In April–August 2012 Barack Obama spent an estimated $100 million on TV to caricature the prospective GOP presidential candidate as Gordon Gekko Jr.—a tax cheat, corporate raider at Bain Capital, even responsible for a woman’s death from cancer. Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor, 2002 Olympics hero, and savior of firms like Staples, chose not to respond until the campaign’s traditional autumn start—a fatal mistake, given how in politics a charge unanswered becomes a fact undenied. By the time Romney reacted, the U.S. jury was closed. In 1988 Bush too wanted to wait till September to go negative, and then lightly. Unlike Mitt, he had tenacious aides who saved Poppy from himself.
According to Newsweek magazine’s The Quest for the Presidency, the general campaign hinged on pollster Bob Teeter’s late spring interview of two groups of Reagan Democrats—specifically, middle-class Catholics, the 1988 election’s decisive swing group—who had returned to the Democrat Dukakis. At Bush’s June retreat with his high command in Kennebunkport, Teeter took two videotapes of voters from Paramus, New Jersey, and told the veep, “I think you should look at these.” Bush did and left the screening sadder, wiser, and aware of his challenge’s size.
Poppy’s image with these Jerseyites was vague, tepid—wimpy. Worse, they preferred the liberal Dukakis to Bush, though the Democrat opposed the death penalty, had refused to sign a law mandating the Pledge of Allegiance in his state’s public schools, had okayed a lenient prison furlough program, and belonged to the American Civil Liberties Union—the radical ACLU. “They don’t know this guy’s record,” the vice president explained next day, startled. (That week Bush said for the first time that Dukakis represents “old-style ’60s liberalism” from “Harvard Yard’s boutique,” leading the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd to ask, “Wasn’t this a case of the pot calling the kettle elite?” Bush replied, “Yale’s reputation is so diffuse, there isn’t a symbol. Harvard boutique to me has the connotation of liberalism and elitism.”) Teeter’s groups even thought Dukakis would out-tough Bush on drugs.
Only one fact saved the vice president from despair. When the Reagan Democrats learned Dukakis’s record, half returned to Bush. “They don’t know enough about him,” said the veep. As that omission changed, he thought, Dukakis’s lead would fall. I watched in curiosity, having written for Reagan’s cabinet since 1982. My first speaker, ex–Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker, had been Reagan’s vice presidential pick before the 1976 GOP Convention, the Gipper vainly trying to loosen that state delegation’s pro-Ford tilt. As Reagan’s later head of Health and Human Services, Schweiker was an early politician to hype stopping disease before it struck—wellness. In addition, he liked to quote non-pols like longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer: America was “still the best country for the common man, black or white. If he can’t make it here he can’t make it anywhere else.”
Unlike many politicians, Schweiker would intersperse humor through the body of a speech, recalling when “‘Who lost China’ meant a debate between political historians—not an argument over who misplaced Nancy’s dinnerware,” Mrs. Reagan having spent $200,000 for new White House china. An introduction was “overly immodest—but as a golfer, I’m always grateful for a good lie.” Edward Kennedy had recently been rumored to have met with Reagan. “He promised to deliver Massachusetts—as a retirement home.” Schweiker thought the one-line phrase a device not to dumb down an audience but to rouse and keep its interest—e.g., “My only special interest is America’s.” “The worst environment is to be cold, hungry, and unemployed”—for millions the nation Reagan inherited as president.
When Schweiker left to head the American Council of Life Insurers (née Insurance), liberal congresswoman Margaret Heckler of suburban Boston succeeded him. Bad news: she was petulant and superficial. Good: she liked to break an audience up. “Groucho Marx once said of a woman he knew, ‘She got her good looks from her father—he’s a plastic surgeon,’” Heckler said.
In 1984 I got my first look at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, headed by Samuel Pierce, the cabinet’s sole black, a fellow New Yorker, smart, taciturn, and vastly underrated. His low profile frustrated political aides. Policy makers noted his Enterprise Zones, private-sector initiatives, and help for those at the margin of the home-buying marketplace.
