by Curt Smith
In December 1987 Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty, the first pact to cut the number, not merely limit the rise, of nuclear missiles. The Soviets accepted Reagan’s zero option, once scorned by Pravda as a fascist fantasy. “It is a simple proposal,” said Reagan in the East Room as Gorbachev stood nearby. “One might say disarmingly simple.” It was also a startling victory for the man Democratic grandee Clark Clifford once called an “amiable dunce.”
The Bushes sat next to Nancy Reagan and the Gorbachevs in the front row, each pleased in a way they had not expected. Mrs. Reagan delighted in her spouse cast as a peacemaker. On taking office, Gorbachev had heard Reagan compared to Hitler. Unexpectedly, the Soviet found a peer he liked and respected. Theoretically, INF would let him focus on economic reform. The Bushes’ joy was political. Reagan’s popularity invariably augured Poppy’s. “This was the best day for him,” said Lee Atwater, “since election night of ’84.”
The Iran-Contra morass had flung Bush into limbo land. The secretaries of defense and state, Weinberger and George Schultz, respectively, said they had opposed the plan. As Texas governor Ann Richards, in another context, sneered at the 1988 Democratic Convention: “Where was George?” Had Poppy backed the Iran-Contra botch up? If so, he had broken the law. Had he even known? If not, why not? Bush’s curriculum vitae flaunted foreign policy. That identity—also integrity—was now in doubt. Sophocles was said to “know the world steadily, and . . . know it whole.” So was Bush. How could he be in the dark? Announcing for the GOP nomination, Alexander Haig asked, “Where was George Bush during this story? Was he the copilot in the cockpit, or . . . back in economy class?” If Bush couldn’t reply convincingly, his campaign’s raison d’être might collapse.
On October 12, 1987, Reagan’s number two announced for number one. He said Poindexter had “compartmentalized” the plan; thus, Bush knew only some parts, “deliberately excluded” from others. The vice president claimed to have been “out of the loop”—in effect, ignorant or innocent. Polls showed the public not convinced about either or sure why Bush was running.
“If I were elected,” he had told David Keene, a senior official in the 1980 campaign, “I’d bring in the best people.”
“Fine, George,” Keene would say, “but what are you going to tell them to do?”
If elected, would he veer left of Reagan? Build on his beginnings? Revert to the good government moderate liberalism of his dad? Reflect the mores and concerns of the Sunbelt, where the GOP’s base and future lay? Bush’s proudest achievement, he often said, was that his five children still came home. Few pols could say the same, but it wouldn’t fit on a bumper sticker or stir a thirty-second ad.
Serve whom? was a question Bush answered only in his 1988 acceptance speech and in the general campaign pursuant. On the other hand, some of “the best people” had already arrived by late 1987: Atwater, tactics and organization; Bob Teeter, polling; Craig Fuller, campaign and government scheduling; and Roger Ailes, whose 1968 TV “Man in the Arena” brainstorm helped elect Nixon and who revived Reagan after 1984’s first debate, later founded the Fox News channel, and as media guru, was now trying to remake Bush’s persona on the tube.
“I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse,” said Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. He left English to Bush, who could leave it mangled. If a president can’t speak, he can’t educate. If he can’t educate, he can’t lead. Ailes went to work, seeing Bush between twice and ten times a week, trying to slow his speed, which, in turn, deepened his voice. Smile; be calm; limit gestures; sit erect toward the front of the chair; lean forward; be polite but aggressive; use any question to springboard to your agenda. Stay on message; when necessary, parry and pirouette. To woo the voter, you must persuade. To persuade, you must articulate. Take control. Ailes had little time to waste.
“TV does something to George,” Barbara Bush once said, wisely. It often shrunk him, made her husband seem shrill and gaunt, a schoolmarm, not a cowboy like the Gipper. His pleasant-in-person voice could turn high and tinny on the tube. Wearing eyeglasses, Bush looked older, less presidential than the athlete who left younger aides exhausted campaigning or “rec-reating,” he laughed. Gestures often failed to correspond with words. Few viewers associated with prep-school Bushisms like “Tension City” or “deep doo-doo” or “I’m not going to wear a mini-skirt or have purple hair” to win. Trying to note his and Reagan’s “setbacks,” Bush malapropped, “we had sex.” A reporter said he should be sued for malpractice of the tongue.
