My Father, My President

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My Father, My President Page 10

by Doro Bush Koch


  Mom remembers that Senator Javits “wouldn’t come, because he didn’t think it was funny, but it was great fun.” During the party, Dad jumped up on a chair and gave a dramatic reading of the article, adding funny comments about each man and himself. At one point, my mother overheard the Russian ambassador asking a friend who was more familiar with Western culture, “Vat is dis ‘overrated’?”

  My parents hosted an endless string of receptions—entertaining constantly—as it came with the job. The big parties were fun and I’d come in for a while and see people, and then go off and do my homework. But my favorite part of our daily routine was going to school in the morning, because I got to spend uninterrupted time with Dad.

  At first, I was taking public transportation to school, but unbeknownst to me, the CIA had received intelligence information that a radical Arab terrorist organization, Black September, was planning some sort of an attack against Israelis or Americans in New York. The CIA feared that our family might be a target, and they specifically wanted me to be driven to school rather than continue taking public transportation.

  (By the way, the CIA’s concerns were well founded. In September 1972, terrorists associated with Black September stormed the Munich Olympics and eleven Israeli athletes were killed.)

  Dad had a driver who drove him to the U.N. mission every day in a black limo, but I was mortified at the idea of showing up in a limo—so they had Jerry Aprile, my dad’s driver, switch to a more innocuous-looking sedan. Jerry was a real New Yorker and he was very funny.

  Yet even in the sedan I was embarrassed, and insisted on getting dropped off a block before the school. I was painfully aware of being in the minority as an American student for the first and only time in my life. I remember the feeling of being different and alienated—and I was so focused on my own embarrassment I neglected to notice that most of the other students, who were also children of diplomats, were arriving in black limos!

  Being the teenage son or daughter of someone in public life can be unusual because you’re aware of the coverage in the press, the riding in the limos, the life in a glass bowl—but you’re powerless to do anything about it, and not old enough to have developed a thick skin. To be honest, it can also be a bit lonely, especially if you have to move around a lot as we did. You lose the security that comes with living in one community for a long time. In that regard, my nieces Barbara and Jenna Bush are lucky to be twins and to have each other.

  Chapter 7

  THE TITANIC BOILER ROOM

  “As you look back now at that period of 1973 and 1974, and realize how remarkably unscathed George Bush has come out of all that [Watergate], that’s as high a tribute as I think you can give any man or woman.”

  —Bill Steiger (speaking in 1978)

  In November 1972, shortly after President Nixon was reelected in a landslide victory over George McGovern, he summoned Dad to Camp David to discuss “the future.” Dad had served as ambassador to the United Nations for nearly two years by then, but President Nixon had a new idea for making use of my father’s talents and party loyalty: the president had asked for the resignation of Kansas Senator Bob Dole as chairman of the Republican National Committee and wanted Dad to replace him. (In fact, President Nixon had requested the resignations of every member of his cabinet as well as of Senator Dole, at the start of his second administration.)

  Dad wasn’t sure he wanted the job. He clearly loved the U.N. posting and was not ready to leave; but given his instinctive deference to the office of the president, he also knew it might not be his decision. “I always felt that one should do what the president asked of him, unless he was certain he could not do the job,” Dad explained to me. (An old friend and colleague from the House, Congressman Bill Steiger of Wisconsin, said years later that he wished Dad would have said no to a president just once.)

  Mom was sure he shouldn’t take the job because of all the travel involved—the chairman of the RNC spends his time constantly helping candidates in all fifty states—and because she had seen how vicious party politics could be. Interestingly, many of his diplomatic friends thought it was not only a great job but a step up. (After all, the Chinese communists pointed out, Chairman Mao’s title was “chairman of the party.”) Despite his doubts, and those of my mother, Dad felt he really couldn’t turn the president down.

  Dad never felt close to President Nixon, but he respected many of his achievements, particularly in the realm of foreign affairs. They had an affable relationship and, before Watergate, one of mutual respect. So in January 1973, just as President Nixon was beginning his second term in office, Dad made the move to the Republican National Committee. We left the Waldorf and returned to Washington, and I, thirteen years old by then, returned to National Cathedral School.

  It wasn’t until after Dad arrived on the job in January that the Watergate story broke; and, of course, he never would have taken the job had he known what was to come. Barely a month later, in February 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee was established. By April, President Nixon denied he was involved in the break-in and cover-up, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had resigned—along with White House aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. Then White House counsel John Dean III was fired.

  In May, a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was named. During the summer that followed, John Dean testified before the Senate Watergate Committee, and Judge John Sirica ordered the White House to turn over the tapes President Nixon had been recording in the Oval Office dating back to 1971.

  My father was under enormous strain. Leading a political party whose president was sinking deeper and deeper into a legal, political, and ethical quagmire with each passing day must have been more than most people could have endured.

