Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (36 page)

Many evaluators nonetheless correctly concede Reagan’s contributions. From the beginning of his presidency, he had rejected the notion that the Cold War must be permanent or that Communism would long remain a force in world politics. In holding such beliefs, he ignored the opinions of virtually all experts, including CIA officials, most of whom had failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1981 on, he had favored nuclear arms reductions along the lines of the INF treaty. Though hard-liners in the Soviet Union had frustrated him before 1985, he had bided his time, meanwhile building up American defenses. Reagan’s unyielding insistence on SDI, his admirers emphasize, frightened Gorbachev, who understood that the United States had far greater economic and technological capability. All these policies, they add, established Reagan as a dedicated foe of Communism, thereby enabling him to do what more liberal American leaders might not have been able to do politically: negotiate an INF treaty, sell it to the American people, and get it through the U.S. Senate.
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Other observers give Gorbachev more of the credit. SDI, they agree, worried him. Moreover, the initiative was a bizarre and diplomatically destabilizing idea that impeded serious conversation with the Soviets. By arousing hard-liners in the USSR, these critics add, SDI probably made it more difficult for Gorbachev to seek accommodation with the United States. The key to success, these observers maintain, was Gorbachev’s early recognition that the USSR must cut its spending for armament and strike a deal to prevent further escalations in military technology. The road to warmer relations and to the end of the Cold War, they insist, began with the economic and political crises of the Soviet Union—a vast Potemkin village that Gorbachev other reformers were determined to reshape—not in the White House. Not everything good that happens in the world, these observers remind us, emanates primarily from the United States.
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These debates may go on forever, or at least until many more key documents are declassified and made available to scholars. In any event, it is clear that both Gorbachev and Reagan negotiated in good faith to ameliorate tensions. A good deal of difficult diplomacy lay ahead—long after the United States and the USSR (and, later, Russia) started cutting back their arms, the two nations still possessed awesome nuclear might, notably in long-range weapons—but after 1989 the world was a safer place than it had been for decades. And SDI was never deployed. Reagan’s role in helping to ease the nuclear threat enabled him to regain some of the popularity he had lost as a result of the Iran-contra scandal and to leave office with very high (68 percent) job approval ratings.
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Facilitating the melting down of the Cold War, which almost no one had predicted in 1981, was his most important international legacy as president.

7
Bush 41

Americans, who are intensely proud of their democratic institutions, have often picked patricians and multimillionaires as their presidential candidates. In the years between 1904 and 1960, these included Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, FDR, Adlai Stevenson, and JFK.

In selecting George Herbert Walker Bush as its nominee in 1988, the Republican Party followed this tradition. Bush, who turned sixty-four in June of that year, was the son of Dorothy Walker and Prescott Bush, a stern and accomplished man who had risen to become managing partner of Brown Brothers, Harriman, a top Wall Street firm, and to serve between 1953 and 1963 as a Republican senator from Connecticut. George fashioned a record that would have made any parent proud. Sent to Phillips Academy, Andover, he flourished as a student and an athlete and was chosen president of his senior class. After graduating in 1942, he quickly joined the navy, becoming its youngest pilot. During World War II he flew fifty-eight missions in the Pacific, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross for completing a mission in a burning plane before bailing into the sea. After the war he attended Yale, where he captained the baseball team and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948. His accomplishments to that point were as substantial as any presidential candidate in modern United States history.
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After leaving Yale, Bush set out for Texas, where family money helped him fare handsomely in the oil development business. He then turned to the world of politics, serving on Capitol Hill as a Republican representative from a suburban Houston district between 1967 and 1971. After losing to Lloyd Bentsen in a race for the Senate in 1970, he served as Nixon’s ambassador to the United Nations and then as chairman of the GOP National Committee. Ford then tapped him to head the CIA. Though he failed to win the GOP presidential nomination in 1980, he became Reagan’s running mate. For the next eight years he was a discreet and totally loyal vice president—so conscientiously that many people, slow to recognize that he was keenly ambitious and competitive, derided him as a “wimp” and an “errand boy” who would never be able to stand on his own. Others who knew him (including some Reagan loyalists) thought he was a political chameleon who had no strong opinions. Most people who worked with him, however, found him to be an unusually genial, courteous, and well-mannered man. He generated considerable and lasting loyalty among his inner circle of friends and advisers.
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Though Bush hit a few snags on the path to his nomination in 1988, he proved to be more popular in the primaries than his major foes, Kansas senator Robert Dole and Pat Robertson, who had resigned his ordination in the Southern Baptist Convention before launching his challenge.
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By March, Bush was assured of the nomination, which—like all major party presidential nominees in late twentieth-century America—he took on the first ballot at the GOP convention in August. (By then, the political conventions had become scripted, anachronistic rituals, not decision-making events.) Bush selected Indiana senator J. Danforth Quayle as his running mate, arousing widespread complaints that he had chosen a poorly regarded senator who had used family connections to escape the draft during the Vietnam War. Though the criticism of Quayle, an often lampooned figure, was unnerving, Bush—who was distrusted by many conservatives—hoped that his running mate, a vocal supporter of “family values,” would help him with white evangelical Christian voters. In accepting the presidential nomination, Bush gave a strong speech in which he pledged to hold the line on taxation. “Read my lips,” he told the delegates. “No new taxes.”
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A herd of hopefuls left the starting gates in 1987 to run for the Democratic nomination, with Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Senator Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee, and Senator Paul Simon of Illinois in the pack. Delaware senator Joseph Biden, former Colorado senator Gary Hart, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson charged ahead among the early leaders. Well before 1988, however, the suspiciousness incited by Vietnam and Watergate had become pervasive and had spurred increasingly aggressive investigative reporters to dig into the personal lives of major candidates. It was soon revealed that Biden had plagiarized speeches. In May 1987, the
Miami Herald
broke a story indicating that Hart, a married man who had dared reporters to pry into his personal life, had been having an affair with a part-time model. Newspapers and tabloids featured a photograph of Hart sitting on a yacht,
Monkey Business
, with the model, Donna Rice, perched on his knee. Both aspirants dropped out of the race.

