by Kitty Kelley
“You can’t believe all the money the Bushes have,” said Sharon Bush, Neil’s former wife. “Bar doesn’t like anyone to think they’re rich because then people might not contribute to her sons’ political campaigns, but she and Gampy [George Senior] are really, really rich . . . They are paid thousands just to appear at corporate events—they don’t even have to speak, but when they do, they get huge fees . . . They have a full-time Secret Service protection—twelve agents all the time . . . they fly all over the world on private planes. They cruise for free on John Latsis’s yacht every summer, which has twelve marble bathrooms on board . . . Mr. Latsis only gives his yacht to two people in the world—Prince Charles and George Bush . . . Every time they go to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Singapore or Thailand, you can’t believe all the money they are paid and the presents they are given.”
The Bushes’ former daughter-in-law described splendid gifts of diamond-encrusted jewelry, Cartier watches, ruby-inlaid bracelets, emerald necklaces, platinum rings, precious porcelain, silk carpets, leather goods, and 24-karat gold sculptures that she said were worth “hundreds and thousands of dollars, probably millions.” She asserted that the gifts collected by President Bush during his three-day trip to Kuwait in April 1993 took his Houston staff four months to catalog.
Sharon Bush saw firsthand how easy it was for her father-in-law to accumulate wealth. In her view, he simply turned on money spigots all over the world, especially in Asia and the Middle East. She witnessed oil-rich potentates lining up to befriend the Bushes at any cost. She watched lucrative contracts and extravagant consulting fees flow into the family coffers as the former President traveled the world, steering foreign business to his sons Neil and Marvin. Seeing the wealth of goods and services that rained down on the family, Sharon Bush could be forgiven for describing their lifestyle as one of “never-ending luxury.”
Three months after he left office, George H.W. Bush made his triumphant entry into Kuwait, where he was hailed as “Abu Abdullah,” which is Arabic for “Worshipper of God.” Kuwait Airways had provided a special plane for the presidential party, which included the elder Bushes; their sons Neil and Marvin and their wives; Laura Bush; former Secretary of State James A. Baker III; former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu; former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady; Bush’s good friend Lud Ashley; and retired Army Lieutenant General Thomas Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1992 Persian Gulf War.
Having already contributed over $1 million to the George Bush Presidential Library, the Kuwaitis planned a three-day Festival of Gratitude to fete their “liberator,” which Kuwaiti newspapers dubbed “Operation Love Storm.” Bush was bathed in adulation from the moment he arrived. He addressed the Kuwaiti parliament and received the nation’s highest medal from the Emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah. Chanting women lined the streets as robed swordsmen danced to the rhythm of beating drums and little children waved banners that read: “Oh dear Bush you are the delight of our smiling eyes.”
After the three-day festival, George and Barbara flew home, leaving their entourage to drum up business in the little kingdom. John Sununu, representing Westinghouse, and General Kelly and James Baker, representing Enron, negotiated for contracts to rebuild bomb-damaged Kuwaiti power plants. The rights to rebuild three plants and operate them over twenty years were worth $4 billion. Marvin Bush had been retained by his father’s former military aide Admiral Daniel J. Murphy to negotiate bidding for American defense firms. Neil Bush, representing two Houston firms in which he was a partner, tried to get contracts for oil-related ventures from Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity and Water.
Weeks later the Kuwaiti government uncovered an Iraqi plan to assassinate President Bush during his visit. They arrested sixteen people, including eleven Iraqi nationals, and seized 550 pounds of explosives. An attempt on the life of a former President is considered an act of aggression against the United States itself, which forced the Clinton administration to react. After two months of investigation, the United States initiated air strikes against Baghdad and launched twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iraq’s intelligence agency. In a televised address to the nation on June 26, 1993, President Clinton called Iraq’s “attempt at revenge by a tyrant against the leader of the world coalition that defeated him in war . . . particularly loathsome and cowardly.”
The former National Security Council chief of counterterrorism Richard Clarke recalled on 60 Minutes: “We responded by blowing up Iraqi intelligence headquarters and by sending a very clear message through diplomatic channels to the Iraqis, saying if you do any terrorism against the United States again, it won’t just be Iraqi intelligence headquarters, it’ll be your whole government. It was a very chilling message. And apparently it worked because there’s absolutely no evidence of Iraqi terrorism since that day until we invaded [March 19, 2003] them. Now there’s Iraqi terrorism against the United States.”
Nevertheless, ten years later Saddam Hussein’s assassination attempt against his father would provoke George W. Bush to wage an all-out war against Iraq—claiming it was still a threat to the United States and linked to Al Qaeda terrorists—that would bitterly divide the United States and alienate European allies.
During the early months of his retirement the relationship between President Bush and the man who defeated him remained cordial enough so that George returned to the White House on occasion. He joined former presidents Ford and Carter in September 1993 in support of NAFTA. He was so impressed by President Clinton’s articulate command of the issue that he said, “Now I know why he’s inside looking out and I’m outside looking in.” George told The Washington Times that Barbara refused to accompany him to the White House because she was uncomfortable socializing with the Clintons. She remained bitter and intractable about losing the election and wanted nothing to do with her husband’s successor. Later, as President Clinton became mired in the scandal of his sexual involvement with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, George became as vociferous as his wife in his criticism of Clinton.
