by Kitty Kelley
No one in the family denied that George had decided to challenge Ann Richards partly because she had poked fun at his father during the 1988 Democratic National Convention. “Years ago George’s emotions related to Ann Richards’s statements about my father would have been transparent,” said Marvin Bush. “It may have gotten to him. He may have publicly said something that he would regret. By the time the election rolled around in 1994, he was a different guy. He was disciplined. I think he surprised a lot of people who didn’t know him.”
Demonstrating robotic self-control, George stayed on message, which exasperated the governor, who could not rattle him. Later she said, on Larry King Live, “You know, if you said to George, ‘What time is it?’ he would say, ‘We must teach our children to read.’” Karl Rove had stressed four issues that mattered most to Texans—crime, education, welfare reform, and guns, guns, guns. Richards had defied the NRA by vetoing the concealed-weapons legislation, which George promised to sign, saying he supported guns for everyone. He also would sign a bill allowing Texans to carry guns in churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship. As his reward, he received the NRA’s endorsement and all their campaign money.
Remembering the effectiveness of his father’s Willie Horton ads, George aired a commercial of a man abducting a woman and holding a gun to her head while an announcer intoned that “in the last three years seventy-seven hundred criminals have been released early from prison.”
On the opening day of dove season, George shot a songbird known as a killdeer, an endangered species. Ann Richards ripped into him. “Guns don’t kill killdeer,” she said. “People kill killdeer.” George promptly confessed, paid a $130 fine, and opened a press conference that afternoon by saying, “Thank goodness it wasn’t deer season. I might have shot a cow.” He took so much ribbing for his mistake that he began introducing himself as “killdeer slayer.”
With this humorous exception, George kept to Rove’s script and never deviated. Polling highest among white males, he played to their visceral dislike of President Clinton, who had raised taxes and admitted gays into the military. Bush painted Ann Richards as an old-fashioned liberal tied to the Democratic administration in Washington. “While I’m going to win on issues that matter to Texans, the Clinton connection and Ann Richards’ affection for Clinton is not going to help her at all,” George told reporters. Being able to hog-tie both of his father’s foes gave the avenging son a powerful one-two punch. Because Ann Richards kept swiping at him as “Daddy’s little boy,” George banished his father from the campaign and never mentioned him by name. “The minute the other George Bush wades into the process, my message gets totally obscured,” he said. When he finally allowed “the old man” to appear with him in public a few days before the election, he introduced the elder Bush by saying, “Mr. President—Dad—we’re glad you’re here. After two years our country understands how much we miss you.” The white male Republican crowd characterized by the Texas writer Molly Ivins as “Clinton-hating, Christian-right, gay-bashing gun toters” gave both Bushes a foot-stomping ovation.
Early on George had become slightly testy when a Houston Chronicle reporter asked him whether he had ever used illegal drugs.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” he said. “What’s the difference?”
When the story broke, he held a news conference in Lubbock.
“What I did as a kid? I don’t think it’s relevant. I just don’t . . . don’t think it matters. I think what matters is my view on prisons, welfare reform and education . . . Did I behave irresponsibly as a kid at times? Sure did. You bet.” He had flown to Lubbock on his campaign plane, which he had named Accountability One.
When the issue of infidelity surfaced in Florida, Jeb Bush told reporters that the only woman he had ever slept with was his wife. When George heard his brother’s declaration, he was shocked. “Jeb said that? Oh, boy. No comment. I mean Jeb is setting a tough standard for the rest of us in that generation.”
Even as a married man, George had a whispered past, which almost surfaced during the campaign. A woman appeared in Austin, claiming to have been a call girl from Midland with an intimate knowledge of him during his days in the oil patch. “Supposedly she was ‘the other woman’ in his life, or one of them,” said Peck Young, an Austin political consultant. “She set herself up in a hotel here and was prepared to sell her story to the highest bidder . . . Word got around town, and she claimed she got a visit from some men who made her realize it was better to turn tricks in Midland than to stop breathing. She said she had been approached by what she described as ‘intelligence types.’ She left town abruptly.”
Some people felt that George’s past did not seep out and embarrass him and his family because he was protected by a coterie of former CIA men with an allegiance to his father.
“I know for a fact that during the early nineties in Houston there was an outfit we called Rent-A-Spook,” said Young. “They were retired Agency guys from NSA [National Security Agency] and CIA, and they were selling their expertise to companies that wanted to avoid corporate espionage. There were some unkind souls in Houston who claimed they would also commit corporate espionage if there were enough money involved . . . I ran into them once working on a political campaign, and they were very real and very professional and very scary . . . George junior has seemed to be protected by some invisible mechanism . . . and the speculation has been for years that that mechanism was Daddy’s old retainers from the agency . . . They have made young George bulletproof.”
The elder Bush’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency were so strong that when the former President built his presidential library at Texas A&M, the university also established the George Bush School of Government and Public Service next to the library, and installed a CIA career officer to teach and recruit for the CIA on campus. The school was dedicated on September 10, 1997, and the ceremony marked the debut of “The George Bush Presidential March,” played by the Texas A&M University band.
