Chapter 23

THE SPRING COLT

“This is history—the likes of which I have never seen, and nobody else has. As you know, George Bush landed safely. Then, in a few hours, he was off for Spain with his grandson, and then to Rome to see the Pope, and then he was coming back and going to Latin America, and he was going to play golf at Augusta after the tournament was over. The life goes on. An amazing little vignette in this quite remarkable man, whatever your politics are.”

—Hugh Sidey after Dad’s first parachute jump in 1997

On January 6, 1995, Mom and Dad reached a proud family milestone when they privately celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in Sea Island, Georgia—returning for only the second time to the spot where they honeymooned half a century prior. There they played golf and dined with friends Louise and Bill Jones.

When my parents returned from that weekend getaway, they attended a grander anniversary celebration at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville that included our family—with all thirteen grandchildren (the fourteenth, my daughter Georgia Grace or “Gigi,” named for her grandfather, would arrive a year later)—and extended political family, as well as my parents’ friends from the entertainment industry. The program that night featured a heavy emphasis on country music stars like Vince Gill, the Oak Ridge Boys, Lee Greenwood, and Loretta Lynn. Roger and Natalie Whittaker also flew in from England, and some of Dad’s political colleagues such as Lamar Alexander, Sonny Montgomery, and Marilyn Quayle offered very kind remarks about the strength of my parents’ marriage.

“One might say that the catalyst in their marriage is humor,” said my Uncle Johnny Bush. “They can tease and scold and banter and laugh. Even when crushed by the loss of a child, they could still find ways to laugh. Through life of constant change and uncertainty, of raising five children, frequently moving from one location to the next, of supporting her husband through over thirty years of the vicissitudes of political life, Barbara has ever and always been able to make a home for him, and in that home there is always laughter.”

Adding to the laughter in their home early in 1995 was the fact that Outlaw Biker magazine named Mom their “Biker Babe of the Century” and described her as a “classy broad.” That gave Mom, and Dad, plenty to talk about as they continued to crisscross the country giving speeches, helping a number of charitable causes, and pursuing other interests. In 1994 alone, in fact, Dad gave 111 speeches, campaigned for forty-eight candidates, traveled to twenty-two foreign countries, and visited more than half of the U.S. states.

“It’s amazing,” my brother Neil observed. “I love the fact that they’ve always been so active. They’re both so youthful in their minds—proof that age is just a number. Dad worries about losing his memory, but he’s got a better memory than I have now—and I think it’s because they just keep moving forward, always looking ahead.”

Meanwhile, the festivities from Mom and Dad’s fiftieth anniversary were just settling down when it was time for the family to reconvene again—this time in Austin to see my brother George sworn in as the governor of Texas. I remember we all gathered in George’s very ornate, new office in the State Capitol in Austin.

Mom remembers, “It was one of life’s happiest moments. I was truly touched to see George’s friends from Midland, Houston, Yale, and some from Andover. And there were Laura’s friends from Austin, SMU, Houston, and Midland. That day, I took the two of them off my worry list. Faith, family, and friends are the things that allow one to accept challenges. George and Laura have all three.”

Jeb, for his part, returned to Florida, where he was already the presumed GOP front-runner for the 1998 gubernatorial race. He continued working with state Republican leaders on issues ranging from “truth in sentencing” laws—making sure criminals serve at least 85 percent of their jail time—to promoting charter school education around the state. Speaker of the Florida House John Thrasher noticed that Jeb was so active, so visible, and so effective at shaping legislation that he was like a “phantom governor.”

On April 1995, a truck bomb exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, destroying the building, killing 168 people, and wounding hundreds more. Among the dead that day was a federal agent named Al Wicher who had served on Dad’s Secret Service detail. Agent Wicher was a husband, father, and son—and that personal connection to the tragedy only added to the shock that Dad, and all of us, were feeling during that time.

The Oklahoma City blast occurred on the second anniversary of the unsuccessful federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of seventy people, including a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent named Steve Willis. Dad attended Agent Willis’s funeral in 1993. What’s more, immediately after the highly controversial ATF raid in Waco, Clinton Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen named Dad’s former Secret Service lead agent and friend John Magaw to head the ATF.

Given Dad’s connection to Agent Wicher and the ATF, Dad was deeply offended shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing when he received a solicitation letter from the National Rifle Association (NRA) referring to federal agents as “jack-booted thugs” and describing them as “wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.” Though he was a lifelong member of the NRA, Dad was galled by such reckless language and tactics—attacking the reputation of our nation’s law enforcement officers to raise money. The letter was so offensive, in fact, that Dad fired off a letter to the NRA’s president resigning his membership effective immediately. “I have long supported many things the NRA supports,” Dad told me, “but this excessive anti-law enforcement rhetoric was too much for me.”

Dad’s resignation made national news, and the NRA’s defenders—of which there are many in Washington and elsewhere around the country—accused Dad of grandstanding to get a good headline or two. Nothing could be further from the truth. He simply could not stand by while some of the finest professional men and women he knew, with whom he worked on a personal basis, had their character dragged through the gutter.

It’s a common refrain throughout Dad’s life.

“The L-word, ‘loyalty,’ that’s what they’ll put on his tombstone,” said Senator Al Simpson. “Loyalty to President Reagan, loyalty to his country, loyalty to his family, loyalty to his friends regardless of the consequences . . . Show George Bush a fallen dove—unless he shot it, of course—and he will go fluff the poor bird up and put it back on its feet again . . . You would want him on your side.”

In 1996 Dad’s friend, Illinois Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, saw his forty-two-year career in public service come to an end when he pleaded guilty to two charges of mail fraud related to his congressional office. In July of that year, Congressman Rostenkowski was sent to a federal prison hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was treated for cancer and then transferred to the federal jail in Oxford, Wisconsin, in December. (In December of 2000, President Clinton pardoned him.)

