George H.W. Bush – Revisited
The Bush We Didn't Know But Now Celebrate
By John Solomon
In December 1983, Vice President George H.W. Bush
slipped away from a Latin America trip on a secret
mission then known only by a handful of U.S.
leaders_ his absence hardly noticed amidst the
season's normal holiday fare.
With El Salvador ablaze in civil war and the
country's U.S.-backed military losing American
confidence with growing reports of civilian
massacres carried out by death squads, Bush and a
small contingent of White House aides and Secret
Service agents whirled through the Salvadoran
mountains aboard two Army Black hawk helicopters.
Their task was to deliver a stern warning to the
Salvadoran military commanders from President Ronald
Reagan: end the execution of civilians or the United
States would instantly cut off its aid in the fight
against Cuban-backed communist rebels.
Tensions inside El Salvador were high after reports
that soldier-led “death squads” had killed three
Roman Catholic nuns and a laywoman.
Air Force II landed in San Salvador’s airport and
then Bush was escorted onto an unmarked Army
Blackhawk helicopter – absent the presidential seal.
As the chopper whirled through the mountains, the
pilots kept an unusually high altitude – about 5,000
feet -- hoping to avoid anti-aircraft and small
gunfire from rebels on the ground below.
The scene of the meeting seemed -- to the advance
staff at least -- hardly fitting for a man just one
heartbeat away from the U.S. presidency: a sultry
mountainside villa with faded pink concrete walls,
purportedly used by San Salvador’s president as a
residence.
When Bush's advance team scouted the location a few
days earlier, they thought they had walked onto the
set of a horror movie.
“The grand room, no bigger than an average living
room was obviously the only room the meeting could
take place,” recalled Antonio Benedi, one of Bush's
most trusted advance aides who accompanied him on
the mission.
The carpets were stained with a brown, bloody color,
and there were similar spatter stains on the walls.
“It looked like a meeting had gone terribly wrong
and no one survived,” Benedi recalled.
The advance team pondered calling off the meeting,
but no one wanted to tell Bush, a former World War
II fighter pilot who survived being shot down in the
Pacific, they were afraid for his safety.
“There was no doubt what the Vice President would
say. So we prepared for the meeting,” Benedi
recalled.
Bush’s official reason for the Latin American trip
was the typical itinerary for a vice president –
attending the inaugural celebration of Argentina’s
first democratically elected president in decades.
Only Reagan, Bush’s chief of staff, the
administration’s national security team and handful
of aides were privy to the Salvadoran side-trip and
the planned confrontation with military commanders
who supervised the death squads.
A Marine officer assigned to the National Security
Council – who a few short years later would burst
into the national limelight as the unrepentant
central figure of the Iran-Contra scandal – was
among the chosen few. Lt. Col. Oliver North kept by
the vice president’s side for much of the trip.
The night before the Salvadoran
mission, Bush retreated from the Argentinian
festivities to the U.S. embassy. Seemingly at ease,
he challenged his traveling partners to a game of
low-stakes poker.
“Bush
pulled a Harry Truman, and asked if anyone wanted to
play poker,” North recalled in an interview this
week. “I told him my personal limit is $5, and
before long I’m out of the game, real quick.”
The next morning Bush’s jet departed for El
Salvador. An old Boeing 707, the jet didn’t have
enough fuel to make a direct flight to San Salvador
so the crew made a fueling stop in Panama.
There, Bush held a second meeting -- absent from his
official schedule. Bush, accompanied by a CIA
officer and his NSC staff, asked Panamanian
strong-arm man Manuel Noriega – who years later Bush
as president would unseat from power in a military
invasion – to meet him at the airport for a
lecturing on the need for more democracy in the
Central American nation.
“I watched George H.W. Bush confront
the man directly about the drug trade, his support
for bad people in Latin America and the need to
bring real democracy to Panama,” North recalled.
Then it was off to El Salvador. The
official report of the trip states that Bush visited
with the Salvadoran president and urged him to
disband the so-called death squads blamed for
hundreds of civilian executions or risk losing U.S.
aid in the civil war.
The Blackhawks landed in a grassy field near the
presidential villa, and Bush’s team took a short
drive to the location. Surrounded by mountains, the
location offered a reminder of the violent divisions
inside the country at a time when the military was
losing ground to communist rebels. The sound of fire
from a Salvadoran gunship – perhaps ten to 15
kilometers away – was faintly audible as the vice
president strutted into the villa.
By the time Bush arrived, the Salvadorans had
spruced the walls with a fresh coat of paint and a
new carpet. The stains that troubled Benedi were no
longer visible.
After some brief pleasantries, Bush retreated to a
room for a private discussion with the Salvadoran
president.
Outside in the hallways, Bush’s
chief of staff Dan Murphy, North, Benedi and a
couple of Secret Service agents armed just with
sidearms grew alarmed as a large number of
Salvadoran military commanders – their semiautomatic
rifles slung across their shoulders -- entered the
villa, preparing to meet the vice president.
