Hail to the Chiefs Part XLI: 41
"I'm certainly not seen as a visionary, but I hope I'm seen as steady and prudent and able." - George H.W. Bush
"What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day." - Pygmalion
"In many ways Bush was what Reagan pretended to be." - "American Experience - George Bush"
George Herbert Walker Bush once commented "You know, I think I'm only an asterisk between Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton." Sadly if he would add his own son to that list, the first President Bush may have a point. He is probably doomed to be obscured by more charismatic, more glamorous presidents. However, if Reagan was the star of the show for the modern Republican party, Bush was the stage manager. Instead of being the one in the spotlight giving the big dramatic speech, Bush was usually the one in the background making sure the scenes and props were ready, and the actors in the right places. Like the other underappreciated presidents, I found the story behind the rather bland image, to be fascinating, and full of surprises.
Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, but spent most of his childhood in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was named after his maternal grandfather: George Herbert Walker. Because of his namesake, the young Bush was often called "Poppy" a nickname I always assumed he acquired when he was a grandfather himself. His father, Prescott Bush, was involved in Republican politics. Prescott Bush was a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal in favor of Planned Parenthood and Civil Rights.
As for George...he went to the prestigious Andover Prep School. The expectation was that he'd go immediately to Yale, just like his father. Instead, Bush became a naval pilot flying missions in the Pacific during World War II. In one mission, that would haunt him for decades afterwards, Bush had to bail out of his plane in a parachute. Despite following procedure to the letter, two of his crewman were never found afterwards. The incident also was part of what drove Bush to take up skydiving as a hobby....in his 70's! Bush hopes to skydive to celebrate his 90th birthday which is about 2 years away.
After his war experience Bush married Barbara Pierce in 1945. George Walker Bush would be born the following year. The Bushes would eventually have 6 children altogether. Their second child, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953.
Bush opted to go to Yale. However, unlike his 3 brothers, he turned down an offer for a job on Wall Street after graduation. The family moved to Texas, and Bush started an offshore oil drilling business, which was how he earned his fortune. Texas was also where Bush's political life began.
Bush was the chairman of the Harris County (Houston area) Republican party. Initially that was a very small group. There were hardly any Republicans in Texas at that time. After an unsuccessful run for the Senate as a moderate in 1964, Bush decided to try and form an alliance in the Republican party between the moderates, and the more conservative elements, including the extreme right-wing anti-communist John Birch Society members.
It was an effective alliance. In 1966 Bush was elected to the House where he served two terms, and thanks to some intervention from Prescott Bush, he got a coveted seat on the House Ways and Means Committee, almost unheard of for a freshman congressman.
In 1970, President Nixon strongly encouraged Bush to run for the Senate. Bush asked Lyndon Johnson for advice. LBJ advised him "The difference between a senator and a congressman is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit." Bush decided to take the risk. He lost out to conservative Democrat Lloyd Bentsen. Eventually Nixon offered Bush the position of Ambassador to the United Nations a position he served in for two years, and was the beginning of Bush's education in foreign policy.
In 1973, in the middle of the Watergate Scandal, Nixon asked Bush to be chairman of the Republican National Committee. Despite urging by his wife and friends that this was a bad career move, Bush believed that he couldn't turn down a request from the president. Bush remained loyal to Nixon long after other supporters had fled. Bush believed that Nixon was innocent, and the scandal was an issue with Nixon's staff. Bush was later horrified to discover that Nixon had lied to him, and privately called Nixon "amoral." He encouraged Nixon to resign.
Bush was briefly a contender to be President Ford's vice-president, but Ford opted for Nelson Rockefeller instead. Ford offered Bush the ambassadorship to Britain or France, both prestigious posts. Bush requested China. After nearly 2 years of being a punching bag during the Watergate Scandal, he was ready to get as far away from Washington as possible. He also felt that China was the future.
As the United States had not officially recognized China yet, technically Bush was not an ambassador at all, but head of the liaison office. This made him the low man on the totem pole for foreign diplomats in China, even behind the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It was also a particularly interesting time to be in East Asia as he had more of a close up view of the victories of North Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge in April 1975.
