My Father, My President Page 37

  Clearly, Ellie—who was five at the time—could not appreciate what a thoughtful and extremely generous gesture this was, because she took the beads, much to my embarrassment, and promptly threw them in the prickly Rosa regosa bushes that lined that section of the driveway. I will never forget the sight of Prince Bandar, dressed in his splendid white robes, as we waded into the brambles to retrieve the beads.

  In order to isolate Saddam and Iraq internationally, a large measure of Dad’s success would lie in his personal relationship with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. For years, the USSR had supplied Baghdad all of their weapons systems. It was a major source of influence on the Middle East throughout the Cold War, and the Soviets had a lot of people working in Iraq on that fateful day in August.

  “I can remember, at one point, being sent to Moscow to talk to the senior Soviet military leadership, including my counterpart, their defense minister,” recalled Dick Cheney, at that time the secretary of defense. “The Soviet military was very reluctant to answer our questions. What we wanted to know was what had they provided to the Iraqis, were there any systems there we didn’t know about, did the Iraqis have some capabilities we were unaware of that would be a threat to our troops. Left to their own devices, most of the Soviet military leadership would not have cooperated, but Gorbachev saw to it that they cooperated enough. That was due primarily to the relationship he had with the president.”

  Dad was constantly on the phone with President Gorbachev, and they also held a bilateral meeting in Finland in September where the two superpowers issued a joint statement calling for Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait.

  “We did not differ in our assessment of the invasion of Kuwait as an act of aggression,” President Gorbachev told me. “Indeed, what happened was that right after the end of the Cold War a greedy and brazen aggressor trampled underfoot a small state, with its huge oil reserves. This kind of behavior could not be tolerated. Our meeting in Helsinki on September 9, 1990, held at the initiative of the president, focused on how to preserve and consolidate U.S.-Soviet partnership in the face of the crisis.”

  “It is good that the Soviet Union and the United States have shown the world that now, in this gulf crisis, they are together, that they stand side by side,” Dad said at that Helsinki meeting.

  “I appreciated his willingness to consult with us and his statement that he would not want the conflict to escalate and would prefer a peaceful solution—even though at the time many in the United States were calling for immediate military action,” President Gorbachev added. “At the final stage of the crisis, the United States decided that a ground operation was necessary in order to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait. We, however, were sure that this could be achieved through political pressure, and things were moving precisely in that direction. Nevertheless, I saw it as my main task to preserve what we had achieved in international affairs and in U.S.-Soviet relations. No one, including Saddam Hussein, could drive a wedge between us.”

  On September 11, 1990, Dad appeared before a joint session of Congress about the Persian Gulf situation, and spoke of a new partnership with the Soviet Union and a “new world order” where “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” The speech was very well received. On the way to the Capitol, Dad rode in his limo with Sig Rogich, who was a special assistant to the president. Sig often teased Dad about his wardrobe, most of which was not to Sig’s liking. In the limo, Dad asked Sig if everything was ready for the speech. Sig responded, “We are good on everything, sir, except for your tie.”

  Dad said, “What do you mean, my tie?”

  “It doesn’t match your suit, sir, and quite frankly, it’s a bit drab and it doesn’t send the right message,” Sig replied. So Sig switched ties with Dad.

  Later, Dad returned Sig’s tie, along with a photo of himself in the tie making the historic speech. The inscription read, “When it was all said and done—all in the magnificent House Chamber said as one, ‘Look at that tie!’ It sent just the right message to Saddam Hussein. Thanks Sig—George Bush.”

  In early fall, Dad decided he wanted to visit the troops being stationed on and around the Arabian Peninsula. When he set the date for his visit over the Thanksgiving holiday, the Secret Service started working with General Schwarzkopf and his staff to sort out the complicated details.

