The Men who would be President

Rockefeller's Wallet, Carter's Lust, Reagan's Jokes.... In the Past, Robert Scheer has given Playboy Readers Prescient Portraits of the candidates. Here is his Report on George Bush and Michael Dukakis

George Bush was in his element. Throttling forward, with a wide grin on his face, he powered his cigarette boat up to max and headed straight for the dock, frightening his passengers before turning at the last moment to avoid a collision. Ha-ha! Up in his ancestral summer homeland of Maine, he's known as that kind of yachtsman.

Guts or nuts? I don't know, probably just wild sport. Bush has spent a lifetime throwing himself utterly into whatever game he's playing. All I know is that it's not something Michael Dukakis would do. Dukakis is measured; Bush, hyper.

When the campaign plane pulls up on the tarmac in some Godforsaken hot watering hole in the Midwest, Dukakis disembarks to use his allotted 15 minutes to toss a football with his aides. His playtime is also his work-time. No sense of abandon here. The ball will be thrown, muscles will be limbered and flattering press photos will be taken. A good use of time, which pleases Dukakis considerably.

Different strokes, yes. But who are these men? They both survived the grueling pace of the primaries by not revealing too much of themselves. Now the curtain is drawn tighter as thousands of us journalists will trip over one another observing them throughout the fall. I have been at this juncture before, going all the way back to Nixon and Kennedy, and I know that now the TV packaging will begin in earnest: What we learn will be by accident and little more.

When they were jostling for media space in a tight crowd of primary candidates, you could still learn something. With Bush, it means looking back to the last time he was really out there, vulnerable, in a competitive primary pack, in the early days before the 1980 election, before he wrapped himself in the protective mantle of Vice-President. There were a few times back then when I was the only reporter in his fold and was able to interview him for hours on end. With Dukakis, it means going back to this past May, when he still had Jesse Jackson on his hands going into the California primary. His handlers seemed to think that several hours of interviews with me, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, would be useful.

So it is midsummer and I now go back over my taped interviews and notes, as I did for previous elections when I wrote profiles of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan for this magazine, even as I continued to cover the campaign through the conventions and into the fall. I've tried to read the histories of Bush and Dukakis, something I think we reporters don't do enough, and add to that what glints I could get from my own professional encounters with them. Not for the nugget, the almighty anecdote—we'll get a million of those before this campaign is through—but for clues as to what they really believe about issues, how they behave under pressure.

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On one level, the contrast is obvious. Everyone I have talked with who really knows Dukakis ends up with the same summary refrain: "What you see is what you get." The Greek governor is controlled, efficient, never wasteful of emotion or effort. Friends call him Michael, not Mike, and none of them recalls him referring to himself as Greek before he got into politics. Despite suppressing his ethnic background, he carried his heritage with him. His father made him learn the language and customs of Greece. His acquaintances don't all put it exactly that way, but the sense one has is that the stereotype rings true: Dukakis is a first-generation American with a funny name still proving that he can be trusted to run the store; the do-gooder superachiever looking for a load to bear so they'll let him stay.

Bush, the scion of an old-line political family, on the testimony of his peers, really does act as if he were born to run anything he damn well was interested in running. He has always belonged. His achievements were his for the asking, largely honorific; no one thought to judge seriously his performance.

It does neither man a disservice to suggest, based on an exhaustive reading of the record and personal contact, that one, Dukakis, set out to change the world, first with a reformer's zeal and later, after being chastised by electoral defeat, with a technocrat's crawl. And that the other, Bush, delighted in the world as it was and sought only its and his own refinement.

This is to suggest not that Bush is generally frivolous—there are obviously many things he cares deeply about, from family to country to public service—but that he doesn't take the role of Government to be all that important. Never once that I know of has Bush urgently pinpointed some need in the society that Government need fulfill. He is an evangelist of the status quo, a born-again believer in what is rather than what might be.

To understand Bush, one has to get past the credit lines that he endlessly unrolls. History? Start with his autobiography, Looking Forward. It reads like a letter a kid might send home from college. There's all the upbeat fun stuff—the wonderful people he met, the beautiful scenery, the moments of thrilling action—but nothing about what he learned from all that broadening. He exudes the conviction that Congress was "exciting" for two terms, the United Nations "frustrating" for two years, Peking "intriguing," the CIA "stimulating" for one year and the Vice-Presidency "interesting" every darn day of his term.

But his autobiography offers little evidence of real achievement other than his dazzling personal mobility—there is only skilled footwork at avoiding the obvious pitfalls. As a Congressman, he seems proudest of the fact that he managed, after initial hesitation, to reject the support of the John Birch Society. At the UN, Ambassador Bush, who had long opposed the admission of Communist China, was kept in the dark on Nixon's betrayal of Taiwan until the last moment. In China, as our first Liaison Officer, he had to keep out of the way of Henry Kissinger, who didn't approve of Bush's glad-handing. At the CIA, Director Bush invited in the now-infamous Team B, outside hawks who demoralized the professional staff. But it is Bush's enduring strength that all these assignments were merely sturdy rungs on the ladder. "On to the next event," he told his UN staff after Taiwan was kicked out. As Barry Bearak documents in his L.A. Times profile of Bush, there never was a sense of failure.

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Dukakis, by contrast, seems almost obsessed by his errors of the past. He learned early in his career that he was not immune to failure. Bolting out of the gates of Harvard Law School, Dukakis chalked up one quick victory after another as a new breed of reformer challenging the entrenched and corrupt Democratic old guard in Massachusetts. He was playing in one of the toughest leagues of ethnic and patronage politics and, amazingly, he beat them by winning the governorship.

Then it was his turn to show his stuff, and the new governor did so boldly—out with patronage and perks, drive a Chevrolet, bring in a dynamic government that services people's needs. But then the voters threw him out.

