Kati Marton (49 page)

In 1974, George and Barbara suffered another public humiliation. President Gerald Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. “Yesterday was an enormous personal disappointment,” Bush wrote his friend James Baker. “For valid reasons we made the finals … and so the defeat was more intense.” But the Bush credo was to move on, look ahead, not dwell on disappointment. “That was yesterday,” Bush declared. “Today and tomorrow will be different, for I see now clearly what it means to have really close friends … the sun is about to come out and life looks pretty darn good.”

As always with the Bushes, hard on the heels of defeat came a consolation prize. President Ford dispatched them to head the American mission in Beijing. Just as she had once declared she always wanted to live in Odessa, Texas, Barbara now willed herself to love the gray and watchful capital of the People’s Republic. “The Bushes have an ability to not acknowledge things that they don’t want to acknowledge,” observed Barbara’s former chief of staff Susan Porter Rose. “They both have it. They don’t see what they don’t want to see.” In politics, which is mined with setbacks and sustained by a public display of happiness, denial is an asset. When her husband was not appointed vice president, Barbara sent this description of her life to the
Smith Alumnae Quarterly:
“I play tennis, do vol. work and admire George Bush!” Her guiding philosophy was, If you put a bright face on it, it
will
be bright. (Two decades later, Hillary Clinton practiced her version of this credo of willed optimism—”fake it ’till you make it.”)

Once again, Barbara packed and moved and sorted out the lives of her five children. “It’s great,” George wrote Baker from Beijing. “We are happy here, though Bar and I miss family, friends, news, even politics. It is funny how fast we get cut off ….” Bush was perhaps less isolated than his wife. Accompanying him to Beijing was Jennifer Fitzgerald, his new executive assistant. In her early forties, the divorced, English-born Fitzgerald was the only woman other than his wife ever publicly linked to him. Their relationship was, at a minimum, emotionally close. Barbara’s many absences from China fueled the rumors of a liaison. Barbara’s recollection of taking leave of George for a short trip home is poignant. “Although this was planned for months I was heartsick. I had never been so far away from George and could hardly stand saying goodbye to him.”

In her absence, her husband was seen outside the office with Jennifer. They shopped and dined together and often traveled together. Jennifer controlled access to him. She imposed martial order on a man known for his lax management style. In both looks and style, Jennifer vaguely resembled Barbara. Though roughly ten years younger, her appearance was matronly and comfortable rather than stylish. The order and discipline Barbara provided at home, Jennifer imposed on the office.
Bush liked strong women. For two decades, Jennifer, like Barbara, freed him to be the easygoing, universally loved figure. “I’m not saying she’s Miss Popularity,” Bush said of Jennifer. “She’s doing what I want done. When you have to say no, particularly to friends, there’s bound to be some level of frustration.”

She was one of those women found in the upper reaches of corporations as well as in politics who give their lives to the great man. They have no other real interests. Sometimes they fall a little bit in love with him. If they are ready to work the hours no one else will, it is a labor of love. They feel they understand him, know his needs better than anyone else—better even than his wife. Very rarely, the great man reciprocates. Rarer still is the man willing to reciprocate for the woman’s sacrifice with a sacrifice of his own. For there are always others willing to serve him, ready to step in when, inevitably, the intensity between the boss and the office wife becomes a problem.

In 1976, all the good cheer and I’m-the-luckiest-woman-alive bravado trickled out of Barbara. Her husband was summoned home from Beijing to a job they both felt would end his political life: director of Central Intelligence. “I was given no options,” Bush wrote his friend William Steiger. “I was asked to take on the CIA—I agreed … because of a fundamental
sense of duty ….
It’s just that uncomplicated …. I honestly feel my political future is behind me ….” As always, Bush rationalized the new position, put a bright face on it and failed to consider his wife. “She’s shed a few tears …. But now she sees that in spite of the ugliness around the CIA, there’s a job to be done …. I’m fifty-one and this new one gives me a chance to really contribute.”

With her five children grown or away at school, Barbara now had too much time on her hands. She was bitter that all those years of relentless uprooting and campaigning and self-sacrifice were invested in a political future that now seemed to vaporize. Worst of all, there was no room for her in George’s new position. For the first time, her husband could not even talk about his job at night. He disappeared into the world of covert operations with Jennifer Fitzgerald in tow.

