Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 31
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Destiny and Power Part 31

PROLOGUE.

IT WAS LATE GHWB diary, November 4, 1992. He had tried to sleep but could not. "I went into bed with Bar and tears kept coming, and here I am; she is asleep, but I can't sleep," he dictated at 12:15 A.M. (Ibid.) SUITE 271 Ibid. The suite number was confirmed by author interviews with David Jones, White House lead advance on the trip, and Tim McBride, Bush's longtime personal aide. See also "Suite 271, Bush's Home Away from Home," Sun Journal, Lewiston, ME, January 1, 1990.

WOOD-PANELED LIVING ROOM For images of the suite on election night, see David Valdez, comp., George Herbert Walker Bush: A Photographic Profile (College Station, Tex., 1997), 13637.

WEARY BUT RESTLESS GHWB diary, November 4, 1992. "I want to sleep," he dictated. "I lie down, but I can't sleep." (Ibid.) ON A SMALL SOFA GHWB diary, November 4, 1992.

BABY BOOMER DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR Naftali, GHWB, 142.

"I ACHE AND I NOW MUST THINK" GHWB diary, November 4, 1992.

HE KEPT HIS VOICE LOW Ibid. The level of his voice is evident from the audio version of the diary.

ASLEEP BACK IN THE BEDROOM Ibid.

"I THINK OF OUR COUNTRY" Ibid.

"HURT, HURT, HURT" Ibid.

"I DON'T LIKE TO SEE" Ibid.

CONSIDERED A "DRAFT DODGER" Ibid., November 5, 1992.

WHO HAD MANAGED TO STAY OUT OF THE ARMED FORCES Bill Clinton, My Life (New York, 2004), 15461. See also Dan Balz, "Clinton and the Draft: Anatomy of a Controversy," WP, September 13, 1992.

HAD PARTICIPATED IN GHWB diary, November 4, 1992. See also Gerald F. Seib, "Bush Criticizes Clinton's Role Over Vietnam," Wall Street Journal, October 8, 1992; Wicker, GHWB, 199200, 2045.

"I GUESS IT'S LOSING" GHWB diary, November 4, 1992.

"I LIKE HIM" Ibid.

"I STILL FEEL" Ibid., November 6, 1992.

"THE PASSION AND ACTION" Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched with Fire," Memorial Day Address, May 30, 1884, Keene, New Hampshire, http://people.virginia.edu/~mmd5f/memorial.html.

"THE BOYS" GHWB diary, November 4, 1992.

"BE STRONG" Ibid.

RETIRED FOR THE NIGHT Ibid.

"IT'LL CHANGE" Ibid., November 8, 1992.

THE FARTHER THE COUNTRY MOVED See, for instance, Jonathan Rauch, "Father Superior: Our Greatest Modern President," The New Republic, May 22, 2000; Peter Baker, "Bush 41 Reunion Looks to Burnish His Legacy," NYT, April 3, 2014. Jeffrey M. Jones, "History Usually Kinder to Ex-Presidents," Gallup, April 25, 2013, is illuminating. (www.gallup.com/poll/162044/history-usually-kinder-presidents.aspx.) "HARD TO BELIEVE" Author interview with GHWB.

ONE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN LIVES For my portrait of Bush in the following pages, I am particularly indebted to his own books: All the Best, the collection of letters; A World Transformed, with Brent Scowcroft, on the Bush administration's foreign policy; and the 1987 autobiography he wrote with Victor Gold, Looking Forward. Mrs. Bush's two volumes of memoirs-Barbara Bush: A Memoir and Reflections: Life After the White House-were also invaluable. I am not the first and will certainly not be the last to try to capture the man and what he meant. I learned much from GWB, 41: A Portrait of My Father (New York, 2014); Herbert S. Parmet's George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New York, 1997); Timothy Naftali, George H. W. Bush (New York, 2007); Tom Wicker, George Herbert Walker Bush (New York, 2004); Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy (New York, 2008); Jeffrey A. Engel's two edited volumes, The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (New York, 2009) and Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War (New York, 2013); Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (New York, 2004); Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush (New York, 1992); Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York, 1989); Nicholas King, George Bush: A Biography (New York, 1980); Mickey Herskowitz, Duty, Honor, Country (Nashville, 2003). For more skeptical views of Bush and his family, see Kitty Kelley, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (New York, 2004); Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (New York, 2009); Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York, 2004).

I also learned much from the scholarly literature that is cited below. I am particularly indebted to the following volumes: Greene, The Presidency of George Bush; Christopher Maynard, Out of the Shadow: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War (College Station, Tex., 2008); The China Diary of George H. W. Bush: The Making of a Global President, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel (Princeton, N.J., 2008); Michael Nelson and Barbara A. Perry, eds. 41: Inside the Presidency of George H. W. Bush (Ithaca, N.Y., 2014); Richard Himelfarb and Rosanna Perotti, eds., Principle Over Politics? The Domestic Policy of the George H. W. Bush Presidency (Westport, Conn., 2004).

