THE FORTY-FIRST PRESIDENT WASN’T FORGOTTEN after he left Washington. Seven hundred letters or more flooded into his office every day. When he went out to restaurants, the other diners applauded. Abundant speaking offers poured in with handsome honoraria attached, temptations Bush would yield to on occasion calling them “white collar crime.” The brave face he had worn during the seventy-seven days between the election and his departure from the White House remained in place in his new life. “We have much to be grateful for,” he wrote in early February to a columnist who had written a flattering piece on his presidency—one of many to come from others through the years. “And once in a while someone says something very pleasant and nice and reassuring; and it all seems like the whole journey was worth every single minute of it.”
But though he didn’t wear it on his sleeve, the reelection loss pained Bush more than people knew. George W. saw it in quieter moments with him. Some of it came with the territory. “All presidents go through a period of withdrawal, I don’t care what they say,” said George W., who would go through his own withdrawal sixteen years later. “It’s just a natural phenomenon. It’s a deflation.” Some of it was compounded by the circumstances. “I don’t think depressed is the right word, but definitely—kind of a downer. It was a painful year for Dad, really painful to be rejected,” George W. added. The repudiation of the American people, the inability to complete the mission he had started; it was hard to accept. “Barbara is way out ahead of me,” Bush wrote of his wife.
Indeed, Barbara Bush was quicker in moving on; she had spent her life looking new circumstances in the eye—however daunting—and unflinchingly adapting. This was no different. “On January 20, we woke up [at the White House] and we had a household staff of 93,” she recalled. “The very next morning we woke up and it was just George, me, and two dogs—and that’s not all that bad.” The former first lady readapted quickly to suburban life, taking the wheel of a car for the first time in a dozen years after she and her husband bought her a new Mercury Sable. Among other things, she did her own grocery shopping. When the curious asked, “Aren’t you Barbara Bush?” she had a stock reply: “Oh, she’s much older than I am.”
Both got on with their lives. Every morning, the Bushes awoke to a new day, sharing a light breakfast while reading the New York Times and the two local Houston papers before walking the dogs, then moving on to busy schedules that had marked most of their lives. “Along the way,” Bush wrote to a friend, “we count our blessings.”
Shortly into their time after the White House, the Bushes accepted an invitation from the Kuwaiti royal family to visit Kuwait. It had been over three years since the Gulf War’s end, and Bush had yet to see the Middle Eastern country his leadership had liberated. On April 13, the Bushes left Houston with a party that included Jeb and Columba, Neil, Laura, Jim Baker, and John Sununu. They boarded a chartered blue-and-white Kuwait Airways jetliner with amenities that rivaled Air Force One, and set off for a three-day journey.
A hero’s welcome awaited Bush as the plane touched down in the country’s capital, Kuwait City. Thousands of schoolchildren, accorded a special holiday for the festivities, lined the streets waving American flags, holding balloons, placards, and flowers, and cheering their country’s champion. Among the gifts Bush received from the Kuwaiti government were an antique door (symbolizing a Kuwaiti proverb, “If a man gives you a key to his home, you are friends. But if he gives you a door, you are family”) inscribed with the names of the fallen U.S. soldiers in Operation Desert Storm, and the Mubarak the Great medal, Kuwait’s highest civilian honor.
While the Kuwaiti head of state hadn’t forgotten Bush’s leadership role in driving Iraqi forces out of the country just three years earlier, neither had Iraq’s. The day before Bush’s arrival, sixteen Iraqis were taken into custody at the Kuwait-Iraq border after a plot to assassinate Bush was uncovered. Officials traced materials found in their vehicles to the Iraqi government. Their mission had been to drive a vehicle filled with explosives near the parade route where Bush’s motorcade would be traveling, and to detonate the bombs with a remote control, or if the remote failed, with a timing device. The backup plan would be a suicide mission in which one of the leaders of the operation would strap on a belt laden with explosives and detonate it while approaching the former president. Mounting evidence in the weeks that followed pointed to a chief culprit: Saddam Hussein.
On June 27, President Clinton gave the order for a “firm and commensurate response.” U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf launched twenty-three Tomahawk missiles toward the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which had directed the assassination attempt against Bush. In a televised Oval Office address explaining the attacks, Clinton said, “The attempt at revenge by a tyrant against the leader of the world coalition that defeated him in the war is particularly loathsome and cowardly.” Asked why Saddam himself hadn’t been targeted, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin replied, “It’s very difficult to capture a single individual. Dropping bombs on the hope that you’re going to get a single individual is a very, very demanding task.” When Bush was reached for comment in Kennebunkport, where the Bushes would annually spend the late spring, summer, and early fall months, his response was brief. “I’m not in the interview business anymore,” he said. “But thank you very much for calling.”
Bush was delighted to be out of the “interview business,” taking pleasure in turning down the bulk of the media’s frequent requests. He didn’t need the spotlight and had no grand plans for an activist post-presidency. In recent years, he had seen Richard Nixon rise like a phoenix from the ashes of Watergate to become a kind of self-appointed secretary of state and eventually a respected elder statesman, someone whose foreign-policy judgment Bush himself had come to value as president—just as Ronald Reagan had and Bill Clinton would. He had also seen Jimmy Carter overcome the humiliation of his reelection defeat in ’80 by banging nails for Habitat for Humanity and launching the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization attached to his presidential library devoted to peacemaking and human rights. Soon, Carter, a future Nobel Peace Prize laureate, became what many considered America’s finest former president.
Bush, on the other hand, had given up on “saving the world” and saw no need for rehabilitation, content instead to be a “point of light for the community.” Eventually, his efforts on behalf of various philanthropies throughout his post-presidency would yield over $670 million. Among other things, the former president busied himself as a board trustee for Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center, eventually becoming chairman, and overseeing the planning of the $83 million George Bush Presidential Library and Museum and the George Bush School of Government and Public Service on the edge of the campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, an hour-and-a-half drive from Houston.
Likewise, Bush dismissed talk about his legacy—the “L-word,” he called it when the subject arose. While Barbara spent much of her first year out of the White House on an IBM laptop laboring away on Barbara Bush: A Memoir, the autobiography she had been contracted to write for Scribner, he opted not to do so. The first ex-president since Woodrow Wilson to decline to write a memoir—and the sizable paycheck that went with it—Bush had no interest in making a case for the historical record. He was content instead to leave his political past behind him. On his last day in the White House, as he bade farewell to his staff, he avoided self-aggrandizement. “Maybe they’ll say we did some good things,” he said. But he would leave it up to historians to make the call. As he put it later, “Let history be the judge without my pushing and pulling.”
What he couldn’t have known was that history was not done with him. Bush’s proudest moments were rooted in family. Ultimately, nothing mattered more to him. As he settled into his post-presidency, his two eldest sons began focusing on their own political ambitions. His days of “saving the world” may have been behind him, but the Bush patriarch’s legacy—the “L-word”—was still growing.