Pierce spoke largely to business and minority groups, saying of Martin Luther King Jr., “He strove to ensure that as all were born equal in dignity before God, all could become equal in dignity before man.” He quoted the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Ben Maimon, or Maimonides, to the American Jewish Heritage Committee, urging its members “to anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellowman . . . so that he can earn an honest livelihood.”
This, Pierce said, was “the highest step and the summit of charity’s golden ladder.” In July 1988 Dukakis climbed the golden ladder to his.
Officially nominated in Atlanta, the Democratic candidate for president chose Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas as vice president, evoking 1960’s JFK-LBJ Boston-Austin axis. He entered the convention stage to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” gave a rousing speech that tended the different clients of his party, and ended it, polls said, having reestablished a seventeen-point lead over Bush. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” Dukakis said to no one in particular. Later, he would rue the irony of being right.
Bush had to pick his vice president before or at the GOP Convention in New Orleans. Dukakis had auditioned his candidates at rallies, embarrassing those not picked. The spectacle offended Poppy. He would choose his veep privately, no one except the contenders knowing. Bob Dole was one; politics’ Gary Cooper never said a word when a nod would do. Another, Jack Kemp, could be rude, loudly coughing at meetings when he wanted to be heard. Other candidates may or may not have included Elizabeth Dole, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and Senators Alan Simpson, Pete Domenici, and John Danforth. Bush didn’t really want to pick any of the above. What he wanted was to surprise. “Watch my vice presidential choice,” he said. “That will tell all.”
His vice presidential surprise was J. Danforth Quayle, forty-one, Indiana’s junior senator, a Robert Redford look-alike, and Bush thought, GOP entrée to the baby boom generation. Praising Quayle, John McCain looked skin deep, not deep down: “I can’t believe a guy that handsome wouldn’t have some impact.” Instead, the media accented Quayle’s National Guard service, as if it were a lark; affluent background, as if it differed from most of theirs; and ideology, as if the first national boomer candidate had to be a liberal. Picking Quayle was Bush’s first decision as presidential nominee, and the media less analyzed than ravaged him. You could accuse it of a feeding frenzy, except that would be unfair to animals.
Bush didn’t ask, but I would have picked another surprise: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Italian, Catholic, then fifty-two. He had nine children, liked classical music and rhetoric, and was the ultimate strict constructionist. He could have lanced Dukakis, was a recognizable heavyweight, and was probably too brilliant for the job. George H. W. Bush’s job was now to give the best—surely, most widely watched—address of his life: the GOP acceptance speech at the convention, striving to fill center stage after two decades in the wings.
Bush assigned the speech to celebrity Reagan writer Peggy Noonan, who enlisted a talented free-lance humor writer from California. Doug Gamble had left Canada in 1980 because “I had had it up to here with [then–prime minister] Pierre Trudeau’s socialist paradise.” Arriving in Los Angeles, Gamble happened to write a piece of political satire that famed commentator Paul Harvey read on the air. Someone heard it at the White House, called Doug, and asked him to submit material. To Gamble’s shock, soon he was writing regularly for the Gipper. After Reagan’s forty-nine-state blowout, director of speechwriting Ben Elliott wrote Gamble a thank-you note citing his favorite line: “They [Democrats] dream of an America where every day is April 15th. We dream of an America where every day is the 4th of July.”
In 1987 Noonan and Gamble began writing for Bush. In the 1988 acceptance, they aptly cast him as a quiet man, “but I hear the quiet people others don’t. The ones who raise the family, pay the taxes, meet the mortgage. I hear them and I am moved, and their concerns are mine.” This is America, Bush said: “The Knights of Columbus, the Grange, Hadassah, the Disabled American Veterans, the Order of AHEPA, the Business and Professional Women of America, the union hall, the Bible study group, LULAC [League of United Latin American Citizens], ‘Holy Name’—a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand Points of Light in a broad and peaceful sky”—voluntary individuals and groups who knew, as the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville said in 1828, that liberty could not be created without morality, nor morality without faith.
