My Father, My President Read online

  “It took one hell of a lot of courage after having done the jobs he did to step out and run for president when you have no name ID, no ability to really raise a lot of money,” James Baker told me. “A candidate is sometimes the lowest form of human life. Everybody’s an expert in politics, and it just took one hell of a lot of courage and your dad had that courage.”

  My sister-in-law Laura has her own theory as to why Dad ran: he was raised by his mother with a love of sports, and “maybe that athletic part of it translates to other parts of life, to running for office. The idea that you would get on the court—those are the people who will step up to the plate and take the licks. There are a lot of would-be presidents and would-be governors that never run for anything.” Maybe that explains why two of my sports-minded brothers, George and Jeb, were not afraid to enter the political arena.

  Dad formally announced his candidacy at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in May 1979. My grandmother was with us that day, and I remember looking over and seeing how proud she was of her son announcing his candidacy for president of the United States. James Baker remembers the lead story in the Washington Star, written by Jack Germond and Jules Witcover: “Bush Campaign Peaks on the Day of Announcement.”

  “We proved them wrong,” he says now.

  Late in 1979, a friend of Jimmy Pierce (one of my cousins on Mom’s side) named Joe Hagin had just graduated from Kenyon College and took a job with Dad. In short order, he went to Florida to work on one of the first straw polls (basically a popularity contest), called the Florida Presidential Preference Convention, in Orlando. Joe shared an apartment with my brother Marvin, and together they hatched an idea for Mom and Dad to host a party for the convention guests and to shake as many hands as possible. The duo rented all the ballroom space they could get in the host hotel.

  Joe recalled: “I figured people would be more likely to vote for somebody if they had a picture with them. So we bought three Polaroid cameras and had these really fancy little envelopes made up—Ambassador and Mrs. Bush welcome you—so every time he’d stick out his hand, one of the guys would snap a Polaroid picture and we’d slide it into one of these envelopes and hand it to the people.”

  Whatever they did worked, because the final straw poll vote on November 17, 1979, ended with Dad coming in a surprisingly strong third behind Governor Reagan (who was the favorite going into the poll) and former Texas Governor John Connally. The headline in the Orlando Sentinel the next day read “Reagan Takes the Cake, but Bush Takes the Icing.”

  Dad’s campaign didn’t stay low-profile after that. “What seemed just impossible awhile before suddenly became possible . . . It just took off,” Dad recalls. They went into the Iowa caucuses energized—a core group of staff and volunteers traveled around Iowa with Dad, working at the precinct level. “Just strictly grassroots campaigning,” Dad recalls. “We went up there and worked organizationally very hard . . . we had a good Iowa team.” It helped that early on, Dad had lined up a base of key supporters in Iowa.

  “There was a huge Bush ad in the Des Moines Register, which was really quite shocking, because it was like a who’s who of the Republican Party in the state of Iowa, and it was quite impressive,” recalled Pete Teeley. It was timed to coincide with Dad’s announcement of his candidacy on May 1. Local volunteers took him around to “Meet George Bush” town meetings and covered every inch of the state. Sally Novetsky, a county chairman for Dad, remembers Dad speaking without notes, being so warm and friendly with people that she’d tell potential supporters, “Once you’ve heard and met him, there will be no doubt who you will be for.” She was right, and the campaign started picking up converts from other candidates.

  Becky Beech, Mom’s assistant who hailed from Iowa and was the granddaughter of Mary Louise Smith, Dad’s cochair at the RNC, remembers Mom went to all ninety-nine counties in Iowa for small campaign events and coffees—“it was very much retail politics,” she recalls.

  My brother Marvin spent almost a year in Iowa, working on Dad’s campaign. Before the caucuses, he might go to the West Des Moines High School auditorium and give a short speech to several hundred people and from there go to somebody’s living room in Cedar Rapids and speak to just ten people.

  “I look back many years later and I see friends of mine who work at the family business and contribute to the family company’s success. For me, it was really a neat feeling because I felt that I’d always been a taker from Dad. Trust me, I realize that my involvement didn’t move the dial in Iowa—but he made me feel like it did, and that gave me a great sense of confidence at a younger age than I might have otherwise,” Marvin said.

