Reagan's Disciple

Preface

The idea for this book grew out of a joint presentation, “A Tale of Two Presidents,” that the two of us gave March 27, 2006, at Stanford University where we were Hoover Media Fellows. The presidents were Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The two of us are Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon, father and son, who have occasionally worked together as reporters but are collaborating on a book for the first time. We were and remain fascinated by the degree to which George W. Bush, the son of President George H. W. Bush, modeled—or tried to model—his presidency not after his father’s but after Ronald Reagan’s. On matters of style and substance alike, the younger Bush and several of his aides and consultants evoked the Reagan model at every opportunity. Members of the Reagan team, at least when Bush was riding high in public approval, had welcomed the comparisons as ratification that their hero was the gold standard for presidents—and even more so for Republican presidential candidates.

In 1980 Reagan won the White House by easily besting the senior Bush and five other candidates for the Republican Party nomination and then defeating incumbent President Jimmy Carter. Four years later, under the gauzy slogan of “Morning Again in America,” Reagan won reelection in an impressive forty-nine-state landslide. Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, ascended to the Oval Office in 1988 in an election that was largely a referendum on Reagan and his policies. On his own in 1992, Bush lost to Bill Clinton in a three-way race. So it was not surprising that Team Bush relished Reagan comparisons in the 2000 presidential campaign. Ken Khachigian, a premier speechwriter for Reagan, described Bush as lacking “artifice or contrivance,” in supposed contrast to Democratic nominee Al Gore. “If nothing else, George W. Bush appears genuine,” Khachigian said. “That’s Ronald Reagan all over the place.” Scott McClellan, campaign spokesman and later White House press secretary, would parry virtually any criticism by invoking Reagan’s name. (“Like Ronald Reagan, Governor Bush understands that the role of a leader is to set a clear agenda,” he would say. “Like Ronald Reagan, Governor Bush is setting up a positive, uplifting tone for the country.”)

Even when the younger Bush was compared to his father, Reagan was part of the equation. When the voting ended on November 7, 2000, a key Bush adviser in Austin was asked by a British journalist what kind of president the Texas governor would make. “Truly, I think he will be a cross between his dad and Ronald Reagan,” the aide replied. “He has the innate decency of his father and the ability of Reagan to set a broad course.”¹ The “cross” Team Bush had in mind was the melding of Forty-One’s “kinder and gentler” impulses with Reagan’s conservatism on taxes, social policy, and America’s place in the world. In this construct, taxes would be cut not only because government was insatiable and its programs counter-productive, but also because it was better for poor people. This was an echo of supply-side economics, which held that tax reductions spurred productivity and helped everyone.

Jack Kemp, a Republican House member representing a working-class district in Buffalo, had popularized supply-side in the late 1970s to attract Democrats who distrusted traditional Republican polices of balanced budgets and high interest rates. Kemp often quoted President John F. Kennedy, who had proposed tax cuts and famously said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” Reagan, also given to quoting JFK and attentive to measures that appealed to independent and Democratic voters, had embraced supply-side economics during the 1980 presidential campaign. George H. W. Bush, in contrast, had dismissed the theory as “voodoo economics,” a view he necessarily recanted when he became Reagan’s running mate. But tax policy proved a continuing stumbling block for the elder Bush. As the 1988 presidential nominee, he promised never to raise taxes. Breaking this promise contributed to his defeat four years later and made an indelible impression on his son. George W. Bush would not repeat his father’s political mistake, and his tax cuts stamped him as the Gipper’s heir. This phenomenon was examined in “Reagan’s Son,” an incisive cover story by Bill Keller in The New York Times Magazine on January 26, 2003, seven weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Keller, soon to become the executive editor of his newspaper, described a president with Reagan-like priorities in judicial appointments and deployment of American power as well as tax-cutting. Furthermore, wrote Keller, “Reagan DNA” was imprinted in the staffing and training of the George W. Bush administration. Several longtime Reagan aides agreed. One of them, Hoover Institution scholar Martin C. Anderson, who had served as Reagan’s domestic policy adviser, said that when he gave tutorials to Bush it felt as if he were briefing a younger version of Reagan. Michael K. Deaver, who had been closer to the Reagans than any other White House aide, also saw Bush’s behavior as Reaganesque. “I mean, his father was supposed to be the third term of the Reagan presidency—but then he wasn’t,” Deaver said. “This guy is.”

