by Curt Smith
As president, Reagan would quote the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, often using them to twit his age, sixty-nine when inaugurated—“I know that’s true because Jefferson told me.” Bush’s frame of reference differed. “I’d rather quote Yogi Berra than Thomas Jefferson,” he said in our first meeting. His favorite Berraisms included “It’s always dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future.” At July 1980’s GOP Convention in Detroit, Bush apparently had little chance of being Reagan’s vice presidential nominee. Nashua stung. Bush had shown finite appeal beyond the eighteenth hole. Nancy Reagan was still miffed that he hadn’t dropped out earlier.
After the 1980 primaries, Jimmy Carter led Reagan and independent candidate John Anderson in the Gallup Poll, 39, 32, and 21 percent, respectively. Tellingly, though, six in ten were upset by the incumbent’s “handling of the Presidency.” Before the Republican Convention, the Georgian launched a TV attack blitz, dubbing the Gipper a lightweight right-wing warmonger. Henry Kissinger, hoping to (a) unify the GOP and (b) become secretary of state to a record third U.S. president, urged that (c) Ford become Reagan’s vice president, at which time the thirty-eighth president warmed to the idea if (d) he could play “a meaningful role.” Word of a “dream ticket” made the quadrennial event, held in Ford’s home state, go bonkers.
On the convention’s opening night, Ford traveled to the CBS TV booth, where the august Walter Cronkite held forth. America’s “most trusted man” got the Accidental President to describe the parameters of his possible vice presidency, including the term “co-presidency.” Watching, Bush reasonably assumed that Ford would not talk so brazenly unless Reagan had approved a pact, not knowing that the Gipper too was shocked. Reagan pollster Richard Wirthlin said the candidate literally jumped off the couch. “Did you hear what he said about his role?” Reagan said. “Sounds like he wants to be a co-president.”
After the Cronkite telecast, Reagan summoned Ford to his hotel suite, where they met alone. Ten minutes later each emerged to say that the “dream ticket” had been scrubbed. Berra once said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Reagan was about to take a road he perhaps had not intended. “The answer is no,” the Gipper told his staff. “He [Ford] didn’t think it was right for him or me. And now I am inclined to agree.”
Reagan had been an eight-term president of Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild. He was intuitive, incisive, with a gamesman’s gift for timing. With Ford now out, delay about who was in might help Carter paint him as naive. “Reagan picked up the phone,” aide Michael Deaver wrote in his book, Behind the Scenes, “and to the amazement of everyone in the room, said, ‘I’m calling George Bush. I want to get this settled. Anyone have any objections?’”
Reagan grasped the need for the ticket to lure non–true believers. It says much about Bush’s ability to foster trust that Reagan instantly turned to him. No one, including Deaver, objected. The Gipper called Bush, saying that he would like to promptly announce his choice. Bush was delighted—and incredulous. Unintentionally, the Accidental President had made him the Accidental Vice President.
Only Reagan knew for sure if he would have chosen Bush had Ford not guest starred with Uncle Walter. For more than a decade, Bush had eyed the presidency—from before opposing Lloyd Bentsen via the UN to thrice being spurned by Ford to China and the CIA to campaigning more exhaustively in 1979–80 than anyone else in either party—all in vain.
Now, in one moment, Ford had inadvertently propelled Bush to the possibility, as John Nance Garner said, of being “one heartbeat” from the presidency. It all felt unreal—a miracle, looking back. For one who believed in God, as Bush did, immersed since youth, it was hard not to see the work of Providence.
Bush’s new work now began.
In his acceptance speech, the new GOP vice president said, “If anyone wants to know why Ronald Reagan is a winner, you can refer him to me. I am an expert on the subject.” Next day he met a news media that, if not as wholly an appendage of the Democratic Party as today’s, still tried to split the Republican ticket. “I won’t permit myself to get bogged down in trying to find or accentuate—or permit you to make me accentuate—differences that I had with the Governor because they had been minimal,” Bush told reporters.
