by Kitty Kelley
“It’s hard not to notice how white this crowd is,” Paul Jennings noted in The Texas Observer. “Not just mostly white. Really white. Take away Colin Powell and the A&M grounds crew, and you basically have the whitest group of people that you’re likely to run across outside of a gun show.”
In his welcoming remarks, the Texas governor bashed bonhomie to smithereens. He praised his father in a way that panned his successor: “I’m here to praise my father as a man who entered the political arena and left with his integrity intact . . . A war hero, a loving husband . . . and a President who brought dignity and character and honor to the White House.”
On paper the governor’s words looked benign and loving, but spoken by a prideful son at the height of Clinton’s personal scandal in front of a predominantly Republican crowd, they sounded biting and censorious. The assault on the President’s integrity was not lost on anyone.
“His speech was rude and insulting,” said Bobbie Greene, a Clinton aide. “His theme was lack of morality, which was totally inappropriate in that particular setting, especially when President Clinton spoke so warmly and well of his father.”
“They [the Bushes] keep believing they can exalt themselves by running down Clinton’s character,” said George Stephanopoulos, another White House assistant. “But Clinton keeps winning.”
Noting the governor’s edgy speech, Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times, “George W. was serving notice on that stage that he would be the instrument of vindicating his father’s loss to Bill Clinton.”
Barbara Bush, who would not tolerate a negative word about her husband or her children, took exception. “I later heard that some people thought George W. got too close to the line when he spoke about his dad’s decency and honesty. That really bothered me, because I remember when I was campaigning for George [in 1992] and would talk about his decency and honesty, reporters would say: ‘Do you mean you don’t think his opponent is decent or honest?’ I would answer, ‘Who’s talking about him? I’m talking about George Bush.’ Well, we were here to talk about George Bush and you can’t mention George Bush unless you talk about decency and honor.”
The family had never accepted Bill Clinton as a worthy successor, and they delighted in his unfolding scandal. They e-mailed one another ribald jokes about Monica Lewinsky and became as preoccupied as the rest of the country with the prurient coverage of Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit against Clinton. When it was reported that the plaintiff claimed she could identify a “distinguishing characteristic” of Clinton’s anatomy, the former President, once CIA director, did not rest until he discovered exactly what she was talking about. He then e-mailed his sons and several male friends a clinical description of Peyronie’s syndrome, which can cause a distinct curvature of the male sexual organ. One man recalled the fillip to Bush’s locker-room e-mail: “And, of course, his Johnson curves to the left.” Among themselves the Bushes could not get enough of Clinton’s humiliation.
By 1998 the family was looking toward its restoration through the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush, whose reelection as governor seemed assured, which would make him the first Texas governor to win back-to-back terms. When asked if George W. would run for President in 2000, his mother told reporters, “If he doesn’t, I’ll kill him.” Barbara Bush already referred to her son as “the Chosen One.”
When the television journalist Paula Zahn and her producer interviewed the elder Bush for a CNN profile at Kennebunkport, Mrs. Bush invited them to stay for drinks and dinner with the governor and Laura Bush, who happened to be visiting.
“Part of this story is how Barbara jabs and needles her son,” recalled someone familiar with the evening. “They really do go at each other . . . but it’s mostly Barbara. That evening George W. was getting antsy because he’s impatient, he doesn’t drink anymore, and he was hungry. He paced back and forth, making everyone feel uncomfortable. He kept saying, ‘C’mon. Let’s eat.’ The elder Bush was drooling over Paula Zahn’s legs, and the younger Bush was yammering to get to the dinner table. Finally Barbara said, ‘I guess we’ll all have to gulp our drinks to satisfy the Chosen One. C’mon, George, let’s get moving. The Chosen One wants his dinner. We dare not keep the Chosen One waiting.’ By the time they all sat down, the sun was setting and the last bit of light reflected off the window and framed George W. like a halo. His face was bathed in light as he sat at the table. ‘See,’ yelled his mother. ‘I told you he was the Chosen One.’”
The governor of Texas realized that having his brother as governor of Florida could be an enormous advantage in 2000, so George W. went out of his way to help Jeb win his race. He arranged several fund-raisers for him in Texas, screened his television ads, and dispatched the family to campaign throughout Florida. Both brothers billed themselves as “compassionate conservatives” and tarred their opponents as Clinton Democrats, stopping just short of calling for the President’s impeachment. At a debate in Florida, which his mother attended, Jeb said, “The White House is no longer a symbol of righteousness, a symbol of something good, and we need to restore it.”
Both brothers were elected resoundingly in November 1998 (Jeb won 56 percent to 44 percent; George won 69 percent to 31 percent), prompting their father to proclaim that Election Day the happiest day of his life. Their mother could barely contain herself. “This means that one out of every eight Americans will now be governed by one of my boys,” she said proudly.
Two weeks later the two brothers made their debut at the Republican Governors Association in New Orleans. Basking in the spotlight, they held a news conference for the national press corps.
“I wanted to introduce my little brother to the Texas press corps,” said George W., “but it looks like some others came along.”
The two joshed onstage as a horde of reporters peppered them with questions.
