Ronald Kaufman Oral History

I'm a big oral history buff. I'm on the Bush Library board, as I'm sure you all know from your work, and I've been pushing for oral history down there early on. So this is in place of that, I guess.

Back in the White House days there was a fellow from LSU [Louisiana State University], I think, who was an oral history guy. I think he worked with the archives. He was pretty famous. I can't remember his name. He did some oral history of, I think, the Vice Presidency. I tried to wrack my brains--a really nice guy--because he's got quite a bit of material that may be helpful to you in your project.

I think the best place to begin, Mr. Kaufman, is to ask you how you first got into politics and then we'll move into the Bush years.

The politics of Bush or politics in general?

Politics in general.

My only real politics, professionally speaking, has been for Bush. I was always the Bush sycophant in the project. I got involved in presidential politics as a volunteer back home in Quincy, Massachusetts, home of the Adamses. I got involved in politics as a volunteer, passing out bumper stickers for friends, that kind of stuff.

I went to Quincy Junior College. As a class project I ran a campaign for city council. It was in an old Italian section of Quincy and they never had a non-Italian-speaking Italian represent that area of Quincy, Mass., which is a city of 89,000 just southeast of Boston. The present candidate was an eastern Nazarene Foreign Minister who didn't fit at all, demographically. When I was a kid, we used to call him "Gronk." He was a big, tall guy. To make a long story short, we knocked off the incumbent Italian three-to-one in June, and he ended up being mayor later on for, like, fifteen years.

So I volunteered. A guy who became a good buddy of mine was a state rep. We went to the convention together in 1976. He went as a delegate. I went as a guest and fell in love with the process of presidential politics.

This was '76, [Ronald] Reagan-[Gerald] Ford?

The Reagan-Ford convention.

In Kansas City.

Actually, to become a delegate in the Republican Party, there are two ways to do it in most states. One is you run in a local caucus in each congressional district and they elect three people per CD [congressional district]. Then the rest of them are elected at large, either at a convention or by state committee or some other avenue. My friend who was a state rep wanted to be a delegate, so I ran the operation to get our friends to go to the local caucus to vote for him for delegate. This is kind of how we got started on presidential politics.

Okay.

We went to Kansas City, had a great time, and came back. Of course, as you know, [Jimmy] Carter won. And then in '77 my friend wanted to run for Governor of Massachusetts in '82. The next election was '78. He wasn't ready. We figured '82. We decided that we'd get involved early in the presidential process for '80 for some candidate, and use that candidate's organization and money to build a statewide organization in Massachusetts that would transfer to '82 so my friend could run for Governor, because we were two poor kids who had no money, basically.

In '77, if you remember, there was a whole raft of candidates on the Republican side--from Ronald Reagan, the favorite, to Howard Baker who was second, to John Connally, to George Herbert Walker Bush, to Ben Fernandez, who was born in a boxcar--remember back in those days? You guys remember this. It's very hard to talk to high school kids about this. They look at you like, "Who's Ronald Reagan?" It's tough to get old. To make a long story short, we narrowed it down to three candidates to help in '77--Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Howard Baker. Reagan, because he was the front-runner, Baker, because he was the minority leader and, win or lose, he could help my friend become Governor afterward, and George Bush, because he was born in Massachusetts, he had roots there, and had a great organizational sense of politics.

We didn't know any of the candidates, but those were kind of our research. We ruled out Reagan, figuring that two young punks from Massachusetts would never get close to Ronald Reagan, and we talked to Baker and he was totally--he's a great guy, Howard Baker, but his people were very unorganized. We met George Bush. He was very organized, very disciplined, and we fell in love. So we signed up for Bush early. At the time, I was running supermarkets, wrapping lettuce and stuff. Somewhere around '78 I quit my job and went to work to run the organization in Massachusetts.

My buddy at the time was a bright rising star of Massachusetts politics, which wasn't difficult, unfortunately, in Massachusetts. We lined up as cochairmen Andy Natsios, who now runs USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], Leon Lombardi, who is now a judge in Massachusetts, Paul Cellucci, who ran for Governor and now is our ambassador to Canada, and myself. The guy who was the chairman, my buddy, now my brother-in-law, of course is Andy Card. We all started working for him way back then. Other than me, they've all done pretty good in life. So that's how I got involved in politics, really, and that's how I got involved with President Bush and the Bush family.

So, in the '80 campaign, can you just give us some sense of what your responsibilities were?

Sure. Once we decided to go with Bush, Andy and I wrote this long memo to Jim Baker about how important Massachusetts could be. Because if you go back and look at the context--Iowa, of course, first, then New Hampshire--Massachusetts in that year was the first big state in the process of selecting delegates to the convention. So we wrote this long paper about how important Massachusetts should be to the process. He was born there, they could do pretty well in Iowa, do better in New Hampshire than they would in Massachusetts. There was a whole theory about life--which they bought as a good idea and gave us a relatively good budget, knowing that if we did well in Massachusetts, it would also help us in New Hampshire, so it made sense.

Andy, Paul, Bill, Andrew, all wanted me to be a campaign manager but at the time I had no experience so they had a big fight with Baker and ended up making me the political director and having someone with more experience be the campaign manager for Massachusetts. So I basically ran the organization in the primary.

As luck would have it, thanks to Rich Bond, we won Iowa when we weren't supposed to. But they came back in New Hampshire and cleaned our clock. Massachusetts was a week later. Everyone assumed we'd lose Massachusetts because of what happened in New Hampshire. We ended up winning Massachusetts at like three in the morning by a thousand votes. So we surprised the world and hung on to Massachusetts and for some reason, I got some credit for it.

Then, I went on the national team and they sent me to Connecticut to run the organization's phone banks in Connecticut, which was a week later. Again, in politics, there are great things that are true--truisms. What is it? "Don't be good, be lucky." When we got to Connecticut, we were behind by ten, twelve points. We got a little bump out of Massachusetts, and to make a long story short, we ended up winning Connecticut by two or three points.

Then they sent me to run western Pennsylvania, again in the primary against Reagan. Again we're behind by a bunch of points.

Is it down to just Reagan and Bush at this point?

It's getting to that point now, I guess. It's down to the two of them, pretty much. People dropped off pretty quickly. It should have been Baker. We actually--I skipped that part. It's kind of a fun story. Do you care about stories?

Yes, absolutely.

Even if they're not true?

Especially.

This is the funny story--I'm running the operation in Massachusetts and we had a great group. At one point in time in Massachusetts we had worked our heart out. After Iowa, we were at about 70 percent in the polls against the field, really, really doing good. But going back earlier, in the first week of November in '79, the first straw poll in the country was up in Maine at the state convention. It was put there on purpose by Bill Cohen, who was then a state senator and Howard Baker's right-hand guy. They had planned this whole convention in November to give Baker momentum coming out of a legislative session to the fact that Baker announced for the Presidency. The straw poll was at the state convention on a Saturday. He announced his candidacy on Friday or Thursday in Tennessee.

"Now that the session is over, now that I'm out, watch my smoke," Howard Baker said. "I'm going to go up to reannounce in New Hampshire, then go to Maine on Saturday and win the straw poll." That was kind of the whole--they rented a 727, or whatever they had back in 1979, and had all the press with them. They had the announcement tour in Maine at the state convention.

It was stacked so that the last speaker was supposed to be Baker. Anyway, I got a call five days before, saying that we're in trouble. Maine is one of Bush's six home states and all the polls show he's coming in fourth or fifth. It's going to be a disaster for us--the straw poll. Can you get some of your young punks from Massachusetts to come up? So on Saturday morning we had a couple of buses and two or three six-packs of Bloody Mary mix and we got in a bus and went up to Maine, to Portland, to the civic center where the convention was. Sure enough, we got there--I forget who was speaking--John Connally--and we were told, "You're in trouble. You're coming in fourth or fifth in the straw poll. This could be the beginning of the end for George Bush."

I had all the kids hidden on the side. It was a typical uneventful Republican state convention--the average age is 137. We got there and Connally's speaking. Half the people are asleep. He finishes and gets off. Luckily, Bush was second-to-last, so when they announced George Bush to the podium, I got my band of about 75 happy kids who go screaming out to the floor illegally, yelling, screaming, hollering, and stuff. They all had these red, white, and blue T-shirts. They finally got us off the floor.

The ambassador, who is not known to be exactly Daniel Webster's eloquence sometimes--I must say I love him--gave a great speech and we got screaming and he got going and the audience got caught in the crossfire a little bit, and it was one of the best speeches of his life. When he finished, instead of going off the back of the stage, I had him go through the audience, through the kids out on the floor again and he worked the floor. This story doesn't have to be this long.

No, no, this is good.

Tell me if you want it shorter, or longer. So, he came through the middle of the floor and we had woken everybody up and they were standing. It was great. They finally cleared us off the floor. Then they announced Howard Baker, and all the three-piece-suit types just couldn't match the enthusiasm. He gave--I think he was a little bit surprised--a flat speech and then he finished and they announced, "Okay, now it's over," and they explained how they were going to do the balloting. They passed the ballots out and explained.

As they're doing that, I had the kids all in the stands together with their red, white ,and blue T-shirts on. I went over and gave the band guy 50 bucks and had him play patriotic music so as people were voting, my Bush kids were singing "God Bless America" and all that stuff. Of course, the ambassador had taken off to go to the next stop in the state, thinking we were screwed anyway.

To make a long story longer, at the end they announced, "Okay, here's who came in last, first." Ben Fernandez got seven votes or whatever. Phil Gramm got ten. Keep in mind we thought we were going to come in, like, fifth. They announced that John Anderson came in fifth. If we came in fourth, we'd feel great about it. Then they announced that John Connally came in fourth. That means we came in third so we went crazy. Then they announced that Ronald Reagan came in third, which meant that we came in second, so we went nuts. Then they announced we won. We went crazy. People went nuts. People were crying. I'm going to cry now. It was unbelievable.

Going home on the bus, after a couple of pit stops for some more beer, I told the kids, "You guys and girls should be proud of what you did. Because of what you did today, it changed presidential politics. Howard Baker's campaign will probably go off the polls the wrong way, and we'll go the right way."

Sure enough, the next day, front page, "above the fold," as they say, in the New York Times was a picture of a kid screaming and the headline was, "Bush Upsets Baker in Maine" and it was the beginning of the real first kind of Bush victory that the kids in the bus will tell you led to his Vice Presidency. But it was one of those great moments--emotion actually stole the day from the big guys, from all the big shots with Baker. I haven't told that story for a long time.

That's probably fairly rare these days, right? The ability to--

Presidential politics is a big deal. Emotion still plays a part and, as candidates prove, emotion can carry a lot. John Anderson captured some emotion in '80, later on in the process. We had it for a while. We called it "Big Mo" if you remember, and Big Mo died somewhere along the way to New Hampshire. Ronald Reagan had some emotion in his campaign. Bill Clinton had emotion, but he got--so every now and then emotion--[John] McCain in the last cycle got some emotional people.

But it tends to be for a short period of time, for a cause versus a candidate, almost as much. And it tends to be marginalized in the end. So it is unusual where emotion can play a part and actually make a difference in the outcome. I would contend that the emotionalism of Anderson or McCain actually didn't make a difference in the end. It didn't really. The press wrote about it, people loved it, and it was a lot of fun. It made for good TV and stuff. In the end it probably didn't change the outcome.

Anyway, back to Pennsylvania. We left Connecticut and went to Pennsylvania. I was in charge of western Pennsylvania, again lucky. I was there for, like, three weeks and we were behind by twelve, fourteen points and we ended up winning by six or seven. We won because we overachieved in western Pennsylvania. I happened to be in western Pennsylvania, so all of a sudden, I'm smart. Then they sent me to Michigan, to take over Michigan.

I ended up taking over Michigan for the last month of the primary. Again we got lucky and in Reagan's blue-collar Michigan we ended up beating Reagan two-to-one. Then the clock ran out, in that Reagan picked up delegates in small states and caucuses and the press said, "It's over."

If you want little vignettes, if that helps, I can divert or just keep to the basic facts, whatever you want.

I like the vignettes. I think they add. We're trying to talk to history here. We're trying to--

History is like an accident. The view of history, the view of an accident, depends on where you stand, so keep that in mind. I have a strong view of everything but it's because of where I stood.

I got lucky in that the day before the election in Massachusetts, the ambassador came in for the last event before the Election Day, on Monday night, and we were all together at the plane before he leaves, with Jim Baker and Bob Teeter, our pollster. What's going to happen? The polls were looking bad. I said, "I think we're going to get lucky and hold on," which we did by a point or so.

We got lucky the Monday night before the election in Connecticut and I happened to be with those guys again. They asked the same question. It was too close to call. I said, "I think we're going to do all right." We won.

In Pittsburgh, the Monday night before the election, "Okay, Lucky, what do you think?" I said, "I think you can prove a case for a nice solid victory." In Michigan, we're in the county airport in Detroit--Wayne County Airport--the same scenario. The press lets out a report that we're doing well in Michigan, even though the polls are too close to call. But what was happening was the reporters were starting to write, regardless of what happens in Michigan, it appears that Reagan is about to go over the top in delegates needed to get elected in the ancillary states. We tried to make Michigan a big deal. We felt we could take on Reagan in Michigan. And beating Reagan in blue-collar Michigan was important to the theme of what we were trying to accomplish.

He's about to leave. He said, "Okay, what do you think?" And I said, "Well, either we made this race worth something or not, either we proved our case or not, either you're going to win big or you're going to lose here in Michigan. I think you're going to win big." You know how you say something and all the smart guys in the room kind of go, "Oh my God, that dumb bastard." We ended up beating Reagan two-to-one in Michigan. But the sad part is, on Election Day, the ambassador calls back and he said, "Do you really mean what you said yesterday?" I said, "Yes, it feels great. We're going to do great."

