The American Vice Presidency (78 page)

As a strong Reagan man in the Senate, he supported the president’s 1981 tax cuts and then his subsequent tax increase of nearly ninety-nine billion dollars, despite continuing his unremitting opposition to higher taxes. But with the rate of unemployment among young blacks as high as 40 percent, he lobbied to save youth job training from Reagan’s ax. A subcommittee he chaired drafted, with the Democratic senator Ted Kennedy, the Quayle-Kennedy Job Training Partnership Act, providing $3.9 billion to be dispensed at the local and state levels.

The bipartisan legislation added some heft to Quayle’s reputation, and he was easily reelected to the Senate in 1986. Little was heard from him into the presidential year of 1988, but from time to time he dropped by the office of Vice President George Bush, by now a presidential candidate. Through increased speaking on the Senate floor, attendance at Senate Republican lunches also attended by Bush, and more of those drop-ins to Bush’s vice presidential office, just off the Senate floor, Quayle made himself known to the vice president.

Next, Quayle took some positions in the Senate that aligned him with Bush on matters in dispute within the Reagan administration, particularly the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Soviet Union. That summer he urged Bush to press Reagan to veto a three hundred billion dollar defense budget bill he considered cut too deeply by the Democrats, while agreeing with Bush that discretion on arms control be reserved to the president. Reagan used his veto, highlighting the Republicans’ pro-defense posture entering the 1988 campaign. Quayle said later, “That was the turning, that was the major point” in his relationship with Bush.
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As the 1988 convention opened and Bush was nominated on the first ballot, the only suspense left was the identity of his running mate. Any idea of Dan Quayle as a nominee for vice president of the United States would have been regarded as sheer fantasy. Bush did not reveal his choice even to Reagan until the president was boarding his plane from the convention city, New Orleans. Bush was determined, on the advice of the media adviser Roger Ailes, to use his selection to demonstrate that after eight years under Ronald Reagan’s shadow he was taking charge of his own course. Also, he wanted to show he was not the bland figure so often painted by critics but capable of springing a surprise, throwing a “long ball” as Ailes put it, at a convention having little drama.

After Reagan had departed, Bush called Quayle and then boarded an old paddle-wheel riverboat down the Mississippi to the New Orleans pier, where Quayle was told to meet his arrival. Watching the scene on television from their hotel room were the two seasoned political professionals already assigned to run the vice presidential campaign—Stuart Spencer of California, on old Reagan and Ford hand, and Joe Canzeri of New York, a veteran of Nelson Rockefeller campaigns. They didn’t know Quayle, and he didn’t know them.

Dan and Marilyn Quayle were at dockside, and when Bush disembarked and introduced his running mate, the ebullient young Hoosier raced forward and enthusiastically embraced his political benefactor. As Quayle grabbed the thunderstruck Bush in a bear hug, Spencer, watching the TV screen, told his sidekick, “Well, we gotta correct that.”
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Quayle himself later described his effervescent entry into the national limelight thus: “I was talking like a junior senator in campaign overdrive. I was picked, in part, for my youth, but this was a little too youthful—not vice-presidential nor, given the nature of that office, potentially presidential … but I was energized and proud, and I was wearing my emotions on my shirtsleeves.”
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Thus began the “handling” of Dan Quayle that was to guide, and torment, the new Republican vice presidential nominee between then and the election in November. Canzeri was immediately dispatched to pick up Quayle at his hotel to prepare him for what was to come. The next morning at a news conference, Quayle was subjected to a withering bombardment
about everything from the Paula Parkinson golf weekend to his National Guard service and failure to serve in Vietnam, and he did not handle himself well. He brushed off the query about Parkinson and called the question about not serving in Vietnam “a cheap shot.” And he added naively, “I did not know in 1969 [when he entered the Guard] that I would be in this room today.”
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Quayle was paraded that night into each of the television network booths at the convention hall. When Tom Brokaw of NBC asked whether he had received special help in getting into the National Guard, he acknowledged that “phone calls were made.” When Dan Rather at CBS asked him what his worst fear was, he blurted out, “Paula Parkinson.” The rumor soon spread that Quayle would be dropped from the ticket. But according to Rich Bond, who had run Bush’s upset caucus victory in Iowa in 1980, the immediate orders concerning the rumor were: “Squash it. Squash that one like a bug.”
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Memories of the fiasco that had followed George McGovern’s dumping of Tom Eagleton in 1972 assured that quick decision.

