Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 16
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Destiny and Power Part 16

I desperately want to win. The kids have worked hard, Bar has worked hard. Everybody has killed themselves.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, on the eve of the 1988 New Hampshire primary HE WAS IN HIS PAJAMAS as his advisers filed in. Bush had declined to spend the night in Iowa, heading on to New Hampshire in order to begin anew as quickly as possible after the caucuses. As Lee Atwater later recalled to the political writers Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, who reported the morning scene, "I had my whole little speech ready" to take the blame for the caucuses. As usual, though, Bush was interested in today and tomorrow, not yesterday. "We've got eight days," Bush said. "Let's sit down here right now and let's don't get up until we figure out how to win this campaign."

Andrew Card, a Bush supporter from the 1980 campaign, was put in charge of the ground game in New Hampshire along with Hugh ("The Ayatollah") and Judd Gregg. Card had boarded Bush's airplane after it landed in Nashua from Iowa to give the unhappy traveling party a pep talk. "Nobody should get off this plane with dour looks," Card had told Bush and the team. "When you hit the tarmac, you need to be smiling-you want to be happy that you are in New Hampswhire." Card and the Greggs needed Bush to be his usual energetic self. The work to be done, Card recalled, was self-evident: "Identify the vote, know where it is, and get it out."

New Hampshire governor John Sununu was also a critical player. In his sixth year as governor, he believed that candidates won in New Hampshire by practicing what he called "see me, touch me, feel me" politics. In the year before the primary, Sununu arranged for Bush to shake an estimated sixty thousand hands in the state and to take five to seven thousand pictures with voters-on the grounds, Sununu recalled, that "if you have a picture of yourself and the Vice President on the mantel, you'll work awfully hard to make it a picture of yourself and the President." On New Year's Eve, as 1987 turned into 1988, he had brought Bush to Concord, in the cold, to hand out hot chocolate and to pose for photos. The voters saw Bush, touched him, felt him. Now came the test: Could Bush translate his investments of time into an actual victory in the primary? The polls were bad. Richard Wirthlin, the old Reagan pollster who was now working for Dole, was buoyant. "He was whistling 'Hail to the Chief' and all that stuff," Dole recalled to Germond and Witcover. "He told me, 'You're going to be the next president.'"

Bush threw himself into the state with two or three breakfast trips a day to McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts; back-to-back radio and TV interviews; drives on snowplows; and handshake after handshake after handshake. Barry Goldwater, whom Bush friend and finance chairman Bob Mosbacher flew up and back by private plane, came to campaign, as did Red Sox hero Ted Williams and the legendary pilot Chuck Yeager. At the end of long, frantic days, Bush would turn philosophical. "Watch and wait, wait and watch," he dictated. "I'm in my room, my feet up, my shoes off, and my whole body aches. [I'm] really tired, but I can't show it." Just days out from the voting in New Hampshire, Bush reached a point of internal equilibrium. "If I don't make it, I have no excuses," Bush dictated. "And if I win, and I still think I will, my hands will be full. The biggest job in the world."

Dole continued to diminish Bush's vice presidency and underscore his own life experiences. He told voters that he couldn't recall Bush being central to the successes of the Reagan years, driving home the point that the vice president was a shadowy, insubstantial figure. "He takes credit for a lot of things," Dole said, but where was the evidence? Where was the leadership? He-Bob Dole-he had been there for Reagan, doing the hard work in the Senate. Dole pollster Richard Wirthlin gave voice to the worst fears of the Bush high command. "It's quite clear," Wirthlin said, "that this is a very winnable race."

- Roger Ailes agreed, and he was anxious to launch a frontal strike against the high-flying Dole. "I wanted to go negative," Ailes recalled, "but I had been ordered not to do any negative ads."

He made one anyway. Called "Senator Straddle," it attacked Dole chiefly on taxes, arguing that it was Bush, not Dole, who had pledged not to raise taxes. Ailes's office in New York cut the ad, and he drove through a snowstorm to pick it up and screen it for Bush. In the candidate's hotel room, Ailes, Atwater, and Sununu debated whether to put the "Straddle" ad on the air in New Hampshire. Bush looked at the floor as his advisers talked through the pros and cons. "It seemed to me too harsh," Bush said, and he told them not to use it.

As the days passed, the polls in New Hampshire moved all over the place. "We're either eight up," Bush pollster Bob Teeter said, "or eight down." Bush's advisers came back to him to reopen the "Straddle" question. Confronted with uncongenial numbers, Bush reconsidered the decision. He understood the stakes. He needed the win, badly. "I simply have to pull this out," Bush told his diary, "or we're going to have a long grueling battle and people are going to go over the side." Ailes and Atwater pressed anew: The Dole tax spot was a fair ad-tough but fair. Then Barbara Bush weighed in: She thought it was fine. Bush pondered for a long moment and finally spoke. "Are you certain," he asked, "we need to do this?"

Before anyone else could say anything, Atwater said, "I take that as a yes," and Atwater and Ailes hurried from the room. Bush's authorization of the negative ad was in keeping with his competitive character. Because people saw Bush as so agreeable and polite, they could underestimate his capacity to make the tough call. Ailes's anti-Dole spot ran repeatedly on the New Hampshire airwaves in the last days before the voting, and the vice president performed well in a half-hour "Ask George Bush" TV special on the Saturday night before the Tuesday voting. In the final hours, things were moving Bush's way.

- Bush was at peace with his decision. Everywhere he looked were reminders of why he was fighting. His old rival Donald Rumsfeld was in New Hampshire campaigning with Dole as the decision was made to go negative. Bush slept fairly well, "but when I wake up, the fray instantly is on my mind." He was determined to prevail. "I desperately want to win," Bush dictated on the eve of the voting. "The kids have worked hard, Bar has worked hard. Everybody has killed themselves."

On primary day in New Hampshire, Bush visited two polling places, did eight radio interviews, and rode an exercise bike for twenty-four minutes. After a lunch of chowder, he tried to lie down but could not sleep. With Barbara and the rest of the family out hitting last-minute voting lines, Bush took a fifty-minute walk by himself at a quarter after three. When he returned to the hotel, "our people blew sky-high on the exit polls." A relieved Bush cast the moment in stark terms. "We came out of the dead," he dictated. "Three days ago there was gloom and doom in our camp and it turned around through a lot of hard work." And the "Straddle" ad. "The emotions are high," he told his diary, and the final results exhilarating. Bush defeated Dole, 38 to 29 percent, with Jack Kemp polling 13 percent, Pete du Pont 10, and Pat Robertson 9. On television that evening with Tom Brokaw, NBC surprised both Bush and Dole by putting them together on the screen for a moment. "Do you have anything to say to Dole?" Brokaw asked Bush. "I wish him well, and I'll see him in the South," Bush said. Dole snapped, "Yeah, tell him to stop lying about my record."

