GEORGE H. W. BUSH DIDN’T think Richard Nixon owed him a thing. Though the president had implied that he would want Bush to remain in government regardless of the outcome of his Senate run, Bush wasn’t counting on it. A sense of entitlement was anathema to him, just as it would be to his children. Besides, Nixon was ambivalent about him and he knew it. Though Bush’s mind and loyalty impressed the president, he had reservations; Nixon, who put a premium on toughness, equated Bush’s privileged upbringing and Ivy League diploma with softness and a lack of grit. But in an Oval Office meeting on December 9, less than a month after Bush’s Senate loss, it was Nixon who would offer Bush a way forward by dangling before him several job possibilities: chairman of the Republican National Committee, a high-level White House staff job as a special assistant to the president, or U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. All of them offered Bush a political lifeline.
Bush ruled out the first job; he had no desire to head up the GOP. And while he found the notion of a top staff job in the Nixon White House intriguing, it was the UN post that most interested him. Nixon gave Bush the nod, nominating him for the position, which the Senate confirmed despite concern among several of its members over Bush’s lack of foreign-policy experience. Once again, George and Barbara packed their bags, this time heading for Manhattan, where they set up house at the ambassador’s resplendent official residence, apartment 42A in the Waldorf Astoria Towers—once the home of the imperious Douglas MacArthur—at Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street.
After settling into his new responsibilities, Bush judged the position as “broad, interesting, fantastic but . . . not as ‘important’ as some think because we have less policy input at this point than I would like to see it have.” Part of it had to do with his status within the Nixon White House, where zealous insiders minimized Bush’s influence. Bush found himself on the outside in 1971, when pursuing the most contested issue of his UN tenure, the body’s recognition of Taiwan over the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate representation of China. The matter prompted sharp debate and a vote in the General Assembly to determine if Taiwan should be expelled in order to offer the PRC a permanent seat. Bush pushed for preserving the status quo, in keeping with the U.S. policy of refraining from recognizing the communist PRC in favor of nationalist Taiwan. He vigorously lobbied other nations to do the same, little realizing that Nixon had dispatched his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on a secret diplomatic mission to Beijing, China’s capital. Kissinger was to meet with Chinese leadership as a first step toward opening relations with China and disrupting the geopolitical balance with the Soviet Union. Bush wound up on the losing end of the vote, which came to 76 nations in favor versus 35 opposed.
Nonetheless, the post enhanced Bush’s experience in the foreign-policy arena and expanded an already swollen Rolodex, as he and Barbara won friends by plying a distinct brand of personal diplomacy that would become a signature of the Bush clan. The ambassador would entertain often in the Waldorf apartment, or host his counterparts on outings that ranged from catching a Mets game at Shea Stadium to going for a round of golf or an afternoon of ice-skating. They took a Chinese delegation for lunch to the Bush home in Greenwich, where Dottie Bush wore black to make her plainly dressed guests feel at ease but accidently burned the Minute Rice she had prepared. When journalist Dick Schaap wrote a New York Magazine article in which Ambassador Bush was among “The Ten Most Overrated New Yorkers,” Bush embraced the dubious distinction by throwing a party for the additional nine on the list along with Schaap, who, he surmised, was “too humble to include himself.” He also invited some UN counterparts as another chance to “put a human face on diplomacy.”
Being back in New York, though, reaffirmed why he had left the area nearly a quarter century earlier to put a stake in the ground in Texas. As he wrote in his diary in 1971, “I am continually amazed at the arrogance of the intellectual elite in New York. They are so darn sure they are right on everything. It’s unbelievable. Having lived in Texas for 23 years I have forgotten how concentrated this problem is, but it’s sure there.” But the proximity to his parents’ home in Greenwich, Connecticut, forty miles or so north of the city, proved a blessing in September 1972, when Prescott Bush fell ill with lung cancer and complications around a prostate operation. After being hospitalized for a chronic cough at Sloan Kettering in New York, the same hospital where Robin Bush had died in 1953, the seventy-seven-year-old Bush passed on to the ages on October 8.
