AS REAGAN’S LOYAL VICE PRESIDENT, George Bush campaigned as the heir to the “Great Communicator.” He was elected to continue Reagan’s policies, but with what Bush called a “kinder and gentler” attitude. Mostly he did so, but without his predecessor’s charisma.
Bush deftly presided over the demise of the Soviet empire and orchestrated the Persian Gulf War, which pushed Iraq out of Kuwait with a massive air, land, and sea campaign. For a while, his popularity soared, and it looked like he would be unbeatable in 1992. But his public standing was ravaged by the recession of the early 1990s, when he seemed too preoccupied with foreign affairs, too much a scion of privilege, and unconcerned about everyday people’s problems.
Bush was more vigorous than most Americans remember him. His first extended foreign trip aboard Air Force One was a visit to Japan, Korea, and China during February 1989—in only five days. This set the pace.
Bush also tried to be accessible, as had Gerald Ford. In fact, he was more open to people than Reagan had ever been, contrary to the impression left by Reagan’s careful stage management. Bush knew his staff far better than his predecessor did, would keep track of their birthdays so he could send them handwritten notes, and showed an interest in their family situations. He would even visit the press cabin on Air Force One during nearly every trip, to talk policy or say hello. Occasionally, it resulted in the TV cameras capturing him swaying awkwardly or losing his balance momentarily as he chatted with reporters during periods of turbulence, adding to his goofy image.
At his core, Bush loved tradition and decorum, and these traits permeated everything he did as chief executive. “George Bush was in awe of the presidency,” says David Valdez, his White House photographer.
Valdez recalled a story about Lyndon Johnson: A young military officer once pointed to the presidential 707 in the distance and said, “There’s your plane, sir.” Whereupon Johnson supposedly replied, “Boy, they’re all my planes.” Bush would never think that way. To him, the presidency was an honor bestowed by the country temporarily on a series of fortunate men, and he would never presume to “own” anything connected with it.
Bush instilled in his staff his own sense of honor about riding Air Force One. “That airplane is the greatest plane in the world,” says Valdez, who traveled with Bush for 10 years during his vice presidency and presidency. “… When you fly on that plane, you are representing the United States, and when you land, that huge 747 sits there as the flying embassy of the United States of America.” This was the common view in Bush’s White House.
The flight crew respected Reagan but they liked George Herbert Walker Bush. They admired his golden resume—former vice president, director of Central Intelligence, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to Beijing, chairman of the Republican National Committee, congressman from Texas, oilman, and World War II hero. But they liked his genuine affinity for people, and were perplexed and disappointed that he could never convey this quality to the country.
Bush heard that John Haigh, chief flight steward on Air Force One, was a whiz at horseshoes—a Bush family pastime—and the president invited him to participate in the first White House horseshoe tournament, in 1989. Haigh won, and from then on Bush would call him “champ” and kid him about it in front of guests, even heads of state. For the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, this was heady stuff, and Haigh considered it typical of Bush’s generosity and consideration.
“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” says former flight steward Tim Kerwin. “He was always wanting to do nice things for people.” On vacations at his estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, for Thanksgiving and July Fourth, Bush would realize he was keeping crew members away from home, so he would call their hotel and invite them to his home for dinner or a barbecue.
One of the most vivid public impressions of Bush came in an Air Force One moment, when he banned broccoli from the plane. He had hated the vegetable since childhood, when his mother made him eat it, and now he was president and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. White House officials thought the incident made him look decisive but I had a different view after I broke the story in U.S. News & World Report. He looked out of touch to be absorbed with such a silly issue.
While the president banned broccoli, Barbara Bush reaffirmed an earlier ban on smoking aboard the plane. She considered it a dirty, unhealthy habit, and the commander in chief went along with her. But some aides and crew members couldn’t call it quits, especially on long flights when the urge to smoke got overpowering. They learned that they could slip into a lavatory, light up and puff into the toilet or the sink, then pull the flush lever or release the plunger. The smoky air would get sucked down the commode or the washbasin, and no one would be the wiser. Of course it was against federal regulations to smoke in the lavatories, but mostly the offenders were worried that if Barbara found out, they would be cashiered. She never did.
WHEN BUSH BECAME the first president to ride the big 747, his eyes widened in awe. His first concern was that voters would think it was extravagant. “I’m glad this was ordered up on Ronald Reagan’s watch,” he told an aide as he eyed the spacious presidential office. But Bush thought so much of the plane that he wrote an article about it for Forbes magazine on November 18, 1996, four years after leaving office.
