by Kitty Kelley
It was the meanest comment the Vice President’s wife had ever made in public, and she suffered from the negative reaction, which made Barbara look like that word that “rhymes with rich.” After seeing her comment broadcast on the nightly news, she called George’s sister, Nan Ellis. “I just can’t believe I did that to your brother,” she said. “I’ve been crying for twenty-four hours and I’ll never stop . . . how could I have done it?” She called George in tears, and he told her not to worry. Then she called Geraldine Ferraro. She said she had meant “witch” not “bitch,” but she apologized for saying anything.
“At the time, I was annoyed,” said Ferraro. “I thought, ‘How does a woman act like that?’ I felt that it was a terrible put-down—a terrible class put-down . . . I was hurt but I gave her credit for calling as quickly as she did. I told her not to worry about it, that we all say things at times we don’t mean. ‘Oh, you’re such a lady,’ she told me. All I could think of when I hung up was: thank God for my convent-school training.”
Two days after Barbara Bush’s defamation of Geraldine Ferraro, her husband’s press secretary, Pete Teeley, delivered his own, calling the congresswoman screechy and scratchy. “She’s too bitchy. She’s very arrogant. Humility isn’t one of her strong points.” He refused to apologize. “No reason to,” he said. “It has nothing to do with her as a person. On television, she appears bitchy. Her negative numbers are going up because she comes across that way.”
Being the first woman to run on a national ticket put enormous pressure on Ferraro, who had to surmount the bigotry and sexism her candidacy unleashed, particularly among men within the media. When George F. Will reported that her husband, John Zaccaro, had not paid taxes, Ferraro proved Will wrong and suggested he publicly apologize. Instead, Will sent her roses with a card, which read: “Has anyone told you you are cute when you’re mad?”
The night of the debate, October 11, 1983, Ferraro had been fully prepped. She presented herself as informed and lucid. When attacked, she kept her temper but responded firmly, even sardonically.
“Her opponent, on the other hand, acted much more the hysterical lady,” wrote Robin T. Lakoff in her book Talking Power. “His voice rose in indignation in both pitch and volume; he waspishly (no pun intended) reiterated the same charges again and again (he didn’t listen); he grew visibly upset and overwrought; his face got red, his voice tense and shrill. He went into his lecture mode. This was not the archetypal male in calm control. Yet the next day pollsters declared Bush the ‘winner.’ No one had much to say about why or how. The answer is that Ferraro lost because she dared to speak up in public against a man.”
At one point during the debate Ferraro chided Bush for lecturing her. “Let me just say . . . that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy . . . Secondly, please don’t categorize my answers, either. Leave the interpretation of my answers to the American people who are watching this debate.”
She missed a chance to clobber Bush when he said that the Reagan administration looked at civil rights “as something like crime in your neighborhood.” But she had recovered by the time Bush made his most damning accusation. He said that she and Mondale had claimed the 242 men who had died in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon had died in shame. Ferraro immediately corrected him. “No one has ever said that those young men who were killed through the negligence of this administration and others ever died in shame.” Mondale labeled Bush’s accusation “unpardonable” and said he was “angry as hell” about the untruthful remark. He demanded that Bush issue an apology for his lie, but Bush refused.
The day after the debate the Vice President addressed a rally of longshoremen in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and referred to the previous evening’s debate: “I tried to kick a little ass.” Hours later his staff showed up on the press plane wearing buttons that said, “We kicked a little ass.” Some reporters started calling the Vice President “Kick-Ass George,” others wore hats made of jockstraps.
“It set quite a testosterone tone,” recalled Julia Malone of Cox Newspapers. “The Bushies didn’t understand how offensive it was to women. Later at an ‘Ask George Bush’ event, the Vice President took questions and kept calling on man after man after man, ignoring the women who had their hands up. Finally he said, ‘One last question,’ and all the women in the press corps shouted in unison, ‘Call on a woman.’ He looked so surprised and acted a little put out at being told what to do by a bunch of women, but he finally took one question from a woman.”
Bush’s attitude raised a great deal of gender tension on his press plane, where he seemed to strut his new “kick-ass” status. “When the debate was over, the women in the press corps stood up and cheered Ferraro,” recalled Jeb Bush, who had accompanied his father to the debate. “The whole thing was very difficult. Usually on a press plane, camaraderie develops with the press. But on the Bush plane, things were very difficult.”
Female journalists resented Bush’s chauvinistic treatment of Ferraro, which showed them something they had not seen before: his discomfort in accepting women as peers. They started to notice that there were no professional women on Bush’s staff who held positions comparable to the men. “All the women were either secretaries or gofers,” recalled one woman journalist, “and whatever Jennifer Fitzgerald was [her official title was ‘executive assistant’] didn’t count . . . Maybe Bush’s attitude was just part of his generation, but it certainly made you see that even a so-called nice guy can be a male chauvinist pig.”
