Retrieve a time of puppies, picket fences, and Masonic lodges—frozen in amber but fixed and sure—of the bespectacled librarian, uptown soda fountain, and streets laced by unlocked homes. Did such an age exist? It did, especially in the America between two world wars. George Herbert Walker Bush loved “a nation,” he said, referencing a medium that existed only later, “closer to [television’s] The Waltons than The Simpsons.”
Bush forged what Whittaker Chambers in another context styled “some quality, deep-going, difficult to identify in the world’s glib way, but good, and meaningful.” Its Agincourt: what writer Robert Healy called that “Yankee trait of competing hard, then picking your opponent up off the floor.” Politics prizes ego, power, and a Harold Hill type of flimflam. Bush aired generosity—giving boyhood classmates half his lunch (his nickname, “Have Half”)—modesty, and self-deprecation.
What a conundrum wrapped in hard-to-get-a-handle-on. The moderate northeastern Episcopalian liked country and western music. The patrician enjoyed hunting, fishing, and horseshoes. America’s forty-first president (hereafter, Bush 41) could war on language: “Zippity doo-dah . . . Don’t cry for me, Argentina!” Yet his charm—“I’m president,” he said of broccoli, “and I don’t have to eat it!”—eclipsed prep school and the Ivy League, forming a mountain twang.
Bush belonged to the “Old Boy Network” of perquisite, expectation, and old-shoe chivalry, yet he offset privilege by seeming a regular fellow. “And that’s the wonder, the wonder of this country,” said Willy Loman in The Death of a Salesman, “that a man can end [up] with diamonds here on the basis of being liked!” What did Bush stand for? critics carped, aside from grace, refusal to gloat, and reluctance to offend. As it turned out, more than the Brahmin peaks of courtesy and face.
At home Bush was said to lack a philosophy—“the vision thing,” he coined and gently twitted. Abroad he helped reshape the post–Cold War world. The Greek Heraclitus said you cannot stand in the same river twice. He would have liked the man who, tongue in cheek, Bush called “Mr. Smooth”—himself. Writing a book is discovery, not preconception; the result, George H. W. Bush: Character at the Core. I wish to thank those who helped me explore the surface and complexity of America’s 1989–93 president.
I was speechwriter to the president, writing largely about values, politics, and philosophy. When Bush 41 left the White House, I informally headed his speech staff for the next three years. I write here about the person and president I know, helped by the recollection of many journalists. I especially want to thank the late Time columnist, White House correspondent, and president watcher Hugh Sidey and Tom DeFrank, former Newsweek White House correspondent, now National Journal contributing editor, and student of Bush 41. DeFrank contributed to Newsweek’s book The Quest for the Presidency, which captured Bush’s brilliant 1988 campaign. I am also grateful for Peggy Noonan’s must-read Wall Street Journal column.
In Bush’s White House study hung a painting. The Peacemakers showed Lincoln and his generals near the end of the Civil War. Outside, battle rages. A rainbow denotes the passing of the storm. Bush was a peacemaker: the Berlin Wall down; Eastern Europe freed; the Soviet Union spent; Communism dead. The storm was a reelection that unhorsed that record’s author. History will ask how Operation Desert Storm’s hero got 37.5 percent of the vote in 1992. The why is that Bush was a world statesman and prosaic politician. He loathed campaigning’s faux intimacy—the baring of your soul. I am indebted to campaign accounts and detailed polling analysis that show politics’ bloodletting. In 1988 Bush caused it. In 1992 he endured it.
By definition a speechwriter’s book reflects the craft—anecdotal, episodic. Bush was endearingly unhip. To him, Pac-Man was a camper, not a video game. Asking Aretha Franklin’s phonetic spelling, he called “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” “respect.” Bush liked kids, comity—the Leader of the Free World rose at 5 a.m. to type thank-you notes—honest sentiment, and family. Barbara Bush spoke daily with their five children across the country. Millions would have cheered had they known.
For a time Bush brooded about his 1992 loss, blaming himself, not what he called “the team”: “I couldn’t get through. There’d be all these people saying, ‘Bush is out of touch.’ I couldn’t jump over the hurdle.” In time he cleared it to begin anew. “Just think,” he said, shining cowboy boots, “I don’t need new suits for the rest of my life.” He and Mrs. Bush built a new house in Houston, their home since the 1950s, dividing time each year between Texas (October–April) and the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine (May–September). Each evoked the most overwhelming sense of coming home to some place that belonged.
