Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 26
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Destiny and Power Part 26

- After Christmas at Camp David and the annual hunting trip to Beeville, Texas, with Will Farish ("I slept well, except [for] waking up in the middle of the night, thrashing around about the prosecutor," Bush dictated), the president went overseas, first to Somalia and then on to Moscow for the signing of START II. At the treaty ceremonies with Boris Yeltsin, the scope of global change struck Bush yet once more. "The closing of an era," he told his diary on the third day of the new year.

He returned to Washington for the final days. Bush decided to award Ronald Reagan the Presidential Medal of Freedom and invited the Reagans to the White House. Bush, who understood that many Republicans believed he had fallen from power because he had strayed too far from Reaganite principles, could easily have forgone the whole thing. Why give your critics an easy occasion to compare you unfavorably to your predecessor? But because Reagan had made so much possible, both for the country and for Bush himself, the forty-first president wanted to honor the fortieth with an award that would not long be in Bush's gift.

Nancy unnecessarily complicated things, offending Barbara. Mrs. Reagan called Dick Cheney to say that she was hoping he would come "because," Bush told his diary, "they needed supporters of Ron's there, as if to imply, at least to Bar, that we weren't supporters, and that Cheney was on her side, not ours."

For Bush, the presentation in the East Room was alternately warm and uncomfortable. He spoke emotionally of his "friend and mentor," praising Reagan for his role in the American story. Yet, as Bush told his diary, "That was a tense ceremony, there were a lot of people there that had been super-critical of me-'don't stand for anything, against everything Reagan stood for,' nasty, ugly-and there they were in the White House." Reagan, however, reciprocated Bush's regard with apparent sincerity, and the applause for both men was sustained. "He seemed much older to me," Bush dictated. "Nancy apparently never even said thank you to Barbara."

Throughout the ceremony Bush had been thinking about an ongoing attack on Iraq. Apparent missile sites south of the 32nd parallel were in violation of postwar agreements, and Bush authorized air strikes. "[Saddam] is pushing and beating his chest and telling his people that he's the winner," Bush dictated, "when he is a wimp and a loser."

- George Strait and Brian Mulroney were the Bushes' guests for their last weekend at Camp David. (As were Warren Christopher and Vernon Jordan, the two men heading Clinton's transition team, whom the president, in a classic Bush touch, had invited up.) Bush was doing what he loved: juggling global phone calls about the strikes against Iraq while hosting an eclectic house party. Strait sang at a Saturday vespers service in the chapel, spent the night, and settled down with the president to watch the NFC and AFC championship games on Sunday.

On their final night in the White House, the Bushes hosted a small dinner for Prescott Bush, Jr., the Jonathan Bushes, and the Billy Grahams. Barbara was maintaining a brave and cheerful face, though she had fallen while packing in the West Sitting Hall and had eleven stitches in her arm. At evening's end there was a stroll around the grounds and then early to bed.

The twentieth of January came at last. It was a cold, clear, blue morning, and Bush rose, dressed, and walked the dogs. Ranger ran ahead, leaping as usual. At nine o'clock the president had his final national security briefing. "There was an unreal feeling to it because as we looked at Bosnia or Saddam Hussein, it was a matter of, 'Ok, so what?'" Bush dictated. "Nothing to do about it, nothing to follow-up on, nothing to suggest we try. Had an almost eerie feeling."

Scowcroft and the CIA men left, and Bush sat alone for a moment in the bare Oval Office. The desk had been cleaned of paperwork, the framed pictures packed up. He looked out the windows at the horseshoe pit, remembering the tournaments and the good times. He watched a female Secret Service agent walk past the pool toward the driveway. He could see the Washington Monument, the green grass of the Ellipse, and the flags around the base of the great white obelisk. He turned back to the desk, away from the barren Rose Garden, to leave a note for his successor. The envelope, Bush thought, looked lonely on the big desk-the desk where he had sat for so many hours and decided so many things, surrounded by men he trusted as he faced the trials of war and the tribulations of a troubled home front.

