For Bush, John Connally’s humiliation was almost as delicious as had he won the GOP nomination itself. He felt that Connally’s machine had resuscitated Lloyd Bentsen’s comeback in the 1970 U.S. Senate race. Moreover, Bush knew that the native Texan thought him somehow effete, despite Poppy’s remarkable record of heroism and success. He would have recoiled at Connally’s Weltanschauung: “You are judged in Washington,” snarled JBC, “by the enemies you destroy.” I had not known of the bile—“dislike” hardly describes it—between the candidates when I began to write for Connally. Gradually, I became aware as the two staffs drank each Friday night at the Alexandria, Virginia, bar Chadwicks. Each partied in a separate corner of the second floor, my few meetings with the Bush staff pleasant. It seemed mostly Texan and northeastern, heavily Ivy League, largely upper class and prep school. Connally’s staff was overwhelmingly Lone Star, also upper class, largely University of Texas, and more conservative than Bush’s. I was one of few New Yorkers— and likely the only person ever to have written for Connally and Bush.
Michael Kramer of New York magazine was with Bush in his hotel the night of the January 21, 1980, Iowa caucus, when Connally, conceding, came on the screen. Bush reached out as though to shake his hand through the screen. “Thank you, sir, for all the kind things you and your friends have been saying about me,” Poppy said, then raised his hand, slammed it on top of the set, and said, “That prick!” Dorothy Bush must have forgiven her son’s lapse, this once.
Announcing in November 1979, Reagan intended to spend most of his time in New Hampshire before its February 26 primary. Like Carter in 1976, Bush applied retail politics to virtually every Iowa cattle call and caucus, aware that the Gipper was the default GOP incumbent, having almost upset a sitting president four years earlier. Bush sent a million pieces of mail to party members across Iowa a week before its caucuses. The outcome stunned his principal rival, almost a native son since his 1930s suzerainty as WHO play-by-play man Dutch Reagan: Bush, 31.25 percent; the Gipper, 29.4 percent; balance, other candidates. Later Reagan thanked Iowans for a needed “kick in the pants,” the caucuses briefly crowning a new front-runner.
Certainly the victor thought so, claiming momentum—“The Big Mo,” he exulted, joining “deep doo-doo” in classic Bushspeak— preppyisms likely to limit the GOP’s working-class appeal. Reagan, who would swell it, began for the first time to engage his future running mate. Still, many doubted if Dutch, at sixty-nine, was still Tom Mix by way of Jimmy Stewart. The answer came in Nashua, New Hampshire, at a February 23 debate the Nashua Telegraph had offered to sponsor between Bush and Reagan. Accepting, “we [then] worried that it might violate electoral relations,” said a Reagan aide, “so we offered to fund the event with our money” and invited the other four candidates to participate.
When Bush arrived at the debate, he learned for the first time of the new six-man format. Feeling sandbagged, he understandably refused to compete, causing an impasse on the stage. “He’d been given the shortest of notice,” said then–Newsweek White House correspondent Tom DeFrank. “It’s also true that Reagan had a firm percent of the vote. With two guys debating, Bush would inherit the anti-Reagan vote, probably winning. With six, it would split.” Reagan tried to explain the decision, prompting Telegraph editor Jon Breen to tell the sound man to mute his microphone, at which point Reagan steamed, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green [sic]!”— perhaps subconsciously, one actor aiding another, Reagan borrowing the line from Spencer Tracy’s film The State of the Union.
What a sight! Reagan, visibly furious, his phrase the most quotable quote in GOP primary history. The other candidates, offstage, having reluctantly agreed to the original two-man debate. The event continuing, uneventful and unnecessary. Leaving, Bush aides saw the parking lot littered with “Bush for President” badges. Trailing in the polls before Mr. Breen cut the Gipper’s mike, Dutch romped next week, 50–23 percent. A quarter century later, his future close friend laughed at the memory. “Reagan had left Iowa before election night and paid big-time for it,” Bush said. “He always learned from his mistakes. In New Hampshire he kept stumping there until the polls were closed.”
We also recall the about to be ex-front-runner sitting, awkwardly, as Reagan took over: Bush did not know how to seize the moment (the actor did, brimming with self-confidence), having been taught as a child to defer, not dominate (usually a good thing, not here). Bush soldiered on without “the Big Mo,” winning primaries in Puerto Rico, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, and Michigan, his vote affluent and moderate-liberal, where Reagan, heading the ticket, would arguably be weak. “Why doesn’t he get out of the race?” Nancy Reagan objected that spring as Bush lost one race after another. He did, May 26.
Reagan used a standard line when asked if he was nervous about an event: “I was on the screen with Errol Flynn” in 1940’s Sante Fe Trail. The message was that he’d already been in the big leagues; one in two Americans at that time saw at least one film a week. The famed actor impressed the Gipper. At first Bush did not. Franklin Roosevelt said that wishful thinking could not rewrite history. To Reagan, Poppy’s first role had been the Nashua fiasco. “Just melted under pressure,” said the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee. In May 1980 Bush called Reagan’s supply-side stratagem “voo-doo economics.” Neither increased the possibility that Reagan would make Bush veep. Aware of his largely self-made fix, Bush sold his house in Houston and bought his grandfather’s estate at Walker’s Point. To many, it seemed that the Connecticut Yankee was giving up on politics.
