In Houston, the Bushes had bought a house on Indian Trail, and the First International Bank became Bush's home base. He chaired the executive committee and took an office there with the expectation that he would work for the bank one day a week in Houston, attend a monthly meeting in Dallas, and fly to London three times a year. He maintained his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations and joined the Trilateral Commission, a group of leaders in Japan, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and the United States that met around the world to talk over global issues. He accepted invitations to give speeches, both paid and gratis, in Alaska, Massachusetts, and Florida.
He was careful about the appearance of cashing in on his government service, refusing a directorship with McDonnell Douglas, the aerospace company. There was another road not taken in these months when Bush declined an offer from Ross Perot to run Perot's oil business in Houston. "I'll pay you a lot of money," Perot told Bush, who considered the idea. ("This was before Ross became really strange," Bush recalled.) The Bushes and the Perots were friendly, and the Perots once visited Kennebunkport as the Bushes' guests. "I thought about it," Bush recalled. When he did his due diligence with mutual acquaintances, however, Bush found no support for the idea of going to work for Perot. "I talked to some people, and they said, 'For God's sake don't do that.' So I said no, and thanked him profusely for thinking of me."
"Well, this is your big mistake," Perot said, according to Bush. Speaking of himself in the third person, Perot went on: "You don't say no to Ross Perot."
- Everything Bush was doing-the business, the travel, the speeches-was directed toward the next goal, one that he spoke of with close friends only weeks after the Carter inauguration. He knew in his bones what he wanted to try next. He wanted to seek the presidency.
It would not be easy. Andrew Card, a young Republican representative in the Massachusetts legislature, was asked to set up a pre-1980 fundraiser for Bush in Springfield, Massachusetts. Card prevailed on friends of friends to host an afternoon tea. After driving to Hartford, Connecticut, to pick up the candidate, Card arrived with Bush in Springfield for the event. The sign in the living room read: WELCOME GEORGE BUSCH.
"Looks like I need to work on the name recognition thing," Bush said, plunging forward, fixing his lopsided grin on his face, grabbing for every hand.
- Bush made his character his platform. He was a man of notable experience, of sound judgment, of even temperament, of measured optimism. In his decade or so of public service he had watched the presidency up close and could make a case that he was, in the words of the nascent Bush campaign, "A President We Won't Have to Train"-a jab at Jimmy Carter, who was seen by many Republicans as a presidential novice, and a nod to concerns about whether Ronald Reagan, nearing seventy and seemingly extreme in his views, was up to the challenges of the Oval Office. The George H. W. Bush who was planning to offer himself to the country for 1980 was very much the George H. W. Bush who had grown up and come of age in a political world shaped more by a commitment to service than by a contest of ideas. He was a moderate conservative-to the right of Nelson Rockefeller (and of where Prescott Bush had stood) but a bit to the left of Ronald Reagan and the movement conservatives who were gaining strength in the GOP.
By 197980, the movement conservatives were driven by God, Mammon, and an absolutist view that American strategy toward the Soviet Union should be rollback, not detente. In the wake of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, religious conservatives were also becoming more politically active, calling for constitutional amendments banning abortion and allowing prayer in public schools. Economically, Reagan's followers-and Reagan himself-had been converted to the theory of "supply-side economics," which held that tax cuts would stimulate so much economic activity that tax revenues would actually rise if rates were lower.
All things being equal, Bush favored giving the private sector primacy of place in matters of economics. He seemed moderate compared to Ronald Reagan, who offered the Republican Party a sunny Goldwaterism, but Bush, like Reagan, believed in lower taxes, fewer government regulations, and a muscular foreign policy. The two men disagreed on abortion (Bush was more moderate on the issue) and the primacy of tax cuts (Bush feared that drastic reductions in taxes without spending restraints risked higher deficits and possibly inflation). They agreed on much else, differing mainly in tone. Reagan was sure and certain, Bush often charming yet diffuse.
Bush acknowledged that he was neither wonk nor ideologue. He saw politics more in terms of consensus than of ideology. One ran for office-and did what partisanship required to win elections-in order to amass power to serve the larger good. For Bush, the work of government was less about radical reform than it was about careful stewardship.
Reagan viewed politics differently-as a clash of convictions, not a consensus to be discerned. Since his days on the road as a spokesman for General Electric in the fifties, making the case for free enterprise and against collectivism either at home or abroad, Reagan was a candidate of ideas-abiding principles grounded in experience that Reagan drew upon in order to judge the wisdom or the folly of proposed courses of action. Reagan's ability to project great conviction gave him the necessary room to maneuver when the time came, as it almost always did, for compromise in political life. Movement conservatives accepted Reagan as one of their own, and were willing to forgive-or sometimes even ignore-his occasional lapses from the conservative creed.
