George Bush invited me to go fishing.
It happened because I saw a report on CNN that showed him fly-fishing from a boat on a stream near Kennebunkport. It seems there are a few sea-run browns in the headwaters of one of the coastal streams there. I thought Bush threw a pretty good line, so in the middle of 1991, I wrote him and requested an interview about fly-fishing. The recession was just taking hold. I was curious, among other things, to see if Bush was going to develop a Hoover problem, casting happily while the economy and his political support went to hell.
I got back a very nice letter, dated Aug. 8, 1991.
"Dear Howell:
"I am flattered that you would like to have my experiences on fly-fishing -- flattered because I am not a good fly-fisherman at all. I like the sport, but I have only done it a couple of times: once with Jim Baker in Wyoming, and once with Alan Simpson, also in Wyoming. I've got some outstanding reels and fly rods, but what I lack is fly-fishing experience."
He went on to describe his fondness for catching bluefish off the Maine coast: "We take them on bait-casting reels and light rods and 12-pound test line." Bush said he would be happy to be interviewed about his "enthusiasm for fishing generally," but I should not take that film clip as evidence of expertise in my favorite branch of the sport. "The point of all this is that I would not be a good subject for even half a chapter for any book if the topic is fly-fishing."
The letter impressed me in one way and gave me pause in another. I admired the President's candor about his fly-fishing experience, his preference for light tackle and the general modesty of his tone. But I was taken aback by the news that Alan Simpson, the Republican Senator from Wyoming, was a fly-fisherman. So much for the ennobling influence of the sport. During Bush's term, Simpson established himself as the meanest man in the Senate. True, his hatefulness had a kind of Dickensian grandeur. But there was no way you could follow his rantings about women, the environment and civil rights and still believe that fly-fishing in the mighty temple of the Rockies is guaranteed to purify the soul.
SPEAKING OF SOULS, HERBERT HOOVER WROTE A book entitled "Fishing for Fun -- and to Wash Your Soul." He was a surprisingly spiritual man, but like Bush, he had a politically fatal attachment to the idea of the Presidency as a passive stewardship. I think history will remember both as well-meaning men who did not understand that the President must be an active guardian of the people's welfare, more attuned in hard times to the suffering of the poor than to guarding the economic pieties by which the wealth of their class is preserved. Neither seemed to grasp the lesson of Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency. The stability of American society depends less on defending the rich against imaginary threats than on providing a decent standard of living for the unfortunate. If Bush had been as worried about the fact that he could see homeless people in Lafayette Park from his bedroom window as he was about lowering the capital-gains tax, he would still be President. Similarly, if Hoover had been as concerned about hunger in Alabama as he was about the depth of trout pools on the Rapidan, he might have won a second term.
The fact is, the Rapidan is a river that can make people greedy. To see it is to want to possess it. So it was with Hoover when he first came in 1929 to the deep hollow between Fork Mountain and Double Top Mountain on the eastern flank of the Blue Ridge. This is where the Rapidan plunges through a hemlock forest and through gray boulders that jut from the ferny earth like the aboriginal bones of old Virginia.
In no time, a crew of 500 marines was splitting the silence with bulldozers and hammers. Camp Hoover became a layout of a dozen cabins, barracks for 250 men and riding stables. Hoover liked to think big. The marines carted in 51 tons of boulders for a single fireplace in the President's lodge. By 1930, plans were under way for a 100,000-trout hatchery on the river bank.
A few Democrats grumbled about this use of tax money to create a private, 164-acre playground, but Hoover assured them that he had done his part. He had paid $5 an acre for the land and chipped in $15,000 worth of lumber for the Marine carpenters. As for the road building, the White House explained that this was a training exercise that the President had generously allowed to take place on his land.
Hoover delighted in making members of his Cabinet and distinguished visitors like Charles Lindbergh join him in building rock dams in the stream. Their labor did result in better holding water for trout in a few pools. So far as I know, this was the only undertaking of the Hoover Administration that actually improved conditions in a Southern state. Except for his fishing camp, Hoover opposed, as a matter of principle, the spending of tax money on public-works projects in the South. His firmness in this regard allowed the region to enjoy an especially intimate experience with the Depression, and no doubt many older Southerners can identify with the sentiments expressed by my then-82-year-old father when I described Hoover's idylls along the Rapidan. "Yeah, we heard back then that Hoover liked to fish," he said. "We were hoping he would fall in and drown."
Hoover's book came out in 1963, near the end of his long, grumpy retirement. He died in 1964 at 90. The preface captures the tone of Hoover's last three decades. He had put together this slim collection of his speeches and magazine articles on fishing, Hoover said, because an editor suggested its publication would be a relief from "the daily grind of trying to find out why the Communists get that way."