Every politician needs a base—his home. Which was Poppy’s? In 1988 he told David Frost, “Texas is our home, and this [Walker’s Point] is idyllic for a family to come home to. I lived there [Texas] since 1948, voted in every major election since ’48 down there, and it’s where I made my living. It’s where most of our kids were born.” Still, his mother, “the spiritual leader of our family,” lived in a bungalow on Walker’s Point. Their Maine home was “our anchor to windward in the summertime. Our kids live in five different states . . . and they come home here. We had twenty-two people in this house a few weeks ago. It was wonderful.” The estate and home had been bought and built, respectively, in the early twentieth century by George Herbert Walker. Later the future “Summer White House” passed to Poppy’s parents. What was home? There was no simple answer: no Lincoln bidding farewell at the Great Western Railway Station; no Johnson on a horse at the LBJ Ranch; no JFK as Hyannis Port’s Young Man and the Sea.
Lance Morrow wrote the same of Bush, politically. “He sometimes seems to have misplaced America, and to be intently seeking it,” Morrow observed in the 1980s. “Or perhaps fleeing it. Bush used to be a moderate Republican. Now, inheriting the Reagan legacy, he is constrained to run as a right-winger. Bush went from patrician Connecticut to the Texas oil fields as a young man . . . from one identity to another, from one appointive office to another, and these transitions seem at least to add up to a sense of permanent motion and quest, or search for something that is finally his own.” The self-styled Mr. Smooth wanted consensus. Growing conservatism wanted its way. Connecticut Yankees were dying—literally. If Poppy was to reemerge to lead the GOP, he would have to turn right.
Before withdrawing as a candidate, Bush was in permanent motion, perhaps seeking his “identity.” After Connally’s losing campaign, so were survivors, his withdrawal robbing them of joy and definition. Casting about, I focused on a periodical that, in memory’s rear-view mirror, embodied what Upton Sinclair once called “standardized as soda crackers.” He meant the Saturday Evening Post—the first magazine that I recall reading and that, having backed Connally, offered me in spring 1980 the post of senior editor and national affairs editor. What I was about to help run now had offices, not in Philadelphia, as I remembered as a boy, but in Indianapolis, Indiana. (In 2013 the Post decided it would rather relocate to Philadelphia and did.)
There was no weekly with a more glorious name than the old Saturday Evening Post, characterized by imagination, great narrative, and a kinship with Middle America. “Through world wars and the Depression,” it said, “the Post informed its readers of global events, entertained them with cliff-hanging stories that ran in serial form, and moved or amused them with evocative, sometimes sentimental, covers.” It began in 1821, evolving from Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. In 1897 Cyrus H. K. Curtis bought the magazine for $1,000. He hired a new editor, George Horace Lorimer, a minister’s son from Boston, and founded the Curtis Publishing Company. For more than half a century, the Post was a weekly grandstand and mirror of a middle-class mentality; it lasted until 1969, when one of its best writers penned a eulogy.
By his count Stewart Alsop had done 126 articles and 147 columns for the periodical—about 750,000 words. Now twenty-five years after his first article—“a look at Harold Stassen’s chances of being President, which I concluded were excellent”—he wrote of the magazine’s love of words and editors “[who] considered a writer’s style and political views his business, as long as he was accurate and readable.” Generations of Americans displayed the Post in their waiting rooms or bought it at the corner drugstore or trekked each Thursday to their mailbox—as esteemed as Life, less dull than Reader’s Digest, and more small-town than Look. The bylines of Paul Gallico and Ellery Queen; diaries of Alexander Botts and Scattergood Baines; Pete Martin’s gossip profiles, breathlessly intoning Hollywood; and an artist whose work became the Post reflected the America of their time.
At seven I traced the covers of the illustrator Norman Rockwell, who painted, among a swarm of other things, the politicians of each season—in mine, JFK, Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller, Ike with his pitching iron. His Post seemed impervious. What killed it—also, the magazine’s treatment of politics, humor, and fiction—was an aging readership, slack advertising and circulation, and cultural disarray. Newsweek wrote, “More and more, Rockwell’s America wasn’t there anymore”—bound inextricably with the Great God Television. By its last weekly writhing, the Post had lost $62 million since a 1962 move from Philadelphia to New York—apparent proof of the general interest magazine’s demise. Next year, 1970, Indiana businessman Beurt SerVaas bought the Curtis empire and became president. The Post relocated to Indianapolis, reemerged as a one-dollar-a-copy newsstand quarterly, and recycled golden oldies from Tugboat Annie to Ted Key cartoons, the old “gray narrative illustrations,” custom headline type once used by the magazine, and Rockwell, puffing his pipe and preparing to paint a Post delivery boy on its initial cover.
The Post’s first two issues sold out their 500,000-copy press run. It became quarterly in 1971, turned to ten and now six issues a year, and temporarily revived the general-interest genre—a triumph for SerVaas and wife Cory, Post editor and publisher. Both hired me to succeed—no one could, or has, replaced—the glorious Ben Hibbs, Post editor from 1942 to 1961; later, William Emerson and Otto Fried-rich; and 1970s former Esquire managing editor Fred Birmingham. A typical issue tied fiction, “Post People,” medicine, entertainment, a tale about John Wayne sculpture, and right-center politics. Any GOP nominee would find a friend.
