Jeb, for his part, returned to Florida, where he was already the presumed GOP front-runner for the 1998 gubernatorial race. He continued working with state Republican leaders on issues ranging from “truth in sentencing” laws—making sure criminals serve at least 85 percent of their jail time—to promoting charter school education around the state. Speaker of the Florida House John Thrasher noticed that Jeb was so active, so visible, and so effective at shaping legislation that he was like a “phantom governor.”
On April 1995, a truck bomb exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, destroying the building, killing 168 people, and wounding hundreds more. Among the dead that day was a federal agent named Al Wicher who had served on Dad’s Secret Service detail. Agent Wicher was a husband, father, and son—and that personal connection to the tragedy only added to the shock that Dad, and all of us, were feeling during that time.
The Oklahoma City blast occurred on the second anniversary of the unsuccessful federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of seventy people, including a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent named Steve Willis. Dad attended Agent Willis’s funeral in 1993. What’s more, immediately after the highly controversial ATF raid in Waco, Clinton Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen named Dad’s former Secret Service lead agent and friend John Magaw to head the ATF.
Given Dad’s connection to Agent Wicher and the ATF, Dad was deeply offended shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing when he received a solicitation letter from the National Rifle Association (NRA) referring to federal agents as “jack-booted thugs” and describing them as “wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.” Though he was a lifelong member of the NRA, Dad was galled by such reckless language and tactics—attacking the reputation of our nation’s law enforcement officers to raise money. The letter was so offensive, in fact, that Dad fired off a letter to the NRA’s president resigning his membership effective immediately. “I have long supported many things the NRA supports,” Dad told me, “but this excessive anti-law enforcement rhetoric was too much for me.”
Dad’s resignation made national news, and the NRA’s defenders—of which there are many in Washington and elsewhere around the country—accused Dad of grandstanding to get a good headline or two. Nothing could be further from the truth. He simply could not stand by while some of the finest professional men and women he knew, with whom he worked on a personal basis, had their character dragged through the gutter.
It’s a common refrain throughout Dad’s life.
“The L-word, ‘loyalty,’ that’s what they’ll put on his tombstone,” said Senator Al Simpson. “Loyalty to President Reagan, loyalty to his country, loyalty to his family, loyalty to his friends regardless of the consequences . . . Show George Bush a fallen dove—unless he shot it, of course—and he will go fluff the poor bird up and put it back on its feet again . . . You would want him on your side.”
In 1996 Dad’s friend, Illinois Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, saw his forty-two-year career in public service come to an end when he pleaded guilty to two charges of mail fraud related to his congressional office. In July of that year, Congressman Rostenkowski was sent to a federal prison hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was treated for cancer and then transferred to the federal jail in Oxford, Wisconsin, in December. (In December of 2000, President Clinton pardoned him.)
During his seventeen months of incarceration, the former chairman of the powerful U.S. House Ways and Means Committee lost sixty-five pounds—but he was also reportedly not enthusiastic about receiving visitors. That didn’t stop Dad from reaching out to his former colleague from Capitol Hill.
“Danny told me the story about your father calling the jail saying he wanted to talk to Rostenkowski,” former Illinois congressman Marty Russo told me. “One of the officials told him, ‘We don’t allow calls in.’ So your dad said, ‘I’m President Bush. I want to talk to him.’ They had to get the warden on the phone, who said, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. President.’”
“Danny called me and said, ‘You know what, that gives you the measure of the man,’” Congressman Russo continued. “Of course he was former president at the time, but Danny said, ‘The president calls me, puts his prestige on the line to talk to me. That’s the kind of friend he is. He never forgets his friends no matter what.’ It was a really emotional thing for Danny to tell me that story.”
When Dad was president, his perpetual penchant for inviting groups of people to come for a movie or stay for dinner or overnight didn’t cause much trauma in the Bush household because Mom and Dad had the White House staff and Laurie Firestone to help magically transform these spur-of-the-moment whims of a restless mind into a seamless reality.
