Chapter 8

LAND OF CONTRASTS

“He went from the United Nations to China, a country just emerging from total isolation, a country with whom the United States had had no contact for about two decades. And we were just trying to feel our way. Here he got the image of a giant awakening: paranoid, jealous, hopeful. And he grappled with the question: How do you work with that? How do you cultivate them?”

—Brent Scowcroft

It was August 1974, and we had all been in and out of Kennebunkport that summer, everyone on vacation from schools and jobs. We all watched on television as President Nixon resigned and Chief Justice Warren Burger swore in Vice President Gerald Ford as the thirty-eighth president of the United States. We also watched as speculation built regarding whom President Ford would choose as his vice president.

Dad had arrived at the house in Maine with Pete Roussel, who was his press secretary at the RNC, because the two of them wanted to get out of Washington. The D.C. rumor mill was in overdrive, and each day it seemed there were more reporters calling.

Mom had called Spike Heminway and asked him to keep Dad busy while he was home, to take his mind off things. When Spike arrived at the house one morning, he yelled for Dad and found him upstairs on his knees, fixing a toilet. They moved on from that project to scrubbing the hull of Dad’s boat, flipped over on the sandy beach after the tide had gone out. It was there that Pete found the two of them and gave them the word that Nelson Rockefeller’s private plane had just taken off from a local airstrip and was heading for Washington, D.C. (The Rockefellers had a vacation home nearby.)

The three of them headed back to the house, where Mom was in the kitchen. Pete, Spike, and Dad sat out on the porch with a small television turned on.

“Well, it’s not going to be me,” Dad said to Pete.

“How do you know that?” Pete replied.

“Because I haven’t heard anything,” Dad said. Just then the network anchor broke in on the television. “And now an announcement from President Ford at the White House,” said the announcer. The door to the East Room opened and then immediately shut.

“Well, there’s been a brief delay of some sort,” said the anchor.

At that moment, the phone right next to Dad on the porch rang. It was President Ford, and Dad had a brief conversation with him, then put the phone back down. Dad turned to Pete and Spike and said, “Watch that tube. It’s not going to be me.” And sure enough, the door opened again, and out came President Ford to announce he had chosen Governor Rockefeller.

Pete remembers a local television crew from the Portland, Maine, station walking up shortly after that, while they were all still on the porch. The reporter stuck a microphone over the railing and said, “Mr. Bush, you don’t seem to be too upset about this.”

Dad stared at the reporter and then said, “Yes, but you can’t see what’s on the inside.”

It was, of course, an honor to even be mentioned for consideration. Despite the fact that Dad received more votes than anyone else in a poll of Republican National Committee members as a possible vice presidential candidate, he didn’t expect to be chosen for the job. Since this was coming on the heels of Watergate, he knew that President Ford needed a vice president who wasn’t associated with Washington.

Dad and President Ford had known each other since the 1960s, when Ford was a congressman from Michigan. I asked President Ford about that phone call.

“I was one who always tried to soften the blow, so to speak, and that’s why I called your dad,” President Ford said. “I thought at the time my administration would be strengthened by having somebody who had some background in state administration. Your dad was a good candidate because of his record, but Nelson Rockefeller had the background as a former governor of New York.”

A few days later, on August 22, 1974, shortly after Rockefeller’s selection was announced, President Ford invited Dad to the Oval Office to discuss his next assignment.

During this meeting, Dad told President Ford that it was essential he put his own person in as chairman of the RNC, and they both agreed that Mary Louise Smith would be a great replacement. (Mary Louise Smith had been Dad’s choice, as she was serving as cochair of the RNC with him. She was a native Iowan with a history of political and civic leadership.)

As for himself, Dad expressed an interest in going into international affairs. To this, the president offered, “London and Paris are open. Would you be interested in either of these?”

Paris and London were two of the top diplomatic postings—it doesn’t get any better. They were both plum jobs that come with lots of glamour and perks. Dad responded that while that was very flattering—“beautiful embassies, wonderful challenges,” as he put it—he’d prefer to go to Peking, now known as Beijing, China.

“I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to go to a big embassy and be an ambassador,” he told me. Because Washington was just opening its relations with Peking—a relationship that was very strained so far—our presence in China was not one of a full embassy, as it was in Paris or London. Technically, it was the U.S. Liaison Office, or USLO. “I just wanted to do something really different. I’d been through the drill with the Republican National Committee; but I had loved my U.N. days and wanted to get back in foreign affairs. The challenge of China seemed to be like the future—which it certainly turned out to be,” he explained.

If Dad could somehow further Washington’s relationship with Peking, which he believed he could, then that’s where he wanted to be. He felt it would be more challenging in many ways—very different and, not an unappealing factor, very far from Washington. “It was halfway around the world, it was different, and it was the future,” he said.

Ford said he’d discuss it with Secretary of State Kissinger. Soon afterward, Dad was told, “China it is.”

