The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Thereafter Bush swept most of the Super Tuesday primaries en route to the 1988 Republican nomination and the campaign in the fall against the Democratic nominee, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, and his running mate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas. In a bravado gesture to the conservative Republican anti-tax crowd in his acceptance speech at the convention, Bush proclaimed, enunciating each word, “Read my lips! No new taxes!”24 It was a crowd-pleasing gambit he would come to regret later.

  In a major surprise, Bush chose a lightly regarded Republican senator from Indiana, J. Danforth Quayle, grandson of the conservative Indiana and Arizona newspaper entrepreneur Eugene Pulliam. Asked later why he chose Quayle, Bush said vaguely because Quayle “represents the next generation and the future.”25 The selection triggered much criticism over the youth and inexperience of the boyish, forty-one-year-old Dan Quayle, who went on to commit gaffes in the campaign, described in the following chapter, but none of this had a detrimental effect on the outcome. The team of Bush and Quayle was elected in November by 53.4 percent of the popular vote compared with 45.6 percent for Dukakis and Bentsen, and in the electoral college by 426 to 111.

  For the next four years, Bush occupied the Oval Office in his own right, but he was unable to hold on to presidential tenure despite a major foreign-policy achievement. In 1990 he ordered an invasion of Iraq with U.S. and allied forces, which reversed a military conquest of Kuwait by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The swift military action sent Bush’s popularity soaring at home, but it could not be sustained in the face of a clinging economic recession. He failed to blunt a strong Democratic assault in 1992 and was replaced by the Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton.

  Bush’s candidacy and election in 1988 did not hold up in either passion or policy in his failed 1992 reelection bid. The senior Bush retired with his wife, Barbara, to Texas. In the face of subsequent natural disasters around the globe, he joined with former president Clinton in massive fund-raising relief efforts that brought each of them esteem in their later years.

  In terms of Bush’s role in the evolution of the vice presidency as a force in governance, however, neither in his own performance in the office nor particularly in his selection of a running mate did he stand out. Bush’s choice of Quayle was widely seen as both startling and irresponsible after he himself had come a heartbeat from the presidency in the near assassination of Reagan. He escaped any penalty for it in winning his first term and lost his quest for reelection more for his failure to improve the economy, in the face of an appealing Democratic challenger and campaigner named Bill Clinton.

  J. DANFORTH QUAYLE

  OF INDIANA

  No American vice president came to office under a heavier cloud than Dan Quayle, despite his record of respectable if not outstanding service in the United States Senate and before that in the House of Representatives, from Indiana. The senior George Bush’s choice of the youthful Quayle was widely regarded as a blatantly political one, based on providing some sex appeal and charisma to the bland Bush image rather than any experience or intellectual heft Quayle would bring to the Republican ticket.

  The extreme secrecy with which Bush kept his choice to himself, even from his closest staff associates, compounded the surprise of Quayle’s entry onto the national political stage. It generated a frenzied vetting of his background by a particularly curious and diligent news media. Reporters were especially fixed on discovering not only why Quayle had been selected but also what there was about him and his personal and political background that qualified him to assume the presidency if circumstances so required.

  In advance of the opening of the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans in August, the Bush pollster Bob Teeter had drawn up a list of about twenty prospective running mates, soon whittled down to about a dozen, including several of whom were regarded as mere decoys. Senator Bob Dole of Kansas and Congressman Jack Kemp were considered the favorites. Beyond Quayle’s youth and possible appeal to a younger generation, another reason he was on the list could have been that Bush wanted his own Bush as vice president. That is, perhaps he wanted a totally loyal and uncomplaining Republican who would happily serve in the shadow of the president as Bush had done as Reagan’s standby for eight years.

