The Family (64 page)
In a conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Bush alluded to his wife as a grudge keeper. The Prime Minister said his wife was the same way, adding, “Do you think it’s because women are less forgiving than men?”
While the President was not as overt as the First Lady, he certainly knew how to drop-kick “kinder and gentler” as well as she did. After he addressed a fund-raiser for Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato of New York, George Bush became incensed hearing D’Amato rap him a few days later for spending too much time on the golf course. Calling the Republican “an ungrateful son of a bitch,” the President sent word to D’Amato that he could forget about any more help from the White House. “George is normally a very even-tempered guy,” said his friend Lud Ashley, “but he’s also a very loyal guy. And when he doesn’t get loyalty in return, that does tick him off.”
Ralph Neas, then executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, felt the sting of Bush’s retaliation after the President vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which was intended to prohibit discrimination in employment.
“I was very critical of the President for that veto and for calling the bill a quota bill simply to pander to the right wing,” said Neas. “I said he was acting beneath the dignity of his office.”
Traveling on Air Force One, the President heard Neas describe him on television as the man who had promised during his 1988 campaign to leave “the tired baggage of bigotry behind,” and then proceeded to make Willie Horton the most famous black man in America. Despite Bush’s rhetoric about voter outreach, he had vetoed passage of a voter-registration program that could have added millions of minority voters to the election rolls, and now he had vetoed a civil rights act passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress. “The White House is declaring open war on civil rights,” said Neas.
The President became so angry at Neas that he momentarily forgot his name and startled reporters by blasting him as “that . . . that . . . white guy who attacked me on this quota bill.” Neas became persona non grata at the Bush White House and was barred from all future bill signings.
The former television correspondent Susan King experienced a similar slap after doing a story on the campaign whispers about Bush and other women, including his involvement with Jennifer Fitzgerald.
“He was furious with me,” King said. “I didn’t say in the piece that he and Jennifer were having an affair, and it’s not a story I’d submit for a prize, but it was legitimate to raise the issue because everyone was talking about it at the time. Barbara did not like Jennifer and did not want her around. That was clear to all of us on the campaign . . . George never forgave me for doing the piece . . . A year or so later, when I was doing a story on Dan Quayle and was in the White House to get a shot of Quayle and Bush together in the Oval Office, the President allowed my cameraman in but kept me out.”
The same President who called his mother every day, wrote touching notes to strangers in trouble, and constantly extolled the blessings of “family, friends and faith” was spiteful to his adversaries. When House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt criticized the President for his “failure to lead,” Bush banned him from several White House events.
Former Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker experienced one of the meanest rebukes in 1989, when he was turned away from the installation ceremony in the Rose Garden of his friend Justin Dart Jr., who had been named chairman of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities.
“My assistant, Kim Elliott, and I arrived at the White House for Justin’s swearing in, but we never got past the front gate,” said Weicker, who had been defeated in 1988 by Joe Lieberman. “The White House guard told me my name had been scratched off the list . . . Vice President Quayle was furious when he found out what happened, and to his credit he called me to apologize . . . He tried to blame John Sununu, the President’s chief of staff, rather than the President himself.”
Over the years Weicker had worked closely with Justin Dart Jr., who had lost the use of his legs after a bout with polio but continued to fight for the rights of the disabled from his wheelchair. As the senior senator from Connecticut, Weicker had introduced a bill during the 100th Congress that eventually led to landmark civil rights legislation for the disabled. “The legislation was changed substantially after I left the Senate, but nevertheless, no bill ever had more of my stamp or more of my heart in it than the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
At the 1988 GOP convention Weicker tried to get a commitment in the Republican platform that the party would support the disabilities act, but he was rebuffed by Sununu, who said Bush did not want the plank. “I think Bush was probably committed,” said Weicker, “but he had to take in the bleatings of the hard right.”
