Bush saw the matter in philosophical terms. "They want to defeat him-not because of sexual harassment necessarily, but because of a lot of other views," Bush dictated. "It is a stinking, lousy process, and I feel bitter about it." The president believed Thomas's version of events, not Anita Hill's. On Tuesday, October 15, 1991, Barbara joined Bush in the study off the Oval Office to watch the Senate vote. Thomas prevailed, 52 to 48. Asked about Thomas two decades later, Bush said: "I am very proud of him, and I respect him-he did not have an easy life, and here he is on the Supreme Court of the United States."
- The weekend of the Thomas debacle coincided with the anniversary of Robin's death. On the helicopter ride between Camp David and the White House, Barbara reminded her husband that it had been thirty-eight years since they had lost their little girl. "Thirty eight-it is so hard to believe," Bush told his diary. "I can literally feel her presence sometimes."
It was a melancholy season. While monitoring the Thomas drama, Bush had gone for a run at Camp David with Ranger, who "tore through the woods, down the trails, leaves flying, and I wondered at the beauty. I wonder if [as] you get older if you notice the leaves more. I slowed down, almost stopped, to look at a brilliant red leaf lying there among the golds and the browns. I thought, 'Boy, is time running out?'"
There was Thomas, there was the slow economy, and there was the question of John Sununu's future. In many ways the White House chief of staff was a casualty of the recession and of the president's own inability to recapture the energy of 1989, 1990, and the first few months of 1991. As the economy had slowed and the reality of the 1990 budget deal sunk in-there would be, by design, less federal money to spend on programs-the Bush White House could point to fewer domestic successes. While there had been progress on the budget, on education, on the environment, and on the Americans with Disabilities Act in the first half of Bush's term, things seemed different now. Bush's approval numbers were-as the president himself had predicted at the very moment of victory in the Persian Gulf-drifting downward.
Sununu was a tough chief of staff-the bad cop-and tough chiefs of staff tend to make more enemies than friends. For George H. W. Bush's chief of staff, in particular, that was part of the job description. Bush hated saying no, so Sununu was the one who delivered bad news. By late 1991 he had delivered a lot of it to a lot of people-often too harshly-and he had few allies now that things had gotten rough.
Sununu was also weakened by a series of reports about his travel at taxpayer expense, including his once taking a car and driver from Washington to New York for a stamp auction. Sununu maintained that he was following policy by using cars and planes that enabled him to stay in secure communication with the White House. Nevertheless, the frenzy about the sins of the man who, according to Newsweek, was known to staffers as "King John" (behind his back, of course), added to unhappiness within the administration about him and his style.
Yet firing people was not in Bush's nature, even when he knew that it was time for someone to move on. In the late autumn of 1991, Bush asked his eldest son to undertake a kind of research project for him. Would George W. poll the top people in the administration, the cabinet, and the 1992 reelection campaign and come back to him with thoughts about how things should be structured going forward? George W. was honored. "It was a big moment-your dad, the president of the United States, asked me to do something," George W. recalled. "It was universal that there was a problem inside the White House." The message was the same all over the place: Sununu needed to go. "Mother and Dad and I were upstairs and I gave my report," George W. recalled. "It was my role to create the conditions where it was easier for Dad to tell John that it was time to move on."
Over dinner in the Residence, George W. delivered the verdict: "Basically the White House structure has become such that you're isolated," George W. told his father, "and everybody on your team thinks it's because of Sununu." The president sat, impassive, taking it in for what seemed an eternity. "And there was nothing, no reaction," George W. recalled. "He was thinking. He said nothing." Finally the father broke the long silence. "So who's best to do this?" Bush said. George W. suggested a few names, Jim Baker and Bob Mosbacher among them. Bush didn't think any of the possibilities quite worked. "There was no good option," George W. recalled, and then he volunteered himself for the assignment. "If you'd like," George W. said, "I can do it, and I'll do it the right way." Another long pause. "All right, son," Bush said, and ended the conversation.
George W. spent the night in the White House, and at five thirty the next morning the telephone next to his bed rang, waking him up. His father was on the line. "Son, good luck today," Bush said. George W. had a conversation with Sununu laying out the same things he had told his parents the night before and suggesting that the chief of staff give the president the option of making a change.
After the meeting, George W. walked out to the horseshoe pit near the Oval Office with Sununu. When the son caught his father's eye, he winked: All would be well. (At lunch, father and son had a long talk. The elder Bush wanted to hear everything that had happened, word for word.) It took several more days-Sununu mounted a brief campaign to keep his job-but the chief of staff eventually resigned. Sununu was out, and Bush asked Transportation Secretary Sam Skinner to step in. But no organizational chart could change the reality that many Americans felt the economy was in trouble.
The president's polls kept falling. "It's hard to get the Christmas spirit because we're under tremendous fire on the economy," Bush told his diary. His ratings in an ABC NewsWashington Post survey put him at 47 percent approval, with 50 percent holding a negative view of his performance. It was, he noted gloomily, "the lowest I have ever been." He held no one but himself responsible. "I must accept all the blame for this," he dictated. "It goes with the job." He had survived tough times before. "The big thing is don't show it. Just keep going, do your best."