Dean Burch, who had stayed on as counselor to President Ford, remembered hearing about the meeting from a “shocked” President Ford: “I, along with everybody else, was terribly surprised . . . because I knew that it was within his power to have taken almost any job he wanted . . . he could have been secretary of commerce or something else had he wanted it.”

During his time at the United Nations, Dad had become fascinated with China and its place on the geopolitical world stage. Through working on the question of the dual representation policy, Dad had come to better understand not only Taiwan but China, in all its layered complexities. Beyond the vexing question of Taiwan, the normalization of U.S.-China relations depended on several areas of concern: economics and issues of trade; security and concerns over the Soviet expansion in Asia; and democracy and human rights issues.

China in 1974 was at a unique moment in its history. After imperial rule ended in 1911, China’s ruling party was the nationalist Kuomintang, which called for parliamentary democracy and moderate socialism. It was led by Chiang Kai Shek and was in a coalition with the communists throughout World War II. But in 1949, Mao Zedong and his Red Army pushed the Kuomintang from the mainland. The nationalists fled to Taiwan and set up the Republic of China there, which maintained China’s seat in the United Nations and on the Security Council until 1971—when the dual representation vote took place while Dad was ambassador to the U.N.

Just before that vote, Henry Kissinger had made his now-famous secret trip to China, which preceded Richard Nixon’s historic visit in 1972. Nixon met with Mao while he was there.

In 1966, Mao and his third wife, Jiang Qing, directed the Cultural Revolution in order to fight “bourgeois” values and rekindle the revolution. Thousands were executed in ideological cleansing campaigns, and by the time my father arrived in 1974 the civil unrest had slowed. It wasn’t until September 1976—long after Dad and Mom had left—that the Cultural Revolution was declared over with the arrest of the Gang of Four, a group of communist leaders that included Mao’s widow, a few weeks after Mao died.

And so, in October 1974, my parents arrived in China. My father became the chief of the U.S. Liaison Office, only the second American to serve as the chief of the USLO, following David Bruce, one of America’s most respected diplomats. Relations with the United States were new and very fragile, and Dad loved the idea of being in on the ground floor of it. Mao by this time was an ailing eighty-year-old—although no one knew exactly where he was at one point—and speculation was rife among the diplomatic corps that he was dying. Dad called it “reading the Chinese tea leaves.” (The speculation turned out to be true, as Mao died less than two years later, on September 9, 1976.)

Harry Thayer, who was Dad’s deputy in China and who had been on the U.N. staff with Dad, noted that the new mission chief was well received when he arrived—in part because of his personal diplomacy during his U.N. days. In addition to the baseball games and Broadway shows he’d invited other diplomats to in New York, Dad hosted the new Chinese delegation at his mother’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut, for brunch.

I remember going to that brunch. My grandmother had the children, including the Thayer children, wait on tables—on her terrace. My mom remembers that Ganny had been a widow for only about a month and was wearing black pants and a black top with a beautiful Senate pin that my grandfather had given her. The Chinese were very formal, all wearing suits. I can hear my grandmother’s sweet soft-spoken voice responding to them with phrases like, “Isn’t that lovely?” I also remember lots of bowing and laughing, and the “ah, ah, ah” that comes when a word is understood.

Dad and Mom were running late because their driver had taken the long way. While we were waiting, the rice got a bit overdone. When the food was served, the Chinese foreign minister took a scoop of rice and then asked politely, “What is this?” Embarrassed, we had to explain it was minute rice. It was so overcooked the Chinese didn’t recognize it!

Harry Thayer, Chris Phillips, and some of the other staff from the U.N. mission came out as well, enjoying a nice September day that coincided with the Chinese foreign minister’s annual trip to the United States. “It was atypical and unusual” for an ambassador to invite foreign visitors to such a get-together, Thayer said, “and it was the kind of personal touch your dad was very good at.”

Harry Thayer also said that the Chinese would have kept a record of Dad’s interactions with the Chinese officials at the United Nations. Every conversation that Dad had and everything he did in New York would have been chronicled in that Chinese record, and available to people in Peking who were going to be dealing with him. Luckily, they must have liked what they read in those dossiers: the Chinese and the diplomatic community welcomed him very politely and graciously.

Dad’s style was a bit different than that of his sole predecessor, David Bruce, who was more reserved. Before Bruce arrived in Peking, he had been the United States ambassador to France, West Germany, and Great Britain. “Though greatly respected, Ambassador Bruce was discouraged from attending any National Days—every country represented in China had its own national celebration— and we changed that policy,” my father said. While Dad, too, had great respect for protocol, he was also very outgoing and eager to make connections with people on a personal level, regardless of rank.

For instance, my father took some heat when he invited one of the CIA’s China bureau communications officers to lunch the second day he was there. Some members of the foreign service community grumbled about this, saying, in effect, “You can’t do that, you have to have us first.” But even those overly preoccupied with protocol couldn’t help warming up to Dad pretty quickly.

