George Bush ran a terrible campaign for reelection. In the beginning the White House was arrogant because of the immense success in overseeing the end of the Cold War and the comparable success of the Gulf War. One of the most grievous mistakes that a number of the Bush people, most particularly the president himself, made was to underestimate Bill Clinton, to compare the two candidates, as it were, by weighing their respective curriculum vitae: where they came from, what jobs they had held, and how they had handled the issue of patriotism. That was fatal. Political campaigns are all too intense and unpredictable, and candidates, as many a front-runner had learned over the years, most notably Jerry Ford running against Jimmy Carter, are rarely the sum of their résumés.
The people around Bush also forgot that their man had never been a particularly good or charismatic candidate. If the growing importance of television was tilting the presidential race from the tortoise to the hare, then Bush would surely lose that race, the sum of his years in governance far more impressive than his sound bites. He was an attractive man up close, someone of considerable personal grace and warmth. His good manners were a constant, but he was often oddly awkward, and in projecting his better qualities in public forums, his civility tended to come off as stiffness. His occasional struggles with the English language made it seem as if it were a somewhat alien instrument.
Bush was very much aware of his limitations. Words were not his strength. His voice was hardly mellifluous. The simplest of presidential responses were often blurted out. Experts on learning disabilities often sensed that they had found a longtime sufferer. Emotions were always to be buttoned up, not, as with many more naturally skillful politicians, to be used deftly in the right way at the right time for political effect. In addition, speaking publicly of his accomplishments might imply that he was promoting himself, and he had been raised in a culture of ego austerity, alien as that was to presidential politics. When Peggy Noonan, the ablest conservative speechwriter of a generation, who had written several of Ronald Reagan’s best speeches, tried to make a lateral move to Bush, she found it hard going, not just because of the difference in their politics, but because of the candidate’s modesty and reluctance to use the first-person singular.
Once, in 1988, engaged in a bitter do-or-die struggle with Bob Dole for the Republican nomination, Bush had summoned Ms. Noonan to write a speech for him—she who had supplied so many poetic phrases for Ronald Reagan. She made a draft but Bush did not like it. What was wrong? she asked. “Oh,” he answered, “the me-me-me stuff.”1 Noonan learned quickly and became adept at writing pronounless speeches, because he would kill any sentence that had the word I in it. So instead of “I moved to Texas and soon we joined the Republican Party,” she wrote, “Moved to Texas, joined the Republican Party . . .”2 Bush absolutely shrank from the very idea of being eloquent. Not only was he unable on his own to find a graceful sentence or a phrase that would lift his words to match the occasion, but he remained on red alert lest those around him try to slip in something tending to upgrade either him or the moment. “That’s not me,” he would say, spotting a dangerously eloquent phrase, and out it would come. He was always on the watch for what he called “the poetry stuff,” and for moving phrases that were, in his opinion, “Noo-nanesque.”3
Vice presidents who are not charismatic often spend much of their time, even when they are out on their own, fighting the shadow of the more charismatic figure who has gotten them so close to the presidency. So it had been for Lyndon Johnson, ever fighting the shadow of Jack Kennedy. So it would one day be for Al Gore following Bill Clinton. So it was in 1992, when the person Bush was always running against, other than Bill Clinton or Ross Perot, was Ronald Reagan. Even as president he somehow remained in Reagan’s shadow. The Reagan connection had turned out to be a two-edged sword. It had helped Bush get the 1988 nomination, but it also hung over him as a measurement he could never quite live up to in the minds of many Americans who hungered not merely for Reagan’s policies, but for the comfortable feeling provided by the man himself. That was what the faithful longed for, the conservative faithful, and the Reagan Democrats as well, and that was where Bush was forever doomed to fall short.
