The Test of His Life
President Bush: He’s headed for the White House, but now he’ll
have to transcend the carnage of winning. How the rules of Texas
and B-school will play in D.C.
By Howard Fineman and Martha Brant
NEWSWEEK
Dec. 25 issue — Al Gore’s aides had passed the word
to Austin earlier in the day: The Call would come
that night at 7:45 Texas time—precisely 15 minutes
before the vice president’s concession speech.
‘Time Heals a Lot of Wounds’
36 Days: The Fallout
Bush v. Gore May Be Just The Beginning
Al Eyes the Future
Leader of the Pack
GEORGE W. BUSH planned his evening accordingly. For
the last meal before his transformation into a president-elect,
he chose comfort food and quiet. In a small dining room on
the first floor of the governor’s mansion, he joined his wife,
Laura, and aide-de-camp Karen Hughes (and her son,
Robert, 13) for a supper of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and
green beans. His aides had told Gore’s people to call the
mansion switchboard, not the private quarters upstairs, where
the single line was always in use. “We were afraid he’d get a
busy signal,” a Bush aide said later, mostly in jest.
As the appointed time approached, others joined Bush by
the phone in the study: Don Evans, Texas First Friend and
campaign chairman; Andy Card, White House
chief-of-staff-to-be. They waited. No call. A few more
agonizing minutes ticked by. No call. No one dared say what
he was thinking. Finally, at 7:53, the phone rang. It was Gore.
“I’m calling to congratulate the 43d president,” he said. “And
I promise not to call again.” Bush laughed politely. They
commiserated over the torture of it all, and agreed to meet in
Washington. “All the best to you and your family,” Bush said,
then hung up, smiled—and breathed a sigh of relief. One of
the longest, weirdest and most bitterly controversial elections
in American history was over.
Campaign 2000 abruptly
ended last week after one last
vote count—not in Florida, but in
the U.S. Supreme Court. A
harshly divided high court, issuing
a 5-4 ruling, locked down any
further recounts in the Sunshine
State. In so doing, the court
sanctified earlier tallies that had
given the state, a micron-thin
Electoral College majority, to
Bush. After a uniquely grueling 36
days, he had finally won the election on a TKO in the latest
available round, outlasting Prince Al the Indefatigable. Now
comes the hard part. The question isn’t merely how
President Bush will govern, but whether he’ll be able to
govern at all. He won, but does he have the
wherewithal—and the running room—to rise above the
carnage of winning?
Newsweek On Air: President Bush
Bush rides to
Washington weaker
than Superman in a
Suburban full of
kryptonite...
Bush rides to Washington weaker than Superman in a
Suburban full of kryptonite—all name and no mandate. He
is the son of a president, of course (only the second to win
the White House), and the first president in history with an
M.B.A. Yet 29 percent of voters in the new NEWSWEEK
Poll regard him as illegitimate, his victory the result of an
outrageous judicial fiat. He lost the popular vote (only the
fourth president to have done so) and won an Electoral
College majority by two votes. The Florida results are the
Grassy Knoll of electoral politics; reporters and researchers
soon will be pawing through ballots there in search of proof
that Gore was the real winner. Bush’s fellow Republicans
will control Congress, but by such small margins that he may
be a prisoner of his party, not master of it. As for
Democrats, they’re promising an Era of Good Feeling—and
sharpening their knives in the alleyways of the abattoir.
And that’s just what awaits Bush in Washington. The
rest of the country could be an even bigger problem. While
the world is at peace, more or less, the economy beyond the
Beltway is flagging after the longest run of sustained growth
in history. As voters return to their regularly scheduled
programming—business channels on TV and stock tickers on
their PCs—they are seeing more red numbers than green.
President-elect Bush may be facing his father’s bad
macroeconomic luck. Bush the Elder followed Reagan’s
boom, and paid for it with a recession in 1990 and a loss at
the polls in 1992. Bush the Younger is following the Clinton
boom (which his father’s budget deal helped create). He
must pray that the sweeping tax cut he favors makes sense
to Congress and Alan Greenspan—and, more important, that
his economic policy works.
In the end, was the
election decided
fairly?
