Privately, she is a caustic and judgmental woman, who has labored to keep her sarcasm in check—with incomplete success. And once she notes a soft spot, says a longtime associate, “she hangs on forever. She never, ever, ever, ever lets go. She can just get under your skin and needle you.”
“I mean,” elaborates a former aide, “she’s a good person, she talks about AIDS and stuff. But she’s not this nice person.”
One Washington regular—the second wife of a prominent man—tells of meeting the First Lady at a recent party. Mrs. Bush, who had a slight friendship with the man’s first wife, seemed “hostile” to the couple, “her vibes, the look on her face, everything. . . . She looked at me, and if looks could kill, I’d be dead,” the woman relates. Hoping at least to make the conversation smooth, the second wife mentioned a mutual acquaintance, a Bush-family friend. She had met him, she said, through political circles, and had supported him in a recent, unsuccessful bid for office.
“Well,” retorted the First Lady, “that is undoubtedly why he lost.”
On a personal level, she can be domineering. Aides, old friends, even family members give eerily similar accounts of her offering unsolicited advice on appearance: “You’ve got to do something about your hair,” she told one aide; to another, who had just grown a mustache, she said, “Has George seen that? Shave it off!” She is full of admonitions about smoking, now that she has given it up, and diet—especially diet.
Peggy Stanton, a friend from the years when Bush served in Congress, remembers being embarrassed at lunches of the congressional wives’ club. “I was a pretty healthy eater, and Bar would say, ‘Now, watch Peggy, she’s going up for her third helping.’ Which was true, but I didn’t necessarily want the world to know.”
“You’re too fat,” Barbara tells her younger brother, Scott Pierce, when he puts on weight. And when Bush was vice president, according to an aide, Barbara boiled over one day at the sight of the staffers eating junk food on Air Force Two. “She said we were all fat, we all ate too much, and from then on we would only get fruit and so on,” a change that was instituted immediately.
The more people talk about Barbara Bush, the more confusing grows the disjunction between the image and the woman. Two apparently contradictory threads run through her history. The first is her rigorous fealty to the gender roles of her day. And the second is the clear force of her personality—the commanding will that has been diverted and disguised, but never extinguished, by her life as the humble helpmate of George Herbert Walker Bush. The two threads of her life come together in an uneasy suspicion that she has paid a heavy price for the image she has lived.
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If this is Tuesday, it must be Miami Beach. Clean white limousines are packed like Chiclets at the curb of the convention center, where a thousand loyal Republicans have gathered to salute First Lady Barbara Bush as “National Statesman of the Year.” They have forked over a little more than $800,000 to their state party, in amounts ranging from $500 to $10,000, for the privilege of eating a chicken dinner in her presence.
At seven o’clock they are herded into a curtained-off area of the huge exhibition space, its concrete floor and cavernous ceiling wanly cheered by a few potted ferns draped in Christmas lights. Like all political dinners, this one is interminable, with a dozen separate speeches, an invocation, the Pledge of Allegiance, a twelve-piece band, and a rendering of “God Bless America” by a choir of overmiked children.
The First Lady has been up since 5:30 in the morning, and has already flown to San Antonio (for a lunch-hour fund-raiser) and then back East to Miami. But to judge by her facial expressions, greatly magnified on a huge video monitor suspended over the crowd, she would rather be spending this night with a thousand rich Florida strangers in an echoing exhibition hall than spend it anywhere else on earth. She rewards every speaker’s peroration with emphatic nods of agreement; she traverses even the dullest bits with her attentive, First Lady–listening expression firmly in place.
And these men do talk. The hour is ticking past 9:30 when Barbara Bush finally rises to speak.
She is over-whelmed by this whole evening, she tells the crowd.
She thanks the priest for his bee-ooo-ti-ful prayer.
She comments on the won-der-ful music.
