by Curt Smith
1. Billy Graham had been the Bushes’ close friend for the past thirty years. He and wife Ruth had even vacationed in Kennebunkport since the 1970s. The memo suggested that they jointly attend church post-election Sunday, November 13. On Inauguration Day Graham might grace the Bush family box; New York Archbishop Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor, deliver an invocation; a Jewish prelate, the benediction; a black evangelist, a prayer about the indigent. In America, ecumenicalism is smart—and right. “I don’t care what religion a man has,” Bush quoted Eisenhower saying, “as long as he has one. Without that none of this makes any sense.”
2. As this account has shown, like the average American male, Ike loved college football—ruggedly individual, wholesome in a swelling-of-the-heart Norman Rockwell way—and nothing wed its heroism and amber waves of grain like the Army-Navy game. It was a day of pageantry and epitome of who we are: “duty, honor, country.” In 1961 John F. Kennedy, a World War II Navy hero, sat on the Army side in the first half, crossing the field at halftime. The entire Navy section rose to cheer. A chant erupted: “Welcome home! Welcome home!” The thirty-fifth president beamed.
As Bush grew up, only the World Series matched the Army-Navy game as America’s midcentury divertissement. One Fall Classic highlight film observed, “Each autumn comes a day in this great land of ours when the wheels of industry turn a little slower . . . the white-collar worker takes a little more time [at] lunch . . . when almost everyone is stricken with WORLD SERIES fever.” Especially in World War II, service-academy football, wrote Robert Mayer, seemed “America’s sporting equivalent of war.” In 1944 Gen. Douglas MacArthur wired victorious West Point coach Red Blaik: “We stopped the war [in the Pacific] to celebrate your magnificent success.”
To Bush and Reagan, people like Blaik and MacArthur were figures from Olympus. If the Secret Service agreed, I urged, have the president and president-elect travel to the Army-Navy game in early December in Philadelphia. In the first half, the Gipper could sit amid midshipmen; Bush, the cadets. At halftime they would meet at midfield, shake hands, and each proceed to the other side of the field—Bush doubtless hearing, “Welcome home!” The symbolism would resound: continuity, football, and the military meshing.
3. The 1988 campaign clearly implied that values would form the boot of the Bush administration. Yet it was plain that foreign policy would be the buckle. Polling showed that most Americans expected Bush, like JFK and Nixon, to be a foreign-policy president. It linked his skill and interest. Even better, less fettered by Congress, a president had greater latitude abroad than at home. Bush could act decisively, showing himself a leader.
Bush grasped that his best interest required reacquainting foreign leaders with his familiarity with world events, building on the UN, China, the CIA, and many trips abroad as vice president. This approach would swell his presidential cachet, underline his legitimacy as Leader of the Free World, and use Bush’s turf to strengthen him domestically so that Congress would hesitate to block his agenda. Such combinations are hard to find.
One example was Margaret Thatcher’s November 1988 state visit. The prime minister and Bush liked one another. I suggested each would benefit from Bush holding a dinner for Mrs. Thatcher at the veep’s residence, where the past and present cream of the foreign policy elite could laud the Anglo-American alliance. Bush could invite Clark Clifford, Dean Rusk, and George Ball, making this anchor of U.S. policy inclusive. Solicitude, Bush’s forte, would aid the bipartisan foreign policy his own dad admired.
In the Old West, whose movies Bush loved as a good-guy prism and progenitor, the outlaw tried to stay a step ahead of the sheriff. In the interregnum between the election and inaugural, Bush tried to stay ahead of a posse determined, as this narrative has noted, to delegitimize his victory. What came naturally to Bush made strategic sense: consensus. Let Democrats throw the first stone, as they shortly would; then, tut-tutting, Bushies could say, “They’re not interested in the national interest—only in guerrilla war.”
4. On November 2, 1988, the Washington Post had published a “No Endorsement” editorial. Opening the door, I wrote, Bush might send a letter to board chairman Katharine Graham, saying, “Once this election is history, and both of us have the chance to catch our breath, perhaps we can meet at a time of your convenience to discuss, in a more personal vein, our years ahead as public people and as citizens.”
