The Quiet Man Read online

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to my family—

  who have always played the largest role in my own journey.

  Their support has made it all worthwhile.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 Journey to the White House

  2 Framing the Mission

  3 Clearing the Way

  4 The Disciplined Leader: Ending the Cold War

  5 “Read My Lips”: The Budget Agreement of 1990

  6 Free-Market Policies for the Environment and Energy

  7 Empowering Communities and Families

  8 The Compassionate Conservative

  9 Desert Storm

  10 Panama, China, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

  11 The Supreme Court

  12 An Embattled 1992

  Postscript: Completing the Mission

  Acknowledgments

  References

  Index

  Photograph Section

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  “I’M A QUIET MAN, BUT I HEAR THE QUIET PEOPLE OTHERS DON’T.”

  —George Herbert Walker Bush, 1988 Republican

  Convention Acceptance Speech

  In early 1993, after the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, I was invited to speak to a business group about my life in government and years of service to the man Clinton had defeated the previous year—former president George Herbert Walker Bush. As governor of New Hampshire for three terms, I had worked with Bush long before he was elected to the Oval Office and helped him through a contentious GOP primary against a host of other Republican candidates. Later, as his chief of staff, I served the president faithfully for almost his entire term of office. During the speech, I summarized for the group what I felt were Bush’s accomplishments in both foreign and domestic policy. In the question-and-answer period that immediately followed, I was asked why I felt the president had lost his reelection bid.

  After touching on what I believed were the inadequacies of his campaign, I noted the historical precedents of losing an election immediately after leading a nation through a great shift in the foreign policy landscape.

  “The most notable example is Winston Churchill, whom everyone credits with having been the heart and soul of England’s victory over Hitler in World War II,” I told the group. “Then, immediately upon the end of that war, there was an election in England, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s party was voted out of office.”

  Looking at some of George Bush’s partners from the end of the Cold War, we see very similar results. Mikhail Gorbachev lost his presidential election in 1991 and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lost the leadership of her own party. President François Mitterrand of France lost an election, as did Brian Mulroney in Canada. Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany lost, too, in 1998. Even the Australian prime minister lost his election, as did the prime minister of Italy. The Japanese prime minister had to step down, and his ruling party lost a reelection bid for the first time since World War II.

  I referred to all of this as the “Churchill Effect,” and it seems to afflict leaders after a great foreign policy burden is lifted from an electorate’s shoulders. There is an almost immediate shift in a nation’s agenda. People refocus their attention on domestic needs and desires, and the new priorities send them in search of new leaders. It is quite possible that in 1992 George Bush was just a victim of the Churchill Effect.

  George Bush had not just one, but several Churchill moments. Not only did he orchestrate one of the largest and most successful military campaigns in history when he drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, but he also adeptly led the world through the most dramatic and remarkable political transformations of the modern era—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the restoration of democracy in Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. George Bush gently guided America as it stepped onto the stage as the world’s lone superpower.

  Regrettably, those international achievements have overshadowed President Bush’s successes on the domestic side. During the 1992 presidential election campaign, Bill Clinton often accused our forty-first president of not having a domestic agenda, but nothing could be further from the truth. Unlike his successor, who passed only a couple of major bills during his two terms, George Bush was an enormously effective president. Except for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legislative blitz during the Great Depression and Lyndon Johnson’s masterful and opportunistic policy-making run in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy, the domestic legislation of George H. W. Bush is the most prolific, consequential, and precedent-setting of all the modern presidents’.

  Ronald Reagan had a great capacity for communicating conservative principles and a conservative agenda. George Bush may not have had the rhetorical skills of the “Great Communicator,” but his style of quiet, effective leadership produced policies and legislation that, when considered as a whole, were even more conservative than those of his iconic predecessor. Committed to family values and conservative social principles, George Bush went into office intent on cutting spending, reducing taxes, minimizing regulatory burdens, and using America’s strength to maintain peace and stability throughout the world. He was a free-market conservative through and through, and his record in both foreign and domestic policy reflected it.

  I believe George Bush was the right man for his time. He was the last American president of the so-called Greatest Generation, which came of age during World War II. Internationally, the time called for a man who inherently understood the historical imperatives of postwar Europe, who was unafraid to project power in the face of tyranny, and who respected the power of his position enough to use it judiciously. The time also called for a man who knew why he loved America and was willing to make it better.

  George Herbert Walker Bush is much too modest a man to brag about what he accomplished as the forty-first president of the United States. The conventional wisdom regarding his administration ignores many of his great achievements. Here I put into context not only how he reshaped the face of the world, but also his extraordinary domestic achievements, which have not received the recognition they deserve.

