Yet, less than one year later, Marshall announced his retirement from the bench, giving
Bush the chance to split the organizations of black America with the Clarence Thomas
appointment. Those who saw Marshall's farewell press conference would have to agree
that he still possessed one of the most lucid and trenchant minds anywhere in the
government. Had Bush's vindictiveness expressed itself once again through its inevitable
instruments of secret blackmail and threats?
During June and July, domestic economic issues edged their way back to center stage of
US politics. As always, that was bad news for Bush.
Bush's biggest problem during 1990 was the collision between his favorite bit of
campaign demagogy, his "read my lips, no new taxes" mantra of 1990, and the looming
national bankruptcy of the United States. Bush had sent his budget to the Hill on January
29 where the Democrats, despite the afterglow of Panama, had promptly pronounced it
Dead on Arrival. During March and April, there were rounds of haggling between the
Congress and Bush's budget pointman, Richard Darman of OMB. Then, on the sunny
spring Sunday afternoon of May 6, Bush used the occasion of a White House lecture on
his ego ideal, Theodore Roosevelt, to hold a discreet meeting with Democratric
Congressional leaders for the purpose of quietly deep-sixing the no new taxes litany.
Bush was extremely surreptitious in the jettisoning of his favorite throw-away line, but
the word leaked out in Monday's newspapers that the White House, in the person of
hatchet-man Sununu, was willing to go to a budget summit with "no preconditions."
Responding to questions on Monday, Bush's publicity man Fitzwater explained that Bush
wanted budget negotiations "unfettered with conclusions about positions taken in the
past." That sounded like new taxes.
Bush had been compelled to act by a rising chorus of panicked screaming from the City
of London and Wall Street, who had been demanding a serious austerity campaign ever
since Bush had arrived at the White House. After the failure of the $13 billion Bank of
New England in January, Wall Street corporatist financier Felix Rohaytn had
commented: "I have never been so uneasy about the outlook in 40 years. Everywhere you
look, you see red lights blinking. I see something beyond recession, but short of
depression." [fn 17] At the point that Bush became a tax apostate, estimates were that the
budget defecit for fiscal 1990 would top $200 billion and after that disappear into the
wild blue yonder. The IMF-BIS bankers wanted Bush to extract more of that wealth from
the blood and bones of the American people, and George would now go through the
motions of compliance.
The political blowback was severe. Ed Rollins, the co-chairman of the National
Republican Congressional Committee, was a Reagan Democrat who had decided to stick
with the GOP, and he had developed a plan, which turned out to be a chimera, about how
the Republicans could gain some ground in the Congress. As a professional political
operative, Rollins was acutely sensitive to the fact that Bush's betrayal of his "no new
taxes pledge" would remove the one thing that George and his party supposedly stood
for. "The biggest difference between Republicans and Democrats in the public perception
is that Republicans don't want to raise taxes," complained Rollins. "Obviously, this