2
The city of Angels was now ablaze, for the acquittal of three of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers videotaped in the spring of 1991 clubbing the black motorist Rodney King 56 times in 81 seconds provoked a howl of rage. Fires of fury engulfed sections of the sprawling metropolis that had crackled with so much energy and pride during the Olympian summer of 1984. Not far from the LA Memorial Coliseum stadium, which had reverberated with those looping chants of ‘USA! USA!’, came screams of anger. The fireworks gave way to plumes of acrid smoke and piles of grey ash.
Now a student in Boston, I watched the evening news those April nights with unblinking horror, as footage was broadcast of stores being looted, entire blocks being torched and a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, being dragged from the cabin of his truck and viciously beaten by a group of rioters, one of whom repeatedly pummelled his face with a brick. So proud were his attackers that they performed victory dances for the news helicopters hovering above, as if celebrating a last-minute touchdown. It was hard to watch, but impossible to take your eyes off. Sixty-three people were killed, 2,383 were injured.
Walking on the night of the riots through Central Square in Cambridge, an African-American enclave sandwiched between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a British friend who had arrived on a coveted academic scholarship angrily declared he wanted to turn his back on America that very instant and leave without completing his studies. The mood of locals drifting through the streets, however, was of numb resignation. So commonplace was injustice, even following the civil rights reforms of the ’60s, that few expected fair treatment from the criminal justice system. What was shocking, then, was the absence of shock. For the first time, the thought entered my mind that American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States was inherently special and unique, could also be a negative construct. The phrase ‘Only in America’ could be a term of derision. Even at this time of multiplying divisions, however, I remained confident about America’s future.
During a visit to my family friends in Orange County a few months later, we ended up having a heated discussion on the terrace overlooking the pool about the acquittal of the LAPD officers. Like many white Angelinos, my father’s best man sympathised with the cops. So I got hold of a copy of a speech delivered in Congress by Senator Bill Bradley – the lanky former basketball star who had played alongside the greats of the NBA before going into politics – slipped it into a manila envelope and posted it to their address in Fountain Valley.
‘Fifty-six times in 81 seconds,’ thundered Bradley. ‘Fifty-six times in 81 seconds.’ Then he repeated the word ‘pow’ 56 times, striking his mahogany Senate desk with a pencil every time he uttered it.
‘Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.’
These kinds of dinner-table post-mortems took place across the country, as Los Angeles became the latest proxy combat zone of the culture wars. The city where in 1984 athletes such as Carl Lewis, Edwin Moses, Valerie Brisco-Hooks and a young Michael Jordan had lifted the spirits of a beleaguered nation now became a symbol of America’s racial divisiveness and pervasive sense of gloom.
It was 1992. National self-doubt again weighed heavy. Japan looked set to outpace the United States economically and technologically. Germany was resurgent. America had won the Cold War only to see other countries prosper. With the country mired in recession, the standard-of-living gains of the Reagan years, if not quite a chimera, seemed superficial. Even Donald Trump was now in financial trouble. The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, his trashy eighth wonder of the world, now resembled a Potemkin village. After its flashy opening in 1990, Trump was forced the next year to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. With creditors at his golden doors, the New Yorker had to sell off his airline and yacht, The Trump Princess. The Trump Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City filed for bankruptcy the following year, as did the Trump Plaza, which had opened in 1984.
By some measures, America had more to celebrate in the early ’90s than the mid-’80s. The Berlin Wall was demolished by the very people it once enclosed. The Iron Curtain, following the 1989 revolutions in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania, had been ripped down. Earlier that year, the Red Army completed its humiliating retreat from Afghanistan. By the summer of 1991, the Warsaw Pact, the communist counterpoint to NATO, had been dissolved. By the New Year, the Soviet Union no longer existed, after morphing peacefully into the Russian Federation and 14 separate republics.
‘You can have a very quiet Christmas evening,’ Mikhail Gorbachev informed President Bush during a telephone call to Camp David on 25 December 1991, after handing over authority of the nuclear arsenal to the new Russian president, Boris Yeltsin.1 The Russian bear had been declawed. After a 40-year fight, the United States could claim an ideological victory in the Cold War. The American system was dominant. George H. W. Bush was in a position to craft his ‘New World Order’, a phrase both he and Gorbachev used to describe a harmonious new era based on great power collaboration not conflict.
A lightning conquest in the first Gulf War in 1991 underscored America’s new pre-eminence. In Operation Desert Storm, some 543,000 US military personnel took just 100 hours to liberate occupied Kuwait.2 Threatened with ‘the mother of all battles’, the US-led forces not only annihilated the Iraqi army, which suffered some 20,000 deaths, but also slayed the phantoms of Vietnam. For all the concerns beforehand about wading into a Mesopotamian quagmire, America lost 148 troops. ‘By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,’ the president told state legislators at the White House in a rare public show of self-congratulation.3
The Gulf War was also a diplomatic triumph, in which the United States stood at the head of a multilateral coalition drawing together 28 countries. The United Nations Security Council authorised the military operation. Bush also had the strategic insight to bring military action to a timely end. Alert to the dangers of regime change, he halted the blitzkrieg advance down the ‘Road of Death’ to Baghdad and made no attempt to topple Saddam Hussein.
By no means was Operation Desert Storm flawless. Bush should have compelled the Iraqi dictator to sit at the table in Safwan when ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf accepted his country’s surrender, a public shaming that would have dramatically undercut his power. When Shiites and Kurds rose up against the Iraqi dictator, Bush left them at the mercy of the dictator’s army. However, not since the end of World War II had America been so sure-footed in projecting its military and diplomatic power.
‘When you left, it was still fashionable to question America’s decency, America’s courage, America’s resolve,’ Bush told returning troops at Sumter, South Carolina, in March 1991. ‘No-one in the whole world doubts us any more.’4
The university campus I was on at MIT exuded confidence and spoke also of America’s ambition to conquer the remaining new frontiers. On arrival I was given something called an ‘email address’, and told it was possible to communicate with professors via a device called the Intranet, which connected all the computers. To my impressionable eyes, Americans seemed to be in a hurry to win the future.
At the very moment America had most to cheer, however, it no longer had a cheerleader as president. Throughout his career, Bush had obeyed the directive of his patrician mother against boastfulness, a commendable trait in the white-flannelled tennis clubs of Maine, maybe, but not one rewarded in modern-day politics.
When the Berlin Wall was demolished in 1989, Bush was reproached by the White House press corps for failing to rejoice in America’s victory; for missing the historical moment; for not rushing to Berlin. ‘You don’t seem elated,’ said a mystified reporter. ‘I’m just not an emotional kind of guy,’ the president protested in his buttoned-down way. Bush also knew triumphalism in Washington would strengthen hardliners in Moscow looking for an opportunity to oust Mikhail Gorbachev. A trip to Berlin may have won a few news cycles, but made it harder to bring the Cold War to a peaceable conclusion.
