Bob and George Go to Washington or The Post-Watergate Scramble
George Bush and Bob Strauss are battling to see whether the Democrats or the Republicans will pick up the nation’s political pieces. Sounds straightforward. Well, it’s not.
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It is also one of the most fearsome places in America to eat breakfast, at least if one is the day’s “guest of honor.” To sit, at eight in the morning, surrounded by two dozen columnists and reporters like, say, Peter Lisagor, Bob Novak, David Broder, Roscoe Drummond, et al., all of them spearing you with sharp queries while you’re trying to eat badly discolored scrambled eggs, is not the cheeriest way to begin one’s day.
David Broder has already done a little pump-priming. His Washington Post column this morning had taken to task an outfit called the Democratic Advisory Council of Elected Officials, a group set up earlier this year by Bob Strauss with the intention of developing policy statements that most party members could live with, if not necessarily adhere to. Broder dismissed the Council as an ineffectual “vacuum” and laid much of the blame on Strauss-appointed chairman Arthur Krim.
One of the revelations Strauss intends to “drop” at the breakfast, prompted somewhat by Broder’s piece, is that he is inaugurating a number of “task forces” on various policy areas—environment, energy, foreign policy, the usual—designed to fill that vacuum. The other Strauss announcement is that a woman, Ms. Donna Smith of Kentucky, is being appointed to head a newly-created Washington liaison office for Democratic governors. The assembled press corps is not noticeably interested in either revelation.
Instead, while Strauss is grimly trying to ingest those eggs, they ask about changes in the party rules, why it is that a Democrat, Ohio Congressman Wayne Hays, is holding up passage of the Democrat-initiated campaign finance reforms, what did he think of off-year election returns, how long has he known Leon Jaworski, on and on and on, the eggs growing steadily colder and colder.
Strauss actually enjoys it, giving as good as he gets, spinning earthy parables in the best aw-shucks down-home manner, spitting four-letter expletives between mouthfuls of scrambled egg. The reporters, most of them veterans of two decades of the trapdoor callousness of Washington journalism, laugh with him, warm to him. For the most part he responds to their questions, but he does so indirectly, almost off-handedly, answering with a joke or a yarn or a wounded aphorism.
It’s an old game, of course, one that political reporters in Texas learned to play a long time ago. By erasing the line between questioner and respondent, transforming inquisition into conversation, guileless innocence emerges as honesty and opinion becomes a kind of aw-hell-we-all-know-thet fact. It’s shrewd, certainly: warmer, more human, but not altogether more truthful. One’s opponents, journalists particularly, are co-opted onto a neutral ground of quasi-friendship; compromise and agreement are facilitated, but debate and veracity get lost somewhere in the joshing and backslapping. Bob Strauss plays the game as an All-Pro.
Peter Lisagor is sitting next to him, trying to pin him down on Watergate; specifically, if Strauss thinks Nixon is as inept and bankrupt as he says, why not call for his impeachment? And, carrying that a step further, why doesn’t the Democratic Congress put its votes where its mouth is and vote impeachment instead of just yammering on about corruption and credibility?
Strauss is a little cornered on this one, says that it would look awfully partisan for the Democrats, or for him as Democratic chairman, to actually call for Nixon’s impeachment, “and if there’s anything this country can’t afford it’s for this mess to become a partisan fight, it might tear the country apart.”
Lisagor isn’t buying this, presses harder, wants to know why it’s any less partisan to badmouth the president for “illegal acts” than to do the next logical thing, i.e., to impeach him for those “illegal acts.”
Strauss is looking for cover: “It’s just like. … ”
That’s the tip-off that a yarn is coming.
” … those strip-tease dancers they used to have at carnivals and county fairs. They’d have a barker outside just like Nixon hollerin ‘C’mon in, she’ll take it all off.’ And when I was a boy we’d break our asses to get our sweaty little palms on a quarter so we could see the naked dancers. We’d go every time. … ”
Strauss is just getting started now, evoking all the sweaty-palmed horniness of a Lockhart, Texas, twelve-year-old, his eyes gleaming, grinning, two dozen hardnosed powerhouse newspapermen starting to smile.
