by Kitty Kelley
Doro met Robert Koch, a Democrat, who had worked for House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and Democratic Representative Tony Coelho of California. Her mother assisted their courtship by inviting them to several White House state dinners. During this time the President dispatched his daughter as the U.S. representative to Paraguay’s presidential inauguration; to Morocco for the anniversary of the King’s ascension; and to the winter Olympics in Albertville, France. By 1992, Robert Koch had proposed to Doro. The First Lady ordered a mother-of-the-bride dress for herself and a bridal gown for her daughter from their favorite designer, Arnold Scaasi. The family gathered on June 28, 1992, and watched the President walk his only daughter down the aisle of the chapel at Camp David.
“That was one of the happiest days of my presidency,” said George Bush. He was still staggering from his unhappiest day two years before, when he had betrayed the most famous words he ever uttered: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”
He knew at the time he made the promise that it was a lie, but, as he said, he was prepared to do anything to get elected. His budget director, Richard Darman, convinced him that a tax increase would generate money for domestic spending and be his political salvation. Everyone else said it would be political suicide.
Lee Atwater, whom Bush had made chairman of the Republican National Committee, was flabbergasted. “The guy has no political instincts whatsoever,” he told the Republican consultant Roger Stone. “Bush and this crowd are going to screw it up. Bush won’t get reelected.”
Reneging on his campaign promise to Americans, the President agreed to a tax increase in 1990 as part of the $492 billion deficit-reduction package passed by Congress. He felt compelled to compromise because of the rapidly escalating costs of salvaging the savings-and-loan industry, whose estimated losses exceeded $230 billion. In exchange for agreeing to a tax increase, Bush insisted on cutting the capital-gains tax to benefit those who earned more than $200,000 a year. As a consequence, his poll numbers fell twenty points within twenty days, and he was taunted by newspaper headlines that read: “Waffle,” “Retreat,” “Blink,” “Flip Flop.” He admitted later that it was the “biggest mistake” of his presidency. “If I had to do that over, I wouldn’t do it.”
Democrats applauded him. “It was a profile in courage for George Bush,” said Dan Rostenkowski, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “He laid the economic foundation for the prosperity that Bill Clinton took credit for in the 1990s.”
Republicans thought it was a profile in lunacy. “You are going to get killed [in the midterm elections],” Ed Rollins, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told Bush’s pollster. “This is the most sacred pledge Bush ever made. If you raise taxes in this term, he can kiss his ass away in ’92, and he’s going to take a bunch of House members with him.”
Rollins immediately issued a memo to all House Republicans on the tax pledge: “Do not hesitate to distance yourself from the President.” He even went on a morning television show with the Republican consultant Doug Bailey to criticize the President for breaking his campaign promise.
The President, who watched television constantly in the White House, blanched when he saw the show. Demanding blind loyalty no matter what, he insisted that Ed Rollins be fired. “There wasn’t anything he could do about me,” said Doug Bailey, co-founder of the prestigious Republican consulting firm Bailey/Deardourff and Associates, “but poor Ed lost his job simply because he could not in good conscience tell Republicans running for reelection to fall on the sword of the President’s broken promise . . . Bush, of course, didn’t see it that way. He is obsessed with loyalty, loyalty, loyalty, which affects the entire family and inevitably leads all of them to their unhealthy preoccupation with enemies: ‘If you’re not for us, you’re against us, and if you’re against us, by God, you’ll pay.’”
The President laid down the law to House Republican leaders: “I’ll never do anything for you guys as long as Rollins is up there.” Within months Ed Rollins would resign.
The Vice President was in the shower when CNN reported that the President conceded to the Democrats and would be raising taxes. “I probably should have looked at the drain, because that’s where the Republican Party’s best issue . . . was headed,” said Dan Quayle. To say nothing of his own political career.
On the eve of the midterm elections the President announced his intention to sign the deficit-reduction bill, saying, “I can’t say this is the best thing that has happened to us . . . since the elimination of broccoli . . . but it represents a corrective action on a pattern of federal spending gone out of control.”
Republicans wished the President had simply backed down on broccoli. Months earlier he had banished the vegetable from the White House menu. “I do not like broccoli,” he said. “I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. I’m President of the United States now and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.” The crew of Air Force One put a sign in the galley of a broccoli floret with a red slash through it.
Now Republicans had to contend with bumper stickers that said, “Nixon lied to me about Watergate, Reagan lied to me about Iran-contra, and now Bush is lying to me about taxes.”
Just as Ed Rollins predicted, Republican voters stayed home in droves on November 6, 1990. “It was the lowest Republican off-year turnout since Watergate, and it was all because of Bush’s tax increase,” Rollins wrote in his rollicking memoir, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms. “We had a net loss of nine seats, but I’m convinced that my memo . . . saved fifteen incumbent seats that otherwise would have gone down the drain.”
