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Nixon's Revenge 

MARK CRISPIN MILLER

The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (New York: Norton 2001) 29may01

The anti-intellectual appeal goes way back in American history and is still a potent one; and the Bush team made it with enormous skill, alleging W's rusticity and hyping Gore's aggressive braininess with all due unanimity and vehemence. It is therefore remarkable, and cause for optimism, that that drive ultimately failed, although it surely did a lot to redden all those middling states where Bush's act played well. Despite Gore's inability to warm the cockles of the national heart-and, more importantly, despite the media's gigantic bias against him-the majority of voters did not find W so "likeable" or, if they did, were not convinced that he was any deeper or more able than he seemed. Television's daily revelation of his absolute unfitness was, or should have been, a killer. Just as Nixon's men could never make him seem like fun, Bush's propagandists couldn't make that party animal seem capable of running the United States; and so it finally took five members of the nation's highest court, and the journalists' blind eye to what went down in Florida, to place him in the nation's highest office.

Nixon's Revenge MARK CRISPIN MILLER / The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder  (New York: Norton 2001) 29may01

"They misunderestimated me."
  — President George W. Bush

And yet TV's exposure of the governor's unfitness was itself misleading; for it allowed the quick construction of a caricature that has served to idealize the candidate, however cruelly it's been rendered. The dim bulb played by Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live, and roasted nightly by Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and the rest, and satirized by countless political cartoonists, is, on the one hand, an appalling figure-the sort of idiot prince who might slouch in the throne of some exhausted monarchy, perhaps, but who should never sit in charge of our democracy. While shockingly out of his depth, however, that plain half-wit is himself benign-a danger only insofar as evil others might manipulate him (as in SNL's mock soap Palm Beach). For all his faults, that butt is kind of "likeable," a simpleton as genial, blithe, and innocent as Alfred E. Neuman (to whom our president has often been compared). In short, that cheerful moron is a figure not much different from the smirking anti-Gore extolled by the Republicans throughout the recent contest. ("You don't have to be smart to be president! "yelled Representative J. C. Watts in introducing W at a rally in South Carolina.)[29] He may be dumb, in other words, but he's not ambitious, and he's a real nice fella, wouldn't hurt a fly.

The overall good-naturedness of that cartoonish image has been subtly amplified by Bush's own public response to such derision. Like all postmodern politicians from Ronald Reagan on, this Bush has understood that, in the culture of television, there is no balm like "self-effacing humor." However much the satire galls him-and it's obvious that it does-he has managed somewhat, and so far, to rise above it-and ensure its harmlessness-by seeming to take part in it himself. Thus he started early on to use that weary little joke about his tendency to "stress the wrong syl-LAB-ble," and told Letterman that he "would make sure the White House library has lots of books with big print and big pictures." Likewise, just before Election Day, he and Al Gore co-starred in the opening bit on Saturday Night Live-he riffing broadly on his own dyslexia (he said he was "ambivalent" about appearing on the show, which he at times had found "offensible"), while Gore sat stiffly sighing. That defensive comic pas de deux brought down the house-which made it clear, if further proof were needed, that such self-parody has no subversive edge at all. Indeed, such frank cooperation often works to power's advantage, since it appears to demonstrate a kingly magnanimity by showing the world that such burlesque is really licensed by the sovereign. Thus Ronald Reagan had Rich Little doing Ronald Reagan at his big inaugural bash in 1984, the Gipper richly laughing through it all; and the elder Bush was just delighted to have Dana Carvey come and do him at the White House, no hard feelings-and not very funny, either. Real satire always draws a little blood or else it's just court entertainment: Harry Shearer would never have been asked to play the Reagan White House, nor would Governor Bush have visited The Daily Show; and the Clintons got a bit more than they bargained for-as did all the other attendees that night-from Don Imus when he gave his raucous keynote at the annual dinner of the Radio/TV Correspondents Association in 1996. The comedy that's politician-friendly, on the other hand, is always trivial (even if it's sort of funny)-as are the politician's self-inflicted jabs. Far from being self-critical, in fact, the politician who cracks wise about himself-it seems to be a male thing, by and large*- is actually thereby betraying a certain shamelessness, both in himself and in the culture that sits laughing with him. (For examples, see "The Wit and Humor of George W Bush," pp. 120ff.)