In the 1990s Bush 41 enforced a new rule: Nearing grandpa, his then twelve (now seventeen) grandchildren had to “deimperialize the presidential retirement” by giving him a hug. Bush also was made an Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.
“How does it feel to be married to a real knight?” he asked Barbara later.
“Sir George, make the coffee,” she said.
Gratefully, America’s vision of the vision thing’s architect changed profoundly in the post-1990s twilight of his life. Polling and anecdotal data showed that the country’s appreciation of Bush as a person and president had soared.
“He built a great alliance and won a great war, so people think of him as a great Commander-in-Chief,” said pollster John Zogby, whose full analysis of Bush graces chapter 13. “He was a war hero as a young man, became a father, grandfather, a father figure, and our last President from The Greatest Generation. It all fits together.”
Stylistically, it had fit together too. In 1991 Bush had helped open the Ronald Reagan Library. “I learned so much from him,” the Gipper’s two-term vice president told the crowd, “about leadership, how to treat people.” Bush withheld one story that I had drafted for the speech for fear that he would break down telling it.
In 2004 I reinstated that story in his June 11 eulogy for Reagan at Washington’s National Cathedral, Bush telling it fine. “It’s something Reagan taught,” 41 told me. “Every time you practice something really emotional, you lessen its effect on you so that finally you can say it.” By now I knew Bush so well as a speaker that I predicted his voice would break in another sentence. It did.
Next morning Bush, kindly and typically, phoned to praise “your Gettysburg Address,” then apologized for having to abort the call. The reason was that he had to mark his eightieth birthday—as he has every fifth year since, including ninety—by parachuting from an aircraft 12,500 feet above the ground to honor two World War II “buddies” killed in 1944, when the Japanese shot down the then-twenty-year-old pilot’s Avenger plane.
You can see an Avenger replica at the Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which opened in 1997 at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Leadership is said to bubble down from the top. It does in people around Bush 41. I have visited each of the thirteen presidential libraries from Franklin Roosevelt to George W. Bush. Among others, Director Warren Finch, Deputy Director Patricia Burchfield, audio-visual archivist Mary Finch, and archivist Debbie Wheeler help make College Station’s among the best. Let me also thank Roman Popadiuk, former director of the Bush Presidential Library Foundation, and Angie Cooper and Nonie Fisher for speaking and scheduling help. Fred McClure, a White House colleague, is the foundation’s fine chief executive officer. Jean Becker is President Bush’s longtime chief of staff. Linda Casey Poepsel, director of correspondence at his Houston office, is a dear friend and, like the entire staff, exceedingly loyal and able. I am grateful to each.
I want to thank White House speech colleagues, later described herein, who tried to help listeners glimpse the Bush we saw each day. Speechwriting researchers were invaluable, including Stephanie Blessey, Carol Blymire, Jeannie Bunton, Carolyn Cawley, Peggy Dooley, Ted Garmey, Jennifer Grossman, Christina Martin, the late Robert Simon, and Rett Wallace. Let me especially thank William F. Gavin, speechwriter to President Nixon, longtime aide to Congressman Bob Michel, and author of such novels as One Hell of a Candidate. His superb book Speechwright: An Insider’s Take on Political Rhetoric inspired this work. The University of Nebraska Press’s Derek Krissoff, Martyn Beeny, Marguerite Boyles, Alicia Christensen, Sam Dorrance, Tish Fobben, Acacia Gentrup, Kyle Simonsen, and Rosemary Vestal helped facilitate this project. Kathryn Owens and Julie Kimmel artfully brought the manuscript to print. Also helpful were my wife, Sarah, who carefully read the text; our children, Olivia and Travis; counselor Phil Hochberg; Gene Brissie; and Ken Samelson.
I wrote where I am privileged to teach: the University of Rochester, in Upstate New York, site of the public papers and audio, video, and other correspondence of former three-term New York governor and two-time Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. In 2013 the university staged a popular exhibit, The Presidential Voice: A History of Presidential Speechwriting. This history shows how language can reflect an age—and often change it too.
Bush’s library contains what the former president calls “the record of the history of what we made in this administration.” His life was the history of an American, transcending race, ideology, or geography— architect of Desert Storm; conqueror of Communism; nonpareil diplomat; model dad; grandpa extraordinaire; U.S. grandmère’s husband; parachutist, in his ninth decade, recalling a special time and place.
As president, Bush began a pioneering “Points of Light” program. Think of his life as hug a child, touch a heart, and tend a wound. You might not be prudent, to use a favorite Bushism, to call it his greatest Point of Light. But you might be right.