Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 13
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Destiny and Power Part 13

The Special Relationship

He's hard to read; he doesn't ask for advice; he doesn't say, "what do you think about this," very much-but the other side of that is, I feel uninhibited in bringing things up to him.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, on working with Ronald Reagan AFTER DETROIT, Ronald Reagan came to trust George Bush, particularly when the No. 2 on the ticket proved to be true to his word never to try-even if he could have-to outshine Reagan. "Bush had a special relationship with Reagan," wrote Reagan domestic policy adviser Martin Anderson. Reagan was determined, Anderson said, to bring Bush "deep into the inner sanctums, virtually letting him sit by his side as he conducted his presidency."

Reagan was an intelligent delegator, Bush discreet and conscientious. Those genuinely familiar with the two men believed they would form a strong working partnership. "I know both of them, and they're gentlemen," Bryce Harlow, the old Republican hand, remarked to Boyden Gray, the Washington lawyer who became Bush's longtime counsel. "It won't be anything like Kennedy and Johnson. It's going to work better than anything in the modern era."

Bush had hardly been able to contain his enthusiasm during the inaugural festivities on Tuesday, January 20, 1981. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, as usual, administered Bush's oath of office. During the parade that afternoon, an ecstatic Bush waved to the crowds with such energy that some observers thought he might fall out of the limousine.

At the first meeting of Bush's vice presidential team, the chief of staff, former admiral Daniel Murphy, was clear about how things were to be. "Don't upstage the President's staff. That would be the quickest way to alienate George Bush from Ronald Reagan." Murphy also said there should be "no surprises and no self-aggrandizement. There's only one star on this staff, and that's George Bush."

Bush at once learned that the vice presidency was unlike any post he had ever held. His jobs since his days in the House-the United Nations, the Republican National Committee, China, the CIA-had specific briefs. Serving Reagan brought Bush into contact with every conceivable area of interest and concern. And yet Bush was realistic about a critical fact of political life: The president is the president, and not much else matters. He hoped to serve Reagan well and to reassure the now-essential right wing of the Republican Party that he was a worthy successor to the president, who was the true conservative hero. It was a difficult, even exhausting political task, for in the Reagan years Bush was largely seen either as a man with no real convictions or as a moderate Machiavelli who, with James Baker, was determined, in the political vernacular of the right, to keep Reagan from being Reagan. The two caricatures of the vice president were in conflict: Bush could not simultaneously be a craven wimp with no agenda other than his own ambition and be a secret Rockefeller Republican genius capable of manipulating Ronald Reagan. (The former required no philosophy at all and the latter was all about philosophy.) As vice president, George Bush was neither as irrelevant as many thought nor as powerful as many feared. His diaries of the period-sporadic but still revealing-show that he spent the Reagan years working hard to be useful to the president, struggling, from year to year and election cycle to election cycle, to convince the base of his party that he could be trusted with the Reagan legacy.

At his core, Bush judged his vice presidency on the degree to which Reagan himself trusted him-or didn't. In the first year of the administration Alaska senator Ted Stevens wrote Bush to say "'Separate yourself from 1600 on some issues,'" Bush recalled. "Bad advice, totally impossible advice."

The role Bush crafted for himself was that of senior confidential adviser and absolute administration loyalist. Reagan appreciated his vice president's ready ear and usually sound counsel, and he took Bush for granted in the best sense of the term. For Reagan, Bush appears to have been kind of a human Marine One-a perk of the office that made life easier. Like the presidential helicopter, Bush was always there, an accepted and natural part of the daily action.

Reagan could be enigmatic even to those who had known him for a great deal longer than Bush had. Still, the two men developed a working relationship that, while not even remotely one between equals, was one in which the principal came to trust the subordinate and the subordinate came to respect the principal. "When I do bring up something controversial," Bush told his diary in the first Reagan term, "he might not comment; he might not say anything right there; and he might not look particularly enthralled about it all or say, 'Tell me more'; but I never get the feeling that he doesn't want me to tell him, so I do and I try not to overdo it."

- Bush developed a set of informal rules of conduct for himself in his new role. He spelled them out only later, toward the end of his service as vice president, but for him they were real and controlling from the beginning.