During his seventeen months of incarceration, the former chairman of the powerful U.S. House Ways and Means Committee lost sixty-five pounds—but he was also reportedly not enthusiastic about receiving visitors. That didn’t stop Dad from reaching out to his former colleague from Capitol Hill.

“Danny told me the story about your father calling the jail saying he wanted to talk to Rostenkowski,” former Illinois congressman Marty Russo told me. “One of the officials told him, ‘We don’t allow calls in.’ So your dad said, ‘I’m President Bush. I want to talk to him.’ They had to get the warden on the phone, who said, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. President.’”

“Danny called me and said, ‘You know what, that gives you the measure of the man,’” Congressman Russo continued. “Of course he was former president at the time, but Danny said, ‘The president calls me, puts his prestige on the line to talk to me. That’s the kind of friend he is. He never forgets his friends no matter what.’ It was a really emotional thing for Danny to tell me that story.”

When Dad was president, his perpetual penchant for inviting groups of people to come for a movie or stay for dinner or overnight didn’t cause much trauma in the Bush household because Mom and Dad had the White House staff and Laurie Firestone to help magically transform these spur-of-the-moment whims of a restless mind into a seamless reality.

After he left the White House, of course, Mom and Dad no longer had the same number of hands to facilitate Dad’s voracious appetite for entertaining—an appetite that only grew more ravenous when my parents reach Maine for the summer. It got to the point that Mom joked she runs the busiest bed-and-breakfast in Maine, and she may actually be right!

The guest list over the course of a typical summer ranges from family, to former and current heads of state, to pro athletes, to members of the Bush extended political family, to anyone else Dad has encountered along the way. In going through Dad’s personal files, I found literally hundreds of notes to people that included an invitation of one kind or another: “We won’t take no for an answer,” he’ll write. “It would be a joy to see you.” Or simply, “Come see us.”

Jean Becker, Dad’s chief of staff for the last twelve years, aptly describes Dad as a “tumbleweed.”

“He just collects people as he goes long,” Jean explained. “I’ve often wondered how frustrating it must be for the kids and grandkids, brothers and sister, and nephews and nieces who really are his family, because you think you’re going to spend some time with him and suddenly there’s thirteen other people there at the table, or four other people in the boat. He adopts everybody.”

We call some of these people “brothers from another mother.” The truth is, while Dad’s collection of friends grew, our circle of friends widened as well—and our lives are far richer today for it.

For the Fourth of July holiday in 1995, Dad invited Vaclav Havel, who had recently stepped down as president of Czechoslovakia, to Walker’s Point for the festivities. Also invited were Governor Jock McKernan and his wife, Senator Olympia Snowe.

All during dinner, Dad was lobbying Mom to take the dinner group out on the boat after supper to watch the fireworks, but Mom was resisting. She would vary her response from questioning the logistics of moving so many people onto the boat, to the dampness and chill in the air, to changing the subject altogether, saying she preferred to watch them from the house.

“Finally, getting nowhere with Mrs. Bush,” recalled Governor McKernan, “the president stated in a loud voice that he thought the guest of honor, President Havel, should make the decision on whether the group watched the fireworks from the boat or from the house. A hush came over the room, and President Havel, without missing a beat, responded, ‘It is always difficult to choose between two worthy options. And while I, personally, would side with the president in viewing the fireworks from the boat, I believe it would be more appropriate for the group to accede to the wishes of our hostess and view them from the house.’”

As disappointed as Dad was, he led the applause for such a diplomatic response.

In October 1995, Dad and his Presidential Library Foundation hosted their first event in Colorado Springs—a forum called “A World Transformed: Our Reflections on the Ending of the Cold War.” Journalist Hugh Sidey was there in the audience:

I went up to a conference that former President Bush had in Colorado Springs on ending the Cold War. He had Gorbachev there—naturally, President Gorbachev talked too much, but it was nice to have him there; he was very central in that operation. There was Margaret Thatcher, who sat three hours with her ankles, her thighs, her knees, pressed together and her hands folded. British discipline. I was absolutely amazed. And there was George Bush, looking a little more grandfatherly, a little tummy there, coming up with a little more gray hair, and Mitterrand was still alive. He was a little green at that point, and he was dying. But he was still funny; he had that Gallic sense of humor. And there was Mulroney—I didn’t know till I got up that close to him how much like Jay Leno he appeared. You know, he’s got that big jaw. They talked all morning long, these people who had brought this about. And then it suddenly occurred to me as I watched that every single one of them had been punished by the political system that they supported: Bush, defeated; Mitterrand was in hot water over there; Margaret Thatcher, out, criticized; Mulroney, same thing; Gorbachev, defeated. Isn’t that an irony? The people in this public life.

A week later, I was back in Washington, and I went to the funeral of a friend of mine, John Scali, who used to be the U.N. representative under Nixon. And there in front of the church was the gathering—he was also, as you know, an ABC correspondent—of the hierarchy of television. Goodness, there was Roone Arledge, and there was Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts and Ted Koppel and Peter Jennings. They were all gorgeous, I mean, they had Phoenix tans and a few of them had chin tucks, and Sam’s toupee was on straight. But the sense of power and position and prestige in this group was unmistakable. I was talking to a friend of mine and I said, “Last week, I was with the people that did all the heavy lifting, and they were uncertain and a little frayed at the edges, to be honest with you. But here is this group. What is happening in our society, and in our culture, and in our politics?

