George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  In 1990 I should have, but didn’t, ask for a special baseball card produced by the Topps Baseball Card Company. The idea originated with Doug Gamble, who prepared a joke for use in welcoming Oakland, Bush saying, “One of my grandkids told me he wanted to be a baseball player, not a politician, because politicians never get their picture on bubble gum cards.” Gamble made it up, verbal license key to comedy. Topps took it seriously, producing an exclusive edition of a hundred cards with a picture of Bush, twenty-four, in his 1948 Yale baseball uniform. The president was given the card set. Newsweek later printed a photo. By 2013 a card in good condition and clearly coated sold for $3,367.

  On January 20, 1993, his last day in office, Bush was kind enough to have his secretary ask if I’d like a ball autographed by the Miami (née Florida) Marlins. Nineteen years later, speaking at the Baseball Hall of Fame, I noted that the former president was liberally mentioned in my new book on Fenway Park—for Bush, going back to the future attending games there as a boy.

  A member of the audience observed that the date, June 12, was Poppy’s eighty-eighth birthday. Within seconds each person in the Hall’s Bullpen Theater was singing “Happy Birthday” to Bush, hundreds of miles away in Maine. Williams had died in 2002. Were Ted still alive, he would have said that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir never sounded better.

  On April 4, 1991, Bush’s season of Gulf War triumph, Pennsylvania senator John Heinz, a Republican, died in a plane crash, leaving his U.S. Senate seat open. Governor Bob Casey offered the vacancy to auto executive Lee Iacocca, who declined. Harris Wofford, former special assistant to President Kennedy on civil rights, then accepted, taking office May 9. That fall a special election matched the Democrat against the GOP’s heavily favored former Pennsylvania governor and U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh. Future Bill Clinton aides Paul Begala and James Carville piloted Wofford to a ten-point victory, using health care and the flagging economy. The election staggered the Bush White House, already unsure of how to seek reelection. Clearly, with unemployment at midyear 7.8 percent, it couldn’t tout Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Still, Democrats like Gephardt and Nunn had declined to run. In Albany, New York governor Mario Cuomo sat in a plane, preparing to fly to New Hampshire to file for its primary when he read a John Zogby poll showing him losing his home state to Bush, 42–36 percent. The plane never left. Cuomo didn’t run. Inflation and interest rates were still low, Bush was personally popular, and even many Democrats thought him a seminal foreign policy president. In January 1991 Media Opinion Research gave Bush a 62–31 percent approval/disapproval rating. (A year later his average was 43–53 negative.) Plus, his wife was Barbara Bush Superstar.

  She had debuted on a populist note, reviving the first open-house inaugural reception since William Howard Taft. On the morning after Bush’s swearing-in, people who had waited through the night were greeted by the new First Couple and escorted through the mansion. Early in the administration, Mrs. Bush founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, a private group seeking grants from public and private institutions, today chaired by children Jeb Bush and Doro Bush Koch. “I’m talking about the big, bouncy kind [of family], the single parent, extended families, divorced, homeless, and migrant,” she said, giving the term “inclusive” new depth. By and by she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Moreover, she began Mrs. Bush’s Story Time, a national radio program about reading aloud to children.

  Barbara accented synergism—how failure to comprehend what you read could devastate each chapter of a life—education, work, parenthood, travel. At the same time, Mrs. Bush opposed any law making English America’s official language owing to “racial overtones.” It let her discuss problems like AIDS, teen pregnancy, and homelessness sans baggage—visiting the inner-city organization Martha’s Table, which provided food for the poor and homeless; noting the need of unmarried mothers for help with children; at Grandma’s House, a pediatric AIDS care center, holding a baby infected with the virus and posing for photographers to contradict the then impression that this act could spread the disease.