First, don't play the political opportunist's game by putting distance between yourself and the President when some White House decision or policy becomes unpopular....

Second, don't play the Washington news-leaking game....

This leads directly to the third rule...conduct all interviews on the record-even interviews with friends, especially if you want to keep them as friends. That way you're less likely to be surprised when you later read or hear yourself quoted in the press.

Where did Bush's sense of the vice presidency come from? The origins of his theory-and his practice-that the number two man should be seen but not heard, save for private moments with the president, can be traced to Bush's understanding of the experiences of Walter Mondale in the Carter years and of Nelson Rockefeller during the Ford administration. "Be sure not to take any line responsibilities," Mondale had warned Bush, who interpreted the advice to mean that he should avoid "permanent assignments covering specific areas of Administration policy," for competing interests within the government with stakes in the given subject would try to stymie whatever it was that you were trying to do. "The Vice President's authority in any executive area comes from the White House, but the lines are sometimes blurred," Bush recalled. "Since Washington is a turf-conscious environment-never more so than at or near the center of power-a Vice President perceived to be stepping over a line could be on a collision course with the White House staff or some Cabinet member."

Which is what had happened to Rockefeller. The former New York governor had arrived in Washington in 1974 determined to play a significant role in domestic policy. He chaired the White House's Domestic Policy Council but found that the staff, which could focus more tightly on fewer issues than Rockefeller, was in control despite the seeming power of the vice presidency. Rockefeller hated it. In a conversation with Bush, who was then CIA director, in the vice president's Old Executive Office Building office, Rockefeller had spent twenty minutes expressing his frustrations. "My relations with the President are good," Rockefeller had told Bush, "but that damned staff has cut me off at the knees."

Bush never forgot Rockefeller's words. If you could have good relations with the president, then what else really mattered? The key to taking on specific assignments was to make sure you had the authority as well as the responsibility-the ability not just to make recommendations but to implement them. For Bush, the lesson of Rockefeller was to focus upward, on the president, and if handed a more traditional task within the administration, make certain you had the power to act, not just argue.

Bush also quickly formed an affectionate view of Reagan, which, given Bush's nature, was not surprising. "I spent sixteen years fighting the man and what he stood for," Bush told Congressman Mickey Leland, a Texas Democrat, in February 1981. "But I didn't know him." Reagan, Bush said, was "unthreatened by people or events, a superb person."

Bush attended daily briefings in the Oval Office, and there were weekly lunches, usually on Thursdays, featuring Mexican food. (Bush added a lot of hot sauce to his chili; Reagan did not.) "Before lunch every week, there was a vacuuming for new jokes to tell," recalled Boyden Gray, Bush's legal counsel. (Bush dropped some jelly beans into his lap by mistake one day while sitting in the Oval Office. "George, I've got a question to ask you," Reagan said. "What else do you feed that thing besides jelly beans?") One morning in 1981 was typical of the Reagan-Bush relationship. Bush called the Oval Office to see if Reagan "was busy and he wasn't, so I stuck my head in." They chatted about interest rates and proposed cuts in defense. Reagan shared a clip from The Wall Street Journal that argued business leaders should take a cue from Reagan and go on vacations, delegate authority, and preserve their energy for the big things.

There was a sense of ease and of spontaneity between the two men. Gray remembered a meeting with Bush and a group of young visitors with severe disabilities. "They were very difficult to communicate with, but Bush was masterful at it," Gray recalled. Bush decided to take the kids down the hall to the Oval Office to meet President Reagan. There was no appointment, no notice. Reagan was delighted, and the session lasted an hour. "That was the level of comfort," Gray recalled, "of even informality then."

- There was one discordant note: Mrs. Reagan, who never truly embraced the post-Detroit spirit of reconciliation between the two former opponents. While Reagan himself was perfectly pleasant to the Bushes, his wife grew formal, distant, even cold. She worried about the Bushes upstaging the Reagans and declined to open the Reagan social circle to include the vice president and his wife. The Bushes were rarely invited to the private quarters of the White House in the Reagans' eight years in power.