Bush was determined to be true to himself in public no matter how bland that made the occasion; he would never be out of his own context. His lack of eloquence was surely a political weakness. But unlike Johnson, Bush was smart enough to know that the single worst thing he could do was compete with Reagan at being Reaganesque. The more he did that, the more he would surely fail. The contrast between the private and public Reagan and the private and public Bush, the difference between reality and image, was fascinating. When Bush graduated from Andover in the spring of 1942, graduation day had been his eighteenth birthday and he had signed up for the service. He had been the youngest naval pilot in World War II, had won the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross, and was by traditional American standards not an inconsiderable hero. Reagan, who was the right age to serve, had taken something of a bye during that conflict; his main contribution had been making propaganda films for the military. His war record was, in modern terminology, a virtual one, though he did not always seem to remember that. But it was Reagan, with that marvelous natural confidence, the lack of doubt in his voice, even the audacious macho walk born of many a cowboy film, who was considered a hero (and who even implied in speeches that he had, in fact, served in combat in World War II). It was Bush whose manliness appeared to be in doubt. In 1980, when he was first running for the presidency, Newsweek, a magazine where most of the editors had never heard a shot fired in anger, ran a devastating cover story about him saying that he was fighting the Wimp Factor.
Reagan had been a hard act to follow politically. Symbols had been the mother’s milk of his longtime profession, and he understood not merely their importance but the timing implicit in their use. More than anyone around him, he had a sense of when to use them with perfect pitch politically. After all, no one has a highly successful career in Hollywood without understanding not merely the importance of symbols but how to make them work. He was an American everyman; he knew exactly what the American people felt and needed at different times because it was more often than not the way he felt, and the most natural thing in the world for him was to excel at being the person they wanted him to be. That particular quality separated the more cerebral analysts and critics of American politics from the American voters on the subject of Reagan. The former, watching him in action, aware of his acting background, often privately disagreeing with much of what he believed, saw him as plastic and inauthentic, a man of Hollywood; the voters, by contrast, sensing that what he said was what he felt, that he had come by these feelings naturally, and more, that what he felt was the way they felt about so many of the same things, saw him as being absolutely authentic.
Reagan knew a very few things, but his strength was that he was completely faithful to those few things and strongly believed in them: the government was too big, it shouldn’t tinker in the affairs of ordinary people if at all possible, and if let alone, America was a great regenerative society. To many people who were more sophisticated politically, he was an easy man to discount because of the simplicity of his beliefs, his unshakable faith in them, and his carelessness with what seemed to be facts. He could get all his facts wrong, yet in the minds of the people voting still be completely right. Underestimating him was both easy and fatal—the graveyard of American politics was littered with the headstones of those men who had made the deadly mistake of underestimating Ronald Reagan.
The things that political writers and pundits valued most, complexity and subtlety of thought, accuracy in factoids and anecdotes, meant little to Reagan, and America’s political analysts saw him as a lightweight, instead of what he was, someone unique, an American original whose sense of the country’s hopes, fears, and expectations was remarkably true. What he had about the country was faith. Like Dwight Eisenhower, he understood how much to know and how much not to know on all occasions; he was sure that ordinary people would trust him on major issues, and in fact they did. The rhetoric was in no way a sham. He believed absolutely in what he said about the greatness of America, and his remarkable career was proof of those verities and of that rhetoric: America worked and indeed worked magically. Why not therefore be confident? That inner core of confidence helped him greatly once in office. He never went around fighting himself. The small things, the personal insecurities and inadequacies that were so dramatically magnified in most men once they became president, the doubts that could explode into full-fledged paranoia and had made the presidency so difficult for men like Johnson and Nixon, never bothered him. The importance of his personal confidence was not to be ignored. Who else, upon election as president, would hire Jim Baker as his chief of staff, a man who had run two campaigns against him?
