George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  The introduction of bit pols had begun at the 1988 New Hampshire rally, Rick Robinson wrote, when Williams, unannounced and unexpected, strode on stage, getting and needing no introduction. The crowd gasped, stared in disbelief, then stood and roared. The noise volleyed, rose, and crashed outside against the trees. Ted, still The Kid at seventy, introduced “a good friend of mine who’s running for president.” Applause greeted Bush, though not as deafening as number 9’s. For several days they were inseparable: “Where thou goest,” Ruth said to Naomi, “I goest, too”—a Laconia dogsled, a Manchester fishing show, the sidewalks of Currier and Ives towns—Williams mobbed; Bush joking that the candidate was hired help. Years later I asked Sununu what had pivoted the primary. Instantly, he roared, “The Kid!” The ex-governor then added diplomatically, “And Bush having his picture taken with fifty thousand people in the state.”

  Roger Ailes bought thirty minutes on virtually every TV station serving New Hampshire, including those based in Boston, for a Saturday evening special. The only thing missing was negative advertising to match Dole’s. It is fair to characterize most politicians’ attitudes as do unto others before they do unto you. By contrast, Bush loathed the negative ad, thought it mean and small, and was reticent to use it, even if behind.

  On Friday afternoon Bush’s aides were still pleading with him to air the ad “Straddle,” attacking Dole on taxes. The Kansan was unfairly smearing him, they said. No one would blame Bush for setting the record straight.

  “George,” said Mrs. Bush, “I don’t think it’s so bad.”

  “Well,” Bush succumbed, “you guys know more about the state.”

  The ad, calling Dole a waffler, ran all weekend. Polling moved toward Bush, who vowed, unlike Dole, never to raise taxes. Much later Bush recalled the last several days as personal, neighborly; as if having braved an outer-body experience, he was in a real sense coming home. He blitzed Dole, 38–28 percent. Kemp got 13, Pete du Pont 10, Robertson just 9. On election night NBC’s Tom Brokaw prepared to quiz Dole as his interview with Bush was ending. Did Poppy, he asked, have anything to say to his rival?

  “No,” Bush said, gracious in victory, “just wish him well and meet him in the South”—each primary in Lee Atwater’s bailiwick.

  “And Senator Dole,” Brokaw said, “is there anything you’d like to say to the vice president?”

  “Yeah,” Dole growled. “Stop lying about my record.”

  Yogi Berra famously said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” At that point the Republican contest for president was.

  Dole trudged on, bruised and bitter, his window of opportunity closed. The Kansan won uncontested next door Minnesota and North Dakota. Next came Atwater’s state, South Carolina, where Bush’s strategist had organized in each county like a courthouse race. “We can break his back. We can finish him,” he said of Dole, knowing that it would have a domino effect on seventeen-state Super Tuesday three days hence. Atwater busted Bush’s TV budget, spending $750,000 to ensure Dole’s demise. More than any GOP strategist since Nixon, who ran the 1960, 1968, and 1972 campaigns in his head, Atwater grasped what moved the middle class.

  On March 5 Bush won all six South Carolina congressional districts, all thirty-seven delegates, and 49 percent of the vote. Dole and Robertson took 21 and 19 percent, respectively. In 1945 Japanese emperor Hirohito surrendered, saying, “We must endure the unendurable.” On March 29 Dole surrendered, withdrawing from the race. Still, he would do “all I can for our nominee, George Bush.” Dole then made a prearranged call to Poppy in his office—brief, civil, no reference to “lying about my record.” Dole hoped vainly that Bush might name him vice president—thus, embraced good behavior. Meanwhile, Bush began musing what behavior might make him president.

  The backdrop already made for pleasant reading. Economic growth was high, inflation low. The market had revived from the single-day 508-point plunge on October 19, 1987. Soviet troops began to leave Afghanistan. In May 1988 the Gipper spoke to Soviet dissidents at the U.S. embassy in Moscow and about religious freedom at the Danilov Monastery and intellectual freedom at Moscow State University. Reagan and Gorbachev walked through Red Square, apparently as close as Bogart and Bacall. Many would have endorsed Bush’s vow at Reagan’s 1991 library dedication: “Mr. President, we’ll get you on Mount Rushmore yet.” Poppy gained from how at seventy-seven—this was crucial—the incumbent could easily have won a third-straight term.

