{"id":5470,"date":"2018-12-03T06:18:11","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T14:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=5470"},"modified":"2018-12-03T06:18:11","modified_gmt":"2018-12-03T14:18:11","slug":"the-patrician-president-and-the-reporterette-a-screwball-story-the-new-york-times-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=5470","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;\u201cThe Patrician President and the Reporterette: A Screwball Story\u201d, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Maureen Dowd, Opinion Columnist, Dec. 3, 2018<\/p>\n<p><em>My faithful correspondent, Poppy Bush, scribbling and typing notes through decades of history.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"css-u5vfum StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-4w7y5l\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Nobody understood our relationship \u2014 least of all us.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">It was, admittedly, odd.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cI like you,\u201d the first President Bush wrote me once, after he was out of office. \u201cPlease don\u2019t tell anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">In decades of correspondence, he tried to figure out why we stayed in touch, beginning one note \u201cDarn you Maureen Dowd\u201d and mischievously observing in another, \u201cSometimes I found it better around my family to go \u2018Maureen who?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">At times, typing on what he called \u201cmy little IBM,\u2019\u2019 he signed off \u201cCon afecto, GB,\u2019\u2019 or if I was writing critically about his sons, \u201cCon Afecto, still, just barely though! gb.\u2019\u2019 Or \u201cLove\u201d scratched out and replaced with the handwritten rebuke, \u201cnot quite there yet.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">I come from a line of Irish maids who worked for the first families of America, the Mellons and the Gores, wealthy, aristocratic families like the Bushes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-1m2ozyi\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"story-ad-1-wrapper\" class=\"css-1r07izm\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">George Herbert Walker Bush, known by his childhood nickname of Poppy, was cared for by maids and chauffeured to kindergarten at Greenwich Country Day School. His idea of cursing like a sailor entailed unleashing a string of epithets like \u201cGolly!\u201d \u201cDarn!\u201d and \u201cOh, shoot!\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">His father was a Wall Street banker turned Connecticut senator who was straight out of central casting: craggy, 6-foot-4, wearing gray worsted suits even in warm weather. My brothers, Michael and Martin, teenage pages at the Capitol in the \u201950s, were in awe of him. Michael was in the Senate mail room one day when the young man sorting letters held up one addressed to the Connecticut senator and mused: \u201cYou just know a guy with a name like Prescott Bush is not driving a bus.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">If the Clintons are the careless Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Barack Obama is a Camus-like figure of existential estrangement and Donald Trump is a flimflam man out of \u201cHuckleberry Finn,\u2019\u2019 H.W. was Bertie Wooster, an airy WASP propelled to the top by the old boys\u2019 network.<\/p>\n<div class=\"css-4w7y5l\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">In another life, I probably would have been serving President Bush his vodka martini, made to perfection with a splash of dry vermouth, two olives and a cocktail onion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-1m2ozyi\">\n<div class=\"css-1n4qhbn ejk1mx12\">\n<div class=\"css-u5vfum StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-4w7y5l\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">But I came along just as the old world of Ivy League white men running everything was breaking up. My mom had applied for a job as a reporter at The Washington Post in 1926 and had been told by a gruff city editor that it was too rough a trade for a young lady.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">But by 1988, I could be The New York Times White House reporter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">And that was a shock to the system for H.W. He was all noblesse oblige and I was all class rage. He was clearly expecting someone with a name like Horatio Farnsworth III, a Harvard man who would bat around the finer points of the North Atlantic alliance over highballs on Air Force One. And he got a newfangled, irreverent \u201creporterette,\u2019\u2019 as Rush Limbaugh called us in those days, who was just as focused on character and personality as politics and policy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">At dinner one night, President Bush\u2019s pollster, Bob Teeter, had a couple of martinis and got frank with me: \u201cWe just don\u2019t see you as The New York Times White House reporter. We see you more at a newspaper like the New York Daily News or the Chicago Tribune.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Dumbfounded, I stammered, \u201cYou mean because I\u2019m a woman with an ethnic, working-class background?\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Yes, Teeter replied.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">And thus began the screwball story, spanning decades, mystifying everyone, of the patrician president and the impertinent reporter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">I wrote a lot about how the preppy with the striped watchband transformed his blue-blooded Yale background to seem more red-blooded Texas, putting Tabasco sauce on his tuna fish sandwiches, wearing cowboy boots emblazoned with \u201cGB,\u201d listening to the Oak Ridge Boys and Reba McEntire, and pretending that pork rinds were his favorite snack rather than popcorn.