And so to snicker at this president for his stupidity is not productive, for his unfitness isn't really funny-and in any case he isn't stupid. True, he is the most ignorant president in U.S. history, probably the most illiterate, and easily among the least concerned about the contents of his mind. Moreover, his off-the-cuff remarks betray what is apparently an inability to reason-an intellectual handicap much worse than, say, a lack of interest in the sort of wonkish fare that he himself has always gleefully dismissed.

* Of course, there are exceptions. Concerning Katherine Harris's "mischievous sense of humor," Katherine G. Seelye tells this story: "In a recent television interview with Diane Sawyer, Ms. Harris told a story about Christmas shopping at Target one night when she could not sleep. `The woman looked at my credit card and looked at me and she goes, `Katherine Harris: And like, she didn't, she said, `Are you Katherine Harris?'And I said, `Yeah. I only have on one layer of makeup. I'm incognito.' ""Katherine Harris Redux: No Longer Larger Than Life," New York Times, February 5, 2001.

("Sitting down and reading a five-hundred-page book on public policy or philosophy or something" is just not his thing, he told Tucker Carlson.) At issue here is not the president's distaste for slogging through tough prose but the incessant hints of a profound confusion that ought not to cloud the mind of anyone who has his finger on the trigger: a penchant for non sequiturs, a hard time making elementary distinctions, a tendency to merge cause and effect. Tautologies abound in Bush's speech: "In terms of being a president that says there is no place in [i.e., for] racism, it starts with saying there's no place for racism in America." "If you don't stand for anything, you don't stand for anything." And when asked about the prospect of there not being sufficient unity at his Republican convention, he replied: "I am confident there will be. I'm confident people are coming together. And the reason I believe this is because our party is united." (For more on Bush's illogic, see "Let Me Make One Thing Perfectly Clear," below.)

We can cite such examples till the cows come home, but it won't change the fact that George W Bush is our president, despite his obvious lack of interest in, or preparation for, the job (and despite the fact that the American people didn't vote him into office)-a momentous sign that he is by no means the cheery imbecile that many people would prefer to think he is. That he performs as front man for Dick Cheney's shadow government does not mean that he's a figurehead, like Henry Pu Yi or Paul von Hindenburg. Although he is as overwhelmed as he appears, this president is neither as dim-witted nor as easygoing as TV makes him out to be. That first impression now requires a clear corrective because-as he might say we misunderestimate him at our peril. For just beneath that "What, Me Worry?" grin there burns the adamant, ill-shaven glare of Richard Nixon. Uncannily, the vengeful spirit of that most unlikeable of presidents is back upon us once again-reincarnate in our hyperchummy chief executive, who, television keeps telling us, is marvelously "likeable."

By his own description "a political animal"-or, in Mary Matalin's admiring phrase, a "political campaign terrorist"*-Bush, like Nixon, has

* "He is not as ham-handed as the typical terrorist," Matalin told Bill Minutaglio. "He's much more of a stiletto as opposed to an ax murderer. He comes into a room, you know he's there." First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (New York: Times Books, 1999), p. 260.

exactly what it takes to win elections at their dirtiest: a taste for blood and a sharp sense of how to agitate his base, the right. He is also driven by ferocious tribal loyalty-a trait entirely missing from the loner Nixon, who had "the soul of an alley cat," as William Rusher put it once. The feudal urge to glorify his clan, exalt his vassals, and reward his friends has taken Bush a long, long way. Moreover, although bored stiff by governance, he is capable of SWAT-like focus in the war room. As J. H. Hatfield-alone among biographers-has pointed out, the first son exerted a great influence on the Bush/Quayle campaign in 1988, giving it his terroristic all. He joined the team to keep an eye on Lee Atwater, whose lowbrow antics he appeared on the cover of Esquire with his pants down-had offended Mother Bush. Soon, however, young George was working closely with the dirty trickster, working hard to give offense on a far grander scale. The two of them devised the tactics, then George would urge the necessary measures on his then-reluctant dad. "He'll do positive things, but that's all," Nixon noted of the loyal George H. W fifteen years before. The first son helped the candidate get past such inhibitions. It was he who got the elder Bush to go ballistic on Dan Rather in a live exchange on CBS so as to stifle any further talk of Iran-Contra, and to show off the candidate's king-sized cojones for the media-hating right (a gambit that restored the campaign's faltering momentum). Thus W aggressively exploited the old anti-telejournalistic animus that Nixon was the first to take advantage of, through the medium of Spiro Agnew. (See p. 75.) It was also W who persuaded Dad to go along with the strategic smear of Jimmy Swaggart just two weeks before the South Carolina primary, where Swaggart's man Pat Robertson was threatening Bush's chances; and so Bush/Atwater leaked word of Swaggart's motel assignations to the local press-a covert op that saved the state for Bush Sr. And, crucially, it was W who ensured that the notorious-and effective-Willie Horton ads could be blamed plausibly on mavericks unaffiliated with the Bush campaign. The first son raised the money for those ads and devised the cover operation that could then be said to have produced them on its own (a ruse that-to paraphrase our president allowed Bush/Quayle to claim the high horse while taking the low road).[30]

