Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 17
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Destiny and Power Part 17

As often happened in the last days of a campaign, the race seemed to be tightening in overnight tracking polls, and Jim Baker worried about the numbers. An anxious team at Bush headquarters sent the nominee a few harsh speeches to deliver. The drafts, Bush thought, were "red meat, outlandish, equating Dukakis with socialism."

He made a last-minute trip to Pennsylvania on Sunday, October 30, 1988, to stay in the news. The night before, there had been a sharp up-tick in the tracking in Bush's favor. On Wednesday, November 2, just to be safe, Baker asked him to screen a "comparative" ad. "Jim, I cannot get into the ads now," Bush said. "Everyone is encouraging me to be more positive, however, so I don't want to have some smear ad at the end....We should stay positive at the end of the campaign here."

By the last push, Bush could not remember where he had been on a given day; "it's blurred and blended in." His closing words to his diary on the eve of the election were cautiously optimistic. "There is an apprehension and a nervous waiting, anxiety-and [the] recognition [that by] Wednesday it will be all or nothing, and the desire to do what's right, do my best, and the recognition that it's going to be extraordinarily difficult."

He was nervous and nostalgic. "It's fitting that we come back to Texas where I voted first 40 years ago almost to the day in West Texas," he told his diary as the campaign ended. "Then it was Dewey and Truman, and I remember the upset result, and I'm just hoping against hope that that same thing doesn't happen again." He knew the critics believed he had taken the low road to victory, and he admitted that such talk bothered him. "I don't know what we could do differently," Bush dictated. "We had to define this guy."

- On Election Day, Bush won convincingly, carrying forty states with 53.4 percent of the popular vote. According to exit polls, he won more votes than Dukakis among men and among women, taking 59 percent of the white vote; 30 percent of the Hispanic; and 12 percent of the African American. In The Washington Post's exit surveys, the country was split 50 percent to 50 percent over whether America should "keep moving in the direction Reagan has been taking us." Unsurprisingly, Bush won 92 percent of the votes of those who thought we should stay the Reagan course, and Dukakis carried 93 percent of those who believed it was time for a change.

Then and in retrospect, there was a widespread sense that 1988 represented a historic level of negative campaigning. Studies of political trends over time, however, suggest that, as the political scientist John G. Geer has argued, "The advertising in 1988, despite all the claims, did not usher in a new era in American politics." According to Geer's data, negative appeals (such as the tank, Boston Harbor, and revolving door ads) were more prevalent, but only by few percentage points when compared to negative appeals in previous campaigns. The rate of negativity in 1988 was roughly in line with that of the campaigns of 1964, 1972, and 1980. Moreover, Bush and Dukakis ran the same percentage of negative ads, at 35 percent. (In 1980, Reagan's rate was 42 percent; in 1984, Mondale's was 37 percent.) What is clear is that, as Geer wrote, "It was the news media's coverage that brought about a new era." Heightened press attention to the tactics of campaigning undoubtedly made the '88 race feel more personal, even if, by historical standards, it was not.

- America knew what it was getting. George H. W. Bush was no Ronald Reagan. He was a different kind of man, a different kind of leader-quiet, not dramatic, steady, not spectacular. No incumbent vice president had been elected to succeed an incumbent president since Martin Van Buren won in 1836. Richard Nixon's defeat in 1960 was more common-a sitting vice president losing to the opposition party-and the pundits had long believed that Bush would face the same fate.

In the intensely personal politics of presidential choice, the people had decided-or at least 53.4 percent of those who chose to vote had decided-that Bush was the kind of man who could be counted on in what he called "the biggest job in the world." Theirs was not a particularly data-driven decision-Bush himself admitted he was short on specifics-but that did not mean the Bush victory was irrational. He had said he wouldn't raise taxes and he seemed sound on national defense-and those things, combined with the public impression of his private character, were enough.

From Connecticut to the Pacific to Texas to Washington to Beijing and back again, Bush had proven himself an attractive and reliable man to those who got to know him. He had rivals but virtually no enemies, largely because of his apparently limitless capacity to make others feel included and at ease. The American voters turned to him in 1988 for many of the same reasons so many others had turned to him in smaller ways for so many years and across so many different assignments: because experience and intuition suggested to them that things would be safe in his hands. Others were more eloquent, others more sure and certain in their ideology. There were few others, however, who so convincingly conveyed the ineffable sense that they were fit for command.