"That defeat in 1978 was a very important experience," Dukakis recently said. "I think if you get hurt, you are going to be a more sensitive and a more understanding person, and I am these days, much more than I was prior to when that happened." One should dwell on that a bit, because, as we will see, Dukakis' electoral failure haunted his political evolution. In defeat, he returned to Harvard, this time to the Kennedy School of Government, to nurse his political wounds and figure out what had gone wrong—and to immerse himself in the new hard-boiled post-McGovern liberalism that was based on partnerships, corporate and otherwise, rather than confrontation.

I remember that period, having attended seminars with Dukakis and having observed the grouping of a new political tribe with him at the Kennedy Center. What emerged in his next stint as governor was a rejection of much of traditional Hubert Humphrey liberalism and an acceptance of new high-tech concepts of efficient government management. Play down the divisive race, class and social issues, play up competency. That and, a cynic might add, hold your breath for the national economy to improve and defense dollars to expand to float the Massachusetts miracle. Some felt that that miracle was more than aided by a Pentagon co-opting Massachusetts' labs and brains.

Whether militarily induced or not, the new package worked and more or less continues to work successfully, and Dukakis was overwhelmingly re-elected. He now has a ten-year record of real programs with quite a few accomplishments. But his every action indicates that he remains nervous about his grip on power. He had been thrown out in 1978 for reasons he still considers minor and irrational—his opponent bested him on issues such as abortion, the legal drinking age and capital punishment, which Dukakis feels are hardly central to government. So he now hears the footsteps that torment many liberals—the footsteps of an unwashed middle America that may be too easily moved to illiberal positions. In the club of the powerful, liberals like Dukakis always fear that they are "passing." Indeed, at the Democratic Convention, the word liberal was never uttered by Dukakis spokesmen, who used the word progressive instead. Enthusiasm for the Democratic Party's legacy of reform was left to Jesse Jackson's people, while the Dukakis Yuppies were running as fast as their Reeboks could take them from their party's history.

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Bush does not seem haunted by any sense of history. Indeed, his unwillingness or inability to look back is, I think, a major source of his strengths and his failures. When I first interviewed him, I was struck by his cavalier and, at times, even contemptuous attitude toward the past—"all that ancient history," as he put it, referring to Watergate and the Pentagon-papers case, which had occurred a scant eight years before. As if, by definition, history's being old was, as an informing guide, simply useless.

The subject came up while I was flying with him in a little plane in 1980. It was before he won the Iowa primary that catapulted him to electoral prominence and he wasn't being taken that seriously as a Presidential candidate. I had been assigned by the L.A. Times to interview all the candidates, and, as it happened, Bush had a stopover in L.A. on his way to Santa Barbara. With only a couple of hours' notice, I rushed into our library and began feverishly pulling clips and throwing them into my briefcase.

By the time I sat down next to Bush on the plane, with just enough room for a press aide and the two pilots, I could talk only about L.A. traffic, and the two of us chatted amicably about that and the Oakland Raiders, who were playing that night on Monday Night Football. It was fun and relaxed until I remembered why I was there and pulled out a handful of clips that I had gone over in the taxi on the way to the airport. A few of the articles concerned Bush's performance as head of the Republican National Committee during Watergate and his stint as head of the CIA. I asked him about new regulations at the CIA, including one that increased the penalty for someone who leaks information, and I asked whether he thought it should have applied to the Pentagon-papers case. Here's the exchange:

Scheer: Do you think The New York Times was correct in publishing the Pentagon papers?

Bush: I haven't thought about it, frankly. If everything The New York Times can get its hands on——No. I think there are some constraints, some legitimacy to the concept of national security.

Scheer: Well, do you think that should have applied to the Pentagon-papers case?

Bush: I told you, I don't have a judgment, I don't have——I don't remember all that ancient history.

Scheer: Well, it isn't so ancient.

Bush: I've told you my position, and you're not going to get an answer.

Scheer: It's important because——

Bush: Well, it's important to you and it's not that important.... I've told you my position.

Scheer: It was important to President Nixon, who you worked with, and he argued that the leak in the Pentagon-papers case was so severe that it threatened the foundations of our Government, and that was the reason for the whole "Plumber's Unit" and Watergate—right?

Bush: I don't recall what he argued on that—couldn't be less interested.

Scheer: In Watergate?

Bush: Yes, in that whole area.

Scheer: Do you think there are any lessons to be learned——

Bush: Yes, some of them—don't break the law and don't lie.

Scheer: Nixon's argument is that he was protecting national security.

Bush: Interesting.

Scheer: You said you didn't want to explore Watergate again, but there's one statement I want to ask you about. You once said, "I applaud President Nixon's comprehensive statement, which clearly demonstrates again that the President himself was not involved with the Watergate matter."

Bush: It came out to the contrary—oh, come on.

Scheer: What I want to ask you is——

Bush: Go back and read the whole goddamn thing that happened after this! What kind of reporting are you doing?

At this, Bush exploded. His drink almost flew out of his hand, and he was shouting. Only when we changed the subject did he calm down. I remember being impressed that when I interviewed candidate Ronald Reagan in that same period, he would answer similar questions without the slightest strain. Reagan, in the style to which we have become accustomed, would break off into stage-whispered jokes, anecdotes and reminiscences—but eventually, he met the questions head on, without any fuss.

I encountered the Bush temper again after my interview was published. This time, the tension was not over Watergate but over a portion of the interview about fighting a nuclear war. Bush had made a remark to me that caused an uproar in the press, threatening to derail his campaign that year. Reporters were hounding him about what he'd said—that a nuclear war was winnable—and it began to take its toll. At first, he more or less denied saying it, until reporters called me and asked to hear the taped interview. Then he shifted his stance and said that the media were misinterpreting what he had told me. Then he began to lose it. "Just read it!" he shouted at one reporter.

