by Kitty Kelley
SLATER: Governor, were you ever arrested after 1968?
BUSH: No.
When George first reported for jury duty at the Travis County Courthouse on September 30, 1996, he smiled for the television cameras. “I’m glad to serve,” he said. “I think it’s important. It’s one of the duties of citizenship . . . I’m just an average guy showing up for jury duty.”
Inside the courthouse he found out that he was a potential juror for a drunk-driving case. He summoned his general counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, to petition the court to exempt him because of the possibility that as governor he might be called upon to pardon the accused. Despite the far-fetched premise, the judge agreed as a courtesy to excuse him from jury duty. Bush would later appoint his lawyer to the Texas Supreme Court.
The Houston Chronicle reported the governor’s dismissal as “a development that allowed him to avoid potentially embarrassing questions about whether he had ever climbed behind the wheel after drinking.”
When reporters asked George if he had ever been arrested for driving while intoxicated, he said, “I do not have a perfect record as a youth.” No one thought to check the arrest records in places where he had lived as a youth—until November 2, 2000. Five days before Election Day, Tom Connolly, a longtime Maine Democrat, stumbled upon the twenty-four-year-old police report that the governor had concealed all his public life. The disclosure cost George more than a modicum of respect, especially since he had been presenting himself as honest and truthful in contrast to the Democrats. His obvious attempt to hide his arrest made reporters skeptical. They used the term “Clintonesque” to describe his squirmy attempts to handle questions about the cover-up. Karl Rove later estimated the revelation had cost Bush about 1 million votes, enough to make him lose the national popular vote.
When the Travis County prosecutor Ken Oden, a Democrat, learned of the governor’s arrest record, he felt Bush and his attorney had purposely misled him. “He used his position as governor to avoid having to answer potentially embarrassing questions about his past,” Oden told Salon.com. The defense attorney P. David Wahlberg said, “Everybody understood [Bush] just didn’t want to answer questions about drinking and drugs and things like that.”
Predictably, Barbara Bush rushed to her son’s defense. She claimed he had been arrested because he was “driving too slowly.” The arresting officer, Calvin Bridges, said he had cited George for “driving erratically and [running] off the road into some hedges.”
In her book Reflections, Barbara dismissed the arrest as “much ado about nothing.” She wrote, “Frankly, I think that instead of the effect that some hoped for, this might have reminded people that George had the discipline to give up drinking and that he was strong.”
Those closest to George agreed that the key to his new persona lay in his steely discipline. His sister described him as a fat boy who deprived himself to stay thin. His mother depicted a drinker who denied himself to stay dry. Both acknowledged that the effort to control these appetites was monumental. In order to maintain his rigid discipline, George imposed an inflexible order on his life. Like any addict in recovery, he needed a regular schedule, rising early and retiring early. He prayed daily from his One-Year Bible, which was divided into 365 readings, each from the New Testament, the Old Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs. Edgy and impatient, he exercised at least one hour, sometimes two hours, a day. With martinet punctuality, he started and ended meetings exactly on time. He refused to read memos longer than two pages. He thrived on making quick decisions. His religiosity allowed him to live in a black-and-white world of absolutes with no bedeviling in-betweens. His decisiveness sprang from his need to control and to establish order amid chaos. Once he made a decision, he rarely looked back. Reversing himself might be misinterpreted as a sign of weakness, and he dreaded nothing so much as looking wimpish. There would never be a “wimp factor” with George W. Bush.
He swaggered and smirked and seemed to enjoy shocking people with his exaggerated machismo. He cursed constantly, which his father, no stranger to ribald language, said started when he was five years old. In a 1951 letter to a friend, the elder Bush wrote, “Georgie aggravates the hell out of me talking dirty.” Years later reporters would be astonished by some of George’s obscenities. David Fink, formerly with The Hartford Courant, was stunned when he asked George what he and his father talked about. George’s response: “Pussy.”
“I just couldn’t use the word,” said Fink years later. “I wrote instead that he had made an unflattering reference to women. I know that he said it on the record, but part of me thought that . . . well, I would not talk that way to a stranger, much less to a reporter on the record . . . so I guess I protected him, because I thought maybe he was trying to be a guy ingratiating himself to another guy.”
When Tucker Carlson interviewed the governor for Talk magazine, he, too, was surprised by George’s vulgarity. Carlson asked about a rumor that the Gore campaign had a photograph of Bush dancing nude on top of a bar.
“They think it’s like a high school election,” George said, “where if you beat up your opponent enough you can win. They’ve lost their fucking minds.”
When a right-wing friend accused the born-again governor of taking the Lord’s name in vain, George exploded. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “Total bullshit.”
Whether talking to reporters, congressmen, or heads of state, George made no effort to curb his trash mouth. He called Adam Clymer of The New York Times a “major league asshole.” After praising Republican Representative Charles Whitlow Norwood Jr. of Georgia, George said, “So now that I’ve kissed your ass, what do I have to do to get a deal?” Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was taken aback to hear, “I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that.”
