Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 25
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Destiny and Power Part 25

God, It Was Ghastly

How can you help us if you don't know what we're feeling?

-Questioner at the presidential town hall debate, Richmond, Virginia, October 1992 THE CALL WAS UNEXPECTED. In Washington for a C-SPAN appearance in early September, Ross Perot reached out to Jim Baker, and Baker invited Perot to meet at Baker's house on Foxhall Road. For two hours Perot held forth. "He waxed very emotional about the dirty tricks by the Republican Party-same old story," Bush told his diary after being briefed by Baker. "He hit George W...he indicated George W. was heavily involved in investigating his kids-which is a sheer lie."

Perot lectured Baker on the economy and threatened to reenter the race if he felt neither Clinton nor Bush was truly serious about deficit reduction. There was always a conspiratorial tone. Perot theorized that a Dallas businessman and Bush friend had Gennifer Flowers "warehoused" in a Dallas apartment in order "to spring her out at the appropriate time." He offered to speak to Bush directly, but Bush was not interested. "I see no reason to talk to him," Bush dictated. "I've lost all confidence in Ross Perot. I think he's a highly wired up, strange little egomaniac, nurtured on conspiracy theories."

By the time Baker had returned to the White House, Dick Cheney was calling to report that he had heard Perot was planning to reenter the race on October 1. The rumor had reached Cheney from the technology world, where Perot was said to have purchased "$9 million worth of computers" that could orchestrate telephone appeals to households. On Thursday, October 1, 1992, Perot could help himself no longer and announced that he was a candidate for president after all. It was a three-way campaign once again. The only constant was that Bush was behind no matter who else was in the race.

- In an interview with CNN's Larry King from San Antonio, Texas, Bush made his most aggressive moves yet against Clinton on the issue of character, attacking the challenger for not recalling details of a 1969 visit to Moscow (a Rhodes scholar trip) and for taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War while he was studying in England. It was thin gruel, but, when he considered it with the draft questions, Bush was truly offended by what he took to be Clinton's embrace of the counterculture a generation before. As Bush had said in Houston, accepting his renomination, "I bit the bullet, and he bit his nails."

In their first debate-held at Washington University in St. Louis on Sunday, October 11, 1992-Bush pressed the demonstrations argument again, but Clinton was ready, invoking Bush's father's opposition to Joe McCarthy to deflect what Clinton argued was a Bush assault on his patriotism. In his own estimation, Bush's attack on Clinton on the demonstrations was "a dud."

In Richmond at a town hallstyle debate on Thursday, October 15, all the strange new forces in American politics that had bedeviled Bush for over a year came together in one harrowing exchange in the Robins Center at the University of Richmond. A young woman rose from the audience to ask the three candidates a question: "How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives? And if it hasn't, how can you honestly find a cure for the economic problems of the common people if you have no experience in what's ailing them?"

Glancing at the watch he wore on his right wrist, Bush rose to respond. "Well, I think the national debt affects everybody. Obviously it has a lot to do with interest rates. It has-"

Bush was interrupted by Carole Simpson, the moderator.

"She's saying you personally," Simpson said.

The questioner spoke up again, too. "On a personal basis, how has it affected you-has it affected you personally?"

"Well, I'm sure it has," Bush said. "I love my grandchildren and I want to think that-"

Another interruption. "How?"

"I want to think that they're going to be able to afford an education," Bush said. "I think that that's an important part of being a parent. I-if the question-if you're-maybe I get it wrong. Are you suggesting that if somebody has means that the national debt doesn't affect them?"

"Well, what I'm saying-"

"I'm not sure I get it," Bush said, smiling awkwardly. "Help me with the question and I'll try to answer it."

"Well, I've had friends that have been laid off from jobs," the questioner said. "I know people who cannot afford to pay the mortgage on their homes; their car payment. I have personal problems with the national debt. But how has it affected you? And if you have no experience in it, how can you help us if you don't know what we're feeling?"

Simpson stepped in to try to help Bush. "I think she means more the recession, the economic problems today the country faces, rather than the deficit."

