by Larry King
BUSH: I don’t know. I think some, but not all. I don’t know that a debate has ever decided anything. They always cite the Kennedy-Nixon debates, where people listening to it on radio thought Nixon won, and people watching it thought Kennedy won. But I don’t know. We don’t think that it’s, you know, the be-all and end-all, but it does give you the chance to stand up there and say “Here’s what I’m for.” No filters. People don’t need a Monday morning quarterback [saying] “you have just heard this or that.”
Bush did well. And I could tell he enjoyed the back and forth with callers while talking to the audience and shaking hand after hand. In fact, one caller from Cleveland asked Bush where he was a resident. The president said Texas.
KING: And still a Texas driver’s license?
BUSH: Still. You want to see it?
KING: Yes. Make sure it isn’t expired.
BUSH: No, no, it’s not expired. (He pulls out his wallet and hands it over to me.)
KING: I like the smile!
BUSH: Does it say “President”?
KING: Wait a minute. Yep. President George W. Bush. The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Department of Public Safety, Texas. It’s a class C driver’s license.
BUSH: Hey, wait a minute.
KING: Six feet, one inch tall. Sex is male. Eyes are brown. Birth date is 6/12/24. And this expires 6/1/93.
BUSH: I’m legal. Where’s your car. Let’s go for a drive.
It was the first time I had seen George Bush loosen up. And I left San Antonio the next morning thinking not about the interview as much as about these three men who want to be president of the United States. They spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to get there. And when one of them does, that person loses the chance to walk down a street and talk to someone whose name they don’t know about what is and isn’t working. And it is those conversations that make each of these men, and the forty-one men before them who have achieved this goal, want the job in the first place. Each has an idea of how to make something work better. How, I wondered, might the country be different if bus trips and forums and shaking hands could be a part of every day for every person who sits in the Oval Office? I knew I’d never know the answer.
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Those who are paid to watch television and complain were busy as the Talk Show Campaign started winding down. Jonathan Yardley, book critic of the Washington Post, and a fellow I have always enjoyed reading, took all of society to task for allowing a presidential campaign to fall to the level of talk show hosts interviewing candidates. “To put it bluntly,” he wrote on October 12, “these aren’t the people who ought to be asking the questions.” I kept reading that line over and over and getting madder and madder. I was in my condo in Arlington, Virginia, thinking, “Well, Mr. Yardley, does that mean Rather and Jennings and Brokaw are the only ones who should be asking the questions? And if it’s wrong for a television talk show host to ask the questions, why isn’t it wrong for a book critic at the Washington Post to be writing a column about what television should and shouldn’t do?” For the first time, the idea became real that a media elite existed. And I knew I was getting hammered and Donahue was getting hammered and Arsenio was getting hammered because the smug journalists inside the Beltway were watching their readers and viewers looking at other areas for information. They didn’t like it. And like in some political campaigns, they went after the messenger. It was a recurring theme in 1992.
Despite Mr. Yardley’s handwringing, Bush and Clinton and Perot were everywhere now, spending an hour on the morning shows, taking phone calls (and good questions), and doing it all without the “filter” George Bush talked about earlier. And by the last week of the campaign, Bush had narrowed the double-digit gap according to polls. Now the country was focused on something called the “Perot Factor.” It was pretty clear Ross wasn’t going to win this thing, but nobody had ever seen a third party candidate with $60 million to spend on infomercials with charts and graphs. In some markets, Perot was beating network television shows. The undecided vote, however, was the number everyone was trying to gauge. The Perot Factor was playing havoc with any firm ideas any pollster or pundit or, for that matter, talk show host might have.
Dan Quayle came on in that final run and, to my enjoyment, brought a chart of his own. It showed the economy was completing six straight quarters of growth. And when I asked why people weren’t feeling good about the numbers on his graph, we got into the coverage and how 98 percent of all stories about the economy during the past month were negative. I could feel my eyes start to roll back into my head.
KING: Have you ever seen two newspapermen say, “Let’s go get Bush today”? I’ve never seen that. Never.
QUAYLE: (laughs) You know—
KING: Where they plot to hurt someone? Where, like, some nefarious conspiracy—
QUAYLE: No, I’m not getting into a nefarious conspiracy, but what I am saying is that they’re saying “Okay, let’s see. Do we want to do a positive story or a negative story on the economy?” And, obviously, there has been a calculated decision made with those that control what goes on television, control what goes on the networks, to make it a negative story.
I knew of no editorial board or broadcast editor that have had conversations about steering stories one way because the other party has been in office for twelve years, a point Quayle made in the interview. It reminded me of a caller to the radio show who said late one evening, “You know, Larry, every time the space shuttle goes up, it rains six weeks later.” The logic was the same. There wasn’t any.
Ross Perot had adopted the Patsy Cline song “Crazy” at every campaign stop. He had been the topic of a 60 Minutes piece looking into his claim there was a concentrated effort by the Republican party to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. And when we had our last sit down in Washington I asked him about it.
