Thankfully, the United States had a President suited to the moment. Within months of taking office, George Bush had the vision to recognize Gorbachev’s potential, the diplomatic savvy to help him, the humility to avoid provocation, and the strength of character to stand up to pressure from critics. The President who guided the Cold War to a peaceful end was the same decent, humble, thoughtful man that I have known all my life. It’s no exaggeration to say that the lessons that Dorothy Walker Bush taught her son a lifetime earlier—win with grace, don’t brag, think of the other guy—directly contributed to the peace of the world. Not too many mothers can say that.

Future historians will no doubt give George Bush credit for his leadership in ending the Cold War. At the time, however, his success had an unexpected cost. By removing the main foreign policy issues from the agenda of the 1992 election, he erased his greatest strength. In one of the most dramatic turnarounds in political history, George Bush went from an admired leader with approval ratings in the high eighties to a man without a job.

THE HARDEST YEAR

ON HALLOWEEN 1991, a massive storm pounded the Maine coastline. Winds gusting up to seventy-five miles per hour and thirty-foot waves caused more than two hundred million dollars in property damage. Amid the destruction was my parents’ beloved home at Walker’s Point. The Wave, a small guest cottage, was ripped off its foundations. My parents’ house was severely damaged when giant boulders were swept through the living room. Couches floated out to sea. As Dad put it in a letter to a friend, Kennebunkport had endured a “truly historic pounding.” To some local residents, the Halloween nor’easter of 1991 became known as “the perfect storm.”

The storm that struck Walker’s Point was a harbinger of the tumultuous year ahead for George Bush. Just a few months earlier, his decisive handling of the Gulf War and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe had earned him historically high approval ratings. Yet the economy was in recession, and the American people were frustrated. In less than a year, Dad’s approval ratings collapsed by more than forty points. He faced a primary challenger, a billionaire independent, and a Democratic Party determined to retake the White House after twelve years in the political wilderness. For all who loved George Bush, 1992 was a painful year.

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ALTHOUGH FOREIGN POLICY dominated his presidency, George Bush came to the White House with a serious domestic agenda: to improve education, reduce crime, encourage volunteerism, and stimulate economic growth by keeping taxes low.

Those plans quickly collided with the realities of a struggling economy. The economy had been growing steadily since the recession that Ronald Reagan had confronted in the early 1980s. But rising inflation, combined with the savings and loan crisis, slowed economic growth to a near halt by early 1990. Before long, the country was in recession. The budget deficit ballooned to more than two hundred billion dollars, nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product. Economic advisers warned that the deficit could drag the economy into an even deeper recession.

The White House strategy was to invigorate the economy by lowering the deficit through spending cuts. The economic policy team hoped that a lower deficit would drive down interest rates and restore consumer confidence, which in turn would stimulate economic growth. In 1990, however, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and they wanted to reduce the deficit by raising taxes rather than cutting spending. After months of negotiation with leaders from both parties, Dad accepted a budget compromise: In exchange for major spending reductions, he would accept some revenue increases. That was what President Reagan had done in 1982, when he agreed to a tax increase as part of a deficit reduction bill. There was a big difference between 1982 and 1990, however. Unlike Ronald Reagan, George Bush had said, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”

Congress considered the compromise in the fall of 1990. Republicans, led by Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia—who at one point had supported the compromise

—revolted and failed to pass the bill. Without a spending bill in place, the government shut down briefly. The Democrats took the opportunity to demand personal income tax hikes in addition to other revenue increases. (As we have learned over the years, the American people expect their government to function, and a shutdown led by Republicans always strengthens the Democrats’ hand.) By that point, Dad had deployed troops to Saudi Arabia, where they were preparing to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. He felt that he could not afford a budget crisis at home while he was managing a national security crisis abroad. And he believed that reducing the deficit was critical to restarting the economy. He agreed to the revised deal, including the tax increases proposed by the Democrats.

From an economic perspective, the budget bill made some sense. It imposed spending discipline by setting firm caps on discretionary spending and requiring additional government spending on programs like Medicare and Social Security to be offset by cuts in other areas. For every dollar in revenue increases that Dad accepted, the Democratic Congress agreed to two dollars in spending cuts.

From a political perspective, however, the budget agreement was a disaster. Dad’s decision to break his “no new taxes” pledge fractured the Republican Party. The White House did a poor job of communicating the rationale behind the deficit deal. It seemed to me that there was not a full-scale effort to defend the deal. I’m not sure why. Perhaps senior advisers did not want to attract any more attention to Dad’s broken pledge. If so, that was shortsighted.

In retrospect, the White House should have conducted a full-throated public relations campaign to explain the budget decision. By taking the issue to the people, a President can build up public support and change minds in Washington. Unfortunately, George Bush did not do that for the budget agreement of 1990, and the bitterness that resulted from his broken pledge damaged his standing within his party.

Ultimately, many economists would later credit Dad’s decision with laying the foundation for the explosive economic growth of the 1990s. Sadly for President George Bush, the positive economic news did not appear until right after the 1992 election.

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THE DEFICIT REDUCTION deal obscured many other domestic accomplish

ments of Dad’s presidency. He fulfilled a campaign promise by signing the Americans with Disabilities Act, a landmark piece of legislation that has enabled millions of Americans with physical disabilities to participate more fully in society. I saw the positive impact of the law firsthand. When I was comanaging partner of the Texas Rangers, we designed the new Ballpark in Arlington to include wheelchair ramps and handicap-accessible seating so that all fans could cheer on the Rangers. Dad also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991—a fitting complement to the open-housing bill that he supported in 1968—which allowed greater access to courts for victims of racial discrimination without endorsing quotas. And he signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the most significant environmental legislation in two decades. The bill applied market forces to reduce the problem of acid rain in the most economically efficient way possible. And it worked. In 2002, the Economist magazine called the bill “the greatest green success story of the past decade.”