In George W.'s recollection, much of their communication from 2001 to 2009 could be divided into two categories. "Half the time he'd be telling me, 'Son, you're doing fine,' which meant a lot because he'd actually been president and knew what it was like," George W. recalled, "and half the time he'd be railing about what somebody had said about me, which is precisely what I did with him when he was president. Many of the phone calls, I know, were to hear my voice."
- At Christmas 2002 at Camp David, George W. sought his father's counsel on Iraq. In his memoirs, Bush 43 made as little of the moment as possible while still deeming it significant enough to report. "For the most part, I didn't seek Dad's advice on major issues," Bush 43 wrote in Decision Points. "He and I both understood that I had access to more and better information than he did. Most of our conversations were for me to reassure him that I was doing fine and for him to express his confidence and love."
He admitted, however, that "Iraq was one issue where I wanted to know what he thought." At the presidential retreat where his father had spent so many hours in times of peace and of war, George W. explained where things stood. "I told Dad I was praying we could deal with Saddam peacefully but was preparing for the alternative," Bush 43 recalled in his memoir. "I walked him through the diplomatic strategy...and my efforts to rally the Saudis, Jordanians, Turks, and others in the Middle East." The elder Bush's reply ratified the younger Bush's course. "You know how tough war is, son," the elder Bush said, alluding to Afghanistan, "and you've got to try everything you can to avoid war. But if the man won't comply, you don't have any other choice."
With these words, the father endorsed the son's decision on Iraq-a fact that does not fit the usual narrative. It is important to recall, too, that George H. W. Bush, while celebrated in memory for his management of the 199091 Persian Gulf crisis, was himself willing to risk impeachment by going it alone if Congress had failed to authorize the use of force. In the 200203 period, at least, the assumed gap between Bush 43 and Bush 41 was likely not as wide as commonly supposed.
Still, that gap was thought wide indeed. In the spring of 2004, Bob Woodward published a book on the run-up to Iraq, Plan of Attack. In the course of reporting it, Woodward interviewed the president and asked if he sought his father's advice. "The discussions would be more on the tactics," Bush 43 told Woodward. "How are we doing, How are you doing with the Brits? He is following the news now. And so I am briefing him on what I see. You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."
Both Bushes said later that the remark was more theological than Freudian. "George is a religious guy," Bush 41 said. Bush 43 argued that his point was about his dependence on his Christian faith in times of trial-not about his father's personal or political characteristics. Nevertheless, the "wrong father" remark fed the popular view that the two Bushes were out of phase with each other.
It is true that Bush 41 was, as one friend put it, "anxious" about going to Baghdad. The former president understood the complexities of the undertaking better than nearly any other man alive, and he worried about war and its aftermath. This same friend, though, recalled that the elder Bush was so devoted to his son that the former president set those concerns aside and rallied to George W., putting his faith in the incumbent president's judgment.
The elder Bush had signaled some of his own thinking on Iraq-thinking more in line with his son's than not-in a little-noted but revealing speech in Houston at an Arab American community dinner in the fall of 2002. "I came to assure you that our President does not want war, does not want a conflict where innocent people lose their lives," Bush told the audience on Saturday, November 2, 2002. "What he wants is to make Iraq's brutal dictator give up his ruthless quest for weapons of mass destruction; make him honor the many agreements already made and broken; make him abide by the will of the civilized world."
He alluded to his own painful decisions: "As President I worried about the loss of innocent life; but I knew in my heart of hearts we could not let a tyrant with the 4th largest army in the world take over his neighbor by force." The bottom line, according to Bush: "So put it this way: No one wants war against Iraq, but no one wants Iraq to get more terrifying weapons of mass destruction. We must do all we can to work for peace and then, if we have to fight, to protect the lives of the innocents in Iraq." Bush also believed that September 11-an act of war on continental American soil-had presented his son with a set of circumstances and challenges that no president since Lincoln had faced, a conviction that reinforced the old man's instinct to defer to the incumbent.
The day George W. Bush issued the orders to go to war, the forty-third president-like his father had before him-walked alone on the South Lawn. Upstairs in the Treaty Room, which he also used as a study, he wrote a letter to his father.
Dear Dad,...
At around 9:30 A.M., I gave the order to SecDef to execute the war plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom. In spite of the fact that I had decided a few months ago to use force, if need be, to liberate Iraq and rid the country of WMD, the decision was an emotional one....
I know I have taken the right action and do pray few will lose life. Iraq will be free, the world will be safer....
I know what you went through.
Love,
George
A reply came by fax: Dear George, Your handwritten note, just received, touched my heart. You are doing the right thing. Your decision, just made, is the toughest decision you've had to make up until now. But you made it with strength and with compassion. It is right to worry about the loss of innocent life be it Iraqi or American. But you have done that which you had to do.
