Chapter 14

POINTER MAN

“Needless to say, I’m not an expert on the Republican Party or, for that matter, winning the presidency. But your dad seemed to me to be the kind of Republican that I admired and respected. He had some balance to him. My sense was he was a good, strong, viable candidate.”

—Michael Dukakis

The same week that Dad announced his second candidacy for the presidency, on October 12, 1987, Newsweek magazine put him on its cover with their infamous headline “Fighting the Wimp Factor.” The photo featured my father speeding along on his cigarette boat—one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle, with a seafarer’s scowl on his face, wearing a foul-weather jacket.

In the weeks and months leading up to the announcement, a Newsweek reporter named Margaret Warner said she was writing a profile of Dad, and had convinced him that it was going to be a reasonable piece, mostly biographical about our family and how we interact. “So I did something we never did,” Dad told me. “I told Mother she ought to talk to her.” Thus assured, eighty-six-year-old Dorothy Bush sat for an interview. In fact, we all did—Jeb, George, Aunt Nan, Mom. We all felt the same way Dad did: “She really won us all over. She was very sweet and very nice.”

During my interview with her, I showed Margaret around Kennebunkport a little—and I remember how she kept saying how much she loved my parents, how great they were. In fact, it seemed that everything she asked me about them started with, “Your parents are so amazing. Let me ask you this . . .”

Then the story got published. The article’s theme was repeated over and over, with words peppered throughout it like “subservient,” “emasculated,” and “silly.” The word “wimp” alone appeared eight times, and pictures and quotes from my family and Dad’s closest friends were manipulated to make it appear as if we all agreed with the author’s premise. Even now, reading it almost twenty years later, I’m still struck by how cruel it was.

So shortly after it was published, I called Margaret and asked why she wrote what she did. Margaret began to cry and said that her editor made her put the word “wimp” in all those times, and said that she was very sorry.

But the damage was done.

It still amazes me today that Margaret, or any nameless editor, could use that word about a man who had flown fifty-eight combat missions and survived being shot down at sea—let alone everything else Dad had done in his life to that point.

Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski put it this way: “It used to tee me off to no end in the campaign when they talked about your father as a less than physically adept individual. That son of a gun almost got killed in that airplane disaster, and yet they looked at your father as being somewhat timid. That used to boil me. I think that conclusion drew me closer to your father. I got to like your dad a lot, because I thought that they portrayed him very inaccurately. But then again, I knew him.”

Like Congressman Rostenkowski, anyone who knows my father knows better—but that didn’t save Newsweek’s readers from being treated to a fictional series of insights about Dad that were gained under false pretenses in October 1987.

Years later, incidentally, I saw Margaret at a party, and it made me realize that in politics you do run into the same people over and over. She seemed to avoid me; and if I were her, I suppose I would still be embarrassed, too.

When the “wimp” cover hit newsstands, of course, my brothers and I felt used—and were even more upset than Dad was. Don’t get me wrong: Dad was furious. He told me, “It was hard to treat Margaret the same way after what a lot of people felt was a betrayal.” Still, it’s as Geraldine Ferraro said—it’s easier to be the candidate than to be the family. Dad was the one to calm everybody down because he could take it, but the rest of us hated how he was being treated.

Ede Holiday, who was the treasurer of Dad’s PAC at the time, says, “I often use that story for my kids—if George Bush ever listened to what other people said about him, he never would have been president. You have to have the strength of character to keep moving when something so unreasonable and unfair happens to you in a public way.”

Candidly, we felt the same sense of outrage when conservative columnist George Will later described Dad as “Reagan’s lapdog.” It was a particularly disdainful observation coming from another Reagan supporter. My father valued loyalty a great deal and had been an unquestionably loyal friend to Ronald Reagan. To have that same trait used against him by one of President Reagan’s staunchest defenders was both absurd and petty.

Jon Meacham, now managing editor of Newsweek, explained what the press was doing: “It’s the nature of the media beast to build somebody up and then tear them down, and then build them up and tear them down again. An important thing to remember about the press is there is no ideological bias. I honestly believe we have a bias toward conflict and a need to change the narrative. That’s the problem—it’s not that we’re liberal or conservative.”

Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post media critic, agreed: “The media often assign narratives to people in public life and then look for stories or anecdotes to confirm those narratives.” So the media narrative at the time was that although Dad may have been the front-runner, he didn’t have the “right stuff” to become president.

It was against this backdrop that Dad officially announced his candidacy at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Houston before most of our family and two thousand supporters—including several astronauts and June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of the Challenger commander; a few baseball players from the Houston Astros; and even a professional wrestler named Paul Boesch who was one of the original stars of Wrestlemania.

Of course, many of my parents’ friends from Texas were there, along with our family. Lionel Hampton, the eighty-year-old jazz great who had played for the CIA employees years ago, was there, too.

Dad’s notes recalling that night were both poignant and funny: “Bar looks beautiful. Thirty-four years ago today, Robin died . . . Lionel Hampton, loyal to the end. Loyal, loyal, loyal . . . The balloon drop that started at the top of the Regency was marvelous,” he continued. “For a frightening moment, it looked like a condom drop—raw rubber appearing from the ceiling—balloons that had popped during the night. But, then down came the array of balloons . . .”

By the end of the event, he wrote, “The press doesn’t understand that there is strength in all of this.”

Almost as soon as Dad announced his candidacy, reporters started asking President Reagan if he would endorse my father’s candidacy—to which the president said he would not. This surprised and disappointed me, and I wondered why the president was so reluctant given the fact that Dad and he were so close—and by all accounts, Dad was a superb and loyal vice president. There were quite a few GOP candidates in the primaries, and in hindsight perhaps he felt that as head of the party he couldn’t do anything until the nomination.

To Dad, however, it was no surprise. “It never occurred to me that he would not support me. There was a lot of speculation in the press that he wasn’t going to—which was put out by some of the real right-wing guys. He assured me privately he was for me. Some of our people around me were saying, ‘Well, he ought to be out there sooner.’ But I wasn’t surprised at all. He did what he said he’d do, at his own pace, his own time, and that was all right.”

The other announced candidates for the Republican nomination were Kansas Senator Bob Dole, who, like Dad, had served in World War II; former Delaware governor Pierre “Pete” DuPont; President Reagan’s former secretary of state and President Nixon’s chief of staff, General Al Haig; New York Congressman and former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp; and televangelist Pat Robertson, whose candidacy lasted longer than most experts predicted.

For the Democrats, the contenders were former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt; Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, star of the Senate Judiciary Committee; Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants in his third term as governor; Congressman Dick Gephardt from Missouri; Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, a late entrant who had his eye on winning Super Tuesday; former senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who lost the nomination to Walter Mondale in 1984; the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who also ran against Mondale in 1984; and finally, the bow-tie-wearing Senator Paul Simon of Illinois.

The media soon dubbed the Democratic candidates the Seven Dwarfs—an unflattering reference comparing them to the much-ballyhooed noncandidacy of New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Governor Cuomo was the subject of a “draft” movement in the press, and he even made fun of his own presidential aspirations at the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington, saying that Satan had offered him the presidency in exchange for his soul. Cuomo replied, “So what’s the catch?”

The national press touted other noncandidates as well—including Bill Moyers, the PBS reporter, and Pat Schroeder, a former congresswoman from Colorado.

Another editorial cartoonist noted that voters looking in their refrigerators that Thanksgiving would find six varieties of fruitcake and one leftover turkey—meaning Gary Hart, who was running again after his 1984 finish. Hart was the presumed front-runner until a photo of him turned up in the National Enquirer on the deck of the yacht The Monkey Business with Donna Rice, a woman who was not his wife. Hart ended up dropping out of the race, then jumping back in, then dropping out again.