- The politics of the Middle East were always in play. Despite their cooperation in the Gulf War, the American president and the Israeli prime minister did not have the warmest of relationships. In 1989, when Yitzak Shamir had come to the United States, Bush had urged Israel to stop building settlements in the occupied territories in the hope that such a concession might improve relations with the Palestinians. As Richard Haass, who was in the Oval Office with the two leaders, recalled it, Shamir gestured dismissively and said "no problem." The exchange led to great confusion. "Bush thought he had an understanding from Shamir that the Israelis would not cause any problems with their settlement activity, meaning that they would cease building new ones," Haass recalled. "Shamir, I later learned, thought he was telling the president that the settlements...should not cause any problem and that all the debate was much ado about nothing. Shamir thus continued authorizing them; Bush thought the Israeli leader had broken his word."
Now, two years later, Bush and Baker hoped to use the coalition victory in the Gulf as an opportunity to address the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a series of tense meetings, Baker traveled the Middle East to build support for a summit to be held in Madrid. Bush also insisted that Israel pay a price on the road to the conference, announcing that he was holding up "$10 billion in loan guarantees" for the resettlement of Soviet Jews unless Israel stopped the settlements. "It was hard to exaggerate how emotional it all was," Richard Haass recalled. Israel believed Bush largely "unfriendly," even hostile, and the president inadvertently reinforced that view by telling the press that he was "'one lonely little guy' up against 'some powerful political forces,' that is, the Jewish lobby," Haass recalled. "I winced." He told Bush and Scowcroft that the statement "would trigger alarm bells. They were genuinely surprised. But it did. Jewish leaders were taken aback, and the president, who did not have a prejudiced bone in his body, was hurt that they thought he was speaking in some anti-Semitic code." The Madrid conference, which began on Wednesday, October 30, 1991, was notable, but the region remained a historic tangle, essentially impervious to even the most diplomatically minded of American presidents.
- On Christmas Day 1991, at ten in the morning eastern standard time, the head of the Soviet Union called the president of the United States to announce the end of the experiment in Communism born in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
To Bush, whom he reached at Camp David, Gorbachev was warm-and reassuring on a key question. He told Bush that he would transfer authority over the nuclear arsenal to Yeltsin as soon as he had announced his resignation. "I can assure you that everything is under strict control," Gorbachev said. "There will be no disconnection. You can have a very quiet Christmas evening."
To the world, Gorbachev said: "An end has been put to the 'Cold War,' the arms race, and the insane militarization of our country, which crippled our economy, distorted our thinking and undermined our morals. The threat of a world war is no more."
- Bush was gracious in victory. Speaking from the Oval Office at nine P.M. on Christmas night, he said: "Mikhail Gorbachev's revolutionary policies transformed the Soviet Union. His policies permitted the peoples of Russia and the other republics to cast aside decades of oppression and established the foundations of freedom." The Cold War, Bush said, "shaped the lives of all Americans. It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction. That confrontation is now over."
The Cold War ended for many reasons. Among them were the aspirations of millions of ordinary people behind the Iron Curtain; the leadership of men such as Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and Pope John Paul II; the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; and the decades-long resolve of the West, particularly the United States, to stand strong against Communism.
In the final analysis, Gorbachev was unable to master the forces that he had helped unleash: the drive for more democratic institutions, for market economics, for an end to a totalitarian culture that could not withstand sustained challenge from the West. From Truman to Reagan, American presidents had confronted the Soviet threat in different ways in different eras. The 1980s had been critical, with Reagan articulating a vision not of coexistence with, but of victory over, Communism. And Bush's quiet insistence on peaceably dismantling the Soviets' territorial empire, most notably in Germany, had struck a mortal blow.*
"I didn't want to get too maudlin or too emotional, but you literally feel you're caught up in real history with a phone call like this," Bush dictated. "Something important, some enormous turning point. God, we're lucky in this country-we have so many blessings."
His joy was tempered by the realization of what awaited him in the new year. "There will be no let up," Bush dictated. "Everything we do will be screened and seen [as] purely political, and be hammered away at every turn. The reporting reminds me of 1988. It used to be 'dogged by Iran-Contra, the [Vice] President came to Iowa'; now it's 'dogged by the recession, the President trying to make things look good,' or whatever."
Two days after Gorbachev's announcement, on Friday, December 27, 1991, Bob Teeter handed Bush a poll that was "discouraging in every way-not only in my own popularity, but the American people are all over the field on what they want to see to fix the economy....Right now, nobody thinks we're doing a damn thing about the economy....Every single day they are pounding out with some negative message, and so even though inflation is better than it's been; interest rates are lower than they've been; unemployment less bad than in a recession, everyone thinks we're on the wrong track, and confidence is at a lower level than even Jimmy Carter's horrible days"-Jimmy Carter, the one-term president.
* Asked in retirement whether he thought Reagan received too much credit for ending the Cold War, Bush replied: "I don't think too much at all, but I think to say that he singlehandedly ended the Cold War, that hurts a little bit because I think we had something to do with it. There was a speech once where Margaret Thatcher got up and said, 'Let me be clear on one thing. Ronald Reagan and I ended the Cold War.' And here was Lech Walesa there, and Vaclav Havel, and people that had made significant contributions to ending the Cold War, and that was embarrassing. Helmut Kohl sent me a note saying, 'This woman is crazy.'"
FORTY-FOUR.
It Was Discouraging as Hell
I just wish it were over.
