The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  The purpose of his stopping in Jerusalem was to meet with Amiram Nir, Israel’s deputy on counterterrorism, who was negotiating between the Americans and the Iranians over hostages. Arranged by Oliver North, George’s breakfast meeting in the King David Hotel was described first as a briefing on counterterrorism and later as a general review of proposals for rescuing hostages, omitting, of course, any mention of an exchange of arms.

  Months later documentary evidence revealed that the meeting was an arms-for-hostages deal. From the statements of Amiram Nir and Craig Fuller, Bush’s chief of staff, who accompanied him to the meeting and took notes, the Vice President was told that if the Iranians received weapons, they would arrange the release of two hostages—not all seven of the American hostages being held in 1986, just two. Nir said there was “no real choice” other than to change the all-or-nothing policy of the United States and deliver the arms in hopes of getting the hostages out one at a time. Iran released Father Martin Jenco to encourage the United States to change its policy. The policy was changed, and the weapons were transferred. In November 1986 one more hostage was released: David Jacobsen.

  The Vice President later claimed in interviews that he did not know the breakfast meeting’s purpose. “The scope of the operation was not clear to me,” he said. Then he amended his statement and admitted there was some discussion of arms sales but only as a means to “reach out to moderate elements” in Iran. Within the next year he would practically strangle himself in a cat’s cradle of evasions, omissions, and equivocations, repeating over and over, “I was out of the loop . . . out of the loop.”

  “I still shudder when I think of Bush’s trip to Israel,” said Roberta Hornig Draper, whose husband was the U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem. “Bush was there to get pictures of himself for the presidential campaign. That was his only purpose as far as I could see. I was with Mrs. [Teddy] Kollek, the wife of the mayor of Jerusalem, and we accompanied the Bushes to the Wailing Wall, where Mrs. Kollek was literally knocked over by all the cameramen crowding in to photograph Bush. He was disgusting to cause such a scene at a holy place. It was so unnecessary. So disrespectful. My husband and I apologized to the Ambassador and his wife and to Mayor Kollek and his wife for the rude behavior of our country’s Vice President and his entourage.

  “As bad as George Bush was on that trip, Barbara was worse. She was a total bitch. So mean to her staff that it took my breath away. Really nasty, and all because she had dressed inappropriately for visiting the Holocaust Museum. She had worn a blue flowered cotton housedress and open-toed sandals. I couldn’t believe it. Here she was the wife of the Vice President of the United States, for God’s sakes, and she looked like she was going to a Sears Roebuck picnic. She’d been in public life long enough to know how to dress with decorum, but I guess she was so accustomed to flopping around in tennis shoes and muumuus that she no longer made the effort unless she was forced to . . .

  “She barked at me when I showed up in a black suit, pearls, and heels. ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ she snapped. I told her: I always dress like this when we go to the Holocaust Museum. She was obviously embarrassed. She screamed at her staff and demanded to know why they had not told her how to dress. She sent them to her hotel to get her another outfit.”

  At the age of sixty-one, Barbara Bush was supremely confident about most things, but, according to those who worked for the Vice President, her one area of vulnerability was her appearance. “Unfortunately, she had no taste in clothes and she was fat,” said an assistant. “So every effort was made to make sure there were fewer comparisons between her and Mrs. Reagan so that Bar would not look bad . . . She was always talking about her weight, and she was always on a diet. She said she wished she was smaller, but then she’d eat ten meals. If you tried to compliment her, she came at you like a sledgehammer. For example, at a reception you might say, ‘Gee, Mrs. Bush, that’s a lovely dress.’ The response: ‘You don’t need to suck up to me. I’m a fat old woman and I look awful and you know it.’

  “I don’t want to make Mrs. Bush sound like a total harridan, because she can be solicitous and kind and generous, but then in a schizophrenic turn she can lash out and be mean. It’s so strange and sudden that you start to wonder if the kind side is just a front. You never know what might provoke the other side—the mean judgmental side. You just know that you don’t want to trigger that tiger in her because it’s awful.

  “I remember someone going through a receiving line with Mrs. Bush and getting the third degree. Barbara challenged her on why she hadn’t had any children. ‘You’re married, right? Don’t you want children? Why are you waiting? How many children do you want? What do you mean you don’t know? When are you going to get started?’ She was very judgmental in that sense. She’s secure only with women who have had a lot of children like her. More comfortable with women who are mothers rather than strong professional women.”

  At a time when half of all American women worked outside the home, Barbara believed they should be inside the home taking care of children. She was skeptical of women who continued to work after having babies.

  “She didn’t imply that I shouldn’t do it,” said her chief of staff, Susan Porter Rose, a mother of one. “But . . . women are home with their babies. Period. And that’s how you’re a mother. And you’re not a good mother if you don’t do that. But I think our little office and our little staff that had three who were mothers, I think seeing that work was enlightening for her.”