  “I’d been over there two trips before that to work with General Schwarzkopf to help set the trip up,” recalled John Magaw, the Secret Service agent in charge of Dad’s detail. “It was my job to know exactly what the president and First Lady were going to do, and the military agreed that they wouldn’t change the schedule without us [the Secret Service] knowing. But the catch was: the President wanted to interface with the troops. How do you make sure that troops that are in combat one day are mentally okay to face the commander in chief the next?” Specifically, they were worried about all those soldiers with weapons being so near the president.

  Schwarzkopf recalled arguing the point, saying, “These are trusted members of the armed forces. Certainly, we’re going to go to war, and certainly, I’m not going to go out and take away the weapons of all of the troops that are there. It just doesn’t make sense. It would insult the troops.”

  To solve the problem, Schwarzkopf and Magaw decided to follow the same procedure troops encountered daily at mess hall: they would bring their firearms forward, present them to show they were unloaded, and then stack all the rifles together. All normal procedures.

  This time, however, a Secret Service agent dressed in military uniform would guard the weapons.

  In the midst of all the planning for security and other scheduling needs, Dad remembered some of the smaller details, too.

  “Going through all of these briefings, we were concerned about safety, and the generals were focused on the troops,” Magaw remembered. “But at one point, the president spoke up and asked, ‘What shoes should Mrs. Bush wear?’ The terrain was all sand and very uneven, and he wanted her to be comfortable. I just found that to be so thoughtful, and typical, of him.”

  Following stops in newly liberated Czechoslovakia and in Germany and Paris, Dad and Mom landed at Dhahran Air Base on November 22, and my father addressed a crowd of air force personnel. Then they hopped into a helicopter with General Schwarzkopf and made the first in a series of flights to visit with troops.

  Between stops, Dad and the general discussed the operation to that point, as well as the developing plans for the battle to come. “Through all our dealings, I sensed that he trusted me—just as he trusted Colin,” Schwarzkopf reflected. “He trusted the two of us as a pair as far as the conduct of the war was concerned, and he never—ever—interfered, micromanaged, or did any of the things that just drove us crazy in Vietnam.”

  At each stop, Mom and Dad found the morale of the troops high. Eyewitness accounts all report the same thing: when he got up to give his speech, he maybe spoke five words before all the cheering and hollering would drown him out. During their Thanksgiving dinner at an encampment near Dhahran, moreover, the troops besieged them and took pictures with their little cameras while Mom and Dad both signed autographs like crazy.

  The traveling squad next flew out to the USS Nassau in the Persian Gulf where Thanksgiving services were held, then back to eat a second Thanksgiving dinner, this time with marines.

  “For me, this was a very emotional trip,” Dad said. “Looking at the young kids, I knew some of them would be going into combat when the Storm began—and they all looked so young. Aboard the USS Nassau, where we attended a prayer service on the top deck, I lost it. The tears of gratitude freely flowed.”

  “It was just a wonderful and inspiring visit—particularly for the soldiers,” Schwarzkopf said, looking back. “In Vietnam, we didn’t have a lot of presidents coming over and getting person-to-person contact with the soldiers. This president let our troops know that, from a personal standpoint, he really cared—not as troops, not as a huge army, but as individuals.”

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nbsp; During this Thanksgiving trip, meanwhile, a power struggle within the ranks of British conservatives ended with Lady Thatcher’s resignation—and the subsequent election of John Major, first elected to Parliament eleven years earlier, who was currently serving as chancellor of the exchequer. Considering the time and effort Dad and his team had invested in keeping such a diverse coalition together, losing a staunch ally like Lady Thatcher at such a critical time—in the midst of delicate U.N. negotiations, for example—was a very tough blow.

  “I remember going through London on one of my trips out there and stopping at Number 10 Downing to see Mrs. Thatcher,” Cheney said, “and she kicked everybody out of the room and then gave me—oh, an hour, hour and a half talking about the decisions we were going to have to make, how she thought the conflict would unfold, all based on her experience in the Falklands War a few years before that. She was a great ally.”

