The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  “Dotty told Aunt Dolly that George wasn’t up to the job because he didn’t have the killer in him,” said Dolly Hoffman’s niece. “Dotty said he lacked the necessary toughness to be President. She did not mean he was a weak man, just that he was too genteel and soft to be President.”

  Within weeks young George W., neither genteel nor soft, was galloping to his father’s rescue. “I think [his] coming up here will be very helpful and I think he will be a good insight to me,” the Vice President wrote in his diary. “He is very level-headed and so is Jebby. I think some of our political people are thinking, ‘Oh, god, here come the Bush boys.’ But you know where their loyalty is and they both have excellent judgment and they are both spending a bunch of time on this project.”

  Marvin, the youngest and least political of George’s four sons, had been sidelined with ulcerative colitis. To save his life, doctors had removed his large intestine. The surgery left him with a permanent colostomy bag attached to his abdomen to collect body waste. After several blood transfusions, Marvin later joked about his hospitalization. He said he knew he was dying when two things happened: his father spent the day by his side, and his brother Jeb called to say “I love you.”

  His mother blamed his inflammatory bowel disease on political stress. “Marvin had his colon taken out because he worried about a lot of things,” said Barbara. “A lot of them were related to criticism about his father.”

  Marvin pooh-poohed politics as the cause for his colitis. “Mom will never be a doctor,” he said. “I talked to an eleven-year-old who has it, but her dad didn’t run for president.” As a spokesman for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, Marvin said he wanted to help remove the shame attached to the disease. “The groups I talk to the most are people who aren’t married,” he said. “They think this ruins all that. It doesn’t.”

  Marvin’s wife, Margaret, had been diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer at the age of five. She, too, almost died, and to save her life, doctors removed her ovaries, making it impossible for her to conceive. Shortly after Marvin’s hospitalization the couple adopted a baby girl and, four years later, a baby boy. Because of his long convalescence, Marvin dropped out of his father’s presidential campaign.

  When his brother George W. moved to Washington, he did not want to live in the Vice President’s thirty-three-room mansion. Instead, he and Laura and their six-year-old twins rented a town house about a mile away. They had been keeping their distance from the family for several years, passing up the 1980 presidential race, forgoing summers in Kennebunkport, and even skipping the big surprise party in January 1986 that George threw for Barbara on their forty-first wedding anniversary. The Bushes’ friends had flown to Washington from all over the country to celebrate, and all the family was on hand, except for W. and Laura. Doro and William LeBlond, who married in 1982, had flown in from Maine; Neil and Sharon from Colorado; Jeb and Columba from Florida; Marvin and Margaret from Virginia; but young George and Laura remained in Texas. “It’s a long way,” Barbara said later, “and too expensive,” reminiscent of her comments after she did not attend her mother’s funeral.

  She knew that distance and expense had nothing to do with the absence of her firstborn. Family members, including Louise Walker, confirmed that Barbara had stopped speaking to her son for more than a year. At that point George W.’s drinking was out of control, and his drunken outbursts had become a source of unending embarrassment to his wife and to his parents, who no longer wanted to be around him. The last eruption at a family gathering had been W.’s tactless crack to Gerry Bemiss’s wife during her fiftieth birthday party. “So, what’s sex like after 50, anyway?” George asked. It would be several more months before he finally decided to stop drinking. During that time he began attending a men’s Bible class in Midland. He was grappling with the prospect of turning forty on July 6, 1986, and trying to stay afloat in the oil business as prices collapsed. Following his company’s merger with Harken, he was paid $80,000 a year as a consultant (translation: for being the Vice President’s son), but he had no business to run, no office to manage, no professional responsibilities to uphold.

  Once he sobered up, his mother told him he could join his father’s campaign, although his father never directly asked for his assistance. “He didn’t want me to disrupt my life for him, when in fact, I was looking for, you know, the invitation to come and go to battle with him,” said George W. The decision to move to Washington was also one of self-preservation, knowing that the son also rises. “If his father lost, he would be the forgotten son of a Vice President,” said his cousin John Ellis. “If his father won, a whole world would open up. His fate would rise and fall with his father’s.”

