George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  Bush expected a cabinet position. To some, he seemed Rockefeller’s ideal replacement: young, conservative, and Texan. Reading Bush’s letter, Ford had another thought. For a year, revelations, including those based on queries by the Senate Church Committee about illegal and unauthorized activities, had rocked the CIA. The president and Kissinger sent Bush a “for eyes only” cable telegraph, asking him to come home and lead an agency charged, Poppy later said, “with everything from lawbreaking to simple incompetence.”

  Bush knew that this might make his tenure at the RNC look tame and that “some wanted me out of the way politically”—the CIA being theoretically nonpartisan. At the same time, he recalled what his parents had taught: you say yes when a president asks. Bush soon found that congressional Democrats were more obsessed by a question not yet posed. In retrospect, his confirmation hearing showed why the mid- and late 1970s were a Hades for conservatives in what polling called a right-of-center country. Not content with fairly judging his ability to head the CIA, majority Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee demanded that Bush not run for vice president in 1976.

  “If I wanted to be vice president,” Ford’s nominee tartly stated the obvious, “I wouldn’t be here asking you to confirm me for the CIA.”

  For several days dialogue rivaled pulp fiction. Democrats argued that the CIA might be a covert White House stepping-stone; Poppy countered that if anything, it would deter. The principle, he said, was principle. Bush would never desert “my political birthright” simply to be confirmed.

  Finally, outflanked by Democrats (“They were perfectly willing not to have a director,” Bush said later of liberal hardball; “it was all politics, nothing about the Nation”), he asked Ford to exclude him as a potential running mate. “I know it’s unfair,” Bush told him, “but you don’t have much of a choice if we are to get on with the job of rebuilding and strengthening the agency.”

  In effect Ford told the committee that he would submit to Bush’s mugging. On January 30, 1976, Poppy replaced William Colby as director. In The Next President, David Frost wrote, “A number of supporters [have] told me, ‘If only George Bush could meet every member of the American public on a one-on-one basis, they would probably all vote for him.’” I have found that to be an understandable view. Bush’s knowledge and personality helped rebuild the CIA’s morale, so restoring the agency that its headquarters now bears his name.

  Bush regularly briefed Ford on national security. In 1975 a former Democratic governor of Georgia became a nearly full-time resident of Iowa. Jimmy Carter made a heretofore asterisk of a caucus a springboard for his party’s 1976 presidential nomination. He vowed never to lie to America, to be as “good and decent and fair as are the American people,” and to be a great president—in his autobiography’s priceless title, Why Not the Best? As CIA director, Bush briefed Carter as a candidate, then voyaged to Plains, Georgia, to regularly update the president-elect. The DC grapevine surmised that Bush might stay, but Carter wanted his own man and got him in Stansfield Turner.

  Things are said to occur in threes. Ford dug that many potholes in Bush’s White House road: picking Rockefeller as No. 2 in 1974; overlooking Bush when Rocky announced his withdrawal; and finally, not bucking Congress on Bush’s possible status as veep. Instead, the president made Bob Dole his running mate, then heard the Kansas senator say in his October 1976 TV debate with Walter Mondale that “Democrats have started every war in this century”—ignoring, among other things, how fascism began World War II. Ford narrowly lost the general election to Carter, 297 to 240 electoral votes. Choosing Bush as vice president would have avoided Dole’s visit to Mrs. Malaprop, won Texas, and helped elsewhere in the South, Carter barely taking many states.

  At sea Bush returned to Texas. He became chairman of the executive committee of its First International Bank. He taught in 1978–79 as part-time professor of administrative science at Rice University’s Jones School of Business. “I loved my brief time in the world of academia,” Bush smiled, twenty years before he taught at the newly opened Bush Presidential Library, saying, “I plan to do some teaching, because when you teach, you learn.”

  In 1977–79 Bush was also appointed a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, burnishing his résumé for 1980. He would campaign not on ideology, rhetoric, or fanfare of the common man— rather, on his background, experience, and knowledge of government. In short, he would run as all that Carter was not.

