My Father, My President

by Doro Bush Koch

  But then he moved into what he calls “a Texas sort of lazy, clipped syntax kind of thing that I just went with.” He explained to me that he exaggerated the phrase “not going to do it” to become “not gonna do it” and, finally, “na ga do it.” “You take little teeny observations of him and then just make them almost a separate character.”

  My brothers and I saw Dana’s impersonation before Dad did—“Look, I don’t stay up late like you kids do,” he’d say—but he became more familiar with it once he was in the White House.

  I can’t remember when I first met Lee Atwater, but I always liked him. Everyone respected his instincts because he was tough and no-nonsense. I knew that with him on our side, we’d be in good hands politically.

  “He had a huge, infectious personality,” Marvin remembers. He saw a lot of Lee because Marvin’s business office was only a few doors down from campaign headquarters in Washington. Marvin recalled that Lee had little Civil War soldiers on his desk, and he would make his points by moving the soldiers around. Lee was very disciplined, jogging every day, never drinking, and smoking a pack of cigarettes a week—but he only smoked on Fridays.

  I also remember how Lee had one of the only cell phones in town—it was as big as a lunch box and he took it everywhere. He was on the cutting edge in those days. (During the 1988 campaign, there was no e-mail or voice mail, no fax machine on Air Force Two, and certainly no BlackBerry or Internet. One campaign staffer, Debbie Romash, remembers doing “the Delta dash”—rushing to the courier service on Delta Air Lines that used the last flight out of Washington every night, to get schedules and briefing books to the campaign team on the road.)

  As he looked to the 1988 primary calendar, Dad wanted to erase his 1980 loss in New Hampshire. One of his key people back then had been Andy Card—who had since run, and lost, for Massachusetts governor in 1982. I respect Andy and volunteered on his 1982 race—stuffing envelopes, making phone calls, even passing out bumper stickers with Andy’s father one day.

  After Andy lost, Jim Baker offered him a job at the White House as liaison to the nation’s governors. Andy remembers one advantage of the job was that it allowed him to build close relationships with Republican governors and their grassroots operations in key states, including New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, who had been a Reagan supporter in 1980 and had become the chairman of the Republican Governors’ Association in 1987.

  Dad and his team were well aware that Governor Sununu’s help would be crucial in 1988. “There’s a saturation of politics here, and Lee loved that atmosphere. He understood New Hampshire and he used to come up a lot,” said Governor Sununu. “The vice president actually felt a little more comfortable campaigning here than in Iowa. New Hampshire is a ‘see me, touch me, feel me’ campaign state. I estimate that he personally shook hands with about fifty thousand people that year before the primary. I’ll bet we had about five thousand Polaroid pictures taken—on the theory that if somebody has a picture of themselves and the vice president on the mantel, they’ll work awfully hard to make it a picture of themselves and the president on the mantel.”

  In 1987, Dad and Lee Atwater met with Andy and convinced him to leave the White House and run the New Hampshire campaign. Andy’s wife, Kathy, wasn’t too happy about the idea, but he convinced her. “It was a life-changing experience for me,” Andy says now, remembering that he saw Kathy only thirteen nights that entire year and slept on a cot in his office in Concord.

  Andy also assembled a group called the Freedom Fighters, grassroots organizers who ran operations at the precinct level. They met every Monday at 7:00 a.m. in Concord, “which means some people had to leave Coos County way up north [where the town of Dixville Notch votes first in the primary and gets tremendous media attention] at 3:00 a.m. to get to Concord in time for the meeting,” Andy recalls. He told every precinct captain in the state it was not their job to get George Bush elected president, only to get George Bush elected president of their precinct.

  “I told them we want to be like Larry Bird [the Boston Celtics legend]—we’d love it if it came to New Hampshire, and we were two points down with ten seconds left in the game. We would be standing outside the three-point circle begging for the ball because we have the confidence that we can sink the three-point shot. That was what our campaign strategy was all about.”

