The Family (62 page)

Dan Quayle came out of New Orleans as nothing more than a punch line to jokes about how many vice presidents it takes to sink a political campaign. Resisting pleas to remove him from the ticket, George stood by his choice but regretted having made it. At the end of the convention he confided the disaster to his dairy: “It was my decision, and I blew it, but I’m not about to say that I blew it.”

Others did it for him. When Quayle went to New York City for a fund-raiser at a golf course, reporters asked the chairman of the state Democratic Committee for a quote. “It’s appropriate that Dan Quayle is coming to New York to raise money for Republicans at a golf outing,” said John Marino, “since he is George Bush’s biggest handicap.”

Even George’s closest friends were dismayed. “After New Orleans I went to the Bushes for cocktails,” said the columnist Charles Bartlett. “As I came in, I said to George, ‘How in God’s good name did you select Quayle?’ A voice at the end of the room said, ‘I want to hear this one.’ It was Barbara. George told me he’d only met Quayle once or twice, but that Nick Brady played golf with him and Nick told George that Quayle was good on defense issues. George needed someone young and from the Midwest, so Quayle was in . . . That’s as much thought as he gave to it.”

George later claimed to have considered a long list of candidates, including Senator Robert Dole of Kansas; Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Hanford Dole; Representative Jack Kemp of New York; Governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee; Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico; Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming; Senator John Danforth of Missouri; Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana; Senator John McCain of Arizona; Senator Bill Armstrong of Colorado; Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi; Representative Lynn Martin of Illinois; Governor John Sununu of New Hampshire; Governor George Deukmejian of California; Governor John Ashcroft of Missouri; and Governor Kay Orr of Nebraska.

George liked what he saw of himself in Dan Quayle: both came from good (that is, wealthy) families, pledged DKE in college, and played decent golf. He chose his running mate without consulting anyone else, which his campaign manager made clear to reporters in numerous background briefings. “Not my choice,” said James Baker. He wanted no part of the young man who kept comparing himself to John F. Kennedy. When Quayle drew the comparison in his debate with Dukakis’s running mate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen was ready. Having been prepped by the Democrats’ best media and debate coach, Michael Sheehan, the Texas senator demolished Quayle:

QUAYLE:
It’s not just age; it’s accomplishments, it’s experience. I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency . . .

BENTSEN:
Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

“As bad a choice as some people thought Dan Quayle was, it could have been a lot worse, I assure you,” said French Wallop. “There were a few discreet inquiries made about putting my former husband, Malcolm, on the ticket when he was the senior senator from Wyoming, and that would have been a disaster for family values . . . Malcolm was conservative on all the right issues, but he was too much like George—both were rich, elite Yalies. Then there was another little issue that might have been problematical with the religious right . . . Malcolm liked to dress up in women’s clothes.”

When Mrs. Wallop discovered her husband’s predilection for cross-dressing, she said, she demanded a divorce. She sent engraved announcements to all their friends that said: “French Wallop regrets to inform you that due to a significant indiscretion on the part of her husband of 16 years he may now be reached at the following address . . .”

The Bushes did not seem prudish about the sexual eccentricities of their social set. They counted at least one transvestite, a Los Angeles power broker, among their close friends.

“I think they’re much more tolerant than the rest of their right-wing brethren on certain issues,” said Cragg Hines, a columnist for the
Houston Chronicle
. “I remember Barbara called reporters in for lunch and talked about their friendship with Stewart McKinney, a Republican congressman from Connecticut, and how angry she was that he had been outed in his obituary for AIDS. She said it was despicable that the cause of his death had to be published and embarrass his wife and children.”

The Bushes’ sensitivity to the feelings of others was reserved only for personal friends. As the 1988 campaign proved, they did not spare political opponents. In fact, George sank to a new low as he trashed Michael Dukakis with slurs and innuendos about taxes, abortion, pornography, the death penalty, and the Pledge of Allegiance. “Indeed, he has displayed a shameless talent for low blows and big lies,” wrote William Greider in
Rolling Stone
, “stunning not only his Democratic opponent but also Bush’s old friends.”

