George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  It appeared less simple at the time. Living, as opposed to critiquing, the 1950s and early ’60s, you focused on polarity, not uniformity, and how America changed: from a country of tradition to a culture crazed by youth; an administration of businessmen to a government spiced by academe; a Protestant-only presidency to an office others could attain; politicians equating success with legislation to leaders feeling that style wrote the prose of the legend that was Camelot.

  In shorthand code those scoring the 1950s—1952 and 1956 Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson, tarring the “green fairways of indifference,” or John Kenneth Galbraith, torching “the bland leading the bland”—thought America before Kennedy had been puritanical, inhibited. As a young, Presbyterian, and in Murray Kempton’s phrase, “shabby-genteel” male, I came from people who discerned in the Age of Ike a Fred MacMurray type of affability that, in retrospect, seems almost virginal. Demographically and attitudinally, they dominated the GOP.

  Only later did we see a close working compact that bound both then-opposing camps. Our pillar was the keeper of the faith, defender of the peace, and scourge of “Godless Communism.” Who doubted that John Winthrop’s “Shining City upon a Hill” was the last best hope of freedom? To most of the republic, said 1963–69 Texas governor John Connally, the compact helped sustain a system that “fed better, fed more, clothed better, clothed more, housed better, housed more” than any system ever devised by man. In what TV’s Archie Bunker later called the “good old U.S. of A.,” it was a good time to be alive.

  “The Forgotten Americans. The Silent Majority. Hard-working, church-going people. Farmers. Shopkeepers,” a 1990 PBS documentary called the people among whom I grew up. “People with an inbred respect for authority and an unyielding belief in the American Dream.” From a small town’s closeness to the earth, you seldom wandered far away.

  Caledonia, population 2,188, straddled a line between the lowlands of Lake Ontario and rolling greenery to the south in Western New York. It was a factory village, settled by Scotch-Irish immigrants like McPherson, Hinsdale, McIntyre, and Denoon—names vaulting back more than a century earlier, when travelers paused on their sojourn west. It had the country’s first fish hatchery, porches whose swings spied neighbors’ comings and goings, five grocery stores, two car dealerships, a Masonic Temple, a barber shop, and a town tramp dubbed the Big R, abbreviating her surname. Unlike the America of a later age—assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, then malaise—it was a community of piety and place.

  Caledonia was also integrated, unlike many northern and almost all southern burgs, blacks buoying my school band, choir, and Little League team. Near the baseball field, which paralleled a creek, stood the vortex of my youth—the First Presbyterian Church, or White Kirk, where adults read scripture, sent their children to Vacation Bible School, and in general believed what Margaret Thatcher, whom I came to admire as much as any leader of our age, later called “the things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.” Bush’s mother could have said each word. The voters he one day sought could too.

  Our church was at least as large, though not as lavish, as the town’s Episcopal Church and smaller, though less mysterious, than St. Columba’s Catholic Church, and the singing was more reserved than in next-door Mumford’s black Baptist Church—and it could be almost as much a social organization as a vehicle for salvation, hosting November’s annual turkey dinner of takeouts, handouts, and fewer Democrats than pies. The year’s other pleasance—July’s Strawberry Festival, with its homemade ice cream and berries shucked by hand—graced Caledonia’s other Presbyterian meeting place: the Stone Church, across the street—Church Street, naturally—from a small two-story house where I was raised.

  My father was an agriculture teacher, then high school counselor, taking outside jobs to support five children. One day, driving a backhoe, he raised an Indian skeleton that revealed a world not of bloodthirsty savages but of hunters and fishermen and New York counties that bore their name—Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Wyoming. My mother reminded me of no one as much as actress Eve Arden. Before becoming a high school librarian, she had taught Latin in the small Upstate town of Rushford. At five I accidentally told a teacher, “My mother taught in Russia.” Recalling Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Joseph McCarthy’s “list” of 205 State Department employees who “belong to the Communist Party,” my parents expected J. Edgar Hoover to knock at our front door.