The Bush family gathered together at Greenwich’s Christ Church for the funeral ceremony, where George W., Jeb, Neil, and Marvin served as pallbearers. As Barbara wrote, “The Senator dreaded the thought of his friends huffing and puffing under the burden of the coffin.” Prescott Sheldon Bush was laid to rest in Putnam Cemetery, next to Robin, who had been buried there nearly two decades earlier. Among the tributes that poured in for the venerable former senator was one from Nixon. Bush responded with a letter thanking the president for the kind words he had offered. “My Dad was the real inspiration in my life,” Bush wrote, “he was strong and strict, full of decency and integrity, but he was also kind, understanding and full of humor.”
It was Bush’s own reputation for integrity—and his loyalty to Nixon—that led to his next assignment. A month after his father’s death, Bush was summoned to Camp David, where Nixon asked him to give up his post at the UN to become the chairman of the Republican National Committee. The president wanted a “good Nixon man—first.” Bob Dole, the incumbent chairman apparently didn’t fit the bill; Bush did. Not that Dole knew. When he visited Bush in New York later to inquire about his hypothetical interest in the position, it fell to Bush to gently tell Dole that he no longer had the chairmanship himself. Such was the dysfunction of the Nixon administration. Bush understood that the job as GOP head was a lateral move at best, but the president was asking . . . He accepted.
Integrity was not a hallmark of Nixon’s White House as the strands of the Watergate scandal slowly, irrevocably unraveled. Five months earlier, on June 17, 1972, Washington police reported a simple bungled robbery of the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington’s Watergate office building. The burglary resulted in the arrests of seven men, including one former FBI agent and two former White House aides who were working for the Committee to Re-elect the President, given the unfortunate acronym CREEP. Coverage of the story continued throughout the fall as the drip, drip of revelations implicated Nixon White House aides. But they stopped short of Nixon, who went on strong to win reelection in a rout against his Democratic challenger, South Dakota senator George McGovern, by garnering 61 percent of the popular vote.
Throughout Bush’s thankless nineteen months in the job, he diligently traveled the country preaching the Republican gospel at key meetings and fundraisers, defending Nixon, whose credibility continued to erode and with it financial contributions to the party. The president, after all, had told Bush—and the country—that he was innocent of any wrongdoing in Watergate. Bush took him at his word.
In the fall of 1973, the White House and the Republican Party took another hit when Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, was implicated in a bribery scandal dating back to his days as governor of Maryland. Agnew resigned in the face of mounting evidence, leaving Nixon to reluctantly appoint House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford as vice president in October 1973, the first vice president to be appointed under the provisions of the Constitution’s Twenty-Fifth Amendment. In addition to the continued festering of Watergate, further investigative scrutiny of the Nixon White House showed a web of deceit and trickery beyond the scandal at hand.
On July 23, as Watergate’s cancerous tentacles continued to spread throughout the Nixon White House, Bush penned a long letter to his four sons—“Lads” he called them—elucidating his support of Nixon, despite the growing sentiment against him, including the clamor around the president’s possible impeachment. “Dad helped inculcate into us a sense of public service [and] I’d like you boys to save some time in your lives for cranking something back in,” he wrote. “It occurred to me your own idealism might be diminished if you felt your Dad condoned the excesses of men you knew to have been his friends or associates.” After enumerating the strengths and weaknesses of Nixon as he saw them, he affirmed his belief that Nixon should be censured by the Senate but not impeached, stating, “I will never feel the same around the President after all this, but I hope he survives and finishes his term. I think it’s best for the country in the long run.” He also used the situation to impart a lesson to his boys: “Listen to your conscience,” he urged.
Don’t be afraid not to join the mob—if you feel inside it’s wrong.
In judging your President, give him credit for enormous achievements . . . but understand too that the power accompanied by arrogance is very dangerous. It’s particularly dangerous when men with no real experience have it—for they can abuse our great institutions.