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">He protested that his mesquite side was genuine. \u201cCan I name drop right here?\u201d he wrote me once. \u201cI am mad about Reba and she likes me, too \u2014 so there!\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Fortunately, H.W. was too gracious to hold my background and writing style against me for long. He adapted and treated me with utter fairness and kindness, even when I dubbed him \u201cgoofy\u201d for bouncing around like Tom Hanks in \u201cBig,\u201d an irrepressible boy in a dignified man\u2019s body. \u201cAnts on a hot pan,\u2019\u2019 the Chinese christened him, for his frenetic personality.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">What other commander in chief wore a bunny tie on Easter and a pumpkin tie on Halloween? Who else would sit in the White House reading women\u2019s magazines with his wife and then look up to ask, \u201cBar, what\u2019s a bikini wax?\u201d Who else would go to the magic shop near the White House and fill his office with items like a red rope that turned white, a calculator that squirted water and cash on a string so you could yank it back when someone tried to pick it up? He also had a crystal ball with a disembodied voice that gave Delphic answers to questions about tax increases: \u201cThe images are cloudy. Have someone else ask.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Who else would send me a Polaroid of himself wearing a T-shirt that said \u201cBroccoli Lover\u201d? Or a picture of himself and Barbara parodying that famous attenuated Al and Tipper Gore convention kiss?<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Who else would jump out of a plane on his 90th birthday, years after he began using a wheelchair? Waiting for her husband on the landing pad of their church in Kennebunkport, Barbara dryly noted that if the parachute didn\u2019t open, at least they wouldn\u2019t have to go far for the funeral.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Poppy wasn\u2019t perfect. I recoiled when he beat Michael Dukakis with the race-baiting Willie Horton campaign designed by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes. And again when he sent his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to Beijing for a secret midnight champagne toast with the leaders who perpetrated the Tiananmen Square massacre. And again when he didn&#8217;t do nearly enough to combat the AIDS epidemic. And again when his White House directed the defense of his Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, that tried to discredit Anita Hill. Unlike President Trump, who does his own wet work, the Bushes took the more refined route of outsourcing their ends-justify-the-means moves.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">But, as politicians go, 41 had many good qualities. Most of the time, he tried to do the right and decent thing, as he saw it, to act for the good of the country and the world. He earned his sobriquet from his biographer <a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/11\/15\/books\/review\/jon-meachams-destiny-and-power-the-american-odyssey-of-george-herbert-walker-bush.html?module=inline\">Jon Meacham<\/a>: \u201cThe Last Gentleman.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Covering H.W.\u2019s White House was wildly different than covering Donald Trump\u2019s. A Trump day bursts with a fusillade of huge news stories, often starting at dawn with a crazy tweet and usually involving the amorality, criminality and vulgarity of the president and his circle. I could go for months without getting a juicy story out of 41\u2019s White House. It was often hard to even break into the paper \u2014 unless we discovered that the president showered with his dog, Millie, or that Millie was suffering from lead poisoning from licking the White House paint.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">In the absence of stories about impeachment, porn stars and white-collar criminal transgressions, I was left writing about Bush-speak, 41\u2019s tangled syntax. At a Knoxville high school, when he was asked about ideas to improve schools, he replied: \u201cWell, I\u2019m going to kick that one right into the end zone of the Secretary of Education.\u2019\u2019 Sometimes he forgot and read his stage directions, like: \u201cMessage: I care.\u201d As Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine, the president treated words as \u201cperverse, buzzing little demons that need to be brushed away periodically like flies.\u201d This did not help H.W. in debates with Bill Clinton, which is why he was caught impatiently checking his watch.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">He once tried to dismiss a reporter who asked about his role in the Iran-contra scandal, chiding: \u201cYou\u2019re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.\u201d He went past dialoguing with other world leaders to \u201ctrialoguing.\u201d He often quoted some advice from his mother, using it for all occasions: \u201cSo tomorrow there\u2019s going to be another tidal wave, so keep your snorkel above the water level.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">He shunned personal pronouns because his beloved mother, Dorothy, always warned him not to gloat or focus on \u201cthe big I.\u201d Asked what the Malta summit with Mikhail Gorbachev would mean for the world, Bush replied: \u201cGrandkids. All of that. Very important.\u201d In his State of the Union message, he asked: \u201cAmbitious aims? Of course. Easy to do? Far from it.