Chapter 19

ALMOST A MIRACLE

“There is no precedent in history for a major empire to collapse without there being a major war, and someday George Bush will get the credit he deserves for bringing about a basically bloodless revolution that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

—Bob Gates

One of the most popular fixtures during Dad’s term was the White House horseshoe tournament. Now, when you think of horseshoes, you probably think of a leisurely pastime played between old friends with the score only a secondary consideration.

Not in Dad’s White House.

The family horseshoe historian, my brother Marvin, believes Dad picked the game up during the latter part of his vice presidency—during a campaign trip to Ohio and the National Horseshoe Tournament. The next thing we all knew, a truck was pulling up to the vice president’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue with all the ingredients to make a professional horseshoe pit.

After Dad and Mom moved into the White House, they had a pit installed next to the swimming pool. (According to Dad’s diaries, on his third full day in office, he began planning where the horseshoe pit would go.) The pit was so close by, in fact, if Dad was sitting in the Oval Office and people were playing, he could hear the clanging of the shoes. Eventually, they set another practice pit up by the basketball court, far enough away from the Oval Office that Dad wouldn’t always be tempted to go out and see what was happening. Both were regulation pits with all-weather artificial clay, so if the rains came, the pits could be swept and instantly ready for play.

Before the first match, Dad appointed himself “commissioner of the tournament.” He loves to add a tongue-in-cheek ceremonial element like this even with our family tournaments. Then, together with the head usher, Gary Walters, they came up with the different teams—from the vice president’s office, the gardeners, the nurses, and so on. Even Air Force One had a team. Then within each team, they would have a play-off to see who the two members of that team would be. As soon as play began, every time you’d walk into the White House there would be a big buzz about who beat who.

Dad and Marvin made up the family team, and during the first couple of tournaments they did pretty well, usually losing in or just before the semifinals. During one magical run, however, Marv and Dad ended up winning the whole thing, beating the housemen, Ron and Lindsey, in the finals. By this time, Dad had anointed himself “Mr. Smooth,” and during that last match everyone would scream “Smooth, Smooth” as he approached the pit.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been involved with any sporting event with Dad, or any other endeavor, that excited him more,” recalled Marv, who had dubbed himself “Mr. Smooth Jr.” “He may have been more excited that day than when he won the Iowa caucus, to put it mildly. He’s a very competitive guy, and we had lost a couple of times when we probably shouldn’t have. So there was a lot of pressure with so many people out there, and he was just elated.”

Win or lose, however, when the finals arrived, Mom and Dad hosted a barbecue by the pool. They invited all the participants to bring a spouse or a guest, and Dad would usually stand up and make a funny speech before the final match. Looking back, Marvin remembers how the tournament boosted the morale of the entire White House staff, particularly during the Gulf War.

“The enthusiasm that he had for that is something that I think really helped him through some of the rough spots in the presidency because he had an opportunity to get out, release some energy,” Marvin said. “It also turned that White House from an office into more of a family home because it brought together the ushers, butlers, nurses—all the different constituencies within the White House. To this day, when I go to the White House for a reception or something, someone will usually sidle over and ask if we are going to resurrect the horseshoe tournament. That’s because of Dad. In a way, that tournament was not only a lasting hallmark of his presidency—it was also a metaphor for the way he approaches life.”

Another morale booster for Dad personally came on July 9, when he welcomed two of his boyhood idols, Joe DiMaggio (the Yankee Clipper) and Ted Williams (the Splendid Splinter), to the White House and awarded them a presidential citation. That summer marked fifty years since the 1941 Major League Baseball season—arguably the most remarkable season in baseball history. That year, DiMaggio had his fifty-six-game hitting streak, and Ted Williams hit .406. For a baseball fan like Dad, that season—and this visit—were pure heaven.

“We arranged to have the ceremony for them on the day that the All-Star Game was played in Toronto,” Governor Sununu told me. “When these legends arrived, the president presented the award to them in the Rose Garden, then we got on Air Force One and flew up to Toronto. We were with the president, the vice president, and a bunch of us from the White House just sitting there listening to these guys tell stories. It was a very memorable day.”

