George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  In early 1991 Chriss Winston left the White House to free-lance and spend more time with her pre-kindergarten son. Sununu quickly picked Tony Snow to replace her as speech editor and also to become chief writer. He was thirty-five, a Davidson graduate, editorial page editor of the rightist Washington Times, and more conservative than Winston or Demarest, whom Sununu ignored in Snow’s hiring. Tony quickly began regular speech meetings, encouraging a locker-room give-and-take on how Bush could aggressively convey a more conservative air.

  As in 1988, I wanted Bush to run on foreign policy and cultural conservatism. After all, it beat Dukakis. (The same amalgam also won in 1968, 1972, 1980, and 1984.) Some wanted him to become the environmental president. In 1992 Bush rightly gave many green speeches. Others wanted to accent economic growth; at this point there wasn’t much. Some fixated on proving the GOP wasn’t as mean as Dems insisted—inane then and now. Speech meetings also discussed wearability—key amid 24/7 coverage. In 2012 Queen Elizabeth observed her Diamond Jubilee. No newsstand snubbed her. That summer 220 million Americans made the London Olympics our most-watched-ever event. Each wore well. After eight years America hadn’t tired of Reagan. After three, had it tired of Bush?

  Arriving, Snow got Bush to use the 1991 commencement speech at the University of Michigan to lash speech codes erasing language “hateful”—often, simply unpopular—to the left-wing sensibility. In totalitarian countries, secret police crush freedom of expression. Today, Bush told the crowd, academe’s political correctness does. “Ironically, on the two hundredth anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses,” Bush said. “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. . . . What began as a crusade for civility has soured into a cause of conflict and even censorship. Disputants treat sheer force—getting their foes punished or expelled, for instance—as a substitute for the power of ideas.”

  Bush’s broadside was prescient. I think he would have tried in a second term to lessen pc’s assault on unfettered speech. In one speech he hailed “a government of the extended hand—not closed mind and self-indulgent heart.” Bush wished he could move as swiftly on domestic issues as on foreign policy—“Let me deny I plan to meet with the world’s most venerable remaining Communist leader [U.S. Communist Party leader], Gus Hall,” he joked—but couldn’t. “The president can propose—but only Congress can legislate.” Bush bristled as unemployment rose, Democrats revived, and tales grew of him being “out of touch.” By fall Bush said, “Last March 6, I challenged Congress to pass crime and transportation bills. It’s 225 days later, and Congress is still in mental recess.” Humor was an antidote: “Driving over here, I heard Randy Travis singing, ‘It’s just a matter of time.’ What a relief to hear a song expressing confidence in my ultimate ability to catch a fish.”

  Increasingly, even the judiciary showed what Bush called “the deficiencies of the domestic political scene,” why he “hate[d] the posturing on both sides.” In 1990 Supreme Court nominee David Souter, proposed to Sununu by liberal New Hampshire U.S. senator Warren Rudman, was approved by the Senate, only to promptly “turn on us”—the same phrase Thomas Dewey had used about Earl Warren four decades earlier in Ike’s administration—each an alleged conservative who became a radical judicial wrecker. In September 1991, not about to err again, Bush nominated African-American Clarence Thomas, the real thing, to Sununu’s right. With reelection near, the president did what he hadn’t with John Tower in 1989: put his prestige on the line. It worked. Thomas was narrowly confirmed. For a quarter century, Thomas and Antonin Scalia have been ballasts of strict constructionism.

  Thomas “gave a powerful captivating opening statement to Congress,” Bush wrote in his diary. “I am proud of the job he did. There was not a dry eye in the place”—nor soon a dispassionate voice as ex-intern Anita Hill used pornographic prose to accuse Thomas of sexual harassment. Campaigning, Bush told a crowd, “Republican control of Congress would avoid the vicious character assassination to great Americans like Clarence Thomas. With the support of special interest groups, Congress has replaced the process of advise and consent with the politics of revise and attack.” Finding it hard to hate people, Bush hated such incivility. The politics he liked illumined the Fourth of July 1991 at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, Poppy showing how four nation builders, their likenesses completed by brave men half a century earlier, embodied America’s core. Washington forged independence. Jefferson stirred democracy. Lincoln demanded equality. Theodore Roosevelt—TR—preserved what Bush called “the very wonder of the environment.”

