George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  In February 1991 Bush taped an eightieth birthday salute to Ronald Reagan, whom he said defined “what you described as the American song: ‘Hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair.’” Even here Bush’s mind was on his mission, adding to my draft: “I join all Americans in rejoicing at the high level of technical advantage that we enjoy in our war with Iraq.” The video included his self-typed “When I think of the accuracy of our missiles and the superb performance of our planes, I think of your passionate conviction that no American should be asked to fight unless equipped with the very best. Your fighting for strong defense budgets over the eight years you were President is paying off now for every man and woman fighting for our country half-way around the world.” Margaret Thatcher would be at the dinner, Bush adding, “May God bless PM [Prime Minister] Thatcher and those courageous men and women of the UK who are fighting shoulder to shoulder with our brave troops.”

  Comedian Dana Carvey once called Bush’s mot “wouldn’t be prudent” the president’s third middle name. Freeze early 1991: for once, the Prudent Man had jumped over the moon. “By God,” he said, “we’ve licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” On March 6 Poppy addressed a joint session of Congress, saying, “I come to this House to speak about the world—the world after war.” As they met, “Saddam walks amidst ruin. His war machine is crushed.” From division Bush saw “a new world coming into view,” quoting Churchill, a new world order in which “the principles of justice and fair play protect the weak against the strong.” On June 8 Operation Desert Storm commanders saluted Bush during the victory parade on Washington’s Constitution Avenue; half a million watched. The president stood, as Edmund Burke once described a peer, “at the summit. He may live long, he may do much. But . . . he can never exceed what he does this day.”

  Hussein’s demolition put the Arab-Israeli peace process back in play. That July Bush and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I)—the first major arms pact since 1987’s INF Treaty. Lech Wałęsa received the Medal of Freedom as “the first democratically elected president [of Poland],” said Bush, having “forged a solidarity of spirit which has held millions of Poles to gather in steel mills and shipyards and tenements and towns. They knew that some would die in the crusade against aggression. Yet they cheered as they sang to you, ‘Sto lat.’—May he live one hundred years! Our task is to help freedom live still longer.” New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote that Bush had gained “a popularity and stature almost inconceivable for any president in his third year in office.”

  Another Times columnist, Abe Rosenthal, told me, “He is giving America the best leadership abroad this nation has ever seen.” A USA Today poll read, “Bush: 91 percent approval”—Gallup’s historic high. In March he had left for a weekend at the presidential getaway at Camp David. Staff members and families congregated on the South Lawn to say good-bye. It was surreal and couldn’t last. Hand-lettered signs read, “The Great Liberator” and “91.” How could Bush top the topper? The question lingers, even now.

  On February 27 Bush spoke to the American Society of Association Executives about education, opportunity, and crime—“part of our domestic Desert Storm,” said its writer, Mary Kate Grant. The audience response rivaled “one hand clapping. Maybe they weren’t ready to move on [from the war].” In his March 6 Persian Gulf victory speech, the president asked Congress “to move forward aggressively on our domestic front.” Bush noted the already enacted: a historic Clean Air Act; child-care legislation; the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act; the Immigration Act of 1990, increasing legal entrée to the United States by 40 percent. Now, he urged Capitol Hill to pass pending administration programs, first in crime and transportation, then civil rights and energy. “If our forces could win the ground war in a hundred hours,” he said, “then surely the Congress can pass this legislation in a hundred days.”

  Bush knew that foreign policy rarely elects a president. An exception had been Nixon’s forty-nine-state 1972 landslide, tying his trip to China, arms treaty with the Soviet Union, and winnowing of the war. Even its foundation had been “the United States in the midst of a new economic boom,” artificially helped by 1971–73 wage and price controls, said the New York Times. Bush often said, “We know what works. Freedom works.” If the economy worked, among other things, Poppy could return to foreign affairs. As we have seen, Bush inherited a huge federal deficit from Reagan: three times 1980’s. Raising taxes to curb it pleased the Left at the cost of a conservative revolt. To Sununu, that rebellion cost the GOP a chance to own the 1990s recovery. “That budget agreement was much more significant than people recognize,” he said in 2014, noting that the deficit fell and economy rose in what would have been Bush’s second term.