Between the election and the inauguration, William Wilson, a member of Reagan's "kitchen cabinet" from California, came to Bush. "Right after Reagan had been elected-and I had been elected vice president-we got a message from this guy Wilson," Bush recalled. "It turned out he was carrying water for Nancy on this. The message was, 'Stay out of the paper, get a lower profile, back down. Tell the Shrubs to keep a lower profile.' We weren't taking a high profile, not doing the Washington thing of saying this or that, and it burned me up, and it burned Barbara up. She was very unhappy about it, deservedly so. We couldn't back down if we hadn't backed forward. We hadn't done anything. Hadn't done a damn thing. And I was very careful about that, always. Still don't know what drove that. But Nancy and Barbara just did not have a pleasant personal relationship."

What was behind Nancy Reagan's restrained but real hostility toward the Bushes, particularly Barbara? Theories abounded. There was perhaps lingering anger over the 1980 primary campaign, when Bush made an issue of Reagan's age. There were cultural differences-East Coast versus West Coast, old WASP society versus Hollywood, politics versus entertainment. The show business explanation has much to recommend it: In the Reagans' Hollywood universe, there could be only one leading couple. In the Washington of 198189, Ronald and Nancy Reagan were the stars, and the supporting actors, George and Barbara Bush, were to stay deep in the background. Ever vigilant and prone to worrying, Nancy wanted to make certain that the Bushes knew their place.

- Fortunately for Bush, Mrs. Reagan's skeptical view of the vice president was not widely shared in Reagan's inner circle. One sign of Bush's success in overcoming the doubts of Detroit in the Reagan inner circle came when Ed Meese and Mike Deaver (along with Jim Baker) recommended that Bush be put in charge of the administration's toptier national-security-crisis management group. There was a sound internal logic to the decision. Traditionally the national security adviser had played this role, but Secretary of State Alexander Haig, sensitive to any encroachment on his policy territory, did not, as Reagan recalled, "like or trust" the incumbent national security adviser, Richard Allen. The president approved of the Bush appointment. "Not only would that deal with Haig's unhappiness over Allen," Reagan wrote, "I also thought that it was prudent-and important for the country-for the vice-president to play as large a role in the affairs of the administration as possible; I didn't want George, in the words of Nelson Rockefeller, simply to be 'standby equipment.'"

The decision enraged Haig, who called Reagan to protest. The secretary of state, Reagan recalled, "didn't want the vice-president to have anything to do with international affairs; it was his jurisdiction, he said, and he told me he was thinking of resigning." The outburst proved the Bush idea had been a sound one. An anonymous White House aide (who sounded an awful lot like Jim Baker) was quoted as saying, "the President simply feels more comfortable with George because he doesn't let his ego and ambition show and he doesn't come off as strong as Al Haig."

Bush was also a key figure on the rollback of federal regulations on business. Formally known as the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, the group's mission was part of Reagan's decades-long campaign against excessive government intervention in the economy. Bush went about the work quietly but persistently.

Operating under Executive Order 12291, issued by President Reagan in February 1981, the Bush task force reviewed existing regulations and served as a referee for any new proposals. Reagan had spelled out the guiding principle in the executive order: "Regulatory action shall not be undertaken unless the potential benefits to society for the regulation outweigh the potential costs to society." According to domestic policy adviser Martin Anderson, the task force took on 181 regulations in thirteen departments in the first three months, saving an estimated $18 billion in the first year and an annual $6 billion going forward.

It was difficult to gauge the Bush task force's impact in part because much of its power was preventive. The bureaucracy and special interest groups found themselves defending existing regulations so much that, as Anderson put it, "they didn't have any time left over to dream up many new regulations....Any significant proposal for regulation by any part of the Reagan administration would have eventually come up for review in Bush's task force. None ever came up because none were ever proposed." The environment was also a crucial part of Bush's portfolio. "Ronald Reagan delegated a great deal of presidential authority to him, particularly on environmental regulation," recalled Bush counsel Boyden Gray. Bush was, then, critical in the regulatory sphere of the 1980s. It was typical of him to hide in plain sight, exercising a measure of power without being stagey or seeking publicity.

