When Things Went Right: The Dawn of the Reagan-Bush Administration

Chapter 24 Moving On

Chapter 24 Moving On Demonstrating the full range of duties required of an American vice president, Bush’s next trip after successfully selling INF to the European elite was to Florida to wave the green-and-white starting flag at the Daytona 500 NASCAR race. Sunday, 20 February 1983 We landed at Daytona around :; the raceway is next to the runway. We staffers rode in a van, and along with the other cars in the VP’s motorcade actually went onto the two-and-a-half-mile track. We rode on the level lane, amazed at the  degree banked lanes that rose to our right. To our left in the infield was a small city of RVs [recreational vehicles] whose owners and occupants were finishing off a meal and mounting the roofs to watch the twenty-fifth running of the Daytona . Confederate flags fluttered in plenitude, reminding me of Lee Atwater’s great definition of NASCAR: “Woodstock for rednecks.” That truth was underscored when the motorcade broke and we staffers were driven through the crowds into the stadium area behind a police vehicle with flashing lights. At close range we could see the celebrants: people with stern, weathered faces, most—male and female—wearing red gimme caps advertising both the race and Winston cigarettes. Peter Robinson turned to Boyden Gray, scion of a rich North Carolina family closely connected with R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, and asked, “Boyden, does this awaken any feudal feelings in you?” The time of constant trip-taking with the vice president of the United States was drawing to an end. I was closing in on my desired job at the Navy Department, and the final stop was a meeting with the man who would dominate the next four years of my official life as George Bush had done the previous two: Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman Jr. moving on 277 Friday, 25 February 1983 A staff car delivered me to the Mall Entrance of the Pentagon. With a few minutes to spare, I looked at portraits of former Army chiefs of staff before taking the escalator two flights up to where SecNav [the Secretary of the Navy] dwells. In the early-American waiting room I was greeted by Cdr. Dan Murphy Jr., the Admiral’s son and staff secretary to Secretary Lehman. A short while later, a remarkably young four-striper [Capt. Paul David Miller, Lehman’s executive assistant] led me into the Secretary’s office. John Lehman stood just inside the doorway, buttoning his jacket. He took me to a seating area and apologized for the short meeting, saying he had a lunch with “Cap” [Weinberger]. Lehman looked at me with a stare that was both casual and intense, his blue eyes fixed on me as he commenced a monologue in a Philadelphia drawl. “First of all,” he said, “we want to have you here at Navy in the sort of job you want. We don’t want you to slip away.” He spoke of my working on procurement matters with the assistant secretary for shipbuilding and logistics, George Sawyer. He made unmistakable that the job would be a DAS. He also talked of my possibly going into OSD [Office of Secretary of Defense] to fight “the McNamara creeps” who have been chopping up or shooting down Navy programs. Lehman said several times that such work would be “noticed.” But we both concluded it would be better for me to get grounded in the Navy before considering a move elsewhere in the Pentagon. A ship’s clock sounded eight bells; lunchtime had arrived. Lehman rose and escorted me to the door. It had all been exciting, but there is an obvious catch: I have never dealt in procurement, contracts, or contractors, which ought to give a George Sawyer pause when considering me for his staff. I believe my analytical skills and hard work would enable me to do the job, but there would be billions of dollars at stake and very experienced (even tricky) people with whom I’d be dealing. It is a proper challenge, and it isn’t mine yet. But, as [DOD political personnel chief ] Marybel Batjer told me, “This is something Lehman wants to do, and it will be done.” Later, GB told me he was very excited and “proud” at what seems to be . This was a reference to OSD bureaucrats who still hewed to the “quantitative analysis” method of weighing...