Maybe it helps a tiny bit as you face the toughest bunch of problems any President since Lincoln has faced: You carry the burden with strength and grace....
Remember Robin's words 'I love you more than tongue can tell.'
Well, I do.
Devotedly,
Dad
Reading his father's words a decade later, George W. Bush choked up with emotion. Tears came to his eyes as he relived, briefly, a moment when a father's love and a predecessor's approval came in a single note to offer reassurance in a troubled hour.
After the fall of Baghdad in early April 2003, Bush emailed his son. "This is a great day for our country, indeed for the world," he told the incumbent president. "You have borne the burden with no complaining, no posturing. You have led with conviction and determination; and now the whole world sees that more clearly."
He hoped, too, that his son would be spared the difficulties of history that had complicated his own war leadership. "No doubt tough times lie ahead, but, henceforth, here and abroad, there will never be any doubts about our Commander in Chief, about his leadership, about our boy George." Bush was right about the tough times ahead. The disappearance of doubt proved another matter altogether.
- After Jeb was reelected to a second term as Florida's governor in 2002, his parents traveled to Tallahassee for the swearing-in. At the ceremony, Columba, her father-in-law noted, was "looking lovely."
Columba Bush was something of an enigma within the Bush family. In a clan given to endless competition and breakneck speed-one old Texas political aide to George H. W. recalled that you "never wanted to get in the way" of a Ping-Pong ball in a Bush match "because they were like missiles"-Jeb's wife was quiet and private. What mattered most to Columba's father-in-law, though, was not whether she took part in the world of Walker's Point but whether she made his second son happy. He did not pretend to understand Jeb's marriage fully, and he worried when, in Jeb's first year as governor, Columba failed to declare the merchandise she'd bought on a Paris shopping trip at customs. (She was fined $4,100 for the omission.) But what struck the old man most through the decades, through all the vicissitudes of his second son's life and marriage, was how committed Jeb was to her, and her to him.
At the inauguration in Tallahassee, George P. the eldest son, now twenty-six, was the "amazing" master of ceremonies; Jeb Jr., who was nineteen, sat next to his grandfather. "Then came quiet, lovely, troubled Noelle looking beautiful, but obviously not totally at ease." Noelle, twenty-five years old, struggled with drug addiction and had recently been arrested for prescription-drug fraud.
In his inaugural address, Jeb alluded, implicitly, to the difficulties his family faced. "Although it is an intensely private-and, at times, painful matter-you should know I have rededicated myself to being a better father and husband," the governor said. "Looking today at the faces of my wife and children, all three of them, I realize that any sense of fulfillment I have from this event is meaningless unless they, too, can find fulfillment in their lives. They have sacrificed greatly for me, and I love them dearly."
His father, whom Jeb referred to as "now and forever my greatest hero," listened with pain and with pride, later writing: There Jeb stood, the most loving, caring father in the world, standing in front of his addicted daughter saying he'd do better, he'd do more. It broke my heart; and I saw out there in the crowd many other faces with tears in their eyes. Everyone knows that Jeb has given his kids, especially Noelle, his unconditional love. Her addiction has broken his heart but he will always stay at her side, loving her, caring for her and praying for her.
- Ronald Reagan died on Saturday, June 5, 2004, after a decade-long struggle with Alzheimer's. Fred Ryan, a trusted Reagan aide, had a to-do list in the plans for the immediate aftermath of the fortieth president's death. "I was supposed to call the kids and then, without delay, I was supposed to call Bush 41," Ryan recalled. "Mrs. Reagan was insistent that he be told as soon as possible. It was very important to her." From the first draft of the Reagan funeral plans-a service, according to presidential custom, in the works beginning in Reagan's last months in office-Bush was always set to speak, along with the incumbent president. At first, of course, he was the incumbent president, but even after the 1992 election Mrs. Reagan was firm that she wanted Bush to eulogize her husband. After all the years of tension, after all the slights (real and imagined, on both sides), there was, for Mrs. Reagan, a certainty that George H. W. Bush would conduct himself with grace, say the right things, and commend his fallen chief with nobility and with generosity. "Nancy was very strong about that," recalled Fred Ryan. "The pallbearers kept dying, so that changed, and the music and the hymns were open to revision, but Bush's speaking was a constant."
When he rose to deliver his remarks at the National Cathedral, he proved more than worthy of the trust of the widow who had been unjustly skeptical of him and his wife for a quarter of a century. "Once he called America hopeful, bighearted, idealistic, daring, decent and fair," Bush said of Reagan. "That was America and, yes, our friend." His voice broke when he spoke of what Reagan had meant to him. "As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life. I learned kindness; we all did. I also learned courage; the nation did." And humor: Bush quoted Reagan's one-liner to the doctors at George Washington University Hospital after the assassination attempt in 1981: "I hope you're all Republicans."