No such mercy was on offer for Bush. His inability to project great conviction, even when he was, in fact, greatly committed to a given principle, was a perennial problem. Movement conservatives did not think he was one of them, and so whereas Reagan could nearly do no wrong in their eyes, Bush could nearly do no right. If Bush succeeded in becoming president, he would do so because he had convinced enough voters that he was the kind of man-not only that, but the particular man-who could be trusted to make the big calls. Trust me, Bush was saying. I am what you want and what you need, even if I can't quite define what I am pithily or precisely. It was, in a way, the most elemental of political arguments, and it was the argument that Bush would make in national politics for the rest of his life.
- George H. W. Bush was not the only member of the family pondering politics in 1978. George W., now thirty-one and living in Midland, announced his candidacy for the U.S. House seat being vacated by the retirement of George Mahon, a Democrat. "The primary will be very difficult," Barbara wrote, but if George W. were to win the nomination, he would have a good chance at victory in November. His mother, however, worried not only about his chances but about what his campaign might mean for his father. "You know, I wonder if George Bush, Jr., understands just how difficult it is to have two people thinking about running for office in one family?" she wrote her friend Millie Kerr from Kennebunkport in September 1977. George W. would be asked about his father's positions, and vice versa, in their opponents' constant search for controversy. The Bushes had been here before. "It reminds me of the time that George took all the heat when his father was in the U.S. Senate and voted against the oil industry," Barbara wrote.
Bush never weighed in directly on whether his son should make the race. He did, however, ask George W. to go see Allan Shivers, a conservative Democrat who had been governor of Texas in the late 1940s and for much of the 1950s. Was young Bush planning to run against Democratic state senator Kent Hance? Shivers asked. George W. said he "was seriously considering it," and Shivers's reply was succinct. "Son, you can't win." As George W. recalled it, "There was no encouragement, no nothing....I remember wondering why Dad had introduced me to the governor. Looking back on it, it may have been his way of telling me, without smothering my ambition, that I should be prepared to lose."
In the fall of 1977 George W. brought Laura Welch home to his parents; the two were to marry in a small ceremony in Midland on November 5. Laura was introduced to the Bushes on the same day Columba and Jeb's second-born, Noelle, was baptized in Houston. The Bushes felt as though everything were right with the world when they met Laura. "They are perfect for each other!!!" Barbara wrote of the young couple.
George W. Bush's 1978 House race led to one of the earliest skirmishes of the 1980 presidential campaign. Ronald Reagan's political action committee, Citizens for the Republic, intervened in the younger Bush's congressional primary by endorsing and supporting Bush's Republican opponent, Jim Reese, the former Odessa mayor who had lost a bid for the House seat in 1976. After the Reagan blessing, Reese garnered sufficient votes in the primary to force a runoff with George W. Though George W. finally won the nomination, the Bushes blamed the Reagan endorsement for the runoff. A "Washington Whispers" item in U.S. News & World Report said, "A Ronald ReaganGeorge Bush ticket for the Republicans in 1980? Party leaders who like the idea now say personal animosity between the two all but rules it out."
- The autumn of 1978 brought one last round of campaigning for GOP midterm candidates before the Bushes turned their full attention to Iowa, with its caucuses on January 21, 1980, and to New Hampshire, with its primary five weeks later, on February 26.
In the Midland congressional campaign, George W.'s general election opponent, Democrat Kent Hance, mounted an anti-elitist, anti-carpetbagger campaign against the younger Bush like the one Ralph Yarborough had run against his father fourteen years before, with Hance explicitly attacking the Bush lineage. "A large part of his campaign was against Big George & his membership in the Trilateral Commission," Barbara wrote in a campaign diary. It worked: George W. lost, 52 to 48 percent.
Jim Baker, meanwhile, came up short in a race for Texas attorney general. Bush's friendship with Baker had helped the talented Texas lawyer move into national circles. In May 1975, when Bush was in China, Rogers Morton, the secretary of commerce, had called with a question: What would Bush think of Morton's asking Jim Baker to become undersecretary of commerce? "I told him, after discounting my objectivity cuz of friendship, that I thought you would do just great," Bush wrote Baker. "It's a high level job with some freedom for politics and plenty of contact with business leaders."
