The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Young George attended the exclusive Greenwich Country Day School and then Phillips Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts. There he was not rated a distinguished student but excelled in sports as captain of the soccer and baseball teams. He was six months from graduation and planned to follow in his father’s footsteps at Yale when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He told his father that college would to have wait, because he intended to enlist in the navy on this eighteenth birthday in June 1942.

  During Christmas break, George met Barbara Pierce at a local country club dance, and they started dating. On his birthday he was sworn in as an ordinary seaman in Boston. Soon after, he was shipped off to navy preflight training in North Carolina as an aviation cadet. He became a combat pilot, and on a bombing run in the Bonin Islands, in the Pacific, his plane was hit. He continued to the target, dropped his bombs, and leveled off, telling his two crew members to bail out. Neither survived, but he jumped into the sea, where an hour and a half later an American submarine picked him up.5 He rejoined his squadron and ultimately flew fifty-eight combat missions. Home on leave, he married Barbara on January 6, 1945, and on July 6 of the following year, his first child was born, named George Walker Bush but called Junior in the family.

  After the war was over, George Senior entered Yale in the fall of 1945, joining his elder brother, Prescott Junior, called Pressy. There, in addition to being captain of the baseball team, he turned out to be a diligent student, making Phi Beta Kappa and graduating in two and a half years. The Yale connection, as it was intended to do, paid off for George. Through a fellow Bonesman, he got into the Texas oil business at a portable drilling rig equipment company in Odessa, where he earned $375 a month as a clerk. After transfers to several towns in California where he sold rigs, he and his young family moved back to Texas, to Midland, a booming oil town just east of Odessa.

  He became a partner in an independent oil production company, and the couple added a daughter, Robin, and three more sons—John Ellis Bush (Jeb), Neil Mallon Bush, and Marvin Pierce Bush. They lost Robin to leukemia at age three, after which another daughter, Dorothy (Doro) was born.6

  Meanwhile, back East, Prescott Bush Sr. got into politics. In 1950 he ran for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut and lost narrowly but in 1952 won the other, recently vacated, Senate seat. He became a strong supporter and occasional golf partner of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and one of the first Republicans to denounce the Red-baiting tactics of Wisconsin’s senator Joseph R. McCarthy. After two six-year terms, Bush retired in declining health.7

  In 1953, son George Bush’s firm, boosted with a fortuitous investment of about half a million dollars from an uncle, Herbert Walker, and others, merged with another independent oil operation, Zapata Petroleum. In 1959 it split between inland and offshore sectors, with Bush becoming president of Zapata Offshore and moving his family to Houston. Like his father’s success earlier, George Bush’s success in business provided him enough money to go into politics.

  When the still young Republican Party in Texas began to encounter inroads from the far-right, fiercely anti-communist John Birch Society, Bush was recruited to be the party’s chairman. As a somewhat naive champion of party unity, he at first tried conciliation with the Birchers, and when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1964, his opponent, the liberal Democratic incumbent Ralph Yarborough, tagged him as “the darling of the John Birch Society.”8 Although a longtime supporter of the United Negro Fund, Bush opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and also the first nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union and backed Barry Goldwater for president in a conspicuous effort to associate with the dominant conservatism in Texas. Those attempts often conflicted with the GOP moderation of eastern Republicans, including his own father.

  In the end, Bush lost to Yarborough for the Senate seat but ran ahead of all the other Texas Republican candidates as well as Goldwater that year. He later expressed regrets that in courting the right wing he had failed to repudiate the “irresponsibility” of some of Goldwater’s supporters.9 In 1966, Bush took on a more modest challenge, winning the House seat from Houston. As a congressman, George Bush was more in tune with his father’s moderate views than with Texas conservatism. In spite of his 1964 vote against civil rights, he opposed racial segregation and supported an LBJ surtax to support the war in Vietnam and Great Society programs. And in 1968 he backed open housing in the Civil Rights Act of that year, citing the service of black troops in Vietnam.10

  In 1970, Bush ran for the U.S. Senate and lost again, but reentered public service as the American ambassador to the United Nations, appointed by President Richard Nixon. After the 1972 landslide reelection of Nixon over the Democratic senator George McGovern, Nixon tapped Bush to relieve Senator Bob Dole of Kansas as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Bush was not thrilled with the appointment but accepted it as loyal Republican soldier. Nixon told him he was not involved in the Watergate mess, and Bush said that was good enough for him. He traveled around the country attesting to the president’s innocence.11

  Then came a bump in the road in the summer of 1973 with the disclosure that Vice President Agnew was facing likely indictment on allegations of corruption as the Baltimore County executive and the governor of Maryland. In October, Agnew resigned to escape a jail term, and Nixon was faced with selecting a replacement under the new Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Texas Republicans pushed Bush for the job, but Nixon chose the popular House minority leader, Gerald Ford, as sure to be confirmed by Congress as required.