Bush paid tribute to Nancy, reaching across the strange chasm that had separated them. "If Ronald Reagan created a better world for many millions it was because of the world someone else created for him," he said. "Nancy was there for him always. Her love for him provided much of his strength, and their love together transformed all of us....So, Nancy, I want to say this to you: Today, America embraces you. We open up our arms. We seek to comfort you, to tell you of our admiration for your courage and your selfless caring."
Such charitable words about Nancy might not have come easily to a less generous man. Yet Bush rose to the occasion, and his eulogy not only to the husband but to the wife was, in a sense, George Bush's final act of service to Ronald Reagan.
- The 2004 presidential campaign was stressful for Bush, who worried hour by hour about his son's chances for a second term. When he read overnight polls in the final days that showed the president's numbers slipping, he was bereft. "This, of course, caused my aching duodenum to throb, to pulsate, to hurt," Bush wrote Hugh Sidey. Bush was addicted to television coverage of the campaign. Barbara bought a set of headphones so that she could listen to audiobooks while her husband writhed in pundit-inflicted pain.
The Sunday before the election, Bush recalled, "was a nice quiet day for us except I could not help but watch the darned TV. The talking heads seemed even louder, even more obnoxious....'Liar' was often used to describe the President. Hatred filled the airwaves and oozed into the print media, too." Bush had spent some time on the campaign trail, but his scheduled events had come to an end on Saturday, October 30, 2004. The Bushes tried to relax by going to the Texans NFL game on Sunday, but Bush was thrilled when the reelection campaign called Jean Becker to see if the former president had one more trip in him, this one to Green Bay on Monday. The next morning he boarded a jet for the two-hour, twenty-minute flight, spoke to a veterans' group in Wisconsin for twenty minutes, shook hands, and returned to Texas. Flying home his mind wandered, briefly, to the final flight of the 1988 campaign, when the hour of decision was at hand in his own quest.
As ever, though, the past quickly receded for Bush, who eagerly awaited the overnight polls on Tuesday morning. To his relief, the numbers were better, and he called Jeb, whom Bush referred to as "our realist," to get his take on Florida. "Dad, we will carry Florida," Jeb told him. Cheered by the private polling and by his second son's reassurance, Bush turned on the television to hear a different story, with commentators saying that the president was "behind by a smidgen" in Florida, which had, in the private polling, seemed safe enough. "Had they seen the tracking polls, the 'overnights'?" Bush asked in a letter to Hugh Sidey. "I figure they haven't seen them." Or, worse, Bush worried, perhaps the "talking heads" were right and the "overnights" were wrong-a possibility that Bush turned over and over in his mind as he and Barbara took a midday flight to Washington's Reagan National Airport. During the trip, Bush's speculative fears on the ground in Houston-what if the race was closer than the reelection campaign thought?-had become real. The early exit polls suggested a Kerry landslide, a repudiation of the president, another one-term Bush. "I feel like I have been hit squarely in the gut-hard," Bush wrote.
Arriving at the White House, Bush spoke on the phone with a longtime political adviser, Ron Kaufman, who told him to wait for the next "cut" of numbers-due about four P.M.-before worrying too much. It was, however, already too late for that. The former president said hello to Bush 43, who was in exercise clothes after a workout and rubdown, and to the "serene, wonderful" Laura. He tried to take a nap but failed. Describing himself as "a total nervous wreck by then," he wandered around the West Wing in search of Karl Rove, whom he found at a computer, surrounded by the exit poll data. "I sat at his table and he explained to me in great detail why I should not be concerned about the exit polls," Bush recalled. He left Rove, returned to the Residence, tried again, unsuccessfully, to nap, watched TV (which only made things worse), and finally joined his son in the Treaty Room for the long night ahead.
His son was, by comparison, calm amid the storm. Bush 43 lit a cigar, made calls, and waited. They spoke with Jeb three different times, making sure the numbers in Florida were holding up (they were) and watched the close results coming in from Ohio. If Ohio were secure, then so was reelection; the first wave of exit polls had indeed been wrong. (So much so that Bob Shrum, Kerry's chief strategist, had addressed his candidate early in the evening as "Mr. President.") As the hour grew late, though, the Ohio election officials were reluctant to announce that Bush had won the state. "There was discussion about whether the President should just go out and declare victory," Bush recalled. "I feared that without the remaining major networks declaring that we had won Ohio, the President would be taking on not only Kerry & Co but the network anchors as well."