In the primaries he had clashed with Reagan on foreign policy, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and taxes. En route from Los Angeles to the convention, aide Stuart Spencer heard the Gipper trash Bush’s months-long rebuke of him for ten minutes, then say calmly, suddenly, again the pragmatist, “What’d you think?”—about Bush as vice president. He hadn’t closed the door. Hearing Bush tell the media to forget six degrees of separation between number one and number two, many Reaganauts looked at him anew. By contrast, many pressies would have attributed to Bush T. S. Eliot’s “We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men,” had they known who the poet was. “If I’d been a liberal,” Bush later laughed, “they’ve have praised my fidelity to principle. It’s just the way it is. The media has a double standard.”
Going forward, Reagan-Bush could count on solid GOP support, though the liberal Republican congressman Anderson had become a third-party candidate. Would he hurt Reagan, luring the GOP leftist fringe, or the incumbent, giving the ABC (Anyone But Carter) voters a choice? No one knew. In cold text it was hard on the stump to separate the Republican ticket. Reagan urged a pronounced cut in “big government programs.” Bush vowed a balanced budget within three years, the first time since Nixon’s first year as president. Bush, like Kennedy in the early 1960s, said lower tax rates would mean higher tax revenues—supply side’s core. Reagan said famously that “recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
In August Reagan, touting states’ rights to “help people do . . . as much as they can at the community . . . and the private level,” spoke at the annual Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. Bush defended his own longtime National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) record—and the Gipper’s decency. Carter mocked Reagan for saying that trees caused pollution. He also had a Gallup Convention “bounce”: from sixteen points behind, he leapt to one ahead. Bush, counterpunching, said that Carter’s self-created misery index—the unemployment plus inflation rate, nearing 20 percent—polluted something worse: the economy. The lead bobbed back and forth, like a crew race on Long Island Sound. The debates seemed crucial—the League of Women Voters scheduled three presidential and one vice presidential—except that Anderson’s presence skewered the cards.
Carter would not debate with Anderson. Reagan would not debate without the independent candidate. “He [Carter] couldn’t win a debate,” said the Gipper of himself and Anderson, “if it were held in the Rose Garden before an audience of Administration officials with the questions being asked by [Press Secretary] Jody Powell.” On September 20 Anderson and Reagan met to little polling movement. Carter opposed a three-man duel, fearing that Anderson would take independents unable to back Reagan but unforgiving of Carter’s record. Clock ticking, the first two presidential debates and Bush’s duel with Vice President Walter Mondale were canceled. Finally, conceding Carter’s criteria—“We led him by a point or two,” said pollster Wirthlin, “but were concerned voters scared of Reagan would go back to Carter. We had to show he didn’t have horns”—Reagan okayed an October 28 debate in Cleveland.
Too often debate rewards what doesn’t count—appearance, glibness—and minimizes what does—character, maturity. The presidency and vice presidency need people as deep as a river. Today’s culture spurs many candidates as shallow as a spoon. Carter attacked— “war hawk” and “dangerous right-wing radical”—and revealed how daughter Amy told him the election’s greatest issue—“the control of nuclear arms.” Reagan was devastating in a poised and wistful way. After Carter demagogued Medicaid and Social Security, the Gipper sighed a
nd said, “There you go again.” Closing, Reagan faced the TV screen that had been his home since the 1950s. “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? . . . Is America as respected as it was four years ago?” To ask was to answer.
Reagan won forty-four states to Carter’s six and the District of Columbia, 489 electoral votes to the incumbent’s 49, and 51 percent of the vote to his 41; Anderson’s 6 percent cost Carter as much as Reagan. Reagan won most key Gallup groups: independents, 54–30 percent; whites, 55–36; males, 54–37; females, 46–45; white Protestants, 62–31; Catholics, 51–40; households with incomes of $15,000–24,999, 53–38; $25,000–50,000, 58–32; over $50,000, 66–26; high school graduates, 51–43; college graduates, 51–35; people thirty to forty-four years of age, 54–37; forty-five to fifty-nine, 55–39; sixty or over, 54–40; the South, 51–44; white South, 60–35; Midwest, 51–40; Far West, 53–35; suburban/small cities, 53–37; and rural/small towns, 54–39. Carter won among Democrats, liberals, blacks, Hispanics, people eighteen to twenty-one years of age and in cities with populations greater than 250,000. He and Reagan tied among people twenty-two to twenty-nine years of age. Barack Obama used the same base in a different America to become a majority president a quarter century later.
