Chapter 20

A STEEP INCLINE

“In 1992, I was deeply torn, because I liked your father so much; but we had a lot of differences on domestic policy, very few on foreign policy. In some ways it was personally very difficult for me, that campaign, because I liked him so much.”

—Bill Clinton

Mom and Dad rang in 1992, the worst political year of their lives, in Sydney, Australia. They were on the first leg of a four-nation, twelve-day trip to Asia. In their hearts, I am sure both my parents were happy to get away from what had become a terribly unpleasant domestic political scene: conservative commentator Pat Buchanan and white supremacist David Duke had declared they would challenge Dad for the GOP nomination, while Democratic presidential contenders such as Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, former California Governor Jerry Brown, and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin were all attacking Dad as being out of touch and uncaring.

It was a constant chorus of political critics in stereo, and we had yet to hear from one H. Ross Perot.

The daily pounding and blistering criticism not only hurt Dad’s political poll numbers but also contributed to a growing—if also technically inaccurate—perception that the economy was still in a recession. Most experts today agree that the economy emerged from a brief recession in the spring of 1991; but as the calendar turned to 1992, many Americans were being told—and some clearly believed—we were heading for another Great Depression.

The Asia trip was undertaken largely at the initiative of Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, who would help chair the forthcoming reelection campaign—and who was arguing for Dad to be more aggressive about getting his economic message out. Though the itinerary took them to Australia, Singapore, Korea, and Japan, the target audience for the visuals and messages the trip produced was really in swing states like Michigan and Ohio. The idea was to announce a series of new trade and commercial agreements that would, in turn, show how Dad was working to open new markets for American businesses and help create more jobs for American workers.

This was not your ordinary presidential trip, though, because also joining Dad for parts of this trip were a number of business leaders such as the Big Three car executives from Detroit—the CEOs of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—as well as leading representatives from other sectors such as manufacturing. It was a good mix of people, and truth be told it had been a reasonably good and productive trip—that is, until they reached Japan.

First, even before they arrived, some in the Japanese media picked up on the fact that the U.S. CEOs accompanying Dad were overpaid when compared to their Japanese counterparts. In those days, the average Japanese CEO made maybe half a million dollars, while the U.S. CEOs who would be trying to win concessions from the Japanese auto industry received many times that. So even before Mom and Dad landed in Tokyo, this news item seemed to serve as a harbinger that it would not be a smooth visit.

The news item that made global headlines from that Japan visit came after they arrived, on January 8. That night, a flu bug caught up with Dad at a formal state dinner, and he threw up on Kiichi Miyazawa, the prime minister of Japan, which we believe may be the one and only time in history a president has done that.

“All during the daytime, he was just sick as a dog,” Secret Service Agent John Magaw recalled. “Doctors were telling him, you can’t continue to do this. So finally around noon, we got him to postpone whatever was on his calendar, and for the next two hours or so he rested and took medication. Still, the doctors were saying it doesn’t look good, so they got as much medicine as they could possibly get in him.”

That night, when Mom and Dad arrived at Prime Minister Miyazawa’s palace, Dad told Rich Miller, whose shift as Dad’s head Secret Service agent followed John Magaw’s, that he was feeling poorly. So they went to the restroom with another agent, Tom Ferrell, and Dad became sick to his stomach, soiling his tie. The agents told Dad he could not go forward with the event, but Dad insisted, telling them, “It would be a slap in the face to the Japanese to cancel now.”

“I looked at Tom and said, ‘If your tie matches his suit, you’re going to have to give it up,’” Rich recalls. “So he does. The president got a little kick out of that, and he put it on and then he went inside.”

The room was set up with a very large U-shaped table with Mom and Dad in the middle, while Rich sat eight or nine seats from them on the left side.

“I looked at him at one point, and he started looking very pale,” Rich continues. “He mouthed the word to me, ‘bathroom.’ Of course, he was hoping it was behind the podium, but there wasn’t anything back there.” Dad would have had to walk all the way through the guests to go outside, so he just gutted it out. Meanwhile, he continued to get paler, which concerned Rich enough that he finally got up and started approaching Dad.

“Just about the time I got behind him, I put my hand on his shoulder and he fell to the left,” Rich said. “I reached down to grab him, trying to turn the president to his left so he doesn’t vomit on himself, but I couldn’t turn him. I’m thinking, ‘What’s the story here?’ At that moment, Prime Minister Miyazawa looks at me, pulls my arm, and says, ‘Hey, you’re pulling my leg.’ ”

Mom had moved near Dad by this point and was holding up a napkin to give Dad some privacy from the audience in the room.

When Rich laid Dad on the floor, he remembers that Dad was unconscious for about three seconds before the doctors and nurses revived him. Major Paula Trivette, a very able army nurse, literally vaulted over the table to get to Dad. Dr. Lee opened his tie to get him some air, then he unzipped Dad’s trousers—which obviously caught Dad’s attention.

“Burt, what the hell are you doing down there?” Dad asked. Hearing this, Mom turned to the crowd and said, “I think the president is going to be fine.”

“I wanted to clear the room so he could go out in a way that nobody would see him,” Rich said, “but he said, ‘No, I’m going to walk out of here.’ He had that look about him that when he says I’m going to do this, you know he’s going to do what he said.”

When Rich stood him up, however, Dad had also soiled his suit. Once again, Special Agent Tom Ferrell was called to surrender an article of clothing—this time his raincoat. Donning the coat, Dad walked out of the palace right by the press to the car.

Mom, meanwhile, stayed behind at the dinner—no doubt relieved to know Dad would be all right, but also left to help salvage an awkward situation. What followed was vintage Barbara Bush. At the time for Dad’s scheduled remarks, Mom stood up and said:

I rarely get to speak for George Bush, but tonight I know he would want me to thank you, on behalf of his administration and the businessmen who are here, for a wonderful visit and for a great friendship, and on my part, for a lovely day, and I think for a wonderful day for all of you.

You know, I can’t explain what happened to George because it never happened before. But I’m beginning to think it is the ambassador’s fault. [Laughter] He and George played the emperor and the crown prince in tennis today, and they were badly beaten. And we Bushes aren’t used to that. [Laughter] So he felt worse than I thought . . .

Mom then called on General Scowcroft to deliver Dad’s prepared remarks. Her comments—combined with the fact that she stayed at the dinner—helped to reassure everyone that the situation was not as serious as it might have appeared on TV.

The dinner program that night was supposed to have been closed to the news media except for an unmanned Japanese camera set up to capture the toasts. The images that camera position caught of Dad fainting and being helped to his feet were soon beamed out to the waiting world, and caused a global stir. What was left unreported was that almost half the press corps had also come down with the same flu.

