Date: Mon Jan  4 03:48:42 est 1993
From: "John Covici" <covici@ccs.covici.com>
Message-Id: <2b47f9f2.ccs@ccs.covici.com>
Reply-To: "John Covici" <covici@ccs.covici.com>
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET
Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: Part 30
Status: O
{XXIII: Bush Takes the
Presidency} 


George Bush's quest for the summit
of American political power was so
sustained and so unrelenting that it is
impossible to assign the beginning of
his campaign for President to any
specific date. It is more accurate to
report that his entire tenure as Vice
President was consumed by the
renovation and expansion of his
personal and family network for the
purpose of seizing the presidency at
some point in the future. During this
phase, Bush was far more concerned with
organizational and machine-building
matters than with ideology or public
relations. For most of the 1980s, it
was convenient for Bush to cultivate
the public profile of a faithful and
even obsequious deputy to Reagan, while
using the office of the vice president
to build a national and international
overt/covert power cartel. 
   Bush had no regional constituency
in any of the half-dozen places he
tried to call home; his ``favorite son''
appeal was diluted all over the map. He
had no base among labor, blacks, or in
the cities, like the Kennedy apparat.
Blue-blooded financiers gravitated
instinctively to Bush; and his lifeline
to the post-Meyer Lansky mob was robust
indeed; and these were important
factors, although not enough by
themselves to win an election. Bush's
networks could always tilt the media in
his favor, but the Reagan experience
had provided a painful lesson of how
inadequate this could be against a
clever populist rival. Otherwise,
Bush's base was in the government,
where eight years of patient work had
packed the executive branch, the
Congress and its staffs, and the
judiciary with Bushmen. 
   Nor was it only that Bush lacked a
loyal base of support. He also had very
high negatives, meaning that there were
a lot of people who disliked him
intensely. Such animosity was
especially strong among the ideological
Reaganite conservatives, whom Bush had
been purging from the Reagan
administration from early on. 
   There would prove to be very
little that Bush could do to lower his
negative response rate, so the only
answer would be to raise the negatives
of all rival candidates on both sides
of the partisan divide. This brutal
imperative for the Bush machine has
contributed significantly to the last
half decade's increase in derogation
and vilification in American life.
Bush's discrediting campaigns would be
subsumed within the ``anything goes''
approach advocated by the late Lee
Atwater, the organizer of Reagan's 1984
campaign, who had signed on with Bush
well in advance of 1988. 
   The {Washington Post} went after
Bush as ``the Cliff Barnes of American
politics,'' a reference to a character
in the TV soap opera {Dallas,} whom
the {Post} found ``blustering,
opportunistic, craven, and hopelessly
ineffective all at once.'' Others,
foreshadowing the thyroid revelations
of 1991, talked about Bush's
``hyperkinesis.'' Even the unsavory
George Will commented that ``the
optimistic statement `George Bush is
not as silly as he frequently seems'
now seems comparable to Mark Twain's
statement that Wagner's music is better
than it sounds.''@s1 
   More than anything, Bush wanted an
early endorsement from Reagan, in order
to suppress or at least undercut
challenges to his presumptive
front-runner status from GOP rivals in
the primaries; it was already clear
that Senator Bob Dole might be the most
formidable of these. Bush feared Dole's
challenge, and desperately wanted to be
anointed as Reagan's heir-apparent as
soon as possible before 1988. But
Reagan had apparently not gotten over
the antipathy to Bush he had conceived
during the {Nashua Telegraph} debate of
1980. According to a high-level Reagan
administration source speaking in the
summer of 1986, ``more than once the
President [told Bush], `Obviously, I'm
going to stay neutral until after the
convention, and then I'm going to work
for whichever candidate comes out on
top.'|''@s2 Despite Bush's ``slavish
devotion,'' Reagan wanted to keep the
door open to his good friend, Senator
Paul Laxalt of Nevada, whom Reagan
apparently thought was getting ready to
run for President. One can imagine
Bush's rage and chagrin. 
   Reagan stubbornly refused to come
out for Bush until the endorsement
could no longer help him in the
Republican primaries. Reagan chose to
wait until Super Tuesday was over and
the rest of the Republican field had
been mathematically eliminated. Reagan
actually waited until Bob Dole, the
last of Bush's rivals, had dropped out.
Then Reagan ignored the demands of
Bush's media handlers and
perception-mongers and gave his
endorsement in the evening, too late
for the main network news programs. The
scene was a partisan event, a very
large GOP congressional fundraising
dinner. Reagan waited to the end of the
speech, explained that he was now
breaking his silence on the
presidential contest, and in a
perfunctory way said he would support
Bush. ``I'm going to work as hard as I
can to make Vice President George Bush
the next President of the United
States,'' said old Ron. There were no
accolades for Bush's real or imagined
achievements, no stirring kudos.
Seasoned observers found Reagan's
statement ``halfhearted ... almost
grudging.''@s3 

