George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  In 1990 President Bush introduced scholar David Donald before his White House Lincoln lecture. Aware of JFK’s respect for Lincoln, I had called Kennedy Presidential Library director David Powers, who sent me an October 1960 campaign reference to Lincoln, writing, “Jack used this here [Illinois] and in other places [vs. Nixon].” Bush used it too, invoking how in 1861, leaving Springfield to assume the presidency, “Lincoln addressed his home people at the Great Western Railway Station.” Listening, I drifted back to Middle America’s 1960s split view. On one hand, it liked how JFK made of politics a sudden magic place—“Jack,” said a Democrat, “is the first Irish Brahmin.” On the other, it mistrusted his liberalism, beautiful people, and as Hubert Humphrey wrote, “win at all cost” code—thus, the 50-50 election tie.

  In a fall 1961 Gallup poll meriting the phrase white lie or faulty memory, 62 percent of those surveyed said they had voted for Kennedy in 1960. (He actually got 49.7.) JFK might have won reelection in a breeze. Only the South resisted, civil rights’ irresistible force facing the region’s immovable object. Kennedy was in Dallas November 22, 1963, partly to slow the free fall; a Texas poll showed conservative senator Barry Goldwater—a libertarian, a true believer (“In your heart,” said posters, “you know he’s right”)—narrowly leading him. A Goldwater tide might have helped Bush unseat liberal U.S. senator Ralph Yarborough in 1964. Poppy had planned to paint the incumbent as a zealot. Instead, Kennedy’s death made Texan Lyndon Johnson president.

  Suddenly, Goldwater’s—thus, briefly Bush’s—tide began running out. Attacked by Yarborough as “a right-wing extremist,” Bush lost 56.2 to 43.6 percent but ran far ahead of Goldwater’s 36.5 percent in Texas. In 1966 Yale ’48 resigned at Zapata, selling his share for more than $1 million. Entering politics, Bush had found the water fine.

  Franklin Roosevelt called himself a juggler, the left hand not knowing what the right was doing. Bush understood, trying to finesse the difference between his background and constituency. In 1966 he denounced the Birch Society but gave TV speeches scoring the United Nations. The perceived country club Republican opposed segregation, knocked busing, and hailed Ike’s “sensible center.” Bush had bought a home in Houston’s Tanglewood area. As Harris County chairman, he used the Supreme Court one man–one vote ruling to file suit for congressional redistricting in Houston. Upheld, the suit preserved the new Seventh Congressional District as if it had been designed by Bush himself: affluent “Silk Stocking,” overwhelmingly white, mostly Protestant, and three of every four voters from somewhere else. If Bush were a “carpetbagger,” as Democrats huffed, so was his new district.

  Bush beat Democrat Frank Briscoe, 57 to 43 percent, to become the first Republican to represent Houston. Upside: Bush was smart, attractive, and unlike Goldwater, not regarded as a nut. In 1964 Nixon and Reagan were the sole national Republicans to campaign for the Arizonan; years later he repaid each by trashing them. “I used to wonder whether Barry was evil or just dumb,” Eisenhower would say. “No more. He’s the dumbest person I’ve ever known.” Helping Bush were Nixon and Ford, among other GOPers, each having known his dad. In particular, Nixon took a liking, Bush on his short list of possible 1968 vice presidential candidates. “Just one Congressional term, not a lot in his record to recommend him. It just shows how Nixon viewed his potential,” said Goodearle. Downside: What was Bush, anyway, beyond a bright young man on the make?

  Bush made the House Ways and Means Committee as a freshman— economics his leather. In 1968, reelected without opposition, he voted for the Civil Rights Act, which mandated open housing, reviled by many in his district. Bush backed gradual withdrawal from Vietnam, a litmus of Nixon’s, narrowly elected president in 1968, but also birth control—the Right dubbed him “Rubbers.” Some thought him pragmatic, a comer to get things done. Others deemed Bush’s persona fuzzed, as Theodore White thought Nixon’s was in 1960: “This is one of [his] characteristic and fatal flaws—that he presents too often a split image.” The divide presaged Bush’s presidency, when many in the media’s peewee mind couldn’t grasp how what they felt a Greenwich fop could like pork rinds, horseshoes, Johnny Cash, and Dolly Parton.

