“Duty, Honor, Country”: A History of Conventions, 1988

“Duty, Honor, Country”: A History of Conventions, 1988

Late morning. Tuesday, August 16, 1988. Two men met at the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station twenty miles south of downtown New Orleans. Their meeting took place in the air condition, to avoid the aluminum foil-like grip of Louisiana humidity.
     The meeting couldn’t have been any more scripted. Ronald Reagan, in a dark suit with an American flag pin stuck to his lapel, grinned for the many cameras present. His deputy for the last eight years, George H.W. Bush, waved in Bush fashion. He stretched out an arm. He aimed the arm in the direction of the crowd. He held his hand there for a moment. The Bush wave was a study in stop sign stiltedness.
     The many television cameras and the many print journalists didn’t pay attention to Bush. This was President Reagan’s last moment on the world stage. The evening before, on the first night of the Republican Convention, Reagan gave the crowd more of what they wanted: Reagan Teflon. After eight years in office, he stated, it was “time for a change. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are the change.” Rather than explaining that leap of judgment, Reagan, being Reagan, then told the crowd to “go out and win one for the Gipper!”
     His speech to the convention was more than just affectation. According to Elisabeth Drue, author of Reagan’s World: The Unmasking of the 1980s, Reagan “was in the throes of the dementia that accompanied Alzheimer’s. He thought he was the Gipper. Of course, most of America thought Reagan was the Gipper too.”
     At the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station President Reagan and Vice President Bush shook hands. The television cameras caught the Vice President, and Republican nominee for president, whispering into his boss’s ear. “George Bush whispered the name of his running mate into Reagan’s ear,” revealed Elisabeth Drue, an eyewitness at the air station and a journalist known affectionately as “Dean Drue” for her books on many of the national conventions of the latter half of the 20th century. “Bush hadn’t told anybody yet, including the running mate. The look on Reagan’s face was priceless. It can be summed up with one word: Who?”
     Another eyewitness, James A. Baker, a loyal cadre of both Presidents Reagan and Bush, disagreed with Dean Drue’s assessment. He asserted, “Ronald Reagan smiled, patted his friend George on the shoulder and said, ‘Good choice.’”
     The video of the moment has been forever preserved. A copy exists at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. According to the video, Reagan did not smile. Reagan did not pat his friend on the shoulder. Reagan did not offer any words. Reagan, to judge from the tape, had never heard of the man just whispered.
     Elisabeth Drue explained, “Vice President Bush whispered the full name into the President’s ear: James Danforth Quayle. The name threw Reagan for a loop.”
     Dan Quayle, as of the summer of 1988, had been in the House of Representative for two terms (1977-1981) and the senate for eight years (1981-1989). In those twelve years, Quayle had not attached his name to a single piece of legislation. Ronald Reagan knew only the most visible and distinguished legislators. Quayle wouldn’t have entered his lexicon.
     Reagan of course had a unique ability to cover for his ignorance. He did what he normally did in the given situation. He smiled broader. He created a smile that could light up the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi to New Orleans.
     As Reagan boarded Air Force One for the ride back to the capital, Vice President Bush took a steamboat called the Natchez down the Mississippi. The 90-minute cruise would arrive at Spanish Plaza, the gateway to downtown New Orleans.
     James Baker, then simultaneously Reagan’s Treasury Secretary and Bush’s campaign chairman, was on the Natchez. “George told his inner circle of his desire to nominate Dan,” Baker wrote in his memoirs. “I remember being impressed by Quayle’s positives. He was young, handsome, and conservative, and he came from the heartland.”
     While these characteristics of Quayle certainly sound accurate, they were “banal,” to quote Elisabeth Drue, “and unremarkable. Why did George Bush nominate the jejune Dan Quayle? The reasons were purely instinctual. Dan Quayle reminded George Bush of himself at an earlier age. Like Bush, Quayle came from a prominent family, and yet he’d gone on to make a name for himself. Like Bush, Quayle was a competitive fighter. He’d taken on an incumbent senator, the liberal icon Birch Bayh, and knocked him out. Bush was impressed. He thought he could groom Quayle to be the new Bush, the legacy. At that time of course he didn’t know that his son George would amount to anything other than a failed oilman. James Baker, it should be noted, completely disagreed with Bush on Quayle. And he voiced his displeasure on the Natchez.”
     According to Dean Drue, Baker thought Quayle was too green, politically. “He argued for another name on the short list,” Drue stated. “Bob Dole.”
     For explanation’s sake, I emailed James Baker through the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. I received an anonymous response, from a “James Baker spokesman.” “The Secretary has nothing to say,” the spokesman wrote, “except what’s in his books.”
     Baker wrote two books, the tedious The Politics of Diplomacy and the insensate Work Hard, Study… and Keep Out Of Politics! (Not only does the second book lack reason and insight but consider the awkward title. What was the publisher thinking? I emailed this question to G.P. Putnam’s Sons. I received an anonymous response, from “the editors.” “James Baker’s a powerful man and what James Baker wants, James Baker gets,” the editors wrote. Then the editors went a little catty. “Personally, I think it’s an unwieldy, extremely amateurish title that essentially killed sales. If a reader doesn’t have the time to pronounce the title, how can you expect the reader to buy the book?” Good question.)