  The first First Lady to have a black press secretary, Anna Perez, lobbied her husband to sign the Hate Crimes Statistics Act. The Washington Post’s David Broder credited her for the president naming Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, the administration’s sole black cabinet member. Improbably, her energy matched her peripatetic spouse’s. She worked to renew the White House Preservation Fund, renaming it the White House Endowment Trust, of the White House Historical Association, and met her $25 million endowment goal. In 1990, invited to speak at all-women’s Wellesley College in suburban Boston, Mrs. Bush was criticized by students for defining herself through the president, not her résumé. Adeptly, she calmed a student backlash. “I was twenty myself,” she quipped, addressing their potential to have a family and career and saying in a speech written by Ed McNally that perhaps one day a member of the audience might follow her path—“and I wish him well!”

  One day she revealed that Millie had given birth to puppies, an event that made Life magazine’s cover. In 1990 Millie’s Book: As Dictated to Barbara Bush became the New York Times’s number-one nonfiction best seller. Routinely, in sneakers and jeans or slippers and housecoat, Mrs. Bush walked Millie in Maine and across the White House lawn. Like Poppy and Millie, she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, often telling about coping with an overactive thyroid. Three cases in one household led the Secret Service to vainly test the water at the White House, Camp David, the vice president’s residence, and Walker’s Point for lithium and iodine, thought to be culpable. The first First Lady who knew how to score a baseball game since Bess Truman also became the first to throw out a ball to open the season. Barbara lacked pretense, shunned politics, and curbed her proclivity to “vent very well,” said son W. Still, “You don’t have to guess if something’s on her mind.”

  Could all of this—Bush’s wisdom, the respect foreign leaders accorded him, his wife’s wide appeal, the belief that they were the kind of people you wanted to represent America—compensate for Bush’s perceived lack of a domestic map? On November 4, 1991, he helped dedicate the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. At that moment I thought Reagan a good, even great, president, not sensing that nearly a quarter century later America would add historic—according to a 2012 Gallup Poll, the greatest president in U.S. history—partly because he had such a map. Bush’s allusions to “We’ll get you on Mount Rushmore yet!” show this appreciation of the Gipper’s niche. Bush often changed policy, leaving voters unsure, say, about the budget, but rarely changed values, or what he thought about certain people. Why was Reagan an exception?

  From 1981, when they began to know each other, Bush developed for Reagan not envy but respect, even awe, for his ability to communicate—thus, persuade. He liked—I think, because he shared—Reagan’s decency, kindness, and reluctance to hurt. Both were unfailingly humble—an unusual trait in politics’ narcissism. Both had a long-standing marriage key to their success—wives not stronger but tougher than they were, quicker to spot phonies, aides with their own agenda, strays who might harm the Boss. The two presidents differed in chronology: Reagan was a true believer who later learned how to get things done; Bush was a pragmatist who later came to conservatism. Personally, each conducted himself as a president should.

  A record five presidents—Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon—heard the forty-first begin by telling Carter, “I feel badly that you haven’t met a Democratic president yet, but please don’t do anything about that.” Bush then noted that “today we honor an American Life—which is the title of his autobiography. We also honor an American Original. Ronald Reagan was born on February 6th—but his heart is pure Fourth of July.” Reagan was humorous extempore and with a script. He was also, said Bush, “a visionary, a crusader, and prophet in his time.”

  Reagan was “a political prophet—leading the tide toward conservatism.” He was also a “Main Street prophet.
Politics can be cruel, uncivil. . . . Reagan was strong and gentle.” For eight years Bush “saw a man who was thoughtful and sentimental, sending money to strangers whose stories touched him, writing letters on yellow legal paper.” Reagan then asked that they be retyped—because he wanted to make it easier for the recipients to read.

  “Not even a bullet from the gun of a would-be assassin could stay his spirit. On that terrible day in March 1981, he looked at the doctors in the emergency room and said, ‘I hope you’re all Republicans.’” As president, Reagan “was unmoved by the vagaries of intellectual fashion. He treasured values that endure. I speak of patriotism and civility and generosity—values etched in the American character. Once, asked whom he most admired in history, he simply responded, ‘The Man from Galilee.’”

  Next, Reagan was a national prophet. “Ronald Reagan believed in returning power to the people. So he helped the private sector create more than 16 million new jobs. He sought to enlarge opportunity, not government. So Ronald Reagan lowered taxes and spending, cut inflation, and helped create the longest peacetime boom in American history. How ironic that the oldest president of the United States would prove as young as the American spirit.”

