When Big Business Needs a Favor, George Bush Gets the Call
WASHINGTON D.C.
Cactus Jack Garner, who served for two terms as vice-president under Franklin Roosevelt, once compared his high office to a bucket of warm spit. (Actually, it is said, Garner compared it to a warm bucket of something else.) The vice-president, after all, does little but make banquet speeches, attend foreign funerals and wait upon the president’s heartbeat.
George Bush has faithfully executed all those duties, but he has also made much more of the job. In fact, Bush has converted that high office into a convenient back door for corporate lobbyists anxious to emasculate federal laws protecting public health, safety and the environment.
Bush is something more than a slender preppie who wears striped watchbands and speaks with a boyish enthusiasm. As former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bush participates in high-level policy debates and lunches each week with the president. Occasionally, when Ronald Reagan is away, Bush gets to play president, overseeing White House crisis meetings, like the recent ones on Lebanon. A president who delegates away his authority is a good deal if you’re a vice-president who doesn’t have any.
Within the administration, true-blue Reaganites regard Bush as dangerously moderate; in internal debates over such matters as civil-rights enforcement and aid to the handicapped, Bush has actually become known as a secret “good guy,” arguing against those who wanted to gut the federal commitment in those areas. In some instances, like the fight over equal opportunity for the disabled, he actually prevailed.
But Bush’s predominant identity as vice-president is that of a conservative businessman. Before he entered politics, he was a Texas oilman with his own company. In between political jobs (which have ranged from U.N. ambassador to envoy to China to director of the CIA), he served on various corporate boards, including a stint as director-consultant to Eli Lilly & Company, the drug makers (see box, page 13). As vice-president, he has served those interests well.
Under Bush, the vice-presidency has become a hidden court of last resort for special-interest groups that have lost their arguments in Congress, in the federal courts or at the regulatory agencies. They’ve discovered they can argue their cases before a more sympathetic judge. If all else fails, call George. Joan Z. Bernstein, a lawyer representing the pharmaceutical industry on water-pollution regulations, once suggested: “The lawyer who does not argue all the way to Vice President Bush may be subjecting himself to a malpractice charge….I, for one, have already put Vice President Bush’s number in my Rolodex.”
During the first days of his term, Reagan created and handed over to Bush the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief. He empowered it, in conjunction with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to clear away costly red tape from the maze of federal regulations.
Last August, as election year approached, George Bush declared victory and folded his operation, claiming to have saved Americans $150 billion by eliminating wasteful rules and regulations. By then, though, an unpleasant odor had developed around the Reagan administration’s regulatory favors to business; it was obvious the White House wanted to get some distance from that subject before the reelection campaign.
In the abstract, what Bush and his staff were doing sounded innocent enough – merely extending less powerful regulatory-review machinery used by previous administrations. In practical detail, however, what Bush and his staff attempted does not look much like “reform,” as they called it, but old-fashioned political fixing. They created a mechanism whereby the private sector could secretly use its political clout to short-circuit lawful processes. In passing, he and his staff ran important errands for old friends, former clients or former employers who couldn’t manipulate things through the regular channels of government. Case by case, the vice-president’s office got involved in some mean and petty issues that directly affect people’s health and lives, from the dumping of toxic pollutants in lakes and rivers to government warnings concerning potentially harmful drugs. Even the conservative-oriented Fortune magazine seemed appalled: “In the end,” said the publication, “Reagan’s policy of deregulation may deserve the criticism being hurled at it – that it is not pro-reform at all, merely pro-business.”
Bush’s principal agent in this phase of the Reagan revolution was his general counsel, a cool, button-down Washington lawyer named C. Boyden Gray. His old clients included such industry heavies as the Business Roundtable, an organization made up of the chairmen of many major U.S. companies. Early on, Gray advertised his services in a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “If you go to an agency first, don’t be too pessimistic if they can’t solve the problem there,” Gray told the business executives. “If they don’t, that’s what the task force is for.”
James C. Miller III, who was executive director of Bush’s task force while he served as regulatory-affairs director at OMB, described their power with some relish: “You know, if you are the toughest kid on the block, most kids will not pick a fight with you.” A federal regulator who balked at revisions suggested by the task force or OMB would be taking a great risk, Miller told an interviewer, “meaning that the president of the United States might decide to remove such a person from office.” In that bullying spirit, Bush’s task force and OMB won a lot of arguments with reluctant bureaucrats, even when they were advancing industry claims that had already been rejected in public hearings or federal courts.