1988 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION : After Career as Loyal Follower, Bush Steps Into Leading Role

He has been so many things--so many different things during more than half a century in hot pursuit of the American Dream. Son of privilege and Texas wildcatter, traveling salesman and global diplomat, prep schooler and teen-age warrior. George Bush went to Congress, ran the CIA, served at the United Nations and headed the GOP.

And, along the way, there were so many helping hands. When Bush was shot down in World War II, a saving hand pulled him from enemy waters. A family hand grubstaked his business venture. A fatherly hand directed him to the right schools and helped him with right connections. A President handed him a job. Another President handed him another job. A third handed him the vice presidency.

Tonight he moves beyond reach of helping hands.

Now He’s on His Own

Tonight, George Bush steps out on his own.

To a roar of partisan Republican approval, Bush strides onto the podium tonight to defend America’s status quo and undertake the two-man battle with Democrat Michael S. Dukakis for that last glorious rung on the ladder of dreams.

Precisely because he has been so many different things in his 64 years and because he has been beholden to so many powerful men, Bush has made experience his motto. “How does one man come so far?” asks the narrator in a Bush video biography. His early advertising called him “ready from day one.”

As Bush sees it, he has spent his lifetime preparing for this one colossal job.

But, every inch of the way, with every move on the path from freezing Iowa to sweltering New Orleans, Bush has come up against a stereotype so compelling and so unflattering that he has become one of the least favorably viewed men to earn his party’s nomination in contemporary times.

Perceived as Yes Man

It remains his burden, after years of effort, to carry a cross as someone else’s yes man.

The campaign argot describing Bush’s predicament has become worn. He is merely a resume, they say. All hat and no cattle, to borrow a Texas-ism. For a while, it was fashionable to call him a wimp. Now, you hear how he has failed to “define” himself or his vision for America.

“Oh, the vision thing,” Bush once said by way of waving off the whole subject.

What do these critics know? he asks. “They’ve never run for sheriff.”

Bush is an easy man to underestimate. The question doubters do not seem to want to ask is: If he is such easy pickings, how did he get this far?

“It’s an amazing thing,” said Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater. “Someone will talk about some weakness and he will prove them wrong. But five minutes later, they are talking about the same weakness again.”

Three Parts of Offer

Bush’s offer to America is a weave of three strands:

First, to safeguard the basic rightward heading of the Reagan revolution. This includes fierce resistance to taxes, continued opposition to abortion and, most of all, a belief that the best society is one that glorifies individual initiative.

On this theme, Bush won enough votes for the nomination with unprecedented swiftness and decisiveness last spring. Republicans in the primaries were simply not of a mind to veer from the policies of Reagan, the first President since Dwight D. Eisenhower headed toward successful completion of two terms.

Second, though, Bush acknowledges a change in national mood.

After more than a decade, the great whirl of anti-government politics in America is quieting. Bush steps onto the Superdome podium tonight as a man comfortable with the notion of devoting a career to public service.

In reassuring tones, Bush argues that from the inside one can learn Washington’s corridors, its intricate protocols--how to make it work, which is a large step forward from learning how to tame it.

No time for “on-the-job training,” he says.

‘We Can Do Better’

Third, and most recently, Bush has scrambled pell-mell to show that although, yes, he thinks the Republicans have improved the country, “in some select ways we can do better.”

You can read this as old-fashioned constituent politics, the kind of campaigning that in 1984 was associated with Democrats: Find a constituency, offer a program; find a problem, offer a cure. Get government working.

So the vice president has come to champion more than just a “safety net” to assist Americans. He wants to help working families with a child-care tax credit, to make a priority of education, to assist the handicapped in public transportation, although, like his rival, Dukakis, he has yet to spell out in detail how he would pay for such programs.

He toils at ethnic politics--promising Latinos a Cabinet post. Suddenly, a Republican is seen trying to penetrate the solidly Democratic black vote. European ethnics are fashionable. At the same time, he pledges to conservatives to keep alive the military buildup. He pushes the space program. Farmers and environmentalists will not be forgotten, he promises. America at once will build and progress and protect and conserve and spend and balance its budget.

Mixed Feelings Held

As strategies go, this is workaday fare--political convictions trimmed by the winds of public opinion into a campaign maybe no more inherently contradictory than the mixed feelings voters themselves hold about government and politics.

What is not so familiar is this predicament of a presidential nominee who has been in the public eye for 20 years and is still such a blur.

Bush thinks the public simply does not know him. Because he has been overshadowed by those above him during his climb to the top, he believes that there has been little chance for people to come to appreciate him.

