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Daughter, sister, biographer

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Times Staff Writer

Her father left the White House 14 years ago, and her brother is midway through his second term as president. But Dorothy Bush Koch is only now stepping into the spotlight with a new book about the first President Bush and about her family.

And she has a few gently pointed words to say about life as the lone daughter in the country’s most powerful political family.

Introducing her book at a Miami event on Sunday, “Doro,” as she is known to her siblings, said it was nearly impossible to convince strangers that the generation of George W. Bush, Jeb, Neil and Marvin also included her.

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“It’s as if they are finding out about the fifth Beatle,” she said.

After Jeb Bush, the brother who is also Florida’s governor, introduced her at Miami Book Fair International, Koch added bluntly: “Thank you, Jeb, for letting people know that I actually do exist.

“The traditional path to making a name for yourself in our family is running for elective office, and I couldn’t do that because, for one thing, all the really good offices were taken,” Koch said wryly.

Koch lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington and devotes much of her time to raising money for causes (including her relatives’ political campaigns). She is a mother of four. Her husband, Robert, is the president of the San Francisco-based Wine Institute, a lobbying group for the wine industry.

Koch’s book walks through the life and times of her father, George H. W. Bush, a war hero at age 20 after he was shot down fighting the Japanese in 1944.

He went on to serve in Congress, run the CIA, head the Republican National Committee and win election as vice president for eight years and president for four.

Koch worked on the book for two years, conducting 135 interviews with friends, family and even political opponents of her father, including the man he beat for the presidency in 1988, Michael Dukakis.

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One intriguing element of Koch’s presentation Sunday, though, was what she implied but did not directly state about the contrasting images of the family’s two presidents, one of whom is known as the consummate diplomat and the other who has labeled himself the “war president.”

Twice on Sunday, she noted that among the accomplishments she most admired about her father was his ability to manage the end of the Cold War “without a shot being fired.”

The book aims to cement the legacy of the country’s 41st president as a war hero and thoughtful world leader, but it comes as the 43rd president is struggling to preserve his own legacy amid an increasingly violent Iraq war -- a war that many say his father would not have waged.

The book also comes as the current President Bush, in trying to find his way forward in Iraq, is increasingly reaching back to his father’s foreign policy team for advice and leadership.

The title of Koch’s book, “My Father, My President: A Personal Account of the Life of George H. W. Bush,” suggests that Koch does have her favorite between the family’s two presidents.

Though much has been made of whether the current President Bush has accomplished more than his father -- winning two terms in the White House and toppling Saddam Hussein -- Jeb Bush spoke Sunday of how he never aspired to outdo his father.

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Instead, he was haunted by the desire to live up to his dad’s example.

“If you start with the premise that your dad is as perfect as a person can be -- and, typically, guys try and aspire to be like their dad ... think about how traumatic that’s been,” he said.

“But I figured out if I could be half as good and kind and generous and compassionate as my father, then that would be pretty good,” he added.

“And once I figured that out, I stopped worrying about getting therapy.”

When a questioner at the Sunday event asked about the two presidents’ differing decisions on Iraq, Koch instinctively deferred to her brother, and he deferred to well-worn family talking points.

“When the current president and President 41 are together, we’re talking about sports and we’re talking about our families,” the governor said. As for their approaches to Iraq, Jeb Bush added: “It’s never come up, to be honest with you.”

Gov. Bush said Koch’s 586-page book would probably serve as the official presidential memoir. He said their father did not intend to write his own.

As any loyal daughter would, Koch seeks to convey the record as she and her family see it.

Writing about the famous 1988 Willie Horton presidential-campaign ad, Koch lauds it as an effective portrayal of Dukakis’ support of a weekend furlough program for violent criminals. Horton, an African American, was serving a life sentence for murder when he committed a rape while released for a weekend furlough.

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Democrats and civil rights leaders called the ad race-baiting. It took on new resonance last month, when the Republican Party aired a controversial attack ad against a black Senate candidate in Tennessee.

The former president told his daughter that critics were wrong about the Willie Horton ad.

“I felt we did the right thing,” he said, adding later: “It was definitely a crime issue.”

Koch did convince the two presidents to reflect a bit on their relationship with each other. The current president said his father had been paying too much attention to attacks coming from Democrats these days, whereas the elder Bush said: “I know George is strong and can take it, too -- but it still burns the hell out of me.”

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peter.wallsten@latimes.com

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