  Of course, the campaign road to New Hampshire first made its way through the Iowa caucuses. Mary Matalin was working at the RNC at the time and had been sent to Iowa as a field worker.

  “That was the first emergence of the Christian Coalition,” she remembers, referring to supporters of Pat Robertson. “Nobody knew who they were. I kept calling Rich Bond and Lee Atwater, and no one believed me because they hadn’t seen it. You had to be on the ground. They couldn’t see them in the polling, so we didn’t know what their numbers were. We take them for granted now. So we were shadowboxing with the invisible army of the Christian Coalition. We also had Bob Dole in that race. It was not his home state, but he was a farm state guy. He was very organized there.”

  Given Dad’s success in 1980, everyone presumed he would win Iowa again in 1988. But we lost to Dole and Robertson, coming in third. The shock of that loss shot through the campaign. How bad was it? To give you an idea, Atwater fired Mary that night and then called her in the middle of the night to fire her again. Then the next morning, Lee fired Mary for a third time in front of all the field personnel!

  When I asked Dad about Lee’s reaction the night of the Iowa caucuses, he recalled, “Lee was a tough, elbows-flying fighter. With me, he was always respectful and very supportive. But he’d fly off the handle. He’d get very uptight when things weren’t going well. He was an emotional fellow.”

  “The next morning, I had to go on a Wisconsin trip with the vice president,” Mary said. “That primary was going on then, and somebody else told the VP that I was fired. Right there, he said, ‘Oh. She’s unfired. That’s ridiculous. She’s not incompetent.’ We weren’t even that close then.”

  Lee Atwater’s wife, Sally, remembers how gracious Dad was to all the Iowa workers: “Lee said that when your father addressed his campaign workers, he told them he, George Bush, was taking full responsibility for the loss. He wanted the workers to know that he knew how hard they all had worked.”

  As Mary said, the Iowa loss stunned all of us. Jeb remembers it well: “I was sent to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the intern who was supposed to be traveling with me, after he saw the king-size whippin’ Dad had gotten in the caucuses, left me. Evacuated. So I got a six-pack of beer, walked back on my own to the Motel 6, and watched the rest of the dreary results by myself.”

  Ede Holiday was the money person for the campaign. The day after we lost Iowa, she called Andy Card at 5:30 a.m. in the campaign headquarters in New Hampshire asking what he needed. In no time, the entire campaign staff went up there on buses to go door-to-door.

  “I got up there and Lee Atwater was literally in a catatonic state,” Ede said. “He could not speak. He could not breathe. I don’t know if he brushed his teeth for three days. He just feared it was the end. He literally could not function. We’d just lost Iowa, and if we lost in New Hampshire, we’d be done. John Sununu, on the other hand, had the biggest smile on his face. He kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to win. I guarantee you we’ll win in this state. This is what we’re going to do.’ And he laid it all out.”

  With less than a week to go in New Hampshire, important decisions had to be made regarding how to spend precious campaign resources—and among Dad’s top advisers there were the inevitable, sharp disagreements about how much money to spend. Bob Mosbacher, for example, wanted to save some for down the line, but Lee said to him, “If you don’t spend it here, there won’t be anyplace to spend it down the line, because we’ll be out of the race.” Lee decided to front-load the money, betting that Dad would win New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Super Tuesday.

  For the entire team, the pressure was on.


  All of this played into the decision to run the “Senator Straddle” ad, attacking Bob Dole for flip-flopping on the issues. Dad was not enthusiastic about it but finally decided to do it. “If you can get it on the air, then all right,” he said to Mosbacher. Dad was referring to the fact that the ad schedules at all the TV stations had been set, and they were not taking any changes.

  Two months before this pivotal primary, however, Governor Sununu had asked Dad to accept an invitation for an interview at Channel 9 in Manchester—the biggest media market in the state. The event was right at the height of the Christmas season, and Dad asked, “Why do we have to do this?” But the governor prevailed, and Dad and Mom went.