He called me at nine o'clock. The polls close at eight. Nine o'clock--we're pumped, we just kicked butt everywhere, great. I'm packing my bags to go to California. I know I can beat Reagan in California now. I watched the eleven o'clock news, and of course we're still celebrating and the lead on the eleven o'clock news wasn't, "Bush upsets Reagan in blue-collar Michigan," which would have given us--because now we're broke and we actually were on half-pay--that would have given us momentum to go to the next layer of states. It was, "Reagan goes over the top in delegates in Wyoming caucus," or something.

I'm sitting there watching TV and all the kids are going crazy and it's a real weird feeling from the ultimate high talking to the ambassador--we're going to go on--to realizing it's probably over, because it's all the feeding the beast and if you can't get momentum out of beating Reagan in Michigan two-to-one, then you can't get momentum any place. You're not going to raise the money. You're not going to do the things you need to do. So it was one of the weirdest political days of my life, feeling great about what we accomplished and knowing it was kind of meaningless. Sure enough, three or four days later he got out.

You did.

Yes, even though he had a marvelous victory. For me it was lucky. I was in four states. He only won four primaries, and I was in them. If they'd sent me to states like Florida, you wouldn't even be talking to me today. You wouldn't know who I am.

I don't know about that. Did you go to Detroit? Did you go to the convention?

Yes.

Can you tell us about your experiences there, and when the vice-presidential talk started to surface?

Okay. The trouble in doing this is it makes you sound like you're more important than you really are. I was a very tiny, tiny cog in a very big, big wheel. I was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time many times.

One thing I did the last month I was in Michigan for the primary--I found a friendly supporter who had a building across from the convention center. And without permission, or being asked, I tucked away a whole bunch of supplies, oak tag paper and crayons and stuff like that, a small print machine, in case--I'm the ultimate optimist, I'm working for the President. So my job, after we lost--got out of the race--I came back to Massachusetts. One of the guys who helped me, Andy Natsios, who was now the state party chairman, asked me to be executive director of the party, temporarily at least, which I agreed to do. I told him I wanted to help Bush. That was all I cared about.

Mr. Baker called me and asked me if I'd be in charge, at the convention, of keeping people from demonstrating for Bush, because the Reagan crowd and Governor Reagan had made it very clear he didn't want to be pressured into picking the VP [Vice President]. He wanted it very low-key. He'd given Ambassador Bush some things to do at the convention and wanted to make sure that our troops supported Reagan loyally because he had won some delegates and stuff. So my job was to keep people from having a pro-Bush demonstration that would upset the Reagan folks and overshadow him in any way.

But there was a lot of pent-up support for the ambassador. So we got out there convention week. The week before, I'm tamping down vigilante efforts to do something for Bush. And then, [Jack] Kemp speaks on Monday and he has his young YRs [Young Republicans] do a demonstration. I had a call Tuesday--Ambassador Bush is speaking Tuesday night--I had a call at ten o'clock from Elsie Hillman, who is a national committeewoman from Pennsylvania, saying, "Listen, after watching what Kemp did, we don't care what Baker says or Bush said, we owe it to ourselves to demonstrate for Ambassador Bush when he speaks and--Tough." I had four of those calls.

Now I'm worried there's going to be a half-baked demonstration and it's going to look pale compared to--even though it's what the Reagan folks want. So I called up Baker and quit, and became the guy in charge of organizing the convention floor. I bring out all my hidden stash of stuff, and spent all night long making signs and stuff. It was kind of fun, actually. We had a great demonstration. You had to be there. It was a great demonstration. I'm too old to say it, but it was great. It was thunderous, actually.

The sad part. I am in the hall when Ambassador Bush comes to have his moment in the sun, and we're backstage and as George Bush is about to go up to give his most important speech, because he's really giving it to an audience of one, right? Governor Reagan is watching in the--what's the name of the hotel in Detroit? Big speech. The guy who was in charge of the program, who sits at the bottom of the stairs with the director, turns to the ambassador and says, "By the way, they're reporting on the networks it's going to be Jerry Ford." I almost said, "You bastard, how can you tell a man then? Couldn't you have waited until later?" Anyway, he goes up there, we go crazy, he gives a great speech anyway, and he goes back. He's staying at the Pontchartrain Hotel, across the street from the Renaissance Hotel. I can't remember my clients' first names but I can remember this stuff.

Anyway, the press is reporting it's going to be Ford. I'm on the floor and we're all kind of depressed. It's his call, but we love Bush. Nothing against Reagan, we just love Bush. The Massachusetts delegation was staying in Plymouth, Michigan. A lot of us said, "We're leaving. We just can't put up with this." My wife and I said, "Let's go over to the Pontchartrain Hotel and go up and see Ambassador Bush. Let's see if we can find him and say, 'No matter what happens, we appreciate all you've done for us.'"

So we leave the hall and the rumor is that Reagan has decided to come to the hall with Ford to calm everything down and announce that his Vice President is going to be Ford. So--it's a long story. We go to the Pontchartrain Hotel, and go up to the top floor where Ambassador Bush is staying and we get there and it's Dean Burch, I'm sure you guys know--

A [Barry] Goldwater guy, wasn't he?

A Goldwater guy, head of the party for a while. He was Secretary of Commerce under Reagan and one of former President Bush's closest friends. He was kind of like the campaign chairman. Vic Gold, another old crazy curmudgeon--a great old guy, Jim Baker, and a couple of others--I can't remember who else. My mind is kind of foggy about who was there at the time. I just got there and they're all in the living room, commiserating a little bit. The phone rings and Mrs. Bush says to Ambassador Bush, "It's Governor Reagan." We all assume this is the "Sorry, George."

So they go in the bedroom. She screams, he screams, "It's us!" The next thing, eight million Secret Service agents show up. I was again--being lucky--I just happened to be there at the time. Then they went that night to the hall to accept. I did say that I'm going to be there. The rest is history.

You mentioned when you first got into it, you and Andy Card, you had a sort of calculation as to which of the campaigns would be beneficial to Andy--

We didn't know any of the players.

When did you develop the bond, the emotional bond, that you clearly have with George Bush? When did that happen? When did you start to get to know him and what was it about him that was--

Well, we looked at the campaigns and we narrowed it down to three without meeting any of the players. We kind of ruled Reagan out because we felt that two punks from Massachusetts wouldn't be important. Then Baker and Bush--we were leaning toward Bush--then we met Ambassador Bush. Some of our friends had been working with--they knew we were looking to campaign, so it became clear it was the right thing to do.

Once you get to know the President and be around him and be around Mrs. Bush, you couldn't help it. Barbara Bush was then in D.C. and was kind of working in the office. Someplace I have pictures--those two pictures up there--That's Andy in '79 or '80 in Massachusetts and underneath it is Dora Bush and Abby and Bitsy or something. They campaigned as Bitsy, Bopsy, Mipsy--all these WASPy kids. Poor little Jewish kids didn't have a chance in the Massachusetts Bush campaign. They're just great human beings.

I remember going to--I remember the first time I ever actually heard him speak, before I actually met him, was at Harvard, talking to someone at the law school. He was getting booed at Harvard.

He was getting booed?

Well, it's tradition. A couple of things that impressed me were things like, "What's the difference between you, Mr. Ambassador, and Carter on foreign policy?" And him saying, "Well, President Carter looks at the world through glasses and sees the way he wants it to be. I look at it as the way it is." I mean, it made such sense to me.

Then you go through his background and stuff. Then, when I got to meet his kids and the family, and it was clear from Day One what they've always said, that this is all about faith, family, and friends. And I watched how his kids, who were then a lot younger, obviously--their respect and love for the parents, despite the fact that George Bush was always serving the public, and with long hours and long travels. I said, "Gee, when I have kids, I hope my kids respect me and love me as much as these kids do." So it's all that. You fall in love in politics. That's what great politicians do to you. You fall in love with them, totally and professionally.

Can you give us your initial assessments of Ronald Reagan? This is a George Herbert Walker Bush oral history but we're also doing the Reagan oral history. As a candidate, and any impressions you may have had, especially in those early days?

Going in, looking at it steely-eyed, as what's best for us in the future, was respect for Governor Reagan--clearly, the guy was articulate and smart. I've always thought about politics and politicians. The two qualities that people need to win elections--with all the candidates, why does this guy win and this guy lose? You can scratch your head--what's the common thread? After this I had lots of jobs with other candidates, but anyway, the two common threads were fire in the belly and the ability to inspire loyalty in the troops. If you have those two qualities, you can win, and certainly Ronald Reagan had both of those. Initially we never got close to him. He never came to Massachusetts. We didn't really get to know him.

Were you at that debate in New Hampshire where there was the famous microphone incident?

I was, but I was in the back of the room. I wasn't a player in New Hampshire. I was in Massachusetts. I was only there driving someone up; I wasn't part of it. But the more you fall in love with your candidate, the more you dislike the other candidates. It's not real, but at the time, it's emotional and the more you discredit the other candidate. I was at several joint appearances, debates or whatever, and you watch your guy and you watch Governor Reagan, and you say, "Man, we're going to do great." Every time, Reagan was terrible or whatever. And Reagan would go up five points in the polls. I'm missing something here.

What were you missing?

I think you had a tendency to believe what the press was saying, which was very negative, because you want to. The guy didn't--all that about him not really being in charge, and not being at the top of his game and all that stuff--that missed. Once you get to know the guy, it's so B.S.

In politics, the amazing thing about politics is how many times the public perception of politicians, whether they be Republican or Democrat, whoever they are, is out of sync with reality. Sometimes the guy is terrific in public and in person he's a jerk, or vice versa. Take [Ted] Kennedy being all these kinds of things. But when you meet Ted Kennedy and you watch how he works, the guy is thorough, disciplined, intelligent--I can't say this publicly--intelligent, a very astute Senator, who, if you wanted one Senator on your side, it's Ted Kennedy. He knows issues thoroughly. It's out of whack with his public perception, certainly back home.

So with Ronald Reagan, you fell in love. You want the perception to be that he's not good and your guy's great, so you buy into the public perception without really knowing the guy. But you had to be impressed the whole way by the people who loved him, because he had what we had. We had a much smaller little army. He had a huge army of people who really cared. People would come from Minnesota or Wyoming to campaign in New Hampshire or Massachusetts. I was very impressed with all that. But the truth is, he was not a player in Massachusetts. He only came two or three times, so I didn't really have any feeling about him personally. I just bought into--and he also had some zealots, like all candidates do, and you hate the zealots, right? Somehow, they became the candidate a little bit, and you're so mad, what they're saying about your candidate--what the zealots are saying about your candidate. You get pissed.

Thinking back, my view about Reagan was always very positive but he just wasn't George Bush. We were kind of in love with our guy and it really wasn't about Ronald Reagan, it wasn't about Howard Baker, it wasn't about--that wasn't what we were about. Keep in mind, we got into it to build an organization for the future, so it was to our advantage to keep it positive. We didn't want to be pissy with the Baker guys because we were hoping the Baker guys would support our guy for Governor in '82. We were very cautious in the beginning, so we didn't get sucked into a lot of that stuff, but we did, quite unprofessionally, fall in love in the campaign, still to this day.

Could you tell us a little bit about the fall campaign in 1980 against Carter and Anderson and what role you played?

Yes. After the convention that night, Mr. Baker asked me what I wanted to do. I said, "I don't know. Help George Bush become President." At this point in time I'm a total sycophant. There's nothing left. All I care about is making Bush President. I had three options. One was to ride the Vice President's campaign plank, two was to work on the Reagan campaign someplace, or three, to go to the RNC [Republican National Convention] and be one of the regional political guys or girls for the RNC. Those were kind of the three options that were given to me.

Mr. Baker said, "Which one do you want to do?" I said, "To tell you the truth, sir, I don't care. My goal, somehow, hasn't changed. I still want to make George Bush President someday. With all due respect to Ronald Reagan, maybe eight years later, or four years."

He said, "Take the RNC job, because if you want to work in the administration you should take the job with the Reagan campaign. If you want to work in the Vice President's office you should take the Vice President plank. But if you really want to help him become President someday and you don't know squat about politics--you've been lucky. You were in the right place at the right time." He didn't say that. He was nicer, but that's basically what he was saying. "A year ago you were wrapping lettuce. What do you know? Go back and learn politics. The best way to do that is work as a regional field guy for the RNC." So that's what I did. When Jim Baker gives you advice, what do you do? You take it. So I got a job running New England for the RNC for the fall campaign.

It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of activity, a lot of enthusiasm. We had a great election cycle in '80 in New England. It was good for Republicans across the board but in New England it was particularly successful. But Baker was right. I didn't know squat about politics. My job as an RNC field guy--what that means is you're supposed to help the state parties get out the vote, activities and all-- the party activities, help the candidates--the congressional candidates, the gubernatorial candidates, the Senate candidates in their campaigns. That's the kind of job. Then I had a couple of kids working for me. One kid was working for the state reps. One guy did mayors or whatever. One did finance. So I was in charge of all this. I didn't know anything.

I'd go to a meeting and they'd say, "Ron, what do you think?" The guy had one of the calendars. I'd say, "I'll tell you in a second, but I've got to go to the men's room." What do I do now? "Good idea." I'd B.S. my way through the '80 cycle. I got very lucky. After the '80 cycle, I guess, it was good. Even in New England where the press is not very favorable--

Reagan-Bush carried Massachusetts, which no one could believe.

He did. We still don't believe it in Massachusetts. The great trivia question is, right now--today--the state with the longest string of consecutive Republican Governors currently serving is Massachusetts--four in a row. It's a great trivia question.

