The Wilderness

by McKay Coppins

  “He just lets these little things get to him, and he worries too much,” one Miami Republican complained to me after spending close to an hour sitting next to Rubio on a flight as he fretted over a mildly critical process story about him in a small DC political magazine. “I’m just like, ‘Marco, calm down.’”

  As the year drew to a close, with the outlook of a major bipartisan congressional push on immigration looking better than ever, everyone in the Biltmore scene was grousing about Marquito’s wishy-washiness, and some were even doing so on the record.

  In one particularly whispered-about bit of Marco bashing, Jeb Bush’s son Jeb Jr.—a Coral Gables resident and Biltmore stalwart—granted me an on-the-record interview in which he heaped praise on several Republican senators for their eagerness to solve the country’s immigration problem, but then grumbled of Rubio, “He’s got to actually execute and get something done, rather than just talking.” Jeb Jr. went on to add, with a veneer of sympathy, “Marco’s gotta be careful. My dad can kind of say anything he wants because he’s not running for anything.”

  In truth, it was precisely Bush’s politics-be-damned attitude that so endeared him to the Biltmore set—and so thoroughly distinguished him from the anxiety-ridden Rubio. Jeb had spent his years since leaving office vocally championing causes he cared about—from immigration reform to tougher federal education standards—as well as lobbing bombs at his own party whenever he thought they were on the wrong side of an issue.

  “These last few years, we’ve had Jeb Bush unplugged, and it’s so fun,” Navarro gushed.

  Unlike Rubio, who was prone to geeking out over his newfound political celebrity, Jeb responded to media speculation about his presidential aspirations with a too-cool-for-school shrug. One Miami Republican noted the contrast by describing a pair of recent visits paid by New York Times reporters to the Biltmore: “When Jim Rutenberg came down here to do a profile, Jeb blew him off. When Mark Leibovich came down, Marco took him to a Dolphins game.” Jeb had never been the type to thrill at the sight of his mug on a magazine cover, and as governor he had been legendary for ignoring, demeaning, deriding, or toying with the press—depending on what his mood called for that day. Once, when a local television reporter asked him a question about abortion that he deemed unfair, Jeb proceeded to put her down in front of her colleagues with such ruthlessness that some thought she might cry. On another occasion, as journalists were filing out of the crowded Capitol basement after a gubernatorial press conference, a male reporter felt a pinch on his rear. When he turned around, he found the governor smirking at him like a towel-snapping frat boy. Jeb gave the reporter a little wink, and then strode away without a word.

  Now, as Rubio was fussing and fretting over how to position himself in the immigration debate, Jeb was putting the finishing touches on a book he believed would reshape the national discussion on the subject. He spent the final weeks before Christmas shuffling in and out of his office at the hotel, making tweaks to the manuscript and trading emails with his coauthor, the conservative lawyer and activist Clint Bolick. Most in Jeb’s Biltmore booster club hadn’t read a word of it yet, but they had no doubt that his book would be a force for good.

  As for Marquito’s influence, the jury was still out. But his dithering over immigration only reaffirmed to many that Rubio should step aside in 2016 and make room for Jeb to run.

  “I have always seen Rubio as a very respectful person,” said former West Miami mayor Rebeca Sosa. “I have no question in my mind that if one day he needs to sit down with a friend and discuss issues of importance for the nation… he and Jeb will do it.” Navarro was similarly hopeful that the two men would huddle and hash out some sort of agreement well before the election. “We’re not going to have to pick between Jeb and Marco,” she told me at the time. “They’d never do that to each other, or to those of us who love them both.”

  “But,” she added, “time is a factor. Marco has plenty of time. Jeb doesn’t.” From Navarro’s perspective, there was no guarantee that Rubio would be ready for the presidency by 2016. Jeb, on the other hand, “is ready now. He’s been ready for years, and we’ve been ready and waiting.”