  Dan Quayle seemed a pleasant enough fellow from a well-off Indiana family of deep conservative Republican roots. His maternal grandfather, Eugene Pulliam, was a successful publisher of small to moderate-sized newspapers there and in Arizona. But he was not a believer in inherited wealth or in giving his children or their children a free ride through life; they were all expected to work. He did, however, give Dan’s father, James Quayle, a job as the advertising manager and sports editor of his paper in Lebanon, Indiana, where “Danny,” as he was called, was born on February 4, 1947, to Jim and Corinne Pulliam Quayle. The boy was named after James A. Danforth, a marine friend of his father who had been killed in Germany in World War II. Soon after, the family moved to Huntington, Indiana, where Jim Quayle became the publisher of another Pulliam paper,1 and then on to Arizona to still another.

  During young Dan’s junior year at Scottsdale High School, where he played on the golf team, the family moved back to Huntington, where he quickly made the high school varsity team and his father became publisher of the local Herald-Press. Dan was deeply into all sports and school antics, and in the summers he worked as a reporter and advertising salesman at his father’s paper and in the press room melting down printing plates and cleaning out ink fountains. Both Grandfather Pulliam and Jim Quayle insisted that Dan carry his share of the workload.

  At DePauw University, in Greenville, Indiana, Quayle joined Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and focused on varsity golf. A gag circulated on campus that “Dan Quayle managed to get from the Deke house to the golf course for four years without ever having to go through a classroom.” It was a major exaggeration, Ted Katula, the school’s athletic director said later, but he confirmed that Quayle was an outstanding player who, he said, would have been a top amateur golfer had he decided to stay with the game. “He had a very friendly nature about him,” Katula said, “but he was serious about his golf game. He was in his own world when he got on a golf course.” At the same time, Quayle, for all the family money, worked part of the way through DePauw, waiting tables and doing chores in the kitchen of a sorority house.2

  The United States was now getting entangled in Vietnam, and there were anti-war demonstrations on the DePauw campus, but Quayle never got involved in them.3 Although Quayle graduated as a political science major, there was considerable dispute about whether he had ever taken or passed the comprehensive examination in the course required for his degree. Of more concern to him at the time, however, as it was with many other college seniors, was whether he would be caught in the military draft before graduation. Six days before that event, Dan joined the Indiana National Guard with some help from family friends. He managed to be assigned to a public information unit, where he had to report once a month to a camp about fifty miles south of Indianapolis. There he helped turn out a small newspaper on Guard activities, which took about half a day.4

  While in the Guard, Quayle decided to go to law school, but his mediocre college grades were not good enough to get him into the Indiana University program. However, an old family friend and teacher at its night school extension with Purdue got him admitted there, where he met and married another law student, Marilyn Tucker.5

  Quayle’s interest in public office was whetted by briefly working for the state attorney general and governor, and he and Marilyn practiced law together before he resumed work at the family newspaper in Huntington. Later, ironically for one who became a whipping boy for the press, Quayle attributed his core conservative hostility toward government to his background in the newspaper business. “People in the newspaper business hate the government. They distrust the government,” he told his biographer. “It is the last unregulated business. It is almost immune from regulation,” said this eventual
champion of deregulation. “It is deeply ingrained in them that the government should keep hands off, that government cannot do any good, that it only brings trouble. That distrust is deeply ingrained in me.”6

  In 1976, Quayle was recruited by the local county Republican chairman to challenge an eight-term Democratic congressman, and at age twenty-nine he won the first of two terms in the U.S. House. As a down-the-line conservative, Quayle was seen by critics as he had been in college, as more focused on athletics than on his legislative duties. A colleague recalled, “People called him a ‘wet head’ because he was always coming out of the [House] gym. His attendance record was lousy.… They didn’t know where he was a lot of the time. He’d be in the gym or he’d sneak off to play golf and they’d have to call around to find him [for House votes].”7 Most memorably, in 1978 he introduced a bill to cut off food stamps for participants in a coal strike when a University of Maryland professor estimated that the federal government was spending more than $430,000 a day supporting the strikers. The bill got nowhere.

