; and the meal was huge. Mom and Dad and their hosts crowded in two to a side so the press could get a picture. Then they left by car to drive to the Gdansk shipyard.
“We could see people lined up alongside the roadway before we got to the shipyard,” Mom remembered. “Along the way, Lech would say, ‘Oh my God! Biggest crowd ever, bigger than Margaret Thatcher even!’ As far as the eye could see there were people. I noticed Peter Jennings on the TV platform and later read the transcript of his program. He said something like, ‘Why has President Bush had such disappointing crowds?’”
From Poland, it was on to Hungary. Dad was supposed to speak in the main square in Budapest, and as they pulled in, they saw a sea of people—nearly 100,000 had gathered, waiting patiently in the rain for hours. General Scowcroft was there, as was Condoleezza Rice of the NSC staff. Tim McBride went with Dad into a trailer offstage and discovered that Dad did not have a raincoat to wear. After a few minutes of scrambling on Tim’s part, a Secret Service agent stepped forward and said, “Here, the president can wear mine,” and offered him the kind of raincoat that can be folded up and carried in a pocket.
With the coat on, my father stepped out onstage with Bruno Straub, the President of Hungary’s Presidential Council. The crowd enthusiastically cheered. But then they all stood and waited as President Straub gave a very long, dull speech. General Scowcroft remembers what happened when it was Dad’s turn to speak: he took his speech and tore it up in front of the crowd. “He said that this was not the time for this kind of thing—and he just ad-libbed this wonderful short speech. While it was happening, the rain quit and the sun started to come down through the clouds. And the crowd went crazy,” General Scowcroft said.
After his remarks, Dad left the stage and began shaking hands with the people in the crowd, with Tim McBride at his side. As he began working the rope line, he saw this elderly woman who was shivering. Dad said, “You’re so cold. Here, let me give you my coat.”
Tim whispered, “You can’t do that, that’s not your coat.”
A tug-of-war ensued over the twenty-five-dollar raincoat, won by Dad.
“Later, I’m explaining to Agent Robinson why we don’t have his coat anymore,” Tim said. “And the president wrote the agent a check for the coat, which I’m sure was never cashed. We have a great picture of him in this coat, which he signed and gave to the agent. It was the generosity of someone else’s coat.”
The Europe trip concluded with drier stops at the G–7 in Paris and the Netherlands.
Our family convened in Kennebunkport for the Fourth of July weekend that year, and some mornings, Dad and I would go for a jog and talk. That weekend, I told him that People magazine had called and that I was worried that the press would make a big deal out of my divorce. The last thing I wanted to do was become a distraction or burden for Dad. I was relieved when he told me not to pay too much attention to the media interest.
Throughout Dad’s presidency, August proved to be a month seemingly reserved for crisis management—highlighted by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991.
August of 1989 proved uneventful by comparison, but productive nonetheless. Before leaving for a working vacation in Maine, for example, Dad signed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act on August 9 in the Rose Garden. He had introduced legislation to fix a festering savings-and-loan crisis soon after entering office, and Congress, in keeping with the prevailing spirit of bipartisanship, had followed suit.
“Reagan sort of brushed it under the rug and postponed it, but President Bush pushed for action right off the bat,” Boyden Gray remembered. “The economy still dipped into recession, but that was an enormously important piece of work that cleared the decks—allowing the economy to take off in 1991.”
The legislative and economic work behind him, Dad—and indeed our entire family—were soon subjected to another, different kind of S&L crisis. Sadly, the same spirit of bipartisanship that inspired Congress to tackle the fallout from 750 failed S&Ls soon gave way to political gamesmanship, with some Democrats paying particular attention to a single Colorado S&L, Silverado, where my brother Neil at the time served as an outside director.
That December, Dad wrote our family friend Lud Ashley saying, “I cannot believe his [Neil’s] name would be in the paper if it was Jones and not Bush. In any event, I know the guy is totally innocent.”
Eighteen S&Ls in Colorado had failed, not just Silverado. Many more in Texas and throughout the country also failed at that time. Yet Silverado was the only institution called to testify in front of Congress.
Dad had once felt kindly toward Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas; but that changed when Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee, subpoenaed Neil to testify on Capitol Hill—doing everything he could to embarrass and make life hell for Neil.
“They put Mom and Dad—Dad in particular—in a complex position,” Neil said. “He’s the president of the United States, and his son has been investigated by a federal regulatory agency. There’s nothing you can do about it. He could offer his love and his support—which he did—but he couldn’t intervene. Everything worked out, but the only thing I regret is how it became such a politicized issue.”