Dad had broken ground on his presidential library at Texas A&M a year before that conference, and on November 6, 1997, Mom and Dad celebrated the dedication of the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University with President and Mrs. Clinton, President and Mrs. Ford, President and Mrs. Carter, Nancy Reagan, Lady Bird Johnson, former world leaders such as Lech Walesa of Poland and Toshiki Kaifu of Japan, movie stars like Kevin Costner, former cabinet and staff members, and an estimated 25,000 other friends, relatives, and Aggies.

Both Jeb, as the president of the Library Foundation, and George W., as the host governor, addressed the sun-splashed crowd; and when it came time for Dad to speak, the first thing he did was apologize to his mother in heaven.

“She always told me, ‘Don’t be a braggadocio, George. Nobody likes braggadocios,’” Dad recalled. “I worried how she would feel about our library, because it is a bit of an ego trip—I mean, most of the pictures and exhibits are about me.”

That same fall, in September 1997, Mom and Dad also celebrated the dedication of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. Together with the library, the Bush School has become a consuming passion for Dad. He loves the spirit of the campus, the Corps of Cadets, and the friendly manner of the students. He loves their commitment to excellence and traditions and was devastated when a massive log pile for the traditional student bonfire—a tradition ninety years old at the time—collapsed inward in November 1999, killing twelve Aggie students.

Every semester, Dad invites Bush School students to the cozy apartment he and Mom have on campus or goes into a classroom and lets them ask him any question they want for as long as they want. Dad has also brought a lot of prominent political figures and business leaders from across the country and around the world to the A&M campus for the widest variety of events—speeches, conferences, award ceremonies.

“He’s here quite a bit from October to May,” said Texas A&M President Bob Gates, who also served as Dad’s NSC deputy and CIA director. One time, for example, Dad called Bob and asked him to go to lunch in the cafeteria in the Memorial Student Center—in the heart of campus, the busiest spot and at the busiest time.

So Dad and Bob Gates walked into the cafeteria right at lunchtime, and people turned and looked and couldn’t believe he was there. The twosome fetched their trays, got in line, and Dad got the barbecue plate.

By the time they made it through the food line and to the cash registers, word had spread and the cafeteria became kind of a mob scene. Dad didn’t want to sit at a table for two because that was too exclusive, and there weren’t any tables for four, so they sat at a table for six. Instantly, four guys from the Corps of Cadets plopped down their trays and never moved the entire rest of the lunch.

“I’ll bet President Bush signed two hundred autographs while he was eating, and probably took twenty-five or thirty pictures,” Bob Gates said. “Kids had cameras in their backpacks for reasons I don’t understand, and he even talked to a couple of moms on cell phones. How he actually finished his meal while he did all that other stuff was a real trick.”

Dad also draws a crowd of Aggies whenever he does one of several things: goes to the recreational center on campus to work out, attends one of the many sporting events he and Mom support each year . . . or jumps out of a perfectly good airplane.

Since Dad’s parachute jumps, people have asked when he became such a daredevil. He has always loved driving his boat fast, but something changed during a trip to Puerto Rico in the mid–1990s.

“I thought I had a rein on your father and his penchant for pushing the limits of personal safety until he announced he was going hang gliding into the sea,” recalled Jim Pollard, who led Dad’s post-White House Secret Service detail for several years. “This event was a ‘not normal operation’ according to Service Service standards, so we set up an elaborate contingency plan to protect the president in case something went wrong. All went well, but what I did not know at that time was that this event was only the warm-up of ‘not normal’ things to come.”

What really got people scratching their heads was when they first heard that Dad planned to make a parachute jump in March 1997. The month before, my father had dropped by a meeting of the International Parachute Association in Houston to see a friend, Chris Needels, who convinced Dad it was easy and safe. That visit rekindled a deep desire Dad had harbored since he was shot down in World War II.

When he was shot down in September 1944, that parachute jump was decidedly not a voluntary effort. Not only did his two crew members die, but Dad was also injured as he exited the plane. He had pulled the rip cord too early. He received a glancing blow to his head, while the chute itself had ripped when it got caught on the horizontal stabilizer; it therefore did not open fully—making for an accelerated fall into the sea.

Dad told me he wanted to make another jump in part “to show that old guys can still do stuff.”

To realize his goal, however, Dad would have to win converts to his cause—and overcome the objections of family members who thought we were saving him from himself. To their credit, each of my brothers understood this desire immediately when Dad called, even if they couldn’t refuse teasing Dad about having a midlife crisis at age seventy-three.

“Fine, Dad,” said Jeb, “but don’t change your sexual preference.”

“That’s great,” said the governor of Texas, “but don’t tell anyone about your eighteen-year-old girlfriend.”

I’m afraid I was less reassuring. When Dad called to tell me the news, my first reaction was, “Oh, Dad, do you have to do this?”

“Yes, Doro,” he replied. “I’m going to do it, and don’t you tell anybody.”

“Do you think I’d tell anybody this?” I gasped in disbelief. Little did I know that he’d take up parachuting as a hobby in his seventies and eighties.

Even General Denny Reimer, then the head of the army, checked in with Dad to make sure he was aware of the risks. Fully satisfied after their phone visit, General Reimer said, “I hope this doesn’t lead to my getting a call from Strom Thurmond next week.”

Dad’s jump was being sponsored by the U.S. Parachute Association, but would be held at the army base in Yuma, Arizona, and coordinated with the U.S. Army Golden Knights, the elite parachute team. On March 25, 1997, Dad jumped out solo at 12,000 feet and fell down to 4,500 feet at 120 mph.

Dad’s good friend Hugh Sidey watched with Mom from the ground below: “We’re out in the desert and he’s up above us. He’s in a parachute, and Barbara Bush is below. President Bush brought along his orthopedist, just in case, and so we’re standing down there in the desert, watching the president of the United States descend in a parachute. And the doctor turned to me and said, ‘You’ve probably seen this before.’ And I said, ‘Are you kidding? This is history, the likes of which I have never seen, and nobody else has.’ ”

Dad still jokingly says that when safely on the ground, he asked Mom what she thought. Mom said, “I haven’t seen a free fall like that since the ’92 election!”