  Easily reelected, in 1979 Quayle cast himself as a staunch Cold War warrior, urging the shelving of Jimmy Carter’s second arms limitation treaty until all Soviet Union troops were removed from Cuba. He continued to find time to play golf, including joining a weekend trip to a Florida resort with other House Republicans at which a soon-to-be-famous lobbyist named Paula Parkinson shared their group cottage. The episode came to light the next year when he ran for the Senate against the incumbent Democrat Birch Bayh, who was seeking an unprecedented fourth term from Indiana.

  Marilyn Quayle’s reaction to the rumor that her husband had slept with Parkinson was that if he had a choice between golf and sex, golf would win out every time. Quayle won the Senate seat as one of the beneficiaries of a fierce campaign effort by the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which drove a host of veteran Democratic senators, including Bayh, from office, abetted by the popularity of Ronald Reagan at the head of the Republican ticket.

  Quayle attributed his Senate election, however, to his own efforts to escape from what he saw as a boring and “awful job” in the House, where “you can’t get anything done.”8 In the Senate, though, he at first was no more involved with legislation than he had been in the House. When the new president Reagan failed to act quickly enough on a campaign pledge to abolish the Department of Education, Quayle introduced such legislation, which also languished.

  Meanwhile, the thirty-three-year-old freshman senator now lamented his switch from the House. He told his Indiana biographer, “I miss my peer group. There aren’t many senators under thirty-five with children under six. There are no basketball games. People don’t get together in groups on the floor and tell stories. There are no groups or cliques here. In the House you have little clubs.” He was said to be “sneaking over to the House in the late afternoon to play basketball.”9

  In May 1982, when the president of his alma mater DePauw invited Quayle to deliver that spring’s commencement address, which carried with it an honorary degree, an irate faculty voted against the invitation. But to save the president and the school further embarrassment, enough faculty members changed their votes on a second ballot, and the invitation went forward. The campus radio station, however, reported on what was supposed to be an off-the-record faculty meeting, resulting in two students being fired and a third being suspended and then resigning from the station, charging censorship. When Quayle learned of the actions, he urged the station manager to reinstate them, declaring his firm support of First Amendment rights of a free press, but the suspensions stood. Quayle gave the address and received the honorary degree.10

  As a strong Reagan man in the Senate, he supported the president’s 1981 tax cuts and then his subsequent tax increase of nearly ninety-nine billion dollars, despite continuing his unremitting opposition to higher taxes. But with the rate of unemployment among young blacks as high as 40 percent, he lobbied to save youth job training from Reagan’s ax. A subcommittee he chaired drafted, with the Democratic senator Ted Kennedy, the Quayle-Kennedy Job Training Partnership Act, providing $3.9 billion to be dispensed at the local and state levels.

  The bipartisan legislation added some heft to Quayle’s reputation, and he was easily reelected to the Senate in 1986. Little was heard from him into the presidential year of 1988, but from time to time he dropped by the office of Vice President George Bush, by now a presidential candidate. Through increased speaking on the Senate floor, attendance at Senate Republican lunches also attended by Bush, and more of those drop-ins to Bush’s vice presidential office, just off the Senate floor, Quayle made himself known to the vice president.

  Next, Quayle took some positions in the Senate that aligned him with Bush on matters in dispute within the Reagan administration, particularly the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Soviet Union. That summer he urged Bush to press Reagan to veto a three hundred billion dollar defense budget bill he considered cut too deeply by the Democrats, while agreeing with Bush that discretion on arms control be reserved to the president. Reagan used his veto, highlighting the Republicans’ pro-defense posture entering the 1988 campaign. Quayle said later, “That was the turning, that was the major point” in his relationship with Bush.11

  As the 1988 convention opened and Bush was nominated on the first ballot, the only suspense left was the identity of his running mate. Any idea of Dan Quayle as a nominee for vice president of the United States would have been regarded as sheer fantasy. Bush did not reveal his choice even to Reagan until the president was boarding his plane from the convention city, New Orleans. Bush was determined, on the advice of the media adviser Roger Ailes, to use his selection to demonstrate that after eight years under Ronald Reagan’s shadow he was taking charge of his own course. Also, he wanted to show he was not the bland figure so often painted by critics but capable of springing a surprise, throwing a “long ball” as Ailes put it, at a convention having little drama.

