Clint Eastwood for veep in 1988? An oral history of George H.W. Bush’s presidency.

He was the only one-term American president in the past three decades, but plenty happened on his watch: the collapse of communism, the first Gulf War and a recession that helped usher him out of office. Now, George H.W. Bush’s presidency is revealed in greater detail, as the University of Virginia’s Miller Center opens its archive of oral history interviews about the 41st president, including conversations with Dick Cheney, James Baker, Robert Gates and Dan Quayle.

Find out why Bush stopped short of ousting Saddam Hussein, which Hollywood superstar was (briefly) considered for the vice presidency, the reason George W. Bush became so focused on staff loyalty and what kind of attire was strictly prohibited in the Oval Office.

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Oust Saddam? Remember Noriega.

“We looked at three options: One was destroying the Republican Guard, the second was throwing Saddam out of Kuwait, and the third was bringing about a change of regime in Baghdad. Well, we agreed to the first two in about 10 minutes, and we spent two weeks debating the third one. . . . We had all just gone through the experience on Panama of not being able to find Noriega, eight or nine months before, and we had a hell of a lot more information and a hell of a lot more presence in Panama than we were going to have in Iraq. To what degree are we likely to shatter the coalition if we try to bring about a change in regime? . . . So we ended up recommending against the inclusion of that as a war aim. And the president actually signed off on the war aims — so we knew going in what our objectives were going to be.”

— Robert M. Gates, CIA director

Keeping the Russians on board

“Gorbachev kept meddling. Especially as we got closer and closer to [the] actual onset of the war — trying to find ways to get us to back off, accept some kind of a compromise so he could broker a deal with Saddam and so forth. It was endless. It just went on and on and on and became a source of frustration. For somebody like myself, I finally would have said: ‘To hell with it. How many divisions has he got in Saudi Arabia?’ The answer, of course, is zero. The president said: ‘No, we’re going to keep him on board. We’re going to manage the process.’ . . . So he clearly set the tone from the beginning and was consistent throughout. He wanted this to be an international effort.”

— Dick Cheney, secretary of defense

Fishing for a “New World Order”

“It was coined in one of the few times that I’ve had with the president absolutely uninterrupted for about four hours. We were fishing, and the fish weren’t biting. We were sitting out in a calm ocean, and it was a marvelous opportunity for a philosophical talk at length. You know, you never have time with presidents. They’re always busy, and you have to focus on the issue. Here, it was open. So it started leading us into ‘What’s this new world going to be like?’ This was in August of ’90, a couple of weeks after the attack on Kuwait. ‘What’s it going to be like?’ ”

— Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser

Bush-Eastwood ’88!

“Did you know that Clint Eastwood’s name was thrown out at one point? . . . When we were way behind. Honestly, it was suggested in not an altogether unserious — well, he was a mayor. He was a Republican mayor. Anyway, it was shot down pretty quick. [Laughter.] But we were looking at an 18-point deficit.”