-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, August 1992 HE COULD BARELY SPEAK. In Tokyo for a state visit in early January 1992, Bush was at a dinner given by Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Halfway through the pre-meal receiving line, Bush felt faint. Realizing he was about to be sick, he excused himself, was shown to a bathroom, and vomited. Ever one to keep his commitments, Bush refused to go home. Returning to the event, he finished shaking hands and sat down beside the prime minister for dinner. Feverish, Bush could not keep up his end of the conversation. He turned pale-as "white as a sheet," one guest told The New York Times afterward-and lost consciousness, slumping to his left, toward Miyazawa.
"I remember breaking out into a cold sweat, water just pouring out of me, and then the next thing I knew, literally, I was on the floor," he dictated to his diary at the Akasaka Palace. "I woke up, [and] I had this euphoric feeling. It's hard to describe it...100 percent strange; and then I looked up, and there I was in the faces of the nurses, and the doctors, and the Secret Service guys, lying flat on the floor." Then he saw that he had thrown up again-this time on himself and on Miyazawa. "Why don't you roll me under the table," Bush joked to the prime minister, "and I'll sleep it off while you finish the dinner." The president refused an ambulance, fixed his tie, which had been taken off to open his collar when he passed out, and walked out of the room. The Secret Service loaned him a green raincoat to cover what the Times decorously referred to as the "regurgitated food." "I got home and I was just dehydrated and dead tired," he dictated. Bush was back on schedule by the next afternoon.
In a small way, the president's illness connected him to a large number of his own countrymen-the stomach flu was a big problem in the winter of 1992. "Mr. Bush's bout with the flu recalled his handling of the recession," Anna Quindlen wrote in a Times column entitled "The Stomach Thing." "He got it after everyone else did and he kept trying to pretend it wasn't that bad."
As 1991 had drawn to a close, Bush was politically beset. To his right stood Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon and Reagan aide who had become a right-wing populist provocateur. Emboldened by Bush's breaking of "Read my lips" and driven by isolationism, the commentator embodied both the rise of constant media and of the conservative discontent with the 1990 budget agreement. On the stump, Buchanan was "sniping away, direct, nasty, tearing down," Bush dictated. Buchanan's hatred of things imperial led him to dub Bush "King George" and to call gleefully for his "Pitchfork Brigades" to topple the incumbent Republican president.
Buchanan was finding receptive audiences in New Hampshire, which had experienced difficult economic times. Richard Nixon was predicting that Buchanan might get 40 percent of the vote there. Heading into New Hampshire, Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-radio host who was on the rise, endorsed Buchanan. Explaining his decision to back the challenger, Limbaugh recalled thinking: "Look, if we want to win this...there needs to be a conservative debate, a conservative element of this campaign." Callers to Limbaugh's show used the word "Ditto" to signal their agreement with the host; in the season of Buchanan's surge in New Hampshire, the challenger's supporters would say "Lock and load" when they checked in with Limbaugh. "Ride to the sound of the guns," Buchanan was merrily saying on the trail. "Ride to the sound of the guns." (To win Limbaugh over after the primary, Bush would be himself, inviting the radio kingmaker to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. The president carried Limbaugh's bag to the room himself. Roger Ailes had brokered the evening.) In a campaign memo, Alex Castellanos, a Bush adviser, assessed the Buchanan threat. "Pat Buchanan is currently a safe outlet for protest," Castellanos wrote on Monday, January 6, 1992. "Voters do not want him to be President. He is the vehicle through which they can send George Bush a message." The key, then, Castellanos argued, was for Bush to emphasize that he'd gotten that message before the primary. To make his point, Castellanos created an imaginative scenario. "If we could capture the campaign in one scene, for example, it might be this," he wrote, continuing: Someone representing the state's economic frustrations, a soft-Bush voter, confronts George Bush in New Hampshire and says "Here's what happened to us. Help us." Perhaps she breaks down. The President lets her vent her frustrations, then goes to her in his role as father figure, hugs her, holds her, reassuring her. He repeats her concerns. "I know we have priorities here at home. You are my priority. It is going to be all right. Here is what we are going to do."
A lovely scene-but it would never happen. Bush was not that kind of campaigner. He knew, though, that he had to do something to reassert himself on the trail. He was so worried about a trip to New Hampshire to fend off the Buchanan insurgency in mid-January that he took a sleeping pill the night before.
The day in New Hampshire was a disaster. At an Exeter town hall meeting, reading from a note card designed to remind him of the work at hand, Bush declared: "Message: I care." In Dover, he said, "Don't cry for me, Argentina," quoting, for no apparent reason, a song from the musical Evita. He rendered the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as "the Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird." He called himself "Mrs. Rose Scenario" as he tried to project economic confidence. It had been a miserable day. "You try to smile," Bush told his diary, "you try to keep a stiff upper lip; you try to encourage people, you don't want to get down; and every night on the news and every day we get hammered."
In Orlando the week after his State of the Union address, Bush attended a convention of the National Grocers Association. He was shown a new technology for scanning items in grocery store checkout lanes-an improvement on existing systems that had become common in American stores-and evinced polite interest and surprise. Watching a live video feed of the event and working from a pool report-a customary practice for White House coverage-Andrew Rosenthal, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote a story depicting Bush as "amazed" (Bush's word) by the exhibit. The piece captured the political moment perfectly, portraying the president as distant from everyday realities. The White House pushed back against the story, and the Associated Press reported that Bush had been shown new technology that could read a code that had been "ripped and jumbled into five pieces." The ferocity of the Bush reaction-Marlin Fitzwater denounced the story as "media-manufactured and maintained"-inadvertently underscored how vulnerable the president felt in the winter of 1992. "All in all," Bush dictated after the article appeared, "it's a pain in the ass."
