Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 27
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Destiny and Power Part 27

I am where I am because of you. You should always know this.

With love,

George

- In his first summer as governor, George W. traveled to Walker's Point after a meeting in Vermont. The day before he was to arrive his mother looked outside the window and saw strange men prowling around the driveway. "I asked what they were doing and was told that they were advancing GWB's expected arrival," she wrote. "How funny to have George's agents (Texas Rangers) checking on our security!!!"

It did not take long for talk of a national Bush restoration to begin. At a fiftieth birthday party for George W. at the governor's mansion in Austin in the summer of 1996, Bob Bullock, the powerful Democratic lieutenant governor whom Bush had courted, toasted George W.: "Happy birthday. You are one helluva governor. And Governor Bush, you will be the next president of the United States."

As George W. recalled it, Bullock's words "shocked" him. "Ten years earlier, I had been celebrating my fortieth birthday drunk at The Broad-moor," Bush recalled, alluding to the night of hard drinking in Colorado in 1986 that had led him to give up alcohol. "Now I was being toasted on the lawn of the Texas Governor's Mansion as the next president. This had been quite a decade." Pride in the journey he had made was an important element in George W. Bush's character. Confident in his own abilities, he thought the history of his life from the age of 40 forward offered clear evidence that he could make his way in the larger world. He would go on as he had set out: defining himself in the public eye as a loving son, but as his own man.

- The 1996 Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole, visited Walker's Point that summer, joining the senior Bushes and Laura and George W. for a conversation and lunch. They discussed possible running mates, and Dole pointed out that everybody seemed to have some problem or another. A story from the Dole selection process shed light on a new truth about the Bushes. Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, called Jim Baker to see whether the former secretary of state would be interested in talking about the vice presidential slot on the 1996 ticket. Baker telephoned Bush to ask what he thought; Bush heard Baker out and said he would call right back. Bush checked in with George W., then telephoned Baker again. "I think it's a great idea-and, more important, George does, too," Bush said. In that moment Baker realized there was a changing of the guard in the Bush universe. The former president had thought it proper to seek the governor of Texas's opinion on an important political question before offering his own.

- In the wake of Clinton's defeat of Dole in November 1996, George W. felt, as he put it to The Washington Post's David Broder, like a "cork in a raging river" as the 2000 campaign approached.

The 1998 allegations that President Clinton had carried on an affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, horrified the Bushes. "Can one believe that this conversation is going on about the president of the United States?" Barbara wrote. The former president was decorous in public; in private, he was troubled. On a winter 1999 visit to France-he and Scowcroft were promoting their book on foreign policy, A World Transformed-Bush was invited for a meeting with French president Jacques Chirac in the Elysee Palace. "We had a genuine tour d'horizon," Bush recalled in a letter to his friend Hugh Sidey of Time on the transatlantic flight home to Houston. Chirac's dismissive view of the Clinton scandal, however, left Bush unsettled. "I am worried," Bush wrote. "Like most world leaders I think Chirac feels we have 'lost it' over the Lewinsky matter. That was the view of everyone I talked to. Oddly, no one I talked to in France focused in on 'lack of respect for the office' [to] say nothing of lying under oath or obstruction of justice."

The scandal unfolded as speculation about George W.'s prospects for the presidency in 2000 grew. The elder Bush could not sleep on the night before the 1998 midterm elections. (He tried a Tylenol PM, but it did not work.) He worried about both of his political sons-and about what awaited George W. in the wake of reelection. "Yesterday I told him-'George, on November 4th things will be very different,'" Bush wrote Sidey. "He knew exactly what I meant....He is strong though-tough enough, too, to withstand the pressure."

His view of his eldest son: "He is good, this boy of ours. He's uptight at time[s], feisty at other times-but who wouldn't be after months of grueling campaigning. He includes people. He has no sharp edges on issues. He is no ideologue, no divider. He brings people together and he knows how to get things done. He has principles to which he adheres but he knows how to give a little to get a lot. He doesn't hog the credit. He's low on ego, high on drive."

The forty-first president was watching the Florida exit polls with care. If Jeb's numbers in the gubernatorial race "look even fairly good," Bush wrote, he and Barbara were going to fly to Miami to surprise their latest governor son. "The plan is to show up at his hotel rooms unannounced, unadvanced-just a mother and dad wanting to be with their boy. I love the thought." Jeb prevailed, the trip was made, and, as Bush wrote Hugh Sidey, "there is no question in my mind that he will become a major political figure in the country. He is passionate in his caring and in his beliefs. He speaks well and at 6'4" he is an impressive man. Take it from his proud Dad."

And the governor of Texas, safely reelected, was widely expected to join the 2000 presidential campaign, only eight years after his father's defeat.