The Silverado episode not only showed how complicated it was for Mom and Dad to raise kids in the public eye, it also emphasized how important it was for us to stick together. “Even though we are not physically close to each other, we’re a very close family—some would say almost dysfunctionally close—because there is an abundance of unconditional love. There’s so much love for our parents, and that love has been shared to the next generation, to us and to our children,” Neil said.
Dan Rostenkowski, the former congressman from Illinois, first met Dad when they were both young members of the House Ways and Means Committee in 1967. While Dad left the House in 1970, Congressman Rostenkowski stayed on the Ways and Means Committee and became chairman of it during the Reagan years. He and Dad stayed good friends throughout, despite the unlikely match of a rough-and-tumble Chicago pol and my father. Regardless of his gruff exterior, the congressman is a charming man.
One day early in 1989, Dad called him. “Danny, you’ve got to come down here. I want to show you this place [the White House]. I’ll buy you lunch.” So he said okay, and soon after, he heard from Treasury Secretary Brady, also inviting him to lunch in his office. Rostenkowski tells the story of his l
unch appointment:
In the Treasury offices they’ve got these big high windows and you could see the thunder and the lightning and the rain. Nick Brady picks up the phone and I surmise that George Bush is on the line. So I got the phone. He says, “When are you coming to see me? My treasury secretary invites you and you go to his office but you won’t come see me. Hang up the phone and come right over here.” “Well, can we finish lunch?” I said. “It’s raining like an s.o.b. outside.” He said, “Come through the tunnel.”
I hang up and Nick Brady looks at me and says, “What tunnel?”
So Brady calls the Secret Service, the guy outside the door. “Is there a tunnel between the Treasury and the White House?” “Yes, sir, there is.” So he shows us where the tunnel is.
We get over to the White House and we wind up going past the bowling alley and into the janitor’s room, and the janitor is sitting there. I said, “How do we get to the president’s office?” And he jumped up and said, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I said, “I’m with Nick Brady, the secretary of the treasury.” He recognized Nick Brady, so he took us upstairs, and we finally get to the Oval Office. So we walk into the office and no one is there. Patty Presock told us the president was in that little cubbyhole office around the corner. He’s got John Sununu and Jim Baker in there, and I walk in with Nick Brady. George looks at the three other fellows and he looks at me, and he says, “Would you fellows mind leaving me alone with the chairman for a minute or two?” So they get up and they go into the Oval Office.
He stretches over to look and see if they’re out of the room. He looks at me, throws his hands up in the air, and says, “Jesus Christ, Danny, I’m president of the United States!” I started to laugh and he laughed and he says, “I’ve got to show you this place.” He just dismissed the three of them and he took me around, showing me the White House.
Dad turned his attention to two other top domestic priorities: the war against drugs, which was the subject of his first address to the nation from the Oval Office in September, and the education summit later that month at the University of Virginia.
In hindsight, the education summit was interesting not only for what it accomplished but also because it brought Dad together in partnership with the man who would succeed him in the Oval Office: Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who was also then the head of the National Governors’ Association.
“This whole school reform effort’s been going on for more than twenty years,” President Clinton said, looking back, “but it would never have had the legs it had if President Bush hadn’t brought us together and supported the process. It was the first major step nationally since Terrel Bell, President Reagan’s secretary of education, issued that famous Nation at Risk report in 1984.”
President Clinton also recalled an argument his wife, Hillary, and Dad had during the summit dinner that first night.
“She told him that our infant mortality rate was higher than a lot of other countries,” President Clinton remembered. Dad disputed Hillary’s assertion and said he would look into it.
“The next day—this is so typical of him—he wrote Hillary a note and gave it to me,” President Clinton said. “He said, ‘Give Hillary this. She was right.’ He wrote her a note thanking her for telling him something he didn’t know. See, I think that stuff is a sign of strength, not weakness.”
The fall of 1989 proved a pivotal turning point in the Cold War, a time when Dad’s newly revised foreign policy strategy seemed to produce immediate results in Eastern Europe.
America’s previous policy toward Eastern Europe, General Scowcroft explained, had been that we supported any of the satellites who stuck their thumb in the Soviets’ eyes. For example, during the Reagan administration Romania was our number one satellite, our favorite. That would change.
“What we did was support those nations who were struggling for greater freedom to turn to market economies and to open their political system,” General Scowcroft recalled. “So Romania went from first to last, and Poland went up to first place. We tried to encourage Poland, we tried to encourage Solidarity, and along with that, we modified our arms-control policies in an attempt to get Soviet troops out of Eastern Europe, because we thought that the Soviet troops, with their jackboots on the neck of the people, were what was probably keeping the revolution from happening.”