  All the hard work paid off. Dad won the Iowa caucuses. At the victory party at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, Dad called it Big Mo—big momentum—and it “definitely [made me] a contender, Reagan and me . . . that was the biggest breakthrough for me,” Dad recalls.

  Becky Beech agreed: “People were elated. It was clear that it was extraordinarily significant. You could tell from that night to the next morning how the media attention was shifting directly onto them.”

  More important, he was no longer an asterisk in the polls.

  From there, however, they headed into New Hampshire—and into trouble. “There were false expectations that the Big Mo would sweep us past Ronald Reagan, who was the presumed front-runner,” said Andy Card. “The Big Mo lost its momentum in New Hampshire.”

  In Manchester, the League of Women Voters sponsored a televised debate, and Governor Reagan won over the crowd with his signature charm. Soon after, a controversy arose with a scheduled debate on February 23, 1980, in Nashua, New Hampshire. The local New Hampshire newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph, invited Dad and Reagan to debate each other—without any of the other GOP candidates. Dad would have been happy to debate the others as well, but since the newspaper was hosting the event, he felt obligated to abide by their rules. The other candidates—John Anderson, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Phil Crane—were all miffed about being left out and showed up anyway. Ronald Reagan backed down and agreed they should be included, but Dad didn’t know about this reversal. When the newspaper insisted on sticking with the original plan—and Dad sided with them—some thought he was being rigid.

  The Reagan campaign had covered the rental of the hall where the debate took place—and when Reagan attempted to explain why the other candidates should be included, the moderator instructed the A/V technicians to turn off his microphone. “I paid for this microphone, Mr. Green,” Reagan thundered defiantly. The audience loved the line (which came from an old Spencer Tracy movie), which has since earned a place in political lore.

  Betsy Heminway was in the audience that night. From the Bush campaign’s perspective, she said, “It was horrible.”

  Dad eventually lost the New Hampshire primary, and he has since pointed to that debate as a low point in his campaign. Apparently, so did David Gergen, later a TV commentator and a communications director for President Clinton. Gergen started on Dad’s staff in New Hampshire; but after that debate, he packed his bags and left the campaign without saying a word to anyone.

  “He just gave up on me,” recalled Dad.

  Pete Teeley remembers that Dad “stayed in there when, I must tell you, it was pretty gloomy at times. We weren’t raising any money. A lot of volunteers that had come to work for us, they all quit. A lot of them went to work for Reagan.”

  Andy Card was the Massachusetts campaign chair and remembers the morning after the New Hampshire loss. There Dad made the decision that they had to win Massachusetts. “We worked really, really hard to restore positive momentum and exceed expectations, by carrying Massachusetts,” Andy recalled. The momentum started to pick up again as the campaign moved forward to win in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, John Anderson decided to drop out of the Republican race and run as an independent; and Howard Baker and John Connally chose to just drop out altogether.

  In Connecticut, another recent college grad, Tom Collamor
e, remembered meeting Dad a few years earlier as a volunteer at a fund-raiser for the Republican candidate for governor. Even though Tom was just “a punk driver,” as he described it, Dad was very nice to him—in his estimation “the nicest by far” of all the potential presidential candidates who made their way through Connecticut then. So Tom wrote Dad a note saying, “I’m just a college kid but if you run for president, I’d love to help you.”

  He got a nice note back from Dad, but didn’t hear anything until he got a phone call from Malcolm “Mac” Baldrige, an old Yale friend of Dad’s. (Mac would become President Reagan’s secretary of commerce on Dad’s recommendation, and tragically, he died in a 1987 horse riding accident. I like to remember him as a cowboy from Connecticut.) Mac told Tom, “I’ve just agreed to chair the Connecticut campaign for George Bush for president, because I’ve known George for a long time,” he said. “And they sent me the file from Houston on Connecticut, and your letter is one of the only things in it, so I thought maybe we ought to get together and you can help me out.”

