The Family (50 page)

“The program was being taped for PBS, and, unfortunately, there were a few snafus due to technical problems and several starts and stops as everyone struggled for a perfect performance . . . Leontyne Price was most accommodating about singing her songs over every time she was asked, but the Bushes went crazy. The next day Barbara called Tamara and reamed her out. ‘How dare you invite us to something and make us sit through all that awful music and such a dreadful, interminable performance. That was the worst evening of our lives.’ Tamara was heartsick. She said later that if you got stung by the business end of Barbara Bush, you’d get yourself a snoot full of hornet venom.”

Barbara was as blunt as a battering ram, and her frequent blasts caused a great deal of distress.

“I remember when we went to a book-signing party in 1984 for Barbara and her C. Fred book,” said Damaris Carroll, referring to the first book Barbara wrote about the family’s dog. “Joel was in front of me and Barbara flung her arms around him and gave him a huge kiss. I was behind him in line, so she started to put her arms around me, too, and give me the same kind of huge hug. But in the middle of the embrace she pulled back. ‘I don’t know you that well,’ she said, and she shoved me away and went on to someone else . . . It was very cutting.”

Sometimes Barbara’s spontaneity left people speechless. “I remember when I first met her,” recalled Aniko Gaal Schott, a public-relations executive in Washington, D.C. “It was while he was Vice President and we were invited to the residence for a reception. We arrived a little early, and Barbara came in and said she’d just been meeting with all the African diplomatic wives. ‘I couldn’t tell one from the other,’ she said. She was quite direct and fresh and unspoiled, but I was a little taken aback. As a diplomatic wife myself who has spent many years in the Foreign Service, I was surprised—shocked, really—that she would be quite so . . . well . . . so undiplomatic about meeting with a group of African women and saying they all looked alike.”

Even within her own family Barbara could be extremely abrupt. “She can be a tyrant,” said her former daughter-in-law, Sharon Bush, who was married to Neil for twenty-three years until they divorced in 2003. “That’s why her boys called her ‘The Nutcracker’ . . . She is a real stickler for good manners on things like thank-you notes, but she can be unbelievably rude to people, even cruel.”

Sharon had never forgotten her wedding day when a photographer from a newsmagazine asked for a family portrait. Barbara, standing next to her husband, rounded up her children. Sharon, described by Barbara in her memoir as “darling,” stepped forward in her wedding dress. “I’m sorry,” Barbara said to her. “We don’t want you in this picture.”

Dr. Floretta Dukes McKenzie, the former superintendent of the D.C. public schools, experienced the back of Barbara’s hand when she accompanied a group of schoolchildren to the Vice President’s house.

“It was just a photo op for Mrs. Bush, who had adopted literacy as her new cause and was trying to get publicity for her association with Reading Is Fundamental, but for the children it was quite an outing and they were excited to go to a mansion and meet the wife of the Vice President of the United States,” said McKenzie, one of the nation’s leading black educators. “We had been allotted just so much time for Mrs. Bush to read to the children and be photographed . . . We were told when our time was up, and I helped the teachers round up the children and get them back on to their buses. I then returned to the residence to get my purse, but the door had been locked and my purse was left sitting on top of the doorstep.”

Shortly before the Bushes moved into the Vice President’s mansion, George had sold their home in Houston ($792,017) and used the money to buy Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport, which caused a rift on the Walker side of the family.

“Dotty had been working my mother over to sell the big house and all the property to George,” said Ray Walker. “After Dad died, my mother considered selling, and she put the house on the open market, but then Dotty started pressuring her. ‘Herbie would want it to go to George,’ she said. ‘Herbie would turn over in his grave if he thought you would sell outside the family . . . George was Herbie’s favorite . . . You have to sell to George and keep it in the family . . .’ You see, for Dotty, family was church, church family . . . so my mother caved in . . . She sold to George [$780,800] and had to pay a gift tax, but then the Bushes agreed to pay the gift tax . . .