After he left the White House, of course, Mom and Dad no longer had the same number of hands to facilitate Dad’s voracious appetite for entertaining—an appetite that only grew more ravenous when my parents reach Maine for the summer. It got to the point that Mom joked she runs the busiest bed-and-breakfast in Maine, and she may actually be right!
The guest list over the course of a typical summer ranges from family, to former and current heads of state, to pro athletes, to members of the Bush extended political family, to anyone else Dad has encountered along the way. In going through Dad’s personal files, I found literally hundreds of notes to people that included an invitation of one kind or another: “We won’t take no for an answer,” he’ll write. “It would be a joy to see you.” Or simply, “Come see us.”
Jean Becker, Dad’s chief of staff for the last twelve years, aptly describes Dad as a “tumbleweed.”
“He just collects people as he goes long,” Jean explained. “I’ve often wondered how frustrating it must be for the kids and grandkids, brothers and sister, and nephews and nieces who really are his family, because you think you’re going to spend some time with him and suddenly there’s thirteen other people there at the table, or four other people in the boat. He adopts everybody.”
We call some of these people “brothers from another mother.” The truth is, while Dad’s collection of friends grew, our circle of friends widened as well—and our lives are far richer today for it.
For the Fourth of July holiday in 1995, Dad invited Vaclav Havel, who had recently stepped down as president of Czechoslovakia, to Walker’s Point for the festivities. Also invited were Governor Jock McKernan and his wife, Senator Olympia Snowe.
All during dinner, Dad was lobbying Mom to take the dinner group out on the boat after supper to watch the fireworks, but Mom was resisting. She would vary her response from questioning the logistics of moving so many people onto the boat, to the dampness and chill in the air, to changing the subject altogether, saying she preferred to watch them from the house.
“Finally, getting nowhere with Mrs. Bush,” recalled Governor McKernan, “the president stated in a loud voice that he thought the guest of honor, President Havel, should make the decision on whether the group watched the fireworks from the boat or from the house. A hush came over the room, and President Havel, without missing a beat, responded, ‘It is always difficult to choose between two worthy options. And while I, personally, would side with the president in viewing the fireworks from the boat, I believe it would be more appropriate for the group to accede to the wishes of our hostess and view them from the house.’”
As disappointed as Dad was, he led the applause for such a diplomatic response.
In October 1995, Dad and his Presidential Library Foundation hosted their first event in Colorado Springs—a forum called “A World Transformed: Our Reflections on the Ending of the Cold War.” Journalist Hugh Sidey was there in the audience:
I went up to a conference that former President Bush had in Colorado Springs on ending the Cold War. He had Gorbachev there—naturally, President Gorbachev talked too much, but it was nice to have him there; he was very central in that operation. There was Margaret Thatcher, who sat three hours with her ankles,
her thighs, her knees, pressed together and her hands folded. British discipline. I was absolutely amazed. And there was George Bush, looking a little more grandfatherly, a little tummy there, coming up with a little more gray hair, and Mitterrand was still alive. He was a little green at that point, and he was dying. But he was still funny; he had that Gallic sense of humor. And there was Mulroney—I didn’t know till I got up that close to him how much like Jay Leno he appeared. You know, he’s got that big jaw. They talked all morning long, these people who had brought this about. And then it suddenly occurred to me as I watched that every single one of them had been punished by the political system that they supported: Bush, defeated; Mitterrand was in hot water over there; Margaret Thatcher, out, criticized; Mulroney, same thing; Gorbachev, defeated. Isn’t that an irony? The people in this public life.
