This gesture of kindness was the right thing to do, and Dad instinctively knew that. Mom and Dad helped me understand that I had to be aware of my children and that Billy would always be their dad. They helped me navigate my divorce with dignity.
My parents’ lessons have paid off. You could say that dinner was a small gesture with grand results, because Billy remains close to our family to this day.
Chapter 14
POINTER MAN
“Needless to say, I’m not an expert on the Republican Party or, for that matter, winning the presidency. But your dad seemed to me to be the kind of Republican that I admired and respected. He had some balance to him. My sense was he was a good, strong, viable candidate.”
—Michael Dukakis
The same week that Dad announced his second candidacy for the presidency, on October 12, 1987, Newsweek magazine put him on its cover with their infamous headline “Fighting the Wimp Factor.” The photo featured my father speeding along on his cigarette boat—one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle, with a seafarer’s scowl on his face, wearing a foul-weather jacket.
In the weeks and months leading up to the announcement, a Newsweek reporter named Margaret Warner said she was writing a profile of Dad, and had convinced him that it was going to be a reasonable piece, mostly biographical about our family and how we interact. “So I did something we never did,” Dad told me. “I told Mother she ought to talk to her.” Thus assured, eighty-six-year-old Dorothy Bush sat for an interview. In fact, we all did—Jeb, George, Aunt Nan, Mom. We all felt the same way Dad did: “She really won us all over. She was very sweet and very nice.”
During my interview with her, I showed Margaret around Kennebunkport a little—and I remember how she kept saying how much she loved my parents, how great they were. In fact, it seemed that everything she asked me about them started with, “Your parents are so amazing. Let me ask you this . . .”
Then the story got published. The article’s theme was repeated over and over, with words peppered throughout it like “subservient,” “emasculated,” and “silly.” The word “wimp” alone appeared eight times, and pictures and quotes from my family and Dad’s closest friends were manipulated to make it appear as if we all agreed with the author’s premise. Even now, reading it almost twenty years later, I’m still struck by how cruel it was.
So shortly after it was published, I called Margaret and asked why she wrote what she did. Margaret began to cry and said that her editor made her put the word “wimp” in all those times, and said that she was very sorry.
But the damage was done.
It still amazes me today that Margaret, or any nameless editor, could use that word about a man who had flown fifty-eight combat missions and survived being shot down at sea—let alone everything else Dad had done in his life to that point.
Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski put it this way: “It used to tee me off to no end in the campaign when they talked about your father as a less than physically adept individual. That son of a gun almost got killed in that airplane disaster, and yet they looked at your father as being somewhat timid. That used to boil me. I think that conclusion drew me closer to your father. I got to like your dad a lot, because I thought that they portrayed him very inaccurately. But then again, I knew him.”
Like Congressman Rostenkowski, anyone who knows my father knows better—but that didn’t save Newsweek’s readers from being treated to a fictional series of insights about Dad that were gained under false pretenses in October 1987.
Years later, incidentally, I saw Margaret at a party, and it made me realize that in politics you do run into the same people over and over. She seemed to avoid me; and if I were her, I suppose I would still be embarrassed, too.
When the “wimp” cover hit newsstands, of course, my brothers and I felt used—and were even more upset than Dad was. Don’t get me wrong: Dad was furious. He told me, “It was hard to treat Margaret the same way after what a lot of people felt was a betrayal.” Still, it’s as Geraldine Ferraro said—it’s easier to be the candidate than to be the family. Dad was the one to calm everybody down because he could take it, but the rest of us hated how he was being treated.
Ede Holiday, who was the treasurer of Dad’s PAC at the time, says, “I often use that story for my kids—if George Bush ever listened to what other people said about him, he never would have been president. You have to have the strength of character to keep moving when something so unreasonable and unfair happens to you in a public way.”
Candidly, we felt the same sense of outrage when conservative columnist George Will later described Dad as “Reagan’s lapdog.” It was a particularly disdainful observation coming from another Reagan supporter. My father valued loyalty a great deal and had been an unquestionably loyal friend to Ronald Reagan. To have that same trait used against him by one of President Reagan’s staunchest defenders was both absurd and petty.
Jon Meacham, now managing editor of Newsweek, explained what the press was doing: “It’s the nature of the media beast to build somebody up and then tear them down, and then build them up and tear them down again. An important thing to remember about the press is there is no ideological bias. I honestly believe we have a bias toward conflict and a need to change the narrative. That’s the problem—it’s not that we’re liberal or conservative.”
Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post media critic, agreed: “The media often assign narratives to people in public life and then look for stories or anecdotes to confirm those narratives.” So the media narrative at the time was that although Dad may have been the front-runner, he didn’t have the “right stuff” to become president.
It was against this backdrop that Dad officially announced his candidacy at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Houston before most of our family and two thousand supporters—including several astronauts and June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of the Challenger commander; a few baseball players from the Houston Astros; and even a professional wrestler named Paul Boesch who was one of the original stars of Wrestlemania.
Of course, many of my parents’ friends from Texas were there, along with our family. Lionel Hampton, the eighty-year-old jazz great who had played for the CIA employees years ago, was there, too.