  The Reagan administration had been accused of insensitivity to the Holocaust when the President decided to visit the little cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, that held the graves of forty-nine Nazi storm troopers. His decision angered Jewish groups in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union, all of whom held public demonstrations. Elie Wiesel, who grew up in the death camps and lost his parents in Auschwitz, pleaded with the President on national television not to lend his presence to a German military cemetery. This provoked further outrage, including two resolutions in the House of Representatives beseeching Reagan not to visit Bitburg, coupled with a similar resolution signed by over half the Senate. The editorial opposition to Bitburg was overwhelming as newspapers throughout the country pleaded with the President to change his mind. Even his wife begged him, but Ronald Reagan would not budge.

  He had given his word to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and he said that if he reneged, he would look weak and indecisive. Former President Nixon backed him in his resolve, as did former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vice President Bush, who sent him a secret note, which Reagan later published in his autobiography: “Mr. President, I was very proud of your stand. If I can help absorb some heat, send me into battle—It’s not easy, but you are right!!!”

  The outcry over Bitburg had convinced the Bush hardnoses that he needed to demonstrate his own sensitivity to the Holocaust. They scheduled a four-day trip to Poland in September 1987 with stops at the concentration camps of Birkenau and Auschwitz, where 4 million people had been exterminated. “There will be a lot of wreaths laid on this trip,” said an aide. The trip was so blatantly political that the Polish press accused Bush of using their country to launch his presidential campaign.

  He held a press conference in Warsaw, where he seemed to have been endorsed by Lech Walesa, leader of the outlawed union Solidarity. “The next question is, how many relatives does he have in Iowa,” said the Vice President. His remark illustrated the obvious reason for his trip. When he was asked why he had a camera crew accompanying him on what was supposed to be a diplomatic mission, Bush said: “To take good pictures of me in Poland.”

  At Birkenau he and Barbara stared in disbelief at the gas chambers and ovens that had incinerated ten thousand bodies a day.

  “They are big on crematoriums,” George said. “There’s one over here, one over there.”

  He asked his guide, a Pole who had survived five years in the camps, if the victims brought by train had suspected their fate.


  “Well, they could guess from the fact that the incapacitated were sent to one row, and the rest to another. But they were lied to. The sick were told they were going to the hospital, and the rest to work.”

  “They must have suspected,” said Bush.

  “They must have.”

  “Husbands and wives were separated here?”

  “Yes.”

  “As long as you’re alive, you hope,” George said.

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” said Barbara.

  The Vice President placed a wreath at a stone memorial. The white ribbon crisscrossing the green leaves said: “Never again. The American People.”

  As George and Barbara toured a cancer ward at a children’s hospital, his eyes filled with tears. The memory of losing their three-year-old daughter, Robin, to leukemia seemed as raw as the day she had died in 1953.

  Later, as the Bushes approached the gate of Auschwitz, their photographers pushed everyone aside. “Get out of the shot,” they yelled. The camera crew wanted a carefully composed picture of the Vice President and his wife, tastefully dressed in a black coat, black hose, and black heels. At the wall of death where twenty-five thousand people had been shot, George placed a wreath inscribed: “Their sacrifice will never be forgotten by the American people.” After the Bushes returned to Washington, they produced a glossy campaign pamphlet of colored photos showing George praying at the Wailing Wall, talking with Shimon Peres, visiting a resettlement center for Ethiopian Jews, standing in the Old City overlooking the Temple Mount, and approaching Auschwitz with Barbara. The flyer mailed to Jewish voters in the United States was titled “George Bush. The one candidate who has proven his commitment to the Jewish people.” The text quoted him as saying, “I oppose the creation of an independent Palestinian state; its establishment is inimical to the security interests of Israel, Jordan and the U.S.”

  The former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky praised George for his efforts on behalf of Soviet Jewry, and the former Israeli Ambassador Meir Rosenne credited him with saving eight hundred Ethiopian Jews. The Ambassador had visited Bush at home to explain that when Ethiopia forbade the practice of Judaism and the teaching of Hebrew in the 1980s, the Israelis launched a secret effort known as Operation Moses to rescue Ethiopian Jews. Once the news of the rescue operation broke, the effort had to be shut down, leaving hundreds of Jews stranded. The Vice President went directly to the CIA and secretly arranged a rescue mission that saved those Ethiopians. The mission was never made public until George’s campaign.

  In his pamphlet to U.S. Jews, George claimed to be “the first major American political figure to condemn Louis Farrakhan’s message of racial and religious hatred.” George said he was “the highest ranking U.S. official to have seen firsthand the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.” He said he and his wife “also visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem,” and that he understood “the lessons of the Holocaust and will fight dangerous hate groups in America.” He said he was unequivocal in condemning anti-Semitism and bigotry.

  Not all Jews accepted the image of George Herbert Walker Bush as their defender. When Chaim Herzog, former President of Israel and one of the main founders of the Mossad, wrote his memoir, Living History, he talked to his editor about what he perceived as Bush’s benign anti-Semitism.

  “It wasn’t an active, blatant anti-Semitism,” recalled the editor Peter Gethers. “Herzog felt it was the result of Bush’s country-club upbringing. That he radiated superiority. Herzog believed that Bush felt superior to Jews but that he also felt superior to anyone not in his own class and circle. Herzog wasn’t bothered by it—he just noted it and felt it was something that had to be dealt with.”