- On Sunday, January 19, 1992, The New York Post had published a story about Bill Clinton's alleged extramarital activity unsubtly headlined "Wild Bill." Reading the article, Bush told his diary that the sex stories "ought to be out of the political arena, and ought to stay on the issues. The standard should be, 'The Public Trust,' and if behavior spills over into a person's duties that's one thing, but just to dig into the past in an insidious way...does not contribute anything to the process."
It was a measured, mature perspective, one that had to have been influenced by the old allegations about Bush and what George W. had called the "Big A" in 1987. After the Clinton Post report, Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas woman, sold her story about an alleged twelve-year affair with Clinton to the Star, a supermarket tabloid. "It makes politics ugly and nasty," Bush told his diary, "and the climate bad, and there is no gain for anyone in all of this." Bush had been here before, when Gary Hart's 1987 implosion had led to speculation about a Bush affair. "They ought to leave this kind of crap out of the campaigns, but any comment we make will be interpreted as fanning the fires on Clinton and his wife," Bush dictated. "Our friends in Arkansas say every bit of it is true....The press claims they hate it and they love it-it's very clear."
Then, in early February, a letter Bill Clinton had written as a young man seeking to minimize his chances of going to Vietnam surfaced. He had made a commitment to enter the ROTC to avoid being drafted only to learn afterward that he had a high draft number, which meant his chances of being conscripted were lower. At that point, Clinton had backed out of his agreement to join the ROTC, thus avoiding military service altogether. "Here's a guy who said he was going to go in, and then went back on his commitment or word," Bush dictated after reading about Clinton's youthful maneuvers, "but all of that kind of thing is not in focus now."
Bush did not want his campaign trafficking in rumors. In mid-February, after a pollster for Bob Kerrey was discovered to have faxed negative information on Clinton and the draft to a reporter, Bush issued a stern memorandum to his top team. "It is absolutely essential that all personnel be told that they must not resort to campaign tactics that assault another's character," Bush wrote. "Please be sure all hands get the word." The president was especially sensitive to charges of negative campaigning, given the prevailing view that he had stooped to conquer in 1988-a view that Lee Atwater himself had seemed to endorse in 1991.
After suffering a seizure while delivering a speech, Atwater had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. In a confessional piece in Life magazine, he expressed some regrets. "In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate.' I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not." Atwater wrote Dukakis to apologize. "We obviously were on opposite sides of a tough and negative campaign, but at least he had the courage to apologize," Dukakis said. "That says a lot for the man." Bush took the news of Atwater's March 1991 death hard, telling his diary: "He suffered a lot at the end-too much-and off he goes to God's loving arms."
- For the White House, the results of the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, February 18, 1992, were miserable. Bush won, but Buchanan polled 40.4 percent, which nearly matched Eugene McCarthy's protest vote against Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Newt Gingrich told The New York Times that the vote was a "primal scream" of populist anger with the status quo.
Heading into primaries in Georgia and Texas, the Bush team contemplated what to do about the energetic Buchanan challenge. Bob Teeter argued that Bush should take him on directly; Dan Quayle insisted that he should not. Agreeing with Quayle, Bush said he would largely hold his fire against Buchanan for now but "might tweak him from time to time."
Bush did make one course correction in the wake of Buchanan's strong finish in New Hampshire. On the eve of the Georgia primary, Bush told The Atlanta Constitution that the tax increases in the 1990 budget deal had been his "biggest mistake." He was, in effect, repudiating his own political courage. His mea culpa was about tactics, not substance, and the Constitution interview appears to have been the product of his exhaustion with his conservative critics. He tossed a bit overnight about his "biggest mistake" language. "It's hard to tell how it will go, but any fair-minded person would say, 'My God, he's getting hammered by this Read My Lips and I can understand that he wished he hadn't done it,'" Bush dictated. These were the musings of a man under campaign pressure; he was, for a moment, thinking more about how to get through the day than he was about the substance of what he had done.
- On Wednesday, March 18, 1992, Bush spoke with Roger Ailes, who had been largely shut out of the reelection campaign by Bob Teeter and others but who still kept in touch with the president. ("Reelections are always very corporate, very buttoned down, and the guys around Bush thought they didn't need me," recalled Ailes. "I was seen as the 'junkyard dog,' and they didn't think they needed one this time.") Ailes reported on what Bush called "the ugliness the Clinton people are trying to peddle to Rupert Murdoch: affidavits-supposed affidavits-smearing me....He says that Murdoch told them he didn't want any part of it." In these same weeks, the Bush rumors were mentioned in a Gail Sheehy profile of Hillary Clinton in Vanity Fair. "Why does the press shy away from investigating rumors about George Bush's extramarital life?" Hillary asked. She then went on to answer her own question. "I'm convinced part of it is that the establishment-regardless of party-sticks together," Hillary told Sheehy. "They're going to circle the wagons on Jennifer and all these other people."
"Baloney," replied Barbara Bush. In private, The Washington Post reported, Barbara was harsher, calling Hillary's Vanity Fair comments "lower than low." The president hated everything about the subject. "It's just the symbol of how horrible it all is," Bush dictated on Tuesday, April 7, 1992. The rumors made one more notable appearance in the 1992 campaign. A new biography of the Washington lobbyist Robert Gray reported that a now-dead ambassador had claimed that he had once been asked to arrange a tryst for Bush and Jennifer Fitzgerald at a chteau in Switzerland. The story was being promoted by Democrats and was picked up by The New York Post in August. At a press conference with Bush and visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at Walker's Point on the day of the Post article, a CNN reporter asked about the allegation. A furious president dismissed the story as "a lie." To his diary, Bush said: "My main worry is the family; hurt to the family; and [the] hurt particularly to Bar; but there is not a damn thing you can do about it in this ugly climate. I felt I had to knock it down-the lie that it is-but it keeps the gossip merchants happy."