  The Gipper had helped solidify America as a right-of-center country. Bush’s unpleasant reading was that America did not yet see him as a right-of-center man. Moreover, his nomination had almost come too soon. Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis used Jesse Jackson as a weekly foil to lure headlines and delegates and become the certain Democratic nominee. In June Bob Teeter showed him eighteen points ahead of Bush. In turn, Dick Wirthlin’s survey showed Bush’s approval rating lower than Gorbachev’s—“like Ike’s being lower in America,” he said, “than Khrushchev’s during the 1950s Cold War.”

  Reagan’s foreign policy had aimed to build up (arms) to ultimately build down (then negotiate). Bush aides began to consider what the imminent Republican nominee had not: tearing down (Dukakis) might be easier than building up (Bush).

  EIGHT

  The Immaculate Election

  In April–August 2012 Barack Obama spent an estimated $100 million on TV to caricature the prospective GOP presidential candidate as Gordon Gekko Jr.—a tax cheat, corporate raider at Bain Capital, even responsible for a woman’s death from cancer. Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, 2002 Olympics hero, and savior of firms like Staples, chose not to respond until the campaign’s traditional autumn start—a fatal mistake, given how in politics a charge unanswered becomes a fact undenied. By the time Romney reacted, the U.S. jury was closed. In 1988 Bush too wanted to wait till September to go negative, and then lightly. Unlike Mitt, he had tenacious aides who saved Poppy from himself.

  According to Newsweek magazine’s The Quest for the Presidency, the general campaign hinged on pollster Bob Teeter’s late spring interview of two groups of Reagan Democrats—specifically, middle-class Catholics, the 1988 election’s decisive swing group—who had returned to the Democrat Dukakis. At Bush’s June retreat with his high command in Kennebunkport, Teeter took two videotapes of voters from Paramus, New Jersey, and told the veep, “I think you should look at these.” Bush did and left the screening sadder, wiser, and aware of his challenge’s size.

  Poppy’s image with these Jerseyites was vague, tepid—wimpy. Worse, they preferred the liberal Dukakis to Bush, though the Democrat opposed the death penalty, had refused to sign a law mandating the Pledge of Allegiance in his state’s public schools, had okayed a lenient prison furlough program, and belonged to the American Civil Liberties Union—the radical ACLU. “They don’t know this guy’s record,” the vice president explained next day, startled. (That week Bush said for the first time that Dukakis represents “old-style ’60s liberalism” from “Harvard Yard’s boutique,” leading the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd to ask, “Wasn’t this a case of the pot calling the kettle elite?” Bush replied, “Yale’s reputation is so diffuse, there isn’t a symbol. Harvard boutique to me has the connotation of liberalism and elitism.”) Teeter’s groups even thought Dukakis would out-tough Bush on drugs.

  Only one fact saved the vice president from despair. When the Reagan Democrats learned Dukakis’s record, half returned to Bush. “They don’t know enough about him,” said the veep. As that omission changed, he thought, Dukakis’s lead would fall. I watched in curiosity, having written for Reagan’s cabinet since 1982. My first speaker, ex–Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker, had been Reagan’s vice presidential pick before the 1976 GOP Convention, the Gipper vainly trying to loosen that state delegation’s pro-Ford tilt. As Reagan’s later head of Health and Human Services, Schweiker was an early politician to hype stopping disease before it struck—wellness. In addition, he liked to quote non-pols like longshoreman phil
osopher Eric Hoffer: America was “still the best country for the common man, black or white. If he can’t make it here he can’t make it anywhere else.”

  Unlike many politicians, Schweiker would intersperse humor through the body of a speech, recalling when “‘Who lost China’ meant a debate between political historians—not an argument over who misplaced Nancy’s dinnerware,” Mrs. Reagan having spent $200,000 for new White House china. An introduction was “overly immodest—but as a golfer, I’m always grateful for a good lie.” Edward Kennedy had recently been rumored to have met with Reagan. “He promised to deliver Massachusetts—as a retirement home.” Schweiker thought the one-line phrase a device not to dumb down an audience but to rouse and keep its interest—e.g., “My only special interest is America’s.” “The worst environment is to be cold, hungry, and unemployed”—for millions the nation Reagan inherited as president.

