George H. W. Bush

by Curt Smith

  Bush went to New Jersey, a swing state he had won in 1988, and Kentucky, where Clinton’s southern lilt was beguiling, if not convincing. He signed the Poultry Act of 1992 in Louisiana, with its history of liking such rogues as Clinton, but which shared Bush’s “favorite bumper sticker: ‘Annoy the media: Re-elect Bush.’” In Michigan, another 1988 swing win, the president addressed the International Association of Chiefs of Police, saying, “People who act like animals have no place in decent society.” The Gipper could not have said it better. On October 27, 1992, in Ohio, Bush tried to say that the recession had been over since 1991. He announced that growth had risen for the fifth-straight quarter, at 2.7 percent, later revised to 3.5, and unemployment had fallen for the third-straight month.

  It is hard to define the clang of noise and chant and caffeine and game plan and faded dream and changing hope that is an American presidential campaign. Celebrities are drawn for reasons noble, ignoble, or somewhere in between. On October 28 Bruce Willis and the Oak Ridge Boys joined Bush in Strongsville, Ohio. On election eve Poppy said, “These Oak Ridge Boys are really great. I wish you could have been with us on the plane—every single one of you. . . . I wish you could have heard these guys singing those beautiful gospel songs. It made us—not a dry eye in the house.” In Columbus Arnold Schwarzenegger joined Bush about the same time that “they [Clinton and Gore] say we are less than Germany and slightly better than Sri Lanka.” Said Bush, “My dog, Millie, knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos.”

  By then incessant thirty- and sixty-minute infomercials had boosted Perot’s polling support near 20 percent. Bush’s manic campaigning—in one day, five states; saying of Clinton’s promised hundred-day economic plan, “You’re more apt to see a UFO than you are his plan”; relentlessly quoting Horace Greeley’s “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wing: only character endures”—had brought him within single digits. “We had the momentum,” said Bush. “The crowds, the polls, character as the issue” until an October surprise halted his last-week surge and, as he said, “put the last nail in our campaign.”

  Lawrence Walsh was a Columbia Law School graduate, Thomas Dewey protégé, deputy attorney general, and American Bar Association president who was named in December 1986 as independent counsel in charge of the Iran-Contra investigation. On Friday, October 30, 1992, Walsh, by now the prototypal RINO, re-indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on one count of “false statements.” The indictment mocked long-standing Justice Department policy of not indicting a political figure out of a grand jury after August of an election year. Indeed, Walsh went further, implicating Bush in the scandal, though the accusation was irrelevant to the indictment. Clinton administration attorney Lanny Davis later called the decision to indict before, not after, the election “bizarre.”

  That day, however, Clinton echoed Walsh’s take. A day later Bush replied with little of the politesse of his Greenwich breeding. “Over the past twenty-four hours, Governor Clinton has become panicked. He uses the word ‘pathetic.’ Well, he ought to know a performance like that when he sees one,” Bush said. “He’s afraid for the power that he’s lusted for, the political viability that he wrote about when he was demonstrating against this country over in England, is going to slip away from him. [So] he’s begun a series of personal attacks on my character, and he has basically called me a liar.” Such charges, Bush said, weren’t new. “I have responded to them repeatedly and under oath . . . in numerous investigations in a six-year, Democrat-run political fiasco that has cost the taxpayers $40 million.”

  Next day Bush canvassed Michigan and Connecticut, then New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Louisiana on election eve, ending in Texas, at Houston’s Sports Arena, introduced by Bob Hope, where nostalgia was in vogue. “What an awesome array. What a great homecoming and a great welcome back,” Bush began. “Texas, that’s where it all started for Barbara and me: forty-four years ago, when we moved out to Texas, West Texas, we voted in our first presidential election out there; here in Houston, thirty years ago, when I gave my very first speech on my own behalf. And tonight, in Texas, I will give my last speech ever on my own behalf as a candidate for reelection as president of the United States.”