Moreover, his natural ebullience helped him in one additional way as he began to seek the presidency. The seventies had been a dark time nationally, a time not so much of American weakness as of perceived weakness. First, there had been the humiliating departure from Vietnam, then the catastrophic events in Iran, amplified again and again on national television—Day 323, America Held Hostage, Walter Cronkite would say—and the soaring energy prices and a belief that the American industrial manufacturing core was losing ground to the Japanese. In that period, Reagan, ever self-assured—no American politician had a jauntier walk—was the welcome antidote. He was perfectly cast for the moment, and it was not by surprise that the emotional (as opposed to the geopolitical) issue that burned so intensely with him, the Panama Canal, burned with the electorate as well. He believed in America, and America, of course, believed in him. Whatever else, with the Cold War still on, no one was going to push America around, not while Ronald Reagan was president—not, as he liked to say, on his watch.
Now Reagan was gone, leaving behind a deeply divided Republican Party. That made it a much harder equation for Bush, who could never match Reagan in natural appeal. Nor, unlike Reagan, could he so easily fuse the two adversarial wings of his party, the new right, driven by the fundamentalists, and the old traditionalists, who were often made uncomfortable by their Sun Belt colleagues. Bush simply lacked the political and human skills to pull it off. He was too much the product of his own background. If he tried to do Texasy things, he always looked a little stiff and sounded a little tinny, as when he spoke of a situation in which, if things went wrong, he would be in deep doo-doo.
Bush had existed in an odd compromise with the far right of his own party for the past four years. The right had been hard on him, ever suspicious that his heart was not where it ought to be. George Will had once called him a lapdog, and it did not get much worse than that. At heart, and almost everyone knew it, despite his protestations to the contrary, Bush was a centrist in a party whose center was very much under assault. What worked somewhat to his advantage was that the issues of primacy, for him, foreign policy ones, were less and less vital to the new forces in his party. For the right wing of the party was, as the threat of the Soviet Union receded, far more interested in domestic political and cultural issues—what were now known as family values, most particularly abortion—and its power was centered in the electoral primaries and the Congress. The overriding interest of the more moderate centrist wing was foreign policy, and its power and influence were manifest in the executive branch in Washington and often in different governorships.
The most tangible evidence of the split had come during the tax battles of 1990, when Bush had broken his pledge and approved a tax increase because of the rising deficit. Newt Gingrich and his pals sat that one out in the Congress. The damage to Bush politically was dual: not only was he wounded by breaking a pledge, but having done the right thing for the good of the nation’s economy, he remained fearful of much of his own party on the issue. He would back off from talking about it during the campaign—thereby taking no credit for having done what was self-evidently the right thing. Because his own party was so emotionally locked into tax-bashing, doing something reasonably courageous had become something shameful.
In matters of foreign policy the two wings of the party were more than a little uncomfortable with each other. The people running the executive branch still had roots in the old Dewey-Vandenberg-Eisenhower internationalism, but the people ascending in both houses of the Congress, many of them from the Sun Belt, were very different. They might be anticommunist, but they were more jingoist than internationalist, less traveled, in many instances, than their predecessors, and an ever-stronger current of isolationism ran through their thinking. They were especially apprehensive about any kind of multilateral foreign policy commitment. Describing them in one of his columns, the New York Times’ Tom Friedman, the paper’s gifted foreign policy analyst, had referred to them “as a hard core of Republicans in Congress whose motto on foreign policy could be summed up as ‘Stupid and proud of it’ or ‘Dumb as we wanna be.’ This is the crowd that favors everything from nonpayment of UN dues to further cuts in foreign aid, to outright isolationism.”
The Bush people saw the congressional leadership very much the same way. When they spoke about the right-wingers in private, they did so with raised eyebrows and a deft negative shake of the head. The word yahoos was often used. These were people, they would say, whom you needed in the party to get the requisite 51 percent and to hold on to committee chairs, but in all other ways they seemed alien, their thinking far more adversarial than that of old colleagues from the other party who had for so long comprised the great centrist bipartisan internationalism of the postwar years.
In the past, domestic politics had not greatly interested Bush. He had spoken during the 1988 campaign about being the education president, but that had been the most casually uttered of promises, and the thought of reeducating millions of young Americans had not much burdened him thereafter. Once in office Bush and the team around him had thrown any number of bones—a Supreme Court appointment here, a few district judgeships there—to the right wing. But Bush’s relationship with this powerful, aggressive force in his own party, at the end of eight years as vice president and the four years of his presidency, represented at best a loveless, passionless marriage.
