May 06, 2020 / By mobanmarket
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DALLAS CENTER, IA — One the eve of the 1980 Iowa Caucuses, George H.W. Bush finished the last bite of a home-cooked dinner in the family home of John McDonald, a small-town Iowa lawyer with powerful Republican National Committee connections, and carried the dirty dishes to the kitchen. He wasn’t kicked under the table or prompted to clear it by either of “the two Barbaras” — Barbara Bush or Barbara McDonald, who had cooked the meal, and who became collectively known around Iowa as a powerful force behind the political aspirations of their husbands. It was simply one measure of the man who would become the nation’s 41st president, something gentlemen did in reciprocity for a fine meal.
That, as much as anything in what became a long friendship with the Bush family, made a lasting impression on Ralph Brown, McDonald’s law partner and one of five people who attended the intimate dinner party on the eve of the important night in Bush’s political career: He won the caucuses that year. Heavily invested in Bush’s campaign success, Brown was one of three Iowa Republicans who had prodded him years earlier to run for president and start campaigning in the small state made politically relevant by its first-in-the-nation test of presidential preference.
“It’s one little snapshot, but that told you a lot about the man,” said the now 73-year-old Brown, who still practices law in Dallas Center, a small town about 30 miles northwest of Iowa’s capital city of Des Moines.
Brown, who will attend Bush’s funeral in Houston Thursday, said the sight of the future president fetching dirty dishes to the kitchen reinforced what people have been saying all week about Bush, who died Friday at the age of 94:
“He was such a kind, thoughtful person.”
A former state Republican Party executive director and secretary of Iowa’s state senate, Brown was about a year into his law practice in Dallas Center when he met Bush at a September 1978 campaign rally in Iowa City. The more Brown saw Bush at midterm election rallies around the state, the more sure he and a group of about eight Republicans were that the former diplomat and intelligence director offered Republicans’ best chance to win back the White House.
Brown and a handful of others hatched the “draft Bush” plan in his Dallas Center living room in February 1979. Bush was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a large business banquet in western Iowa in mid-March, so a committee of three — Brown, immediate Republican National Committee chairwoman Mary Louise Smith and Cherokee attorney George Wittgraf — agreed to drive across the state and get the ball rolling. “We’re going to launch your campaign in Iowa,” they in effect said, Brown recalled.
Behind his credentials, Bush was a fascinating character. Brown and the others decided his breadth of experience — practical experience in the inner workings of government as a former congressman and Republican National Committee chairman and foreign policy finesse as a former United Nations ambassador, U.S. liaison to China and central intelligence director — uniquely positioned him amid rising tensions with the former Soviet Union.
“He knew what he was talking about,” said Brown, who spent many hours squiring Bush from one Iowa town to another during the 1980 campaign cycle.
“We laughed about him name-dropping — he’d say, ‘the last time I saw Mao,’ meaning Mao Tse Tung — but he did know these people and what he was talking about.”
‘George Bush In The Round’
Iowa’s precinct caucuses are part of old party apparatus that dates back to statehood. They churned along every two years without much notice from anyone outside of Iowa — until 1976, when Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter announced his upstart campaign in Iowa and showed how victory in Iowa can translate to winning the White House. Carter’s win also showed how candidates can use the neighborhood gatherings — where party faithful debate positions on everything from property taxes to nuclear disarmament — to win over Iowans, one voter at a time. Few candidates were more in their element in that environment than George H.W. Bush.
With candidates jetting in and out in a matter of hours and touching down in multiple states in a single day, the lead-up to today’s caucuses looks a lot different than it did in 1980. And today, winning over a voter at a time comes down to saturating the airwaves with campaign ads that may say more about candidates’ opponents than the candidates themselves.
Back then, “it was true retail politics,” Brown said. “We worked hard, person by person, to gain their support. Candidates don’t do a three-day trip in Iowa anymore.”
Caucus lore is full of references to stump speeches in cold, unheated barns on snowy winter days and in small restaurants over a cinnamon roll the size of a dinner plate. It’s pretty close to the truth of how politicking happened. Candidates traipsed among pigs and cattle, and the press corps following them captured bucolic images of them wiping manure from their expensive wingtips. They wanted to look like Iowans, the common folks in the middle of America who held extraordinary sway over their political futures, and the best of them — like Bush — did it with aplomb.
He won the Iowa Caucuses that year, finishing ahead of Ronald Reagan, who occupied the White House for eight years. Bush was the last Republican to drop out in the 1980 campaign, and Reagan made him his vice president.
By the time Bush returned to Iowa in the 1988 campaign, he had already developed an easy familiarity with Iowans that occasionally confounded his security detail and certainly campaign aides like Brown. Bush’s idea of a good campaign event wasn’t standing before an enthusiastic crowd, but sitting in the middle of a small circle of strangers to listen to what they had to say.
“It started in 1980, but was a focal point in his ’88 campaign — his appearances were ‘ask George Bush in the round,’ and he’d make a few remarks and then ask, ‘Who’s got the first question?’
“You don’t go out in the middle of people who just showed up and say ‘who’s got the first question?'” Brown said, laughing at the memory that, even absent today’s hyper-partisan, high-security environment, was remarkable in its intimacy.
“George Bush got to know a lot of Iowans, and a lot of Iowans got to know him,” Brown said. “He wanted to learn about the issues Iowans were concerned about, and he wanted to listen to what they were thinking about … He simply approached politics and governing with his very own style.”
Self-Deprecating Humor
He also had the gift of self-deprecating humor, often mocking himself as depicted in comedian Dana Carvey’s hilarious “Saturday Night Live” skits, Brown said. And after cartoonist Garry Trudeau first depicted Bush as invisible in his “Doonesbury” comic strip, but later drew him as an asterisk, Bush signed a week’s worth of strips for the campaign staff with the asterisk.
“He knew people were poking fun at him, and he could laugh along with them,” Brown said. “He was a president who could laugh and enjoy people around him.”
Though he won the Republican Party’s nomination and the White House in 1988, Bush finished a dismal third in the same neighborhood caucuses he had won eight years earlier. His showing was enough for one of the coveted “three tickets out of Iowa” in the presidential vetting process, but televangelist Pat Robertson’s second-place finish behind Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas showed the growing influence of evangelical Christians on GOP politics that continues today.
For Brown, it was the best of times in Iowa politics, because of both the tenor of politicking and the lasting memories that were created. He spent time in the Bush homes in Kennebunkport, Maine, and Houston, and came to regard Bush as a friend and mentor.
“Getting to know George and Barbara and their children was the most incredible experience of my life,” Brown said. “It’s been said over and over and over the last few days, but he was a man of character.”
Lead image: In this October 1985 photo, Ralph Brown is pictured with at-the-tie Vice President George and Barbara Bush at their home in Kennebunkport, Maine. (Photo courtesy of Ralph Brown)
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