Baker took the Commerce post. He went on to become President Ford's delegate hunter against Reagan at the closely contested Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1976 and, finally, Ford's general election campaign manager against Jimmy Carter. Two years later Baker had decided on the run for attorney general. Bush advised Baker to try for governor instead, arguing that Democrats in Texas were not yet ready to pay enough attention to down-ballot races to break with their traditional party. Bush's analysis turned out to be correct. "He was right," Baker recalled, "and I was wrong." Baker retreated to Florida for a breather, but Bush was on the phone in a matter of days. "Let's get cracking," he said. It was time to run for president, and Bush needed his old friend to take charge. Baker said yes, and the campaign began.
- The Republican politics of 1980, as manifested in 197879, was defined and dominated by Ronald Reagan. It was Bush's fate to be a conservator in a contest against the great conservative crusader of the age. Bush appeared to be a man of the center largely because, in Reagan, he found someone to his right within the Republican Party.
The cherished favorite of the Sun Belt and Western conservatives, Reagan was the putative front-runner for the nomination after the Carter victory in 1976. In late 1978, Bush and Jim Baker traveled to Los Angeles to pay a courtesy call at Reagan's office in Century City. The news Bush had to deliver-that he was going to run for president-was not unexpected, and Reagan received them politely but distantly.
Reagan himself had to address two broad questions to secure his own chance to take on Jimmy Carter in 1980: Was the former California governor too old to serve competently in the Oval Office? And was he too ideologically extreme to be president? Because these issues could not be resolved except in the campaign itself, there was room for candidates other than Reagan to fight to position themselves as the most plausible alternative to the front-runner. In addition to Bush, the options included former Texas governor and Nixon Treasury secretary John Connally; Senators Bob Dole and Howard Baker; and Congressmen Phil Crane and John Anderson, both of Illinois.
Bush was attacked as yesterday's man-a moderate in a party that was growing more conservative, a Washington insider in a climate that favored outsiders, an Ivy Leaguer too soft to make the hard calls. "Bush should avoid being labeled as 'moderate' or 'Northeastern' or 'Ford' candidate," read an early internal campaign document. Bush instead staked out his position as what the press called "the thinking man's candidate," saying: "Call me a conservative, but one with compassion." And he was-but he was also a politician who knew what it took to win, and winning against Reagan required convincing enough Republicans that Reagan was "a great old dog, but he won't hunt this year," as Bush political director David Keene put it to reporters.
Note the key adjective: "old." The degree to which age was an issue in 1980 was illustrated by a pro-Bush scenario sketched out by James B. "Scotty" Reston of The New York Times: "George Bush's hope is that Messrs. Reagan and Connally will knock each other out because they're too old and that the party will have to turn in a convention deadlock to younger men."
Bush jogged constantly during the campaign and spoke, endlessly, of being "up for the '80s." A Bush brochure made the age point about as explicitly as one could without calling Reagan senile: "George Bush is the right age. He will be 56 at the time of the 1980 election. This is the age which business, professional and educational organizations recognize as the time of maximum executive ability. This is the age when the individual reaches the peak of mental capacity." In interviews, Barbara volunteered that Bush was "the perfect age" for the job. "I don't question Reagan's health or stamina or his intellectual capacity to handle issues," David Keene said after Reagan officially kicked off his campaign in November 1979. "But he may be unable to field tough questions and develop sophisticated positions under the pressure of a campaign"-which, when one thought about it, could only be because of issues of health, stamina, or intellectual capacity.
Still, this was Ronald Reagan. Sixteen years before he had captured the hearts and minds of movement conservatives with his speech "A Time for Choosing." Twelve years before he had posed a surprisingly formidable challenge to Richard Nixon for the 1968 nomination. Four years before he had come within a handful of delegates of denying a sitting Republican president the nomination of his party. How could Bush, with his tiny national name recognition, compete?
Jimmy Carter had shown the way by catapulting himself from obscurity to success by winning the Iowa caucuses in 1976. On an early campaign memo, Jim Baker jotted a note to himself: "Key to winning is: Start early and develop an organization better than any of the opponents....Carter did it. Primary elections are won by organization!-almost regardless of candidate." On the ideological question, a stray note in Baker's hand in his 1980 campaign files summed it up: "Bush has to be 'acceptable' to Right Wing-not necessarily 'favorite of.'"
- Bush made the obvious official in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington on Tuesday, May 1, 1979. "Ladies and gentlemen," Bush began, "I am a candidate for President of the United States....I seek this nomination as a lifelong Republican who has worked throughout his career, in business and in public office, on behalf of the principles of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower."