In June 1999, George W. Bush made it official. He would be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. After announcing his bid in Amana Colonies, Iowa, he traveled to Kennebunkport to see his parents. The Bushes served hamburgers and hot dogs on the deck at Walker's Point before a one thirty press conference on the lawn. The senior Bush made clear that the 2000 campaign was the next generation's, not his. "He doesn't need a voice from the past," the former president said of his son that afternoon. Bush treated George W. in much the way he had treated Ronald Reagan or any other president. The candidate was the candidate, and the president was the president. The job was so tough, the critics so numerous, the second-guessing so intense, that Bush decided his best role was that of a loving, attentive father.

In a primary debate, an answer of George W.'s underscored the generational and cultural distinctions between father and son. Asked to name his favorite philosopher, George W. replied: "Christ, because he changed my heart." Calling his son afterward, Bush senior said, "Don't worry, son, I don't think the Jesus answer will hurt you very much." George W. was struck by the remark; it had never occurred to him that what he thought of as honesty about his faith could hurt him.

"My dad went to Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut," the younger Bush would say, "and I went to San Jacinto Junior High in Midland." Inspired by his father's example, he also made clear that he had learned from his father's mistakes. When George W. talked about the need for a clear vision, or about keeping one's word to the base, or about projecting an unmistakable identity, it was not hard to infer that the son understood where his father had fallen short-and where he was determined to hit the mark.

- The passing of the generational mantle had its awkward moments for the forty-first president. He had urged his sons to make their own way, but he could not help but occasionally feel a little left out as time marched on. Karl Rove, George W.'s chief strategist, traveled to Houston from Austin for dinner with the senior Bushes in April 2000. "He didn't mean to, but he really hurt George's feelings," Barbara wrote. "He sort of intimated that we should not come to the Convention other [than] to make the speech that a former President would normally give. He was worried about the picture. It should be the Presidential candidate and the VP and their families. We agree, but surely we would be in a box with the rest of our family to cheer him on as a mom and dad." Told later that he had upset the former president, "Poor Karl was sick." The elder Bush did attend the whole convention but declined to speak. It was George's turn, he told friends, and who wanted to hear a former president anyway? Waste of prime time.

Heading into the summer of 2000, George W.'s chief concern was who to name as his running mate. As he weighed the different options, he kept coming back to the man he had put in charge of the search process, Dick Cheney. For Karl Rove, at least, the Cheney choice seemed too retro, too much a throwback to the father's era. When George W. asked him to make the case against Cheney-with Cheney in the room-Rove argued that picking Cheney would "send the message, I feared, that the young governor was falling back on his father's administration for help."

George W. asked his father for advice on the choice; the senior Bush warmly endorsed Cheney. In July, Don Evans, the son's campaign chairman, called the Bushes to give them a heads-up that Cheney was the pick. On the telephone with Evans on the porch at Walker's Point, Bush said: "Well, that's great, and she's great, too," referring to Lynne Cheney. At the elder Bush's request, legendary Houston heart surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley had reviewed Cheney's health records and offered the opinion that Cheney was up to the challenge of the campaign.

At the convention in Philadelphia, Jeb offered a toast to George W. during a family dinner. "I have watched you, big brother, for the last year, and about five months ago I suddenly found myself thinking: 'I am looking at a president.' I am in awe, I'm proud of you, and I love you." The family continued to be impressed by their Florida son as well as by the presidential nominee. "Jeb is a workaholic and is still in constant touch with the world through email," Barbara wrote. "He has made his email address public and gets several hundred a day, ALL of which he answers late into the night, early morning, or before lunch-just all the time."

The Bushes' minds had been taken far off politics on a Friday in May 2000. With the rector of St. Martin's, their church in Houston, they slipped away to College Station to re-inter the remains of their beloved Robin, whom they had brought from Greenwich to their future burial plot at the presidential library. "It seems funny after almost 50 years since her death how dear Robin is to our hearts," Bush wrote the rector, Larry Gipson, afterward. The former president had cried when Gipson read the prayers at the grave. "But they were not the same tears of devastation, loss, and pain that I felt when Robin died," Bush wrote. "Instead they were tears of gratitude that we had her at all and maybe even tears of joy that she was still with us." Nearly a half century earlier, Bush recalled, the parent of one of Robin's fellow leukemia patients had said, "'Well, I guess Jesus was right when he said "Let the little children suffer so they can come unto me,"'" Bush recalled. "She got it wrong...but maybe she also got it right, too. Her kid and ours did suffer and indeed in their innocence they went to heaven. Of that I am certain." He was certain of something else, too. "We are very comforted to know that when we are buried," Bush wrote, "the body of our beloved little four year old will be tucked in right there beside us-right next to her parents who love her so much."

- On the morning of Election Day 2000, Bush spoke to students at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in College Station before he and Barbara were driven up to Austin. On the ride Bush was attached to his mobile phone, anxious for exit polls, anecdotes, and political intelligence of any kind.