  Bush entered politics at a time when the America for which he had nearly died seemed increasingly treated, to quote Ring Lardner, like a side dish the mid-1960s declined to order. Duty, honor, country yielded to EST, Zen, spiritualism, “Do your own thing,” “If it feels good, do it,” and other mindless mots. Looking back, the age was a bumper sticker, arrogance and a snarky meanness scaling a hidebound triumph undreamt of under Ike or JFK. “I think it would be difficult,” sociologist Robert N. Nisbet wrote, “to find a single decade in the history of Western culture when as much calculated onslaught against culture and convention in any form, as much sheer degradation of both culture and the individual passed into print, into music, into art, and onto the American screen [and into its streets] as the decade of the sixties.” More often we thought at cross-purpose, speaking past, not to.

  A favorite college teacher said the ’60s ended in 1973, “when Nixon began to drown [in Watergate] and Vietnam ended.” Similarly, the 1950s ended November 22, 1963. Two days later Johnson told a diplomat, “I am not going to be the President who saw South Viet Nam go the way China went.” LBJ rallied to Saigon’s side. In August 1964, when two U.S. destroyers were said to be attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson ordered a counterassault on North Vietnam. Next year he introduced American combat troops, initiated bombing raids up north sans retaliatory pretense, and dropped more U.S. bombs in Vietnam than hit all enemy targets in World War II. The stratagem, “gradual escalation,” aimed to win the war while Johnson enacted his domestic “Great Society.” Longtime friend John Connally told LBJ it wouldn’t work: “The economy can’t sustain guns and butter.” Fatalities hit five hundred weekly.

  To many, stalemate daubed the confusion of the president, not the courage of our troops. By 1967 Johnson was choosing bombing targets for his generals. Publicly, Bush backed his fellow Texan. (On January 20, 1969, he was the only GOP congressman at Andrews Air Force Base to bid the now ex-president adieu as Johnson flew home to Texas.) Privately, Bush thought LBJ should leave the military alone. Alabama governor George Wallace was less discreet: “What we’ve got to do is win. We’ve got to pour it on.” By contrast, the Left termed the North-South conflict a civil war, the solution—get out now!— deserting the government the United States had helped install. Part of America dubbed Johnson’s ministry of the war a revealing nihilism. The other saw the counterculture—that vacuous cliché—as unwilling to assume its responsibilities—even to know what they were. Bush, prizing civility, feared that America had become a dialogue of the deaf.

  What part of the fracturing—right vs. left, hard hat vs. hippie, the rule of law vs. an activist who sniffed, “So we struggle, in our humble way, to destroy the United States”—stemmed from the war? Who knows, even now? Reaction against the pious ’50s—a 1991 PBS documentary sniped, “Obey authority, control your emotions, fit in with the group, and don’t even think about having sex”—might have been inevitable. Vietnam’s magnifying glass showed a horror house at home. In 1967 Paris reported 20 armed robberies; London, 205; and Washington DC, 2,429. Riot ravaged Watts, Cleveland, Detroit (where forty-three died), Newark, and hundreds of other cities. Was the war an excuse or a cause?

  University buildings were burned and scholarly works destroyed. Bombings, sit-ins, and vandalism maimed sites where panty raids once seemed bravura. Students tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Trained antiwar protestors clashed with club-swinging police—crabbed radical Tom Hayden, “the shock troops of the Establishment”—at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Militant H. Rap Brown turned Phineas T. Bluster: “Violence is necessary. It’s as American as cherry pie.” Few Americans praised Cuban radical and pop culture sham Che Guevara. More merely rued their country, coming apart.

  In August 1968 the Republican nominee for president gave an acceptance speech that MSNBC’s Chri
s Matthews later called “a masterpiece” and George Gallup termed the most effective acceptance in polling history. “Millions of Americans cry out in anguish,” the GOP speaker said. “Did we come all this way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?”

  The question, you hoped, was rhetorical. The speaker was Richard Nixon, giving the address that made him president. Later, Esquire magazine said, “There was no player [of our age] in the national drama who came close to Nixon; the idea of Nixon was somehow central to the experience of being an American in the second half of this century.” Next to Ronald Reagan, Nixon was also the person who most profoundly changed George Bush’s life.