Joe Biden also faltered early. In his case, he was caught plagiarizing parts of a speech by Neil Kinnock, a Member of the British Parliament. Curiously, Biden only used the parts of the Kinnock speech where Kinnock talked about growing up as the son of a coal miner, which Biden was not. The tapes showing Biden’s and Kinnock’s speeches were put out to the press by Dukakis campaign manager John Sasso, who was fired for his role, and Biden dropped out shortly thereafter.

Dad assembled a top-notch team for his campaign leadership: His national cochairs were New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, who had been active in organizing the grassroots effort in New Hampshire, and Texas Senator John Tower, Dad’s friend and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. James Baker, having served as President Reagan’s chief of staff and Treasury secretary, was the general chairman. In addition, there was what Roger Ailes called the Group of Six, or G–6, as it came to be known, made up of Nick Brady, the former Wall Street banker and New Jersey senator; Bob Mosbacher, the Texas oilman who ran fund-raising; pollster Bob Teeter; Dad’s chief of staff, Craig Fuller; political guru Lee Atwater, who had been instrumental in the 1984 Reagan reelection; and Roger Ailes, a well-known media consultant.

“At the end of the day, when everybody went home, that group would go out to dinner and figure out where we were going next,” Ailes remembers.

“Lee would call them ‘the adults,’” Ede recalls of the G–6. “Having these ‘adults’ over the top of the campaign helped everybody not get into trouble. It gave needed maturity to the campaign organization.”

Each of us in the family took a role as well. I campaigned in both the primaries and the general election. In fact, Jack Kemp’s daughter Jennifer and I became good friends, because often I’d run into the children of the other candidates at events, and it was nice to see a friend in the crowd.

Because I was living in Maine at the time, I also campaigned there some but mostly traveled all over the East Coast and mid-Atlantic states. A campaign worker, Bill Canary, traveled with me and became a close family friend.

My brother Neil worked hard in New Hampshire, and Marvin traveled all over the country. Marvin, in fact, remembers going to Chicago and campaigning there with a Democratic councilman named “Fast Eddie” Verdeliac, who had endorsed Dad.

“We spent some time freezing our rear ends off at a Chicago Bears game, and every person walking by would call out, ‘Yo, Eddie, you’re my man!’” Marvin recalled. “The guy worked me like a dog—we did about eight events in one day, and the last one was at a raucous union hall. Maybe four hundred fifty people in a room with a capacity of two hundred, and everybody was drinking pretty heavily. By the time I got up there to speak, I was basically screaming in tongues about how great Dad was. Eddie was fantastic. He gave a beautiful tribute to Dad. I couldn’t understand a word he said, but it was beautiful.”

When I pointed out to Marvin that Fast Eddie’s legal clients allegedly had ties to the mob, he said diplomatically, “Well, you meet some colorful people and you get endorsements from unexpected sources.”

Jeb resigned as Florida secretary of commerce and campaigned for Dad mostly in Florida and California. He remembers talking to Lee Atwater early on with George, right when Dad hired Lee. “George and I ganged up on him and had a stern conversation with him. We said, ‘We don’t care what a hotshot you are, we want to know how loyal you’re going to be to Dad. If someone threw a hand grenade in this room, all Dad’s children would want to be the first to jump on it to save him. Would you do the same thing?’ He was a little cocky—all these political operatives are—and we wanted to test his loyalty, his allegiance.”

Lee handled it well, and said that if loyalty was a concern, then perhaps George should move to Washington and keep an eye on things. So George moved to a town house in Washington, D.C., with Laura and their four-year-old twins, Barbara and Jenna. Laura remembers, “We picked that town house because we wanted to be really close to the vice president’s house. We figured it might be the only time in our lives we’d live in the same town they lived in. It was really a bonding experience for all of us. Until then, Bar and I certainly hadn’t been close at all.”

Mom and Dad, George and Laura, and Marvin and Margaret had hamburger lunches together every Sunday, despite the fact that they were in the middle of a national campaign.

George took an office at campaign headquarters and became the “loyalty enforcer”—a term he coined in describing his job. “I was a person without portfolio,” George said. “I was there really to kind of be Dad’s eyes and ears in the campaign. I call it a loyalty enforcer, but also I was there to be in a position where I could help the team stay a team.”

“What happened, of course,” added Laura, “was George and Lee really developed a friendship.”

Lee’s friend Karl Rove explained why a “loyalty enforcer” was a necessity on that campaign: “Having been vice president for eight years, your dad was depending on a lot of people who had been for somebody else in the previous eight years and whose interests might be more professional than personal. The people who did it for Nixon and Ford and Reagan were prepared to do it for Bush. Not necessarily out of extreme personal loyalty, but because that was the way you advanced your career in Washington. That’s great—but when you get into choppy waters, those people are more likely to be wringing their hands to a member of the press, or pouring out about one of their colleagues, or being indiscreet about campaign activities. Simply because their ultimate loyalty is not to the man himself.”

At one point, Esquire magazine ran an interview with Lee that featured a photo of Lee in his underwear, which upset George a great deal. The article characterized Lee as “all grit . . . all blood on the floor and don’t look back.” George recalls, “I called Lee and said, ‘This isn’t about you. This is a disgrace. And if you think I’m upset, talk to my mother.’ He immediately called her and apologized.”

George also was the first one to deal with a campaign rumor that Dad had an affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald, his executive assistant in China and at the CIA, telling Newsweek in June 1987, “The answer to the big ‘A’ question is N-O.” Years later, in 1992, I stood with my parents at a press conference in Kennebunkport when the issue came up. Of course, it wasn’t true. Even Michael Dukakis thought the rumor was outrageous because he fired a staffer, Donna Brazille, for spreading the rumor.

“To hell with all that. I just said, ‘Look, we’re not going to have any part of that,’” Governor Dukakis told me. “When you decide you’re going to go into this business, you’ve got to decide who you are, what standards you’re going to set for yourself and the people around you. If folks get out of line, you can’t accept that.”

As you might expect, it was incredible to me that Dad was put in such a preposterous position. It was one more example of how people who run for office become public property, and how some people in the media will stop at nothing to bring them down. Where does it stop? The press can say whatever they want, and if you don’t go out and deny it, they assume that it’s true—and it becomes part of their “narrative.”

Aside from the nastiness of the campaign rumor mill, I have very fond memories of the 1988 campaign. I suppose we all tend to glorify our “early years,” but to me it seems like a different time than the politics of today. There were so many characters running for president, so many twists and turns, and we were all young and enjoying this surreal adventure.

Adding to the romance of it all, my brothers and I were all basically newlyweds, and there were many young grandchildren running around the campaign events. I also remember habitually staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live. In fact, that year marked the beginning of Dana Carvey as George Bush. When I asked Dana about the first time he met my father, Dana said, “I think your dad had a really good attitude about it, because he always said [Carvey slips into his impersonation of Dad]: Comes with the turf. Got to be able to take a few zingers. Not take yourself too seriously.” In the beginning, Dana said he didn’t think there was much to impersonate—“I really didn’t pick it up,” he explained—and mostly concentrated on Dad’s hand gestures, pointing with his right hand into the distance, doing the double hands when he’d say “at this juncture.”

But then he moved into what he calls “a Texas sort of lazy, clipped syntax kind of thing that I just went with.” He explained to me that he exaggerated the phrase “not going to do it” to become “not gonna do it” and, finally, “na ga do it.” “You take little teeny observations of him and then just make them almost a separate character.”

My brothers and I saw Dana’s impersonation before Dad did—“Look, I don’t stay up late like you kids do,” he’d say—but he became more familiar with it once he was in the White House.

I can’t remember when I first met Lee Atwater, but I always liked him. Everyone respected his instincts because he was tough and no-nonsense. I knew that with him on our side, we’d be in good hands politically.

“He had a huge, infectious personality,” Marvin remembers. He saw a lot of Lee because Marvin’s business office was only a few doors down from campaign headquarters in Washington. Marvin recalled that Lee had little Civil War soldiers on his desk, and he would make his points by moving the soldiers around. Lee was very disciplined, jogging every day, never drinking, and smoking a pack of cigarettes a week—but he only smoked on Fridays.

