George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  Ross Perot was many things—but stupid he was not. “The American people don’t care about position papers,” he said. “They care about principles.” Ironically, Bush could have used this to his advantage because it played to his, not Clinton’s, strength. “Slick Willie upholding ‘traditional values’ is akin to Hollywood hailing chastity,” I wrote domestic policy aide Jim Pinkerton. “In one speech, Dan Quayle has succeeded where often we have not: raising family values—right vs. wrong; responsibility vs. irresponsibility—to a primary place in the campaign. This dovetails with Bush’s persona—a President who believes, as he says, that ‘life means nothing without fidelity to principle.’”

  We shouldn’t shrink from Quayle’s message, I wrote. “Instead, we should use it to flog the Left because the V.P. has struck a nerve.” As it was, trying to repackage old lamps as new, Bush outlined a six-point plan to “revive America”: an anti-drug initiative, expanded urban community services, welfare reform, an inner-city jobs program, the revolutionizing of American education, and home ownership. “We know critics will say, ‘You’ve proposed these before.’ That’s true,” Bush said, fingering Congress, “but they have not been tried.” Many still haven’t.

  Previously, before a major speech or course correction, the writers met with the president, Sununu, and Demarest. In June 1992 we held the most bizarre meeting of any in my time in the White House. Standing at the end of a large table in the Roosevelt Room, pollster–turned–campaign chairman Bob Teeter passed around, as Schlesinger writes in White House Ghosts, “an elaborate chart he had produced on his computer, laying out a structure that he wanted the speech-writers to follow in drafting speeches on such topics as education, values, jobs, and crime.” Each topic had a box in the chart, but one was empty. It read, “Theme/Slogan/Name.” Teeter told us, “What I want from you is to help fill this empty box.” Overnight, writers were to mine themes that should have been concocted months before. Mentally, each writer’s jaw must have dropped a foot. Get Smart was one thing. Getting this was quite another.

  I don’t know if World War II made Teeter’s box, but its theme filled the Rose Garden June 4 as Bush spoke on the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Midway, the Pacific theater’s turning point, to heroes no longer young but in memory never old. The Men of Midway “knew that no one ever walks away from appeasing an aggressor. He only crawls,” said Bush. They did neither, waging “war to win the peace.” Two days later Thatcher’s successor as British prime minister, John Major, helped commemorate D-day at the White House. Bush recalled what Dwight Eisenhower said when honored by the city of London in 1945: “To preserve freedom, a Londoner will fight. So will a citizen of Abilene.” Bush was playing to another strength—national defense.

  In mid-June the president pounded the Democrats on health care, eerily presaging Obamacare: “The last thing we need is the government playing doctor.” At another stop he portrayed Clinton as far left on abortion, preferential treatment, spending, and government: “If they had their way, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day would be replaced by Big Brother’s Day.”

  On July 4 the Bushes, trying to solidify the rural America that had convincingly backed him, Ike and Reagan twice, and Nixon thrice, traveled to the aptly named Faith, North Carolina, “a town an hour or so from Siler City, where [The Andy Griffith Show’s] television’s Aunt Bee is buried,” Bush said. Then, inevitably: “If she were with us, I wonder if she’d be serving broccoli.” The president ad-libbed, to laughter, “I hope not.”

  Bush loved the “picture-postcard holiday,” especially that morning’s Main Street parade. He was thinking of trying bungee jumping, but “Barbara didn’t go for it. She said it’s okay for a candidate to throw his hat into the ring—but not his whole body.” The president said, “We meet in small-town America—in many ways, the spiritual heart of all America.”

  Bush observed that when someone in Faith was sick, “neighbors bake casseroles; and if needed, help pay medical expenses. When someone in Faith loses his job, neighbors provide support and love. You show why America would be better off if we spent more time caring about each other and less time suing each other.”

  Four values, he thought, sustained rural America: faith in immediate and extended family; in self-reliance; in God; and in America’s divine blessing. Faith had 553 inhabitants, but each Sunday more than eight hundred congregants attended church. Listening, I likened it to voting in Chicago: more would cast a ballot than lived in a ward. “Your mayor tells me this way he keeps track of who’s coming and going.”