A week later, I was back in Washington, and I went to the funeral of a friend of mine, John Scali, who used to be the U.N. representative under Nixon. And there in front of the church was the gathering—he was also, as you know, an ABC correspondent—of the hierarchy of television. Goodness, there was Roone Arledge, and there was Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts and Ted Koppel and Peter Jennings. They were all gorgeous, I mean, they had Phoenix tans and a few of them had chin tucks, and Sam’s toupee was on straight. But the sense of power and position and prestige in this group was unmistakable. I was talking to a friend of mine and I said, “Last week, I was with the people that did all the heavy lifting, and they were uncertain and a little frayed at the edges, to be honest with you. But here is this group. What is happening in our society, and in our culture, and in our politics?
Dad had broken ground on his presidential library at Texas A&M a year before that conference, and on November 6, 1997, Mom and Dad celebrated the dedication of the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University with President and Mrs. Clinton, President and Mrs. Ford, President and Mrs. Carter, Nancy Reagan, Lady Bird Johnson, former world leaders such as Lech Walesa of Poland and Toshiki Kaifu of Japan, movie stars like Kevin Costner, former cabinet and staff members, and an estimated 25,000 other friends, relatives, and Aggies.
Both Jeb, as the president of the Library Foundation, and George W., as the host governor, addressed the sun-splashed crowd; and when it came time for Dad to speak, the first thing he did was apologize to his mother in heaven.
“She always told me, ‘Don’t be a braggadocio, George. Nobody likes braggadocios,’” Dad recalled. “I worried how she would feel about our library, because it is a bit of an ego trip—I mean, most of the pictures and exhibits are about me.”
That same fall, in September 1997, Mom and Dad also celebrated the dedication of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. Together with the library, the Bush School has become a consuming passion for Dad. He loves the spirit of the campus, the Corps of Cadets, and the friendly manner of the students. He loves their commitment to excellence and traditions and was devastated when a massive log pile for the traditional student bonfire—a tradition ninety years old at the time—collapsed inward in November 1999, killing twelve Aggie students.
Every semester, Dad invites Bush School students to the cozy apartment he and Mom have on campus or goes into a classroom and lets them ask him any question they want for as long as they want. Dad has also brought a lot of prominent political figures and business leaders from across the country and around the world to the A&M campus for the widest variety of events—speeches, conferences, award ceremonies.
“He’s here quite a bit from October to May,” said Texas A&M President Bob Gates, who also served as Dad’s NSC deputy and CIA director. One time, for example, Dad called Bob and asked him to go to lunch in the cafeteria in the Memorial Student Center—in the heart of campus, the busiest spot and at the busiest time.
So Dad and Bob Gates walked into the cafeteria right at lunchtime, and people turned and looked and couldn’t believe he was there. The twosome fetched their trays, got in line, and Dad got the barbecue plate.
By the time they made it through the food line and to the cash registers, word had spread and the cafeteria became kind of a mob scene. Dad didn’t want to sit at a table for two because that was too exclusive, and there weren’t any tables for four, so they sat at a table for six. Instantly, four guys from the Corps of Cadets plopped down their trays and never moved the entire rest of the lunch.
“I’ll bet President Bush signed two hundred autographs while he was eating, and probably took twenty-five or thirty pictures,” Bob Gates said. “Kids had cameras in their backpacks for reasons I don’t understand, and he even talked to a couple of moms on cell phones. How he actually finished his meal while he did all that other stuff was a real trick.”
Dad also draws a crowd of Aggies whenever he does one of several things: goes to the recreational center on campus to work out, attends one of the many sporting events he and Mom support each year . . . or jumps out of a perfectly good airplane.
Since Dad’s parachute jumps, people have asked when he became such a daredevil. He has always loved driving his boat fast, but something changed during a trip to Puerto Rico in the mid–1990s.
“I thought I had a rein on your father and his penchant for pushing the limits of personal safety until he announced he was going hang gliding into the sea,” recalled Jim Pollard, who led Dad’s post-White House Secret Service detail for several years. “This event was a ‘not normal operation’ according to Service Service standards, so we set up an elaborate contingency plan to protect the president in case something went wrong. All went well, but what I did not know at that time was that this event was only the warm-up of ‘not normal’ things to come.”