The jump made worldwide news, and soon Dad was hearing from friends around the globe. Most important, we thought he had maybe “exorcised the demon” and gotten this urge out of his system.

We should have known better.

Two years later, Dad celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in June by making a second jump—this time at his library at College Station. The second skydive was dubbed Operation Spring Colt, and after his chute opened, it read “Making Cancer History: M. D. Anderson.”

The jump did not go smoothly. Dad was tumbling and on his back for most of the free-fall descent. One of the Golden Knights, also in a free fall, helped Dad get into the proper position just seconds before it was time to open his chute. No one on the ground could tell this, but the film taken by an army parachutist shows the whole fall in frightening detail. When asked about it later on, Dad mischievously said, “Only my laundryman knows!”

Our whole family had arrived in Houston the day before for Dad’s seventy-fifth birthday dinner with seven hundred of Mom and Dad’s friends and an extravaganza for a thousand more featuring Bruce Willis, Van Cliburn, Larry Gatlin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other stars. The entire weekend raised over $10.2 million for M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Dad first joined the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center Board of Visitors in 1977, when he and Mom moved back to Houston at the start of the Carter administration. Since losing Robin, Mom and Dad have both always had an interest in helping in the fight against cancer, and M. D. Anderson had a sterling reputation as a world leader in cancer research and treatment. When my parents returned to Washington in the Reagan administration, however, Dad temporarily resigned from the board—but that didn’t stop him from donating the proceeds from his 1987 campaign biography, Looking Forward, to the hospital.

After the White House, Dad reconnected with the Board of Visitors and became increasingly drawn into its work—or make that pulled. Around the time of his seventy-fifth birthday and this second parachute jump, the head of M. D. Anderson, Dr. John Mendelsohn, approached Dad about becoming chairman of the Board of Visitors. “We explained to him that becoming chairman involved two years as the vice chairman, then two years as chairman-elect, and then two years as chairman. So it’s a six-year deal.”

Upon hearing of the six-year commitment, Dad turned to Jean Becker and kiddingly said, “This is harder than being president!” But he agreed to accept the appointment.

Over the years, Dad has raised literally tens of millions of dollars for M. D. Anderson. He attends many events at the hospital, and he hosts an annual fund-raiser for the hospital every summer at Kennebunkport. Jean Becker said, “He makes a difference in big ways and little ways, and sometimes he’ll say to me, ‘Jean, I just don’t think I’m doing enough. I have to do more.’ And I’ll just roll my eyes and say, ‘How much more can you possibly do?’”

In addition to M. D. Anderson, Dad has also been actively involved in the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships program, which he chaired for four years; and the Points of Light Foundation, of which he is still the honorary chairman. He also has been very active with First Tee, a PGA Tour- sponsored program created by Dad’s friend Commissioner Tim Finchem to make golf more accessible to kids from every background.

In March 1998, Dad received a letter from his friend Vic Gold admonishing him for comments that were very critical of the national press. Out there on the speaker’s circuit, Dad would frequently knock the heck out of the Beltway press—and no matter where he was, he received a standing ovation from the crowd in response.

“It felt good doing it,” Dad confessed.

But Vic, whom Dad respects a lot, thought such behavior was beneath Dad as a former president, so Dad joshingly decided he would start a new organization called Press Bashers Anonymous in order to help him stay “clean.”

He did very well for the first year, then my brother George declared his candidacy for president—and the last seven years have been a roller-coaster ride of relapses and recovery.

“The love/hate thing with the press has gone on forever,” Dad said. “In a fit of anger in 1992—when I thought I was grossly, unfairly treated—I went back and looked at some of the things they were saying about Grover Cleveland, and it was the same thing. It’s ever thus.”

As for his own relations with individual members of the national press, Dad has gradually softened his hard edge against most members of the fourth estate. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times said, “I think he gained respect for me during the Clinton administration, when he realized that I treated all presidents—not just Republicans—with the same skepticism and tweaking style.”

Maureen went on to tell me about the time she brought her mother to a White House Christmas party one year, and Dad kissed her mother when she came through the receiving line. “In the car on the way home, she was quiet for a while and then said in an ominous voice, ‘I never want you to be mean to that man again.’ She kept a framed picture of that night—with her, me, your dad and mom—near the chair she sat in for years after she lost the ability to walk or see. Her last vote in 2004 was for your brother.”

My favorite Maureen Dowd column was the one she let her brother Kevin write for her one Christmas Eve. He lauded the job the president was doing. I wish she’d let Kevin write her column every day!

Dad, though angry at Maureen’s attacks on the president, genuinely likes her. “I know this is a hard one to understand,” he told me. “It’s just a dad thing.” He does, however, remain totally disenchanted with the New York Times, feeling the paper is merciless toward my brother and that it is guilty of editorializing.

For the first four and a half years after leaving the White House, my father’s personal aide, Michael Dannenhauer, went just about everywhere with Dad. They had developed a very close relationship, but all that time Michael also lived with a deeply held fear.

“All those years I always wondered if the president assumed I was gay,” Michael said. “Obviously, I was never going to say anything to him about it. In 1998, when he asked me to serve temporarily as chief of staff, in the back of my mind I wondered if he would want me to be his chief of staff if he knew I was gay. Would he be embarrassed by me? Would he want to fire me?”

Michael confided first in his sister Beth and then in Jean Becker, Dad’s chief of staff who was taking time off to help Dad write All the Best. Jean asked Michael if he planned to tell Mom and Dad, and Michael emphatically shot that idea down, thinking it would be far too awkward a conversation. However, Michael was just as emphatic that Jean tell the truth if she was asked about it—just as he would.