That same spring brought with it the Great American Workout, an outdoor sports festival on the South Lawn of the White House designed to encourage people to exercise more and live healthier lifestyles. The chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was enthusiastically leading the charge at Dad’s urging. After the South Lawn event, he took the Great American Workout to all fifty states. Schwarzenegger said, “We would go always to successful schools to have ‘fitness summits’ and he would always remind me to go to the schools that were failing and to go to the inner-city schools, to the kids that are really disadvantaged. And we would pump them up and encourage them to stay away from drugs and alcohol and gangs. I was motivated by your father to reach out to people that need help.” Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to be elected governor of California in 2003.

In April 1991, Willard Willowby passed away. Woody, as we all knew him, was a longtime White House doorman who operated the elevator in the private residence. We all loved him, and Marvin and he had gone to a few baseball games together. Dad, Marvin, and I went to his funeral and were touched to see that Woody would be buried with a George Bush button on his lapel. After Woody died, my niece Marshall told us she thought Woody’s angel was in the elevator.

About a month after Woody died, Dad gave the commencement address at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and returned to Camp David for the weekend. Following a short nap, he went out for a jog when he sensed that something was wrong.

“I was jogging with him,” Special Agent Rich Miller, one of Dad’s Secret Service detail leaders, recalled, “and as we made our way down the path, he said he had a little funny feeling. So we stopped and walked back to the medical unit. I was fairly new to the detail at the time, and I just remember him sitting there as Dr. Lee checked him. When the doctor made the recommendation to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital, the president looked at me and said, ‘Everybody in the world is going to hear about this. We have to think about that part of it.’ The doctor said, ‘Well, we’ll just keep it as quiet as we can,’ and I agreed to do the same. Finally, the president told Dr. Lee, ‘You’re the expert, so let’s go.’ That’s the kind of trust he put in the people around him.”

News of Dad’s condition immediately leaked out, and when I first heard about it, I was naturally very concerned—I had no idea what an “atrial fibrillation” was. It is a condition where the heart muscles get out of sync, and as a result blood does not move efficiently through the heart. In fact, even today Dad’s heart is not in “sinus rhythm,” or what doctors consider normal. Yet they do not worry about this condition. He takes a blood-thinning drug called Coumadin and a few other medications, and, in his words, he feels like a “spring colt.”

As it was, Mom stayed with Dad in the hospital that first night, and when I talked to him the next morning, he sounded like his old self. At Bethesda Mary Jackson, a military nurse assigned to the White House, was at Dad’s side waiting to see if his heart would return to sinus rhythm when Dad complained of gas pains. Mary told him simply “Let ’er rip, Mr. President.” Dad has never let her forget those immortal words.

On May 14, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip of the United Kingdom visited the White House for a formal state visit. Because of the traditional formality of the British throne, the visit was closely watched by the high society set.

Unfortunately, one small but important detail was neglected during the arrival ceremony.

“This was Joseph Reed [chief of protocol] making a real diplomatic bungle in the fact that I miscalculated in basic arithmetic,” Joseph recalled. “George Bush is well over six feet tall, while Queen Elizabeth is five foot four. Yes, I put them at the same podium, and when Queen Elizabeth went to the podium to give her speech, all you could see of her was a hat in the shape of a ‘boater’ bobbing up and down.”

The peculiar sight of Her Royal Highness almost totally obscured by “the blue goose,” or the presidential podium, created a monumental furor with the press corps, who started referring to it as “the talking-hat incident.” Dad telephoned Joseph over at Blair House and teased, “Joseph, you’re in trouble. Barbara’s mad at you, and you’re going to take the fall!”

Joseph replied, “Sir, that’s why you hired me.” As a good chief of protocol, he took the blame for his blunder and then went on with the business of state. [The truth is that he had told Dad to pull out a stand on the podium after he spoke and before the Queen’s speech, but Dad had forgotten.]

The formal state dinner that night was Washington at its black-tie best, but my brother George managed to inject a little humor into Her Majesty’s evening. Wearing cowboy boots, he sidled up to the queen and declared, “I’m the black sheep in my family. Do you have any in yours?” Not Mom’s idea of protocol.

