Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 8
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Destiny and Power Part 8

- By October 1973, Nixon was losing control. Attorney General Elliot Richardson, ordered by the president to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, refused and resigned. Richardson deputy William Ruckelshaus also declined to execute Nixon's command. Finally, Cox was fired by the number three at the Justice Department, Robert Bork. The Cox dismissal and the resignations of Richardson and Ruckelshaus were dubbed the "Saturday Night Massacre."

Shortly thereafter Nixon claimed that two subpoenaed White House tapes had gone missing, and there was an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the middle of another crucial recording, allegedly the result of a transcription mistake by Rose Mary Woods, the president's devoted secretary. For Bush it was all too much. "I am appalled at the handling of the Watergate tapes matter," he dictated to his diary. These were, Bush said, "extremely complicated times-this job is no fun at all."

- Things at home were also somewhat fraught. George W., now in his midtwenties, was not having an easy time of it. A rejection by the University of Texas law school had left him "in shock," his mother told her diary in January 1971. It was, she added, a "real morale depressor." Baine Kerr, the Bushes' lawyer and Houston neighbor, offered a theory. "Baine says that George got higher marks than many accepted by the University of Texas law school and that he will intercede if we will let him," Barbara wrote on Sunday, January 31. "He says that it is political and that the head of the Board of Regents is opposed to George. We told him thanks, but no thanks."

After a Pentagon screening of a CBS film on South African apartheid, the younger Bush "promptly wanted to go to South Africa and expose the whole thing," Barbara wrote in her diary. "He is really worrying George and me a little. He should talk less and do more. He just can't seem to get interested. He is reading the Bible a lot. I have suggested that he talk to Ganny Bush and maybe he should look into divinity school."

Beginning in the fall of 1971, there was quiet speculation that George W. might make a bid for the Texas state senate from Harris County. "He is very seriously considering running...." Barbara wrote in her diary on Friday, October 1, 1971. He weighed the possibilities-he would have faced Democrat Jack C. Ogg in the general election-but decided against the race. "We hope he'll feel settled," Barbara wrote after George W. called with the news in January 1972.

Shortly before, as a senior at Andover, Jeb had spent several months in the winter of 197071 on student service trip to Len in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. Bush had been a bit worried about his second son. "Jebby is going to need some help I am sure," Bush told his diary during his time at the United Nations. "He is a free and independent spirit and I don't want him to get totally out of touch with the family."

In Mexico, Jeb met and fell instantly in love with Columba Garnica de Gallo, a child of a broken home. His friends thought Columba made Jeb a much more serious young man, and he was speeding through the University of Texas in the period his father served as RNC chairman. The Bushes welcomed Jeb's newfound focus but were taken aback when, at Christmas 1973, Jeb announced that he and Columba were going to marry.

On the day after Christmas, 1973, George W., then twenty-seven and a student at Harvard Business School, crashed into some trash cans after arriving home from a night out drinking. "Your behavior is disgraceful," Barbara told George W. "Go upstairs and see your father." George W. marched into his parents' bedroom to confront Bush. "I understand you want to see me," George W. said, recalling that he had "defiantly charged upstairs and put my hands on my hips." Other versions of the story have George W. saying, "You want to go mano a mano right here?" Whatever the son said, the father lowered the book he was reading, looked George W. in the eye, and then returned to his book. The silent stare sent George W. back out of the room. "He normally is a good guy," Barbara wrote of George W. in her diary. "He says that he drank so much because he was upset over Jeb. All I know is that he challenged his dad and backed down. His brothers put him in the sauna!!!!" (Recalling the "mano a mano" moment, George H. W. Bush said: "He didn't really want to, either.") While George W. did not remember invoking Jeb that night ("I was probably just looking for an excuse to use with Mother," he recalled), Barbara had her own initial concerns about Jeb's marriage. Columba, after all, was unknown to them. "How I worry about Jeb and Columba," Barbara told her diary. "Does she love him? I know when I meet her, I'll stop worrying." Barbara was impressed that Columba appeared to be "a great influence" on Jeb. "We were notified that because of his academic record [at Texas], Jeb had made Phi Beta Kappa," Barbara recalled. "I called to say how thrilled we were, and he told me he had done it for Columba because he wanted to prove he was serious. She [had] thought he was a rich man's son and a playboy." Barbara gave Jeb her grandmother Pierce's wedding ring for Columba, and the couple were married in Austin in February 1974.

- In Washington, Bush long insisted that "without the facts" he would not favor removing Nixon from office either through resignation or impeachment and conviction. He was, however, "sickened" after the April 1974 release of edited transcripts of conversations that depicted the Nixon White House as dark, conspiratorial, and profane. "The whole amoral tone made me ill," Bush wrote.