“I was very depressed, lonely and unhappy,” Barbara wrote of this painful time. “It is still not easy to talk about it today, and I certainly
didn’t talk about it then.” She attributed her depression to her age and to the women’s movement. “Suddenly women’s lib had made me feel my life had been wasted.” But hers was a more urgent cry for attention than a general unhappiness with the women’s movement. “Sometimes the pain was so great I felt the urge to drive into a tree or an oncoming car.” Unlike Betty Ford, who suffered a similar depression, Barbara never accused her husband of neglect. Her personal code required that she never be a burden to him. That a woman as steely as she was cracked under the weight of the political life speaks for itself.

It must have been quite a shock for the man who had always relied on his rock-solid partner to discover that she was the one in need of him. “He would suggest that I get professional help,” she recalled, “and that would send me into a deeper gloom. He was working such incredibly long hours at his job, and I swore to myself I would not burden him. Then he would come home and I would tell him all about it. Night after night, George held me weeping in his arms while I tried to explain my feelings. Sometimes I wonder why he didn’t leave me.” This is an astonishing confession from a woman of such bred-in-the-bone reserve. The words take on deeper meaning since she published them two years after she left the White House, when she could hardly have been motivated by a political need for a display of public “intimacy.”

Her collapse surely got his attention. “I love you very much. Nothing—campaign separations, people, nothing will ever change that,” he wrote his wife on her fifty-fourth birthday. “I can’t ever really tell you how much I love you.” It is doubtful that Bush ever again took his wife for granted as he had in the period leading to her breakdown.

“George Bush is an extraordinarily flirtatious man,” says a woman reporter who covered his presidency. “He loves women. He came on to a lot of women, but he never got close to the line. It was a game for him, something he enjoyed engaging in. Yet it didn’t seem to be going on with Barbara. I think that says more good things about them. But she would often do something that marked him as hers. She can make fun of him and make jokes which the rest of us could not. Nor did she defer to him, even in the White House.” Diane Sawyer recalled that when CBS first assigned her to cover President Bush, “Barbara came out and asked, ‘Are you going to be joining us?’ I said yes. ‘Are you going to travel with
us?’ I said yes. She took her elbow and gored me in the ribs. ‘He’s my boyfriend, sweetie,’ she said, ‘now don’t forget it.’”

As with many political marriages, his need for her was as much personal as political. Once, in Barbara’s words,
“we
became vice president,” his presidential hopes revived again. Barbara was again indispensable as he campaigned. She wanted the presidency as much as he did. What other purpose had their nomadic life, the near total loss of privacy and the cultivation of armies of “friends” had? There was only one prize that would compensate for having her husband labeled a wimp. Only the presidency would provide satisfaction for the years this most opinionated woman refrained from speaking out. Only being upstairs at the White House would make up for the humiliations Nancy Reagan had inflicted on her.

For eight years Nancy had treated Barbara with a pointed disdain. Only twice in eight years did the Bushes dine with the Reagans upstairs. Nancy deliberately withheld the most prized invitations from the Bushes. “Once,” recalled a member of Nancy’s staff, “when Nancy bailed out of an East Room ceremony, she called me and said, ‘Make sure Barbara isn’t on the platform without me there.’ Mrs. Bush understood the situation. ‘Just tell me where she wants me to stand,’ she said.” Just as she never complained about what she suffered as a wife, so she never spoke out about the Reagans’ treatment of the Bushes. She was biding her time.

In 1984, George, reeling from harsh media coverage, again considered abandoning his presidential dreams. Barbara, raised by her father to fight hard and win, helped to keep him in the game. “During this time Barbara was a kind of rudder helping him steer the large ship of his public life,” Bush’s chief of staff Craig Fuller recalled. “He would not have reached out to some of us without her encouragement. He would not have started thinking about building his team for the presidential campaign.”

It was Barbara’s career, too. Her competitive instincts were fully engaged. She, too, liked being in the center of things. She had paid her dues and was not about to quit now. She was tougher, scrappier and possessed of finer public relations antennae than her husband. “I’m not sure his political instincts are that great,” Lud Ashley noted. “They’re good enough, but you need more than that for a presidential campaign. She
had that.” Barbara may have had another motive. “George is so much more fun when he’s engaged in something he cares about,” in the words of an old friend of the couple.