  Bush’s talk was home talk. Among friends and family, he could confide—and did. “Pundits” said he was behind. “So what? I have a feeling the gods are smiling on us, and I know we’re going to win this campaign.” Even in a time “of uncertainty and transition, the American people share our values. And that’s one of the reasons we’ll do it, some simple, commonsense beliefs that Barbara and I learned right here in the great state of Texas”—belief in faith, family, and friends; that America always will be “one Nation under God”; in “the word of honor.” Texas is where “I learned about character. Character is what you are when no one’s looking and what you say when no one is listening.”

  Bush readily conceded that “I’ve never been too hot with words. In fact, some of the more elite pundits say I can’t finish a sentence,” on occasion “being right.” The people knew, however, that “I care very deeply about our nation. And I believe that we must treat this precious resource with great care,” helping and being kind to people. It was our dowry, passed on “to our kids and to our grandkids.” Voting was a ritual too; Bush requested theirs. Then it was over—the campaigning, the soliciting, the trying to talk in voters’ language, which so entranced John F. Kennedy—“The damnedest thing is I love it,” JFK had said. So did Bush, who, unlike JFK, saw electioneering as a prelude to, not part of, governance.

  On Election Day 1992, scuttlebutt passed less on the Internet—it barely existed—than by word of mouth. Even in the East, citizens had barely begun to vote as I arrived at the White House, hoping for the best but expecting the worst—my presidential two-step in every election save 1972 and 1984, when even yard signers, precinct captains, and the corner drunk could presage a Nixon and Reagan sweep.

  In the 1981 film Body Heat, William Hurt said of the Kathleen Turner character, “She would do what was necessary.” What was necessary for Bush was to win Ohio and New Jersey; any path to 270 electoral votes led through them.

  Numbers are statistics, but not always static. In 1992 Michigan and Pennsylvania headed ten states that haven’t voted Republican since. In 2000 and 2004 the Democrats didn’t win a single southern electoral vote. By contrast, Bill Clinton won four states of the Confederacy in 1992—and became the first Democrat to win every northeastern electoral vote since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Clinton also won many states that Republicans had regularly won after LBJ’s tsunami: California, Colorado, Illinois, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Vermont, even New Hampshire, Bush’s 1988 savior—and New Jersey, by 79,341 votes. In 1988 Bush followed Nixon’s advice to “carpet bomb” Ohio, treating it as intensely as a governor would. Four years later Clinton edged him there by 90,632 votes. Perot’s 1,036,426 Ohio total was mostly white, moderate, and middle/working class—Bush’s base. Poppy had not done “what was necessary.”

  Early Election Day, talking with Nixon’s office, I found that New Jersey and Ohio, achingly close, were gone—thus the election. In eleven northeastern, midwestern, and mostly southern states, Perot’s candidacy topped Clinton’s victory margin over Bush. As it was, despite Perot, an unpopulist Bush high command, a tenacious Democratic economic game plan, and 1992 recession less reality than myth, Clinton got only 43.5 percent of the electorate, or 44,909,906 votes. Put another way, Bush’s 37.5 percent, or 39,104,550 votes, was the lowest incumbent’s total seeking reelection since William Howard Taft’s 23.2 percent in 1912 vs. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

  According to CNN / USA Today polling, 34 percent of the electorate was conservative, 19 liberal, and 38 moderate. Perot drew more support from Bush conservatives than Clinton liberals. Clinton trailed narrowly among married men and women, leading widely among unmarried. Two in ten whites favored Perot; the rest tied between Bush and Clinton. Minorities broke heavily De
mocratic. White Protestants, nearly half the vote, preferred Bush, 47–33. Catholics and especially Jews supported Clinton, whose backing was also strong among voters ages seventeen to twenty-nine and sixty and older. Bush tied in between. He also had an edge among college graduates. Clinton led at the poles: no graduation or a postgraduate education.

  Family finance fractured, as it has since Hoover: those who made under $50,000, particularly under $15,000, backed Clinton; over $50,000, Bush. Clinton won the East; as Bush said in his “last speech” in Houston, “I got the book-learning back East, but I learned about life right here in Texas.” The Midwest backed Clinton, 42–37 percent, Perot interceding. The South repaid Bush’s love, 43–41. The West was on the cusp of turning almost as solidly Democrat as the South once had been: Clinton, 43–34.