For the record, here it is, verbatim:

Scheer: Don't we reach a point with these strategic weapons where we can wipe one another out so many times and no one wants to use them or is willing to use them, that it really doesn't matter whether we're ten percent or two percent lower or higher?

Bush: Yes, if you believe there is no such thing as a winner in a nuclear exchange, that argument makes a little sense. I don't believe that.

Scheer: How do you win in a nuclear exchange?

Bush: You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you. That's the way you can have a winner, and the Soviets' planning is based on the ugly concept of a winner in a nuclear exchange.

Scheer: Do you mean, like five percent would survive? Two percent?

Bush: More than that—if everybody fired everything he had, you'd have more than that survive.

I was off the campaign when the interview ran and rejoined it some weeks later. I was waiting at Midway Airport in Chicago in the chartered-airplane holding room, where the Secret Service agent had positioned me, all the right-colored tags around my neck and on my luggage giving me the appearance of a bedraggled refugee. I was supposed to rejoin the Bush caravan and was uncertain how I would be received by Bush and his staff. Suddenly, Bush burst through the doors, with staff and agents in tow but without the media pack that had been shunted aside to file its stories in a telephone-filled room. This was to be a quiet, down time for him; I had evidently been placed in the wrong holding cell.

Bush was clearly taken aback. He caught my eye in mid-stride, which for Bush is sort of a gallop, with one leg wriggling up in mid-air, an arm holding a trench coat and a briefcase stuck off to the side, his head cocked at a 45-degree angle and his mouth wide open. He looked like a character out of Dr. Seuss, and I was about to smile, expecting this odd-looking creature to say something strange but funny. Instead, the face screwed up with rage and was placed about eight inches from my face in what must be man-to-man confrontation favored by prep schoolers. A finger was jabbing the air near my nose and a somewhat squeaky but persistent voice kept repeating, "I want that tape, I want that tape."

I assumed he meant my taped copy of our interview sessions, particularly the portion covering nuclear war. At first, I was apologetic. "Is there something wrong?" I said. "Are you saying you were misquoted? Perhaps we should sit down and go over the text." I'm as inclined as the next person to accommodate the concerns of powerful people. But Bush would have none of it. With his finger still poking the air, he repeated several times, "I want that tape!" which was then followed by the threat to go to my publisher, "whom I know quite well." I was dumfounded at first, then angry.

"You have the tape," I said.

"What?"

"Yes, your press people sat in on the interview and taped every second of it. What's the beef?"

Bush then turned on a hapless press aide. "Get me a copy of that tape!"

I was forgotten as he and the entourage rushed past.

Why go into all this now? For two reasons: Bush is not, in my experience, the genial team player so often described by the media that travel with him and that he assiduously and effectively cultivates. When crossed, as he was by Dan Rather recently, a less attractive side may be revealed. But, more important, he really doesn't seem to care very much about the substance of issues. When I asked him about strategies of nuclear war, all he cared about was positioning himself politically. He got into trouble because he wanted to sound tough and on top of things. The fact is, he didn't know what he was talking about. He had been echoing the hawks' argument on the Soviet build-up without having first digested those arguments and their assumptions. One of those assumptions was the notion, absurd as it may sound, that nuclear war is winnable. It was a necessary assumption for fueling the arms race, because if a nuclear war cannot be fought and won, then there is no logical rationalization for ever more refined and more powerful nuclear weapons.

I asked him what I still believe is a reasonable question: Why, with all our nuclear arms, does it matter if we have two percent more or less than the Soviets? He was not interested, as were Reagan, Carter and others I had interviewed, in the substance of the matter. He saw it only as a pitch to be squared off against.

In both his testy meanness and his opportunism, Bush's two more striking characteristics, in my view, he demonstrated the fundamental wellspring of his make-up: Bush is a political survivalist. No matter the status he has occupied in life—Yalie, airman, oil merchant, Congressman, Republican National Chairman, Ambassador to the UN and China, CIA Director and Vice-President—there is only one salient accomplishment: survival.

And not merely survival. As Bearak wrote, it is a matter of heroic survival, survival with the necessary oomph to go on to the next stage, not just getting by but being viewed as a winner. No mean accomplishment, given that even by his own reckoning, in his autobiography, not a single major accomplishment is recorded in any phase of his Government service. Scrutinize the record of his two terms in Congress and you come up with ... good sailing skills. He was adept at negotiating the shoals between the extreme right wing of his party and the Eastern moderate Republicanism to which he had been born. He defined himself as a "Goldwater Republican" to differentiate himself from the outright fruitcakes of his time. He wasn't crazy enough to be against fluoridation or for legal segregation in housing. But he did reject Martin Luther King, Jr., as "militant," was against the landmark Civil Rights Act when he first ran for Congress, until he was finally persuaded to vote for it four years later, opposed Medicare and favored the use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam war if "militarily prudent."

Asked about the hard-right positions he took, Bush's response today is that he came from a conservative district in Texas and that those were centrist positions in that part of the country. Whoa, partner. The man at the other end of the spectrum from Bush, pushing civil rights and Medicare, was a Senator named Lyndon Johnson—who represented all of Texas in the nation's capital.

In fact, at the time, as L.B.J. tried to find support for both bills, Bush spoke out against both the civil rights bill, saying, "It violates the civil and constitutional rights of all the people," and the Medicare bill, saying it would lead to "socialized medicine." He has since spoken out for both bills, but only after it would have been politically suicidal to do anything else. He now supports them both, incidentally, as if he had never believed otherwise.

