So I gave that line to your dad. I told him not to use that unless he had to, but if they start down a road you think is unfair, then nail him on this. I think your dad put it in the back of his mind and really didn’t think too much about it.
I also found out that Rather was being briefed over the weekend by a Democrat adviser named Tom Donilon, brought in to coach him. I thought that was unfair. That’s the first time I had ever heard of a network bringing a guy in to coach an anchor on how to get a politician. That would be like hiring me at that time to go in and coach Tom Brokaw on how to get somebody. It just wasn’t done. I don’t have that a hundred percent, but I’m told it was true and I think it probably was. I did see Donilon later at the L.A. debate with Bob Squire [a Democratic political operative] and with Mike Dukakis, so I believe it probably was true.
Your dad and I went to the Senate office and he got ready to go in. I went down the hall and looked in the room where they were going to shoot, and I noticed they had sent an assistant bureau chief over to produce the interview. Normally, they would send a field producer. I’d been around long enough to know that if the assistant bureau chief is there, they’re expecting something more important to happen.
I went back and I said, “This looks pretty serious. They’re going to play a little package before you go on, and then Dan is going to interview you.” And they played this package explaining Iran-Contra. There must have been a factual error or two in it, because your dad got mad. I could see he was looking at it and he said, “That’s not right, that’s not right.” And I thought, “This is good. He’s getting cranked up here.”
The vice president was ready for bear when the thing started. But he’s ever the gentleman, and so he was trying to do the best he could to not get hot about it. Then Dan started boring in on him on Iran-Contra: “Aren’t you guilty?” And finally, Dan said something and I gave your dad the signal, just go for it. He didn’t want to go for it.
My sense at that point was that we could lose this battle. I grabbed the clipboard out of the bureau chief’s hand and I wrote WALKED OFF THE AIR. I showed it to him, made a fist, and said, “Go! Go! Just kick his ass!”
Rather must have said something that made him mad. And your dad just unloaded on him. He said, “Dan, comparing this to my career is like comparing your career to the time you walked off the air.”
When you go back and look at the tape, it looked like Rather was in the ring. If you slow the tape down, it looks like he took a punch. His head rolls forward. His head comes back, his eyes roll up and come back down. It just looks like one of those old boxing movies where the guy takes a punch. That was pretty much it. It was pretty clear that fight was over and your dad won.
We went back to the holding room and, of course, the calls started pouring in. They were mostly favorable to your dad. Only a few weren’t. I heard him on the phone in the background saying, “Yes, you’re right. No, I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry.” He hung up, and I thought, “Who the heck was that?” I mean, everybody is calling to congratulate him. I said, “Who was that?” He said, “That was my mother. She said that just because that other man was rude was no excuse for me to be.”
Looking back, Ailes said that the interview wiped out the “wimp” image, but “I don’t think the feud ever went away. It was simmering for ten years. Sometimes your dad says we won the battle and lost the war—because Rather went after him for the next ten years. It came to a head again when Rather went after your brother over his Texas National Guard record. It did not stand up to journalistic standards. You just don’t pay somebody for five and a half years to do an investigative piece on news that everybody already has, unless you’re out to get them.”
“Roger did a very good job of recognizing what the press was going to try to do,” Governor Sununu remembers. “They didn’t want your father to win. Dealing with the ‘wimp factor’ article and the Dan Rather interview are good examples of Roger planning ahead and letting the president know the kinds of things that would happen.”
Along with Sig Rogich, Ailes was also instrumental that fall in creating the campaign’s television ads, including ones on the furlough program that Michael Dukakis supported for violent criminals in Massachusetts—they showed a revolving door at a prison with convicts going right out of jail—and the famous “tank” ad, in which Dukakis was photographed in a very large tank helmet. Dad remembers that one as his favorite of all the ads, adding, “Roger Ailes and Sig Rogich get the credit for that ad—it was the best of all.”