George H. W. Bush did, and for that reason, chiefly, he was now the president-elect of the United States.

- On the evening of the election, from the Houstonian Hotel, Bush spoke to Reagan, and Barbara to Nancy. Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia called to congratulate the president-elect, who celebrated with wine and cheese.

"We went to bed sort of in shock," Barbara wrote. "I mean, George is going to be the 41st President of the United States. Hard to believe. Think of all the people who should be here and who would be so proud and say, 'I knew it all the time!!!' Neil Mallon, Pres Bush, Sr., and Marvin Pierce." In the hour of victory, Barbara thought of the men who had first gauged her husband's depths, and seen so much in him. Now a majority of American voters had taken his measure, too, and chosen to entrust him with ultimate authority.

- For Bush, the weeks between the 1988 election and his inauguration offered him a chance to move from vote getter to conciliator. "Campaigns go away," Bush told his diary, "and you stand on the question of the issues themselves, and your style." The seeking of office-the focus groups and the tracking polls and the hastily called hotel meetings about airing this ad or that ad-were of less interest to him than the holding of office, and now that he was about to hold the greatest office of all he wanted to leave the brutality of the campaign as far behind as possible. On the trail, Bush had fired off Mao's "empty cannons of rhetoric," and in his conception of the presidency, what mattered was what you did once in power, not what you said in order to get there.

At eight o'clock on the morning after the victory over Dukakis, the Bush family went to St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston for a brief service. George W. rose and prayed: "We ask, Lord, that you open our hearts and minds to you: Many of us will begin a new challenge. Please give us strength to endure and the knowledge necessary to place our fellow man over self....Please guide us and guard us on our new journeys-particularly watch over Dad and Mother."

A few hours later Bush met the press at the George R. Brown Convention Center. He announced Jim Baker's appointment as secretary of state, handled some transition business, and opened the floor to reporters. The campaign was yesterday, Bush insisted; what mattered was today and tomorrow.

Around Thanksgiving, Bush called Dukakis and said he'd be happy to drive from Kennebunkport to Boston to say hello, but Dukakis, Barbara recalled, "was not ready for that yet." They did get together in early December in the vice presidential residence, where Dukakis gamely posed for a photo with the Bushes' English springer spaniel, Millie, a gift from their Houston friends the Will Farishes. (Barbara was putting together Millie's Book, written from the dog's point of view, and had a chapter on "famous people she knew.") "I never liked dogs," Dukakis said, recalling various canine attacks during his days as a paper boy.

- The Bushes spent a sunny and snowy New Year's weekend at Camp David. The Reagans were at Sunnylands, the Walter Annenbergs' Rancho Mirage estate, so the president-elect and his wife had the run of the retreat. Or the run of much of it: The Bushes knew not to stay in Aspen, the presidential cabin, until after January 20. Nancy remained vigilant about the prerogatives of her husband's office and did not schedule a tour of the White House family quarters for Barbara until January 11, just nine days before the transfer of power. "There is this feeling of competitiveness," Bush dictated, "and I'm afraid Nancy is going to be hurt when she is out of office, out of the limelight, and out of reach of the glamour of the White House."

Bush returned to Washington, where, as president of the Senate, he was in the chair for the counting of the votes of the electoral college. That morning Bush confided something to Barbara. "I'm excited for the first time," Bush told her. "I just felt different. I can't wait to get in that office now, and start trying to make things happen." He was comfortable with the prospect of power. "There's no such feeling of anxiety as I approach this job. No extra acid in the colon. A quiet, a strange quiet, accompanied by anticipation. I know how to begin, I know how to start, I know where the office is, and I'm not overawed because I've been in there a lot."

