In fact, Sig was back in Washington getting ready to return to Iceland when Secretary Baker called and said he wanted Sig to come back and run the media for the campaign.
Sig recalled protesting at first: “I said, ‘I can’t do that. I moved everything—my clothes, my car.’ To which Jim said, ‘Well, I just got off the phone with the Old Man [which is what Secretary Baker called Dad in private]. Why don’t you tell him you can’t do it? Just put me on hold and call him—it won’t take very long!’ Well, Baker knew I would never do that.”
After attending a White House meeting that night, Sig went to the headquarters the next morning and fired almost everybody on the campaign advertising staff. From there, Sig moved into a D.C. hotel and, from September through election day, never took a day off.
“When I came back to help the campaign of the president of the United States, we had two or three commercials in the can—and that’s it. We were almost into September,” Sig told me. Over the next thirty days, we produced forty TV commercials and probably three hundred radio commercials. None of that was done before, because nobody could make a decision on the advertising. It was run by committee to a degree that we just didn’t get anything done.”
On October 1, Ross Perot reentered the race, naming retired navy admiral James Stockdale as his running mate. The Texas billionaire also announced he would run a series of thirty-minute infomercials on the economy.
Perot’s “October Surprise” came in time to get him in the three televised presidential debates that month. Meanwhile, Dad has always maintained he hated debates—“too much showbiz,” he said. The three-way debates with Perot and Clinton did little to change his view. During the Richmond, Virginia, debate on October 15, for example, Dad checked his watch at one point, which commentators and political opponents pounced on to suggest Dad wasn’t interested in fighting for the American people. Twelve years later, at the dedication of Bill Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock, Dad confessed that when he looked at his watch, he was actually “wondering when Ross Perot would be done speaking.”
Perhaps the best summation of the final stages of the 1992 campaign appropriately came from David Bates, who had started with Dad as his traveling aide back when he was an asterisk in 1978 and was cabinet secretary in 1992:
It was a painful experience because all the cards were stacked against him. Plus his campaign, the White House, everybody, including me, should have and could have done a better job for him. Everything was unfortunately breaking against him. The economy was perceived to be much worse than it actually was. The economy was coming back and getting stronger, but it was not really apparent to people at that point.
It was almost as if it was destined not to be. He had done such a great job in foreign policy. The Cold War ended without a shot being fired. Desert Storm had gone so well. He booted Saddam out of Kuwait. Germany was unified. All the foreign policy issues were off the table. I mean, that was apparent to the average person. It was a very similar situation to Churchill after World War II when he was voted out. He was a victim of his own success: World War II ended, he had led extremely ably during World War II. Then when the war was over, the British people turned to a younger, more energetic person [Clement Atlee] who was talking more about the domestic economy. They turned Churchill out.
Buchanan ran against the president in the primaries and basically called him a liar, which hurt. You had Clinton there talking, and the media repeating everything Clinton said, “worst economy since the Great Depression.” That was kind of a preposterous claim—one of the big lies of the 1992 campaign—but you had Clinton out there saying, “I’m going to focus on the economy like a laser beam.”
Then you had Perot, who got 19 percent of the vote. Most of those voters came from us.
To this day, I am certain that he could have won but for Lawrence Walsh indicting Caspar Weinberger [for the Iran-Contra affair] the Friday before the election. I remember that Friday morning we had a campaign stop in St. Louis with Governor [John] Ashcroft, and the Democratic governor of Maryland, Governor Schaefer. It was really big news, and we were really moving. I heard Jim Baker say on the Wednesday before the election he thought we were going to win it, because we were moving up. Clinton was losing support. The theme about trust was really working, and I think a lot of doubts were starting to creep in about Clinton.