” … the whole works’d be in this big carnival tent, and you’d get inside and its just darker’n hell except for they’ve got this light on the stage, and they’d start playin an old Victrola and the girls’d come on out. … ”
Strauss is gesturing and grinning, glancing around the table of reporters, looking them straight in the eye, smiling, drawing them in, back to Lockhart in the Twenties, watching dancing girls.
” … and they’d be bumpin and grindin and we’d be panting and sweatin. … ”
Even Lisagor is grinning, listening, and he’s lost it.
” … and then they’d ssslloooowwwlly take off a little bit of clothes, and then another little bit, and then that damn barker’d say ‘Well, that’s it for this show, need another quarter fer the next one,’ and so we’d have to go hurry up and find another quarter for the rest of it … ”
The reporters have long since quit taking notes, put up their pencils, chuckling to one another.
” … and we’d probably spent a couple dollars by this time, and she’s still takin off her clothes, and that barker is still breakin in just when it’s goin good, and I’ll be damned if I never did get to see that little old g-string. … ”
He’s a good yarn-spinner, Strauss is, able to hold them all, interest them, bring them along.
” … and it’s just like Nixon, he’s just like that old carnival barker, just strippin a little bit here, and a little bit there, and then sendin you away till you end up payin for some more. Then he’ll tell you just a little bit more about what’s goin on, but you never do get to see that g-string, he never does really get down and tell you the whole truth.”
The reporters have all guffawed and applauded Strauss’ earthy raconteurism, and he’s home free. They’re letting him off the hook, they know, but then he’d answered most of their questions, put on a good show, been infinitely better than most of the up-tight fence-straddlers that come to breakfast here.
On the way out, David Broder stops to shake hands, smiling, says “I don’t think The Christian Science Monitor has been this scandalized since Pete McClosky came here and said ‘bullshit.’ ”
WHATEVER BENIGN STAR IT IS that tends George Bush’s destiny, lights his ambition, it was early on trapped in the flawed orbit of Richard Nixon. Bush’s meteoric ascent, in a decade’s time, from county GOP chairman to national chairman, including his prestigious ambassadorship to the United Nations, was due largely to the strong tug of Nixonian gravity. Likewise, his blunted hopes and dimmed future, like the Comet Kohoutek, result from the too-close approach to a fatal sun.
George Bush first met Richard Nixon in the Fifties, when the latter was vice president and the former was the son of a wealthy, popular U.S. senator. It was not until years later, though, when Bush was pursuing his own political career, that the two became friends.
Nixon campaigned for Bush in both 1964 and 1966, when Bush was first drawing attention as a hot property and Nixon was in mid-passage from crisis to crisis. When Nixon became president, Bush became a teacher’s pet; together with other young, moderate Republicans—Rumsfeld, Ruckelshaus, Riegle, Finch—he was soon a presidential favorite, described in the press as one of “Nixon’s Men.” Like Bush, they were all intelligent and ambitious, hardworking, possessed of an easy and casual charm. Bush is the only one still in the close company of the president.
When Bush gave up his safe congressional seat to run again for the Senate in 1970, he was invited out to San Clemente for a presidential pep-talk. Almost immediately, rumors began passing through Washington that, should he win, Bush might well replace Spiro Agnew as Nixon’s 1972 running mate. The rumor’s currency was abetted by the known fact that in 1968, though just a lowly freshman congressman, Bush was on a pared-down list of ten possibilities when Nixon was first nominated. In the two years since, the Bush-Nixon rapport had grown steadily closer.
Bush announced for the Senate fully expecting to win. Nixon was high in the polls, the Southern Strategy was lurching along at full throttle, and Ralph Yarborough was again the Democratic incumbent. Fully two years before the election, Bush staffers began building an arsenal to use against him. Remembers one of them: “We had a whole library on Yarborough, we knew more about him than his wife and his mother put together.”
My Library