The acceptance speech shone a spotlight on Bush’s perceived infelicities, as Reagan had by accenting his age. Poppy didn’t fear glamorous rivals, he explained: “I’ll try to be fair to the other side. I’ll try to hold my charisma in check.” Bush spoke to those who said he didn’t “always communicate in the clearest, most concise way. . . . I dare them to keep it up. Go ahead, make my twenty-four-hour time period.” He was plainspoken, seeing “life in terms of missions—missions defined and missions completed,” from torpedo bomber to the Texas plains. “I may not be the most eloquent, but I learned early that eloquence won’t draw oil from the ground.”
Bush’s overall mission was continuity: “After two great terms, a switch will be made. But when you have to change horses in midstream, doesn’t it make sense to switch to the one who’s going the same way?” Its foundation was record jobs, businesses, and income and low inflation, unemployment, and interest rates. “[Democrats] call it a Swiss cheese economy. Well, that’s the way it may look to the three blind mice. But when they were in charge, it was all holes and no cheese.” Bush named other issues, like school prayer, gun ownership, the death penalty, and the Pledge of Allegiance, on which he was uniformly to Dukakis’s right. “We must change from abortion—to adoption,” he said, emotionally. “Barbara and I have an adopted granddaughter. The day of her christening, we wept with joy. I thank God that her parents chose life.”
The speech lasted forty-nine minutes, was interrupted eighty times, and changed the election. Some recall Bush’s attack on Dukakis’s furloughing murderers and vetoing the Pledge, which worked because it affirmed the Democrats’ rift with Middle America. Others remember self-deprecation, which worked because it was natural. At the Democratic Convention, Ann Richards had barbed that Bush was “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” In New Orleans he said, “Once Barbara asked . . . what I was doing. I said, ‘I’m working hard,’ and she said, ‘Oh, dear, don’t worry. Relax, sit back, take off your shoes, and put up your silver foot.’” Many recall another pledge. “My opponent now says he’ll raise [taxes] as a last resort, or a third resort. When a politician talks like that, you know that’s one resort he’ll be checking into.” Then, unforgettably: “The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, ‘Read my lips. No new taxes.’”
Later, drawing an unfortunate distinction between speaking and governing, Bush did not treat each speech as president as fully or carefully as the material or event may have merited. By contrast, Poppy owned this speech, giving it with inflection and rhythm and energy and heart. More than any event, it made him president. Before the address Dukakis had led by 10 percentage points. After it Bush led by 7. Before the acceptance Bush had never led Dukakis one-on-one. Afterward, he almost never trailed.
Traditionally, Labor Day started the general presidential election. For the Bush campaign, headquartered on Fifteenth Street in Washington, each day had been Labor Day since July. In his acceptance Bush had vowed a “kinder, gentler” America. His campaign’s aim was to equate Dukakis with the suspect and alien. By August the governor’s pollster, Ed Reilly, said the Bushies had recast the campaign as Fred MacMurray vs. Robert De Niro. Bush had not seen the Democratic Convention, which trashed him nightly and unseemly as Reagan’s spoon-fed valet. Returning home, he was convinced by aides that the Democrats had played dirty, gone nuclear first. Furious, Bush set out, like any gentleman, to reclaim his name. Looking back, a more innocuous convention would have served Dukakis better.
On the stump Bush began to even the score. What kind of man would oppose a mandatory Pledge? Why had “this card-carrying member of the ACLU” furloughed—released—“a hardened first-degree killer who hadn’t even served enough time to be eligible for parole”? Bush, in his acceptance speech, was referring to convicted murderer Willie Horton, who then committed a rape and assault in Maryland. Horton became the poster child for Dukakis caring more about hoods than victims. Bush was an outdoorsman—“a Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” he said. Why had Dukakis let corporate greed dirty Boston Harbor? The campaign paired attack with Bush’s crusade for conservation, family, and a more ennobling culture. Usually the challenger controls the agenda. Here the incumbent—Bush, as Reagan’s surrogate—did. In his acceptance Dukakis tried to flee his record by saying, “This is an election about competence, not ideology.” By late August Bush led in both.
