Chapter 16

GREASING THE SKIDS

“I don’t think the Oval Office was ever occupied by someone with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of foreign policy than President George Herbert Walker Bush.”

—Brian Mulroney

In late February 1989, Mom and Dad made their first major foreign trip together, going to Japan for the funeral of Emperor Hirohito, followed by a return visit to China, then Korea. The presidency is an institution steeped in symbolism, and this particular trip made Dad the first president to travel to Asia before Europe. Whether it was intentional or not, this trip set a new tone reflecting Dad’s long-held view of Asia in general and China in particular as emerging world powers.

As it turns out, neither the trip to Japan nor the one to China was free of controversy. For example, when the White House announced Dad would attend the Hirohito funeral, veterans’ groups around the country were outraged, citing the emperor’s actions in World War II. Of course, Dad was also a veteran; and like the fervent anticommunist Nixon going to China in the early 1970s, my father similarly had the moral standing to go to Tokyo in 1989. Dad argued that it was the right thing to do. He wrote in his diary the night of the funeral:

My mind raced back to the Pacific. I did think of my fallen comrades . . . here I was President of the United States, paying respects to the man who was the symbol of everything that we hated. A man whose picture was always shown to keep us all together, fighting hard. Endless pictures of Japanese soldiers cutting off the heads of prisoners, or firing the coup de grace against thousands as they were dumped into the graves alive, all in the name of Hirohito. And there we were, paying tribute to him, a gentle man indeed.

Emperor Hirohito had helped democracy take root in postwar Japan by renouncing his divinity and backing the new constitution; and over the course of Hirohito’s sixty-two-year reign, Japan became one of the world’s great economies and one of our strongest allies. After the emperor’s funeral in Japan, Mom and Dad continued eastward to China for a brief two-day visit. It was a warm homecoming for them, seeing old friends and even returning to the church where I had been baptized over a decade before.

Actually, I had been baptized in a little church atop the old Bible Society building, but, happily, the congregation had since grown so large that they had to move into a bigger space. Mom and Dad remember that the church leaders and members recalled my being baptized there, and that they considered me to be a member of their parish, even though I was not along on the trip. The choir sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” which must have been an emotional experience for them.

This visit to China also afforded Dad a chance to renew his acquaintance with Deng Xiaoping and to express his hope for improved relations between our two nations. While Dad has been a frequent visitor to China since leaving the White House—making some sixteen post-presidential visits to date—this February 1989 visit would be his only trip to China as president. Little did he or even China’s leaders know, but events there would soon spiral out of control, making official contacts between China and the United States very difficult.

In late spring of 1989, I was asked to go on a delegation to Taiwan, as a guest of the Taiwanese government. Dad didn’t like the idea of a foreign government picking up the tab for a presidential son or daughter, so he said no. But shortly afterward, he asked me to serve on my first U.S. presidential delegation, going to Paraguay for the inauguration of President-elect Andrés Rodríguez. It was an exciting proposition, as Paraguay had been under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner for thirty-five brutal years. Stroessner had been accused of torturing and murdering his political opponents.

Then General Andrés Rodríguez, the army leader, overthrew Stroessner and won the first multicandidate election in many years. (In fact, a new constitution was adopted in 1992.) So these were hopeful times. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would visit Paraguay, a landlocked country about the size of California surrounded by Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia.

Our delegation consisted of Senator Larry Pressler (R-SD), Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt (R-AR), Peace Corps Director Paul Coverdell, Tony Salinas of Texas, Elsie Vartanian of New Hampshire, and Jodie Dwight, my childhood friend from Maine.

Jodie and I stayed at the embassy in Asunción with Ambassador Timothy Towell and his family, who could not have been more gracious hosts. While in Paraguay, we also rode the last wood-burning train; we visited a Peace Corps outpost to view an irrigation project; and we went to an asado—a Latin barbecue—at a ranch on the outskirts of Asunción. The ranch was reminiscent of Texas—the same vegetation and landscape. There we were treated to delicious Paraguayan fare with lots of sizzling beef.

In fact, the ranch was famous for raising a particular kind of bull, the pride of this ranch. Jodie and I went on a much-anticipated tour to view the bulls; and when we got there, the bulls were the biggest I’d ever seen. (They were so big their “units” were almost touching the ground.) At that moment, immaturity descended and Jodie and I got the dreaded “giggles,” which seems to happen to me at the most inappropriate times. We were able to regain a semblance of control and finish our visit, but it’s funny after seventeen years the things one remembers.

Far more important, I remember the inauguration of President Rodríguez—and the feeling of freedom that was in the air that day. The Rodríguez family treated us like family, and our delegation sat in the best seats with family and friends everywhere we went. I remember clearly the parade with the military marching by, the flags and the fanfare. The city was dusty and in need of repair, but ripe for the new administration to begin anew. It was a proud moment of political stability in Paraguay, which still has its struggles today.

