George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  Connally, who said he agreed, persisted in treating Americans as adults—less, I think, out of ignorance than pride. Refusing to talk down, he dealt in policy, not emotion. The upshot was that he won GOP minds, not hearts. “Listening to Connally is like eating a Chinese dinner,” Reagan aide Lee Atwater barbed. “Ten minutes later, you’ve forgotten you ate.”

  Connally’s résumé, which he thought superior to Reagan’s, didn’t stop his stalling in the polls. In November Reagan won a key Florida straw poll, 36–26 percent, over Big Jawn; out of nowhere, giving a fine extempore speech, Bush corralled 22. Early 1980 Connally losses in Iowa and New Hampshire followed. Big Jawn axed Mahe, turned more to old Texas Democrats, named future securities fixer Charles Keating his campaign chair, and increasingly scalded aides about being overbooked—scheduler David Parker began holding the phone a foot from his ear. Thinking he could outraise everyone, Connally had spurned federal spending limits—thus, was ineligible for matching funds. In January the $12 million candidate ran out of cash.

  His last stand was the March 8, 1980, South Carolina primary. Atwater leaked a story to Lee Bandy, a writer for the state’s largest newspaper, The State, that “Connally was trying to buy the black vote,” said Bandy. “That story got out, thanks to me, and it probably killed him. Lee [Atwater] saved Ronald Reagan’s candidacy.” Atwater died in 1991. Other Reagan aides deny the story. At any rate Reagan won decisively, whereupon Connally withdrew three days later. He won one delegate: Ada Mills of Clarksville, Arkansas.

  I remember a meeting with advisers as the walls began closing in. Connally got out a pen and piece of paper and began drawing a brochure.

  “Here’s what I want it to say,” he began. “On one side, ‘Connally,’ the other side, ‘Reagan.’ On my side it’ll read, ‘Governor, Texas,’ on his, ‘Governor, California.’”

  I watched in fascination.

  “Next comes cabinet experience,” he said. “‘Connally—Secretary of Navy and Treasury. Reagan—Nothing. Business experience— Connally, rancher, lawyer, businessman. Reagan—actor.’” For a long pause I eyed George Christian.

  “‘Foreign policy—Connally,’ find out the number of trips I’ve taken. ‘Reagan’—if any, there’ll be far fewer.” Connally stopped, theatrically. “Now we come to the personal side. ‘Connally—married, thirty-nine years. Reagan—divorced.’”

  An aide said quickly, “Governor, you can’t say these things. The media will slaughter you.”

  Connally looked past him. “Why not?” he demanded, planting his jaw. “It’s not an exaggeration—it’s the truth.”

  Connally hoped that speeches like Dallas’s and Pittsburgh’s might right his ship. So he spoke of capital punishment, permissiveness, and social leeches to lure independents and conservative Democrats—but his heart wasn’t in it. Touting America’s civil religion, Reagan said, “[My favorite] historical character was the man whose simple teachings in a three-year span between the ages of thirty and thirty-three set down rules which, if we had the courage to follow them, would solve all the problems of the world today, the Prince of Peace, the Man of Galilee.” Connally couldn’t talk that way. He liked to speak about productivity, regulation, and tax relief—unlike Reagan, never grasping the kind of coalition that could help conservatives usurp power.

  Bush did, belatedly, in 1988, as we shall see, addressing nonpolitical concerns of character, faith, and spirit—what a Time columnist called a blend of “nostalgia; religious simplicity; stoic heroism; reverence for family as the mainspring of society; a belief that truth dwells in inner conviction rather than facts”—issues like the Pledge of Allegiance and voluntary prayer. To use Connally’s favorite phrase, such an agenda would have “personally offended” him as not the province of a president. On one hand, Big Jawn was a most impolitic pol, scrapping lines that told “groups what they want to hear, not what they need to,” said Christian. On the other, I will admit, part of me loved his going for the jugular.

  When a voter doubted nuclear power plant safety, Connally snapped, “Your problem is, you’re afraid of the future.” He whipsawed his favorite Kennedy: “The milk fund—what about it? I never was thrown out of college for cheating. I never killed anybody.” At a Denver business breakfast, I gave him a last-minute note about Jane Fonda, “who said that if America left Southeast Asia, there would be no bloodbath—only peace and harmony. They were wrong—dead wrong—and millions are dead because they were wrong.” Connally used it because Connally believed it. Because he did, it brought down the house.

