What It Takes (187 page)

It was weird for Dick, in the House, but he had no choice. He had to raise money (he was still working off his debt), and it wasn’t that he didn’t like the job—it was fine, day to day. I went along with him once, while he raced from his dark, cramped, two-room office suite to the floor of the House, to his car and to Baltimore, for a speech on the greenhouse effect; then back to D.C., Capitol Hill, to the Ways and Means Committee, where Rostenkowski was trying to ram through a vote on the S&L bailout, but it wasn’t yet time for the vote; so Dick walked out to give a talk to some Texas Democrats who were meeting in Washington (who knows why); then back to Ways and Means for the vote (finally); and back to the office for a couple of meetings; then down to a demonstration of the new Cray supercomputer; then back to the office to dress (black tie!) and off to meet Jane for dinner in a ballroom full of Democratic fat-cats. “I’m like a butterfly,” Dick explained. “I light here, light there. It’s great, each part of it, but you can’t tell what happened.”

I asked him, how about reading, or study? Dick was supposed to be writing a book. And learning Japanese.

“Nah. Just running.”

And thinking. His home-state Democrats wanted Dick for Governor; his favorability ratio stood at seventy-two to eight—there was no one Dick couldn’t beat, Missouri could be a Democratic state! Dick’s Capitol Hill staff wanted him to move up to the Senate—he could beat Kit Bond in ’92, and
still
run for President in ’96. Steve Murphy said opportunity lay in the House. The long knives were out for the Speaker, Jim Wright (payback for Tower, lunch-buddies said), and Murphy thought Wright was a goner. New jobs for everyone! ... So the killers came back for a meeting—they set aside two days—and Carrick (who’d moved to L.A. to become a TV exec) sat at the head of the table, like old times. And they went around the table, like old times, and everybody had his say, until someone asked Dick, who said he didn’t like the Senate, didn’t want to be a Senator ... didn’t want to be Governor (sure as hell didn’t want to tell Jane she had to move again, to Jeff City, Missouri) ... if things happened in the House, fine. ... “Now,” Dick said, “let’s get back to ’92. How much would we have to raise by the end of this year?” They could have done the meeting by phone in one hour. Gephardt just wanted to be President.

Within weeks, all his plans were smoke. Not only was Speaker Wright a goner, but Dick’s pal, Tony Coelho, third in the leadership, got blowtorched in the papers, too. No one had a better nose for trouble than Tony: he didn’t wait for his clothes to catch fire—he left the Congress ... and Gephardt was Majority Leader.

It had to be God who was doing it. That’s what Loreen said when she toured Dick’s new nine-room suite in the Capitol, with the vaulted ceilings painted with state seals, and the hideaway lounge with the wine rack and wet bar, and the small black TVs next to the chairs (so the Leader could keep abreast of doings on the floor). It wasn’t just the luxury, nor even the
opportunity
(Gephardt was second-in-command to Tom Foley, who was already
sixty years old
). No ... this was the job of Dick’s dreams! It was his role now to call the members together, and ask:
Okay, guys, what do you want to do about this? Okay, good
—
let’s do it!

And Dick thought, what with his new skills from the Presidential campaign, he could craft for House Democrats a unified message—for the first time, they would be not just a ragged crowd-noise of ills, bills, and interests. They would sing in chorus to make one point about
where they stood
, what they
stood for
... and how they stacked up against George Bush.

So after Dick settled into the job—in just a few months—he started meeting every morning with his message hit-team, about twenty members who were interested and showed some talent. They worked out the spin and the lines for the day, and they all used them. ... And it worked to perfection. By the time Bush conceded his paralysis and called a Budget Summit to work out some mega-deal on the deficit ... Dick was chairing the Summit and calling the tune for the Message Chorus. Democrats stuck it to Bush for months, had everybody in the
country
saying Bush was for a capital-gains cut because it would
benefit the rich
—Bush was
for the rich
... the Democrats were for “tax fairness,” and “a break for the middle class.”

It was gorgeous!

