by Kitty Kelley
Dr. Burton Lee dived under the table to loosen the President’s tie. A nurse mentioned taking off his belt, but finding none on his tuxedo pants, Lee began to unzip Bush’s fly. The President stirred slightly.
“Burt, what the hell are you doing?”
“Just checking out the big boy, Chief,” said the White House physician.
The First Lady started laughing, got up from the President’s side, and helped clean up the Prime Minister. The President was driven back to the Akasaka Palace and put to bed, while Barbara jocularly addressed the crowd, saying it was all the Ambassador’s fault for not playing better tennis. “He and George played the emperor and the crown prince and they were badly beaten. And we Bushes are not used to that.”
Some people suspected that George had been drinking heavily before the dinner and Dr. Lee spun a hangover into a case of twenty-four-hour flu. The doctor admitted that he had given the President a flu shot a few months earlier. A television camera left running on the balcony of the dining room had filmed the incident; images of the President of the United States throwing up in the Japanese Prime Minister’s lap had been transmitted around the world. The video showed Bush’s ashen face as he was being lifted up framed by a floral display on the table, making him look as if he were lying in a wreathed coffin.
The President recovered the next day and held a press conference with the Prime Minister to quash alarms over his health.
Q: Mr. President, people all around the world yesterday saw some very disturbing video of you collapsing in apparently very severe distress that many of us are not accustomed to when we see people with the flu. Can you describe what you were experiencing there? And also can you say that your doctors have conclusively ruled out anything other than the flu, or will there be further tests?
A: No further tests. Totally ruled out anything other than the 24-hour flu. I’ve had an EKG, perfectly normal. I’ve had blood pressure taken and probing around in all kinds of ways . . . So this is the flu.
The President apologized to the Prime Minister for his “shabby performance” the night before and said he was embarrassed that film of him lying on the floor being attended by aides had been televised.
“George talked about his throwing-up incident constantly after that,” recalled former House Speaker Thomas S. Foley. “He and Barbara visited Japan when I was the Ambassador in 1998, and I invited them to lunch. He couldn’t stop talking about upchucking at that State Dinner six years before. After lunch, he even called the guy whose lap he had erped in. He just wanted to say hi and see how he was doing.”
When the President returned to Washington in January 1992, he flew to New Hampshire, where he was being challenged in the Republican primary by Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon speechwriter and brilliant far-right commentator. At the same time Richard Nixon, appearing on the Today show, was asked his opinion of Bush’s performance as President. Publicly Nixon supported his former protégé but later confided his concern to his assistant Monica Crowley.
“I hope I sounded all right on Bush,” he said. “I’m afraid that I just don’t sound credible defending him because I really don’t think he’s done that great of a job. And his New Hampshire visit is a disaster. He’s up there petting cows and raving about God knows what. He just looks so desperate. And you know, he’s getting no support from his people; the White House communications people are saying that the New Hampshire trip was triumphant! Oh, boy. They must be dreaming down there.”
Sharing this concern was the wife of the White House counsel C. Boyden Gray. “I knew George was going to lose in 1992 because he wasn’t focused on winning,” said Carol Gray. “How could he be? He was distracted by his own troops and all their skirmishes . . . The infighting around him was so overwhelming you could not believe it, and being an intrinsically weak man, he was unable to keep order in his own office. Remember how he could not fire John Sununu and had to call in his son to do it for him . . . The grown men around the President were fighting like kindergartners, and he could not stop them. He wanted too much to be a pal to everyone, so he didn’t step in to stop the wrangling. He did not have the nerve to lay down the law to any of them . . . He had Nick Brady and Jim Baker and Craig Fuller and my husband clawing at each other day and night, trying to get close to him. Their fights sucked all his emotional energy at a time when he needed to run the country. The President is a man too easily distracted. He’s got a real attention deficit disorder, and those guys should have protected him. Instead, they fought each other like little boys on the playground trying to be the one closest to the big guy. It was sick, so sick. If not so tragic, it would have been hysterically funny.
“God, I can’t tell you the weekends in my marriage that were lost to Boyden stewing over Sununu or Craig Fuller or plotting against Jim Baker. I was so young at the time—Boyden is seventeen years older than I am—but I saw so much being married to him that I knew early on George Bush was never going to be reelected. He was not a strong President like LBJ, who never would have tolerated that kind of interpersonal disarray to dominate the Oval Office. George left the running of his family to Barbara, who was bull-dyke tough . . . He probably should have let her run the country, too, instead of relying on men like Jim Baker and John Sununu and my husband. George might just as well have put the country into the hands of five-year-olds who did nothing but sling Play-Doh at each other as to rely on those men . . .