Once George made up his mind to run for president, Barbara’s role in his personal and political life was enhanced. He was selling who he was: a family man with solid values whose kids came home to visit. When asked what made him fit to be president, Bush answered—almost surreally—“I’ve got a big family and lots of friends.” Barbara was at the core of that image. But after eight years as Reagan’s number two, it was hard to tell what Bush stood for. He had shifted his views on civil rights, abortion, gun control, China, the United Nations. She learned it was best never to express hers. When she went off her usual winning script, as when she said Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro was a “$4 million rhymes with rich,” she could cause an uproar. But even her slipups seemed calculated. Though she apologized profusely to Ferraro, she had made her point. It was an old Nixon trick: putting negative remarks into circulation by apologizing or denying them.

Nobody inside the 1988 Bush campaign doubted her essential role. Her eldest son, George, even boasted about it. “There were times [when] people did something that I think upset my mother …. Leaks and staff siphoning credit for ideas originating with the candidate especially infuriated her.” George W. Bush claims credit for mediating between staff and his mother in those instances. “I would then go and talk to that person
[sic]
and inform
[sic]
that they had made a mistake and that they needed to mend their ways and explain to them that if they were not careful the wrath of the Silver Fox would fall upon them.” George W. knew that was not an experience anyone inside the campaign, the government or the media relished. “Fear of Barbara” was a potent political weapon. “My mother was viewed as a very smart, intelligent, savvy person. People needed to be aware of her presence. No one wanted to irritate her ….” Very few politicians’ wives could be as cutting as the woman who liked to claim she left politics to her husband. Of Rosalynn Carter, Barbara Bush once said, “There’s nothing wrong with being a strong, supportive wife—if you have a strong husband. I think she [Rosalynn] missed on that ….”

George’s running for the highest office offered another consolation for Barbara. Jennifer Fitzgerald, still George’s faithful gatekeeper, would finally have to go. “I always thought less of George Bush for having Jennifer around as much as he did,” a former White House staffer noted. “It was so in-your-face for Barbara.” Fitzgerald had alienated nearly everyone by her proprietary attitude toward her boss. “She even had control of the children’s access to their father,” one staffer remembered. “She would undo what others had scheduled. The kids had to book their tennis games with their father through her.” Craig Fuller recalled being warned not to accept the job of Bush’s chief of staff. “As long as Jennifer was there, I was told I’d never succeed. She was powerful and influential and sat right outside his office. She tangled with other people on the staff and clearly exerted a lot of control, sometimes more than the chief of staff. Jennifer was somebody who managed to transcend all of George Bush’s different activities. A lot of people were jealous of that, and maybe that’s why the rumors of something else going on between them were started. I never saw anything myself. I never had any trouble with her. I suggested that maybe with the changes in the office she could do something else. I told her we needed someone on Capitol Hill.”

Fitzgerald was indeed moved to the Hill as congressional liaison, but she continued to travel with the vice president. Sometimes, if Barbara was along, a seemingly innocent remark could spark tension. As the vice president descended
Air Force Two
during a tour of NATO countries, Jennifer was overheard to say, “You should wear a pocket hankie, Mr. Vice President, like Ambassador_____.” Barbara, within earshot of the dapper ambassador, shot back, “I think it makes him look like a fag.” But the following day, reporters noticed that Bush sported a pocket hankie.

Whatever the real nature of the relationship, Jennifer Fitzgerald was now a political, not a personal, matter. Only Barbara had the power to resolve it. “I decided to raise it with the vice president after our weekly intelligence briefing at their residence,” Fuller recalled. “We were sitting out on the porch, and as we finished the intelligence briefing, [campaign operatives] Lee Atwater and Bob Teeter joined us. It fell to me to deal with the difficult issue. So I said, ‘One more thing, sir. You won’t like it, but you will be asked about adultery.’ Well, Bush was just livid.
At that moment, Mrs. Bush appeared around the corner, back from a walk. She looked at us and said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And the vice president said to her, ‘Well, I’m going to be asked the adultery question at the next news conference.’ Mrs. Bush cut him off. ‘The answer is
no.
End of discussion.’ And that was the answer. That is how we dealt with it.”