While he has the sort of smarts required for work of that clandestine sort, our president has also long been sharp enough to keep his disparate warriors inside the GOP's big tent. This, too, is a Nixonian ability-although our president is actually much better at it, since the necessary schmoozing comes much easier to him than to his dad's uneasy mentor. It was the younger Bush who in the 1980s made the peace between the Christian far right and his Episcopalian father-no mean feat since, as far as those believers were concerned, George Bush, with his membership in Skull and Bones and the Trilateral Commission, was about as worthy a Republican as Che Guevara.* As the man responsible for outreach to the Pentecostalists and Southern Baptists and their brethren, W forged many bonds secure enough to see him through the last election, his victory throughout the red states owing everything to that connection; and yet even as he always talked the talk of Christian rectitude, Bush has also walked the walk of Wall Street-and in him the twain do meet. Thus he has shown the sort of coalition-building savvy that defined his idol, Ronald Reagan. As long as all the players are on the right, W can talk to 'em-as in Texas, where Governor Bush did work with some Democrats, but where he did not work with any Democrats who weren't essentially Republicans. (There are quite a few such players in Texas politics.) Whoever can pull off such diplomatic coups cannot be half retarded, however comical his grammar.

Bush's link to Nixon is not merely temperamental, for his team has long included operatives who made their bones in Nixon's service. Lee Atwater was a Nixon acolyte and devotee of both the Gipper and Strom Thurmond-who transferred to the Bush machine in 1988, after having used Jew-baiting tactics to get Carroll Campbell into Congress. Likewise, there was Roger Ailes, who got his start in 1968 producing Ask Richard Nixon! -a series of canned television forums that placed the candidate "in the arena" with a hand-picked audience of grinning milquetoasts-and ended up coordinating Bush/Quayle's media drive while coaching Bush on how to come off manly at the podium. (Ailes now runs Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV) For his part, W was mentored by Atwater, whose early cohort, Karl Rove, has been with Bush the Younger from the start. Known

* That W was able to stay tight with the Christian Coalition even after having worked to sink Pat Robertson (by smearing Jimmy Swaggart) is an indication of his rare adroitness.

to the inner circle as "Turd Blossom" (the nickname came from Bush), the war-addicted Rove is just the sort of "mean, tough son-of-a-bitch" whose dedication Nixon always craved: "If you're not with Karl one-hundred percent, you're an enemy," as Texas GOP chair Tom Pauken has marveled. From his early days as a dirty trickster for the College Republican National Committee in 1973 -stealing stationery, forging invitations to fictitious parties, sifting garbage for discarded memos, etc.-Rove went on to do his number for the Texas right (while also handling other clients, including Phillip Morris), working his black magic as required. Just hours before the one gubernatorial debate in 1986, with the campaign of his boss, Republican Bill Clements in trouble, Rove charged dramatically-and with no evidence that he had found a hidden microphone in his office, and accused the incumbent, Democratic governor Mark White, of having had it put there. Four years later Rove made news again when it emerged that he'd been meeting privately with ultraright FBI agent Greg Rampton, who had been supplying him with secret information on Agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower. (Rove was working then for state representative Rick Perry, who wanted Hightower's job.) Such Watergate-style operations have recurred since Rove began to work full time for W The crude attempt to tar the Gore campaign before the first debate (by anonymously mailing them a training video that supposedly only Bush was meant to see) appeared to be pure Rove-and certainly was vintage Nixon.[31]