Still Bush remained loyal. In the spring and summer of 1974, his defense of Nixon came down to a plea for proportion unless and until there was clearer proof that the president himself had broken the law. The stand Bush took-of cautious support until it was beyond any question that Nixon had participated in the cover-up-was hardly a profile in courage. It was, rather, that of a conventional politician, of an ambitious man who chose to defend the powers that were-which, not incidentally, were the powers that had championed and promoted his prospects in public life. Yet his reaction to Nixon's descent into disgrace was also rooted in a sense of duty to party and a basic human empathy for what Nixon-and the Nixon family-were enduring. Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the president's younger daughter, came to Bush one day pleading for him to try to defend her father more vigorously. Her appeal touched him, but he was doing all he felt he could do in good conscience.

He worried about what his own children thought of him. "It occurred to me your own idealism might be diminished if you felt your Dad condoned the excesses of men you knew to have been his friends or associates," Bush wrote George W., Jeb, Neil, and Marvin on Tuesday, July 23, 1974. "I feel battered and disillusioned."

- The day after Bush wrote those words, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to turn over all of the White House tapes. The House Judiciary Committee began several days of deliberations that resulted in the approval of three articles of impeachment. If the articles passed the full House, the president would be tried in the Senate and, if convicted, removed from office.

On Wednesday, July 31, Bush went to the White House for a conversation with Al Haig, the hard-charging army general who had risen from serving as an aide to Kissinger to succeeding Bob Haldeman as Nixon's chief of staff in the spring of 1973. They met in Haig's West Wing office for nearly an hour. The midterm elections of 1974 were only three months away. If Nixon were thinking of resigning to avoid his forcible removal from the presidency, Bush told Haig, "he ought to do it now rather than later." From the party chairman's perspective, the reason was clear: "If he resigned after the elections [in November 1974]," Bush said, "we would probably take a bigger bath in the elections and then the new president would be faced with a Congress far to the left of where the country stood." Bush's signal was clear enough. Nixon should go.

- At noon on Monday, August 5, 1974, Dean Burch called Bush from the White House. An old Goldwater adviser, Burch had become Nixon's political counselor in these troubled months. A new tape was about to emerge, and Burch wanted Bush to come along with him and Nixon lawyer Fred Buzhardt to brief House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona, a Bush friend. The week before, Rhodes had called Bush. "You got any good news?" Rhodes asked. "Yes," Bush said, "it's 12:17 and nobody's been indicted."

Now the news was the impending release of a June 1972 White House conversation between Nixon and Haldeman six days after the Watergate break-in. The president and his then chief of staff had spoken for an hour and thirty-five minutes that morning-from 10:04 A.M. to 11:39 A.M.-and could be heard plotting how to use the CIA to stop the FBI's investigation of the burglary. "This was proof the President had been involved, at least in the cover-up," Bush recalled. "This was proof the President had lied." In the meeting with Rhodes, Burch, and Buzhardt, Bush spoke of stepping down. Burch and Buzhardt argued against the move. "Somebody," they argued, "needs to be around to pick up the pieces."

As this long summer Monday drew to a close, he recorded his current thinking for his diary. Resigning as party chairman was always an option. "I do not feel the President can survive...." he dictated. "I [am] torn between how to lead and what is leadership at a point like this. Oddly enough at this moment leadership may mean doing nothing....Maybe by sitting quietly...trying to hold the party together, one can do the most service. But it means the risk that people won't know how strongly and deeply I feel about this whole grubby Watergate mess....Watergate is a shabby, tawdry business that demeans the Presidency. Am I failing to lead by not stating that?" He knew the price of staying at the RNC, but he would pay it, forgoing the heroic headlines that resigning in protest would have brought him. Bush was not particularly driven by personal loyalty to Nixon, for he was under no illusions about what the president thought of him. The president "feels I'm soft, not tough enough, not willing to do the 'gut job' that his political instincts have taught him must be done," Bush wrote in July 1974. "He is inclined to equate privilege with softness or stuffiness."

Bush's truest fealty was to his own vision of what he called the "system," by which he meant a constitutional structure peopled with men and women of essential good will engaged in a never-ending struggle to govern well. "Civility will return to Washington eventually," Bush wrote his sons that summer. "Personalities will change and our system will have proved that it works-more slowly than some would want-less efficiently than some would decree-but it works and gives us-even in adversity-great stability." Bush had faith in the resilience of the American order, and he wanted to play his part in rescuing that order from the chaos Nixon had wrought.

- On Tuesday, August 6, 1974, Nixon was running late for a midmorning cabinet meeting. The session was pushed back; "the atmosphere," Bush recalled, was "one of unreality." When Nixon finally entered the Cabinet Room, the applause that customarily greeted his arrival was not forthcoming. The president looked terrible. "It was obvious he hadn't been sleeping well," Gerald Ford recalled. Nixon, Ford observed, was "sallow."

The president checked the clock in the middle of the cabinet table before turning to his notes for the meeting. "I would like to discuss the most important issue confronting the nation," he said, "and confronting us internationally too-inflation. Our economic situation could be the major issue in the world today." Bush was mystified. Ford, sitting nearby, thought: "My God!"