I enjoyed the creative cycle of building a magazine, each issue bred from scratch: story, photo, caption, theme. In two years we wrote cover stories about “Ronald Reagan’s Greatest Role,” the 1981 presidential inaugural, Robert Redford, and the Muppets; penned fiction and nonfiction book reviews; won a national cover award by putting the film star dog Benji in a barber chair, wrapping him in a towel, and simulating a haircut; and grasped why Wright Morris wrote of Rockwell, “His special triumph is in the conviction his countrymen share that the mythical world he evokes exists.”
Dutch Reagan could evoke it too, especially after being sworn in as president on January 20, 1981. As our narrative will show, Bush, having almost left politics, took the oath that day as vice president. Looking back, the office’s criteria seemed so tailored to Poppy—discretion, hard work, intelligence, loyalty—that he wore it like a Savile Row suit.
As president, Reagan would quote the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, often using them to twit his age, sixty-nine when inaugurated—“I know that’s true because Jefferson told me.” Bush’s frame of reference differed. “I’d rather quote Yogi Berra than Thomas Jefferson,” he said in our first meeting. His favorite Berraisms included “It’s always dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future.” At July 1980’s GOP Convention in Detroit, Bush apparently had little chance of being Reagan’s vice presidential nominee. Nashua stung. Bush had shown finite appeal beyond the eighteenth hole. Nancy Reagan was still miffed that he hadn’t dropped out earlier.
After the 1980 primaries, Jimmy Carter led Reagan and independent candidate John Anderson in the Gallup Poll, 39, 32, and 21 percent, respectively. Tellingly, though, six in ten were upset by the incumbent’s “handling of the Presidency.” Before the Republican Convention, the Georgian launched a TV attack blitz, dubbing the Gipper a lightweight right-wing warmonger. Henry Kissinger, hoping to (a) unify the GOP and (b) become secretary of state to a record third U.S. president, urged that (c) Ford become Reagan’s vice president, at which time the thirty-eighth president warmed to the idea if (d) he could play “a meaningful role.” Word of a “dream ticket” made the quadrennial event, held in Ford’s home state, go bonkers.
On the convention’s opening night, Ford traveled to the CBS TV booth, where the august Walter Cronkite held forth. America’s “most trusted man” got the Accidental President to describe the parameters of his possible vice presidency, including the term “co-presidency.” Watching, Bush reasonably assumed that Ford would not talk so brazenly unless Reagan had approved a pact, not knowing that the Gipper too was shocked. Reagan pollster Richard Wirthlin said the candidate literally jumped off the couch. “Did you hear what he said about his role?” Reagan said. “Sounds like he wants to be a co-president.”
After the Cronkite telecast, Reagan summoned Ford to his hotel suite, where they met alone. Ten minutes later each emerged to say that the “dream ticket” had been scrubbed. Berra once said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Reagan was about to take a road he perhaps had not intended. “The answer is no,” the Gipper told his staff. “He [Ford] didn’t think it was right for him or me. And now I am inclined to agree.”
Reagan had been an eight-term president of Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild. He was intuitive, incisive, with a gamesman’s gift for timing. With Ford now out, delay about who was in might help Carter paint him as naive. “Reagan picked up the phone,” aide Michael Deaver wrote in his book, Behind the Scenes, “and to the amazement of everyone in the room, said, ‘I’m calling George Bush. I want to get this settled. Anyone have any objections?’”
Reagan grasped the need for the ticket to lure non–true believers. It says much about Bush’s ability to foster trust that Reagan instantly turned to him. No one, including Deaver, objected. The Gipper called Bush, saying that he would like to promptly announce his choice. Bush was delighted—and incredulous. Unintentionally, the Accidental President had made him the Accidental Vice President.
Only Reagan knew for sure if he would have chosen Bush had Ford not guest starred with Uncle Walter. For more than a decade, Bush had eyed the presidency—from before opposing Lloyd Bentsen via the UN to thrice being spurned by Ford to China and the CIA to campaigning more exhaustively in 1979–80 than anyone else in either party—all in vain.
Now, in one moment, Ford had inadvertently propelled Bush to the possibility, as John Nance Garner said, of being “one heartbeat” from the presidency. It all felt unreal—a miracle, looking back. For one who believed in God, as Bush did, immersed since youth, it was hard not to see the work of Providence.
Bush’s new work now began.
In his acceptance speech, the new GOP vice president said, “If anyone wants to know why Ronald Reagan is a winner, you can refer him to me. I am an expert on the subject.” Next day he met a news media that, if not as wholly an appendage of the Democratic Party as today’s, still tried to split the Republican ticket. “I won’t permit myself to get bogged down in trying to find or accentuate—or permit you to make me accentuate—differences that I had with the Governor because they had been minimal,” Bush told reporters.