In December 1998, Michael was in Dad’s office for an early-morning meeting. Dad’s longtime assistant Linda Poepsel was also in the office, and after she left, Dad asked Michael to close the door. My father was seated behind his desk, and Michael stood in front assuming it would be a short conversation. Unknown to Michael, Dad had been at his library at Texas A&M the previous day with Jean, and the two had discussed Michael.

“Now, don’t be mad at Jean,” Dad started the conversation. “Don’t be mad at Jean, because I asked her. I asked her if you are gay.”

Caught totally off guard, Michael sat down and put his head in his hands, unable to look at Dad.

“I want you to know I don’t care,” Dad continued. “Barbara and I love you. You are a part of our family, and it doesn’t matter to us that you’re gay. I am not embarrassed of you and never will be.”

Michael recalled that Dad’s eyes welled up and tears streaked down his cheeks.

“I hope I have never said anything or done anything in our time together to make you feel less of a person,” Dad concluded. “I want you to be happy—that’s what is most important.”

Since the state of Texas changed the terms of office for governor from two years to four years in the 1970s, no sitting governor of Texas had ever been reelected. In 1998, however, my brother George campaigned for reelection as a prohibitively strong incumbent with 70 percent support in Texas—and growing support nationally should he become a GOP candidate for president in 2000. Everywhere he went that year, Texans and reporters asked if he would seek the White House, and when he won that November with 69 percent of the vote, the speculation over his political future only intensified.

Meanwhile, thanks to the way he handled a tough loss in 1994 and the constructive leadership he has shown on a host of issues in the interim, Jeb also found himself back on the campaign trail in Florida as an equally strong candidate for the GOP nomination—but facing a tough challenge in the general election against Lieutenant Governor Buddy McKay.

Jeb campaigned hard all fall, and not until the exit polls started coming in on election day was he fully confident of the outcome. Dad was monitoring the exit polls from Houston as well, and once the numbers looked encouraging, he decided to lease a small plane and fly over to Miami with Mom to surprise Jeb that night.

Dad recalled, “When we arrived, the campaign people asked if I wanted to introduce Jeb and I said, ‘Oh yeah. I’m very proud to introduce the new governor of the state of Florida.’ It was a very emotional thing to be able to do.”

“I didn’t know they were coming,” Jeb told me. “I was pretty confident that I was going to win, and to have them there was fantastic.”

Dad used to tell this funny—perhaps fantasized—story. Flying back to Houston that night, with the light of New Orleans off in the distance, Dad looked out his window and said, “This has to be the happiest night of my life.”

“What about the night we were married?” Mom shot back.

“That was a very pleasant night, too!” Dad replied.

On June 8, 2000, Mom turned seventy-five years old, and Dad had planned a big surprise party for her a few nights later at the Kennebunkport River Club. There were 176 guests, including family members, tons of her friends from throughout her life, all of Mom’s former aides dating back to the earliest days of Dad’s vice presidency, and other special invited guests. That night, Marvin emceed the toasts, skits, and singing—it was an unforgettable night.

Like the Roger Whittaker surprise, however, Dad’s cover was blown at the last minute. The day before the party, Senator Alan Simpson called and said, “Listen, Bar, I know you are too smart not to have figured this out. So I’m not going to play the whole game here. Ann and I cannot be there, but wanted to wish you a happy birthday, and hope the party is great tonight.”

Mom said, “You know, Alan, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you better hang up the phone right now.”

Undeterred, Dad marked the occasion of Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday by presenting to her a photo of the “Ranking Committee.” It was then that so many people in Dad’s life would finally, at long last, come to learn the true identity of this infamous committee. Dad explained, “It is not a club. There are no members to it. Just an authority that ranks these jokes. People send them in, like yesterday I got one from Brent Scowcroft. One of them is fairly funny and the other one is not, so the Ranking Committee e-mails back, ‘You get seven on the one, four on the other. Try again.’ And so it’s fun. We’ve got several people in on it.”

For so many years, Dad had referred to this secret committee whenever setting up competitions, judging a competition, or—these days—evaluating the jokes he receives via e-mail. The committee’s proceedings were always done in secret because “people would try to corrupt it,” Dad explained. What’s more, the committee’s word was absolute and final, and the committee did not like the whining about its rankings.

Something wasn’t quite right when we first saw the photo of the Ranking Committee, however. The five members appeared to be diverse—there were two women and three men—but they all had the same face . . . Dad’s face, to be precise.

“How does his mind work?” Jean Becker asked. “Where did that come from? And, of course, we took that picture on a day when he had a hundred things that I thought were really important—but we had to drop everything to get the local photographer up here.”

Dad posed three different times—as a golfer, as a businessman in a suit and tie, and as a hard-core motorcycle biker with a bandana or do-rag on his head with dark sunglasses and a jean jacket vest. For the ladies in the photo, Dad’s longtime assistant Linda Poepsel sat in one chair with her professional attire while Jean donned an Arabic robe. Dad’s face was superimposed on Linda and Jean.

“The biker costume, I wish we knew where that came from,” Jean said. “He left that on forever. There’s actually a picture in my office in Kennebunkport of him as the biker with everyone who was in the office that day. He loved walking around as the biker person, and I finally had to tell him to go change because he had an appointment.”

On June 12, 1999, in Austin, my brother George declared his candidacy for president of the United States. Then he flew to Iowa, New Hampshire, and other politically important states aboard a campaign plane dubbed Great Expectations. At the end of the month, his campaign announced they had raised a jaw-dropping $36 million in the first half of 1999—twice as much as Vice President Gore. George’s campaign was off to a flying start.