Nixon was deliberately ducking the existential issue of whether the administration itself was to long endure. Then, just as suddenly as he had launched into inflation, Nixon turned to Watergate. There had, he claimed, been no "intentional breach of the law" and "no obstruction of justice." At the time of the June 1972 break-in, he said, he had been consumed with Vietnam and the opening to China and had failed in his obligation to be "tending the store on the political side. Those who were [tending the store] were overeager." He knew, he said, that the impeachment vote in the House was lost. Yet he would not resign. He would fight it out in the Senate.

So there it was: the decision of the moment, made by a man with an ambivalent relationship with reality. No one in the room spoke. Nixon felt compelled to fill the silence. "I vetoed $35 billion in appropriations during Watergate," he went on. "I intend to fight the inflation battle with all the tools we can." Still no one spoke. At one point an uncomfortable Nixon glanced uneasily around the room. His eyes met Bush's. The president smiled awkwardly and mouthed "George." Bush was moved. "My heart went totally out to him even though I felt deeply betrayed by his lie of the day before," Bush told his diary. "The man is amoral. He has a different sense than the rest of people. He came up the hard way. He hung tough. He hunkered down, he stonewalled. He became President of the United States and a damn good one in many ways, but now it had all caught up with him."

Breaking the silence, Ford asked for the floor: "Mr. President, with your indulgence, I have something to say."

"Well, Jerry, go ahead."

"No one regrets more than I do this whole tragic episode," Ford said. "I have deep personal sympathy for you, Mr. President, and your fine family. But I wish to emphasize that had I known what has been disclosed in reference to Watergate in the last twenty-four hours, I would not have made a number of the statements I made either as Minority Leader or as Vice President....I'll have no further comment on the issue because I'm a party in interest. I'm sure there will be impeachment in the House. I can't predict the Senate outcome." Nixon, Ford thought, "seemed taken aback" by the vice president's words.

The president tried to return to business as usual. There was brief conversation about a new farm appropriations bill that he believed would have to be vetoed, followed by talk of a possible economic summit between the executive branch and Congress. Attorney General William Saxbe spoke up. "Mr. President, I don't think we ought to have a summit conference. We ought to be sure you have the ability to govern." After a long, painful pause-everyone else in the room remained silent, waiting to see the president's reaction to Saxbe's challenge-Nixon said, slowly, "Bill, I have the ability just as I have had for the last five and a half years."

No one believed him. With the skepticism of the group now in the open and gathering force after Ford's and Saxbe's remarks, Bush tried to get Nixon's attention. Speaking up, Bush said that Saxbe "was right"; that Watergate was adversely affecting the economy; and that if Nixon wanted to fight on for survival, it would be best to do so "expeditiously"-the sooner the trauma ended, the better.

Listening to Bush, Kissinger knew that the session was nearing the point of no return. If someone else took Nixon on now, it might be impossible to stop most of the cabinet from coming out against the president-right then, to his face. Given Nixon's state of mind-he might well resign if he believed it were his own decision, not the result of pressure-an open revolt of the men who owed their places to him could send Nixon into a state of defiance from which he might not return. Cutting off the cabinet conversation, Kissinger said: "We are here to do the nation's business." The discussion meandered on for a bit longer before Nixon rose and returned to the Oval Office.

As the meeting broke up, Bush told Haig that "the whole goddamned thing had come undone and there was no way it could be resolved." The White House's Senate count was wrong. If the president really believed he still had a chance of holding thirty-four votes-the minimum required for acquittal-then "people were not leveling with the White House."

Credit 15.1 The handwritten draft of Bush's letter to Richard Nixon urging the embattled president to resign, August 1974.

- In the midst of this extraordinary week, Bush had to fly to California to prepare for a GOP fundraising broadcast. In his room at the Beverly Wilshire on Wednesday, August 7, 1974, he sat down to draft a candid letter to Nixon on hotel stationery. "Dear Mr. President," Bush began, It is my considered judgment that you should now resign. I expect in your lonely embattled position this would seem to you as an act of disloyalty from one you have supported and helped in so many ways.

My own view is that I would now ill serve a President, whose massive accomplishments I will always respect and whose family I love, if I did not now give you my judgment.

Until this moment resignation has been no answer at all, but given the impact of the latest development, and it will be a lasting one, I now firmly feel resignation is best for this country, best for this President. I believe this view is held by most Republican leaders across the country.

This letter is made much more difficult because of the gratitude I will always have for you.

If you do leave office history will properly record your achievements with a lasting respect.

- Nixon never replied. On Thursday the eighth Nixon decided to resign, and he met with Ford late that morning to give him the news. Word of the resignation leaked out around noon. It was, Bush recalled, an "unreal" day. As he prepared to assume power, Ford made time to see Bush, who had returned from Los Angeles overnight. The incoming president had been friendly with Bush's parents. The two had served together for four years in the House. And since Bush had returned to Washington from New York for the RNC, the two men had been in parallel positions, having to defend Nixon until Nixon became indefensible. They were comfortable with each other; they inhabited largely the same world. There was trust between them. And when the two men met on the day Nixon was to announce his resignation, both knew that the political class ranked Bush as a top prospect to become Ford's vice president.

