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George Herbert Walker Bush by Tom Wicker Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended)
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Friend Another fine contribution in the Penguin Lives series is Tom Wicker’s biography, George Herbert Walker Bush. By the time you close the book, you’ll likely learn that throughout a lifetime of service, George H.W. Bush has made thousands of friends. Wicker describes an honorable man, who served the nation and the Republican Party well. Given the brevity of the Penguin series, there’s much left out, but what’s here constantly returns to the importance of friendship. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter Three, pp. 48-54: After Gerald Ford lost the presidential election to Jimmy Carter in 1976, numerous voices speculated in the press that, as a unity gesture and for the sake of continuity in a sensitive post, Carter might keep George Bush as CIA director. Well before the inauguration, I wrote an op-ed column in the New York Times deprecating that idea—how could a former Republican national chairman be a bipartisan unity appointee? Almost immediately I received a phone call from Jody Powell, who was to be the new president’s press secretary. As was his wont, Powell didn’t mince words: “We’re not going to do that.” Months before, I’d written that Governor Carter, then a relatively unknown candidate, was sure to lose the Florida Democratic primary to George Wallace of Alabama. Powell had called me then, too, and said just as bluntly: “We think we’re going to win in Florida.” Carter did win in Florida and went on to be nominated and defeat an incumbent president. So I trusted Powell’s information when he told me Bush would not be reappointed. I didn’t know, however, and Powell didn’t tell me, that Bush actually had offered to stay on as DCI in a Democratic administration, not least because he had come to like the agency and the job and wanted to help restore the CIA to the high public standing he thought it deserved. Once his offer was rejected, he found he did not like being at loose ends in Houston and out of a government position for the first time since he’d won election to Congress in 1966. How do I “stay alive?” Bush wrote to ask Bayless Manning at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, describing himself as “blessed by having had fascinating government assignments” and admitting to retaining his interest in national politics. In similar vein he wrote to Alan Greenspan, who had been Ford’s economic adviser (and whom in 1992 Bush was to reappoint as chairman of the Federal Reserve), Charlie Bartlett, and others of his myriad friends.^2It was politically advantageous to return to the business world, so Bush took on various lucrative business opportunities, being careful as a former DCI to avoid politically awkward conflicts of interest. All the while, however, thoughts of the presidency apparently were germinating in Bush’s mind; he organized a PAC, the Fund for Limited Government (FLG), with his Houston neighbor, James A. Baker III, as chairman, and gathered a number of politically knowledgeable friends at Kennebunkport—the FLG footing the bill—to discuss his future. Bush looked with an increasingly jaundiced eye on the presidency of Jimmy Carter, whom he regarded as weak and unskilled in the ways of Washington—but he listened carefully when Baker explained that Carter, by winning early in 1976 in the Iowa caucuses, had shown the way for a candidate with little national support to gain the name recognition a presidential candidate needed. Besides, like Carter in 1975, Bush saw no one else in his party with a more legitimate claim than his to the White House. And he was not yet convinced that Ronald Reagan, the front-runner, who had lost the 1976 nomination to Ford by only a whisker, could win in 1980. Bush liked to claim that his extensive record of impressive posts—in Congress, at the UN, at the RNC, in China, at the CIA— qualified him for the presidency. Actually there was less to this claim than met the eye, and Bob Dole was to observe cuttingly in 1988 that his long years in the Senate had given him a real record, “not a resume.” This clearly implied that Bush’s vaunted experience was the other way around—a résumé, not a record—and not much of a qualification for the White House. That was after Bush had served eight years in the vice presidency—as the choice of Ronald Reagan more than of the American people. Before the vice presidency, the Bush résumé was particularly thin. Lots of Americans, after all, have put in four years in the House of Representatives without running for president on the strength of this relatively minor achievement—and in Bush’s case his two terms had resulted from only one challenged election. Counting his two Texas Senate races, he had never defeated an incumbent officeholder—and had beaten only one opponent of any kind, in 1966. Bush’s two years at the UN had been unmarked by major crises and undercut by Nixon and Kissinger’s “opening to China~’ his own year in Beijing was virtually uneventful, his party chairmanship had been devoted almost entirely to the loyal defense of Richard Nixon, and his labors at the CIA had been largely in sheltering the agency from the public, the press, and Congress. His two Senate campaigns had been competent but losers still; he had not won a competitive election since 1966 and that only in a congressional district all but tailored for him. All George Bush’s most impressive-sounding jobs, in truth, had been appointive. No standard of qualifications—save the age requirement of thirty-five and the U.S. residency requirement—_exists for