They're No. 2! And Here's How They Got There.

Reagan didn't like any of them. He thought George Bush was a wimp, and he was still mad at Howard Baker for opposing him on the Panama Canal. Of course, he was still mad at Gerald Ford because he thought Ford had chiseled him out of the presidency four years earlier.

Wirthlin said the polls showed that Ford could help us the most. So we sat down and talked with the Ford people. . . . [They] were proposing that if Ford became the vice presidential nominee and the vice president, he would, in effect, become the president. They would be nice and let Reagan go to the funerals, and he -- Ford -- would pick the secretary of state and the secretary of defense. Anybody who wanted to see the president would have to go through him.

Ed Meese came down from one of the meetings and showed it to me, and I said, "Ed, this guy wants to be president." He said, "Yes, but he ain't gonna be." . . .

Reagan was finally saying, "Well, I don't think it can be Ford." At the same time, Ford was saying, "This is a mistake." They both separately came to the agreement . . . that this really wouldn't work. . . . I always thank God for that.

Stuart Spencer on George H.W. Bush's selection of Dan Quayle in 1988: Somewhere along the line, [Bush] was going to go with Quayle. He didn't tell [James A.] Baker that. . . . He didn't tell anybody that. I have no argument with his choice, but if you're going to pick a young, totally unknown senator from a state like Indiana, you'd better use the political process to see how it's going to work. . . . [He] should have made sure that Quayle's name was leaked so that it could be bounced around, so that the press could go do their vetting. . . . The first vetting Quayle gets is New Orleans [site of the Republican National Convention], where there are 5,000 animals who don't know who he is and are mad because they hadn't guessed who it could be. . . .

I go to Baker and Bush, and I say, "What do you want me to do with this guy?" By this time, they're in a state of shock. . . . I don't get any good answers. The answers were sort of a shrug: "Do what you want to do."

I looked at them and said, "Okay, I'm going to go out and bury the son of a bitch. We've got 90 days, and all they can do is harm you. He's going to every burg in America. He's not going to any high press level towns. He's going to do nothing." They didn't say no. . . .

After about 10 to 15 days of that, Quayle figured out what I was doing. . . . I don't lie very much, so when Dan asked me, I told him, ". . .You got off to a bum start, and it's not your fault. But you can't save George Bush. You can't win for George Bush. You can't do anything but be a problem for George Bush unless we do this right."