I was at the other end of that beam in Bethesda, Maryland. I remember waking up early because I wasn’t able to sleep, and out of habit I turned on CNN. It was there I saw, over and over again, Dad fall over at the Japanese dinner. At first, I was scared, and I immediately ran downstairs to find the agent on duty. (I had actually rented out my guest room to the Secret Service. It worked out well, as they were able to have a command post in my home, and I always felt safe.) They told me Dad was fine and that it was just the flu. Even so, the TV channels ran it again and again, and each time I saw it I couldn’t help but worry. I was very glad when he and Mom came home.

One morbidly humorous postscript to what was an otherwise embarrassing and scary episode: Since the dinner that night was closed to the press, many of the working media members and camera people went to a Tokyo restaurant that night—all gathered in a single room. Clearly, there was a miscommunication as to what had happened to Dad, because the hostess entered the room and in that wonderfully formal and proper Japanese way kept saying, “Very sorry. Very sorry.” When everyone quieted down, the hostess then dropped this bombshell: “Your president died tonight.”

After a moment of stunned silence, pandemonium broke out as everyone scrambled for the door—fearful that they were missing the story of the century.

Unfortunately, Dad’s political year got off to a fairly lousy start as well. The problems took root even before 1992 started. In addition to the primary challengers pounding away on the right and left, his attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, lost a special U.S. Senate election in Pennsylvania in November following the sudden death of Senator John Heinz, who died in a tragic helicopter crash earlier in 1991. Within a week of Senator Heinz’s death, both Lee Atwater and Dad’s old friend John Tower had died, and within two weeks Dean Burch had died of cancer. It was a rough time in my parents’ lives.

When that Pennsylvania race began, Dad’s favorability rating was up in the eighties, and Attorney General Thornburgh, who had also served as Pennsylvania governor, had a forty-five point lead against Harris Wofford, the university president who had been appointed to fill Heinz’s seat temporarily.

“You couldn’t believe that you could squander something like that, but at the end of the election, George Bush’s favorability ratings were below 50 percent and my lead had vanished,” Governor Thornburgh recalled. “I remember going to the White House after that, where I licked my wounds. I said to the folks down there, You know, up in Pennsylvania, back when coal was king about a hundred years ago, when the miners went to the mouth of the mine every day they’d release a canary into the mine. And if the canary came back, they knew that it was safe to work in the mine. If the canary didn’t come back, they knew there was trouble in the mine.

“Boys,” he continued, “I’m your canary, and there’s trouble in the mine.”

The Pennsylvania Senate race not only introduced health care as a key 1992 issue, it was also interpreted by members of the White House press corps and the national news media as a direct rebuke of the Bush administration for failing to act aggressively on a sluggish economy and other domestic concerns. Thus, between Wofford’s stunning victory in November 1991 and the Sununu resignation the following month, the press must have felt there was plenty of political blood in the water at 1600 Pennsylvania.

The media feeding frenzy was on.

On February 4, Dad went to the National Grocers Association convention in Florida, and before he gave his speech he toured the exhibition area where he was shown the latest scanner technology. Of course, Dad knew how a supermarket scanner worked; but in one demonstration, executives showed Dad how the scanner could still ring up a product even if the bar code was torn in five different places—not your typical grocery store technology.

Unfortunately, a New York Times reporter named Andy Rosenthal, the son of Times former managing editor A. M. Rosenthal, wrote a story under the headline “Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed.” He went after Dad for not understanding how a basic scanner worked. Dad’s political opponents seized on Rosenthal’s piece to support their own attacks against my father as being out of touch, and soon this nasty fairy tale was dominating the airwaves.

“I was amazed at how much coverage this one relatively minor incident had gotten,” remembered Howard Kurtz, the media critic for the Washington Post, “so I started making some phone calls and discovered that the New York Times reporter, whose front-page piece had ricocheted this story into the media stratosphere, had not witnessed the supermarket incident himself. Instead, he had written it from a couple of paragraphs in a pool report. What’s more, the Houston Chronicle reporter who wrote that pool report thought the matter was so insignificant that he didn’t include it in his own news story.”

My father-in-law, George Koch, is a former president of the Grocery Manufacturers of America, and he followed the scanner episode very closely. “President Bush was one of the greatest listeners that we’ve ever had in the presidency. He would listen to what you had to say and would appear to be very, very interested. He would never say, ‘Look, I know all this.’ The reporter mistook his polite and personal way of listening with not being knowledgeable. The most important thing in this whole story was the reaction of Newsweek, which stated that Bush acts ‘curious and polite,’ but it went on to say ‘hardly amazed.’ Michael Duffy of Time called the whole thing completely insignificant as a news event—prosaic polite talk. He said if anything, the president was bored. Bob Graham, who demonstrated the scanner for the president, said, ‘It’s foolish to think the president doesn’t know anything about grocery stores. He knew exactly what I was talking about.’ ”

Again, Kurtz explained how the media often assign narratives to people in public life and then look for stories or anecdotes to confirm those narratives. The example he cited was Vice President Quayle misspelling “potato” in a classroom, which was utterly insignificant in and of itself, but it tapped into the unfair “media narrative” that Dan Quayle was not an intellectual.

“In the case of President Bush,” he noted, “the media narrative at the time was, nice fellow, something of a patrician and a little out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans who have to worry about the price of a quart of milk. That’s why this scanner story took off like a rocket. It confirmed this media narrative about the president; and if the same thing had happened to some other presidential candidate, it probably wouldn’t even have rated a paragraph.”

Kurtz pursued the story-behind-the-story, and his story changed the tone of the coverage a little bit, but it could not slow down the tidal wave of debate about this one minor incident. In fact, the scanner reference continued to surface for years even after Dad left the White House—to his constant frustration. “I wrote Punch Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times,” said Dad. “I think this was the only such letter I wrote as president. I like Punch a lot, but he was not willing to do anything about the nasty Rosenthal piece.”

“The trouble is, it gets stuck in the computer, and it’s still there today,” Dad said. “It’s just manufactured news—fake history—but there’s no question that it hurt me a lot.”

Dan and Laverne Rostenkowski were in the White House residence visiting one afternoon with Mom and Dad when Millie and Ranger came into the room. Ranger went right up to the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and relieved himself on his shoe, hitting the pale carpet around it at the same time. Congressman Rostenkowski remembers, “The next thing I know, your dad’s got a steward in with some soapy liquid. He tells them to leave and your dad is on his hands and knees cleaning the carpet. And I said, ‘George, you’re president of the United States, you’re my president. Get off your darn knees.’ He said, ‘How can I ask a steward to clean up after the dog?’ ”

Later, Dad sent Congressman Rostenkowski a photo of them all at the scene of the crime, inscribed, “To Dan and Laverne. Watch out for that dog. Whoops! Anyway, welcome, welcome, welcome. George and Barbara.”

