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

Preface

Preface Crossing the Potomac In the genre of coming-to-Washington literature, no one wrote better than the late lawyer-lobbyist Harry McPherson. In his memoir, A Political Education , Harry lyrically described the night in  that he and his wife arrived in the nation’s capital after a long journey from Texas: I slow the car to cross Memorial Bridge. I want to remember this time, this shifting of our lives. We are crossing the wide, black Potomac River, mythic in the January night, leaving the South and its easy permissiveness, its flattering affirmations. . . . We are entering the North, where one must be astute as well as compassionate. It is a solemn moment. The smell of power hangs over this city like cordite. My arrival, as described in the pages of a personal journal, was less lyrical but equally excited. Poetically as well as automotively, I arrived in daylight, the veritable dawn of the era of Ronald Reagan. It was  January , a little over two weeks before Reagan’s inauguration as the fortieth president of the United States. For me and so many others already in the city or shortly to arrive, this was a dramatic moment both for our nation and for ourselves. We were like the eager youth who flocked to town in March  to join Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal or those who, twenty-eight years later, came to be part of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. We probably would have come just as enthusiastically at the start of any president’s administration, but these three moments proved of particular consequence to the country. We would brag to the youngsters who followed us, with a mixture of nostalgia and pride, that we were there then. Significantly for this narrative, I did not arrive as a committed Reaganite. Instead, I came to Washington to work for the new vice president, George Bush, another Texan who bestrode national government in the twentieth century. A member of the centrist or “moderate” wing of the Republican Party, Bush had been Reagan’s main opponent for the GOP presidential nomination in –. Unlike the two Texans who preceded him, John x preface Nance Garner and Lyndon Johnson (vice presidents to the aforementioned Roosevelt and Kennedy), Bush’s challenge to Reagan was no tardy push at the national party convention. Instead, it was a long, tough, and often bitter battle fought across the map of primaries and caucuses in the opening months of . Bush won some, Reagan won more, and it was for reasons of party unity, not fondness or comradeship, that Reagan put Bush on his ticket. In so doing, he planted the seeds of a famous victory in November and two more after that. Although Reagan and Bush were partners in that triumph, it was far from clear as I arrived in Washington that the new VP—and, by extension, I—would have an easy time of it in the White House. Viewed with suspicion and no little hostility by those who had supported Reagan’s presidential hopes as far back as , Bush may well have been isolated and ignored as vice president. After all, the previous Republican vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, had been politically emasculated by President Gerald Ford’s two chiefs of staff, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, if not by Ford himself, despite having been supreme lord of New York State for fifteen years—and a Rockefeller to boot. This possibility (even prospect) greatly concerned someone who was not among the many arriving in Washington during those frigid days at the start of . He was already there: Vice President Walter F. Mondale. A devout liberal Democrat who had gone down in political flames with Jimmy Carter in November, Mondale did not care about George Bush so much as the modern American vice presidency, an institution he had forged. In , with the fate of then–Vice President Rockefeller vividly in mind, Mondale consented to go on the Democratic ticket with Carter only if Carter agreed that as president he would do four things: give Mondale an office in the West Wing of the White House; allow him access to the same policy papers and intelligence that Carter himself saw; give him a standing invitation to any meeting in the Oval Office except those of a personal nature for Carter; and have a weekly luncheon, with no one’s staff present, to guarantee that the VP would see the president regularly and privately. Carter assented...