by Gail Sheehy
He climbed into a tiny life raft and vomited. “I didn’t know whether I’d survive. It seemed like the end of the world.”
A few hours later, he saw a periscope break the monotony of the sea. For a moment, he said, he feared it was a Japanese submarine. But American sailors fished him up. For the next month, he knew what fear really was, he said, as the sub was continually attacked by Japanese ships and aircraft, depth charged, and surface bombed. But six weeks later, although he had the option of rotating home, Bush elected to return to combat.
IN STARK CONTRAST TO HIS BRAVERY in wartime, Bush’s overweening need for Ronald Reagan’s approval made him appear weak. He spoke emotionally of the president and “the closeness we have.” I asked him how he had cultivated such trust from Reagan. “It took awhile, but the president knows now, which he probably didn’t know, that I’m not going to betray him.” He admitted that his refusal to separate himself from the president had “cost me something. Politically.”
Bush was ridiculed for saying he wasn’t great at “the vision thing.” He gave a revealing look at his concept of Reagan’s “miracles” in an ad-libbed speech. “Ronald Reagan and I believe in the miracle that is America. But the funny thing is, when you look at miracles, they’re nothing. It’s hard work.”
The deadline to close my piece was early December 1986. On November 13, the Iran-Contra arms scandal blew up and President Reagan addressed the nation with an outright lie: “We did not, repeat, did not, trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” The president’s magic was suddenly tarnished, and the scandal put Bush under relentless questioning. Bush ducked for almost a month. He denied any knowledge of the policy. I had to call my editor and beg to tear up the front and back of my story to shoehorn in an update on Bush’s behavior. The vice president’s only comment to me was that “mistakes were made.” He never did let on that he knew Reagan’s hands were all over the Iran-Contra deal. Reagan’s agreement to sell arms to the Islamic state of Iran, in exchange for the freeing of the hostages, had assured his win as president. Reagan then used the proceeds to finance a secret war in Nicaragua.
Bush maintained that “I’m for Mr. Reagan—blindly.” He wrapped one arm in another and rubbed it. In the end, his slavish loyalty to Reagan worked. Bush was elected president.
TODAY, IN LIGHT OF THE CATASTROPHE of his son George W.’s two fruitless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, George H. W. Bush looks like a great foreign policy president. He showed strong leadership when it came to the biggest crisis to confront a president: the necessity to take the nation to war in 1991. Using his skillfulness as a former ambassador to the United Nations, President Bush persuaded fifteen countries on the Security Council to pass a cease-fire resolution in November of 1990 against Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait. To lead Operation Desert Storm, he assembled an overwhelming force of ten countries including Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. It was arguably the last time an American president would be able to gather a worldwide coalition including Muslim states to oppose aggression in the Middle East.
THE FIRST BUSH PORTRAIT was followed by character pieces about other 1988 candidates: Michael Dukakis, Albert Gore Jr., Senator Bob Dole, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. I later expanded versions of these profiles, adding a chapter on President Reagan, for my 1988 book, Character: America’s Search for Leadership.
The Vanity Fair pieces often made front-page news and gave me a chance to spread the word further on the Today show or evening news programs. The “gotcha reporting” criticism often surfaced, but by the end of the campaign, the character portrait was pretty well established as a new and respectable genre of political writing.
Before the election, Tina was on the phone to me: “Guess what? The Washington Journalism Review just called me. You were voted the best magazine writer in America.”
“You must be kidding.”
“It’s brilliant, Gail, brilliant. And I get to throw a cocktail party for us in Washington.”
CHAPTER 31
Start-Ups
THE GO-GO 1980S STIMULATED both Clay and me to dare to head in new directions. Clay tried a cold start-up of a weekly newspaper, the East Side Express, in October 1983. It had the same sassy attitude as New York, but focused on the social life of young Upper East Siders.
