George Herbert Walker Bush was the scion of an American dynasty descended from Mayflower Pilgrims that included bankers, politicians, athletes, and entertainers. He spent eight years as Reagan’s vice president and in 1988 was elected president. Yet in spite of his cosmopolitan résumé he had plain tastes. He was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, and his palate was determined by the DNA of his tribe: white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Reinventing himself as a Texas petroleum executive in 1948, Bush regarded food as a form of refined fuel rather than as a health aid, artistic expression, or other airy-fairy notion, as he might have put it.
“The principal lesson of WASP cookery…is that life is to be endured, not enjoyed,” wrote The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley. “The essence of WASP cookery—talk about oxymorons!—is undercooked meat accompanied by overcooked vegetables….I hate broccoli, but once a week I take a deep breath and eat it…and no doubt will continue to do so after they deposit me in the great broccoli patch in the sky.”
Indeed, President Bush made headlines with a famous Yardley- like diatribe. “I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!” he wailed. Though he would laugh it off as a joke, Bush’s jeremiad sounded more like a heartfelt cri de coeur against a grave injustice, one he had nursed over a lifetime. But he might have misjudged, for even trivial gripes about food from a president can have large economic and political repercussions.
Not only did Bush send a message to children that vegetables are not important, but outraged broccoli farmers sent ten tons of their crop to Washington, D.C., in March 1990. The press took note and needled the White House about the protest. Bush tried to defuse the situation with humor: “Now, look….There are truckloads of broccoli at this very minute descending on Washington. My family is divided. For the broccoli vote out there: Barbara loves broccoli….So she can go out and meet the caravan of broccoli.”
“You’re darn right I do,” said Mrs. Bush. “I love broccoli.” When the shipment arrived, she added, “We’re going to have broccoli soup, broccoli main dish, broccoli salad, and broccoli ice cream.”
But when the Bushes hosted a state dinner for the Polish prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a few days later, not a single green floret appeared. Sensing hypocrisy, the media railed about “Broccoli-Gate” and asked where the ten-ton shipment had gone. The White House said it had donated the veggies to homeless shelters. Broccoli-Gate mystified the Poles, who had never heard of the crunchy green crucifer.
Almost as famous as his distaste for Cruciferae was Bush’s fondness for snacks. He liked beef jerky, popcorn, Butterfingers, Blue Bell vanilla ice cream (which he had flown to Washington from Houston), and, most famously, pork rinds. Like Reagan’s love of jelly beans, Bush’s affinity for pork rinds generated headlines and charmed his political base. But Bush’s snack seemed less genuine than Reagan’s. This gets to a larger point: the way presidents talk about food can be unintentionally revealing. While he might have actually enjoyed the crunchy, greasy pork rinds, Bush’s constant mention of them, and his ostentatious splashing of Tabasco sauce on them, appeared to be a calculated appeal to working-class southern voters. And while he liked to be photographed fishing, Bush never ate his catch, or as Barbara put it, “he’s no fan of slimy white fish.” This led to a perception that he was fishing for show. (He released his catch or gave them to his Secret Service agents.)
Such tropes were part of a broader effort to portray George H. W. Bush, a thin-lipped graduate of Phillips Academy and Yale, as a Regular Guy. The effort yielded spotty results and occasionally backfired—most jarringly in 1992 when Bush bought a gallon of milk at a supermarket and declared himself “amazed” by the checkout scanner. The incident revealed that he had not shopped for himself in years, which did not impress voters. Bush’s lack of what he called “the vision thing”—an inspiring agenda tied to an emotional bond with constituents—doomed his reelection in 1992.
Barbara Bush, meanwhile, had endeared herself to Texas voters by making a big pot of spaghetti with tomato sauce and serving it on paper plates. Though she didn’t love to cook, Mrs. Bush was a mother of six who could produce a competent batch of food when she had to. Her repertoire included Yankee classics like New England clam chowder and mushroom quiche, along with Texas-themed snacks like “Mexican Mound” (a ziggurat of nachos), “Zuni Stew” (pinto beans piled with vegetables, chiles, and Muenster cheese), barbecued chicken, lemon bars, pralines, and—most popularly—chocolate chip cookies (the recipe for which was printed in Parade magazine and widely distributed).