Memoirs of key players in the Bush administration were invaluable: John H. Sununu, The Quiet Man: The Indispensable Presidency of George H. W. Bush (New York, 2015); James A. Baker III with Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 19891992 (New York, 1995); James A. Baker III with Steve Fiffer, Work Hard, Study-and Keep Out of Politics! Adventures and Lessons from an Unexpected Public Life (New York, 2006); Colin L. Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey; Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York, 2011); Richard N. Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars (New York, 2009); Marlin Fitzwater, Call the Briefing! Bush and Reagan, Sam and Helen: A Decade with Presidents and the Press (New York, 1995); Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York, 1996); Richard Darman, Who's in Control? Polar Politics and the Sensible Center (New York, 1996).

"WAY OUT THERE" Author interview with GHWB.

"THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS" Undelivered address of Franklin D. Roosevelt prepared for Jefferson Day, April 13, 1945, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Franklin D. Roosevelt, 194445 (New York, 1950), 615.

IN THE WARM DUSK OF A TEXAS AUTUMN Author interview with GHWB.

"MY MOTIVATION'S ALWAYS BEEN GOAL" Ibid.

HE FELL SILENT Ibid.

"WHATEVER YOU'RE IN" Ibid.

OFFERED JOBS AT BROWN BROTHERS HARRIMAN Ibid.

"IT JUST WASN'T" Ibid.

"WOULDN'T HAVE HAD" Ibid.

DOROTHY WALKER BUSH'S ADMONITIONS Author interviews with GHWB, Nancy Bush Ellis, and Jonathan Bush.

"NOBODY LIKES A BRAGGADOCIO" Author interview with GHWB.

"THE STAR OF THE FAMILY" Author interview with Nancy Bush Ellis.

"HE WAS MEANT TO BE SAVED" Ibid.

"THIS IS MY SON GEORGE" Author interview with Michael Beschloss, who was told the story by a son of the ambassador. On the eve of the 1989 presidential inauguration, Bush's brother Jonathan got a call in his Washington hotel room from a childhood friend. "Well, you were right," the friend said.

"What do you mean?" Jon Bush asked.

"Fifty years ago you told me your brother was going to be president, and tomorrow he is." (Author interview with Jonathan Bush.)

In Naftali, GHWB, Naftali speculated that GHWB's battle against a staph infection in his Andover years may have played into this sense of himself as well. "Surviving this ordeal, which required a lengthy stay in the hospital, may have given him a sense of mission, if not destiny." (Naftali, GHWB, 6.) "'There has to be a certain ego factor to drive a person to run for the Presidency,' [Bush] told a reporter in 1979. 'I've been driven to do a lot of things in life. I was driven to be a success in business, to excel in college, to be the youngest fighter pilot. I'm confident that I'm better than those guys, but so far I haven't been able to prove it.'" (Ibid., 36.)

HE OPPOSED THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT ATB, 88.

ONLY TO VOTE FOR OPEN HOUSING Ibid., 10711.

"READ MY LIPS" "Transcript of Bush Speech Accepting Presidential Nomination," NYT, August 19, 1988.

ONLY TO BREAK THAT PROMISE ATB, 48183.

A HARD-HITTING PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN See, for instance, LSY, 33456.

A "KINDER AND GENTLER" "Transcript of Bush Speech Accepting Presidential Nomination," NYT, August 19, 1988.

"TELL THE TRUTH" ATB, 356.

"ONE OF THE CRITICISMS" Author interview with GHWB. Asked when he decided to seek the White House, he said there had been no single epiphany. "There wasn't a defining moment," Bush recalled. "I looked around and I said, 'Why not me?' I'd had a breadth of experience and I was driven, and I wanted to do it, and I felt I could be a good president. It was more personal. It wasn't any great demand from across the world, 'This is the guy to come in and save the nation'-there wasn't any of that....There wasn't a moment where I said, 'Why not me, Lord?'" So there was no burning bush moment, no hour when the call to the highest office became clear? "No burning bush-burning desire, but no burning bush," he said. "I had no, 'Once I get there, I can solve the problem of this or that.' I just felt that I could do something about the U.S. standing in the world, and help people, and broad stuff like that. But not, 'If I get in there, I'll go pass a flat tax or I'll do this or that.'" (Ibid.) EISENHOWER SAID THAT HIS GOAL "American President: A Reference Resource on President Dwight D. Eisenhower," Miller Center, University of Virginia, http://millercenter.org/president/eisenhower/essays/biography/4.

VISITING A CHILDREN'S LEUKEMIA WARD GHWB diary, September 29, 1987.

"MY EYES FLOODED" Ibid.

DICTATED INTO A HANDHELD Author interview with GHWB.

SOMETIMES CARRYING THE DEVICE Author interview with Tim McBride.

"THE LONELINESS OF THE JOB" Author interview with GHWB.

"A FASCINATING TIME OF CHANGE IN THE WORLD ITSELF" GHWB diary, May 26, 1989.

