The Last Republicans by Mark K. Updegrove

Author:Mark K. Updegrove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

PART V

“His Turn Now in the Family”

35

“THE L-WORD”

THE FORTY-FIRST PRESIDENT WASN’T FORGOTTEN after he left Washington. Seven hundred letters or more flooded into his office every day. When he went out to restaurants, the other diners applauded. Abundant speaking offers poured in with handsome honoraria attached, temptations Bush would yield to on occasion calling them “white collar crime.” The brave face he had worn during the seventy-seven days between the election and his departure from the White House remained in place in his new life. “We have much to be grateful for,” he wrote in early February to a columnist who had written a flattering piece on his presidency—one of many to come from others through the years. “And once in a while someone says something very pleasant and nice and reassuring; and it all seems like the whole journey was worth every single minute of it.”

But though he didn’t wear it on his sleeve, the reelection loss pained Bush more than people knew. George W. saw it in quieter moments with him. Some of it came with the territory. “All presidents go through a period of withdrawal, I don’t care what they say,” said George W., who would go through his own withdrawal sixteen years later. “It’s just a natural phenomenon. It’s a deflation.” Some of it was compounded by the circumstances. “I don’t think depressed is the right word, but definitely—kind of a downer. It was a painful year for Dad, really painful to be rejected,” George W. added. The repudiation of the American people, the inability to complete the mission he had started; it was hard to accept. “Barbara is way out ahead of me,” Bush wrote of his wife.

Indeed, Barbara Bush was quicker in moving on; she had spent her life looking new circumstances in the eye—however daunting—and unflinchingly adapting. This was no different. “On January 20, we woke up [at the White House] and we had a household staff of 93,” she recalled. “The very next morning we woke up and it was just George, me, and two dogs—and that’s not all that bad.” The former first lady readapted quickly to suburban life, taking the wheel of a car for the first time in a dozen years after she and her husband bought her a new Mercury Sable. Among other things, she did her own grocery shopping. When the curious asked, “Aren’t you Barbara Bush?” she had a stock reply: “Oh, she’s much older than I am.”

Both got on with their lives. Every morning, the Bushes awoke to a new day, sharing a light breakfast while reading the New York Times and the two local Houston papers before walking the dogs, then moving on to busy schedules that had marked most of their lives. “Along the way,” Bush wrote to a friend, “we count our blessings.”

Shortly into their time after the White House, the Bushes accepted an invitation from the Kuwaiti royal family to visit Kuwait. It had been over three years since the Gulf War’s end, and Bush had yet to see the Middle Eastern country his leadership had liberated.

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