The problem is not that Bush, by his current standards, was wrong, but that he gives no indication of having learned anything from his mistakes. We are talking about education here or the lack thereof. His autobiography reeks of noblesse oblige. This man has been plopped into more interesting circumstances in any given week than most people dream of in a lifetime; yet it is as if he's only gone from one mindless cocktail party to another. He tells us nowhere that anything he encountered in Congress, at the CIA, at the UN or in China, or that any of the thousands of trips, meetings, jobs, conversations, tours altered his view of the world. He is the political surfer, ever more effectively riding the waves, marveling at this retention of youthfulness.

Reagan, that sunny apostle of eternal youth, is nourished by a powerful set of beliefs. Bush's momentum hangs on the action of the moment, but Reagan, a man who believes things deeply and truly, is driven by much more. Nancy and I may be the only intellectuals in the country to still believe this, but I know Reagan to be a man of political substance.

Reagan may have had some cockamamie reactions to life's experiences, from the Hollywood blacklist days to his meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev; he may get his facts and even his most personal experiences wrong, such as thinking he liberated concentration camps in Europe when he was never there. But through it all, there is a man who cares deeply about what he thinks he has seen—be it dead babies in an abortionist's bottle or the Red menace. Reagan can change, as he has demonstrated in his dealings with Gorbachev, but there is in that change the sense of a mind, however slowly and resisting, working through a problem important to him.

Not so George Bush. In his race for the Senate, Bush held that "if Red China should be admitted to the UN, then the UN is hopeless and we should withdraw." But when Nixon began the process of opening relations with Red China, Bush was first on board, as Ambassador to that same dread UN presiding over the admission of Red China and acquiescing to the expulsion of Taiwan. Then George and Barbara could be found bicycling happily in Peking when Bush served as the first U.S. Liaison Officer to what was still Mao's China.

Why does that switch signify something, especially since Nixon was the biggest switcher of all? Because with Bush, there was something so flighty about his shifts of position, which are always delivered with unbridled enthusiasm, never with a scintilla of angst. Nixon anguished over his shift and, indeed, developed the Nixon Doctrine to justify it as a necessary step in a new era of limits. Bush acts like someone who has just gone along for the ride.

Bush once believed that the U.S. forces must win in Vietnam "no matter what weapons they use," because the Red Chinese were our real enemy there. So having tea with Mao must not have been as routine an occurrence as his autobiography indicates. But maybe it was just another wonderful soiree.

According to his autobiography, Bush hadn't known there was tension between the Soviet Union and China until he found himself at a chilly gathering with diplomats from both Communist powers in the residence of the French ambassador to the UN in the early Seventies. How could he not have known? The Soviets and Chinese Communists have been at odds since 1927, and the Sino-Soviet dispute was full-blown by 1960, when they were already skirmishing on their border, before the Vietnam war.

But search Bush's autobiography or the totality of his speeches, interviews and writings since, and there is not one word of serious re-examination of his earlier views of Red China or of the evolution of U.S. policy.

Why bother with all this "ancient history"? Because it goes to the main Bush claim on the Presidency: that he has been there. That he is, in the slogan of his 1980 campaign, "A President we won't have to train." He runs first and foremost on résumé. But his most important foreign-policy experience prior to becoming Vice-President, by his own claim, involves China. And in that area, his education was so intellectually paltry, so breezily anecdotal and so arrogantly indifferent to elementary rules of logical consistency or historical accountability as to render Reagan, by comparison, a (continued on page 172)Men who would be President(continued from page 86) Talmudic scholar.

Bush's learning curve remains similarly flat when one turns to his experience as Vice-President. On most matters of controversy during that eight-year period, sending the Marines to be blown up in Lebanon or the Iran/Contra affair, Bush insists that he was "not in the loop." But during his tenure as Vice-President, he did have an important responsibility: He was in charge of formulating the nation's strategy on counterterrorism. He headed the Presidential Task Force on Terrorism and its public report was issued under his name.

In the introduction, signed by Bush, we find the quintessential Bush prose style, reminiscent of résumés and autobiographies: "Our task force was briefed by more than 25 Government agencies, visited 14 operations centers to observe our capability firsthand, met with more than 100 statesmen, military officers.... Our conclusion: The U.S. policy and program to combat terrorism is tough and resolute." It ended with a ringing declaration: "We will make no concessions to terrorists." Impressive enough.

Yet that report was issued at the end of February 1986—a month after Bush, as it was later revealed, had attended a meeting with the President to go over a proposal by Oliver North that arms be offered to Iranian terrorists.

Did Bush know for sure that the U.S. Government was planning to give arms to Iranian terrorists at the very moment that he signed his declaration against "concessions to terrorists"? The "Where was George?" taunt by Ted Kennedy and the Democrats at the convention was reinforced by a Republican. A Reagan Administration insider, Constantine C. Menges, the National Security Council expert on terrorism, states in his new book that "the Administration had decided to appease one of the most violent sponsors of terrorism." Bush's basic response to such charges is that he was in the dark, "unaware ... denied information ... not in the loop."

He was absent from the crucial December 7, 1985, White House meeting with the President at which George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger strenuously opposed the arms sale to Iran. Bush could have been there but had other things to do. "I was off at the Army-Navy football game," he told The Washington Post, "and none of them ever came to me [to discuss their objections]."

He did manage to make another meeting a month later, at which time Shultz and Weinberger protested again. Shultz says, unequivocally, that Bush favored the arms sales. "I don't recall that," Bush has said. Nor does he recall that ten days later, President Reagan approved the covert sale of arms to Iran when he signed an intelligence finding. A Poindexter note places Bush at that meeting as well, but Bush insists, "I do not recall a finding being signed, and I think I'd remember that. The President may have signed the finding, but there was no discussion of a finding in front of me...." Nor does he even "recall" the now well-documented fact that Shultz and Weinberger opposed the arms sales.