  In 1991 Nixon likened George Bush, to whom we are about to return, to quarterback Joe Montana. “Nothing flashy—no long bombs— but he’ll short-pass you to death. Dependable—and he makes few mistakes.” Going for the bomb, Big Jawn was too often intercepted. Later, writing for a very different Texan in the Bush White House, I recalled Connally’s instinct for ad hominem combat. “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better,” he said, quoting Sophie Tucker. In his world, “Second is fine and third is worse, but neither of them are acceptable. You don’t win at any price. You just win.”

  Risking all, Connally lost all. Spurned politically, he plunged into real estate, made a fortune, then went bankrupt in 1988 from the collapse of his state’s economy—to the last, as Horace Busby said, “the fulfillment of the mythology of Texas.”

  One night in November 1979, on a flight from Houston to the nation’s capital, Connally suddenly recited lines from Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon”:

  My hair is grey, but not with years,

  Nor grew it white

  In a single night,

  As men’s have grown from sudden fears.

  In college, Connally’s favorite poets were the romantics. His romantic notion of leadership was not a wet finger in the wind.

  SIX

  A Phone Call from the Gipper

  For Bush, John Connally’s humiliation was almost as delicious as had he won the GOP nomination itself. He felt that Connally’s machine had resuscitated Lloyd Bentsen’s comeback in the 1970 U.S. Senate race. Moreover, Bush knew that the native Texan thought him somehow effete, despite Poppy’s remarkable record of heroism and success. He would have recoiled at Connally’s Weltanschauung: “You are judged in Washington,” snarled JBC, “by the enemies you destroy.” I had not known of the bile—“dislike” hardly describes it—between the candidates when I began to write for Connally. Gradually, I became aware as the two staffs drank each Friday night at the Alexandria, Virginia, bar Chadwicks. Each partied in a separate corner of the second floor, my few meetings with the Bush staff pleasant. It seemed mostly Texan and northeastern, heavily Ivy League, largely upper class and prep school. Connally’s staff was overwhelmingly Lone Star, also upper class, largely University of Texas, and more conservative than Bush’s. I was one of few New Yorkers— and likely the only person ever to have written for Connally and Bush.

  Michael Kramer of New York magazine was with Bush in his hotel the night of the January 21, 1980, Iowa caucus, when Connally, conceding, came on the screen. Bush reached out as though to shake his hand through the screen. “Thank you, sir, for all the kind things you and your friends have been saying about me,” Poppy said, then raised his hand, slammed it on top of the set, and said, “That prick!” Dorothy Bush must have forgiven her son’s lapse, this once.

  Announcing in November 1979, Reagan intended to spend most of his time in New Hampshire before its February 26 primary. Like Carter in 1976, Bush applied retail politics to virtually every Iowa cattle call and caucus, aware that the Gipper was the default GOP incumbent, having almost upset a sitting president four years earlier. Bush sent a million pieces of mail to party members across Iowa a week before its caucuses. The outcome stunned his principal rival, almost a native son since his 1930s suzerainty as WHO play-by-play man Dutch Reagan: Bush, 31.25 percent; the Gipper, 29.4 percent; balance, other candidates. Later Reagan thanked Iowans for a needed “kick in the pants,” the caucuses briefl
y crowning a new front-runner.

  Certainly the victor thought so, claiming momentum—“The Big Mo,” he exulted, joining “deep doo-doo” in classic Bushspeak— preppyisms likely to limit the GOP’s working-class appeal. Reagan, who would swell it, began for the first time to engage his future running mate. Still, many doubted if Dutch, at sixty-nine, was still Tom Mix by way of Jimmy Stewart. The answer came in Nashua, New Hampshire, at a February 23 debate the Nashua Telegraph had offered to sponsor between Bush and Reagan. Accepting, “we [then] worried that it might violate electoral relations,” said a Reagan aide, “so we offered to fund the event with our money” and invited the other four candidates to participate.