Meanwhile, Dad took an informal—relaxed, even—approach in contacting his fellow world leaders. From the beginning of his administration, he started working the phones, reaching around the globe to call his fellow leaders, many of whom he knew from his days at the United Nations, from China, and from his eight years as vice president. Dad called nearly two dozen world leaders within days of being sworn in as president, no doubt because he wanted to get to know as many of the new ones as possible on a first-name basis.

“When I first came to work at the National Security Council in 1989, I couldn’t believe how often President Bush contacted his counterparts abroad,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told me. “He would call someone like German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, for example, all the time—just to say that he was thinking about him after reading how Kohl had won some big vote in the Bundestag [the German parliament] or something like that.”

“This had never been done before, and in fact some of the foreign leaders thought they were phony calls at first,” said Bob Gates, who served as Dad’s deputy national security adviser before being appointed director of Central Intelligence. “It was like somebody saying, ‘This is Queen Elizabeth calling.’ It took probably a year and a half before we had some procedures smoothed out with some of these other people. It went the fastest with the British and the Germans and the French, but it was really funny some of the time when he would reach out and try and talk to some of these leaders, because they just weren’t prepared for him.”

For example, former Japanese prime minister Toshiki Kaifu told me that on New Year’s Day of 1990, at eight o’clock in the morning, the phone rang in his bedroom. It was Dad. “A Happy New Year to you, Toshiki! We have a custom in our country. We say Happy New Year to family members first and then to our friends and relatives. I wish you the best of luck this year, Toshiki. Barbara asks me to give her best regards to you and Sachiyo.” The prime minister recalled, “Wasn’t I surprised to receive an unexpected call in such friendly terms! I thanked him profusely.”

Earlier, in August 1989, Dad had taken Prime Minister Kaifu to the horseshoe pit at the White House before their first meeting, after sensing that his guest was a little tense. “We had a lot of fun,” the prime minister remembers. Dad repeatedly called the prime minister by his first name, but given the Japanese custom of showing deference to elders, Prime Minister Kaifu called Dad “Mr. President.” But then Dad said with a smile, “Toshiki, my name is George. Say ‘George,’ won’t you?” He put his arm around Kaifu’s shoulder, and the prime minister told me he’d never forget that day.

Dad also got to work on our relations with our European allies—some of which were in good shape, but some of which needed attention. For example, General Scowcroft explained the relationship Dad was heading into with the French: “President Reagan and President Mitterrand didn’t get along at all. They disliked each other, and used to play tricks with each other to see who would come in last at NATO meetings and be the poo-bah. It was really quite poisonous.”

Early on, Dad told General Scowcroft, “I want to fix that.” Scowcroft enthusiastically agreed in principle, but was less certain when Dad proposed inviting President Mitterrand to Kennebunkport. General Scowcroft wasn’t sure someone as stiff and formal as the French president would enjoy the informality of Kennebunkport—but Dad pressed ahead with his invitation.

Since I was living in Maine at the time, Dad asked me to meet the French and American advance teams several weeks ahead of the visit to show them around Walker’s Point and the cottage where President Mitterrand would be staying. On a cold, overcast spring day, I led an army of advance men—it seemed like hundreds of them—to my grandmother’s house, which was right next door to my parents’ house on Walker’s Point. My grandmother’s summer house, called the Bungalow, was where the president of France would stay.

The Bungalow is a one-story house with ocean views on all sides, but it is also simple and modest. It was no Versailles, but it was filled with happy memories. It had very few amenities—and a furnace was not one of them. We walked into the house, and since it had been closed up for the winter, it was very cold and damp. The French took one look around and, with eyebrows raised, began talking among themselves in French, making tsk-tsk noises and starting sentences with Mon Dieu! Instead of Louis XIV armchairs, they encountered a living room full of well-worn summer furniture.

To aggravate an already tense situation: As we walked down a hall to the master bedroom, I showed them the master bath. Sitting on the toilet seat was an “extender”—an elevated seat with handles that makes sitting easier for an older person. The French advance man in charge asked me what it was. I tried to explain, in the most delicate way possible, as the man’s previously quizzical face soon betrayed his great horror.

Quickly, I moved the tour to the bedroom, where several Frenchmen inspected the bed the president would sleep in. They took one look at Ganny’s hospital-style bed—the kind that goes up and down with a remote control—and firmly announced it would not do. It was clear at that moment that I had lost them. They said they would have to arrange for a different bed for President Mitterrand.

When the Mitterrands finally arrived, Mom and Mrs. Mitterrand spent a day in Portland, and I arranged a luncheon for them at the home of Betsy and Chris Hunt in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. After lunch, we took Mrs. Mitterrand out in a boat in Casco Bay—which has literally hundreds of islands, big and small—so she could experience the beautiful rugged coast of Maine. We also went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Portland, where there were many dolls the French had sent as a thank-you after World War II.

