Personal History

Our last dinner at my house was in November, after the election, in 1988, just as the Reagans were getting ready to leave Washington for California. Security surrounding the president had gotten much tighter. Although my door sits way back from the street, I was asked to put up a tent so that the president could get out of his car concealed from view. When I brought them in, I was told not to take them into the living room, because by then it was too crowded, but I simply ignored this and did so, and they were both quickly surrounded by well-wishing friends. The throng created one minor problem when someone knocked against a glass, which spilled a drink with ice on the floor. I was dumbstruck at seeing the president of the United States down on his hands and knees in the middle of the crowd, picking up the ice. On the phone the next day, Nancy told me this reminded her of something that had happened in the hospital after the assassination attempt. The president, who was not supposed to get out of bed, went to the bathroom and spilled some water on the floor in the process. When attendants came in, he was on his hands and knees wiping it up. Asked why, he said he was afraid the nurse would get into trouble.

The natural arm's-length relationship between the government and the press always takes on an even more adversarial nature during any presidential campaign. The election year of 1988 was no exception. There were the usual stresses and strains with both Bush and Michael Dukakis, his Democratic opponent, and there were some unusual ones. Both candidates, of course, complained about our coverage of their campaigns. Both visited the paper for editorial lunches, but our troubles with each of them mounted sharply, as did our editorial dismay at their campaigns.

I had known George Bush for years, not intimately but pleasantly. My father had invested in the oil company Bush had started as a young man, and I liked both George and Barbara and thought of them as fine moderate Republicans in the tradition of his father, Sen. Prescott Bush, whom I had also known. I hadn't seen much of them in the previous eight years, when he had served as vice president, but was well aware that he had been loyal to Reagan, politically as well as personally.

Newsweek, however, had gotten on the wrong side of the candidate when it published--the very week Bush had announced his intention to run for president--a cover story on the vice president titled ""Fighting the Wimp Factor.'' The ""wimp'' label had been a thorn in the Bush campaign flesh since that time. The profile of Bush had been fair and complete, but the effect of the word ""wimp'' crying out from the cover on newsstands everywhere was hard to overcome.

What followed was not untypical: the Bush people distanced themselves from Newsweek reporters. Finally, in September 1988, a meeting was set up at the vice president's residence, between [editor] Rick Smith, [Washington bureau chief] Evan Thomas, and me from Newsweek, and Bush, Jim Baker, and Craig Fuller, Bush's chief of staff. Bush claimed that the whole story had been wildly distorted by playing up the word on the cover, for which he accurately blamed the editors. His family, whom he'd asked to cooperate on the story, was naturally upset and angry and had advised him that further cooperation with the magazine, in any but a technically correct manner, would only prove the point: that he was indeed a wimp.

I earnestly tried to explain about the complicated newsweekly process, until Bush, without relenting, said that Rick Smith and Jim Baker should talk. As the vice president and I walked toward the door, he whispered to me in the nicest possible way, ""We'll work it out, but don't tell them.'' Rick did get together with Baker and managed to clear the air enough so that we could do the necessary background reporting, but the issue never really died and was compounded by others.