Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 263

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush," by Jon Meacham.

For all Bush knew Ronald Reagan could die on the operating table in the waning hours of afternoon. Yet the vice president showed no fear, no anxiety. “He seems so calm,” Jim Wright wrote in a diary he kept on the flight, “no signs whatever of nervous distress.” In a way, Bush had been here before. Long ago he had been charged with life-and-death responsibilities on an airborne mission. Then he had been twenty years old, an aviator in the vast mosaic of war. Now he was in middle age, a statesman returning to the precincts of temporal power. Then, amid fire and smoke, he had finished his mission. Now, amid uncertainty and doubt, he was determined to do his duty, which, as he saw it, was to lead quietly and with dignity.

Ed Pollard and John Matheny, the vice president’s air force aide, conferred with Bush about arrangements upon arrival in Washington. “There might be a crowd at Andrews,” Pollard said. “If you don’t mind, sir, we’d like to bring the plane into the hangar and disembark there.” Bush agreed. Then the conversation shifted to the next step of the journey. Pollard and Matheny argued that Bush should take a helicopter from Andrews directly to the South Lawn of the White House. That was by far the fastest route—faster and safer than helicoptering to Observatory Hill and driving down Massachusetts Avenue to the White House.

The idea made all the sense in the world—except to Bush. His first rule as vice president, he recalled, was the “most basic of all the rules....The country can only have one President at a time, and the Vice President is not the one.” A showboating vice president who attracted attention to himself was a reminder of the president’s absence.Intuitively, Bush believed that the stronger he looked the weaker the president might seem. “At this moment I am very concerned about the symbolism of the thing,” Bush said to Pollard and Matheny. “Think it through. Unless there’s a compelling security reason,I’d rather land at the Observatory or on the Ellipse.”

Landing on the South Lawn was the president’s prerogative, and the last thing Bush wanted was to be seen as trying to usurp the privileges of the president. The South Lawn felt “too self-important,” Untermeyer wrote of the debate between Bush and his security men. There was precedent, Pollard and Matheny countered, for a vice president to use the South Lawn. “But we have to think of other things,” Bush replied. “Mrs. Reagan, for example.”

Bush understood the logistical and symbolic arguments for the South Lawn. “By going straight to the White House, we’d get there in time for the 7 P.M. network news,” Bush recalled. “What better way was there to reassure the country and tell the world the executive branch was still operating than to show the Vice President, on live TV, arriving at the White House?” The prospect, however, troubled Bush. “The President in the hospital...Marine Two dropping out of the sky, blades whirring, the Vice President stepping off the helicopter to take charge,” Bush mused. “Good television, yes—but not the message I thought we needed to send to the country and the world.”

Matheny was thinking in practical terms. “We’ll be coming in at rush hour,” he told Bush. “Mass Avenue traffic will add anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to your arrival time at the White House.”

“Maybe so,” Bush said, “but we’ll just have to do it that way.”

“Yes, sir,” Matheny said, but Bush saw that he looked puzzled.

“John,” Bush said, “only the President lands on the South Lawn.”


 

 

The assets that made Bush an effective adviser to Reagan and might make him a sound president—his aversion to sloganeering, his belief in bipartisanship, his devotion to principled compromise—were, in his reading of the Republican electorate of 1984, liabilities.



Bush was already thinking about how to unify the party for the fall. The Dole voters,he believed, would be on board: They were Republican regulars. The Pat Robertson brigades struck Bush as more problematic—they seemed more interested in ideology and theology than in political victory. Campaigning in Kingsport, Tennessee—a thoroughly Republican city in a state Reagan had carried twice—Bush encountered a stony-faced Robertson backer who refused to shake the vice president’s hand.“Look, this is a political campaign,” Bush said to her. “We’ll be together when it’s over.” The woman was unmoved, and Bush, in the privacy of his diary, reflected:

Still, this staring, glaring ugly—there’s something terrible about those who carry it to extremes. They’re scary. They’re there for spooky, extraordinary right-winged reasons. They don’t care about Party. They don’t care about anything. They’re the excesses. They could be Nazis, they could be Communists, they could be whatever. In this case, they’re religious fanatics and they’re spooky. They will destroy this party if they’re permitted to take over. There is not enough of them, in my view, but this woman reminded me of my John Birch days in Houston. The lights go out and they pass out the ugly literature. Guilt by association. Nastiness. Ugliness.Believing the Trilateral Commission, the conspiratorial theories. And I couldn’t tell—it may not be fair to that one woman, but that’s the problem that Robertson brings to bear on the agenda.

