by Kitty Kelley
For those who study the fault line of class in America, the campaign of 1980 is instructive, because two dynastic sons chose to challenge their parties’ front-runners, and these two presumptive heirs based their candidacies solely on their sense of entitlement. Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts decided to take on the Democratic incumbent without any idea of what he could bring to the office, beyond his illustrious name. When Kennedy was asked by Roger Mudd why he wanted to become President, he could not answer the question. He stammered for many uncomfortable seconds before mumbling something about public service.
George Bush did almost the same thing when he was asked why he should be elected to the highest office in the land.
“It’s not a job. It’s . . . a . . . a . . . challenge. And I am idealistic. I’m driven . . . I’m driven to contribute something.”
Both men portrayed themselves as selfless patricians interested only in serving the public good, far above rank politicians interested only in power. Neither man could articulate his reason for running beyond a visceral dislike of Jimmy Carter. The scions of the Kennedy and Bush family dynasties felt they were more entitled to the White House because of who they were than men of lesser lineage who mirrored the American public.
George so cherished being on the inside that he could not tolerate Carter’s pride in being an outsider. “My thesis is that the United States won’t ever again elect a person totally unfamiliar with foreign affairs, totally running against Washington and how Washington works,” he said in 1979. His son George W. Bush would knock down that proposition in the year 2000.
By January 1980, George’s seventeen trips to Iowa had finally paid off as Reagan began faltering in the polls. Reagan had been so sure of winning the state that he hadn’t bothered to campaign. George, meanwhile, had assembled one thousand doorbell-ringing volunteers. He and his wife and their five children visited all of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties and shook as many hands as they could at least once. On January 21, George surged ahead of everyone’s expectations and won the precinct caucuses. The Reagan campaign was reeling, and the political press corps perked up. Suddenly “George Who?” was on the cover of Newsweek.
“We’ve got the momentum,” George boasted. “Big Mo is on our side . . . There’ll be no stopping me now . . . We’ve got Big Mo.”
Again reporters scratched their heads.
George continued to confound the press with his quirky adolescent phrases such as “tension city,” “I’m in deep doo doo now,” and “catching the dickens.” Other fractured expressions needed a glossary. “It was Vic Damone today” meant victory on the golf course. “Little wiener countries” were small troublemaking nations, “Little Wieners” were his grandsons, and negative campaign ads were “the naughty stuff.” He dismissed pesky questions about his gaffes as “No more nit-picking—it’s ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.’”
As the press struggled to decipher George’s fragmented syntax, they tried to comprehend his politics and figure out what he stood for.
“How would you define yourself ideologically? Moderate or conservative?” asked one reporter.
“I don’t want to be perceived as either,” said George, who wanted to be all things to all people.
“Well, how do you want to be perceived? You can’t be both.”
“How do you know I can’t?”
The reporter persisted.
“Well, would you like to be known as a moderate conservative?”
Bush hesitated. “Yeah,” he said. Then he took it back. “No. A conservative moderate is better.”
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Barry Bearak said that interviewing George Bush was like dancing without touching.
Finally the press forced George to clarify his positions, most of which contrasted sharply with Ronald Reagan’s. Bush said he favored an Equal Rights Amendment, and he opposed an amendment that would overturn Roe v. Wade and ban abortion. He also opposed licensing and registering firearms.
“Oh, God, did he ever oppose that one,” said Cody Shearer. “He must’ve bitched for three days straight when he had to go down to the District building in Washington to register the guns he kept in his house. ‘Outrageous,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to do this in Texas.’”
George crowed about his “Big Mo” for thirty-six days as he sprinted toward the New Hampshire primary. But that state’s major newspaper had already taken aim at the man with the “Big Mo.” William Loeb, the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, was a fervent Reaganaut, and his editorials scorched Bush as “a spoon-fed little rich kid” and “an incompetent liberal masquerading as a conservative.”
The “spoon-fed little rich kid” soon stumbled on his own frugality. When the local newspaper in Nashua agreed to sponsor a one-on-one debate between the two front-runners, Bush and Reagan, the FCC ruled that the newspaper’s sponsorship constituted an illegal campaign contribution. Reagan’s campaign approached Bush to split the cost, but Bush balked. So Reagan picked up the thirty-five-hundred-dollar tab, and because he was footing the bill, he tried to change the ground rules by inviting the other candidates to participate.
The night of the debate only two chairs were placed on the stage, according to the rules, and George started to take his place when Republican Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire asked him to meet with the other candidates. George refused.
“Those were not the ground rules,” he said.
“Well, they’re here now and if you don’t come, you’re doing a disservice to party unity.”
“Don’t tell me about unifying the Republican Party,” George snapped. “I’ve done more for the party than you’ll ever do. I’ve worked too hard for this and they’re not going to take it away from me.”
George pushed his way to the stage and sat down. A half hour of confusion ensued while Ronald Reagan hung back with the other candidates, who argued with the debate officials that they should be allowed to participate. Finally Nancy Reagan forced her husband to go onstage. Reagan walked down the aisle followed by Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, Representative John Anderson of Illinois, and Representative Phil Crane of Illinois. The unruly crowd of two thousand roared their readiness for a big event.