With its mix of the trivial and the tumultuous, the strange nature of daily life in the presidency was growing ever more real. On the personal front, Friday, January 6, 1989, was the Bushes' forty-fourth wedding anniversary: The president-elect gave Barbara a new necklace. There were unmistakable signs that life would never be the same again, at least for the next four or eight years. "The briefings on my responsibilities in the nuclear age-stark," Bush dictated on Saturday, January 7. "The stark...reality, the awesome responsibility really was driven home." That evening the Bushes went to dinner and a show, Shear Madness, at the Kennedy Center. "I gasp at the prices," Bush told his diary. "The danger is you can get out of touch in this business."

On the Monday before his Friday inaugural, Bush sat in the vice presidential residence, thinking. Through the leafless trees he could see the Washington Monument and the Capitol. The previous eight years had been good ones. He had been happy in this house, happy in the job under Reagan. Outsiders mocked the vice presidency and had mocked Bush in it, taking his loyalty to the president and his refusal to share what he told Reagan as signs of weakness. Yet he had given his word to Reagan-and to himself-that he would not grandstand. He had kept his word, and he had been rewarded for it. What he often called the "common wisdom" had been wrong, and he had been right.

In the steadily emptying house, surrounded by boxes, he was vindicated, for he was leaving it as the next president of the United States. He thought of the good days he and Barbara had shared in the house-the home in which they had spent the most time in their married lives. "Millie chases the foxes; Millie catches three squirrels; Millie catches a bird," Bush dictated. "They say there's frustrations in the vice presidency. Perhaps, [but] you simply make your own passions, your own priorities, and when you work with a man like Ronald Reagan, it comes easy."

He asked himself the big questions. "People say, 'What does it feel like? Are you ready? Can you handle it? What do you do?' The answer, 'Family, faith, friends, do your best, try your hardest; rely on the innate good sense, kindness, and understanding of the American people.' That's where a President gets his strength, I'm sure of it. No one can have instant success, no one can make this nation kinder and gentler overnight, but we can try." It was almost time for the move down to the White House, into the Oval Office, into the maelstrom. The task ahead was almost unimaginably complex. And yet he believed, quietly, that he was as ready as a man could be.

PART VI.

The Awesome Responsibility.

1989 to 1993.

Here I am as the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, and living in a fascinating time of change in the world itself.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, 1989.

Credit p6.1.

The president and Mrs. Bush on the final night of the Republican National Convention, Houston, Thursday, August 20, 1992..

THIRTY.

The Sun Started Through.

For we are given power not to advance our own purposes, nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, in the prayer he wrote for his inaugural.

BUSH CAME TO THE PRESIDENCY a decent and caring man whose experience in life and in government had taught him that there were few simple problems and even fewer perfect answers. He saw himself as a guardian, not as a revolutionary. A realist, Bush confronted the issues of the hour as they arose in the natural unfolding of history. TR had a Square Deal, FDR a New Deal, Truman a Fair Deal, JFK a New Frontier, LBJ a Great Society, Reagan an eponymous Revolution. Bush was temperamentally uncomfortable with such grand schemes. As his vice president, Dan Quayle, put it, Bush was "results-oriented," not philosophically driven.

His presidency was shaped by all that he had met and all that he had done. World War II and the loss of Robin had taught him that life was "unpredictable and fragile," a truth that meant those who were spared owed debts of service to others. He had come of age as a businessman and as a father under Eisenhower, whose conservative centrism had created the conditions for Bush's own prosperity and happiness in postwar Texas. As a politician Bush had apprenticed in Johnson's Washington, where presidents were neither angels nor demons but sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Under Nixon and Ford, he had learned about diplomacy, national politics, and intelligence gathering firsthand. And Reagan had given him an impressive model of leadership to which to aspire, even if Bush knew he could never match the Gipper as a presidential performer.

A figure of conservative consensus at home and cautious creativity abroad, Bush governed in a consequential time-what Henry Kissinger thought the most tumultuous four-year period term since Truman. The death throes of the Soviet empire, a hot war in the Middle East, violent upheaval in China: The world was in fundamental flux on Bush's watch, and he led with confidence on the global stage. At home he confronted rising federal deficits and debt that threatened the economy, and his leadership put the country on a path toward fiscal health at great political cost. He signed significant environmental legislation, established the principle of national education goals, worked to expand free trade, and enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act, the most sweeping civil rights measure in a generation.