  The president began with the father of our country. Ben Franklin, then American minister to France, attended a diplomatic dinner in Paris during the War for Independence. “First a French official rose, toasting Louis XVI and comparing him to the moon,” said Bush. “The British ambassador then toasted his monarch, George III, likening him to the sun.” Finally, the aging Franklin stood to speak: “I cannot give you the sun nor the moon, but I give you George Washington . . . who, like Joshua of old, commanded both the sun and the moon to stand still, and both obeyed.”

  Jefferson, Bush resumed, obeyed his endless curiosity, knowing “how self-determination could unleash the full flower of the individual American.” Traveling, “Jefferson stopped in an inn and began conversation with a stranger. They talked of mechanics, and the stranger decided the newcomer must be an engineer,” said the president. “When the talk shifted to agriculture, it seemed Jefferson must be a farmer. More talk led the stranger to think Jefferson must be a lawyer, then a physician, then a clergyman. The following day, when Jefferson left, the stranger learned that he was merely president.”

  All of us learned from Lincoln. He preserved the Union, abolished slavery, and said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” Bush felt that Abe would also want him to tell a story. “A stranger found him on the street with two of his sons. Both of them were sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Whatever is the matter with the boys, Mr. Lincoln?’ the stranger asked. Lincoln sighed, then said: ‘Just what’s the matter with the world. I’ve got three walnuts, and each wants two.’”

  Like each face on Mount Rushmore, Lincoln was pulled in countless directions, living in a time of extraordinary peril. Yet each acted extraordinarily, like the monument’s final face, Teddy Roosevelt, grasping “that to widely use we must wisely serve our national and cultural resources,” said Bush. “To preserve them, we must protect them. TR expanded the size of the National Forest by 40 million acres. He created five National Parks and sixteen monuments, including the Grand Canyon. Above all, he used the bully pulpit—to TR, the essence of the presidency.”

  By mid-1991 did Bush’s essence resonate as it had even a few months earlier? That spring the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd had written, “This President relaxes by wearing the others out.” Surprisingly, Poppy then lost fifteen pounds in six weeks. (The ultimate diagnosis was Graves’ disease, which causes an overactive thyroid.) In May the seemingly preternaturally young Bush, sixty-six, was hospitalized for two days, for atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat discovered while the president was jogging. The incidents bruised Bush’s persona and convinced some that he was no longer up to the job. A few felt him old-timey, not in sync with a postmodern culture. Like Churchill, Bush had been an exquisite war leader. A people’s peace priorities can differ, as the Brits showed in 1945.

  At one end Bush’s Gallup approval still topped 70 percent, easily besting any 1992 Democratic contender. At the other his intensity level trailed the Gipper’s, who had a lower overall approval at the same time in his own first term. Moderate Democrats like Georgia’s Sam Nunn and Missouri’s Richard Gephardt had “scrambled to show they’d backed Bush’s Gulf policy,” Hugh Sidey told me of early 1991, “when in fact they’d opposed it—rats trying to reboard the ship. Now they were edging back toward their party.” What surprised is that regular White House co
mmunications meetings fixed almost exclusively on the president’s approval rating and reaction from the hustings.

  Seldom did we use Bush’s post–Gulf War prestige to advance a domestic program—too busy applauding popularity for its own sake—nor did polling affect Bush’s position on any issue, which must strike today’s reader as ennobling or crazed. Bush wanted politics to end at the water’s edge. It even ended largely inside his White House as the calendar turned toward 1992.

  For a long time after taking office, George Bush was helped by the fact that he was the most nonpartisan president, I would argue, since Dwight Eisenhower. The past quarter century had been nothing if not partisan—sharply, even recklessly. For many, possibly a clear majority of Americans, Bush was culturally a welcome time-out. He seemed a model husband, father, and grandfather. He loved real dogs of every type. As we have seen, he liked to fish, hunt, run, play golf and tennis, and drive his cigarette boat, Fidelity, at Walker’s Point. He installed a horseshoe pit on the White House lawn. He played to win but, unlike Bill Clinton on the links, didn’t claim a mulligan. He liked people, generally, telling and hearing stories, and Nashville’s love of country. He was religious, but not off-putting; dignified, but not starchy; humorous, but never made a fool of himself. He was a bona fide war hero whose gallantry, like that of most of broadcaster Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, you had to hear about from others. A distinguished other was the U.S. Navy Foundation, which gave Bush its 1991 Lone Sailor Award for naval and government service.