One old friend was Senator Barry Goldwater, who came out of retirement to tell George to “knock it off and start talking about the issues.” No one was more horrified than Bush’s eighty-seven-year-old mother. She told a friend she felt like weeping when she saw the inflammatory ads produced by Americans for Bush, one of George’s political action committees, that showed Willie Horton, a convicted black murderer who raped a white woman after he was furloughed from prison by then-Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts. Dorothy Bush was offended by the blatant racism of the ad, which ran for twenty-eight days only on cable televison but was reported by the networks. The Willie Horton ad was followed by another, featuring the fiancé of Horton’s rape victim, and then another featuring the sister of Horton’s murder victim. One particularly racist ad in North Dakota showed the dark visage of the first-degree murderer and told viewers: “Imagine life with Jesse Jackson as secretary of state.” Governor Dukakis had never mentioned the possibility.

Three former CIA agents spoke out against George, saying that no former director of the agency should ever be elected President. “Any CIA director carries baggage from having dealt with criminal elements around the world,” said John Stockwell, who worked for the CIA in Angola, Vietnam, and the U.S. headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Stockwell quoted from an interview with Manuel Noriega in which the Panamanian strongman said he had information that could be used to blackmail Bush. “There are a hundred Noriegas out there in the world that he has dealt with as CIA director who have similar control over [him].”

Stockwell was joined by two other dissident former agents, Philip Agee and Phil Roettinger, a retired Marine colonel. All three were touring the country, giving speeches, and urging Bush’s defeat. They said their tour was unconnected with the Dukakis campaign and that they were paying their own way by holding fund-raising events at various stops.

Philip Agee, who lost his U.S. passport for criticizing the CIA’s covert operations, said that Bush had participated in a secret operation known as “the supermarket,” in which arms were shipped to the contras with funds raised through the sale of narcotics. Such transactions, of course, violated U.S. law.

The third former agent, Phil Roettinger, said that the campaign of “lies and deceit” that Bush was waging reminded him of the psychological-warfare techniques he taught as a CIA agent. He cited as an example of character assassination the technique of doctoring a photograph so that the person targeted is shown with someone unsavory. He said that the agency usually used Communists to destroy someone’s reputation. Bush, he said, employed the same strategy to discredit Dukakis by using a photograph of Willie Horton.

Donna Brazile, a Dukakis field coordinator, accused the Bush campaign of the basest racism. “They’re using the oldest racial symbol imaginable,” she said. “A black man raping a white woman while her husband watches.”

George Bush did absolutely nothing to disassociate himself from any of the Willie Horton ads. Instead, he blamed the media for perpetuating the charges of racism against him. Even his authorized biographer, Herbert Parmet (
George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee
), found him “disingenuous.”

Yet three years later Bush continued to deny that the issue was designed to be racially divisive: “The point on Willie Horton was not Willie Horton himself. The point was, do you believe in a furlough program that releases people from jail so they can go out and rape, pillage and plunder again? That’s what the issue was.” Even Lee Atwater was so ashamed of the ugliness he had helped perpetuate that he made a public apology before his death in 1991.

By Election Day, Americans had become fed up. The turnout of 88.9 million voters was the lightest since the election of Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Exit polls showed that many of those who did go to the polls were casting negative votes against either Bush or Dukakis rather than favorable votes for either of them. “The American people will vote if they have something to vote about,” said Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a nonpartisan research group. “We had an unprecedented number of voters in 1988 who said they didn’t like either candidate.”

Still, George Bush received 53 percent of the vote and carried forty states with 426 electoral votes. No new President had ever presided over a more divided government than the one facing Bush, whose coattails were so short that he failed to reduce the opposition’s majority in the House or the Senate. He did not seem to be in the least concerned. The day after the election he held his first press conference in Houston and announced James Baker was going to be Secretary of State. The President-elect also mentioned that “George the Ripper” had retired. “The campaign is over,” he said. “No more attacks.” Proving his angel was the measure of his devil, George sent a silver foot to Ann Richards. After the Democratic convention he had belittled her as “Bessie Bouffant.” In a handwritten note, he said: “You’ve probably received a hundred of these ‘feet,’ but I want you to have this one from me—a peace offering . . . It’s real—just ask the Hunt brothers [a reference to the Texans who attempted to corner the silver market in a financial fiasco].”

