What It Takes (109 page)

See, it didn’t have to do with how they saw Teeter, or how they (or Teeter) saw George Bush. The point (the whole point with the badge of the Big Gee) was how George Bush looked at
them
. Fuller and Atwater might have hands-on control, might be asked, in fact, to run the halves of Bush, Inc. But they were Washington creatures, men in their thirties ... who worked for George Bush. Therefore, in Bush-life, the view from Kennebunkport, they were the lowest G-2 in Gee-Six. They were staff. Bush had run through a lot of staff. When they came for briefings, or brought pooh-bahs to Maine, Atwater and Fuller stayed in hotels. But Teeter antedated Bush in the big time—he’d worked for Nixon. He was not, in the Bush-mind, a total Washington creature, but a Michigander (i.e., from real America). Teeter had built his own business (Bong!—a big bell in the Bush campanile), so, at times, Teeter had stayed in the house on Walker’s Point.

Teeter’s complement in this higher G-2 was Roger Ailes, another professional op, a television guru, another antedater of Bush, builder of a business, a New Yorker who continued to work from New York. Ailes was a tough guy with a blunt, gray goatee, thick of appearance and slovenly: he looked like he was wearing someone else’s suit—but one he’d borrowed years ago (now the guy didn’t want it back). The point was, Ailes didn’t care how he looked. If people didn’t like his suit—fuck ’em, they were assholes! So Ailes, preemptively, acted like an asshole right back. That’s one of the reasons Bush liked him: not that he was an asshole to Bush—but he didn’t mind looking like an asshole
for
Bush.

Ailes was honest, and in his own way, modest. He didn’t try to talk to Bush about U.S.–Soviet relations, or the War Powers Act ... or anything outside his ken. In the highly compartmentalized acquaintance of the Veep (how else could one keep thirty thousand friends straight?), that showed up as something like sense. As a consequence, Ailes was invited to work his wiles upon Bush’s image, his appearance, his speaking style ... on which subjects Ailes was not shy. One hot day, Bush, at the podium, stripped off his suit coat to reveal his tie and a dress shirt with ...
short sleeves
! The sweating and enraged Ailes met the Veep at the foot of the stage:

“Don’t
ever
wear that shirt again! ... You looked like a fucking CLERK!”

They got to be great friends. Ailes, too, stayed at the Walker’s Point house ... if there was room. But not if the First Friends showed up—Bob Mosbacher and Nick Brady. They were the last and the highest G-2...
real
white men.

Mosbacher was Finance Chairman of GBFP, a friend to Bush for thirty years, a man whose life rang a half-dozen Bush-bells of respect: he came from money in a New York commuter suburb but eschewed daddy’s business—stocks and bonds—for the oil fields of Texas. (Bong!) He made his own pile—vast oil and gas holdings—and devoted himself to raising money for the GOP, building the Party in Texas. (Bong!) He was Finance Chairman, nationwide, for Gerald Ford ... a man of civic commitment—a chairman of Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Institute ... a sportsman—U.S. sailing champ in Olympic-class yachts ... a hale and handsome sixty-year-old with lively blue eyes and the charm of self-deprecation. (Bong, Bong, Bong!) In the argot of Andover men, Mosbacher was an all-rounder.

Nick Brady, Campaign Chairman, was a quieter figure, as became a private banker to the nation’s most-monied. In fact, the Bush-bells of Brady’s life rang harmony with those of Bush’s father. Like Prescott Bush, Brady had climbed the rungs of his investment bank—in Brady’s case, the firm was Dillon Read—while the principal, C. Douglas Dillon, lent service to the man in the White House. (Mr. Dillon was Secretary of the Treasury for Kennedy and Johnson.) Brady finally arrived at chairman of the board. Meanwhile, he served the nation’s weal in his own way, for nine months as a Senator from New Jersey, appointed to fill an unexpired term, and then on blue-ribbon boards and commissions created by the Reagan White House. Brady was a diffident man to strangers, gray-granite-jawed, like a chunk of Manhattan schist. He went back with Bush only ten years or so—got to know him after Carter won and Bush had to step down as Director of Central Intelligence. But right away, Brady showed his acumen by offering Bush a partnership at Dillon Read. How did Brady know he wanted to lure Bush aboard when—in Brady’s own words—he barely knew the man? The answer speaks to the method and worldview of white men:

Of course, he knew the family ...

Then, too, he could just
see
Bush’s “way of going” ...

Bush was clearly “a very senior sort of person,” Brady said. “It’s like thoroughbred horses.”