It is a curious book, revealing Hoover to be both a fly-fishing elitist and a meat fisherman so dedicated that he made fish killing a political virtue. Americans believe "they have a divine right to unlimited fish," he said. "They have inherited this notion from 10,000 generations of free fishermen."
In an essay entitled "The Class Distinction Among Fishermen," Hoover put dry-fly fishermen at the top of his pecking order, followed by wet-fly casters, spin casters and, on the lowest rung, users of live bait. In what sounded like a personal confession, Hoover added that "toward the end of the day, when there are no strikes, each social level collapses in turn down the scale until it gets some fish for supper." In other words, fishing, in the final analysis, is about food.
Despite this retrograde tendency, Hoover made it clear in "Fishing Presidents and Candidates" that he was a snob about fly-fishing. He reported -- "with a slight egotism!" -- that only he, Teddy Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland "had been lifelong fly-fishermen before they went to the White House." A mixed lot of chief executives who leaned heavily to Democrats like Wilson and F. D. R. went after the "common fishes," he sniffed. With a surprising lack of feeling, Hoover needled his predecessor and fellow Republican, Calvin Coolidge, for failing to progress from worms to dry flies in his trout fishing.
The best part of Hoover's book is a few paragraphs in which he elaborated on his well-known remark, "Presidents have only two moments of personal seclusion. One is prayer; the other is fishing -- and they cannot pray all the time!"
In the book, he began by ruminating on the appeal of fishing for Presidents. Most are first drawn to it, he said, because of the "political potency of fish" as a signal that a candidate has the common touch. Once they are in the White House, something else sets in.
"That Presidents have taken to fishing in an astonishing fashion seems to me worthy of investigation," he wrote. "I think I have discovered the reason: it is the silent sport. One of the few opportunities given a President for the refreshment of his soul and the clarification of his thoughts by solitude lies through fishing. As I have said in another place, it is generally realized and accepted that prayer is the most personal of all human relationships. Everyone knows that on such occasions men and women are entitled to be alone and undisturbed.
"Next to prayer, fishing is the most personal relationship of man; and of more importance, everyone concedes that the fish will not bite in the presence of the public, including newspapermen.
"Fishing seems to be one of the few avenues left to Presidents through which they may escape to their own thoughts, may live in their own imaginings, find relief from the pneumatic hammer of constant personal contacts, and refreshment of mind in rippling waters. Moreover, it is a constant reminder of the democracy of life, of humility and of human frailty. It is desirable that the President of the United States should be periodically reminded of this fundamental fact -- that the forces of nature discriminate for no man."
HOOVER predicted the attractions of privacy and discipline that would draw Jimmy Carter to fly-fishing. But he was not so prescient when it came to George Bush. Here was a President who hated solitude, got itchy on any Saturday when his schedule allowed a quiet day in the family quarters with Mrs. Bush, and generally preferred gregarious pastimes to solitary sports.
Before considering Bush and Carter in detail, I should note that the sports and recreations of a President sometimes crystallize in the public mind as a controlling metaphor for his regime. There was Ike the genial golfer and casual fly-fisherman. With Carter, the attack of the killer rabbit on his fishing skiff in Georgia and his collapse while jogging created an image of haplessness that hardened into a governing electoral reality when the helicopters that were supposed to rescue the hostages in Teheran crashed in the desert. In the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton's decision to play golf at a segregated golf course in Little Rock fed into public doubts that he was a Democrat who espoused one set of values and practiced another. Could a few more sporting gaffes Carterize -- or Bush-whack -- the Clinton Presidency? Recent history suggests that Clinton might use a fishing trip now and then to take the curse off all that time on the golf course.
In his successful 1988 campaign, Bush demonstrated the lasting efficacy of Hoover's wisdom about the "political potency" of the fish as a symbol of the common touch. He cannily presented himself as a bass fisherman, a fan of country music and a muncher of pork rinds. But once in office, he reverted to his true enjoyments. My guess is that his decision to deliver comments from a golf cart as he dispatched American troops to the Persian Gulf helped produce the image of elitist detachment that crippled him in 1992. Similarly, Bush did not grasp that it was unseemly for a petroleum millionaire to be ripping along in his gas-guzzling cigarette boat when he was waging what many Americans suspected was a war for oil.
Bush detests any kind of psychological analysis of his motives, tastes or behavior. He calls it "being put on the couch." He once complained to Marlin Fitzwater, his press secretary, that Maureen Dowd of The Times was studying his golf game too closely. "I saw her giving me the Gail Sheehy treatment," he wrote in a memo to Fitzwater. "Indeed, she was trying to figure out what makes this crazy guy tick." It is not surprising, then, to read what Newsweek found in its post-election report on the 1992 race: "When campaign honchos Bob Teeter and Fred Malek told Bush more than a year ago that he should quit playing golf and riding in his speedboat because it furthered the image that he was out of touch with voters, Bush paid little attention."
