The Family (61 page)

Pete Teeley issued a statement: “What Bush did is show the American people he wasn’t going to be pushed around by Dan Rather.”

Dan Rather defended himself with his own statement: “Trying to ask honest questions and trying to be persistent about answers is part of a reporter’s job.”

The columnist Mike Royko shuddered: “It took him only a few grim minutes to turn a rich elitist like George Bush into a sympathetic character for millions of people who work for their paychecks. Think what Rather could do for a guy who doesn’t look like his mommie still takes him to tennis camp.”

The next day Herblock, the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist for
The Washington Post
, drew the Vice President as a skinny boxer wearing trunks marked “Iran-Contra Connection.” The trunks had fallen to his ankles as he waved a scrawny arm in victory, barely able to hold up the heavy boxing glove. With the other glove he covered his manhood.

Iran-contra continued to dog Bush, and he bristled at reporters who did not accept his declarations of innocence. He became particularly exercised by David Hoffman’s coverage in
The Washington Post
. One evening on Air Force Two he asked some reporters to join him for his nightly martinis. “After a couple of silver bullets, he let us know exactly what he thought of Hoffman,” recalled Cragg Hines, a
Houston Chronicle
columnist. “Bush said, ‘To his face it will always be ‘Hi ya, David. How are ya?’ Behind his back, it’s ‘Fuck you, David.’ Bush put his hand under the table and gave him the finger.”

By then George’s niceness had morphed into nastiness, as it always did under political pressure. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a high-school student asked him about his changing position on abortion. He saw the student was reading from a pamphlet put out by his rival Republican Representative Jack Kemp of New York.

“I didn’t know these things were being passed around,” he said. He snatched the flyer and ripped it to shreds.

“Finis,” he said, stalking off.

The Vice President fell on his face in the Iowa caucuses and placed an embarrassing third, giving Senator Dole the lead going into New Hampshire. By the time George arrived in Portsmouth, he seemed a chastened man. “I don’t always articulate, but I always do feel,” he told one crowd. “Here I stand, warts and all.” Those who had always admired Bush’s decency, his sense of honor and fair play, took heart that the nice guy had returned. Then he thumped Dole for “nearly single-handedly” bringing down the GOP ticket in 1976 and chided him for divorcing his wife who had nursed him back to health after the war. “In my family loyalty is a strength,” George said. “It’s not a character flaw.” He authorized a series of slash ads attacking Dole as “Senator Straddle” for flip-flopping on taxes. Watching his polls rise after the ads ran convinced George that negative trumps positive in the vulture’s game, and that was how he decided to play. So much for Mr. Nice Guy. He won the New Hampshire primary with the help of the state’s governor, John Sununu, and swept the Super Tuesday primaries, which ensured the GOP nomination. Still, to beat Dukakis he knew that at some point, he would have to stand on the shoulders of the President.

George needed the King’s blessing, but the Queen was balking. Nancy Reagan was in no hurry to have her husband anoint his successor. Every time the Bush campaign presented a plan to the President for such a tribute, Mrs. President said no. She had vetoed a dinner in February and a reception in April. She even forced cancellation of her husband’s appearance at a Bush rally held within walking distance of the White House. Finally she agreed to a tepid endorsement on May 11, 1988, at a dinner in Washington, D.C., where Reagan was to address three thousand of his staunchest supporters, each of whom paid fifteen hundred dollars to attend. The Bush camp quickly submitted a fulsome endorsement, which Nancy immediately nixed. “No,” she said. “It’s Ronnie’s dinner!”

That evening a black-tie crowd paid homage to the Gipper and watched a dewy twenty-minute film of “great moments in the Reagan years” set to inspirational music with fluttering American flags. Filled with cheerful nostalgia, the film barely mentioned the name George Bush. The President stood to roaring applause and delivered a stirring speech about “morning in America” and “a shining city on a hill.” He then ended on a quiet note:

If I may, I’d like to take a moment to say just a word about my future plans. In doing so, I’ll break a silence I’ve maintained for some time with regard to the Presidential candidates. I intend to campaign, as hard as I can. My candidate is a former member of Congress, Ambassador to China, Ambassador to the United Nations, Director of the CIA, and National Chairman of the Republican Party. I’m going to work as hard as I can to make Vice President Bush the next President of the United States.