Bush valiantly tried once more, saying: Well, you ought to-you ought to be in the White House for a day and hear what I hear and see what I see and read the mail I read and touch the people that I touch from time to time. I was in the Lomax A.M.E. Church. It's a black church just outside of Washington, D.C. And I read in the-in the bulletin about teenage pregnancies, about the difficulty that families are having to meet ends-to make ends meet. I talk to parents. I mean, you've got to care. Everybody cares if people aren't doing well. But I don't think-I don't think it's fair to say, "You haven't had cancer, therefore you don't know what it's like." I don't think it's fair to say, you know, whatever it is, that if you haven't been hit by it personally-but everybody's affected by the debt because of the tremendous interest that goes into paying on that debt, everything's more expensive. Everything comes out of your pocket and my pocket.

So it's, it's sad, but I think in terms of the recession, of course you feel it when you're President of the United States. And that's why I'm trying to do something about it by stimulating the export, investing more, better education systems. Thank you. I'm glad to clarify.

Simpson invited Clinton, who had been watching Bush with a virtually wolfish face, to take his turn. He rose and walked directly to the edge of the audience and held the questioner in his gaze. "Tell me how it's affected you again. You know people who've lost their jobs and lost their homes."

"Well, yeah, uh-huh," the woman said, agreeing.

"Well, I've been governor of a small state for twelve years....I have seen what's happened in this last four years when in my state, when people lose their jobs, there's a good chance I'll know them by their names," Clinton said. "When a factory closes I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them. And I've been out here for thirteen months meeting in meetings just like this ever since October with people like you all over America, people that have lost their jobs, lost their livelihood, lost their health insurance."

There it all was: the economic concerns predominating; the public empathy; the showmanship of politics in the new media age-none of which Bush had come close to mastering.

Credit 45.1 During a Richmond, Virginia, presidential debate with Ross Perot and Bill Clinton, Bush struggled-unsuccessfully-to connect with voters in a town hall forum.

- The morning after, even Barbara Bush was ready to start hitting harder.

"I'm going negative," she told her husband.

"Well, Bar, you're the one that always said you didn't like the negative."

"I know, but the truth has to come out," Barbara replied.

In private, he shifted between fatalism and hope. "The debates seem like ancient history and the results, let's face it, were not good," Bush told his diary on Wednesday, October 21, 1992.

Yet he could not completely accept the idea that he was going to lose. Of a Penthouse magazine account of the ClintonGennifer Flowers liaison, Bush mused, "What happens if he should win and then this is just the tip of the iceberg? What does it do to the Presidency, the trust of which I've tried to uphold? The honor of which I've tried to live by, serve by?"

The year grew ever stranger. In late October, Perot said he had left the race in July in part because of rumors that Republican dirty tricksters were planning on embarrassing his daughter by doctoring photographs for public release and by disrupting her wedding. "I could not allow my daughter's happiest day of her life, or one of them, to be ruined because of me....I stepped back to protect her," Perot said. He also alleged a wiretapping plot against him and his business. Marlin Fitzwater called the raft of charges "loony," and Bush himself said the allegations were "crazy."

In the last days of the race Bush's internal numbers started improving. Then, as Bush finished a rally in St. Louis, he received word that Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-contra independent counsel, had struck again, indicting former secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger for obstruction. Walsh cited new notes of Weinberger's from one of the January 1986 meetings on the Iran arms initiative that included the phrase "VP approved." Bush did not believe there was anything new in the latest blow from the independent counsel, but the press coverage of the re-indictment was intense. The campaign hierarchy, Bush dictated, was "worried and panicked that this will stop our momentum. Well, it might, but so be it-[I] told the truth and that's all you can do."

Whatever movement there had been in the polls was over. "The national press is still hammering away on Iran," Bush dictated. "A frantic, desperate, sinking Clinton tries to rap my character on this issue." Except that Clinton was not sinking: He was holding steady with a working lead over the president.

The final days were one long thunderstorm in this, the last campaign in which Bush himself would appear on a ballot. What had begun twenty-eight years before, in the 1964 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, with occasional crowds of one or two or perhaps three people, was coming to an end-and he could not wait for it all to be over.