Speaking of dogs, Uncle Lou often dropped by Walker’s Point with his dog, Gilbert. Because Gilbert was a feisty little Jack Russell terrier, Uncle Lou was often discouraged from bringing the dog for visits.

When Gilbert died, Uncle Lou asked if everyone thought it would be okay for him to put flowers in the dog’s memory on the altar at church. No one knew what to say but thought it was ridiculous, so they told Uncle Lou he’d better check with Mom, who also loves dogs. He walked right into her bedroom without knocking and said, “Barbara, you love your dogs. Don’t you agree that I should put flowers on the altar in honor of Gilbert?” Mom said, “Louis, all I can say to you is, does Gilbert accept Jesus Christ as his Savior?” Louis turned on his heel, saying, “Damn you, Barbara!” and marched out, slamming the door behind him.

I think everybody was laughing, including Uncle Lou.

For both Republicans and Democrats, the first true battleground of the 1992 primaries was not Iowa, but rather New Hampshire. In Iowa, Dad’s organizational strength as an incumbent president was prohibitively strong, and such was certainly the case for the favorite Democratic son, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. Accordingly, most challengers chose not to invest precious time or dollars fighting losing battles there and instead went directly to New Hampshire.

What Iowa lacked in fireworks, New Hampshire more than made up for. First, spurred on by the conservative newspaper the Union Leader in Manchester, Pat Buchanan’s insurgent campaign—the so-called Buchanan brigades with their rhetorical “pitchforks”—was making inroads against Dad. Just two weeks after Pat declared his candidacy, in fact, one poll published in the Concord Monitor in late December had Dad leading 58 percent to 30 percent for Buchanan—an undeniably strong start for an upstart challenger.

“It was a real eye-opener,” Vice President Quayle recalled. “Not that it was fatal, because you can have these challenges and survive, but that was sort of the first sense that okay, this is going to be a tougher race than we had anticipated.”

Perhaps more sensationally, however, Governor Clinton’s campaign problems first surfaced in New Hampshire in mid-January and for a time overshadowed Dad’s troubles. One of Dad’s campaign managers, Fred Malek, recalled, “It was incredible. We thought Clinton was going to kill himself, go down with a lot of that stuff. We didn’t see how the hell he could survive. But, boy, he did.”

On the Republican side, meanwhile, Pat Buchanan won 37 percent in New Hampshire, which shocked and concerned all of us, and only added to the media feeding frenzy. All political hell broke loose that someone who had never run for office and had very little money could do so well against an incumbent president. After all, we were eleven months removed from the historic victory in the sands of Kuwait and not even two months removed from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the peaceful end of the Cold War. Dad had seemed almost invincible just a short time ago.

Buchanan’s campaign suddenly had life and his supporters were emboldened, but the candidate himself was realistic about his prospects moving forward.

“After New Hampshire, I hoped there would be talk that the president really didn’t want to run for a second term and that Mrs. Bush didn’t want him to run,” Buchanan said. “I couldn’t beat the president of the United States. My hope was maybe I could do like Gene McCarthy and do well in a very early primary—and then if President Bush, like Lyndon Johnson, decided not to run, it would be too late for anybody else to get in.”

The night after the New Hampshire returns hit the nation, Texas business magnate H. Ross Perot announced on CNN’s Larry King Live that if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all fifty states, he would run for president as an independent candidate. While the Buchanan candidacy had been somewhat surprising to Dad, Perot’s announcement was more of a disappointment. Dad and Ross had known each other for two decades, and during the 1970s Perot had obviously thought enough of Dad to offer him a job after he left the CIA.

Perot had served in the navy like Dad, before founding Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in Dallas in 1962. In 1979, he paid a team of former special ops people to rescue two EDS employees in a daring mission after they had been jailed in Iran over a contract dispute. During the 1980s, however, Perot had wanted to go to Southeast Asia to look for U.S. servicemen still missing from the Vietnam War. That request was nixed by the Reagan administration, and Dad volunteered to deliver the news—a decision he later regretted. In fact, Dad said, “Perot shot the messenger.”

As had Buchanan, Perot opposed the Gulf War—and he also had encouragement from an outside source (in Perot’s case, it was a new grassroots organization exasperated by congressional pay raises). For all of his business success, however, Perot had never run for public office at any level; and apparently even he wasn’t quite sure what to expect during his first foray onto the campaign trail.

“At the end of that first show, Perot asked me, ‘Do you think we’ll go anywhere?’” Larry King recalled. “And I said, ‘Who knows?’ Then suddenly it took off. The economy was in trouble, and along comes this little guy in Texas taking on the major parties. I think, frankly, had he not veered off and gone a little nuts, Ross might have won. He was in the right place, at the right time, and he has only himself to blame.”

To manage his campaign out of the gate, Perot tapped his lawyer from Dallas, Tom Luce, who first met Dad in the mid–1960s and was also friendly with my brother George. Unlike Mr. Perot, Tom did have campaign experience: he headed SMU Students for John Tower in 1961; he had worked for the state party; he had been chairman of several different candidates’ campaigns; and he had also run (unsuccessfully) for the Republican nomination for governor of Texas in 1990. Tom’s first job was trying to instill some kind of campaignlike organization on a candidate who also wanted to be his own campaign manager and press secretary.

“It was a very unconventional campaign, to say the least,” Luce said. “When I arrived at the headquarters to help him, there were 2,500 pending media requests and there was no staff whatsoever. So I was press secretary, campaign manager, and gradually we built up a little staff, but not much of one. As I say, Perot was a very unconventional candidate.”

Looking back, most outside observers—my brothers and I included—are convinced there was an undeniable vendetta element to the Perot candidacy. He seemed to have some unknown grudge against Dad.

Larry King said, “The president used to ask me every time, ‘What does Perot have against me? I knew him in Texas. I don’t know any reason why he would not like me.’ I would ask Perot, who said, ‘This is just politics. This is just agreement or disagreement.’ I don’t know that I ever believed that. Something happened with the president that turned Perot off him.”

Oddly enough, Perot’s antagonism was not as surprising to some of us as the betrayal of Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican operative. Ed’s wife, Sherry, had taken an important job as the director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, and that spring, Ed wrote Dad a very glowing letter expressing confidence he would be reelected and offering to help in any way possible. Within weeks, however, it was announced that he had joined forces with Jimmy Carter’s former chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, as one of the two new Perot campaign managers—and Sherry resigned her White House position against Dad’s wishes.

In February, Dad asked me to lead the presidential delegation to the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. I was really excited because I knew he had also asked his sister, Nancy Ellis, to go. Aunt Nan is one of my very favorite people—a dynamic woman with a magnetic personality. Her mannerisms remind me of Katharine Hepburn. A Yale friend of Dad’s, Osborne Day, was also in the delegation, so I knew it was going to be fun.

