Chapter 18

A SENSE OF HONOR

“I had the privilege of working with George Bush during the first Gulf War. I came to know a wise man, a compassionate man, a man who needed no prodding to do what was right, a man who never shrunk away from the toughest of decisions at the toughest of times.”

—John Major

Shortly after midnight on August 1, 1990, two Iraqi divisions comprised of more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and seven hundred tanks surged southward into the tiny nation-state of Kuwait and quickly overwhelmed any resistance. The main thrust of the attack was spearheaded by Iraq’s elite Republican Guard, while special forces converged on Kuwait City from the Persian Gulf—using helicopters and boats. Within hours, the invaders had established a provisional government and publicly declared Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, as its leader.

“I was having a drink with a friend in town,” General Scowcroft later recalled, “and I got a call from the Situation Room asking me to come back. When I returned around 9:00 p.m., the president was in the White House Medical Office receiving treatment on his shoulders. We talked about what to do, and he decided right there we should notify the United Nations and call for a NATO meeting. I conducted a telephonic NSC meeting that night, and we set up an NSC meeting for the next morning.”

Details of the invasion were sketchy that first night. Initial reports suggested that up to two hundred people had been killed in heavy gunfire and that the younger brother of the emir of Kuwait was shot dead while trying to defend the royal palace. The emir himself had escaped to Saudi Arabia. It wasn’t until about an hour after Dad and General Scowcroft first spoke that initial reports such as these could be confirmed.

By the time the NSC meeting was held the next morning, however, it was clear that a genuine international crisis existed. Still, it was much too soon to decide on a strategy in Scowcroft’s view, so that initial NSC meeting became more of an assessment session—a first chance to examine “where we are” and “what the situation is.”

That same morning, Dad was scheduled to travel to Aspen, Colorado, and give a speech on the transformation of the military at the end of the Cold War, so the NSC meeting occurred earlier than usual. Gathered around the Cabinet Room table, Scowcroft remembered how most comments expressed a tone of acceptance: Well, it’s unfortunate, but this is a small country. It’s halfway around the world. It’s a fait accompli. We can’t do much about it, and so what we need to do is adjust.

When the media were brought in, Dad recalled, “among the forest of boom and handheld microphones, I was careful in my remarks. I condemned the invasion and outlined the steps we had taken . . . I did not want my first public comments to threaten the use of American military might, so I said I was not contemplating intervention, and, even if I knew we were going to use force, I would not announce it in a press conference. The truth is, at that moment I had no idea what our options were. I did know for sure that aggression had to be stopped and Kuwait’s sovereignty restored.”

After the meeting, Dad and General Scowcroft flew to Aspen. Because they were going to be late, Dad decided they would travel in one of the small government jets that could land at the Aspen airport. If they took the 707, they would have to land in Denver first and switch planes.

“As we flew out there on this tiny jet,” Scowcroft recalled, “we were facing each other and our knees were touching. And I was scrambling to revise his speech that he was giving for the fact that there had been a big invasion. And he was already starting to call his colleagues around the world to get their take on the new situation.”

On the way out, General Scowcroft confided his dismay at the tenor of the NSC meeting, feeling the situation was much more serious. “The president agreed completely, and right there on the plane he decided that the situation in Kuwait was intolerable,” Scowcroft said. “So I said, ‘Why don’t I start off the next meeting and explain why it’s so serious.’ And he said, ‘Maybe I ought to do that.’ I said, ‘No, if you did it, you will stifle discussion because it will sound like you’ve made up your mind. So let me do it, let the discussion proceed. And then it will come out that way.’ ”

Before Dad delivered his hastily revised speech, however, he went to the Aspen home of Henry Catto—then the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom—to make more calls and to meet with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. As luck would have it, Thatcher was already scheduled to attend the same conference held by the Aspen Institute, which would give the two leaders a chance to confer in person just hours after the Iraqi aggression.

Following their bilateral meeting, Dad and Lady Thatcher held a joint press conference.

“I remember sitting on the bed in the Cattos’ bedroom with the president on the phone,” Scowcroft said. “He talked to King Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, King Fahd, and others. During this time, he was constantly gathering information. Afterward, he and Thatcher gave a good press conference. Someone later put out the notion that Thatcher had to buck the president up—that she said, ‘Don’t go wobbly, George.’ Well, that didn’t happen then. That was an entirely different circumstance that happened about a month later.” In fact, according to her own memoirs, Prime Minister Thatcher uttered this phrase during a phone call with Dad three weeks later, on August 26. They were discussing the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution the day before, which enabled the coalition to enforce the embargo against Iraq. “We must use our powers to stop Iraqi shipping. This is no time to go wobbly,” she said. She wasn’t worried about Dad’s resolve—she would have been preaching to the choir—but rather wanted to make sure that the embargo was enforced by the entire coalition.

Dad later recalled how, during their press conference, Lady Thatcher “put her finger on the most important point—whether the nations of the world had the collective and effective will to implement the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and compel withdrawal and restoration. It would be up to American leadership to make that happen.”