  Behind our house the Lehigh Railroad’s whistle voiced distant ventures that spoke of impossible dreams. I walked its tracks to school, crossing hazy swampland ankle-deep in water—or rode a bicycle festooned with streamers and cards attached to spokes that scent of fingers on a mandolin. Returning home was equally self-dramatic. First, I passed aging Scotchy Tennent—a rumored veteran of the charge up San Juan Hill—sitting on the American Legion Building stoop. He dispensed candy to hangers-on, talking of combat and the flag and temptations assailing the small-town faith. (Ninety) proof lay a hundred feet away, slumped beneath a tree—our town drunk, Red Ned, half the size of Otis Campbell of TV’s The Andy Griffith Show, set in mythical Mayberry, North Carolina, but just as gassed.

  Law ’n’ order crested up the hill in Bernard Hayward, Caledonia’s chief of police, who resembled Mayberry policeman Bernard P. Fife in more than name. He packed but rarely used a gun, relying on sturdy citizens to, as TV’s Barn’ would say, “nip it [crime] in the bud.” Complying, we frequented Moonwink’s Restaurant, where after school-league Biddy Basketball victories the owner donated banana splits, and the village library, founded in 1826, with quotations on the wall urging a more moral and fruitful life.

  One day my best friend and I, each ten, visited O’Brien’s Drugstore, not far from the veterans statue in the middle of town. It was not long before I noticed the proprietor looking over our shoulders.

  “What would your parents think?” asked Mr. O’Brien, a courtly, soft-spoken man, to my friend, holding Playboy magazine. Oblivious, I was reading Mad’s latest issue, no more knowing what Playboy was than how E = MC2.

  I waited for my friend, then stepped outside and headed home, unaware how Dwight Eisenhower often hailed “the great and priceless privilege of growing up in an American small town.”

  All of the banal and towering, self-assured and un-self-confident, devious and trustworthy people who are the people of the United States have something central to their life. To Mario Cuomo, it is the immigrant experience; commentator Bill O’Reilly, his Catholicism; George Bush, noblesse oblige. The small town was Ike’s central fact—and a large part of the America that made Bush president. Church Street and Wall Street, high school and prep school, blue-collar and Connecticut chic, believed in its chivalries and its codes.

  Eisenhower was perhaps the most beloved man in American history. In late 1954, 84 percent of the American people in a Gallup poll couldn’t name one thing Ike had done wrong in his first two years as president. A year later 60 percent of Democrats wanted the Republican as their 1956 nominee. “Everybody ought to be happy every day,” he said. “Play hard, have fun doing it, and despise wickedness.” Five years later I witnessed on TV my first act of political theater—Ike at the 1960 GOP Convention in Chicago, deplaning, speaking, waving; in writer Richard Cohen’s words, “a buoyant and humane man, encircled by a captivating grin.”

  Eisenhower is remembered not only as a “great and good man,” to quote biographer Stephen Ambrose, but as a great and good president. He knit eight years of peace and prosperity—1.5 percent inflation, the Interstate Highway System, St. Lawrence Seaway, the first civil rights bill in eighty-two years, domestic unity, and nonpareil prestige—a decade more Americans would choose to relive, I believe, than any of the century. Wrote Theodore White: “Never did the sun shine fairer across a great Nation and its prospects than it did in the age of Eisenhower.”

  On Janu
ary 21, 1989, President Bush had his first White House meeting with the speech staff in the Roosevelt Room, a rich, mahogany chamber off the Oval Office, where he talked of policy, language, and the Ghosts of Presidents Past. To my left was a large fireplace; to its side, a patchwork of flags—one of the United States and another bearing the presidential seal. Across the room was Theodore Roosevelt’s 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. Western art and a Remington bust enhanced the effect.

  I asked Bush what predecessors he most admired. The president said Lincoln, because he abolished slavery and saved the Union. TR, because he was what Bush hoped to be—the conserver of lands and wildlife for unborn generations. Finally, he named the Sunflower son who graduated from West Point, becoming general of the Army, Columbia University president, first Supreme Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and thirty-fourth president.

  “I always liked Ike,” Bush began. He revered him as a person, chief of World War II’s Allied Expeditionary Force, and what Andrew Jackson became to Harry Truman, Truman to Gerald Ford, and FDR to Ronald Reagan—a presidential frame of reference.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He was bipartisan. It was Congress and the president on the same side. We’ve lost so much of that since then,” Bush said, unguardedly twirling glasses in his hands. “He got the country moving in one direction—representing our best values along the way.”

