Race Against Time

by Keith Boykin

  Even aside from the War on Drugs, Reagan governed with shameless indifference toward the concerns of Black Americans. His administration reversed long-standing policy at the Internal Revenue Service when it tried to give tax exemptions to racially segregated private schools like Bob Jones University in South Carolina. His Justice Department waged a war on affirmative action and minority contracting requirements. He fired all three Democratic members of the US Commission on Civil Rights, including distinguished Howard University professor Mary Frances Berry, and replaced them with Blacks who were hostile to civil rights. And in 1986, while Nelson Mandela remained imprisoned in South Africa, Reagan vetoed a bill that authorized economic sanctions against the racist apartheid government of that country. In an extraordinary rebuke, Congress overrode Reagan’s veto. It was, according to Politico, “the first time since enactment of the War Powers Resolution in 1973 that Congress had overridden a presidential foreign policy veto.”

  History would soon vindicate Nelson Mandela and the Black South Africans for whom he fought, yet the broader success of Ronald Reagan as a political figure gave him mythological status among Republicans. In Reagan, the GOP found a smooth-talking, union-busting, tax-cutting, defense-spending, welfare-hating spokesman who could articulate the party’s values and appeal to white racial resentment more effectively than any Republican in modern history. His landslide victories in 1980 and 1984 paved the way for future candidates and convinced a generation of young Republicans that they were the proper heirs to a new “permanent majority” that would rule the nation for a century. Reagan’s legacy of antigovernment rhetoric would shape American political debate for decades, but it was his party’s racial rhetoric that would eventually expose the most glaring paradox.

  America had entered a new stage in its never-ending civil war, and just like the conflicts of the 1860s and 1960s, it was never just a battle about the federal government; it was a battle about race. As the country would learn in the decades that followed, a significant percentage of white Americans were never as antigovernment as Republicans suggested they were. They were anti-Black.

  Looking back now from the vantage point of the post-Trump era, it’s clear how the Reagan brand of politics altered the trajectory of both the country and the Republican Party for generations to come. Reagan provided Republicans a suburban-friendly script for future elected officials to disguise an unpopular procorporate, antiworker agenda behind a veil of telegenic demagoguery and plausibly deniable racism. After Reagan, it would only get worse.

  4

  GEORGE H. W. BUSH’S KINDER, GENTLER RACISM

  I was twenty-three years old, working in my first job out of college, when I heard the name “Willie Horton.” It lingered like a cloud in the air for long stretches of time, casting a shadow over the work I was doing. He was the star of a new television commercial in which he played the role of a super villain—a menacing, bearded Black man who raped, kidnapped, and murdered his victims. But Horton was a real person, and he had been plucked from obscurity to be featured in an advertisement for George H. W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. The message to white America was unmistakable, and the lesson for politicians was unambiguous. If Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan had created the conditions for elected officials to manipulate white racial resentment, it was George H. W. Bush who first showed Republicans how to weaponize that resentment.

  I stood on the other side of the fence, watching my dream job in politics slowly turn into a nightmare. I had never imagined when I graduated from college and took a job working for the Dukakis campaign that my candidate would become the Democratic nominee for president a year later and I would land a position traveling with him every day on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, after surviving the primary, the campaign was faltering under the strain of the general election, and I felt like I was a cornerman for a boxer who was being beaten up in the ring and refused to fight back.

  In the wake of two terms of Ronald Reagan, the election pitted Republican Vice President George Bush against Democratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Always a gentleman, Dukakis had vowed to run a clean campaign. But when Bush accused Dukakis of being a soft-on-crime, unpatriotic, out-of-touch, elitist “Massachusetts liberal,” Dukakis refused to engage Bush forcefully until it was too late to make a difference. The great irony of Bush’s campaign of attacks was that he—the wealthy patrician scion of a political dynasty who summered at a seaside mansion in Kennebunkport, Maine—convinced America that Dukakis—the thrifty son of immigrants who shopped at Filene’s Basement for discounted suits and lived in a modest two-family duplex—was the elitist. It was maddening that people believed Bush’s attacks, but it was difficult to fight Bush’s scorched earth campaign while Dukakis hemmed his staff in with a public pledge of positivity.

  Run by Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign seemed to understand the larger societal forces in play that ours did not. During a trip to Washington, DC, early in the general election season, I remember a group of protesters, dressed in old-fashioned-looking black-and-white prison uniforms, greeted our motorcade and distributed “Get Out of Jail Free” cards to the traveling press and onlookers. The cards described Dukakis as “the prisoner’s best friend.” The protest group claimed to be college Republicans, but at one point during the demonstration I recognized the face of a runner jogging down the street and right through the protesters. It was Lee Atwater, the man CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather had described as “George Bush’s negative campaign specialist,” and the “college Republicans” cheered when he passed through.