By refusing to attend a victory celebration in New York, Bush showed the same self-effacement in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Troops deserved the ticker-tape adulation, he told advisors, not their commander-in-chief. Nor did the highest presidential approval ratings Gallup had ever recorded, a stratospheric 89 per cent – a poll in USA Today put his popularity even higher at 91 per cent – go to his head.5
When he left for Camp David after the war was over, hundreds of White House aides gathered on the South Lawn waving signs that read ‘The Great Liberator’ and ‘91 per cent’. Bush, though, was careful to avoid a ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment. ‘I haven’t yet felt this wonderfully euphoric feeling that many of the American people felt. I’m beginning to,’ he told a gathering at the White House. But he admitted to needing ‘more time to sort out in my mind how I can say to the American people: “It’s over. The last ‘t’ is crossed, the last ‘i’ is dotted.’’’6 He was a better statesman than showman.
Far from sharing in the euphoria, Bush ended up suffering from a post-war funk, a Churchill-style ‘black dog’, that led him to consider quitting politics altogether. ‘I want to get out of this,’ he wrote in his diary in February 1991. ‘I want to walk into a drugstore in Kennebunkport; build a house in Houston; or teach at the library at A&M [Texas A&M University], with less pressure.’7
A year out from the start of the primary season, his mood remained bleak: ‘I’ve lost heart for a lot of the gut political fighting, as a result of trying to lead this country and bring it together in the Gulf. It’s strange but true.’8 In his moment of maximum triumph and popularity, he temporarily lost his way. Thereafter, it was extraordinary how quickly things unravelled for Bush. Here was a president with the foreign policy acumen and diplomatic skills to forge that ‘New World Order’. But it was the new political order he found more perplexing. The reunification of Berlin had a schismatic effect on Washington. The loss of America’s post-war organising principle brought to mind the prophetic words of Georgy Arbatov, a Soviet expert on the United States, speaking before the break-up of his homeland: ‘We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.’9
The son of a patrician senator and scion of a blue-blood banking family who reinvented himself as a Texan oil man and Lone Star politician, George H. W. Bush could easily have been the poster boy for the geographic reorientation of the Republican Party. There was always the sense, though, that he was faking it: that he enjoyed darting around the waters off Walker’s Point on the Maine shoreline in his cigar boat more than hurling horseshoes; that he felt more comfortable in preppy loafers than cowboy boots; that he was a Yankee, rather than a true son of the south. For nearly a quarter of a century, he kept a mailing address at the Houstonian Hotel that allowed him to vote in Texas, but his ancestral and spiritual home was the Bush compound in Kennebunkport. ‘This is home,’ he admitted in 1988. ‘This is where I am really me.’10 Dana Carvey, the comedian who pilloried the president each week on Saturday Night Live, described Bush as Mr Rogers, the children’s TV presenter, trying to be John Wayne. Never, though, was he True Grit.
Rather than its southward tilt, what Bush truly embodied was the mounting tensions within the Republican Party between the establishment and insurgent right. Throughout his 30-year career, as this private struggle played out in the public arena, we saw two contradictory Bushes: on the one hand, the well-mannered Ivy Leaguer advocating a kindler, gentler politics; on the other, a ruthless opportunist who fought like a scrappy redneck. In Washington, he tended to behave like an aristocrat – once, during the 1984 primary season, he told Senator Gary Hart, the Democratic frontrunner, that if he needed rest ahead of the Maine caucuses he was more than welcome to use the nearby Bush residence. To get to Washington, however, Bush often fought ugly, even as he tried to maintain a veneer of civility.
Battling for a Senate seat in Texas during his first political campaign in 1964, he opposed the Civil Rights Act, derided Martin Luther King as a ‘militant’ and remained staunchly loyal to Barry Goldwater.11 But in a state populated by ranch hands and oil workers, he also wore preppy striped ties on the campaign trail, and appeared at rallies alongside the Bush Bluebonnet Belles, the musical cousins of the Yale Whiffenpoofs, an a cappella ensemble that performed at his father’s political events.12 His campaign manager considered him the worst candidate he’d ever worked for.
After his defeat, Bush regretted aligning himself so closely with Goldwater and bemoaned the malign influence of the far-right John Birch Society.13 ‘This mean humourless philosophy which says everybody should agree on absolutely everything is not good for the Republican Party or for our State,’ he wrote, foreshadowing battles that lay ahead. ‘When the word moderation becomes a dirty word we have some soul searching to do.’14
As the conservative movement veered further right, Bush often sounded more like an outlier than the radicals. During the 1980 Republican primaries, his taunting description of Reaganomics as voodoo economics raised the hackles of supply-siders, who believed in reducing taxation and lessening government regulation. Even after serving for eight years as Reagan’s loyal deputy, he was seen as a Rockefeller Republican masquerading as a Reagan Republican, which is essentially what he was – a lamb in wolf’s clothing.
Aware of his right-wing image problem, Bush tried to make amends by professing his love of pork rinds and beef jerky, testifying to becoming a born-again Christian and even inviting Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker for supper at the Naval Observatory, his vice-presidential residence. Yet right-wingers knew these mating rituals were performed through gritted patrician teeth. His true feelings surfaced after being harangued at a campaign event in Tennessee by a supporter of the TV evangelist Pat Robertson who refused to shake his hand, an affront for a gentleman of such refined manners.
‘They’re scary,’ Bush wrote in his diary, ‘they’re religious fanatics and they’re spooky. They will destroy this party if they’re permitted to take over.’15 So repulsive did he find the New Right that in 1987 he turned down an invitation to address the Conservative Political Action Conference. ‘Fuck ’em, I ain’t going,’ he reportedly told aides. ‘You can’t satisfy these people.’16
As he launched his campaign for the Republican nomination in 1988, his early mis-steps recalled that first, striped-tie campaign in Texas. Explaining away his poor performance in an early Iowa straw poll, he noted his supporters had to drop off their daughters at debutant balls.17 At a truck stop in New Hampshire, he requested ‘a splash’ of coffee.18
Bush benefited, however, from the absence of an obvious Reaganite heir. His main rival, Bob Dole, who won the 1988 Iowa caucus, was pilloried by New Right conservatives as ‘the tax collector for the welfare state’, having helped enact the tax hike that kept Social Security solvent. So despite being humiliated in Iowa, where Pat Robertson pushed him into third place, Bush rebounded in New Hampshire by portraying Dole as a tax raiser. On Super Tuesday he won 16 of the 17 states contested, and wrapped up the nomination. Thus, this pillar of the establishment became the standard-bearer of an anti-establishment party. For the next 30 years, the Republican right yearned for its Excalibur moment, when the true heir to Ronald Reagan would pull from the stone the sword. Instead, the primary process kept on selecting establishment candidates rather than true believers.
When the Republican Party gathered for its 1988 convention in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech best remembered for the six-word pledge that ended up ensnaring his presidency. ‘Read my lips, no new taxes,’ he snarled, trying to sound more like John Wayne than Mr Rogers. In passages composed with the help of Reagan’s most eloquent West Wing wordsmith, Peggy Noonan, he also outlined his vision of a kinder, gentler America illuminated by a thousand points of light.