  The Bush campaign was forced to dismiss seven volunteers who were linked to anti-Semitic organizations, including Jerome A. Brentar of Cleveland, who helped hundreds of Nazis immigrate to the United States after World War II. He was one of the chief financial backers for the defense of John Demjanjuk, who was sentenced to death by an Israeli court. “To appoint this ugly assortment of anti-Semites and racists shows gross insensitivity to the Jewish community and to all those who oppose bigotry,” said former Democratic Representative and later Senator of New York Charles E. Schumer, who supported Michael Dukakis. Days after the dismissals The Washington Post revealed that Frederic V. Malek, deputy chairman of the RNC and one of Bush’s best friends, had carried out a survey in 1971 of Jews in high-ranking jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics for President Richard Nixon.

  “The moral clock is ticking for the Bush campaign,” said Schumer. “Thinking people across the country are waiting to see how quickly he purges his campaign of anti-Semites, hate mongers and those who allowed them to have roles in the race for the White House.”

  Malek resigned the next day, rather than let the charges against him be used against the Vice President. Bush praised him as a man of honor, and their close friendship remained unchanged. Malek continued raising large sums of money for Bush and was the financier to whom George W. Bush turned when he wanted to buy the Texas Rangers. In later years the Maleks were always invited to accompany the Bushes on their annual cruise of the Greek islands.

  The Vice President’s glossy campaign pamphlet to American Jews with its impressive quotes and posed pictures seemed of little import on November 25, 1986, when the Iran-contra scandal hit the front pages. The President’s admission that the United States had been secretly selling weapons to the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Iranian fanatics had taken Americans hostage and sponsored terrorism, dumbfounded people. They were further shocked to find out that funds from the arms sales were illegally funneled to the contras in Nicaragua. Both Republicans and Democrats assailed the White House. Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were stupefied.

  “We’ve paid ransom, in effect, to the kidnappers of our hostages,” said President Carter. “The fact is that every terrorist in the world who reads a newspaper or listens to the radio knows that they’ve taken American hostages and we’ve paid them to get the hostages back. This is a very serious mistake in how to handle a kidnapping or hostage-taking.”

  President Ford said, “Whoever initiated this covert operation and carried it out deserves some condemnation by certain people in Congress, by people on the outside.”

  Criticism rained down on the President, who suffered the sharpest one-month drop in popularity ever recorded by pollsters measuring presidential job performance. For the first time in his presidency, Reagan’s lack of credibility was certified. He appointed a presidential commission to investigate the role of the National Security Council. The commission’s role was not to investigate charges but to examine the foreign policy apparatus that had led to the scandal. George suggested that Senator John Tower, his good friend from Texas, head the commission with another Bush friend, retired General Brent Scowcroft, and former Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. Attorney General Ed Meese was pressured into transferring the Justice Department’s investigation to a special prosecutor, and the morass known as Iran-contra stayed in the news for the next six years with congressional hearings, lawsuits, convictions, and eventually presidential pardons.

  Suddenly the Bush campaign had a problem they had not anticipated. Their strategy of riding Reagan’s coattails into the White House seemed shaky in the wake of Iran-contra. Ten weeks later their relief was almost palpable when the Tower Commission issued its report, clearing everyone of wrongdoing. The report stated there had been an arms-for-hostages deal and a diversion of funds to the contras, but blamed the State Department for lack of oversight. As Richard Ben Cramer wrote in his campaign book, What It Takes, George had convinced the Tower Commission that he was “out of the loop”: “Of course, he had that wired with his friend John Tower and his friend Brent Scowcroft as two of the three members . . . but everyone had to admit—right?—he won! He showed he was unaware, not a player—not culpable of knowing anything!”

  Throughout the spring of 1987, George fought the tain
t of Iran-contra and issued a string of denials, claiming he knew nothing about arms for hostages or funding the contras: “I can’t recall [when I heard of the sales]. I don’t know that I had a specific role in making any determinations of it.”

  “I wish with clairvoyant hindsight that I had known we were trading arms for hostages.”

  “Mistakes were made.”

  “If we erred, the President and I, it was on the side of human life. It was an over concern about freeing Americans.”

  He wrote to reassure his mother: “Some of our political friends worry about me and what all this will do to me . . . I don’t worry—really. I know the President is telling the whole truth. I know I have, too. And I also know that the American people are fair and forgiving.”

  Dorothy Walker Bush did not believe the President had told the truth. George insisted he did and reiterated that in another letter to her:

  Loved your post-visit letter; but let me clear up one point. The President did NOT know about the diversion of funds to the Contras. He had stated what his policy was on a limited amount of arms to Iran, but he has stated he did not know about the diversion of funds . . .

  Don’t worry about all this stuff, please . . . the total truth will be out soon, and people will see that the President has told the truth. That’s the main thing. Of course there will be differences about arms to Iran, etc., but so be it.

  George’s mother had not wanted him to run for President in 1980, because she felt politics had gotten too mean. She did not think George was up to it, but his slashing campaign had proved her wrong. Now she was even more concerned. She told her Hobe Sound friend Dolly Hoffman that George was not cut out to be President.