  Bush told how a small boy’s prayer expressed such faith: “God bless mother and daddy, my brother and sister,” it began, continuing, “and, oh God, do take care of yourself, because if anything happens to you, we’re all sunk.”

  A president could express faith too. “I’m appalled by a recent Supreme Court ruling outlawing voluntary prayer at graduation ceremonies—and I throw down the gauntlet,” he said. “If the Supreme Court won’t act, I hope the Congress will. I call on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment. We need the faith of our fathers back in our schools.”

  Bush concluded with Eisenhower’s quote about the “priceless privilege” of being raised in an American small town. Twenty years later almost to the day, a man died who proved Ike right.

  Like politicians, athletes, and columnists, most actors die, are briefly mourned, and recede into memory. An exception was Andy Griffith, dead, July 3, 2012, at eighty-six, in his beloved North Carolina. Since then television marathons have hailed 1960–68’s The Andy Griffith Show. Watching, we still treasure it in a quiet way too deep for applause.

  By 1960 the University of North Carolina graduate, then thirty-four, had buoyed film, record comedy, and Broadway. A quarter century later, Griffith began TV’s long-running Matlock, won a Grammy for 25 Timeless Hymns, and made the Gospel Hall of Fame. Any or all would have forged a remarkable career. In between, Griffith made it legend.

  The Andy Griffith Show debuted number four in 1960–61 Nielsen ratings, never missing the top ten. It left the air—Griffith wanted to try film—number one in 1967–68. Return to Mayberry became 1986’s highest-rated TV movie. Another Mayberry special was a huge hit in 1995. Why do reruns today seem original, their wearability almost magical?

  First, the cast still scintillates. Ironically, Griffith hated that first series year. “I played a hick,” he said, stuck in his 1950s stage role in No Time for Sergeants. Thereafter, he played a Will Rogers Sheriff Andy, wry and calm and wise. When Don Knotts as manic deputy Barney Fife left in 1965—also for film—the show lost some of its magic. From 1961 to 1965, though—the Xanadu we recall—the series was, to quote Mary Poppins, “practically perfect in every way.”

  Knotts won five Emmys. Griffith’s and Ron Howard as son Opie’s tie formed the program’s core. Frances Bavier as Aunt Bee so loved North Carolina that, as Bush said, she is buried in Siler City. We also embraced cousins Gomer and Goober Pyle and prim Helen Crump, Griffith’s steady, and primitive Ernest T. Bass, trolling from the hills, and the Darling family, playing bluegrass heaven. Said the New York Times, “The characters have remained tantalizingly real.”

  Next, episodes mime dowries from the past: Barney’s sidecar; “Opie the Birdman,” adopting three baby songbirds after accidentally killing their mother with a slingshot; the Fun Girls, as alien to Aunt Bee as propriety to Cannes. Bass can’t get a girl without a uniform. “Man in a Hurry” sees the light as Andy and Barney sing “Church in the Wildwood.” Opie asks, “But what about the little one—the trembler?” before a pack of dogs is rescued. “You beat everything, you know that?” Andy would say to Barney. Weekly, brilliant writing, acting, and editing did.

  Finally, the place remains Griffith’s utterly incalculable gift, making Mayberry perhaps the world’s most famous small town, more renowned than Cooperstown or Bedford Falls. Mayberry was fictional—based on Andy’s Mount Airy, North Carolina, boyhood home—except that it was so exquisitely unerring that i
t could have been constructed only by someone who grew up, said a critic, “with such deep respect for the people and places of his childhood”—indeed, who never left, not even when Griffith worked on Broadway or in Hollywood.

  Historically, many have deemed the small town—insipidly, some still do—backward, even biased. This series showed it less narrow and narcissistic than the big city. Said the New York Times upon Andy’s death, it created “the notion that the moral center of the country lies somewhere in a small town”—more self-contained than self-obsessed.

  A friend suggests that given Mayberry, Matlock, film, and other shows, TV could start a Griffith channel. Each Monday night Andy would tell his Griffith audience, “I appreciate it, and good night.” Recalling, you appreciate how “our series was about love,” he said, and a culture kind and courteous and sensitive and sentimental, mastering what a writer called “the kingdom of art.”