“History will remember me as the first president to fly on Air Force One Tail No. 28000,” he wrote.
“Everyone says, ‘What’s it really like?’
“Well, let me tell you: it’s grand. It’s not fancy, with gold bathroom fittings and plush carpets like those G-IV’s that fly celebrities. No mirrors on the ceiling, no circular beds, no Jacuzzis, no bidets even. But man oh man, is it comfortable.”
He went on to describe the big presidential stateroom that takes up the front end of the aircraft with two couches that convert into beds; an adjacent bathroom with shower; the presidential office next door, decorated in muted brown and beige tones, that features a wraparound desk in one corner, and a medical room with operating table and a cabinet full of medications.
Bush wrote of the senior-staff quarters: “There are three comfortable chairs there, but best of all there are two full-length, double-decker beds tucked into one side of the room, on the left as you enter the door. People would pull rank to get into those bunks on the long flights.”
Bush also related a bizarre moment that occurred when he flew aboard Air Force One, at President Clinton’s request, to the funeral of assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin. He was assigned to the four-person senior-staff cabin along with former President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. Bush liked to sleep stretched out, so he eased himself to the floor and began to doze as his cabin mates relaxed in their first-class leather chairs.
“Jimmy Carter must have been thinking ‘presidential’ too, for when I awakened after a nice four-hour sleep, there he was on the floor, his face but a few inches from my face,” Bush wrote. “Scary? No, but different. What would his precinct chairman in Plains say? What would mine in Houston say? AF1 makes the strangest of bedfellows.”
The 747 also gave a president rare luxury. The jumbo jet let the commander in chief take a shower on board, and Bush frequently availed himself of this opportunity. Sometimes he would appear before the press immediately after washing his hair, making him look like a wet puppy. (He didn’t blow dry.) When he realized there was room for a massage table, he had a military nurse give him rubdowns to relax him, although this was not revealed to the media because it might seem too posh.
He liked to watch an occasional movie but found many modern films too raw. On one flight, the president, the First Lady, and a handful of aides were watching an R-rated film provided by a Washington-area video rental chain when suddenly two large breasts appeared on screen. Everyone froze in embarrassment until Barbara blurted out, “Who picked this movie?” No one spoke up until the president responded meekly, “Well, I didn’t.” In any case, he preferred to read books or listen to country music; the Oak Ridge Boys and Alabama were among his favorites.
Like most other presidents, Bush was concerned about overeating, a worry intensified by his desire to remain in athletic trim but complicated by his love of fattening foods. When the staff found out that he liked rich seafood soups from Bookbinder’s restaurant in Philadelphia, they arranged for regular supplies to be delivered to Andrews Air Force Base and they would stock them on the plane. He also was an obsessive user of artificial sweetener for his coffee. Yet, in addition to high-calorie Tex-Mex food and barbecue, he would indulge his sweet tooth on long flights with Eskimo Pies, Baby Ruth bars, and Blue Belle ice cream from Texas.
BUSH WAS A HANDS-ON manager, a smart policy analyst, and a man who genuinely tried to reach out to his adversaries, even the news media. For his first three years in office, he visited the press cabin routinely, which was rare in the Reagan era. In fact, he showed up so often that he wore out his welcome. After a while, some journalists would feign sleep and wear Lone Ranger-style black sleep masks to discourage the president from making news at the end of a long day. On such occasions he would slip into the press cabin, survey the “sleeping” reporters, shake his head at their lethargy, and return to his quarters.
BUSH’S EXPERIENCES ON Air Force One reflected his foreign-policy preoccupation. Nearly all his important moments aboard the plane concerned international affairs, and Bush never hesitated to make decisions there. He felt, with considerable justification, that he was a foreign-policy expert in his own right.
One example of Bush’s sangfroid came en route to Malta in December 1989 for his first summit meeting with Soviet leader Gorbachev. In the middle of the night, as Bush slept, there was a coup attempt in the Philippines.
Senior officials in Washington called an emergency meeting to discuss what should be done. But there was a major dilemma: Should they awaken the commander in chief? He was, after all, heading for a very important summit, and he needed his rest. Yet a crucial decision had to be made that could affect whether Filipino leader Cory Aquino, a solid American ally, would remain in power.