He was ready to go, or as ready as any man who had been so painfully dismissed by the voters of his nation could be. He would not cry, not in public, but he never knew if he'd make it through a given moment. Lord, how many speeches he had rushed through, nearly breathless, impatient with the text before him, trying to finish before he broke down.

In a matter of hours it would not matter. He would be fine at the Capitol, amid the ceremony of the inauguration and the official leave-taking. It was the quieter goodbyes beforehand that worried him-the telephone operators and the household staff. These he dreaded. After those, he hoped, it was all going to be okay. But only after.

Someone had mentioned the polls, which were up: Bush was leaving on a good note. He didn't care anymore-not much, anyway. "I'm saying, 'Well, that's nice, that's very nice, but I didn't finish the job.'" Yet it had been more than a job for him. It was a calling, something sacred, though he would have resisted such talk, waving it away. Too grand, too much show business.

No matter. His discomfort with grand terminology and weighty historical verdicts did not mean that grand terminology and weighty historical verdicts did not apply. They did, and in these last moments of power, alone in the Oval Office, Bush allowed himself a stream-of-consciousness reflection on what the previous four years had meant to him. "As I told Bill Clinton, I feel the same sense of wonder and majesty about this office today as I did when I first walked in here." As the sun streamed in the windows, he went on: I've tried to keep it; I've tried to serve here with no taint of dishonor; no conflict of interest; nothing to sully this beautiful place and this job I've been privileged to hold....[Misjudgments] maybe on this issue or that, but never misconduct, never doing anything that would tarnish and hurt the Presidency. And yet no one seems to know that, and no one seems to care. They say, "What motivates you?" And I used to be teased about "service for the sake of service." Well, it does motivate me. People should give; but it's service with honor, service with a flair for decency and hopefully kindness. I know the latter never came through because the press won that one-"cold hearted," "disconnected," "not caring about people." But I don't think they can lay a glove on me in the final analysis on serving without conflict; never for personal gain; always bearing in mind the respect for the office that I've been privileged to hold; the house I've been privileged to live in; the office in which I've tried to serve.

He thought of Barbara, who was preparing to receive the Clintons and the Gores for coffee before the ride up to the Capitol, and then the trip home to Houston. "Barbara is wonderful," he dictated. "She's strong and what a First Lady she's been-popular and wonderful." The generational shift now under way-from the Bushes to a couple young enough to be their children-was, he admitted to himself, difficult. "Suddenly eclipsed by the new wave, the lawyer, the wife with the office in the White House; but time will tell and history will show that [Barbara] was beloved because she was real, because she cared, because she gave of herself. She has been fantastic in every way, and my, how the people around her love her, my, how that staff rejoices in the fact she came their way."

They had been joking between themselves about the move to Houston-about Barbara's cooking, and the end of the concierge service of the White House. "We kid about no staff, no valets, no shined shoes, no pressed suits," Bush told his tape recorder as the minutes ticked by. He liked that Barbara, her eye on writing a memoir, was finding so much pleasure in reviewing her own diary and papers from their long journey, reading him bits and pieces that had been put into her computer. "The joy she gets from that little thing is [a] wonder to behold, and she's writing and thinking and laughing," Bush dictated. "She goes, 'Remember this?' and then reads me a long thing from 1968 or 1975. It's amazing."

As he prepared to leave, he ended his diary.

"This," he said aloud, "is my last day as President of the United States of America."

The telephone rang, interrupting his reverie. Boyden Gray was calling, asking Bush to sign a document that would preserve the work the administration had been doing on computers. Bush was happy to do it. In the final analysis, though, he posed a rhetorical question to the empty room: "Who gives a damn now?"

There were more household goodbyes. The Clintons and the Gores were due for coffee before long. Bush knew that his watch was ending, his duty done.

PART VII.

In the Twilight.

1993 to 2016.

When you've made the big calls, it's tough to be on the sidelines-but you've got to be.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH.

Credit p7.1.

Jeb, George W., Dick Cheney, Bush 2000 campaign chairman Don Evans, and the forty-first president discuss the close vote in Florida at the Texas governor's mansion in Austin, election night 2000..

