While the Democrats were having their convention, my father and Jim Baker got out of town, heading up to Shoshone National Forest in northwestern Wyoming for a week of fly-fishing. Dad recorded in his diary at the time:
I have concluded from this trip that I can be very happy in what follows on. If I lose, I don’t know what I’ll do, but I know I’ll be happy. But the main thing is, I’d like to do something to help others . . . I still feel confident that I will win, but the polls are tough . . . I feel rested and my mind is clearer. We’ll go back to the rat races; the copies of memos; who has the action on this letter and that; the stacks of paper; the endless criticism; great pressures; and the ugliness; but this little jaunt has proved to me that you can get your soul refurbished.
It’s a good thing the trip was reinvigorating, because by the time the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket rolled out of Atlanta, the Democrats were seventeen points ahead in the polls. Suddenly, Dad was an underdog.
In August, the Republican convention was held at the Superdome in New Orleans. It was exciting and great fun, being on the convention floor, attending the parties, and seeing so many old friends. Ronald Reagan gave a terrific speech, as you might expect, asking Dad to “go out there and win one for the Gipper.” The crowd loved it. My sister-in-law Columba seconded Dad’s nomination as president, first in Spanish, then in English.
Meanwhile, Jeb’s twelve-year-old son, George P., led the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance in front of the entire convention and television viewing audience. According to his father, George P. couldn’t have been more nervous. Jeb remembers how his son was “looking like he was going to throw up. He turned white. Didn’t have a pulse. So he went out . . . and I was on my hands and knees behind the curtains looking around the corner in case I had to run out. I was thinking, ‘He’s going to lose it.’ So I was going to run out.” But George P. did fine, and no one ever saw Jeb hiding offstage on his hands and knees.
Dad wrote in his diary that week:
The kids and the grandchildren were front and center, and they did well. Doro speaking so beautifully for her Mother and also on the convention floor. The boys, all of them, on the television and speaking at the convention, all were terrific. Our family got much more focus. They took the heat well, and they showed great presence and great warmth.
There was a lot of speculation as to whom Dad would choose as his running mate. About three weeks before the convention, in fact, some of his friends—Fred Malek, the director of the convention, and his wife, Marlene; Jim and Susan Baker; my brother George and Laura; and Vic Gold and his wife—had kicked around a few names in front of Dad, who never said a word and just listened. “It’s going to be Kemp—couldn’t you sense his reaction?” Fred remembered saying to Marlene on the drive home. “Of course, I was dead wrong.”
I also remember a family dinner right before the convention where we all went around the table and took a guess. Dad sat there, nodding and listening, but never saying a thing. I don’t remember any of us being right.
Unbeknownst to us, he had called Dan Quayle, a senator from Indiana, the Monday after the Democratic convention and asked if he’d mind being considered for vice president. Senator Quayle talked it over with his wife that night and then called back to say okay.
“Bob Teeter will be calling you,” Vice President Quayle remembers Dad saying. “That was it, until the day of the convention. He didn’t interview because he didn’t want to put people through that. He knew us all very well, especially the members of the Senate, because he was such a worldly person. In his mind, he knew their capabilities, knew who they were, knew what he needed, and that he didn’t really have to do this. Plus, I don’t think he particularly liked the process he went through himself, in previous years. He just didn’t like it when the cameras would be on six candidates and then it would be down to three. Why aren’t you in the six? Then the three down to one. What did you do wrong? He doesn’t enjoy that part with the press. It’s his caring side coming out.”
On the day Dad was to announce his choice to be on the ticket, the Quayles were eating lunch at Sammy’s Steak and Lobster Place on Bourbon Street in New Orleans when the call came in to return to the hotel. They had been eavesdropping on other diners’ lunch conversations and actually heard someone say, “I wonder if this guy from Indiana’s got a chance.”