Bush kept a diary during his time in China. It was an interesting contrast to the Reagan diaries. First off, I had to remind myself that when Bush was referring to "Mother" he meant the woman that gave birth to him, not the woman he married. Bush was also a lot more reflective and analytical than Reagan. I was especially struck by a diary entry about when Bush had watched a miniseries on the Kennedys. He hadn't particularly cared for it, but wondered if his bias was getting in the way. Reagan never wondered if he had bias....he would have just called the miniseries "liberal demagoguery."
My favorite parts of the China diaries weren't the foreign policy parts, but just the daily life and foibles. The Bushes brought their spaniel Fred to China. He was a bit of an oddity at the time. Thanks to the recent Cultural Revolution, pets were almost unheard of in China. One day Barbara took Fred for a walk past the Gabon Embassy Lively music was coming out, and Fred managed to escape from Barbara and raced into the Embassy. Barbara was mortified, but the Gabonese thought the situation was hysterically funny.
For entertainment they would get movies that were a few years old, and an early version of VHS tapes of various American TV shows. One night Bush put in his diary that they would be playing the movie "Carnal Knowledge." Knowing the movie I flinched thinking "Oooooh this is not going to end well." The next entry Bush was relieved that only one other couple had shown up as....yeah not the best movie for diplomatic entertainment.
Bush spent a little over a year in China. He spent the remainder of the Ford administration as Head of the CIA.
When the Carter administration began, the Bushes initially went back to Houston. Bush found he was bored stiff by life away from the political arena. It didn't take long for him to start to plan a presidential campaign for 1980.
In 1980, pretty quickly, the top two contenders for the Republican candidacy were Bush and Reagan. The competition was really between the more moderate branch of the Republican party, and the growing conservative movement. Bush did not agree with Reaganomics calling it "voo doo economics." So it was a bit of a surprise when Reagan asked Bush to be his running mate. Bush agreed for Reagan to switch from pro-choice to pro-life, and would prove to be a very loyal vice-president. Reagan would choose Bush campaign manager James Baker as his first Chief of Staff, and that would help Bush have more of a Walter Mondale style, partner in the administration, vice presidency.
In 1988, Bush finally had another chance to run for president. Although his candidacy was by no means a sure thing. Thanks to campaign manager and wunderkind Lee Atwater, the campaign was one of the more vicious cutthroat campaigns in American history. Initially Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis had a commanding lead, but Bush would prove victorious. The anti-Dukakis ads were mostly about discrediting Dukakis's gubernatioral record. On his watch he had allowed prison furloughs including for murderers. The most famous ad showed that Dukakis allowed African-AmericanWillie Horton a furlough. The ad, not directly produced by the Bush campaign, was accused of using racial prejudice to get votes. Eventually the Bush campaign requested that the ad be pulled. Although by that point Dukakis wasn't helping himself much either, such as the notorious Dukakis sits in a tank and looks like a major dork photo op. In hindsight, for the 1984 and 1988 campaign it seems like the Democrats were just running Jimmy Carter again, with the same success they had in 1980.
For his running mate, Bush chose Indiana senator Dan Quayle. Quayle had initially been elected in the Reagan wave of 1980. He also inspired the most famous line of the 1988 campaign. When Quayle would get questioned about his relative lack of experience, he liked to point out that Jack Kennedy got elected president without a lot of legislative experience. Democratic Vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen lunged on that line during the vice-presidential debates: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." A Republican voter later commented to me "Bush picking Dan Quayle as his running mate was a stroke of genius. It took the focus off of Bush being a wimp."
Privately, during the 1988 campaign, Bush wrote to his grandson and told him if he lost the election, that wouldn't be so bad because then they would be able to spend more time together. That shows a remarkable degree of emotional health for a presidential candidate. Could you picture Johnson or Nixon writing a letter like that?