PEROT: Larry, just—Look, let’s just go back to the issues that concern the people. The only reason I have done this, the only reason I have put my family through this—
KING: But you’ve become a public—You’re a major public figure, Ross.
PEROT: I know. I am their servant. I am here to serve them. I am here for one reason, and that is to fix the problems that face this nation. It’s the only reason I’m doing it. My family is totally supportive. The minute my daughter got back from her wedding, we told her. We didn’t tell her until after the wedding trip. And her reaction was—she’s a very strong person—she says, “Okay, the wedding’s over. Let’s get back in the race.”
When the show was over, Ross wouldn’t make any predictions about whether he was going to work next Wednesday at Perot Systems in Dallas or, as he had promised if elected, in Washington, D.C. We shook hands, slapped each other on the back, and walked off the set. That’s when we were met by two uniformed police officers saying there had been a bomb threat phoned in and the building was being evacuated immediately. The news operation at that hour comes out of Atlanta so the Washington bureau isn’t affected too much. Still, it was a weird feeling to think someone had felt so strongly about something they wanted to kill Ross— or was it me? All of this is going through my head as I walk out the door and down the stairs and out the lobby and to my car. No, I didn’t stick around to say goodbye. Not to Ross, not to the desk clerks. Nobody. I learned that Ross told the D.C. cops to get out of the building and not risk harming themselves, which could, in turn, harm their families.
During that week the radio program moved to daytime for a special series of political shows before the election. We took calls from Clinton and Perot’s campaign manager and Bush’s campaign officials. And we took a call from Texas where a fourth-grade class was listening as part of its current events lesson. Senator Tim Wirth (D-Col) was in the studio having decided not to seek reelection. We polled the class: Clinton 45 percent, Bush 30 percent, and Perot 25 percent. I remember laughing at the numbers as I wrote them down.
It had been a long campaign. Clinton lost his voice, Ross was go
ing nonstop, and Bush had a horrible cold. Even in this electronic age, there remains a need to do what worked in Iowa; to look at the voters, to shake their hands and say (if the candidate can still talk), “I need your help.” Everyone bitched about the last few days, including me, but I also knew it was better this way than sitting in a sterile television studio talking to one city and then another and then another. In that last week, the TV show decided to go all out and talk to each candidate one more time, showing the voters just who these three guys were and what each wanted to do if given the job. They were all more than happy to find an hour or so to talk to a national audience, despite trying to be in ten different places every twenty-four hours.
The president and I had a final interview in front of an audience at Memorial Hall in Racine, Wisconsin, on the Friday before the election. As we went on the air, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, had been reindicted by a Grand Jury impaneled by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh (Weinberger and five others in the Iran-contra case were pardoned by President Bush on Christmas Eve, 1992). The timing couldn’t have been worse for Bush and his campaign let the point be known. While I understood their suspicions, I also wondered where the solution was to be found. Does the special prosecutor go on vacation during a campaign? If so, the guy only works one day a year. Still, the Justice Department isn’t supposed to do anything that can affect an election so I understood Bush’s concern, even though it was his Justice Department. The issue centered on questions regarding whether Weinberger knew about an Israeli-brokered agreement to buy four thousand TOW missiles that went to moderate elements in Iran in exchange for five U.S. hostages in Lebanon. The question was whether George Bush knew about the scheme. He said no. Clinton charged there was “a smoking gun” in the role Bush played as vice president.
Clinton’s campaign manager, George Stephanopoulos, called our Washington studio as the interview progressed and was transferred to Tammy Haddad, who was on site in the production truck outside Memorial Hall. She listened to George complain about me not asking tough questions. This was part of the work done in the now famous “war room” where television, radio, and magazines and newspapers were called by Clinton campaign staff and told, among other things, to ask tougher questions of whatever Bush official was being interviewed. Tammy told Stephanopoulos she was in the middle of a live show, Larry has asked all the right questions, and she couldn’t listen to any more of his complaints. However, she added, if he wanted to ask Bush a question, do it now. Stephanopoulos put her on hold for a second and then came back on, saying okay.
STEPHANOPOULOS: It says quite clearly in the memo five hostages in return for the sale of four thousand TOWs to Iran by Israel. How could you not know that it was arms-for-hostages?
BUSH: May I refer you to the wonderful sleuthing done by the United States Congress, costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, where the accurate records are reflected here? And if that was Caspar Weinberger’s opinion, fine. Go ask President Reagan if he thought it was arms-for-hostages—same transaction—and he’d say “No.”
KING: But if four thousand TOWs are going in return for five hostages, what else could it be?
BUSH: Larry, please read the testimony. There’s all— There was kind of trying to work with moderates. They weren’t dealing with the people who had the hostages. There’s a whole history that this poor guy is trying to resurrect four days before the election. It’s wonderful how his call gets in, this random call—a woman from Belgium, one from Switzerland— It’s perfectly all right.
