Buchanan stayed in the race for several months, filling the airwaves with attacks on the President. He eventually dropped out and endorsed Dad, but his challenge revealed that the Republican Party was fractured. The experience illustrated one of the key rules of political campaigning: the importance of consolidating the base. It was easy for me to do that in 2000, when Republicans of all stripes were hungry to reclaim the White House after eight years. In 2004, I reached out early to key leaders and managed to tamp down any concerns from disgruntled factions of the party. Pat Buchanan prevented George Bush from doing that in 1992. And to make matters worse, Buchanan’s success energized independents, one of whom was about to enter the presidential race.

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ON THE SURFACE, H. Ross Perot and George Bush had some things in common. Like Dad, Perot was a Navy veteran and a Texas businessman. The son of a cotton broker in Texarkana, Perot had graduated from the Naval Academy and gone to work for IBM. He eventually launched his own company, Electronic Data Systems, which became a pioneer in the computer industry and made Perot a rich man. Dad and Perot knew each other from the Texas business community. From Dad’s perspective, they got along well. Evidently Perot respected Dad at one time, because he had asked Dad if he would be interested in running a Perot-backed oil company after he left government at the beginning of the Carter administra

tion.

Over the years, something obviously went wrong in their relationship. Dad believed that a problem arose over Ross Perot’s belief that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnam. When the Defense Department reported to President Reagan that there was no evidence of living POWs, Perot—who disagreed with that assessment

—opened his own discussions with the Vietnamese government. The President decided that Perot’s trips had to stop and asked his national security team how to handle the situation.

“I know Ross from Texas,” Dad volunteered, “and I’d be glad to convey the message to him.”

Perot was convinced that there was a conspiracy to abandon the POWs. After his conversation with Dad, he concluded that George Bush was part of the conspiracy. As Dad would later put it, “Perot shot the messenger.”

On February 20, 1992—two days after Pat Buchanan’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary—Perot announced on Larry King’s CNN call-in show that he would run for President if grassroots supporters registered him on the presidential ballots of all fifty states. At the time, that seemed like a long shot. Within weeks, however, Perot announced that the Home Shopping Network had been hired to manage the thousands of calls an hour that he was receiving urging him to enter the race.

Perot’s agenda had some elements that appealed to both sides of the political aisle. He believed in cutting the deficit and reducing government waste. He espoused a populist protectionist message to safeguard American businesses from foreign competition. He was pro-choice and opposed the Gulf War; he also called for slowing the growth in Social Security benefits to balance the budget and called for an expansion of the war on drugs. His unifying theme was antiestabl

ishment and anti-incumbent. And nobody embodied the political establishment more than the incumbent, President George Bush.

The campaign’s first reaction to Perot was somewhat dismissive. To those who had known Perot for many years, it seemed inconceivable that he could survive on the national political stage. I was worried. Perot had lots of money and had tapped into populist discontent with Washington. The media was thrilled to have a colorful new personality to cover and initially lavished praise on Perot. I monitored his progress from my office building in Dallas, which overlooked a Perot campaign headquarters. Day after day, I watched people in BMWs and SUVs line up to collect yard signs and bumper stickers. It was like watching the disintegration of a political base in slow motion.

By the summer of 1992, the campaign had no choice but to take Perot seriously. Like Pat Buchanan before him, Perot made relentless attacks on Dad and the Washington establishment that were taking a toll. Then, all of sudden, Perot announced that he was withdrawing from the race. His explanation was difficult to understand. First he said that he did not want to deadlock the Electoral College and force the election to be resolved by the House of Representa

tives. Later, he would claim (with no evidence) that the real reason he had dropped out was that Dad’s campaign had threatened to ruin his daughter’s wedding. I was amazed that this man was being taken seriously as a presidential candidate. I had also learned not to underestimate Ross Perot. I predicted to friends after Perot’s withdrawal, “He’ll be back.”

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IN 1988, Dad had run against history in the form of the Van Buren factor. In 1992, he was trying to do something unprecedented. No two-term Vice President who succeeded to the presidency had ever been elected to two full terms of his own. John Adams came close, but Thomas Jefferson got in the way. Two centuries later, George Bush ran into William Jefferson Clinton.

Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas was not an obvious choice for the Democrats. In 1991, with Dad riding high in polls after the Gulf War, several of the front-running candidates

—Governor Mario Cuomo of New York and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey—had decided not to run. Clinton, who was forty-five years old (one month my junior), entered a wide-open Democratic field. Clinton had a charming personality and was a superb campaigner who had been elected Governor five times. He was considered one of his party’s brightest policy minds, and he espoused a “third way” of politics that steered a middle ground between traditional liberalism and conservatism. I remember Dad telling me that he had been impressed by the Arkansas Governor at a White House–sponsored education summit.

Clinton had a compelling life story. His father had been killed in a car accident three months before he was born. Raised by his mother, he had worked his way out of small-town Arkansas to Georgetown University, a Rhodes Scholarship, and Yale Law School. In a detail that no campaign scriptwriter could invent, his hometown was called Hope.

The man from Hope also had a lot to overcome. He was seen by some as undisciplined, and he was dogged by rumors about personal indiscretions. He received less than 3 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, and in New Hampshire the media reported allegations of an affair with a former TV news reporter in Arkansas. Clinton responded with a high-profile interview on 60 Minutes immediately following the Super Bowl. He acknowledged making mistakes, and his wife, Hillary, fully defended her husband and their marriage. Shortly thereafter, Clinton shocked the political world by finishing second in New Hampshire behind the heavy favorite, Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. In his speech after the New Hampshire primary, Clinton proclaimed himself “the Comeback Kid.” And he was. He swept the Southern primaries and outlasted Paul Tsongas and California Governor Jerry Brown to clinch the Democratic nomination.

As the race unfolded, it became clear that Bill Clinton would be a formidable opponent. He understood the importance of clear and simple campaign themes. One of those themes was change. After eight years of Reagan-Bush and four years of Bush-Quayle, Clinton knew that voters were ready for fresh faces. He also recognized the generational changes reshaping the electorate. Clinton cultivated his image, playing his saxophone on late-night TV with Arsenio Hall and appearing with college students on MTV. Clinton doubled down on the change theme by selecting as his running mate Senator Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee, a fellow baby boomer. The message was clear: Their generation’s time had arrived.