Fred Steeper, the pollster on that Friday morning before the campaign, had it dead even in terms of his overnight tracking numbers. Of course, to get dead even, we were coming up and Clinton was losing support. And a CNN poll of likely voters that same morning had us back minus one. And then at 11:00 a.m. the independent counsel looking into the Iran-Contra affair, Lawrence Walsh, announced his indictment of Caspar Weinberger for allegedly lying to investigators, and the main exhibit was some note saying Bush was in the loop. It was awful. That weekend was absolutely awful.
From that point on, noon until election day, it was nonstop coverage about Iran-Contra. And I remember that Friday night in Wisconsin, we did Larry King Live, and George Stephanopoulos somehow got his call through—surprise, surprise.
It was a Thursday before the campaign, and we were at the Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at an event with the former president, and Baker said that he was walking by the press bin and [ABC reporter] Ann Compton said, “How are you feeling, Secretary Baker?” And he said, “We feel good, we’re moving.” And she said, “I know, but I don’t think it’s going to last.” And then the next morning, boom.
To give you an idea of the impact of the Walsh indictment: on October 30, five days before the election, Andy Card—then secretary of transportation who had just come back from managing the federal response to Hurricane Andrew in Florida—jumped on a small plane with Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin, Secretary of Energy Jim Watkins, and Republican National Committee Chairman Rich Bond to do airport rallies in swing states. They were supposed to do four events in Ohio, three in Michigan, and end up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
At the first stop, the troupe landed at the airport on the West Virginia side of the river, but the event was actually in Ohio. They got off the plane, did a press conference, went to a little rally, then got back on the plane and flew to the next city.
“We get off the plane, and the first question at the press conference was on the Iran-Contra special prosecutor,” Andy remembered. “It’s like you hit the brick wall. All the momentum goes. So everything that you want to talk about is gone because it’s all Iran-Contra. It was very demoralizing.”
They did that first rally, then we went to the next stop in Columbus, Ohio. There it was the same deal—everyone interested in Lawrence Walsh. By the time they reached Dayton, Ohio, Secretary Martin said, “This is not working. I’m not going to get back on the plane. I’m going back to Washington.”
By the time they reached Cleveland, Jim Watkins said, “This isn’t working,” and he, too, left. Long story short: all the positive momentum that we had all felt on Thursday was gone by Saturday morning.
“You talk about a politically timed indictment, but I didn’t say it then,” Dad said. “Don’t blame somebody else. Just get along about your business. But that was a cruel blow by a special prosecutor who I’m afraid I don’t respect for no other reason than that one reason.”
To add to our woes, the actual indictment was handled by a San Francisco trial lawyer named James J. Brosnahan, who worked for the independent counsel and who had a long record of making political contributions to Democratic presidential candidates and other liberal causes. In fact, Federal Election Commission records show that Mr. Brosnahan made a $1,000 contribution to the Clinton/Gore campaign on October 29, 1992, the day before Weinberger was indicted.
The Halloween before the election, we were living in Bethesda, Maryland. Sam and Ellie were attending public school, and I went to their yearly Halloween parade, standing with all the other parents watching the kids march by on the blacktop. Suddenly, I saw one of the students marching with
a Clinton-Gore sign. Looking closer, I saw the student had a clown suit on and a George Bush mask. Some of the parents nearby chuckled.
I stood there without expression but was dying inside. I remember feeling so hurt and thinking how insensitive it was to Sam and Ellie. Throughout this awful campaign, they often got comments from other children, parroting their own parents. One time, Ellie took a paintbrush with red paint and ran it right down the face of a classmate who told her that her grandfather was going to lose. She was only five years old; and while she didn’t understand the politics, she was hurting.
When someone you love is in political office, politics are personal. There is no way around that. We, as a family, are fiercely loyal, and whether you are five or thirty-three, as I was in 1992, those kinds of cruel moments cut the deepest.
As they neared the final stop of the 1992 campaign, Air Force One was dropping into Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on November 2 for Dad’s second-to-last campaign rally—coming in from Kentucky before moving on to Houston for the night. It was late afternoon, and the Oak Ridge Boys were on the plane. Mary Matalin and Ron Kaufman were sitting up front with Dad.
