And fifteen minute discussion. Were going to get started here with round two of president s on whom oliphant was able to bestow his gifts and a country on which he was able to bestow his gifts by commenting visually, and with words, on those president s. Im mike nelson, the guy you had to put up during the first panel. Fortunately we have new people to add their voices to the wonderful voices you heard from the scholars who were on the first panel. Once again, weve got military Center People here. And the Miller Center, one of its main emphases is the focus on studying the presidency in depth, historical depths, with objectivity. In other words, were all in the business of doing stuff that an editorial cartoonist is not in the business of doing, which is reacting to events on a daytoday basis, which pat oliphant did more than 10,000 times in his 60 plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. 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 ever done it, to provide comment, to provide opinion, to provide something to provoke discussion rather than perhaps to aspire to settle discussion. The panel today, this afternoon, which will cover the president s from george bush i dont use the h. W. He was george bush when he was president. When John Quincy Adams became president , john adams didnt have to change his name. So im sticking with george bush and, of course, his immediate successor bill clinton. And then george w. Bush, the one who came next. And finally we dip our toe into the obama presidency, part of which pat oliphant was able to capture in his cartoons. Were also going to see at least one example of pat oliphants great gifts as a sculptor, unfortunately we only get to see it in two dimensions. We only get to see an image of it but its an extraordinary work. One of our panelists, the one im going to introduce right now, Mary Kay Kerry can actually tell us about the sculpture and the president who it portrays. Mary kate is a senior fellow at the Miller Center. Shes been teaching this year in the Politics Department of the university. She was a speech writer and a Communication Specialist of all sorts in the bush quail campaign of 1988 and during the george bush presidency. The former director of the Miller Center and member of the History Department here held prominent positions in both bushes administrations. Both george and george w. Administrations and probably did other things that im not even aware of that are worth noting. And then chris lu, a senior fellow at the Miller Center, has worked over the years in all three branchs of the government. I dont know how many people get to say that, truthfully at least, including seven years in the obama administration. So what were going to do is the same thing we did the first time around. Were going to take cartoons from each one of these presidencies in sequence, all of them pat oliphant creations that are now part of the university of virginias special collection library. And that are available, in many cases for you to go see, either there or over at the Miller Center where there are some others. And lets start with that first cartoon. Okay. So for those of you who cant read that far back, because i know its a little difficult, you have george bush on the top, what they try to sell. And as he is perceived, and then dukakis, what they try to sell, how he is perceived. And then it has altered egos i cant read that. Can anybody else read that . I can. Youve got it . Here you go. Thanks. Altered egos or how we think of them when we think of them at all. There you go. I was on the 1988 bush Dukakis Campaign on the bush side. I would say the top half is exactly not true, not how he was perceived. The bottom half is exactly how dukakis was perceived, from our point of view. I remember being i remember having a tshirt that said, beware of greeks wearing lifts. There was a lot of joking about the difference in height between governor dukakis and president bush. President bush was 62 or 63. I remember there was a saturday night live skit because dukakis after dark. It played on this, that there was this other side to Michael Dukakis that nobody saw or knew about. But on the top side, though, i would say the left side of what they try to sell is exactly what we all perceived in george bush. A war hero, 58 combat missions, and lifelong public 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, especially 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. Yeah. So whats being portrayed here, one of the challenges, by the way, for the panel is that for many of you, we dont need to explain what the references are in these cartoons, because you get many of you probably remember, oh, theyre talking about the wimp factor. Theyre talking about 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. The origin of the wimp factor label was a Newsweek Magazine cover that had a picture of bush and under it the wimp factor, which stunned. At the time, i was a Career Foreign Service officer. I was not on the campaign trail and, in fact, had no declared political affiliation. I would go into the administration, actually, as a detailee from the state department, working in the Bush White House at the beginning of 49. 89. It may seem like 49 now as i age and it all looks misty. But the question, why did first, why was he labeled a wimp and why did the label kind of seem to stick . Even if you are a bush partisan, and frankly, everybody who worked for bush became one if they had not been before. Right. Its interesting when you, just as a little sidebar comment, you do learn a lot about these leaders by looking at the attitudes of the people in the circle around them. And he commanded a lot of loyalty among the people around him. But why . There is something about the thin, reedy voice, having been kind of a second banana to reagan for eight years, the sense that on the campaign trail he was actually not, in my view, a forceful and charismatic public 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, is just the opposite. So there are qualities there. Theres an emotional quality that would occasionally leak to the surface and a sense that on the campaign trail, he would just kind of spout the conventional pablum. People would ask him to say it to different audiences. Therefore, people had trouble getting a firm sense of him. And some people on the right wanted him to be a more muscular conservative, one image of him. And he didnt fit that, so but there is something to this that you just have to recognize. Theres something in the image of him that people are perceiving. I dont think that by i am not sure that by 1992, mr. Oliphant would have drawn him the same way after the gulf war. But youll see, he sticks with this image for a while in the early bush period, frankly because the caricature seems to capture something that is resonating with the american people, and you have to face up to that and understand it. And a final little comment, 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 will then be lost 30 years later and by looking at the cartoons you can recover. What i find interesting about the cartoons is how ingrained these 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 against that. You try to push back against the unforced errors and of course, the most famous unforced error from the 88 campaign was, you will all recall Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank with kind of an illfitting helmet. 