“I FEEL COMFORTABLE IN THE job,” the forty-first president allowed in his diary the day after his inauguration. He had been around the White House on and off for nearly two decades, and as he said later, “knew where the keys to the men’s room were.” In 1980, his campaign slogan was “A President We Won’t Have to Train.” Indeed, nine years later, after adding eight years in the vice presidency to his résumé, the duties of the office came easily to him.
The role of first lady came easily to Barbara, too. The “Silver Fox,” as she was nicknamed, was warm, self-deprecating, and comfortable in her skin. Her understated style was a change from the imperial image of her predecessor—and a refreshing departure for many women. According to the Washington Post, her immediate popularity was “in no small measure a byproduct of the appearance of a woman at center stage who dared to look her age.” “My mail tells me that a lot of fat, white-haired, wrinkled ladies are tickled pink,” she said. When her husband asked her if she was going to eat her dessert, she replied, “I have to eat for my fans.”
Just as Barbara lessened the burden for her husband as she always had, so did the balance of the family, which surrounded him as a balm. “We approach everything as family,” George H. W. Bush said. So it was in his presidency; he never understood some of his predecessors who whined about the office as “the loneliest job in the world.” His first Oval Office visitor as president was his mother, Dorothy, who visited her second-born child on the first full day of his presidency. When asked by a reporter afterward if it was the most exciting moment of her eighty-seven years, she replied, “So far. So far.” Marvin and Doro, who both lived in the Washington area, could be at the White House to have dinner or a beer with him, and George W., Jeb, and Neil, off in Dallas, Miami, and Denver respectively, visited on special occasions. Bush also put his family to work. In the first eighteen months of his term in office, a member of the Bush or Walker families was included in fifteen of forty-one delegations sent abroad for ceremonial occasions.
The first-family dynamic helped make the president and first lady more accessible even to the loftiest of visitors. When Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, visited the White House in the spring of 1991, George W. and Laura were on hand with the other Bush progeny and their spouses. At a small luncheon they all attended in advance of a state dinner the same evening, Barbara jokingly told the Queen that she had seated George W. as far away from her at the dinner as possible. “Is he the black sheep in the family?” the Queen inquired. When George W. admitted he was, she replied, “Every family has one,” then asked Barbara why she considered her eldest son to be so dangerous. Barbara allowed that it was his plainspokenness—and the fact that he had threatened to wear to the evening’s black-tie affair one of his gaudy pairs of cowboy boots, either a pair embossed with an American flag or another with the words “God Bless Texas.” Which pair was he planning on wearing, Her Majesty asked George W. “Neither,” he replied. “Tonight’s pair will say, ‘God Save the Queen.’”
Just as George H. W. Bush found the job of president agreeable, he had an immediate comfort with those in his administration, which was composed heavily of friends, old hands, and Reagan White House veterans—many of whom would serve in his son’s White House. Jim Baker, perhaps his closest friend, whom he had passed up as a vice presidential possibility, was tapped instead as secretary of state. The two men had known each other for thirty years, and Baker, seven years Bush’s junior, owed Bush for getting him into politics. Despite a warning from his grandfather to “work hard, study, and keep out of politics,” and the fact that he had been a lifelong Democrat, Baker took a plunge into the political world as campaign director in Bush’s 1970 Senate race at the urging of Bush, who saw it as a means of occupying Baker after the loss of his first wife to breast cancer the same year.
Brent Scowcroft, who would become another of Bush’s closest friends, stepped into the role of national security adviser, a post he had occupied in Gerald Ford’s administration a dozen years earlier. Along with Scowcroft came two promising deputies, Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Reagan’s last national security adviser, Colin Powell, got Bush’s nod as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dick Cheney, the Wyoming congressman who had served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, was appointed as secretary of defense after Bush’s initial choice for the post, longtime senator from Texas John Tower, fell victim to a Democratic-controlled Senate, which exacted revenge for the rough campaign and a three-term Republican lock on the presidency. Tower was rejected due to a long history of boozing and womanizing, making it the first time a cabinet official had been rejected by Congress in thirty years.
John Sununu, who had helped to deliver the all-important New Hampshire primary to Bush, was given the post of chief of staff, while Lee Atwater was rewarded for his own efforts in the campaign with an appointment as chairman of the Republican Party before succumbing to an aggressive form of brain cancer at the age of forty in 1991.
The new president’s leadership style, devoid of his predecessor’s presidential majesty and theatrical flair, was marked by pragmatism, prudence, and restraint as a series of momentous international events began rolling out in his first year. His first major test on the world stage came in the spring. The desire to break free from totalitarianism, as Bush had presaged in his inaugural address, hung thick throughout the globe as the decade drew to a close. By early April 1989, it spread to China, where student protesters began gathering by the thousands in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to demand democratic reform. The dissident movement grew after a two-day state visit by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose call for glasnost and perestroika—greater openness and political and cultural reform—had given hope to those in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations. A week after Gorbachev’s departure in mid-May, Chinese authorities instituted martial law to put down the protesters, whose ranks had escalated to almost a million. Tanks were mobilized only to be met by human blockades.
