My Father, My President Page 42

  My father-in-law, George Koch, is a former president of the Grocery Manufacturers of America, and he followed the scanner episode very closely. “President Bush was one of the greatest listeners that we’ve ever had in the presidency. He would listen to what you had to say and would appear to be very, very interested. He would never say, ‘Look, I know all this.’ The reporter mistook his polite and personal way of listening with not being knowledgeable. The most important thing in this whole story was the reaction of Newsweek, which stated that Bush acts ‘curious and polite,’ but it went on to say ‘hardly amazed.’ Michael Duffy of Time called the whole thing completely insignificant as a news event—prosaic polite talk. He said if anything, the president was bored. Bob Graham, who demonstrated the scanner for the president, said, ‘It’s foolish to think the president doesn’t know anything about grocery stores. He knew exactly what I was talking about.’ ”

  Again, Kurtz explained how the media often assign narratives to people in public life and then look for stories or anecdotes to confirm those narratives. The example he cited was Vice President Quayle misspelling “potato” in a classroom, which was utterly insignificant in and of itself, but it tapped into the unfair “media narrative” that Dan Quayle was not an intellectual.

  “In the case of President Bush,” he noted, “the media narrative at the time was, nice fellow, something of a patrician and a little out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans who have to worry about the price of a quart of milk. That’s why this scanner story took off like a rocket. It confirmed this media narrative about the president; and if the same thing had happened to some other presidential candidate, it probably wouldn’t even have rated a paragraph.”

  Kurtz pursued the story-behind-the-story, and his story changed the tone of the coverage a little bit, but it could not slow down the tidal wave of debate about this one minor incident. In fact, the scanner reference continued to surface for years even after Dad left the White House—to his constant frustration. “I wrote Punch Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times,” said Dad. “I think this was the only such letter I wrote as president. I like Punch a lot, but he was not willing to do anything about the nasty Rosenthal piece.”

  “The trouble is, it gets stuck in the computer, and it’s still there today,” Dad said. “It’s just manufactured news—fake history—but there’s no question that it hurt me a lot.”

  Dan and Laverne Rostenkowski were in the White House residence visiting one afternoon with Mom and Dad when Millie and Ranger came into the room. Ranger went right up to the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and relieved himself on his shoe, hitting the pale carpet around it at the same time. Congressman Rostenkowski remembers, “The next thing I know, your dad’s got a steward in with some soapy liquid. He tells them to leave and your dad is on his hands and knees cleaning the carpet. And I said, ‘George, you’re president of the United States, you’re my president. Get off your darn knees.’ He said, ‘How can I ask a steward to clean up after the dog?’ ”

  Later, Dad sent Congressman Rostenkowski a photo of them all at the scene of the crime, inscribed, “To Dan and Laverne. Watch out for that dog. Whoops! Anyway, welcome, welcome, welcome. George and Barbara.”

  Speaking of dogs, Uncle Lou often dropped by Walker’s Point with his dog, Gilbert. Because Gilbert was a feisty little Jack Russell terrier, Uncle Lou was often discouraged from bringing the dog for visits.

  When Gilbert died, Uncle Lou asked if everyone thought it would be okay for him to put flowers in the dog’s memory on the altar at church. No one knew what to say but thought it was ridiculous, so they told Uncle Lou he’d better check with Mom, who also loves dogs. He walked right into her bedroom without knocking and said, “Barbara, you love your dogs. Don’t you agree that I should put flowers on the altar in honor of Gilbert?” Mom said, “Louis, all I can say to you is, does Gilbert accept Jesus Christ as his Savior?” Louis turned on his heel, saying, “Damn you, Barbara!” and marched out, slamming the door behind him.

  I think everybody was laughing, including Uncle Lou.