For all the high-mindedness of his convention speech, however, Bush ended up taking the gutter route to the White House. Roger Ailes became one of his chief image-makers. Lee Atwater, a pit-bull terrier of a political consultant and a down-and-dirty proponent of the southern strategy, served as his campaign manager. The South Carolinian, who on his deathbed apologised to opponents for his venality, produced a 312-page memorandum, ‘The Hazards of Duke’, that outlined the weaknesses of his opponent, the Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis. Then Bush set about assassinating his character.
He questioned the patriotism of this Greek-American first-generation immigrant, and sought to capitalise from a notorious ad featuring Willie Horton, an African-American convicted murderer who twice raped a white woman while furloughed from prison under a Massachusetts programme in place while Dukakis was governor.
‘If I can make Willie Horton a household name, we’ll win the election,’ said Atwater, licking his South Carolinian lips at the prospect of depicting Dukakis as a liberal elitist who was soft on crime. ‘The only question is whether to portray Willie Horton with a knife,’ Ailes told Time magazine.19 Even well-mannered moderates such as Bush were prepared now to prosecute the politics of personal destruction.
What the 1988 campaign also revealed was the extent to which elections were coming to be fought on cultural terrain. Candidates deliberately sought to divide the country. Emotive wedge issues had more sway than dry policy questions. All politics was personal. On education, it was whether children should recite the Pledge of Allegiance. On health, it was reproductive rights. Bush even toured a flag factory to wrap himself in the Stars and Stripes. ‘Every single thing I did,’ Ailes later explained, ‘from debates to rhetoric to speeches to media was to define the two [candidates] and push them farther apart.’20
Witnessing my first campaign, I was shocked not just by the unscrupulousness but also by the effectiveness of negative campaigning. When I interviewed Dukakis afterwards on the Boston campus where he taught classes in public policy, he seemed still to be suffering from a political form of PTSD. Winning 40 states, including California, and more than 53.4 per cent of the vote, the Republicans scored not just their third victory in a row but their third lopsided win. The GOP had now won five of the last six presidential elections, fuelling talk of a permanent electoral lock on the White House. It said much about the pitiful state of Democratic presidential politics that Dukakis’s 45.6 per cent share of the vote was the party’s second-best performance in 20 years. The District of Columbia was the Democrat’s only impregnable stronghold. Not a single state was deep blue.21
In his inaugural address, Bush tried to rekindle those thousand points of light, and lamented the rancorous state of politics. ‘There has grown a certain divisiveness,’ he said. ‘We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other’s ideas are challenged, but each other’s motives.’22 Yet Bush’s nationalistic, scorched-earth campaign accelerated that trend. A genial patrician had foreshadowed what post-Cold War politics would look like. And it was ugly.
The early post-war years could hardly be described as an idyllic age of American consensus, a non-partisan Shangri-La. However, the Cold War imposed a discipline on Washington politics that produced a level of comity unrecognisable today and also a steady stream of sound public policy. The country experienced outbreaks of paranoia, such as the McCarthyite witch-hunt aimed at rooting out alleged communists in the US government and Hollywood, fuelled by the ideological intensity of East–West tensions. On Capitol Hill, a reactionary – and bipartisan – coalition of dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and segregationist southern Democrats continued to block long-overdue reforms, most flagrantly civil rights.
Nonetheless, much of the 1950s and early 1960s witnessed a surprising degree of constructive cooperation, as partisanship was subordinated to the collective aim of containing communism. The cloakrooms of Capitol Hill were crowded with veterans, such as the former patrol-boat skipper Jack Kennedy and navy reservist Richard Nixon, who had experienced combat in Europe and the Pacific. Now, the Soviet Union was the enemy. At a time when domestic politics was inseparable from foreign affairs, Democrats and Republicans were rivals not mortal foes. Legislators went to Washington to legislate.
Defeating the Soviets, and demonstrating the superiority of the US system, provided the spur for most of the bipartisan achievements of the age. The national freeway system, that bitumen landmark of the Eisenhower years, was the result of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, a measure designed, as its title suggested, to make it easier to move troops around the country.
In a Sputnik-induced panic, following the Soviet Union’s successful launch in 1957 of the world’s first satellite, Congress didn’t pass a straightforward education act to improve science teaching, but rather the 1958 National Defense Education Act, again with bipartisan backing. The mission to the moon was an attempt to make sure an American astronaut planted the Stars and Stripes before a Soviet cosmonaut unfurled the hammer and sickle. Even the civil rights reforms of the ’60s had a Cold War dimension, since ‘whites only’ signs and the protests they sparked gifted the communists a propaganda coup at a time when Washington and Moscow were competing to extend their spheres of influence on the newly decolonised continent of Africa.
Throughout this period, the country’s leaders were refreshingly pragmatic. Dwight D. Eisenhower was such a non-ideological figure – ‘his smile was his philosophy’, it was once said – that in 1952 both Republicans and Democrats tried to draft him as their presidential candidate.23
In winning the Republican nomination, the former general beat Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, or ‘Mr Conservative’ as he was known, an era-defining defeat in which the GOP opted for moderation and internationalism over hard-line conservatism and isolationism. Eisenhower, sounding like an early advocate of Third Way politics, promised to take America ‘down the middle of the road between the unfettered power of concentrated wealth ... and the unbridled power of statism or partisan interests’. During his eight years in office, he made no concerted attempt to dismantle FDR’s New Deal.24
Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, far from being the crusading liberal idealist of lore, was also a cautious pragmatist. His election in 1960 heralded generational change, but hardly a major ideological shift. Unexpectedly, Lyndon Johnson enacted more liberal legislation than Kennedy, but remained a moderate at heart who tried to steer a course between northern progressives and his fellow southerners.
Even Richard Nixon, for all his law-and-order shrillness during the 1968 campaign, governed much like his former boss, President Eisenhower. Federal spending and federal regulation grew faster under Nixon than under Johnson. For a politician who pioneered the southern strategy, his civil rights record was unexpectedly enlightened. So, too, was his environmentalism. Nixon authored the 1970 Clean Air Act, the most ambitious green legislation yet passed, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. From president to post-war president, consensualism provided a continuous thread.
Congressional leaders were also surprisingly cooperative. During the Eisenhower years, the then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and his Texan mentor House Speaker Sam Rayburn came in for criticism, not because they stymied the president’s legislative agenda but because they lent too much support. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, as we have seen, would not have been enacted had it not been for the support of moderate Republicans led by the then Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen.
Even Nixon’s resignation from office, the biggest political commotion of the post-war years, produced a surprising degree of bipartisanship. Though there was a cabal of Nixon loyalists, including Ronald Reagan, who stayed with him almost to the end, members of his own party were instrumental in his downfall. It was a Republican, Fred Thompson, the minority counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee and a future Hollywood actor and GOP presidential candidate, whose line of questioning revealed publicly for the first time that Nixon kept a secret taping system in the Oval Office (another Republican staffer had uncovered its existence). The conservative National Review, under the editorship of William F. Buckley, demanded that Nixon hand over the ‘smoking gun’ tapes.
Howard Baker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, posed the legendary Watergate question, ‘What did the president know, and when did he know it?’ Baker expected the question to help exonerate Nixon, but after discovering the president knew an awful lot more than he had previously let on, he backed impeachment. When the House Judiciary Committee voted on five articles of impeachment, three passed with Republican support. Finally, it was Republican elders, such as the Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott and Barry Goldwater, who drove down Pennsylvania Avenue to implore Nixon to resign.