  In the 1980s Lee Greenwood made “God Bless the USA” the GOP’s unofficial anthem, akin to the Democrats’ “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The Republicans’ song should really be “Don’t Fence Me In.” In cities with over 500,000 people, Clinton detonated Bush, 58–23, Perot invisible. Among cities with 50,000–499,999, Clinton decisively led, 56–33. In suburbia, once as reliable as Ward and June Cleaver, the president lost, 40–39. In rural America, they were tied. One in five backed Perot, who talked their own language down to the cornpone and the twang.

  Perot lacked, of course, what Bush possessed—the depth that the small town and suburbia once had recognized and would again. At 10:20 p.m. election night, the president spoke at Houston’s Westin Galleria Hotel to concede. “Well, here’s the way I see it. Here’s the way we see it and the country should see it, that the people have spoken. And we respect the majesty of the democratic system.” Bush had just called Clinton in Little Rock “and offered my congratulations. I want the country to know that our entire administration will work closely with his team to ensure the smooth transition of power.”

  To the nation, 41 observed, “We have fought the good fight, and we’ve kept the faith. And I believe I have upheld the honor of the presidency of the United Sates. Now I ask that we stand behind our new president.” It was not a night for speeches, he said, but Bush wanted to share a special message “with the young people of America. Do not be deterred, kept away from public service, by the smoke and fire of a campaign year or the ugliness of politics.”

  As for the president, he planned to get “very active in the grandchild business” and to find ways to serve. “The definition of a successful life,” he said, “must include serving others.” How one might do that, hearing Bush conclude, and what form it might take, was a question not without its mystery.

  TWELVE

  A Morning After

  The shock of losing the presidency, expected or not, yielded to simple sorrow by the time Bush returned to the White House the afternoon after Tuesday’s election. “Maybe you didn’t read the election returns,” he greeted cheering staff near the Rose Garden. “It didn’t go out the way we wanted. Now we will go inside, readjusting. But you have given us a marvelous life.” Bush praised Dan Quayle—“The guy almost killed himself out there, hard work day in and out, and what he wasn’t doing Marilyn was”—concluding, “It’s been a wonderful four years . . . and I think we’ve contributed something to the country. Maybe history will record it that way.” On Saturday Bush began his weekly radio address by saying, “Way back in 1945, Winston Churchill was defeated at the polls. He said, ‘I have been given the Order of the Boot.’ That is the exact same position in which I find myself today”—not a position he “would have preferred, but it is a judgment I honor.” Bush hoped there would be “no finger pointing, no playing the blame game,” but inevitably there was.

  Depending on the source, he should never have vowed not to raise new taxes. Others thought the vow no crime but breaking it a blunder. His domestic agenda was overly me-too—or was it so robust that Bush had to raise revenue to afford it? He should have dumped Quayle. He should have used the vice president more effectively. Bush should have gone to Baghdad. W.’s later misadventure proved he was right not to. He should never have let Buchanan keynote the GOP Convention. Bush wouldn’t have had to if he had grasped Pat’s and later H. Ross Perot’s core. The president should have emulated Buchanan’s populism—thus blocking Perot. He should have remade the GOP in the image of his dad—corporate, socially liberal, and prone to compromise. He should not have hyped Desert Storm, as if running for reelection in a rear-view mirror. He should not have pledged a “kinder, gentler” nation; if America wanted that, Alan Alda, not Reagan, would have been the first actor-president. In 1995 Bush, looking back, told me, “I should have spent more time on speeches, on the importance of words generally. That’s the one thing I’d do differently.” Your choice. Take your pick.