To his diary, Bush downplayed the possibility, largely in an unsuccessful attempt to manage his own expectations. He had wanted the vice presidency in 1968, had been mentioned as a candidate if Nixon had dumped Agnew for the 1972 reelection campaign, and had been spoken of yet again when Ford himself got the job in 1973. And so, when Ford and Bush spoke on Thursday, August 8, 1974, Bush took full advantage of the opportunity, raising subjects that ranged far beyond his portfolio as national party chairman. "I talked about the White House staff," Bush recalled, particularly about the press office, and he asked Ford to let him have "input" into whatever decisions were made about the communications operation. "I then went on to the National Security Council," suggesting that Kissinger had become too powerful in his dual roles as secretary of state and as national security adviser. Bush thought Ford needed his own man as a national security broker. That was the only way, Bush said, that Ford could "put an imprint of his own on foreign policy."

Only late in the conversation did Bush turn to his actual brief: the Republican National Committee. He said he would resign as soon as Ford wanted him to. It was critical, Bush told Ford, for the new president to have his own chairman, for the work for 1976 would have to begin "very soon." Until this point Ford had reacted little to Bush's tour d'horizon. At the suggestion that Bush was giving up the committee forthwith, though, Ford came to life. "He indicated that he wanted me to stay for awhile," Bush recalled, "that he had total confidence in me, that he didn't want it to look like he didn't have confidence in me, nor did he want it to look like I didn't have confidence in him, by doing anything precipitous."

Credit 15.2 Watching Nixon's farewell in the East Room on Friday, August 9, 1974, Bush wondered to himself: "What kind of a man is this really?"

The next afternoon, Friday, August 9, the Bushes were in the East Room for Nixon's farewell to the staff and the cabinet. They watched, fascinated, as the fallen president mused aloud about his parents ("My mother was a saint"; "I remember my old man. I think that they would have called him sort of a little man, common man"); about resilience ("Only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain"); and finally, too late, about equanimity. ("Others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.") The speech was emotional and rambling. "What kind of a man is this really?" Bush wondered to himself. "Caring for no one and yet doing so much."

After the Nixons had left for California and Ford had been sworn in as the nation's thirty-eighth president, Bush got a call from Bill Timmons, the Nixon legislative aide who was now a Ford adviser. Would Bush be available to come back to see Ford to discuss the vice presidential nomination? On Sunday, August 11, 1974, the two men met for thirty-one minutes in the Oval Office, sitting across from each other on the sofas that were arranged perpendicular to the fireplace. Bush allies were running an informal campaign for the post; Jim Baker, for instance, came in from Houston to talk Bush up around town, and other supporters worked the phones.

In the Oval Office, at Ford's request, Bush walked through his resume for vice president. "Phi Beta Kappa economics, Yale, East and West, successful in business, Ways and Means, finances in order, knowing the business community, press relations, politics, UN." Ford took all this in, and then they discussed other possible vice presidents, including Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. Bush was cool about both men, saying that he "worried about [the] divisions in the party from either right or left" if Ford chose one of them. "I kept coming down on the middle ground," Bush recalled, and-always his mother's son-he fretted that he was being too self-promotional. "It sounds like you're building yourself up, making your own case all the time," he thought to himself.

"Mr. President, it's a funny position I guess I [am] in, making this pitch," Bush said as he left, "and I hope it wasn't too strong."

"Not at all," Ford said. "I asked for it."

"No matter who you pick, you will have my total support," Bush said, looking Ford "right in the eye."

"George, I don't have any doubt about that at all," Ford said.

Within Ford's circle, Bryce Harlow had been tasked with presenting the new president with a memorandum on the most likely candidates. After assigning points for "national stature," "executive experience," and "ability to broaden [Ford's] political base," Harlow ranked Bush first, followed by Rogers Morton, John Rhodes, and Bill Brock. Nelson Rockefeller was in fifth place. Bush, Harlow wrote, was "strongest across the board"; the only caveat, Ford recalled, was that "some of my advisers regarded him-unfairly, I thought-as not yet ready to handle the rough challenges of the Oval Office." For Ford, the choice came down to Bush, Rockefeller, and Don Rumsfeld, whom Ford knew from the House and who was currently in Brussels as NATO ambassador.

On Sunday morning, August 18, 1974, Bush's prospects took a hit in the press. Citing unnamed sources, Newsweek reported that Bush faced "potential embarrassment in reports that the Nixon White House had funneled about $100,000 from a secret fund called the 'Townhouse Operation'" to Bush's 1970 Senate campaign. The Watergate special prosecutor would ultimately clear Bush, but any charge of possible corruption in the climate of the time was damaging. When he heard about the story, Bush called the White House with a gracious message for the president. The report, he said, "could be an embarrassment to President Ford, and that President Ford should know this before he decided who his Vice President is going to be."

The waiting ended on the morning of Tuesday, August 20, 1974, when Ford called Bush in Kennebunkport to let him know the next vice president of the United States was going to be Nelson Rockefeller. It was a miserable moment. "Yesterday was an enormous personal disappointment," Bush wrote Jim Baker.