When the President signed the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26, 1990, he invited three thousand people to the White House to witness what he said was the major accomplishment of his presidency. Lowell Weicker was not among the honored guests.
“I know there had been some bad blood between the Bushes and Lowell, but it was so petty to keep him away from that bill signing,” said Kim Elliott. “We knew it wasn’t an oversight, because senators like Harkin, Kennedy, and Dodd lobbied the White House to get Lowell included, but Bush wouldn’t do it . . . And Bush didn’t even have that much to do with the ADA. The credit for getting it passed goes to Senator Bob Dole on the Republican side and Senator Tom Harkin on the Democratic side.”
Try as he might, even the President of the United States could not keep Weicker out of the Bush White House for good. When the President and the First Lady hosted a party for the nation’s governors in 1991, they had to invite Weicker because by then he had been elected governor of Connecticut, one of the few people to hold the office of U.S. representative (1969–71), U.S. senator (1971–89), and governor (1991–95).
“I remember when we went to the White House,” recalled Weicker’s wife, Claudia. “Barbara greeted us by saying, ‘Oh, Lowell. You old renegade, you.’”
Tom D’Amore, Weicker’s chief of staff, chuckled. “I liked Bar a lot,” he said, “because she’s Lowell Weicker in a dress. They’re both direct and speak their mind.”
To the dismay of his aides, President Bush seemed more engaged in planning parties and meeting celebrities in the first months of his term than in dealing with affairs of state or addressing himself to the domestic issues of a faltering economy and burgeoning deficit.
“I covered George senior during the first six months he was President,” said Worth Kinlaw, a Navy cameraman assigned to the White House, “and he was like a kid in a candy shop . . . I covered Reagan, Bush, and Clinton—all totally different. Reagan was like your favorite grandfather—funny but you could never get too close. He enjoyed telling great stories, especially about the past. Clinton was the bad boy from high school, always trying to cop a feel. He was totally into babes. Oh, God. When those White House videos finally become public, you’ll see what I mean by totally, grossly, and completely into babes. He’ll be nailed then like never before. And Bush . . . well, Bush was like your goofy uncle . . .
“I remember when Miss USA came into the Oval Office with her crown and scepter and talked about how she was not just a pretty face but was committed to saving the world. You could see Bush’s eyes glazing over. After she left, he said, ‘Did ya hear that, fellas? It’s all about brains now. I liked it better when it was just bikinis.’ Bush is a man’s man and has that kind of male humor.”
“That’s for sure,” said Julia Malone of Cox Newspapers. “I went with John Mashek to do an interview in the Oval Office. The first thing the President said was, ‘Hey, John. Ya got any jokes to tell?’ Then he looked at me. ‘I know I can trust you, Mashek, but what about her?’ So I agreed to go off the record while the two of them swapped their dirty jokes. It was an awkward moment, but George Bush is a locker-room kind of guy. For all his kindly graciousness, he’s really just a towel-snapper at heart.”
Mashek admitted there was nothing that President Bush liked more than a dirty joke. “I never heard him tell a racist joke, but he sure did love a good sex joke . . . A far fall from the prudish demeanor of his father, who never swore in front of a woman.”
As President, Bush kept a male fertility figure, which he had received from the President of Mozambique, in the Oval Office bathroom. The carved wooden statue, facing the toilet, stood three feet high and was anatomically correct, if somewhat exaggerated. The President kept a roll of toilet paper on the extended male organ. He liked to send young women into the bathroom and watch their reaction when they emerged.
“Alixe Glenn, who was deputy press secretary and about twenty-six years old at the time, told a group of reporters about George Herbert Walker Bush’s weird sex thing,” recalled one White House correspondent. “She said the President told her to go into his bathroom and wash her hands. She did as she was told and came out red-faced with embarrassment. The President thought it was killingly funny.”
A new President usually gets a “honeymoon” of one hundred days to get the ship of state on an even keel and headed in the right direction. The Bush honeymoon lasted all of two weeks before he was battling the U.S. Senate over his nomination of John Tower to be Secretary of Defense.