In the primaries he had clashed with Reagan on foreign policy, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and taxes. En route from Los Angeles to the convention, aide Stuart Spencer heard the Gipper trash Bush’s months-long rebuke of him for ten minutes, then say calmly, suddenly, again the pragmatist, “What’d you think?”—about Bush as vice president. He hadn’t closed the door. Hearing Bush tell the media to forget six degrees of separation between number one and number two, many Reaganauts looked at him anew. By contrast, many pressies would have attributed to Bush T. S. Eliot’s “We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men,” had they known who the poet was. “If I’d been a liberal,” Bush later laughed, “they’ve have praised my fidelity to principle. It’s just the way it is. The media has a double standard.”
Going forward, Reagan-Bush could count on solid GOP support, though the liberal Republican congressman Anderson had become a third-party candidate. Would he hurt Reagan, luring the GOP leftist fringe, or the incumbent, giving the ABC (Anyone But Carter) voters a choice? No one knew. In cold text it was hard on the stump to separate the Republican ticket. Reagan urged a pronounced cut in “big government programs.” Bush vowed a balanced budget within three years, the first time since Nixon’s first year as president. Bush, like Kennedy in the early 1960s, said lower tax rates would mean higher tax revenues—supply side’s core. Reagan said famously that “recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
In August Reagan, touting states’ rights to “help people do . . . as much as they can at the community . . . and the private level,” spoke at the annual Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. Bush defended his own longtime National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) record—and the Gipper’s decency. Carter mocked Reagan for saying that trees caused pollution. He also had a Gallup Convention “bounce”: from sixteen points behind, he leapt to one ahead. Bush, counterpunching, said that Carter’s self-created misery index—the unemployment plus inflation rate, nearing 20 percent—polluted something worse: the economy. The lead bobbed back and forth, like a crew race on Long Island Sound. The debates seemed crucial—the League of Women Voters scheduled three presidential and one vice presidential—except that Anderson’s presence skewered the cards.
Carter would not debate with Anderson. Reagan would not debate without the independent candidate. “He [Carter] couldn’t win a debate,” said the Gipper of himself and Anderson, “if it were held in the Rose Garden before an audience of Administration officials with the questions being asked by [Press Secretary] Jody Powell.” On September 20 Anderson and Reagan met to little polling movement. Carter opposed a three-man duel, fearing that Anderson would take independents unable to back Reagan but unforgiving of Carter’s record. Clock ticking, the first two presidential debates and Bush’s duel with Vice President Walter Mondale were canceled. Finally, conceding Carter’s criteria—“We led him by a point or two,” said pollster Wirthlin, “but were concerned voters scared of Reagan would go back to Carter. We had to show he didn’t have horns”—Reagan okayed an October 28 debate in Cleveland.
Too often debate rewards what doesn’t count—appearance, glibness—and minimizes what does—character, maturity. The presidency and vice presidency need people as deep as a river. Today’s culture spurs many candidates as shallow as a spoon. Carter attacked— “war hawk” and “dangerous right-wing radical”—and revealed how daughter Amy told him the election’s greatest issue—“the control of nuclear arms.” Reagan was devastating in a poised and wistful way. After Carter demagogued Medicaid and Social Security, the Gipper sighed and said, “There you go again.” Closing, Reagan faced the TV screen that had been his home since the 1950s. “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? . . . Is America as respected as it was four years ago?” To ask was to answer.
Reagan won forty-four states to Carter’s six and the District of Columbia, 489 electoral votes to the incumbent’s 49, and 51 percent of the vote to his 41; Anderson’s 6 percent cost Carter as much as Reagan. Reagan won most key Gallup groups: independents, 54–30 percent; whites, 55–36; males, 54–37; females, 46–45; white Protestants, 62–31; Catholics, 51–40; households with incomes of $15,000–24,999, 53–38; $25,000–50,000, 58–32; over $50,000, 66–26; high school graduates, 51–43; college graduates, 51–35; people thirty to forty-four years of age, 54–37; forty-five to fifty-nine, 55–39; sixty or over, 54–40; the South, 51–44; white South, 60–35; Midwest, 51–40; Far West, 53–35; suburban/small cities, 53–37; and rural/small towns, 54–39. Carter won among Democrats, liberals, blacks, Hispanics, people eighteen to twenty-one years of age and in cities with populations greater than 250,000. He and Reagan tied among people twenty-two to twenty-nine years of age. Barack Obama used the same base in a different America to become a majority president a quarter century later.
To the degree that a vice president can matter, Bush did in 1980. He reassured moderates and independents, many in the East, where Reagan led only 47–42 percent, and cemented the Gipper’s huge margin among Bush’s natural clientele—whites, Protestants, households with incomes over $50,000, suburbia, professionals, college graduates, and people thirty to fifty-nine years old. Still, Bush knew Reagan only faintly and his inner circle less. He knew also that the Reagan campaign thought he had “folded at Nashua. No spunk,” according to one. Heraclitus said, “A man’s character is his fate.” Slowly, Bush’s character became his.
He had seen others showboat: Theodore Roszak, hailing irrationality; Margaret Mead, wallowing in Future Speak; Kenneth Keninston, terming baby boomers the best and brightest. They violated Bush’s deepest sense of self. He would earn Reagan’s respect his way, which was his parents’ way—by his conduct, how he acted, treated others. A song, ironically, of that younger generation put it well: “Little things mean a lot.”