  After Reagan had departed, Bush called Quayle and then boarded an old paddle-wheel riverboat down the Mississippi to the New Orleans pier, where Quayle was told to meet his arrival. Watching the scene on television from their hotel room were the two seasoned political professionals already assigned to run the vice presidential campaign—Stuart Spencer of California, on old Reagan and Ford hand, and Joe Canzeri of New York, a veteran of Nelson Rockefeller campaigns. They didn’t know Quayle, and he didn’t know them.

  Dan and Marilyn Quayle were at dockside, and when Bush disembarked and introduced his running mate, the ebullient young Hoosier raced forward and enthusiastically embraced his political benefactor. As Quayle grabbed the thunderstruck Bush in a bear hug, Spencer, watching the TV screen, told his sidekick, “Well, we gotta correct that.”12 Quayle himself later described his effervescent entry into the national limelight thus: “I was talking like a junior senator in campaign overdrive. I was picked, in part, for my youth, but this was a little too youthful—not vice-presidential nor, given the nature of that office, potentially presidential … but I was energized and proud, and I was wearing my emotions on my shirtsleeves.”13

  Thus began the “handling” of Dan Quayle that was to guide, and torment, the new Republican vice presidential nominee between then and the election in November. Canzeri was immediately dispatched to pick up Quayle at his hotel to prepare him for what was to come. The next morning at a news conference, Quayle was subjected to a withering bombardment about everything from the Paula Parkinson golf weekend to his National Guard service and failure to serve in Vietnam, and he did not handle himself well. He brushed off the query about Parkinson and called the question about not serving in Vietnam “a cheap shot.” And he added naively, “I did not know in 1969 [when he entered the Guard] that I would be in this room today.”14

  Quayle was paraded that night into each of the television network booths at the convention hall. When Tom Brokaw of NBC asked whether he had received special help in getting into the National Guard, he acknowledge
d that “phone calls were made.” When Dan Rather at CBS asked him what his worst fear was, he blurted out, “Paula Parkinson.” The rumor soon spread that Quayle would be dropped from the ticket. But according to Rich Bond, who had run Bush’s upset caucus victory in Iowa in 1980, the immediate orders concerning the rumor were: “Squash it. Squash that one like a bug.”15 Memories of the fiasco that had followed George McGovern’s dumping of Tom Eagleton in 1972 assured that quick decision.

  In another news conference in his home town of Huntington, Quayle offered more evasive or confused answers while local supporters jeered the inquisitorial press. He was brought back to Washington for what Bond called “Dan Quayle goes to candidate school,” run by his professional campaign handlers.16 Spencer and Canzeri said, “We knew we were going to have to script him,” but as stories mounted about how Quayle was being “handled,” he grew more irritated. In September before the City Club of Chicago he threw away the script prepared for him on national defense and winged it. He was disorganized, guilty of misquotes, and performed poorly.17

  The nadir of Quayle’s troubles came in his debate with the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Senator Lloyd Bentsen. When asked what was the first thing he would do were he suddenly to become president, Quayle haltingly said, “First I’d say a prayer for myself and for the country I’m about to lead, and then I would assemble [the president’s] people and talk.” Tom Brokaw pressed him on what he actually would do, and he answered by talking about his experience. “I have far more experience than many others who sought the office of vice president in this country,” he said. “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.” Bentsen pounced. “Senator,” he said, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” Quayle lamely replied, “That really was uncalled for, Senator.”18