Leaving Aspen, Dad and General Scowcroft returned to Washington and spent the following weekend at Camp David. There they met with the NSC principals, including Vice President Quayle, Secretary of State Baker, Chief of Staff Sununu, Secretary of Defense Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, Director of Central Intelligence Bill Webster, as well as General Norman Schwarzkopf, who at that time headed the U.S. Army Central Command based at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida.

While Schwarzkopf was a newcomer to the NSC inner circle, his military roots ran as deep as any—with a father who also graduated from West Point, served in World War I, reenlisted during World War II, and was assigned to postwar Iran training the national police force there (with young Norman in tow).

Now, some forty years after attending school in Iran, one of Schwarzkopf’s biggest responsibilities was defending the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. He had assumed his post as a four-star general in 1988, and one of the first tasks he tackled in his new post was revising and updating the contingency plans for defending against an Iraqi attack. Little did he and his staff know, but within months Dad would call upon them to put that proposal into action.

The NSC meeting at Camp David that initial weekend after the invasion was another conceptual briefing, and again Dad didn’t say much. After the NSC team departed, General Scowcroft stayed behind and accompanied the president back to the White House the following day—a Sunday.

The midafternoon summer shadows had only started to streak across the hazy South Lawn on August 5 when Marine One hovered in at 3:00 p.m. Watching on TV, I could see the somberness in Dad’s face as he approached the bank of microphones staged near the Rose Garden. I sensed no apprehension, but rather a smoldering intensity in the way he spoke. Dad reflected in his diary:

Although over the weekend I had been thinking about the need to voice my determination to the American people, I had not decided when I should do it. At that moment, I just planned to fill everyone in on the diplomatic steps we were taking and the international reaction. I explained that none of our allies was willing to accept anything less than total Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, nor would they tolerate a puppet government. Everyone, of course, wanted to know what measures we would take ourselves to protect Americans in Kuwait, especially in view of Iraqi threats to close down foreign embassies. To this, I answered, “This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.”

After the press conference, General Scowcroft’s phone rang in his West Wing office. General Powell had been watching Dad on TV, and after hearing the sudden declaration, he told Scowcroft, “Well, we’ll learn not to leave you two up there alone!”

But General Scowcroft recalls that the decision to set out this firm marker was Dad’s—and his alone. Dad had yet to decide exactly how to kick Iraq out of Kuwait—Operation Desert Storm was still five months from commencing—but he knew what had to be done. The status quo, the situation as it existed that late August afternoon, was not acceptable to him anymore.

“No bravado—it was just a calm, quiet way of going about his business,” General Scowcroft said. “He didn’t pound the table and say, ‘You guys fall in line,’ or anything. He forged the policy by the power of his persuasion. They all think they came to the same conclusion right off the bat.”

On August 16, King Hussein of Jordan visited Dad in Kennebunkport. Jordan had sided with Iraq over the Kuwaiti invasion, and His Majesty, a friend of Dad’s for years, came to Maine to plead for America’s understanding. Marlin Fitzwater recalls the conversation and said Dad was hearing none of it.

“You picked the wrong side,” Dad reportedly said.

Then my father started to walk King Hussein down the driveway from the Big House to his helicopter. Suddenly, he stopped next to the Bungalow, shook the King’s hand, and said, “My mom has been sick. I want to stop here and see her.” Dad walked into the Bungalow, leaving the king to walk alone to his helicopter and the waiting press corps.

Dad was sending a signal that he didn’t have time for weakness in the face of aggression.

That same day, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, the distinguished Prince Bandar, and the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud, also came to Walker’s Point to consult with Dad. After their meeting, as Prince Bandar was likewise returning to his helicopter, my daughter, Ellie, skipped along at his side. Bandar was carrying his worry beads, which were made of onyx and diamonds, and apparently, he was so taken with Ellie that he offered her the beads.

Clearly, Ellie—who was five at the time—could not appreciate what a thoughtful and extremely generous gesture this was, because she took the beads, much to my embarrassment, and promptly threw them in the prickly Rosa regosa bushes that lined that section of the driveway. I will never forget the sight of Prince Bandar, dressed in his splendid white robes, as we waded into the brambles to retrieve the beads.

In order to isolate Saddam and Iraq internationally, a large measure of Dad’s success would lie in his personal relationship with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. For years, the USSR had supplied Baghdad all of their weapons systems. It was a major source of influence on the Middle East throughout the Cold War, and the Soviets had a lot of people working in Iraq on that fateful day in August.

“I can remember, at one point, being sent to Moscow to talk to the senior Soviet military leadership, including my counterpart, their defense minister,” recalled Dick Cheney, at that time the secretary of defense. “The Soviet military was very reluctant to answer our questions. What we wanted to know was what had they provided to the Iraqis, were there any systems there we didn’t know about, did the Iraqis have some capabilities we were unaware of that would be a threat to our troops. Left to their own devices, most of the Soviet military leadership would not have cooperated, but Gorbachev saw to it that they cooperated enough. That was due primarily to the relationship he had with the president.”

Dad was constantly on the phone with President Gorbachev, and they also held a bilateral meeting in Finland in September where the two superpowers issued a joint statement calling for Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait.