Dad’s notes recalling that night were both poignant and funny: “Bar looks beautiful. Thirty-four years ago today, Robin died . . . Lionel Hampton, loyal to the end. Loyal, loyal, loyal . . . The balloon drop that started at the top of the Regency was marvelous,” he continued. “For a frightening moment, it looked like a condom drop—raw rubber appearing from the ceiling—balloons that had popped during the night. But, then down came the array of balloons . . .”
By the end of the event, he wrote, “The press doesn’t understand that there is strength in all of this.”
Almost as soon as Dad announced his candidacy, reporters started asking President Reagan if he would endorse my father’s candidacy—to which the president said he would not. This surprised and disappointed me, and I wondered why the president was so reluctant given the fact that Dad and he were so close—and by all accounts, Dad was a superb and loyal vice president. There were quite a few GOP candidates in the primaries, and in hindsight perhaps he felt that as head of the party he couldn’t do anything until the nomination.
To Dad, however, it was no surprise. “It never occurred to me that he would not support me. There was a lot of speculation in the press that he wasn’t going to—which was put out by some of the real right-wing guys. He assured me privately he was for me. Some of our people around me were saying, ‘Well, he ought to be out there sooner.’ But I wasn’t surprised at all. He did what he said he’d do, at his own pace, his own time, and that was all right.”
The other announced candidates for the Republican nomination were Kansas Senator Bob Dole, who, like Dad, had served in World War II; former Delaware governor Pierre “Pete” DuPont; President Reagan’s former secretary of state and President Nixon’s chief of staff, General Al
Haig; New York Congressman and former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp; and televangelist Pat Robertson, whose candidacy lasted longer than most experts predicted.
For the Democrats, the contenders were former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt; Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, star of the Senate Judiciary Committee; Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants in his third term as governor; Congressman Dick Gephardt from Missouri; Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, a late entrant who had his eye on winning Super Tuesday; former senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who lost the nomination to Walter Mondale in 1984; the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who also ran against Mondale in 1984; and finally, the bow-tie-wearing Senator Paul Simon of Illinois.
The media soon dubbed the Democratic candidates the Seven Dwarfs—an unflattering reference comparing them to the much-ballyhooed noncandidacy of New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Governor Cuomo was the subject of a “draft” movement in the press, and he even made fun of his own presidential aspirations at the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington, saying that Satan had offered him the presidency in exchange for his soul. Cuomo replied, “So what’s the catch?”
The national press touted other noncandidates as well—including Bill Moyers, the PBS reporter, and Pat Schroeder, a former congresswoman from Colorado.
Another editorial cartoonist noted that voters looking in their refrigerators that Thanksgiving would find six varieties of fruitcake and one leftover turkey—meaning Gary Hart, who was running again after his 1984 finish. Hart was the presumed front-runner until a photo of him turned up in the National Enquirer on the deck of the yacht The Monkey Business with Donna Rice, a woman who was not his wife. Hart ended up dropping out of the race, then jumping back in, then dropping out again.
Joe Biden also faltered early. In his case, he was caught plagiarizing parts of a speech by Neil Kinnock, a Member of the British Parliament. Curiously, Biden only used the parts of the Kinnock speech where Kinnock talked about growing up as the son of a coal miner, which Biden was not. The tapes showing Biden’s and Kinnock’s speeches were put out to the press by Dukakis campaign manager John Sasso, who was fired for his role, and Biden dropped out shortly thereafter.
Dad assembled a top-notch team for his campaign leadership: His national cochairs were New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, who had been active in organizing the grassroots effort in New Hampshire, and Texas Senator John Tower, Dad’s friend and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. James Baker, having served as President Reagan’s chief of staff and Treasury secretary, was the general chairman. In addition, there was what Roger Ailes called the Group of Six, or G–6, as it came to be known, made up of Nick Brady, the former Wall Street banker and New Jersey senator; Bob Mosbacher, the Texas oilman who ran fund-raising; pollster Bob Teeter; Dad’s chief of staff, Craig Fuller; political guru Lee Atwater, who had been instrumental in the 1984 Reagan reelection; and Roger Ailes, a well-known media consultant.
“At the end of the day, when everybody went home, that group would go out to dinner and figure out where we were going next,” Ailes remembers.
“Lee would call them ‘the adults,’” Ede recalls of the G–6. “Having these ‘adults’ over the top of the campaign helped everybody not get into trouble. It gave needed maturity to the campaign organization.”
Each of us in the family took a role as well. I campaigned in both the primaries and the general election. In fact, Jack Kemp’s daughter Jennifer and I became good friends, because often I’d run into the children of the other candidates at events, and it was nice to see a friend in the crowd.
Because I was living in Maine at the time, I also campaigned there some but mostly traveled all over the East Coast and mid-Atlantic states. A campaign worker, Bill Canary, traveled with me and became a close family friend.
My brother Neil worked hard in New Hampshire, and Marvin traveled all over the country. Marvin, in fact, remembers going to Chicago and campaigning there with a Democratic councilman named “Fast Eddie” Verdeliac, who had endorsed Dad.