Soon commotion broke out as the soldiers refused the
Secret Service agents’ request to leave their arms
outside. Bush poked his head out of the meeting to
ask for quiet.
“We Americans were outgunned 5-to-1 and the prospect
of having the VP deliver a message that they clearly
didn’t want to hear was stark at best,” North
recalled.
Murphy, now deceased, suggested to Bush that perhaps
the session with the military commanders be called
off for security reasons. The vice president
rejected the idea. “That is what we are here for.
We're here so they get the message,” North recalled
Bush saying.
Soon, several dozen soldiers filed into the room
with their sun-faded camouflaged fatigues and
weapons. Most stood since there weren’t enough
chairs.
After brief pleasantries, an animated Bush slammed
his fist on the conference table, startling the
soldiers, as he condemned the killings of the nuns.
His message and tenor were unmistakable.
The vice president “told these commanders that their
actions would have to stop immediately in order to
restore the United States confidence in their
ability to fight this war. Otherwise, the US would
be forced to cut off aid,” Benedi recalled.
North said the scene was surreal. “They’re all
senior guys, some of whom we had good reason to
believe were the heads of deaths squads. And
everybody -- to include the VP -- knew that,” he
said.
“He delivers this incredible stark message, ‘If it
(the killing) doesn’t stop we are going to cut off
our aid and it will stop you dead in your tracks and
you know what that means,’” North recalled.
Bush quickly dispatched the message and boarded the
Blackhawk, hoping the short, curt visit would make a
lasting impression. North handed the military
leaders a list of death squad leaders they wanted
remove.
Within two weeks, the Salvadoran army reported
disbanding its notorious death squads – and U.S. aid
continued to flow as reports of human rights abuses
grew more infrequent. The civil war, however, would
rage on for years and reports of deaths squads
returned in 1989 during Bush’s presidency with the
slayings of Jesuit priests.
Bush ultimately brought closure to the Salvadoran
conflict, presiding over a peace accord in 1992 that
brought democracy to the central American country –
one that holds still today amidst continued violence
and strife inside the country.
On the helicopter ride back from the 1983 trip, Bush
kept his normal matter of fact tone, failing to
acknowledge even for a second the risks he had just
taken.
But his team was quickly reminded. Just two weeks
later the veteran Army pilot who flew Bush's chopper
was shot dead as he sat in his cockpit in San
Salvador, the victim of a communist rebel gunman,
Benedi recalled.
As Bush nears his final years, his brows more silver
and his legs weakened by Parkinson's like symptoms,
the untold tales of a life of public service and
heroism are beginning to eke out.
It's not by Bush's doing. He prefers to keep such
stories to himself, seldom venturing into public
save for an occasional sporting event or social
dinner. He declined an interview request from
Newsweek.
But the country – perhaps yearning for a time when
politics was more civil and political leaders built
impressive resumes before pursuing the presidency –
has begun to celebrate the accomplishments of one of
its elder statesmen.
President Barack Obama last month awarded the elder
Bush the prestigious Medal of Freedom. He has an
entire battleship named after him and on Monday he
will collect his latest accolade for his commitment
to volunteer work through his Points of Light
Foundation.
Mostly gone from public memory is Bush’s infamous
portrayal of himself as a passive bystander in the
Iran-Contra scandal or the Newsweek cover of 1987
questioning whether Bush was a “wimp.” Faded too are
the memories of a painful 1992 re-election loss or
the chronic attack ads playing back Bush's broken
“read my lips” promise on taxes.
Bush wasn't afraid to mix it up politically – as
Republican Party chairman he was a fierce defender
of Richard Nixon during the early Watergate scandal
and he later knocked Michael Dukakis out as a
presidential candidate with the Willie Horton
soft-on-crime line of attack. But he also seemed to
possess a willingness to compromise with Democrats
that often alienated his conservative base as well
as an aw-shucks, aloof and humble side that at times
seemed awkward for a man at the pinnacle of powers.
A fumbled phrase, an awkward joke or the overuse of
the lines like, “Not going to do it. Wouldn’t be
prudent” gave comedian Dana Carvey plenty of
material to work with on Saturday Night Live. But
today it also has given the 41st
president a tangibly human quality.
“At the time, they didn’t seem to be leadership
qualities to the public. They didn’t seem to have
impact. Some even saw it as weaknesses,” said Roman
Popadiuk, who worked alongside Bush in the White
House as a national security spokesman and today
heads his presidential library foundation.
“But now people are looking back at how he treated
people and how Washington is now. And they’re
appreciating how he harkened back to an era in which
people were treated with respect and in which
politics had some civility,” Popadiuk said. “The
mutually cooperative way he tried to address things,
the calm way he handled things in crisis, people see
it today as the strength.
Popadiuk and Benedi remember how Bush’s calm, muted
response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November
1989 led some conservatives to question why he
hadn’t celebrated more overtly the American victory
over communism. To this day, many conservatives give
Reagan the credit though it occurred on Bush’s
watch.
