Dad said to Senator Simpson, “That’s what I wanted you to see.”
Chapter 19
ALMOST A MIRACLE
“There is no precedent in history for a major empire to collapse without there being a major war, and someday George Bush will get the credit he deserves for bringing about a basically bloodless revolution that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
—Bob Gates
One of the most popular fixtures during Dad’s term was the White House horseshoe tournament. Now, when you think of horseshoes, you probably think of a leisurely pastime played between old friends with the score only a secondary consideration.
Not in Dad’s White House.
The family horseshoe historian, my brother Marvin, believes Dad picked the game up during the latter part of his vice presidency—during a campaign trip to Ohio and the National Horseshoe Tournament. The next thing we all knew, a truck was pulling up to the vice president’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue with all the ingredients to make a professional horseshoe pit.
After Dad and Mom moved into the White House, they had a pit installed next to the swimming pool. (According to Dad’s diaries, on his third full day in office, he began planning where the horseshoe pit would go.) The pit was so close by, in fact, if Dad was sitting in the Oval Office and people were playing, he could hear the clanging of the shoes. Eventually, they set another practice pit up by the basketball court, far enough away from the Oval Office that Dad wouldn’t always be tempted to go out and see what was happening. Both were regulation pits with all-weather artificial clay, so if the rains came, the pits could be swept and instantly ready for play.
Before the first match, Dad appointed himself “commissioner of the tournament.” He loves to add a tongue-in-cheek ceremonial element like this even with our family tournaments. Then, together with the head usher, Gary Walters, they came up with the different teams—from the vice president’s office, the gardeners, the nurses, and so on. Even Air Force One had a team. Then within each team, they would have a play-off to see who the two members of that team would be. As soon as play began, every time you’d walk into the White House there would be a big buzz about who beat who.
Dad and Marvin made up the family team, and during the first couple of tournaments they did pretty well, usually losing in or just before the semifinals. During one magical run, however, Marv and Dad ended up winning the whole thing, beating the housemen, Ron and Lindsey, in the finals. By this time, Dad had anointed himself “Mr. Smooth,” and during that last match everyone would scream “Smooth, Smooth” as he approached the pit.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been involved with any sporting event with Dad, or any other endeavor, that excited him more,” recalled Marv, who had dubbed himself “Mr. Smooth Jr.” “He may have been more excited that day than when he won the Iowa caucus, to put it mildly. He’s a very competitive guy, and we had lost a couple of times when we probably shouldn’t have. So there was a lot of pressure with so many people out there, and he was just elated.”
Win or lose, however, when the finals arrived, Mom and Dad hosted a barbecue by the pool. They invited all the participants to bring a spouse or a guest, and Dad would usually stand up and make a funny speech before the final match. Looking back, Marvin remembers how the tournament boosted the morale of the entire White House staff, particularly during the Gulf War.
“The enthusiasm that he had for that is something that I think really helped him through some of the rough spots in the presidency because he had an opportunity to get out, release some energy,” Marvin said. “It also turned that White House from an office into more of a family home because it brought together the ushers, butlers, nurses—all the different constituencies within the White House. To this day, when I go to the White House for a reception or something, someone will usually sidle over and ask if we are going to resurrect the horseshoe tournament. That’s because of Dad. In a way, that tournament was not only a lasting hallmark of his presidency—it was also a metaphor for the way he approaches life.”
Another morale booster for Dad personally came on July 9, when he welcomed two of his boyhood idols, Joe DiMaggio (the Yankee Clipper) and Ted Williams (the Splendid Splinter), to the White House and awarded them a presidential citation. That summer marked fifty years since the 1941 Major League Baseball season—arguably the most remarkable season in baseball history. That year, DiMaggio had his fifty-six-game hitting streak, and Ted Williams hit .406. For a baseball fan like Dad, that season—and this visit—were pure heaven.
“We arranged to have the ceremony for them on the day that the All-Star Game was played in Toronto,” Governor Sununu told me. “When these legends arrived, the president presented the award to them in the Rose Garden, then we got on Air Force One and flew up to Toronto. We were with the president, the vice president, and a bunch of us from the White House just sitting there listening to these guys tell stories. It was a very memorable day.”
That same spring brought with it the Great American Workout, an outdoor sports festival on the South Lawn of the White House designed to encourage people to exercise more and live healthier lifestyles. The chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was enthusiastically leading the charge at Dad’s urging. After the South Lawn event, he took the Great American Workout to all fifty states. Schwarzenegger said, “We would go always to successful schools to have ‘fitness summits’ and he would always remind me to go to the schools that were failing and to go to the inner-city schools, to the kids that are really disadvantaged. And we would pump them up and encourage them to stay away from drugs and alcohol and gangs. I was motivated by your father to reach out to people that need help.” Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to be elected governor of California in 2003.
