My Father, My President Read online

  The day after their arrival, the two delegations awoke to the rumble and roar of a big storm. The two military ships were being thrown by the waves as though they were tiny boats. Ariel de Guzman, who worked as a navy chef at the time and has served as Mom and Dad’s chef and house manager for years, remembered how Dad went up on the bridge of the ship with the captain, watching the ocean swells in the pouring rain.

  Suddenly, Dad saw a silhouette of someone out on the bow of the ship. The figure seemed to be holding on to something, struggling to keep his balance and looking down toward the water. Dad asked the captain on the bridge about it. The officer explained that a sailor was standing watch on the bow to make sure the anchor lines didn’t dislodge in the rough seas, causing the ship to drift into shallow water and run aground. In fact, he was on a telephone reporting back to the bridge as the “eyes” on the bow.

  According to Ariel, Dad “left the bridge and went to meet the telephone talker despite the strong winds and blinding rain. He shook his hand and thanked him for helping keep the ship safe.”

  President Gorbachev recalled how Dad’s qualities—“a serious approach to problems, balanced judgment, and the ability to put reason above emotion”—made their mark at Malta. “When we discussed the most complex issue of that time—German unification—George said, ‘We will not do anything recklessly and will not try to speed the unification issue . . . At the same time, the Germans have to think about the time when the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic will be history. In this matter, I will be acting prudently. Let our Democrats accuse me of timidity: I will not be jumping on the Wall, for there’s too much at stake here. I will not be tempted to act in a way that’s flashy but could have dangerous consequences.’

  “I appreciated those remarks, and subsequent actions of President Bush were consistent with them,” President Gorbachev reflected.

  He added, “The most important thing that I recall about Malta is that it revealed a high degree of mutual understanding and willingness to consider the unique position and interests of each other, as well as the understanding of the immensity of the global problems that required us to join forces. The handshake across the table at the conclusion of the talks was not a mere formality, but a gesture that recorded the fact that our two countries no longer regarded each other as enemies.”

  Dad’s relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev was truly a unique one. “One contrast between our relationship and those that preceded it was the amount of contact I had with Gorbachev,” Dad recalled in A World Transformed. “I probably had more interaction with him than my combined predecessors did with their Soviet counterparts. I liked the personal contact with Mikhail—I liked him. How many American presidents could say that about the leader of the Soviet Union? Roosevelt or Truman saying that about Stalin? Kennedy about Khrushchev? Nixon about Brezhnev? I know President Reagan felt warmly about Gorbachev, too, but he did not have the opportunities to work as closely with him as I did. Gorbachev and I found we could sit down and just talk. I thought I had a feel for his heartbeat. Openness and candor replaced the automatic suspicions of the past. It was a stark contrast to the dark decades of Cold War we were leaving behind.”

  Chapter 17

  THE RIGHT THING

  “George Herbert Walker Bush made the prosperity of the 1990s possible. Without the 1990 budget agreement, you would not have had the prosperity in the Clinton administration.”

  —Newsweek editor Jon Meacham

  In May 1989, an international panel of election observers led by former president Jimmy Carter and Vatican officials detected massive voter fraud by Manuel Noriega’s government in Panama during their national elections. The political and security situation there had steadily deteriorated to the point that, in October of that year, some members of the Latin American press had begun to ask Dad if the time for military action had come. Yet it wasn’t until a U.S. marine had been killed, his wife brutalized, and Noriega had declared war against America that—on December 20—Dad lost all patience with Noriega’s dangerous behavior.

  As the situation escalated in December, however, General Scowcroft was worried how the operation was going to play in Latin America. He told me, “When we went into Panama, normally that would have caused an explosion in Latin America—big brother in the North is throwing his weight around again. But before we went in there, your dad had talked to virtually every head of state in Latin America. Not about Noriega and Panama necessarily, but just how they were doing. So while there were some complaints about our unilateral action, it went off without any serious eruption in Latin America. And that is almost unbelievable. That’s the way he operated. It was just instinctive for him.”

  Operation Just Cause was the first time Dad put American troops into harm’s way. He has since commented frequently how that decision—which only the president can make—is the most difficult thing a president can do. But Dad knew it had to be done, after all other options were exhausted.

  “When I went to him to say we should take out the whole Panamanian armed force,” Colin Powell recounted, “he listened carefully, some questions were asked, some issues were raised, and we went ahead and we did it. And he was very decisive.”

  After seeking refuge in the Vatican embassy for several days, Noriega surrendered to American forces on January 3, 1990—just nineteen days after the Panamanian National Assembly had bestowed the title of “maximum leader” on him. Thereafter, Noriega was brought to Miami for trial on drug-trafficking charges, racketeering, and money laundering. He was subsequently convicted in July 1992 and sentenced to forty years in federal prison.

  Two interesting postscripts on Panama: After Noriega’s personal possessions were searched, a cardboard gun target with the names Bush and Cisneros written on it was found with several bullet holes in the head region. (General Mark Cisneros was the army commander in Panama, and Noriega obviously hated him as much as he did Dad.) Dad hung the target in his office at Camp David, but it always made me uncomfortable to look at it.