I also remember how Lee had one of the only cell phones in town—it was as big as a lunch box and he took it everywhere. He was on the cutting edge in those days. (During the 1988 campaign, there was no e-mail or voice mail, no fax machine on Air Force Two, and certainly no BlackBerry or Internet. One campaign staffer, Debbie Romash, remembers doing “the Delta dash”—rushing to the courier service on Delta Air Lines that used the last flight out of Washington every night, to get schedules and briefing books to the campaign team on the road.)

As he looked to the 1988 primary calendar, Dad wanted to erase his 1980 loss in New Hampshire. One of his key people back then had been Andy Card—who had since run, and lost, for Massachusetts governor in 1982. I respect Andy and volunteered on his 1982 race—stuffing envelopes, making phone calls, even passing out bumper stickers with Andy’s father one day.

After Andy lost, Jim Baker offered him a job at the White House as liaison to the nation’s governors. Andy remembers one advantage of the job was that it allowed him to build close relationships with Republican governors and their grassroots operations in key states, including New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, who had been a Reagan supporter in 1980 and had become the chairman of the Republican Governors’ Association in 1987.

Dad and his team were well aware that Governor Sununu’s help would be crucial in 1988. “There’s a saturation of politics here, and Lee loved that atmosphere. He understood New Hampshire and he used to come up a lot,” said Governor Sununu. “The vice president actually felt a little more comfortable campaigning here than in Iowa. New Hampshire is a ‘see me, touch me, feel me’ campaign state. I estimate that he personally shook hands with about fifty thousand people that year before the primary. I’ll bet we had about five thousand Polaroid pictures taken—on the theory that if somebody has a picture of themselves and the vice president on the mantel, they’ll work awfully hard to make it a picture of themselves and the president on the mantel.”

In 1987, Dad and Lee Atwater met with Andy and convinced him to leave the White House and run the New Hampshire campaign. Andy’s wife, Kathy, wasn’t too happy about the idea, but he convinced her. “It was a life-changing experience for me,” Andy says now, remembering that he saw Kathy only thirteen nights that entire year and slept on a cot in his office in Concord.

Andy also assembled a group called the Freedom Fighters, grassroots organizers who ran operations at the precinct level. They met every Monday at 7:00 a.m. in Concord, “which means some people had to leave Coos County way up north [where the town of Dixville Notch votes first in the primary and gets tremendous media attention] at 3:00 a.m. to get to Concord in time for the meeting,” Andy recalls. He told every precinct captain in the state it was not their job to get George Bush elected president, only to get George Bush elected president of their precinct.

“I told them we want to be like Larry Bird [the Boston Celtics legend]—we’d love it if it came to New Hampshire, and we were two points down with ten seconds left in the game. We would be standing outside the three-point circle begging for the ball because we have the confidence that we can sink the three-point shot. That was what our campaign strategy was all about.”

Of course, the campaign road to New Hampshire first made its way through the Iowa caucuses. Mary Matalin was working at the RNC at the time and had been sent to Iowa as a field worker.

“That was the first emergence of the Christian Coalition,” she remembers, referring to supporters of Pat Robertson. “Nobody knew who they were. I kept calling Rich Bond and Lee Atwater, and no one believed me because they hadn’t seen it. You had to be on the ground. They couldn’t see them in the polling, so we didn’t know what their numbers were. We take them for granted now. So we were shadowboxing with the invisible army of the Christian Coalition. We also had Bob Dole in that race. It was not his home state, but he was a farm state guy. He was very organized there.”

Given Dad’s success in 1980, everyone presumed he would win Iowa again in 1988. But we lost to Dole and Robertson, coming in third. The shock of that loss shot through the campaign. How bad was it? To give you an idea, Atwater fired Mary that night and then called her in the middle of the night to fire her again. Then the next morning, Lee fired Mary for a third time in front of all the field personnel!

When I asked Dad about Lee’s reaction the night of the Iowa caucuses, he recalled, “Lee was a tough, elbows-flying fighter. With me, he was always respectful and very supportive. But he’d fly off the handle. He’d get very uptight when things weren’t going well. He was an emotional fellow.”

“The next morning, I had to go on a Wisconsin trip with the vice president,” Mary said. “That primary was going on then, and somebody else told the VP that I was fired. Right there, he said, ‘Oh. She’s unfired. That’s ridiculous. She’s not incompetent.’ We weren’t even that close then.”

Lee Atwater’s wife, Sally, remembers how gracious Dad was to all the Iowa workers: “Lee said that when your father addressed his campaign workers, he told them he, George Bush, was taking full responsibility for the loss. He wanted the workers to know that he knew how hard they all had worked.”

As Mary said, the Iowa loss stunned all of us. Jeb remembers it well: “I was sent to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the intern who was supposed to be traveling with me, after he saw the king-size whippin’ Dad had gotten in the caucuses, left me. Evacuated. So I got a six-pack of beer, walked back on my own to the Motel 6, and watched the rest of the dreary results by myself.”

Ede Holiday was the money person for the campaign. The day after we lost Iowa, she called Andy Card at 5:30 a.m. in the campaign headquarters in New Hampshire asking what he needed. In no time, the entire campaign staff went up there on buses to go door-to-door.

“I got up there and Lee Atwater was literally in a catatonic state,” Ede said. “He could not speak. He could not breathe. I don’t know if he brushed his teeth for three days. He just feared it was the end. He literally could not function. We’d just lost Iowa, and if we lost in New Hampshire, we’d be done. John Sununu, on the other hand, had the biggest smile on his face. He kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to win. I guarantee you we’ll win in this state. This is what we’re going to do.’ And he laid it all out.”

With less than a week to go in New Hampshire, important decisions had to be made regarding how to spend precious campaign resources—and among Dad’s top advisers there were the inevitable, sharp disagreements about how much money to spend. Bob Mosbacher, for example, wanted to save some for down the line, but Lee said to him, “If you don’t spend it here, there won’t be anyplace to spend it down the line, because we’ll be out of the race.” Lee decided to front-load the money, betting that Dad would win New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Super Tuesday.

For the entire team, the pressure was on.

All of this played into the decision to run the “Senator Straddle” ad, attacking Bob Dole for flip-flopping on the issues. Dad was not enthusiastic about it but finally decided to do it. “If you can get it on the air, then all right,” he said to Mosbacher. Dad was referring to the fact that the ad schedules at all the TV stations had been set, and they were not taking any changes.

Two months before this pivotal primary, however, Governor Sununu had asked Dad to accept an invitation for an interview at Channel 9 in Manchester—the biggest media market in the state. The event was right at the height of the Christmas season, and Dad asked, “Why do we have to do this?” But the governor prevailed, and Dad and Mom went.

The reception turned out to be an all-hands-on-deck event at the station, complete with families. Mom and Dad chatted and posed for photos with family members, reporters, and station management. “They just won everybody over at Channel 9,” Sununu remembered.

That gesture would pay off later in the heat of a hotly contested, do-or-die primary. When Sununu was told there was no way to air the “Straddle” ad on Channel 9, he called the station manager, “who obviously had been at that Christmas reception with his children and his wife and had about nine pictures taken. And I said, ‘Can you meet me at the station and help me convince your people to change this?’ And he said, ‘Of course, I’ll do that for the vice president.’”

Apparently, Dad made such an impression on the station management that they were very comfortable bending the rules to accommodate what was being asked.

Sununu met the manager after hours, going in with our ads. When the governor saw Dad later, he said, “Oh, by the way, when you asked me three months ago why you had to do that Christmas event, this is why.”

Therese Burch remembers campaigning with Dad in New Hampshire, at a truck stop called Cuzzin Richie’s. While Dad was visiting with truckers in the coffee shop, the press corps were buying baseball hats in the gift shop that said “Shit Happens” and wearing them to surprise Dad. Of course, he roared with laughter, she said, and then as he was getting ready to leave, a trucker invited Dad to take his rig for a ride. So Dad jumped into the driver’s seat, and the reporters all assumed he’d take a spin around the parking lot. “To everyone’s amazement, the vice president took off in the eighteen-wheeler Mack truck and headed for the highway. One Secret Service agent, Russell Rowe, jumped on the back of the truck, as the other Secret Service agents and press scrambled to follow,” she said. When they got back, Dad thanked the trucker and had a good laugh. “The press and the crowd were all speechless because they couldn’t believe he knew how to drive the rig.”

It was clear that Dad had to win New Hampshire to stay in the race. “Here we were, like Larry Bird, begging for the ball, with great confidence that we could sink the shot and win,” said Andy Card. “And that’s what we did.” Dad won, this time beating Bob Dole by 15,000 votes and Pat Robertson by a three-to-one margin.

Next came the South Carolina primary, part of Lee’s strategy to build the “southern firewall”—sort of an insurance policy to ensure that a conservative was elected in case Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t go well. Lee was confident of victory because of his experience in his home state—where he organized college campuses for Strom Thurmond’s reelection campaign in 1972 and then did the same for Richard Nixon, before going to Washington as national director of the College Republicans with Karl Rove. Pat Robertson’s campaign was stopped cold in South Carolina, and it was a big win for Dad going into Super Tuesday.

That year, 1988, was the first year the parties held the so-called Super Tuesday primaries—the first regional group of primaries ever held—encompassing fourteen states, mostly in the South. The idea, Andy Card explained, was that “if you didn’t have momentum going into it, you weren’t going to come out of it successfully.” Dad won 600 of the 803 delegates that were in play in 1988, to close the gap on the 1,139 needed to secure the Republican nomination. “It was a landslide,” remembers Bill Canary, a campaign operative who went on to become special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs. He noted that Robertson only won the state of Washington, and that although Bob Dole’s best chances were in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and North Carolina, “we won them all,” Bill said. “It ended the debate as to who would be the Republican nominee in 1988. In the end, it was the Democrats that still were without a clear nominee by March 8.”

Among the Democrats, Jesse Jackson won the five Deep South states, Al Gore the five border states, Michael Dukakis won Florida, Texas, and Maryland, and Dick Gephardt won only his home state of Missouri.

At one point, Mary Matalin, a lawyer by training, was sent to Michigan to handle a complicated rules fight having to do with delegates, which ended up in federal court there. Pat Robertson had charged Dad’s campaign with buying off Kemp supporters, and held a separate convention to select delegates—despite the fact that the state party chairman did not recognize that rogue meeting. A legal battle ensued, and it came down to a decision by the Bush campaign that had to be made: do we cut a complex deal with the other Republican candidates who had delegates pledged to them, or do we forge ahead in court by ourselves and hope for the best? So Mary came in to brief the campaign’s G–6.

“They already didn’t like me from Iowa,” Mary recalled. “We went through all the arguments, and they were all saying, don’t do it, it’s too risky. Your father asked what I thought. I thought we should cut the deal. He said, ‘Well, I trust her. She’s on the ground. She knows what’s going on. We’re going to do the deal.’ That’s the way to manage people. Nobody knew what to do. But he had faith in me. That is one of a million stories of why people would work their hearts out for him—because this is not just lip service to loyalty and trust. This is how he behaved.”

It turned out it was the right decision—a throw of the dice, she said, a big risk. Dad won Michigan, and soon he had the votes to wrap up the Republican nomination.

As the two parties headed to their conventions, tradition stated that the challenger’s party would go first and the incumbent last. So the Democratic convention was held first, in July at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta. It was there that Ann Richards drawled, “Poor George, he can’t help it—he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Senator Teddy Kennedy followed next, hitting on Iran-Contra and calling out to the crowd over and over, “Where was George?” (A year or so later, Senator Kennedy sent Dad a good-natured note with a photo of a billboard from Milford, Connecticut, which read “Where’s George? In the White House, Teddy!!”)

It was also in Atlanta that then-Governor Bill Clinton gave such a long and tedious speech that he was nearly booed off the stage. It’s still called the “In Conclusion” speech by some, because that’s the point in his speech when the crowd cheered loudest. In fact, many observers said that it was the end of Bill Clinton’s political career—the first of many times that would be said about him, and not just by my brothers.

So much for conventional wisdom!

In general, I thought the entire Democratic convention was mean-spirited, with the attacks on my father more personal than political. I remember disliking Ann Richards’s comments most of all. Politically, I disagreed with almost everything she said. I did, however, like her line saluting women, saying “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels.”

Dad looked back on it, saying, “It upset me that she was doing that, making it personal like that—but that’s the campaign. When George beat her a few years later, I guess you could say he showed her what she could do with that silver foot!”

As his running mate Governor Dukakis chose Dad’s old Texas rival Senator Lloyd Bentsen. “I made a lot of mistakes in that campaign. I think one of the things I did well was to go through this [VP selection] process, and it was exhausting. We were all aware of what happened with McGovern and Eagleton,” Governor Dukakis told me, referring to George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee who dropped his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, from the ticket after it came out that Eagleton had received electroshock therapy for depression. They went on to lose by what was then the second largest landslide in American history.

So after the last primary in June, Dukakis asked Paul Brontas, his campaign chairman, to begin the process of choosing a VP candidate. “We narrowed the field down to four people: Lloyd Bentsen, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and John Glenn,” the governor added. “We set up teams, volunteer teams of lawyers and accountants, one for each candidate, who went into their backgrounds, their finances, their stuff over and over again. I met with each of them.” He ended up choosing Bentsen because of the geographic balance, his experience on Capitol Hill, and his ability to be a “first-rate president,” should the need arise.

The night Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen officially claimed the Democratic nomination, I remember seeing the split-screen image of the roll-call vote of the delegates, putting them over the top—with the Dukakis family sitting up straight on their hotel room sofa.

Governor Dukakis was very excited to have his eighty-six-year-old grandmother at the convention. He told me about her—how she arrived from Greece at nine years old, lived in the tenements across from a shoe factory, and was the first Greek American woman to attend college in American history, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Bates College in 1925. She had become a schoolteacher, gotten married, and raised their son in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Mrs. Dukakis was eighty-six; my own grandmother Dorothy was eighty-seven when she attended the Republican convention, to see Dad accept the nomination.

While the Democrats were having their convention, my father and Jim Baker got out of town, heading up to Shoshone National Forest in northwestern Wyoming for a week of fly-fishing. Dad recorded in his diary at the time:

I have concluded from this trip that I can be very happy in what follows on. If I lose, I don’t know what I’ll do, but I know I’ll be happy. But the main thing is, I’d like to do something to help others . . . I still feel confident that I will win, but the polls are tough . . . I feel rested and my mind is clearer. We’ll go back to the rat races; the copies of memos; who has the action on this letter and that; the stacks of paper; the endless criticism; great pressures; and the ugliness; but this little jaunt has proved to me that you can get your soul refurbished.

It’s a good thing the trip was reinvigorating, because by the time the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket rolled out of Atlanta, the Democrats were seventeen points ahead in the polls. Suddenly, Dad was an underdog.

In August, the Republican convention was held at the Superdome in New Orleans. It was exciting and great fun, being on the convention floor, attending the parties, and seeing so many old friends. Ronald Reagan gave a terrific speech, as you might expect, asking Dad to “go out there and win one for the Gipper.” The crowd loved it. My sister-in-law Columba seconded Dad’s nomination as president, first in Spanish, then in English.

Meanwhile, Jeb’s twelve-year-old son, George P., led the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance in front of the entire convention and television viewing audience. According to his father, George P. couldn’t have been more nervous. Jeb remembers how his son was “looking like he was going to throw up. He turned white. Didn’t have a pulse. So he went out . . . and I was on my hands and knees behind the curtains looking around the corner in case I had to run out. I was thinking, ‘He’s going to lose it.’ So I was going to run out.” But George P. did fine, and no one ever saw Jeb hiding offstage on his hands and knees.

Dad wrote in his diary that week:

The kids and the grandchildren were front and center, and they did well. Doro speaking so beautifully for her Mother and also on the convention floor. The boys, all of them, on the television and speaking at the convention, all were terrific. Our family got much more focus. They took the heat well, and they showed great presence and great warmth.

There was a lot of speculation as to whom Dad would choose as his running mate. About three weeks before the convention, in fact, some of his friends—Fred Malek, the director of the convention, and his wife, Marlene; Jim and Susan Baker; my brother George and Laura; and Vic Gold and his wife—had kicked around a few names in front of Dad, who never said a word and just listened. “It’s going to be Kemp—couldn’t you sense his reaction?” Fred remembered saying to Marlene on the drive home. “Of course, I was dead wrong.”

I also remember a family dinner right before the convention where we all went around the table and took a guess. Dad sat there, nodding and listening, but never saying a thing. I don’t remember any of us being right.

Unbeknownst to us, he had called Dan Quayle, a senator from Indiana, the Monday after the Democratic convention and asked if he’d mind being considered for vice president. Senator Quayle talked it over with his wife that night and then called back to say okay.

“Bob Teeter will be calling you,” Vice President Quayle remembers Dad saying. “That was it, until the day of the convention. He didn’t interview because he didn’t want to put people through that. He knew us all very well, especially the members of the Senate, because he was such a worldly person. In his mind, he knew their capabilities, knew who they were, knew what he needed, and that he didn’t really have to do this. Plus, I don’t think he particularly liked the process he went through himself, in previous years. He just didn’t like it when the cameras would be on six candidates and then it would be down to three. Why aren’t you in the six? Then the three down to one. What did you do wrong? He doesn’t enjoy that part with the press. It’s his caring side coming out.”

On the day Dad was to announce his choice to be on the ticket, the Quayles were eating lunch at Sammy’s Steak and Lobster Place on Bourbon Street in New Orleans when the call came in to return to the hotel. They had been eavesdropping on other diners’ lunch conversations and actually heard someone say, “I wonder if this guy from Indiana’s got a chance.”

“So I get back and am told to call Jim Baker,” Quayle recalled. “I think, ‘Dang it, Baker’s got to tell the losers.’ I turn on the television and Tom Brokaw says, ‘We’ve just confirmed it’s not Jack Kemp. And hang on here, yes, we now have confirmation that it is apparently not Senator Dole.’ And so I call Baker and he said, ‘Hang on for the vice president.’ When the vice president asked, ‘Would you?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ He said, ‘Thank you very much. We’ll be a great team. We’d like to keep this a secret. This is your first big assignment.’”

Dad also told the Quayles to come to the Spanish Plaza in New Orleans at 3:45 p.m. for the announcement. Senator Quayle replied, “I don’t know where the Spanish Plaza is, but I’ll figure it out, don’t worry.”

That afternoon, a crowd was waiting on the plaza for my parents to steam down the Mississippi aboard a paddleboat named the SS Natchez, then land and make the announcement on a stage at the dock. I was on board the Natchez as well and had no idea whom Dad would announce.

It was crowded, and Quayle remembered, “No one let me through. They said, ‘Who are you?’ and I said, ‘I’m the senator from Indiana.’ ‘We don’t care where you’re a senator from, we’re waiting here to find out who is going to be the next vice president.’ I said, ‘It might be me, guys! Let me through!’ Finally, Roger Ailes and Strom Thurmond and Tommy Thompson saw me about fifteen rows back, and they sent the Secret Service to get me to the front row.”

When Dad made the announcement, he surprised everyone.

“I wanted somebody young and somebody who had a good record, and he had been working on labor legislation with Kennedy,” Dad said as he reflected on his choice of a running mate. “Dan had defeated Evan Bayh and gone into the Senate. He was young and attractive and that’s why I wanted him.” Dad also liked Senator Quayle because he had a conservative voting record and would bring regional balance to Dad’s Texas/New England background.

Dan Quayle gave me his theory on why he was chosen: “I don’t think your dad’s told anybody how it came down to Dole and myself, but that’s my guess. It was a generational choice. I’ve always compared it to what Eisenhower did in picking Nixon. Because Nixon was actually younger than I was—Nixon was thirty-nine when Eisenhower picked him. Your father had all the credentials, just like Eisenhower. So I knew that I had a pretty good chance, and that he might do something a little unexpected. But you never know. It’s a decision of one.”

Dad knew that Quayle had served in the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War. In fact, a Washington lawyer and Vietnam veteran, Bob Kimmett, had talked with Senator Quayle on behalf of the campaign about his guard service. Kimmett noticed that Quayle’s draft number was actually a high number and that even though he would not have been drafted, Quayle decided to go into the guard anyway. Apparently, Kimmett thought it was all right. My brother George, who is only six months older than Vice President Quayle, had been in the guard as well, so it didn’t set off any alarms with Dad.

But it did with the press.

“The news media treated him horribly,” remembers Dad. “They jumped all over him for his service with the National Guard during Vietnam. Brutal, brutal. And it continues to this day.”

As for Marilyn, before there was Hillary, there was Marilyn Quayle. She had been a lawyer in her own right, and together they had a law firm, Quayle and Quayle, in the same building as Dan’s father’s business. Senator Quayle worked in newspaper publishing, and Mrs. Quayle had a successful law practice. Later, when he became vice president, she put her law practice on hold and considered running for an open Senate seat, but decided against it.

The night after the Quayle announcement, Jim Baker asked each member of our family to represent our state delegations—to pay tribute to Dad while announcing that our state had cast all of its delegates’ votes for him. We were all so excited—I would announce Maine’s votes, Marvin would do Virginia, Neil would do Colorado, Jeb would do Florida, and George would do Texas, putting Dad over the top for the nomination. I remember wearing a red-and-white-checked dress and being very nervous. I practiced my lines over and over again. Somehow, I managed to get the words out without too many malaprops.

“I was pretty fired up,” Marvin recalled. “Had a nice suit on and was well prepared, had some nice remarks about Dad. I was candidly a little nervous and was hovering around the Virginia delegation. I had taken the liberty of informing virtually everybody I knew on planet Earth that I was going to be on television, and encouraged them to tune in. Then I realized about halfway through they were doing this in alphabetical order. By the time Virginia came along, there were about four citizens in Guam who were watching on C-SPAN. I appreciated Neil’s tribute to Dad—which came after he praised Colorado for being a state—‘from the mountains of Aspen to the hills of Breckenridge, from the cow pastures of Durango to the . . .’ His speech went on for about fourteen minutes. I don’t think that helped my cause much. Once they got to Texas, they timed it in such a way that George, our brother, put him over the top and the balloons were falling around. By the time I got up, the janitors were kind of cleaning up the balloons that had popped hours earlier. You guys were all back in the hotel suite, and you watched me on some sort of internal television feed.”

Earlier in the day, Dad had invited Ray Siller, his friend and comedic writer, up to his suite at the Marriott to watch the nomination vote. Ray arrived in the suite expecting to find a big crowd and instead discovered my father alone with all the grandchildren, abandoned by the rest of us and left to babysit all the kids.

“The Bush munchkins seemed heavily caffeinated, flinging their toys on the floor, ricocheting about the room, drivers in a NASCAR race gone terribly wrong,” Ray remembers. Dad threatened them all with bedtime, “and from the other room two of the boys responded to the vice president’s command by bolting in with space-age weaponry and randomly spraying the perimeter.” One kid blasted his grandfather, who then asked Tim McBride to please find a pointer for him to use. Tim found a schoolteacher’s pointer—a three-foot-long wooden dowel with a rubber tip—and brought it back to my father, complete with red, white, and blue streamers.

Dad then invented a game called Pointer Man, in which one child would serve as Pointer Man, standing before the bank of television screens and, at the direction of the others, pointing every time a friend or family member appeared on-screen. Then it would be someone else’s turn to be Pointer Man. This had the effect of getting the children to sit down and clear a sight line for Dad and Ray to see the televisions. Ray said Dad’s job that night reminded him of the plate-spinners on The Ed Sullivan Show, juggling the grandchildren while watching history unfold on the monitors.

That night—only one day after the Quayle announcement—Dad said to Ray, “I can’t understand the criticism the press is heaping on Dan about serving in the National Guard. Don’t know why they’re making such a fuss over that. So many at the time fled to Canada.”

The next night was my father’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination. According to Fred Malek, “It was do or die,” the high point of the entire convention, and he remembers being with Dad, Roger Ailes, Bob Mosbacher, and Lee Atwater in a holding room below the podium about thirty minutes before the speech. “He should have been completely on edge—it was showtime, and unless he delivered, his campaign was likely to sink,” Fred remembers, adding that the campaign was still seventeen points down to Dukakis at this point. “To my surprise, he sat there with us watching the convention on TV and traded jokes for half an hour. Never said a word about the speech until he delivered a great acceptance speech.”

The truth is, Dad “worked on it over and over,” according to his diary the night of the speech. Roger Ailes arrived to help Dad polish up his delivery. Ailes today runs the Fox News Channel, but at the time, he was a New York “image” consultant that the campaign had hired—and that Dad resisted at first. Ailes recalled, “Secretly, he thought all the guys around Reagan were staging him too much. He said, ‘I’m already vice president.’ I said, ‘You’re not president—yet.’ So even though he didn’t like the sort of business I was in, he and I hit it off and had a lot of laughs. He knew I wasn’t there to change him and I wasn’t there to do anything ‘weird,’ as he put it.”

Recently, I came across Roger Ailes’s notes from that night, to help Dad with his delivery of the acceptance speech:

Listen to the audience . . . Let the equipment do the work—Don’t overshout . . . Do not rush . . . Do NOT step on laughs or applause . . . Wait to start next sentence . . . Silence is drama . . . Don’t start sentences then have to start them over . . . Eyes that twinkle . . . Absolute total confidence . . . Never furrow brow or look worried . . . Calm—cool—self-contained . . . Give the Best Speech of Your Life—Enjoy it.

“I remember sitting there when the family had all gone to the convention hall . . . I felt calm; I knew what I had to do.” Dad was worried that the press had built it “up and up and up—had to do this, had to do that, and it was the biggest moment in my life, which it was; and almost setting expectations so high that they couldn’t be matched, and yet they were.”

“Great speech. Fantastic acceptance speech,” said Jeb afterward. “I took the speech”—literally—“he signed it for me and then I kept it for a while. I had to give it back. Sent it to the library. It was with his annotations.”

Peggy Noonan, one of President Reagan’s speechwriters, was very helpful to Dad; but Tom Collamore, his personal aide at the time, didn’t like the way that Noonan subsequently “made a cottage industry out of taking credit for some of his finest speeches and statements. While she may have been an important wordsmith, the ideas were his. I saw the notes that he wrote reflecting on what he wanted to say in his convention speech and in his inaugural address. Those were his ideas.”

Dad sent a memo to Peggy, laying out themes and ideas. In the final speech, he called for a “kinder, gentler” America and saluted Americans who are engaged in community service—“a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” He jokingly promised to “keep his charisma in check.” And he said this: “The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’” The crowd roared.

By the end of it all, Dad not only closed the gap with Dukakis but left New Orleans two points ahead in the polls.

Meanwhile, the simmering feud with Newsweek over the “wimp” cover continued. Dad later told me, “I was at the VP house with Jimmy Baker and they said Katharine Graham wanted to come talk about it. Out she came with Rick Smith, who was the editor in chief of Newsweek, and Evan Thomas, the Washington bureau chief. They wanted to do a behind-the-scenes book, which they did every year, with Tom DeFrank.

“Baker said, ‘This is unacceptable.’ I said, ‘We’re not going to cooperate with them. If Newsweek asks a question in a news conference, we’ll answer it with no discrimination against them. But we’re not going to lean over and discriminate for them by giving them the inside, behind-the-scenes story of this campaign. I’m going to tell our people on the campaign not to cooperate with them.’ And we did. But I think some did cooperate anyway.

“They came out and said they were terribly sorry about the ‘wimp’ piece,” Dad continued. “Evan Thomas spoke up: ‘I was the one responsible for this. I’m the guy that did it.’ I have to take it he was showing off for the publisher and owner, Kay Graham. It poisoned my relationship with him.”

Later that fall, on a cold Sunday, even snowing a little, Roger Ailes was waiting at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington when Dad landed in Air Force Two.

Roger was at Andrews because the campaign press office, unbeknownst to him, had earlier agreed to a “campaign profile” of my father by Dan Rather of CBS News, having been assured by the network that it was a standard videotaped piece on the candidate.

Roger had gotten a secret call that morning from someone at CBS News, a young man Roger had helped get a job. “He went to an outside pay phone and he called me and said, ‘Look, I’ll get fired if they find out I told you this, but the producer of the show is going around the newsroom saying, “We’re taking Bush out of the race tonight.”’” Here is Roger’s account of what happened from then on:

I went out to Andrews to meet him and got in the car with him on the way to the speech. I said, “I’ve got a tip-off that this is really not a campaign profile, this is really an attack on Iran-Contra. They’ve canceled half the show. Rather is geared up to go after you.” And your dad said, “I’ve answered those questions a hundred times and they’re not going anywhere.” I told him I thought this was a real political hit. I didn’t think this was like a standard interview.

We worked it out that if it was a standard interview, your dad would do what he always did. And if it wasn’t, I said, just say, “Dan, your comparing my career to Iran-Contra is like my comparing your career to the time you walked off the air.” The significance of that is, in broadcasting if you leave dead air, that’s the equivalent in the military of going AWOL. You just don’t do it. Professional broadcasters don’t leave their post. Dan had done that in a flap. Some show ran over and he got into a snit. He walked off the air and left six minutes of dead air on CBS. It was probably the most embarrassing moment of his career, because it was the most unprofessional thing he could possibly do.

So I gave that line to your dad. I told him not to use that unless he had to, but if they start down a road you think is unfair, then nail him on this. I think your dad put it in the back of his mind and really didn’t think too much about it.

I also found out that Rather was being briefed over the weekend by a Democrat adviser named Tom Donilon, brought in to coach him. I thought that was unfair. That’s the first time I had ever heard of a network bringing a guy in to coach an anchor on how to get a politician. That would be like hiring me at that time to go in and coach Tom Brokaw on how to get somebody. It just wasn’t done. I don’t have that a hundred percent, but I’m told it was true and I think it probably was. I did see Donilon later at the L.A. debate with Bob Squire [a Democratic political operative] and with Mike Dukakis, so I believe it probably was true.

Your dad and I went to the Senate office and he got ready to go in. I went down the hall and looked in the room where they were going to shoot, and I noticed they had sent an assistant bureau chief over to produce the interview. Normally, they would send a field producer. I’d been around long enough to know that if the assistant bureau chief is there, they’re expecting something more important to happen.

I went back and I said, “This looks pretty serious. They’re going to play a little package before you go on, and then Dan is going to interview you.” And they played this package explaining Iran-Contra. There must have been a factual error or two in it, because your dad got mad. I could see he was looking at it and he said, “That’s not right, that’s not right.” And I thought, “This is good. He’s getting cranked up here.”

The vice president was ready for bear when the thing started. But he’s ever the gentleman, and so he was trying to do the best he could to not get hot about it. Then Dan started boring in on him on Iran-Contra: “Aren’t you guilty?” And finally, Dan said something and I gave your dad the signal, just go for it. He didn’t want to go for it.

My sense at that point was that we could lose this battle. I grabbed the clipboard out of the bureau chief’s hand and I wrote WALKED OFF THE AIR. I showed it to him, made a fist, and said, “Go! Go! Just kick his ass!”

Rather must have said something that made him mad. And your dad just unloaded on him. He said, “Dan, comparing this to my career is like comparing your career to the time you walked off the air.”

When you go back and look at the tape, it looked like Rather was in the ring. If you slow the tape down, it looks like he took a punch. His head rolls forward. His head comes back, his eyes roll up and come back down. It just looks like one of those old boxing movies where the guy takes a punch. That was pretty much it. It was pretty clear that fight was over and your dad won.

We went back to the holding room and, of course, the calls started pouring in. They were mostly favorable to your dad. Only a few weren’t. I heard him on the phone in the background saying, “Yes, you’re right. No, I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry.” He hung up, and I thought, “Who the heck was that?” I mean, everybody is calling to congratulate him. I said, “Who was that?” He said, “That was my mother. She said that just because that other man was rude was no excuse for me to be.”

Looking back, Ailes said that the interview wiped out the “wimp” image, but “I don’t think the feud ever went away. It was simmering for ten years. Sometimes your dad says we won the battle and lost the war—because Rather went after him for the next ten years. It came to a head again when Rather went after your brother over his Texas National Guard record. It did not stand up to journalistic standards. You just don’t pay somebody for five and a half years to do an investigative piece on news that everybody already has, unless you’re out to get them.”

“Roger did a very good job of recognizing what the press was going to try to do,” Governor Sununu remembers. “They didn’t want your father to win. Dealing with the ‘wimp factor’ article and the Dan Rather interview are good examples of Roger planning ahead and letting the president know the kinds of things that would happen.”

Along with Sig Rogich, Ailes was also instrumental that fall in creating the campaign’s television ads, including ones on the furlough program that Michael Dukakis supported for violent criminals in Massachusetts—they showed a revolving door at a prison with convicts going right out of jail—and the famous “tank” ad, in which Dukakis was photographed in a very large tank helmet. Dad remembers that one as his favorite of all the ads, adding, “Roger Ailes and Sig Rogich get the credit for that ad—it was the best of all.”

There had been other good ads earlier in the campaign on both sides. Dick Gephardt aired an ad showing Dukakis urging Iowa farmers to grow Belgian endive as a crop. The Dukakis campaign, for their part, ran an ad showing an acrobat dressed up as Gephardt, doing backflips as an announcer listed his flip-flops on various issues.

My favorite ads, however, were the positive spots. My daughter Ellie had a starring role in one ad, running across a field and jumping into Dad’s arms. Ray Siller remembers my father telling him how patient Ellie was during the taping, how she just kept running toward him through a meadow, take after take. That was a great ad. I remember hearing that a prominent Democrat—I think it may have been former Democratic national chairman Bob Strauss—even said, “If I see that ad one more time, I may even vote for the s.o.b.”

Although my focus was on Dad and what I could do to help his campaign, other people were focused on Michael Dukakis. I only met Michael Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, once, during that strange dance that takes place after a presidential debate. It’s very important onstage as to who puts his hand out first, especially after just being attacked in front of millions. Most of the time, the two families—never having met each other before—have to congratulate each other warmly for the benefit of the cameras. Every move is watched and can easily be misconstrued.

The campaign focused on several issues, one of which was Dukakis’s support for the furlough program in Massachusetts—first pointed out by Al Gore in a Democratic debate—in which violent criminals were allowed weekend furloughs, even though they were not eligible for parole.

“I didn’t even know Horton’s name or whether he was black or white at the beginning,” Lee Atwater said afterward. “I only knew he was in prison for a terrible crime. Then I hear this guy was given a furlough. He was in jail with no hope of parole. Why would you let a guy like this out? He had no incentive to go back. And he couldn’t get the death penalty [in Massachusetts]. What would be his incentive not to kill and rape? That’s why it was such a salient issue with the American people.”

It wasn’t until October 1988—right before the election—that Democratic Party leaders denounced the furlough issue as racially motivated, but the press immediately disputed this line of attack. Even the Washington Post editorialized the next day that it may or may not be relevant to stress the Dukakis furlough record, “but it isn’t racist.”

Today, after many years of Democrats and the press repeating false information, people mistakenly think the campaign used the Willie Horton story to racially divide people, not to show Dukakis’s weakness on crime. (Years later, during the debate over the Bush administration’s civil rights bill, Dad sent my brothers and me a briefing paper reiterating the facts of the Horton case, because they had gotten so distorted over the years. His note read, “If anyone raises Willie Horton in some context other than the furlough abuse, flash this true explanation at ’em.”)

I asked Dad recently about the whole Willie Horton episode: “I felt we did the right thing. The people at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize for the exposé of Willie Horton. It was definitely a crime issue. We got on Dukakis about having this lenient furlough program where he let people out of jail, and here was the best example—a man who was a convicted rapist who went out and raped again when he was on furlough. By the way, he demanded we call him William Horton later, when he was back in jail. Just a humorous aside.”

The crime issue was very powerful in 1988, especially after an NYPD officer named Eddie Byrne—he was only twenty-two at the time—was executed by a drug gang in his patrol car. This cold-blooded killing came on orders from a drug kingpin who had wanted his gang members to “kill a cop” as a test of bravery. The incident made headlines nationally, because it illustrated how out of control drug-related violence had become in our cities. In a very emotional ceremony, Eddie Byrne’s parents gave Dad his police badge, which my father still has. Shortly afterward, the Boston Police endorsed Dad over Michael Dukakis.

Governor Dukakis looked back on the fall campaign with regret. “One of the big lessons of 1988 is if the other guy is going to come at you—and people have been coming at people since the beginning of the Republic—you’ve got to have a carefully thought-out strategy for dealing with that . . . It’s very clear that you cannot sit there mute if people are attacking you. And that’s what I did. And by the time I woke up to the kind of damage [that] was being done, it was almost irreparable,” he said. “It was a judgment call I made, and it turned out to be a very unwise judgment call.”

On the positive side, and helping Dad’s cause, the economic news was good during the campaign. Seventeen million new jobs had been created in the previous five years; inflation had dropped from 12 percent to 4 percent during the Reagan-Bush administration; interest rates had been cut in half; and unemployment was the lowest in fourteen years.

Lee Atwater had a way of operating, “command focus” as he called it, and it brought discipline and strategy to the campaign. Along with Jim Baker’s day-to-day leadership, the campaign hummed along. A good example of both men’s impact was the “line of the day” message that they sent out in a fax pyramid—then an emerging technology—that would include the latest campaign developments, quotes from my father, and bulleted issues to about ten thousand campaign workers across the country every afternoon. The idea was that if some precinct captain in Iowa was on Nightline, he would have the latest from Bush headquarters. Campaigns in both parties have been doing the same thing ever since, only now by e-mail instead of fax.

Andy Card had been helping with opposition research on Michael Dukakis, and since he knew Dukakis personally from his days in the Massachusetts statehouse, Andy was good at anticipating Dukakis’s response to things. He became instrumental in the preparations for the debates. “I first met Dukakis when I was a sophomore in high school,” Andy remembers. “I knew he’d been a cross-country runner and a trumpet player and a Boy Scout. He didn’t like people in uniforms and ran away from being a Boy Scout. The year I got elected to the legislature was the year he got elected governor. He was a reformer and a maverick.”