“Get them chairs,” shouted a woman.
Reagan moved toward the mic to explain the situation to the audience.
The moderator, Jon L. Breen, a Bush supporter, screamed at the engineer. “Turn Mr. Reagan’s microphone off.”
But Reagan grabbed the mic and with it the Republican nomination for President.
“I’m paying for this microphone, Mr. Green,” he thundered, mispronouncing the moderator’s name.
The crowd, whipped up for gladiators, yelled and stomped their feet in approval as Reagan melodramatically seized the moment. George sat on the stage like a little milquetoast, fidgeting and staring straight ahead as if oblivious to the bedlam engulfing him. “He looked like a small boy who had been delivered to the wrong birthday party,” William Loeb wrote. Ronald Reagan concurred. He told an aide that George lacked “spunk.”
The moderator insisted that the other candidates leave the stage so the debate could begin. After waving to the crowd, the Nashua Four walked off to hold rump press conferences, in which they all accused Bush of unfairly shutting them out and being afraid to meet them head-on.
The debate that ensued onstage was anticlimactic to Reagan’s thundering triumph moments earlier. In contrast, George looked so weak and spineless that his campaign strategists recommended he leave the state early and let them try to salvage the last day of the campaign. Hours later, New Hampshire’s television viewers saw Bush jogging in the Texas sun, while the sixty-nine-year-old Reagan stood in the frosty air of New Hampshire, shaking hands with the locals.
George had gone into the New Hampshire primary race neck and neck with Reagan, but on February 25, 1980, Reagan trounced him 49 percent to 23 percent, easily reestablishing himself as the front-runner.
“It was
that damn Nashua debate thing, wasn’t it?” George asked Pete Teeley, his press secretary.
“The good news is that nobody paid any attention to the debate,” said Teeley. “The bad news is that you lost that, too.”
But George had enough staying power to win primaries in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. In each he became more and more critical of Reagan, jabbing at the governor’s age and lack of experience. “There may be a better valedictorian out there but not one who has the mix of experience that I do,” crowed George. “I feel about 35 years old and am ready to charge.” Along the way he captured headlines by declaring that Reagan’s proposal to reduce taxes without reducing government spending was “voodoo economics.” That phrase provided by Pete Teeley lingered like indigestion. George later denied he had ever said it. Even when shown the videotape from his speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on April 10, 1980, in which he characterized Reagan’s supply-side economics as practicing voodoo, he still denied it.
At every stop, George trumpeted his résumé as if his presidential appointments had imbued him with experience that no one else could match. In fact, those appointments, each lasting only a year or so, merely testified to the kindness of mentors. George was a professional protégé who blacked the King’s boots, and whether the King was Nixon or Ford, George was compensated accordingly. His list of appointments sounded so dazzling that no one bothered to question whether he had accomplished anything in his various posts. Just having received the appointments seemed to be enough, but upon examination his résumé was far more impressive than his record. The conservative commentator John Podhoretz dismissed George as nothing more than a glorified clerk.
“He had been an unmemorable UN ambassador, a faceless and powerless ambassador to China, [and] a tentative director of the Central Intelligence Agency,” wrote Podhoretz in his book Hell of a Ride.
The record shows that as Ambassador to the United Nations, George socialized constantly and made many friends but did nothing substantive in foreign policy, especially with regard to China, the major issue at the time. Nixon and Kissinger made all the important policy decisions and rarely bothered to inform Bush, who admitted he had to read The New York Times to find out what was happening.
As chairman of the Republican National Committee, George traveled the country meeting party potentates while supporting the President on Watergate and at the same time trying to get Republicans elected to office. To an extent he succeeded on the former—his support was unwavering until the end, although Watergate eventually brought Nixon down—but he failed woefully on the latter. Shortly after Election Day 1973, George wrote in his diary: “Right now after the November elections there are a wide number of comments that the Republican Party has had it—that we are in for a disaster.”
Six weeks after he left the RNC, the Republicans lost forty-eight House seats and four Senate seats in the 1974 elections.
As head of the U.S. mission in Peking, George played a lot of tennis and entertained constantly. “There was nothing for him to do but hold down the fort,” said the mission’s political counselor. “He went to all the parties hosted by other missions . . . He was great at that kind of thing. Just great.”
As director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George was a benign custodian who made no waves, which was a relief to all who worked there. Unlike his predecessor, William Colby, George did not ruffle feathers. For that reason, he received great agency support when he ran for President. “Spooks for Bush” raised thousands of dollars for George in the early primaries.
In May 1980, Texas held its first presidential primary, and the two Republican front-runners debated on television from separate locations, but once again Houston’s favorite son folded. “He just melts under pressure,” Reagan said of Bush, who suffered a humiliating defeat in the primary. He lost his own state to Reagan, and that was the knockout blow. By then the Bush campaign had run out of money and momentum and Jim Baker wanted to pull the plug, but George was like a punch-drunk boxer. He didn’t want to quit.