The "lifelong Republican" phrase was a shot at Reagan and Connally, both Democrats turned Republicans. Bush then made an unusual point about himself: If Americans were looking for a crusade or for a comprehensive program, they should look elsewhere. "As a candidate for President," Bush said, "I am not promising" a New Deal, a New Frontier, or a Great Society. "But I do pledge a new candor," Bush said. "To be effective, leadership in the eighties must be based on a politics of substance, not symbols; of reason, not bombast; of frankness, not false promise....As a candidate, and as President, I will speak not in terms of simple solutions but of hard choices."
He offered a largely conservative view of those choices. "The American people must be told the hard, unvarnished truth about the nature of our problems at home: That we cannot buy our way out of problems with expanded government programs. On the contrary, where government expands, our problems multiply."
He ended with Eisenhower: More than a quarter century ago, in his first State of the Union message to the Congress, one of the wisest and strongest of this century's Presidents said: "There is in world affairs a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly. There is in our affairs at home, a middle way between the untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare of the whole nation...." President Dwight Eisenhower then went on: "In this spirit we must live and labor: confident of our strength, compassionate in our heart, clear in our mind. In this spirit, let us turn to the great tasks before us."
Listening to Bush's announcement at the National Press Club, Scotty Reston of the Times took note of the Eisenhower allusions. "This was the first time in memory that Ike had ever been nominated for equality and immortality with Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln," Reston wrote, "and it told something about George Bush's ideals."
What did it tell? That Bush, like Eisenhower, would engage in the means of politics in order to achieve the ends of power and public service. It was not all about service in the biblical sense of doing unto others or helping the poor: Either man could have rendered that kind of service without seeking the presidency of the United States. In Bush's case, he wanted to be the leader, to win whatever contest it was, because his father had expected it, his mother had encouraged it, and he longed for it.
- Reagan's campaign strategy for the 1980 Republican nomination was largely defensive. "Our biggest opponent is us," Reagan campaign chief John Sears said in 1979. "If we do our job right, nobody can catch us." With a large lead, the front-runner's camp decided to limit Reagan's exposure to the happenstance of the campaign trail, which left Iowa, in particular, open for a Carter-like surprise for a candidate willing to give his all to the caucuses.
Bush was willing. His focus on the state paid off in May 1979 when he defeated Reagan in a straw poll in Ames. Of 1,288 voters, Bush won with 39.6 percent. Reagan came in second with 25.9 percent, followed by Howard Baker with 13.8 percent and Connally at 10.7 percent. "I've got a long way to go, both in Iowa and nationally," Bush said, "but it's a good psychological lift."
That was the good news. The bad news came the same day. The sponsor of the straw poll, The Des Moines Register, published a statewide survey taken in late April. In it Bush ran sixth out of seven contenders. A striking feature of the Register poll was a second-place finish by a man who was not in the race: former president Gerald Ford, who trailed Reagan by only three points and who buried Bush by a margin of twenty-five-all without being a candidate.
For Bush, Ford had been a factor from the start. From Jim Baker's first conversation with Bush about a 1980 presidential bid, Baker, who had managed Ford's 1976 general election race, had made his role in a Bush campaign contingent on Ford's approval. In December 1978, after Bush called him in Florida in the wake of the loss in the attorney general's race, Baker sought Ford's blessing. Ford gave it, telling Baker that he should work with Bush but adding: "It's going to be tough."
One of the things making life difficult for Bush was the speculation that Ford himself might challenge Reagan in 1980, either in the primaries or at the convention. If Reagan ran again, Time had written in November 1977, "top Republicans expect Gerald Ford, 64, no matter how much he relishes retirement, to jump in, largely out of loyalty to the anti-Reaganites who supported him in 1976." Ford was sending conflicting signals about making the race largely because he was himself conflicted. Polls had him defeating Carter in a general election heat. Moderates uncomfortable with Reagan and uninspired by Bush allowed themselves to dream of a Ford comeback. For Ford, it was all hugely tempting. Why shouldn't it be? He had only narrowly lost to Carter in 1976. Here was a chance, possibly, to be summoned from retirement to avenge a close-run defeat. It was worth thinking about.