   The Wimp Factor
 
   Reagan's endless reticence meant
that Bush had to work especially hard
to pander to the right wing, to those
people whom he despised but
nevertheless needed to use. Here Bush
stooped to boundless public
degradation. In December 1985, Bush
went to Canossa by accepting an
invitation to a dinner in Manchester,
New Hampshire held in honor of the late
William Loeb, the former publisher of
the Manchester {Union Leader}. We have
already documented that old man Loeb
hated Bush and worked doggedly for his
defeat in 1980. Still, Bush was the
``soul of humility,'' and he was
willing to do anything to be able to
take power in his own name. Bush gave a
speech full of what the {Washington
Post} chose to call ``self-deprecating
humor,'' but what others might have
seen as groveling. Bush regaled 500
Republicans and rightists with a fairy
tale about having tried in 1980 to woo
Loeb by offering rewards of colored
watchbands, LaCoste shirts, and Topsider
shoes to anyone who could win over Bill
Loeb. The items named were preppy
paraphernalia which Loeb and many
others found repugnant. 
   Some of the assembled
right-wingers repeated the line from
the Doonesbury comic strip according to
which Bush ``had placed his manhood in
a blind trust.'' Loeb's widow, Nackey
Scripps Loeb, was noncommittal. ``We
have decided on a candidate for
1988--whoever best fights for the
Reagan agenda,'' she announced.
``Whether that person is here tonight
remains to be seen,'' she added.@s4 
   Lawfully, Bush had earned only the
contempt of these New Hampshire
conservatives. In October 1987, when
the New Hampshire primary season was
again at hand, Mrs. Loeb rewarded Bush
for his groveling with a blistering
attack that featured reprints of Bill
Loeb's 1980 barbs: ``a preppy wimp,
part of the self-appointed elite,'' and
so forth. Mrs. Loeb wrote, ``George
Bush has been Bush for 63 years. He has
been Ronald Reagan's errand boy for
just the last seven. Without Ronald
Reagan he will surely revert to the
original George Bush.'' Mrs. Loeb
repeated her late husband's 1980
advice: ``Republicans should flee the
presidential candidacy of George Bush
as if it were the black plague
itself.''@s5 
   All of this culminated in the
devastating {Newsweek} cover story of
October 19, 1987, ``Fighting the `Wimp
Factor.'|'' The article was more
analytical than hostile, but did
describe the ``crippling handicap'' of
being seen as a ``wimp.'' Bush had been
a ``vassal to Kissinger'' at the United
Nations and in Beijing, the article
found, and now even Bush's second-term
chief of staff said of Bush, ``He's
emasculated by the office of vice
president.'' To avoid appearing as a
television wimp, Bush had ``tried for
the past 10 years to master the medium,
studying it as if it were a foreign
language. He has consulted voice and
television coaches. He tried changing
his glasses and even wearing contact
lenses.... Bush's tight, twangy voice
is a common problem. Under stress,
experts explain, the vocal cords
tighten and the voice is higher than
normal and lacks power.'' According to
{Newsweek}, 51 percent of Americans
found that ``wimp'' was a ``serious
problem'' for Bush. 
   The {Newsweek} ``wimp'' cover soon
had Bush chewing the carpet at the
Naval Observatory. Bush's
knuckle-dragging son, George W. Bush,
called the story ``a cheap shot'' and
added menacingly: ``... I'd like to
take the guy who wrote that headline
out on that boat,'' i.e., the
Aronow-built {Fidelity} in which Bush
was depicted on the {Newsweek}
cover--which sounded very much like a
threat. George W. Bush also called
{Newsweek} Washington bureau chief Evan
Thomas to inform him that the Bush
campaign had officially cut off all
contact with {Newsweek} and its
reporters. The decision to put
{Newsweek} out of business was made by
candidate Bush personally, and aborted
a plan by {Newsweek} to publish a book
on the 1988 campaign. The press got the
message: Portray Bush in a favorable
light or face vindictive and
discriminatory countermeasures. 

   Big Bucks for Bush
 
   Bush campaigns have always
advanced on a cushion of money, and the
1988 effort was to push this
characteristic to unheard-of extremes.
In keeping with a tradition that had
stretched over almost three decades,
the Bush campaign finance chairman was
Robert Mosbacher, whose Mosbacher
Energy Corporation is one of the
largest privately held independent oil
companies in Texas. Mosbacher's net
personal worth is estimated at $200
million. During the 1988 campaign,
Mosbacher raised $60 million for the
Bush campaign and $25 million for the
Republican National Committee. 
   Bush's big money campaigning was
especially dependent upon Texas oilmen,
whose largesse he required to stoke his
political machine. Bush was running a
political action committee called the
Fund for America's Future, which raised
$3.9 million in off-year 1985, a hefty
sum. Of that take, about a fifth was
raised from 505 Texas donors, with
Texans giving more than the residents
of any other state. Some $135,095 of Bush's
money harvest came from persons who
could be clearly identified as oil
industry figures, and the rakeoff here
was probably much greater. 

