Dotty Bush was not impressed. She expected her son to uphold humane principles, and she did not consider nerve gas a boon to humanity. Her disapproval bothered George, because there was no one whose good opinion mattered more to him than his mother’s. He was almost relieved when the bill was killed in the House of Representatives, but then Reagan insisted it be reintroduced. George, half-jokingly, told the President that he didn’t see how he could face his eighty-two-year-old mother if he had to cast another tie-breaking vote in favor of the measure. “If I have to do it, you’re going to have to explain to her why her son is in favor of creating a gas that could kill millions,” said the Vice President.
Four months later George did what he most dreaded—he displeased his mother. He cast the second tie-breaking vote of his vice presidency on November 8, 1983, which allowed the Senate to pass a bill (47–46) to begin producing nerve gas. That afternoon on Air Force One, as the Reagans were flying to the Far East, the President called Dorothy Bush in Greenwich. He said her son was doing a wonderful job and she could be proud of how he was serving the country as the “best vice president ever.” The President then called the Vice President to say that he had made the mommy call.
“The President didn’t talk about nerve gas, but I knew what the idea was,” Dotty Bush told a reporter. “George knows that I disapprove of it; he knows how I feel. But he said that we have to have it to deter other countries from using it. But George knows I would die if this country would ever use it.”
George’s vote retained $124 million for production of nerve-gas bombs and artillery shells in a defense appropriations bill. But again it was eventually defeated in the House of Representatives, much to the relief of George’s mother.
During the reelection campaign of 1984, her grandson John Ellis, who worked for NBC, kept Dorothy Walker Bush informed of the latest polls. He regularly sent her the state-by-state breakdowns on how the Reagan-Bush campaign was doing. Ellis, known as the family’s media mole, later worked for Fox News and did the same thing for his cousin George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign.
Mrs. Bush said the poll numbers from Ellis showing Reagan with a comfortable margin reassured her, but she cautioned against overconfidence. “Remember the Truman-Dewey race,” she said. “We all went to bed thinking it was Dewey, and we woke up and there was Truman in the White House.”
George’s mother, who offered to work the telephones for the Reagan-Bush ticket, said she felt her son was at a distinct disadvantage having to run against history in the making: Geraldine Ferraro, a former congresswoman from Queens, had been chosen as the first woman to run for national office on a major-party ticket. Her selection by Walter Mondale as his running mate had galvanized many women. Even the elderly Mrs. Bush said she could see herself supporting a woman for Vice President if the woman had the necessary qualifications, which, of course, compared with her son, Ms. Ferraro certainly did not. Seeing the huge, enthusiastic crowds that Ferraro was drawing worried Dorothy, who said she thought her son should not accept Ferraro’s challenge to debate. In retrospect, George probably should have listened to his mother.
Three days before the debate Ferraro, whose disclosed net worth was $3.8 million, chided Bush as an example of the Reagan rich who were getting richer at the expense of the poor. Fuming over the criticism, Barbara Bush blasted her husband’s opponent in front of reporters. “That $4 million—I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich—can buy George Bush any day.”
It was the meanest comment the Vice President’s wife had ever made in public, and she suffered from the negative reaction, which made Barbara look like that word that “rhymes with rich.” After seeing her comment broadcast on the nightly news, she called George’s sister, Nan Ellis. “I just can’t believe I did that to your brother,” she said. “I’ve been crying for twenty-four hours and I’ll never stop . . . how could I have done it?” She called George in tears, and he told her not to worry. Then she called Geraldine Ferraro. She said she had meant “witch” not “bitch,” but she apologized for saying anything.
“At the time, I was annoyed,” said Ferraro. “I thought, ‘How does a woman act like that?’ I felt that it was a terrible put-down—a terrible class put-down . . . I was hurt but I gave her credit for calling as quickly as she did. I told her not to worry about it, that we all say things at times we don’t mean. ‘Oh, you’re such a lady,’ she told me. All I could think of when I hung up was: thank God for my convent-school training.”