  Any apprehension Dad or his team might have felt about the changing of the guard within the British government, however, would be quickly put to rest. Shortly after his election, Prime Minister John Major flew to Washington for an informal meeting, and Dad invited him to Camp David. The foul winter weather grounded all air travel, so the four of them—Dad, John Major, Brent Scowcroft and his British counterpart, Charles Powell—drove in one car.

  “We started talking about Iraq and when we would be ready to begin liberating Kuwait,” General Scowcroft recalled. “It started as a general conversation, but Prime Minister Major said, ‘We need to start thinking about getting ready to go.’ He asked the president what time frame he had in mind, and the president said, ‘Well, I’m thinking about January 17.’ It was dark in the car, but Major didn’t hesitate for a second. Here’s a brand-new prime minister just entering office, and he’s about to go to war.”

  “John Major never flinched,” Dad added. “He never said he had to check with his cabinet or needed more time to consult. Given the circumstances, one could not ask for a better ally or a better friend.”

  “Ideally, I would not have chosen to be drawn into a military conflict within days of taking office, but I never had any doubt about the justice of the action to be taken following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,” John Major told me. “Nor was there much doubt in my mind that if Saddam Hussein were left to his own devices, he would turn his attention to Saudi Arabia—and possibly other gulf states—sooner rather than later. It was a clear decision on our part.”

  As the mid-January deadline drew nearer, preparations—both diplomatic and military—continued at breakneck speed. In November, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the coalition to use “any means necessary” to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty. In December, Dad offered Saddam Hussein fifteen dates to meet with Secretary Baker—an offer Saddam eventually refused.

  “Saddam never believed I would use force,” Dad once told the British journalist Sir David Frost. “Maybe he read the ‘Wimp’ cover in Newsweek. Maybe he was listening too much to the post-Vietnam syndrome in the United States as it surfaced through the lips of some of the senators. Whatever the reason, he miscalculated.”

  Entering 1991, I could sense the pressure building inside Dad. At times, he seemed lost in thought—as if his mind were elsewhere. He seemed fully aware of the seriousness of the next steps if Saddam Hussein didn’t change course, and that lives would be lost.

  “One of the things that was great about working with him as president was he had a great sense of humor, and we had a lot of laughs,” recalled Bob Gates, who was General Scowcroft’s deputy during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. “He always had a way of breaking up the pressure, but that kind of came to a halt in the fall of 1990. He was much more solemn. Clearly, the burden of the decisions that he faced was wearing on him, and so we went through a five-month period—until the spring of 1991—where the old George Bush was replaced by the war president. We all felt those pressures, but it fell most of all on him. So there was a lot less joking around.”

  Perhaps the most contentious event leading up to the start of the war was the debate over a congressional resolution supporting the war effort. Dad had made the decision right off the bat to seek congressional approval for the coalition’s objectives. They already had the support of the United Nations Security Council, but the road to success on Capitol Hill proved a bumpier ride.

  A major debate had engulfed Dad’s top advisers for months concerning whether the administration should even seek congressional approval if force was needed to reverse the Iraqi invasion. Both Scowcroft and Defense Secretary Cheney argued against it. But Dad had learned a great deal watching President Johnson during the Vietnam War, particularly the way LBJ went to Congress to get the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed. Dad decided that, whether he legally had to or not, it would be best to have congressional approval for any military action he took.

  “He listened to our debate,” Cheney said, “but in the end he said, ‘No, we’re going to go up there and we’re going to ask for specific authorization to use force.’ It was a close vote, especially in the Senate, but it turned out to be exactly the right thing to do, particularly in terms of, I think, national support for the enterprise. The country really came together behind it. Of course, the vote took place just a couple of days before we actually launched the air force, so it was a courageous step on his part.”