The 1992 Bush campaign was troubled from the start. Almost everything that could go wrong went wrong. The president appeared sluggish, slow to pay much attention to mounting distress signals and make the moves necessary to streamline his team. Some of Bush’s closest friends thought afterward that his health had been a problem—medication for a thyroid illness that the doctors had never quite got right—and the candidate who was usually the most upbeat and focused of men, indeed almost hyperactive, often seemed listless and behind the beat. The White House, in early 1992, was poorly run. John Sununu had departed, chased out by an undertow of minor scandal and the hostility of a great many centrist Bush traditionalists, who thought him not only too ideological but too arrogant. Sam Skinner, who had replaced him, was hardly up to running either the White House or a presidential campaign.
Many Bush advisers, aware of how damaging the polls had become, were pushing hard for some kind of domestic program, some new booster shot of energy. But the Bush political people were divided. The hard-liners were so taken with Clinton’s negatives, particularly his lack of service in Vietnam, that they believed that no matter what the numbers said, he was beatable. Another, more moderate wing was worried by the polls and the degree to which they showed that people blamed Bush for the economy and felt he was indifferent to their problems. This latter group was increasingly aware that the reelection campaign promised to be hard, that Clinton, the certain Democratic nominee, might prove to be a formidable candidate. “We face,” Fred Steeper wrote in the spring of 1992, “a twenty-month recession, a 78 percent ‘wrong track’ number, and a Southern Conservative Democrat. In my mind this is our worst political nightmare.”4
By August, as things went from bad to worse, a most unhappy and reluctant James Baker was pressured into leaving the State Department and coming back to his old job in the White House to run the campaign. He brought with him a few top people, and he was absolutely appalled by the state of the campaign. He later told close friends that it had been lost as early as May. No one was ready for a big-time campaign. Baker had returned to an empty cupboard. Only one speechwriter was on hand. No one had been hired to do the television commercials. They were behind in every department, and this time they were up against some tough professionals.
Baker, the people around him thought, seemed to be in virtual shock—or as close to shock as someone that tough-minded ever got. His heart was obviously not in this race; he had not wanted the job and thought the campaign was a disaster. Despite the closeness of their friendship, an undercurrent of competition had always existed between Bush and Baker. Bush got the top job and Baker did the heavy lifting for him, and yet Baker had always impressed the opinion makers in Washington more than Bush. Perhaps coming back to the White House was one test of loyalty too many. Baker had been at the pinnacle of his career as secretary of state, a job he loved, and now he was back at the White House in a mere political job, once more playing the role of Tonto to Bush’s Lone Ranger.
Ensconced in a familiar but unwanted role, Baker seemed almost melancholic to old friends and, for a man who usually took complete command of what he did, somewhat disengaged. His energy level was not good, and if after his defeat George Bush was disappointed, Barbara Bush, who reflected the family’s feelings about loyalty more openly and was generally less forgiving than her husband, was furious at Baker. Eight years later when George W. Bush was preparing to run, and many of the older Bush people came together as an informal group of consultants, notable for his absence from that group was James Baker. He was essentially removed from the inner circle until the moment right after the election, when, summoned once again from his place on the Bush bench, he was miraculously resurrected and became the point man for George W. Bush in the legal wrangles over the Florida vote—even a distinguished former secretary of state, it was implied, says we won. He carried out this particular role with such partisan enthusiasm and passion that he began to lose the admiration of some who had thought him an uncommonly talented secretary of state.