It's my home state, by the way.

Really? Doesn't show. Where about?

Worcester.

Really? Really doesn't show. You know Dave Forsberg, by any chance?

Oh sure. In fact, I went to Assumption College and--

Did you really?

He was a Worcester City Councilor at the time but he taught at Assumption College.

He was my Bush coordinator for Worcester County--a great guy. Great friend to this day.

Anyway. It was a fun election. People forget that Reagan was behind for a bunch of it and it didn't gel until near the end, until the troops and the prisoners, and all that. It all came together. I'm trying to think of a vignette. I can remember the phone calls the last two weeks of the campaign. That's when you knew you were going to win. You're calling the mother ship here, the RNC, and their question was, "Where do you need money? Where can you spend money?" The money was just rolling in and they wanted to spend it wisely. "Where can we help buy a race or two? Who needs more money?" Really, we almost couldn't spend it fast enough, effectively. That's when you kind of realize this may be a good cycle. Those are my memories of '80.

So after the election could you tell us what you do? I assume you're getting ready for the '82 Governor's race.

Unfortunately, I overachieved. I did the RNC regional thing and then the Vice President-elect asked me to run his one event during the Inaugural, the Vice President reception at American History [Smithsonian National Museum of American History]. So I ran his one event.

That's right.R. Kaufman, 8/6/2003 1

? 2021 The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia and the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation

I don't want to get into events. I can give you a whole bunch of stuff about that if you want to do it. I think it will take too much time. I ran that event, which was a blast, actually. It's a great building. I had an office there for, like, a month and a half.

Then in '81 I was promoted to run the Northeast for the RNC and this goes back to the lucky thing again. In '81, as in every off-year following the President's election, there are two gubernatorial elections, as you know--Virginia and New Jersey. And they always become more important, and Dave Broder and Tom Edsel and Larry Sabato--all these geniuses--write stories about how important these two races are to judge how the new President is doing. White Houses pay too much attention to them, and committees do. In '81 we were supposed to win Virginia and lose New Jersey. That was supposed to happen. In fact, we screwed up Virginia. I think it was Marshall who was the candidate.

[J.] Marshall Coleman.

Right, Marshall Coleman was supposed to be the big--and he just totally destroyed the campaign. Of course, I was in charge in the Northeast. I had New Jersey and we had a crowded primary because a guy named Jim Florio was the candidate and the winner of our primary was Tom Kean. So I got responsibility for winning this race, and I'd have to come down here every day or every other day to the White House--there'd be these big meetings--and fly back to New Jersey and do what I had to do to win New Jersey. Every day, as Virginia went down the tubes, Jersey became more and more important, which I didn't like at all.

The only good thing about the whole thing, I remember, is that I got to be a genius--I'd have a White House meeting and have to run up to Tom Kean's house for a meeting. They would fly me into LaGuardia and have me take the helicopter for 40 bucks across New York City to land just as the sun was setting at Newark. So that was the best part of it.

But to make a long story short, we won. Tom upset Florio by a thousand votes and they had a recount and we maintained, which surprised everybody. We held onto it. New Jersey, unlike other states in New England, isn't exactly a good government state, and everybody assumed that they'd steal it back, but we kept it pretty good. So for some reason I got credit for it.

In December of '81, then Chief of Staff Baker decided that the RNC needed a big shake-up and they fired almost everybody other than Dick Richards, who was the chairman, and moved Rich Bond in to be deputy chairman, and made me the national political director. So there I am. I've been in politics, like, two years. Now I'm running the country. Shows you how bad they were. So I became the national political director for the '81-'82 cycle. Our job was to defy history, to be the first time since [Franklin D.] Roosevelt to have a President in his first term pick up seats in the off-year elections. We lost 26, I think, counting them up. We were doing pretty good until 10 percent unemployment hit and that kind of put a crimp in our style. Losing 26 wasn't too bad.

Then the Vice President asked me if I'd run his reelection campaign. I was in charge of the reelection campaign starting in August of '83. [Lee] Atwater and I and [Ed] Rollins started the reelection campaign. The six months in between I was over at HHS [Health and Human Services]. Jim Baker called me--the President asked me--in January of '83 if I'd do the reelection campaign--

Vice President Bush asked--

Right, and I said, "Sure, are you kidding me?" So I thought, That's great, I can coast for six months. The first thought was, I can coast here a little bit. Then Baker called me up from the White House and said, "Listen Ron--" Notice that he's gone from "Mr. Baker" to "Baker." He said, "Listen, we're going to make Margaret Heckler" --who just lost her reelection campaign--"Secretary of HHS. What do you think?" I said, "I think you're nuts, because she's nuts." I shouldn't say that. I didn't say it.

That's okay.

So he browbeat me into going over to HHS for six months to help her set up the government, which was really interesting. I actually enjoyed it. Then I went over to the campaign in August and ran the VP--It sounds very fancy-schmancy, but the truth is you're just a handmaiden to the campaign. You do what they tell you to do.

I was going to ask--you don't have a lot of leeway, I would imagine.

You really don't. You do, but you don't, really. You do what they tell you to do. But my real job--In all honesty, my job wasn't to run anything. My job was to be the historian, to go through and watch carefully how they put the campaign together--who produced, who didn't produce, what was a smart thing for them, and not a smart thing--and report back to the Bush team so that if in '85 he decided to run for President, we'd have a good basis of history.

Was it Baker who asked you to do this, do you recall?

No, because he was Chief of Staff to the President. He would never--they were very disciplined. Did he know what was going on? Of course, in my opinion, but they were too smart for that. It was the aforementioned [Malcolm] Mack Baldrige, I think Nick Brady was involved too, I'm pretty sure. Pete Teeley, who was his press secretary, Vic Gold, probably a couple of other--his team at the time.

I was very careful of who did what and stuff. I made sure, as much as possible, the things the Vice President did A) help the President, first and foremost. But B) beyond that, help the Vice President for the future.

Could you say something about what you talked to Bush about, personally? The sort of thing you and he spoke about when you were with him? And were you conscious at that time or was he explicit about laying the framework for a later presidential campaign?

The Vice President ran the CIA. You're going to have to be explicit, you probably shouldn't be. If I have any kind of talent at all, it's to keep my mouth shut, understanding what is probably the best thing to do without being told. I've never talked about the personal relationship to anybody, probably never will, not that there's anything worthwhile to talk about. That's just the way I do business as a person. So, no, he never said, "Do this," or "Do that." My guess is he understood my job was not just to make sure the campaign--Meanwhile, the only instruction from him was, "Make sure you do whatever they want." My goal was to be the perfect handmaiden to the campaign.

Did he have an intense interest in the political parts of politics?

He loved politics, sure, but he was the ultimate loyalist to President Reagan. He always believed that he owed President Reagan a great deal. He would never want what's good for him to in any way, shape, or form, interfere with what's good for President Reagan. If it means he'd take a bullet, he'd take a bullet. That was implicit and explicit. That was the way we ran the campaign. We're there to serve, and we're always the first guys in the building--and girls--and always the last ones to leave. If there's any dirty job to do, we'd do it, regardless of what it was. That was what he wanted and that was what we did.

Now, if we did some good things for the President and the party along the way that accrued to the benefit of the Vice President's political future, that's great too, but that was my explicit direction. In the end--the last two or three weeks of the campaign when it was clear that we were going to win and win healthy--it was clear it was good for President Reagan to have tails, if you will. So going out and helping endangered Members of Congress or struggling challengers is a smart thing to do for the President. The Vice President spent the last few weeks doing a hundred little events for Members of Congress. A Vice President doesn't have--you go to Boston, who cares? No one cares. But if you go to Richmond, it's a big deal.

I made a point of the campaign--In the end he went to a bunch of places where we felt a vice-presidential event would have an impact for either a sitting member who was in trouble or a challenger. I remember going to Beau Boulter in Abilene, Texas when it was a dead-even heat. We went in there, did a spectacular event, we left, and he won. That was great for the President, but it wasn't bad for the Vice President, either. But he would never think to say to me, ever, "This is good for me and my future."

I kept good notes. But you know from your work already, no one keeps better notes, no one is better at this stuff than the former President. Every time I think I'm doing a good job doing my notes, he's ten thousand leagues ahead of me.

Is this where you work with Atwater for the first time?

I met Lee during the '80 campaign. And I worked with him in the RNC a little bit.

He must have been very young at that time, in '80, right?

Me or him?

Well--

I was just curious. Right. He was. He was then the number three guy or four guy at the White House. I don't know how much you've done on Atwater, but that's a whole project in itself--a very complicated fellow. I'm assuming you all know that one of his first jobs in politics on a national level--He was Karl Rove's executive director when Karl Rove was chairman of the CRs, the College Republicans. He was paid staff executive director to Lee Atwater. Here's another great little story, I'm sure you guys know. Who was the first employee of Ambassador Bush's first PAC [political action committee], a precursor to his campaign for President? Which, you know, is 1977? Karl Rove--more trivia. Where was I?

Atwater.

I really thought we'd need the best in the '82 cycle, '81-'82, when he was responsible for coordinating with the White House and the RNC and the congressional committee and the senatorial committee, the off-year elections. They were interesting days for me. I was actually a ping-pong ball in those days. My boss was Rich Bond.

Remember I said Baker had sent Bond and me over to take over the RNC? There was a lot of resentment about that because we're two Bush guys taking over the RNC. And Baker, being a Bush guy--The right-wing conspiracy types thought this was just an awful thing to happen. Again, we had to be very careful to always be the handmaiden type, so the guy in the White House was Atwater. In those days Atwater hated Bond.

Then, there's a third player in this. The Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs was a fellow named Rich Williamson, out of Illinois. These were three young, really bright guys, all vying to be the next Lyn Nofziger, who was the guru at the time, and all trying to suck up to Baker. And all Baker guys.

My day in the office--I'd be at the RNC at 6:00 or 5:30 and the first call would always be from Atwater who'd be there about the same time. And he'd go, "That goddamned Bond." He'd trash Bond for like half-an-hour. I'd hang up and Rich would come in. "That goddamned Atwater, the son-of-a-bitch." Then I'd get a call from Williamson. "That bastard Bond," "That bastard Atwater." I used to be a ping-pong ball for a while in those days. That was my first--Lee was in charge of the White House political office, and he was terrific, smart, focused, disciplined, worked his heart out, great historian--

Great historian?

He loved history. The difference--people often compare him and Karl--the difference is Karl has a much better sense of policy and the politics of policy. Atwater was a pure politician. I mean, the more you know Karl, the more in awe I am of Karl's understanding of policy, how it should work. A huge difference, really.

In the '84 campaign you were up against Geraldine Ferraro. Did that present certain special problems?

Oh sure it did. It made it very trying. It was uncharted water. My candidate was terrific, the ultimate consummate gentleman at all times. It made it very hard. I think someone who was a little bit more hard-bitten, more political, would have had an easier time with her, but he had a difficult time. The campaign did not go well, for lots of reasons that I won't get into with you guys right now. It wasn't to be a good campaign for him. It wasn't his fault. Some of the folks around him--probably me, too--I was too inexperienced to do what I was doing.

You don't want to talk about the--

No, never will. Sorry. But we didn't serve him well, in my humble opinion. The problems were exacerbated by the press falling in love with her. There was a famous press conference she had when the press was tearing her apart about taxes. I can't remember what caused it. She ended up having a press conference and saying, "Okay, I'm staying here until you have an answer to every question." She's there for six hours in the middle of some gym floor and the press fell in love with her for having the courage to do what she had to do to survive, quite frankly. She brought with her all her taxes and all that stuff.

So they went to Vice President Bush and said, "How about your returns, and your stuff?" He said, "Well, I've given you everything. Actually, when I was in Congress, I wrote the law about public disclosure. I've gone beyond that. Matter-of-fact, I'm the first candidate ever to put all my assets in a blind trust." Actually, both the Washington Post and the New York Times wrote editorials about how this was a great thing to do, to go beyond the pale, if you will.

He went on, "So I have no idea what's in there, because that's the idea of a blind trust." They said, "We want you to open the trust so we can look at it." And he said, "I can't do that. That's ridiculous, you can't do that." And they said, "You have to. We want to know what's in there." And this became a big issue. As a matter of principle--it was absurd. I remember having this conversation with Dean Burch and he said, "He's going to have to. They're going to make him do it eventually." And of course, he had to, and then he had it closed again. It cost like $25,000 to open and close it.

That kind of thing that they forced him to do because, working as the woman candidate, any time that she made a mistake, they overcompensated. Everything he said was put in a different context. Things you'd say running against a man, somehow, when running against a woman, were taken out of context. So even if you said the same thing every day of your life, throughout a thousand campaigns, you say the same thing and all of a sudden, it's not right, or it's taken as inappropriate or trying to make something out of this.

Do you have an example of something like that, just to illustrate--

That's a good question. I'll try to think of some little vignette or--

There was the thing at the debate--

That's a different thing. I'm not going to give you that one. At the debate in Philadelphia at the Art Museum, I believe. It was a great debate. Actually, he was not expected to do so well, and she was expected to do well, and he did very well actually. I'm prejudiced. He did very well. We got good press out of it, surprisingly. It surprised us, anyway.

The next day, we had the best day of the campaign. We went to Paterson, New Jersey, to the docks, to receive the endorsement of the Teamsters and the dockworkers, or one of the unions. Then we flew from there to Alabama for a trade conference and sat beside [George] Wallace and three other Democratic Governors on some trade thing. We did meet Reagan there. This was like the best day you could ever have.

She, afterward, went to Madison, Wisconsin, to a rally at the University of Wisconsin, which at the time was like Berkeley East.

Right.