On the day after the primary, Bush returned to Washington. Atwater was relieved. "I never told you this," he said to Bush, "but the numbers in the South got awful slim after our loss in Iowa." One remark warmed Bush's heart more than he could say. "I'll sleep better tonight," Reagan had said after learning that Bush had won in New Hampshire.

- Bush was already thinking about how to unify the party for the fall. The Dole voters, he believed, would be on board: They were Republican regulars. The Pat Robertson brigades struck Bush as more problematic-they seemed more interested in ideology and theology than in political victory. Campaigning in Kingsport, Tennessee-a thoroughly Republican city in a state Reagan had carried twice-Bush encountered a stony-faced Robertson backer who refused to shake the vice president's hand.

"Look, this is a political campaign," Bush said to her. "We'll be together when it's over." The woman was unmoved, and Bush, in the privacy of his diary, reflected: Still, this staring, glaring ugly-there's something terrible about those who carry it to extremes. They're scary. They're there for spooky, extraordinary right-winged reasons. They don't care about Party. They don't care about anything. They're the excesses. They could be Nazis, they could be Communists, they could be whatever. In this case, they're religious fanatics and they're spooky. They will destroy this party if they're permitted to take over. There is not enough of them, in my view, but this woman reminded me of my John Birch days in Houston. The lights go out and they pass out the ugly literature. Guilt by association. Nastiness. Ugliness. Believing the Trilateral Commission, the conspiratorial theories. And I couldn't tell-it may not be fair to that one woman, but that's the problem that Robertson brings to bear on the agenda.

In the wake of Bush's win in New Hampshire, President Reagan finally allowed himself to be more expansive about the Republican field. At lunch on the last day of February 1988, Bush recalled, Reagan "made a comment that Dole is mean, and shows a mean side....He didn't think Kemp was presidential at all, and he made a comment that he was concerned about Robertson and some of the extremes that he brings into the party." Another sign of Bush's success: a Kemp supporter called Jonathan Bush to say "Jack will get out and endorse me if we'll make a deal on the Vice Presidency." It was the latest in a series of feelers from Kemp about the second spot on a Bush ticket. "I don't know how we're ever going to handle this, but I just told them all-everybody-that there must be no indication of any deal of any kind," Bush dictated on Thursday, March 3. He wanted to keep his options open. (Though not totally open: The New York developer Donald Trump mentioned his availability as a vice presidential candidate to Lee Atwater. Bush thought the overture "strange and unbelievable.") - On Saturday, March 5, 1988, in the South Carolina primary, Bush crushed Dole, and went on to sweep the contests across the South three days later. (Bush's one defeat that day came in Washington's caucuses.) "That tension sleeplessness seems to have gone away," Bush told his diary after the victories. Yet Dole kept up his attacks on Bush. "He's a desperate, mean man, and people see it," Bush dictated on Sunday, March 13. "I'll...try and be gracious, but he has been a no good son of a bitch about me, hitting me at every turn, bitter, jealous, and class-conscious hatred. It's too bad; I've never felt that way about him at all, and yet, now I've seen this ugly side." Senator Jake Garn of Utah told Bush that Dole had muttered "Judas" at him on the Senate floor after Garn had endorsed Bush.

Still, Bush was now the putative nominee, and Washington loved a winner. "The mood has changed dramatically around the White House," Bush told his diary on the seventeenth. Dole ended his campaign on Tuesday, March 29, 1988. Bush called him to wish him well. It was a polite but brief conversation. On Wednesday, April 6, the two men met in Bush's office at the Capitol. Dole said he would like to organize a reception for Bush with all the GOP senators to pledge support for the fall campaign. He and Elizabeth "had been a little hurt and it might take him a while to get back to normal," Bush told his diary, "but they would both be helpful."

- Richard Nixon came to dinner at the vice presidential residence on Friday, April 15. "He looks a little shorter, walks a little slower-he's 75 years old," Bush told his diary. He asked the Bushes to call him Dick. Nixon liked his swordfish, ordered but did not finish a white wine on the rocks, and was polite to the stewards. It was a night of pure politics. "He does urge on me a certain moderation," Bush dictated. "He points out that he, himself, differentiated himself from Eisenhower; that he had his own identity, whereas I don't, but I should find one. He encourages it to be one of moderation: You've got the conservatives, so be moderate." Nixon ticked off some vice presidential names: "Dole, Howard Baker, Lamar Alexander, and no woman, because none are seen as Presidential." (Bush was not so sure on this last score. "I asked Nick Brady on Saturday[-]just to titillate his thought process[-]...what he thought about Sandra Day O'Connor," he told his diary in late April.) The evening ended at eight thirty P.M., and Nixon flew back to Saddle River, New Jersey. "Nixon basically doesn't like me," Bush dictated that night. "I think he probably doesn't feel I'm tough enough." At one point during the dinner, listening to Nixon's hard-line analysis, Bush wondered, "What's wrong with being a gentleman? Being a gentleman doesn't mean you're not tough enough to sit down with Gorbachev."

First, though, he had to deal with the governor of Massachusetts. Then he could worry about Gorbachev.

- Born in Massachusetts in 1933, the son of Greek immigrants, Michael Dukakis was a bright and able young lawyer and politician who rose from the state legislature to serve three terms as governor (he was elected in 1974, was defeated in 1978, then returned to power in 1982 and 1986). Serious, studious, and frugal-he cut his own grass, took public transportation to work, and loved to talk about his ancient snowblower-Dukakis was an emerging national player in the Democratic Party of the 1980s and had nearly been chosen to run as Walter Mondale's vice presidential nominee in 1984.