In April 1991, Willard Willowby passed away. Woody, as we all knew him, was a longtime White House doorman who operated the elevator in the private residence. We all loved him, and Marvin and he had gone to a few baseball games together. Dad, Marvin, and I went to his funeral and were touched to see that Woody would be buried with a George Bush button on his lapel. After Woody died, my niece Marshall told us she thought Woody’s angel was in the elevator.
About a month after Woody died, Dad gave the commencement address at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and returned to Camp David for the weekend. Following a short nap, he went out for a jog when he sensed that something was wrong.
“I was jogging with him,” Special Agent Rich Miller, one of Dad’s Secret Service detail leaders, recalled, “and as we made our way down the path, he said he had a little funny feeling. So we stopped and walked back to the medical unit. I was fairly new to the detail at the time, and I just remember him sitting there as Dr. Lee checked him. When the doctor made the recommendation to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital, the president looked at me and said, ‘Everybody in the world is going to hear about this. We have to think about that part of it.’ The doctor said, ‘Well, we’ll just keep it as quiet as we can,’ and I agreed to do the same. Finally, the president told Dr. Lee, ‘You’re the expert, so let’s go.’ That’s the kind of trust he put in the people around him.”
News of Dad’s condition immediately leaked out, and when I first heard about it, I was naturally very concerned—I had no idea what an “atrial fibrillation” was. It is a condition where the heart muscles get out of sync, and as a result blood does not move efficiently through the heart. In fact, even today Dad’s heart is not in “sinus rhythm,” or what doctors consider normal. Yet they do not worry about this condition. He takes a blood-thinning drug called Coumadin and a few other medications, and, in his words, he feels like a “spring colt.”
As it was, Mom stayed with Dad in the hospital that first night, and when I talked to him the next morning, he sounded like his old self. At Bethesda Mary Jackson, a military nurse assigned to the White House, was at Dad’s side waiting to see if his heart would return to sinus rhythm when Dad complained of gas pains.
Mary told him simply “Let ’er rip, Mr. President.” Dad has never let her forget those immortal words.
On May 14, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip of the United Kingdom visited the White House for a formal state visit. Because of the traditional formality of the British throne, the visit was closely watched by the high society set.
Unfortunately, one small but important detail was neglected during the arrival ceremony.
“This was Joseph Reed [chief of protocol] making a real diplomatic bungle in the fact that I miscalculated in basic arithmetic,” Joseph recalled. “George Bush is well over six feet tall, while Queen Elizabeth is five foot four. Yes, I put them at the same podium, and when Queen Elizabeth went to the podium to give her speech, all you could see of her was a hat in the shape of a ‘boater’ bobbing up and down.”
The peculiar sight of Her Royal Highness almost totally obscured by “the blue goose,” or the presidential podium, created a monumental furor with the press corps, who started referring to it as “the talking-hat incident.” Dad telephoned Joseph over at Blair House and teased, “Joseph, you’re in trouble. Barbara’s mad at you, and you’re going to take the fall!”
Joseph replied, “Sir, that’s why you hired me.” As a good chief of protocol, he took the blame for his blunder and then went on with the business of state. [The truth is that he had told Dad to pull out a stand on the podium after he spoke and before the Queen’s speech, but Dad had forgotten.]
The formal state dinner that night was Washington at its black-tie best, but my brother George managed to inject a little humor into Her Majesty’s evening. Wearing cowboy boots, he sidled up to the queen and declared, “I’m the black sheep in my family. Do you have any in yours?” Not Mom’s idea of protocol.
On September 27, 1991, Dad’s friend and former spokesman Pete Teeley jumped into a taxi and rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. All month long, he had felt a dull pain in the right side of his abdomen and finally had Burt Lee, Dad’s doctor and an oncology specialist formerly with Sloan Kettering in New York, check it out. The doctor discovered that Pete’s appendix was inflamed, and needed to come out right away. Pete packed an overnight bag, thinking his stay at the hospital would be a short one.
When the doctors went in to take out the appendix, however, they discovered a big tumor sitting underneath the appendix that had actually caused the inflammation. That night, they removed sixteen inches of Pete’s colon.
The diagnosis was not encouraging: Pete had stage III colon cancer, and doctors gave him a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Making matters worse, he nearly died on the table during a second surgery, and he ended up in intensive care for ten days. Things were touch and go. The word got to Dad that Pete was dying and that he was not getting the best medical care.