“For the president, the Oaks did a medley of gospel songs a capella, ending with ‘Amazing Grace,’” Ron recalled. “As they sang ‘Amazing Grace,’ everyone in the place started to cry—not bawling crying, just tearing. It was clear we were going to lose, and it was all over. It had been a long campaign, and that was the first time we actually admitted to ourselves, even semiprivately, that this is over.” Dad thinks he and Mary Matalin were probably the only two people who still thought we would win.
As sad as that time was, we still found ways to laugh as a family. On election night, for example, we all gathered in Dad and Mom’s suite to watch the returns. We were in the living room, and Mom was in the bedroom reading a romance novel. Things were not looking good at all, casting a pall over the room. Periodically, however, Mom would walk into the room and say, “What’s it like to drive a car?” and then walk back out. A few minutes later, she came in and asked, “How do you buy an airplane ticket?” and then walked back out and read her book.
It really made us laugh. She was trying to lighten things up.
There was no taking the bone-jarring hurt out of the final 1992 results. It just hurt, and it hurt a lot. As a family, we had tasted political defeat in the past—but together, we had never endured an uglier, more disappointing, and ultimately helpless year than 1992. We saw a good man, and a great leader, brought down by distortion, innuendo, and fabrication.
That night, Governor Clinton became the first candidate since Richard Nixon in 1968 to win the presidency with less than 50 percent of the popular vote. Still, he won almost 45 million votes to Dad’s 39 million and, most important, the 370 electoral votes he and his supporters needed, to Dad’s 168, to claim the White House.
As a family, our eyes were wide open: after Dad’s twelve years of success at the highest level, we knew that presidential politics was, and still is, a rough neighborhood. And as always, Mom and Dad kept us grounded during this difficult time—just as they had through the heady times. When the moment came to concede, we stood together, as always.
“Everybody had gone out onstage—all the family was out there—and the president was about to be announced,” Joe Hagin recalled. “We were in the offstage announcement area waiting to go out. David Bates, the announcer, and I were the only people standing back there with him. David and I were both crying. The president reached out and grabbed us both by the neck, one in one hand and one in the other. He said, ‘Boys, don’t worry about this. It’s been a heck of a ride.’”
With that, Dad walked out and gave his concession speech. Offstage, Joe regained his composure and surveyed the scene. “I watched a big Secret Service agent at the front, standing there stiffly. About halfway through the speech, I saw a big tear run down his face—which shows how much the Secret Service loved him, and still love him.”
Without question, November 1992 had to be the worst month of Dad’s life, but not because it was the month he lost the presidential election: rather, it was the month he lost his dear, sweet, amazing mother. As Dad wrote to Lady Bird Johnson a few weeks later, she was “our leader, our compass, our family’s best person.”
I went with my dad to Greenwich to visit his mother the day she died, November 19. I remember the date clearly because it was Ellie’s eighth birthday. I had planned an afternoon swim party for Ellie with many of her classmates from Westbrook Elementary School. Dad called me the day before, however, and said, “Your grandmother is very, very sick and I’m going up to say good-bye. I want you to come.” Dad knew how much I loved her and how honored I was to carry her name.
More important, I knew how much Dad loved her. Dad needed someone to be his emotional support that day, but he picked the wrong person. When I saw my grandmother in the last stages of death, both Dad and I wept unabashedly. It’s still moving to think I was there when my father said good-bye to his mother, the woman who had the biggest impact on his life. I believe that to be true because my dad’s life was not defined by the political system he navigated, but by the set of beliefs his mother taught him. To be kind and thoughtful and to think of the other person. To live a life of service and to honor God.