  Also, within weeks of the successful Operation Just Cause, Dad met a woman in Cincinnati named Sandra Rouse whose son, Private James Markwell, died on the first day of the battle. On December 18, before the operation, Markwell had written a poignant letter to his family:

  I have never been afraid of death, but now he is waiting at the corner. For me, I don’t know. I may walk by; he may stop me. I have been trained to kill and to save, so has everyone else. I am frightened by what lies beyond the fog, yet intrigue and curiosity have brought me through my training this far—I must go through the fog whether the other side is a plane ride home for Christmas or the fog never ends. Do not mourn for me. Revel in the life that I have died to give you.

  Dad wrote to my brothers and me after meeting Mrs. Rouse and reading Private Markwell’s words. In his letter, Dad said, “When I mourn our dead and wounded, when I think of their families and loved ones, I also think of the courage of our troops. I expect I’ll remember PFC James W. Markwell as long as I live. I’ll remember a loving mother’s grief but also her pride in one young, courageous and patriotic soldier.”

  As Christmas 1989 approached, Dad wrote this entry in his private diary:

  December 16, 1989

  Ellie walked in about 4:00 am—she was sleeping in Bar’s little office off our bedroom—and I was aware of her presence. I held out the blanket (we didn’t say anything), pulled her in, and then rolled her over into the middle. Millie was already there, so in went Bar, Millie, Ellie and me. I said, “Be quiet, and go to sleep.” We really never did go back to sleep, but she didn’t say anything. She was a wiggly little thing, but she hugged me and it reminded me exactly of when Robin was sick. It was frightening, it was much the same—her little figure standing there, roughly the same age, equally as beautiful, just walking towards my bed, and standing there, just looking at me . . .

  That first Christmas, our family converged on Camp David, as we did every Christmas that Dad was in
the White House. Of course, the holidays are supposed to be a joyous time of the year—and we would be celebrating Dad’s first Christmas as president—but the truth is, all was not well for me and several others in our clan.

  In fact, I was so distraught about my deteriorating marriage, one night I curled up in bed next to Dad and sobbed. Meanwhile, Mom’s eyes were still giving her problems because of the Graves’ disease; and Ganny’s health was not good—she was in the hospital. Then Aunt Nan’s husband, Sandy Ellis, passed away, which was hard on both of my parents—and indeed all of us who knew and loved him.

  On the positive side, Neil was optimistic about a new business venture; George had just finished his first season as general manager for the Texas Rangers; and Marvin had a great year businesswise, and—best of all—he and Margaret applied to adopt a second child. Their son, Walker, arrived on December 30.

  More than just a new decade was dawning as 1989 gave way to 1990. As we moved into the last decade of the millennium, the bloody Russian Revolution of 1917 was also starting to yield to the peaceful revolution of 1989. Everywhere you looked, it seemed, freedom was on the move. Nelson Mandela was soon to be freed in South Africa; and in Latin America, one dictatorship after another was yielding to democracy. Moreover, the formerly jailed dissident leader Lech Walesa would soon be elected president of Poland; while the jailed playwright Vaclav Havel was already president of Czechoslovakia.

  In the Soviet Union, 1990 saw an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power and the birth of modern property rights—two fundamental reforms that would not have been possible even ten years earlier. While the march to freedom seems inevitable now, at the time it seemed anything but that. No one knew what was going to happen next.

  The burning international question that Dad confronted in 1990 centered on Germany. The opening of the East German border in late 1989 had raised the possibility of reunification, but how—and when? After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day: it had taken forty-plus years for the Soviets and East Germans to establish the institutions and systems used to divide families and isolate East Germans from West Germans.

  When the issue of reunification first came up, a critical catalyst in moving the process forward was a dinner that the president and Helmut Kohl had in December of 1989 right after the Malta Summit.

  “For me, it was especially important that I be informed firsthand by President Bush about the Soviet-American summit meeting, which had taken place on warships off the coast of Malta,” Chancellor Kohl recalled. “George told me that Gorbachev had seemed tense with regard to the German question and thought that the Germans were proceeding too quickly, that I was in too much of a hurry. Bush contradicted the Soviet president and explained that he knew me and knew that I was cautious and would not jump the gun on this. Furthermore, he said that Gorbachev would also have to understand the German side and to accept the emotions the events had triggered in Germany.”

  Chancellor Kohl continued: “George also shared my view that Gorbachev couldn’t manage the tremendous pace at which the developments were unfolding. At the NATO summit one day later, George Bush played a decisive role in assuring that, on the side of the West, a further important step was taken in the direction of German unity. The American president made it clear to our partners in NATO that the United States supported my policy. George Bush’s plan was to become an advocate for the German cause and in return to receive our assurance that we would strongly advocate for a united Germany’s membership in NATO. Both ideas had my support.”

  Events moved quickly after that. “The unification of Germany . . . moved so fast that nobody was really in control of it,” General Scowcroft said afterward. “But the president, early on, said, ‘It’s going to happen, and if it’s going to happen, it ought to happen fast, and I’m going to put my faith in Helmut Kohl,’ and he did. At that time, the Russians were threatening force if there were any moves to unify Germany. The British and French were strongly opposed—nobody wanted Germany unified. President Bush thought it had to be done fast before all this opposition could coalesce and freeze the process or create instabilities which would be fatal for all of us.”