There was news that Saddam was going to hold a rally of five hundred thousand Iraqis in Baghdad to celebrate a Bush defeat. There was Bush's private assertion, in the face of the Perot challenge, that he himself "would vote for Bill Clinton in a minute before Ross Perot-I know too much about Ross Perot and his paranoia." There were the nervous campaign chieftains, the sleeping grandchildren, the scratchy voice, and the rejected attacks. (Baker, Bush dictated, "comes in with three different assaults they want me to make on Clinton. One of them is so strident. One of them raising the question of Gennifer Flowers, so blazingly, and I said, 'No.' They were anxious to snuff out Iran-Contra, and Doro overheard Teeter telling somebody as he walked along, 'We have sent the guy three different scripts and he wouldn't use any of them.'") And there were Bush's frenzied, loopy attacks on Clinton and Gore, including his cry that Millie, the springer spaniel, knew "more about foreign policy" than the Democratic "bozos" challenging him.

The hotel suites blurred together, his sinuses were shot, and he was so tired that he couldn't sleep. David McCullough's biography of Harry Truman sat unfinished. Bush was just too worn out to read. Only Mary Matalin was cheerful-"We're going to win," she would say, "going to win." George W. joined the plane for the final push on Monday, November 2, 1992. With his eldest son and with Jim Baker, Bush sat in his office on Air Force One, talking of polls and sports, telling bad jokes and complaining about Perot.

Arriving in Akron, Bush received the Oak Ridge Boys in his office on the plane, and the group sang some gospel songs. Thinking of his own dad, the president teared up during "Amazing Grace." Leaning over to his son, Bush said, "Boy, would my father ever have loved to have been here hearing these guys sing." Musing to his diary, Bush dictated: "And then I think of how some in the press say, 'Oh, Bush puts on this love of country music.' [They don't know] our background, [they don't] know the joy we had at Grove Lane [when I was] 10 years old listening to Dad's Silver Dollar Quartet sing. But it's no use trying to explain to them."

Between stops Bush tried to nap. Jim Baker was dozing on a couch in the presidential bedroom, and George W. was restless, "milling around nervously," Bush dictated. The president changed into a clean blue shirt and a gray suit for a rally in Louisville. Gazing out the window as Air Force One began to land, he watched the sun break through the clouds.

"A good omen," Baker said.

"Yes, I think it is," Bush replied, absently.

At last he returned home to Houston. There was a final rally, a huge event. Cheryl Ladd, Bob Hope, Charlton Heston, Ted Williams, Arnold Palmer, the Gatlin Brothers, Naomi Judd, Lee Greenwood: The place, Bush recalled, was "rocking and rolling." It was nearly ten P.M., and Bush was energized by the crowd. He spoke of coming to Texas forty-four years before, of making his and his family's life there. He had started out here, and now he was returning home at the end of what he called "the battle of my life."

The silliness of recent weeks-the giddy talk of "bozos"-was gone. The Bush who spoke in the closing hours of the campaign was more serious, more somber, more authentic. "You know, I will readily contend that I've never been too hot with words, and I think you know that," Bush said.

In fact, some of the more elite pundits say I can't finish a sentence. Well, they may be right from time to time. But I'll tell you something, though. I think you also know, I think especially the people here do, that I care very deeply about our nation. And I believe that we must treat this precious treasure with great care. America is something that has been passed on to us. And we must shape it. We must improve it. We must help people and be kind to people. And then we must pass that on to our kids and to our grandkids.

The Bushes were driven to the Houstonian Hotel. They decided not to turn on any of the five televisions in their suite, falling into bed for the night. "I worry so about others and the problems facing the country, and how almost insurmountable they seem at times," Bush dictated at the end of the evening on Monday, November 2, 1992. "Yet I do have this great confidence in America-unbelievable confidence-that we can do it and solve the problems so the country can move. And so it is, the end of campaign '92, the end of the ugliest period in my life"-the last words he spoke to his diary the day before the votes were cast and his fate decided.

- He slept terribly, waking twice in the night with stomach pain. At six thirty in the morning, Bush went for a run and maintained the news blackout that he and Barbara had imposed on themselves the evening before: no TV, no newspapers.

