The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  “It could have been worse,” his uncle George joked to an aide. “The girl could’ve been a boy.” A few seconds later he added, “We might’ve picked up some gay votes with that one, huh?”

  Such jokes made some people wonder if George was genuinely committed to his ferocious public stands or if his proclamations were simply calculated for political gain. With an estimated 4 million gay voters in the United States, as opposed to 15 million social conservatives, a cynical politician could be expected to support the issues favored by the conservative majority. As governor, George had taken a hard line against homosexuality. He said he supported the state’s law against sodomy as a “symbolic gesture of traditional values.” He opposed hate-crimes legislation that would have protected gays. He also opposed gay adoption and gay marriage. (As President, he came out in favor of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.) Yet he approached the former Texas state representative Glen Maxey, an openly gay Democrat, and tried to draw a line between his politics and his personal feelings.

  “He pulled me over really close, almost nose to nose, and said, ‘Glen, I like you as a person. I respect you as a human being. I want you to know that what I say publicly about gay people doesn’t apply to you.’”

  Angered by Bush’s opposition to gay adoption, Maxey replied, “Governor, when you say that a gay person is not fit to be an adoptive parent, you’re talking about me.”

  During the presidential debates, George pledged that homosexuals “ought to have the same rights” as all other people, but he would not meet with Log Cabin (gay) Republicans. When he was President, his administration decided that homosexuals could be fired from the federal government because of their sexual orientation. In 2004, the Office of Special Counsel ruled that federal employees no longer had recourse if they were fired or demoted simply for being gay.

  When Bush proposed the constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex unions, Calvin Trillin picked up his witty pen to write a poem:

  GEORGE W. BUSH SPEAKS OUT ON GAY MARRIAGE

  He backs an amendment defining the vow

  Of marriage as being a guy and his frau,

  Lest civilization sink into a slough—

  Which he says could happen. It isn’t clear how.

  Though he can’t explain it, he needn’t expand.

  We saw this with Poppy. We know what’s at hand:

  The Jesus battalions demanded this stand.

  The yelp of the lap dog is heard in the land.

  George’s Andover classmate Conway “Doc” Downing, an African American businessman involved in the gaming industry, smiled as he tried to explain his friend’s paradox. “I’m in a pariah business—Internet gambling,” he said. “When George was governor of Texas, I called Clay Johnson to get Richard Rainwater’s address. Rainwater was the big money behind the Texas Rangers. That’s all I wanted. No help, no recommendation. Just a personal address. I told Clay I wanted to send Rainwater a proposal about gambling. Clay checked with George and called me back. He gave me the address, but said, ‘You didn’t get it from us, because the governor is on the record as opposing gambling.’”

  As the 2000 presidential campaign heated up, George won the Iowa caucuses, but going into New Hampshire, he fell behind McCain in the polls. Bush’s pollsters said that one-fourth of his support came from people who liked his mother and father. “It’s powerful,” the New Hampshire attorney Tom Rath told Newsweek. “People say the acorn doesn’t fall very far from the tree.” George summoned his family to the state to campaign with him. Jeb arrived and handed out Florida oranges. Barbara appeared in pearls to address the luncheon crowds at Geno’s Chowder and Sandwich Shop. “Georgie will keep his promises,” she said. “Or else his mother will come get him!” The former President stood on stages with his arm wrapped around his eldest son. “You can trust my boy,” he said. “Our son won’t let you down . . . Our boy will work to restore respect to the presidency.”

  Voters in the Granite State were not impressed with the “our boy” argument. They saw the Bush family invasion as a desperate Hail Mary pass by a candidate who had taken them for granted, flying home to Austin every weekend to sleep in his own bed. John Adams, the only President whose son aspired to succeed him—and did—never campaigned for John Quincy Adams. The reason, David McCullough, Adams’s biographer, told the columnist Mary McGrory: “It would have been considered ‘unseemly.’” In the Adams family, however, the father’s redemption was not invested in the political success of his son.

  Karl Rove, who had never run a national campaign, predicted an easy victory in New Hampshire. When he saw the early exit polls on primary day, he was astounded. His candidate was down fifty points to thirty-two. He went to the governor’s suite.

  “We’re going to lose and lose badly,” he said.

  “How bad?” asked Bush.

  “Real bad,” said Rove. “We’re going to lose by eighteen, nineteen, twenty points. There’s no good news here.”

  George did not curse and scream. He sat for a few minutes, watched the Weather Channel, and then drove to a gym in a strip mall and worked out. When he returned, he reassured his troops that no one would be fired, and he braced himself for the call to his father.

  “We’re going to be whipped,” he told him. George later recalled that moment as one of his worst. “It’s much harder to be a mother or dad than it is to be the candidate. It was really hard for me to be the son when he was the candidate. And I had to assure them I would be fine. And I will be. I don’t rationalize defeat.”

  He gathered his top aides and questioned them closely. “What the hell happened?” he asked. “Why didn’t we know?”

  That night, after losing to McCain by eighteen points—49 percent to 31 percent—George called to congratulate his opponent. The senator was as stunned to win as the governor was to lose.

