The Inauguration Of George Bush - 13 January 1989

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party – if it’s understood that the party is not a political party but the Washington party, the glittering shindig that will be thrown for George Herbert Walker Bush for about three days of next week beginning on Thursday, going through the inauguration on Friday and winding up with a final blow-out on Saturday.

Let the new hero be paraded and cheered through the fair before next week we set him up at the coconut shy and start to knock him down.

This is the standard procedure, a tradition of civility and goodwill towards any about to be inaugurated president, no matter who he is, from whichever party. I recall with a wince my introduction to this tradition, though there was no inaugural festival. It was only a few days after Franklin Roosevelt had dropped dead in Georgia and suddenly a man from Missouri, who nobody outside Washington knew very much about, was suddenly President of the United States.

I don’t suppose more than 40 of us of the press corps in those days shuffled into the Oval Office of the White House when the secret service gave us the signal to enter for President Truman’s first press conference.

As we were moving in I remember expressing what I assumed was a shared mood of anxiety verging on alarm about the qualifications of the new man and it did seem then that a midget was trying to fill the footprints of a giant. I said something of the sort to the man next to me, the Washington bureau chief of one of the national weekly news magazines.

To my astonishment and embarrassment he turned on me. “That’s no way to talk” he said “about a new president. This is the time to build him up, not tear him down.” Well, anyway, Truman it was clear after that first press conference didn’t need our sympathy or condescension. He turned out to be as diffident as a sergeant major. He snapped and crackled at the press with much good humour but also with occasional slaps at people whose questions he thought showed that they ought to go away and read over the Constitution.

Well today in Washington, this capital of mischief, vortex of rumour, cooking pot of gossip and malice, in Washington today you can’t hear or read a bad word about George Bush. It takes an actual effort of memory to recall how all the press in the early spring was rollicking in the fun and games of George Bush’s unfortunately preppy manner, his accent, his incurable habit of in moments of bafflement or temper stammer out such lurid epithets as "By golly" or "Darn it".

The now forgotten Don Regan, Mr Reagan’s all-powerful chief of staff, wrote in his memoir that when he told Vice President Bush that the president’s appointments calendar was controlled by Mrs Reagan on the advice of her astrologer. “When I was finished”, Regan wrote, “the vice president uttered what was a very strong expletive for him, 'Good God' he said."

Mr Bush was being written off as a candidate after he lost the Iowa Primary. He was shown mockingly wearing blue jeans and a wind-breaker, driving a truck through the snows of New Hampshire, a last pathetic effort it seemed to appear as a man of the people, but Senator Dole the recent winner was too witty, too mean to poor old George Bush in New Hampshire and Mr Bush leapt back again.

The preppy stigma was plucked away once for all when he borrowed the most artful and gifted of President Reagan’s speech writers, a lady not to be forgotten in the history of president-making, Peggy Noonan, and she wrote Mr Bush’s acceptance speech for the New Orleans convention. It was simple, gutsy, very eloquent and set a surprising new tone with its hopes of a gentler, kinder nation.

I don’t know if Mr Bush copied the Churchill habit of rehearsing a speech before a mirror for hours on end, but George Bush the Republican nominee suddenly looked like a new man, sounded like a new man, a new voice, a new type.

We rarely heard the word "preppy" after that, and then during the campaign a new Bush was fashioned by the producers and writers of the Bush commercials, a downright, glib, scolding, mean Bush, hammering away to the distress of a lot of people at mainly two themes – a Massachusetts convict who out on a weekend pass had committed rape and murder, and the fact that Governor Dukakis carried a dreadful letter on his forehead but wouldn’t admit it. The letter was the dreaded L – liberal.

That touched the lowest depth of Mr Bush’s campaign but also it appeared it was the most effective part. In the wake of the election most Democrats and many moderate Republicans were sadden and embarrassed by the public image of the Bush who had won but then once the interminable campaign is over the people heave a great sign.

