Why Is He Hiding Behind a Preppy? : The Other George Bush: Macho, Confident, Witty

To travel and spend time around George Bush is to recognize the presence of two men.

There is the full-dress, by-gosh George Herbert Walker Bush. As a public speaker, his stage presence is awkward and his voice pitched. Whiny, they call it. The camera somehow makes him smaller than he is. He is streaked with remote blue-blood tastes. His personality? Vaporous comes to mind. And, as a campaigner, he seems curiously drawn to the banana peel.

This is the vice president many in America have come to know.

And opinion polls underline what is obvious--public feelings for this would-be President fall short of endearment.

But, up close, he can be quite another man. Imagine a can-of-beer-and-a-hotdog guy: Self-confident, playful, salty, approachable and, yes, even quick-witted.

A rangy 6-foot-2 205-pounder with the open-necked shirt who pitches horseshoes, barbecues, mixes nimbly in a crowd, listens to country and Western tunes and loves the thunderous sound and bone-jarring speed of his exotic Cigarette boat.

“Why isn’t that George Bush running for President?” Aides said they have heard this question from reporters, politicians and others who have watched Bush unwind at his vacation estate in Kennebunkport, Me., or on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, where he lives in Washington.

Rephrase the question and it becomes more a campaign riddle: “If that’s really George Bush, why is he hiding himself?”

Bush believes it is now time to start showing that, after two decades in public life, he still has much to reveal.

“I’ve not felt comfortable talking about the private side of the Bush family and all of that,” he said at a press conference Thursday in Boston. “I’ve now concluded that I have to make it clear what makes me tick inside.”

Pollster Robert Teeter said it is a matter of Bush, as throughout his life, doing what is required for a job. As vice president and in his many posts before that, Bush defined himself as a loyal staff member, behind the scenes. Now it’s his job to introduce himself to America and get voters to like him.

Shopping at Sears

So, associates tell of Bush’s going to Sears himself to buy a power tool or shopping at Safeway, of his sometimes jumping into a car and driving around the private roads of the Naval Observatory just to feel “normal.” He runs two miles because it makes him feel good and then gulps, yuk, fried pork rinds with Tabasco because, like the 500-pound gorilla, he is vice president and he can eat whatever he wants.

But, with only four months remaining until the general election, other true believers worry that the vice president’s image may be so deeply fixed, and so consumingly blah, that turnaround will be difficult.

“The caricature does seem to proceed him wherever he goes,” said one associate who has been through three national campaigns with Bush.

A column published in June in the Los Angeles Times illustrates the challenge facing the vice president.

In a ‘Tweedy Cocoon’

Calvin Trillin, author and humor columnist, lampooned Bush as a golly-jeepers prep-schooler with a tin ear for American values and style. Trillin called him “fated to walk through life as if encased in a sort of tweedy cocoon.” Three times in the brief column, Trillin made his point by describing Bush as one of those, you know, “Eastern preppies with sailboats.”

It just seems so natural to envision Bush in his sailboat.

Natural but not quite right.

Bush prefers power to sail--always has. And he is well-to-do enough to afford lots of power. His Fidelity is a sleek Cigarette boat, with twin engines and capable of lancing across the Atlantic waves at 50 m.p.h.

Once, during a campaign stop in Indianapolis, a reporter asked just the right question at the right time to evoke a rare, personal monologue from Bush about his zeal for speed.

The reporter noted that, as a campaign gimmick when visiting industrial sites, Bush was known to jump into the driver’s seat of whatever truck or tractor or skip-loader was handy. What would he like to drive in Indianapolis? he was asked.

Without hesitation, Bush began:

“The Indianapolis 500--macho man going around those banks at 130 . . . . Although (on) that weekend (Memorial Day) I like to go up to Maine and get my own kicks. There, I have a boat I drive which is fast, plenty of power, a 28-foot Cigarette. And I know how to drive it.