Bush 43 decided that to claim victory now, late in the night, would be needlessly provocative. He was going to bed. They would reassess in the morning. "I was totally in accord with that decision," the elder Bush recalled, and he and Barbara retired to the Queen's Bedroom.
Father and son awoke near dawn, and both were seeking coffee when they ran into each other at the door to the younger Bushes' bedroom. The president invited his father to come to the Oval Office, where they sat together. Bush 43 called newly elected senators and top campaign staff. In these early morning hours, there was still no sense, as Bush put it, of "if and when Kerry might 'fold 'em.'" The Oval Office conversation shifted to a new question: Should the White House-or, more specifically the forty-first president-encourage a Democratic elder statesman to reach out to Kerry to nudge him toward concession?
The elder Bush was willing, briefly. "I felt Bob Strauss would be the ideal person to call, but none of us wanted to look like it was a White House pressure move," Bush recalled. "Strauss was totally trusted but I for one worried that some Kerry minion would find out about the call and leak it to the press as an example of unacceptable pressure and/or of trying to deny the people's right to know or right to have every vote counted." Andrew Card, Bush 43's White House chief of staff, called Jim Baker to ask him to reach out to Vernon Jordan, a Kerry adviser. Baker agreed, and he asked Jordan to get his man to stand down. Within hours, Kerry conceded.
The elder Bushes were scheduled to leave midmorning. Before they departed, both walked around to the Oval Office from the diplomatic entrance to say goodbye to their son. Bush joined the president for a moment on the putting green. (Barney, the First Family's Scottish terrier, chased the putts into the cup.) "Dad," Bush 43 said, "do you realize that this is the first time since 1988 that a President has won with a clear majority of the vote?" It was a warm remark, a reminder that the elder Bush had been the last president to receive the affirmation of a majority of American voters. Clinton had not managed it in 1992 or in 1996; neither had the younger Bush in the contest against Gore.
Standing there with his reelected son, Bush felt more than ever as though his own hour had passed. "I wish I could help this son of ours," he wrote. "I wish I could do something to help ease the burden, a burden incidentally that he never ever complains about. But I cannot. I am an old guy. My experiences are out of date." It was time to go home to Houston.
FIFTY.
The Buck Stops There
He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer. It just showed me that you cannot do it that way.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH on Dick Cheney's vice presidency I love George Bush. I do.
-BILL CLINTON ON THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS, 2004, a tsunami in Southeast Asia ravaged the region, killing nearly a quarter million people and leaving vast destruction in its wake. To signal American compassion and American unity, George W. Bush asked two former presidents-his father and Bill Clinton-to raise money for relief efforts. As part of their mission, the two men traveled together to the region. Bush left Houston to meet up with Clinton in Los Angeles, and they boarded a government plane to cross the Pacific. Clinton won Bush's heart early by deferring to the older man, insisting that the forty-first president take the one stateroom on the plane with a bed. (Clinton spent most of the night playing cards and talking-always talking-in an adjoining cabin.) And Clinton "always waited so we could go off the plane together," Bush recalled, "giving the greeters the old familiar 'wave from the top of the stairs.'"
The two men had spent little time together before the journey, but soon bonded. Bush was dazzled by Clinton's gifts of gregariousness and charisma; Clinton sought Bush's fatherly approval and, given his historical imagination, enjoyed the company of the embodiment of the fading order of Cold War statesmanship. Clinton tended to run late; Bush tended to run precisely on time. On one occasion, when Clinton had not yet turned up for a reception with an embassy staff, Bush went ahead into a ballroom to say a few words, only to have the door fly open and "bigger than life itsownself Bill Clinton strode in," Bush wrote.
"George," Clinton said, "sorry if I'm late but I had to stop by the kitchen to say hi and thank all those good people."
Bush was bemused, not angry. "He was far more easily recognized and to be frank got a warmer reception than I did, and mine was pretty darn good," Bush wrote. "Rationalization: Not to detract from Clinton's star power with the crowds, but I have been out of office for a long, long time." Clinton's volubility was striking. "He talks all the time," Bush recalled, emphasizing the last three words with care. "He knows every subject. You mention Nigeria, and he'll say, 'Now let me tell you about what's happening in the northern part of the country.' I don't know how much of it's bullshit and how much of it's real, factual. We went to call on different embassies-Indonesia and Thailand. We were greeted warmly by the ambassadors. There was this painting. Clinton asks who painted it, and the ambassador told him. It was one of their famous painters, Umbuga or something like that. And when we were walking out, Clinton turned to the ambassador and said, 'That is one of the most beautiful Umbugas I have ever seen.' He's just shameless. But outgoing and gregarious. I like the man." As Bush recalled the tsunami trip, "Bill did have an opinion on everything and asked questions on a lot of things. When the questions were answered he would then opine based on some experience of his own, somewhere, sometime ago." Imagining Clinton's stream of conversation, Bush continued: Does this purification system use reverse osmosis? This is diesel driven isn't it? I remember the hurricane damage I saw in Xland, or this reminds me of my trip to the Sudan, or I used to love to watch the kids singing in Ulan Bator. Boy, you haven't seen a wedding til you've seen one in Swaziland. These are made up examples, but the point is on every subject at every place he went on about his own experiences. I do think people were fascinated.