At a large private dinner at the Shoreline Grill in Austin, the elder Bush ordered a vodka from the bartender-and drank two triples. It was a cheerful gathering, full of children and grandchildren and uncles and aunts and cousins. Then, George W. recalled, "the exit polls started coming in. The networks called Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida for Gore." The party seemed to freeze. A distraught Jeb walked over to George W. The two men embraced. "George W. told Laura that he'd like to watch it from home" at the governor's mansion about a mile away, Barbara recalled. George W. rounded up his mother, his father, and his mother-in-law, Jenna Welch, and they hurried back to monitor the results in more familiar surroundings. The trip to the mansion, George W. recalled, was "quiet." Believing he had lost, he was thinking of what the family code dictated in such circumstances. "There isn't much to say when you lose," George W. recalled. "I was deflated, disappointed, and a little stunned. I felt no bitterness. I was ready to accept the people's verdict and repeat Mother's words from 1992: 'It's time to move on.'"

The elder Bush was, to put it mildly, a nervous wreck. Then, as the night went on, George W. appeared to have won Florida after all, and Gore called to concede, only to have the numbers tighten again, at which point Gore retracted his concession. Even after the second call from Gore, some Bush advisers argued that George W. should declare victory to the waiting throngs in the rainy Austin night; Jeb advised against it. If Florida was in fact too close to call, George W. did not want to look presumptuous or power hungry. "He took me aside and said, 'Don't do this,'" George W. recalled. "He was right. I trusted his judgment." The elder Bushes went to bed about four A.M. not knowing whether their son had won. When they rose to drink coffee three hours later with George W. and Laura, who were reading papers in bed, the results were still unknown. The senior Bushes decided to drive home to Houston.

Back in Florida after an early flight, Jeb saw a Gore-Lieberman DC-9 on the runway. "We've been invaded," he told Karl Rove by telephone. Vice President Gore announced that former secretary of state Warren Christopher would represent his interests in the recount. Don Evans, George W.'s national chairman, took the candidate an idea of the top campaign staff's: Why not ask Jim Baker, who had spent election night in Austin with his wife, Susan, to take over operations in Florida? George W. approved, and Evans and George W. both spoke to Baker. "He didn't hesitate," George W. recalled. "He said, 'I'm gone; I'm in.'" Within hours Baker was en route to Florida.

On Thursday, November 9, 2000, the Clintons hosted a dinner in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the White House. Given the disputed election, it was an uneasy occasion. The Bushes flew up to Washington, changed into black-tie at the Jackson Place quarters set aside for former presidents, and were received at the White House, where they joined Lady Bird Johnson, the Fords, the Carters, and the Clintons. Hillary had won a U.S. Senate seat from New York, and Chuck Robb, LBJ's son-in-law, had lost his Senate race in Virginia. "So there we were: a winner (Hil), a loser (Chuck), and Mr. and Mrs. In-between (GB and BPB)," wrote Barbara.

Barbara concealed-barely-her disdain for Clinton, who had quoted John Adams's prayer that none but "honest" men should rule under this roof. "What absolute nerve," she wrote. "He was impeached because he lied to the American public and the special prosecutor. I have come to the conclusion that he really does not know right from wrong." At the end of the evening, Bush was scheduled to fly to Spain for a previously planned hunting trip with King Juan Carlos, and Barbara returned to Houston.

Bush father and son were on the telephone constantly, exchanging quick updates and offering mutual reassurances. Both men wanted to buck up the other. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, the elder Bushes went out to Crawford for a quiet day with Laura and George W., who grilled steaks. The phone buzzed with news about Florida from Baker, Rove, and Don Evans, but still nothing definitive.

Resolution finally came on Tuesday, December 12, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in effect, that Bush had won Florida and that there could be no further recounts. On the night of the decision, George W. was in bed, reading, with the television off. Rove heard the news first and called him. "Congratulations, Mr. President!" Rove said. As George W. tried to understand what was being reported on the networks-the correspondents were unsure, leading to several moments of confusion-he cut Rove off, saying, "I'm calling Baker."

Baker confirmed it. The election was over. George W. had prevailed. On Wednesday the thirteenth, Vice President Gore delivered a gracious concession. After a dinner with friends, the elder Bushes watched Gore's speech. Moved, the former president picked up the telephone. He wanted to salute Gore. "His speech was absolute perfection," Bush wrote. "He did it with grace and dignity and a genuineness that enthralled the nation. I know how difficult it was for him to do what he did."

On television Bush saw Gore climb into a limousine after the speech, and he telephoned Jean Becker, his chief of staff. "I want to call Al Gore," the former president said. "I've been where he is. I've lost, and losing hurts." Bush reached the White House switchboard and asked to be connected to the vice president. A few minutes later Gore returned the call. "I congratulated him, just one sentence or two, just a few words," Bush recalled. "I suddenly felt for him, saw him as a man whose disappointment had to be overpowering." Gore was grateful. "President Bush was very emotional, very kind," Gore recalled. Hearing Gore's voice took Bush back to 1992.