  Bush hoped to govern like Eisenhower—more as president than politician, his model a plaque that sat on Ike’s desk: “Gently in manner, strong in deed.” Soon speech references dubbed “Dwight Eisenhower— beloved Ike” sprouted like fireflies, aides joking that “beloved Ike” was Eisenhower’s surname. Finally, the word came forth from staff secretary Jim Cicconi, Bush’s fellow Texan: No mas. “If I see that phrase again,” he said, partly tongue in cheek, “I’ll go back and vote for Stevenson.” Pity—our research file still bulged with beloved Ikeisms. I am sure Bush never knew of Cicconi’s decree.

  Eisenhower was not the kindly stick figure / father figure drawn by critics and admirers. Reserved, he was mercurial. His fuse was limited to intimates. Most people despair over big things—separation, death. Ike exploded over the little—a lousy seven iron, a balky jeep ignition. (Years later I used Ike as a scapegoat: “If temper was good enough for Eisenhower, it’s good enough for me.”)

  Ike could be cold. Journalist Hedley Donovan shocked friends by saying that Eisenhower was smarter than Stevenson but not as nice. He used aides to deflect criticism. Nixon, his vice president, noted how Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, Ike’s wartime chief of staff, tearfully recalled, “I was only Ike’s prat boy. Ike always had to have a prat boy.” Yet he was also adored by crowds in India and Italy, Budapest and Berlin. Many leaders are loved in their own countries or admired in others. Ike was loved internationally as America’s sine qua non. Hearing Bush, I wondered, What was it that so set Eisenhower apart?

  To begin, he was a man of inordinate goodwill. “In politics,” Nixon observed, “the natural reaction is to have strong hatreds one way or the other. Ike didn’t fit that pattern. He didn’t think of people who disagreed with him as being the enemy. He thought, ‘They don’t agree with me.’” At home Eisenhower felt that “the road to success must be down the middle”; abroad, knowing war, he hated it—“I’ve had enough of war,” Ike told the Soviets in 1955— thus began the age of summitry, the belief that “open skies” could open hearts. Three decades later what Bush called the Revolution of ’89 flowed from the morality and humanity of a soldier, diplomat, and five-star general.

  Ike encapsulated his age and land. He liked Zane Grey novels and TV Westerns, Bush’s kind of escapist lilt. As the president told Eisenhower’s Centenary Commission in a 1990 speech, Ike’s favorite band was Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. (Sadly, Bush axed my line “Of course, his [Eisenhower’s] fox trot was better than mine. As Barbara says, whose isn’t?”) Ike played baseball and football at West Point. Bush played baseball at Yale. As president, each attended the Army-Navy football game, culled from America’s psychic attic. Eisenhower installed a putting green a few feet from the Oval Office, his love of golf a national belly laugh. (Out too went the Centenary line: “You’ll know I’ve had a similar impact if the next few years bring creation of a seniors’ fishing tour.” The president could be wary about equating himself with Ike.)

  It is true Eisenhower was not a linguist; to many, that affirmed his honest sense of identity. “He was one of us—we trusted him to act on behalf of us,” Bush told the Eisenhower Commission. Next came a passage the president kept in: “In fact, fracturing syntax, Ike even spoke like us.” Smile and self-effacement. “Come to think of it, now I know why he’s among my favorite presidents.”

  Above all Ike was beloved because he acted—decided—as a president should. Bush had a splendid résumé when he ran for president— but it didn’t include the words “preserved civilization.” Eisenhower’s did. He provided what he prescribed for democracy: “faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy.” Eclipsing biography’s flesh and bones, Ike was as much a citizen of London as Abilene.

  After one fit of Eisenhower temper, his mother told the then ten-year-old, “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city.” He did, and as Bush said, enriched the nation’s. Beloved Ike, indeed.

  After reading and writing millions of words about Eisenhower, Stephen Ambrose concluded that the secret to his success was trust: “I never found him in a personal lie.” This account will show how Bush, in his starched white shirts trekking the oil fields, proving that Prescott Bush’s son could make it on his own, and mentally readying to join Dad’s craft of politics, was a man of honor too, speaking and listening with respect for people as individuals.