Now, in the spring of 1988, he was the Democratic presidential nominee. "I believe we're going to have fun running against Dukakis, and it looks to me like the classic conservative [versus] liberal approach," Bush told his diary on Monday, April 25. (He found Dukakis a bit strange. Dukakis, Bush told his diary in early May, looked like "a little midget nerd" as he came out of a coal mine.) What Bush called "the gut issues" were going to be at the heart of the campaign-"neighborhood, family, death penalty, and even abortion and prayer." It would be, he thought in April, "a classical liberal versus conservative race," for Bush believed early on that he could run against Dukakis in the way he had run against Ralph Yarborough in 1964, depicting his opponent as too liberal and too far out of the mainstream. It had not worked in Texas all those years ago. Bush needed it to work now.

- On Wednesday, May 11, 1988, Reagan was scheduled to endorse Bush officially at a black-tie dinner for Republican congressional candidates. The president wrote his remarks about Bush out by hand and showed them to him. They were, the vice president told his diary, "not too full of praise, but straight....I had every opportunity to mention it if I didn't like it. I didn't think there was anything wrong with it at all." That evening, at the Washington Convention Center, Reagan summarized the administration's accomplishments since the 1981 inauguration-"four months and seven years ago," as Reagan put it-closing with a brief endorsement: If I may, I'd like to take a moment to say just a word about my future plans. In doing so, I'll break a silence I've maintained for some time with regard to the Presidential candidates. I intend to campaign as hard as I can. My candidate is a former Member of Congress, Ambassador to China, Ambassador to the United Nations, Director of the CIA, and National Chairman of the Republican Party. I'm going to work as hard as I can to make Vice President George Bush the next President of the United States. Thank you, and God bless you.

Not exactly effusive, and Reagan, who was speaking fairly late in the evening (his remarks came around ten P.M.) strangely mispronounced Bush's last name, saying "George Bosh."

Was Reagan ambivalent about Bush? The Reagans and the Bushes had been brought together by the force of circumstance-the need for Reagan, the movement conservative, to bring mainstream Republicans and swing voters to his cause in 1980-at a time when Reagan was still seen in some quarters as a potentially dangerous man. George Bush was many things, but dangerous was not one of them. Reagan seems to have liked Bush about as much as Reagan would have liked any other professional colleague: Bush was a supporting actor, no rival for top billing, and Reagan appreciated that Bush never postured.

None of which meant, however, that Reagan was all that enthusiastic about Bush as a successor. The question is whether the president was all that enthusiastic about having anyone as a successor, and whether the failure to embrace Bush warmly and publicly was rooted in Reagan's own subconscious sense of himself-a sense shared by many presidents, including Reagan's old hero Franklin Roosevelt-as irreplaceable. Bush himself would later say that no man who has sat at the desk in the Oval Office can easily envision someone else there.

After the dinner speech, "a gigantic flap"-Bush's phrase-ensued over whether Reagan was truly for Bush or not. After speaking with Bush the next day, Reagan dispatched his press secretary to issue a new presidential statement: "I was surprised by the news reports that have said my endorsement last evening of the Vice President was 'lukewarm.' I am enthusiastic, fully committed and, as I have said, will go all out to make Vice President Bush the next President of the United States. George has been a partner in all we have accomplished, and he should be elected. He has my full confidence and my total support. I will campaign actively on his behalf."

Though it had been a difficult few days, Bush was quietly confident. "I still have this comfortable feeling," he told his diary in May, "that when we get the issues in focus, the country does not want to go back to the left; they do want some experience and stability; they don't want to dismantle the defenses; they want judges who are tougher on crime; they don't want homosexual marriages codified; they don't want murderers out of jail; and indeed they don't want higher taxes and the [extremists] of the environment to prevail."

Or so Bush believed, and hoped.

TWENTY-NINE.

I'm Stronger and Tougher

I have no apologies, no regrets, and if I had let the press keep defining me as a wimp, a loser, I wouldn't be where I am today: threatening, close, and who knows, maybe winning.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, November 1988 You have a Gary Cooper there-they can't beat him.

-WARREN BEATTY, about Bush, to Bush friend Jerry Weintraub HISTORY, IT SEEMED, WAS NOT ON BUSH'S SIDE. Since the twenty-year Democratic Roosevelt-Truman era, modern American voters, with the exception of Jimmy Carter's single term, had preferred a change of parties in the White House every eight years. There was an expectation among many commentators that 1988 was a Democratic year. As the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., argued, building on a theory of his father's, there were "cycles" in American history in which periods of Republican rule were followed by eras of Democratic reform. Dukakis, meanwhile, was presenting himself to the country as a pragmatist, a detail-oriented manager in stark contrast to Reagan's image as a disengaged ideologue-an image exacerbated by Iran-contra.

In the late spring of 1988, the Democratic strategy was working. Though he had won the nomination, Bush, after eight years in Reagan's shadow, was faring poorly in terms of the voters' sense of his own views and virtues. According to an internal Bush campaign survey of Missouri voters in late April-Missouri was a key bellwether state-many possible swing voters were fuzzy about the vice president. "Too conservative," said a woman in her early thirties, while a woman in her late sixties told pollsters that Bush was a "super liberal." There was also a sense that it was time to move on from Reagan and from Bush. "I feel we need a different leader in this country," said a woman in her late forties. "We need a change." Most chilling of all, perhaps, was the response of a male Republican voter in his early sixties: "I want to vote for a Democrat this time."

On Memorial Day, 1988, Bush trailed Dukakis in the national polls. The ABC NewsWashington Post spread was Dukakis 53 to 40 percent, and Gallup was worse: 54 to 38 percent. What to do? "We had to define Dukakis before we went into a permanent free fall," Roger Ailes recalled. The task of definition fell within the purview of James P. Pinkerton, the Atwater ally who served as the Bush campaign's director of research. Fresh from scrubbing the Dole record, Pinkerton had begun to review the Dukakis paper trail. Reading over a LexisNexis transcript of a Democratic primary debate in New York, Pinkerton noticed a question that Al Gore had put to Dukakis about a Massachusetts program that granted prison furloughs to first-degree murderers. "Eleven of them decided their two-week passes were not long enough and left. Two of them," Gore had said to Dukakis at a Daily News forum. "Two of them committed other murders while they were on their passes."

"Wow," Pinkerton recalled thinking, "this is really weird." He called Andy Card, the Bush adviser and a former Massachusetts state legislator, to ask if he'd heard anything about this. Yes, Card replied, the furlough issue had become a big deal in Massachusetts-so much so that the Eagle-Tribune, a newspaper based in Lawrence, had won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the program in general and the case of a man named William Horton, Jr., in particular. Pinkerton ordered photocopies of all the Lawrence stories, and stacks soon arrived at Bush headquarters on Fifteenth Street in Washington.

