What It Takes Read Online Free PDF

him right out of his chair, trying to have a serious discussion —why Ronald Reagan refused to have arms talks with the Russians. Years later, she was still half-convinced Bush was willfully stupid, or had the attention span of an eight-year-old. Didn’t matter! They could all think so, and he wouldn’t lift a finger to prove them wrong. He wouldn’t even let his staff help. His first Chief of Staff, Admiral Murphy, used to haul every staffer in for a talk, to let them know they had only one job: to help George Bush do his job, and his job was to help the President. There would be no disagreement between members of the Vice President’s staff and the President’s staff. They could not argue with anyone in the White House . Admiral Dan had them all in, down to the girls who’d answer the phones. And with the same flair he’d once shown as Commander of the Sixth Fleet, he’d warn:
    “Honey, tonight, you’re gonna go out with your boyfriend. And you’re gonna go to a bar, and you’re gonna have a drink. And you’re gonna want to tell him what a wonderful guy you’re working for, and what a great thing he did today ... and how he saved the President from the most awful thing that somebody else was trying to do. ... Sweetheart, you don’t know who’s in the next booth, do you? So ... DON’T SAY A GODDAM THING!”
    It got so the whole OVP was a whisper zone in that gray granite building across the street from the White House. People and paper moved back and forth down the dark, lofty halls of the Old EOB—earnest young people, of good families, sons and daughters of George Bush’s friends, would run between the offices, flushed with the press of business for the Vice President. And nothing came out! George Bush would go out to speak, all over the country, twenty, twenty-five days a month (he wouldn’t duck a chance to help the Party, the President) ... and nothing would be heard of him! True, the speeches weren’t about George Bush, or what he was doing, or what he thought. They weren’t about anything, really, except what a great country, and a great President, we had. That was fine with Bush. All the positions, all the speeches, were just politics to him. The rest, the friendships, or loyalty to the President, those were personal matters—matters of the personal code. That was where Bush’s talents lay, and the only thread of steel running through his life to his seventh decade. He wasn’t going to let politics change the way he was. God forbid! It was all personal with George Bush. He couldn’t see things any other way.
    Of course, he would accommodate. After he came off like such a stiff in the ’84 reelection, and his personal polls took a dive, and reporters on his plane got so nasty, then his friends ganged up and made him change the staff: they told him he had to, if he ever wanted to be President; they called it a more “political” support team. That’s when he signed on Lee Atwater—neither son nor friend to any old Bush-friend—to run the PAC and the campaign to come. That’s when he had to let Dan Murphy go, and hire Craig Fuller as the new Chief of Staff. Fuller was a young White House pro: neat, calm, organized, and people said he knew how to stick the knife, if he had to. But he was another stranger. Jeez, Bush would call the office now, and half the people who answered were strangers! He’d live with it, if that’s what it took. But it just wasn’t ... friendly. And it wasn’t really fair to Dan. Those rules weren’t Dan’s rules, they were Bush’s. Bush told him just how he meant to do the job, even before he got elected. It was the fall of ’80, at the same lunch where he offered Dan the job. Murphy had been his deputy at the CIA. They could talk frankly. And Bush told him point-blank, wanted him to know how it was going to be, had to be ...
    “I’ve thought a lot about it,” Bush said. “I know I’m not gonna have much input on policy, nothing substantive to do at