“So I get back and am told to call Jim Baker,” Quayle recalled. “I think, ‘Dang it, Baker’s got to tell the losers.’ I turn on the television and Tom Brokaw says, ‘We’ve just confirmed it’s not Jack Kemp. And hang on here, yes, we now have confirmation that it is apparently not Senator Dole.’ And so I call Baker and he said, ‘Hang on for the vice president.’ When the vice president asked, ‘Would you?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ He said, ‘Thank you very much. We’ll be a great team. We’d like to keep this a secret. This is your first big assignment.’”
Dad also told the Quayles to come to the Spanish Plaza in New Orleans at 3:45 p.m. for the announcement. Senator Quayle replied, “I don’t know where the Spanish Plaza is, but I’ll figure it out, don’t worry.”
That afternoon, a crowd was waiting on the plaza for my parents to steam down the Mississippi aboard a paddleboat named the SS Natchez, then land and make the announcement on a stage at the dock. I was on board the Natchez as well and had no idea whom Dad would announce.
It was crowded, and Quayle remembered, “No one let me through. They said, ‘Who are you?’ and I said, ‘I’m the senator from Indiana.’ ‘We don’t care where you’re a senator from, we’re waiting here to find out who is going to be the next vice president.’ I said, ‘It might be me, guys! Let me through!’ Finally, Roger Ailes and Strom Thurmond and Tommy Thompson saw me about fifteen rows back, and they sent the Secret Service to get me to the front row.”
When Dad made the announcement, he surprised everyone.
“I wanted somebody young and somebody who had a good record, and he had been working on labor legislation with Kennedy,” Dad said as he reflected on his choice of a running mate. “Dan had defeated Evan Bayh and gone into the Senate. He was young and attractive and that’s why I wanted him.” Dad also liked Senator Quayle because he had a conservative voting record and would bring regional balance to Dad’s Texas/New England background.
Dan Quayle gave me his theory on why he was chosen: “I don’t think your dad’s told anybody how it came down to Dole and myself, but that’s my guess. It was a generational choice. I’ve always compared it to what Eisenhower did in picking Nixon. Because Nixon was actually younger than I was—Nixon was thirty-nine when Eisenhower picked him. Your father had all the credentials, just like Eisenhower. So I knew that I had a pretty good chance, and that he might do something a little unexpected. But you never know. It’s a decision of one.”
Dad knew that Quayle had served in the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War. In fact, a Washington lawyer and Vietnam veteran, Bob Kimmett, had talked with Senator Quayle on behalf of the campaign about his guard service. Kimmett noticed that Quayle’s draft number was actually a high number and that even though he would not have been drafted, Quayle decided to go into the guard anyway. Apparently, Kimmett thought it was all right. My brother George, who is only six months older than Vice President Quayle, had been in the guard as well, so it didn’t set off any alarms with Dad.
But it did with the press.
“The news media treated him horribly,” remembers Dad. “They jumped all over him for his service with the National Guard during Vietnam. Brutal, brutal. And it continues to this day.”
As for Marilyn, before there was Hillary, there was Marilyn Quayle. She had been a lawyer in her own right, and together they had a law firm, Quayle and Quayle, in the same building as Dan’s father’s business. Senator Quayle worked in newspaper publishing, and Mrs. Quayle had a successful law practice. Later, when he became vice president, she put her law practice on hold and considered running for an open Senate seat, but decided against it.
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sp; The night after the Quayle announcement, Jim Baker asked each member of our family to represent our state delegations—to pay tribute to Dad while announcing that our state had cast all of its delegates’ votes for him. We were all so excited—I would announce Maine’s votes, Marvin would do Virginia, Neil would do Colorado, Jeb would do Florida, and George would do Texas, putting Dad over the top for the nomination. I remember wearing a red-and-white-checked dress and being very nervous. I practiced my lines over and over again. Somehow, I managed to get the words out without too many malaprops.
