and China did not have full diplomatic relations, so Bush was never officially ambassador.)īefore leaving for what was then called Peking, Bush asked Secretary of State Henry Kissinger if he might read memos of Kissinger's meetings with Mao Zedong and Chou Enlai. The earliest came in 1974, shortly after Ford granted Bush's wish and designated him "chief of the U.S. If this act of forgetting served to strengthen his relationship with Reagan, there were other examples in George Bush's political life of the usefulness of a short memory. He had truly erased those days and those words from his mind. I believe that to Bush the 1980 primary campaign was all a messy, unpleasant time when he had to attack the man who subsequently put him on the GOP national ticket, who was now his friend and whose economic program he was working feverishly to promote. The reporter and all else were aghast: Bush was not known for lying why would he make such an astonishing claim?īush had to backtrack when NBC easily produced film of his pronouncing the words "voodoo economics," and he graciously apologized to the reporter-typically, in a handwritten note. Of course he had: The unforgettable phrase (the creation of his campaign press secretary, Peter Teeley) had been used against Reagan in the Pennsylvania Republican primary only a year earlier. In 1981, during his first year as Ronald Reagan's vice president, an NBC reporter asked if he had revised his view that the president's fiscal policy was "voodoo economics." Bush denied he had ever said such a thing. Sometimes Bush's disinterest in the past led to embarrassing moments. (Also equipped with a steel-trap memory is their son George W.) After all, he could always turn to his wife Barbara, who never forgot a thing. "George Bush," I said, "never opens those drawers."īush's short-term memory may have confounded his staff and historians but never himself. I said that memory is like a chest of drawers that people like us delight in opening, pulling out a treasured object and lovingly turning it over in our minds before putting it back in the chest. Bush knew he couldn't answer questions like, "What were you thinking when the Berlin Wall came down?" So he summoned a mass of ex-staffers to provide their own recollections, something we were all quite eager to do.ĭriving away from Walker's Point, Marlin expressed consternation at our former boss's inability to recall even monumental moments. We had just come from a gathering at the big family house in Kennebunkport where scholars from the University of Virginia were conducting an oral history of the Bush presidency. Although his talk with Ford had occurred only three years before our interview, and, although it was a major turning point in his life, Bush couldn't recall why.įast-forward to the year 2000 and another conversation in Maine, this one with Marlin Fitzwater, who had been Bush's press secretary in the White House. Soon after he became president, Ford asked Bush (then chairman of the Republican National Committee) what he wanted to do in the new administration. The topic one afternoon was the resignation of Richard Nixon and the advent of Gerald Ford. He had signed me as ghostwriter on a proposed memoir for which I interviewed him during two glorious summer weeks in Maine. I became aware of Bush's short-term memory not when he was in his nineties but four decades earlier, in 1977. This very Texan, forward-looking attitude was in contrast to that of most denizens of Washington, DC, who focus on someone's current status and are quick to recall the highlights (and low lights) of that person's past, no matter how distant. He didn't much care about the dead past, including his own. Bush was always excited about what he was doing or planning to do, and he was always interested in what you were doing, too. He was a man who lived in the present and the future, not the past. The wisdom of this truly important thing was shown by the life of the late President George H. " I forget whatever deathless dictum I planned to proclaim I just remember that my friend finished the sentence for me: "A short memory!" At one point in the conversation, I raised my index finger to intone, "The most important thing to have in politics is. Many years ago, I had lunch with a man who knew his way around Harris County politics, especially the bare-knuckled variety of Pasadena, his hometown.
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