I understand you met my son. Now how about meeting his father—I love Panama.
Good luck,
George Bush #41
Dad asked President Torrijos if he would give the note to the cabinet minister. President Torrijos said that he would not only give the note to the minister, he would read it aloud at the next cabinet session!
After a four-month engagement, Bobby and I were married on June 27. Because I had been married before, I wanted something low-key—definitely not a White House wedding. Yet Bobby had not been married, so I also wanted to make sure he had a proper ceremony and reception. We decided to be married at Camp David, where Mom and Dad had dedicated the beautiful new Evergreen Chapel just a year before.
The presidential retreat was first established in 1942 in the Catoctin Mountains near the little town of Thurmont, Maryland. That part of Maryland is always at least ten degrees cooler than Washington, and President Roosevelt enjoyed going there to escape the dreadful summer heat in our nation’s capital, which was deemed to be hard on his health. FDR soon dubbed the encampment Shangri-La.
In 1953, President Eisenhower renamed the retreat Camp David, after his grandson, and that name stuck until my brother Marvin mounted a modest campaign to have the retreat renamed, immodestly, after himself. In fact, he succeeded in convincing most members of our immediate family to refer to it as Camp Marvin, though for the record this remains strictly an informal designation.
Several months before the wedding, Mom took me to New York to buy a dress. We went to see Arnold Scaasi, who has made beautiful dresses for Mom for years. Arnold loved the rich and, in the case of my mom, the famous, and he excitedly pulled out bolts of beautiful fabric and draped them over the First Lady, settling on a lovely lilac lace fabric.
Then Arnold turned to me and said, “Oh yes, the bride . . .” Clearly, I was not as famous or interesting! Nevertheless, Arnold also made a beautiful dress for me: salmon chiffon on the bottom topped with lace.
There were also a few unplanned fashion statements made at our wedding. For example, unknown to us, Bobby’s brother Danny thought it would be funny to surreptitiously put Bush-Quayle ’92 stickers on the bottom of Bobby’s shoes, so when he knelt at the altar, he did a little campaigning on behalf of our ticket. We heard the laughter but didn’t know what was so funny until later.
Dad had forgotten to pack a suit and was forced to wear what he had in his closet—most notably a pair of white pants with a thin blue pinstripe, exactly like the New York Yankees wear!
I am biased, of course, but our wedding was beautiful. First, we were surrounded by our close friends and family members. Added to that, Camp David features breathtaking views of the Appalachian Valley as well as a variety of majestic trees. Idyllic is the word that comes to mind. All the cabins are named after trees, such as Birch, Dogwood, and Maple, and we held the reception behind Aspen, the president’s house, where tables were set on terraces on different levels and around the pool.
While guests mixed and mingled, a division of the Marine Band played country music. I will never forget the generosity of some of the White House personnel who came up to help that weekend. Because Camp David is run by a small detail of Marines primarily concerned with security, they didn’t have enough people there to man a wedding, so some of the White House butlers, Laurie Firestone from the Social Office, and others volunteered to help us. Looking back, I am still touched by their thoughtfulness.
Finally, I’ll always remember what George Hannie, one of the extraordinary butlers who works at the White House, said to me. As I was thanking him, George spoke up and said, “It’s okay, honey, but just don’t do it a third time!” Words to live by!
(Incidentally, one of the greatest joys of having the privilege to visit the White House regularly thanks to my brother George is being able to see the White House staff, many of whom are still there from Dad’s time as president.)
Unlike our very private wedding at Camp David, we held our rehearsal dinner on June 26 at the White House. Traditionally, the groom’s family hosts the rehearsal dinner, but the Kochs, who very much wanted to host it, understood that if Dad were to go someplace else, the entire press corps would have to go with him—and our private family event would have turned into a zoo. Since it was our desire to have a private wedding, it worked well to have the rehearsal dinner at the White House.