Bush went to Washington to see Ford. In the Oval Office on Thursday, August 22, the president was warm and told Bush the decision had been "very close." Ford's next question: "What do you want?"

Bush's first suggestion was that he be considered as secretary of commerce, but Ford appeared uninterested in that possibility. Two diplomatic posts were mentioned: either ambassador to the Court of St. James's or envoy to China. As the conversation drifted on, they talked about Bush's becoming White House chief of staff, but Ford said that he was determined to run a decentralized shop, which made the top staff job less appealing. They talked about the ambassadorship to France and also came back to China. "I told [Ford] that I was very interested in foreign affairs," Bush recorded in his diary. "I indicated that way down the line, maybe 1980, if I stayed involved in foreign affairs, I conceivably could qualify for Secretary of State. The President seemed to agree."

The August 22 meeting ended inconclusively. Bush left Washington for Kennebunkport, the decision in the president's hands. After the weekend, on Monday, August 26, Ford called Bush at midday. Ford had talked to Kissinger and believed that, of the diplomatic options, "the one that is the best for you is China." Bush agreed, but not without raising another scenario once more: What if he were to come in as Ford's White House chief of staff? Ford was polite but firm. "He seemed to think that matter was still alive though he thought going to China was much better for me," Bush told his diary. "I am inclined to agree with that."

Such was Bush's contemporaneous account, in his 1974 diary, of how he became the envoy to China. In memory (notably in his 1987 autobiography, Looking Forward), Bush cast the choice to ask for China as a bold, adventurous stroke that he, not Ford, had first suggested as an exotic alternative to London or Paris. In truth, Bush had first asked for a cabinet post (Commerce) and then inquired about becoming White House chief of staff.

Bush's recast version enabled him to view the decision for China as the same kind of moment he and Barbara had faced in 1948 about going to Texas or remaining in the East. "Back then we decided not to do the traditional thing, but to head for the West," Bush recalled. "We now agreed that if the President gave me a choice of overseas assignments, the thing to do was head for the Far East. An important, coveted post like London or Paris would be good for the resume, but Beijing was a challenge, a journey into the unknown."

After Watergate and after losing the vice presidential nomination, he wanted to feel the way he had felt at the United Nations, not at the Republican National Committee. Bush's worst day as UN ambassador now seemed better than his best day as RNC chairman. In Bush's mind he had risked all for the party, and for what? He had again been passed over for vice president. His integrity had been anonymously attacked in the press. He was not the president's first choice for chief of staff. Given this run of bad luck, why not embrace a chance to broaden his foreign policy experience far from Washington and hope that he would again be seen as a rising statesman rather than as a professional partisan? Bush, in sum, needed China itself at this point.

After a brief experiment without a strong chief of staff in place, meanwhile, Ford appointed Don Rumsfeld to the post, putting Rumsfeld at the center of the White House action. It was the job that Bush had been interested in-another instance, along with the choice of Ford's vice president, of Bush and Rumsfeld finding themselves rivals under the same flag.

As Bush prepared to leave for the Far East, Kissinger wanted to make one thing clear to him: "There'll be some substantive work from time to time, but for the most part you'll be bored beyond belief." In light of the recent past, Bush was willing-even eager-to take that chance. Once a man had survived Watergate, how bad could anything be? "What the hell," Bush said to a reporter. "I'm fifty. It won't hurt anything."

SIXTEEN.

Am I Running Away from Something?

People stare at you. Gather around the car. Look at you. Once in a while smile. No hostility but tremendous curiosity.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, on life among the Chinese CHINA WAS AN HONORS CLASS in diplomacy and politics for Bush, an education in the realities of subtlety, respect, and indirection so often fundamental to relations between nations. In Congress and at the United Nations, Bush had learned that diplomacy required personal connection. In Beijing, he learned that it also required persistence and patience-particularly patience, which was not his strong suit. The man who came to China liked action, movement, phone calls, results. The man who left China understood that diplomacy was a long game and that change could come rapidly or glacially depending on the circumstances of a given country and given situation.

Richard Nixon's shadow still fell over nearly everything. In late September 1974, when the Bushes arrived in Anchorage, Alaska, en route to China, Bush received a message to call Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski in Washington. According to a transcript of a White House tape, a Nixon fundraiser had claimed that Bush had been approached to raise $30,000 for the Watergate burglars but had refused. (The story was not true.) "The incident itself is not important except that here I was leaving the United States, last point of land, and a call [came] out of the ugly past wondering about something having to do with Watergate, cover-up and all those matters that I want to leave behind," Bush told his new China diary.

The question of why he was flying around the globe was not far from his mind. "In going to China I am asking myself, 'Am I running away from something?' 'Am I leaving-what with inflation, incivility in the press and Watergate and all the ugliness?' 'Am I taking the easy way out?' The answer I think is 'no' because of the intrigue and fascination that is China."

