THE DEMOCRATIC RACE WAS NOT as conclusive. Super Tuesday had come and gone with no clear winner or standout in a field that included Michael Dukakis, Missouri congressman Richard Gephardt, U.S. senator from Tennessee and congressional legacy Al Gore, and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who had never held elective office. In a game of inches, Dukakis broke out of the pack a month later, in mid-April, with a clear primary victory in New York and the mother lode of delegates that came with it.
Exuding competence if not charisma, the fifty-five-year-old Massachusetts governor had presided over the “Massachusetts Miracle,” an economic turnaround that brought the Bay State back from the economic gloom of the 1970s. Dukakis boasted of 800,000 new jobs in his state in a dozen years and a negligible unemployment rate of just under 3 percent—imagine, he suggested, what he could do for America. It was enough to intrigue voters, who gave Dukakis a thirteen-point lead over Bush in the polls by late May—a gap that owed as much to negative impressions of Bush and a waning confidence in the country’s economic future as it did to favorable views of Dukakis. As a Dukakis strategist put it, “They are losing the election at this point; we’re not winning it.”
Bush’s bare-knuckled toughness in the primaries continued as his campaign shifted to the general election. “What’s fourteen inches long and swings in front of an asshole?” Bush joked privately to his inner circle, answering, “Dukakis’s tie.” Meanwhile, publicly he hammered away at his opponent’s liberalism, such as his veto of a bill that mandated the Pledge of Allegiance in Massachusetts’s public schools and his sanction of a program allowing for weekend furloughs for imprisoned felons, including those who had been sentenced for murder. “Let ’em stay where they belong,” he declared at a rally. It was a theme he would come back to with great effect.
The Democrats struck back at their national convention in Atlanta in mid-July. Dukakis sailed into the convention with a credibility boost after announcing his choice as running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, the smooth, probusiness conservative senator from Texas, who had defeated Bush for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1970. Harkening back to the John F. Kennedy–Lyndon Johnson Democratic ticket of 1960, which boasted a Boston-to-Austin regional alliance, the selection of Bentsen provided geographic and ideological balance to Dukakis’s ticket while lending it an air of gravitas and establishment credibility.
Ann Richards, the quick-witted, silver-coifed treasurer of Texas, offered a pithy keynote address. “After listening to George Bush all of these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like,” she drawled to the party faithful. “Poor George, he can’t help himself. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” The zinger scored, launching Richards into the national spotlight and poising her for a successful bid for Texas governor two years later. The only hiccup came when the forty-one-year-old governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, angling for his own shot at national attention, gave a rambling, uninspired thirty-three-minute policy speech—over twice the expected length—before endorsing Dukakis, which provoked boos and sparked rousing applause only when he spoke the words “In conclusion . . .” Otherwise, the Democrats staged a polished convention resulting in a bounce in the polls for the party’s ticket cresting at seventeen points. The Dukakis campaign left the convention, as the party’s presidential nominee put it, “with the wind at our backs.” But as the Washington Post warned in an article recapping the triumphant proceedings, “Dukakis, a native of often stormy New England, knows that the wind can shift abruptly.”
George H. W. Bush, another New England native, knew it, too. His turn came a month later as the GOP convened in New Orleans on August 15, braving the sultry summer heat to crown him as its standard-bearer. The vice president arrived in Louisiana with much speculation as to whom he would choose as his own number two. A number of names were floated, including former opponents Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, both logical picks to satisfy the party’s skeptical conservative wing. Other names had been considered, as well. Donald Trump, the self-promoting, braggadocious New York real estate mogul and author of the 1987 bestselling book The Art of the Deal, made unsolicited overtures to the Bush camp to suggest that he was available to be Bush’s running mate. Intrigued by Trump’s unconventionality, Lee Atwater entertained the notion, going so far as to have a phone conversation with Trump; Bush, when presented with the option, summarily rejected it for the same reason.
Acting alone without consulting any member of his family or inner circle, Bush went a different and unexpected direction. His choice was Dan Quayle, the attractive forty-one-year-old conservative junior senator from Indiana who had won the seat eight years earlier, riding the momentum of the Reagan-Bush landslide in 1980 with an impressive win over respected veteran Democrat Birch Bayh. Quayle, Bush reasoned, brought youth to the ticket—ushering the baby boomer generation into national politics, which had been dominated by the World War II generation since the “torch” had been passed from Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy nearly three decades earlier.