Watergate prompted a series of reforms intended to fumigate Washington. Campaign finance laws curbed the corrupting influence of money and made it harder to pull off Nixonian dirty tricks. Constraints were imposed on executive power, limiting the president’s authority to start new wars and impound funds appropriated by Congress. There was a push to raise ethical standards and provide greater government transparency.
Politics in Washington, however, became more combative. The influx of ‘Watergate Babies’ in the 1974 midterm elections, the vast majority of whom were 30-somethings who came of political age during the culture wars of the 1960s and had been participants in the civil rights and anti-war movement, had a radicalising effect on the House.
The lingua franca of politics also changed. The Class of ’74 talked of rights and values, rather than the pocketbook dollars and cents of the New Deal era. For progressives, it was the right to have an abortion or the right to drink clean water. For conservatives, it was the rights of an unborn foetus and right to bear arms.
All these issues aroused powerful passions, which meant feelings started to trump objective facts and politics became more emotive. Debates also came to be framed in a more binary way, often as moral and even mortal clashes. As the historian John Lawrence has observed, ‘Elevating policy goals to the status of rights would prove to be a crucial step in the evolution of ideological partisanship in the United States.’25
Because of their moral absolutism, the new generation of lawmakers was often allergic to compromise. From the mid-’70s onwards, the voting gap between congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans became more pronounced. Progressives became more secular and conservatives became more devout. Cultural relativism clashed with religious dogma.
On both sides of the aisle, congressional oversight increasingly came to be used as a political cudgel, paving the way for the televised hearings that have become such a permanent – and polarising – feature of Washington. The enactment in 1978 of the independent counsel statute, another post-Watergate reform, placed in the hands of lawmakers powerful new weapons that could be used for partisan purposes.
First, the new law was used to investigate whether Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, and campaign manager, Timothy Kraft, had used cocaine. Then, in what felt like a reprisal attack, the Democrats deployed independent counsels to hound members of Ronald Reagan’s inner circle, namely his attorney general, Edwin Meese, and chief image-maker, Michael Deaver.
Public life became criminalised. Congressional oversight hearings became show trials. A classic of the genre was the Iran-Contra hearings, which featured an exotic array of cast members, including Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, resplendent in his full dress Marine Corps uniform; his beautiful assistant Fawn Hall, who helped him shred incriminating documents; and Admiral John Poindexter, Reagan’s National Security Advisor, who was convicted of lying to Congress and obstructing its committees.
Televising Congress, where the klieg lights were intended to have the same cleansing effect as sunshine, further raised the partisan temperature. Soon after the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network went to air in 1979, with a speech from a thrusting Tennessean congressman named Al Gore, a young freshman grasped its potential for promoting himself and his aggressive brand of Republicanism. Taking advantage of rules that prohibited C-SPAN cameras from showing wide shots of an empty chamber, Newton Leroy McPherson Gingrich started delivering incendiary late-night speeches with little or no live audience, but a growing one in American living rooms (by 1984, almost 20 million homes received C-SPAN). In the process, Gingrich and his allies created a new style of late-night political television, a prototype, in conservative content at least, for Fox News.
Gingrich’s grandstanding had long irked the House Speaker, Tip O’Neill, whose breaking point came in the spring of 1984, when the Georgian accused him of pursuing ‘a McCarthyism of the Left’. O’Neill responded with finger-wagging rage. ‘It is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress,’ he thundered.
By mounting a derogatory personal attack on Gingrich, however, O’Neill breached House rules, and thus became the first Speaker since 1798 to be rebuked for violating its honour code. When this David-and-Goliath clash aired on the evening news, Gingrich instantly became a right-wing folk hero. ‘I am now a famous person,’ he told The Washington Post.
His guerrilla tactics worked to asymmetrical perfection. ‘The number-one fact about the news media is they love fights,’ Gingrich afterwards told a group of conservative activists. ‘You have to give them confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention. When you get attention, you educate.’26
For O’Neill, all politics was local. For Gingrich, all politics was confrontational. Bipartisanship, he believed, buttressed the status quo by reducing the incentive to change course, which was a problem for a party that had not held the Speakership since the 1950s.
Democrats were hardly shrinking wallflowers. This they showed in the battle in 1987 to block the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who as Nixon’s solicitor general had fired the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox after the notorious ‘Saturday Night Massacre’, when the attorney general and deputy attorney resigned rather than do so.
A constitutional originalist who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Roe v. Wade, and a string of Supreme Court rulings on gender equality, Bork was the first nominee to find himself in the midst of the kind of confirmation knife-fight commonplace today (paradoxically, the year before, the Senate had confirmed the arch-conservative Antonin Scalia by 98 votes to 0).
In an epoch-making fight between liberals and conservatives, Ted Kennedy marked out the battle-lines. ‘Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions,’ he roared on the Senate floor, ‘blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution. Writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government.’
The hearings could hardly have been more polarising, with the opposing sides even resorting to paid advertising as if it were an election campaign. The die was cast.
For the next climactic nomination fight, when in 1991 President Bush nominated the black jurist Clarence Thomas to replace the civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall, I was living in America. Like the rest of the country, I was spellbound by the televised hearings, in which Thomas claimed to be the victim of ‘a high-tech lynching’ and the law professor Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment.
Viewers sniggered at the porn films he allegedly discussed with her, starring Long Dong Silver, an actor with an eponymously large penis. There was a collective sense of cringe at the revelation that he reportedly asked Hill, ‘Who put the pubic hair on my Coke?’
What I failed to realise at the time was that we were watching a trailer for an internecine future, a movie we would watch many times over, when the struggle for control of the Supreme Court would produce some of the nastiest and most divergent clashes.
A former congressman, Bush preferred the old ways of Capitol Hill. The backslapping camaraderie. The weekend mini-league games and supper parties. The wives’ clubs that brought together political spouses from both sides. The co-sponsored legislation. On becoming president, though, he was confronted by the new spitefulness when the Senate rejected his choice of defense secretary, the former Texas Senator John Tower. In more collegiate times, Tower’s transgressions, which included drunkenness, womanising and links to defence contractors, would probably have been forgiven or ignored. Capitol Hill, after all, was home to more than its share of drunken letches. For only the third time in the twentieth century, however, the Senate blocked a president’s Cabinet pick.
Though unforeseen at the time, Tower’s withdrawal ended up having consequences that would impact American life for decades to come. Congressman Dick Cheney, who had been serving as the Republican minority whip, filled the vacancy at the Pentagon, which speeded his rise. This in turn created an opening in the GOP House leadership. By just two votes, Newt Gingrich beat Ed Madigan, a moderate from Illinois favoured by the party establishment. The headline in The Washington Post served as a forewarning: ‘Gingrich Elected House GOP Whip: Increased Partisan Polarization Seen’.27 His aim, after all, was to turn the Republican Party into a fully fledged opposition party.