What the public didn’t know then – and Bush refused
to discuss publicly – was that Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev had sent an urgent cable to Bush
on Nov. 9, 1989 as the wall crumbled asking the
United States not to take provocative action that
might instigate a Tiananmen Square-like military
crackdown in East Germany.
The letters remain classified but sources described
to Newsweek that Gorbachev’s letter appealed that
neither side take any action that would lead to
confrontation.
The president acquiesced, settling for a response so
muted that reporters asked during an Oval Office
photo opportunity why he didn’t seem more enthused
about the historic crumbling of communism’s most
famous symbol.
Bush didn’t let on, staying focused on the plan that
he and his national security aides devised. Six days
later, Bush penned a three-page letter to Gorbachev
assuring him the United States appreciated the
Soviet leader’s careful approach to the events in
East Germany and was supportive of the peaceful
transition of power.
The president’s letter also embraced Gorbachev’s own
perestroika reform initiatives to bring
economic modernization to the wider Soviet empire,
citing specifics like the democratic reforms that
were ongoing in the Czech Republic.
Eventually, the two men would meet in December 1989,
but Bush never sought to shield himself from the
criticism by divulging the behind-the-scenes plea of
the Soviet leader.
Today, the continuing attacks on
the 41st president's son, George W. Bush
and his performance as the 43rd
president, don't seem to phase the patriarch of the
political dynasty.
He’s known to start a tale among friend with lines
like, “Back when I gave damn,” cognizant now that he
doesn’t owe anyone anything at this stage in his
career.
Today he counts the man who vanquished him from the
White House – Democrat Bill Clinton – as a friend, a
relationship that blossomed when the two worked to
raise money for Asian tsunami victims a few years
back.
Friends say Bush still likes to take a personal
stroll to the local Albertsons grocery story in
Houston or take in a sporting event or two. But he
has slowed significantly with the loss of strength
in his legs, which friends describe as Parkinsonism,
a vascular disease that weaken his extremities and
occasionally displays some of the symptoms of
Parkinson’s disease.
The symptoms started a few years back as Bush
recovered from back surgery and the weakness has
progressed such that he struggles to walk, even with
a cane these days, even though his upper body
strength remains firm.
When the elder Bush came to Washington for the Medal
of Honor ceremony with Obama, he stopped first for
lunch with some of his friends like Benedi. During
the lunch, Bush stayed in a wheelchair.
But when the time came for him to
appear in public, Bush left the chair behind,
insisting to walk on his own power with the help of
a military aide. The ceremony gave much of America
its first glimpse in years that the 41st
president had aged and grown a bit more frail.
To those who are honoring Bush – Democrat and
Republican alike -- what matters now is highlighting
the resume and accomplishment of a man who traded
his privileged upbringing for the cockpit of a Navy
fighter jet. Shot down into the Pacific by enemy
Japanese fire, Bush only yearned for more public
service after a brief stint at Yale and as an oilman
that secured him a small fortune.
Bush held nearly every power title one could crave:
congressman, Republican Party chairman, CIA
director, envoy to China, U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations, vice president and finally
president.
But impressive titles, the perks of power or even the warm embrace of political popularity seemed to matter less to Bush than the simple satisfaction of getting a job done effectively – a trait shared by many of his “greatest generation” members.
It's likely what made him comfortable in the shadows
of the more famous and eloquent Reagan, willing to
swoop into a room full of armed military offices in
a Latin American mountainside villa at the whim of
his boss, his friends say.
It also the qualities that have led Americans –
especially Democrats -- to cast aside whatever
doubts or aspersions they held from a political era
gone by and to embrace Bush 41 as elder statesmen.
During the bitter debate last year over
cap-and-trade regulations bitterly opposed by
Republicans, Democrats hailed the elder Bush for
creating an earlier cap-and-trade permitting system
in the early 1990s that helped substantially reduce
the pollution that causes acid rain. Anathema to his
own party today, Bush’s stance two decades ago
remains cherished by environmentalists.
Last summer, Obama singled out
the elder Bush on the 20th anniversary of
the Americans with Disabilities Act, another law
fostered during the 41st presidency.
Obama’s tender references to Bush’s bipartisanship
pierced the usually partisan, vitriolic air that
encompassed Washington today.
“Equal access. Equal opportunity. The freedom
to make our lives what we will. These aren’t
principles that belong to any one group or any one
political party. They are common principles.
They are American principles," Obama declared that
day.
Bush was absent from the ceremony, typically
shunning the limelight in his latter years. But
friends say he basked in being recognized for the
spirit of compromise and cooperation it took to get
something like the ADA into law two decades ago.
If there is one honor, friends
say, that Bush is looking forward to it’s the March
21 ceremony honoring his volunteer work at the
Points of Light foundation. Bill Clinton is slated
to be the master of ceremonies, a poignant tribute
to Bush’s belief that some issues rise above
politics.
To Bush, the bipartisan embrace
of his volunteer effort will be as sweet as any
entry on his lengthy resume.