Why did Reagan have such a magical hold on his followers—and for that matter, on the American people? These questions have been examined in Lou Cannon’s books and will, in shorter compass, be reexamined in this one. There are three key points. The first is that conservatives saw Reagan as their champion because he led them out of the political wilderness to national power and, many of them believe, to greatness. This adoration was expressed at a December 1, 1988, Republican dinner by Kemp, who described himself as a “foot-soldier... in the Reagan army” and noted that over the years he had introduced Reagan as George Gipp, as a modern-day Sir Thomas More, and as Alexander the Great. Then, with President-elect George H. W. Bush in attendance, Kemp gazed at Reagan and gushed, “with all due respect to Winston Churchill and with all due respect to William Manchester, who wrote The Last Lion, Churchill was not the ‘last lion’ of the twentieth century. He’s with us tonight: Ronald Wilson Reagan.”²

The second reason for Reagan’s iconic status is that a significant majority of Americans, including many Democrats and independents, viewed him as a reassuring figure who had steadied the nation in troubled times and, by dealing successfully with the Soviet Union, made the world a safer place. Even though President Reagan’s popularity had been nicked by the Iran-contra affair, he finished his two terms with approval ratings ranging from 63 percent (Gallup) to 68 percent (The New York Times–CBS), the highest for any president who has left office alive. In a Gallup Poll in 2001, Americans ranked Reagan as the greatest president of all time, slightly ahead of John F. Kennedy, with Abraham Lincoln third. (Even among more skeptical academic historians, Reagan’s ratings have slowly advanced. These historians placed Reagan twenty-second when he left office; in four more recent surveys he has ranked anywhere from third to eleventh.)

The third reason Reagan remains popular is that in the eyes of many he benefits in comparison to his successors. The first Bush lost the public’s confidence by barely responding to recession—and lost his reelection bid. Clinton’s reputation was damaged while he was president by fund-raising and sex scandals, and after he left office by retrospective criticism that he had failed to prepare America for terrorist attacks. Americans across the political spectrum are disillusioned with George W. Bush for a host of reasons, most of all the Iraq War. In their eagerness to discredit him, political liberals who couldn’t stand Reagan when he was alive have discovered hitherto unrecognized qualities of greatness in the fortieth president. Disappointed conservatives, meanwhile, have recast Bush as the Anti-Reagan. “Bush is not a conservative,” wrote Jeffrey Hart, the conservative academic and author of The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times. “He is a right-wing ideologue.”³ In this same essay Hart quoted conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. as defining true conservatism as “the politics of reality,” adding that Bush did not meet this standard. For his part, Bill Buckley cooled first on the Iraq War, and then on the Bush presidency itself. Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, in Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, denounces Bush on the book’s first page as a “pretend conservative” who, despite cutting taxes, never made any meaningful attempts to rein in federal spending. “He has more in common with liberals, who see no limits to state power as long as it is used to advance what they think is right,” Bartlett said of GWB. The phrase coined by Bush defender Fred Barnes—“big-government conservatism”—has been used derisively in National Review and other conservative publications.

There are two principal reasons why conservatives have soured on George W. Bush. One is uneasiness about the war. The other is Bush’s blithe embrace of deficit spending, necessitated, in part, to finance that war. As the U.S. occupation of Iraq turned into a stalemate, a spirited debate broke out in liberal circles over whether Al Gore would have launched an invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. Gore, who said in the 2000 campaign that his guiding principle as president would be “WWJD” (what would Jesus do?), answered, as many Democrats have, that he would have invaded Afghanistan, but not Iraq. Conservatives began debating a similar question, but their concerns came under the heading of what can be termed “WWRRD?”

