It was not, in George’s case, the idea of jumping on after the man was down. He had stayed with him to the bitter, bitter end. Maybe too long. Maybe George should’ve bailed out earlier, although frankly, I would have thought a great deal less of him had he done that. Not because of any personal loyalty to Nixon, but I just think that the party chairman, appointed by the president, sticks with him until he himself has made up his mind. George contributed, certainly, to the decision that President Nixon had to make. And he contributed to it well.
Much has been written about that “surrealistic” cabinet meeting, with others present at it each remembering it a bit differently. My dad’s diaries note that he spoke up at the meeting—a suggestion had been made for the president to meet with congressional leaders, which Dad strongly advised against because of the confrontational mood on Capitol Hill—and as a result, his asking how expedient a congressional trial of the president would be, should it come to that. Here’s what then-Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Caspar “Cap” Weinberger wrote to me, shortly before he died:
In the faltering days of the Nixon Presidency, we were having a rather desultory Cabinet meeting. The agenda item concerned a new anti-inflation campaign. President Nixon wanted to support a large scale anti-inflation meeting scheduled for the next week. Your father finally said, “Look, this is quite ridiculous, talking about matters of this kind when the only thing on everyone’s mind is whether this Presidency is going to survive.” President Nixon glowered and then said, “One thing is certain—I will never resign the Presidency.” End of meeting. Your father had again demonstrated firmness and decisiveness and candor. He literally spoke for the whole Cabinet.
The day after that bizarre cabinet meeting, Dad presented President Nixon with the following letter:
August 7, 1974
The Honorable Richard M. Nixon
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President:
It is my considered judgment that you should now resign. I expect in your lonely embattled position this would seem to you as an act of disloyalty from one you have supported and helped in so many ways.
My own view is that I would now ill serve a President, whose massive accomplishments I will always respect and whose family I love, if I did not now give you my judgment.
Until this moment resignation has been no answer at all, but given the impact of the latest development, and it will be a lasting one, I now firmly feel resignation is best for this country, best for this President. I believe this view is held by most Republican leaders across the country.
This letter is made much more difficult because of the gratitude I will always have for you.
If you do leave office history will properly record your achievements with a lasting respect.
Very sincerely,
George Bush
Dad went to the White House to see Rose Mary Woods. It was Thursday, August 8, 1974, the day the president had announced he was going to resign:
I went over and saw Rose Woods. There was a pall over the entire White House. I debated about seeing her, but I felt it was a kind thing to do. I felt she would probably be sore about my resignation request letter and she was strained at first. Eddie Cox was there the whole time. Rose had some tears. I told her you’ll probably differ with me, but I am convinced that this is much the best thing for the President as well as the country. She said, “Yes, I do differ with you.” She was sore with [Senator Bob] Griffin and [Congressman John] Rhodes and others who have been close friends with the President. She was apparently blind to the enormity of what he had done. Faithful to the end . . .
Then, finally, on Friday, August 9, 1974, President Nixon announced his resignation:
There is no way to really describe the emotion of the day. Bar and I went down and had breakfast at the White House. Dean and Pat Burch and the Buchanans were there in the Conference Mess. There was an aura of sadness, like someone died. Grief. Saw Tricia and Eddie Cox in the Rose Garden—talked to them on the way into the ceremony. President Nixon looked just awful. He used glasses—the first time I ever saw them. Close to breaking down—understandably. Everyone in the room was in tears. The speech was vintage Nixon—a kick or two at the press—enormous strains. One couldn’t help but look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame and wonder what kind of a man is this really. No morality—kicking his friends in those tapes—all of them. Gratuitous abuse. Caring for no one and yet doing so much . . .
I went back to the National Committee and addressed them. I tried to identify with the feelings I am sure they all felt—of betrayal and distrust and yet pride. I told them we had been through the toughest year and a half in history and yet I now felt we were coming on an optimistic period. I told them that the President [Ford] asked me to stay on. All in all it was a pretty good meeting although I felt drained emotionally and physically tired.
Having read the diary entries penned during the Watergate era, I was fascinated on the one hand and saddened on the other, to revisit the angst my dad had endured. It amazes me now that when he was with our family, Dad managed to keep his compass as a father throughout it all.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to work hard and put yourself on the line for a man who ultimately lies to you. It’s ironic because Dad bends over backward to be ethical—anything that even smells of borderline is out of the question with him. So defending Nixon for that time period must have been an enormous disappointment when he found out he was guilty as charged.
Dean Burch talked about whether, in hindsight, Dad should have resigned in protest: “During it all, he was able to keep up the front that everything is working and the system will take care of itself, and yet I know damn well that he must have gone home and thrown up after giving some of those speeches that he had to give to hold the thing together. He was placed in an absolutely impossible position, of course. We all were. We were all stuck in a situation that we just couldn’t control. But George had to be up in the front lines all the time, and that was a very difficult place to be.
