Kati Marton (50 page)

The morning after the
New York Post
published the story of Bush’s rumored affair on August 24, 1992, “We debated asking Mrs. Bush about Jennifer,”
Newsweek
White House correspondent Ann McDaniel recalled. “Just then, Mrs. Bush walked into the press room and said, ‘OK, which of the Big A’s do you want to start with? Adultery or abortion?’ She wasn’t about to wait for us to beat around the bush. She was going to control the story.” That was the end of Jennifer Fitzgerald. Moved to the State Department’s Office of Protocol, she was never again publicly seen with Bush. Whatever the real nature of their relationship, once Fitzgerald became a political liability and was no longer allowed to serve him, she had the good grace to disappear completely.

With her usual blend of steel and defiance, Barbara triumphed. Like Jacqueline before her and Hillary after, she would not allow anyone to see her humiliation. But the hurt from the Fitzgerald years lingered. In a supreme act of media manipulation, she even expressed sympathy for the woman who had caused her pain. “She’s a wonderful lady,” Barbara said with a clenched smile to Barbara Walters. “And can you imagine how hurtful that was to her?” But when pressed as to whether the public has a right to know if a politician has been unfaithful, her anger flared. “When you are married, it’s different, dearie.”

If it is possible to be temperamentally suited for the role of first lady, Barbara Bush was. Her rigorous training in noblesse oblige and good manners in the most awkward situations without ever betraying real emotions served her well in the White House. “Barbara Bush was an ideal first lady,” presidential adviser David Gergen said. “She had a quality of steel about her.” Barbara’s popularity in the polls and her stature made her a force to reckon with inside the White House. “The difference between Barbara and Nancy,” a staffer who worked in both administrations noted, “was that people knew Nancy would go to Mike Deaver
or Jim Baker if she were upset about something. If Mrs. Bush felt strongly, we knew she would go directly to her husband. We would hear from the president, ‘Bar is really unhappy about …’ or ‘Bar says we ought to …’ Mrs. Bush’s influence on her husband was direct. Nancy’s was indirect. People in the White House respected her [Barbara’s] power and influence because of her popularity. You certainly did not want her mad at you.” When asked about Nancy’s use of aides to bring pressure on President Reagan, Barbara tartly replied, “We do things differently. I have always been able to go through George.”

It would not have occurred to Barbara to move her office into the West Wing, as her successor would. The notion of a declared “two-for-the-price-of-one” presidency was an alien concept for the tradition-minded Bushes. But even those who claim never to have heard her views on policy could not mistake her influence. Together, George and Barbara planned the tone of the Bush inaugural and White House. “We wanted very much for it to be a people’s inaugural,” Barbara said. It would be a family house, less formal and less glitzy than the Reagans’—a place where muddy dogs and sticky children were welcome. The new, relaxed atmosphere was one more way for Barbara to let the world know what she thought of Nancy. In public she was careful about her comments, proclaiming, “I am [Nancy’s] greatest fan. I think she’s done a wonderful job. The White House has never been more beautiful, the flowers prettier, the food better …. But”—Barbara paused for emphasis—“she and I are not alike and you can’t compare apples and oranges ….” Once in a while, she abandoned caution for the satisfaction of a good swipe. “I think Nancy Reagan has done a wonderful job for American designers, honestly, and as I say, if I were a size two, they’d give them [couture dresses] to me too.” Then, pausing a beat, she inserted the needle. “But I pay for mine.”

Barbara refused to comment on a much publicized, scorching biography of Nancy. She told reporters she had “no intention to read that garbage.” Her press spokeswoman, Anna Perez, recalled a flight during which the first lady seemed engrossed in a best-seller by Rosamunde Pilcher. Occasionally, however, Barbara would shake her head and make a comment about Nancy. Puzzled, Perez got up and peered over Barbara’s
shoulder. “Behind a fake cover, she was reading the Nancy bio,” said Perez.

Barbara’s self-assurance grew with her stature. For the first time, her husband needed her more than she needed him. “I’m going to approach my job as Barbara approaches hers,” he said shortly after becoming president. “Call ’em the way you see ’em, as the umpire said.” She had become his role model. “I don’t think he would have guessed that his wife would have touched the country as she did,” Craig Fuller noted. “He was very proud of her as a result, and yes, I would say there was some amazement at her success.” President Bush now larded his speeches with the phrase “Barbara and I.”

Since George hated any display of emotion beyond sentimental tears, Barbara channeled her anger at others. “She had this way about her to put you in your place,”
Washington Post
reporter Donnie Radcliffe noted, “then come back quickly and attempt to make up for it. It was part of her way. She was very adroit.” Almost everyone who has ever worked for Barbara has felt the cold snap of her irritation at some point. Rex Scouten said she never raised her voice, but “She could cut you down in a hurry. She knew everything that went on in [the White House]. I used to wear vests. I had an old pocket watch and I put it on a chain. Mrs. Bush noticed it right away. ‘What’s that, Rex,’ she asked, ‘your Phi Beta Kappa key?’ I knew from the way she said it that she didn’t like me wearing it. She thought it was too showy.”

Few people who received Barbara’s wrath ever forgot it. Once, Barbara arrived ahead of George for a dinner at the Chinese embassy. Spotting Barbara’s car, deputy chief of protocol Bunnie Murdoch informed the Chinese ambassador, who invited Barbara to come inside the residence, rather than await her husband’s arrival outside. “And just who told him I was here?” she said later, flaring at Murdoch. “I mumbled something about, ‘Well, I assumed …’ and Mrs. Bush cut me off,” said Murdoch. “‘Never assume.’ She was so quiet I was completely undone. She saw that I turned beet red and said, ‘Just don’t do that again.’”