Classic global balance-of-power issues prevailed during Bush's time as envoy. There was, in April 1975, the fall of Saigon, the last tragic act of America's long and unsuccessful war in Vietnam, and Bush worked hard to convince not only the Chinese but other Pacific nations that the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam did not signal a return to isolationism. In the context of the time, Bush's anxiety was that Chinese Communist influence could spread through Asia, particularly to Cambodia, the Philippines, and North Korea. Yes, China hated the Soviets and urged the United States to be powerful-but only because a powerful United States helped China by distracting Moscow. "China keeps wanting us to be strong, wanting us to defend Europe, wanting us to increase our defense budget, etc.," Bush dictated in July 1975. One lesson of his China experience was that American engagement was crucial if America wanted markets, allies, and, perhaps above all, stability. In Asia and around the world, America needed to be visible but not pushy, muscular but not domineering.

On the Bushes' first night in Beijing, they went to bed early in the American residence in the People's Liberation Armyguarded foreign diplomatic compound. (Bush was officially head of the U.S. Liaison Office, or USLO.) The heat in the apartment was stifling; as Bush put it, Barbara "got snoring again just like West Texas." He got up to turn off the heaters and plugged in a Sears humidifier. "End first night," Bush told his diary. "Lots of new sights and sounds and smells. Don't drink the water. The soap is good. The eggs are little. Short-wave makes a lot of whistling sounds-sounds just like 30 years ago."

The difficulty of his work made Bush all the more eager to do well. As he put it, one of the office's chief tasks was to discern what was unfolding inside the opaque world of Chinese politics: "Was some leader not mentioned in a news story about the dedication of a new building in his city of birth? Was a Chinese deputy minister sent to an international conference, instead of his boss? Why hasn't so-and-so been heard from in over three months? Who's up, who's down?" The ambassador from Nepal told Bush something that stuck with him. "I've been here ten years," the envoy said, "and I think I actually know less about the Chinese than when I arrived." As Bush put it, Chinese diplomats could turn "the cryptic phrase into an art form." There were, he said, three ways a Chinese official might reject a request-"all polite," Bush noted, but all insurmountable. If a meeting was said to be "not convenient," the Chinese were saying it would not happen until "hell freezes over." If a meeting was accepted "in principle," it "meant don't hold your breath." And if a meeting was described as "possible, but it might take a while," you might wait, Bush said, "five to twenty years," since "a while" meant something very different to the Chinese than to Americans.

After more than a decade of making deals in the business world, of running four campaigns in six years, and of serving as UN ambassador and as party chairman, Bush was perhaps most struck not by what he found in China but by what was missing: a ringing telephone. "I haven't gotten a phone call in a week-imagine that!" Bush wrote his children in late October 1974. Writing Jim Baker, he asked how Nelson Rockefeller was working out as vice president. "Maybe I'm better off out here," Bush wrote, "though [the vice presidency] would have been a whirlwind"-and Bush loved a whirlwind.

He had been on the ground for less than a week when he changed mission policy. In its desire to control as many aspects of the American-Chinese relationship as possible, the State Department had instructed Bush's predecessor, David Bruce, not to attend the different embassies' national day celebrations, occasions that offered an American envoy the opportunity to mingle with Chinese diplomats and officials. Bush, who wanted to meet more people and try to build bonds of affection and respect, broke with the instruction and cheerfully made the rounds, becoming a fixture on the diplomatic scene.

Bush's belief in personal diplomacy was not shared by the realpolitik secretary of state. "It doesn't matter whether they like you or not," Kissinger once told Bush, who could not have disagreed more. In October 1974, Bush dictated a telegram to Kissinger at the State Department announcing his new outgoing approach. The Bushes then struck out for a reception hosted by the Algerians. The ambassador from Algiers, Bush recalled, "looked like he was going to fall over in a dead faint when he saw us arrive." Later that evening Chiao Kuan-hua, the Chinese diplomat who had denounced the United States at the United Nations in 1972, hosted the Bushes at a banquet. There was some substantive talk ("He raised the question of oil and we discussed that," Bush recalled) and a discussion of an impending Kissinger visit. Now the foreign minister, Kuan-hua was anxious to repay Bush for an old debt of hospitality: Kuan-hua had been among the Chinese that Bush had hosted at his mother's house in Greenwich one Sunday in the UN years.

Everything was absorbing, exciting, new. The Bushes largely eschewed the chief of mission's chauffeured car, preferring to join the throngs of the city's bicyclists. Always a somewhat eclectic dresser-when he was not wearing a suit, Bush could show up in almost any combination of clothes-he would put on a People's Liberation Army hat, a self-described "Marlborough country wool jacket" (he meant "Marlboro," as in the cigarette, not "Marlborough," as in the ancestral family of Churchill), and mount his bike. The majordomo of the envoy's official residence, Mr. Wong, told Bush that both he and Barbara were known, fondly, as "Busher, who ride the bicycle, just as the Chinese do." (Bush's bike bore a novelty Texas license plate that read, simply, GEORGE.) A Mr. Lo at the nearby commissary said that Bush was "getting to be a legend in [his] dress." There was a method to Bush's eccentricity. "They are not themselves as open and outgoing but they are warm and friendly," said Bush, "and I remain convinced that we should convince them...that Americans are not stuffy, rich and formal."