Members of the Bush campaign complain to this day it was a setup. It wasn’t. They say the election was lost as a result of that interview. It wasn’t and they know it.
At 10:48 P.M. election night it was official. Bill Clinton had gathered 43 percent of the vote, George Bush 37 percent, and Ross Perot 19 percent. But the number impressing me the most was the turnout. More than 55 percent of Americans went to the polls. And the fourth graders in Houston were more accurate than any pundit I had interviewed for the entire year.
The next day I was reading the newspapers in my living room and looking forward to interviews with people who aren’t running for office. Of course we’d do a lot of pundit-driven shows for the next few days trying to put into words what had happened, but it was a good feeling to know I would soon be talking to Don Rickles instead of some political something or another. That was my thought as the phone rang. I knew the voice right away.
“Larry?”
“How about you come on and talk about the year, Ross?” I offered.
“Larry, that’s not why I’m calling.”
“Okay, what’s up?”
“Larry, there’s a lady in the hospital who likes your show. And she’s real sick. I think a phone call from you would make her feel good.” He gave me the phone number and one minute later I’m talking to a very surprised lady named Helen. That moment taught me more about Ross Perot than anything else the entire year.
When I think about 1992 there are any number of scenes that come to mind. I remember the speed of change, the anger in the voters, the fact you just can’t dismiss anything anymore because anything does, indeed, go. And I have one other thought: Ross wasn’t kidding when he said the day after the 1992 election he would be at work.
NOVEMBER 3, 1992
· 1992 Voting age population: 89,529,000
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· 1992 Registration to vote: 133,821,178
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· 1992 Turnout to vote: 104,405,155
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· Percentage of voting age who voted: 55.09
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· Popular vote for Bill Clinton: 44,909,326 (370 electoral votes)
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· Popular vote for George Bush: 39,103,882 (168 electoral votes)
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· Popular vote for Ross Perot: 19,741,657 (0 electoral votes)
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Source: Federal Election Commission
CHAPTER THREE
Thinking About Tomorrow
January 21, 1993. There’s electricity everywhere in Washington, D.C., when America readies itself for Inauguration Day. Every four years bleachers go up along Constitution Avenue across from the White House so that VIPs can view the passing parade with its floats and marching bands from every state. For the non-VIP, one has to stake out a position along the parade route between the Capitol and the White House. But you know what? On Inauguration Day people aren’t thinking about seating arrangements. It is the current in the air and the bunting that hangs from buildings. It is the street vendors hawking everything from license plates to ugly paintings of the new president to T-shirts. It is all right there in trailers and on banquet tables at ridiculously high prices to mark the arrival of the next White House occupant or at clearance sale prices to say goodbye to the present occupant. So if you can look beyond all the exteriors that define one way of seeing Inauguration Day, it is, like the election preceding it, about what is going on inside each of us. And it doesn’t matter where you are seated.
I wasn’t in the VIP section as the parade passed. I was in an office building with a huge balcony overlooking Constitution Avenue. The weather was crisp and the energy everyone was feeling seemed all the more intense because of a brilliant blue sky and bright sun. This was the perfect party; inside, a wide-screen TV (in 1993, fifty-two inches was wide-screen) carried the president’s fourteen-minute inaugural address. Outside, I could see the people and actually hear Clinton’s words echo through the streets. It was a few minutes later when Maya Angelou took to the podium and delivered a poem she had penned for this day called “On the Pulse of Morning.” I felt the room change as she said the words and I knew it really wasn’t the room but, rather, something inside me and a lot of other people.
That evening there were thirteen inaugural balls in Washington. I did my national radio show from the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown and it was, as usual when we go on the road, a wild fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience. The place was
packed and everywhere I could see what people were feeling. My first guest that night was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Mack McLarty, who went to Miss Mary’s kindergarten class in Hope, Arkansas, with the new president. He told me Clinton offered him the position the night after the election in a late meeting at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock. McLarty wanted to think about it and, after a few weeks, agreed to take the position. And when I interviewed him inauguration night, he had already been on the job.
KING: Tell me what happened today after the inauguration. Did you go to work?
McLARTY: We did. I went to work this afternoon. We had people ready to answer the telephone at 12:01. I was at my desk by two.
KING: Are you looking forward to this?
McLARTY: There’s a crosscurrent of emotions. I think that’s natural. There’s excitement, and it’s an honor to serve people of this country and to work with a friend of forty years. But there’s a certain amount of reflection and apprehension.
KING: Is the president going to continue to jog?
McLARTY: I think that’s part of the way he keeps fit from a mental as well as a physical standpoint.
Art Buchwald and Mark Russell were up next, two men who make their living from what happens, and doesn’t happen, in Washington. Russell was going to be on stage at Ford’s Theater the following night, so I asked him to come up and give us a preview. He sat next to me in his best deadpan manner. Buchwald kept a straight face on my other side.