Women reporters also observed there were no women in the Bush family who pursued a career or even held a professional job. Even those wives with college degrees, and in Laura Bush’s case a graduate degree, faded into the background of their male-dominated marriages, ceding center stage to their husbands. George W. Bush best expressed the family’s male credo when he said, “I have the best wife for the line of work that I’m in: She doesn’t try to steal the limelight.” He told a Texas writer: “She’s not trying to butt in and always, you know, compete. There’s nothing worse in the political arena than spouses competing for public accolades or the limelight.” As President, one of W.’s first judicial nominations went to James Leon Holmes, who once wrote: “The wife is to subordinate herself to her husband . . . to place herself under the authority of the man.” All women who married into the Bush family became housewives and mothers. As Barbara Bush told reporters: “We’re all very happy being kept by our husbands.”
Garry Trudeau skewered the Vice President’s treatment of Gerry Ferraro in a Doonesbury strip that showed reporters shouting questions to Bush: “Mr. Bush, in recent weeks, we’ve heard a lot of vulgar language about Mrs. Ferraro from you, your wife and your campaign manager.
“Was all of this part of a planned manhood strategy, to counter the wimp image that has plagued your political career?”
Trudeau’s withering pen has George responding:
“Are you kidding? I’ve always talked tough! When I said I kicked Mrs. Ferraro’s behind that’s EXACTLY what I meant! And you can print that!”
“In a family newspaper?”
“Gosh, yes! Heck! It’s just an old football term!”
The Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist had watched Bush twist himself into a pretzel of reverses on numerous policies—the economy, abortion, the deficit, the Equal Rights Amendment—to become Reagan’s man. A few days before the 1984 election Trudeau took deadly aim. He started a week of japes, beginning with a White House correspondent making an announcement on the nightly news: “Good evening. Vice President George Bush’s manhood problem surfaced again today as concern over his lack of political courage continued to grow . . .
“Accordingly, in a White House ceremony today, Bush will formally place his embattled manhood in a blind trust.
“It will be restored to him only in times of national emergency.”
George became a laughingstock on his own press plane. The next
day’s strip was even more belittling: “Sir, will your manhood be earning interest?”
“Very little. There’s not that much capital.”
Humiliated at the sniggering behind his back, George banished the press from his plane and accused Trudeau of “carrying water for the opposition” and “coming out of deep left field, in my view.” In his personal diary, Bush referred to the satirist as “the insidious Doonesbury.”
Barbara Bush was even more dismissive. “People who saw a man who fought for his country, who built a business and added to the productivity of this country, who never turned down his President when he was asked to serve, nobody thought that,” she said. “Only one little cartoonist.”
Two weeks later on David Brinkley’s Sunday-morning talk show, the Vice President tried to deny his nasty remark about Geraldine Ferraro.
“You said you’d kicked her ass,” Sam Donaldson reminded him.
“I didn’t say that,” Bush snapped.
“What did you say?”
“Well, I’ve never said it in public.”
Donaldson pointed out that he was in public, accompanied by reporters, and his comment was recorded on camera.
“Well, if I’d wanted to say in public the statement that I have never repeated, I would do it.”
The positive numbers in the polls had shot up for the Republicans following the debates, but then The Washington Post weighed in with an editorial comparing the Vice Presidential candidates. The paper called Ferraro “smart, strong and resourceful,” conceding that her lack of foreign policy experience showed up from time to time in her statements. George got hammered:
Something else shows when George Bush speaks—something that threatens to trash whatever esteem his impressive résumé and his private personal grace have earned him. Maybe it is just that he is a rotten campaigner (winning elections, after all, has never been his forte). But he seems to reveal himself as all viewers of “Dallas” will long since have noticed, as the Cliff Barnes of American politics—blustering, opportunistic, craven and hopelessly ineffective all at once. This impression has been so widely remarked in recent weeks by commentators of every political persuasion that it hardly needs elaboration.
On November 6, 1984, Ronald Reagan was resoundingly reelected, winning every state in the Union except for Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The election had been a landslide triumph for the President but a personal defeat for the Vice President, who was so morose about his bad press that, according to close aides, he considered retiring from public life. He sulked for a few days, and then rallied. In a note to Senator Barry Goldwater, George wrote: “It’s been tough and ugly this time; but the results are what counts [sic].”
He also wrote to Republican Representative Barber Conable of New York: “I’m glad it’s over. It got ugly—you saw vestiges of that ugliness. But worth it? You bet!”
Soon the climate would turn even uglier as the Reagan administration came face-to-face with the scandal of Iran-contra—a shorthand term for the illegalities involved in financing the civil war raging in Nicaragua. President Reagan had pleaded with Congress to aid the contras, whom he referred to as “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers.” Congress denied his plea and passed the Boland Amendment, making it illegal to provide funding to overthrow Nicaragua’s duly elected Communist government.
By 1986 Americans had become sadly familiar with names such as the Reverend Benjamin Weir, Father Martin Jenco, and Terry Anderson of the Associated Press, who were among the seventeen Americans and seventy-five Westerners kidnapped in Beirut by terrorists and thrown into hellholes around Lebanon. All the captives were brutally tortured, and some left to die like roadkill. These kidnappings were part of a campaign—in retaliation for Israel’s 1982 invasion, which had been supported by U.S. warplanes and ships from the U.S. Sixth Fleet—by Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah to rid Lebanon of all Americans.