“To George Bush being President meant dipping into foreign policy and entertaining at the highest level. He loved visiting the Queen of England and meeting heads of state and going to diplomatic parties and hosting State Dinners and playing tennis with Pete Sampras on the White House courts. I hate to say this because I’m a Republican and I loved George Bush . . . He was a great guy. I remember the first time Boyden and I went to Camp David after he was elected President. I felt a little out of my element because I was so young . . . I was walking down the hall to our room and I passed the President’s room. He was on the floor. ‘C’mon in, Carol,’ he said. ‘I’m doing my buttocks exercise.’ I thought he was great. I loved the way he looked and acted. So friendly, unlike his wife, who was a monster . . . Barbara scared me to death. I blame her in a way for emasculating him to the point that he couldn’t delegate and stand up to men like Jim Baker and my husband . . . Those guys were always in fighting mode like cocks ready to claw each other to the death. George couldn’t cope with it all . . . I guess his mother was right when she said he was just not cut out to be President because he didn’t have a strong stomach.”
The President’s stamina had been severely tested in July 1991 over his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Initially Bush had wanted to make the black lawyer his first nominee to the Court the year before, but Boyden Gray said Thomas, who had been on the D.C. Court of Appeals for seventeen months, was not ready. Gray recommended David H. Souter to fill the first Supreme Court vacancy and Thomas to fill the next one.
Bush wanted credit in the history books for appointing a black justice to the Supreme Court, but he needed to find a conservative who was against abortion to satisfy the demands of right-wing Republicans. Still, the President knew he was in for a confirmation fight when he proposed the inexperienced jurist for the highest court, because when he was confirmed as a federal judge, many senators said they would not confirm him for the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas opposed affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act, and abortion, but Bush figured that Thomas’s race would weigh heavily in his favor and stave off the opposition of civil rights groups. It almost worked.
The National Urban League withheld its opposition, but the board of directors of the NAACP voted 49–1 to oppose; the AFL-CIO Executive Council voted 35–0 to oppose; the NOW officers and convention delegates voted unanimously to oppose; and the black National Bar Association voted to oppose.
Still smarting from the John Tower debacle, the President was determined to have his way on Clarence Thomas. After the American Bar Association had rated Tho
mas as “qualified” rather than “well qualified” or “not qualified,” Bush said, “He is the most qualified person to sit on the court.”
“That nomination was a deeply cynical ploy on the part of my husband and the President,” said Carol Gray. She said she felt sick watching the machinations of the Bush White House force the Senate to accept a less than stellar conservative jurist for the highest court in the land. “They almost deserved the icky sordid mess they got with Anita Hill.”
After Clarence Thomas testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee for five days, the committee deadlocked 7–7 on the nomination and voted to send it to the full Senate without making a recommendation. Days later, Timothy Phelps broke a story in Newsday that Anita F. Hill, a University of Oklahoma law professor, had told the FBI that she had been sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas while working for him at the EEOC. The White House dismissed the allegations as “unfounded”; and Clarence Thomas swore in an affidavit that they were not true, but the Senate, embarrassed that the charges were not investigated thoroughly, delayed the vote on Thomas to hold public hearings on the charges.
The debate became rancorous, and the accusations of sexual harassment deeply divided the country, rubbing raw the wounds on both sides of the political spectrum. The television audience exceeded soap-opera ratings as everyone, including the President, watched the men on the Senate Judiciary Committee, all white, interrogate a black female professor and a black male judge about squeamishly intimate details of their personal lives.
Politics had coiled itself around gender and race like a python, crushing decency and decorum from the proceedings. When three Republican senators—Alan Simpson, Arlen Specter, and Orrin Hatch—appeared to be hectoring Anita Hill, women became outraged. The discord between Republicans and Democrats flared like gas flames, and no one emerged from the conflagration unsinged.
The President, who had started it all, wrote to a friend in Lubbock, Texas, complaining about all the groups he saw as being too much in favor of abortion rights and affirmative action that were speaking up against Thomas’s nomination:
They are trying to destroy this decent man. I do not think they will succeed but they are in frenzy around here. The most liberal of the women’s groups are really outrageous; and then you have the smug liberal staffers who leak FBI reports to achieve their ignoble ends. It is sinister and evil, but I doubt the Senate under the control of the one party will do a damn thing about it . . . This is an ugly process and one can see clearly why so many good people elect to stay out of public life.
A few days later, the President played golf at the Holly Hills Country Club near Camp David and brought a small television so he could watch the Thomas-Hill coverage as he raced from hole to hole. He had been advised more than once not to attack Anita Hill personally for fear of looking insensitive to women, but Bush could not restrain himself. Bristling with anger, he walked toward a group of reporters and described the hearings as “the ultimate in trying to drag someone through the mud and tear down his family . . .
“How come the normal behavior [on the part of Anita Hill] for ten years? How come the last-minute charge brought before the American people? I don’t understand that. She didn’t have to come forward at the last moment.” The President said he and his family “felt kind of unclean watching this.”
Three days later Clarence Thomas was confirmed by a hard-fought vote of 52–48, but the fallout had poisoned everyone. Years later Boyden Gray would tell Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that it took five years for Clarence Thomas to become a whole person again.