“I drove the 39-foot Blue Thunder (powerboat racing) catamaran the first time it was ever driven by anyone other than a professional. And this is my secret love. And I’ve been doing it for years. Washingtonians never write about it because it doesn’t quite fit the Ivy League, elitist mold.”

Not stopping, Bush went on to tell of a day he went boating with NBC News correspondent Tom Pettit .

“I said: Tom, have you ever been totally out of the water in a fast boat? He said no. I said, do you want to? He said yeah.

“So we went out in the sea, where I’ve lived all of my life. And I put the throttles forward. We took one wave, then another and went totally out--both screws turning in the air. We went back in just right, and back out again. And I looked over and Pettit was moaning. I thought he was faking. But his back had gone out.”

Still not ready to quit, Bush recalled the reaction of his wife, Barbara, to the incident with Pettit.

“Barbara said he’s been giving you fair coverage and now look what you’ve done to him!”

No ‘Wimp Stories’

The vice president concluded the interview with a grin, saying: “Pettit was out of work for three weeks but he hasn’t written any wimp stories.”

However, son George concedes one fact about his father’s Cigarette boat. Swift as it is, Fidelity is configured with twin 185-horsepower engines, leaving it “slightly underpowered,” so as to make more room aboard for guests.

The real rub with Bush, though, is not about boats. Nor is it about any other easily dispelled misconception--like the nationally circulated profile that called him a fly fisherman when actually he is a blue-water, heavy-tackle man.

Rather, it comes down to the more difficult matter of who George Bush is at the stem. Is he the chilly, distant, WASPy aristocrat of prep-school upbringing, the New England patrician, as some writers are fond of calling him? Or is he the comfortably accessible Texas wildcatter he sees in the mirror?

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau and his Doonesbury strip portray Bush as such a vapid elitist that he is the invisible man. This drives Bush dizzy.

Cartoonist Called ‘Elitist’

“He’s a fellow elitist, did you know that!” Bush demanded when Trudeau’s name came up in an interview. “Coming out of the elite of the elite, wealthy kid from Rye, N. Y., a fellow Yalie. I gather what he writes has a penetrating effect in the salons of 5th Avenue and among the elite inside the beltway in Washington . . . . This Doonesbury speaks for the Brie-tasting, Chardonnay-sipping elitists.”

Much as the stereotype rankles him, though, Bush is ambivalent, and sometimes strangely lackadaisical, about trying to dispel it.

For the benefit of smooth relations with the political press corps that has been traveling around America with him for almost a year, Bush has held any number of relaxed dinners, barbecues, boat rides and shirt-sleeve bull sessions at which his easy nature comes to the surface.

Here one gets a sense of how the White House might be on a summer weekend with the Bush family in it--crammed with people, casually dressed, the odor of charcoal in the air and the clink of horseshoes--with Bush gliding from group to group making sure everyone is getting attention.

Here you can see Bush down on his knees and wrestling with a granddaughter, or talk to him about tarpon fishing, or about politics in far-away New Mexico, or hear about the kind of clay he prefers in his horseshoe pit, or even share a slightly crude joke. He might grab a cold beer in a can but reluctantly return to pour it in a glass because of Barbara: “Jeez, she’ll kill me.”

Sessions Off the Record

Always, however, these sessions with reporters are decreed to be off the record. And to report them, it is necessary--as was done here--to ask some functionary to describe on the record the very thing you saw with your own eyes off the record.

Then, some of these elements of Bush’s personality are so unexpected and elusive from a distance that those who tell of them are sometimes mistaken for partisans by disbelievers.

“When he is on the record, the guard goes up. That’s the way he is,” longtime adviser Peter Teeley said.

From time to time, Bush himself will reflect on his mixed feelings. Recently at a Kennebunkport press conference, he was asked why people seemed not to know him.

“There’s some reason to wonder about that,” Bush agreed and then stammered on inconclusively: “I read characterizations in the paper that I don’t particularly agree with when it comes to analyzing myself. I guess maybe I have a little private oasis in there, too. I don’t necessarily like to parade the grandchildren--although you might be seeing a little more of that out there--and talk about my, you know, self quite as much. But I’m getting better about that, and I think people will know what I think more.”