- Ross Perot, who had long been at the periphery of Bush's life, had moved to the center of it in the spring of 1992.
A spry Texas billionaire, Perot had made his fortune building a computer business (with significant government contracts) in Dallas. A graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Perot seemed a straight talker from the plain-speaking West, full of colorful analogies and refreshingly free of traditional political cant. Rather like Lee Iacocca and Peter Ueberroth from the 1980s, Perot was a familiar American archetype: a heroic outsider who might just be able to ride in to rescue the nation from hard times and broken politics.
In a speech at the National Press Club, Perot said he was available to be drafted to run for president. It was, Bush dictated, "a big massive ego trip," but the announcement resonated. "He now wants to parlay his outsidership into winning the election," Bush told his diary, "or, if not that, bringing me down." Bush believed part of Perot's motivation was personal. It had fallen to Vice President Bush to tell Perot that he would have to reduce his involvement in the Vietnam POW/MIA issue during the Reagan years, and Bush never forgot Perot's unhappiness in 1977 when Bush declined to come work for him. Now, in '92, Bush believed the public romance with the Texas billionaire would last about three months, at which point "Perot will be defined; seen as a weirdo; and we shouldn't be concerned with him."
To run his campaign, Perot hired Republican consultant Ed Rollins, Bush's old nemesis from the National Republican Congressional Committee, as well as former Carter chief of staff Hamilton Jordan. The Rollins news struck close to home, for Rollins's then-wife, Sherrie, was assistant to the president for public liaison and intergovernmental affairs, a high-ranking White House post. Before her husband took the Perot job, Sherrie had been determined that Bush hear the news about her husband's defection from her directly. In the president's study off the Oval Office, she found a placid George H. W. Bush. She was worried, she said, that Republicans like Rollins would not be considering going to work for an independent candidate if they weren't concerned that Bush was going to lose in November. The president was unfazed. "Sherrie, Ed is making a terrible mistake," Bush told her. "I know Ross Perot, and he's crazy. Mark my words, this won't last. And the American people are never going to elect a person of Bill Clinton's character. This is all going to work out, and we're gonna win."
The president may have been calm, but the political mood of the country was deeply unsettled. Positioning himself as an outsider Mr. Fix-It, Perot had a spectacular spring in the polls, leading both Bush and Clinton. As summer arrived, Perot continued to lead in national surveys, with Bush and Clinton competing for second place. Why, Bush wondered, did the voters not see what he saw-that Perot, as Bush put it to his diary, was "outrageously ill-suited to be President of the United States"?
- After terrible riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of white police officers who had been videotaped beating an African American, Rodney King, Vice President Quayle spoke to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco about family values. He discussed the high costs of the breakdown of the two-parent family. In a noteworthy popular allusion, Quayle added that the CBS situation comedy Murphy Brown, in which Candice Bergen played a single Washington reporter, sent the wrong cultural signal when the title character had a child out of wedlock and called it "just another 'lifestyle choice.'"
Quayle was widely attacked for seeming to be insensitive to hardworking single mothers, and the White House staff was in what Quayle called a "total panic." The president himself had never seen the show and was a bit puzzled by the whole thing.
From Florida, Jeb Bush was impressed by Quayle's performance. "While the liberal columnists and editorial writers denigrate him (the same folks who rip you apart regularly)," Jeb wrote his father in a memorandum dated June 2, 1992, "he has scored big with our base vote." Jeb thought the "values theme" a good one, suggested that his father pursue it, and closed with a piece of practical counsel. "On another subject, I really think it would be good to have George [W.] up in D.C. more often," Jeb wrote. "I believe we are in for a rumble and the folks around you, while all fine people, are a cautious lot." In another sign of the president's lack of focus on the mechanics of the election, he failed to follow up on Jeb's good suggestion, and George W., now managing partner of the Texas Rangers, remained in Dallas, in touch with his dad but removed from the day-to-day campaign operations he had been part of four years before.
The administration and the campaign's lethargy had made the president nostalgic for John Sununu. Bush was dissatisfied with Sam Skinner as chief of staff. "I must confess, I miss Sununu and his brilliance and his ability to put things in perspective, and to get up and browbeat the Hill," Bush told his diary in May 1992. Bush credited Sununu with helping pass the ADA, the clean air bill, the civil rights bill, and even the budget agreement. "Yes, there was a lot of china broken, but I'm wondering if we don't need the Chief of Staff to step up his activities, and get control more," Bush dictated.
- On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in New York in the summer, Bill Clinton took an unusual step. Confounding the conventional political calculus, he chose a fellow southern baby boomer, Al Gore of Tennessee, as his vice presidential running mate. The public reaction to the tableau of the energetic and attractive Gore family joining the Clintons in Little Rock was palpably positive. In the White House, Bush assessed the changing dynamics. "I've always thought Gore was kind of fragile and surreal, very liberal; and on the environment, he's [a] far-out extremist," Bush dictated on Friday, July 10, 1992. Bush noted that Gore's family life (he had married his high school sweetheart) and his military record (he had served in Vietnam) were happy contrasts to Clinton, "but it will be like other Vice Presidential nominees-it's really the top of the ticket that makes the difference."