So, Nick and George were just neighing across the paddock fence. And Bush, with equal, instantaneous clarity, saw that Brady was, in Andoverese, “sound.”

The interesting coincidence—well, not pure coincidence—was that Brady, so sound, so profoundly a conservator, was matched and met on his rung of the Gee-Six by Mosbacher, the go-go wildcatter entrepreneur ... just as the clerkly and careful Teeter contrasted with the fiercely pugnacious Ailes ... just as Fuller, in his Teflon pinstripes, contested with the flamboyant blues-man, Atwater.

You could call it balance ... or uneasy stasis. In fact, it was more fluid than appearance would suggest—a constant rondo of alliance and agreement, depending sometimes on who had talked to whom, and when, or the fact that Atwater worked no more than fifty feet from Teeter, or someone’s best friend couldn’t get a call-back from Fuller, or the First Friends had just spent a weekend in the big house at Maine. ... But it
was
difficult to win quick consensus. It
did
result in a campaign whose candidate spent twenty-five straight nights in his own bed, in a remote corner of the nation, four months before the first primaries. (It probably had been thirty years since a major contender for President took three or four weeks off—Ike, maybe.) ... Anyway, whatever came up, you always had to think what your fellow Gees might say ... and it was only prudent to consider what Bush (or some other Gee) might be talking about with that notable nonmember, Jim Baker (Gee-Squared). ... In fact, there were so many ways that Gee-Six
meant
defense ... the wonder was Bush ever left Kennebunkport.

But he did. About once a week, he’d motorcade down to Pease Air Force Base, climb aboard a waiting Stratoliner, and fly off to do something helpful. Last week it was New Orleans, where he spoke to a VFW convention. This week it would be San Antonio, to address the American Legion. Of course, the U.S. Air Force would have Bush back in his ocean-view bed that same night ... anyway, this, too, was defense.

This was part of Atwater’s southern fire-wall strategy, Lee’s determination to erect an unassailable, insurmountable Super Tuesday bulwark, so that even if Bush lost Iowa ... even if he fell on his face
big-time
and pissed away his lead (and Governor Sununu’s help) in New Hampshire ... even if Bob Dole got hot and swept the lesser early contests in Minnesota and South Dakota ... even if Jack Kemp convinced the tax-cut-and-Star-Wars crowd that he was the Real and Rightful Reagan Heir ... even if Pat Robertson’s eye-in-the-middle-of-the-forehead charismatics crawled out by thousands from under church pews ...
still, even so!
... on Super Tuesday, seventeen states would vote, most of whose citizens had never seen a candidate, and, as a consequence, they would vote in small numbers—small enough to match, or even overmatch, with a machinable bloc ... just the kind of bloc vote that Lee could deliver, knowing, as he did know, every small-time white-shoe Republican op in the Old Confederacy, having worked with them on the Gipper’s campaigns, having greased them now, assiduously, for nearly three years, as the head of the Bush PAC, and then the Bush campaign, having wheedled and threatened and bribed them aboard, every one, in every state ... until the other campaigns must perish from lack of help, or lack of money, or, ultimately, votes ...
one way or another
, George Bush was going to look like a winner on March 8.

This was defense by suffocation—you look to see where the other guy’s breathing, then mash down the pillow of Bush, Inc.’s, superior resources. That’s why these veterans groups (meeting in the South) were important enough to pull the Veep off his boat—you look at it like a white man (i.e., with cold-eyed literalness), you could see how the veterans might plump for Dole.

That was the same leak-plugging logic that led Bush to sign on a strange but Bush-devoted Christian, Doug Wead, as “adviser” and liaison to the born-again crowd. Wead was a preacher—Assembly of God—except he didn’t have a church to pastor, never wore a clerical collar ... seemed to have a second career as a motivational speaker for Amway. He looked like a standard Washington luncher, dyed his hair, showed up as man-in-the-know at politico-religious meetings, where he appeared to be well known. The convention of Christian Booksellers, for example: Wead was big—had a half-dozen books under his name. Now he was working on a book about Bush.
Man of Integrity
was Wead’s new title. ... Anyway, you’d see him at Fifteenth Street, or at the OVP, murmuring warnings about “the movement” and millions of Praise-the-Lord votes that Robertson would bring forth unless George Bush acted fast.