On September 27, 1991, Dad’s friend and former spokesman Pete Teeley jumped into a taxi and rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. All month long, he had felt a dull pain in the right side of his abdomen and finally had Burt Lee, Dad’s doctor and an oncology specialist formerly with Sloan Kettering in New York, check it out. The doctor discovered that Pete’s appendix was inflamed, and needed to come out right away. Pete packed an overnight bag, thinking his stay at the hospital would be a short one.

When the doctors went in to take out the appendix, however, they discovered a big tumor sitting underneath the appendix that had actually caused the inflammation. That night, they removed sixteen inches of Pete’s colon.

The diagnosis was not encouraging: Pete had stage III colon cancer, and doctors gave him a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Making matters worse, he nearly died on the table during a second surgery, and he ended up in intensive care for ten days. Things were touch and go. The word got to Dad that Pete was dying and that he was not getting the best medical care.

Pete remembered: “So the next day, the president called the hospital and basically said, ‘I’m sending over one of my personal physicians, and I want him to have access to Pete’s files.’ The nurses told me after that call, everything changed. All of my medicines changed, and that’s when I started getting better. If I hadn’t known George Bush, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be here today.

“Here I am in intensive care, on a respirator, with all these tubes coming out,” Pete said. “The phone rings, the nurse picks it up, and she’s on the phone for a second. Then she puts her hands over the phone and says, ‘It’s the president of the United States. I can’t talk to him. I’m too frightened.’ All of the nurses were begging off, when finally the one who confessed she was a Democrat talked to him.”

Mom visited Pete a few days later and declared him on his way to a recovery when she found him watching the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings on TV. Thankfully, Pete went on to survive his cancer and write The Complete Cancer Survival Guide.

On Monday, July 1, Dad had stepped out of his office at Walker’s Point and announced that he was nominating Judge Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to succeed Justice Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even before the announcement was made, Ben Hooks of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had promised that if Judge Thomas were nominated, the White House and Thomas would be in for “the mother of all confirmation hearings,” playing off of Saddam Hussein’s infamous, and empty, threat to wage the mother of all battles and destroy the coalition forces that tried to remove Iraq from Kuwait.

Earlier on the day of the announcement, Judge Thomas had been secretly brought up the driveway on the east side of Walker’s Point—away from the media—to maintain the surprise factor as long as possible. Justice Thomas remembered what happened from there:

Of course, President Bush introduced me to everybody on the deck when I arrived. Mrs. Bush was standing out there wearing a big hat, and she said, “Judge, congratulations.” Then catching herself, she said, “I guess I let the cat out of the bag.”

I thought I was coming up to have lunch for my interview. Yet Mrs. Bush was suggesting that I’m going to be nominated, so now I’m totally scared. Then the president introduced me to Brent Scowcroft and some of the others on his staff.

From there, we went into the master bedroom where there was a little sitting area and a table with family photos, and the president said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions. First, can you and your family get through the confirmation?”

I said, “Yes.” Perhaps I should not have said yes, as it turned out, but I said we could handle it.

Then the president asked, “If you go on the Supreme Court, can you call them as you see them?”

I also responded yes to this question, noting, “It’s gotten me in a lot of trouble, but I’ve done it my whole life.”

Finally, President Bush said, “Look, if you become a member of the Supreme Court, I will never publicly criticize any opinion of yours.” He repeated that, then he said, “At two o’clock I’m going to nominate you to the Supreme Court of the United States. Let’s go have lunch.”

That was the totality of our discussion about the Supreme Court.

When things got really bad a few weeks later, I went to the Oval Office and apologized for getting him in so much trouble. Things at that point were getting totally out of control. I think I may have suggested then that, if he wanted, I would be more than happy to just say the heck with it and withdraw my name.

See, I had never really wanted to be on the Court. I always saw it as public service, something that we’re supposed to do. Nevertheless, the president rejected my offer to stand down, saying he was going to be there to the end and he was going to fight it through. This wasn’t about politics, ever. In none of the discussions we had during that time or when I was nominated was there any discussion other than deeply personal discussion—as though you were talking to a father or an uncle.

He was in it with me as a father and as a friend.

My wife and I were so beaten down by that time. If you notice in those pictures, I had not had a haircut all summer. I couldn’t go to the barbershop. I rarely went out in public. I had been studying all summer—twenty-five three-inch binders. I would read through that material all night, into the wee hours of the morning, then all day. In fact, I had not slept for sixty minutes in a row for three and a half months.

