Daring (41 page)

The twenty-five-year-old Hart, still imprisoned by his evangelical upbringing, began beating on the cell floor. David Barber, a Duke history professor, told me that Hart, a married senator, had slept with many young volunteers on the McGovern campaign, but when the women wanted a relationship, he acted as if he didn't know them. Finally, he went over the wall, gravitating toward the furthest extreme and using hedonists and fixers to find him girls. That led him into the kind of suspect scene where party drugs were ubiquitous.

What demon was loose in the mind of the fifty-year-old front-runner of the Democratic Party when he frequented Turnberry Isle, home of the party boat
Monkey Business
? He lurched across the chartered yacht, drink in hand, to tell a model friend of Donna Rice's to pass a message to the lanky blonde that this was her big chance to play with the next president of the United States.

When Hart was confronted by reporters from the
Miami Herald
, who had staked out his town house on Capitol Hill and verified a weekend liaison with Ms. Rice, the senator denied any immoral conduct and stalked off the public stage in furious defiance.

Initially, Tina and I thought it best to leave Hart to indecent obscurity. But the Hart tragedy continued to obsess Americans. Here was a smart and charismatic new-generation politician; why should we lose a potentially great president because of a sexual peccadillo? Network pundits reminded us nightly that we had lived through the adulterous presidencies of FDR and JFK. So was Hart the victim of a prurient press?

“To Gail Sheehy, he was not,” as Tina Brown wrote in her
Vanity Fair
editor's letter. “Hart's sexual adventures were only a symptom of a character malaise . . . she made us realize how the true character of a presidential candidate can remain a secret to the public despite what he feels is excessive scrutiny.”

“The Road to Bimini,” as we headlined the story, seemed to register with a critical mass of Americans. It suggested an answer to the question: Why would any man in his right mind defy a
New York Times
reporter who asked about his alleged womanizing, challenge him to “put a tail on me,” and then arrange a tryst at his Washington town house with the same Miami party girl?

Because Hart's double life had finally imploded. He could not be both worthy and sinful. He needed to be caught.

Despite all evidence, Hart continued to lie and attack me. When we appeared together on
Nightline
, with Ted Koppel questioning us on split screens, Hart flatly denied that he had ever been to Turnberry Isle. Unbeknownst to him, however, hours earlier I had remembered a photograph I'd seen in the resort manager's office while I was researching the piece for
Vanity Fair
, showing a rakish-looking Hart and his sidekick Beatty on the boat. I'd made a copy of it, thinking the magazine might want to use it. Two hours before showtime, I scrambled for the image, then recalled I'd given it to the fact-checkers. I called Pamela Maffei McCarthy,
VF
's managing editor, who went to the office, retrieved it, and got it delivered to me minutes before the monitor light went on in the remote studio. When Hart asserted he'd never been on the
Monkey Business
with Donna Rice, I held up the photo. Hart's lie was exposed.

ONE SATURDAY IN
1986, Tina called me in the country to say, “You need to get into the character of George Bush.”

I couldn't wait to start. Back in the 1980s, we still wanted our leaders to be macho. Brick walls were made for Jack and Bobby Kennedy to walk through. Lyndon Johnson humiliated people to make certain they were afraid of him. Richard Nixon compiled a secret enemies list and bugged reporters. Ronald Reagan projected cowboy courage as a movie idol. But nobody seemed to be scared of George Herbert Walker Bush. The core question in my mind would become the title of my story: “Is George Bush Too
Nice
to Be President?”

To explore the character of George Bush, I talked with forty of his friends and family, aides, and close observers before I traveled with him on campaign. What made this lengthy and tenacious process worthwhile was being able to gather enough of the puzzle pieces of my subject's life to propose a pattern that might surprise even him. Bush's sister, Nancy, told me she often said, “Damn it, George, why won't you say what you really think!” According to his brother Jonathan, “You just can't get him in there fighting.”

