"Not a Cross Word Between Us"

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The new pragmatism overcomes even an old antagonism

For George Bush, the vice presidential nomination is not just a consolation prize but a goal that he has pursued for two years--or so his aides are now saying. At their first strategy meetings in 1978, one adviser told TIME last week, Bush and his campaign planners recognized that Ronald Reagan might well be unbeatable in 1980. So, says this aide, Bush decided at the outset to campaign for the Oval Office and simultaneously to position himself for the vice presidency.

Bush stoutly denies this story. "Absolutely not," he says. And, since it makes his campaign seem thoughtfully planned rather than indecisive or excessively gentlemanly, the tale may indeed contain an element of after-the-fact rationalizing. But Bush's campaign could hardly have been better designed to make him Vice President than if that really had been its purpose from the start.

Even before those initial 1978 strategy sessions, Bush was careful to touch base with Reagan. He and his campaign-manager-to-be, James Baker, paid a courtesy call on Reagan in California in 1977 to inform him that they were setting up a committee to explore a Bush run for the nomination. Baker recalls that Bush and Reagan chatted for a "very cordial 30 minutes."

This year in the heady weeks after his unexpected victory in the Iowa caucuses in January, Bush failed to define a set of positions--"to go from George Who to George What," in Baker's words. Such positions might have made Bush seem a clear-cut alternative to Reagan, but also an incompatible running mate. And even after Bush suffered a stunning defeat in New Hampshire in February, he steadfastly refused advice from some of his staff to criticize Reagan harshly, though that is the standard strategy for reviving a faltering campaign. That refusal was widely ascribed to Ivy Leaguer Bush's disinclination to get into a rough-and-tumble fight, but it turned out fortunately.

During the campaign, Bush seemed just sufficiently moderate to win six primaries from Reagan, including those in the key states of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Michigan. That gave him 266 delegates and showed that he had enough electoral appeal to be an attractive choice for Vice President.

Reagan's staffers favored Bush, if they could not get their "dream ticket" with Gerald Ford. But there was one big problem: Reagan himself doubted whether Bush was tough enough for the job. Another problem: Nancy Reagan did not particularly care for Bush.

The two nominees do not know each other at all well. Apart from Bush's visit in 1977, they had met primarily on the dais at party functions and at the pre-primary debates. One was the now celebrated affair in Nashua, N.H., where Reagan invited four other candidates into what was supposed to be a one-on-one confrontation, and a thoroughly flustered Bush would not agree to a change in the rules to let them speak. The incident left an unfavorable impression of Bush not only on the New Hampshire voters but on Reagan. Says Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt: "Reagan thinks Bush choked in Nashua."

Reagan also worried a bit about Bush's advocacy of the Equal Rights Amendment and his opposition to a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion, stands that arouse the passionate dislike of some of Reagan's followers. Finally, says one Republican National Committee official, Reagan by last Wednesday "was getting sick and tired of having George Bush's name shoved down his throat by his staff."

Still, after Ford finally said no to the vice presidential nomination, Reagan immediately settled on Bush and the two began presenting an image of good fellowship. At a joint press conference, a reporter asked how they got along personally. Replied Reagan, with a broad grin: "We've been together for a couple of hours this morning, and I didn't get much sleep last night, and there has not been a cross word between us." Another reporter asked if it bothered Bush that "you are the No. 2 choice for the No. 2 spot?" Replied Bush: "What difference does it make? It's irrelevant. I'm here."

The two do have some differences, however. Careful though Bush was not to attack Reagan personally during the primaries--the only thing he did to emphasize the contrast between Reagan's 69 years and his own 56 was to brag endlessly that he jogs two or three miles a day--Bush did lash heartily into some of Reagan's positions. The most important was Reagan's advocacy of a 30% cut in income tax rates over three years, a proposal that the nominee not only repeated but stressed in his acceptance speech last week. During the primaries, Bush derided that idea as "voodoo economics" and "pie in the sky."

Bush also attacked Reagan's suggestion that the U.S. might blockade Cuba in reprisal for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A blockade, he said, would tie up the entire U.S. Atlantic Fleet for no useful purpose: "The Cubans didn't invade Afghanistan. The Soviets did." And while Bush did not stress his positions on the ERA and abortion during the campaign, he did not conceal them. Democrats will make what they can of these differences. Democratic National Chairman John C. White, for example, portrays Bush as a weakling for accepting the very conservative Republican platform: "That by-golly ambition got him. He caved in completely."

