What It Takes (108 page)

He’d be back before sundown, for the cookout. Then, by 8:00
P.M.,
he’d be tired. “Let’s see who’s first into bed!” he’d tell the Grands. And that was the close of another big day.

It wasn’t like he didn’t get anything done. His two New England operatives, Andy Card and Ron Kaufman, bused in Republican officials from New Hampshire. John Sununu got the full treatment—the puffy Gov wasn’t much for tennis, but there were rides on the boat, cookouts, lunches on the terrace. Of course, it didn’t stop with Sununu ... heavens, no! There were Republican members of the State Senate, and the world’s largest State House of Reps (400 members—263 Republicans). They’d come up in gaggles and stay in hotels, and get, uh ... Important Briefings, and invitations to cocktail things at the Point ... the Vice President wanted to see
them
. And it did not stop with legislators. There were members of Party committees, Mayors, Police Chiefs, Town Selectmen, tree wardens, library trustees ...

“This is ridiculous!” Bush would mutter. “I’m s’posed to be on vacation!”

Bush was always serious about “recreating,” a verb that would occur to him, usually, in mid-protest (“Jeez, c’mon! I thought we were try’na recreate here!”) and which he’d pronounce with stress on the “reck.” He wasn’t interested in his re-creation.

But that was the other interruption of his days and nights at Walker’s Point: the white men of his campaign—the “G-6,” they liked to call themselves—were always flying back and forth, scheduling meetings, bringing political pooh-bahs, setting up briefings, hauling experts from Washington, to re-create the Vice President as a thinker on education in the nineties, or on international economics, trade and tariff negotiation, or Third World development in the year 2000.

They’d set up director’s chairs on the terrace, into one of which Bush would toss himself, with his long legs canted out over nearly four feet of stones, the laces of his Top-Siders jiggling while he tried to listen. He was always grateful for their effort ... but he didn’t say much. He’d sit next to the guy who was leading the talk, and he’d ask a question every once in a while—he’d ask the person who hadn’t said anything. It was hard to tell if Bush wanted the answer, or just wanted that man to have a chance to talk. Bigger briefings were held in the living room, a grand and spacious chamber jutting out to sea, windows on three sides, pale green walls, chintz-covered couches and chairs in profusion, amid which the experts would set up easels, with charts that Bush would regard with polite attention, for maybe ten seconds apiece. Sometimes, his left wrist would cock and jiggle over his legal pad—and that was great psychic reward, when the Vice President would note an idea. Mostly his gaze moved from face to face—it was the people who interested him.

They’d show up overdressed, with black shoes and shirts that were meant to bear ties, and after a day, their noses would be burnt red, or their eyes would peer out from pale raccoon-masks, where their new sunglasses kept the skin Washington-white. They’d sit on the couches with their knees together, and they wouldn’t interrupt. They’d scowl at their agendas, or their notes—pages of typed stuff that could take days to get through ... plans on who would carry the ball on which portions of the discussion ... the Top Ten matters they had to take up with the Veep. They’d be lucky if they got to Two.

See, it was over when Bush said it was over, and that was when he got to thinking what the Grands were doing out on the rocks past the pool, or whether the bluefish were biting, or that he hadn’t stopped by his mother’s house that day. He’d never embarrass them by cutting them off, or walking out—but it wasn’t gonna go on all day, either.

He sure as hell wasn’t going to memorize briefing books—fat tomes of policy-speak—no matter how many the pointy-heads compiled for him. Jim Pinkerton, the campaign’s Director of Research, had fifteen guys up till five in the morning—for a
week
—before he showed up in Maine, bearing a briefing book as thick as his thigh. Pinkerton was a pale six-foot-nine tower supporting a brain strangely clarified by altitude. He looked like a guy who’d invent brilliant gizmos to defraud the phone company. But instead he was the chief pointy-head for the Bush campaign. Needless to say, Bush considered Pinkerton somewhat weird—and clearly, too brainy to be listened to. As for the briefing book, well, maybe he’d look at it.

See, a lot of guys had the wrong idea about Kennebunkport: they thought this was the place where Bush would sit in wave-washed stillness, to do some serious thinking ... you know,
study
. They didn’t understand Walker’s Point at all.

Anyway, Pinkerton’s book was designed for debate-prep: positions of all the Republicans on all contestable matters of state. Dole and Kemp, Haig, du Pont, Robertson—everything they’d said about everything. Pinkerton went so far as to analyze Paul
Laxalt’s
Senate votes. In sum, this book held everything that Bush would need to joust with his opponents on the high-policy plateau. Therefore, it was useless:

Bush’s white men did not want him to debate.

