Chapter 12

MR. VICE PRESIDENT

“I once said that he is a great Vice President, but I know and I’ve seen that it didn’t come easily. George Bush is a man of action, a man accustomed to command. The Vice Presidency doesn’t fit easily on such a man. But George Bush is also a patriot. And so he made it fit, and he served with a distinction no one has ever matched. Day in, day out, I’ve sought George Bush’s counsel from the very first day of our administration.”

—Ronald Reagan

Life for the Bush family took a fascinating turn when Mom and Dad moved into the vice president’s residence. Looking back, I see it as the best of all worlds for my parents because it was like a real home. Unlike the White House, it afforded them privacy. Perched on a hill on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, north of Georgetown on Embassy Row and less than ten minutes from the White House, the Victorian-style house has twelve-foot ceilings, thirty-three rooms, and a terrific wraparound porch. It was originally occupied by the superintendent of the Naval Observatory, but the chief of naval operations liked it so much he took it over.

Eventually, it became clear that the vice president needed an official home because of the increasing security that came with the job. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was the first vice president to be in the house, but he only used it for entertaining (the truth was, his home on Foxhall Road in Northwest Washington was much grander). Vice President Walter Mondale, his successor, was the first to actually live at the Naval Observatory.

I was in the middle of my college studies the day Mom and Dad moved in, back in school for the winter semester. “Moving into the house was just wonderful and exciting—a whole new dimension in our lives,” says Dad. “It was mind-boggling in a sense. And then getting the office in the White House, the one right down the hall from the president in the West Wing; and the great big ceremonial office in the Executive Office Building; and the one up in the Capitol as president of the Senate. So we had all that to get started. It was great.”

During the transition, Dad and President-elect Reagan visited Capitol Hill, paying a courtesy call on the congressional Democratic leadership in House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill’s office. When they walked into the room, Dad spied his old friend Dan Rostenkowski and brought President-elect Reagan right over. Dad and Congressman Rostenkowski had served together years earlier on the House Ways and Means Committee, when Dad was a congressman. “Listen, you’ve got to know this guy,” Dad said to Reagan about Congressman Rostenkowski. “He’s going to be chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.”

At that point, Tip O’Neill was deciding between making Rostenkowski the chairman of Ways and Means or the majority whip and was leaning toward the latter. When Dad introduced him as the next chairman of Ways and Means, Rostenkowski said, Tip O’Neill “almost died.” As soon as the meeting was over, O’Neill pulled Rostenkowski aside and said, “What’s George Bush doing, saying you’re going to be chairman of Ways and Means? You better talk to me first,” followed by a tongue-lashing about who was in charge.

Rostenkowski then called Dad and told him about the pickle he was in with the Speaker, and Dad explained that Rostenkowski would be far better off as chairman of Ways and Means than as majority whip, in line behind Jim Wright, who was a young man and would probably be around for a while. “Danny, it’s all going to be the economy and it’s going to be taxes,” Dad predicted about the Reagan agenda. Rostenkowski agreed with him, but asked Dad not to tell anyone else he’d be chairman in public anymore. “He says, well, what’s done is done,” Rostenkowski said to me. Sure enough, Dan Rostenkowski took the chairmanship shortly after that day, and served for fourteen years, during the Reagan, Bush, and part of the Clinton administrations.

As the 1981 inauguration approached, Mom had gowns made for her by New York designers Arnold Scaasi and Bill Blass. The former had met Mom at an earlier event and told her, with a slightly disdainful eye on her outfit, that he could “make a prettier dress for you.”

On inauguration night 1981, Mom and Dad had to appear at each of nine inaugural balls around town, traveling by limo with the Reagans. They’d get introduced to the crowd and then take a little spin on the dance floor. Dad, frankly, has never been much of a dancer—but Mom says at the inaugural he “danced very sweetly at all nine balls, because he knew he should. They were short spins!”

During the inauguration, our entire family was invited to the White House with the Reagans. It turned out to be one of several times that we would be invited to the White House during those eight vice presidential years, mostly for state dinners and other events. We didn’t see much of the Reagan kids over the years, though Maureen was very friendly and campaigned a lot for her father. Jeb spent some time with her on the campaign trail and admired her loyalty and tenacity. “She was a great speaker,” he remembers. Just like President Reagan.

The Reagan and Bush children shared the common bond of having their fathers become president. All of us know how hurtful it is to have family members criticized publicly, so I’ve been surprised and taken aback—to say the very least—at how inexplicably bitter Ron Reagan Jr. has been toward my brother George. Ron Jr. seems to go out of his way to express his contempt for our forty-third president.

As far as our mothers go, Mom and Mrs. Reagan got on quite well, though they are very different people. When I asked Mom if they were fast friends, she replied, “Not fast friends, but friends.” Because Mrs. Reagan had never lived in Washington before, Mom instinctively felt she should protect the new First Lady. Soon after President Reagan and Dad took office, in fact, some senators’ wives had a meeting to tell Mrs. Reagan how to “skin a cat.”

In particular, Mom remembered Strom Thurmond’s wife telling Mrs. Reagan what exactly they wanted her to do at some event. “I could see it was irritating her just slightly,” Mom recalls. “And I said, ‘This is ridiculous. She was a governor’s wife and she knows exactly what she’s doing.’”

Meanwhile, settling into his office at the Old Executive Office Building, Dad gathered together everyone whom he had hired up to this point. My father put together a great staff, including Admiral Dan Murphy, his chief of staff; Pete Teeley, his press secretary; Boyden Gray, his legal counsel; and later, Don Gregg, his national security adviser. Dad and Boyden didn’t know each other yet, but clearly he liked and respected Boyden, as he ended up serving as Dad’s chief legal counsel throughout the twelve years of his vice presidency and presidency—a White House record.

That morning, Dad welcomed everybody and gave a little talk. At the end, he said, “One thing I want you all to always remember is this: the first day that you walk through that gate and you don’t get a special feeling about where you are and what you’re doing, that’s the day that you need to go find something else to do.”