  For both Republicans and Democrats, the first true battleground of the 1992 primaries was not Iowa, but rather New Hampshire. In Iowa, Dad’s organizational strength as an incumbent president was prohibitively strong, and such was certainly the case for the favorite Democratic son, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. Accordingly, most challengers chose not to invest precious time or dollars fighting losing battles there and instead went directly to New Hampshire.

  What Iowa lacked in fireworks, New Hampshire more than made up for. First, spurred on by the conservative newspaper the Union Leader in Manchester, Pat Buchanan’s insurgent campaign—the so-called Buchanan brigades with their rhetorical “pitchforks”—was making inroads against Dad. Just two weeks after Pat declared his candidacy, in fact, one poll published in the Concord Monitor in late December had Dad leading 58 percent to 30 percent for Buchanan—an undeniably strong start for an upstart challenger.

  “It was a real eye-opener,” Vice President Quayle recalled. “Not that it was fatal, because you can have these challenges and survive, but that was sort of the first sense that okay, this is going to be a tougher race than we had anticipated.”

  Perhaps more sensationally, however, Governor Clinton’s campaign problems first surfaced in New Hampshire in mid-January and for a time overshadowed Dad’s troubles. One of Dad’s campaign managers, Fred Malek, recalled, “It was incredible. We thought Clinton was going to kill himself, go down with a lot of that stuff. We didn’t see how the hell he could survive. But, boy, he did.”

  On the Republican side, meanwhile, Pat Buchanan won 37 percent in New Hampshire, which shocked and concerned all of us, and only added to the media feeding frenzy. All political hell broke loose that someone who had never run for office and had very little money could do so well against an incumbent president. After all, we were eleven months removed from the historic victory in the sands of Kuwait and not even two months removed from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the peaceful end of the Cold War. Dad had seemed almost invincible just a short time ago.

  Buchanan’s campaign suddenly had life and his supporters were emboldened, but the candidate himself was realistic about his prospects moving forward.

  “After New Hampshire, I hoped there would be talk that the president really didn’t want to run for a second term and that Mrs. Bush didn’t want him to run,” Buchanan said. “I couldn’t beat the president of the United States. My hope was maybe I could do like Gene McCarthy and do well in a very early primary—and then if President Bush, like Lyndon Johnson, decided not to run, it would be too late for anybody else to get in.”

  The night after the New Hampshire returns hit the nation, Texas business magnate H. Ross Perot announced on CNN’s Larry King Live that if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all fifty states, he would run for president as an independent candidate. While the Buchanan candidacy had been somewhat surprising to Dad, Perot’s announcement was more of a disappointment. Dad and Ross had known each other for two decades, and during the 1970s Perot had obviously thought enough of Dad to offer him a job after he left the CIA.

  Perot had served in the navy like Dad, before founding Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in Dallas in 1962. In 1979, he paid a team of former special ops people to rescue two EDS employees in a daring mission after they had been jailed in Iran over a contract dispute. During the 1980s, however, Perot had wanted to go to Southeast Asia to look for U.S. servicemen still missing from the Vietnam War. That request was nixed by the Reagan administration, and Dad volunteered to deliver the news—a decision he later regretted. In fact, Dad said, “Perot shot the messenger.”

  As had Buchanan, Perot opposed the Gulf War—and he also had encouragement from an outside source (in Perot’s case, it was a new grassroots organization exasperated by congressional pay raises). For all of his business success, however, Perot had never run for public office at any level; and apparently even h
e wasn’t quite sure what to expect during his first foray onto the campaign trail.

  “At the end of that first show, Perot asked me, ‘Do you think we’ll go anywhere?’” Larry King recalled. “And I said, ‘Who knows?’ Then suddenly it took off. The economy was in trouble, and along comes this little guy in Texas taking on the major parties. I think, frankly, had he not veered off and gone a little nuts, Ross might have won. He was in the right place, at the right time, and he has only himself to blame.”