The conversation was over in a flash, but I suddenly felt quite different about Al Gore. The anger was gone, the competitive juices stopped flowing. I thought of Algore as two words (Al Gore) not one. I thought of his long years of service and of his family. I thought back to my own feelings of years before when I lost, when I had to go out and accept my defeat. He did it better than I did, and his ordeal had to be tougher because the election was so close. True I had to actually give up the Presidency that he was now seeking, but still he had been in public life a long time and he and his family were shattered.

In Austin, the president-elect was about to address the nation from the floor of the Texas legislature. Their eldest child was the president of the United States.

It was surreal. History had now struck their family twice. "What a lovely son we were given," Barbara wrote friends. "I keep reading all sorts of things about our wanting revenge or a dynasty, etc. Baloney! We feel exactly as you would feel if one of your chicks became President. It is an awesome feeling."

Cameras captured Laura and George W. holding hands before the address. "I saw in his posture, in the way he walked, [and] in his smile the same mannerisms and expressions we have known ever since he was a little boy," Bush wrote Hugh Sidey, the longtime Time columnist.* After George W.'s brief speech, Bush called his son's personal aide, Logan Walters. "Logan, this is George Bush the elder, can you hand this phone to my boy?" The president-elect took the phone. "What did you think, Dad?"

"I told him how perfect I felt his speech was," Bush recalled. Barbara repeated how proud they were. The conversation ended, but the senior Bush kept the television on, watching the rest of the coverage. He saw the president-elect's car disappear behind a white curtain at the governor's mansion-a security precaution that he remembered well.

He closed his letter about the evening with a prayer. "May God give our son the strength he needs. May God protect the 43rd President of the United States of America." Bush signed off: "Your friend, the proudest father in the whole wide world."

*Bush and Sidey corresponded a great deal during George W.'s presidency; the letters form a kind of diary of the elder Bush's impressions of his son's election and presidential years.

FORTY-NINE.

It Is Not Easy to Sit on the Sidelines

I'm the father, and it's his turn to make the big calls, and he should know that his father's going to either be quiet or supportive....I'm not going to go back and revisit decisions and say, "Hey, he should have done this or done that." Just not going to do it.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, on George W. Bush's presidency RISING EARLY AT BLAIR HOUSE on a wet Inauguration Day 2001, the father of the next president fortified himself with coffee. After putting on a skin-toned undershirt and royal blue long leggings beneath his suit, George H. W. Bush left for services at St. John's Church. In a sermon, the president-elect's minister from Dallas, Mark Craig, alluded to the senior President Bush's 1989 inaugural prayer, quoting words that Bush had written a dozen years before. "He didn't mention my name," Bush recalled, but "I recognized the prayer and was deeply touched."

It was that kind of day, and was to be that kind of decade: George H. W. Bush onstage yet silent, regal yet restrained. The Bushes were in largely uncharted territory. No son had followed his father to the presidency since John Quincy Adams won the White House in the election of 1824, nearly a quarter of a century after John Adams left the new capital in 1801, never to return. (The elder Adams died in 1826, two years into his son's term.) The senior Bush-who sometimes referred to his son as "Quincy"-was determined to carry on in the new century as he had since 1994, when George and Jeb entered the arena: be supportive, be helpful, answer questions if asked, but stay out of what Bush called "the opining business."

After the service, the former president was driven to the Hill. In a holding room at the Capitol before the ceremony, the elder Bushes waited with George W.'s twins, Jenna and Barbara. Both grandparents marveled at the girls' "stilt-like heels."

On the platform overlooking the Mall, Bush, with Barbara on his right arm, walked to the podium. "I don't want to be a braggadocio," he wrote Hugh Sidey, "but we did receive a warm welcome from the platform guests and the huge crowd below." He took his place, standing to applaud as the Cheneys and the Clintons walked to their seats, and waited. His son was announced. "George walked down the steps-not looking overly relaxed, but straight and proper and smiling at friends," Bush recalled. "He looked good. He looked Presidential." The oath administered, the forty-third president turned to seek out the forty-first. George W. hugged his mother and cupped his father's neck in an embrace. It was the only moment, miraculously, when the elder Bush cried. "Pride of a father in a son," Bush recalled. "Why not shed some tears?"

On the drive from the Hill to the White House, where the Bushes would take in the parade from a reviewing stand, the forty-first president passed anti-Bush protestors. Jenna and Barbara, who were in the car with their grandparents, expressed concern. "I tried to assure them not to worry because this simply went with the territory, all Presidents suffer through this kind of ugliness; but they were not convinced," Bush recalled.