Credit 16.1 On their preferred mode of transportation in Beijing, 197475. His assignment as envoy to China immersed Bush in the diplomatic arts of patience and indirection.

Though he was having a good time bicycling around Beijing and trying to understand the Chinese regime, Bush wanted a better sense of what was happening in Washington. He wrote Bill Steiger to ask his old congressional friend to arrange for different offices on Capitol Hill to add Bush to their newsletter mailing lists.

- Kissinger arrived in late November 1974. Bush watched in amazement as a bevy of security agents preceded the secretary of state out of his big plane. "So many," murmured the Chinese government interpreter Nancy Tang, who was standing with Bush at the arrival ceremony. The Bushes joined the Kissingers-Henry's wife, Nancy, had traveled with her husband-at a cluster of guesthouses. (The Bushes were assigned the same quarters, number eighteen, where the Nixons had stayed in February 1972.) The accommodations were comfortable-and wired for sound. When Barbara was preparing to mail a letter, she said aloud, "Everything's here but the glue [for the stamps]." No Chinese were in the room. The next day a bottle of glue was.

Bush was fascinated by the Kissinger style, which could never be his own. "Kissinger is brilliant in these talks," Bush recalled of meetings with Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping and others in the autumn of 1974. "Tremendous sweep of history and a tremendous sweep of the world situation." Less appealing to the intrinsically polite Bush was Kissinger's imperiousness. The secretary of state was overtly respectful of Bush-he believed the fifty-year-old diplomat was likely to remain an important man-but was less so with his own team. "His staff are scared to death of him," Bush told his diary. "The procession is almost 'regal.' People quake, 'He's coming. He's coming.'" Kissinger wanted what he wanted when he wanted it.

If Bush was afraid that he was out of sight, out of mind, in Washington, he had to have been reassured by Kissinger's interest in Bush's thinking about the future. "He asked how long I planned to stay," Bush dictated. "This is the second reference he has made to it. I had in my mind that he was probing to see what my political plans were."

Bush answered honestly: He just didn't know. There was no clear upward path at the moment. "I told him I had no political plans, that I thought the ticket for '76 was locked in with the appointment of Rockefeller, which I do, and that I had no plans at all," Bush said. Kissinger pressed the matter further. "Kissinger made some reference to my running for President in 1980," Bush dictated. Kissinger was wise to keep an eye on this political man, one who could be both self-interested and self-deprecating. By coming to China and enhancing his statesmanlike credentials, Bush was maneuvering for future advantage subtly rather than showily. It was the kind of move Kissinger appreciated and admired.

- Christmas was coming, and Barbara went home to Washington to spend the holidays with the children. "Great talks with Bar on the phone," Bush dictated. The family was in strong shape in these years: "no drugs, no dope, no crime, no troubles. We should knock on wood." He did hate that Barbara was gone. "It is right that Bar be there but boy do I miss her."

Dorothy Bush was due in China in the third week of December. "Mother arrives tomorrow," Bush told his diary. "I have that kind of high school excitement-first vacation feeling." After Mrs. Bush, now seventy-three years old, landed in Beijing, she took twenty minutes to freshen up, put on a PLA hat, and hit the streets of the capital, bicycling with her son. On the twenty-fifth, they had an American holiday meal-turkey and cranberry sauce-before Bush went off to a tour of "the caves" beneath the city that had been arranged for him by Deng Xiaoping.

It was a memorable Christmas Day. "Dig tunnels deep," Mao had ordered his people, "store grain everywhere." Mao's mission: to create a means by which his people might survive a nuclear assault from the Soviet Union. The result: a vast project to create enormous underground shelters across China. Bush was met at an intersection and taken to a clothing store, where his tour guide pressed a concealed button that operated a trapdoor. They climbed down into the tunnels. Bush walked from room to room. There was enough space, he thought, for thousands in this subterranean kingdom.

Bush climbed back out, emerged into the light of the store, collected his bicycle, and pedaled home. His mother asked about the tour, and Bush detailed the project to her. "Her comment was that it was an odd Christmas gift: an invitation to visit a bomb shelter on a day dedicated to the spirit of peace on earth," Bush recalled. Her son, however, did not think the day at all strange. "By that time...I'd been in China long enough to know that my hosts left little to chance or accident in dealing with foreigners," Bush said. "The Chinese were out to make a point-that they are vigilant against the Soviets, and ready for any turn of world events, even the worst." A people prepared to go underground in order to endure a nuclear holocaust was a people with the longest of views. Patient, persistent, and determined, the China that Bush was learning firsthand was a China that bent only when it chose to bend. They saw history-they saw reality itself-differently than the West. And now Bush could see those things through their eyes.

- Bush heard about the fall of Saigon not through official channels but during a national day reception for the Netherlands on Wednesday, April 30, 1975. The Americans were finally pulling out, defeated after the long and grueling war to save South Vietnam from the Communist North Vietnamese. Bush watched as three North Vietnamese officials at the reception ("three little guys about four feet high," Bush told his diary) "rushed happily out of the room" at word of the American evacuation from Saigon. Soon he heard the sound of celebratory firecrackers coming from the North Vietnamese embassy.

