The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The renaissance of grandfathering may be at hand, if George Bush has his way. With a quiet vengeance, he has spent his year of White House afterlife avoiding the lofty traditions of ex-Presidents. "Deimperializing" the presidential retirement, as he puts it. In his preferred role, Bush would be delighted to lead America's 19 million grandfathers back to the playgrounds, classrooms and fishing holes to dispense concern and love for kids.

"I really meant it when I said I want to get active with the grandchildren," he declared recently. "The big things in the world are better now. But I firmly believe that the biggest danger to us is the disintegration of the American family."

"I talked about it in the campaign," he recalls in a conversation in his unpretentious ninth-floor office on Houston's Memorial Drive. "Single biggest thing, the decline of the family. We were written off as rabid right-wingers" for saying so, Bush remembers. "Clinton goes and gives a speech in the South, a good speech, and people say, 'Ain't it wonderful he's putting focus on the family.' And I'm glad he is. But you know, as I look at society, we're far worse off in that regard."

Bush has shelved much of his political weaponry. He would grandfather the entire population if he could. He is just back from the bedside of a child dying from brain cancer. "Might brighten his life," he says. "Little guy lying there. Just broke your heart." Next he worries about a Kentucky kid who wants Bush to come for his Eagle Scout ceremony. Mail bearing these small hopes is at flood tide. He wants to tell the boy he can't be there but to keep going, keep trying. These are little things compared with the power equations at the White House, but to him they are "points of light" that answer his call for volunteerism from those old days. "It's a different kind of thing that you do here," he declares. "Make a life a little better. It isn't going to be done just by government." His 13 grandchildren claim a large slice of him. "Doro ((daughter Dorothy Koch)) brought down her Bobby ((10 months)) the other day. I was down on the floor crawling around and watching him follow me. A total joy. I mean it." So is the time he spends with his quiet 18-year-old grandson, George P. "He is a silent being. But just being there is a joy."

When Bush bought a new Boston whaler for the Maine summers, he held a naming contest and executed some grandfatherly diplomacy by giving almost every entry some award, ending with two names that were painted on the boat: Speedy Sea King and Wa-Wa's Devil, which is Bush family code for their housekeeper, Paula Rendon.

One recent day, Bush rushed to pick up Lauren, his son Neil's nine-year-old, to take her to school for a grandfather-granddaughter breakfast. He was half an hour late for a jet waiting to fly him to Mexico for a speech. Promises to grandchildren take precedence.

Bush has moved around below the radar of big media, turning down requests from news shows. "I don't mind being an oddball," he says. "I kind of enjoy it." His inner urgency to know everything has subsided. "I don't try to read the hot line that somebody sent me or the latest column. I mean, 'Who's up, who's down' -- I don't give a damn anymore." The flinty code of propriety that has always weighted him is in evidence. Only a few close friends know his doubts about Clinton's stewardship. They go to the nature of the man, questions about his resolve and principles. Bush has questioned some of Clinton's policies publicly, but usually does so indirectly as a commentary on his own record.

"The things that flowed from Desert Storm were marvelous," says Bush. "It led to the Madrid meeting on the Middle East, and that led to the handshake on the White House lawn between Arafat and Rabin. And NAFTA was our baby. Clinton, once he got through trying to get by the labor and environmental crowd, worked like hell for it. Give him credit. But it was our deal."

All this, as well as other views of his action in foreign policy, through the breakup of the Soviet empire and the unification of Germany, will be in the book that he and former aide Brent Scowcroft are doing. It is hard, confining work for Bush. He lifts a 350-page mound of manuscript off his small desk and notes that on top are two pages of comments and suggestions by his Knopf editors. He sighs.

He has brooded for endless hours about his loss to Clinton. But he has not found a complete answer. "I couldn't get through," he declares. "I'd say, . 'Good news, the economy is recovering,' and there would be all these people saying 'Bush is out of touch.' I couldn't jump over the hurdle." Was it his words, his body language, his patrician presence -- what? "I don't know, I don't know," he replies, frustration still breaking over his face.

The "wound" of his defeat is rarely glimpsed these days. He moves too fast. He has been to England, Sweden, China, Hong Kong, Taipei, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Kuwait, Mexico -- some of them twice -- and endless American cities. Once or twice each week he is airborne, generally in commercial planes. He earns between $70,000 and $100,000 per speech. He also gives a lot of free pep talks at fund raisers for friends.

Bush is one of the five members of that amorphous but exclusive club of retired Presidents. He phones up Reagan and Ford now and then. He sent Nixon 13 photographs of the five of them and asked him to autograph one each for Bush's grandchildren. "I'm not selling these," Bush promised. Nixon signed.

Bush remains skeptical of all the proposals to formalize the counsel of the former Presidents. "Presidents shouldn't be asked to call the guy they defeated or call one of their predecessors unless there's something specific," says Bush. "Many are pressing to get seminars with all the Presidents together. I couldn't be less interested."

At the moment Bush does not see a need to change the way the presidency is organized, to shape it more like a parliamentary system to prevent the gridlock that plagues the U.S. government. "I don't buy into this bit about how intelligence failed or the machinery didn't work," he declares. "I could make a case for a single, six-year term. But I don't feel passionately about it." He does feel deeply about "a capacity for loyalty, that you don't chicken out when somebody's in trouble and pull away for self-gain." He has a strong notion about the use of talk shows by the White House: "I just think some of those shows are debasing." He admits that he may shift some of his views when he begins teaching in his presidential library at Texas A&M, due to open in 1997.

Meantime, the Bushes are fixing up their homes. At the center are the rambling family quarters in Kennebunkport, Maine. Storm repair is completed, cottages readied. There will be an apartment for them at the Texas library. And the pink brick Houston town house, which critics doubted could be built on so narrow a lot, is a functional triumph.

Bush sets the coffee machine for 5:15 every morning. He serves the toasted bagels. The couple read the New York Times and the two Houston newspapers, sample the world and local TV headlines. Then he heads for the third floor for half an hour on the NordicTrack (jogging is out because of a lame hip) and a verbal massage from his friend Rush Limbaugh over the wide screen. In the shower he takes down an old-fashioned shaving brush and mug and lathers up. The equipment "tells you something," he says. But he shaves in the shower with a modern razor.

"Don't need any new suits for the rest of my life," Bush claims, surveying his high-tech closet, which holds about 25 dark ensembles from his White House days. He polishes his own shoes and cowboy boots, taking pride in a collection of special creams and pastes and an electric buffer, which he brandishes like a weapon. He knows all the kitchen gadgets, cleans up the dishes, measures his vodka martinis by eye. Barbara's passion is a special wrapping room with ribbon and paper holders for the endless stream of birthdays that confront them. The walls and tables of the house are covered with paintings and photographs of family and historic White House moments. There is even a Frank Sinatra primitive painting of the Washington Monument. It's all so far from Pennsylvania Avenue.

"Home," says Barbara. "I plan to die here."

"Home," says her husband. "I'm not going to age."