   The Primary Campaign
 
   James Baker was the titular head
of the Bush campaign, but the person
responsible for the overall concepts
and specific tactics of the Bush
campaign was Lee Atwater, a political
protege of Senator Strom Thurmond
of South Carolina. Thurmond had been a
Democrat, then a Dixiecrat in 1948,
then a Democrat again, and finally a
Republican. The exigencies of getting
elected in South Carolina on the GOP
ticket had taught Thurmond to reach
deeply into that demagogue's bag of
tricks called the wedge issues. Under
Thurmond's tutelage, Atwater had become
well versed in the essentials of the
Southern Strategy, the key to that
emergent Republican majority in
presidential elections which Kevin
Phillips had written about in 1968.
Atwater had also imbibed political
doctrine from the first practitioner of
the Southern Strategy, the dark-jowled
Richard M. Nixon himself. 
   In January 1983, for example, Lee
Atwater, at that time deputy director
of the White House office of political
affairs (and a creature of the
Bush-Baker connection), met with Nixon
for three and a half hours in Columbia,
South Carolina. Nixon held forth on
three points: the decisive political
importance of the Sun Belt, the
numerical relations within the
Electoral College, and the vast
benefits of having no primary
competition when seeking reelection. 
   In 1988 as well, Nixon was brought
in to be the {spiritus rector} of the
Bush campaign. During March of 1988,
when it was clear that Bush was going
to win the nomination, Nixon ``slipped
into town'' to join George Bush, Bar,
and Lee Atwater for dinner at the Naval
Observatory. This time it was Bush who
received a one-hour lecture from Nixon
on the need to cater to the Republican
right wing, the imperative of a tough
line on crime in the streets, and the
Soviets (again to propitiate the
rightists), to construct an independent
identity only after the convention, and
to urge Reagan to campaign actively.
And of course, where Nixon shows up,
Kissinger cannot be far away.@s6 
   1988 saw another large-scale
mobilization of the intelligence
community in support of Bush's
presidential ambitions. The late Miles
Copeland, a high-level former CIA
official who operated out of London
during the 1980s, contributed a piece
frankly titled ``Old Spooks for Bush''
to the March 18, 1988 issue of
{National Review}. 
   Bush and Atwater feared all their
competition. They feared former
Governor Pierre DuPont of Delaware
because of his appeal to liberal and
blue-blooded Republicans who might
otherwise automatically gravitate to
Bush. They feared New York Congressman
Jack Kemp because of his appeal to the
GOP right wing and to blue-collar
Reagan Democrats, and because of what
they viewed as his disturbing habit of
talking about the Strategic Defense
Initiative and similar issues. They
feared that Senator Bob Dole of Kansas,
with his ``root canal economics'' and
right-wing populism, and his solid
backing from the international grain
cartel, might appear more credible to
the Wall Street bankers than Bush as an
enforcer of austerity and sacrifices. 
   But at the same time, they knew
that Bush had more money to spend and
incomparably more state-by-state
organization than any of his GOP
rivals, to say nothing of the fabled
Brown Brothers Harriman media edge.
Bush also ruled the Republican National
Committee with Stalin-like ferocity,
denying these assets to all of his
rivals. This allowed Bush to wheel
toward the right in 1986-87 to placate
some of his critics there, and then
move back toward the center by the time
of the primaries. 
   But all the money and the
organization could not mask the fact
that Bush was fundamentally a weak
candidate. This began to become obvious
to Atwater and his team of perception
mongers as the Iowa caucuses began to
shape up. These were the caucuses that
Bush had so niftily won in 1980. By
1988, Bush's Iowa effort had become
complicated by reality, in the form of
a farm crisis that was driving
thousands of farmers into bankruptcy
every week. Farm voters were now
enraged against the avuncular thespian
Ronald Reagan and were looking for a
way to send a message to the
pointy-headed set in Washington, D.C.
Bush's Iowa campaign was dripping with
lucre, but this now brought forth
resentment among the grim and
grey-faced rural voters. 
   In mid-October 1987, five of the
six declared Republican candidates
attended a traditional Iowa GOP rally
in Ames, just north of Des Moines, on
the campus of Iowa State University.
Televangelist Pat Robertson surprised
all the others by mobilizing 1,300
enthusiastic supporters for the
Saturday event. The culmination of this
rally was a presidential straw poll,
which Robertson won with 1,293 votes to
958 for Dole. Bush trailed badly with
864. This was the occasion for Bush's
incredible explanation of what had
happened: ``A lot of people that
support me, they were off at the air
show, they were at their daughters'
coming out parties, or teeing up at the
golf course for that all-important last
round.''@s7 Many Iowans, including
Republicans, had to ask what a
debutante cotillion was, and began to
meditate on the fact that they were not
socially acceptable. But most concluded
that George Bush was the imperial
candidate from another planet, bereft