- In the middle of March 1981, Bush took off on a four-day trip to Florida to build support for the administration's economic package. At a Brevard County fundraiser, astronaut Wally Schirra, who introduced Bush, had some fun with the Reagan-Bush team, saying that Bush was so "tall, handsome, and urbane that he is the first politician who may become an actor." The trip was tense, though, because of what was unfolding back in Washington.

An odd rumor had begun circulating around the capital. According to the story, the vice presidential Secret Service detail had accidentally shot Bush while he was leaving a weekend assignation in Georgetown with Janet Steiger, the widow of his friend Bill Steiger, at three o'clock in the morning. A mugger was said to have tried to attack Bush, and the agents, aiming for the assailant, hit Bush instead. In another version of the tale, the mugger had stabbed Bush.

In Melbourne, Florida, on Tuesday, March 17, Bush speechwriter Vic Gold advised publicly confronting the story. "Both GB and I think that dignifying a smear like that with a statement would be wrong," Chase Untermeyer, Bush's executive assistant, wrote in his diary. "Let it die of its own foolishness." Bush refused to engage, and the vice presidential party flew back to Washington.

The next morning, Wednesday the eighteenth, Bush's staff met in his West Wing office. A fire was burning in the fireplace. The Steiger rumor was growing in intensity. Though no one had yet reported the story, journalists from major news organizations were calling. One columnist, Maxine Cheshire, told Bush press secretary Pete Teeley that her source was a Secret Service agent. "The Service has firmly denied the whole episode, and Jim Baker saw their logs," wrote Untermeyer. "GB's attitude is one of low-burning anger, but he will refrain from making a comment."

Where had the story come from? Rich Bond, the Iowa caucus veteran and Bush political adviser, thought the rumor had originated with conservatives who were trying to deflect attention from "a recent story that Reps. Jack Kemp [Republican from New York] and Tom Evans [Republican from Delaware] and Sen. Dan Quayle [Republican from Indiana] shacked up with a winsome lobbyist named Paula Parkinson, who taped their intimate encounters with her." (That story, too, was untrue.) Later that day, Shirley Green, Teeley's deputy, warned the staff not to talk about the story for fear that such speculation would give the press the "news peg" it needed to write about the rumor. (As Untermeyer wrote, they needed to avoid headlines like "'Bush Staffers Suspect Far Right of Spreading Sex Rumor.'") The FBI was called in; Director William Webster, a former federal judge, had already heard a variation of the rumors-"a version that had GB coming out of an expensive bordello," as Untermeyer put it-and promised to investigate. Bush was interviewed by two FBI agents on Friday, March 20, 1981, and the story fell apart.

On Sunday, March 22, The Washington Post published a piece headlined "Anatomy of a Washington Rumor: False Tale Takes [On] Life of Its Own, Swiftly Spreads-Then Collapses."

- The Bush circle was pleased it had kept a dignified silence about the whole drama. "We handled the whole matter appropriately, grandly ignoring it and letting it die on its own," wrote Untermeyer. "We can't forget, after all, that we're supposed to be the class act in this town."

On Saturday, March 28, Bush attended the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, an exclusive gathering of politicians and journalists. Reagan spoke to the club, and Ginger Rogers was among the guests at the Capital Hilton.

Reagan was solicitous of Bush. "Does he feel what he's doing is worthwhile?" the president asked Barbara at Reagan's seventieth birthday party in February. "I just want to be sure he's doing enough." Then Reagan raised the most terrible prospect of all. "If the awful-awful should happen," the president said, "George should know everything."

TWENTY-FOUR.

The President Was Struck

My every inclination is to be calm, not churning around.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH Have you ever known a day this wild?

-BARBARA BUSH IT WAS DARK AND DRIZZLING in Washington when George Bush awoke in his bedroom in the vice presidential residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory early on Monday morning, March 30, 1981. Because he was taking off from Andrews Air Force Base for a trip to Fort Worth and to Austin at 8:55 A.M., Bush had arranged for the CIA to deliver his daily briefing at the residence on Massachusetts Avenue rather than at the White House.

Chase Untermeyer and Jennifer Fitzgerald, another aide, met Bush, and they helicoptered out to Andrews. They landed on the runway in the rain and hurried onto Air Force Two. Awaiting Bush aboard the jet were two Texas congressmen-Kika de la Garza, the Democratic chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and Bill Archer, a Republican from Houston.