The clips made for compelling reading. Horton was a convicted first-degree murderer in Massachusetts who had received a weekend pass in April 1987 and fled to Maryland, where, over the course of a horrific twelve hours, he raped a woman twice at knifepoint after pistol-whipping, stabbing, and tying up her fiance. In Maryland, Horton was convicted of rape and kidnapping and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences-plus eighty years. The Eagle-Tribune published piece after piece until a petition drive to have the furlough law changed succeeded. While the program had been signed into law under a Republican governor, the Horton disaster occurred on Dukakis's watch, and Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have kept first-degree murderers from benefiting from the furloughs. "To be sure, some in the Bush campaign were [already] apparently familiar with the furlough issue; days before Gore first broached it, one operative had suggested to reporters that it would be a helpful line of inquiry," Sidney Blumenthal, then of The Washington Post, wrote late in the 1988 campaign. "Gore, however, had broken the ice for them, and Pinkerton's effort appears to have been the first systematic response."

In the conversation with Pinkerton, Andy Card had passed along another tip: Dukakis had also vetoed a bill requiring public school teachers to lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance. For the Bush camp, a picture was forming. Dukakis opposed capital punishment and belonged to the American Civil Liberties Union. According to a memorandum Pinkerton prepared for Bush, the ACLU believed that the First Amendment protected "'kiddie porn'" and that "Rioting prisoners should not be punished." Considering the cluster of issues that seemed to put Dukakis far to the left of American life and politics, the Bush team could not quite believe its good fortune. As Jim Baker recalled, Dukakis, while a "bright, honorable man," was "running now for president of the United States, not president of Massachusetts."

In the last week of May, the Bush team conducted two focus groups in Paramus, New Jersey. Like the voters surveyed by the Bush team in Missouri, the cross-section gathered in New Jersey was underwhelmed by, and unclear about, both candidates. Told about the furloughs or the pledge, however, a significant number cooled on Dukakis and warmed to Bush. Atwater, Ailes, and their colleagues knew they now had the means to slow and possibly reverse Dukakis's rise in the national polls-if Bush would agree. On Saturday, May 28, 1988, Bush received a delegation from the campaign at Walker's Point. Briefed on the findings from Paramus, Bush said he worried that attacking Dukakis now, so early in the campaign, would "look desperate." Ailes threw up his hands. The polls were disastrous. Bush was blurry to nonexistent in the public mind, and if voters did have an opinion, it was likely to be negative. Dukakis was new, a Democrat who didn't seem extreme offering himself to the country after eight years of Republican power. Ailes's verdict, put directly to Bush: "We are desperate."

Bush had been here before, in New Hampshire, debating the "Straddle" ad. His team had come through then, and he was open to their advice now. If the furlough and the pledge issues would draw the contrast with Dukakis, then Bush was fine with the plan. "I could tell Bush was thinking, 'You know, they're right. We could lose this thing,'" recalled Ailes.

The mission was clear: Show Dukakis to be out of sync with the broad American electorate. "It will be easy to paint him for what he truly is-a Massachusetts liberal," Bush dictated. He justified his ideological and cultural attacks on Dukakis in the most basic of terms. He thought he was the better man-better for the country, better for the world-and if he had to do things and say things that he would not say or do in ordinary times, well, these weren't ordinary times. This was a presidential campaign, a contest for the highest office, the ultimate test. "I think I'm stronger and tougher, and I've been seasoned by fire, and Dukakis hasn't," Bush dictated in the summer. "I'm going to make it."

Given the dismal state of his polling-Dukakis was ahead by double digits-Bush traveled to the Texas state Republican convention to give what he thought was a "definitive" speech on Dukakis. The address laid out the themes that Bush was to repeat through November, arguing that Dukakis's views on economics, criminal justice, foreign policy, and culture were outside the mainstream. "What it all comes down to," Bush told the Texas faithful, "is two different visions." Dukakis's, Bush said, was "born in Harvard Yard's boutique"; his own came from Texas. (Yale was never mentioned.) "When I wanted to learn the ways of the world, I didn't go to the Kennedy School; I came to Texas, in 1948," he said. "I didn't go to a symposium on job creation, I started a business." The crowd loved it. "I am a practical man," he told the Texas audience. "I like what's real and I like what works and I respect policies that achieve results."

What was working, he saw, was a campaign of comparison and contrast with the governor of Massachusetts. The same press corps that had long questioned Bush's toughness pirouetted and now lamented what Dukakis called the vice president's "mudslinging and name-calling." In the face of Bush's assault, Dukakis said, "The American people aren't interested in what Mr. Bush thinks of me or what I think of him." Time, as Bush liked to say, would tell who was right on that score.

- For Bush, there were two significant decisions to be made before the battle for the general election was fully joined. Would Jim Baker leave Treasury to run the campaign? And whom should Bush choose as his vice presidential running mate?

The Reagans-plural-were less than enthusiastic about a change at Treasury. "You can be more valuable by staying here and keeping the economy on course," Reagan told Baker, who returned to Bush with the news of the presidential "no."

"It doesn't look to me like this is gonna fly unless you talk to the president," Baker told Bush. Reagan then gave Bush the same answer, but the president invited Bush and Baker to the Residence, Baker recalled, to "talk it over one more time."

After Bush made his case, Reagan agreed, saying, "If that's what you want, George, that's what we'll do. It just occurred to me that Jim might be more valuable as secretary of the treasury." Nancy Reagan had joined the conversation upstairs and seemed to share her husband's view that Baker could do Bush more good at Treasury than by going to the campaign.

"Nancy does not like Barbara," Bush told his diary in June 1988. "She feels that Barbara has the very things that she, Nancy, doesn't have, and that she'll never be in Barbara's class....Bar has sensed it for a long time. Barbara is so generous, so kind, so unselfish, and frankly I think Nancy Reagan is jealous of her." Mutual friends told Bush that "Nancy couldn't see any family living in the White House after theirs, and that's the way she felt about it."

Baker had been delighted with his cabinet post. Yet for all his own ambition and the care he took with how he was portrayed and seen by the press and by the public, Baker was fundamentally loyal to Bush, whom he credited with making his life in politics possible. There was a bond between the two men that was often tested but never broken. Baker acceded to Bush's wishes and left the Treasury for the campaign offices on Fifteenth Street.

