by Curt Smith
Prescott Bush, most often described as intimidating, loudly asked the new Mrs. Bush, “Did I ever tell you that you could smoke?”
Instantly, she said, “Well, did I marry you?”
Reportedly, the elder Bush broke out laughing.
Since then Barbara had zealously helped Prescott’s son as a wife, mother, and host. She had cautioned him to spurn the RNC position. She enjoyed China, bicycling with Bush to remote cities and regions unavailable to most Americans. The CIA was harder: Much of Bush’s data were classified—thus, closed. At fifty, Barbara had many friends who had reached career goals—thus, increasingly, she felt isolated. Rejecting analysis—the Protestant canon of self-reliance—Mrs. Bush began lecturing about the China of the Ming Dynasty and Mao Tsetung and 1972’s Trip That Changed the World. It hadn’t changed hers.
“For Bar, 1980 was a pivot,” said her husband. “She’d done charitable work, been with party women’s groups, met diplomatic wives, but this stage was bigger.” She was his Boswell but not his party’s, opposing, as it did, abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. When Bush was nominated, his opinions became Reagan’s. That, in turn, made Barbara’s attitudes less germane as the vice president began a second term. As a child, she had gathered with her family at night to read together—not surprising, since Dad was a publisher. Now adult and childhood literacy became her issue. Son Neil had dyslexia. Mrs. Bush began working with firms to find what caused illiteracy, learning that 35 million adults and 23 million Americans could not read beyond an eighth-grade or fourth-grade level, respectively.
Here and around the world, Barbara found that homelessness was a curse. Everywhere she was careful to be correct, never uttering a word remotely critical of Nancy Reagan. Like the Gipper, Mrs. Bush made fun of herself: the white hair, how she was more mature than hip, more L.L. Bean than designer clothes. Middle America looked in the mirror and saw itself—a person of substance, not style. Historian Henry Steele Commager said, “Ours is very much a presidential country.” Mrs. Bush knew that it is also a canine country. In 1944 Republicans spread the tale that a destroyer had been sent to Alaska, at great taxpayer cost, to rescue President Roosevelt’s dog Fala. At a labor dinner, FDR had taunted the GOP. “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons,” he said. “No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.”
In 1952, under assault for an alleged “secret fund,” Republican vice presidential nominee Richard Nixon gave a network radio/TV speech known for the dog that gave the address its name. A man in Texas, hearing Pat Nixon mention that her children had never had a dog, had sent a package to Union Station in Baltimore. “It was a little cocker spaniel, in a crate . . . black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six-year-old, named it Checkers,” Nixon said. “And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” They did. Lyndon Johnson had a dog whose initials were LBJ: Little Beagle Johnson. The Reagans had a King Charles spaniel. The Obama household has a Portuguese water dog. In 1984 America learned that none could surpass Barbara Bush’s golden-colored cocker spaniel C. Fred Bush for literacy.
Like her children, Mrs. Bush had grown up around and with dogs, aware that they divined qualities alien to the human condition. Dogs neither lied nor deceived nor complained of suffering. They were devoid of pretense, had a cold nose and a warm heart, and bespoke enduring love. C. Fred Bush was named after family friend C. Fred Chambers. Published by Doubleday, 1984’s C. Fred’s Story: A Dog’s Life, by C. Fred Bush, “edited slightly by Barbara Bush,” was a children’s book about the Bush family told from her dog’s “point of view.” All proceeds benefited literacy charities. Mrs. Bush promoted it tirelessly, knowing that the spaniel breed was a favorite not only of hers but of America’s. In a memorable World War II illustration, a soulful dog sits in a chair, shawl with a star covering an armrest, awaiting the GI’s return. The dog inevitably was a C. Fred semi-look-alike. For a quarter century—1936–52 and 1983–90, according to the American Kennel Club—the cocker spaniel was America’s most popular dog until overbreeding inevitably set in.