“Our cadet code of honor at Texas A&M is ‘Aggies do not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do,’” said Zach Leonard (class of 2002), “and that’s why the CIA wants to recruit from our corps of cadets. We have a sense of national service and a sense of duty to the country. Jim Olson, who is with the CIA, teaches ‘Cold War Intelligence’ at the George Bush School and does the CIA recruiting on campus. Allowing the CIA to recruit at Texas A&M is one of the reasons George Bush put his library here . . . He turned down Yale and Rice and the University of Texas to build here at College Station . . . He also made his former CIA director [1991–93] Robert M. Gates president of Texas A&M.”
Whether his father’s agency contacts insulated George from scrutiny during the 1994 campaign, it looked that way to many in the Richards camp. George appeared particularly invincible to the governor when she tried to make an issue of his insider trades of Harken stock. He had served on the board of Harken from 1986 until 1993, when he resigned to run for office. During those seven years he made four stock transactions for a total of $1 million, none of which was reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission within the legally specified time—the tenth of each month after the sale.
In December 1986, George borrowed $96,000 from Harken to buy 80,000 shares of Harken stock. He used the 212,000 shares of stock he already owned as collateral. He reported the sale to the SEC in April 1987, four months late. He said the SEC lost the original filing.
In June 1989, George borrowed $84,375 from Harken to buy 25,000 shares of Harken stock. He reported the sale to the SEC on October 23, 1989, fifteen weeks late. He blamed the Harken lawyers.
In 1989, Harken instituted a policy that relieved its directors of any personal obligation to repay their loans. This effectively freed up the 212,000 shares that George had used for collateral in 1986 so that he could sell them.
In June 1990, he sold 212,140 shares of Harken stock for $835,000. He reported the sale on March 4, 1991, thirty-four weeks late. One week before h
e sold the stock, Harken lawyers circulated a memo—one that George definitely saw—stating that Bush and other members of the troubled oil company’s board faced possible insider-trading risks if they unloaded their shares.
The reason for the memo was that questions were raised in 1989 as to whether Harken posted an improper profit on the sale of a subsidiary in order to obscure the company’s overall losses. The SEC forced them to restate their earnings. In August 1990, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss that was a result of trading in commodity futures and liabilities incurred through its subsidiary Aloha Petroleum. Eight days before this announcement George sold his stock. If he had known about the company’s impending loss and sold his shares beforehand because of it, he would have been guilty of profiting illegally from insider information. Businessmen go to prison for such offenses. Because he sat on the directors’ audit committee and the restructuring committee, he was assumed to know what was happening to the company’s finances and thus able to decide when best to sell his shares.
When confronted, he professed ignorance about the company’s loss—such ignorance would not have made him a very effective board member—and blamed the Harken accountants. His only comment on the matter: “All I can tell you is that in the corporate world, sometimes things aren’t exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures. [It’s up to the SEC] to determine whether or not the decision by the auditors was the appropriate decision. And they did look, and they decided that the earnings ought to be restated, and the company did so immediately.”
After an article in The Wall Street Journal, the SEC investigated George’s stock sale but never questioned him personally. “In its investigation the staff reviewed thousands of pages of documents produced by Harken and Bush,” said the SEC memorandum. One critical document not available to the SEC investigators: the memo from Harken lawyers warning the board that they faced possible insider-trading risks if they sold their shares. Not until the day after the SEC closed its investigation of George did his lawyer, Robert Jordan, turn over that memorandum of June 15, 1990, titled “Liability for Insider Trading and Short-Term Swing Profits.” By then the SEC had already reached its conclusion. When George became President, he appointed Robert Jordan to be Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
On August 21, 1991, while President Bush was in Kennebunkport preparing for the arrival of British Prime Minister John Major, the SEC released its report clearing the first son: “In light of the facts uncovered, it would be difficult to establish that, even assuming Bush possessed material nonpublic information, he acted with scienter [deliberately or knowingly] or intent to defraud.”
The SEC’s finding did not pass the smell test with Governor Richards. During the 1994 campaign she pointed out that the SEC chairman, Richard Breeden, had worked for George Bush when he was Vice President and later when Bush was President before Bush appointed him to the SEC. Breeden had been the principal architect of the President’s plan to restructure the savings-and-loan industry, for which Neil Bush had become the poster child. The general counsel of the SEC, James Doty, a big Bush supporter, had helped George W. put together his deal with the Texas Rangers, but Doty said he recused himself from George’s SEC investigation. Doty, who later joined James A. Baker’s law firm, Baker Botts, explained why the SEC took no action against George for his blatant disregard of reporting regulations: “Half of corporate America was filing those forms late at that time.”
Breeden, who lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and named his first son Prescott, said, “I knew that to protect the integrity of the investigation, I had to leave the investigation up to the career staff. I told them to do it the regular way—which means no holds barred—and I will stand up for you. If anything had been found, it would have been prosecuted. In the end, we didn’t bring a case because there was no case there.”
The Dallas Morning News reported that the SEC had dropped its case, but said the action “must in no way be construed that he [George W. Bush] has been exonerated.”