There was a round of applause when the President mentioned George by name, although he mispronounced “Bush” to sound like “Blush.”

As the crowd waited for a stem-winder endorsement, the President wound down. “Now it’s on to New Orleans,” he said, “and on to the White House.” He waved good night to the adoring crowd and strode out of the ballroom with the First Lady.

Barbara Bush was furious, and after eight years of knee-cracking service her husband was humiliated. They both cringed when they saw the front-page headline in the next day’s
Washington Post
: “Reagan Gives Bush a Terse Endorsement.” The subhead said: “Brevity of Remarks at Fund-Raising Dinner Baffles Republican Activists.”
The New York Times
noted: “Bush Camp Longs for Signs of More Support by Reagan.”

The President’s restrained endorsement did nothing to lift the Vice President in the polls. Bush continued to trail Dukakis into the summer. By the time the Democrats gathered in Atlanta for their national convention in July 1988, they had decided that George, as they called him, was some sort of national joke. The keynote speaker, Ann Richards, the Texas state treasurer, brought down the house when she said, “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

The Texas agriculture commissioner, Jim Hightower, poked fun at Bush as a “toothache of a man, telling us to stay the course and threatening to lead us from tweedledum to tweedledumber.”

In his folksy, homespun Texas style, Hightower drawled: “His is an upper-class world in which wealth is given to you at birth. George Bush was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”

The most blistering attack was delivered by Senator Edward Kennedy, who called George a “hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing” Vice President. With rhetorical flourish Kennedy asked where George was when the Reagan-Bush administration made its biggest mistakes.

“At least Ronald Reagan accepts the blame as well as the credit for the policies of the last eight years,” said Kennedy. “But not George Bush, who on question after question keeps burying his head in his hands and hiding from the record.”

The senator cited the Iran-contra scandal and the delegates screamed: “Where was George?” He cited the indictment of Panama’s Manuel Noriega and drug trafficking in Central America, and the delegates shouted: “Where was George?” He cited the proposed cuts in aid to the elderly, and the delegates yelled: “Where was George?” He decried the administration’s veto of a civil rights bill, and the delegates chorused: “Where was George?”

“When those decisions were being made, I think it is fair to ask where was George?” Kennedy said. “George Bush is the man who is never there. And he won’t be there after the clock strikes noon on January 20, 1989 [Inauguration Day].”

Wound up to a frenzy, the delegates clapped their hands and stomped their feet as they chanted, “Where was George? Where was George? Where was George?”

Watching in Kennebunkport, Barbara Bush hissed with fury. She called Ann Richards “that woman with all the hair,” and she dismissed Senator Kennedy with withering disdain. “That man has no right to even utter my husband’s name.”

George was spared the Democratic spectacle that touched off his wife’s wrath. He had gone fishing in Wyoming with Secretary of the Treasury James A. Baker III, whom he had persuaded to take charge of his faltering campaign. Bush made Baker an offer he could not refuse: “I become President; you become Secretary of State.”

Ethnic Americans were reveling in the nomination of Michael Dukakis. As Jeffrey Eugenides wrote in
Middlesex
(published in 2002):

This was 1988. Maybe the time had finally come when anyone—or at least not the same old someones—could be President. Behold the banners at the Democratic Convention! Look at the bumper stickers on all the Volvos. “Dukakis.” A name with more than two vowels in it running for President! The last time that had happened was Eisenhower (who looked good on a tank). Generally speaking, Americans like their president to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. If they have more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice.

George’s election was still far from certain. For weeks he had been running eighteen points behind Dukakis. His problem was summed up by
Time
in its convention-eve cover story: “George Bush—in Search of Stature.” His top aides had been urging him for months to develop his ideas and arbitrage the future. “Oh, you mean the vision thing,” he said to Lee Atwater, clearly exasperated. George had no inclination to conceptualize and said more than once he did not need to have a vision. No one within his new circle of born-again evangelicals thought to mention a pertinent passage from the Book of Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

By the time of the GOP convention, George had been widely ridiculed as a man without vision and without the ability to communicate one should it come his way. He knew that his acceptance speech was crucial in defining him as a person and as a President. He reached out to Reagan’s lyricist, Peggy Noonan, who had composed some of his sweetest music. George asked the speechwriter for her help. “I’ve got to give people a better idea of myself,” he said. She gave him both a voice and a vision.