Two days after Barbara Bush’s defamation of Geraldine Ferraro, her husband’s press secretary, Pete Teeley, delivered his own, calling the congresswoman screechy and scratchy. “She’s too bitchy. She’s very arrogant. Humility isn’t one of her strong points.” He refused to apologize. “No reason to,” he said. “It has nothing to do with her as a person. On television, she appears bitchy. Her negative numbers are going up because she comes across that way.”
Being the first woman to run on a national ticket put enormous pressure on Ferraro, who had to surmount the bigotry and sexism her candidacy unleashed, particularly among men within the media. When George F. Will reported that her husband, John Zaccaro, had not paid taxes, Ferraro proved Will wrong and suggested he publicly apologize. Instead, Will sent her roses with a card, which read: “Has anyone told you you are cute when you’re mad?”
The night of the debate, October 11, 1983, Ferraro had been fully prepped. She presented herself as informed and lucid. When attacked, she kept her temper but responded firmly, even sardonically.
“Her opponent, on the other hand, acted much more the hysterical lady,” wrote Robin T. Lakoff in her book
Talking Power
. “His voice rose in indignation in both pitch and volume; he waspishly (no pun intended) reiterated the same charges again and again (he didn’t listen); he grew visibly upset and overwrought; his face got red, his voice tense and shrill. He went into his lecture mode. This was not the archetypal male in calm control. Yet the next day pollsters declared Bush the ‘winner.’ No one had much to say about why or how. The answer is that Ferraro lost because she dared to speak up in public against a man.”
At one point during the debate Ferraro chided Bush for lecturing her. “Let me just say . . . that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy . . . Secondly, please don’t categorize my answers, either. Leave the interpretation of my answers to the American people who are watching this debate.”
She missed a chance to clobber Bush when he said that the Reagan administration looked at civil rights “as something like crime in your neighborhood.” But she had recovered by the time Bush made his most damning accusation. He said that she and Mondale had claimed the 242 men who had died in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon had died in shame. Ferraro immediately corrected him. “No one has ever said that those young men who were killed through the negligence of this administration and others ever died in shame.” Mondale labeled Bush’s accusation “unpardonable” and said he was “angry as hell” about the untruthful remark. He demanded that Bush issue an apology for his lie, but Bush refused.
The day after the debate the Vice President addressed a rally of longshoremen in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and referred to the previous evening’s debate: “I tried to kick a little ass.” Hours later his staff showed up on the press plane wearing buttons that said, “We kicked a little ass.” Some reporters started calling the Vice President “Kick-Ass George,” others wore hats made of jockstraps.
“It set quite a testosterone tone,” recalled Julia Malone of Cox Newspapers. “The Bushies didn’t understand how offensive it was to women. Later at an ‘Ask George Bush’ event, the Vice President took questions and kept calling on man after man after man, ignoring the women who had their hands up. Finally he said, ‘One last question,’ and all the women in the press corps shouted in unison, ‘Call on a woman.’ He looked so surprised and acted a little put out at being told what to do by a bunch of women, but he finally took one question from a woman.”
Bush’s attitude raised a great deal of gender tension on his press plane, where he seemed to strut his new “kick-ass” status. “When the debate was over, the women in the press corps stood up and cheered Ferraro,” recalled Jeb Bush, who had accompanied his father to the debate. “The whole thing was very difficult. Usually on a press plane, camaraderie develops with the press. But on the Bush plane, things were very difficult.”
Female journalists resented Bush’s chauvinistic treatment of Ferraro, which showed them something they had not seen before: his discomfort in accepting women as peers. They started to notice that there were no professional women on Bush’s staff who held positions comparable to the men. “All the women were either secretaries or gofers,” recalled one woman journalist, “and whatever Jennifer Fitzgerald was [her official title was ‘executive assistant’] didn’t count . . . Maybe Bush’s attitude was just part of his generation, but it certainly made you see that even a so-called nice guy can be a male chauvinist pig.”