Two weeks later he flew to Kennebunkport for Thanksgiving. On the grounds of the family’s estate at Walker’s Point, he continued to savor his victory. Describing the moment later to a friend, Bush said, “I wondered what my old man would say if he could see his little boy now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

N
ever a debutante, Barbara Pierce Bush entered the world of high society at the age of sixty-three when she made her debut as First Lady. Landing on the cover of
Time
as “The Silver Fox,” she burst into full bloom as a beloved American icon. When she appeared at her first inaugural luncheon in January 1989, she seized the spotlight and never let it go.

“I want you to watch me all week and remember,” she joked. “You may never see it again . . . Notice the hairdo, the makeup, the designer clothes.” She whipped open her size-sixteen jacket like a runway model, and the audience erupted with delight, cheering her spoof of herself and her assault on the lacquered image of her predecessor.

“It’s so uncalled for,” Nancy Reagan complained to a friend after watching Barbara’s swipe at her on television. “If it hadn’t been for us, they wouldn’t even be here.” Nancy felt the Bushes had gone out of their way since the election to draw negative contrasts by popping up in churches as well as various restaurants around town, something the Reagans rarely, if ever, did. After showing Barbara through the family quarters on January 11, 1989, Nancy got the stiletto the next morning when she read Barbara’s comments: “All those closets—why you just can’t believe all the clothes closets Mrs. Reagan has . . . I don’t know how I could possibly fill them.” Barbara had already bought an $8,000 ermine jacket and a $1,250 Judith Leiber purse for her husband’s inauguration, but no one knocked her extravagance the way critics did Nancy Reagan’s. Barbara avoided her predecessor’s mistakes by withholding news about her Seventh Avenue shopping sprees and the designers who contributed to her inaugural wardrobe. When a reporter asked her at one event whose dress she was wearing, she replied, “Mine.”

Throughout that week, she killed the departing First Lady with kindness. She said how much she “admired” Nancy’s attention to detail. “She’s a perfectionist and I’m not,” said Barbara, who did not mention her insistence on pressed sheets, petits fours coated in pastel frosting, and doilies, “not tablecloths,” for tea parties. “It doesn’t bother me if something isn’t perfect,” she said. “I’m much more interested in people.” Nancy barely saw the velvet glove before the steel fist clobbered her.

Barbara praised the First Lady for redecorating the White House and vowed not to change a thing, “well, except maybe one room.” She said she might convert Nancy’s beauty salon into a playroom for the Bushes’ eleven grandchildren, drawing another galling contrast with the Reagans, whose family was so fractured that few people recalled grandchildren ever visiting them in the White House. “I’ve got to find someplace for all the children’s toys,” said Barbara. “Besides I usually do my own hair.” Nancy probably did not know her throat was slit until she started bleeding.

She who had pilloried Geraldine Ferraro as something that “rhymes with rich” had perfected her right hook. Battering-Ram Bar had evolved into Bee-Stinging Bar: she now hid hornets in every bouquet she tossed. Reporters saw only her flowers; recipients felt only her sting. “Barbara is like an M-40 sniper rifle,” said a military man who worked for George Bush for several years. “She can make a clean kill from a thousand yards away . . . She’s got a mouth on her that can maim and destroy . . . scrape her tongue for venom and you could create an antidote for ricin . . . when she delivers the life-taking blow, she does it with a thin-lipped smile . . . Have you ever seen an asp smile?”

An assistant on Vice President Bush’s staff once described Barbara as a killer fish. “If you get the look that says, you’re trespassing in my waters, you’re dead. Crunch. The water fills with blood, and you’re holding your head in your hands before some fool can scream: ‘Shark attack. Shark attack.’”

Nancy Reagan was renowned as a petticoat President who dominated her husband’s White House, hiring and firing his personnel, dictating his schedule, and influencing his policies. Powerful as she was, Mrs. Reagan was a clumsy amateur alongside Barbara Bush, who never left fingerprints. Behind her grandmotherly facade was a pearl-wearing mugger the equal of Ma Barker. Over the years Barbara had become the family’s enforcer because her husband, so eager to be liked, was averse to conflict. He left the pistol-whippings to her, and when she needed camouflage, she summoned her firstborn.

