George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

overtones of "Read My Lips- No New Taxes." The other themes reflected Atwater's
studies of how to drive up the negatives of Bush's Democratic opponent, who would be
Massachusetts Governor Dukakis. Very early on, Bush began to harp on Dukakis's veto
of a bill requiring teachers to lead their class each day in the pledge of allegiance.
Speaking in Orange County, California on June 7, Bush said: "I'll never understand, when
it came to his desk, why he vetoed a bill that called for the pledge of allegiance to be said
in the sschools of Massachusetts. I'll never understand it. We are one nation under God.
Our kids should say the pledge of allegiance." [fn 35]
This theme lent itself very well to highly cathexized visual portrayal, with flags and
bunting. Atwater was assisted in these matters by Roger Ailes, a television professional
who had been the executive producer of the Mike Douglas Show by the time he was 27
years old. That was in 1967, when he was hired by Richard Nixon and Leonard Garment.
Ailes had been one of the most cynical designers of the selling of the president in 1968,
and he had remained in the political media game ever since. Between them, Atwater and
Ailes would produce the modern American television equivalent of a 1930's Nurmeburg
party rally.
At about this time, the Bush network we have seen in operation at the Reader's Digest
since the 1964 campaign conveniently printed an article about a certain Willie Horton, a
black convicted murderer who was released from a Masschusetts jail on a furlough, and
then absconded to Maryland, where he raped a white woman and stabbed her fiance. The
Massachusetts furlough program had been started by Republican Governor Frank
Sargent, but this meant nothing. Bush was to use Willie Horton in the same way that
Hitler and the Nazis exploited the grisly crimes of one Harmann, a serial killer in
Germany of the early 1930's, in their calls for law and order. In Illinois in mid-June, Bush
began to talk about how Dukakis let "murderers out on vacation to terrorize innocent
people." "Democrats can't find it in their hearts to get tough on criminals," Bush ranted.
"What did the governor of Massachusetts think he was doing when he let convicted firstdegree
murderers out on weekend passes, even after one of them criminally, brutally
raped a woman and stabbed her fiance? Why didn't he admit his mistake? Eight months
later, he was still defending his program, and only when the Massachusetts legislature
voted by an overwhelming majority to abolish this program did he finally give in. I think
Governor Dukakis owes the American people an explanation of why he supports this
outrageous program."
As packaged by Bush's handlers, it was throughly racist without being nominally so, like
Nixon's "crime in the streets" shorthand for racist backlash during the 1968 campaign.
Later, Bush would embroider this theme with his demand for the death penalty, his own
Final Solution to the problem of criminals like Willie Horton. These themes fit very well
into the standard Bush campaign event, which was very often Bush appearing before a
local police department to receive their endorsement. Bush's ability to organize these
events in places like Boston, to the great embarrassment of Dukakis, doubtless reflected
strong support from the CIA Office of Security, which was the bureau that kept in contact
with police departments all over the country and, inevitably, infiltrated them.