A LITTLE AFTER MIDNIGHT ON November 4, the day after the election, Bush coached himself through the balance of his administration. “Be strong, be kind, be generous of spirit, be understanding and let people know how grateful you are,” he dictated in his diary. “Don’t get even. Comfort the ones I’ve hurt and let down. Say your prayers and ask for God’s understanding and strength . . . do what’s right and finish strong.” He would put a brave face on and be gracious, just as his mother would have expected.
Dorothy Walker Bush was much on his mind in his last days in the White House. On November 19, at age ninety-one, she died peacefully in Greenwich, another doleful chapter in a year Bush was eager to put behind him. Earlier in the day, he and Doro went to her hospital bedside in Greenwich to see her in her last hours. Both of them sobbed as they looked at her tiny figure, struggling to breathe, her tattered Bible at her side stuffed with notes her second son, the future president of the United States, had written her from Andover. She had been slipping mentally in the past couple years, and it had been painful to see her diminished. Once the undisputed leader among the expanded Bush families and the most vivacious mother among his friends—the one who won the mothers’ race at Greenwich Country Day School, leaving others well in her wake, and the captain of the mothers’ baseball team—she had become, in Bush’s words, a “tired old lady.” Now she was gone.
In many ways, it was harder for George W. Bush to accept the election defeat than it was for his father. Nearly three decades earlier, he was hurt and angry when William Sloane Coffin, a one-time friend of his father at Yale, told him that his dad, his hero, had been beat in his 1964 Senate race by a “better man.” But how could the American people not see that it was the better man who had been beat on November 3? How could the American people have thrown George Bush over for Bill Clinton? Sure, the economy mattered, but what about character? George W. was the family’s most astute politician, the one his father most relied on for his political view. Still, it was difficult for George W. to separate the political reality that had been so apparent in 1992 from his own disappointment. That was the way between the Bush father and son, to feel pain for the other more acutely than they themselves did.
Almost immediately after the election, George W. began training for the Houston Tenneco Marathon, to be held a few days after Clinton’s inauguration, when his parents would be back home. It was a chance to exercise discipline and focus on something else—and to purge all the bile that had accumulated in the last four years: the media’s scrutiny and knocks against the old man; the obsequiousness over Clinton; Neil getting dragged through the mud on Silverado. The eighteen-mile training runs leading up to the race would give him a chance to let it all go and move forward. Maybe it would help his parents to move on, too. (When the race came off, they would be there to cheer him on at mile 19, where his irrepressible mother yelled, “Hurry up, George, there are fat people ahead of you!”)
On January 20, 1993, Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived at the White House late for the traditional coffee between the incoming and outgoing first couples. The Bushes received them cordially, exchanging pleasantries and talking convivially before taking the 1.8 mile ride up Pennsylvania Avenue, where Clinton would go through the rituals of his inauguration. Well afterward, George W. tried to “psychobabble” his father by asking, “What did it feel like to welcome Clinton? I hear you were very gracious.” His father replied, “I didn’t have a choice.” When Clinton returned to the White House later in the day as its chief resident, he found a letter Bush had left him on the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk.
Dear Bill,
When I walked into this office just now, I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that, too.
I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described.
There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I’m not a very good one to give advice, but just don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course.
You will be president when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.
Good luck—
George
Earlier in the month, Tip O’Neill, who had been a tough opponent on Capitol Hill, told Bush, “Don’t worry. You’ll leave this place with a lot of people loving you. You’re a good man. You’ve been a good president.” The American people seemed to agree. Bush’s approval rating, which had sunk to 29 percent the previous summer, stood at 56 percent. “I’ve done what I could,” Bush said before departing Washington. “I intend to do everything I can to honor the office of the presidency . . . I feel good that I handed over the office so that Iraq is no problem for President Clinton . . . I wish him well.” The Bush children could be forgiven for not being quite as cordial. At the close of an interview with the New York Times, Jeb sarcastically jibed at the new president. “Remember,” he said, alluding to the chorus of Clinton’s campaign theme song, “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”
As for what tomorrow would hold for George H. W. Bush, it was anyone’s guess. Even his family didn’t know what would come next. When George W. was asked the following day what his father would do in his post-presidency, he replied, “I’ve asked him myself and he said, ‘I don’t know.’ I just don’t think he’s worked it out yet.”
On January 21, the coffee machine began percolating at around 5:00 a.m. in the Bushes’ two-story colonial brick town house in the Tanglewood section of Houston, a rental they would occupy for seven months as construction was completed on their modest new home in the West Oaks subdivision not far away. Informally dressed in a checkered shirt, windbreaker, and running shoes, and clutching a briefcase, Bush left the house at 7:30 a.m., well before rush hour, en route to his new office in the pink granite building at 10000 Memorial Drive. Lying in wait to capture the former president, a lone press photographer accompanied Bush on the elevator up to his ninth-floor, eight-office suite. Bush explained that he could go no farther than his office door. “I’ve been in public life for over twenty years,” he said. “Now, I just want a little time for myself.”