“I remember when Bush brought his secretaries over to see their new offices,” said Kathleen Lay Ambrose, an aide to Vice President Mondale. “We were agog because each one of them was wearing a mink coat. That was such an eye-opener in 1981. Secretaries in mink coats! Jennifer Fitzgerald had the best of the minks, and we figured that was because she was . . . well . . . you know . . . Bush’s mistress . . . How did we know? Well, we didn’t ‘know’ in the French sense of being under the bed, but their relationship was an accepted fact of life among politicos at that time, although it was quiet and discreet and very much under the radar screen.”
Jennifer was now very much back with Bush. Jim Baker had threatened not to run the campaign in 1980 if he had to deal with “that impossible woman,” so George had kept Jennifer out of the campaign while paying her a salary out of his own pocket. After the election, he insisted that she come back and be part of his vice presidential staff.
“Jennifer was his closest confidante, much to the consternation of many of his closest friends,” recalled the political consultant Ed Rollins. “The only guy able to stare Bush down about Jennifer was Jim Baker.”
Fitzgerald returned more powerful than ever and soon tangled with Bush’s top political aide, Rich Bond, who became so frustrated that he told the Vice President he would have to leave unless she was reined in.
“Jim Baker made me make that choice once before,” Bush said, “and I made the wrong choice.”
Bond had no option but to resign.
Within weeks the Vice President’s extramarital dalliances flashed up on Nancy Reagan’s radar screen, and she gleefully related every salacious morsel. When George heard that the President’s wife was “rumor mongering,” he wrote in his diary: “I always knew Nancy didn’t like me very much, but there is nothing we can do about all of that. I feel sorry for her, but the main thing is, I feel sorry for President Reagan.”
What came to be known as the story of “George and his girlfriend” occurred the evening of March 18, 1981, when some of the Reagans’ closest friends were having dinner at Le Lion d’Or in Washington, D.C. Although no one knew the name of the girlfriend, Nancy was given all the delicious details the next morning.
“Suddenly there was a great commotion as the security men accompanying the Secretary of State [Alexander Haig] and the Attorney General [William French Smith] converged on our table,” recalled one of the five dinner guests. “They started jabbering into their walkie-talkies, and then whispered to Haig and Smith, who both jumped up and left the restaurant. The two men returned about forty-five minutes later, laughing their heads off. They said they had had to bail out George Bush, who’d been in a traffic accident with his girlfriend. Bush had not wanted the incident to appear on the D.C. police blotter, so he had his security men contact Haig and Smith. They took care of things for him, and then came back to dinner.”
Nancy peddled the gossip about “George and his girlfriend,” but only among her closest associates, not enough to stain the public image of the Vice President as the world’s nicest guy and a most devoted family man. “If the accident had made the police blotter, we probably would’ve had to report it,” said Michael Kernan, formerly an editor at
The Washington Post
. “But if it was just George Bush with another woman, we wouldn’t have touched it—then.
“I remember an occasion after that when Bush was visiting a woman late at night over by the Chinese Embassy on Connecticut Avenue and a fire broke out. The D.C. Fire Department came, but Bush’s Secret Service would not let the firemen into the building until they got the Vice President out the back door. We all knew about it at the paper, but nobody wrote about it in those days. There was a conspiracy of silence about politicians and their extramarital affairs until about 1987 when Senator Gary Hart was caught posing with a blonde on his lap, denied he was having an affair, and then dared the press to follow him. That incident changed the press code for political philandering. After that, everyone was fair game. Before that, George, like a lot of others, was able to get away with quite a lot.”
Before 1987, George had managed to keep his affairs with other women fairly discreet, and although Jennifer Fitzgerald was a major involvement, she certainly was not the only “other woman” in his life. During his days at the Republican National Committee, there had been a woman in North Dakota who had divorced her husband and moved to Washington to be closer to Bush. During the 1980 campaign he had an intense relationship with an attractive young blond photographer who worked for a photo agency that had assigned her to the campaign. After the election, George offered her a job as his chief photographer, which she declined because of their romance.