I was really surprised, however, when I heard who the remaining traveling squad would be: Hollywood stars Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith! Dad really liked both Melanie and Don. At one point, he had invited them to a state dinner, and Marvin was seated with Melanie. Afterward, she wrote Marvin a note, calling him “the sexiest dinner partner in town.” Marvin’s wife, Margaret, who was also at the dinner, immediately contacted Don and got him to write her a note, which read, “To the sexiest dinner partner in town—two can play at that game.”

We had an odd assortment of people going to Albertville. Only Dad would dream up an eclectic group like this, and off we went.

Albertville was a charming winter wonderland of a town filled with eighteen hundred athletes from sixty-four nations. We went from event to event all bundled up in our warmest winter wear, taking in the ski jumping, figure skating, ice hockey, bobsledding—always cheering on our American athletes.

While it was thrilling to be at the Olympics, I have to admit I was fascinated by Melanie and Don. One afternoon, our delegation was walking into one of the Olympic events. Even though I was the head of the delegation, it felt more natural to fall behind the movie stars as, let’s face it, they really were the center of attention. Everywhere they went, cameras flashed like crazy. Both usually wore long fur coats and wonderful fur hats, and Melanie very glamorously would hold her cigarette in a cigarette holder just like a Hollywood starlet. On this occasion, an eager young man came running up and asked if he could please have their autographs, to which Don responded in his most movie-star-like way, “Later, baby, we’re on a U.S. delegation.”

Dad liked sending family members on delegations to other nations because “it was something you could appoint family to without paying the price of nepotism. The U.S. must be represented and should be at the inauguration of presidents and funerals. Vice President Gore did not go to many funerals, and he made a huge mistake. It was at a funeral that I met Gorbachev—after Chernenko’s funeral—and I got to size him up for the president. And so delegations do some good. You can have a lot of bilateral meetings with other countries you can’t have if you just wait for them to come to Washington. I liked going on delegations for Reagan and I liked appointing delegations. Having said that, however, they don’t have an enormous influence on policy,” Dad told me.

Meanwhile, back at home, unbeknownst to me, Bobby had gone up to Camp David the Saturday after I left to ask Dad for my hand in marriage. Mom and Dad were thrilled and were touched that Bobby would make such an effort; and Bobby, for his part, remembers Mom calling him that morning to see if he was still coming because it was snowing that day.

Bobby drove up for the day and went straight to Aspen, the presidential cabin at Camp David. As he arrived, he remembers seeing Mom and Lud Ashley throwing on parkas and rushing out to take a walk. It was obvious to everyone why Bobby was there.

Dad was sitting in front of the TV flipping the channels when Bobby entered the room, and stopped to hear what Bobby had to say. Bobby remembers Dad shedding tears of happiness over the request and saying yes.

When I got back to the United States, Bobby took Sam, Ellie, and me out to dinner at the Congressional Country Club. After dinner, Bobby took us into a private room and proposed to all three of us! He gave me a diamond ring with three diamonds—one each for Sam, Ellie, and me. Upon hearing the proposal, Sam yelled, “Yessss!”

It was very sweet . . . and very unanimous!

On June 11, Mom and Dad traveled to Panama for the first time since the restoration of its democracy in early 1990. It was a hopeful time in Panama, and it was a positive first stop for Dad before he continued on to Rio de Janeiro for a contentious, politically charged United Nations conference on the environment.

At the time of Dad’s visit, the United States was viewed favorably by 80 percent of Panamanians, and friendly crowds lined the streets of Panama City as Mom and Dad’s motorcade drove past. Both Panamanian President Guillermo Endara and the Secret Service were worried about protests breaking out, but after a big lunch at the Presidential Palace Dad tried to put his host at ease, joked that the “tiny, tiny handful of people that are protesting . . . ought to go up to San Francisco and get an idea of what a real protest is like.”

After lunch, the Endaras and Dad and Mom went to a large outdoor event in the Plaza Porras—where some ten thousand Panamanians were waiting.

During the event, Mom remembered there were a few students throwing rocks and what they thought were firecrackers, followed by Panamanian troops firing tear gas out in the crowd. When the Secret Service heard what they believed to be gunshots, they evacuated my parents back through the arrival area into the armored limousines.

“When I approached the president about leaving, he didn’t want to because it would look bad,” said Special Agent and detail leader Rich Miller. “So I mentioned to him, ‘We really need to go because Mrs. Bush is on the stage with you, and we really need to get both of you back in there.’ That’s when it clicked for him, and we got up and evacuated back into the car.”

The next stop on the itinerary was a U.S. military base. Upon hearing that the motorcade route was free of problems, the agents sent half the motorcade ahead just to make sure it was clear. Then it was time for Mom and Dad to move.

Special Agent Miller recalled, “After we got in the car, I looked at President Bush and said, ‘We’re not going anywhere that President Endara can go because we were going to the airport to leave the country as scheduled.’ So the president looks at President Endara and very apologetically says, ‘You’ve got to get out.’ The guy looks at him like, really? I don’t think he wanted to get left behind, but he was fine.”

Now flash forward fourteen years. In February 2006, Dad went fishing in Panama with the president, Martín Torrijos, who was elected in 2004 and is the son of former president Omar Torrijos Herrera, killed by Manuel Noriega. While there, Dad learned that a woman named Balbina Herrera, who was in that 1992 audience—and who participated as tear gas against Dad was released—today serves in President Torrijos’s cabinet as minister of housing. Happily, she is now fully committed to democracy.

When Dad heard this, he immediately wrote her a note, dated February 15, 2006:

Dear Balbina,

Excuse my informality. I just want you to know that my eyeballs are clear now!

Just kidding! Everyone tells me you are doing a great job as a very popular minister who now supports your fine President.

I understand you met my son. Now how about meeting his father—I love Panama.

Good luck,

George Bush #41

Dad asked President Torrijos if he would give the note to the cabinet minister. President Torrijos said that he would not only give the note to the minister, he would read it aloud at the next cabinet session!

After a four-month engagement, Bobby and I were married on June 27. Because I had been married before, I wanted something low-key—definitely not a White House wedding. Yet Bobby had not been married, so I also wanted to make sure he had a proper ceremony and reception. We decided to be married at Camp David, where Mom and Dad had dedicated the beautiful new Evergreen Chapel just a year before.

The presidential retreat was first established in 1942 in the Catoctin Mountains near the little town of Thurmont, Maryland. That part of Maryland is always at least ten degrees cooler than Washington, and President Roosevelt enjoyed going there to escape the dreadful summer heat in our nation’s capital, which was deemed to be hard on his health. FDR soon dubbed the encampment Shangri-La.