One Republican disappointment was California’s seventeenth congressional district, where the Democrat Calvin Dooley was elected. Dooley made sport of President Bush when, in 1992, after redistricting occurred he was elected to the twentieth district. During the ’92 campaign, he regaled constituents about his experience as a first-term congressman in the Bush administration. He told voters in Fresno and Bakersfield how the President showed solidarity with the House of Representatives by coming up to the Hill just like other former House members to use the House gym. The President arrived at the Capitol in his bulletproof limousine accompanied by twenty-six motorcycle police, fourteen Secret Service agents, and enough firepower to arm Paraguay. Amid all this security, Bush worked out, showered, and returned to the White House.
“It’s quite an experience to be a lowly freshman congressman in the shower with the President of the United States (pause) and to look over and see (long pause) that the leader of the free world is (longer pause) . . . a . . . well . . . er . . . just an average little guy.”
Audiences guffawed each time he told the story, and at one Dooley fund-raiser in California a delegation from Washington, D.C., including the Speaker of the House of Representatives, had to struggle for composure as the congressman described the commander in chief’s “little stick.”
Determined to recoup his manhood, the President had a plan in place, thanks to the advice of a tough woman. When Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the President conferred with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Aspen, Colorado. “Remember, George,” she said. “I was almost to be defeated in England when the Falkland conflict happened. I stayed in office for eight years after that.”
Mrs. Thatcher was referring to Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, when she had dispatched England’s armed forces to establish British sovereignty. Known as the Iron Lady, she proved her mettle in that war and emerged victorious. At the time, George Bush characterized her as a “broad with steel balls.” Now she would provide the spine he needed to confront Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. When the President started to waver, she would back up his resolve by saying, “Don’t go wobbly on me, George. Don’t go wobbly.”
Continuing his August vacation at Kennebunkport, the President met with visiting heads of state, including King Hussein of Jordan, who arrived after meeting
with Saddam in Iraq. The King argued for negotiations, but Bush demanded immediate withdrawal. Not surprisingly, the President’s focus was on the one subject he knew best. “I will not allow this little dictator to control 25 percent of the civilized world’s oil,” he told Hussein. Queen Noor recalled her husband’s describing the meeting as “quite a raw experience.” She said the King was shocked by the President’s choice of words and his implication that there were only two worlds—the Arab world and “the civilized world.”
The President also met with Prince Bandar, the Saudi Arabian Ambassador and a member of the Saudi royal family. Bush told him the Pentagon had satellite photos showing Iraqi troops massing on the Saudi border. This was false. The photos did not show what the President claimed, but Bush felt he needed to exaggerate the danger of an Iraqi invasion to obtain consent to deploy American troops on Saudi soil. Once he had Saudi consent, the President understated the number of troops he intended to deploy in Saudi Arabia. He told Prince Bandar he would send 100,000 troops when he planned to send 250,000. That would be the first phase of the troop buildup known as Desert Shield. The President announced the deployment to the American people on August 8, 1990. But later in a news conference he declined to give any figure at all.
A lifetime of lying to achieve his goals made the President facile in this crisis: he concealed from the American public the massive size and duration of the military deployment; he withheld his plans to defend Saudi Arabia as well as liberate Kuwait; he hid his strategy for all-out war. He made no announcements until after the November elections. As Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame wrote, “his well-practiced and ruthless use of deception” was crucial in helping win support at home and abroad.
George had already decided that the country’s vital interests were at stake. Now he needed to persuade the American people that access to Iraq’s oil was a necessity for which it was worth spilling American blood. He careened around for weeks, frantically trying to find high-minded words for committing American troops. He talked about “a mad dictator” who wanted to control “the economic well being of every country in the world.” He said, “Our oil-lifeline is threatened.” And he said, “It is the national security,” and “It is aggression.” Grasping for a reason that would resonate, the President said, “If you want to sum it up in one word—it’s jobs.” He talked about the importance of standing up for the little guy in Kuwait, but people saw only oil-rich emirs riding around in their Mercedeses. “We must restore rulers to Kuwait,” said the President, but Americans were unmoved when they learned Kuwait’s sixty-four-year-old monarch, Sheik Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, had fled to the Saudi resort town of Taif with five of his forty wives. The President hammered “Iraq’s aggression,” saying it was a challenge not just to the security of Kuwait “but to the better world we all hope to build in the wake of the cold war . . . We are talking about the price of liberty.” Finally he ratcheted up the rhetoric to humanity’s greatest fear: annihilation. “Nuclear threat,” said the President. “We are determined to knock out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb potential.”
The rash of excuses—when the simple truth, as he put it to King Hussein, was that it was all about the control of oil—would, of course, be repeated when George W. also invaded Iraq a decade later. Unlike his father, W. claimed his war on Iraq was to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, W. said the war was “to make America a more secure country.” Bush 43 said the United States must invade Iraq because UN Gulf War cease-fire resolutions had been violated for a decade, allowing Saddam Hussein to amass chemical and biological weapons. Bush 43 said a military campaign was necessary because Saddam “has a connection to Al Qaeda.” War was necessary, Bush 43 stressed, “to free the Iraqi people” and “to bring democracy to the Middle East.” Playing to the most basic fear of annihilation, he said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Before George H.W.’s invasion, former President Jimmy Carter wrote to members of the United Nations Security Council and asked them not to support the use of force against Hussein. On November 29, 1990, the UN passed a resolution calling on Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait by January 15, 1991, after which UN member states could use all means necessary “to restore peace and security in the area.”