of the foggiest notion of their lives
and their everyday problems. 
   During the buildup to the Iowa
caucus, Bush continued to dodge
questions on Iran-Contra. The famous
``tension city'' encounter with Dan
Rather took place during this time. Lee
Atwater considered that performance
Bush's defining event for the campaign,
a display which made him look like John
Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Gary Cooper,
especially in the South, where people
like a pol who ``can kick somebody's
ass'' and where that would make a big
difference on Super Tuesday. 
   But Bush's handlers were
nevertheless shocked when Dole won the
Iowa caucuses with 37 percent of the
vote, followed by Pat Robertson with 25
percent. Bush managed only a poor show,
with 19 percent, a massive collapse in
comparison with 1980, when he had been
far less known to the public. 
   Bush had known that defeat was
looming in Iowa, and he had scuttled
out of the state and gone to New
Hampshire before the results were
known. Bush was nevertheless stunned by
his ignominious third-place finish, and
he consulted with Nick Brady, Lee
Atwater, chief of staff Craig Fuller,
and pollster Bob Teeter. Atwater had
boasted that he had built a ``fire
wall'' in the southern Super Tuesday
states that would prevent any rival
from seizing the nomination out of
Bush's grasp, but the Bush
image-mongers were well aware that a
loss in New Hampshire might well prove
a fatal blow to their entire effort,
the advantages of money, networks, and
organization notwithstanding. 
   Atwater accordingly ordered a huge
media buy of 1,800 gross rating points,
enough to ensure that the theoretical
New Hampshire television viewer would
be exposed to a Bush attack ad 18 times
over the final three days before the
election. The ad singled out Bob Dole,
judged by the Bushmen as their most
daunting New Hampshire challenger, and
savaged him for ``straddling'' the
question of whether or not new taxes
ought to be imposed. The ad proclaimed
that Bush ``won't raise taxes,''
period. It was during this desperate
week in New Hampshire that Bush became
indissolubly wedded to his lying and
demagogic ``no new taxes'' pledge,
which he repudiated with considerable
fanfare during the spring of 1990. 
   When Bush had arrived in
Manchester the night of the disastrous
Iowa result, New Hampshire Governor
John Sununu, his principal supporter in
the state, had promised a nine-point
victory for Bush in his state. Oddly
enough, that turned out to be exactly
right. The final result was 38 percent
for Bush, 29 percent for Dole, 13
percent for Kemp, 10 percent for
DuPont, and 9 percent for Robertson. 
   In the South Carolina primary, the
Bushmen were concerned about a possible
threat from television evangelist Pat
Robertson, who had mounted his major
effort in the Palmetto state. Robertson
was widely known through his
appearances on his Christian
Broadcasting Network. Shortly before
the South Carolina vote, a scandal
became public which involved another
television evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart,
a close friend of Robertson and an
active supporter of Robertson's
presidential campaign. Swaggart
admitted to consorting with a
prostitute, and this caused a severe
crisis in his ministry. Jim Bakker of
the PTL television ministry had already
been tainted by a sex scandal. 
   Pat Robertson accused the Bush
campaign of orchestrating the Swaggart
revelations at a time that would be
especially advantageous to their man.
Talking to reporters, Robertson pointed
to ``the evidence that two weeks before
the primary ... it suddenly comes to
light.'' Robertson added that the Bush
campaign was prone to ``sleazy''
tricks, and suggested that his own
last-place finish in New Hampshire was
``quite possibly'' the result of
``dirty tricks'' by the Bush campaign.
Bush responded by dismissing
Robertson's charges as ``crazy'' and
``absurd.'' Robertson had been linking
Bush to the ``international banking
community'' in his South Carolina
campaigning.@s8 
   True to his Southern Strategy,
Atwater had ``front-loaded'' Bush's
effort in the southern states with
money, political operatives, and
television, straining the legal limit
of what could be spent during the
primary season as a whole. A few days
before Super Tuesday came the South
Carolina primary. The state's governor,
Caroll Campbell, was a former customer
of Lee Atwater. Strom Thurmond was for
Dole, but his endorsement proved to be
valueless. Here Bush got all the
state's 37 delegates by scoring 48
percent of the vote to 21 percent for
Dole, 19 percent for Robertson, and 11
percent for Kemp. 
   Then, in the March 8 Super Tuesday
polling, Bush scored an
across-the-board triumph, winning in
Florida, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas,
Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma,
Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri, and
Maryland, plus Massachusetts and Rhode
Island outside of the region. With
this, Bush took 600 of 803 delegates at
stake that day. Four and a half million
Republicans had voted, the best turnout
ever in southern GOP primaries. When
Bush beat Dole by a three-to-two margin
in Illinois, supposedly a part of
Dole's base, it was all over. Bush
prepared for the convention and the
choice of a vice president. 