The question was whether to authorize the Pentagon to intervene militarily. “We were all huddled down in the Situation Room [of the White House],” recalled Andrew Card, who was then Bush’s deputy White House chief of staff. Also in the Situation Room, participating via videoconference, were Vice President Dan Quayle, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, and General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“We were trying to agonize, do we call the president on Air Force One, who we knew was sound asleep?” Card said. Instead, they funneled the information to an airborne Brent Scowcroft, the White House national security adviser, whom they did wake up. The rebels had seized an airfield near Manila and were using it to bomb government facilities, and Aquino wanted the Americans to strafe the airfield to stop the bombing runs. There was another complication: Vice President Quayle and Defense Secretary Cheney were squabbling. Quayle had called a meeting of senior foreign-policy advisers in Bush’s absence, and he was labeling it a National Security Council meeting, which would have given it decision-making authority. His goal, as a possible presidential candidate in the future, was to burnish his credentials as a decisive leader and he wanted to take command of the NSC apparatus. But Cheney said that since the president wasn’t there, there could be no NSC meeting, and he refused to attend. Quayle and Cheney began to call Scowcroft every few minutes, each trying to feed him recommendations that were sometimes at odds.
Scowcroft contacted General Powell and they worked out a plan: American aircraft would fly menacingly over the rebel-held airfield and prevent planes from taking off, but would not strafe it. Bush was awakened, listened to Scowcroft’s recommendation, asked a few questions, and gave his approval. Then the president went back to sleep. The flyovers worked, and the crisis was defused.
ONE REASON FOR BUSH’S refusal to get worked up about the attempted coup in the Philippines was that he was so focused on the Gorbachev meeting that would begin almost as soon as he landed. He didn’t want any distractions.
When he got up, he called in his senior advisers and began to finalize the proposals he would make to Gorbachev in Malta, including measures to increase trade and grant economic assistance as a reward if the Kremlin implemented the democratic and economic reforms it was promising. As aides took notes, Bush summed up the plan and came up with 17 points.
Bush then asked aides who was supposed to start the discussion. Secretary of State James Baker said it would be Gorbachev because he would be hosting the event on a Russian cruise ship, the Gorki; the Soviet leader would be expecting to make welcoming remarks and then would segue into substantive issues. Bush wanted a change in the protocol. “I want him to see this package and to hear my proposal before he says anything,” the president said, “so that whatever he has to say is reflective of this proposal and not reflective of the past.”
It was decided that Bush would let Gorbachev make his welcoming comments, and then interrupt him and outline his plan. “The whole package was put together on Air Force One… . Actually it was almost the same agenda that Clinton adopted ten years later. It held up a long time,” according to Marlin Fitzwater, press secretary to Bush and Reagan.
When the summit meeting started, Bush followed the plan. He interrupted Gorbachev and said. “I know this may violate protocol, but there is something I’d like to say.” Then he presented his ideas.
Gorbachev had a three-by-five spiral notebook in which he had jotted his own thoughts about improving the East-West relationship. He flipped the pages as Bush addressed the points he was about to make, one by one. He was obviously taken by surprise. But Gorbachev was delighted, because he hadn’t thought he would get this kind of firm personal commitment to U.S. assistance from the president. The summit was a success.
In fact, the superpower relationship had eased so much, and the U.S.S.R. was changing so fast, that the Berlin Wall would come down in only a few months. When it did, Bush was criticized for showing too little emotion at the West’s victory, which had been so long in the making.
He later visited the remnants of the wall in Berlin, and on the way back to Washington got into a discussion with aides about why he hadn’t climbed on top of the symbolic structure to make a point about the triumph of freedom. He was miffed that anyone would suggest such a thing, adding: “It’s up to those people [in Germany] to sort it all out.” His objective was not to embarrass the Russians, whose empire was splitting apart and whose reaction might be unpredictable if they felt offended or threatened, but to show sensitivity to a fallen adversary. He talked as if he had just won a friendly tennis match with a chum at the country club. He may have been wise to put future relations with Moscow ahead of a temporary sense of elation, but he came across as distant and bloodless.
ANOTHER REVEALING MOMENT came as he was flying to the Middle East to visit U.S. troops for Thanksgiving in November 1990. He had deployed hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf area for the war against Iraq that would begin the following January, and he was, on this occasion, steeped in emotion. These were the young men and women he was about to send into harm’s way.
