by Curt Smith
Golf ran deeply through his clan. Bush’s grandfather George Herbert Walker founded the famed amateur Walker Cup, between the United States and UK. Bush once asked me to write about it for his then-eighty-seven-year-old uncle, Louis Walker, representing the family at the cup matches at Nairn, Scotland. “One point you might make is that with all this golf heritage, we [Americans] have never come up in recent years with much [amateur] golf talent,” Bush wrote, “also perhaps something about the wonder of the Walker Cup itself and the joy of pure amateur competition.” Bush was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, once addressed America’s Ryder Cup team, and loved golf’s history, élan, and grace. He said he liked sports in general—“the sportsmanship, the analogies, the winning, the losing.”
The next day, November 21, Gallup started a three-day poll that found Bush’s approval rating at barely 51 percent—the last time he got majority approval in the poll until January 1993, his last month on the job.
In our visit with Bush, the president discussed his December 7, 1991, address in Honolulu to World War II veterans and their families and his speech aboard the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, which Mary Kate Grant and I, respectively, would write. Each would mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, which cost 2,403 American lives, drew the United States into World War II, and forever freeze-framed the day. Bush said that he would not apologize for America dropping the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end the war. Negating an invasion, President Truman had been right to save the lives of U.S. and Japanese soldiers and civilians. Americans of Japanese descent were not to be called Japanese-Americans—no hyphenated identity—but “Americans with a Japanese background.” Amen.
Next week I met with Bush in the Oval Office. Friends of his had died in the Japanese attack. As the reader has seen, a day later Bush, seventeen, had tried to enlist. Too young, he was told to return at age eighteen. Bush did, becoming the Navy’s youngest bomber pilot. “Look, I have to be careful,” he said of the half-century-later USS Arizona Memorial speech. “I don’t want to break down.” Writing, I didn’t say that I hoped Bush would—not for effect alone, or even mostly, but so others would see the honor and emotion—the character—that his staff saw each day.
For several weeks I worked on the speech, gleaning letter, anecdote, and history from the day that still “live[d] in infamy.” Tony Snow was helpful editing: hard, but not harsh, grading every word. “This is a very good speech,” went a November 29 memo, “but it can be a great speech, and it must be.” Next week a final draft was approved by Snow, David Demarest, then the president. Only later did I learn that in Hawaii Bush was still so afraid the speech would make him break down that he almost didn’t give it. Demarest asked Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s friend and national security adviser, for support. Liking the speech, to be nationally telecast, Scowcroft reassured the president. In his book White House Ghosts, Robert Schlesinger wrote, “Bush spoke at 8:10 A.M. on a morning much like the infamous one a half-century earlier: bright sun in a mostly clear sky, a slight breeze. The water gleamed. And he spoke with unusual eloquence.”
December 7, 1941, “was a bright Sunday morning,” Bush began. “Thousands of troops slept soundly in their bunks. Some who were awake looked out and savored the still and tranquil harbor.
“On the stern of the USS Nevada, a brass band prepared to play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ On other ships, sailors readied for the 8 a.m. flag raising. Ray Emory, who was on the Honolulu, read the morning newspaper. Aboard California, yeoman Durell Connor wrapped Christmas presents. On the West Virginia, a machinist’s mate looked at the photos just received from his wife. They were of his eight-month-old son, whom he had never seen,” Bush said, voice cracking.
“Think of how it was for these heroes of the Harbor—men who were also husbands, fathers, brothers, sons. Imagine the chaos of guns and smoke, flaming water, and ghastly carnage. Two thousand four hundred and three Americans gave their lives. But in this haunting place, they live forever in our memory—reminding us gently, selflessly, like chimes in the distant night.”
Aboard the memorial, you could see how “every fifteen seconds a drop of oil still rises from the Arizona and drifts to the surface. As it spreads across the water, we recall the ancient poet: ‘In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’ With each drop, it is as though God Himself were crying,” Bush said, voice again breaking. “He cries, as we do, for the living and the dead.”