The confirmation process had brought out the worst in everyone, diminishing all those involved in some way: Republican Senator John Danforth of Missouri, who led the bitter fight for Thomas, lost luster among his colleagues for his dogmatic defense. Senators Simpson and Hatch were stung by the fury of their female constituents, who bombarded their offices with letters criticizing them for their treatment of Anita Hill; Senator Arlen Specter barely won reelection in Pennsylvania after his brutal cross-examination of Hill. The handling of her sexual-harassment charges against Justice Thomas had infuriated women across the political spectrum, who realized how little clout they had in a Congress dominated by white men. That fall an unprecedented number of female candidates ran for public office. Five women won seats in the Senate, and forty-seven women won seats in the House of Representatives. Most of the winners were Democrats.
In the end, President Bush got his way with Clarence Thomas, but at enormous cost. The process caused his party great enmity and sacrificed goodwill that he sorely needed. Worst of all, he had soiled his toga. Forsaking the ideal of presidential leadership expressed by Abraham Lincoln, Bush had not strengthened the bonds of affection among people by appealing to their better angels. Rather, he had caused the level of public discourse to be lowered, and the divisive afterclap affected him. He wrote a letter to Senator Alan Simpson, who had berated the press, Democrats, and women’s groups while helping to get Clarence Thomas confirmed:
You were right on all this. You helped a decent man turn the tide. You walked where angels feared to tread by zapping some groups and some press, and, in the process, they climbed all over your ass—but damnit you were right . . . Having said all this I’ll confess—there are days when I just hate this job—not many, but some.
Reading the polls after the hearings, the President decided he needed to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1991 in order to get reelected. He had already vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, claiming it was a “quota bill,” but in the wake of Clarence Thomas he could not afford another veto. His core beliefs were irrelevant. All that mattered was winning.
Earlier in the year his staff had arranged for him to receive an honorary doctorate from Hampton University, the all-black college in Hampton, Virginia, but the degree did nothing to enhance his standing in the civil rights community. Most of the 1,023 graduates refused to stand for his entrance to “Hail to the Chief.” They did not applaud the citation praising him for forty-three years of service to black education, and when he delivered his speech equating prejudice with cowardice, they sat on their hands.
Determined not to veto any more civil rights legislation, the President directed his White House counsel to work with the Senate and House Democrats to reach a bipartisan agreement on the 1991 Civil Rights Act. But those who attended the negotiations said that Boyden Gray consistently stymied the proceedings with contrary proposals. In one meeting, former Transportation Secretary William T. Coleman waved one of Gray’s memos.
“The President told us to negotiate in good faith,” Coleman said. “Can you believe what Boyden came up with?”
Gray snatched the document from Coleman’s hand and ripped it to shreds.
“That’s inoperable,” said Gray, unable to defend his position.
“I haven’t heard that phrase since the Nixon administration,” said Coleman, laughing.
During another negotiation with civil rights representatives, including the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Gray tried to establish a rapport with the Latinos and African Americans present by saying that he identified with their plight.
“You know I can understand how you feel, and what it must be like,” he said, “because I, too, felt the pain of discrimination when I was at Harvard and I was the only W.A.S.P. on the Crimson.”
The room fell silent and people shifted with embarrassment. The White House lawyer did not realize he looked like a dundering fool. “Everyone around that table was thunderstruck at the astonishingly insensitive and inappropriate remark,” recalled Ralph Neas, then executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “Here was one of America’s scions, an heir to the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco fortune, demonstrating his plantation mentality. This was the type of man George Herbert Walker Bush surrounded himself with as President of the United States. With such a person advising him, there was no danger of Bush ever ascending to the pan
theon of presidents where Abraham Lincoln was enshrined.”
After a bitter and anguished struggle, a compromise was finally reached, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991 was sent to the President’s desk for his signature. On the eve of the bill signing, Boyden Gray again emerged as the hangman. He circulated a presidential order to all federal agencies directing them to comply with provisions that would end a quarter century’s worth of affirmative action and hiring guidelines benefiting women and minorities.
The validity of executive orders has been questioned over the years because they are powerful edicts. It is a President’s way of avoiding congressional authorization and bulldozing over judicial review. An executive order is a law made by a single individual—the President of the United States—and Boyden Gray’s executive order for George Bush sought to overturn decades of civil rights legislation.
When news of the executive order was leaked, the entire Bush administration was turned upside down. Frantic cabinet secretaries called the White House in an uproar, and civil rights leaders denounced the directive as an assault on decades of civil rights progress. Everyone foresaw years of litigation to resolve whether an act of Congress takes precedence over an executive order while those who most needed protection by the law would be stripped of their civil rights. Backed into an uncomfortable corner, the President’s press secretary said the executive order, immediately withdrawn, “may have been open to misinterpretation.”
The President signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 on November 21, 1991, in a Rose Garden ceremony that was overshadowed by the intent of Boyden Gray’s presidential directive. The President condemned the “evil of discrimination” and reiterated his support for affirmative action, but he got none of the credit he craved. “There is no question that the Bush administration will continue to do everything possible to undermine the Civil Rights Act of 1991,” said Ralph Neas at the time, “and undermine the bipartisan enforcement policies of the past quarter century.”