The question at hand was the first Republican TV debate, another special edition of William F. Buckley’s
Firing Line
. The Bush campaign had been diddling Buckley for months with “scheduling problems.” In the view of the white men, there was no acceptable schedule for the Veep to begin bleeding on stage. What if they could not stanch the flow?

Tell the truth, there were so many things Bush’s white men did not want him to do, they were collegially, collectively content that he wasn’t doing anything—except reck-reating. That’s how the white men were, or how they wanted to be seen: collective, competent, controlling—in a collegial way, of course, so you couldn’t really tell who said what, or who was culpable of knowing anything. No divisions among them, no individual opinions—just a blank white wall, the board of Bush, Inc. That was the first corporate decision, and the overriding ethic of the Gee-Six.

The name was the tip-off: it was a play on G-7, the Group of Seven—Prime Ministers and Presidents who’d meet, from time to time, for photos, and to decide what the dollar should be worth, what to do about oil, how the civilized world should fight terrorism, that kind of thing. It was the U.S., Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, maybe Canada was in there ... pretty much everybody who could make a decent car. The meetings, the group photos, were meant to convey to the world’s unwashed that the Free World big boys, the guys with the twelve-inch GNPs bulging in their pants, were all agreed how the game should be played—stick to the rules, or do without friends.

That was the subtext of the Gee-Six in the world of Republican politics. These were supposed to be the big boys, titans all and each, allied on the bridge of the flagship, SS
Bush
, to steer the great white fleet through the roil of public waters, back to safe harbor in the White House.

“... A formidable high command,” said Germond and Witcover.

“... An able leadership team,” said the
Newsweek
s.

What it was, was a committee, playing defense.

Craig Fuller, of course, was a Gee-Six, and a natural at this. He must have been California state champ at fending. In the OVP, in the OEOB (that’s how they talked at Bush, Inc.), Fuller fended off the public. He fended off the Veep’s own campaign. He fended off the Veep’s own friends. The press he fended with such efficacy, they couldn’t get in the damn building! (Bush didn’t have a Press Secretary after Iran-contra, when Marlin Fitzwater moved up to help the Gipper. No spokesman at all—went on for months. Of course, Bush didn’t mean to say anything. Then again, he was kinda, you know, running for President. ...) Anyway, Fuller was so busy fending off potential fender-benders, people who might tell Bush anything unplanned or unpleasant, that no one could get a call through to Fuller. He was “in a meeting,” usually with his staff of fellow fenders, all working overtime, protecting the Veep, bumping memos back and forth, piling up pink message slips, having their secretaries check with Fuller’s secretaries to make sure the paper flow didn’t back up.

Actually, the OVP was set up as a wall of secretaries, and secretaries to secretaries, who were all young and presentable Republican women in suits, or dresses, and pearls, or fake pearls—one strand, not too large, like they never took them off after their graduation pictures—who were so awfully busy picking up the chiming phones and telling callers that their bosses were “in a meeting,” which would be followed by “a three-o’clock,” “a three-thirty,” and “a four-o’clock” ... that they barely had time to chime up the photo office to double-check the addresses to which smiling photos of George Bush and his newest friends should be sent (the photos were the major physical product of the OVP) ... and if they had to be “away from their desks,” you could
see
how they had to march double time in their no-wrinkle skirts, with their security badges swaying under their pearls, and hear the
clipclop-clipclop
of their high heels on the hard stone hallways (two or more sounded like arrhythmic flamenco), with the
crish-crish-crish
of their panty-hosed thighs rubbing desperate maraca beat ... and you could understand why these well-made-up and well-spoken young women could get so hard-eyed, icy-voiced, if a caller (not to mention the occasional citizen who actually penetrated the echoing EOB and gummed up
everything
by
presenting
himself) suggested that their bosses had been in meetings, unable to call back, for months, and maybe the best thing would be a meeting—
for him
... well, you could imagine how disruptive it was to have to stop, to explain, that they did not “handle the calendar,” and the woman who took care of that was “in a meeting” or “away from her desk,” and the caller ought to send a letter ... oh, the paper flow!