“Can I disagree on one thing?” Jeb asked.
“Yeah. Just make sure it’s a minor point,” said George W., adding, “I’ve been telling him what to do for 45 years and he hasn’t listened yet.”
When someone called out “Governor Bush?” they looked at each other and laughed.
A reporter asked about the presidential election in 2000.
“Let me just say this,” said George W. “For someone who is running for president, it would be wise for them to knock on Jeb Bush’s door. Florida’s an important state.”
The Texas governor tried to dodge answering the question of whether he would run, although the Florida governor gave him a resounding endorsement.
“Listen, I didn’t grow up wanting to be president of the United States,” said George W.
Jeb smiled wistfully. “I did,” he said.
“Yeah,” his brother replied. “You did.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds,” asked the English philosopher John Locke in 1689, “or of the falsehood of all he condemns?”
Just such a man was sitting in the statehouse in Austin, Texas. Within days of his reelection as governor, George W. Bush was secretly planning to run for President, because, as he said, he felt certain he had been called. He was encouraged in this belief by evangelical friends like Doug Wead and by his mother, who called him “the Chosen One.” Anticipating W.’s reelection in 1998, Wead had written a memo encouraging George to run despite his less than promising past. “You have been given a great opportunity, an opportunity that has been denied to many who have sought it. It is a gift that has rarely been extended. It might not ever be extended again.”
During the religious service for W.’s second inaugural, the Reverend Mark Craig, pastor of the United Methodist Church of Dallas, preached about a calling for public service. Barbara Bush leaned over and whispered to her son, “He’s speaking to you.”
By then George had come to believe it himself. Seven months earlier he had not been so sure. At that time Karl Rove had escorted him on his first pilgrimage to the home of
former Secretary of State George Shultz on the campus of Stanford University. Shultz was the Jack Steele Parker Professor of International Economics at the Graduate School of Business as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He had gathered a few former Reagan and Bush economists as well as the Stanford provost Condoleezza Rice to take a look at the fifty-two-year-old governor, whom Republicans were clamoring to make their nominee. Having raised $24 million for his race for governor, George had proved himself a stupendous fund-raiser, and his financial backers now wanted to go the distance for a national race.
His top-ten contributors were:
Knowing that the Palo Alto crowd was looking for someone like Ronald Reagan, George arrived at his first policy salon slightly nervous but charmingly self-effacing.
“You’re my professors,” he told them. “I’m the Econ 1 student, and I’m taking it again because I didn’t do well in it in college.” He did not mention his disappointing grades in economics—71 for the first semester and 72 for the second semester—which put him at the bottom of his class at Yale. Instead, he asked the assembled sages what they thought of his plan to reform Social Security by allowing younger workers to invest some of their accumulated revenue in the stock market.
“I’m a little concerned about how much risk is there,” George said. “What do you do to prevent people from investing in worm farms?”
The policy discussion lasted several hours, and when George left, he felt a little surer of himself.
“They didn’t seem to think I was slobbering on my shoes,” he said to Rove.
After that session, George Shultz, then seventy-nine, began making regular trips to Austin to tutor the governor in foreign policy. A long line of GOP elders followed Shultz, practically begging the governor to run. W. was young, attractive, and had a brand name. “It was just one big massive hug around this guy they thought was the most likely to deliver a Republican White House,” said the pollster Frank Luntz. Without trying, George was perceived as—and had virtually become—the party’s best chance to beat Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election. Despite an unprecedented period of economic prosperity and world peace during the Clinton-Gore years, the Vice President was considered vulnerable because he would be running in the scandalous wake of the President.
Having spent most of his public life scrambling (in fact, desperate) to become President, George Herbert Walker Bush could not believe what was happening. He was dumbfounded by the presidential groundswell engulfing his son and totally perplexed as he watched his party go down on bended knee to proffer its nomination. He was the last to recognize George’s success at retail politics. This was the son he least expected to succeed in anything, let alone national politics. Dizzy with disbelief, George senior sought advice from old friends in Congress about whether George junior should run.
“When he called me, I told him I didn’t think the kid was ready,” said Dan Rostenkowski, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who served fifteen months in a federal prison and was fined $100,000 for running petty scams out of his congressional office. “George assured me his boy was ready, so I said, why the hell are you asking me then . . . I like the old man. I think he should’ve been reelected. George senior went up against the right-wing conservative bastards in his party in 1990 and did the right thing for the country by raising taxes and laying the foundation for the economic growth that took place under Clinton . . . Of course, Clinton took all the bows, but it was George Bush who made it possible . . . When he called to ask me if his kid should go for it, I said that if it’s his time, he should grab it because the time only comes around once.”
While his father was canvassing friends for a consensus on his son’s political future, George W. had already decided. By November 1998 the endearing modesty of the previous April had disappeared, and in its place was something mightily short of the divine right of kings. George W. had come to believe that he had been “called” to the presidency.