Inside the White House, the Bushes wandered through stacks of crates. The bright blue Clinton Oval Office carpet had been rolled up; Bush 43 would use Reagan's. Walking from the West Wing to the main house and then out the North Portico door, Bush sat on the second row of the reviewing stand. Turning to a military officer, he said, "Let me know when President Bush is arriving," taking pleasure in the phrase "President Bush." A few moments later the officer gave the word: "The president is coming, sir."

As his son entered the enclosure, the father rose in respect.

- It was a long parade. Barbara, as her husband put it, "pulled the rip cord and went to the White House," but Bush wanted to wait to see the Texas A&M marching band. At last the Aggies marched into view, and the new president turned to the old to ask him to come forward. "I had been sitting right behind him, but I had not wanted to go stand next to him-did not want to 'horn in,' as mother used to say," Bush recalled. At his son's invitation, however, the father stepped up, reviewed the Aggies, and excused himself to take a warm tub back in the bathroom off the Queen's Bedroom. Bush was just beginning to relax, soaking a sore hip, when there was a knock on the door. "Mr. President," he was told, "President Bush would like you to meet him downstairs to walk over to the Oval Office." Bush moved fast, drying off, throwing on a suit, and "hustl[ing]" over to the West Wing.

Bush smiled at the sight of the new president at the big desk in the Oval Office. "Over the next eight years, I would have many memorable meetings in the Oval Office," George W. recalled. "None compared to standing in the office with my father on my first day." Father and son walked back into the adjoining suite that the elder Bush had loved so. Standing in the study, Bush felt his past was vividly present: Here was where "I did a lot of work, made a lot of phone calls, kept my computer and watched the blossoms break out each spring," he recalled. "Memories rushed back of phone calls made to world leaders, Brent Scowcroft at my side. Memories of personnel problems, of happy days and sad days too." (He dropped a heavy hint to his son about restoring the horseshoe pit that Clinton had removed, but the younger Bush was more interested in building a small T-ball field.) Their inspection done, the two men went back to the Residence together, the past and the future shoulder to shoulder.

Upstairs, the new president broke off to dress in black-tie for the evening's inaugural balls while the elder Bush joined his wife for a drink and watched an NBC profile of the family anchored by Jamie Gangel. (Laura recalled that the new president was "shocked" to learn that he now had not one but two valets. "I don't think I need a valet," George W. said to his father. "Don't worry," the elder Bush replied, "you'll get used to it.") The elder Bush was in bed by a quarter to nine, content to read a bit of a James Patterson mystery (Roses Are Red) and tease Jenna and Barbara and their friends-"a whole group of University of Texas glamour girls"-as they departed for the inaugural balls. In the quiet house, he and Barbara turned out the lights and said their prayers, "asking the Lord to bless our son and to lift him up when the going gets tough."

The next morning there was a Sunday service at the National Cathedral and then a reception on the main floor of the White House. Bush was ready to go home, but took a quick moment to look at his own portrait. An impromptu receiving line formed. "I kept telling the folks lined up with cameras, 'The President is in the East Room, hustle on down and say hi,'" Bush recalled. "But no they needed a quick shot with their kids with #41 so I stood there for a long time. It was OK, a bit flattering really." There were a few instances of confusion. "Having been President before there were still moments lingering on....Someone goes 'Mr. President' and I'd start to acknowledge," Bush recalled. "Or walking with George someone might say 'Hi, Mr. President!' and I'd spin around." At noon the forty-first president took his leave. He pulled George W. aside for a farewell. They looked at each other, grew teary, and the father departed.

- The transition had been truncated. "George W. has been so dear about calling his dad almost daily to talk over decisions that he has made....George does not suggest, but listens and then comments," Barbara wrote on Christmas Eve 2000. George W. asked his father about retaining George Tenet, the Clinton-appointed director of the CIA (the elder Bush approved) but never consulted him about the choice for secretary of defense: Donald Rumsfeld, the old man's old rival. ("Knew what the answer was," George W. recalled.) Rumsfeld had been under consideration for the CIA, but after two other possible defense secretaries-Fred Smith of FedEx and Indiana senator Dan Coats-fell by the wayside, Condi Rice suggested him for the Pentagon. Rove raised the same concern he had broached the previous summer with the Cheney nomination. "I liked Rumsfeld but told Bush that tapping him would feed the story line that Cheney was in charge," Rove recalled. "Bush dismissed the fear and told me that the old hands-Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld-would come to understand who was in charge if they didn't already know."

The Rumsfeld appointment was a clear sign that the second President Bush was determined to pursue his own course. Rumsfeld was an aggressive figure; he told George W. that he would be "leaning forward" at the Pentagon, which was just fine with the president-elect. The history between Rumsfeld and the elder Bush did not matter to George W. In the new president's view, he had a job to do, and Don Rumsfeld could help him do it. His mother took quiet note of the decision. "It is an interesting appointment as Rummy was never fond of GHWB," Barbara wrote in her diary on Friday, December 29, 2000. "He got the credit for suggesting GB as Director of the CIA rather than Sect. of Commerce, feeling that would keep GB from ever being President." Of the Rumsfeld appointment, Bush 41 would only say: "We were never really close. No heavy hostility-just different."