Women reporters also observed there were no women in the Bush family who pursued a career or even held a professional job. Even those wives with college degrees, and in Laura Bush’s case a graduate degree, faded into the background of their male-dominated marriages, ceding center stage to their husbands. George W. Bush best expressed the family’s male credo when he said, “I have the best wife for the line of work that I’m in: She doesn’t try to steal the limelight.” He told a Texas writer: “She’s not trying to butt in and always, you know, compete. There’s nothing worse in the political arena than spouses competing for public accolades or the limelight.” As President, one of W.’s first judicial nominations went to James Leon Holmes, who once wrote: “The wife is to subordinate herself to her husband . . . to place herself under the authority of the man.” All women who married into the Bush family became housewives and mothers. As Barbara Bush told reporters: “We’re all very happy being kept by our husbands.”
Garry Trudeau skewered the Vice President’s treatment of Gerry Ferraro in a
Doonesbury
strip that showed reporters shouting questions to Bush: “Mr. Bush, in recent weeks, we’ve heard a lot of vulgar language about Mrs. Ferraro from you, your wife and your campaign manager.
“Was all of this part of a planned manhood strategy, to counter the wimp image that has plagued your political career?”
Trudeau’s withering pen has George responding:
“Are you kidding? I’ve always talked tough! When I said I kicked Mrs. Ferraro’s behind that’s EXACTLY what I meant! And you can print that!”
“In a family newspaper?”
“Gosh, yes! Heck! It’s just an old football term!”
The Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist had watched Bush twist himself into a pretzel of reverses on numerous policies—the economy, abortion, the deficit, the Equal Rights Amendment—to become Reagan’s man. A few days before the 1984 election Trudeau took deadly aim. He started a week of japes, beginning with a White House correspondent making an announcement on the nightly news: “Good evening. Vice President George Bush’s manhood problem surfaced again today as concern over his lack of political courage continued to grow . . .
“Accordingly, in a White House ceremony today, Bush will formally place his embattled manhood in a blind trust.
“It will be restored to him only in times of national emergency.”
George became a laughingstock on his own press plane. The next day’s strip was even more belittling: “Sir, will your manhood be earning interest?”
“Very little. There’s not that much capital.”
Humiliated at the sniggering behind his back, George banished the press from his plane and accused Trudeau of “carrying water for the opposition” and “coming out of deep left field, in my view.” In his personal diary, Bush referred to the satirist as “the insidious Doonesbury.”
Barbara Bush was even more dismissive. “People who saw a man who fought for his country, who built a business and added to the productivity of this country, who never turned down his President when he was asked to serve, nobody thought that,” she said. “Only one little cartoonist.”
Two weeks later on David Brinkley’s Sunday-morning talk show, the Vice President tried to deny his nasty remark about Geraldine Ferraro.
“You said you’d kicked her ass,” Sam Donaldson reminded him.
“I didn’t say that,” Bush snapped.
“What did you say?”
“Well, I’ve never said it in public.”
Donaldson pointed out that he was in public, accompanied by reporters, and his comment was recorded on camera.
“Well, if I’d wanted to say in public the statement that I have never repeated, I would do it.”
The positive numbers in the polls had shot up for the Republicans following the debates, but then
The Washington Post
weighed in with an editorial comparing the Vice Presidential candidates. The paper called Ferraro “smart, strong and resourceful,” conceding that her lack of foreign policy experience showed up from time to time in her statements. George got hammered:
Something else shows when George Bush speaks—something that threatens to trash whatever esteem his impressive résumé and his private personal grace have earned him. Maybe it is just that he is a rotten campaigner (winning elections, after all, has never been his forte). But he seems to reveal himself as all viewers of “Dallas” will long since have noticed, as the Cliff Barnes of American politics—blustering, opportunistic, craven and hopelessly ineffective all at once. This impression has been so widely remarked in recent weeks by commentators of every political persuasion that it hardly needs elaboration.
On November 6, 1984, Ronald Reagan was resoundingly reelected, winning every state in the Union except for Minnesota and the District of Columbia. The election had been a landslide triumph for the President but a personal defeat for the Vice President, who was so morose about his bad press that, according to close aides, he considered retiring from public life. He sulked for a few days, and then rallied. In a note to Senator Barry Goldwater, George wrote: “It’s been tough and ugly this time; but the results are what counts [
sic
].”