The Family (71 page)

During the GOP convention Barbara Bush went on CNN to denounce the network. “I think it’s disgraceful,” she said.

“It’s worse, in my opinion, to print a hurtful, harmful story about the president of the United States from a man who’s dead, and they’re all lies. With no proof, that’s disgusting.”

She berated the press at every turn and excoriated reporters for pressing the issue with a direct question to the President. “It’s sick,” she told
The Houston Chronicle
. “It was a lie. It was ugly . . . The mainline press has sunk to an all-time low and CNN gets the top of my list.” She also criticized the author Susan Trento. “I don’t know the person who wrote that sick book, but they ought to have their mouth washed out with soap and for the press to pick it up is even worse.”

The next day Stone Phillips of
Dateline NBC
walked into the Oval Office for a scheduled interview and, despite a warning from the President, repeated the question. He received an angry denial and a lecture about sleazy journalism.

“It was what everyone was talking about,” said the NBC spokeswoman Tory Beilinson. “Not to ask the question wouldn’t have been right. The question is fair. They’re running a campaign where one of the main issues is family values. Marital fidelity has a lot to do with family values.”

The British press speculated on “the horizontal jogging” of the two men running for President, pointing out that both Clinton and Bush had alleged paramours with the same first name and both men had put their women on the public payroll. Bill Clinton’s Gennifer was paid a mere $17,000 a year in a nonunion low-wage state; George Bush’s Jennifer held a high-ranking federal job worth $100,000 a year. The contrasts between the women resided in more than different spellings of the same first name. Gennifer Flowers was a glamorous blond cabaret singer with a preference for low-cut dresses. “Like we say in Arkansas,” she told
The New York Times
, “‘if it ain’t pretty, don’t put it on the front porch.’” She had sold her story to a tabloid, whereas the other Jennifer, also blond but much older and less flamboyant, went into hiding when her story appeared.

Jennifer Fitzgerald refused to respond to press inquiries. She had been stung in the past, particularly in
The Washington Post
, which announced her appointment in January 1989 with a sly lead: “Jennifer Fitzgerald, who has served President-elect George Bush
in a variety of positions
, most recently running the vice presidential Senate offices, is expected to be named deputy chief of protocol in the new administration.”

A year later
The Washington Post
broke the story that she was fined $648 by the U.S. Customs Service for “misdescribing” the value of a fur-lined raincoat ($1,100) and failing to declare a silver-fox cape ($1,300). She had bought them on an official trip to Argentina in July 1989 with the President’s brother Jonathan Bush and his wife, Jody. They represented the President in Buenos Aires at the inauguration of President Carlos Menem. After a State Department investigation, Jennifer was suspended for two weeks without pay, but she did not lose her presidential appointment.

Flying to the defense of her sixty-year-old daughter, Frances Patteson-Knight, eighty-six, dismissed rumors of Jennifer’s affair with the President as “quite simply and utterly ridiculous.” It was the dignified response of a proud woman descended from Russian aristocrats who, she said, became one of the wealthiest families in America before losing millions in the stock-market crashes between the two world wars. Her home in McLean, Virginia, set on twenty acres, was crammed with antiques, pedigreed dogs, and a wide selection of photos of Jennifer and George in silver frames on the piano and adorning the walls of the bathroom, showing them in formal dress as well as casual wear, relaxed and laughing.

“Jennifer is completely tortured by this whole business,” said her mother. “She doesn’t know what to do. She thinks it is all just horrible, horrible . . . She is very disappointed by Bush’s reaction . . . She respects him because he’s President, but doesn’t think he’s acted like a man here. She is very hurt by his lack of support. I don’t think he called her. If he did, she would be less desperate.”