And they finally did pummel Bush to submission. They made him admit he’d have to raise taxes, have to take the heat
with them
. ... They cornered him, finally, in the Oval Office, where Bush stared glumly at his desk drawer and said, okay ... he had Darman write out a statement:
It is clear there is a need for taxes
... which, of course, was no good because the sentence mentioned no human beings (
mistakes were made
) ... so they sat there till Bush inserted the words “to me.”

It is clear to me
...

And that took half a year.

By that time, Gephardt was talking to the killers again—what if he
did
go in ’92? Actually, the killers talked. But Dick agreed!

“If he didn’t want to
do
anything,” Dick kept saying about George Bush, “why’d he run?”

The most eloquent sign was his putting came back. Any weekend golfer knows, you hit the long drives with your legs and back, full swing of the arms, turn of the torso—big body action, muscle and mechanics ... but a dinky four-foot putt puts the mirror to your troubled soul. And Bush ... well, not to be harsh, but ... Bush stunk up every green for
eight years
as Vice President. He had the yips.

When he got the nomination wrapped up, he got one of those long semi-legal putters and went out to play ... that was the first hint. He got back to the big house on the Point and broke in on his sons, who were planning a golf match—“Don’t count me out!” ... After he won the election, he’d stand behind that big putter, and he could see every inch of the path that ball would travel, the hole looked twice as big and ... bingo! In the cup! That’s when he announced to the family, and the world:

“
Mr. Smooth ... is back!
”

And through the first couple of months of his administration, you’d barely find anyone to argue. Bush looked so happy in the job—like he knew exactly what he’d find, and he’d just been waiting to sit in that chair, to show the right way to do things ... it was instantly well known that this was a transition unlike other transitions. A real insider, said the triple-E pundits—a sure-fingered masseur of Congress and the agencies. A confident and sharing man, said admiring reporters in his press conferences—he took questions about
anything
! You could see him thinking up the answers,
himself
. He didn’t have to wait for six months of staff work, he picked up the phone and called Gorby—to chat. This was a man who knew the ropes in the rigging of the great Ship of State.

Of course, that’s exactly what Bush meant to show. He laughed off the idea that the job was oversized. Not that he meant to brag—anything but! He’d say something humble, like, the Gipper left the shop in great shape, or the fine people in the government were wonderful about cooperating, or he was lucky enough to have had some experience ... Mr. Smooth! He looked like he had come to believe his old campaign slogan: “Ready on Day One to Be a Great President.”

But there are different ways to become President—not all of them easy to pin down. Bush won the vote, November ’88, and became President, politically. He took the oath at the Capitol, January ’89, and became President, Constitutionally. But it would take time, he knew, before his Presidency, the look and sound of him in that office, could settle into the public mind as fact, when the words “President Bush” would sound easy together, like “Washington” and “D.C.”—that date could not be predicted. Nor could the date of dread and dreams when the nation’s fortunes would seem to be at stake, and the people would turn to their President—
to him
—and expect him to act, and to win. Nothing about that moment could be predicted, except ... that would mark the last becoming—at that moment, for good or ill, the Presidency would descend upon him.

And that was the moment for which Bush waited. When friends gushed to him about approval polls (over sixty percent!), the splendid press he was getting, his graceful (so effortless!) personal success, Bush would say the polls could be fickle. The press would surely turn. As for him, he’d say, he hadn’t yet “been tested by fire.”

He was right about the polls—they started sliding. In his third month, the Senate killed off his Cabinet nominee, John Tower, the first time in thirty years such a slap was dealt to a new President. Hundreds of top-level jobs in the government were still vacant, or filled with Reagan holdovers who were doing the country the service of keeping those paychecks warm. Bush had no major bills before the Congress. He had yet to answer Gorbachev’s call for accelerated arms control. The foreign policies of the U.S. were said to be on hold for mysterious “reviews” by unnamed officials and experts ... and, sure enough, Bush was being hammered in print.