George’s cock-o’-the-walk manner served him well as governor of Texas. During his six years in the statehouse he allowed 152 executions (150 men and 2 women), a record unmatched by any other governor in modern history. He claimed he reviewed each execution case carefully, but research by The Atlantic Monthly suggested that he and his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, exhibited a shocking lack of attention to the facts of the cases that came before them. Gonzales’s memos, which never made specific recommendations to the governor, were found to be cursory summaries lacking crucial specifics about the execution cases. The final page of each summary contained the “Governor’s Clemency Decision” with a space for George to check “Deny” or “Grant” and affix his signature. In 152 out of 153 cases Bush checked “Deny.” Only once in six years did he intercede with his Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop an execution—that of an alleged serial killer who had been sentenced to die for a murder that two attorneys general concluded he did not commit.
The most famous plea for clemency came from Karla Faye Tucker, who had been convicted of a drug-induced murder of two people with a pickax. During her fourteen-year incarceration, Tucker apparently experienced a religious conversion and became a model prisoner who repented her crimes and asked for forgiveness. She petitioned the governor to stay her execution and commute her sentence to life. Texas had not executed a woman since 1863, and her plea received international attention. Her story was featured on 60 Minutes, The 700 Club, and Larry King Live for two consecutive nights. The televangelist Pat Robertson championed her case, as did the human rights activist Bianca Jagger and Pope John Paul II. Governor Bush would not meet with any of them. “If the crime fits the penalty, the penalty is given,” he said.
Two weeks before Tucker’s scheduled execution by lethal injection, CNN’s Larry King traveled to Gatesville, Texas, to interview the condemned prisoner from death row. She broke down and sobbed as she described her crime. She talked about her religious salvation and how she placed her faith in God.
KING: Do you think . . . politics and everything . . . that politics are involved? That part of the decision [for Governor Bush] is, will it hurt me with the electorate or help me with the electorate, if
I decide this? You do think that?
TUCKER: Oh, yes. I am not crazy. I do believe that.
KING: And Texans like capital punishment?
TUCKER: Yes.
KING: So you’re in trouble there?
TUCKER: Naturally speaking, it would look like there’s no hope but I . . . my hope is in God.
Two nights before the scheduled execution, Jenna Bush, then sixteen years old, told her father over dinner that he should commute the sentence. George refused. “If the crime fits the penalty,” he repeated, “the penalty is given.” On February 3, 1998, he signed the execution order.
“May God bless Karla Faye Tucker,” he said, “and may God bless her victims and their families.”
The next day’s editorial in the Austin American-Statesman sided with Jenna Bush. “[Tucker’s execution] was so poignant and unnecessary that it gave all but the most determined death penalty advocates pause,” said the paper. “Her death . . . should prompt every judge, jury, and legislator to reconsider the death penalty that Texas indulges with such abandon.”
A year later the governor was still smarting from the criticism. Unable or unwilling to hide his mean streak, he spoke sarcastically to a reporter about the execution.
“I didn’t meet with Larry King when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’”
“What was her answer?”
George pursed his lips in mock fear and whimpered, “‘Please, don’t kill me.’”
But King never asked her that question and she never gave that answer. Bush’s ridicule of the woman executed the previous year seemed exceedingly callous, even cruel.
George would never match his father’s graciousness, but he was capable of nice gestures. Ruth Gilson, a realtor with Millicent Chatel, recalled a touching moment during a 1999 fund-raiser at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.
“I had paid one thousand dollars to meet the governor,” she said. “I very much wanted to see him because I had voted for his father and I was going to vote for him.”
She recalled that she was one of very few women to attend the event. “All the men looked to be lobbyists in expensive suits with huge stomachs. The room filled up fast and we were all squished together. I was at the front of the rope line. A little old lady about eighty-five years old crept in beside me. She said she needed to see the governor. ‘I just have to talk to him,’ she said.”
The elderly woman was frail and wearing clothes that looked worn and dated. Perched on her head was a little hat with a veil. “She looked like a church lady from the 1950s,” said Gilson.
George arrived, made a short speech, and then started working the crowd. The little woman stepped forward and asked if she could say something. He reached out and took her hand. She whispered in his ear to please do something about the price of prescription drugs for the elderly. He nodded. “I’ll try,” he said. Then he stepped back to look at her.
“Did you pay a thousand dollars to come here?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“Well, I want you to get your money back.” He turned to the man with him. “Get her name and address and see that she gets a check for a thousand dollars.”
The little old lady shook her veiled head. “No, I want you to have it all, Mr. Bush. I want you to win.”
“Well,” said George. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll keep a hundred dollars and you keep nine hundred dollars and we’ll both win. That’s what we’ll do.”
She smiled gratefully.
“It was such a sweet gesture on his part,” recalled Ruth Gilson. “Others might have seen it as patronizing, but I didn’t. In a crowd of fat-cat lobbyists that little woman in her tattered coat looked like someone’s poor grandmother, and he responded sensitively.”
Much like his father’s, however, George W.’s compassion tended to extend only to those who were loyal and helpful to the family. It also extended to those who were in the family’s tax bracket.