  To manage his campaign out of the gate, Perot tapped his lawyer from Dallas, Tom Luce, who first met Dad in the mid–1960s and was also friendly with my brother George. Unlike Mr. Perot, Tom did have campaign experience: he headed SMU Students for John Tower in 1961; he had worked for the state party; he had been chairman of several different candidates’ campaigns; and he had also run (unsuccessfully) for the Republican nomination for governor of Texas in 1990. Tom’s first job was trying to instill some kind of campaignlike organization on a candidate who also wanted to be his own campaign manager and press secretary.

  “It was a very unconventional campaign, to say the least,” Luce said. “When I arrived at the headquarters to help him, there were 2,500 pending media requests and there was no staff whatsoever. So I was press secretary, campaign manager, and gradually we built up a little staff, but not much of one. As I say, Perot was a very unconventional candidate.”

  Looking back, most outside observers—my brothers and I included—are convinced there was an undeniable vendetta element to the Perot candidacy. He seemed to have some unknown grudge against Dad.

  Larry King said, “The president used to ask me every time, ‘What does Perot have against me? I knew him in Texas. I don’t know any reason why he would not like me.’ I would ask Perot, who said, ‘This is just politics. This is just agreement or disagreement.’ I don’t know that I ever believed that. Something happened with the president that turned Perot off him.”

  Oddly enough, Perot’s antagonism was not as surprising to some of us as the betrayal of Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican operative. Ed’s wife, Sherry, had taken an important job as the director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, and that spring, Ed wrote Dad a very glowing letter expressing confidence he would be reelected and offering to help in any way possible. Within weeks, however, it was announced that he had joined forces with Jimmy Carter’s former chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, as one of the two new Perot campaign managers—and Sherry resigned her White House position against Dad’s wishes.

  In February, Dad asked me to lead the presidential delegation to the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. I was really excited because I knew he had also asked his sister, Nancy Ellis, to go. Aunt Nan is one of my very favorite people—a dynamic woman with a magnetic personality. Her mannerisms remind me of Katharine Hepburn. A Yale friend of Dad’s, Osborne Day, was also in the delegation, so I knew it was going to be fun.

  I was really surprised, however, when I heard who the remaining traveling squad would be: Hollywood stars Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith! Dad really liked both Melanie and Don. At one point, he had invited them to a state dinner, and Marvin was seated with Melanie. Afterward, she wrote Marvin a note, calling him “the sexiest dinner partner in town.” Marvin’s wife, Margaret, who was also at the dinner, immediately contacted Don and got him to write her a note, which read, “To the sexiest dinner partner in town—two can play at that game.”

  We had an odd assortment of people going to Albertville. Only Dad would dream up an eclectic group like this, and off we went.

  Albertville was a charming winter wonderland of a town filled with eighteen hundred athletes from sixty-four nations. We went from event to event all bundled up in our warmest winter wear, taking in the ski jumping, figure skating, ice hockey, bobsledding—always cheering on our American athletes.

  While it was thrilling to be at the Olympics, I have to admit I was fascinated by Melanie and Don. One afternoon, our delegation was walking into one of the Olympic events. Even though I was the head of the delegation, it felt more natural to fall behind the movie stars as, let’s face it, they really were the center of attention. Everywhere they went, cameras flashed like crazy. Both usually wore long fur coats and wonderful fur hats, and Melanie very glamorously would hold her cigarette in a cigarette holder just like a Hollywood starlet. On this occasion, an eager young man came running up and asked if he could please have their autographs, to which Don responded in his most movie-star-like way, “Later, baby, we’re on a U.S. delegation.”

  Dad liked sending family members on delegations to other nations because “it was something you could appoint family to without paying the price of nepotism. The U.S. must be represented and should be at the inauguration of presidents and funerals. Vice President Gore did not go to many funerals, and he made a huge mistake. It was at a funeral that I met Gorbachev—after Chernenko’s funeral—and I got to size him up for the president. And so delegations do some good. You can have a lot of bilateral meetings with other countries you can’t have if you just wait for them to come to Washington. I liked going on delegations for Reagan and I liked appointing delegations. Having said that, however, they don’t have an enormous influence on policy,” Dad told me.