Immediately, Gingrich ramped up his campaign to bring down O’Neill’s successor as House Speaker, Jim Wright, who was alleged to have breached ethics rules over income received from his autobiography. Wright, a veteran of World War II, became the first Speaker to resign because of scandal. In a fiery resignation speech, he bemoaned the ‘harsh personal attacks’ and ‘mindless cannibalism’ of partisan warfare: ‘It is grievously hurtful to our society when vilification becomes an accepted form of political debate, when negative campaigning becomes a full-time occupation, when members of each party become self-appointed vigilantes carrying out personal vendettas against members of the other party. In God’s name, that’s not what this institution is supposed to be all about.’28
Gingrich saw things differently. ‘This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars,’ he told the Heritage Foundation during a speech in 1988. The new politics in a nutshell.
In his next fight, over the 1990 budget, Gingrich took on the president himself. Bush, in a grand bargain with the Democratic leadership, had jettisoned his ‘no new taxes’ pledge in return for deficit-reducing cuts in government spending. Naturally, Gingrich believed Bush had committed conservative apostasy. ‘I think you may destroy your presidency,’ he told Bush at a White House meeting on the day congressional leaders inked the final deal.29 Then he stormed out of the West Wing.
When CNN broadcast Bush’s budget deal announcement, it did so on a split screen. One side showed Bush in the Rose Garden flanked by Democratic congressional leaders. The other showed Gingrich exiting the White House and heading back to Congress, where he was greeted by cheering supporters. The schism within the conservative movement was being broadcast in real time. When the budget deal came to a vote in the House, 71 Republicans remained loyal to the president. A hundred and five sided with Gingrich.30 The Republican Party was split in two: the pragmatists pitted against the purists.
The bipartisan budget, which slashed the deficit by $500 billion over the next five years, put the country’s finances on a sounder footing and helped usher in the economic boom of the ’90s. In terms of policy, it provided Bush with one of the most long-lasting achievements of his presidency. Politically, however, it was disastrous. As president, he could claim still to be the titular leader of the Republican Party, but Gingrich was in true command of the conservative movement. At the GOP convention two years later, Bush was forced to make a pitiful apology. ‘Well, it was a mistake to go along with the Democratic tax increase. And I admit it.’ The baby-boomers had usurped the greatest generation. The age of moderation was coming to an end.
When I arrived in Boston in the late summer of 1991, Bush continued to enjoy the kind of dizzying approval levels that made him a shoo-in for a second term. Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, the president’s most threatening Democratic opponent, was doing his ‘Hamlet on the Hudson’ act, as he dithered over whether to mount a challenge. Al Gore, after his dress rehearsal four years earlier, considered Bush invincible. So, too, did Lloyd Bentsen, Dukakis’s vice-presidential running mate and the sole Democratic star of the dismal 1988 campaign, who had already beaten Bush once before in the 1970 Texan Senate race.
By Labor Day, the traditional end of the American summer, the only candidate in the race was a charisma-less no-hoper, the former Senator Paul Tsongas – another Greek-American from Massachusetts, no less – who introduced himself to the American people with a campaign ad showing him doing laps in a swimming pool in skin-tight Speedos. Not until October did the Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, enter the race, vowing in his down-home drawl to fight for ‘the forgotten middle class’ and to ‘make America great again’. Clinton, evidently, did not think he could win. As he revealed to Washington insiders, this was primarily a warm-up for 1996.31
For reporters eager to cover a contest not a crowning, Clinton was the most eye-catching Democrat. An all-you-can-eat buffet of a candidate, he was Georgetown University, Yale and Oxford-educated with a folksy, popular touch; the partner of a talented and equally ambitious wife, saddled with a ‘Slick Willie’ reputation for womanising; a telegenic governor who had turned backward Arkansas into a laboratory of centrist reform; a preening overachiever with a junk-food habit.
Back at the 1988 Democratic convention, Clinton had suffered a near-death experience after delivering an interminably long primetime speech where the words ‘in conclusion’ were met with mordant applause. Displaying the survival instinct and pop-culture smarts that saved him four years later, afterwards he went on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to poke fun at himself, an act of contrived self-deprecation that probably rescued his career.
What also made Clinton so intriguing was his leading role in the Democratic Leadership Council, the group founded in 1985, the year after the Reagan landslide, to win back Reagan Democrats. Indeed, an irony of Bill Clinton is that a politician who became such a polarising figure rose to prominence as the prime architect of centrist Third Way politics. Clinton became the chairman of the DLC in 1990, the year of its inaugural conference, and was a driving force behind the New Orleans Declaration that spoke of ‘expanding opportunity, not government’ and noted ‘the promise of America is equal opportunity, not equal outcome’.32 Jesse Jackson ridiculed the DLC as the ‘Southern White Boys’ Caucus’. Yet the only Democrats to win a presidential election in the previous 28 years had been two southern boys, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. Small wonder the Arkansan was seen as the Democratic Party’s great white hope.
During this early phase of the race, I myself got to see the governor up close – felt his firm handshake, was affixed by his empathetic gaze, was flattered to momentarily become the focus of what struck me even then as his transactional attentiveness. Our first encounter came outside the doors of the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, a pilgrimage of sorts for a candidate who, like most ambitious Democrats, yearned to be seen as the next Jack Kennedy. Clinton, though, believed he had a special claim on this moniker, having shaken hands with the young president during a Boys Nation visit to the Rose Garden in 1963 when he was 16 years old. If anything, the black-and-white photograph capturing this moment for posterity showed Clinton looking more like the senior partner.
Buttonholing the candidate, I suggested he sit for an interview with his old university newspaper in Britain, Cherwell, and asked if we could schedule some time. Clinton liked the idea – or at least gave the people-pleasing impression of liking the idea – and handed me the number of his media handlers in Little Rock.
The next time I ran into him was at another stopping point on Boston’s Camelot trail, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. This time he suggested I contact his chief of staff, Betsey Wright, whose fictionalised character, Libby Holden, was played in the movie Primary Colors by Kathy Bates. For the second time, however, I failed to make any headway.
The third time I saw him was in the back corridor of a downtown hotel, one of those kitchen escape routes favoured by candidates seeking a quick getaway. Again I introduced myself as the bothersome student reporter keen to nail down an interview, but this time Clinton looked alarmed, as if he was being ambushed. Even the hitherto magic word ‘Oxford’ seemed to terrify him. The headlines a few days later made more sense of his startled reaction. Clinton’s controversial draft letter written during his year as a Rhodes Scholar in Britain, in which he stated no government should have the power to compel a citizen to fight in a war they opposed, had been leaked to the press, and now read, to his critics at least, like a suicide note.
Already by then, Clinton’s candidacy was imperilled. Days earlier, Star, the supermarket tabloid, had published an exposé featuring Gennifer Flowers, a cabaret singer from Arkansas who claimed to have had a 12-year affair with the governor. Four years earlier, Gary Hart, the then Democratic frontrunner, had been forced to withdraw when the Miami Herald reported on his trysts with the model Donna Rice aboard the pleasure boat Monkey Business.
Clinton, though, was determined to withstand what were then called ‘bimbo eruptions’, an ugly misogynistic term coined, ironically, by Betsey Wright. Activating a pre-planned strategy of containment, Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to sit for an on-the-couch interview for 60 Minutes that acknowledged marital difficulties without delivering a full-blown confessional. This we all watched, dipping chips into bowls of guacamole and sipping on flavourless American beer, in a special Super Bowl Sunday edition of the programme, which attracted some 50 million viewers.