After his run Bush stopped off to buy some fishing tackle, threw some horseshoes with George W. and Marvin, then lunched with Barbara, Marvin's wife, Margaret, and Scowcroft. (The president enjoyed a bit of frozen yogurt.) After a quick haircut, Bush got the first wave of bad news from Baker. The exit polls in Pennsylvania and Ohio, Bush told his diary, were "terrible." Then came New Jersey and Michigan, and the message was the same. "It looks like a blowout," Bush dictated. "I have this strange feeling deep inside. I guess I'm hurt, but a strange feeling of relief. I think it's the ugliness of the hour, the ugliness of the year."

It was over. Clinton won 43 percent of the popular vote; Bush, 37 percent; and Perot, remarkably, 19 percent. Clinton's margin in the electoral college was decisive, 370 to 168 for Bush. Perot carried no states.

Had Ross Perot not run in 1992, would Bush have defeated Clinton? Bush believed so, and it is true that Perot's persistent arguments about the failing American economy hurt the president. Exit polling, however, found that Perot tended to draw about equally from Bush and Clinton, and Clinton himself long remembered that his numbers had been hurt when Perot spent millions in the last weekend of the campaign on TV spots attacking the Democratic nominee's record in Arkansas. While it is impossible to know what would have happened had Perot not been in the race, Bush's political vulnerability in the twelfth year of Republican rule, though exacerbated by Perot, was wide and deep once the conventional wisdom about Bush's economic and domestic stewardship took hold. This much was certain: Like Buchanan's primary insurgency and Gingrich's revolt over taxes, Perot's populist challenge was a sign that American politics was moving into a far different world than Bush had known. A sizable number of voters didn't want steady as she goes. They wanted a revolution against the status quo.

- As the returns had come in, Bush had been both stoic and sad. The Bush family was there in force. "At first I had a feeling of a burden being lifted," Bush dictated late that night, "and then I saw the hurt in the kids; they're crying."

To Clinton and to the nation that evening, Bush had been grace itself, congratulating the president-elect and announcing that his plans were mainly "to get very active in the grandchild business."

In private, he was emotionally fragile. He returned to Andrews Air Force Base the next day and boarded Marine One, which landed at the Pentagon: The White House lawn was filled with administration officials to welcome him back. His son Marvin was riding with him. As the presidential motorcade was crossing Memorial Bridge, a uniformed soldier on the sidewalk stood at attention and saluted.

The president grew emotional. "I let everybody down," he said, shaking his head.

"I know you'll do it, but you've got to get it together," Marvin said. "You've got about three minutes."

The president recovered his composure and presented a collected face to the world. The arrival at the White House "was emotional and it was a long, long gamut to run near the fountain on the South Lawn up to the White House. I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it without emotion, but we did." One young soldier gave Bush a thumbs-up in solidarity. "I must say I thought to myself, 'How in God's name did this country elect a draft dodger?' I didn't feel it with bitterness, I just felt it almost generational. What am I missing?" The wounds were bearable-but only just. "It's almost like living with what I might imagine it would be like to have a cancer-painful-but you can accommodate it," Bush dictated. He was no longer, it seemed, the kind of man a majority of Americans wanted to be in charge of their affairs.

"The overseas cables are wonderful, quote, 'You'll have your place in history.'" Bush dictated. "That seems to be the central theme, but domestically it's the same: don't stand for anything, don't care about people, haven't done anything, squandered your popularity, and on and on it goes-and brutal in its intensity," Bush dictated at Camp David five days after the defeat. "All I want is time, I think, time to unwind."

- Bush remembered the pain the most-a pain that never fully went away. "It was terrible," he recalled in retirement. "God, it was ghastly. Your whole life is based on trying to accomplish stuff, and losing hurts. It hurt a lot. My problem was the feeling of letting people down, letting the people around you down. You know, who really believed in what we were doing. And you let them down. That was the sad part for me, and I felt very strongly about that. I still do."

FORTY-SIX.

The Closing of an Era

You ran the worst campaign I ever saw, but you're going out a beloved figure [and] everybody will tell you that.