Harry Thayer remembers bicycling around Peking with Dad, to various national holiday celebrations and assorted occasions, and to church, which was a fifteen-minute bike ride from the embassy. One day, Harry got into a taxicab. When the driver saw that he was American, he made a thumbs-up sign and said, “Bush good!” The word had gotten around among the locals—especially the taxi drivers who would see Dad riding his bike around town and eating at the half a dozen restaurants that were available to foreigners in Peking—that Dad was a good guy, a friend of the Chinese people. Dad brought parties of staff, visitors, and diplomats to all the restaurants open to foreigners, and Harry said it helped build the image that Dad was “as much as an American can be, the man-about-town.”

“President George Bush is an old friend of the Chinese people,” Jiang Zemin, former president of the People’s Republic of China, told me. “He knows China very well and has made enduring efforts to push forward China-U.S. relations and friendship between the two peoples. In the fall of 1974 . . . he made a lot of Chinese friends. Many people were deeply impressed by the photo of President Bush and Mrs. Bush riding bicycles in the streets of Peking. President Bush later assumed many other important positions, but his interest in the growth of China-U.S. relations never receded. He is a main participant in and witness to the process of the bilateral ties over the past thirty-odd years.”

Dad devoured everything he could about China: the politics, the history, the culture—and even tried to learn the language, practicing on everyone from the waiters in restaurants to fellow tennis players on the court. He and Mom took very seriously their daily language lessons with Miss Tang, their Chinese language tutor. Because she had been educated in the West, Miss Tang knew her life was in danger during the Cultural Revolution.

“So she was back in her shell,” Dad said, because she was afraid of radical students who were known for beating people like her in the streets. “She was wonderful, but very reluctant to talk about herself at first. We stayed in touch with her.”

Mom was relishing the fun of a foreign posting together—just the two of them—and saw it as an opportunity to have Dad “all to herself.” His previous work schedules hadn’t allowed much time for each other: first back in Texas, when he worked so hard to build his business; then in Washington, keeping up with the hectic life of a congressman; and finally as RNC chairman during Watergate. In China, they would be alone for the first time since George W. had been born twenty-eight years earlier.

The older “boys,” George and Jeb, were now adults—George studying to earn his master’s degree at Harvard, and Jeb married and settling down with Colu in Texas. Marv and Neil were off at boarding school, and soon I would be as well, entering tenth grade.

I followed in the footsteps of my grandmother, my Aunt Nan Ellis, and several cousins and chose Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. I had applied before my parents knew they were going to China, so my family thought the timing worked out well. Still, I was nervous. When Mom dropped me off, I could barely let go of her. It wasn’t just that I was leaving home: it was also that my parents were leaving the country.

While I wanted to go away to school—my brothers had all gone to boarding school—I quickly realized it was not for me. It was an awkward age. I was shy and never really felt I fit in—and though I stayed for three years, most weekends were spent wishing I were with my family.

During that time, Mrs. Freeze, my art history teacher, suggested I study Chinese art, which in a way kept me in touch with what my parents were going through. When I eventually went to China, I was able to identify with much of what I saw because of this art course. Looking back, I appreciate Mrs. Freeze’s thoughtful attempt to help me experience China with them from a distance. She must have sensed how much I missed them.

They missed us, too. Even though he was halfway around the world, my dad had a way of making me feel like I was the most important person in his life. Whenever I spoke to him by phone—which wasn’t too often, with long-distance calls at five dollars a minute in those days—he always sounded so glad to hear my voice, and it made me feel so loved. To this day, the sound of his voice makes me feel the same way.

When they left for China, our family had to work harder to stay in touch. As a result, we became much closer. Despite the fact that we were all spread out—China, Virginia, Texas, Connecticut, Washington, D.C.—the ties that bind were fast and firm.

The fifteen months my parents spent in China, from October 1974 until December 1975, were a very happy time for them personally. There they enjoyed entertaining new friends and immersing themselves in all things related to the “Middle Kingdom.”

My father kept a diary, now some thirty years old, which I read for the first time in researching this book. During his time in China, he dictated his thoughts just about every night into a tape recorder. When those tapes were transcribed, the material filled more than three hundred typewritten pages.

While some wondered why Dad would want to go to China when he could have chosen a more comfortable or prominent posting, Dad never regretted his choice for a moment. He saw the glass half-full in one of his first diary entries, where he recounts conversations he had with Henry Kissinger about the posting:

I think in this assignment there is an enormous opportunity of building credentials in foreign policy, credentials that not many Republican politicians will have. Kissinger has mentioned to me twice, “This must be for two years, George. You will do some substantive business, but there will be a lot of time when you will be bored stiff.” I thought of Henry and I am sure [of] his role in having Nelson Rockefeller get the VP situation, but I will say that he was extremely generous in telling Chiao Kuan Hua [the chairman of the Chinese delegation to the United Nations when Dad was there, and who now served as Mao’s foreign minister] that I was close to the President.