C. Fred’s Story was a novel idea, artfully told, casting Mrs. Bush in a sympathetic, down-home, dog- and child-loving light. The book had a paw print on the cover page; photos of C. Fred with luminaries from Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and Charlton Heston to astronauts Robert Crippen and John Young to President Reagan, Queen Beatrix, and Gene Hackman; and a breezy text by, you assume, C. Fred’s Mistress of the Manor. Story was reprinted an enviable ten times, got excellent reviews, and led to even larger best-selling books. It also began a bond over the next third of a century between Mrs. Bush and America that was improbable, even phenomenal. Born in a manse, she became the girl next door, wearing pearls, yet seen as Main Street. Said son George W.: “She’ll just let rip if she’s got something on her mind.”
On one hand, picture Mrs. Bush as Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher, mannered, unflappable, inviting you for coffee at Murder, She Wrote’s fictional Cabot Cove, Maine, doubtless near Kennebunkport—that hourly whodunit, not coincidentally, the Bushes’ favorite 1980s and ’90s TV show. She had a great curiosity, tolerant mentality, and indiscriminate memory—the perfect host. On the other, Mrs. Bush could be redolent of Barbara Stanwyck in, say, Cattle Queen of Montana. One expected her to ford a stream, take the hill, or ward off the Indians till the cavalry came. Forceful, she was not coquettish; prideful, she was not immodest; she would persuade, but never profane, a listener. Politically, she narrowed the gulf between Poppy and the middle class.
George W. Bush praised his mother’s “genius with the media,” which I often saw after leaving the Saturday Evening Post in 1982 to return to Washington. I had missed the maelstrom of the capital. Moreover, President Reagan’s belief in limited government, sane taxes and spending, in God we trust, and American nobility seemed worthy of the Founding Fathers then, and now. I was asked to write for three secretaries of the cabinet—Richard Schweiker and Margaret Heckler of Health and Human Services and Samuel Pierce of Housing and Urban Development—and often dealt with members of Bush’s vice presidential office in the Eisenhower (née Old) Executive Office Building (EOB), next door to the West Wing.
The Bushies impressed me with their courtesy and quality—the class we seldom see any more, reflecting their boss’s character. I also contributed, as speechwriters do, ideas and one-line phrases for the 1988 general campaign against Democrat Michael Dukakis, which led to my working for Bush as president. Let us retrieve the 1985–89 term that preceded Bush’s presidency, in which Ronald Reagan showed why, as Sherwood Anderson wrote in Winesburg, Ohio, “at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes.”
In 1960 Vice President Nixon was glad to campaign as Eisenhower’s successor, only to be hurt by recession, ballot box chicanery, and TV imagery in the first presidential debate. He lost, barely. In 1968 Lyndon Johnson, retiring, gave his vice president, Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey, Vietnam, urban riot, and an America more torn apart than at any time since the Civil War. Humphrey lost, narrowly. Bush had studied both. “Nixon probably got more real votes in ’60. And the other one [vice president] who tried was . . . Humphrey. And the very constituency that should have supported him the most was screaming outside the convention hall in Chicago because of the Vietnam War.”
Bush meant to be, and was, exquisitely loyal to Ronald Reagan. If Reagan flagged, Bush would be a fatality. If not, he would gain from—no one was closer to—the man of whom Time magazine said in 1986: “Reagan is a sort of masterpiece of American magic, apparently one of the simplest creatures alive, yet a character of complexities that connect him with the myths and powers of his country in an unprecedented way.” Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill would put it simpler: “I’ve been in politics half a century
and have never seen a person as popular as you.”
Reagan was called the Great Communicator for his likability, facility with the spoken word, reassuring voice, and rapport with American history and for being a rarity in Washington—a politician who was funny on purpose. He was proud of his craft, aware what it meant today: “There’ve been times,” he told Michael Deaver, “that I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.” Reagan paid exceptional care to how a president should look and act. He dressed formally but not ostentatiously. He never took his suit coat off in the Oval Office, respecting it. Even when shot in 1981, he hitched up his pants to precisely meet his suit button when leaving the limousine to enter DC’s George Washington Hospital. “He had this habit of making sure the pants and jacket fit just right,” said Deaver. Ignoring a bullet lodged near his heart, Reagan “checks his pants, buttons his suit,” then collapsed entering the revolving hospital door.
