Moderate in temperament, Eisenhower and Bush were both more traditionally conservative than many of their contemporaries understood, in the sense that they sought above all to conserve what was good about the world as they found it. For them, conservatism entailed prudence and pragmatism; they eschewed the sudden and the visionary.
Bush was a master of what Franklin Roosevelt once called “the science of human relationships,” and his capacity to charm — with a handwritten note, a phone call, a quick email, a wink, a thumbs-up — was crucial to his success in public life and was an essential element of his soul.
Bert’s most crucial decision was to move beyond wholesale commerce to develop an investment banking business.
He became one of the leading financiers in the Midwest. A sharp trader who instinctively recognized the advantages to be gained from short selling, fee splitting, buying on margin and other clever practices not then widely understood, he built a fortune that eventually underwrote the ambitions of several generations of heirs.
In one of the signal moments in his family’s history, Prescott was tapped for Skull & Bones, the legendary secret society that, if nothing else, equips a group of 15 students who are already the elite of the elite with a special network pledged to one another’s success.
But even as she insisted that her children strive to excel, she undercut the vanity that almost inevitably accompanies their status in society. “You just didn’t talk about yourself. Bad taste.” She forbade her children to use the word “I,” causing all sorts of verbal gyrations.
In contrast, Prescott is remembered as stern, imposing and a strict disciplinarian. His children may have joshed with him, but they never confronted him. “My father spoke loudly and carried a big stick.” Prescott was regarded as an important man who did important work.
As George moved ahead in business and government, he was a person whose first instinct was to avoid confrontation, to placate and pacify his superiors and to move ahead by winning the backing of powerful patrons. Some see George’s lifelong reluctance, if not outright disdain, for psychological introspection as a response to his father’s alcoholism. He was never one who liked to dredge up the past.
First, however, he had to get through a crowded Republican primary. That contest highlighted some of Bush’s strengths and weaknesses as a campaigner. For all his energy and ability to connect with voters one-on-one, he was an uninspiring public speaker, a deficiency that he never really overcame. By the same token, and to the great dismay of his advisers, he mostly avoided talking about his distinguished war record. For Bush and the world he came from, that would have constituted the unpardonable sin of boasting. Whatever the reason, it showed a becoming degree of modesty.
George’s own view of such distinctions was both hazier and more succinct: “Labels are for cans.”
His initial experience in the House was both frustrating and rewarding. He later noted that as a junior congressman, it was hard to get accustomed to the lack of power, especially when as an oil executive he had enjoyed the luxury of making decisions and seeing them carried out immediately.
Nixon’s henchmen dug up everything nasty they could find on Bentsen and shipped it down to Houston for Bush to use against him in ads and speeches.
In April 1971, while Bush was UN envoy, Nixon and Kissinger had agreed that Bush was “too soft and not sophisticated enough” to handle what was then the beginning of the Nixon opening to China.
Nixon was a great leader, he told his boys, and a first-rate intellect but also a third-rate person.
Listen to your conscience. Don’t be afraid not to join the mob — if you feel it’s wrong. Don’t confuse being “soft” with seeing the other guys’ point of view.
But in the serious diplomatic work of the UN, Bush was notably unsuccessful. He performed the usual tasks required in that era — standing up to the Soviets when they accused the US of imperialism and vetoing anti-Israel resolutions. But he also presided over the biggest diplomatic defeat the US had ever faced at the UN: the GA’s vote in 1971 to oust Taiwan as the UN representative of China and replace it with Beijing’s Communist regime.
Watergate was already building into a national scandal, and Nixon wanted someone in charge of the Republican Party whom he could control. Bush had been a loyal soldier at the UN. More important, perhaps, Bush had been a recipient in his failed 1970 Senate campaign of more than $100K from a Nixon slush fund that was designed to gain leverage over prominent elected Republicans. Nixon pushed Bush to take the job of chairman of the RNC, and although Bush was reluctant to leave foreign policy, he accepted.
Over time, Kissinger began to realize that Bush might not remain his underling forever and was already planning a run for president, so he softened his handling of the envoy.
But Bush was still politically ambitious and feared that the CIA job could damage his future. “I do not yet have politics out of my system entirely,” Bush wrote to Kissinger, “and see this as the total end of any political future.”
If Bush saw the CIA job as an end to his political career, his critics paradoxically saw Bush’s political ambition as a liability for the job.
At the UN he had learned the limits of US power and the importance of personal diplomacy. They called him “the mad dialer” because he made so many calls to world leaders. And at the CIA he learned the importance — and limits — of intelligence as an aid to policymaking.
Bush chafed at the public’s perception of the 2 men. He was seen as buttoned-down East Coast preppy to Reagan’s folksy, Hollywood cowboy charm. Reagan was the all-American hero even though Bush was a decorated pilot who had flown 58 combat missions in WW2. Reagan was the darling of the GOP conservatives for his avowed support for family values, despite the divorce of his first wife and estrangement from his children. Unfair as it seemed to Bush, he concluded his public image was just something “I’d have to live with.”
The most important thing is to have a VP that the president is comfortable with. The worst thing would be to have a VP whom he would have to look at over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t going to push him off a cliff.
Bush’s willingness to go on the attack against one of America’s most recognized TV news anchors helped counter his image as a “wimp.”