  “When he called to concede the primary and offer his congratulations . . . he was quite gracious, and I appreciated it,” said McCain. “I told him that I thought we and the people we loved could be proud of the way we had conducted our campaigns. I meant it . . . We said good-bye as friends. We would soon be friends no more.”

  Later Laura Bush spoke to her husband like a schoolteacher scolding a wayward child for not performing up to his potential. “You let him do this to you,” she said. “You let John McCain talk down to you. You’ve got to fight back.”

  Laura knew her man. Once he saw the loss as an assault on his manhood, he would jump on his horse and charge. The next day he flew into South Carolina with his youngest brother. As George swept aside the curtain on the plane separating his cabin from the press corps, Marvin said, “The next sound you hear will be the media removing their lips from John McCain’s blank, blank, blank.” The family felt the media, including reporters covering Bush, had been seduced by McCain.

  George made it clear that for the next eighteen days he planned to come from the right on every issue. Within hours he proved, as the New Hampshire attorney Tom Rath had observed, that the acorn truly does not fall far from the tree. He emulated his father’s slashing Willie Horton strategy and transformed the South Carolina primary into one of the most vicious campaigns in political history.

  George began with a speech at Bob Jones University in Greenville. BJU was an institution that, over the years, had opposed integration, banned interracial dating, and condemned homosexuality and whose founders were vociferously anti-Catholic. In 2000 the university president, Bob Jones III, still referred to Mormonism and Catholicism as “cults which call themselves Christian.” The school threatened to arrest any out-of-the-closet gay alumni who dared to return to the school. One political placard on campus read: “Vote Bush Because Gay People Have Too Many Rights.” Student-body attendance was compulsory for the governor’s speech, and the six thousand Christian-right students turned out to cheer loudly every time George said the word “conservative.” Newsweek counted twelve cheers in two minutes. George, who had kept a Confederate flag on his
wall during his years at Andover, aligned himself with neo-Confederates and questioned McCain’s commitment to states’ rights—coded rhetoric for the right to be racist.

  Not all conservatives applauded George for lending his presence to a citadel of prejudice. “It’s one thing to lurch to the right,” said Bill Kristol, editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard. “It’s another thing to lurch back 60 years. You could make the case that ‘compassionate conservatism’ died February 2 when Bush appeared at Bob Jones U.”

  The next day George piled on McCain by sponsoring an event with J. Thomas Burch Jr., the head of a little-known veterans group, who charged that after he came home from Vietnam, McCain “forgot us.” After Burch spoke, Bush embraced him.

  McCain, who still limped and could not raise his arms as a result of his imprisonment by the North Vietnamese, was livid. He ran an ad comparing George Bush to Bill Clinton, and asked: “Isn’t it time we had a president who told the truth?”

  Being equated with the man he regarded as reptilian was more than Bush could bear. He retaliated as if McCain had impugned his mother: “Politics is tough, but when John McCain compared me to Bill Clinton and said I was untrustworthy, that’s over the line. Disagree with me, fine, but do not challenge my integrity.”

  “That commercial . . . was the Godzilla judo flip for us,” recalled Trey Walker, McCain’s national field director. “McCain’s momentum had already started to evaporate, and that just stopped him dead.”

  The two candidates heaped charges upon countercharges as they clawed their bloody way to the conservative high ground on outlawing abortion, gambling, pornography, and homosexuality while supporting guns and God and the Confederate flag.

  The Bush team retained the services of Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, to run grass roots in the state, and they immediately started attacking with push polls, telephone banks, e-mails, anonymous mailings, automatic dialings of untraceable hate messages, phony front groups, and radio talk-show call-ins to pillory McCain with lies that he was a liberal reprobate who abandoned a crippled wife to father black children by black prostitutes. Preposterous charges of extramarital affairs, abortions, wife beatings, mob ties, venereal diseases, and illegitimate children were flung at him, while his wife, Cindy, was tarred as a wayward woman and drug addict who had stolen to support her habit, his children were vilified as bastards, and his friend and supporter from New Hampshire former U.S. Senator Warren Rudman was subjected to vile anti-Semitism. The poison drip saturated South Carolina for eighteen days and nights of slaughterhouse politics.

  “I’ve seen dirty politics, but I’ve never seen a rumor campaign like this,” said Terry Haskins, the speaker pro tem of the South Carolina House of Representatives and a McCain supporter. “It’s a vile attempt to destroy a man’s reputation just to win an election, and I know it’s organized because none of these rumors existed until the day after New Hampshire.”

  On February 12, a week before the election, Bush was caught by a C-SPAN camera talking to a state senator. Neither man realized he was being watched.

  “You haven’t even hit his soft spots,” said the senator.

  “I know,” said Bush. “I’m going to.”

  “Well, they need to be—somebody does, anyway.”

  “I agree,” said Bush. “I’m not going to do it on TV.”

  By the time he finished mauling McCain in South Carolina with his anonymous smear campaign, George had almost surpassed his father’s vile race-baiting.

  “We suspected that Ralph Reed was behind it all,” said Mark Salter, McCain’s administrative assistant, “but we couldn’t prove it, because there was no paper trail . . . They operated under the radar system . . . used political action committees no one ever heard of . . . which gave Bush complete deniability.”