The Gipper had fine writers—Peggy Noonan, Tony Dolan, Ben Elliott, Ken Khachigian, Aram Bakshian, and Peter Robinson, among others—but they would tell you the staff’s best writer delivered his speeches too. Reagan gave them the gift of knowing his own mind; they never had to guess. He called the Soviet Union “an evil empire”—raising hate and hubris at the New York Times. In Berlin the president uttered perhaps his most famous line: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” When the Challenger shuttle exploded, killing a crew of seven, he soothed grieving congregants: “We will never forget them . . . as they waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” On the fortieth anniversary of D-day, Reagan spoke at the U.S. Ranger Monument at Normandy: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs.” Why had they risked their lives—some no more than teens? “It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love.” Reagan’s presidency played long-running verbal hits.
Once, he asked Nancy, “Where do we find such men?” The answer, Reagan said, came almost as soon as the question: “Where we’ve always found them—on the farms, in the shops, the stores, and the offices.” His oneness with their America evoked “a simpler place and a simpler time,” said the PBS documentary Reagan—“small towns, patriotic values, family and community, an idealized America that no longer was, that perhaps never was,” except that it was real for those who lived there. Reagan lived there, even as he bounced from one 1920s small town to another, Dad looking for work. Bush lived there, even as he tried to volunteer at seventeen to avenge Pearl Harbor. So did I, the verities of my boyhood town knitting race and class. Most Americans lived there, or hoped to from afar.
In July 1986 Reagan helped mark the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, given to America by France. It had been closed to the public, refurbished, and would be relit by the president, pushing a button to send a laser one mile to the statue in New York Harbor. Aboard the USS John F. Kennedy, Reagan hailed assimilation—out of many, one—what Lady Liberty had promised Slavs and Poles and Italians and Jews and, belatedly, blacks, for a century—all, said Emma Lazarus, “yearning to breathe free.” The Gipper mused, “The things that unite us—America’s past, of which we’re so proud; our hopes and aspirations for the future of the world and this much-loved country—these things far outweigh what little divides us.” Then: “Tonight we pledge ourselves to each other—and to the cause of human freedom—the cause that has given light to this land—and hope to the world.”
Historian Robert Dallek called Reagan “brilliant at creating a rapport with the country, appealing to its better angels.” No other president could have, or has, so “found the American sweet spot,” wrote Time. Liberty Weekend 1986 caught the Gipper at high tide. If Bush could ride it, he would likely be the next U.S. president. Cautious—to use a favorite word, “prudent”—the boyhood angler at Walker’s Point also knew the tide inevitably ran out.
Reagan was bent on not letting terrorism undo his presidency—easier said than done. In 1984 William F. Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut, was kidnapped by the terrorist group Hezbollah, tortured for fifteen months, and probably died of a heart attack on June 3, 1985. A year later terrorists hijacked a plane and murdered an American passenger. The crisis was resolved but fueled Reagan’s worry about seven other passengers held hostage in Beirut, kidnapped by fanatics of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who had bedeviled Carter in 1979–81. This president vowed to spurn appeasement: “Let me make it plain to the assassins in Beirut and their accomplices, wherever they may be, that America will never make concessions to terrorism. To do so would only invite more terrorism.” Invariably, Reagan knew what to say. The question was how closely he listened to himself.
At this point the Gipper did not know of Buckley’s murder. He did know, as the then actor once wrote, that “my heart is a ham loaf.” In 1985 his national security adviser, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, proposed a plan to improve relations with alleged moderates in Iran. As McFarlane explained the scheme, this might influence hostage takers in Beirut—and expedite Khomeini’s fall. Reagan approved it, later saying he was unsure whether the plan included sending guns to anyone in Iran.