After such a meeting, the Post, perhaps, would have treated President Bush less acidly, which is not to say sycophantically; perhaps not (I suspect not). No matter. It cost nothing to extend an open hand. The political goal was to create a preemptive public record. A larger goal—which, growing to know Bush, I found he deeply felt—was to communicate across a no-man’s land in which liberal and conservative talked at, not with, each other, as stick figure, not human being.
5. In the past a president-elect had shown this perspective in what JFK dubbed his cabinet’s and senior staff’s “ministry of talent,” officials announced irregularly, one by one, or all at once. I proposed that each Saturday morning from mid-November to mid-December Bush announce two or three cabinet and senior staff officials, starting with, say, the secretary of commerce, and concluding, before Christmas, with the secretaries of defense, state, and treasury.
Saturday brunch with Bush might have ensured, to the greatest possible degree post-election, the attention of his country. Postscript: In the end Bush announced his cabinet “irregularly.” He was receptive to advice, but trusted his instincts and followed his own timetable. After all, as he often asked aides, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you president?” To my knowledge, no one yet has given an adequate response.
NINE
Hopeful at the Creation
More often than not, presidents hire personnel whose qualities offset, not duplicate, their own vulnerabilities. For example, just as Lyndon Johnson, roughhewn and coarse, lured such soft-spoken loyalists as George Christian and Horace Busby; just as Richard Nixon, constitutionally unable to brook personal confrontation, required H. R. Haldeman as his Official Son of a Bitch; just as Gerald Ford, open and amiable, needed Robert Hartmann to ward off outsiders; just as Ronald Reagan, a delegator unschooled in Washington, needed street-smart Chief of Staff James A. Baker—so, I wrote in early 1989, would George Bush, gentle, civil, a conciliator by nature, require White House appointees who were tough and tough-minded, facile and assertive, fiercely loyal to the new president’s person and policies, and even brutal in their execution. In short, the forty-first president would need people who mirrored Nixon’s praise, circa 1972, of George Herbert Walker Bush: “He’ll do anything for the cause.”
There are exceptions to every rule, but Democrats themselves best expressed what Bush faced, becoming president. “He may get a fifteen-minute honeymoon after he takes his hand off the Bible,” said Representative Richard Durbin of Illinois. California representative Robert Matsui was less charitable, bragging, “This guy’s not going to have any honeymoon at all.” To confront academics, foundations, and Hill Democrats; fight the special interests vs. general; and go above a hostile media to reach and move America, Bush did not need nice guys. He was decent enough for an entire staff.
The 1988 campaign showed brilliantly that this patient, generous, and kindhearted man could paint political pitchfork-populist art when linked, arm in arm, with aides who loved their country, hated what extremists had done to it, and did not dislike rolling up their sleeves, extending elbows, and using what they deemed necessary means to reach their end. To help the Bush presidency enrich 1990s America so that America could enrich the world, he and they, I believed, must be no less combative now.
In early 1989 I was hired as a speechwriter to Bush 41. The FBI did its usual indefatigable job probing every crevice of a nominee’s life, knowing, for example, the name of my childhood dog, who was sadly unable to testify, having died when she was ten. My time at Gannett, at the Saturday Evening Post, and in the Reagan cabinet helped. As we have seen, a fall 1988 a
d hoc media campaign group introduced me to people who joined the administration. Raymond Price again wrote on my behalf to Bush’s new communications director, David Demarest, a moderate New Jersey Republican and public affairs official in Reagan’s Labor Department.
Demarest knew, as historian Arthur Schlesinger’s son Robert wrote in White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters, a history of modern presidential speechwriting since its birth in the early 1920s, that “Bush and his top advisors did not attach the same value to speechmaking that Reagan had.” Demarest thought that Reagan’s writers had too high a profile, were too self-absorbed, and resembled radio’s 1940s serial The Bickersons. Instead, the communications director wanted team writers who played nice, were loyal, and checked ego at the door.
With luck, a varied staff might also serve Bush and the two occasionally harmonic but often warring wings of the GOP. The Main Street wing supplied most of the party’s votes: a Silent still-Majority trying to save, buy a home, and educate their children. It touted sane tax and spend, limited government, the Bible as moral compass, and America as freedom’s beacon. The Wall Street wing supplied most of the party’s money. It touted globalism, increasing secularism, free if not necessarily fair trade, outsourcing, and a conciliatory or me-too political ideology, depending on your definition. The wings seldom overlapped.