  When Bush arrived at the debate, he learned for the first time of the new six-man format. Feeling sandbagged, he understandably refused to compete, causing an impasse on the stage. “He’d been given the shortest of notice,” said then–Newsweek White House correspondent Tom DeFrank. “It’s also true that Reagan had a firm percent of the vote. With two guys debating, Bush would inherit the anti-Reagan vote, probably winning. With six, it would split.” Reagan tried to explain the decision, prompting Telegraph editor Jon Breen to tell the sound man to mute his microphone, at which point Reagan steamed, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green [sic]!”— perhaps subconsciously, one actor aiding another, Reagan borrowing the line from Spencer Tracy’s film The State of the Union.

  What a sight! Reagan, visibly furious, his phrase the most quotable quote in GOP primary history. The other candidates, offstage, having reluctantly agreed to the original two-man debate. The event continuing, uneventful and unnecessary. Leaving, Bush aides saw the parking lot littered with “Bush for President” badges. Trailing in the polls before Mr. Breen cut the Gipper’s mike, Dutch romped next week, 50–23 percent. A quarter century later, his future close friend laughed at the memory. “Reagan had left Iowa before election night and paid big-time for it,” Bush said. “He always learned from his mistakes. In New Hampshire he kept stumping there until the polls were closed.”

  We also recall the about to be ex-front-runner sitting, awkwardly, as Reagan took over: Bush did not know how to seize the moment (the actor did, brimming with self-confidence), having been taught as a child to defer, not dominate (usually a good thing, not here). Bush soldiered on without “the Big Mo,” winning primaries in Puerto Rico, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, and Michigan, his vote affluent and moderate-liberal, where Reagan, heading the ticket, would arguably be weak. “Why doesn’t he get out of the race?” Nancy Reagan objected that spring as Bush lost one race after another. He did, May 26.

  Reagan used a standard line when asked if he was nervous about an event: “I was on the screen with Errol Flynn” in 1940’s Sante Fe Trail. The message was that he’d already been in the big leagues; one in two Americans at that time saw at least one film a week. The famed actor impressed the Gipper. At first Bush did not. Franklin Roosevelt said that wishful thinking could not rewrite history. To Reagan, Poppy’s first role had been the Nashua fiasco. “Just melted under pressure,” said the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee. In May 1980 Bush called Reagan’s supply-side stratagem “voo-doo economics.” Neither increased the possibility that Reagan would make Bush veep. Aware of his largely self-made fix, Bush sold his house in Houston and bought his grandfather’s estate at Walker’s Point. To many, it seemed that the Connecticut Yankee was giving up on politics.

  Every politician needs a base—his home. Which was Poppy’s? In 1988 he told David Frost, “Texas is our home, and this [Walker’s Point] is idyllic for a family to come home to. I lived there [Texas] since 1948, voted in every major election since ’48 down there, and it’s where I made my living. It’s where most of our kids were born.” Still, his mother, “the spiritual leader of our family,” lived in a bungalow on Walker’s Point. Their Maine home was “our anchor to windward in the summertime. Our kids live in five different states . . . and they come home here. We had twenty-two people in this house a few weeks ago. It was wonderful.” The estate and home had been bought and built, respectively, in the early twentieth century by George Herbert Walker. Later the future “Summer White House” passed to Poppy’s parents. What was home? There was no simple answer: no Lincoln bidding farewell at the Great Western Railway Station; no Johnson on a horse at the LBJ Ranch; no JFK as Hyannis Port’s Young Man and the Sea.

  Lance Morrow wrote the same of Bush, politically. “He sometimes seems to have misplaced America, and to be intently seeking it,” Morrow observed in the 1980s. “Or perhaps fleeing it. Bush used to be a moderate Republican. Now, inheriting the Reagan legacy, he is constrained to run as a right-winger. Bush went from patrician Connecticut to the Texas oil fields as a young man . . . from one identity to another, from one appointive office to another, and these transitions seem at least to add up to a sense of permanent motion and quest, or search for something that is finally his own.” The self-styled Mr. Smooth wanted consensus. Growing conservatism wanted its way. Connecticut Yankees were dying—literally. If Poppy was to reemerge to lead the GOP, he would have to turn right.

