Till then, Bush had ignored repeated warnings to come out fighting for his presidency or risk losing it; it was a measure of his resistance, and his team’s growing frustration, that they felt it necessary to use guile where open diplomacy had failed. The ploy worked: the president was steaming nicely when he and Fitzwater encountered one another an hour later in a holding room at the Sheraton Astrodome hotel.
“Well, Marlin,” Bush said, his smile masking his anger, “you’re trying to cause trouble by showing me this before dinner.”
“I was trying to get you fired up, sir,” Fitzwater said.
“One of these days, we’re gonna have to get into this,” Bush said, heading for the dais.
By “this,” he meant polities, and he did get into it for one rare time that night; he junked most of the prosy script his handlers had written for him and proceeded to scorch the sauce jardiniere with a shrill, podium-thumping attack on the “Democratic liberal carping” he had to endure every day. His hold on the language was, as usual, insecure-“The Democrats want to ram it down my ear,” he said of one piece of pending social legislation-but his sulfurous anger warmed the room. “Guess I’m gonna have to be the nice guy in this campaign,” John Sununu, the notoriously unnice White House chief of staff, joked to his tablemates; the president, it appeared, would supply the brimstone.
Bush had never been a very happy warrior, and his appetite had been further dulled by the pasting he had taken for the nastiness of his 1988 campaign; it had become one of the trials of his presidency to be so often reminded of how meanly he had won it. His distaste for an encore was an open secret, even to relative strangers. “I’m not looking forward to this,” he told a campaign-management recruit who had been marched round to meet him that summer. Bush vastly preferred holding office to the grubby business of seeking it; merely to declare his candidacy, in his mind, was to cross the line from statesman to beggar, and he refused to be hurried into it.
There had been a time when he wondered whether he should run at all-whether his continuing in office would impose too large a burden on his family. Barbara Bush’s reservations about a second term were well known to her friends. She could, as she often told them, live just as easily without the perks or the cares of the White House; they suspected that she would in truth be happier bidding Washington goodbye.
Her ambivalence deepened when, in the spring of 1991, Bush’s heart had gone into a scary and briefly disabling flutter. The problem was quickly traced to an overwrought thyroid, and the pills that remedied the problem overcame Bar’s last line of resistance. Running again had always been George’s decision, she told her chums. She had deferred to his wishes in business and politics all their lives, and she wasn’t going to start meddling now.
Bush knew that; his own misgivings centered on his children. An old friend who joined him in trolling for bluefish off Walker’s Point in Maine one sunny August morning in 1990 found the president’s mood curiously out of joint with the beauty of the setting and the brilliance of the day. His third son, Neil, had got entangled in a savings and loan scandal in Colorado. The press had pilloried him, and the legal fees had cleaned him out. Would that have happened if his father hadn’t been president? Bush didn’t think so.
“The Neil thing is really bothering me,” he said. “My heart aches for my son.”
His companion protested that Neil seemed to be getting his life back together, and that Bush in any case had a higher duty to his country.
Irritation flashed in the president’s eyes. “It’s my flesh and blood whose life I’m affecting,” he said.
The issue was settled that Christmas, when Bush gathered the clan at Camp David and canvassed them informally about what he ought to do. “Dad,” his second son, Jeb, told him, “the world needs you.” There were no dissenters, not Barbara, not Neil; the family consensus was, go for it.
Yet even then, the president dawdled. Active planning for Ronald Reagan’s re-election had begun a year and a half in advance, and the outcome had been a nearly foregone conclusion. Bush, by contrast, let the seasons slide away without so much as putting together a campaign command. He missed the people who had run the show in 1988-Lee Atwater, the demon attack strategist, dead of brain cancer at 40; Roger Ailes, the adman, reduced at his own wish to kibitzing by phone from Manhattan; James Baker, the boss of bosses, otherwise engaged being secretary of state and securing his own place in the presidential line of succession. A new set of handlers-suits, Ailes used to call them-would materialize once Bush announced, and he dreaded their arrival.
His own plan, stubbornly held, was to field an organization in January and to declare his candidacy a month later. When he submitted to a midsummer day’s political retreat at Camp David, it was, as he privately let on, a way to get everybody off his back.