  Meanwhile, the investigation of the Watergate crimes and cover-up continued, and amid more disclosures via the tapes recorded in the White House, Bush finally concluded that he had been misled. On the most incriminating “smoking gun” tape, Nixon was heard telling Haldeman, his chief of staff at the time, to get the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation. So finally, on August 6, 1974, Nixon called a cabinet meeting at which he proceeded to discuss—inflation!

  According to Alexander Haig, Nixon’s new chief of staff, Bush, invited by Nixon to attend, “suddenly seemed to be asking for the floor. When Nixon failed to recognize him, he spoke anyway. Watergate was the vital question, he said. It was sapping public confidence. Until it was settled, the economy and the country as a whole would suffer. Nixon should resign.… Nixon brushed Bush aside, saying it might be a good idea to call a domestic summit conference on the economy. Bill Saxbe, the attorney general, spoke up. ‘Mr. President, I don’t think we ought to have a summit conference,’ he said. ‘We ought to be sure you have the ability to govern.’ ”12 On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned, turning the presidency over to Ford.

  With the vice presidency vacant, a poll of Republican leaders expressed their support for Bush, but the new president instead chose Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. Apparently as an alternative prize, Bush was offered his choice of ambassadorships to London or Paris but asked instead for the China portfolio as chief of the U.S. Liaison Office, the United States not then having established a formal embassy there. Ford agreed, and Bush was shipped off to Beijing for thirteen months, before being recalled to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA then was under severe congressional scrutiny and had been called “a rogue elephant.” Bush’s friends warned he was heading into a political dead end, but once again he decided he could not reject a presidential call and took the post.

  In 1979, with Carter looking increasingly likely to become a one-term president, Bush announced his candidacy for the Oval Office. The former California governor Ronald Reagan, who had given Ford stiff opposition for the 1976 Republican nomination, also decided to run again. In a large field in the 1980 Iowa caucuses, Bush surprised with a victory over Reagan, who was caught napping with minimal personal campaigning in the state. Suddenly Bush was in the national news claiming he now had the “Big Mo”—for momentum.

  But the Reagan campaign woke up in New Hampshire, ambushing a petulant Bush in a televised debate involving the full field in what he had expected would be a one-o
n-one face-off with Reagan. Bush charged, correctly, that he had been sandbagged, and in the ensuing primary Reagan routed him, 50 percent to 23. Not only did Bush’s “Big Mo” fade thereafter; his irritated reaction to the surprise debate appearance of the other candidates, orchestrated by Reagan’s campaign manager, left a bad taste with Reagan that further cooled a chilly relationship between the two.13

  As the contest for the nomination went on, Bush characterized Reagan’s plan for balancing the budget and simultaneously cutting taxes and raising defense spending as “voodoo economics,” widening the breach. When Bush denied ever using the term, a reporter produced a tape recording of him saying it. When he was repeatedly asked by reporters whether he would accept the vice presidential nomination, his pat answer was, “Take Sherman and cube it.” He meant he shared in spades what the Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had said in memorably dismissing any presidential candidacy: “If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.”14

  In any event, the men around Reagan were thinking in another direction. As early as May in advance of the Republican convention, Reagan was prodded by some aides to ask former president Ford whether he would be interested in being Reagan’s running mate. Ford said he was not, but at the convention Reagan was persuaded to try again. Among the arguments used on Reagan was that he would have Bush as the alternative if he didn’t get Ford to run.

  Ford, probably unwittingly, opened the talk to public scrutiny when Walter Cronkite of CBS asked him in a television interview whether they were talking about “something like a co-presidency.” Ford never used that term, but it got Reagan and his chief strategists to thinking of what might be lost in such an arrangement, and they finally thought better of the idea.

  Dick Cheney, Ford’s former White House chief of staff, recalled later that in exploratory talks with Bill Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager, “it was stunning how much they were willing to give up. We came away thinking, ‘This is nuts.’ ”15

  After the election Reagan said about the Cronkite interview: “[It] was part of what was making me realize that this thing was out of hand.… I began to wonder if all of us in our belief in the dream ticket, if we had thought beyond the election. Everything was based on the election; it was not based on thinking about how it would work.”16

  Finally, Reagan and Ford, after conferring one more time, concluded that the scheme posed too many questions of implementation and areas of responsibility. As Ford left Reagan’s hotel suite, Reagan mopped his brow and said, “Now where the hell’s George Bush?”17 He called Bush at his hotel suite and asked him to be his running mate. Bush broke out his trademark crooked grin and gave his wife the thumbs-up sign. Bush thus eagerly put the Sherman-like statement behind him and became Reagan’s loyal partner on the Republican ticket that trounced Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in November.

  After their inauguration, the always amiable Reagan followed Carter’s example of giving his vice president his own office within the White House, providing him with the Presidential Daily Brief and a weekly private lunch. He also chose as his chief of staff Bush’s close friend and adviser James A. Baker III, who kept a sharp eye for decent treatment of the new vice president.