He was the kind of guy who would step out in his pin-striped suit in the middle of a downpour to help his chauffeur fix a flat. He was always a teacher's pet, never a bully. “Too little,” he admitted to me. The secret to his sense of humor was that he knew how to plant the punch line in someone else's mouth. He was also loyal to a fault. Bush served under three presidents—as UN ambassador, GOP chairman, envoy to China, and director of the CIA—unable to see, much less admit, the most egregious mistakes of the men for whom he worked. During the Watergate scandal, when Bush was GOP chairman, even his mother tried to persuade him that Tricky Dick was lying. But Bush was the last man in the party to believe ill of Richard Nixon.

I asked everyone I interviewed if he or she knew of a gut issue with George Bush, something for which he consistently stood. Most answered like Malcolm Baldrige, secretary of commerce, who said, “I dunno. He probes everybody about what they think before he makes up his own mind.”

“Poppy” was his feckless nickname. His habit of a lifetime was to avoid at virtually any cost tackling anyone head-on. It wasn't hard to see the antecedent in his childhood. His father, Prescott, was austere, a towering Wall Street banker and former senator with a basso profundo voice who invited no argument and brandished a belt to punish his children. The vice president later affirmed to me, “Dad was really scary.” The parallel between his relationship with his father and with Reagan seemed palpable. George H. W. Bush would do anything to keep from making the father angry.

When I finally got a green light to interview the vice president, it was after he had barnstormed through three states in a twelve-hour day. His hair was mussed and his clothes were an incongruous combination of a banker's pin-striped pants and a baseball jacket. I was ushered into his private cabin on
Air Force Two
and stood before him as the plane began rolling down the runway. Bush stretched out and put his stocking feet up on the couch.

“So is this gonna be a deal on where I'm coming from, a complete psychiatric layout?”

It was so Bush; there was almost nothing he avoided more assiduously than introspection. So I began by asking to talk about his war experiences. “I get in trouble with my mother if I talk about being in combat,” he said. Why? I asked. Talking about it would sound like bragging. Bush had never told the whole story to a reporter up to that point. I cajoled him.

What went through his mind, I asked, when that eighteen-year-old string bean of a pampered suburban boy, the youngest pilot in the U.S. Navy, climbed into his barrel-chested bomber and sat on top of two thousand pounds of TNT? In seconds he'd rev up his single engine, then reach over to signal the tower and push forward on the throttle and—
swooock
—he'd be catapulted into the Pacific mist. Minutes later, he would be grinding through heavy antiaircraft fire.

“I thought I was a kind of macho pilot,” he finally admitted. “You were trained, you knew what to do. There wasn't any ‘Wonder if it's going to work this time' feeling to it.” On the morning of September 2, 1944, the young American fliers on USS
San Jacinto
were readied to hit Japanese installations on Chichi-shima. They were warned that their ship wouldn't be around to pick up anyone who went down—it was turning south. Bush was in the second pair of Avengers to go in. He looked out and saw fluffy little clouds all around, black flack filling the sky; it would only be luck to get through it. “I was aware that the antiaircraft fire would be heavy, but I was not afraid. I wasn't thinking: This next one's going to hit me.”

But it did. Suddenly his plane slammed forward. Black oily smoke belched out of the engine and streamed through the cockpit. Bush admitted that, for the first time, the macho pilot was scared. “We were going down. I never saw what hit me, but I felt this thing. I had to finish my bombing run.” He continued his dive and hit his target. When he bailed out, he pulled the rip cord too early. The slipstream caught his body, all 152 pounds of it, and flung it at the tail of the plane. He hit his head. His chute tore. He was falling fast. He managed to slip out of his harness before his boots smacked the water.

He climbed into a tiny life raft and vomited. “I didn't know whether I'd survive. It seemed like the end of the world.”

A few hours later, he saw a periscope break the monotony of the sea. For a moment, he said, he feared it was a Japanese submarine. But American sailors fished him up. For the next month, he knew what fear really was, he said, as the sub was continually attacked by Japanese ships and aircraft, depth charged, and surface bombed. But six weeks later, although he had the option of rotating home, Bush elected to return to combat.

