IF 9/11 WAS THE DEFINING moment of his presidency, it was the righteous cause of freedom with which the forty-third president most wanted to be defined as he prepared to take the helm for a second term. Upon leaving his first cabinet meeting after his reelection, Bush spotted his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson. His upcoming inauguration address on his mind, Bush gave Gerson a simple direction. “I want this to be a freedom speech,” he said.
After working closely with Gerson on twenty-two drafts, a freedom speech is what Bush got. On January 20, 2005, before a crowd of 400,000—at least 146 of whom were members of the sprawling Bush clan—Bush spoke for twenty-one minutes using the words freedom, free, or liberty just shy of fifty times. “At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together,” he said. “For a half a century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of Communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical—and then there came a day of fire.” The global dissemination of liberty, he asserted with echoes of Woodrow Wilson more than eight decades earlier, was “the calling of our time” and “the best hope for peace.” “Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty,” he continued, “though this time in history—four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen—is an odd time for doubt.” Regardless, it was a tough sell for the many Americans wary of the festering aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who saw some national security measures as the draconian trampling of civil liberties.
George H. W. Bush watched his son from the inaugural platform, once again doing double duty as a father and as part of a contingent of former presidents who gather quadrennially to observe the inauguration of a presidential successor, a further manifestation of the peaceful transition of power as the hallmark of American democracy. With him were fellow “formers,” Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. A dozen years earlier, Bush had cordially and obligingly turned the office over to Clinton, but there had been a chill between them then. How could there not have been? The elbows had been sharp in the ’92 campaign during which Bush had called Clinton and Al Gore “two bozos,” as Clinton successfully depicted his opponent as out of touch and indifferent.
Presently, though, as the elder Bush and Clinton sat together against the cold of the day, just a notch above freezing, a thaw had set in. Against all odds perhaps, the two men had become friends. The relationship had sprouted with a recent entreaty by the president who asked that they team up in the name of American public relations, international diplomacy, and money-raising in the wake of one of the most devastating natural disasters on record. On December 26, 2004, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake shook beneath the Indian Ocean triggering a massive tsunami that overwhelmed coastal areas throughout Southeast Asia. The death toll would measure over 230,000, in fourteen different countries in the region. Initially, the U.S. responded by offering up $15 million in disaster relief, later upped to $35 million. At a time when the American image was tarnishing due to the war in Iraq and when the U.S. ranked last among developed nations in foreign aid as a percentage of gross domestic income, the American contribution was looked upon as paltry.
As the White House scrambled to show American compassion, Andy Card suggested tapping 41 and Clinton to encourage donations in the private sector and to tour the most ravaged areas of Southeast Asia. It was a big statement—two ex-presidents and former rivals coming together in the name of philanthropy and international goodwill. Accepting the president’s request, the twosome, like a mismatched duo in a buddy movie, set off in mid-February from Los Angeles for Thailand in a blue-and-white Boeing 757 with the words “United States of America” emblazoned on its fuselage. As they got to know each other better on the trip—which included stops in Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Maldives—a genuine friendship blossomed.
Bush conceded that before the trip he “did not really know” his former rival. He gathered that Clinton would have scored poorly in his grade school report card in the area of “Claims no more than his fair share of time and attention in the classroom,” and lamented that “Clinton time” nullified his instinctive punctuality. But as he spent time with Clinton, he found himself liking him. The fifty-eight-year-old Clinton treated him with deference and consideration, including his insistence that his eighty-year-old elder take the plane’s only bed in the stateroom while he slumbered in a seat in the plane’s main cabin, despite recently being laid up with quadruple-bypass surgery. Bush also appreciated the fact that Clinton “went out of his way not to criticize” his son, the president.
Putting the two together “wasn’t ‘Let’s have an experiment in character,’” 43 said later. “It was really focused on how to get money from the private sector to show the world that not only does the government of the U.S. care but so do the citizens—to help deal with a major catastrophe. And so we put them together, [and] it was the beginning of a really unique relationship.”
