Above all, her rule was to accommodate her husband. “The one thing she made sure of was that George Bush was comfortable—she’s been very clear about that,” says Susan Morrison. At first glance this, too, seems an unremarkable policy for a woman of Barbara Bush’s generation. But women who have known her in different stages of their married life say that she went even further to cater to her husband than most of her peers did in their marriages. “She was very thoughtful of him in every way,” says Peggy Stanton, who befriended Barbara in the congressional wives’ club after Bush was elected to Congress in 1966. “Probably more so than most of us . . . I just remember that she wouldn’t impose on him in any way.”
George Bush is famously frenetic, “desperate to be in constant motion,” in the words of one of his oldest friends, FitzGerald Bemiss. His omnivorous sociability has meant constant hard work for his wife. Peter Teeley, a longtime adviser, says, “Look, he is very boyish in the sense that he would say, ‘Let’s have fifty people over this weekend, we’ll serve ’em so-and-so and so-and-so,’ and then not worry about how the food is going to be purchased, and who’s going to get it there, and who’s going to cook it, and so on. He’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got to go golfing.’ Or ‘play tennis.’”
Barbara would sometimes grumble about this, but she never seemed to say no. By 1974, when other women were discovering the wounded, angry sister who had so often shadowed the bouncing figure in the women’s magazines, Barbara could still send this description of her activities to the Smith Alumnae Quarterly: “I play tennis, do vol. work and admire George Bush!”
From the very beginning, George Bush’s political career was simply a larger canvas on which to paint her domestic destiny. All that discipline she had; why, sacrifice was her middle name—of course she was happy to visit all 189 precincts in Harris County, Texas, in 1962, to help him win the post of Republican Party county chairman in his first race ever. By the time he ran for Congress, of course she would listen to the same speech, over and over and over and over, while madly needlepointing red, white, and blue patches bearing his name for the good ladies of Houston to sport on their purses.
Her iron manners, too, made her a champion political wife. Admiral Dan Murphy, who was Bush’s first vice-presidential chief of staff, remembers sitting next to Barbara at an official dinner somewhere in Africa. “We had been warned by the doctors not to eat any salads, anything that hadn’t been cooked. So I didn’t, but she was going along eating the salad. I said, ‘Mrs. Bush, the doctors told us we shouldn’t eat things like that.’ And she said, ‘This is their country, and they’re serving salad, so I’m going to eat it.’”
She soldiered her way through a losing Senate race, two terms in Congress, and a painful second Senate loss. She smiled at George Bush’s side through his stints as Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the U.N. and then as chairman of the Republican Party—though she had strongly counseled him to avoid the G.O.P. post, which was offered him in the midst of the Watergate cover-up. They spent fourteen months in Beijing, where he was special envoy to the People’s Republic of China.
And suddenly, after their return to the U.S. in late 1975, she fell into a black depression—the only time that Barbara’s will openly rebelled against Barbara’s life.
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I would feel like crying a lot and I really, painfully hurt,” she later told U.S. News & World Report. “And I would think bad thoughts, I will tell you. It was not nice.”
In some interviews, she has attributed her depression to “a small chemical imbalance.” In some, she laid it at the door of the women’s movement, saying, “Suddenly women’s lib had made me feel my life had been wasted.”
But in others she has hinted that it was the classic mid-life crisis of the woman who had been raised to gain all her identity through the service of others, whose lives had now left the cozy orbit of her care. Not only was 1976 the year her youngest child, Doro, turned seventeen, but it also marked a devastating shift in her relationship with her husband.
She had suddenly gone from feast to famine. In Beijing, with the younger children off in boarding school, the Bushes were alone for the first time since their marriage, exploring their strange new world together. “I loved it there,” she has said over and over. “I had George all to myself.”
When he was called back to Washington to become director of the C.I.A., he was all at once in a job whose very nature reinforced the old divide in the Bushes’ daily lives: this time, he couldn’t talk about his job at night.
But if 1976 was the year Barbara’s frustration reached a crisis, it was not the only time she expressed it. The Bushes’ history is full of poignant references to her unrequited desire for his company.
Even if his work didn’t draw him away from home, his frenzied social life did. “His attitude is ‘If you want to see me, great, get your clubs.’ I think she’s constantly trying to make the marriage work that way,” says a former aide. “Do you think they ever sit alone and have dinner? I think she’d like that, but she knows it’s never going to happen.”
Barbara Bush took up golf last year, she told reporters, in the hope of spending more time with the president. But he declined to play with her—just as he had stopped playing tennis doubles with her years before, because he didn’t think she was a good enough player.
In what one person on the scene described as a “pathetic” tableau, Barbara and her friend Betsy Heminway went “tagging after him” while he and three buddies played Kennebunkport’s Cape Arundel Golf Club. As Maureen Dowd of The New York Times reported then, the president gleefully announced to the press that his wife’s game “stunk.”
“When the president, pressed by journalists, finally agreed to play with his wife, the disillusioned First Lady shot back, ‘When? Just like he’s going to garden with me one day.’”
