The Patrician President and the Reporterette: A Screwball Story

#TIA – This opinion piece about the late and increasingly considered great president George Bush speaks volumes about the man and the reporter who wrote it. 

Nobody understood our relationship — least of all us.

It was, admittedly, odd.

“I like you,” the first President Bush wrote me once, after he was out of office. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

In decades of correspondence, he tried to figure out why we stayed in touch, beginning one note “Darn you Maureen Dowd” and mischievously observing in another, “Sometimes I found it better around my family to go ‘Maureen who?’”

At times, typing on what he called “my little IBM,’’ he signed off “Con afecto, GB,’’ or if I was writing critically about his sons, “Con Afecto, still, just barely though! gb.’’ Or “Love” scratched out and replaced with the handwritten rebuke, “not quite there yet.”

Read more at The New York Times