Bushes Spend Somber, Solitary Holiday at Maine Home

KENNEBUNKPORT, Me. —  Thanksgiving has always been a warm, cozy time in this soft-hued, postcard-charming New England fishing village and resort town--particularly for George Herbert Walker Bush.

The nation’s 41st President spent his boyhood summers in the family’s 26-room mansion on Walkers Point, and he has come back here every year except in 1944, when he was serving with the Navy in the Pacific. It has been the place that binds the Bushes together, he once told a biographer.

Four years ago at this time, when Bush had just won the 1988 presidential election and was about to step into the political sunlight, this was a happy week in Kennebunkport. The Bushes opened the Walkers Point mansion to visitors. The President-elect was ebullient.

But this year, soon-to-be-private citizen Bush and his wife, Barbara, are spending a Thanksgiving that is as gray and harsh as a Maine winter. Up here in his boyhood summer home, a magnificent turn-of-the-century hunting lodge of weathered wood and stone, Bush is simply waiting it out.

The transition is “too long and too ungenerous,” he complained to reporters recently.

By any standard, this has been an introspective Thanksgiving for the President and his family. After one term as Chief Executive, Bush suffered a defeat that has left him hurt and uncharacteristically bitter. (Maine officials disclosed on Monday that even the state that Bush calls his vacation home cast more of its ballots for Ross Perot than for him.)

The Bush family estate here has only recently recovered from the heavy storm damage that it sustained during a treacherous nor’easter 13 months ago.

And just last week, the President’s mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, died of a stroke at age 91. According to friends and family members, mother and son had been especially close. Bush frequently cited her as a major influence in his life. Her funeral was Monday.

As a result, the 11-acre Bush compound at the edge of this tidy community of gray, white and brown clapboard houses is impersonal and still. Secret Service agents continue to check motorists along the perimeter road, but there are few other signs that the Bushes are “at home.”

The Kennebunkport White House, as Bush’s traveling entourage has become known, has all but shut down. Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater has not scheduled a briefing since early September, and the number of presidential announcements has trickled to near zero. Fitzwater isn’t due up here until today.

Sean T. Walsh, one of Fitzwater’s staffers, said the President and First Lady celebrated Thanksgiving alone on Thursday, one of the few times in recent memory that they have not been joined by other family members or guests.

The menu was traditional: roast turkey, bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, green beans with almonds, cranberry sauce, mixed green salad and pecan pie.

Outside, cold air and heavy rain heralded the start of winter, as a storm that had just swept through the Midwest made its way up the Atlantic seaboard, roiling the waters just off the Bush estate.

The President and First Lady braved an early morning drizzle and soggy greens to play a round of golf with golf pro Ken Raynor and his wife. After two hours, however, the four gave up and went home.

The President’s schedule this weekend is minimal. Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, is expected to arrive here later today to brief him on the international situation. And aides say the Bushes may attend church here on Sunday, although even that is not certain.