Part of the New World Order came in how Americans understood their world. Indeed, in retrospect, the most notable aspect of the 1991 Gulf War was the outsized role that cable television played in it. Although CNN had been around for a decade, it only emerged as a major force in the news world during the conflict. Notably, CNN was the only network with correspondents stationed in Baghdad when the military assault began; as a result, it alone had the capacity to bring viewers live, real-time reports about what was happening on the ground there. For the duration of the conflict, the military operations offered dramatic content for the twenty-four-hour news cycle, which the network presented in the same gripping fashion as a Hollywood film. Americans watched the war unfold on television from the comfort of their homes. In some ways, of course, this was nothing new. The Vietnam War had widely been known as “the living room war,” as Americans watched nightly reports from the battlefield on the evening news. But the reports from that war had been slowly and steadily processed—raw footage was captured on film in the field, then flown back to network studios to be edited and processed into coherent stories, and then finally shown in short form in tight segments on one of the “big three” broadcasts days or weeks later. In sharp contrast, the war that CNN broadcast into America’s living rooms came as an almost constant live feed, unfolding in real time, with neither reporters nor viewers sure of the outcome as the images played out before them.13
As much as the war was a victory for the allied coalition, it was also one for CNN. On the evening that the bombing began, its ratings increased twelvefold, soaring higher than any basic cable network had received in the history of the technology. The traditional networks suddenly lagged in their ability to cover the events. For weeks, viewers watched nearly continuous images of high-tech “precision bombs” falling on Iraqi targets in what some called the “video game war.” Even President Bush became an avid watcher of the cable network, which he said was the quickest source of news about developments in the war zone. “I learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA,” he quipped. The Iraqis watched CNN as well, as it provided information about outside events that they otherwise could not have found. (“How many Iraqis does it take to fire a Scud missile?” began a common joke. “Three. One to arm, another to fire, and a third to watch CNN and see where it lands.”)14
With Americans enthralled with coverage of a war that went so well, and seemingly with so little cost to them, President Bush’s popularity soared. In early January, a CBS/New York Times poll had his approval rating at 58 percent; a few days later, as the air war began, it leapt to 86 percent. His reelection in 1992 started to seem inevitable and several prominent Democrats decided that they would not run against him. “The number of people who don’t like George Bush,” admitted Congressman Newt Gingrich, hardly a friend, “is almost down to the number of people running for the Democratic nomination.” When the president delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress on March 6, 1991, to celebrate the victory, legislators wore yellow ribbons and waved American flags to demonstrate their support. Republicans, seeking to remind the public that most Democrats had voted against using force, stuck pins on their lapels that said: “I voted with the President.” It was yet another sign that partisanship did not stop at the water’s edge.15
But polling experts warned that the wartime surge in the president’s popularity, like past “rally events,” would not last. “There’s fragility evident in Mr. Bush’s present standing,” a New York Times editorial cautioned in early March 1991. “Despite all the popular support for his policies in the Gulf, little seems to translate into support for his other policies. In recent weeks, approval for his handling of the economy has consistently been 40 points lower than his Gulf rating.” 16 The aftermath of the operation likewise created problems for the administration. The decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power, which Bush felt was the best strategy to avoid a long and protracted ground presence, didn’t sit well with many Republicans who felt that US troops had not been allowed to finish the job. When Hussein violated UN-authorized “no-fly zones” to attack his enemies in Iraq in 1992, some Americans started to question whether the victory was as grand as they had thought.
Indeed, Bush’s bounce in the polls proved short-lived as the economic recession of 1990 and 1991 dragged on. An estimated 4.5 million Americans lost their jobs during those years, pushing the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent in June 1992, the highest level since 1982. Major corporations across the nation initiated massive rounds of layoffs. AT&T fired 100,000 employees and General Motors another 74,000; meanwhile, both Pan Am and Eastern Airlines went under, throwing another 48,000 out of work. As American companies collapsed, Japanese ones seemed to be making startling inroads in the United States. In 1991, for instance, the Matsushita Electrical Industrial Company paid $6.6 billion to buy out MCA, the American company that owned MCA Records and Universal Studios. Executives went to great lengths to assure investors that nothing would change. “We impressed upon our clients the fact that our businesses would continue to be run in the fashion they had been run,” one noted. “The idea that the Japanese [would] interfere in making movies and writing books is borderline silly.” 17 Still, the sudden influx of foreign ownership quickly became a major political issue, spurring fears that the American economy was literally being sold off to some of the nation’s biggest competitors. The trend sharply undercut the triumphalism of the Gulf War victory. As former Democratic senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts put it: “The Cold War is over, and Japan won.” 18