“I did my job with honor,” Bush told an audience at Eckerd College. “I take pride that Barbara and I treated the White House with respect and dignity and we didn’t have those scandals in our administration.”
While her husband focused disdain on the President, Barbara took aim at the First Lady. When a reporter asked what she thought about Hillary Clinton’s plans to run for the U.S. Senate from New York, Barbara looked as if she might regurgitate. “Let her do what she wants,” she snapped. “And when she loses, I think she’ll feel very badly.” Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the Senate in November 2000.
“Mrs. Bush would not accept any of Hillary’s invitations,” recalled a White House social aide. “She wouldn’t even come for the White House Endowment Fund dinner, and half the money raised that evening [to establish a fund to replenish the furnishings] was in her name. She came for her portrait dedication [July 1995] and for the two hundredth anniversary of the White House with other first ladies, but that was about it.”
The Bushes went into retirement like Salvation Army bell ringers, eager to rake in as much money as fast as they possibly could. George had a library to build, and Barbara wanted to retain the Barbara Bush Foundation staff and office. “Everyone knew that I had never earned any money as I had never seriously worked in the 48 years we had been married,” she said. “So besides losing the election, now at 68 years old I was going to have to make some money.”
She accepted $2.2 million (“They offered me a sum I couldn’t say no to,” she told TV’s Larry King) to write her autobiography, but the President chose not to write a postpresidential memoir, possibly because of the conflicting stories he had told over the years. He also had an obsession with secrets—personal and political. “I’m not writing a memoir,” he stated. “I’d rather let history decide.” Instead, he published a book of his letters (All the Best) and a book on his foreign policy (A World Transformed), which he wrote
with retired General Brent Scowcroft.
“I worked as the editorial assistant on A World Transformed in 1996,” said Leyla Aker, “and I remember the former President insisting he was writing it for his sons. Plural . . . He absolutely considered it his legacy.”
The sad irony is that the son who followed him as President seemed not to have read his father’s book, which laid out the steps for building the global consensus necessary to pursue U.S. foreign policy in a transformed world. By then, the son had decided that his father, who could not get himself reelected as President, was not a model for success.
In writing her book Barbara Bush: A Memoir, George H.W.’s wife achieved the distinction of becoming the only First Lady ever to be sued for libel. Barbara had written that Philip Agee, a former CIA agent, had identified Richard Welch as an agency operative in “a traitorous tell-all book” that caused Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, to be assassinated in December 1975. Agee denied her allegation and filed a $4 million libel lawsuit against her and her publisher, Lisa Drew Books of Charles Scribner’s Sons. Agee proved that he had not identified Welch in his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, and he demanded an apology from Mrs. Bush, plus an immediate retraction in the paperback edition of her book. Barbara refused to apologize for her mistake, but she did make the retraction.
“I did not have to pay the $4 million,” she said, “but it was a costly nuisance suit. I will hope not to have to go through that again!”
Two years after the lawsuit, her husband raised the issue in his remarks at the dedication ceremony of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as the George Bush Center for Intelligence: “[W]e need more protection for the methods we use to gather intelligence and more protection for our sources, particularly our human sources, people that are risking their lives for their country . . . Even though I’m a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life,” he said in April 1999, “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”
Those words would haunt his son four years later, when the conservative columnist Robert Novak, citing two unnamed sources in the George W. Bush administration, identified Valerie Plame, the wife of former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson, as a CIA agent. The Ambassador had been asked by the CIA, on orders from Vice President Dick Cheney, to investigate whether Iraq had tried to purchase nuclear materials—a charge that the Bush administration claimed was true and that it gave as a partial reason to justify invading the country and removing Saddam from power. The results of Wilson’s investigation, however, challenged Bush’s contention. Wilson found the rumors false, and he made his findings public. The Novak column looked like a spiteful attack by the Bush administration to punish the Ambassador for showing that the President had not told the truth in his State of the Union address. The leak to Novak became the subject of a grand jury investigation, which threatened felony charges for Novak’s sources, punishable by as long as ten years in prison.
The former President struggled with his enforced retirement. He could not give up wearing his presidential cuff links, his Air Force One windbreaker, or his sweat togs with the Camp David logo. Averse to looking through what physicians call the “retrospectoscope” to examine the mistakes that had led to his defeat, George Bush simply blamed the media. He constantly gave vent to his hostility. “I don’t like them and I don’t miss them,” he said. “As President I defended freedom of the press; now I rejoice in freedom from the press . . . I know I sound bitter but I don’t give a damn.”
He traveled the world collecting honors and awards, including a knighthood from the Queen in England. Corporations continued paying him $100,000 a speech. Global Crossing, the telecommunications company, paid him in stock that was worth $4.5 million when he sold. His audiences gave him standing ovations, and as he loosened up on the speaking circuit, he revealed a nastiness that he had once tried to conceal.