  Any one of or a combination of these ideas might have brought victory, which seemed so sure for most of 1991. Later, leaving the presidency, Bush quoted Theodore Roosevelt, who thought that credit or blame belonged to those “who actually strive to do the deeds.” You caught a whiff of that the day after Election Day. “I can only say it was my administration, my campaign,” Bush told the staff. “I captained the team, and I take full responsibility for the loss. No one else was responsible. I am responsible.” A week later he asked a poignant farewell dinner with the Senate leadership at Union Station if writer Steve Provost’s comparison of him to Churchill’s “Order of the Boot” had been “overly harsh.” Probably not, he concluded. “Listen, being in the company of Churchill ain’t that bad. I gave him [Provost] a little raise and sent him back to Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  Thus began an interregnum of sad songs and long farewells—as Maurice Chevalier sang indelibly in Gigi, “I remember it well.” First, Bush told “private life” what it would soon be up against. “You’ve created a bit of a monster,” he told Senate wives about Mrs. Bush. “You’ve given her a whole new self-confidence which is”—he paused amid laughter, self-confidence being her excessive, not recessive, gene. The president concluded, “Give her a wide berth because she’s a bundle of energy, shifting gears from the present.” That day, a week after the election, author Timothy Naftali relates, the Bushes made an impromptu late-night visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Designer and architect Maya Lin’s huge V slices into the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Veterans were marking the tenth anniversary of the memorial’s birth with a daylong reading of the 58,137 names carved into its black-granite face of those who died in the one major war America lost.

  Just before midnight the president was taking a solitary walk on the South Lawn when the notion came to him. He woke Barbara up and asked the Secret Service if a last-minute visit to the Mall could be arranged. Bush didn’t want attention—as always, he remembered his mother: be a sportsman; accept the verdict. What he wanted was to find the reason, thus dim the hurt, of his rebuff. He had thought he would win. His life had been based on service. Now the country he loved had for the moment turned its back. Why? For a long time he did not understand. That month Bush wrote brother Jonathan a letter. “I will always regret not finishing the course,” he said, recalling a Kenyan runner in the Summer Olympics who had limped across the finish line forty-five minutes behind the leaders. “He was hurting bad. ‘My country didn’t send me all the way to start the race. They sent me here to finish it.’ I didn’t finish the course, and I will always regret that.” Both knew that a greater regret lay ahead.

  Bush’s trek to the sacrosanct V recalled the two achievements he deemed the proudest of his life: Poppy’s pre-voting-age service in World War II and conducting two wars as what Gen. Wesley Clark called “a brilliant commander in chief” that buried the curse of Vietnam. Asked as president what he wanted on his gravestone, Bush drew a simple marker with a cross and his serviceman’s identification number on one side and “He loved Barbara very much” on the other. Many Vietnam veterans had been greeted shamefully on their return from service. As much as any American, Bush restored the military to its rightful niche, the Gulf War turni
ng veterans into heroes. It was natural for him to tear that night at the Vietnam Memorial—also, less than two weeks later, at losing the person who had loved him most since birth.

  “It was the idea of obligation to others, as preached by Dorothy Bush, that drove the President into a life of service, now winding down in bittersweet days,” wrote Time’s Hugh Sidey as Bush and his daughter Dorothy (Doro) flew to Greenwich, Connecticut, to be by his mother’s side in her final hours. Bush was losing the job he had wanted his adult life. His “Mum,” he called her, had most forged his entire life. Sidey wrote, “George Bush was shaped and tempered by his mother’s nature. His was a soul finally formed by strata of love and discipline relentlessly laid down. Bush was lucky, so very lucky, to be rooted in a woman like [her].”

  Bush and his daughter “sat next to her bed sobbing,” the president confided that night. “Her little frayed Bible, her old one was there, and I looked in it and there were some notes that I had written her from Andover.” Dorothy Walker Bush, ninety-one, died later that day. “Her death,” wrote Sidey, was “added anguish in the President’s season of political rejection, a burden few men have known.” Yet—this is the thing—leaving the office he had worked a lifetime to attain, hosting one holiday function after another, smiling, guesting, retrieving names, telling stories—I recall this from a Christmas party—or meeting Clinton in the Oval Office November 18, Bush never revealed to the outside world the inner turmoil of a broken heart. You went on, never complained, took refuge in what lay ahead.