  Chancellor Kohl could see what others couldn’t: he saw an opportunity ahead as the East German communists began to lose their hold, both politically and economically. Within four months of that December 1989 dinner with Dad—in March 1990—there would be free elections in East Germany. And four months after those elections, President Gorbachev—who faced his own grave political problems at home—decided to allow a unified Germany to move forward and join NATO.

  On October 3, East Germany was incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany. After forty-five years, Germany was at last united in freedom.

  “The division of Germany was always unacceptable to George Bush,” Chancellor Kohl said, looking back at that historic time. “He saw it as a violation of human rights. Thus, he supported wholeheartedly the process of reunification from the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. From the beginning, George Bush stood at the forefront of all of those who supported and encouraged us on our way to unity. We Germans could not have won the unity of our fatherland freely—at least not in the span of one year—if George Bush as president of the United States of America, and with him the American people, hadn’t stood firmly at our side.”

  After separating from my husband, Billy, for a year, I moved to Washington when our divorce became finalized. I wanted to be closer to Mom and Dad. The actual day the papers were filed, Jeb drove with me to the courthouse in Maine.

  Not long after, I was renting a small home near Westmoreland Circle in Bethesda, Maryland, trying to decide where to live, when Marvin, who lived in Virginia, gave me a little brotherly advice. He said, “Whatever you do, don’t buy a house in Maryland. It’s one of the most Democratic states in the country.” As usual, I listened to my brother, weighed my options, but eventually bought a home in the Tulip Hill section of Bethesda, Maryland.

  In the meantime, I started working at the National Rehabilitation Hospital (NRH) in Washington—which remains one of the greatest experiences of my life. The hospital was built and founded by Ed Eckenhoff, who was paralyzed from the waist down at a very early age. Ed still runs the hospital and knows firsthand what it is like to receive care at a facility like NRH, and he is an inspiration to the staff and clientele alike. I launched my new career in the communications and development office and was working there when Dad signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, into law. Since then, I have witnessed the monumental effect that the ADA has had on the disabled community.

  I loved working at NRH in no small part because Ed and the rest of the staff were very supportive and very discreet. They knew I wanted to avoid any kind of special attention. Despite my efforts, however, I quickly discovered that being the president’s daughter in Washington is quite a different story than in Maine. When people started to learn my family background in Washington, suddenly I became very popular—and started receiving invitations from people I had never met. (The second we lost the 1992 election, most of those people disappeared.)

  My friend Honey Skinner swears that when I got to Washington, I was on a mission to meet someone—and she may be right. I suppose I wanted someone with whom I could share the excitement of Dad’s White House years, but by the same token I wasn’t looking to get married right away. In any case, I began to date.

  I was lucky in that lots of people tried to set me up with eligible bachelors, but I quickly discovered that dating in college and dating as the mother of two children, one very rambunctious, was quite a different story. It helped that I had the “daughter of the president” thing going for me. In some cases, that got me in the door.

  On other occasions, however, I found it necessary to use the revolving door—walking out almost as soon as I walked in. Such was the case in early 1990 when my cousin kindly set me up on a blind date. The prospect and I were to meet at the Old Ebbitt Grill very close to the White House
, just across the street from the Treasury Building. It was convenient for me to park on the south side of the White House and walk over, so I breezed in to let Mom and Dad know what I was doing. Dad teased me a little, and Mom was encouraging.

  Arriving at Old Ebbitt, I found the man by description, and we had a drink at the bar. It was awkward from the start. He only seemed interested in talking about current affairs and what was going on in Washington. I wanted to tell him about my children, but knew that might be a showstopper, so I engaged in the political and current affairs discussion.

  That is, until he said to me, “You know, I think it’s ridiculous for your father and this administration to go to South America when the drug cartels are out to get him. Don’t you think that’s stupid and dangerous?” I was so mad at the rudeness of his question that I stood up, politely thanked him, and told him I had to go. I arrived back at the White House less than thirty minutes after I had departed. Mom and Dad were still there and naturally asked what happened. They laughed—Dad harder than anyone—as I gave a blow-by-blow recap of the failed encounter.

  On February 14, before departing for the first-ever drug summit in Cartagena, Colombia, Mom and Dad went out to dinner at one of their favorite local restaurants, the Peking Gourmet Inn. There they enjoyed the house specialty, Peking duck, with George and Laura, Marvin and Margaret, and Dr. Burt Lee and his wife, Ann. Dr. Lee was a New York oncologist whom Dad had asked to be White House physician.

  Nerves among the group were somewhat on edge that night, as they had been throughout our family since this particular trip had been announced. After all, in a very real sense, the next day Dad would stand at ground zero with respect to the drug war—not a very safe neighborhood for any president, American or Colombian. Here in the United States, when you mention “the war against drugs,” for the most part you are referring to policies—a political agenda. In Colombia, however, this war involves armed guerrillas fighting, killing, and dying on orders from drug lords and cocaine kingpins.