Who's lying? Too early, given all the trials to come, to tell. But a more pressing question to ask of one who now seeks to be President is, If he opposed the policy, why didn't he rise in the manner of Shultz and Weinberger to object? "'I was persuaded by the President's view on that," Bush said. "Now, if it were a question of, you know, my feeling I may have broken some law or done something wrong, why, then I'd be much more concerned about it," he added. "It's a question of judgment. You correct it and go on to the future."

Sounds reasonable until one recalls that counterterrorism was Bush's terrain within the Administration and that the Iran affair undermined the entire program that Bush had put together. The arms sale to Iran was not a side show in which one gracefully accepted a bit part. Nor was it a matter, à la Ed Meese, of his being legally guilty of a crime. Bush is asking to be President based on his experience in the White House. And the arms sale, more than any other incident in the long eight years, shows Bush being tested on his leadership and judgment. Perhaps, most of all, it demonstrates Bush's lack of seriousness. He told Ted Koppel this past summer that he now views the entire affair not as an occasion for soul searching over a major transgression of stated U.S. policy but as one of "two or three little issues that have gone wrong."

Whoa again. It is not just two or three little issues. The reason the Iran/Contra affair—which threatened to bring down the Reagan Presidency—occurred in the first place was adherence to outmoded attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Briefly, the fiasco of Iran/Contra was made possible by blind adherence to the dying mythology of the Cold War. It presumed, as Ollie North so eloquently testified, a battle between Communist evil and free-world virtue. Stopping communism in Nicaragua justified an alliance with terrorists.

OK. But what if communism is no longer the Evil Empire—unified and determined in its drive to destroy us—as Bush used to say? What if the Cold War is over? Is Bush the man to recognize that sea change, to move it along as fast as possible and to prepare America for the shock of peace breaking out? Iran/Contra was a test of Bush's ability to assert common sense in the midst of a swirl of patriotic and jingoistic hysteria. If Shultz and Weinberger passed that test, Bush failed it.

Would he fail it as President, when dealing with a myriad of communisms in the world may be his biggest challenge? It is ironic, but the record shows that Republicans have been better at exploiting breaks in Cold War tension than Democrats. Eisenhower brought Nikita Khrushchev to the United States, Nixon went to China and Reagan went to Moscow. Why not Bush as peacemaker? It can't be ruled out. Republicans are better positioned to make overtures to Communist governments because they are far less vulnerable to Red baiting. Ever since Democrats took the rap from Senator Joseph McCarthy for having "lost China," they have been traumatized by the charge of being soft on communism. But Bush's performance in Irangate raises questions about whether he has the stomach that Reagan had to take on the right wing of his party in negotiating with the Soviets.

Far from showing courage with his right wing, Bush has apparently decided to show that he has his own foreign policy, distinct from Reagan's, by attacking the President—from the right. Despite the remarkable string of changes in the Soviet Union that prompted Reagan's reappraisal of his own Evil Empire theory. Bush warned that the President might be going "too far."

"The Cold War is not over," Bush warned in a major foreign-policy speech after the Moscow summit. He added that "we must be bold enough to seize the opportunity of change but at the same lime be prepared for what one pundit called 'the protracted conflict.'" At another gathering, Bush pointedly denied Reagan's assertion that fundamental change was taking place in the Soviet Union. "We've got to keep our eyes wide open," he warned. Asked if he accepted Reagan's statement at the end of the Moscow summit that the Soviet Union was no longer the Evil Empire and that the world was now safer, Bush replied, "I don't agree with the premise. I don't agree that we know enough to say that there is that kind of fundamental change, a turning inward à la China, on the part of the Soviet Union. I don't feel that way."

An odd issue on which to break with Reagan. This is the Vice-President who, in the name of team loyalty, did not break with Reagan over his support of the racist government in South Africa, his fruitless pursuit of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or his efforts to minimize shooting down a civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf. Only when Reagan expressed the possibility that the Soviet Union might be changing for the better did Bush choose to dissent.

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Nothing the candidates may have to deal with is as important as how the U.S. reacts to the Soviet Union's undergoing a second revolution. Bush's reaction has been to attack Reagan—presumably for his right-wing constituency—to credit the Soviet changes to the U.S. military build-up and to call for more of the same. Where Dukakis stands on this is less clear.

Is he a Cold War Democrat in the mold of the late Henry "Scoop" Jackson, determined to prove that he is not soft on communism? Or is he closer to Jesse Jackson's view that we now have more things in common with the Soviets than real differences? Or, and this is a scary one, is he another Jimmy Carter floundering helplessly between those two contradictory views of the world?

Dukakis hates the Carter-comparison questions more than any others. The only time I saw him bristle was when I asked him about how he would avoid Carter's tendency to vacillate in foreign affairs. "It's really a foolish question to ask," he said. Why foolish? Carter, also a governor with no hands-on foreign-policy experience, attempted to speak for all wings of the fractious Democratic Party and ended up speaking for none. Carter turned to dovish Cyrus Vance to be his Secretary of State and superhawk Zbigniew Brzezinski to be his National Security Advisor, and the result was foreign-policy malaise. But any President must now choose between those two roads, and it is fair to ask which one Dukakis would take.

I talked with him about the Cold War one night on the plane coming back from California, where he had clinched the Democratic nomination—though his ever-calm demeanor hardly suggested victory. Alter a stop in St. Louis to pick up, for the benefit of the TV cameras, the endorsement of Congressman Richard Gephardt, and pausing for a passing tornado, we were again en route on the bumpy ride to Boston. Dukakis, indifferent as always to his surroundings, ignored the rude shocks to the plane and continued reading reports on platform controversies with the intensity that one of the TV crew members was devoting to a steamy novel.

