What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  “That’s one thing Ah kin do,” Atwater would affirm happily. “Ah kin really make ’em chase the rabbit!”

  Problem was—what Lee didn’t calculate: that trail of timid, stinking rabbit spoor seemed to lead directly to the backside of his candidate, the much-defended VP.

  51

  A Weanling Woodlouse

  IN FACT, EVERYBODY KNEW—for years, since 1980!—that Bush was kind of a weenie, a wuss, a wuh ... wuh, wuh ... well, that’s when it started, in 1980, the first time Bush ran for President.

  It wasn’t that they didn’t like him—the press, the lunch-buddies, the pink-jowled men-in-the-know at Duke Zeibert’s—how could they not? Bush was so friendly, eager, engaging, so well bred ... they called him “preppy,” which was a word in vogue (there were books on how to become so). And though that struck Bush as inaccurate (in his mind, he was an oilman, a wildcatter, a West Texas pioneer ...), he tried not to pick fights about it, as long as he was winning. In fact, it wasn’t hostile while he was winning—Bush was the moderate against the troglodyte Reagan, the Great White Man Hope of the big-feet for a long and satisfying Republican bloodbath.

  Then, Bush stopped winning and got out of the race. (Actually, Jim Baker pulled him out.)

  Then, Bush accepted the VP slot and said he never disagreed with Reagan. No, really! ... Bush was a troglodyte, too!

  Well, Jeez, you know ... didn’t the guy believe in anything?

  In fact, he did: he believed in George Bush ... and winning—in turning this episode of his life into a win. Of course, when they did win, Reagan and Bush, things only got worse from the, uh, whi ... whi ... whillywha perspective.

  At that point, not only was it standard Carter-era-Washington poop (“Political observers said ...”) that Bush had sold out his principles, his middle-of-the-road positions, his essence as the preppy son of the Council-on-Foreign-Relations elite ... but the new crowd, the Reagan wonks, never had forgiven him for contesting their hero. Bush (and worse still, his buddy Jim Baker, the new Chief of Staff at the Gipper’s own elbow!) were worms in the apple of the Reagan revolution—for God’s sake, everybody knew, they were moderates!

  So it did not matter how many strident speeches Bush made in support of Reagan. (That only confirmed the suspicion that Bush was a wheedler, a weakling.) It did not matter how often or how ably Bush represented the President overseas. (So what? He’s an errand boy, a whiffler!) It certainly did not redound to Bush’s credit that he stood by Reagan while he caused a deep recession and enormous deficits (confirming Bush’s judgment on “voodoo economics”) ... or as Reagan sent hundreds of Marines to their slaughter in Beirut, on a mission no one could explain (a mission opposed, untraceably, by Bush). By that time, Reagan had survived being shot, so no one could attach any blame to him. Anyway, heading into the ’84 reelection, Reagan was supposed to stay on the big job of leading the Free World (i.e., chopping brush on his ranch) while Bush, the loyal deputy, flew around the nation to defend the administration.

  That he did: a thousand chicken lunches and dinners were spiced by Bush-encomia on the Gipper, Bush-attacks on the Democrats, on the Congress, on the Sandinistas ’n’ Soviets ... and ’84 was the worst—miserable! The problem was, every time Bush opened his mouth, some wise-ass reporter was sure to ask: Why’d you say the opposite, in 1979? Abortion, the ERA, taxes, arms talks ... if Bush tried to deny the conflict, they had quotes, they had videotape! (That was so unfair.) Bush was waffling, he was a, uh ... wiggler!

  Of course, to Bush, this was all personal. He’d tried so hard to make friends! Why couldn’t they see that? See him, like he really was? What got into these people? ... He’d ask his Press Secretary, Peter Teeley—Teeley was an old pro, supposed to know reporters—but Teeley was too old a pro ... kind of pissed off, in fact, that he still had to know reporters. He hated reporters! He wanted to be a real white man. ... Teeley’d snarl: “Ahh, these stupid fuckers wouldn’t know a story if it hit ’em in the mouth. No-counts! Second-stringers!”

  Which wasn’t much help to Bush, making friends.

