Wherever he went, as America's president or before it, George Herbert Walker Bush usually carried a felt-tipped pen and a supply of note-cards. On these he wrote letters. Some were thank-yous; others a clumsy, but courteous, attempt to get his views across to other people; yet others just a "good to see you" kind of thing.
When the time came to write his presidential memoirs, to salve some of that desperate hurt after Bill Clinton thrashed him in 1992, he published instead 600-plus pages of correspondence. They ranged from doting letters to new-born grandchildren to his worries, as a young seaman in 1943, that his girlfriend Barbara, "so darn attractive", would drop him while he was away; from his attempt to explain the Watergate scandal to his four young sons, to his mortified account of throwing up in 1992 on the Japanese prime minister, "the damnedest experience". He admitted that some of the letters were nutty. But they were also of the moment. As he said, "It's all about heartbeat."
His forte, and first love, was foreign policy. He had been ambassador to the UN for Nixon, an envoy to China for Gerald Ford (he and Barbara riding round delightedly on bicycles) and head of the CIA, besides, as vice-president, a follower-of-the-hearse at dozens of state funerals. Instinctively, he thought in terms of global power games; fortuitously, his time as president coincided with the end of the cold war, a heady and fascinating moment.
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