by Kitty Kelley
“George was very useful to Harken,” said a board member. “He could have been more so if he had had funds, but as far as contacts were concerned, he was terrific . . . It seemed like George . . . knew everybody in the U.S. who was worth knowing.”
Even after George moved to Washington, D.C., to help supervise his father’s campaign for President in 1987, Harken continued to pay him.
“Hell, that’s why he’s on the damn board,” said a Harken insider. “You say, ‘By the way, the President’s son sits on our board.’ You use that. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
The presidential connection struck gold when Harken was chosen for an exclusive offshore drilling contract by Bahrain. The tiny oil-rich country, described by Time as “unabashed in its desire to foster a warm relationship with the U.S.,” chose Harken to drill three exploratory wells at a cost of about $50 million. The project was too big for Harken to handle, so the company partnered with the Bass brothers of Houston, big Republican contributors and close friends of the Bush family.
The founder of Harken, who had sold the company, said George W. Bush was worth every dollar the new owners were paying him. “It’s obvious why they kept him,” said Phil Kendrick. “Just the fact that he’s there gives them credibility. He’s worth $120,000 a year to them just for that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Vice President had been defanged. Recovering from what he called “all the Doonesbury dung” of the reelection, he wanted to be a nice guy again. So he called Geraldine Ferraro and invited her to lunch. As the winner, he could afford to be generous. Besides, he did not want a popular woman for an enemy. “George needs to have everyone like him,” said his cousin Ray Walker, a psychiatrist. “Otherwise, he’s psychically uncomfortable.”
Bush’s overture to Ferraro was graciously accepted, and lunch was prepared by his Filipino chef, who kept a calendar of nude women on the wall of the Vice President’s kitchenette. “We ate in the Executive Office Building,” recalled Ferraro years later. “I came with Bob Barnett, the Washington attorney who had prepared me for the debate by playing the part of Bush, and Bush was there with Rep. Lynn Martin [Rep.-IL], who prepped him by playing me. When we told George that Bob had dressed like him for debate practice right down to the pinstripes and preppy watchband, he whipped off one of his striped cloth multicolored watchbands from Brooks Brothers and gave it to Bob as a souvenir.
“It wasn’t an easy lunch, sitting there with the guy who had trounced me. But we all did our best and got through it. I do remember something quite bizarre . . . I had mentioned having a house in St. Croix and how I hated changing planes in Puerto Rico because my luggage always got lost. Bush said, ‘Oh, I just love lost-luggage jokes.’ We sort of looked at him. He said, ‘I really do. I just love lost-luggage jokes.’ He didn’t explain and he didn’t tell a lost-luggage joke. It was such a strange thing to say, but maybe lost-luggage jokes are some kind of high WASP humor I don’t understand. After lunch Bush pulled open the drawer of his desk to show me where all the vice presidents had carved their initials, and then we had our pictures taken. Bush inscribed mine: ‘Let’s debate. No, let’s be friends. You have a great fan here. George Bush.’”
Geraldine Ferraro was not the only one perplexed by the Vice President’s style. President Reagan’s White House photographer, Michael Evans, recalled an instance during a Washington blizzard when photographers were waiting to take Reagan’s picture walking back to the family quarters. “Serfs had to be called in to salt down the walkway, and we were in the Oval Office waiting for that to happen,” Evans said. “The President, the Vice President, Chief of Staff Jim Baker, Michael Deaver, and myself. George started reminiscing about the big blizzard of his childhood. He told a story about the snow falling so hard that his chauffeur, Alec, who was driving him to Greenwich Country Day School, piled off into a snowdrift.
“Poor guy was so out of touch he had no idea of how he sounded to the rest of us who didn’t grow up being driven to grade school by the family chauffeur. The looks exchanged between Deaver and Baker were priceless. Both raised their eyes to heaven as if to say, ‘Is this guy for real?’ In fact, Mike Deaver said afterward, ‘With all due respect, Mr. Vice President, I wouldn’t tell that story in your next speech.’ We all laughed. Heh. Heh. Heh.”