“We did not differ in our assessment of the invasion of Kuwait as an act of aggression,” President Gorbachev told me. “Indeed, what happened was that right after the end of the Cold War a greedy and brazen aggressor trampled underfoot a small state, with its huge oil reserves. This kind of behavior could not be tolerated. Our meeting in Helsinki on September 9, 1990, held at the initiative of the president, focused on how to preserve and consolidate U.S.-Soviet partnership in the face of the crisis.”

“It is good that the Soviet Union and the United States have shown the world that now, in this gulf crisis, they are together, that they stand side by side,” Dad said at that Helsinki meeting.

“I appreciated his willingness to consult with us and his statement that he would not want the conflict to escalate and would prefer a peaceful solution—even though at the time many in the United States were calling for immediate military action,” President Gorbachev added. “At the final stage of the crisis, the United States decided that a ground operation was necessary in order to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait. We, however, were sure that this could be achieved through political pressure, and things were moving precisely in that direction. Nevertheless, I saw it as my main task to preserve what we had achieved in international affairs and in U.S.-Soviet relations. No one, including Saddam Hussein, could drive a wedge between us.”

On September 11, 1990, Dad appeared before a joint session of Congress about the Persian Gulf situation, and spoke of a new partnership with the Soviet Union and a “new world order” where “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” The speech was very well received. On the way to the Capitol, Dad rode in his limo with Sig Rogich, who was a special assistant to the president. Sig often teased Dad about his wardrobe, most of which was not to Sig’s liking. In the limo, Dad asked Sig if everything was ready for the speech. Sig responded, “We are good on everything, sir, except for your tie.”

Dad said, “What do you mean, my tie?”

“It doesn’t match your suit, sir, and quite frankly, it’s a bit drab and it doesn’t send the right message,” Sig replied. So Sig switched ties with Dad.

Later, Dad returned Sig’s tie, along with a photo of himself in the tie making the historic speech. The inscription read, “When it was all said and done—all in the magnificent House Chamber said as one, ‘Look at that tie!’ It sent just the right message to Saddam Hussein. Thanks Sig—George Bush.”

In early fall, Dad decided he wanted to visit the troops being stationed on and around the Arabian Peninsula. When he set the date for his visit over the Thanksgiving holiday, the Secret Service started working with General Schwarzkopf and his staff to sort out the complicated details.

“I’d been over there two trips before that to work with General Schwarzkopf to help set the trip up,” recalled John Magaw, the Secret Service agent in charge of Dad’s detail. “It was my job to know exactly what the president and First Lady were going to do, and the military agreed that they wouldn’t change the schedule without us [the Secret Service] knowing. But the catch was: the President wanted to interface with the troops. How do you make sure that troops that are in combat one day are mentally okay to face the commander in chief the next?” Specifically, they were worried about all those soldiers with weapons being so near the president.

Schwarzkopf recalled arguing the point, saying, “These are trusted members of the armed forces. Certainly, we’re going to go to war, and certainly, I’m not going to go out and take away the weapons of all of the troops that are there. It just doesn’t make sense. It would insult the troops.”

To solve the problem, Schwarzkopf and Magaw decided to follow the same procedure troops encountered daily at mess hall: they would bring their firearms forward, present them to show they were unloaded, and then stack all the rifles together. All normal procedures.

This time, however, a Secret Service agent dressed in military uniform would guard the weapons.

In the midst of all the planning for security and other scheduling needs, Dad remembered some of the smaller details, too.

“Going through all of these briefings, we were concerned about safety, and the generals were focused on the troops,” Magaw remembered. “But at one point, the president spoke up and asked, ‘What shoes should Mrs. Bush wear?’ The terrain was all sand and very uneven, and he wanted her to be comfortable. I just found that to be so thoughtful, and typical, of him.”

Following stops in newly liberated Czechoslovakia and in Germany and Paris, Dad and Mom landed at Dhahran Air Base on November 22, and my father addressed a crowd of air force personnel. Then they hopped into a helicopter with General Schwarzkopf and made the first in a series of flights to visit with troops.

Between stops, Dad and the general discussed the operation to that point, as well as the developing plans for the battle to come. “Through all our dealings, I sensed that he trusted me—just as he trusted Colin,” Schwarzkopf reflected. “He trusted the two of us as a pair as far as the conduct of the war was concerned, and he never—ever—interfered, micromanaged, or did any of the things that just drove us crazy in Vietnam.”

At each stop, Mom and Dad found the morale of the troops high. Eyewitness accounts all report the same thing: when he got up to give his speech, he maybe spoke five words before all the cheering and hollering would drown him out. During their Thanksgiving dinner at an encampment near Dhahran, moreover, the troops besieged them and took pictures with their little cameras while Mom and Dad both signed autographs like crazy.

The traveling squad next flew out to the USS Nassau in the Persian Gulf where Thanksgiving services were held, then back to eat a second Thanksgiving dinner, this time with marines.

“For me, this was a very emotional trip,” Dad said. “Looking at the young kids, I knew some of them would be going into combat when the Storm began—and they all looked so young. Aboard the USS Nassau, where we attended a prayer service on the top deck, I lost it. The tears of gratitude freely flowed.”