The president had no teleprompter, only note cards, which he held. It was as if they grounded him, providing reference. “The men of Pearl Harbor . . . knew the things worth living for were also worth dying for: principle, decency, fidelity, honor.
“So look behind me at Battleship Row—the gun turret still visible and flag flying proudly from a truly blessed shrine,” Bush began his peroration.
“Look into your hearts and minds: You will see boys who this day became men and men who became heroes.
“Look at the water here, clear and quiet, bidding us to sum up and remember. One day, in what now seems another lifetime, it wrapped its arms around the finest sons any nation could ever have—and carried them to a better world.
“May God bless them,” Bush’s voice almost whispered. “And may God bless America, the most wondrous land on Earth.”
Tom Brokaw saw Bush, tearing, and said, “Obviously a difficult speech by President Bush, who gets emotional at events that involve veterans, especially from World War II.” It showed Bush’s fear of private turning public—also mercy, resolve, sincerity, kindness, and fellow feeling for veterans, alive and dead.
If America had seen this Bush more often, 1992 might have ended quite differently.
ELEVEN
Into the Abyss
Bush returned to an administration lessened by the December 4 resignation of Chief of Staff Sununu, who had been accused of using government jets for personal trips, such as skiing excursions, and classifying the trips as official, for purposes such as promoting conservation or Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light.” Once he took a government limousine from Washington to a rare stamp auction at Christie’s auction house in New York. Sununu spent $5,000 on rare stamps, sent the car back unoccupied, and returned to DC on a government jet.
During one week forty-five newspapers printed editorials damning Sununu, some urging his exit. White House counsel C. Boyden Gray ordered him to repay the government more than $47,000 for the flights, which he did, not stilling critics, who acidly assaulted Sununu’s alleged sense of entitlement. Today many of those same people ignore Barack and Michelle Obama’s use of Air Force One and the White House itself as a piggybank, Sununu’s misconduct akin to throwing a spitball in Sunday school.
Bush’s decision to dispatch Sununu briefly reduced criticism of the administration, which revived after the president went to Japan, came home to stump New Hampshire, and began a campaign that even to a GOP Cassandra seemed impossible in 1991 to lose. Sununu’s exit deprived Bush of the person who, though born well-off, had the most sensitive blue-collar intuition of any high Bush aide. Atwater was recently dead. Ailes had left to create Fox News. I thought of Sununu as, first, Pat Buchanan, then Ross Perot, snatched political bodies that had backed Bush in 1988.
As it happened, Sununu proved inextinguishable, remerging in 2012 as an aide to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, a man not unlike Bush in policy and person. At seventy-three Sununu became what the GOP lacked in 1992—a take-no-prisoners surrogate. One day Sununu told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that President Obama was “lazy and disengaged.” Most journalists, including Mitchell, thought the criticism shocking. Others, looking at Obama’s vacuous record, felt that Sununu was being kind.
My last December 1991 memo to him mimed others that he received and what nascent talk radio urged daily—the Bush campaign’s need to attack. That year’s March
Gallup Poll had given the president a 91 percent approval rating. In November 1992 he got 37.5 percent of the total in the general election—a historic plunge. Like most metooers, the GOP’s free fall was largely caused by playing on the other team’s turf.
The Clintons’ mantra was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Since their media chorus and the GOP campaign agreed, that maxim became the slogan of the election. Bypassed was Bush’s magnificence in Desert Storm—how he literally reshaped the globe. Obscured was Gorbachev dissolving the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991—a land until very recently consigned to oblivion. Ignored was Bush’s integrity—and how lower interest and inflation rates made it much easier to buy a home and afford a family. Forgotten—as if they never happened.
Instead, by Election Day “It’s the economy, stupid” meant two things: (1) the worst unemployment since 1984 and (2) the president’s breaking his “No New Taxes” pledge. Each kept Bush from connecting to the economically restless middle class. Given that, my December 1991 memo proposed how we could use our agenda to polarize the electorate—recognizing that to Democrats bipartisanship meant a Republican white flag.