So much for our president's Nixonian abilities and personnel. But what makes W run that way? It seems anomalous indeed that Richard Nixon, who "went up the walls of life with his claws," as Bryce Harlow once re marked-should have exerted such an influence on this or that George Bush, who, to quote Ann Richards, "was born on third base and thought he hit a triple." The simple answer to this mystery is quite important, since it will help us understand exactly what we're living with today. Surprisingly, the large and very wealthy House of Bush, with its sterling fourteenth-century pedigree (the Queen of England is a cousin) and its decades of high influence on Wall Street, is driven by much the same resentment that compelled-and in the end destroyed-the threadbare Californian, son of Hannah and the loser Frank. That shared hostility explains the otherwise bizarre entanglement between the golden Poppy and the brazen Nixon, who evidently saw Bush as the son he'd never had: "A total Nixon manfirst," he enthused at the outset of his second term. "Doubt if you can do better than Bush." And yet the heart of Nixon beats more strongly in the breast of our new president, who lacks those dated scruples that he once had to talk his father out of honoring.[32]

The Bushes' resentment is more complicated than the plain class grudge that drove the underprivileged Nixon. Like him, they were angrily fixated on the Kennedys-not out of thwarted aspiration, certainly, but from dynastic envy, George the Elder having longed for years to transform Prescott, retroactively, into an American patriarch like Joe Kennedy: "Just wait till I turn these Bush boys out," he promised proudly back when Jack was president. Over the years after Camelot, the cult of JFK became more galling than inspiring, as it appeared to leave the Bush ménage forever in the shade, and grumbling tightly on the patio of their own mammoth seaside compound. Seeking to define themselves as somehow better than the competition, they took-preposterously-to trumpeting the family's modest origins, their frontier diligence and pluck just like Nixon. "While Kennedy was running for the Senate in 1952 with a healthy inheritance to back him," wrote Bush friend Fitzhugh Green, in an early presidential hagiography, "Bush was struggling to build his own bankroll"-a "struggle" that in fact entailed much generous investment by the folks back home (primarily Bush's dad and Uncle Herbie). Such invidious mythology loomed large in Poppy's presidential spectacle, what with the pork rinds and the cowboy boots and the canny exploitation of his clumsy way with words ("I may not be eloquent," etc.). And yet, while disavowing the Camelot mystique, Bush Sr.-like Nixon-also tried at times to reproduce it, strongly echoing JFK in his own inaugural address (penned by Peggy Noonan, who as a girl had been "in love with the Kennedys") and even picking Dan Quayle as his running mate in part because he thought the Indianan's youthfulness would call Jack Kennedy to mind. (He was wrong.)*[33]

* In Man of Integrity (1988), a family-sponsored propaganda volume meant to sell the Christian right on Bush's presidential bid, there is this revealing passage, at the start of Chapter 7, "Family Comes First":

It is impossible to understand the Vice President outside the context of his own family. There is an electricity, a special magic, when Barbara and the children are nearby.

Worked up by their lesser status as a rival house, the Bushes, once they'd settled down in dusty Midland, also found themselves offended by the high disdain that many Eastern liberals felt toward Texas. Unlike Nixon, who never longed to go back where he came from, the transplanted Bushes loved their neighborhood as they loved themselves, and that allegiance sharpened their Nixonian hostility toward sophisticated coastal types. Barbara writes of one telling face-off at a Georgetown dinner party in early 1968, when she and George had just moved to Washington for his first stint in Congress. Sitting next to her was some nostalgic Camelot survivor who kept taking shots at LBJ, then said, "I hate all Texans." When Barbara told him she was one, he said that she was obviously different, having grown up in the East. "I said that he was right, but that he was talking about my children, who were lucky enough to be born Texans. I turned my back and never spoke to that whining, pompous man again." With that, "George and I crossed `inside Washington' dinners off our list ."[34]

Fed by his clan's imperial ambitions, and shaped by his experience as a very wealthy kid in segregated Texas, the eldest son could only come to hate the East-or any other precinct outside Nixon country. This had to do primarily with the 1960s. Bush's time away from home at Andover, then Yale-was tolerable only insofar as he could replicate the sort of nonstop fun-time and homogeneous companionship that he knew while growing up in Midland. As head cheerleader at Andover, then as president of Delta Kappa Epsilon-Yale's drunkest frat house-and as a loyal Bonesman (like his dad), Bush had a ball. The currents of the time, however, were all against such puerile institutions-and eventually against his father, and against the president whom his father was serving with that anomalous steadfastness. The elder Bush became a Nixon surrogate as soon as he joined Congress in 1968-the year of the Tet Offensive, the Chicago Seven, Soul on Ice, and the White Album, to name just a few manifestations

When all four boys recently appeared with their father on a morning television talkshow, the telephone lines lit up for hours. Some said that they were reminded of the Kennedys, that they had never seen so many young men in the same family so bright and handsome and personable.