She does so in a rich, cultured, carefully modulated voice that is still soaked, after forty-five years of Texas and politics, in the affluent air of her childhood. A slight shock attends anything she says: for all the familiarity of her image, you suddenly realize that you have almost no memory of hearing her voice. It is one of the chief requirements of her job that she say as few genuinely memorable things as possible.
“I’ve known for years that I was the luckiest woman in the world,” she says. “I do have the most marvelous husband, children, and grandchildren. We live in the greatest country in the world. And tonight you have honored me with such a great honor,” she says. “I don’t deserve it. Of course I’m going to accept it, but I don’t deserve it.”
To some degree, Barbara Bush’s persona is a simple function of beautiful manners. I have watched her over and over in these First Lady tableaux: at a White House tea, cuddling a child who has a brain tumor; in New Hampshire, choking down yet another chicken breast at a Keene senior citizens’ center; at the home of a grandmother in D.C.’s drug corridor, where she escorted the Queen of England—and where she actually made good enough small talk to bridge the gap between the hostess and her royal visitor.
Her exigent private manner is balanced, in public, by a universal graciousness. The only way to reconcile these two facets of Barbara Bush is to understand her as a woman of her class: the American social stratum that has always raised its children to assume their own superiority—and also to mask that assumption at all times.
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Her roots are in Rye, New York, the kind of town that imparts an unconscious confidence: not quite so rich as Greenwich, Connecticut, just up the way, where George Bush was raised, but secure and Waspy and well-to-do.
The Pierces lived on Onondaga Street, in a five-bedroom brick house almost at the border of the Apawamis gold club. They didn’t have a fortune, but they had a large social inheritance: Pauline Pierce was the daughter of an Ohio Supreme Court justice, and Marvin, a member of a once wealthy Pennsylvania iron clan, was a distant relative of President Franklin Pierce.
“We weren’t rich” compared with some of the neighbors, says Scott Pierce, who still lives in Rye. “But we were certainly upper-middle-class.”
Barbara, the third of four children, had a caustic tongue even as a child. June Biedler, who was one of Barbara’s best friends, remembers her as “very articulate, very witty,” and as “kind of a gang leader.” When the girls boarded the school bus in the morning, “Barbara would have decided ‘Let’s not speak to June today.’ Or Barbara would decide ‘Let’s not speak to Posy today,’ and so the rest of us would obediently follow along and give that person a miserable time. And I don’t remember that there was ever a ‘Let’s not speak to Barbara today’ arrangement.” Biedler stresses today that she loves and admires Barbara Bush, and believes that her friend grew up to be a kind and generous woman. But as a teenager, she recalls, “I thought Barbara was really mean and sarcastic.” Among other things, she teased Biedler about her painful childhood stammer.
This cruelty, Biedler suggests, may have been the result of having “a mother that was a little mean to her.” Pauline Pierce was a beautiful woman, but an exacting observer of social status. She was rather humorless, “austere,” according to Biedler; “formal,” in Scott Pierce’s memory. She was particularly critical of Barbara, according to Donnie Radcliffe’s biography, Simply Barbara Bush. In several of the stories Barbara tells of her childhood, one makes out Pauline’s unpleasant concern that her younger daughter—a big girl, who by the age of twelve was five feet eight inche
s and weighed 148 pounds—might not cut it in the marriage market.
For her junior year in high school, Barbara followed her sister, Martha, to Ashley Hall, a genteel ladies’ prep school in Charleston, South Carolina, the kind of place where a chaperone accompanied the girls to dances at the Citadel.
As photos attest, she had by then developed into a slim and pretty teenager, with pale skin and large, dark eyes. She was “at her prettiest,” muses Biedler, “probably in her early twenties or in her late teens,” but even then “she always had somebody who was prettier, like her sister.” Martha, five years older, was devastating competition, a knockout who during college appeared on the cover of Vogue. Rosanne M. (Posy) Clarke, one of Barbara’s friends, remembers that Martha “was gorgeous—tall and skinny and beautiful. Barbara . . . was pretty, but Martha was glamour.”