All the while, people were out to do me harm. It was like being in a jungle and people were hunting me. I thought, why? I’m just a kid from Georgia. There’s nothing there. They attacked my mother. They attacked my sister, talking about her in this horrible way. We were not prepared to defend ourselves.

When you’re at that point, you’re beyond tears. I remember grieving about my grandparents. You sag under the weight of your grief. That’s the way I felt during the confirmation. It’s sort of a tearless grief. I had been pounded from July to October, over a hundred days.

Clearly, all the left-wing black groups felt they had license to do whatever they wanted to me, and they did it. Then I found out later they had focus groups to see what they could do to pry support away from me in the South. To do that, first they said I was not qualified, then they made an issue of the race of my wife.

None of it worked, though.

My mother lost thirty-five pounds during my confirmation. It finally got the best of her when we returned to the White House from the swearing-in ceremony. There was a big crowd, and my mother started feeling faint, so one of the White House physicians took her into a separate room and tested her blood pressure. They decided they wanted to take her to George Washington Hospital for observation, and you know who spent time with her until she went to the hospital? Barbara Bush. She told me, “Go on with the rest of your family and I’ll look after your mom.”

The president asked me, “Can you call them as you see them?” I told him I could. The oath that I took to do this job, and that promise to him, are the two things that keep me going in the difficult cases. I will not break my word to that man. I get real emotional about it. Because when you’re at your lowest, you can really get the measure of the people who are there—and President and Mrs. Bush were there.

Here’s what Dad had to say about Clarence Thomas: “He got brutalized in the hearing. In the view of the liberal opponents of Clarence Thomas, there’s no such thing as a distinguished conservative black person. If you’re conservative, they’ll turn on you, and Clarence Thomas was turned on by the community. He was passed close to unanimously for the appeals court, and he served with distinction. Then suddenly, he’s made into an evil guy with no morals. I found it very offensive, and the more they piled on him, the more determined I was to stay with him and to support him. I remember him coming down to the White House with Jack Danforth saying, ‘Do you think it’s time I got out of the race? I think it may be hurting you, Mr. President.’ I put my arm around him and I said, ‘You can’t do that. You’ve got to stay in this fight, and you’re going to be confirmed, I’m sure of it. You’ll be a great justice.’ And he has been.”

Dad continued: “All this Anita Hill stuff was transparently phony, in my view. John Danforth, who was a very distinguished Episcopal minister as well as a senator, swore by Clarence Thomas. His judgment helped the votes in the Senate, but of course the most liberal media turned on him. I remember he called it a ‘high-tech lynching’—and it was. They just piled on him, and lifted up this Anita Hill who came out of nowhere. She followed him around, wanted to work for him, wanted to be on his staff, wanted to be at his side, and then suddenly she turned on him.”

Like the horseshoe tournament, there was another unique competition initiated during Dad’s presidency, this one called the Brent Scowcroft Award for Somnolent Excellence. It grew to be a very prestigious award within the administration, even if the award’s namesake and nominees did protest on occasion.

“Brent was a marvelous national security adviser, who did work long hours every night,” Dad said. “Though he fell asleep regularly in daytime meetings, he didn’t feel that he was worthy of having the award named for him. We all knew that that was modesty on his part, however, because he was terrific at falling asleep during meetings.”

To be considered for the Scowcroft Award, first you had to fall asleep at a meeting at which Dad was present. Witnesses were required. Dad would then judge you on the soundness of your sleep and how tight your eyes were closed. Points were also awarded for “the recovery,” which Dad explained using General Scowcroft as an example:

“He’d be sleeping like this in the middle of the meeting, and then he’d hear something subconsciously, so he’d wake up. He had a notepad, and he’d immediately start smiling and writing down what he hadn’t heard. So recovery was part of it.”

A new file was started in 1991 with Dad’s hand-typed, private Scowcroft Award notes:

April 30, 1991: The challenge today mounted by Dick Cheney is worthy of total approval. He slept soundly. Everyone applauded when he woke up—a sterling performance as far as sleeping goes . . .