There had been other good ads earlier in the campaign on both sides. Dick Gephardt aired an ad showing Dukakis urging Iowa farmers to grow Belgian endive as a crop. The Dukakis campaign, for their part, ran an ad showing an acrobat dressed up as Gephardt, doing backflips as an announcer listed his flip-flops on various issues.
My favorite ads, however, were the positive spots. My daughter Ellie had a starring role in one ad, running across a field and jumping into Dad’s arms. Ray Siller remembers my father telling him how patient Ellie was during the taping, how she just kept running toward him through a meadow, take after take. That was a great ad. I remember hearing that a prominent Democrat—I think it may have been former Democratic national chairman Bob Strauss—even said, “If I see that ad one more time, I may even vote for the s.o.b.”
Although my focus was on Dad and what I could do to help his campaign, other people were focused on Michael Dukakis. I only met Michael Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, once, during that strange dance that takes place after a presidential debate. It’s very important onstage as to who puts his hand out first, especially after just being attacked in front of millions. Most of the time, the two families—never having met each other before—have to congratulate each other warmly for the benefit of the cameras. Every move is watched and can easily be misconstrued.
The campaign focused on several issues, one of which was Dukakis’s support for the furlough program in Massachusetts—first pointed out by Al Gore in a Democratic debate—in which violent criminals were allowed weekend furloughs, even though they were not eligible for parole.
“I didn’t even know Horton’s name or whether he was black or white at the beginning,” Lee Atwater said afterward. “I only knew he was in prison for a terrible crime. Then I hear this guy was given a furlough. He was in jail with no hope of parole. Why would you let a guy like this out? He had no incentive to go back. And he couldn’t get the death penalty [in Massachusetts]. What would be his incentive not to kill and rape? That’s why it was such a salient issue with the American people.”
It wasn’t until October 1988—right before the election—that Democratic Party leaders denounced the furlough issue as racially motivated, but the press immediately disputed this line of attack. Even the Washington Post editorialized the next day that it may or may not be relevant to stress the Dukakis furlough record, “but it isn’t racist.”
Today, after many years of Democrats and the press repeating false information, people mistakenly think the campaign used the Willie Horton story to racially divide people, not to show Dukakis’s weakness on crime. (Years later, during the debate over the Bush administration’s civil rights bill, Dad sent my brothers and me a briefing paper reiterating the facts of the Horton case, because they had gotten so distorted over the years. His note read, “If anyone raises Willie Horton in some context other than the furlough abuse, flash this true explanation at ’em.”)
I asked Dad recently about the whole Willie Horton episode: “I felt we did the right thing. The people at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for the exposé of Willie Horton. It was definitely a crime issue. We got on Dukakis about having this lenient furlough program where he let people out of jail, and here was the best example—a man who was a convicted rapist who went out and raped again when he was on furlough. By the way, he demanded we call him William Horton later, when he was back in jail. Just a humorous aside.”
The crime issue was very powerful in
1988, especially after an NYPD officer named Eddie Byrne—he was only twenty-two at the time—was executed by a drug gang in his patrol car. This cold-blooded killing came on orders from a drug kingpin who had wanted his gang members to “kill a cop” as a test of bravery. The incident made headlines nationally, because it illustrated how out of control drug-related violence had become in our cities. In a very emotional ceremony, Eddie Byrne’s parents gave Dad his police badge, which my father still has. Shortly afterward, the Boston Police endorsed Dad over Michael Dukakis.
Governor Dukakis looked back on the fall campaign with regret. “One of the big lessons of 1988 is if the other guy is going to come at you—and people have been coming at people since the beginning of the Republic—you’ve got to have a carefully thought-out strategy for dealing with that . . . It’s very clear that you cannot sit there mute if people are attacking you. And that’s what I did. And by the time I woke up to the kind of damage [that] was being done, it was almost irreparable,” he said. “It was a judgment call I made, and it turned out to be a very unwise judgment call.”