  He stayed away from the press when he could—cut back on interviews. Let ’em use the stuff from his speeches. Then he was elitist, afraid to take questions, a waxwork! ... Doonesbury started working that stuff about Bush putting his manhood into a blind trust. (That sent Bush over the edge. Who was that guy? Tru-dohhhh? ... He’s the elitist—a Yalie! Junior knew him!—a spoiled sixties crypto-commie-intellectual snob!)

  Well, it only got worse: the press pack was growing, had to file every day (Bush was out there making a spectacle of himself!) ... and they couldn’t use the stuff from the speeches—nothing in the speeches, except borrowed lines from the Gipper, America standing tall and all ... and, the way Bush was, when the stuff wasn’t his, he’d raise his voice to a scream on the borrowed lines, trying to show he did believe ... his voice would leap an octave, and he’d whinny out these Rambo zingers, and wave his arms (someone must have told him that showed force) ... speech coaches came and departed without effect, and the TVs would edit stuff just to show the mistakes, and the print press was worse: the profiles ... Jeezus! They’d be asking about his watchband, his shirts and his shoes, trying to prove he was really still a preppy, expecting him to go through his, uh ... wardrobe ... when he tried to tell them, he was really sorta Texan, when you got down to it: he liked country music, he’d have a beer and popcorn—no! pork rinds! He liked pork rinds! And chili, and chicken-fried steak: we love all that stuff! ... But they wouldn’t believe it, wouldn’t write his line-of-the-day. Instead they’d harp on some offhand remark, like The Washington Post, which had the gall to quote him on the front page when he said, just by the by, that, yeah, sure, as a last resort, you could probably raise taxes to cut the deficit.

  And that was the day he was supposed to fly to California, to the ranch, for lunch! It was embarrassing ... hauling in this planeload of banshees, screaming, taxes, TAXES! What about the TAXES? ... At the Great Tax-Trimmer’s ranch. Well, Bush denied that he’d ever thought about taxes ... and Teeley—he was ripshit!—after the story persisted for a day, after the Post called the next day’s speech an effort to bury Bush’s tax gaffe, he called up the Post reporter in her hotel room, three o’clock in the morning, and threatened never to help her again, with anything ... if she was drowning! And of course, that upset her: it was Dale Russakoff, on her second trip of her first campaign ... so Bush had to go down the aisle of his plane, the next day, straight to Russakoff’s seat, where he stopped, you know, just to chat ... “Yeah, I heard y’play tennis! We’ll have to get the Ranking Committee to check you out—maybe we can play!” And after that, he went back to the Power Cabin, but he didn’t stop trying ... no. An aide came down the aisle with a life-sized tennis racket made of chocolate (God knows where Bush had procured it), which was a Veeply gift for Russakoff. ... You think it helped?

  The Post editorial page essayed a comparison of the VP candidates, lauding Mondale for his “audacious and commendable” choice of a female. The paper called Ferraro “smart, strong and resourceful,” conceding that her lack of foreign policy experience showed up in her speeches, from time to time ... but:

  “Something else shows when George Bush speaks—something that threatens to trash whatever esteem his impressive résumé and his private personal grace have earned him. Maybe it is just that he is a rotten campaigner (winning elections, after all, has never been his forte). But he seems to reveal himself, as all viewers of ‘Dallas’ will long since have noticed, as the Cliff Barnes of American politics—blustering, opportunistic, craven and hopelessly ineffective all at once. This impression has been so widely remarked in recent weeks by commentators of every political persuasion that it hardly needs elaboration. ...”

  (No, such poop was well known by everybody-in-the-know.)

  That tore it with the Post: Cliff Barnes!