Jackson fared well for a while, winning five southern primaries on “Super Tuesday” in early March. But he was well to the left of most people in the party. As a black man, he was thought to have no chance of winning a national election. And Jackson had his own political liabilities. Speaking in New York four years earlier, he had referred to the city with the antiSemitic slur of “Hymietown.” When Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, described Judaism as a “gutter religion,” Jackson refused to criticize the statement.

The winner of what proved to be a contested campaign for the Democratic nomination was Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who was the son of successful Greek immigrants. Winning the early primary in neighboring New Hampshire, Dukakis, a liberal on most issues, built a large lead in fund-raising. He then maintained a precarious advantage by winning key primaries over Gore and Jackson in the next few months. Like Bush, he took the nomination on the first ballot. At the convention he balanced the ticket by choosing Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, a conservative, as his running mate. No Democratic presidential candidate had ever won the election in November without carrying the state of Texas.

When the Democratic convention came to a close in July, Dukakis enjoyed a seventeen-point lead in the polls over Bush. As a three-times elected governor, he had a reputation as an incorruptible, intelligent, and efficient administrator. In an effort to capitalize on his strengths—and to attract the broad middle of the electorate—he announced in his acceptance speech, “This election is not about ideology, it’s about competence.” During the campaign he sought to link Bush to the Iran-contra scandal, asking voters, “Where was George?” Other Democrats zeroed in on Quayle, ridiculing him as a draft dodger and as an intellectual “lightweight.” Texas treasurer Ann Richards, a feisty campaigner, had great sport mocking Bush’s efforts (which were clumsy) to adopt the folksy ways of Texans, by saying that he had been “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Democrats also ridiculed his malapropisms, or “Bush-speak.” On one occasion Bush announced, “Everyone who has a job wants a job”; on another he promised to increase “experts,” when he meant to say “exports.”
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Like Jimmy Carter in 1976, however, Dukakis lost his early lead. Try as he did, he could not prove that Bush had known about the arms-for-hostages swaps. The former vice president protested that he had been “out of the loop.”
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Though voters appeared to agree that Dukakis was “competent,” they also found him to be aloof, imperturbably calm, and without clearly articulated goals. The satirist Mort Sahl groused that Dukakis was “the only colorless Greek in America.” Republicans made fun of an ad, intended by Democratic strategists to show that Dukakis would be a strong commander-in-chief, which showed him grinning foolishly, clad in a jumpsuit and an outsized, Snoopy-style helmet while riding a tank. Bush quipped, “He thinks a naval exercise is something you find in Jane Fonda’s exercise books.” Bush also seized on the fact that Dukakis (in an earlier term as governor in 1977) had vetoed a law requiring teachers to lead students in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Dukakis’s advisers had told him, correctly, that the measure, which would have subjected non-complying teachers to criminal charges, was unconstitutional. Bush was unmoved, labeling Dukakis a “card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.”
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While coping with symbolic and cultural matters such as these, Dukakis had trouble holding his unwieldy party together. Centrists in the Democratic Leadership Council formed in 1985 still battled liberals for supremacy. Liberals also fought with one another, fragmenting the old New Deal coalition. Robert Reich, a Massachusetts liberal, complained after the election that “liberalism, and, inevitably, the Democratic Party, too, appeared less the embodiment of a shared vision and more a tangle of narrow appeals for labor unions, teachers, gays, Hispanics, blacks, Jews . . . fractious Democratic constituencies, each promoting its own agenda.”
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Though Republicans had to contend with internal divisions, they were not so quarrelsome as the Democrats. For the most part they agreed on key issues, notably the need for high defense spending, low taxes, and (at least in theory) small government in most domestic matters. They remained popular among politically engaged voters who supported the causes of the Religious Right.
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Republicans also enjoyed large advantages in fund raising. By 1988, the number of corporate political action committees, most of which were solidly Republican, had risen to 1,806 (compared to 89 in 1974 and 1,206 in 1980). By contrast, labor had 355 PACs.
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It was reported later that 249 contributors, barred by campaign finance regulations from giving more than $1,000 directly to a candidate, donated $100,000 or more to the GOP’s “Team 100,” an organization of big-money donors, in 1988. This was permitted under the law, which had gaping loopholes.
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Bush was a centrist Republican who had never been comfortable with the right wing within his party. A moderate Episcopalian, he had few ties with the evangelical Christian Right, members of which tended to regard him as an irreligious country-club Republican. But in 1988, as during his years as vice president, he was careful not to antagonize it. Like many other Republicans, he demonized the
l
word, “liberal.” Opposing gun control, he supported voluntary prayers in the public schools and the death penalty for people who committed extraordinarily violent crimes. He opposed abortion, except in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother. Among the aides who helped him get in touch with socially conservative religious people was his eldest son, George W. Bush. Young George had kicked a serious drinking habit two years earlier and had found God. “It was goodbye Jack Daniels, hello Jesus,” he said.