  The reception turned out to be an all-hands-on-deck event at the station, complete with families. Mom and Dad chatted and posed for photos with family members, reporters, and station management. “They just won everybody over at Channel 9,” Sununu remembered.

  That gesture would pay off later in the heat of a hotly contested, do-or-die primary. When Sununu was told there was no way to air the “Straddle” ad on Channel 9, he called the station manager, “who obviously had been at that Christmas reception with his children and his wife and had about nine pictures taken. And I said, ‘Can you meet me at the station and help me convince your people to change this?’ And he said, ‘Of course, I’ll do that for the vice president.’”

  Apparently, Dad made such an impression on the station management that they were very comfortable bending the rules to accommodate what was being asked.

  Sununu met the manager after hours, going in with our ads. When the governor saw Dad later, he said, “Oh, by the way, when you asked me three months ago why you had to do that Christmas event, this is why.”

  Therese Burch remembers campaigning with Dad in New Hampshire, at a truck stop called Cuzzin Richie’s. While Dad was visiting with truckers in the coffee shop, the press corps were buying baseball hats in the gift shop that said “Shit Happens” and wearing them to surprise Dad. Of course, he roared with laughter, she said, and then as he was getting ready to leave, a trucker invited Dad to take his rig for a ride. So Dad jumped into the driver’s seat, and the reporters all assumed he’d take a spin around the parking lot. “To everyone’s amazement, the vice president took off in the eighteen-wheeler Mack truck and headed for the highway. One Secret Service agent, Russell Rowe, jumped on the back of the truck, as the other Secret Service agents and press scrambled to follow,” she said. When they got back, Dad thanked the trucker and had a good laugh. “The press and the crowd were all speechless because they couldn’t believe he knew how to drive the rig.”

  It was clear that Dad had to win New Hampshire to stay in the race. “Here we were, like Larry Bird, begging for the ball, with great confidence that we could sink the shot and win,” said Andy Card. “And that’s what we did.” Dad won, this time beating Bob Dole by 15,000 votes and Pat Robertson by a three-to-one margin.

  Next came the South Carolina primary, part of Lee’s strategy to build the “southern firewall”—sort of an insurance policy to ensure that a conservative was elected in case Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t go well. Lee was confident of victory because of his experience in his home state—where he organized college campuses for Strom Thurmond’s reelection campaign in 1972 and then did the same for Richard Nixon, before going to Washington as national director of the College Republicans with Karl Rove. Pat Robertson’s campaign was stopped cold in South Carolina, and it was a big win for Dad going into Super Tuesday.

  That year, 1988, was the first year the parties held the so-called Super Tuesday primaries—the first regional group of primaries ever held—encompassing fourteen states, mostly in the South. The idea, Andy Card explained, was that “if you didn’t have momentum going into it, you weren’t going to come out of it successfully.” Dad won 600 of the 803 delegates that were in play in 1988, to close the gap on the 1,139 needed to secure the Republican nomination. “It was a landslide,” remembers Bill Canary, a campaign operative who went on to become special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs. He noted that Robertson only won the state of Washington, and that although Bob Dole’s best chances were in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and North Carolina, “we won them all,” Bill said. “It ended the debate as to who would be the Republican nominee in 1988. In the end, it was the Democrats that still were without a clear nominee by March 8.”

  Among the Democrats, Jesse Jackson won the five Deep South states, Al Gore the five border states, Michael Dukakis won Florida, Texas, and Maryland, and Dick Gephardt won only his home state of Missouri.

  At one point, Mary Matalin, a lawyer by training, was sent to Michigan to handle a complicated rules fight having to do with delegates, which ended up in federal court there. Pat Robertson had charged Dad’s campaign with buying off Kemp supporters, and held a separate convention to select delegates—despite the fact that the state party chairman did not recognize that rogue meeting. A legal battle ensued, and it came down to a decision by the Bush campaign that had to be made: do we cut a complex deal with the other Republican candidates who had delegates pledged to them, or do we forge ahead in court by ourselves and hope for the best? So Mary came in to brief the campaign’s G–6.