“There’s a sense of entitlement that all the Bushes have,” said Ron Reagan Jr. in 2004. “They feel as if they’re entitled to everything that comes their way. I know that the first President Bush felt that he deserved to be President because it was his ‘turn’ to be President. It was his due. He’d served all the people he was supposed to have served. He’d put in the time. He’d done favors for all the powerful people he needed to do favors for. So in his mind, he deserved to be President . . . His son George W. Bush was ‘run’ for President. They [the party establishment] came to him and said, ‘You’ve got the name recognition, we can raise the money and run you . . .’ I think they looked around at the other potential candidates and thought, ‘There’s no one else out there we can control.’ They found the perfect empty vessel in W. He’ll go wherever the wind will go. And ‘they’re’ in charge of the wind. That doesn’t mean he’s stupid. I don’t believe he is. I think he’s of average intelligence . . . My sense of him is that he’s not ideologically motivated at all. But he’s certainly willing to use an ideology to benefit himself. I think George W. Bush’s ideology is the ideology of self.”
The forty-six-year-old son of President Reagan said he did not share the same sense of entitlement as George W. Bush. “I don’t know why I don’t have the same feeling,” Reagan said. “My father wasn’t from old money for one thing. He did most of what he did on his own. He had help; obviously, he didn’t do everything by himself. No one gets to be President of the United States without help. But he became President on his own accomplishments . . . Remember when the first President Bush spoke about the vision thing? Well, for my father, vision wasn’t a ‘thing.’ You can argue with my father’s point of view and his policies, which I’m certainly willing to do, but he was a man with a genuine vision. He had very specific beliefs, and he stood by them . . . My father wrote his own speeches. He used to write his own radio addresses. I grew up watching him do that as a child. The Bushes can barely read their own speeches, much less write them . . . I believe the Bush vision—for both H.W. and W.—is probably wrapped up in their family fortunes rather than in anything that has to do with the good of the country.”
Despite the pleas of his closest friends and his twin daughters not to seek the presidency, George W. Bush felt that he was the only man who could save the Republican Party. As his close friend and top aide Clay Johnson recalled, it was a “calling, this sense of there’s a need [that only] I, George W. Bush, [can] satisfy.”
“Very close personal friends of his and Laura’s tried to talk him out of this,” said Johnson, who went to Andover and Yale with George. “And one woman in particular, a good friend of theirs for many years, just pleaded with him not to run. It would so irrevocably change their lives that she just asked them please not to run. ‘Don’t do this to yourself.’ And his response to her was, ‘Look, I share your concern. But if I don’t run, who else is there? If not me, who? Who do we want—who are we going to be pleased with as our next President? We—I would love to think that there’s somebody else out there that we could all get behind, but I don’t know who that person is.’”
The timing was impeccable. Even if George lost, he still remained governor of the second-largest state in the nation. Having become a multimillionaire, he no longer needed to work. He had hit the jackpot in June 1998, when Tom Hicks, one of the Bush family’s biggest contributors, bought the Texas Rangers for $260 million. For his 1989 investment of $500,000, George received $15 million. “When all is said and done, I will have made more money than I ever dreamed,” he said.
“Who knew that he would be further blessed with an opponent [Al Gore] so wooden and awkward and arch that he would make people overlook Bush’s abysmal lack of fitness for the highest office in the land?” said a disgruntled member of the Democratic National Committee several years later.
At the time, Vice President Gore was assumed to be the Democratic nominee for 2000. Ordinarily, his incumbency would have given him an unbeatable advantage, but the Democrats had been dam
aged by the scandals surrounding President Clinton, who was impeached by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998, on one count of obstruction of justice and one count of perjury. It was an extraordinarily contentious period in America’s political life, but the Senate acquitted Clinton on both charges, permitting the forty-second President to complete the remaining 708 days of his term.
President Clinton had lied under oath—and on television to the American public—about his sexual involvement with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. His sex life and his defense of his actions had taken the country on a lascivious loop-de-loop for thirteen months. The Vice President had defended the President against the squalid accusations, but when it became clear that the President had lied to his wife, to his cabinet, and to the country, the Vice President was aghast.
“What he did was inexcusable,” Gore said on national television, “and particularly as a father, I felt that it was terribly wrong, obviously.”
The Republicans pounced. They saw that their best chance for recapturing the White House resided in the firstborn son of a family universally accepted as good and wholesome. “Family values” became a term of indictment against Bill Clinton. Every time George W. Bush said he was running “to restore dignity to the White House,” he subliminally called up the image of a twenty-two-year-old intern from Beverly Hills snapping her thong at the President of the United States. Her seductive trifle had led to a constitutional crisis, following a relationship of oral sex and telephone sex that by turns titillated and revolted all who had become fixated on the saga as it unfolded twenty-four hours a day on television and radio.
At the time Al Gore formally announced his candidacy in June 1999, he did not know how to personally dissociate himself from the man who had made him Vice President and still claim the political advantage of the administration’s peace and prosperity. It was a problem that vexed him throughout the campaign, throwing him on the defensive as he teeter-tottered on the Clinton seesaw. The President dominated the primaries of both parties. He was the dog’s mess in the middle of the living room; Democrats tried to escape, while Republicans kept dragging them back to rub their noses in it.