  In 1990 Ann Landers wrote that “manners are” an inheritance to “children who are taught kindness, generosity, and respect at home.” The downside was naiveté. My father tells how at eight, I beat up a bully, then ran after him, asking forgiveness. Two years later, visiting my mother’s home city, Worcester, Massachusetts, I gave a stranger twenty-five cents to buy baseball cards for me, which he pledged to, but did not, return. Small towns can leave you more smart than street-smart, needing to learn how to treat life warily. Ike learned in the Army. Nixon learned in the Navy, playing poker. As we shall see, America’s forty-first president could be excused for feeling cynical after Democrats reneged on their 1990 tax agreement to trim multiyear spending.

  Republicans felt taken, as they had in the phantasmagoric election of 1960. “We were babes in the woods,” said Nixon, running against Kennedy for president. Much of the theft occurred in Texas and Chicago: people registered in the graveyard; the same people voting in different districts; more backing Kennedy than resided in a district. “The stealing was outrageous,” said Bush, whose Harris County voted solidly GOP. “If we’d had more people in Chicago that could count in those wards, Nixon probably would have been elected.” The theft taught Bush a lesson Nixon would not forget.

  Two years later Bush entered politics, running for GOP chairman of Harris County—for Republicans, historically more of a waif of the moon than bright noon sun. In 1952 Democrats had owned every southern U.S. House and Senate seat from Virginia to California. By 1956 Eisenhower peripherally cracked the solid South by taking four states, including his birthplace, Texas. In 1961 John Tower became the Lone Star State’s first Republican U.S. senator since Reconstruction. At the same time, Texas was growing from without. Veterans from elsewhere came, enjoyed, and stayed. Many left the cities for Republican suburbia. Oil made Texas even more business friendly. Risk takers—entrepreneurs—felt at ease in the GOP.

  As the state moved rightward, the ultraright John Birch Society also thrived, worrying some Republicans that it might seize the party apparatus. “Up to now, our primaries’d been small in-house affairs,” said Bush’s first campaign manager, J. Roy Goodearle. “The story is that one time the only folks showing up were two drunks and a Democrat at th
e meeting by mistake.” Unless a strong candidate entered, “a Bircher might win a low-turnout county chairman race.”

  To Goodearle, “George’s attraction was that he’d bring in enough voters to defeat the Birchers. Our folks thought he was conservative, but safe.” Bush was also ready. “This was a challenge I’d been waiting for,” Poppy said, “an opening into politics at the ground level where it all starts.” He easily won the vote—his first election victory—then surprisingly tried to enlist the Birchers within the GOP base. Their toxicity eluded Bush, Goodearle said. “George didn’t understand.”

  About this time Lewis Mumford termed Ike’s successor, who never lost an election, “the first American President to give literature . . . a place of dignity and honor in our national life.” If, quoting Kennedy, the presidency was “the vital center of action,” language was its core. Only seven years older than Bush, JFK scored with his inaugural, Cuban Missile Crisis speech, and 1963 nuclear disarmament address, called by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev “the greatest speech by an American president since Roosevelt.” Another speech confronted the Soviets’ concrete and barbed wire wall, built in 1961, that divided Berlin, halted the refugee flow from the Communist East to democratic West, and separated families till its 1989 collapse.

  On June 26, 1963, Kennedy addressed hundreds of thousands of people in the divided city, speaking briefly but unforgettably—“Ich bin ein Berliner”—I am a Berliner. Two and a half years into his presidency, JFK was still from, not of, politics’ rock ’em–sock ’em maelstrom. In the 1960 Wisconsin primary, a drunk had tossed a glass in his face. Kennedy had picked it up and said, “Here’s your drink.” His style gripped reporters, even would-be pols—“JFK was understated,” said Bush. “Never a false public step.” He began the Peace Corps, formed the Alliance for Progress, braved the Bay of Pigs, and presented “a picture of total urbanity,” one writer said, “the first true reflection in the Presidency of America at the turn of the mid-century, a country of city dwellers long gone from Main Street.”