“A Presidency ‘On the Edge of a Cliff’ ” was the lead essay in
The Washington Post
’s Sunday Outlook section. In it, no less than David Gergen declared the administration atotter. Bush was a “Mexican Jumping Bean,” traveling too much, giving speeches about nothing; he was neglecting the “vision thing” and frittering time on details; he’d stuck with Tower so long he’d created a political bloodbath; he was clueless without his campaign White Men, dependent on the low-brow John Sununu; Bush was “being nibbled and nicked to death,” he was too often “surprised,” “reactive,” “chained to his in-box”—this went on for fifty solid inches ... and, of course, Gergen was not alone.
Everybody knew
poor Bush was out to lunch. And not just OTL, but egregiously, obtusely, willfully lackadaisical—close to
negligent
(Bush didn’t
want
to do anything, well-known people-in-the-know insisted) ... because everybody had just finished writing (last month) how Bush-the-insider knew everything about being President ... so how could they turn now and report he was having a hard time?

That was the first time I caught a glimpse of Bush the President. I was in a White House hallway, waiting to go upstairs to see Barbara Bush, when ... came flying out of a doorway, George Bush, twenty feet away and closing. He had a pack of suits behind him, Secret Service guys and policy guys, the military guy, and who-knows-what guys—twelve, at least, fanned out in his wake, in a ragged V, like Canada geese, pumping their arms to keep up and wearing purposeful scowls, all ... except for Bush. I murmured to Bar’s aide, at my side, “There’s the boss!” Bush whipped his head around with a vague smile—trying to locate the source so he could make a goofy face at whoever it was, give that personal gift that had brought him to these great halls—but he had the loose-eyed and inward look of an athlete in the final quarter, deep in the game, everything pumping in him with an internal roar that would dim all outside ... except, of course, he was George Bush, so the game
was
every person outside—each one, individually, owed a measure of his energy and a tick off his clock, which he was trying to give (
Who was that?
) while he’s still the lead goose, couldn’t miss a step, because the others would march up his back, and the next meeting (and the next, and the next) couldn’t start till he got there, and anyway, he’s the
boss
, supposed to be out front ... all the time.

It seemed to me, Bush wasn’t lackadaisical
for one instant
, and all the stray facts that were retailed at lunch tables fell into a pattern of another shape. President Bush stuck to the bitter end with John Tower, not because he courted (or didn’t know enough to avoid) the political showdown ... but because Captain Poppy stood by his ungainly chum, Ovie, when the rest of the Andover squad would have shooed Ovie off the field.

President Bush had two daily go-rounds with his Chief of Staff, John Sununu, morning and evening, while Sununu ticked off items from his notebook and Bush knocked them down, one by one (trying to do, with each, whatever seemed sound) ... not because Sununu, Rasputin-of-the-Rocky-North, had a chokehold on the President or his agenda ... but because George Bush was the Harris County Chairman who
always
stopped by the office at night, to read the memos, sign the mail, and clear his desk before he went home to Bar and the kids.

This President charged about the country giving airy, friendly speeches about nothing-in-particular, not because Sununu was fearful of competition from bright speechwriters, or because this White House was without the political edge of the G-6 ... but because George Bush (“Watch the
action
!”) had risen for forty years in business, politics, and government,
always
on the move, always by the coin of his person—he was practicing the
essence
of his politics, precisely by jumping on a plane and
showing up
.

President Bush picked up the phone to chat with Gorbachev (and Thatcher, Kohl, Mitterrand, Andreotti, Takeshita, Mulroney, Salinas, Aquino, Mubarak, King Hussein, King Hassan, King Fahd, and forty or fifty lesser-known heads of state ...) because the Commander in Chief and Leader of the Free World was going to save the planet from conflict ... the same way George Bush saved the county GOP from warfare with the Birchers—by interposing his person: they were all going to like him, he
knew
they would, they were going to be friends.

The horrifying fact was, he didn’t know any other way. He was using everything he ever knew—and some things he wished to God he knew better ... but all he had to go on, all he could bring to the job, was his own life before he hit the bubble. And God knows, he was spending it—pouring it out, to do this job. Mr. Smooth was working his withered old buns off.

And heaven help the fellow with whom George Bush did not want to be friends—especially if that fellow happened to run some small troublemaking nation, one of those “little wiener countries.” The personal coin, like any other, had two sides.