  Finally, Reagan was a global prophet. “Today, the world is safer because he believed that we who are free to live our dreams, have a duty to support those who dream of living free. Ronald Reagan predicted that communism would land in the ash heap of history—and history proved him right. . . . He practiced what he preached, supporting a strong military and pioneering the Strategic Defense Initiative. His vision paid off for every American in the sea and sands of the Gulf,” said Bush, the man who perhaps knew best.

  “Our friend—the Iron Lady—as usual, said it best. I speak of Margaret Thatcher—your fellow liegeman of liberty. Recently, she spoke of how great leaders are summed up in a sentence. ‘Ronald Reagan,’ she said, ‘won the Cold War without firing a shot. He had a little help—at least that’s what he tells me.’ Looking here at men and women of the presidencies of the last three decades, it occurs to me that help came largely from the American people and you.”

  Bush concluded: “Here’s part of what historians will say of Ronald Reagan. He was the Great Communicator and also the Great Liberator. From Normandy to Moscow, from Berlin to the Oval Office, no leader since Churchill used words so effectively to help freedom unchain our world. You know America. And you have blessed America as few men ever have”—Reagan’s voice as lilting as any musical, crying gotcha to the soul.

  Bush scrapped one library dedication story for fear he would break down telling it about Reagan, weak from being shot, wiping spilled water from the hospital floor to keep nurses out of trouble. He told it in his 2004 eulogy for the Gipper. By then he had absorbed Reagan’s counsel that every time a speaker practices an emotional story, “you drain your emotion but not its impact on the crowd,” explained Bush. “So you better own the material.” That said, his voice cracked in another sentence; for Bush, the eulogy was exceedingly difficult to give.

  No one had to tell Bush why the Gipper had a January 1989 63 percent approval—Gallup’s highest upon leaving office since Ike. No one should have had to tell any policy or political aide either. In 1988 Poppy had brought a dazzling curriculum vitae to the electorate. Under Atwater’s tutelage, he ran an electric campaign. Yet as Bush said at the 1990 Nixon Presidential Library dedication, “I know how I got here”—Reagan’s benediction. Newsweek’s “Conventional-Wisdom Watch” indelicately put it well: “Reagan: ’87 CW: another failed president. ’88 CW: so great he even elected Bush.” Poppy was the closest candidate on the ballot to a third Reagan term.

  Therefore, it surprised me to see several aides slight the Gipper in the Bush speechwriting “staffing” process, which was described earlier. This let administration officials critique speeches—e.g., an economist on a farm address or political expert on a fund-raiser—before they reached the president. Some comments about the man who in 1984 won forty-nine states included “Sounds too much like Reagan,” “Reaganesque—take out,” or “too extreme, like Reagan.” Most snubs were rejected in the “reconciliation” process—thus, never reached the president. Had Bush seen them, he would have been appalled.

  Bush said, accurately, “I am not Ronald Reagan. I couldn’t be if I wanted to.” Unlike Bush, such aides—a decided minority of the staff—showed ingratitude, not grasping that sans Reagan’s record they would have needed a visitors’ tour to see the Oval Office. They were also ignorant of how a president today gains, as Reagan showed, by linking prose and popular culture. In addition, some disliked the tone of Bush’s 1988 campaign, preferring that social issues, like Reaganism, vanish from the GOP. Newsweek had praised “Bush’s transformation from pragmatist to ideologue.” The aides who wrote “Reaganesque—take out” apparently would have liked Bush to run a pragmatist’s 1988 campaign—and lose.

  Like liberal Republicanism generally, these aides often also loathed many of the people who elected Reagan and Bush—people trying to teach their children work, faith, and family, less ideological than traditional—Middle America, the Silent Majority, their overlapping social and cultural conservatism vital to the GOP. Before 1968 losing nominees ignored or belittled social and value issues. In 1968 and 1972, Nixon added social rightism to fiscal and foreign policy—and won. In 1980 Reagan used “welfare queens”; 1988, Bush, Willie Horton; 2004, George W. Bush, gay marriage. Each won. In 1996, 2008, and 2012, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, respectively, snubbed social conservatism—and lost.