-George Bush with Doug Wead, Man of Integrity (Eugene, Ore.: Harvest House, 1988), p. 111

of the global trends that seemed to spell the end of everything that Nixon and the younger Bush had both believed in.

And yet there is, of course, a difference between Bush's anti-'60s beef and Nixon's. For the thirty-seventh president, as for millions of other Americans, the schisms and innovations of that decade were apocalyptic, threatening everything with mere destruction, and so requiring a defensive movement back toward that exclusive tidy Eden that "we" enjoyed before the rise of Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, the Beatles. "The country-we turned away from the Great Society," Nixon raved to Alexander Haig in May 1973. "It turns away from an obession about the blacks. And it's starting to turn away from the crime and drug syndrome, the dirty movies, etc. It turned away from, you know, the whole [unintelligible] peace thing. I mean, it turned a little character."[35] The villains of the piece were not "the blacks" per se, not even the Communists, but all those affluent liberals who had made things go so wrong-the permissive parents and their snotty college kids, the pompous bleeding hearts who let the Reds and negroes get away with murder, the pseudointellectuals with their big words and "dirty movies." Nixon's rage at that elite expressed, among other things, a class-based sense of grievance, piqued to fury by the spectacle, or thought, of privileged types who, even though they had it all, were blithely dumping on the values that had made this country great and that he'd worked his whole life long to honor-or so he liked to think.

For George W Bush, on the other hand, the 1960s represented not a vast barbarian invasion but a pretty big impertinence. The turmoil was annoying to him largely for its threat of interference with his faux-aristocratic life of buddy rituals and heavy drinking; but he was most irked by the general disrespect for George Bush Sr., a famed alumnus whose support for Nixon and the war in Vietnam were naturally well-known at Yale. Of course, it was also a matter of taste for young Bush, who didn't groove to Sgt. Pepper any more than Nixon did. ("The Beatles went through that kind of a weird, psychedelic period, which I particularly didn't care for," confessed the governor, who went on to have Wayne Newton help inaugurate him.) But it was all the somber questioning that most aggrieved him-the sudden vocal skepticism toward the wisdom of the Fathers, for their errors, or crimes, in Vietnam and on the ground at home. The younger Bush could not abide such antipaternal sentiment, much less share it, since his own dad was-and still is-his guide in everything. "There is an arrogance about some Ivy League connections that is bad," the father wrote the son in 1974, referring to the student enemies of Richard Nixon. "I saw an intellectual arrogance that I hope I never have," said W in 1992, describing Yale precisely as his dad (and Nixon) did.[36]

That there was some "arrogance" among the campus left is surely true although far less than in the White House at the time. However, to thus write off that whole explosion of dissent itself betrays a certain smugness, especially considering Bush's own frank lack of any intellectual or moral engagement in those painful years: "I don't remember any kind of heaviness ruining my time at Yale." To be that cavalier about the war, the global influence of U.S. corporate power, the plight of blacks, and the demands of "women's liberation" was to be absurdly out of step-a careless Bourbon among Jacobins, Girondists, fretful moderates, and active royalists. His own beloved dad was more affected by the issues of the day: Representative Bush voted, bravely, for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, with its "open housing" provision-a stand that won him lots of hate mail from his native Houston-and although a dedicated hawk, he took the protestors seriously, meeting with them often in D.C. and even standing up for them before Republicans at home, pointing out the moral basis of the demonstrations and reminding his constituents that "we in Texas certainly can't stand to be without the right to dissent." (That respectful view was very different from the absolute contempt that would pervade the Nixon White House.)* For his part, the son, through all his years in Jim Crow Texas, was never moved to take a stand on civil rights-unlike Joe Lieberman, Pat

* Roger Morris recalls the Nixon team's dismissiveness: " `Look,' [they might have said], `these people in the streets are thoughtful, they may have a point about the war, it may behoove us to rethink some of our assumptions. They never did that. They thought [the demonstrators] were insubstantial and capricious, they thought it was basically a draft protest, they thought they were cowardly, they thought they were there for frivolous reasons.... They just never took the protest seriously in an intellectual sense.... And their disdain and their contempt for the anti-war movement was part of the defense mechanism for keeping them out.... If you could dismiss them as a bunch of flukes and phonies and kids, you didn't really have to think seriously about what they were saying.' " Quoted in Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 307.