I remember wearing a long red chiffon dress that I had made for me. It still hangs in my closet, and if I cut myself in half, it might fit. The State Dining Room was decorated with red and pink flowers and pink tablecloths and looked as beautiful as at any state dinner. But the atmosphere was permeated by family and friends. There were some articles in the press that speculated on who would be at the wedding—which cabinet members and politicians around town. But we didn’t want a “Washington” wedding.
There were toasts and lots of exuberant laughter. Sam, Ellie, and I prepared a “rap” song that we sang to Bobby which wasn’t anything Snoop Dogg would approve of, to be sure. There was also dancing in the foyer to the music of the Marine Band. Known as the President’s Own, the U.S. Marine Band was established by Congress in 1798, making it the oldest musical organization in the United States. They are elegant and remarkable, and, as president, Dad loved the privilege of having them play at White House events.
Today, I often accompany out-of-town friends on the tour of the White House. Every once in a while, the tour guide will mention, among other things, that President George H. W. Bush’s daughter had her rehearsal dinner in the State Dining Room. Even now, when I hear it on the tour, it still seems as if they are talking about someone else.
Bobby’s being a member of the “loyal opposition” has certainly added spice to our marriage. Little did he know that he would be so outnumbered down the line by more governors and presidents! I know there have been awkward situations for Bobby to cope with over the years, but he has always handled it all with class and dignity. He has always been totally loyal to our family.
That doesn’t mean Bobby has placed his political convictions in a blind trust, however. While we have the usual arguments that all married couples have, I will confess that some of them have also crossed into politics. Bobby remains unconvinced of some of my positions, but I’m working on it!
As the 1992 campaign moved into summer, the two major party candidates were shifting gears from the primary season to the general election. Dad had soundly defeated Pat Buchanan, while Bill Clinton had outlasted Paul Tsongas and was in the process of finishing off his own tough-talking insurgent challenger, former California governor Jerry Brown.
It was the Perot campaign, however, that appeared to be on a roll as Memorial Day came and went. The Texas billionaire was at or near the top of every national poll, and his campaign was close to registering Perot in every state. The national media loved this remarkable, improbable development and lavished Perot with airtime and print coverage.
Yet, as soon as Perot was possibly poised to break the race wide open, the bottom fell out on his campaign. Several weeks’ worth of critical news stories throughout May and June started to take its toll on both the candidate and his standing with voters. Mr. Perot also reportedly balked at footing the bill for fundamental campaign staples such as TV advertising and yard signs. By the time the Democratic convention had started in New York in mid-July, Mr. Perot had dropped nine points in just the previous week alone—and the clash of egos and tempers at Perot headquarters boiled over, past the breaking point.
Some accounts suggested that Mr. Perot dropped out of the race because he realized that his continued success would mean his family would lose their privacy—a burden he did not want them to have to bear. If this is true, I can understand and respect that.
However, the official explanation he gave when he dropped out on July 16 was harder to follow. Mr. Perot said he was dropping out because it was clear that no one would win the election outright—which would, in turn, force the vote into the House of Represe
ntatives, delay the selection of the ultimate winner, and deny the new president adequate time to prepare the new administration. Such a development would be too disruptive to our political system, Perot said, and he did not want to contribute to that.
During all this, Dad was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with Jeb, Secretary Baker, and Jamie Baker for what had become his traditional getaway during the Democratic convention.
Meanwhile, Tom Luce, the lawyer for the now-defunct Perot campaign, decided to join Dad’s campaign. “I felt like I had discharged my obligation, if you want to call it that,” Tom Luce said. “I felt that I had done what I could do, and Ross Perot had decided to drop out of the race. I had no idea he was going to get back in the race, and in the meantime I’d committed to President Bush—so it was a simple proposition in my mind.