Eisenhower fused them in 1952 and 1956; having dispatched Hitler, he left political quibbling to mortals. Nixon embodied Main Street and groveled for Wall Street’s largesse. In 1976 and at first in 1980, Wall Street thought Reagan a troglodyte. A decade later, prosperity all around, he seemed almost as good as Milton Friedman. In 1988 Wall Street financiers forgave Poppy’s impression of Grant Wood’s American Gothic; Prescott Bush’s son didn’t—couldn’t—mean it. White House writers might reduce the gulf.
In particular, Demarest, with a fine sense of humor, wanted Bush to get audiences to laugh. David had a late-night comedic attitude. Alas, as this book notes (see the “Author’s Note” re: Aretha Franklin’s song “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”), Bush was not a late-night kind of guy. We compensated by using humor writer Doug Gamble, key to Bush’s 1988 acceptance speech, and adopting the president’s cultural milieu, which considered “hipness” another word for as transient as the wind. My humor ran toward black comedy, forged as a child by the 1960 election and the Boston Red Sox. A ballad goes, “Being Irish means laughing at life knowing that in the end life will break your heart.” What counted was Bush’s humor. We would learn by trial and error.
In the book President Kennedy, Richard Reeves writes that JFK “came to power at the end of an old era or the beginning of a new, which was important because his words and actions were recorded in new ways. The pulse of communications speeded up in his time.” So did Bush 41. At the beginning of his term, we had electric typewriters, fax machines, and primitive computers, which the technology challenged—e.g., me—did not know how to use. We had to learn quickly on the job. E-mail did not exist; neither did a social media that later tied “iPod” and “hashtag” and “iPad” and “tweet.” As these new technologies grew, they helped the Democrats win four of six presidential elections from 1992 to 2012. In 1989 I was absorbed by words like “save,” “search,” and “shift”—and above all, the Indian saw “you can only know someone by putting your feet in their moccasins.”
Our great adventure began January 20, 1989, George Bush giving the inaugural address that from his 1960s and ’70s wilderness, even as recently as the 1988 Democratic Convention, must have seemed as distant as the green light to Jay Gatsby at the end of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s dock. Writer Peggy Noonan cast the site as “democracy’s front porch.” Bush’s “first act as president” was a prayer. He then began a theme—“a new breeze is blowing”—freedom. “We know what works,” he said. “Freedom works.” The new president paraphrased from Saint Augustine: “In crucial things, unity; in important things, diversity; in all things, generosity.”
Government could help, but only people could inspire. “[Together we could] make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world.” To 41, the bully pulpit meant example. Example meant bipartisanship. Goodwill begat goodwill. At one point Bush turned from the lectern and extended his hand to Speaker of the House Jim Wright and Senate majority leader George Mitchell. “For this is the thing,” Bush said. “This is the age of the offered hand.” Too late he sensed that Democrats wanted his head, not hand. For the moment, drugs inflamed him most. “Take my word for it: This scourge will stop.” The speech ended with a fifth use of “breeze.” Noonan then left speechwriting to pen a Wall Street Journal column and write books, including What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era, the Gipper’s presidency in vivid prose.
Directly I officially began as speechwriter to the president. My office was room 120 on the first floor of the Eisenhower EOB, the former State, War, and Navy Building across West Executive Avenue from the West Wing door. It was large with a high ceiling and looked out on traffic on Seventeenth Street. The huge pillared and porticoed building looked like a skeleton from Victorian London. I liked it because it was historic and idiosyncratic and you could be in the Oval Office in less than five minutes. Since 1969 writers had been housed in the Old EOB—their corridor known as “Writers’ Row” or “Kings’ Row,” Theodore White wrote of the Nixon presidency, since Nixon had a first-floor EOB office hideaway. Under Bush, writers occupied offices to my right and left.