“Would Ronald Reagan have invaded Iraq?” Patrick J. Buchanan, Reagan’s onetime White House director of communications, asked in a 2004 column days after Reagan’s death. “Would he have declared a doctrine of preventive war to keep any rival nation from rising to where it might challenge us? Would he have crusaded for ‘world democratic revolution’? Was Reagan the first neoconservative?” Buchanan, who never favored the Iraq War—even when it appeared to be going well and was politically popular with a majority of Americans—argued no. And while it’s true that Buchanan is an idiosyncratic conservative and longtime critic of the entire Bush family, he was not alone. Conservative scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, coauthors of America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and Global Order, maintained that it is a “travesty” to even assert, as several prominent Iraq hawks have done, that Reagan would have invaded Iraq.

The purpose of this book is to examine that proposition and the broader questions surrounding it: Did it ever make sense to anoint George W. Bush the rightful inheritor of Reaganism? Once in the Oval Office, did he govern as Reagan governed and lead the nation in the direction Reagan would have led it? Finally, did the forty-third president of the United States ratify the Reagan Revolution—or derail it?

We trust that readers of this book who have followed the authors’ works over the years will expect an evenhanded and thorough examination of our subject matter from—in the old sense of the phrase—a fair and balanced point of view. Neither of us is partisan, an outlook made easier by the fact that we are not ideological. We come to our judgments with shoeleather reporting and analysis based on facts and historical context. Between the two of us, we have covered six of the last seven presidents and interviewed all seven. While reporting this book we drew on Carl’s access to Bush aides and former aides, such as Michael Gerson, Karl Rove, Peter Wehner, and Bush media maven Mark McKinnon, formerly a Texas Democrat; and on Lou’s longtime relationship with such GOP luminaries as Colin Powell, Michael Deaver, James Baker, Kenneth Duberstein, Edwin Meese, and George Shultz, among others. Carl has twice dined with George W. Bush; Lou had numerous interviews and exchanges with Ronald Reagan. Both of us, particularly Lou, have long known Dick Cheney. We respect these people without identifying with them, or with their Democratic critics. We believe reporters should be beyond politics. We see our role—as contemporary historians and biographers as well as journalists—as one of bearing witness to events and trying to understand them. In the pages that follow, we have tried to describe the essence of these two presidencies, the fortieth and the forty-third, and to compare them in a way that sheds light on what has happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the past three decades. We hope that this analysis will be particularly useful at a time when Americans are in the process of choosing their next president.

We realize we are joining a conversation in progress and have no illusion that what we say will be the last word on either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. This book is neither an anti-Bush polemic nor an apologia, and it makes no pretense of being a definitive account of how the United States became involved in the war in Iraq, a subject on which there are a wealth of excellent books. Being non-ideological, however, does not mean we are conflict averse. Reporters make judgments every day, and we have tried to confront the difficult questions raised by the George W. Bush presidency. The war in Iraq has revived the traditional American distrust of foreign entanglements, once labeled “isolationism,” that persist even in an age of globalism. It has encouraged some conservatives to say aloud what they muttered in the Reagan years: That deficits are a real problem and that many tax cuts are illusory. But the debate over the national direction is taking place during the Bush presidency in a different political context than the one faced by Reagan. Republicans were a minority in the House throughout Reagan’s presidency and in the Senate during his last two years in office. Until 2006, Republicans were mostly in control of Congress during the George W. Bush presidency; even now, they are more numerous in the House than at any time in the Reagan years. That fact proved a mixed blessing for Bush during his first six years in office. John Kerry was correct when he asserted that Bush hadn’t vetoed any spending bills, but Reagan didn’t veto many of them either, and he also, after his ballyhooed tax cuts of 1981, raised taxes several times without suffering much in conservative esteem. Given the Democratic majority in the House, many conservatives excused Reagan as doing the best he could.

Yet for all his second-term travails and the accompanying plunge in his popularity, Bush has unquestionably advanced the Reagan Revolution in significant ways. The Democrats, even while denouncing Bush’s tax cuts, have failed to make a serious effort to reverse them. The judiciary, most notably the Supreme Court, has become more conservative. Thus, the assertion made by Bill Keller that “Bush is in a sense the fruition of Reagan” is worth a close examination today, as it was in 2003. So, too, are the implications of Keller’s prescient conclusion: “If [Bush] fails, my guess is that it will be a failure not of caution but of overreaching, which means it will be failure on a grand scale.”

LOU AND CARL CANNON