George Bush Salutes Minnesota Family Council
Former President George Bush was the keynote speaker for the 15th anniversary banquet of the Minnesota Family Council. The following are his remarks.
I have great respect for your Senator -- this one [Sen. Rod Grams] -- [tremendous laughter] and I'm pleased that he's taken the time out to give me this warm introduction. I want to thank Tom Prichard for having me here, and I want to pay my respects to Joe Soucheray who, in his own way as the Mayor of Garage Logic, makes an awful lot of sense.
It's a pleasure to be back in Minneapolis. I will not bore you with war stories, but 56 years ago, almost to this day, I was leaving Minneapolis, having taken my first flight training as a naval aviation cadet. The first time I landed on anything other than snow and ice was when I left here and went to Corpus Christi.
I want to salute the [Minnesota Family] Council for the tremendous work they do, day in and day out, and each of you this evening. Your selfless support by being here tonight, and the work that most of you do year around in your communities, makes this Council's work possible. And important work it is.
I know that my friend James Dobson must be very proud of the great strides that this Council's made in 15 years, and I will say this: Your efforts and those of countless other organizations around the country really make a difference.
As the theme of this night is "Family," I thought I'd give you a quick update on mine. Barbara is disappointed that she is not here tonight. It's kind of a relief to me, though. I was President of the United States of America; now I'm known as the Husband of Barbara Bush, the most popular woman in the United States. I have this kind of Rodney Dangerfield complex. But I wish Barb had been here to hear that warm introduction. If she were here, she would tell you exactly the same thing that I will tell you -- that life after the White House is wonderful. We are extraordinarily happy, we are blessed in many, many ways, and we are grateful. Retirement is everything we bargained for -- extremely hectic, extremely satisfying. We keep saying we're going to slow down and act our age, but there's so much to do. Like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane (in March of last year). I had to work that in. People asked me, were you scared or nervous, and I said, "Only when I went to tell Barbara." I did wonders for the joke market.... "I haven't seen a free fall like that since the election of '92."
It was sort of closure. On September 2nd, 1944, I made a parachute jump over the island of Chichi Jima; I did it badly. My life was spared, but I made a mistake. I went out too early and pulled the cord and the chute tangled on the plane.... I thought the press would ridicule me last year, but what happened was a lesson here for other old guys. Be what you want to be. Give it your best shot. Somehow that silly parachute jump awakened in people that thought. I heard from the crown prince of Bahrain, and all the way around the world to the mayor of Shanghai. I went to visit Spain, I talked to the king of Spain, and the Prime Minister of Spain and all they wanted to do was talk about the parachute jump. I went to Italy and talked to the President and the Prime Minister and the Pope, and the only guy that didn't ask about the jump was the Pope, but it was the week after Holy Week and he was a very tired and busy man.
As for the rest of our big family, we could want nothing more than at this stage in our lives to spend time with our 14 grandchildren, our five children and their spouses, and that is a truly rewarding aspect of life after the White House.
I miss some things about my former job and I don't miss others. I don't miss the national press. That may come as a surprise to you. I haven't asked Rod his views on them, but if he gave me his, I would then give you mine and I'd tell you what I really think about the national press, but as my dear friend Dana Carvey would say, "Not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent."
On a serious note, I think the national press -- and I make a huge differentiation between the local and statewide press and the national press -- the national press has become too intrusive. They've become unaccountable. And I think that they'd better get their act together; I think they're losing the confidence of the American people. I just stay out of their way. It used to be if you were president or senator, and some guy asks you a terrible question, offensive on the face of it "Oh, yes sir, thank you for asking that." Now I say, "The hell with ya, I don't want to talk to you and I don't want to answer your questions." Life is great and I have this feeling of liberation and I try not to go on the national press. I have tried hard not to be critical of our president; he has a difficult job. I have tried hard to stay out of the way of the Senate, which us doing a good job now that we have good men like Rob there. But I've had my chance and I don't want to get in the way.
Recent events, however, do concern me, so I did do something the other day. I went on a CNN show with Bernie Shaw about Iraq. Tom [Prichard] suggested I might say a few words about that. I have strong feelings about that. We defined the mission. We used diplomacy to its fullest to try to bring about a peaceful resolution, tried to end the aggression which was the mission. It wasn't anything else, and I get a little short today with those who are saying, "Well, you did it wrong. You should have gone in and killed Saddam Hussein." With your daughter, maybe -- send her or him into a fruitless hunt into a secure environment for the most secure tyrant in the world. We couldn't even find a two-bit warlord in Mogadishu. And now they're saying to me -- these guys who wouldn't support me for use of force in the first place -- "You didn't do it right."