IN STARK CONTRAST TO HIS BRAVERY
in wartime, Bush's overweening need for Ronald Reagan's approval made him appear weak. He spoke emotionally of the president and “the closeness we have.” I asked him how he had cultivated such trust from Reagan. “It took awhile, but the president knows now, which he probably didn't know, that I'm not going to betray him.” He admitted that his refusal to separate himself from the president had “cost me something. Politically.”

Bush was ridiculed for saying he wasn't great at “the vision thing.” He gave a revealing look at his concept of Reagan's “miracles” in an ad-libbed speech. “Ronald Reagan and I believe in the miracle that is America. But the funny thing is, when you look at miracles, they're nothing. It's hard work.”

The deadline to close my piece was early December 1986. On November 13, the Iran-Contra arms scandal blew up and President Reagan addressed the nation with an outright lie: “We did not, repeat, did not, trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” The president's magic was suddenly tarnished, and the scandal put Bush under relentless questioning. Bush ducked for almost a month. He denied any knowledge of the policy. I had to call my editor and beg to tear up the front and back of my story to shoehorn in an update on Bush's behavior. The vice president's only comment to me was that “mistakes were made.” He never did let on that he knew Reagan's hands were all over the Iran-Contra deal. Reagan's agreement to sell arms to the Islamic state of Iran, in exchange for the freeing of the hostages, had assured his win as president. Reagan then used the proceeds to finance a secret war in Nicaragua.

Bush maintained that “I'm for Mr. Reagan—blindly.” He wrapped one arm in another and rubbed it. In the end, his slavish loyalty to Reagan worked. Bush was elected president.

TODAY, IN LIGHT OF THE CATASTROPHE
of his son George W.'s two fruitless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, George H. W. Bush looks like a great foreign policy president. He showed strong leadership when it came to the biggest crisis to confront a president: the necessity to take the nation to war in 1991. Using his skillfulness as a former ambassador to the United Nations, President Bush persuaded fifteen countries on the Security Council to pass a cease-fire resolution in November of 1990 against Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait. To lead Operation Desert Storm, he assembled an overwhelming force of ten countries including Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. It was arguably the last time an American president would be able to gather a worldwide coalition including Muslim states to oppose aggression in the Middle East.

THE FIRST BUSH PORTRAIT
was followed by character pieces about other 1988 candidates: Michael Dukakis, Albert Gore Jr., Senator Bob Dole, and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. I later expanded versions of these profiles, adding a chapter on President Reagan, for my 1988 book,
Character: America's Search for Leadership.

The
Vanity Fair
pieces often made front-page news and gave me a chance to spread the word further on the
Today
show or evening news programs. The “gotcha reporting” criticism often surfaced, but by the end of the campaign, the character portrait was pretty well established as a new and respectable genre of political writing.

Before the election, Tina was on the phone to me: “Guess what? The W
ashington Journalism Review
just called me. You were voted the best magazine writer in America.”

“You must be kidding.”

“It's brilliant, Gail, brilliant. And I get to throw a cocktail party for us in Washington
.”

THE GO-GO
1980
S STIMULATED
both Clay and me to dare to head in new directions. Clay tried a cold start-up of a weekly newspaper, the
East Side Express
, in October 1983. It had the same sassy attitude as
New York
, but focused on the social life of young Upper East Siders.

“Every morning when Clay walked into the office, it was like estrogen shock,” Cyndi Stivers, then the entertainment editor, recalls. The newsroom was all women: Patricia Leigh Brown, who would become a feature writer for the
New York Times;
Lisa Gubernick, who would go on to
Forbes
magazine; and Bethany Kandel, who during her career has written on every topic from homelessness to breast cancer.

Being Clay, he couldn't help himself from plunging into the politics of a prepresidential election year. “It's time for a woman vice president,” he said casually as we rode up in the elevator to our apartment. I was startled but I knew to trust his prescience.

“What kind of a woman would that take?”