     In the book with the “unwieldy, extremely amateurish” title, James Baker recalled Bush’s actions after announcing his running mate to his inner circle: “George soon called Dan and told him that he was his first and only choice… Our schedule that day called for us to take the Natchez down the Mississippi to the Spanish Plaza... Quayle was instructed to meet us at the dock.”
     Senator Quayle was not the only person waiting at the dock. Spanish Plaza, according to eyewitness Elisabeth Drue, was “overflowing with reveling Republicans. They were led by one guy who carried a sign. The sign was for the Vice President’s eyes and it concerned his vice presidential running mate.”
     “Dad,” the sign read, “you can tell me!” George W. Bush held the sign.
     James Baker described George W.’s behavior as “ever-playful.”
     Elisabeth Drue described George W.’s behavior as “puerile… for a teenager. And W. was 42-years-old.”
     According to Drue, the Quayles – Dan and his wife Marilyn – had to push through the crowd to get to the stage. “Catastrophe was averted only because the Secret Service parted the crowd like the Red Sea,” she explained.
     Dan Quayle described his feelings that day. According to his autobiography, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir, he felt “absolutely giddy with happiness” and “a load of adrenaline.” That mixture apparently accounted for his behavior.
     Eyewitness Elisabeth Drue described the scene in the Washington Post the next day. Quayle “jumped up on the stage. He circled the Vice President like a young warrior doing a war dance around his chief. He then grabbed his benefactor by the shoulder and repeatedly hugged his arm, gamboling around the platform like the jackpot winner on a television game show. Bush looked on a bit thunderstruck at the display of juvenile enthusiasm he had unleashed.”
     Another eyewitness to the event, James Baker, wrote, “I was surprised by, but only mildly concerned about, Dan’s excess exuberance. Would that Quayle’s enthusiasm had been our only problem.”
     Within hours a story came out on Quayle. Did he use his family connections to join Indiana’s National Guard and thus avoid possible combat service in Vietnam? Quayle himself fanned the flames. Asked why he had opted for the Guard, Quayle innocently answered that he wanted to get married and go to law school. He then added, “I did not know in 1969 that I would be asked this question today.”
     Dan Quayle made this statement in the late afternoon. A few hours later, a Vietnam veteran addressed the Republican Convention. “I was born into a family with a long military tradition,” he began his speech. “My grandfather attended the United States Naval Academy. My father attended the Naval Academy. And I attended the Naval Academy. Even as a Navy man, I will never forget my first visit to West Point and how impressed I was at its beauty, especially the Chapel. I vividly remember seeing a plague on the wall of the Chapel inscribed with 156 names. These are the names of the young men who graduated from West Point in 1950. That year, North Korea attacked South Korea, and these young men gave their lives in combat, in the defense of someone else’s freedom. At the bottom of that plague is the West Point motto: ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’ ‘Duty, Honor, Country,’ let’s reflect on those words and how they apply to us…”
     The man’s name was John McCain. In 1988, McCain was a senator two years into his first term. He was also on George Bush’s short list for the vice presidential nomination. According to Scott Selly, a McCain aide at the time, “Before Dan Quayle came popping out on the dock in New Orleans, the last name eliminated for consideration by the AP wire was John McCain.”
     Further, according to Selly and revealed here for the first time, the Bush campaign made an emergency phone call to the McCain camp as the senator spoke to the convention. Scott Selly recalled the gist of the phone call: “Would McCain accept the vice presidential nomination if Bush dropped Quayle. Well, I didn’t have to interrupt the Senator’s convention speech to ask his opinion. ‘Yes,’ I cried. ‘Of course.’”
     Scott Selly never notified his boss of the phone call. According to John McCain, he clearly made the AP wire’s short list, but the Bush campaign never contacted him about the running mate job.
     When asked who in the Bush campaign made the emergency call to the McCain camp, Scott Selly responded with one name, “Baker.”
     Is Selly credible? Soon after the Republican Convention of 1988, Selly lost his position within the McCain camp. It seems that Scott Selly was moonlighting for Charles Keating. Selly served as Keating’s right-hand man at Lincoln Savings and Loan in Irvine, California. In 1989, after seeing its assets rise from $1.1 billion to $5.5 billion, Lincoln Savings went bankrupt. A California court convicted Keating of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy. He served four years of a twelve and a half year sentence. Scott Selly served two years of a five-year sentence for collusion.
     Scott Selly apparently introduced Charles Keating to John McCain. During the 1980s Keating contributed over a million dollars to five senators known as the Keating Five. John McCain was among them. Include that detail in McCain’s “Duty, Honor, Country.”
     As for McCain becoming Bush’s running mate, James Baker offered a double denial. “Dropping Dan from the ticket,” Baker wrote in his memoirs, “was never in the cards.” In addition John McCain’s name, according to Baker, never made the short list.
     Baker’s stock answers in his memoirs didn’t satisfy my investigation. I emailed James Baker a question: Did Baker make an emergency phone call to the McCain camp while the senator addressed the Republican Convention of 1988? A “James Baker spokesman” replied, “The Secretary has nothing to say, except what’s in his books.”

(To celebrate the summer of 2008, a summer of conventions after all, I am writing a series on the presidential conventions of the latter half of the 20th century. To read earlier parts of this series, please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” below. You will see the “History of Conventions” articles to the right.)

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“Duty, Honor, Country”: A History of Conventions, 1988