The Vice Presidency: Second Look at a Second Lady

An affable, unimpressive public man improbably rises to great power, and it transpires that the master of his ascent is a strong-willed watchdog of a wife with an ambition as long as her enemies list. That political scenario is as classic as Lady Macbeth and as modern as Nancy Reagan, and it was just those predecessors that Marilyn Quayle was being compared to last week. After six months of investigation by Bob Woodward and David Broder, the Washington Post unfurled a seven-part series on Vice President Dan Quayle in which most of the critical scrutiny appeared to be directed not at the Vice President, but at his wife.

Much of the damage seemed self-inflicted. After more than three years of near silence on her husband's inelegant entry into national politics in 1988, the Second Lady made an inelegant entry of her own: in interviews with the Post, she brandished daggers at the press and at her husband's campaign handlers, denouncing such ignominies as their alleged refusal to serve food on charter flights, which caused her to lose "14 pounds in one week." She became "so thin," she said, that "my skirt would move around and my kick pleat would end up in the front, because there was nothing to hold it . . . It was just awful."

But Marilyn's most undiplomatic words were aimed at Secretary of State James Baker, who may compete with her husband for Bush's job four years from now and is a formidable Washingtonian in the meantime. Baker is not only Bush's closest friend and former campaign manager, but also has accumulated friends around the capital since he arrived 17 years ago. It was Baker, Marilyn complained to the Post, who was responsible for Quayle's fumbling first appearance at the riverfront rally in New Orleans in August 1988, because the campaign sent no one to greet him. He was also to blame, she charged, for the critical press coverage of Quayle's nomination, even though Baker, like everyone else, was kept in the dark about Bush's choice until minutes before the President's plane landed at the convention. "They should have been ready to go with papers on exactly who Dan was," said Marilyn. "There was nothing tangible to hand to a member of the press. So people were scrounging where they shouldn't have been." And it was Baker, she said, who arranged to waken Quayle two nights later to grill him on his National Guard record. "Getting Dan . . . up at 3 in the morning to discuss things," she said, was "just stupid, stupid, stupid! I think there was a frenzy in the press and that kind of produced a frenzy among people who would normally be a little bit more level thinking."