The American Vice Presidency (75 page)

On Christmas Day of 1979, however, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in support of an internal coup there, leading Carter to impose an embargo on grain sales, in spite of a previous pledge in Iowa, the nation’s corn capital, never to do so. Kennedy immediately attacked the embargo, saying it would hurt Iowa farmers without punishing the Russians, who could get the grain they needed elsewhere. Three days later, with the Iran hostage crisis also still unresolved, Carter pulled out of the debate, saying he was hoping soon “to bring the Iranian matter to a head” and hence there was no way he could leave Washington.
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The newspaper offered to shift the site there, but Carter declined.

In Des Moines, Mondale seized on Kennedy’s criticism of the embargo, accusing him of trying to capitalize on “the politics of the moment.” Although Mondale himself had advised Carter not to order the embargo, he said supporting it was “the patriotic route to take.” When a reporter asked the vice president if he was accusing Kennedy of being “unpatriotic,” Mondale said only, “I’ve said what I’ve said.” Kennedy, learning of the remark, shot back, “I don’t think I or the members of my family need a lecture from Mr. Mondale or anyone else about patriotism.”
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Years later, in his memoir, Mondale wrote, “This was hard for me. Kennedy’s position was my position; I didn’t think the grain embargo would hurt the Soviets much, but I knew it would hurt American farmers and turn the farm states against us.” He wrote he “regretted immediately” saying, “Kennedy should support the president at a time like this,” adding, “I was tired and I shouldn’t have said it. Ted took offense, and I took it back right away, and by the next morning he had accepted that. But it was bruising.”
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Worse from the viewpoint of the Carter campaign, Kennedy’s challenge dragged on through June and left the Democratic Party badly split. With the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan, overcoming doubts about the competence of a former movie star to be president, he and his running mate, the former UN ambassador George Bush, won a clear-cut victory on Election Night in both the popular vote and the electoral college.

Despite failing to win a second term, Mondale could claim some significant victories in his four years as vice president. He was instrumental in the creation of the Department of Education; he also was a key figure in the enactment of the Panama Canal treaties transferring the canal to Panamanian control, in the rescue of the Vietnamese boat people, and particularly in his assistance to Carter in bringing a successful conclusion to the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks at Camp David. He was credited also with moderating some of Carter’s deeper budget cuts affecting the poor and the middle class while retaining enough political capital to achieve his party’s presidential nomination four years later.

In 1984, Mondale made a political comeback by winning the Democratic nomination over Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who ran as an insurgent against the party establishment candidate. Mondale won strong labor backing and turned the tables on the charismatic Hart, the 1972 campaign manager of George McGovern, by questioning his substance. The Mondale campaign dusted off a television advertising slogan of the day, asking of Hart in his own ad, “Where’s the beef?” It halted Hart’s early surge, but Mondale did not clinch the nomination until the final day of the last 1984 primaries.

In his convention acceptance speech, aware that he was trailing Reagan in the polls, Mondale rolled the dice, boldly declaring, “Let’s tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” It caused Reagan’s deputy campaign manager, Lee Atwater, to remark that Mondale deserved “an A-plus for boldness” but predicted that Mondale would “get an F-minus in the end.”
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He was right. Mondale explained much later, “I thought one way of dealing with Reagan was to show more confidence, solid experience in dealing with the budget. It didn’t get me anywhere.”
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In a long-shot effort to pull out the general election, Mondale nominated the New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as the first female in American history to be on a major national ticket. The ticket won an impressive vote among women, but in vain. Mondale himself could not match the Reagan appeal, and a hope in his camp that a rambling performance by the aging president in their first debate would benefit the challenger was dashed in the second. Reagan won the audience by jokingly observing, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit,
for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
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Mondale acknowledged later that he knew he was beaten after that.

Reagan’s reassurance of his competence in that second debate brought an even greater landslide victory in November for him and Vice President Bush, who captured all but 13 of the 538 electoral votes, losing only Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Mondale went back to law practice in Minneapolis.

Mondale’s defeat did not end his public service, though. In 1992, upon the presidential election of his fellow Democrat Bill Clinton, Mondale was offered the ambassadorship to Moscow, which he accepted but later thought better of it as a poor fit for him and ultimately declined it. Clinton came back and offered him Japan, which he accepted and served happily and effectively for four years, returning in late 1996 to Minnesota, where he engaged in DFL Party affairs with no intention to ever run for public office again.

But in 2002, the Democratic senator Paul Wellstone, campaigning for a third term less than two weeks before the election, perished in a small plane crash that also claimed his wife and a daughter. Wellstone’s campaign manager pleaded with Mondale to run in Wellstone’s place as the only Democrat who could hold the seat and assure Democratic control of the Senate. Reluctantly, he agreed. But a large and emotional memorial service for Wellstone, attended by leading figures of both political parties, turned into a political rally in the hands of unthinking partisan Democratic speakers. The tone was deeply resented by attending Republicans and many other grieving Minnesotans. On Election Night, Mondale, then age seventy-four and hindered by the poisoned circumstances, lost by three percentage points to the Republican mayor of St. Paul, Norm Coleman, and returned again to the practice of law in Minneapolis.

Mondale, because of his intimate service with Carter in the White House, was arguably the most well-prepared man for the presidency who ran for but never attained it. Still, his service in the vice presidency, shaped largely by his own hand in collaboration with his president, became the model for future presidents in making constructive use of the office, if they chose to follow it.