Which Ford did-often aloud and in public. On Thursday, September 27, 1979, at the Washington Press Club, Ford said that in politics you "never say 'never,'" a point he repeated to a private gathering of two dozen Republican lawmakers. He was not a candidate, he said, but "that's not a Sherman." Ford was reading the same polls everybody else was reading-polls showing that he was the only Republican, including Reagan, who had a lead over Carter in a head-to-head matchup, 51 to 42 percent. (Reagan and Carter were in a statistical tie.) For now, in late 1979, Ford preferred to watch, ponder, and wait.
- Bush, meanwhile, raced, raced, and raced, doing well in a cascade of contests in the waning months of 1979.
One event was billed, immodestly, as a "Cavalcade of Stars." In October, in Ames, at the field house of Iowa State University, 3,400 showed up for fifty-dollar boxed meals and eight-minute presentations from each of the candidates except Reagan, who, in keeping with his front-runner strategy, skipped the event. Bush won this second straw poll with 35.7 percent. Reagan received only 11.3 percent-what reporters called "a surprisingly low fourth," behind Howard Baker and John Connally.
Bush chalked up the win and pressed on. Three weeks later, in early November 1979, he won again, this time in a Maine straw poll, upsetting Howard Baker, who, with the support of his Senate colleague William Cohen, had expected to carry the day-and the subsequent headlines-at the state party convention in Portland. Bush had flown in, given his speech-every hopeful except Reagan was there-and returned to Texas. But a strange thing happened-strange, at least, for George Bush. By all accounts the momentum shifted from Baker to Bush on the strength of Bush's rhetorical performance at the Maine convention. (And not because of the Kennebunkport connection, which failed to sway many full-time Maine residents.) He had had enough of Carter-style brooding and self-abasement, Bush said, asserting, The New York Times reported, that it was time to "stop wringing our hands and apologizing for our country." The line brought the Maine Republicans to their feet, and Bush won.
Not bad, Bush was thinking, not bad. Finally he headed south, to the Florida Republican convention straw poll in Kissimmee. There were hot-air balloon rides (Dole had rented one, Bush two); free drinks (Baker's campaign offered double shots of whiskey); and CONNALLY-LEADERSHIP FOR AMERICA T-shirts. Lowering expectations, Reagan had called the poll "meaningless" before the voting. When he came in first, with 36 percent, he was happy to find all sorts of meaning in the results. Connally had spent $300,000 on the event in the hopes of bloodying Reagan and emerging as the chief challenger. The big Texan did come in second, with 27 percent, but the press played up an angle of the story that drove Connally mad: Bush's 21 percent, which The New York Times reported as "surprisingly strong" and Time declared "the surprise of the weekend." Bush himself was so shocked-pleasantly shocked, but shocked all the same-that he asked his staff to double-check. "Count 'em again," he said. "Count 'em again."
Iowa, Maine, Florida: Bush wasn't supposed to be doing this well. Now, in the wake of outright straw poll victories in Iowa and Maine and a better-than-expected performance in Florida, the political world was warily expressing a contingent appreciation for what Bush had wrought in 347 days of campaigning in 1978 and '79.
"Mr. Bush is the hot property right now," the Times wrote eight weeks out from Iowa. "I think Bush has a chance to win it here," said David Readinger, Connally's Iowa chairman. "Iowa had been the Democratic campaign surprise of 1976," Bush recalled. "Our game plan was to make it the Republican campaign surprise of 1980." Iowa was everything. "We bet the whole thing, really, on the caucuses," Bush recalled. "If we'd gotten killed there I would've been dead meat." If Bush were to succeed in his quest, he had to win, soon, in Iowa, on a winter Monday in January.
NINETEEN.
We Have Done the Unthinkable
The action begins in Iowa. It's where everything starts for everybody.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH LIFE WAS A SPIRALING, exhausting, endless succession of flights and handshakes and speeches and coffees and airport press conferences and barbecues and Rotary Clubs and fundraisers and thank-you notes and interviews and hotel rooms-and then it started all over again the next morning, with another flight and another handshake and another speech and another coffee and another airport press conference and another barbecue and another Rotary Club and another fundraiser and another school and another thank-you note and another interview and another hotel room. And then another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another, and on and on and on, across Iowa county after Iowa county, New Hampshire town after New Hampshire town, Florida city after Florida city.
"I'm surprised my body can take it," Bush told his diary on Wednesday, October 10, 1979. "The mind is still clear, although I totally lose track of where I've been and whom I'm with. I've given up on names."
Bush sent his traveling aide David Bates home for a rest. "He was just dropping and drooping," Bush recalled. "I felt the same way but I was just determined not to show it-determined to push on." There was no break, no pause, no breather. There was only the goal. "I don't want to look back," Bush told his diary, "and find I've left something undone."
