Episode 24: George H.W. Bush
Show Notes
Overview:
Today’s episode is all about George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st President of the United States, and the man who came to the Oval Office arguably with the greatest pre-presidential resume of all. Ok, Eisenhower makes a good bid in this fight, but consider Bush’s credentials: he was a war hero, successful businessman, a congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, chief envoy to China, head of the Republican National Committee, head of the CIA, and then for eight years Ronald Reagan’s vice president.
That’s a pretty darn impressive list, and Bush was a pretty darn impressive guy: tall, smart, confident, and friendly. But a long resume of loyal and competent service is not ultimately the same as long resume of leadership. Bush was a good soldier and loyal, but also modest—well, as modest as a politician could be—and wanted to be friends with everyone. A loyal subordinate throughout his career, voters were right to wonder what precisely Bush stood for in 1988 when he ran for president. A cover story in Newsweek perhaps put it best. Was Bush…a wimp? He’d followed orders and changed political positions so easily when prudence or politics required, did he actually have convictions of his own?
Quick case in point: he was the last man standing between Ronald Reagan and the Republican nomination in 1980, and was also arguably Reagan’s sharpest critic on the campaign trail. Bush was the one who termed the best description of Reagan’s unproven theory of supply side economics as “voodoo economics,” an accurate slam so good it’s still used today to deride the policy of tax cuts and trickle-down prosperity long after most everyone has forgotten who first uttered the phrase. But then when asked to join the Republican national ticket as Reagan’s vice-president? Well, then no one supported his boss, or his policies, more vigorously. Bush said “I support the president” so often over the next four years he might as well have had the phrase tattooed on the inside of his eyelids.
We’ve already said quite a bit about Bush so here’s your briefest of primers. Born to wealth and privilege—hey, another one!—Bush attended the finest schools, and joined the Navy at the age of 18, becoming one of its youngest aviators. He flew numerous missions as the pilot of a three-person bomber crew, and lost plenty of friends and fellow pilots as the war in the Pacific dragged on. Then, on September 2, 1944, he was shot down. His two crewmates didn’t make it, and laying in a tiny rescue raft in the middle of the Pacific, bloody and wounded, the waves and tides pushing him towards Japanese held territory and likely capture and death—he found purpose. Maybe it was God, though as a Yankee Episcopalian one didn’t discuss such things publicly, but he pledged to spend the rest of his life in public service.
Well, public service at the top. Bush epitomized the idea of noblesse oblige, that to whom much is given much is expected and that those in charge, should be. He rose the political ranks as described before, ultimately becoming President in 1989, just as the Cold War seemed ready to end, or explode. At least one of the three historians on this podcast has written that Bush’s quiet, confident, behind-the-scenes diplomacy helped keep the peace during a time of tremendous tumult, and the sad fact of politics is that quiet, confident, behind-the-scenes diplomacy might impress historians, but it doesn’t do much to impress voters. Arguably more occurred on the foreign affairs front during Bush’s sole term in office than during any other four year stretch—the End of the Cold War, Tiananmen Square, the invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, German reunification, and on and on. But voters care about jobs, and the long-term economic consequences of Reagonomics came due on Bush’s watch. Unemployment soared, and confidence in America and its future plummeted. Their nation stood undisputed on the global stage by the close of Bush’s first term, yet nearly ¾ of Americans polled in 1992 said their country was headed in the wrong direction.
Challenged on the right by nativist Pat Buchanan, then from the center from independent Ross Perot and center-left Democrat Bill Clinton, Bush became an ex-president in 1993. And of course, the father of president after that, though that’s for a later episode.
We were thrilled for this episode not only to call upon great historians, but participants in history as well. This is something easier done for recent presidents, of course, than for 19th century ones. So today we began our conversation speaking to Professor Tim Naftali of New York University and a regular contributor to CNN. Author of numerous books on diplomacy and politics, Tim’s claim to fame today was the biography of Bush 41 he did for the famed American Presidents Series. We then talked to Fred McClure, a veteran of the Bush Administration, and chief legislative aide to the president from 1989 to 1991. You’ll soon hear why Fred liked to joke that this job meant he was the president’s “chief spear-catcher,” except, it was no joke. Finally, we spoke to SMU’s Neil Foley, The Robert and Nancy Dedman Chair in History and author of, among other works, Mexicans and the Making of America.
Together our conversations highlighted two themes:
That the politics of race don’t have to be central to a president’s agenda to leave their mark.