At one point Bush received an email about Clinton from his sister, Nancy Ellis, who had been watching the coverage of the trip. It was short and to the point: "He's still claiming more than his fair share." As Bush explained, "In grade school they had a place on our report cards 'Claims no more than his fair share of time and attention in the class room.' Bill would have gotten a bad mark there."
In Sri Lanka, the two men agreed to wrap up a dinner with the country's president by ten P.M. Everything was moving according to plan, and they were on track to be in bed on time-until Clinton started pausing to speak with every other guest. "He stopped and chatted and explained things to official after official," Bush recalled. Clinton leaned against the wall, continuing to talk. The entourage, including Bush, tried hand signals, eye signals, shoulder signals-nothing worked.
In the car at last, Clinton said, "George, you owe me big time for getting us out of there a lot earlier than we expected." Bush surrendered. "I thanked him profusely," Bush recalled. "And I said nothing more. You cannot get mad at the guy."
- Bush's reluctance to broaden his post-presidential role beyond those missions his son asked him to undertake was underscored after a trip to Germany to mark the fifteenth anniversary of reunification in the summer of 2005. Among the ceremonial trappings, three eagles were brought in to take their place on the arms of Bush, Gorbachev, and Helmut Kohl. "My eagle was the biggest-I was thinking, 'Oh great symbol of American might and pride, do not claw me, do not shit upon me,'" he wrote. "It worked out OK."
Bush enjoyed being with Gorbachev-the former Soviet's ebullience reminded Bush of those heady days when the two men worked together so closely-but was wary of Gorbachev's eagerness to convene gatherings of former leaders to call for action on different issues. "Gorbachev always wants to get us 'used-to-bes' together for one good cause or another," Bush wrote his old friend Lud Ashley. "He keeps holding yellow-pad conferences trying to save the world on the environment, human rights, health care, Africa. You name the subject-then a conference will be convened....Get a cause and the Gorbachev Foundation will assemble a bunch of the 'once-was' crowd. Write a paper that will then gather moss and remain unread by the current world leaders who Gorby and others hope to enlighten."
Bush's impatience with blue-ribbon panels-or what he liked to call "yellow-pad conferences"-was also rooted in his concern for his son. "I prefer Maine or A&M-besides, if I entered in to these type of things some report would inevitably show differences between the old guys and the current administration; and I do not need to cause the President grief by my signing on to some report that is not necessarily in accord with his policies," Bush told Ashley. Why complicate the forty-third president's already complicated life?
Bush thus stayed largely offstage, quietly doing a great deal of charity work; he and Mrs. Bush raised huge amounts of money for cancer research and literacy, among other causes. Then, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Bush 43 reached out once more to his father and Bill Clinton for fundraising and relief help. George W. was being attacked personally for, as his father put it, "not giving a damn." The criticism enraged the former president, who wrote Hugh Sidey a passionate letter defending his son. He was reminded, he said, of what he himself had faced after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. "Now my own son is under this kind of blistering, mean-spirited attack," Bush wrote. "People assign to him the worst possible motives. They do not recognize how complex the recovery is. They do not want to say that it was impossible to foresee the extent or even the type of the damage....The critics do not know what is in 43's heart, how deeply he feels about the hurt, the anguish, the losses affecting so many people, most of them poor."
A sign of the depth of his torment over the criticism of the White House was found in a postscript to his letter. He was writing, he noted, on September 2-the anniversary of Chichi-Jima. "Now I see some of his most nasty critics trying to shoot down my beloved son-shoot him down by mean spirited attacks," Bush wrote. "I was a scared kid back then. Now I am just an angry old man hurting for my son."
In October 2006, Bush and Clinton traveled to Philadelphia to accept an award from the National Constitution Center. "If you ever have an ego problem, don't travel with President Clinton to the Maldives Islands," Bush advised the audience. "It was like traveling with a rock star. 'Get out of the way, will ya, Clinton's coming!'" Bush acknowledged that, yes, "there may have been one or two lapses in etiquette on the 1992 campaign trail. For example I really did not think that our dog Millie knew more about foreign policy than the governor of Arkansas. But hey, we were in the heat of the battle-the elbows get sharp, you know!" Competition, Bush added, was essential to democracy. "It doesn't matter if it is Democrat versus Republican, liberal or conservative, or Coke versus Pepsi. Competition is a good thing-a needed thing-indeed the very thing on which our national progress is built."