George’s invitation to Geraldine Ferraro was just a warm-up to the full blasts of ingratiation he would unleash as he revved up for the 1988 presidential race. This was his political currency: being a nice guy, coming from a good family, always being gracious and supportive—as long as victory was already assured. So from his victorious vantage point, George Herbert Walker Bush during the next three years would splash buckets of bonhomie in every direction, but mostly to the far right. Proclaiming himself “born again,” he would bootlick evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, whom he referred to behind their backs as “temple burners.” He would toady up to conservatives and shamelessly court right-wingers like Roy Cohn, who told his biographer before he died: “I have to say that Bush has been romancing me for years. He knew I was in with the conservatives, and he wanted my support for ’88.” George even went on bended knee to extol the memory of William Loeb, the bombastic publisher of New Hampshire’s Manchester Union Leader who had pilloried him as “a spoon-fed little rich kid” and warned readers: “Republicans should flee the candidacy of George Bush as if it were the Black Plague.”
When her brother attended a testimonial dinner in honor of Loeb, Nan Bush Ellis nearly retched. George praised his enemy as “a man of fierce and outspoken loyalty to his friends, his country and his political beliefs,” and then praised his widow, Nackey Scripps Loeb, as “his spirited and charming wife who is carrying on his work with tremendous energy.” The spirited widow definitely carried on what her husband had started: she vilified George at every turn and endorsed his opponent Pierre “Pete” du Pont for President in 1988.
“I hassled George when he spoke at the Loeb dinner,” Nan Bush Ellis admitted. “And, oh, I was so self-righteous here in my beautiful ivory house, and I called up and . . . I said I don’t know how he could do this.”
What his sister did not understand was that there was almost nothing that her brother would not do to become President of the United States. He devoted the second term of his vice presidency to that pursuit. He began by reshuffling his staff, admitting that for the first four years he had purposely maintained “a weak roster” so as not to compete with or threaten the President’s staff. Now there was a fight brewing, so the nice, friendly, supportive Vice President needed hard-nosed professionals who understood political hardball and would do the dirty work needed to make him Ronald Reagan’s heir. The succession would not be easy, however, because the King was reluctant to relinquish his crown. When Reagan was asked in February 1985 about endorsing his Vice President for the 1988 nomination, he hedged. “I’ll be like Scarlett O’Hara,” he said. “I’ll think about it tomorrow.” Later, at a White House correspondents dinner, he joked, “George Bush has been a wonderful Vice President, but no one is perfect.”
Even on July 13, 1985, when the seventy-four-year-old President had to be anesthetized to remove a malignant tumor from his lower intestine, he resisted turning over the powers of the presidency to his Vice President. It was the first time section 3 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment had been invoked. George was in Kennebunkport at the time but flew to Washington when the President entered the hospital. Bush called three friends to join him for tennis at the Vice President’s mansion. During the game he lunged for an overhead shot, lost his balance, fell back, smashed his head on the concrete, and knocked himself unconscious. His physician hurried to his side and after a few minutes got him to his feet. He spent the rest of the afternoon resting. George’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, who had accompanied him to Washington, withheld the information from the press. It was many years before anyone learned that for an unspecified period of time, the President and the Vice President of the
United States had been simultaneously incapacitated.
The next day Fitzwater was asked what the seven hours of the Bush administration had been like. He quipped: “I think I missed it.”
Doonesbury immortalized the 474 minutes with a strip that featured the Vice President being interviewed: “How will history judge the Bush hours?”
“I think history will be very high on them, Roland. Remember, not a single country fell to the communists during my watch.”
The columnist George Will lamented that the Twenty-fifth Amendment had not transferred power to the First Lady instead of the Vice President, because, as he wrote, the country would have seen how formidable a person in a size-four dress can be. “In George Bush’s 8 hours as acting president the deficit increased $200 million. Nancy would never have allowed that.”
When President and Mrs. Reagan flew to Honolulu in April 1985, George summoned his family and all his capos and consiglieri to Camp David to discuss the 1988 campaign. “This is my best shot,” said the Vice President, “but I am not going to do it if we don’t have 100 percent behind me . . . I cannot do this without your support and feeling that you are all with me, because it is going to be a hard thing to do.”
