Bush 41, Jews and Israel: It was complicated

WASHINGTON — George H.W. Bush, the one-term president whose public grappling with Jewish leaders made headlines while his private interventions helped bring tens of thousands of Jews out of danger, died Friday at home in Houston, less than a year after his wife Barbara.

His failed 1992 re-election bid marked a low point in relations between Republicans and the Jewish community. Bush scored 11 percent of the Jewish vote, one-third of his share four years earlier in his victory over Michael Dukakis.

The Bush presidency was marked by tensions both with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and American Jewish leadership.

In 1991, the president lashed out at pro-Israel activists who flooded Congress in response to the president’s reluctance to approve loan guarantees for Israel to help absorb hundreds of thousands of Jews from the collapsed Soviet Union.

Bush called himself “one lonely guy” battling “a thousand lobbyists on the Hill.” Jewish leaders resented the insinuation that the pro-Israel community was possessed of a power sinister enough to unsettle the leader of the free world. The “one lonely guy” comment haunted Bush thereafter, with even Republican Jews apt to use the first Bush presidency as a signifier of how far they had traveled in attracting Jewish support.

Yet that was hardly the whole story. Less remembered was how, as Reagan’s vice president, Bush quietly engineered pivotal efforts to bring Jews out of the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Syria.

“When you add up the Jews he saved, he will be a great tzadik,” Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s former director, said.

Bush was deeply involved in foreign policy as vice president, and Jewish leaders said he helped orchestrate the dramatic Seder hosted by Secretary of State George Schultz at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1987.

He also ignored advice from his national security team in 1991 and approved American overtures to the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia that resulted in Operation Solomon, which brought 15,000 Jews to Israel. Bush also helped persuade Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to allow young Jewish women to move to New York so they could marry in the Syrian Jewish community.

While some of these actions were secret, Bush was averse to claiming responsibility even later.

“He was a man who was old school,” said Marshall Breger, liaison to the Jewish community under Reagan and Bush. “You had the sense of him being private about his feelings and sensitive to the notion that he might be seen as vain and saccharine towards other with overstatements.”

Breger recalled traveling in the backseat of a car with Bush to dedicate the new quarters of the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, in 1984. Part of the dedication included the affixing of a mezuzah, and Breger attempted to hand Bush a yarmulke. Bush wouldn’t take it.

Breger pointed out that he had secured a camouflage yarmulke for the occasion, but that seemed to make matters worse.

“I said, ‘You’ll need to wear one of these.’ And he said, ‘They’ll think I’m pandering.’ It was very much against his code to pander,” said Breger, now a law professor at Catholic University here.

“I said, ‘First of all, they’ll think you’re appropriate, and second of all, they’d love you to pander,’” Breger recalled. Bush reluctantly donned the yarmulke, but Breger noticed he had removed it before the ceremony concluded.

Bush’s intense privacy came across as stiffness and allowed his rivals to portray him as distant. Two moments in the 1992 election helped alienate the public from the president, whose handling of the first Persian Gulf War helped bury post-Vietnam ambivalence about the military.

His apparent surprise at supermarket scanner technology suggested that he was unfamiliar with the mundane chores of average Americans. Though the story was debunked — Bush was familiar with the device, but was amazed at a new generation scanner on display at a grocery convention in Florida — the image stuck.

At a town hall meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, during the primaries, looking at notes, Bush read aloud, “Message: I care,” not realizing it was advice from an aide. The phrase became an emblem of his awkward inability to connect.

Still, public service was a natural draw for George Herbert Walker Bush, whose father, Prescott, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut. In later years he would recall how natural it seemed to enlist in the Navy after graduating from Andover Academy in 1942. He became a bomber pilot and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross after the Japanese shot down his plane in 1944.

A year later he married Barbara Pierce, and like his forebears, attended Yale. He declined his father’s offer of a job at an investment banking firm and headed to Texas, where he plunged into the oil business. Within years he was an oilman.

But Bush couldn’t resist the call of public service, and by the end of the 1950s he was active in the state Republican Party. In 1966, he was elected to Congress — a signal achievement at that time for a Republican from Texas.