In another of the early entries, Dad asks himself the questions many others must have had on their minds:

In going to China I am asking myself, “Am I running away from something?,” “Am I leaving what with inflation, incivility in the press and Watergate and all that ugliness?,” “Am I taking the easy way out?” The answer I think is “no,” because of the intrigue and fascination that is China. I think it is an important assignment, it is what I want to do, it is what I told the President I want to do, and all in all, in spite of the great warnings of isolation, I think it is right—at least for now . . . hyper-adrenaline political instincts tell me that the fun of this job is going to be to try to do more, make more contacts . . . the fun will be in trying.

Dad’s diaries from China are full of entries that begin with phrases like “another beautiful day in Peking,” “almost euphoric in my happiness,” and “lots to do and lots to learn.” Dad noted that his first visitor upon arrival was the head of the Kuwaiti mission. There are many references to new friends at various embassies, “movie nights” at their residence with popcorn and popular American films, and plenty of laughter resulting from language difficulties.

It helped that our cocker spaniel C. Fred went with them, along with seventeen cases of dog food. Dad relates that C. Fred arrived from quarantine upon their entry into the country looking “damned confused” and dirty. (It turned out the more they washed him, the grayer he got. His blond coat turned gray because of the hard water and pollution in the air, as did my parents’ clothes and linens.) On the day of the dog’s arrival, “four of the help in the back ran away when they saw C. Fred. Bar called him over and had him do his tricks and they were soon out watching him and laughing. Initially they were scared.”

The locals were scared because, in those days, dogs were outlawed in Peking—for sanitation reasons, supposedly. I didn’t believe it, and assumed that the number of dogs was inversely related to the number of Chinese restaurants there (more on this in a minute). Dad loved to go on morning runs with C. Fred, while Mom frequently took him around town despite all the stares.

Together, my parents explored Peking on foot and on bicycle. They were reluctant to take limos everywhere—especially for short distances—out of consideration for the staff and, really, a sense of adventure. Their stay in China was particularly adventurous when it came to the food. There are references in the diaries to eating sea slugs—a delicacy at twenty-five dollars a pound—chicken blood soup, swallow’s spit, and worst of all, upper lip of dog (hence my brilliant theory on the lack of dogs). They loved the food in China and served only Chinese food in their residence. Their favorite restaurant was called the Sick Duck, because it was located next to the hospital. Here’s an entry:

Dinner on the twenty-third at The Sick Duck. Course after course of duck including the webbing and the feet, the brain served handsomely.

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.

Mom had a daily tai chi session at 6:00 a.m. and says she did it for several reasons, one of which she described as follows: “It was a way to interact with the Chinese, as well as the people who were below the rank of ambassador. There was almost a caste system. Amazingly old-school.”

One of Mom’s first outings was to procure bicycles and, subsequently, government licenses for them. The first week, Dad and one of his deputies, John Holdridge, went to a sporting goods store to get a Ping-Pong table “for the kids.” They brought back the “Double Happiness” model, which cost $125, compared to the world championship table the salesmen were pushing for $250. Although Dad said the Double Happiness table was for us to use when we visited, he had grown up with a Ping-Pong table in the front hall of his childhood home in Connecticut. He was good.

As Dad began his initial series of diplomatic calls on the Chinese officials and other embassies in Peking, he tried to set a different tone. He made his first call on the acting chief of protocol for the Chinese, telling him that the United States would prefer “frank, informal discussions if possible, that Chiao Kuan Hua [the foreign minister with whom Henry Kissinger had put in a good word] ought not to feel that he should have a formal kind of reception for me of any kind, that I would much prefer a very small meeting where we could talk more frankly. I knew Chiao had many banquets and I felt he didn’t need yet another one.”

He explained his motives for approaching the protocol chief in this way: “What I was attempting to do was to establish a frank relationship and to try to move out of the normal, diplomatic, stiff-armed, stilted deal. It may be difficult. It may be impossible but I want to keep pushing for it. What I have got that can be helpful in this approach is having been in politics . . . I said that if they wanted to talk about the American political scene I would be prepared to do it from the unique vantage point of having run one of our parties”—something that carried a lot of weight in one-party Communist China. At one point, a Chinese official even referred to him as Chairman Bush, before Dad set him straight about what it meant to be head of the RNC, to great laughter.

The U.S. Liaison Office in China was “a reporting post more than an action post,” Dad explained to me recently. “Our experts—there weren’t that many of us, just fifteen or so there—would get as much information from other embassies as they could, or any other way they could, and they would report when they came back.” So while there were broader policy reasons for the U.S. to open relations with China—promoting free markets and democratic principles, as well as addressing security concerns—the goal of the USLO was to listen and learn, and then report.

Just as Dad’s tenure began, the cover of a CIA operative named James Lilley was exposed by columnist Jack Anderson in October 1974.