  Years later George said that the eighteen months he spent in his father’s presidential campaign were the best months of his life and reignited his interest in politics. His wife agreed. “I think working with his dad, like George got to do in 1988 . . . if there was any sort of leftover competition with being named George Bush and being the eldest, that it really at that point was resolved.”

  Junior, as he was called, signed on to the Bush presidential campaign for five thousand dollars a month to be, in his words, “an organizer, hand-holder and surrogate for my father.” He told a reporter: “When your name is George Bush, you don’t need a title in the George Bush campaign.”

  The Vice President’s staff called him “the enforcer from hell” and gave him a wide berth. “He was mean, tough, and focused,” said the deputy chief of staff. “We treated him the same way we’d treat any hit man.”

  The dauphin strutted into Bush headquarters in his cowboy boots, chewing tobacco and carrying a Styrofoam cup as his spittoon. “Just call me Maureen,” he told the receptionist, taking a swipe at President Reagan’s daughter, who was notorious for bossing her father’s staff. George bonded immediately with Lee Atwater, also keen, quick, and nasty. George won over the rest of the staff when he said: “Just let me know what I can do to help. All I want to do is get my father elected President.” He made few demands, other than to take time out every day to jog. He also took weekends off. On road trips he insisted on spending no more than two nights away from D.C. Part of staying sober depended on maintaining a strict routine. He had fallen off the wagon a few times since his fortieth birthday, but was trying hard to stay sober. So if he was in California for more than forty-eight hours, he insisted the campaign fly him back to Washington for a few days to decompress, then fly him back to California.

  Presidential politics—as well as politicans’ relationships with the media—changed abruptly that spring, when the Democratic front-runner, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, lost his candidacy over an extramarital dalliance. Long plagued by rumors of womanizing, Hart, a married man with children, had spent the night with a young model named Donna Rice. She was photographed sitting on his lap aboard a yacht in Bimini ludicrously named Monkey Business. Hart denied allegations of their affair published in The Miami Herald and challenged reporters to follow him if they did not believe him. Their stakeout of his Washington town house generated massive media frenzy and unleashed a series of investigations into his personal life.

  He tried to recoup his standing at a press conference a few days later, but his career was over when he refused to answer a Washington Post reporter’s question: “Have you ever committed adultery?” Faced with future disclosures of his indiscretions, Hart withdrew from the presidential race on May 8, 1987, in a bitter farewell speech.

  That episode shook the timbers of presidential politics. The once-unmentionable subject of a man’s personal life was now fair game for reporters. It became a measure of a candidate’s character. Every candidate scrambled for cover, including the Republican front-runner. The Bush campaign became particularly concerned when a gossip columnist in the Chicago Sun-Times mentioned that several people were working on a story about George Bush that would link “Mr. Boring” to “a prominent east coast socialite and the wife of a close supporter.” The e
xposé never materialized, but it threw Lee Atwater into manic overdrive. He grabbed the phones and peppered reporters. “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya workin’ on? Whadda ya got?”

  Over lunch with editors from Newsweek, Atwater claimed that his candidate did not have “a pecker problem.” The magazine’s Howard Fineman called him later for an official denial. Atwater said he would get back to him, and sprinted into young George’s office. Together they approached the Vice President. The campaign’s press spokesman argued against addressing the rumors, and giving journalists an excuse to broadcast them, and the Vice President agreed, but Atwater and George W. insisted they had to respond. With characteristic bluntness, George asked his father: “Well? You’ve heard the rumors. What do you say?” The adoring son had no doubt about his father’s response.

  “They’re just not true,” said big George.

  Junior called Howard Fineman: “The answer to the Big A question is N-O.”

