The Republicans

(12 of 12)

Although he met with Contra Supplier Felix Rodriguez, and his own security adviser Donald Gregg knew details of the contra supply operation by August 1986 that he did not consider "vice-presidential," Bush denies all knowledge of that activity. I asked him if he felt betrayed, as many Americans did, that U.S. arms were sold to the Ayatullah. "I don't think you ought to use the word betrayed, but that shouldn't have happened -- not the selling of the arms, but the divergence of funds to some of the contras." Describing his own discovery that funds had been diverted, Bush said, "The minute I heard that, I -- Whoops! Strong!"

The Vice President has avoided lengthy questioning over his relations with the contras. He has made public his agreement with the President that arms should have been sold to Iranian moderates, though he had some problems with the participation of a foreign government in a covert operation and with the chances of the cover being blown. For the rest, he is the terrorism and crisis-control specialist who knew little about what was going on among White House friends and staff members. It would have taken "clairvoyant hindsight," he claims, for him to have stopped the contra diversion.

When I asked Barbara Bush how the vice presidency had changed her husband, she said it had mellowed him. He takes things less personally. Yet there now seems something violated beneath his affability. He has been so many things to so many people, he embodies so many cultural divisions, that his crooked smile, though still winning, seems to fork across his face like a jagged crevice or fault line. He boasts of having lived in seven states and calls himself a Texan, though most people think of him as Eastern.

Bush assured me he was more at peace with himself and with his critics -- before bringing up his critics and angrily dismissing them. He is used to being liked, and with good reason. What, after all, is wrong with a man who has done community serVice from the time he organized for the missions as president of S. of I.? What is there to criticize in the model family man and loyal servitor to his party, the devoted friend to many estimable people, the inheritor of a popular President's completed second term? It is hard to dislike George Bush, no matter what others were doing around him. Perhaps the worst charge that can be brought against him is what they call, at Chaffey / High, enabling behavior.