That month I joined an ad hoc group of about a dozen people from within and outside the Reagan administration to plot speech ideas, propose scheduling events, and write one-line phrases for the campaign. We met or spoke by phone after office hours—no cheating the taxpayer—once a week with ex–Nixon and Connally scheduler David Parker, Bush speechwriter Bob Grady and policy expert Jim Pinkerton, and other writers, consultants, and analysts. Some material was used; most probably not. I am not sure how much it helped. I do think it helped me become a speechwriter to Bush. I sent numerous memoranda to Parker, Grady, Pinkerton, and other aides. Those excerpted here recall the photographs and memories—above all, the general state—of the campaign.
On September 15 I warned that with Bush peaking; “the press may say ‘he has run out of gas.’” To avoid his being tarred for preferring superficiality to substance, I urged that he repeat Nixon’s 1968 use of nighttime network radio: ten speeches, each thirty minutes, addressing issues from drug abuse and health policy to spending and the work ethic, given successive nights October 25–November 3, on CBS’s then 220-outlet network. In addition, Bush could discuss 1990s national defense and traditional values germane to Billy Graham Democrats in the South and Richard Daley Democrats in the North. Speeches might include “American Values” to the Catholic Youth Organization; “Foreign Policy,” Council on Foreign Relations; “The Perils of Appeasement,” Ford Library; and “Our Judeo-Christian Tradition: America’s Timeless Treasure,” University of Notre Dame.
The national media would despise this tactic; Reagan Democrats, love it. The memorandum said, “In summary, we must keep the press from claiming: ‘The Force now lies with Dukakis. The Bush campaign has stalled.’” Bush’s Gallup and Harris lead had stabilized at 5–7 percent. The veep held a large lead in the South—an estimated 150 electoral votes of the 270 needed. My memo urged Bush to appear on The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. Cynics had mocked the Yalie’s genuine love of country music, Dukakis needed a mid-South upset somewhere, and the Opry’s WSM radio and TV network reached millions. “To us, the Opry means America,” Bush could say. “There are those—my rival and his friends in the Harvard-Cambridge crowd—who deride its values. I am proud to uphold them. As president, I will act on their behalf.”
Inevitably, attention turned to the first presidential debate, September 25 in Winston-Salem. His campaign still at sea, Dukakis increasingly focused on America’s drug epidemic—and the veep’s inability to stem it as head of the White House anti-drug task force. Drugs were the sole social issue on which Democrats held a polling edge, so I urged that during the debate Bush say that if elected he would name 1984 Summer Olympics head Peter Ueberroth to a new cabinet position of drug czar. Ueberroth had assailed drug traffickers, was famously tough-minded, and boasted the highest favorable rating in the history of California’s Field Poll. The announcement would have left Dukakis groping to respond.
Bush never made the proposal—grandstanding, he doubtless thought. Instead, the first debate left a viewer schizophrenic. Which registered? Dukakis’s “solid content” or “stolid persona . . . not just cool and detached but smug and smirky”? asked Charles Kraut-hammer. Or, in the words of John Buckley, “George Bush’s genuine humanity, goofy as he can sometimes be,” his “Everyman quality that creates empathy”? Dukakis provided what Gerald Ford dubbed “a smart-alecky manner.” Bush could treat English like a high schooler totaling his car. Someone dubbed the debate “the Ice Man” vs. “the Nice Man.” The Nice Man thought he had let his team down: “I didn’t do very well tonight,” Bush said. His aides left the debate smiling. It lasted till Dan Quayle compared himself with another once U.S. senator.
An October 4 memorandum critiqued the next night’s Quayle-Bentsen vice presidential debate. “Quayle must be calm, poised, above all, Presidential,” I wrote. “If so, since expectations are so low, the Hoosier can’t help but score.” By the time Quayle had finished further lowering expectations, Justice Scalia looked like Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Coherent if robotic, Quayle was holding his own in the debate when he did what aides had warned against. “I have as much experience in the Congress,” he began, “as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.”
Bentsen, sixty-seven, adopted the look of a sad father about to ground a hapless son. “Senator,” he fixed Quayle, “I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Quayle looked frozen. “That was really uncalled for, Senator,” he said.
“You’re the one who was making the comparison, Senator,” snapped Bentsen. The debate finally ended with Quayle having increased the number of those who thought him not ready for prime time or the presidency.