“I was pretty fired up,” Marvin recalled. “Had a nice suit on and was well prepared, had some nice remarks about Dad. I was candidly a little nervous and was hovering around the Virginia delegation. I had taken the liberty of informing virtually everybody I knew on planet Earth that I was going to be on television, and encouraged them to tune in. Then I realized about halfway through they were doing this in alphabetical order. By the time Virginia came along, there were about four citizens in Guam who were watching on C-SPAN. I appreciated Neil’s tribute to Dad—which came after he praised Colorado for being a state—‘from the mountains of Aspen to the hills of Breckenridge, from the cow pastures of Durango to the . . .’ His speech went on for about fourteen minutes. I don’t think that helped my cause much. Once they got to Texas, they timed it in such a way that George, our brother, put him over the top and the balloons were falling around. By the time I got up, the janitors were kind of cleaning up the balloons that had popped hours earlier. You guys were all back in the hotel suite, and you watched me on some sort of internal television feed.”
Earlier in the day, Dad had invited Ray Siller, his friend and comedic writer, up to his suite at the Marriott to watch the nomination vote. Ray arrived in the suite expecting to find a big crowd and instead discovered my father alone with all the grandchildren, abandoned by the rest of us and left to babysit all the kids.
“The Bush munchkins seemed heavily caffeinated, flinging their toys on the floor, ricocheting about the room, drivers in a NASCAR race gone terribly wrong,” Ray remembers. Dad threatened them all with bedtime, “and from the other room two of the boys responded to the vice president’s command by bolting in with space-age weaponry and randomly spraying the perimeter.” One kid blasted his grandfather, who then asked Tim McBride to please find a pointer for him to use. Tim found a schoolteacher’s pointer—a three-foot-long wooden dowel with a rubber tip—and brought it back to my father, complete with red, white, and blue streamers.
Dad then invented a game called Pointer Man, in which one child would serve as Pointer Man, standing before the bank of television screens and, at the direction of the others, pointing every time a friend or family member appeared on-screen. Then it would be someone else’s turn to be Pointer Man. This had the effect of getting the children to sit down and clear a sight line for Dad and Ray to see the televisions. Ray said Dad’s job that night reminded him of the plate-spinners on The Ed Sullivan Show, juggling the grandchildren while watching history unfold on the monitors.
That night—only one day after the Quayle announcement—Dad said to Ray, “I can’t understand the criticism the press is heaping on Dan about serving in the National Guard. Don’t know why they’re making such a fuss over that. So many at the time fled to Canada.”
The next night was my father’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination. According to Fred Malek, “It was do or die,” the high point of the entire convention, and he remembers being with Dad, Roger Ailes, Bob Mosbacher, and Lee Atwater in a holding room below the podium about thirty minutes before the speech. “He should have been completely on edge—it was showtime, and unless he delivered, his campaign was likely to sink,” Fred remembers, adding that the campaign was still seventeen points down to Dukakis at this point. “To my surprise, he sat there with us watching the convention on TV and traded jokes for half an hour. Never said a word about the speech until he delivered a great acceptance speech.”
The truth is, Dad “worked on it over and over,” according to his diary the night of the speech. Roger Ailes arrived to help Dad polish up his delivery. Ailes today runs the Fox News Channel, but at the time, he was a New York “image” consultant that the campaign had hired—and that Dad resisted at first. Ailes recalled, “Secretly, he thought all the guys around Reagan were staging him too much. He said, ‘I’m already vice president.’ I said, ‘You’re not president—yet.’ So even though he didn’t like the sort of business I was in, he and I hit it off and had a lot of laughs. He knew I wasn’t there to change him and I wasn’t there to do anything ‘weird,’ as he put it.”
Recently, I came across Roger Ailes’s notes from that night, to help Dad with his delivery of the acceptance speech:
Listen to the audience . . . Let the equipment do the work—Don’t overshout . . . Do not rush . . . Do NOT step on laughs or applause . . . Wait to start next sentence . . . Silence is drama . . . Don’t start sentences then have to start them over . . . Eyes that twinkle . . . Absolute total confidence . . . Never furrow brow or look worried . . . Calm—cool—self-contained . . . Give the Best Speech of Your Life—Enjoy it.