Bush may have been right historically, but the Gore announcement signaled the beginning of a summertime Democratic renaissance. The two southerners seemed, in the words of Newsweek's pre-convention cover, to be the "Young Guns" who could effectively take the fight to the aging Bush. As the Democratic ticket roared into New York for what was to be a highly effective four days of introducing Clinton as a repackaged "Man from Hope," Bush was enduring a six-hour meeting with advisers on Monday, July 13 that served only to remind the president how lethargic the campaign was. "I'm not getting the strong staff support we get in the foreign policy field," Bush told his diary. "They keep telling me that the polls show I'm disconnected; the polls show I don't care; the polls show I don't get it and I keep saying, 'Fine, I do, but don't tell me what the polls show, tell me what to do about it.'"
He and virtually everyone around him believed that he needed Jim Baker to take over the campaign. In a repeat of the drama of 1988, Baker was happily serving in a high cabinet post and unhappily considering a return to the hourly political wars. To escape the pressures of the campaign during the Democratic convention, Bush took off for a fishing trip with Baker (Jeb would join them for part of the holiday) at the secretary of state's ranch in Wyoming. In the wilderness, Bush reached an understanding with Baker. The secretary of state would return to the White House for one last Bush campaign. Baker longed to remain at State, traveling the world, but all the small rivalries and tiny resentments, the occasional competitiveness and the inevitable tensions, were swept away when Bush made it clear that he needed Baker. Hearing this, Baker agreed; the ambition and the pride fell away. "He'll do what I want him to do," Bush dictated. "He has to be at my side."
At a quarter after nine on the second morning of the trip, there was a bulletin from Dallas. Ross Perot was withdrawing from the race. Summoning reporters, Bush called the Perot news "a positive development" and invited the billionaire's supporters to join the Bush cause. Away from the journalists, Bush reached Perot himself from Baker's meadow. The connection was poor, but their chat was "civil," Bush told his diary, and he told Perot he would be back in touch again soon. Perot said he "would welcome that."
One of Bush's first calls was to George W., who was "elated and feels this guarantees that we'll carry Texas," Bush dictated. "It also throws the Clinton-Gore strategy [off] a little bit. Because with Perot out of there...we ought to do well across the South, regardless of the Vice President." Now that he was out of the campaign, Perot made anti-Clinton noises. "I want to talk to George in total privacy," Perot told his intermediaries. His intended message was that Clinton would be disastrous for the country. "He's very pissed off at me," Bush dictated, "but he hates Clinton." Bush and Perot were supposed to meet, but Perot grew difficult about setting a date and alleged-with no evidence-that the administration had released his fitness reports from his time in the navy. Tired of the back-and-forth, Bush let the matter of a meeting drop.
He did, however, keep hearing talk of a Perot "October Surprise," whatever that might be.
- The Clinton-Gore ticket surged out of the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden. After New York, Gallup had the Democrats leading Bush 57 to 32 percent. In the face of such numbers, Bush's friends, family, and advisers were looking for anything that might put the president on the path to victory. In the weeks before the Republican National Convention in Houston, that search led many on Bush's side to contemplate whether the time had come to drop Dan Quayle from the ticket.
It was not the most propitious of moments for Quayle (his propitious moments were few and far between). Though loyal to his vice president, Bush himself had his ambivalent moments. The year before, in the summer of 1991, Bush had told his diary: "I think he will be a good campaigner, work hard, go to certain places, and I damn sure don't want to go back on my feeling that he should be on the ticket. I worry though that he might not be quite ready to be President, but then I expect every President thinks that. Reagan probably wondered whether I'd be ready to be President. On the other hand, [Quayle]'s far brighter than the critics [think], and I think if something happened to me...his big challenge would be to establish confidence, get good people, and then I think all these fears would go away. He's got a lot of right-wing reflexes."
On CNN's Larry King Live in the summer of 1992, Quayle had said that he would stand by his daughter should she choose an abortion, only to have Marilyn Quayle announce that no, her husband was wrong. Their daughter would carry any baby to term. "It's all over the television, and now the pro-abortion people are saying Dan finally showed some humanity," Bush told his diary. "In the meantime, the press goes on and on, on and on, bashing, bashing, bashing."
For almost exactly four years, ever since his hasty introduction to the nation at the convention on the water's edge in New Orleans, Quayle had done his best to win over an underwhelmed public. His polling numbers were stubbornly low, and even a largely favorable David BroderBob Woodward Washington Post series had failed to shift the conventional wisdom within the political class. Bush himself was occasionally put out by what he found to be Quayle's reflexive conservatism and by the Quayle staff's eagerness to position their principal as the most reliably right-wing voice in the White House. Taken all in all, though, Bush liked Quayle and understood well the difficulties of the vice presidency. A careful reconstruction of the Quayle question by Newsweek's 1992 special-project election team found that as important, perhaps, was Bush's conviction that removing his 1988 choice from the 1992 ticket would be an implicit admission that choosing Quayle had been a mistake in the first place. In the aftermath of the storm over "Read my lips," the president had no appetite for such a political moment. It was true, Bush acknowledged to himself, that Quayle's polling performance was "terrible....He's not resonating; he does not project Presidential timber; right now, he's being compared unfavorably with the plastic Al Gore," Bush dictated. "Gore is getting an enormous press ride out of the Convention, but I see that for what it is-a kick, a boost."