  For the moment, the economy fell further. A mild recession had begun in 1990. As unemployment rose, Bush added benefits for jobless workers. Downsizing cost many largely Republican and independent white-collar jobs. In 1991 Bush convened about twenty political aides, went around the table, and asked each for advice. Almost all urged him to pump-prime the economy—now. Bush refused. He had named Fred Malek, former Marriott Hotels president, as 1992 campaign manager, working with Teeter and fund-raiser Robert Mosbacher. Malek now told the president that he needed above all to insulate himself from the recession. Eighteen months before Election Day, Bush answered that he had already done all that was needed to win a second term, citing low inflation and interest rates. Inexplicably, economists had convinced the Yale ’48 economics major that in 1992 America would be recession-proof.

  That being—at least seeming—true, some wanted to restore exemptions for high-income taxpayers and reduce marginal tax rates. Many wanted Bush to make good on his 1988 campaign: voluntary prayer in school; a less coarse culture; teach, not torch, American history. Others wanted him to forcefully enunciate a Reaganesque approach to government: keep taxes and spending low and liberties unencumbered. Bush was sympathetic, I think, to each view. Inevitably, though, the president returned to foreign policy, like an old tune or first love.

  No ally was a greater friend of late twentieth century America than, as Bush said, another recipient of the Medal of Freedom—“the greengrocer’s daughter who shaped a nation to her will.” As the reader has seen, in August 1990 Margaret Thatcher was at a conference with Bush when Hussein invaded Kuwait. “Now, George, this is no time to go wobbly” was her advice he recited in the months ahead. That November Thatcher was removed from office by a coup d’etat of her own Tory party—a cabal she would have called the “wets”—Britain’s answer to U.S. RINOS.

  In 1981 Thatcher was the first official guest of the newly inaugurated President Reagan. In 1988 she was his last White House guest before the Gipper left office. She died in 2013, at eighty-seven, nine years after Reagan “left this beachhead for another,” as he once said of American and Allied D-day fatalities. Shakespeare could have been describing Britain’s only female prime minister: “[We] shall not look upon [her] like again.”

  First elected in 1979, she found Britain economically on her knees—so Thatcher decreased what government must do and increased what the individual may do. She axed inflation, slashed price controls, and privatized public housing so that the poor could own their homes.

  Thatcher found her island nation unsure of its mythic past—so that when Argentina threatened Britain’s Falkland Islands, she formed an armada to defend their rights, as had elsewhere Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington and her hero, Winston Churchill.

  Under her the special relationship between America and the United Kingdom became even more unbreakable—so that when Hussein began the Gulf War, the two partners plotted policy in tandem. Churchill wrote Britain’s finest hour; Thatcher perhaps democracy’s finest era.

  Thatcher, relishing the sobriquet, was called the Iron Lady. Once a clique of Tories urged her to U-turn a policy. “Turn if you like,” she admonished them. “The Lady is not for turning.” Her strength came from a need
to work and belief in tradition, sovereignty, family, and British—by extension, American—exceptionalism. It produced a pitch-perfect affinity with both nations’ middle-class instincts and intuitions.

  In 1991 I was asked to write Bush’s speech giving Thatcher the Medal of Freedom. Jotting notes, I thought of how her upright upbringing—the family lived above her father’s store—evoked the character of sublime World War II films like Mrs. Miniver. Her background produced the woman whose picture can be found in thousands of homes in Eastern Europe, where she showed, as was said of Charles de Gaulle, that “greatness knows no national boundaries.” The Iron Curtain was no match for the Iron Lady.

  My last memory of Thatcher was her scalding and brilliant November 22, 1990, Question Time farewell in Parliament upon her leaving office. “[For those opposing her policies] it’s all compromise . . . it’s sweep it under the carpet, leave it for another day, it might sort out and sort itself, in the hope that the people . . . would not notice,” she said, hecklers crushed, the ancient hall roaring in approbation.

