“I am in a peculiar position,” said George, “because I know that my name has been considered.”
The President nodded. “I am getting strong recommendations on it,” he said.
“Well, if it would be agreeable with you and it doesn’t seem to be putting on the hard-sell, I’ll give you my credentials as well as shortcomings and then try to be somewhat objective.”
George jumped in:
I went through the resume—Phi Beta Kappa economics, Yale, East and West, successful in business, Ways and Means, finances in order, knowing the business community, press relations, politics, U.N. We talked about all of these and I told him I thought he had to get his own mark on foreign policy, and I thought that there would be times when it would be good to have his total man—namely his Vice President going on these foreign trips and I felt I could do that well.
George left the White House feeling quite optimistic, as he recorded in his diary: “For the first time I have the feeling that it might work about the Vice Presidency.”
On August 20, 1974, he was in Kennebunkport watching television and waiting for the President to enter the East Room of the White House to make his announcement. The phone rang. The White House operator asked him to hold for the President. Ford came on the line to tell him that he was about to introduce Nelson A. Rockefeller as his Vice President and wanted George to know beforehand. Crushed, George managed to offer Ford his total support.
Within minutes a reporter arrived at the family compound and walked over to Bush.
“You don’t appear to be too upset,” he said.
George responded tersely. “You can’t see what’s on the inside.”
Furious about not being selected, he resolved to resign from the RNC. “He thought he had it,” recalled Eddie Mahe Jr., political director of the RNC. “He said they could shove the RNC job.”
George spent the next day writing letters to his friends. In a note to Lud Ashley, he wrote: “Yesterday was a real downer. I guess I had let my hopes soar unrealistically but today perspective is coming back and I realize I was lucky to be in the game at all.”
He also wrote to James A. Baker III:
Dear Bake—
Yesterday was an enormous personal disappointment. For valid reasons we made the finals (valid reason I mean a lot of Hill, RNC, & letter support) and so the defeat was more intense—
But that was yesterday. Today and tomorrow will be different for I see now, clearly, what it means to have really close friends—more clearly than ever before in my life.
As a consolation prize, Ford offered George any assignment he wanted. George recorded in his diary that he met with the President on August 22, 1974, to discuss the matter: “The President indicated that the decision on the VP had been very close. ‘You should have been very complimented by the support.’”
Ford, a kindly man, obviously wanted to soften the blow for George. Private papers in the Ford Presidential Library indicate that the President had decided on Nelson Rockefeller from the beginning. George never was a contender, except in the press and in his own mind.
The President offered to make George Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the most prestigious post in the Foreign Service: “He wondered if it was substantive enough—so did I. We talked about the money. I told him I had lost a lot of money and didn’t know if I could afford it.”
The President then offered the second-most-prestigious post—Ambassador to France, but George passed because he could not speak French.
“I don’t have any languages, either,” Ford said comfortingly.
Finally they touched on China, and George, who had not discussed the decision with his wife, said he wanted to succeed David K.E. Bruce as head of the U.S. mission in Peking, now Beijing. Ford was surprised because there was no ambassadorial status to the appointment and not much social life, but he agreed to the assignment. George wrote in his diary: “I told [the President] that I wanted to do more in foreign affairs in the future . . . I indicated that way down the line, maybe 1980, if I stayed involved in foreign affairs, I conceivably could qualify for Secretary of State. [He] seemed to agree.”
Profiling the new chief of mission to the People’s Republic of China in
The New York Times
, Christopher Lydon wrote, “In the career of George Bush it seems that nothing succeeds like failure.” George never forgave the journalist for accusing him of failing upward.
In the first entry to his Peking diary George questioned his motives for leaving Washington:
Am I running away from something? . . . Am I taking the easy way out? The answer I think is “no” . . . I think it is an important assignment. It is what I want to do. It is what I told the President I want to do, and . . . I think it is right—at least for now . . . I think in this assignment there is an enormous opportunity of building credentials in foreign policy, credentials that not many Republicans will have.
Professionally the appointment to China would enhance George’s credentials, but personally it would discombobulate his thirty-year marriage, send his wife packing for three months, prompt her to burn her love letters, and eventually lead to her severe depression.