- The elder Bushes spent the evening of Monday, September 10, 2001, at the White House. (George W. recalled that he "had made it clear that Mother and Dad had an open invitation to stay at the White House anytime.") On the morning of the eleventh, they kissed Laura goodbye-the president was in Florida-and boarded a private flight to St. Paul, Minnesota, where they were scheduled to deliver speeches. Barbara recalled that they were in the air, drinking coffee and reading the papers, when the copilot told them that a commercial airliner had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. Soon they were told the plane would have to land. The second tower had been hit, too. "Now we knew this was not an accident," Barbara recalled, "but a terrorist attack." The Secret Service moved the Bushes from the Milwaukee airport to a motel, where they followed the horror of the day on television. They reached the president by phone. Where are you? George W. asked. "At a motel in Brookfield, Wisconsin," Barbara replied.

"What in the world are you doing there?"

"Son," Barbara said, "you grounded our plane."

The elder Bush advised his son, who was moving from air force base to air force base, to return to the capital as soon as he safely could. ("He totally agreed with that," Bush recalled.) Watching the news, Bush's mind raced. He worried about the personal security of the president. The possibility of assassination seemed strong. He was concerned, too, about violence against innocent Muslim-Americans. Behind his self-imposed public silence Bush churned with thoughts and ideas. "What can we do about all this?" he wrote Hugh Sidey on Wednesday, September 12. He recalled his terrorism task force under Reagan, an experience, he noted, that had made him "somewhat familiar with what can and can't be done." As an old spymaster he spoke of the promise and the perils of human intelligence. "This means dealing with 'bad guys,'" Bush wrote. "Evil people. Unsavory folks who will betray their own country." Bush's old concerns about executive prerogatives were revived. "Congress with its insistence on knowing every detail under the guise of 'right to know' must be more disciplined, more leak proof."

On Friday, September 14, 2001, the former presidents were to join George W. for a memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington. By custom the presidents sat at such events in reverse chronological order, meaning that the Bush 43s would be next to the Clintons, followed by the Bush 41s, and so on. Before the gathering at the cathedral, the elder Bush had a request for Bill Clinton. Would Clinton mind if they broke protocol? "Today I want to sit next to my son," Bush said. Clinton agreed, and the elder Bushes were next to the younger Bushes. "War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder," the forty-third president told the world from the cathedral's lectern. "This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing." When George W. returned to his pew, he felt his father squeeze his arm.

Closing his letter to Sidey on September 12, the elder Bush had made a rare admission. "It is not easy, dear friend," Bush wrote, "to sit on the sidelines now, not easy to not make decisions or take actions."

- By temperament and experience, George H. W. Bush was accustomed to deferring to the wishes and to the will of the president of the United States, be he Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, or, now, his own son. Hour to hour, day to day, month to month, and year to year, the reality of his son's candidacy and then presidency required the elder Bush-who always respected reality-to resist a natural inclination to express his own views. "Once you've sat at that desk" in the Oval Office, the elder Bush remarked in retirement, "it's complicated to see someone else there. When you've made the big calls, it's tough be on the sidelines-but you've got to be."

By temperament and experience, George W. Bush had the self-confidence of a man who had, in the short space of a dozen years, chosen to forgo a life as what Jim Baker jokingly described as "a juvenile delinquent, damn near" and risen to the pinnacle of American life. A shrewd student of his father's career in particular and of contemporary politics in general, the younger Bush had mined the elder Bush's public life for lessons for his own journey.

The father had sometimes seemed without convictions; the son would be a man with a clear creed. The father had lost the conservative base of the party; the son would maintain his standing with the right. The father had been attacked for appearing weak; the son would project strength at all times. They were different men, running and ruling at different times. As a legislator, diplomat, party chairman, CIA director, and vice president, the father spent eighteen years implementing or managing the visions of others. He was not expected to project his own; was, in fact, discouraged from it as a man in the service of the House leadership, Nixon, Ford, or Reagan.

As a governor and a presidential candidate, on the other hand, the son had spent six years with the expectation that he would spell out what was to be done. "The difference in some ways is that I was held to account as a chief executive," George W. recalled. "My political skills were honed on defining a vision, defending it, and then implementing it, and that's different. It's a different path. When you're the governor you have to have agendas and the agendas have to be based on principles, and legislation follows. When you're governor you don't drift." When you are in administrative jobs or the vice presidency, as George H. W. Bush had been, drift was sometimes part of the job description.