Yes, Bush won fair
and square
No, there should
have been a recount
in Florida
I can't decide
Vote to see results
For George II, history doesn’t offer much
encouragement. The three 19th-century men who staggered
into the White House after having lost the popular vote had
troubled administrations. All were front men for rising
industrial interests (for high tariffs and hard money) and
responded to their precarious positions by decrying partisan
warfare. In the end, all were consumed by it. The most
famous Electoral College graduate was John Quincy
Adams—the last son of a president to follow his dad into
the job. Bush the Elder, NEWSWEEK has learned, has
begun jokingly calling his son “Quincy.” If you’re Dubya, it
may not be that funny; the younger Adams served just one
term.
HOW TO SURVIVE
To survive this time, Bush would seem to need Bill
Clinton’s maneuverability, Ronald Reagan’s sunny solidity
and Harry Truman’s tenacity. And yet the man now heading
to Washington is a self-proclaimed semipro whose main
claim to fame before entering politics in 1994 was his role
as a dealmaker for baseball’s Texas Rangers. It’s one thing
to lower expectations, another to bury them. Now that he’s
our man—and he has to be—what is there about him that
gives hope that he will succeed?
Bush has a canny
knack for creating
teams, but he can
be nasty, even
vindictive, to those
who get in his way.
There is, to begin with, a canny knack for creating
teams. Bush can be nasty, even vindictive, to those who get
in his way. It’s part of the family tradition. But he’s the kind
of fellow who likes to assemble a squad for the main
purpose of choosing himself to lead it. At Andover, he
formalized a casual stickball league, naming himself
commissioner. At Yale he was not only president of his
fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, but unofficial king of
frat-house rugby. Athletic skill wasn’t the source of his
power. (He wasn’t, in fact, a great athlete.) It was his
roster-writing personality—his desire to be center of
attention by taking on the job of creating a team. As the
eldest of four Bush sons, and the eldest in a roving pack of
Bush cousins, he was only doing what came naturally.
At Harvard Business School, he learned that
sociability could be profitable. The school eschewed
number-crunching quantitative studies in favor of group
learning, with teams of students handling real-world “cases”
with no “right” answer. The goal was not book smarts but
cooperative problem-solving. One guru was Alfred Sloan,
the legendary leader of GM, who preached the virtues of
win-win partnerships. “Our view is that you learn by
interacting with people,” said HBS professor and historian
Richard Tedlow. You also learned to delegate—to
surround yourself with the best and rise with them. At HBS,
Bush wasn’t considered the most serious student, but he
was elected president of a mock company that competed
for schoolwide honors.
Last weekend Bush began assembling a new team, in
hopes of rising with it. At his ranch in Crawford, Texas, he
introduced his choice for secretary of State. As Bush had
long made clear, it was Colin Powell, who had been
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in his dad’s
administration. Widely respected, Powell would be the first
person of color to serve in such a high-ranking job—a prize
catch for a presidential candidate who got fewer than
one-in-10 black votes. Bush, his eyes brimming with tears,
introduced Powell as a “son of the South Bronx,” an
“American hero and American example.” Powell, for his
part, promised to foster a “uniquely American
internationalism” that would respond to a new multicultural
“world mosaic of many pieces and colors.”
December 13 — George
W. Bush delivers his
acceptance speech.
The rest of the roster of early recruits carried a similar
and not too subtle message of inclusion. Blacks, Hispanics
and women were prominent. There was Alberto Gonzales,
a Texas lawyer and state Supreme Court justice, for the
White House counsel. One longtime trusted aide, Karen
Hughes, would be counselor to the president. Stanford
professor Condoleezza Rice would be the national-security
adviser. Don Evans, fund-raiser and friend, would be
nominated for secretary of Commerce.
BIPARTISAN APPEAL
The list, overall, was geared for bipartisan appeal. Bush
needed the good will of Democrats, culturally if not
politically, or at least their forbearance. It’s a strategy he
learned in Austin, where the lay of the political land required
him to join forces with the Democrats who controlled the
legislature.
They thought that
they controlled him, too.
And, in a way, they did:
he went with the flow
they dictated. But he
also got most of his
legislation
passed—welfare reform,
tort reform, education
reform—and was
re-elected by the largest
margin in Texas history.
Is Bush smart
enough to be a good
president? Polls
show that most
voters think so.
