REAGAN-BUSH COASTED TO AN EASY victory in November, taking nearly 51 percent of the vote to Carter-Mondale’s 41 percent, with John Anderson, running as an Independent, yielding just shy of 7 percent. Any hopes Jimmy Carter had to retain the White House had largely dissipated seven months earlier, on April 24, with his failed mission to rescue the fifty-two American hostages who had been held captive in Iran since the fall of 1979 when Iranian revolutionary “students” stormed the U.S. embassy. The aborted offensive, seen by many as a metaphor for Carter’s well-intentioned but luckless administration, ended in tragedy as a helicopter exploded when it hit a transport plane, resulting in the deaths of eight American troops. Reagan offered a marked alternative. In contrast with the malaise of the Carter administration, he radiated the promise that America’s best days were ahead; with his victory, the electorate turned the page to a decidedly new chapter, one they hoped would be as sanguine and sunny as the messenger’s twinkly eyed disposition.
Preparing for their own next chapter, George and Barbara sold their Houston home for $843,273, rented a suite at the Houstonian Hotel, and moved into the official vice president’s residence, the rambling three-story, 9,150-square-foot white brick home on the grounds of the Naval Observatory less than a quarter mile from the White House. Walter Mondale was the first vice president to call the mansion home, which had been designated for the vice president a few years earlier, though Mondale’s predecessor, Nelson Rockefeller, in keeping with all that his last name implied, chose instead to live in his own much larger Washington mansion.
Any lingering animosity between Reagan and Bush had long melted away on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1981. Bush wasn’t one to look back and harbor grudges, nor was Reagan, who appreciated that Bush had held to his pledge to “work, work, work” for him during the campaign. The new administration began serendipitously with the release of American hostages who boarded a plane that left Iranian air space during Reagan’s inauguration address, the fruition of a sleepless negotiation by Carter in the waning hours of his presidency, but a symbol of the new beginning as America and its new president looked forward.
Reagan’s propensity for forgiveness extended not only to Bush but also to his campaign manager, Jim Baker, as well. Impressed by Baker’s performance, Reagan tapped him to be his chief of staff. Baker would prove himself an adept administrator. Along with deputy chief of staff, Mike Deaver, and counselor to the president, Ed Meese, holdovers from Reagan’s gubernatorial days, he rounded out the “troika” that would become instrumental in the smooth running and overall effectiveness of Reagan’s first term in the White House, keeping a spit shine on Reagan’s favorable public image. Baker and Bush occupied neighboring offices in the West Wing, steps away from the Oval Office. “I know I satisfied the Reagans that I was totally loyal to them,” Baker said, “and yet I was in a position to see that the vice president was included in meetings.”
Bush’s instinctive loyalty flowed naturally to Reagan, who, after all, had rescued him from political obscurity and with whom Bush now marched in lockstep. In a 1982 press conference, Bush went as far as to deny that he had ever called Reagan’s economic policy “voodoo economics” during the campaign, challenging the media to find evidence. (NBC News did, subsequently airing a clip of Bush making the accusation at an April 1980 campaign stop at Carnegie Mellon University.)
Two Texans had held the vice presidency within a half century of Bush taking the office, and both had earthily expressed their disdain for the office. Franklin Roosevelt’s first VP, John Nance Garner, famously likened the office to “a warm bucket of piss,” while Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s number two, compared it to being “a stuck pig at a screwing match.” It was better for Bush, thanks in part to Carter. Intent on strengthening the VP role, Carter had met regularly with Walter Mondale, including weekly one-on-one lunches. Reagan continued the practice with Bush. Every Thursday the two were in town, they met for Mexican fare in Reagan’s private West Wing dining room, where Bush had the president’s ear and Reagan was able to talk freely. As Bush said later, “Presidents don’t get to do that very much.” Reagan appreciated his vice president’s ability to keep their conversations in confidence. “He would be forceful with Ronald Reagan, but not in front of a whole bunch of people trying to grandstand,” George W. said of his father, whom he would emulate when acting as his father’s adviser during the elder Bush’s presidential run in 1988. “Reagan expected Bush to be a younger Nelson Rockefeller, and Bush thought Reagan would be a better dressed, better stated John Bircher,” said Chase Untermeyer, Bush’s executive assistant. “But they were naturally bound to be friends based on their humanity and the value they placed on good relations.”
To be sure, there were personal as well as political differences between Bush and Reagan. Bush’s Waspy northeastern background contrasted sharply with that of Reagan, the Irish son of Jack Reagan, an alcoholic shoe salesman whose peripatetic career took the Reagan family of four from town to town across Illinois just ahead of his sagging reputation. Bush revered his own father, the sterling character of whom made him his role model. Jack Reagan, on the other hand, was hardly an exemplar of moral rectitude. Ronald Reagan, in a rare moment of emotional openness, recalled as an eleven-year-old boy discovering his father flat on his back from a whiskey binge, “dead to the world” on the snowy front porch of their home where he managed, reluctantly, to drag him out of the wrath of winter, inside and into bed. While George H. W. Bush was the same kind of hero to his children that his father had been to him, Reagan maintained a distant relationship with his own children, two from his first marriage to actress Jane Wyman and two from his marriage to Nancy, his closest confidante and chief protector, whom he married in 1952. When Reagan expressed envy for Bush’s close family and gaggle of grandchildren, Bush gently reminded him that he had grandchildren of his own. But the pair found common ground and developed a warm camaraderie. “There was no doubt who was the senior partner in our relationship,” George said, “but our trust and friendship had grown with each passing day.”