“It was very embarrassing for me, for him, and for everybody,” Lilley said, looking back. “He took it in good stride. I said, ‘Boss, I don’t think my utility here is going to be indefinite; I think I should eventually leave.’ He said, ‘Don’t rush, take it easy.’ So I finally left six months later, on routine home leave. We didn’t want these guys who play games in the newspaper to intimidate us.”

Lilley added that his final memory of that trip was leaving on the train with his wife, Sally. As the train pulled out of the station, Lilley opened the letter that Dad had written. He and Sally read it, and she began to cry. “It was a very nice note, very moving,” he said.

Lilley was chosen by Dad fifteen years later to be ambassador to China, and he has vivid memories of what it was like in 1974 when my father first met Deng Xiaoping, later the leader of the Chinese communists. Americans had a hard time winning the trust of the Chinese, and the feeling was mutual. So much was riding on making some sort of a personal connection, and my father instinctively knew this.

Ambassador Lilley recalled, “When these two men met, Deng—the short, tough revolutionary from Sichuan in central China—and Bush—the tall, ambitious, and smart elitist from America’s Northeast—the chemistry was immediate. Deng saw Bush as an American who someday would lead his country, and Bush saw in Deng a major force in China’s future. Deng could be very acerbic and your father was very enthusiastic and he couldn’t be put down. I think Deng realized your father mattered in Republican politics and he mattered a lot. It was not an intellectual appreciation but a visceral one.”

Dad and Mom quickly realized that they wanted to send a message, of sorts, to the Chinese. They wanted their inclusiveness and warmth, their openness, and their casual, friendly attitude to be symbolic of the U.S. attitude toward China. “We were out—the United States was out being active,” Dad told me. They saw how some missions—especially those from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—were isolated and, likewise, so were the countries they represented. In his diary, Dad refers at one point to Ambassador Vasily S. Tolstikov of the USSR:

Most interesting fellow but he is kind of isolated, living in this massive white marbled palace. There is no thaw there between the Soviet Union and China, or if there is, he damn sure hasn’t been clued in on it.

He enjoyed the Africans and was convinced that one way to learn more about China was through them. Members of the African delegations often came to diplomatic soirees, as he did, “tuxedoless,” and were anything but remote:

That evening we went to a dinner dance given by Ambassador Akwei of Ghana. He apparently has been a leader in the diplomatic community via dancing. He has a Hi Fi set rigged up, a table overflowing with Western food, a young son whose eyes sparkled . . . and seemed like one of our kids when asked to run the tape recorder or something.

As he worked to forge friendships with the Chinese, Dad relied on his love of sports—something he counted upon many times over the course of his career. He played a lot of Ping-Pong and tennis with the Chinese—horseshoes came later—and he attended spectator sports on a regular basis, including a very exciting game of hockey between the Soviets and the American kids, a few years in advance of that miraculous game during the 1980 Olympics. “Sports really are marvelous for getting across political lines,” he writes, and his own sportsmanlike conduct and athletic charm went a long way toward reinforcing the message he was trying to send. (By the way, he still uses a phrase in his tennis games that he picked up in China: “unleash Chiang”—a reference to Chiang Kai Shek, the nationalist leader exiled on Taiwan—as slang for Let’s start the game and serve the big one. He had a bit of a weak serve, and it was his way of making fun of it: Time to unleash Chiang!)

That year, we still gathered as a family for Thanksgiving, without Mom and Dad. It was too far for either us or them to travel just for Thanksgiving. My brothers and I came from boarding school or college and gathered at the Greenwich home of Spike and Betsy Heminway. “Quite a rowdy Thanksgiving,” Spike recalls. “A lot of football watching, everyone on the den floor.” We were excited knowing that Mom was coming to join us for Christmas in a few weeks.

Throughout his time in China, Dad was very impressed with the curiosity and friendliness of the Chinese people, yet he also saw their reticence and unreasonableness at times. “It is hard to equate the decency, kindness, humor, gentility of the people of China with some of the rhetoric aimed against the United States,” he wrote. As many times as he was approached with respect and humor, he was also assaulted with anti-American, anti-imperialist propaganda.

He called it “the land of contrasts,” and the polarity of life there went beyond just the words and slogans:

The beauty in many ways. The courteous friendliness of the individuals with whom you do talk. The desire to please in so many ways. And then that is contrasted with the basic closed society aspect of things. Lack of Freedom. Discipline of people. Sending them off to communes. No freedom to criticize.

At another point, he writes, “You respect the discipline, you respect the order, you respect the progress but you question the lack of gaiety, the lack of creature comforts, the lack of freedom to do something different.” He wrote about the daily life: “The contrasts are enormous. There will be a waft of marvelous odors from cooking and then a few yards further some horrendous stench from garbage or sewage.” He describes loudspeakers blasting angry propaganda at happy children on the playground, who continued their games with their hands clapped over their ears.

