Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 14
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Destiny and Power Part 14

Everything was quiet-or as quiet as it could be under the circumstances. At about nine thirty P.M., roughly twelve and a half hours after he had left Washington for Texas for the most routine of political day trips, George Bush went home.

- About 1:30 A.M. in Washington, Art Weise of The Houston Post put in calls to Bush's staff to ask an uncomfortable question: Did Neil Bush, who had moved to Denver, know John Hinckley, whose family also lived there? Oddly, Neil and his wife had been scheduled to dine with Hinckley's brother the night after the assassination attempt. There was more. "The Hinckleys are a prosperous family, and John Sr. may have been a Bush contributor," Untermeyer wrote in his diary after speaking with Weise. "Art wanted to know if this connection was known by GB in flight, and I said that as late as the helo ride from Andrews to the Observatory, we weren't even sure what the gunman's name was." Weise made an excellent point in the overnight calls: "even a slight Bush connection in this shooting could set off the conspiracy freaks."

The next morning Bush's staff met him at his car on West Executive Avenue to brief him on Weise's questions. "Jesus," Bush said, but Untermeyer recalled that Bush seemed "only mildly concerned, so little in fact that he didn't think to call Barbara or ask any of us to do so." Pete Teeley suggested a quick probe into any further links, including the possibility that John Hinckley, Sr., might have donated money to Bush's campaigns. An hour passed before it became clear that there was nothing more to the story than remarkable coincidence.

Bush had the fullest of days on Tuesday, March 31, 1981. With Reagan recovering, Bush stepped into what a vice presidential aide told reporters was a "pinch-hitting" role. At the White House, Bush convened the cabinet but notably presided from his usual chair across from the president's. He met with congressional leaders to hear a report on the investigation of the shooting from Attorney General William French Smith. Bush's air of reserved authority was such that everything appeared perfectly calm. After the White House sessions with Bush, Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker told journalists that "never for a moment was there any interruption of the normal lawful chain of command" during the long afternoon the day before.

At eleven o'clock in the morning, Bush drove up to Capitol Hill. In an eighteen-minute appearance on the Senate floor, he reassured lawmakers, dismissing talk of tension among the president's top officials in the wake of the Haig moment. "I have not detected, nor do I believe, there's any such rift," he said. Amid reports that the administration had considered invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment on Monday, Bush said that Reagan's current condition rendered all of that moot. "There's no need for any emergency procedures-the power of the Vice President to do anything," Bush told senators. Steady as she goes, he might have added: steady as she goes.

He returned to the White House to receive Andreas A. M. van Agt, the prime minister of the Netherlands, at a quarter after one. There was a brief ceremony and then a lunch to discuss NATO, Poland, and the Soviet Union. After briefing Reagan at the hospital a few days later, Bush told reporters that the president was "fully on top of the situation." To Bush, no other message mattered more than that Reagan was president, was on the mend, and all would be well. "That's the main point I want to make," Bush said. "It's not useful to go into any more detail."

On Wednesday, April 1, 1981-the second full day of Reagan's recovery-the usual 9:15 Oval Office national security morning briefing was held in Bush's West Wing office. Weinberger arrived ahead of Haig and was chatting with Bush when they heard the door rattling. The doorknob had been acting up lately and had now broken completely-at just the moment Haig was trying to use it. "Go right on in, Mr. Secretary!" Jennifer Fitzgerald said to Haig, who stood helplessly in the outer office. "I get the feeling it's a little inhospitable," Haig said with what Untermeyer recalled was a "wry smile." Weinberger finally opened the door from the inside to let Haig in.

Ten days later, on Saturday, April 11, President Reagan returned to the White House to continue recuperating there. Bush had spent part of the morning running in the Secret Service marathon in Beltsville, Maryland. Freshly showered-his hair was still wet-he joined Barbara at the White House to greet the president, who was dressed in a bright red sweater.

The crisis had passed, and Bush emerged from the crucible of the shooting as a sensible and steadying force. Expected to be presidential but not too presidential, he had performed well. Reagan, already disposed to treat Bush with respect, had all the more reason to believe that his vice president's professions of devotion and duty were genuine. Decades later, recalling his performance on the day of the shooting and in the aftermath, Bush said: "Did it help me with President Reagan? Sure, I think so. He saw-and Nancy saw, I might add-that I'd meant what I'd said all along, since he called me up in Detroit. He was the president, I wasn't. A president has enough to worry about without having to worry that his vice president is undercutting him, or trying to make himself look good at the president's expense. I'd decided that he deserved my total loyalty, and he got it."

The political class approved of what it had seen. "Vice President Bush...seems sure to gain in clout because of the calm manner in which he filled in for the President at Cabinet meetings and ceremonial functions," wrote Time. "His demeanor, neither pushy nor retiring, impressed even some Reaganites who had considered him a mushy moderate. Said one: 'He has been impressive. He has a good sensitivity to the situation.'" In The New York Times, William Safire wrote, "George Bush struck just the right note." Larry Speakes, the deputy press secretary whose unsteadiness had provoked the Haig appearance on the day of the shooting, recalled that "I have never been so impressed with Bush as I was that night, the way he instantly took command."

For Bush, the most political of matters-the attempted murder of the president of the United States-was interpreted through the prism of the personal. Asked about what was going through his mind during the attack and afterward, Bush would reply, "I worried about my friend who was hurt."

Over club sandwiches on the first Wednesday in May 1981, Bush aides Rich Bond and Chase Untermeyer talked about "contingency planning for the time when President Reagan might die in office." They were working without Bush's knowledge-the vice president would have shut them down, hard, if he'd been aware of the project-but believed it crucial to work on the question. Bond reported commissioning research on the Nixon-Ford and Kennedy-Johnson transitions and urged Untermeyer to read Bob Hartmann's book Palace Politics, which covered the Ford period. The goal of the lunchtime conversation was the ultimate production of a "Memorandum for the File" that would "include such things as how to set up a swearing-in and who would get which jobs and offices in the immediate post-event days."