Gary Hart, in his valedictory speech announcing his exit from the race, warned that politics had become ‘another form of athletic competition or sporting match’. On 60 Minutes, it was being used as a pre-match curtain raiser ahead of the biggest sporting event on the calendar. Under persistent questioning from the presenter Steve Kroft, the Clintons demonstrated the new skill set required of ambitious politicians: the ability to withstand scandal and determination to fight back.
Though the governor survived the onslaught, the couple suffered lasting collateral damage. In Bill Clinton, conservatives saw a skirt-chasing draft-dodger. In his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, they saw a self-righteous feminist who sneered at women who had not pursued careers of their own. ‘You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,’ she said on 60 Minutes, a condescending line that haunted her for decades afterwards.
In her primetime debut, she had been forced to introduce herself to the American people in the most appalling of circumstances, the curse of the wronged political wife. Gone was the chance to create a more favourable first impression solely on her own terms. Bill Clinton, who came second in the New Hampshire primary three weeks later, became the Comeback Kid. His wife was cast as Lady Macbeth. My sense is that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election almost a quarter of a century before she ran.
Gone by the start of election year was President Bush’s air of unassailability, something he himself had predicted would evaporate. ‘The common wisdom today is that I’ll win in a runaway,’ he wrote in his diary in March 1991, ‘but I don’t believe that. I think it’s going to be the economy [which] will make that determination.’33 As unemployment rose, his personal approval rating came back down to earth.34 By Christmas, it had dipped below the all-important 50 per cent mark. The New Year brought worsening economic news, and an unhappy trip to Japan, during which he vomited over the Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa at a state banquet. The pictures of him slumped back in his chair, his body askew, his chin resting on his dinner shirt, his wife holding a napkin up to his gaping mouth, seemed to depict a president heading for enforced retirement.
Reporters who previously trumpeted his invincibility, now treated the president like roadkill. ‘Bush encounters the supermarket, amazed,’ was the front-page story in The New York Times in early February, a snarky piece on how the president had apparently been bamboozled by the barcode scanner he was shown at a mock-up of a checkout at a grocers’ convention.
It fed the narrative, as the Times put it, that Bush ‘is having trouble presenting himself to the electorate as a man in touch with middle class life’.35 This widely referenced story, which is still cited to illustrate Bush’s aristocratic detachment, was wrong. Bush had actually been shown a state-of-the-art checkout, with features, such as the capability to read mangled barcodes, then considered ground-breaking.
On other occasions, Bush essayed his own negative headlines. ‘Message I care,’ the 67-year-old told a town hall meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire, mistakenly reading aloud from his cue cards. ‘Don’t cry for me Argentina,’ he said cryptically at an event in Dover.
As Bush struggled even to string a coherent sentence together, we watched Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and communications director for Ronald Reagan, give word-perfect expression to the malcontents on the insurgent right – his ‘Pitchfork Brigade’, as it came to be known. Though Buchanan had never held elective office, television had made him a conservative celebrity. CNN’s Crossfire, which he co-hosted, and The McLaughlin Group, on which he appeared as a panellist, provided antagonistic arenas to hone his pugilistic style. Naturally confrontational – he was a street brawler as a child – he depicted himself as an isolationist up against a globalist, the renegade outsider against the establishment blue blood.
Buchanan attacked the trade deal Bush had negotiated with Mexico, railed against Japan for its predatory trade policies, linked rising levels of crime to rising levels of immigration, castigated European allies for sponging off the Pentagon and threatened to withdraw the United States from multilateral organisations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. ‘He would put Americans’ wealth and power at the service of some vague new world order,’ Buchanan grumbled in his announcement speech. ‘We will put America first.’36
Demonising illegal immigrants was central to his political brand. ‘Take a look at what’s happened to the people of California,’ he said in an interview on This Week with David Brinkley. ‘One in five felons in a federal prison is an illegal alien. The immigrants are coming in such numbers that they’re swamping the schools, and you have to raise taxes.’37 Buchanan also staged a photo-op at the southern border, to make the case for fortifying the frontier with a concrete-buttressed fence and ditches. ‘I am calling attention to a national disgrace,’ he said, after a tour from the Border Patrol guards, ‘an illegal invasion that involves a million aliens a year.’38 ‘Pitchfork Pat’ came up with a mocking nickname for his opponent: ‘King George’. ‘Make America First Again’ was his campaign slogan.
At times, his nativism spilled over into blatant racism. ‘I think God made all people good,’ he told Brinkley, ‘but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?’39
For right-wingers who could not quite bring themselves to support David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK who had entered the race for the Republican nomination, the anti-Semitic Buchanan was the more palatable option.
Bush limped over the finish line in the New Hampshire primary, but Buchanan’s 36.5 per cent share of the vote was nonetheless startling. ‘I think King George is getting the message,’ he declared on the night of this glorious defeat. ‘When we take America back, we are going to make America great again, because there is nothing wrong with putting America first.’40 So similar was the language, so echoing the message, that it seemed almost 20 years later he was being plagiarised by Donald Trump.
The 1992 New Hampshire primary rewrote the rulebook. Clinton demonstrated it was possible to weather multiple personal scandals if a candidate was shameless enough to brazen them out and come up with a counter-narrative. For Clinton it was his ‘Comeback Kid’ storyline, all too easily embraced by a pliant press, which helped him wrap up the nomination over the coming months as the contest moved south. His survival helped desensitise the electorate to philandering politicians and thus normalised bad behaviour.
For the GOP, Pat Buchanan demonstrated the populist lure of nativism, nationalism and protectionism. In so doing, he shattered the Republican consensus on mass immigration and internationalism. In the aftermath of the Cold War and in the absence of Ronald Reagan, he showed, too, that the future of the conservative movement was very much up for grabs.
For now, the Republican establishment was strong enough to withstand this insurgent assault. New Hampshire was Buchanan’s high point, and Bush swept the remaining primaries. Nonetheless, the president had to appease Buchanan and his ‘Pitchfork Brigade’ of two million voters by granting him a speaking slot at the Republican convention in Houston. This he used to devastating effect.
With the imprimatur of primetime, Buchanan framed the election as a ‘cultural war’ in which American values were under attack from the ‘homosexual rights movement’, the ‘radical feminism’ of Hillary Clinton and ‘the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history’. The Democratic agenda, he claimed, meant ‘abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools [and] women in combat units’. To clamorous cheers from the Houston delegates, Buchanan declared, ‘There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this is a war for the soul of America.’ The Texas journalist Molly Ivins sneered that ‘the culture war speech’, as it came to be known, was ‘better in the original German’. The president’s son, George W., shocked by its extremism, called it ‘disastrous’.41 That night, however, Buchanan achieved a personal victory, by bringing the intolerant, values-based language voiced by so many grassroots conservatives into the Republican mainstream.