Others close to Bush, including his elder sons, thought Quayle should go. George W. Bush suggested replacing him with Dick Cheney; Jeb called in from Florida "saying he's had calls from many real conservatives and Christians saying that we ought to get rid of Quayle," his father told his diary. The boys were clear: Bush needed to do something decisive to get back into this thing. At the moment, though, Bush could not see his way clear to sacrificing Quayle on the altar of expediency. "When your own sons and others say you ought to do something to look strong, I have to know that it is pervasive," Bush dictated. Yet, he added, "I wouldn't look strong. I would look like I had sold him out, and the hue-and-cry would rise up, particularly from the right."
Still, the counsel kept coming. Peggy Noonan told Bush that she thought Dick Darman should be fired and Jack Kemp should replace Quayle on the ticket. Former President Ford telephoned to urge a vice presidential change. Jim Baker favored a new running mate but could not see how to effect it if the president remained reluctant.
Newsweek's election team later revealed that there was one dream scenario for several Bush allies: Have George Herbert Walker Bush name the first candidate of color to a major-party national ticket. A Colin Powell vice presidential nomination was by now an old Washington fantasy, one that had been bruited about since early in the run-up to the Gulf War. The problem was that Bush was unwilling to do what he needed to do to bring such an idea to fruition-and, in the absence of Quayle's voluntarily stepping aside, it would have been necessary for the president to effectively fire his vice president.
Before the summer, Quayle chief of staff Bill Kristol had gone to Bob Teeter, the president's reelection chairman. "What I hope doesn't happen is leaks and sniping without Bush coming to him and saying, 'I want to make a change,'" Kristol said. In the event of such a direct approach, Kristol promised not to "mobilize every conservative in Washington to rally to Quayle's support"-the vice president's team, in other words, would respect the chain of command. "The problem was that all the suggestions-if you could call them that-that Quayle should get off the ticket were so indirect that we felt entitled to fight back indirectly," Kristol recalled. And so the Quayle operation shrewdly used The Washington Post to cut off debate over the vice president's future. On Saturday morning, July 25, 1992, the paper reported that Bush had told Quayle that he would remain on the ticket. "There weren't any such discussions," Bush told his diary that day, "but I have concluded that he should." Bush's reasoning: "The bottom line on Quayle is, if he is dumped, I'm attacked [for] not keeping my word, 'Read My Lips'; no loyalty, looking after myself, and not the other guy," Bush dictated two days later. Quayle was to remain.
During a political meeting in the Roosevelt Room two months earlier, in May 1992, Bush had scribbled a note to Patty Presock, the deputy assistant to the president who was in charge of Oval Office operations. He was worried about his energy and his acuity, and he wanted to make sure that his medical team was fully in the picture a year into his treatment for Graves' disease. He had recently made a mistake on a letter, misdating it "82," a decade off. Bush wanted Presock to keep an eye on him. "Please save copies of places where I mess up in letters," Bush wrote her. "I want you to monitor for frequency. Does it relate to fatigue[,] schedule[,] or political tension. Tell Doctor!" In a conversation shortly thereafter with Bush, White House physician Dr. Burton Lee, and Presock, Lee asked whether Presock had noticed any changes in the president lately. "An obvious change, at times, was the President's handwriting and his signature," Presock recalled-and changes in handwriting could be a sign that his thyroid medication was not exactly right.
Now, after an early morning jog on Friday, July 24, 1992, Bush "felt slightly dizzy" and stopped by the White House Medical Unit before leaving for a speech in Crystal City across the Potomac. As the medical team ran tests, including an EKG, the president saw they were concerned. "I could tell they thought something was wrong," Bush dictated later that day, "and sure enough, they told me they thought I was not perfectly normal and that I might have atrial fibrillation again. It turned out that I do have atrial fib, and I felt tired." Dr. Lee had recently adjusted Bush's thyroid medicine in an attempt to raise the president's energy levels. The complexities of the Graves' disease, however, proved too great. Later that day, Bush snapped at protestors during a speech. And still later that afternoon, at another event, Bush wound up "drenched with sweat."
The heart episode passed quickly, but Bush mused to himself about what would happen if his health took a serious turn for the worse. "I got [to] thinking yesterday, hypothetically, suppose there is something wrong, then I have to...say to the American people, 'I told you if my health was bad, I would let you know,'" the president told his diary on Saturday, July 25. "Walk out, say I was not running, and throw the convention into a tremendous tizzy. It would be action all the way, and I don't know who the nominee would be. But maybe they would have a better time of winning, although I doubt it."
Having raised a dire scenario, he dismissed it-sort of. "In any event, that's not going to happen. But if something did happen to my health in the next week or so, or two weeks or so, that is what would have to happen." By Saturday his heartbeat had returned to normal. The White House never disclosed the president's July 1992 brief atrial fibrillation, which had been due to increasing his thyroid medication in order to find the optimal level. "If Bush had ended up with a serious problem or health issue that would have affected the performance of his duties, then we would have been honest about that with him and with the media," Dr. Lee recalled. "But this episode passed so quickly that that was not an issue, and so there was no announcement. Did we have a medical misplay because we were working on the dose? Yes. Did it have long- or short-term consequences for the president? No."
