Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 23
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Destiny and Power Part 23

Alan Greenspan had announced that the economy had suffered a "meaningful downturn" by October 1990. According to the historian James T. Patterson, "the recession began to emerge in 1990 and lasted until mid-1991, when recovery very slowly took place." It was the first cyclical downturn since the difficult Reagan recession of 1982. Unemployment, particularly among white-collar workers, rose to what Patterson noted was "the highest rate in ten years"-from 5.9 percent in 1989, the year Bush took office, to 7.8 percent in the middle of 1991. "Whatever the causes, the downturn was severe," Patterson wrote, and the effects of the recovery would not be widely felt until well after politics of 1992 had taken shape.

"The euphoria is up there on the war, but when it wears off, we're going to be facing these humungous deficits and the economy is still down, down, down," Bush dictated in mid-March 1991. "Gosh, I'm hoping that this will be a mild recession. I hope and hope and hope that it will be."

FORTY-TWO.

I'm Just Not Sure I Want to Run Again

Soon we'll have to start thinking of the campaign. I dread it.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH THE POSTGULF WAR PERIOD of Bush's presidency is a study in shadow. Bush himself was gloomy and emotionally adrift, finding little joy in the job that had filled his life with light for just over two years. "Nothing except a battle lost," the Duke of Wellington is said to have remarked, "can be half so melancholy as a battle won." The creation and maintenance of the coalition of nations, the supervision of military preparations, and the alternating anxiety and exhilaration of the actual combat itself had left Bush drained. Part of the cause was a kind of post-combat letdown along the lines Wellington had described long before. Another was a thyroid condition known as Graves' disease that would be diagnosed in the late spring. For a time in 1991, America had a president who struggled to present a steady face to the world even as he contemplated standing down from the 1992 campaign.

The trip from the White House to the J. W. Marriott Hotel at Thirteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW was brief. The president used the few moments in the car to go over the speech he was about to deliver to the American Society of Association Executives at eleven A.M. on Wednesday, February 27, 1991, the day the war ended. The subject was domestic policy, and Bush read the text with a sinking feeling. It was, he thought, a rather poor effort, full of platitudes about the American Dream and forced language about his vision for the nation at home. Looking up at Dave Demarest, the White House director of communications, Bush said, "You don't expect me to read this shit, do you?"

Demarest tried to laugh it off, but the president was serious. Pushing his way through the speech at the hotel, Bush was horrified at the silence in the room. "It fell flat," he dictated. "Not one clap of applause." Returning to the White House, Bush told John Sununu that the entire episode "was frankly quite embarrassing."

However much he may have preferred foreign affairs, Bush was aware that his presidency-like most other presidencies-would rise or fall not only on what he did in the larger world but on how he managed life at home. Even amid the frenzy of good feeling about the Gulf War, he took nothing for granted. Now, Bush dictated to his diary, "the ball will shift into the domestic court, and we will be back to the old political game who's up, who's down, the loud voices on the [CNN political talk show] Capital Gang; the attacks by the Democrats, which I am bound to get in spades."

Some allies argued-both to him and in political circles-that Desert Storm could be followed by a "Domestic Storm" of programs to address the economy, education, the environment, and other home front issues. The advice was well-intentioned, but Bush was doubtful about the administration's prospects for great domestic success. "Try this on," he dictated. "Suppose you had Dick Gephardt as Secretary of State and [Ted] Kennedy as Secretary of Defense-how could you do it?"

He fantasized about surprising the world by announcing that he would not seek reelection. "[I'd] call a press conference in about November and just turn it loose," Bush told his diary on Wednesday, March 13, 1991. He went on: You need someone in this job [who can give his] total last ounce of energy, and I've had [that] up until now, but now I don't seem to have the drive. Maybe it's the letdown after the day-to-day five [o'clock] calls to the Situation Room; conferences every single day with Defense and State; moving things, nudging things, worrying about things; phone calls to foreign leaders, trying to keep things moving forward; managing a massive project. Now it's different, sniping, carping, bitching, predictable editorial complaints....[T]his cynical liberalism that comes down on any President.

His contrasting faces on Sunday, March 17, 1991, captured the tensions Bush was feeling. At a rally for returning troops in Sumter, South Carolina, the world saw a cheerful president pay heartfelt homage to the military that had performed so splendidly under his command. "When you left, it was still fashionable to question America's decency, America's courage, America's resolve," he told a delighted throng at Sumter Memorial Stadium. "No one, no one in the whole world doubts us anymore."

Flying home to Washington on Air Force One, Bush drank two martinis. Barbara was away in Houston; he arrived back at a lonely White House. "I'm not in a good frame of mind now," he dictated. The confident commander in chief of the South Carolina rally was nowhere in evidence. "My whole point is, I really don't care, and that's bad-that's bad," he told his diary that Sunday evening. "But I'll get in there and try. We've got our issues; we've got our plan; and now I've got to fight for them." It wasn't that he felt above it all; he was just tired of it all. "It's not that I'm bigger than the politics, but it's just that I've been down that road and I'm not that much of a political animal"-which was demonstrably untrue; it was more accurate to say that this consummate political competitor was no longer interested in the cut and thrust of the arena.