To the degree that a vice president can matter, Bush did in 1980. He reassured moderates and independents, many in the East, where Reagan led only 47–42 percent, and cemented the Gipper’s huge margin among Bush’s natural clientele—whites, Protestants, households with incomes over $50,000, suburbia, professionals, college graduates, and people thirty to fifty-nine years old. Still, Bush knew Reagan only faintly and his inner circle less. He knew also that the Reagan campaign thought he had “folded at Nashua. No spunk,” according to one. Heraclitus said, “A man’s character is his fate.” Slowly, Bush’s character became his.
He had seen others showboat: Theodore Roszak, hailing irrationality; Margaret Mead, wallowing in Future Speak; Kenneth Keninston, terming baby boomers the best and brightest. They violated Bush’s deepest sense of self. He would earn Reagan’s respect his way, which was his parents’ way—by his conduct, how he acted, treated others. A song, ironically, of that younger generation put it well: “Little things mean a lot.”
Reagan chose—it is assumed, with Nancy Reagan’s selah—James A. Baker III, Bush’s campaign manager and longtime friend, as his White House chief of staff. For Poppy, it was like striking a vein of silver ore. Through January 1985, when he became treasury secretary, Baker ministered to Reagan’s economic, political, and international agenda. He also fueled the Reagan-Bush friendship, kept his old friend abreast of decisions large and small, and helped facilitate what Bush would have been in any event—the ultimate team player, even at age ten at Greenwich Country Day School. His hero was Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, pride of the New York Yankees, a good and quiet man of whom Captain Bill Dickey said, “Every day, any day, he just goes out and does his job.”
From 1926 to 1938, Gehrig drove in a hundred or more runs, including an American League record 184, another record thirteen-straight years. Bush and his father heard network radio convey seven Yankees World Series titles. “I remember Graham McNamee doing most of the play by play,” Bush said, “and Lou’s continuity”—ten Series home runs, thirty-four runs batted in, and a .316 average. “Gehrig was steadier, less flamboyant, and more dependable than the Babe . . . steadily achieving excellence”—a telling self-portrait.
In 1939, after a Major League record 2,130 straight games, Gehrig was felled by an enemy within: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a hardening and collapsing of the spinal cord—now called Lou Gehrig’s disease. That July 4 the Yankees retired his number 4 at Yankee Stadium. Between games of a doubleheader, he delivered baseball’s Gettysburg Address. “Some may think I’ve been given a bad break,” said Gehrig, “but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.” The peroration wed sweetest song and saddest thought: “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Gehrig died in 1941. Half a century later, Bush called him “my hero not just as a child—still is”—one first baseman to another. “Lou Gehrig was a great example in his personal life, and showed courage as he faced death”—dutiful son, faithful husband. Bush talked baseball—also Washington Redskins football, politics, foreign and domestic policy, guests’ families, and the day’s odds and ends—at the many social events he and Mrs. Bush hosted at the vice president’s residence at One Observatory Circle, two miles from the White House. Mrs. Bush had called him “the Pearle Mesta of the United Nations,” the American socialite known as the “hostess with the mostest”; the name and instinct stuck.
Bush knew most members of Congress, had worked with some still serving, liked to kibitz, and was a quick study of the Hill’s leaders and legislation. As president of the Senate, he briefed Reagan regularly—and well. Nixon once said, “If it weren’t for people, this [the presidency] would be an easy job.” To Bush, people were the job. As vice president he traveled 1.3 million miles, visited all fifty states and sixty-five countries, and attended so many funerals that Baker coined his fictional motto: “You Die. I Fly.” Barbara Bush quietly bristled at the fuss, saying, “George met with many current or future heads of state at the funerals he attended, enabling him to forge personal relationships that were important to President Reagan—and later, President Bush.” The 1991 Gulf War became exhibit A.
