George Bush
Parmet, Herbert S.
Getting Down to That Legacy Thing 0 George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee Herbert S. Parmet Scribner /570 pages / $32.50 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold T he hot political buzzword going the...
...Nevertheless, though Reagan came to appreciate Bush's Lone Star qualities, the "wimp factor," as Newsweek termed it, persisted until the day Bush himself was handed the dilemma of choosing a running mate in 1988...
...His reply...
...Don't laugh...
...In George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee, Herbert S. Parmet, whose previous books include biographies of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, VICTOR GOLD, national correspondent of The American Spectator, was co-author of George Bush's autobiography, Looking Forward...
...but the record shows he served Bush well as a loyal subordinate and in no case can be blamed for losing an election—either the one that brought Bush to power or the one, four years later, that cost him the presidency...
...The irony here is that Bush, who prized loyalty as a supreme political virtue, would place his trust in a Dick Darman to engineer a matter as critical as the 1990 budget deal and, for all practical purposes, set the course for his administration's domestic policy...
...So it is that even as Bill Clinton contemplates the navel of his place in history, the early returns are coming in on the legacy of his predecessor, George Bush...
...What, for example, will Christie Whitman's legacy be after she leaves the state house in Trenton in the year 2002...
...Dan Quayle may have stumbled on the campaign trail that year, but it wasn't, like Dole in 1996, for lack of direction...
...Did Bush, after the media battering given his running mate in the days that followed, have any second thoughts about his choice...
...While Dole would be `instantly perceived as president,' Quayle remained more 'exciting and new.'...His voting record was solidly conservative, but even liberal rating groups managed to approve of a quarter of his actions...
...z) Why, despite little personal knowledge of Dan Quayle, did Bush pick him as a vice presidential running mate eight years later...
...Nothing the reporter cared to hear...
...But considering what we've since seen of the national campaign wizardry of Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, a strong case can be made that George Bush in 1988 made the best of all possible vice presidential choices, given his options...
...Like the novice gardener who pulls up his potato patch every morning to see how the crop is coming along, legacy buffs in the dot-com nineties won't take "wait" for an answer...
...Preferred and worked at it...
...What's more, Parmet tells us, Quayle had the unqualified backing of Bush's respected media consultant, Roger Ailes, who "seconded the wisdom of opting for the unexpected," advising the candidate that the 41-year-old Indiana senator "symbolized youth in the future of the Republican party...
...Needless to say, George Bush didn't view the matter in that light...
...Reagan was far from alone in that perception...
...Not to forget Oliver Stone doing his turn on Iran-contra...
...but in large part to that most pernicious of all political career killers, bad timing...
...3) Why, after his unqualified "Read my lips" pledge at the Republican convention that same year, did Bush become party to the Democratic-inspired tax increase of 1990...
...But one, obviously, who filled a void...
...Thus was born, in Parmet's original phrase, the "Lone Star Yankee," the Ivy League product whose independent taste for chicken-fried steak and pork rinds never failed to amuse a cynical press...
...That he did...
...By the morning of August 16, when he boarded his plane for the trip to [the convention], Bush's mind was set," writes Parmet...
...Darman, after all, was a professional technocrat with itinerant political loyalties...
...Quayle may have lost his vice presidential debate with Lloyd Bentsen, but it wasn't like Kemp, in his debate with Al Gore, because he mistook the occasion for a fraternity chatfest...
...Not that Bush, given even ideal timing, could have served a fruitful second term without mending fences on the right...
...The rationale offered by Bush detractors was that an insecure presidential nominee was afraid to have a "heavyweight," e .g., a Bob Dole or Jack Kemp, overshadow him on the ticket...
...Reagan's problem with Bush—aside from Nancy Reagan's problem any running mate other than her own choice, Paul Laxalt—was his perception, formed during the primary season, that Bush was a wimpish "man in a Brooks Brothers suit...
...We know, but will future generations...
...I must say," George Bush confided to his diary at the time, "I hate this dealing with Congress and these budget matters, I much prefer foreign affairs...
...Something along the lines of, "Why don't we wait a few years to find out...
...Parmet's conclusion, drawn from interviews as well as private campaign memoranda, is that it was Bush's quest for a "bold stroke" rather than personal insecurity that led him to select Quayle...
...offers up a Theodore White-model of instant history which, if not the final word on Bush's legacy, brings fresh insight to the three whys most often asked about his political rise-and-fall: (i) Why, despite telling friends of his "strong reservations" about Bush, did Ronald Reagan pick him as a vice presidential running mate in 1980...