The flight to Fort Worth was just shy of three hours. Bush asked Untermeyer, Fitzgerald, and Vic Gold to join him in his stateroom for a continental breakfast and a briefing on the day ahead. At about a quarter to eleven central time Air Force Two began its descent to Carswell Air Force Base near Fort Worth. In Texas the weather was sunny and warm; Untermeyer noted that early spring rains had made the North Texas plain freshly green. In Fort Worth, Bush's first stop was the unveiling of a historical plaque at the Hotel Texas, where John Kennedy spent the last night of his life.

In the White House, Reagan was having a quiet lunch and taking a final look at a speech he was to deliver shortly to a meeting of the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO. The venue on this gloomy Monday: the International Ballroom of the Washington Hilton.

- After his stop at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Bush was driven to the Tarrant County Convention Center to address a Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association luncheon. He spent an hour and twenty minutes at the event. He left the convention center at 1:20 P.M. central time and arrived back at Carswell.

Jim Wright, the House majority leader, was joining Bush for the fortyfive-minute flight to Austin, as was Congressman James Collins, a Republican from Dallas. Chase Untermeyer, an alumnus of the Texas legislature, sat down with Wright, Collins, and Bill Archer, who was still with the vice presidential party. As the 707 taxied down the runway, Bush chatted in his stateroom with two of his loyal Texas aides, Jack Steel and Betty Green. It was 1:45 central time, 2:45 in Washington. An air traffic controller, without explaining why, radioed Air Force Two's cockpit once the plane was in the air: "Are you continuing to Austin or diverting to Washington?"

"We're heading to Austin, as scheduled," came the reply. Monitoring radio communications through a headset, a Secret Service agent on the plane heard there had been a shooting as the presidential party left the Washington Hilton a few moments before. According to this first report, two agents had been struck, but the assailant had missed Reagan. "Sir, we've just received word about a shooting in Washington," Ed Pollard, the head of the Bush Secret Service detail, told the vice president a moment later. "There is no indication that the president has been hit. Word is that two agents are down. That's all we have right now. But I'm going to make some calls and see if I can get some more information."

"Where did it happen?" Bush asked.

"Outside the Washington Hilton," Pollard said. "I'll let you know when we get more information."

In the interval between Bush's departure from the Cattle Raisers Association meeting and the boarding of Air Force Two for the 1:45 P.M. central takeoff for Austin, John W. Hinckley, Jr., a mentally disturbed young man, had opened fire on Reagan outside the Hilton at 2:27 P.M. eastern time.

Getting off six shots from a .22-caliber revolver, Hinckley wounded four men: White House press secretary James Brady, Washington, D.C., police officer Thomas Delahanty, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, and Ronald Reagan. At first no one, including Reagan, understood that he had been hit; he initially believed that he had broken a rib when he had been rushed into the back of the car. The president complained of difficulty breathing and was coughing up blood. At the direction of Secret Service agent Jerry Parr, the president was driven from the hotel to George Washington University Hospital rather than to the White House. Doctors at the hospital found that Reagan had, in fact, been shot, struck by a bullet that had ricocheted off the presidential limousine and entered the left side of Reagan's chest, coming to rest an inch from his heart.

Barbara Bush learned of the shooting while working at her desk in the vice presidential residence. The television was on but muted. She looked up at one point to see the news reports and the raw, choppy footage of the shooting outside the Hilton. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing," she recalled. "My heart ached so for Nancy." Barbara understood, however, that the human instinct to turn up in order to be of quiet support was, in this case, the wrong impulse. "I knew that the best thing I could do for her was to stay away; what she needed was a best friend," Barbara recalled-and Barbara Bush was not Nancy Reagan's best friend. Barbara's own best friend, Andy Stewart, Potter Stewart's wife, came over without delay.

Jim Baker and Ed Meese were driven from the White House to the hospital. Learning of the shooting while at the State Department, Al Haig reached Baker and said that he would contact Bush. At the White House, Haig, still in his trench coat, walked into Baker's office and picked up the phone to be connected with Air Force Two.