He was unimpressed by the predictions of the political class. "The common wisdom today is that I'll win in a runaway, but I don't believe that," Bush dictated. "I think it's going to be the economy [which] will make that determination. I think I can talk proudly about what happened in Desert Storm, but I think it will be overshadowed in the Fall of '92 by other issues."

And yet he was driven, as of old, by competitiveness and by duty. He genuinely believed that his administration had a better agenda for the country than the Democrats could offer. "I love the job and I think we have a real chance to accomplish a lot; I think we have in foreign policy," Bush dictated on Monday, April 22, 1991, adding: "We're still getting pounded for no domestic program, [and] for some odd reason, that makes me say 'Well, let me stay in; let me try to run again, [and] if elected, finish the job on these very, very important fronts.'"

- On Saturday, May 4, 1991, the Bushes flew to the presidential retreat for an overnight break. It was a beautiful day, and after a forty-minute nap, Bush was joined by Rich Miller of the Secret Service for a jog on the camp's wood-chip trails. On the run through the Maryland woods, the president was startled to find himself out of breath. This was unusual; even at age sixty-six-almost sixty-seven-he had always been in terrific shape. Yes, he had been tired lately-really since the end of the ground war-and had twice had trouble running at his usual pace in recent weeks. (Once, at Fort McNair, a spectator had called out, "Looking good," to which Bush replied, "Looking slow.") He had also lost several pounds. His panting on the paths on this Saturday, though, was different-his fatigue deeper, harder to shake.

Unsure what was happening, Bush stopped and walked, caught his breath, then tried to run again. It was no use. He made it only about a hundred yards before he was panting once more. He soldiered on for thirty to forty minutes, starting and stopping. Finally he asked Miller to call the duty doctor, and, nearing Camp David's chapel, Bush tried to run the last bit of path to the medical unit.

He did not make it. "The same tired feeling came," Bush dictated later, and the medical staff sat him down for an EKG conducted by Dr. Michael Nash, a White House physician. Nash's finding: The president was suffering from a fibrillation, or irregularity, of the heart. "You're going to have to go down to Bethesda," Bush was told. "We really have to check to see what's causing this." Bush's first thought was not about his health but about politics. "My whole mind goes, 'Oh no, here we go, here comes a bunch of Democrats charging out of the woodwork to run.' There will be a scare scene sent all around the world, and wild speculation will begin about my health and fitness, and it's too darn bad."

Within minutes the Bushes were aboard Marine One, taking off at 5:38 P.M. en route to the naval hospital at Bethesda. Barbara looked worried, but Bush kept telling her that he felt fine. The doctors at the hospital confirmed the initial diagnosis: The president had an irregular heartbeat, a treatable condition. He would spend the night in the hospital as the doctors sought to restore his heartbeat to its usual rhythm.

To the world outside his suite at Bethesda, the word was, in a favorite Bush phrase, steady as she goes. At seven thirty P.M. he and Quayle, who was at home at the vice presidential residence, spoke on the telephone. "The President was in very good spirits and joking," vice presidential chief of staff Bill Kristol told reporters after consulting Quayle about the call. At eight thirty P.M. Marlin Fitzwater held a press conference. "There are no indications at this time that he had a heart attack," Fitzwater announced. "There's never been any question of the President losing consciousness or not being able to carry out his functions."

On Sunday the fifth, as he waited to see whether the treatments would be successful, Bush was restless, working the telephones and playing video games with a few of his grandchildren. He had not slept well. "The problem with all of this is that there will be lot of speculation as to what it means, and lots of feeling that I shouldn't run again," Bush dictated to his diary in the hospital. "The Democrats are now taking a new and inspired look-not hoping something happens-but thinking something might."

Implicit in his concern that the episode was giving new hope to the opposition was a returning fighting spirit in terms of 1992. Had he not been recovering from his postwar dejection about politics, he might well have interpreted the heart incident in a different, more optimistic light: as an excuse, perhaps, for announcing that he was standing down for reelection. Instead, he fretted about appearing weak, and about the appearance of weakness encouraging his foes. In his suite at Bethesda, his competitive instincts were stirring.

His doctors told him that they might have to put him under a general anesthetic and use electrical shock to restore his heartbeat to its regular rhythm on Monday. Such a step would have required him to transfer power, albeit very briefly, to Vice President Quayle, and Bush, alone in the night after Barbara had returned to the White House after kissing her husband goodbye, thought that his condition might be more serious than he had at first thought. "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?'" Bush dictated. "Have I properly told her I loved her?" His stream of consciousness continued: I just can't believe anything will go wrong and it won't. But this diary is a confession of sorts, and I have no fear of this procedure, but I've left undone a lot of things I should've done. When I listen to this tomorrow, I'll be saying, "Hey, how silly you were," but there is the family....[T]here's Bar, and our house in Maine, and what she'll be able to do. I want her to have these notes, and maybe she could write a book and make enough money to live a reasonable lifestyle and keep our home, our anchor to windward at Kennebunkport....I don't want to go through my life worrying about my heart fibrillation, taking medicine, and I wonder if this will heighten the day when I make the decision not to run for President. It all depends on how I feel, but as this diary knows, I'm quietly thinking about not running. I feel good; my health is good; and my spirit is good, so why am I saying all of these things?