“Barbara is the toughie in the family,” said Cody Shearer, whose mother grew up with the Pierces. “All the Bush men have bladders near their eyeballs—they all cry all the time. The old man is the worst but not Bar. She sheds few tears.”

During inaugural week the matriarch never failed to mention that the entire Bush-Walker clan would be converging on Washington for George’s swearing in. “There will be 247 of us,” Barbara said, exposing yet another vulnerability of the Reagans, who preached family values but could not practice them, because their family was sundered by dissension.

Barbara excelled at damning with faint praise. During an interview before the inauguration, she was asked about her favorite first ladies. “I wish you wouldn’t say Eleanor Roosevelt because I grew up in a household that really detested her,” she said. “Let’s talk about someone else.” She then named Pat Nixon and Betty Ford as two first ladies she particularly admired. She did not mention Nancy Reagan.

By then the week had started to look like a bloody payback for eight years in the shadows as the Second Lady, forced to accept blue as her favorite color because the First Lady had commandeered red. Without uttering a harsh word, Barbara declared her independence by posing for the cover of
Time
in a scarlet suit.

“She never forgave Nancy for treating them like the help,” said Edmund Morris, President Reagan’s biographer. “It was an open secret in the White House . . . that Nancy and Barbara detested each other.”

The final indignity for Nancy Reagan occurred when her alma mater, Smith College, offered Barbara, the First Dropout, an honorary degree. Nancy had chased that accolade for the eight years of her husband’s presidency, regularly sending emissaries to the school to plead her case. As a graduate of Smith, she felt more than entitled to an honorary degree and was miffed that it was never forthcoming. Only after she left the White House did the school concede to honor her, but with the proviso that the degree be awarded after Barbara had received hers. Infuriated, Mrs. Reagan declined. Months later she took small consolation in the newspaper photos showing Smith students protesting Barbara’s appearance. The students wore T-shirts that had printed photos of both first ladies. The caption beneath Nancy’s said, “Smith class of 1943”; the caption beneath Barbara’s said, “Left in ’44 to marry George.” The back of the T-shirts said, “There must be a better way to get a Smithy in the White House.”

Throughout inaugural week the media described the new First Lady as warm, likable, natural, down-to-earth, and absolutely genuine, and derided her predecessor as shallow, imperious, and totally obsessed with Hollywood glitz and the fripperies of fashion. Nancy represented the age of avarice; Barbara heralded the age of altruism. Parvenus out; patricians in.

The beleaguered First Lady had not even left town before the press started building up her successor with breathless headlines: “Bye-Bye Glamour,” howled
USA Today
. “Goodbye, First Fashion Plate,” chortled the
New York Post
, “Hello, First Grandmother.” “Family, Laughter to Fill White House,” proclaimed
The Washington Times
. “At Last—a First Lady Who’s a Real Woman, Wrinkles and All,” crowed
The Washington Post
.

Barbara told
The New York Times
that she viewed herself as a role model for many American women. “My maid tells me a lot of fat, white-haired, wrinkled ladies are tickled pink,” she said.

Even David S. Broder, the premier political columnist of
The Washington Post
, joined the hallelujah chorus with a column titled “What Makes Barbara Bush So Special.” “It may seem exaggerated to suggest that she will be the conscience of this White House, but my guess is that she will be more an example to the country,” he wrote. “She comes from a tradition that says that those who are favored with wealth and power thereby acquire reciprocal obligations to those who lack any advantages . . . Her example will now inspire, not just those who have known her in the past, but millions of others who are just discovering what makes Barbara Bush so special.”

Within months
The Wall Street Journal
would praise her as “America’s Grandma” and report that she was more popular than her husband: “Barbara Bush Earns Even Higher Ratings Than the President.” At the end of four years
Vanity Fair
would gush: “Barbara Bush stands as close to universal popularity as any figure in America.”

Even Democrats were enthralled. “I like her forthright manner, and her no-nonsense ways,” said Pamela Peabody, the sister-in-law of the former Democratic governor of Massachusetts Endicott “Chub” Peabody.

“Early on Barbara looked like a great dame,” said Bobbie Greene, who later worked for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I remember how surprised I was when I met her press secretary, Anna Perez, at the beginning of the Bush administration. I said how lucky she was to work for someone who seemed so nice. Anna looked at me, stretched out her arms, and said, ‘Yes, and I have all the claw marks to prove it.’ I never knew what she meant until many years later.”