“My brother managed to keep a small piece of property and Dotty, of course, got her house, but my mother sold everything else to George for practically nothing . . . The whole transaction still bothers me,” said Ray Walker in 2002. “I would have liked my children to have benefited.”

To offset the capital gain on his Houston house, George declared Kennebunkport as his principal place of residence and did not pay taxes on the declared $596,101 profit from the sale of his Houston home. The next year the IRS went after the Bushes and claimed that the Vice President’s residence, which they lived in for free, was their principal residence so they owed taxes on the $596,101. George, who had rented an apartment in Houston to keep his voting residence in Texas, threatened to sue the IRS. He fought the matter for two years, then settled in 1984 by paying the extra tax, $144,128, plus interest, $54,000.

Whenever he blasphemed the IRS, George found his most sympathetic audience with President Reagan. High taxes were the one subject on which the two men agreed. They sounded like two old pensioners as they complained to each other about giving up so much of their income to the government. At the time, Reagan’s net worth was $3 million and Bush’s was $2.1 million.

The Reagan presidency nearly ended at 2:35 p.m. on March 30, 1981, when a deranged gunman shot the President outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. The assailant, John W. Hinckley Jr., who was later found not guilty by reason of insanity, said he had hoped to kill the President to impress the actress Jodie Foster. He said he had become obsessed with her after seeing
Taxi Driver
. His brainsick violence almost took the President’s life, wounded a Secret Service man, and severely wounded a D.C. policeman, who had to be retired on disability. The ricocheting bullets also maimed the White House press secretary, James Brady, who barely recovered after four and a half hours of brain surgery. He never walked or worked again, could no longer speak perfectly, and has required full-time care ever since. He and his wife, Sarah, have devoted themselves to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

At the time of the shooting the Vice President was over Texas in Air Force Two. He received an in-flight call from Secretary of State Al Haig, advising him to return to Washington immediately. George arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at 6:40 p.m. and took a helicopter to the Vice President’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue. The Secret Service had wanted to chopper him directly to the White House, but he resisted such a dramatic arrival. “Only the President lands on the south lawn,” he said.

In the White House situation room, George, who had been told Reagan would recover, left the President’s chair empty and sat in his own seat. “The President is still the President,” he said. “I’m here to sit in for him while he recuperates. But he’s going to call the shots.”

His graceful comportment contrasted sharply with that of the Secretary of State, who had raised hackles earlier in the day by dashing to the lectern in the White House pressroom and declaring himself in charge.

Years later the White House physician, Daniel Ruge, admitted that the Twenty-fifth Amendment should have been invoked when the President went into surgery.

“I think we made a mistake in not invoking it,” Ruge said. “No doubt about it, because Mr. Reagan could not communicate with the people a President is supposed to communicate with. If ever there was a time to use it that was it . . . But it never occurred to me then.”

Those in the White House who had distrusted George Bush as an establishment opportunist came to appreciate his calm demeanor in a time of chaos and confusion.

“I have never been so impressed with Bush as I was that night, the way he instantly took command,” the assistant press secretary Larry Speakes wrote in his memoir. He recalled the Vice President saying he would meet with the cabinet and the congressional leadership the next day.

“The more normal things are, the better,” said Bush. “If reports about the President’s condition are encouraging, we want to make the government function as normally as possible. Everybody has to do his job.”

The next morning Bush’s considerable calm was jolted when he heard that his son Neil had planned a dinner party at his home that night, barely twenty-four hours after the assassination attempt, for Scott Hinckley, the deranged gunman’s brother.

Neil, who worked for Standard Oil Company of Indiana, lived in Denver, where Scott Hinckley was vice president of his father’s Colorado-based firm, Vanderbilt Energy Corporation. Scott was dating a friend of Sharon Bush’s at the time, and Neil had invited the couple for dinner.

“From what I know and have heard, the Hinckleys are a very nice family . . . and have given a lot of money to the Bush campaign,” Sharon said. “I understand that he [John Hinckley Jr.] was just the renegade brother in the family. They must feel awful.”