In Bush's inauguration speech he talked about a "kinder gentler nation" hinting that he'd be taking a more moderate route than the Reagan administration. However what made the inauguration memorable for me was...I was hiding in the hallway of my middle school watching Bush get sworn in. My class was doing math, but another 6th grade class thought that watching history in the making was more important. (My class always seemed to be doing math during the historical events. In 1986, a 5th grader raced into my 3rd grade math class to tell us that the Challenger had blown up. We didn't believe him.)
During Bush's first year in office, the Berlin Wall fell. By the time his first term ended, Germany was reunited, the former Soviet bloc countries were all becoming democratic, and the Soviet Union had dissolved. At the time, Bush got some grief for not showing any outward exuberance about the situation. However, Bush knew his history. He remembered the 1956 Hungarian revolution, which was supported by the U.S., led to a Soviet crackdown....and he didn't want a repeat of that event. Bush felt it would have been inappropriate to rush over to the fall of the Berlin Wall and gloat, that the moment should be purely by and for the Germans. While he may have given the impression of being a bit uptight at the time, I think it was the best course of action, and probably helped make for a smoother transition.
In August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. Bush didn't want to see the power balance in the Middle East tilt in Saddam Hussein's favor. The first Gulf War liberated Kuwait in a matter of months, and Bush's popularity soared. In the Bush American Experience, three of his advisors: James Baker, Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft all comment about how they used to get grief for not advancing all the way to Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein but, to quote Baker, "Nobody asks me that question anymore."
Unfortunately for Bush, the end of the Cold War and the brief Gulf War all happened early on in his term. This left the remaining years he had to focus on the less glamorous domestic issues. One thankless task Bush had was to try and put through a balanced budget to try and make up for years of deficits from the Reagan administration. In this way, Bush was a lot like Martin Van Buren. Both were vice-presidents who succeeded their president. Both had to clean up the messes left behind by the more charismatic president, and were largely blamed for the messes. Both had a recession occur near the end of their administrations.
In the 1992 election Bush ran not only against the more charismatic Bill Clinton, but against 3rd party candidate Ross Perot. My favorite part of the campaign was that all 3 candidates were left-handed.....that and I found banty rooster Ross Perot hilarious. Perot successfully divided the vote enough that Bush can probably credit his defeat to Perot. Bush, naturally, was saddened by his defeat and frustrated that he couldn't "finish the job." Barbara Bush later remarked: "It was very disappointing, to put it mildly, that he didn't win. I now think that we were saved the four most miserable years of our life."
Bush, although he didn't show much evidence of it publicly when he was president, had a lively sense of humor. One thing he did to cheer up his staff after the election was bring in Dana Carvey to do his George Bush impression. (I'd also highly recommend reading Bush's letters to his friends and family. The later ones in particular are often really funny.)
In 2001 George H.W. Bush got to experience what had only happened to John Adams before: he got to see his own son be elected president. In later interviews, Bush remarked that naturally he didn't have any objectivity about the second Bush administration, because it was his son. During the second administration Bush and former president Clinton got to be buddies as they began to do charity work together.
I've been finding, especially with the 20th century presidents, that the more I research them the more they surprise me. I remembered Bush as a fairly bland president, whose health I was praying for so we wouldn't have a President Quayle. I was surprised at what a passionate man he is. Unlike some of his predecessors, I felt better about the presidency after reading about Bush thinking "Well what do you know? Once in a while we DO get somebody sane and level-headed in the Oval Office!"
Resources
"George H.W. Bush" by Timothy Naftali - One of the Schlessinger series. I had some issues with this book as more than once I caught an error where a quote wasn't quite accurate. Those mistakes made me question how accurate the rest of the book was.
"China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global President" edited by Jeffrey Engel - This book is a bit of a slog, heavy on the footnotes, but there are some gems about Bush's time in China, and I also liked Engel's analysis at the end of what impact the experience had on Bush's life and career.
"All The Best, George Bush: My Life In Letters and Other Writings" by George Bush - This book was delightful. I felt like I got more of a glimpse into Bush's emotional life, and sense of humor. Got to see a lot of sides of him that just were not evident when he was president.
American Experience: George Bush - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/bush/player/ Another fine documentary from the series.