  According to the 2004 Pew Research Forum poll, 90 percent of the nation backed vigilant border security; 87, religious symbols on public property; and 80, voluntary school prayer. Aides scrawling “Sounds too much like Reagan” found such attitudes puerile. They would roll their eyes at how the Gipper had a Fundamentalist mother, asked at ten to be baptized, dated a minister’s daughter, graduated from a religious college, and ended his 1980 acceptance speech with a moment of silent prayer.

  Reagan never forgot who sent him to Washington—and why. “In Dixon, [we] may have had little in material terms, but we were emotionally wealthy beyond imagination,” he said in his library speech. “I grew up in a town where everyone cared about one another because everyone knew one another.” Reagan’s childhood vantage animated the 1980, 1984, and 1988 campaigns. Most Americans shared it. Bush had vowed to continue it. Aides trashing Reagan on speech drafts helped to betray it, ignoring social policies without which the GOP has been deader than the dodo bird.

  Blinded by bias, they often let ideology trump fact. For example, the Bush White House included the Gay GOP Office—their national presence then slight—and the Evangelical Outreach Office—as we have seen, the Republicans’ largest bloc. Neither should have had to justify its existence, but one did—to some, improbably, the latter. In the end apostles of the Big Tent Party can be the biggest unpragmatists of all.

  Every meeting of the president is catalogued by a notetaker. A November 20, 1991, luncheon with presidential speechwriters and researchers was held against a backdrop of political angst. Bush spurned his usual casual fast-food cuisine for chicken salad or tuna salad, with cottage cheese on lettuce encircled by fruit. Cappuccino frozen yogurt with cream and shaved cinnamon on top topped the menu. The president put Tabasco sauce on his tuna and mixed sweetener and thyroid medicine into his coffee. The lunch looked ahead to the campaign, Bush starting with a plaudit: the speechwriters might not know how much he appreciated us, but we were doing a great job.

  “We need a formulation for placing the blame on Congress for the economy without losing their support,” read the notes of the late Robert Simon, a fine speechwriting researcher. The economy had been flagging, Bush charged with obsessing on foreign policy. “In the next few weeks,” Simon continued, “POTUS wants to let the people know he is concerned, he cares, and is in touch with the American people.” To Bush, the message was key. At Yale he had taken a psychology class, in which in s
elling repetition was taught as crucial. Thomas Dewey said that you had to say something four times before the audience remembered it. Billy Graham said, “Repeat, repeat, repeat—tell the audience what you’re going to tell it, tell it, then tell it what you told it.”

  Bush was determined to be natural—“not to undermine what you are and what you believe.” John F. Kennedy “got away with a lot of intellectual stuff; POTUS doesn’t feel comfortable doing that,” Simon wrote. He wanted speeches that were short and humorous and shunned “high-flying” rhetoric which would undercut how Bush usually appeared. Similarly, he believed in the Bible, noting God in the “just war” speech and those to the Catholic cardinals and religious broadcasters, but didn’t “want to over-do Bible references.” His religion was in the heart, not on the sleeve. Bush was comfortable with family values but not with discussing abortion. “We made our view clear, and we stand with our decision.” Pro-life since 1980, Bush had favored abortion rights before then.

  Bush spoke for a time about speaking skill. He admired Reagan’s ability to “separate the words from his heart”—he cited the Gipper’s Pointe du Hoc D-day speech—but said that he could not. “You can blame it on the genes.” The president blamed his dropping polls on the economy—“a recession,” he now conceded—noting that Reagan’s approval rating in November 1983 before the 1984 election matched his now; the difference, Bush’s mid-50s percent was falling, Reagan’s rising. Another GOPer, Pat Buchanan, was posing a primary challenge. Bush asked us to be charitable so that Pat would endorse him once Buchanan was eliminated. “He’s out there on a weird platform,” Poppy shook his head. He then talked about his “personal interests.” Bush loved country music, naming two “personal favorites—Reba and Crystal,” McEntire and Gayle, respectively—by first name. He also played golf to escape reporters, “the only thing I can do to relax.”