The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  George’s scorched-earth tactics in South Carolina had enraged his critics, especially Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, who felt that Bush’s stand on sexual abstinence before marriage was the height of hypocrisy. Bush’s pledge to put federal funds into abstinence programs further outraged Flynt, who argued that such programs did not reduce teen sex. Pronouncing Bush a menace to society, the pornographer hired two investigative reporters to explore every aspect of the governor’s sexual past. In October 2000, he claimed to have hit pay dirt.

  Appearing on CNN’s Crossfire, Flynt alleged that George W. Bush had impregnated a woman in the 1970s when he was living at the Chateau Dijon in Houston. According to Flynt, George arranged an abortion through a physician, who purportedly performed the procedure at Houston’s Twelve Oaks Medical Center.

  “When I said that we had the proof, I am referring to knowing who the girl was, knowing who the doctor was that performed the abortion, evidence from girlfriends of hers at the time, who knew about the romance and the subsequent abortion. The young lady does not want to go public, and without her willingness, we don’t feel that we’re on solid enough legal ground to go with the story . . . One of the things that interested us was that this abortion took place before Roe v. Wade . . . which made it a crime at the time.”

  Without confirmation from the woman, who Flynt said had married an FBI agent, the mainstream press would not touch the story. “Walter Isaacson [former editor of Time] would not go with it because Larry Flynt was involved,” said Brian Doyle, an assistant Time editor. “Even though he had four affidavits from the woman’s friends.” Michael Isikoff of Newsweek said, “Certainly, there was a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support it, but without the woman herself coming forward to admit that Bush arranged her abortion, we could not do anything with it.” Richard Gooding of The National Enquirer said that when he interviewed the woman, she denied having had an abortion. “She admitted they dated exclusively for six months, but said they never had the kind of sex that would get her pregnant.”

  The story was pursued because of Bush’s stand against abortion and his threat to support a “human life amendment” to the Constitution, which would overturn Roe v. Wade. As governor, he signed eighteen anti-abortion laws, and as a presidential candidate he promised to appoint only pro-life judges.

  Following the “our boy” fiasco in New Hampshire, George sidelined his father, who made no further public appearances, lest the public see the patriarch as the puppeteer pulling the wooden puppet’s strings. Behind the scenes, however, the elder Bush continued supervising his son’s campaign. He was in daily contact with the Austin office. “Sometimes there were four—five—six calls a day,” said an aide, “and every night Joe Allbaugh called him with the latest polls, no matter where he was.” In Japan the former President announced over dinner that “our boy” was going to sweep Super Tuesday. “He was consumed,” admitted his wife. “Absolutely consumed.” He had sixteen T1 lines installed in his Kennebunkport estate to accommodate the telephones and computers of campaign aides and advisers flying back and forth from Texas.

  At his father’s suggestion George appointed former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to interview possible running mates. Former Missouri Senator John Danforth, New York Governor George Pataki, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, and Representative John Kasich of Ohio were subjected to the laborious vetting process. George did not want to make the same mistake his father had made in selecting Dan Quayle.

  Cheney, then CEO of the huge energy company Halliburton, spent three months on the process, conferring regularly with Bush, visiting him at his ranch in Crawford and at the statehouse in Austin. During the Gulf War, Cheney had become close to the senior Bush. Toward the end of the vetting process, George H.W. finally recommended Cheney to his son as a running mate when Colin Powell removed himself from consideration. The only concern was Cheney’s medical history, which included three heart attacks and a quadruple coronary bypass. His doctors assured the Bushes that Cheney’s heart could take the stress, but their assurances proved to be more optimistic than realistic.

  George felt comfortable with the balding man who was five years his senior and looked as if he had never missed a meal. Both came from the oil business and shared the same hard-line conservative politics. As Wyoming’s only congressman from 1979 to 1990, Cheney had voted against affirmative action, Head Start, the Clean Water Act, and the Equal Rights Amendment. He also voted against freeing Nelson Mandela. Like George, he favored easy access to handguns, and he, too, had been arrested for drunk driving, once in November 1962 and again in July 1963. One of his two daughters, Mary, was an avowed lesbian, which the vehemently antigay Bush accepted as “no problem.” Cheney had flunked out of Yale after two years on an academic scholarship, which amused George, who had nothing but disdain for his alma mater. Apparently, Yale and Yalies felt the same way about them. In the general election of 2000 over 84 percent of the Yale student body voted against the Bush-Cheney ticket. They threw their support to Al Gore and Joe Lieberman (Yale 1964; Yale Law School 1967), the first Jew to run for national office.

  George announced his running mate by taking another whack at the President. “Dick Cheney is a solid man . . . a man who understands what the definition of ‘is’ is.” The allusion was to Clinton’s maddening answer during his 1998 grand jury testimony in the Lewinsky scandal when he said, “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”

  On the eve of the Republican convention, Clinton struck back. Appearing at a Rhode Island fund-raiser, he suggested that Bush was not qualified to hold the highest office in the land. He said Bush’s only credential was his highly inflated sense of entitlement. Mimicking him, the President said, “How bad can I be? I’ve been governor of Texas. My daddy was president. I own a baseball team. Their fraternity had it for eight years, give it to ours for eight years.”