- With the Republican convention approaching, the campaign and the administration debated how Bush might take the initiative on the domestic front. There was talk of using the president's acceptance speech to propose a flat tax or a value-added tax. "I like the idea of something that would have broad appeal. Now I'm thinking of government reorganization; [Civilian Conservation Corps]-type training program; and a long ball on taxes, where you would put on a consumption tax, and then cut everybody's tax rates substantially," Bush dictated on Thursday, August 13, 1992. But no: "Had a bunch of economists in yesterday who did not like that." The drift continued.
Bush arrived in Houston trailing Clinton by double digits. He had about twenty points to overcome, and if he were to do it, he had to begin now. At a welcoming rally in Houston, the Bushes joined the Quayles-Randy Travis sang-and the president enjoyed the moment. For Bush, "the adrenaline started flowing."
President Reagan addressed the convention on opening night. Now eighty-one, Reagan spoke more slowly than he had in the past, but his message was clear. "The presidency is serious business," Reagan said. "We cannot afford to take a chance. We need a man of serious purpose, unmatched experience, knowledge and ability....His is a steady hand on the tiller through the choppy waters of the '90s, which is exactly what we need. We need George Bush."
Bush called on the Reagans. "A little tense with her but he was very nice," Bush dictated. There was a troubling moment. Speaking to Bush, Reagan-who would be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease two years later-seemed lost in thought and asked, "Was Franklin D. Roosevelt a Democrat?" then recovered and "went on and spoke very fluently and very accurately about what it was like when he was a Democrat."
Endorsing Bush, Pat Buchanan electrified the convention hall with a speech that paid tribute to Reagan and took the Clintons on over issues ranging from gay rights to abortion. "Friends, this election is about more than who gets what," Buchanan said. "It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side."
Bush called Buchanan after the speech. "He was very gracious," Buchanan recalled. To his diary, Bush dictated: "Pat Buchanan laid it to Clinton-not only [to] Hillary Clinton, but on the gays and all of this, and it made it a polarizing event. And of course, I'm asked today about attacks on Hillary...and I said, 'No, I wanted to stay out of the sleaze business, out of the attack business.'"
In his own acceptance speech on Thursday night, Bush opened with foreign policy, taking credit for the immense changes that had convulsed the world since he had stood before the convention in New Orleans four years before. "My opponents say I spend too much time on foreign policy, as if it didn't matter that schoolchildren once hid under their desks in drills to prepare for nuclear war," Bush said. "I saw the chance to rid our children's dreams of the nuclear nightmare, and I did."
Bush's political problem was that he didn't have the same passion for domestic policy, and he was an unconvincing actor. If he did not believe something, he had a hard time faking it-a fact that made him a good man but not the best of politicians. Observers did not think his heart was fully in the race even now, and they were largely right. "I just wish it were over," he told his diary on Saturday, August 22, 1992. Even the weather appeared to be against him. He was criticized for seeming unresponsive to victims of Florida's Hurricane Andrew, ultimately dispatching troops to help with relief.
In early September Bush arrived back at the White House from a trip to Fort Worth. George W. greeted him. "He said I looked tired and was worried about over scheduling," Bush dictated on Thursday, September 3. "One little sign of fatigue," George W. told his father, "and it raises the Quayle question all over again." Bush admitted his son had a point: "I think that's right."
Quayle, however, wasn't the problem. Bush was. Reading his campaign's polling, Bush saw that 78 percent believed the country was on the wrong track, and the horse race numbers were as depressing as ever, with Clinton leading 52 to 39 percent. It was, Bush dictated, "discouraging as hell." Particularly galling was the finding that 54 percent believed things were worse under Bush than they had been under Carter.
It was a beautiful late summer day in Washington-marred only by the poor poll results-and Bush, who had some time alone with Barbara at the White House, allowed himself to think the unthinkable. What if he were to come up short? "I guess I'd have to say I would have failed....Then I said to myself, 'it's not going to happen,'" Bush dictated. "I'm a better person, better qualified, better character to be President, despite a bunch of shortcomings that I may have and there certainly are plenty of them. It's kind of a funny feeling-a funny strange feeling." He put it more bluntly a few days later: "I've got a slight confession. For the first time I'm wondering if we can overcome this flood of bad news."
From July to September 1992, 96 percent of TV evening news coverage on the economy "focused on economic weakness and shortcomings," according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "Though [a] recovery was underway, the U.S. economy still had many problems during the closing months of the 1992 campaign," wrote the political scientist Everett Carll Ladd. "But 96 percent negative coverage distorted what was in fact a complex picture with many positive as well as negative features." To her colleagues, Bush campaign adviser Mary Matalin circulated a Washington Post piece headlined "Republicans and Some Journalists Say Media Tend to Boost Clinton, Bash Bush." "We are not paranoid whiners," Matalin wrote. "The media has its own agenda-the same liberal one Bill Clinton's running on."
To Bush, the question about Clinton that overshadowed nearly all others was the draft. "I'm tired of the guy lying and ducking on the draft and not coming clean," Bush dictated on Wednesday, September 9, 1992. "So we've got to press him without trying to demagogue the issue, but I remain convinced that it is a very important question because it's a question of truth as well as, for a lot of older people, a question of whether he ducked service. The new generation doesn't think that one is as bad, but I think it's very bad not wanting [to participate] when your country is at war. I simply find that offensive, but maybe this shows the age and the generation gap."
The universe Bush had known was gone. In September, Bush noted that the old Soviet infantry brigade was being removed from Cuba. "What changes in the world," Bush dictated, "and yet who gives a damn."
FORTY-FIVE.