May 9: A fantastic challenge by Ed Derwinski [secretary of veterans affairs]. Very firm eye closure and a remarkable recovery gambit. Ed with eyes tightly closed used the seldom-used nod technique. He nodded vigorously whenever in his slumber he heard the end of a sentence . . .

May 17: Following the Queen’s [Elizabeth of the U.K.] state dinner . . . the next morning Brent and John S [Sununu] jointly announced that I had made a serious challenge for the Scowcroft Award. Aware of my innocence, I discussed this important matter with Bar, who confirmed I was never out of it. Eyes open at all times, she stated. Brent’s witness was Doro, who defended her father against this ludicrous charge. Though this entry is now part of the Scowcroft File it really is so fallacious a charge that it shouldn’t have been brought up . . .

Eventually, the Scowcroft Award grew to be such a successful award domestically that Dad instituted an international award.

“One time a delegation from Iceland made a starring performance,” Dad recalled, “because they had three people sitting at the table at this CSCE [Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe] meeting in Paris, and all three of them were asleep at the same time. Even the guy that was speaking was asleep while he was speaking.”

Describing Dad as “unmerciful” concerning the award, the harassment apparently got so bad that General Scowcroft had a pair of eyeglasses with wide-open eyes painted on them. He also noted how “his” award exemplifies why Dad is so good with people.

“Sometimes in our debates, things would get very heated and very tense,” the general said. “In the middle of it, the president would come out with some joke—and you could just feel the tension breaking. That’s what he used the Scowcroft Award for.”

Of all the modern presidents, Dad was perhaps the most avid boatman to occupy the Oval Office. President Kennedy served aboard a PT boat in World War II and sailed at his home in Hyannisport, but Dad had an absolute passion for his twenty-eight-foot cigarette boat, Fidelity—and for driving it fast.

It was while Dad was out on his boat on August 21, 1991, that he received the news of Mikhail Gorbachev’s release from house arrest following a failed coup.

Throughout July and August, there had been rumors that some of the Soviet hard-liners in the military and government hierarchy would attempt a coup to stop President Gorbachev and his reforms. When Dad visited Moscow in July, President Gorbachev had dismissed these threats as rumors; but on August 18, the hard-liners struck. TV reports indicated that President Gorbachev had resigned for health reasons, replaced by a committee of old-school Soviets.

President Gorbachev and his family were taken to their vacation dacha on the Crimean Sea, where they were held under armed guard. After four days, however, the coup-plotters were disbanded and the White House switchboard was finally able to contact President Gorbachev by phone.

“I was not satisfied with the connection we had,” Special Agent John Magaw said. “I wasn’t sure it would be secure. We weren’t very far out [in the boat], so we turned around and, bang, the president threw it in high as he did a lot of times. When we went into the house, I stayed outside the bedroom, but I could see [President and Mrs. Bush]. The president sat on the edge of the bed, and there was tremendous concern in his voice. He said, ‘Mr. President, I’m sorry to hear what’s happened. Where are you, what’s going on? Is your family going to be okay?’ While I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, I could see that the president was reasonably satisfied with the answers.”

“At 5:45 p.m., seventy-three hours after communications had been disconnected, the connection was restored. I first talked with Boris Yeltsin, who had taken the right stand during the attempted coup, and then with other leaders of the republics,” President Gorbachev said. “It was, of course, also important to resume contacts with the leaders of those countries that by that time had become our partners and to assure them that we would do everything possible to stabilize the situation, and that there was no reason for concern as to the control of nuclear weapons. In my conversation with George Bush, I was particularly touched when he and Barbara conveyed their best to Raisa, for whom those days were a terrible ordeal, and said that for three days they had been praying for us.”

When Dad went to Kennebunkport for his August vacation that summer, it became clear to the press that fishing would be a huge part of his agenda. As Marlin Fitzwater recalled, each day’s press briefing included the question, Is the president going fishing today?

“The media knew that the president often used these fishing expeditions to discuss business with staff, friends, or heads of state invited along for the ride,” Marlin recalled, “so reporters asked about every detail of the fishing. Soon every briefing began with the same question: ‘Did the President catch any fish today?’”

After two or three days, one of the reporters filed a pool report to all other reporters, saying it was “day three with no fish.” Then it became “days four, five, and six with no fish.”