FORTY-SEVEN.

I'd Like to See Old George Bush.

I suggest that you establish very fast that you are your own man, that you agree on some issues with me and that undoubtedly there will be many where you would have voted differently.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH to George W., about the son's congressional campaign, 1977.

Chart your own course, not just on the issues but on defining yourselves.

-BUSH to George W. and Jeb, 1998.

HUGH LIEDTKE, Bush's old Texas business partner, had offered the former president the use of his house on the Gulf of Mexico. In late January 1993, not quite ten days after the Clinton inauguration, the Bushes accepted Liedtke's hospitality for a seaside weekend. When Bush, who wanted to try his luck fishing, went to get a license, the woman behind the counter seemed puzzled. She couldn't quite place the former leader of the Free World's face. "Have we met before?" she asked. His only comfort that day was catching a flounder that was enough to feed the household for lunch.

Bush needed the fishing; he was struggling to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign. "He is not bitter, but just cannot seem to focus in on anything yet," Barbara wrote in mid-February 1993. "He was depressed," his brother Jonathan Bush recalled after a visit to Houston during the first months of retirement. "Then we went out to dinner at a restaurant and everybody cheered when they saw Pop, and he came back to life again."

The Bushes enjoyed puttering around the kitchen in Houston, with Barbara cooking and Bush doing dishes and making the morning coffee. By her own admission, the former First Lady's culinary skills were-how to put it?-uneven. When George W. came over the night before he ran a marathon in late January, he needed carbs, so his mother offered to make pasta. The result was an undercooked dinner; her husband said how much he preferred his pasta "rare." The former president, always conscious of his weight, also volunteered that he had dropped two pounds "without even trying."

- It was a good life. Bush inhaled the daily CIA briefings sent to former presidents, and he remained addicted to the news, following it while restricting his commentary to close friends. Back in 1992, at one of the many low moments of the reelection campaign, Bush had imagined life after the presidency: "I'll spend time up at Texas A&M [where his presidential library was built]...just blending in; growing old with grace and kindness....And then every once in a while, some big shot will come in-some officeholder, some King, some Prince, some Prime Minister, and some President, and they'll say, 'I'd like to see old George Bush.'" After talking about their "interesting times" together, Bush mused, he'd say goodbye to the visitor, and "say that I did my very best, tried my hardest, kept it honest; and put something back into the system."

To a remarkable degree Bush managed to make this vision of retirement real. From October to early May he was in Houston, working at his desk in an office suite near the Bushes' house. In the summers he led a migration to Kennebunkport, where, between boating, golf, and tennis, he would go through correspondence and return emails at the staff headquarters on Walker's Point. The flow of guests both in Maine and in Texas was never ending. It was not unusual to find, say, the Oak Ridge Boys and John Major at the dining room table or out on the stone porch. Other callers and correspondents included figures from Hollywood (Chuck Norris, Brooke Shields, Kevin Costner, Teri Hatcher); country music (Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, Larry Gatlin); politics (Brian Mulroney, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev), and both Hollywood and politics (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

There was an annual cruise in the Greek isles with family and friends, quail hunting in rural Texas, golf and fishing in Florida, and pilgrimages to Bohemian Grove, the men's enclave in Northern California. He read fiction and nonfiction (The Private Life of Chairman Mao was a favorite early in his retirement), but instructed his staff not to tell anyone. "Don't want people thinking I'm an intellectual," he said, half-smiling.

Bush's understanding of life after the presidency was straightforward: Make money in a dignified way and don't complicate your successors' lives by opining publicly. He delivered many highly paid speeches, creating enough wealth to keep the family very comfortable for the rest of his life-and beyond. A 1993 engagement for a $100,000 address to an Amway convention attracted press attention: It was thought to be the most money a former president had ever commanded for a single domestic appearance.

Though he avoided serving on corporate boards, in later years Bush accepted a position as a senior adviser for the Carlyle Group, a global private-equity firm based in Washington. (Jim Baker, former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, and Dick Darman were also part of Carlyle.) Bush's role was to travel to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East to deliver lunch and dinner speeches before audiences of potential investors in the group's funds. As compensation, he asked that the accumulated speaking fees (roughly $100,000 per speech in the 1990s and into the 2000s) for each trip be invested in Carlyle funds, which, in turn, produced strong returns.