Sensitive to how the suspense of his VP pick might be “degrading” to those on the short list—just as he had been earlier in his career—Bush decided to announce his decision at a scheduled rally at New Orleans’s Spanish Plaza on the banks of the Mississippi River, after a cruise on a riverboat.
Effusive and overeager, Quayle giddily bounded on stage radiating a less-than-ready-for-prime-time impression. He grabbed Bush by the shoulders and punched him on the arm as he exclaimed to the crowd, “Let’s go get ’em. All right? You got it?” The press’s reaction was tepid. The Los Angeles Times wrote, “In naming the staunchly conservative Quayle, scion of a rich and powerful family in a traditionally Republican state, Bush passed over a flock of better-known contenders who might have provided the ticket with greater experience, broader credentials and perhaps more political clout.” Alluding to the popular beer, critics soon dubbed the ticket Bush-Lite.
While Quayle had been unprepared for his national debut—Baker had called Quayle with the news only ninety minutes earlier, after which Bush called Quayle personally—so was the Bush advance team, which hadn’t planned effectively for Quayle’s appearance at the densely packed rally in Spanish Plaza. When no advance men found them, Quayle and his wife, Marilyn, tried to work their way to the stage through the crowd, successful only after the Secret Service steered them through the chaos.
Controversy came almost immediately after Quayle’s announcement when questions about his military service arose. Had he dodged the draft, as some had speculated, or had he fulfilled his military obligation by serving in the National Guard? A crisis was averted when it was revealed that Quayle had fulfilled his military commitment through service in the National Guard, but likely as a means of preempting deployment to Vietnam. George W., in defending Quayle’s service—and perhaps his own—told the Associated Press, “The thing that’s important is he didn’t go to Canada. Remember, Canada was an option. Let’s keep it in generational perspective.” Still, Quayle’s shakiness amid media scrutiny reinforced the impression of him as being callow and out of his depth. Behind the scenes, George W. believed swapping out Quayle for another running mate could invigorate the campaign, going so far as to briefly mount an effort to dump him from the ticket. He aborted it as his father made it clear that he was sticking with him. “Quayle was a generational statement,” George W. conceded in 1990, “a statement that said, ‘I’m willing to reach into our [baby boomer] generation, I’m not afraid.’ It didn’t work.”
A wave of nostalgia swept over the convention, which marked a curtain call for Ronald Reagan, who despite the doldrums of Iran-Contra and a daunting federal deficit, would see his approval rating climb to 63 percent by the end of his term. Through his enduring faith in America, “a shining city on a hill,” as he called it, Reagan had restored American pride in the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, and the disquiet of the Carter years. After establishing a warm but firm relationship with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev—and abandoning the appeasement strategies of earlier administrations—he negotiated an arms-control agreement dismantling all Soviet and American short- and medium-range nuclear missiles. The Cold War, which had defined world geopolitics since the end of World War II, was in its waning days, with the Soviet Union, in financial distress, nearing collapse and the liberation of the Eastern Bloc countries not far behind. As he addressed his party for the last time as president, he gave his vice president a directive: “George, go out and win one for the Gipper.”
Bush used his own address to tread a delicate balance between praising Reagan, who had delivered peace and prosperity—themes he emphasized in his own campaign—and differentiating himself from him. Bush had learned much from the boss “about decency and honor and kindness, and those broad values.” But there was a perhaps unintended callousness to the unbridled capitalism Reagan espoused. Eight years earlier, he told Americans, “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” His rhetoric, often angry and indignant, appealed to a nation that had seen the economy and its place in the world soften and slip. Bush’s vision for America, while nebulous in many respects, was rooted in community and compassion. “I don’t hate government,” he declared. “A government that remembers that the people are its master is a good and needed thing . . . [W]here is it written that we must act as if we do not care, as if we are not moved? Well, I am moved. I want a kinder and gentler nation.”