There were, of course, frustrations and failures. He was an inconsistent leader of popular opinion and a poor manager of his own political capital. No president before him ever rose higher in public estimation, yet by 1992 he would be defeated as a new generation of Democrats, aided by the news media and by the populist Texas billionaire Ross Perot, portrayed him as adrift and unengaged.

For a time, the political triumph of George Bush was immense-a story of presidential success in which man and moment met as the nation and the world required the steady hand he offered. The political tragedy of George Bush came in the last eighteen months or so of his presidency, when he seemed a caretaker at a time when voters were in the market for a dreamer. His White House years are a story of the rise and decline of a president who reached an unprecedented pinnacle of popularity only to fall, dizzyingly, to defeat at the polls. He wasn't surprised, really, by the turn of events. He knew that what politics gave, politics took away.

- Friday, January 20, 1989, was cold and cloudy. In the car on the way from the White House to the Capitol, Reagan reassured Bush about the weather: "When I became Governor of California, just as I placed my hand on the Bible, the sun came through and warmed it." It was typical Reagan, focusing on the positive and the possible. (He had taken his first gubernatorial oath indoors at midnight, but had an outdoor ceremony afterward.) Bush was cheered by the story. "And sure enough," Bush recalled, "while we were on the platform, the sun started through."

Bush's inaugural address was brief. He thanked Reagan and then asked the nation to pray. As heads bowed, the new president withdrew a small sheet of paper from his breast pocket. He had drafted the words himself. "Heavenly Father...Make us strong to do Your work, willing to heed and hear Your will, and write on our hearts these words: 'Use power to help people.' For we are given power not to advance our own purposes, nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people. Help us to remember it, Lord. Amen." In his address, Bush was candid about the political culture over which he was to preside. "There has grown a certain divisiveness," Bush said. "We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives." He closed with a plea for grace and dignity. "Some see leadership as high drama and the sound of trumpets calling, and sometimes it is that," Bush said. "But I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds. And so today a chapter begins, a small and stately story of unity, diversity, and generosity-shared, and written, together."

As Billy Graham offered the benediction and Alvy Powell, an army musician, sang the national anthem, Bush leaned over to Reagan and pointed upward-the sun had come out. The now former president smiled and nodded. He had known it all along.

The Bushes walked the Reagans through the Capitol to the east front and then down the steps to a waiting helicopter. As Reagan boarded, he turned back and offered a salute to his successor, who returned it. Reagan joined Nancy inside the chopper, and Bush headed back up the steep steps. Jim Baker, who had been standing to the side during the farewell, embraced his old friend, and the president of the United States and the secretary of state walked arm in arm toward the doors of the Capitol, the new order heading to work as the old took its leave, heading west.

- Baker roamed the world as secretary of state but remained preternaturally attuned to Bush and his fortunes both at home and abroad. Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor who would later join the administration as secretary of education, was always struck by how Bush and Baker seemed connected telepathically; each man appeared perennially aware of what the other was thinking and doing. While this intimacy did not mean the president and the secretary of state were in constant agreement, it did invest Baker with an unusual level of power, for, as he liked to put it, "No one ever thought that they could get between me and my president." The Bush-Baker relationship fascinated the press. "They keep playing it up that he's always selfish, always looking after his own ass, always looking to be President, etc.," Bush told his diary, "but I have a lot of confidence in him."

One man who totally understood the Bush-Baker connection was Brent Scowcroft, whom Bush asked to return for a second engagement as national security adviser. Slight and soft-spoken, Scowcroft thought the national security adviser's job was to serve as an honest broker of information and policy options for the president. A classic realist, Scowcroft believed that the Reagan "Evil Empire" rhetoric had been too harsh. Better to strike moderate tones and move cautiously-a formulation that appealed to Bush. Scowcroft also intuitively knew to defer to Baker as America's chief diplomat, avoiding the usual rivalries between the State Department and the National Security Council. Scowcroft was so conscious of Baker's prerogatives that he initially refused to speak publicly on foreign policy without clearing it with Baker beforehand-an act of respect that Baker appreciated, but which soon proved superfluous. The Bush foreign policy team operated with an extraordinary degree of harmony. Scowcroft's staff included Robert M. Gates, a steady, impressive CIA veteran who served as deputy national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice, a Stanford professor who handled Soviet and Eastern European affairs.