\u2019\u2019 Once on his beloved cigarette boat, the Fidelity, he told me, \u201cCan\u2019t act. Just have to be me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Dana Carvey mocked the president by standing in front of the Berlin Wall on \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d and intoning: \u201cBefore Bush, wall. With Bush, no wall.\u2019\u2019 Bush, who loved to laugh and who traded barbershop jokes with his Secretary of State James Baker and his image wizard Sig Rogich, ended up putting a tape of Carvey mimicking him in his presidential library. (His fondness for dirty jokes grew antiquated, colliding in the end with the #MeToo wave, for which he apologized.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">After 43 became president, 41 wrote to Time\u2019s Hugh Sidey with a self-deprecating comparison to John Adams, the only other president whose son also became president: \u201cA prolific reader, he loved the classics, prided himself on his ability to speak Latin, and had a library of extraordinary proportions. I couldn\u2019t wait to stop studying Latin. Big difference there between me and John.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">I wrote about Bush\u2019s grueling schedule, not of governing but of sporting: shooting, casting, jogging, putting, pitching, lobbing, boating, diving and body surfing. I dug up the dirt on his floating backhand, unsteady putting stroke and a basketball shot that his son Marvin called \u201can ugly air ball.\u201d Many a summer morning at 6 a.m., I could be found on the Kennebunkport golf course, sitting cross-legged and watching Bush play \u201caerobic golf\u2019\u2019 or \u201cgolf polo.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"css-u5vfum StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-4w7y5l\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">He complained in one of his \u201cblue notes\u2019\u2019 from the Oval to his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, that I was sitting in a \u201chinayanistic\u201d Buddha pose on the first tee, \u201coff meditating in Sri Lanka.\u201d It was giving him the yips. He worried I was trying to figure out \u201cwhat makes this crazy guy tick.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Once, to pay him back for all the break-of-day golf games, I thought it would be funny to wear a \u201cJesse Jackson for President \u201988\u201d cap and a \u201cBob Dole for President \u201988\u201d T-shirt on the course. As H.W. came hurtling down in his golf cart toward the ninth hole, I was waiting for him to see my get-up and laugh. But he didn\u2019t look my way. His golf partner, his oldest son, then known as \u201cJunior\u201d and the Roman candle in the family, did look, though, and leveled a fierce glare at me.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cNo worries,\u201d I comforted myself. \u201cJeb\u2019s the comer. Junior\u2019s the black sheep.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">H.W. used sports as a way to do personal diplomacy, playing horseshoes with heads of state at Camp David or driving them maniacally on his motorboat at Kennebunkport. (Francois Mitterrand begged off, saying he\u2019d get mal de mer.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">I was in the press contingent when 41 took Hosni Mubarak to his first baseball game to see the Baltimore Orioles. The crowd cheered as Ted Williams, who was in the stands, was introduced and then reacted in flummoxed silence when the announcer boomed \u201cthe president of Egypt \u2014 Mubarak.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">One of the only things that 41 ever boasted about was when he began hilariously claiming, after he got out of office, that he had coined the phrase \u201cYou da man\u201d in the \u201960s. \u201cHe maintains he was inspired to shout it to the Houston Astros\u2019 Rusty Staub as he rounded third base following a home run, and it slowly caught on from there,\u2019\u2019 Doro Bush wrote in her book on her dad.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-1m2ozyi\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"story-ad-6-wrapper\" class=\"css-1r07izm\">\n<div class=\"css-4w7y5l\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">I interviewed President Bush about popular culture and he accused me of doing a \u201cpsychoanalytical\u201d piece and trying to put him \u201con the couch.\u201d I found out that Greer Garson was his favorite actress, that he had had a crush on Doris Day as a teenage Navy pilot in World War II, that he loved glee club music, that he was a bust at the fox trot, and that he once dozed off while watching the Ronald Reagan movie \u201cSanta Fe Trail.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">I didn\u2019t spare the journalistic rod. When I took my mother, who was on crutches, to a White House Christmas party, President Bush kissed her sweetly. On the way home, she said, \u201cI knew he had a cold, but he was so handsome, I just went for it.\u2019\u2019 Then she glowered at me, muttering, \u201cI don\u2019t want you to write anything mean about that man ever again.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<div class=\"css-u5vfum StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-4w7y5l\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Somewhere along the way, H.W. and I grew to appreciate each other.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cWe have a love-hate relationship,\u2019\u2019 he told me when I ran into him in 2001 at a book party in Georgetown. \u201cI talk to my shrink about it.\u201d He knew that I knew he was kidding; he avoided introspection at all costs, often ending debates in the White House by saying \u201cI\u2019m president and you\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Like the current occupant of the White House, 41 was obsessed with The New York Times. (Both men\u2019s fathers read the Times.) But while he tweaked the liberal press \u2014 a 1992 bumper sticker said \u201cAnnoy the media, re-elect Bush\u201d \u2014 Poppy understood we are not the Enemy of the People. His critiques were more along the lines of this one in a note he sent me: \u201cBooh!, editorial page.