Republicans zeroed in with special zeal on what they called the “revolving door prison policy” of Dukakis’s governorship. This was a program—instituted by a Republican predecessor—which enabled prisoners to take brief furloughs. Most states, including California during Reagan’s tenure as governor, had comparable programs, as did the federal prison system, though only Massachusetts made it available to lifers.
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One of these Massachusetts prisoners was Willie Horton, a convicted first-degree murderer, who on a weekend furlough had repeatedly beaten and stabbed a man and assaulted and raped his fiancée. Dukakis, defending the program, did not discontinue it until April 1988. Some of Bush’s state party committees and independent groups circulated pictures of Horton, an ominous-looking black man, and produced TV ads that showed streams of prisoners going in and out of prison via a turnstile. Though Bush’s national committee disavowed material that identified and pictured the prisoner, there was no doubting that the Bush team knew and approved of the ads.
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Tactics like these revealed that Bush, for all his gentility, could be ruthless in pursuit of his ambitions. They also indicated that social and cultural issues involving crime and race continued to be large and divisive in American life, and that Republicans would use these issues, as they had since 1968, in order to blunt the appeal of bread-and-butter economic platforms favoring Democrats. In 1988, these negative tactics virtually dominated Bush’s campaign, making it difficult to know what he stood for. At times, he dismissed “the vision thing”—that is, the idea that he should try to sell any sweeping or inspiring message (as Reagan had tried to do) to the American people.

GOP tactics such as these relegated larger issues, such as the enormous budget deficit, to the periphery and placed Dukakis on the defensive. Until the last two weeks of the race, when he campaigned more vigorously, he seemed almost unaware of how effectively the Republicans had identified him—and the Democratic Party—as “soft” on issues that ranged from crime to foreign policy. Dukakis also seemed reluctant to take the offensive. When he was asked in a presidential debate if he would favor the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, he responded by saying that he would not and then by offering a cool, impersonal, and—it seemed to many onlookers—politically fatal defense of his opposition to capital punishment.
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Bush referred to his opponent as the “ice man.”

Dukakis labored under one final, perhaps crucial political disadvantage: In 1988, Republicans claimed credit for having lifted the spirits of Americans during the previous eight years. Though Iran-contra was fresh in voters’ memories, Reagan still enjoyed widespread popularity. Senate confirmation in the spring of the INF treaty solidified a popular impression that he had been resolute in his handling of the Cold War. Perhaps most important, the economy had been growing slowly but uninterruptedly since 1983. Bush, as Reagan’s vice president, benefited politically from the more optimistic national mood that had developed since the Bad Old Days of the Carter years.