“It wasn’t just another woman,” said someone close to the situation, discussing the wedge that had come between George and Barbara. “It was a woman who came to exert enormous influence over George for many, many years . . . She became in essence his other wife . . . his office wife.”
George had never been a compulsive womanizer with one-night stands or flameout affairs. Rather, he maintained a few flirtatious relationships, which his wife had tolerated because he never humiliated her. He chose his other involvements very carefully (usually out of town) so as not to threaten his marriage. Then along came Jennifer Fitzgerald, who started out as his secretary and became so much more.
“George met her when she was working for Dean Burch,” said Roy Elson, former administrative assistant to Democratic Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona. “Dean was Barry Goldwater’s man at the Republican National Committee; then Dean went to the White House under Nixon and stayed with Ford until the end of 1974. Jennifer was his personal assistant . . . I knew her very well and there’s no question in my mind what her relationship was with George Bush but that’s because of what Dean confirmed . . . and why shouldn’t I have believed Dean? He was my best friend until the day he died . . . we went to college together and later roomed together in Washington, D.C.”
Jennifer Ann Isobel Patteson-Knight Fitzgerald was forty-two years old and divorced when she walked into the Oval Office on November 30, 1974. As she waited to have her farewell photo taken with President Ford, she toyed with the long string of pearls wrapped around her neck. The door opened just as she broke the strand, but not her stride. Short, blond, and pretty, she smiled, and let the broken pearls dangle as she posed with the President, who also smiled. She was leaving in a few days for the People’s Republic of China to become personal assistant to the chief of the mission, and George Bush could hardly wait.
“I am looking forward to Jennifer Fitzgerald coming over to be my secretary,” he wrote on October 21, 1974, the first entry of his China diary. He had told friends that she would be his “buffer” with the State Department, someone loyal to him and not looking for State Department advancement. “I don’t know what particular skills she brought to the job,” recalled one member of the U.S. mission. “She certainly couldn’t type.”
In those days Peking was a remote outpost seven thousand miles from Washington, D.C. It might as well have been 7 million miles. Mail took one week to be delivered through the State Department’s diplomatic pouch and six weeks by postal service. Peking had no television, no English radio, no English movies, no English newspapers or magazines. Telephone calls cost sixteen dollars for the first three minutes. Adding to the feeling of isolation was what George described as China’s “underlying hatred of foreigners.”
Barbara suddenly decided to leave Peking before Jennifer’s arrival, saying she wanted to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with the children, first in Washington and then in Houston, where Jeb was living with his new bride. Barbara would not return to China until the next year.
Her departure rankled George for several reasons, not least of which was having to pay for her ticket. There were only two flights a week in and out of Peking in those days, and because Barbara had not made plans, she asked whether she could fly home on the White House plane with Henry Kissinger after his diplomatic visit. He had arrived in November for five days with his official entourage, his wife, and his children.
George wrote in his diary:
Barbara boarded the plane with the Kissinger group and headed off for the first Christmas we will be apart in 30 years . . . [T]he day of the departure they told me there was a little flap in the States about Kissinger’s kids and wife and that the press was insisting that they pay. And [Kissinger’s aide] thought it would be better if I paid. So I, a little sore about it, wrote out a check for sixteen hundred dollars to the U.S. Air Force and said, “Now you tell them I paid in advance” for . . . the first-class trip.
Described by his friends as “extraordinarily frugal,” and by his aides as “downright cheap,” George badgered the State Department for weeks to be reimbursed for the sixteen hundred dollars. He resented having to pay for Barbara’s first-class fare. He had had a similar experience as UN ambassador when he was sent to Europe for an orientation tour. First-class tickets had been provided for him and his top aide, but if Barbara insisted on accompanying him he was required to pay for her. “There was lots of teasing about how we would go,” she recalled. “George said he would send me back messages from first-class to coach, or maybe I could come up and visit first-class once in a while.” In the end, George refused to pay for her to fly first-class. Instead, he traded in the government-paid tickets, and, as Barbara recalled, “We all flew coach class.”
