About a month after the 1970 election, Dad met with the President at the White House. Mother called to tell me that Dad had been nominated to serve as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. I was surprised. I thought back to his campaign speeches blasting the UN as an ineffective institution that should have little influence on American foreign policy. At the time, the Texas crowds had responded with loud cheers. I wondered what they’d say when they heard about UN Ambassador Bush.

Looking back on it, I see why the UN position appealed to my father. His travels abroad and experience negotiating offshore drilling contracts with foreign companies and governments had sparked an interest in international issues. The new position got him out of Washington and gave him a life after defeat. Plus the job came with a seat in the Cabinet, which would allow Dad to see the workings of the White House up close.

My father’s first mission was to get confirmed. Previous UN Ambassadors included heavyweights like Adlai Stevenson, a former Governor of Illinois and two-time Democratic presidential nominee, and Arthur Goldberg, who left his lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court to take the job. The New York Times editorialized, “Nothing in [George Bush’s] record qualifies him for this important position.” Thankfully, most Senators disagreed—and were willing to overlook Dad’s skepticism about the UN during the 1964 campaign. The Senate confirmed him handily, and he took his oath as Ambassador in February 1971. Once again, he and Mother were on the move. This time they did not have to find a place to live. One of the perks of the UN job was that it came with housing: a penthouse apartment on the forty-second floor of the Waldorf Astoria.

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OVER THE YEARS, George Bush became an expert at starting new jobs. As soon as he was appointed to the position at the UN, he reached out to a wide variety of people for advice, including former President Lyndon Johnson. When he made his first visit to the U.S. mission at the UN headquarters in New York, he ate lunch with some of the top administrative staff. He took a tour of UN agencies in Europe and received detailed briefings on each agency’s operations. While he admired the service of many American diplomats, he recognized quickly that the UN was inefficient and that its management structure provided no accountabi

lity. When I became President thirty years later, little had changed. I grew increasingly frustrated with the UN’s inability to achieve results as well as with its propensity to send mixed signals, such as giving Cuba and Libya seats on the Human Rights Council or failing to stop the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur. Nevertheless, I learned that many of my fellow world leaders, especially in Europe, needed the UN imprimatur to convince their parliaments to fund operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As UN Ambassador, Dad devoted his energy to building trust with his fellow Ambassadors. He chatted his way through the required dinners and cocktail parties. He also created other opportunities to get to know his colleagues. He and Mother took Ambassadors and their families to Broadway shows, a John Denver concert at Carnegie Hall, and baseball games at Shea Stadium. He invited the Italian and French Ambassadors and their families to Walker’s Point, asked his mother to host a luncheon for the Chinese delegation in Greenwich, escorted a group of Ambassadors to NASA headquarters in Houston, and organized a private screening of The Godfather. He recognized that the key to effective diplomacy was developing personal relationsh

ips—an approach that can be called “personal diplomacy.” The brand of diplomacy that my father developed at the UN became a hallmark of his foreign policy for years to come, especially during the presidency.

One of my parents’ favorite places to entertain was the spectacular apartment at the Waldorf. The nine-room suite had once belonged to Douglas MacArthur, and it measured up to his luxurious taste. The first time I visited my parents at the Waldorf, I found Dad in the living room, which was forty-eight feet long with elegant flooring and woodwork.

“Is this big enough for you, Dad?” I asked.

“It’s adequate,” he deadpanned.

Mother and Dad had a very happy life at the Waldorf, and so did my little sister Doro. As I told John Negroponte when I appointed him UN Ambassador years later, “I don’t think you’ll have any problem adjusting to the accommodat

ions.”

The most controversial policy issue facing the UN during Dad’s tenure was the question of which delegation should represent China. The country held a coveted seat on the Security Council that two rival factions—the Nationalists, based in Taiwan, and Mao Zedong’s Communists, based on the mainland—were vying to fill. The United States had always supported the Nationalists as China’s representative at the UN. But as Mao Zedong and the Communists grew in power, they claimed that they were the only legitimate Chinese government and pushed to exclude Taiwan from the UN.

In the fall of 1971, the UN General Assembly held a vote on who would represent China. The Nixon administration supported “dual representa

tion,” meaning that both mainland China and Taiwan would have seats. My father, tapping into the personal relationships he had developed, reached out to almost a hundred UN delegates, explaining his concerns about emboldening the Communists and urging them not to turn their backs on the Taiwanese. Dad’s position was undercut, however, when President Nixon dispatched National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to Beijing to set up a historic visit to the People’s Republic of China. Kissinger’s trip weakened Dad’s hand by reinforcing Mao’s claim that he was leading the true Chinese government.

Dad did his best, but the dual-representation strategy failed and Taiwan lost its UN seat by a few votes, fifty-nine to fifty-five. Several delegates who had promised to support Taiwan either switched their position or abstained from the vote. In a show of sympathy, Ambassador Bush rose from his seat on the floor of the General Assembly and accompanied Taiwan’s disgraced Ambassador, Liu Chieh, out of the UN. They were heckled and jeered on the walk down the aisle. Mother, who had come with Dad to watch the historic vote, remembers delegates spitting at her. The UN, created as an idealistic forum to pursue peace, had become a venue of ugly anti-Americanism.

In September 1972, a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September kidnapped and killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich. Israel responded by launching attacks against Syria and Lebanon. A majority of the UN Security Council supported a resolution that condemned the Israeli military response but was silent about the terrorist attack against the athletes. Because the United States holds one of the five permanent seats on the Security Council, it has the power to veto any Security Council resolution. The administration chose to exercise America’s veto power for only the second time to block the anti-Israel resolution. Over the next few decades, U.S. Ambassadors to the UN repeatedly used the veto power to defend our ally Israel from unfair condemnation.

In all his government positions, George Bush took his duties seriously. But he never took himself too seriously. During his time as Ambassador, New York magazine published an article by sportswriter Dick Schaap identifying the “10 most overrated men in New York City.” Dad made the list, as did other local luminaries including New York Senator Jacob Javits, Cardinal Terence Cooke, and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger. Some on the list had an ego delicate enough to take offense. Not Dad. He decided to hold a party for everyone on the list. As he wrote on the invitation, “I’d like the chance to look you over to see why you are so ‘overrated.’ ” Almost all of them (plus Dick Schaap) showed up for a lighthearted evening at the Waldorf.