Clinton was forthright. "I love George Bush," he said. "I do. And I think that we figured out how we're supposed to do this. I developed a good relationship with the current president. I told him: I will never ask you to change what you believe, you say what you believe. I'll say what I believe. And I'll say it with respect, whatever you want me to do to help our country in good conscience, I'll do it."
The rapprochement between the Bushes and Bill Clinton did not extend to Hillary. "I don't feel close to Hillary at all," Bush said, "but I do to Bill, and I can't read their relationship even today."
"We like her, but we don't see her," Barbara said. Unlike former president Clinton, Senator (and then Secretary of State) Clinton did not come to call at Kennebunkport. Barbara thought of the Clintons when she read Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time. "The relationship between Franklin and Eleanor sounds rather like the relationship between Bill and Hillary," Barbara wrote in her diary. "Respect for each other, but separate lives. Who knows."
As time passed and it became clear that Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2008-by making a case against the years of George W. Bush-the elder Bush wrote to his immediate successor. "The politics between now and two years from now might put pressure on our friendship," Bush told Clinton in the autumn of 2006, "but it is my view that it will survive. In any event, I have genuinely enjoyed working with you. Don't kill yourself by travel or endless rope lines."
- The autumn of 2006 was fraught. The situation on the ground in Iraq had deteriorated, with continuing violence and instability. An Iraq Study Group, cochaired by Jim Baker, was seeking to offer bipartisan analysis and a possible way forward. (Members included Sandra Day O'Connor and Democrats Vernon Jordan and Leon Panetta.) The panel's report was due just after the midterm elections, which went terribly for the Republicans: President Bush referred to his party's losses as "a thumping."
Even before the votes came back, Bush 43 realized it was time for Don Rumsfeld to go, and the president consulted the elder Bush about the possibility of naming Bob Gates, the incumbent president of Texas A&M, to succeed Rumsfeld. "Do you think Gates would do it, and do you think he'd be good?" Bush 43 asked. "One, I think he'd do it," the elder Bush replied, "and second I think he'd be very good." Recalling his views at the time, Bush said: "At A&M, he had a marvelous way to get the support of his people, had a wonderful manner. Bob Gates is motivated by service. He's not trying to get a better license plate. He's down to earth, bright, really good guy." (During a two-day span over the Thanksgiving weekend in 2005, Jim Baker had gotten calls from Bush 41 and then from Bush 43 to discuss Baker's coming to Washington to replace Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. The possibility was Bush 43's idea, and he had asked his father, who liked the suggestion when he heard it, to make the initial overture to Baker. Baker believed that it was a good idea to name a new defense secretary, but at age seventy-six, he decided he had best forgo a return to the Cabinet.) Robert Gates represented the realist tradition more commonly associated with the elder Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft. To Bush, Rumsfeld had put too much value on American unilateralism, eschewing diplomacy and consistently opposing Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had served Bush 43 from 2001 to 2005. Fairly or not, Bush thought Rumsfeld an unreflective hawk who, along with a post-9/11 Dick Cheney, had formed the core of an influential hard-right element within the administration.
Bush was relieved by the call from his son and was glad to see Rumsfeld go. "I think he served the President badly," Bush recalled of Rumsfeld after Bush 43 left the White House. "I don't like what he did, and I think it hurt the President, having his iron-ass view of everything. I've never been that close to him anyway. There's a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He's more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that." Bush was blunt: "Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow and self-assured, swagger." Before the end of 2006, Rumsfeld was gone.
- Bush 41 had no time for the argument that the son was finishing a job in Iraq that the father should have handled in 1991. "The idea of 'doing it better than we did in '91'-I think historically that isn't going to be the case, but that's juxtaposing the father against the son, and I don't like to do that, and I don't like to talk about it," Bush 41 said. "And I don't really think it's in play here." As Bush saw it, toppling and capturing Saddam were "proud moments" in American history. For him, 1991 and 2003 were not comparable. "Different wars, different reasons," Bush recalled.
Those who thought Bush 41 was sitting around shaking his head in dismay through Bush 43's two terms were wrong. "Oh, I know that's the common wisdom," the elder Bush said, "but it's not right."