  THREE

  Perfectly Clear

  The Upstate New York town of my youth had one bar, six churches, and no traffic lights. Its people believed in work, God, family, a fondness for the familiar, and a reverence for everything American. Their hero was what journalist Tom Wicker called “one of us”—the quintessence of Middle America. Defending Richard Nixon, they defended their past and found what their parents and grandparents—bullied by a ruling class Congressman John Anderson dubbed the “Volvo and brie cheese crowd”—had rarely known. A voice.

  Displaying pluralistic ignorance, where the members of a majority— here, the Silent—did not feel themselves a majority, they naturally admired Nixon’s tenacity. “No matter what you say,” jibed Jimmy Carter in 1976, “he was a leader.” He regarded “trendies” and “beautiful people” and “academics who couldn’t butter a piece of toast” as lepers at a bazaar. Meg Greenfield wrote of the “Nixon Generation. Half of America spent their adult lives hoping every day that Nixon would become President. The other half spent it passionately hoping he would not.” After Watergate had forced RN to resign in 1974, aide Bryce Harlow compared him to a cork. Push Nixon down—always he resurfaced. Only FDR ran as many times for national office: five. Until 2012 more people had voted for Nixon for president than any man in history. In post–World War II America, his history was our history—Nixon ’R’ Us.

  Nixon began for me in the most theatric election of our time. I recall 1960 vividly, for even after the Great Debates—Mom saying of the first round, “He [Nixon] looks terrible”—and the turmoil of the final weeks—Kennedy stumping the Northeast, an election-eve Nixon telethon, two warriors spent by a hell-bent campaign—it was unthinkable that Kennedy would win. Election night went quickly, for I was in bed by eight: Nixon ahead, but Kennedy gaining; my father’s pessimism auguring, for the first time, defeat. Next morning I raced to the front door and grabbed our daily newspaper, the Rochester, New York, Democrat and Chronicle. The headline screamed disaster: “Kennedy Wins.” (The provincial subhead was cheerier: “Nixon Carries Monroe County.”)

  In 1962 Nixon lost to Pat Brown for governor of California. Mocked as a loser, derided for his squareness, incinerated, like Marley, done, Nixon proceeded to amaze by rising—exhumed—so that having served the GOP in good times and bad, he again became a leading candidate for the Republican nomination. Wrote Norman Mailer of Middle American delegates at the 1968 convention in Miami, which Bush attended as a Texas and Nixon delegate, “It was his comeback which had made him a hero in their eyes, for America is the land which worships the Great Comeback, and so he was Tricky Dick to them no more, but the finest gentleman in the land; they were proud to say hello.”

  There was nostalgia and love—akin to a gentle protectiveness—for wife Pat’s cloth coats and the Nixon family, decent, much-wounded, and as straight and resolute as they came. In 1968 Mailer referenced Julie Nixon, then twenty. “No, she was saying, her father had never spanked them,” he wrote of her and sister Tricia. “‘But then,’ the girl’s voice went on, simple clarity, even honest devotion in the tone, ‘we never wanted to displease him. We wanted to be good.’” Mailer said he had not heard a child make a remark like that about their father “since his own mother had spoken in such fashion thirty-odd years” before.

  Upstate New York saw Nixon as brave and vulnerable and thoughtful and sentimental—a view so divorced from Washington’s as to script another language. That may be why his stroke so stunned in 1994. There was no room in our view of Nixon for the finality of death. In 1967 I mailed a handwritten letter to the senior partner at the Manhattan law firm of Nixon, Mitchell, Mudge, and Rose. I was president of my church’s Ecumenical Fellowship, and our group would be in New York in August, and was there the chance we could meet, and if there was, it would be as fine as anything I had known.

  In early April I received an answer from secretary Rose Woods. Nixon would be out of the country, writing for Reader’s Digest. However, schedules change, and would I call on his return? I did and was invited to Nixon’s office at 20 Broad Street, off Wall. For half an hour we talked of sports and college—Nixon suggested Cornell, my dad’s alma mater (“Thank God,” RN said, “the least Ivy of the Ivies”)— and the need to work your way through school.

