For most of four years, the men around George Bush had looked on his alliance with J. Danforth Quayle in the manner of relatives regarding a bad marriage in the family, a mismatch that could not be undone and so had to be endured.
The vice president’s enemies at Bush’s court had always been more numerous and better positioned than his friends. The ticket had barely been elected when Lee Atwater, a favorite of the president-elect, ventured in several private conversations that Quayle would have to be replaced the next time around. The vice president, to him, was like a lone deuce in draw pok-er – a card to be traded, if necessary, in hopes of something better. ““If we screw up and Bush is in deep s—,’’ Atwater told a friend at the White House as early as February, 1989, ““Quayle will have to go.''
The faction most powerfully drawn to the idea of Quayle’s removal from the ticket was led by Bob Teeter and Fred Malek, the two top operating officers of the campaign. Early on, Teeter had considered shrinking Quayle’s name on the official Bush/Quayle ‘92 bumper sticker. By spring, Malek’s thinking had taken the next great leap forward. He began lobbying Teeter, as the president’s best friend in the campaign command, to use his access, and make the case for dumping Quayle outright. Teeter finally did, though the president was resisting all such suggestions; his response was that he liked Quayle and the way he was going about his job.
His feelings in fact were more mixed than he let on to any but his closest associates. Both he and Barbara did like Quayle; they appreciated his hard work and his good-soldier fidelity to the president, even when it ran crossgrain with his own more conservative beliefs. But as time went on and his fortunes ebbed, a pro forma quality crept into Bush’s defense of his vice president, an unenthusiasm in his tone and, sometimes, his conversation that betrayed his real feelings to his intimates.
His complaint, confidentially expressed, was that Quayle had become the captive of and the mouthpiece for the party’s farther right. Among friends, Bush put some of the blame on Marilyn Quayle for her husband’s surrender. Marilyn was too shrill, too hard-core, he said. On hot-button issues like abortion, the president thought, Dan had let her push him too far right. Barbara, in less open ways, had made known her dismay. ““Can you believe what our vice president said today?’’ she asked staffers after what she considered a particularly primitive utterance on AIDS.
The grievances by themselves were not enough to move Bush to drop Quayle; his code of loyalty had given under strain in other situations where his own survival was in peril. His sense of face was another matter; he preferred living with the vice president to confessing error or exposing himself to attack by the conservatives or the press. He had singlehandedly created Quayle as a national figure. To drop him now would be seen not merely as an act of expedience but as a confession that he had been wrong.
There was no way to budge the president, the plotters knew, without compelling evidence that Quayle might cost him the election, and Bob Teeter went looking for some. In the early summer, he and Malek made another run at Bush, suggesting that they do a poll on the Quayle question. Though he seemed unenthusiastic, the president, tellingly, did not say no. Jim Baker, then still at the State Department expecting and dreading Bush’s call, was interested enough to go along.
The fishing expedition didn’t quite work out. The hyper-secret returns, though intriguing, were not nearly conclusive enough to carry forward to the president. On a first sweep, in early July, voters were asked whether they would be more or less likely to vote for Bush if he dumped Quayle. Half said more likely; only a fourth said less. But a closer reading suggest-ed that the numbers were swollen by Democrats who would never vote for Bush anyway and by Republicans who would finally come home to him, even if they did prefer some other sec-ond banana. Teeter sent pollster Fred Steeper back for more.
The second and third courses, delivered in late July and early August, were a stew of mixed portents. On what pollsters call a ““thermometer scale’’ of 0 to 100, Quayle’s mean rating was 25 – the rough equivalent, weatherwise, of a sleety day in February. Dick Cheney scored a tepid 34, Jim Baker a warmer 51 – and General Colin Powell, a secret favorite among the plotters, a mellow 57. But in a series of trial heats, Bush fared only a point worse against the Democrats with Quayle on the ticket than he did in a one-on-one matchup against Clinton alone. Only Baker among the pool of substitutes made an appreciable difference, closing the gap from 21 points to 14.
There was thus no hanging brief to lay before the president. Teeter pressed ahead anyway. Baker, at first, hung back. His wish, privately expressed to friends, was that the vice president simply go away without having to be asked. But no one who knew the Quayles believed that he would quit voluntarily; Marilyn, a friend said, would never let Dan do that.
Prudence ranked as high on Baker’s scale of values as on Bush’s, and for a time, he held to his view that it was best to leave bad enough alone. But he never quite closed the door to arguments to the contrary. His own staffers were pushing for a dramatic move – drafting General Powell to replace Quayle on the ticket. Malek, too, argued for the switch. The mere idea of it seemed to scare the Democrats in his wide circle of friends; its shock value alone could buy Bush a second look and perhaps alter the course of the race.