- The first six months or so of Bill Clinton's term were difficult, with the new president distracted by the issue of whether gays could serve openly in the military, by a $200 presidential haircut on Air Force One at LAX, and by chaotic relations with Capitol Hill. In June 1993, Bush confided a skepticism to Baker. "I take no joy in the way Clinton is screwing things up-I really hope their act down there improves," Bush wrote from Maine on Wednesday, June 9, 1993.

One of Clinton's first decisions about the use of force was connected to Bush. In April, the former president had led a small delegation of family and friends to Kuwait (Baker and Sununu joined the party), where he accepted the thanks of the nation he had liberated. Bush received, as The New York Times put it, "a hero's welcome," taking on what the newspaper called "a rock-star aura as police officers and teachers restrained children from running out to try to touch his car."

A 175-pound car bomb was discovered and more than a dozen men were arrested for being part of a plot to kill the former president on a motorcade route. The FBI and the CIA investigated and found human and forensic evidence that Iraq's intelligence service had directed the attempted attack. "It was a big bomb," Clinton recalled. "I was furious." He summoned Colin Powell, who was still serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. "This guy just tried to kill an American president," Clinton said to Powell. "I think we ought to knock the living hell out of them."

"Mr. President, the question is, 'Do you want to get in another war, or do you want to punish them?'" Powell replied. "This was a ham-handed effort with little chance of success. You need a response, but not another war. If Saddam had killed Bush or wounded him, you would have to take Saddam out," Powell said, but under the circumstances a more proportionate response was in order.

"I really wanted to make them pay," Clinton recalled. "I was so mad"-but he agreed with Powell and authorized a Tomahawk missile strike on the Iraqi intelligence headquarters. Speaking to the nation on the evening of Saturday, June 26, 1993, Clinton said: "It was an elaborate plan devised by the Iraqi government and directed against a former president of the United States because of actions he took as president. As such, the Iraqi attack against President Bush was an attack against our country and against all Americans."

The White House kept Brent Scowcroft informed about the investigation and the retaliation. Clinton called Bush at four forty on the afternoon of the U.S. response, which took place about six P.M. Washington time. "We completed our investigation," Clinton told Bush. "Both the CIA and the FBI did an excellent job. It was directed against you. I've ordered a cruise missile attack." On the phone, Bush was reserved. "Clinton closed the conversation by assuring Bush that he had done everything he could to minimize the loss of life," recalled George Stephanopoulos, the senior Clinton adviser. "Maybe that's what Bush needed to hear most; maybe his bred-in-the-bone patrician modesty made him a little embarrassed by all the trouble everyone was going to for him."

"I think he thinks we did the right thing," Clinton said to his aides. "Thought it was a tough call."

Secretary of State Warren Christopher traveled to Maine to brief the former president. The missile strike took out part of the targeted headquarters; eight people were killed when several of the Tomahawks struck a residential neighborhood. Bush maintained a dignified silence about the entire affair. "I'm not in the interview business, but thank you very much for calling," Bush told the Associated Press in Kennebunkport. In later years, when visitors would raise the subject of the attempt on his life, Bush was terse: "Glad it failed."

- In September 1993, Bush returned to the White House at Clinton's invitation for the signing of an Arab-Israeli peace accord and to appeal for the passage of NAFTA. Bush was happy to make the trip; Barbara wrote that she was "just not ready to go back yet."

Bush spent the night in the Queen's Bedroom in the Residence; the Carters had the Lincoln Bedroom; the Fords chose to stay at the Willard Hotel nearby. As Clinton and Carter settled in for a long night of talk, Bush retired. "You know he's always been early to bed, early to rise," Clinton said the next day. "And he stayed up pretty late for him last night." Asked whether things were strained between the recent foes, Clinton said: "I wouldn't say it was awkward. It got more informal as it went along."