Leaving Ganny’s bedside that day was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. We went back to Washington—Dad to his final days as president, and me to Ellie’s party. That day at 5:05 p.m., Mom got a message from Patty Presock that read:
Nan Ellis just called. Mrs. Bush Sr. died 5 minutes ago. I thought you might want to tell the President.
Nan Ellis said that Mrs. Bush Sr. was waiting for the President and after he left today, she just let go.
If you learn by example, my grandmother set the best there could be—and Dad absorbed every bit of it. Dad and I knew that day that Ganny went to heaven as she had been preparing to do. Consider what she observed when she wrote her own eulogy years before her death on April 17, 1981:
This is a service of gratitude to God for the easiest life ever given to anyone to live on this earth and all because of LOVE. From my mother’s knee I learned to know Jesus and that He would always be with me if at night in bed I would just tell Him any mean, selfish, even untrue things I had done during the day, He would lift them from my mind and I would awake refreshed, and later along the way if there was a steep incline, He would take my hand and help me up the hill. How right she was.
Chapter 21
MOUNTAINTOPS AND VALLEYS
“He did have a vision, even though people would criticize him on the so-called vision thing. It was his vision and his quiet pragmatic way of going about things that brought the Cold War to an end and put us on a better path for the future. It was a pragmatic vision of getting the problem solved and getting the job done—not just lecturing about his vision.”
—Colin Powell
Even after fourteen years, the number of reasons you find for Dad’s defeat in 1992 depends on the number of people you ask—because everyone, it seems, has their own convictions on the matter.
Looking back, Jim Baker thinks there were three main reasons for Dad’s defeat—and the one reason that was Dad’s fault was actually a product of his and President Reagan’s success.
“We’d been in power twelve years,” Secretary Baker said, “and it was very hard to be seen as an agent of change when you’ve been there twelve years and people want to vote for change. The only constant in politics is change. That may sound funny, but it’s true.”
Dad shares this view: “I don’t see how anybody could have done it differently against this onslaught for change, change, change. And the opposition, the Clinton campaign, was very good with their war room and their young Turks throwing footballs in their campaign. They were good, very good.”
Secretary Baker also pointed to Ross Perot’s candidacy: “He took 19 percent of the vote. We got 38 percent and Clinton got 43 percent, and we know he [Perot] took two out of ev
ery three votes from us. You take two-thirds of 19 and add it to 38 and you get 51 percent. So that really hurt us.”
The third thing that hurt Dad, according to Secretary Baker, was the negative perception too many Americans had about the economy. “We had an economy in ’92 that was coming back,” he said. “Many of the president’s advisers told him that nothing needed to be done substantively because the economy was coming back; and, indeed, it did. But nobody realized it until October, too late for us.”
Still, when you look at everything that happened during his administration, Dad’s four years in office were of far-reaching consequence for our nation—and for the world. No question, President Reagan’s “peace through strength” broke the back of the Soviet economy, forcing the Soviets to the negotiating table; but as we entered the endgame, the fact that the Cold War was won without a shot being fired, without conflict between the superpowers, is largely due to the leadership my father exerted during those tense, dangerous times. As the Chinese proverb states: the height of skill is not to fight and win one hundred battles, but to win those battles without having to fight.
When you look at everything Dad did in his career leading up to his presidency, it is as if everything he did throughout his life was preparing him to meet the central challenge of his time. My brother George told me, “I think his greatest accomplishment was helping to wind down the Cold War. He had a deft touch in dealing with the winners and losers. It’s a lesson I’ve learned from him, by the way, that personal relationships matter a lot. These leaders came to trust him during this tumultuous time, because he was very steady in helping to bring order.”
Dad was true to himself to the end. General Scowcroft said that every time they prepared a speech for my father with soaring rhetoric in it, Dad would cross it out. He’d say, “That’s not me. I’m not comfortable talking that way.” Maybe it’s because, for Dad, true eloquence lies in action. He knows full well the power of words in politics, but he actively shunned anything that smacked of “show business.”
My Father, My President Page 44