Bush 41 In China: Kinda Like Old Times
Former President Is Back on Familiar, if Changed, Ground

By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 11, 2008

BEIJING -- Former president George H.W. Bush doesn't give a lot of interviews these days, and for one simple reason: He doesn't want to have to start talking about his son, the president. "Then somebody wants to psychoanalyze you, stretch you out on the couch . . . go into the differences that might exist," he says dismissively, gesturing to the sofa in his hotel suite here, high above this bustling city.

But near the end of a 25-minute interview Saturday, largely devoted to his long association with China, the former president relents a little. The conversation is turning to the subject of personal diplomacy -- a hallmark of his career in public service and a major theme of recently published diaries from Bush's days in the 1970s as the senior U.S. diplomat in Beijing.

It's also something the father sees a bit of in his son.

"All I know is I am very proud of the relationships he has established with different leaders," the senior Bush says of "the president," as he refers to the junior Bush. It's not only the Chinese leadership, he says. "It's also [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin. He gets criticized for that, but I think it's smart and wise and right that he has pleasant relationships with people and that they trust him. I think he's developing that with [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy. I know it's there with Putin."

Perhaps mindful that Putin has been directing a new military campaign in Georgia, Bush goes on: "It doesn't mean you approve of what Putin is doing or his denial of human rights in Russia. That's the thing that gets me about some of these critics. They think if you establish a personal relationship, that you're then signing off on everything that person does. And that's not right."

Bush is here in China as the honorary captain of the U.S. Olympics team and to accompany his son on his fourth and likely final trip to China as president. He's come with a bevy of Bushes -- not just the president and first lady Laura Bush, but also daughter Doro, son Marvin, granddaughter Barbara and various friends and retainers. His wife Barbara very much wanted to come, Bush says, but is still a bit hobbled from recent surgery on both knees.

The two presidents have spent a lot of time together here: at the dedication of the new U.S. Embassy in China, dinner with the U.S. ambassador, lunch with Chinese President Hu Jintao. The two also watched swimmer Michael Phelps smash a world record and attended the big U.S.-China basketball game on Sunday night with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, a longtime Bush family friend.

Bush has been typically exuberant in carrying out his duties as honorary Olympics captain. Meeting Team USA with Bush 43 before the game, Bush 41 gave a warm hug to Lakers star Kobe Bryant and received an affectionate greeting from Cavaliers hero LeBron James: "What's up, pops?" the massive James asked.

The affection the two Bushes have for one another has been palpable on this Olympics trip. "My dad was a fabulous president," the junior Bush said after receiving an effusive introduction from his father at the embassy event. "And I tell people one reason why was, not only did he know what he was doing, he was a fabulous father."

The visit to China, his 22nd since leaving the Oval Office in 1993, has served as a kind a nostalgic homecoming for the senior Bush: As the U.S. envoy in China in the mid-'70s, Bush put in practice an approach to personal diplomacy that reached its apex nearly 20 years later, when as president, Bush called in a lifetime's worth of chits with other world leaders to marshal the grand coalition that evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

Bush came to China in large measure to get away from Watergate-era Washington, where he served as chairman of the Republican National Committee and fiercely defended a doomed President Richard Nixon.

Turning down President Gerald Ford's offer of ambassadorships in London or Paris, Bush headed to Beijing convinced it would one day be a major player on the world stage and eager to meet "the next generation of China's leaders," as he notes in "The China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global President."

During his 14 months as the U.S. envoy to China in 1974 and 1975, as China was beginning to emerge from decades of isolation, Bush threw himself enthusiastically into a round of embassy receptions, encounters with government bureaucrats and a handful of meetings with senior officials such as Deng Xiaoping. Most famously, he and wife Barbara bicycled around Beijing regularly, trying to get to know ordinary Chinese. "It was a continuing revelation," Bush says of his time here. "It was fun."