  Sheriff Andy, Barn, Opie, Aunt Bee, Goob, Gomer, and above all, Mayberry still inhabit our psychic home, as lyric as a songbird and sturdy as their town. No wonder we fell in love.

  On July 8, 1992, Sam Skinner spoke to the White House staff not of a rural or suburbia or working-class stratagem. Instead, he said he had finally found a new communications director. Steve Provost, thirty-two, a spokesman for Kentucky Fried Chicken, had previously been a speechwriter for former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean (a bad sign: Kean was a decided liberal) and had never worked in the White House or for a presidential campaign (worse, according to political Washington). I shared Provost’s affection for political sloganeering and cheer lines. He understood that a presidential campaign, with its slam bang and smash mouth and do unto others before they do unto you, was a God-awful arena in which to educate the public. Steve realized that selling chicken and a candidate are more alike than not: be catchy, creative, cut through the clutter. What he didn’t grasp was political history and a fractured electorate and voters whom Bush had owned and then had lost and might—had to—retrieve.

  On July 9 Bill Clinton chose Tennessee senator and 1988 presidential candidate Al Gore as his running mate. Improbably, that week Ross Perot, leading the Gallup three-way trial, withdrew, saying that staying in the race with a “revitalized Democratic Party” would cause it to be decided by the House of Representatives. Eight days after picking Gore, Clinton gave his acceptance speech, vowing a “New Covenant” for America and the closing of the economic gap under Reagan and Bush between the rich and the poor. Politically, the talk was brilliant. “Covenant” had a biblical lilt familiar to millions of evangelicals—an anchor of the post-1968 Republican majority. The income gap addressed the growing disparity of another GOP anchor—blue-collar Reagan Democrats. The effect was a historic-high thirty-point convention “bounce.” Clinton had got 25 percent of Gallup vs. Bush and Perot. With Perot gone, the GOP comatose, and Gore spawning boomer synergy, he now swamped Bush, 55–31 percent.

  The White House reaction was denial and incomprehension. How could Bush’s 91 percent approval become 31 percent vs. Clinton? Had the president changed? Had America? Skinner decided it must be the speech staff Bob Teeter had summoned weeks earlier to save them. In early 1992 Snow hired Scripps-Howard reporter Andrew Ferguson. Grant, Davis, McNally, and Lange had voluntarily left months before. In July Provost hired several part-time writers to swell the staff. A month later he fired half the staff. Even survivors found it wrenching. I recall coming upon a friend sobbing in his office. In the Washington Post, a Herblock cartoon showed Bush campaigning: “I’m concerned about jobs, jobs, jobs!—My job, Dan Quayle’s job, my speechwriters’ jobs—.” Those axed were talented, what happened not their fault. The shake-up three months before Election Day was puzzling (so late, for what?) and telling (like trying to dump Quayle as number two, missing the point). The problem remained the message: What was Bush’s for a second term?

  After their convention Clinton and Gore began a bus tour around the country, their sound system blaring Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow.” Earlier the Arkansas governor had attacked Sister Souljah, a rap musician, for her sewer lyrics. The bus tour gave Clinton another chance to flaunt a spurious centrist pose: he backed the death penalty, supported uniforms in public schools, and seemed oxymoronic—a moderate national Democrat. Officially, the Bush campaign said that every major-party nominee gets a “bounce” from his convention. Unofficially, Bush began to personally zing his opponent, referencing Clinton’s bus tour and the Democrat’s admission that he had smoked marijuana—but not inhaled. “People ask me why my opponent keeps saying the things he does,” Bush said. “Maybe he’s been inhaling too many bus fumes.”

  One afternoon in Wisconsin, Bush visited one of the country’s largest newspaper-producing areas. “The paper produced here makes some of America’s finest newspapers.” Pause. “It also helps make the Washington Post.” Moreover, the president witnessed Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson sign landmark welfare-reform legislation. Thompson said it passed the two criteria of another great governor whenever a program was proposed. “Is it right?” New York’s late Thomas Dewey said. “Will it work?” Bush told how a writer was asked what he would take if his house were on fire and he could remove only one thing. The writer replied, “I would take the fire.” Bush, too, liked what worked.