He was also very serious about supporting the president and his staff. Dad admonished the group never to leak information in the press or say anything against the president’s policies. As far as he was concerned, they were one team—and everyone was there to support President Reagan and his agenda.

From the start, Dad and President Reagan began to have lunch together every Thursday, which succeeding presidents and vice presidents have continued to this day. “No agenda. No written notes. Just the two of us,” Dad explained to me. “A lot of people would say, well, you’re going to see the President, tell him this, tell him that. But I didn’t do that, and one of the reasons it continued in a very frank way is that he knew I wasn’t going to say, by the way, Mr. President, so-and-so wants you to do this. It was very informal—I felt totally free to say whatever I wanted. Bring in the latest jokes or talk about what he was going to do, like going to the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany.”

They’d also share Mexican food, which they both loved—chips and salsa, tortilla soup, or chile con queso.

Joe Hagin watched the Thursday lunches develop into something bigger. “He provided a very trusted voice to the president, and he supported the president, who did not have a lot of foreign policy experience. He served as an honest broker and an honest sounding board for the president, because I think the president understood that nothing that the two of them said to each other would ever leak. And that was very important . . . in short order, President Reagan grew to trust him.”

Jon Meacham, the presidential historian and Newsweek editor, explained to me the impact of what Dad and President Reagan were doing, slowly but surely. “President Reagan was in the midst, with your father’s help, of really reorienting the country from what had been a center-left country from 1960 to 1980 to a center-right country, where we still are. When you look at what President Kennedy, President Johnson, President Nixon, President Ford, President Carter were doing, it was all slightly to the left of center. It wasn’t crazy liberal, but that’s where the dial was. Reagan pushed it back center right, and your father held it there.”

On March 30, 1981, Dad was off on a day trip, this one to Fort Worth. It was his first visit back to Texas since he had become vice president. Back in Washington, President Reagan had just delivered a speech at the Hilton Hotel across town, and as they were leaving the building to return to the White House, six shots rang out. Not only was President Reagan shot, so was Tim McCarthy, a Secret Service officer; Jim Brady, President Reagan’s press secretary; and Thomas Delahanty, a D.C. police officer. John Hinckley Jr., the twenty-five-year-old shooter, was arrested on the scene.

Air Force Two had just taken off from Fort Worth heading to Austin when the word came in about the shooting. They were flying in an old Boeing 707—it had been President Eisenhower’s Air Force One—and the onboard television would go black whenever the pilot communicated with ground control, adding to the confusion and suspense about the president’s condition. Chase Untermeyer, who was on the VP staff at the time, remembers that after they had decided to return to Washington, a call came in from the president’s counsel, Ed Meese, that Reagan had come through the surgery successfully and was out of danger. However, the Secret Service was still uncertain whether there was a larger plot behind the attempted assassination, and wanted Dad to helicopter directly to the South Lawn of the White House for safety.

While Dad was still in the air, Secretary of State Al Haig made his now-famous announcement to the press, “I am in control here,” which had something to do with why Dad decided not to take the helicopter to the White House from Andrews Air Force Base. Instead, he choppered to the vice president’s house first and then drove to the White House in a secure motorcade.

Dad explained his decision this way: “I didn’t want to look like I was president of the United States. I don’t know whether they had actually transferred the power to me as president, but clearly, I was next in charge. Al Haig had come up to the press room and said he was in charge here, and it was important to get back and keep the regular order”—which is Dad’s nice way of saying that under the Constitution, the “regular order” for succession would be vice president, then Speaker of the House, then secretary of state.

Years later, Don Gregg looked back on the whole scene: “The contrast between the way your dad behaved, which was to just move in unobtrusively and there was the sense of continuity, and Al Haig, who was rushing in saying, ‘I’m in charge’—it just couldn’t have been more striking. A man with a huge ego, in the case of Haig, and a man with great compassion and a great sense of proportion, your father.”

Chase observed that from that day forward, many Reagan staffers who had previously treated Dad with “limited enthusiasm” came to trust him.

Dad’s concern was with how President Reagan was doing. He wanted to go to George Washington Hospital right away to see the president, but when he heard about the pandemonium there, he decided to send Joe Hagin to check it out first. “I went down that night and it was chaos at the hospital,” Joe remembered. “I sent word back that I thought it was not a good time for a visit.”

“So we went the next day to the hospital to see President Reagan,” said Joe. “The vice president was very concerned about Nancy and the appearance of the whole thing. I was impressed with how calm and collected he was, how determined he was to handle it in the right way and not to be seen as stepping into the limelight.”

Pete Teeley went along, too. “We went upstairs and the VP said, ‘Well, come on, you can go see President Reagan,’” Pete told me. “I was kind of reluctant to do it—Mrs. Reagan was there and I thought to myself, ‘Hell, she’s not going to want a bunch of staff guys wandering through.’” So when Dad went into President Reagan’s room—he didn’t stay long, just enough to say hello and be able to reassure everyone back at the White House that the president was fine—Pete went to visit Jim Brady, a very good friend of his and the president’s press secretary. John Hinckley had shot him in the head during the assassination attempt.

“His [Brady’s] condition was shocking,” Pete told me. “It looked like he had just suffered a terrible beating. And Sarah [Jim’s wife] said to me that the doctors wanted him to start recognizing sounds and voices and names, and she had me whispering to him . . . He wasn’t making any movements. It was a very sad situation.”

The day of the assassination attempt, Rich Bond, Dad’s deputy chief of staff, had his own personally devastating experience. Rich and his wife, Valerie, were at Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., visiting their baby son, Patrick, who had been born prematurely back in December. Patrick had been fighting for his life every day for three months, but then sadly, he died that morning at the hospital. Rich and Valerie were returning to their home with Valerie’s parents when Rich got an emergency call through the White House switchboard to report to the office because of the shooting.