He was saying them because he was anxious. Though the health scare was relatively minor, it was still a scare. Here he was, the most powerful man on Earth, and his own heart was threatening to betray him.

With the dawn came good news. The medication was working. There was no need for the electrical procedure, no need for the anesthetic, no need for the transfer of power-and no need for further nights at Bethesda. Bush was elated. The crisis, he thought, had passed. With the proviso that he would have to wear a small heart monitor for a time, he was able to return to the White House. In truth he was not as chipper as he sought to appear ("I came to the office, but I still don't feel totally right-a little weaker than I thought I'd be," he told his diary on Tuesday, May 7), but he appears to have kept that to himself. Determined to project a sense of energy and good cheer, Bush called out, "Back to work, back to work" as he walked into the Oval Office. That afternoon brought a new medical bulletin. His doctors had found that Bush was suffering from Graves' disease, which had also afflicted Barbara since 1989. "An overactive thyroid," wrote New York Times medical correspondent Lawrence K. Altman, "can cause symptoms like nervousness, restlessness, hyperactivity and weight loss." He would have to forgo alcohol for a time, and Barbara told reporters that she was going to secretly move the White House from caffeinated to decaffeinated coffee.

Bush's overactive thyroid had led to his excessively rapid heart rate (the atrial fibrillation). Now that the doctors had handled the fibrillation through medication (for a time, digoxin, warfarin, and procainamide), the question turned to treating his Graves' disease, or hyperthyroidism. The accepted course of action was to "ablate" the thyroid with radioactive iodine to eliminate the thyroid gland's ability to produce excessive levels of thyroid hormone that could, in turn, lead to further episodes of atrial fibrillation, among other issues. Once the thyroid was sufficiently "ablated," Bush's doctors introduced medication, L-Thyroxin, to bring the thyroid level back into the normal range. (By September 1991 the president was taking only L-Thyroxin and baby aspirin.) "It was a difficult balancing act," recalled White House physician Dr. Burton Lee. "There was, and is, a lot of clinical uncertainty about what exactly the dose should be in the individual case. If we did not have the medication exactly right, then he could remain clinically hypothyroid"-meaning that Bush would have less energy and less focus than he had had in the first part of his presidency. If the doctors raised his dose of L-Thyroxin, however, they risked sending Bush back into atrial fibrillation. For the most part, Bush's doctors kept the president's thyroid condition in check. Yet there were those around Bush who speculated whether issues with the treatment for his Graves' disease contributed to his failure to engage vigorously with the politics of 1992. "To those of us who watched him carefully, the old zip was gone," recalled Marlin Fitzwater. Everything, of course, is a matter of context. At sixty-six, the president had long been more active than many people many years his junior. Still, in layman's terms, Bush's thyroid condition and his treatment for it may have played some role in slowing the president down a bit at just the moment he needed as much physical, mental, and spiritual verve as he could muster.

The day the president returned to the White House from Bethesda, the Democratic Leadership Council, a group founded after Walter Mondale's forty-nine-state defeat, announced a new centrist policy agenda at the conclusion of a gathering in Cleveland. Much of the attention was focused on Doug Wilder of Virginia, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, and Al Gore of Tennessee. "Too many of the people who used to vote for us, the very burdened middle class we're talking about, have not trusted us in national elections to defend our national interest abroad, to put their values in our social policy at home or to take their tax money and spend it with discipline," said one speaker. "We've got to turn these perceptions around, or we can't continue as a national party." It was a resonant message. And with it, the speaker, Bill Clinton, returned to Arkansas, to think some more about whether 1992 was the right moment to strike.

- Just after nine thirty on the sunny morning of Saturday, June 8, 1991, in the amphitheater of Arlington National Cemetery, Bush offered a eulogy at a memorial service for the fallen of the Gulf War. "Dwight Eisenhower once spoke of the most ennobling virtues of man: faith, courage, fortitude, and sacrifice," Bush said as he stood beneath enormous American flags, flanked by Baker, Cheney, Bandar, and the Kuwaiti ambassador. "He knew that America grew out of brave men's dreams of a commonwealth of freedom, of virtue....It lives because we dared risk our most precious asset-our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our husbands and wives-the finest troops any country has ever had." Bush's voice broke with emotion when he came to the section about "our most precious asset," and tears sprang to his eyes.

From the dais high above the crowd on this sunny Saturday, Bush looked out and saw those gathered in a way that no one else could. He saw them as souls in his charge, lives in his hands. To him the soldiers, sailors, and airmen he had ordered into harm's way-and might yet again-and their kith and kin were not abstractions but real people from real families who, at his personal command, had given or would give the last full measure of devotion.

Credit 42.1 Speaking at Arlington National Cemetery in honor of the casualties of Desert Storm, Bush grew emotional. The American ideal, he said, "lives because we dared risk our most precious asset-our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our husbands and wives-the finest troops any country has ever had."