  George Bush came into office with a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish for his country and how he wanted to do it. He guided and sweated out the details with his domestic policy team just as diligently as he attended to foreign affairs with his national security team. In a way, his domestic achievements are even more exceptional because he had to deal with a very partisan and Democratic-controlled Congress throughout his term.

  President Bush signed into law more than a dozen major pieces of domestic legislation during his four years in office, including the 1990 budget bill, his energy deregulation legislation, the Clean Air Bill, the Farm Reform Act, his crime bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. His Education Summit with America’s governors produced the first set of “national performance goals” to spur the improvement of education in our K–12 schools. He also passed precedent-setting child care legislation, led the effort to resuscitate the savings and loan industry after the system’s collapse, reinvigorated Latin American economies by restructuring bonds under the Brady Plan, and negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement.

  Many of the issues George Bush faced when he took office in 1989 had been lingering for decades—the struggle against communism, instability in Latin America, social inequality, threats to the environment, struggling schools. Solving those issues was a fitting last mission for the former fighter pilot who once told the American people, “I see my life in terms of missions—missions defined, and missions completed.” George H. W. Bush’s last public mission in the national arena set the stage for a new century and, to use a phrase often heard in those years, a new world order. It was also, not coincidentally, the last time an administration really got it right—working for the country’s common interest, above partisan sniping and electoral self-interest.

  As an added dividend, the George H. W. Bush administration brought into the national spotlight some figures who would become household names then and in the years that followed. The Bush administration brought Dick Cheney, a member of Congress and former chief of staff for President Gerald R. Ford, to national prominence as secretary of defense. It elevated Colin Powell to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and international celebrity. With Clarence Thomas, it placed on the Supreme Court the most ardent and principled originalist in American history. And in Roger Ailes, Bush found a political consultant who would go on to transform the American media landscape.

  Writing this book required me to break a promise I made to myself when I left the White House in 1992. Back then I made a firm decision not to write any book about my experiences as chief of staff. I did not want to do one of those “kiss and tell” books so often churned out by retiring political figures. At the time, when I mentioned this decision to the president, he seemed quite satisfied. George Bush was not a great fan of those tell-all books.

  Recently, however, I began to have second thoughts about not writing, and I conveyed those thoughts to President Bush during one of our regular lunches at his family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, in the fall of 2013. The Bush compound sits on one of those rugged, rocky stubs of land jutting into the ocean along the Atlantic coast. For well over a century, it has been the place for seven generations of Bushes to g
ather, bond, relax, recharge their batteries, celebrate victories, mourn defeats, and strategize about the family’s future endeavors. The president and Barbara call it the family nest. It is locally known as Walker’s Point after the president’s mother’s side of the family, who originally purchased the property in the late nineteenth century.

  That brisk autumn day, my wife, Nancy, and I drove past the Secret Service agents who still guard the compound’s gates, then embraced with hugs and handshakes as fine a First Family as has ever lived in the White House. The Bushes were gracious and welcoming as always. We met the president in his little office about a hundred yards from the residence. We lingered there for some time, and our cordial conversation quickly escalated to a fairly raucous, humorous exchange. I teased him about the obnoxiously colorful socks he had started wearing to all his public appearances. We even brought him a couple of pairs to add to his collection.

  Eventually, it was time for lunch and, with a young aide pushing his wheelchair down the path, we made our way to the main house, where Barbara, wearing a bold pink sunshield of a hat, joined us. We sat down on the back deck overlooking the Atlantic Ocean for a leisurely lunch of lobster salad and other trimmings. The first hour of conversation focused on what was happening around the country and the world. As lunch wound down, our discussion turned to whether or not the president would consider another parachute jump on his ninetieth birthday in June (he had celebrated his seventy-fifth, eightieth, and eighty-fifth birthdays by skydiving). He was all for it, but I could tell from the stern look on Barbara’s face that perhaps she was not sold on it yet. She would later relent, however, and the president would spend part of that birthday drifting earthward under a red-white-and-blue parachute with veteran members of the US Army’s Golden Knights group.

  Changing the subject that day, I told both Bushes that I felt it was time for the full story of his administration to be told—to document what he had achieved in both the domestic and the international arenas during his presidency. I lamented that so many of his accomplishments were still unappreciated and perhaps even unknown to members of the younger generation.

  “I have been thinking about writing the book I said I would never write,” I told him.

  They both responded quickly and supportively. “Great idea. Go to it,” the president said.

  That is how this book was born.

  No one spends more time with the president than his chief of staff. There were very few meetings at which I was not in the room, and I had the opportunity to hear the president’s candid opinions and see how he shaped his decisions. This book, the first from a White House chief of staff in more than twenty-five years, tells the story from the perspective of a hands-on participant who was there to witness everything as it happened in the Oval Office. I believe it will change what people think they know about George H. W. Bush, the forty-first president of the United States.