In the most memorable speech of his career, the sixty-four-year-old Vice President pledged to “complete the mission” begun by Ronald Reagan. George expressed his hope for a “kinder and gentler nation,” echoed years later in his son’s pledge to be a “compassionate conservative.” The Vice President applauded the goodness of people who helped others and said that if everyone embraced volunteerism, the effort would create “a new harmony, like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” He then reassured Americans that he would continue their prosperity, uttering the most famous words he would ever speak: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”

Noonan’s speech had given the Republican candidate some substance, and George delivered her lines with strength and sincerity. He had been taking lessons for weeks from the speech coach Lilyan Wilder, whose mission was to lower his nasally pitch and slow down his rat-a-tat-tat pace to give him some semblance of statesmanship. She was paid one thousand dollars an hour and deserved one million dollars, so great was her challenge. “I did the best I could with the man,” she said wearily, “but it was difficult because . . . of . . . um . . . his busy schedule and . . .”

Her biggest hurdle was George’s own resistance. He did not think he needed help with public speaking, despite suggestions to the contrary from campaign aides, friends, and even his family. His brother Jonathan was so frustrated by George’s lackluster delivery that he recommended hiring the famous acting coach Stella Adler, but George would not hear of it. “Let the others have charisma,” he said. “I’ve got class.”

When he finished his acceptance speech, the hall was transformed into a swirl of balloons and colored streamers. Delegates waved signs that said: “God Is a Republican” and “Mom, Apple Pie and George Bush.” His family joined him onstage—his children, his brothers, his sister, and all of his grandchildren. When Jeb and Columba—she had become a U.S. citizen so she could vote for her father-in-law—walked out with their three children, the band broke into a spirited version of Ritchie Valens’s song “La Bamba.” Earlier, at the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, George had introduced Jeb and Columba to the Reagans. Pointing toward Jeb and his Mexican wife, Bush said: “That’s Jebbie’s kids. The little brown ones. Jebbie’s the big one in the yellow shirt saying the Pledge of Allegiance tonight.” Bush said Jeb’s family was his “secret weapon” with Hispanic voters.

“Oh, really,” said Nancy Reagan.

Columba Bush, who was to second, in Spanish, her father-in-law’s nomination at the convention, was hurt by his reference to her children as “the little brown ones.” She later admitted her distress but said, “[I]t turned out to be a great experience. What that made me do was start to promote Mexican art. I wanted Hispanics to be proud of their culture, to not be ashamed of being brown.”

The Vice President’s polls shot up immediately after his acceptance speech but were dissipated by ongoing criticism of his running mate, Dan Quayle. In selecting the forty-one-year-old senator from Indiana, George thought he could bridge the gender gap by giving female voters someone he said “looked like Robert Redford, only is better looking.” That mentality might have accounted for Bush’s lack of support among women. Selecting a Robert Redford look-alike certainly did not help. There had been earlier speculation that Bush might select a woman as his running mate, but Pat Schroeder, the Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, quipped it would never happen. “People would say: ‘We need a man on the ticket.’”

Quayle was a liability from the beginning. In his first press conference, the young senator stumbled over questions about his military service, why he had served in the National Guard, and whether his family used any undue influence to get him a slot in the Guard. At first he denied influence was used. Later he said he didn’t know. Finally he admitted that some phone calls were made. Within hours the headline in
The New Orleans Times-Picayune
threw the convention into a swivet: “Draft-Dodger Questions Dog Quayle.” Vietnam remained a raw nerve, especially for veterans, and Bush was bombarded by questions from journalists about Quayle’s military service. George ignored their shouted queries as he walked to his hotel suite, but his eldest son stopped to defend Quayle. “The thing that’s important is he didn’t go to Canada,” said George W. Bush, whose own National Guard service would one day come under attack.