  One day in 1968, John Ellis Bush—a long-limbed, long-voweled tenth grader with a permanent look of discontent tugging at his features—placed a record on the turntable in his dorm room and dropped the needle. As the peppy guitar riff to Steppenwolf’s psychedelic-rock hit “Magic Carpet Ride” popped out of his speakers, Jeb introduced Peter Tibbetts, a classmate and toking buddy, to the wonders of hashish. Outside, students across the pastoral campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, were cramming for tests and cranking on term papers; scions from the nation’s wealthiest families were plotting Ivy League applications, and politically inclined liberals were plotting revolution. But here in Jeb’s corner of the redbrick Pemberton Cottage dormitory, both ambition and activism were in short supply. He just wanted to light up and escape, and tonight he had a travel companion. “The first time I really got stoned,” Tibbetts would later recall, “was in Jeb’s room.”

  At the time, the popular political portrait of Jeb—the thoughtful policy wonk with a heart of gold; the compassionate conservative attuned to matters of social justice; the smarter, better, more worthy Bush brother—had not yet been painted. In its place was a considerably less appealing sketch: the unpleasant, cocksure prince who reeked of privilege and seemed bitterly beset by the problems of the aristocracy. As the great-grandson of wealthy industrialist Samuel Prescott Bush, the grandson of U.S. senator Prescott Sheldon Bush, and the son of newly elected congressman George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb had arrived at the prestigious prep school with a legacy to preserve and expectations to meet—and he hated everything about it. The winters were too cold. The customs of the East Coast, all-boy student body were unfamiliar. And the classes were far more difficult than what was offered at the Texas public schools he was used to.

  “There was a high expectation that you were to be part of the Andover community, and you were supposed to do your work,” Jeb would later recall. “If you didn’t, they’d just leave you at the side of the road… This was wartime conditions, dog eat dog.”

  But rather than rise to the occasion, Jeb seemed content to coast, knowing that even as he unhappily sulked over the unjust demands his last name placed upon him, his family’s money and influence would shield him from any real repercussions for his behavior.

  “The thing that really struck me about Jeb more than anyone I ever met, is he understood that he was from the world that really counted, and the rest of us weren’t,” Phil Sylvester, Jeb’s Phillips Andover roommate, would later tell the Boston Globe. “It really was quite a waste of his time to engage us. This was kind of his family high school. There wasn’t anything he could do to be kicked out, so he was relaxed about rules, doing the work. This was just his family’s place.”

  The combination of brooding and rudderless entitlement left a less-than-favorable impression on many of his classmates. One would later remember “a kind of arrogance to him,” while another would describe him as “slightly snarly and spoiled.” Even Jeb himself would look back decades later on his Andover days and confess, “I was a cynical little turd at a cynical school.”

  But at the time, Jeb wasn’t quite so self-aware. He saw himself as someone trapped in a gilded prison—a martyr at the hands of his overbearing parents and these oppressive New England snobs, but without any real cause to give meaning to his suffering. As the son of an ascendant statesman, he had stubbornly refused to take an interest in politics: when his family had moved to Washington upon George Sr.’s election to Congress, Jeb had been the only one to stay put in Houston, moving in with friends so he could finish the school year. Later, at Andover, with the Vietnam-era culture wars reaching a fever pitch, he remained aloof and uninterested in idealistic crusades—even as antiwar students in black armbands marched across campus, and activist groups campaigned aggressively against the school’s administ
ration.

  Instead, Jeb found low-stakes, rich-kid ways to rebel. He smoked a lot of pot and hung out with Andover’s self-styled “freaks.” At one point, classmates would recall, he might have been involved in some sort of clandestine liquor-selling scheme. And in a rare act of teenage defiance that would actually bring him a measure of pride years later, he went out of his way to befriend the small group of African American students at the school. Through it all, his only discernible ideology was a determination to break rules he didn’t care for, shirk responsibilities he didn’t want, and violate expectations he didn’t invite.