In 1953, President Eisenhower renamed the retreat Camp David, after his grandson, and that name stuck until my brother Marvin mounted a modest campaign to have the retreat renamed, immodestly, after himself. In fact, he succeeded in convincing most members of our immediate family to refer to it as Camp Marvin, though for the record this remains strictly an informal designation.

Several months before the wedding, Mom took me to New York to buy a dress. We went to see Arnold Scaasi, who has made beautiful dresses for Mom for years. Arnold loved the rich and, in the case of my mom, the famous, and he excitedly pulled out bolts of beautiful fabric and draped them over the First Lady, settling on a lovely lilac lace fabric.

Then Arnold turned to me and said, “Oh yes, the bride . . .” Clearly, I was not as famous or interesting! Nevertheless, Arnold also made a beautiful dress for me: salmon chiffon on the bottom topped with lace.

There were also a few unplanned fashion statements made at our wedding. For example, unknown to us, Bobby’s brother Danny thought it would be funny to surreptitiously put Bush-Quayle ’92 stickers on the bottom of Bobby’s shoes, so when he knelt at the altar, he did a little campaigning on behalf of our ticket. We heard the laughter but didn’t know what was so funny until later.

Dad had forgotten to pack a suit and was forced to wear what he had in his closet—most notably a pair of white pants with a thin blue pinstripe, exactly like the New York Yankees wear!

I am biased, of course, but our wedding was beautiful. First, we were surrounded by our close friends and family members. Added to that, Camp David features breathtaking views of the Appalachian Valley as well as a variety of majestic trees. Idyllic is the word that comes to mind. All the cabins are named after trees, such as Birch, Dogwood, and Maple, and we held the reception behind Aspen, the president’s house, where tables were set on terraces on different levels and around the pool.

While guests mixed and mingled, a division of the Marine Band played country music. I will never forget the generosity of some of the White House personnel who came up to help that weekend. Because Camp David is run by a small detail of Marines primarily concerned with security, they didn’t have enough people there to man a wedding, so some of the White House butlers, Laurie Firestone from the Social Office, and others volunteered to help us. Looking back, I am still touched by their thoughtfulness.

Finally, I’ll always remember what George Hannie, one of the extraordinary butlers who works at the White House, said to me. As I was thanking him, George spoke up and said, “It’s okay, honey, but just don’t do it a third time!” Words to live by!

(Incidentally, one of the greatest joys of having the privilege to visit the White House regularly thanks to my brother George is being able to see the White House staff, many of whom are still there from Dad’s time as president.)

Unlike our very private wedding at Camp David, we held our rehearsal dinner on June 26 at the White House. Traditionally, the groom’s family hosts the rehearsal dinner, but the Kochs, who very much wanted to host it, understood that if Dad were to go someplace else, the entire press corps would have to go with him—and our private family event would have turned into a zoo. Since it was our desire to have a private wedding, it worked well to have the rehearsal dinner at the White House.

I remember wearing a long red chiffon dress that I had made for me. It still hangs in my closet, and if I cut myself in half, it might fit. The State Dining Room was decorated with red and pink flowers and pink tablecloths and looked as beautiful as at any state dinner. But the atmosphere was permeated by family and friends. There were some articles in the press that speculated on who would be at the wedding—which cabinet members and politicians around town. But we didn’t want a “Washington” wedding.

There were toasts and lots of exuberant laughter. Sam, Ellie, and I prepared a “rap” song that we sang to Bobby which wasn’t anything Snoop Dogg would approve of, to be sure. There was also dancing in the foyer to the music of the Marine Band. Known as the President’s Own, the U.S. Marine Band was established by Congress in 1798, making it the oldest musical organization in the United States. They are elegant and remarkable, and, as president, Dad loved the privilege of having them play at White House events.

Today, I often accompany out-of-town friends on the tour of the White House. Every once in a while, the tour guide will mention, among other things, that President George H. W. Bush’s daughter had her rehearsal dinner in the State Dining Room. Even now, when I hear it on the tour, it still seems as if they are talking about someone else.

Bobby’s being a member of the “loyal opposition” has certainly added spice to our marriage. Little did he know that he would be so outnumbered down the line by more governors and presidents! I know there have been awkward situations for Bobby to cope with over the years, but he has always handled it all with class and dignity. He has always been totally loyal to our family.

That doesn’t mean Bobby has placed his political convictions in a blind trust, however. While we have the usual arguments that all married couples have, I will confess that some of them have also crossed into politics. Bobby remains unconvinced of some of my positions, but I’m working on it!

As the 1992 campaign moved into summer, the two major party candidates were shifting gears from the primary season to the general election. Dad had soundly defeated Pat Buchanan, while Bill Clinton had outlasted Paul Tsongas and was in the process of finishing off his own tough-talking insurgent challenger, former California governor Jerry Brown.

It was the Perot campaign, however, that appeared to be on a roll as Memorial Day came and went. The Texas billionaire was at or near the top of every national poll, and his campaign was close to registering Perot in every state. The national media loved this remarkable, improbable development and lavished Perot with airtime and print coverage.

Yet, as soon as Perot was possibly poised to break the race wide open, the bottom fell out on his campaign. Several weeks’ worth of critical news stories throughout May and June started to take its toll on both the candidate and his standing with voters. Mr. Perot also reportedly balked at footing the bill for fundamental campaign staples such as TV advertising and yard signs. By the time the Democratic convention had started in New York in mid-July, Mr. Perot had dropped nine points in just the previous week alone—and the clash of egos and tempers at Perot headquarters boiled over, past the breaking point.

Some accounts suggested that Mr. Perot dropped out of the race because he realized that his continued success would mean his family would lose their privacy—a burden he did not want them to have to bear. If this is true, I can understand and respect that.

However, the official explanation he gave when he dropped out on July 16 was harder to follow. Mr. Perot said he was dropping out because it was clear that no one would win the election outright—which would, in turn, force the vote into the House of Representatives, delay the selection of the ultimate winner, and deny the new president adequate time to prepare the new administration. Such a development would be too disruptive to our political system, Perot said, and he did not want to contribute to that.

During all this, Dad was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with Jeb, Secretary Baker, and Jamie Baker for what had become his traditional getaway during the Democratic convention.

Meanwhile, Tom Luce, the lawyer for the now-defunct Perot campaign, decided to join Dad’s campaign. “I felt like I had discharged my obligation, if you want to call it that,” Tom Luce said. “I felt that I had done what I could do, and Ross Perot had decided to drop out of the race. I had no idea he was going to get back in the race, and in the meantime I’d committed to President Bush—so it was a simple proposition in my mind.