I said, "Man, if I could just have this kind of day every day for the rest of my life." We kicked ass big time. At the first event, at the union event, it went great. We took a great picture there. Everything was perfect. He's walking, shaking hands as he's leaving with a bunch of union folks. He's about to get in--and this union guy comes and says, "How'd you do last night?" And he said, quietly, like we're talking, "We kicked a little ass last night." And one of these little goons got it, and it became a big thing. We get on the plane. No one near heard it until we got on the plane and the press guys were playing back and caught it and they turned it into this big deal. Like this was some sexist thing versus something that any guy from west Texas would say anytime.

This is where I'd probably get in trouble with my boss a little bit. I thought this was great. This runs about the time we got into the "wimp" thing. So I called ahead. We went to Alabama, then to the West Coast. By the time we hit ground in Alabama, we had some signs already made up. "Kicked Ass Last Night, George?" By the time we hit Wisconsin, I mean, whatever our next stop was, we had full blown pro-Bush demonstrations. "Kicked Butt Last Night--Yeah!" It became a thing, the kicked ass.

The Democrats and the press were terming it a negative. It actually turned out to be, in my humble opinion, a positive. It kind of gave a little bit of spark to the whole thing. Thanks for remembering that, pal. I still have T-shirts at home with buttons and all kinds of--I didn't think of them, anyway.

So were you surprised at the magnitude of the victory in '84?

No. I was hoping it had more legs. Again, it was a funny election, in that the operation was a complete success but my patient didn't have a good time. It was not a good election for all kinds of reasons. So I felt I had not served him as well as I should have. Maybe I shouldn't have done what I was doing. I was in a little over my head. But it wasn't as good an election for him as I felt it should have been or could have been--for him, personally.

We did well in many ways, and obviously, if you look, compare the '84 campaign to how it rated to '88, it was fabulous. We made a ton of friends and if you go back and look at the clips--I'm prejudiced--the theme of the '80s, the first four years of the Bush administration is that George Herbert Walker Bush was the best Vice President in history, the most involved, did it best. No Reagan person ever said a bad word about Bush. They didn't think he was trying to jockey for position. There was no internal fighting between the Bush guys and the Reagan guys during the campaign.

Everyone said--the most ardent Reagan folks said, "Boy, these Bush guys really get the joke, that they're working for Reagan." So the things we were supposed to accomplish, the implicit orders I got from my boss, I thought were carried out well. From that perspective it was a terrific campaign. And the margin of error was great--the win was great. But to me, I had different mile markers to judge how good it was, and from those mile markers I cared about the most, other than the most important one, which was him, it was terrific.

This relationship between President Reagan and Vice President Bush--As you said, most of the accounts seem to indicate that it was healthy and solid and there were no problems there. But there have been a few--Edmund Morris in particular, when he wrote that biography of Reagan, which has been trashed by a number of folks. Morris reported that there actually was some tension between the two men. Did you ever hear any of this or see it?

Morris is a respected historian of note. I can only tell it from my vision again.

Sure, right.

In my personal observations, in eavesdropping in conversations with the President, it was always nothing but the best. It was always quite strong as time went on. There's not a doubt in my mind that President Reagan trusted George Bush implicitly. These guys had never been best friends, in the beginning. I mean, Ronald Reagan was a poor guy from the Midwest, an Irish Catholic who--you know. And George Bush was a patrician from Connecticut who was saved from being Elliot Richardson by moving to west Texas.

It's said that the value of a human being is inside--how they value other people, the way they look at other people, the way they respect other people whether they be other leaders, or a guy who drives a car, or a Secret Service agent. And the way they felt about their families bonded them together, all wrapped up in trust. With all due respect to Morris, I never saw anything like what he insinuated and stated in his book. From my vision, this is one thing I'm pretty clear on-- that there was huge respect between the two men. Personally, I've witnessed it a bunch of times.

[BREAK]

We're sort of at the point where you're gearing up for the '88 campaign and you become the director of the Fund for America's Future, is that correct?

That's correct.

So tell us about how this comes about.

Sure. As I'd mentioned earlier, I think my real job was to be the historian and it was clear to me from my perch that the right guy to run the campaign was Atwater, although there were those who felt it should have been Rollins, who wanted to run the campaign. But my recommendation strongly to the Bush team was that it should be Atwater. Despite his roguish image, eventually everybody agreed and he joined the campaign.

When he left after the election of '84, he went to a lobbying firm on a contract, and couldn't leave the contract to start a PAC up. So I ran the PAC from the beginning of set up. I was a placeholder for Lee until such time as Lee could get loose. I forget when he came over. I think it was '85, I can't remember. Then I went up to New Hampshire. I was in New Hampshire for the '88 election. Then after he won the New Hampshire primary, and at the convention, my job was to go back to Massachusetts after the Democratic Convention and drive [Michael] Dukakis crazy. I kind of overachieved in that one. It was the most fun I ever had in any campaign. That was a lot of fun. Mostly because it's very seldom that in any state you could actually impact the national campaign.

Because of a lot of good people in the campaign,'88 was a great campaign--'92 was a lousy campaign--'88 was a terrific campaign. The right people, right places, everyone was open, we had a good team and they were willing to listen to anything. I always believed the idea was to use Massachusetts as a backdrop to embarrass Dukakis, to point out his real record and stuff. So it started kind of early--I'm going to say in the summer, actually, even before the convention. The Greek Church of North and Central America--whatever the official title is--the Greek Church--was having their annual meeting, by chance, in Boston. Iakovos, who was the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, was actually a friend of Vice President Bush's and through a series of meetings, we got Vice President Bush invited. In the Greek Church Dukakis was an interesting figure. He was liked and hated at the same time.

To make a long story short, we maneuvered it so that Dukakis went in for a lunchtime speech and was received with a tepid response. The Vice President came in the next day and was greeted by people standing on the table waving white handkerchiefs. Reporters covering both events said, "Wow, Bush came to Massachusetts, to the Greek Church, and blew Dukakis's socks off." Then we followed that up with the now-famous Boston police endorsement, where the Boston cops endorsed Bush on September 2nd in the mall someplace.

The fun part of it that was lost in history--this is a little braggadocio--We'd been working our butt off in Massachusetts and at the time we were behind by twelve to fourteen points nationally, and people forget that also. This is, like, September of election year, '88. But I sensed Massachusetts being a lot closer than that, so I went to the publisher of the Boston Herald and cut a deal with him--that I'd give him the inside into what's going on with some stuff if he'd agree to do a poll and release the poll the day the President came in for the cops' endorsement. If he did that, I'd have the President carry the paper off the plane with him. One of the coolest things in my life was going the night before, at midnight or one in the morning, to the run of a major paper, and see my headline come off it, and the headline was, "Poll Shocker--Bush ties Duke in Massachusetts," and the poll actually shows dead even.

So the cool part about the Boston cops--that endorsement destroyed Dukakis--is him walking off the plane with a poll saying that in Massachusetts where they know him best, he's dead even. We'd do all these kinds of crazy things.

You had the harbor tour.

The harbor tour where--his big thing was "Mr. Environmentalist." Boston Harbor was a disaster, and it was a disaster because Dukakis got in a fight with bureaucrats. It was classic. That's why it was perfect. Dukakis had gotten in a fight with the bureaucrats over funding. It wasn't about amount. It was how and why--I can't remember all the details now. As a result, literally, Boston didn't sign up for--didn't take--tens of millions of dollars of cleanup money. The state didn't get it, because of Dukakis. That was really what we were trying to point out--that this guy does not get it and the harbor's dirty because of it. So it was one of these great events.

The Boston cops were great because it was--those who knew Dukakis best knew that he was soft on crime. Willy Horton was great because it wasn't racist. It was never racist. I go crazy about this--perceptions and reality. When Al Gore used Willie Horton as an issue in New York in the primary debate, no one accused it of being racist. It only became a racist issue at the end of the campaign when Dukakis raised it as a racist issue. They, on purpose, made it racist because they were playing the race card. I'm so adamant about that. To this day it drives me nuts because no one deserves it. George Bush would never use the race card. It's not his nature as a human being.

Dukakis ended up spending more time in Massachusetts campaigning than he did in Ohio and California combined. I can give you a thousand stories. I won't clutter this up with a thousand stories of how we used Massachusetts as a tool to drive him stark-raving mad. Remember the debate, the famous debate with Bernie--what's his name from San Diego?

Shaw?

Up to that point in time the Boston Globe was a fully owned subsidiary of the Dukakis campaign. The reporter at the time, who now works for Mrs. [Teresa] Heinz, Chris Black--she's a friend, I like her a lot--but she used to say "our campaign." She was a reporter for the Globe and she'd cover "our campaign," meaning the Dukakis campaign.

The day after the famous debate on CNN, we open up the Op-ed page of the Boston Globe and there are seven Op-ed pieces, every one of them just kicking the bejesus out of Dukakis. First, I had it reprinted and handed out at the statehouse and handed out from Dukakis headquarters. Then I had it reduced and put it on the front of a T-shirt. I had the home addresses of all the campaign staff--the campaign staff was in Boston--so they got in the mail these T-shirts that had Bush on the back--Bush-[Dan] Quayle. I gave one to every single member of the traveling press on the Dukakis plane, so half the guys are wearing these T-shirts of the Globe just trashing Dukakis the next day. Fun stuff like that.

One big day in Boston always is when they put on sale the Boston Celtics tickets. People line up all night long. So we had all kind of caterers with Bush-Quayle stuff. When the next day comes--four, five, seven hours--televised, it's all Bush-Quayle. We only had one billboard in the country paid for by the Bush-Quayle campaign and it was the one on top of headquarters. Headquarters was the one where Dukakis had to drive up Cambridge Street. To go up to the statehouse, he had to go by the office and the billboard. Every day. This was so much fun. It was too easy, it was embarrassing.

Literally, someone picketed his house every three days, someone was out there picketing for something. His base guys out there picketing--poor people, blacks, Hispanics, cops, teachers--they were out there. It was too easy.

Can you talk a little bit about this sort of campaign tactic you used, which was called in a newspaper article, "disinformation," where you would sort of let--the Dukakis people would be led to believe that there was to be a Bush event somewhere and it turned out that there wasn't. "Misinformation" or "disinformation?"

There was only one time we had--We did the Boston Harbor--We had the Greek Church, right, and the Boston Harbor, and then the Boston cops. Keep in mind, this is all aimed at the Boston press as much as the national press, really, and destabilizing the Dukakis campaign team. Because when you're in Boston, when you wake up in the morning the first thing you do is turn on the Boston TV or read the Boston papers. The idea was to keep them destabilized a little bit.

I wanted to go in, come back to Massachusetts and get the endorsement of the Springfield police, just to show we could do it--no other reason. But Dukakis folks controlled all the unions and stuff. We were outnumbered. You know, we're a platoon and they've got six brigades. We had been pretty cool about pulling these little raids off without getting caught too much. So now they're steaming. They're waiting for us to come back. They know we're going to come back. They don't know where, but they're going to get us this time.

Within three days there were three different stories in the papers. The first one was--the Bush folks have rented the Westin Hotel in Springfield; the Bush folks have rented some hall in Lowell; the Bush folks have rented Cape Cod Community College. So they're running around. Then we show up in Springfield and get the endorsement of the Springfield cops. It's just fun stuff, nothing wrong. It was just kind of fun stuff to do my job.

You called it "psychological terror." Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Where are you getting this stuff from?

Newspaper articles.

Bad source. I'm a sweet guy. It's all this kind of--there's a famous--can I take something out of time context?

Please.

We had a bunch of cops endorse us--Springfield and Boston. Fast-forward to 1990. The Democratic State Convention in 1990 was in Springfield, Mass. I was in the White House and one of the Boston TV stations called and said, "Do you want to do color commentary at the convention?"--which is normal operating procedure. I said, "Sure, I'd love to." So it's parties Friday night and Saturday. It's the first time it's been carried gavel-to-gavel on C-SPAN and on cable and it's Dukakis's farewell speech, and it's a big deal. He's been Governor 140 years. It's a big deal.

I go up Friday night and I work the crowds. I'm relatively well-known because of all this stuff in Massachusetts and everyone's giving me a hard time. It's kind of a fun thing, like being Ted Williams in New York City. It's fun just going around and harassing folks. I'm having a great time. Oh, and the Springfield cops are out in front of the Springfield Civic Center and they're not picketing, but giving informational picketing, because they're in a war with the mayor over their contract. They were threatening much earlier through the Democratic State Committee that they were going to picket if in fact the mayor was part of it, because the mayor had treated them so poorly, blah, blah, blah--nothing to do with presidential politics whatsoever.

The state party agrees that the mayor will not be inside. He won't go, and so nothing's disrupted. There's informational picketing Friday night, beforehand. To make a long story short, around three in the morning they find that the mayor is actually planning to go and speak. The cops, they feel they've been lied to. So eight o'clock comes the next morning and they throw a picket line in front of the Springfield Civic Center. The Democrats won't go over a picket line so there is an uproar. The whole convention is sitting out front for, like, three hours until they settle this thing, and people are going crazy. 39

R. Kaufman, 8/6/2003 2

? 2021 The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia and the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation

Somehow, because I had been there and because the Springfield police had in fact endorsed Bush, they somehow accused me of causing this, which of course never happened-- causing all this to happen, this embarrassment. It went on forever. Dukakis went nuts. He went on TV and said, "Kaufman, that evil--" And they sued me for violating their civil rights.