George and Barbara, their five children, George’s three brothers—Prescott, Jonathan, and Bucky—and his sister, Nancy, sat on one side of a long wooden table in the rustic presidential lodge. Across from them perched the new hard-nosed professionals: Lee Atwater, the campaign manager and a political consultant with Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater; Marlin Fitzwater, the VP’s press secretary; Bob Teeter, the VP’s pollster; Craig Fuller, the VP’s new chief of staff.
“They were firing off questions about everything: how we would run the campaign, our loyalty to George Bush, just everything,” recalled Marlin Fitzwater. “It struck me then and there that the Bushes were very different from the Kennedys in that they would never have their Ted Sorenson [speechwriter]. No one outside the family would enter the inner circle.”
Two months before that April summit, George Bush had made it clear that he intended to use his family as a campaign hallmark. He wrote to his finance chairman, Robert Mosbacher, who was organizing a political action committee for Bush known as Fund for America’s Future:
George and Jeb both want to help on the PAC. George feels that he can bring in a lot of young business people from the West coast . . . Jeb, as you know, is the County Chairman for the Republican Party in Dade County, Florida.
. . . I have not talked to Neil in Colorado, Marvin here in Washington, or Doro LeBlond in Connecticut. Maybe it would make sense to have all 4 boys and Doro on the masthead in order to get the Bush name identified with the PAC.
Most participants at the Camp David meeting recalled the fierce interchange between the Vice President’s two elder sons and Lee Atwater, the southern-fried political operative who had worked for the arch segregationist Strom Thurmond. As campaign manager, Atwater ladled out the facts of political life for the family and what they had to do to drape Reagan’s mantle around George’s neck. They knew the first priority was raising millions. And Atwater hammered home the importance of Super Tuesday, the new regional primary in seventeen states—the two biggest being Florida and Texas—that had been set for March 8, 1988.
“I’m sure you boys will get those wired right for us,” Atwater said, nodding toward Jeb and George junior.
George senior found Atwater a little “too brash” for his liking, but brash as the motormouth was, the family agreed he knew his stuff and would probably do anything to win. He and his partners had been described in Esquire as “outlaws who aren’t afraid to bloody their chaps.” Jeb and George W. raised the only reservation: they questioned Atwater’s loyalties, because they knew his partners would be working for Jack Kemp and Bob Dole, two of the Vice President’s opponents for the GOP nomination.
“How do we know we can trust you?” asked George W.
“What he means is, if someone throws a grenade at our dad, we expect you to jump on it,” said Jeb.
“If you’re so worried about my loyalty, then why don’t one of you come in the office and watch me, and the first time I’m disloyal see to it that I get run off?”
Eventually young George would accept the challenge and move his family to Washington in the spring of 1987. Until then, Ron Kauffman, head of Bush’s political action committee, was delegated to ride herd on the hyperkinetic campaign manager.
During the reshaping of the Vice President’s staff, everyone watched to see how the reshuffling of top personnel might affect Jennifer Fitzgerald, then the Vice President’s executive assistant. Bush had deep-sixed Admiral Daniel J. Murphy as chief of staff and reassigned Pete Teeley to the job of campaign press secretary, but Jennifer was untouchable. When she announced she wanted to transfer from the VP’s office in the Old Executive Office Building to the VP’s office in the U.S. Capitol, everyone on staff sighed with relief.
“She was a powerful woman in that she could influence the Vice President more than anyone else,” recalled a woman on the Vice President’s staff, “but she was miserable for morale. She was insecure as far as her intellectual capacity because she did not have a college education. One of the reasons she wanted to transfer was to assert she had substantive knowledge and was not just a secretary/scheduler. In effect that’s really all the Veep’s congressional office did, but everyone wanted her out of the office, so they conspired to flatter her into thinking she’d be taken much more seriously if she transferred to the Hill. We all encouraged her in that fantasy and it worked . . . But it did not diminish her influence over the Vice President. It only got her out of our hair.”