First, the Bush White House needed to treat its friends better than its enemies. By late 1991 Bush’s problems lay with Reagan-Nixon conservatives, who felt estranged over taxes and social issues. Movement rightists like Buchanan, Ed Rollins, even Newt Gingrich were a symptom, not cause, of GOP disarray. In their view, correct or not, we had needlessly destroyed bridges to Reagan’s legacy.
Second, a key was to discuss Republican issues—drug use, the death penalty, a strong defense, cultural decline, permissiveness, and equal opportunity, not preferential treatment. A decisive polling majority backed us on every issue. Instead, Democrats controlled the playbill—education, the environment, child care, and other issues where they held an edge. Discussing them did little to convince Dems or independents to vote Republican.
Better late than never—albeit terribly late—the GOP needed to define differences between the parties, recalling that “us vs. them” had won every time it had been tried since Nixon’s 1968 election—and could again by preempting Buchanan, sidelining Perot, and setting the agenda. Instead, too many Republicans acted like Nelson Rockefeller had never died—and Reagan had never lived. Me-too could lose in 1992. One reason was a culture it had allowed, like a fungus, to infect.
As noted in chapter 9, Bush grew to adulthood liking the American Western—with jazz and the Broadway musical, among other things, uniquely American. As 1960s through ’90s “edge” coarsened an increasingly sick culture, the Western became preciously anachronistic—a life preserver in a cesspool age. The white hats won. Honesty trumped irony, even if now seen more on late-night TV than in the wide-screen theater. Either place a favorite Everyman, like Bush, was steady and underestimated, trim, old-shoe, and solid, projecting depth, stoicism, and the guy next door.
Unlike Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford was not a laconic icon in the saddle. Unlike John Wayne, he never pined to become Paul Bunyan via Pecos Bill. Unlike Jimmy Stewart, he became neither institution nor caricature: the shy fox taken as a naïf who ends up taking the taker.
By the time Ford was a teenager, the son of a Canadian railroad executive wanted to act. “It’s all right for you to try,” said his father, “if you learn something else first. Be able to take a car apart and put it together. Be able to build a house, every bit of it. Then you’ll always have something.” Learning, the tyro went off on his own, as Bush did in Texas oil.
At Ford’s late 1940s to ’60s acting peak, he worked on wiring, plumbing, and air conditioning at home. At one time or another, he was a roofer, plate-glass window installer, and five-dollar-a-week Santa Monica bartender. Years later, famous, Ford drove regularly by the bar. “There are too many places here that won’t let me forget how I started.”
Imagine Madonna aping such a modest blue-collar pulse. You can’t; the dots don’t connect. In one five-year period, Ford took off an average twenty-one days between movies, in 1960–61, filming four simultaneously. “I like to work,” he said, making eighty-five films. In Blackboard Jungle the native Quebecer was a valiant teacher. Pocketful of Miracles bared a bootlegger of bonhomie. Dear Heart cast a lonely businessman. The Big Heat vaunted a vengeful cop.
Always, Ford’s genre was the big-skied/hearted Western—Cimarron, The Man from Colorado, 3:10 to Yuma, Cowboy, TV’s The Hacketts—ideal for his dry, born-for-the-heartland voice. Like Jim Davis, Morgan Woodward, the grand Ben Johnson, the great Ward Bond, he embodied the frontier’s dirt and sagebrush vantage of Old World nobility and New World meritocracy.
Diane Holloway said of 1950s TV and cinema: “[They] and we were kinder than today. Life in general was more polite.” I once asked Bob Costas why Maureen Dowd wrote, “We’re cruder, more self-involved, and more over-the-top than ever.” He said, “Television and film have a lot to do with it.” We would have been better people with more Westerns as our guide.
Ford, who died in 2006 at ninety, never confused himself off screen with anyone, including Bush. He was an entrepreneur, brooked multiple marriages, and was a World War II marine. He was a Democrat till campaigning for Reagan for the job Poppy later had. Yet he played many Western characters suggestive of Bush, luring overwhelmingly the same constituency. Ford mourned how to some decency had become for squares. In a cycle of irony, squareness made him special.