Barbara was far closer to her father, a well-liked, genial man, than to her mother. From these parents, she learned her earliest lessons in gender politics, a model of how moms rule the roost but dads win the popularity contests. “Mother was kind of the glue of the family,” says Scott Pierce, “although my dad was the one everybody admired.”
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By 1941, the year Barbara turned sixteen, Marvin Pierce was nearing the top of McCall Corp., publisher of McCall’s and Redbook, among other magazines. The company’s flagship magazine, which his younger daughter read avidly in her dorm room, had by then developed the blueprint of her life. Amid cautionary tales about women who were not humble or kind or careful enough to land and keep a man, ads advised that the goal of life was to tie the knot (“She’s engaged! She’s lovely! She uses Pond’s!”).
Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, while home from school on Christmas break, Barbara met her destiny. It was at a dance at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, the kind of tame affair designed so that boys home from Taft and Andover and Deerfield could practice their mating calls on suitable girls home from Miss Porter’s and Saint Tim’s.
Barbara and George Bush, only sixteen and seventeen years old, locked onto each other with a striking seriousness, an intense mixture of teenage crush and wartime gravity that is almost unimaginable today. Three years would go by before the wedding, but the outcome was never seriously in doubt.
Most of their friends are at a loss when asked what so quickly cemented this couple. The answer often boils down to social class—that they were, as George’s redoubtable mother put it, “sensible and well suited to each other.”
On her side, there was the glamour of his enlistment, his string-bean handsomeness, his reputation as a big man on the Andover campus. “He was a real catch,” emphasizes Posy Clarke. “He was terribly attractive—this young naval officer—and the Bush family was certainly prestigious.”
On his side, the most intriguing account comes from his brother Jonathan, who once said, “She was wild about him. And for George, if anyone wants to be wild about him, it’s fine with him.”
Barbara went—again in Martha’s footsteps—to Smith, but even while she attended classes she seemed hardly there at all. “She was different from the rest of us in that her destiny was already fixed,” says Margaret Barrett, a roommate. “Her whole life was bound up in [George].” She made plans to return sophomore year but canceled at the last minute, in August, dropping out for good. “I was just interested in George,” Barbara has said.
They married, with all the trimmings, while he was home on leave in January 1945. Their plan was that after the war he would take up his education at Yale, and she would take up the life of his young bride. They honeymooned on Sea Island, Georgia, where George dashed off a magisterial bulletin to his sister, Nancy: “Married life exceeds all expectations. Barbara is a fine wife!”
“It was a real storybook romance,” says Posy Clarke in wry summary. “They married and went to New Haven, and she worked her tail off the rest of her life.”
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Meet Mr. and Mrs. Bush, the Wasp patriarch and wife: He is lanky and spare, with sharp bones and a youthful hardness to his jaw, graying but still handsome. She, though, is lined and bowed, snow-topped, spreading at the middle. So unfair, what nature can do to men and women, and what society makes of the results.
By the time George and Barbara Bush reached their early forties, she was conscious of the disparity in their looks. Over time she tried different strategies for dealing with this painful contract—including, for a while, unsuccessfully dyeing her hair—until finally she settled on a rollicking self-satire that firmly beat observers to the punch.
These days, no one admits to being among the advisers and hangers-on who once carped about her looks (Can’t we do something about Barbara?). Each and every one of her courtiers understood all along how fabulously refreshing she was. The White House had the power to turn her hair from gray to “silver,” and her style from matronly to “natural.”
And still, the contrast between her and her husband remains, insistently pointing to another possibility: that she is his picture of Dorian Gray, the one who wears the life they have lived together.
“She’s tougher than he is,” runs the standard refrain of friends and aides of George and Barbara Bush. For decades, going back almost to the start of their marriage, Barbara bore the hardest parts of this couple’s lot.