In another news conference in his home town of Huntington, Quayle offered more evasive or confused answers while local supporters jeered the inquisitorial press. He was brought back to Washington for what Bond called “Dan Quayle goes to candidate school,” run by his professional campaign handlers.
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Spencer and Canzeri said, “We knew we were going to have to script him,” but as stories mounted about how Quayle was being “handled,” he grew more irritated. In September before the City Club of Chicago he threw away the script prepared for him on national defense and winged it. He was disorganized, guilty of misquotes, and performed poorly.
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The nadir of Quayle’s troubles came in his debate with the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Senator Lloyd Bentsen. When asked what was the first thing he would do were he suddenly to become president, Quayle haltingly said, “First I’d say a prayer for myself and for the country I’m about to lead, and then I would assemble [the president’s] people and talk.” Tom Brokaw pressed him on what he actually would do, and he answered by talking about his experience. “I have far more experience than many others who sought the office of vice president in this country,” he said. “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.” Bentsen pounced. “Senator,” he said, “I served with
Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” Quayle lamely replied, “That really was uncalled for, Senator.”
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The Quayle camp was stunned, in part because Quayle had made that comparison on earlier occasions, and his advisers, including his wife, had counseled him to abandon it. Long after the debate, he insisted, “The comparison of myself and Kennedy on this point was relevant, because by 1960 he had served six years in the House and eight in the Senate, almost what I had, and he was running for the presidency itself.”
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Canzeri later blamed the misstep on Quayle’s short attention span, cruelly observing, “He was like a kid. Ask him to turn off a light, and by the time he gets to the switch, he’s forgotten what he went for.”
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Quayle blamed it all on his handlers, writing later, “My biggest mistake was allowing myself to be put in a position where I couldn’t take responsibility for anything—my schedule, my press availability, my own words and movements.”
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As destructive as the exchange with Bentsen was to Quayle’s credibility, on Election Night the Bush-Quayle ticket won over the Democratic ticket of Michael Dukakis and Bentsen. Quayle now had a second chance to make a good impression on the American voters. On the eve of the inauguration of the new administration, he quoted Winston Churchill on what he had just been through: “There is nothing more exhilarating in life than to be shot at without result.”
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In taking office, Quayle concentrated on two executive responsibilities given to him, chairing the National Space Council and the Council on Competitiveness, where he could carry the conservative flag against troublesome environmental regulations. He also undertook ceremonial duties abroad, with some political risk. Meeting in El Salvador with the retiring president, José Napoleón Duarte, he clumsily said the United States would “work toward the elimination of human rights.” On return, when the Republican National Committee censured the Louisiana legislator and former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, Quayle commended the RNC for its “censorship” of him.
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On an early Quayle trip to the Far East, a host of American reporters signed up for what came to be called the “gaffe watch.” They were rewarded on a refueling stop when he treated the locals to a geography lesson, Quayle style: “Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in
the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.” At a stop in Pago Pago, American Samoa, where the famous resort is pronounced “Pango Pango,” he botched it as “Pogo Pogo,” as in the jumping stick or the old cartoon character. And he addressed a group of local schoolchildren as “happy campers,” leading the Samoan delegate to Congress to complain that he seemed to be “implying that the people of Samoa are simple, illiterate natives camped out in the jungle.”
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Back home, in discussing the United Negro Fund, whose slogan at the time was “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” it came out of Quayle as “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind, is very wasteful. How true that is.”
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Quayle himself admitted that saying he had simply “mangled” the motto wasn’t enough. “I fractured, scrambled and pureed” it.
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When an earthquake hit Northern California as millions of Americans watched a World Series game in San Francisco, Quayle inspected the damage and called it “a heart-rendering sight” at which “the loss of life will be irreplaceable.”
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Who could make up such malapropisms? But in an interview with the
Dallas Morning News
in November, Bush said Quayle would “absolutely” be his running mate again in 1992 if he wanted to be. When United Press International asked Quayle whether he might seek the presidency himself in 1996, he acknowledged, “Anytime you get into politics, being president crosses one’s mind.”
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Soon after, Bush was en route to Malta for a summit meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev when a coup attempt was made against President Corazón Aquino in the Philippines. On the advice of deputy national security adviser Robert Gates, Quayle called a meeting of the National Security Council and conveyed to Bush through White House communications its recommendation that American air cover be provided to keep rebel planes on the ground. Bush so ordered, this limited action worked, and the coup was foiled. Afterward, Quayle took credit as the man in charge with Bush airborne, noting, “I was the one asking the questions, seeking the options and pushing for a consensus.”
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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, also involved, later disputed his view. Powell wrote that it was his own intervention with Bush’s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, that avoided a tougher response, but he allowed that the vice president “did perform well in the Philippine situation,” though his aides “put a spin on the story that exaggerated Quayle’s role.”
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In early 1990 Bush sent the vice president to Latin America on an important damage-control mission after the administration’s invasion of Panama to overthrow dictator Manuel Noriega in violation of the charter of the Organization of American States. Two countries on Quayle’s itinerary, Mexico and Venezuela, balked at receiving him. But Quayle completed the other stops satisfactorily and without incident, except for another episode that kept the gaffe watch at work.