“Every morning when Clay walked into the office, it was like estrogen shock,” Cyndi Stivers, then the entertainment editor, recalls. The newsroom was all women: Patricia Leigh Brown, who would become a feature writer for the New York Times; Lisa Gubernick, who would go on to Forbes magazine; and Bethany Kandel, who during her career has written on every topic from homelessness to breast cancer.
Being Clay, he couldn’t help himself from plunging into the politics of a prepresidential election year. “It’s time for a woman vice president,” he said casually as we rode up in the elevator to our apartment. I was startled but I knew to trust his prescience.
“What kind of a woman would that take?”
“Any politician who makes that radical leap has to pick a woman who is otherwise safely conventional.”
“Obviously she has to be a Democrat.”
“A conservative Democrat,” he said.
Out of the air he pulled the name Geraldine Ferraro. I’d never heard of her and I was sure that very few other people had. Clay told me that she was a three-term congresswoman from Queens. Italian, married with children.
“She’s a woman, she’s ethnic, she’s Catholic, and she has the support of blue-collar and union voters.” Clay rattled off her bona fides. “She would excite a lot of women.”
“And maybe men, too.”
IN THE WAITING AREA for a shuttle flight to Washington, I looked around for a middle-aged, dumpy Queens housewife. Instead, a vivacious woman with blond-streaked hair steamed up the ramp wheeling her suitcase behind her. She stuck out her hand to shake mine. She was friendly and funny and pretty and we immediately hit it off.
On board the American flight I complimented her on her blue-rimmed designer glasses. “My husband hates them,” she said. I asked her how long she’d been married—twenty-three years it turned out. Cleverly she turned the interview around to me. “How long have you been married?”
“Mmmm, once briefly. I’ve been seeing the same man”—I stopped to calculate how long—“for sixteen years.”
“SIXTEEN YEARS?!” she practically shouted. “What are you thinking?!”
“I thought it was okay when it was just a ten-year stand.”
She laughed, and every time I saw Geraldine Ferraro after that, her opener was “SIXTEEN YEARS!”
But on that flight I had only forty-five minutes to learn what she was about. From my research I knew that domestic policy was her strength with an emphasis on women’s issues. She was also active on the environment and critical of Reagan’s handling of toxic cleanups. I was impressed, but a journalist has to probe: “I can’t write a puff piece about you,” I said. “Tell me a weakness.”
Immediately she said “foreign policy.”
This was her first mistake, as she would later acknowledge. She probably knew as much about foreign policy as most members of Congress. Only a woman would be so eager to admit her weakness. It turned out that Ferraro had never given the vice presidency a thought. She was angling to be named the party’s platform chair.
My piece ran in the East Side Express in October 1983 with the headline: “Will This Queens Housewife Be the Next Vice President?”
At the Democratic Convention nine months later, the presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, blew the roof off San Francisco’s Moscone Center by announcing that his vice-presidential pick would be the first woman ever. Ferraro, a forty-eight-year-old former teacher and assistant prosecutor, broke into a wide grin as Mondale said, “I’m delighted to announce that I will ask the Democratic Convention to ratify her.” Mondale congratulated himself for taking the “difficult decision” to choose a woman, but added: “Gerry has excelled in everything she’s trie
d, from law school at night to being a tough prosecutor to winning a difficult election, to winning positions of leadership and respect in the Congress.”
Mondale said her political rise was “really the story of a classic American dream.” TV viewers saw women delegates weeping tears of joy when Ferraro gave her acceptance speech.
Clay was spot on. Mondale had been a tepid vice president during Jimmy Carter’s single term and desperately needed pizzazz for his presidential ticket. Ferraro gave him an immediate bounce of sixteen points, pulling him even with President Reagan. But Mondale’s people had devoted only forty-eight hours to the vetting of Ferraro. They missed red flags going back to 1978 when her husband, John Zaccaro, a real estate developer-manager, had contributed $110,000 to her congressional campaign and violated election law. The media began raising questions regarding Ferraro’s family’s finances and why she and her husband filed separate tax returns. She promised to release both their returns, then reneged, then made a joke: “You people who are married to Italian men, you know what it’s like.”