“My secretary came in and said, ‘The president is on the phone,’” Tom Luce recalled, “and I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ I thought it was one of my smart-aleck friends, but she was serious. I picked up the phone and the voice said, ‘Tom, this is George Bush.’ I kind of sat up straight in my chair and he said, ‘I’m in Jackson Hole fishing with Jim Baker and I just heard the news about Ross Perot, and I just want to tell you that I more than most people value loyalty. I know why you did what you did, and welcome back—no hard feelings.’”

Dad asked Tom and his wife, Pam, to come up to the White House after Perot dropped out. My brother George set up the meeting.

“We had dinner with President and Mrs. Bush, George W., and Nancy Ellis, and my wife in the upstairs dining room,” Tom said. “Then I went out on the Truman balcony, which was quite a thrill for me to talk to the president after dinner about what he called the Perot phenomenon.”

With Mr. Perot seemingly out of the race (at least until early October), the fall campaign appeared to be shaping up as a two-man showdown between Dad and Bill Clinton—and Dad’s campaign finally appeared to be getting traction. In July, they even managed to string together several days of positive coverage.

The Perot departure had created a void at exactly the moment the Democrats were conducting a successful convention in New York. To try and keep the Clinton campaign in check, Mary Matalin and Torie Clark on Dad’s campaign team started putting out what they called “a lie a day” items chronicling how Bill Clinton would say different things to different crowds to win their approval.

On August 3, they put out a press release that contained twenty or so statements, including one item calling attention to the fact that the Clinton campaign had paid $25,000 for investigators to contact several women with whom Governor Clinton allegedly had affairs. Mary and Torie thought this “bimbo eruption” issue was fair game, because taxpayer dollars were involved.

As soon as the press release went out, however, the national press corps went nuts. It was the first time either campaign had formally raised the infidelity issue, and, as a result, our campaign release dominated the network news coverage. Immediately, a number of people on both sides of the political aisle were calling for Mary’s head—Democrats outraged at what they said were “dirty tricks,” and Beltway Republicans upset that Dad had been knocked “off message” by the antics.

“I was utterly devastated,” Mary said. “Everyone at the White House wanted an apology, but that would have made the situation worse. So the president called me from Air Force One, and I couldn’t stop crying. He said, ‘Don’t cry. It’s okay. You were doing it because you were fighting. Just don’t do it again.’ The grass roots loved it because we were fighting back, but the Beltway crowd hated me for doing it.”

The next day at the White House, there was a meeting of the senior campaign staff in the Roosevelt Room. To Mary, it seemed that everyone at that meeting gave her the cold shoulder; but when Dad came into the room, he walked all the way around the table and gave Mary a big hug.

In the meantime, Governor Clinton had selected Tennessee Senator Al Gore as his running mate and started to make Vice President Quayle an issue in the campaign, suggesting that Quayle was not prepared to be president. By then, the vice president had endured the overdone “potato” flap, but he had also made his famous “Murphy Brown” speech defending traditional “family values” and attacking Hollywood for its corrosive influence on our culture. That speech elicited howls of protest from political opponents and most corners of the media, who said they didn’t need anyone from Washington lecturing them about values. Yet many of these same critics hailed President Clinton two years later when he made a similar speech about values in Memphis.

Nevertheless, some of Dad’s political people started to talk about whether or not to keep the vice president on the 1992 ticket, arguing that it might help my father’s poll numbers to get a new partner. Dad rejected this advice.

“You just don’t do stuff like that,” he told Mary Matalin.

That summer, historian David McCullough spoke at the White House about Teddy Roosevelt. Dad invited Senator Alan Simpson to stop by the Oval Office after the lecture, and the senator had something on his mind.

“Let me tell you what I see about this campaign,” the senator said. “When I’m through in this seven minutes or eight minutes, it might just be a rupture of our friendship. Stay out of the damn boat. Quit playing golf or you’ll have a whole lifetime of doing that. Let the people know who you really are. They don’t know who you are.”

Dad took off his glasses and began to chew on the temple of them. “Well, how do I do that?” he shot back.

“Just be the same guy with the people of the United States as you are with all of us in the Senate,” came the reply. “Write your own stuff.”

In the end, Dad reassured his friend, “I can see you’re very worried about me and the campaign. Don’t worry. I’m not worried. They’re never going to elect Bill Clinton to be president of the United States.”

On August 13, Dad walked into the White House press briefing room and announced that he had asked his secretary of state and friend of thirty-five years, Jim Baker, to resign from the Department of State and return to the White House as chief of staff. If there was any question that Dad was determined to give his all in the fall campaign, this announcement answered it.

At this point, Dad had been the target of an unending barrage of political attacks and negative media coverage for the better part of the previous year. He remained confident of his ultimate success as he geared up for the Republican convention in Houston. Yet we knew a tough road lay ahead, particularly as we watched Bill Clinton and Al Gore storming across the country on a bus tour that kept their positive press coverage going well after the final balloon drop at Madison Square Garden.

With Perot out, and the Clinton-Gore ticket surging, the Republicans gathered for their national convention in Houston. The task Dad’s team faced at the Houston Astrodome was no less daunting than the challenge they had confronted in New Orleans four years before—and hopes were high that Dad could produce a similar turnabout.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say, and how the Houston convention went depends on whom you ask. The media, which are invariably drawn to controversy and conflict, focused on Dad’s former primary opponents and made much of the more strident parts of Pat Buchanan’s otherwise strong speech—and that of Pat Robertson. We featured more than 120 speakers that week, but the media focused like a laser beam on but a handful of lines from two or three speakers.

In fact, when I saw the news coverage of the convention, I felt like I had attended an entirely different event. By contrast, I remember my young nephew George P. giving a speech he wrote himself, giving it very well, and punctuating it at the end with “Viva Bush!”

I remember Labor Secretary Lynn Martin talking about the increasing role of women, and President Reagan giving what would turn out to be his final major political speech, doing so in his usual classic style. Best of all, in my view, I saw Mom and Dad stand before America that week and paint a positive, inclusive, and hopeful picture of the future. They were funny and warm, and, media coverage notwithstanding, they closed the gap with the Clinton-Gore ticket as they rolled out of Houston.

The battle had been joined, but Dad still had his work cut out for him.

During the first week in September, Dad traveled to Chicago, arriving at a hotel on South Michigan Avenue for a fund-raiser that evening. That afternoon, the director of political affairs at the White House, Ron Kaufman, ran into Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde, who had been trying to get ahold of someone at the campaign or at the White House.