Bush actually liked being vice president. “I guess every Vice President had to endure the annual rounds of ‘whatever happened to VP ______ stories,’” he wrote Nixon. “They don’t bother me a bit. I like my job. I have plenty to do, and I believe I can be helpful to the President. So what else is there?” Actually, there was something else—something big. Bush bargained on the vice presidency offering a launching pad for the Oval Office after Reagan’s turn, which alone may have been enough for Bush to withstand the inherent indignities of the job.
His ascent to the presidency nearly happened accidentally. Just seventy days into Reagan’s administration, on March 30, Reagan made a speech to the Construction Trades Council at the Hilton Hotel, a mile and a half from the White House. As Reagan left the hotel through a side entrance at 2:27 p.m., raising his right arm to acknowledge a small crowd, he heard what sounded like “a small fluttering sound—pop, pop, pop.” It was followed by a Secret Service agent pouncing on him and thrusting him into an awaiting limousine, which at the Secret Service’s direction sped to George Washington University Hospital, not the White House, when blood began flowing from Reagan’s mouth. Reagan thought the “excruciating pain” he felt was a broken rib, the result of the agent’s force against him. He would discover later that one of three .22-caliber bullets from the gun of John Hinckley Jr., a deranged twenty-five-year-old from Colorado, had struck him in the chest—less than an inch from his heart. The decision to take the president immediately to the hospital likely saved his life. Reagan’s press secretary (Jim Brady), a Secret Service agent, and a police officer were also hit in Hinckley’s assault.
Bush was at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, on board Air Force Two awaiting a short hop to Austin, when he was alerted to the news of the shooting at 1:43 p.m. central time. The details were blurred. Initial reports from Washington indicated that Reagan was unharmed. Bush awaited direction and further details from the White House as he watched news coverage on a small color television set in Air Force Two’s sixteen-square-foot stateroom, whose walls resounded with history; it was the same room in which Lyndon Johnson had taken the presidential oath of office on a runway at Dallas’s Love Field after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, when the 707 aircraft served as Air Force One. Given the plane’s nonsecure phone lines, Bush learned through a telex from Secretary of State Alexander Haig that Reagan had been struck in the back and was in serious condition. “Recommend that you return to D.C. at the earliest possible moment,” Haig wrote. After a necessary stop for refueling in Austin, Air Force Two bound for Washington.
While Bush was airborne, Haig, a former four-star general who had been the second highest ranking officer in the army, asserted command in the White House Situation Room before bursting in on a press conference about the president’s condition. Asked by a member of the press corps who was making decisions for the government, Haig replied erroneously, “Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state. I am in control here at the White House, pending the return of the vice president.”
Bush was conspicuously less zealous during the crisis. Upon his arrival back in Washington at 6:30 p.m. eastern time, he struck the right balance of urgency and understatement, rejecting a proposed plan for him to fly directly to the White House via Marine Two, the vice presidential helicopter. “Something about it didn’t sit well with me,” he wrote later. “It may well have made for great TV, but I thought it sent the wrong message to the nation and the world.” As he explained to a military aide, “Only the president lands on South Lawn.” Instead, he was transported by helicopter to his residence at the Naval Observatory, then by motorcade to the White House. There he entered “with perfect equanimity,” recalled a White House aide, and confidently assumed the head of the table in the Situation Room. After reading a short statement to the press, he adjourned to his office, called members of the congressional leadership, and met with the wives of the police officer and the Secret Service agent who had been shot. Before leaving for the evening, he visited a shaken Nancy Reagan, whom he described to an aide as “tiny and afraid.” Reagan recovered slowly, returning to the White House on April 11, but the attempt on his life was far more serious than the public realized.
The vice president won plaudits for his cool-headed restraint during the crisis, as well as respect among Reagan acolytes in the West Wing. The president did better, achieving hero status nearly overnight. He had faced the attempt on his life with cinematic stoicism and aplomb, walking into the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital before collapsing, and tossing off one-liners embossed immediately on the Reagan legend. When Nancy Reagan rushed to him at the hospital, he greeted her with a borrowed line from the boxer Jack Dempsey, who, after taking a pounding from rival Gene Tunney, remarked to his own wife, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” When a medical team prepared the president for emergency surgery, he quipped, “I hope you’re all Republicans,” and asked by a nurse afterward how he was doing, he replied with a quote from W. C. Fields: “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” How could you not like the guy?
It translated into legislative advantage for Reagan, whose political capital surged as his approval numbers, which reached a high of 68 in May, soared. Even the canny Tip O’Neill, presiding over a majority of Democrats in the House, knew he was beat. Congress, he said, would go with the will of the people, and “the will of the people will go along with President Reagan.” The White House sped Reagan’s conservative agenda through Congress, including a 25 percent across-the-board tax cut over three years and sharp increases in defense spending, which would swell by 35 percent throughout the course of his presidency.
There were setbacks. In 1982, the budget deficit surged to $110.7 billion despite Reagan’s pledge to reduce federal spending, as the economy fell to its lowest levels since the Great Depression, with unemployment rising into double digits. Reagan’s poll numbers plunged to 35 percent in 1983. The same year the country lost a barracks of 241 marines on a peacekeeping tour of duty in Beirut, Lebanon, to a bombing traced to Hezbollah, a militant Islamic terrorist group, prompting a change in Reagan’s Middle East policy. But as the presidential election year of 1984 approached, beckoning Reagan’s reelection, the economy righted itself enough that Reagan once again rode high.