  When Schweiker left to head the American Council of Life Insurers (née Insurance), liberal congresswoman Margaret Heckler of suburban Boston succeeded him. Bad news: she was petulant and superficial. Good: she liked to break an audience up. “Groucho Marx once said of a woman he knew, ‘She got her good looks from her father—he’s a plastic surgeon,’” Heckler said.

  In 1984 I got my first look at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, headed by Samuel Pierce, the cabinet’s sole black, a fellow New Yorker, smart, taciturn, and vastly underrated. His low profile frustrated political aides. Policy makers noted his Enterprise Zones, private-sector initiatives, and help for those at the margin of the home-buying marketplace.

  Pierce spoke largely to business and minority groups, saying of Martin Luther King Jr., “He strove to ensure that as all were born equal in dignity before God, all could become equal in dignity before man.” He quoted the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Ben Maimon, or Maimonides, to the American Jewish Heritage Committee, urging its members “to anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellowman . . . so that he can earn an honest livelihood.”

  This, Pierce said, was “the highest step and the summit of charity’s golden ladder.” In July 1988 Dukakis climbed the golden ladder to his.

  Officially nominated in Atlanta, the Democratic candidate for president chose Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as vice president, evoking 1960’s JFK-LBJ Boston-Austin axis. He entered the convention stage to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” gave a rousing speech that tended the different clients of his party, and ended it, polls said, having reestablished a seventeen-point lead over Bush. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” Dukakis said to no one in particular. Later, he would rue the irony of being right.

  Bush had to pick his vice president before or at the GOP Convention in New Orleans. Dukakis had auditioned his candidates at rallies, embarrassing those not picked. The spectacle offended Poppy. He would choose his veep privately, no one except the contenders knowing. Bob Dole was one; politics’ Gary Cooper never said a word when a nod would do. Another, Jack Kemp, could be rude, loudly coughing at meetings when he wanted to be heard. Other candidates may or may not have included Elizabeth Dole, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and Senators Alan Simpson, Pete Domenici, and John Danforth. Bush didn’t really want to pick any of the above. What he wanted was to surprise. “Watch my vice presidential choice,” he said. “That will tell all.”

  His vice presidential surprise was J. Danforth Quayle, forty-one, Indiana’s junior senator, a Robert Redford look-alike, and Bush thought, GOP entrée to the baby boom generation. Praising Quayle, John McCain looked skin deep, not deep down: “I can’t believe a guy that handsome wouldn’t have some impact.” Instead, the media accented Quayle’s National Guard service, as if it were a lark; affluent background, as if it differed from most of theirs; and ideology, as if the first national boomer candidate had to be a liberal. Picking Quayle was Bush’s first decision as presidential nominee, and the media less analyzed than ravaged him. You could accuse it of a feeding frenzy, except that would be unfair to animals.

  Bush didn’t ask, but I would have picked another surprise: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Italian, Catholic, then fifty-two. He had nine children, liked classical music and rhetoric, and was the ultimate strict constructionist. He could have lanced Dukakis, was a recognizable heavyweight, and was probably too brilliant for the job. George H. W. Bush’s job was now to give the best—surely, most widely watched—address of his life: the GOP acceptance speech at the convention, striving to fill center stage after two decades in the wings.

  Bush assigned the speech to celebrity Reagan writer Peggy Noonan, who enlisted a talented free-lance humor writer from California. Doug Gamble had left Canada in 1980 because “I had had it up to here with [then–prime minister] Pierre Trudeau’s socialist paradise.” Arriving in Los Angeles, Gamble happened to write a piece of political satire that famed commentator Paul Harvey read on the air. Someone heard it at the White House, called Doug, and asked him to submit material. To Gamble’s shock, soon he was writing regularly for the Gipper. After Reagan’s forty-nine-state blowout, director of speechwriting Ben Elliott wrote Gamble a thank-you note citing his favorite line: “They [Democrats] dream of an America where every day is April 15th. We dream of an America where every day is the 4th of July.”