He consoled himself by reading Scripture in his private cabin, and at one point wrote a note to himself on a yellow pad. It read: “This will not be another Vietnam.” He placed it in his desk drawer as a reminder. And he was true to his word. He ended the Persian Gulf War after a 100-hour ground attack that routed Saddam Hussein’s forces. Yet President Bush would face considerable criticism in later years for failing to pursue the campaign and force Saddam from power.
ON AIR FORCE ONE, Bush loved to wear a bizarre white jacket depicting a map of the world. Completing his ensemble would be white socks and slippers with the presidential seal on each toe. Aides thought he wore the outfit for shock value, just to see people’s reactions to the idea that the prim and proper Brahmin from Yale would have such an awful sense of fashion. Mostly he would wear a dark blue jogging suit on the plane, or, on short flights, switch to a blue windbreaker bearing his name and the words AIR FORCE ONE.
The informality and the close quarters helped create an atmosphere of familiarity that was important in developing staff cohesion. “Pretty soon everyone is running around in gym suits and shorts and T-shirts and stuff,” recalls Fitzwater, “so all the constraints of a tie and a suit kind of fall away and it tends to lead to great camaraderie, great familiarity.”
Bush mostly worked at his desk, and he would invite people in as he did at the Oval Office. “He was always doing business,” Fitzwater says. He resisted having most of his speeches done in advance, as Reagan had done, preferring to finalize his addresses on board. This was harder on the staff than during the Reagan days, when things were precooked, because once Bush signed off on a text, it would have to be typed up and distributed to the news media while Air Force One was airborne, or rushed to the press corps once Air Force One landed.
He made an extraordinary number of phone calls to foreign leaders and other government officials, and he liked to have members of Congress along for the ride. Bush also liked big meetings in the conference room, where officials would give briefings on policy, on the logistics of trips, on media coverage, and so forth. “He would actually change agendas and reassign people to attend different meetings, so it was very much a working atmosphere for him on the plane,” says a senior aide.
“The presidents clearly feel like it’s their world and they’re in control of it,” Fitzwater told me. “They know the people on there and they trust them. There’s a feeling that the information is trapped in the plane. You don’t fear all the normal leaks that you do in the White House. It’s an interesting phenomenon.”
BUSH FELT SUCH control over Air Force One that he could defy his own non-confrontational nature and discipline errant aides there.
Just before the midterm elections of 1990, he forced the dismissal of GOP strategist Ed Rollins from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. What infuriated Bush was Rollins’s contention in a political newsletter that Republican candidates must divorce themselves from the White House because of the alleged involvement of Neil Bush, one of the president’s sons, in a savings and loan scandal that was getting big headlines at the time. Because of Neil, Rollins said, the Bush name was not helpful.
“President Bush went through the roof,” recalls a senior aide, feeling that his innocent son had been maligned. While aboard Air Force One, he called Guy van der Jagt, chairman of the House campaign committee, who Rollins was working for, and started yelling at the top of his voice, a rarity for the usually composed president. Van der Jagt at first didn’t want to fire Rollins, saying that penalty would be too harsh. But Bush declared, “If you don’t fire him, I will never sign another fund-raising letter for you as long as I am president.” Then he hung up. Van der Jagt relented, and Rollins was released.
In late 1991, Bush forced the resignation of then White House Chief of Staff John Sununu after Sununu’s arrogance, bullying ways, and secretive, dictatorial style had alienated him from conservatives and other natural allies.
Earlier that year, I had broken a story in U.S. News about how Sununu was misusing government aircraft for personal business and vacation trips, at taxpayer expense. He refused to apologize, and his enemies used the flap as a bludgeon to attack him in the news media and spread the word to Bush that he was becoming an embarrassment. Just as important, Bush’s popularity was sinking amid a painful recession, and he needed all the friends he could get, adding to Sununu’s vulnerability.
By November, Bush was getting the word from his allies and friends that Sununu had to go; no one, it seemed, wanted to work with him in the upcoming 1992 reelection campaign. George W. Bush, the president’s son and political troubleshooter (who would later win election as the 43rd president), told Sununu privately that he had lost virtually all support for continuing as chief of staff. At first the abrasive former governor of New Hampshire refused to resign gracefully. But after a failed attempt to rally congressional support on his behalf, he gave up.