“The joking wasn’t pleasant,” reports one person who saw the scene. “It wasn’t fun, Nick-and-Nora repartee.”
Even at times when the Bushes’ lives meshed more closely, there was an undercurrent of insecurity in Barbara. “She was very aware that he was so young-looking,” says a friend from the late sixties. By then Barbara was already hardening her defenses, beginning to make jokes that lanced the wound before someone else could press on it. “I noticed that years back, that she would joke about her appearance,” says Peggy Stanton.
Bush often seems to treat Barbara more like a buddy than a wife. In public they present their relationship as a partnership that had transcended sex, entering the realm of teasing friendship. Last summer, on Barbara Bush’s sixty-sixth birthday, the millionaire president gave her twenty pairs of Keds as a gift. When he was vice president, says a former aide, his advance teams would joke about having to remind him to open doors for her.
With other women, however—the dozens of attractive young women he meets in his work—George Bush is famously flirtatious. “A biiiiiiig flirt,” says a female former aide.
Rumors have circulated since 1980 that Bush has had extramarital affairs. But they are unlikely to be proved unless a party involved chooses to talk about it. All we can intuit, through outward signs, is Barbara Bush’s long, more subtle struggle to remain as important a part of her husband’s life as he has been of hers.
In this regard, his sporting relationships with his male buddies, his manic insistence on constant motion and the presence of crowds, seem as great a challenge as other women do. During the Thanksgiving weekend after his election, the Bushes invited the reporters covering them in Kennebunkport to come to the house for wine and cheese. When USA Today reporter Jessica Lee burbled her thanks to Barbara, the future First Lady responded grimly, “Don’t thank me. Thank George Bush. He invited you.” (In these moments of exasperation or pain she often refers to him by both his first and last names.)
“I think there’s an essence of sadness about her, way deep down,” says someone who has worked w
ith Barbara Bush in politics. “Maybe a lot of who she is developed in reaction to sadness.”
When her depression hit, she was not the type to deal with it introspectively. Her husband urged her to talk to someone about it, but her style was to tough it out. She was helped, paradoxically, by Bush’s growing political ambitions. His entry into presidential politics opened up a new world, and a more expansive role for her beyond the threshold of their house. The higher George Bush rose, the more he needed Barbara in his political life.
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In pictures taken of the early planning meetings for the ’88 campaign, there are seven or eight advisers lounging around the pretty green living room of the Bushes’ Kennebunkport home. In the background, intent on a jigsaw puzzle or a knitting project, hardly paying any attention at all, is Barbara Bush. She is doing what she once did as a young bride at Yale, sitting for long hours behind home plate while George played ball—keeping score.
This is the first of her two roles in his career: the watchful monitor of internal politics who judges each man and woman by the standard of his or her devotion to George Bush. This role is mysterious to almost everyone who works with Bush, for she is infinitely careful. Yet no one around them doubts that she has great power to influence her husband, especially in his views of people. Some go as far as to suggest that she is his number-one political adviser, “first among equals.”
But at almost all times she maintains the ultra-traditional façade of the old-style political wife, who is there only to see to her husband’s comfort. Aides and associates from every period of his political career hasten to explain that Barbara Bush is not Nancy Reagan. She does not carry her own agenda, or choose political goals for her husband; she doesn’t muck around with policy or sit in on Cabinet meetings. Aides to Sam Skinner and John Sununu say that neither chief of staff, even in the most troubled passages of his tenure, heard often from the First Lady.
But every successful politician has a quasi-official “family” around him, an inner circle in which personality has a great impact on politics and policy. It is in this realm that Barbara Bush is influential. Here, staffers learn that Barbara is always “just within earshot, just out of sight,” in the words of one campaign staffer. Courtiers tread very, very carefully in this domain, knowing, in the words of media adviser Roger Ailes, that “she wants what’s best for her husband, and boy, she’s strong.”
Her second role in George Bush’s career is a version of the role she played in their family life—the disciplinarian.
Bush is skilled at surrounding himself with others who will draw the heat away from him. Says Ed Rollins, “George Bush is a man who wants to be loved. As opposed to respected. It’s very important to him that everybody like him.” Thus Bush works harder than most at delegating the more unpleasant parts of his job.
In 1988, for example, Bush assigned the role of bad cop to Lee Atwater; for the first three years of his presidency, John Sununu played the heavy. (The effectiveness of having such a tool has become clearer than ever since December, when Sununu left. Lacking this essential foil, Bush has assigned the role piecemeal to various aides, as when spokesman Marlin Fitzwater was sent out to blame the Los Angeles riots on the programs of the Great Society. But because the men who now fill the White House seem too bland to personify evil, responsibility seems to get laid at Bush’s door faster than it used to.)
On a subtler level, Bush has always cast family members in similar roles. Today his son George W. Bush plays the role of enforcer or executioner when a tough call must be made: it was the younger Bush, for example, who told Sununu that his time had run out.
And many suggest that, especially during a political race, Barbara plays a more light-handed version of the same role. “She definitely is the institutional memory of slights,” says one former political staffer. “She is one distinct other level of the Praetorian Guard.”