Though he was widely blamed for the recession, in truth President Bush did a great deal to help end it. Importantly, he parted with the economic ideas that had defined the Reagan era and, in some ways, had helped bring on the recession in the first place. First, in a significant break with the principles of supply-side economics—a school of thought that he had previously mocked as “voodoo economics”—Bush raised domestic spending to help fuel the economy through a Keynesian stimulus. Second, he authorized a federal bailout of the savings and loan industry, another casualty of the Reagan era. In the early 1980s, Reagan tripled the amount of federal insurance available to S&Ls, as his allies in Congress passed new laws that allowed those same lending institutions to engage in a range of high-risk investments. In the late 1980s, many S&Ls suddenly collapsed, ruining large numbers of depositors and forcing the federal government to launch a massive, controversial bailout. It was, at the time, the single costliest financial scandal in American history. Third, Bush broke his campaign pledge that he would never raise taxes and did so to address both the long-term federal debt and the immediate federal deficit. The economic policies of the Reagan years, when government revenues had been greatly reduced while spending increased, had exploded the federal debt from 32 percent of GDP in 1980 to 50 percent in 1989 to 53 percent by 1990. The federal deficit, meanwhile, had grown, in fits and starts, from 2.8 percent of GNP in 1980 to 4.1 percent in 1990. To address these problems, Bush acceded to a tax hike.19
When Bush moved forward with the deficit reduction package in spite of his “read my lips” promise, prominent conservatives rebelled against the president and vowed that they would not support him in the campaign. House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich openly led a revolt against a sitting president of his own party. One day before the House was set to vote on the measure, Gingrich dramatically walked out of a White House meeting. According to Bush, the plan had been for all the Republican and Democratic leaders to walk into the Rose Garden and outline a bipartisan deal to the press. This way, neither side could be to blame. But when they started walking out, the president noticed that Gingrich had simply disappeared. White House officials, who thought Gingrich had signed off on the deal, saw this as an “act of political sabotage,” remembered Budget Director Richard Darman. “You’re killing us,” Bush later told Gingrich, “you are just killing us.” 20 Even though Bush made a televised appeal to the nation warning of “economic chaos” that would ensue if the deal failed, the House
rejected it. Following the vote, House Democrats took the opportunity to negotiate a better deal with the White House that included an even larger tax increase; it soon passed the House and Senate. Bush’s rift with the Right would never heal and, according to polls, it cost him support in his bid for reelection.
Besides the economy, Bush made strides with other domestic programs. Working with a Democratic Congress, the president enacted a number of important initiatives. One area in which he made surprising inroads was environmental protection, an issue that had become increasingly prominent over the course of the 1980s. An unintended consequence of the Reagan administration’s war on the EPA had been a surge of interest in private organizations dedicated to protecting the environment. The Sierra Club’s membership increased by roughly 50 percent over the first half of the decade, from 246,000 in 1980 to 378,000 in 1985, while its budget likewise mushroomed from $9.5 million to $22 million. The National Audubon Society experienced similar growth, moving from 400,000 members and $10 million in funds in 1980 to 500,000 members and $24 million in 1985. By the end of the Reagan era, environmental protection had become such a popular cause that Bush tried to claim it as his own issue in the 1988 election. On the campaign trail, Bush stopped in Michigan to deliver a speech about the need for the government to address climate change. “Our land, water and soil support a remarkable range of human activity, but they can only take so much and we must remember to treat them not as a given but as a gift,” he cautioned. “These issues know no ideology, no political boundaries. It’s not a liberal or conservative thing we’re talking about.” 21
As president, Bush looked to make good on his promise to protect the environment, taking aim at a new crisis in air pollution. As American power plants ramped up their activity in the 1980s, they sent massive clouds of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The result was “acid rain,” a startling phenomenon that began to take a destructive toll on eastern North America. Despite the alarm, Congress proved incapable of overcoming its partisan gridlock to find a solution. “By the end of the Reagan administration, Congress had put forward and slapped down 70 different acid rain bills,” the Smithsonian magazine noted, “and frustration ran so deep that Canada’s prime minister bleakly joked about declaring war on the United States.” A breakthrough came in the Bush years, however, with the embrace of the novel idea of emissions trading. Developed in conversations between Bush’s White House counsel C. Boyden Gray and leaders of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the policy would soon become known by its component parts: “cap and trade.” Basically, the government would set an overall cap on emissions; individual companies would be allotted their fair share of the cap, which they could use themselves or trade off to other companies. A free-market means from the Right was thus used to reach an end long championed by the Left. While many in the administration chafed at the idea of limiting industrial production in any way, emissions trading became a key element of the 1990 Clean Air Act. When its provisions went into effect, the impact was dramatic: acid rain emissions plummeted by 3 million tons in the first year, well ahead of schedule.22
As the Republican president made inroads on environmental protection, he also secured landmark legislation in another field more commonly linked to Democrats: civil rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act, the most significant civil rights measure since the 1960s, had the full support of the president from the start. The new law implemented a wide array of federal protections and mandates for the physically disabled, an estimated 43 million Americans in all. “Every man, woman and child with a disability can now pass through a once-closed door to a bright new era of equality, independence, and freedom,” Bush happily announced at the July 1990 signing ceremony. The measure was “historic,” he claimed, as it represented nothing less than the “world’s first declaration of equality for people with disabilities.” In a metaphor that called to mind the collapse of Communism and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, Bush called the new law a “sledgehammer” that would break down the barriers between the disabled and “the freedom they could glimpse but not grasp.” The crowd that had gathered roared with approval. (“There was an empty wheelchair in the back row,” a reporter noted, “and somebody said that the occupant must have gotten up and walked on the waves of emotion.”) Moments like these—for the environment as well as civil rights—suggested that there might be hope for government action on bipartisan lines, but such instances were becoming increasingly rare.23