At the conclusion of the ceremony, Bush felt he could not just walk "imperiously" off the stage. He asked Schwarzkopf, who was there in his trademark desert fatigues, to join him and Barbara in talking to several rows of families. "It was so sad," Bush dictated. "I said, 'Did you have a loved one over there?' 'Yeah, my Dad was killed,' or 'Yes, my only boy gave his life.' It was very, very touching and very, very moving."

From the quiet of Arlington-Bush had noted a songbird over the white gravestones on the lush green grass of the cemetery just before he spoke-the presidential party moved back across the Potomac for the largest military celebration in Washington since the end of World War II. There, on Constitution Avenue, the president watched as unit after unit marched by. Aircraft streaked through the skies, and the armaments that had driven Saddam from Kuwait were paraded by a crowd that was estimated to be 200,000 strong. By the time the sun had set and the fireworks went off, the ranks of the spectators had grown to 800,000. "Great day," Bush remarked. Would the good feeling from the war be enough to reelect Bush nearly eighteen months hence? He doubted it. "I firmly believe that elections are won or lost by the state of the economy," he dictated, optimistically adding: "and ours appears to be improving. That isn't to say we won't have enormous problems out there."

Into the first half of the summer of 1991 the Democrats remained in disarray. Watching from the White House, Bush noted that Iowa senator Tom Harkin was "wowing the crowds on the liberal left" and West Virginia senator Jay Rockefeller was "knocking me on education and foreign affairs." Governor Mario Cuomo of New York was "silent. He's got big state problems and he's now trying to talk conservative on economic matters. He's fast on his feet and a lot of people think it will be Cuomo and [Al] Gore." As for Gore himself, Bush quoted The Hotline, the inside-Washington newsletter, which had described the young Tennessee senator as "'wooden,' or something like that. [He'll] be out there on his environmental kick. An attractive guy, but [they say] he is a worse speaker than me-the poor guy's in real trouble if he's worse than me." Bush's handicapping was another sign that the president was reengaging with politics. He may have longed for tranquillity, but he also believed that he was better for the country than any of the alternatives.

- He was pleased, too, with the slow but steady progress the administration was making on an important long-term project: the creation of a North American free-trade zone. Reagan had spoken of a "North American Common Market" with Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Bush thought even bigger, speaking of a hemispheric model that would include Latin America.

In May 1991, when Congress moved to extend his "fast-track" authority-which gave the president the power to negotiate and present a treaty that could not be amended-Bush was delighted. "This is a very important step for our country....It's a great day, it really is," Bush said. Facing concerns that an agreement could siphon American jobs off to lower-paying factories in Mexico and might exacerbate environmental conditions, Bush had lobbied hard for the renewed negotiating authority, using White House breakfasts and sit-downs to sell lawmakers on what would become known as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. "The White House almost ran out of eggs benedict this week," Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, remarked.

A confirmed free trader, Bush was committed to NAFTA and to the arduous negotiations-both with the participating nations and with the Democratic Congress, always worried about job exports and the environment-and persistently pursued them through 1991 and 1992. At a time of economic slump at home, such complex diplomacy was especially difficult, but Bush believed that NAFTA, whatever its short-term political costs, would create conditions for long-term prosperity. The president never gave up, and the accords would be completed in August 1992 and signed in Mexico City that December.

- In late June, Thurgood Marshall, the first-and only-African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, announced his retirement from the bench. Bush moved quickly, asking Boyden Gray and John Sununu to work on a new nomination.

In theory he was interested, as he had been at the time of the Souter nomination, in a Hispanic or a woman, but Marshall's retirement was particular, and Bush thought of a young federal judge he had known for a long time: Clarence Thomas, a Yale Law graduate who was a member of the small African American Republican world that Bush had cultivated and supported, quietly, for decades. By Monday, July 1, 1991, Bush, on the telephone, told Thomas that he was "very close to a decision," but that nothing was final; would the judge mind a trip to Kennebunkport? When Thomas arrived at Walker's Point-the staff smuggled him in to avoid photographers-he joined Bush in the master bedroom on the first floor of the house. As with David Souter, there was no philosophical discussion; no specific issues were raised. Bush asked that Thomas make his decisions "as an umpire would," calling them as he saw them, and he promised never to criticize or second-guess the justice once he was on the bench. There was one more thing, too: Bush asked "if he was ready for the bruising fight...ahead."

Thomas said yes, all of that sounded fine. He believed he was ready. Bush was putting his faith in a man he thought to be generally conservative and of good character. That was enough. "If he rules against what I think on Roe vs. Wade, so be it," Bush told his diary on Wednesday, July 3. "If he rules differently on any issue, so be it. He'll approach it with honor and integrity, and he will not try to do social engineering from the bench." After a joint press conference-one in which Thomas choked up recalling his life's journey from obscurity in rural Georgia-Bush invited him back to the stone porch for lunch. Confirmation hearings would come in the fall, as would Bush's signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 after a long fight.

In October 1990, the president had vetoed a civil rights bill arguing that it "employ[ed] a maze of highly legalistic language to introduce the destructive force of quotas into our national employment system." In the fall of 1991, after difficult negotiations, Bush signed a measure supported by Democrats and moderate Republicans.

