HILLARY Clinton revealed George H.W. Bush’s apparent affair with his assistant – sparking his wife’s battle with depression, a new book has claimed.
Details of the alleged affair between Bush and his aide Jennifer Fitzgerald, are revealed in a new book about the family, titled: Grace & Steel: Dorothy, Barbara, Laura, and the Women of the Bush Dynasty.
Claims of the affair led to Bush's presidential loss to Bill Clinton in 1992, after Hillary made the liaison public in a bombshell Vanity Fair interview.
And according to the book, obtained and evaluated by the Daily Mail, Bush had already been warned by his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, that his affair would follow him “forever”.
Bush's supposed affair with blonde beauty Jennifer Fitzgerald was rumored in 1974 when the soon-to-be-president served as chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China.
The claims led to Bush's wife Barbara considering suicide and Bush's mother Dorothy Walker Bush, the formidable family matriarch, wasn't happy either, tearing into her son to 'fix it' or risk his political future.
The apparent affair became public two decades later in 1992 when Hillary Clinton told about it in a Vanity Fair interview – costing Bush the election.
The revelation is said to have contributed to Bush's wife Barbara considering suicide because she was so depressed.
The author of the new book, J. Randy Taraborrelli, has previously written biographies about Jackie Kennedy and Beyonce.
His latest work delves into the tensions between Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan when their husbands were Vice President and President respectively.
The book also goes over the rocky road to acceptance of Columba, the Mexican woman that Bush's son Jeb married when she was 19
Hillary said in her Vanity Fair interview that she was having tea with Ann Cox Chambers, chair of Atlanta Newspapers Inc at the time, who told her: 'Everybody knows about George Bush…the establishment, regardless of party, sticks together. They're gonna circle the wagons on Jennifer and all these other people.'
Dorothy Bush, who was 91 at the time, said: "This is all Hillary's fault" because she had 'stirred up' the controversy.
The timing of the interview was hypocritical, but did the job. Bill Clinton had been accused of having an affair with Gennifer Flowers in January 1992 – the Vanity Fair interview came out in May of that year.
Bush angrily denied it but it was a factor in him losing to Bill Clinton and making him a one-term President.
Only then did Fitzgerald and Bush finally go their separate ways. A source said that they "just stopped being in each other's lives". Bush left a message and she didn't call back, and that was it.
Dorothy warned the future president decades before that the "stories will follow you forever" about his relationship with Jennifer Fitzgerald.
When Bush protested that "it's not what it looks like," his mother batted it away and said: "Phooey. It's always what it looks like."
The confrontation happened while Dorothy was visiting Bush in 1974 in China where he was the chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China.
Dorothy's warning proved prescient as Bush refused to banish Fitzgerald from his orbit, even when he became President.
The book, which is out on Tuesday on St Martin's Press, says that Bush hired Fitzgerald to be his 'special assistant' just before he left for China as the country's liaison, a post awarded to him by Gerald Ford.
At 42, Fitzgerald was seven years Bush's junior and was born in England to a British military officer father and a mother from a wealthy Boston family.
She was pretty and petite and had blond hair which she wore in a short and stylish fashion – and caught Bush's eye.
Before Bush left for Beijing in the Fall of 1974, he and Barbara had a 'heated argument' about Fitzgerald and he insisted there was nothing going on.
A month after they arrived Barbara still wasn't comfortable with it and decided she needed some space so she returned to the US, leaving Bush alone with Fitzgerald in China.
It would be the first Christmas that Bush and his wife would spend apart in 37 years – and it was when Bush supposedly cheated on her.
Taraborrelli quotes an unnamed source as saying that it happened on a two week trip Bush and Fitzgerald took which began the day after Barbara left, with a first stop in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The source said: "I think that's where it happened. Prior to Hawaii it had just been a flirtation.
"In Hawaii I believe it turned into an affair, first the Sheraton Waikiki and then at an apartment Bush leased in (the neighborhood) Kahala."
The source said that despite Bush being balding with a receding hairline "he had power" and having served as US ambassador to the UN and chair of the Republican National Committee his career was on the rise.
After Hawaii the lovers went to Tokyo for the rest of their work trip and returned to China in December.
Thousands of miles away in the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Dorothy began to hear the rumors about the affair.
Elsewhere in 'Grace & Steel', Taraborrelli delves into the tensions between Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan when their husbands were Vice President and President respectively.
Nancy 'had it in for' Barbara because she considered her a rival and Barbara felt the same because Nancy reminded her of her domineering mother Pauline
Their relationship got so bad that Nancy snubbed Barbara openly, once walking away from her mid sentence during an event in the White House State Room.
Barbara once told an assistant: "She's my mother all over again. Look at the way she stares at me. No one has looked at me like that since I was 12."
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