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">When I asked the ex-president if he would like to meet with our editorial board, he replied, \u201cOnly after 3 root canal jobs. Thanks anyway.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">He reminisced in one note that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. had covered his campaign a bit in 1980: \u201cWe liked him, but then he got to be an editor then top gun \u2014 publisher. A lib, yes, but not a mean one.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-1m2ozyi\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"story-ad-7-wrapper\" class=\"css-2ninbb\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">H.W. wrote that he was not as anti-press as his sister, Nancy Ellis, who had once excoriated the Taylors, who used to own the Boston Globe. \u201cI am not like my beloved sister, who has re-cancelled her Boston Globe subscription four different times,\u2019\u2019 he said, \u201cand who took on one of the sacred Taylor family in a letter-to-the-ed as a \u2018Droopy Drawers.\u2019\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">He would complain when I used the \u201cd word\u201d (dynasty) and when he thought I was making the family sound elitist, telling me to lay off the \u201clegacy crud\u2019\u2019 and \u201cthe Gatsby stuff,\u2019\u2019 fretting that it could hurt Jeb. He told me to ignore his stationery with the drawing of the posh Kennebunkport compound. He sometimes signed off sardonically, \u201cSincerely, My Excellency, GHWB, Eastern Elitist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Mostly, he agonized about how strange it was that we stayed in touch when I was so hard on W. about the invasion of Iraq. (Even though H.W. and I both believed that ousting Saddam would cause more trouble than containing him.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cWhere do you and I stand,\u2019\u2019 he pondered. \u201cIt is not hate (underlined). How can I feel a warm spot in my heart for someone who day in and day out brutalizes my son? I don\u2019t know but I do. End of Confession \u2014 Con Afecto, GB #41.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Another time, he wrote: \u201cI don\u2019t like it that you don\u2019t like my oldest son; but it\u2019s a bit of a stand off cuz he doesn\u2019t like you either. But then he doesn\u2019t know you as well as I do. Time may heal.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Jean Becker, 41\u2019s lovely chief of staff, joked that the former president and I needed \u201ccouples counseling.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"css-u5vfum StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-4w7y5l\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Sometimes, H.W. talked about his \u201cmadness Richter scale\u201d or declared himself \u201cdouble dip angry\u201d with me after a tough column on W.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cYou see, I like this exchange with you, but, as confessed before, I get angry with you!\u2019\u2019 he wrote. Another time, he teased: \u201cNow I am off to the clinic to take a little Prozac, stretch out, and get some shrinkster to figure out this love\/hate thing about you that plagues me.\u2019\u2019 At one point, he pleaded: \u201cDo not prescribe shock therapy.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">He said he preferred to keep his advice to his eldest son private, noting: \u201cI am even very careful around close friends having learned that the propensity to leak is stronger than the sex drive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Once, in return for being on a panel at the Bush Library \u2014 we had to wait until Barbara was out of town because she was peeved about my W. columns \u2014 41 gave me a copy of a book which was the closest he got to a memoir, \u201cA World Transformed,\u201d written with Scowcroft. The inscription said it was \u201cbetter than Sominex if you ever need a tranquilizer.\u2019\u2019 And he trepidatiously gave me a quirky, raffish, 11-page typed parody of my Bush parodies portraying W. as a Boy Emperor being controlled by his malevolent regents, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">His satire was laced with \u201cforsooths,\u2019\u2019 \u201clyres,\u2019\u2019 \u201cnobles and peasants,\u2019\u2019 \u201ccourtiers,\u2019\u2019 \u201cverilys\u201d and other Old English touches. It was funny, bringing alive the fantasy court of Bushland with Poppy as \u201cthe old warrior king\u201d; \u201cQueen Bar\u201d; \u201cKing Prescott of Greenwich, now in heaven\u201d; \u201cPrincess Doro\u201d; \u201cEarl Jeb of Tallahassee\u201d; \u201cLady Dowd, charming princess of Op-ed land\u201d; \u201cQueen Hillary of Chappaqua&#8221;; \u201cSir Algore\u201d; \u201cMaid Monica\u201d frolicking with \u201cKing Bill\u201d in the Oval Office, ushering in \u201ca new permissiveness, a new standard that confuses the old man.\u201d And there was George of Crawford, \u201cthe new King\u201d who took the throne after \u201cthe Battle of Chads in November.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">But an even funnier thing that happened in the course of this unique relationship came after the ascension of W. \u2014 whom 41 sometimes referred to in his notes as \u201cmy boy, Quincy.\u201d In 2006, 43 made a rare trip to Kennebunkport one weekend for a wedding, a christening and a funeral, and I went with the press corps. I was surprised when Karl Rove called me to tell me he was involved in a cloak-and-dagger plot with Bush senior, who wanted to meet me for coffee but didn\u2019t want his son to find out because it would irritate him.