In the wake of Bush’s win in New Hampshire, President Reagan finally allowed himself to be more expansive about the Republican field. At lunch on the last day of February 1988, Bush recalled, Reagan “made a comment that Dole is mean, and shows a mean side....He didn’t think Kemp was presidential at all, and he made a comment that he was concerned about Robertson and some of the extremes that he brings into the party.” Another sign of Bush’s success: a Kemp supporter called Jonathan Bush to say “Jack will get out and endorse me if we’ll make a deal on the Vice Presidency.” It was the latest in a series of feelers from Kemp about the second spot on a Bush ticket. “I don’t know how we’re ever going to handle this, but I just told them all—everybody—that there must be no indication of any deal of any kind,” Bush dictated on Thursday, March 3. He wanted to keep his options open. (Though not totally open: The New York developer Donald Trump mentioned his availability as a vice presidential candidate to Lee Atwater. Bush thought the overture “strange and unbelievable.”

From education to the environment to civil rights for the disabled, Bush’s domestic legislative achievements did not fit neatly into the traditional categories of left and right. Conservatives distrusted Bush’s use of government to reach certain ends, and liberals were wary of his emphasis on limiting regulatory intrusion and, where possible, using market-based incentives. But what the president called, without irony, “sound governance” required the sensibility of the “Have-Half” Poppy Bush of distant days. Sometimes, when his political advisers would try to tell him that his compromises were difficult to sell to his own base, Bush would fix them with what one longtime aide called “the Look—you know, the one that said, politely, of course, ‘If you’re so smart, then why aren’t you the president of the United States?’"

This was the crux of the matter. Bush was more interested in the result, which he defined as responsible governance and sound financial stewardship, than he was in the political work of educating the country about the situation at hand. He was willing to concede some ground on taxes—or “tax-revenue increases”—in order to get the Democrats to agree to spending constraints. Because of existing law, that spending, if left unchecked, could one day lead to draconian automatic cuts or ruinously higher taxes (or both) that might damage an economy and a culture accustomed to a larger federal role in the life of the nation.

So why not say so, explicitly and dramatically, to the American people, beyond the context of a hastily called news conference at nine thirty on a Friday morning in summer just before the Fourth of July holiday? Partly because, in the furor over the 1990 budget, the president fell prey to a tendency to assume that other people were living inside his head with him and understood what he was doing and why he was doing it. He governed by making the decisions he felt were right and then moving on to the next item of business. He was no Coolidge, to be sure, but neither was he an FDR, who used the radio to educate the public, or a Reagan, who believed speeches mattered. Bush really did not—at his peril. “He truly believed that the country was going to judge him on results—what he did and how it turned out—not on what he said in a speech,” Dan Quayle recalled. “I’d go in and urge him to take a case to the country, and he’d say it over and over—‘Dan, what people want is results. That’s what matters.’”

Bush’s discomfort with the rhetorical requirements of his office was one of his cardinal weaknesses as a president. He had worked hard, devilishly hard, to earn the privilege to manage the affairs of the age, but then he wanted to go back to work, not deliver a grand address or present a consistent message. Why? One reason may be his belief, expressed in private, that he was no Reagan, and Reagan was known as something Bush would never be: the Great Communicator. Instead of learning from the president he served for eight years, Bush appears to have become intimidated by the Reagan rhetorical legacy. He therefore preferred the press conference format, where he could jump around from topic to topic in a way that matched his personal hyperdrive.

Another reason had to do with the media environment itself. The president read so many newspapers and summaries of political talk shows that he could work himself up into barely controlled rages. Perhaps part of Bush’s blind spot on the role of sustained rhetoric and disciplined messaging was that he believed most journalists tended to ignore his arguments in favor of details about political winners and losers, or, as Bush liked to say, “who’s in and who’s out.” This is not to excuse him for failing to use the communicative powers of the presidency more fully, but it may help explain his reluctance to do more to sell his programs to the American public.

As he saw it, he had the nation’s best interests at heart. He had signed up to serve America since his eighteenth birthday. He lived by the code of “duty, honor, country.” He took for granted—perhaps subconsciously, and surely unwisely—that everyone else, or most everyone else, saw him the way he saw himself, as a public servant trying to serve the public as best he could. To govern was to choose, and in the tax decision he had made the most responsible and plausible choice available to him in an imperfect world.