  I recall a tale of the London cabbie, hearing Thatcher’s speech by radio, laughing and crying so hard he had to pull off the road. “Just listen to her!” he said. “Maggie’s leaving”—her heart breaking—“and she’s givin’ ’em hell. What a woman! God, we’re going to miss her.” We have and do. Thatcher left, a lioness in winter. The Rockies would crumble before this great Briton did.

  Coda. In mid-1990 I began to talk informally with several Tory members of the British parliament about the possibility of writing for Prime Minister Thatcher for a short period through a leave of absence or secondment from the White House. Thatcher, it seemed, might be well inclined. Jonathan Aitken, a conservative member of Parliament (MP), wrote Peter Morrison, Mrs. Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary, who contacted Aitken and me just before she was deposed by the conservative coup. “I have been in touch with him,” Morrison then wrote Aitken of me, “but sadly, the need does not now arise.” On November 22, as Thatcher led her final Question Time, a loyalist shouted, “You can wipe the floor with those people!” That week Thatcher graciously replied to a letter our speech staff had mailed to London.

  Dear Mr. Smith:

  I received your very kind message on behalf of the White House speech writers, and would just say how much I have admired your marvellously professional work over the last two years. You have produced some splendid speeches which have been a tremendous encouragement to those of us who believe in a free society, and in a leading world role for the United States.

  With many thanks and best wishes.

  Kind regards.

  Yours sincerely,

  Margaret Thatcher

  Like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ike, Kennedy, Reagan, and Bill Clinton, among many others, Bush treasured the “special relationship.” In 1939 King George VI of England visited Washington. Presenting the singer Kate Smith to His Majesty, FDR said, “This is America.” He also knew what Great Britain was: a nation joined to ours by heritage and culture, civilization and law.

  A song that year vowed “There’ll always be an England.” In 1940 the Nazi blitz sowed doubt about whether even the country’s capital would survive. After being spared, Buckingham Palace, like the rest of London, was bombed. “Finally, we can look the [battered blue-collar] East Side in the face,” said the future Queen Mother, Elizabeth, feeling that England’s stiff upper lip and stiffer spine would gain American sympathy, then aid.

  In 1991 her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, visited Washington for the first time since 1976, when, as she said, “with a gallant disregard for history, we shared wholeheartedly in the celebrations of the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of this great nation.” I was honored to write each of Bush’s five speeches honoring Her Majesty, starting with her May 14 arrival on the South Lawn. Terming her “freedom’s friend,” Bush noted that at eighteen she had fought in World War II “against fascism.” America “began to know you as one of us, summoning . . . our values and our dreams.

  “For nearly four hundred years,” said the president, “the histories of Britain and America have been inseparable”—from Jamestown and Plymouth Rock to “the sands and seas of the Persian Gulf. Years from now [men and women] will talk of the First Infantry Division and the Desert Rats and of the finest sons and daughters any nation could ever have.”

  Bush then quoted from Elizabeth, twenty-one, in 1947’s wake of World War II, over radio to the British people: “My whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our family to which we all belong.” She concluded, “But I shall not have strength to carry out the resolution alone unless you join it with me.” By twenty-six Queen Elizabeth II had braved her father’s death, become monarch, and begun a reign to rival Victoria’s.

  Bush said, “Your example helped inspire a nation—and helped your nation inspire the world.” On behalf of America, “which reveres [its] mother country,” he introduced the queen. Memorably, event staff had placed the podium too high for her, so Her Majesty’s hat peered from behind the mike. She recalled that “it is forty years since our first visit to this country, when Mr. Truman was president. It made such a deep impression that I can hardly believe that so many years have slipped past in the meanwhile.”

  Now, she said, “I fully understand what Winston Churchill meant when he spoke of the inspiration and renewed vitality he found every time he came here. In her third as in her first century, the United States represents an ideal, an emblem, and an example: an ideal of freedom under the law, an emblem of democracy, and an example of constant striving for the betterment of the people.”