Even before announcing his candidacy, George had raised $40 million, which anointed him the clear-cut front-runner. Rove’s strategy had been to get him crowned before he ascended the throne. “If you are the establishment choice on the Republican side, you are the inevitable nominee,” Rove told a group of lobbyists in Austin. “No ifs, ands or buts.” By the end of 2000, George had raised more than $193 million to Gore’s $133 million, making their race the most expensive presidential campaign in history. Newsweek said that George had assembled the greatest fund-raising machine in politics. His single largest financial backer was the credit-card company MBNA, which contributed $240,000 and gave him use of the company plane. The CEO, Charles Cawley, a Bush family friend, was paid $50 million a year by the company he founded. He was a Ranger for Bush, which meant he had to raise over $200,000. He raised $369,156 for the presidential campaign and then personally contributed $100,000 to the Bush inauguration. In 2004, Cawley was forced by his board of directors to retire because of his imperious financial demands.
George made no apologies for aligning himself with the richest men in America. He knew that money was the mother’s milk of politics. Addressing an Al Smith Memorial Dinner in New York City, he made sport of his wealthy contributors: “This is an impressive crowd, the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”
George had become so accustomed to the luxe life of limousines and private jets that he seemed out of touch with those who had to work for a living and rely on buses and trains. Tom Downs, the former head of Amtrak, remembered calling him when Amtrak was canceling the Texas Eagle, the last passenger rail link between Dallas and Houston. Bush was unaware that such a service even existed.
“When we need to get there, we just take one of Herb’s planes [Herb Kelleher, head of Southwest Airlines], or drive fast,” said the governor. He told Downs to go ahead and drop the service. “No problem.”
Downs then called Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. senator from Texas, to tell her about the cancellation. She asked about Bush’s reaction. Downs phrased the governor’s response diplomatically.
“No, tell me what he really said,” she insisted.
Downs told her.
“That little shit,” said the senator.
George traveled to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on June 12, 1999, to announce his candidacy. “I am proud to be a compassionate conservative,” he said. “I am running so that our party can match a conservative mind with a compassionate heart.” He arrived on a chartered jet he had named Great Expectations. A reporter asked why he named his plane after a book by Charles Dickens. George looked at him quizzically.
“It started out as ‘High Expectations’ and I suggested ‘Great Expectations,’” he said.
“But the book?”
“If I read it, I can’t remember it,” said the governor.
When Jim Hightower heard the story, the Texas communicator threw up his hands. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Gore versus Bush is going to be a race between Dull and Dullard.”
In Iowa, George joined a field of eight GOP candidates, most of whom would drop out after he won the caucuses. Staying the course would be Senator John McCain of Arizona, who did not have the money to campaign in Iowa. The underfinanced candidate hoped to beat Bush in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan, and New York before finishing him off in California. A maverick conservative, McCain had beguiled reporters with his refreshing candor, and he excited voters with his honesty and his tough talk about campaign-finance reform. Having been locked in a cage as a prisoner of war for over five years, McCain was revered as a hero. He once joked that he slept more soundly in North Vietnam knowing that George Bush was defending the shores of Texas from invasion. The campaign between the prince and the pauper reflected their contrasting personal styles. Bush flew on luxury jets and carried his own pillow so he would not have to sleep on cheap hotel linen, while McCain traveled on a red, white, and blue bus he had
named “The Straight Talk Express.”
Days after George made national news with his formal announcement in Iowa, he again hit the front pages—this time as the brother-in-law of Columba Bush, who had been nabbed by U.S. Customs for failing to declare nineteen thousand dollars’ worth of clothes and jewelry she had bought in Paris. Claiming she spent only five hundred dollars, the wife of Governor Jeb Bush was stopped, searched, and fined forty-one hundred dollars. At her husband’s insistence, she publicly apologized. He said she had lied because she did not want him to know how much she had spent on her five-day shopping trip. “It was a difficult weekend at our house,” said the governor.
Columba was so ashamed that she did not want to accompany her husband and children to Kennebunkport for their annual summer vacation with the Bushes. Frightened of her in-laws, she locked herself in the bedroom at the family compound and would not come out until her sister-in-law, Sharon Bush, knocked on the door and invited her for a walk. “I remember [Jeb’s] thankfulness and appreciation when I took the time to spend with Columba in Maine,” Sharon said.
Jeb later said: “My wife is not a public person. She is uncomfortable with the limelight, which is why I love her. I don’t want a political wife—I want someone who when I get home I can have a normal life with.”
Normalcy had long since disappeared from their household. In 1994 their eldest son, George Prescott Bush, had a fight with a former girlfriend and her father and drove his SUV into their front yard. He was not arrested, because the girlfriend’s parents did not press charges. The next year, Noelle Bush, the governor’s daughter, was arrested for shoplifting and paid a $305 fine. As she became more addicted to drugs, she received twelve traffic tickets in six years; including seven tickets for speeding and three for accidents. In October 2000, security guards in a Tallahassee mall parking lot caught sixteen-year-old John “Jebby” Bush with a seventeen-year-old girl, both naked from the waist down except for Jebby’s socks. A police report on the governor’s son cited “sexual misconduct,” but neither was charged with a crime.