Columbia, SC (WLTX) — One of the many people who reported on President George H.W. Bush's White House lives right here in Columbia.
University of South Carolina College of Information and Communications Dean Emeritus Charles Bierbauer is decades-removed from his time at the White House.
“You have to remember I was there in the pre-iPhone era,” Bierbauer said while flipping the pages of an aging photo album.
For Bierbauer, it's been a week of looking through old photographs and remembering old stories.
For nine years, 1984 to 1993, he covered the White House as CNN’s senior correspondent, including the entire presidency and two campaigns of President George H.W. Bush.
Bierbauer’s last day in the West Wing was President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. Before Bush, Bierbauer covered the end of President Reagan's time in office.
But, on Wednesday, the former reporter talked with respect about the subject of his past stories.
“George Bush was accessible. George Bush was approachable and to a journalist that's about the golden measure. Can I get to him? Can I ask him questions? Can I engage with him? Can I have that time that helps me as a reporter better understand what he as a President is all about,” Bierbauer said.
Looking back, the former correspondent said the 41st President’s time in office was a time of transition for the whole world.
“The Berlin Wall came down, Communism collapsed, the Soviet Union dissolved, a conflict broke out in the Middle East that was put down by a coalition of more than 30 countries, some of whom had been enemies,” Bierbauer said.
“That really was a tribute to what President Bush was able to draw together based on his experiences, his personality, his rolodex,” he added.
Through the ins and outs of domestic and foreign policy decisions, Bierbauer spent every day covering Bush's White House and the family inside it.
“She [Barbara Bush] was not an intrusive presence in the White House. But, she was certainly a known entity. I had time to get to know her, interviewed her on a couple of occasions, shared a couple of meals. These are things that you get to do. She was less tolerant of the press than her husband was, which is another way of saying she was protective,” he told WLTX.
“That’s something to be respected,” Bierbauer continued.
And he said the President and First Lady’s romance, which started as teenagers, was the real deal.
“This is a tribute in its own way to faith, fidelity and family, which were sort of principles that George Bush and Barbara Bush believed in,” Bierbauer said in his Columbia home.
When asked, the former CNN reporter said he thinks the President would want to be remembered for a lifetime of faithful service from World War II to the presidency.
As he showed WLTX the photos from countless interviews, one story from the end of the 1992 campaign, a race Bush would eventually lose, brought back a memorable exchange.
“In the course of that interview, I asked him, 'Has anyone told you, you cannot win this election?' He was trailing that badly. His response was, 'no one I trust,” Bierbauer told WLTX.
Bierbauer was interviewing Bush in the last month of the campaign while on a whistle-stop campaign trip in South and North Carolina.
The answer always stuck with him, because he never found out what the President meant.
“Did it mean he didn't have people around him that he completely trusted, or did it mean he was getting advice from some people? Or did it mean the message wasn't sinking in? I’ve always thought back to that,” he said, calling it a sad memory.
Months later, he recalled Bush having trouble with his loss to then-President Bill Clinton.
“For a protracted period of time after the ‘92 election, I think it’s fair to say he was in a bit of a funk. But, he got beyond it and certainly felt greatly redeemed when his son became the 43rd President,” Bierbauer said.
Now, he's left with the photographs summing up four years of work inside Bush’s White House.
“I liked him, he was-- as I say he was affable, he was approachable. He was willing and up to the give and take with journalists. He understood what we did and he appreciated that. He didn’t always like what he did, or what we may have written, or how we may have analyzed his campaign or his presidency. But, the sense that many of us, as journalists, took away from it was he respected and wanted us to do our job, whether he liked the product or not,” he explained.