Nicaraguan contras, a deal which Newsweek classified as "Bush's only foreign-policy success"
during his first two months in office. [fn 7] Busthat his new regime would break with the sleazy Reagan years by promh had attempted to burnish his image by promoting new high standards ofising (^)
ethical behavior in which even the perception of corruption and conflict of interest would be
avoided. These hollow pledges were promptly deflated by the reality of more graft and more
hypocrisy than under Reagan.
Bush's first hundred days in office fulfilled Fukuyama's prophecy that the End of History would be
"a very sad time." If '"post-history" meant that very little was accomplished, Bush filled the bill.
Three weeks after his inauguration, Bush addressed a joint session of the Congress on certain
changes that he had proposed in Reagan's last budget. The litany was hollow and predictable: Bush
wanted to be the Education President, but was willing to spend less than a billion dollars of newmoney in order to do it. He froze the US military budget, and announced a review of the previous (^)
policy towards the Soviet Union. This last point meant that Bush wanted to wait to see how fast the
Soviets would in fact collapse before he would even discuss trade normalization, which had been
the perspective held out to Moscow by Reagan and others. Bush said he wanted to join with Drug
Czar Bennett in "leading the charge" in the war on drugs.
Bush also wanted to be the Environmental President. This was a far more serious aspiration. Shortly
after the election, Bush had attended the gala centennial awards dinner of the very oligarchical
National Geographic Society, for many years a personal fiefdom of the feudal-minded Grosvenor
family. Bush promised the audience that night that there was "one issue my administration is goingto address, and I'm talking about the environment." Bush confided that he had been coordinating his (^)
plans with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and that he had agreed with her on the
necessity for "international cooperation" on green issues. "We will support you," intoned Gilbert
Grosvenor, a fellow Yale alumnus "...Planet Earth is at risk." Among those present during that gala
evening was Sir Edmund Hillary, who had planted the Union Jack at the summit of Mount Everest.[fn 8]
In order to be the Environmental President, Bush was willing to propose a disastrous Clean Air Act
that would drain the economy of hundreds of billions of dollars over time in the name of fighting
acid rain. Bush's first hundred days coincided with the notable phenomenon of tMargaret Thatcher, who had previously denounced environmentalists as "the enemy within," andhe "greening" of (^)
fellow travellers of the British Labour Party and the loonie left. Thatcher's resident ideologue,
Nicholas Ridley, had referred to the green movement in Britian as "pseudo-Marxists." But in the
early months of 1989, allegedly under the guidance of Sir Crispin Tickell, the British Ambassador
to the United Nations, Thatcher embraced the orthodoxy tgreenhouse effect, and acid rain --every one of them a pseudo-scientific hoax--were indeed at thehat the erosion of the ozone layer, the (^)
top of the list of the urgent problems of the human species. Thatcher's acceptance of the green
orthodoxy permitted the swift establishment of a total environmentalist-Malthusian consensus in the
European Community, the Group of 7, and other key international forums.
Characteristically, Bush followed Thatcher's lead, as he would on so many other issues. During the
hundred days, Bush called for the elimination of all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by the end of the
century, thus accepting the position assumed by the European Community as a result of Mrs.
Thatcher's turning green. Bush told the National Academy of Sciences that new "scientific
advancements" had permitted the identification of a serious threat to the ozone layer; Bush stressedthe need to "reduce CFCs that deplete our precious upper atmospheric resources." A treaty had been (^)
signed in Montreal in 1987 that called for cutting the production of CFCs by one half within a ten-
year period. "But recent studies indicate that this 50 percent reduction may not be enough," Bush
now opined. Senator Al Gore of Tennessee was calling for complete elimination of CFCs within
five years. Here a pattern emerged that was to be repeated frequently during the Bush years: Bush