“I remember sitting there when the family had all gone to the convention hall . . . I felt calm; I knew what I had to do.” Dad was worried that the press had built it “up and up and up—had to do this, had to do that, and it was the biggest moment in my life, which it was; and almost setting expectations so high that they couldn’t be matched, and yet they were.”
“Great speech. Fantastic acceptance speech,” said Jeb afterward. “I took the speech”—literally—“he signed it for me and then I kept it for a while. I had to give it back. Sent it to the library. It was with his annotations.”
Peggy Noonan, one of President Reagan’s speechwriters, was very helpful to Dad; but Tom Collamore, his personal aide at the time, didn’t like the way that Noonan subsequently “made a cottage industry out of taking credit for some of his finest speeches and statements. While she may have been an important wordsmith, the ideas were his. I saw the notes that he wrote reflecting on what he wanted to say in his convention speech and in his inaugural address. Those were his ideas.”
Dad sent a memo to Peggy, laying out themes and ideas. In the final speech, he called for a “kinder, gentler” America and saluted Americans who are engaged in community service—“a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” He jokingly promised to “keep his charisma in check.” And he said this: “The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’” The crowd roared.
By the end of it all, Dad not only closed the gap with Dukakis but left New Orleans two points ahead in the polls.
Meanwhile, the simmering feud with Newsweek over the “wimp” cover continued. Dad later told me, “I was at the VP house with Jimmy Baker and they said Katharine Graham wanted to come talk about it. Out she came with Rick Smith, who was the editor in chief of Newsweek, and Evan Thomas, the Washington bureau chief. They wanted to do a behind-the-scenes book, which they did every year, with Tom DeFrank.
“Baker said, ‘This is unacceptable.’ I said, ‘We’re not going to cooperate with them. If Newsweek asks a question in a news conference, we’ll answer it with no discrimination against them. But we’re not going to lean over and discriminate for them by giving them the inside, behind-the-scenes story of this campaign. I’m going to tell our people on the campaign not to cooperate with them.’ And we did. But I think some did cooperate anyway.
“They came out and said they were terribly sorry about the ‘wimp’ piece,” Dad continued. “Evan Thomas spoke up: ‘I was the one responsible for this. I’m the guy that did it.’ I have to take it he was showing off for the publisher and owner, Kay Graham. It poisoned my relationship with him.”
Later that fall, on a cold Sunday, even snowing a lit
tle, Roger Ailes was waiting at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington when Dad landed in Air Force Two.
Roger was at Andrews because the campaign press office, unbeknownst to him, had earlier agreed to a “campaign profile” of my father by Dan Rather of CBS News, having been assured by the network that it was a standard videotaped piece on the candidate.
Roger had gotten a secret call that morning from someone at CBS News, a young man Roger had helped get a job. “He went to an outside pay phone and he called me and said, ‘Look, I’ll get fired if they find out I told you this, but the producer of the show is going around the newsroom saying, “We’re taking Bush out of the race tonight.”’” Here is Roger’s account of what happened from then on:
I went out to Andrews to meet him and got in the car with him on the way to the speech. I said, “I’ve got a tip-off that this is really not a campaign profile, this is really an attack on Iran-Contra. They’ve canceled half the show. Rather is geared up to go after you.” And your dad said, “I’ve answered those questions a hundred times and they’re not going anywhere.” I told him I thought this was a real political hit. I didn’t think this was like a standard interview.
We worked it out that if it was a standard interview, your dad would do what he always did. And if it wasn’t, I said, just say, “Dan, your comparing my career to Iran-Contra is like my comparing your career to the time you walked off the air.” The significance of that is, in broadcasting if you leave dead air, that’s the equivalent in the military of going AWOL. You just don’t do it. Professional broadcasters don’t leave their post. Dan had done that in a flap. Some show ran over and he got into a snit. He walked off the air and left six minutes of dead air on CBS. It was probably the most embarrassing moment of his career, because it was the most unprofessional thing he could possibly do.
My Father, My President Page 26