In a keynote address to a convention of home builders in Las Vegas, he talked about what it was like to be a former President. “One of my major disappointments is that demonstrations are meager now when people protest my appearances,” he said. He recalled one of his presidential motorcades in San Francisco, which had drawn a crowd of women’s rights activists. “I turned the corner and I saw the ugliest woman I’ve ever seen. She had a sign that said, ‘Stay out of my womb.’ And I thought, ‘No problem, lady.’”
Each speech was an occasion to reward friends, punish enemies, and castigate the media. George had never recovered from the humiliation of Newsweek’s “wimp” cover, which some relatives thought might have prompted his aggressive machismo on the speaking circuit. They speculated it was the need to prove his manhood that led him at the age of seventy-two to take up skydiving. His top aide, Jim McGrath, disagreed: “The reasons behind this are strictly personal . . . It has to do with World War II.”
McGrath’s remark gave rise to speculation that Bush might have been, as The Times of London wrote, “trying to exorcise demons from his earlier jump, the circumstances of which flared up into controversy during his presidential campaign.” His 1987 account of what happened during World War II differed from his earlier version, causing some to wonder if he had panicked when his plane was hit by the Japanese and bailed out before trying to save his crew.
Bush admitted that he was still haunted by jumping out of his plane over Chichi-Jima. “I never really dwelled on making another jump,” he told Hugh Sidey. “But it was always a thought back in my mind: Do it again and do it right.”
To prepare for his first peacetime jump, Bush gave up martinis for a month to get in shape, and he took six hours of flight training. On March 25, 1997, accompanied by two guides from the Army’s elite Golden Knights parachute team, George jumped out of a military plane 12,500 feet above the Arizona desert. “I’m a new man,” he exclaimed upon landing. Two years later, as part of his seventy-fifth birthday celebration, he decided to sell tickets and make a second jump for charity. More than one hundred members of the media converged in Houston to record that jump on June 9, 1999. Some reporters called it “historic” because no other former President had performed such a stunt. His parachute canopy carried the logo “The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.” At the joint birthday party for him and Barbara that followed in the Astrodome with three thousand paying guests, the Bushes raised $10.2 million to establish the George and Barbara Bush Endowment for Innovative Cancer Research at the University of Texas at Houston.
“We do a lot for charity,” said Barbara, rightfully proud of her work for good causes. She had joined the board of AmeriCares and the Mayo Clinic. In addition to being president of the Barbara Bush Texas Fund for Family Literacy, she became honorary chairman of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
But even in this area, there has been criticism of Barbara’s sincerity. “As the longtime honorary national chair of the society, Barbara Bush has made no effort whatsoever to play an active role—no fund-raising, no donations,” said someone close to the board of trustees of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. “There have been numerous occasions when she might easily have mentioned her role, especially as she and her husband lost a daughter to leukemia, but she has never done so. Yet she had written about her daughter’s death and spoken of it on national television at the GOP political convention. The mere mention of that role would have helped gain the society recognition, thus encouraging interest and donations. Not a word has she uttered. No public-service ads, no attendance at major society activities. And I’ve no knowledge of the family ever encouraging any of their wealthy friends to give money, either.”
While the Bushes are not philanthropists, their tax returns—up through 1991, the last year their returns are available—document their commitment to charity. Each year they contributed to Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones, plus all the schools their children attended. Their checks ranged from ten
dollars to one thousand dollars:
“The Bushes are great because if they belong to something, others want to belong, and big money will follow in their wake for a good cause,” said Larry Lewin of National Dialogue on Cancer, an umbrella organization of various cancer groups, which the Bushes supported as co-chairmen. “She’s a lot smarter than he is . . . George sometimes says silly things that don’t make sense or are inappropriate. I remember when the Johns Hopkins report came out that broccoli appeared more effective than antibiotics in fighting peptic ulcers and preventing breast and colon cancer. We were meeting at Kennebunkport and George stood up and said, ‘I don’t care if broccoli cures cancer, I’m not eating it. No way. No how. I can’t stand it. Don’t want it. Won’t eat it.’ He thought he was being funny, but it was a brainless remark and not at all amusing, considering who we were and why we were there. But, of course, we all forced a big belly laugh because of who he is.”
After four years of bell ringing around the world, George Bush had raised $83 million to build his limestone-and-marble presidential library on the campus of Texas A&M University. The dedication, on November 6, 1997, showcased the exclusive club of former presidents and first ladies who gathered to honor one of their own. President and Mrs. Clinton arrived on Air Force One to join President and Mrs. Ford, President and Mrs. Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Lady Bird Johnson. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg represented her parents, and Julie Nixon Eisenhower sat on the dais in the place of her father, who had been Bush’s major political mentor.
Jeb Bush acted as master of ceremonies for the event, which featured speeches by all the presidents and the two first ladies who were representing their husbands. As governor of Texas, George W. Bush welcomed the twenty thousand guests, including generals, senators, congressmen, ambassadors, corporate CEOs, university presidents and professors, televangelists, and movie stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Costner, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Willis. The former leaders of Britain, Canada, Bermuda, the Netherlands, Japan, and Poland also flew in for the occasion.