PORTLAND, Maine — When George H. W. Bush asked Jean Becker to become his chief of staff after he’d left the White House, she was more than a bit perplexed. “I told him I didn’t know how to be a chief of staff,” she writes. “I had never been anyone’s boss; I had never done a budget; I had never really been in charge of anything.”
Don’t worry, he told her. He just needed a “seat warmer” until he found someone who would take the job permanently. Becker, a former journalist who had helped Barbara Bush write her memoir, reluctantly agreed. “I was not terrified, but maybe mystified. I really had no idea what I was doing,” she writes. “[My predecessor], God rest her soul, left me only one file, which was some old paperwork on presidential funerals; and the only advice she gave me was to make sure there was toilet paper in President Bush’s bathroom.”
Becker stayed with Bush for the next quarter-century, until his death in November 2018. She has now written a book about her experiences called “The Man I Knew: The Amazing Story of George H.W. Bush’s Post-Presidency.” It is not a critical biography, but a warm and affectionate look at a man who led a remarkable life. Insider stories? She’s got dozens of them—sad, funny, poignant, uplifting.
After she’d worked for Bush for several years, Becker got a job offer that genuinely tempted her, one that would have taken her back to journalism. “I did the proverbial pluses and minuses list,” she told me. “I will admit to you that very high on the plus list was spending the summers in Kennebunkport.”
Go with a new professional challenge? Or stay with the Bushes? It was not an easy decision, and she struggled with it. “But I woke up literally in the middle of the night one night—everybody knows how this feels and how this can happen—and I thought to myself, I have the best job on earth. What on earth am I thinking?” The next day she called the prospective employer and turned down the offer. “It was,” she says, “the smartest decision I ever made.”