The only person talking on the Bush side was Barbara. The White House staff remained silent, and the campaign was lip-locked. No one within the inner circle uttered a word. Years later, Carol Taylor Gray said: “Jennifer was a fact of life in George’s life. Period. End of discussion. It was what it was. No one knew that better than my husband [C. Boyden Gray], who worked for George Bush for twelve years. We talked about it constantly . . . No one held it against George. Actually, I liked Jennifer—she was petite and attractive, and she made him happy, so I’m glad he had her in his life to give him a little joy . . . I know this is heresy to say because Barbara Bush is adored by the country and looks like such a sweet old grandmother, but the country doesn’t know her like I do . . . I don’t think she has a good heart . . . she’s not a nice woman. To dogs, maybe, but not to people, at least not to women like me . . . I didn’t see her after Boyden and I divorced, so I can only speak for what I saw during our marriage.”

By the time of the GOP convention in Houston the President was trailing Clinton by thirty points; after Pat Buchanan’s fire-breathing speech on prime-time television, the Bushes probably should have started packing. In a remarkable—and, to many moderates, terrifying—tirade, Buchanan laid waste to all but the religious right of the Republican Party. He railed against the agenda “Clinton and Clinton” would impose on America—“abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units.” With the televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell beaming down from the VIP skyboxes in the Astrodome, Buchanan, whose speech had been approved by the Bush campaign, repeatedly attacked the morals of the Clintons and all those who accepted abortion as a legal right and considered homosexuals to be human.

“There is a religious war going on in this country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Gore are on the other side and George Bush is on our side.”

No one was more shocked by Buchanan’s bombast than Barbara Bush, who immediately characterized his rhetoric as “hateful,” “mean,” and “racist.” Not even Ronald Reagan’s big-tent speech of love and unity could salvage the damage. Nor could James A. Baker III, who had reluctantly resigned as Secretary of State to run his friend’s last campaign. The Republicans limped out of Houston on the defensive and remained there all fall.

Slashing the air, talking too fast, spouting gibberish, flubbing lines, and ad-libbing poorly, the President of the United States campaigned as if English were his second language. He reviled those who said he had no vision. “The vision thing,” he said. “Don’t want to hear about it.” He thrashed his opponents as “crazy.” He called Clinton “a bozo.” He said, “My dog Millie knows more about foreign policy than that clown.” He labeled the Clinton-Gore ticket “Governor Taxes and the Ozone Man.” He accused the press of being pro-Clinton. Playing to the public’s bias, he waved a bumper sticker that said: “Annoy the media. Elect George Bush President.” It was as undignified a campaign as any President had ever run.

By late October the President had sunk in the polls, but he remained defiantly confident. “I don’t want to hear the polls,” he told Mary Matalin. “I don’t care about the polls . . . I know I’m going to win and I know why I’m going to win. It has nothing to do with these numbers.”

Iran-contra had started to dog Bush in June, when Caspar Weinberger was indicted for five felonies, including two charges of perjury. One count was thrown out, but on October 30, 1992, a federal grand jury delivered another indictment against Weinberger. This one referenced a note dated January 7, 1986, showing that George Bush had indeed attended the meeting and supported the arms-for-hostages deal that had been opposed by Weinberger and Shultz. For five years Bush had denied that he knew about the plan, claiming repeatedly, “I was out of the loop.” Now there was evidence that for five years he had lied.

Campaigning in Wisconsin the day after the indictment, he addressed a crowd that was buzzed by a single-engine plane circling overhead trailing a banner: “Iran-Contra Haunts You.” The President nearly snapped his cap.

“Today is Halloween, our opponents’ favorite holiday,” he cried. “They’re trying to scare America. If Governor Taxes and the Ozone Man are elected, every day is going to be Halloween. Fright and Terror. Fright and Terror. Witches and devils everywhere.”

When his opponent questioned his honesty, Bush responded like an adolescent. “Being called dishonest by Bill Clinton is like being called ugly by a frog,” he said.

He snapped at reporters who tried to interview him about the indictment and his role in Iran-contra. “I think most people concede that the media has been very unfair,” he said. “I think the press has been the worst it’s ever been, ever!” When confronted by an AIDS activist waving a condom, he remarked, “Oh, look! New press credentials.”