“We spent some time freezing our rear ends off at a Chicago Bears game, and every person walking by would call out, ‘Yo, Eddie, you’re my man!’” Marvin recalled. “The guy worked me like a dog—we did about eight events in one day, and the last one was at a raucous union hall. Maybe four hundred fifty people in a room with a capacity of two hundred, and everybody was drinking pretty heavily. By the time I got up there to speak, I was basically screaming in tongues about how great Dad was. Eddie was fantastic. He gave a beautiful tribute to Dad. I couldn’t understand a word he said, but it was beautiful.”
When I pointed out to Marvin that Fast Eddie’s legal clients allegedly had ties to the mob, he said diplomatically, “Well, you meet some colorful people and you get endorsements from unexpected sources.”
Jeb resigned as Florida secretary of commerce and campaigned for Dad mostly in Florida and California. He remembers talking to Lee Atwater early on with George, right when Dad hired Lee. “George and I ganged up on him and had a stern conversation with him. We said, ‘We don’t care what a hotshot you are, we want to know how loyal you’re going to be to Dad. If someone threw a hand grenade in this room, all Dad’s children would want to be the first to jump on it to save him. Would you do the same thing?’ He was a little cocky—all these political operatives are—and we wanted to test his loyalty, his allegiance.”
Lee handled it well, and said that if loyalty was a concern, then perhaps George should move to Washington and keep an eye on things. So George moved to a town house in Washington, D.C., with Laura and their four-year-old twins, Barbara and Jenna. Laura remembers, “We picked that town house because we wanted to be really close to the vice president’s house. We figured it might be the only time in our lives we’d live in the same town they lived in. It was really a bonding experience for all of us. Until then, Bar and I certainly hadn’t been close at all.”
Mom and Dad, George and Laura, and Marvin and Margaret had hamburger lunches together every Sunday, despite the fact that they were in the middle of a national campaign.
George took an office at campaign headquarters and became the “loyalty enforcer”—a term he coined in describing his job. “I was a person without portfolio,” George said. “I was there really to kind of be Dad’s eyes and ears in the campaign. I call it a loyalty enforcer, but also I was there to be in a position where I could help the team stay a team.”
“What happened, of course,” added Laura, “was George and Lee really developed a friendship.”
Lee’s friend Karl Rove explained why a “loyalty enforcer” was a necessity on that campaign: “Having been vice president for eight years, your dad was depending on a lot of people who had been for somebody else in the previous eight years and whose interests might be more professional than personal. The people who did it for Nixon and Ford and Reagan were prepared to do it for Bush. Not necessarily out of extreme personal loyalty, but because that was the way you advanced your career in Washington. That’s great—but when you get into choppy waters, those people are more likely to be wringing their hands to a member of the press, or pouring out about one of their colleagues, or being indiscreet about campaign activities. Simply because their ultimate loyalty is not to the man himself.”
At one point, Esquire magazine ran an interview with Lee that featured a photo of Lee in his underwear, which upset George a great deal. The article characterized Lee as “all grit . . . all blood on the floor and don’t look back.” George recalls, “I called Lee and said, ‘This isn’t about you. This is a disgrace. And if you think I’m upset, talk to my mother.’ He immediately called her and apologized.”
George also was the first one to deal with a campaign rumor that Dad had an affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald, his executive assistant in China and at the CIA, telling Newsweek in June 1987, “The answer to the big ‘A’ question is N-O.” Years later, in 1992, I stood with my parents at a press conference in Kennebunkport when the issue came up. Of course, i
t wasn’t true. Even Michael Dukakis thought the rumor was outrageous because he fired a staffer, Donna Brazille, for spreading the rumor.
“To hell with all that. I just said, ‘Look, we’re not going to have any part of that,’” Governor Dukakis told me. “When you decide you’re going to go into this business, you’ve got to decide who you are, what standards you’re going to set for yourself and the people around you. If folks get out of line, you can’t accept that.”
As you might expect, it was incredible to me that Dad was put in such a preposterous position. It was one more example of how people who run for office become public property, and how some people in the media will stop at nothing to bring them down. Where does it stop? The press can say whatever they want, and if you don’t go out and deny it, they assume that it’s true—and it becomes part of their “narrative.”
Aside from the nastiness of the campaign rumor mill, I have very fond memories of the 1988 campaign. I suppose we all tend to glorify our “early years,” but to me it seems like a different time than the politics of today. There were so many characters running for president, so many twists and turns, and we were all young and enjoying this surreal adventure.
Adding to the romance of it all, my brothers and I were all basically newlyweds, and there were many young grandchildren running around the campaign events. I also remember habitually staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live. In fact, that year marked the beginning of Dana Carvey as George Bush. When I asked Dana about the first time he met my father, Dana said, “I think your dad had a really good attitude about it, because he always said [Carvey slips into his impersonation of Dad]: Comes with the turf. Got to be able to take a few zingers. Not take yourself too seriously.” In the beginning, Dana said he didn’t think there was much to impersonate—“I really didn’t pick it up,” he explained—and mostly concentrated on Dad’s hand gestures, pointing with his right hand into the distance, doing the double hands when he’d say “at this juncture.”
My Father, My President Page 24