As a getaway during the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in July-Dukakis had chosen ancient Bush foe Lloyd Bentsen for vice president-Bush and Jim Baker took off for a fishing trip in Wyoming. They flew out with a small entourage into Cody, then helicoptered into the Shoshone National Forest. They rode horses and fished. The world receded. Bush and Baker shared a tent, going to bed around nine each evening. They bathed in a cold waterfall.

At the Democratic convention, Texas state treasurer (and future governor) Ann Richards took Bush on, saying, "For eight straight years George Bush hasn't displayed the slightest interest in anything we care about. And now that he's after a job that he can't get appointed to, he's like Columbus discovering America." Then she mocked him: "Poor George, he can't help it-he was born with a silver foot in his mouth." In his acceptance speech, Dukakis sought to make the race about economics and opportunity. The Republicans were about prosperity for the few, not the many, he said, and "maintaining the status quo-running in place-standing still-isn't good enough for America." The election, Dukakis argued, "is not about ideology. It's about competence....And it's not about meaningless labels." Coming out of Atlanta, Dukakis led Bush by seventeen points in the Gallup Poll, 54 to 37 percent.

In a "private and confidential" memorandum to Baker, Atwater, and other top Bush campaign officials dated Tuesday, August 9, 1988, Roger Ailes laid out his thinking for the general election. Calling his plan "Campaign Theme-'A Mission for America,'" Ailes wrote: On Election Day, the voter must know three things about Michael Dukakis. He will raise their taxes. He is opposed to the death penalty, even for drug kingpins and murderers. And he is an extreme liberal, even a pacifist on the subject of national defense. They must also know that George Bush will not raise their taxes. He has the experience to keep negotiations going with the Soviets. And he is very tough on law and order. If we penetrate with those three messages, it is my belief that we will win the election. A major amount of our time, effort, speeches, commercials and interviews should be spent repeating and repeating and repeating those messages. We must force this election into a very narrow framework to win.

- August 1988 would be Bush's moment to step forward, accept the presidential nomination, and announce his first truly independent political decision since he and Barbara flew into Detroit for the Republican National Convention eight years before: his choice of his own vice presidential running mate. It would be truly independent. Bush's annoyance with the public prominence of what he called the "handlers"-including Baker-and his impatience with criticism and second-guessing manifested itself in the vice presidential decision-making process. He listened to advice, and he read the results of the polls his staff commissioned. He was determined, however, to make the final call himself.

In one California survey, the campaign polled possible running mates, among them Bob Dole, Elizabeth Dole, Jack Kemp, Missouri senator John Danforth, New Mexico senator Pete Domenici, California governor George Deukmejian, Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, 1984 Olympics impresario Peter Ueberroth-and Clint Eastwood, the actor who also served as the Republican mayor of Carmel, California. Eastwood was a passing idea of Jim Baker's; neither the actor nor the other two nontraditional names, Iacocca and Ueberroth, polled especially well in the test run in California.

According to Bush biographer Herbert S. Parmet, "Bush's list"-which Parmet described as "not particularly revealing for its political or geographic coloration"-also included South Carolina governor Carroll Campbell, former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, Indiana senator Richard Lugar, Arizona senator John McCain, Colorado senator Bill Armstrong, Mississippi senator Thad Cochran, Illinois congresswoman Lynn Martin, John Sununu, Missouri governor John Ashcroft, and Nebraska governor Kay Orr.

Bush had an urge to shake things up, and he was interested in an Indiana senator whom he'd gotten to know in the Reagan years: forty-one-year-old Dan Quayle, who had risen from the House to defeat Birch Bayh, a legendary liberal lawmaker, for a Senate seat in 1980. Quayle had passed a significant job-training act with Ted Kennedy and had learned arms control and foreign policy as a member of the Armed Services Committee. He was one of the few members of the 1980 class of Republican senators to have won reelection in 1986 and was decidedly conservative-a member in good standing of the wing of the party most skeptical of the incumbent vice president. And he had friends in Bush's inner circle: Bob Teeter and Roger Ailes had worked for Quayle in '86. "He's knowledgeable on military affairs, and it's an intriguing thought," Bush told his diary in July 1988. "Dole and Kemp would both be acceptable choices, but I can't get enthused."

At one point in the deliberations over the vice presidential pick, Roger Ailes made a case for Quayle on "casting" grounds. "Bush had been seen for so long as the junior guy to Reagan that it made sense for Bush's own VP to appear clearly junior," Ailes recalled. "A youthful-looking Quayle would make Bush seem the fatherly, senior figure. And Quayle had a good record, so that, plus the 'casting dimension,' if you will, put him in the mix."

Quayle had sizable ambitions. After his reelection to the Senate in 1986, he had briefly considered challenging Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. "I talked to my wife and talked to some others and thought I might just run," Quayle recalled. "I talked a little about it and they said, 'Yes, yes, yes.' You had George Bush, you had Bob Dole....Others said, 'You're still a junior Senator. You've got plenty of time. Do you really want to jump out and do it right now?'" After some consideration, Quayle decided against taking the leap.

Bush liked the idea of a Vice President Quayle on the grounds of novelty and generational change. "He wouldn't get instant credibility, but it would make a generational difference," Bush told his diary. "He's smart, bright, a good speaker....He comes from the Midwest, and that would be good." The vice presidential decision was down to Bob Dole or Dan Quayle. "Dole would be more instantly perceived as President, and Quayle is more exciting and new; and though people wouldn't know much about him, they would get to know him pretty quick," Bush told his diary on Saturday, August 13, 1988. "He's 41, but so was Kennedy and so was Teddy Roosevelt." (JFK was actually 43 and TR was 42 when they became president.) Quayle, who knew he was under serious consideration, called Jim Baker on Sunday night to ask about plans for a rollout if he were, in fact, the choice, and Baker assured him that things were well in hand. At that point, Baker and others apparently assumed that Bush would land on Dole, who required no introduction. As a result, there was little to no advance work for a Quayle announcement. "He had known me a long time," Quayle recalled of Bush, "and I think he felt that if he knew me, everybody must know me."