Dad thought this was rather funny and soon joined in the fun by chiding himself to the press, saying, “Well, boys, it is day seven with no fish.”

“But then the president’s competitive instincts took over, and he started to get serious about his fishing,” Marlin recalled. “Trips on the water lasted longer. He would go further out to sea looking for fish. Guests started including real fishermen.”

Some horrible hand of fate had taken over, because the harder my president appeared to try, the less fish were available. He couldn’t even get a bite.

“Not only that, as we got to day twelve or thirteen, his humor about the whole matter began to fade,” Marlin said. “In fact, the staff didn’t even want to ask him about it anymore. And I started going to the Secret Service for a fishing report, rather than upset the president.”

Finally, on day seventeen, Dad caught a fish. By that time, Marlin said, the fishing report was more famous than foreign policy.

As 1991 wore on, it became clear that Chief of Staff John Sununu had an increasingly strained relationship with the media, and the political damage he sustained as a result, fair or unfair, in turn weakened his hand in dealing with Congress. There was tremendous scrutiny on Sununu especially after it was learned that he had taken government aircraft to go see his dentist. The media took to referring to this as the Air Sununu Scandal.

As the press commentary intensified, Sununu dug his heels in.

“From the Reagan days, there was a presidential order that the chief of staff and the national security adviser could not fly on commercial planes,” Sununu explained. “So Scowcroft and I were always operating under that order. But when they started going after me in the press, they always seemed to bury the part about the presidential order in paragraph 73.”

Andy Card, Sununu’s deputy, recalled that on June 12, Dad’s birthday, the chief of staff was going up to New York to attend a stamp show—but didn’t disclose what his plans were directly to Andy. “At first, I heard he was going up for briefings with the General Services Administration. I thought it was a weird thing for a chief of staff to do, but turns out he was going up for a stamp show. This was during the height of the Air Sununu Scandal, and I told him, ‘This is not right.’”

According to Andy, Governor Sununu defended the trip by saying, “I’m driving. I’m not taking the plane. I’m driving up. The White House driver is driving me up, and I’m going to work in the car.”

That same day, Dad gave a big domestic policy speech on the South Lawn which focused on his “points of light” initiative. The event was being driven by Gregg Petersmeyer and his team in the Office of National Service, and Sununu’s absence did not go unnoticed.

“That was when his relevance was significantly diminished in the White House,” Andy said. “Ann Devroy, a tough, take-no-prisoners reporter for the Washington Post, was on a mission to do him in—and so during the summer, Sununu was seen as a damaged leader in the White House. It became increasingly uncomfortable for the staff as more people in Congress and elsewhere recognized it.”

A more candid conversation about the role of the chief of staff— and what should happen—took place that August up in Maine.

“This was at the same time that the president was asked to make decisions about his campaign, the reelection campaign,” Andy said. “What’s the structure going to look like? Do you start things that early? What role does Bob Mosbacher play? What role does Fred Malek play? What role does Bob Teeter play? What role does the chief of staff play? So it was an interesting time in terms of both policy dialogue and campaign dialogue.”

Andy thought Dad should make a decision on the chief of staff and start fresh in the fall, but perhaps owing to Dad’s prevailing sense of loyalty, such a decision was not made, and Sununu continued to hobble onward as the administration moved through September, October, and November.

During the Thanksgiving holiday, Dad went to Camp David. David Bates, who later became the cabinet secretary at the White House, and Dorrance Smith, formerly the longtime producer of This Week with David Brinkley and Dad’s head of media affairs, were up to play tennis. During that same period, Sununu’s friends—like Senator Bob Dole—started calling Dad and saying positive things about the job his chief of staff was doing.

When Dad asked Andy why this sudden flurry of calls was directed at him, Andy replied, “Well, I think that they’re probably calling because Sununu would ask them to call and say he should stay in there.”

Dad called Andy back shortly after that and asked him to come to the White House after he returned from Camp David to meet with Boyden Gray and Dorrance—and to discuss what Sununu was doing. “We met on a Sunday afternoon at the White House, because I think the president wanted to do it when Sununu wouldn’t realize,” Andy remembered. “So we gathered in the Oval Office and came to the conclusion that probably Sununu wasn’t contributing as much as he should, and he should move on.”