Nowhere was the contrast more clear than when Henry Kissinger came to visit. “He is a man of great contrasts,” wrote Dad when the secretary of state arrived in November, along with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Brent Scowcroft, who was then the national security adviser, and a few other aides:

There is too much entourage feeling. Too much kind of turmoil. Is he coming? Is he coming? Is he late? Is he late? Nobody is willing to bite the bullet and speak up. Amazing—mixed feeling. Great respect for the man and his accomplishments and yet concern about some of the trappings and some of the ways of handling people. Everyone with him talks about how difficult it is, and yet he can be extremely charming. Pressures on him are immense and the accomplishments immense so one forgives the eccentric things . . . No question about it. People quake, “He’s coming. He’s coming.”

Another entry reads:

Kissinger is an extremely complicated guy. He is ungracious, he yells at his staff . . . and yet all those petty little unpleasant characteristics fade away when you hear him discussing the world situation. He comes alive in public . . . He literally is so alive within, you can see it on the outside very clearly. He is like a politician with the roar of the crowd on election eve, or the athlete running out at the 50-yard line just before the kick off. The public turns him on.

Dad notes Kissinger’s “bitching” about the press, but then sidling right over to the press corps to chat. His demands for work to be done, then a lack of follow-through. To Dad, the man was an enigma. Later on, he writes:

I remember one big argument I had with Kissinger the time of the China vote [presumably as to whether Kissinger’s secret trip to China had pulled the rug out from under Dad during the dual representation vote] and yet at lunch he graciously turned to Barbara and said that “George is the finest ambassador we’ve had up there anytime since I’ve been in government.” Very pleasant. Unsolicited and I might add, totally unexpected.

Kissinger was very curious as to what Dad’s plans would be after China, politically speaking, and even asked if he was going to run for president in 1980. Dad replied that he couldn’t see that far ahead and just wanted to do a good job in China. I noticed that within a few months, however, he has a diary entry that toys with running for governor of Texas:

I have time to think these out. The plan might be to go home after the elections in ’76, settle down in Houston in a rather flexible business thing, shoot for the governorship in ’78, though it might be difficult to win. Should I win it, it would be an excellent position again for national politics, and should I lose, it would be a nice way to get statewide politics out of my system once and for all.

When Kissinger left just after Thanksgiving, Mom traveled back to the United States to spend Christmas with us. Dad was lonely without her, but his mother traveled to China with her sister-in-law Marge Clement to spend Christmas with him. He took them to embassy dinners and bike riding, which they loved to do—in fact, my grandmother continued to ride well into her late eighties. As he relates their adventures, you can just hear his voice in the Dictaphone:

Gave her a nice twenty minutes or so to shape up, and then we took a long bicycle ride down past the Great Hall of the People. You should have seen the people stare at old momma on the bicycle.

After his mother left, Dad wrote one particularly sad entry, when President Nixon was gravely ill with phlebitis:

Dinner alone. Early to bed, troubled by the VOA [Voice of America] report that President Nixon is in critical condition. I remember my last two phone calls with him, the only two I had since he left the White House. I felt like I was talking to a man who wanted to die. Here we are in China largely because of him, and the whole damn thing is sorry.

My brothers and I made plans to visit China in the summer, and I couldn’t wait. For my parents, the winters in China were long and difficult. Everything turned gray and drab. At one point, Aunt Nan went for a visit and spent ten days bicycling around Peking with Mom, before the two of them traveled to the countryside. It was the first time my mother and my aunt really spent any time together, and it cemented a lifelong friendship.

Away at boarding school, I got homesick. On weekends, my friends went home to their parents. Occasionally, I’d get invited along. I missed my parents and my brothers. Dad writes of a letter that arrived from Marvin, saying things were great, but it made Mom sad:

Bar sat and cried as she read it . . . I miss the children a lot every day and yet they seem to be holding together. They seem to be getting strength from each other. They spell out their love for their parents. We are very lucky.

Over the cold winter months, Mom and Dad entertained plenty of people, despite the fact that in those days, you couldn’t just travel to China. There were no visas. Any travel by foreigners had to be at the invitation of the USLO. So my dad decided to take advantage of this restriction and bring in the best of the United States and show them the best of China. He invited the heads of Coke and Pepsi, for example, for visits. He found a way to get people into China who couldn’t have done it on their own, no matter who they were.

As friendly and easygoing as Dad was, the when-in-Rome maxim could only be carried so far. One day, the Chinese guard posted at the entrance of the liaison office compound refused entry to one of Dad’s expected guests. She was the wife of our consul general to Hong Kong, an American citizen who happened to be ethnic Vietnamese. Despite the American passport, the guard refused to allow her to enter.

As his deputy, Harry Thayer, remembered, when Dad found out, he “absolutely blew his stack” at the Chinese for the effrontery of refusing the admission of an American diplomat. Dad went to the gate and blasted the officer for not letting in this woman, but his tirade did no good. Finally, the Chinese foreign minister was called, and within a few minutes the guard relented. Dad just couldn’t tolerate this sort of behavior, particularly when it affected an American citizen.