Toward the end of the campaign Governor Richards ran ads suggesting George was guilty of insider trading when he sold his Harken stock—a criminal act. The Bush campaign responded by rolling out its biggest gun to blast the governor: George’s mother.
“It makes me pretty darn mad,” said Barbara Bush, “to see these ads that just plain aren’t true. [George has] been a good, successful, decent, honest businessman. Why doesn’t Ann Richards talk about the issues? That’s what George is doing. She should be so lucky as to have a son like George.”
The voters agreed with the former First Lady. Despite Richards’s popularity—she maintained a 60 percent rating through Election Day—George won by more than 300,000 votes. Exit polls showed his strongest support to be among white Republican males. It was a stunning victory. But the Florida election was even more stunning. Jeb had been expected to win fairly easily, but he lost by 64,000 votes. The incumbent Governor Lawton Chiles defeated W.’s younger brother by fewer than two percentage points in the closest gubernatorial election in the state’s history. At home in Houston the elder Bushes were astounded. They had expected the results to be reversed—Jeb to win, George to lose. Having traveled throughout Florida helping Jeb raise over $3 million for his campaign, they were heartsick about his loss.
As George prepared to make his victory speech that night, his father phoned from Houston. After a few minutes, George hung up, dispirited. “It sounds like Dad’s only heard that Jeb lost,” he told his aunt Nancy. “Not that I’ve won.” George felt even worse when he saw his father interviewed on television. “The joy is in Texas,” said the former President. “My heart is in Florida.”
The mean streak that once fueled George as a bullyboy playing pig ball at Andover now surfaced to smack his brother. “Jeb would have been a great governor,” George told the press. “But such is life in the political world. You cannot go into politics fearing failure.” Earlier he had taken a whack at his father. “Bill Clinton drove the agenda against my father,” he told The New York Times. “My father let Bill Clinton decide what issues the two of them were going to talk about. That was a major mistake, and I wasn’t going to let it happen to me this year.”
The 1994 election put even greater distance between the two brothers: George sailed on the crest of his success, while Jeb nearly drowned in the undertow of his failure. The campaign almost cost him his family. His marriage was ruptured; his daughter, Noelle, seventeen, was on drugs, and his two sons, Jebby, eleven, and George P., eighteen, were unruly and out of control. His wife blamed him for the wreckage of their lives. Relatives told the writers Peter and Rochelle Schweizer that Columba Bush felt she and the children had paid too high a price for Jeb’s political ambition. The Schweizers quote her as saying, “You have ruined my life.”
Jeb would spend the next two years like Humpty Dumpty, trying to put himself back together again. Having grown up wanting to be President, he would not give up his political dreams, but he tried to make amends to his family as well as to the minority voters of Florida. He committed to Catholicism so he could share the religion of his wife and children. He attended classes at Informed Families, a drug-prevention agency in Miami. He started a public policy foundation to collect money to keep himself in the public eye. And he joined forces with a leader in the African American community of Miami to start a charter school.
Jeb and his wife attended George’s inauguration in January 1995, and the new governor did not let his brother’s presence go unremarked. From the podium he nodded toward Jeb. “He’s looking happy and proud, but also something else, maybe a little sad, too,” George said. “It’s a tough moment, tough for me to look at. I love my brother, you see.”
That morning Barbara gave George a letter from his father with a set of cuff links that Prescott had given to him when he won his Navy wings in 1943. The former President said the gift was “my most prized possession.” George hastily read his father’s letter. “At first I didn’t think about the continuity, the
grandfather part,” he recalled. “The main thing I thought was that it was from my dad. He was saying that he was proud of me. But later I reread the letter and thought about it. It ended with, ‘Now it’s your turn.’ It was a powerful moment.”
George and Barbara were not just passing out presents. They had rushed into their retirement with both hands out. Within weeks of leaving the White House, they were cashing in on their previous high office by charging stupendous speaking fees. Barbara offered herself for $40,000–$60,000 a speech, and her husband charged even more. For a speech in the States, he charged $80,000 plus first-class expenses, including limousines and hotel suites. For a speech abroad, he charged $100,000. The Bushes had left the White House in 1993 with a net worth of $4 million. Within ten years they were worth in excess of $20 million.
Like all former Presidents, George H.W. Bush received a yearly federal pension ($157,000), plus an additional pension (estimated to be about $100,000) for his government service as congressman (four years), UN Ambassador (two years), liaison to China (one year), CIA director (one year), and Vice President (eight years). He also received a budget for office, staff, travel, and rent ($623,000) and full Secret Service protection for himself and his wife. In addition, the Republican National Committee, unlike the Democratic National Committee, offers its former presidents $150,000 a year for administrative expenses. George Bush did not need his party’s offer, so he turned it down, saying that he would not trade on his high office by sitting on corporate boards or lobbying the U.S. government. “I will now try to conduct myself with dignity,” he said, “and in a way not to dishonor the office I was so proud to hold.” Still, he managed to derive stupendous profit from his presidency, proving that privilege pays.