We did it right. We defined the mission. We tried to do it diplomatically. We got a vote of the U.S. Congress -- largely, I regret to tell you, along partisan lines. We sent people to see Saddam Hussein, and then we decided "this aggression will not stand" and the politicians and the president got out of the way and we let a superb military fight the war and win it with a merciful limitation on the loss of American life.
We won the war because, I think, we clearly defined the mission, we accomplished it, and then we were blessed with this fantastic military. I do miss them.
As to what's happening there today, I'm not sure my opinion would be worth much because I'm not fully briefed -- nor should I be -- on the military plan itself. I think it's very important that before the first shot is fired the President make very clear -- and I think he's trying to do that -- to the American people what's at stake. We must not compromise with Saddam Hussein in any way, and we must deny him the ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. That could clearly be a mission. How you accomplish it, I'm not certain I know. The President must define what the end game is; where does it end?
In our case, it was clear, although the mission was extraordinarily complex because we had half a million soldiers that were about to go in harm's way. The testimony from experts at that time was "they'll all be burned up in a trench of fire when the troops roll from Saudi Arabia into Kuwait. He's going to unleash his nerve gas and his biological weapons, he's going to obliterate Israel. We had this huge pressure from some of my critics, saying, "You're going to have on your hands, sir, the loss of 50,000 Americans."
I remember Ross Perot -- I'm trying to forget Ross Perot but I remember Ross Perot -- the night of the campaign was on Larry King: "I know the man that's making those 50,000 body bags!" Well, the pressure was up. But we defined the mission and your kids, and some that I know, accomplished it.
Today it's different. I hope that the mission is clear. I am very concerned that we appear to be going relatively alone. Had I gone into Baghdad with the 101st or the 82nd Airborne, which we could have done, that coalition that we painstakingly put together of 31 countries would've been instantly shattered for the very reasons that the Arabs are unwilling to go along full bore with our President today. And so President Clinton is faced with a dilemma.
I will tell you this: Though I have some reservations, if he decides that the war must begin, I will support him as long as there is one American who is in harm's way. The country has to come behind the president if he makes that extraordinarily difficult decision. I hope before it is done that the mission is made clear and that the end game is made clear.
I do miss our military. I loved working with those officers. I remember when Colin came into my office about 94 hours after the ground war had begun. He said, "Our mission is accomplished, sir." And I said, "does Norm Schwarzkopf agree?" And he said, "Yes. Do you want to talk to him?" And he walked over to the front of my desk, picked up the secure telephone, said, "Get me Schwarzkopf." The White House operators, which are military personnel, had Norm on the phone in 30 seconds on a secure voice contact out in the desert. And I said, "Do you agree the war should end?" And I said, "Do your commanders agree?" "They all do."
It was a marvelously moving moment for me. The military that had been so kicked around in Vietnam, had demonstrated that if the mission was properly defined and they were given the proper equipment -- and I salute my predecessor, Ronald Reagan, for seeing that they did have the proper arms -- that they could do the job and do it well. We have a fantastic military, dedicated, all volunteers.
There's one peripheral side effect to Desert Storm. When those troops came marching home with their heads held high to the adulation of people and the respect of American people and the respect for America restored around the world, in some wondrous way it seemed to heal the wounds of Vietnam for those men that went there and those women who served there -- spat upon when they came home, denied the honor of serving their country in uniform because of the divisiveness, because of those demonstrators that proclaimed that our mission was immoral, denied the honor. Desert Storm somehow miraculously lifted that cloud and gave them the honor that they deserved. It was a wonderful moment for me when I saw Vietnam veterans marching with the Desert Storm veterans.
I didn't mean to give this much on this subject, but this is one of the things I feel very emotional about: Service to country. Duty, honor, country. That means an awful lot to me.
I'm happily out of politics. I'm enormously proud that in spite of this ugly climate that I think exists in Washington that clearly was there in 1992, that two sons of ours have decided to be in the political arena. One is now the governor of the second largest state, Texas, and the second is running to be governor of the fourth or fifth biggest state, which is Florida. Leave out your politics -- conservative / liberal, Republican / Democrat -- for the purpose of this: Barb and I have enormous parental pride. The pride of a father in a boy throwing his hat into what Teddy Roosevelt justly called the political arena. Rod [Grams] knows that sometimes it isn't very pleasant in Washington, and I can tell you it's not very pleasant in some of these state capitals, but the fact that these kids are willing to serve, having stood by their Dad's side through tough times, gives us enormous pleasure.