"Mr. Vice President, this is Secretary Haig," Haig said. "We had a serious incident and I'm sending you a message by secure line. I recommend you return to Washington as soon as possible."

Bush heard that much from Haig, but the connection was poor, and after breaking the initial news, Haig was speaking only to static. Then Don Regan, who as secretary of the Treasury oversaw the Secret Service, called Bush, "urging that I scrub my Austin schedule and fly back to Washington." Implicit in the message, Bush believed, was a warning about his own safety. "Any attempt on the President's life alerts the Service to the possibility that it might be part of a larger plot," Bush recalled. The vice president could be in danger. The shooting in Washington might be an isolated act-or it might be part of a wider conspiracy to take out the top leadership of the American government. "We have no way of knowing that there weren't gunmen sent to Washington, Fort Worth, and Austin," a member of Bush's Secret Service detail remarked on Air Force Two.

As Bush absorbed Haig and Regan's advice, he was handed the decoded telex from the White House. "Mr. Vice President: In the incident you will have heard about by now, the president was struck in the back and is in serious condition," Haig had written. "Medical authorities are deciding now whether or not to operate. Recommend you return to D.C. at the earliest possible moment."

This was the first Bush knew that Reagan had himself been shot. The scope of what was happening was clearer, and more frightening. In the air on his 707, heading for Austin, Bush thought of the tragedy that had befallen another president not quite eighteen years before. "It had to occur to me, but I didn't want to think about it," Bush recalled. "The [Hotel Texas], where I'd unveiled the national historic plaque a few hours before, had been the place that John F. Kennedy had spent the night of November 21, 1963, before his visit the next day to Dallas." There was more. "Even the plane we were on had played a part in that tragic trip," Bush recalled. "It was the Air Force Two used by thenVice President Johnson as he accompanied President Kennedy to Texas on November 21, 1963." Was history repeating itself? Had Bush come to Texas as vice president-and would he leave it as president?

Air Force Two was nearing Austin. As the aircraft closed in on the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport in the Texas capital, the plane's televisions picked up the ABC News coverage of the shooting. The flickering black-and-white images-of what Bush recalled as "the crack of gunfire, people hitting the pavement, Secret Service agents struggling with the suspect, the President's car speeding away"-deepened Bush's sense of the moment.

The plane landed briefly in Austin to refuel. Bush canceled his speech to the legislature. He would return to Washington as quickly as the 707 could safely take him. Outside Air Force Two, the dignitaries who had gathered to greet the vice president were in mild shock. "Various friends came up to say hello," wrote Chase Untermeyer, "smiling bravely and looking up at the plane, as if it were a symbol of the government in Washington, from which we all felt semi-removed."

On the ground in Austin, Bush called Dan Murphy, who was in the Situation Room that afternoon. Murphy briefed him on Brady, Delahanty, and McCarthy. From the hospital, Meese told Bush that Jerry Parr's decision to go straight to the emergency room had probably saved Reagan's life. The president was still in surgery. News of his condition and prognosis-presuming he survived-was several hours away. Bush asked for a moment alone. He wanted to collect his thoughts, he said-and "to say a prayer not simply for the President of the United States but for someone I'd come to know and respect."

The plane was soon in the air for the two-and-a-half-hour flight to Andrews. Bush called Barbara several times. "I really needed to be near his voice, and he must have sensed that," Barbara recalled. Reporters on board were anxious to speak to the vice president, but his instinct was to hold off. He said no interviews-not, he added, "until we had more information." Bush understood his role-to "wait," as he put it, "and stay calm." The White House counsel, Fred Fielding, was at work on the mechanics of invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment in the event Reagan remained unconscious for a long period. "They're preparing papers for the transfer of authority if that becomes necessary," Bush told his staff aboard Air Force Two.

For all Bush knew Ronald Reagan could die on the operating table in the waning hours of afternoon. Yet the vice president showed no fear, no anxiety. "He seems so calm," Jim Wright wrote in a diary he kept on the flight, "no signs whatever of nervous distress." In a way, Bush had been here before. Long ago he had been charged with life-and-death responsibilities on an airborne mission. Then he had been twenty years old, an aviator in the vast mosaic of war. Now he was in middle age, a statesman returning to the precincts of temporal power. Then, amid fire and smoke, he had finished his mission. Now, amid uncertainty and doubt, he was determined to do his duty, which, as he saw it, was to lead quietly and with dignity.