   The Wedge Issues Campaign
 
   The Bush campaign of 1988 had no
issues, but only demagogic themes.
These were basically all on the table
by June, well before the Republican
convention. The first was the pledge of
no new taxes, later embroidered with
the Clint Eastwood tough-guy overtones
of ``Read My Lips--No New Taxes.'' The
other themes reflected Atwater's
studies of how to drive up the
negatives of Bush's Democratic
opponent, who would be Massachusetts
Governor Michael Dukakis. Very early
on, Bush began to harp on Dukakis's
veto of a bill requiring teachers to
lead their class each day in the pledge
of allegiance. Speaking in Orange
County, California on June 7, Bush
said: ``I'll never understand, when it
came to his desk, why he vetoed a bill
that called for the pledge of
allegiance to be said in the schools of
Massachusetts. I'll never understand
it. We are one nation under God. Our
kids should say the pledge of
allegiance.''@s9 
   This theme lent itself very well
to a highly cathexized visual
portrayal, with flags and bunting.
Atwater was assisted in these matters
by Roger Ailes, a television
professional who had been the executive
producer of the Mike Douglas Show by
the time he was 27 years old. That was
in 1967, when he was hired by Richard
Nixon and Leonard Garment. Between
them, Atwater and Ailes would produce
the modern American television
equivalent of a 1930s Nuremburg party
rally. 
   At about this time, the Bush
network we have seen in operation at
the {Reader's Digest} since the 1964
campaign conveniently printed an
article about a certain Willie Horton,
a black convicted murderer who was
released from a Massachusetts jail on a
furlough, and then absconded to
Maryland, where he raped a white woman
and stabbed her fiance. The
Massachusetts furlough program had been
started by Republican Governor Frank
Sargent, but this meant nothing. Bush
was to use Willie Horton in the same
way that Hitler and the Nazis exploited
the grisly crimes of one Harmann, a
serial killer in Germany of the early
1930s, in their calls for law and
order. In Illinois in mid-June, Bush
began to talk about how Dukakis let
``murderers out on vacation to
terrorize innocent people.'' 
   As packaged by Bush's handlers, it
was thoroughly racist without being
nominally so, like Nixon's ``crime in
the streets'' shorthand for racist
backlash during the 1968 campaign.
Later, Bush would embroider this theme
with his demand for the death penalty,
his own Final Solution to the problem
of criminals like Willie Horton. 
   To crown this demagogy, George
H.W. Bush of Skull and Bones portrayed
Dukakis as an elitist insider:
``Governor Dukakis, his foreign-policy
views born in Harvard Yard's boutique,
would cut the muscle of our defense.''
Bush's frequent litany of ``liberal
Massachusetts governor'' was shameless
in its main purpose of suggesting that
Bush himself was {not} a liberal. 
   When Bush arrived in New Orleans
for the Republican National Convention,
he was accompanied by Baker, Teeter,
Fuller, Atwater, Ailes, and James
Baker's Girl Friday, Margaret Tutwiler.
Up to this point, Bush's staff had
expected him to generate a little
suspense around the convention by
withholding the name of his vice
presidential choice until the morning
of the last day of the convention, when
Bush could share his momentous secret
with the Texas caucus and then tell it
to the world. 
   Bush's vetting of vice presidents
was carried out between Bush and Robert
Kimmitt, the Washington lawyer and
Baker crony who later joined Baker's
ruling clique at the State Department,
before being put up for ambassador to
Germany when Vernon Walters quit in the
spring of 1991. Bush and Kimmitt
reviewed the obvious choices: Kemp was
out because he lectured Bush on the SDI
and was too concerned about issues.
Dole was out because he kept sniping at
Bush with his patented sardonic
zingers. Elizabeth Dole was a choice to
be deemed imprudent. John Danforth,
Pete Domenici, Al Simpson, and some
others were eliminated. Many were the
possible choices who had to be ruled
out not because of lack of stature, but
because they might seem to have more
stature than Bush himself. 
   Quayle had shown up on lists
prepared by Fuller and Ailes. Ed
Rollins, attuned to the Reagan
Democrats, could not believe that
Quayle was being seriously considered.
But now, at Belle Chase Naval Air
Station north of New Orleans, Bush told
his staff that he had chosen Dan
Quayle. Not only was it Quayle, but
Bush's thyroid was now in overdrive: He
wanted to announce his selection within
hours. Quayle was contacted by
telephone and instructed to meet Bush
at the dock in New Orleans when the
paddle-wheel steamer {Natchez} brought
Bush down the Mississippi to that
city's Spanish Plaza. 

   Why J. Danforth Quayle?
 
