GERALD FORD HAD A CHOICE to make. The first man to ascend to the office not by a national vote but by the provisions of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the presidential appointment of a vice president when the post is unoccupied, Ford had a vice presidential vacancy of his own to fill. During the first week of his presidency in the dog days of August 1974, as the dark cloud of Watergate began to dissipate over a weary land, the new president turned his attention toward whom he should tap as his second in command. Bryce Harlow, an adviser to Ford, was tasked with compiling a list of potential candidates evaluated based on national stature, executive experience, and an ability to broaden Ford’s base of political support. A roster of sixteen was narrowed to five, each one quantified with a total score measuring the candidate’s standing against the selection criteria, and submitted to Ford. The first name to appear, with a corresponding score of 42, was that of George H. W. Bush.
On August 11, Ford’s second full day in office, Bush himself made a pitch for the job in a half-hour Oval Office meeting with the new president. Ford asked Bush about other possibilities including Republican heavyweights Nelson Rockefeller, the moderate former New York governor, who ranked fifth on Harlow’s list with a score of 35, and Barry Goldwater, the conservative stalwart. Bush expressed worry about the backlash Rockefeller would cause with the party’s right wing, which had stridently thrown Rockefeller over for Barry Goldwater as the party’s presidential nominee a decade earlier, and about Goldwater as anathema for moderates. By implication, Bush was the safe choice, firmly in the middle. Harlow agreed, contending in his assessment for Ford that for the sake of party harmony, “plainly [the choice] should be Bush,” but added as a downside that it might be “construed as a partisan act, foretelling a Presidential hesitancy to move boldly in the face of known controversy.” Ford culled his own short list to three final candidates: Bush, Rockefeller, and Donald Rumsfeld, the brash forty-two-year-old NATO ambassador and former Illinois congressman who, like Bush, was considered a comer in the party.
Among those who wondered at Bush’s prospects was George W., who was in Fairbanks, Alaska, working for Alaska International Air during a summer break from Harvard Business School. He called his father after learning in a local newspaper that he was on Ford’s vice presidential short list. “Well, there are some who think I could do a good job, but I wouldn’t make too much out of it,” Bush told W., perhaps managing his own expectations as well as his son’s.
Indeed, there were drawbacks for Bush. Ford’s advisers regarded the fifty-year-old former congressman and former UN ambassador as “not yet ready to handle the rough challenges of the Oval Office,” a view Ford felt was unfair. More damning was a story circulating that Bush’s 1970 Senate campaign had received roughly $100,000 from an illegal secret slush fund controlled by the Nixon White House called the “Townhouse Operation.” Bush, who immediately made Ford aware of the revelation as a potential liability, would eventually be cleared from any wrongdoing in the matter, but the association with the disgraced Richard Nixon didn’t help his cause.
On August 20, just before announcing his decision, Ford called Bush who had retreated to the late-summer tranquility of Kennebunkport. Nelson Rockefeller, the president told him, would be his nominee. As Ford explained to Dick Cheney, Rockefeller was his choice because he was “nationally and internationally known,” a counterbalance to Ford himself, who only months earlier had been a congressman from Michigan’s Fifth District with little name recognition around the world. When asked for his reaction to the breaking news by a local television crew that had reached the front porch of his Kennebunkport home, Bush’s first response was raw. “It hurts so much,” he said.
The vice presidency now spoken for, Ford was open to hearing Bush’s thoughts on other job possibilities later the same month. Bush inquired about becoming secretary of commerce or White House chief of staff. Ford was lukewarm on both. Instead, he volunteered the two most prized diplomatic posts—the ambassadorships of either Great Britain or France—and a third: chief of the United States Liaison Office in China, with which the U.S. had not yet established full diplomatic relations in the wake of Nixon’s historic trip toward rapprochement two years earlier. Each opportunity was consistent with Bush’s future ambitions. As he wrote in his diary, “I indicated that way down the line, maybe 1980, if I stayed involved in foreign affairs, I conceivably could qualify for Secretary of State. The President seemed to agree.” After consulting with his own secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, Ford told Bush he believed China was his best option. Bush agreed to take the post, likening his decision afterward with that of his going west to Odessa in 1948. “An important, coveted position like London or Paris would be good for the resume,” he wrote later, “but Beijing was a challenge, a journey into the unknown.”
The journey began late the following month. “Sure the place is different, but that’s what I wanted,” Bush told the Washington Post before he and Barbara left in late September for Beijing, then called Peking. Different it was. The intensity and demands of Washington half a world away, Bush found himself, as he explained in a letter to his children a month after his arrival at the Liaison Office, “cut off from the day to day news,” keeping tabs on the western world through a short-wave radio that hissed and wheezed like a Depression-era radio set. He was, he related, enjoying a “pace in my life less hectic than I have known in many, many years,” adding for emphasis that his phone hadn’t rung in over a week. “The difference between our two countries is immense—and yet there’s a feeling that the people would like to be friends,” he observed. It represented an opening for Bush, for whom personal diplomacy was both a strong suit and an effective tactic, he had found, toward strengthening national ties.