- Ed Pollard and John Matheny, the vice president's air force aide, conferred with Bush about arrangements upon arrival in Washington. "There might be a crowd at Andrews," Pollard said. "If you don't mind, sir, we'd like to bring the plane into the hangar and disembark there." Bush agreed. Then the conversation shifted to the next step of the journey. Pollard and Matheny argued that Bush should take a helicopter from Andrews directly to the South Lawn of the White House. That was by far the fastest route-faster and safer than helicoptering to Observatory Hill and driving down Massachusetts Avenue to the White House.

The idea made all the sense in the world-except to Bush. His first rule as vice president, he recalled, was the "most basic of all the rules....The country can only have one President at a time, and the Vice President is not the one." A showboating vice president who attracted attention to himself was a reminder of the president's absence. Intuitively, Bush believed that the stronger he looked the weaker the president might seem. "At this moment I am very concerned about the symbolism of the thing," Bush said to Pollard and Matheny. "Think it through. Unless there's a compelling security reason, I'd rather land at the Observatory or on the Ellipse."

Landing on the South Lawn was the president's prerogative, and the last thing Bush wanted was to be seen as trying to usurp the privileges of the president. The South Lawn felt "too self-important," Untermeyer wrote of the debate between Bush and his security men. There was precedent, Pollard and Matheny countered, for a vice president to use the South Lawn. "But we have to think of other things," Bush replied. "Mrs. Reagan, for example."

Bush understood the logistical and symbolic arguments for the South Lawn. "By going straight to the White House, we'd get there in time for the 7 P.M. network news," Bush recalled. "What better way was there to reassure the country and tell the world the executive branch was still operating than to show the Vice President, on live TV, arriving at the White House?" The prospect, however, troubled Bush. "The President in the hospital...Marine Two dropping out of the sky, blades whirring, the Vice President stepping off the helicopter to take charge," Bush mused. "Good television, yes-but not the message I thought we needed to send to the country and the world."

Matheny was thinking in practical terms. "We'll be coming in at rush hour," he told Bush. "Mass Avenue traffic will add anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to your arrival time at the White House."

"Maybe so," Bush said, "but we'll just have to do it that way."

"Yes, sir," Matheny said, but Bush saw that he looked puzzled.

"John," Bush said, "only the President lands on the South Lawn."

- At around four P.M., Brady deputy Larry Speakes gave a series of inconclusive answers in the White House briefing room. "If the president goes into surgery and goes under anesthesia," one reporter asked, "would Vice President Bush become the acting president at that moment or under what circumstances does he?"

"I cannot answer that question at this time," Speakes said.

"Larry, who'll be determining the status of the president and whether the vice president should, in fact, become the acting president?"

"Pardon?"

"Who will be determining the status of the president?"

"I don't know the details on that."

Worried that this series of shaky answers suggested the government was in confusion, Haig, who had been watching Speakes on television, rushed upstairs from the Situation Room to address the cameras. He did not pause to compose himself. Out of breath and perspiring as he took the podium, Haig attempted to project a sense of calm. "I just wanted to touch upon a few matters associated with today's tragedy," Haig said. "First, as you know, we are in close touch with the vice president who is returning to Washington. We have in the Situation Room all of the officials of the cabinet who should be here and ready at this time. We have informed our friends abroad of the situation, the president's condition as we know it, stable, now undergoing surgery. And there are absolutely no alert measures that are necessary at this time." Bill Plante of CBS asked the key question. "Who's making the decisions for the government right now?"

"Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state in that order and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so," Haig said. "As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the vice president and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course."

A floor below, Don Regan said, "Is he mad?" In his rush to reassure the nation and the world, Haig had misstated the line of presidential succession and seemed power-hungry. (Under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, both the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate are ahead of the secretary of state in the order of succession.) Bush watched Haig's performance on the black-and-white television on Air Force Two. At ten after five eastern time, the Bush party heard an erroneous ABC News report that James Brady had died of his wound. The shooting itself, Haig's press conference, the Brady news, the uncertainty about Reagan's prognosis: It was misery upon misery.