Polls that had narrowed in the last few days suddenly showed Clinton pulling ahead again, because a majority of Americans did not believe the President had told the truth about Iran-contra. His biggest deception—withholding his diaries—would not become known until after the election.

The Iran-contra independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, had made his first document request on March 27, 1987, for all of Bush’s personal records, including diaries. Rather than issue subpoenas to the White House, Walsh’s office relied on written requests because he wanted to avoid taking the executive branch to court. Bush, who kept copious diaries as a matter of habit, ignored the request.

Five years later, on September 24, 1992, his personal secretary, Patty Presock, opened a safe in the residence of the White House and found his long-hidden diary. She recognized that many passages pertained to Iran-contra matters and wondered if it should not be turned over to the independent counsel. When she told the President about her discovery, he said the diary was irrelevant to Walsh’s investigation. She disagreed, so he called the White House counsel.

Boyden Gray claimed to be astonished when he first saw the diary—hundreds of pages that were a complete daily record of the last two years of the Reagan presidency, plus the entire Bush presidency up to that point. It is difficult to accept that the lawyer, who worked for Bush for almost twelve years, did not know about Bush’s practice of keeping a daily diary by dictating into a tape recorder each night and then having the tapes transcribed. Bush had been doing this for many years, unaware of the legendary Mae West’s comment: “Keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.”

Boyden Gray’s friendship with George Bush stretched back to their fathers, who had played golf together. Now, as White House lawyer, Gray made a calculated decision to withhold the diaries until after the election. He knew the race against Clinton was close, and he worried that if the diaries were suddenly produced after all these years, charges would be made of a cover-up. He went to the President, explained the political problem, and said he planned to tell no one until after the election.

“If that’s your judgment, fine,” Bush said with no hesitation.

At 3:00 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 1992, George Bush still believed he would win. His practical wife, who knew better, was already trying to figure out how to get a driver’s license, something she had not had to think about for the past twelve years of government cars and drivers. By 10:00 p.m., the President was ready to concede. Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote to 38 percent for Bush and 19 percent for Ross Perot. George Bush had received the lowest popular vote for an incumbent Republican President since William Howard Taft. That night Bush wrote in his diary:

It’s hurt, hurt, hurt and I guess it’s the pride, too . . . I don’t like to see the pundits right; I don’t like to see all of those who have written me off right . . . I was wrong and they were right and that hurts a lot.

The hardest blow was yet to come. On November 19, 1992, the President flew to Connecticut to say good-bye to his ninety-one-year-old mother, who was dying. He sat at her bedside with his daughter, Doro, sobbing. Thumbing through the frayed Bible beside her, he found notes that he had written as a young boy at Andover. On her piano in the living room was his official picture as President signed: “For Mummy—I love you very much. Pop.” He returned to Washington an hour after he had arrived, and Dotty Bush died the next day. His family remembered that just before he had taken the oath of office on January 20, 1989, he had leaned over to kiss his mother on the platform. “Many of our family are here,” he said, “and they all, as does this son, worship the ground you walk on.” The night she died he wrote in his diary: “Mum, I hope you know how much we all love you and care. Tonight she is at rest in God’s loving arms and with Dad.”

Momentarily, the loss of the presidency and the scandal of Iran-contra seemed incidental next to losing the most important person in his life. “It’s immaterial when you think of Mother, love, faith, life and death,” Bush said. Later, though, in a letter to his brother Jonathan, George wrote about what losing the White House meant to him: “I didn’t finish the course, and I will always regret that . . . I also know the press were more hateful than I can ever recall in modern political times. I have to get over my ‘hating.’”

George placed most of the blame for his loss on the independent counsel. “Walsh had that phony indictment come out just before the election,” he told Marlin Fitzwater. “Probably cost me the election.”

The President retaliated a few weeks later and put Lawrence Walsh out of business. The day before Christmas—ten days before Weinberger was to stand trial—Bush exercised his prerogatives as chief executive and pardoned all those who had been indicted and convicted in Iran-contra: Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, and three CIA officials: Clair E. George, Alan D. Fiers Jr., and Duane R. “Dewey” Clarridge.