The elder Bush knew that there were "people that criticize George around martinis." If Bush heard such talk, he recalled, he would reply: "So would we be better off with Saddam Hussein in there?" Mimicking a chagrined cocktail guest, Bush went on: "'Oh no, that's not what I'm saying,' they'll say back, but that's kind of the bottom line. Saddam's gone, and with him went a lot of brutality and nastiness and awfulness."
In a series of wide-ranging interviews for this book from October 2008 through November 2010, Bush 41 said he believed that the Bush 43 White House's public tone was harsher than it should have been. Though Bush 41 was supportive of the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan and, despite private anxieties, of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was uncomfortable with the Bush 43 administration's cowboy image. "I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there-some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him," Bush 41 recalled. "Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn't necessarily solve the diplomatic problem."
What was he thinking of specifically? "You go back to the 'axis of evil' and these things, and I think that might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything," the elder Bush replied. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush 43 had referred to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of evil," arguing that the three terrorist-sponsoring nations were attempting to arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction-weapons that might one day be supplied to terrorists. The use of the phrase caused consternation in the diplomatic world. A New York Times piece after the State of the Union caught the moment: "Europe Seethes as the U.S. Flies Solo in World Affairs."
A key question through much of George W. Bush's presidency was whether the war on terror would widen beyond Afghanistan and Iraq-chiefly to Iran, a favorite target of "neoconservatives" who often argued for the use of American force around the world. "As long as bringing down Saddam was the goal, that didn't seem to me to be unreasonable," Bush 41 recalled. "I think the world's better off with the guy gone. But it was after that-the appearance that we're going to go in there and fight with Iran, or we're going to go in there and fight with so-and-so to get our way, I didn't like that, and I don't know that the President felt that way. But because he's President, without denouncing those around him who were putting that out, why, he gets the blame, and I think probably unfairly on that."
When talking about the substance of his son's presidency, the elder Bush tended to speak in a musing, hesitant way, at once hedging and blunt. One can hear him weighing his own views, his deference toward the presidential office, his love for his son, and his awareness that responsibility begins and ends with the man in charge. "What you really need to know, and want to, is what I thought when he did this or that," Bush said. "I just don't want to go into all that. He's my son, he did his best, and I'm for him. It's that simple an equation."
In thinking over the son's eight years in power, Bush 41 returned on several occasions to the subject of Dick Cheney, whom he believed bore a large measure of responsibility for the administration's overly hawkish image. Bush 43 was himself reluctant to intervene militarily beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, preferring a more diplomatic approach in his second term, but the Cheney wing of the administration pressed for a more vigorous reaction on issues such as Iran's developing nuclear program. Neoconservative arguments about transforming the Middle East-by force if necessary-leaked out in the press and into the political conversation and influenced even Bush 41's view of Bush 43's White House.
Cheney, Bush 41 knew, was a shrewd Washington player. As White House chief of staff at the age of thirty-four under Ford, as a member of Congress, and as secretary of defense for Bush 41, Cheney knew how to maximize his influence within the system and, as vice president, was not shy about boldly stating his own bold positions. Condi Rice, who served as national security adviser in the first term and as secretary of state in the second, believed Cheney's staff was "very much of one ultra-hawkish mind...determined to act as a power center of its own."
Bush 41 had no doubts about whether his son was, in George W.'s own phrase, "the Decider." The father's point was not that Cheney was the power behind the throne, but that Cheney's activist vice presidency had given the administration a harsher image than it might otherwise have had. "I think George would say that 'I was the one making these decisions. I was the one doing this,'" Bush 41 said in 2009. "But I think Cheney had a real influence, for better or for worse, depending on which period we're talking about." In Bush 41's opinion, the vice president at times appeared to have a disproportionate voice in the affairs of the son's administration-and Bush always believed in proportion. "He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer," Bush said of his son's vice president. "It just showed me that you cannot do it that way. The President should not have that worry."
The kind of "worry" Bush 41 was talking about was on public display in 2007, when a national-security aide to Cheney speculated about the use of force against Iran. Reports of the Cheney aide's remarks prompted Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to warn against "new crazies" who might lead America into a war with Iran. "We fully believe that Foggy Bottom is committed to the diplomatic track," an unnamed European official told The New York Times-which Bush 41 read every day. "But there's some concern about the vice president's office."
In Houston or in Kennebunkport, the forty-first president would read such stories with concern and puzzlement. To Bush, the Cheney of the first decade of the new century was not the Cheney of 198993. Secretary of Defense Cheney had seemed reasonable and measured. Vice President Cheney appeared to be a champion for thorough-going neoconservatives who believed in projecting force to promote American security interests. An irony: The elder Bush himself had helped enable the rise of the neoconservative view of foreign policy by approving the "Team B" exercise of competitive analysis at the CIA in 1976. Many of the Cold War hawks of the 1970s and '80s became War on Terror hawks after 9/11. A further irony: Bush 41 had, in his time, cast the struggle to liberate Kuwait as one of "'good' vs. 'evil'" and had been willing to risk impeachment to go to war against Saddam-a unilateral state of mind.
