The White House correspondents’ dinner, the last of the season, was coming up that Saturday, and Bush was flying back from his Texas ranch in the afternoon in order to attend. From the tone of his voice I could tell that the dinners are an inside-the-Beltway ritual that he only grudgingly accepts. For all the eschewing of some Washington conventions, the Bushies have been pretty conventional in their approach to the Washington establishment.
With the advice of Margaret Tutwiler, a Washington fixture herself who served No. 41 and came on board to help roll out No. 43’s administration, many D.C. traditions have been upheld. President Bush and his wife attended a private dinner with media and business elite a few months ago at the home of Katharine Graham, the owner of The Washington Post and NEWSWEEK. He kept the practice of meeting with TV anchors before his first joint address to Congress. And he hired the master of Republican humor, Landon Parvin, to help him out with the four dinners. It was Parvin-a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan-who wrote Nancy Reagan’s “Second Hand Clothes” skit for a 1982 Gridiron dinner (attended mostly by columnists and cartoonists). The imperial First Lady wore tattered clothes on stage and sang a song mocking her stingy clothing allowance to the tune of “Second Hand Rose.” The routine went a long way toward countering her humorless, spendthrift reputation.
Parvin has just the right touch it seems for getting politicians to make fun of themselves. In the case of Bush, he says, it wasn’t hard. “He has a whimsical sense of humor,” Parvin says. “It’s offbeat.”
Case in point: One of Bush’s cousins once told me a story about George W.’s idea of a good gag. They were at a Japanese restaurant together and Bush quietly slid a large piece of seaweed out of his soup and into his shirt pocket. It was sticking out like a soggy four-point handkerchief for a long time before anyone noticed. In the White House, Bush likes to shake up his aides with random outbursts of humor. He’s been known to give a sudden abrazo (a big bear hug) to his workaholic deputy chief of staff, Josh Bolten.
Bush also likes to poke fun at sycophantic staffers who stand up when he enters a room. He’ll raise the palms of his hands up and down, commanding them to stand and sit as if he were an orchestra conductor. When an aide lavishes on just a little too much praise for a speech he’s given, he’ll exclaim: “That was brilliant Mr. President! Just brilliant!” Of course Bush also commands and expects respect. His aides-even those who joke with him-call him “sir.” If they get a little too full of themselves he reminds them who the boss is. His humor can be pointed, needling. But when it comes to working with Bush on his comedy routines, Parvin says, “His humor is good-natured. He’s like Reagan that way.”
It must also be easy for a comedy writer to work with President Bush because he provides so much of his own material with his verbal miscues. For the first dinners, Parvin included some of Bush’s most famous mangled quotes-from America’s need for “a taller pie” to that most pressing of questions: “Is our children learning?”
One irony that has become clear, Bush cannot mangle words on command. During the campaign, when candidate Bush did a stint on “Saturday Night Live,” the producers tried to get him to mispronounce “ambivalent.” It took him several takes because he kept saying it correctly. At the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner, Bush was supposed to use a word he’d made up in a press conference just that week, “misunderestimate.” He messed up the mess-up and said “misunderstood” instead.
For the most recent dinner with print reporters, Parvin decided to take a new approach: a family slide show. Fewer words, more pictures. Bush liked the idea and allowed Parvin to go down to Texas to look at the family photo albums. Now, these aren’t just any family scrapbooks. There are some 70 of them about the size of a thick newspaper. They are stored in an off-limits, temperature-controlled section of the George H.W. Bush’s presidential library. Barbara Bush kept everything it seems from her kids’ report cards and Little League line-ups to clippings about her husband’s early races.
Parvin spent hours looking through the Bush family snapshots and took digital photos of them back to Bush, who culled them. The hit of the night: a nude frontal photo of Jeb Bush as a toddler. In keeping with the Bush family tradition of ribbing one another, George W. did not tell Jeb he was going to expose him.
Bush only practiced the script for the slide show twice. He read through it quickly for final approval on a Monday and then practiced a half hour before the dinner that Saturday night, according to Parvin. Once again, the contrast with President Clinton is striking. Last year, at his farewell correspondents’ dinner, Clinton showed a video in which he starred. The footage made fun of the press, which kept writing about how bored Clinton seemed in office. The video had Clinton bicycling through the halls of the Old Executive Office Building, running after Hillary’s limo with a brown-bag lunch she’d left behind and watching the clothes go around and around in the White House laundry room. It was hysterical. But it was also amazing how much time he put into it.
It’s not that Bush wasn’t involved in the making of his slide show. He was. It was his idea to include a picture of his mother sticking out her tongue. It was all in good Bush humor. But it was also a peek at a sentiment mother and son share about the Washington press corps and its traditions.
