1991: United States

THE PRESIDENCY

George Bush was preoccupied during most of 1991 by a succession of dramatic foreign policy events, including the first major U.S. military conflict since the Vietnam War and sweeping changes in the Soviet Union. His leadership in these and other crises won him widespread praise and public approval, but his opponents continued to say he lacked a vision for what he wanted to accomplish at home, and his impact in domestic affairs was largely felt by the successful use of the veto. By November, with many Americans increasingly concerned about a slumping economy, the perception that the president had little to offer on the home front had begun to take a political toll.

Persian Gulf War.

Bush began the new year determined to bring to a resolution the confrontation with Iraq that had developed after its invasion and annexation of Kuwait in August 1990. It appeared clear the president now believed that economic sanctions and international political pressure would not convince Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait and that the massive military force that the United States and its allies had deployed in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region would have to be put to use. Thus, even though polls indicated that Americans were almost evenly divided on going to war and many in Congress wanted to give sanctions more time to work, Bush bluntly asked Congress on January 8 to approve a resolution authorizing the use of 'all necessary means' to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait if Iraq did not withdraw voluntarily by the January 15 deadline set by the United Nations. On January 12 the Senate voted, 52-47, and the House, 250-183, to give Bush the authorization he wanted. The stage was set for war, and on January 15, Bush signed a national security directive in the Oval Office giving the green light for a massive air assault to begin against Iraq the following night (the early hours of January 17 in the Persian Gulf).

By early February, when allied bombs had inflicted devastating damage but failed to dislodge the Iraqis from Kuwait, Bush began preparing public opinion for the inevitability of a ground war. Given the possibility that any diplomatic settlement would allow Saddam Hussein to claim at least moral victory, the White House coldly brushed off a Soviet peace effort and on February 22 demanded that Iraq begin a withdrawal by the following day. When that failed to happen, Bush ordered the ground assault. On February 27, Bush announced that Kuwait had been liberated — 'Iraq's army is defeated [and] our military objectives are met.' He ordered the ground war to be halted at 8 A.M. Gulf time on February 28. The assault lasted just 100 hours.

Politically, this represented the high point in Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis, as several polls showed his job approval rating hovering at a record 90 percent. In the following days and months, the clear allied victory gave way to a muddled outcome. In part because of Bush's decision not to prolong the ground offensive by attacking fleeing Iraqi troops, Saddam Hussein was able to salvage enough of his forces and equipment to put down revolts by Iraq's Kurdish minority in the north and Shiite Muslim minority in the south, leaving both groups resentful of the United States for encouraging and then failing to support them. The Iraqi military coup that Bush had apparently hoped for never materialized. And while for the present Saddam Hussein had lost the power to threaten his neighbors militarily, the dangers posed by his remaining in power were underlined when UN inspectors discovered the Iraqis had been concealing the remains of an ambitious program to develop nuclear weapons.

Soviet Relations and Arms Control.

Bush found himself at a historic turning point in dealings with the Soviet Union during 1991. Not only did the Soviet Union largely play the role of ally rather than adversary, but as economic conditions worsened and political turmoil spread in the one-time cold war rival, its status changed rapidly from superpower to junior partner to poor relation, and by year's end the union had fragmented into independent republics. Two related questions occupied Bush throughout the year: how much should U.S. policy be tied to the fortunes of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and to what extent should the United States come to the economic aid of its former adversary? Bush found it necessary to balance his desire to help Gorbachev politically with his belief that a substantial infusion of Western cash would be wasted until there was a guarantee of real economic reforms in the Soviet Union.

Bush's personal rapport with Gorbachev paid dividends throughout the first part of the year, particularly during the Persian Gulf crisis. It was clear that the United States could not have won UN backing for the effort to force Iraq out of Kuwait without the support of the Soviets. As the year progressed, Bush and Gorbachev also overcame disagreements that had been holding up treaties for reducing conventional military forces in Europe and long-range strategic nuclear weapons. The accords were considered major milestones in the reduction of East-West tensions. At the end of July, Bush made his first trip to the Soviet Union as president and signed the strategic arms reduction treaty with Gorbachev (using pens made of metal from missiles destroyed under the 1987 treaty eliminating the two sides' medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe).

Fulfilling an earlier pledge to Gorbachev, Bush also said in Moscow that he would send Congress a trade agreement that would give the Soviets most-favored-nation status. But he tried to finesse the problem of whether U.S. policy should be focused on Gorbachev or on Russian President Boris Yeltsin and other leaders of the increasingly independent-minded Soviet republics. He met privately with Yeltsin, who on an earlier trip to the United States had been given short shrift at the White House. In a trip to Ukraine, Bush said the United States would not take sides in the disputes between the republics and the central government, but he warned sternly against 'suicidal nationalism.'