The President had been warned by Craig Fuller, Robert Teeter, and Secretary of the Treasury Nick Brady that the former Texas senator would be a divisive nomination. The dictatorial Tower had left few friends in the Senate when he retired, and he had problems with “booze and broads.” Bush dismissed the objections: he said he had never seen Tower drunk on all fours in public, and womanizing was a fact of life for all men. Besides, Tower wanted the position at Defense, and Bush wanted to give it to him, especially since Tower’s commission had exonerated George from any wrongdoing in Iran-contra. Bush told his aides that a President is rarely denied his choice of cabinet members. Over his aides’ objections, he submitted Tower’s nomination on January 20, 1989. Bush wrote in his diary: “Not only did I think he would do an outstanding job, I also assumed his nomination would glide through the Hill for two good reasons: he was more than qualified for the job, and Congress is usually kind to its own. I could not have been more wrong.”
The President met with the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee to plead for Tower, but the Democrat Sam Nunn of Georgia was not persuaded. His committee rejected the President’s nomination 11–9 after Nunn announced: “I cannot in good conscience vote to put an individual at the top of the chain of command when his history of excessive drinking is such that he would not be selected to command a missile wing, a SAC [Strategic Air Command] bomber squadron or a Trident missile submarine.”
Having nominated Tower over the objections of his advisers, the President would not back down. He stubbornly insisted on taking the nomination to the floor of the Democrat-controlled Senate. “We are not going to paint our tails white and run with the antelopes,” he declared. He wrote to his friend the columnist Charles Bartlett: “I am going to stand with Tower all the way, and I am confident he will make it. I have never seen such a campaign of innuendo, vicious rumor and gossip in my entire life . . . I am not considering alternatives.”
On March 9, 1989, the Senate rejected the nomination 53–47, the first time in modern history a former senator had been so rebuffed. The President stood alone in congratulating himself for his loyalty, while others began to question his judgment. Only forty-eight days into his term and his presidency had gone Code Blue; he was forced to call a press conference to announce that his administration was not terminal. “There is no drift,” he claimed. “No malaise.” Yet the President had saddled himself with a Vice President who was even more gaffe prone than he was. Dan Quayle had addressed the United Negro College Fund, whose slogan is “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” by saying: “You take the United Negro College Fund model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
In addition to his inept Vice President, the President, who said he would not tolerate the appearance of impropriety in his administration, had appointed a White House counsel, C. Boyden Gray, who had not disclosed eighty-seven thousand dollars in deferred income from a family business while he was in government, and a White House chief of staff, John Sununu, whose arrogance was alienating everyone in sight and whose misuse of government planes cost taxpayers $500,000 and would eventually cost him his job.
Compounding the problems within the Bush White House was the President himself. As democracy began bursting forth from the concrete slabs of Communism in Eastern Europe and South America, Bush seemed wary of looking jubilant. “I don’t want to do anything dumb,” he said.
When Chinese troops fired in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, in a bloody crackdown on the democracy movement, Bush responded lamely: “This is not the time for an emotional response.” He did not denounce the violence, the abuse of power, or the loss of lives. He promised to issue an executive order protecting Chinese students in the United States, but he never did, because he did not want to offend his “old friend” Deng Xiaoping, Chairman of the People’s Republic of China. Freedom lovers around the world ached for something more inspirational from the President of the United States, but Bush was incapable of giving them the rhetoric they desired. “It would not be prudent,” he said. He repeated that phrase so often that it became the signature line for a prissy imitation of Bush by the comedian Dana Carvey on
Saturday Night Live
.
The President performed miserably in July 1989, when he visited Warsaw, which was celebrating the legalization of the Solidarity movement and the restoration of freedom. Lacking the ability to mirror the hope and humanity of the Polish people, the President sounded like a dismal clerk as he emphasized the difficulties of the economic reform that Poland would have to face.