I believe, you see, that public service is a noble calling. You can't prove that in the polls. Good men that serve are sometimes derided unfairly. But I still believe that good people can do good things. And if they only will get involved in it.
Texas A&M, where we have our presidential library, we have the George Bush School of Government and Public Service. It's a tiny little master's program, starting off small, it'll grow, we have I think 19 in the first class. My view is if we can inculcate into a handful of young people the concept that public service is noble, that public service is worthwhile, we will be doing the Lord's work. Public service isn't just running for office. It can be being one of a thousand points of light, serving others regardless of the way in which you do it, and that's what I hope this little school can accomplish. It worries me that people recently have been tuning Washington out. I worry about the sleazy controversies and the rancor we hear about on a daily basis. These days it seems that we do have a deficit of decency that turns most people off of the political process. And that cannot be good for our country.
Politics has gotten uglier. I mentioned our own experience in '92, and I'm not a cry-baby, I lost fair and square, my opponent won fair and square, but I think most would agree that the Washington press was in a pack mentality mode and so I am concerned about people being turned off by politics.
People ask me, "What do you think is the biggest problem facing our country today?" Political, militarily, whatever it may be. I'll tell you this because it goes to the heart of your work: I really believe that the foremost problem we have in this country is the breakdown of the American family. This isn't a government problem. But I do believe that if we could reverse this disturbing trend -- too many families breaking up, too many children left to fend for themselves, too many teen pregnancies, too many kids born out of wedlock -- we could wipe out problems such as drug abuse and violent crime. Those two alone are cancers on society.
If I could go back as President, wave the magic wand, and do one thing, it would not be a government program. It'd be ways to more effectively use the bully pulpit to find ways to strengthen the family. Do you remember when Barbara Bush went up to Wellesley and she was going to give this speech and the Wellesley girls were going to protest because Barbara Bush had never "made it on her own?" She was the wife of somebody and she wasn't a lawyer and she didn't have her own business and she hadn't been a teacher and educator. Barbara's smart. All the girls were going to protest, so Barbara invited Risa Gorbachev, a true communist, to go with her to Wellesley -- a wonderful tactic on Barb's part because the girls didn't dare boo with Risa Gorbachev there, and they took down their signs and they listened to my wife. And in a speech which Margaret Thatcher told me was the best she had ever heard, Barbara said to them, among other things, "What happens in your house is more important than what happens in the White House. And the girls understood that. The women cheered for Barbara Bush when she said that.
Let me put it another way. When I was running for office, and often while I was in office, I used to hear it said, and perhaps you remember reading this, that "George Bush was brought up in a life of privilege." I don't think they were paying me a high compliment by saying that. But I was privileged. I was privileged in material ways. During the Depression I'd gotten ill, as I did, and my dad could afford to pay the medical bills. He could see, when other kids couldn't afford to go to college, that we could go to school. We'd get hurt in the game, he could dust us off and put us back in the game of life. So we were privileged materially. The real privilege came in the way I was raised in the privilege of values. I was blessed with a wonderful mother and dad and they tried to teach us, and they tried to teach us right from wrong. And they lifted us up. On January 29 in 1989 when I raised my hand to take my oath of office as the 41st president of the United States, my 87-year-old mother was there, and for me that was the most appropriate symbol of all because I was molded by her example.
My parents and grandparents believed strongly in character, integrity, helping others. The values are almost cliché. "Don't brag on yourself." "Give the other person credit." I remember calling mother up from school once: "I scored three goals in soccer!" Long pause. "Fine. How did the team do?" Values that perhaps sound like cliches, but they're so fundamental. And many kids, who were not blessed by having a mother and a dad in the home, today are not blessed by having a mother and dad in the home -- have been denied because of not having strong parents.
Mother was always saying, "Do your best. Work hard. Stand for something. Give something to somebody else. And if you don't like things, don't sit around and complain; try to change them. If you take something out, put something back." The advice continued until I was through being Vice President and almost through the end of my presidency. I'll never forget when I was Vice President I was getting home right after sitting right behind Ronald Reagan, right next to Tip O'Neill during the first State of the Union address. Get back to the VP house, and the head of the house there said, "Your mother's calling sir." Ooh.
She said, "George, it's wonderful. You're on television the whole time President Reagan is speaking!" I said, "Mother, you've seen these things before," and she said, "Well, I've never seen my own son sitting there." I said, "Well it was really a wonderful feeling." She said, "But I noticed something. I noticed you were talking to Tip O'Neill when Reagan was speaking!" I said, "He started it!"