As he prepared to leave Washington for New Orleans on Tuesday, August 16, Bush had decided on Quayle. He had not had a final gut check with Jim Baker or Lee Atwater or anyone else. "I wanted it to be a surprise, a surprise choice," Bush recalled in retirement. The lawyer and West Pointer Robert Kimmitt, who had been handling the vetting of possible running mates, did not know who the final pick was until the flight. (To be ready for any eventuality, Kimmitt had brought along three big litigation boxes with background materials on a small number of candidates, including Quayle, Dole, and Kemp.) The Reagans were leaving New Orleans after a Monday evening address by the president. The Bushes met them at the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station. Bush whispered his choice to Reagan and then gestured to Jeb's kids, who were nearby. "One thing in my heart is that I did say to the President, 'Those are our grandchildren over there-the little brown ones,' pointing out which ones [they were] and wanting them to come over and speak to him with great pride; but the press picked it up on the loudspeaker, and then tried to make it that I'm insensitive to Hispanics," Bush told his diary. "It kills me, [and] the worst thing is I'm afraid I might have hurt little George [P.], whom I love more than life itself."

Bush told Baker that they should start calling the final runners-up for the vice presidential slot, but Bush still kept the final choice from most of his top advisers. They reached Domenici, Simpson, and Danforth, holding back on the Doles and on Kemp. Robert Kimmitt had checked out a last-minute concern about Quayle's health (he had a case of phlebitis) and called in to give what Bush called "clearance to Quayle."

Bush then told his team that Quayle was the choice. The new pick and his wife, Marilyn, were asked to come to the waterfront Spanish Plaza in New Orleans where Bush, who was arriving there on a riverboat, would introduce his new running mate. The announcement did not go well. "We notified Quayle about an hour beforehand," Bush recalled. "Then all hell broke loose." As Quayle remembered it, the plaza "was a mob scene-hot and loud and friendly, but not something you'd want to push your way through." But push they did. They had no other choice; both Quayles has been unfairly given only the barest time to prepare themselves. At the podium, Quayle seemed giddy and unserious, and there had been no preparation to present him to a national audience in a detailed way. (Jim Pinkerton sent a staffer to the local bookstore with his credit card to buy a copy of The Almanac of American Politics to get up to speed on the vice presidential nominee.) The first call Quayle received once the Bushes and the Quayles returned to the Bushes' hotel suite was from Richard Nixon. "Vice President Bush did the same thing Eisenhower did," Nixon told Quayle on the telephone. "He picked a young senator with a foreign policy background." Buoyed by the approval of his old chief, Bush chose to interpret the events of the day in the most positive of lights. "The surprise played and it was considered [b]old, generational and future," Bush told his diary.

But only for a moment. There were questions about whether Quayle had improperly used connections to secure a place in the Indiana National Guard. (He had not.) Asked at his first joint press conference with Bush why he had not gone to Vietnam, Quayle replied, honestly, "I did not know in 1969 that I would be in this room today, I'll confess."

- That was Wednesday. Thursday, the convention's closing day, was George Bush's most important political hour. His acceptance speech was crucial, marking his true debut as an independent political actor after two terms as Reagan's number two. "I knew what I had to do," he told his diary. "The press was building it up and up and up-had to do this, had to do that-and it was the biggest moment in my life, which it was; and almost setting expectations so high that they couldn't be matched and yet they were." Speaking from a text by Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Bush told his story. "I may not be the most eloquent, but I learned early that eloquence won't draw oil from the ground," Bush said. "I may sometimes be a little awkward, but there's nothing self-conscious in my love of country. I am a quiet man, but I hear the quiet people others don't. The ones who raise the family, pay the taxes, meet the mortgage. I hear them and I am moved, and their concerns are mine." He spoke of America as "a thousand points of light"; of his dream of a "kinder, gentler nation," and he pledged-unambiguously-never to raise taxes. "Read my lips," he said. "No new taxes."

Probably the most memorable line in the address, "Read my lips" had been a source of controversy behind the scenes. The phrase had come from Roger Ailes, who had used a version of it in an earlier campaign for Senator Chuck Grassley in Iowa. Dick Darman, a Jim Baker ally and a fiscal moderate, had tried to get the line out of the speech, but it remained, in part because Noonan kept putting it back in. "Why?" she recalled in her memoir, What I Saw at the Revolution. "Because it's definite. It's not subject to misinterpretation. It means, I mean this."

The convention adored it. In the speech, Bush made his experience explicit. "For seven and a half years I have worked with a President, and I have seen what crosses that big desk," Bush said. "I have seen the unexpected crisis that arrives in a cable in a young aide's hand. And I have seen problems that simmer on for decades and suddenly demand resolution. I have seen modest decisions made with anguish, and crucial decisions made with dispatch. And so I know that what it all comes down to...after all the shouting and the cheers-is the man at the desk." He paused dramatically, then said: "My friends, I am that man."

It was a wonderful rhetorical performance-all the more so because Bush had never really performed wonderfully in such a setting in all his years in politics. "Immediately after the speech," he told his diary, "I knew it was good."

Bush had done something he did not often do, something he had found difficult since absorbing his mother's injunctions to focus on others. With hardly a moment to spare given the approach of the November election-his greatest test-he had spoken eloquently about himself and his own view of the world. I am that man. For him it was a bold statement. "I say it without boast or bravado," he had told the convention. "I've fought for my country, I've served, I've built-and I will go from the hills to the hollows, from the cities to the suburbs to the loneliest town on the quietest street to take our message of hope and growth for every American to every American." His pledge at this moment on a summer's evening in New Orleans-the peak of his life-was not about the past but about the future. "I will keep America moving forward, always forward," he said, "for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of light." His conclusion, and his promise: "That is my mission. And I will complete it."

- He reveled in the post-speech ovations at the Superdome with the Oak Ridge Boys and Shirley Jones, but the Quayle questions (about his military service and about whether the young senator was really qualified to be second in line for the presidency) would not go away. Bush had savored secrecy too much. Asked decades later why he had not allowed Baker and others to know about the Quayle decision and prepare for contingencies such as the National Guard flap, Bush was candid. This had been his first opportunity in eight years to make a call on his own, he said, and he was eager to do it just that way: on his own. "Sometimes, you just get tired of having people tell you what to do all the time," Bush recalled.