  Federal Election Commission campaign records would show that Ralph Reed was paid more than half a million dollars by Enron “for ongoing advice and counsel.” Karl Rove had recommended the conservative political activist to Enron in 1997, feeding suspicions that Rove wanted to keep Reed’s favor for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.

  One aspect of Reed’s fiendish operation in South Carolina targeted 140,000 Republicans throughout the state with flyers from the Christian Coalition titled “10 Disturbing Facts About John McCain.” A southern female, who identified herself as being with a religious group, followed up with a phone call to these same voters. In a honey-sweet accent, she related horrendous stories about McCain and expressed concern about such a man becoming President. Before hanging up, she said, “You all be sure to listen to the Reverend Robertson this Sunday.” When Pat Robertson appeared on one of the morning talk shows, he made a veiled reference to “some of those other things that are in John McCain’s background.”

  Presenting himself as a “reformer with results,” George criticized McCain’s credentials for espousing campaign-finance reform. “He’s the big committee chairman all the lobbyists give their money to . . . He’s the Washington insider.” Winding up to clobber McCain as a self-righteous hypocrite, George said, “He can’t have it both ways. He can’t take the high horse and then claim the low road.”

  These linguistic gaffes plagued him throughout the campaign, causing great hilarity among the media, which detailed every mental malfunction:

  “What’s not fine is, rarely is the question asked, are, is our children learning?” (January 14, 2000)

  “You’re working hard to put food on your family.” (January 27, 2000)

  “This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It’s what you do when you run for President. You gotta preserve.” (January 28, 2000)

  “The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case.” (January 30, 2000)

  “How do you know if you don’t measure if you have a system that simply suckles kids through?” (February 16, 2000)

  “I understand small business growth. I was one.” (February 19, 2000)

  “I don’t care what the polls say. I don’t. I’m doing what I think what’s wrong.” (March 15, 2000)

  “Laura and I don’t realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis.” (April 15, 2000)

  “Well, I think if you’re going to do something and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness.” (August 30, 2000)

  “We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.” (September 4, 2000)

  Four days before the South Carolina primary, the two GOP candidates met for a nationally televised debate. They were standing awkwardly next to each other in the studio, and McCain turned to his rival.

  “George,” he said, slowly shaking his head with disgust.

  The governor played by Godfather rules. “John,” he said, “it’s politics.”

  “George, everything isn’t politics.”

  During the debate McCain did not hold back. “You should be ashamed,” he said, castigating George for campaigning with a man who had maligned McCain’s commitment to veterans.

  Bush shot back with outrage over the ad that had accused him of Clinton-style truth twisting. “Whatever you do, don’t equate my integrity and trustworthiness to Bill Clinton,” George said. “That’s about as low a blow as you can go in the Republican primary . . . Morally, any of us at this table can outperform Bill Clinton.”

  After the debate the candidates assembled for a group picture. George walked over and grasped both of McCain’s hands in his own.

  “John,” he said. “We’ve got to start running a better campaign.”

  McCain was incensed by the hypocrisy. “Don’t give me that shit,” he snarled, “and take your hands off of me.”

  By the time voters went to the polls, the two candidates had come to loathe each other. Trouncing McCain 54 to 41 percent, George won South Carolina and reestablished himself as the Republican front-runner over an opponent he described as “self-righteous.”

  “The reason why I thi
nk a few of those people are still angry at me is because we interfered with the coronation,” said McCain. “Look, Bush and his people will have to live with the legacy of South Carolina; I don’t.” In his concession speech, the senator said, “I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way.”

  He then charged into Michigan and turned Bush’s tactics against him by running a telephone bank that reminded Catholic voters of George’s appearance at the virulently anti-Catholic Bob Jones University. George hid behind the skirts of his Mexican sister-in-law.

  “Do I support the policy against interracial dating? Of course not. My own brother Jeb, the great governor of Florida, married a girl from Mexico, Columba, a fabulous person . . . plus she’s a Catholic.” Not even the miscegenation laws in Texas had considered Mexicans a separate race.

  McCain questioned how that response excused George’s failure to speak out against bigotry. He blasted Bush as “a low-road campaigner” who would stoop to anything, including “character assassination” to win. McCain beat George 50.8 percent to 43 percent in Michigan.

  Heading into the New York primary on March 7, 2000, George scrambled to make amends to the state’s 7.3 million Catholics for his Bob Jones appearance. With Catholics constituting about 45 percent of the GOP primary turnout, George wrote a letter to New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor saying he regretted not condemning the anti-Catholic policies of the fundamentalist school. He did not apologize, nor did he acknowledge that by accepting the invitation from Bob Jones University he had legitimized the school’s bigotry. In an editorial called “Boy George’s Bogus Confession,” the New York Daily News criticized him for pandering. “Bush . . . showed he was willing to sacrifice principles for votes.”

  The Democratic National Committee printed up T-shirts for reporters covering the Bush campaign that said, “Bob Jones Redemption Tour.” Still, George won the New York primary, and by Super Tuesday he and Al Gore had secured their parties’ nominations. Their campaigns began in earnest after the political conventions.