Transcript: Chapter 11

Narrator: Ronald Reagan, who had doubts about Bush eight years earlier, came to feel he was the most qualified president-elect in American history. They became good friends. When Bush went to the Oval office for the first time as President, a note from Reagan read: God bless you and Barbara. I'll miss our Thursday lunches. You'll have moments when you want to use this stationery. Bush placed the note in his desk. On the desk he placed a picture of Robin. They would remain there for his entire term in office. The first photo was with his mother. His competitive spirit had come from her. And his sense of modesty. She had taught him never to call attention to himself. Yet for 8 years he had seen Reagan inspire Americans with a sense of drama and celebratory spectacle. Reagan's conservative revolution had swept him to the national stage. George H. W. Bush was Ronald Reagan's heir.

Richard Viguerie: He spent the entire eight years as vice president traveling the length and breadth of this country, saying "trust me, I am a conservative, and if I am ever elected president of the United States I will govern as a conservative." We didn't expect him to be another Ronald Reagan, but we did expect that he would keep his clear promises and he would govern as a right-of-center president.

Narrator: Bush was Ronald Reagan's heir. He was Prescott Bush's son.

Richard Norton Smith: There you have the conundrum of the Bush Presidency. He was looking over one shoulder and seeing where the Republican Party was going. And over the other shoulder, he saw his own lineage, his own tradition. He saw his father, Prescott Bush. He saw Dwight Eisenhower. And he saw Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, who in retrospect are seen as moderate conservatives.

Narrator: Now, with a chance to be his own man, George Bush began to distance himself from Reagan.

John Robert Greene: First thing that he does is -- through his transition team, which was run in part by his son, George W., was went in and booted all of the Reagan appointees, and told them, with a great deal of harshness, that they were to be out of town before sundown. It was an ideological housecleaning, and Reagan appointees are shown the door, in a harsh transition that makes it look like a Democrat is coming in.

Narrator: Wasting little time, Bush tackled some of the problems he inherited. On the domestic front, he decided to clean up a messy banking problem that Reagan and Congress had all but ignored. In 1986, when the real estate market collapsed, hundreds of savings and loan banks had gone bust. The cost of bailing out depositors was pushing $50 billion and was projected to triple. Bush knew it would be expensive and politically thankless.

John Robert Greene: You do it, not to advance your interests. You do it because it's in the interest of millions of people who will never vote for you and will certainly never give you any credit for doing it. That's responsibility. That's accountability. That's the old establishment way of discharging the privileges of leadership.

Herbert Parmet: He's separating himself from Reagan. One of the things that haunted Bush all the way through was his being compared to Reagan. And immediately, from his acceptance speech, "a gentler and kinder country," he's separating himself from Reagan. And this was some of the major residue of the Reagan administration.

Narrator: In Nicaragua, he agreed to withdraw support from the counter-revolutionary Contras if the Marxist Sandinista government agreed to free elections.

Timothy Naftali: President Bush began to act quite differently from Candidate Bush. One of his first initiatives was to push for elections in Nicaragua, and to take Nicaragua off the front burner of U.S. foreign policy. He didn't want to continue the divisive American debate.

Narrator: Bush also confronted the question of how to deal with a rapidly changing Soviet Union. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had pledged at the United Nations to renounce the use of force and withdraw one-half million troops from Eastern Europe. Many Russian experts felt the Cold War was over -- even the "Wise Man" who 45 years earlier had devised the policy of containing the Soviet Union.

Colin Powell: President Bush came into office realizing a lot had been done under President Reagan, but there was still a Soviet Union. It hadn't gone away. It still had all of its missiles. It still had its troops, and so it wasn't entirely clear what was going to happen. Mr. Gorbachev was a very charismatic figure, but it wasn't clear whether or not he had the whole Soviet governmental structure with him, governmental structure with him. And so there was the degree of caution and a degree of, let's study this.

Narrator: Four months into his term, Bush responded to Gorbachev.

George H. W. Bush (archival): Ultimately, our objective is to welcome the Soviet Union back into the world order. Containment worked and now is the time to move beyond containment to a new policy for the 1990s -- one that recognizes the full scope of change taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself.

Narrator: The response, many felt, was too timid. A New York Times editorial said if an alien spacecraft landed and looked for earth's leader, it would be taken to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Pavel Palazchenko, Foreign Ministry, Soviet Union: Gorbachev was encouraging reforms, definitely. And he believed and said that if we wanted change in our country, if we wanted to abandon the old system in our country, how could we prohibit or inhibit change in our neighbors?

Narrator: Bush did not meet the Soviet leader for almost a year. He did respond to the changes Gorbachev had encouraged in Eastern Europe. In Poland the anti-government Solidarity movement routed the Communists in free elections, the first break in the Iron Curtain in more than 40 years. The challenge for Bush when he arrived in Warsaw in July 1989 was not to provoke a backlash by Poland's communist leader Gen. Jarezelski or Kremlin hardliners.

George H. W. Bush (archival): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your hospitable and gracious words of welcome. We extend the heartfelt best wishes of the American people, and here in the heart of Europe, the American people have a fervent wish -- that Europe be whole and free.

Narrator: Bush spent time with Poland's reform leader Lech Walesa. He spent more time with Jaruzelski.

John Sununu, Chief of Staff: The President, I think, really understood that a lot of the folks that were there doing the Russians' bidding were still Poles first, and cared about their country. And he tried to create a structure in which the strong hand, supported by the Soviet Union, became a part of the solution rather than opposition to the solution.

Condoleezza Rice, Soviet expert, National Security Council: He was determined that no one was going to feel that they had been defeated. He was very aware, I think, of the Versailles syndrome that Germany had felt defeated after World War I, humiliated after World War I, and that had brought to power Adolf Hitler.

Timothy Naftali: He saw what was going on in Eastern Europe as a very delicate process that involved holding the hands of both the reformers and the old style communists.

John Sununu: It was an art form that George Bush was very good at. He understood the- that most people generally have good intentions. You just have to find a way to get them to work together in order to bring them forward.