At the same time, he offered red meat to the party’s right wing by standing firm on taxes. Three years earlier, Reagan had scored big by co-opting a line from a Clint Eastwood “Dirty Harry” movie when lawmakers proposed a tax hike, challenging them by threatening, “Go ahead. Make my day.” Bush drew on the same kind of pithy glibness. “The congress will push me to raise taxes and I’ll say, ‘No,’” he said. “And they’ll push again and I’ll say to them, ‘Read my lips: No new taxes!’” The line stirred a din of applause, but it would prove a fateful pledge that helped boost his candidacy but sink his presidency.
Putting his natural humility and his mother’s admonishments to guard against self-aggrandizement at bay, Bush also seized the chance to define himself to a nation that, in spite of his seven and a half years as vice president, had yet to fully understand or appreciate him. He talked of his life as a series of missions, like the one he embarked on in World War II, nearly two generations earlier. He had seen over the course of his years working with Reagan the issues that come across “that big desk.” Who should be sitting there for the next four years, he asked. “My friend,” he said confidently, “I am that man.”
I say it without boast or bravado. I’ve fought for my country, I’ve served, I’ve built, and I’ll go from the hills to the hollows, from the cities to the suburbs to the loneliest town on the quietest street to take our message of hope and growth for every American to every American. I will keep America moving forward, always forward—for a better America, for an endless, enduring dream and a thousand points of light.
This is my mission, and I will complete it.
It was the most revealing, most inspiring speech of Bush’s political life. Afterward, as the convention disbanded, a CBS poll showed Bush-Quayle up six points over Dukakis-Bentsen. The political winds had shifted.
Still, the Bush camp and the Republican Party took nothing for granted, relentlessly depicting Dukakis as a liberal out of touch with mainstream American sensibilities, evidenced by his status as a “card carrying member” of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and a foreign-policy neophyte. Taking aim at Dukakis’s weak stance on crime, an independent group, Americans for Bush, ran a series of three television ads beginning in early September that highlighted the story of Willie Horton, an African American convicted murderer, who had raped a white woman and assaulted her white fiancé in the course of a weekend furlough from prison. While none of the spots featured Horton’s image, and they ran on a limited basis for a period of twenty-eight days, the campaign garnered national media attention—“earned media,” it would later be dubbed—that called out its racial overtones while giving it far greater exposure.
The fall saw a series of three debates; two between the presidential nominees and one between their running mates. The latter came on October 5, when Quayle squared off against Bentsen in a one-sided contest that compounded Quayle’s woes. When Quayle, combating perceptions that he was callow, likened his experience to that of John F. Kennedy when he ran for president, Bentsen—anticipating Quayle’s claim, which he had made on the campaign trail—won the contest with a single knockout blow: “Senator,” Bentsen replied, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
The first presidential debate, on September 25, was largely anticlimactic. Bush mostly played it safe, avoiding long answers and specificity that might arouse controversy. A Saturday Night Live skit mocking the debate had Dana Carvey as Bush, responding to a question about how he would achieve a “kinder, gentler nation,” running out the clock by reiterating a stream of pat campaign phrases. When told he had additional time to offer a more fulsome response, Carvey redundantly replied, “Let me sum up: [Keep] on track. Stay the course. Thousand points of light.”
When asked for a rebuttal, Jon Lovitz, playing Dukakis, deadpanned, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
Prior to the debate, Dukakis provided his own caricature. In mid-September, as part of an effort to show himself as tough on defense and a worthy commander in chief, Dukakis made the mistake of riding in a sixty-eight-ton battle tank during a visit to a General Dynamics facility in Michigan. Outfitted in an army helmet with his name on it—and defying an inviolable politician’s rule of not putting anything on your head, which has stood since Calvin Coolidge’s unintendedly comical 1927 photo op in an oversized American Indian headdress—the scene instead made Dukakis look like an exuberant child playing army.
Another costly blunder came in the second Bush-Dukakis debate, on October 13, when Dukakis was asked if he would reconsider his position against the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, had been raped and murdered; Dukakis offered a reasonable though passionless response that reinforced perceptions of him as a robotic technocrat. A political cartoon the following day had Bentsen whispering in Dukakis’s ear, “Frankly, governor, you’re no Jack Kennedy either.” The public agreed. The situation the candidates had found themselves in in the late spring had reversed: It wasn’t so much that Bush was winning but that Dukakis was losing.