In the spring of 1984 the Vice President, accompanied by his “executive assistant,” attended nuclear-disarmament talks in Geneva. During the talks the couple registered in separate hotel rooms. One night a lawyer from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency had to deliver some papers to Jennifer Fitzgerald. The lawyer knocked on Ms. Fitzgerald’s door after midnight and was startled when Vice President Bush answered in his pajamas. After the talks, the Vice President and his assistant shared a cottage, Château de Bellerive, on Lake Geneva owned by the son of the Aga Khan, Sadruddin, whom George had met when the Prince was at the UN.
Many years later, Susan B. Trento mentioned the rendezvous in her book
The Power House
, and cited the discomfort of the U.S. Ambassador Louis Fields, who had been asked by the Vice President to make arrangements in April 1984 for his tryst. At the time Barbara Bush was promoting her book on C. Fred, the family dog, and did not accompany her husband to Geneva. Fields, a big Bush supporter and a solid Republican, was stunned by the Vice President’s “heavy-handed” request.
“I am not a prude,” Fields told one man, “but I know Barbara and I like her.”
“He was not out to denigrate Bush,” recalled Joe Trento, the author’s husband and a former journalist, who had spoken at length with Fields. “He said it was obvious they [Bush and Fitzgerald] were having some sort of relationship by the way it was handled and the way they treated each other . . . He [Fields] feared it could become an issue and put him [Bush] in jeopardy.”
Fields died in 1988, and Susan Trento’s book was not published until 1992. When reporters tried to ask Bush about the allegations, he refused to answer. “I’m not going to take any sleaze questions,” he snapped. “You’re perpetuating the sleaze by even asking the question . . . You should be ashamed of yourself . . . dragging down the political process . . . appealing to the prurient interest.”
As always, Barbara Bush supported her husband with enough fury for both of them. “It’s sick,” she said. “It’s a lie. It’s ugly, and it never happened.”
Nancy Reagan always felt she knew better. Perhaps that is why George Bush could never rise in her estimation, despite his undeniable loyalty to Ronald Reagan. As her good friend George F. Will wrote, “The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny arf—the sound of a lapdog.”
Bush never forgave the bow-tied columnist for his “cheap shot,” and told Hugh Sidey that when Will wrote him a note inviting him for lunch, Bush passed. “I’ve been through about as much as you can go through, ridicule and everything, but I draw the line at personal attacks.”
Nancy, who saw the Vice President as weak and sniveling, referred to him as “Whiney” and mimicked his herky-jerky speech patterns. Besides, it was “Ronnie’s Presidency” and “Ronnie’s White House,” and Ronnie’s wife was not prepared to share either with someone who had once derided “Ronnie” as an aging Hollywood half-wit. The First Lady never overcame her animus toward the Bushes, and for the duration of her husband’s presidency she isolated them like bad bacteria. She invited them to state dinners only because the State Department insisted. She did not invite them to any private White House dinners, including the sparkling affair for the Prince and Princess of Wales. Contrary to all dictates of protocol, Nancy insisted that George Shultz’s wife accompany Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of the Soviet premier, on a trip to the National Gallery rather than give the publicity to Barbara Bush. During the Reagans’ eight years in the White House, Nancy never once invited the Bushes to dinner in the family quarters, an affront that Barbara never forgave.
“Barbara hated Nancy,” recalled Damaris Carroll, Congressman Joel Pritchard’s wife. “You could just feel it, especially when we went to the Vice President’s residence for a dinner party . . . It was not in anything she ever said; it was in what she wouldn’t say that you felt the animosity.”
“It was hurtful to Barbara,” said Shelley Bush Jansing, the daughter of James Smith Bush. “But she never complained, never once during the White House years . . . It was only after they left that she told us how difficult it really was.”
Publicly Barbara tried to be as accommodating as her husband. Both made a concerted effort to avoid publicity and to always cede the limelight to the Reagans.