It let him refuse to throw good taste after bad, even as culture became our lounge lizard and America the lounge. If character was Bush’s core, it also helped make Ford a great character actor. Watching Ford on film, you grasp why Bush, to the surprise of many, ultimately thrived in politics too.
In 1946, the same year Glenn Ford starred in three films, including the film noir classic Gilda with Rita Hayworth, director William Wyler released the Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives, about soldiers returning from World War II and their families greeting them and homecoming’s joys, worries, and confessions of the heart. If virtually anyone in the Bush administration took a polygraph test, they would likely say that 1992 was among the worst years of their life. Why? “Because in four years we went from maybe the best campaign in modern history [1988] to maybe the worst,” said a friend. Because George Bush was a president who should have been reelected: a superb diplomat, great role model, proud of his country’s past, buoyant about her future, untouched by scandal, putting strict constructionist Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, and keeping government growth smaller than it had been or would be again. Time’s Hugh Sidey, covering ten presidents from Ike through Bush 43, said 41 “ran the government better than any other modern President”—a grand president at war and peace.
The year 1992 was awful because of misjudgment—ours. As Bill Clinton increasingly seemed the probable Democratic nominee, we thought that America would never choose a man like him. He wrote that he “loathed the military,” was said to be a serial adulterer, and had admitted to using drugs. Aides spoke of thwarting “bimbo eruptions,” women with whom Clinton even recently had an affair and who might come forward to testify. At the 1992 GOP Convention in Houston, Buchanan defined Clinton’s concept of service: “When Bill Clinton’s time came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.” I recall a March train ride from New York to DC, concocting an attack line similar to the GOP’s that fall: “Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, the law, and the country. What makes you think he won’t cheat on you?” Despite the Bush campaign, it was all going to be so easy. We were wrong because the country’s culture—therefore, much of America—had changed.
The year 1992 was ugly because Bush deemed campaigning separate from governing, unlike Clinton, who thought each a natural extension of the other. Because few in the Bush campaign grasped Poppy’s 1988 lunch-bucket coalition. Because the national media, for reasons of culture and ideology, became Clinton’s shameless amen corner. “You and I know that the media was blatantly biased against Bush,
” Nixon wrote me a few days before Christmas 1992. “This can’t be blamed on his personal press relations. No President in my lifetime has been more considerate of the press than he was. Yet, when the chips were down they showed their liberal bias and then compounded the injury by sanctimoniously claiming they were always fair and objective.”
The year 1992 was errant because Bush could articulate “the vision thing” he gently mocked for the world but not for America. He lost because he let the election become a referendum on the mild 1990–91 recession. “When things turned around I’d say, ‘Good news, the fourth-straight quarter of growth,’” the president said of 1992. “By then people weren’t listening. I couldn’t break through.” Bush lost because he didn’t insist that a presidency must involve foreign policy and moral leadership, at which he excelled. He liked the culture of the Western but was not comfortable defending it. Bush lost because he noted his feats too seldom—say, the Soviet Union’s dissolution or how, as Buchanan said, “under Bush more human beings escaped from the prison house of tyranny to freedom than in any other four-year period in history.” On one hand, this kept the media from accusing Bush of ignoring the economy. On the other, he let people who opposed him dictate what he said.
Go figure: as Communism dissolved in late 1991, the campaign of the U.S. president who helped dissolve it began to sink. On December 16 Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner disastrously succeeded Sununu. As new chief of staff, the ex–Eagle Scout remained a fine transportation secretary. Skinner hired a management consultant, Eugene Croisant—to many known as “French Breakfast Roll Man”—who, looking for a fall guy, unfairly found one in communications director David Demarest, vainly suggesting he be fired. In December Bush told a press conference that “given the way the economy failed to recover as was widely predicted three months ago, this science of economics is inexact at best,” adding that his early January 1992 trip to Asia would accent exports—“jobs.” On January 8 Bush, run ragged, vomited at an official dinner into the lap of the Japanese prime minister, the photo making page 1 from Terre Haute to Tokyo. The new year had begun as badly as the old year closed. It would make you laugh if it hadn’t already made you cry.