-TIP O'NEILL to George H. W. Bush HE WAS WORRIED, ostensibly, about his dog. On the Thursday morning after the election, Bush was walking Ranger, one of the family's English springers, around the White House grounds. "Ranger [is] perky [and] sees a squirrel," Bush told his diary. "It's raining and he jumps with that marvelous jump where he kind of goes straight up and kind of comes straight down. His head is up and I call him and [his] ears perk, and I'm thinking, 'What in the hell will we do with this marvelous free spirit of a dog'" when they were back in Houston, where the Bushes planned to build a house on a small lot. Poor Ranger-what would they do with his energy?

Bush might as well have been talking about himself. For decades he had lived a life of epic scope on the grandest of stages. Retirement-in this case, forced retirement-was a foreign, disconcerting concept. Yes, he had long fantasized about a surprise withdrawal from politics, but such fantasies usually came at moments of passing stress or irritation. Now he had no choice in the matter. Like Ranger, he was, in his way, a "marvelous free spirit" soon to lose the privileges and joys of life at the White House.

The right was crude in its self-satisfaction at Bush's fall. In a sophomoric gesture, a model of Bush's head was served on a platter at a dinner hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation-a prank of "extraordinarily good taste," Bush dictated with some bitterness. Barbara, meanwhile, was "that same restless wonderful wife that holds onto the seams [like] in 1976, shifting gears, rushing down to buy that house, buy a nest." Driven by his curious but by now familiar combination of humility and stubbornness, Bush was doubtful that anything he did would help with what he was to call the "L-word," his legacy. Time and history would sort it all out. The man who had gone from the apex of postGulf War popularity to such a lackluster showing in the general election understood that things change, often and rapidly. So why bother worrying about it?

A week after Election Day, the Bushes rode up to Capitol Hill for a dinner with the Senate Republican caucus. "I dreaded going," Bush told his diary, but Bob Dole went out of his way to pay tribute to his old rival. "He choked up, he showed a warm side that many didn't feel he ever had," Bush dictated. "He was so generous in his comments and so thoughtful; and I thought to myself, 'Here we are, a guy that I fought bitterly with in the New Hampshire primary and now I salute him as a true leader, a wonderful leader, a guy that bent over backwards to do what the President wanted.'"

It was an emotional night-the beginning of the end of his presidency. Bush sat next to Republican senator Alan Simpson's wife, Ann, at dinner, and they quietly discussed the election. Bush told her that he felt "that I had let people down, that there was a generational disconnect and the thing that discouraged me was my failure to click with the American people on values, duty, and country, service, honor, decency. All the things that I really believe; they never came through-never ever. And the media missed it, and the Clinton generation didn't understand it, and I told her I felt a little out of it and that I had not been able to communicate better what I really believe."

Returning to the White House, Barbara went to bed. Bush stayed up taking care of paperwork and mail, then walked outside. The night was clear, the view from the grounds matchless. Bush gazed at the Washington Monument and took in the vista across the Potomac. From this perspective, Bush thought, even the gray Treasury building had its charms. He remembered that there was an all-night Veterans Day vigil to read the names of the dead at the Vietnam Memorial. The war was on his mind; he had had an emotional exchange with John McCain earlier in the evening in the receiving line at the Senate dinner. He was suddenly seized with a desire to go over to the memorial, quietly, and take his turn paying tribute to the fallen. To visit in the daylight hours, he thought, would "look like I was sticking it in Clinton's eye." In the darkness, however, unannounced and with minimal fanfare-perhaps that would work.

Reaching the West Wing, Bush decided that he would go-right then. He told the Secret Service, and the president and the First Lady-he had roused her from her sleep-took the short ride to the memorial. To the surprise of the few overnight observers, the president of the United States read a few names, saluted the fallen, and left as quietly as he had come.

- On Wednesday, November 18, 1992, Bill Clinton called on the man he had defeated. Bush came out of the White House to greet the president-elect in the driveway, a cordial beginning to a two-hour meeting. In the Oval Office, the two men discussed the world scene. "He's very friendly, very respectful, asked my advice on certain things," Bush told his diary. "Talked at length about Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia, etc., and the difficulties that he might anticipate there. I told him I thought that was most likely to be the prime trouble spot. We did not discuss China, and I'm sorry that we didn't. I just forgot it. The subjects covered were: sanctions on Yugoslavia, the war in Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, the instability in Russia, START II, Ukrainian relations, the Baltics, the conflicts in the former USSR, Uruguay Round...Maastricht treaty, the peace process-Middle East, Iraq, Libya Pan Am 103, Iran, Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Liberia, Angola."