Schroeder, Edward Garvey, Barney Frank, Clinton, Gore and many other white members of the generation that our president has often deprecated for its selfishness. Nor did the younger Bush say anything, pro or con, about the war back then. His silence on the subject struck his brothers in the DKE house as remarkable, since he was not the silent type, and they were talking endlessly about it. He refused to sign an antiwar petition, but otherwise did nothing about Vietnam, except keep from going there by taking full advantage of that plum assignment to the Texas Air National Guard."

Thus was all the era's idealism quite lost on our president, who staggered through that fiery epoch partying and making good connections. (When they first saw Animal House, some of Bush's college pals were struck by his strong undergraduate resemblance to the woozy, boozy "Bluto," played by John Belushi.) The chaos and the disrespectfulness he noticed, and deplored, while simply tuning out the grand utopian impulse that was throbbing everywhere. Indeed, his only impulse vis-à-vis "the [unintelligible] peace movement" was just like Nixon-to attack it. For its "arrogance" in challenging his own complacent views and in dissing his beloved father, Bush became a surly and half-conscious sort of counterrevolutionary, who would ultimately work that grudge into his platform. This explains the basis of his own relationships with other bitter sons (and daughters) of the lower middle class-Nixon's spiritual children, whose hard alliance with the wealthy W is but the next step down from George the Elder's more ambivalent-and less destructive-partnership with Tricky Dick himself. Our president's most devoted operatives are those ex-kids who saw their parents' values spit on by the haute-bourgeois protesters of the 1960s, and who are still seething after all these years: the toxic Rove, mad Mary Matalin, and other livid shadowboxers. Moreover, Rove long ago provided Bush with some simple broadsides that enable the illusion of an intellectual basis for the anti-'60s fervor that impels the whole cabal: Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare and David Horowitz's Destructive Generation. Such screeds offer a veneer of sober doctrine (a very thin veneer in Horowitz's case) for what is nothing more than a belated, and gratuitous, assault against the vanished counterculture-that is to say, an endless venting of self-righteous wrath for its own sake.

Notes

  1. "You don't have to be": "Fellow Governor Touts Texan with a Double-Edged Anecdote," Washington Post, 6/1/2000.
  2. "political campaign terrorist": Mary Matalin quoted in Minutaglio, First Son, p. 260; "soul of an alley cat": Rusher quoted in Strober and Strober, Nixon: An Oral History, p. 50; "He'll do positive things": Nixon to Charles Colson, Oval Office conversation, 1/2/73, in Stanley Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 193. Bush's contribution to his father's terroristic presidential drive in 1988 has been noted by all his biographers, but it is J. H. Hatfield whose .account is most detailed. See "Home Run" in Fortunate Son, pp. 75-96.
  3. "`If you're not": "Behind Bush juggernaut, an Aide's Labor of Loyalty," New York Times, 1/11/00.
  4. " went up the walls": Harlow quoted in Greg Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas-Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 (New York: 1998), p. 40; "A total Nixon man": Elizabeth Mitchell, W Revenge of the Bush Dynasty (New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 116.
  5. "Just wait will": Ibid., p. 63; "While Kennedy was running": Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York: 1989), p. 64; "I may not be eloquent": from Bush's acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention; "in love with the Kennedys": Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Devolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (New York: Random House, 1990), pp. 6, 9.
  6. Georgetown dinner party: Barbara Bush, Barbara Bush: A Memoir, p. 67.
  7. " The country-we turned": Oval Office conversation between President Nixon and Alexander Haig, 5/16/73, in Kutler, Abuse of Power, p. 506.
  8. "The Beatles went though": Minutaglio, First Son; "There is an arrogance": All the Best, George Bush, p. 182.
  9. "I don't remember": Minutaglio, First Son, p. 117; "we in Texas": Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee, p. 130.
  10. " I'm a warrior": Bush on Larry King Live, CNN, 8/16/92; "WHAT HAS HE": Minutaglio, First Son, p. 286.

source: MARK CRISPIN MILLER The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (New York: Norton 2001)

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