Yet Bush was outwardly serene. "It's hard to describe my emotions," Bush dictated to Untermeyer on the plane. "They're cumulative. A funny thing: the way Reagan's and my relationship has developed-not presidentialvice presidential but more like a friend. [There's] a concern for someone who's your friend. Because I see it that way-seeing him [on videotape] getting into that car, waving-I see it on a personal plane." He had no doubts about his own capacity to govern if it came to that. If there were, say, a military crisis in Eastern Europe arising out of current Soviet-Polish tensions, "having to be the person to determine that, [to] be the critical person to make that decision-I don't have any consternation about it at all....My every inclination is to be calm, not churning around," Bush said. "I would have thought it would have been much more complicated about the responsibilities, but my innermost thoughts are [that] this guy is a friend....I think about Nancy Reagan: Is anybody holding her hand? I have a great feeling that all will work out. The President is very strong."

At 6:08 P.M., Bush's telephone buzzed. Ed Meese was calling to report that Reagan was out of surgery and things looked good. "That's wonderful-that's very good," Bush said. Meese would meet Bush at the vice presidential residence. "See you at the house," Bush said.

Looking out the window as Air Force Two approached Andrews, Untermeyer noticed a bright sunset after hours of rain; the combination of the setting sun and the slick pavement of the capital cast the city in a strange orange light. The aircraft landed and taxied into Hangar 7 before Bush boarded the helicopter for the short trip home. Barbara, with Meese at her side, was waiting for him. The Bushes, Untermeyer recalled, embraced, and Bush and Meese shook hands. The motorcade was ready, and off Bush went. Untermeyer and Fitzgerald went back toward the house with Barbara. "Have you ever known a day this wild?" Barbara asked.

- "What's the latest?" Bush asked as he walked into the Situation Room.

The cabinet members, The New York Times reported, "rose respectfully." Later a few would recall that though they had called Bush "George" before the assassination attempt, they addressed him as "Mr. Vice President" from the moment he came into the Situation Room. "The President is still President," Bush told them. "He is not incapacitated and I am not going to be a substitute President. I'm here to sit in for him while he recuperates. But he's going to call the shots."

Earlier, with Haig misstating the line of succession, things had seemed chaotic, and Haig and Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger had exchanged tense words over the alert status of U.S. forces. Now, with good news of the president and with Bush, Meese, and Jim Baker in the White House itself, matters seemed in hand. When sensitive national security issues were raised in the rundown for Bush in the Situation Room, Baker and Bush called for a pause in the discussion to ask whether everyone present had the proper security clearances.

It was a straightforward question. By posing it they further defused the tensions in the White House, for several aides and others without the right clearances filed out of the tiny Situation Room, easing the crowding and giving the principals a bit more room and a bit more air.

Should Bush make a public statement to offer a benediction to a long, miserable day? "I think I could," Bush said. "And just say we are very pleased. I don't think we need questions, either." At eight P.M., Bush called an end to the running meeting in the closed, claustrophobic Situation Room in favor of a much smaller group in his own office upstairs in the West Wing. A few remarks were drafted, and he walked into the briefing room.

From the podium where a succession of figures had failed to reassure since the shooting-a long eight hours-a calm George Bush addressed the nation at 8:20 P.M. It was the briefest of statements. He said he was "deeply heartened" by an upbeat report from Reagan's doctors. The president, Bush said, "has emerged from this experience with flying colors and with the most optimistic prospects for a complete recovery. I can reassure this nation and the watching world that the American government is functioning fully and effectively. We've had full and complete communication throughout the day and the officers of the federal government have been fulfilling their obligations with skill and with care." The last point was not strictly accurate, but Bush thought it wisest to cast Haig's difficult afternoon in the best possible light. Piling on the secretary of state would not serve the president or the country.

Bush returned to his office. There he called congressional leaders to check in and telephoned the wives of Thomas Delahanty and Tim McCarthy. Deciding against visiting the president at the hospital, he learned that Nancy was back in the Residence and went over to pay his respects. "She looked tiny and afraid," Bush remarked to his staff when he returned a few moments later.