Things that had once looked so rosy had begun to look bleak in the winter and spring of the campaign. Bush continued to slip in the polls. Pat Buchanan had run against him in New Hampshire, the worst possible state for Bush, and had exploited the weak economy as well as nativist feelings to wound him. As summer arrived, the campaign obviously needed a boost, and some of the people around Bush believed that the ideal way to do that was to get rid of the weight of an inconsequential vice president and add someone of greater gravitas whom the center of the electorate would take more seriously. It would also show that this was a newer, more professional Bush team. That meant, in blunt English, dropping Dan Quayle from the ticket. The Dump Quayle movement had begun as far back as the fall of 1991 and included some of Bush’s top people. The chief coconspirators were Baker, then still secretary of state, and Bob Teeter, Bush’s pollster and an old personal friend with roots in moderate to liberal Republican politics, who was slated to run the 1992 campaign. Neither man liked Quayle, neither valued him greatly as a man or a politician, and both regarded Bush’s original selection as more or less inexplicable. Moreover, they now thought they had a new ally, Bush himself, who believed that Quayle had been too open in his flirtation with the religious right, a violation of the crucial Bush code of loyalty. Bush and the people closest to him held that the fundamentalists should be kept just happy enough to prevent them from being mutinous, but in no way encouraged or allowed across the moat. “Do you think all this right-wing stuff that Dan is doing these days is helping us?” Bush asked Teeter one day. No, Teeter answered. “I don’t think so either,” Bush said, and he suggested that perhaps Teeter should talk to Quayle about it—though obviously the person to do that was the president himself.
If Quayle was to go, it was decided, the best signal that this was a dramatically new team would be his replacement by Colin Powell. But if Powell was to be approached, it would have to be done in a way that was completely deniable. Deniability was important if people were proffering vice-presidential bids to Republican hopefuls when there already was a Republican vice president. So one day very much on his own, Stu Spencer, the California consultant who had played an instrumental role in the creation of Ronald Reagan’s political career, dropped by the Pentagon to talk with his friend Powell. Bush was not in on this, of course, and Spencer was just making a social call. Everything was discussed in a hypothetical way—a hypothetical place for a hypothetical general on a hypothetical ticket. In turn the general made clear that he, who existed in a real and not hypothetical world, liked being a real general in a real army, and that for a variety of reasons he was not interested in being a politician. He had no desire to go on a Republican ticket, and some of the people who thought they wanted him might not like all of his social positions. But if the president badly wanted the general to be on his ticket, and the president himself asked, the general, good soldier that he was, would, of course, accept. But the general would prefer not to be asked.
There were other possibilities—Baker himself and Dick Cheney; there was enough post–Desert Storm aura still attached to Cheney to make him an attractive candidate. Two weeks before the convention, the Dump Quayle people were sure they were going to nail Quayle, for Bush was paying more and more attention to polls showing who would and would not help the ticket as a Quayle replacement. The plotters were certain they had Bush’s support, and the one problem, since Bush did not like confrontation, was who would tell Quayle. But then Bill Kristol, who was Quayle’s political man and infinitely more nimble at the political game than his boss, set a marvelous trap for Bush. With about two weeks to go, Quayle went to the White House for breakfast and asked the president if he was happy with him. Bush hesitated for just a moment, failed to bite the bullet, and said, yes, he was. Kristol immediately gave the media the Quayle version of events, and a story went out that day in effect reaffirming Quayle’s place on the ticket. Bush was furious with the leaked story but did nothing. Quayle stayed on the ticket in no small part because it was now so much harder to dump him. With that the last chance to strengthen the ticket by adding Powell or Baker and perhaps to change the outcome of the election was lost.
The convention was a disaster. Rarely had a sitting president allowed his enemies to dominate what under most circumstances was a democratic form of coronation. It should have been Bush’s show and a celebration of his not inconsiderable achievements in foreign policy. But it was not. Instead, the convention showcased angry right-wingers whose principal concern was not a safer post–Cold War America with exceptional new possibilities for the grander uses of the nation’s extraordinary energies. Rather it was primarily concerned with whether American women had the right to choose an abortion, not necessarily a subject about which Bush had strong convictions.