If Buchanan provided a script for Donald Trump, Ross Perot, another presidential aspirant, offered a field guide for billionaire populism. The pint-sized, jug-eared Texan, a former IBM salesman who amassed his fortune by founding a data company at the start of the computer age, had the same gift for self-publicity – he had once sent Christmas baskets to POWs held in Vietnam and then flown to Hanoi to personally demand they be delivered. He did not feel bound by normal rules – he organised a commando team to rescue two of his employees being held in Iran, a paramilitary escapade dramatised in the popular 1986 television mini-series On Wings of Eagles. His unexpected popularity also demonstrated how it was possible to upend politics in a single moment, just as Reagan had done in ‘The Speech’.
For the Texan, it came two nights after the New Hampshire primary during an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live show, when he invited viewers to place his name on the presidential ballot in all 50 states. Even before the programme ended, the signatures came gushing in.
Like Buchanan, Perot railed against cheap Japanese imports and destructive global trade deals. But it was his outsider attacks on Washington, his positioning as an anti-politician, his insistence on putting American interests first and his business acumen that fuelled his rise. ‘The people are concerned that our government is still organised to fight the Cold War,’ he told a country worried about US decline. ‘They want it reorganised to rebuild America as the highest priority.’42 Again, the language sounded emphatically ‘America First’.
By the time the primary season drew to a close, Perot led the national polls, pushing Clinton into third place. Never before in the history of Gallup polling had a third-party candidate led the presidential race.43 All the polls suggested he was drawing equally from the Democrats and Republicans and mobilising independent voters who felt the traditional parties had made them politically homeless.44
The Perot honeymoon, so adoring in the spring, did not survive the summer. His policy of firing corporate employees who cheated on their spouses seemed puritanical. Employing a staff member to measure the skirt length of his employees seemed not just autocratic but theocratic. Facing the kind of scrutiny he was completely unused to, he suspended his eccentric campaign in mid-July, and blamed his withdrawal on Republican dirty tricksters he accused of trying to sabotage his daughter’s wedding.
As Perot faltered, Clinton surged. The turning point came in the early summer with his carefully orchestrated attack on the African-American hip-hop activist Sister Souljah, who in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots had railed, ‘If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?’
Sister Souljah became a proxy for Clinton’s true targets, traditional left-wing black leaders such as Jesse Jackson and the identity politics they personified. The attack offered proof of his centrism, and showed he was unafraid of offending the very groups white working-class voters complained had hijacked the Democratic Party. (Clinton had hitherto played the race card during the New Hampshire primary when he returned to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a lobotomised black felon who told his lawyer the night before he was ‘gonna vote Clinton’ and then asked for the pecan pie from his last meal to be set aside to eat after his execution.)
The selection as his running mate of Al Gore, a fellow southern moderate, underscored his New Democrat credentials. On the eve of their convention in New York, Clinton even received what sounded like a tacit endorsement from Perot. ‘The Democratic Party has revitalised itself,’ remarked the Texan. ‘They’ve done a brilliant job, in my opinion, in coming back.’45
On the black-and-white television in my student billet in Boston, I tuned in every night to see the Democrats stage their most successful convention since Kennedy stood in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean, to unveil his ‘New Frontier’ reform programme. Clinton’s ‘The Man from Hope’ convention biopic, which evoked the mood of a Norman Rockwell painting as it told the story of his humble origins in Hope, Arkansas, was a soft-focus triumph. It set the scene for his sunny speech – ‘I believe in a place called Hope’ – that brought Madison Square Garden to its feet. The first poll afterwards showed him with a lead of 27 points.
Scornful still of Bill Clinton, Bush thought he was too much of a ‘Slick Willie’ to win. ‘The American people are never going to elect a person of Bill Clinton’s character,’ he wrote in his diary. But the charisma gap with the youthful candidate continued to plague him. Whereas Clinton happily donned his shades and lifted a saxophone to his lips to play ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on The Arsenio Hall Show – the pop-culture moment of the campaign – the White House said Bush considered the show too lowbrow to appear on.
Arsenio Hall, in a statement that spoke of the generational gulf between the two main candidates, hit back. ‘Excuse me, George Herbert, irregular-heart-beating, read-my-lying-lipping, slipping-in-the-polls, do-nothing, deficit-raising ... sushi-puking Bush! I don’t remember inviting your ass on my show. My ratings are higher than yours.’46 In an ever more celebritised politics, pop-culture figures now helped make the political weather.
The televised debates laid bare Bush’s failure to master the presentational requisites of the presidency. His emotional aloofness, at a time when Oprah Winfrey had become the queen of daytime talk, was a further handicap. In the second debate, held for the first time in a town-hall format, an audience member asked the candidates how the national debt affected them personally. Clinton, who understood the intimacy of the medium, was masterful, purposefully edging closer to the questioner with the stagecraft of Elvis and the empathy of Dr Phil. ‘Tell me again how it’s affected you,’ he purred. By contrast, a tongue-tied Bush confessed to being confused by the question. When the cameras caught him peering uncomfortably at his wristwatch, this awkward gesture suggested his time had passed.
By this late stage, in an October surprise of sorts, Perot had re-entered the race, following another appearance on Larry King Live in which he displayed again his unusual messianic energy. And voters disaffected with the two main parties remained enthralled.
On Election Day, he attracted almost 20 million votes, or 18.9 per cent of the vote. Not since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 had a third-party candidate done so well, a performance made all the more remarkable by his absence from the campaign for two months during the summer and his decision to stump in only 16 states.47 Clearly there was an appetite for a billionaire businessman in the Oval Office, whatever their eccentricities and excesses. Perot’s strong showing prompted a warning from his one-time spokesman Jim Squires. ‘The next time round the man on the white horse comes, he may not be so benign. He could be a real racial hater or a divider of people.’48
By winning only 37 per cent, President Bush suffered the ignominy of receiving the lowest share of the popular vote of any incumbent in more than 100 years. To add to his humiliation, some on the Republican right celebrated his defeat. ‘Oh, man, yeah, it was fabulous,’ reflected the future House Majority Leader, Tom ‘The Hammer’ DeLay, a hard-line acolyte of Newt Gingrich. Had Bush won, he reckoned, it would have meant ‘another four years of misery’ for House GOP conservatives.49 Moderate conservatism would have received a boost. Radical Republicans would have been side-lined. The New Right had to lose in order to win.
Bill Clinton’s 43 per cent share of the vote was lower than Mike Dukakis’s, but finally he had managed to pick the Republicans’ electoral lock on the White House. Demonstrating once more that southern Democrats were the party’s most feasible presidential candidates, Clinton won four states of the Old Confederacy, and polled highly below the Mason–Dixon line.
In doing so, he broke apart the Nixon and Reagan coalitions and redrew the electoral map. California went Democrat for the first time since the Johnson landslide in 1964, and has remained so ever since. Michigan, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont and Delaware, which had been reliably Republican since the mid-’60s, now became reliably Democratic. The party of McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis returned as a serious force in presidential politics. Before Clinton, the Republicans won five out of six presidential elections. After his victory, the Democrats won the national popular vote in six out of the next seven.
1992 is rightly viewed as a watershed election, because it ended the Republicans’ domination of the White House. Also there were portents of the rise a quarter of a century later of Donald Trump, whether it was Buchanan’s ethno-nationalism, Perot’s billionaire populism, Clinton’s imperviousness to scandal or the collapse of Bush-style moderation.