A healthy discussion over how the team would deliver this awkward message to Sununu followed and finally, someone suggested Andy should do it. My brother George had a big part in resolving the matter, but at the staff level, the plan called for Andy to deliver the message, accompanied by Dorrance and Boyden.

“On December 2, we went to Sununu’s office and shut the door,” Andy said. “Cutting right to the chase, I said that I thought the president would accept Sununu’s resignation.”

Sununu replied, “No, he won’t. He wants me to stay on.”

Andy pressed: “Well, I think he would accept your resignation, and I think he’d like to have it.”

Sununu then asked everybody to leave except Andy, and the two had a very emotional conversation. They then worked out a method to make the resignation known—doing it the next day, when Dad visited Florida and Mississippi.

“I remember the president did not come to the Oval Office that morning because he was leaving right from the residence to go on the trip,” Andy said, “but he called and wanted to know what was going to happen. So I told him, and then I met him in the Diplomatic Room before they left to get on the helicopter. That’s where I told him that something would happen that day. I couldn’t guarantee at what point during the day, but something would happen. He thanked me, and I stayed at the White House. As they left, I told Marlin Fitzwater to stay on his toes, because something would be happening.”

That morning, December 3, Sununu called Andy into his office to share the resignation letter that he had written in pencil on white lined paper. Sununu said he would deliver the letter and talk to the president about it on the trip. Sununu’s resignation was effective December 15.

“I love John Sununu, and I owed him a lot,” Dad said. “He is one of the brightest men I have ever met, and his sense of humor is great. I hated every moment of this very difficult decision and still love the guy.”

Looking back, Sununu believes the absence of Lee Atwater was a contributing element in his demise. “If Lee had lived, I wouldn’t have had to leave,” he said. “I think a lot of the political problems I ended up with would have been blunted because Atwater was smart enough to deal with those crazy political things, and it put me in a position where I couldn’t take care of my own political problems.”

“It was difficult,” remembered Sam Skinner, who replaced Sununu as chief of staff. “Number one, we were at 41 percent in the polls. The president’s approval rating had gone from 90 percent after the war to 40 percent because of concerns about the economy, and everybody—except the president, it seemed—was pretty demoralized. He always had a positive nature, and he just said we’re going to have to attack it. Of course, we had some unbelievable things happen over the next few months that made us feel as if we were jinxed.”

I have already confessed I am no historian, and to that, let me add I am certainly not qualified to offer a scholarly analysis of the end of the Cold War. Yet I feel reasonably safe in suggesting that December 1991 will stand out in history, for centuries to come, as a period of profound—and positive—change in our world. First, on December 8, Russian President Boris Yeltsin called Dad to tell him that the Russian republics had taken the final, historic step to make their decades-old dream of self-determination a reality. Russia, Ukraine, and the other states that made up the USSR decided they would form a Commonwealth of Independent States. They were in essence casting aside the yolk of tyranny—the Soviet regime in faraway Moscow—that had suppressed them for too long.

Second, on Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as leader of the Soviet Union. “Because President Bush had built such a strong relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, he understood on a personal level what the fall of communism meant to him,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. “He understood how difficult the decision was for Gorbachev to essentially manage the death of the Soviet empire. Gorbachev recognized that—and he respected it.”

Then she told me of a fascinating moment: “Before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time at the Kremlin, the final call Gorbachev made was to President Bush. He wanted reassurance from a trusted, valued friend that the decision he had made was correct, that history would judge him favorably.”

“It so happened that I was making my statement about stepping down from the presidency on the day when Christmas is celebrated in the West [the Russian tradition is to celebrate it later, on January 6], but I nevertheless asked my assistant Pavel Palazchenko to find out whether it was possible to contact the president,” President Gorbachev recalled. They found Dad at Camp David, and President Gorbachev recounted for me how their historic conversation went:

I told President Bush that in about two hours I would be making a statement about stepping down. I also said that I had just sent him a farewell letter but I still wanted to take the opportunity and call him to reiterate once again how much I valued all that we had been able to achieve together—both when he was vice president and, particularly, when both of us were president. I expressed the hope that the leaders of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] countries, particularly of Russia, understood their responsibility in preserving and increasing the capital we had created over these years in relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, and generally in international relations.