  Meanwhile, back at home, unbeknownst to me, Bobby had gone up to Camp David the Saturday after I left to ask Dad for my hand in marriage. Mom and Dad were thrilled and were touched that Bobby would make such an effort; and Bobby, for his part, remembers Mom calling him that morning to see if he was still coming because it was snowing that day.

  Bobby drove up for the day and went straight to Aspen, the presidential cabin at Camp David. As he arrived, he remembers seeing Mom and Lud Ashley throwing on parkas and rushing out to take a walk. It was obvious to everyone why Bobby was there.

  Dad was sitting in front of the TV flipping the channels when Bobby entered the room, and stopped to hear what Bobby had to say. Bobby remembers Dad shedding tears of happiness over the request and saying yes.

  When I got back to the United States, Bobby took Sam, Ellie, and me out to dinner at the Congressional Country Club. After dinner, Bobby took us into a private room and proposed to all three of us! He gave me a diamond ring with three diamonds—one each for Sam, Ellie, and me. Upon hearing the proposal, Sam yelled, “Yessss!”

  It was very sweet . . . and very unanimous!

  On June 11, Mom and Dad traveled to Panama for the first time since the restoration of its democracy in early 1990. It was a hopeful time in Panama, and it was a positive first stop for Dad before he continued on to Rio de Janeiro for a contentious, politically charged United Nations conference on the environment.

  At the time of Dad’s visit, the United States was viewed favorably by 80 percent of Panamanians, and friendly crowds lined the streets of Panama City as Mom and Dad’s motorcade drove past. Both Panamanian President Guillermo Endara and the Secret Service were worried about protests breaking out, but after a big lunch at the Presidential Palace Dad tried to put his host at ease, joked that the “tiny, tiny handful of people that are protesting . . . ought to go up to San Francisco and get an idea of what a real protest is like.”

  After lunch, the Endaras and Dad and Mom went to a large outdoor event in the Plaza Porras—where some ten thousand Panamanians were waiting.

  During the event, Mom remembered there were a few students throwing rocks and what they thought were firecrackers, followed by Panamanian troops firing tear gas out in the crowd. When the Secret Service heard what they believed to be gunshots, they evacuated my parents back through the arrival area into the armored limousines.

  “When I approached the president about leaving, he didn’t want to because it would look bad,” said Special Agent and detail leader Rich Miller. “So I mentioned to him, ‘We really need to go because Mrs. Bush is on the stage with you, and we really need to get both of you back in there.’ That’s when it clicked for him, and we got up and evacuated back into the car.”

 
The next stop on the itinerary was a U.S. military base. Upon hearing that the motorcade route was free of problems, the agents sent half the motorcade ahead just to make sure it was clear. Then it was time for Mom and Dad to move.

  Special Agent Miller recalled, “After we got in the car, I looked at President Bush and said, ‘We’re not going anywhere that President Endara can go because we were going to the airport to leave the country as scheduled.’ So the president looks at President Endara and very apologetically says, ‘You’ve got to get out.’ The guy looks at him like, really? I don’t think he wanted to get left behind, but he was fine.”

  Now flash forward fourteen years. In February 2006, Dad went fishing in Panama with the president, Martín Torrijos, who was elected in 2004 and is the son of former president Omar Torrijos Herrera, killed by Manuel Noriega. While there, Dad learned that a woman named Balbina Herrera, who was in that 1992 audience—and who participated as tear gas against Dad was released—today serves in President Torrijos’s cabinet as minister of housing. Happily, she is now fully committed to democracy.

  When Dad heard this, he immediately wrote her a note, dated February 15, 2006:

  Dear Balbina,

  Excuse my informality. I just want you to know that my eyeballs are clear now!

  Just kidding! Everyone tells me you are doing a great job as a very popular minister who now supports your fine President.