It turns out that, in the same hotel that same night, the Catholic League of Illinois was having its annual Man of the Year dinner in the ballroom downstairs. Many church leaders from Illinois and throughout the Midwest would be there. The Midwesterners would be there to honor Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who was one of the few pro-life leaders in the Democratic Party. In fact, Governor Casey had been denied a speaking role at the Democratic convention in New York because of his views on abortion, and as such was one of the few Democratic governors who had not endorsed Bill Clinton. (One of the others, Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer, would endorse Dad later in the campaign.)

To Ron, stopping by this Catholic event was a no-brainer—a huge opportunity the campaign should not pass up. There was some back-and-forth as to scheduling a drop-by, but Ron thought, no problem, we’ll go down after our event. “We finish our event,” Ron said, “and I said, ‘Okay, let’s go downstairs,’ and I was voted down—‘No, we can’t go, we’re leaving.’ We never went. Bill Clinton’s campaign would have had him go downstairs, work every hand in that room, and kiss every nun twice on the cheek—but for some reason, we didn’t. That’s just how bad the 1992 campaign was.”

Just as Dad had brought Secretary Baker back to the White House to help him for the stretch run in 1992, the decision was also made to make Sig Rogich, the 1988 media consultant who had recently been appointed ambassador to Iceland, a similar offer he could not refuse.

In fact, Sig was back in Washington getting ready to return to Iceland when Secretary Baker called and said he wanted Sig to come back and run the media for the campaign.

Sig recalled protesting at first: “I said, ‘I can’t do that. I moved everything—my clothes, my car.’ To which Jim said, ‘Well, I just got off the phone with the Old Man [which is what Secretary Baker called Dad in private]. Why don’t you tell him you can’t do it? Just put me on hold and call him—it won’t take very long!’ Well, Baker knew I would never do that.”

After attending a White House meeting that night, Sig went to the headquarters the next morning and fired almost everybody on the campaign advertising staff. From there, Sig moved into a D.C. hotel and, from September through election day, never took a day off.

“When I came back to help the campaign of the president of the United States, we had two or three commercials in the can—and that’s it. We were almost into September,” Sig told me. Over the next thirty days, we produced forty TV commercials and probably three hundred radio commercials. None of that was done before, because nobody could make a decision on the advertising. It was run by committee to a degree that we just didn’t get anything done.”

On October 1, Ross Perot reentered the race, naming retired navy admiral James Stockdale as his running mate. The Texas billionaire also announced he would run a series of thirty-minute infomercials on the economy.

Perot’s “October Surprise” came in time to get him in the three televised presidential debates that month. Meanwhile, Dad has always maintained he hated debates—“too much showbiz,” he said. The three-way debates with Perot and Clinton did little to change his view. During the Richmond, Virginia, debate on October 15, for example, Dad checked his watch at one point, which commentators and political opponents pounced on to suggest Dad wasn’t interested in fighting for the American people. Twelve years later, at the dedication of Bill Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock, Dad confessed that when he looked at his watch, he was actually “wondering when Ross Perot would be done speaking.”

Perhaps the best summation of the final stages of the 1992 campaign appropriately came from David Bates, who had started with Dad as his traveling aide back when he was an asterisk in 1978 and was cabinet secretary in 1992:

It was a painful experience because all the cards were stacked against him. Plus his campaign, the White House, everybody, including me, should have and could have done a better job for him. Everything was unfortunately breaking against him. The economy was perceived to be much worse than it actually was. The economy was coming back and getting stronger, but it was not really apparent to people at that point.

It was almost as if it was destined not to be. He had done such a great job in foreign policy. The Cold War ended without a shot being fired. Desert Storm had gone so well. He booted Saddam out of Kuwait. Germany was unified. All the foreign policy issues were off the table. I mean, that was apparent to the average person. It was a very similar situation to Churchill after World War II when he was voted out. He was a victim of his own success: World War II ended, he had led extremely ably during World War II. Then when the war was over, the British people turned to a younger, more energetic person [Clement Atlee] who was talking more about the domestic economy. They turned Churchill out.

Buchanan ran against the president in the primaries and basically called him a liar, which hurt. You had Clinton there talking, and the media repeating everything Clinton said, “worst economy since the Great Depression.” That was kind of a preposterous claim—one of the big lies of the 1992 campaign—but you had Clinton out there saying, “I’m going to focus on the economy like a laser beam.”

Then you had Perot, who got 19 percent of the vote. Most of those voters came from us.

To this day, I am certain that he could have won but for Lawrence Walsh indicting Caspar Weinberger [for the Iran-Contra affair] the Friday before the election. I remember that Friday morning we had a campaign stop in St. Louis with Governor [John] Ashcroft, and the Democratic governor of Maryland, Governor Schaefer. It was really big news, and we were really moving. I heard Jim Baker say on the Wednesday before the election he thought we were going to win it, because we were moving up. Clinton was losing support. The theme about trust was really working, and I think a lot of doubts were starting to creep in about Clinton.

Fred Steeper, the pollster on that Friday morning before the campaign, had it dead even in terms of his overnight tracking numbers. Of course, to get dead even, we were coming up and Clinton was losing support. And a CNN poll of likely voters that same morning had us back minus one. And then at 11:00 a.m. the independent counsel looking into the Iran-Contra affair, Lawrence Walsh, announced his indictment of Caspar Weinberger for allegedly lying to investigators, and the main exhibit was some note saying Bush was in the loop. It was awful. That weekend was absolutely awful.

From that point on, noon until election day, it was nonstop coverage about Iran-Contra. And I remember that Friday night in Wisconsin, we did Larry King Live, and George Stephanopoulos somehow got his call through—surprise, surprise.

It was a Thursday before the campaign, and we were at the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at an event with the former president, and Baker said that he was walking by the press bin and [ABC reporter] Ann Compton said, “How are you feeling, Secretary Baker?” And he said, “We feel good, we’re moving.” And she said, “I know, but I don’t think it’s going to last.” And then the next morning, boom.

To give you an idea of the impact of the Walsh indictment: on October 30, five days before the election, Andy Card—then secretary of transportation who had just come back from managing the federal response to Hurricane Andrew in Florida—jumped on a small plane with Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin, Secretary of Energy Jim Watkins, and Republican National Committee Chairman Rich Bond to do airport rallies in swing states. They were supposed to do four events in Ohio, three in Michigan, and end up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

At the first stop, the troupe landed at the airport on the West Virginia side of the river, but the event was actually in Ohio. They got off the plane, did a press conference, went to a little rally, then got back on the plane and flew to the next city.

“We get off the plane, and the first question at the press conference was on the Iran-Contra special prosecutor,” Andy remembered. “It’s like you hit the brick wall. All the momentum goes. So everything that you want to talk about is gone because it’s all Iran-Contra. It was very demoralizing.”

They did that first rally, then we went to the next stop in Columbus, Ohio. There it was the same deal—everyone interested in Lawrence Walsh. By the time they reached Dayton, Ohio, Secretary Martin said, “This is not working. I’m not going to get back on the plane. I’m going back to Washington.”