That's a true story, and there's one other to show you the persistent advice I received, sometimes on target sometimes not. We landed for the first time in the helicopter on the South Lawn, returning from my first weekend at Camp David as President of the United States. Nobody but the President's supposed to land on that south lawn. So I got out of the helicopter -- HMX-1 -- walked into the diplomatic entrance there on the ground floor of the White House. And the chief usher who runs the House, Gary Walters, who, incidentally, makes that museum -- the people who serve there make that museum, the "People's Museum" -- into a real family home. They love that place and they treat every family there with respect and with love. But anyway, I walked in this time, and Gary Walters said, "Your mother's calling, sir." Oh gosh. And she said, "George, it's wonderful how the helicopter can land right there on the South Lawn!" And I said, "Well, Mum, you've seen that, you've seen Ronald Reagan many times." She says, "Honey, I know, but my own son!. It's wonderful!" She said, "But I noticed something." I said, "What was it?" She said, "Well, I remember how Ronald Reagan would always wait at the foot of the stairs of the helicopter for Nancy and they would walk in together." And I said, "Mother, I will never walk in front of Barbara again. Thank you for your phone call."
Strong families send decent people into the world. Good parents teach their children basic values of decency and respect and responsibility and hard work. They give their children what I call an inner moral compass to help distinguish right from wrong and then act accordingly. Our son Jeb was the longest-lasting civil rights leader in Florida -- started three years ago with a liberty charter school in Miami. And they teach kids respect, and they teach them values. Every one. An African-American kid from the poorest section of Miami -- somebody dropped a dollar bill the other day and a little fourth-grader picked it up and gave it to the teacher and said, "This is not mine." They have uniforms, and the parents have to work there. Many of the families are broken up, but they are teaching values in this school, something that I hope can happen all around the world. And I hope that you will stay with this concept of school choice and of teaching what's right and wrong in these schools.
One of the things that I was proud of is that we started this program called being one of a thousand points of light. And between 1990 and 1993 we honored 1,020 Americans as daily points of light for selfless effort to help others. This year, the Points of Light Foundation revived this program to continue recognizing the work being done by groups like the Minnesota Family Council and so many other groups and charities that you work for in this great city. I understand that we have here, literally, from doing a little homework, all of you, a thousand points of light right here in this room. For those of you who aren't familiar, being one of a thousand points of light means claiming one of society's problems as your own, it means getting involved and rolling up your sleeves. It means caring, and it means helping others. Government can and does do some things to help people in need. But it can't do it all. Private citizens, volunteers, do so much more.
No exercise is better for the human heart than reaching down and lifting someone else up. To serve others, to enrich your community, this truly defines a successful life. Success is personable, and it is charitable, and it's not the sum of our possessions but of how we help others. And there is no problem -- now think about this one -- there is no problem that we face today in the country that is not being solved somewhere. Whether it's drugs, whether it's teen pregnancy, whether it's education, whether it's Barbara's crusade for family literacy -- someplace in the country these problems are being solved.
For eight years as Vice President and four as President and even today, I have seen literally thousands of examples of neighbor helping neighbor, that spirit that made this country respected, made it kind, and made it strong. That was one of the real joys of being President, and Barbara and I are continuing to try to encourage others to volunteer their time and effort to fight community problems. Barbara's on the board of this marvelous Mayo Clinic right here in your own state, I'm vice chairman of the M.B. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, a fantastic facility. She has her literacy foundation, I'm the head of the Eisenhower Foundation and the chairman of the Points of Light Foundation. We're trying to do our part, trying to be shoulder to shoulder with everyone in this room who does something to help somebody else.
So I was very pleased when I was invited to come here to salute your for your 15 years of helping others and lifting lives. And I wish you well as you continue to fight for the principles that have sustained us through hard times and prosperity alike: Freedom, faith, family, democracy, respect for life, free markets and capitalism which kindle the entrepreneurial spirit and give rise to our dreams. These are the pillars upon which a civilized society continues to build for the future. They are the ideals that give life meaning.
Life for Barbara and me has been filled with one fulfilling challenge after another. Heavens, after 53 years of marriage and 34 different homes we've come full circle. I was blessed to serve our nation in many different ways, in many different jobs. But now that those days of public service are over, I can honestly say that the three most rewarding titles bestowed upon me are the only three I have left: a husband, a father, and a grandfather. And I can tell you that what matters is not what you achieve in politics, not even if you are lucky enough to climb the highest mountain there is in politics and be president of the greatest, freest nation on the face of the earth. What matters is your friends, and your family, and your faith. We feel richly blessed, and I bet everyone here in this marvelous Council feels exactly the same way.
Thank you, and may God bless you in your work.
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