  Russakoff never did get an interview—neither her nor the reporter from Time, another woman ... so it got to be a “woman thi
ng,” which is how everything seemed to turn, after Ferraro was out there. Bush couldn’t believe it! They’d compare him—after all he’d done—to a junior Democrat Congresswoman! It was ridiculous! Of course, he couldn’t say that ... couldn’t go after Ferraro at all ... wouldn’t be that way about a woman, couldn’t say, couldn’t breathe his conviction that she, their darling, their symbol of liberality, was actually an arriviste ... they’d think he was picking on her, as a woman, you know, or as an Italian from Queens (where he knew how gamey, grasping, the politics were—God! Look at Al D’Amato!) ... so he had to just take it, while they insulted him with comparisons—and she came after him with knives: she started talking about his taxes—him and Bar!—how they only had to pay twelve percent that year ... talk about nerve! When she and her sleazeball husband had piled up $4 million in New York, uh ... well, you know that kind of business! Bar was furious. That’s when she said, in the plane—she thought it was off the record—that she and George had always lived well, and didn’t try to poor-mouth ... “like that four-million-dollar—well, I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.” ... Well, when that got into the papers, Bar was in tears (so mortified at hurting George) ... and Bush threw the press off his plane altogether. They could ride in their own stinking plane—see how they liked it.

  They didn’t ... and by the end of the campaign, Bush was well known as a worm, a weanling woodlouse, a weedy wort in the garden of politics, a wan, whimpering ... well, it was war.

  Of course, he won. That was the big thing—his team won reelection, big. Wasn’t that the point?

  Well, not altogether.

  That’s when Bush had to change his whole staff—in ’85—because the campaign had been such a personal disaster. So he got Atwater ... started courting the right wing ... he did it because he wanted to win. But in January of ’86, George Will wrote him up:

  “The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny ‘arf’—the sound of a lapdog.”

  Later that year, when Iran-contra hit, Bush had to prove he was “out of the loop.” And he did! He convinced the Tower Commission. ... Of course, he had that wired, with his friend John Tower and his friend Brent Scowcroft as two of the three members ... but everyone had to admit—right?—he won! He showed he was unaware, not a player—not culpable of knowing anything!

  Of course, that had its price, too, as the lack of awareness was allied, in the tribal mind, with incapacity, imbecility, impotence. ...

  But he wasn’t going to give anyone a chance to stick him with that ... none of his opponents—oh, wouldn’t they love to—if he sat on stage with them, got out there where they could all fire away. Hell, no! Why should he debate—let something happen? ... If nothing happened, he was going to win!

  See, at every stage of the game, George Bush did whatever he had to, to win. And now, by the end of the summer of 1987, he was the clear front-runner for the Republican nomination, had a campaign command second to none, had more money, more operatives, more friends than any politician in the country ... no wonder he could reck-reate for three weeks straight.

  Still, the savants, pundits, pooh-bahs—even if they couldn’t write it, wouldn’t say it on TV yet—everyone who was in-the-know knew that Bush would never get there. ... (God! Look at him, behind the fence of his mansion in Maine!) ... Might as well say it:

  The man was a wimp.

  52

  White Men at Play

  THIS GROWING PROBLEM OF perception had snuck up on the Veep: the bubble imposes its own special blindness, like one-way glass—you might see out, darkly, but you never can see how it looks from the outside.

  Not even by act of imagination, not for an instant, could George Bush put himself outside the fence at Walker’s Point ... say, in a Chevrolet, the backseat loaded with ketchup-smeared kids, stuck in crawling traffic on Ocean Avenue, the two narrow lanes that led from the village of Kennebunkport, along the coast, past the “cottages” (mansions, they’d call them, in the Chevy) that looked out to sea, all built when building was grand and gracious, on the rise of land to the left of the road, the landward side, across the street from the ocean ... except for ... one house that owned the seaside rocks. It was a compound, really—there was, in addition to the big house, a bungalow where the VP’s mother still summered, and a small guest house, The Wave, that was once a wing of the mansion but had been rebuilt, after a great storm, as a two-bedroom cottage separated from the main house by a narrow path. ... But what you saw from the road was one great house, dark and massive on its private promontory of green and gray, that was so big, so distant, it seemed to sail like a great ship on the ocean itself, and to conjure a world so grandly distinct from the earthly present smell of french fries in the Chevy, that it might be a picture in a shiny magazine, or a video-still from Lifestyles ... captured before the Secret Service man emerged from the gatehouse to hold up a patient forestalling palm—no, not even pictures were ours to hold of this embodiment of otherness, privilege, and ease.

