Kati Marton (51 page)

Only rarely did her convictions trump her political caution. In the wake of a school shooting incident, a reporter asked Barbara if she thought assault weapons should be illegal. “Absolutely,” she answered. Within a week, her husband declared, “Absolutely not.” For her subsequent silence on the issue, Barbara was publicly chastised by Lady Bird Johnson’s press spokeswoman, Liz Carpenter. “Americans have come to expect a first lady to care about her family and her country in visible ways that lead others to action,” Carpenter wrote, “and to stiffen the spine of the president when he needs it.” In a letter Barbara never sent but included in her memoirs, she answered the charge. “Long ago,” she wrote Carpenter, “I decided in life that I had to have priorities. I put my children and my husband at the top of the list. That’s a choice that I have never regretted …. I realized that a more literate America would benefit every single thing I worry about: crime, unemployment, pollution, teenage pregnancy, school dropouts, women who are trapped into welfare and therefore poverty, etc. You name it I worried about it …. Abortion, pro or con, is not a priority for me. ERA is not a priority for me, nor is gun control. I leave that for those courageous enough to run for public office.”

Her answer to the charge of political cowardice was typically shrewd. Barbara was quite disingenuous in implying that she had to choose between literacy and gun control and literacy and a woman’s right to choose. Barbara needed no handlers to contrive this winning formula. Though possessed of the same accommodating spirit as her husband, she was more successful because she
seemed
more believable.

To glean how she really felt, one must examine her statements before and after the Bush administration. In 1980 she declared, “George has
always been against gun control. Well, I have always been for gun control. For thirty-five years I have been for gun control ….”

By 1992 George and Barbara seemed out of step with their own party. The GOP had turned too sharply right for the Bushes. Something else had also changed. The candidate was bone-tired. For the first time in his political career, Bush did not relish the race. “I haven’t made up my mind,” he told concerned friends and family. The effort to keep the Gulf War alliance together left him weak and low. “I have never felt like this a day in my life. I am very tired. I didn’t sleep well and this troubles me because I go to the nation at nine o’clock. My lower gut hurts, nothing like when I had the bleeding ulcer. But I am aware of it and I take a couple of Mylantas.”

Bush had discovered something known only to a handful of members of the world’s most exclusive club: there is never any downtime for the president. “I come over to the house about twenty to four to lie down. Before I make my calls at five, the old shoulders tighten up. My mind is a thousand miles away. I simply can’t sleep. I think of what other presidents went through.” There was another reason he seemed sapped of his competitive juices. On May 5, he started off on a jog at Camp David. “I … got tired right away, or got out of breath, so I stopped and walked. Then I ran a little but couldn’t run more than a hundred yards, so again I stopped. I did this for about thirty or forty minutes and I told Rich [Miller, a Secret Service agent] to get the doctor ….” The president was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, the same thyroid deficiency his wife suffered in 1989, only in his case it affected the rhythm of his heart.

For a president to be sick while in office is a unique experience. Even more than normally, the eyes of the world, through the camera’s unblinking lens, are on his every move. “I got up and went to the bathroom and ABC carried a picture of me standing there ….” Such was the high cost of the office that even with her husband’s condition uncertain, Barbara’s first consideration had to be the political consequences of his illness. How would this play in the country, and the world? Edith Wilson had had similar considerations. Knowing that her every gesture could set off speculation, Barbara decided against spending the night in the hospital with her husband. “I went home … partially to reassure the world and
our own children that it was not serious.” Her husband was not fooled. “She’s a little more worried than she indicates and I’ll probably be thinking tomorrow, Have I really told her how much I love her, and it’s going to be okay?”

Medication restored Bush’s heartbeat to normal. But the convergence of the Gulf War and his illness depleted the once hyperkinetic man. On June 10, 1991, he added this to his White House “funeral file”: “I want the song ‘Last Full Measure of Devotion’ sung by a good male soloist …. Gravestone—the plain stones we see at Arlington. I would like my Navy number on the back of it …. Also on the stone in addition to what I already requested: ‘He loved Barbara very much.’”

FOR BARBARA AND GEORGE
the worst year of their political life was the year that ended it: 1992. On January 9, a photograph showing the president throwing up on the lap of Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa was beamed across the globe. The image of the stricken president became as much a metaphor for Bush’s final year in office as the one of Jimmy Carter collapsing while jogging. Nothing Bush would do that year could erase that devastating image. Barbara could do little to inject into her husband’s final campaign the momentum it never had.

“The wheels came off in ’92,” Lud Ashley remembered. “Every day I shook my head at his disastrous campaign. The people running it were bickering among themselves. There was no theme. George wasn’t telling the American people where the country was going. I was so upset I wrote him a memo telling him he wasn’t coming across to the electorate. But George assumed ultimately the character issue would sink Bill Clinton. He just could not believe a man who had dodged the draft and all those other facets of his personality would be elected president.” But Bush never articulated an alternate vision. Nor would he agree to get rid of his running mate, Dan Quayle. “George felt Quayle had served him as he wanted to be served,” said Ashley. “He never admitted that choosing Quayle had been a boneheaded move.”