“George might have done himself some momentary good by bailing out two or three weeks before the end, but the hell of it is I think that would have simply cheapened him, rather than having added to his stature in the long run. That was just not an option that some of us had. We were in too far to make a big pretext of resignation and stomping off in a huff. We were there and we just simply had to play out the hand—and we had no cards. And George was not an elected official and he didn’t have a constituency that he had to report back to, so he didn’t have that sort of an excuse . . . But I think George played it the hard way, which was to stay.”
It wasn’t until years later that Dad could look back at the whole episode and find the humor. In the late 1990s, he told an interviewer about a phone call he received at the height of Watergate from Bob Strauss, the head of the Democratic National Committee. Strauss said, “George, your job reminds me of making love to a gorilla.” Dad said, “How so?” And Strauss said, “Well, you can’t stop till the gorilla wants to.”
“And that’s the way it was,” said Dad. “You had no control over these things. Just happened on and on, and finally, the gorilla stopped and Nixon resigned.”
So it doesn’t surprise me that Dad would stay in the game, move forward, and take on the next challenge—despite such a profound disappointment. “It never occurred to me to get out of public life because of Richard Nixon’s transgressions,” Dad said to me. “Even then, I felt I could continue to serve in some way, somewhere.”
Chapter 8
LAND OF CONTRASTS
“He went from the United Nations to China, a country just emerging from total isolation, a country with whom the United States had had no contact for about two decades. And we were just trying to feel our way. Here he got the image of a giant awakening: paranoid, jealous, hopeful. And he grappled
with the question: How do you work with that? How do you cultivate them?”
—Brent Scowcroft
It was August 1974, and we had all been in and out of Kennebunkport that summer, everyone on vacation from schools and jobs. We all watched on television as President Nixon resigned and Chief Justice Warren Burger swore in Vice President Gerald Ford as the thirty-eighth president of the United States. We also watched as speculation built regarding whom President Ford would choose as his vice president.
Dad had arrived at the house in Maine with Pete Roussel, who was his press secretary at the RNC, because the two of them wanted to get out of Washington. The D.C. rumor mill was in overdrive, and each day it seemed there were more reporters calling.
Mom had called Spike Heminway and asked him to keep Dad busy while he was home, to take his mind off things. When Spike arrived at the house one morning, he yelled for Dad and found him upstairs on his knees, fixing a toilet. They moved on from that project to scrubbing the hull of Dad’s boat, flipped over on the sandy beach after the tide had gone out. It was there that Pete found the two of them and gave them the word that Nelson Rockefeller’s private plane had just taken off from a local airstrip and was heading for Washington, D.C. (The Rockefellers had a vacation home nearby.)
The three of them headed back to the house, where Mom was in the kitchen. Pete, Spike, and Dad sat out on the porch with a small television turned on.
“Well, it’s not going to be me,” Dad said to Pete.
“How do you know that?” Pete replied.
“Because I haven’t heard anything,” Dad said. Just then the network anchor broke in on the television. “And now an announcement from President Ford at the White House,” said the announcer. The door to the East Room opened and then immediately shut.
“Well, there’s been a brief delay of some sort,” said the anchor.
At that moment, the phone right next to Dad on the porch rang. It was President Ford, and Dad had a brief conversation with him, then put the phone back down. Dad turned to Pete and Spike and said, “Watch that tube. It’s not going to be me.” And sure enough, the door opened again, and out came President Ford to announce he had chosen Governor Rockefeller.
Pete remembers a local television crew from the Portland, Maine, station walking up shortly after that, while they were all still on the porch. The reporter stuck a microphone over the railing and said, “Mr. Bush, you don’t seem to be too upset about this.”
Dad stared at the reporter and then said, “Yes, but you can’t see what’s on the inside.”
It was, of course, an honor to even be mentioned for consideration. Despite the fact that Dad received more votes than anyone else in a poll of Republican National Committee members as a possible vice presidential candidate, he didn’t expect to be chosen for the job. Since this was coming on the heels of Watergate, he knew that President Ford needed a vice president who wasn’t associated with Washington.
Dad and President Ford had known each other since the 1960s, when Ford was a congressman from Michigan. I asked President Ford about that phone call.
“I was one who always tried to soften the blow, so to speak, and that’s why I called your dad,” President Ford said. “I thought at the time my administration would be strengthened by having somebody who had some background in state administration. Your dad was a good candidate because of his record, but Nelson Rockefeller had the background as a former governor of New York.”
A few days later, on August 22, 1974, shortly after Rockefeller’s selection was announced, President Ford invited Dad to the Oval Office to discuss his next assignment.
During this meeting, Dad told President Ford that it was essential he put his own person in as chairman of the RNC, and they both agreed that Mary Louise Smith would be a great replacement. (Mary Louise Smith had been Dad’s choice, as she was serving as cochair of the RNC with him. She was a native Iowan with a history of political and civic leadership.)
As for himself, Dad expressed an interest in going into international affairs. To this, the president offered, “London and Paris are open. Would you be interested in either of these?”