Summer finally came. George arrived in China a week before Marvin, Neil, and I did. Jeb was not able to join us because of a new job at the Texas Commerce Bank—and he and Colu were expecting a baby. Neil, Marvin, and I arrived on June 12, Dad’s fifty-first birthday. It was an amazing trip. Dad’s diary entry that day reads:

Doro, Marvin and Neil arrived . . . They looked great, giggling, bubbling over with enthusiasm—having enjoyed Honolulu, tired, not seen anything of Tokyo, only one night there and into Peking. They were great. They rushed down and played basketball, rode down to the Great Square. Marvin played tennis and then off we went to the Soup Restaurant, where we had eel and they all loved that. Neil Mallon bought the dinner and it was all pretty good.

Dad’s mentor Neil Mallon and his wife, Ann, were visiting, and on the first Sunday we were there, we all went to church. Despite the fact that the Chinese did not allow their own people any freedom of worship, the government did allow foreign diplomats to attend church services every Sunday. My parents were regulars at a tiny church that had a congregation of fourteen people and was located atop the old Bible Society building. The services were conducted entirely in Chinese—except when the foreigners sang the old familiar hymns in the languages of their own countries, with the Chinese ministers singing the same hymns at the same time in Chinese.

While we were there, my parents decided it might be a good idea to have me baptized at the Bible Institute, since I had not been baptized yet. It sounds a little unusual that I was fifteen and still not baptized—but remember, I was the youngest of five in a frenetic family.

Arranging for a baptism in a communist country is no small feat. Dad and Mom were grateful that the Chinese government allowed the service, but that was only after an official meeting. The authorities wondered—understandably—why we wanted to do this, as did I. Mom explained that we wanted the family together for the occasion and just hadn’t been able to do it earlier. But I soon discovered a great reason for being baptized at fifteen: you get to pick your own godfather. So I picked one of Dad’s funniest and most handsome friends, Spike Heminway. I sent him a telegram right away inviting him immediately to China for the baptism, though I didn’t expect him to come.

Spike remembers it as “that wonderful Chinese telegram which we didn’t understand.” “We were sitting there, in Maine,” he said, “and this telegram arrived and it was in Chinese. We said, ‘What in God’s name is this?’” I had no idea that the telegram would be sent in Chinese. Somehow Spike and his wife, Betsy, found a way to translate it and wrote back—in English—that he couldn’t make it. So I telegrammed back a message asking if my brother Marvin could stand in for him. Of course, Spike said okay.

So there we were that day at the service, two awkward teenagers standing up as replacement godfather and goddaughter. I remember one of the three ministers was from the Church of England and another was a Baptist. There were a number of elderly Chinese people, taking pictures and smiling, despite the language barrier. Mom remembers it as a very special, spiritual hour. “A very special day,” Dad recalls fondly now, thirty years later.

Welcoming a child into the church is always a joyous occasion; but welcoming a child into an underground church in a communist country is unforgettable—not only to the parents and the child but also to all those who witness it. It sent a glimmer of hope to the Chinese people who were there and to the many others who heard about it. If this little ceremony inspired just one of them to hold out hope that perhaps someday they’d have the freedom to be baptized, that’s great. To me, it was one more unique thing about my life—embarrassing at the time, but remarkable looking back on it now.

George, Neil, Marvin, and I took a train ride with Mom to Wuxi and then Shanghai and then to Peitaiho (now known as Beidaihe), a beach resort. Back in Peking on bicycles, we went to Mom’s favorite place, the Forbidden City. She knew every nook and cranny. And we visited the Summer Palace and the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. It reminded me of the days when Dad was in Congress and Mom took us all to see the sights.

One thing that sticks out in my mind regarding all this sightseeing was that my brothers were complete oddities to the locals—they towered over the Chinese, and Neil’s blond hair made him even more exotic-looking.

A week later, we celebrated George’s twenty-ninth birthday before he left China by himself to go back to Harvard. After graduation, he was thinking about returning to Midland, Texas, to try his hand in the oil business. When George left, Dad noted in his diary that George was starting out a little later in life than Dad had, “but nonetheless starting out on what I hope will be a challenging new life for him. He is able. If he gets his teeth into something semi-permanent or permanent, he will do just fine.”

Shortly before Neil, Marvin, and I left, my parents threw a wonderful Fourth of July party, complete with hamburgers and hot dogs (ordering hot dog buns all the way from Japan), American beer, and even American cigarettes. Dad spent months preparing for it. “Hot as Hades,” Mom remembers, and “the children of Harry Thayer and George Bush cooked and served with complaints.” We also helped decorate, with lots of red, white, and blue. It was held at the USLO compound, and quite a big crowd came.

It was not your usual Peking party. The Fourth of July had been celebrated in years past by Dad’s predecessor, but Dad’s party was reportedly noisier and more active than in prior years. The sound of pounding could be heard throughout the compound on July 3, and when worried staffers came to investigate, they found Dad up on a ladder hammering away, securing American flags and balloons. Dad loves a good party.