For the three dozen people he invited, the half-day conclave in Laurel Lodge was memorable for what didn’t get said or done. “I haven’t decided what to do yet,” Bush said. “I wouldn’t waste your time if I knew I wasn’t running. I expect I will, but I haven’t made any decisions.”
Glances flicked meaningfully around the conference table. Bush’s mode was avoidance; he grudgingly agreed to a start-up fund-raising operation. But there seemed to him to be no point war-gaming an election 15 months away. The economy would be decisive, and in his insistent opinion, it would soon get better.
It didn’t, nor did the president’s sinking fortunes. By mid-autumn his job-approval rating had tumbled nearly 20 points in six weeks, and America’s unhappiness with itself was rising toward levels unknown even in the darkest days of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter. Only Bush seemed ignorant of the depth of the disquiet. He was sure the people still liked him, and as one of his top aides confessed in the waning days of 1991, no one around him had had the nerve to tell him otherwise.
There were signs of danger in that autumn’s by-elections, a wave of revulsion against incumbents of either party; even a retouched white supremacist named David Duke had run for governor of Louisiana and made it to a runoff before losing. But the most ominous news, for Bush, was the defeat of his friend and sometime attorney general, Richard Thornburgh, for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania. Thornburgh had gone into the race with a 44-point lead over Harris Wofford, an able but obscure chairwarmer then occupying the office by appointment. His worst mistake, among many, was advertising his ease in the corridors of power in Bush’s Washington. In a season for outsiders, he became Mr. Inside, and he lost to Wofford by a landslide.
Bush’s responses to adversity had the look of panic; for a time, it was almost as if having read his lips was the least reliable guide to his intentions. He did dizzying U-turns on civil rights and unemployment benefits. A long-planned mission to Tokyo and other Asian ports of call was abruptly postponed the night Thornburgh crashed and burned in Pennsylvania.
The hip-hop dance across the stage of public policy made a bad start for Bush’s campaign; it reinforced a new complaint, beginning to be heard from voters in Fred Steeper’s focus groups, that maybe Bush did change his mind too much. His numbers were still sliding, to a level 10 points lower than Bob Teeter had hoped and thought they would be at the eve of battle. Bush finally did begin to sense his peril and to understand that he could not hang back much longer. But there was a painful matter he had to address first, a canker of discontent that had bedeviled his presidency and was stalling his campaign. He had to do something about John Sununu.
Bush had always hated confrontation, and when he finally moved on Sununu, he did it his way: with dragging foot and hidden hand. The device he chose after much delay was a letter, privately dispatched on the last day of October 1991 to the eight or 10 men who made up his inner circle in politics. “I have asked son George to very quietly make some soundings for me on 1992,” he began. “I’d appreciate it if you’d visit with him on your innermost thoughts about how to best structure the campaign.”
Their responses would be held strictly confidential, Bush promised; he had instructed George W. not to share their views with anybody except him. “My plan,” he went on, “is still to wait-defer final campaign structural decisions until after the first of the year at least; but there seems to be a fair amount of churning around out there.” He hoped his friends would speak freely. What he needed, he said, was “the unvarnished, frank views of my most trusted political confidants.”
Bush had chosen his words carefully, making the letter sound like a routine request for advice, and had included Sununu on the eyes-only distribution list. But it was more nearly an invitation to a hanging. The president could guess how his people felt about Sununu: half the cabinet had been intriguing for months to get him fired, and the core members of the campaign-to-be were muttering that they didn’t want to work with him. Bush was in effect soliciting a vote of no confidence, a don’t-blame-me consensus that Sununu had to go.
Sununu was smart, everybody had to concede that; he had come down from New Hampshire after six years as governor wearing his genius IQ on his sleeve. But he was widely regarded in Washington as the poster child for that locally pandemic disease called the arrogance of power. His approach to management appeared to have been modeled on Caligula’s, and so did his appetite for the luxuries of his high position; his frequent use of air force planes for personal trips had lately become a public scandal.