John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire, brought an engineer's mind and a brusque, no-nonsense Yankee sensibility to the inner circle as White House chief of staff. The gregarious Bush hated saying no; the tough-minded and sometimes arrogant Sununu imposed discipline within the president's organization. "Sununu thinks a mile a minute-a new idea on whatever subject it is," Bush told his diary. "He's bright as he can be; [a] quick grasp with the budget. He sometimes can be a little too confrontational with bankers or congressmen or whatever, but he's awful good." From afar, Richard Nixon looked on approvingly. "Like a good chief of staff he is not afraid to be the SOB so that the Boss can be the good guy!"

Bush's old friend Nicholas Brady, the former chairman of Dillon, Read who had briefly served as a U.S. senator from New Jersey, was secretary of the Treasury. Roger B. Porter, a Rhodes Scholar and professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, had served in the Ford and Reagan White Houses before joining the Bush team in 1989 as assistant to the president for economic and domestic policy. And there was Dick Darman, who became the director of the Office of Management and Budget. A brilliant analyst and master of the intricacies of the budget and of domestic policy, the moderate Darman had worked for Elliot Richardson, served as Reagan's staff secretary, and was Baker's deputy at Treasury. He had opposed the "Read my lips" language in Bush's acceptance speech-and now, in an irony that the whip-smart Darman fully appreciated, the task of addressing the deficit while laboring under a promise of "No new taxes" had fallen to him.

- On the evening of the inauguration, after fourteen balls, the Bushes spent their first night in their new home. The next morning at eight, the president and Barbara greeted visitors who had camped out overnight to tour the White House. He thrived on the pace. After opening the mansion to the public, Bush walked over to the West Wing. He had been there with Richard Nixon, and with Gerald Ford, and with Ronald Reagan. Now, finally, it was his West Wing. "I went to the Oval Office and everything was changed overnight, quick," Bush recalled. "Reagan was gone, Bush was in. The papers were the way I wanted them....The CIA briefing started," and the presidency of George H. W. Bush truly began.

He treasured a small souvenir. President Reagan had left him a note on a piece of Sandra Boynton stationery. A cartoon elephant lay prostrate beneath a flock of turkeys. The caption: "Don't let the turkeys get you down."

Dear George You'll have moments when you want to use this particular stationery. Well go to it.

George I treasure the memorys [sic] we share wish you all the best. You'll be in my prayers. God bless you & Barbara. I'll miss our Thursday lunches.

Ron Bush had an important ceremonial task to dispatch on his first full day as president: receiving his mother in the Oval Office. "Mother was the star," Bush told his diary. A reporter asked Mrs. Bush if this were the most exciting day of her life.

"So far," Mrs. Bush replied. "So far."

THIRTY-ONE.

If It Weren't for the Deficit...

I cannot break my "Read the Lips" pledge. I would be totally destroyed if I did.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, April 1989 ON A SNOWY SATURDAY in January 1987, Richard Nixon had come by to see Bush at the vice presidential residence. Nixon loved to talk politics, and he had handicapped the '88 race for Bush. The most prescient thing the former president had said in the three-and-a-half-hour session, though, was about governing, not running. "George, you know you were right about 'voodoo economics,' don't you?" Nixon had asked. "We've got to handle the deficit. You know there is going to have to be a tax increase."

Nixon's prediction had proven accurate. The month Bush defeated Dukakis, the General Accounting Office projected that tax increases "are probably an unavoidable part of any realistic strategy for reducing the deficit." Former presidents Ford and Carter also told Bush and Dick Darman that, as they put it, "based on definitive analysis, it would be very difficult to balance the budget without some considerable increase in revenues." During their post-1988 election courtesy call, Mike Dukakis and the president-elect had chatted about the just-released report of a national deficit study commission. "There's no way I can raise taxes in the first year," Bush had said. Dukakis was startled. In the first year? he thought. "It was clear to me then," Dukakis recalled, "that 'Read my lips' was a temporary promise."