Reagan chose—it is assumed, with Nancy Reagan’s selah—James A. Baker III, Bush’s campaign manager and longtime friend, as his White House chief of staff. For Poppy, it was like striking a vein of silver ore. Through January 1985, when he became treasury secretary, Baker ministered to Reagan’s economic, political, and international agenda. He also fueled the Reagan-Bush friendship, kept his old friend abreast of decisions large and small, and helped facilitate what Bush would have been in any event—the ultimate team player, even at age ten at Greenwich Country Day School. His hero was Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, pride of the New York Yankees, a good and quiet man of whom Captain Bill Dickey said, “Every day, any day, he just goes out and does his job.”
From 1926 to 1938, Gehrig drove in a hundred or more runs, including an American League record 184, another record thirteen-straight years. Bush and his father heard network radio convey seven Yankees World Series titles. “I remember Graham McNamee doing most of the play by play,” Bush said, “and Lou’s continuity”—ten Series home runs, thirty-four runs batted in, and a .316 average. “Gehrig was steadier, less flamboyant, and more dependable than the Babe . . . steadily achieving excellence”—a telling self-portrait.
In 1939, after a Major League record 2,130 straight games, Gehrig was felled by an enemy within: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a hardening and collapsing of the spinal cord—now called Lou Gehrig’s disease. That July 4 the Yankees retired his number 4 at Yankee Stadium. Between games of a doubleheader, he delivered baseball’s Gettysburg Address. “Some may think I’ve been given a bad break,” said Gehrig, “but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.” The peroration wed sweetest song and saddest thought: “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Gehrig died in 1941. Half a century later, Bush called him “my hero not just as a child—still is”—one first baseman to another. “Lou Gehrig was a great example in his personal life, and showed courage as he faced death”—dutiful son, faithful husband. Bush talked baseball—also Washington Redskins football, politics, foreign and domestic policy, guests’ families, and the day’s odds and ends—at the many social events he and Mrs. Bush hosted at the vice president’s residence at One Observatory Circle, two miles from the White House. Mrs. Bush had called him “the Pearle Mesta of the United Nations,” the American socialite known as the “hostess with the mostest”; the name and instinct stuck.
Bush knew most members of Congress, had worked with some still serving, liked to kibitz, and was a quick study of the Hill’s leaders and legislation. As president of the Senate, he briefed Reagan regularly—and well. Nixon once said, “If it weren’t for people, this [the presidency] would be an easy job.” To Bush, people were the job. As vice president he traveled 1.3 million miles, visited all fifty states and sixty-five countries, and attended so many funerals that Baker coined his fictional motto: “You Die. I Fly.” Barbara Bush quietly bristled at the fuss, saying, “George met with many current or future heads of state at the funerals he attended, enabling him to forge personal relationships that were important to President Reagan—and later, President Bush.” The 1991 Gulf War became exhibit A.
In 1988, looking back, Bush said, “If you’re a supportive vice president, you sublimate your own priorities and your own passion for a team.” He had, adding, “Ultimately, I’m not going into this game [of criticizing President Reagan]—and it is a game. I’m not going into that. It’s talking about character, about fundamental honor. These are things that matter with me. Decency. Talk about what I learned from my dad. Let somebody else play that game. Not me.” There are far worse ways to be recalled.
On March 30, 1981, Bush unveiled—ironically, events proved—an historical marker at the Fort Worth hotel where John F. Kennedy had spent his last night in 1963 before being assassinated next day in Dallas. In early afternoon Bush learned that Reagan had been shot and seriously wounded after giving a speech in Washington. A bullet by would-be assassin John Hinckley lodged an inch from the president’s heart. Reagan was rushed to George Washington Hospital, was operated on, and came close to dying, America learned much later. “I didn’t know I’d been shot when I heard that noise. I thought it was firecrackers,” Dutch said. In Texas, Reagan’s would-be successor immediately ordered that his plane return to the nation’s capital.
Landing at Andrews Air Force Base, Bush was urged by many aides to helicopter to the White House. It would be dramatic, pitch-perfect for the kinetic tube, showing the government intact and functioning, freeze-framing Bush as a leader in absentia. Instinctively, he refused. “Only the president lands on the South Lawn,” Bush said, doing what was proper—a little thing. When Reagan heard of the story, he was impressed—better, touched. The helicopter flew to the vice presidential home. Bush drove to the White House, went to the Situation Room, and joined the cabinet meeting already under way. Among issues discussed was the nuclear football—the button that, once pushed, would start a nuclear war.
In Bush’s absence some officials had acted rashly. “As of now, I am in charge here,” Secretary of State Alexander Haig, sweating, told the nation, harming his own credibility and rearranging the line of succession. By contrast, Bush’s calm and Reagan’s grace soothed many. “I hope you’re all Republicans,” the Gipper told doctors in the operating room. Weak and underweight, he returned to work April 11, ultimately using TV—“If Congress won’t see the light, I ask you to make it feel the heat,” he said in one address—and Bush on the Hill to help pass the Economic Recovery Act of 1981. The law lowered the marginal and lowest tax bracket from 70 to 50 and 14 to 11 percent, respectively. Another work of Providence: explaining the act to pols, the Yale economics major was able to make the dismal science clear.