   Quayle turned up at the dock in a
state of inebriated euphoria, grabbing
Bush's arm, prancing and capering
around Bush. As soon as the dossiers on
Quayle came out, a few questions were
posed. Had his Senate office been a
staging point for Contra resupply
efforts? One of the Iran-Contra
figures, Rob Owen, had indeed worked
for Quayle, but Quayle denied
everything. Had Quayle, now a hawk,
been in Vietnam? Tom Brokaw asked
Quayle if he had gotten help in joining
the National Guard as a way of ducking
the draft. Quayle stammered that it had
been 20 years earlier, but maybe
``phone calls were made.'' Then Dan
Rather asked Quayle what his worst fear
was. ``Paula Parkinson,'' was the
reply. This was the woman lobbyist and
{Playboy} nude model who had been
present with Quayle at a wild weekend
at a Florida country club back in 1980. 
   The Bush image-mongers hurriedly
convened damage control sessions, and
Quayle was given two professional
handlers, Stuart Spencer and Joe
Canzeri. After a couple of Bush-Quayle
joint appearances before groups of war
veterans to attempt to dissipate
Quayle's National Guard issue, Quayle
was then shunted into the secondary
media markets under the iron control of
his new handlers. 
   Although Bush's impulsive
proclamation of his choice of Quayle
does indeed raise the question of the
hyperthyroid snap decision, the choice
of Quayle was not impulsive, but rather
perfectly coherent with Bush's profile
and pedigree. Bush told James Baker
that Quayle had been ``my first and
only choice.''@s1@s0 Bush's selection
of political appointees is very often
the product of Bush-Walker family
alliances over more than a
generation--as in the case of Baker,
Brady, Boy Gray, and Henry Kravis--or at
least of a long and often lucrative
business collaboration, as in the case
of Mosbacher. The choice of Quayle lies
somewhere in between, and was
strengthened by a deep ideological
affinity in the area of racism. 
   J. Danforth Quayle's grandfather
was Eugene C. Pulliam, who built an
important press empire starting with
his purchase of the Atchison (Kansas)
{Champion} in 1912. The bulk of these
papers were in Indiana, the home state
of the Pulliam clan, and in Arizona.
``Gene'' Pulliam had died in 1975, but
his newspaper chain was worth an
estimated $1.4 billion by the time Dan
Quayle became a household word. 
   Old Gene was a firm opponent of
racial integration. When Martin Luther
King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968,
Gene Pulliam sent a note to the editors
of his papers in Indianapolis, Indiana
ordering them not to give the King
tragedy ``much exposure'' because he
considered the civil rights leader a
``rabble rouser.'' He instructed that
the news of King's death be summarized
in as few words as possible and
relegated to the bottom of the front
page. 
   The Bush-Quayle alliance thus
reposed first of all on a shared
premise of racism. 
   Quayle is known to the vast
majority of the American public as a
virtual cretin. Quayle is the first
representative of the post-war Baby
Boom to advance to national elective
office. Unfortunately, he seems to
exhibit some of the mental impairment
that is known to overtake long-term,
habitual marijuana users. 
   Quayle was admitted by the
University of Indiana Law School in
violation of that school's usual policy
of rejecting all applicants with an
academic average of less than 2.6. He
wanted to be a lawyer because he had
heard that ``lawyers make lots of money
and do little,'' as he told his
fraternity brothers at De Pauw. As it
turned out, the dean of admissions at
the University of Indiana Law School
was one G. Kent Frandsen, who was a
Republican city judge in Lebanon,
Indiana, a town where the Pulliam
family controls the local newspaper. He
had always been endorsed by the Pulliam
interests. Two years later, Frandsen
would officiate at the marriage of J.
Danforth Quayle to Marilyn Tucker.
Still later, Frandsen would serve as
Quayle's campaign manager in Boone
County during the 1986 Senate race. It
was thus no surprise that Frandsen was
willing to admit Dan Quayle to law
school as part of a program for
disadvantaged students, primarily those
from the black community. 
   After all this, it may appear as a
miracle that Dan Quayle was ever able
to obtain a law degree. J. Danforth's
receipt of that degree appears to have
been mightily facilitated by the
plutocratic Quayle family, who made
large donations to the law school each
year during Dan's time as a law
student. 
   What were Quayle's pastimes during
his law school years? According to one
account, they included recreational
drugs. During the summer of 1988, a Mr.
Brett Kimberlin told Dennis Bernstein
and a radio audience of WBAI in New
York that he had first met J. Danforth
during this period at a fraternity
party at which marijuana was indeed
being consumed. ``He found out that I
had marijuana available at the time,''
said Kimberlin. ``It was good quality,
and he asked if I had any for sale....
I thought it was kind of strange. He
looked kind of straight. I thought he
might be a narc [DEA agent] at first.
But we talked and I felt a little more
comfortable, and finally I gave him my
phone number and said, `Hey, well, give
me a call.' He called me a couple weeks
later, and said, `Hey, this is DQ. Can
we get together?' and I said `Yes, meet
me at the Burger Chef restaurant.' We
struck up a relationship that lasted
for 18 months. I sold him small
quantities of marijuana for his
personal use about once a month during
that period. He was a good customer. He
was a friend of mine. We had a pretty
good relationship. He always paid
cash.... When him and Marilyn got
married in 1972, I gave him a wedding
present of some Afghanistan hashish and
some Acapulco gold.''@s1@s1 
   Kimberlin repeated these charges
in a pre-election interview on NBC News
on November 4, 1988. Kimberlin was a
federal prisoner serving time in
Tennessee after conviction on charges
of drug smuggling and explosives. Later
that same day, Kimberlin was scheduled
to address a news conference by
telephone conference call. But before
Kimberlin could speak to the press, he
was placed in solitary confinement, and
was moved in and out of solitary
confinement until well after the
November 8 presidential election. A
second attempted press conference by
telephone hookup on the eve of the
election did not take place, because
Kimberlin was still being held
incommunicado. On August 6, 1991, U.S.
District Judge Harold H. Greene ruled
that the allegations made by Kimberlin
against U.S. Bureau of Prisons Director
J. Michael Quinlan were ``tangible and
detailed'' enough to justify a trial.
Kimberlin had accused Quinlan of
ordering solitary confinement for him
when it became clear that his ability
to further inform the media about
Quayle's drug use would damage the
Bush-Quayle effort. The trial is still
pending as of our publication date. 
   In March 1977, Congressman Dan
Quayle contributed an article to the
Fort Wayne, Indiana {News-Sentinel} in
which he recommended that Congress take
a ``serious'' look at marijuana
decriminalization. In April 1978,
Quayle repeated this proposal,
specifying he supported
decriminalization for first-time
users.@s1@s2 