Keeping the decision to himself had been prideful, and he paid for that pride. Bush thought Quayle would make it through the storm, but he also realized that any damage to the campaign had been self-inflicted. "The whole thing is trying to shift to whether I have any management scale," Bush told his diary on Sunday, August 21, 1988. "It was my big decision, and I blew it, but I'm not about to say that I blew it." In context, Bush was apparently referring to how he "blew" the rollout of the choice, not the choice itself. He would stand with Quayle.

Bush's equanimity was made easier by the movement in the polls. The seventeen-point Dukakis lead of midsummer had collapsed, and in the wake of New Orleans Bush led 48 to 44 percent.

- It was a day, or so it seemed, to talk about the environment. On Thursday, September 1, 1988, Bush took a boat tour of a polluted Boston Harbor, campaigning as a "Teddy Roosevelt Republican" and warning that Dukakis could not be trusted with the environmental care of the country when the fabled harbor in the governor's own state was in such poor shape. (According to The New York Times's account of the day, the Dukakis campaign pointed out the federal Environmental Protection Agency was "largely...[at] fault.") The harbor, which was to be the subject of an anti-Dukakis Bush ad, gave the vice president the occasion to raise another favorite topic. "As his boat cruised past a prison," the Times's Robin Toner wrote, "a reporter called out, 'Any of those people get furloughs over there?'"

"Only one, Willie Horton," Bush replied.

According to the newspaper, the vice president had smiled when he said it; the coverage suggests that Bush was offering up a "steady stream of one-liners" at the time. But the Horton story would long raise uncomfortable questions about Bush's conduct of the 1988 contest.

As the campaign had gone on, the story of Horton's crimes and his furlough had become ever more widely known. The hugely influential Reader's Digest ran a piece entitled "Getting Away with Murder" in its July 1988 issue, which was available to many readers by mid-to-late June. In the third week of June, Bush, who had been attacking "unsupervised weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers," used Horton's name in a Louisville, Kentucky, speech to the National Sheriffs' Association. As David Hoffman of The Washington Post reported, "Vice President Bush invoked the terror of Willie Horton today in a continuing effort to portray Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis as soft on crime."

Much of the political controversy about Horton then and in ensuing years grew out of a television ad featuring Horton's image that had been produced not by the Bush campaign but by an independent group. The ad, called "Weekend Passes," ran for only 28 days on cable television, ending October 4, but was widely discussed in the media, increasing its impact. The group, the National Security Political Action Committee, was by law allowed to spend money in support of candidacies but was forbidden from coordinating with campaigns. Indeed, the Bush campaign wrote the national television networks that the "'Willie Horton' advertisements were not produced, authorized, or approved by the Bush campaign," according to campaign lawyer Jan Baran. Jim Baker, the campaign chairman, publicly denounced the mug shot ad. But, as The New York Times reported, he did so "just three days before the commercial was to conclude" its run. "If they were really interested in stopping this, do you think they would have waited so long to send us that letter?" Floyd Brown, a NSPAC consultant, asked in the Times. Baker recalled that he had no idea what the ad's broadcast schedule was. "We wrote the letter when the criticism started coming," Baker recalled. "People said this was a racist ad, not a crime ad, so we took action and told them to stop it."

Speculation about the campaign's alleged role was fueled by a kind of swaggering culture on the part of campaign staff. Mark Goodin, the campaign's deputy press secretary, kept a mugshot of Horton on his office bulletin board. "If I can make Willie Horton a household name, we'll win the election," Lee Atwater had said in June. In a speech to Southern Republicans in Atlanta in July 1988, The Washington Post's Thomas B. Edsall reported, Atwater cited the Reader's Digest piece. "There is a story about a fellow named Willie Horton who, for all I know, may end up being Dukakis' running mate....The guy [Dukakis] was on TV about a month ago, and he said, 'You'll never see me standing in the driveway of my house talking to these [vice presidential] candidates'"-an allusion to Walter Mondale's more public 1984 selection process. "And guess what? Monday, I saw in his driveway of his home Jesse Jackson. So anyway, maybe he [Dukakis] will put this Willie Horton on the ticket after all is said and done."

Roger Ailes had been quoted in Time in August about using Horton against Dukakis. "The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it," Ailes joked to a reporter. "I meant it as a wise-ass comment, but I shouldn't have said it," Ailes recalled. "I just said it to make the Dukakis camp nervous." (The Time correspondent who reported the quote, David Beckwith, confirmed that Ailes was not speaking seriously. The remark had been made at an off-the-record lunch, but Beckwith later called Ailes to ask to use the quote because it was "colorful bravado." Ailes agreed to put the quote on the record.) To Ailes, Horton's crimes and his furlough were totally legitimate issues. The problem in Ailes's mind was that the use of Horton's actual image would backfire. After Atwater handed Ailes a copy of the Horton mug shot, Ailes tore it up. "I said, 'Lee, you can't put this guy on TV-you'll be called a racist,'" Ailes recalled. "I was completely opposed to it-not because I'm a good guy but because I didn't think it would work and would change the subject from crime to race. I never made an ad that depicted or explicitly mentioned Willie Horton, and I didn't have anything to do with anyone who did." In a piece about the Horton ad controversy on the eve of the 1988 voting, in an interview with The New York Times, Atwater said the Bush campaign had "had a 'firm policy' not to use Mr. Horton's photograph 'in any of our ads.'" Asked whether the NSPAC ad had "been beneficial" to the Bush campaign, Atwater replied: "We have no way of evaluating that."

The independent-group ad had been made by Larry McCarthy, who had worked for Ailes for six years before leaving in 1987, and who had worked for Bob Dole; Jesse T. Raiford, also formerly of Ailes's firm, did production work on the NSPAC ad. Both men said that the Bush campaign had nothing to do with the NSPAC spot. Ailes, Atwater, Baker, and Bush himself also said there no collusion. "I didn't have anything to do with that ad," Ailes said, "and I've offered $100,000 to anyone who could prove that I did"-an offer he first made in 1992.

Baker has acknowledged that "skeptics" accused the "Bush team of coordinating with a not-so-independent political action group to produce the inflammatory ad, so we could then repudiate it and enjoy the best of two worlds. In other words, we were accused of using a two-track system to get an outside group to do our dirty work for us." According to Baker, however, the Bush campaign "as far as I know-and I was campaign chairman"-had "nothing to do" with the NSPAC commercial and, "given the uproar that followed," he recalled, "I'm fairly sure it did us more harm than good."