In his 1993 book, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, Richard Reeves wrote, “There was an astonishing density of event during the Kennedy years”: the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, the space race, civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan’s first years as president had a similar density. On Inauguration Day the American hostages seized in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini were released. On January 29, 1981, Reagan held his first press conference as president. Asked about the Soviet Union, he said, “As long as . . . they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain . . . a one-world Socialist or Communist state, I think when you do business with them . . . you keep that in mind.” Said an adviser, incredulous, “Well, that takes care of that [détente].”
In early February Reagan addressed the nation for the first time on the economy. On April 28 the Gipper, still recovering from the bullet wound, spoke to Congress on behalf of his economic program like Caesar taking Gaul. In August he signed the act in California—“the most important economic law,” he said, since his hero, Franklin Roosevelt, forged the New Deal half a century earlier. The economy tumbled into 1983, then rose for the rest of his presidency. On August 5, 1981, Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers, the largest union to back him in 1980, for violating a federal law prohibiting a government union from striking. The Kremlin was stunned, U.S. intelligence later learned, to find a different kind of president.
In Britain Reagan told Parliament that “the forward march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” Boldly, he proposed a zero option: if the Soviets removed their ss-20 missile deployment, America would not install Pershing 2 and ground-launch missiles in West Germany. The Reds said no. Reagan went ahead. He proclaimed the “Reagan Doctrine,” seeking to “roll back” Communism in, among other places, Latin America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—and foresaw a strategic defense initiative to protect America from attack by a strategic nuclear ballistic system, making nuclear war improbable. When Soviet fighters downed Korean Air Lines flight 007, carrying 269 passengers, near Moneron Island, Reagan said the Soviets had turned “against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere.” To many, the United States was again standing tall.
On October 23, 1983, American peacekeeping forces in Beirut, sent by Reagan during the Lebanese civil war, were attacked by a suicide truck bomber—241 U.S. Marines died; more than 60 were wounded. Bush led a White House team four days later to investigate. That week Reagan ordered U.S. forces to invade Grenada, where a 1979 coup d’etat had formed a nonaligned Marxist-Leninist government. The force helped protect several hundred American medical students at St. George’s University and stem an alleged Soviet Cuban military buildup in the Caribbean. Symbolically, on a trip abroad Reagan might sing “Amazing Grace” with troops, eat in their mess, and beam when a soldier said he was from California. More tangibly, he rebuilt the armed forces hollowed out under Carter.
The different kind of president was helped by a different kind of vice president. For one thing, Bush knew the world—U.S. friends and enemies—better than any vice president since Nixon. “Here’s where the United Nations and CIA really helped,” said John Sununu, Bush’s future presidential chief of staff. “He just wasn’t socializing with countries’ leaders at personal events and meetings. He’d been getting to know them—their families, how they worked.” For another, the human element applied irrespective of rank. In the mid-1980s Bush’s mother chided him for reading while Reagan gave a State of the Union address. Bush explained that he was just following the text. No matter, she said; it still showed bad manners. Reagan, whose mother had grounded him in fundamentalist religion, had been taught how to treat other people too.
The near assassination affirmed the Gipper’s faith. “God must have been sitting on my shoulder. Whatever time I’ve got left, it now belongs to someone else,” said Reagan, citing the phrase “I look to the hills, from whence cometh my strength.” After March 30 he and Bush met every Thursday for lunch and conversation—“wide-ranging, from affairs of state to small talk,” said Poppy, who, knowing Reagan’s humor, began each session with a joke or story, often at official Washington’s expense. The veep was judicious, increasingly synergistic with his boss, never divulging in eight years one syllable that he and Reagan said to one another. Incrementally, perhaps inevitably, Bush became a trusted member of the inner circle.
“You don’t become president,” Reagan said, in prose that Bush would echo. “The presidency is an institution, and you have temporary custody of it.” Like every vice president, Bush was given special projects. Reagan asked him to chair a special task force on federal regulations—red tape as heinous to the GOP as a red cape to a bull. Bush studied hundreds of rules and admonitions, deciding specifically which to change and end. Reagan called “a Federal program the nearest thing on earth to eternal life.” The more Bush could discard, the more he helped the country—and himself, with conservatives if he chose someday to run for president. That was also true of coordinating a federal war on international drug smuggling into America. The Right, often suspicious of foreigners, had reason to be here.
By early 1984 Bush seemed, if not someone who caused voter orgasm, at least a politician who seldom evoked a wrinkling of the nose. He was acceptable—to many, by fit and start much more. In particular, he was wooing the staff of the late William Loeb, publisher of the hard-right Manchester Union-Leader, and Jerry Falwell, founder of the conservative Moral Majority. Loeb’s paper bestrode New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first primary. Falwell’s movement could affect a dozen state caucuses and primaries—and the general election after that.
Inexplicably, conservative columnist George F. Will recoiled: “The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny arf—the sound of a lap dog.” Perhaps he found them—huff—middle class. Most Republicans were reassured, thinking Bush a hunter who went where the ducks were. The sound they heard him emitting resembled a cash register—people giving to the presumptive next prez.