In October 1987 Newsweek had profiled Bush on the cover, calling a war hero, self-made oil man, and virtually goof-free vice president a “wimp.” Reading, you would think Iran-Contra the totality of his career. It made Bush seethe—and Ailes thankful, since an angry Bush was a more effective Bush. Poppy became more determined than ever to erase “his pallor as a performing artist,” said Newsweek later, “a visible unease [present] whenever he got in front of an audience or a camera.” Fine. Bush would do what the expert told him. If doubt lingered, it dissolved January 25, 1988.
The CBS Evening News had already aired standard profiles of the eleven other presidential candidates. Richard Cohen, CBS News politics producer, now sought an interview with Bush for a similar “candidate profile,” Evening News anchor Dan Rather questioning. Bush assumed it would be an honest interview—“He’s a fair man,” said the vice president, knowing Rather from Houston TV in the early 1960s. Dorothy Bush might have told him that people change.
As reporters revealed in the Newsweek book The Quest for the Presidency, aides warned that Rather had developed his own partisan story of Bush, the Ayatollah, and Contra commandantes and then requested the Bush interview. Their five-minute “profile” would be an edited setup job.
“Ab-so-lute-ly no!” Ailes bellowed at a staff meeting. “Jesus. No, no, no!”
Staffers at CBS had been “running around the network,” the News-week book later read, “boasting that they would take Bush out of the race.” After a Ferris wheel of debate, the Bushies countered any Rather interview must be live. Atwater was unconvinced: “I’d really watch that guy,” he said when Bush phoned in the day of the January 25 telecast.
“He’s a fair man,” Bush repeated.
“All right,” said Atwater, not believing a syllable.
Teeter had found that CBS planned to do the separate Iran-Contra piece first, then stage the interview. Confirming it, Ailes met the veep when Air Force Two landed at Andrews Air Force Base prior to the newscast. Even with a live interview, he told Bush, you are being set up.
“I’ve answered the [Iran-Contra] question five hundred times,” Bush said in the limousine ride to Washington. “I don’t see any big deal.”
It was, Ailes said. “All they have to do is press you on dates and bullshit that you haven’t had time to review, and you’re gonna look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, no,” Bush said. “Dan Rather is a good newsman. He won’t do that.”
“Hey,” Ailes said, “his job tonight is ratings. His ass is on the line. He doesn’t care about you. If he thought he could get away with it, he’d shoot you.”
Slowly, Bush sensed the danger. Pleased, Ailes plowed on. “Don’t accept anything Rather says to you,” he said. “Don’t accept the premise of any question—I don’t even care if it’s right. Stay on offense the whole time and wear him out.” According to The Quest, Ailes had “studied Bush. The guy wouldn’t fight unless he got mad, and what dependably would get him mad was the feeling that he was being treated unfairly.”
Ailes told Bush to watch the Iran-Contra segment before his interview. “That’ll get you up.” Another story did too. Months earlier Rather, on location in Miami, had his newscast delayed by a tennis match. Peeved, he walked off the set to call CBS New York to complain. The match ended during Rather’s absence. Ailes recalled that with nothing else to put on the air, CBS went to bl
ack—an empty screen—for six minutes.
“Look,” Ailes said, “he’s trying to judge your whole vice presidency by this stuff. That’s like judging his whole career in broadcasting by six minutes when he acted like an asshole.”
A rebroadcast of the interview a quarter century later makes Rather a poster child for the irrefutability of media bias. He impugns, badgers, accuses, interrupts in a way he would never do, never did, to liberals he interviewed—among them, Walter Mondale, Al Gore, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. This Ahab’s Moby Dick was the GOP, as Rather later showed in his dishonest coverage of George W. Bush’s National Guard service, which more or less ended his network career.
In 2003 Rather guested on a series I hosted on then-CBS WHAM Radio in Rochester, New York. I said that Time columnist Hugh Sidey had called Richard Nixon the finest foreign policy president since FDR. Straightaway Rather began a two-minute soliloquy. His rancor was self-evident. More alarming was how Rather seemed unhinged. I once admired his judgment and courtly made-in-Texas mien. Nothing proved their erosion like his 1988 inquisition of Bush.
The CBS Evening News anchor resembled a district attorney: “[Many people] believe you’re hiding something. . . . How could you? . . . You made us hypocrites in the face of the world.”