In China, George also would not pay for flying the family dog, C. Fred, to Kennebunkport for the family’s annual vacation. As he noted in his diary: “Hassle over C. Fred. He now cannot go as extra baggage but rather as a separate package at baggage rates—$9 a pound, times $28 a dog, plus $12 a cage equals 9x40=$360 one way. Sorry, he stays here!”
Barbara’s sixteen-hundred-dollar ride on the Kissinger plane continued to annoy George four months later, when he saw a magazine with a photograph of the Kennedy children scampering toward Marine One as it landed with the President at JFK’s home in Middleburg, Virginia. George wrote in his diary: “I wondered whether the reporters were swarming around in those days to see who was paying for the helicopter.”
Jennifer Fitzgerald arrived in Peking on December 5, 1974, and the next day she and George left for twelve days in Honolulu for the Chief of Missions Conference. His diary noted some State Department business and concluded with his reflections at the end of the trip:
Spent the last two days out of that Sheraton Waikiki madhouse and in the 4999 Kahala apartment—just lovely . . . Checked out the bathhouse again . . . Totally relaxing. Someday I will write a book on massage I have had ranging all the way from Bobby Moore and Harry Carmen at the UN to the steam baths of Egypt and Tokyo. I must confess the Tokyo treatment is the best. Walking the back, total use of knees, combination of knees and oil, the back becoming a giant slope does wonders for the sacroiliac, and a little something for the morale too. Massage parlors in the U.S. have ruined the image of a real massage. It is a crying shame. Flew back to Peking on Iran Airlines. Jennifer and I alone in first class.
George’s seventy-three-year-old mother had become concerned enough about Barbara’s departure to make her own arrangements to visit her son over the Christmas holidays. Sensing a possible crisis in his life, Dorothy Walker Bush and her sister-in-law Margie Clement (Prescott’s seventy-five-year-old sister) stayed with him for three weeks. They arrived on December 18, 1974.
George’s mother remained the most important woman in his life, and the day before her arrival he wrote about her impending visit with breathless anticipation: “Mother arrives tomorrow. I have that kind of high school excitement—first vacation feeling.”
Dotty Bush understood her son’s driving ambition. She knew how much he needed to play a role on the world stage, and she wanted Barbara to look the part of an important man’s wife. Dotty had urged her daughter-in-law to try to improve her matronly appearance. She did this kindly by suggesting that Barbara might feel better with a little more exercise. She then remarked how pretty Barbara had looked as a brunette, adding that George looked quite boyish for a grown man. That’s when Barbara got the message and started dyeing her white hair so she wouldn’t look so much older than her husband.
In his mind George had slotted his wife into the mother-of-my-children category, a ranking of respect that was bracketed in steel. Like a Mafia don, he kept the wife category separate from the category of other women. While his attentions strayed over the years, his family commitment remained solid. That was Barbara’s insurance policy—knowing she would never be divorced—but in 1974 that was not enough.
“I don’t think there was much going on in that marriage by then,” recalled Nadine Eckhardt, who was married to Democratic Representative Bob Eckhardt of Texas. “We saw a lot of them in the days when George and Bob served in Congress together.
“I have given lots of thought to the duality of people like the Bushes. All of us have male and female in us; some more, some less. George and Barbara married young and had those kids when the hormones were working well. By the time I met them George was very ‘femme.’ Slim and silly and a hopeless flirt. In my book I say he was cute and we were attracted to each other. It was sort of like when you’re attracted to a gay guy and you know nothing’s going to happen so you just forget about it and be friends.”
Another congressional wife who observed the Bush marriage was Marian Javits, the widow of the late senator from New York Jacob Javits. “George needed more hugging and touching,” she said. “Passion was a need for him that was probably part of his great ambition . . . We visited them in China and while I do not understand Barbara, I do know she adored George. Pure love . . . I think she saw that her biggest strength was to imitate his mother, almost become his mother . . . Barbara let herself look the way she did on purpose. If George had wanted her to look any other way, she would have. Believe me . . . I know this as a wife . . . I think with Barbara her kids made up for everything.”