American-born presidential candidates of either party; but Bush’s claim clearly was exaggerated—compared with, say, Dwight Eisenhower in 1952: no election experience at all but commander of Allied forces in Europe in World War II, army chief of staff, president of Columbia University, the first SACEUR (postwar supreme commander of NATO in Europe), leader in any number of national popularity and presidential preference polls. Nevertheless Bob Dole’s claim to superiority also lacked ultimate validity. A veteran senator does have a voting record on many issues, but that is not necessarily a political asset; he or she has little experience outside the Senate chamber, with other nations in world affairs, or with large-scale administration, hence little substantial experience for the presidency—witness the fact that in the twentieth century only two senators, Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy, have been elected directly from the Senate to the White House. In fact ten twentieth-century presidents— the two Roosevelts, Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton—never served in Congress at all. Bush’s variety of service, though he exaggerated the importance of each of his posts, actually gave him even in 1980 the kind of wide-ranging background experience that few senators achieve. He knew, or at least had met, political leaders around the world; he had dealt—though not very officially—with such great leaders as Mao Tse-tung. Like Dole, many in the press (including me) scoffed at Bush’s claims for his résumé, but in the late 1970s it put him in demand to comment on major international issues, to make speeches for big and little causes and at rallies for local candidates. All those friends listed in the card index Barbara Bush zealously maintained also were a major asset—school friends, political friends, business friends, family friends, money friends, and Republican activists in every state, some of whom were politically indebted to him. And in those days, as always, George Bush was never too tired to respond to political duty—which also was opportunity. As he began seriously to reach for the presidency, a major result was more cards in Barbara’s growing index, more “due bills” owed him by other politicians. After every appearance he sent off notes to everyone he’d met who had helped him, who maybe someday could help him, even if they were then signed on with some other candidate. He took lessons from a speech coach (without much effect), shook thousands of hands, kissed babies tirelessly, ate plate after plate of banquet chicken and roamed the country from end to end—nearly two hundred thousand miles in one year. In these campaign travels he was accompanied only by David Bates, a young Houston lawyer who provided Bush’s on-the-road staff (in 1978 Jim Baker was tied up running unsuccessfully for attorney general of Texas). On May 1, 1979, two years after winding up his CIA service, George H. W. Bush announced that he was formally what he had been informally since leaving public service: a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. In retrospect it may appear that he was overstepping himself; to some it did then; but his decision to run was no more brash—perhaps less so—than his effort in 1974, with a less impressive résumé, to persuade Gerald Ford to appoint him vice president. Every aspiring politician, at some point—or perhaps several—must risk the possibility that his reach will exceed his grasp. Still following Carter’s example, moreover, Bush and Baker focused on Iowa, organizing all ninety-nine of its counties, appearing in all of them time and again, working every gathering they could find, from lodge meetings to church barbecues. Bush was at his best in someone’s living room before a dozen voters or in a town hail before fifty—and those, as Carter had shown, were the venues where the Iowa caucuses ultimately were won. Nor did Bush let his weak poll numbers—6 percent to Ronald Reagan’s 45 in early January l980—discourage him. He did not claim to be, or campaign as, a rigid conservative or a fierce liberal; let people think of him as they saw him, he reasoned—plain, friendly George Bush, who believed that his personal quality was more important to voters than any ideology or any political promise. And sure enough the gap slowly began to close; later in January the polls stood at Reagan, 33 percent; Bush, 27. So it was that on the cold February night of the Iowa caucuses, George H. W. Bush defeated Reagan (who’d never even bothered to come to the state) by just over two thousand votes, or 1 percentage point: Bush, 30.5; Reagan, 29.4. And the Carter example held. By winning Bush got the bounce he needed into public recognition as a serious candidate, plus the inflow of campaign funds that resulted, even a cover story and photo in Newsweek. Now he had “Big Mo”—lots of momentum—the upbeat candidate exulted. If so, it had come just in time for the New Hampshire primary, which now could be pictured as what the Bush campaign had long wanted: a one-on-one showdown with Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it was inexperience in presidential campaigning, or maybe the effect of their belief in Big Mo. Neither George Bush nor his aides took seriously enough the plain fact that Reagan had come within a percentage point of winning in Iowa—without campaigning or appearing in the state. Biographies of contemporary figures can often miss the mark. George H.W. Bush seems to capture the essence of the man: a good friend who made friends. Perhaps in time, there will be other things to say, but for now that seems just right. Steve Hopkins, November 26, 2004
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