But the fun part is the following Monday I'm going back to Washington. I'm at Logan Airport. As always, I'm late and I go down to get my ticket at the gate, which you could do in those days. At the entrance to the gate there's the steward taking tickets and there's Dukakis with Phil Johnston, who is now state party chairman. Phil looks over and sees me, sees Dukakis, they talk, they go down the shoot. I follow five minutes later and he's in first class and I give him a kind of--"Well, Governor, it's good to see you," shake his hand. It drives him crazy--"Grrrrrrrr." I sit down. We sit there for 30 minutes and don't move. About 35 minutes later the station manager boards the plane, comes in, talks to Dukakis, says, "Hi, Mr. Kaufman, how're you doing?" "Fine." He walks off. We take off and I don't think anything of it.

So I get to the office in the White House and the phone rings and it's Andy Hiller, Channel 4. "Do you have any comment?" I said, "Any comment on what?" "On what happened today." I said, "What are you talking about?" I really had no idea what he was talking about. Turns out, when Dukakis saw me, he turns to the stewardess and says--This is right after the plane went down in Lockerbie--says to the stewardess, "You better check this guy Kaufman's bags for bombs. He's a known terrorist." He goes down the shoot. Well, she panics. She calls the station chief. The station chief comes over, sees it's Dukakis, sees it's me, gets the joke.

By a fluke there's a guy who worked for Channel 4 waiting for his wife or something and he overheard it, reported back to Hiller, and they run with it. The next thing you know, I get the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] at the White House. They're interviewing the Governor in the Governor's mansion. And at the airport they're going to fire the station manager, fire the girl, and arrest Dukakis for breaking the law because it's a very strict--you can't kid about this stuff--especially after this.

So they ask me what I think and I say, "Oh, the Governor would never do anything like this"--on and on. Who picks it up that night? Jay Leno. Jay Leno runs with it. Next day, front page of the Washington Post, New York Times, and Dukakis is forced to apologize to me personally, publicly. It goes on and on. I couldn't pay for this stuff.

Going back to the campaign. Dukakis is going to Colby College, no, Bates, to give an education speech on a Monday, so on Sunday he's in Boston. He flies in a small plane to Lewiston. The press plane is a big plane. It goes from Boston to Portland and they bus them from Portland to Lewiston, which is about 45 minutes. They get off. They have their dinner on education.

Back at the bus they're met by some very attractive young Bates students with suits and ties and stuff and they give them a little trinket bag--some L.L. Bean stuff. They get on the bus and they're driving back and they open it up and it's a report card. Dukakis on education--F on this and F on honesty and F on all this stuff. And a book written by Dave Cowans, a former Celtic great, and a note from me, "Have a great trip back. Here's some reading material for your trip back to Portland. P.S., See page 143." They open it up and it's Dukakis and Cowans having some debate and Dukakis saying, "I would never run for President. What do you think, I'm crazy?" Goofy stuff like this.

So the press guys are hooting and hollering. They get back to Portland airport and they're met by [John] Jock McKernan and they do a news conference right there. Jock does a great job on Dukakis and education. Then they announce, "We have a special bus taking anyone who wants to L.L. Bean for a private--a special shopping trip." To L.L. Bean, which everyone loves to do on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. So they all take the bus up to L.L. Bean and a bus back. But the thing is, that means the plane goes back empty, which means the campaign has paid for the plane versus the press paying for the plane--all that kind of stuff. Every day there was some sort of new fun thing.

He did a press conference once, a big press announcement. We started the campaign at Faneuil Hall--I remember this like it was yesterday. It was so much fun. He was driving from the State House to Faneuil Hall. He had the route all lined out and somehow, I can't imagine--It must have been ESP [extrasensory perception]--I knew the route. So I had, like, eight million little kids screaming and yelling. So, they get wise and don't go this way because of the Bush guys. They plan a new route, and somehow I figured that out in advance. They kept changing the route around for two hours, to figure out how to get there without getting killed. It was fun.

What was your relationship with Atwater at that point? Were you assigned to kind of keep watch on Atwater? What was the relationship between Atwater and Vice President Bush?

Was I assigned to keep Atwater--Where are you getting that stuff?

Oh, I read that in a book.

It goes back to my earlier job during the campaign as the resident historian without portfolio. One of my jobs was to become--if they really believed Lee was the guy--to be his best friend, and understand Lee, to get into Lee's head and see if he really cared and stuff. So I got to know Lee really well. He became a very close friend, a personal friend.

Lee was an interesting guy. Lee was one of the smartest guys I ever met. He understood the game better than anybody and was brilliant at Washington. When he first came to town, he had a reputation of being this ladies' man, kind of wild and crazy kid, smart but crazed. And he realized that if he was going to run the Bush campaign that Mrs. Bush would never--and he managed to change his image in town in a drastic way, which is really hard to do. I'm a huge Lee Atwater fan. He was just terrific.

One of the first times I was in the White House when Lee was--in '81, we were working on the '82 cycle--in the middle, I guess. Lee was always paranoid about Jim Baker because he wasn't a Baker guy. Everybody said he had this fight with Rich Williamson and Rich Bond and they both were Baker guys. So Lee was always looking for ways to ingratiate himself with Mr. Baker.

He knew that, for whatever reason, I was closer to Margaret and Jim--Margaret Tutwiler and Jim Baker. The first time I came over he insisted we go over and say hello to Margaret. I'm not a guy who goes over and says, "Hey, how are you?" I had to go over and Mr. Baker came out--Jim came out--and I remember Lee talking, Mr. Baker this, and Mr. Baker that. I always like to fast-forward back to the beginning of the '88 campaign when--'87 obviously--Lee was in the office and Baker calls and Lee says, "God damn it, Jim, that's not what we should be doing," just to point out the growth in Lee from '81 to '87 in the respect and the--anyway.

Where's George W. Bush in '87 and '88?

Keep in mind, in '87 I was spending 97 percent of my time in New Hampshire.

George W. Bush is in D.C.

So I wasn't in the office all that much. My job was to be in the state. I knew the next President Bush from '80 days a little bit. I wasn't really around him a lot. I'm not a good source of information about how he played in the campaign. I just wasn't there. My job was out in the field so I'm not a really good person to give you some good insight and dirt on that relationship.

But the next President was really good at listening. Anyone with a bitch would go to him and he'd listen. And he was really smart about understanding what should and should not go forth either to Jim Baker or to his father or somebody else. It's a really great talent. He knew exactly what--he had a sense of--this is important but not important enough to bother anybody with. It would be counterproductive.

Could you talk a little bit about what you saw of the selection of Dan Quayle for the Vice President spot and your assessment of Quayle as a candidate and politician?

There are a couple of parts to this. First, Atwater. Go back and read, study Atwater. He was big that the Vice President needed as his Vice President somebody who appealed to baby boomers. There was lots of political time, energy, and thought put into the baby boom generation. This was going to be the big election and would George Herbert Walker be the last World War II President or not? It was kind of a dividing line. It was clear--and Lee was adamant that we needed to have someone as Vice President who would attract the baby boomers.

Well, Bob Teeter, who was our pollster, and our media guy, Ailes, Roger Ailes, both were adamant that that was the right thing to do. When Vice President Bush was the point person for the President on weapons treaties and reductions he dealt with a bright young Senator from Indiana in Dan Quayle. He was always impressed with A) Quayle's knowledge and homework, and B) the fact that, while Quayle was seen to be a hard-core conservative, the guy who respected Quayle the most was Kennedy. That also impressed him.

Quayle's background was kind of a clincher in that he was a bright young lawyer in Indiana. He was recruited to run for Senate--excuse me, Congress, the House--against an incumbent Democrat in '76--not a great year for Republicans--and he knocked the guy off. I think it was '76, or '74, wasn't it? Knocked him off, the incumbent Democrat, and got reelected the next year by the largest margin in the history of that congressional district. And then in '80 ran against Birch Bayh, an icon in Indiana, and defeated him--not an easy task. Then in '86 he was elected statewide in the largest margin in the history of Indiana--statewide--a great track record to look at for someone for Vice President.

So for all the right reasons--also Teeter and Ailes had both worked for Dan Quayle when Dan Quayle ran for Senate--so there was a nice little fit for everything. It made a lot of sense. It got sidetracked because of the unfortunate way the convention unfolded and somehow Dan Quayle never seemed to get his footings. We talked earlier about how hard it is to change the perception in the public's mind once you get the perception there. One he got off on the wrong foot somehow, every little thing just seemed to be one plus one equals ten.

Why did that happen though? Why did it get off to that bad start?

I know where you're going and I ain't going there. Lots of reasons. He never had a good team underneath him, surrounding him. It wasn't his team. It was the campaign's team and he never had faith in the team. So there was never a synergy around his campaign for Vice President. It just never got on track. Whose fault? We could always point fingers, but it just never got going.

Once he became Vice President, he actually served the President very well. You can go back and look at his tenure as Vice President of the United States. It was terrific. He had the President's full confidence and was terrific and actually as a candidate for reelection in '92--One of the untold stories of the '92 election is how well he did in '92. He campaigned his heart out, did a great job, and was definitely a plus in '92. But campaigns for President aren't about Vice Presidents, they're about the President. No matter how good you are or how bad you are, in the end a Vice President candidate doesn't make a difference.

So when he had that debate with Lloyd Bentsen and Bentsen zinged him with that JFK [John Fitzgerald Kennedy] line--that was not something that gave you any deep concern?

Keep in mind, that was in '88.

Right.

It wasn't the highlight of his campaign, clearly. He didn't do well in the debate. But listen. Remember Ronald Reagan talking about a car going off in the distance on the northern California Pacific Highway--it's still going someplace? All these men and women have good days and bad days, and good moments and bad moments. Dan Quayle probably could have used better staff, better help, better training, more time, but in the end, it didn't make a difference.

I think we won in '88 by a pretty good margin. Can't find a seat, a CD that we lost because of Dan Quayle, or a vote that we lost because of Dan Quayle, and he served the President well. If President Bush were here now, he'd second that pretty strongly. He was a terrific ally and as a guy in charge of politics, at the White House at least, he did everything we asked and more. I think he served President Bush like President Bush served Ronald Reagan.

There were a lot of reports at the time--in '88 and since--that the Dukakis campaign was one of the more poorly run campaigns ever, perhaps up there with [Bob] Dole's '96 effort. You're somebody who's a veteran and a pro at these things--what was your assessment of the Dukakis effort?

I don't think it was as bad as people make it out to be, in all honesty. Sometimes campaigns are better than the candidate. Sometimes the candidate is better than the campaigns. I think the Dukakis campaign was better, actually, than the candidate. I think the candidate was somewhat flawed. The debate with Bernie Shaw--He blew that. It wasn't the campaign. It wasn't at some staged moment that he had bad advice. I don't think the campaign was particularly terrible. It wasn't great, but it certainly was better than our campaign in '92, by a long shot. And a great thing about the Dole campaign--it made the Bush-in-'92 campaign not the worst. You know?

We'll get to the '92 campaign shortly.

You have to?

Yes, we have to.

Rats.

Let's talk about your tenure in the Office of Presidential Personnel. You move into the White House. Can you tell us what your brief was there?

This is a great vignette. As you get older, truth and legend kind of blend. After the election, President-elect Bush and I were in Houston for some reason. We went for a run at Memorial Park which is three miles around. He said, "Ron, I want you to go to the Inaugural." Everybody has to go to the transition. I went to the Inaugural and my job at the Inaugural was one of the best jobs they have in politics. I had all the authority to do anything to make it work well, but no line responsibility, which is always a great job to have. So I went to the Inaugural.

Then he said, "I want you to come to the White House and be the deputy in Personnel. Your job really is to make sure the folks that helped me get here get their share of a place in the government. They help me get my programs through, because I'm a big believer in--" "Patronage" is always an interesting word. It depends on where you stand. "I'm a firm believer that when you're elected to be Governor, or mayor or President, you need people in key places who understand where you want to take government and help you get there and that that loyalty is really important."

So my job was to work with the Cabinet Secretaries to make sure that people who were selected for the key posts were in fact Bush loyalists who understood where he wanted to take government. My boss was Chase Untermeyer, who was in charge of the Cabinet and the top jobs.

The President said, "I want you to do that," and he said, "I want you to work with the regional jobs, because that's where the real politics is, in the regions." Over the years there were less and less regional jobs. He said, "Trouble is, historically the regional jobs have been kind of controlled by members of the Senate. I've met with Senators and kind of inferred that the regional jobs--judges and marshals--would be as it was under Reagan, but I want you to fight them hammer and tong on those jobs and get as many back for our guys as possible. If you get caught, I'm always going to go to bat for you, but do the best you can."

The last thing he said was, "I want you to go up there, sit down with Senator Gramm and tell Senator Gramm that the patronage jobs in Texas belong to the President of the United States, not the senior Senator."

You had to do this?

Yes. So I said "Okay, Sir." I'd been with him all those years, loyal slave and sycophant that I am, my reward is to go to the Inaugural, and to beat up on people who aren't doing their job. The other part was that Chase didn't want me. "Go work for a guy who doesn't really want you to do the job."

Why didn't he want you?

Because of my relationship with the President. And the Chief of Staff didn't want me for the same reason. I was a backdoor to Bush. "Go up and tell the Senators they don't have patronage anymore," in general. "Then tell Phil Gramm who, like Lyndon Johnson, loves patronage--Tell him he's lost, you won." I said, "This is my reward, correct, Sir?"

My job in Presidential Personnel was basically to be in charge of the political process, to make sure as many of our folks who helped us get there would help us stay there, would get jobs. So that they weren't Jack Kemp's people at HUD [Housing and Urban Development], they were George Bush's people at HUD--that kind of thing.

So you looked more for people who were going to be loyal to George Bush, rather than loyal to the ideology. I mean, with Reagan it was thought of to be more ideology and Bush it was more loyalty?