By his own account George W. Bush saw himself as a president more in the mold of a Theodore Roosevelt or of a Ronald Reagan than of a George H. W. Bush. TR and Reagan were poets of leadership; George H. W. Bush was more prosaic. "I admired presidents who used their time in office to enact transformative change," Bush wrote in his 2010 memoir, Decision Points. He had studied TR, he reported, and learned from Reagan, "who combined an optimistic demeanor with the moral clarity and conviction to cut taxes, strengthen the military, and face down the Soviet Union despite withering criticism throughout his presidency." George W. Bush sent the word to his team: "I decided to push for sweeping reforms, not tinker with the status quo. As I told my advisers, 'I didn't take this job to play small ball.'" One Bush 43 quotation about Bush 41's time in power seemed to sum up George W.'s apparently superior view of his own political capacities: "Never underestimate what you can learn from a failed presidency."

There were two popular, often intermingled, story lines. One was that George W. Bush was in politics to avenge his father's defeat in 1992 and restore the family to power. The other was somewhat darker: that George W. was in politics to compete with, and attempt to surpass, his father-by projecting a firm ideological identity when his father had not; by winning a second term when his father had not; and, as things developed, by removing Saddam Hussein from power when his father had not.

While it is too simplistic to say George W. Bush governed the United States of America for eight years solely in reference to his relationship with his father, it would be nave to think that their story-like the story of most fathers and sons-was not also shaped by emotional complexity. George W. had learned from his father's victories and his father's defeats-and he was determined, in his own case, to win more than he lost. Politically, George W. saw his father in much the way many other Americans did: as a gracious and underappreciated man who had many virtues but who had failed to project enough of a distinctive identity and vision to overcome the economic challenges of 199192 and to win a second term. He also knew that his father had suffered from the unfair characterization of a being a "wimp"-a caricature that had been shown to be faulty, given Bush's victory in 1988 and his handling of the Gulf War but which endured, painfully, in the family imagination.

George W. argued that the biggest misconception about his relationship with his father was "that there was competition between my dad and me. That I ran for office to compete with him. Which misses the point of his unbelievable character. Why would you compete with somebody you love? Now, the psychobabblists would say, 'Because that's precisely who you want to compete with.' I view it differently. I view it that you'd want to compete with somebody who you didn't love, that you'd want to show them up. It never entered my thought process. It's hard to make people understand that he is such a good man and served as such a clear example for two sons who chose the same field that we wanted to emulate him as opposed to compete with him. And he taught us valuable life lessons-that politics wasn't dirty, necessarily; that politics was noble; that family could still matter, that I could still be a good dad when I ran. I know that sounds a little Pollyannaish to some, but nevertheless that's valid."

As president, George W. Bush faced the most complicated of tasks. As a clinical political matter it was not only in his interest but in the interests of the nation and of the world for him to do as well or better than his father had done in the White House-something the elder Bush, as a political creature, intuitively understood.

They were locked in an odd bind. George H. W. Bush had opinions but would not offer them unless asked; George W. Bush had his own worldview and preferred not to ask. "If I had asked Dad for his opinion on a policy matter, he-knowing the presidency, and knowing that the president had more access to information than anybody-would have said, 'Send your briefers,'" George W. recalled.

Still, the forty-third president protested a bit much on how little he consulted his father. A careful reading of Bush 43's memoir Decision Points reveals that he did reach out to his father on Iraq, on national security appointments, and on other matters. George W. disliked discussing such occasions, leading to a public impression that he may have been heedless of the old man to the point of disrespect. In truth, one suspects that George W. Bush, in his effort to make his own way, purposely downplayed his consultations with his father. Asked after he left the White House whether he may have been defensive about acknowledging that he had sought the old man's advice for fear of appearing overly dependent on the previous generation, George W. Bush allowed: "That's not a bad observation."

The elder Bush could be willful, too. The more the world pounded away at the son, saying 43 should be more like 41, the less the father wanted to hear critiques of the son, even if-perhaps especially if-the critiques cast the father in a brighter, better light. Asked in 2010 what he thought of his son politically, the elder Bush replied: "I think he's a highly successful politician, elected governor of Texas when most people didn't think he would be, elected president when a lot of people didn't think he would be. I'm very proud of him. I don't know what can be done differently to get people to see what I see, but I think he made some very tough decisions, right decisions."

One irony: many of the journalists and politicians who used George H. W. Bush as a weapon with which to bludgeon George W. Bush had long derided George H. W. Bush. The former president who once could do no right was sometimes lionized as a statesman less because of his own merits as a statesman and more because he wasn't his son.

Bush was circumspect even with his closest lieutenants, Scowcroft and Jim Baker. "Both those guys [Scowcroft and Baker] know of my affection for my son, they know of my conviction that he doesn't need his father out there opining, and they know that I'm not going to do that in any way, inadvertently or directly," Bush recalled. "So there's kind of a no-man's-land there. They'll give me an opinion, but they don't say, 'You've got to get the President to do this or you've got to talk to him about that'-they don't do that. I told them early on that he's President, I'm not. I had my chance. Now he's got to do what he thinks is right."