On October 12 Bush and Jim Baker went to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles to see the home-team Dodgers win the National League pennant, blanking the New York Mets, 6–0. Next night the veep hoped to seal his own deal in the final TV joust—the horse race now competitive (Poppy up four to six points, depending on the poll) but the Electoral College a semi-lock (320 to 410 votes). On a pre-debate stage tour, the Nice Man, seeing Dukakis and aide Bob Squier, comically waved to them at Ailes’s urging. Unnerved, the Ice Man glared. Bush’s campaign, which began with the candidate’s getting Bob Dole to snarl, “Stop lying about my record,” ended with his getting inside his other main rival’s head. Woody Allen said famously that 90 percent of success was just showing up. Mind control had become 90 percent of politics.
More than two decades later, interviewing Dukakis at length for a book, I found him a literate, knowledgeable, and thoroughly engaging person. In 1988 he entered the last debate inexplicably having been unable to use issues like Quayle, AIDS, the homeless, or the national debt doubling since 1981 to $2.6 trillion to dent the GOP. He was still reeling from a recent Republican TV spot which used a Democratic photo op to balloon Bush’s already huge polling lead in national defense. Desperate to show Dukakis hadn’t fallen off a turnip truck, his campaign had put the Korean War veteran in an M1 Abrams tank outside a General Dynamics plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan. The Republican ad used footage showing Dukakis helmeted, standing in one of the tank’s hatches, smiling, and waving to the crowd. “Dukakis in the Tank” became almost as ridiculed as Quayle.
Braving the flu, Dukakis spent much of the last debate’s day in bed. More painful was his divided staff. Smile. Don’t smile. Be strong. Be likeable. Be a next-door neighbor. Don’t be too common. Be yourself. Please don’t. Moderator Bernard Shaw of CNN asked the opening question—whether Dukakis would still oppose the death penalty if his own wife were raped and murdered. The governor might have mentioned that his own brother had been killed by a hit-and-run driver or that his father had been mugged at the age of seventy-seven in his office. Instead, emotion gone, he answered like a student trying to pass the bar, even omitting wife Kitty’s name. By the time Dukakis finished, some in his headquarters on Chauncey Street in Boston were likely planning a post-debate wake in a different kind of bar.
Shaw tried a similar ploy with Bush, asking a hypothetical question about Quayle becoming president upon his death. Bush interrupted with a mock one-word reply—“Bernie!”—conveying natural reluctance to address his own mortality. Dukakis did not tell one story in ninety minutes, fixed on fact like a CPA on numbers. Bush told many, leaving his first debate’s fondness for numbers back at the hotel. Ahead, he was gracious. Asked if he could find something to praise about Dukakis, Poppy smiled: “Listen, you’re stealing my close. I had something very nice to say in that.” Behind, trying to be warm—“I think I’m a little more loveable these days than I used to be back in my youth”—Dukakis must have found Bush like punching at a pillow. After the first debate, a Time poll showed that voters thought Dukakis had won but that by 44 to 38 percent Bush was more likeable. The last debate turned perception into steel.
Six days before the election, James Baker, said Newsweek, held a senior staff meeting. “We need to be very careful. This [negative] thing has been pushed right to the limit.” He was right, but so was Atwater: you dance with the one who brung you, and us vs. them had brought Bush to the brink. Hating negative campaigning, Bush hated losing even more. In late October Dukakis, rising from the crypt, began using the L for Liberal word, appeared on every TV show but Emeril Lagasse’s, and nearly caught Bush in Bob Teeter’s polls. Was Mr. Smooth’s fall a blip or trend? The former, as it occurred.
Dukakis’s only hope was what aides called an eighteen-state strategy—focus on the states where Bush’s late lead was not “insurmountable,” including California, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Washington. The Democrats had to win each, drawing what Atwater dubbed “an inside straight”—more hope than game plan, foretelling Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama in 2012. Dukakis’s problem was Bush’s more than two hundred electoral vote firewall: the 155-vote Confederacy, farm and Rocky Mountain states, and likely the California to which Grapes of Wrath Okies had trekked, where Nixon and Reagan had evangelized, and of the Orange County birthplace of Goldwaterism. To them Bush would add New Jersey, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Michigan, among others.