That's too simplistic, but nice try. I'd put it this way. It was people who understood where President Bush wanted to go, to take the country and the government and help him get there. That's why a President is elected. We have, as you all know, a very bifurcated system of government. HHS has 310,000 employees, 120 political appointees. The idea is that those 120 political appointees are supposed to be scattered through the bureaucracy so that when the President and the Secretary of HUD decide on a direction, that little army takes that big army down the right path. That's theoretically--if you read the Federalist Papers--the way it was designed.

So my job was to make sure that little army were people who understood where the President wanted to go. Sometimes Secretaries don't always have the same agenda as the President. Hard to believe, every now and then, so my job was to make sure--The way I interpreted my job was to make sure that the people who had those jobs understood where the President wanted to go and were loyal to where the President wanted to go, first and foremost. Not disloyal to any ideology or for any ideology in particular. It wasn't their job to be ideological. It was their job to take the country on the course the President wanted to go in.

Did Untermeyer agree with you on this?

I was a little bit more hard-edged about it, I would say. I think Chase would say that. Chase is one of my best friends in the world. I'm sure he could have slaughtered me many times. Another little vignette to put it in perspective--I hated this job and ended up loving it. I enjoyed every day of it. It was Atwater's idea and it was the right idea. Someone who understood and had the courage and the guts to stand up to Cabinet members, members of the Senate, other White House staff who wanted to have their buddies in jobs. You had to be pretty tough--to take a beating pretty good. Atwater thought I was the right person for the job, and I think the President did, too, for whatever reason.

But Atwater gave me some advice. He said, "Listen, find a member of the Cabinet and pick a fight with him over some high-profile slot. Make a great public war to show that you have the courage to fight them and the backing to fight and win." That made sense to me. I figured I wouldn't pick Jim Baker, I don't know why. [Laughter] He's a pretty smart guy. Or Bob Mosbacher. He was so cooperative anyway. I didn't want to pick on Jack Kemp for the reasons you just said. You don't want to make it appear to be an ideological deal.

I picked Carla Hills, who was the toughest member of the Cabinet by about twelve. Everyone was afraid of her and [John] Sununu hated her, so it was perfect. She had already appointed a couple of Democrats to high places so she was my first public--it got to be so bad-- One day about 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning I get a phone call from Sununu. He said, "Listen, Kaufman, I know what you're doing. I understand it, but I just got a call from Carla Hills, waking me up and saying, 'It's either Kaufman or me, but one of us is leaving this administration.'" So I backed off a little bit. It worked pretty well, actually. It was fine.

I got to play with Clarence Thomas, which was a great thing. It was really interesting.

I'm sorry--what was the Clarence Thomas?

I did a lot of the politics inside on Clarence Thomas. So in my own little way I felt I helped make a difference, because I am a true believer that personnel is policy. Good personnel can get good policy through and bad personnel won't. It was interesting.

Early on I had a call from Atwater. He said, "Listen, how'd you like to have lunch with Strom Thurmond?" I said, "Sure, I'd love to." A living legend. I've only met him a couple of times-- awesome. "Next Wednesday you'll have lunch in Thurmond's office." Classic Atwater, I should have known better. So I'm about fifteen minutes late because I'd been on the phone. I hate being late. I figured I'd see a big crowd for lunch, that I'm just going to be a little piss in the back of the room. Turns out, I'm lunch--to talk about the regional jobs.

It's the ranking Republican Senator from each state. Georgia had no member of the Senate. It was Newt [Gingrich] as the ranking House member. They're all sitting there cooling their heels waiting for me to show up. Atwater introduces me to Thurmond and Thurmond speaks up and says, "Ron, we're here to talk about our regional jobs and what the Bush Presidency thinks about our regional jobs." I look around--Atwater's on the table. Get up, Lee.

I said, "I apologize for being late. Senator, to be honest with you, they're not your regional jobs. They're President Bush's regional jobs. We're all Republicans here. I think it is very important. This is the President's army to keep the troops in line for the next four years, and after the first four years, you can have them all. But for now, I think they're President Bush's regional jobs."

Dead silence. I mean, I thought I was going to be killed in about eight seconds. The guy who saved me--actually, it was Newt. He said, "You know, at least the guy's honest, Senator, and I can understand exactly where he's coming from." He was great. He saved my butt. Then I came back and I said, "Listen, Senator, the truth is there are a lot of folks that helped Senator Thurmond become Senator who also helped President Bush become President. You come to me with folks you want to have and we'll work together on it." Actually, I became half-baked famous for a while on the Hill--as a dope.

Can I take you back a bit? I'm sorry, there was something I wanted to ask you about the transition from Reagan to Bush, and those are these reports that there was some bad blood, even though this was the first handoff of a sitting President to a Vice President since Martin Van Buren, or whatever.

Good point.

Did you see that?

Yes, a lot. When we ran for reelection and the campaign started up and we won and I started to do the personnel stuff. You had a natural and understandable conflict. You had people who had federal jobs already--the political jobs--who would say, "We worked for the Reagan-Bush administration. You wouldn't get reelected if we hadn't done a good job. We want to keep them."

Then you had the people who worked on the campaign who said, "Listen, we worked our guts out for the President and we'd like to have our chance of having the jobs." Then you had the people in the states that helped in the organization in the states and said, "We want our jobs." Then you have Members of Congress saying, "Well, you know, these are great staff people who really understand these--and we worked hard for the President, and we want our staff guys to have some of these jobs." So you have competing forces for the same jobs.

In the end when you looked at it, it worked out about right. About a third of them stayed, about a third of them came from the campaign, and about a third of them came from the states and/or the Hill. So, in the end it kind of worked out right. But the Reagan folks felt they were owed those jobs and, actually, a hostile takeover would have been easier. You could have just cut everybody's head off, it's simple. A friendly takeover is a lot harder to do right. There was no way in the world you could ever make it right.

Some of the subsets of my job that the President asked me to do--one was to try to make that transition as painless as possible, which really meant saying "no" nicely. There aren't that many jobs. The Mayor of New York has ten times more jobs than the President of the United States has to give out. There really aren't a lot of jobs. There are, like, three thousand jobs. It's not a lot, if you think about it--full-time jobs.

So you're saying "no," and it's how you say "no" and how you hold people's hands and all that stuff. I'm prejudiced. We did a good job in trying to hold hands and tell folks, Republicans aren't supposed to be the guys who want to come here and stay here and keep these jobs. Don't tell me you need two more years for retirement. These jobs aren't about retirement. They're not supposed to be.

It was hard. It was difficult and we did the best we could. We probably failed some places. But in the end, it was okay. A couple of folks were--there were some messy ones, but I don't see how you can do it any better.

On a different front, was there a concerted effort to assert, to make it clear, that this was a new administration? This was a Bush administration, not a Reagan administration?

That's a great--actually you raise a good point that I'll come back to later in a different way. That's a really good point. I should have said it earlier.

In the beginning of the campaign, when we first started putting together the pieces quietly--back in the fun days, in the Massachusetts days--one part of my report was that the hard part's going to be--this can't be about Reagan III. This can't be about Reagan's third term. It's got to be about the Vice President and his Presidency and his people. And you've got to distance yourself from the Reagan folks up front.

If you go back and look at the clips, historically speaking, in the beginning there were lots of clips about, "Why isn't Reagan doing more for President Bush? Why aren't his people doing more for President Bush?" It was a conscious decision on the part of the campaign, early on, to make sure that the reporters and Americans realized that this was about George Herbert Walker Bush and his four years and his people to run those four years, and not about the last eight years of Ronald Reagan.

Nothing disrespectful to Ronald Reagan, but voters don't care about what you did for them before. It's what you're going to do for them now that counts. And a very important part--I felt strongly about a sitting Vice President getting a chance to get elected on his or her own right. It had to be about them, and not about their boss. For President Bush, who slavishly worked for his boss for six and a half, seven years, it's a little bit of a problem, obviously. And there was some resentment in the way we handled it, because that was a public thing on purpose and lots of folks understandably didn't like it.

Ed Rollins was pissed that we didn't let him run the campaign. There were a lot of folks who were really upset that we didn't use them more and that we had our own chairmen in states. It wasn't necessarily the Reagan chairmen. Yes, we included the Reagan folks whenever we could, because you had to do that. But in the end, you had to do that or you couldn't win.

It's the same problem that George W. Bush faced in 1998 when he started to think about--in '97--when he started thinking about running for President. He couldn't let this be about "Bush-lite" or "Revenge of Bush" or "Son of Bush." It had to be about Governor Bush, his direction, his four years and his people. Not about the former President, his defeat, and his people.

And it was very important that guys like me and other visible Bush folks be nowhere to be seen in the beginning until it was established that this was really Karl Rove's campaign and Karen's [Hughes] campaign and Joe's [Allbaugh] campaign and Bush's campaign. Once that imprimatur was down--You go back and read the clips and you see lots of stories about unnamed sources--Bush sources--being pissed. But they had to be. They couldn't be part of it. If you all could write, "This is about the father," he would never have won. It's the same concept. Does it make sense to you?

I'm wondering if I can get you at this time to maybe comment or reflect on some of the other major figures who worked in the Bush White House, starting with Chief of Staff John Sununu, whom I assume you got to know quite well throughout various campaigns.

Yes, I've known John forever. I met Governor Sununu when he ran for the Senate in 1980 and he lost to Warren Rudman in the primary. What impressed me--I was up there election night. I think it was '82. Yes, it was '82. He lost to Rudman. Election night he went to Rudman's headquarters and he cut a deal with Rudman to be his campaign chairman and he worked his heart out for Rudman for Senate. It was a close election, and that's the day he became Governor. It was brilliant. Well done. I've been a fan of his ever since. John's a brilliant guy.

I worked really hard with him putting together the pieces of the Bush campaign in New Hampshire, which is a very difficult state. Everyone said it's just so hard. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, putting the Bush team together in New Hampshire for the '88--We had all these--In New Hampshire, everybody hates everybody else. There aren't two camps. It's like putting together Afghanistan, I promise you, and John was very helpful, mostly, in allowing me to stitch together disparate camps to have one Bush camp.

We were able to put the Sununus and the [Hugh] Greggs and a lot of folks together in one camp, which is why we survived in Iowa. I can never understate how great the organization was in New Hampshire in the primary in '88. We came in third in Iowa. We lost to Pat Robertson and it didn't dent New Hampshire. It was a credit to a lot of folks, including Sununu, who kept that thing together. We skipped over that, didn't mean to.

John was controversial, like all Chiefs of Staff pretty much, other than Andy. He was a Chief of Staff who had a strong belief in an organized, disciplined organization that fed everything through proper channels, and that made him unpopular in some cases. He was not afraid to exercise his thoughts on the process. Presidents pick the Chiefs of Staff for different reasons.

It was a somewhat surprising choice, if I remember right. I think Craig Fuller was sort of the front-runner, at least in the media for a time and then--

The worst way to get--One way never to get a job with George Herbert Walker Bush is to be the front-runner in the media. I promise you--that's not good for your health.

So he was campaigning for the position?

No, that's not fair. He just became the front-runner.

People always underestimated the former President as a manager and a politician--a lot. If you look at his history, the people who made up his campaign in the '80 campaign for President--almost none of them worked for him in the White House office, because in '81 he wanted a campaign staff that was nonpolitical and very subservient to Reagan the first four years. So he brought in Admiral [Daniel] Murphy, and all his folks were nonpolitical. Almost all the key players were basically nonpolitical. Rich Bond was the only kind of politician.

Then when it came time to run for reelection, after he won reelection in '84 he got rid of the whole staff and he had a whole different staff come in--Craig Fuller, et al., who were much more political, much more in tune to a political phase of his life. And they did a great job. The first staff--As you said earlier, at the end of four years the predominant feelings about the Bush Vice Presidency the first term is that he was the greatest, strongest Vice President in history. That's a pretty accurate statement if you look through the clips. As a result, those guys were all fired. He had a whole new staff, much more political.

They do the impossible, getting a Vice President elected in his own right, and their reward is to all get fired. He brings in a whole different staff to run the Presidency. The point being he's much smarter than people give him credit for--much more wise about the candidate feeling that the people who get you there don't keep you there, sometimes. So, he had a whole different staff. Very few people who worked in the Vice Presidency worked in the Office of the President. 49

R. Kaufman, 8/6/2003 2

? 2021 The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia and the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation

John was a tough taskmaster and he didn't suffer fools lightly. As smart as can be. If you go into a meeting with John Sununu, you'd better have your ducks in order. You'd better know that briefing book. If I were to meet him and hadn't read that, he'd know more about it than I would. You had to give him credit for that. He did some things right, he did some things wrong, and he probably would have been better served if he had had some Washington experience--understood the crazy ways of Washington a little better.

The only time that President Bush ever asked me what I thought--not that he really cared--about who should be in the Cabinet--I thought Sununu should be OMB [Office of Management and Budget]. I think he would have been a great OMB Director for the first couple of years, three years, and then tough enough to be Chief of Staff later, maybe. But that was better for his personality, his expertise, and lack of Washington understanding. I think he would have been served better and the President may have been served better, but, regardless, John came and went.

You mentioned OMB, which brings me to Richard Darman. Any reflections on Mr. Darman? We've heard quite a bit about him.

I bet you have. I'm a huge fan on one hand, and different on others. Any time you'd go to a meeting, I could promise you, you'd walk away from that meeting and the guy who probably got the most out of that meeting was Darman. Brilliant son-of-a-bitch. Really, really smart. And Machiavellian as hell, as I'm sure you know, as was Sununu. But that's not a bad quality--I don't look at that as an evil quality. Probably their biggest mistake, from my perspective again, is that they fell in love with the budget deal and they put so much of their soul into it. I truly believe it was a bad deal that probably should have been made--

A bad deal that probably should have been made?