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. Some of the more important moments of george bush 41, whether its the unfair i would say, grocery scanner thing, where he didnt know how that worked or the famous moment of the 1992 debate when he looked at his watch, seeming to be bored. Now, whenever we prep a candidate for debates, we either take their watches off or tell them never, ever look at your watch. I remember when i was working for john kerry in 2004, he was doing president ial debate prep in wisconsin. We wanted him to go out and do some public event. Gas prices were high. We wanted to highlight how gas prices were high. We wanted to send him out to fill up a gas tank. And to avoid the dukakis moments or george bush grocery scanner moment, we actually checked, do you know how to fill up a gas tank . And its not that were ever sure that senator kerry had ever filled up a gas tank but thats one of those moments you didnt want to happen. So in part because some of these 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. One thing we havent noted yet, which has been 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, punk, the pigeon that was a de facto greek chorus, not a pigeon, a penguin, that pat oliphant included in all of his cartoons to add a dollop of commentary. But these are snapshots of a moment, but on the other hand, they are windows into a period. I think what we start seeing 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. It was as if achilles and heracles were once again meeting in a battle, two titanic figures and either one of them worthy of trotting on a heroic stage. And now by 1988, were looking at president ial candidates as diminished and even comic figures, and thats, in some ways, has become 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 not to the day, but to the year, of George Washington being 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 using two bibles, one stacked on top of the other, one was the bush family bible and one was the inaugural bible. And he started 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 being fired. 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 previous president s. And while it was perfectly appropriate for president bush to pay homage to George Washington with the bible, its not the classiest thing to say im the greatest president since soandso. I dont think did he. No, no, i was referring to somebody else, actually. Simply to say, there are subtle ways that president s reference back to previous president s. Everybody wants to seem kennedyesque without saying im like john kennedy. Thats one of the interesting things i saw in this cartoon. And you cant really see what punk is saying but it says beautiful aint it george or george. Second george is written in a different font. What is that font . 18th century font. Its a pun on two georges and then the 18th century font. 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 this sort of bland and even boring figure, and solid and virtuous in every way, but no spark of life do we see in any of the pictures that we have of George Washington. Just take out your dollar bill and look at that. Whereas in truth, i dont think that any american in history has been a figure of such excitement anded a adoration in his own generation as George Washington. People were crazy about washington. They thought he was not only respectable and had all the virtues of respectability but was an exciting guy, a sexy guy. But i think washington is doomed to always be the bland figure that his portraitist portrayed him as. So i had to ask should i read this out loud . Here is apparently dan quayle in the baby carriage saying gug, gug, mccarthyism, gug, gug and then bush saying, my goodness, listen to that. Little danforths 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. So at this point, they had 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 tower and former chair of the Senate Committee and bush names him, his old friend, to secretary of defense. And it comes out that theres concerns about, as herb parment put it, his love of women and booze. And there was some sort of conflict of interest investigation as well, and it was the First Time Since 1959 that a cabinet officer was not confirmed. The senate at this time was 45 republicans and 55 democrats, i believe, and the vote went down 4753. 53 no. So that, to me, means i believe that means two democrats crossed over and voted yes, or more republicans voted no. But it was due to the fact that the democrats were in the senate, in control of the senate, and that is why tower did not get through. The larger point to make here, though, is george bush felt very strongly that loyalty goes down as well as up. He was tremendously loyal to john tower despite all the flaws that were exposed. In meachums book, he tearfully says to john tower, i will not pull the rug out from under my friend and stuck with him. It also, i think, set the stage for why he was so tremendously loyal to Clarence Thomas nomination as well. He, i believe inaccurately, is depicted here as treating dan quayle as some sort of baby, and that couldnt 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. I think because he, himself, had been Vice President and he wanted the same treatment for his Vice President. So continued his tradition that he started with president reagan, having lunch every week with the Vice President. They had a very close relationship. And i think he was this was not the way he looked at dan quayle. Philip probably has more to say. Well, it is about a speech that quayle gave after the tower nomination was defeated. I take a more sympathetic view to the cartoonist than mary kate on this one, because i do not join the dan quayle rehabilitation lobby. I agree with what mary kate said that bush tried to treat quayle the way he thought a Vice President should be treated and with appropriate dignity, but do not think that dan quayle was one of the key insiders of the bush administration. You know, though he was in a lot of meetings, and as i said, bush treated him appropriately, but he was not a very influential person, i believe, at the in the senior ranks of the administration. So here is what happens here. This