“My secretary came in and said, ‘The president is on the phone,’” Tom Luce recalled, “and I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I thought it was one of my smart-aleck friends, but she was serious. I picked up the phone and the voice said, ‘Tom, this is George Bush.’ I kind of sat up straight in my chair and he said, ‘I’m in Jackson Hole fishing with Jim Baker and I just heard the news about Ross Perot, and I just want to tell you that I more than most people value loyalty. I know why you did what you did, and welcome back—no hard feelings.’”
Dad asked Tom and his wife, Pam, to come up to the White House after Perot dropped out. My brother George set up the meeting.
“We had dinner with President and Mrs. Bush, George W., and Nancy Ellis, and my wife in the upstairs dining room,” Tom said. “Then I went out on the Truman balcony, which was quite a thrill for me to talk to the president after dinner about what he called the Perot phenomenon.”
With Mr. Perot seemingly out of the race (at least until early October), the fall campaign appeared to be shaping up as a two-man showdown between Dad and Bill Clinton—and Dad’s campaign finally appeared to be getting traction. In July, they even managed to string together several days of positive coverage.
The Perot departure had created a void at exactly the moment the Democrats were conducting a successful convention in New York. To try and keep the Clinton campaign in check, Mary Matalin and Torie Clark on Dad’s campaign team started putting out what they called “a lie a day” items chronicling how Bill Clinton would say different things to different crowds to win their approval.
On August 3, they put out a press release that contained twenty or so statements, including one item calling attention to the fact that the Clinton campaign had paid $25,000 for investigators to contact several women with whom Governor Clinton allegedly had affairs. Mary and Torie thought this “bimbo eruption” issue was fair game, because taxpayer dollars were involved.
As soon as the press release went out, however, the national press corps went nuts. It was the first time either campaign had formally raised the infidelity issue, and, as a result, our campaign release dominated the network news coverage. Immediately, a number of people on both sides of the political aisle were calling for Mary’s head—Democrats outraged at what they said were “dirty tricks,” and Beltway Republicans upset that Dad had been knocked “off message” by the antics.
“I was utterly devastated,” Mary said. “Everyone at the White House wanted an apology, but that would have made the situation worse. So the president called me from Air Force One, and I couldn’t stop crying. He said, ‘Don’t cry. It’s okay. You were doing it because you were fighting. Just don’t do it again.’ The grass roots loved it because we were fighting back, but the Beltway crowd hated me for doing it.”
The next day at the White House, there was a meeting of the senior campaign staff in the Roosevelt Room. To Mary, it seemed that everyone at that meeting gave her the cold shoulder; but when Dad came into the room, he walked all the way around the table and gave Mary a big hug.
In the meantime, Governor Clinton had selected Tennessee Senator Al Gore as his running mate and started to make Vice President Quayle an issue in the campaign, suggesting that Quayle was not prepared to be president. By then, the vice president had endured the overdone “potato” flap, but he had also made his famous “Murphy Brown” speech defending traditional “family values” and attacking Hollywood for its corrosive influence on our culture. That speech elicited howls of protest from political opponents and most corners of the media, who said they didn’t need anyone from Washington lecturing them about values. Yet many of these same critics hailed President Clinton two years later when he made a similar speech about values in Memphis.
Nevertheless, some of Dad’s political people started to talk about whether or not to keep the vice president on the 1992 ticket, arguing that it might help my father’s poll numbers to get a new partner. Dad rejected this advice.
“You just don’t do stuff like that,” he told Mary Matalin.
That summer, historian David McCullough spoke at the White House about Teddy Roosevelt. Dad invited Senator Alan Simpson to stop by the Oval Office after the lecture, and the senator had something on his mind.
“Let me tell you what I see about this campaign,” the senator said. “When I’m through in this seven minutes or eight minutes, it might just be a rupture of our friendship. Stay out of the damn boat. Quit playing golf or you’ll have a whole lifetime of doing that. Let the people know who you really are. They don’t know who you are.”
Dad took off his glasses and began to chew on the temple of them. “Well, how do I do that?” he shot back.