Let bygones be bygones. The American people have a short political memory. They didn’t have to forgive the mean, jabbing George Bush of the campaign; they simply forgot him. That character is now as dead as the laughable preppy.

So there is yet another new Bush and the people who know him best and have worked with him say that the two former Bushes were both false fronts, the first an invention of the media, the second a ferocious battledress that Mr Bush was only too happy to shed.

So now he is the traditional incoming new man and given the benefit of every doubt. His Cabinet is complete and pays no dues to the far right or the television evangelists who gave him such hefty support. It’s a collection of moderate Republicans and it’s entirely a Cabinet of insiders, of Washington veterans.

Now this is odd, almost to the point of hilarity. When you consider that both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan campaigned and won their presidencies on the theme that government was the big culprit, Washington insiders were the villains and that what the country needed was new blood from the outside, men from the country uncorrupted by the machinery and the machinations of power.

So first arrived the so-called Georgia Mafia and then the troop of Californians new to the capital city. True, George Bush has brought in and will bring in some old buddies from Texas but none of them is a newcomer to Washington and its ways and for the most part they, his Cabinet and his advisers, are moderate, conservative Easterners.

Now that again is an extraordinary reversal of a movement we have written about for 20 years and long ago decided was irreversible. For the first 50 years or more of this century the Republican party drew its strength from eastern money and midwestern idealism, rural independent Republicanism.

No later than 1964, when Senator Goldwater of Arizona was the Republican candidate, we all reported as a great new lurch of American history that the power of the Republican party had gone to the west and south-west and the new generation in the deep south that had once for all deserted its ancient links with the Democrats. “From now on,” we said, "the money is banked in Los Angeles and San Francisco and the ideology comes from the sun belt, from Florida all the way to California.”

So... not at all remarked on so far, as I’ve seen, is the geographical set-up of the Bush administration which quietly, without protest or excuse, has moved the power of the party back to the old boys of New England and the north-east, plus a little infusion of new blood from Texas.

It’s remarkable and I wouldn’t dare say just now what it signifies or will come to signify, and if it’s traditional to think no evil of the new man and wish him nothing but the best, it’s even more proper to think only on what is lovely and of good report in the presidency of the man who is leaving it.

The columnists and TV pundits are very busy this week getting in their brief historical surveys of the Reagan years. A national paper printed on Wednesday a page sampling of one-liners, final crisp opinions from a cross-section of Americans.

They go all the way from a man in Massachusetts giving thanks to God for bringing America a saviour at a time when the nation was unsure of itself to a 67-year-old man in Oregon who says, “I see Ronald Reagan as a stubborn ideologue who has led an administration filled with lies, dishonest, deceit and corruption. He will be remembered for having led a nation into a moral, ethical, financial and industrial decline.” In Omaha a 17-year-old – “He restored patriotism, he strengthened the economy and lowered unemployment and gave us pride again in our country. One of the greatest presidents.”

I could go on and on, spanning a gamut from idolatry to disgust, but those short quotations record the actual balance of opinion by two to one. He came in in early 1981 with 60% of the people taking a good view of him. His popularity dipped down into the 40s twice, once after the marines were murdered in Lebanon and then during the Iran-Contra revelations, but it was soon up again and at the end he leaves it in unprecedented popularity – 66% of Americans are very much for him.

The other night on television Governor Mario Cuomo of New York who, it’s generally agreed, could have had the Democratic nomination last year for the asking, was asked in a phone-in programme what the verdict of history would be on Ronald Reagan.

In the short run he thought favourable; in the long run, he couldn’t say. This was no time, he said, to mention – mentioning – the deficit, the poor, a drug-ridden society, the homeless. You had to say that he inspired the country with a simple, idealistic view of its history and its aims “...and,” said Governor Cuomo, who is not this year anyway about to knock the most popular president in history, “he was beloved, but then he’s a loveable man”.

The governor – who lacerated this administration at the Democratic convention in 1984 as uncaring, greedy, uncompassionate, swollen with false pride – Governor Cuomo is plainly biding his time 'til, shall we say, 1992?

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