The staff could do as it wished. The assassination attempt gave Bush himself a new perspective on Reagan. While in the hospital, the president spilled some water in his bathroom. He then got down on his hands and knees to clean it up. He worried that the nurse might get in trouble if he didn't. Bush always remembered the moment-in part, his speechwriter Christopher Buckley later observed, because that's what the vice president himself would have done.

TWENTY-FIVE.

George Did It

Do you think we feel less than others about nuclear war? We want peace, and we want to keep the peace.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, responding to a challenge from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1983 The nuts will never be for me. We might as well recognize it. I've been doing this for thirty years.

-BUSH, on the Republican right wing, 1983 AS HE RECUPERATED in the spring of 1981, spending his days in the Solarium on the top floor of the White House, Ronald Reagan, wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, decided to reach out directly to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. "I wanted to let him know that we had a realistic view of what the Soviet Union was all about," Reagan recalled, "but also wanted to send a signal to him that we were interested in reducing the threat of nuclear annihilation." For Reagan, the letter marked a shift in tone. Nine days after the inauguration in 1981, in response to a question from ABC News's Sam Donaldson, Reagan had offered a dark view of Soviet intentions. Communist leaders, he said, "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat."

Now, after his shooting, the president produced an initial draft of a letter on a pad of yellow paper arguing that the Soviets had nothing to fear from the United States. He appealed to Brezhnev to think beyond the Cold War. "Mr. President," Reagan wrote, "should we not be concerned with eliminating the obstacles which prevent our people from achieving their most cherished goals?" Brezhnev, Reagan recalled, sent back an "icy reply....So much for my first attempt at personal diplomacy." Yet, as his letter indicated, Reagan was willing to deal. One of the president's gifts as a negotiator was his capacity to blend the harshest of rhetoric with the boldest of disarmament proposals-up to and including nuclear abolition. By November 1981, a few months after his first effort, the president had again written Brezhnev, this time to propose a "zero-zero option": The United States would not deploy a new generation of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, the Pershing IIs, if the Soviets would dismantle three types of intermediate-range nuclear weapons.

In the Cold War of the early 1980s, Reagan mixed increased Pentagon spending, the domestic deployment of the MX missile (a transcontinental weapon), and a hawkish tone with proposals such as the zero-zero option for intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF). His vice president appreciated Reagan's strategy of talking tough while arguing for specific disarmament ideas. "I think there [is] a certain unpredictability...about us" on the Soviets' part, Bush told his diary, "and I think that's good."

The Soviets rejected Reagan's zero-zero option, which made the president all the more determined to deploy the Pershing IIs. Though the Europeans had first sought such an INF deployment in 1979, antinuclear sentiment was proving politically popular, particularly in West Germany, where elections were to be held in March 1983. "The American government must urgently get away from the thought that Western Europe and especially West Germany are military colonies of the U.S.A.," declared the Greens, a West German antinuclear party. Facing the risk that the Atlantic alliance could fracture, with European allies refusing to support the Pershing deployment that was scheduled for late 1983, Reagan asked Bush to go to Europe to make the case for the American position.

It was a complex assignment. Bush would travel through seven different nations trying to defuse Reagan's image as a nuclear cowboy. Part of his task in Europe, Bush told reporters, was "to impress upon them the depth of conviction that our president has about arms reduction." Reagan had crafted the strategy and projected the vision of either an INF-free European theater or an enhanced NATO force in Europe to counter the Soviet missiles in place. It was Bush's job to sell the strategy and explain the vision to a skeptical Europe.

He was "up but edgy" about the high-profile trip as he helicoptered from the vice presidential residence to Andrews in late January 1983. The Washington Post sent him off with these words on the editorial page: "The vice president seems to us just the right man-positive, experienced, political-to satisfy the allies' real craving for a strong and sensible American lead."

In West Berlin, Bush spoke at a dinner given by Mayor Richard von Weizscker at the Intercontinental Hotel. Pulling a piece of paper from his suit pocket, the vice president announced that he was about to read an open letter from President Reagan to "the people of Europe" calling on new Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to meet with Reagan "wherever and whenever [Andropov] wants in order to sign an agreement banning U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range land-based nuclear missile weapons from the face of the earth." The offer Bush presented had the desired effect. The call for a summit, said West German opposition leader Hans-Jochen Vogel, was a "positive development. It is the first time Reagan has offered such a step and we greet it. It is progress." (Andropov rejected the overture as a propaganda ploy.) In private meetings with European leaders and in public remarks, Bush signaled an American willingness to pursue arms control progress while standing by the U.S. commitment to the Pershing II deployment in the absence of Moscow's agreeing to the zero-zero option, or at least something close to it. By putting a reasonable face on American policy, Bush lowered rhetorical tensions. He spoke of knowing Reagan's "heartbeat," of understanding how much the president wanted peace. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher cabled Reagan warm words about Bush's mission. Over eleven days, Bush traveled to seven countries, doing the hard work of diplomacy.

On the last day of a long journey, in the ornate, twelfth-century Guildhall in the City of London, Bush declared that he had discovered that the Atlantic alliance was in strong shape. "Once again I found that the rumors of the death of our alliance have been greatly exaggerated," Bush told the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the medieval splendor of the setting. "What unites us is still far more enduring than whatever divides us." Diplomatic boilerplate, perhaps, but the CIA was reporting internally that opinion in European capitals appeared to be moving from pre-journey skepticism to post-journey support for U.S. plans. There was more work to be done, of course, Bush told his diary, "but the groundwork is laid, and the tide, to some degree, has been turned."

