Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (37 page)

Results of the election in November were hardly encouraging to advocates of democratic government: Only 54.2 percent of eligible voters turned out, the lowest in a presidential election since 1924. Why so low? Observers speculated that neither Bush nor Dukakis was an inspiring candidate, that the nasty campaign had disgusted voters, that the issues had not been especially gripping, and that a great many people (as in earlier elections) cared more about personal matters than about what their political leaders were promising. Whatever the causes, the low turnout prompted rising alarm that Americans were becoming steadily more apathetic about politics and public affairs.
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Though Bush did not match Reagan’s resounding success of 1984, he won easily, thereby becoming the nation’s forty-first president. (When his son George W. Bush became the forty-third in 2001, many people labeled the father “Bush 41.”) Receiving 48.9 million votes to 41.8 million for Dukakis, he captured 53.4 percent of the vote to his opponent’s 45.6 percent. He carried forty states for a triumph in the electoral college of 426 to 111. He was especially strong in the South, which (like Reagan in 1984) he swept, and where he won an estimated 66 percent of the white vote. Analysts concluded that he received 60 percent overall of middle-class votes and that he even bested Dukakis, 50 percent to 49 percent, among women voters.
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Three straight GOP victories in presidential elections indicated that the Republican Party, which had been badly battered by Watergate, had staged a considerable comeback.

As in 1984, however, the results in 1988 did not indicate that a fundamental political realignment had occurred.
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Democrats maintained majorities in the Senate and the House that they had held since recapturing the Senate in 1986, prompting Democratic representative Pat Schroeder of Colorado to wisecrack, “Coattails? Bush got elected in a bikini.”
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In 1989–90, Bush would have to contend with Democratic advantages of 55 to 45 in the Senate and of 259 to 174 in the House. The elections of 1990 gave Democrats still more strength on the Hill. Bush, like Nixon, Ford, and Reagan before him, had to cope with divided government and with high levels of partisan antagonism.

T
O MANAGE AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY
, which was his primary interest as president, Bush assembled an experienced team of advisers. James Baker, a Texan political supporter who had served Reagan as chief of staff and secretary of the treasury, became secretary of state. Richard Cheney, Ford’s staff coordinator before becoming an influential congressman from Wyoming, took over defense and quickly established a high level of control over the Pentagon.
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Brent Scowcroft, a retired air force general and professor of Russian history at West Point, was selected as national security adviser. A well-informed and efficient man, he had held this post under Ford. In October 1989, General Colin Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first African American to occupy the position. Though tensions occasionally divided these advisers, they were a cohesive team on most issues.
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By the time this team left office in January 1993, a number of late-developing issues remained unresolved. One of these involved Yugoslavia, which imploded in 1991–92 amidst savage fighting between Eastern Orthodox Serbs, Roman Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. A host of outraged observers, including United Nations peacekeepers sent to the area in November 1992, reported evidence of massive “ethnic cleansing,” especially by Bosnian Serbs backed by the Serbian regime in Belgrade. Throughout 1992, stories about Serbian-run death camps and “genocide” appeared in American newspapers. By the end of the year it was estimated that more than 1.7 million Muslim refugees were scattered about onetime Yugoslavia and nearby nations. The Bush administration, however, was focusing at the time on the election campaign and was seriously distracted by a severe recession. It was also hoping to maintain cordial relations with Russia, which had historically supported the Serbs. NATO allies, moreover, opposed significant military action in the region. The United States and its Western allies placed an embargo on arms to the area, even though such a policy harmed the Bosnian Muslims, who had little in the way of economic or military resources, more than it did the Serbs or the Croats. Powell and high officials at the Pentagon feared that American military engagement in the region would lead to another disaster like Vietnam. For all these reasons, the Bush administration kept its distance from the Balkans.
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Bush left other foreign policies in an uncompleted state. In late 1992, his administration succeeded in negotiating a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which proposed to eliminate tariffs between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. But when he left office in 1993, the agreement still needed Senate approval, which was expected to be difficult. In the last month of his administration, he sent 28,000 American troops on a humanitarian mission to help U.N. peacekeeping forces in Somalia, where famine threatened the population. Though the Americans were not expected to remain for long, they were still in the country when he departed from the White House. Dealing with the tense situation in Somalia, like gaining approval for NAFTA, fell into the lap of his successor.

In Latin America, however, the president was luckier than Reagan, who had been nearly ruined by the Iran-contra scandal. In February 1990, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were badly defeated by a coalition of opponents in a free election. The United States then ended its trade embargo, and the contras ceased operations. By 1992, the civil war in El Salvador that had caused the death of 75,000 people in the 1980s—most of them peasants who had been fighting against their oppressive government—had finally come to an end. While savage battling continued in Guatemala, and while people throughout Central America continued to cope with widespread poverty, some of the warfare that had bloodied the region, and drawn the United States deeply into the area, had abated at last.