  He also showed glimpses of a trait that would become more pronounced later in life: a proclivity for using blunt force to get his way and exert dominance. At six foot four, he towered over most of the boys on campus, and his size—combined with his cavalier confidence—made him an intimidating figure to some. He picked fights with classmates he felt had crossed him, and hulked over students who were smaller and less self-assured than he was. Andover alum Gregg Hamilton, who weighed just ninety-eight pounds as a senior, would later liken the school to “a Lord of the Flies situation,” in which Jeb was at the top of the food chain and he was at the bottom. “Jeb was large, physically imposing, and traveled in a crowd that was, I guess, somewhat threatening to an outsider like myself.” Jeb’s friend Tibbetts, meanwhile, would remember with some regret following Jeb’s lead as they taunted and tormented a smaller classmate, once sewing his pajama pants together so he couldn’t put them on. (As an adult, when a reporter asked him about classmates’ perceptions that he was a bully, Jeb claimed to have no recollection of such incidents.)

  The first outlines of the more attractive Jeb portrait—the one that would come to define his political persona—weren’t rendered until he spent a winter abroad in central Mexico during his senior year. Despite his lackluster grades, he had always been smart, and Jeb picked up the language more quickly than his fellow exchange students. He used his Spanish to score tequila for the group and flirt with local muchachas—until, one Sunday afternoon, he met the muchacha who would finally pry him out of his stupor of mediocrity.

  The story of how Jeb met Columba Garnica Gallo would take on many romantic incarnations over the years, but the Bushes’ favorite version begins many centuries earlier in Spain. There was a popular courtship ritual in those days in which, after Catholic Mass, young bachelors and bachelorettes would form concentric circles around a town’s plaza and stroll in opposite directions, stealing glances at one another. “My version of that story that’s been told thousands of times over the last six or seven centuries is that my wife was driving a car around the town square and I was in the town square,” Jeb would recall. “She looked out the back of her car. She was in the backseat and I saw her.” Columba was half a torso shorter than Jeb, with dark eyes and a mesmerizing voice, and he was immediately lovestruck. “She was very alluring, very mysterious… I was captivated.”

  Columba was in love, too—but she had reservations. She detected in Jeb the laziness of a young man for whom life is all one leisurely downhill drift, and sensed the recklessness that comes with the training wheels affixed by elite social status. Where other girlfriends might have found such qualities fun and alluring and contented themselves with a fling, Columba made clear to Jeb that he would have to shape up if he wanted to truly win her over. And so he returned to Andover that spring with a new sense of purpose, earning straight As for his final trimester as he sought to impress the novia he’d left behind. “She kept me wrapped around her little finger,” he said later. “I just couldn’t keep her out of my thoughts. It was all consuming. I wrote her almost every day.”

  Upon graduating, Jeb forsook Yale, the Ivy of choice for three generations of Bushes, and enrolled instead at the University of Texas at Austin in order to be closer to Columba. Having survived Andover’s academic boot camp, he cruised through his course work in Latin American studies, easily making Phi Beta Kappa between regular jaunts across the border. Jeb’s mother, Barbara, was delighted with her son’s sudden turnaround and called him at college one day to congratulate him. “He told me he had done it for Columba because he wanted to prove he was serious,” she would later write. “She thought he was a rich man’s son and a playboy.”

  Jeb returned home for Christmas break soon after that and told his family about his intentions to marry the Mexican girlfriend that none of them had met (and who still didn’t speak much English). At first, it seemed to some in the family like just the sort of impetuous, immature decision Jeb would make in the interest of provocation or subversion. Barbara recorded her concern in a fretful diary entry: “How I worry about Jeb and Columba. Does she love him? I know when I meet her I’ll stop worrying…”

  Jeb proposed during the same Christmas break at a restaurant in Mexico City. He gave Columba a ring that his mother had helped him pick out; she gave him a ring with a peace symbol on it. On February 23, 1974, they married in a modest ceremony at a University of Texas chapel to which Jeb had invited none of his friends. Whatever concerns the Bush family might have harbored about the marriage at the outset, none of them could deny Columba’s positive influence on Jeb. “I was struck by lightning by my now wife,” he would recall. “I got smarter.”

