Among the most unlikely and most fortunate events in American history was the 1988 election of George H.W. Bush, who will celebrate his 87th birthday on Sunday.<\/p>\n
You may consider each of those points \u2013 unlikely, very lucky \u2013 an overstatement, so let me explain.<\/p>\n
First, was Mr. Bush\u2019s election really all that unlikely?<\/p>\n
In 1988, I was a speechwriter for President Reagan.\u00a0 Going into the year, the Democrats could barely wait for the campaign to start.\u00a0 The president was down in the polls.\u00a0 Iran-Contra had taken its toll.\u00a0 To them and the media, the election of Mr. Reagan\u2019s vice president was unthinkable.\u00a0 Meanwhile, within the White House, presidential counselors were advocating that the president stay out of the race.\u00a0 Mixing the outgoing chief executive in election politics was \u201cunpresidential\u201d they argued.<\/p>\n
I thought this keep-the-president-aloof plan was insane and made my view known to anyone who would listen.\u00a0 For example, after receiving a briefing at the State Department in preparation for the Toronto Economic Summit of that year, I shared my concern with my briefer, the under secretary for economic affairs, as I recall.\u00a0 It turned out that he had served as a member of Eisenhower\u2019s Council of Economic Advisors.\u00a0 He told me that in 1960 Ike\u2019s handlers had taken the same above-it-all view.\u00a0 Ike could have put Nixon over the top, he believed, in which he was surely correct.<\/p>\n
Then he talked about the cost of that mistake.\u00a0 By 1960 inflation was all but out of the economy.\u00a0 Growth was steady and sustainable.\u00a0 We were in a strong position in the Cold War, even as we were nowhere in a shooting war.\u00a0 Eight years later, the gains against inflation had been lost.\u00a0 The economy was faltering.\u00a0 We were stuck in a hot war with no plan either for winning or exiting.\u00a0 Go back and keep pushing them he said as I left.<\/p>\n
Of course, my low-level nagging had zero impact on the events that followed.\u00a0 But there was a shake up in the White House.\u00a0 A more aggressive senior staff was put in place.\u00a0 And the president launched full throttle into the race.<\/p>\n
How rare was Mr. Bush\u2019s win?\u00a0 No vice president since Martin Van Buren in 1836 had been elected directly to the presidency.\u00a0 Except for Herbert Hoover\u2019s victory in 1928 and William Howard Taft\u2019s in 1908, you had to go back to the post-Civil War era to find an election without an incumbent on either ticket where the presidency did not change parties \u2013 and, as I say, none of those campaigns involved a sitting vice president.\u00a0 In other words, anyone betting on Mr. Bush\u2019s victory in late 1987 would have said, not a chance.\u00a0 And yet, as good luck had it, he won.<\/p>\n
Second, why was it a stroke of fortune for the country?<\/p>\n
To answer that question, let me pose another question.\u00a0 Was there anyone in the nation (with the exception of Mr. Bush\u2019s predecessor) to whom you would have entrusted with equal confidence the oversight of American global affairs at the time the Soviet Union was collapsing?<\/p>\n
Some say, oh, he should have trumpeted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet communist state.\u00a0 Are they kidding?\u00a0 The key to bringing the Cold War to a peaceful and successful conclusion was that the U.S. did NOT act like a victor but as a friend, helping Russia cross the threshold from a brutal and archaic empire to a \u201cnormal country,\u201d as the saying of the time had it.\u00a0 In this strategy Mr. Bush and Mr. Reagan were in complete agreement.<\/p>\n
As Mr. Bush wrote with his National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft in their brilliant volume, A World Transformed<\/em>:<\/p>\n The long-run framework of Bush foreign policy was very deliberate: encouraging, guiding, and managing change without provoking backlash and crackdown\u2026.\u00a0 At a time when personalities and relationships made a significant difference to the course of history, the international leadership, East and West, found it could work generally to sort out the tough issues \u2013 on Germany, or Iraq, on the future of Europe.\u00a0 The great forces in action could have led to world catastrophe, but with the down and dirty, hands on participation, we molded it so there were no losers, only winners, furthering stability and long-term relations for the sake of peace.\u00a0 We eluded the shadow of another Versailles.<\/p>\n It is not too much to say that, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon, no U.S. chief executive in history has entered office with an equal knowledge of the global personalities and their relationships.\u00a0 None has started his presidency with as firm a grasp on the \u201cdown and dirty\u201d of harnessing those relationships to resolve the long twilight struggle in favor of peace and freedom.\u00a0 No one could have carried the strategy of Mr. Bush\u2019s predecessor \u2013 a strategy that Mr. Bush participated in developing \u2013 to such a stunning conclusion.<\/p>\n During this, his birthday week, George H.W. Bush deserves far more recognition for his stunning achievement than he has yet received.\u00a0 In his four presidential years, he brought to pass a miracle of diplomacy and leadership.\u00a0 The nation and the world are tremendously fortunate he occupied that office at that time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Among the most unlikely and most fortunate events in American history was the 1988 election of George H.W. Bush, who will celebrate his 87th birthday on Sunday. You may consider each of those points \u2013 unlikely, very lucky \u2013 an overstatement, so let me explain. First, was Mr. Bush\u2019s election really all that unlikely? In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global-issues","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":936,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions\/936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}