In the French Quarter, It Seems That the Republican Old Guard Is Having Its Way

From his lofty perch aboard the riverboat Natchez, Vice President George Bush waved awkwardly toward the crowds on the Mississippi River bank. Gazing out from the Hilton Hotel at the foot of Poydras Street, Frank Johnson, an English journalist standing next to me, said: “How is it that George Bush, who was born with all the advantages, never quite seems to know how to behave, whereas Ronald Reagan, who grew up in the home of an alcoholic, instinctively knows the right gestures?”

As usual, Bush looked gauche and ill at ease. Word had just reached us that he had described the children of his son Jeb and his Mexican-American daughter-in-law as “the little brown ones.” A reporter for the London Times reluctantly put aside his Creole gumbo and said that he would have to see if he could get this news into the final edition of his paper.

All the Brits were in agreement: Bush is a disaster for the Republicans, a barrel of gaffes ready to unroll throughout the fall campaign. Reagan hadn’t known his own strength in 1980, never really had needed Bush in the first place. Now, having addressed the national convention, he was aboard Air Force One heading for California. Nearby there was a burst of excitement and clapping from the crowd around a television set. Bush had just announced that Dan Quayle was his choice for a running mate. The Indiana senator seemed to be leading the vice president in a pep rally of sorts.

“Bit of a quiz-show host,” said John O’Sullivan, the new editor of William F. Buckley’s National Review and until recently an aide to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“The first baby-boom candidate for major office,” said Frank Johnson.

“I thought that the country was getting older, not younger,” said Bill Deedes, the 74-year-old former editor of the Daily Telegraph and close friend of Thatcher’s husband, Dennis.

At the Superdome that evening, among the dozen or so conservatives with whom I spoke there was a general sense of relief that Pete V. Domenici, Alan K. Simpson or Bob Dole had not been picked from among the senators. But such relief was overwhelmed by the disappointment that Rep. Jack Kemp of New York had likewise been rejected. As former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was delivering her foreign-policy address, Kemp himself came by with a close-pressing camera entourage. He looked stunned, I thought, but he managed a ghostly smile and still summoned up the politician’s art of recalling the names of near-strangers. But he is facing a new career now.

“I don’t see how Bush can win,” said Kemp’s friend Jude Wanniski, who heads a consulting firm called Polyconomics. If Bush wanted a conservative, why didn’t he pick Kemp? Wanniski believed, as did several others at the Hyatt Regency that night, that Bush had been intimidated by Kemp’s forceful presentation of the issues at weekly meetings with Reagan and Bush at the White House. And for this reason the feeling was that Bush had once again shown weakness in picking Quayle.

On Monday night, when President Reagan spoke in the echoing, 24-story-tall Superdome, I happened to enter the arena with Judge Robert Bork, the unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee. He made slow progress down the corridors as he was stopped every few yards by autograph hunters and well-wishers. Some said that they wished he would address the convention. He told me that he had not been invited to do so, adding without rancor that among those who would speak the next night was William Coleman, President Gerald R. Ford’s secretary of transportation. Coleman testified against Bork before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year.

Another black to address the Republican convention this year is Alan Keyes, formerly an assistant to Kirkpatrick at the United Nations. He is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate race in Maryland this fall. I bumped into him at Felix’s Restaurant in the French Quarter. The main problem with the Republican Party, he told me, is that it remains in the hands of an Old Guard that thinks of the GOP more as a private club than as a political party. Its members are suspicious of outsiders, the highly articulate Keyes said, not because they are reactionary or racist but simply because they don’t want to relinquish the reins of authority to newcomers.

My impression is that Reagan never made much of an impression on the Republican Party hierarchy, and in fact never tried to change it. The Old Guard invited him into the club, and he acted as its highly successful figurehead for eight years. Now that he is leaving, the GOP leadership is threatening to revert to type. That could be a serious setback not only for the party but also for the country.