Powell’s credentials as a military man and a White House adviser were impeccable. But it was the color of the general’s skin that pushed the idea into the megaton range as a political weapon. Powell would be the first African American ever on a major-party ticket – a fact that would assure Bush a place in the history books and threaten Clinton’s biracial base of support.
But there was no certainty that Powell would be available, and considerable ground for suspecting that he would not be. At the height of the buzz in Washington about what a wonderful choice he would be, the general himself called Quayle to say the talk wasn’t coming from him; he was, he said, neither interested in nor bucking for the vice president’s job. The task of getting him interested was further complicated by the absence of a warrant from the presi-dent; no official approach could be made without Bush’s say-so.
But an unoffical emissary appeared providentially in the person of Stu Spencer, a sharp, salty California pol with a place in history as one of the inventors of modern campaign consulting. Spencer had friends in high places in the campaign, and, by happy chance, was on good terms socially with Gen. Powell as well.
Spencer was smart enough to know that a run at Powell would have to be a solo operation, without formal commission; the rules of play in such matters required deniability all around. His secret meeting with the general at the Pentagon was undertaken without Bush’s knowledge and was carefully indirect, a discussion of the idea of a Bush-Powell ticket.
Powell’s response was a not-quite-slammed door. He gave the strong impression that he would accept a place on the ticket if it were offered to him and if he were certain that the tender came straight from Bush. But he was emphatic about not wanting to be asked. He was flattered to be thought of, he said; it was just that the moment was all wrong for him. He felt obliged to serve out the remaining year of his term as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff – the highest station ever achieved by an African American in the military. Then, after thirty-five years in uniform, he needed time to make some money and collect his thoughts on what to do with the rest of his life.
He wondered further whether the people promoting him for the job really knew who he was, politically speaking. He had been scrupulous about keeping his views to himself on any issue outside his official duties, narrrowly defined. Even his party preference remained his secret. But he had opinions, and, he told Spencer, he imagined that some of the people promoting him for vice president might change their minds on hearing them. Some Bush people supposed that the general’s feelings about abortion might be more tolerant than the pro-life militancy of the party.
Under the rules of play, Spencer could not formally give the campaign a report on the sitdown. But news of the general’s reluctance made its way quickly back to Fifteenth Street. The caballers felt finally obliged to respect his wish to be left alone. But their hopes burned on, and the tides of politics were bringing Jim Baker slowly, inexorably, their way. If Jimmy wasn’t actually promoting a coup, one friend said, he wasn’t standing out there waving a stop sign either. And when Jerry Ford called one day in July to say that he, too, favored a change, Baker urged him to phone the president.
They missed connections at first, but when Bush called back from Air Force One, Ford was characteristically blunt. ““George,’’ he said, ““the campaign is dead in the water. You could lose unless there’s some new spark.’’ The only way to strike it, in Ford’s view, was to get Quayle off the ticket. But it had to be done delicately. Someone irreproachably loyal to Quayle would have to persuade him to walk the plank.
Bush thanked the former president for his advice and said he would mull it over. He promised no more than that, and, he told Ford, he didn’t think that he would be changing his mind.
In fact, the idea of replacing his running mate had begun to grow on Bush. He was hearing practically nothing else from the people he normally looked to for advice. Even his long-ago patron, Richard Nixon, had sent word through an intermediary that Quayle had to go; given the state of the economy, the former president said, he had become a luxury Bush could no longer afford.
Baker had known for some time that he would be running the campaign. His own reputation and his future would be on the line with Bush’s, and the more he stared into the clouds boiling up on the horizon, the more expendable Quayle came to seem. With just two or three weeks left till the convention, Baker chaired a meeting of his own people and the senior campaign leaders at his house on Foxhall Road, and the Quayle problem inevitably came up. The rough consensus among them was that the vice president was a problem and that the best solution would be not unlike what Jerry Ford had proposed: sending somebody Quayle trusted to persuade him to stand down.
But who would be the messenger of doom? the group parted that night without a solution, but they kept talking, and came up with what they were sure was the perfect choice. Their nominee was somebody who genuinely liked Quayle and who unquestionably spoke for the president. Her name was Barbara Bush.
It was Baker who carried the idea to his friend the president – and who soon came back with the president’s flat no. He hadn’t objected in principle to the idea of doing Quayle in; he seemed rather to be saying he didn’t want his fingerprints on the weapon, not even by proxy. It was inappropriate, he told Baker, for Barbara or anyone else in his family to serve the death warrant – a blanket refusal that took his sons Junior and Jeb out of play as well. The plotters resumed the search for the right bear-er of bad tidings. They never found one, not, anyway, in Barbara’s league, and another scenario died for the want of right casting.