The end came on December 3, 1991, as Air Force One was cruising from Florida to Meridian, Mississippi. Sununu gave Bush his letter of resignation in a tense final scene in the president’s airborne office. Bush sat behind his big mahogany desk and the outgoing chief of staff took the high-backed leather chair opposite him, with press secretary Fitzwater on the couch across the room. Everyone was terse and composed but after Sununu and Fitzwater returned to the senior-staff cabin, the former governor began to weep silently, with tears running down his cheeks. He said it was the press’s fault. “They’ll be celebrating, I suppose,” he said, then added sadly: “I didn’t think they could get me.”
THE PERSIAN GULF crisis showed Bush at his best.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, his senior advisers initially were not too concerned. The day after the attack, at a hastily convened meeting of the National Security Council, there was a consensus that the invasion was a fait accompli and there was little or nothing the United States could do about it. The war zone, after all, was halfway around the world, and any U.S. intervention would draw widespread condemnation in the Arab world.
Bush wasn’t happy with the meeting. But he was scheduled to give a speech in Aspen, Colorado, that afternoon, and he broke off discussions to chopper to Andrews Air Force Base. It turned out that the airstrip at the Rocky Mountain resort was too short to accommodate the 747, so Bush flew there in a small executive-style aircraft called a Jetstar. This meant that, during the worst crisis of his presidency, he was traveling with only one senior foreign-policy adviser aboard—Brent Scowcroft.
They sat knee-to-knee in the small cabin, and Scowcroft decided to speak his mind. The national security adviser, a diminutive man with soft brown eyes and a gentle voice, talked with surprising passion. He had been “very disturbed” by the tone of resignation expressed at the NSC meeting that morning. “We can’t accept this as a fait accompli,” he said. He suggested having another meeting as soon as they got back, to revisit the issue.
Bush felt the same way. The president said vital U.S. interests were at stake—oil supplies and the stability of the entire Middle East—and he would not allow Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait to stand.
After conferring with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in Aspen, and finding her in complete agreement, Bush drew a line in the sand a few days later and declared that the invasion was unacceptable.
From then on, Bush played his role as commander in chief masterfully. He built an international coalition against Iraq, including Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, and he sent 500,000 U.S. troops to the region over the next four months. He gave Saddam Hussein every chance to avoid war by pulling out of Kuwait. He let the generals figure out the best military strategy and let them do their job. And he persuaded Congress and the American people that war was the honorable and necessary course.
After a massive air campaign in January and a brief ground assault, the Iraqi forces were rolled back, Kuwait was liberated, and the war was over. It was all set in motion by that conversation between Bush and Scowcroft on the president’s plane en route to Aspen. It was the high point of the Bush presidency.
YET BUSH APPEARED TO BE NEGLECTING the domestic side of his job. As the recession deepened, he seemed powerless to stop it and insensitive to both the pain that middle-class families were suffering and the profound sense of economic uncertainty that was spreading across the country. Bush’s popularity was dropping, and even Republican conservatives were upset because the president had broken a campaign promise by agreeing to raise taxes in order to reduce the mushrooming federal deficit. The signs of political trouble were everywhere.
Returning from a disappointing trip to Japan in January 1992, an unsettled Bush decided to discuss the upcoming reelection campaign with Robert Teeter, his chief campaign strategist, and Sam Skinner, his new White House chief of staff. He hadn’t been paying much attention to his political team, assuming that his strategists were doing their jobs and would figure out how to win.
As he took a seat in the senior-staff compartment, Bush was in a sour mood—with good reason. Teeter’s plan to bring corporate executives along on the trip had backfired; the businessmen had bad-mouthed the president’s economic policies at nearly every stop. Worse, Bush had gotten some extraordinarily bad publicity when he contracted stomach flu and vomited in the lap of the Japanese prime minister at a dinner. The embarrassing photos had been carried in the news media around the world.
Bush said he hoped an upcoming trip to New Hampshire, site of the first presidential primary in just a few weeks, would start to turn things around. Yet polls showed that he might lose this first test.
“Where do we go from here?” Bush asked.
Teeter, a pollster by profession, and Skinner, a former businessman, disagreed about what to do. As Bush fumed silently, they squirmed in their first-class seats and blamed each other for the president’s sagging political fortunes. They couldn’t agree on who was responsible for what, and neither seemed willing or able to take charge. As things got tense and their voices rose, Bush bit his lip and frowned—then walked out in a huff and closed the door behind him as he entered his private cabin.