On one hand, the Republican “presidential electoral lock”—former LBJ aide Horace Busby coined the term—was so strong at this time that “Mother Goose could have beaten Dukakis,” said a Democratic aide, hyperbolically. On the other, Bush’s image had been so defaced—it was only a year since Newsweek’s “wimp” cover—that the mere possibility of victory amazed. That magazine now hailed “a brilliant achievement—owed . . . in . . . part . . . to his paid handlers, the cosmeticians who had made a mild man look hard and the armorers who had made a genteel man sound like a schoolyard bully.” No “recent President had been, or been presented as, so completely an artifact of packaging and promotion.”
If the artifact was more electable than the man, the man was more presidential than the artifact. We now return to both as the campaign ended and a presidency in waiting began.
In October 1988 Bush had told Ailes, “I want to get back on the issues, and quit talking about him”—Dukakis. That fall Congress debated the federal seven-day waiting period before someone could buy a handgun, a provision backed by many police officers. “I wish the police chiefs and the gun owners could figure out a compromise,” Bush said. “I’m for both sides”—the Second Amendment and the rule of law.
Increasingly, people grew to like a person who viewed politics less cynically than bemusedly. Once Poppy termed Dukakis an excellent debater, adding, “I’m lowering expectations.” He began a speech by asking as an aside, “Is this the time we unleash our one-liners?” Calling from a phone bank to benefit photographers, he told a startled listener, “I’m just doing a little show-biz phoning here.” A friend recalled how Bush walked across Yale’s campus in 1948 to be inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, humbly noting that he was not a real intellectual. Perspective made Bush a pragmatist, a problem solver. What mattered was honor, right and wrong, and at every juncture, how things worked.
In 1988 what worked was to make the election a referendum on Dukakis’s liberalism. Bush said that the approach was political, not personal. Lloyd Bentsen attacked him as “all hat and no cattle.” Other insults were meaner. Bush did not respond. Another fellow Texan, House majority leader Jim Wright, was under investigation for financial hanky-panky. Bush barely touched it—too busy ballyhooing that his and not Dukakis’s ideology worked. In the end Poppy won a handsome if not quite Gipper-size landslide: 53.4 to 46.6 percent of the popular vote and 426 to 112 Electoral College vote. Dukakis won Massachusetts, next-door New York, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota’s Middle America outlier—a mere ten states and Washington DC.
I was at the Houstonian Hotel on election night as Bush, having lost in the past and knowing Dukakis’s pain, phoned his rival. He then came down to the ballroom to thank the crowd and, over television, share an outcome that had seemed improbable less than four months before. Few had expected such a pasting of Dukakis even twenty-four hours earlier. Bush won the election, paraphrasing the Beatles, getting by with a lot of help from his friend. For tens of millions, he came as close as they could get to reelecting the Gipper.
More than 85 percent of voters who approved of Reagan, thought he had made them better off, and liked his course supported Bush. According to NBC News, Bush also got 46 percent of the blue-collar vote, equal to Reagan in 1980. He narrowed the gender gap to four points vs. Reagan’s ten in 1984 and took a majority of women in the South. On the other hand, he won men by ten points vs. the Gipper’s twenty-five. Bush won rural America, 58–42 percent, and suburbia, 54–46, 43 percent of the electorate. Dukakis won the cities, 57–43; Catholics, 52–48; and blacks and Hispanics easily. Poppy narrowly won baby boomers, retirees, and white-collar workers, 51–49; professionals and managers, 56–44; and crucially, independents, 58–42. The better educated and more affluent, the more decisively Bush won.