At the end of our trip, Dad came up with the idea to send us—just the kids—on the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Peking to Moscow. Dad thought it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Besides, how much trouble could a bunch of teenagers get into on a slow train through Siberia?

We boarded the train in China on July 16 for a five-day trip through Mongolia and Siberia and then on to Moscow. Our traveling party was composed of Marvin, Neil, myself, and a friend of mine visiting from school. We had two tiny rooms with two berths, one stacked on top of the other. The very first night, we left our windows open and woke the next morning covered in black soot. The train burned coal, and we were covered in it.

We shared a bathroom with the entire car, and when I went to freshen up, I turned on the faucet and out came the water . . . one drip at a time. I then realized that leaving the window open the first night of the five-day trip was a big mistake.

We traveled through China with Chinese personnel on board and a Chinese dining car. When we got to Mongolia, everything switched over to Mongolian personnel and a Mongolian dining car. While this was being changed over, our rooms were searched and we were asked to show our passports. All of this by Chinese authorities first, then Mongolian, then Russian—in very loud and aggressive voices. All the train personnel—especially in Mongolia and across Siberia—seemed angry and always searching for stowaways or something else. I was very nervous and worried, but nobody else seemed to be.

The train would stop for five or ten minutes at a time in tiny train stations in what looked like the middle of nowhere. (Actually, it really was the middle of nowhere. It was the farthest reaches of Siberia, after all.) At one point, my friend got off the train to buy a loaf of bread and I was a wreck as the train was about to leave without her. She did make it back after some very real angst, but I was too scared to get off at any point along the way. We were told to bring snacks (crackers and peanut butter) and thankfully we did, as we experienced firsthand how food in the Siberian gulags must have tasted.

Neil spent the whole trip studying guidebooks and reading maps and giving us history and culture lessons. I took comfort in peanut butter and crackers. My friend took comfort in Marvin, who by now had a crush on her. Together, the four of us traveled through the countryside in China, across the Gobi Desert and out of Mongolia, then around Lake Baikal—the deepest freshwater lake in the world and nearly four hundred miles long—then across the steppes of Siberia and through the Ural Mountains until we reached Moscow. (When he saw the deepest lake in the world, Neil remembers thinking, “Wow, this is cool . . . but after four days on a train, I guess anything is cool.”)

Once we arrived in Moscow, English-speaking Russian “intel” agents met us and we toured the sights they allowed us to see, like St. Basil’s Cathedral and Lenin’s tomb. “It was surprising that we had the freedom to move around,” Neil recalls, adding that it was not nearly as oppressive as China had been. We stayed overnight in an apartment provided by the state, “plain furnishings, simple but clean,” Neil remembers, and that we were accompanied by an English-speaking Russian woman who worked for the Soviet domestic security agency.

Before we left, Neil has a vague recollection of Marvin negotiating with the locals to swap Levi’s. “American jeans were a hot commodity,” he said. (Marvin—whose recollection of this is even more vague than Neil’s—is a very successful businessman today, to no one’s surprise.)

Russia was gray, and, to my mind, the people at that time looked sour and unhappy. Then we went to Leningrad and saw the beautiful pastel-colored buildings and the Hermitage. While on the train, Neil had announced that his dream was to see the Swiss Alps while drinking wine—underage drinking was legal in Europe—and eating cheese and chocolate in the shadow of the Matterhorn. I think all that Siberian food inspired this vision. When Marvin and my friend decided to head back to the United States together, I was left with Neil and his alpine dream.

When I think back on it, I’m amazed we were allowed to do this on our own. It was typical of the spirit we grew up with—having a mom and a dad who loved a good adventure. I think it was something they would have liked to do, and thought it would be a great idea to send us instead. “I was the oldest of the three of us, and it wasn’t like we had an adult companion,” Neil recalls. “It was a great experience to feel empowered, to be responsible. The fact that they would allow us to go and encourage us to explore and see the world, in a way, is a metaphor for the way they raised us. They allowed us to grow wings and fly in different directions.”

Looking back on my parents’ fifteen months in China, I see it as a positive period of growth for my family. The photo albums of that time show my parents both looking healthy and happy, in front of the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace. It was a time for my Dad to recharge his political batteries after the difficult, drawn-out months of Watergate, and an opportunity for my parents to be alone together.

Though it was many, many years ago, they still light up when they talk about their time there. The memories are a little less crisp now, but still vivid. Not just the sights, but the smells, tastes, and sounds of China. In one of his final diary entries, Dad tried to record it all, as though he was afraid he might someday forget:

Sounds that I will not forget. The early morning singing in the park—loud and usually very good tenor voices for the most part. The organized cadence of kids marching. The never ceasing honking horns downtown in Peking, the jingle of bicycle bells, the laughter of the children as they play near the park, the blaring of the loudspeakers with the excesses of the propaganda whether it’s on a train, in a park, at a building site, wherever. The July and August sound of the crickets.