Still, to the elder Bush, the Cheney with whom he had served from 1989 to 1993 seemed a changed man. "I don't know, he just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with," Bush recalled. When did Bush begin to think that this was not the same Cheney? "The reaction to [the attacks of 9/11], what to do about the Middle East," Bush recalled. "Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East." The reference was apparently to Cheney's hard line on Iran. Describing Cheney as a kind of "Dr. Strangelove," Thomas Friedman of The New York Times captured the zeitgeist nicely in November 2007: "Vice President Cheney is the hawk-eating hawk, who regularly swoops down and declares that the U.S. will not permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Trust me, the Iranians take his threats seriously." There was also the vice president's support for an American air strike on a North Koreanbuilt nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007. (Bush 43 declined to take Cheney's advice. Israel attacked the reactor instead.) What did Bush think had changed Cheney? "I don't know," Bush said. "I don't know. I don't know." One theory of his, Bush mused, was that the vice president's wife, Lynne, a conservative intellectual and historian, had influenced her husband's turn rightward. "You know, I've concluded that Lynne Cheney is a lot of the eminence grise here-iron-ass, tough as nails, driving," Bush said. "But I don't know." Bush added that the Cheneys' daughter Liz, an outspoken conservative who served in the State Department for several years in the George W. Bush administration, was also "tough" and influential with her father. The implied theory: Cheney had become ever more hawkish at least in part because of the conservative leanings of his family circle.
In Bush's view, Cheney-whom Bush called "a good man"-should have held himself in greater check as vice president. When Vice President George H. W. Bush had views, he shared them with the president exclusively. When Vice President Dick Cheney had views, he and his large staff forcefully articulated them in policy-making meetings within the White House and around the government-and, in the way of Washington, the Cheney position would become known in the press and abroad. No two men could have had more divergent views of the vice presidency, and Bush, in retirement, clearly favored his conception of the office over Cheney's. "The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department," Bush said, alluding to the vice president's national security team. "I think they overdid that. But it's not Cheney's fault, it's the president's fault."
The bottom line: Bush 41 believed that Cheney and his "hard-charging" staff and allies had fueled a global impression of American inflexibility-an impression that the diplomatically inclined elder Bush thought had made the forty-third president appear less reasonable than he in fact was. Yet Bush 41 acknowledged that the president, not Cheney, was ultimately responsible not only for the administration's content but also for its tone. "The buck," Bush agreed, "stops there."
- In his high-ceilinged, book-lined study in McLean, Virginia, Dick Cheney read a transcript of Bush 41's comments. A small smile came to his face as he absorbed them. "Fascinating," Cheney murmured.
"No question I was much harder-line after 9/11 than I was before, especially when we got into this whole area of terrorism, nukes, and WMD," Cheney continued. "And I find it fascinating because they clearly had very different perceptions of the role of the vice president. Ours was, I think, a relatively unique arrangement. That's what President Bush 43 wanted. He wanted me to play a significant role, and he was true to his word. And I did set up a strong organization to focus on what it was that he wanted me to focus on, which was all the national security stuff." ("I do disagree with his putting it on Lynne and Liz," he said. Mrs. Cheney and Liz Cheney declined to comment on Bush 41's remarks.) Did the elder Bush ever signal such views during his son's years in office? "I've never heard any of this from Forty-one," Cheney replied. "He would sometimes stick his head in, and we'd talk, but he never indicated anything like this." What about Bush 41's opinion that Cheney was "very hard-line and very different" than the one he'd worked with-a view shared by Brent Scowcroft? "We were dealing with a completely different kind of a threat after 9/11," Cheney replied. "We lost three thousand people. It was worse than Pearl Harbor, here at home. And so I believed then, and still do to this day, that it was very important that we recognize that this wasn't just a terrorist act or a law-enforcement problem. It was a war, an act of war, and that we were justified in taking extraordinary measures to defend the country. We did what we believed we needed to do. W is the one who made the decisions. To the extent I was a consequential vice president is because that's what he wanted."
After reading a transcript of his father's comments about Cheney, Bush 43 replied: "He certainly never expressed that opinion to me, either during the presidency or after. I valued Dick's advice, but he was one of a number of my advisers I consulted, depending on the issue." The elder Bush, his son said, "would never say to me, 'Hey, you need to rein in Cheney. He's ruining your administration.' It would be out of character for him to do that. And in any event, I disagree with his characterization of what was going on. I made the decisions. This was my philosophy."