When Communist hard-liners staged a coup against Gorbachev in August, Bush's initial reaction was muted and appeared to reflect his general inclination to accept and deal with the government in power. But after consulting with other foreign leaders — characteristically contacting more than a dozen of them by phone — and receiving a message from Yeltsin pleading for support, he denounced the coup as 'unconstitutional' and called for Gorbachev's reinstatement.

The failure of the coup accelerated the radical changes that were sweeping the Soviet Union and prompted Bush to undertake changes in U.S. policy. Shortly after the coup attempt, Bush began discussing with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft the idea of a major initiative on arms control that would take advantage of the new situation with the kind of boldness that Bush's critics often accused him of lacking. In late September he made an unexpected televised speech in which he announced that the United States would eliminate more than 3,000 short-range nuclear weapons, pull back over 1,000 more from front-line positions, and remove 450 strategic missiles and 40 long-range bombers carrying nuclear weapons from alert status. Bush called on the Soviets to take equivalent steps and also urged new negotiations to eliminate all intercontinental missiles with multiple warheads. The sudden unilateral cuts were a dramatic departure from past arms control efforts, which had been characterized by slow, modest progress, and Gorbachev soon announced comparable initiatives.

The continuing disintegration of the Soviet state in the wake of the coup, however, made U.S. policies focused on Gorbachev and his government increasingly untenable. When citizens of Ukraine voted in favor of independence in a December 1 referendum, the administration welcomed the outcome as a 'striking testament to the will for liberty' and indicated full diplomatic recognition would eventually follow, but asked for assurances about what Ukraine intended to do with nuclear weapons on its soil. A week later, when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Byelorussia) declared that the Soviet Union 'had ceased to exist' and that they had formed a Commonwealth of Independent States, Bush again reacted cautiously.

In a speech on December 12, Secretary of State James Baker outlined overall U.S. policy in the Soviet crisis, including food and medical aid but little in the way of direct financial guarantees. By the time Baker left for Moscow on December 15, the Gorbachev government was clearly almost defunct, and Baker devoted most of his efforts to obtaining the pledges of Yeltsin and the leaders of other republics with strategic nuclear weapons on their soil to abide by the arms control agreements Gorbachev had made. When Gorbachev finally resigned on December 25, signaling the formal demise of the Soviet Union, Bush made a televised speech praising him and announcing U.S. recognition of several of the newly independent republics.

Israel and the Arabs.

U.S. relations with Israel reached a high point during the Gulf War. Israel heeded Bush's pleas not to strike back at Iraq for numerous Scud missile attacks because the United States believed Israeli retaliation would splinter the anti-Iraq alliance, which included many of the Arab states. But as the United States embarked on marathon efforts after the war to bring about a Middle East peace conference, the administration's attitude toward Israel became far more critical.

Bush angered Israel and American Jewish groups by backing Secretary of State Baker's assertion that the biggest obstacle to U.S. peacemaking efforts was the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Specifically, Bush persuaded Congress in September to delay consideration of a request by Israel for $10 billion in loan guarantees, which would have been used to raise money to pay for housing, jobs, and roads needed to cope with the influx of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union. The administration feared that seeming to foster the settlement program would set back the delicate negotiations over a peace conference.

Despite the strains in U.S.-Israeli relations, the eight trips Baker made to the Middle East between March and September bore fruit. On October 30, Israeli and Arab representatives met in Madrid at a conference opened by Bush and Gorbachev, holding (after the opening session) the first direct face-to-face Arab-Israeli peace talks. Israeli and Arab negotiators met again in Washington in December.

Congress and Politics.

Polls consistently showed that Bush was viewed by many Americans as a 'foreign policy president' who was much less skilled at dealing with domestic problems. But for most of the year, the Democrats seemed unable to exploit this weakness. His high profile during numerous foreign policy crises increased the difficulties they faced in articulating their opposition from Capitol Hill, where they had no clear spokesperson or program. Bush also dominated the Democrats through his use of the veto. In November the House sustained his veto of a bill that would have overturned an administration ban on abortion counseling in family planning clinics receiving federal funds. The failure by Congress to override the veto ran the president's unbroken string of successful vetoes to 24.

In a March 6 address to Congress on the Gulf War, the president tried to seize the initiative on domestic issues and turn the tables on his Capitol Hill critics by challenging them to quickly pass administration-backed legislation on transportation and crime. 'If our forces could win the ground war in 100 hours, then surely Congress can pass this legislation in 100 days,' he said. But Democrats had their own competing versions of both proposals. A transportation bill did clear Congress just before adjournment in late November, but in the face of a threatened veto of revised anticrime legislation, lawmakers left town without taking final action on that measure. A package of education reforms also got tangled in partisan politics.