The Bush and Buchanan people had had prolonged negotiations over how much exposure Buchanan would get as the price for his support of the president. The White House had clearly given away too much: not merely prime time but on the first night of the convention, the primest of prime time. Worse, when Buchanan had sent in his speech for clearance, the White House people had chiefly been concerned about the degree of enthusiasm for Bush. Because of that they failed to catch the harsh, unnerving rhetoric—the call for a religious and cultural war, exactly the wrong message for most moderate Americans, who were notoriously uneasy with any display of zealotry, especially religious zealotry.
All too many speakers at that convention did not sound like people who had been in power for the last twelve years. They sounded like people angry at the people who had been in power, particularly for the last four. The convention was hungry for red meat, and it came right off the bones of George H. W. Bush. In the end both the burden and the fault were Bush’s, and it cut to what was wrong with his campaign and perhaps what had always been missing from his political career. It was not that Buchanan (rather predictably) gave one of the ugliest speeches in the history of modern national conventions. It was that Bush, the party’s nominee, failed to answer it himself because he was intimidated by the delegates at his own convention. Reagan could handle these people; he could not.
There was an additional problem, the entrance into the race of a third-party candidate named Ross Perot, a billionaire who seemed to bear far greater personal animus toward Bush than toward Clinton. Perot systematically and effectively attacked Bush on the economy, relieving Clinton of that responsibility and allowing him to run on a higher plane. Perot’s was the kind of campaign that the opposing vice-presidential candidate usually runs, and it allowed both Clinton and Gore to take the high road while Perot served as their hit man.
The Perot candidacy was, if not a fatal wound, one not to be underestimated. But the deepest wounds were self-inflicted. There were simply too many people in the White House, including the president himself, who were so personally offended by all the baggage that the young Democratic candidate carried, particularly what they considered to be draft dodging, that the idea that the America they knew would reward Clinton for a life, in their view, so poorly led was inconceivable. In some ways they were right. Just a few years earlier, the Clinton challenge might have been laughable. But the world had changed and the America now voting was no longer the America they knew.
The Clinton people were sure that Bush and the people around him were living in the past, unable to adjust to new circumstances. The transition from Cold War politics to post–Cold War politics, something that Reagan might have made with uncommon ease, was too difficult an adjustment for the less nimble Bush. In fact, Stan Greenberg thought Clinton was now not only closer than Bush to the demographic center of the country, he was closer to the cultural and political center as well. The draft issue was a dangerous one for Bush, Greenberg believed. The young men of the country had not been subject to the draft for a generation and they wanted that issue closed.
If Bush criticized Clinton on this one, he was also criticizing millions of young American males. As soon as the Republican convention was over, Greenberg did a memo for Clinton and his top people disguised as a memo that Bob Teeter might write for George Bush—a kind of know-your-enemy-and-see-yourself-as-they-see-you document. The subject, based on Green-berg’s own polling, was how to attack Clinton most effectively, thereby to prepare him as best they could for the coming assault. The fake Teeter memo said that if Bush ran on the economy, he would lose. The ideal way to run against Clinton, Greenberg suggested, was first to attack his political record, thereby diminishing his place on the larger national landscape, and to portray him as an untested, small-time operator from a poor, unimportant state who aspired to too big a job. Only then should they deal with his draft record. That done, they could go after his character and try to exploit the issue of trust. If they reversed the order of the assault, Greenberg discovered from his polls, it was likely to fail because the American people did not want that kind of attack at the very outset of a campaign. They wanted to measure the candidate on his fitness for the job.
To the delight of the Clinton team, the Bush people went after his character and the draft issue from the start. That begot a great sigh of relief from the Clinton camp. The Bush people had fallen into a trap they had set for themselves. Later in the campaign, when Bush finally did begin to talk about domestic issues, he did not introduce them properly, Greenberg believed, failing to segue from his foreign policy successes to his ability now to use the same energies and talents on the domestic front. Only near the end of the campaign, when it was far too late, did the Bush people go after Clinton’s political record with ads that made Arkansas look like it was right out of the dust bowl of the thirties. Ironically, Clinton, who had not been that bothered by the assault on his personal life and his draft evasion, went ballistic with the attacks on his record and was sure they would hurt him. They did not. In all ways, Greenberg thought the Bush campaign never went to its strengths and never adjusted to the new political realities. What had worked so handsomely for Bush just four years earlier against Michael Dukakis no longer worked in this very different era against the shrewder, wilier Clinton and his team, particularly James Carville, ever combat ready. Carville was like a liberal-Democratic version of Lee Atwater, the young Republican adviser who had specialized in a scorched-earth policy toward political opponents.