“It was just a wonderful and inspiring visit—particularly for the soldiers,” Schwarzkopf said, looking back. “In Vietnam, we didn’t have a lot of presidents coming over and getting person-to-person contact with the soldiers. This president let our troops know that, from a personal standpoint, he really cared—not as troops, not as a huge army, but as individuals.”

During this Thanksgiving trip, meanwhile, a power struggle within the ranks of British conservatives ended with Lady Thatcher’s resignation—and the subsequent election of John Major, first elected to Parliament eleven years earlier, who was currently serving as chancellor of the exchequer. Considering the time and effort Dad and his team had invested in keeping such a diverse coalition together, losing a staunch ally like Lady Thatcher at such a critical time—in the midst of delicate U.N. negotiations, for example—was a very tough blow.

“I remember going through London on one of my trips out there and stopping at Number 10 Downing to see Mrs. Thatcher,” Cheney said, “and she kicked everybody out of the room and then gave me—oh, an hour, hour and a half talking about the decisions we were going to have to make, how she thought the conflict would unfold, all based on her experience in the Falklands War a few years before that. She was a great ally.”

Any apprehension Dad or his team might have felt about the changing of the guard within the British government, however, would be quickly put to rest. Shortly after his election, Prime Minister John Major flew to Washington for an informal meeting, and Dad invited him to Camp David. The foul winter weather grounded all air travel, so the four of them—Dad, John Major, Brent Scowcroft and his British counterpart, Charles Powell—drove in one car.

“We started talking about Iraq and when we would be ready to begin liberating Kuwait,” General Scowcroft recalled. “It started as a general conversation, but Prime Minister Major said, ‘We need to start thinking about getting ready to go.’ He asked the president what time frame he had in mind, and the president said, ‘Well, I’m thinking about January 17.’ It was dark in the car, but Major didn’t hesitate for a second. Here’s a brand-new prime minister just entering office, and he’s about to go to war.”

“John Major never flinched,” Dad added. “He never said he had to check with his cabinet or needed more time to consult. Given the circumstances, one could not ask for a better ally or a better friend.”

“Ideally, I would not have chosen to be drawn into a military conflict within days of taking office, but I never had any doubt about the justice of the action to be taken following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,” John Major told me. “Nor was there much doubt in my mind that if Saddam Hussein were left to his own devices, he would turn his attention to Saudi Arabia—and possibly other gulf states—sooner rather than later. It was a clear decision on our part.”

As the mid-January deadline drew nearer, preparations—both diplomatic and military—continued at breakneck speed. In November, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the coalition to use “any means necessary” to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty. In December, Dad offered Saddam Hussein fifteen dates to meet with Secretary Baker—an offer Saddam eventually refused.

“Saddam never believed I would use force,” Dad once told the British journalist Sir David Frost. “Maybe he read the ‘Wimp’ cover in Newsweek. Maybe he was listening too much to the post-Vietnam syndrome in the United States as it surfaced through the lips of some of the senators. Whatever the reason, he miscalculated.”

Entering 1991, I could sense the pressure building inside Dad. At times, he seemed lost in thought—as if his mind were elsewhere. He seemed fully aware of the seriousness of the next steps if Saddam Hussein didn’t change course, and that lives would be lost.

“One of the things that was great about working with him as president was he had a great sense of humor, and we had a lot of laughs,” recalled Bob Gates, who was General Scowcroft’s deputy during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. “He always had a way of breaking up the pressure, but that kind of came to a halt in the fall of 1990. He was much more solemn. Clearly, the burden of the decisions that he faced was wearing on him, and so we went through a five-month period—until the spring of 1991—where the old George Bush was replaced by the war president. We all felt those pressures, but it fell most of all on him. So there was a lot less joking around.”

Perhaps the most contentious event leading up to the start of the war was the debate over a congressional resolution supporting the war effort. Dad had made the decision right off the bat to seek congressional approval for the coalition’s objectives. They already had the support of the United Nations Security Council, but the road to success on Capitol Hill proved a bumpier ride.

A major debate had engulfed Dad’s top advisers for months concerning whether the administration should even seek congressional approval if force was needed to reverse the Iraqi invasion. Both Scowcroft and Defense Secretary Cheney argued against it. But Dad had learned a great deal watching President Johnson during the Vietnam War, particularly the way LBJ went to Congress to get the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed. Dad decided that, whether he legally had to or not, it would be best to have congressional approval for any military action he took.

“He listened to our debate,” Cheney said, “but in the end he said, ‘No, we’re going to go up there and we’re going to ask for specific authorization to use force.’ It was a close vote, especially in the Senate, but it turned out to be exactly the right thing to do, particularly in terms of, I think, national support for the enterprise. The country really came together behind it. Of course, the vote took place just a couple of days before we actually launched the air force, so it was a courageous step on his part.”