After the sheer agony of 1992, I was awed by my brother having the fortitude to mount his own presidential challenge. True, George came to the starting line with an enviable political name; but as he put it at the time, he “inherited only half of Dad’s friends and all of his enemies.” He would still have to prove himself and lead a team with little experience at the national level through the killing fields of primary politics.

Looking back, George told me that he felt free to make his own decision about running for president—and not worry about the consequences if he was not successful—because of the unconditional love he has always received from Mom and Dad.

“There is an enormous spotlight on you, as well as pressure,” George said. “If I sat and agonized and thought, ‘Gosh, if I lose, I’ll diminish the family name,’ I wouldn’t have run if that had been my psyche. I never thought that way. The only thing I was concerned about was, one, did I want to put my own family through this media meat grinder, and two, was I prepared to, upon victory, be in a position where there would be no such thing as anonymity— because if you win, you are forever made president.”

Dad, meanwhile, was easing his way into the campaign. Of course, he was completely interested in seeing George do well and helping him in any way, but at the outset, his first and foremost concern was that he didn’t want to be a burden.

“He thought that if he were to get involved early on, it would dredge up Republican fears of 1992,” recalled Dad’s traveling aide Gian-Carlo Peressutti, “so he really downplayed his role to everybody during the exploratory committee phase. Then that kind of morphed from ‘I’m really not going to be involved’ to ‘I can see I can play a helpful role in raising money, and so that’s going to be my role.’”

So as he traveled around the country keeping his own engagements, Dad started doing a few fund-raising events. For example, if he would give a speech to a business group in Charlotte, North Carolina, George’s campaign would tack on a fund-raising event while Dad was there.

“As the primaries got closer, the president did in fact end up doing more political events,” Gian-Carlo added. “The political events he did really were events to motivate the base.”

Dad and Mom even surprised George one time at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, which turned out to be a very emotional event for two reasons: first, because we were able to keep it a complete surprise; and second, because it was the first time that Dad and George appeared together at a campaign event for the presidency.

As we had with Dad, our entire family threw ourselves into George’s campaign. I traveled around to all the primary states for George W. with my sister-in-law, Tricia Koch. One assignment we got was to go to Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the first town to cast the first votes in the first primary of the presidential election. The voting takes place at midnight at the Balsams Hotel in the famous “Ballot Room.”

This tradition began in 1960 when Dixville Notch was granted the right to conduct its own elections. It is important to candidates because it attracts national and international media attention. Some old New Hampshire veterans would say, as Dixville Notch goes, so goes the nation—and as far as I was concerned, this was an important assignment. So Tricia and I left the main headquarters in Concord and hopped into a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a volunteer driver to head up to Coos County, which borders Canada.

The weather report called for snow, so our Texas-born volunteer driver thought it best if we stopped for “survival” supplies just in case. That was a bit worrisome, but we were on a mission to win the first votes for my brother. So we packed up a first-aid kit, water, some snacks, and headed out. Four-plus hours later, we survived whiteout conditions where we occasionally couldn’t tell the road from the forest and made it to the Balsams Hotel in the White Mountains.

After we arrived, we were told that we couldn’t blatantly ask people for votes, as we were in the room where votes were actually cast. Arizona Senator John McCain had already been to Dixville Notch and had handed out signed copies of his book. Had we known, I would have come armed with signed books—lots of people in my family had written books, including a few dogs. That would have been easy. Instead, we immediately felt at a disadvantage. Still, there was no doubt whom we were there for, as we were clad in George W. Bush gear from head to toe.

Another interesting rule in the Dixville Notch vote is that voters can declare or change their party affiliation on the night of the vote. So everyone was a potential vote for George W. Bush, and Tricia and I were determined to get the majority. We did everything else we could think of—winks, nods, hugs—to get the votes of the twenty-nine citizens of Dixville Notch who showed up that night.

As the night wore on, the tension built. Midnight finally came and the votes were announced. For the Democrats: four votes for Senator Bill Bradley and two votes for Al Gore. For the Republicans: twelve votes for George W. Bush, ten votes for John McCain, and one vote for Steve Forbes. (How’d we miss that one vote?)

At that moment, you would have thought we had won the entire election in a landslide. Tricia and I were bouncing off the walls with excitement. The joy carried over into the next morning on our car ride back to headquarters. We ran into the headquarters thinking everyone would be celebrating, but unfortunately, that was not the case. Early statewide polling results were beginning to come in, and things were not looking so good. The New Hampshire primary loss to Senator McCain in 2000 ended up being as hard a loss as the win in the Iowa caucus was encouraging.

But George regained his footing with a solid win in South Carolina, won nine out of the thirteen Super Tuesday states, and took a lead in delegates he never relinquished from that point on. On February 15, he won the Delaware caucus, and I was asked to make his official acceptance speech as winner. I have heard many acceptance speeches over the years, but this was the first—and only—time I would ever be making one. It was my big moment. I worked hard on the speech, practicing it over and over. As I was giving the speech, however, I realized that an acceptance speech is only interesting if it is being delivered by the person who actually won the election.

George had come into the primary fight riding a wave of great expectations, and thanks to the help of a very talented political team and thousands of dedicated volunteers, he had met them.

In August, the Republican Convention was held in Philadelphia, where George officially became the Republican nominee. In his acceptance speech, he said, “Mother, everybody loves you and so do I. Growing up, she gave me love and lots of advice. I gave her white hair. And I want to thank my dad, the most decent man I have ever known. All of my life I have been amazed that a gentle soul could be so strong. Dad, I am proud to be your son.”

Coming out of Philadelphia, the Bush-Cheney ticket surged to an 18-point lead, and everyone was geared up for the bruising home stretch.