Dad and Mom treated the Mitterrands like family. “It was a foreign policy coup,” said General Scowcroft. “From that time on, Mitterrand never disagreed fundamentally on anything the president really wanted. We could not have made a better move, because of all the things we had to do with the French in the last days of the Soviet Union—it just couldn’t have happened.”

Also invited to Maine for this breakthrough visit was Walter Curley, who was set to leave in two weeks for his post as our ambassador in Paris. “It was a weekend of substantive discussions, plus some fun,” Ambassador Curly later recalled. “I must admit that if you want to get set up well when you get to Paris, have the president of the United States introduce you in his own house to the president of France with his arm around you. It indicated to the French president and to his senior colleagues my access to the Oval Office and to Secretary Baker. This awareness was extremely useful throughout my term in France.”

In May 1989, while the administration’s strategic review was still under way, Dad sent Secretary Baker to Moscow to meet with President Gorbachev. It was the first time Secretary Baker had been to Moscow and the first time he would confront a Soviet leader one-on-one. Their agenda encompassed three main topics: Dad’s active interest in developing a constructive relationship between superpowers; his desire for a sensible, peaceful resolution to the conflict in Central America (Nicaragua); and the possible timing for a summit meeting between the two superpower leaders.

“The diplomatic mission was crucial to the president because we wanted perestroika to succeed,” Secretary Baker explained. Dad was extremely anxious to hear from Baker immediately after the meeting; in fact, he wanted to hear from Secretary Baker even if the secure communications broke down.

Just in case, he told Baker to call him and, if the meeting went very well, say, “It reminded me of a trip to Otto’s.” Otto’s is Dad’s favorite place for barbecue in Houston. If the meeting went all right, Dad continued, Baker should say, “It reminded me of a trip to Molina’s.” Molina’s serves excellent Tex-Mex.

“And what if it goes poorly?” Secretary Baker asked.

“Then tell me, ‘It reminded me of a tennis game with Bob Murray!’” Dad replied, referring to an old Houston tennis rival of theirs.

Afterward, Baker reported to Dad that the trip had been like Molina’s—a good meeting, but we still had some serious challenges to overcome. Given Gorbachev’s effective public relations blitz in Europe, Baker was primarily concerned with Dad being upstaged at a pivotal NATO meeting in Brussels three weeks later.

The stakes were high, and not just for Dad.

“Gorbachev may have been out in front of me in Europe,” Dad conceded, referring to the Soviet leader’s public relations blitz in Europe. “He was already talking about Europe as a ‘condominium’—as a house where people could freely move into other rooms, meaning other countries. We were doing our strategic review and getting ready to talk about a ‘Europe whole and free.’ So we were not ships passing in the night at that point. I think there was confidence that we can move forward together.”

At that first NATO meeting, incidentally, Dad was further indoctrinated into the ways of international diplomacy as president. Once all of the leaders were in place for the meeting, they went around the table, and the various leaders made remarks. Chancellor Kohl of Germany started, followed by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, France’s François Mitterrand, and Canada’s Brian Mulroney. Since Dad was the president of the United States at his first NATO meeting, everyone was looking at him, and he took notes during these remarks.

Most leaders kept their remarks short and to the point, and then the prime minister of Iceland was recognized for his comments. Iceland has no navy, no air force, and no soldiers in NATO. It is a member of NATO because of its strategic location in the North Atlantic. Once the prime minister started to speak, Dad politely resumed his note-taking.

“The prime minister went on and on and on and on, and President Bush looked absolutely exhausted trying to keep up with this guy,” Prime Minister Mulroney recalled. “Finally, the secretary-general of NATO banged his gavel calling for a coffee break, and the president came staggering over to see me because we were sitting just opposite. He said, ‘Brian, what the hell happened?’ I said, ‘Well, George, you just learned your first rule of modern diplomacy as president of the United States. The smaller the country, the longer the speech!’”

One of the very first public announcements Dad made as president, this one on January 21, was that two of my brothers, Marvin and Neil, were going to make up a tennis match with tennis champions Chris Evert and Pam Shriver that had been rained out in 1988.

“These women, confident of their own ability, have suggested that the Bush boys will not get over two games a set,” Dad said on the White House South Lawn to members of the news media. “And yesterday, Chris Evert renewed the challenge. I am absolutely confident that the Bush boys will get over two games a set . . . And there’s going to be a tremendous match right here on this tennis court [at the White House] as soon as spring is here.”

The day of the renewed match, May 16, Neil couldn’t make it, so Jeb was brought in as a wild card. It also rained that day, so they couldn’t play at the White House. Dad, ever the great organizer, called up to the Senate and moved the match to the indoor courts on Capitol Hill, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Once word of the match spread, a handful of senators—including John Breaux, John Heinz, Thad Cochran, and John Warner—joined the small crowd of spectators.