Bush gave his successor a thorough tour-Hillary was calling on Barbara the next day-showing him the pool, the horseshoe pit, the putting green, and the weight room. Clinton's reaction: "Wow." As they parted, Bush said, "Bill, I want to tell you something. When I leave here, you're going to have no trouble from me. The campaign is over, it was tough but I'm out of here and I will do nothing to complicate your work and I just want you to know that." Clinton was appreciative, the visit warm. ("Speculation on Hillary Clinton and what it's going to be like with Hillary, and what will Hillary do," Bush dictated in mid-November. "All the women in the press corps are all for her, I'm sure, but beyond that she's going to have some problems. She is very militant and pro-liberal-cause, and that's going to get her into some difficulties.") - He had had only one request of Clinton: that the new president continue the Bush administration's "Points of Light" initiative. Drawing on the phrase from his address to the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Bush had been determined to use the presidency to press the case for voluntarism. Nearly four years before, just ten days after his inauguration, on Monday, January 30, 1989, he had convened a meeting in the Roosevelt Room to discuss the question. It meant a lot to him: The only structural change he made in the White House after taking over from Reagan was to create an Office of National Service. "Any definition of a successful life," Bush said, "must include serving others"-an observation he would often repeat. "By co-opting a piece of the very definition of 'success,' which was certainly America's secular god coming out of the '80s especially, the statement would in fact be far more powerful in its own way than politics and policy, because of course culture is more powerful than politics," recalled Gregg Petersmeyer, who directed the White House Office of National Service. The Points of Light initiative created an infrastructure for voluntarism and celebrated daily examples of volunteers who were making a difference. As Bush had put it in his first post-1992 election radio address: "There are no magic solutions to our problems. The real answers lie within us. We need more than a philosophy of entitlement. We need to all pitch in, lend a hand, and do our part to help forge a brighter future for this country."

- After the Clinton visit and tour, Nancy Ellis telephoned her brother: Dorothy Bush was fading. "It looks this time like it might be the end," a tearful Bush told his diary after talking to his sister. "I want to hug her one more time."

After the misery of the long campaign year, the pain of the defeat, and the exquisite agony of hosting his conqueror in the White House-an agony that Bush, his mother's son, concealed brilliantly, as she had taught him-after all of this, now he was to lose the woman who had given him so much. He and Barbara got on the telephone to Greenwich, but they could not be sure that Mrs. Bush understood: "I wonder if she knows that this is her middle-size [son] calling her saying, 'We love you Mum,' and this is Bar saying, 'We love you very much,' and all we heard was this deep breathing."

Bush considered flying to Connecticut immediately, but his brother Jonathan said, "Oh no, don't do that. She's done this before." The president went to bed in the White House on that Wednesday evening worrying, worrying, worrying about his ninety-one-year-old mother who lay dying 250 miles to the north. He tossed in his sleep. "I might not have a chance to kiss her good night," he told his diary. "Tough times, tough negative times. This one [is] so close to the heart, so very close, indeed." He woke early and, at five minutes to seven in the morning, announced that he was going to Greenwich. Since Barbara had to remain to keep her appointment with Hillary Clinton, the president asked Doro to come with him. They flew on an Air Force jet with a smaller-than-usual security and press entourage.

Credit 46.1 The Bushes greet the Clintons at the White House on Inauguration Day 1993. The defeat, Bush admitted to himself, "hurt, hurt, hurt," but he and Barbara were determined to bid farewell with grace.

Mrs. Bush was breathing with difficulty, and Bush and his daughter wept by her bedside. The president reached over and leafed through his mother's "frayed Bible." In its pages were notes that he had written her from Andover and a birthday card he had mailed her from the navy.

He held her hand, thinking of all the times she had lovingly rubbed his through the years. After a few hours he and Doro left for Washington. To Bush, the sight of his mother struggling to breathe put the rest of life in proper perspective. "I don't know that Mum knows I'm President of the United States," he told his diary, but "I do know that is not important anymore."