“Jim Baker was beside himself,” recalled Susan King, a former television journalist, now with the Carnegie Corporation of New York. “He and Bush have a complicated relationship because they’re such close friends. Baker told him he had to drop out then to have a chance to become Reagan’s Vice President. If he didn’t drop out, he’d cause so much divisiveness that he’d split the party and probably reelect Jimmy Carter. George wouldn’t listen. He wanted to charge ahead into the California primary, which was sheer lunacy, because the campaign was broke, but George was determined, and his wife and kids pushed him hard not to give up. So when Bush was on the road, Baker called a press conference and told all of us that George’s time as a presidential candidate was over. Baker folded up the troops and headed them all back home, forcing Bush to concede.”
George limped back to Texas and spent the weekend licking his wounds. Then he did the math: he had 400 delegates; Ronald Reagan had more than 1,000; only 998 were needed for the nomination. Reluctantly, Bush approved the concession statement that Baker had drafted, and on Monday morning George agreed to formally withdraw from the race. He sent a telegram of congratulations to Reagan and pledged his “whole-hearted support in a united party this fall to defeat Jimmy Carter.”
By the time of the convention in July, George had released his delegates to Reagan and felt that he was entitled to be named as Reagan’s running mate. George had been passed over three times since 1968, once by Nixon and twice by Ford, and now he wanted nothing more than to run with Ronald Reagan. “If this doesn’t work out,” he told the writer Michael Kramer, “I’m gonna be the pissedest-off guy around.”
The only problem was that Reagan did not want George as his running mate. He did not like him personally and had no regard for him politically. On top of that, Nancy Reagan could not abide him. But Reagan’s polls showed that Bush would help unify the party.
“I remember flying with Reagan from L.A. back to the convention [in Detroit],” recalled the political consultant Stuart K. Spencer. “We were having a conversation when he brought up George Bush. He was still angry about the stuff Bush had said about him in the primaries. Anyway, I listened and listened and listened, and finally he stopped complaining about Bush and said, ‘What do you think?’
“I laughed and said, ‘I think you’re gonna pick George Bush.’ He said, ‘Why should I?’ And I said, ‘Because you’re flying back to a convention that’s locked you into a lot of right-wing stuff, and this guy has the reputation as a moderate, that’s why.’”
Reagan would have far preferred sharing the ticket with former President Jerry Ford, and for a few hours there was a tentative plan in place for such a dream ticket—it was being negotiated in the back rooms by Ed Meese for Reagan and Henry Kissinger for Ford. Ford was demanding everything but the rights to the Lincoln Bedroom and “Hail to the Chief.” During the convention Walter Cronkite interviewed Ford about the startling proposal of a former President’s running for Vice President. As the interview progressed, Ford described his role as one of equal responsibility in which he would have jurisdiction over the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget.
Watching the interview in his suite, Reagan jumped off the couch and pointed to the television.
“Did you hear what he said about his role?” he said to his pollster Richard Wirthlin. “Sounds like he wants to be a co-president.” Reagan told Ed Meese to immediately call off the negotiations.
A few hours later, Ford went to Reagan’s suite dressed in a navy blue blazer and gray slacks. He and Reagan went into a private room, where they talked: Ford said that he did not think his serving as Vice President would be of value, but he agreed to help in every other way to elect Reagan and defeat Jimmy Carter.
Still Reagan did not want to pick Bush, who also had watched the Cronkite interview and now assumed the worst: a Reagan-Ford ticket. “He was padding around the nineteenth-floor hallwa
y in tan khakis and a red polo shirt,” reported Michael Kramer. “He was pulling on a Stroh’s beer, and I was his only company . . . The deal had been cut: Ford was going to be ‘co-president,’ although no one knew what that meant.”
“It’s the second time Ford has screwed you, isn’t it?” Kramer asked. Mellowed by a few beers, George smiled.
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re right. But you know, it builds character.”
Reagan longed to make his good friend Paul Laxalt, the senator from Nevada, his running mate, but Reagan’s campaign strategists objected.
“Why can’t I pick someone I like?” Reagan asked plaintively. His aides explained that an ideological soul mate would not help the ticket, and Laxalt’s ties to casino owners in Las Vegas might be problematic. Bush was the most logical choice, they said, but Reagan resisted, harking back to New Hampshire.
“I’m wary of a man who freezes under pressure,” he said. “George froze that night. That haunts me.”
He conferred with his pollster, and again the consensus was Bush. Reagan called Stuart Spencer.
“You still feel the same way about Bush?”
“Yeah. Nothing’s changed.”
Reagan grimaced and nodded toward the phone. The call was placed to Bush’s suite; Jim Baker answered and handed George the receiver while Barbara ushered everyone out of the room.
“George, it seems to me that [out of all the other candidates] the fellow who came the closest and got the most votes for president ought to be the logical choice for vice-president,” said Reagan. “Will you take it?”
George jumped at the offer.
“He didn’t have a moment’s hesitation,” Reagan wrote in his memoir.
The cartoonist Pat Oliphant captured the essence of the evening by showing Reagan, pompadour piled high on his head, talking to Ford, who was pulling clubs out of his golf bag: “Well,” says Reagan, “I guess I’m stuck with him . . . However, he does understand the role of a Vice President.”
