As always, Dad was gracious. He called Clinton shortly after the polls closed on the West Coast, conceded defeat, and gave a warm speech thanking his supporters and congratulating the President-elect. When the tally was complete, Bill Clinton won 43 percent of the vote. Dad took almost 38 percent, while Ross Perot claimed 19 percent. In all, nearly twenty million people had voted for Perot. There is no way to know how those twenty million people would have voted in a two-man race. I believed then, and I still believe today, that if Ross Perot had not been on the ballot, George Bush would have won the 1992 election. I know that Dad felt the same way. He is not a man to hold grudges. Yet when asked about Perot in a documentary aired in 2012, Dad said, “I think he cost me the election and I don’t like him.” (Interesti

ngly, despite the 1992 campaign, I went on to become good friends with Ross Perot’s son, Ross Jr., and with Bill Clinton.)

Of course, Perot alone was not to blame. After twelve years of George Bush as President and Vice President, the American people were ready for a change. The baby boom generation increasingly dominated the electorate, and Bill Clinton epitomized the fresh face that many voters sought. And then there was the economy. Bill Clinton was wrong when he said that George Bush didn’t get it or didn’t care. Dad understood the economic anxiety facing the country. He had taken action to address it. And in 1993, the Commerce Department revised its estimates for the prior year. It turned out that the economy grew in all four quarters of 1992, including a growth rate of 5.7 percent in the pivotal final quarter, when the election was held. That growth laid the foundation for the economic boom of the 1990s, which was largely credited to Bill Clinton. In one of the ironies of history, Bill Clinton passed on to me an economy that appeared strong but was actually heading into recession. The lesson was that timing is an important part of politics, and by the time the facts about the economy came in, time had run out for George H.W. Bush.

—

JUST OVER TWO weeks after his defeat, Dad flew to Greenwich, Connecticut. He was still down about the election, and now he faced more bad news. His beloved mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had entered her final hours. For almost all of her ninety-one years, my grandmother had been an active, vigorous, seemingly ageless woman. She swam and played golf well into her eighties. She never lost her competitive edge, her abiding faith, or her capacity to love. Dad and my sister Dorothy, my grandmother’s namesake, sat quietly by her bedside while she slept. At one point his mother asked him to read to her from her Bible. As he opened the well-worn book, a bundle of papers tumbled out. They were letters that he had written her more than fifty years earlier. She had saved them all that time in her Bible, and every day she had prayed for her son. He prayed with her for the last time, said his good-bye, and flew back to the White House. A few hours later, she died. That night he wrote in his diary, “Mum, I hope you know how much we all love you and care. Tonight she is at rest in God’s loving arms and with Dad.”

Amid his grief and disappoint

ment, George Bush was determined to make the most of his final days in office. Characteristically, he wanted to use his power to help others. When the Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, asked the United States to help address a starvation crisis in Somalia, Dad agreed. He sent U.S. Marines to the war-torn East African nation to help secure infrastructure and allow food shipments to enter the country. In early January, Dad traveled to Somalia to visit the service members carrying out the mission. He was a devoted Commander-in-Chief, and he wanted to use his last trip abroad as President to thank the troops.

Dad was not the only one disappointed by his defeat. In the weeks after the election, members of the White House staff were despondent. In hopes of lifting their spirits, he decided to invite a surprise guest. Throughout his presidency, he had been portrayed on Saturday Night Live by the comedian Dana Carvey, who had honed an impression of Dad that exaggerated his speech patterns, hand gestures, and reputation for “prudence.” To the comedian’s astonishment, Dad called him a few weeks after the election and invited him and his wife, Paula, to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom and then appear at a White House event. The staff was told to gather for an important message from the President. As “Hail to the Chief” played, Dana Carvey walked into the East Room, took the podium, and regaled the audience with his trademark routine. Among other jokes, he created a scene of Dad informing the Secret Service that he planned to go jogging in the nude. The room roared with laughter. The idea was vintage George Bush: He was thinking of others, laughing at himself, and bringing joy to people who were hurting.

I too was hurting. It stung to see a good man rejected by the voters. As a way to move past the election, I decided to run the Houston marathon the next January. During the eighteen-mile training runs, I was able to begin dealing with the pain of defeat. I also found a sense of liberation after Dad left the White House. I no longer had Secret Service protection, and I was able to drive my Lincoln Town Car on the streets of Dallas for the first time in four years. I did so for two years, until I was elected Governor. I haven’t driven a car on any street since 1995.

—

MOTHER AND DAD hosted the whole family for Christmas at Camp David in 1992. It was a bittersweet trip. We enjoyed the beautiful setting, and we all assumed that this would be the last time that we stayed at Camp David. Dad did his best to stay upbeat and never complained. In a letter to his brother, he recalled the story of a runner in the Olympics who limped across the finish line far behind the winners. He remembered the runner saying, “My country didn’t send me all this way to start the race. They sent me here to finish it.” Dad felt the same way. “I didn’t finish the course,” he wrote, “and I will always regret that.”

We all reminded him that he had a lot to be proud of. He had accomplished more in one term than many Presidents had in two. History would remember him as the liberator of Kuwait and the President who oversaw the peaceful end of the Cold War. In some ways, he was like Winston Churchill, who had been tossed out of office in 1945 just months after prevailing in World War II. The British voters felt that Churchill had completed his mission and that they wanted someone else for the next phase. Ultimately, that’s what happened to George Bush in 1992. In Britain, the people regretted their decision and returned Churchill to office. That would not be the case for Dad. Yet his defeat in 1992 opened up new possibilities for others, including Jeb and me. And while it seemed hard to believe at the time, that Christmas at Camp David would not be the Bush family’s last.

THE AFTERLIFE

Now, I no longer pursue happiness…I have found happiness. I no longer pursue it, for it is mine.

George H.W. Bush, August 2001

ON JANUARY 21, 1993, George H.W. Bush woke up at a rental house in Houston. For the first time in twelve years, he had no morning intelligence briefing and no packed schedule to review. Everyone who has ever had the privilege of living in the White House confronts an adjustment after leaving—a transition to what Laura once called “the afterlife.”