I have on my desk the Decree of the President of the USSR. Due to the cessation of my duties as commander in chief, I transfer control of nuclear weapons to the president of the Russian Federation. I attach great importance to this matter being under secure control. As soon as I make my statement on stepping down, the decree will enter into force. So you can celebrate Christmas and sleep quietly tonight.

As for me, I have no intention of hiding in the taiga. I will remain in politics and in public life. What I intend to do is help the processes to get under way in our country and for new thinking to prevail in world politics.

U.S. media people have often asked me what I thought about relations with you. I would like to say, not only through the media but to you personally on this day, that I very highly appreciate our cooperation and partnership, our friendship. Our roles may change, and in fact they will change. But what we built together between the two of us and what we did together will remain forever.

President Gorbachev remembers Dad’s reply as follows:

I want to assure you that we’ll remain engaged in your affairs. We’ll try hard to help, particularly the Russian republic, given the problems it is facing, which may get worse in winter.

I am very glad to hear that you have no intention of hiding in the taiga and will continue to be active in politics and public affairs. I am sure that this will help the new Commonwealth.

I have written you a letter, which will be sent today. I say in it that I am confident that what you have done will go down in history and future historians will fully appreciate your achievements.

I note with satisfaction what you’ve just said about nuclear weapons. This is extremely important internationally. I appreciate your attitude, and that of the leaders of the republics, in this matter. I want to assure you that we’ll continue to cooperate very closely in this important regard.

Now, on a personal note: I have noted your wonderful, very pointed remarks about the relationship that you developed with me and Jim Baker. I value those remarks very highly, and they fully reflect my own feelings.

I hope our paths will cross again soon. You’ll be a welcome guest, and we’ll be happy to host you, after things settle down, perhaps here at Camp David.

My friendship toward you is unchanged and will always remain the same as we go forward. There should be no doubt whatsoever in this regard.

Of course, I will work on relations with the leaders of Russia and the other republics with due respect, openly and positively, and I hope on a progressive basis. We’ll move toward recognition, with full respect for the sovereignty of each republic. We’ll work with them on a broad range of issues. But this will in no way affect my determination to maintain contacts with you, consider your advice in your new capacity, and preserve our friendship with you and Raisa. Barbara and I cherish it.

So on this very special day, at this historic crossroad, I salute you and thank you for all you’ve done for peace, and I thank you for your friendship.

“Perestroika and President Gorbachev’s New Thought ushered in a new era in world politics,” Chancellor Kohl said of the former Soviet leader. “His name will remain inextricably linked with the end of the Cold War, the arms race, and to the peaceful revolution in the German Democratic Republic. His level-headed actions after the fall of the Berlin Wall were decisive for the further development of the peaceful revolution. On November 10, 1989, the day after the fall of the Wall, the then-KGB forces in Moscow and the hardliners tried to persuade him to send in tanks and military units against the demonstrators in the DDR, who were supposedly storming Soviet Army facilities. But I was able to calm Gorbachev and convince him that his information was incorrect. Because of the trust in each other that we had built up in the preceding months, he believed me when I assured him that the demonstrators were peaceful and wanted nothing other than to live in freedom. We will always be grateful to Gorbachev, who—faced with the decision of sending in tanks and or leaving them in the barracks—chose the peaceful solution.”

“To have that happen—to have the Cold War end and the Soviet Union dissolve without a conflict—is almost a miracle,” General Scowcroft reflected. “If you had asked any American twenty years earlier how such a series of events might happen, they would have guessed it would happen by war. I mean, these things just don’t happen the way it happened. Today, looking back, it seems sort of inevitable. But the president managed it in a way to reduce the tensions—not to alarm the Soviet Union with what was going on in Eastern Europe, not to excite the French and the British about German reunification. All these things he managed very carefully. It wasn’t inevitable at all.”

“I am convinced it was his diplomacy and his instincts that took us through a time that was far more dangerous than almost anybody recognized as the Soviet Union was collapsing,” Bob Gates added, “sitting over there with forty thousand nuclear warheads and the potential for civil war, for military intervention in Eastern Europe and Poland and elsewhere. All those things were very real risks, and it was because of his diplomacy that that empire peacefully disintegrated virtually without bloodshed.”