I slipped into the row behind him to interview his constant side-kick and fellow Greek, Paul Brountas, the Boston lawyer who has been associated with Dukakis since Harvard Law School days. Brountas reminisced about the time the two of them had driven to Los Angeles to attend the 1960 Democratic Convention—where John F. Kennedy, a neighbor in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline, was nominated. The two friends were conspiring to reform the Democratic Party in the Sixties, and Brountas knew Dukakis then, as he does now, as well as anyone other than his wife.

I asked Brountas about what they did during the war. Not in the Fifties, in Korea, where they were both Infantry grunts, but in the Sixties, when they were rising Democratic Party politicos and their party was waging the Vietnam war.

Brountas forthrightly said that he had stood by the President and could never bring himself to break with Johnson on the war. I asked about Dukakis' position, and Brountas said he didn't know, since they had lost contact during those years. I suggested we ask the governor, who was by now dozing off from a grueling day of campaigning in three states. He wouldn't do that. I persisted. "Oh, what the hell," Brountas said. Both of us stood up to lean over the seat in front of us, while Brountas shook the governor awake.

"Scheer here wants to ask just a couple of questions. OK?"

Dukakis rubbed his eyes sleepily and nodded. I pointed my microphone at him over the seat and blurted out, "When and what did you first think about Vietnam?"

Dukakis, though still rubbing his eyes, seemed not at all perturbed to have been awakened for such a question and spoke extemporaneously—a rarity during a campaign of set speeches: "I think it was 1965, Bob. There were either five or seven of us, Democrats in the legislature, who issued a statement at that time.... Then I was—you know my Democratic organization went for McCarthy in 1968 and I was a McCarthy delegate at the Chicago convention. As a matter of fact, we had a fight within my town in 1968 over control of the Democratic organization, because at that time, interestingly enough, Jack Backman, who subsequently became a very liberal legislator, thought that we were being unpatriotic in opposing Johnson in 1968. This was well before Johnson's withdrawal, and so we had a contest, kind of an anti-Vietnam slate, if you will, between the group that I and other people were leading and this more conservative, whatever, pro-Vietnam group.

"I just felt from the beginning that the whole thing was doomed to failure. And apart from the whole history of the thing, I was just very strongly opposed to the war. And a lot of that had something to do with my experience in Korea, you know, a sense of what was happening over there, and so forth. It's hard to say. I remember reading The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, and feeling like I wanted to 'send 150 copies to key folks in the State Department and say, 'Look, this will take three hours; read it, maybe you'll have some sense of the futility of what you're trying to do.' And, of course, as it went on, it just got worse and worse.... It was really one of the worst decades in history...."

I was intrigued by the heartfelt, impromptu response and by Dukakis' choice of reading material on Vietnam. The Quiet American is about the efforts of a CIA operative—the Oliver North of his day—to save the Vietnamese for the free world during the time the French colonialists were in Vietnam; his efforts are blundering in a complex cultural and religious terrain. To some old-time antiwar activists, Greene's was the first novel that explained the quagmire that would become the Vietnam war.

Still playing the reporter, I asked Dukakis why he had not backed Robert Kennedy's challenge to Johnson. He smiled and said, "Well, I probably would have, but I was already committed to Eugene McCarthy's campaign as a delegate." Which, of course, was an even earlier and gutsier break with Johnson than backing Kennedy.

I have no doubt that Dukakis is as free of Cold War obsessions as any leading Democrat this side of Jesse Jackson. But his foreign-policy aides are another story. He has attracted the best and the brightest gang, the same sort of Harvard intelligentsia that brought us Vietnam. Some of the old faces, such as John Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen, who wrote the Dukakis platform declaration for the convention, are back. But mostly, they are a far younger crowd who nevertheless seem determined to project what foreign-policy advisor Jim Steinberg terms an "activist" role for America in the world. Whether that means a revamped Kennedy Peace Corps or special forces advisors remains to be seen.

Nor have Dukakis' advisors exhibited the political courage required to lead this country out of its dependency on the Cold War. They have exhibited instead a desperation to win without much concern for the content of their victory. Dukakis' long primary campaign was little more than a series of photo opportunities in which he carefully skirted controversy. Dukakis' staff denigrated the effort of the Jackson people to raise issues, dismissing them as party poopers; that is to say, they trivialized Jackson's concerns, as if they represented the picayune efforts of a spoiler rather than a serious challenge to the politics of the Democratic Party establishment.

Dukakis' campaign manager, Susan Estrich, was so scathing in her attack on Jackson's motives in continuing his fight over the Democratic Party platform that she had to apologize. I was amazed when I heard that, since I had observed Estrich as leader of Ted Kennedy's platform challenge to Jimmy Carter at the 1980 Democratic Convention.

Which was the real Dukakis campaign? The answer came soon enough in the choice of a Vice-Presidential running mate. In probably the most revealing move of his political life, Dukakis sent a message of unmistakable clarity: Win at any price. In turning to the Cold War wing of his own party, presumably to add balance to the ticket, Dukakis indicated clearly that he could countenance the movement of U.S. policy in that direction should he be incapacitated. As a young Congressman, Lloyd Bentsen advocated the use of nuclear weapons to end the Korean War. He didn't indicate whether or not that would also end Korea. As a U.S. Senator, Bentsen has supported each and every military boondoggle and, indeed, is famous for gobbling up contributions from defense contractors.