  By late October 1988, the campaign had devolved into a frustrating slog of exhausting travel, missed debate opportunities, sinking poll numbers, and bad news stories. We had spent most of the general election playing defense, and I had lost confidence in the campaign’s ability to win. By this point, everyone on the campaign staff and the traveling press crew knew the routine of Dukakis’s appearances and could recite his stump speech by heart. He would arrive to Neil Diamond’s “America,” smile, wave, and then deliver the same speech over and over again about “good jobs at good wages.” But one day in New Haven, Connecticut, Dukakis ventured off the routine.

  He interrupted the usual stump speech to mark the fifteenth anniversary of an infamous moment in American history, in which Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson refused and resigned, forcing Nixon to turn to his deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused and resigned. The third in line at the Justice Department, Robert Bork, then carried out Nixon’s unscrupulous order. Nixon’s elimination of three high-ranking Justice Department officials became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” That day in New Haven was a year after President Reagan nominated Bork to the US Supreme Court, and the Senate rejected him. Bush had praised Bork as an “excellent” choice, and Dukakis took this anniversary as an opportunity to pounce. “Truth was the first casualty in the Nixon White House, and it has been the first casualty in the Bush campaign,” Dukakis said. After the speech, we stopped at an Italian restaurant near Wooster Street so the press could file their stories, and I called the Boston headquarters to check in. By the time I got off the phone, the campaign was in chaos.

  As the motorcade continued moving to the airport so we could travel to the next location, to a white-tie event in Manhattan, the staff and reporters couldn’t stop talking about one person: Donna Brazile. When I first met Donna in Iowa, I was intimidated by her imposing stature and her reputation. At only twenty-eight years old, she was a political prodigy who had already worked in senior staff positions in three presidential campaigns. When I got to know her on the Dukakis campaign, I discovered that she was a very candid, hardworking, fun-loving person, and I enjoyed being around her. She also talked to white people in power the way I wanted to, and the way I someday would, but not yet.

  As the national field director of the Dukakis campaign, Donna did not always travel with the
candidate, but on this day, she was with us and she had a lot to say. While talking to reporters earlier in the day, she accused Bush of two things that no one on the campaign had ever said publicly. First, she said that Bush was running a racist campaign. He was “using the oldest racial symbol imaginable,” Donna explained: “a Black man raping a white woman.” Second, she told reporters that Bush needed to come clean about rumors of his alleged marital infidelity. The criticism about Bush’s racist campaign barely registered at first. The swift reaction that day centered on the other charge, and the story that would appear in the New York Times focused on Donna’s resignation after she had told reporters to investigate rumors about Bush’s personal life. “Donna was not speaking on behalf of the campaign in any way whatsoever,” press secretary Dayton Duncan told reporters.

  Later that day in the staff room of the Waldorf Astoria in New York, I relayed a message to Donna that the campaign manager, Susan Estrich, was on the phone. “Would you like to talk to Susan?” I asked. She did. After that conversation, I saw Donna for the last time during the campaign. She sat in a dark corner of the back room of the staff suite, staring wistfully into the air. Her body language and facial expression were so lifeless that she looked as if someone had sapped the energy from her. It was a defeated look that I had never seen in her before. When it was all over, she released a statement of regret. “Because the time is short, and the issues are so important, I have decided to leave the campaign,” she told the press. I was very disappointed to see her go, but I also recognized something powerful in her inner peace, and I wrote about it in my journal that day. “Donna is a tough woman,” I wrote. “She’ll be back.”

  Lost in the initial controversy of the campaign’s palace intrigue was that Donna actually initiated a critically important conversation on race in the 1988 presidential campaign. Her comments triggered weeks of discussion and news articles about the racist origin of the Willie Horton ad and about the racist campaign that Bush and his surrogates were waging. That debate was too little, too late to save the struggling Dukakis campaign, but it forever framed how the 1988 Bush campaign would be perceived in victory. Even today, some remember George H. W. Bush with fondness because of his perceived moderation in comparison to other Republican presidents, but he was all too willing to embrace the racist elements of his party to achieve his political ambitions.

  George Bush was not the first candidate to run a racist national campaign or to govern with racist policies. America had a long history of racism in presidential politics. At least a dozen American presidents had owned slaves, and neither major party was immune to the disease of racism, but it was the Democrats who had been most problematic in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Even as the nation entered the 1960s, the Democratic Party still had a stunningly intolerant record on civil rights. Democrat Woodrow Wilson racially segregated the federal government and purged Black civil servants from management jobs in federal government. He also held a screening of the racist film The Birth of a Nation in 1915, but when Black civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter complained about Wilson’s policies, Wilson had him thrown out of the White House. The next Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, locked up Japanese Americans in internment camps, refused to support antilynching legislation to protect Blacks, and excluded gold medalist Jesse Owens and other Black athletes from a White House victory ceremony following the 1936 Olympic games in Adolf Hitler’s Berlin. When Democratic President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, his fellow Democrat Strom Thurmond temporarily bolted from the party and ran against him on a segregationist platform as a Dixiecrat. Democrat George Wallace followed suit with his own third-party segregationist campaign two decades later in 1968.