...The clinching note in Bush's selection process came, according to Parmet, with a viewing of "This Week with David Brinkley" the day before the convention opened...
...His "no-new-taxes" pledge had been a "rallying point for conservatives," Parmet points out, and his "summit" with congressional Democrats in 1990, with taxes on the table, "appeared as an incredible betrayal...
...He was the president, we know, who ousted Noriega, put together the Gulf War coalition, and was there in the Oval Office when the Evil Empire dissolved and the Cold War ended...
...At 84 February 1998 • The American Spectator...
...It was one that would follow George Bush throughout his career, despite all evidence that he didn't fit the Eastern establishment mold seemingly prescribed by his New England birth and education...
...But as Parmet tells us, the Bush campaign, no less than Reagan's, was staffed by "those who aligned themselves with other members of the new right, also known as `movement conservatives.'" "The Bush inner circle was generally more conservative than its facade of moderation," writes Parmet, quoting one "movement" staffer to the effect that Bush was "closer to Reagan ideologically" than she realized, though his "conservative instincts were visceral rather than intellectual...
...Getting Down to That Legacy Thing 0 George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee Herbert S. Parmet Scribner /570 pages / $32.50 REVIEWED BY Victor Gold T he hot political buzzword going the Washington rounds these days, replacing "vision" as a media flavor-of-the-year, is "legacy...
...I Bush and not even campaign manager Jim Baker's lack of enthusiasm for Quayle would alter his decision...
...Because Bush had roots in the East—and was running against Reagan, the right-wing favorite—it followed, by media lights, that he was an Eastern Republican "moderate" in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller and Elliot Richardson...
...Out of the question, of course...
...And like other vice presidents, before and since, Quayle may have been ridiculed for simply holding the job...
...The choice itself was made on more pragmatic grounds: Bush, according to the polls, would add more to the ticket than any other name on Reagan's vice presidential selection list, plus the fact, pointed out by Reagan adviser Ed Meese, that Bush's tenacity on the primary trail belied the "wimp" charge made by his critics...
...Persuaded by White House advisers—notably, OMB Director Richard Darman—that escalating deficits and a budget stalemate could wreck the American economy, the president felt he had "little choice...
...But George Bush, given Parmet's first returns, is off to a fair start...
...asecond to Bush delegating the conduct of his campaign to a dysfunctional team of professional consultants...
...That depends...
...After his military service [he] was not about to step into the monotonous routine of daily commutation into New York for eight hours...on Wall Street," writes Parmet, telling of Bush's decision to strike out on his own as an oil equipment salesman in Odessa, Texas...
...Quayle appeared on the show with the vaunted "heavyweights," Dole and Kemp, who, conscious of being frontrunners for the vice presidential slot, "were cautious and mundane," while Quayle, with nothing to lose, was bold and assertive...
...Parmet quotes a diary entry in which Bush, at convention's end, says that the Quayle selection was his alone and "I blew it...
...Nor was that the only mixed signal Reagan and others at the Detroit convention got from the general stereotyping the political press applies to presidential candidates...
...Fortunately for Bush, the first precinct heard from is that of a credible presidential historian rather than, say, a Robert Caro looking for Texas sludge, or a Garry Wills on the prowl for crypto-fascist malignancy...
...Political legacies, no less than the outcome of elections, have a lot to do with timing...
...Reagan would learn this only after he had chosen Bush as his runThe American Spectator • February 1998 83 ping mate and the two erstwhile rivals became not simply political allies but personal friends...
...One of Governor Whitman's friends was actually asked that question by a political reporter, no more than ten days after she won re-election last November...
...Who can doubt that had Gulf Storm taken place six months later, or the economic upturn of 1993 six months earlier, Bill Clinton would have spent the past five years in Little Rock, eating meals at Charlie Trie's Chinese chophouse and, as a senior member of the Rose Law Firm, handling the tangled legal affairs of his good friend James Riady...
...So it must have seemed at the time...
...That settled the matter for44 Parmet concludes it was Bush's quest for a 'bold stroke' rather than personal insecurity that led him to select Quayle...
...Why Dan Quayle...
...It was no secret at Detroit in the summer of 1980 that Reagan had, as he told one confidante, "strong reservations about George Bush"—strong enough, in fact, to lead the Republican presidential nominee to consider the absurdist proposal that he pick Gerald Ford as his running mate and settle for a co-presidency...
...N o, for that final note to George Bush's three-decade political career, the blame can be unevenly distributed: one part to Ross Perot's third-party entry into the race...
Vol. 31 • February 1998 • No. 2