It was a great disappointment to Dad that the Senate majority leader, George Mitchell of Maine, made the Senate vote authorizing Desert Storm a partisan vote. In fact, the entire Democratic leadership leaned heavily on its members to defeat the measure. Even Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, a man Dad respected a great deal on military affairs, voted no. Eventually, the resolution passed 52–47, with only ten Democrats voting in favor of it.

That final weekend before the January 15 deadline, Mom called our family friends Betsy and Spike Heminway and asked them to join Dad and her at Camp David. Spike’s job, according to Mom, was to keep Dad busy.

Spike remembered, “She said, ‘He’s got to make this decision, and you’ve got to keep him occupied.’ So we did everything—horseshoes, bowling, everything. At about four o’clock, however, he said, ‘Come on, Spike, let’s go take a walk around the perimeter.’ So the two of us set out, and at one point I looked at him and there were tears in his eyes. When I asked what was wrong, he gestured to the military police around us and said, ‘See these kids? I’ve got to send them to war, and I don’t want to do that.’”

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver were also at Camp David that weekend. On Sunday morning, as everyone filed in for an intimate chapel service, one of the press aides approached the Heminways and asked them to sit in the front row with Mom and Dad.

“‘No, no, no,’” Betsy recalled saying. “‘Let the Schwarzeneggers sit there. We see them plenty.’ But they kept saying, ‘No, you sit up there.’ We wondered what was so important about us sitting up there, and we later found out it was because there was going to be a picture of the president at chapel that day—the day before they announced what was happening—and they didn’t want to have him sitting with ‘the Terminator.’ They were worried that some weirdo might try to make it an issue.”

One interesting sidebar from that weekend involved “the great toboggan run”—make that “the infamous toboggan run.” After church that Sunday, Betsy and Mom raced out to go down the hill behind Aspen, the president’s house at Camp David, before the grandchildren got to the saucers and the toboggan first. They had monopolized them the night before, and the grown-ups thought they could have a run before the kids got dressed in snowsuits. Now, the snow had melted a little the night before and then frozen—so it was ice instead of snow. Seeing Dad and Arnold Schwarzenegger having so much fun, Mom decided she wanted to try it. The toboggan slid down the hill at breakneck speed, heading for the woods.

“I jumped on a saucer and flew, spinning on the ice,” Mom recalled. “Dad saw me and yelled ‘abort’ and ‘jump off.’ I was so stunned I ended up hitting a tree and had a small break in my leg. I was lucky I didn’t hit my head!”

In the aftermath of this domestic disaster, Dad decided he would send Mom off to the hospital with Betsy, while he stayed behind with Arnold. “That was a bad move on my part, something I haven’t lived down to this day,” Dad said fifteen years later.

A few nights later, Dad and Mom invited Senator Alan Simpson, his wife, Ann, and Lud Ashley to the White House residence for a quiet dinner. When Dad opened the curtains afterward, he could see and hear the protesters gathered just outside the North Lawn fence. Senator Simpson recalled how Dad asked aloud, to no one in particular, “How can they think that I like war? I’ve been in war. I don’t want any more war. But, by God, we can’t have this guy just taking over another country.”

Dad continued talking to Ann while Mom and the senator walked Millie. Senator Simpson said, “We got in the car afterward and Ann said, ‘He’s going to pull it. He’s going to pull the chain shortly.’ When I asked if the president said that exactly, she said, ‘No, but I can just tell. He’s not going to let this [the Iraqi invasion] happen.’”

Meanwhile, the preparations continued—and Dad gathered as much information as he could. His late friend the widely respected Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey remembered going over to see the Air Force chief of staff, General Tony McPeak, before the air campaign began.

“Do you know where I’ve been?” General McPeak asked Hugh. “I’ve been at the White House having breakfast with the president.” Dad found out that General McPeak had recently been over to Saudi Arabia and flown a couple of missions in an F–16 with his fighter pilots over the desert. Dad wanted to know what it felt like to be in the cockpit, what the desert looked like down there, and the other preparations.

“I invited Tony to come over because I wanted to know if the air force was ready to fight and if he was as confident as he was a few months before when he had briefed me at Camp David,” Dad said. “He assured me we were ready and that our technology would in fact be effective—that our stealth fighters could not be detected by enemy radar. I had a high regard for Tony and was greatly relieved by his upbeat report.”

As Dad prepared to announce the start of the war on TV, White House Communications Director David Demarest, who had helped Dad with close to 750 speeches and remarks by this point, found out Dad was writing his own remarks for what he would say to the nation. David later learned that Dad had also asked Dan McGroarty, who was one of David’s writers, to sit in the outer office outside of the Oval Office in case Dad needed to check a fact or to help with a line. David candidly confessed to me that he was hurt about that—as the head communications man, he understandably wanted to be sitting out there at this great moment in history.

“Late in the day I get a call, and the president wanted to see me,” David recalled. “So I went down to the little study outside his office and he said, ‘I’m working on this. What do you think about this line?’ I looked at the line and I thought it was fine, but it wasn’t anything particularly consequential. Right then David Valdez walked in to take a picture of me and the president working on this speech, and then David left. I went back to my office and I thought, he’s intuitive enough to know that I would have wanted to be a part of this day. That was extraordinary, particularly given the moment he was about to experience. That human quality of his always came through.”