Eastern Europe had a history of recurrent uprisings. A vicious cycle tended to play out where the Eastern Europeans would revolt, and the Russians would come in, clamp down, kill a lot of people; it would be uneventful for a while, and then it would erupt again. What Dad and his team wanted to do is keep the eruptions gradual, never to the point that the Soviets would feel they had to crack down. “The problem is,” General Scowcroft said, “we didn’t know exactly where that point was, but that was our goal: keep things moving in Eastern Europe, but don’t give the Russians a provocation to come in.”
Reading Dad’s diary entry for November 8, 1989, I saw that Dad was sensitive to the criticism from some observers that things were not moving quickly enough in Eastern Europe. Any reaction by the Soviets in Poland, Hungary, or East Germany could change the perception among the American people that things were in fact moving in the direction of democracy. Dad knew that if he put too much of an American face on the internal reforms going on inside those nations, we’d be inviting a crackdown.
Then, the very next day, November 9, 1989, the East German government announced a new visa policy that essentially opened the door to the West. After twenty-eight years, the Berlin Wall “fell” in the sense that it was rendered obsolete by this new immigration policy. More than ten thousand East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin. There were mass celebrations that lasted for days, as people broke pieces off the Wall, danced on top, and crossed through the Brandenburg Gate. East Germany allowed free elections shortly afterward.
“On the day of the fall of the Wall, November 10, 1989, I spoke with President Bush extensively by phone that evening to inform him about the opening of the borders,” Chancellor Kohl told me. “I also told him about two large rallies that had just taken place in Berlin: one in front of the Schöneberger Rathaus, which a left-wing mob had disrupted; and another one at the Gedächtniskirche, where 120,000 to 200,000 participants gathered peacefully and joyfully. In an address there, I thanked the U.S. for its solidarity and support, without which this day would never have happened. George Bush seemed highly interested in the events and said he was deeply impressed by the way in which the Federal Republic was handling the whole situation. It was also important to him that I had publicly praised the role the U.S. had played.”
Given this dramatic development, there were many voices in Congress urging Dad to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall as the triumph of democracy.
“We both felt an overwhelming euphoria—a euphoria that said this was truly freedom’s victory,” Secretary Baker recalled. “But as a statesman, President Bush wanted to welcome the change diplomatically, almost clinically. He knew that Moscow would be watching our public statements, and watching them very closely. He was determined not to be overly emotional so that Gorbachev and [Foreign Minister Eduard] Shevardnadze would not feel, as the president himself later said, that we were somehow sticking our thumb in their eye.”
In fact, according to Dad’s diary, President Gorbachev had contacted Dad the day after the Berlin Wall fell to ask that the United States not overreact. Dad took a heap of public criticism for his tempered reaction, and as Secretary Baker put it, “This was an example of how George Bush would always put what’s right for America ahead of what’s right for George Bush.”
“My restraint—or prudence, if you will—was misunderstood, certainly by some in the Congress,” Dad recalled. “Senator Mitchell, the leading Democrat in the Senate, and Dick Gephardt, the leader in the House, were saying, ‘Our president doesn’t get it. He ought to go to Berlin, stand on the Wall, dance with the young people to show the joy that we all feel.’ I still
feel that would have been the stupidest thing an American president could do, because we were very concerned about how the troops in East Germany would react. We were very concerned about the nationalistic elements in the Soviet Union maybe putting Gorbachev out. I think if we’d misplayed our hand and had a heavy-handed overkill—gloating, ‘We won, Mr. Gorbachev. You’ve lost, you’re out’—I think it could have been a very different ending to this very happy chapter in history, when the Wall came down.”
“The fall of the Berlin Wall was not a complete surprise for us,” President Gorbachev recalled. “Not everyone, however, was ready for the pace of German unification that the Germans on both sides of the border wanted. West Germany’s NATO allies—the British, the French, the Italians—did not want German reunification, particularly a quick one. I understood this from my conversations with Mitterrand, Thatcher, and [Italian Prime Minister Giulio] Andreotti. We, too, had some apprehensions. But I believed that it was morally wrong to continue to insist indefinitely on the division of such a great nation, putting the blame for the past on the shoulders of new generations. All the parties had to act with great responsibility to avoid complications in the process of unification.”
It was against this very optimistic historical backdrop that Dad and President Gorbachev met just off the coast of the tiny nation of Malta in December. Dad and his staff were onboard a U.S. Navy cruiser, the USS Belknap, while the Soviets were aboard the USSR cruiser Slava.
On the eve of the summit, President Gorbachev wanted to accommodate Dad’s desire to have the negotiations onboard two navy ships. But, just to be on the safe side, he also made arrangements for a huge passenger liner, Maxim Gorky, which was cruising in the Mediterranean, to head for Malta. It was supposed to be a hotel for the delegation and entourage.
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