What It Takes Read Online Free PDF Page A

philosophy of government. ... But the first answer was true. George Bush was trying to become President by making friends, one by one if need be, and Ronald Reagan was a Big One.
    It certainly didn’t matter that they disagreed—that Voodoo Economics thing, and a few other differences, on civil rights, the environment, education, energy, and U.S. policy on Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Soviet relations. Of course they disagreed, because George Bush knew five times more about the governments of the world—his own included—than Ronald Reagan ever would. But it didn’t matter! The fact is, they didn’t disagree anymore, because George Bush would not disagree with the President. This was another of George Bush’s talents: accommodation. He had the capacity to act on the judgments of others, to live within the bounds of received wisdom. It was a talent that had smoothed his path from his parents’ home, through prep school and the U.S. Navy, where the lessons of life were delivered explicitly, and later through Yale, business, and politics, where things grew murkier, and the judgments one lived by had to be doped out. But he did divine them: he was always sensitive to the ethic around him. And to the extent he could accommodate himself, he flourished, and made friends every step of the way. In 1964, he first ran for Senate as a Goldwater man, and though Bush lost, Goldwater was still a friend twenty-two years later. In 1966, for a House seat from Houston, he ran as a Main Street Republican, then served and voted with the moderate mainstream, as a backer of Richard Nixon. And in 1970, when he ran and lost for Senate again (this time, slightly to the left of his rival), he asked his Big Friend, President Nixon, for a job at the UN, which he’d roundly reviled as a Goldwater man. By 1980, the accommodation to Ronald Reagan was just a walk in the park.
    And it did not matter if the Reaganauts couldn’t see him as one of their own. They screwed most of his friends out of jobs, stopped talking when he came into the room, made jokes about him when he was absent. He knew it, just as surely as Johnson had known. Hell, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out, the way reporters would ask his staff: “People, uh, in the Cabinet meetings tell me Bush never says anything. ... Is that true?” Or they’d just print it: “ Administration sources said the Vice President had nothing to contribute. ...” Of course he knew who the sources were. Some were the same hypocrites who came to his office before the meeting, asking him to back their schemes, talk to the President for them. ... Then, when he wouldn’t, they’d have some columnist in for breakfast and, just in passing, smiling, with a wedge of grapefruit on their spoons, they’d saw Bush off at the knees. Oh, he knew the game! Still, he never got into that White House cockfight: an eye for an eye, a leak for a leak. Could have had a pro, Jimmy Baker, do it for him. But he wouldn’t: it was a matter of loyalty to the team, loyalty to the President; most of all, a matter of discipline.
    This was another of Bush’s great talents: personal discipline. There were no leaks from the OVP: there was not one story saying George Bush was unhappy with this or that decision, or the President overrode objections from George Bush. In fact, there were no stories suggesting Bush had opinions at all, even before a decision came down, even when it would have gotten him off the hook. It would have been so easy: when Ed Meese was filling Reagan’s ear with some Neanderthal antiblack screed, sticking the administration’s nose into a civil rights fight, putting them all in the soup ...on the wrong side of the issue! And here’s a reporter in Bush’s armchair, gently inviting: “Mr. Vice President, it seems that you might be less comfortable with something like this. ...” But Bush wouldn’t bite. Never. Christ, the reporters were easy. One of his own aunts came at him, drove