  During his twenty months leading the RNC, Dad kept a diary that reveals the depths of his anguish over what was happening. Reading the entries in order, and knowing the end result, is like watching a car drive off a cliff in slow motion. For example, an early diary entry involves Nixon’s conversation with my father about Spiro Agnew’s impending resignation on tax evasion charges unrelated to Watergate:

  September 16, 1973

  He [President Nixon] pointedly asked if John Connally [treasury secretary] could be involved in this matter. It occurred to me immediately that he was considering Connally for Vice-President . . . I get the feeling that within a week or ten days the Vice President will resign. I get the distinct feeling the President is giving top consideration to appointing Connally, who I am sure he feels he can get through both Houses of Congress.

  Former Texas governor John Connally—Ralph Yarborough’s nemesis who had edged him out of Kennedy’s car in Dallas that day—was now the only Democrat appointed to Nixon’s cabinet, serving as secretary of the treasury. He had spearheaded the “Democrats for Nixon” effort in Texas, which helped Nixon win Texas as part of the GOP landslide in the 1972 presidential race. After the election—and three months after LBJ’s death—Connally became a Republican.

  When word of Nixon’s leaning toward Connally got to both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, however, the idea went down in flames. Afterward, Congressman William Whitehurst of Virginia remembered that President Nixon asked every Republican member of the House and the Senate to submit up to three names to him, as possible candidates for the vice presidency. Whitehurst submitted Dad’s name (so we know Dad got at least one vote). Nixon ended up naming Gerald Ford as his vice president—but also made it clear he’d support Connally for the 1976 Republican nomination.

  At about the same time, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state and national security adviser, won the Nobel Peace Prize. On October 13, 1973, Dad wrote:

  I also couldn’t help but think of the irony when Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize. Here was Nixon taking all the flack on the war, Kissinger executing his policies, and Henry walking away with a coveted honor. Of course I have great respect for the job Kissinger did—his imagination, his grasp of the situation—but i
t is also a little ironic.

  A week later, on Saturday, October 20, the “Saturday Night Massacre” took place. That night, Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had sided with the Senate Watergate Committee in demanding that the White House turn over Nixon’s tapes. Because the special prosecutor was appointed by the Department of Justice, he answered to the attorney general and could be fired by him—but both Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused to fire him and resigned in protest. Nixon then named Solicitor General Robert H. Bork as acting attorney general, and Bork went ahead and fired Cox—all this in one night.

  Dad, for the most part, didn’t let the pressure show. He seemed the same at family dinners and Sunday barbecues, happy at his place manning the grill, making sure everyone had a drink, joking around with his guests. As always, family and friends came first to Dad.

  My childhood friend Liz Grundy, who later went on to work for Dad, recalled a time when she was fourteen, at the height of Watergate, when she came to our house for a weekend barbecue with her parents.

  “Throughout the afternoon, we noticed that your father was constantly having to interrupt his hamburger grilling to go inside to take telephone calls,” she recalled. Liz stayed on to have a sleepover, and the next morning Liz’s mom offered to come pick her up.

  “Oh no,” Dad said. “I have to go downtown, I’ll be happy to bring her in.”

  As it turned out, the barbecue was the same night as the Saturday Night Massacre. “Thus, all the phone calls and the trip downtown to the White House on a Sunday,” Liz noted. “In the midst of all this, George Bush still made time to drop off his daughter’s friend on the way.”

  In November, Dad discussed with President Nixon what had happened after Vice President Agnew’s resignation in October. Although Nixon had nominated Gerald Ford to replace him, Ford would not be confirmed by both houses of Congress and sworn in until early December:

  November 14, 1973

  We talked about the Agnew matter. I told him that Barbara and I had supported Agnew and told him about my personal letter from Agnew . . . I told him I was going to call on him. I said I might be criticized for this but I felt an affection for the man. The President indicated I did just the right thing and he told me he himself had bought Agnew his Cabinet chair (which cost $600).

  While he wanted to pursue his own political career, Dad told Nixon that he would stay with the RNC job—which he didn’t much care for—because he felt the party needed the consistency of his leadership during the beginning of what would become a protracted period of difficulty for the Republicans:

  I told him that I had been urged by Connally, Anne Armstrong and others to run for Governor of Texas but that I had decided not to do it now. I felt there was a chance for a Republican to win and it would be important, but I felt that my leaving might inadvertently increase the speculation that I had no confidence in the Administration—it might add to an air of instability. I mentioned that I was not trying to equate myself with Ruckelshaus or Richardson. The President agreed that it would be good to stay on the job. I believe he said “through the elections.” He then said, “You could go into foreign service which we could arrange very easily, but I think you ought to come into the Cabinet at that point.”

  By this point, I am beginning to feel that as RNC chairman my father, like Atlas, was keeping the weight of the world on his shoulders, but just barely:

  November 30, 1973

  This job is like walking a tightrope. You want to be fair to the President—you want to accentuate the positive accomplishments of the President, you want to take credit for them for the Party, but you want to be darn sure that the people know the Party does not approve of Watergate or its handling . . . Right now after the November elections there are a wide number of comments that the Republican Party has had it—that we are in for a disaster . . .