Right, because of the war and other factors, the fact we didn't control Congress, et cetera. The mistake in my mind was twofold. One was falling in love with it, and two, the way they sold it. Remember, we signed it in the Rose Garden with everybody being rosy, happy, a great deal for America and all that stuff, versus wheeling President Bush in on a gurney in a straitjacket with a pen in his mouth, saying, "I hate this deal. It sucks raw eggs. It's going to make me break my promise, but Congress--those bastards--have forced me into this and I have to sign this because of the war, et cetera, and sign it reluctantly. I think my guys have not done me particularly well, not that they're bad people, but we got a bad deal, but I have to sign it." The chances of that selling later on, in my opinion, were a whole bunch better than trying to say this is a great deal.

This was your advice at the time?

That's been my feeling. I won't say that was my advice, in retrospect, but that's always been my feeling.

And you feel that it did cost the President--

It was one of many things that cost the President. We didn't lose because of raising taxes--it was a factor. We lost for a whole bunch of reasons. Do you really want to go there? Couldn't we skip '92? I hate that year. Bad wine. Bad women. Just an awful year.

Actually, I want to follow up a little bit on that tax deal because that comes up repeatedly--the notion that he'd made an explicit promise at the convention, "No new taxes."

Great line.

Was that a Peggy Noonan line, do you know?

I don't know, but I think so. I believe it was.

Now you're the political affairs person at this time, is that correct?

What time?

Fall of '90?

No, I was still in Personnel. I wasn't as deeply involved as I would like to have been so I can claim no credit, and no blame. I've always got a loud mouth in expressing my opinions. Luckily, I was not the political director--

Sununu and Darman had something of a tin ear when it came to this political savvy?

John's a--I mean, they're both smart guys. It's interesting--the three smartest guys I met in this business, Sununu, Darman, and Newt Gingrich--they all kind of brought about their own downfall. I guess you can't be smarter than the average bear without at some point affecting your ability to understand the average kind of bear. I think mostly they fell in love with the deal, what they were doing, which is not uncommon. A lot of us do that. I fell in love with George Bush.

I think they lost perspective. They're so deep into it that they lost--they're normally very smart. People say they're "dumb politicians." You don't become Chief of Staff to the President--Dick Darman is one of the smartest guys I know. That's B.S. They certainly lost it in this particular circumstance. They didn't play it right.

Again, I don't think it was the deal itself, because the truth of it, when you look into it, is that the caps we put on spending served well and probably made the Clinton years work, in all honesty, but it didn't make any difference. It's like me trying to argue that Willie Horton is not a racist issue. It's done, so forget about it. That's the way life works. But the deal wasn't bad. It was just the way to market the deal.

The tax deal signing, lobbying for the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I think there was a Clean Air Act, sort of ticked off perhaps the old Reagan wing of the party, whatever. Was that a concern of yours when you finally did move into the political affairs? About the base--the question about Bush sort of abandoning the Reagan revolution.

There was a group of folks within the party, a certain band that never trusted or liked George Bush. If for no other reason than he was the guy who really seriously challenged Ronald Reagan in the end. We were the last guy standing. And that caused us--if you go back and look at George W.'s race for Congress, and he was the patrician kid, the trilateralist--all that kind of stuff--there was just an anti-Yankee, anti-Northeast establishment bent to the party that, because of that, would never accept George Bush, and wanted to walk out of the convention when Reagan--The truth is, on a lot of issues that they cared about the most, supposedly, Bush was more consistent. On the pro-life issue--Bush was much more consistent on the pro-life issue of his Presidency than Ronald Reagan was. Ronald Reagan raised taxes, like, 26 times, but it's not about that.

It was the way it was sold.

Touchy-feely stuff. The group that never were going to be strong Bush supporters. Having said that, I never thought that threatened our Presidency. We had much bigger problems to deal with than that. We had the perception of the economy. Winning the Presidency four times in a row. History says it's really hard. I'm a big believer in history, as you all are, obviously. Winning the Presidency four times in a row is a herculean task.

The most important thing was the right track-wrong track question, which, as you all know was--Election Day--17 right track, 80 wrong track. You cannot win. Did we do things to help him? We ran into trouble in the campaign. It's going to take every ounce of my being not to say what I really think about that campaign, personality-wise. Nah.

No, no, no--

Go ahead, be our guest! It was the worst run campaign in the history of American politics. Every one of us should be shot and quartered for the way we ran that campaign. We served that man so poorly, we should be ashamed of ourselves until the day we die. I'll always feel that. I can give you a whole bunch of chapter-and-verse without getting into personalities to prove the point if that will make you happy.

Let's do that. We're jumping ahead a bit but--

We can stop--

It's important.

Please, this is very important, so I'd rather have you--

You know, to this day, when you hear people say, "Did President Bush really want to win?"--I'm sure you guys have heard that a thousand times. Was he sick? Was it the Crohn's disease, or the--I was with him every day at that point in time, and every day the guy would get up at five in the morning and go to midnight. Here's a guy who wouldn't lose a game of horseshoes to the butler on purpose. It's not in his being. But clearly something happened to set off the scent that we didn't care, because it's too prevalent, among reporters, among people in Washington. So I have my theories like everybody else.

One theory, on that part of it, and I'll get into some specifics about the campaign being terrible, but one theory is that deep in his heart--Here's a guy who lied about his age, basically, to serve his country, running against, as Mary Matalin called him, a "draft-dodging, philandering, pot-smoking son-of-a-bitch," Bill Clinton. Deep in his heart I don't think the former President would ever believe that America would throw him out for Clinton. He would never articulate that. He'd never say that, I mean--consciously. Subconsciously, I think it was just there. I think he felt in the end that there is a God, there is justice, and the American people are smarter than that. I believe that was in part a problem, subconsciously.

The campaign, however, was just an awful campaign. Not to waste too much time, I'll give you two classic examples of just how bad it was. One was right after the convention in September sometime. The campaign is so bad there are now three political people on the plane. I'm going to leave personality and names out because it's not important. You can probably figure them out. There's a person who is the political person from the campaign. I'm the President's political person, and Jim Baker now puts a political person on the campaign. So if we're going to make changes or if anything had happened, we all have to agree on stuff. I can't think of a worse thing to do--politics by committee.

We go into Chicago for an event at the Hyatt on Michigan Ave. I can remember that, but I can't remember my client's first name. The first part of the problem that's wrong is we're doing a fundraiser in late September. That should never be. We should be done raising our money by then. Anyway, it's on the top floor of the Hyatt Hotel, so we had enough time for me to go to run. So I change and go for a run. I also check everything out and everything's fine.

I run into Henry Hyde in the lobby. He says, "Ron, I'm glad I found you. I've been trying to get hold of someone in the campaign in the White House. I can't get anybody to return my phone calls." Tonight--same hotel--in the ground floor ballroom, the Illinois Catholic Church was running its annual Man-of-the-Year dinner and every important Catholic in the Midwest was going to be there. They're honoring Governor [Robert] Casey of Pennsylvania, and he's the only Democrat who hadn't endorsed Clinton. "Can you stop in?"

I said, "Of course." This is a chip shot--you kidding me? So I went upstairs and I find the two folks--the campaign political person and the Baker political person--and I say, "Hey, listen, can I change the schedule?" We get an edict from the campaign in the White House--"You can't change the schedule; the President's tired," blah, blah, blah. I said, "Hello. Illinois? Catholics?" After about an hour of painful debate, we agree we'll go down to the Catholic thing first, then do our thing and get out so it doesn't make the day any longer. Great. Fine. I find Congressman Hyde, then I go for my run and come back. Turns out the Catholic thing starts after ours so we can't go there first. So we'll have to go after ours.

We do our event, our fundraiser, and I go to my two compatriots, "Okay, let's go downstairs." "No, can't do it, can't change it." So we blow them off. I mean, they're still waiting for us to this day, I think. We blow off every important Catholic in the Midwest, blow off the Governor of Pennsylvania, and all the Catholic voting power. I go nuts. I go stark-raving mad. I locked myself in a conference room and I called my wife and said, "I'm quitting the campaign. If I'm so ineffectual that I can't convince folks of the importance of this event, I should be shot and drawn and quartered." That's how bad the campaign was. Bill Clinton would have gone into that room. He would have worked every hand in that room 27 times. Every little--not only kissed twice--but probably half the priests.

What was the cause of this? Was it personnel?

Just the campaign was dysfunctional. It was so bifurcated by this point in time. You're going to get me in trouble, you guys. The truth, in my opinion, is we had great people working on the campaign in the wrong places. I'll leave names off, that's not important, but people who should have been fundraisers, who raised money last time and were great fundraisers, wanted to be general chairmen. And people who were great pollsters wanted to be campaign managers. And the people who should have been Chiefs of Staffs wanted to win Nobel Prizes at the State Department, and everyone put their own little piece ahead of the greater good, in my humble opinion. These are all my friends and I'm getting in serious trouble saying this, but I really believe it.

This is because you'd already been in power and expected to remain? You weren't hungry enough in that sense?

I guess all that. I mean, who's to know why, but we were full of ourselves. Part of it goes back to what happened after the war. You had to be there to appreciate how incredibly overwhelming it is to be treated as royally as we all were right after the war, and justly so. I think it deadened the senses. It really deadened a lot of things and people got a little bit out of whack. You hear a lot about what the White House does to people. The war did that to a lot of people. Not the President, by the way. But it leaves you totally out of whack. People got full of themselves and didn't serve him well, didn't serve the campaign well.

The economy actually wasn't--As you all know, the best quarter we had was the last quarter. The recession was over by then, and to Clinton's credit, he took credit for it. We would have done the same thing. I'm not blaming him for it. But we just did a terrible job--

Another great example is the last week of the campaign. A week before the election, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, before the election--three of those days--I think it was two days now--we were on a train trip through Wisconsin. I'm sure you've all read enough to know how campaigns are run--how hard it is to organize a presidential campaign trip. It takes months of planning. How, in sweet Jesus, knowing what you know about the campaign, could you put the President of the United States on a train in Wisconsin for three days, or two days--whatever the hell it was. It was ludicrous. Even if you won Wisconsin, which we didn't do. It was nuts.

Any campaign that would do that to the candidate should be shot. And you can't say it was a mistake, because of what it takes to put someone in that kind of thing. The tragedy was, if you go back and look at the polling data--CNN did the daily track, USA Today did a daily track--the whole week he was closing. He closed until two things happened. My vision from where I stood was that Americans really had serious, grave doubts about Clinton. The election wasn't about Clinton, it was about us. A year from November it's going to be about W., not about whoever the stooge is the Democrats are going to put up. Sorry, editorial comment.

It was about us. They looked at Clinton and really didn't like him. Then, President Bush did something which was unusual for him, calling them "bozos"--so uncharacteristic, so un-presidential, not like him at all, but out of frustration. It just didn't click with people. Then, of course, the famous indictment. The polls were closing every day. I think on Wednesday it went down to three points or four points, just like this, and then the "bozo" thing hit. And then rumors that the indictments were coming.

This was the [Caspar] Weinberger thing?

Yes, the [E. Lawrence] Walsh--It just by chance happened to be the Thursday night before the election. They leaked it then. So we're closing. It was one of the saddest days of my life, on that stupid train trip. Every day, I was the guy who got the CNN pollsters first thing in the morning and I'd go to the President and say, "This is what they're telling me." I'd be the first guy. So we're on a train and somehow, I couldn't get connected with the pollster and I'm a little bit late getting a hold of the CNN pollster. We tried and missed--whatever.

The President's goofy brother, Prescott, calls him and says, "You're ahead." He had gone from, let's say it was--I can't remember the exact numbers--48-44 Clinton-Bush, to, you might say, 49-41 Bush. Prescott calls Bush to give him the great news. It turns out that CNN had run the wrong pictures with the wrong thing. It wasn't getting closer, it widened at that point. But the President is pumped because he now thinks he's ahead. I call and say, "Sorry, Sir, the pictures are wrong." Again, it wasn't these exact numbers but it was not a happy moment.

Still, it was relatively close, considering everything. We had a chance to change it around and we're running around the cornfields of Wisconsin on a train trip. It just points out how bad the campaign was. And there are a thousand more instances like that to show the campaign was dysfunctional.

When did you first sense that perhaps things were not going all that well? Was it the [Pat] Buchanan challenge in New Hampshire?

That didn't help matters. That was a symptom versus a cause.

I mean, there's got to be a point where you go from the Gulf War euphoria, thinking this thing is--

Clearly. I'm just trying to decide what I'm going to tell you without getting in trouble. When John had to leave us--Sununu--because of silly things, and he could have survived, probably, but he had burned so many bridges because of his style. You can be tough as long as things are going well. But when you have no allies and things go bad, it's--you know. They brought in Sam Skinner, who is a marvelous guy. I don't know how much stuff you have on people--

We talked to him and--

If I was smart, I'd read what everyone else said about the Skinner months before I said anything, but they were a disaster. I don't know if you've got that on tape anyplace, but it was a total, unmitigated disaster. No one's fault, it just didn't gel. I don't blame them. It just didn't gel. The campaign started off and it didn't gel and nothing worked. So when I say we failed the President, I mean, we failed the President badly.

Then, by the time the convention rolls around and Baker comes in to try and save the thing--It's like, Nolan Ryan may be the greatest pitcher in history but if he had been retired for four years he couldn't come back and pitch the World Series, no matter how great a pitcher he is. Jim Baker had been, on purpose, out of politics for three years at State. You can't be any further out of politics than State, as far as this kind of politics. He brought his team in at the last minute. You can't come out of retirement and expect to be sharp in the World Series in the seventh inning, basically.

