The Family (70 page)

In December 1991, the President called on his son to fire White House Chief of Staff John Sununu. Sununu had been using government planes for private travel, and young George dutifully delivered the chop. Later W. told
D
magazine in Dallas: “It’s just not that often you can do something really meaningful to help the President of the United States.”

Unfortunately, the President, who gave full rein to his sense of self-entitlement, did not do much to help himself. Ignoring Ross Perot as a threat, Bush also dismissed Bill Clinton as an “unworthy” opponent. During an Oval Office meeting in 1992, President Bush pointed to his chair and asked, “Can you see Bill Clinton sitting here?” Uproarious laughter all around. Despite polls that showed Clinton beating him, the President told his family and friends that the Arkansas governor did not stand a chance. He could not see a “draft dodger” beating a decorated war hero. Neither could his wife, who went on television to say: “Bill Clinton and I have something in common. Neither of us served in the military. Ha. Ha.”

“There were other things as well,” said Osborne Day, a Bush family friend. “I’m afraid George was encouraged by what all the Secret Service guys with Clinton told him . . . George told his sister, Nan Ellis, about all the Clintons’ rows and Hillary throwing ashtrays at Bill and how they hurled profanities at each other, and fought all the time. ‘A guy like that just can’t win,’ George said. ‘A guy like that doesn’t deserve to be President.’”

To George H.W. Bush, someone who was not from a family like the Bushes or the Walkers—a “good” family—simply should not be President of the United States. Bush had met the Clintons in September 1989 in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a bipartisan summit of governors that he had convened to write national education goals for the country. The President and Mrs. Clinton got into a heated discussion over education spending and infant-mortality rates. Hillary told friends she was shocked that the President of the United States was so wrong on basic issues affecting America’s children and so ill informed. Those friends report she told her husband: “We can take this guy. No question. He knows nothing . . . We have to take him. There’s no way the country can survive in his hands.”

Having spent 1988 getting his own private tutorial from a Bush strategist on how to run for President, Bill Clinton was more than ready. “I had worked for Bush in 1988 and was very involved with Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes in the anti-Dukakis campaign,” said the political consultant Dick Morris. “I had run the campaign that defeated Dukakis for governor of Massachusetts in 1978, so I was kind of the house expert on how to run against the guy . . . Clinton and I talked every day, and I kept him very, very closely informed of what the thinking in the Bush campaign was . . . It was like going to school for Clinton in learning how a presidential campaign worked, how negatives were thrown in, how you retaliate, how you reply . . . We spent a lot of time talking about all of the attacks that Bush was throwing: Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance, ACLU, all that stuff, and Dukakis’s failure to respond.

“Clinton had tremendous admiration for Bush’s 1988 campaign, an admiration that was more related to Jim Baker as campaign manager, Lee Atwater as political strategist, and Roger Ailes, who did the media. It was an admiration for the operatives, not the candidate. From them Clinton learned a basic lesson: you never let an accusation sleep under the same roof with you. Answer it immediately. He adopted the war-room mentality of rapid response and used it against Bush in 1992 at every turn.”

Both sides claimed to have a hands-off policy on using sexual indiscretions against each other during the campaign. “Our guy was more susceptible on that issue,” admitted a Clinton aide. “After I went to Arkansas and saw what we were dealing with—lists longer than the phone book—I started doing a little research on the other side and found that Bush also had other women in his life . . . I took my list of Bush women, including one whom he had made an Ambassador, to his campaign operatives. I said I knew we were vulnerable on women, but I wanted to make damn sure they knew they were vulnerable too.”

The Clintons had appeared on
60 Minutes
in January 1992 to respond to Gennifer Flowers’s story of her twelve-year affair with the governor. With his wife at his side, Clinton acknowledged causing pain in his marriage, and although he did not give a full-throated admission of infidelity, the issue of his womanizing seemed to subside in the polls.