On the positive side, and helping Dad’s cause, the economic news was good during the campaign. Seventeen million new jobs had been created in the previous five years; inflation had dropped from 12 percent to 4 percent during the Reagan-Bush administration; interest rates had been cut in half; and unemployment was the lowest in fourteen years.
Lee Atwater had a way of operating, “command focus” as he called it, and it brought discipline and strategy to the campaign. Along with Jim Baker’s day-to-day leadership, the campaign hummed along. A good example of both men’s impact was the “line of the day” message that they sent out in a fax pyramid—then an emerging technology—that would include the latest campaign developments, quotes from my father, and bulleted issues to about ten thousand campaign workers across the country every afternoon. The idea was that if some precinct captain in Iowa was on Nightline, he would have the latest from Bush headquarters. Campaigns in both parties have been doing the same thing ever since, only now by e-mail instead of fax.
Andy Card had been helping with opposition research on Michael Dukakis, and since he knew Dukakis personally from his days in the Massachusetts statehouse, Andy was good at anticipating Dukakis’s response to things. He became instrumental in the preparations for the debates. “I first met Dukakis when I was a sophomore in high school,” Andy remembers. “I knew he’d been a cross-country runner and a trumpet player and a Boy Scout. He didn’t like people in uniforms and ran away from being a Boy Scout. The year I got elected to the legislature was the year he got elected governor. He was a reformer and a maverick.”
The fall debates came—two presidential and one vice presidential. James Baker and Roger Ailes negotiated all the arrangements with the Democrats. “Baker and I would do good cop, bad cop. They thought I was crazy and Baker was sane,” said Roger. “I said, ‘I want a forty-eight-inch-high podium.’ Well, that would have come up to Dukakis’s eyebrows. I said, ‘Look, my candidate’s tall. His eyes focus at forty-eight. We can go to forty-six inches if that will help you.’ Well, that got up just under Dukakis’s nose. They kept wanting a forty-two. But I kept pushing them to get the taller podium, knowing that it would make him look like Rocky the Squirrel standing back there. Every once in a while I’d go crazy and say something half-obscene and Baker would calm me down. Then he’d say, ‘I’ve got to leave, got to get back to the White House. I’ll leave you with Ailes.’ And, of course, they’d immediately say, ‘No, no, no. That’s okay. Don’t leave us with Ailes.’ We finally negotiated a pitching mound for Dukakis to walk up on, but no cameras back there to actually shoot it, which we agreed to.”
Jeb remembers the pitcher’s mound: “Instead of having a riser, a step where he could stand up, they built it like a baseball mound, where you could see the pitch. So then he had to get off this little pitcher’s mound to shake hands with Dad.”
In the pre-debate practices, Dick Darman played Michael Dukakis, and Roger Ailes was the emcee. Ailes and the other campaign strategists urged Darman to be very tough on Dad, and he was. He repeatedly went after Dad for supposedly being “out of touch” with ordinary Americans. He also mixed in some humor—coming out onstage wearing a tank helmet, holding up an ACLU membership card, and standing on a wooden riser.
“But it was evident that I was getting to the VP—and doing so in front of a live audience of family, friends, and advisers. I persisted. He clearly did not like what was happening. Not at all. But he remained cool. When we came to the end of one of the sessions, I knew I had gone too far,” Dick said. At the point when he was to shake hands with Dad midstage, Dad walked off the stage “without a word to me or anyone else.” Dick walked to his car alone, fearing he’d made a career-defining mistake. But soon enough, Dad thanked him for making him work even harder on debate preparations, and even invited Dick to the election night festivities.
Dad just can’t stand debating: “Hated it. It was show business. You look this way and then that way. A lot of cosmetics. We thought we did pretty well in some of the presidential debates, but the next thing you know, out comes Tim Russert or somebody saying we lost the debates. So I hated them,” he said to me.
Then the real debates came. Once all the pre-debate preparations were wrapped up, Roger Ailes would spend the last half hour before the debate with Dad alone—“so that nobody else would run in the room and interrupt him or disrupt him or ask him a question he couldn’t answer or, frankly, get him in a bad mood,” Roger told me. “I wanted to have the last word. I walked him to the stage in Los Angeles so nobody would run up to him and say his house was on fire. Something that would get you totally off.”