   The Last Lap
 
   The final stages of the campaign
were played out amid great public
indifference. Some interest was
generated in the final weeks by a
matter of prurient, rather than policy
interest: Rumors were flying of a Bush
sex scandal. This talk, fed by the old
Jennifer Fitzgerald story, had surfaced
during 1987 in the wake of the
successful covert operation against
Gary Hart. The gossip became intense
enough that George W. Bush asked his
father if he had been guilty of
philandering. The young Bush reported
back to the press that ``the answer to
the Big A [adultery] question is N-O.''
Lee Atwater accused David Keene of the
Dole campaign of helping to circulate
the rumor, and Keene, speaking on a
television talk show, responded that
Atwater was ``a liar.'' Shortly
thereafter, a ``sex summit'' was
convened between the Bush and Dole
camps for the purpose of maintaining
correct GOP decorum even amidst the
acrimony of the campaign.@s1@s3 
   Evans and Novak opined that
``Atwater and the rest of the Bush high
command, convinced that the rumors
would soon be published, reacted in a
way that spelled panic to friend and
foe alike.'' On June 17, 1987, Michael
Sneed of the {Chicago Sun-Times} had
written that ``several major newspapers
are sifting ... reported dalliances of
Mr. Boring.''@s1@s4 But during that
summer of 1987, the Brown Brothers
Harriman/Skull and Bones networks were
powerful enough to suppress the story
and spare Bush any embarrassment. 
   In the end, the greatest trump
card of Bush's 1988 campaign was Bush's
opponent Michael Dukakis. There is
every reason to believe that Dukakis
was chosen by Bush Democrat power
brokers and the Eastern Establishment
bankers primarily because he was so
manifestly unwilling and unable
seriously to oppose Bush. Many are the
indications that the Massachusetts
governor had been selected to take a
dive. The gravest suspicions are in
order as to whether there ever was a
Dukakis campaign at all. Well before
Dukakis received the nomination,
supporters of Lyndon LaRouche in the
National Democratic Policy Committee
called attention to the indications of
personal and mental instability in
Dukakis's personal history, but the
Democratic Convention in Atlanta chose
to ignore these highly relevant issues. 
   As the NDPC leaflet pointed out,
``There is strong evidence that Michael
Dukakis suffers from a deep-seated
mental instability that could paralyze
him, and decapitate our government, in
the event of a severe economic or
strategic crisis. This is a tendency
for psychological breakdown in a
situation of adversity and perceived
personal rejection.''@s1@s5 The best
proof of the validity of this
assessment is the pitiful election
campaign that Dukakis then conducted.
The NDPC leaflet had warned that the
GOP would exploit this obvious issue,
and Reagan soon made his celebrated
quip, ``I'm not going to pick on an
invalid,'' focusing intense public
attention on Dukakis's refusal to
release his medical records. 
   The colored maps used by the
television networks on the night of
November 8 presented a Bush victory
which, although less convincing than
Reagan's two landslides, nevertheless
seemed impressive. A closer examination
of the actual vote totals reveals a
much different lesson: Even in
competition with the bumbling and
craven Dukakis campaign, Bush remained
a pitifully weak candidate who, despite
overwhelming advantages of incumbency,
money, organization, years of
enemies-list operations, a free ride
from the controlled media, and a
pathetic opponent, just managed to eke
out a hair's breadth margin. 
   Bush had won 53 percent of the
popular vote, but if just 535,000
voters in 11 states (or 600,000 voters
in nine states) had switched to
Dukakis, the latter would have been the
winner. The GOP had ruled the terrain
west of the Mississippi for many moons,
but Bush had managed to lose three
Pacific states: Oregon, Washington, and
Hawaii. Bush won megastates like
Illinois and Pennsylvania by paper-thin
margins of 51 percent, and the
all-important California vote, which
went to Bush by just 52 percent, had
been too close for George's comfort.
Missouri had also been a 52 percent
close call for George. In the farm
states, the devastation wrought by
eight years of GOP free enterprise
caused both Iowa and Wisconsin to join
Minnesota in the Democratic column.
Chronically depressed West Virginia was
having none of George. In the oil
patch, the Democrats posted percentage
gains even though Bush carried these
states: In Texas, Oklahoma, and
Louisiana the Democratic presidential
vote was up between 7 and 11 percent
compared to the Mondale disaster of
1984. In the Midwest, Dukakis managed
to carry four dozen counties that had
not gone for a Democratic presidential
contender since 1964. All in all, half
of Bush's electoral votes came from
states in which he got less than 55.5
percent of the two-party vote, showing
that there was no runaway Bush
landslide. 
   The voter turnout hit a new
postwar low, with just 49.1 percent of
eligible voters showing up at the
polls, significantly worse than the
Harry Truman-Thomas Dewey matchup of
1948, when just 51 percent had deemed
it worthwhile to vote. This means that
Bush expected to govern the country
with the votes of just 26.8 percent of
the eligible voters in his pocket. Bush
had won a number of southern states by
lop-sided margins of about 20 percent,
but this was correlated in many cases
with very low overall voter turnout,
which dipped below 40 percent in
Georgia and South Carolina. A big plus
factor for George was the very low
black voter turnout in the South, where
a significant black vote had helped the
Democrats retake control of the Senate
in 1986. 
   Among those Republicans who had
succeeded in winning the White House in
two-way races (excluding years like
1948 or 1968, when the totals were
impacted by Henry Wallace and Strom
Thurmond's Dixiecrats, or by George
Wallace), Bush's result was the weakest
since fellow Skull and Bones alumnus
William Howard Taft in 1908.@s1@s6 