“Shock on top of sorrow,” Rich summarized, “a long, stressful afternoon and evening.” By 11:00 at night, everything was just beginning to calm down and Dad called Rich into his West Wing office, saying he’d just heard the news about Patrick. “I started to cry and he gave me this long, fierce hug, telling me it was going to be okay,” Rich remembers. It was okay—the president survived, and another son, Michael Thomas, was born to the Bonds in the fall of the following year.

As 1981 progressed, my parents read in the paper that a cross had been burned in the front yard of a Cameroonian couple serving in Washington with their country’s embassy. Without any announcement or press contingent, Mom and Dad just went over and rang the doorbell, expressing their regrets and support to the scared couple.

“I think Dad is drawn to people who are hurting,” Marvin added. “He’s a natural healer. He doesn’t profess to be that, but he has an amazing innate sense of when people are hurting and that’s when he’ll turn on that attention—whether it’s in the form of a beautiful letter or a hug or some unsolicited advice.”

The attempted assassination marked a turning point in Dad’s relationship with President Reagan. For example, Don Gregg remembers meeting with Dad one Saturday morning after the assassination attempt, when Dad said he found out that the president would be at the White House on a summer Sunday—a prisoner of the “bubble” that presidents tend to live in. Don quoted Dad as saying, “He just feels like a bird in a gilded cage down there. I may ask him to play golf.”

When I asked Jim Baker about Dad’s relationship with President Reagan, he said, “Well, it matured. At first, it was a little bit shaky. Reagan went to your dad not because he wanted to, initially, but because there wasn’t any other possibility. Why? Because your dad had delegates at the convention, and the best way to bring the party together would be to put George Bush on the ticket.

“But your dad quickly overcame any reservations that Reagan had by being an absolutely perfect vice president,” Secretary Baker added. “I’ve said to people over and over, nobody ever performed that job better than your dad, because he knew that he was never supposed to be juxtaposed against Reagan. He was an absolutely superb vice president for Reagan, and they really got along extremely well. It was a very, very close friendship, and I’d say that began the first year.”

Jim Baker, President Reagan’s chief of staff, was in a good position to watch the relationship grow—he was in the office next door to Dad’s in the West Wing, near the Oval Office. He followed Dad’s lead to ensure that the normal rivalries between the presidential and vice presidential staffs never took root.

“It didn’t happen in our administration,” said Baker, “because I was the chief of staff and I know I satisfied the Reagans that I was totally loyal to them; and yet I was in a position to see that the vice president was included in meetings.”

As the 1982 midterm elections approached, Dad began to campaign for Republicans in closely contested districts. His very close friend Lud Ashley, a Democrat, was running for reelection for his congressional seat in Ohio, which he had held since 1955. Republicans in Washington had identified Lud’s seat as winnable and decided to devote resources—including the vice president—to unseat the incumbant.

“He came out to Toledo and campaigned against me!” Lud laughingly told me. Dad went to the Toledo Blade for a meeting of their editorial board, whose members all knew that he and Lud had a long history together—but that didn’t stop them from trying to bait Dad into saying something against Lud. Dad looked at them and explained that of course he was campaigning for a Republican-controlled Congress, but added, “If you think I’m going to say one word against Lud Ashley, you’re crazy. Have I made myself clear?”

Lud lost the election, and Dad hasn’t heard the end of it since.

Dad was very happy that the vice president’s house was adjacent to a tennis court. He played tennis regularly. He also played paddleball in the House gym with some of the congressmen on the Hill who were involved in the administration’s tax reform legislation: Sonny Montgomery, Dad’s friend and regular paddleball partner (who would yell “Kill Bubba!” when he tried to put the ball away); Bill Archer, who replaced Dad as the congressman representing Houston and later became chair of the Ways and Means Committee; and Marty Russo, the congressman from Illinois, who was also on Ways and Means.

“We kicked butt,” Marty Russo remembers. “Your dad does not like to lose.”

On a trip to Australia in 1982, Dad was playing tennis with his old friend John Newcombe and Tony Roche, the former Wimbledon doubles champs, at an indoor court in front of a few dozen spectators. Several times in a row, Tony would lob it to Dad, who would smash it back, and then Tony would drop it right at Dad’s feet. The third time, Dad tripped over his own feet and fell down, blood streaming down his elbow.

“You could hear a pin drop,” recalls John Newcombe. “The Secret Service wanted to laugh but dared not. Suddenly, George sprung to his feet and said in a loud voice, ‘Don’t shoot him! I’m okay.’”

During a trip to Mexico, Dad spied Jim Burch and several of his fellow Secret Service agents playing tennis on their off-duty hours. Dad approached their supervisor, asking if Jim would be allowed to play with him and a pair of local tennis pros. Jim was allowed, and Dad made sure Jim received autographed, official photos of the match when they returned home. Later, Dad tipped Jim off when Dad was scheduled to play different matches with Bjorn Borg, Ivan Lendl, and Tony Roche, so that Jim could arrange to be on duty then and watch the match.

Many times after tennis or running, Dad checked his weight after showering. Ralph Basham, one of his Secret Service agents who went on to become head of the Secret Service and subsequently U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner, remembers one time in the locker room. “He would go over and get on the scale. He didn’t want any extra weight on him, so he wouldn’t even put his glasses on. Then he couldn’t read the scale. ‘Ralph, come here. I can’t read. What does this say?’ he’d ask. Of course, then I’d say, ‘Well, sir, it’s two hundred.’ He’d reply, ‘Oh no, it can’t be. Read that again. It’s got to be a bad scale.’”

During the first Reagan administration, my brother Neil and his wife, Sharon—who had met and fallen in love during the New Hampshire primary in 1980—welcomed their first child, Lauren, into our family.