  Fineman mentioned that supporters of Senator Bob Dole and other Republican presidential contenders were fanning the infidelity rumors.

  “They’re trying to undermine one of my father’s great political strengths—the strength of our family,” said George W.

  Newsweek ran the story under the headline “Bush and the ‘Big A Question.’” “I have no idea what the Bush people were thinking when they came up with that response,” Fineman said later. “We wouldn’t have run anything at all if the son of the vice president hadn’t called us in this really extraordinary fashion.”

  George W. did not realize then that he had lied for his father, who was angry about the incident. According to an Evans and Novak column, “[The Vice President] expressed the opinion that his son and staff would have been well advised to follow his example and keep silent.”

  Many reporters felt conflicted about prying into a politician’s personal life. Some were revulsed at the prospect of inquiring about extramarital affairs. Others, like William Greider, a Rolling Stone columnist and formerly with The Washington Post, said the topic was legitimate. “The press didn’t invent the practice of candidates using their families as a selling point. Politicians who use their families to create a public image have no grounds for complaint when the press demonstrates that image is false.”

  Four months later Newsweek dropped a bomb on Bush that nearly obliterated his candidacy. On the eve of his formal announcement for the presidency in October 1987, the magazine ran a cover story titled “Bush Battles the Wimp Factor.” George never totally recovered from the fallout of that article, which seemed to ratify the knocks against him as “a lapdog,” “an empty suit,” and “Ronald Reagan’s little echo.” The word “wimp,” with all its implications of weakness, was a wallop to a politician struggling to be seen as strong and decisive.

  George immediately went on the attack but sounded pitiful as he struck back. “It’s a lousy cheap shot,” he told a crowd in Red Oak, Iowa, “and the American people don’t make up their minds over what some elite publication in the East is going to think.”

  He went on CNN’s Larry King Live and talked about his exploits during World War II and the death of his child:

  Nobody on our carrier when I landed there in the water with four depth charges in my plane or after I got back to the ship after being dropped down, said, “Hey, you wimp, I want to talk to you about something.” Nobody ever said that when Barbara and I . . . went through a tragedy of seeing our daughter wrenched away from us by cancer, six months sitting at that child’s bedside . . . Nobody said that at the CIA when I went out there and said, “Look, we’re going to make some changes here and then I’m going to lead you people, I’m going to lift you up and lead you . . .” Here’s my heartbeat, here’s my pulse right here. Here’s what I’ve done in my life. Now you call me a wimp.

  He ranted against Newsweek editors for months and berated Evan Thomas, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief. The Bush family rallied and tried to help restore his manhood.

  “I’m infuriated,” said Barbara Bush. “It was a cheap shot . . . It hurt. It hurt our children, truthfully. It hurt George’s mother. It hurt me. I mean it was hurtful . . . I never want to hear that word again.”

  “My father is a hero,” said Marvin Bush.

  Nancy Bush Ellis wrote a scathing letter to Katharine Graham, the owner of Newsweek and one of Nan’s occasional tennis partners. “I felt there were terrible misconceptions,” she said. “The whole wimp, elitist, preppy thing.”

  Neil Bush weighed in. “I get very upset when people try to portray my father as not being a man of character,” he said. “There is a four-letter word that begins with a ‘w’ and ends with i-m-p. It’s so outrageous.”

  No one was more irate than George W. Bush, who unleashed a stream of coarse vulgarities against the magazine and all its writers. To their faces he called them “assholes,” and behind their backs he cursed their mothers. He also cut them off from any further access to his father. “I felt responsible, because I had approved the interview,” he said. “I was livid, and I let a lot of people know exactly how I felt.”

  Young George saw the wimp cover as nothing less than a public castration. Like the hotheaded Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, he became savage about avenging his father’s honor and preserving the family’s political fortunes. Profane, abusive, and ugly, he lashed out at reporters whose stories he did not like, sometimes becoming frighteningly confrontational.

