Bush kept cool while the world caught fire
George H.W. Bush came to the presidency with real experience in foreign affairs, from Mao Zedong’s China to the United Nations, from CIA director to the vice presidency with Ronald Reagan. An early campaign slogan once boasted, “A President We Won’t Have to Train.” But Bush learned about the world in an era of Cold War constancy that was turned on its head during his presidency, a period of heaving tumult far more dramatic than Bush or anyone else anticipated.
He kept his cool. He kept it because that is who he was, at the very core driven by his own personal code: prudence and stewardship. When the world
blew up on his watch, Bush gripped the wheel, kept his eyes on the road and tried to avoid a wreck.
During his White House years, China’s leaders massacred pro-democracy student demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square; Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and was repelled by an extensive U.S.-led war coalition; the Berlin Wall tumbled and Germany was reunified in NATO; and President Mikhail Gorbachev lost control of the Soviet Union, which imploded. In a period of immense flux and unpredictability, Bush was buffeted by surprises, made mistakes he regretted, harbored doubts about himself and never proved a visionary. But when it came to the hardest moments, he prized stability and practiced caution. He was a pragmatist, not an ideologue.
He had “grown up and come of age in a political world shaped more by a commitment to service than a contest of ideas,” wrote his biographer, Jon Meacham, who called Bush a balancer and a guardian, not a revolutionary.
He certainly did not see himself as the apostle of a new world order. As it turned out, the world remade itself during his four years as president.
Bush placed high value on personal relationships, cultivated over many years, and worked hard at them, often frenetically. Some aides called him the “mad dialer” for all his telephoning; he woke up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the middle of the night. He relished a private word with King Hussein of Jordan on a speedboat in the Gulf of Aqaba, or with Gorbachev on a hiking trail at Camp David, or with French President François Mitterand looking out at the sea at Walker’s Point. In a crisis, he called the White House Situation Room at 5 a.m. for updates. He didn’t like to be alone and was rarely idle.
He was old school, believing that a commitment was a word of honor and must be kept. His governing methods were those of a pre-internet age, with decisions forged in private meetings
and messages sent by personal letter through back channels. Bush respected the Washington establishment, including the Foreign Service, the intelligence community and the military, as well as Congress, and he surrounded himself with experienced policy hands who knew how to make government work.
His first big test came when China’s security forces massacred thousands of prodemocracy student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. He had been the U.S. envoy to China from 1974 to 1975, after President Richard Nixon’s opening but before formal relations were established, and he was often seen pedaling his bicycle around Beijing with his wife, Barbara. When the Tiananmen massacre shocked the world, Bush ignored the demands for harsh retaliation and instead pursued a calibrated response. Ten days later, he sat down at his electric typewriter and wrote a private letter “from the heart” to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, asking whether he could send a secret emissary, which he did, dispatching national security adviser Brent Scowcroft with a message that he would give the Chinese some breathing room.
It was classic Bush: cautious, working behind the scenes, trying hard not to overreact and sending a secret message.
The most intense overseas crisis of his presidency followed with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Hussein’s forces rolled over international borders, looted the rich emirate and threatened oil-producing behemoth Saudi Arabia. Immediately after the invasion, Bush told reporters “we’re not discussing intervention,” but
added he would not discuss it openly “if I were.” Calling around, he was alarmed to hear that Arab leaders, including Saudi King Fahd, might cave and reward Hussein’s aggression with some kind of deal. Within days, Bush declared, “This will not stand.”
Thatcher famously told Bush on that middle-of-the-night call, “This is no time to go wobbly.” But Bush’s dictated diary entries, revealed in Meacham’s landmark 2015 biography, “Destiny and Power,” show Bush wasn’t going wobbly. With his close friend, Secretary of State James Baker III, the United States began to build a vast military coalition, eventually joined by 28 nations and 700,000 troops for “coercive diplomacy,” to persuade Hussein to either retreat or be driven out of Kuwait.
By the end of August, according to his diary, Bush was speaking privately of war, although the coalition-building and diplomacy would require many more months. The U.N. Security Council had set a deadline of Jan. 15, 1991. “It has been personalized,” Bush dictated to his diary of Hussein on Aug. 29. “He is the epitome of evil.”
In September, fishing one day with Scowcroft, Bush “asked impatiently when we could strike.”
But Bush’s eagerness was tempered by worry. The Vietnam War had left a lasting imprint on American politics: fear of another military quagmire. In private, Bush fretted about whether he was walking into an extended conflict that might ruin his presidency, much as the war had done to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“If it drags and there are high casualties, I will be history,” Bush dictated to his diary,
according to Meacham, “but no problem — sometimes in life, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
The Democratic-controlled Congress was recalcitrant about war. Bush was determined to go to war without congressional approval, but he privately feared he might be impeached if he launched fullscale military operations without a congressional vote and the war went badly.
Just three days before the U.N. deadline, he won narrow approval from Congress to wage war under a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of “all necessary means” if Iraq refused to leave Kuwait by the set time frame. As it turned out, the war was brief, and Hussein’s military was crushed, in part, by American high-tech weaponry, deployed for the first time since Vietnam.
When it was over, Bush was not triumphant. He struggled with his prudence.
He had determined early on that the goal of the war was limited — to eject Hussein from Kuwait — and that is what the Security Council approved. Bush ordered the ground war halted once that goal was accomplished. He stopped short of sending troops all the way to Baghdad to destroy the Iraqi leader and his regime. Baker recalled that all of Bush’s team urged him to stop at that moment.
Baker wrote in a memoir that had the troops gone to kill Hussein, the war could have been portrayed as one of conquest, not defense of Kuwait, and could lead to “a military occupation of indefinite duration,” with urban combat that could create “a political firestorm at home.” The prudent Bush certainly did not want that.
But he also had misgivings; Hussein survived. “As I think about it, it would be very good if we didn’t leave him intact,” Bush said to his diary in the early days of the war, speculating that maybe the Iraqi people or army would “take him out.” They didn’t.
When it was over, the president struggled with a period of quiet “despondency,” his biographer found, that was hidden from the public. The letdown “was rooted in his failure to bring about Hussein’s fall.”