Dad wrote Lauren a note when she was three days old that referred to a photo of her in the paper, “smiling right out there in front of all the world, just like your wonderful Dad has done all his life—even when it hurt.” Like Lauren, Neil was always smiling, even though he went through a terrible struggle with learning disabilities as a child. I remember one time in the mid–1980s a letter arrived from a junior high school teacher asking Mom to share some of Neil’s struggles with the students, because “they feel like failures.” Mom immediately asked Neil to help, and Neil wrote a candid and inspiring note to the teacher:

People probably thought I was lazy or didn’t care or that I just wasn’t very bright. Despite the learning disability, I knew deep down inside I wasn’t dumb. The root of my difficulty was a reading problem known as dyslexia . . . I learned that through hard work I could overcome my handicap. I also developed other skills that “smarter” people sometimes have trouble with—a desire to fight for my goals and an ability to get along with people . . . As your students know, life is not always easy and for me it sure didn’t seem fair. With the combination of a strong desire to learn, the willingness to work hard, and support from family, friends and teachers, every human has the potential to climb any mountain.

Neil was diagnosed with dyslexia and got the proper help while he was in high school. Learning to deal with dyslexia changed his life. Today as a result, he works harder, cares more, and enjoys life like few people I know. Although he was working at an energy exploration company when he wrote that letter, he now heads an educational software company.

Neil credits “the magic of Dad’s support—combined with Mom’s— and they never let me feel like I was different or less able.” Mom and Dad found Neil’s strengths—basketball, for example—and played to those strengths. “Mom took me to all the assessments and evaluations, but they both gave me the shot-in-the-arm confidence I needed to go through life. Half the battle of a learning disability is not to personalize it—to feel like you’re stupid or use it as an excuse.”

My brother George agrees that Mom and Dad’s love was crucial to his success in life. “I used to tell our girls: ‘I love you. There’s nothing you can do to make me stop loving you, so stop trying.’ In other words, Dad made sure his kids understand that there’s this great well of affection available no matter how awful things get.”

“Everybody had a shared experience,” explains Marvin. “It killed us all when we’d read some nasty article about Dad. And in a way that became a rallying cry for all of us to help defend each other, help each other through some very difficult elections. It’s been inculcated into our family by virtue of the fact that we spent a lot of time with Dad’s family and his siblings. They were very cohesive, very close to each other.”

As Marvin explains it, “I think there were fathers who were around more and, to a certain extent, were stifling to friends of mine. Always around and judging the kids. One of the greatest attributes of both of our parents is that they gave us enough rope to make a lot of decisions, and they knew how to pull that rope in when we abused the privilege.”

How has our family remained intact despite the constant glare of publicity and Dad’s long hours? “You can analyze it all kinds of ways. It’s love, period,” said my brother George. “If we didn’t love each other as much as we do, and love Mother and Dad as much as we do, it would be harder to circle the wagons. People would be going their own way.”

After the assassination attempt, President Reagan didn’t travel much, at least internationally, and Dad stepped in to help in this regard. As a result, his relationships with leaders around the world grew not only in number but in importance.

For example, Dad began a great friendship with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who explained, “When we were in a meeting, President Reagan was in charge. Your dad did what a strong, loyal vice president is supposed to do: he kept his own counsel and shared it only with the president. But then when I’d go to the vice president’s house to see him, it was different. He had opinions on everything. I found him entertaining and funny and fascinating, a wonderful guy.

“One day my wife, Mila, and I were there, and we were sitting there having a glass of Coke and a couple of sandwiches,” Mulroney continued. “All of a sudden, the doors open and the grandchildren came in. They were crawling all over him. He never missed a beat. He kept talking to me. He enjoyed every second of it. The dogs were running around and, I said to myself, this guy’s got his values in the right place.”

One of Dad’s first official trips as vice president was to size up François Mitterrand, the newly elected president of France. Don Gregg, Dad’s national security adviser, was sitting with the two leaders in a very formal dining room when suddenly he spotted two dogs up on their hind legs outside the French doors, pawing to get in. Dad suggested they finish lunch and take the dogs for a romp outside the Elysée. “Your dad was wonderful with the dogs and it was a very, very humanizing moment with Mitterrand, who was otherwise rather cold and withdrawn.” With that, another solid relationship was born.

After the Mitterrand meeting, they flew to London to meet with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (as well as her husband, Denis, one of Dad’s favorite people, who passed away in June 2003). They then flew back to Andrews Air Force Base to spend the night in Washington.

“Got up the next morning, flew to California, went to the Reagan ranch, briefed the president on the Mitterrand visit, and then flew to the Far East,” recalled Joe Hagin, who traveled to sixty-two countries with Dad during the vice presidential years. “In a matter of eight days, we were in eighteen of the twenty-four time zones in the world.”

When I asked my father what he liked most about being vice president, he said, “I liked being around Reagan, and I liked traveling abroad . . . He was very generous about my traveling to different places. He’d let me take the initiative.” Mom’s back-of-the-envelope accounting of all of my parents’ travel during the vice presidential years comes to 1,629 days spent out of Washington, traveling an estimated 1.3 million miles—about fifty-four times around the world.

During the eight years he was vice president, Dad attended many funerals. In fact, Jim Baker used to joke that my father’s slogan as vice president should have been “You die, I fly.” But none were more important in terms of relationship-building than those of the Soviet Union’s three leaders: Presidents Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, who died within twenty-eight months of each other.

Each time there was a state funeral in Moscow, there would be a long receiving line in one of the grand halls of the Kremlin. Once they reached the end of the receiving line, each world leader would be brought into a private meeting room for bilateral discussions. When Dad would go into the room, no aides or Secret Service were allowed in with him. As a precautionary measure, Secret Service Agent John Magaw would slip a little hand alarm to Dad—a small remote alarm that would transmit a wireless signal to the Secret Service in the hall—to keep in his pocket in case he began to choke on a piece of food, or some other similar situation.

It was assumed that the room in which these bilateral meetings were held was bugged. As other leaders entered the room, they would look at each other and occasionally pass little notes, cleverly working out a sort of code to use when they had to speak out loud. And they got better at it each time, so that they were able to have a conversation without allowing the KGB to know what they were actually talking about. My father enjoyed that enormously—he got a big kick out of seeing these world leaders develop ways of circumventing the audio surveillance.