At one point during the fall campaign, I pulled into a local gas station and saw a woman at the pump who had a “George W. Bush” bumper sticker on her car. I went over to thank her, explaining that I was the candidate’s sister. “No, you’re not,” she said to me. “Governor Bush doesn’t have a sister.” I politely explained that yes, he does, and I am his sister. No, she repeated, that’s not possible.

At this point, I could tell she was starting to suspect that I was some kind of nut. To prove my real identity to her, I ran and got a copy of Mom’s 1994 book, Barbara Bush: A Memoir, out and showed her a family photo. (I just happened to have the book that day; I don’t always drive around town with a copy!) Anyway, I thought I had convinced her until I found out later that she called the campaign to verify who I was—she didn’t believe me, after all!

When the fall debates took place between Al Gore and my brother, I went to support George. I remember thinking that I had come to the event to support my brother, and yet what on earth could I do? So I spent time in the holding room with George, Laura, and other friends and family. George was relaxed and ready, but the rest of us were miserable, nervous wrecks. I had bought an herbal stress-relieving balm from the local grocery store, and brought that along in case it might help. I shared the stress-reliever with Laura, and we rubbed it all over our “pulse points,” as instructed on the label. I’m not sure if it was George’s great performance or the herbal balm, but we were much calmer by the end of the debate, which my brother won.

My parents voted early on election day 2000, then made the ninety-minute drive to Texas A&M, where Dad had an event with Bush School students in College Station. While they were at the Bush Library Foundation office on the A&M campus, Jean Becker started receiving exit poll results from Ron Kaufman, Dad’s former political director at the White House. The first wave of numbers was not encouraging.

From College Station, Mom and Dad drove to the Governor’s Mansion in Austin. The plan called for us to have a family dinner at the Four Seasons and then go upstairs to a suite and watch the returns.

Events took a disturbing turn during dinner, however, when the networks called Florida for Vice President Gore, and I remember Jeb tearfully hugging George and expressing his regret that Florida had gone the other way.

“I felt like I let him down,” Jeb said.

With the early returns not offering much encouragement, my brother George decided he would prefer to watch the returns back at the Governor’s Mansion with Laura, Mom and Dad, and Laura’s mother, Jenna Welch. Meanwhile, Marvin and I went to a conference room right next to the family suite with Karl Rove, Condi Rice, Don Evans, and others. The room had four televisions and a bank of laptops with people on the Internet collecting information from around the country.

On nights like election night 2000, even the most brilliant people set reason to the side. For example, I sat next to Condi, and at one point we decided to switch seats. As we did, we started winning states. From that moment forward, whenever we lost a few states, Condi and I decided to switch seats again—as if that somehow altered the cosmic order of things.

Before they pulled Florida back from being called for Gore, however, there were a handful of states that we knew we needed to win if we were going to lose Florida.

New Mexico was one of the states, and when it came across the wire that we lost New Mexico, too, I remember Condi Rice saying, “That was one of the ones we needed, wasn’t it?” That stark realization sucked the life right out of the room.

Things were still looking bleak when Karen Hughes, one of my brother George’s closest friends and counselors, arrived at the Governor’s Mansion.

“I went up the back stairs and saw President Bush 41,” she said. “He was sitting on the couch by himself. Without thinking, I said, ‘Oh, hello, Mr. President, how are you?’ He said very quietly, ‘Not very good right now.’ I felt so terrible. Here’s this wonderful man just dying inside, watching in agony, concerned for his son.”

Throughout the night—as she had in 1992—Mom would periodically go into the main room, watch for a while, then leave.

Back at the Four Seasons, we were still anxiously watching returns when an NBC reporter called to say, “Florida is not a done deal.” They were suspicious of how quickly Florida was called, and at that point in the night they were thinking about pulling it back. As word of this critical turn spread, Marvin walked over to the window, leaned out, and said, “Condi, you can come off the roof now.” Everybody cracked up.

I also remember seeing Jeb run down the hall with a cell phone on each ear as word came in that Florida was being put back in the undecided column. He was heading over to the Governor’s Mansion to monitor events from there. I remained behind at the hotel, so Karen Hughes detailed what happened from there:

Jeb came bounding up the stairs with a couple of staff members, shouting “back from the ashes.” He got on the computer and started reading election returns—like the local county judge race. Jeb was convinced that we were going to carry Florida.

When Fox declared Florida for Governor Bush, Jeb said, “I’m not seeing that. Where are the numbers? We’d better be sure.” I felt as the senior staff person there that I didn’t want us to go out and declare victory and not have it be the case. We were trying to make certain that the numbers were backing up what we were hearing on the news.

Then Vice President Gore called and conceded. That was a euphoric moment. President and Mrs. Bush 41 hugged the president-elect, who also kissed Laura and shook hands with Jeb. There was a sudden release of tension.

Once the networks declared and Al Gore called, a lot of people came over from headquarters, including campaign chairman Don Evans and Karl. Vice President and Mrs. Cheney also arrived with Senator Alan Simpson and his wife, Ann.

Jeb, meanwhile, was still looking at the numbers. I wanted to make sure everybody had the idea this was over, so I was calling the press to make sure they knew Al Gore had conceded.

The president-elect went downstairs to get ready to go do a victory statement. Before he could go out, however, Don Evans received a call from Bill Daley, the chairman of the Gore campaign, saying that Gore was going to call back and we should wait. All of a sudden, everybody was confused. No one knew what was happening.

I walked back upstairs, and President Bush 41 and the president-elect were standing in the living room. The president-elect was on the phone and he was talking to Gore. And I remember him saying, “What do you mean you’re retracting your concession?” It was bizarre.

That’s when Al Gore said something like, “Don’t get snippy with me.”