At the Guildhall, Bush was challenged by Bruce Kent, general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. With what his aide Chase Untermeyer thought was "great sincerity and almost Churchillian majesty," Bush replied: "Do you think we feel less than others about nuclear war? We want peace, and we want to keep the peace." Capturing the scene in The Washington Post, Michael Getler, a reporter who had followed Bush's tour, wrote: "It was a succinct way to put one side of the argument about the best way to avoid war. Bush's point was that military balance, even if it meant lots of weapons, was one way to keep the peace and that such a view did not mean that those who support it are any less concerned about nuclear war than those demonstrating against it." It was a fitting coda to an effective journey.

- In Washington, Bush was treated as a returning hero. "Bush faced his European challenge with all the zeal of a man who would like to be president," Time wrote. He was congratulated in the halls at the White House and was thrilled when he stopped in the Oval Office to see the president, who "jumped up with that warm, really welcome-home expression that made me feel that he had thought it was worthwhile." Bush appeared on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, February 13, 1983. "Everybody I talked to, 'great trip, great trip,'" Bush told his diary. "It's funny how fleeting all of this is, but I think at this juncture, it's fair to say things have gone pretty well." Reagan called him after the broadcast to congratulate him.

In the end, the INF deployments took place, the pro-American Helmut Kohl won reelection, and Americans, after the Bush visit, appeared more rational in European eyes. The Washington Post congratulated Bush extravagantly. "He listened carefully and he elaborated Washington's approach to the missile question in a way that allowed open-minded Europeans to consider that the administration is not missile-happy, not bent on confrontation...but...is determined to assert American leadership and to deserve the confidence of the allies." The headline on the Post editorial said it all: "George Did It."

- On the political home front, the vice president spent a good deal of time and energy seeking to assuage elements of the Reagan coalition that he hoped would one day be elements of a Bush coalition. When Bush accepted an invitation to address the American Conservative Union, he told his staff he should do it, even though "the nuts will never be for me. We might as well recognize it. I've been doing this for thirty years." He did have one thought: Perhaps the best path forward lay in "establishing good relations with individual conservative leaders." He would deploy his most formidable political asset-his personal charm. He might never win their hearts, but he would give them no reason to say that he hadn't tried.

In the Reagan years, then, Bush often met with the kinds of conservatives who had been doubtful about him, including the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell. In Manchester, New Hampshire, Bush nemesis William Loeb of The Union Leader had died in September 1981. At the suggestion of Gerald Carmen, Reagan's old New Hampshire chairman, Bush had reached out to the right-wing publisher a few weeks before, and the two men had had a cordial exchange. On hearing of Loeb's death, Bush dispatched a message of condolence. "I didn't want it to look too flowery or effusive," Bush told his diary, "because he hated me and I was not overly enthusiastic about him."

Jim Baker, who was serving as Reagan's chief of staff, was also a frequent target of the right. "Jimmy Baker at year end is tired and would like to transfer," Bush told his diary on New Year's Day 1983. "He would love to be CIA or Defense or certainly Attorney General; but there is no indication that the President is going to make any changes of this nature." Bush was sympathetic to his friend's hopes to move out of the exhausting chief of staff post, but he did not know Reagan's views on the matter. "I don't think the President will let him go, although who knows what's in the President's mind," Bush dictated on Tuesday, January 4, 1983. "He keeps his cards very close to his chest when it comes to personnel matters and that kind of thing." A few weeks later another possibility emerged. "Jimmy Baker was in today wondering about going to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick having had it, apparently, and having had enough," Bush told his dairy. "I recommended it to him-I think he should get out. He's my friend and a loyal friend, but I think it would be good for him to be on about his business and doing something else. You get destroyed in there, and he's done a wonderful job....Now he ought to be in a Cabinet post or something out of the place where he's a continual target for the far right." Bush suggested that CIA director William Casey go to the United Nations and Baker take over at CIA. "He was thrilled and went charging out of the office, but what he did with that brilliant idea of mine, I don't know." Nothing would come of Baker's efforts to move on in 1983: He was too valuable to Reagan where he was.

As Bush worked to placate the right, he found raw politics at the highest levels alternately fascinating and repellant. After a hostile interview with columnist Joe Kraft, Bush dictated, "They try and drag you into highly technical matters-some of which I know-but I'm so defensive as to not wanting to mess up things that I get irritated."

He preferred the substance of governing to the style of politics, and Bush believed in listening to voices outside the innermost circles. "I had briefings from middle-level experts at the CIA on Germany and France on arms," he told his diary. "I find it very worthwhile to get these people in. There is a great deal of expertise in our bureaucracy that is never used by the top policy makers."

For all his work with conservatives, Bush learned something he had not expected to from watching Reagan, who deferred action on many cultural issues crucial to his supporters and who even quietly raised taxes. "The President is a darn good compromiser, and he's had to compromise and, yet, his adherence to a position comes through loud and clear," Bush dictated. "I think it's important that you don't compromise too much, but you have to have the facility to govern, to get things done, and that is what some of these people don't understand."

- Would Reagan seek reelection in 1984? In January 1983, Bush told his diary: "Incidentally, at this moment, I'm convinced the President is going to run. I see no question about it; I believe it; I'm convinced in my own mind that he should run; and I think he'll be re-elected." And yet the president-already older than the oldest man to have ever served-was not explicit about his own thinking. On Thursday, January 20, 1983, the president and the vice president appeared together at an event commemorating the second anniversary of their inauguration. "Today when he walked across that stage, he looked a little older and he was limping and his voice was hoarse, and I was wondering for the first time as to whether he might not [run]," Bush told his diary. By late April 1983, however, the questions were answered: Reagan was running, and he wanted Bush by his side. Though the vice president had won Reagan over-which, in the short run, was all that mattered-Bush sent Jim Baker a copy of a Conservative Digest article that found 64 percent of conservative leaders wanted Bush replaced on the 1984 ticket. "Light reading," Bush scribbled across a cover sheet to Baker-adding a frowning face.