Other polling suggested Bush as safe and experienced—an agent of “cautious change.” In the South, said political scientist Earl Black, Willie Horton and the Pledge made Dukakis “seem someone who isn’t ‘one of us.’” Elsewhere, the federal deficit, drug abuse, and programs for the middle class were more discussed. Bush led among people wanting competence, experience, strength, and trustworthiness in a crisis. Dukakis led among those interested in domestic issues. In the NBC poll, a 50–44 percent majority said yes to the question, “Does the country want change?” Bush won overwhelmingly among the 44 percent wanting no change—and narrowly among an additional 18 percent wanting minor change. Ideologically, he may have been the ideal Republican to follow the Gipper.
Looking back, Bush’s victory was seminal, though it cannot be said that many realized it then. He was the last Republican to win each of ten states today known as “blue,” voting Democratic for president: Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and California—152 electoral votes in 2012. No candidate in either party has equaled his 1988 electoral or percentage vote total. On election night Bush spoke of telling Dukakis that he wanted to be president of all the people, including those who had not supported him.
“When I said I wanted a kinder and gentler nation, I meant it—I mean it. My hand is out to you and I want to be your president too.” A campaign is a disagreement, he continued, “and disagreements divide. But an election is a decision. And decisions clear the way for harmony and peace.” He must have felt as Dukakis, winning the nomination, said: “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
Not everyone felt Poppy’s bliss. According to Time, “For Bush it was a victory without drum rolls, a majority without a meaningful mandate. The promise of a Bush Administration lies in the hope that the new President will soon forget the manner in which he won.” Conceding Democratic ineptitude, Walter Shapiro put greater onus on “Bush’s angry scripts as he launched fusillades of demeaning attitudes against the hapless Michael Dukakis.”
In such a fever swamp, many expected liberals from Bill Moyers to Mario Cuomo to try to discredit Poppy’s legitimacy before Bush took the oath. There would be no honeymoon until Democrats respected—feared—the president-elect’s potency and resolve. In 1949–50, bitter over Thomas Dewey’s 1948 debacle, the congressional GOP placed its feet—“Korea, Communism, and Corruption”—squarely on Harry Truman’s throatlatch. If permitted, Democrats would do the same. Furious at Dukakis, incredulous at blowing a sure thing, they blamed the Duke, voter naiveté, Willie Horton, the Pledge, or the turpitude of the GOP Right—anything but the ideology Bush campaigned against.
In a landmark book, Presidential Power, historian Richard E. Neustadt concluded that the public’s opinion of a chief executive “takes shape for most executives no later than the time they first perceive him as being President (a different thing than seeing him as President).” Bush had vowed to be an activist president, sustain Reagan’s legacy, and make his presidency matter. This demanded he be streetwise and aggressive, acting quickly against forces determined to disembowel him. It also meant he must affirm the three themes of the electorate that had chosen him: economic opportunity, a strong defense, and traditional values.
As we shall see, in 1992 independent candidate H. Ross Perot was backed by nearly one in five Americans—traditional in outlook, raised on American preeminence, and taken from Bush’s base. In election week 1988, not knowing of Perot, I submitted a memo, as many colleagues did, I hoped, to fuel the diversity of opinion every administration needs.
My memo focused on how the new administration might tie Bush and the Silent Majority, eliminate any need for a third party, and secure a second term. Following is a sampling:
1. Billy Graham had been the Bushes’ close friend for the past thirty years. He and wife Ruth had even vacationed in Kennebunkport since the 1970s. The memo suggested that they jointly attend church post-election Sunday, November 13. On Inauguration Day Graham might grace the Bush family box; New York Archbishop Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor, deliver an invocation; a Jewish prelate, the benediction; a black evangelist, a prayer about the indigent. In America, ecumenicalism is smart—and right. “I don’t care what religion a man has,” Bush quoted Eisenhower saying, “as long as he has one. Without that none of this makes any sense.”
2. As this account has shown, like the average American male, Ike loved college football—ruggedly individual, wholesome in a swelling-of-the-heart Norman Rockwell way—and nothing wed its heroism and amber waves of grain like the Army-Navy game. It was a day of pageantry and epitome of who we are: “duty, honor, country.” In 1961 John F. Kennedy, a World War II Navy hero, sat on the Army side in the first half, crossing the field at halftime. The entire Navy section rose to cheer. A chant erupted: “Welcome home! Welcome home!” The thirty-fifth president beamed.