It didn’t help that his concession was inelegantly announced, in a 1-page statement quietly pinned to the bulletin board in the WH pressroom. That looked cowardly, and coming after a campaign in which he promised not to raise taxes.
The deal put the nation on a firmer fiscal path and created new rules that severely limited spending and were later given credit for helping set the stage for the economic boom of the 1990s. But the damage Bush suffered from party loyalists was just as lasting. Conservatives in his party never trusted him again. Bush had done the right thing, but he paid a steep price for doing it.
The move caught his allies off guard and would typify Bush’s instincts in foreign policy: long periods of study, secret planning and then a globe-grabbing surprise.
Bush told friends he had finally put an end to the nation’s Vietnam syndrome. When the Gulf troops came home, they were welcomed in a fashion that had eluded the nation in the 1970s.
For Bush, the aftermath of what came to be known as the Gulf War was a case of almost textbook complacency. His poll numbers, hitting an unimaginable 90% in some quarters, were thought by WH officials to be signs of a secure future. One by one, Democrats who might have challenged him for the presidency in 1992 dropped out of contention.
Still overconfident, Bush and his advisers could hardly bring themselves to take a philandering Vietnam draft-dodger seriously. As Bush’s greatest generation passed into history, baby-boom voters would take a more forgiving view.
Now into bed, prepared to face tomorrow: be strong, be kind, be generous of spirit, be understanding and let people know how grateful you are. Don’t get even. Comfort the ones I’ve hurt and let down. Say your prayers and ask for God’s understanding and strength. Finish with a smile and some gusto and do what’s right and finish strong.
The world waited anxiously for Bush’s reaction. “We’re not discussing intervention,” Bush told reporters before an emergency meeting of his NSC shortly after sunrise on August 2. “I’m not contemplating such action.” It was a limp response. His national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, said there was an “undertone of resignation to the invasion and even adaptation to it as a fait accompli.”
Powell told Cheney that the president was growing impatient: “He keeps asking if we can’t get the Iraqis out of Kuwait with air strikes.” Both men knew the clock was ticking. “Bush was investing enormous political capital in Desert Shield. His administration had come almost to a domestic standstill as the Gulf swallowed up his attention. And he did not think he could hold the international coalition together indefinitely.”
Bush was under enormous pressure, and I could see it in his taut features. He was trying to balance Arab states, Israel, Western allies, the Soviets, Congress, and the American public, like a juggler spinning plates on the tops of poles, wondering how long he could keep everything in the air.
When the question is asked “How many lives are you willing to sacrifice” — it tears at my heart.
I kept saying to myself, Stay on track, do what you have to do, ask the right questions, make the proper changes, if you need to make them, then be firm.
Unlike most presidents who author autobiographies shortly after leaving office — both to pay the bills and to offer an unchallenged defense of events that happened on their watch — Bush declined such offers, leaving historian the task of assessing his tenure.
As she quickly realized, for all the attention and sometimes glamour, the life of a political spouse has its downside. In her memoir she even poked fun at the early days of his political career when she was obliged to accompany George as he endlessly traversed the precincts of Texas. “That’s when I took up needlepoint, just to keep from looking and feeling bored to death. After all, I had heard George’s speech 200 times!” In her years on the national stage, Barbara earned a reputation as one of the most formidably talented of political wives, an emissary for her husband who was able to endure the grind of any campaign and the tedium of any public appearance without ever losing her game face.
For those who crossed paths with Barbara over the years, the waspish gibes, delivered with that wintry smile, surely came as no surprise. Marjorie Williams detailed the fear that Barbara inspired among her husband’s political associates, a steeliness that not infrequently came across as nastiness. Even her own stepmother admitted she feared Barbara’s wrath. “I could get in so much trouble if I said something she didn’t agree with. Because you know how she is: She knows how she wants to appear to the world.”
She had loved the time in China, where she and George had delighted in biking around the capital of Beijing, among other activities. Now she was 51, the kids were off on their own, and her husband was working ferociously long hours at a job he could not even discuss with her because of its sensitive nature. “It is still not easy to talk about today, and I certainly didn’t talk about it then. I felt ashamed, I had a husband I adored, the world’s greatest children, more friends that I could see — and I was severely depressed. Sometimes the pain was so great, I felt the urge to drive into a tree or an oncoming car. When that happened, I would pull over to the side of the road until I felt okay.”
Will you marry me? Oops, I forgot, you did that 49 years ago today! I was very happy on that day in 1945, but I am even happier today. You have given me joy that few men know. I have climbed perhaps the highest mountain in the world, but even that cannot hold a candle to being Barbara’s husband.
Working to elect his father had brought them closer together. George W. declared that he had gotten over his “self-pity” about “being George Bush’s son,” and Laura observed that “if there was any sort of leftover competition with being named George Bush and being the eldest, it really at that point was resolved.”
George W., the onetime ne’er-do-well, toppled Richards in Texas, while Jeb, the model son, fell short in Florida.
Many factors figured into the decision, but it was hard to ignore the obvious personal element. “After all,” George W. Bush told an audience before launching the invasion, “this is the guy that tried to kill my dad at one time.”
I’m an old-fashioned guy. I still think politics is a noble calling. I believe most people in politics are honorable people that are serving for the right reasons.