- The news in late 1979 played to Bush's strengths as a seasoned foreign policy hand. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, reviving Cold War tensions. In Tehran, revolutionaries deposed the American-supported shah, installing the Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of a new theocratic state and seizing the American embassy, taking fifty-two Americans hostage.
Given the chaos abroad, Bush, the former diplomat and CIA director, was an attractive presidential prospect. "I'm just so outraged by the humiliation of our country," Bush said of the Iranian situation. He underscored that he was a man who could be trusted in a dangerous time. "I see the world as it really is," Bush told audiences. "And it's tough out there." Implicitly dismissing Reagan's experience, he said: "I've been there, not lecturing on the Republican free enterprise circuit."
The family fanned out to tell the Bush story. The early states were manageable enough that the Bush-Walker clan could achieve a kind of political market penetration. Marvin moved to Iowa, Neil to New Hampshire. Doro took a leave from Boston College to attend secretarial school in order to be more useful at headquarters. Dorothy Bush and her daughter, Nancy Ellis, were amazed, but thrilled, that people would pay $150 to come to a reception with watercress sandwiches and white wine. In Iowa, Barbara was pleased to hear a caller on a radio show say, "I'm for George Bush-he has such a great family," only to realize that the caller was Marvin Bush. In a blazer, Neil worked crowds large and small. "Consider my dad," he would say. "He's going to knock 'em dead."
In 1978, when he and Columba were in Venezuela, where he was working for a Texas bank, Jeb had called his father to volunteer to work for the campaign full-time. Bush happily accepted, and Jeb moved back to the United States with his little family. "It was a blast," Jeb recalled. He started out by traveling with his father but was soon dispatched to campaign on his own. (After Iowa, he would run the Puerto Rico primary effort.) He was a relatively shy young man. "I really wasn't motivated by politics at the time," Jeb recalled. "I ended up overcoming fears and trepidations about politics, and I really did it for my dad."
Bush fretted that he had allowed his own mission to overwhelm everything-and everyone-else. "I look at Bar's schedule and I think it is too intense, too tough," Bush dictated. "She doesn't get home enough. We've overdone it." One night he encountered Barbara unexpectedly in the Des Moines airport; each was on the way to a different flight. They had not realized the other would be there.
Neil was engaged to be married, but "we've really said nothing about that, done nothing about it," George H. W. Bush told his diary. Doro had a boyfriend for the first time. "Yet, we haven't taken them out to dinner together-done any of the things that normally we do." The tumult of the campaign, though, created its own kind of intimacy. The family "is in close, in tight, doing well."
Everybody had an opinion about everything. When a friend raised the shortcomings of the candidate's speaking style-not a new subject-Bush thanked him for "taking the tough road and bringing up the 'not so easy things.' I am really grateful. I need help. I need advice. I need criticism. For me this goal is the end all-be all. I feel driven. Hopefully for altruistic reasons."
On a commercial flight from Puerto Rico to Miami in late 1979, Bush was seated "next to a boring guy that recognized me" and who was happy to have the chance to give a presidential candidate a piece of his mind. The passenger, Bush recalled, was "concerned about things-and I couldn't be less interested; and yet, I've got to smile and sit here....'Okay fellow, let's have your say-you solve all the problems.'" Yet then Bush felt guilty about yearning to be free of his fellow passenger. "That's what our system is about; so why shouldn't I be pleasant to this guy?...I think I'll have to hear him out and who knows, I may learn something."
Typical Bush: talking himself into enduring, even enjoying, something few people would be able to bear. That was, in a way, the essence of campaigning for president: making the best of a grueling slog. Bush's charisma was not overwhelming, but it was real; his charm was not electric, but it was enveloping. The willingness to listen to the guy on the plane, to feign interest in everybody's opinion, and to convince everyone he met that it was a treat to be with them were all vitally important weapons in Bush's political arsenal.
- With its 2,531 precincts, each of which would hold a caucus, Iowa required the rawest of retail politics. A young Republican operative, Rich Bond, moved to the state to work for Bush in the late spring of 1979. Bush had important Iowa supporters who, along with Jim Baker, framed the caucus strategy; the core Bush group included George Wittgraf, Mary Louise Smith, John McDonald, and Ralph Brown. Every day Bond, who lived in Ames with his wife, Valerie, and four-year-old son Matthew, drove an hour to work at the Des Moines Insurance Exchange Building. From eight in the morning until ten at night, sitting with primitive lists from the 1976 caucuses, Bond would call every voter he could.