  The “our boy” contingent in Kennebunkport barked like seals. The next morning Bar and Poppy hit the morning shows. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” said President Bush on the Today show, his voice tight with rage. “I’m going to wait a month and then, you give a call . . . And if he continues that, then I’m going to tell the nation what I think about him as a human being and a person.” Barbara followed up on Good Morning America, implying that Clinton had brought too much disrespect to the presidency for Al Gore to restore. “It would be very difficult, I think, with some of the things he’s done,” she said. Lest there be any doubt about restoring the House of Bush, Newsweek featured the GOP ticket on its cover as “The Avengers.”

  Clinton had drawn blood, pushing the candidate’s parents to give credence to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that showed 54 percent of those questioned believed that George W. Bush “has relied on family connections to get ahead.” That was by far the strongest perception, positive or negative, that applied to either candidate during the election.

  The race between Bush and Gore, it was clear to all concerned, was going to be close. From the beginning both parties saw problems in Florida. A high turnout of black voters worried the GOP, because they knew that Jeb’s abolishing the state’s affirmative-action programs had made him no friends in the African American community.

  In September, Jeb, whose positive poll ratings were over 60 percent in the state, met with Florida’s Republican leaders. “Please, I’m begging you,” he joked. “Don’t make me go home to Kennebunkport at Thanksgiving having not carried Florida.” He campaigned with George whenever he was in the state, but Jeb toned himself down considerably, because he worried about appearing brighter and more articulate. When George left the state, Jeb did not make speeches for him. He would not go on network talk shows, and he turned down all interview requests from national publications. He did not support his brother as prominently as other Republican governors like John Engler of Michigan, Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. The media noticed.

  “Listen
, I’m busting my hump,” Jeb said, stung by criticism that he was not doing enough. “I’ve raised a lot of money; I’ve campaigned when my brother has come to the state . . . I have a different relationship . . . I’m his brother, so I have to be a bit more careful about how I help. Because of the comparisons that might not help George in some cases.”

  When Al Gore started leading in the polls, the Bush family hit Florida with full force. The former President, who had won the state in 1988 and 1992, exhorted Republicans to support “my boy because he will restore honor and dignity to the White House.” Laura Bush read to elementary-school students; Jeb’s handsome son, George P. Bush, spoke Spanish to Miami’s Hispanics; Columba Bush promoted arts projects in Fort Lauderdale; Barbara Bush visited senior-citizen centers; and George W. Bush promised Cuban exiles that as President he would never lift the sanctions against Fidel Castro until Cuba was free.

  The day before the election Bush flew to Bentonville, Arkansas, confident he could humiliate the President by winning his state. When he did, he told his cheering supporters, “They misunderestimated me.”

  On Election Day, November 7, 2000, the country looked toward Florida as the deciding state for the White House. At 8:00 p.m. the networks called the state for Vice President Gore; by 2:20 a.m. they had reversed themselves for Bush. The Vice President called the governor to concede, only to call back and retract his concession when he found out how close the vote was. Out of 6 million votes cast, the differential was 6,000 votes, and Florida law required a recount for any margin of less than a half percent. By 6:00 a.m. the difference was down to 1,784 votes. Weeks later, the final difference was 537 votes. The official Florida tally was 2,912,790 votes for Bush, 2,912,253 votes for Gore.

  All of the canvassing boards in Florida’s sixty-seven counties were required by state law to order a recount of the votes cast. What followed was a bewildering procedure that dragged on for thirty-five days as the nation sat on the edge of its seat, breathlessly waiting to see who would become the next President of the United States. Bush immediately assumed the role by publicly setting up a transition office and meeting with staff to discuss the new administration. The family dispatched its consigliere James A. Baker III to Florida to oversee the recount, to insist on counting the overseas military ballots, and to get the votes from the Democratic precincts discarded. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher tried to fulfill the same role for the Democrats, but he was overmatched by the stealth of Baker, who kept repeating for television cameras, “The vote in Florida was counted . . . The vote in Florida has been recounted . . .” The Democrats never challenged the premise, although it was not true.

  Lawyers swarmed into the state from both parties to protect their candidate’s rights during the tumultuous process of machine and manual recounts for which the state was ill prepared. Lawsuits flew back and forth as the parties lodged legal challenges against each other, and the nation became embroiled in a numbing discourse on chads—the minuscule squares of paper on punch-out votes. There were descended chads, those that had been properly punched out; dimpled chads, which had been slightly punched; and hanging chads, which had been punched halfway. Weeks later Bush would joke about appointing his brother Governor Jeb Bush of Florida the Ambassador to Chad.