“We knew the Democrats were saying we were negative campaigners and had branded us trash-talkers,” said Mary Matalin, political director of the Republican National Committee. “We did not need to reinforce their negative image of us, particularly on an issue like philandering, so we kept out of it. The word went out: nobody will say anything about Clinton’s personal life. When the press calls for comment: No comment.”

Surprisingly, it was the Bush camp that got walloped next by the issue of philandering. On August 11, 1992, the
New York Post
published a front-page story headlined “The Bush Affair,” complete with photos of George Bush and Jennifer Fitzgerald, who some people thought bore an eerie resemblance to Barbara Bush. The story was based on a newly released book by Susan Trento called
The Power House
, which described a Washington lobbyist who had participated in an early effort to cover up “Bush’s sexual indiscretions . . . if he ever hoped to be president.” A footnote in the book suggested that the late Louis Fields, an ambassador to the nuclear-disarmament talks in Geneva, had arranged for Bush and Ms. Fitzgerald to share a guesthouse in Switzerland when they were together in 1984. A
Post
sidebar with a screeching headline, “New Book: Bush Had Swiss Tryst,” carried the details, which quoted Fields as saying, “It became clear to me that the vice-president and Ms. Fitzgerald were romantically involved . . . It made me very uncomfortable.”

The morning the story broke, the President was vacationing in Kennebunkport with his family and meeting with Yitzhak Rabin, the newly elected Prime Minister of Israel. After their discussion, the two heads of state planned to hold a press conference.

Reporters were bused from their hotels to the Bush compound and told to queue up behind ropes. As they waited for the press conference to begin, a female aide in the White House press office went up and down the rope line asking which reporter would be asking the President about the
New York Post
story. It seemed to some reporters as if the aide was urging the question to be asked. No one said anything, although all had been discussing the story. On the bus, Brit Hume of ABC-TV said he would not ask the question because it was “intrusive and too personal.” Susan Spencer of CBS-TV said she did not want to ask the question, but if no one else did, she would because it was a legitimate inquiry. Mary Tillotson of CNN said the same thing.

Usually, the President of the United States does not have his entire family present at a press conference, but on this particular morning the White House made sure that his white-haired wife of forty-seven years, his children, their spouses, their pets, and all of the grandchildren buttressed Bush. In addition, they even wheeled out the President’s mother, who was ninety-one. The most reasonable explanation is that Bush surrounded himself with family as a response to the
Post
story—and in preparation for the inevitable question.

“No reporter really wanted to ask the question in that setting,” said Julia Malone of Cox Newspapers, “but it was a major story in that morning’s papers and it couldn’t be ignored.”

From the beginning the press conference was tense and strained. The President called on several people, who side-stepped the question that hung like a cloud. Then he pointed to Mary Tillotson, who had wanted to ask him about Bosnia. But she had told her producer she would ask the infidelity question if she was called on and no one else had asked.

“Mr. Bush, uncomfortable as the subject is, I would think it’s one to which you feel the necessity to respond because you’ve said that family values, character, are likely to be important in the presidential campaign. There is an extensive series of reports in today’s
New York Post
alleging that a former U.S. Ambassador, a man now deceased, had told several persons that he arranged for a sexual tryst involving you and one of your female staffers in Geneva in 1984.”

The President’s face hardened. Grim and thin-lipped with anger, he spat out his response. “I’m not going to take any sleazy questions like that from CNN,” snapped the President. “I am very disappointed you would ask such a question of me. I will not respond to it. I haven’t responded in the past. I am outraged, but nevertheless in this kind of screwy climate we’re in I expect it. But I don’t like it and I’m not going to respond other than to say it is a lie.”

Sensing her grandfather’s fury, one of his granddaughters burst into tears and was led away by her mother.

“It was probably the worst professional day of my life,” Tillotson said later. “I so wish someone else had asked the question, but no one did.”