Carville had come to prominence in an off-year Senate election in Pennsylvania in 1991 for the seat of the late Jack Heinz. The race was not without parallels to the 1992 presidential race. Dick Thornburgh, a popular former governor, a member of the Bush cabinet, and a somewhat patrician politician like Bush, had been willing to resign from the cabinet to make the race. Against him was the relatively unknown Harris Wofford, a former head of the Peace Corps and a college president. At one point Thornburgh led by forty-seven points in the polls. Carville’s way to celebrate the end of the Cold War and cast attention on the soft Pennsylvania economy was his simple phrase “It’s time to take care of our own,” which was the forerunner of his later “It’s the economy, stupid.” Wofford had gone on to win, but the big winner was Carville with his combative style.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the 1992 campaign was the lack of bounce Bush got from the Gulf War. The ground war had been prosecuted with brilliance and had lasted only a few days, the casualties minimal. It had been watched on television by an entire nation. The coming of the twenty-four-hour news channels and the ability to watch Pentagon film of American bombs and rockets hitting Iraqi targets had made it seem like a great national video game. It had been prosecuted by a professional army—a very professional army, it would turn out. The country had been thrilled, and afterward both Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, the most different of men, had emerged as national heroes. There had been marvelous celebratory parades in Washington and New York, which much of the nation had watched. Then very quickly it was all gone.
Perhaps it was the very nature of the war. Its brevity and the fact that the soldiers fighting it were from an elite professional army meant that few American homes actually shared in the danger, diminishing its impact. On the eve of war, David Maraniss of the Washington Post had gone down to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he interviewed seven young men, each either twenty or twenty-one, about the same age as the young men ready to fight in the Gulf. In this Southern citadel of traditional patriotism, five of the seven supported the war, but none was willing to fight in it. “This might sound selfish, but I think it would be a shame to put America’s best young minds on the front line,” said one young man.5 Maraniss’s piece was unusually telling; it was as if war had turned into a spectator sport, with most American homes immunized from the reality of it all. Perhaps the television coverage itself made it seem more like an entertainment event and helped turn many Americans into viewers rather than patriots. For most citizens, whatever the pleasure in seeing this awesome display of American might, the Gulf War was like watching a movie rather than a genuine participatory experience. When it was over, it was over quickly. The boost that Bush got from it was quick and impressive, but not long-lasting. It was not a deeply shared national experience. A new political coda seemed to be at work here: ask little of a nation and instead ask sacrifice from only a few people, and in the end the nation will care little.
Defeat was hard for George Bush, who believed up until the final days of the campaign, despite the polls, that he was going to win. He was sure that on Election Day the country would experience a blinding moment of reality and vote for him. The America he knew would not turn on him and vote for a man who had refused to serve his country, a man he sometimes in private and in public referred to as Elvis, a man who had played the saxophone on a goofy television talk show and was comfortable appearing on a channel called MTV, which surely had greater appeal to Bush’s grandchildren than to the president himself. In the closing moments of the campaign, Bob Teeter, the pollster, and Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary, went to Bush and tried to cushion the news of the inevitable. But Bush still refused to believe them and was sure that his faith in the wisdom of the American people would be validated.
• • •
In the final days of the Bush administration, Larry Eagleburger made one last try on Bosnia. In a sign of how far his own views had evolved, he had become the most proactive member of the administration. In early December he got permission to talk to our European allies about endorsing a new policy of “lift and strike”; that is, lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnians and using American airpower to deter Serb aggression. He did not have high hopes. He knew the European concerns about the vulnerability of their troops on the ground, but he thought it was worth the attempt. Nothing else was working and the atrocities were getting worse.