Apparently, hubris and overconfidence are viruses that breed in the ventilation system of the Oval Office like some exclusive form of Legionnaires' disease. Even Carter, a religious man whose faith called for self-abnegation, sometimes slid over into self-congratulation. Yet in the course of his Presidency, he moved from amateur to expert status in fly-casting for trout and in fly-tying. In 1991, the museum of the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta mounted an exhibit called "The Tie That Binds." The displays included Carter's fly-tying desk. It was clearly the workplace of a craftsman. Plenty of people would argue that fly-tying is the ideal hobby for a micromanager and that, if the Hoover Presidency failed while he flailed the waters of the Rapidan, Carter lost the 1980 election by spending too much time at such a desk on the second floor of the White House.
Carter, of course, was a more sensitive President than the architect of the Depression, even if he did bring us Depression-level interest and inflation rates. Anyone who puts his book "An Outdoor Journal" alongside Hoover's can also see that he understands the mechanics and psychology of fly-fishing on a much deeper level.
"It levels people out," Carter said when I visited the exhibit at the library. "The trout don't give a darn if you're President of the United States or a local farmer or a high-school kid. It's a disciplinary thing, too," he added, noting the constant pressure to learn "a little more about how currents behaved, what kind of trout will take a certain kind of fly at a certain time of year or what the temperature of the water does or how a cloudy day affects it or how I can approach a pool without my shadow or silhouette being outlined against the sky. If you read a whole book on it and only come up with one suggestion, it adds to your repertoire and so you become increasingly effective. But then you realize that nobody can ever master the sport. Even Lee Wulff hasn't mastered the sport. He's still learning, he tells me."
Carter made this comment shortly before Wulff, a legendary fisherman who lived in upstate New York, died in a plane crash in 1991. He had used the Presidency the way any smart fly-fisherman would -- to get expert coaching. He fished with Wulff and George Harvey, who taught a well-known fly-fishing course at Penn State, and Dave Whitlock, a consummate fly-tier and fisherman who was hired by L. L. Bean to direct its effort to cut into Orvis's business. In 1980, Carter asked a number of experts, including Ben Schley and Ed Shenk, to Camp David for a fly-fishing clinic. He also invited Vince Marinaro as the featured speaker, providing at least one occasion at which the crusty old dry-fly innovator from Pennsylvania could feel he was getting the recognition he deserved.
I had first met Carter in 1973, when he was the Governor of Georgia and I was assigned to cover him for The Atlanta Constitution. Our fishing careers had many parallels. Both of us fly-fished for bluegills and bass in our youth and then became devotees of the sport upon moving to Washington. Big Hunting Creek near Camp David was a school for both of us, although Carter told me that as President he visited Camp Hoover and the Rapidan only once.
The arc of his career can be detected in artifacts in the Carter Library. They have there a picture of Carter splashing water with a boat paddle toward the infamous killer rabbit that tried to climb into his skiff when he was fishing on a farm pond near Plains midway through his Presidency. The photograph shows a spinning rod in the boat with a bobber attached to the line. The President as bait fisherman. The library has this photograph in its files, but it is not on display.
What is on display is a frame of varnished wood that is used as a drying reel for fly lines. Carter built it in his workshop on the day after he lost the 1980 election. The object bespeaks the therapeutic values Carter found in fly-fishing after a crushing defeat and his desire for top-to-bottom mastery of the sport that reshaped his attitude toward fishing.
"It's hard to talk without derogating other kinds of fishing, which I also enjoy," he said. "I really enjoy fishing with a plastic worm for bass in the warm-water areas in South Georgia and Florida. I don't want to derogate that, but at the same time, fly-fishing to me opened up just a new panorama of challenge. Because you had to learn the intricacies of streams, of currents, of water temperature, of different kinds of fly hatches, how to tie your own flies, which you wouldn't ordinarily do in other kinds of fishing, and then try to match whatever fly is hatching off and experiment. It's a matter of kind of stalking, a great element of patience, because the consummate fly-fishers really spend a lot of time observing a pool or a stream or current run before they ever put a fly in the water."
THIS BRINGS US BACK to my fishing trip with George Bush. It is hard to imagine Bush going into that kind of detail with his fishing. He is an active, rather than a contemplative, man. But let it also be said that while fishing brings out the testy side of some people, it was just the opposite with Bush. He was such a genial and considerate host that I found it hard to square that behavior with his lackadaisical performance and meanspirited policies. He was also, by every sign I know, a deeply snake-bit fisherman.
