Kati Marton (47 page)

But there was a deep irony behind Barbara’s skillful one-liner about Nancy: it wasn’t true. Barbara had been wearing designer clothes, “hairdo” and makeup for years and would continue to do so. In reality, Barbara’s matronliness was as carefully packaged as Nancy’s rail-thin look. Manipulative, judgmental and tough, Barbara was not quite what she seemed. So skilled was she at managing her image that she gave almost everybody something to like about her. The traditionalists saw a woman who reminded them of their mothers or grandmothers. Feminists saw a feisty woman speaking her mind. She managed to turn every potential negative into a positive: her age, her weight, her wrinkles, even her privileged lifestyle. It wasn’t that the times had fundamentally changed; it was that Barbara was shrewder than Nancy in presenting herself.

After eight years of Nancy’s thinly disguised palace intrigues, Barbara calculated that the country was ready for something else. She would play the country’s good-natured grandmother who left the business of state to her husband, an unabashed throwback to a time when everybody knew his or her place and fathers knew best. The image was contrived, but the act worked.

Barbara thought that who she really was, or what her marriage was really like, was nobody’s business but hers and her husband’s. Coldly determined, she would prove more successful in her role as first lady than her husband as president. George never learned the political skills
that Barbara seemed to grasp intuitively. It was she, in conversation with her husband, who inspired the “kinder and gentler” line he proclaimed in his 1988 convention acceptance speech. She let others, primarily Peggy Noonan, craft the words, but she had the idea. This Connecticut Yankee had been outraged by the nouveau riche California White House. She was offended that while Ronald Reagan declared ketchup a school lunch vegetable, champagne flowed in the White House.

But, unlike Reagan, George Bush did not owe his wife the presidency. Bush had the drive, the tribe, the energy and the charm to get elected. His talent for male bonding nearly compensated for his tin ear for politics, as well as his aversion to grand ideas. But Bush needed Barbara. She had iron will and an antenna for danger. She was the memory bank for slights. “Bar’s the one who’d remember that kind of thing,” her husband would say. Those inside the Bush camp treated her with immense respect. “Barbara was always taken into consideration,” Roger Ailes, Bush’s longtime media adviser, noted. “She was forceful in protecting the president. Barbara was always aware of what was going on.” She was also the source of one of Bush’s strongest assets: his image as the patriarch of a large and appealing brood.

Barbara compensated for George’s shortcomings. Unlike her husband, whom the press routinely (and cruelly) referred to as a “wimp,” she seemed like granite. George could indulge his enthusiasms—pork rinds, horseshoes, odd, tribal ways of talking—because Barbara was watching his back. Somewhat ruefully he called his wife “Miss Frank,” knowing he could expect something approaching the unvarnished truth from her. In an office as cushioned with sycophants as the presidency is, that is no minor role. And, unlike many presidents, George seemed to relish his wife’s sometimes brutal candor. “He’s much nicer than she is,” said an old friend. “She is fierce and snobbish. She can freeze him out if she thinks he is pandering too much. Once, when we were having lunch with them and he was saying nice things about Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, she cut him dead. ‘Come on, George,’ she said, ‘you don’t really believe any of that, do you?’”

As much as the Carters and the Clintons, and much more than those accidental presidential couples the Trumans and the Fords, the political
ascent of the Bushes was a shared enterprise. Barbara understood that she had to be understated in order to be effective, not to overshadow her husband, who often suffered from an appearance of lightness. He was not a man whose presence filled a room. Nor did he have a natural constituency. Throughout his political life, Bush had to cobble together both his platform and his base. Unlike Roosevelt, Reagan or Clinton, Bush could not afford the appearance of an assertive, strong woman as his visible partner. Like Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara was a strong woman who presented herself publicly as a submissive and supportive wife.

As first lady, Barbara did not take chances. She did not try to carve out new territory as Rosalynn Carter had. Her agenda was her husband: electing him to office and then keeping him healthy and happy once there. Beyond her family, she was not passionate about a cause, though she was serious about literacy. Skirting sensitive issues, she did safe things. She was coy on the subject of abortion, which was opposed by her husband and ever so quietly favored by her. She identified herself as pro-choice only once she was out of the White House. But through subtle pauses, inflections and body language, she gave moderate Republicans a feeling that she was with them, that they had an ally in the Bush White House. Nobody ever successfully pinned her down. She was brilliant at sending a signal without leaving an imprint.

She had her views, but they were always subordinated to her husband’s political needs. Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt or Hillary Clinton, she would not take on her husband in public. “We stopped discussing [gun control and abortion] about fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago,” she admitted once. “What’s the point?”

But her husband, while usually upbeat, was never able to convey what FDR, LBJ and even Jimmy Carter did: a feeling of authentic connection with his territory, geographic and political. He always seemed a shade off somehow: the cigarette boat whipping around the Maine coast, the velvet embroidered slippers and striped watchband in Texas. He seemed an outsider, not a man rooted to his terrain. His capacity for friendship and his good manners were not enough. The same index cards with “talking points” that transported Reagan to inspirational
heights worked no magic for Bush. In the end, Barbara, the more natural performer, could do little to alter that fact.