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">The former C.I.A. director who liked to sign his notes at the agency, \u201cHead Spook,\u2019\u2019 still had some tricks up his sleeve. I loved the idea of one president with a Secret Service detail sneaking around behind the back of another president with a Secret Service detail, when they were both staying in the same family compound in the small Maine town.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-1m2ozyi\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"story-ad-9-wrapper\" class=\"css-2ninbb\">\n<div class=\"css-u5vfum StoryBodyCompanionColumn\">\n<div class=\"css-4w7y5l\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Talk about Skull and Bones skulduggery. We didn\u2019t pull it off, but I liked the derring-do of it, recalling the days when President Bush used to try to lose his security detail when he was careering around in his speedboat in Maine.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">After he was out of office, I sent H.W. and Barbara books and small Christmas mementos. Once, I told my assistant, Ashley Parker \u2014 now a Washington Post White House reporter \u2014 to send him a glasses case embroidered with a lobster. She got distracted and sent him some cheap drugstore hand warmers that you put inside gloves.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">Naturally, since we\u2019re talking about the most polite man who ever lived, I soon got a thank-you note for the 50-cent present: \u201cI shall use the handwarmers as Pres. Obama comes in and we Bushes leave town,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">When my mom died at 97 in 2005, he sent me a kind email that made me cry.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cIt hurts to lose a parent,\u2019\u2019 he wrote. \u201cIt hurts an awful lot. When my own Mom died I went up to Greenwich to check on her. She was close to death and her breathing was so labored that I literally prayed to God, as I knelt right there by her bed, that she would go on to heaven. She was prepared to do just that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cI hope your own Mom had a peaceful passing; and that she felt joyous about going on to heaven. Heck with politics. Heck with the NYT and all my hang ups about\u201d it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">I flew down to Houston to have lunch with H.W. in 2011.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cDid you come because you think I\u2019m going to die?\u201d the then 87-year-old in a wheelchair asked me as we dined at his favorite pizza dive.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">No, I replied. I told him I was enlisting to go with him on his ninetieth birthday parachute jump.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">He spoke fondly of Bill Clinton and respectfully of President Obama. Then I asked him about Donald Trump, who was leading the birther charge against Obama. Neither of us could have imagined then that Trump would dispatch H.W.\u2019s long-nurtured dreams of his son Jeb becoming president with two words: \u201clow energy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-1m2ozyi\"><\/aside>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"story-ad-10-wrapper\" class=\"css-1r07izm\">\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">At the mere mention of Trump\u2019s name, 41 made a face. \u201cHe\u2019s an ass,\u2019\u2019 he snapped.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">When Trump began plowing his way through Republican rivals, H.W. was known to throw his shoe at the television set.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">The narcissistic, amoral, vulgar reality-TV president and the modest, principled, classy, old-world president could not be more different.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">With Poppy, there was decency and sweetness.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cPut it this way,\u2019\u2019 he wrote me once. \u201cI reserve the right to whine, to not read, to use profanity, but if you ever get really hurt or if you ever get really down and need a shoulder to cry on or just need a friend \u2014 give me a call. I\u2019ll be there for you. I\u2019ll not let you down.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\">\u201cNow, go on out and knock my knickers off. When you do, I might just cancel my subscription.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\"><em>[We cannot urge you too strongly to go to the original at the link. The photos (starting with Maureen Dowd and the Bushes at Christmas at the White House in 1989) are astonishing and add immeasurably to the power of the story. We do not remember a column quite like this from Maureen Dowd with so many accompanying photos perfectly placed enhancing the multidimensional and moving nature of the piece.]<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ygdjhk e2kc3sl0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/12\/02\/opinion\/george-hw-bush-maureen-dowd.html?action=click&amp;module=Opinion&amp;pgtype=Homepage\">The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Maureen Dowd, Opinion Columnist, Dec. 3, 2018 My faithful correspondent, Poppy Bush, scribbling and typing notes through decades of history. Nobody understood our relationship \u2014 least of all us. It was, admittedly, odd. \u201cI like you,\u201d the first President Bush wrote me once, after he was out of office. \u201cPlease don\u2019t tell anyone.\u201d In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5470"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5471,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470\/revisions\/5471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}