To stand outside Washington’s National Cathedral in November 2018 for the funeral of George H. W. Bush was to watch a tableau of modern history file past. All the living former presidents were there: Jimmy Carter, George Bush Jr, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who by now had become a close friend of his one-time adversary. Also in that front-row pew, albeit cold-shouldered by the others, was the latest commander-in-chief to carry the nuclear codes in his suit pocket, who was invited to attend, but pointedly not asked to speak.
The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was too ill to make the journey, but Lech Wałesa, the hero of Gdansk and leader of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s, had flown in from Poland to salute a president globally regarded as the leader of the free world. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, a protégée of Helmut Kohl who had grown up in East Germany, also crossed the Atlantic to pay tribute to Bush’s skilful handling of the peaceful reunification of her homeland, a feat the late president regarded as his greatest accomplishment.
From London had come the former British Prime Minister John Major, another moderate conservative short of charisma, who had struggled to escape the oversized shadow of a domineering predecessor. Diplomatic luminaries of the Cold War years made their slow way down the nave: elder statesmen such as Henry Kissinger, who was pushed in a wheelchair, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who was hunched over a walking frame, and the former Secretary of State James Baker, by far the most sprightly and commanding of the three. Dick Cheney and Colin Powell walked briskly past the tiered bank of television cameras outside, heroes of the first Gulf War whose reputations had been sullied by the second.
In this rare act of political ecumenism, Bush was farewelled with affection, humour and near universal respect. George W. described his father, tearfully, as a ‘great and noble man’, the ‘brightest of a thousand points of light’. Jon Meacham, whose sympathetic 2015 biography of Bush had done so much to rehabilitate his reputation, saluted ‘America’s last great soldier statesman’. He also told of how he had rehearsed his eulogy in front of its recipient, a reading met with the patrician self-effacement that had sometimes hobbled his presidency: ‘That’s a lot about me, Jon.’50
Many Americans that day mourned not just the passing of a former president but also the vanishing of a lost politics. To them, Bush was a war hero who personified the patriotic bipartisanship of the post-war years; a moderate who genuinely wanted to make America a kinder and gentler country, even if he was prone to political viciousness; and a pragmatist who disdained the ideological purists in the Republican Party who fetishised tax cuts and demonised government.
Like Harry S. Truman, another great foreign-policy president underappreciated at the time, Bush offered a prime example of how presidential reputations evolve over the passing decades: how legacies are reassessed and how traits characterised contemporaneously as weaknesses can be judged by future generations as virtues.
Posterity was certainly more generous than the headline writers of the time – Newsweek spoke of his ‘wimp factor’, even though he had flown 58 missions over the Pacific and been shot down by the Japanese over Chichi-Jima. Nor was he now so easily dismissed as a White House placeholder sandwiched awkwardly between the more consequential Reagan and Clinton presidencies. In his less showy way, he could also lay claim to being an era-defining politician: those fleeting years of unrivalled US global dominance, when its military seemed invincible, its multilateralism was widely applauded, its finances were more robust and its politics was more level-headed.
Because he was a one-term president, a transitional rather than transformational leader, his achievements, especially in the domestic sphere, had often been overlooked. Bush himself saw parallels with Babe Ruth, the baseball legend famed for his batting but who for 50 years held the record for pitching the most consecutive scoreless innings in a World Series.51 Much like the music of Wagner, to bastardise Mark Twain, his presidency was better than it sounded.
Posthumously, his policy contributions came to be reassessed. Among the dozen or so major bills he signed into law were crucial amendments to the Clean Air Act raising emissions standards, the 1991 Civil Rights Act and his great legislative achievement, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Most consequential perhaps was the 1990 budget deal, which laid such a firm fiscal foundation for the economic growth of the ’90s. The Bush years were a reminder of what could be achieved through a boring presidency that unfolded mostly in the background.
Politically, too, his success has been underestimated. No one since has won 40 states, or a 53 per cent share of the vote (although Barack Obama came close in 2008). Bill Clinton, the beneficiary of the peace and prosperity that Bush helped deliver, never cracked 50 per cent. He was the last president to be regarded universally as legitimate, which owed much to the fact he was the final greatest-generation commander-in-chief, and also the final president of the pre-internet age. This was very much an offline presidency.
Bush had the misfortune to occupy the White House in the age of television, a looking-glass that magnified the gulf in star power with Reagan. Nor did his accomplishments necessarily make for good TV. Coalition building, whether at home or abroad, took place away from the cameras. The evening news shows rarely rewarded detail, nuance or modesty. Instead, they hungered for the kind of dramatic imagery Bush was so reluctant to confect. Prioritising foreign over public relations, he shied away from a Brandenburg Gate moment in order to make sure the Iron Curtain moment passed off peacefully.
Nor was he well suited for the shock-jock age, even though he made clumsy attempts to court the cultural warriors of the conservative airwaves. Carrying the bag of Rush Limbaugh when he invited the radio host to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom – a stay negotiated by Roger Ailes – was never going to pacify right-wing blowhards.52 Instead, it made him look needy and weak. From start to finish, Bush was the New England blueblood ill at ease in an ever more populist and southern party.
On the international front, he was the last president to enter office with a rounded grasp of foreign affairs, expertise that brought into sharper focus his eldest son’s abject ignorance. His multilateralism buttressed the diplomatic architecture, such as NATO and the United Nations, which America had constructed after the war, and which became the foundation of its pre-eminence. Understandably, it pained him not to get more recognition at home for his success abroad.
‘My opponents say I spend too much time on foreign policy, as if it didn’t matter that schoolchildren once hid under their desks in drills to prepare for nuclear war,’ he said in his 1992 convention speech. ‘I saw the chance to rid our children’s dreams of the nuclear nightmare, and I did.’53 Alas for Bush, domestic politics had become uncoupled from foreign affairs.
Even though Bush was ideally qualified to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end, he was inept at articulating a post-Cold War mission at home. He admitted as much when he spoke so derisively of ‘the vision thing’. Voters expecting to enjoy the spoils of victory were sorely disappointed when the economy went into recession. He was a man of his time, and his time was the epochal struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. After receiving that Christmas Day phone call from Gorbachev, it was almost as if he no longer had a raison d’être. His New World Order turned out to be an empty slogan.
Much was made in the aftermath of his death of the gracious letter Bush wrote in his own hand to Bill Clinton that he placed on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office on inauguration day in January 1993. ‘Your success now is our country’s success.’
Magnanimous though that gesture doubtless was, Bush did not think Clinton possessed the rectitude to be president. Those feelings came to the fore on his final morning as commander-in-chief when an admiring soldier flashed him a thumbs-up. ‘I must say I thought to myself, “How in God’s name did this country elect a draft dodger?’’’ he asked in his diary. ‘I didn’t feel it with bitterness. I just felt it was almost generational. What am I missing?’54 He was missing that the torch had just been wrenched from the hands of the greatest generation. The age of decency had come to an end. Baby-boomers were now in the chair. Those who had never donned military fatigues. Those who viewed Washington as a theatre of war.