In the spring of 1984, the family took a trip to Hobe Sound, Florida, to see Bush's mother. Dorothy Bush, Barbara wrote, "really was wonderful and she did very well at keeping everything low key. (She usually invites the world to meet Pop as she is so proud of him)....Mom amused me because I heard her say to the tennis pro, 'Of course, George will play with Jeb. George likes to win.'...At 60 years of age his mother still says he wants to win." He did, but he had one more campaign to win as a lieutenant before he would, in 1988, take what he knew would be his last shot at the presidency itself.

For much of the year, the 1984 campaign was not especially dramatic. The economy was doing well, and Reagan was popular. For the Bushes the race to succeed Reagan four years hence was an implicit element of much of the campaign. In the spring, Reagan and Bush went to speak to the Conservative Political Action Conference together. "I hated it," Barbara wrote. "All of these people have been against George Bush....The President spoke and then he led the standing ovation for George, bless his heart. I would have died if he hadn't! They were polite, but it is just not comfortable."

- In July 1984, Walter Mondale, the Democratic presidential nominee, made history by choosing the first woman for a national ticket: New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro.

"Tensions are very very high," Bush wrote his sister, Nancy Bush Ellis. "I am totally convinced (I hope not conspiratorially so) that we are up against many in the press who hate to see the demise of Ferraro and the defeat of Mondale." In his eagerness to show conservatives that Reagan had been right to choose him in 1980, and perhaps overcompensating for his reticence about the counsel he offered the president, Bush seemed an inarticulate, hyperactive cheerleader. "His apostasy [from his 1980 centrism] had to be pure, credible to every dedicated Reaganite," observed the biographer Herbert S. Parmet. The assets that made Bush an effective adviser to Reagan and might make him a sound president-his aversion to sloganeering, his belief in bipartisanship, his devotion to principled compromise-were, in his reading of the Republican electorate of 1984, liabilities. Bush entered a silly season, still desperate to prove his partisan bona fides two decades after he first appeared on a GOP ballot. "Whine On, Harvest Moon," he would say in a lame attempt at wittily countering the Mondale-Ferraro critique of the administration. "I'm for Mr. Reagan-blindly," he said on the '84 trail, leaving the impression that he was a man without a core of his own.

Shrewd observers-chiefly Garry Trudeau of the editorial comic strip Doonesbury, himself a St. Paul's and Yale man-pounced. Bush, Trudeau argued, had put his manhood in a blind trust and had an evil twin, "Skippy," a dark, ambitious alter ego who said and did whatever it took for "Poppy" to win and cling to power. (At a reception for the Today show a few years later, Trudeau, the husband of Today cohost Jane Pauley, told Bush that he had heard "one of [your] sons was hot," and George W., who was there, said yes, that he had "really wanted to kick your ass.") The campaign press depicted Bush as effete and wimpy. Bush resented his enduring caricature as an eastern elitist. "It's funny how those who have real breaks early in life" get put in one of two categories, he told his diary. "If you're a Republican, that's bad; but if you're a Democrat, a la Kennedy or Harriman or Roosevelt or whoever, why, it's no problem." Thinking ahead to a vice presidential debate with Ferraro, Bush reflected on his dilemma. "She's kind of mean and prosecutorial, and if you come back tough, why, you get it for beating up on a woman; and if you don't, you come back as a wimp," he dictated. "No win!"

Nothing was going right. Barbara told reporters that Ferraro could be described as a word that rhymed with "rich." The night before, in one of the Reagan-Mondale debates, Mondale had "needled the President about his elite, rich vice president," Barbara recalled. "It really had burned me up because we had all read that Geraldine and her husband, John Zaccaro, were worth at least $4 million, if not more. The press were teasing me about it, and I said something like, 'That rich...well, it rhymes with rich...could buy George Bush any day.'" It was, Mrs. Bush recalled, "not a nice thing to say," and she called to apologize to Ferraro. ("She was very gracious about it," Barbara recalled.) The aftermath of the "rhymes with rich" story was "agony" for Barbara. ("She felt horrible," George H. W. Bush recalled.) "For several years I thought it would be engraved on my tombstone," Barbara wrote in her memoir. "My family teasingly called me the 'Poet Laureate' of our household."

After the vice presidential debate-one in which Ferraro accused Bush of condescending to her about foreign policy-Bush was with some longshoremen, one of whom had a sign that said "George, you kicked a little ass last night." Then, in what Bush characterized as a "big mistake," he said that yes, he had tried "to kick a little ass last night"-a bit of discordant locker-room talk. (Bush had not noticed a nearby TV microphone.) The press even criticized Bush for attending a fortieth anniversary event in Norfolk commemorating the mission at Chichi-Jima. He was attacked for "epaulette flexing" and accused of "flaunting" his war record. But none of it affected the outcome of the 1984 election: The Reagan-Bush ticket crushed the Democrats, carrying forty-nine states.

Even in victory, though, Bush was worn down. After the election, the Reagans offered the Bushes the use of Camp David. There, in the quiet woods, the vice president of the United States rested and pondered what was ahead. He slept soundly, recuperating from the rigors of the campaign trail, and looked forward. The 1988 presidential election was forty-seven and a half months away.

TWENTY-SIX.

On the Eve of the Run

These are serious people, among the best we have, with the gifts of intelligence and friendship and compassion.

-SCOTTY RESTON, on the Bushes, The New York Times, Wednesday, December 31, 1986 BUSH FIRST RAISED his own presidential ambitions with Reagan on Thursday, December 13, 1984. Over lunch, Bush spoke of 1988 and told the president that while he and Barbara "hated to think of it this soon," they felt that, as Reagan well knew, a national campaign was so intricate and so complex that they needed to begin making staffing and fundraising decisions. Ever deferential, Bush made it clear to Reagan that he was not asking for "any reaction" or any favors, nor did the president have to worry that Bush was "going to be out there plowing my own furrow, or creating my own positions, etc. I just can't do that." The vice president could tell that talk of life after Reagan made Reagan a bit uncomfortable: Presidents tend to dislike being reminded that they are replaceable, even after two terms. Reagan, however, told Bush he was "doing the right thing," and the conversation moved on.