  Before withdrawing as a candidate, Bush was in permanent motion, perhaps seeking his “identity.” After Connally’s losing campaign, so were survivors, his withdrawal robbing them of joy and definition. Casting about, I focused on a periodical that, in memory’s rear-view mirror, embodied what Upton Sinclair once called “standardized as soda crackers.” He meant the Saturday Evening Post—the first magazine that I recall reading and that, having backed Connally, offered me in spring 1980 the post of senior editor and national affairs editor. What I was about to help run now had offices, not in Philadelphia, as I remembered as a boy, but in Indianapolis, Indiana. (In 2013 the Post decided it would rather relocate to Philadelphia and did.)

  There was no weekly with a more glorious name than the old Saturday Evening Post, characterized by imagination, great narrative, and a kinship with Middle America. “Through world wars and the Depression,” it said, “the Post informed its readers of global events, entertained them with cliff-hanging stories that ran in serial form, and moved or amused them with evocative, sometimes sentimental, covers.” It began in 1821, evolving from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. In 1897 Cyrus H. K. Curtis bought the magazine for $1,000. He hired a new editor, George Horace Lorimer, a minister’s son from Boston, and founded the Curtis Publishing Company. For more than half a century, the Post was a weekly grandstand and mirror of a middle-class mentality; it lasted until 1969, when one of its best writers penned a eulogy.

  By his count Stewart Alsop had done 126 articles and 147 columns for the periodical—about 750,000 words. Now twenty-five years after his first article—“a look at Harold Stassen’s chances of being President, which I concluded were excellent”—he wrote of the magazine’s love of words and editors “[who] considered a writer’s style and political views his business, as long as he was accurate and readable.” Generations of Americans displayed the Post in their waiting rooms or bought it at the corner drugstore or trekked each Thursday to their mailbox—as esteemed as Life, less dull than Reader’s Digest, and more small-town than Look. The bylines of Paul Gallico and Ellery Queen; diaries of Alexander Botts and Scattergood Baines; Pete Martin’s gossip profiles, breathlessly intoning Hollywood; and an artist whose work became the Post reflected the America of their time.

  At seven I traced the covers of the illustrator Norman Rockwell, who painted, among a swarm of other things, the politicians of each season—in mine, JFK, Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller, Ike with his pitching iron. His Post seemed impervious. What killed it—also, the magazine’s treatment of politics, humor, and fiction—was an aging readership, slack advertising and circulation, and cultural disarray. Newsweek wrote, “More and more, Rockwell’s America wasn’t there anymore”—bound inextricably with the Great God Television. By its last weekly writhing, the Post had lost $62 million since a 1962 move from Philadelphia to New York—apparent pro
of of the general interest magazine’s demise. Next year, 1970, Indiana businessman Beurt SerVaas bought the Curtis empire and became president. The Post relocated to Indianapolis, reemerged as a one-dollar-a-copy newsstand quarterly, and recycled golden oldies from Tugboat Annie to Ted Key cartoons, the old “gray narrative illustrations,” custom headline type once used by the magazine, and Rockwell, puffing his pipe and preparing to paint a Post delivery boy on its initial cover.

  The Post’s first two issues sold out their 500,000-copy press run. It became quarterly in 1971, turned to ten and now six issues a year, and temporarily revived the general-interest genre—a triumph for SerVaas and wife Cory, Post editor and publisher. Both hired me to succeed—no one could, or has, replaced—the glorious Ben Hibbs, Post editor from 1942 to 1961; later, William Emerson and Otto Fried-rich; and 1970s former Esquire managing editor Fred Birmingham. A typical issue tied fiction, “Post People,” medicine, entertainment, a tale about John Wayne sculpture, and right-center politics. Any GOP nominee would find a friend.

  I enjoyed the creative cycle of building a magazine, each issue bred from scratch: story, photo, caption, theme. In two years we wrote cover stories about “Ronald Reagan’s Greatest Role,” the 1981 presidential inaugural, Robert Redford, and the Muppets; penned fiction and nonfiction book reviews; won a national cover award by putting the film star dog Benji in a barber chair, wrapping him in a towel, and simulating a haircut; and grasped why Wright Morris wrote of Rockwell, “His special triumph is in the conviction his countrymen share that the mythical world he evokes exists.”

  Dutch Reagan could evoke it too, especially after being sworn in as president on January 20, 1981. As our narrative will show, Bush, having almost left politics, took the oath that day as vice president. Looking back, the office’s criteria seemed so tailored to Poppy—discretion, hard work, intelligence, loyalty—that he wore it like a Savile Row suit.