The division of the burdens was subtle initially, not untypical of family life in the late forties and early fifties. In almost every account of their first years together in Texas, George Bush is out doing and being—starting his own company, raising money back East, enjoying what he would always describe nostalgically as a great adventure. And Barbara is living a parallel life of grinding hard work.
In the first six years of their marriage they moved at least eleven times, first in the service, then to New Haven, and then out West, into the oil business: from Odessa, Texas, to Huntington Park, California, Bakersfield to Whittier to Ventura to Compton, then back to Texas, where they settled in Midland. Over fourteen years Barbara bore six children: George, Robin, Jeb, Neil, Marvin, and Dorothy.
For long periods Barbara managed the family alone, while George traveled. “I remember Mom saying she spent so many lonely, lonely hours with us kids,” the Bushes’ daughter Doro told Ann Grimes, author of the book Running Mates. “I can understand how she felt. She did it all. She brought us up.”
“The kids were much more afraid of their mother than their father, I think,” says Susan Morrison, who got to know the family well as a press secretary during the 1980 campaign. “If she said it, it went. And if he said it, maybe there was a way around it.” His natural aversion to conflict, his great eagerness to be liked, made him the quintessential good cop; her basic toughness, her acid wit and strong will, made her the perfect disciplinarian.
As with Barbara’s parents, Mother was the glue, and Dad was the fun.
To this day, says one who knows the family well, “he uses her to throw some bombs, while he sits back and calms the waters.”
The greatest burden of Barbara’s young life, though, was the death of her second child, Robin, at the age of three. Here, too, one can see the Bushes dividing roles in a way that assigned Barbara the more painful tasks.
In the spring of 1953, Robin, then the Bushes’ only daughter, was diagnosed as having leukemia. “You should take her home, make life as easy as possible for her, and in three weeks’ time, she’ll be gone,” the doctor told the Bushes.
But this was not their style. Instead they flew Robin to New York, where George’s uncle was a big wheel at Memorial Hospital, and where doctors from the Sloan-Kettering Institute agreed to treat her aggressively. They managed to gain seven months of life.
At almost exactly the time of Robin’s diagnosis George had begun a new business partnership, hugely increasing his business stakes, and the demands of his work presented a welcome escape. It was Barbara who sat with Robin every day in the
hospital, she who was a daily witness to her daughter’s pain, the torment of treatment with drugs and needles. She laid down the law: no crying in front of the girl, who was not to know how sick she was. Thomas “Lud” Ashley, a Yale friend of George Bush’s, was then living in New York and saw a lot of Barbara during the ordeal. “It was the most remarkable performance of that kind I’ve ever seen,” he says. “It took its toll. She was very human later, after the death. But not until then.”
Only twenty-eight years old, she was alone when she made the final decision of her daughter’s life: while the prognosis was hopeless, the doctors offered a chance to arrest the internal bleeding caused by all the drugs Robin had been given. It was a risky operation, but might buy more time. George, who was on his way to New York, couldn’t be reached.
George’s uncle advised against the surgery, but Barbara decided to go ahead. Thirty-six years later, she cried when talking to a reporter about this lonely decision. Robin never came out of the operation, though George reached the hospital before she died.
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In defining herself solely as a wife and mother, Barbara Bush was like millions of other women of her generation, sold on a romantic vision of domesticity. Even so, she seems to have pursued the whole package more emphatically than most, working at homemaking like the strong-willed woman she is. “Bar was the leader of the pack,” says Marion Chambers, a friend from Barbara’s Midland years. “She set the example for us.” Her children had the best, most elaborate birthday parties in the neighborhood, as well as the most carefully nametagged clothes. Her house was spotless; others felt, in contrast, like slackers.
She ground her teeth at night and smoked Newports by the pack.
Every year, a week before Christmas, she made an elaborate gift of cookies to her friends’ children—a decorative packet for each child, containing a differently shaped cookie for each day before Christmas; the idea was to tie it onto the tree so the child could work his or her way toward the big day. She also threw herself into charity work, the hospital, the local women’s league.
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