When President Brezhnev died unexpectedly in November 1982, my parents and the VP staff were on a tour of Africa. They left Nigeria for Moscow, and warmer clothes were sent from Washington with Secretary of State George Shultz—“the highest-ranking deliveryman in the world,” Dad said later. Mom and Dad soon found themselves in front of Brezhnev’s coffin, paying their respects to Mrs. Brezhnev.

Dad recalled, “The flowers were spectacular. The setting awesome. The music Chopin. Superb.” Suddenly, the three hundred strings that had played so beautifully gave way to a military march, and Brezhnev’s coffin was positioned behind Lenin’s tomb by a tank-puller. “There was no mention of God. There was no hope, no joy, no life ever after, no mention of Christ and what His death has meant to so many,” Dad recounted. “So discouraging in a sense, so hopeless, so lonely.”

On the way back to Africa, Dad wrote a cable to President Reagan in midair from Moscow to Frankfurt on November 15, 1982, outlining how the funeral had become an opportunity for a bilateral meeting with Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov. And then, vintage Dad, he described the funeral itself to Reagan in terms of their own families: “I at first saw only hostile troops and hostile power. We had a little wait, and I watched the changing of the guard and looked at the faces, and then I saw my sons and yours: George, Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Mike and Ron.”

Dad and Mom returned to Zambia after the funeral. Shortly after, they sat down for lunch with their African hosts, and an African clergyman got up and offered a blessing before they began the meal. Dad said, “Oh, I can’t tell you how good it feels to have a meal blessed!” He continued, “I’ve just come from this very dark ceremony in Moscow watching Brezhnev be buried, and the only sign of anything religious was when Mrs. Brezhnev was given a last look at her husband before his coffin was closed and she bent over and kissed him on the cheek and then crossed herself.” Back here in the States, I remember how her seemingly tiny religious gesture made headlines—and how it gave many in the West hope for commonality and even peace.

After just fifteen months in office, Leonid Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, died of kidney failure at the age of sixty-nine on February 9, 1984, and once again, Dad found himself attending the funeral of a Soviet leader. As he had before, he went to the Kremlin for the burial and stayed for a series of bilateral meetings with the new Soviet leader. Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was also in failing health when he assumed office and died at age seventy-two just thirteen months later, in March of 1985. He was the last of the Soviet “old guard” leaders, and had already turned over many of his day-to-day responsibilities for running the Soviet empire to a fifty-four-year-old former Politburo member named Mikhail Gorbachev. It was at Chernenko’s funeral that Dad met Gorbachev for the first time.

“The minute I met him, I said to myself, ‘This man is different,’” Dad recalled years later. “You could tell he wanted a dialogue in a different way from the others. He was his own man; he was charismatic.”

He continued: “I remember once Gorbachev flared up when we were talking about human rights . . . and then he calmed down and said, ‘We ought to talk about these things. Tell President Reagan I want to discuss any subject he wants.’ It was quite a breakthrough, because I was the first one from our country to see him in action in this powerful new job.”

Just as he did after the first Soviet funeral, Dad wrote a cable to President Reagan from Air Force Two. Gorbachev was about to become the leader of the Soviet Union, and what strikes me about Dad’s letter is his take on Gorbachev’s charisma and the effect it might have on members of Congress:

One has got to be optimistic that Gorbachev will be better to work with . . . hopefully one will truly “start anew” . . . there is the possibility that his attractive personality will be used to divide us from our allies and to attract more support for old views and themes. I can just see some of our Members of Congress eating out of his hand in wishful anticipation of achieving détente, but giving away too much in the process as we try to figure out who this man really is. It will be an interesting trip, but as the monkey said when he was shot into outer space, “It beats the hell out of the cancer research lab!”

In 1983, Dad and Mom went on an official trip to Europe, to visit the allies and negotiate with the Russians on the issue of intermediate-range missiles. This important trip is memorable not only for the international stakes involved but also because of the massive protests, including two attacks on Dad’s motorcade—one in Germany and the other in the Netherlands.

But Dad would not be intimidated or back down.

On June 26, 1983, for example, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl hosted Mom and Dad at an anniversary celebration in the city of Krefeld (North Rhine-Westphalia) commemorating the first wave of emigration from Germany to America 300 years ago.

“For us Germans, and for me as German chancellor, it was a great honor that none other than the American vice president and his wife, Barbara, came to Germany for this occasion,” Chancellor Kohl told me. “This occurred at a time when the stationing of midrange weapons was being discussed intensely in the Federal Republic of Germany and was also being protested against in many places. In Krefeld as well, the atmosphere was heightened, and the commemoration was not without disturbances. The lights even went out at times in the hall where we were gathered. But George Bush did not let himself be irritated by it and he gave a splendid speech about German-American relations. What impressed me was the great composure with which George Bush reacted to the disturbances, which were very embarrassing.”

Chris Buckley, Dad’s speechwriter for two years who today is the editor of Forbes FYI magazine and a best-selling author, was also on that trip and remembers events this way:

“He was sent to Europe to about eight or nine European capitals in as many days to persuade the Europeans to accept the placement of Pershing and ground-launched cruise missiles that they themselves had requested. But the Russians had whipped up a big propaganda campaign, and there were marches in European capitals with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating against America for ‘forcing’ these missiles on poor little Europe.

Chris continued: “It was a very important trip and he gave one speech in Berlin when we arrived and it basically made the case. The Times of London did an editorial about him and said, not a bad speech—which for the English is very good. It was a very testy time. We had to drive through a jeering crowd in London—people giving me the finger, and I gave it right back!! Special relationship? Special relationship this! We drove to the Guildhall in London and your father gave the speech and then there was a question-and-answer session. These lefty Brits stood up, most of them with clerical collars on, saying, ‘How can you force these missiles on Europe? You’re trying to blow up the world and make everything dangerous.’ You know, the old pacifist rant. And your dad just looked at this guy and said, ‘Wait a minute. Believe it or not, I care about this. I have kids, too, you know.’ And he absolutely disarmed the crowd. At that moment, standing in the Guildhall, I could tell he was angry, and yet there was even something gentle about his anger. That’s how I think of his leadership. He led gently. There’s not an ounce of bluster or inauthenticity about him.”