It is also not reassuring that the two Democratic candidates come from states that rank very high in military spending and that the economic miracles they allude to depend so much on that fact. According to a Dartmouth study, the Massachusetts miracle "was triggered by a specific factor: the beginning of the national military build-up in the late Seventies." Census figures indicate that Department of Defense industrial purchases grew by 165 percent in New England from 1978 to 1983, while the national growth was only 122 percent, and Dukakis has not been known to turn any of it back.

Even without Bentsen, the Dukakis program envisions a military build-up rather than a freeze, as advocated by Jackson. Although he favors a halt to some nuclear systems, such as the MX, the Midgetman and S.D.I., Dukakis wants to shift that money to new high-tech gadgets for conventional-war fighting.

Dukakis also favors continuing some very expensive nuclear-weapons programs, such as the D5 missiles for submarines and the Stealth bomber. I could never get anyone in the Dukakis campaign to tell me what the Stealth bomber could do to warrant its 50-billion-dollar price tag. Its military task, as outlined in Congressional hearings, is to seek out enemy targets after a nuclear exchange has been under way for some days. Not a very exciting prospect, yet each one of the suckers costs $500,000,000, or twice the amount that Dukakis is willing to spend on increased funding for education during his first year in office.

Dukakis never did meet the challenge of Jesse Jackson head on when Jackson charged that there would be no commitment to an increase in social spending without a fundamental challenge to Cold War priorities. When I pressed Dukakis on whether he would go along with Jackson's commitment to make major cuts in defense in order to apply the funds to education, he said no.

So what commitment will he make? In Massachusetts, Dukakis and the legislature he controls have taken care of the poor and otherwise needy as long as the state's economy and its tax revenues have expanded. When they haven't, and now is such a time, he has slashed those social programs first. This is neoliberalism à la the Harvard Kennedy school, which may make fine accounting sense unless you're the one with the heat turned off. But maybe if you've come up in politics as the Representative of wealthy Brookline, you don't know about that.

Interviewing Dukakis and his domestic-issues aides, I came upon a startling observation: They don't believe that there is an underclass in America, in the sense of a group of people who have been frozen out, down through generations, by racism, poor education and a welfare holding-cell mentalilty. True, they know full well that there are poor, homeless, even exploited people. But their view of why those people exist is not far from Bush's: Expand the general economy and they will be brought along to a new prosperity.

"Good jobs at good wages" is Dukakis' most fervently expressed campaign promise on the economy. The idea that there may be large numbers of people out there—indeed, right around his own Statehouse, where it is frightening to walk at night—who are too poorly educated and socially undisciplined to take those jobs seems to have escaped him. Dukakis told me, "I reject the idea of an underclass in the sense of people being locked into poverty." Perhaps it is to be expected that a man who had only one top black in his national campaign office for most of the primary is not focused on the dire consequences of a history of racism and the fact that a significant number of people in this country are simply not part of the system and will not easily be brought in.

"There are good white schools and there are good black schools," said Tom Herman, senior deputy director of domestic issues, and the point is to get good administrators in both.

Given his view that the problem is so easily manageable, it is no wonder that Dukakis thinks an additional expenditure of 250,000,000 Federal dollars a year might really have an impact on taking kids from inner-city public schools into the high-tech jobs of the future. One has the sense, having spent time with him and his people, that under the skin of this reasonable and well-intended reformer/do-gooder lies the disapproving sensibility of a Horatio Alger conservative. Maybe he really believes that "those people" should just get their act together, that Government will do the minimum to assist, if the money is there, which it is not likely to be in the big-deficit years ahead. Only a thought, but how else to explain his rift with Jesse Jackson, which was not a leftover story from the primary or the convention but the central quandary of Dukakis' party.

Is it possible that Dukakis really does believe that being a black from 125th Street in Harlem is the same as being a Greek from Brookline, Massachusetts? And that he simply doesn't get the message of alienation demonstrated by the broad black support for Jackson? Here's another part of a conversation we had:

Scheer: One thing that clearly has emerged in this election is that the black community in America is alienated from white leadership.

Dukakis: I don't see that at all. As I've said often, [Jackson's] getting the lion's share of the black vote. I'm getting the lion's share of the Greek-American vote, for the same reason.

When I asked Dukakis if he had learned anything from the Jackson campaign, he replied, "I think Jesse has done a terrific job of addressing issues. He obviously has great gifts as a public figure. And while we disagree on some issues, we share a lot of the same goals and a lot of the same hopes and dreams and aspirations for the people of this country. And, as I said, our two respective communities have been tremendously inspired and enthused by our candidacies, I think, because in many ways, we are a symbol of their hopes and dreams and aspirations. I think it's terrific.... Now, obviously, there's a much larger black community than there is a Greek community, but I think that a year or two ago, if anybody had seriously suggested that a couple of guys named Dukakis and Jackson would be the two remaining candidates, people would have said no. It's happened, and I think it's terrific." Which, to me, means that he has learned very little from Jackson. Dukakis generally avoided the slum neighborhoods that Jackson routinely visited, and when he occasionally ventured nearby, it was like a tourist missing the entire point. Dukakis spent an hour in Pasadena and for months after talked about the great work being done there to control gang violence. He didn't seem to understand that middle-class Pasadena relates to impoverished south central and east L.A., the centers of serious gang violence, the way his Brookline high school does to East New York Vocational.

I'll drop it now, but the subject remains a live issue in contemplating a Dukakis Presidency. The Massachusetts miracle, which has occurred in a state with a small minority population, a state favored by massive centers of learning and high-tech competence and fertilized by disproportionate military expenditures, is not a model for the urban and racial problems of this nation. Nor is there anything in the Dukakis program that goes beyond that model.

Perhaps for that reason, Dukakis staffers tend to focus less on what he might do with the economy and more on his intent to return the Supreme Court to its civil-liberties moorings. The staffers describe not an activist Democratic Presidency, but a damage-limiting one that would stall the Rea-ganites' attacks on past civil rights legislation and on the liberalism of the courts. And here Dukakis is quite willing to take the heat.