On January 16, I went to the theater with Honey Skinner. As it turned out, the Simpsons were there, too. We had settled in to watch a play when Honey suddenly noticed a Secret Service agent scrunched down at the end of our row, waving at us. It could only mean one thing. “They’ve bombed Iraq,” I whispered to Senator Simpson as we all left the show.

Honey and I left immediately and went to the White House—up to the private quarters, where Dad and Mom and my brother George were gathered. “I remember the seriousness of it,” Honey reflected. “I felt personally that I shouldn’t be there because I wasn’t in your family, but immediately everyone said, ‘Are you kidding? Get in here.’”

Billy Graham was there, too, and we watched the beginning of the air war on television. Dad remembers, “I knew exactly what time the bombers were supposed to be over Baghdad and then we were getting a report from Bernie Shaw on CNN, ‘The skies are lit up and you can hear it.’ I called over to the Situation Room and said, ‘What’s going on? It’s early.’ It wasn’t supposed to start until later. They checked and said some of the planes had been detected early and they were shooting at them, using defensive antiaircraft artillery to get them.”

Dad continued, “I remember walking over to the Situation Room to get the reports from the battlefield, and the reports were good. We didn’t lose any planes. Nobody knew how fierce the battle would be, because Saddam had said it would be ‘the mother of all battles.’ We did very definitive targeting to avoid civilian damages as much as we could. I was worried about all these pilots and crew members going into harm’s way, and then out they came in good shape. It worked out pretty well, and it was a very exhilarating time. It was a Saturday. The next day we went to church.”

My friend Jodie Dwight and I went to Camp David the next weekend, right after the war started, along with Sam and Ellie. Friday night, Jodie and I went to the helicopter pad to meet Dad—he flew in very late for an intense weekend of telephone diplomacy. It was icy cold, and every star in the sky shone bright and brilliant. We were wearing the army-green parkas with fur-trimmed hoods that are provided in the cabins for the guests at Camp David. The second Dad’s foot hit the ground, the marines on duty hoisted the American flag. For some reason, the image of the raising of the flag is just as vivid to me today as the stars were that night.

Few in our family would argue that the six weeks of the air campaign, and the hundred-hour ground war that followed, was the most nerve-racking time of Dad’s presidency. Bernie Shaw, the CNN anchor who was holed up in a Baghdad hotel with reporter Peter Arnett, recalled that Marlin Fitzwater had issued a statement warning all American journalists to leave Baghdad before the bombing began, as there was no way for the U.S. military to protect them. Bernie told me:

I actually said during our coverage, “I want to thank the White House for the many warnings given us, but obviously we’re going to stay here.” I did that publicly for a reason—to say thank you, and that we were aware of their concerns, but we’re not budging because we thought the story should be covered. But it was awfully lonely as other journalists started bailing out and we were the only ones there.

President Bush called CNN president Tom Johnson to lean on him heavily, saying, “Get your people out of there.” He said, “Well, Mr. President, we’ve got to do our job.”

Tom stood his ground and said to your father, “We’re going to stay.” And the president said, “My friend Bernie Shaw is in there. I’m concerned about him.”

When Tom Johnson was editor of the Los Angeles Times, he lost two journalists on his watch, so he was very sensitive to journalists being killed. Tom Johnson responded, “We’re concerned about his safety and everyone else’s safety.” And that was [the end of] that conversation.

Then do you know what Tom did? He picked up the phone and called Colin Powell at his office at the Pentagon. Tom asked the general point-blank, “Is the hotel a target?” And Colin Powell exploded, saying, “You’re calling me on an unsecured line asking me about classified information.” I think Tom said he hadn’t heard that kind of cursing since LBJ talked to him.

Tom used to be a right-hand aide to President Johnson, and he and General Powell had first met when they were White House Fellows together. They were friends. And then Colin Powell said, “Bernie Shaw’s my friend, too.”

It was a difficult time for everybody. Ellen Tolten, who was one of the military nurses staffing the White House Medical Office during that time, recalled, “When Desert Storm started, I remember him saying how he worried about all the soldiers. He wondered what their parents were thinking, and he was up late with a lot of desk work.”

Being members of the military themselves, the nurses could all relate. They knew what it was like to be separated from family.

During the war, Dad rarely left the White House except to go to Camp David or Kennebunkport. In fact, he went for sixty-four or sixty-five days without formal travel because of the war. On February 1, however, he visited troops and military families at the Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina.

“The morale at Cherry Point was sky-high, but the emotions ran deep as I visited with families whose loved ones were halfway around the world,” Dad said. “The families were supportive of our objectives, yet all of us were worried about the safety of their husbands, sons, and dads—their wives and daughters and moms.”

“One of the things that struck me from my perspective as secretary of defense was the extent to which he had a connection with the troops up and down the chain of command,” Vice President Cheney said recently. “On the one hand, he knew what he was asking of them because of his own experience in World War II, because he had been shot down. That degree of understanding and empathy that he displayed for them was very important. They understood what they were being asked to do, and why. They also had great confidence in him that their sacrifice was worthwhile—and that he would not in any way, shape, or form ever treat that obligation lightly.”