  All of these knit, as I have written, Bush’s upper-class Connecticut lineage and this nation’s vast middle-class lilt. Together they formed a mix vital to his political success—president, but a regular guy. Another denominator was a game so American that in World War II Japanese warriors charged U.S. GIS chanting, “To hell with Babe Ruth!” Billy Joel sang A New York State of Mind. For Bush’s and my younger generation’s, baseball’s state of mind imbued our growing up.

  Joseph Alsop wrote, “If I feel that there were giants in the Roosevelt years, I claim the right to say so.” To Bush, Lou Gehrig was a giant. His coming of baseball age included Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx, then Stan Musial and Enos Slaughter, with Graham McNamee and Red Barber behind the mike. Mine tied Henry Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Vin Scully, and Willie, Mickey, and the Duke (Snider). All were the welcome beckoner of a thousand afternoons.

  “To express the game you have to follow it from childhood,” said Mel Allen, the 1939–64 Yankees announcer whose voice meant baseball to Bush and me. Among his reverie: a 1942 game at Yankee Stadium. Like Bush, New York’s Tommy Henrich was about to go to war.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the PA announcer said, “this is the last time that you will see Tommy Henrich in a Yankee uniform for the duration.”

  The crowd burst a lung. Detroit’s Dizzy Trout stepped off the pitching rubber. Henrich stepped into the batter’s box, yelling, “Come on, Dizzy, throw the ball.”

  Trout cupped his hands: “Stand there and listen to it, you SOB. You’ll remember it as long as you live.” He was expressing something on his baseball mind.

  The player most on Bush’s mind was “the greatest hitter who ever lived”—the man whom he and John Sununu credited with helping to pivot the 1988 New Hampshire primary. They had a lot of company. In 1974 Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris wrote The Great American Card Flipping, Trading, and Bubble Gum Book, saying, “In 1955, there were 77,263,127 male American human beings, and every one of them in his heart of hearts would have given two arms, a leg, and his collection of Davey Crockett iron-ons to be Teddy Ballgame.”

  In 1959 a pinched nerve caused Ted Williams to bat a career-low .254. In response, Ted wouldn’t sign a new contract till Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey cut his salary. The Kid then hit .316 in 1960. That September 28, Williams exited as only a deity could—homering, number 521, in his last at bat, and declining, as Ted always did, to tip his cap. John Updike explained why in a classic New Yorker article: “God does not answer letters.”

  Williams retired, made the Hall of Fame, gave what many deem its best-ever acceptance speech, and became, said Sports Illustrated, “the patron saint of Cooperstown.” Three decades later George H. W. Bush plotted a designation of his own.

  In 1990 Bush wanted to give Williams the Medal of Freedom. As Leigh Montville writes in his fine book, Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero, The Kid originally declined. Startled, Chief of Staff Sununu called to learn why.

  “No, thanks,” Williams said.

  “No, thanks?” said Sununu.

  Teddy Ballgame: “I don’t want to do it.”

  Sununu called a longtime Bush family friend to ask Ted to change his mind. Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent found that Williams didn’t want to wear a tuxedo. In turn, “Sununu said he didn’t have to wear a tuxedo, but did have to wear a tie,” wrote Montville. In the past Ted had likened a necktie to a noose.

  Surgery then delayed Ted’s honor, starting a year of speculation—“like waiting for Godot,” said a West Wing aide, “except that Godot couldn’t hit.” It ended with Number 9 getting the Medal of Freedom that Lucille Ball, Omar Bradley, Warren Buffett, Martin Luther King, Edward R. Murrow, and six U.S. presidents, including Bush, have also received.