“What your dad didn’t care to admit was that Pam had a shoulder injury and she hadn’t played in two months, and I had just come off a layoff of five weeks and I hadn’t played,” Chris Evert told me. “Pam and I rolled our eyes, and we were thinking maybe that was the price we had to pay to stay at the White House,” after a recent weekend visit with Mom and Dad. “We had to play with the boys, who we thought were not going to be good players at all. We thought we would have to be nice to them. Because I said to Pam, should we really try our hardest? She said, ‘Let’s just see how it goes.’ ”

Once the match began, the boys quickly took the lead, much to the delight of the crowd. “I didn’t realize Marvin had that big of a serve, and I didn’t realize that Jeb was that good,” said Chrissie. “They beat us two sets. We left the building with our tail between our legs because, honestly, before the match we were thinking about giving them games. Pam and I were red-faced when we left . . . and your dad never lets us forget it.”

“After we beat them, Marvin and I vowed not to talk about it in public until after their tennis careers were over, for fear of diminishing women’s tennis,” Jeb teasingly told me. “Fortunately, we played indoors because the court was a lot faster and it made it possible for us to stay in the game,” Jeb remembered. “In fact, we won the first set, lost the second, won the third. The court was very slick, very fast. If we were playing on the court at the White House outdoors, we would have lost because they could have killed my serve—they’re great players. They almost won anyway. But the point was: it’s not about me or Marvin or Chris Evert or about Pam Shriver; it’s about Dad, and how excited he got. It was a great moment for Dad, and the thing that gave him more joy in sports than anything else I can remember.”

Starting in April 1989 and escalating throughout May, Chinese students began to gather in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Peking (by this time more commonly known in English as Beijing)—not unlike our National Mall in Washington. The students were mourning the death of Hu Yaobang, who had been regarded as perhaps the most liberal or progressive among the Chinese leaders—a sympathetic figure open to the popular desire for political reform.

Meanwhile, a sizable international press corps had started assembling in Peking near Tiananmen Square for a historic meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and the Chinese leadership in mid-May. Gradually, however, the media’s attention was diverted from the summit, focusing instead on the students’ demands for reform and their open criticisms of the Chinese government.

The early restraint of the Chinese military in the face of the student protests gave hope that there might be a peaceful resolution between the students and the communist leaders. Anyone who was alive at the time will never forget the sight of the lone, brave student stopping a column of tanks. In the end, however, the Chinese leaders had lost face and deemed the situation no longer tolerable. Appeals for restraint on all sides sadly gave way to violence. On the night of June 3, Chinese troops moved upon the temporary “Democracy Plaza,” opening fire and clearing the square.

Dad was as horrified as anyone at this brutality, and needed little prompting to respond. In fact, he led the world in imposing sanctions on the Chinese government—suspending military sales and halting all military contacts. However, while many of the talking heads on TV wanted him to take more drastic action—such as declaring embargoes and cutting off diplomatic relations altogether—Dad felt such actions would only hurt the people of China and set back bilateral relations immeasurably.

“Of course, that was a very traumatic experience in China’s history,” Dad recalled to Sir David Frost. “It put an understandable strain on the relations between China and the United States . . . Yes, we had some critics . . . Let the critics say what they want, but I think history is going to say we did it all right . . . You don’t always look back. You’ve also got to look ahead. But if we go back to slapping them publicly all the time and confronting them, and accusing them of seeking hegemony—we could put world peace at jeopardy. It’s that big.”

To avoid aggravating the tragedy, Dad appealed to his seventeen-year friendship with Deng Xiaoping, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. My father wrote Deng a private, personal letter outside of the normal diplomatic channels, keeping only one copy for his private file.

The letter reminded Deng of his previous statements to Dad about the need for good relations with the West and his desire to keep China “moving forward.” Dad also said he was writing as a genuine lao pengyou—or “old friend,” as Deng had called Dad years earlier. Finally, Dad told Deng he was thinking of sending a personal emissary, in confidence, to “speak in total candor to you,” and asked for a reply outside of bureaucratic channels. He signed off “with a heavy heart.”

Within twenty-four hours, Deng had agreed in a personal reply to Dad, and Brent Scowcroft was sent immediately to China.

“The trip was completely secret, because we didn’t want at this point anybody to know we were talking with the Chinese,” General Scowcroft said, explaining the sensitivities involved. “That would have caused a big public relations brouhaha. So I went over on a military aircraft, a C–141, with aerial refueling so I didn’t have to land anywhere and nobody would spot me.”

As the U.S. military airplane neared China, however, somebody had neglected to warn the Chinese defense forces that a special emissary was approaching. Spotting this unannounced plane, the forces sent a message into Peking asking permission to shoot it down. That’s when the Chinese leadership intervened to save the secret travel party—or at least that’s what the Chinese leaders told General Scowcroft and Dad.