The polls pointed to a Bush-Quayle victory when George and Barbara Bush, after campaigning till the final hours, arrived in Houston on Air Force Two on Monday, November 7, the day before Election Day, where they were met on the tarmac by George W. and Laura. George W. had spent much of the summer and fall on the road, traveling, often alone, to “backwater towns” promoting his father’s cause—Bakersfield, California; Marion, Ohio; Texarkana, Texas. “Off markets,” where his presence would generate big crowds as “the closest thing they’d ever come to a presidential candidate,” and local media would offer a bigger bang for the buck. In doing so, he saw his importance as his father’s surrogate. “People are really looking at offspring to find out, ‘What are this guy’s kids like, because I may see something in the man through his children,’” he said. Now, with the campaign in its last hours, he was back in Texas to greet his parents after completing his own mission.
The journey had bound the two men closer as comrades in arms, slogging toward the same goal. George W. got to know his father as a “warrior” with whom he was hunkered down “in the trenches during a tough political fight.” His father saw it the same way. “It was a wonderful experience for both of us. He was very helpful to me,” George observed, “and I think it toughened him for the real world.” It was a telling turn of phrase; George W. had been in “the real world” for some time. He was a husband and father, had held a series of jobs, made a respectable run for Congress, and launched, run, and sold his own business. The “real world” to George H. W. Bush, in other words, was politics at the highest level. In this way, George W.’s involvement in his father’s 1988 presidential campaign was an apprenticeship. “[Junior] was the first and last word on the toughest issues and not only because he was his son,” said Mary Matalin of him, “[but] because he always had great judgment, and the daddy always [had] unconditional love for all of his kids.”
George’s unconditional love was never in doubt. But his respect for his son’s instinctive political ability grew during the experience, just as it boosted George W.’s self-confidence as well as his place within the family. “If there was competition with his father,” Laura said of her husband, “it was certainly gone by 1988. He had an opportunity most people never have—to work with his parent as adult to adult. They had time to work through any competition.” Invoking the classic film The Godfather—which features a Mafia don’s sons, the hotheaded Sonny Corleone and his cunning younger brother, Michael, who eventually emerges to lead the family to new heights of power—Joe O’Neill said, “George went up [to Washington] as Sonny Corleone and came back as Michael.” The experience reignited his own political ambitions far beyond the seat in Congress he sought a decade earlier, especially as he looked toward his return to Texas and the future it might hold. But those were thoughts for another day. This was George H. W. Bush’s time, as the results on Election Day made clear.
The Bushes, their children, and grandchildren, convened at the elder Bushes’ suite at the Houstonian where they watched the returns yield 53 percent of the popular vote for their family’s patriarch versus Dukakis’s 45 percent. At 11:00 p.m., after the polls closed on the West Coast, Dukakis called Bush to concede defeat. The following morning, at 7:45 a.m., the family attended a service at Houston’s Saint Martin’s Episcopal Church, where George W., the family’s “go-to prayer guy” since his religious embrace two years earlier, was asked to offer an invocation. “Many of us will begin a new challenge,” he intoned.
Please give us strength to endure and the knowledge necessary to place our fellow man over self . . .
We pray that as we face new challenges, we understand that through you we can clear our minds and seek wisdom . . .
Please guide us and guard us on our journey, particularly watch over Dad and Mother.
Afterward, the president-elect, Barbara, George W., Laura, and Barbara and Jenna boarded Air Force One to return to Washington. If Barbara Bush had any glamorous illusions about her new station as first lady in waiting, they dissipated when she rolled up her sleeves to remove wads of toilet paper her seven-year-old twin grandchildren had mischievously jammed into one of the plane’s toilets.
Once back in Washington, George W. once again rolled up his own sleeves to aid his father in the transition to the White House. The loyalty enforcer in the campaign, he now headed up “Scrub Team,” a secret group of Bush insiders who determined which members of the campaign staff would be offered positions in the White House based on their competence and the allegiance they showed George H. W. Bush. As his father prepared for a move to the White House, George W. wound down his time in Washington. A few days after his father’s election win, he and Laura closed on a home in Dallas’s manicured Preston Hollow neighborhood, north of the city among many of Texas’s most famous sons. There, in Texas’s most moneyed city, George W. would begin a next chapter of his own.