In the East Room, presidents past and present made the case for NAFTA. After listening to Clinton's eloquent pitch for the trade agreement, Bush told the audience that he now understood why Clinton was president, and he wasn't. It was, Clinton recalled, a "wittily generous" thing for Bush to say.

- One February Monday after he left the White House at first seemed like any other day. Bush was in Houston, just doing what he always did-giving a speech, shaking hands, posing for photographs. He was taking questions at a parachute association annual meeting when somebody asked him to describe what had happened at Chichi-Jima. As he was telling the story, he recounted how he had "pulled the rip cord and released my chest straps too early, and how I had sunk fairly deep when I hit the water."

Then it came to him. "For some reason, I went back to a thought I had way in the back of my mind," he recalled in a letter to his children. "It has been there, sleeping like Rip Van Winkle, alive but not alive. Now it was quite clear. I want to make one more parachute jump!"

It was a piece of unfinished business for a man who liked to finish what he started. Once he started thinking about it, he could think of little else. "Why has this now become an obsession?" Bush wrote. "I have everything in life, far more than I deserve. I want to finish my life as God would have it. I have never been happier, but I want to do this jump."

There was a sporting, teasing, self-aware tone to his preparations for the jump at age seventy-two, but there was also an undercurrent of seriousness. Thinking about Chichi-Jima on "that dreadful day," Bush remembered that he had been "scared then. Will I be scared again?" When he informed the children, he asked Doro "not to tell anyone."

"You must be kidding," she said. "Do you think I would tell anyone about this?" (Recording her reaction, Bush wrote: "I felt Doro was ready to support me-tentative but okay.") The day in the Arizona desert with the U.S. Army Golden Knights went splendidly. He felt "a twinge of fear-not panic, but rather a halting feeling in the leg, groin, and gut." Then he jumped, and all was well. He would jump again on his eightieth, eighty-fifth, and ninetieth birthdays-"reveling in the freedom, enjoying the view." As he always did.

- The inveterate letter writer remained an inveterate letter writer. His notes to the outside world offered a window on an active, sympathetic, eclectic mind.

In the aftermath of the April 1995 bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City by right-wing extremists, the National Rifle Association attacked federal agents as "jack-booted thugs." Bush was furious and resigned as a life member of the NRA, writing that "your broadside against Federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country. It indirectly slanders a wide array of government law enforcement officials, who are out there, day and night, laying their lives on the line for all of us."

With The Washington Post's Ann Devroy, a longtime antagonist who was being treated for cancer at Houston's MD Anderson, Bush rose above the old divisions. There had been a tension between the two of them, Bush wrote: Perhaps an inevitable tension, that clouded things between us-never a visceral dislike, but a tension. I was the out of touch President, the wimp; you were the beltway insider who thrived on who's up, who's down-who will be fired, who will win. But now I am out of it, happy in my very private life, away from the arena; and you are on leave fighting a battle that far transcends the battles of the political wars. Strangely, wonderfully, I feel close to you now. I want you to win this battle. I want that same toughness that angered me and frustrated me to a fare-thee-well at times to see you through your fight.

To parents-friends of Marvin's-who had lost a young son, Bush drew on his own pain to offer comfort.

I expect you are now saying "Why?" Well, I can't, even now, pretend to know the real answer; but let me tell you something that might help a little bit. Only a few months after Robin died, the grief and awful aching hurt began to disappear, to give way to only happy memories of our blessed child....She's never left us. The ugly bruises, trade marks of dread Leukemia, are gone now. We can't see them at all....I hope you will live the rest of your lives with only happy memories of that wonderful son who is now safely tucked in, God's loving arms around him.

He tried to stay in touch with Ronald Reagan, whom he always thought of fondly. "I don't know how you feel," Bush wrote Reagan in 1995, "but I must say I do not miss politics at all; however, Barbara and I are, of course, very proud of our two sons who got into the Political arena last Fall."

- The rise of the Bush sons began as George W. and Jeb started to seriously consider seeking the governorships of Texas and of Florida. Sons following a father into politics: It was a familiar Bush story.

