Those president s. Im mike nelson. Im the guy that you had to put up with the first panel. Fortunately, we have a new cast of people to add their voices to the wonderful voices that you heard from the scholars of the first panel. Once again, we have Miller Center people here. The Miller Center and one of the main emphases is to study the presidency in historical depths with objectivity and in other words, we are all in the business of doing stuff that an editorial cartoonist is not in the business of doing, and that is reacting to events on the daytoday basis as pat oliphant did in his 60plus years as a newspaper cartoonist, and whereas we all strive to be as objective as we can, the job of the editorial cartoonist, and pat oliphant as well as anybody has done it is to provide the comment, and to provide opinion and provoke discussion as opposed to aspire to settle the discussion. This panel today is going to cover the president s from george bush and i dont use the h. W. , but he was george bush when he was president , and when John Quincy Adams became president , he did not have to change his name, a sound am sticking with george bush, and of course, his immediate successor bill clinton and george w. Bush, the one who came next and then finally, we sort of dip our toe into the obama pret si,sidency. And we will see one example of pat oliphants work in sculptures, and it is an inextraordinary work, and one of the panelists Mary Kay Cary can tell us about the sculpture and the president who it portrays. Mary kate is a fellow at the miller institute, and she has been teaching in the politics part of the university. She was a speechwriter and Communication Specialist in all parts of the Bush Quayle Campaign in 1988 and in the george bush presidency. And philip zelico is the former member of the Miller Center and member of the History Department here held prominent positions in both bushes administrations, both george and george w. Admin straegs a administrations and did other things that i am not aware of that are worth noting. And chris lowe s a senior fellow here at the Miller Center. And he has worked in over the years all three branchs of government, and i dont know how many people can say that truthfully at least, including seven years in the obama administration. So what we will do is the first time around is to take the cartoons from each one of the presidencies in sequence and all of them oliphant creations that are now part of the university of virginias special collection library, and that are available in many cases for you if go see either there or over at the Miller Center where there are some others. Start with that new cartoon. All right. For those of you who cant read that far back, because i know it is a little difficult, you george bush on the top, and what they try to sell, and then as he is perceive and then dukakis what they tried to sell and then as he is perceived, and then it says altered egos and i cant read. Can anybody else read that . I got it. Okay. Yes, here you go. Altered egos or how we think of them when we think of them at all all. There you go. I was on the 1988 bush dukakis campaign, and the bush side, and the top half is not true, and not how he was perceived and the bottom half is exactly how dukakis is perceived from our point of view, and i remember being and having a tshirt that said beware of greeks wearing lift, and there is a lot of joking about the difference of the height of governor dukakis and president bush. President bush was 62 or 63, and there was a saturday night live skit called dukakis after dark and played on this that there was another side of Michael Dukakis that nobody knew or saw, but on the top side, i would say that the left side of what they try to sell is exact ly what we all perceived in george bush, war hero and 58 combat missions, and lifelong public servant. And i met David Mccullough when i was making a documentary about president bush, and David Mccullough says that it takes 50 years for historians to render judgment on a president , and how glad he was to see that historians had come around on george bush and given him the credit that he truly deserves and that george bush was alive to see it. So i do think that he was admired widely by the time he died. So i do think that the top of this is not accurate. But i also realize that i am a little biased. So let me see if this is on. And what is portrayed here and one of the challenges of the panel is that for many of you, we dont have to explain the references of the cartoon, because many of you are remembering that they are talking about the wimp factor, bush as a wimp. For young people nowadays, they thought george bush was a wimp . Why did they think that he was a wimp . That is actually a really good question. And there was a magazine cover that had a picture called the wimp factor and it stunned. I was not declared with any political affiliation, and i would go into the administration as a detailee as a state department detailee in the Bush Administration when i was 49 and it may seem that way now i am so misty. And so, why was he labeled a wimp and why did it stick . Even if you are a bush partisan, and frankly, everybody who worked for bush became one if they had not been before. It is interesting when you are just as a little side bar comment, you do learn a lot about the leaders by looking at the tuds of the people in the circle around them. And he commanded a lot of loyal around the people around him. And so there is something about the thin ready voice and being second banana to reagan for eight year, and in the sense that he was on the campaign trail, he was not in my view a forceful and charismatic speaker by and large. He is actually one of the people, and actually johnson had a little bit