In the early days, just by not being Nancy, Barbara Bush managed to bridge the gap of age, class, and politics to appeal to a broad segment of the population, particularly women, who had had a bellyful of her anorectic predecessor. Reporters relished the spontaneity of the new First Lady, her frankness, and her quotable humor. “It always helps to have an easy act to follow,” noted Calvin Trillin in
The Nation
.

Barbara understood her appeal. “I’m not a threat to anyone,” she said. “How could I be? Look at me . . . Nancy wore a size 4. That’s the size of one of my legs.” Posing for a photographer, she quipped, “Unfortunately, my winning smile makes me look as if I’m being electrocuted. My kids are always looking at pictures of me and saying: ‘Look at Mom, she’s plugged in again!’” When she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder that required radioactive iodine and injections of prednisone, she experienced double vision. When she returned to the White House after a treatment, reporters shouted, “How are your eyes?” She sauntered over to the cameras and playfully crossed her eyes. “They’re fine,” she said.

Having mastered the art of self-deprecation, Barbara made fun of herself before others could, but she admitted once how much effort it took for her to laugh at the comments about looking so much older than her husband. “That hurt,” she said. “Really hurt.” When she showed a reporter a picture of George standing between his mother and his wife, she added pointedly, “His mother is the one on the right.” Insecure about her looks, Barbara told one photographer she wanted to have her official portrait painted with her wearing a hat. “I’ll do anything I can to take the picture off the face.”

“Barbara Bush came into the White House with a dexterity at manipulating her image,” said Donnie Radcliffe, who covered the Bush White House for
The Washington Post
, “and she wasn’t above playing off her own outspoken style against Nancy Reagan’s reluctance and often inability to express herself. Media-smart, a less popular political wife might have seemed calculating.”

Barbara capitalized on her goodwill with good works. Within weeks of her husband’s inauguration, she was photographed cuddling an AIDS baby, an arresting picture in 1989, when many people were so afraid of the disease they avoided the afflicted. Encouraged by the White House physician, Burton Lee, Barbara lent her prestige to the problem in hopes that photographs of her with AIDS babies would help to dispel fears that the disease was transmitted by touching. She felt slighted when Diana, the Princess of Wales, visited New York’s Harlem Hospital and made news around the world by cradling a dying AIDS baby. Barbara wanted credit for being in the vanguard. “I visited that clinic a full year before she did,” she told reporters. “You just didn’t care.”

Barbara became a champion of the homeless, the hungry, and the handicapped. People saw her as a humanitarian who might soften her husband’s hard stances on abortion and gun control, but she was quick to disabuse them of the notion. “I do not want to dilute what influence I have by talking about things that I was not elected to do anything about,” she said. “Besides, I do not lobby my husband.” Instead, she spearheaded a drive for literacy, starting the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy with $500,000 in private contributions. She reached the apogee of her acclaim when she announced that her pedigreed English springer spaniel, Millie, was “getting married.” Named for Mildred Kerr, Barbara’s best friend in Texas, Millie delivered six puppies in the spring of 1989. Immediately the President’s polls shot up.

“Let me give you a little serious political inside advice,” he said at his next press conference. “One single word: puppies—worth ten points, believe me.”

Months later the First Lady wrote
Millie’s Book
, which she dedicated to “George Bush, whom we both love more than life.” The First Lady promoted her doggy book around the country and made it a number-one bestseller.

“Millie has made me legitimate,” Barbara said. “Who else do you know that wrote a book that made a million dollars for charity and gave it all away? I was feeling a tad guilty by the women’s movement until Millie did what she did. And it was all by myself, nobody helped . . . Every word was written by me and Millie.”

Again the President took notice. “You have read my tax returns,” he told reporters. “You can tell who the breadwinner is in the family. The dog made five times as much as the President of the United States.”

Millie followed the First Lady everywhere she went, even sharing the presidential bed. “She gets the middle,” Barbara quipped. George said that Millie got better press than anyone in the administration, including Secretary of State James Baker, which the President found amazing, “considering Millie doesn’t leak like Jimmy does.”