Warned by Ailes, Bush replied, “[You] told me this was going to be a political profile,” not a nine-minute “rehash into something that has been exhaustively looked into”—so different from CBS’s other eleven “candidate profiles” as to resemble today’s MSNBC.
Six times Bush said a variation of “I want to be judged on the whole record, and you’re not giving me an opportunity.”
Rather wasn’t interested in the whole record, or in keeping CBS’s word. Toward the end he said, “I don’t want to be argumentative, Mr. Vice President.”
“You do, Dan,” said Bush.
“No . . . no, sir, I don’t,” Rather insisted.
“. . . I don’t think it’s fair . . . to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran,” Bush said. At that point he used the coda Ailes had planted a few hours earlier. “How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven [sic] minutes when you walked off the set in New York [actually, Miami]?” he asked Rather.
“Well, Mister,” said the CBS anchor, stunned.
“Would you like that?” Bush continued.
“Mr. Vice President,” Rather stumbled.
“I have respect for you,” Bush said, “but I don’t have respect for what you’re doing here tonight.”
The sound heard was millions of Americans cheering. Save Spiro Agnew, no national Republican had so ably indicted media prejudice since Nixon’s “last press conference” in 1962.
Bush’s tour de force came two weeks before the first in the nation 1988 Iowa caucus. His chief rival seemed to be Bob Dole, sixty-four, from Russell, Kansas, a small-town boy who some feared had left it long ago. Like Bush, he was a World War II hero, but unlucky—in the war’s final weeks, enemy fire had shredded his right arm and shoulder. It took him forever to insert a button, put on a coat, tie his tie. Nixon used his left hand to shake Dole’s good hand—no other pol showed the sensitivity to think of it—bringing tears to Dole’s eyes. He had come to DC in 1961, absorbed it, and become a Senate heavyweight. Dole talked in Beltway babble but liked to think he still identified with the Midwest’s roughhewn life. The public wasn’t sure. Had Dole changed? Was he still one of us?
Bush’s second rival was John French “Jack” Kemp, former pro football quarterback, Buffalo area congressman since 1973, and apostle of supply-side economics. He had a wonderful tan, JFK-like blow-dried hair, kinetic energy, generous self-esteem, and a desire to talk dwarfing Hubert Humphrey’s. Kemp was conservative, but mostly in a fiscal Johnny-one-note way. Asked about MTV, U2, the Rubik’s Cube, or Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Kemp would answer supply side: It was his prologue and finis. He appealed to that sliver of the GOP whose Dead Sea Scrolls was the Wall Street Journal editorial page. It is not that Republicans disliked Kemp’s agenda—only that one note would not suffice. Many vainly urged him to also talk of military strength and cultural decay—balance. Otherwise, Kemp might soon be benched, and was.
A wild card was the Right Reverend Pat Robertson, who had $10 million in the bank. On one hand, GOP solons feared the party was increasingly too much a theocracy. On the other, Robertson owned the Christian Broadcasting Network, hosted its 700 Club, and represented, he said, the 65 to 70 million people who termed themselves evangelical—perhaps America’s largest, if loosely affiliated, religious group. Robertson wouldn’t hurt Dole, aides thought, since the Kansan was overtly secular. Bush might be different, since on occasion he mimed Reagan’s prescription of Calvinist salvation and America as Beulah Land.
“In a two-man race, our votes would be split,” one Des Moines minister said. “Robertson provides another option.” There were many to divide. By 2004, according to a Pew Research Forum poll, 44 percent of the nation termed itself “born-again.” Politically, these Christian, mostly Protestant, evangelicals were the Republicans’ largest block: 35 percent of George W. Bush’s entire vote. More “born-agains” voted than all blacks and union members combined. Moreover, their scorn of secularism, moral decline, and border insecurity tracked millions of Catholic, orthodox Jewish, and Protestant non-evangelicals’. W. coined the phrase “coalition of the willing.” Born-agains and friends formed a GOP coalition of the winning.
Iowa presaged a key element of Bush père’s 1988 coalition: church groups and prayer meetings and Sunday socials across the state. Dole countered by speaking their cant about farming and factory work and being raised in such small towns as Alton and Audubon and Eldridge and Eagle Grove. Like them, he knew how to get things done, like living off the land. Like them, he hadn’t had it easy. Here, if anywhere, Dole should have scored, and did: 37 percent to Robertson’s 25 and Bush’s 19. “The results are hard to read as anything but a repudiation of George Bush,” read the Des Moines Register. Even a television evangelist had trounced the vice president of the United States.
