With no help from her dog Millie (she says!), Barbara Bush has written her biography.
More than a half-million copies of "Barbara Bush: A Memoir" quietly appeared in bookstores around the country last week, reflecting Scribner's expectations that it will outdo "Millie's Book," the 1990 bestseller dictated by the Bush family pooch to Barbara Bush (she says!) when she was first lady.Though there are few surprises, "A Memoir" is no dog of a book. It is a lively and partisan recollection of "a life of privilege" - most of it spent in George Bush's shadow - throughout the nearly 50 years of their peripatetic marriage.
Through all her years of campaigning, the "toughest issue" for her was abortion, she writes. "Everyone, it seemed, tried to make me say how I felt about the issue, hoping to catch me disagreeing with George. I honestly felt, and still feel, the elected person's opinion is the one the public has the right to know." She does acknowledge, however, that personally she is pro-choice.
At another point, she expresses doubts about Anita Hill's veracity during hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. "The question is," she says she wrote in her diary on Oct. 11, 1991, "is this woman telling the truth? It is Clarence's word against Anita Hill's. I do not mean to sit in judgment, but I will never believe that she, a Yale Law School graduate, a woman of the '80s, would put up with harassment for one moment, much less follow the harasser from job to job."
Anecdotal, funny and punctuated with occasional comments that some might rhyme with "itchy," it is the chronicle of a public life during some of the country's most troubling crises and of a private life as recorded in a diary for more than 30 years.
"It will come as no surprise that I felt a lesser man by far had won the election," she writes of Bill Clinton in the prologue, setting the record straight about how she took George Bush's defeat.
Of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mrs. Bush writes she "is certainly very much a part of her husband's decision-making process. She seems much the stronger of the two. Does it make him seem weaker? I am afraid that when problems or controversy occur, and they will, the finger will be pointed at Hillary. I am not saying this is right or wrong. It just occurs to me that the American people also are going through an adjustment."
In what she calls the "most painful chapter to write," she traces the decline of Bush's popularity and the factors that contributed to his loss.
There were other factors besides the end of the Cold War, a dozen years of a Republican presidency, the economy and an impression that he had no domestic program and was more interested in foreign affairs, she says.
One was the generation gap, which she says was pointed up by Clinton's "first pronouncement" as president that homosexuals should be allowed in the military. "Should homosexuals be denied the right to serve their country?" she asks, then delivers the kind of saucy observation for which she is noted. "There are many pros and cons, but like Bill Clinton, I have never been in the service and so have little to base my judgment on."
Among the heavies who helped derail her husband's campaign were Ross Perot, the billionaire independent candidate, and Pat Buchanan, "challenging George from the ultraconservative right wing of the party." She says she despised his style of campaigning - "I hate gay bashing."
The media hardly escape her scorn either. She accuses them of wanting Clinton to win and of "lopsided reporting" toward that end. When the Bushes flew to Houston aboard Air Force One on Inauguration Day, she writes, the press "complained bitterly" to her about not being allowed to have a press pool aboard.
"That amused me, and I told them that any one of them who had voted for George should speak up then or forever hold his peace," she writes, adding, "The silence was deafening." Her media blitz (including a 12-city book tour) will be launched with an ABC interview with Barbara Walters next Friday.