On a long-ago summer Saturday at home in Houston in 1977, Bush had taken to his typewriter to lay out his thoughts for George W. on the son's upcoming bid for Congress. "Your father will be an issue-I hope not an albatross, though in some...[right-wing] groups because I served at the UN and was in Peking you could get zapped with that," Bush wrote. "I suggest that you establish very fast that you are your own man, that you agree on some issues with me and that undoubtedly there will be many where you would have voted differently....I will help by coming there or by staying away."

The 1977 letter foreshadowed how George H. W. Bush would treat his political sons in later years: with deference and with the expectation that there would "undoubtedly" be differences of opinion between the generations.

Unless asked, Bush would not insert himself into his sons' political lives. In this he was doing one of the things he liked best: carrying on a sound tradition. After he had retired from the Senate, Prescott Bush had described S. P. Bush's view of fatherhood. "He did not attempt to influence me at all, in connection with my later life," Prescott Bush recalled. "I might say parenthetically that I have followed that same idea with my own five children, four of whom are sons, and while I've been ready to talk with them, as he was with me, about the various possibilities, I've never borne down on them, any more than he did with me, and said, 'What you really ought to be is a lawyer,' or what you really ought to be is this or that."

George H. W. Bush had followed the same basic code, and now, in the 1990s and beyond, stories comparing and contrasting the father and the sons were going to be endless. At first, the narrative was about how the sons were better politicians than their defeated father. (The story line would change in 2000 and beyond, when the toll of a presidential campaign and then of the presidency itself bore down on George W., and his father's historical stock began to rise.) In the 1990s Bush gave George W. and Jeb a permanent dispensation. They should say and do what they thought best: Your Mother tells me that both of you have mentioned to her your concerns about some of the political stories-the ones that seem to put me down and make me seem irrelevant-that contrast you favorably to a father who had no vision and who was but a place holder in the broader scheme of things. I have been reluctant to pass along advice. Both of you are charting your own course, spelling out what direction you want to take your State....But the advice is this. Do not worry when you see the stories that compare you favorably to a Dad for whom English was a second language and for whom the word destiny meant nothing....At some point both of you may want to say 'Well, I don't agree with my Dad on that point' or 'Frankly I think Dad was wrong on that.' Do it. Chart your own course, not just on the issues but on defining yourselves....So read my lips-no more worrying.

In 1994, George W. was challenging incumbent Democratic governor Ann Richards, who seemed formidable. "George," Barbara said to her son, "you can't win." Other old Bush advisers suggested waiting out a second Richards term, but George W. felt he was ready. In Florida, Jeb would face Democratic governor Lawton Chiles.

The father's counsel to George W. from 1977 remained sound for both sons: "Do it with all you've got. Keep your cool, work like hell, don't let the meanness that will surface get you down, don't overreact, see the other guy's point of view. See his merits but convince people you are the better man-for you are."

FORTY-EIGHT.

The Proudest Father in the Whole Wide World

If I were "The One," no one told me about it.

I didn't get the memo.

-JEB BUSH He doesn't need a voice from the past.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, on George W.'s 2000 campaign for president IN THE LARGER BUSH CIRCLE, the two eldest sons had long stood in contrast: It was Unserious George and Serious Jeb. George W. was given to streaks of sarcasm and swagger; Jeb could be sarcastic, too, but adopted a quieter, more studious mien. In the bitterness of the loss to Clinton in 1992, Chase Untermeyer, one of the most loyal of Bush devotees, mused about a restoration in the fullness of time. He predicted that Jeb, not George W., was the likelier brother to lead the way back to the White House. Jim Baker believed the same thing: "George W. was the cutup in the Bush family....Jeb was always more serious. Many of us thought that maybe, just maybe, Jeb would be the one to carry on the Bush family tradition in politics."

That is not, however, the way Jeb recalled the family dynamic. "If I were 'The One,' no one told me about it," Jeb said. "I didn't get the memo. And the relationship between George and Dad is incredibly close and loving. I've always been bemused by people who state as fact that which is highly speculative, or untrue, which happens a lot. I don't think my mom and dad think that way-'He's the one, more than that one.' Literally I never had a conversation about that. Ever. I'd say in terms of topics of conversation in the Bush family: family; sports; and then...well, that's about it."

