Bush 41—Dirty Old Man or Sexy Senior Citizen?

I played church baseball with Kevin Nietmann in Dallas nearly six decades ago. After high school graduation, I went to Austin and he went to Annapolis. Not only is Kevin an alumnus of the U.S. Naval Academy, he is also an arch-conservative. That political outlook evidently prevented him from acknowledging the ungentlemanly behavior of one of our presidents, George Herbert Walker Bush. He insisted with much vehemence that Bush would never have grabbed the rear ends of eight women during various photo-ops between 1992 and 2014. Bush, Kevin stated, was far too honorable to have acted in such a ham-handed and oafish manner. I contend that this was not a he-said, they-said deal; Bush was guilty, and it deserves to be remembered and not swept under the rug.

One of the women who accused Bush declined to be named, but the others were unafraid to go public. They include Heather Lind, Jordana Grolnick, Megan Elizabeth Lewis, Christina Baker Kline, Liz Allen, Amanda Staples and Roslyn “Rozi” Corrigan. One was an interpreter, three were actresses, one was a novelist, one was a journalist, one was an aspiring Republican politician and one was a mere high school student.

It bears mentioning that Bush—who died at age 94 on November 30, 2018—suffered from Graves’ disease and vascular Parkinsonism, had two hip replacement surgeries and spent his final six years in a wheelchair. I can find no reference to him having any form of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia which sometimes includes the loosening of inhibitions and thus the very sort of conduct Bush engaged in during those 22 years. And who’s to say he refrained from doing it before 1992 or after 2014? You probably know that he served as POTUS between January 20, 1989 and January 20, 1993.

As indicated earlier, his modus operandi seemed to be photo-ops. Who doesn’t want to have his or her picture taken with a president? I have one of me and his son, George W. Bush, at the conclusion of the 1995 Capitol 10K in Austin when he was governor of Texas, six years before he got to the White House. Bush Senior liked to start off with a lame joke: “Want to know who my favorite magician is? David Cop-a-Feel!” (He occasionally used an alternative, “my favorite book.”) He would then put his hand on the woman’s posterior and give it a good squeeze.

Corrigan was a high school junior, the daughter of a career CIA man. (Bush had spent one year as head of the CIA, interestingly enough.) Standing on Bush’s right side with her mother on his left, she was appalled when, on the one-two-three, the former president groped her. Almost as soon as she could talk to her mother in private, Corrigan exploded in indignation: “Mom, he put his hand on my butt!”

When he did this to Grolnick, Barbara Bush was present. She saw it and tried to make light of the matter by saying, “George, you are going to get thrown in jail one of these days.”

After he had fondled Kline, a female friend of the family pulled her aside and asked her to be “discreet.” In other words, don’t go telling everybody about the ex-president’s crude deportment.

He had a different joke before pawing Staples: “Oh, I’m not that president!” apparently in relation to the man who had beaten him in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton. She looked back on the incident and said, “I’ve thought about this, and if I had a daughter I’d never tell her to shrug it off because he was the president. I can only imagine how many women have had their butts grabbed in a photo-op. Certainly this hasn’t left me jaded or damaged, but it has made me think about the abuse of power. Hands off!”

Bush ought to have known better. He was born with every conceivable advantage—a New Englander from a rich family who went to private schools and then Yale University. Ironically enough, he had a reputation for courtly gentility.

Laura Bush, his daughter-in-law and wife of Bush 43, offered a tortuous and nonsensical answer during a CNN interview: “I’m just sad that we’ve come to this. That was something that was very, very innocent that he’s been accused of. But I know he would feel terrible.”

A Bush family spokesman, James McGrath, could do little better: “Mr. Bush simply does not have it in his heart to knowingly cause anyone harm or distress, and he again apologizes to anyone he may have offended during a photo-op.”

Some of the articles I reviewed before writing this piece described Bush’s action as not just sexual harassment but sexual assault. What the creepy old geezer did was inexcusable, but it did not rise to the level of an assault and fell far short of rape. Bush’s behavior vis-à-vis these—and surely other—women was cited in most of his obituaries, albeit near the bottom. But I doubt there is any reference to such boorish antics at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the Texas A&M University campus.

Why did he get a pass for so long? There seems no doubt that Bush family members knew of his peccadillo and enabled it. I will close by reminding you—and Kevin Nietmann—that in his 1850 classic David Copperfield, Charles Dickens wrote, “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”