In Washington, he soon forged friendly ties with national Jewish groups. Appointed ambassador to the United Nations by Richard Nixon in 1972, he made headlines when he canceled an appearance on “The Dick Cavett Show” after Jewish leaders asked him not to lend legitimacy to the evening’s other guest, Meir Kahane.

Bush wrote Cavett at the time that he had checked with “certain responsible, highly respected leaders of national Jewish organizations” who convinced him that “any move by me that would have even the slightest appearance of giving recognition or credence to Kahane would damage the serious productive and legal efforts that they and thousands of their fellow Jews have been making to alleviate the suffering of their brothers.”

At the United Nations, Bush made Soviet Jewry one of his signature issues, and the Jewish community organized a tribute dinner for him in 1973 after he left his post.

His concern for Israel was evident again in 1976, when he was director of the CIA. Bush was furious when CIA officials estimated semi-publicly that Israel had 10 to 20 nuclear weapons ready for use. Since the 1960s, the U.S.-Israel protocol had been neither to confirm nor deny Israel’s alleged possession of nuclear weapons.

In a statement that year to JTA, Bush did not address the apparent revelation, but added: “To the degree that any classified information might have been mentioned, I accept full responsibility. I am determined it will not happen again.”

Bush ran a contentious primary against Reagan in 1980, then accepted his offer as running mate. He assumed critical foreign policy roles under Reagan, but the two men never grew close. Reagan barely stumped for Bush in 1988.

Still, the departing president did his successor a favor in early 1989, giving the go-ahead for low-level U.S.-Palestine Liberation Organization relations. Bush would have faced a political firestorm had he initiated such ties, but he needed them to pave the way to one of his grand ambitions: corralling the Middle East cats into a new world order of peace, led by what was fast becoming the world’s only superpower.

Bush’s patrician lèse-majesté irked Israeli officials, especially Prime Minister Shamir, whose rough youth could not have contrasted more with Bush’s upbringing.

In A World Transformed, the recounting of his presidency that Bush wrote with his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, Bush commended Shamir for making the unpopular decision not to strike Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War despite the raining of missiles on Israeli cities.

Just pages later, Bush wondered why Shamir was unenthusiastic about joining the Madrid peace conference that the United States had convened after the war. Bush wrote that he expected a degree of gratitude from Israel for protecting it during the Gulf War — apparently not realizing that it was precisely this unwanted protection that stirred resentment among Israelis fiercely committed to protecting themselves.

The diplomatic clashes did not abate. In June 1990, Bush’s most trusted adviser, James Baker, appearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, asked for a little “good faith” from Shamir.

“When you’re serious about peace, call us,” Baker said, addressing Shamir, and gave the number for the White House switchboard.

In March 1992, former New York City mayor Ed Koch wrote that Baker had dismissed concern about Jewish anger, saying “F--- the Jews, they don’t vote for us.” Baker denied it.

Fred Zeidman, a Houston-area businessman and Republican fundraiser who is friendly with the Bush family and with Baker, said the remark has long been misunderstood. Baker was aiming his ire at another Cabinet member, Zeidman said, and intended it as a joke.

By mid-1992, with his presidential campaign underway, Bush seemed irreparably wounded ito the Jewish community. A strong primary performance by Pat Buchanan, a culture warrior known for occasional Jew-baiting, didn’t help. Nor did Buchanan’s apocalyptic keynote speech at the convention that summer.

Jewish leaders have said since his presidency, they endeavored to make clear to Bush how dear to the community he is. Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, recalled meeting with Bush not long after his “one lonely guy” remark.

Bush had tears in his eyes, Hoenlein said, and insisted he never intended offense. “I led my whole life differently,” Bush told the delegation.

Bush rarely interacted with Jewish leaders after his presidency, and he never knew the adulation his son would earn in some Jewish quarters for his devotion to Israel.

The younger Bush seemed in some ways to directly contradict his father’s policies. One of the elder Bush’s first acts was to set in motion the process that would eventually welcome PLO leader Yasser Arafat into the American sphere. The younger Bush decided from the outset of his presidency to isolate Arafat, whom he reviled as an unrepentant terrorist.

Foxman said history will judge Bush kindly.

“I believe he will go down in Jewish history as the president who was engaged in more initiatives to save more Jews in countries where they were being persecuted,” he said.