Presidency Upstaged: The Public Leadership of George H. W. Bush

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments My interest in this topic, as well as the research and writing for this book, has spanned several years. I first began working on this project in 2001 while still an assistant professor at Austin College. My goal was to take a closer look at the public aspects of the George H. W. Bush presidency to gain a better understanding of the role that public leadership plays in the modern presidency. Despite the fact that Bush was a one-term president who was known for wanting to distance himself from the stagecraft of the Reagan years, I suspected that the Bush communication strategy would nonetheless make an excellent case study. Looking back at the Bush years can leave one with a sense of disconnect: How could a president who oversaw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, and who saw record-breaking approval ratings for his job performance during Operation Desert Storm, see his political fortunes change so dramatically by 1992 and not win reelection? While many factors, such as the economy, played a role in the outcome of the 1992 presidential election, simply dismissing Bush as an unsuccessful communicator, which many had done, left too many unanswered questions about the complexities of the public aspects of the presidency. In addition, the Bush years also represent a time of dramatic changes within the news media industry. Having been a newspaper reporter in California during most of the Bush presidency, I had experienced firsthand the trends of the newspaper industry, including downsizing, hiring and salary freezes, the consolidation of daily newspapers, and the coming of the Internet age, all of which contributed to increased competition and a shifting tone to more negative and sensational news coverage. As I transitioned from a full-time journalist to a full-time graduate student in the early 1990s, and thus developed my scholarly interest in the public presidency,the question of Bush as a communicator continued to intrigue me, with particular interest in how the changes in the news industry had shaped Bush’s communication strategy and public style. The ideal opportunity to begin the analysis came nearly a decade later when I was an assistant professor at Austin College, only about a three-hour drive from the Bush Presidential Library in College Station. x : Acknowledgments Thus, my scholarly journey with Bush 41 had begun. I presented the first draft of chapter 1 at APSA in 2002, thinking that the book would be done within two years (and in time for my tenure decision). In 2005, I presented the first draft of what would become chapters 2 and 3 at APSA, two months after accepting my current position at Chapman University, a move that took me back home to California (with tenure long behind me). Yet my motivation for and interest in the project never waned, and each subsequent trip to the Bush Library continued to yield relevant documents to support my research. Nearly every year, when seeing colleagues at conferences, I would be asked, “How is the Bush book coming?” My standard response became, “If I don’t finish it soon, it may just become my retirement project.”Happily, that did not occur, as I was able to finish the first draft of the manuscript during the 2008–2009 academic year once I put nearly five years of administrative responsibilities as department chair (on two campuses) behind me. In hindsight, I am glad that the final draft of the book was not completed until late 2009, which allowed me to include important documents released at the Bush Library in the fall of 2009 under a Freedom of Information Act request that I submitted more than six years earlier in the spring of 2003. I take it as a sign that things worked out how they were meant to be. Given that writing this book became a rather long journey,I have many people to thank. First, I am deeply appreciative of the continued support andpatienceof MaryLennDixon,editor-in-chief of TexasA&MUniversity Press, while this manuscript reached its conclusion. I also appreciate Jim Pfiffner’s early enthusiasm for the project and his desire to include the book in the Presidency and Leadership series. I am also grateful for the amazing knowledge and professionalism of the entire staff at the Bush Library. Having conducted research at nearly every presidential library, I have spent more time at the Bush Library than any other.As a result,I can say without...