The President knew that waging a war to push the Iraqi army out of Kuwait would cost billions of dollars and require a massive mobilization of the U.S. military. He needed to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein was evil. The second bit of convincing was more difficult: that the oil fiefdom of Kuwait was a struggling young democracy. The CIA describes Kuwait as a “nominal constitutional monarchy,” but the emphasis should be on “nominal.” The country ruled by the al-Sabah family, personal friends of the Bushes, does not allow political parties, and only 10 percent of its citizens (population 2,183,161) are allowed to vote.
Over the next six months Secretary of State James A. Baker put together a coalition of thirty-four countries to provide ground troops, aircraft, ships, and medics. He also raised $50 million from U.S. allies. The government of Kuwait spent $11.9 million in fees to Hill and Knowlton to mobilize U.S. public opinion against Saddam. The public-relations company conducted opinion polls and audience surveys to take the emotional pulse of the country in order to identify themes that would be most effective in selling the war.
“We found,” said Dee Alsop, who helped Hill and Knowlton with the PR campaign, “the theme that struck the deepest emotional chord was the fact that Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped.”
Bush finally had a rationale he could embrace, which he sold as the struggle between good and evil. Being on the side of the angels gave him renewed confidence as he held forth on the necessity of going to war. He wrote in his diary:
I know the consequences if we fail, and I know what will happen if . . . we look wimpish, or unwilling to do what we must do . . .
I think of the evil that is this man [Saddam]. He has to not only be checked, but punished, and then we worry about how we handle our relations with the Arab countries.
Time chose the two faces of George Bush—one with foreign policy vision and the other with domestic blindness—as the magazine’s “Men of the Year.” That mixed honor might have triggered the dream George had about his father:
We were driving into some hotel near a golf course, and there was another golf course way over across the fence, though not a very good one. I heard Dad was there, so I went to see him, and he was in a hotel room. We embraced, and I told him I missed him very much. Aren’t dreams funny? I could see him very clearly: big, strong, and highly respected.
The specter of his father as “big, strong, and highly respected” drove the President in his conduct of the impending war. On January 12, 1991, he told his staff: “I have resolved all moral questions in my mind. This is black and white, good and evil.”
That day both houses of Congress voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq. In the Senate, the vote was passed through the efforts of Connecticut’s Democrat Joe Lieberman and Virginia’s Republican John Warner. The ratio of 52–47 was the narrowest ever to vote for war. One newly elected senator who voted against the resolution was Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. On his first trip to the White House, the Democrat had cornered the President and spoken forcefully about the inadvisability of war. Bush shook him off and later asked, “Who is this chickenshit?”
The President felt immense relief when Congress gave him the power to act in accordance with the UN resolution. As he wrote in his diary:
I felt the heavy weight that I might be faced with impeachment lifted from my shoulders as I heard the results. In truth, even had Congress not passed the resolutions I would have acted and ordered our troops into combat. I know it would have caused an outcry, but it was the right thi
ng to do. I was comfortable in my own mind that I had the constitutional authority. It had to be done.
The United States had deployed 540,000 troops to the Persian Gulf by January 16, 1991, when the air war started. The night skies over Baghdad lit up with tracer fire as the first bombs of Operation Desert Storm fell on the capital of Iraq. The world watched the war live on CNN, almost as if it were a video game. The precision of Scud missiles slicing through the skies followed by the swoosh of black bat planes known as stealth bombers became prime-time entertainment. The Saudis were so impressed by the air show they wanted to purchase the same planes, but the United States would not sell them. Instead, the Saudis had to settle for buying the less sophisticated F-15XPs. They purchased seventy-two from the United States at a total cost of $9 billion, including weapons and ground support. Generals with shiny stars on their battle fatigues took to the airwaves to describe the killing efficiency of F-16 Falcons, F-4G Wild Weasels, A-10 Warthogs. The Pentagon had clamped down on press coverage so that viewers saw only what the commanders wanted them to see. The decision to control the news was made early in the strategy sessions. Many in the military believed that they had lost Vietnam because an independent press corps, which had been allowed to travel the countryside unsupervised, reported whatever they saw. The commanders felt the stories had been so negative that Americans turned against the military mission of the war and made it unwinnable. So from the beginning of Desert Storm the generals insisted on a news blackout.
The mesmerizing air war lasted thirty-eight days before the ground war began on February 23, 1991, and carved “a highway of death” through Iraq. The President insisted that Saddam either surrender or face military defeat. “We don’t want to have another draw, another Vietnam, a sloppy ending,” Bush said. When Saddam agreed to an unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait, the President issued a cease-fire. Within one hundred hours the $61.1 billion war was over.