In the transition from Reagan to Bush, Roger Porter was weighing the possibility of working with Carla Hills as deputy U.S. trade representative when the president-elect asked him to become assistant for economic and domestic policy. Porter asked the president-elect a question: What was Bush's chief priority on the home front? Without hesitation, Bush replied: "Getting deficits under control." The answer, Porter recalled, "reflected his conviction that large and growing deficits would slow economic growth and that setting fiscal policy on a sustainable long-term path was his most crucial economic task."

The federal budget had last been in balance under President Johnson. Since then, federal outlays had outpaced federal revenues at an ever-rising rate. In 1989, Bush faced the stubborn fact that the deficit might lead to tougher economic times since the Federal Reserve was unlikely to lower interest rates until it was convinced the administration and Congress were serious about reducing the deficit. Without lower interest rates, there would be less capital in the marketplace; with less capital in the marketplace, there would be slower growth, fewer jobs, and possibly a recession. Or worse.

In the political and cultural ethos of the late 1980s and early '90s, the federal deficit, if allowed to grow inexorably, was seen as a harbinger of potential American decline as an economic and military force. The Yale historian Paul Kennedy's surprise 1987 bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, argued that heavily leveraged countries could lose everything, and the Kennedy thesis was very much in the air as Bush took office. "If it weren't for the deficit," Bush wryly told his diary as he prepared to assume power, "I'd be feeling pretty good these days."

Bush saw the deficit as more than a problem to be managed. It was, conceivably, an existential question for the nation's economic health and for America's place in the world. Trapped between his own campaign rhetoric of "Read my lips" and economic and political reality, he was coming to understand that movement toward a balanced budget might well require more revenue-more taxes. The business cycle was also working against him. After the deep recession of 198182, the country had had several good years under the Reagan presidency. (Though at a price: The federal debt-or accumulated deficits-had tripled from fiscal 1980 to fiscal 1989.) Beginning in 1989, the economy grew at below-typical rates.

Bush was thus caught in a depressing spiral. The higher deficits from the Reagan years meant slower economic growth (in part because of the Federal Reserve's reluctance to lower interest rates), and slower economic growth exacerbated the deficit since tax receipts were lower in leaner times. Add in a series of savings and loan failures that had increased federal outlays as Washington bailed out exposed depositors, and Bush was taking office at a frustrating fiscal moment.

There were only two solutions: drastically reduced spending or higher taxes. Bush's problem was that the Democratic majorities in Congress were not interested in cutting spending, and he had memorably promised not to raise taxes. "I cannot break my 'Read the Lips' pledge," Bush told his diary on Sunday, April 2, 1989. "I would be totally destroyed if I did."

In the way of politics, he deferred the reckoning for a year. As his first budget took shape (for fiscal year 1990) Bush was popular, in large measure because the effects of the slowing economy had not been fully felt in the country at large. Early days were cheery days: An ABC NewsWashington Post poll had Bush's approval rating at 76 percent, "the highest," Bush was told, "of any President at this time of his Presidency since Johnson, who took over after the Kennedy murder....[I]n any event it'll change, but we might as well enjoy it while we can-keep trying, keep working."

He called on an old friend, Dan Rostenkowski, the Democratic chairman of Ways and Means, for help. Over lunch in December 1988, "Rosty" agreed to "avoid embarrassing the new President on taxes for one year-but for only one year," Dick Darman recalled. "Given the no-new-taxes pledge," Darman noted, "even a one-year reprieve seemed better than none." Bush took it, happily. Darman was reading Time's coverage of the bipartisan announcement of a 1989 budget that avoided the hard choices until 1990. The headline, Darman knew, said it all: "Wait Till Next Year."

