Media-wise, this is going to be a tough campaign for Barbara Bush. Her competition for first lady is Kitty Dukakis, who has quite a juicy story to feed the press: 26 years of drug addiction and the possibility of being the first Jewish first lady. How can Barbara Bush, that nice, warm, grandmotherly woman we`ve seen standing in reception lines for eight years, possibly compete for press attention?
”Well,” says Barbara Bush, arching an eyebrow, ”the drug addiction was to diet pills, and I can`t do anything about not being born Jewish. That`s not my fault.”
And then there`s the way the press is playing up Mike and Kitty Dukakis`
relationship as though it were the love affair of the century. He mouths ”I love you” to her at the Democratic convention and holds her hand during interviews. George Bush`s mother had to remind him that it would be nice if he let his wife exit first from airplanes.
”We`re private about those things,” Barbara Bush says. ”Maybe it`s more of a great love affair to be married for 43 years to the same person and really love them and not have to wear it on your sleeve. Maybe that`s what love is all about.”
From the tight way she holds her mouth as she says it, Bush leaves no doubt that to her, that is indeed what love is all about. Leave the lovey-dovey stuff to the Democrats.
Barbara Bush is what she is: 63. Sturdy. White-haired. (More about that later). Handsome. (That`s the word that reporters, struggling for an adjective to describe a woman who dares not to be glamorous, have unanimously settled on.) Organized. (Her Christmas gifts are already ordered: nearly 1,000 of them for aides and friends who go back to her days as a newlywed.) Loyal. (When a friend was having a baby, far from home, Bush charged into the hospital, announced herself as the closest living relative and kept the woman company.) She`s funny, in a self-deprecating way. (In her standard political speech, she tells of recently standing next to her husband and having a photographer yell at the lady in the red dress to get out of the picture. She looked down, and in a horrible flash realized he was referring to her.) She`s frank. (It was she, don`t forget, who called Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro a ”$4 million . . . rhymes with rich” during the 1984 campaign.)
She`s a warm, likable, no-nonsense woman.
In some ways, she`s a dinosaur. She may be the last wife of a presidential candidate who gives interviews discussing how she likes her sheets (pressed) and her petit fours (coated in pastel frosting) and how she feels about doilies and tablecloths at tea parties (doilies, yes; tablecloths, no). She has spent her life as a homemaker, making 28 homes in 17 cities during 43 years while her husband kept switching jobs: businessman, congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, envoy to China, head of the Central Intelligence Agency and vice president of the United States. She has devoted her life to the care and comfort of her husband and five children and has few regrets.
”My life hasn`t been too bad, either,” she says, sitting in the magnificent four-storied, gabled vice presidential residence in which two sets of guards check you in and servants bring iced tea decorated with fresh mint. ”I`ve loved my life. I`ve had a very good, very selfish time. But have I thought about my children, worried about them, cared about them? Of course. And my husband. And I don`t think I`ve given up one thing.”
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Sixteen-year-old Barbara Pierce of Rye, N.Y., met 17-year-old George Bush of Greenwich, Conn., at a Christmas dance. He asked for an introduction to the girl in the red-and-green dress. She still hasn`t asked him why. All she knows is that she laid eyes on a man she describes to this day as ”the handsomest I ever saw: 6 feet 2 inches tall, eyes of blue,” with the ”kindest, sweetest face.”
The next night he went to another dance looking for her and invited her to watch him play basketball. Her entire family turned out. Besides his blue eyes, she fell in love with what she calls his ”caring.”
”His mother used to call him `Have Half` because he always offered half of everything he had. Give him a banana, and he`d say, `Do you want half?` ” Three years later she dropped out of Smith College to marry him. After 43 years of marriage, she still gets gushy. ”To know him is to love him, honestly,” she says. ”Isn`t he good-looking?” she asks.
”She`s his biggest fan,” says their daughter, Dorothy, 28.
It`s not many women who can say along with Barbara Bush, ”I married the first boy I ever kissed.”
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Barbara and George Bush both come from prominent, wealthy families, though she says she`d like to lead an expedition to her family home to show that it was not the estate that people think it was, just because her father was president of the McCall Corp., the publishing concern. After marriage, life was treating them well: George was prospering in the oil business, and they had three children. Then they faced every parent`s nightmare: Their daughter was sick, and she wasn`t going to get better. Robin Bush died of leukemia in 1953, a few months short of her 4th birthday.
”Seventy percent of people who lose a child get divorced in the first or second year,” Barbara Bush says. ”It either breaks you or it strengthens you enormously. We worked well together. I was very strong when the child was sick, and then I just absolutely collapsed. George could barely look at her when she was sick-it killed him so, he loved her so, as did I-but I just made up my mind that no one was going to cry in front of her. She was going to be happy until it was over. And then I just could not face it. And George just put his arms around me and made me share and talk to him about it, and he made me see people. He would not let me go.”
Losing her daughter made Bush cling to the two children she had left, George and the infant Jeb. ”I wouldn`t let them out of my sight. One day I heard little George say to a friend, `I`m sorry, Mike, I can`t play with you. I have to play with my mother.` And then I realized what I was doing to that poor little child.”
Eight months after the death, Barbara and George Bush were in so much physical pain that they had checkups. They assumed they must have caught a bug, hanging around the hospital so much. The doctor told them they were fine; the pain was just heartache.
Bush is still a devoted mother. Her son Marvin, 31, had his colon removed after a bout with colitis last year-the hospital vigils brought back
”enormous shades of those awful days in the hospital” to her-and Marvin has become a spokesman for people with similar problems. Abigail Van Buren
(advice columnist Dear Abby) sat next to him recently when he was about to address a group about his experience. As he got up to speak, he turned to her, pointed to a small tape recorder and said, ”Would you please press this when I start? My mother wants to hear it.”