At critical moments, Sununu seemed gifted at handing his enemies a whole armorer’s stock of swords. There had been the time, for example, when Bush needed a new Republican national chairman and asked Sununu to sound out two veterans of the 1988 campaign about taking the job. One, Rich Bond, was actively interested; the other, Craig Fuller, while less enthused, was willing to consider it if the president wanted him. But Sununu, jealous of his own standing at court, told Bush that both men had said no. In time, the truth reached the president, who was not pleased. Bond eventually got the job. Sununu’s was at risk.
Through the summer, the strains between the two men grew harder to hide. When the Soviet old guard mounted its coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, Bush pointedly excluded Sununu from the list of aides he summoned to Kennebunkport to help him deal with the crisis. Sununu came anyway, on his own motion, but was never a major player.
Not long thereafter, he showed up unannounced at Walker’s Point once again, interrupting the president at tennis.
“Why are you here?” Bush asked.
“I just wanted to talk to you about something,” Sununu said. He mentioned a pending problem of state.
“I solved that yesterday,” Bush said tartly, turning on his heel and walking off toward the horseshoe pit.
Neither did it help Sununu’s cause that the sedition had spread to the unborn reelection campaign. Sununu had put it about that he himself would be directing the effort out of his White House office. That arrangement had worked nicely for Ronald Reagan in 1984, but Jim Baker had been chief of staff then, and people had wanted to work for him. Sununu commanded no such affection. several of Bush’s designees for the campaign team were near mutiny at the mere idea, and their leading man, playing Fletcher Christian to Sununu’s Captain Bligh, just happened to be one of the president’s best friends.
His name was Bob Teeter, and his hard feelings dated to the days when Sununu had muscled him out of a serious management role in the Bush White House. Teeter’s bruises had not healed with time. He usually masked his emotions behind a stolid Midwestern reserve, but his unfondness for Sununu was apparent, sometimes explosively so. He didn’t like the man or trust his word, and-while he could not quite bring himself to say so directly to Bush-he didn’t want to chair the re-election effort if it meant reporting to Sununu. He had done six presidential campaigns, he told friends that fall. He didn’t need a seventh. He might not be there at all.
Sununu’s last lifeline was finally severed in the wake of the president’s idle suggestion, in a speech, that the interest rates charged by banks on past-due credit-card payments be lowered. The notion, while popular, was a nonstarter as a business proposition; the markets had bellywhopped badly at the mere notion that the banking industry, already in trouble, might lose some badly needed profits. Bush’s embarrassment was deep enough when the world thought he had been reading some ghostwriter’s bad idea from a prepared script. But Sununu made matters worse by saying, in a TV interview, “The president ad-libbed.”
The seismic rumble that followed was the sound of people surnamed Bush deserting Sununu en masse-the First Lady and all five of their children among them. George W., known widely and inaccurately behind his back as Junior, told one of the anti-Sununu partisans, “We have a saying in our family: If a grenade is rolling by The Man, you dive on it first. The guy violated the cardinal rule.”
The responses to Junior’s formal canvass, begun two days before Thanksgiving, were devastating: the White House and the campaign were in disarray, and in the nearly universal view of his colleagues, Sununu was at fault. Jim Baker once again urged Sununu’s removal; so did Bob Teeter, who was to chair the campaign, and Bob Mosbacher, a Bush family friend slotted for a more ornamental role as general chairman.
Junior’s call on Sununu himself was an amiable quarter-hour visit, not much longer or less civil in tone than that Washington social ritual called a drop-by. There were pleasantries about the Bushes’ affection for Sununu, and his for them. But the reports from the troops were troubling.
“John,” Junior said, “a lot of people are saying the problem is you.”
His tone was unjudgmental, his language guarded. One way to solve the problem, he counseled gently, might be to consider leaving, but he stopped well short of asking for Sununu’s resignation. What he did need to do, Junior said, was to have a frank talk with the president.
SUNUNU WAS VISIBLY SHAKEN; he had expected to be asked how the campaign should be structured, not to be told by indirection that he might want to freshen up his resume. He fought on, by now alone. The night he finally met with Bush, nothing happened; the assumption among the president’s men was that he wanted Sununu out but had been unable to pull the trigger. The next morning Sununu marched on Quayle, pleading for a stay of execution. Quayle listened noncommittally, then briefed the president over lunch that noonday.
He’s resisting, Quayle said.
Bush appeared to be in pain.