In the late afternoon-it was just after five P.M.-Bush was back in the capital, performing a ceremonial presidential chore, receiving the credentials of ambassadors on the first floor of the White House. The envoy from the Bahamas came through last. While chatting with him, Bush noticed his close aide Patty Presock whisper something to Barbara, who was sitting with the ambassador's wife and children. Barbara rose and approached her husband. "Your Mum has died," she told him.

Nancy Ellis believed that George's visit had been their mother's final piece of earthly business. "Mum knew you were there and then she decided that was it," she said to her brother. She told reporters, "Mrs. Bush Sr. was waiting for the President and after he left today, she just let go."

The calls started coming into the White House, and Bush appreciated them-including Bill Clinton's-but in his grief he could not believe that those outside his family really understood what the world had just lost. "How many times she taught us [to] be kind to the other guy," he told his diary, "'never hurt feelings, love.'" Her funeral was held at Christ Church in Greenwich four days later. Prescott Jr. read a letter his mother had written for the occasion. Mrs. Bush's ashes were buried next to her husband, near Robin's gravestone.

- Between his grief and the winding down of the presidency, Bush cared less and less about lingering issues, including questions about a search of Clinton's passport files at the State Department during the campaign. A Bush political appointee at State had ordered a search of Clinton's travel records from his student days, Clinton recalled, "chasing down bogus rumors that I had gone to Moscow to pursue anti-war activities or had tried to apply for citizenship in another country to avoid the draft." Newsweek had broken the story of alleged tampering with files, and after the election the outcry from the press grew. An embarrassed-and exhausted-Jim Baker offered Bush his resignation, which Bush waved away. It was "absurd," Bush said, to think Baker, "the most honorable guy," had "done something wrong." Al Gore called the episode a "McCarthyite abuse of power," but the FBI found that there had been no tampering with the files. A three-year investigation by an independent counsel concluded no laws had been broken. (The special prosecutor, Joseph DiGenova, added that the matter "should never have been referred for prosecution.") Clinton himself dismissed the episode. "It was just all part of the deal," he said, shrugging, more than twenty years later, after he and Bush had become friendly. "Politics is a contact sport."

Bittersweet economic news came in as the weeks passed. Consumer confidence was up, which the press attributed to Clinton's election, but soon came a statistic about things on Bush's watch: The economy had been growing at about 4 percent in the third quarter of the year, more than the early estimate of 2.7 percent. "This one they can't give credit to Clinton for," Bush told his diary. "They might try, but they simply can't do it."

His diary entries became more sporadic as the autumn wore on. "I haven't felt like dictating," Bush told his diary on Sunday, November 29, 1992. "My moods have been up and down. Mum's death really got to me, as I'm sure it did the rest of the family." When he was in Maine, he could not walk around Walker's Point without seeing her everywhere, remembering "the numbers of times we'd race up the little pebble path-in the old days pebbles-to tell her what had happened, who won, how it had gone. We ran in our bathing suits, with Mum in hot pursuit, to jump into the ocean."

He had a farewell lunch with Sonny Montgomery and other House friends on the Hill. After the meal of country ham, red-eye gravy, eggs, and grits, Tip O'Neill came by; he was, Bush dictated, "just great, and warm, and friendly."

"You ran the worst campaign I ever saw," O'Neill told Bush, "but you're going out a beloved figure [and] everybody will tell you that."

The days grew shorter, but one trouble spot attracted Bush's sustained attention: Somalia, on the horn of Africa, was riven by warring factions. The civil struggle had created a humanitarian crisis, and Bush saw an opportunity to put American power to work to save, in his words, "thousands of innocents." "There is a feeling that we won't help black nations, so that would be a peripheral benefit showing that the United States does care," he told his diary on Monday, November 30. "There is a feeling in the Muslim world that we don't care about Muslims. A large U.S. humanitarian effort backed by force would help in that category."