  “They already didn’t like me from Iowa,” Mary recalled. “We went through all the arguments, and they were all saying, don’t do it, it’s too risky. Your father asked what I thought. I thought we should cut the deal. He said, ‘Well, I trust her. She’s on the ground. She knows what’s going on. We’re going to do the deal.’ That’s the way to manage people. Nobody knew what to do. But he had faith in me. That is one of a million stories of why people would work their hearts out for him—because this is not just lip service to loyalty and trust. This is how he behaved.”

  It turned out it was the right decision—a throw of the dice, she said, a big risk. Dad won Michigan, and soon he had the votes to wrap up the Republican nomination.

  As the two parties headed to their conventions, tradition stated that the challenger’s party would go first and the incumbent last. So the Democratic convention was held first, in July at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta. It was there that Ann Richards drawled, “Poor George, he can’t help it—he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

  Senator Teddy Kennedy followed next, hitting on Iran-Contra and calling out to the crowd over and over, “Where was George?” (A year or so later, Senator Kennedy sent Dad a good-natured note with a photo of a billboard from Milford, Connecticut, which read “Where’s George? In the White House, Teddy!!”)

  It was also in Atlanta that then-Governor Bill Clinton gave such a long and tedious speech that he was nearly booed off the stage. It’s still called the “In Conclusion” speech by some, because that’s the point in his speech when the crowd cheered loudest. In fact, many observers said that it was the end of Bill Clinton’s political career—the first of many times that would be said about him, and not just by my brothers.

  So much for conventional wisdom!

  In general, I thought the entire Democratic convention was mean-spirited, with the attacks on my father more personal than political. I remember disliking Ann Richards’s comments most of all. Politically, I disagreed with almost everything she said. I did, however, like her line saluting women, saying “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels.”

  Dad looked back on it, saying, “It upset me that she was doing that, making it personal like that—but that’s the campaign. When George beat her a few years later, I guess you could say he showed her what she could do with that silver foot!”

  As his running mate Governor Dukakis chose Dad’s old Texas rival Senator Lloyd Bentsen. “I made a lot of mistakes in that campaign. I think one of the things I did well was to go through this [VP selection] process, and it was exhausting. We were all aware of what happened with McGovern and Eagleton,” Governor Dukakis told me, referring to George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee w
ho dropped his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, from the ticket after it came out that Eagleton had received electroshock therapy for depression. They went on to lose by what was then the second largest landslide in American history.

  So after the last primary in June, Dukakis asked Paul Brontas, his campaign chairman, to begin the process of choosing a VP candidate. “We narrowed the field down to four people: Lloyd Bentsen, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and John Glenn,” the governor added. “We set up teams, volunteer teams of lawyers and accountants, one for each candidate, who went into their backgrounds, their finances, their stuff over and over again. I met with each of them.” He ended up choosing Bentsen because of the geographic balance, his experience on Capitol Hill, and his ability to be a “first-rate president,” should the need arise.

  The night Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen officially claimed the Democratic nomination, I remember seeing the split-screen image of the roll-call vote of the delegates, putting them over the top—with the Dukakis family sitting up straight on their hotel room sofa.

  Governor Dukakis was very excited to have his eighty-six-year-old grandmother at the convention. He told me about her—how she arrived from Greece at nine years old, lived in the tenements across from a shoe factory, and was the first Greek American woman to attend college in American history, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Bates College in 1925. She had become a schoolteacher, gotten married, and raised their son in Brookline, Massachusetts.

  Mrs. Dukakis was eighty-six; my own grandmother Dorothy was eighty-seven when she attended the Republican convention, to see Dad accept the nomination.