Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirty-five

I was pleased to see that Daddy had done very well in Palo Alto during my time in Washington. He’d made many friends and was active both with the university’s Public Service Center and with the Stanford Department of Athletics. We settled into a nice pattern of getting together two or three times a week. Though we spoke by phone every day, we led separate and fulfilling lives.

By the start of 1988, the presidential campaign was heating up. George Herbert Walker Bush, the sitting vice president under Ronald Reagan, was the front-runner to become the Republican standard-bearer. I hadn’t met Vice President Bush, but I did know his principal foreign policy advisor, General Brent Scowcroft. Brent was one of the wise men of the foreign policy establishment, having served Gerald Ford as national security advisor.

When Bush won the presidential election, Brent called and asked me to join him at the National Security Council. Jim Baker also invited me to join him at the State Department as deputy director of policy planning, helping to oversee the department’s internal think tank on strategic issues in foreign affairs. Then Senator Bill Cohen, whom I had gotten to know during my time with the Joint Chiefs, also called me—during the Super Bowl, no less—on behalf of the designee for defense secretary, John Tower, to offer me a job in the Pentagon. After a brief trip to Washington to check out the prospects, I settled on the job of director of Soviet and East European studies at the NSC. I decided that while the other jobs were interesting, there was nothing like being a member of the White House staff.

When I told Daddy that I wanted to take the job, he was not surprised. “You’re going again!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly to let me know that it was fine with him. Stanford was quite surprised, since I would be taking my third leave of absence in four years. Nonetheless, the university approved an unpaid leave, and I headed to Washington.

I quickly learned that work at the National Security Council is hard and not very glamorous. Generally, NSC staffers write memoranda to prepare the President for phone calls and meetings, take notes to create a permanent record, coordinate with other government agencies to keep them on track with the administration’s priorities, and just take care of whatever the President needs to do his job, whether it’s whispering facts in his ear or photocopying his papers. In the past, though, the NSC staff had sometimes gotten too involved in carrying out the nation’s foreign policy. The Iran-Contra affair in the mid-1980s had been one such case, in which the NSC staff had secretly cooked up a plan to divert funds from covert Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan resistance (the Contras)—apparently without the knowledge of the secretary of state, let alone the Congress. The fallout was disastrous; the affair almost brought down the Reagan presidency. But Brent Scowcroft was a stickler for keeping the NSC staff in its proper place.

At the NSC, the hours are long, there is little tolerance for mistakes, and one must pay close attention to details. Sometimes the work has very little to do with serious policy making. My first task, only two days after I arrived in Washington, was to deal with a minor crisis involving the Soviet Union. It seems that a bakery cooperative somewhere in the USSR had sent a huge, several-hundred-pound cake congratulating President Bush on his election. By the time the cake arrived, it had crumbled into pieces, and a number of vermin had had their way with it. I went down to inspect the gift and suggested that we dispose of it—but only after taking a picture of the cake in a part of the White House that would be easily recognizable. We could then send the picture to the wonderful Soviet citizens who’d been so thoughtful.

I settled into my new job and life in Washington. Each morning I arrived at the White House at six-thirty and rarely left the office before nine at night. I found the work demanding, and I sometimes wondered if I’d make the cut. The NSC was known as a place where the weeding-out process was pretty severe: it wasn’t uncommon to have a colleague with whom you were working on Monday disappear by Friday. No one ever asked what happened, but it was assumed that he or she had made an unforgivable mistake that embarrassed the White House or, even more unforgivably, the President.

I also knew that Brent preferred to have the NSC staff remain relatively anonymous and out of the spotlight. Brent set the standard as the most important man in Washington whom few Americans could identify in a photo lineup. But there was great media interest in me. When the Washington Post wanted to do a profile on the new Soviet specialist, a black woman professor from Stanford, I asked permission from Brent, who agreed I should do it. The morning the profile appeared, I was stunned to see a long, eye-catching article with a gigantic picture of me reading Pravda, a Soviet newspaper. It wasn’t exactly the anonymity that was expected of the President’s staff, and I was relieved when Brent called to say that he thought the article was terrific. Still, as my wonderful friend Vernon Jordan, the civil rights leader and venerable Washington lawyer, once warned me, Washington loved to create celebrities and then tear them down, and I resolved not to let celebrity status undermine my effectiveness. I don’t know why I worried—I never had time to attend the cocktail parties and dinners that came with a high profile anyway.

Office and Washington politics aside, there were times that reminded me why I had chosen the White House over other, more senior jobs in the administration. The first such experience came when Brent called late on a wintry Friday afternoon in February. The President wanted to invite a group of Soviet specialists to his home in Kennebunkport, Maine, on Sunday to discuss the unfolding changes in Moscow. At first I despaired at having to round up a group of academics so late on a Friday. I quickly learned, though, that when the White House calls, assistants and spouses manage to find people. So that Sunday, I met five other Soviet specialists at the airport in Portland, Maine. We made our way along the icy roads to Walker’s Point, where we briefed the President in the bedroom—the only room at the time that had heat.