  I still think fondly of how Nixon need not have met me but as a kindness did. Later I was to find this typical, not of the Old nor New, but of the Real Nixon—solicitous and shy. Two years later I entered college—1969–71, Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania; transferring because of tuition cost, 1971–73, State University of New York at Geneseo—as Nixon took the oath of office. It was then, as America cast herself in rancor, that he fused person and president like no chief executive since FDR.

  It is hard today for post–baby boomers to grasp the early 1970s’ fervor and division. Upheaval rent morality, civil rights, feminism, and drugs, and asked whether police were pigs, love should be free, grades abolished, and America—as 1972 Democrat nominee George McGovern said—“come home.” The University of Pennsylvania avoided collision with student war protesters by putting its American flags in storage. Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam, railing against “those blue-eyed murderers—Nixon and the rest of those ethnocentric American white male chauvinists.” Understatement went underground.

  On April 30, 1970, vowing that we would not be “a pitiful helpless giant,” Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia. Campuses exploded when six students were killed at Kent State University and Jackson State College. Hundreds of schools closed or went on strike. Buses ringed the White House to ward off protestors. The heartland felt besieged, Nixon upholding it more by personality than policy: welfare reform, revenue sharing, the all-volunteer Army, the Environmental Protection Agency. Despite Vietnam, Nixon’s diplomatic summitry helped end the bipolar world. In February 1972 he ended decades of U.S. estrangement by visiting Beijing, Hangchow, and the Forbidden City. That May he became the first president to visit Moscow, joining Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev in the nuclear age’s first agreement to limit strategic arms.

  Like Bush, Nixon loved foreign policy—global, conceptual, moving chess pieces from a distance. He was more direct fighting America’s cultural war. My generation loved the amplified beat of rock. Said Nixon at a White House event with the Ray Conniff Singers: “If the music’s square, it’s because I like it square.” The liberal elite adored nothing if not fad. Nixon liked football and baseball; hated cocktail parties; despised “front-runners, the social climbers”; and thumbed his nose at the fashionable. “My family never had the wild, swinging times many trendies think of,” he told me. “What we did have, of course, was a lot of fun. I, for example, and depending on the season, naturally, loved to sit down at the piano and belt out some Christmas carols.”

  Middle America could see Nixon as Father Christmas and not be deceived, accepting what writer Raymond Price called Nixon’s “dark side”—the taped Milhous of “expletive deleted”—feeling that his good outweighed the bad. He began the habit of wearing the flag in his lapel pin; taunted draft dodgers as “idealistic? What they wanted was to protect their ass”; and grasped the Forgotten American’s nobility and injury. Mocked by the maniacal 1960s, they felt not bigotry but injured pride. Sharing it, Nixon would “mobilize an immense, info
rmal army of ordinary people,” said biographer Conrad Black. “They identified with him in his lack of glamour, dedication to hard work, old virtues, and home truths, as well as his tactical political cunning, and above all his dogged indefatigability.”

  Nixon’s public lay among the ordered and traditional—“good, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens”—not Eric Goldman’s “MetroAmerican,” privileged by lineage to rule. Duty mattered. To them, Vietnam was a test of character—whether as America conceded the limits of its power, its adversaries respected the power of its will. Religion counted too. Nixon, a Quaker, told aide Charles Colson, “You know, I could be a Catholic. I honestly could. It’s beautiful to think about, that there is something you can really grab ahold of, something real and meaningful.” Few politicians talk like that.

  Even Nixon’s awkwardness was endearing. At RN’s July 19, 1990, library dedication, Bush told how one day at an airport Nixon heard a little girl shouting, “How is Smokey the Bear?”—then in the National Zoo. Nixon smiled as the girl kept repeating her question. Baffled, he turned to an aide for help. “Smokey the Bear, Mr. President,” the aide whispered. “Washington National Zoo.” Triumphant, Nixon walked over, took the girl’s hand, and beamed, “How do you do, Miss Bear?”

  Nixon’s flaws some saw as virtues. His virtues others saw as sins. His solitude they termed isolation; reserve, arrogance; propriety, aloofness; sentimentality, corn. “This traumatic clash of cultures,” Meg Greenfield wrote—Nixon as Grant Wood vs. the age’s fashion cleaved families, legislators, and generations. As it lodged in the White House—in a man who detested, and was detested by, America’s hip, camp, and pop-art intelligentsia—the split cemented his rapport with America’s great middle before helping to bring about his fall.