In 1988 Time’s David Beckwith wrote, “As the public became better acquainted with his [Bush’s] personality and his sense of humor, they grew to like it, even viewing fondly his tendency toward malapropisms and scrambled syntax. In the end, despite talk of scripted events and control by handlers, the public got to know Bush and liked what it saw.” That had been true even by 1984, which, Bush would tell you, was not his favorite year.
In 1981 James Baker had listed Reagan’s trifecta: “Economic recovery. Economic recovery. Economic recovery.” By 1984 the recovery was, if not complete, irrefutable to even Democrats. Like a fever, Reaganomics broke before reviving. “It’s funny how they [critics] don’t call it that anymore,” said the Gipper in 1987, “now that it’s working.” Unemployment peaked in December 1982, a highest-since-the-Depression 10.8 percent jobless rate. It dropped to 5.4 percent by the time Reagan left office. At the same time, inflation flew back inside the cage: 12.5 percent at the end of 1980 vs. 1988’s 4.4. “Look back at 1981 and ’82,” said 1984 campaign manager Ed Rollins. “We had to cut government back, and give private enterprise some help. The economy was sick because we’d lacked leaders with spine.” The correct prescription was liberty.
“When people are free to choose, they choose freedom,” was a sure Gipper applause line. Under Reagan federal receipts grew at an annual 8.2 percent average. Even with 1981–82’s recession, gross domestic growth increased yearly at 3.85 percent, including 1984’s election year 8, a fortuitous patch of timing. Reagan’s TV campaign that year remains a classic. “It’s Morning in America,” the voice-over began. Film shows hard hats building homes, ships trolling, weddings underway, people working farms, the flag being raised, towheads respecting it. “Today more men and women will go to work than at any time in our nation’s history. With interest rates and inflation down, more people are buying new homes. And our families can take confidence in the new future. America today is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” America had come home.
More than sixteen million new jobs festooned 1983–89. The recovery lasted, with only a minor downturn or two, for almost a quarter century—the longest peacetime boom in U.S. history. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 dropped the top marginal tax rate to 28 percent, raised the bottom bracket to 15 percent, and cut the number of brackets to four. The prime interest rate fell by 60 percent, and the mortgage rate 6.4 percent from its peak. Meanwhile, the federal debt rose from $987 billion to $3.85 trillion under Reagan. “The president always told me that if it came down to a choice of somehow balancing our budget, or rebuilding our military which Carter had so decimated, he’d choose the latter,” said Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. It is true that a budget deficit was necessary to rebuild our defense. It also became the madam at the church cotillion.
By mid-spring 1984 Reagan-Bush was walking in tall cotton. “Here Comes the Recovery!” bannered Time. Then, on July 12, about-to-be Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale made history and momentarily rattled the GOP, picking America’s first major-party woman vice president: Geraldine Ferraro, three-term U.S. representative, bright, liberal, and depending on your politics, barbed or snarky before the latter word was born. On one hand, she was smart and telegenic; would likely swell the gender gap, where Democrats led the GOP among women; and represented New York’s multiethnic Queens district of TV’s All in Family, its symbol malapropping Archie Bunker, who idolized “Richard E. Nixon.” On the other, she was married to ethically checkered realtor John Zaccaro and had yet to hit big-league pitching.
In 2008, critiquing Barack Obama’s candidacy, Ferraro panned affirmative action’s double standard—which, ironically, she said, had profited her. “If you go back to 1984 and look at my historic candidacy, if my name was Gerald Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would have never been chosen as a vice president,” said the Fox News contributor. “It had nothing to do with my qualifications.” America agreed. In a summer 1984 poll of all voters, 60 percent thought “pressure from women’s groups” caused her nomination, whereas 22 percent thought her “the best candidate” available. Mondale ignored the New Yorker’s thin résumé, low name recognition, and lack of foreign policy experience. Needing to act boldly, he did.
Before Ferraro’s pick, Mondale trailed Reagan by sixteen points in the Gallup poll. A week later the same firm showed them tied. At the convention in San Francisco, Mondale vowed to raise taxes—“an act of courage,” he said—to cut the debt and that year’s $185 billion deficit. It “wasn’t courage,” Bush retorted. “It was just a [Democratic] habit.” As vice president, Poppy would visit most of the thirteen Latin American nations that, leaving Communism, held democratic elections in the 1980s. At August’s GOP Convention in Dallas, Bush acted not as Reagan’s attack dog—a veep’s historic niche—but as a would-be president, quoting Dwight Eisenhower: “May the light of freedom . . . flame brightly, until at last the darkness is no more.”
Aware of the Gipper’s popularity—liberal congresswoman Pat Schroeder called him the “Teflon President,” as in no criticism stuck—Ferraro assaulted his number two, becoming Bush’s most elusive foe since Bentsen. Barbara Bush said, “Her name rhymes with rich”—a middle-class poseur. Liberal, Ferraro called herself a small c conservative. Catholic, she opposed the Church on abortion. Protecting her, the press ignored the dissonance. Virtually every survey shows most national journalists leaning left. What startles is the media’s recent brazenness, unafraid to bare prejudice.