In fact, Bush seems a moderate only in comparison to Reagan, and not all that moderate even by those standards. They share much of the same basic conservative philosophy: Bush has assailed Big Government and its omnipresent regulation almost as often as Reagan himself, and Bush has just as frequently demanded a big U.S. military buildup and a stern policy toward the Soviets. Bush too has emphasized tax cuts as an essential part of his economic strategy. He insisted last week that he fully supported Reagan's call for a 10%, $36 billion first-stage reduction in 1981.

The real differences between Bush and Reagan are in style and manner. The son of a Connecticut banker and Senator, educated at Andover and Yale, frequently dressed in rep tie and blazer, Bush is the very embodiment of the Eastern Republican Establishment that many of Reagan's rougher-hewn followers detest. Thirty-two years in Texas, where he made a fortune now estimated at more than $1.8 million in the oil business, have left no trace of the Sunbelt in his voice or manners. As a Congressman (1967-70) who later served brief terms as Ambassador to the U.N., chairman of the Republican National Committee, envoy to China and director of the CIA, he also is a member of the Washington Establishment to which Reagan is a complete outsider.

During the primary campaign, Bush's background hurt him. Publisher William Loeb effectively sneered at him in New Hampshire as a "clean-fingernails Republican." But now that Bush is the running mate, his credentials ought to help. He brings to the ticket Washington expertise and foreign policy experience, two things that Reagan conspicuously lacks. More fundamental, Bush appeals to a sector of the electorate crucial to a Reagan victory: voters who are receptive to a conservative appeal but have long distrusted Reagan as a potential far-right extremist.

Such voters, says Haley Barbour, who managed Gerald Ford's Southeastern campaign in 1976, "will like Reagan better for choosing Bush. It shows he is pragmatic and not the kamikaze right-winger that some people would have you believe." William Durham, who ran Howard Baker's short-lived campaign in South Carolina, believes that the choice of Bush will especially help Reagan with young professionals who are economically conservative but socially liberal and who so far have found Reagan "difficult to swallow; they don't know what's behind him."

Bush himself is a more mature, more forceful campaigner than when he set out on the long primary trail. His voice is still reedy but his delivery, once rapid to the point of being jumbly, has become measured. His speeches are no longer strewn with the preppy ("fantastic") or jargony ("power curve") phrases that bombed in New Hampshire. Harder to measure, but more important, his bubbly optimism seems to have changed into a more tempered and somber attitude. Though he still laughs easily with the press, his comments to reporters these days often have a hint of asperity. At last week's joint press conference with Reagan, Bush told a questioner: "I'm not going to get nickel-and-dimed to death with detail" about his differences with the presidential nominee.

One of the more effective campaigners for Bush is his wife Barbara, 55, who comes from a background much like his. The daughter of a wealthy publishing executive in Rye, N.Y., she graduated from the fashionable Ashley Hall school for girls in Charleston, S.C., then attended Smith College for one year. She dropped out to marry Bush over 35 years ago, after they had met at a dance while both were home on Christmas vacation. Mrs. Bush maintains that "I'm a nester" who likes nothing better than to putter around their home in Houston on weekends. Nonetheless, she campaigns tirelessly for Bush--and unlike Nancy Reagan, who generally prefers to be on a platform with her husband and close at hand, Barbara Bush often goes off on her own separate campaign tours.

Mrs. Bush jokes effectively about her winter-white hair and wrinkle-creased face. She drew a laugh from a women's Republican club last winter by remarking that every so often someone would tell her: "My, your son gave a good speech--only they don't mean my son." She plays the totally supportive wife, constantly reciting her husband's qualifications for high office. In answer to a question, she remarked: "I'm not running for President, so I am not going to tell you my position on abortion. But I would love to tell you what George's is."

George's position now is to be totally supportive of Reagan. On the night of his own nomination, Bush kept his speech phenomenally short (five minutes), remarking toward the close: "This is Ronald Reagan's night. He is the man whom you and the American people are waiting to hear." And if the ticket wins? Bush would be absolutely loyal. He told TIME last week: "The most important thing is to have a Vice President that the President is comfortable with. The worst thing would be to have a Vice President whom he would have to look at over his shoulder to make sure he wasn't going to push him off a cliff." George Bush is not like that. And Reagan knows it.

By George J. Church, Reported by Douglas Brew/Detroit

With reporting by Douglas Brew/Detroit

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