Pete remembered: “So the next day, the president called the hospital and basically said, ‘I’m sending over one of my personal physicians, and I want him to have access to Pete’s files.’ The nurses told me after that call, everything changed. All of my medicines changed, and that’s when I started getting better. If I hadn’t known George Bush, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be here today.
“Here I am in intensive care, on a respirator, with all these tubes coming out,” Pete said. “The phone rings, the nurse picks it up, and she’s on the phone for a second. Then she puts her hands over the phone and says, ‘It’s the president of the United States. I can’t talk to him. I’m too frightened.’ All of the nurses were begging off, when finally the one who confessed she was a Democrat talked to him.”
Mom visited Pete a few days later and declared him on his way to a recovery when she found him watching the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings on TV. Thankfully, Pete went on to survive his cancer and write The Complete Cancer Survival Guide.
On Monday, July 1, Dad had stepped out of his office at Walker’s Point and announced that he was nominating Judge Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to succeed Justice Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Even before the announcement was made, Ben Hooks of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had promised that if Judge Thomas were nominated, the White House and Thomas would be in for “the mother of all confirmation hearings,” playing off of Saddam Hussein’s infamous, and empty, threat to wage the mother of all battles and destroy the coalition forces that tried to remove Iraq from Kuwait.
Earlier on the day of the announcement, Judge Thomas had been secretly brought up the driveway on the east side of Walker’s Point—away from the media—to maintain the surprise factor as long as possible. Justice Thomas remembered what happened from there:
Of course, President Bush introduced me to everybody on the deck when I arrived. Mrs. Bush was standing out there wearing a big hat, and she said, “Judge, congratulations.” Then catching herself, she said, “I guess I let the cat out of the bag.”
I thought I was coming up to have lunch for my interview. Yet Mrs. Bush was suggesting that I’m going to be nominated, so now I’m totally scared. Then the president introduced me to Brent Scowcroft and some of the others on his staff.
From there, we went into the master bedroom where there was a little sitting area and a table with family photos, and the president said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions. First, can you and your family get through the confirmation?”
I said, “Yes.” Perhaps I should not have said yes, as it turned out, but I said we could handle it.
Then the president asked, “If you go on the Supreme Court, can you call them as you see them?”
I also responded yes to this question, noting, “It’s gotten me in a lot of trouble, but I’ve done it my whole life.”
Finally, President Bush said, “Look, if you become a member of the Supreme Court, I will never publicly criticize any opinion of yours.” He repeated that, then he said, “At two o’clock I’m going to nominate you to the Supreme Court of the United States. Let’s go have lunch.”
That was the totality of our discussion about the Supreme Court.
When things got really bad a few weeks later, I went to the Oval Office and apologized for getting him in so much trouble. Things at that point were getting totally out of control. I think I may have suggested then that, if he wanted, I would be more than happy to just say the heck with it and withdraw my name.
See, I had never really wanted to be on the Court. I always saw it as public service, something that we’re supposed to do. Nevertheless, the president rejected my offer to stand down, saying he was going to be there to the end and he was going to fight it through. This wasn’t about politics, ever. In none of the discussions we had during that time or when I was nominated was there any discussion other than deeply personal discussion—as though you were talking to a father or an uncle.
He was in it with me as a father and as a friend.
My wife and I were so beaten down by that time. If you notice in those pictures, I had not had a haircut all summer. I couldn’t go to the barbershop. I rarely went out in public. I had been studying all summer—twenty-five three-inch binders. I would read through that material all night, into the wee hours of the morning, then all day. In fact, I had not slept for sixty minutes in a row for three and a half months.
All the while, people were out to do me harm. It was like being in a jungle and people were hunting me. I thought, why? I’m just a kid from Georgia. There’s nothing there. They attacked my mother. They attacked my sister, talking about her in this horrible way. We were not prepared to defend ourselves.
When you’re at that point, you’re beyond tears. I remember grieving about my grandparents. You sag under the weight of your grief. That’s the way I felt during the confirmation. It’s sort of a tearless grief. I had been pounded from July to October, over a hundred days.
Clearly, all the left-wing black groups felt they had license to do whatever they wanted to me, and they did it. Then I found out later they had focus gro
ups to see what they could do to pry support away from me in the South. To do that, first they said I was not qualified, then they made an issue of the race of my wife.
None of it worked, though.
My mother lost thirty-five pounds during my confirmation. It finally got the best of her when we returned to the White House from the swearing-in ceremony. There was a big crowd, and my mother started feeling faint, so one of the White House physicians took her into a separate room and tested her blood pressure. They decided they wanted to take her to George Washington Hospital for observation, and you know who spent time with her until she went to the hospital? Barbara Bush. She told me, “Go on with the rest of your family and I’ll look after your mom.”
My Father, My President Page 39