When it was clear the election would not end that night, we decided to send Chairman Evans over to make a statement, and the president-elect said, “I’m going to bed.” President Bush 41 said, “I am, too.”

There wasn’t really much discussion after that.

I just can’t imagine much of a bigger up or down than thinking that you’ve been elected president—only to learn maybe you haven’t. But both the candidate and his father were so stoic and so controlled. Obviously, they were feeling it very intensely, but no one yelled, no one said any bad words.

After election night 2000, the country was plunged into a thirty-five-day period of court fights, press conferences, and endless political debate—some of it acrimonious and baseless commentary. George and Laura handled this extraordinary period by assembling a superb team led by Secretary Baker to manage the recount process. Then they got out of Austin, out of the spotlight. George didn’t want to get caught up in reacting to every new twist and turn, which was smart—as there would seemingly be a new crisis every day.

“He was at peace,” Dad said. “He got ridiculed for being out at his ranch and not tuning in to every little up or down in that long, long, arduous process. He knows who he is. He did his best. He did all these old verities that you learn from your parents—do your best, give the other guy credit, try your hardest. I mean, he did those things.”

While in Crawford, my brother George would check in with people by computer. He would instant-message me and others, “What are you doing? What’s going on?” It got to the point where I didn’t want to leave my desk for fear of missing a message from him. (Later, when he became president, he wrote us all a final e-mail, saying he’d have to sign off of e-mailing as he was no longer a private citizen.)

Dad was nervous, too, and called all of us more than usual.

He also dispelled a myth that arose.

“I read in the paper that I was the one that got Jim Baker to fly down to Florida, to lead that beautiful effort in the recount,” Dad explained. “Jim’s presence there meant everything to me, but I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t know about it until I either heard it from Dick Cheney or from George. Some people didn’t believe that, but it is the truth. I didn’t know one single thing about it. But if George later said, ‘What do you think about it?’ I’d say, ‘You couldn’t have done better.’”

Jeb was also caught in a difficult position during the recount. He had worked his heart out for his brother, but as governor, his first priority—his duty—was to determine if the election was conducted in a proper manner and that the recount process was thorough and fair. Like George, Jeb kept a low profile and left the grandstanding on TV to others.

Lord knows, there was plenty of commentary to go around.

“When a national leader accused Jeb and George of using Nazi tactics, and the media didn’t really respond to that, I was outraged,” Dad said. “But it was more than just the political outrage: it was the hurt of a father who has pride in two wonderful sons who would never use such tactics. So it was a period of anxiety, but if George had lost, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world for us.”

From afar, Dad continued to monitor events in Florida closely through Secretary Baker and Margaret Tutwiler, and at one crucial point in the court proceedings in Tallahassee, Dad checked in with Margaret to get the latest news.

“I told him everything I knew about the matter from my perspective,” Margaret said, “and then I remember saying, ‘I’ll have Mr. Baker call you back as soon as I can find him.’ When I asked for his phone number, the area code was 517, so I asked where he was. He said, ‘I’m at the Mayo Clinic getting ready to have a hip replacement.’ His attention was entirely on George his son—not himself.”

One day during the recount, my former husband, Billy LeBlond, was in town for the weekend visiting Sam and Ellie. We were all at my house when I received a call saying a group of people were gathering to protest in front of the house on Massachusetts Avenue where Vice President Gore lived. I jumped at the opportunity to get out and do something, as I couldn’t stand being in this awful limbo. Everyone in my family laughed and said, “You can’t do that. You’re crazy—someone might see you there!” But I was determined, so I put together a disguise and announced I was going.

Billy and the kids were going to see the Washington Capitals hockey team play, but postponed going to the game to join me on the protest. Billy met me standing in the freezing cold, yelling very creative and very adult chants such as “Get Out of Cheney’s House!” and “Sore Loserman!” and “I say President, you say Bush.”

Incidentally, I wore a scarf and big sunglasses as my disguise, but this attempt at being incognito failed miserably. There I was shouting away with everyone, and random people would walk up and say, “Hi, Doro!”

On December 12, the United States Supreme Court voted 7–2 to stop a manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, saying such an order had “constitutional problems.” The High Court’s action essentially meant my brother would become the forty-third president of the United States.

George remembers, “An NBC News guy got a copy of the court order and started reading it on camera. As I recall, I picked up the phone and called Dad and I said, ‘I’m not a lawyer, but I think this means I won.’”

The next night, Vice President Gore gave a thoughtful concession speech; immediately afterward, Dad called him to thank him for the gracious way in which Gore handled the matter that was so difficult for him and for the whole country.

“I had returned to the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s residence, after making my speech downtown at the Old Executive Office Building,” Vice President Gore told me. “The telephone rang and the operator put your dad through. He told me that he was personally moved by, and grateful for the content of the speech, and I was equally moved by his personal gesture in calling. It was certainly in keeping with his reputation for gestures of that kind. I was impressed by that and very grateful.”

Roughly an hour later, Speaker Pete Laney of the Texas House—a Democrat—introduced my brother to the world as president-elect.

“It didn’t sink in for us until he walked in and was introduced by Pete Laney,” Dad recalled. “I think that was really the most emotional moment for your mom and me—the realization that our son was the forty-third president. I’ll never forget it. We were alone—tucked into our bed in Houston, Texas. We watched, and we sobbed.”

A week later, George went to Washington to continue working on his transition, which included meetings with congressional leaders, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, Vice President Gore, then finally to the White House to visit President Clinton.

“When I saw our oldest son walk into the White House as the president-elect, sitting next to a very gracious President Clinton, I thought it was amazing,” Dad said. “I had just been on the phone with George from the Madison Hotel, and then I saw that—another imprimatur of reality, as he was greeted in that office he’s going to serve in for the next four years.”