Afterward, Quayle walked into Sununu’s office, closing the door behind him. Bush was anguishing, he told Sununu; he simply couldn’t bring himself to fire an old friend. Sununu would be doing himself and the president an enormous service by standing down.
Fifteen minutes later, a chastened Sununu appeared in the Oval Office and offered his resignation. It was an awkward moment, and Bush, not wanting to face it alone, buzzed Quayle in for company. The three spent a half-hour working out the details, including a three-month farewell tour for Sununu with an important-sounding new title as a fig leaf.
The last impediment was gone, and the re-election campaign was rushed into being, a step or so ahead of the president’s legato schedule. By then, reality was closing in. A “draft Buchanan” committee was in the field in New Hampshire, with its hero’s blessings, preparing the way for his imminent entry into the race. The air, there and elsewhere, was smoky with insurrection; the mood that had so worried Fred Steeper in early autumn was turning more sullen and more dangerous by the month.
Two days after the midterm elections of 1990, Bush had invited a dozen of his outside brain trusters to the White House for lunch, bonhomie and some postmortem political shoptalk. As his guests attacked the marinated chicken and the chocolate-orange souffle, he asked them, “Where can I improve?”
Most of the answers were the usual rote chat about message and communications. But a couple of brave souls told Bush as frankly as they dared that he was getting bad advice from his economists. Their rosy forecasts were all wrong. Times were tough. were scared. Jobs were disappearing. Unemployment lines were getting longer. The economy was in recession, no matter what the bar graphs said, and it was getting worse. If Bush didn’t make a show of trying to deal with it, it could be his undoing.
“I’m not sure there is a recession,” Bush replied mildly.
The warnings ran cross grain with Bush’s own deep optimism and with the counsel of his house economist, Michael Boskin; his budget director, Richard Darman, and his secretary of the Treasury, Nicholas Brady. Their collective wisdom was that the economy would fix itself-that all the elements necessary to a recovery were in place and that discretion dictated leaving well enough alone. Their advice suited Bush’s own cast of mind, in which prudence had always been a higher virtue than daring. His compass tended to flutter anyway in the deeper thickets of domestic policy. George didn’t really know what he stood for, one outside friend and adviser said privately, so the easiest thing for him to do was nothing.
Denial thus was elevated to public policy: the president would announce from various venues-including, imprudently, a golf course-that there was no recession or that if there was one, it was blowing over. In a season of change, he was becoming the candidate of the status quo; people wanted something done, and all they heard from him was what he couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t do.
At a White House meeting in October 1991, the call for action was taken up by Dan Quayle, a man whose vague eyes and Lite reputation masked a shrewd native instinct for politics. With his own future ambitions on the line, Quayle had taken up with the younger post-Reagan conservatives in the party and had become an advocate of their ideas about stimulating growth and opportunity by getting the tax codes and the bureaucrats out of the way. He had not got far selling their blue-sky agenda to the president, but, he argued heatedly, Bush had to propose something; people thought their president had abandoned them, and it would be vastly better politically to fight and lose than to do nothing at all.
But, to Quayle’s undisguised dismay, Bush sided once again with his more traditionalist court wizards. Events finally forced him at least to acknowledge reality, if not take arms against it. The last weeks of 1991 had brought a firestorm of layoffs; corporations were downsizing at a rate of 2,600 jobs a day, and by Christmas, General Motors, that monument to a rusting industrial past, announced plans to cashier 74,000 workers. A contagion of angst long familiar on factory floors was spreading through white-collar America as well, and by the time Marlin Fitzwater was propelled forward to concede on Bush’s behalf that, yes, the economy was in recession, the collective anxiety attack had reached epidemic levels.
The portents were ugly when, just before Christmas, Roger Ailes called one of his friends in the campaign to convey his alarm.
“We’re managing a disaster, boys,” Ailes said. “It’s time to get on the offensive.”
The warning was relayed to Bob Teeter. Ailes was right, he said, but they were stuck with Bush’s determination to postpone any new economic proposals until the State of the Union message and to hope in the meantime for visibly better times. Teeter waved in the general direction of the White House, sighing heavily. His friend’s presidency was at stake, but so far as Teeter could tell, the people over there didn’t even understand they had a problem.