The consequences for paying too little attention to Barbara could be severe as well. “Vice President Bush had a young military aide named Sean Coffee,” Bush press spokesman Marlin Fitzwater recalled. “We were all guests of the Chinese government at a banquet in Shanghai. We
had been instructed about the
Mao tai,
how you drink one for courtesy, but never two. Our Chinese hosts started toasting. They got up and went from table to table. Sean, in his dress whites, was going from table to table also. I turned to him and said, Before you do this, look up at the dais, which he did. Mrs. Bush was staring right through him. It was unmistakably a look that said, Sit down and don’t say another word for the rest of the evening. Well, Sean ignored her. At the end of the dinner he made the fatal mistake of riding down the elevator with the vice president and Mrs. Bush, as a personal aide often does. By the time they got to the ground floor, Sean was history. He was sent back to Washington on a commercial plane.”

BARBARA DID NOT THINK
it was in the Bushes’ interest for the public to know how influential she was. “I’m not too sure the American public likes the spouse to be too front and center,” she would write later. “A spouse has a fine row to hoe. Dennis Thatcher played it just right, in my eyes. He was supportive of Margaret always, yet had a life of his own.” According to their friend former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulrooney, the Bushes have a more “modern” marriage than the Reagans. “Nancy and Ronnie lived for each other. The Reagans were interested in their family only insofar as it enhanced their relationship. Bar and George lived for their family. They were much less emotionally dependent on each other. Each was self-sufficient, each lived his own life separately. Ron and Nancy lived one life.”

Like the best political wives, Barbara professed to a near total lack of interest in politics. Apart from occasional “slipups,” deliberate or not, “She would not express her opinions in public,” Bush media adviser Roger Ailes noted, “but she was a strong and respected voice inside.” Fitzwater said that in seven years as Bush’s press spokesman, “I don’t know that I ever heard her comment on policy.” This was part of her careful calculation. She had an upstairs/downstairs attitude about voicing her views—not in front of the staff and certainly not in front of reporters.

The cardinal sin, in Barbara’s opinion, was for a strong, smart wife to call attention to herself. “Shortly after Bush’s 1989 inaugural,”
Washington
Post
reporter Radcliffe recalled, “they were going to Japan to the funeral of Emperor Hirohito, and on to China. I wrote that Barbara was going to be the co-star of the trip, or something like that. I got a call from one of her aides telling me in no uncertain terms that Mrs. Bush did
not
want to be compared to her husband in any way. That she did not wish to detract from his center-stage role on that trip. She was downplaying anything that was on her schedule.” Her view of the wife’s “proper” role was made clear by a comment she made during the Clinton presidency. “Hillary Rodham Clinton is certainly very much a part of her husband’s decision-making process. She seems much the stronger of the two. Does it make him seem weaker?” In Barbara Bush’s view, the answer was self-evident.

Mulrooney saw the private face of the marriage and Barbara’s role in it.

Those who did not perform according to her standards often found their careers cut short or sidelined, and not just military aides. Fuller did not get the coveted chief of staff job in part because Barbara felt he was
leaking to the
Washington Post
—and not returning Barbara’s calls fast enough. Aboard
Air Force Two
following her husband’s defeat in the Iowa straw polls, she summoned campaign operative Rich Bond. “So,” she said with a hard smile, “when are you going back to Iowa to manage the vice president’s campaign?” It was not a question but an order. Bond relocated to Iowa for the next five months.

Though she was content to leave policy to the “hired help,” no one cared more about President Bush’s image or his legacy than his wife. Sometimes the president is the last to know when a staffer serves his own interests with greater zeal than he does those of the president. This is particularly so in the case of the chief of staff, who controls access. “I’ve known very few chiefs of staff who didn’t in the end feel that ‘If I could just get rid of that dumb guy down the hall in the Oval Office … everything would be fine,’” Roger Ailes noted. Barbara concluded that John Sununu had fallen into what Ailes calls the “ego pit” of the chief of staff. Lud Ashley credits Barbara with Sununu’s demise: “She picked up that he had his own agenda. She alerted George to the problem.” After a series of embarrassing press reports charging Sununu with abusing the privileges of his office, Bush fired him in December 1991. But, unlike Nancy Reagan, Barbara stayed in the shadows. When asked about her role, Barbara answered with the same sweet attitude with which she brushed off the Jennifer Fitzgerald story. “I love John Sununu and I love his wife and they know it and I guess that’s what counts.” Barbara rarely lost her composure or let an injury go unanswered.

She had found her winning formula: praise her husband and bolster his policies however she could. In so doing, she even befriended Nancy Reagan’s nemesis, Raisa Gorbachev. There was something gleeful in Barbara’s great show of friendship for Raisa. “She is a lovely-looking creature,” Barbara wrote of her, adding with characteristic irony, “I don’t know how old, but I think the paper said fifty-three or fifty-five. That’s funny, we don’t know if Nancy Reagan is sixty-five or sixty-seven, and she won’t tell. I guess Raisa won’t tell, either.” Barbara scored a double hit when she took Mrs. Gorbachev to Wellesley College to share commencement-speech honors with her. Campus protests had preceded Barbara’s appearance, as a number of students felt the first lady—who
came by her position through marriage, not personal achievement—was the wrong choice to address them. Barbara’s combination of charm and guile disarmed her critics. “Somewhere in this audience,” she told the Wellesley graduating class, “may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president’s spouse.” Then she delivered her punch line: “I wish him well!” The women roared their approval of the most traditional first lady in recent memory.