- The Rostenkowski lunch was typical for Bush. At heart a hospitable man, he put his personal charm to work in the White House. He believed in the efficacy of the invitation to have a quick drink at the end of the day, or to pitch horseshoes, or to watch a movie in the theater on the first floor of the mansion. Congress was decidedly Democratic, with the opposition party holding an eighty-nine-seat margin in the House and a ten-seat advantage in the Senate. During the transition Bush spent time with House Speaker Jim Wright and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell; at his old Democratic friend the Mississippi congressman Sonny Montgomery's recommendation Bush had also met at the vice presidential residence with leading House Democrats Leon Panetta, Tom Foley, and David Obey as well as interest-group leaders from the left. Bush's goal: "to demonstrate that I want to be a President of all the people." From the start, however, he found Capitol Hill less engaging than the rest of the world. The president had a freer hand abroad than he did at home, and by 1989, Bush was largely a creature of the executive branch. (He had served more than three times longer as a presidential appointee or as vice president than he had as a congressman.) And given the Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill, Bush had to cultivate personal relationships to have any real hope of getting anything through Congress. Within a week of the inauguration, the Bushes were inviting lawmakers to the Residence for informal tours. The First Couple would show visitors the Lincoln Bedroom, the Queen's Bedroom, and the Treaty Room, which Bush used as a study. Barbara was as welcoming to the lawmakers as her husband but was a bit more skeptical about the long-term benefits. "Barbara reminded me that only Lyndon Johnson did this, and 'Look where he ended up,'" Bush recalled. "I'd like to think the war in Vietnam had something to do with it, not just his open style." Bush took pictures of the lawmakers in the Lincoln Bedroom with a Polaroid OneStep. The guests loved it.

Conservative Republicans were wary about Bush's outreach to Democrats. In the middle of March, John Sununu attended a meeting of GOP lawmakers in Charlottesville, Virginia, and heard what Bush called "some bitching that we're too bipartisan, [and] have the Democrats down to the White House too much. And I bristle at this introverted, this looking-inward part of the Republican members."

- He faced an early test of presidential power with the controversy over his nomination of his old Texas colleague John Tower to serve as secretary of defense. Beset by rumors of what biographer Herbert S. Parmet described as the nominee's "love of women and booze," Tower offered to remove himself from consideration, but Bush resisted. Democrats in the Senate, led by Sam Nunn of Georgia, opposed the nomination. Though a former senator himself, Tower had few friends in the Democratic caucus. Thought to have been high-handed during his years as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he was a vulnerable nominee. Still, Bush refused to "pull the rug out" from his old colleague, telling a teary Tower that he "was going to stand with him and support him....We cannot show weakness." But Bush could not pull together the votes, and the nomination was defeated in early March.

In the search for a new defense secretary, Bush's first thought was to send Brent Scowcroft over to the Pentagon, but he felt he could not spare his national security adviser as his foreign policy right hand. There were other names in circulation: former secretary of the navy John Lehman and former secretary of defense Mel Laird suggested Don Rumsfeld for a return engagement, but Bush ruled Rumsfeld out. "[He's] unacceptable, because Baker doesn't like him and I worry about his game playing and I think Brent does, too," Bush told his diary. Three other names came up: Jack Edwards, a former congressman; Jake Garn, the Utah senator; and Dick Cheney. "I worry [because Cheney has had] a heart attack," Bush dictated, "and yet I see some enormous potential there."

Cheney called on Bush in the Residence at one P.M. on Friday, March 10, 1989. We "went over his background," Bush recalled. "He hadn't served in the Army; had two DWIs; and [he's] nervous because of the latter-day Tower morality on the Hill. But I told him that I saw no problems with that." Bush announced the Cheney appointment at four P.M. With Cheney's move to the Pentagon, his place in the Republican leadership-minority whip, the number two position behind Bob Michel, the minority leader-was now open, and Newt Gingrich of Georgia stepped in to fill it.

- Gingrich, then forty-five, had risen to prominence in the 1980s by relentlessly attacking the Democratic leadership, often late at night on C-SPAN, when he would fill an empty chamber with apocalyptic rhetoric about what he argued was a war of civilizations between liberals (whom he thought of as "sick") and true conservatives. Now the rebel was in the Republican leadership.

