Bush needed to shake up the [1988 presidential] race. To provide it, because the Bush family always hired out the dirty work rather than do it themselves because my dear young man, that simply is not done, Bush turned to a prominent political media guru named Roger Ailes and, between the two of them, they set up the situation in which, on live TV, while [CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather] was pressing Bush on the latter’s involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush shoved back by citing an episode in which Rather, in a snit because a tennis match had run long, delaying his newscast, had walked off the air. Bush had dope-slapped Dan Rather. The Wimp Factor was dead.
I recall watching that and thinking how contrived Bush’s anger was, how different it was from the genuine anger that he had flashed at that Boston anchorman eight years earlier. I thought it was cheap theatrics and, in retrospect, it sums up a great deal of George H.W. Bush’s political career—the pragmatic insincerity, the subcontracting of the hatchet job to a hired hand, the willingness to play a role, no matter how clumsily, in order to keep and maintain power. Oh, and as it happens, while he was play-acting the bad-ass, Bush also was lying his hindquarters off about Iran-Contra. He’d been hip-deep in that criminal conspiracy, as we subsequently learned in 1992, when he pardoned anyone who could tie that can to his tail on his way out of Washington. He always was a more interesting man than he always felt that he had to pretend to be.
...he could never muster enough political gumption to overcome his own ambition. And so, to me, that will be history’s verdict on George H.W. Bush—that he, as the late Richard Ben Cramer put it, did What It Takes to be president and never seemed to realize how brutal a price that was.
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