When eating alone, the Bushes would, in true WASP fashion, occasionally have bowls of cereal for dinner—Wheat Puffs for the First Lady, Life for the president. In Texas they adapted to the local diet of barbecue and white bread or broiled steak and potatoes. In Washington they kept to a simple diet of tomato bisque, salad, or Chinese food prepared by their personal chef, the Filipino navy steward Ariel De Guzman.
Much like the patrician, ascetic-seeming Woodrow Wilson, the lean and nerdy George H. W. Bush had unexpected carnal appetites. He was perceived as a genial, grandfatherly man who spoke in a circumlocutory patois (“it’s no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or another”), presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union and a peaceful end to the Cold War, and guided the first U.S. invasion of Iraq. But the same man was a Nixon loyalist, was implicated in the Iran-contra scandal, and used race-baiting ads to demonize his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis.
When it came to his personal life, Bush was equal parts heroic and ungallant. In 1953, his marriage was severely tested by the death of their three-year-old daughter, Robin, from leukemia, after which George helped Barbara cope. But his long-running affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald, who worked for Bush in various capacities in the 1970s and 1980s, drove Barbara to depression and suicidal thoughts, according to the biography The Matriarch, based on Mrs. Bush’s diaries. (It was published in 2019 after both Bushes had died.) Even so, the Bushes stayed married for seventy-three years, making theirs the second-longest presidential marriage in history, after the Carters.
In the back of the public mind lurks the fear that the president could be poisoned. When Zachary Taylor died on a hot day in 1850, at age sixty-five, many suspected “Old Rough and Ready” had been fed cherries or cucumbers and iced milk laced with arsenic by pro-slavery enemies. Conspiracy theories about his death festered for years. But when his body was exhumed in 1991, no sign of the poison was found. Instead, it appears he died of a “combination of official scandals, Washington heat, and doctors,” Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in The Oxford History of the American People.
President Taylor likely came down with acute gastroenteritis acquired from Washington’s open sewers, which swarmed with flies. He probably could have survived, Morison notes, but the capital physician and a quack from Baltimore “drugged him with ipecac, calomel, opium, and quinine…and bled and blistered him too. On July 9 he gave up the ghost.”
This story was revived in January 1992, when President Bush was on a state visit to Japan. At a banquet hosted by Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, Bush suddenly threw up, lurched off his chair, and passed out. As word spread from Tokyo to the United States, CNN received a call from a man who identified himself as Bush’s physician. At 6:45 the next morning, a CNN anchorman began to report the “tragic” news that the president had died, when a supervisor yelled, “Stop!” The anchor halted mid-sentence, then reported, accurately, that the president had suffered a stomach flu. Like the charlatan who treated President Taylor, Bush’s “doctor” was revealed to be a seventy-one-year-old prank caller from Idaho. Though mortified, Bush recovered the next day. “The President is human,” his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, explained. “He gets sick.”
The Bushes liked to entertain, and they hosted twenty-five state dinners between 1989 and 1992. These meals were prepared by the formidable executive chef Pierre Chambrin. He was almost a caricature of a French chef of the Escoffier school: a big, acerbic man who smoked cigarettes, went out of his way to not suffer fools, and lavished great care on rich, classic dishes such as lobster in aspic, steak in béarnaise sauce, fresh green salads, and elaborate cheese courses.
In May 1991 the Bushes welcomed Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to an official dinner—the first U.S. visit for the royals since they had attended Gerald Ford’s bicentennial celebration in 1976. Chambrin prepared a luscious dinner that included Maine lobster (a nod to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine), cucumber mousse with aurora (creamy tomato) sauce, crown roast of lamb (a nod to the royals), dauphine potatoes, vegetable bouquets, a watercress and endive salad, and wedges of chèvre and St. André cheese. In a similar vein, Roland Mesnier’s dessert was a ten-inch-high, dark chocolate “carriage” filled with a pistachio marquise (mousse), packed with a load of fresh raspberries, and placed on an Olde London Town street paved with marzipan cobblestones.
It was the kind of meal that fit the occasion and its participants perfectly. But it was also an exercise in nostalgia, a look back to a quickly fading past. The end of the twentieth century was nigh, and the dawn of the twenty-first century was in sight. New times required new leaders, a new set of priorities, and a new approach to food at the White House.