  When he saw Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal having dinner in a restaurant with his family, Junior blasphemed him in front of Hunt’s four-year-old son for an article he had written criticizing the elder Bush. “You [expletive] son of a bitch,” Bush yelled. “I saw what you wrote. We’re not going to forget this.”

  George accosted a television correspondent and demanded to know: “Who the hell do you think you are talking about my father that way?” He became so crazed that Lee Atwater limited his press dealings. “I gotta keep the boy caged,” Atwater joked. Unfortunately, Atwater was not around when George started bullying female reporters.

  “I had a terrifying experience with George W. when I was writing a feature on his mother for Lear’s magazine,” said the Washington journalist Sandra McElwaine. “I was having lunch at the Federal City Club in Washington and saw George W. as I was leaving. So I went over to introduce myself. ‘Excuse me for interrupting you but I’ve been trying to reach you by phone for weeks on a story that . . .’ I couldn’t even finish my sentence before he started yelling at me. ‘That’s not true. You have NOT tried to reach me. You’re lying.’

  “‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘I’ve called several times and spoken with your secretary and her name is . . .’

  “‘That’s a goddamn lie and furthermore who are you to be interrupting my lunch.’

  “He got red in the face and pig-eyed and became so hostile I got scared. I should never have interrupted his meal, but I assure you that the reaction I got was an overreaction to what I had done. When he started screaming at me, I backed away and apologized and ran off. He was one of the nastiest people I have ever encountered.”

  Susan Watters, the Washington correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily, was equally shaken after her unnerving encounter with the first son. During a White House reception that the press had been invited to cover, Watters approached Doro Bush to get a correct identification for a picture the WWD photographer had taken of Doro and her escort.

  “George W. raced across the room and started yelling at me for talking to his sister,” Watters said. “I was so taken aback . . . by his anger and his offensive language . . . that I didn’t know what to say . . . I needed an ID caption . . . He snarled, ‘Leave us alone. Why don’t you just leave us alone, you so-and-so.’

  “‘This is my job,’ I said . . . He was scary, really scary.”

  While George W. was working in the Washington campaign headquarters, his younger brother Neil was working in Iowa as his father’s surrogate at forums around the state. When the results of the Ames straw
poll arrived and the Vice President finished a humiliating fourth, Neil became petulant.

  “Let me just tell you a thing or two,” he said. “Iowa isn’t the only state that matters. There’s New Hampshire and we’ve got the governor [John Sununu].”

  Neil’s father reverted to type in explaining his defeat. “A lot of the people that support me . . . were at their daughters’ coming-out parties, or teeing up at the golf course for that all-important last round.”

  After Iowa the Vice President was derided as weak and unelectable. He trailed the Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis by double digits in the polls, and his negative ratings were among the highest of any presidential candidate in history. George was desperate to turn things around. “We got to get me out there,” he told his campaign aides. “We got to get more of me out there.” He decided the best way to restore his image was to play up his war record, but in the end he overplayed it. He wrote a book with Doug Wead, an evangelical on his campaign staff, titled Man of Integrity. Instead of establishing himself as a genuine hero, George created doubts in the minds of many about what actually happened when he bailed out of his plane over Chichi-Jima in World War II. One of the gunners in his unit, Chester Mierzejewski, was so upset by what George told David Frost in an interview in December 1987 that he publicly challenged George and left the impression that he had not fully told the truth about the tragedy that killed his crew.

  George had always maintained that he never knew exactly what had happened to his two-man crew. He had repeatedly said that when he finished his bombing run, he flew out to sea and kept his plane aloft long enough for the crew to jump. Only in the Wead book does he imply that he saw what happened to his crew. Contrary to what he had claimed in the past, George now put down in print that he saw his gunner, Lieutenant William G. White, killed by machine-gun fire and his radioman, John Delaney, parachute out. George also claimed that a second parachute, Delaney’s, was fired on.