That November Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the new Soviet general secretary, met in Geneva. Margaret Thatcher had said, “This is a man we can do business with.” Reagan had opposed every arms treaty signed by each 1970s U.S. president but now hoped to do business on his terms with Communism’s leader. In their first meeting, Reagan calmly but brutally lashed the Soviet system, yet somehow managed to ingratiate himself personally. “Reagan had something which was so dear to Gorbachev, and that was sincerity,” the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Alexander Bessmertnykh said. Could sincerity neutralize Gorbachev’s opposition to Reagan’s desire to keep Polish Solidarity alive, boot the Soviets out of Afghanistan, and sustain the anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua?
By then Congress had ended Contra funding, confirming Reagan’s belief that liberal Democrats were weak on defense. Publicly, the president tied the Contras to the Founding Fathers and World War II’s French Resistance. “All they need is proof that we care as much about the fight for freedom seven hundred miles from our shores,” Reagan said, “as the Soviets care about the fight against freedom five thousand miles from theirs.” Privately, he told McFarlane, “Bud, I want you to do all you have to do to help those people keep body and soul together.” The aide’s automatic pilot response would almost bring the administration down.
The Geneva summit touched more on disarmament than terrorism, Reagan and Gorbachev agreeing that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” In October 1986 the reform Red, who preached glasnost and perestroika, had a smile said to hide teeth of iron, and knew that Reagan wished devoutly for his nation’s demise, invited the old Cold Warrior to another summit, in Reykjavik, Iceland. What they almost achieved was enough to make each’s aides gasp, and they did. “You’ve got the two leaders of these two powerful countries running way beyond their arms controllers and their defense ministries and their state departments in saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all nuclear weapons,’” Reagan biographer Lou Cannon told PBS.
At bottom Reagan’s foreign policy rested largely on the notion that America could legitimately threaten to spend the Evil Empire into oblivion or irrelevance, whichever came first. Gorbachev could not afford arms competition and economic reform—guns and butter. Thus, he proposed to eliminate all nuclear weapons, contingent on the United States cashiering the Strategic Defense Initiative. Aware that America had no shield against incoming missiles, the Gipper said no, bringing the summit to a close.
“We were that close,” said Reagan, putting his thumb and index finger less than an inch apart, “from eliminating all nuclear weapons.” Instead, aping convention, Senate majority leader Bob Dole, sure to oppose Bush for the 1988 GOP nomination, scored Reagan for trading no-nuke peace for a high-tech toy unsure to even work. “I feel very comfortable with President Reagan’s priorities,” the veep countered without being asked. “He’s lifted
us up and restored our respect.”
What happened next, Bush said later, was a “bigger downer” than being attack dog in 1984. That fall of 1986 a Middle East newspaper reported a guns-for-hostage swap. McFarlane had resigned a year earlier, succeeded by John Poindexter. Reagan denied the deal, then amended his denial. “We did not, repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we,” he said in a televised November 13, 1986, Oval Office address, insisting that better relations had caused the exchange. Whatever the reason, the trade violated administration policy.
Reagan could not explain why arms had been shipped just before Iran released each hostage. Confused and dissembling, he asked Attorney General Edwin Meese to investigate that weekend. Monday morning Meese told him of a probable diversion of funds from Iran to the Contras in Nicaragua—a violation of the law.
Reagan turned white. “What could have been going through their minds? How could they do this?” he said, forgetting his telling McFarlane to keep the Contras “body and soul together.” He sent Meese to brief the press, which turned apoplectic.
Poindexter soon resigned. Reagan fired Oliver North, who ran the lunacy. To many, it seemed superfluous. “This Presidency is over,” wrote columnist Charles Krauthammer. “Nineteen eighty-seven will be a Watergate year, and the following year an election year.”
Reagan appointed an independent (former Senator John) Tower Commission, which found him guilty of lazy management and trading arms—for hostages. Shocked, the president belatedly agreed, giving another network TV address: “As the Tower Board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran for hostages deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages.”
Reagan then apologized, hating to do it, knowing he had to and perhaps should have done it earlier: “There are reasons that this happened, but no excuses. It was a mistake.” His apologia was accepted. Incrementally, the Gipper’s luster reappeared.