Going to Windward: A Mosbacher Family Memoir

18: Don’t Screw It Up

Chapter 18 Don’t Screw It Up Historically, the Department of Commerce has been viewed as a political stockyard where fund-raisers and friends of the president are rewarded with a Cabinet appointment. As such, the stature of the department has lagged—often seen as clumsy, second-rate bureaucracy made up of “trade policemen, textile-quota administrators, and zealous antidumping enforcers,” to cite one of the less enthusiastic assessments. In fact, even though the Commerce posting had helped launch him to the White House in 1928, Herbert Hoover stated that the department “in the Washington social scale was next to the bottom at the dinner table. . . .” Yet prior to my time, some of the most capable and respected businessmen of the twentieh century had taken the post, including President Hoover, my fellow Houstonian Jesse Jones (who in a previous post at RFC was called the “second most powerful man in Washington” after FDR), and another native New Yorker, Averill Harriman. Not bad company, and in fact as I entered the job I felt confident that we could be productive and get things done at Commerce that would make a substantive contribution to the country’s well-being. The early book on me among the Beltway chattering class was that my personal relationship with the president would help me pursue, and achieve, a more ambitious agenda than most of my predecessors. At the same time, the media speculated that my friendship with Treasury Secretary Nick Brady and Secretary of State Jimmy Baker could be put to an early test. “Treasury, State, and Commerce share responsibility for trade and economic issues, and the three departments have often squabbled over policy,” one Business Week story noted. “But if the Three Amigos can work together, the Bush Administration could 1. The Yankee Trader: Why presidents should stay close to their U.S. trade representatives, Greg Rushford/Rushford Report, February 2003. 2. During my three years at the department, President Bush came to visit me a handful of times in my beautiful, big office. We were gazing at the portrait of Herbert Hoover hanging over the fireplace during one of these visits, when I casually—and mischievously—asked George if he realized that Hoover had, in fact, gone directly from the Department of Commerce to the White House. The president appeared somewhat startled by the question at first, then broke out laughing. Don’t Screw It Up 夝 225 wind up with one of the strongest international economic teams Washington has seen in years.” Like the president, Jimmy and I are competitive by nature—and there certainly were a few sharp but friendly policy disagreements during my three years at Commerce. Usually, he would accuse me of wearing my “protectionist hat,” and I would countercharge that he was stuck up in his “ivory tower” at Foggy 3. Richard Fly, Steven J. Dryden, and Mark Ivey, “Mosbacher: Not Just Another Commerce Secretary; If Appointed, He Could Parlay His Friendship with Bush into Power,” Business Week, December 12, 1988, 32. Napping aboard Air Force One in early 1992. George Bush loved to catch members of his team sleeping and signed this photo, teasing: “Keep up the great work as Secretary of Commerce.” 226 夝 Don’t Screw It Up Bottom. After he appeared on the February 13, 1989 cover of Time magazine, with a caption that called him “a gentleman who hates to lose,” Baker inscribed it to me, writing, “To Bob, who hates to lose even more.” Some have suggested that I was not shy about using my relationship with the president to get my way. My plea? Guilty as charged. There’s no question that my friendship with the president benefited the department and enabled me, first, to pursue some of his big ideas—such as NAFTA—and second, to actually get some ambitious things done. That’s not to say our department won every policy dispute we entered during my tenure, however. Early in 1990, in fact, the president chose Carla Hills and the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to take the lead in negotiating the new U.S.-USSR trade treaty he had announced with Mikhail Gorbachev at the historic Malta summit. For weeks, I had been arguing that Commerce should spearhead those talks, given the department’s expertise both in promoting nonstrategic Soviet trade and in managing the export controls that deny the Soviets high technology that could be militarily useful...