- On the first weekend in August, Bush convened a political meeting at Camp David. The subject: the dreaded 1992 presidential campaign. There were about thirty people there, and the session opened with a dispiriting presentation from Bob Teeter, whose polling suggested that domestic and economic concerns were more important to voters than global ones.

The group of advisers was large, and included Quayle, Sununu, Bob Mosbacher, and Mary Matalin. (Jim Baker was in the Middle East.) According to notes of the meeting taken by deputy chief of staff Jim Cicconi, Bush told the gathering that he had made "no final decision" about running, "but only one thing would keep him from" a campaign for reelection: his health, which he believed was fine. He had run two miles the day before, Bush said, and "will do the same today."

While Bush's foreign policy was viewed positively by 72 percent of voters, only 21 percent approved of his handling of the home front. Drily, Cicconi wrote: "Conclusion: have work to do on domestic issues."

Bush was told that "Unemployment [has] replaced deficit as key economic issue"-the wages of the recession-and that healthcare was "'increasingly important.'...Demo's have high ground." Alan Steelman, a former Texas Republican congressman who was at the meeting, was direct about healthcare, telling Bush that the lack of an administration healthcare reform plan was the best example of the president's seeming dearth of attention to domestic issues.

The reelection campaign had to watch out for internal party challenges, too. Of discussion about the Republican platform in 1992, Cicconi wrote: "Key: at early stages, be sure Weber, Gingrich et al (who care most re platform) feel listened to = otherwise they may try to write their own."

- August was a typical one in Kennebunkport. The president was back on the golf course he loved, Cape Arundel, and, dressing for services at St. Ann's Church on Sunday morning, he wore white socks with a pair of what Maureen Dowd of The New York Times described as "off-white leather shoes." Keenly observant, Dowd wrote that "It has been said that Mr. Bush resembles the character played by Tom Hanks in the movie 'Big,' a boy in the body of an adult," and the white socks and shoes, worn with a gray suit and blue tie, offered, she believed, further proof.

At the annual vestry breakfast and meeting at St. Ann's, Bush had fun engaging with the mundane tasks of running a parish church; the conversation about "whether the organ loft needs to have some repairs...or whether the groundskeeper should be on a year round basis...brings you back to earth."

Bush went to bed on the night of Sunday, August 18, 1991, looking forward to a round of golf the next morning with Roger Clemens, the Boston Red Sox pitching ace. For Bush, summer days could get no better than that.

FORTY-THREE.

A Coup in Moscow

The complexities of all of this are absolutely phenomenal, and yet I am determined to handle it without getting us involved in a war.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH THE CALL FROM SCOWCROFT came through at midnight. Waking at once, Bush picked up the phone at his bedside on the first floor of the house at Walker's Point and listened as the national security adviser briefed him on an unusual report from TASS, the official Soviet news agency. Mikhail Gorbachev, it was said, had resigned, improbably citing health reasons. The announcement made no sense; Gorbachev was a vigorous man. Bush had just come from a summit with him in Moscow. There had to be something else-something more sinister-afoot.

At about 5:30 A.M. on Monday, August 19, 1991, Bush asked the Situation Room in the White House for an update. The picture had become a bit clearer. Gorbachev, on vacation in the Crimea, had been deposed by a right-wing cabal of Soviet hard-liners. Gorbachev, Bush was told, "has been put out." It was not a total surprise: Bush had warned Gorbachev of a possible coup "by right-wing forces" in June. Soviet cold warriors in both the government and in the military had had enough of Gorbachev's reforms-reforms that were now well on their way to empowering the republics, not Moscow, bringing the experiment in Soviet power that had begun in the Russian Revolution of 1917 to an end. The August coup was a last attempt to rescue the old Soviet Union from the forces of glasnost and perestroika.

Gorbachev's popularity had been falling as former satellite after former satellite spun away from Moscow. In foreign affairs, the reunification of Germany, while carefully managed and led by the United States, had been a historic blow to Soviet pride; at home, the failure of Gorbachev's market reforms to produce prosperity-gross national product was significantly down-left him with little to boast of.

And there was a new rival on the scene. Bear-like and hard drinking, histrionic and bold, a Russian politician named Boris Yeltsin had emerged in the fluid politics of the Gorbachev era. Elected president of Russia, by far the largest and most influential of the Soviet Union's component parts, Yeltsin took office in July 1991 just as Gorbachev agreed to a new union treaty, which would have replaced the centralized Soviet Union with a looser confederation of republics. The document had sent Soviet conservatives into action in one last push to preserve the old order.

Gorbachev had been vacationing at Cape Foros in the Crimea. Late on the afternoon of Sunday, August 18, he was told that "a group of people" wanted to see him. "I was not expecting anybody, had not invited anyone, and no one had informed me of anyone's possible arrival," Gorbachev recalled. He picked up a telephone in his office, where he had been working. The line was dead. He tried another, and another, and another-all had been cut off. Told by the conspirators on the scene that he should declare a "state of emergency" that would allow them and their allies to take control of the country, Gorbachev replied: "Think again-this affair will end in a civil war and a great deal of bloodshed. You will have to answer for it. You are adventurers and criminals. Still, nothing will come of your plans. The people are no longer ready to put up with your dictatorship or with the loss of everything we have gained in recent years."