None of Bush's domestic efforts seemed to be invested with the same zeal he devoted to foreign policy, and this discrepancy began to take its toll in the fall when Americans grew increasingly gloomy about the failure of the economy to rebound from recession. In a Washington Post poll, 70 percent of those surveyed felt Bush 'spends too much time on foreign problems and not enough on problems in this country.'

As Bush publicly downplayed the seriousness of the economy's slump, his own advisers were split on how much and what kind of action to take to counteract it. Some urged tax cuts and other measures aimed at giving the economy a quick stimulus; others counseled that the economy would recover by itself by the time any such program was able to make an impact. Moreover, Bush felt that the huge federal budget deficit precluded stimulating the economy through new government spending programs.

Bush's postponement of a trip to Australia and Asia and his decision to compromise on a new civil rights bill and an extension of unemployment benefits that had been pushed by the Democrats were seen as concessions to mounting political pressures — and therefore signs of weakness. He even had to share the blame for a 120-point drop in the stock market in November after he suggested — to the discomfort of Wall Street and the nation's troubled banks — that the economy might get a boost if banks lowered interest rates on credit card balances.

The compromise on the civil rights bill should have eliminated some of the acrimony that had built up over two years between the administration and the measure's supporters, who had accused Bush of playing to white racism in vetoing an earlier version. But on the night before Bush was to sign the bill into law, his aides circulated a proposed presidential order to federal agencies that would have had the effect of ending affirmative-action hiring programs for government jobs. Although the directive was hastily withdrawn the next day, it overshadowed the signing ceremony, fueled the impression of a White House staff in disarray, and sent mixed signals about the administration's true attitudes and intentions.

In December expectations that the administration's 'wait and see' approach to the economy would end rose when the president's contentious chief of staff, John Sununu, resigned. Sununu and Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, were said to have discouraged any initiative to 'jump start' the economy in an effort to preserve the hard-won 1990 budget agreement between Bush and Congress, intended to hold down federal spending and reduce the deficit. Sununu was replaced with Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner, who convinced Bush that more vigorous action on the economy was required to stop his political slide. At year's end, Bush was contemplating a variety of tax cuts designed to increase business investment and consumer spending.

Nominations and Confirmations.

Bush waged major battles during 1991 to put black conservative Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and to install Robert Gates, his deputy national security adviser, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Both nominations required Senate confirmation.

Bush chose Thomas, 43, a federal appeals court judge, to take the seat being vacated by the Court's first black justice, Thurgood Marshall, who had long championed civil rights and liberal causes. Despite Thomas's relative youth and brief judicial career, Bush declared him 'the best person for this position.' In selecting him, Bush could take credit for putting a black on the Court at a time when he was under fire for his civil rights policies; at the same time, Thomas appeared likely to bolster the Court's conservative majority on controversial issues ranging from civil rights to abortion. After dramatic televised hearings into a last-minute charge that he had sexually harassed a woman who had worked for him years earlier, Thomas was narrowly confirmed by the Senate, 52-48, on October 15.

Gates, a trusted Bush adviser, had been President Ronald Reagan's choice to head the CIA in 1987 but had been forced to withdraw because of questions on how much he knew about the Iran/contra affair during his tenure as deputy director of the agency. During hearings into his 1991 nomination, Gates defused Iran/contra questions by admitting 'misjudgments' and also withstood a controversy over whether he had slanted intelligence reports to fit the political designs of the Reagan administration. The Senate confirmed Gates on November 5 by a 64-31 vote.

Bush also won Senate confirmation of three new cabinet secretaries: Lamar Alexander, who succeeded Lauro Cavazos at Education; Lynn Martin, who followed Elizabeth Dole at Labor; and William Barr, who took over as attorney general from Richard Thornburgh. The president announced that he would nominate Barbara H. Franklin, a corporate director and Republican activist, to succeed Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, who was to leave the cabinet in early 1992 to head Bush's reelection campaign.

Bush's Health.

Bush gave the nation a brief scare when he was hospitalized on May 4 after complaining of shortness of breath and fatigue while jogging at Camp David. Doctors found him to be suffering from an irregular heartbeat, caused by an overactive thyroid gland that in turn resulted from a disorder known as Graves' disease. In an apparent rare coincidence, the same disease afflicted Bush's wife, Barbara. For a time, as he underwent treatment for the condition, the president looked tired and drawn and sometimes stumbled when he spoke in public. He lost 13 pounds and admitted that some of the medication he had to take had slowed down his mental processes. In a little over a month, however, the 67-year-old Bush had resumed jogging, and in August he declared, 'I feel like a million dollars.'