On October 7 the press fairly reported GOP self-inflicted injury. In the first presidential debate in Louisville, Reagan referred to going to church “here in Washington,” called military uniforms “costumes,” and confused military salaries and pensions, among other things. “Where was the Gipper?” Nancy Reagan, Rollins, and tens of millions must have asked. The likely answer: Reagan, seventy-three, America’s oldest president, was showing age. His debate staff had showered him with facts and statistics—broadcaster Dizzy Dean termed them “statics.” Reagan hated them, knew how they numbed. The next debate, he vowed, would be different. As conservatives said about policy, Let Reagan be Reagan.
In the interim Bush had to stop Mondale’s momentum—1980’s Big Mo now hung ironically—in the October 11 vice presidential debate. He was—choose your analogy—at High Noon, in the OK Corral, the Dutch Boy at the Dike. Surely Poppy would know more about foreign and domestic policy than Ferraro. So, however, had Nixon vs. Kennedy, or Ford vs. Carter. Substance—sheer knowledge—would matter less than style, and style less than wearability—the viewer saying over time, “Yes, that’s my kind of guy. I trust him/her to act for me.” Retrieving the debate, Bush island-hopped in a quicksand sea. Many reporters in the press room, hoping that he would stumble, could be heard cheering loudly for Ferraro. Bush must be aggressive, but not menacing; courtly, not condescending; conservative, not chauvinistic; kind, not “Have Half” of Greenwich Country Day School. One mistake could, if not lose the election, fuel Mondale’s Mo.
In 1945 Chicago writer Warren Brown had been asked about the wartime Tigers-Cubs World Series. “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t think either team can win.” Ironically, both candidates won the vice presidential debate. Thrice panelists asked how Ferraro’s experience equaled Bush’s. She changed the subject, then used a preplanned zinger: “Let me just say, first of all, that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy.” Bush’s mastery of the subject was so plain he didn’t need—couldn’t afford—to zing her. Instead, he mixed detail and praise of Reagan. A poll soon showed that men and women felt that Bush and Ferraro, respectively, had won.
Next day Poppy suggested he had “tried to kick a little ass last night”—for him, harsh profanity out of character, reflecting frustration in his attack-dog role. Bush did it loyally but joylessly, knowing that extreme makeovers rarely work. As we have seen, what did was Reagan campaign TV. In 1984 the United States and Soviet Union still grappled in the post–World War II Cold War. Reagan’s policy toward Communism—the Bear—was Peace through Strength: rebuild, then negotiate. Liberalism refused to concede Communism was a threat. “The Bear” ad artfully split the difference. “There’s a bear in the woods,” the voice-over begins, the animal on the screen. “For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it is vicious, and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who is right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear, if there is a bear?”
On October 21 Reagan and Mondale again met in Kansas City. The president’s age had owned the past two weeks, policy advisers, speechwriters, and humor writers deluging Reagan with one-liners and memoranda, how-tos to defuse fear that he had gone around the bend. Reagan gently reassured them that he would neutralize the issue—not to worry. Most of the White House did.
Panelist Hank Trewhitt of the Wall Street Journal gave Reagan his opening. First, he noted that President Kennedy had “very little sleep” during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. He then asked if Reagan, given his poor first debate, had any doubt that he could endure the demands of the presidency, especially in a crisis.
“Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt,” the Gipper said, “and I want you to know also that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
The crowd erupted. Even Mondale couldn’t help himself. “If TV can tell the truth, you’ll see that I was smiling,” he told PBS in 2012. “But I think if you come in close, you’ll see some tears coming down because I knew he had gotten me there. That was really the end of my campaign that night, I think.” Reagan’s reaction shot is even more telling, like the eighth take on the back lot at Warner Brothers. He is smiling, not boastfully, but contentedly, tongue faintly in cheek, the canary in fatal trouble.
The rest was for history: Reagan, on the train from one small town through another, reliving his childhood with an itinerant father; Bush, touting “my friend and America’s greatest president” and calling Mondale “the all-time tax raiser”; Mondale, knowing that defeat lay ahead, yet refusing to abandon the flag of liberalism; Ferraro, saying Reagan would outlaw abortion, ignore the poor, and raise taxes too—losing, yet proud of making history.
At every campaign stop, Reagan used Al Jolson’s line “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” On election night he told the crowd, “You’ll forgive me. I’m going to say it one more time!”—and did. Except for Nixon’s in 1972, Reagan’s statistics were nonpareil: 525 electoral votes to Mondale’s 13 and 49 states to the Democrat’s one (Minnesota, Mondale’s home state, plus Washington DC). Reagan got 58.8 percent of the vote, 60 percent in 30 states, and 70 percent in Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho. He lost Minnesota by 3,761 votes.
Ferraro hurt, or at least didn’t help. Reagan won 55 percent of the Catholic and women’s vote, first and second to Nixon in 1972, respectively, among GOP presidential candidates. “She was supposed to be a boon with each group,” said Ed Rollins, “and wasn’t.” Bush likely helped, and clearly didn’t hurt, especially in the moderate to liberal Northeast. Including 2012, 1984 is the last presidential election the GOP has won any of these states: Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin. Bush campaigned in each.
In December 1984 President Reagan was asked what he wanted for Christmas. He reportedly joked, “Well, Minnesota would have been nice.”