Reporters scurried to uncover what, if any, connection existed between the Vice President’s family and the President’s assailant. The next day Vice President Bush confirmed that his son was to have hosted Hinckley’s brother, but said the dinner had been canceled. The Vice President denied receiving any large campaign contributions from either of the Hinckley brothers or their father, John W. Hinckley Sr. Bush did admit that he had received a modest twenty-dollar donation from the senior Hinckley when he was running for the U.S. Senate in 1970, but added that Hinckley’s biggest contributions had gone to John Connally in the last presidential campaign.

Neil told reporters that he first met Scott Hinckley on January 23, 1981, the day after Neil’s twenty-sixth birthday. “My wife set up a surprise party for me,” he said, “and it was an honor for me at that time to meet Scott Hinckley. He is a good and decent man. I have no regrets whatsoever in saying Scott Hinckley can be considered a friend of mine. To have had one meeting doesn’t make the best of friends, but I have no regrets in saying I do know him.” Neil added that he had not met the gunman or the gunman’s father but would very much like to meet the senior Hinckley. “I’m trying to learn the oil business, and he’s in the oil business. I probably could learn something from Mr. Hinckley.”

Everyone in the Vice President’s office cringed. They scurried to quash any association of the Bush family with the family of the suspected assassin. They worried about conspiracists conjuring dark scenarios about the Vice President’s being only a bullet away from the presidency. “It’s a bizarre happenstance,” said the Vice President’s press secretary, “just a weird coincidence.”

Another strange confluence was that hours before the shooting on March 30, auditors from the Department of Energy had met with Scott Hinckley in Denver after reviewing Vanderbilt’s books. They warned that the Hinckley oil company faced a $2 million fine for overpricing crude oil when price controls had been in effect. This finding raised the question of whether Scott Hinckley had planned to discuss the matter with the Vice President’s son that evening over dinner. The FBI investigated the assassination attempt and the connection of the Bush family to the Hinckleys but would not release its findings under a 2002 FOIA request, citing privacy concerns for Scott Hinckley and Neil Bush, both alive at the time.

The governor of Texas, Bill Clements, objected to the news stories of March 30, 1980, that linked Texas to various assassinations. Governor Clements said he felt “horrible” when he heard Hinckley was from Texas, the same state in which Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy; where Mark David Chapman, the killer of former Beatle John Lennon, was born; and where Charles Whitman climbed the Tower at the University of Texas and gunned down more than forty people in one of the worst mass murders in modern history.

“This hasn’t got anything to do with Texas,” said the governor, “but if the news media works on it long enough it could hurt the state.”

Ronald Reagan’s popularity soared after the shooting because of the gallant way he had responded. Even with a bullet lodged centimenters from his heart, he walked into the hospital unaided, because he did not want the commander in chief to be shown on television as immobilized. His one-liners to his wife (“Honey, I forgot to duck”) and to his surgeons (“I hope you’re all Republicans”) endeared him to the country. That affection probably cushioned him from the scandal of Iran-contra, which later plagued his administration. The revelation in 1986 that the United States broke its own laws, secretly sold weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages, and then used the revenues from those arms sales to wage a covert war in Nicaragua could have led to impeachment. Few other presidents could have survived such a scandal, but by then the oldest President ever to serve the country had become one of its most beloved.

During Reagan’s first term in office, George Bush set a record for vice presidential travel, logging more than 1.25 million air miles to seventy-four countries. He attended so many funerals of foreign dignitaries that he joked, “My motto is: You die, I fly.”

For the most part, the office is ceremonial. The Vice President’s only prescribed duty in the Constitution is to preside over the Senate, which Bush rarely did except when he was needed. On July 13, 1983, he cast the Senate’s tie-breaking vote to save President Reagan’s plan to resume production of nerve gas. Dorothy Walker Bush, who had supported the nuclear-freeze proposal introduced by Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, was horrified.

“But, Mum, I had to do it,” George told her. “It was my first tie-breaking vote and the first time in six years that a Vice President has been called upon to cast such a vote . . . I couldn’t very well vote against the President.”