Friendship with the Chinese was not of import to Henry Kissinger, who believed that power trumped ideological commonality and amity in advancing America’s position in the world. “It doesn’t matter whether they like you or not,” Bush was told by Kissinger, who would travel to China in two high-profile visits with the nation’s leader and storied founder and chairman, Mao Tse-tung, and Deng Xiaoping, the first vice premier, during Bush’s tenure in China. As he did during his time at the UN, Bush found himself an outsider with the State Department. Though respectful of Bush, Kissinger, intellectually brilliant but secretive and imperious, kept him at a distance. When the last ignominious gasp of the Vietnam War came on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon, which had been seized by North Vietnamese forces, Bush was kept out of the loop. He learned the news at a national day reception for the Netherlands in Beijing, which was illuminated by a triumphal fireworks display launched from the North Vietnamese embassy later that same evening.
As always, the Bushes approached the assignment as a shared adventure. Embracing the culture around them, they took Chinese lessons (though proficiency with the language eluded them) and spent considerable hours absorbing their surroundings. Often they would walk through Beijing with their cocker spaniel, C. Fred, in tow, or join the hordes of drably, monotonously attired Chinese who bicycled through the city as their sole means of transport, George often donning a People’s Liberation Army cap. Like her husband, Barbara got the most she could out of the experience, relating to her hosts in a way she didn’t expect. “We found them very like us. They loved family; we were told they didn’t,” she recalled. “We were very excited about going there—by what we learned.”
At Christmastime, she returned stateside to be with the Bush children for the holiday season, leaving her husband behind in China to entertain his mother during her visit the same month. After a call home to Barbara on December 4, George mused in his diary at how the family had risen to the occasion around his overseas mission:
Great talk with Bar on the phone. The kids are all doing fine. It is as if each one of these five kids, recognizing that the family was undergoing a different experience, are pulling together much more. There are no longer those juvenile battles and each one comes through strong, vibrant, full of humor and different, full of life and we are awfully lucky. It is right that Bar be there but boy [do] I miss her . . .
In June of 1975, the Bush children—minus Jeb—arrived in Beijing for an extended Chinese visit that would include sojourns to Nanking, Shanghai, Wuxi, and other family highlights. The Bushes hosted a Fourth of July party for the diplomatic community complete with red-white-and-blue flourish and American picnic fare: hot dogs, hamburgers, potato chips, and beer. (“The Great Hot Dog Crisis,” as Bush called it, was averted when the State Department complied with his last-minute request to ship seven hundred much-needed hot dog rolls.) And, in a small ceremony at Beijing’s nondenominational Bible school, sixteen-year-old Doro became the first American to be baptized in the world’s most populous nation since it had fallen to Communism in 1949, a bit of unfinished business the family hadn’t quite gotten to back home through the years.
George W.’s first trip outside the U.S. left a deep impression on him. As he reflected in his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, “My visit underscored my belief in the power and promise of the marketplace, and deepened my belief that by introducing capitalism and the marketplace, China will free her people to dream and risk.” It also made him appreciate his good fortune in being an American—and his desire to achieve his own dreams in West Texas. His father reflected hopefully on George W.’s next chapter while acknowledging his slow start in a diary entry on July 6, 1975, his oldest son’s twenty-ninth birthday. “He is off to Midland,” he wrote, “starting life a little later than I did, but nevertheless 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 . . .”
As the father pursued his career in the Far East and his son began his own seven thousand miles away in Midland, each would accrue experience that would mold them as leaders and eventually help define their presidencies. George H. W. Bush, the would-be U.S. senator and might-have-been vice presidential appointee, had accepted his positions at the UN and in China as consolation prizes and made the best of them. At the UN, he had seen what the force of friendship could do to deepen relationships with foreign dignitaries and, by extension, the countries they represented. In China, he would build on that ability, never missing an opportunity to forge a new bond, however ostensibly unimportant—his first visitor at the Liaison’s Office was the head of the delegation from Kuwait, a small Middle Eastern nation of little concern at the time. After Saigon had fallen, he would see U.S.-aligned South Pacific nations calling on the Chinese to bolster relations in the event that America’s loss in Vietnam portended a weaker U.S. presence and diminished support in the region. Countries of little strategic significance could become consequential with a shift in world events; strong ongoing diplomatic relations could make a crucial difference. The diplomatic expertise would come dramatically to bear in Bush’s presidency, as he built an unprecedented coalition of thirty-nine nations around the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi invasion, and in his judicious responses to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the massacre of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where his relationship with China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping allowed him to express his views “with a frankness reserved for respected friends.”
George W. Bush was going on to a career where he was determined from the start to be his own boss, not in a midlevel corporate position with an eye toward working his way up the ladder like many of his fellow Harvard Business School graduates. He would go with his instincts, answering to no one above him—launching his own company in Midland before going on to become co-owner and co-managing general partner of the Texas Rangers and then governor of Texas—preternaturally confident in his abilities. He trusted his gut on decisions professional and personal and moved ahead without hand-wringing or second-guessing, as he would when running for the Texas State Capitol despite profuse counsel that the popular incumbent Democratic governor, Ann Richards, was unbeatable. He would bring the same sensibility to the White House. The self-proclaimed “decider,” Bush’s presidency would be marked by brazen executive decisions, often in the face of fierce doubt or withering criticism, most notably to wage war and nation build in Iraq, and when the war was going awry, ordering a surge in troops.
But all of that remained to be seen in the summer of 1975, as W. struck out for Midland. One thing, though, would soon become clear: He was driven to succeed. “He was focused to prove himself to his dad,” recalled Joe O’Neill, a friend of W.’s since their baseball-playing boyhoods in Midland. It applied not only to the oil industry but broader ambitions. “Right away,” O’Neill said, “he started talking about running for Congress.”