Jennifer became the Vice President’s chief lobbyist and contact on Capitol Hill, where she maintained an office with two secretaries. She also kept her access to the VP’s office in the West Wing of the White House. She participated in all of Bush’s scheduling meetings, oversaw all his arrangements for foreign travel, and accompanied him on trips when he traveled without his wife.
“Barbara couldn’t abide Jennifer,” said Susan King, the former television journalist who covered the Vice President. “That was clear to everyone during the campaign, even members of the press.”
The relationship between the Vice President and his chief lobbyist was accepted by his staff as a fact of life. “I remember talking to Larry Branscum, Bush’s Army intelligence officer, when I joined the staff of Vice President Gore,” said Anne Woolston. “‘Larry, this stuff about George Bush and Jennifer Fitzgerald. Is it true? That they were having an affair?’ Larry said, ‘I just know when they traveled we always had to put them in the same corridor.’ That practically confirmed it for me,” said Woolston, “because when I worked for Gore, staff was never booked on the same floor with the Vice President. Never.”
Jennifer catered solely to the boss. “Everyone on staff had run-ins with her, even Marlin, who was very careful around her,” said one of Craig Fuller’s assistants. “You cannot overestimate her influence on Bush. He went whenever she called. If she wanted him to meet with a senator or a congressman, we had to change his schedule to do it. Those were his orders . . . We all were aware of their relationship—whatever it was. The younger women on staff just couldn’t fathom someone who looked as weirdly out of style as Jennifer sleeping with the Vice President. The men couldn’t figure it either, but there is no denying the connection between them. I can’t explain it, other than to say that Jennifer was a doter. She made George feel that he was God’s gift to mankind. She’d bat her eyes and gush all over him. She’d poof her hair, put on lipstick, and spray perfume every time she walked into his office in her high stiletto heels. She was a courtesan, but not that gifted. Still, she was probably a treat from Bar, who is no gusher. Bar would just as soon say, ‘George, cut the crap’ as ‘open the door.’ Jennifer was an ego trip for him. She made him feel good about himself. Only reason to think that there might have been something to the alleged affair—and, yes, we all talked about
it at one time or other—was that after he became President, Jennifer was shipped off to the State Department so there wouldn’t be any questions regarding their relationship. I also think Barbara did not want her in the White House. Whatever, there was a definite decision made that Jennifer would be a target so she had to be moved away from Bush. Jim Baker was the only one who could counterbalance her. So they put her under him because she couldn’t do him in with Bush . . . Look what happened to Rich Bond when he tried to get rid of Jennifer. Bush let him go and kept her . . .
“She catered to the vain and petty side of George Bush in ways that the rest of us would not have done. For example, he wanted his office on the Hill to be redecorated, and so Jennifer brought him decorator boards with color schemes and styles and swatches. I remember he wanted blue draperies and threw a tantrum when the draperies weren’t the right shade of blue. I was stunned that the Vice President of the United States was focusing on something so small and incidental, but I guess that’s all he really had to do . . . By then he had become so intellectually lazy that he would not spend any time reading the briefs prepared for him. I think he had been a bureaucrat for so long that he simply relied on people to tell him what he needed to know. He did not think for himself. He was verbally inarticulate and could not enunciate a clear concept or formulate ideas. Perhaps he had spent too long in government getting talked to and had lost his ability to think and abstract for himself.”
Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole made the same discovery. After meeting with George to discuss political issues, Dole returned to his office fuming. “I couldn’t talk to him,” Dole said. “He doesn’t know enough about the issues to even talk about them. Where has he been for seven years?”
Caring only about becoming President, the Vice President took direction from his new campaign advisers—the hardheads—who polled everything in an effort to make him appear strong and presidential. His pollster pointed out that he needed “shoring up” among southerners, evangelicals, and Jews, three constituencies George had previously ignored. Now he agreed to make a concerted outreach. Since he was scheduled to go to the Middle East in July 1986, he decided to take a film crew for campaign footage of himself in Israel.