Pollsters often tell it differently. Voters believe that they do know him, and more dislike him than like him.

The Republican National Convention is the place where Bush urgently hopes to find it his way.

In the weeks leading up to New Orleans, he made himself available for extensive interviews to try to warm up his image of remoteness--personal and cultural.

Posing for Commercials

He sat for endless pictures at home; he took reporters fishing in his oceangoing speedboat in the Atlantic off the coast of Maine. His aides talked about his taste for Tabasco and pork rinds as proof that he was an ordinary guy with a genuineness about him. He gathered his whole family recently in Kennebunkport, Me., to pose for television commercials.

What is he trying to show?

“Who I really am, where I’ve been all my life. It’s not fake. It’s real. I hope you people realize that. It’s real, but people don’t know that,” he said.

But Bush is curiously and painfully self-conscious about himself. Good resume, good breeding but . . . good gracious.

How does one man get so far?

Out there at the wind-swept family compound along Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport is an answer straight from a gilt storybook. Old money, Protestant, New England roots support a plentiful and well-connected clan. Here, your parents and your children get married in the same church. Here, your wife does not dye her hair.

Prep Schools and Fishing

Here, boys go to prep schools like Phillips Academy and to universities like Yale, where they are pumped full of confidence and connections. Here, rod-and-reel men, even vice presidents, bear scars on their hands from the teeth of prized local bluefish as they come off the hook.

But here, too, are the roots of the pejoratives that entangle Bush’s image: patrician, remote, elitist, preppie.

On a recent weekend retreat to Maine, photographers were invited to the compound to take pictures of the family.

But, clumsily, they are told not to take panoramas of the luxurious setting. This has the effect only of drawing attention to the privileged life the Bushes lead, and their nervousness about how it will be received in the rest of the country. U.S. News & World Report carries a photo of the grounds with the caption: “This is a picture Bush didn’t want taken.”

Almost in the same breath, though, Bush can show himself to be at peace and not a material striver.

Larger, Posher Boat Seen

When trolling for fish in his boat, Fidelity, the vice president is alerted to the sight of a huge approaching speedboat, almost twice as big and luxurious as his well-used, slightly fading 28-footer.

Through the ages, men in smaller boats have looked up in awe or envy at men in bigger boats. But Bush is uninterested. It’s the fishing and the water and the doing , not the length or the shine on the boat.

“He’s never worried about how high his stack is. He’s never worried about counting his chips,” says his son, George. “All these stories about class have as much to do with reporters as us.”

At 18, Bush was the youngest man to wear the wings of a naval aviator. He flew torpedo bombers off a carrier in the Pacific.

Bush enjoys the story of how he almost became lunch instead of President.

Shot down, his two crewmen killed, he floated in a raft off the Japanese-occupied island of Chichi-jima. After being rescued by a submarine, he learned that two officers on the island were accused of cannibalism.

“My liver could have been hors d’oeuvres,” he says.

Built Oil Business

After the war and college, his family was still behind him, but Bush went his own way--heading west to build an oil business. He pioneered advances in offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

When there was not much to it, he became part of the Republican Establishment in Texas. He won two terms in the House of Representatives from Houston.

But Bush lost two Senate races in Texas. And he has not won office on his own since he left the House of Representatives in 1970.

Then, midway in his life, Bush veered sharply.

Unlike more traditional political leaders, he found advancement as a career political appointee: ambassador to the United Nations, Republican Party chairman, envoy to China, director of the CIA. Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford reportedly considered him for the vice presidency before Reagan finally chose him in 1980.

“The unique thing about Bush is that he is more in the mold of European leaders who gained their experience in the bureaucracy, who worked their way up from inside,” says UCLA political science professor John Petrocik.

Better Reviews From Within

Perhaps, as would be expected from such a man, Bush has almost always received better reviews for his performance from within than from without.

By all accounts, he is solicitous of superiors and underlings. Those who know him find Bush an easier man to like and respect than those who only see him from afar.

He has not, unlike other political climbers, erred and tried to make more of a job than his boss wanted. Sometimes, as in China, that meant doing very little. At the United Nations, it meant being China’s biggest critic. At the CIA, it meant restoring internal morale and pride even at risk to his own political reputation.

Bush’s standard of loyalty may be as high as is ever seen in modern Washington.

At the Republican National Committee, he endured Watergate as a loyalist until the end. As vice president, he watched the storm build from the Iran-Contra debacle and stood loyally.

To Bush, it is not what he has done to get this far. It is what he has done to get ready for what needs to be done.

“I’ve faced life as it is,” he says. “I know adversity and I also know what it’s like to be a success.”