HEADLINE NEWS - Bush Caught Reading!!!
Vinh Dam
January 14, 2001
From the Ranch, President-Elect Gazes Back and Looks to Future
By FRANK BRUNI and DAVID E. SANGER
CRAWFORD, Tex., Jan. 12 — During his long campaign, President- elect George
W. Bush seldom came across as a self-reflective man, the kind who ponders
his place in the world or his trajectory through history.
But minutes into an interview at his ranch here today, he shot to his feet
to retrieve the book he was reading, bringing back a biography of John
Quincy Adams. With Mr. Bush's inauguration little more than a week away, he
was communing with the only other son of a former American president to
assume the office himself.
Mr. Bush said that he had been prompted by a recent, teasing comment by his
father that "old Quincy's doing well in Crawford."
"If he's going to refer to me as Quincy," Mr. Bush said, "I might as well
find out what the fellow was all about." Asked if the inquiry was proving to
be instructive, he noted that Mr. Adams feared that his rise in politics
would be seen as nepotism.
"The dad writes letters assuring him that it's not the case," said Mr. Bush,
who claimed, for his part, not to need any assurance.
Mr. Bush was sitting in a plaid armchair in a renovated farmhouse amid the
piebald cows, ancient live oaks and 1,600 acres of his ranch here. But he
was also sitting at what was surely the oddest and most profound crossroads
of his life, one that found him sifting through contradictory emotions.
Nearby, on an end table, were reminders of the enormous step he was about to
take: a book of all the paintings he could hang in the Oval Office, a manual
on the "First Family Living Quarters." On another table sat "Bully Pulpit,"
a book of quotations from Theodore Roosevelt.
And Mr. Bush's eagerness and excitement about the journey ahead were
palpable as he discussed such matters as the desk he had selected for the
Oval Office. It was the one used by John F. Kennedy — and, later, President
Clinton. Mr. Bush said he did not know where his father's desk was, but then
rifled through a book from White House curators for the answer.
"Storage," he announced.
And yet a part of Mr. Bush seemed to cling to the place and the life he was
leaving behind, to his rugged and remote hideaway here, so far from the
nation's capital, which he often portrayed during his campaign as a brutish
political war zone.
He strolled the rooms and the property here without any sense of hurry to
get or be anywhere else, dwelling on the grand vistas and small details that
had given him such pleasure, from the savanna-like sweep of the land to the
oil painting above the fireplace.
It was a portrait he had commissioned of him and his father, former
President Bush, fishing in a Texas lake. The elder Bush is the successful
one reeling in the catch; the younger Bush said he had instructed the artist
to render it that way.
The president-elect delighted in packing two reporters into an all- terrain
vehicle for a mud-splattering trip through several of the seven canyons
scattered along a winding river. He cataloged the wildlife on the property,
showing off a lone stag that had been hanging out for months with a bovine
crowd.
"He thinks he's a cow," Mr. Bush said.
At another point, Mr. Bush stooped to pick up a fossil-like piece of
jawbone, complete with jagged teeth, from a species he was hard-pressed to
identify.
"Whatever it is," he said, "it's got a few cavities."
He also provided a thorough tour, with voluminous commentary, of the
sprawling but unoccupied new dream house that he and his wife, Laura, have
built beside an artificial lake, which was dug, at Mr. Bush's request, so
that he could troll for bass just yards from the patio.
The house was being finished and furnished even as the couple was packing
for Washington — "This door doesn't close," he yelled to one worker — and
while Mr. Bush said that he planned to return as often as he could, he said
it would probably not be as often as he wished.
He looked forward to the day when his 19-year-old twin daughters, Jenna and
Barbara, would find the isolated ranch more enticing and, beyond that, to a
time when grandchildren might rumble through the breezeways of the new
house.
Among the storm of changes that have confronted Mr. Bush over recent months,
one was the departure of his daughters, who moved out of the governor's
mansion in Austin long before he said goodbye to it earlier this week. In
September, they went to college — Jenna to the University of Texas, Barbara
to Yale.
"I love them," he said, "but I'm really thrilled that they're out on their
own."
As he roamed his ranch in an open- collared purple shirt, blue jeans and
brown leather cowboy boots stamped with his initials, he seemed at once to
be looking backward and forward, to be dwelling simultaneously in the past,
present and future.
All were entwined in a recent farewell gift from staff members that
symbolized his stated desire to retain a down-home Texas sensibility at the
pinnacle of power. It was an exquisitely, ornately crafted leather saddle
with a presidential seal on it.
He proudly stroked it and, later, conceded that there were aspects of the
role he was about to occupy that were still sinking in, that required some
adjustment.
"You're never alone," he marveled, referring to the constant security detail
and the ever-present swarms of onlookers. "There's no mobility here. It is a
much — you really begin to realize what a big deal it is for people to see
the president. And I honor that. I do."
"Like in Boca Grande," he added, referring to a vacation in Florida that he
had taken just days before the New Year's holiday. "I went out to play golf,
and it just didn't dawn on me that when I came to the hole on the road,
there would be 300 people there. And it affected my swing, I want you to
know."
He vowed to "stay in touch with reality" by frequently inviting friends from
Texas to the White House, an environment he already knows well from the four
years that his parents lived there.
Asked about the perk that he expected to enjoy the most, he said: "Good
food, I guess. They've got great food. The dessert menu is unbelievable.
These things are so exotic it's hard to even describe what they are. They're
these kinds of mounds of calories."
Perhaps that explained the three- mile run he had taken that morning, after
which, he said, he had read a bit of the Bible, and then a bit more of the
Quincy book, "John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life," by Paul C.
Nagel.
"The man had a domineering mother, that's for certain," Mr. Bush remarked,
apropos of nothing.
Like his?
"Not even close," he said, later adding: "I've got a strong mother, but
she's not domineering. No, this is a woman who kept trying to thwart his
marriages."
He said that his parents would sleep over in the White House on his first
night there, but not in the bedroom they used to. It would belong to him and
Laura Bush now.
And he said that while he did not talk much with his parents about the Bush
family's being the first to follow in the Adamses' footsteps, "I love the
thought that they are leaving, in essence, a legacy of people that have
followed them into public service."
He later acknowledged that it's "a huge story for a lot of folks: dad
watches son," noting that he would be the first president since Mr. Kennedy
to have his father witness his inauguration. "It's a powerful story. It's a
story of family and a story of love. But it reflects more about him than it
does about me. It says he's a great dad."