Soon, 41 and 42, the “odd couple” as they became known, were constant companions, side by side on their Asian tour, appearing together at the Super Bowl and on the links at a charity golf tournament in Florida, and on the airwaves in joint commercials soliciting donations and in news interviews. Together they raised more than $12 million, which their offices directed to outside organizations that channeled the funds into relief efforts. When 43 asked his father and Clinton to represent him as part of a U.S. delegation at the funeral of Pope John Paul II in April, 41 encouraged his new friend to accept. “Come on,” he said, “it will be better with you along.” Throughout the year, the pair became symbols of bipartisanship lacking in national discourse. “We found that when we traveled abroad, people said this couldn’t have happened in their country,” Bush said in June that same year. “The equivalent of a Republican and a Democrat—this never would happen. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.” Time magazine named the pair “Partners of the Year,” as an honorable mention for their annual “Person of the Year” designation. “I think people look at George and me and they say, ‘This is the way it ought to work,’” Clinton said in an interview with the magazine.
Nearly twenty-five years earlier, Gerald Ford had formed an unlikely friendship with his former rival, Jimmy Carter, under similar circumstances. When Ronald Reagan asked Ford and Carter, along with Richard Nixon, to represent the United States at the 1981 funeral of assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the two bonded during the long plane rides to and from Cairo, precipitating a relationship that Carter described as “almost like brothers.” While 41 and Clinton were also part of the fraternity of former presidents, the pair were less like brothers and more, in the eyes of those who observed them, like father and son. Calling the friendship a “dividend” in his life, Bush, too, mused, “Maybe I’m the father he never had,” and Barbara saw it the same way.
Forty-one’s affection for Clinton was evident in the invitation he extended for Clinton to join the Bush family for a late-June sojourn in Kennebunkport. During the visit, the Bush progeny took to calling Clinton “brother from another mother,” or simply, “bro.” “We all like him,” Barbara said of the family’s newest friend. The feeling was mutual. “[Clinton] would say, ‘Your dad means a lot [to me],’ or ‘I love your dad,’ and then I realized how sincere he was,” said 43, who recognized “the enormous capacity of George Bush to become a father figure in people’s lives.” The relationship surprised him as much as anyone and enhanced his admiration for his father. “It’s a unique quality of a person to be able to put aside [his] defeat and see [something] larger,” he said. At the same time, he developed his own kinship with Clinton, picking up the phone “just to chat” at times, especially during his second term. “I talked to Clinton quite a bit,” he said. “I like being around him. I don’t think there’s any obligation for any president to talk to former presidents, but if you like [the] person and they’re open-minded, you can learn . . . And if there was an issue [he knew] he would say, ‘Here’s my experience with that,’ and I’d be very interested.”
Eight months after the tsunami swept over Southeast Asia, America saw nature’s fury on its own shores as Hurricane Katrina, propelled by 127-mile-an-hour winds, met landfall as a category four storm between Grand Island, Louisiana, and the mouth of the Mississippi River, at 6:00 a.m. on Monday, August 29. Katrina’s wrath, mainly in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, would make it the most destructive natural disaster in American history—resulting, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), in a total of $108 billion in damages and just over eighteen hundred deaths. A million people were left homeless in the storm’s wake. Eighty percent of New Orleans, where levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain had failed, was underwater, as ten thousand of the city’s displaced residents, mostly poor and predominantly African American, sought shelter in the Superdome, which lacked adequate accommodations. The city’s Lower Ninth Ward, a poor, low-lying section, was decimated.
Bush was at his Crawford ranch when Katrina struck. The day after, he traveled to San Diego for a scheduled visit, then returned to his ranch for the night before heading back to Washington on the thirty-first. As Air Force One glided over New Orleans, Bush pressed his face to the window and looked out at the submerged, shattered city below, giving the impression of his detachment and indifference.