With that, Gorbachev recalled, the plotters "totally isolated" him and his family. In Moscow, the conspirators had ordered 250,000 pairs of handcuffs, and tanks began to roll into the heart of the city.

- No one in the United States could reach Gorbachev himself, and in Maine the weather forecast was dire: a hurricane was threatening New England. What to do? Should the president remain in place in Kennebunkport, as he had during much of the Persian Gulf crisis? Or, given the weather, return to Washington for a day or two to monitor events in the Soviet Union?

The golf with Roger Clemens and a party of visitors from the Red Sox organization was off, but Bush, thoughtful as ever, did not want to stiff his guests entirely. Calling the Red Sox delegation at its hotel early in the morning, Bush said: "Not playing golf, but you are welcome to come over and have blueberry muffins." Clemens, Bush family friend Tim Samway, and others arrived for breakfast. They were greeted by Barbara Bush, who was wearing two differently colored sneakers. (This was not unusual. Her husband had once given her dozens of pairs of her favorite Keds in different colors, and she decided that the only way she could ever wear them all was to mismatch them.) As the group was served muffins and coffee, the president sat at the dining room table signing a box of baseballs between calls to world leaders.

As he approved the Coast Guard's taking his boat in from the sea, Bush wondered about the impact of the coup. "Will there be general strikes? Will there be resistance? Will the military use so much force and crack down so much that they won't permit any democratic move to go forward?" There was a new figurehead president in Moscow, and Bush recalled how one of the plotters, Dmitri Timofeyevich Yazov, a military man, had been "grumbling all the time at the meetings that we had in the Soviet Union, drinking a lot, complaining at the table with John Sununu and others about how bad things were."

Suddenly it was August 1990 all over again-the flurry of calls to foreign leaders, the weighing of options, the calibrated public remarks. Bush spoke to his opposite numbers in Italy, Japan, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Germany. "They agree with our principle-talk about reform, insistence with reform, [and] calm things so we don't get into a military confrontation role," Bush dictated. Speaking to Francois Mitterrand, Bush noted that the West needed to be firm but "avoid statements about rearming" and returning to a Cold War mentality. The French president agreed, saying, "Indeed. Let's not create a perception that all is lost. This coup could fail in a few days or months. It goes against the tide. It's hard to impose by force a regime on a changing nation. It won't work."

At ten to eight in the morning on Monday, August 19, Bush held a press conference in the Secret Service's little house at Walker's Point. The rain had come, forcing the session indoors. Given the uncertainty of the moment, Bush's performance was masterly, his answers well pitched to position the United States on the side of the Gorbachev-inspired reforms while taking care not to inflame the situation. In preparing for the session with reporters, Bush had written a note to himself on a draft of talking points: "The West obviously will not retreat from its principles-reform, openness, democracy."

Calling the developments "momentous and stunning," Bush told reporters that "contrary to official statements" out of Moscow "this move was extra-constitutional, outside of the constitutional provisions for governmental change."

Subtly defending Gorbachev, he said: "President Gorbachev is clearly an historic figure, one who's led the Soviet Union toward reform domestically and toward a constructive and cooperative role in the international arena. And it's important to keep in mind the enormous changes that have taken place towards openness, towards reform, changes in Eastern Europe, the newfound cooperation with the United States and others in the Gulf, and many other areas. There's a whole new era of cooperation, and we don't want to see that change, obviously."

Echoing Mitterrand, Bush added another cautionary note: "I think it's also important to know that coups can fail. They can take over at first, and then they run up against the will of the people." Asked what he thought the plotters' motivation was, he was candid. "We don't know that. We don't know that. Clearly, some of the hard-liners have been concerned about the rapidity of reform. They've been concerned about the demise of the Communist Party per se. And I think they've also been concerned about the Soviet economy. But in a coup of this manner, you never know what's going to happen. I think Gorbachev was as surprised as anybody, obviously. And let's just remain open on this as to whether it's going to succeed or not. We're seeing the first returns, you might say, coming in."

Should the hard-liners attempt to make aggressive military moves in terms of abandoning arms control treaties, Bush added, the United States stood ready to take an equally hard line. "We're not going to go back to seeing Europe as it used to be with Soviet forces all through Eastern Europe. So, we're not trying to go back to square one....Obviously if they weren't adhering...that would be a whole different ball game." His sense of proportion was evident. Did he favor Gorbachev's return to power? "Well, I've always felt that he represented the best opportunity to see reform go forward. He's been in a bit of a balancing act, as we all know....He represented enormous productive and fantastic change. And I think throwing him out in this manner is counterproductive, totally."

Had Bush used the "hot line" to Moscow, a reporter asked? No, he replied, there was no need for such a dramatic gesture. It would have been like landing on the South Lawn when he was flying back from Texas during the Reagan assassination attempt: the wrong thing at the wrong time. The hotline, he said, was associated in the public mind with "some kind of military problem between the Soviet Union and the United States. And do you think I want to suggest that to the American people or to the people in Europe? Absolutely not."

He had sent the message he wanted to send. Closing his remarks on the coup, he told the reporters: "All right, you got it. Don't say we never give you any news up here."

