April-May 1999: Bush Deliberately Snubs Father’s Foreign Affairs Advisers

George W. Bush deliberately keeps his father’s closest foreign advisers, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, out of his foreign affairs tutorials (see April-May 1999). This is not just because Bush blames Baker for his father’s failure to win re-election in 1992, but because Scowcroft and Baker are considered the “Wise Men” of the elder Bush’s brain trust, who wield enormous influence both in the US and abroad. “George W. did it [snubbed Scowcroft and Baker] to show his defiance,” a friend of the Bush family will recall. “That did not reflect disrespect for his dad. It was more to have his own identity, to have his own record. He almost had to go out of his way to avoid anyone connected to his father. He constantly faced this challenge of carving out an identity of his own.… When he was gearing up to run [for president] and the money was flowing in and people were making these showboat trips down to Austin [Texas, the home of Governor Bush], he told me, ‘You’re not going to see any Jim Bakers around me when I’m in office.’” [Unger, 2007, pp. 168]