'I Want This for George.' George H.W. Bush's secret pain over his sons complicated legacy

[DonViejo]

‘I Want This for George’

Iraq, a family dynasty and George H.W. Bush’s secret pain over his son’s complicated legacy.

By MARK K. UPDEGROVE November 19, 2017

On December 23, 1990, President George H.W. Bush slept restlessly. The extended Bush family had gathered at Camp David for the holidays as they did every year of his presidency, boosting his spirits, but this year especially, he had a lot on his mind. A ground war in Kuwait looked increasingly likely as Saddam Hussein continued to ignore the warnings of the U.S. and allied nations. It preoccupied Bush, running continuously through his mind. On Christmas Eve morning, he awakened with the remnants of a dream in his head: He was driving into a hotel near a golf course. Across a fence was another golf course, a lesser one. He heard his father, the banker and senator Prescott Bush, was there and went looking for him, finding him in a hotel room just as he remembered him, “big, strong, highly respected.” The two men embraced. “I miss you very much,” the son told his father.

A dozen years later, during Christmastime of 2002, the extended Bush family once again found themselves at Camp David, as President George W. Bush was faced with the possibility of a war with Saddam Hussein, just as his father had been. But while 41 had unconsciously yearned for his father in 1990, 43 had his own father to lean on—and he was right there. As 43 labored to find a diplomatic solution to his standoff with Saddam, he briefed his father on the situation and solicited his view. “You know how tough war is, son,” 41 told him, “and you’ve got to try everything you can to avoid war. But if the man won’t comply, you don’t have any other choice.” The elder Bush’s advice went no further. “[H]e didn’t need to tell me, ‘I hope you’re concerned about the troops,’” 43 said of his father—in one of several interviews the two men gave for my new book on their relationship, The Last Republicans. “He knew me well enough to know that I’d be concerned.”

It was unprecedented. Never before in American history had a president had a father and presidential peer whom he could draw on immediately for counsel. When John Quincy Adams took office in Washington in March 1825, 24 years after his father left office, the decrepit elder Adams, at 89, was in Quincy, Massachusetts, in his last 15 months of life. John Quincy learned of his father’s death days after his passing on July 4, 1826, arriving in Massachusetts just in time for his funeral. “It is among the rarest ingredients of happiness,” he wrote a friend, “to have a father yet living till a son is far advanced in years.” Distance hadn’t allowed the elder Adams to be an active resource for his son during his first year and a quarter in the presidency. But the younger Bush’s father—big, strong, highly respected—was accessible to offer guidance. Regardless, by both Bushes’ accounts, 41’s succinct advice at Camp David was the only time 43 solicited his view on anything of consequence regarding Iraq—and it seemed to belie concerns 41 quietly harbored about a war.

By all inside accounts, George H.W. Bush was first and foremost a loving father during his son’s White House years, refraining from imparting unsolicited advice even as he worried about 43’s administration, especially later as the war in Iraq got mired in mission creep. “I would definitely not characterize 41 as counseling his son in a reproachful way,” said Jim Baker, his former chief of staff and secretary of state. “If he were counseling him, he would say, ‘Are you really sure this is something you want to do?’ Now, I know that 41 thought that some of the advice that 43 was getting in the foreign policy was not the right advice. … But he had the view that, ‘Look, we had our chance; now it’s [his] turn.’” Forty-one also conceded that the world had changed since his administration. “He always said to me, ‘Well, the world was different when I was there,’” 43’s national security adviser and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said. “People who try to say, ‘Well, 41 would have been more circumspect,’ or ‘Jim Baker would have handled it differently’—with al Qaeda having blown up the World Trade Center, really?”

It was in large measure because 41 had been president that he didn’t tender advice more readily. “George Bush knew what it meant to be briefed as president,” 43 said. “He also knew presidents don’t need frivolous, shallow advice: ‘Even though it may not be as informed as your aides’, here’s my opinion …’”

more
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/relationship-president-george-hw-bush-george-w-bush-41-43-iraq-war-215828

[GeorgeGist]

1. A better father would have told Junior ...

"You're not qualified to be President.' and avoided a whole lotta tragedy for the USA and his family.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

2. "But if the man wont comply, you dont have any other choice.

I don't know where to even begin on that one.

[whathehell]

3. Ask the teens he molested if they care about H.W. .Bush''s "Pain"

because I don't...He's just another rich, entitled jerk.

[justgamma]

4. It didn't matter.

The day Shrub was selected, I turned to my hubby and said "We're going to war with Iraq." If people were surprised when we dropped the bombs, they weren't paying attention.