Averse to Public Prying

For a family that has been in public life for so long, public prying still bites into the Bushes.

As she took a seat for a recent interview, Barbara Bush boldly peered inside a reporter’s sport coat at the label. It was her way of making a point about the intense pressures of the campaign trail.

“You know what they tell political wives, don’t you? Cut the labels out of your clothes, so people won’t talk about whether you wear this or that.”

But then, at rare times, the couple seem to enjoy divulging a glimpse of themselves.

When a grade-school boy showed up at the Bush residence during a function the other day, the family springer spaniel, Millie, cuddled up to him.

“One thing you don’t know about George Bush,” his wife told the youngster. “He sleeps with two girls, Millie and me.”

Humor, however, has been the bane of the vice president.

Some of his most celebrated public gaffes have been the result of misfired or off-the-mark stabs at humor. Remember when Bush said that Soviet tank mechanics could show Detroit a thing or two about keeping machinery running? Or when he lost a straw poll in Iowa and said his supporters were at their daughters’ coming-out parties or on the 18th green?

Wary of Popping Off

Most politicians learn sooner than Bush the woes of insulting voters, even in jest. In Bush’s case, the late-coming lesson has made him exceptionally wary of popping off at all in public. And he seems all the more stilted for holding back.

“I always tease George because I say, George you’re so funny at home,” Mrs. Bush confided. “He is funny, you know.” But she knows it doesn’t show publicly. “I get on the road and reporters always say, tell me something funny your husband says,” she said.

Bush’s best laughs result from his timing and expression, not necessarily from his lines.

50-Pound Chocolate Bar

One favorite from the campaign is the story of the chocolate bar. To understand, Bush as a youngster was called “Have Half” because he was always eager to share whatever he had. So, when he found himself holding a 50-pound bar of chocolate in the vat room of the Hershey factory, a reporter behind him couldn’t resist shouting: “Mr. Vice President, have half!”

Bush turned and fired back slyly, “Don’t tell mother.”

Then in Rochester, N. Y., Bush was yet again braced by questions about the Iran-Contra scandal. A reporter, at one point using a battery-powered megaphone, fired question after question. She concluded with this: “Mr. Vice President, just how much did you know about Iran-Contra?”

Deadpanned Bush, “68%.”

If his punch lines seem to sag and lose some zig in translation to the columns of the newspaper, this is nothing compared to what happens when Bush is seen through the camera. TV is merciless.

Bush ‘Shrinks’ on TV

“I can’t explain it. But yes, the camera shrinks him and makes him seem small,” Mrs. Bush said, expressing the campaign’s endless exasperation. “The reason I know that is that, every time we go through a receiving line, people will say, ‘You’re so tall.’ Now why is that, I don’t know. I haven’t any idea.”

For quite a while, Bush children found easy pickings when they asked, “How much do you want to bet my father is taller than Ronald Reagan?” Bush is, by an inch.

“Americans get their candidates through TV and TV does not add to Bush, it takes away from him,” lamented Peggy Noonan, a former television news producer who is a part-time speech writer for the vice president. She expressed her feelings in the Opinion section of The Times last month.

Famous but Unknown

“The odd thing about Bush,” she wrote, “is he’s been famous for 20 years and the American people don’t really know him. His friends say (that), if they could get every American to sit down with him in the kitchen and watch him live his life, he’d win in a walk.”

Bush knows there is little chance of its being a walk to November. And, from time to time, he wonders aloud whether his friends and advisers are right--does the public really need to know or like the private side of him as long as it can be persuaded to appreciate the public him?

“Maybe there is an old shoe familiarity,” he said. “People will give me credit because, see, I’ve been through the mill. I’ve been scrutinized, looked at carefully. I think people are going to be looking for stability and experience, and a little modesty.”

Staff writer Cathleen Decker contributed to this story.