  It was a great disappointment to Dad that the Senate majority leader, George Mitchell of Maine, made the Senate vote authorizing Desert Storm a partisan vote. In fact, the entire Democratic leadership leaned heavily on its members to defeat the measure. Even Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, a man Dad respected a great deal on military affairs, voted no. Eventually, the resolution passed 52–47, with only ten Democrats voting in favor of it.

  That final weekend before the January 15 deadline, Mom called our family friends Betsy and Spike Heminway and asked them to join Dad and her at Camp David. Spike’s job, according to Mom, was to keep Dad busy.

  Spike remembered, “She said, ‘He’s got to make this decision, and you’ve got to keep him occupied.’ So we did everything—horseshoes, bowling, everything. At about four o’clock, however, he said, ‘Come on, Spike, let’s go take a walk around the perimeter.’ So the two of us set out, and at one point I looked at him and there were tears in his eyes. When I asked what was wrong, he gestured to the military police around us and said, ‘See these kids? I’ve got to send them to war, and I don’t want to do that.’”

  Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver were also at Camp David that weekend. On Sunday morning, as everyone filed in for an intimate chapel service, one of the press aides approached the Heminways and asked them to sit in the front row with Mom and Dad.

  “‘No, no, no,’” Betsy recalled saying. “‘Let the Schwarzeneggers sit there. We see them plenty.’ But they kept saying, ‘No, you sit up there.’ We wondered what was so important about us sitting up there, and we later found out it was because there was going to be a picture of the president at chapel that day—the day before they announced what was happening—and they didn’t want to have him sitting with ‘the Terminator.’ They were worried that some weirdo might try to make it an issue.”

  One interesting sidebar from that weekend involved “the great toboggan run”—make that “the infamous toboggan run.” After church that Sunday, Betsy and Mom raced out to go down the hill behind Aspen, the president’s house at Camp David, before the grandchildren got to the saucers and the toboggan first. They had monopolized them the night before, and the grown-ups thought they could have a run before the kids got dressed in snowsuits. Now, the snow had melted a little the night before and then frozen—so it was ice instead of snow. Seeing Dad and Arnold Schwarzenegger having so much fun, Mom decided she wanted to try it. The toboggan slid down the hill at breakneck speed, heading for the woods.

  “I jumped on a saucer and flew, spinning on the ice,” Mom recalled. “Dad saw me and yelled ‘abort’ and ‘jump off.’ I was so stunned I ended up
hitting a tree and had a small break in my leg. I was lucky I didn’t hit my head!”

  In the aftermath of this domestic disaster, Dad decided he would send Mom off to the hospital with Betsy, while he stayed behind with Arnold. “That was a bad move on my part, something I haven’t lived down to this day,” Dad said fifteen years later.

  A few nights later, Dad and Mom invited Senator Alan Simpson, his wife, Ann, and Lud Ashley to the White House residence for a quiet dinner. When Dad opened the curtains afterward, he could see and hear the protesters gathered just outside the North Lawn fence. Senator Simpson recalled how Dad asked aloud, to no one in particular, “How can they think that I like war? I’ve been in war. I don’t want any more war. But, by God, we can’t have this guy just taking over another country.”

  Dad continued talking to Ann while Mom and the senator walked Millie. Senator Simpson said, “We got in the car afterward and Ann said, ‘He’s going to pull it. He’s going to pull the chain shortly.’ When I asked if the president said that exactly, she said, ‘No, but I can just tell. He’s not going to let this [the Iraqi invasion] happen.’”

  Meanwhile, the preparations continued—and Dad gathered as much information as he could. His late friend the widely respected Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey remembered going over to see the Air Force chief of staff, General Tony McPeak, before the air campaign began.

  “Do you know where I’ve been?” General McPeak asked Hugh. “I’ve been at the White House having breakfast with the president.” Dad found out that General McPeak had recently been over to Saudi Arabia and flown a couple of missions in an F–16 with his fighter pilots over the desert. Dad wanted to know what it felt like to be in the cockpit, what the desert looked like down there, and the other preparations.