  On December 3, 1973, the president publicly disclosed his personal finances, under pressure from the press. (Nixon had given a speech to a group of newspaper editors, and during the question-and-answer session had promised to release his financial record, famously declaring, “I am not a crook.”) As Dad listened to the lawyers present the figures, he thought of his own father’s opinion about Nixon’s financial situation:

  December 3, 1973

  . . . I could not help but feel what a difficult thing for a President to have to lay all this out. I also had the feeling, frankly, that the President would have been well advised given his net worth not to have bought Key Biscayne and San Clemente. It was too big a bite for a man with that kind of limited resources. I remember Dad telling me that he worried about this, and I thought, “Oh, how old-fashioned.” But I think now in retrospect, he was right. I also think about Bar telling me that the President ought to let go of one of the houses because of the energy crisis.

  In the midst of all this, my brother Jeb came to Dad to announce that he wanted to marry Maria Columba “Colu” Garnica of Leon, Mexico. They had met in Mexico when he was on a high school program teaching English to schoolchildren. It would be the first wedding in our family. Dad really wanted Jeb to finish college first—and almost to prove his love for Columba, Jeb not only finished a year early but graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas.

  So on February 23, 1974, Jeb and Columba were married in Austin, Texas. The wedding was very small, just family members. The ceremony was at the University of Texas in the chapel on campus. They seemed so young—Jeb, with long hair and a mustache, was only twenty-one years old. “Colu,” at age nineteen, spoke little English at the time, and my main impression of her was that she was tiny and very beautiful. Dad hadn’t met Columba until the rehearsal dinner at a restaurant called the Green Turtle, the night before their wedding.

  When I asked Jeb recently whether Watergate and the stress it was placing on Dad in any way cast a pall over his wedding, he answered, “He was gracious and accepting even though I placed this burden on him—of not even knowing the love of my life until the night before the wedding . . . No talk of Watergate.”

  My brother Marvin was the photographer for the wedding, because he was the right price (meaning free) and because, in his own words, he considered himself “a younger version of Ansel Adams, armed with my new Minolta camera and a burning desire to leave my mark on the world as we knew it in 1974.”

  Here is Marv’s recollection of that day:

  It was with that sense of heightened self-importance that I volunteered to be the photographer for Jeb and Columba’s wedding. Nobody really protested because the ceremony was small and relatively informal and Jeb and Columba were practically kids. So, if they were responsible enough to get married, then maybe I was responsible enough to memorialize the event for both families. Sounds good, right?

  The cool thing with my fellow high school photographers was to roll your own film from spools that held hundreds of frames. It appealed to the “starving artist” mentality and was a sign of being a purist. So, in anticipation of Jeb and Columba’s wedding, I rolled a few canisters of film and packed them for Austin. I was an “in your face” brand of photographer, snapping pictures at every possible angle and at annoying distances from the subjects. My mom claims that I was snapping photos from the ground (sometimes through someone’s legs) at people who were trying to have regular conversation. I think she’s exaggerating, but it is probably a fair description to say that I was early in the paparazzi movement. So, for the better part of two days I snapped away, naively imagining that Jeb would forever be grateful to his little brother for the beautiful photo album that would memorialize his special day.

  The first moment of panic came when I was in the darkroom, reviewing the negatives from the wedding rolls. The frames seemed too congested with conflicting images. I was hoping that my eyesight was playing games with me, so I printed out one of the frames. That’s when the real queasiness hit. As the paper settled into the chemicals in the tray, I began to
see the image of a guitar over a picture of my grandmother and my parents. Uh-oh! It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had rerolled previously used film that had been taken at a Frank Zappa concert at the Mosque in Richmond, Virginia. Every single photo of the Bush and Garnica families had either a photo of Frank Zappa and/or members of his band, the Mothers of Invention, superimposed onto their own images. I remember thinking to myself that a Frank Sinatra photo may have been acceptable—not Frank Zappa!

  Anyway, I chose the coward’s way out—silence. Deafening silence. Radio silence. Aside from a few questions to the effect of, “How did your pictures turn out?” I heard very little about my embarrassing attempt to help my brother out. For the next thirty years, practically nothing was said about the incident. The wedding marked the end of my photography career. Luckily, my mother thought to take one picture of Jeb and Columba with her Kodak pocket Instamatic, and that photo, copied a few times over, is in scrapbooks and on coffee tables in Texas, Maine, and Florida.

  The epilogue to the story, never previously revealed to any family members, is that I submitted a picture of the bride and groom (yes, with Zappa) in an art show at school. I called the picture something clever like “Zappa’s Bride” and won third prize in the photography category.

  About a week after Jeb’s wedding, seven Nixon aides were indicted for conspiring to obstruct justice—among them Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and former attorney general John Mitchell—and President Nixon was named as an unindicted coconspirator. Within two weeks of that, Dad wrote in his diary about a difficult meeting with the White House chief of staff, Al Haig:

 

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