"For too many years," Bush thundered before a receptive audience at the National Sheriffs Association in June, "we've been held hostage by well-meaning but misguided politicians and judges who get their legal views from the A.C.L.U." Bush was referring to Dukakis' admission in an interview with me that he was "a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U." Ironically, I had been pushing Dukakis because he seemed to me to accept censorship of sexually explicit publications. The exchange, the context of which Bush pointedly ignores, went like this:

Dukakis: I think there is a constitutional distinction between political speech and obscenity. That is, I think we can regulate constitutional obscenity. I think it's got to be limited and restrained. I think if somebody wants to put a pornographic bookstore in the middle of downtown Stoughton, Massachusetts, I think the people of Stoughton have the right to say, "Sorry, we don't want that bookstore." But on political speech, I think, we, constitutionally, have got to allow the broadest possible range.

Scheer: Where do you draw the line? Henry Miller? D. H. Lawrence?

Dukakis: That's a good question, and great people have been trying to make that distinction for years. I can't define it, but I know it when I see it, you know? All I'm saying is that constitutionally, I make a distinction between those two things.... Come on. I got work to do.

Scheer: Just this one: When you said this thing about pornography, are you endorsing the work of the Meese commission?

Dukakis: No, no, no, no. Look, I'm a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and I think you have to be very restrained, but I'm not somebody who takes the position that under no circumstances can society impose restrictions on material that, by any standard, is clearly pornographic. And so, in that sense, I think there are some limits. But they've always got to be done in a way that's careful, responsible, restrained, thoughtful and gives as much latitude for people to write and express themselves as we possibly can.

Scheer: But this hasn't scared you? You're not worried about the Phyllis Schlaflys and the Pat Robertsons saying this guy is an A.C.L.U guy, and a secular humanist? Doesn't bother you? Why not?

Dukakis: Because I don't think people believe it. In any event, I think you've got to stand up and be counted, and my experience has been if you do it, people respect you for doing it, whether they agree with you or not. I just feel strongly about these issues, and there's no question that growing up politically during the Fifties had a lot to do with it.

•

When I saw Dukakis after the interview had appeared, and the attacks on him by Bush were in full swing, he smiled and said, "I can handle it; it's what I said and what I believe." No finger pointing at the reporter as the source of his problems. He seems centered and able to handle himself in a way not always obvious in Bush. The polls indicate that the voters tend to view him that way as well. They regard Dukakis as a centrist despite the fact that he is for legal abortions, against the death penalty, for strong civil liberties, against Contra aid and for a vigorous Government's role in the economy. Bush finds it frustrating that the voters have not turned to him as the centrist standard bearer, and while on a check list of labels and credentials, Bush may appear to be more of a centrist than Dukakis, there may be something else at work here. The voters may be looking to a centrist manner or temperament rather than a check list of the issues.

Bush is perceived by many voters as erratic. The man, either through his own psychology or because he's a Northeastern establishment Republican transplanted to Houston, doesn't inspire confidence even within his Republican constituency. He was, after all, defeated in two Senate races in conservative Texas, once by Bentsen. The only elections he has won have been in his wealthy home district in Houston. From the beginning of his political career to the present, the right wing of his party has never trusted him and has voted that way in every primary. So he must constantly touch base with the party faithful by taking positions that his closest advisors say he doesn't really mean. His campaign manager, Lee Atwater, once told me, "The luckiest break for Bush would be for the Administration never to win on any of the social issues." That way, Bush would get to have his rhetorical cake without eating the consequences.

Atwater cited issues that go to the heart of a contradiction in the Republican program: Polls show that most Americans are against the right-wing social program and do prefer cuts in the military budget over those in social spending. They may be for occasionally tough talk on foreign issues, as long as there is no war and no draft. They are for curtailing the liberties of others but not their own; zero tolerance on drugs for the ghetto but not for the country club. In his effort to straddle those contradictions, Bush has seemed all over the place throughout his career. For the E.R.A. one moment and against it another. Against an amendment making abortions illegal at one moment and not so sure another. That balancing act has left Bush an exhausted, harried figure requiring constant self-testing to prove to himself and the rest of us that he does hang together.

•

Maybe, by contrast, Dukakis is too orderly and too careful to lead us anywhere different from where we've already been. Maybe he will just pull us together and ease us intact into the New Age. Dukakis bears all of the marks of the second-generation-immigrant's family, determinedly denying all remaining vestiges of the old world's style while nostalgic about its dreams. Dukakis is Michael Corleone in The Godfather but has nothing to do with crime, mind you. He is as squeaky clean as they come, but in the sense of always taking care of business. No wild dancing, glass throwing or drinking for him, but tears do well up when he recalls his immigrant father going from the family store to Harvard Medical School. That is the source of his liberalism, a vision in which everyone makes it—blacks, women, the Third World—through hard work and increased opportunities, just as his people did.

Dukakis is easy to understand, because most of us have attempted to follow that same path with varying degrees of success. Shape up, keep your nose clean, work hard and you will get respect. Bush is driven by demons unique to those who have nothing to prove to the rest of us. His style is more suggestive of the man who talks a good game but leaves us a bit uneasy, all because we are not sure where the joke ends and when he might explode. He seems to be trying too hard to answer a question that he alone is posing, some matter of self-worth that gnaws at his innards and threatens to undermine his surface optimism and geniality. It's the difference between the mongrel who loves to rush out and get the paper and the overly inbred springer spaniel who is poised and happy—until he bites just for the heck of it.

the perennial bridesmaid tries to win one without the gipper ... ... while the common duke hawks his mass. miracle on the mass market