By his own account, he had mixed success: The closed nature of China, at the time still in the last throes of the Cultural Revolution, made it very hard for the gregarious Bush to make the kind of contacts he had hoped for when he first arrived at the U.S. Liaison Office, as the embassy was known in the days before formal diplomatic relations. His diary brims with frustration over the opaque nature of Chinese officialdom.

His subsequent experience as president also gave him a painful lesson in the limits of personal diplomacy. During his time in China, Bush established a relationship with Deng, but came to be badly disappointed by the Chinese leader during the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989. His critics said Bush was naive.

Looking back, Bush suggests things might have been worse if he had not had a preexisting relationship with the future leader. Bush sees the episode as just one more example of how much things have changed in China, along with the architecture, the commerce and the pollution.

"When I left China [to become director of the CIA], Deng Xiaoping gave this going-away lunch, to the envy of a lot of ambassadors because they could never get to see this guy," Bush recalls. "But he gave this going-away lunch for me in the Great Hall, with Barbara, others. And he said to me, 'Have you been spying on me the whole time?' -- which I thought showed a nice sense of humor and a personal style."

But Bush points out: "Even when Tiananmen Square happened, I couldn't talk to him on the telephone. Today President Hu and President Bush talk back and forth. You couldn't do that back then. It's a dramatic change."

At 84, Bush seems as sharp as ever in his observations, though he moves around more slowly than he did during his once frenetic days of shopping, biking and tennis in Beijing. The former president has undergone hip and back surgeries and was helped up the stairs to his seat at the basketball game by a Secret Service agent.

During the interview, he's wearing an open-collar white shirt, blue blazer with a patch marking his honorary captainship, and orange socks. As he warms enthusiastically to the subject of China, he employs the same familiar hand gestures that comedian Dana Carvey once satirized on "Saturday Night Live."

In the audience at the embassy event Friday was Henry A. Kissinger, who along with President Richard Nixon was one of the architects of the opening to China in the early 1970s. One of the intriguing sub-themes of Bush's China diary is his feelings about the strong-willed secretary of state: While admiring of his diplomatic skills, the China envoy is also disturbed by Kissinger's secretive and Machiavellian ways.

Three decades later, Bush seems a bit uneasy talking about the diary's extensive discussions of Kissinger.

"Everybody wants to focus on that, and I hope you also read in the [book's foreword] the kind things I said of him, the respect I have for him," Bush says in the interview. "But he wasn't easy on his staff."

Jeffrey A. Engel, the Texas A&M professor who edited the diary, says the ex-president made no effort to interfere with his work. The diary, which the envoy dictated onto tapes (they were later transcribed by aides), offer an arresting portrait of a future president eagerly engaged in the routine business of daily diplomacy.

Bush comes across as a hands-on ambassador who pays attention to details like the cost of his meals or the quality of school for the children of embassy officials. While he later came to be described by some as relatively tolerant of China's human rights abuses, in the diary (which Engel says Bush never thought would be made public) he emerges as a clear-eyed and sharp critic of the Communist Party's repression and what he describes as its empty "canons of rhetoric."

Still, in the interview, Bush adopts a longer-term view of China's political evolution: He says he strongly agreed with his son's critique last week of China for its lack of liberty ("He made a profound statement"), but he also says that "there are far more individual liberties in China today and human rights than when I lived there. It's not even a close call, and China doesn't get any credit for that from these groups that say it's not far enough."

Bush says he is glad the opening ceremonies went off without a hitch on Friday. "I think some people were predicting that people would try to disrupt it, and I would be totally out of sympathy with that," he adds, before praising President Bush's decision to come to China for the Olympics.

"Remember the big flurry -- the president has got to boycott the opening ceremony?" Bush asks. "Well, he didn't do that, and I think he made the right decision. And I think the fact that he made that decision had a lot to do with others' approach to it, [not] boycotting, and I think it did a lot to strengthen the U.S.-China relationship today, which is better than at any time in history, if you take the word of Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders."

"Give credit," says the former president once known as the China desk officer at the White House, "for how far they have come; that's what I do."