  I examine the president’s decision-making process during the Gulf War, during the fall of the Soviet Union, and during his meetings with world leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Boris Yeltsin, and Helmut Kohl. We see his determination as he directed steps to fix the savings and loan crisis, put together the 1990 budget, and pressed for and signed other major pieces of legislation. All were important events for people here in the United States and around the world. I know how President Bush dealt with each one of these issues, and how the decisions he struggled with were ultimately made.

  The chapters that follow provide behind-the-scenes details of the Bush presidency, beginning with my efforts to help George H. W. Bush win the 1988 Republican nomination for president when I was governor of New Hampshire and ran his primary campaign, and ending with my last days in the White House in 1992. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a definitive history of President Bush’s administration; rather, it is one man’s recollections of and perspectives on some of the most important events of the last generation.

  1

  Journey to the White House

  One of the first visitors to the Oval Office after President George Herbert Walker Bush was inaugurated in January 1989 was his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush. A small-framed woman with wavy blond hair and a complexion perpetually freckled by long summer days in Maine, Dorothy Bush was the embodiment of good manners and breeding. Her influence over her son, it was said, was of an order of magnitude greater than that of anyone else in his life, so it was fitting that on the day after he took the oath of office, President Bush guided the eighty-eight-year-old great-grandmother gently by the elbow to one of the off-white chairs dominating the most powerful sitting area in the world.

  He sat by her protectively while a gaggle of reporters and photographers were allowed to gather in the doorway for a photo op. It was, she told the assembled group, “the most exciting day of my life so far.” Bush beamed and pointed to her. “This is the one that told me not to brag about myself, and bend my knees when I volley.”

  The directives from his mother may have originally been meant for the world of sports, but I believe the president kept them both front and center throughout his career in politics as well. His mother came from and existed in a world of privilege, but took great pains to see that her children were not spoiled by it. Her edict not to brag about yourself not only influenced her son’s reluctance to tout his accomplishments but also implied an obligation to perform well enough so there would be successes about which you could modestly refrain from bragging and leave to others to acknowledge.

  And the admonition to “bend your knees when you volley,” a tennis reference, reminded the president that competition was good, and that when you competed—be it athletically, politically, or diplomatically—there was a proper, correct way to be most effective. The president’s daughter, Dorothy “Doro” Bush, spelled it out well. “My father has lived his life by certain standards, by a certain set of rules, and with a certain way of doing things that go a long way towards explaining the man he is today.”

  When George Bush spoke about the “certain standards,” he often put them in the context of attributes his parents had, but they clearly were attributes he inherited as well and practiced in every facet of his life. He said of his mother, “She never hurt anyone’s feelings. She always tried to see the other guy’s point of view.” And his description of his father, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, certainly applied to the president: “Big. Strong. Principled. Respected by all who knew him. A leader. Wonderful sense of humor.”

  When I heard George H. W. Bush speak those stirring words “I do solemnly swear . . .” on January 20, 1989, I think I was almost as excited as his mother. I was looking forward to serving as his chief of staff at a time when it looked as if the world was poised to make historic changes. I saw few other people in political life better suited to maneuvering in those choppy waters than Bush. In addition to his impeccable upbringing by Dorothy Walker Bush, he had a top-notch education and had served his country heroically in the military in World War II. He successfully ran a business, served two terms in Congress, and then was America’s envoy to China and our ambassador to the United Nations. He ran the CIA before serving two terms as the country’s vice president. One doesn’t come across résumés like that much anymore.

  Born in 1924, still a child during the Great Depression but largely shielded from its effects, Bush entered Phillips Andover Academy, a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts, in the fall of 1938 and graduated four years later. Many of Bush’s character traits gelled at Andover, among them a knack for leadership as captain of the baseball team and the soccer team and a respect for tradition. Phillips, he said, “was a huge influence in my life, more so than college.”

  After graduation, just months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into World War II, he enlisted in the United States Navy on his eighteenth birthday, and after eleven months of aviation training he earned his wings and a promotion. He was eventually assigned to the aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto.

  The youngest aviator in the US Navy at the time, he flew fifty-eight combat missions in the Pacific. In June 1944, after completing a torpedo run on an enemy radio site, his plane was shot down by Japanese antiaircraft fire. His two crewmates were killed, but George Bush parachuted into the ocean and, after floating in a life raft for a short while, he was rescued by the submarine USS Finback. Amazingly, the recovery was captured on film. The jerky black-and-white footage shows a jumpsuited Bush being dragged onto the deck and then walking purposefully toward the hatch. At one point, the young Bush looks straight at the camera with uncharacteristic alarm in his eyes. I think it’s the only time I have ever seen him look really shaken up.