From Florida, Jeb watched his father and his elder brother with care and concern and was unsurprised that their dad chose to be totally supportive. "No one should expect a rational view of this," Jeb recalled. "He's your son; he's getting the crap kicked out of him; it reminds you of when you were getting the crap kicked out of you by the same people, the same institutions, so you understandably settle on saying: 'This is my son, I love him, and that's it.' You shouldn't really expect anything more, or anything different. He's your son, for God's sake."

- The saga of the two George Bushes became central to the history of the modern era in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the Bush 43 administration turned its attention to Iraq. The distance of years has made it difficult to recall the pervasive sense of danger in the immediate post-9/11 period. Each day in the Oval Office, President Bush read intelligence reports on biological, chemical, and even nuclear threats. Striking Afghanistan was one thing, but the incumbent president believed a key lesson of what he called a "day of fire" was the elimination of threats before they materialized, and the possibility of a dictator like Saddam passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorists was one such threat.

A war against Saddam was a bold choice, but Bush 43 was a president with an avowed interest in being bold in ways that his father had not been. The elder Bush had built his political life on reacting, carefully and pragmatically, to a changing world. The younger Bush had defined himself as a different kind of leader, a man who preferred action to reaction. So even when George W. Bush was acting without any reference to his father, he could appear to be pursuing paths-particularly in foreign policy-as a means of rebellion against, or of competition with, his father.

The targeting of Iraq in the wake of September 11 provided an irresistible context for Shakespearean speculation about dynastic rivalries. (Maureen Dowd of The New York Times-George W. nicknamed her "the Cobra"-was the poet laureate of the saga of father and son.) Those who held such psychological theories about George W. Bush's mind and motives-including many mainstream journalists and opinion makers-felt vindicated on Thursday, August 15, 2002, when Brent Scowcroft published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. The headline: "Don't Attack Saddam." Here, it seemed, it all was: The old man in Kennebunkport, worried that his heir was riding to ruin, uses a liege man to warn the new regime of the folly of their course. The headline on Maureen Dowd's column about Scowcroft's piece: "Junior Gets a Spanking."

Reading the Scowcroft article in the Journal, George W. was, in his own recollection, "angry" that his father's old intimate "had chosen to publish his advice in the newspaper instead of sharing it with me." Moreover, George W. recalled, "I was very unhappy about it not because he disagreed with my policy but because I knew the critics would be quoting him as someone close to Dad saying it was bad."

The president called his father. "He's now going to be in every story," George W. said to his father. "If he had a problem, he could have picked up the phone and come over."

"Brent's a good man," the elder Bush replied. "He's a friend-Brent's your friend."

Some friend, George W. thought. From the forty-third president's perspective, the damage had been done. "Some in Washington," the younger Bush recalled, "speculated that Brent's op-ed was Dad's way of sending me a message on Iraq"-a kind of Allan Shivers moment, reminiscent of the appointment the father had arranged at which the former Texas governor had told George W. that the 1978 House race was a bad idea.

Bush 43 refused to believe that his father would have chosen such a method of sending a message. "That was ridiculous," the younger Bush recalled. "Of all people, Dad understood the stakes. If he thought I was handling Iraq wrong, he damn sure would have told me himself."

Did Scowcroft tell Bush 41 he was going public with his reservations about his son's path? Yes, and the elder Bush did not try to stop him. "President Bush's view was that Brent had a right to speak out," recalled Jean Becker, Bush 41's post-presidential chief of staff. ("I think Brent had some very different opinions," George H. W. Bush recalled, noting that he and Scowcroft did not have sustained conversations about the issue-"because," Bush 41 said, "of the family stuff.") Was Bush 41 using Scowcroft to send a signal to the White House? "That's too conspiratorial," the elder Bush recalled. "We don't work that way."

So what way did they work? The son occasionally asked for counsel and, on those occasions, the father gave it-confidentially and usually in the most general of terms-and the son, like most presidents, did what he chose to do in any event. "I can't sit here and say, 'Son, you've got to move the previous question in the subcommittee,'" Bush recalled. "I don't know enough, and he doesn't need that." They spoke all the time, with the father reassuring the son and the son telling the father not to watch so much cable news. The elder Bush recalled that requests from the president for explicit counsel were "very few and far between. I don't think he did ask me a lot. We'd visit, but it usually wouldn't be, 'Dad, I've got to ask you this question.' He had his own team, his own imprimatur. And he earned it, fair and square. Governor of a huge state. People forget that. He did that on his own. He wasn't some dolt, some dummy going in there. That became kind of the common wisdom, the inside view, so much that abroad he had to kind of face up to that. He was well-educated, an achiever, and I used to get furious at that kind of thing."