In a misguided effort to free the hostages and finance Ronald Reagan’s war against the Sandinistas, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council devised a complex scheme, which he and others later tried to cover up. Until he was fired in 1986, the Marine lieutenant colonel known as Ollie was the White House official most directly involved in secretly aiding the contras, selling arms to Iran, and diverting proceeds from the Iran arms sales to the contras. The deception by North and others led to joint congressional hearings, a presidential commission, an investigation by the Office of Independent Counsel, court trials, and three convictions. In the end, six participants received presidential pardons.
Throughout it all, Vice President Bush, who had attended most of the planning sessions with Oliver North, would proclaim ignorance about what had happened, maintaining, “I was out of the loop.” Yet court documents, congressional reports, transcripts, trial records, and the recollections of others prove otherwise: George Bush knew far more than he ever admitted.
On March 3, 1985, his son Jeb hand-carried to the Vice President’s White House office a letter from the Guatemalan physician Dr. Mario Castejon requesting U.S. medical aid for the contras. George penned a note back to the doctor:
Since the projects you propose seem most interesting, I might suggest, if you are willing, that you consider meeting with Lt. Col. Oliver North of the President’s National Security Council staff at a time that would be convenient for you.
My staff has been in contact with Lt. Col. North concerning your projects and I know that he would be most happy to see you. You may feel free to make arrangements to see Lt. Col. North, if you wish, by corresponding directly with him at the White House, or by contacting Mr. Philip Hughes of my staff.
In January 1985, Jeb Bush had met with Felix Rodriguez, the former CIA operative who served as the chief supply officer for North’s illegal scheme to supply arms to the contras. Later it was suggested that Jeb was his father’s Florida contact in the secret resupply operation.
“That’s crap,” Jeb told The Boston Globe. “I believe the freedom fighters should be supported to the maximum and that their cause is noble and just. But I know the difference between proper and improper behavior because I was brought up well. I would never do anything to jeopardize my dad’s career. That would be a dagger in my heart.”
The secret Iran-contra skein started unraveling on October 5, 1986, when the Sandinistas in Nicaragua shot down a cargo plane carrying military supplies with three Americans aboard. One American survived—Eugene Hasenfus. He claimed he worked for a CIA man named “Max Gomez,” the code name for Felix Rodriguez.
Rodriguez, whose home proudly displayed two autographed pictures of himself with Vice President Bush, called his contact, Donald Gregg, who went to work for George Bush in 1982 as his national security adviser, to report the shot-down plane. Gregg, a former CIA operative, had met Rodriguez in Vietnam about the same time he met Bush.
Upon hearing Rodriguez’s report, Bush quickly called a press conference and denied having any connection with the plane that crashed in Nicaragua, although he did admit knowing the man whose code name was Max Gomez.
Several weeks later The Washington Post linked Iran’s release of three American hostages to American arms sales to Iran. George went on television to defend the administration. He declared that any arms-for-hostages deal was “inconceivable.”
The next day Secretary of State George Shultz called the Vice President and reminded him that not only had Bush attended the crucial meeting on January 7, 1986, but he had also supported the plan to sell arms to Iran—the same plan that Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had opposed. Shultz could have shown George the notes he had taken during that meeting, which proved his point. He later published them in his book. When Bush realized that Shultz had been taking notes, he was flabbergasted, and he wrote in his diary:
Howard Baker in the presence of the President told me today that George Shultz had kept 700 pages of personal notes, dictated to his staff . . . Notes on personal meetings he had with the President. I found
this almost inconceivable. Not only that he kept the notes, but that he’d turned them all over to Congress . . . I would never do it. I would never surrender such documents and I wouldn’t keep such detailed notes.
On November 13, 1986, President Reagan announced on national television that he had authorized the sale of arms to Iran, but he denied that it was a trade for hostages.
A few days later Attorney General Ed Meese undertook an investigation to determine how much of a problem the U.S. arms shipment to Iran was going to be for the administration. Within four days Meese found that $10–$30 million from the arms sale to Iran had been diverted to the contras through Swiss bank accounts. The President was forced to fire Oliver North, but he told him, “One day this will make a great movie.”
The Iran-contra scandal continued to unfold over the next two years, but the Vice President, who had become adroit at what he called “bending” and “stretching” the truth, ducked and dodged and fenced and hedged. He lied more than once to reporters during press conferences and frequently equivocated. He stonewalled the Office of Independent Counsel, and he withheld all of his personal diaries until after he left government service and was outside the reach of the special prosecutor.
During the 1986 Christmas holiday Donald Gregg and his wife threw a party, which the Vice President and Barbara attended along with Bush’s staff lawyer, C. Boyden Gray, and his beautiful new young wife, Carol.
“What has always stuck out about that particular night is the memory of those men, who seemed very playful and a little more tipsy than usual,” recalled Carol Gray. “They were kind of huddled together in that good-old-boy sort of way. The Vice President, Boyden, and Donald Gregg were laughing together very smugly.