The election was over, so an element of restraint had now passed. At State, Eagleburger had been getting hit with the issue every day, and his trip was taken as much as anything else out of frustration. But it indicated the gradual change within the U.S. government that someone who had been perceived as an obstacle to an escalated American response was now going to his old European friends and asking them to up the ante. His trip changed neither hearts nor minds. The Europeans were in as deep as they wanted to be, pleas of an old friend or not. It was one more sign, as the Bush administration left office, of the failure of its policy toward Bosnia.
Eagleburger and Scowcroft recommended and got one other thing in the final days of the administration. The day before Christmas the president issued a warning—it became known as the Christmas warning—to Milosevic and the Serbs to leave Kosovo alone. Eagleburger drew it up. “In the event of conflict in Kosovo caused by Serbian action, the United States will be prepared to employ military force against Serbians in Kosovo and in Serbia proper.” Because of their time in Yugoslavia both Eagleburger and Scowcroft knew that Kosovo remained the true flashpoint. Milosevic was delighted to extract as much as he could from Bosnia, but his political star had risen with his exploitation of ethnic tensions in Kosovo.
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One final revealing discussion about the role of Europe and the United States in the Balkans also came in the last days of the Bush administration. In late December 1992, a group of central European foreign ministers, all part of what was called the Visegrad group, came to Washington to meet with both James Baker and George Bush. The Visegrad group, named after a small town in Hungary, was composed of the leaders of the countries in Europe that had recently been communist and were now coming together to improve their relations with each other and show that they could be part of a new, more democratic Europe, perhaps even members of NATO. Many of these men had known each other since the days when they had been suppressed by communist regimes, and thus they had an innate collegiality. The group traveling to Washington included Polish, Czech, and Hungarian officials. The Austrians were at that moment quite oriented toward a new, democratic Europe, and the Austrian ambassador to the United States, Friedrich Hoess, was shepherding them through Washington and had arranged for a meeting with Baker and then with the president.
Two things were important about the meeting. The first was the immense stature of George Bush at that moment. To these men he was nothing less than the liberator of Europe, the man who had presided over the policies of the most powerful nation in the world when the cruel yoke of Soviet totalitarianism had been lifted from their shoulders. Never mind that their own heroism and the heroism of their people—the innate instinct of ordinary people to resist brutal totalitarian control—were more critical to the outcome than any action of the Americans. But they had nonetheless a great admiration for the policies of the American leaders who had helped stay the course over some forty-five years, and for Bush, in particular, for being the sitting president when it had all ended. Bush had visited their countries and capitals as a hero, the president of a nation whose troops had come to their distant countries for noble ideals during World War II, and whose leadership had stayed true to those ideals during the Cold War.
The second important thing was that these men were all passionate about what was happening in Yugoslavia. They knew the area well, it was in some cases right on their borders, and they knew Milosevic, or, perhaps more accurately, his type. They knew the Milosevics of the world because most of them had spent the last thirty years with the feet of Milosevic-like figures planted firmly on their necks. To them, the idea of Milosevic rising under the aegis of a system that they had fought for a lifetime, then switching over as the battle was won and declaring himself on the side of the new forces, was the height of cynicism. Most important, they knew the antidemocratic nature of what was going on, and they had a strong sense of what the larger cost might be to the people in Yugoslavia and to the general well-being of a more democratic Europe.
They made a passionate pitch to Bush and took turns speaking. For the sake of your legacy, for the sake of peace and decency in our region, we ask you to intervene. Only the United States can end the tragedy before it grows even worse. Bush heard them out but did not really respond. His term was coming to an end and he was not about to undertake a new military endeavor. The delegation was devastated. Leaving Bush’s office, the Slovenian foreign minister, Dimitri Rupel, shook his head, turned to his colleagues, and said, “We hear a lot about the new Europe, but the truth is that the political will of the free world begins and ends in the Oval Office.”