In Chile, Quayle took his wife to the port city of Valparaiso for lunch and some tourist shopping. There he bought a carved wooden figurine of a smiling native, whose top slid up to reveal its lower frontal anatomy popping up. Marilyn Quayle saw her husband about to buy it, so he desisted, but later he sent a Secret Service agent back to get it for him. In the news media, the stories about the “anatomically correct doll” overshadowed all the constructive work Quayle had done on the trip. In a speech to the National Press Club on return, an irate Marilyn called the doll episode “an ugly chapter in journalism and an ugly chapter in my own personal life.”
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One area in which Quayle was an unqualified success was in fund-raising for the party going into the 1990 midterm elections. By some estimates he raised more than fifteen million dollars for Republican candidates by segueing from the nice kid from Indiana into a slashing partisan. Noting he had beaten incumbents in his House and Senate races in Hoosierland, he bragged, “Believe me, you don’t beat incumbents by saying we’re all going to do a good job and I’m a nice guy. You beat incumbents by going for the jugular and by hammering the issues over and over again.”
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An important disagreement between Bush and Quayle came in the wake of a mushrooming deficit and the president’s resulting June 1990 decision to break his 1988 convention pledge of “no new taxes.” His agreement to a compromise with the Democratic congressional leaders shocked and angered fellow Republicans, especially conservatives, including Quayle. He wrote later that he had told Bush, “You shouldn’t do it. You got a bad deal and you should walk away.” But in the end he played the good soldier, “lobbying for a plan my heart wasn’t in,” rationalizing that doing so “actually gained me a more sympathetic ear than I might have gotten otherwise.”
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In any event, in the midterm congressional elections the Republicans lost one Senate and eight House seats.

In May 1991, when Bush was hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat
after jogging and a surgical procedure was considered to deal with it, more questioning ensued of Quayle’s remaining in the direct line of presidential succession. The concern proved unnecessary when Bush quickly returned to his Oval Office desk. Still,
Time
ran photos on its cover of five Republicans “who could be president,” omitting Quayle, and
Newsweek
showed him swinging a golf club and asked, “The Quayle handicap.… Is he a lightweight—or smarter than you think?” Nevertheless, Bush reiterated his intention of keeping him on the ticket. His running mate, he said, was getting “a bum rap in the press, pounding on him when he’s doing a first-rate job.”
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On subsequent trips to Japan and to central and eastern Europe, Quayle was free of gaffes, but he got little press credit for it, not qualifying as news.