George W. thought the broad pro-Jeb impression was partly rooted in the brothers' different experiences as young men. Jeb had finished college in two and a half years, married Columba early, and gone to work building a life in Florida; George W., by his own account, "was viewed as a less serious person. I was seen as more like my mother than my father in many ways. I was more of a cutup, I was irreverent." He was, he recalled, "unattached," interested in girls and adventure and decidedly uninterested in putting down roots. After graduating from Harvard Business School in the 1970s, he moved to Midland "with no possessions, lived in an alley." He went to Alaska one summer just to check it out and was reluctant to buy a house in Midland until a friend talked him into it. "It's totally different from Jeb, who falls in love early and gets married in college and has babies early," George W. recalled. "He's just a different kind of person."

Put another way, Jeb, though seven years younger, grew up faster. Combined with the expectations of 1994, when Florida looked more likely than Texas to elect a Bush son governor, the image of Jeb as the favored brother took hold-hard. Jeb was supposed to be president-not George W. Or so the story went. "The whole idea that Jeb was the favorite one because he was more knowledgeable-that's all bullshit," George H. W. Bush recalled. "Nothing to it. I thought Jeb had a better chance to win than George when George went up against Ann Richards. Nobody thought he could win."

As Baker and others testified, it was true that Jeb had appeared most likely to succeed in the 1970s and '80s, but that was then, and 1994 was now. Soon it wouldn't much matter what the family thought. What the voters of Texas and Florida thought would be decisive.

- Bush could not stay off the telephone during the campaigns, peppering both sons' headquarters with calls about how things looked. On the Sunday night before the '94 elections, the Bushes stayed at their Florida retreat in Boca Grande. Jeb walked into his parents' suite, and Bush asked what the polls showed. "Jeb said about the same as they were when GB called at 9 am in the morning!" Barbara wrote. "We are so nervous."

On election night 1994, the elder Bushes stayed in Houston, anxiously watching the returns from both states. The results: a win in Texas, a loss in Florida. In his suite at the Four Seasons in Austin, George W. spoke with his parents from a bathroom. He thought their pain over Jeb's loss seemed to overwhelm their happiness at his victory. "Bush listened to his father's distress over his brother's defeat; when the conversation finished, he shrugged his shoulders and went back into a room awash in joy and excitement," George W.'s strategist Karl Rove recalled.

"The joy is in Texas," the forty-first president told reporters, "but our hearts are in Florida." As George W. recalled, "To some, his reaction was surprising. Not to me. It was typical of George [H. W.] Bush to focus on the person who was hurting."

In late November 1994, on the evening of the day of the groundbreaking for Bush's presidential library in College Station, Barbara and Jeb sat down for a talk over supper at the Post Oak Grill in Houston. "It kills me that he hurts so," Barbara wrote in her diary. "He worked so hard and so long. I know he was exhausted from being such a good sport and, I'm sure, seeing GWB with all the praise and state troopers must give him a twinge. He told me that the one great joy he had Election Night was that George won. At one time he asked me 'How long was it going to hurt?' That killed me." Barbara and Jeb went back to the Bushes' house to find George W., who had just finished exercising and was having a bowl of cereal. Jeb sat down, and their mother left her two eldest sons talking in the night.

- Inauguration Day in Austin in January 1995 dawned with rain, but the weather cleared early on. The extended Bush family attended church services with Billy Graham. Columba and Jeb flew in from Florida. Bush gave his eldest son the cufflinks that his own parents had sent him when he got his wings at Corpus Christi during World War II. In a letter to the new governor, the former president wrote: "You have given us more than we ever could have deserved. You have sacrificed for us. You have given us your unwavering loyalty and devotion. Now it is our turn." Their son replied with a note of his own.

Dear Mom and Dad, This is my first letter written on my first day as your governor.

What a day!

Your letter moved me so much that I knew I could not look at either (of you) after I was confirmed. I would have wept with love and pride to be your son.