“What that trip did was, I think, very important to the future in China,” Scowcroft added. “It demonstrated to the Chinese the value we put on the relationship. While we had this crisis between us to which we had reacted fairly sharply, we thought that the relationship was extremely important—and I think it was an extremely important move for the president to make.”

Deng died in 1997, and his successor, Jiang Zemin, looked back on that time, telling me: “Even when our bilateral ties suffered certain difficulties, President George Bush could still put the relationship in a strategic perspective and put the overall interests of the two countries above other considerations. Hence, he made important contributions to the maintenance and development of China-U.S. relations.”

The disturbing, tragic images of the Chinese pro-democracy demonstrators being violently put down were fresh in Dad’s mind as he and Mom set off for a nine-day trip to Europe a month later. In Central and Eastern Europe, similar hopes for reform—and the risk of a crackdown—were also in the wind. For Dad, the centerpiece of this trip would be his visit to Poland and Hungary, two nations loosening the Soviet grip on their societies.

Dad and Mom first stopped in Poland, where together they had visited two years prior. The Solidarity labor movement had continued to achieve a great deal of progress on reforms, and Dad and our ambassador, John Davis, had arranged a luncheon at the ambassador’s residence in Warsaw attended by Wojciech Jaruzelski, the chairman of the Polish Council of State, as well as Bronislaw Geremek, a parliamentary opposition leader and Solidarity member. After Dad spoke, both leaders offered toasts.

“It was the first time those two guys had ever sat together,” Bob Gates observed. “It was fairly remarkable for him to put the head of the communist government, Jaruzelski, at the same table with one of the dissident leaders. The president showed that he was a great bridge-builder in this respect. Because he engendered such goodwill from all parties, particularly as it relates to Poland, he essentially greased the skids on which the communists were slid from power.”

The following day, Dad addressed a joint session of the Polish Sejm and the Senat at the Polish National Assembly building; during the session, the entire parliament sang to him the Polish ceremonial song “Sto Lat”: “Good luck, good cheer, may you live a hundred years!” Afterward, General Jaruzelski told Dad that the assembly had never done that for any other visiting world leader—not de Gaulle, not Khrushchev, not Brezhnev. The day after that, Mom and Dad traveled to Gdansk—the birthplace of Solidarity—for a truly memorable lunch with Lech and Danuta Walesa at their home. The lunch was in a tiny house with a breakfast nook; the table was covered with many wineglasses and silver; and the meal was huge. Mom and Dad and their hosts crowded in two to a side so the press could get a picture. Then they left by car to drive to the Gdansk shipyard.

“We could see people lined up alongside the roadway before we got to the shipyard,” Mom remembered. “Along the way, Lech would say, ‘Oh my God! Biggest crowd ever, bigger than Margaret Thatcher even!’ As far as the eye could see there were people. I noticed Peter Jennings on the TV platform and later read the transcript of his program. He said something like, ‘Why has President Bush had such disappointing crowds?’”

From Poland, it was on to Hungary. Dad was supposed to speak in the main square in Budapest, and as they pulled in, they saw a sea of people—nearly 100,000 had gathered, waiting patiently in the rain for hours. General Scowcroft was there, as was Condoleezza Rice of the NSC staff. Tim McBride went with Dad into a trailer offstage and discovered that Dad did not have a raincoat to wear. After a few minutes of scrambling on Tim’s part, a Secret Service agent stepped forward and said, “Here, the president can wear mine,” and offered him the kind of raincoat that can be folded up and carried in a pocket.

With the coat on, my father stepped out onstage with Bruno Straub, the President of Hungary’s Presidential Council. The crowd enthusiastically cheered. But then they all stood and waited as President Straub gave a very long, dull speech. General Scowcroft remembers what happened when it was Dad’s turn to speak: he took his speech and tore it up in front of the crowd. “He said that this was not the time for this kind of thing—and he just ad-libbed this wonderful short speech. While it was happening, the rain quit and the sun started to come down through the clouds. And the crowd went crazy,” General Scowcroft said.

After his remarks, Dad left the stage and began shaking hands with the people in the crowd, with Tim McBride at his side. As he began working the rope line, he saw this elderly woman who was shivering. Dad said, “You’re so cold. Here, let me give you my coat.”

Tim whispered, “You can’t do that, that’s not your coat.”

A tug-of-war ensued over the twenty-five-dollar raincoat, won by Dad.

“Later, I’m explaining to Agent Robinson why we don’t have his coat anymore,” Tim said. “And the president wrote the agent a check for the coat, which I’m sure was never cashed. We have a great picture of him in this coat, which he signed and gave to the agent. It was the generosity of someone else’s coat.”

The Europe trip concluded with drier stops at the G–7 in Paris and the Netherlands.