- Bush made plans to return to Washington. In a call after the meeting with reporters, Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney asked Bush if he thought that Gorbachev had been toppled "because he was too close to us." Bush said he had no doubt of that, and he wondered what the plotters would say was the motivating factor. "At first, they said he had health problems," Bush said to Mulroney. "Maybe that means that Gorbachev's fingernails wouldn't come out."

On the afternoon of the nineteenth, Gennady Yanayev, the self-declared president of the Soviet Union, sent Bush a letter outlining the reasons for the coup. "A disintegration of the USSR would have gravest consequences not only internally, but internationally as well," Yanayev wrote. "Under these circumstances we have no other choice but to take resolute measures in order to stop the slide toward catastrophe." Violence was possible. John Major suggested a NATO ministerial meeting, but Bush was reluctant for fear that "it will make it look like we are militarizing, [and] that we anticipate a military threat to the West....It is the last damn thing we need to get involved in that kind of a confrontation."

There were extraordinary images from Moscow: Yeltsin, whom the usurpers called "reactionary" and "unconstitutional," had stood on a tank to urge that Gorbachev be restored to power. The crowd was with him, crying, "No to fascism." In a conversation with Brian Mulroney, Bush said Yeltsin had "enormous guts." Bush called Vaclav Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia, who told him that many Czechs were likening the Moscow coup to the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The call from Bush, Havel said, would "have a certain calming effect on people" in his country. Western support for the nascent democracies of the old Soviet bloc was critical, Havel told Bush, and the "development toward emancipation and self-determination in the Soviet Union" and in Czechoslovakia was "irreversible. This coup will simply complicate things...but it will not reverse the general development." From Poland, President Lech Walesa told Bush, "We are afraid of one thing in the Soviet Union-anarchy."

So was Bush. Just a few weeks before, the president had delivered a controversial speech in Kiev that had been seen as an attempt to bolster Gorbachev's fortunes. Eager to break away from the Soviet Union, Ukraine was struggling for independence when Bush arrived with a message of caution. "Some people have urged the United States to choose between supporting President Gorbachev and supporting independence-minded leaders throughout the U.S.S.R.," Bush said in Kiev. "I consider this a false choice." Bush added that "Freedom is not the same as independence" and warned against "suicidal nationalism." The New York Times's William Safire dubbed it the "Chicken Kiev speech," and it had indeed sent the wrong signal to reformers. Bush was, however, honestly wrestling with the churn of the time. As the coup unfolded, he wondered anew whether he could truly end the Cold War without serious bloodshed.

- "The thing is to be calm," Bush told his diary during the August coup. Dictating an imaginary message to Gorbachev, Bush said: "If I were to comment tonight, I would say: 'Mikhail, I hope you are well.'" The president continued: I hope they have not mistreated you. You have led your country in a fantastically constructive way, you've been attacked from the right and from the left, but you deserve enormous credit. Now, we don't know what the hell has happened to you, where you are, what condition you are in, but we were right to support you. I'm proud we have supported you, and there will be a lot of talking heads on television telling us what's been wrong, but you have done what's right and strong and good for your country, and I am proud that we have been supportive. I like you and I hope that you return to power, skeptical though I am of that....I hope that Yeltsin, who is calling for your return, stays firm; that he's not removed by the power of this ugly right wing coup.

Bush missed what he remembered as the clarity of the Persian Gulf crisis. "What had to happen was Iraq had to get out of Kuwait," he dictated. "Here, I'm not sure what has to happen. What I'd like to see is a return of Gorbachev and a continuous movement for democracy. I'm not quite sure I see how to get there."

- Early on Tuesday morning, August 20, 1991, Bush spoke to Yeltsin for twenty-five minutes. Yeltsin's headquarters in Moscow was surrounded. "He thinks they might storm the building; he says there are a hundred thousand people outside, and, all-in-all, this courageous man is standing by his principles," Bush dictated. Yeltsin reported that Gorbachev himself was surrounded by "three rings" of KGB and Soviet troops loyal to the plotters. (He also suggested that a delegation from the World Health Organization check on Gorbachev's condition.) Bush told Yeltsin that he was willing to call Yanayev, but he did not want to legitimize the junta. "No, absolutely, you should not do that," Yeltsin said. He asked Bush to "demand to speak on the phone with Gorbachev and to rally world leaders to the fact that the situation here is critical," both of which Bush did. Bush asked Yeltsin to stay in touch. ("I hope that the lines will not be cut off," Bush said.) By the next day, throngs of pro-Yeltsin supporters had filled the streets to fight the coup, and the Russian Supreme Soviet had supported Yeltsin's push against the plotters.

Back in Maine after a quick trip to Washington, Bush and Scowcroft set up headquarters in the living room of the main house at Walker's Point. As the rains whipped against the big windows, the two men worked the telephones. At one point they were handed a cable reporting that Margaret Thatcher was trying to insert herself into the crisis. The former prime minister was attempting to reach Gorbachev in the Crimea and had telephoned Reagan in California, Bush was told, saying, "We were in it at the beginning." As Bush noted in his diary, "This obviously annoys John Major tremendously. Some people simply can't let go." Yeltsin steadily took control, fighting off the plotters and rallying pro-democracy forces. In a call on the twenty-first, he told Bush that Bush's words against the coup were "an important statement by the American President in support of the Soviet people."