What really got people scratching their heads was when they first heard that Dad planned to make a parachute jump in March 1997. The month before, my father had dropped by a meeting of the International Parachute Association in Houston to see a friend, Chris Needels, who convinced Dad it was easy and safe. That visit rekindled a deep desire Dad had harbored since he was shot down in World War II.
When he was shot down in September 1944, that parachute jump was decidedly not a voluntary effort. Not only did his two crew members die, but Dad was also injured as he exited the plane. He had pulled the rip cord too early. He received a glancing blow to his head, while the chute itself had ripped when it got caught on the horizontal stabilizer; it therefore did not open fully—making for an accelerated fall into the sea.
Dad told me he wanted to make another jump in part “to show that old guys can still do stuff.”
To realize his goal, however, Dad would have to win converts to his cause—and overcome the objections of family members who thought we were saving him from himself. To their credit, each of my brothers understood this desire immediately when Dad called, even if they couldn’t refuse teasing Dad about having a midlife crisis at age seventy-three.
“Fine, Dad,” said Jeb, “but don’t change your sexual preference.”
“That’s great,” said the governor of Texas, “but don’t tell anyone about your eighteen-year-old girlfriend.”
I’m afraid I was less reassuring. When Dad called to tell me the news, my first reaction was, “Oh, Dad, do you have to do this?”
“Yes, Doro,” he replied. “I’m going to do it, and don’t you tell anybody.”
“Do you think I’d tell anybody this?” I gasped in disbelief. Little did I know that he’d take up parachuting as a hobby in his seventies and eighties.
Even General Denny Reimer, then the head of the army, checked in with Dad to make sure he was aware of the risks. Fully satisfied after their phone visit, General Reimer said, “I hope this doesn’t lead to my getting a call from Strom Thurmond next week.”
Dad’s jump was being sponsored by the U.S. Parachute Association, but would be held at the army base in Yuma, Arizona, and coordinated with the U.S. Army Golden Knights, the elite parachute team. On March 25, 1997, Dad jumped out solo at 12,000 feet and fell dow
n to 4,500 feet at 120 mph.
Dad’s good friend Hugh Sidey watched with Mom from the ground below: “We’re out in the desert and he’s up above us. He’s in a parachute, and Barbara Bush is below. President Bush brought along his orthopedist, just in case, and so we’re standing down there in the desert, watching the president of the United States descend in a parachute. And the doctor turned to me and said, ‘You’ve probably seen this before.’ And I said, ‘Are you kidding? This is history, the likes of which I have never seen, and nobody else has.’ ”
Dad still jokingly says that when safely on the ground, he asked Mom what she thought. Mom said, “I haven’t seen a free fall like that since the ’92 election!”
The jump made worldwide news, and soon Dad was hearing from friends around the globe. Most important, we thought he had maybe “exorcised the demon” and gotten this urge out of his system.
We should have known better.
Two years later, Dad celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in June by making a second jump—this time at his library at College Station. The second skydive was dubbed Operation Spring Colt, and after his chute opened, it read “Making Cancer History: M. D. Anderson.”
The jump did not go smoothly. Dad was tumbling and on his back for most of the free-fall descent. One of the Golden Knights, also in a free fall, helped Dad get into the proper position just seconds before it was time to open his chute. No one on the ground could tell this, but the film taken by an army parachutist shows the whole fall in frightening detail. When asked about it later on, Dad mischievously said, “Only my laundryman knows!”
Our whole family had arrived in Houston the day before for Dad’s seventy-fifth birthday dinner with seven hundred of Mom and Dad’s friends and an extravaganza for a thousand more featuring Bruce Willis, Van Cliburn, Larry Gatlin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other stars. The entire weekend raised over $10.2 million for M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
My Father, My President Page 49