Actually, actually the more we thought about it, we want to repeat the first theme: that the politics of race don’t have to be central to a president’s agenda to leave their mark on history.
Guests:
Dr. Timothy Naftali is a Clinical Associate Professor of Public Service and a Clinical Associate Professor of History, is director of NYU's undergraduate Public Policy Major. A native of Montreal and a graduate of Yale with a doctorate in history from Harvard, Naftali writes on national security and intelligence policy, international history and presidential history. Using Soviet-era documents, he and Russian academic Aleksandr Fursenko wrote the prize-winning One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964 and Khrushchev’s Cold War, the latter winning the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature in 2007 and inclusion on Foreign Affairs’ 2014 list of the ten best books on the Cold War. As a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, Naftali wrote a history of US counterterrorism policy, published as Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism. Most recently, with Peter Baker, Jeffrey Engel and Jon Meacham, he wrote Impeachment: An American History.
Naftali came to NYU Wagner after serving as the founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, where he authored the Library's nationally acclaimed exhibit on Watergate and oversaw the release of 1.3 million pages of presidential documents and nearly 700 hours of the infamous Nixon tapes. Naftali, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN.com, The Los Angeles Times, Slate and Foreign Affairs, is a CNN presidential historian. Most recently, he was featured in CNN’s The 2000s, Presidents Under Fire: The History of Impeachment and The Bush Years: Family, Duty, Power. In addition, he served as historical consultant to the CNN Original Series "Tricky Dick" and the NETFLIX series, Designated Survivor.
Follow Dr. Naftali on Twitter.
Mr. Fred McClure is Executive Director of The Leadership Initiative at Texas A&M University. Mr. McClure was previously the Chief Executive Officer for the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, Mr. McClure was the Washington, DC, managing partner for the international law firm, SNR Denton. He has also served as Assistant for Legislative Affairs to President George H.W. Bush and as Special Assistant for Legislative Affairs to President Ronald Reagan. His previous U.S. government service includes Legislative Director to U.S. Senator John Tower, Associate Deputy U.S. Attorney General and Chairman of the Board of Visitors of the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1995, Governor George W. Bush appointed Mr. McClure to The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents where he served as vice chairman.
Mr. McClure also serves as Lead Director on the Board for Alex Lee, Inc., a North Carolina-based food retailer and distributor. In 2011-12 he served as President of The University Club of Washington, D.C. Having served as Chairman from 1998 to 2002, Mr. McClure is a Board member of the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association.
A former Managing Shareholder of Winstead, Sechrest and Minick, Mr. McClure previously served as Managing Director of Public Strategies Incorporated and as Government Affairs Staff Vice President of Texas Air Corporation.
Mr. McClure graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in agricultural economics, earned summa cum laude honors, was chosen Phi Kappa Phi, elected student body president and received the Brown-Rudder Outstanding Student Award. He received a Juris Doctor degree from Baylor University in 1981.
In 1991 Mr. McClure was named the 115th Distinguished Alumnus of Texas A&M University and an Outstanding Young Alumnus of Baylor University. He has served as Vice President of the Texas A&M University Association of Former Students and as a member of the Board of Directors of the 12th Man Foundation. In 1994, Time magazine named Mr. McClure as one of America’s 50 most promising leaders age 40 and under.
Dr. Neil Foley received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, Masters from both Georgetown and the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Professor Foley's current research centers on the politics of immigration and citizenship in North America and Europe; Nativism/Xenophobia and ethno-nationalist movements globally; changing constructions of race, citizenship, and transnational identity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands; migration studies; and comparative civil rights politics of African, Asian, and Latinx Americans.
He is co-editor (with James Hollifield) of Understanding Global Migration (forthcoming, Stanford University Press, 2021) and the author of The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas (University of California Press, 1997); Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Harvard University Press, 2010), Mexicans in the Making of America (Harvard University Press, 2014), Teaching Mexican American History (American Historical Association, 2002, co-authored with John R. Chávez); and Reflexiones: New Directions in Mexican American Studies (University of Texas Press, 1998).
Professor Foley is a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians and has lectured extensively in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. For a number of years he lived and taught in Mexico (Mexico City), Germany (Berlin, Heidelberg, Stuttgart), Spain (Salamanca, Zaragoza), and Japan (Misawa; Naha, Okinawa). He also spent two years living on aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean Sea where he taught sailors of the U.S. Navy's 6th Fleet in its Program for Afloat College Education (PACE).