Carol Vander Jagt, the wife of U.S. Rep. Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan, has known Barbara Bush since their husbands came to Congress together in 1967
(Bush as a representative from Texas). Every Christmas, a group of friends get together for lunch, to exchange gifts and to discuss the last year.
”When it`s Barbara`s turn, all she talks about are her children and her grandchildren, not a word about her husband being vice president. Those are the things that are important to her.”
There was a time in her life when it seemed like maybe those things weren`t enough. ”For a while, you were made to feel like you were nothing
(if you didn`t have a career),” Barbara Bush says. ”For a brief period, when all the children were gone and George worked in the CIA, I felt I should be doing something. The women`s movement made me feel I had done nothing, but that was wrong.
”I`ve always been an active volunteer, and my husband had always shared with me when he could and made me feel needed. But for a while, I didn`t. Now I feel as though the children have to be a priority. I`m one of the few people I know whose children all got married-to the opposite sex-had children and stayed married. Knock on wood.”
And yet she impressed upon her daughter, Dorothy, how important it was for her to finish college. ”She always wished she had,” Dorothy says.
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After 43 years together, Barbara Bush says George Bush is still
”fabulous, fabulous” company. ”We read, we eat dinner on the porch, watch the evening news, talk about the news.”
Two of their children say they`ve never seen their parents quarrel. Son George, 42, describes their relationship as ”idyllic.” Son Marvin says that politics has strengthened their marriage. ”When you`re in the public eye, you end up relying a disproportionate amount on your family. I traveled with my father the other day, and when I got off the airplane, an aide said, `You lifted your father`s spirits tremendously by being here.` Well, that`s what my mom can do on a consistent basis. Reggie Jackson once said he was the straw that stirs the drink for the New York Yankees-that`s a good way to describe my mom in my family.”
”She provided a center,” says Janet Steiger, chairwoman of the Postal Rate Commission, whose husband also came to Congress with George Bush. ”She gave him tremendous stability. With five kids, and him running around the world, moving from place to place, that was incredibly important. That was a great gift to him. It enabled him to sail into some very choppy seas.”
What did George Bush give his wife? Their children, all of whom are working in the campaign, say ”love,” ”strength,” ”support,”
”security.” And yet, at times, he appears to be almost indifferent to her. She says he never noticed when her hair turned white, never noticed when she started to dye it, never noticed when she stopped.
In his autobiography, ”Looking Forward,” published last year, their wedding gets one sentence. Most references to her are of the ”Barbara and I lived here,” ”Barbara and I lived there” variety. In 255 pages, he devotes not one paragraph to the woman with whom he has spent more than four decades. In the fallout of the Gary Hart scandal, George Bush was the target of rumors about ”other women.” Barbara Bush chose to deal with them publicly through humor. ”How can George Bush have an affair?” she asked. ”He can`t stay up past 10 o`clock.” Her son Neil, 32, said he thought the Republicans floated the rumors to add a little muscle to his father`s image.
When asked about the rumors today, she calls them ”malicious, vicious, ugly untruths” and dismisses them. ”I don`t want to talk about it because it isn`t true.”
For a longtime political wife, Bush has a remarkably thin skin. ”She always advises me not to read the papers, but she does, and I do too,”
Dorothy says. ”Sometimes it can be brutal.”
Subjects Barbara Bush would rather not discuss: the ”wimp” factor, her hair, her wrinkles.
Bush can`t understand why the world does not see her 195-pound husband as the war hero and tower of strength that she sees. She knows he doesn`t come across well on television, so she blames television.
Her hair-short, white, wispy-is another subject Bush would prefer to skip. She calls it ”boring,” though it has been the subject of national press, political consultants and so much mail that she has two form letters, one she sends to people who like it, one she sends to people who don`t. She dyed it for years and hated it. It turned every color but the brown she wanted it to be, it felt awful and it restricted her lifestyle.
”You couldn`t run your hand through it, and George sort of liked to run his hand through it. I had to go to the beauty parlor twice a week. I used to have to say, `I`m sorry, I can`t do this, I just went to the beauty parlor.` I don`t have to do that anymore. I exercised this morning and washed my hair. I like that. That`s how I want to live my life.”
Another nonsubject: the way some people assume she`s George Bush`s mother. ”I can`t do a thing about it,” she says.
”People are so mean,” Dorothy says. ”I think it`s the cruelest, meanest thing anyone could say. She`s a beautiful person. She accepts herself, and we`re proud of her. . . . Of course, it bothers her.”
”George Bush sees me through the same eyes he used 43 years ago,”
Barbara Bush says. ”He doesn`t see me as I look today.”
People have called Barbara Bush her husband`s not-so-secret weapon in the campaign. She has become a confident public speaker who disarms a crowd with her warm, self-effacing manner.
”People are always coming up and saying nice things about my mom,” Neil says. ”It`s not that they don`t like George Bush, but they love Barbara Bush.”
When she talks about her interests, especially literacy, she speaks from the heart. Neil was dyslexic as a child, and he says his mother suffered through his reading problems with him. ”She was always there. She kept my spirits boosted when I wasn`t feeling so great about myself.”
”It was never a case with my mother of, `Oh, let`s find a project for Barbara Bush,` ” Dorothy says. ”She`s involved with the same things she was involved with before my father ran for president.”
If her husband is elected, Bush intends to continue to work for literacy, leukemia research, the homeless. She`ll work hard to see that he wins. But if he doesn`t?
”Would I fall on my sword? Absolutely not. I`d be heartbroken for a week at the most. When you`ve had children who`ve been sick or who`ve died, life gets put in much better perspective.”
And then, Barbara Bush sees one advantage to her husband not getting elected: She can return to her garden, ”while I can still bend.”