Early in the morning on October 23, 1983, a suicidal terrorist drove a Mercedes truck, loaded with explosives equivalent to six tons of TNT, at high speed into the headquarters building of a U.S. marine battalion at Beirut International Airport. The explosion killed 241 American servicemen, mostly marines, who were stationed there as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.

President Reagan directed the Marines into Beirut in August 1992 at the request of the Lebanese government to assist, together with French and Italian military units, in supervising the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The multinational force was also there to serve as peacekeepers, attempting to help the Lebanese government achieve political stability after years of factional fighting. Sadly, the mission would fail, and Lebanon would again descend into deadly chaos.

The day of the bombing, Dad told President Reagan that he would like to go to Beirut himself. President Reagan agreed, and the next day, accompanied by General P. X. Kelley, then the commandant of the United States Marine Corps, Dad made the trip to Lebanon. They stood there, side by side, in the rubble, watching young marines as they clawed at twisted steel and broken concrete in an effort to find their comrades—hopefully alive.

“It was a sad but meaningful manifestation of Semper Fidelis,” notes General Kelley. “When we subsequently visited the wounded aboard the USS Iwo Jima, I could not help but see compassion and pain on the face of a true hero—one from another war and another generation.”

When there were breaks in Dad’s travel schedule, he and Mom would head to Kennebunkport, Maine, to our family home, which would eventually become known around the world as Dad’s summer White House. In the late 1890s, my great-great-grandfather Dwight Davis Walker and my great-grandfather George Herbert Walker bought the peninsula of land that today is called Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport. In 1901, they built a big Victorian home on the tip of the land and named it Surf Ledge. These days we all call it the Big House. A second, smaller house built next to it, called the Bungalow, was given to my grandparents Dorothy and Prescott as a wedding present the year after they were married. From the turn of the century onward, the Walkers would escape the summer heat of St. Louis by heading to Kennebunkport; by the 1930s, my grandparents brought their children there for the summer from Greenwich, with Prescott Bush commuting weekends on the overnight train from Greenwich.

There in Maine, my grandmother Dorothy taught my father and his siblings sailing and tennis and bridge. Aunt Nan remembers the sound of the surf on the Maine coast lulling them to sleep at night, and she thinks it continues to help Dad relax. When they were thirteen and eleven, Dad’s grandfather George Walker let him and Uncle Pres take out an old boat named the Tomboy for hours on end, which began my Dad’s love of being on the water. Aunt Nan says that for Dad, spending time in Kennebunkport became “a very deep and important thing in his life, a real touchstone place.”

Dad calls Walker’s Point his “anchor to windward.”

The famous nor’easter of 1978 damaged thousands of homes along the New England coast, including the Big House. At the time of the storm, Uncle Herbie—George Herbert Walker Jr., my grandmother’s brother—owned the house, but when he died shortly afterward, my Aunt Mary decided to sell the house to Mom and Dad.

Since Dad had left the CIA and moved back to Houston, he and Mom had the time and energy to fix up the storm-damaged house. Previously, we had a gray house on Ocean Avenue, facing Walker’s Point, which had terrific ocean views as well.

By the time Dad became vice president, he and Mom started entertaining on Walker’s Point. At one event, they hosted a dinner for a group of diplomats who had come to visit. Tim McBride, one of Dad’s personal aides, recalls that when the group arrived—probably a dozen people—Dad remembered quite a few from his U.N. days, but there were some new faces to him, and he had trouble putting names with them. As he tried to decide where everyone would be seated for dinner, he was having a hard time.

“Go get my Polaroid camera,” he said to Tim, referring to the one he had used in China, “and run around and take pictures of all the guests, and those will be the place cards.” Tim did exactly that, and Dad carefully arranged the guests by photo.

On one of his first weekends in Kennebunkport as vice president, Dad decided he needed a haircut. Previously, a local barber named Emile Roy had sent a letter to Dad’s presidential campaign, volunteering to help after he read an article about Mom and Dad’s time in China. After reading Emile’s letter, Dad called him up for a haircut (of course, Emile didn’t believe it was really Dad on the phone!), and the two have been friends ever since.

“George invited me fishing one time and it turned out to be a chilly day,” Emile told me. “I was in a short-sleeved shirt and George ran back to the house to get me a jacket. He came back with a hat as well and said that he did not want me to lose my head over it. I think he was referring to my toupee!”

In 1983, Mom and Dad invited all of the nation’s governors and their families over to Walker’s Point for a cookout, when the National Governors’ Association held its annual meeting in nearby Portland, Maine. In a scene that could have been right out of the movie Groundhog Day, both Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts and Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas were guests.

“Our daughter, Chelsea, then was three years old,” remembers President Clinton. “I took Chelsea up to meet the vice president. I thought, ‘Boy, I have such a smart, well-behaved daughter. She’ll be great.’ I said, ‘Chelsea, this is Vice President Bush.’ And she shook his hand and she said, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ And he just laughed. He took her by the hand, introduced her to his mother, and took her to the bathroom. He didn’t have to do that. He could have had somebody else take her. He could have pointed it out to me. He did it himself. I never forgot it.”

During the spring of 1984, Dad was campaigning for the reelection of the Reagan-Bush ticket in Colorado. As Dad walked through the lobby of the Denver hotel where he was staying, he noticed a group of retired baseball Hall of Famers such as Hoyt Wilhelm and Juan Marichal and Whitey Ford. They were there to play in an Old Timers exhibition game that night at Mile High Stadium.

Sean Coffey, Dad’s personal aide at the time, remembers Dad stopping to chat with the players assembling for the photo. The players, in turn, started talking baseball with Dad—who had played first base in two College World Series in 1947 and 1948, while at Yale.