So, Fuller had the OVP organized effectively, but that did not take care of Fifteenth Street, or, in the parlance of Bush, Inc., GBFP—George Bush for President. That was three blocks away, two floors of a run-down office building (but not contiguous floors—six and eight, with locked doors on the stairways, so the Republican girls “away from their desks” spent a measurable fraction of their young lives waiting for two creaking elevators—no matter: if they won, they would all buy pearls and work in the White House) ... this was the official locus of the Gee-Six. Two of them actually worked there.

Lee Atwater was the Campaign Manager, the Fuller and fender for this half of Bush, Inc., and as such, the man most responsible for the physical being and appearance of GBFP. That’s why it looked rattier and more disorganized than it was. This was a matter of style with Lee, who was thirty-six and happy to have you think he was really just a frustrated blues musician, World Wrestling Federation fan, and encyclopedic B-movie buff who’d strayed into politics—uh, Republican politics—because he happened to grow up redneck in South Carolina, and happened to fall in with the Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond, who happened to change over to the Republican Party when he felt the great wind of racial change on his own ancient and wattled neck, and anyway, what could a boy like Lee do when it was his lot in life to understand—almost without trying—the beady-eyed offa-mah-back aspirations of the newly suburban, newly Republican southern and western Sunbelt majority, which, according to Lee’s own college master’s thesis, was now the nominating wing of the Republican Party and the backbone of the GOP’s electoral-college lock, which had elevated Ronald Reagan and which, with God in His Heaven, should control American politics for the foreseeable forthcoming eon? That’s when Lee wasn’t trying to show you he was really a deep and extra-rationally attuned Jedi-warrior disciple of the ancient Chinese philosopher and strategist, Sun Tzu, and also of the Renaissance Italian, Machiavelli, whose books, both and each, he carried with him, always, so he could pull them out and lend them for five minutes, or ten, if you were sitting in his office and he had to pick up the phone.

He would pick up the phone, which was another distinction of style at GBFP (where Fuller was reviled as a gutless paper-pusher), and growl into it: “Whuss happ’nin’?” ... or sometimes, in the manner of a Vietnam platoon commander, watching through his infrareds for gooks in the night: “Whuss movin’? Anythin’ movin’?” ... unless it was (alas, so infrequently) George Bush on the line, in which case Lee would out with a bright “Yes, sir!”

You didn’t have to read Sun Tzu to know how the bread was buttered, and you didn’t have to know Lee’s whole story (though you soon would) to know this was his Big Chance, his own shining shot at History ... which was why all the bodies who were somebodies at GBFP had their offices on the same floor, in the same wing of Fifteenth Street, with their secretaries in full view of Lee’s own pearl-necked Rhonda Culpepper. These somebodies included the aforementioned Pinkerton; the Deputy Manager, Rich Bond; the campaign’s administrator, Ede Holiday; Field Director Janet Mullins; First Son and family spy, George W. Bush ... but in the view of the White Men on the Bridge (I’m Gee-Six and you’re not), the other
important
office was occupied by Bob Teeter.

Teeter was the pollster and strategist, purveyor of good and important reasons why GBFP was playing defense. Teeter was an old hand—Bush pollster in 1980, Ford pollster four years before, and before that, at age thirty-three, baptized by fire in Nixon’s 1972 CREEP. He was not one to overestimate the interest of the American voter more than a year before the election. The only thing voters knew, Teeter’s surveys showed, was who was big-league, the size of a President. Bush was big-league. Even if they couldn’t vote for him, people could imagine him as President. Dole and Hart were the only other names voters knew—even so, they were only half big-league. Why should Bush elevate Dole by engaging in the campaign, joining him, contesting him (and Kemp, du Pont, et al.) on the same stage? Why should he subject himself to their leveling barbs? What if Bush opened his mouth, and out came a mistake?

Teeter was the mildest of men, and modest: twenty years in the big time, he never went Hollywood. He preferred his cabin in the Michigan woods. His office on the Wing of Power was without decoration—one ratty desk, no “seating group,” no lamp other than fluorescents above, no shelves for his unruly hillocks of paper. With the air of a harried accountant, he’d work through polls and speeches, position papers, reams of memos. When he spoke, he’d do a half-hour of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other, unless some other Big Gee told him to cut to the bottom line. In other Fifteenth Street offices, they took to calling him Teets, which had the right air of milk-the-cow, hand-wringing caution. But when it came time to enunciate a Gee-Six position, or to carry some collegial poop to George Bush, even Atwater (whose idea of defense was to rip out the other guy’s liver) was likely to agree: “Teets oughta do it.”