For Bush, the second Reagan term was largely about what was to come-1988. As the vice president and a host of rivals maneuvered for position in the contest to succeed Ronald Reagan, there were rising federal deficits, historic Cold War breakthroughs with Moscow, and, in the waning weeks of 1986, a scandal involving hostages in the Middle East, arms sales to Iran through Israel, and secret funding for the anti-Communist Nicaraguan contras. The question that shaped Bush's days: Would the American electorate of 1988 want four more years of Republican rule? And, more specifically, would the nation want Reagan's most loyal lieutenant to be the one to take the helm? Bush hoped so-deeply and urgently-but it would be a long four years before he could know so.

- On Christmas Day 1984, Bush read a thirty-seven-page memorandum from Lee Atwater, a young southerner who had made his name in the brutal politics of South Carolina before joining the Reagan political office in the White House. (Atwater talked out the strategy; his colleague James P. Pinkerton did the writing.) Back in the 197980 period, the memo said, Bush had been "portrayed in the media as a man of substance. That image was a major contributing factor in his Iowa victory. Soon thereafter, the media began to paint George Bush as merely a man of style-a man of 'Big Mo' and little else." The reelection race against Mondale and Ferraro had not helped, the memo said, for "the VP [was] stereotyped in the press as a 'cheerleader' for the Reagan administration. 'Cheerleader' is a negative way of saying 'loyalist.'"

Atwater framed the task ahead gently but unmistakably. "High irony it is that an Ivy Leaguer with experience in international affairs, domestic politics, and private business should be hit with the rap of 'lightweight' by the more hostile elements of the press," the memo said. "Precisely because the disparity between perception and reality is so great, I am confident that the two can be brought closer into line, that the truth will pull the myth toward it." According to the memo, Bush should court the media and political elites and form a "cosmology" for his 1988 candidacy: Bush, Atwater argued, could become the leader of a party "with a track record of leadership and accomplishment. Results. Common sense. Practical. Realistic."

Bush and Atwater could hardly have been more different, either in terms of native region (New England versus the South), generation (World War II versus baby boom), or style (geniality versus gut fighting), and therein lay Atwater's utility to Bush's ambitions. With his patrician bearing and pedigree, Bush was a figure of an older, fading order of American power. He had come from the world of TR and FDR, of childhood comfort, prep school noblesse oblige, heroism under fire, and Ivy League polish. He had never wondered how he was going to pay the bills, never been uncertain of his place. When his family and his thousands of friends looked at him, they saw a man who could have spent his life making and spending money, but who had instead chosen to obey the biblical injunction, drilled into him by his parents, that to whom much is given much is expected. In his own mind and in the minds of those who loved him, he was born to serve, to give to others, to use his privilege to build, not to consume or to coast.

When others looked at him, though, they sometimes saw a man of means and of connections who played at politics less to serve than to rule. To win the presidency in the closing years of the twentieth century would require convincing voters that his background had equipped him to be of use and of profit to America and to the world. Thus, the political task before him was to convey to the broader public that while he had lived life differently, he saw life in much the way they did and would deploy his experiences in the service of those who had not grown up on Grove Lane and at Walker's Point.

If Bush could do this, he stood a strong chance of becoming president of the United States. If he could not, he would end his political life as Reagan's number two, unable to marshal the hopes and assuage the fears of the nation. To make the last, perilous leap from the vice presidency to the presidency, he needed men around him who understood the country, who had a feel for what moved voters, and who could convince just enough of the public to entrust their lives to George H. W. Bush.

Atwater was one such man. Born in Atlanta in 1951, Harvey LeRoy Atwater had grown up in South Carolina and first met the legendary Senator Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat-turned-Republican, one Halloween. "He came out and gave me a Snickers candy bar," Atwater recalled. "That was the best thing I got that year." Atwater grew up to love rhythm and blues, pretty women, and, above all, politics. While an undergraduate at Newberry College in South Carolina, he interned on Capitol Hill and met Senator Thurmond again. According to John Brady's biography of Atwater, Bad Boy, Atwater was entranced by the sight of the Senate floor, and fell under Thurmond's tutelage. A master of press manipulation, Atwater blended high-minded philosophical musings about generational change-Atwater was obsessed with the baby boomers' impact on politics and culture-and quotations from Sun-tzu's Art of War with hard-edged negative campaigning. (In an oft-cited example, Atwater refused to reply to charges that he had put out the word that an opponent had had electroshock therapy by saying that he would not answer someone who had been "hooked up to jumper cables.") He had worked in the Reagan political affairs office in the White House and believed that Bush, whom he had met when Bush was head of the RNC, was his best bet for a presidential winner.

The question for the close-knit Bush family was whether an outsider such as Atwater could be trusted to put the interests of George Bush first. (Atwater's partners in his political consulting firm were working for rivals for the nomination.) At a family meeting with Atwater, George W. and Jeb wanted to test Atwater's allegiance to their father. Jeb put the issue most bluntly, saying: "If someone throws a grenade at our dad, we expect you to jump on it."

"If you're so worried about my loyalty," Atwater replied, "why don't you come up to Washington to work on the campaign and keep an eye on me?" George W. accepted the challenge, moving his family to Washington to help out. His father was pleased. "I think George Bush coming up here will be very helpful and I think he will be a good insight to me," Bush told his diary in November 1986. "He is very level-headed, and so [is] Jebby."