Our family convened in Kennebunkport for the Fourth of July weekend that year, and some mornings, Dad and I would go for a jog and talk. That weekend, I told him that People magazine had called and that I was worried that the press would make a big deal out of my divorce. The last thing I wanted to do was become a distraction or burden for Dad. I was relieved when he told me not to pay too much attention to the media interest.

Throughout Dad’s presidency, August proved to be a month seemingly reserved for crisis management—highlighted by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991.

August of 1989 proved uneventful by comparison, but productive nonetheless. Before leaving for a working vacation in Maine, for example, Dad signed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act on August 9 in the Rose Garden. He had introduced legislation to fix a festering savings-and-loan crisis soon after entering office, and Congress, in keeping with the prevailing spirit of bipartisanship, had followed suit.

“Reagan sort of brushed it under the rug and postponed it, but President Bush pushed for action right off the bat,” Boyden Gray remembered. “The economy still dipped into recession, but that was an enormously important piece of work that cleared the decks—allowing the economy to take off in 1991.”

The legislative and economic work behind him, Dad—and indeed our entire family—were soon subjected to another, different kind of S&L crisis. Sadly, the same spirit of bipartisanship that inspired Congress to tackle the fallout from 750 failed S&Ls soon gave way to political gamesmanship, with some Democrats paying particular attention to a single Colorado S&L, Silverado, where my brother Neil at the time served as an outside director.

That December, Dad wrote our family friend Lud Ashley saying, “I cannot believe his [Neil’s] name would be in the paper if it was Jones and not Bush. In any event, I know the guy is totally innocent.”

Eighteen S&Ls in Colorado had failed, not just Silverado. Many more in Texas and throughout the country also failed at that time. Yet Silverado was the only institution called to testify in front of Congress.

Dad had once felt kindly toward Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas; but that changed when Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee, subpoenaed Neil to testify on Capitol Hill—doing everything he could to embarrass and make life hell for Neil.

“They put Mom and Dad—Dad in particular—in a complex position,” Neil said. “He’s the president of the United States, and his son has been investigated by a federal regulatory agency. There’s nothing you can do about it. He could offer his love and his support—which he did—but he couldn’t intervene. Everything worked out, but the only thing I regret is how it became such a politicized issue.”

The Silverado episode not only showed how complicated it was for Mom and Dad to raise kids in the public eye, it also emphasized how important it was for us to stick together. “Even though we are not physically close to each other, we’re a very close family—some would say almost dysfunctionally close—because there is an abundance of unconditional love. There’s so much love for our parents, and that love has been shared to the next generation, to us and to our children,” Neil said.

Dan Rostenkowski, the former congressman from Illinois, first met Dad when they were both young members of the House Ways and Means Committee in 1967. While Dad left the House in 1970, Congressman Rostenkowski stayed on the Ways and Means Committee and became chairman of it during the Reagan years. He and Dad stayed good friends throughout, despite the unlikely match of a rough-and-tumble Chicago pol and my father. Regardless of his gruff exterior, the congressman is a charming man.

One day early in 1989, Dad called him. “Danny, you’ve got to come down here. I want to show you this place [the White House]. I’ll buy you lunch.” So he said okay, and soon after, he heard from Treasury Secretary Brady, also inviting him to lunch in his office. Rostenkowski tells the story of his lunch appointment:

In the Treasury offices they’ve got these big high windows and you could see the thunder and the lightning and the rain. Nick Brady picks up the phone and I surmise that George Bush is on the line. So I got the phone. He says, “When are you coming to see me? My treasury secretary invites you and you go to his office but you won’t come see me. Hang up the phone and come right over here.” “Well, can we finish lunch?” I said. “It’s raining like an s.o.b. outside.” He said, “Come through the tunnel.”

I hang up and Nick Brady looks at me and says, “What tunnel?”

So Brady calls the Secret Service, the guy outside the door. “Is there a tunnel between the Treasury and the White House?” “Yes, sir, there is.” So he shows us where the tunnel is.

We get over to the White House and we wind up going past the bowling alley and into the janitor’s room, and the janitor is sitting there. I said, “How do we get to the president’s office?” And he jumped up and said, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I said, “I’m with Nick Brady, the secretary of the treasury.” He recognized Nick Brady, so he took us upstairs, and we finally get to the Oval Office. So we walk into the office and no one is there. Patty Presock told us the president was in that little cubbyhole office around the corner. He’s got John Sununu and Jim Baker in there, and I walk in with Nick Brady. George looks at the three other fellows and he looks at me, and he says, “Would you fellows mind leaving me alone with the chairman for a minute or two?” So they get up and they go into the Oval Office.

He stretches over to look and see if they’re out of the room. He looks at me, throws his hands up in the air, and says, “Jesus Christ, Danny, I’m president of the United States!” I started to laugh and he laughed and he says, “I’ve got to show you this place.” He just dismissed the three of them and he took me around, showing me the White House.