  Two weeks into the process, the recount in Miami-Dade, where Al Gore had received a majority of the votes, was shut down by a GOP demonstration that threatened mayhem. In Washington, Doro Bush, disguised in a scarf and dark glasses, joined two hundred protesters to picket the Vice President’s mansion, screaming insults. She called her mother that night and said that standing on Massachusetts Avenue shouting at the Gores took care of a lot of her frustrations. The partisan free-for-all in Florida had ignited tempers across the country. The Florida state supreme court had ruled that manual recounts could go forward, but Baker shrewdly appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The next day Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney, suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalized for emergency surgery. Bush appeared on television and denied that Cheney had had a heart attack. He said it was “just a scare.” Reporters noticed he was sporting an angry red boil near his eye and they asked if the festering sore was from stress. “Hell, no,” Bush snapped.

  On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 5–4, stopped the Florida recount, overturning the December 8 decision of the Florida Supreme Court. The majority consisted of five conservative justices, all Republican appointees: William Rehnquist (Nixon); Antonin Scalia (Reagan); Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush); Anthony Kennedy (Reagan); Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan). The minority included Stephen Breyer (Clinton); David Souter (George H.W. Bush); Ruth Ginsburg (Clinton); John Paul Stevens (Ford). The headline in The New York Times:

  BUSH PREVAILS

  BY SINGLE VOTE, JUSTICES END RECOUNT,

  BLOCKING GORE AFTER 5-WEEK STRUGGLE

  The final tally showed:

  A fractured Court and a splintered nation awaited the Vice President’s concession. The next day, despite winning the popular vote by 540,520 votes, Al Gore ended the national nightmare with the best speech of his political career.

  “Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States, and I promised him that I wouldn’t call him back this time,” said the Vice President in his televised address. He quoted Senator Stephen Douglas in his loss to Abraham Lincoln. “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.” While strongly disagreeing with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Vice President gracefully accepted the outcome and conceded the election for the sake of national unity.

  After the Electoral College certified him as President-elect, George W. Bush resigned as governor of Texas. In a bar near the Austin capitol several legislators hoisted a glass. “Here’s to our post turtle,” one said. A tourist asked what a post turtle was. The legislator said: “When you’re driving down a country road in Texas and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.” The tourist looked puzzled. The legislator explained: “You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he can’t get anything done while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor stupid critter get down.” They all gulped their drinks.

  Later a crowd gathered outside the governor’s mansion, where one protester held up a sign: “His Fraudulency.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  For years George Herbert Walker Bush has acted indignant if anyone describes his family as a political dynasty. “That’s a bad word you’ve used,” he told a reporter from Time, wagging his finger. “Almost taboo . . . I don’t like that word ‘dynasty’ as it relates to the Bushes. Dynasty seems to me to have the connotation of something other than individual achievement.”

  By the time his son became President, the father’s protestations had begun to sound disingenuous. Perhaps he did not want to admit that dynasties have been a fact of life from the time of Moses to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt.

  Sovereignty, dominion, and lordship had devolved through the ages from the kaisers of Germany, the shahs of Persia, the maharajas of India, the tsars of Russia, China’s Great Moguls, Egypt’s pharaohs, and the mikados of Japan to a familial line of kings and queens in Britain, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

  By the time the word “dynasty” made its way into democracy, the definition had been stripped of its monarchical trappings. The Founding Fathers were adamant when they framed the Constitution: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Shorn of its crowns and coronets, the word still held allure, and the concept of looking up to a prominent family for leadership became an immediate and accepted verity in America. Dynasties were especially potent in colonial politics: the Winthrops of New England, the Lees of Virginia, the Frelinghuysens of New Jersey, the Carrolls of Maryland, and the Adamses of Massachusetts.

  From the beginning, people who be
lieved that all men were created equal also accepted that some men were born more equal than others. Those so fortunate were not only spared resentment at the ballot box but were also frequently rewarded. In a land of opportunity where the electorate yearns to be rich and important, people vote their aspirations. Robert Perrucci, a sociologist at Purdue University, explains this attitude by saying, “People accept inequality if they think there is opportunity.” In politics, a dynasty proves to be a positive, not a pejorative.

  In 1966, Stephen Hess, a historian with the Brookings Institution, wrote an incisive study of American political dynasties. He defined a dynasty as “any family that has had at least four members, in the same name, elected to federal office.” Hess found twenty-two families that qualified under his definition, and he scrutinized fourteen of them in his book America’s Political Dynasties from Adams to Kennedy. He found that the majority of political dynasties shared certain characteristics: they were well-to-do white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from the Eastern Seaboard with Ivy League educations and advanced degrees in law. Many traced their wealth to advantageous marriages, a few to the grand vision and driving ambition of one self-made man. Some dynasties were highly mobile; others were defined by region. Yet for all the advantages, none escaped its share of insanity, suicide, alcoholism, mental retardation, financial reverses, acts of embezzlement, and sexual scandals.

  Since Hess published his book, numerous families have watched their sons and daughters become governors and take their place in the House of Representatives and the Senate. But none has risen as far and as fast as the Bushes. Despite their loud disavowals, they have come to epitomize the American political dynasty. By the year 2000, they had taken an exclusive place in history with the Adamses—the only other family with a father and a son elected President of the United States.