For one thing, by the time we got to the Washington Navy Yard and climbed into the bass boats that would take us down the Potomac toward Mount Vernon, the wind was really honking through the trees. It was early morning on a cold March Saturday, and out on the open water, the wind chill must have been in the teens or lower. Luckily, the guide in my boat, Bob Denyer, had a snowmobile suit in one of the storage compartments. Since the President was in the other boat, I did not have to worry about protecting the leader of the free world from frostbite. But there was not a word of complaint from Bush, even after our long run with the open boats banging unpleasantly across the chop and him with nothing but a light jacket for cover.
We fetched up in a cove that offered a bit of shelter from the wind. The boats were close enough for conversation among the three fishermen in each craft, and the President soon dispelled any idea I had that when the Chief Executive gets ready to go out, there is somebody from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to tell him how many layers of insulation he is going to need. Bush said he'd gotten up around 5 A.M. and asked his wife if he ought to wear his long underwear. She said no and rolled over and went back to sleep.
The wind kept building. The sun was weak. Bush's clothing looked inadequate, and the skin on his gloveless hands looked chapped and papery. I was now squarely up against a novel etiquette problem. If the President of the United States has been kind enough to invite you somewhere, it is difficult to say to him that this is not a very good day for it and you would really be just as happy going back to the White House and having a cup of tea. It is even more difficult to say what I really thought, which went something like this: "Sir, you are 68 years old, which is just old enough to be my father, if you happened to be an early breeder. I would not have my father out here in nasty weather with inadequate clothing."
Bush, for his part, seemed pretty content. He proved to be handy with both spinning and bait-casting tackle. To my surprise, the security forces did not get in our way or interfere with other fishing boats or with the joggers who passed along a trail on the shore. I caught the first fish, a small bass still pale from the long, dark winter. After an hour or so, Bush caught a fish. I think there was one other taken by the party, and after four or five hours, the President said we could go in.
It turned out that the Secret Service and their helpers from the District of Columbia police had run aground with the twin-screw police cruiser that was going to take us back upriver into the teeth of the wind. They got it unstuck, and I was happy to get out of the open boats and into the cabin. There were no seats, and Bush and I were standing side by side, chatting about the fishing. I could not help noticing a loud whomp-whomp-whomp sound when the pilot tried to open the throttles on his diesel engines.
"Sounds like you bent a shaft when you went aground," the President said. There was no reprimand in his voice. He had the matter-of-fact tone of an old Navy man who knows the sound of a bent shaft when he hears it. So we went back upriver at a fast idle.
I admit I lost my courage and did not ask Bush about the theories of Dr. Juice, a Minnesota physician who was interviewed in The Wall Street Journal in 1990. Dr. Juice, a.k.a. Gregory Bambenek, invented Dr. Juice Hand and Lure Cleaner. This product is intended to mask a fish-repelling amino acid called L-serine. It seems that Dr. Juice took a fingerprint from the President at a bass-tackle show that Bush visited in Springfield, Mo., during the 1988 campaign. The Journal's conclusion: "George Bush is a walking L-serine factory . . . his fingerprint on the bait will stink up the water with L-serine and send fish zooming in the other direction."
Maybe it was too cold on the Potomac for Bush's bass to smell the Presidential secretions. But that lone fish did little to dent the general air of pessimism that prevailed all day among Bush's attendants. They carried themselves like parents taking an insistent kid on what they know is a hopeless mission. Even so, I was surprised with the blunt consolation one of them offered to Bob Denyer when he said he regretted not having been able to put the President on to more fish on one of his rare days off.
"Oh, don't feel bad," a White House photographer told the guide. "The President never catches anything."
That day, he was lucky not to catch pneumonia. But he might have taken the weather and the bent shaft as an omen for the rest of 1992.
Photos: A cast of Presidential characters: George Bush, who used fishing to project a common touch, in Cheyenne, Wyo., 1980 (Susan Biddle/National Archives, George Bush Presidential Materials Project); Herbert Hoover, a fishing snob, in Maryland, 1938 (Brown Brothers); the analytical, micromanaging Jimmy Carter in Spruce Creek, Pa., October 1980 (William Fitzpatrick/National Archives, Jimmy Carter Library), and Dwight D. Eisenhower, a casual fisherman, near Pine, Colo., 1953. (Milton Freier/Upi/Bettmann Newsphotos)(pg. 18-19); Herbert Hoover boasted that only he, Teddy Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland (in boat, far right) were "lifelong fly-fishermen before they went to the White House." (Brown Brothers); He scoffed at Democrats like F. D. R. (above right, in Warm Springs, Ga., 1930) who went after "common fishes." (National Archives, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)(pg. 20); On the Potomac, March 1992. From left: President Bush, who caught one fish; Bill Burton and James Vance, journalists; a security officer, and the author. (Photograph by Carol Powers/National Archives, George Bush Presidential Materials Project)(pg. 28)