Part I: A Vanished Universe, Beginnings to 1942 IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL WORLD Author interview with Nancy Bush Ellis.

THE END DEPENDS UPON THE BEGINNING Academy Hill: The Andover Campus, 1778 to Present (Andover, Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 2000), vii. See also Phillips Exeter Academy Archives website, www.andover.edu.

ONE: The Land of the Self-Made Man IS IT NOT BY THE COURAGE William Barrett, "James Smith Bush," in Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord: Third Series, from 1840 to 1895, ed. John S. Keyes, Charles E. Brown, and F. Alcott Pratt (Cambridge, Mass., 1907), 180. Barrett's memoir of James Smith Bush, found in both the GHWB papers at GBPL and in the Grace Church Archives in San Francisco, is an essential source for reconstructing the nineteenth-century Bush family universe.

FAILURE SEEMS TO BE Milton Rugoff, America's Gilded Age: Intimate Portraits from an Era of Extravagance and Change, 18501890 (New York, 1989), 4.

"BUSHY" TO HIS BELOVED FIRST WIFE, FLORA Flora Sheldon Bush to Samuel P. Bush, undated, Samuel P. Bush Papers (VFM 2954), Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio. I am especially indebted to Weisberg, Bush Tragedy, and Schweizer and Schweizer, Bushes, for my treatment of the Bush and Walker family histories. See also Kelly, Family, 2435. The documents from the GBPL, cited below, were also essential, as were interviews with GHWB, Nancy Bush Ellis, and G. H. Walker III.

HOTEL TRAYMORE Railway Age Gazette, June 16, 1915, 1378. See also "Hotel Traymore, Atlantic City, N.J.," Bankers' Magazine, October 1915, 54144.

"THE MOST ELEVATED POINT ON THE ATLANTIC COAST" Railway Age Gazette, June 16, 1915, 1378.

"THE HIGHEST GOLF DRIVING CONTEST" Ibid.

THE TALL, ANGULAR BUSH "Tax 'Watchdog' Passes Up Credit in Economic Victory," undated news clipping, Samuel P. Bush [Articles and Correspondence], Post-Presidential Materials, GHWB Collection, GBPL.

TWO HUNDRED FEET ABOVE THE BEACH NYT, June 20, 1915.

THE DOMED TRAYMORE HAD JUST UNDERGONE "New Hotel Traymore, Atlantic City, New Jersey," Bankers' Magazine, June 1915, 814.

"700 ROOMS AND 700 BATHS" Ibid.

FINDING HIS FUTURE AT BUCKEYE Mansel G. Blackford, A Portrait Cast in Steel: Buckeye International and Columbus, Ohio, 18811980 (Westport, Conn., 1982), 10, 4849.

PRESIDENT OF BUCKEYE SINCE 1908 Ibid., 48.

IN A LONG-SLEEVED DRESS SHIRT AND FORMAL TROUSERS Railway Age Gazette, June 16, 1915, 1378. The details are evident from a photograph of Bush taken as he hit his shot.

THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTED BUSH'S TRIUMPH NYT, June 20, 1915.

THEIRS IS A STORY Weisberg, Bush Tragedy, 1112, discusses the familial patterns.

BUSH'S ANCESTORS WERE IN AMERICA "Walker Family Genealogy," Jan Burmeister Collection, GBPL.

SOME ARRIVED ON THE MAYFLOWER Gary Boyd Roberts, "The Mayflower Descendants of President George Herbert Walker Bush, First Lady Barbara Pierce Bush, and Vice President James Danforth Quayle," The Mayflower Descendant (January 1991), 1, Jan Burmeister Collection, GBPL.

THE MASSACHUSETTS PATRIOT DR. SAMUEL PRESCOTT Patti Hartigan of The Boston Globe request to GHWB, April 2, 1987; GHWB statement in response, Jan Burmeister Collection, GBPL. See also David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride (New York, 1994), 12931, 156, 203, 287, 332.

OBADIAH BUSH Barrett, "James Smith Bush," Memoirs, 176. For more on the Bush lineage, see Jan Burmeister Collection, GBPL.

BECAME A SCHOOLMASTER Barrett, "James Smith Bush," Memoirs, 176.

RECALLED AS THE "COMELY" HARRIET SMITH Ibid.

WENT INTO BUSINESS IN ROCHESTER Ibid.

TURNED TO SENATOR WILLIAM SEWARD Michael J. Cuddy, Jr., "By George (Bush), Obadiah Was Here," The Citizen-Advertiser (Auburn, N.Y.). GHWB sent this undated newspaper clipping to his mother and two aunts with a note dated November 19, 1988. (Jan Burmeister Collection, GBPL.) OBADIAH GREW OBSESSED Barrett, "James Smith Bush," Memoirs, 176.

MINING OPPORTUNITIES Cuddy, "By George (Bush), Obadiah Was Here."

DIED BEFORE HE COULD Barrett, "James Smith Bush," Memoirs, 17677.