The weather eased enough for Bush to take a ride aboard Fidelity, and he was delighted by the thrill of speeding through the choppy seas. Back at the pier, John Magaw of the Secret Service approached Bush with a message: There was a call waiting in the house from "a Chief of State."

"Who?" Bush asked, but Magaw would not say. Returning to his bedroom, Bush, wearing a damp windbreaker and blue jeans, picked up the receiver to find Gorbachev on the other end of the line. (When Gorbachev had gotten through, he had said, "There is a God.") "My dearest George," Gorbachev said. "I'm so happy to hear your voice again."

"My God," Bush said, "I'm glad to hear you." They spoke for eleven minutes. "He sounded jubilant and he sounded upbeat," Bush dictated. "He was very, very grateful to me...for the way we've conducted ourselves."

The coup had failed, in part because of Yeltsin's defiance and in part because the conspirators were largely inept. The peaceful resolution of the crisis was, for Bush, a ratification of his essential diplomatic instincts of balance and moderation. "We could have overreacted, and moved troops, and scared the hell out of people," Bush told his diary. "We could have under-reacted by saying, 'Well, we'll deal with whoever is there.' But...I think we found the proper balance."

Three days later, in Moscow, Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist Party and announced that he believed the party itself should be dissolved. Though Gorbachev had survived the coup, Bush told his diary, he "appears to be weakened-Yeltsin dealing with him in a heavy handed manner. But ours is not to fine-tune every change inside the Soviet Union. Ours is to see, as best we can, things go in our direction, that they go toward world peace, that they go toward freedom and democracy."

- On Monday, September 2, 1991, Bush lunched on the terrace at Walker's Point. After a bowl of clam chowder, a small ham sandwich, and a glass of sherry, he sat alone on the porch soaking up the sun on a spectacularly clear day. Watching about forty seagulls on the rocks near the house, Bush noted that it was the forty-seventh anniversary of Chichi-Jima. "So much has happened, so very much in my life and in the world," Bush dictated on the porch.

He thought more of the future than of the past-in this case, about the 1992 presidential campaign. A political memorandum from Clayton Yeutter, who had succeeded Lee Atwater as head of the RNC, briefed Bush on the latest. Al Gore had announced that he would not seek the Democratic nomination, which, Yeutter wrote, "seems to have stimulated increased interest on the part of some of the second tier Democrats." One name Yeutter mentioned was Bill Clinton's. The "general feeling" among Arkansas Republicans, Yeutter wrote, was that Clinton would run, "though that could bring his personal life under increased scrutiny and could perhaps cause him some embarrassment. Notwithstanding the risk, they see him as too ambitious personally to resist the temptation. Even though he may judge his 1992 probabilities of success as being quite low, he'll want to posture himself for 1996." On the deck overlooking the sea, Bush dictated: "Bill Clinton appears to be in the race."

A charming and talented young southerner, William Jefferson Clinton was the same age as George W. Bush. Raised in Arkansas by a colorful, doting mother and an abusive stepfather, Clinton had been an undergraduate at Georgetown University, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and returned from England to study at Yale Law School before moving home to Arkansas to begin a political career. He lost a U.S. House race in 1974, won a statewide campaign as attorney general in 1976, and was elected governor in 1978. Nationally, Clinton was seen as a leader of a newly prominent moderate wing of the Democratic Party determined to break the Republican hold on the presidency.

Bush had gotten to know Clinton in working together on education issues, particularly at the Charlottesville governors' summit. "I like Bill," Bush told his diary on Monday, September 2, 1991. "He's a nice, decent guy." Bush's competitive sensibility, however, gave him confidence. "I think," Bush concluded, "I can beat him."

- On Tuesday, October 8, 1991, Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings took an unexpected turn. A former subordinate of Thomas's, Anita Hill, charged that the nominee had been guilty of sexual harassment. The allegations had leaked out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the White House suspected the staffs of liberal senators Ted Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio. Bush called it a "last-minute smear....[A] chicken-shit operation if I ever saw one. It is smear and innuendo, orchestrated, I am told, by a Metzenbaum and Kennedy staffer. They are guilty, in my view, of the worst kind of sleaze politics."

It was a terrible moment-personally for Thomas and politically for Bush. Yet the president never wavered in his support for his nominee. On the day after the Anita Hill accusations broke, Bush asked Thomas and his wife to come to the White House. Bush spoke with Thomas while Barbara took Mrs. Thomas for a walk. The president's visit with the nominee was "very emotional," Bush told his diary. "I am determined not to upset things by inadvertently venting my true feelings, which are a disgust for the process, disdain for those...militants who convict him in public, annoyance and anger at the groups who want to get him for abortion or get him for something [and are] now out there hanging their hat on the charge by this woman."

Walking the White House grounds with Bush on a splendid autumn day, Thomas "told me how brutal and terrible this had been; how he simply didn't understand it; how he tried very hard to conduct himself in a decent way all of this life," Bush dictated.