“I think George Bush has gotten a whole lot of mileage out of letting Bar be thought of as the heavy,” says a former political associate. For example, several reporters have been casually told by the president, during one-on-one interviews, that Barbara was angry over something they wrote about him. “Look out, the Silver Fox is really mad at you . . . ,” he’ll say, effectively delivering the warning that the reporter’s copy has offended, without having to risk any personal conflict himself with the reporter.
Whether Barbara’s role is conscious and deliberate, or something that evolved wordlessly out of a long marriage, only the Bushes know. Some believe that it is more conscious on her part than on his. “She knows this man very, very well, and his strengths and weaknesses, and I think she probably compensates for his weaknesses,” says Rollins. “She’s probably a better judge of character than he is.”
“I think she’s much more judgmental about people than he is,” says another longtime associate. “I think she really takes a bead on someone, and for good or for bad, you’re in that box; she’s got you pigeonholed.”
It is widely believed in Washington that Barbara Bush got fed up with John Sununu earlier than her husband did. But “she’s wily in that regard,” says a former staffer. “She knows how things work, and if she doesn’t want to read about what she did, she won’t do it in that way.”
Sometimes, however, her intercession is in a staffer’s favor. When Transportation Secretary Sam Skinner took over from Sununu, one of his first instincts—clearly communicated, through the grapevine of leaks, to the newspapers—was to replace David Demarest as communications director. But Demarest kept his job—reportedly because Barbara defended him. “Word around the White House was she liked him a lot,” says one senior White House aide. It was an important bureaucratic defeat for Skinner, contributing to an early perception that he couldn’t follow up on his own intentions.
Typically, Barbara works at the margins, letting staffers know obliquely—but unmistakably—when they are coming up short. In one legendary story, Barbara clipped the wings of Craig Fuller, chief of staff in Bush’s second term as vice president. Word got back to her from friends and supporters around the country that Fuller was out of touch, hard to reach. So one day on Air Force Two, seeing him leaf through an inches-high stack of phone messages, she told him—in a voice carefully modulated to reach her husband—“Keep looking . . . you’ll find a couple from me.”
She uses humor, too, to keep staffers on their toes. In ’88, she closely monitored the negative campaign tactics of Atwater and Ailes, because she was concerned they would bring too much criticism down on Bush. When Ailes entered a room in which she was present, she would sometimes greet him jovially, “Here’s my bad boy.” Coming from Barbara, it’s hard to read as anything but a reminder: I’m watching.
If George Bush walks a fine line in his political tactics, Barbara is the line referee—making sure that he doesn’t cut it too close. Aides expect her to have a large role in monitoring the propriety of the Bush campaign this fall. While she has not yet shown a strong influence on campaign strategy, she has expressed concern over how tight—and negative—a race is shaping up. Campaign operatives have been warned that the First Lady will not tolerate tactics so inflammatory that they will provoke retaliatory attacks on the Bush family—especially on her sons.
In talking about Barbara Bush’s great influence, however, almost everyone agrees that its boundary is clear. All of her vigilance is directed solely to the greater glory of George Bush. Aides who have tried to draw her into the open on substantive matters have been firmly turned down. Deborah Steelman, Bush’s adviser on domestic affairs in the ’88 campaign, tried to draft Barbara Bush as an ally on issues like child care, health care, and early education. “It just was rebuffed, officially, at every turn,” Steelman recalls. “You only had to do that to her a couple of times to realize that was off bounds.”
To the extent that Barbara weighs in on policy, it is in the dimension of taste—as a protector of
her husband’s reputation. She is said to disagree with the president’s stated opinions in several areas; White House aides are especially eager to suggest that she differs from him on abortion and gun control, fanning some faint hope among Republican moderates that she is fighting a good fight over morning coffee every day.
But it seems unlikely that Barbara Bush actually works to change her husband’s mind on such issues: his positions in those areas are dictated by politics, and she is as shrewd a politician as anyone around him.
Her role in placating moderates may be more important this year than ever before. In a three-way race that includes Perot, the two major-party candidates will likely be forced to defend their traditional bases, which means they will have to appease the most extreme elements in their coalitions. For Bush, this means waging a fall campaign that offers lots of red meat to social-issue conservatives. Barbara Bush’s help will be crucial in telegraphing a contradictory message to more liberal Republicans, especially women angry at Bush over [his nomination of Supreme Court justice] Clarence Thomas and the issue of abortion.
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Up to now, Barbara Bush has been able to have it both ways. She has offered herself as evidence of her husband’s good intentions, while going out of her way to disclaim any power at all to shape the policies that affect the lives—the squalid schools, the threadbare health care, the marginal services—of the unfortunates who people her photo ops.
When Bush decided, in the late seventies, to run for president, Barbara pondered what her major “issue” should be and came up with literacy, a canny choice. On the one hand, as she often explains, it touches on every problem in society, ranging from crime to childhood poverty; on the other hand, it doesn’t invite any controversy.
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