  So Tom joined the “George Bush for President” staff in Hartford, which consisted of one other person at the time in addition to Mac. Whenever Dad visited the state, Tom served as both scheduler and director of ground transportation.

  The campaign had a big Winnebago, and with Tom behind the wheel, Dad devoted a week to Connecticut during which he traveled all over the state in the RV, attending rallies and giving speeches and visiting coffee klatches. In fact, Dad’s first day of Secret Service protection coincided with Tom’s first day behind the wheel of the RV, with a worried Secret Service agent riding shotgun up front beside him.

  Miraculously, Tom managed to keep the Winnebago and all its occupants intact for the entire week, and Dad even won the primary. The campaign continued through other states—they won Michigan but lost Texas—and though the long days never seemed to end, everyone with whom I spoke claims to have enjoyed it.

  Just about every Bush family member worked on the campaign in some capacity. After losing his congressional campaign, my brother George felt he needed to pursue his business career, but he still helped when he could. Neil and Marvin, both in college, took time off to work as well. Like Marvin in Iowa, Neil spent a lot of time in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Jeb and Colu, who had moved to Venezuela because Jeb had a job at a bank there, came back to work full-time for the campaign. Jeb continued on the road with the remaining primaries—Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan, and Oregon—and he remembers being in Portland, Oregon, when Mount St. Helens erupted.

  All three of Dad’s brothers, Prescott, Johnny, and Bucky, pitched in as much as their schedules would allow—as did Dad’s sister, Nancy Ellis, and an army of assorted cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles. Of course, none of us worked harder than my mother, who Becky Beech thinks made more appearances than my father did.

  Margaret Tutwiler pointedly remembers that the Republican governor of Texas, Bill Clements, did not endorse Dad for the Texas primary. So Don Rhodes, completely on his own, would go out at night in his pickup truck and take down the Clements campaign signs around Houston. “Don was so loyal to your father. He was furious. He’d come in every morning and not talk about what he’d been up to the night before,” Margaret recalls.

  Occasionally, I got to accompany my father out on the campaign trail, which was a real treat. Dad was a great campaigner—but not because he is an amazing orator. In fact, he’s the first to tell you he is not a great speaker on the campaign stump; but Dad was a natural at connecting with people, particularly face-to-face, handshake-to-handshake. The Secret Service told me he had a rule that he’d never just kiss a baby, like many politicians do. He’d always check with the parents first for permission to hold a child, so that families never felt that they were just props in some newspaper photo. He never wanted to offend the parents.

  During one primary trip to Nebraska, Dad’s bus got lost in a snowstorm. It was late at night, and Dad was sleeping across the aisle from Bernard Shaw, a reporter for the then-fledgling Cable News Network—CNN—who was assigned to Dad’s campaign.

  “We’d been up for hours,” Bernie told me. “I don’t know how many stops we’d made. As a joke, we got a pint bottle of bourbon and we put it in your father’s lap. Some of us pretended to be asleep and we were restless and turning, what have you, as was he. He woke up and he put his hand on this bottle and he said, ‘What the hell is this?’ And everybody just started laughing. Some of the still photographers took a picture or two, which never saw the light of day, but he couldn’t stop laughing. Sometimes when he laughs really hard, his eyes start watering. He showed a great sense of humor.”

  As the campaign ground forward, Governor Reagan steadily built up more delegates than Dad—and as the momentum began to shift, the money began to run out. James Baker came to Pete Teeley and said, “Pete, we’re out of dough and I can’t pay you.” Pete said, “I don’t care. I’ll just be a volunteer, and we’ll just go through with it.” Soon enough, Dad found out that Pete and a number of other staffers had volunteered to go without a paycheck. He called each one of them up and thanked them.

  “But what was also amazing is that . . . five or six days later, I was going through the mail and there was a note from your dad,” recalled Pete. “And it was about that very subject and it was really something from the heart. He’s on the road, he’s working like hell, you know—twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day—and yet he finds the time to write this lovely note to say thanks again. I was really touched by that. I think about it even today.”