  As his presidency evolved, Carter diminished the office as few have or pray God will again. Time’s Roger Rosenblatt later wrote that the Georgian “oversaw a Presidency characterized by small people, small talk, and small matters. He made Americans feel two things they are not used to feeling, and will not abide. He made them feel puny, and he made them feel insecure.” Carter pardoned most Vietnam draft evaders, handed the canal to Panama, proclaimed day number __ of the Iranian hostage crisis, and at one point fired thirty-four cabinet and staff officials. America seemed a nation McGuffey’s Readers would scarcely recognize—of leaders who spoke of impotence; voters, crossing party, who expected things to get worse; and fear, greased by Washington, that problems were too intractable to solve.

  In 2012 Mitt Romney campaigned solely on the economy, as if the average voter were a Texas Instruments calculator. In 1980 Bush campaigned on knowing more policy than any other Republican, as if the voter were taking a multi-choice exam. Later, as president, the Gipper taught Bush how politics, like life, was more intuitive than intellectual. If people liked you, they would forgive almost anything: you were one of them, trusted to do for, not to. I often marveled at (a) the public’s curious definition of importance, and (b) how affinity could spur support. Reagan’s fondness for TV’s Little House on the Prairie may have meant as much as Bush’s vow to lower the tax on capital gains.

  If elected, Reagan, crowding seventy, would be America’s oldest president. Was he up to the job? No one knew. Bush, fifty-four, announced for the office May 1, 1979. Adept at tennis, golf, fishing, hunting, and horseshoes, he soon campaigned as though possessed. In one year Mr. Smooth attended 850 political events and flew 250,000 miles. What counted, of course, was “Main Street,” said a writer, “and specifically, the people reviled in Main Street.” In 1991 Reagan described them at his presidential library dedication: “Our neighbors were never ashamed to kneel in prayer to their Maker. Nor were they ever embarrassed to feel a lump in their throat when Old Glory passed by. No one in Dixon [Illinois] ever burned a flag. And no one in Dixon would have tolerated it.”

  One question germane to 1980 was, which would-be president grasped Dixon’s view? Another was, which could win? A decade earlier Nixon had watched Guy Lombardo’s orchestra ring in 1971 on CBS Television, then called several friends, including evangelist Billy Graham, comedians Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason, and actor John Wayne. A better parade of Main Street household names did not exist. Nixon didn’t merely know his constituency. Nixon was that constituency. Whoever earned—no one could inherit—it would be the likely Republican nominee.

  Long before GOPers vied to unseat Carter, Graham had personally been beheld by more people than any human being in the history of the world. In 1949 publisher William Randolph Hearst used Billy’s Los Angeles crusade—“Puff Graham,” an in-house memo said—to help the Tar Heel tyro, thirty-one, lure a following he “never dreamt of, never expected.” A year later Time, Newsweek, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post put him on their cover. By the late 1950s, Graham was a global institution, eclipsing Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop Fulton Sheen—a champion of frontier evangelism, a Calvinist’s answer to the pope.

  To Graham, Nixon’s victory in 1968 seemed to verify America as civic Zion: “I guess,” Billy said, “Dick is one of my ten closest friends.” He was the nation’s parish chaplain—said Gallup, America’s most admired man. His umbrella Billy Graham Evangelistic Association achieved a scope distinctive of fundamentalism: “Go,” Jesus told disciples, “and spread the word.” Graham�
��s Hour of Decision tied almost nine hundred radio stations; crusades aired in two hundred television markets; his monthly magazine and movie facilities grew like mushrooms in the shade. At a White House–sanctioned July 4, 1970, “Honor America Day,” he was almost a cabinet official sans portfolio—said radical Angela Davis, “the Lord’s American Son.”

  Graham scored the news media for “imposing a leadership on the American public which they do not want and for making heroes of radicals,” criticized the United Presbyterian Church for giving $10,000 to Davis’s defense fund, and was an electric speaker, neither con man nor intellectual, using religion to deliver America from the 1960s’ dark and massy pull. One biographer deemed Graham “the indestructible American innocent.” He helped save lives and souls, feeling that “governments,” quoting Emerson, “have their origin in the moral identity of men.” A service ended by inviting sinners to stride forward, the organ playing “Just as I Am,” and rededicate themselves to Christ. It is fair to say that Graham buoyed Middle America’s identity as no other clergy has.