  The Democratic Party of the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth century was steeped in racism. But for Republicans, the full-throated embrace of racist appeals to white voters reflected a dramatic shift from where their party began. Sensitive to the concerns of appearing heartless, modern Republicans learned to couch their language in flowery words and gauzy poll-tested rhetoric. It was an approach that began decades before Bush’s 1988 campaign.

  When George Bush ran in his first race for public office in 1964, the forty-year-old oil company executive knew that his party had a branding problem. The campaign to reelect Democratic president Lyndon Johnson had framed the Republican nominee, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, as a trigger-happy maniac who might blow up the world. In a famous Johnson TV commercial that ran only once, in September 1964, a little white girl was shown miscounting daisy petals as she pulled them from a flower in an empty field. “Six, eight, nine, nine,” the girl says slowly. Suddenly, she’s interrupted by the booming male voice of a mission control countdown announcer. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” She stops counting and looks up from the daisy as the camera zooms in on her face and into the pupil of her right eye. An image of a huge explosion and a mushroom cloud of debris fills the screen. It’s followed by the voice of President Johnson. “These are the stakes—to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark,” Johnson said. “We must either love each other,” he added, “or we must die.”

  Bush, the son of a US senator from Connecticut, understood the need for better Republican messaging to respond to Johnson’s criticism, and he found a way to distinguish his brand of politics from the unsympathetic reputation of his party’s standard-bearer. “His conservatism is ‘compassionate,’” The Texas Observer quoted him. However, the magazine didn’t buy it. It reminded readers that Bush had “so little sensitivity” that he explained his opposition to Medicare, which provides medical care for the aged, by comparing it to a federal program to put air-conditioning on cargo ships for African apes and baboons, which Bush jokingly called “medical air for the caged.”

  Nevertheless, Bush had articulated what would one day become the basis of a new messaging campaign for Republicans. “I don’t believe that we conservatives should be placed in the position of being opposed to compassion for our fellow men,” Bush said in 1964. His philosophy was compassionate conservatism, a phrase that would, years later, be associated not with the candidate, but with his then eighteen-year-old son, George W. Bush. As the 1964 Republican Party was moving toward the politics of white anxiety, Bush still continued outreach efforts to people of color. He attended a fundraiser for a group called “Negroes for Bush,” although thirty of the eighty people who showed up were white, according to The Texas Observer. And he visited an “Amigos for Bush” event to reach Hispanic voters, but the only Latino person in the audience was the manager of the restaurant where it was held, the Observer noted.

  For the next fifty years, this would be the political strategy and stagecraft of the Bush family and, by extension, of the Republican Party, at times. It was a strategy that often emphasized a compassionate tone and symbolic gestures of inclusion rather than compassionate policy. Thus, Bush was able to oppose the federal Medicare program to provide health care for the elderly because, he claimed, it unfairly forced the working class to subsidize the wealthy. “I would not say to this fella working with his hands, ‘Look, you’ve got to pay for medical care for this rich fella over here,’” Bush explained. Similarly, Bush opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not because he was racist, he claimed, but because he wanted, once again, to help the little guy. “I’m not opposed to equal rights for all,” Bush said, “but I want to see we don’t violate the rights of 86 percent to try to correct the grievances—and legitimate ones, often—of the other 14 percent.”

  Bush’s argument against civil rights might have won him that Senate seat in other Southern states, but in 1964 he was running not only against incumbent Texas Democratic senator Ralph Yarborough, he was running against a popular incumbent president who was the first Texan to hold the office. Yarborough was the only Southern Democrat in the United States Senate to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Bush slammed him for this. “I
opposed the recently passed Civil Rights Bill,” Bush proudly reported in a 1964 print ad. Yarborough, on the other hand, voted for what Bush called a “so-called Civil Rights Bill.”

  Yarborough was also vulnerable because of an embarrassing encounter he had recently had with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. After President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Thurmond, a devout segregationist, was determined to block the confirmation of one of Johnson’s nominees to run the Community Relations Service, an agency created by the act. Thurmond positioned himself outside the committee room to prevent senators from entering to vote. When Yarborough arrived, Thurmond challenged him. “If I can keep you out, you won’t go in, and if you can drag me in, I’ll stay there,” Thurmond said. The two sixty-one-year-old senators then tussled, removing their suit jackets and wrestling to the ground. Thurmond pinned the out-of-shape Yarborough to the ground and demanded his submission. Only when the committee chairman, Senator Warren Magnuson, broke up the contest, was the hearing able to commence. Although Thurmond won the wrestling match, he lost the vote, sixteen to one. And despite the embarrassment of his physical defeat, Yarborough won the political matchup later that year against George Bush, 56 percent to 44 percent.

  Two years later, Bush found a different path into politics. He ran for Congress and won. From there he moved through a series of high-profile jobs that led him to the presidency. He was US ambassador to the United Nations and then chair of the Republican National Committee under President Nixon. In the Ford administration, Bush served as chief of the US Liaison Office in Beijing following the US normalization of relations with China and as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. And when Republicans swept back into power in 1981, Bush became Reagan’s vice president for eight years.