That quip brought charges of ethnic stereotyping, which escalated the media frenzy. “I had created a monster,” she reminisced.
But the real monster was another woman. As the longtime Republican presidential strategist Ed Rollins later revealed in his book, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, the person who ordered him to create a covert operation to undermine Ferraro was none other than Nancy Reagan. The operation was successful.
When Ferraro debated George H. W. Bush, women who heard it live, including me, thought she had won. But much of the country was unable to forget the snarky sound bite by another woman, Barbara Bush: “That four-million-dollar—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.”
After that experience, I expected that any woman pushed forward to run for national political office would have to be squeaky clean. When Senator John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, it would be another instance of a desperate male candidate needing to add flash to his moribund campaign. This time the vetting process was even shorter. No one was writing about Palin’s religious beliefs; the McCain camp refused even to state her religion. I found out that she had been “anointed” by a firebrand Pentecostal preacher from Kenya, and her fanatic supporters belonged to something called “the tea party.” Too good a story to miss. So, without an assignment but working with an equally passionate cohort, Deirdre English, a Berkeley journalism professor, we jumped on the next plane to Wasilla, Alaska.
Following Palin from church to church, we heard her exhort parishioners to join her in an evangelical cause: “Alaska will lead the nation in a Christian revival,” she proclaimed. “We are the head, not the tail.” Our story, “Palin’s Pastor Problem,” was snapped up by Tina Brown for the first appearance of her digital magazine, the Daily Beast.
Of course, the “mavericky” Palin was quickly exposed as an egomaniac, intellectually vapid, and an expensive clothes horse who would sink the McCain campaign. But the blaze of publicity fired her up as the pilot light under the tea party. Ferraro’s naïveté about how to counter dirty tricks made me sad. Palin made me ashamed. When a woman candidate becomes a figure of national ridicule, how many women of true character are discouraged from daring to step forward on the national stage?
CLAY’S NEW BABY, East Side Express, had a very short life. He and his original backer, Philip Merrill, had screaming matches in the office. Along came the Hartz Mountain birdseed king, Leonard Stern, thinking he could turn this little paper into the new New York magazine. Clay projected the Express would be profitable in the third year. Stern expected to make a killing right away. He dumped the paper less than a month after he bought it.
This was just one small step in the long march toward extinction of small news and literary publications, which later extended to major print magazines and fine newspapers. The massive conglomerates that have come to dominate the U.S. media landscape do not have a primary interest in informing the public. Their interest is in using free airwaves and digital portals to make billions by concentrating their control over what we see, hear, and read.
AMERICA WAS SOARING on a joyride of wild excess, go-go greed, and faster-than-light computerized stock-market trading. Everyone seemed to believe the Dow Jones would continue rising indefinitely.
“When doormen want to share stock tips with you,” Clay remarked to me in the mid-1980s, “you know everybody is thinking about one thing: money.”
The fixation on money did give Clay the impetus for another hit magazine, Manhattan, Inc. The glossy monthly captured the values of Wall Street in the mid-1980s, even as crime and racial and cultural tensions in the city were boiling over. Clay saw the chance to make it the must-read publication about the magicians of money manipulation. Men like junk bond king Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Ron Perelman, and Carl Icahn—the inspiration for the Gordon Gekko character in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street—were making historic changes in the ethos and ethics of Wall Street.
Clay delighted in luring a new team of twentysomething financial geeks to give up their outrageously inflated six-figure salaries on Wall Street for the promise of proud penury as stars on newsstands. Michael Lewis, a hotshot twenty-four-year-old bond trader for Salomon Brothers in London, was Clay’s number-one target. From our first dinner with the witty New Orleans native, Clay knew that Lewis was a natural satirist. Lewis admitted it was his dream to be a writer. What’s more, he had kept notes on the epic mismanagement of his company. Lewis enthralled readers with articles about the coming wreckage on Wall Street. The book that grew out of his work with Clay, Liar’s Poker, assured Lewis of a lifetime as a bestselling author and media darling.