   Notes for Chapter XXIII
 
   1.
 George Will column, Jan. 30,
1986, in George Will, {The Morning
After} (New York: Free Press London,
Collier-MacMillan, 1986), p. 254.
 
   2.
 Jack Anderson and Dale Van
Atta, ``Bush Waits and Hopes for Reagan
Nod,'' {Washington Post,} Aug. 18,
1986.
 
   3.
 Jack W. Germond and Jules
Witcover, {Whose Broad Stripes and
Bright Stars: The Trivial Pursuit of
the Presidency, 1988} (New York: Warner
Books, 1989), p. 156.
 
   4.
 ``Bush Proves Successful in
Ticklish Appearance,'' {Washington
Post,} Dec. 12, 1985.
 
   5.
 ``New Hampshire Chill,''
{Washington Post,} Oct. 11, 1987.
 
   6.
 For Bush in the 1988 campaign,
see {Whose Broad Stripes and Bright
Stars.}
 
   7.
 {Washington Post,} Oct. 16,
1987.
 
   8.
 ``Robertson Links Bush to
Swaggart Scandal,'' {Washington Post,}
Feb. 24, 1988.
 
   9.
 {Whose Broad Stripes and Bright
Stars,} p. 161.
 
   10.
 {Whose Broad Stripes and
Bright Stars,} p. 385.
 
   11.
 Joel Bleifuss, ``In Short,''
{In These Times,} Nov. 16-22, 1988, p.
5, cited by Arthur Frederick Ide,
{Bush-Quayle: The Reagan Legacy}
(Irving, Texas: Scholars Books, 1989),
pp. 55-56.
 
   12.
 {Ibid.}
 
   13.
 {Washington Post,} July 1,
1987.
 
   14.
 {Washington Post,} June 26,
1987.
 
   15.
 See ``Is Dukakis the New
Senator Eagleton?'' in ``Dukakis's
Mental Health: An Objective
Assessment,'' {Executive Intelligence
Review Reprint,} Aug. 15, 1988, p. 8.
 
   16.
 See Kevin Phillips, {The
Politics of Rich and Poor} (New York:
Random House, 1990), p. 215; {Facts on
File,} Nov. 11, 1988; and Paul R.
Abramson, John H. Aldrich and David W.
Rohde, {Change and Continuity in the
1988 Elections} (Washington:
Congressional Quarterly, 1991).
 
----         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com