Is Bush smart enough to be a good president? Polls
show that most voters think so; much of the commentariat,
in media and in academia, has its doubts. And indeed, Bush
can be almost defiantly incurious. He doesn’t read widely,
and has traveled less outside the United States than any new
president in recent times. He can’t stand long memos and
seems to have little interest in ideas for their own sake.
When forced to study at Yale, he did so—just enough to do
well enough in just enough courses to avoid embarrassment.
He relished just one: John Morton Blum’s course on great
leaders’ great decisions.
But Bush is a quick-enough study, and in fact there is a
method to his preppy casualness. At Harvard he was what
is still known as a sky decker—a student who chooses to
sit in the top row of the horseshoe-shaped classroom
amphitheater. Sky deckers sat back and listened, taking in
the scene, contributing consensus-building observation from
on high. Sky deckers also had a better shot at surviving the
professors’ legendary “cold calls”—demands for
impromptu class presentations. From the stratosphere, you
could escape notice until you’d heard the flow of the talk. It
suited his methods, and even now he’d much rather learn
through briefings than paper.
Dubya is used to being a man of whom little is
expected, his name notwithstanding. But he’s insouciant
about it, even puckish. There is a doggedness to him, the
wiliness of a man only too glad to recognize his limitations
and operate accordingly. He tends to draw up simple
schemes in fat strokes with a Sharpie pen on legal
pads—and then follow them, for years if necessary. By last
year it was the grinds
from the front rows at
HBS who were showing
up to fawn over him at
his high-roller
fund-raising events. Bush
said he knew they were surprised to see him—the
tobacco-chewer in the back of the class—as a candidate
for president. “Frankly,” he said, “I’m much more surprised
you’re successful enough to come to this event.” They loved
it.
PRIVATE DOUBTS
At times, in earlier years and in private, his own father
seemed to doubt his eldest son’s capacity. The elder man
was Phi Beta Kappa, with a sure sense of direction after
heroic service in World War II. The son was indifferent and
unfocused. “He is able,” Bush the Elder allowed, writing to
a friend the year Dubya finished Harvard. The father hadn’t
then seen the son in operation on the business and political
playing fields. Now he has, and while he’s hardly an
unbiased witness, he’s impressed. “George has been so
good at bringing people together,” the former president told
NEWSWEEK. “I think he’ll be much better [at reaching
across party lines] than I was. We tried, but eventually we
got polarized.”
In the end what matters is not what’s in the new
President Bush’s head, but in his heart. Why did he want
the job anyway, other than to prove the low expectations
wrong? He says he wants to unlock the faith and
bootstrapping discipline of the left-behind. But how has he
himself exemplified in any way the bravery he wants others
to show? The answer is subtle, and not to be dismissed: a
famous name is a blessing, but a prison too. He’s served his
scion’s time. There was the drinking, which he quit. There
was the risk of missing the grand goal his father achieved.
True, Dubya had luck and family connections—from Dick
Cheney to Jim Baker to Clarence Thomas. But he could
have fallen flat. He didn’t. Now, finally, he will be judged
for his own actions on the great stage, and it’s admirable
enough that he wants to be.
The first public moments of his presidency began
within minutes of Gore’s phone call. The vice president, his
voice thick with emotion, stepped before his family and the
cameras and delivered the speech of his life: an elegiac
leave-taking in which he stifled his bitterness, conceded with
grace and vowed to help the new president “bring
Americans together”—all without hinting that it was he, not
his rival, who had won the popular vote by 337,576 souls.
Then it was Bush’s turn to speak—to an adoring
crowd in the Texas House of Representatives. “Our nation
must rise above a house divided,” he declared, echoing
Lincoln. “I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve
one nation.” Reciting the words of Thomas Jefferson,
founding father of the Democratic Party, Bush vowed “to
stand for principle, to be reasonable in manner and, above
all, to do great good for the cause of freedom and
harmony.”
By the time Bush finished, Gore, who hadn’t watched
the speech, was partying hard back in Washington with
Stevie Wonder, Tom Petty and Jon Bon Jovi. The
president-elect went to bed early. “The same old pillow, of
course,” he reported later. Even clutching it, he hadn’t slept
well. He said it was because he was excited at the prospect
of the presidency. But if he was nervous, too, that was
understandable. The longest campaign was over, and
George W. Bush’s life, in some ways, had just begun.
© 2000 Newsweek, Inc. |