Another essential figure for Bush was Roger Ailes, the Nixon and Reagan media adviser and ad man. Ailes was brought in to do media and to help Bush with his speaking and television styles-a largely thankless job, given Bush's impatience with the subject. Yet Ailes, a son of blue-collar Ohio who had been a producer for The Mike Douglas Show, proved to be the perfect coach for Bush, who sensed an underlying truth about Ailes. "We'd all kill for our clients," a rival consultant once said, but "Ailes is the only one who would die for his, and that's the difference." Bush loved Ailes's irreverence and inventive use of profanity (as long as there were no women around). "Bush was not a willing pupil," Ailes recalled. "If we hadn't hit it off personally, I'd have been fired. He resented what he called the 'show business' stuff around Reagan. But I knew how to make Bush laugh. He was so polite that he would never say anything bad about anybody, but he didn't mind hearing it."

Practicing a speech once, Bush was, as ever, waving his arms about. "You look like a fucking fairy," Ailes said-and Bush cracked up. He liked Ailes-and, more important, trusted Ailes to tell him the truth, however uncomfortable.

- Bush was philosophical early in Reagan's second term. He was doing a lot of reading (Life Its Ownself, a novel of Texas football by Dan Jenkins; Gore Vidal's Lincoln, which Bush said was "a little heavy going"; and William Manchester's American Caesar, a biography of Douglas MacArthur) and thinking about the future. "If you want to be President-and I do-there are certain things that I have to do, certain speculation that I have to put up with, and a certain ugliness that will crop into a campaign or into the pre-campaign."

The ugliness Bush feared was manifest on page A25 of The Washington Post on Thursday, January 30, 1986, when the conservative commentator George F. Will published the toughest of columns about Bush's presidential aspirations. "The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another," Will wrote, "is a thin, tinny 'arf'-the sound of a lapdog." It was devastating, partly because Will was known to be close to Nancy Reagan. Bush hated it, but there was nothing he could do. Will's point-that the right had its doubts about the depth of Bush's devotion to conservatism as it had come to be defined-was inarguable. The Reagan years were ending with a new anti-tax, pro-life party orthodoxy, and the conservatives who made up the GOP base suspected that Bush, for all his service to party and to Reagan, was not truly one of them.

They were, in their way, correct. Bush was not, and never would be, a movement conservative. His base of support was built more on his personal virtues than on any philosophical precepts. He was, as he put it to himself, "not off on one extreme or another." Still, the practically minded Bush had moved a good deal rightward as the party shifted in that direction. On abortion, he had reversed himself since 1980 and now supported a pro-life amendment to the Constitution. Always anti-abortion, he had come to his stronger pro-life view-one he admitted had "evolved"-after discussing the issue with religious leaders. The anti-abortion film Silent Scream had an impact on his thinking as well. As important, perhaps, was his deep love for several grandchildren who had been adopted from their birth mothers. What if the woman who'd been pregnant with one of these babies he adored had chosen to terminate her pregnancy? His conversion to a pro-life position was politically convenient, but it was also heartfelt.

On taxes, he had repudiated his 1980 "voodoo economics" language. It was a large price to pay for political viability, for Bush had been right that tax cuts alone could not lead to long-term fiscal health. Together with a general failure to curb spending in the Reagan years, the supply-side view, with its emphasis on lower taxes, was driving up the federal deficits and debt. Reagan's successor, whoever he might be, would be forced to reckon with unpaid bills and persistent shortfalls.

And on the role of religious faith in politics, Bush struggled to overcome his Episcopalian reticence to speak more openly about his own convictions. Asked whether he had been "born again," he gave a nuanced answer. "I think I would ask for a definition," Bush told Doug Wead, an adviser who helped Bush with the evangelical community. "If by 'born again' one is asking, 'Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?' then I could answer a clear-cut 'Yes.' No hesitancy, no awkwardness." If the question, though, were whether there had been "one single moment, above any others, in which your life has been instantly changed," Bush continued, "then I can't say that this has happened, since there have been many moments."

George Will and other observers thought such maneuvers made Bush a "lapdog" of the right. George H. W. Bush believed them to be the sensible compromises of a politician who wanted to win. He always hoped to be judged on results and action, not words and positioning. For him, campaigns were means to the end of governing wisely and well. Those were the rules of the game, and Bush was forever one to play by the rules. He had a guiding wish: "Let's just hope the inner strength, conviction, and hopefully honor can come through."

- The 1988 Republican presidential field was large, with Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, televangelist Pat Robertson, Al Haig, and former Delaware governor Pierre S. "Pete" du Pont assessing their chances. There was another name out there, too. "Rumsfeld-we keep hearing Rummy's going to run, Rummy's going to do this, Rummy's going to do that," Bush told his diary in the fall of 1986. "I don't mean to underestimate his abilities, but he's carved out a niche-he's gone Right, as we say-and I don't know that there's any room over there." (Rumsfeld tested the waters, decided not to run, and endorsed Bob Dole.) Bush faced a persistent question: Why did he want to be president, aside from the obvious reasons of ambition? On the day of the 1986 midterm elections he put his thoughts on paper. "Believe me, even though I know it is not easy, I know I've got the leadership ability," Bush wrote. He continued: I know I've got the experience. I want to see an educated America. I want to see a literate...America. I want to see a drug-free America. I want to see America with opportunity and jobs. I want to see the emphasis remain on the family values. I want to use our abilities to bring peace, to continue the discussions with the Soviet Union, to reduce the fear of the kids of nuclear weapons, and also to be a beacon for freedom and democracy....But how do you say all these things and get it into a slogan or a formula-a catch-all? I don't know. But this is what I feel very comfortable with-the philosophy....And so, on this...November 4, 1986, I begin this new project-and I hope I'll see it through.

That night the Republicans lost control of the U.S. Senate.

- The autumn grew worse. In the first week of November 1986, a Lebanese publication reported that the United States had sold arms to Iran in an effort to convince Tehran to help free Americans being held hostage by Hezbollah. The arms shipments appeared to be a violation of U.S. policy: Iran had been designated a state sponsor of terrorism, and Bush himself had chaired a task force that declared America would not negotiate with terrorists. The question of American hostages in the Middle East-including a CIA officer captured in the line of duty-was a prominent one in the Reagan White House. The president was both moved by their plight and eager to see them liberated.