It was just a nightmare. There is no way in the world I could describe how bad it was at the very beginning of the campaign. The campaign geared up--You'd think it was science fiction--a bad mockery of The West Wing. It was just awful, just a nightmare.

Was there anyone you could go to? Did you go to George W., for instance, or anyone, and say, "Look, we need radical surgery here"?

W. had been part of the fix, along with Andy, who actually was the guy who lowered the boom on Sununu--not quite what history says. So he had his own personal problems, not problems, but work.

This was--everyone tried--No one didn't want it not to work. Everyone loved Sam Skinner. He's a terrific guy. But it was just an absolute nightmare. Nothing worked. They tried new structures, new people, layered. It was just awful. None of it--we all should have been shot. We were all responsible, every one of us. We all should have quit. The President would have been better served if a bunch of us quit, but we didn't, and it cost him the Presidency. Certainly, you'd say, well, he's in charge. The President is always in charge. He's the first guy to say that. But we all should have known better. It was just an ugly scene.

The media coverage was pretty harsh. There was the whole scanner thing--

If you're a Republican that's part of the game. If you don't know that, don't play. We just did not do it right. For whatever reason, it was a bad season. You know the Guinness Book of Records? I'm in there. When I took over, he was at 92 percent. I drove him to 37.

What effect did you think [Ross] Perot had? What are your thoughts on Perot? In and out?

Didn't help us at all. We didn't lose because of Perot. I don't care what anyone says. It didn't help us any. If he was not in the race we still would have lost, probably. We handled nothing well--about message, about discipline, about focus, about picks in personnel, about obstruction in the White House. We just were awful--didn't serve him well.

What about charges that Bush lacked a vision? You hear this, you read this a lot in political science literature. The big criticism of Bush, Senior, was that he lacked the vision thing when he was President and as a campaigner. Do you have any reaction to that? Is that true or is it just a matter of the way he was portrayed?

I think there could be some part truth in that. As much of a sycophant I am for the guy, some of that's deserved. Part of it, though, is communications. Again, Elmer Gantry he's not and never has been, and that's part of it. Being able to communicate what you think to a large audience in this day and age is really important and that was never his strength. Also, times were such that it wasn't a time of big ideas, of big spending. It was a time of cutting back and managing.

Reagan was about change. The eight years of Reagan--this is lost in history--Reagan's vision took--the Reagan-Bush years took--government from, "How much bigger are we going to be, how much more are we going to spend?" to "How much smaller are we going to be, how much less are we going to spend?" That, theoretically, was what the Reagan revolution was all about. And how much power can you pass back to the states. So there were some radical changes in there.

Bush's Presidency was about managing that change and reshaping the change to fit the times and the resources, et cetera, overlaid by going from a world of two superpowers to a world of one superpower. And managing that properly with immense changes in Latin and South America, in Africa, the Mideast, et cetera. All that was about managing change. It is not a very sexy vision but I would contend that George Bush--this is my prejudice--had more to do with the ending of the Cold War--or at least the unraveling of it in a good way--as much as Ronald Reagan did. Dealing with that took a whole bunch of time, energy, and focus. And it wasn't a time for great new domestic programs.

I mean the press--no vision. We didn't handle it well. We could have done a much better job of selling all that and doing some things. But ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] was great. It was a great thing he was very proud of. We did Clean Water and stuff that Clinton couldn't do. We did a lot of things. We put more blacks, more Hispanics, more women into key jobs than any administration in history. We did lots of really good things. His job is to get that stuff done and our job is to sell it. That's our job, not his job. He hurt us by not being Elmer Gantry, I suppose you could say, in all fairness, but history is going to be pretty good to him, I think. Time is going to say, you know, in those four years a lot of stuff really did happen, and most of it was good.

We're going to leave the '92 campaign soon because I know you're not particularly enjoying this.

I'm afraid I'm going to get in trouble, is what I'm really afraid of. And I am.

There were reports at the time that persist to this day that President Bush was not feeling well, that there were some health issues, and you alluded to this a little bit earlier. Did you see any of this? Was there anything to that at all? He'd had that incident in Japan where he was ill and then it kind of kept cropping up through out the rest of '92. Did you notice any changes?

Yes, I was with him domestically when he traveled. I didn't go overseas. I was the political guy and there was no rational reason for me to go overseas. I was with him more than anybody, time-wise. Given the hours we were at work every day--given his enthusiasm and stuff--I remember staff being asleep on the train, and he'd still be outside waving to people in the middle of the night. I don't buy it. Yes, there were some well-documented minor things, but, in my opinion, none of that had anything to do with him winning or losing.

Much more--one of the five reasons we lost--I'll give you 30. That would be 31. That's my view. Marlin Fitzwater, whom you've probably done, has a different view entirely and he's pretty vocal about it. He thinks very much there was a problem. The former President would probably be on my side of that argument.

Would Lee Atwater have made a difference?

No. I loved Lee to death, but no, he wasn't the policy person. He wasn't the guy inside. I'll tell you, if Mack Baldrige had lived, in my opinion, it may have made a difference. If Dean Burch had lived, guys who were his peers, whom he respected.

The main difference between Atwater and Rove is that these guys didn't turn to Atwater on policy questions, ever. He was never inside the White House. Karl is a peer of these folks, legitimately, and is a large force in policy. If Lee had done policy changes--maybe he was strong enough to beat back some of the changes in the environment--I don't think so. I don't think so--maybe.

As a professional, would you comment on the Clinton campaign?

It was well done. Winners' campaigns always are. As they say, it's like anything else--when you win, you're a hero, when you lose, you're a bum, you're a dope. It was a good campaign. It was run well. I have respect for all those guys. In all honesty, they did the best job they could do on that side, given the flawed candidate that they had. Although he's a great candidate, aside from the dumb things he does with his life. I guess great men are flawed in great ways--Nixon and--As a politician, there's nobody greater than Clinton.

They spent so much time reacting to crazy things. You have to give them credit for keeping it afloat. But it wasn't about that. If we'd done our job right, I think we could have won.

You do?

If we had packaged the tax package right. If we had made sure that he had the right things to say at the right time and places. If we had not let the vision thing become emblazoned in everyone's soul. If we'd had a well-run organization. If we had ordered our chaos for the majority of 1992 in the White House. If we'd had a consistent, well-thought-out, crafted message. If we had been smart enough to shake Catholic hands in Illinois. If we weren't on train trips across Wisconsin for three days before the election. I think it would have made a difference.

You could have overcome the economic news? Even though I understand the economy was improving, the perception was still not quite there yet. You believe you could have overcome that?

I believe we could have mitigated with a good strong campaign and a good strong message. We could have gotten out our message better and more forcefully and given the President a chance. Again, look at the tracking polls, all of them. It was clear the voters didn't want to vote for Clinton. I think we forced them to, or we let them, at least. I blame us. I'm not trying to take the blame away from the President, but I don't think it was him. I think it was us. I don't particularly enjoy saying that, by the way. It's painful to say that the politics sucked, but it did. I'll always be ashamed of it.

On another note, was there any serious discussion about Dan Quayle in '92 as far as possibly unloading him?

Not by anybody who mattered, and certainly not by George Herbert Walker Bush. It never crossed his mind for twelve seconds. Other people may have been telling you different things, but I guarantee you it never crossed his mind.

You had remarked earlier at dinner that you thought Quayle did a nice job--I think that's when you said it--that Quayle did a nice job in the '92 campaign.

He was very solid. He served us loyally and worked his heart out. I would say that one of the best, continuous pieces of advice, I felt, that was given around the strategy table each time was Quayle's. He wasn't listened to all the time, or a lot. We had these meetings absent the President, and Quayle consistently gave us some of the best thoughts and ideas at the table, and he was consistently ignored, particularly after September.

Particularly after September--after Baker returns?

I didn't say that.

Jim and Colleen, we're approaching the end here. Have we skipped over anything that you want to bring up? This is the point where we usually ask you--

"What didn't we ask you we should have?"

Sort of think on a grand scale about any final thoughts on the Bush Presidency or George Bush himself?

He's the best. He's a heck of a lot smarter politically than people give him credit for. Something that always comes back to me that I thought about--people's perception being different from reality. Him being out of touch. One of the big bitches of the Chiefs of Staff was how many people he would talk to a day around the system. He talked to more people than anyone I know. So I always thought it was a weird knock that he was out of touch. He was anything but out of touch. But that was the kind of perception.

It was a great ride.

What's it like--maybe I'm pushing too many buttons here, but what's it like to lose like that?

It sucks. I probably over the years have given him more bad news than anybody else. A couple of pungent moments were kind of fun, actually. This picture right there was taken on the Monday afternoon before the Tuesday election in '92. We're flying into Louisiana someplace. It's the Oak Ridge Boys in Air Force One, in the beautiful conference room and we're dropping them off for the last rally. Then we're going to Houston for a final campaign rally on Monday night, then to the hotel to wait for returns.

I'm a cheerleader kind of guy, so one of my jobs on the plane would always be, "We're going to win this thing," to make him happy. I'm always Mr. Optimist and Mr. Upbeat. We were feeling a little queasy but we had this belief that they really can't do it to us. They can't, despite the polls.

The Oak Ridge Boys come in. It's the President, myself, Mary Matalin, and a couple of others sitting in the conference room. They came in--and they're great friends, personal friends, of all of us. I actually ride in the bus with them now for a week each year. Once a summer I go on the bus with them as a stagehand. They sing a medley of gospel songs, which was their roots--gospel. They did "Amazing Grace"--all a cappella. It hit us, I think. At the end, every one of us was crying--the stewards, a couple of service guys--were in tears. Each one of us felt, "This sucker's over." That moment just hit home deeply. "This ain't good. This really is over."

We dropped them off. Then we go to Houston to AstroWorld where we're having the final rally and, as always, the President goes to the holding room and I always go up and check things out. I look on stage and I forget who they were, but it was all these has-beens. I mean, nice people, but Charlton Heston, Bob Hope--I loved him. The average age of the person on stage was 106. It just hit me, Why are you doing this? I'm thinking to myself. Why do they have these people on stage? This is awful. This is not what you should be doing. Where's Bruce Willis? Where's Demi [Moore]? Where's someone who can walk without a cane?" It was those kinds of things. Right to the end the guys were wrong.

That was the last public event?

The last public event. It was just--it was ugly. The day after we lost, we were at the Houstonian. We're sitting around a table--other guys you interviewed--Bates and Fitzwater and Boyden [Gray]. All these guys were sitting around--Andy--and I had my two daughters with me. We were talking about how we were all going to be out of a job. My little redheaded daughter was pretty close to Mike Deland, who was the head of our EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], and CEQ [Council on Environmental Quality]--in a wheelchair, He was a favorite of my daughters. She says, "Does this mean that Mike Deland's out of a job too?" My older daughter says, "Katie, you dumbbell, everyone you know is out of a job." That kind of put it in perspective--where we were.

I can't think of anything else worthwhile. I've already lied too much and fudged too much. It was a great ride. It was a great Presidency. It was a moral, ethical Presidency. One thing--You got up in the morning and you knew you were never going to have to be embarrassed by the President. He was never going to do anything that--I remember doing a talk show, a TV show with George Stephanopoulos once, a couple, three years after. He had just left the White House, I guess. He was late and--"Sorry, I was doing a deposition" on something or other. He said, "This is the fourteenth time I've been deposed."

Somebody asked me, "What was it like during the Bush years?" There was something about the Walsh thing. "What did Bush know and when did he know it? Did it cause panic in the White House? Did you get worried this was going to bring down--" I said, "This is going to sound very sophomoric but no one ever worried about it because we all knew that George Herbert Walker Bush would never do anything to embarrass himself, his mother, his wife, his family or the Presidency. It never occurred to us, ever, that it would be a problem. I felt bad for the Clinton guys who couldn't possibly say that in a gazillion years.

It made the whole four years--as hard as they were, the ups and downs, the tough times, the good times--worthwhile because you knew you were doing it with people you cared about and who would never let you down. Again, it may sound sophomoric but it made the whole thing worthwhile and that's why we're all so loyal to this day.

Just one last thing. You said you went from "wrapping lettuce" to within ten, fifteen years--less than that--you're in the White House.

Let's see, I wrapped lettuce in '79, '80?

You had quite a ride. There must have been days when you would pinch yourself--

Today. I still don't know anything about this stuff. I can remember the first time I was on Air Force One as political director and the steward said, "Mr. Kaufman, the President wants to see you." "Yes, sir." I walk up front on Air Force One--and this is the new one, which is awesome--and the President would say, "Ron, here's the problem, what do you think?" "Well, Sir, we should do X, Y and Z"--whatever the hell it was. "Good idea. We'll do that." I'd walk back to my seat and I'd end up saying, "Holy cow, that was the President of the United States of America and he's asking me for my advice. God help the country if he's going to take it." It's just the way you felt. What am I doing?

There are some fun parts to it, too. In those days you didn't have the good system for getting tickets for the White House tour you have now. You had to stand in line forever. You'd drive up and you'd see these Americans at five in the morning start to queue up in long lines to get tickets to that little tour. What I used to do about once every month, or every couple of months--I'd get an agent, because no one would believe me otherwise. I'd get an agent, I'd walk over to the line, find some middle-class family, and talk to them. "Hi. You're from Ohio? That's great. I can tell from the white shoes you're from Ohio, that's good. What are you doing? Listen, how'd you like to come to lunch in the White House mess with me today?"

They'd look at me like, "What are you, some drug-induced person?" I'd say, "This is Agent Smith here," I'd find someone to take to the mess. Those little things. It's great. It's really cool that you're part of this whole thing. Well, anyway.

Thank you very much.

I'm not sure I helped too much.

Yes, you did. Thank you.