And he was not Bush's kind of Republican. Born in Pennsylvania in 1943, Gingrich, the stepson of a military man, grew up at different postings around the world, graduated from high school in Georgia, and was educated at Emory and at Tulane, where he earned a PhD in history. He joined the faculty of West Georgia College and worked for Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 presidential campaign before a turn to the right in the 1970s. Gingrich lost two races for Congress before winning in 1978. Grandiose and energetic, he was an intriguing force in the politics of the Reagan-Bush eras, blending a passion for assaults against Democrats with big ideas about life in a postindustrial world. He saw himself, without irony and with little self-awareness, as a "transformational figure."

He was, in short, an uncontrollable force, driven by ambition of epic scope, and now he was moving closer to the center of George H. W. Bush's universe. "The question is, will he be confrontational; will he raise hell with the establishment; will he be difficult for me to work with?" Bush asked in his diary on Wednesday, March 22, 1989. "I don't think so," Bush answered himself, hopefully. "I called him and congratulated him. And he's going to have to get along in some degree, moderate his flamboyance. He will be a tough competitor for the Democrats, but I'm convinced I can work with him and I want to work with him. He's a very bright guy, [an] idea a minute, but he hasn't been elected President and I have."

Would Gingrich, however, acknowledge that overarching reality? The media was skeptical. "The press take the Gingrich election [as minority whip] and shows it as a real challenge to me one way or another," Bush dictated on Monday, March 27. The Washington media, Bush noted, had been "hitting me for being kind and gentle, instead of confrontational, juxtaposing my views against Newt's, my style against Newt's. I was elected to govern and to make things happen, and my...view is, you can't do it through confrontation." Following his instinct to keep people close, Bush invited Gingrich and Vin Weber, the Minnesota Republican congressman who had managed Gingrich's whip campaign, to the White House for a beer. The conversation was pleasant, but the visitors felt there was something Bush was not quite saying. Weber decided to put the question to the president directly. "Mr. President, you've been very nice to us," Weber said as they were preparing to leave. "Tell us what your biggest fear is about us."

"Well," Bush answered, "I'm worried that sometimes your idealism will get in the way of what I think is sound governance." In the most polite way possible, in a single sentence, Bush had just encapsulated a crucial new truth. Gingrich and Weber believed so deeply (so idealistically, to use Bush's terminology) in adherence to conservative ideological principle that compromise on those core views (and compromise was the essence of what Bush saw as "sound governance") was out of the question. The old politics of the possible was being replaced by the politics of purity.

In his first April as president, Bush sat in the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House, with its views of the Jefferson and Washington memorials. He used the room a great deal, often working there at night or early in the mornings. "I'm wondering at the majesty of all of this, and in essence, praying that I will be a good President, a fair President, a strong President, mainly a principled President," he told his diary. "And then it gets all right back to do your best, do what you can, and don't worry about those things that you can't do overnight."

THIRTY-TWO.

Victory in Europe, Terror in China

The longer I'm in this job, the more I think prudence is a value, and I hope experience matters.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH GORBACHEV was something altogether new: a Soviet leader with whom the West, as Margaret Thatcher once put it, "could do business." Born in 1931 to a Russian-Ukrainian farming family in Stavropol, Gorbachev was a bright young man whose father fought in World War II (in Soviet memory, "the Great Patriotic War"). For a time, the elder Gorbachev was thought to have been killed in action in 1944. His family, including thirteen-year-old Mikhail, believed him dead, only to discover that the reports were wrong: His father returned home after the war. Young Mikhail, then, grew up with a sense that accepted realities could change, and change quickly. He was involved in theatrical productions in school. After earning his law degree in Moscow, Gorbachev rose through the party ranks and became the Soviet Union's chief of agriculture. In March 1985, after the death of Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev, at the young age of fifty-four, took over an economically and culturally stagnating Soviet empire.

Bush and Gorbachev had first met at Chernenko's funeral, and the American vice president was instantly impressed. "He was different, totally different, from the types of Soviets we'd been used to," Bush recalled. In a memorandum to President Reagan, Bush wrote: "Gorbachev will package the Soviet line for Western consumption much more effectively than any (I repeat any) of his predecessors. He has a disarming smile, warm eyes, and an engaging way of making an unpleasant point and then bouncing back to establish real communication with his interlocutors."