  Reagan put Bush in charge of a task force on regulatory reform and made him chairman of a crisis management team, a task previously assigned to the president’s national security adviser. But at once, he wrote, his new secretary of state, Al Haig, “was on the phone going through the roof, saying he didn’t want the vice president to have anything to do with international affairs; it was his jurisdiction, he said, and he told me he was thinking of resigning.” To mollify him, Reagan drafted a short statement that made clear the obvious: “that the secretary of state was my primary advisor on foreign affairs.”18 Bush, however, was importantly involved in manning the White House situation room during certain foreign-policy crises.

  Haig’s fixation on jurisdictional turf was soon to be displayed in public.

  Only ten weeks into the new administration, on the afternoon of March 30, 1981, an assassination attempt on Reagan outside the Washington Hilton hotel put Bush literally a heartbeat from the presidency. The president was rushed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where surgeons removed a bullet from within an inch of his heart.

  Bush was on a short speaking trip to Texas, and his plane was just taxiing down an airport runway when he was notified, so the party headed back to Washington. While the president’s condition was still in doubt, the immediate question arose over who was in charge. Haig, apparently confused about the order of presidential succession and crisis procedure, raced from the White House situation room to the press room and declared that “constitutionally, the line to succession ran from the president to the vice president to the secretary of state.” Haig was wrong; the Speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tem came after the vice president in accordance with a 1947 change in the law. He then added that it was up to the president “to decide he wants to transfer the helm,” and “as of now, I am in control here in the White House, pending the return of the vice president, and in close touch with him.” In terms of the immediate crisis there was nothing wrong with that, but in saying “I am in control,” Haig left an impression with some that he thought he was next in line to take over the country.19

  In any event, Reagan survived surgery and quickly recovered, leaving Bush in standby mode. In 1984, the president announced early that he would keep Bush on the ticket for reelection. When the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, chose the first woman on a major national ticket, the New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, Bush had a dicey challenge on his hands. Through much of his career, he had been chided and then ridiculed about his upper-crust background, prep school dress, all-around gentlemanly ways, and urge to please. This rap became what was called by foes the “wimp factor,” yet to attempt to counter it with toughness in his one scheduled television debate with Ferraro that fall could be regarded as unseemly by voters.

  Ferraro, herself a tough politician who rose in her profession with the street smarts of her district in Queens, proved to be no pushover. During an exchange about the terrorist attacks on American facilities in Lebanon, she criticized Reagan’s lack of response, and Bush, coming to Reagan’s defense, condescendingly offered to “let me help you” understand the situation. Ferraro shot back, “Let me just say, first of all, that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy. I’ve been a member of Congress for six years. I was there when the embassy was held in Iran.”20

  Bush survived the debate, but the next morning, at a rally of longshoremen in blue-collar Elizabeth, New Jersey, he was caught on an open microphone morphing into Macho Man by telling someone in the crowd, “We tried to kick a little ass” in the debate. Then, seeing the mike, he blurted, “Whoops! Oh, God, he heard me! Turn that thing off!”21 And so the “wimp factor” clung but had no bearing on the outcome of the election, which Reagan and Bush won easily.

  With Reagan ineligible to run again in 1988, Bush was poised to try for the presidency a second time, with his greatest strength his strict loyalty to the retiring president. For all that, he earned the derogatory label of “lap-dog” from the conservative columnist George Will, who himself had once coached Reagan for a presidential debate and then commended him for his performance. But Bush took care not to seem eager to take advantage of any opportunity presented by a Reagan illness or mishap. In July 1985, when Reagan was hospitalized again for intestinal cancer and signed a temporary transfer-of-power to Bush for the period he would be under anesthesia, Bush stayed at the vice presidential residence up on Massachusetts Avenue rather than going to the White House, following Nixon’s example during Eisenhower’s illnesses.

  Bush’s prospects seemed to slip when the Republicans lost control of the Senate in the 1986 off-year congressional elections. And when the Reagan administration got into hot water over the sel
ling of arms to Iran and siphoning off profits to aid the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua in direct contravention to congressional prohibition, the trail led suspiciously close to Bush. His claim of superior foreign-policy experience as a former CIA director and head of White House crisis management made it difficult to contend he was unaware of what had been going on.

  When a CIA-funded plane carrying arms to the Contras was shot down and an American crew member was captured, the first alert went to Bush’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg. According to a later investigation into the Iran-Contra affair, Gregg was an overseer of the operation.22 Bush claimed to have been “out of the loop,” saying that when the subject came up at a critical White House meeting, he was “off at the Army-Navy football game.”23 But in this and other Reagan adventures in the Caribbean, including the brief invasion of Grenada, Bush was at a minimum a silent partner.

  In the first 1988 preconvention caucuses in Michigan, Bush barely won and then finished a dismal third in Iowa behind Bob Dole and the right-wing evangelist Pat Robertson. There, he got into a spat with the television anchor Dan Rather, who pressed him so hard on what he did and didn’t know about the Iran-Contra deal that Bush showed some fire, and in the process countered the “wimp factor” held against him. He bounced back with a strong showing in debate against Dole, and in the New Hampshire primary his campaign ran a tough television ad saying he would not raise taxes and accusing Dole of “straddling” the issue. Dole snapped back, saying Bush should “stop lying” about his record, and came off as a hot-headed sore loser.