In general, the administration appeared flat-footed. Bush worried about federal overreach in alleviating the situation, convinced by aides that his powers were limited by law and unwilling to override them. Donald Rumsfeld, incurring Bush’s ire, opposed sending in the Eighty-Second Airborne, which he feared would convey the image of martial law. Neither was Bush pleased with the sluggish pace of the FEMA relief effort, though as cameras rolled, Bush praised Mike Brown, the organization’s director, by saying, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Bush conceded later that he should have “recognized deficiencies sooner and intervened faster.”
To be sure, there was a dearth of local leadership in Louisiana. The city’s mayor, Ray Nagin, and the state’s governor, Kathleen Blanco, haplessly flailed during the crisis as chaos reigned throughout New Orleans, where reports of lawlessness, some later proven false, abounded. A committee comprised of eleven Republican members of the House of Representatives looking into the response to Hurricane Katrina issued a universally damning report in February of the following year. “Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure,” it read, “an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare. At every level—individual, corporate, philanthropic and governmental—we failed to meet the need that was Katrina.” But Bush was the media’s main target as criticism of him and his administration hit a fevered pitch. During a star-studded NBC telethon to raise money for disaster relief, rapper Kanye West blurted, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Katrina marked, Bush wrote later, “the worst moment” of his presidency.
As always, George H. W. Bush felt the sting as acutely as his son did, perhaps even more. It was a natural instinct for a family member of a politician to lament a public image that contradicted the person they knew, but even more so for Bush, who was one of the handful of living Americans who knew the presidency first hand. In a September 2 letter to his friend Hugh Sidey, Bush wrote:
I am really down about the way the President has been attacked. Over and over again the networks attack him. First for being late in moving. Then for flying over Louisiana on the way back to Washington. Then on the snaillike pace of relief.
One story in yesterday’s NY Times suggested that the President didn’t care because Katrina’s main victims were African American . . .
These attacks by politicians and news media remind me of those I weathered back in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida. We could do nothing right. Every person who lost a roof or a house aimed their fire at me personally.
Now my son is under this kind of blistering, mean-spirited attack. People assign to him the worst possible motives. They do not recognize how complex the recovery is. They do not want to say that it was impossible to foresee the extent or even the types of the damage. And they also seem to feel that these gun toting, knife wielding thugs should get a pass.
The critics do not know what is in 43’s heart, how deeply he feels about the hurt, the anguish, the losses affecting so many people, most of them poor . . .
In fact, the elder Bush helped mitigate the situation when 43 once again asked him and Clinton, the “A-Team” by estimation of the New York Post, to head up disaster-relief efforts. “I see you’ve reunited your father and stepbrother,” his mother quipped afterward. David Letterman, referring to a struggling NBC Friends sitcom spin-off, cracked in a Late Night monologue, “That’s what they do now—whenever there’s trouble, they send in Presidents Clinton and Bush. Earlier today they arrived on the set of Joey.” The Clinton-Bush team dutifully set out to the worst-hit areas, just as they had in Southeast Asia, and encouraged philanthropy from the private sector. By October the Katrina fund in their names had generated over $120 million, more than any other nonprofit raised except the Red Cross and Salvation Army.
The joint effort further deepened the bond between the forty-first and forty-second presidents. Earlier in the year, Clinton had joked that his unofficial adoption into the Bush clan showed the lengths the family would go “to have another president in the family,” expressing hope that he could “get them to adopt Hillary.” That may have been one Clinton too many. Anticipating the future ambitions of members of the Bush and Clinton families, 41 predicted in early 2006 that his amity with Clinton “might become a little strained when Hillary runs [for president],” adding, as if it were necessary, “I won’t be her campaign manager.” Still, if his friendship with Mr. Clinton came as a surprise to many in 2005, his vote for Mrs. Clinton eleven years later as she squared off against her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, in the election of 2016—Bush’s first ballot for a Democratic presidential nominee—would be far bigger.