By the time they reached Cleveland, Jim Watkins said, “This isn’t working,” and he, too, left. Long story short: all the positive momentum that we had all felt on Thursday was gone by Saturday morning.

“You talk about a politically timed indictment, but I didn’t say it then,” Dad said. “Don’t blame somebody else. Just get along about your business. But that was a cruel blow by a special prosecutor who I’m afraid I don’t respect for no other reason than that one reason.”

To add to our woes, the actual indictment was handled by a San Francisco trial lawyer named James J. Brosnahan, who worked for the independent counsel and who had a long record of making political contributions to Democratic presidential candidates and other liberal causes. In fact, Federal Election Commission records show that Mr. Brosnahan made a $1,000 contribution to the Clinton/Gore campaign on October 29, 1992, the day before Weinberger was indicted.

The Halloween before the election, we were living in Bethesda, Maryland. Sam and Ellie were attending public school, and I went to their yearly Halloween parade, standing with all the other parents watching the kids march by on the blacktop. Suddenly, I saw one of the students marching with a Clinton-Gore sign. Looking closer, I saw the student had a clown suit on and a George Bush mask. Some of the parents nearby chuckled.

I stood there without expression but was dying inside. I remember feeling so hurt and thinking how insensitive it was to Sam and Ellie. Throughout this awful campaign, they often got comments from other children, parroting their own parents. One time, Ellie took a paintbrush with red paint and ran it right down the face of a classmate who told her that her grandfather was going to lose. She was only five years old; and while she didn’t understand the politics, she was hurting.

When someone you love is in political office, politics are personal. There is no way around that. We, as a family, are fiercely loyal, and whether you are five or thirty-three, as I was in 1992, those kinds of cruel moments cut the deepest.

As they neared the final stop of the 1992 campaign, Air Force One was dropping into Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on November 2 for Dad’s second-to-last campaign rally—coming in from Kentucky before moving on to Houston for the night. It was late afternoon, and the Oak Ridge Boys were on the plane. Mary Matalin and Ron Kaufman were sitting up front with Dad.

“For the president, the Oaks did a medley of gospel songs a capella, ending with ‘Amazing Grace,’” Ron recalled. “As they sang ‘Amazing Grace,’ everyone in the place started to cry—not bawling crying, just tearing. It was clear we were going to lose, and it was all over. It had been a long campaign, and that was the first time we actually admitted to ourselves, even semiprivately, that this is over.” Dad thinks he and Mary Matalin were probably the only two people who still thought we would win.

As sad as that time was, we still found ways to laugh as a family. On election night, for example, we all gathered in Dad and Mom’s suite to watch the returns. We were in the living room, and Mom was in the bedroom reading a romance novel. Things were not looking good at all, casting a pall over the room. Periodically, however, Mom would walk into the room and say, “What’s it like to drive a car?” and then walk back out. A few minutes later, she came in and asked, “How do you buy an airplane ticket?” and then walked back out and read her book.

It really made us laugh. She was trying to lighten things up.

There was no taking the bone-jarring hurt out of the final 1992 results. It just hurt, and it hurt a lot. As a family, we had tasted political defeat in the past—but together, we had never endured an uglier, more disappointing, and ultimately helpless year than 1992. We saw a good man, and a great leader, brought down by distortion, innuendo, and fabrication.

That night, Governor Clinton became the first candidate since Richard Nixon in 1968 to win the presidency with less than 50 percent of the popular vote. Still, he won almost 45 million votes to Dad’s 39 million and, most important, the 370 electoral votes he and his supporters needed, to Dad’s 168, to claim the White House.

As a family, our eyes were wide open: after Dad’s twelve years of success at the highest level, we knew that presidential politics was, and still is, a rough neighborhood. And as always, Mom and Dad kept us grounded during this difficult time—just as they had through the heady times. When the moment came to concede, we stood together, as always.

“Everybody had gone out onstage—all the family was out there—and the president was about to be announced,” Joe Hagin recalled. “We were in the offstage announcement area waiting to go out. David Bates, the announcer, and I were the only people standing back there with him. David and I were both crying. The president reached out and grabbed us both by the neck, one in one hand and one in the other. He said, ‘Boys, don’t worry about this. It’s been a heck of a ride.’”

With that, Dad walked out and gave his concession speech. Offstage, Joe regained his composure and surveyed the scene. “I watched a big Secret Service agent at the front, standing there stiffly. About halfway through the speech, I saw a big tear run down his face—which shows how much the Secret Service loved him, and still love him.”

Without question, November 1992 had to be the worst month of Dad’s life, but not because it was the month he lost the presidential election: rather, it was the month he lost his dear, sweet, amazing mother. As Dad wrote to Lady Bird Johnson a few weeks later, she was “our leader, our compass, our family’s best person.”

I went with my dad to Greenwich to visit his mother the day she died, November 19. I remember the date clearly because it was Ellie’s eighth birthday. I had planned an afternoon swim party for Ellie with many of her classmates from Westbrook Elementary School. Dad called me the day before, however, and said, “Your grandmother is very, very sick and I’m going up to say good-bye. I want you to come.” Dad knew how much I loved her and how honored I was to carry her name.

More important, I knew how much Dad loved her. Dad needed someone to be his emotional support that day, but he picked the wrong person. When I saw my grandmother in the last stages of death, both Dad and I wept unabashedly. It’s still moving to think I was there when my father said good-bye to his mother, the woman who had the biggest impact on his life. I believe that to be true because my dad’s life was not defined by the political system he navigated, but by the set of beliefs his mother taught him. To be kind and thoughtful and to think of the other person. To live a life of service and to honor God.

Leaving Ganny’s bedside that day was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. We went back to Washington—Dad to his final days as president, and me to Ellie’s party. That day at 5:05 p.m., Mom got a message from Patty Presock that read:

Nan Ellis just called. Mrs. Bush Sr. died 5 minutes ago. I thought you might want to tell the President.

Nan Ellis said that Mrs. Bush Sr. was waiting for the President and after he left today, she just let go.

If you learn by example, my grandmother set the best there could be—and Dad absorbed every bit of it. Dad and I knew that day that Ganny went to heaven as she had been preparing to do. Consider what she observed when she wrote her own eulogy years before her death on April 17, 1981:

This is a service of gratitude to God for the easiest life ever given to anyone to live on this earth and all because of LOVE. From my mother’s knee I learned to know Jesus and that He would always be with me if at night in bed I would just tell Him any mean, selfish, even untrue things I had done during the day, He would lift them from my mind and I would awake refreshed, and later along the way if there was a steep incline, He would take my hand and help me up the hill. How right she was.