of this, and came across much better in private than public. Reagan by the way, he is just the opposite. So there are qualities there, and emotional quality that would leak to the surface, and on the campaign trail, he would spout the conventional pab lum, and the people who asked him to say to different audiences. Therefore, people had trouble getting a firm sense of them, and some people on the right wanted him to be a much more muscular conservative in one image of him, and he did not fit that. And there is something to this that you to recognize, and theres something in the image of him that people are perceiving. I dont think that by i am not sure that by 1999, mr. Oliphant would have drawn him the same way after the gulf war. But you can see that he sticks with this image for a while in early bush period, frankly, because the caricature is capturing something that is resonating with the american people, and you have to face up to that and understand it. And so this is going to be a final comment, and this is one of the reasons that the cartoons are so valuable as historical items is that they capture something about the way that people are perceived in their generation that is going to be lost 30 years later, and by looking at the cartoons, you can recover. What i find interesting about the cartoons is how ingrained the Public Perceptions get in peoples minds, and for somebody who spends a lot of my life working on campaigns, the Honest Campaign recognizes your liabilities and tries to push back on that, and trying to push back against the unforced errors and of course, the most famous unforced error from the 88 campaign is that you will recall Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank with an illfitting helmet, and no candidate would ever do that now. And so, you know, that could have just as easily have been the perception here of dukakis, and then of course, you will remember, and mary kate, can talk about this better, but some of the more important moments of george bush 41 and the unfair of the grocery scanner thing where he didnt know how it worked and the famous moment of the 1992 debate where he looked at the watch seeming to be bored. Now when we prep a candidate for debates we take the watch off or tell them not the look at their watch. When i was working for john kerry, and he was doing president ial prep, we wanted him to go out to do some public vents and the gas prices were high and we wanted to show how high the gas prices are high, and to fill up a car with gas, and to avoid that grocery scanner event, we said, have you filled up a gas tank . And it is just one of the moments that you did not want to happen. And in part because some of the moments and the early campaign, you double and triple check every time you put your candidate in public, because you dont want to be visual images to stick in the peoples brain. And one thing that we have not noted yet which is a presence in every cartoon that we have seen and will see is the presence of the little character there in the lower right quadrant the punk, which is the pigeon and the not pigeon, but a penguin that pat oliphant included in the cartoons to add a dollop of comedy. But these are snapshots of a moment, but on the other hand, they are windows into a period. What we start to see in 1988 in this cartoon is the departure of the era in which we regarded president ial elections as contests between giants. Think of theodore whites making of a president in 1960, and it is as if achilles and heracles were meeting on the battle, and two titanic figures, and either one of them worthy of trotting on a heroic stage, and now we will see by 1988, we were looking at the president ial candidates as diminished and even comic figures, and that is in some ways, the default setting ever since. So this is a very nice cartoon, and this is george bush and George Washington walking down pennsylvania avenue on Inauguration Day 1989. That was the 200th anniversary and not to the day, but the year of George Washington sworn in at the same time that george bush was sworn in, and president bush was actually very honored by that. He got sworn in with two family bi bibles, and he start ed the inaugural address by pointing that out. And one other comment that brought this to mind is that same conversation with David Mccullough. David mccullough believed that george bush was the most qualified person to run for president since the founders at the time. He didnt say it at the time, but afterwards and that brought it to mind all of the jobs that president bush had done in service to the country before president perfectly prepared him for that moment, and that is the reason why we were able to get through the cold war without a single shot, the end of the cold war, excuse me. And so that is what jumped out to me, is that he was very proud of that moment. The only thing they thought that was amusing is that building on the righthand side if i am not mistaken is the Old Post Office which is now the trump hotel. And what is interesting about this, and i would simply without talking about the current president , and mary kate or philip, you can comment, but president s, i dont think i think it is seen as bad form to compare yourself to a previous president , and while it is perfectly appropriate for george bush to pay homage to George Washington the bibles, and so it is not to say that i am the greatest president since soandso no, i was referencing somebody else. And people want to be like im john kennediesqukennediesque, at say that it is punk, but it is aint it beautiful, george. And the second george is written in a different font so i guess that you would call that what is that font . 