Few in the press corps came to her defense. Some felt the question was inappropriate in front of the Israeli Prime Minister. Men seemed to feel it was totally off-limits, because it involved sex; many women saw the sex issue as a matter of hypocrisy and very much within limits. Political science professor Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia said that reporters should have a legitimate reason for asking the question. “Politicians who use their family to project a wholesome image are asking for a rude press disclosure if they are not living up to those implied ideals,” said Sabato. “A candidate who invites the press into his living room shouldn’t be surprised when a skeptical press finds its way to his bedroom. At the same time, in order to convince the public of the truth of any allegation, some proof or evidence ought to be presented with any public accusation of infidelity. Otherwise, there is no end to the published and aired rumors, some true and some false, and there is no way for a good citizen to distinguish among the various allegations. I have a civic-oriented view of press coverage. It should be done not as a game between the pols and the press, but as a means for vital civic education so that informed voters can make wise choices.”

The editor and publisher of
The Galveston Daily News
defended the question and praised the questioner. “I’ve always been proud of my tough, smart sister Mary,” wrote Dolph Tillotson in an opinion piece. “But never more so than right now.”

Mary Tillotson’s question and George Bush’s denunciation were broadcast over and over on television. Many thought Tillotson’s job might be in jeopardy, especially when one of Marlin Fitzwater’s aides threatened to lift her White House press credentials. “Fitzwater and many of those from the White House who were present at the news conference were quite upset,” recalled Tom Johnson, former president and CEO of CNN. “He was quoted to me as saying something like, CNN never will get another interview with the President. That includes the Larry King show.” (For all of Fitzwater’s bluster, CNN did not have to worry. Neither George nor Barbara would ever miss a chance to appear on
Larry King Live
. They even invited the talk-show host to Texas to emcee George’s eightieth birthday in 2004.)

The First Lady was incensed that she and her husband had been publicly humiliated. She targeted the
New York Post
with the brunt of her anger by canceling a scheduled interview with Deborah Orin, the paper’s White House correspondent. Mrs. Bush condemned the story in an interview with
The Washington Times
, saying it was “an outrage . . . a disgusting lie.”

Barbara had no compunctions about taking on the press to protect the family’s public image. She upbraided Hearst syndicated columnist Marianne Means for referring to George H.W. Bush’s “unhappy experience as Vice President,” and writing that “Reagan and Bush had little in common and no history of confidential communication.” Means added: “Nancy Reagan was freely quoted expressing her utter scorn for Bush.”

In an irate letter, Barbara Bush lectured the prize-winning columnist about her responsibility to her profession and to her readers “to at least present the facts accurately.” Despite evidence to the contrary, Mrs. Bush claimed that her husband and President Reagan “became the best of friends.” She even criticized the Pulitzer–prize winning biographer Edmund Morris for writing “that terrible book, ‘Dutch.’” Mrs. Bush wrote, “George told Nancy Reagan we did not believe one word of it, for which she was very grateful. We also heard from several very close Reagan friends who told us they knew that all the discussion about the hard feelings between the Bushes and Reagans was nonsense.”

Marianne Means responded with a polite letter that firmly refuted every point. “I understand your frustration about inaccuracies that appear in the media,” wrote the columnist. “We in the press feel the same way about politicians who try to rewrite recorded history for their own purposes.”

Unperturbed, Barbara now decided to take on the Cable News Network. At the Republican Convention in Houston, Barbara Bush met with Tom Johnson in the green room before doing a CNN interview with Catherine Crier.

“The quotes I recall are these,” said Johnson: “‘Tom, I am very disappointed in CNN.’ ‘CNN used to be the network we respected most.’ ‘CNN always was fair to us and very responsible.’ ‘I cannot believe that CNN asked that terrible question of George in Kennebunkport, especially in front of his mother.’”

Mary Tillotson was taken off the White House beat and made anchor and host of CNN and Company, a position left open when Catherine Crier left the network.

“Did the incident affect that decision? I think all of us felt a new assignment would be good for Mary and for CNN,” said Johnson. “Frankly, I never would have pulled Mary from the White House beat had the Bush White House pressured me to do so. That would have been caving to political pressure. Doing so would have created major internal problems with our staff and major external problems within our profession.”