  In 1987 Noonan and Gamble began writing for Bush. In the 1988 acceptance, they aptly cast him as a quiet man, “but I hear the quiet people others don’t. The ones who raise the family, pay the taxes, meet the mortgage. I hear them and I am moved, and their concerns are mine.” This is America, Bush said: “The Knights of Columbus, the Grange, Hadassah, the Disabled American Veterans, the Order of AHEPA, the Business and Professional Women of America, the union hall, the Bible study group, LULAC [League of United Latin American Citizens], ‘Holy Name’—a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand Points of Light in a broad and peaceful sky”—voluntary individuals and groups who knew, as the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville said in 1828, that liberty could not be created without morality, nor morality without faith.

  The acceptance speech shone a spotlight on Bush’s perceived infelicities, as Reagan had by accenting his age. Poppy didn’t fear glamorous rivals, he explained: “I’ll try to be fair to the other side. I’ll try to hold my charisma in check.” Bush spoke to those who said he didn’t “always communicate in the clearest, most concise way. . . . I dare them to keep it up. Go ahead, make my twenty-four-hour time period.” He was plainspoken, seeing “life in terms of missions—missions defined and missions completed,” from torpedo bomber to the Texas plains. “I may not be the most eloquent, but I learned early that eloquence won’t draw oil from the ground.”

  Bush’s overall mission was continuity: “After two great terms, a switch will be made. But when you have to change horses in midstream, doesn’t it make sense to switch to the one who’s going the same way?” Its foundation was record jobs, businesses, and income and low inflation, unemployment, and interest rates. “[Democrats] call it a Swiss cheese economy. Well, that’s the way it may look to the three blind mice. But when they were in charge, it was all holes and no cheese.” Bush named other issues, like school prayer, gun ownership, the death penalty, and the Pledge of Allegiance, on which he was uniformly to Dukakis’s right. “We must change from abortion—to adoption,” he said, emotionally. “Barbara and I have an adopted granddaughter. The day of her christening, we wept with joy. I thank God that her parents chose life.”

  The speech lasted forty-nine minutes, was interrupted eighty times, and changed the election. Some recall Bush’s attack on Dukakis’s furloughing murderers and vetoing the Pledge, which worked because it affirmed the Democrats’ rift with Middle America. Others remember self-deprecation, which worked because it was natural. At the Democratic Convention, Ann Richards had barbed that Bush was “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” In New Orleans he said, “Once Barbara asked . . . what I was doing. I said, ‘I’m working hard,’ and she said, ‘Oh, dear, don�
�t worry. Relax, sit back, take off your shoes, and put up your silver foot.’” Many recall another pledge. “My opponent now says he’ll raise [taxes] as a last resort, or a third resort. When a politician talks like that, you know that’s one resort he’ll be checking into.” Then, unforgettably: “The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, ‘Read my lips. No new taxes.’”

  Later, drawing an unfortunate distinction between speaking and governing, Bush did not treat each speech as president as fully or carefully as the material or event may have merited. By contrast, Poppy owned this speech, giving it with inflection and rhythm and energy and heart. More than any event, it made him president. Before the address Dukakis had led by 10 percentage points. After it Bush led by 7. Before the acceptance Bush had never led Dukakis one-on-one. Afterward, he almost never trailed.

  Traditionally, Labor Day started the general presidential election. For the Bush campaign, headquartered on Fifteenth Street in Washington, each day had been Labor Day since July. In his acceptance Bush had vowed a “kinder, gentler” America. His campaign’s aim was to equate Dukakis with the suspect and alien. By August the governor’s pollster, Ed Reilly, said the Bushies had recast the campaign as Fred MacMurray vs. Robert De Niro. Bush had not seen the Democratic Convention, which trashed him nightly and unseemly as Reagan’s spoon-fed valet. Returning home, he was convinced by aides that the Democrats had played dirty, gone nuclear first. Furious, Bush set out, like any gentleman, to reclaim his name. Looking back, a more innocuous convention would have served Dukakis better.