In late 1989, Bush acted to remove another source of turmoil in the region: Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. Like many anti-Communist tyrants, Noriega had received generous American support over the years. Under Reagan, the CIA had provided his regime with military and economic assistance, in return for which Noriega had aided the contras. But when the Sandinistas began to weaken in the late 1980s, his usefulness to the United States declined. Moreover, Noriega was a cruel and corrupt dictator who had enriched himself through gifts from the CIA and through drug trafficking. In May 1989, he annulled a presidential election, after which his henchmen beat and badly bloodied Guillermo Endara, the legitimately elected candidate. Bush, well aware that the Panama Canal would come under Panamanian control at the end of 1999, also worried about what a criminal like Noriega might do if he were allowed to control such a strategic asset. In mid-December 1989, when Noriega’s men shot and killed an American marine lieutenant, beat a navy lieutenant, and beat and groped the naval officer’s wife in Panama City, Bush, Cheney, and Powell resolved to topple him.

The intervention, which Bush named Operation Just Cause, was the largest American military move since Vietnam. It featured the dispatch of 24,000 paratroopers who made a dramatic early morning assault on December 20 at key locations in Panama. Navy SEALs landed on the coast. After bloody street fighting, American troops quickly secured the Canal Zone and Panama City, only to learn that Noriega had taken refuge in the residence of the papal nuncio in the city. To roust him, American troops and tanks surrounded the site and blared earsplitting rock music twenty-four hours a day. Military vehicles gunned their engines to add to the racket. After a show of bravado that lasted until January 3, Noriega surrendered when elite American forces threatened to attack. A day later he was in jail in Miami.

Bush’s handling of the situation in Panama bothered some critics, who pointed out that civilians died in the fighting. Civil libertarians later complained that Noriega was imprisoned for more than a year while awaiting a trial in the United States that could hardly be fair. In April 1992, Noriega was convicted on eight charges, including cocaine trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering, and sentenced to forty years in federal prison.
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But Bush’s Panama operation energized his administration: With the Cold War ending, America, at last, had carried out a large-scale military operation. It was highly popular in the United States. The fighting killed 23 Americans and wounded 394. Endara was immediately sworn in as the legitimately elected president of Panama. Though he struggled during his five-year term, he and his successors managed to promote democratic institutions, including an independent press and judiciary, competitive political parties, and fair elections. Given the sad history of American military intervention in Latin America, these were heartening results.
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While dealing with conflict in Latin America, Bush had to cope with events that arose from the sudden and stunning collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. Some conservatives, having chafed at Reagan’s accommodation with the Soviets, urged him to take a harder line with Gorbachev, who, while remaining Communist, was struggling to keep several nationalistic Soviet republics from breaking free and declaring their independence. Advocates of human rights also pressed Bush to act firmly against the Chinese Communists—the “butchers of Beijing” who killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

Bush and his advisers moved cautiously to manage problems such as these. At first he maintained a wary distance from Gorbachev, and he threatened to toughen trade policies involving the People’s Republic of China unless it released dissidents and embraced more moderate policies. By 1990, however, he had forged a fairly satisfying personal relationship with Gorbachev, and the historic developments of 1990–92—the reunification of Germany within NATO, the independence of the Baltic states, the removal of Soviet troops from the satellite nations of Eastern Europe, the sovereignty of Soviet republics, the fall from power of Gorbachev and the rise to authority of President Boris Yeltsin of Russia—took place with minimal loss of blood. Bush also worked to patch up relations with China, which had become an important trading partner. After the administration worked out a deal with the Chinese that provided amnesty for several hundred Tiananmen Square protestors, Sino-American relations improved slightly.
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This did not mean that advocates of a tough American foreign policy disappeared from the scene. Defense Secretary Cheney, among others, believed that the United States must step vigorously into the vacuum that was developing after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In 1992, Cheney joined Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy undersecretary for policy, in supporting staffers who had drafted an ambitious plan, the Defense Planning Guidance, concerning America’s international obligations. It stated that the United States in the new post–Cold War world must “discourage [all other nations] from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.”
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Though aimed in part at potential competitors such as Japan and Germany, the document was more broadly a statement that the United States must maintain unrivaled superpower status as a colossus against all comers. Then, as in later years, it remained a guiding document of American foreign and military policy.
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In keeping with this prescription, the Bush administration maintained fairly high spending on defense—thereby angering liberals who were seeking a “peace dividend” to be used for domestic social programs. Though expenditures for defense—and for overseas intelligence—did decline a little over the four years of Bush’s presidency, Cheney and other high-ranking officials continued to embrace the Powell Doctrine, which, carried over from the Reagan years, maintained that the United States must maintain a high level of military readiness so that if it ever had to fight a war, it could do so with overwhelming force, thereby protecting American soldiers from the risk of Vietnam-like casualties.
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For the most part, the president and his advisers acted prudently in dealing with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1991, Bush concluded an agreement with Gorbachev that led to the removal of most tactical weapons from overseas positions and reduced the alert status of nuclear arsenals. In START I, negotiated in mid-1991, the two leaders agreed to cut back their nuclear weaponry—from 13,000 warheads in 1990 to 9,000 in 1992 and to 7,000 by 1995.
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Shortly before leaving office in 1993, Bush and Yeltsin negotiated START II, which placed the top limits for each side in the future at between 3,000 and 3,500 warheads. This agreement showed that the United States and its once most powerful enemy were building on the breathtaking advances accomplished by Reagan and Gorbachev. Most observers of American foreign policy gave Bush good marks for his diplomacy with Moscow, for his role in advancing the reunification of Germany, and for his attempts to involve Western allies in efforts to assist the fragile new states that were replacing Soviet republics as well as the Soviet Union’s formerly Communist satellites in Eastern Europe.
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