“I remember they did not want to be put into competition with Nancy’s fancy decorating,” recalled Dolly Langdon, formerly with
People
. “The magazine wanted a story about the vice presidential residence and the Bushes didn’t want to do it, but they finally agreed . . . Then, of course, they hated what was printed and raised hell. Barbara had worked with the decorator Mark Hampton, but she didn’t want that known at the time . . . She’s got very, very . . . uh . . . conventional taste, so the house was sort of ladies-club-looking, if you know what I mean . . . Barbara is the type of woman who will wear a circle pin until the day she dies and serve Velveeta cheese on soda crackers, thinking it’s the height of good taste.”
The Bushes’ taste took a drubbing from President Reagan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, Edmund Morris, who was aghast when he saw the present that Barbara and George had given Reagan on his seventy-fifth birthday. The Bushes never understood why the President and his wife had not acknowledged their gift—an elaborate and rather astonishing stool.
“Guess they didn’t always thank us,” George told the biographer. “Gave him, oh such a neat present for his seventy-fifth birthday, took a whole lot of trouble customizing it to the right measurements, borrowed his boots so it would stand up real pretty . . . Lemme show you. We had a duplicate made.”
Bush led Morris to an upstairs bathroom, where the biographer was momentarily struck speechless. He later wrote in his diary:
It was the single most terrifying piece of kitsch I have ever seen. It would not be out of place at Auschwitz. There, standing booted and spurred, are Dutch’s feet and lower legs, supporting, like some flattened dwarfish torso, an embroidered seat, with the presidential seal
au centre
. While I marvel, as so often before, at the aesthetic perversity of well-born WASPs, Bush shakes his head and says in the same hurt voice, “Not a word of thanks.”
Shortly after the
People
article appeared, Barbara opened the Vice President’s residence for a nonprofit group from Washington, D.C. “A select number of us had been invited,” recalled a designer. “Since I was in the business and Mrs. Bush had just finished working with Mark Hampton, I thought we’d have something to talk about.
“As I went through the receiving line, I shook her hand, said how nice she was to open her home to us. Then I complimented her on the residence. ‘I’m a designer, Mrs. Bush, and I think what you and Mark Hampton have done here is lovely,’ I said. ‘I see a lot of his signature pieces and his chintzes and they’re so . . .’ Before I could finish, Barbara Bush drew back from me and in my memory looked like a giant gargoyle ready to gnash me to bits.
“‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, almost spitting the words into my face like shards of ice. ‘I don’t know what gives you the impression that Mark Hampton did this house. Why I picked out every piece of furniture in this room. I selected all the fabrics. I chose the paint. In fact, you see that couch over there, well . . .’
“She started pointing to various pieces around the room and hectoring me about what she had done and how dare I suggest otherwise. All I was doing was complimenting her, and she turned into this absolute harridan . . . I stammered and thanked her very much for her generosity and tried to get through the line. My husband, who was behind me, was humiliated and tried to rush me away from her, but Mrs. Bush insisted on grabbing me by the arm and continuing her harangue about her various selections around the room.
“I staggered into the dining room, where my friends were waiting, and I promptly burst into tears. I was so ashamed of being belittled by the Vice President’s wife; I didn’t know what to do. I was shattered. But when I thought about it later, I started to get mad. How dare she? I’m a taxpayer and I helped pay for the renovation of that house. And why did she lie about Mark Hampton? Pictures of their work had been published in a magazine.”
Barbara chafed so much under the yoke of trying to be nice and stay quietly in the background that sometimes the pressure of playing the sweet Second Lady to the formidable First Lady became too much, and the explosion was scalding. Friends of the late Tamara Strickland, the wife of a Washington, D.C., physician, remember how the Vice President’s wife lashed out after the 1982 Choral Arts Society’s Christmas program at the Kennedy Center.
“Tamara had invited the Bushes to sit in the presidential box that night as the honored guests in the concert hall for a program featuring Leontyne Price,” said one of Strickland’s friends. “The opera singer sang several carols and some beautiful selections from Handel’s
Messiah
. The music critic from
The Washington Post
said the effect of her dazzling voice was an ‘experience beyond words.’ Everyone was enthralled by the evening. Well, almost everyone . . . except for the Bushes, whose idea of high culture is the Grand Ole Opry.