So, Bush made his moves. For one thing, he worked out a cover-the-bases statement on faith, which Wead and Bush, Inc., could retail when the occasion demanded. The problem, of course, was Bush wasn’t born again. He was a born Episcopalian. So, Bush would say: “Well, if you mean by
born again
, ‘Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?’ ... then I’d answer,
Yes!
No hesitation. ...” Meanwhile, he did not hesitate to issue a ringing endorsement of Jerry Falwell (“The nation is in crying need of your moral vision!”) and to host Wead’s friends, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, at the Residence. (This was before the Fall. Bush said he watched their television show.)

Atwater had elaborate theories to explain how these weren’t just knee-jerk panderings but proactive stratagems on Sun Tzuian (or maybe Machiavellian) principles ... how Bush would cut into the other guy’s base, pick off maybe twenty-five percent, to keep rival campaigns from becoming real movements, forcing them to fight rearguard actions ... Lee had theories on everything. He had a splendidly oriental filigree of justification for the way Bush pandered to the right wing—of course, that was Lee’s idea in the first place.

It started in ’85, shortly after Lee took over Bush’s PAC, the Fund for America’s Future. Bush agreed (after weeks of Lee’s urging) to speak at a dinner tribute to William Loeb, the (blessedly, dead) publisher of the Manchester
Union Leader
. While he was still alive and spitting, Loeb had called Bush a “hypocrite” ... “unfit to be the Republican nominee” ... “up to his neck in Watergate,” and accused Bush of taking illegal contributions from Nixon slush funds in his own ’70 Senate race. (Of course, it could have been worse: Ike was “a
stinking
hypocrite ... Dopey Dwight.” And then, too, there was Ford—“Jerry the Jerk”—and “Kissinger the Kike.”)

But Loeb (even dead) was big with the rabid right, so Bush showed up and praised his long career of vituperation. “Bill Loeb always spoke the truth as he saw it.” Bush also appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (where a majority of the members—still—detested him for being Pres Bush’s son) ... and then, too, at a convention of the Conservative Party of New York (where he tried to make friends by questioning Mario Cuomo’s patriotism). And those were just the public panderings: in private it was wackier.

In ’86, the PAC arranged for Scott Stanley, editor of
Conservative Digest
, and Bill Kennedy, its publisher, to meet Bush in the West Wing of the White House. Just a chat—a search for common ground. (“Y’play tennis? ...”) And it went great! Kennedy and Stanley said to Bush: “What can we do for you?” Bush replied with gravity: “I would
love
to see the War Powers Act tested in court.” They ate that up. He was making headway with these people! They were friends! (They’d already reprinted his Loeb speech in their March issue.) Then Kennedy suggested that KGB operatives were working out of Senator John Kerry’s office. Bush turned momentarily and looked at Atwater (
You owe me for this
...) and then, with a polite smile, without argument, turned back to his guests.

Thing was, if you had a half-hour, Lee could explain why he (and Bush) had nothing to apologize for ... how this was not
really
sucking up to the nuts, but the
appearance
of an effort to suck up to the nuts ... an elaborate Sun Tzuian
feint
—see? ... which would make the other candidates
think
... that
Bush thought
... that the right wing was still the muscle of the party ... so they’d
all
run to the right, see? ... when actually, secretly, Lee knew that the right wing was really just a quarter or a third of the Party—irrelevant!—and when they all, Kemp, Dole, du Pont, started scrapping over this fraction (a shard of which Bush would have grabbed off already), they would be fighting for a base that couldn’t put them over the top, while Bush, having pandered and run, would move on toward the real Reagan center ... see?

“That’s one thing Ah kin do,” Atwater would affirm happily. “Ah kin really make ’em chase the rabbit!”

Problem was—what Lee didn’t calculate: that trail of timid, stinking rabbit spoor seemed to lead directly to the backside of his candidate, the much-defended VP.

I
N FACT,
EVERYBODY KNEW
—for years, since 1980!—that Bush was kind of a weenie, a wuss, a wuh ... wuh, wuh ... well, that’s when it started, in 1980, the first time Bush ran for President.

It wasn’t that they didn’t like him—the press, the lunch-buddies, the pink-jowled men-in-the-know at Duke Zeibert’s—how could they not? Bush was so friendly, eager, engaging, so well bred ... they called him “preppy,” which was a word in vogue (there were books on how to become so). And though that struck Bush as inaccurate (in his mind, he was an
oilman
, a
wildcatter
, a West Texas
pioneer
...), he tried not to pick fights about it, as long as he was winning. In fact, it wasn’t hostile while he was winning—Bush was the moderate against the troglodyte Reagan, the Great White Man Hope of the big-feet for a long and satisfying Republican bloodbath.