  He also began to look at his family’s connections and influence in a new light. By now his father had become one of the most prominent Republicans in Washington, doing stints as President Nixon’s envoy to the United Nations, and as chairman of the Republican National Committee, where he was beginning to draw chatter about a presidential run. Jeb still told himself that he wanted to be his own man, rise on his own merits. But surely there was no harm in using his name as a launching pad.

  If Jeb had once fancied himself the nobly conflicted heir to royalty—reluctant to take his place in the monarchy, and longing for a simpler life—he was now developing a sense of destiny. He was ready to claim his birthright.

  Marco Rubio did not grow up with a birthright waiting to be claimed at his leisure. In 1979, he was eight years old and living with his family of six in a compact one-story house on a working-class block a few miles off the Las Vegas Strip. Space was tight, and everybody could hear everything. Often, in the middle of the night, Rubio would awake to the familiar jingle of keys in the front door as his dad returned from another sixteen-hour workday.

  His parents had fled their native Cuba before he was born, and they now worked themselves ragged in a relentless effort to carve out advantages for their kids. Rubio’s mother, Oriales, worked as a maid at a nearby casino. His father, Mario, had done odd jobs and grunt work, toiled at an assembly plant, and dragged a vendor’s cart through the streets. He fantasized about owning his own business, but every one of his attempts—the dry cleaner, the vegetable stand, the grocery store—failed or fell through. Instead, he took a full-time job as a bartender at a Vegas hotel, mixing drinks into the wee hours and sleeping while the sun was out.

  Years later, as an adult with children of his own, Rubio would look back on his parents’ daily sacrifices with a profound sense of gratitude—punctuated by occasional pangs of guilt—and conclude of his childhood, “I come from extraordinary privilege.”

  From an early age, Rubio displayed a gift for gab and a penchant for performance. At ten years old, he recruited his cousin and sister to form a singing group with him; their repertoire consisted of a single song by the Osmond Brothers to which they subjected their families over and over again. In high school, he enthusiastically entered the all-boys King Cobra talent show, where he gained a reputation as a ham. One year, he adopted a pompous, swaggering stage character as he belted out a Lionel Richie ballad, and then stormed off the stage in faux-divo mode, spiking the microphone on the ground as he left. Another year, he stripped down to perform a Chippendales-style dance routine with his buddies, showing off washboard abs that would be immortalized in the school yearbook. On the football field, Rubio was an undersized defensive back who relied on his confidence and hustle
to succeed, lithely swerving around the much bigger bodies in his way, and peacocking in such a manner that often convinced observers he was one of the best players on the field, even when he wasn’t.

  But despite his outgoing nature, Rubio was consumed with a sort of social wanderlust and a constant suspicion that he was surrounded by people who didn’t like him. Once, while in junior high, he pleaded with his parents to send him to a nearby private Catholic school. They couldn’t really afford it, but they knew that education was important, so they scraped together the tuition money and sent him off. He didn’t last a week with the stuffy uniforms and competitive academics before he began begging to transfer back to the public school just across the street. Every day, as he watched his old classmates file into the modest, boxy building, Rubio would wrestle with the restless feeling that he didn’t belong anywhere—the first pangs of a nagging status anxiety that would follow him all the way to the heights of American political power.

  In 1985, Rubio’s family moved to Miami at the height of the so-called Cuban miracle—a massive influx of exiles that was infusing the city’s DNA with a distinct entrepreneurial drive. In heavily Cuban neighborhoods like Little Havana, Hialeah, and West Miami, it was common for the vehicles that lined the streets to be plastered up and down with commercial decals, proudly announcing to one and all that these camiones and furgones were driven by business owners. Rubio soon became acutely aware that his parents did not belong to the celebrated league of the self-employed.

  Meanwhile, at his new high school, Rubio was mocked for his crisp polo shirts and “American” accent. The other students called him a gringo. The next year he transferred to South Miami High, where he found he got along best with his black classmates. Still, he never quite felt that he fit in with them either. At the end of each day, his friends would return to the predominantly black South Miami, and he would trudge home to Cuban West Miami. He spent most of his evenings alone.