My first face-to-face encounter with the President was wonderful. He was kind and thanked me profusely for everything that I’d done. “You’re so good to agree to leave California and help me out,” he said. Is he kidding? I thought. He’s the President. But I learned that day, and would see throughout my time with him, that this wasn’t false modesty: George H. W. Bush is simply one of the nicest and most self-effacing people that I’ve ever met. He taught me so much about leading people. Countless times he would send a congratulatory note to a foreign leader for a seemingly innocuous achievement. I came to understand that he was building a relationship, which would serve him well when he needed to ask that leader to do something hard. Even I frequently received a thank-you note from the President for a job well done, and this kindness and courtesy made it a joy to work with him. Most important, his natural geniality served American diplomacy well when he was faced with revolutionary changes in world politics.

Because so much was unfolding in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I began to see the President quite often. Just a few days after Kennebunkport, I was asked to meet with the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and the President in the Oval Office. I was overjoyed—and overwhelmed—by simply being there. As I sat in the pale yellow room with the sun streaming through the French doors, I suddenly realized that we were two-thirds of the way through the meeting and I hadn’t taken a single note. This snapped me out of my Condi-in-Wonderland moment. I went back to my office and tried to re-create a record from memory—and vowed to remember that I was there to work, not for the ride.

Yet it turned out to be a wild ride indeed. When I arrived in Washington in January 1989 there was simply no way to predict the historic events that I’d witness and help shape. At the beginning of the decade, Ronald Reagan had come to office determined to challenge Soviet power and had done so successfully. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Facing rapid internal decay, Gorbachev began to loosen the reins of communist authority at home and to pursue a more conciliatory course abroad. This approach rapidly reshaped the foreign-policy landscape.

While President Reagan (prodded by then–Secretary of State George Shultz) had decided that Mikhail Gorbachev was indeed a different Soviet leader, some, including Brent and myself, were skeptical of how authentic the shift in Soviet policy really was. To get a better feel for the changes that were taking place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, we did a policy review of U.S.-Soviet relations and American relations with Eastern Europe.

While we were holding meetings, though, history was sprinting ahead. In April, the Communist Party of Poland was losing control of the country and called for negotiations with Lech Walesa’s underground Solidarity trade union. It seemed that the talks would end in a power-sharing arrangement that heavily advantaged the Solidarity workers and committed the Polish government to hold free parliamentary elections. There was an internal debate in Washington about how to respond. The State Department urged caution and recommended taking only tiny steps toward the emerging democratic forces. But the outcome of the negotiations would, I thought, be a turning point. Working quietly with several other staffers, I managed to get the President to take a more aggressive line.

Within a few days, President Bush went to Hamtramck, Michigan, to give a speech on Poland. The site was chosen by the domestic side of the White House to honor one of the nation’s largest Polish American communities. I accompanied the President, riding for the first time on Air Force One. When I got home, I called Daddy and gave him a thorough account of the day, including the lunch on the second floor of a miserably hot Polish American restaurant. I didn’t tell him that the President had mispronounced the phrase “Polish people,” calling them instead the “polish people”—as in furniture wax. At that slip, Brent turned to me and barked, “Did you forget to capitalize the P?” I was mortified and took responsibility, though in fact the P had been capitalized. It was my first experience with the maxim that I would later pass on to NSC staffers: “It’s the President’s triumph and the SC staffer’s fault.”

Over the next two months we finished our policy reviews, and the President delivered a couple of speeches loosely based on them. The effort to define a new course for U.S.-Soviet relations laid out a series of benchmarks that the Soviets would have to meet in order to show that they were serious about change (although we had to keep revising the speeches because of how fast the situation was changing). From then on, even the most cautious among us knew that the changes were real. Now it was just a question of how far the Soviets were willing to go. Or more correctly, it was a question of whether Gorbachev was any longer in a position to stop the cascade of events that he had unleashed.

Even though I’d been stretched thin by events since arriving at the White House, I continued my long-standing practice of talking to my father on the phone every night, and I could tell that his life was increasingly intertwined with that of Clara Bailey, a principal in the Ravenswood school district where Daddy was volunteering. Ironically, Clara had been born in Birmingham too. An attractive, quiet, churchgoing Baptist lady, Clara was divorced with one grown son, Greg. I’d gotten to know her before leaving for Washington and noticed that Daddy seemed to favor her over the many ladies who sought his attention.

One night when I called him, Daddy’s voice was halting. “I’d hoped to talk to you about this in person,” he said, “but you’re so busy, I don’t know when you’re coming home. Clara and I want to get married.” He abruptly fell silent, waiting a second or so for me to respond. But before I could say anything he started talking again about how his love for my mother had been so special and nothing would ever replace that.

“Daddy, I know that,” I said. I told him that I liked Clara and was glad that they’d decided to get married. Frankly, it never occurred to me to question his decision.

The formal wedding was set for July 1, 1989, at Clara’s house in Palo Alto. Greg and I were the witnesses, and I arranged to host the reception at the Stanford Faculty Club. At the reception, I realized that Daddy had made many new friends since my departure for Washington, and that was gratifying. Clara was clearly very good for him: compassionate and kind, she gave him a new lease on life. To this day she and I remain close. I must admit, though, that I felt a tinge of remorse at the wedding. I was glad that Daddy had found a companion, but his marriage opened the wound again of my mother’s untimely death at the too-young age of sixty-one.