Barbara Bush: A Memoir. - book reviews

Inside this 532-page tome is a lean and mean 170-page book struggling to get out. Barbara Bush pads her memoir with guest lists, dinner menus, and assorted trivia about "the grands," as she calls her 12 grandchildren. Most people, of course, think of Barbara Pierce Bush as the fortunate young woman from Rye, New York, who married the first man she ever kissed--George Bush, the dashing young Navy officer in wartime--and who frequently says how lucky she has been in life. It takes a patient reader to ferret out the true Barbara from the protective shell she has constructed around herself through the years. What emerges from a careful reading is a shrewd woman whose frequent sarcasm and deprecation--directed at herself and at others--seem to be in part a reaction to suffering a lifetime of quiet put-downs. An example: If you thought "Bar," her nickname, was short for Barbara, you'll be pained to learn that "Bar" is named after a horse. When she and George first started courting, the Bush family had a horse-pulled wagon. The Bush boys loved to tease, and George's brother, Prescott, thought it was especially amusing to tag Barbara with the horse's name, Barsil, which became Bar.

Not many young women could take a barb like that and wear it for the next half-century as a badge of honor. But self-deprecation is Barbara Bush's ostensible specialty. When Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of the Soviet leader, asked why she was so popular, Barbara said, "I felt it was because I threatened no one--I was old, white-headed, and large. I also told her that I stayed out of my husband's affairs." Barbara and her handlers carefully cultivated her image as a benign, nurturing grandmother. And it worked: No one ever accused Barbara Bush of secretly running the show, a charge just about every other recent First lady, including Nancy Reagan, has had to fend off. Yet, any reporter who covered the Bush White House knew that Barbara was powerful in her own way and that she could be mean and vindictive. In this book, for example, she has almost nothing to say about Nancy Reagan, with whom she was Second Lady for eight years, and the silence is telling.

One of Barbara's most memorable public moments came in 1984 when she said Geraldine Ferraro, then the Democratic nominee for vice president, was something that "rhymes with rich." It was an early glimpse into Barbara's hit-and-run style followed by a smile. She parried with an apology, fed to her by a friend, saying she certainly didn't mean offense by calling Ferraro a "witch." The book reveals Barbara to be a master of the sly put-down, sometimes covered up with an excess of superlatives about whomever she is simultaneously slicing and dicing. Recalling a campaign trip with Spiro Agnew and his wife, she writes how "amazed" she was that during the long flight between Texas and Washington, then-Vice President Agnew "never once read, wrote, or worked. He played gin rummy. I like them both very much. They were very relaxed and put on no airs."

She is more careful about contemporary political figures, at least those who might matter to Republicans. Her irritation with Jim Baker's management of the 1992 Bush campaign is well-known, but she has only bland praise for him here. A choice dig about Pat Buchanan, whose primary challenge exposed Bush's weaknesses, is delivered through press secretary Anna Perez, who is quoted calling the conservative commentator a "mean-spirited racist." Barbara is less subtle about the Democrat who beat her husband. She zings Bill Clinton in the context of his support for the right of gay people to serve in the military. "There are many pros and cons, but like Bill Clinton, I have never been in the service and so I have little to base my judgment on."

The five words the reader comes to dread are, "I wrote in my diary...." because, more often than not, it reads like a social secretary's Daytimer, punctuated with Hallmark-card insights about the wonders of George Bush and life in the White House. "Yesterday was a great, funny day," runs a typical entry. "George awakened full of it--whatever that means--and decided to have a dinner party that night." But a few pointed diary comments emerge now and again. In one May 1992 observation, she says: "I do not know whether George will survive this political year or not, but I do know he is the only stable person running." Asked in a recent round of promotional interviews what she meant, she smiled and said she really didn't know, as though the words were written by her evil twin.

With rigorous editing, this could have been a good book instead of a long Christmas letter to the Bush's extended family. In the preface, Mrs. Bush points out that her editor limited her to one "wonderful" per page and one "precious" per chapter. I would have similarly rationed "darn" as in "that darn Saddam [Hussein]." What partially redeems the book is the search for the real Barbara and the clues she gives along the way. She writes about George Bush's first term in Congress and how he would go home to Houston every weekend while she "dragged" her five children around Washington, showing them the sights and taking hundreds of pictures that she would later turn into a slide show. "The slides were almost a protective shield, something you could hide behind--just like writing a book with a dog." (Millie's Book was a best-seller and raised over a million dollars for the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy; Mrs. Bush also co-authored an earlier volume, C. Fred's Story, with Millie's predecessor.)

The many jabs Mrs. Bush takes at her own appearance may be good politics, but they are withering to read. A photograph of the adolescent Barbara with an ice-cream cone is captioned, "One of my favorite pastimes--eating." She recalls with an odd glee how she stunned the audience at an "Institute for Aerobics Research Gala" with the self-mocking declaration that she was probably the first speaker they ever had whose body is 33 and one-third percent fat. Her response when she appeared on two magazine covers with Millie: "It looks as though I had forgotten to iron my face." There are several references to bungled attempts to color her hair. Even Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, an old Bush friend, sent her shampoo made especially for people with white hair. It was produced by a firm in Rostenkowski's district and gave Barbara "a definite platinum blonde look," which she didn't like. So she experimented on Millie, who "became a brown and slightly yellow-haired dog. I never dared tell Danny that he had given me the wrong shampoo." These anecdotes are related without emotional commentary, as though they happened to someone else.

But Mrs. Bush's reserve cracks when she recounts preparations for her husband's first presidential run in 1980. A "very loved" sister-in-law tells her about a family pow-wow centering on "What are we going to do about Bar?" in order to make her suitable for the national stage. "They discussed how to make me look snappier--color my hair, change my style of dressing, and, I suspect, get me to lose some weight. I know it was meant to be helpful. But I wept quietly alone until George told me that was absolutely crazy. He has always made me feel loved and just right for him." A few pages later, we learn that the moment the election was over, "George generously suggested I go to New York and buy some 'designer' clothes. he didn't want me to have to hear how 'dowdy' I was."

One of the oddest features of this book is what could be euphemistically called WASP humor, or variations of the whoopee cushion. When Jordan's King Hussein visited and the grandchildren were instructed in the proper greeting, it later became--to great family amusement--"Good afternoon, Your Royal Hiney." Then there was the time one of her twin granddaughters leaned over to the other in the middle of a production of "The Nutcracker" and said, "Say peepee," and the day a five-year-old grandson got in trouble at school for making "farting noises" with his hands. We learn of Barbara's embarrassment when a hairdresser forgets to zip his fly. It'll make you glad you never got invited to sit around the fireplace listening to the Bushes tell stories at Kennebunkport.

Barbara's valentines to George Bush (she routinely discusses him as "George Bush," not "George") appear on almost every page. I believe she loves and even adores him. But to say it so many times makes me wonder if she isn't also pretty darn angry at him. This is the man who once awakened her with a phone call at 5:30 in the morning in Houston with the greeting, "How's the big guy?" He was inquiring after his dog, Ranger. She dismisses with a scant four paragraphs a devastating depression she suffered in 1976. And at the same time that she credits her husband with seeing her through this dark period, she notes that he was "working such incredibly long hours at his job, and I swore to myself that I would not burden him." As a political wife, Barbara learned to put herself behind her husband's ambitions. But she doesn't want to admit that she paid a price. "You have two choices in life," she writes. "You can like what you do, or you can dislike it. I have chosen to like it."

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