Avoid self-righteously turning on a friend, but have your friendship mean enough that you would be willing to share with your friend your judgment.
Don’t assign away your judgment to achieve power.
George W. wrote later of his father’s counsel, “He couldn’t have realized it at the time, but his words set a standard that both Jeb and I would strive to follow when we held public office.”
The day after Bush wrote the letter to his sons, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon must turn over tapes to federal prosecutors, something Bush urged Nixon to do all along as the quickest route to absolution. Instead, the tapes damned Nixon. His house of cards fell in on August 5, as a “smoking gun” recording came to light revealing Nixon’s complicity in covering up the Watergate break-in by ordering Bob Haldeman to block an FBI investigation six days after the burglary occurred. Already “battered and disillusioned” to that point, Nixon’s betrayal devastated Bush. Though Nixon was only eleven years older than he, Nixon was a father figure who had taken a personal interest in his career. As Barbara explained it, “Both of our fathers were the most honest, decent people. [They] never lied to us. So, Nixon [lying] was a huge shock.” Fed up, Bush told Nixon’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, “the whole goddamned thing has come undone and there [is] no way it can be resolved,” and he had no compunctions about sharing his judgment with Nixon.
On August 6, Nixon convened his cabinet. Bush recalled the atmosphere hanging over the Cabinet Room was as “one of unreality.” Refusing to acknowledge the scourge on his presidency, Nixon instead wished to address “the most important issue confronting the nation, and confronting the world, too: inflation.” The men in the room were stunned.
Nixon continued to talk about the issue before suddenly, awkwardly shifting to Watergate, and maintaining there had been “no intentional breach of the law” and “no obstruction of justice.” After a pained silence, Gerald Ford spoke up, suggesting that he would not have supported the president if he had known of the substance of the evidence against him. “I’m sure there will be impeachment in the House,” he said. “I can’t predict the Senate.” He then said it would be his last word on the subject since he was “a party of interest.” After Nixon tried to get back to economic matters, including the prospect of an economic summit between the White House and the Congress, his attorney general, William Saxbe, rejected the notion; “We ought to wait to see if you have the ability to govern,” he said. As the momentum of the meeting shifted, Bush weighed in: Saxbe was right, he asserted, Watergate was a drag on the economy. If Nixon was intent on fighting for his presidency, Bush said, he should do so “expeditiously,” so the country could move on.
The following day, Bush wrote the president a letter affirming his position. “It is my considered judgment that you should now resign . . .” he asserted. “Until this moment resignation has been no answer at all, but given the impact of the latest development, and it will be a lasting one, I now firmly feel resignation is best for this country, best for this President. I believe this view is held by most Republican leaders across the country.” Nixon offered no response.
But a day later, on August 8, Richard Milhous Nixon became the first American president to resign the office. Bush was among those gathered on South Lawn the next morning to bid farewell to the fallen president. Nixon charged up the stairs to Marine One, incongruously flashed his trademark victory sign along with a forced smile before entering, and he was gone. The presidential helicopter ascended skyward, bound for Andrews Air Force Base, where Nixon would soon be on his way toward his home in Southern California, where an uncertain future awaited him. “I’m glad dad’s not alive,” Bush said of Nixon’s resignation. “It would have killed him to see this happen. He thought that we were the party of virtue and all the bosses were Democrats.” A little over an hour after Nixon’s departure, Gerald Ford was sworn in as the thirty-eighth president. He took the oath of office in the White House East Room before a small audience—Bush among them—who watched hopefully as the new president then offered not an inaugural address but “a little straight talk among friends.” “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” he said, extending a promise of sorts. “Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
Just as Prescott had in the 1950s, when he censured Joe McCarthy in an effort to save the Republican Party from drifting toward extremism, Bush had stepped in to help stop the bleeding, sparing his party—and America—further damage at the hands of a man who he dolefully concluded was amoral. As the nightmare of Watergate ebbed, Ford offered the nation a new beginning—just as he would, soon enough, to George H. W. Bush.