My husband Bobby Koch and I first met in 1990, soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait. I was working at the National Rehabilitation Hospital, and my friend and officemate Heidi Hicks invited me to lunch with Bobby and another friend who was looking for a job on the Hill. Bobby Koch worked for Dick Gephardt at the time, who was the majority leader in the House from Missouri. The lunch was really intended for the friend, but Heidi invited me along.

My first impression of Bobby, to be candid, was that he was good-looking and funny. I had reservations because he worked for one of Dad’s political opponents, Dick Gephardt. Heaven only knows what he thought of me.

Time went by, however, and I suddenly began to think that Bobby might not be so bad. I began to talk to Heidi and Tom Nides, Bobby’s great friend, about how I might be able to see him again—and we came up with what we thought was a brilliant plan. Since it was Christmas, I would invite Bobby to the White House to see the Christmas decorations. Tom suggested he and his girlfriend Virginia come along—that way it would not be so awkward.

The problem with the plan was that Bobby was nowhere to be found, so I ended up showing Tom and Virginia the decorations without him. It was the first of several foiled plans to get together, until one evening Bobby invited me to dinner. As soon as I accepted, though, the phone rang and it was Dad. He was calling to ask if I would go to the funeral of Peter McKernan, the only son of Governor Jock McKernan from Maine. Peter, who was twenty years old, tragically collapsed during baseball practice at Dartmouth and died nine days later. I admire Governor McKernan and was heartbroken for him, so of course I wanted to attend the funeral.

The only problem was, it was the same night as the much-anticipated date with Bobby. So I called Bobby and asked him if we could meet at 9:30 p.m., which I’m sure he thought was odd. Following the very sad funeral in Maine, I raced back for our date at Tout Va Bien in Georgetown. The only thing I remember saying was that I loved Italian food, and he very kindly pointed out that we were at a French restaurant. But I do remember thinking he was someone special.

After that, I invited him to the state dinner for Queen Margrethe II of Denmark on February 20. Bobby called his friend Tom and asked why I was inviting him to a “steak” dinner, at which point Tom, known for colorful language, set him straight.

“It’s a state dinner, you idiot,” Tom delicately corrected him.

The state dinner was beautiful. My dad had nearly thirty state dinners during his tenure at the White House and saw the importance of receiving heads of states in this way. Bobby came as my date, and it raised some eyebrows among a few people—one of them being Marilyn Quayle, who knew Bobby from the Hill. She came right over to him and said, “What are you doing here?”

Mom heard the exchange and marched over and said, “Bobby is our guest, and we’re glad he’s here,” which ended the conversation.

“When the president told me that Bobby and you [Doro] were coming up to Kennebunkport for the first time, he mentioned that Bobby was a Democrat,” John Magaw remembered. “We were in the old house up there where the office was, talking about what he was going to do that day. But then he said, ‘Listen, none of that matters. All that matters is my daughter’s happiness.’ ”

When Bobby first met the Secret Service agents who were protecting the children and me, the agent said to him, “No horseshit tonight, got that?” What Bobby didn’t know was that one time, while I was on a date with someone else, my date thought it would be fun to try and ditch the Secret Service. That night, while Bobby was driving me with the agents following in the car behind us, he made a wrong turn. Worried, he turned to me and said, “Do you think this is what the agent meant by ‘no horseshit’?”

I am not a military historian, and will leave it to others to analyze the Gulf War and its aftermath. What I remember most, quite simply, is the immense feeling of relief we had when we heard the end of the war could be in sight. The conflict to that point had been as one-sided as it could be; things could hardly be going better; and the national mood was nearing elation. It was a hopeful time.

“My feeling was, we had told our allies and the world that our mission was to end the occupation of Kuwait,” Dad recalled. “When forming the coalition, we told our partners we will end the aggression—at which point our mission will be complete and all of us can bring our troops home. This we did. One’s word is important in life, especially when it comes to war and peace.”

Prime Minister Major agrees that the war ended when it should have: “If we had gone against the U.N. mandate, the coalition would have broken up; we would have gone to war to uphold international law, only to end it by breaking international law; and it would thus have been very many years before the word of an American president or a British prime minister was trusted again in international circles. In essence, we would have won the war but lost the peace. I have never doubted that the president’s decision to cease hostilities when he did was entirely right.”

“I recall talk of a ‘turkey shoot’ among the troops,” Major added. “Saddam Hussein had withdrawn his professional soldiers from the front lines so that they might encircle Baghdad. In their place, he put little more than young boys with guns in their hands. Neither the president nor myself, nor any of the military commanders, had any stomach for the bloodshed that would be entailed in the entry into Baghdad.”

“It was a sense of honor,” General Powell said. “We did what we said we were going to do. Maybe we can kill some more people and destroy some more forces, but we did what we said we were going to do, so let’s stop. And he was absolutely right. Nobody disagreed with him at the time. There was a lot of second-guessing after the war about how he should have gone to Baghdad—done this, that, and the other—but he was right.”

