Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 213

Here are some excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty," by Susan Page.

Barbara Bush was both warm and tough, simultaneously grandmother and enforcer. She was organized and disciplined, focused and flexible. She built sprawling networks of friends and easily socialized with strangers, from foreign ambassadors at state dinners to factory workers on the campaign trail. She wasn’t flummoxed by abrupt changes in circumstance and locale, from Rye (New York) to Odessa (Texas) to Beijing (China) to the White House. She was comfortable with risk. Those are the qualities of successful CEOs and military commanders and political strategists and, indeed, presidents. Had she been born a generation or two later, when opportunities were exploding for women in America, she might well have been any of those.

Robin’s illness and her death six brutal months later would forever change Barbara Bush. The experience would steel her resolve and broaden her understanding of the ways the innocent can be caught and crushed by the unfairness of life. It would leave an indelible stamp on her about what matters, and what doesn’t. It would cement a bond between her and her firstborn son that would last until Barbara’s passing. And it would test her marriage. George’s and Barbara’s responses to Robin’s illness and eventual death would forge a template that they would follow through the ebbs and flows of their long union. 

Barbara was the strong one during Robin’s painful treatment as George dissolved in tears. With Robin’s death, Barbara was the one who collapsed into sorrow, and George became her rock. The pattern of one stepping up when the other was struggling—and of being able to switch those roles between them—would sustain the couple during times of political defeat and personal pain. It would prove to be crucial decades later when Barbara Bush struggled with depression and again when the elder George Bush was embittered by his defeat for reelection to the White House. 

But nothing would ever match the heartbreaking struggle that robbed them of any sense of the seasons in 1953. The morning after Robin died, on October 11, 1953, Barbara was shocked when she suddenly noticed that the leaves on the trees in her hometown of Rye, in suburban New York, were at the peak of their fall colors. 

The last time she had paid any attention to such things was six months earlier, in Midland, on that March day. “I remember realizing life went on,” she said, “whether we were looking or not.”

The death of a child can pressure any marriage, even a strong one. A study in the 1970s estimated that as many as 90 percent of bereaved couples found themselves in serious marital difficulty within months after the death of a child. A decade later, another study concluded that “all indicators of marital happiness deteriorated over time” among bereaved parents. The most serious problems developed when the mother and the father coped differently with their grief. Often fathers would take refuge in their work and try not to dwell on the loss, the researchers found, while mothers wanted to talk about their child, to express their pain. That disconnect would fray their bonds, sometimes irreparably. 

But George Bush defied that stereotype of his gender and his times. It was Barbara who wanted to rush through a grieving process that could not be hurried; he refused to let her do that. “I wanted to get back to real life, but there is a dance that you have to go through to get there,” she said. “When I wanted to cut out, George made me talk to him, and he shared with me.” He reminded her that others were feeling the same pain she felt. He felt it, as did their son, and their relatives back east, and their friends in Texas. Night after night, he would hold her as she cried herself to sleep.

World War II affected everything for their generation. It disrupted their plans, broadened their horizons, and accelerated their timetables. George Bush was so young when they married (he was twenty; she was nineteen) that his parents had to sign papers to authorize the wedding; the age of consent in New York for men then was twenty-one, though for women it was eighteen. “In wartime, the rules change. You don’t wait until tomorrow to do anything,” Barbara Bush would explain to their children years later. George Bush said they were living with “heightened awareness, on the edge.” 

Their instant connection sparked a marriage that would endure for more than seven decades. When Barbara Bush died in 2018, they could boast the longest union of any presidential couple in American history. The characteristics that marked the start were apparent for the rest of their lives. They took risks. They trusted their instincts. They rolled with the punches. When her fiancé’s return from a war zone was delayed, Barbara scratched out the date on their engraved wedding invitations to write in a new one by hand.

“Mrs. Bush, people say your husband is a man of the eighties and you’re a woman of the forties. What do you say to that?” Jane Pauley demanded in an interview during the campaign on NBC’s Today show. Barbara Bush found the question devastating. “Why didn’t she just slap me in the face?” she wrote in her memoirs. “I was speechless and heartsick.” She managed one of her signature rejoinders: “Oh, you mean people think I look forty? Neat.” 

Her outspoken sister-in-law, Nancy Ellis, told Barbara that she had been the subject of a family discussion at a dinner that hadn’t included her. The topic: “What are we going to do about Bar?” With a campaign ahead, they considered whether they should urge her to lose weight, to color her hair, to wear more fashionable clothes. 

Barbara felt humiliated. It was an unwelcome echo of her mother’s childhood critique of her weight, of the unflattering comparisons with her chic sister. “They discussed how to make me snappier,” Barbara Bush wrote in her diary. “I know it was meant to be helpful, but I wept quietly alone until George told me that was absolutely crazy.” He reassured her, but the suggestion stung, and she didn’t forget it. 

“I tell you the truth, it hurts,” she said eight years later, the snub still on her mind. “When George was first going to run for president, a member of our family said, what are we going to do about Barbara? I said, funny, it doesn’t bother George Bush.” 

As usual, she used self-deprecating humor as a shield. A profile in the Cincinnati Enquirer said a friend had asked her if she would mind watching her husband age during the presidency, as presidents do. “I said, ‘Hot dog! I’d love to watch him age,’” she replied. “ ‘Then he’ll look like me.’”

Robin’s soul had entered her body at the moment of her birth, her mother decided, and it had left at the instant of her death. 

"What do I feel about abortion?” Barbara Bush continued in her distinctive handwriting, bold and clear, with no words crossed out or rewritten. 

“Having decided that the first breath is when the soul enters the body, I believe in Federally funded abortion. Why should the rich be allowed to afford abortions and the poor not?” 

She said she could support limits on the timing of abortions—“12 weeks, the law says”—but she wrote it was “not a Presidential issue,” underlining “not” twice. “Abortion is personal, between mother fathers and Dr.” She considered what public policies might make sense. “Education is the answer,” she wrote. “I believe that we must give people goals in life for them to work for—Teach them the price you must pay for being promiscuous.” 

Along the side margin of the last page, she wrote, “Needs lots more thought.”

Two days before she died, she and George Bush sat in the small den off the living room of their house, holding hands. They gave each other permission—for her to die, for him to live. “I’m not going to worry about you, Bar,” George Bush told her. “I’m not going to worry about you, George,” she told him.