Dad turned his attention to two other top domestic priorities: the war against drugs, which was the subject of his first address to the nation from the Oval Office in September, and the education summit later that month at the University of Virginia.

In hindsight, the education summit was interesting not only for what it accomplished but also because it brought Dad together in partnership with the man who would succeed him in the Oval Office: Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who was also then the head of the National Governors’ Association.

“This whole school reform effort’s been going on for more than twenty years,” President Clinton said, looking back, “but it would never have had the legs it had if President Bush hadn’t brought us together and supported the process. It was the first major step nationally since Terrel Bell, President Reagan’s secretary of education, issued that famous Nation at Risk report in 1984.”

President Clinton also recalled an argument his wife, Hillary, and Dad had during the summit dinner that first night.

“She told him that our infant mortality rate was higher than a lot of other countries,” President Clinton remembered. Dad disputed Hillary’s assertion and said he would look into it.

“The next day—this is so typical of him—he wrote Hillary a note and gave it to me,” President Clinton said. “He said, ‘Give Hillary this. She was right.’ He wrote her a note thanking her for telling him something he didn’t know. See, I think that stuff is a sign of strength, not weakness.”

The fall of 1989 proved a pivotal turning point in the Cold War, a time when Dad’s newly revised foreign policy strategy seemed to produce immediate results in Eastern Europe.

America’s previous policy toward Eastern Europe, General Scowcroft explained, had been that we supported any of the satellites who stuck their thumb in the Soviets’ eyes. For example, during the Reagan administration Romania was our number one satellite, our favorite. That would change.

“What we did was support those nations who were struggling for greater freedom to turn to market economies and to open their political system,” General Scowcroft recalled. “So Romania went from first to last, and Poland went up to first place. We tried to encourage Poland, we tried to encourage Solidarity, and along with that, we modified our arms-control policies in an attempt to get Soviet troops out of Eastern Europe, because we thought that the Soviet troops, with their jackboots on the neck of the people, were what was probably keeping the revolution from happening.”

Eastern Europe had a history of recurrent uprisings. A vicious cycle tended to play out where the Eastern Europeans would revolt, and the Russians would come in, clamp down, kill a lot of people; it would be uneventful for a while, and then it would erupt again. What Dad and his team wanted to do is keep the eruptions gradual, never to the point that the Soviets would feel they had to crack down. “The problem is,” General Scowcroft said, “we didn’t know exactly where that point was, but that was our goal: keep things moving in Eastern Europe, but don’t give the Russians a provocation to come in.”

Reading Dad’s diary entry for November 8, 1989, I saw that Dad was sensitive to the criticism from some observers that things were not moving quickly enough in Eastern Europe. Any reaction by the Soviets in Poland, Hungary, or East Germany could change the perception among the American people that things were in fact moving in the direction of democracy. Dad knew that if he put too much of an American face on the internal reforms going on inside those nations, we’d be inviting a crackdown.

Then, the very next day, November 9, 1989, the East German government announced a new visa policy that essentially opened the door to the West. After twenty-eight years, the Berlin Wall “fell” in the sense that it was rendered obsolete by this new immigration policy. More than ten thousand East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin. There were mass celebrations that lasted for days, as people broke pieces off the Wall, danced on top, and crossed through the Brandenburg Gate. East Germany allowed free elections shortly afterward.

“On the day of the fall of the Wall, November 10, 1989, I spoke with President Bush extensively by phone that evening to inform him about the opening of the borders,” Chancellor Kohl told me. “I also told him about two large rallies that had just taken place in Berlin: one in front of the Schöneberger Rathaus, which a left-wing mob had disrupted; and another one at the Gedächtniskirche, where 120,000 to 200,000 participants gathered peacefully and joyfully. In an address there, I thanked the U.S. for its solidarity and support, without which this day would never have happened. George Bush seemed highly interested in the events and said he was deeply impressed by the way in which the Federal Republic was handling the whole situation. It was also important to him that I had publicly praised the role the U.S. had played.”

Given this dramatic development, there were many voices in Congress urging Dad to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall as the triumph of democracy.

“We both felt an overwhelming euphoria—a euphoria that said this was truly freedom’s victory,” Secretary Baker recalled. “But as a statesman, President Bush wanted to welcome the change diplomatically, almost clinically. He knew that Moscow would be watching our public statements, and watching them very closely. He was determined not to be overly emotional so that Gorbachev and [Foreign Minister Eduard] Shevardnadze would not feel, as the president himself later said, that we were somehow sticking our thumb in their eye.”

In fact, according to Dad’s diary, President Gorbachev had contacted Dad the day after the Berlin Wall fell to ask that the United States not overreact. Dad took a heap of public criticism for his tempered reaction, and as Secretary Baker put it, “This was an example of how George Bush would always put what’s right for America ahead of what’s right for George Bush.”