Paris and London were two of the top diplomatic postings—it doesn’t get any better. They were both plum jobs that come with lots of glamour and perks. Dad responded that while that was very flattering—“beautiful embassies, wonderful challenges,” as he put it—he’d prefer to go to Peking, now known as Beijing, China.
“I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to go to a big embassy and be an ambassador,” he told me. Because Washington was just opening its relations with Peking—a relationship that was very strained so far—our presence in China was not one of a full embassy, as it was in Paris or London. Technically, it was the U.S. Liaison Office, or USLO. “I just wanted to do something really different. I’d been through the drill with the Republican National Committee; but I had loved my U.N. days and wanted to get back in foreign affairs. The challenge of China seemed to be like the future—which it certainly turned out to be,” he explained.
If Dad could somehow further Washington’s relationship with Peking, which he believed he could, then that’s where he wanted to be. He felt it would be more challenging in many ways—very different and, not an unappealing factor, very far from Washington. “It was halfway around the world, it was different, and it was the future,” he said.
Ford said he’d discuss it with Secretary of State Kissinger. Soon afterward, Dad was told, “China it is.”
Dean Burch, who had stayed on as counselor to President Ford, remembered hearing about the meeting from a “shocked” President Ford: “I, along with everybody else, was terribly surprised . . . because I knew that it was within his power to have taken almost any job he wanted . . . he could have been secretary of commerce or something else had he wanted it.”
During his time at the United Nations, Dad had become fascinated with China and its place on the geopolitical world stage. Through working on the question of the dual representation policy, Dad had come to better understand not only Taiwan but China, in all its layered complexities. Beyond the vexing question of Taiwan, the normalization of U.S.-China relations depended on several areas of concern: economics and issues of trade; security and concerns over the Soviet expansion in Asia; and democracy and human rights issues.
China in 1974 was at a unique moment in its history. After imperial rule ended in 1911, China’s ruling party was the nationalist Kuomintang, which called for parliamentary democracy and moderate socialism. It was led by Chiang Kai Shek and was in a coalition with the communists throughout World War II. But in 1949, Mao Zedong and his Red Army pushed the Kuomintang from the mainland. The nationalists fled to Taiwan and set up the Republic of China there, which maintained China’s seat in the United Nations and on the Security Council until 1971—when the dual representation vote took place while Dad was ambassador to the U.N.
Just before that vote, Henry Kissinger had made his now-famous secret trip to China, which preceded Richard Nixon’s historic visit in 1972. Nixon met with Mao while he was there.
In 1966, Mao and his third wife, Jiang Qing, directed the Cultural Revolution in order to fight “bourgeois” values and rekindle the revolution. Thousands were executed in ideological cleansing campaigns, and by the time my father arrived in 1974 the civil unrest had slowed. It wasn’t until September 1976—long after Dad and Mom had left—that the Cultural Revolution was declared over with the arrest of the Gang of Four, a group of communist leaders that included Mao’s widow, a few weeks after Mao died.
And so, in October 1974, my parents arrived in China. My father became the chief of the U.S. Liaison Office, only the second American to serve as the chief of the USLO, following David Bruce, one of America’s most respected diplomats. Relations with the United States were new and very fragile, and Dad loved the idea of being in on the ground floor of it. Mao by this time was an ailing eighty-year-old—although no one knew exactly where he was at one point�
��and speculation was rife among the diplomatic corps that he was dying. Dad called it “reading the Chinese tea leaves.” (The speculation turned out to be true, as Mao died less than two years later, on September 9, 1976.)
Harry Thayer, who was Dad’s deputy in China and who had been on the U.N. staff with Dad, noted that the new mission chief was well received when he arrived—in part because of his personal diplomacy during his U.N. days. In addition to the baseball games and Broadway shows he’d invited other diplomats to in New York, Dad hosted the new Chinese delegation at his mother’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut, for brunch.
I remember going to that brunch. My grandmother had the children, including the Thayer children, wait on tables—on her terrace. My mom remembers that Ganny had been a widow for only about a month and was wearing black pants and a black top with a beautiful Senate pin that my grandfather had given her. The Chinese were very formal, all wearing suits. I can hear my grandmother’s sweet soft-spoken voice responding to them with phrases like, “Isn’t that lovely?” I also remember lots of bowing and laughing, and the “ah, ah, ah” that comes when a word is understood.
Dad and Mom were running late because their driver had taken the long way. While we were waiting, the rice got a bit overdone. When the food was served, the Chinese foreign minister took a scoop of rice and then asked politely, “What is this?” Embarrassed, we had to explain it was minute rice. It was so overcooked the Chinese didn’t recognize it!
Harry Thayer, Chris Phillips, and some of the other staff from the U.N. mission came out as well, enjoying a nice September day that coincided with the Chinese foreign minister’s annual trip to the United States. “It was atypical and unusual” for an ambassador to invite foreign visitors to such a get-together, Thayer said, “and it was the kind of personal touch your dad was very good at.”
My Father, My President Page 12