SHE WAS RAISED
in a traditional, prefeminist era, and accepted that. Her generation of women was supposed to fulfill its destiny within the context of marriage. Her prewar credo held that a woman’s first and last career choice was her marriage. “I’ll tell you in one sentence how you train to be first lady,” she said in 1987, in a typical bit of self-deprecation. “You marry well. That’s all you need to know.” When she was in her sixties, she said she might have become a corporate CEO had she been born later. But she seemed to have no regrets. Her sublimated message—I am who I am, I have made the best of my life, I’m comfortable with myself—had tremendous appeal, especially after Nancy Reagan. In the late-twentieth-century confusion caused by the shifting power balance between men and women, the Bushes exuded old-time clarity. He was the provider, she tended the home fires. She never expressed remorse for leaving Smith College after only one year to marry, or for staying home to have five babies in rapid succession and raising them mostly by herself. “All our children were planned,” Barbara stated. “By me.” Her matter-of-fact optimism was a balm after Nancy’s striving angst.

The Bushes’ marriage was based on shared expectations and values. Each upheld his or her end of the unspoken bargain. George and Barbara had a fixed goal: his ascent in his chosen field. Everything else, their relationship, family life, comfort and well-being, was sublimated to that. How else can one possibly justify twenty-nine family uprootings in forty-four years of marriage?

If, later in life, they seemed more like old chums than husband and wife, it is perhaps because George and Barbara virtually grew up together. When they met as Connecticut teenagers, from classically WASP families, their attraction to each other was immediate. She later said she had trouble breathing when he was in the room. He wrote his mother, “I have never felt towards another girl as I do towards her.” Barbara Pierce would marry the first boy she ever kissed. George was more
sentimental and prone to tears—but equally inexperienced. “I have never kissed another girl,” he wrote his mother at age eighteen. They were raised in the same strict school of conduct. “I would hate to find that my wife had known some other man, and it seems to me only fair to her that she be able to expect the same standards from me,” he wrote. George and Barbara chose their mirror images: two tall, athletic adolescents from large, affluent families who loved dogs, picnics, boats and the sea more than books and ideas. Their fathers took the same commuter train to New York each morning.

Duty, discipline, good manners and service were implanted in George’s and Barbara’s DNA. They shared their parents’ view that men should tend to the outside world and women should rule the family and household. Emotions were suspect, something to control. Displaying affection in front of others was a sign of bad manners. So was expressing real feelings. “You shouldn’t have to tell that,” Bush insisted. “You see it. You know it.” Barbara said George did not even have to propose marriage. It was just understood they would marry.

There were few mysteries between them. Neither was rebellious, probing or introspective. They both have frequently asserted how little they think of “psychoanalyzing.” They neither challenged each other nor complicated each other’s lives. George picked the perfect partner for public life: a woman who would not embarrass him or be an emotional drain, a woman raised to keep their private lives private and keep any problems
inside
the marriage.

But the Bushes were also different in important ways—and those differences were critical to George’s success. “Barbara knows how to hate,” Thomas “Lud” Ashley, George’s Yale classmate and closest friend, noted. “George does not. Barbara is the memory bank. George will get ticked off at somebody and then forget about it. Barbara remembers.” Ashley claimed there was a key disparity in George’s and Barbara’s upbringing. Barbara’s father, Marvin Pierce, who worked his way up the ranks in the McCall Publishing Company, taught his children to be aggressive. “Her brothers were linemen,” Ashley noted, “taught to hit hard, to play both sides off. That was also part of Barbara’s personality.” George, scion of a crustier WASP dynasty, was taught to be competitive but not aggressive. His mother, who had the strongest influence on him, trained George never to talk about himself, never to boast, never to shove his way to the front. George was raised to trust people, to see the good in them. Barbara, according to Ashley, “reads people differently than George. She doesn’t mind impugning motives. He’s more ready to take people at face value. It’s just not in his nature to see beneath the surface. It is in hers.”

January 6, 1945. George and Barbara Bush on their wedding day.

Nobody knew George better than Barbara. “George Bush, and maybe this is a fault,” she once said, “looks for the best in everybody. He does not question motives.” She knew he hated conflict. Barbara had no such compunctions. “I can always find a tricky reason someone did something, because I could have done it myself. George can’t.” Anticipating people’s motives and a fearlessness about hitting hard were qualities Barbara brought to her marriage. “He learned to rely on her judgments of people,” Ashley noted. “It is hard to imagine George going as far as he did without Barbara.”

During a family gathering shortly after their wedding, Barbara was asked if she would like George to be president. “I’d like it,” she answered without hesitation. “Because you know, I’m going to be the first lady sometime.” This was not grandiosity speaking but rather her conviction that there was
nothing
her husband could not achieve. Was he not among the most admired and beloved boys at Andover, voted the Best All-Around Fellow, president of his senior class, captain of the baseball team, secretary of the student council? And he loved her and only her. Bar was the luckiest girl in the world and ready to do almost anything for George.

The length of the road to the White House, rutted with defeats and setbacks, explained both Barbara’s occasional flashes of bitterness and her triumphant smile. Reaching the White House justified her choices and sacrifices: the dislocations, the lonely years raising her children virtually alone, the loss of privacy.