"I'm Rich Bond," he would say, over and over again. "I'm calling for George Bush, and he's running for president. You may not have heard of him. May I send you some information?" If the answer was yes, Bond would write a note, drop it off in the mail on the way home, and call them again a week later. "The vast majority of those Republicans never heard from the Reagan campaign," Bond recalled. "And the vast majority of them did hear from us-more than once. The Reagan campaign believed in a different model-radio and TV. I don't think they were boobs, by any means. They just had no idea what we were doing on the ground."
There were rough spots. One right-winger mailed a brick back to Bond in a return envelope-the campaign had to pay the postage-with a note that said, "We'll never vote for a Trilateralist." Yet there were more good days than bad days. Bond remembered the thrill of having, say, fifteen people show up to hear about Bush at a Council Bluffs Rotary Club meeting.
Bush press secretary Pete Teeley kept arguing that the candidate needed to do more to win national media attention, pushing him to give a big speech at the National Press Club in downtown Washington. Hearing him out, Bush replied, "There aren't any votes in D.C."
In Iowa with Teeley one day, Bush spent two hours at a coffee in the home of a supporter, talking to twenty-five, maybe thirty people. He gave a brief speech, took questions, and mingled as if he had all the time in the world. After saying his goodbyes, Bush climbed into the car with Teeley. "What'd you think of that event?" Bush asked.
"It was terrible," Teeley said. "You just wasted two hours-two hours-with thirty people. Go to the Press Club and you could reach millions with the coverage."
"Yeah, it was two hours and thirty people," Bush said, "but now they're all for me."
Bush spent twenty-seven days in the state; even Carter, who pioneered the Iowa strategy, had devoted only seventeen days to Iowa in 1976. Ninety-six of the state's ninety-nine counties got a visit from at least one member of the Bush family. According to an accounting by Time magazine, on the other hand, Reagan spent just forty-five hours campaigning in the state before the caucuses. In theory, limiting Reagan's exposure was an attractive, logical strategy; in practice, however, it was not working. Iowa polls had Reagan with the support of 50 percent of Republicans in December. By early January he had lost nearly half of those voters, polling only 26 percent to Bush's 17 percent.
In the first week of January, in a sign of political and financial progress, Bush moved from commercial air travel to a private twenty-seat Convair plane. "There are bigger shots running," Bush said on the trail in Henry County, Illinois. "But I've rolled up my sleeves and put together the best grass-roots team in the early states. And we're going to out-organize 'em, out-work 'em, out-spell-out-the-goals-of-the-country 'em." Things seemed better and better. "After doing well in Iowa," Bush said, "we're going to blow some of those bigger shots out of the water."
David Keene estimated to Time that Bush had improved from two out of ten speeches being good to seven out of ten. Bush himself had grown comfortable enough to joke that his stance on abortion-against federal funding, but also against a constitutional amendment, thus taking a more centrist position than Reagan-was "heroic."
- On Monday evening, January 21, 1980, Iowa Republicans turned out at five times the rate they had four years before. From 22,000 in 1976, participation rose to 115,000. "I was sitting in this precinct," a Bush worker told Time, "and these people I never heard of came streaming in. And it was Bush, Bush, Bush." Bush dropped in on one caucus where he defeated Reagan soundly. "You made my night!" he said, but he did not yet know whether the evening was, in fact, his. For that he had to wait a bit longer.
Finally, the overall numbers came in, and the news was staggering. George Bush had defeated Ronald Reagan, 31.6 percent to 29.5 percent. Reagan learned the news at the home of friends in California, where he was having a quiet dinner and screening the Dustin HoffmanMeryl Streep movie Kramer vs. Kramer. Victory night, Barbara recalled, turned the Bushes' hotel suite into a "madhouse." "How sweet it is!" she wrote. "How sweet it is!"
Bush, in exuberant shorthand, declared that he now had the "Big Mo." His excitement, which reminded some observers of a Yale cheerleader after a big win against Harvard, was understandable. Bush had not won the approval of a plurality of voters in a decade-not since the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 1970. The party at the hotel in Des Moines was packed. "It was a crush," Barbara wrote-the greatest of crushes, the most spectacular of evenings. And it was, at that point, the biggest night of Bush's political life, a life that had begun in the Midland Eisenhower campaign nearly thirty years before. He had done something few men had ever done-something his father had never done: He had won an important battle in the larger war to become the president of the United States. "We have done the unthinkable when everyone put us down as an asterisk four months ago," Bush said.