In 1988, looking back, Bush said, “If you’re a supportive vice president, you sublimate your own priorities and your own passion for a team.” He had, adding, “Ultimately, I’m not going into this game [of criticizing President Reagan]—and it is a game. I’m not going into that. It’s talking about character, about fundamental honor. These are things that matter with me. Decency. Talk about what I learned from my dad. Let somebody else play that game. Not me.” There are far worse ways to be recalled.
On March 30, 1981, Bush unveiled—ironically, events proved—an historical marker at the Fort Worth hotel where John F. Kennedy had spent his last night in 1963 before being assassinated next day in Dallas. In early afternoon Bush learned that Reagan had been shot and seriously wounded after giving a speech in Washington. A bullet by would-be assassin John Hinckley lodged an inch from the president’s heart. Reagan was rushed to George Washington Hospital, was operated on, and came close to dying, America learned much later. “I didn’t know I’d been shot when I heard that noise. I thought it was firecrackers,” Dutch said. In Texas, Reagan’s would-be successor immediately ordered that his plane return to the nation’s capital.
Landing at Andrews Air Force Base, Bush was urged by many aides to helicopter to the White House. It would be dramatic, pitch-perfect for the kinetic tube, showing the government intact and functioning, freeze-framing Bush as a leader in absentia. Instinctively, he refused. “Only the president lands on the South Lawn,” Bush said, doing what was proper—a little thing. When Reagan heard of the story, he was impressed—better, touched. The helicopter flew to the vice presidential home. Bush drove to the White House, went to the Situation Room, and joined the cabinet meeting already under way. Among issues discussed was the nuclear football—the button that, once pushed, would start a nuclear war.
In Bush’s absence some officials had acted rashly. “As of now, I am in charge here,” Secretary of State Alexander Haig, sweating, told the nation, harming his own credibility and rearranging the line of succession. By contrast, Bush’s calm and Reagan’s grace soothed many. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” the Gipper told doctors in the operating room. Weak and underweight, he returned to work April 11, ultimately using TV—“If Congress won’t see the light, I ask you to make it feel the heat,” he said in one address—and Bush on the Hill to help pass the Economic Recovery Act of 1981. The law lowered the marginal and lowest tax bracket from 70 to 50 and 14 to 11 percent, respectively. Another work of Providence: explaining the act to pols, the Yale economics major w
as able to make the dismal science clear.
In his 1993 book, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, Richard Reeves wrote, “There was an astonishing density of event during the Kennedy years”: the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, the space race, civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan’s first years as president had a similar density. On Inauguration Day the American hostages seized in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini were released. On January 29, 1981, Reagan held his first press conference as president. Asked about the Soviet Union, he said, “As long as . . . they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain . . . a one-world Socialist or Communist state, I think when you do business with them . . . you keep that in mind.” Said an adviser, incredulous, “Well, that takes care of that [détente].”
In early February Reagan addressed the nation for the first time on the economy. On April 28 the Gipper, still recovering from the bullet wound, spoke to Congress on behalf of his economic program like Caesar taking Gaul. In August he signed the act in California—“the most important economic law,” he said, since his hero, Franklin Roosevelt, forged the New Deal half a century earlier. The economy tumbled into 1983, then rose for the rest of his presidency. On August 5, 1981, Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers, the largest union to back him in 1980, for violating a federal law prohibiting a government union from striking. The Kremlin was stunned, U.S. intelligence later learned, to find a different kind of president.
In Britain Reagan told Parliament that “the forward march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” Boldly, he proposed a zero option: if the Soviets removed their ss-20 missile deployment, America would not install Pershing 2 and ground-launch missiles in West Germany. The Reds said no. Reagan went ahead. He proclaimed the “Reagan Doctrine,” seeking to “roll back” Communism in, among other places, Latin America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—and foresaw a strategic defense initiative to protect America from attack by a strategic nuclear ballistic system, making nuclear war improbable. When Soviet fighters downed Korean Air Lines flight 007, carrying 269 passengers, near Moneron Island, Reagan said the Soviets had turned “against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere.” To many, the United States was again standing tall.