There were, of course, other, more subtle ways to deliver messages in Washington, and Quayle’s enemies resorted to one of them: sending him anonymous smoke signals in the press that he had become a liability to the president and was no longer wanted. The plain intent of the leakage was to get him to go quietly. The effect was just the opposite; he decided to make a fight of it and enlisted those allies he could find, mostly on the party right.
Quayle’s paranoia, as it happened, was well-placed; all that stood between him and termination with extreme prejudice, at that point, was Bush’s squeamishness about pulling the trigger. The argument that there was no other way to preserve his candidacy had finally got to the president by late July; by the end, he was not only receiving but soliciting advice as to whether he should cut Quayle loose. One confidant, not aligned with the cabal, concluded that the president had made the leap from resisting the idea to embracing it.
Bush was in fact at the point of yielding to temptation when Quayle himself, having got wind of the maneuvering, tried to force the issue during one of their weekly meetings. One aide privy to the president’s views described him as ““desperate’’ by then to make a change, had he only been able to figure out how. All that stayed his hand, this source said, was his fear of getting caught, by the press and the party right; he could not bring himself to be more than a passive actor in the drama, hoping against hope that Quayle would jump without having to be pushed. Some of Quayle’s edgier aides would claim afterward that he had volunteered to stand down if it would advance the president’s fight for survival. He hadn’t, not quite. If he had offered to go away, the president, by authoritative account, would have accepted on the spot; indeed, one of his most senior counselors said, he would have been the most relieved man in America.
Their encounter that day instead was a shadow play of things not said and meanings not apprehended. The Quayle-must-go stories in the press, the vice president said with less than total confidence, were ridiculous. Bush had agreed, or seemed to. He did tell Quayle that some important people had been urging him to consider a change. But Quayle didn’t take the hint, if it was one, and Bush eased back from the brink. The stories were ridiculous, he told Quayle. The best thing to do was to ignore them.
Quayle seized on this last as his reprieve. ““There’s nothing to worry about,’’ he told his people afterward. But they suspected the door was still half open and plotted a high-risk strategy for their man; to get it unmistakably slammed, they believed, Quayle himself was going to have to open it first. He was booked for an interview on Larry King Live, and he and his coaches rehearsed his lines. He would say that he was prepared to stand down in an Indiana minute if he really believed that he was hurting the president. But, he would add, he had concluded after much soul-searching that he was an asset to the ticket and so would be staying.
It was guts poker, and when the deal went down, Quayle got only the front half of his bluff on the air – the part about his willingness to disappear if it would help Bush get reelected. There was no follow-up, no chance to accentuate his positives; the stories next morning made it sound as if he were bending his neck to the blade. The media scented blood, and it was important to get the president to abort the feeding frenzy.
His antagonists had beaten him to Bush’s door. Baker, by now a wholehearted convert, and Teeter, a believer from the beginning, had pushed the case for change in separate meetings with the president that very week. Bush had seemed to be open to the question and intrigued by the latest alternative they laid before him: Senate minority leader Bob Dole. There was no love lost between the two men; they had waged a famously bitter fight for the nomination in 1988. But Dole was well-known and widely admired in Republican Washington, and he had been under the media microscope before. There were no undiscovered embarrassments in his past, and no automatic giggles for comic monologists. His potential impact was strong; in several battleground states in the Midwest, his popularity ran twenty points higher than Bush’s.
For a suspenseful moment, the plotters believed and Quayle’s men feared that Bush might capitulate; both sides would agree afterward that Quayle’s future on the ticket, and as a viable national politician, had been perilously close to ending at the hand of the man who had made him. It was not till the last minute that the president finally decided to keep him on, and even then, it was less a vote of confidence than an act of caution. ““I think the press would murder me if I did this,’’ Bush told his disheartened privy councilors.
Quayle didn’t know that when he dropped by the Oval Office to make one last pitch for the president’s formal benediction. The press was still going crazy speculating about his future, he told Bush. He wanted to do something to stop it. There was a way, of course, and the president still clung to the hope that Quayle would take it – by heading for the exit on his own. But Bush would not say so, and Quayle would not step forward without being asked. He chose instead to ignore what had gone unspoken between them; the fact that the president hadn’t come out and suggested that he step aside could be interpreted, or at least spun, as a token of approval as against a failure of nerve. ““Don’t worry, the door’s closed,’’ Quayle told his staff afterward.
The plotters would cling to their dreams and schemes to the very eve of the convention, but the public speculations quieted and would never again reach that critical mass necessary to force a change. Quayle had weathered the crisis. The storm, one of his men said, had turned out to be raindrops.