"I understand the United States alone cannot right the world's wrongs," Bush told the nation in a midday announcement that twenty-eight thousand U.S. troops would go to Somalia as part of a multinational force. "But we also know that some crises in the world cannot be resolved without American involvement, that American action is often necessary as a catalyst for broader involvement in the community of nations."

Already hinting of a quick trip to Somalia to thank the forces for their service, Bush considered making it a bipartisan occasion. "I even toy with the idea of taking Bill Clinton," Bush told his diary on Tuesday, December 8, 1992. "He's going to need a good introduction to the Armed Services given his record, given his position on gays in the military, but I think that might be seen as a big grandstand play so I doubt that that will work." Heading into the holidays, USA Today reported Bush's approval rating was 49 percent-up fifteen points since the election. The newspaper attributed the change to the economy. Bush, however, had a slightly harsher view: "I attribute it to the fact that I'm not getting bashed every single day by the media."

Four years before, during the 1988 campaign, the comedian Dana Carvey of Saturday Night Live had begun working on a Bush impression. "The key rhythms for the voice were John Wayne and Mr. Rogers," recalled Carvey, who added in Bush's eclectic arm gestures. (The president sometimes resembled a windmill, if windmills pointed and chopped their arms in the air.) Sig Rogich, a Bush friend and adviser, would send the president videotapes of Carvey's skits, which Bush loved. After the loss to Clinton, the president called Carvey to ask him to perform at the White House. "Come over and cheer up the troops," Bush said. "They're feeling down." Carvey and his wife spent the night in the Residence; the next day Carvey lit up the East Room with a full George Bush routine. The two men remained close in Bush's retirement. (The former president liked to ask Carvey to do Carvey's Ross Perot impression, and Bush in return, did "a pretty good James Cagney," Carvey recalled.) - With the work on the START II treaty nearing completion-the agreement eliminated an entire class of Russian missiles, the SS-18s-Bush made a sentimental journey to Moscow to sign the deal. "It's a great thing, a wonderful thing to bow out on, and it's important that we do it for mankind-eliminating these SS-18s," Bush dictated.

Bush's diaries themselves became an issue as his presidency ended. In September 1992, Patty Presock, a deputy assistant to the president, was at work in her office on the third floor of the Residence when she began to go through some materials that Bush aide Don Rhodes had delivered to her from the president's second-floor safes. Presock quickly realized that she was reading transcripts of a Bush diary that dated from 1986. A short time earlier (in July 1992) Presock, who had not known that Bush had kept a diary, had been told in a phone conversation initiated by Boyden Gray's office that the Iran-contra independent counsel had requested (though not subpoenaed) any such notes and that "Boyden seemed to think there was a diary." After reading the pages that Rhodes had brought her, Presock went to the president. Bush was unworried. Gray, he said, knew all about everything, so there couldn't be any problem. They then called Gray, who had the opposite reaction. Bush believed that Gray had known about and approved the diary keeping; Gray maintained that he had not known about Bush's extensive dictations dating back to 1986. In the wake of the emergence of the transcripts, Gray had a decision to make: Would he immediately turn the documents over to the independent counsel, or would he wait until after the election in November?

Gray decided to wait. "It was a very, very difficult call, but I did not trust the Office of the Independent Counsel not to leak the material before the election, even though the material was exculpatory," Gray recalled. He recommended to the president that they hold off, and Bush agreed, deferring to Gray's judgment. The diaries were withheld. Once they were handed over, in December 1992, the prosecutors found nothing that led to any criminal charge.

Still, Bush hated the headlines and the editorial speculation that he had something to hide about Iran-contra. There was, meanwhile, an internal administration debate over whether to pardon Caspar Weinberger. As Bush put it, the chief issue was the charge that he was letting Weinberger off the hook in order "to cover my own ass." In a memo to the president, Boyden Gray recommended pardons not only for Weinberger but for several other figures, among them Robert McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, and two CIA officials. The family was in favor. "George feels I ought to do it; he says Jeb feels I ought to do it," Bush dictated on Tuesday, December 22, 1992. "Bar is marginal on it." Bush issued the pardons, closing the saga that had begun in late 1986. The news was announced on Christmas Eve, and the reaction was predictable: Lawrence Walsh accused the president of continuing the "Iran-contra cover up."