“Just be the same guy with the people of the United States as you are with all of us in the Senate,” came the reply. “Write your own stuff.”
In the end, Dad reassured his friend, “I can see you’re very worried about me and the campaign. Don’t worry. I’m not worried. They’re never going to elect Bill Clinton to be president of the United States.”
On August 13, Dad walked into the White House press briefing room and announced that he had asked his secretary of state and friend of thirty-five years, Jim Baker, to resign from the Department of State and return to the White House as chief of staff. If there was any question that Dad was determined to give his all in the fall campaign, this announcement answered it.
At this point, Dad had been the target of an unending barrage of political attacks and negative media coverage for the better part of the previous year. He remained confident of his ultimate success as he geared up for the Republican convention in Houston. Yet we knew a tough road lay ahead, particularly as we watched Bill Clinton and Al Gore storming across the country on a bus tour that kept their positive press coverage going well after the final balloon drop at Madison Square Garden.
With Perot out, and the Clinton-Gore ticket surging, the Republicans gathered for their national convention in Houston. The task Dad’s team faced at the Houston Astrodome was no less daunting than the challenge they had confronted in New Orleans four years before—and hopes were high that Dad could produce a similar turnabout.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say, and how the Houston convention went depends on whom you ask. The media, which are invariably drawn to controversy and conflict, focused on Dad’s former primary opponents and made much of the more strident parts of Pat Buchanan’s otherwise strong speech—and that of Pat Robertson. We featured more than 120 speakers that week, but the media focused like a laser beam on but a handful of lines from two or three speakers.
In fact, when I saw the news coverage of the convention, I felt like I had attended an entirely different event. By contrast, I remember my young nephew George P. giving a speech he wrote himself, giving it very well, and punctuating it at the end with “Viva Bush!”
I remember Labor Secretary Lynn Martin talking about the increasing role of women, and President Reagan giving what would turn out to be his final major political speech, doing so in his usual classic style. Best of all, in my view, I saw Mom and Dad stand before America that week and paint a positive, inclusive, and hopeful picture of the future. They were funny
and warm, and, media coverage notwithstanding, they closed the gap with the Clinton-Gore ticket as they rolled out of Houston.
The battle had been joined, but Dad still had his work cut out for him.
During the first week in September, Dad traveled to Chicago, arriving at a hotel on South Michigan Avenue for a fund-raiser that evening. That afternoon, the director of political affairs at the White House, Ron Kaufman, ran into Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde, who had been trying to get ahold of someone at the campaign or at the White House.
It turns out that, in the same hotel that same night, the Catholic League of Illinois was having its annual Man of the Year dinner in the ballroom downstairs. Many church leaders from Illinois and throughout the Midwest would be there. The Midwesterners would be there to honor Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who was one of the few pro-life leaders in the Democratic Party. In fact, Governor Casey had been denied a speaking role at the Democratic convention in New York because of his views on abortion, and as such was one of the few Democratic governors who had not endorsed Bill Clinton. (One of the others, Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer, would endorse Dad later in the campaign.)
To Ron, stopping by this Catholic event was a no-brainer—a huge opportunity the campaign should not pass up. There was some back-and-forth as to scheduling a drop-by, but Ron thought, no problem, we’ll go down after our event. “We finish our event,” Ron said, “and I said, ‘Okay, let’s go downstairs,’ and I was voted down—‘No, we can’t go, we’re leaving.’ We never went. Bill Clinton’s campaign would have had him go downstairs, work every hand in that room, and kiss every nun twice on the cheek—but for some reason, we didn’t. That’s just how bad the 1992 campaign was.”
Just as Dad had brought Secretary Baker back to the White House to help him for the stretch run in 1992, the decision was also made to make Sig Rogich, the 1988 media consultant who had recently been appointed ambassador to Iceland, a similar offer he could not refuse.
My Father, My President Page 43