Dad wanted to end Desert Storm with a period, not a question mark, and he got his wish on March 3, when coalition generals from Saudi Arabia, Britain, France, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, and other nations observed Iraqi generals accepting all of the coalition’s conditions for a permanent cease-fire at the Safwan Air Base. General Schwarzkopf accepted the documents offering Iraq’s formal capitulation.

At the time of the cease-fire, more than 110,000 coalition air strikes had been flown; 148 U.S. service members had been killed in action, and 467 had been wounded. We mourned those who made the ultimate sacrifice wearing our nation’s uniform, yet we also rejoiced that the casualties had not been nearly as high as even the most conservative estimates predicted.

Rich Miller, a Vietnam veteran who at the time was the number two agent on Dad’s detail, recalled how Dad started to acknowledge the service of Vietnam veterans in his remarks. “Of course, he saluted the Gulf War vets, which they certainly deserved, but near the end he usually mentioned the Vietnam vets—and I think that was exceptional. He did it several times after that, within about two or three weeks. Finally, I said to him, ‘You’re always mentioning the Vietnam vets in these speeches, and I want you to know they really do appreciate it.’ He replied, ‘It’s about time someone said something good about you guys and what you did over there.’ You talk about leadership and obtaining loyalty from people. Those types of things you just can’t describe.”

Dad was concerned with ending what he called the Vietnam syndrome. As a congressman in the late 1960s, he saw firsthand the ugly way in which some of the returning soldiers were treated. As president, he was glad to see how our nation had united behind our troops, and he mentioned our Vietnam veterans as much as possible in speeches—often to loud applause.

“It was magnificent for those of us who had been in Vietnam,” General Schwarzkopf concurred. “I served two tours in Vietnam, was wounded over there, and was separated from my new wife for a year. But nobody ever said thank you.”

That, too, would change.

On June 8, Schwarzkopf and eight thousand troops found themselves marching down Constitution Avenue before 200,000 of their countrymen, leading the Gulf War victory parade along the National Mall. The two-hour march featured bands and a display of weaponry, from the “Scud-busting” Patriot missile to the M–1 tank. An assortment of aircraft that participated in the war effort, including the Stealth F–117, flew overhead. I remember Sam and his cousin Jebby loved the parade, as we all brought the children to watch it from the presidential reviewing stand outside the White House. The boys were especially excited at all the soldiers and military gear on display.

“It was a tremendous celebration of a great victory—a great victory for the right reasons. To every single one of us that was there that day, it was a thrill that we never imagined could have happened,” General Schwarzkopf added.

One person not basking in the afterglow of Desert Storm was Senator Alan Simpson. During the conflict, he had taken to the airwaves and roundly criticized CNN’s Peter Arnett for his reporting from Iraq throughout the war. Arnett was a seasoned international reporter, and CNN’s broadcasting from Iraq was undeniably historic. Even Dad and General Scowcroft tuned in with the battle plans in their lap, following along as if they were watching a TV movie unfold according to the script. Yet, while CNN’s Bernie Shaw and John Holliman had left Baghdad early into the air campaign, Arnett stayed behind, and as a result, he had attained celebrity status among his fellow members of the press corps.

Many others, including Senator Simpson and Dad, had a different take on Arnett’s performances. In fact, they were outraged by his accommodating attitude toward the Iraqi regime. In report after report, details implicating wrongdoing by the Iraqis were routinely omitted by CNN and Arnett, while even the thinnest evidence hinting at any perceived transgression by the coalition forces was hyped and beamed out to the waiting world. In short, Saddam seemed to get the benefit of every doubt, while the coalition was frequently treated as “guilty until proven innocent.”

So Senator Simpson went after Arnett, and a controversy erupted.

“The media tore me to bits for attacking someone they referred to as a hero,” Senator Simpson recalled. “I said, ‘Hero my butt! He’s being put to bed every night by the Iraqi government. He’s on television twice a day. He’s the only organ of propaganda that Saddam Hussein has, if you can’t figure that out. All the others have left—ABC, CBS.’ Anyway, I was about as low as whale crap on the bottom of the ocean. I get a call from George, saying, ‘How’d you like to go to Camp David this weekend? Come down to the White House about 10:00 a.m., and we’ll take the chopper.’ I said, ‘George, you’re at the top of your game, and I’m at the bottom of mine.’ He said, ‘I’ll see you at the White House.’ So we’re sitting there and he’s signing letters, and Barbara is needlepointing. I said, ‘George, I am fully aware of what you are doing here.’ We went out on the lawn and there are all these signs—‘93 Percent, We love George’—people all over, the media. He put his arm around me and said, ‘There are all your friends over there’—and he pointed to this big pile of media people. He got me on the helicopter and off we went. The next day, he gets up, reads every paper, watches every television channel, gets all worked up. I said, ‘Why don’t you quit watching television. You just bitch about it.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you just knock it off? I’m looking for something.’ Sure enough, he found the front page of the New York Times that said, ‘President and Mrs. Bush with Senator Alan Simpson and his wife Ann,’ with a picture of him with his arm around me.”

Dad said to Senator Simpson, “That’s what I wanted you to see.”