  The Reverend Billy was in apposition to another institution of the age: Bert Parks, his Atlantic City no Mount of Olives. It is true Bert could not sing, act, or dance superbly. It is also true that his ordinariness drew you toward him, his slickness a defense. If broadcaster Curt Gowdy meant the era’s World Series, Rose Bowl, and All-Star Game, Parks sold more viewers than anyone on the Miss America Pageant. There he was, each September—girls parading down the aisle, smiles frozen on every face—joining the pageant in 1954 as master of ceremonies. It meant little but was deliciously square— millions could not go to bed until Bert crooned, “There she is, Miss America. There she is, your ideal.” In Caledonia one would no sooner miss the evening than burn the American flag.

  In December 1979, Parks, sixty-five, was fired. People magazine, gawking at the “hoopla,” demanded his return. A decade passed before he revisited the event that involuntarily retired him. In 1990 Parks butchered lines, mis-lip-synched “There She Is,” and forgot to introduce fifteen of the twenty-six former Miss Americas gathered at the pageant’s seventieth anniversary. No matter. It was a trip back, as ratings showed, to a warmer, kinder time. Bert endeared like another middle-class totem. For half a century, a son of London, Ontario, Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians greeted each new year over CBS from New York’s Roosevelt, then Waldorf-Astoria, Hotel. An early ’70s comedian said, “I hear Guy Lombardo says that when he goes he’s taking New Year’s Eve with him.” He did for many when he died in late 1977.

  Looking back, it was not only “The Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven,” to quote the publicists, that made Guy the nation’s neighbor; or soloists like Kenny Gardner, crooning “The Band Played On”; or the Lombardo Trio, singing standards like “Give Me the Moon over Brooklyn”; or even the showman Guy, who made New Year’s so remarkable. Though their feats were—ouch—instrumental, it was the evening’s whole—the horns and party hats and magic—that let Lombardo join that closet of imagery in which, critic William Henry said, “purple mountain majesties, amber waves of grain, small-town school marms, the cavalry riding to the rescue, Norman Rockwell Thanksgivings, the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, the World Series, and astronauts landing on the moon somehow seem interlocked because they each in turn have evoked a swelling sense of personal participation in national pride and purpose.”

  Lombardo became America’s umbilical cord for the rite of New Year’s passage, corkscrewing into high society’s apotheosis. Eyeing what the announcer called “Park Avenue’s finest” in their gowns and tuxedos, all loaded, financially and boozily, and oblivious to the camera, and the lordly Guy, playing to the camera, made me wonder what it must be like to meet such a different clientele that it had to come from a different planet altogether. When my brothers and sisters were young, our parents invited friends to salute the turning of the calendar. Perched on the upstairs steps, we heard the bandmaster, a floor and generation away, count down the seconds to a new and unknown year.

  I think of that January 1 and how Lombardo’s memory has razed each solstice since 1978. In my heart, Guy did take New Year’s Eve with him. On the cusp of the 1980 presidential election, which candidate could inspire the GOP in the new year still to come?

  The late 1970s RNC slogan was—I kid you not—“Republicans Are People, Too,” a communiqué guaranteed to make Democrats jeer, not fear. A joke of the time went, Why do Republicans oppose abortion? Answer: They are most comfortable in the fetal position. Depending on your view, potential presidential candidates were felt marginally or considerably better than the party’s moribund elite.

  Tennessee’s Howard Baker was thought bright, moderate, and squishy soft to some. Ronald Reagan was deemed too old—counsel that was widespread but not wise. Illinois boasted both conservative Phil Crane, sans name recognition and cash, and John Anderson, a Republican in Name Only (RINO) before the term was born.

  At another time Bush might have run as liberty’s Horatio at the Bridge from the UN and CIA. In the 1950s UN ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge used television to regularly bash Communism. Once Lodge called the Soviet delegate “a gentleman.” The Communist chafed, “I’m not a gentleman. I am a delegate.” Lodge replied, icily, “I had hoped the two were not mutually exclusive.”

