When she left the White House, she was deemed by one poll the most admired woman in the world.
But in the months before her death last year, Barbara Bush, the wife of one Republican president and the mother of another, abandoned the party she and her family had spent their whole lives building, horrified by President Donald Trump’s election and deeply disturbed by his administration.
She refused to vote for Trump in November 2016, instead writing in the name of her son Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida who had lost the Republican nomination earlier that year. Asked by her biographer in October 2017 if she was still a Republican, Bush said yes. By February 2018, she had given up. “I’d probably say no today,” she said.
Bush’s journey from Republican stalwart to Never Trumper is chronicled in “The Matriarch,” a biography by Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today, to be published Tuesday by Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. Page interviewed Bush five times before the former first lady died in April 2018 at age 92, and had exclusive access to her diary.
An excerpt published in USA Today on Wednesday described Bush’s antipathy toward Trump — “greed, selfishness and ugly,” as she summed up the New York real estate mogul in her diary in 1990, long before he became president — but a copy of the book obtained by The New York Times includes other revelations about her life.
Among other things, it recounts Bush’s strained relationship with Nancy Reagan when George Bush was vice president, describing how she crossed the Bushes off invitation lists to White House events. It reveals that her husband was outraged when his 1988 presidential campaign hired Roger J. Stone Jr., who would later come to fame as Trump’s adviser indicted on a charge of obstruction of justice, and demanded that he be fired.
And the book explores incessant but never proven rumors that George Bush had an affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald, a longtime assistant. While not reaching a definitive conclusion, Page quotes an unnamed “member of the Bushes’ inner circle” confirming that they did have an extramarital relationship.
“Their surreptitious romance would last for more than a dozen years, inexplicable to those around him and impossible for anyone to manage,” Page wrote. “Several aides decided to leave rather than deal with her. The persistent rumors were humiliating for his wife. They fueled gossip that was politically perilous. Despite all that, Bush for years was unwilling to distance himself from her.”
Both George Bush, who died in November, and Fitzgerald denied any affair to the president’s biographer, Jon Meacham. “I was very close to her for a while. And liked her,” Bush told him. But did they have an affair? “No,” he said. As for Fitzgerald, she told Meacham: “It simply didn’t happen.”
Barbara Bush was a singular figure in American life, the only first lady to see her son become president as well. (Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, had died by the time John Quincy Adams was elected.) But she was a more complicated figure than her grandmotherly image suggested.
A product of the World War II generation, she changed along with society. She resented it when Wellesley College students protested her selection as commencement speaker on the grounds that she owed her only achievement to her marriage. Page recalled encountering Bush at a Kennebunkport picnic in 1990 when the first lady asked her, “How can you work when you have young children?”
But years later, when Bush received a citation that made no mention of her work promoting literacy and other social causes, she bristled at the focus on her family role. “I had not realized that I was a women’s libber,” she wrote in her diary, “but I am now.”
By the time Page interviewed her for the biography, Bush boasted that all of her married granddaughters had children and worked outside the home. Still, she resisted activism. “Do I believe in equal rights for women? Yes,” she told Page. “But I wouldn’t put myself as a feminist, no.”
She struggled over the abortion issue, drawing from her experience watching her 3-year-old daughter Robin die of leukemia. She came to believe that the question was “when does the soul enter the body” and decided it was when a baby takes its first breath.
“Having decided that the first breath is when the soul enters the body, I believe in Federally funded abortion,” she wrote in her diary. “Why should the rich be allowed to afford abortions and the poor not?” She added, “Abortion is personal, between mother fathers and Dr.” But after her husband joined Ronald Reagan’s anti-abortion ticket in 1980, she kept her views to herself.
She likewise evolved on sexual orientation. In 2015, at lunch with Meacham and historian Timothy Naftali, she criticized the Obama White House for making a big show of announcing that it had hired the first openly transgender person. Naftali told her he was gay and explained why it was important to know about the appointment.
“I ended up being persuaded in my mind that after years of hiding this may be a good thing,” she wrote in her diary at age 90. “Nobody wants to be born Gay or Transgender. They have been misunderstood for years. He won the argument.” She added: “There are a world of folks born transgender who are quiet and lonely. How sad to be in the wrong body.”
She never came to terms, however, with Nancy Reagan. “She really hated us,” Bush told Page. “I don’t know why, but she really hated us.”
Page found a draft invitation list to the Reagans’ famed White House dinner in 1985 for Prince Charles and Princess Diana of Britain in which someone, almost certainly Nancy Reagan, had crossed out the Bushes’ names. Reagan also crossed their names off the list for the president’s birthday party a year later.
Yet when the Bushes were leaving the White House in January 1993, Reagan publicly complained that she and her husband had never been invited to the Bush White House for a state dinner, even though Ronald Reagan had been there just 10 days earlier to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
When Nancy Reagan later called Barbara Bush, they had it out. “Don’t you ever call me again!” Bush recalled telling her predecessor before hanging up. It was their last extended conversation.
Bush’s view of Trump long predated the 2016 nomination battle with Jeb Bush. “The real symbol of greed in the 80s” she called him in her diary in 1990. A month later, after reading about his divorce, she wrote: “Trump now means Greed, selfishness and ugly. So sad.”
She blamed anxiety over Trump for a heart spell that hospitalized her in June 2016 and erupted when he suggested that her son could not handle Russia. “Putin endorsed him, for heaven’s sake,” she exclaimed. “Putin the killer! Putin the worst! He endorsed Trump! That’s an endorsement you don’t want.”
On Election Day, she wrote in Jeb Bush’s name. “I could not vote for Trump or Clinton,” she wrote in her diary. (Her husband voted for Hillary Clinton and her son George W. Bush voted for “none of the above.”) The next day, Bush told Page, “I woke up and discovered, to my horror, that Trump had won.”
A friend gave her a red, white and blue digital countdown clock displaying the time that remained in Trump’s term down to the second. She kept it on her nightstand where she could see it every day until her own countdown clock expired a year ago.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.