For the moment, in the winter darkness in Des Moines, there was joy. Yet Bush knew that "there's a long way to go yet." For months, Bush had known something else, too. "Reagan is still tough out there," he said. "I respect his strength." Bush at last went to bed about one thirty. "On to New Hampshire," Barbara wrote in her diary-on to the next.
TWENTY.
It Hurt Like Hell
Reporter: "What is your biggest worry, your biggest problem in New Hampshire?"
Bush: "Reagan."
-The New Yorker's ELIZABETH DREW, Portrait of an Election BUSH STARTED AS EARLY AS HE COULD, rising at five twenty on Tuesday, January 22, 1980, to make appearances on the network morning shows. He and Barbara then boarded a flight to Keene, New Hampshire, followed by another plane full of press and staff. It was snowing when they landed. Bush was greeted by a crowd of fifty and a band that struck up "Hey, Look Me Over."
"How well do you expect to do here?" a reporter asked.
"Better than you think," Bush said. "I think now that I have a real shot at doing as well as the plan calls for. If it works here, there's no stopping me."
The struggle between Bush and Reagan in New Hampshire was intense, personal, and long: In 1980, there were five weeks between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire voting. Bush insinuated, subtly and not so subtly, that Reagan was too old and too extreme; Reagan argued, subtly and not so subtly, that Bush was too effete and too eastern. In this cold New England winter the two men went to war.
Hugh Gregg, Bush's campaign manager in the state, had absolute power-so absolute that the candidate's team called him "Ayatollah." An Andover and Yale man, Gregg, an old Bush friend, had been a wunderkind governor in the 1950s. He assigned the candidate twenty-two minutes for lunch each day, unless he cut it down to six for a sandwich. The opening of the New Hampshire race was coming at what Bush recalled as a "heady" moment. Newsweek put him on the cover, and in Time, three anonymous sources testified to Bush's virtues the week after the Iowa win. "Bush was loyal, but he didn't say everything the White House wanted him to," said a Nixon aide. "He wasn't a toady. He held the party together." An unnamed "onetime director" of the CIA said that Bush "gave a great deal of hope and revival of dignity to people who were feeling low." A former director of operations at the CIA remarked: "He's tough as nails when he makes a decision. He'll stand by it, come hell or high water."
An ABC News-Harris Poll of Republicans found Bush running even with Reagan nationally and ten points ahead in the East-which included New Hampshire. A post-Iowa Boston Globe poll put Bush ahead of Reagan in New Hampshire by nine points. With everything now in doubt, Reagan emerged from his cocoon in California. Bush sensed-feared-what was at hand. "Beneath the media glow of my Iowa success was the political reality that Reagan, without campaigning, had come within two percentage points of winning the caucuses," Bush recalled. What could an active, engaged Reagan do?
Unfortunately for Bush, it was a promising moment for a Reagan comeback. Earlier, the unrest around the world had seemed to favor Bush's diplomatic experience, but as the Iranian hostage crisis dragged on and the Soviets took over Afghanistan, possibly threatening the Persian Gulf, Reagan's image of strength was attracting more support. A series of polls suggested that Americans were becoming more hawkish in the face of the crises in Iran and Afghanistan, with 64 percent favoring an American invasion of the Persian Gulf in the event the Soviets were to move into the region. To give New Hampshire's Republican primary voters-49 percent of whom had supported him in 1976-a reason to choose him over Bush, then, Reagan really just needed to be Reagan again.
- The question of Reagan's age was pervasive, and Bush did what he could to take advantage of it. The only thing Reagan could do to convince people he was not too old to be president was to prove that he was not too old to campaign effectively for president. "Ronnie campaigned harder in New Hampshire than he had ever campaigned in his life," Nancy Reagan recalled. "The press could barely keep up with him." He spent Tuesday, February 5, 1980-the day before his sixty-ninth birthday-going from event to event in New Hampshire, eleven in all, joking about his age. "Compared to the alternative," Reagan deadpanned, "I'm very happy."
To answer Bush on the age issue, the Reaganites injected class politics into the contest in early February, painting Bush as the embodiment of an exclusive world closed to ordinary Americans. "It's old-school tie and inherited influence against the working middle-class Americans," state Reagan chairman Gerald Carmen told The New York Times. Reagan supporter William Loeb, publisher of The Union Leader in Manchester, New Hampshire, agreed. "Mr. Bush," Loeb said, "is the candidate of the self-appointed elite of this country."