As Bush grew up, only the World Series matched the Army-Navy game as America’s midcentury divertissement. One Fall Classic highlight film observed, “Each autumn comes a day in this great land of ours when the wheels of industry turn a little slower . . . the white-collar worker takes a little more time [at] lunch . . . when almost everyone is stricken with WORLD SERIES fever.” Especially in World War II, service-academy football, wrote Robert Mayer, seemed “America’s sporting equivalent of war.” In 1944 Gen. Douglas MacArthur wired victorious West Point coach Red Blaik: “We stopped the war [in the Pacific] to celebrate your magnificent success.”
To Bush and Reagan, people like Blaik and MacArthur were figures from Olympus. If the Secret Service agreed, I urged, have the president and president-elect travel to the Army-Navy game in early December in Philadelphia. In the first half, the Gipper could sit amid midshipmen; Bush, the cadets. At halftime they would meet at midfield, shake hands, and each proceed to the other side of the field—Bush doubtless hearing, “Welcome home!” The symbolism would resound: continuity, football, and the military meshing.
3. The 1988 campaign clearly implied that values would form the boot of the Bush administration. Yet it was plain that foreign policy would be the buckle. Polling showed that most Americans expected Bush, like JFK and Nixon, to be a foreign-policy president. It linked his skill and interest. Even better, less fettered by Congress, a president had greater latitude abroad than at home. Bush could act decisively, showing himself a leader.
Bush grasped that his best interest required reacquainting foreign leaders with his familiarity with world events, building on the UN, China, the CIA, and many trips abroad as vice president. This approach would swell his presidential cachet, underline his legitimacy as Leader of the Free World, and use Bush’s turf to strengthen him domestically so that Congress would hesitate to block his agenda. Such combinations are hard to find.
One example was Margaret Thatcher’s November 1988 state visit. The prime minister and Bush liked one another. I suggested each would benefit from Bush holding a dinner for Mrs. Thatcher at the veep’s residence, where the past and present cream of the foreign policy elite could laud the Anglo-American alliance. Bush could invite Clark Clifford, Dean Rusk, and George Ball, making this anchor of U.S. policy inclusive. Solicitude, Bush’s forte, would aid the bipartisan foreign policy his own dad admired.
In the Old West, whose movies Bush loved as a good-guy prism and progenitor, the outlaw tried to stay a step ahead of the sheriff. In the interregnum between the election and inaugural, Bush tried to stay ahead of a posse determined, as this narrative has noted, to delegitimize his victory. What came naturally to Bush made strategic sense: consensus. Let Democrats throw the first stone, as they shortly would; then, tut-tutting, Bushies could say, “They’re not interested in the national interest—only in guerrilla war.”
4. On November 2, 1988, the Washington Post had published a “No Endorsement” editorial. Opening the door, I wrote, Bush might send a letter to board chairman Katharine Graham, saying, “Once this election is history, and both of us have the chance to catch our breath, perhaps we can meet at a time of your convenience to discuss, in a more personal vein, our years ahead as public people and as citizens.”
After such a meeting, the Post, perhaps, would have treated President Bush less acidly, which is not to say sycophantically; perhaps not (I suspect not). No matter. It cost nothing to extend an open hand. The political goal was to create a preemptive public record. A larger goal—which, growing to know Bush, I found he deeply felt—was to communicate across a no-man’s land in which liberal and conservative talked at, not with, each other, as stick figure, not human being.
5. In the past a president-elect had shown this perspective in what JFK dubbed his cabinet’s and senior staff’s “ministry of talent,” officials announced irregularly, one by one, or all at once. I proposed that each Saturday morning from mid-November to mid-December Bush announce two or three cabinet and senior staff officials, starting with, say, the secretary of commerce, and concluding, before Christmas, with the secretaries of defense, state, and treasury.
Saturday brunch with Bush might have ensured, to the greatest possible degree post-election, the attention of his country. Postscript: In the end Bush announced his cabinet “irregularly.” He was receptive to advice, but trusted his instincts and followed his own timetable. After all, as he often asked aides, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you president?” To my knowledge, no one yet has given an adequate response.