18th century. So it is a pun on two georges and this en the en the 18th cen i am struck with the image of the other president , George Washington who has come down to us largely because of the pictures that we have of him as a sort of brand and even boring figure, and a solid and virtuous in every way and no spark of life do we see in any pictures that we have of George Washington and take out the dollar bill and look at that, whereas in truth, i dont think that any american in history has been a figure of such excitement, and adoration in his own generation as George Washington. And so people were not only respectable, but the virtues of respectability, and an exciting guy, and sexy guy, but washington i think that he is doomed to always be the bland figure that his portrait has portrayed him as. So i had to ask and should i read this out loud . Here is apparently dan quayle and the baby carriage saying gug gug mccarthyism, and then he says look at dans first word in office, and then punk saying, you must be so proud. Apparently i had to ask as a reference to the tower nomination, and that dan quayle said that the people opposed to john towers nomination were engaging in mccarthyism. I i find this very unfair. And i think that there is a little bit of background which is that george bush first met john tower in 1961 when george bush was Harris County republican chair in houston, which was quite a big deal, and john tower decided to run for Lyndon Johnsons senate seat in the special election after johnson left to become Vice President , and that is when the two of them first became friends, and so at this point, they have been friends for almost 40 years. In 1968, there was a discussion earlier, on the earlier panel of nixons short list of Vice President ford, but in 68 according to jon meachums book about bush destiny and power nixons short list for v. P. Was john tower, george bush, spiro agnew and one more, Ronald Reagan. Wouldnt that have been something. So now comes 1989, and it is former senator towers and former chair of the Senate Committee and bush names him to the secretary of defense and it comes out that there is concerns about his as herb parment put it love of women and booze, and the congressional investigation, and the First Time Since 1959 that a cabinet officer was not approved. The senate at this time was 45 republicans, and 55 democrats, i believe, and the vote went down 4753. 53 no. So that means that two democrats crossed over and voted yes or more republicans voted no, but due to the fact that the democrats in control of the senate, and that is why tower did not get through, but the larger point to make here though is that george bush felt strongly that loyalty goes down as well as up. He was tremendously loyal to john tower despite the flaws exposed in meachums book, and he says, i will not pull the rug out from under my friend, and that is also what set the stage to why he was so loyal to Clarence Thomas nomination as well. He, i believe, inaccurately depicted here as treating dan quayle as some sort of baby, and that could not be further from the truth. He went against the advice of everyone who had all kinds of people on the short list for quayle, i mean, for the Vice President , and went with quayle in a surprise move, and treated quayle as an equal, because he, himself, he had been a Vice President , and he wanted the same treatment for his Vice President , and he continued to treatment that he started with Ronald Reagan of having lunch every week with the Vice President , and they had a close relationship. He was, and this is not the way he looked at dan quayle. So, philip, you may have more to say. Well, it is about a speech that quayle gave after the tower nomination was defeated. I take a more sim pa thicket view to the cartoonist than mary kate on this one, because i do not join the dan quayle rehabilitation lobby [ laughter ] i agree with what mary kate said that bush did treat quayle with the treatment that a Vice President should be treated, and dont think that dan quayle is one of the key insiders of the Bush Administration, and that, you know, though he was in a lot of meetings, and as i said, bush treated him appropriately, but he was not an influential person in the senior ranks of the administrations, and here is what happens here. Early 1989, and tower has gone up and been defeated, and quayle gave a nasty speech. Basically saying that tower was defeated because of mccarthyism, and understand that the investigation of tower had been run by sam nunn of the Senate Intelligence committee. And so without knowing about this panel, i was with sam nunn, and jack reid for other reason, and nunn kind of reminisced about the tower fight at some length. He to this day feels that it is perhaps the hardest thing that he ever had to do in the senate. He had known tower a long time, and as had all of the senators the had, and he had worked with him on Armed Services for many years. And to accuse and a lot of the investigation was done extremely confidentially, and very little of the detail that was found in the investigation was ever made public. And so to accuse sam nunn of the latter day joe mccarthy was not a wise thing to say and not as george bushs caricature would say it was not a prudent thing to say because he would be relying on sam nunn as an essential partner to get anything done on the National Security issues for the next four years, and including the confirmation of the person who was nominated to take the place of tower which turned out to be a guy named dick cheney from wyoming. As the secretary of defense. Soer hoo, people noticed so, were noticing in 1989 that dan quayle was making his political view in a big way. He had been mild mannered and now making his debut in early 1989 in the hitman role that agnew had done for nixon or gore would do a l