By early June, Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader, had had enough. In the dead of night on June 3, a fifty-tank convoy rolled into the square as soldiers armed with machine guns put down any protesters that stood in their way, prompting a massacre that would leave three thousand dead and another ten thousand wounded. The movement, symbolized by the image of a lone Chinese dissident standing defiantly in front of a line of four tanks, in Bush’s words, “captured the imagination of the entire world.”
Bush publicly condemned the attacks and called for sanctions, but began with a personal appeal through an “anguished letter to an old friend,” Deng Xiaoping, emphasizing the importance of restraint. Deng responded the following day, accepting Bush’s overture to dispatch an emissary to meet with the Chinese leadership. Brent Scowcroft was dispatched to “convey to the Chinese how serious the divide was between us but also how much we respected our friendship,” as Bush put it later. “It kept the door open.”
Elsewhere in the world, a “door of freedom,” as Bush had foretold in his inaugural address, opened not long afterward. On November 9, East German officials called a press conference to announce the relaxing of travel restrictions from East Germany to West Germany. A confluence of circumstances had led to the announcement: Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost and perestroika, a burgeoning East German resistance movement, and a decaying East German regime under the weakening thumb of the Soviet state. The announcement by a hapless member of the Politburo, who read it for the first time on air, indicated that travel from East Germany to other nations would be “possible for every citizen” and would begin “right away, immediately.” But what was meant to be a limited and controlled opportunity for travel between nations was widely construed by the East German people and the international media as an unimpeded open door to freedom.
After the announcement, unchallenged by the East German police, East and West German citizens by the thousands descended euphorically on the Berlin Wall, where they hacked away at it with pickaxes. Twenty-eight years earlier, in August 1961, the wall had been erected ominously, marking the rise of Cold War tensions between East and West. Now the wall was being smashed into rubble by the very people it separated, symbolizing the Cold War’s imminent end.
During an informal meeting with the press, Bush, seated behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, greeted the news with subdued reservation. CBS’s Lesley Stahl asked him why he was not more demonstrably satisfied. “I’m not an emotional guy, but I’m pleased,” he replied dispassionately.
Hardly. As Jim Baker put it, Bush “could cry at the drop of a hat.” That very month, after his beloved cocker spaniel, C. Fred Chambers, died, Bush left it to Marvin to offer a eulogy knowing that he would become a puddle of emotions if he did it himself. But Bush’s muted reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall was part of a conscious strategy. In Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the world had seen uprisings for liberty and calls for reform met with violent crackdowns. Bush knew the fragility of the situation, refraining from bravado that might embolden East German and Soviet hard-liners. He was also careful not to put Gorbachev in a compromising position, jeopardizing future negotiations.
Bush’s response drew criticism among GOP conservatives, who flagged it as a departure from the probable approach of Reagan, who almost certainly would have used the milestone to assert the triumph of American democratic ideals. Bush and his advisers, on the other hand, saw restraint the most judicious course. “The worst thing, we thought, would be for the President to gloat that we’d won,” Brent Scowcroft reflected, “because what we wanted was for this momentum to keep going. Most people advocated that the President ought to go to Berlin to dance on the wall. But I think the President had exactly the right approach. What he was trying to say was, ‘Look, nobody lost here; we both win with the end of the Cold War.’”
In early December, a month after the Berlin Wall’s collapse, Bush ordered an invasion of Panama and the capture of its dictator, General Manuel Noriega. Noriega had been a thorn in the side of America for years as a drug trafficker for Columbia’s Medellín cartel, contributing to America’s growing drug problem, while accepting money as a paid CIA agent. “I’ve got Bush by the balls,” Noriega bragged shortly after Bush took office. Bush would prove otherwise. As early as October, after the harassment of American service members in the Panama Canal Zone, he had concluded that “a grab of Noriega” would be “more acceptable certainly at home, maybe abroad.” The last straw came with the murder of an American soldier and the torture of another, prompting Bush to deploy fourteen thousand American troops, who joined the thirteen thousand troops already in Panama, for Operation Just Cause, with the mission of removing Noriega from power and bringing him to justice. After a manhunt lasting a few days, Noriega was apprehended and jailed in Miami as a prisoner of war, where he would later be found guilty of eight counts of drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering, and sentenced to forty years in prison. While largely considered successful, the incursion claimed the lives of eleven American soldiers, while wounding 325.
One of the “hardest days of George’s presidency,” Barbara recalled, was a New Year’s Eve visit the first couple made to two San Antonio military hospitals to console some of the wounded and their families. But the commander in chief left bolstered by their patriotism and spirit. Many expressed pride in him and gratitude for his leadership. Another, an African American accompanied by his Filipina wife and their two sons, assured him, “I couldn’t have better care if I had all Donald Trump’s money.”
“It’s been some year,” Bush wrote in his diary the same day, the last day of the decade. “I end the year with more confidence, and end the year with the real gratitude of our team . . . I’m certainly not seen as a visionary, but I hope I’m seen as steady and prudent and able.” His 80 percent approval rating, which had climbed steadily throughout the year, suggested that he was.
He was grateful, too, for his family, which grounded him and gave him solace. In the same diary entry, he reflected on “one of the greatest highlights” of the year: The week prior, on the day after Christmas, before repairing to the office to exercise his duties as leader of the free world, his three-year-old granddaughter, Ellie LeBlond, Doro’s second-born child, summoned him to a bathroom and pointed to an unflushed toilet. “Did you leave that poo-poo?” she asked.