When the American stock exchange crashed in 1987, Herb Lipson, executive chairman of Philadelphia magazine, Clay’s backer for Manhattan, Inc., was at Claridge’s in London. Returning from dinner, he tore off the ticker tape in the lobby and read about the largest drop in history. Certain the world had come to an end, he returned at once to New York to meet Clay for lunch, expecting to see no limos, no lights in the penthouses, and tumbleweed blowing down Park Avenue.
It didn’t happen. Manhattan, Inc. survived for two more years. The crash only made Wall Street—and Manhattan, Inc.—more of an obsession for readers, who salivated over seeing how the mighty would fall. The magazine did begin to bleed financially. But Lipson, the sole stockholder, personally kept the magazine afloat by taking more than a $20 million loss. Years later, he told me he had no regrets: “It was a great ride for us all.”
ONE WEEKEND IN THE VILLAGE of Sag Harbor, I bumped into a classmate from UVM. Bill Pickens was the only African American who had graduated with me. We had danced together at Greek fraternity parties while I was dating the only genetically Greek guy admitted to Alpha Epsilon Pi, the Jewish fraternity. My classmate, now a handsome middle-aged international business consultant, was the grandson of an NAACP founder. Pickens told me that he and William Denby, a black novelist and college professor, had been sharing their frustrations over social in-activism with Betty Friedan: Why weren’t the thought leaders of both the black and white communities of Sag Harbor village teaming up to maximize our voices politically?
By the ’80s, Sag Harbor was becoming a smart and sophisticated retreat for writers, editors, and journalists whose politics were socially progressive. Even as artists opened galleries along its main street, the old charm was preserved with the windmill at the long wharf, the original Five and Ten, and the family-owned Schiavoni’s Market (all remain to this day).
The village was also home to one of the first upper-middle-class black enclaves in the country. Some of the most prominent African Americans of the twentieth century had at one time bought vacation homes here, including Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Colin Powell’s parents, and more recently the restaurateur B. Smith and the novelist Colson Whitehead.
Our mutual friend, E. L. Doctorow, already recognized as a pillar of American literature for his early novels, The Book of Daniel and
Ragtime, called the state into which many of us had slipped “somnambulistic.” Mentally asleep. “With all the brainpower out here,” Bill said, “why don’t we hold a convocation, a kind of publicly held think tank?”
At one of our first brainstorming meetings in one or another’s homes, Pat Pickens, Bill’s wife, came up with the name: Sag Harbor Initiative. Both communities accepted some of the responsibility for the social divide. Nobody had forced it or even much thought about it; it just happened. Clementine Pugh, an outspoken black professor from Lehman College in the Bronx, pointed out that “The ideal in the ’60s was integration. We were moving toward trying to be accepted by white people. That’s over.”
I agreed with Clem Pugh. “Like everything else in the past ten years,” I said, “the spirit and energy that was trying to bring people together just petered out.” Pugh said, “Now we are joining in the formation of the agenda.”
Other socially conscious writers were roused from their guarded solitude, including Robert Caro, who was deeply engaged in writing the second volume of his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson; Kurt Vonnegut, whose most recent social realist novel, Galapagos, had raised concerns that the “oversized human brain” was ironically leading mankind to possible extinction; and Blanche Wiesen Cook, a gay activist who surfaced from her monumental research on Eleanor Roosevelt to join us.
We were to convene the first Sag Harbor Initiative town meeting over Columbus Day weekend, 1987. The weekend before, I was in Florida, sleeping at the foot of my mother’s hospital bed. She had awakened in the middle of the night and asked me to recite for her the 23rd Psalm. I got as far as “. . . he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness—” when Mother pulled the oxygen mask off her nose and corrected me: “What about ‘he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul’?”