In the fall of 1988, the Bush campaign did air an ad showing generic prisoners moving through a revolving door. (Some appeared white, some Hispanic, some African American.) The voice-over: "As governor, Michael Dukakis vetoed mandatory sentences for drug dealers. He vetoed the death penalty. His revolving door prison policy gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole. While out, many committed other crimes like kidnapping and rape, and many are still at large. Now Michael Dukakis says he wants to do for America what he's done for Massachusetts. America can't afford that risk."

By the time any of these ads went on the air, Bush had already overcome Dukakis's lead, suggesting that the Bush team had effectively applied the lessons of the Paramus focus groups through the summer by portraying Dukakis as a Massachusetts liberal in part by talking about furloughs, the pledge of allegiance, and the ACLU. In another effective ad in the autumn, footage of Dukakis riding in a tank gave the Bush camp the background for a spot noting his opposition to different weapons systems.

On Friday, October 21, 1988, Jesse Jackson charged the Bush campaign with using Horton to exploit white fears about black men. Some mainstream opinion-makers disagreed. In an editorial headlined "A Racist Campaign?" The Washington Post, for example, wrote this about the Horton furlough issue: "You can believe that the importance of this topic was greatly overstated and that the 'lessons' drawn from it were demagogic and extravagantly sinister without accepting its use as the basis for a charge of racism against Mr. Bush." (The columnist Michael Kinsley published a contrary view in the Post two days later. Its headline: "Yes, a Racist Campaign.") "Was the use of Willie Horton racist?" Dukakis asked rhetorically a quarter century after the campaign. "Of course it was. Was Bush himself racist? No. This was politics, pure politics, and we were in a campaign, a tough campaign. He needed to make me look too 'liberal,' so he used what was at hand, and the Horton case was in the public record. I didn't think people would be moved by all the bashing of so-called 'liberals.' But I was wrong."

Bush himself said that he believed that the Horton example spoke to the larger campaign argument that Dukakis was outside the mainstream. "I was accused of playing a black trump card against my opponent because of Willie Horton," Bush recalled in retirement. "Well, I didn't do that, one group did, and...[we] denounced them. But we were widely accused of race campaigning." (And when the subject came up, Bush always noted "the issue was first raised by Al Gore in the primaries.") Horton and the furlough issues were about crime, Bush insisted, not race. In truth, in the tangled politics of that difficult year, as so often in American life, they ended up being about both.

- Bush and Dukakis met in a debate on Sunday, September 25, 1988. Some NFL players had told Bush that "you have to take the first hit before you feel the qualms go away." He stayed on the anti-liberal message first crafted at Kennebunkport back in late May. In a tense exchange, Bush denied that his attacks over the Pledge of Allegiance and the ACLU were attacks on Dukakis's patriotism. "You see, last year in the primary, he expressed his passion," Bush said. "He said, 'I am a strong, liberal Democrat,' August, '87. Then he said, 'I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU.' That was what he said. He is out there...out of the mainstream. He is very passionate. My argument with the governor is: Do we want this country to go that far left?...I'm not questioning his patriotism."

Asked to reply, Dukakis said: "Well, I hope this is the first and last time I have to say this. Of course, the vice president's questioning my patriotism. I don't think there's any question about that, and I resent it. I resent it." The numbers for Bush remained favorable. He had established a lead in New Orleans, and it was proving durable, if narrow. Reagan, who had called Bush after the debate and told him he had "done good," was finally, unmistakably, explicitly for Bush.

"Well, I know who's on your side, because he's been on my side, and that's George Bush," Reagan told a campaign rally in Illinois. "He has stood by me for eight years. And so, if you want to know who's on the side of the little guy, well, I'll tell you: It's the big guy, the big guy from Texas. I know because I've worked more closely with George Bush than with any other member of the administration. I've seen him keep a cool head in a hot crisis. I've seen his leadership, and I've been guided by his vision."

Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen debated each other in Omaha, Nebraska, on Wednesday, October 5. Bush watched from Fort Worth. Bentsen walked away with the night by calling Quayle on comparing his experience with John F. Kennedy's. "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Overall, however, Bush believed that Quayle had performed well. "I called him ecstatically, and I called the President, and he agreed and then, of course, for a couple of days, Quayle got pounded," Bush told his diary. "Our staff is worried. The tracking the first day went good, and they keep getting this stuff that Quayle did lousy, so the tracking was off the next night."

On Thursday, October 13, 1988, the first question at the second presidential debate was unusually provocative. Bernard Shaw of CNN asked Dukakis if he would still oppose the death penalty even if his wife, Kitty, were to be "raped and murdered." Dukakis responded coolly, repeating his view that capital punishment was not a deterrent. In the emotional calculus of politics, the moment underscored the narrative Bush and his team had been constructing for months: The Massachusetts governor appeared passionless and remote, a clinical progressive more interested in the correct liberal answer than in flesh-and-blood realities.

Throughout the evening Bush was comfortable. "Roger Ailes gave me very good sound advice, and we had Kissinger sit there, hopefully in the line of sight of Dukakis to intimidate him a little," Bush told his diary. "The Dukakis people sneered a lot more than ours. They hate it when the word 'liberal' is used."

He was already tired of hearing about how the campaign had been a hollow exercise that emphasized symbols over substance. "Now you keep reading that it's the worst campaign in history-the ugliest, the meanest," Bush told his diary in mid-October. "The media was not about to define Michael Dukakis, and a lot of them are liberals; and not only are they not about to define him, they come to his defense....It's absolutely absurd. If a right-winger belongs to a John Birch Society, he is dead-he is dog meat-and yet the ACLU is sacred to these press people."

The adultery allegations recurred in October when speculation that The Washington Post was preparing to publish a story about a Bush affair led to a brief drop in the Dow Jones. Confronted with a falling market, Post editors denied any such Bush report was in the works. The next day, Donna Brazile, Dukakis's deputy national field director, said to reporters: "I wasn't on the stock market yesterday but I understood they got a little concerned that George Bush was going to the White House with somebody other than Barbara. I think George Bush owes it to the American people to 'fess up...." To his diary, Bush dictated: "It was the ugliest, most hurtful kind of thing." Brazile resigned, and Dukakis apologized to Bush, who tried to stay focused, telling himself: "Generally speaking, things look encouraging."

- Arriving in Santa Clara, California, eleven days before the election, Bush looked out the window from Air Force Two. The view reminded him of Midland, and the beginning of the whole journey.