Bush's years of living a lie - George Bush, James Baker vendetta against George Shultz and Ronald Reagan documented in new book 'At the Highest Levels' - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 5, 1993 | by Arnold Beichman

One of the unpublicized stories of the Bush administration has been its rancorous vendetta against President Reagan and George Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state. Details of the vendetta, carried out by Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, spilled into print recently in a book by Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels, in which Baker is cited over and over as saying the most awful things about Shultz and, by extension, about Reagan.

The vendetta officially became public knowledge on Feb. 27 at a Princeton University conference on the Cold War, when Shultz remarked that a campaign of defamation against Reagan was "to a degree led by the Bush administration."

"There are people," he said, "who are going to have some explaining to do, especially those who used to ask, |Why is Ronald Reagan so successful? He knows so little and accomplishes so much.'"

People who have seen the manuscript say Shultz's memoirs, to be published in April, will contain some startling revelations about some events of the Bush years, especially about the Manuel Noriega-Panama affair. At Princeton, I was sitting beside a longtime liberal commentator who said as he listened to Shultz's defense of Reagan's foreign policies. "I'm going to have to revise my opinion of Reagan." I look forward to the revision.

During a coffee break after the Shultz reproach, I asked a State Department official who had served with Shultz for more details about the feud with Bush and Baker. The official said that at a State Department reception shortly after Bush's election, Baker approached her and asked, referring to the former Soviet president and foreign minister: "Don't you think you people were too soft on [Mikhail] Gorbachev and [Eduard] Shevardnadze?" "And then," the Shultz official said, barely concealing her contempt for Baker, "he became a bosom pal of Shevardnadze."

So serious was the Bush-Baker estrangement from Reagan and his friends that when the time came to prepare the guest list for the White House ceremony in January during which Bush awarded Reagan the Medal of Freedom, the White House asked Reagan's office in Los Angeles to prepare the invitations. There was some apprehension that invitations from Bush might be spurned. For some leading members of the Reagan administration who came to the ceremony, that was the first time they had been inside the White House in the four years of the Bush administration.

What has yet to be explained is the reason for the hostility of Bush and Baker, both of whom owe their mostly successful careers to Reagan. There seems not to have been any particular foreign policy difference between the two administrations regarding the crumbling Soviet empire. Why, then, the Bush-Baker aspersions cast on their patron and Shultz? Few people I've talked to have been able to explain it.

Perhaps the explanation is simple. For the eight years of his vice presidency, Bush was living a lie when he defended Reagan's ideas, particularly his economic program. It will be recalled that during the 1980 campaign, before the Republican National Convention, Bush scorned the ideas of his rival for the presidential nomination. Ronald Reagan, as "voodoo economics." And yet when Reagan won the nomination, Bush gratefully accepted the vice president candidacy.

For eight years, Bush bided his time. The Beschloss-Talbott book directly quotes Bush as telling Gorbachev in 1987 that in the coming presidential campaign he would be saying things in his speeches that would displease Gorbachev but that Gorbachev should disregard. He had to make such speeches, Bush said, because of "the marginal intellectual thugs" around President Reagan.

But there may also have been a personal factor in the breach with Reagan. I was told by another source that Barbara Bush in particular resented that the Bushes had never been invited to dine with the Reagans in the private White House family quarters. While Bush lunched once a week with Reagan, the Bushes had never been invited as a family. But important as this seeming slight might be, it cannot be considered a crucial factor in Bush's break with Reagan.

Bush was determined that the years 1988-1992 not be regarded as a third Reagan term. When Bush proclaimed in the 1988 campaign, "Read my lips: no new taxes," it was the voice of Reagan. But when Bush approved the 1990 tax increase, violating his pledge, it was his true voice. History, it is safe to say, will not define the years 1988-1992 as a third Reagan term.

Boris Pasternak wrote of the psychological and even physical consequences of constantly defending obviously false ideas, of living a life of "systematic duplicity." He was, of course, writing about life under Joseph Stalin or Nikita Khrushchev: "Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune."

For eight years, Bush lived a life of systematic duplicity, and the next four years brought him nothing but misfortune.