  At Barcelona’s 1992 Summer Olympic Games, what worked was the U.S. team. On August 11 it arrived at the White House for a South Lawn ceremony. Usually braving politicians, Poppy relished this chance to mingle. “It’s an honor to see you,” he said, “though I almost didn’t recognize you without [NBC broadcaster] Bob Costas as a voice-over.” The president noted that America had caught Olympic fever. That week “Barbara asked me to help her re-arrange a couple of chairs. I said, ‘What’s the degree of difficulty?’”

  One by one, Bush unfurled tales of American Olympians. Shannon Miller overcame a bone chip in her elbow. Gail Devers beat Graves’ disease, which the First Couple tried to keep at bay. Ron Karnaugh wore his deceased father’s hat, making every father proud. Bush was especially wowed by the synchronized swimmers, explaining, “Maybe it’s because I live in a city where it’s tough to get any two people to agree on anything.”

  I never got the feeling that the presidency burdened Bush, or that 41 regretted for a second his decision to seek it. That was especially true when the host and guests were athletes and young at heart, like Bush telling wrestler Bruce Baumgartner, “Any time you feel your heavy weightlifting isn’t enough of a challenge, you’re welcome to drop by and bench-press the federal budget.”

  The 1992 American team had KO’d the opposition: 108 medals—the most since 1904 for a non-boycotted Olympics. The people’s choice was Pablo Morales, a swimmer who medaled in 1984, missed the team in 1988, but came back in 1992 to earn a gold medal at the ripe age of twenty-seven. “Let that be a lesson,” Bush said. “Youth and inexperience are no match for maturity and determination!”—an analogy, he hoped, for Bush vs. Clinton.

  “Now let’s have a picture, then I want to meet each of you,” Poppy told the team. “After that, it’s off to a barbecue for your Olympic-sized appetites.” My guess is that aides had to drag the president away.

  Ross Perot had, if anything, a worse late summer than Bush—first announcing he would not run for president, then charging, sans evidence, GOP-inspired disruption of his daughter’s wedding as the cause. “They have photos that they’re threatening to use, and I want to spare embarrassment,” he said. Immediately, most of Perot’s support fled to Clinton—one outsider to another. “Think of him as a halfway house,” said Tony Snow, astutely. “With the affairs and the draft-dodging, a lot of people weren’t comfortable with backing Clinton right off the bat. So what you had was people leaving Bush for Perot, then Clinton when Ross withdrew. Perot was sort of a bridge. Without him, you never know, but my guess is they’d have stayed with Bush.”

  Instead, Bush trailed in a CBS / New York Times poll, 52–35, when the GOP Convention opened Monday, August
17, in Houston. With the economy seen as stalled, Bush chose to let the social Right write the platform, largely dictate the speaking schedule, and pick the keynoter. Buchanan would tie his ardor, poetry, and empathy for the unsung and dispossessed into a salute to the Forgotten Man, saying, “This election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans.”

  Every religion survey shows the national media as secular—indeed, intensely hostile to faith. It abhorred what Buchanan said next: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.” Liberal RINOS disdained Pat too, since they would rather surrender than fight and are good at it, having surrendered for the last half century. Buchanan proceeded, “And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton and Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.” Later, the media maintained that Buchanan’s “culture war” speech limited the Bush campaign to extremists. Predictably, its bias made a farce of fact.

  For one thing, the last five decades suggest that Buchanan was correct. As Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, a lawyer, told the convention a night later: “Not everyone demonstrated, dropped out, took drugs, joined in the sexual revolution, or dodged the draft”—’60s America more divided than at any time since the Civil War. For another, most convention speakers, including AIDS activist Mary Fisher, were softer—and the speaker list far more varied than that of the Democratic Convention in New York, which barred any utterance remotely sympathetic to causes backed by a majority of Americans in poll after poll: prayer in school, a strict drug policy, pro-life in the final term of conception, and opposition to racial or sexual quotas.