  Other people—Ron Kaufman, who had helped in the primaries, and Paige Gold, a young staffer—later received notes from Dad that also contained checks for their back pay after they went on volunteer status. (Dad held fund-raisers after the campaign ended to pay off his debts, especially to his staff.) “People in the business don’t believe me to this day when I tell them that,” Ron told me. “In the history of politics it’s never happened before.”

  All the other candidates had dropped out by the Oregon primary, leaving just Dad and Reagan. Yet the writing was on the wall. “At some point, it became clear I had no chance to go further,” Dad says. That “some point” occurred at the Holiday Inn at the Columbus airport in Ohio, Joe Hagin recalls. “Reagan had picked up enough delegates that night to put him over the total he needed . . . and I went home and slept for a long time.”

  Quitting the race would not be an easy decision; but Jim Baker, his campaign manager, convinced Dad that staying in the race was not a good idea, despite his feelings for those who had done so much for him. Baker reasoned that if Dad held out and contested Governor Reagan in his own state of California—which was the next primary—it would add to the antagonism that had naturally built up between the two campaigns. Mr. Baker told Dad, “You know, you would then have no chance at all to get put on the ticket.”

  Vic Gold—Dad’s great friend and campaign speechwriter, who had been press secretary to Barry Goldwater in 1964 and later press secretary for Vice President Spiro Agnew—remembers spending an entire day with Dad, discussing whether to drop out. “It would have been very divisive, and he could see that—but at the same time, when you talk to people years ahead of time and they say they’re going to work on your campaign for two years, and then you come up and say, ‘Well, I’m not going to campaign there’ . . . this was all a part of this decision.”

  Dad called the entire staff together and asked each one to submit a secret ballot as to whether they thought he should stay in or drop out. He read the notes and came to his decision. “He did the right thing,” Becky Beech told me. “He thought it all through. We were all asked to vote, knowing that he had a press conference the next day.” Becky voted for him to remain in the race—“fight to the finish”—but “it was sad because everybody thought he could be a great president and could possibly win, but it was clear that the primary was not going in his favor.”

  After swearing him to secrecy, Dad also discussed with
drawing from the race with John Magaw, his lead Secret Service agent. Dad knew he’d lose his Secret Service protection as a noncandidate, and he wanted the agents to be able to plan accordingly.

  Incidentally, John Magaw didn’t say a word to anyone, even though the campaign staff knew something was up and kept asking him questions. On May 26, everyone boarded the campaign plane for a previously scheduled stop in Houston, with the usual staff and press contingent. As the plane took off, suddenly music started coming over the loudspeaker in the cabin. It was the Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler” with the line “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” The staff didn’t see it coming, and the press looked stunned.

  “Boy, was that emotional,” John Magaw remembers. Then Dad, also having a hard time, stood up in front where everyone could see him. He looked out over the crowd and gave them a quick salute.

  After the plane landed, Dad made a statement to the press that he was essentially dropping out: “I have never quit a fight in my life. But throughout my political career—as a precinct worker, a county chairman and national chairman—I have always worked to unite and strengthen the Republican Party,” he said. It was in that spirit that he pledged to Governor Reagan his “wholehearted support in a united party effort this fall to defeat Jimmy Carter.” He ended with his vision of America “as a strong, purposeful, compassionate nation in need of new leadership for the decade of the eighties.”

  Pulling out of the presidential race was one of the toughest decisions my father ever made. But it also turned out to be one of the best—if not the best—decision of his political life.

  Chapter 11

  OUT OF THE CLEAR BLUE SKY

  “Every week the columnists buried us. Every week we’d lose a primary and they’d say, that’s the end of that, and then the next week he’d come back and win one. I remember I said to the fellow from the Post, the next time you bury us, you better drive a stake through his heart, because he kept coming back. That was the thing that most impressed the people around Reagan—your father’s resilience. He was literally the last man standing. It was just—if you want to win, get George Bush. Reagan understood that.”