  That was the tourist’s-eye view—more and more tourists drove by each year of his Vice Presidency, and the traffic was thick now, on summer weekends, in the year when his best shot at the White House approached. There were people in other “cottages” (and one or two at Walker’s Point) who rued the day the road was “built through.” ... It used to be a dead end, so no one could pass on the way to anyplace else. But Bush wouldn’t say such a thing. Very small-d democratic was the Veep about the little people—he never worried about the T-shirtification of the shops on the main street, or the crowds at Mabel’s Lobster Claw. What the hell! If he meant to sup at Mabel’s, someone would call and Mabel would clear out a whole side of the dining room—put half her tables together, fresh flowers for a centerpiece—and turn everyone else away. Of course, she wasn’t supposed to tell the reason ... but word would leak and tourists would line her porch three-deep, waiting for the motorcade. They couldn’t eat—might as well see the show. So there’d be fifty people, or a hundred, waiting with their itchy kids when the motorcade showed up, with its long black cars, and the ambulance, lights flashing, and the earplugs, who’d jump out before the cars even purred to a stop ... it was exciting. Sometimes, the crowd would break into applause! And Bush would wave and grin and thank them. It just showed him anew: all that sour press had nothing to do with the people—they liked him ... and why not? In his mind, they were all on vacation, in Kennebunk, together. You know, no formality that he could see ... just him and all those people from New Jersey—they were all at Mabel’s together.

  Bush could never understand all those reporters “who put me down on the couch.”

  Why was he always up in Maine? Wasn’t it elitist? ...

  For God’s sake, he’d been coming to this place every summer of his life (save for one, when he was bombing the Nips back to Tokyo). ... He didn’t pick it for status! He didn’t pick it at all! Look, there was his mother’s house, the anchor of the family ... surely they could understand that. They wanted character?

  Oh, he read the stories—though he said he didn’t, or said he forgot them the minute he put them down. (“Bar’s the one who’d remember that kind of thing.”) ... But he remembered, too. Some of the bad ones he could recite. And he remembered who wrote them. He always thought, in fact, it must be something about them—or them and him ...a personal thing.

  So he’d try to have them over to the house—drinks, or the boat ... think it helped? Saul Friedman, the reporter for Newsday, known him for twenty-five years—Saul covered his first campaign in Houston!—Saul says, “Why’d you get a boat like that? What’re you try’na prove? A sailboat is your kind of boat.”

  A sailboat!

  Why couldn’t these people see?

  Just as he could not inhabit a french-fry-shocked Chevy, he could not imagine what it was like for reporters, to sit for fruitless days in a lousy hotel in a small town in Maine, killing time, trying to divine if something was ever going to
happen in a campaign that didn’t seem to be a campaign ... not here, anyway—no matter how many white men flew in for conferences, briefings, and strategy set-tos, to which, of course, reporters were not invited.

  The press could ask the pols who motored in for visits: “Whad’ja talk about with the Vice President?”

  “Oh, you know ... fishing.” (That was the truth!)

  Sometimes, reporters could catch one of the white men on his way to the airport, after a conference.

  What went on?

  Any actions, decisions?

  Who said what?

  Of course, the white men could never, uh, exactly remember, if anybody in particular said anything, you know, in particular ... no, it was just nice to be up in Maine. (True enough, too.)

  No wonder the stories said the Bush campaign had no positions. No wonder they implied that Bush was pandering and playing through the campaign. No wonder they started using the quotes from du Pont and Kemp—how Bush was ducking the debate, was not man enough to join a contest of issues, to put forth his agenda for the nation and its people. ... The reporters came, they did their jobs, they asked around—and (in Al Haig’s notable phrase), they didn’t hear a whimp!

  They looked at the distant house on the Point, and they saw:

  White people at play.

  They asked the candidate’s main man, Atwater ... and Lee talked about how great it was to get away from the noise and heat, to talk things over, all the white men together, in the sparkle of sun-on-water, the quiet cool of the night. Lee talked about how classy it was: