RONALD REAGAN HAD BEEN GIVING the same speech more or less for fifteen years. Since catching fire with the Republican right wing with his 1964 television address, “A Time for Choosing,” supporting the doomed presidential run of Barry Goldwater, Reagan had been sounding the same conservative messages: America was under siege by a federal government that was big and getting bigger, grossly excessive in its ambitions and infringing on individual liberties; taxes were too high, adding to a bloated bureaucracy; entitlements were too great. “The Speech,” as it would become known in the Reagan myth, culminated with Reagan suggesting that the choice Americans had was not between left or right, but between “up and down. Up to a man’s age-old dream—the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.” This was Reagan’s clarion call.
It had catapulted the dulcet-voiced, camera-ready former B-movie actor to an A-list Republican, who after two terms as California governor had come within a whisper of capturing the GOP presidential nomination from the earnest-but-lackluster moderate Gerald Ford, the incumbent president, in 1976. In a party that often rewarded the runner-up in the previous presidential primary with the nomination four years later, Reagan quickly emerged as the favorite to become the party’s standard-bearer in 1980. He made his candidacy official in November of 1979, adding his name to a crowded field that included Kansas senator Bob Dole; former Texas governor and secretary of the treasury John Connally; two Illinois congressmen, John Anderson and Phil Crane—and George Herbert Walker Bush.
Bush had thrown his own hat in the ring six months earlier, notwithstanding national name recognition, as George W. recalled later, “so low that in many early presidential polls he didn’t register enough support to be included in the results.” He launched his dark horse candidacy on May 1, 1979, in a speech at Washington’s National Press Club, as “a lifelong Republican who has worked throughout his career, in business and in public office, on behalf of the principles of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower.”
The reference to Eisenhower was a portent: Bush would be running for president as a moderate in the Eisenhower mold—much like his father had been—offering a viable alternative to the conservative Reagan, a former Democrat who had defected to the GOP after supporting Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Eisenhower had ridden into the presidency in 1952 on a wave of popularity implied in his iconic campaign slogan, “I Like Ike.” The hero of D-day, Eisenhower had edged out his conservative GOP rival, Ohio senator Robert Taft, at the Republican National Convention in 1952, but it had more to do with the force of Ike’s personality and towering stature than it did with his moderate leanings. The old notion of Republicanism dominated by the northeasterners like Prescott Bush—nonideological; probusiness; fiscally conservative; moderate, even progressive, on social views—was waning even then. Despite a plank in the 1960 party platform espousing “progressive Republican policies” like “liberal pay,” the GOP continued to drift rightward. By the mid-1960s, the party’s Southern right wing—composed partly of former Democrats alienated by what they saw as the federal overreach of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, including civil rights—became a greater force in the party. It became evident in 1964 when Goldwater, who became the party’s nominee after a divisive convention floor battle, upset Nelson Rockefeller, an emblem of northeastern Republicanism. Since then, the moderate and conservative wings, the latter growing in numbers bolstered by evangelicals and harder-edged right-wingers, had been battling for domination of the party. The year 1980 would be no exception.
With Bush’s chances slim, his campaign went all out in winning the first battleground on the road to the nomination, the Iowa caucus, slated for January 1980. The strategy had worked for Jimmy Carter in securing the Democratic presidential nod in 1976, launching the unknown former one-term Georgia governor from “Jimmy who?” to the lead horse out of the gate and garnering all the media attention that went along with it. Jim Baker—chairman of Bush’s political action committee, the Fund for Limited Government, and now chairman of his campaign—consciously emulated Carter’s approach. He had the right candidate in his former doubles partner, whose natural enthusiasm and feverish energy were conducive to outworking his competitors, especially Reagan, whose advanced age for the time, sixty-eight, was an Achilles’ heel. “The age thing is going to get him,” Bush told his young campaign aide, Karl Rove, who had worked on George W.’s congressional bid the previous year. Bush, thirteen years Reagan’s junior, emphasized his relative vitality by vigorously working all Iowa’s ninety-nine precincts, frequently donning running gear after campaign events for daily jogs and additional time with local constituents. The retail politics of Iowa suited Bush’s strengths. “George Bush had the knowledge that grassroots politics win primaries,” George W. said of his father, “having working knowledge of how politics work, who the players are, their positions, what trigger points are to their mentalities.” Less an ideologue than a decent, competent man whom one would want to see in charge, he was more likely to make a friend who would support him at the polls than he was to make a point or impart a vision that would sway a voter to come to his side.
The campaign fast became a Bush family crusade, with members expressing their love and loyalty by taking time out of their lives to devote themselves to the cause. Bush-Walker relatives, mostly in the Northeast, did everything from helping to raise money to licking envelopes and answering phones in local campaign offices. Barbara, as always, was supportive though it meant endless grueling days on the campaign trail, often without her husband who maintained his own hectic travel schedule as a means of dividing and conquering. As she described it later, “We campaigned in backyards, ballrooms, courthouses, bowling alleys, at a cider and doughnut farm, hot dog plants, high schools and colleges, retirement homes, and hospitals. You name it, we were there.”
So were the Bush children, who threw themselves into the campaign as a way of not only showing their devotion to their father but also paying him back. “I look back many years later and I see friends of mine who work at the family business and contribute to the family company’s success,” recalled Marvin, who took off a semester at the University of Virginia to stump in Iowa in a beat-up Chevy Blazer sporting a “George Bush” vanity plate. “For me, it was really a neat feeling because I’d always been a taker from Dad.” It wasn’t that he agreed with him on every issue—he openly opposed his father’s pro-life stance—but he loved him and he felt he owed him. Neil, having gained grassroots experience in his brother’s campaign, was stationed in New Hampshire, the next crucial campaign front after Iowa. Doro, a student at Boston College, attended nine months of secretarial school to offer administrative help to her father in the campaign’s Boston office. Jeb made a bigger sacrifice, leaving his banking post in Venezuela to throw himself into his father’s campaign in Florida, where his fluency in Spanish helped to win over Cuban American voters. His natural ability and work ethic impressed his dad, who noted in his diary that whenever Marvin, also a volunteer in the campaign, talked of returning to UVA to resume his studies, “Jeb bawl[ed] him out.”
George W.—the oldest of the brood, possessing his father’s name and having shown his political chops in his congressional race the year before—was the candidate’s most plausible surrogate, a role he relished. From his home base in Midland, he made as many as seventy calls a day to members of the oil community in Texas and beyond to grow the campaign’s war chest while tending to his own oil business, which had lain fallow for over a year during his own campaign. And at crucial moments, he was dropped into key areas to take to the stump, including barnstorming in the northwestern part of Iowa with a local congressman several weeks before the caucuses.
The campaign’s intensive Iowa effort proved a prudent investment. On January 21, 1980, Bush walked away the victor in the Iowa caucus with 32 percent of the vote, upsetting Reagan whose token effort in the state yielded 30 percent; Howard Baker placed a distant third at 15 percent, with the remainder of the field pulling down single digits. Bush had broken through. “I’ve got the ‘Big Mo,’” he boasted to reporters of his momentum as the campaign shifted its focus to the New Hampshire primary.
If so, it stopped dead in the gymnasium of Nashua High School a month later. With Reagan and Bush running neck and neck out of Iowa, the Reagan camp had earlier approached Jim Baker with a proposal to participate in a New Hampshire debate limited to just the two front-runners—Reagan vs. Bush—leaving the remainder of the candidates out of the proceedings. Baker eagerly accepted the chance to create the impression that the primary was a two-man race. The Nashua Telegraph agreed to sponsor the debate at Nashua High School. Then, after the Federal Election Committee ruled that the Telegraph couldn’t do so without including the other GOP candidates, the Reagan campaign agreed to put up the funds with the Telegraph playing host to the one-on-one debate, but not its sponsor.
What the Telegraph and the Bush campaign didn’t know was that the Reagan camp had reached out to the other candidates in advance to invite them to come to the debate anyway, promising that they would be allowed to participate in some fashion—and banking on it creating confusion and discord for Bush. All the candidates agreed except Connally, who picked up on Reagan’s plan to outflank Bush, his rival and fellow Texan. “Brilliant strategy,” he responded, “but I ain’t coming. Fuck him over once for me.”
On the winter evening of February 23, three days before the New Hampshire primary, an audience of twenty-four hundred packed into the stuffy gymnasium, including John Anderson, Howard Baker, Phil Crane, and Bob Dole, who ostensibly showed up to protest their exclusion as the crowd quickly came to their aid with jeers and boos. Just beforehand, Baker was told by Reagan emissaries that Reagan was going to expand the debate to include the other candidates. After consulting with Bush, Baker’s response was adamant: “Goddamn it, you guys are not going to fuck this up! This is going to be a two-man debate and you are not going to do anything to change it!”
Reagan felt otherwise, leading the other candidates out on the stage. A fracas ensued leading up to the beginning of the event, with both the Telegraph and the Bush campaign balking at changing the format and insisting that they hold to the original agreement. The Telegraph’s publisher, J. Herman Pouliot, conceded that the candidates could make only closing remarks. As a bespectacled Bush sat mutely unengaged, Reagan picked up his microphone to protest; presently, Jon Breen, the Telegraph’s editor and the debate’s moderator, ordered that it be turned off. Flushed with anger, Reagan tapped his mic, “Is this on?” he asked, then erupted, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!”
Mr. Breen, actually. The man’s name was Breen. But it hardly mattered. In the moment, Reagan came off as strong, commanding, and in control. His “mad as hell” posture reflected the attitudes of a significant cross section of voters at a time when America’s position in the world had waned with the sustained capture of fifty-two American hostages in Iran, a flagging economy marked by high inflation and unemployment, and sapped national pride. The audience thundered its approval as Anderson, Baker, Crane, and Dole added their own applause to the din. Always at his best when indignant—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”—Reagan, as he wrote later, “may have won the debate, the primary—and the nomination—right there.”
Bush’s posture reflected his penchant for playing by the rules, instilled in him early on by his parents. He was not a revolutionary, someone who colored outside the lines. While driven with a fierce desire to win, he wanted to do so fair and square. “It cost him in . . . New Hampshire,” George W. said of his father. “Instead of saying, ‘Okay, I’ll break the rules. Let’s change the rules. You guys can debate, too,’ he said, ‘I agree with the newspaper publishers that this is the way it’s going to be.’”
The debate eventually proceeded, with Reagan pitted against Bush as originally planned, only after Reagan escorted the other four candidates willingly offstage, but the damage had been done. Reagan was the hero; Bush the heavy. Reflecting the views of all four of the nondebating candidates, Dole complained that they were treated “like second-class citizens.” “Bush stiffed us, with the help of the paper,” he maintained. Reagan said he didn’t know why Bush refused to meet with his other opponents, “but that’s something he will have to explain.” Bush was eviscerated not only by his rivals but by the press. If it stung Bush, it was worse for his family. “Looking back at it, the New Hampshire primary was the first time I experienced the unique pain that the child of a public figure feels,” George W. wrote. “I was used to hearing my father get criticized in his Texas campaigns and in his Washington jobs. This was different. The stage was bigger, the stakes were higher, and the barbs were more personal.”
Three days later, Reagan took the New Hampshire primary over Bush by more than double, 50 percent to 23 percent respectively. Bush never recovered. While he would go on to eke out northeastern wins in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, the bulk of the country, especially the party’s conservative base in the South and West, lined up behind Reagan. When Reagan took Texas with 53 percent of the vote versus Bush’s 47 percent, Bush knew his hand had been played. He folded on Memorial Day weekend, after assurances from Reagan’s campaign that he could speak at the Republican National Convention in Detroit in mid-July.
“What went wrong?” Time magazine asked of Bush’s campaign in a June feature story after Reagan had wrapped up the nomination, providing its own answer: “Many things. Though Bush had broad experience as a former Congressman, ambassador and CIA director, his surprise victory in Iowa caught him somewhat unprepared for the national spotlight, and he failed to develop any issues . . . He could be seen, finally, as a decent, likable man but not a political power. Of such perceptions, some would say, are excellent running mates made.”
That became the next question: Would Reagan tap Bush to round out his ticket?