“My restraint—or prudence, if you will—was misunderstood, certainly by some in the Congress,” Dad recalled. “Senator Mitchell, the leading Democrat in the Senate, and Dick Gephardt, the leader in the House, were saying, ‘Our president doesn’t get it. He ought to go to Berlin, stand on the Wall, dance with the young people to show the joy that we all feel.’ I still feel that would have been the stupidest thing an American president could do, because we were very concerned about how the troops in East Germany would react. We were very concerned about the nationalistic elements in the Soviet Union maybe putting Gorbachev out. I think if we’d misplayed our hand and had a heavy-handed overkill—gloating, ‘We won, Mr. Gorbachev. You’ve lost, you’re out’—I think it could have been a very different ending to this very happy chapter in history, when the Wall came down.”

“The fall of the Berlin Wall was not a complete surprise for us,” President Gorbachev recalled. “Not everyone, however, was ready for the pace of German unification that the Germans on both sides of the border wanted. West Germany’s NATO allies—the British, the French, the Italians—did not want German reunification, particularly a quick one. I understood this from my conversations with Mitterrand, Thatcher, and [Italian Prime Minister Giulio] Andreotti. We, too, had some apprehensions. But I believed that it was morally wrong to continue to insist indefinitely on the division of such a great nation, putting the blame for the past on the shoulders of new generations. All the parties had to act with great responsibility to avoid complications in the process of unification.”

It was against this very optimistic historical backdrop that Dad and President Gorbachev met just off the coast of the tiny nation of Malta in December. Dad and his staff were onboard a U.S. Navy cruiser, the USS Belknap, while the Soviets were aboard the USSR cruiser Slava.

On the eve of the summit, President Gorbachev wanted to accommodate Dad’s desire to have the negotiations onboard two navy ships. But, just to be on the safe side, he also made arrangements for a huge passenger liner, Maxim Gorky, which was cruising in the Mediterranean, to head for Malta. It was supposed to be a hotel for the delegation and entourage.

The day after their arrival, the two delegations awoke to the rumble and roar of a big storm. The two military ships were being thrown by the waves as though they were tiny boats. Ariel de Guzman, who worked as a navy chef at the time and has served as Mom and Dad’s chef and house manager for years, remembered how Dad went up on the bridge of the ship with the captain, watching the ocean swells in the pouring rain.

Suddenly, Dad saw a silhouette of someone out on the bow of the ship. The figure seemed to be holding on to something, struggling to keep his balance and looking down toward the water. Dad asked the captain on the bridge about it. The officer explained that a sailor was standing watch on the bow to make sure the anchor lines didn’t dislodge in the rough seas, causing the ship to drift into shallow water and run aground. In fact, he was on a telephone reporting back to the bridge as the “eyes” on the bow.

According to Ariel, Dad “left the bridge and went to meet the telephone talker despite the strong winds and blinding rain. He shook his hand and thanked him for helping keep the ship safe.”

President Gorbachev recalled how Dad’s qualities—“a serious approach to problems, balanced judgment, and the ability to put reason above emotion”—made their mark at Malta. “When we discussed the most complex issue of that time—German unification—George said, ‘We will not do anything recklessly and will not try to speed the unification issue . . . At the same time, the Germans have to think about the time when the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic will be history. In this matter, I will be acting prudently. Let our Democrats accuse me of timidity: I will not be jumping on the Wall, for there’s too much at stake here. I will not be tempted to act in a way that’s flashy but could have dangerous consequences.’

“I appreciated those remarks, and subsequent actions of President Bush were consistent with them,” President Gorbachev reflected.

He added, “The most important thing that I recall about Malta is that it revealed a high degree of mutual understanding and willingness to consider the unique position and interests of each other, as well as the understanding of the immensity of the global problems that required us to join forces. The handshake across the table at the conclusion of the talks was not a mere formality, but a gesture that recorded the fact that our two countries no longer regarded each other as enemies.”

Dad’s relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev was truly a unique one. “One contrast between our relationship and those that preceded it was the amount of contact I had with Gorbachev,” Dad recalled in A World Transformed. “I probably had more interaction with him than my combined predecessors did with their Soviet counterparts. I liked the personal contact with Mikhail—I liked him. How many American presidents could say that about the leader of the Soviet Union? Roosevelt or Truman saying that about Stalin? Kennedy about Khrushchev? Nixon about Brezhnev? I know President Reagan felt warmly about Gorbachev, too, but he did not have the opportunities to work as closely with him as I did. Gorbachev and I found we could sit down and just talk. I thought I had a feel for his heartbeat. Openness and candor replaced the automatic suspicions of the past. It was a stark contrast to the dark decades of Cold War we were leaving behind.”