A caucus is a closed affair, whereby you enroll, spend much of the day on local issues and trivia, then vote. The February 16 New Hampshire primary, eight days after Iowa, required only that you cast a ballot. Arriving, Barbara was told by Governor John Sununu, “Don’t worry. He’ll win. ‘Mr. Fix-it’ will see to it.” Richard Wirthlin, Dole’s pollster, thought it “90 percent certain” that his candidate’s victory there would make him the GOP nominee. Two days after Iowa, his New Hampshire poll showed Dole five points behind Bush but gaining. “We’re going to win this thing,” Wirthlin told the senator. On preelection Friday the poll showed the Kansan five points ahead. Withdrawing, Al Haig endorsed Dole. Later, Bush confessed, “I stared into the abyss and decided something had to change.”
Until then Bush had campaigned formally, almost regally, amid limousines and Secret Service agents, as if expecting to be knighted. (As our narrative shows, Queen Elizabeth finally got with the program, knighting him in 1993.) Grasping his near-death experience, in one day Bush traded his blue suit and red tie for a blue parka and Boston Red Sox cap, junked set-piece speeches, worked a forklift at a lumberyard, and took a spin on an eighteen-wheeler at Cuzzin Richie’s Truck Stop. “Wait till you see the sky diving,” said Sununu, eerily foretelling Bush’s post-presidency. Populist and pugnacious, he guided Bush through five days of glad-handing, flesh pressing, and made-for-TV footage, “dominating every broadcast medium from drive-time radio to network,” said The Quest for the Presidency.
Bush was behind, but still alive, when a friend, fellow outdoors-man, and second only to JFK in many polls as “most important New Englander of the twentieth century” appeared out of nowhere. He had flown his own plane from Florida to Boston’s Logan Airport—whose idea is still a blur—then drove to New Hampshire, arriving backstage at a rally. When Bush arrived, he was atypically scolding an aide. As Rick Robinson wrote in All Right Magazine, “a figure larger than
New England itself” then approached the candidate, saying, “Any problems, Mr. Vice-President?”
“Not now,” said Bush, stunned, staring at Theodore Samuel Williams. “Everything’s going to be fine now.” Robinson titled his profile “How Ted Williams Changed the World.”
Raised in Connecticut, Bush had early gravitated toward Ted’s Red Sox. “The first game Dad took me to was the Polo Grounds,” he said of the Giants’ pre-1958 home across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium, “but my favorite park was [Boston’s] Fenway. It’s nice to know some things don’t change,” including awe for someone who could hit, “something I never mastered at Yale.” After moving to Texas, Barbara carpooled players to Little League, giving umpires her mind. Eldest son George W. became Texas Rangers general managing partner before he entered politics. Most of pop’s speeches after he left office in 1993 were paid, to help build his library. Gratis was 1994’s keynote opening of the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame—“a dear friend,” Bush said, “and the greatest hitter who ever lived.”
Articulate, profane, more handsome than Tyrone Power, Williams became a hero to my father, Woody Hayes, John Updike, and Bobby Knight. By 1988 I knew of no one so revered by men, say, over fifty. Bush felt him a hero too and was glad to tell you why. “The first reason is character. Ted couldn’t stand what he termed ‘politicians’—phonies. Teammates adored him. Rivals asked for batting tips”—wise, given Williams’s six league titles, .344 career average, twice winning the Most Valuable Player award and the Triple Crown—“and Ted never turned them down.” Finally, Sox owner Tom Yawkey had enough. “Ted, I know you’re generous, but why are you helping the enemy?”
Real enemies, said Bush, spiked Korea and World War II. The Kid, aka Splendid Splinter, Thumper, and Teddy Ballgame, among other monikers, flew fifty-eight combat missions, never complaining about “losing five and a half seasons from the prime of his career,” Bush jibed. Add them, said longtime Sox announcer Curt Gowdy, “and there’d be no room in the record books for anyone but Ted.” Bush thought him an extraordinary batter, hunter, and fisherman—“also a conservationist before the phrase ‘environment’ existed. Ted raised millions of dollars for charity,” especially the Jimmy Fund, New England’s charity against childhood cancer. “He was a Point of Light before my administration coined the term.”