Kati Marton (48 page)

Early in life, Barbara honed the sharp retorts and subtle put-downs that became her signature as first lady. As the large-boned daughter of a coolly critical mother and the younger sibling of a thin and graceful older sister, she survived by irreverence, a cutting wit and the ability to see what she wanted to see. Feistiness and humor, rather than feminine charm, were the core of her self-image. “Good night my beautiful,” George wrote his fiancée from the navy. “Every time I say beautiful you about kill me but you’ll have to accept it.” But she did not want the burden of beauty. She lacked the narcissism required for its maintenance, and perhaps sensed her claim on it would be too fleeting anyway. There
were other qualities her ambitious suitor valued in her. “She’s got this great, ramrod steel backbone,” Lud Ashley said. “She is such a gutsy gal. She can stick that jaw out. Nothing is too much for her.”

Barbara and George yearned to get out from under authoritarian, controlling parents. The parents’ metronomic, privileged lifestyle, with each season accompanied by its ritual passages, did not appeal to the young couple. George was too exuberant to be incarcerated in Wall Street like his father. He had demonstrated courage and an affinity for risk-taking by signing up for the navy at age nineteen. “He was a standout at Yale,” Ashley remembered. “It would not have surprised any of us that he would be elected president. There were about thirty people at Yale who had also been shot down in the war, who’d been taken prisoner. But here was George, already married to an extraordinarily pretty girl, with a newborn son, who did two varsity sports, soccer and baseball, and knocked out grades that got the Phi Beta Kappa key.” George was going places.

FLAT AND BROWN
, Odessa, Texas, was a planet away from the soft, green lawns and ancient oaks of Greenwich. “I’ve always wanted to live in Odessa, Texas,” said Barbara dryly when George informed her they would move. In her view, happiness was a matter of will. It was only the first of many moves: from Odessa to Huntington Park, California, to Bakersfield and back to Midland, Texas, as George, eased along the way by family and friends, made his name and fortune in the oil business.

Barbara bore the greatest burden. While George was testing himself in adventuresome ways, she had babies, packed and unpacked and let her mind go “dormant … just dormant.” She later said that in a marriage “where one is so willing to take on responsibility and the other so willing to keep the bathrooms clean … that’s the way you get treated.” It was not a relationship of equals. But she never blamed George.

“She is something, Mum,” George wrote his mother,

It was almost inevitable that a man as well connected and as relentlessly extroverted as Bush would end up in politics. His father, Prescott, had moved easily from Wall Street to the Senate in 1952, where he was popular with both parties. The word “networking” had not yet been coined, but Barbara and George applied themselves to the task with as much zeal as Hillary and Bill Clinton would decades later, collecting endless friends as they crisscrossed the Sun Belt. Barbara’s job was to keep index cards about each of their growing list of friends. By the mid-seventies she had somewhere between four thousand and five thousand index cards. By 1986 the Bushes sent out thirty thousand Christmas cards. Like Lady Bird Johnson, she did not protest George’s last-minute invitations to six more for lunch or dinner. She had never known any other life, any other man. If George liked it that way, she would adjust to a life of constant motion, an endless stream of people filling her kitchen and dining room. Like LBJ, Bush had an insatiable need for company. When he was not entertaining, he was on the telephone. “How George loves the West Coast,” Barbara wrote in her diary, “because he can call anybody he wants when he wakes up. I have to hold him at bay on the East Coast.”

Like so many other men of his generation, Bush saw his wife as an extension of himself. Bush’s legendary acts of kindness and generosity were directed not at his wife but at outsiders. It was snowing hard the day that the congressional freshman’s moving van arrived in Washington in 1966. George could not bear to make the movers drive home in the storm. So he dispatched Barbara to Sears to buy extra sheets for the
moving men. Later, he would insist on keeping the family home for the holidays, so he could send his Secret Service agents home. Unlike Reagan, Bush possessed the gift of genuine friendship. He remembered people’s wives, mothers and children. “One of the reasons I fell in love with George,” Barbara wrote later in life, “was that he was so kind and nice. He always thought of the other fellow. Sometimes that caused me some pain and jealousy, which I’m now ashamed to admit. I just didn’t think there was enough time for us.”

In 1953, their lives crashed. Their only daughter, four-year-old Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia. It was during the months she spent looking after her fatally ill child that Barbara, still in her twenties, started to turn gray. The Bushes’ way of dealing with scorching pain is revealing. “The day after Robin died, George and I went to Rye to play golf with Daddy, at his suggestion,” Barbara wrote. It was not a lack of feeling, rather that physical activity of almost any kind was George’s preferred form of therapy. He, the great extrovert, would not allow Barbara to turn inward. It was the first time in his life that he was actually looking after someone else. “When I wanted to cut out,” Barbara wrote in her memoirs, “George made me talk to him, and he shared with me …. He made me remember that the loss was not just mine …. Many times he held me in his arms and let me weep myself to sleep.” The shared loss no doubt deepened their bond.