  In July 1991 Bush and Sununu concocted another event. One day the chief of staff called not to discuss a UN speech, Oval Office talk, or birthday message for the Dalai Lama. This was important: a fiftieth anniversary tribute to Ted’s and Joe DiMaggio’s 1941 magic daybook—the Yankee Clipper’s fifty-six-game hitting streak and Williams’s colossal .406 average.

  “The president wants to celebrate them,” Sununu told me, “and we’ve come up with a way.” I was to write Bush’s speech and text for each’s “President’s Award.”

  “President’s Award?” I said, having never heard of it. “When was it last given?”

  “Never!” Sununu bayed, nor has it been given since.

  Next week I joined other middle-aged teeny/Teddy-boppers in the Rose Garden. Bush praised DiMag’s “grace and modesty,” asked Williams’s “help with my press relations,” and recited his ninth-inning homer to help the American League beat the Nationals, 7–5, in the 1941 All-Star Game. He then introduced The Kid, whose presence domineered the event.

  “I’ve always realized what a lucky guy I’ve been in my life,” Williams said, humbled. “I was born in America. I was a Marine and I served my country, and I’m very, very proud of that. I got to play baseball and have a chance to hit. I owe so very, very much to the game that I love so much. I want to thank you, Mr. President. I think you’re doing a tremendous job. And I want you to know you’re looking at one of the greatest supporters you’ll ever have.”

  Joe D. followed. “Thank you, Mr. President, ladies and gentleman. I’m honored. Thank you. And to you LSU players [Louisiana State University, NCAA title–winning team, in the audience], congratulations on your championship. I know the feeling. I’ve been in one or two myself. [His Yankees won nine World Series.] It’s nice to be here with you. And thank you again.”

  Bush then asked Maj. David Bonwitt, Marine Cops aide to the president, to read each citation.

  “JOE DIMAGGIO. Graceful afield and sterling at bat, Joe DiMaggio bespoke excellence as few athletes ever have. In 1941 ‘Joltin’ Joe’ electrified America by hitting safely in a record fifty-six straight games. A writer once said, ‘Watching Joe DiMaggio play baseball was like listening to Jascha Heifetz play the violin.’ Today, the nation still turns its eyes to you—Number 5, the Yankee Clipper.”

  “TED WILLIAMS. He was called The Kid, the Splendid Splinter, and in New England, simply Himself. He was an iconoclast and rebel who, half a century ago, batted .406—last hitter to eclipse .400. His feat was especially redoubtable since, as Number 9 has said, ‘hitting a baseball is the hardest task in sports.’ Teddy Ballgame remains John Wayne in baseball woolies—perhaps the greatest hitter of all time.”

  Numbers 41, 9, and 5—Bush, Williams,
and DiMaggio, respectively—then took Air Force One to a “summit” in Toronto with Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, arranged hurriedly so that Bush and company could see that night’s All-Star Game. “The idea behind the whole thing,” Sununu told Montville, “was that we could ride on the plane for an hour and a half and have these two guys to ourselves and listen to them talk. It was wonderful.”

  Someday some administration may like baseball more than Bush 41’s, though it is hard to imagine how. In July 1989, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Little League Baseball before five thousand players, officials, and coaches gathered on the South Lawn, the president decided to use The Encyclopedia of Baseball as a source. “At this point,” he wrote me, “I will take out my handy baseball ref. book and read a couple of lines on both Stan [Musial] and Yaz [Carl Yastrzemski]. ‘Let me consult my handy dandy pocket size book of statistics . . . Musial, Stan . . . Yastrzemski, Carl.’” At the event he told Little Leaguers, “Wanna know about Yaz? You gotta have this book!”

  One year I helped Bush write the Official World Series program cover story, “Memories in the Fall,” Poppy saying, “You never forget your first love. For me, that was, and is, Barbara. But a runner-up is baseball.” Yearly, he welcomed the World Series titlist to the Rose Garden; from 1989 to 1992, Oakland, Cincinnati, Minnesota, and Toronto respectively. “Usually when I’m told of a meeting with some heavy hitters, it turns out to be the congressional leadership,” the president told one team. “Today it’s you.” A year later he advised another, “When I talk to Mr. Gorbachev about reducing offensive weaponry, I’m going to tell him your bats are not negotiable.”