  In 1962 U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson demanded that his counterpart, Valerian Zorin, answer whether the Soviet government had placed offensive missiles on the island of Cuba, ninety miles from Florida. “Yes or no—don’t wait for the translation—yes or no?”

  “I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and therefore I do not wish to answer,” Zorin answered. “In due course, sir, you will have your reply.”

  “You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no,” said Stevenson.

  “You will have your answer in due course,” Zorin said.

  “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over,” Stevenson said, taking the stage to show reconnaissance photos of the missiles in Cuba to Zorin—and the world.

  As we shall see, Bush’s diplomatic work was effective, even brilliant one-on-one. Unlike Lodge’s and Stevenson’s, though, it was almost always private—by instinct, at the UN; by job description, at the CIA.

  Many knew little of Bush, other than pedigree, Ivy education, and experience; polling showed little emotional link. I knew almost nothing then of his staff, background, and fidelity to Middle America, most of all.

  That was not true of another Texan and 1980 Republican candidate: Navy secretary (1961), governor of Texas (1963–69), treasury secretary (1970–72), nearly killed in the front seat of President Kennedy’s car in Dallas, tall, bold, and buccaneering, with his eagle profile and shock of silver hair—Big Jawn.

  FIVE

  Big Jawn

  On August 15, 1971, President Nixon froze wages and prices. Defending him, Treasury Secretary John Connally held a regional press conference that week in my hometown of Rochester, brandishing what Nixon heretofore lacked—as Henry Kissinger said, “a second order of advocacy.” Readying to return to college, I watched on television as Connally gave what columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called “an incendiary performance.” By 1978, with Main Street demoralized by Watergate, Jimmy Carter, and “Republicans Are People, Too,” it was not altogether impossible that Connally might one day be president.

  That December I called Raymond Price, former Nixon speech-writer turned columnist, out of the blue at his office in New York and asked, was there a chance that he and I could meet? We did, downing Bloody Marys in Manhattan as I explained my quandary: I could not penetrate Connally’s palace guard. A man of kindness and humanity, Price knew that to leap from Hamilton College to big-league politics scent like something out of Peter Pan. He also knew that if doors could not be opened, they might at least be nudged.

  Since Nixon’s 1974 resignation, Price had moved to San Clemente; helped draft RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon; written a lyric memoir, With Nixon; and
taught at the Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard. His humility and clarity clashed with DC’s charlatans and shills. Perhaps Price liked my admiration of With Nixon—perhaps, as a politician, what he later described to Connally campaign manager Eddie Mahe as my “combination of enthusiasm and level-headedness. Considering the knocking about that people in the Connally organization are going to have to put up with”—he got that right—“this could be a considerable asset.”

  In January 1979 Connally officially announced for president. After Mahe got a letter from Price, I flew to Washington to meet him. That June I put my dog in a car, loaded boxes in a van, and headed south. I arrived in Washington to find a psychotic patient: government. Gas lines, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates had flown the cage. The president’s approval rating would soon plunge to 17 percent.

  Carter retreated to the presidential getaway at Camp David; consulted aides, experts, and solons; and wrote a speech decrying “a crisis of the spirit.” He returned to Washington to give the address— Senator Edward Kennedy used the word malaise to engrave it—that put the public in the dock. Most Americans disagreed, thinking Carter the problem—leadership, the solution. But from which party and which candidate—and how?

  John Bowdoin Connally thought he knew. He had announced for president, four months before George H. W. Bush, starting his marathon with a sprint, almost as if he could swallow the nomination in a single gulp. In a day he flew from Indianapolis via Milwaukee to Concord, New Hampshire, wowing the party faithful and outspending the field. JBC saw himself as a younger, brighter, tougher Gipper, sure the race would become an old B-grade actor vs. a born-to-be president. It is hard to capture how awesome Connally then seemed. The Washington Post conceded “rave reviews.” George Will, who detested him, fretted about his appeal. “Among Republicans, only Connally seems to [understand] Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy that the Presidency is the only engine the central government has.”