The rap against Dad was that he was “all field and no hit,” but during a 1948 game in Raleigh, North Carolina, Dad happened to hit a single, a double, and a triple—with a few pro scouts looking on. The scouts approached Dad’s coach, Ethan Allen, after the game, but “unfortunately, Coach Allen told them the truth, so the scouts never talked to me much after that,” Dad later said. Six of his teammates were signed by the pros instead.

Dad confessed his shortcomings thirty-six years later to the assembled Hall of Famers. Nevertheless, they invited Dad to come to the game that night, and the next thing Dad knows, he’s in the locker room at Mile High Stadium. They had him suited up in a uniform, and he was swinging a bat when Pete Teeley found him. “I looked at him and I said, ‘What are you doing?’” Pete said. “‘These guys play baseball every day even at the age of sixty. You haven’t played in years. I don’t want you to go out there and make a fool out of yourself.’ He got mad as hell about that.”

Meanwhile, over the stadium address system, they announced there was a “mystery guest” playing with the team, and Dad came out. The crowd had no idea who he was until the announcers said Dad’s name as he went up to bat. Milt Pappas, the great All-Star pitcher, pitched to Dad. Then Dad hit a sharp single to center field and made it to first base.

“The players were delighted, and he was really happy,” remembered Sean, who watched from the third base side. Dad was eventually forced out at second to end the inning—at which point he put on a glove and headed out to first base, his old position at Yale.

“The best was yet to come,” said Sean, because “who comes up but Orlando Cepeda, who was known for hitting line drives. Sure enough, he hits a rocket down the right field line. If it had hit somebody in the head, it would have taken their head off. As it was, it looked like it was going into the right field corner for a double—but that was before first baseman Bush jumps to his left. He dives for it, knocks the ball down, gets up, scrambles into foul territory, turns around, and lobs a perfect underhand pitch to the pitcher covering first. Orlando Cepeda is out. Mile High Stadium erupted in cheers.”

“A Walter Mitty night for me,” Dad told one of the interviewers as he came off the field with a smile, referring to James Thurber’s mild-mannered character who daydreams of being the fearless hero.

In 1983, Joe Hagin went to Dad and told him that while he’d do anything in the world for him, he couldn’t travel anymore—together, they’d been on the road for three years without a break. Dad understood, thought about it, and called Joe back to suggest the job of assistant to the vice president for legislative affairs. Worried that he was young and inexperienced in the world of legislation, Joe told Dad he wasn’t sure it was the right job for him. The more he found out about it, in fact, the more shocked he was—“a two-rung promotion,” Joe called it, with a beautiful office in the Capitol, a good-size staff, and a driver.

“Nonsense, you’ll do fine,” Dad reassured Joe, explaining that the job involved not much travel but a lot of congressional hand-holding. Then Joe discovered why my father wasn’t concerned: “I found out several months later that he had written all one hundred senators a personal letter about me . . . he really invested a lot of time doing all those handwritten notes. People totally welcomed me.”

While Joe was working with Democratic senators and congressmen back in Washington, the Democratic Party held its convention in San Francisco, nominating former vice president Walter Mondale for president and Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro for vice president. Ms. Ferraro was a three-term member of Congress and a former public school teacher who had gone to Fordham Law School at night while raising three children. She was the first woman nominated for the vice presidency by a major party. It was a bold stroke by the Mondale campaign, and it presented a tricky challenge for Dad.

“He was complimentary of my nomination,” Ms. Ferraro told me. “One, because it was the politically right thing to do; and two, because your father was a very gracious man.”

Looking back, Dad says now, “I was very surprised at her nomination. She had limited experience on the national scene beyond being a congresswoman from New York. I got to know her a little bit during the campaign. I haven’t seen her in a while, but I do like her.”

There were stories at the time about a tenfold increase in total media coverage of the vice presidential race from 1980 to 1984. What Dad remembers was the challenge of making appearances with Ferraro, because of the crowds she drew.

Ms. Ferraro agreed: “It was mind-boggling to see. Certainly, I didn’t expect the response that the candidacy had. It was more the candidacy than it was me. I think probably any woman who got the nomination would have been received very much the same way—and that’s in either party. My audiences were as large as President Reagan’s and in some instances larger. Forty thousand people would show up—it was the most amazing thing.”

Meanwhile, in a bar in Sterling, Illinois, then-Congresswoman Lynn Martin was trying to earn an endorsement from some steelworkers in a late-morning meeting. She paid no attention when the phone behind the bar rang, but then the bartender announced that some wise guy had just called and said he was the vice president of the United States. And then the phone rang again, and the bartender realized, actually, that it was the vice president.

“It’s for you,” he said to the congresswoman.

“So I went to the phone and it was your dad,” Ms. Martin told me. ‘What are you doing in a bar?’ And I said, ‘Trying to get votes. What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m calling you because I’m going to debate Representative Ferraro and I’d like you to help me prepare.’”

Congresswoman Martin suspects she was chosen because she and Congresswoman Ferraro served on the same House committee, and were both “sharp—if you were being kind, you could say we were ‘sharp-witted,’ but maybe occasionally just ‘sharp.’”

Mom thought that Dad might not have been taking the whole thing seriously enough, partly because many of his staff members were telling him everything would be fine. But things might not be fine—“she’s going to be tough,” Ms. Martin recalled Mom saying to her about Ms. Ferraro in a phone call.

“Your mom said, ‘Listen, he’s full of himself right now. Cut him down.’ I said, ‘That’s easy for you to say—he’s vice president of the United States. This is my career, too, you know.’” Here she was, a young mother and a new member of Congress. But somebody had to be tough—and help Dad get ready for a difficult debate.

One of the things Congresswoman Martin observed is that she had always debated men—but when men debated women, they primarily debated their wives or mothers. They are seldom in the situation my father was in at that time in America. He had to learn to walk the line between his extraordinary politeness and his competitive side. Boyden Gray, head of the debate prep team, remembers, “It was very, very tricky . . . the strategy was he had to win, but he couldn’t win too strongly. He couldn’t be seen as ganging up on her.”