As he absorbed the news of the first war America had lost in her nearly two-hundred-year history, Bush fell into conversation with the diplomat John Small of Canada, who argued for American resilience in the face of the defeat. "It is important that the U.S. stand firm in Korea [defending South Korea against Communist North Korea], and it is important that this [American] slide and decline be halted," Small told Bush, alluding not only to Saigon but to America's economic recession and post-Watergate distrust of government. "The American people," Small added, "must understand that as soon as America doesn't stand for something in the world, there is going to be a tremendous erosion of freedom."

The pop of Communist firecrackers only deepened the impression that John Small's exhortation to American engagement and greatness made on Bush. In the ensuing weeks and months, Bush would watch as different Pacific nations usually inclined to the United States came to call on Beijing, seeking an alliance if America were to pull back from the region after Saigon. We must remain engaged, Bush urged Washington, before a postVietnam War Asia found a "new alignment" against American interests. In diplomacy, Bush was learning, one could take nothing for granted and had to pay constant attention by courting even insignificant-seeming countries. You never knew when a nation that had been far from your mind-in this case, Thailand and the Philippines-was going to be of critical importance.

- On the Fourth of July, 1975, the Bushes threw an enormous party for the diplomatic community. A week before, in a telegram with the subject line THE GREAT HOTDOG ROLL CRISIS, Bush asked the State Department for emergency assistance to send seven hundred hot dog buns and one hundred bags of potato chips to China. (The bureaucracy got in gear, and everything arrived in time.) The Bushes also held a baptism for Doro, who was sixteen but whose christening had been scheduled and postponed many times over the years. The language of the liturgy had to be translated by a very unhappy atheistic interpreter, but the Bushes were delighted when the ministers of the makeshift congregation told Doro, "We will love you and always miss you."

Kissinger returned to China in October 1975, this time to prepare for President Ford's own planned trip later in the year. In a series of sessions with Deng Xiaoping, Bush listened as Deng and Kissinger jousted over what China believed the United States should be doing in the world. "His complaint-incredible as it might sound-was that the United States was showing weakness in the face of the Soviet threat to world peace," Bush recalled. Deng even invoked the analogy of Munich, accusing the United States of pursuing a policy of "appeasement" with the Soviets. "A country that spends $110 billion for defense cannot be said to be pursuing the spirit of Munich," Kissinger replied. "Let me remind you that we were resisting Soviet expansionism when you two were allies, for your own reasons."

During a meeting with Deng in the Great Hall of the People, Kissinger and Bush received word that Mao himself was ready to see them. "You will meet with the Chairman at six-thirty," Deng said after reading a note that had been handed to him. It would be Bush's first encounter with the legendary Mao. In the chairman's villa, they found the eighty-one-year-old barely able to speak. Kissinger asked how he was doing. Pointing to his head, Mao replied, "This part works well. I can eat and sleep." Tapping his legs, he said, "These parts do not work well. They are not strong when I walk. I also have some trouble with my lungs. In a word, I am not well." With a smile, he added, "I am a showcase for visitors."

Bush sat next to Kissinger, who was at Mao's left hand. "I am going to heaven soon," Mao said. "I have already received an invitation from God."

"Don't accept it soon," said Kissinger.

"I accept the orders of the Doctor," Mao replied, a wry allusion to Kissinger's PhD.

Kissinger then turned serious. "I attach great significance to our relationship," he said. Mao held up one hand in a fist and the little finger of his other hand. "You are this," he said, gesturing to the fist, "and we are that," waving the little finger.

Yet we have common foes, Kissinger said.

Yes, Mao wrote, in English, on a piece of paper.

They spoke of Taiwan; Mao said the issue would be settled eventually, in "a hundred" or perhaps "several hundred" years. By now Bush understood the vernacular in which Mao was speaking. The Chinese, Bush noted, "see time and their own cultural patience as allies in dealing with impatient Westerners." They spoke, too, of a current problem in the relationship that Mao dismissed as a fang go pi, or a "dog fart." It was an expression, Bush thought, that might have even impressed Harry Truman. Bush saw Mao just once more, during Ford's 1975 visit to China. Receiving the president late on a December afternoon, Mao noticed Bush standing nearby. "You've been promoted," Mao remarked to Bush, telling Ford: "We hate to see him go."

- Bush's journey home began, in a way, when White House chief of staff Don Rumsfeld started drafting a long memorandum to the president in the summer of 1975. It was an unsettled time in Washington. Ford was unhappy with his national security team-Kissinger was still doing double duty as secretary of state and national security adviser-and worried that Ronald Reagan might challenge him from the right in the 1976 primaries.

Rumsfeld understood the president's concerns. After asking his deputy Dick Cheney to keep an eye on the reelection campaign, Rumsfeld drew up different scenarios to get Ford ready for the coming year. In late October the president caught a cold, and Rumsfeld took advantage of Ford's time in the family quarters to make the case for a series of changes to strengthen the administration and put the president in a better political posture for 1976.