The fall debates came—two presidential and one vice presidential. James Baker and Roger Ailes negotiated all the arrangements with the Democrats. “Baker and I would do good cop, bad cop. They thought I was crazy and Baker was sane,” said Roger. “I said, ‘I want a forty-eight-inch-high podium.’ Well, that would have come up to Dukakis’s eyebrows. I said, ‘Look, my candidate’s tall. His eyes focus at forty-eight. We can go to forty-six inches if that will help you.’ Well, that got up just under Dukakis’s nose. They kept wanting a forty-two. But I kept pushing them to get the taller podium, knowing that it would make him look like Rocky the Squirrel standing back there. Every once in a while I’d go crazy and say something half-obscene and Baker would calm me down. Then he’d say, ‘I’ve got to leave, got to get back to the White House. I’ll leave you with Ailes.’ And, of course, they’d immediately say, ‘No, no, no. That’s okay. Don’t leave us with Ailes.’ We finally negotiated a pitching mound for Dukakis to walk up on, but no cameras back there to actually shoot it, which we agreed to.”

Jeb remembers the pitcher’s mound: “Instead of having a riser, a step where he could stand up, they built it like a baseball mound, where you could see the pitch. So then he had to get off this little pitcher’s mound to shake hands with Dad.”

In the pre-debate practices, Dick Darman played Michael Dukakis, and Roger Ailes was the emcee. Ailes and the other campaign strategists urged Darman to be very tough on Dad, and he was. He repeatedly went after Dad for supposedly being “out of touch” with ordinary Americans. He also mixed in some humor—coming out onstage wearing a tank helmet, holding up an ACLU membership card, and standing on a wooden riser.

“But it was evident that I was getting to the VP—and doing so in front of a live audience of family, friends, and advisers. I persisted. He clearly did not like what was happening. Not at all. But he remained cool. When we came to the end of one of the sessions, I knew I had gone too far,” Dick said. At the point when he was to shake hands with Dad midstage, Dad walked off the stage “without a word to me or anyone else.” Dick walked to his car alone, fearing he’d made a career-defining mistake. But soon enough, Dad thanked him for making him work even harder on debate preparations, and even invited Dick to the election night festivities.

Dad just can’t stand debating: “Hated it. It was show business. You look this way and then that way. A lot of cosmetics. We thought we did pretty well in some of the presidential debates, but the next thing you know, out comes Tim Russert or somebody saying we lost the debates. So I hated them,” he said to me.

Then the real debates came. Once all the pre-debate preparations were wrapped up, Roger Ailes would spend the last half hour before the debate with Dad alone—“so that nobody else would run in the room and interrupt him or disrupt him or ask him a question he couldn’t answer or, frankly, get him in a bad mood,” Roger told me. “I wanted to have the last word. I walked him to the stage in Los Angeles so nobody would run up to him and say his house was on fire. Something that would get you totally off.”

“Your dad was not happy, I don’t think, with his performance in the first debate; but he killed him in the second. He absolutely demolished Dukakis,” remembers James Baker.

The fact that Dad was not thrilled with that first debate may explain why my brothers Marvin and George were so nervous before the second debate that they went to a theater near the vice president’s residence to watch a movie instead of the debate. Out of sight did not mean out of mind, however: the suspense was such that not once, not twice, but at least three times George anxiously dispatched Marvin to the lobby to call his friend Pat Quinn from a pay phone.

“Marvin called three times, saying ‘PQ, now, give it to me straight. Don’t sugarcoat it for me, PQ,’” Pat recalled. “When Marvin called the first time, I told him it looked like it was ‘about even, don’t worry about it.’ The longer the debate went on, however, the more positive I felt about the vice president’s performance. By their third call I told them, ‘This is a home run. He’s kicking butt.’ ”

Hearing the good news, Marv and George immediately left the theater and went back to the vice presidential residence to watch the rest of the debate.

The big break in the debate came when the moderator, Bernie Shaw, asked Dukakis if he’d change his mind about opposing the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, was raped and murdered. Dukakis gave a very unemotional “no” answer to Shaw, and many people now think that one exchange essentially finished off Dukakis’s chances of winning. “If I had to do that over again, I’d do less rehearsing,” Dukakis told me. “By the time you get to that last month or two, you’ve been at it for months and months and months and you could really start going robotic.”

After that answer, Dukakis’s advisers suggested he show some public affection for his wife, which he did. This in turn caused some of Dad’s advisers to suggest that my parents also get more romantic. Here was Dad’s funny response:

Sweetsie:

Please look at how Mike and Kitty do it. Try to be closer in, more—well er romantic—on camera. I am practicing the loving look, and the creeping hand.

Yours for better TV and more demonstrable affection.

Your sweetie-pie coo-coo.

Love ya

GB

At some point in the fall, the Dukakis campaign announced it was pulling out of Florida, in an effort to focus resources on states where they had a fighting chance. Jeb was the state chairman for Bush-Quayle in Florida, and upon hearing the announcement by Dukakis, he arranged for a big rally. “We had a bon voyage party for Dukakis along Biscayne Bay. We had a picture of a boat with all of Michael Dukakis’s baggage on it. We were saying good-bye to him as he was leaving the state. And while we were doing that at our campaign rally, there was a guy going back and forth in a small motorboat with a blond boy wearing diapers with a sign that said ‘I’m Dan Quayle.’ That’s how things go in the campaign.”

The final two weeks were filled with an endless series of campaign stops. Jeb also remembers traveling on the campaign bus with the Beach Boys and Loretta Lynn, with a lot of stops for them to sing in front of small-town crowds. Still, as we made this final push, everyone was exhausted and not at all sure we were going to win. Dad remembers, “The polls looked pretty good, but there was some last-minute questioning and doubt.”

We ended up in Houston for the election night party at the George Brown Convention Center, my entire family gathered with Mom and Dad along with thousands of people. I remember being nervous—literally feeling like I was on pins and needles.

There was a dinner at the home of some friends earlier in the evening, and Joe Hagin remembers the moment when NBC Nightly News came on. There were TVs everywhere in the house. Joe remembers what happened next: “It actually shocked us all because it was so early, and Brokaw called the election. So we went to the convention center and, after more results came in, [he] did the acceptance speech and we came back out and I was riding in the police car in the front of the motorcade. Then they said on the Secret Service frequency, ‘Timberwolf wants Hagin.’” So Joe jumped out, ran back to Dad’s limo, and was offered a job on the spot, to come back from his corporate job in Cincinnati to a White House job in Washington. “Even today, all these years later,” he said, “it’s all kind of like a fairy tale.”

The results were in: Bush-Quayle had received 53 percent of the popular vote and 426 electoral votes; Dukakis-Bentsen had 46 percent and 111 electoral votes. My father had won all but ten states. “I still find it incredible and almost impossible to believe,” Dad said. He went to bed that night thinking of all the people who should have been there, not the least of whom was his father.

My father was now president-elect of the United States of America. As you might imagine, I was ecstatic—we all were—but the reality, the historical impact, of what had happened to Dad, and to us, would take time to digest. That night, the full range of emotions cascaded over us; relief, unbridled joy, exhaustion, and a tremendous sense of pride. In the eyes of many, Dad had started his quest for the White House as a marginal Don Quixote-esque figure in a fantastical misadventure; yet, just as he had always striven to complete his mission as a naval pilot, he had also withstood the partisan attacks and barbed pens of the Beltway pundits to make this improbable dream a reality. Even today, the sheer magnitude of what he achieved seems surreal—as if it happened in another lifetime. Yet it did happen, and in due course my father would take his place in history with the other distinguished Americans to precede him into that high office.

The next morning, my parents were flying back to Washington on Air Force Two with a big crowd of family and staff. George and Laura’s five-year-old twins, Barbara and Jenna, had stuffed the airplane’s toilet with paper, and Mom was in it up to her elbows trying to unclog it. “I couldn’t help but wonder if any other First Ladies-elect had spent their first morning unstuffing the toilet,” she said.

It was, as Dad’s friend Dan Jenkins is fond of saying, “life its own self.”