The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Barbara and George H.W. Bush lost a young daughter, Robin. The agony never left them.

A tragedy that splits many couples brought them closer

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December 6, 2018 at 3:54 p.m. EST

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Michael Brice-Saddler and Steve Hendrix.

In 1953, Pauline Robinson “Robin” Bush, who was normally energetic, began to complain that she felt tired. So her mother, Barbara Bush, took the 3-year-old to a pediatrician.

A few days later, the doctor called with news that’d break Barbara and George H.W. Bush’s hearts: Robin was very sick. She had leukemia — a word the Bushes had never heard before — and the prognosis was bleak. She would not survive.

“Her advice was to tell no one, go home, forget that Robin was sick, make her as comfortable as we could, love her — and let her gently slip away,” Barbara Bush wrote in her 1994 memoir. “She said this would happen very quickly.”

Instead, the Bushes began a months-long fight to keep their daughter alive.

The day after getting the bad news, the Bushes flew with Robin from their home in Midland, Tex., to New York, moving into the apartment of George H.W. Bush’s grandparents on Manhattan’s East Side. His uncle was a doctor at Sloan Kettering, a leading cancer center even when cancer was barely understood and considered taboo to speak about.

A battle they couldn’t win

Robin stayed in the hospital for seven months, having regular bone-marrow tests and blood transfusions. USA Today reporter Susan Page, who is penning a biography of Barbara Bush set to be published next year, writes that Barbara had one rule — no crying in Robin’s room.

This was a rule that George H.W. Bush — who was sentimental and routinely wore his emotions on his sleeve — found nearly impossible to comply with.

He would tell Robin that he had to go to the bathroom when he felt the tears coming, Page reports. But he would actually step into the hallway to gather himself. Seeing his sick daughter was agonizing at times.

Page writes that Barbara collapsed into sorrow when Robin breathed her last breath and that it was her husband who helped her regain her composure.

Later, Barbara would marvel that a tragedy that splits many couples had brought them closer.

“Time after time during the next six months,” she said, “George would put me together again.”

A hole in their home — and heart

In a letter penned to his mother in the late 1950s, George indicated that something was missing from his home.

At the time, he and Barbara were parents to four rambunctious young boys — George W., Jeb, Marvin and Neal — whom they loved dearly. But, he wrote, there was something he still longed for.

Something he once had.

“The running, pulsating restlessness of the four boys as they struggle to learn and grow — needs a counterpart,” he wrote. “We need some starched crisp frocks to go with all our torn-kneed blue jeans and helmets. We need some soft blond hair to offset those crew cuts. We need a doll house to stand firm against our forts and rackets and thousand baseball cards.”

He continued, “We need a girl.”

The couple would have another daughter, Dorothy, who was born six years after Robin’s death.

‘Dad is hugging Robin and holding Mom’s hand again’: Scenes from George H.W. Bush’s funeral

But George H.W. Bush would remain sensitive to those battling life-threatening diseases throughout his career. Upon winning a seat in the House in 1966, Bush began exchanging letters with Paul Dorsey, a constituent in Houston who had voted for his opponent. When Dorsey was diagnosed with cancer, Bush visited him in the hospital.

While eulogizing the former president on Tuesday, Bush’s biographer, Jon Meacham, recalled an instance when Bush cried upon meeting a young boy in Krakow, Poland, who had leukemia:

“As vice president, Bush once visited a children’s leukemia ward in Krakow. Thirty-five years before, he and Barbara had lost a daughter, Robin, to the disease. In Krakow, a small boy wanted to greet the American vice president. Learning that the child was sick with the cancer that had taken Robin, Bush began to cry.

To his diary later that day, the vice president said this: “My eyes flooded with tears. And behind me was a bank of television cameras. And I thought, ‘I can’t turn around. I can’t dissolve because of personal tragedy in the face of the nurses that give of themselves every day.’ So I stood there looking at this little guy, tears running down my cheek, hoping he wouldn’t see. But if he did, hoping he’d feel that I loved him.”

Enduring grief

At the National Book Festival in 2016, while discussing the letter that Bush wrote to his mother about Robin’s death, Meacham indicated that he once had Bush read it aloud.

Long before he could finish, Meacham said, Bush broke down in sobs so piercing that it prompted his chief of staff to enter the room.

A toddler needs extremely rare blood to beat cancer. People across the world are helping her find it.

“Why did you want President Bush to do that?’” she asked.

“If you want to know someone’s heart,” Meacham began to reply — but the president interrupted him.

On Thursday, Bush will be buried between Robin and Barbara at his presidential library in College Station, Tex.