Barbara did not hide her own view that Quayle was a liability. Ashley recalled a family gathering at Camp David before the 1992 Republican
convention. Every time Quayle’s name came up, “Barbara rolled her eyes. She did not say anything, she just rolled her eyes.” You made your views on Quayle pretty clear, Ashley later teased her. “Yes,” Barbara admitted, “but you’d have a hard time quoting me, wouldn’t you?” which was in keeping with her style. But this time her husband did not heed her message. For him, the private virtue of loyalty trumped the political advantage of dumping his running mate.

Bush seemed out of touch with his country’s gravest troubles: a sluggish economy, inflation and the downward-spiraling quality of life in the inner cities. His tin ear for politics was never more conspicuous than during the rioting set off by the announcement of the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. Fifty-three deaths, two thousand injuries and five thousand fires ripped the city, and from the safety of the White House all the president could find to say was that it was “wrong.” When he finally flew to the ravaged city he missed another chance to heal and inspire. Standing at the bedside of a critically injured firefighter, he mumbled, “I’m sorry Barbara is not here. She’s out repairing what’s left of our house [in Kennebunkport]. Damned storm knocked down four or five walls. She says it’s coming along ….” What, one wonders, was the man who lay flat on his back thinking, hearing the president’s hard-luck tale? And what would Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton have made of this moment? How differently Bush’s own wife would have treated the injured fireman.

The 1992 Republican convention in Houston’s Astrodome was a surreal nightmare for George and Barbara. Loudly and proudly, the party’s triumphant right wing thumbed its nose at Bush’s moderate roots. Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan, in a speech worthy of George Wallace, whipped up xenophobic fervor. “There is a religious war going on in the country,” Buchanan roused the convention. “It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself …. Take back our country!” Buchanan urged a wildly cheering minority who had hijacked the convention, shredding Bush’s right flank in the process.

“Mila [Mrs. Mulrooney] chided Barbara about the right wing,” Brian Mulrooney recalled. “‘You’ve got to get this under control,’ she
told her. Barbara got quite upset and turned on Mila. ‘We’ve had just about enough advice, thank you very much,’ she said. ‘I’m
trying
to get it under control.’”

But Buchanan wasn’t George’s biggest problem; George Bush was. The Cold War was over and he lacked the political instincts to seize the new moment. He wasn’t interested in domestic problems. Tone deaf to the new beat, he allowed other voices in the GOP to define the times. Bush’s lifelong struggle to placate and accommodate his party’s right wing was fruitless. To many in the party, Bush’s most memorable line of 1988, “Read my lips. No new taxes,” was pivotal, because Bush never successfully explained why he had abandoned that pledge. Unlike in 1988, when he spoke movingly of hearing “the quiet America that others don’t,” this time Bush had no soaring rhetoric, no ringing promises. The party’s platform—anti-gay, anti-abortion and distinctly pro–Christian right—did not reflect his views. He had failed to move his party to the center, where he was most comfortable.

“This is all extraordinarily tough on Barbara,” her husband wrote in his diary. “She is still wildly popular and gets a wonderful response, but I can tell she is hurting for me. She refuses to watch the television; refuses to read the papers; and she tells me to turn [the television] off when I turn it on because it is always hammering away at me.” During his second debate against Clinton, a dispirited Bush bemoaned that his wife was not running. She would surely win, the president said. “But it’s too late.”

As always in tough moments, he found solace in his family. “Everything is ugly and everything is nasty,” he wrote in his diary. “But we are a family, and I have a certain inner quiet peace, which I’m not sure I’ve ever had in a situation like this.” For a man who fled introspection, he had gained a measure of self-knowledge. “I agree on Clinton,” he wrote speechwriter Noonan. “He’s got more facts—he’s better at facts-figures than I am. I’m better at life.”

The pain of the actual defeat was beyond anything Bush had experienced. In the greatest competition of his life, he lost massively. Thirty-two states chose Clinton over Bush. “It is hard to describe the emotions of something like this,” he wrote at fifteen minutes past midnight on November 4, 1992, “but it’s hurt, hurt, hurt and I guess it’s the pride
too …. I was absolutely convinced we would prove them wrong but I was wrong and they were right and that hurts a lot.” Bush’s lament is as good a description as there is of a loss so abrupt, so deep, so personal and so public—only a handful of men and their wives have experienced it in the republic’s 224 years.

When, on January 20, 1993, the presidential helicopter,
Marine One,
carrying Barbara and George Bush on the first leg of their homeward journey, made the traditional farewell circle around the White House, Barbara whispered, “It’s so sad.” Twenty years earlier, Pat Nixon had uttered the same three words.

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