Doubting Thomas
Though the economic recession loomed as the largest domestic issue for the Bush administration, the culture wars continued to roil in relation to the Supreme Court. The appointment of Justice Kennedy had brought the Bork confirmation crisis to a close, but not the ongoing struggle over the courts. During 1989 and 1990, the court issued a series of divided rulings on contentious subjects such as domestic violence, parental rights, flag “desecration,” and affirmative action, to name just a handful. Most significantly, the court appeared ready to reverse itself on the hot-button issue of abortion rights. In July 1989, the justices delivered their ruling in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The case centered on a 1986 Missouri law that had declared “human life begins at conception.” The state law banned use of public facilities for virtually all abortions, significantly cut back the use of public funds, and required physicians to perform tests on women seeking an abortion to determine if the fetus was viable. A slim 5–4 majority not only upheld every restriction in the Missouri law but also seemed ready to overturn Roe v. Wade itself. In a rare move, Justice Harry Blackmun, the Nixon appointee who had authored Roe, read his angry dissent from the bench. “I fear for the future,” he read. “For today, the women of this nation still retain the liberty to control their destinies. But the signs are evident and very ominous, and a chill wind blows.”24
Concerns for the future of the court, and the country, only increased when two liberal stalwarts from the Warren court era announced their plans to step down. First, William Brennan, an Eisenhower appointee who had emerged as a champion of civil liberties on the bench, retired in 1990 and was replaced by David Souter. Drawing on a quarter-century’s record as a prosecutor, state attorney general, and justice in New Hampshire, Souter presented himself as a moderate in his confirmation hearings and was easily confirmed in a 90–9 Senate vote. Then, in 1991, civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall announced that he, too, would step down. As a replacement, the Bush administration nominated Clarence Thomas, a forty-three-year-old African American judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Unlike Souter, Thomas was an outspoken conservative, one who had made a name for himself as a consistent critic of all civil rights legislation and affirmative action when he served as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Reagan administration. And unlike Souter, Thomas had little judicial experience, having served on the DC Circuit Court for little over a year.25
Both sides of the culture wars saw Thomas’s nomination as a replay of Bork’s. Florynce Kennedy, a liberal African American activist, urged the National Organization for Women to revive strategies used in the earlier hearings to prevent Thomas’s appointment. “We’re going to Bork him,” she told a NOW conference. “We’re going to kill him politically!” Conservatives, however, drew different lessons from the Bork hearings. Indeed, as one observer noted, the Republican White House’s strategy for advancing Thomas’s nomination was essentially “reverse Bork.” While Reagan’s administration had emphasized Bork’s experience in an effort to downplay his personal ideology, the Bush team resolved to sell Thomas on the basis of his background in hopes of overcoming any concerns about his competence. Thomas’s inspirational story of overcoming racism and poverty as a poor African American from rural Georgia would prove to be the key to his nomination. “Just keep getting his personal story out,” a Justice Department official told his handlers.26
Those who expected the Thomas hearings to match the intensity of Bork’s were not disa
ppointed. The Senate Judiciary Committee found it difficult to gain any understanding of the nominee’s legal thinking. Conservative nominees had learned from the Bork hearings to keep quiet about anything substantial that might be used to oppose their nomination. When Thomas was pressed about his stances on issues likely to come before the court, he disowned or trivialized most of his former statements, especially on matters of civil rights. Unlike Bork, who had forthrightly defended his past statements and offered a clear picture of his future, Thomas refused to offer an opinion on much of anything. When he was asked about Roe v. Wade, which had been decided while he was in law school, Thomas said he could not “remember personally engaging” in any discussion of it as a law student; nor, he added, had he ever “debated the contents of it” in the eighteen years since. Such implausible statements only helped harden opposition to him.27
One day before the scheduled Senate vote on Thomas, the already tense confirmation hearings turned chaotic. A leaked FBI interview with University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill surfaced, including her allegations that Thomas had made inappropriate sexual advances when they worked together at the EEOC. The Senate Judiciary Committee had actually known about what Chairman Joe Biden called “nefarious charges,” but had decided not to look further into them. The reserved thirty-five-year-old Hill, reluctant to make herself a center of controversy, had declined to make a formal affidavit. Still, the FBI interview relayed Hill’s accusation that Thomas had frequently entered into inappropriate conversations with her about pornography and sex. When a story by NPR’s Nina Totenberg followed, the Senate Judiciary Committee reopened its hearings to look into the charges, convincing Hill to testify. Thomas responded with a blanket denial, denouncing the accusation as “a high tech lynching for uppity blacks.” The counterattack, which Thomas said he leveled from his “standpoint as a black American,” effectively saved his nomination. The lynching metaphor didn’t quite fit—his main accuser and many of his loudest critics, like civil rights advocate Florynce Kennedy, were black too—but it completely froze the committee’s white liberals, who seemed unable to counterattack when charged with racism.
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