“Your dad was not happy, I don’t think, with his performance in the first debate; but he killed him in the second. He absolutely demolished Dukakis,” remembers James Baker.
The fact that Dad was not thrilled with that first debate may explain why my brothers Marvin and George were so nervous before the second debate that they went to a theater near the vice president’s residence to watch a movie instead of the debate. Out of sight did not mean out of mind, however: the suspense was such that not once, not twice, but at least three times George anxiously dispatched Marvin to the lobby to call his friend Pat Quinn from a pay phone.
“Marvin called three times, saying ‘PQ, now, give it to me straight. Don’t sugarcoat it for me, PQ,’” Pat recalled. “When Marvin called the first time, I told him it looked like it was ‘about even, don’t worry about it.’ The longer the debate went on, however, the more positive I felt about the vice president’s performance. By their third call I told them, ‘This is a home run. He’s kicking butt.’ ”
Hearing the good news, Marv and George immediately left the theater and went back to the vice presidential residence to watch the rest of the debate.
The big break in the debate came when the moderator, Bernie Shaw, asked Dukakis if he’d change his mind about opposing the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, was raped and murdered. Dukakis gave a very unemotional “no” answer to Shaw, and many people now think that one exchange essentially finished off Dukakis’s chances of winning. “If I had to do that over again, I’d do less rehearsing,” Dukakis told me. “By the time you get to that last month or two, you’ve been at it for months and months and months and you could really start going robotic.”
After that answer, Dukakis’s advisers suggested he show some public affection for his wife, which he did. This in turn caused some of Dad’s advisers to suggest that my parents also get more romantic. Here was Dad’s funny response:
Sweetsie:
Please look at how Mike and Kitty do it. Try to be closer in, more—well er romantic—on camera. I am practicing the loving look, and the creeping hand.
Yours for better TV and more demonstrable affection.
Your sweetie-pie coo-coo.
Love ya
GB
At some point in the fall, the Dukakis campaign anno
unced it was pulling out of Florida, in an effort to focus resources on states where they had a fighting chance. Jeb was the state chairman for Bush-Quayle in Florida, and upon hearing the announcement by Dukakis, he arranged for a big rally. “We had a bon voyage party for Dukakis along Biscayne Bay. We had a picture of a boat with all of Michael Dukakis’s baggage on it. We were saying good-bye to him as he was leaving the state. And while we were doing that at our campaign rally, there was a guy going back and forth in a small motorboat with a blond boy wearing diapers with a sign that said ‘I’m Dan Quayle.’ That’s how things go in the campaign.”
The final two weeks were filled with an endless series of campaign stops. Jeb also remembers traveling on the campaign bus with the Beach Boys and Loretta Lynn, with a lot of stops for them to sing in front of small-town crowds. Still, as we made this final push, everyone was exhausted and not at all sure we were going to win. Dad remembers, “The polls looked pretty good, but there was some last-minute questioning and doubt.”
We ended up in Houston for the election night party at the George Brown Convention Center, my entire family gathered with Mom and Dad along with thousands of people. I remember being nervous—literally feeling like I was on pins and needles.
There was a dinner at the home of some friends earlier in the evening, and Joe Hagin remembers the moment when NBC Nightly News came on. There were TVs everywhere in the house. Joe remembers what happened next: “It actually shocked us all because it was so early, and Brokaw called the election. So we went to the convention center and, after more results came in, [he] did the acceptance speech and we came back out and I was riding in the police car in the front of the motorcade. Then they said on the Secret Service frequency, ‘Timberwolf wants Hagin.’” So Joe jumped out, ran back to Dad’s limo, and was offered a job on the spot, to come back from his corporate job in Cincinnati to a White House job in Washington. “Even today, all these years later,” he said, “it’s all kind of like a fairy tale.”
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