Their life of constant motion soon picked up again. After twenty years in the high-stakes oil business, George moved Barbara and their five children to Houston and plunged into Texas politics. In 1964, Bush showed just how determined he was to please his constituency, opposing the Civil Rights Act. “I still favor the problem being handled by
moral persuasion,
at the local level,” he explained. The man who had once led Yale’s United Negro College Fund was willing to pay almost any price to win. It was not the last time he would deep-freeze his conscience for politics. Bush denounced the United Nations, where he would later serve as ambassador. When he lost the Texas Senate race to Democrat Ralph Yarborough in 1964, Bush swore he’d never again pander so blatantly for right-wing support. From then on, Bush tried to avoid issues and ideology and showcase his personal qualities. Barbara and their photogenic
family became a central part of the image he was marketing. This is who I
really
am, Bush seemed to be saying. The rest is just political accommodation. Barbara’s reward was that her husband needed her more than ever.

“In a sense it was a matriarchal family,” their son Jeb recalled. “Mom was always the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline.” The bleeding ulcer George developed early in his business career was a reminder that he did not deal well with stress. He possessed neither the rhinoceros skin nor the reptilian cunning that politics demanded. “Ivy League connotes privilege and softness,” he wrote his sons in the seventies when Richard Nixon appointed him ambassador to the United Nations, “in a tea sipping, martini drinking, tennis playing sense. There’s an enormous hang up here [in Washington] that comes through an awful lot. I feel it personally …. But I must confess that I am convinced that deep in [Nixon’s] heart he feels I’m soft, not tough enough, not willing to do the ‘gut job’ that his political instincts have taught him must be done.”

Barbara’s role was to keep tension at home to a minimum. She absorbed a great deal of it herself and provided both diversion and stability for her husband. Robin’s death was a wound that never fully healed. There were other heartaches. Son Neil was diagnosed with dyslexia and Marvin was expelled from Andover for smoking marijuana. Barbara chain-smoked Kools and ground her teeth until they hurt. Their daughter Dorothy, born after Robin’s death, remembered her mother saying how lonely she sometimes felt, spending endless hours alone with her small children. “She did it all …. She brought us up. Not to say that my dad wasn’t there some, but definitely she did all the disciplining and she was at every game with my brothers and all of that.”

Those were the gender roles George was used to. His beloved mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, and not his austere father, was the heart of the Bush family, the one who exerted the greater influence. Dorothy’s relentlessly competitive spirit infused all that George did. Well into his seventies, George would still recall his mother’s admonishments and her gift for cutting him down to size. “Mum used to tell me, Now, George,
don’t walk ahead [of your wife].” In October 1999, when Bush returned for a visit to his former home, the United Nations ambassador’s residence in New York City’s Waldorf Towers, he asked the housekeeper, “Show me to the room my mother used to stay in.” His mother’s hold on him did not loosen.

Bush never quite managed to define what he stood for. When he made another run for the Senate in 1970, he gave as his reason “upward mobility.” It seemed as if politics, campaigning, was just another athletic event for him. There was a hustle-for-the-sake-of-hustle feeling about the man, an absence of thoughtfulness. The throwaway grace with which he led at Andover and Yale did not thrive in Texas. His mother had done too good a job scrubbing him clean of the magnetic force called self that a politician must summon to fill the room.

When George was defeated a second time, at forty-six, the wind seemed to have gone out of the Bushes’ political sails. Their relationship was affected by their thwarted ambitions. During the summer of 1970, in an act that generally symbolizes resignation for a middle-aged woman, Barbara stopped dyeing her gray hair. “George Bush never noticed,” she said. “So why had I gone through those years of agony?” At the same time, to rescue his flagging public service career, her husband was forced to lean on a man who stood for everything his mother and father despised: Richard Nixon.

Nixon came through with the UN ambassadorship. Hearing the news, Lud Ashley, by now an Ohio congressman, stopped George in the House Speaker’s lobby. “What the hell do you know about foreign policy?” Ashley asked his friend. “Not much,” Bush answered, “but ask me in ten days.” The presidential favor was not cost-free. When Nixon became enmeshed in Watergate, he “offered” Bush the less prestigious job of chairman of the Republican National Committee, hoping Bush could protect him. Ashley was appalled. “I remember being at the Waldorf at a Yale football get-together and we got talking about the R.N.C. and I said, ‘For Christ’s sakes, George, you got it backwards. You go from that to this. Not the other way around.’ Especially when it was clear that Nixon was going to be in deep trouble. Very few people would have accepted that job. But that was George.”

This time Barbara could not keep her disappointment to herself. Bush wrote Nixon,

In the space of two years, there had been two more uprootings, two more cities for Barbara to adjust to. He served the president, she served him. But while her husband trimmed and shaded his image to suit the times, she did not. She was unabashedly middle-aged and patrician in looks, speech and conduct. And not since Jackie Kennedy—of similar background—had an American political wife drawn such clear boundaries around her privacy. “You have two choices in life,” she often said. “You can like what you do, or you can dislike it. I have chosen to like it.” Disappointments and failures were kept inside the Bush family. The trouble was that George’s important assignments seemed to add no heft to the man. Bush’s reputation was for eagerly supporting almost anything the president and the party required. He was a team player, a utility infielder, not an innovator.