GEORGE H. W. BUSH

OF TEXAS

T
he cliché endures that the vice presidency is the prime stepping-stone to the presidency. But after John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the first two vice presidents, were elected to the presidency in their own right, only two others have since made it—Martin Van Buren in 1836 and, more than a century and a half later, George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988. The nine others who rose to the presidency achieved it as a result of eight presidential deaths and one resignation.

In most of the early years after Adams and Jefferson, the elected vice presidents lacked the distinction required for the presidency or served in such subordinate and near-invisible roles in their administrations that they did not warrant consideration for the highest office. Van Buren was an exception as the chief political strategist and adviser to President Andrew Jackson, and his presidential candidacy was seen as a means to continue the Jackson policies. Likewise, 152 years later, Bush’s presidential candidacy was cast by many Republicans as the closest thing to a third term of President Ronald Reagan, whose agenda Bush loyally embraced for eight years. Although he succeeded in being elected, he proved to be no Reagan, either in charisma or in policy, and in the end was denied reelection in 1992.

Coloring within the lines was a trademark of the senior George Bush. His ancestors on the English and Scottish sides of his family could boast of distant ties to royalty, and his grandparents and parents raised him with a
proper respect for courtesy, piety, and self-reliance. His paternal grandfather, Samuel Prescott Bush, after graduation from Stevens Tech, took various railroad jobs in the Midwest before settling in Columbus, Ohio. There he became the president of a company manufacturing railway car equipment and the first president of the National Association of Manufacturers.
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Samuel Bush’s son, Prescott, George’s father, attended Yale, served briefly as a field artillery captain in France in World War I, on return moved to St. Louis, and went into business. There he met and married Dorothy Walker, daughter of the wealthy investment banker George Herbert Walker. Soon after, he went to work for the U.S. Rubber Company in Tennessee and then in Milton, Massachusetts, where young George, the second of five children, was born on June 12, 1924, and named for his maternal grandfather.
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A by-product of the name eventually was another tag hung on him that later led to derision, especially from political foes. Grandfather Walker had come to be called “Pop” by his sons, so as young George was growing up they called him “Little Pop” or “Poppy,” and it stuck to him with a gentle vengeance outside the family long afterward.
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The family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and Prescott Bush soon joined the New York banking and investment firm of W. Averell Harriman, of which his father-in-law was president. At Yale, he had become a member of the secret elite Skull and Bones Society, where a fellow Bonesman was Roland Harriman, brother of W. Averell. When the firm merged with another Wall Street powerhouse, Brown Brothers, Prescott became one of twelve partners and, not surprisingly, a Republican, though not yet interested in political office.
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Young George attended the exclusive Greenwich Country Day School and then Phillips Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts. There he was not rated a distinguished student but excelled in sports as captain of the soccer and baseball teams. He was six months from graduation and planned to follow in his father’s footsteps at Yale when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He told his father that college would to have wait, because he intended to enlist in the navy on this eighteenth birthday in June 1942.

During Christmas break, George met Barbara Pierce at a local country club dance, and they started dating. On his birthday he was sworn in as an ordinary seaman in Boston. Soon after, he was shipped off to navy preflight training in North Carolina as an aviation cadet. He became a combat pilot,
and on a bombing run in the Bonin Islands, in the Pacific, his plane was hit. He continued to the target, dropped his bombs, and leveled off, telling his two crew members to bail out. Neither survived, but he jumped into the sea, where an hour and a half later an American submarine picked him up.
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He rejoined his squadron and ultimately flew fifty-eight combat missions. Home on leave, he married Barbara on January 6, 1945, and on July 6 of the following year, his first child was born, named George Walker Bush but called Junior in the family.

After the war was over, George Senior entered Yale in the fall of 1945, joining his elder brother, Prescott Junior, called Pressy. There, in addition to being captain of the baseball team, he turned out to be a diligent student, making Phi Beta Kappa and graduating in two and a half years. The Yale connection, as it was intended to do, paid off for George. Through a fellow Bonesman, he got into the Texas oil business at a portable drilling rig equipment company in Odessa, where he earned $375 a month as a clerk. After transfers to several towns in California where he sold rigs, he and his young family moved back to Texas, to Midland, a booming oil town just east of Odessa.

He became a partner in an independent oil production company, and the couple added a daughter, Robin, and three more sons—John Ellis Bush (Jeb), Neil Mallon Bush, and Marvin Pierce Bush. They lost Robin to leukemia at age three, after which another daughter, Dorothy (Doro) was born.
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Meanwhile, back East, Prescott Bush Sr. got into politics. In 1950 he ran for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut and lost narrowly but in 1952 won the other, recently vacated, Senate seat. He became a strong supporter and occasional golf partner of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and one of the first Republicans to denounce the Red-baiting tactics of Wisconsin’s senator Joseph R. McCarthy. After two six-year terms, Bush retired in declining health.
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In 1953, son George Bush’s firm, boosted with a fortuitous investment of about half a million dollars from an uncle, Herbert Walker, and others, merged with another independent oil operation, Zapata Petroleum. In 1959 it split between inland and offshore sectors, with Bush becoming president of Zapata Offshore and moving his family to Houston. Like
his father’s success earlier, George Bush’s success in business provided him enough money to go into politics.