When word of the disarray got around to other Bush strategists about how neither Teeter nor Skinner wanted to take responsibility for the campaign’s problems—and Skinner in particular didn’t know what role he was supposed to play—there was shock and dismay. A senior Bush adviser said, “All I could think of was, it’s over. How can we possibly run an election with these two guys not liking each other and not being able to work together and neither one wanting to be responsible? It was the damnedest thing in my mind. I’d heard of people fighting for power, but here were these two guys fighting not to be in charge.”
AS CRITICISM OF his distance from everyday Americans intensified, Bush’s façade of good cheer began to crack. On a trip to Cartagena, Colombia, he was still fuming at a fresh round of attacks in that morning’s newspapers as Air Force One left Washington. “I think we’ve had too many press conferences,” Bush peevishly told the traveling reporters. “I’m not going to be burned for holding out or doing something deceptive.” He refused to answer even the most benign questions, such as whether he had slept well the night before. “I can’t go into the details of that,” he said sharply, “because some will think it’s too much sleep and some will think it’s too little.”
Actually, Bush was under even more pressure than his critics knew. He had been told that terrorists in Colombia had placed a $30 million bounty on his head, and his Secret Service team was very worried about security. Chief flight steward John Haigh was so concerned that he wrote out his last will and testament that morning before departing, had a friend witness it, and left it in a desk drawer. When Air Force One landed, Haigh stood on the tarmac with Bush’s garment bag, as was his custom, and looked around nervously. “I felt like a turkey in a turkey shoot,” he said. “I thought they might make me the example.” However, the trip went off without incident.
TOWARD THE END of his 1992 campaign, Bush increasingly occupied something of a dream world, reinforced by his isolation on Air Force One. On a trip to Atlanta, he needed instruction from one of his few African-American aides on the proper terminology for referring to black people. She told him the preferred usage was African American, and he dutifully used that term in his speech later that day.
The isolation was infectious. During a flight to Maine for a family event after the president had deftly helped thwart an attempted coup in the Soviet Union, there was gloating on the plane. “Do you think the American people are going to turn to a Democrat now?” said George W. Bush, the president’s eldest son.
Of course, that’s exactly what they did in November.
THE SUNDAY NIGHT before the balloting, Bush was flying from Louisiana to Houston for his final rally in an atmosphere of denial. The polls showed him losing the race to Bill Clinton, but the die-hard Bush staffers on Air Force One couldn’t admit it to themselves. Bush sat in the conference room with a handful of loyal advisers, including George W. Bush, press officer Mary Matalin, and old friend Ron Kaufman. “The polls were not encouraging,” Kaufman recalls, “but we had believed that in the end the country would not vote for what Mary Matalin called that draft-dodging, philandering son of a bitch.”
The Oak Ridge Boys, a popular Country and Western band, were aboard the plane, and they began singing a medley of gospel songs, ending with “Amazing Grace.” Suddenly, it hit everyone, except the president, that the race, and the Bush administration, were about to end. “We were all crying,” Kaufman says. “No one said it, but we had the feeling, it’s over. It was a very poignant, bittersweet moment.”
Recalls George W. Bush: “I think a lot of us felt in our guts that he was going to get beat… . There were just a lot of tears in people’s eyes… . People just knew that this good man was fixing to go down to defeat.”
January 20, 1993, was Bush’s last day in the White House, and his final flight on the presidential plane was a sad one, as it is for all defeated presidents. He recalls being “emotionally drained” and “a little bruised” that day, and describes the routine details of his final flight with vivid precision: how Ranger and Millie, his two dogs, bounded up the stairs, scrambled left into the first couple’s bedroom, and jumped into the president’s bed, where they liked to sleep. How the crew was gracious to the end. How he tried to say thanks to friends on board but choked up. How he considered taking a final shower on the plane but was too depressed for such a symbolic gesture.
“Barbara and I sat at our bedroom desk, across from each other, each of us lost in our own thoughts,” Bush says. “We looked at each other, but we didn’t speak much. Ours had been a wonderful chance to serve, a wonderful opportunity. I hope history will show I did some things right, but on that flight I kept thinking of where I had let good people down—of how I had lost the presidency three months before.”