Boyden remembers the first debate rehearsal, which was to have a television camera, a stage, podiums, chairs, the whole set, in a large auditorium in the Executive Office Building. Dad had specifically said he didn’t want anyone in the session other than Congresswoman Martin and essential staff.

“I ignored his instruction and invited everybody I could think of,” Boyden said. “So we had the place practically filled with Reagan’s staff and everything else. When he came in and saw the auditorium two-thirds full, he was furious. Absolutely furious. But it was the right thing to do, because it made him take the task seriously. And you know, Lynn Martin gave him a pretty hard time.”

Ms. Martin says Mom concedes that Dad was not ready for the first practice debate. He was better by the second, and “he cleaned me up by the third.”

A few days later, the two vice presidential candidates met in Philadelphia for the real debate, and no matter what Ms. Ferraro said, Dad kept his cool. He’s participated in one vice presidential debate and five presidential debates over the years; nonetheless, he says the one with Ferraro was the most tense.

“I think the press was automatically divided,” Dad said. “A lot of the females in the press corps said this was one of us. You could hear ’em clapping.”

In fact, there was a press room behind the stage, filled with people whom Dad would call the spinmeisters—the political guys from the Reagan-Bush campaign, like Lynn Nofziger and Lee Atwater. (They were waiting for the end of the debate and one of the rituals of American politics to start—reporters interviewing political operatives in the “spin room.” Supporters of each campaign would hold a sign over their head with their candidate’s name on it, then roam the room giving sound bites to reporters as to why their candidate won the debate.) While the debate was still going on, Dad’s political staffers actually saw the journalists clapping for Ferraro.

“It was a tough one,” Dad said.

After all the spin had been captured by the reporters, the media analysts that night declared the debate a tie—which came as a relief to both candidates.

The day after the only vice presidential debate, however, Dad made an appearance before a group of longshoremen, one of whom kept waving a sign that read “You kicked a little ass last night, George!” He kept yelling that same comment at Dad, over and over, from the crowd.

As Dad was getting into his car to leave, the man repeated it again to Dad, this time right next to him. Unfortunately, Dad actually repeated the comment back to the man—not noticing an intrusive boom mike as he climbed into his limo. It was all over the news in no time.

Compounding the situation, shortly afterward my mother was joking with some reporters on the campaign plane, thinking she was “off the record.” (Note to reader: never assume you are “off the record” with a reporter.) Mom remembers that one “had needled the president about his elite, rich vice president. It really had burned me up because we all had read that Geraldine and her husband, John Zaccaro, were worth at least $4 million, if not more. The press were teasing me about it, and I said something like, ‘That rich . . . well, it rhymes with rich . . . could buy George Bush any day.’”

By the time it was on the radio news, Mom had called Ms. Ferraro to apologize. By the time it was on the television news, she had called Dad to apologize.

At that point, the media were ready to ambush Mom en route to the next appearance, but before they could, Dad called back with a friend’s advice: “Remember Halloween.” The poet laureate (we call her the poet laureate of our family because of her skill with rhyming words) marched out smiling and said she had talked to Ms. Ferraro and had apologized for calling her a “witch”—and that the apology had been graciously accepted.

Even today, Geraldine Ferraro is very understanding and gracious about the incident. She says, “Your mother was not the candidate. She was very protective of your father. It didn’t figure into the top ten things I worried about. We still kid about it. More than once my girlfriends will remind me, ‘You know, Gerry, you rhyme with witch!’ It’s very funny.”

A night or two later, Dad went to a campaign event, and as he got to the podium, he sheepishly apologized to the crowd: “Sorry we’re late, but Bar and I were upstairs cleaning our mouths out with soap.”

There were other memorable moments from that fall campaign—the critics calling President Reagan the Teflon President; the “Bear in the Woods” ad campaign reminding voters of the Soviet threat; President Reagan not realizing a microphone was live when he joked that the “bombing will begin in five minutes.” But in November, President Reagan and Dad won in a landslide, carrying every state except Vice President Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. The Reagan-Bush ticket took 525 electoral votes to Mondale-Ferraro’s 13.

“My mother was the only person in the entire country who didn’t know we were going to lose,” Ms. Ferraro remembered. When she called my dad that night to concede the election, Dad unexpectedly invited her to lunch. At her suggestion, Dad brought “his Geraldine Ferraro,” Lynn Martin, and she brought “her George Bush,” meaning Bob Barnett, a Democratic lawyer who is married to Rita Braver of CBS News.

“I’d have preferred to be the host today, but under the circumstances, I’ll take what I can get,” Ferraro said. Dad said, “It’s a free lunch.”

The Washington Post reported afterward that they enjoyed salmon steak, asparagus with potatoes, and brownies for dessert, in Dad’s ceremonial office in the Executive Office Building.

Bob Barnett remembered that Ms. Ferraro told them she’d lost her luggage on the way back from vacationing in St. Croix after the election. Dad replied that he was very experienced at losing luggage and was, in fact, a fan of bad lost-luggage jokes, and shared this one: A woman comes up to the counter at United Airlines in Washington with three pieces of luggage. She asks the ticket agent, “Can you send one to New York, one to Los Angeles, and one to Hawaii?” The ticket agent replied, “We can’t do that!” The woman says, “Why not? You did it last time.”

Dad knew that in order to prepare for the debate, Bob had not only researched his speeches and issue papers but had read The Preppy Handbook. He’d even bought those striped ribbon watchbands that Dad sometimes wore. When Dad noticed Bob had on a plain leather watchband during lunch, he took his own watch off its watchband and gave the striped one to Bob as a souvenir. He later sent photos of them comparing watchbands, inscribed “To Bob, you preppy, solid watchband stand-in.”

“On the day of our lunch,” Bob told me, “George Bush was gracious in victory.”

The four of them enjoyed a lively lunch, and Dad afterward showed them the desk in the vice president’s office with his predecessors’ initials carved in the woodwork.

“It’s amazing,” Ms. Ferraro said later. “I don’t think women would do that to the furniture.”