One was Dan McGroarty, a foreign policy specialist, having crafted speeches for Secretaries of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci and worked at Voice of America. Another, Mark Davis, had written speeches for RNC head Frank Fahrenkopf. Mark Lange joined us from the Transportation Department, having worked for Secretaries Ann McLaughlin and Elizabeth Dole. Mary Kate Grant (later Cary) wrote magazine articles, then speeches, for Bush. Ed McNally had been a federal prosecutor in New York. Beth Hinchliffe was a lyric Boston magazine writer. I and several others served all four years of the Bush administration. Until 1992, when, paraphrasing Yeats, its center no longer held, most served at least two.
Bush’s speech team resembled each president’s since the 1960s, numbering five or six writers at a time, each assigned a research aide to cull local story, fact-check, and mediate with local people. Some writers served as alter ego, policy aide, or personal assistant. Some were a speechwriter before entering the White House, with a field of concentration: foreign policy, domestic policy, values and philosophy. Writing could be by committee and sound it. Most presidents agree: one writer, one speech works best. Bush worked with a single writer on a speech, assigned by Demarest from the West Wing, a floor above the president, and speech editor Chriss Winston, housed on Writers’ Row.
For a major speech—State of the Union, UN address, network missive—you might have twenty days to visit aides, policy experts, and the president by phone, later e-mail, or in person and then write a draft. You tried not to abuse your stay; the president’s plate was always full. Ultimately, for most speeches—fund-raiser here, Rose Garden greeting there—you knew your principal so well you could write without consulting him. My Gannett past helped me write on deadline. Especially in an election year, I might arrive at 6:30 a.m., get a phone call at 7, and hear, “The president needs a speech. No hurry. Get us a draft by 11”—11 a.m. I then remembered Reagan terming himself the king of the so-called B-movies: “A B-movie is one they didn’t necessarily want good. They wanted them Tuesday.”
A former aide to liberal Iowa representative Jim Leach, Winston primarily edited more than wrote. Receiving a writer’s draft, she performed varying degrees of surgery, then sent the product to pertinent policy and political aides—the “staffing” process—each of whom played Broadway critic. Some suggested helpful prose and programmatic thoughts. Others strove to be a pain in the patootie—and succeeded. All returned changes to Chriss’s office, where we tried to reconcile the oft irreconcilable—the “reconciliation” process. After
that the speech reached “POTUS” (for president of the United States), who may or may not have been previously involved.
If Bush liked the speech, happy days were here again. It was printed in bold twenty-four-point type so that he could deliver it without glasses—hopefully, but not always, practiced. By contrast, since only POTUS’s vote counted, if he disliked the final draft, it entered, as Reagan said of Communism, your ash heap of history. Scrap your weekend, turn on the computer, and as a great writer, Red Smith, said, “open your veins, and watch the blood come out.” Mercifully, I had to start from scratch only once or twice—so the Red Cross was never called.
On January 21, 1989, Bush—surprisingly taller (six foot two) than Reagan, less angular and more handsome than on television, lithe, still an athlete—entered the Roosevelt Room to tell writers what he liked and disliked about speechwriting and giving. The first rule was to avoid the word I. Such modesty was thought to be unprecedented for a politician—the result of mother Dorothy’s lifelong circumspection. “Fine, George, but what about the team?” she would say as he detailed a boyhood home run. Like River City, ditching I caused capital T, which stood for trouble. Try writing a third-person speech.
Bush’s second rule was to be direct, voiding emotion. “If you give me a ten, I’m going to send it back and say, ‘Give me an eight,’” he said. “And you’ll be lucky if I deliver a six.” A voter once compared two candidates: “Think of them as a violin. When one talks, you hear every squeak of the box. When the other talks, you hear his soul.” To Bush, the squeak was safer.
Bush’s third rule stemmed from grasping what he was and wasn’t. “I am not Ronald Reagan,” he told us. “I couldn’t be if I wanted to.” The spoken word had been Reagan’s presidency. By design it was one aspect—like policy or personnel—of Bush’s. James Agee wrote, “Let us now praise famous men.” Bush’s famous man said, “You can observe a lot by watching.” As observed, Reagan liked to quote Jefferson. No matter an audience’s age, race, sex, or education, Bush quoted Yogi Berra. With certain people—Sinatra, Streisand—only the surname counts. Others flaunt first name or initial: Ellen, W. No name is like the Yog’s.