  Two hours later Bush received the Winston Churchill Award for “the leadership you have shown to the world in recent months,” said the queen in the Rose Garden. Accepting, Bush was to say, “Like Gladstone, Churchill forged a fidelity to honor. Like Disraeli, he rallied others to that cause. We can never reinvent him—but we must never forget him. So we are here to recall what he meant, and what he was.

  “Churchill provided hope when the free world had abandoned it,” the president’s text continued. “He was likened to the bull dog—but to the enemy he was a pit bull. When Britain was under attack by the godless, it was sustained by a leader whom God must have bestowed at its time of greatest peril.” Bush’s peril was 100 percent humidity. “I have prepared here about a forty-five-minute speech, but if I gave it, we would all melt,” he said, the crowd laughing. Bush thanked the queen, ended the event, and at least didn’t tear up my cards.

  Ten minutes later, back on the South Lawn, Bush recalled how in 1937 FDR “celebrat[ed] the British-American family by praising a friend,” planting two “small-leaf linden trees . . . in honor of your father, King George the Sixth’s coronation. For decades they stood erect and proud, like the ties that bind our nations.” In September 1990 a storm in the Washington area had destroyed one of the lindens. Bush could think “of no better way to show our friendship . . . than to plant a new linden tree.”

  It was Bush’s honor “now to dedicate this tree to a truly great and good man, King George the Sixth,” who reigned until his death in 1952, whereupon Elizabeth succeeded him. In 2011 an Oscar-winning film, The King’s Speech, showed King George’s courage in combating stuttering. Like Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Washington, it exuded class.

  Class is not a term Democrats would instantly apply to Lee Atwater—rather, profane, populist, incendiary, a 33 1/3 RPM record played at 78 speed, and win at all costs, which he did. Some would say racist—wrongly, I think—in his early incarnation. Others might say bright, shrewd, knowing “the depth, the draught of water of every one of [his candidates, districts, and constituents],” paraphrasing Emerson. They might even call Atwater the Roy Hobbs of campaign strategists: if not the best there ever was, the best of the GOP’s.

  In 1988 the native Georgian piloted Connecticut Yankee George Bush to the presidency; the two formed an irrepressible combination of
the pauper and patrician. Had Atwater lived, I feel almost sure that Bush would have been reelected handsomely in 1992. National Journal’s Tom DeFrank tentatively disagrees. “Atwater might have forced Bush to focus on the ‘out of touch’ charge then beginning,” he said. “His trouble was that Americans had basically decided that twelve years of Reagan were enough.” Meanwhile, millions, flocking to Ross Perot, became estranged because Bush hadn’t been enough like Reagan. “So you had an internal contradiction in what Atwater would have had to do.”

  DeFrank cites a late 1991 Bush note to doubt whether he would have even run. “‘It’s going to be an ugly year,’ Bush said. I wonder if he ever had the fire in the belly.” Atwater, who did, was named GOP national chairman in 1989, developed cancer in 1990, and died in 1991, having known Middle America like the scale on his guitar. In 1940 Republicans mocked FDR’s third-term campaign of indispensability, as if only he could combat “Hitlerism.” Roosevelt was indispensable. Atwater was indispensable, politically. Since his death, with the possible exception of Bush 43’s Karl Rove, no Republican has approached Atwater’s grasp of tactic, history, and strategy—witness a GOP unhorsed by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In the Bush 41 White House, John Sununu was closest, though it surprises how few grasped that at the time.

  Sununu was born in Havana, was raised in the Big Apple borough of Queens, got his doctorate in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later became a three-term New Hampshire governor and father of eight sons. He was conservative in dress and policy. He fathomed who elected Bush in 1988 and why. He could be barbed, making Time’s May 21, 1990, cover—“Bush’s Bad Cop.” He was often literally the smartest person in the room. If you backed down or were a blowhard, Sununu had little use for you. If you stood up to him and weren’t, you generally got along fine.