In July 1985, the then national security adviser Robert McFarlane had briefed Reagan and White House chief of staff Don Regan on reaching out to Iran, which was then embroiled in its long war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (Regan and Jim Baker had switched jobs in early 1985.) Working through Israel, the hope was to improve relations and win Tehran's help in releasing hostages in the Middle East. The meeting with McFarlane and Regan took place at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where Reagan was recovering from surgery. The next month, in August 1985, the United States made its first sale of arms to Iran via Israel. There were additional shipments of arms in 1985 and in 1986-all despite the Bush task force injunction against negotiating with terrorists.

The record is clear that Bush was aware that the United States, in contravention of its own stated policy, was trading arms for hostages as part of an initiative to reach out to moderate elements in Iran. "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flack and misinformation out there," Bush told his diary on Wednesday, November 5, 1986. "It is not a subject we can talk about." A Saturday, February 1, 1986, note of new national security adviser John M. Poindexter's said that "Most importantly, president and VP [vice president] are solid in taking the position that we have to try." The vice president had also been present at an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday, January 7, 1986, when Secretary of State George Shultz "argued fiercely and with passion against any arms sales to Iran, especially arms sales connected to the release of the hostages," Shultz recalled. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who was also there, agreed with Shultz, and said so. "No one else did," Shultz recalled. Bush was silent as Reagan decided to proceed amid what Weinberger recalled as "talk of the hostages as one of the motivating factors."

In July 1986, in his suite at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Bush met with Amiram Nir, a counterterrorism adviser to Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres. The appointment had been scheduled at the request of Oliver North, a gung-ho marine lieutenant colonel and National Security Council staffer. Bush was uneasy. A veteran of the covert wars, Bush sensed that he was running some risk in taking the meeting. He woke up the night before the conversation and called Poindexter to make sure that seeing Nir was a good idea. Failing to reach Poindexter, Bush got North, who successfully urged Bush to keep the appointment with Nir.

The Israeli briefed Bush in no uncertain terms on the arms-for-hostages efforts. According to a memorandum of the meeting written by Bush chief of staff Craig Fuller, Nir described the initiative's two elements: the "tactical," which was "to get the hostages out," and the "strategic," which was to establish channels to Iran. Now, in November 1986, the public revelation of the Iranian initiative threatened to expose the highest officials of the American government as having said one thing while doing another on the principle of non-negotiation with terrorists. Bush preferred, with Reagan, to emphasize the strategy involved rather than the effort to free the hostages. In the immediate wake of the news, George Shultz heard Bush dismiss the story on television. "Bush on TV says it [is] ridiculous to even consider selling arms to Iran," Shultz said, according to notes Shultz dictated.

Shultz, however, knew the truth. "VP was part of it," Shultz said, according to notes of a conversation he had with Bush ally Nick Brady. "In that mtg. [where the arms-for-hostages plan was approved]. Getting drawn into web of lies. Blows his integrity. He's finished then. Sh[oul]d be very careful how he plays the loyal lieutenant role now." Shultz and his wife, O'Bie, visited the vice presidential residence for a drink on the Sunday after the story broke. Worried that Bush was heading for trouble with public statements, Shultz warned Bush not to try to shade the truth in any way going forward. Bush flared, emphasizing the point that the secret sales were more about establishing a connection to Iran than they were about the hostages. ("He was admonishing me," Shultz recalled. "Sees me as a threat.") "Are you aware there are major strategy objectives w[ith] Iran?" Bush asked Shultz. "I'm v[ery] careful what I say."

"I told him he was there and approved it," Shultz dictated afterward. "He knew & supported it. I s[ai]d that's where you are." There was, Shultz recalled, "considerable tension between us" as the Shultzes left the house. Collecting himself, though, Bush heeded the warning. "Shultz worries about a 'Watergate syndrome,'" Bush told his diary. Jim Baker later told Shultz that "you saved the VP's political life by telling him to be quiet ab[out] arms."

For just over six years, ever since Reagan's midnight call to Bush's suite at the Pontchartrain in Detroit, Bush had subsumed his own identity to Reagan's political agenda. When the Iran story broke, Bush had instinctively reacted in what Shultz called his "loyal lieutenant" mode, denying everything. In fact, however, Bush had surely known enough about the initiative with Iran that his initial denial was at best misleading and at worst a lie. The truth, which Bush was to acknowledge (though with varying degrees of straightforwardness and differing shades of emphasis), was that he had known that, working through Israel, the United States was trading arms for hostages. It was also the case that in private, Bush occasionally would raise sensitive concerns or disagree with the president. In the case of the Iran affair, Bush had long worried about the role of Israel, believing that using a third party gave the Americans too little control over the initiative.

To his diary in early 1987, as administration critics pressed him on his role, Bush dictated: "They don't know that I raised the question over and over again with the President, with Don Regan, with McFarlane, with Poindexter, of concerns on the Israeli connection. But we can't, simply can't say that. We cannot get into that....just have to take the pounding that goes with it and keep your head up." Bush did not want to break his long-standing rule of keeping his advice to the president confidential, almost whatever the cost.

In a speech on the Iran initiative at the American Enterprise Institute in early December 1986, Bush acknowledged that "clearly, mistakes were made" and said that "I was aware of our Iran initiative, and I support[ed] the President's decision." In February 1987 he also approved the leaking of the memorandum of the Nir meeting at the King David Hotel to The Washington Post-the memo that detailed the Israeli role and recorded that he had been fully briefed on the arms-for-hostages element of the initiative. The rationale for the leak: Get everything out as early as possible. If word of the Nir meeting were withheld and were to emerge closer to the 1988 election-from either a U.S. or Israeli source-it could be more damaging. After reading the front-page Post piece on Sunday, February 8, 1987, which had been written by Bob Woodward and David Hoffman, Bush made a quick call to Boyden Gray, whom he had authorized to leak the Nir story. "Great job, great job," Bush told Gray. "I've talked to the Israelis, and they're copacetic. Good job, old boy."

- Bush's initial denial of the details of the Iranian arrangement and his subsequent efforts to minimize his knowledge about the arms sales was an instance in which duty (in this case, to the president and to the secrecy he believed essential to the conduct of some foreign relations) and ambition (he wanted to protect his own political future) conflicted with and trumped his obligation to the full truth. To the mystification of Shultz and Weinberger, Bush would later claim that had he known of their strong objections he might have opposed the initiative.

In August 1987, Shultz recalled being "astonished" when he read an interview with Bush in The Washington Post. "If I had sat there and heard George Shultz and Cap express it [opposition to Iran arms sales] strongly, maybe I would have had a stronger view," Bush told the Post's David Broder in August 1987. "But when you don't know something, it's hard to react....We were not in the loop." Weinberger read the piece, too, and called Shultz: "That's terrible. He was on the other side. It's on the record. Why did he say that?"

Though he claimed to have been "not in the loop," Bush knew that the administration had undertaken a high-risk, high-reward strategy to bring home American hostages and possibly open channels to Iran. He justified the "not in the loop" characterization on the grounds that he had not been privy to every detail of the arms initiative and that he had had no "operational role."

Bush was an old spymaster and a realist. That his first impulse was to hide the truth, however, and that he continued to maintain, on occasion, that the deal was not about arms for hostages but was, rather, "strategic," was unworthy of his essential character.

- After lunch on Monday, November 24, 1986, Bush was in his West Wing office when Attorney General Ed Meese arrived and "laid a real bombshell on me." Oliver North, the National Security Council staffer who had set up the Bush meeting with Nir in Israel, had taken the proceeds of the Iran arms sales and diverted the money to aid the anti-Communist Nicaraguan contras in defiance of a congressional prohibition known as the Boland Amendment. Bush told the attorney general that he had known "absolutely" nothing about the diversion of funds.

In the Oval Office on Tuesday, November 25, Bush heard Don Regan propose an independent review board that would include Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and be chaired by Howard Baker, a potential Bush rival for the GOP nomination. After a moment, Bush spoke up. "I must confess, I do think-and I know that I am a special pleader here-but I don't think somebody running for President should chair this commission," Bush said. "The temptation will be to run against all the White House like the Watergate thing. I just don't think that is right, and frankly I don't think it is fair."

Regan, Meese, and the president agreed with Bush. Still, Bush fretted about seeming self-interested and went back to see Reagan later in the day. "I said I hoped I didn't sound little or small on this thing," Bush told Reagan, "but I really do worry about Baker parlaying, Baker using that form of investigation of the White House to build up a big case that might hurt us or might hurt the White House and those of us that are trying to support you."

"No, I understand totally," Reagan said, "and you are absolutely right."

The president and the attorney general publicly announced the discovery of the diversion. It was, Bush dictated, "one of the worst days for President Reagan and his presidency." At dusk, Bush called the president once more to check in. Reagan had left the West Wing and retired upstairs. "Nancy was away and I thought, 'There he is all alone,'" Bush told his diary. "I really wanted to ask him if I could come over and have a drink, but he doesn't really reach out in that sense....I feel I might be imposing on him." Choosing to leave the president alone, Bush went home.

- In the wake of the diversion news, Bush decided to try to move ahead of the breaking scandal. In a call to Reagan, and in a follow-up note, Bush volunteered to take a polygraph test to prove that he was not guilty of wrongdoing on the contra diversion-clearance, he believed, that would then enable him to conduct an internal investigation of what had gone wrong. The proposal that Bush volunteer to take a lie-detector test over his role in the affair-or, more precisely, his lack of a role in the affair-suggests that Bush was telling the truth from the beginning about contra diversion. Over Thanksgiving at Kennebunkport-the vice president had bought Walker's Point from Mary Walker, the widow of his uncle Herbie, in 1981-Bush worried about the president and about the political impact of the revelations, but men with something to hide do not ordinarily offer to be hooked up to a polygraph.

Neither Bush idea-the taking of the polygraph nor the leading of the panel-went anywhere, but his recommendation for a commission chairman-his old Texas friend John Tower-was accepted. At the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday, December 3, Bush had defended the strategic thinking behind the Iran initiative but admitted that he understood how Americans could be perplexed by the White House's apparent hypocrisy on the arms-for-hostages deal. "Simple human hope explains it perhaps better than anything else," Bush said. "The President hoped that we could open a channel that would serve the interests of the United States and of our allies in a variety of ways. Call it leadership. Given 20-20 hindsight, call it a mistaken tactic if you want to." The appointment of a special prosecutor-former federal judge Lawrence E. Walsh-was announced on Friday, December 19, 1986.

Though Bush (like Reagan) was in the dark about the contra diversion, in political terms the vice president was broadly vulnerable on Central America. In March 1985, Donald P. Gregg, a former CIA officer who was serving as Bush's national security adviser, had arranged for an old Gregg ally, Felix Rodriguez, to move to El Salvador to assist the El Salvadoran government in its fight against Marxist insurgents. Born in Cuba, trained in special forces, and recruited by the CIA as part of the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, Rodriguez was sent to Central America for the limited mission in El Salvador. (Thomas Pickering, then the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, supported Rodriguez's move.) Without Bush's or Gregg's knowledge, Oliver North recruited Rodriguez to help circumvent the Boland Amendment by supplying military assistance to the Nicaraguan contras. North ordered Rodriguez to keep the Nicaraguan operations secret from Gregg and from the CIA. Rodriguez had two brief meetings with Bush, one in January 1985, the other in May 1986, but nothing was said about supplying assistance to the contras.