by Kitty Kelley
Historians especially were appalled by the President’s lack of knowledge and his resistance to learning. At a symposium in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2002, Robert Dallek was seen in conversation with David Herbert Donald. “George W. is the worst President since Warren G. Harding,” said Dallek.
The eminent Pulitzer Prize–winning historian shook his head. “Oh, no, Bob,” said Donald. “He’s the worst since Franklin Pierce.”
Neither historian connected the alcoholic, one-term Pierce, fourteenth President of the United States, to George W. Bush, whose mother, Barbara Pierce Bush, was a fourth cousin four times removed.
The President decided early on that press conferences were a waste of his time. He said they served only to let reporters “peacock” (his term for upstaging him on national television) and “play gotcha.” During four years, he held only 12 solo press conferences. In the same period of time, his father held 141. As President, George Herbert Walker Bush had cared too much about courting the press; his son did not care at all. W. had never liked reporters. Dealing with the press as his father’s enforcer, he frequently responded to their questions by saying, “No comment, asshole.”
As President, when he does meet with reporters, he is carefully scripted. White House correspondents are asked to submit their questions in advance; the press secretary selects a few, and only those reporters are called on during the press conference. As he plunged the country into war with Iraq, the President demanded that his administration speak with one voice—his. He warned that anyone leaking would be fired. The press was given little access to the White House or the Pentagon. Still, the President was not pleased with the coverage his war received. He complained that it was too negative. “We’re making good progress in Iraq,” he said in October 2003. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell it when you listen to the filter.” The “filter” was the national news media, which the President ignored in favor of giving interviews to regional broadcasters. That year he gave no one-on-one interview to any major U.S. newspaper. Instead, he spoke only to The Sun, the biggest-selling newspaper in Britain. Roxanne Roberts of The Washington Post summed up the Bush administration’s attitude toward the press: “They regard us as mosquitoes at a nudist convention. Respect? You must be joking.”
The President prohibited any press coverage of the flag-draped coffins being flown back from Iraq, lest people be reminded of the terrible cost of his war. His attitude, reflecting his family’s dynastic arrogance, was: “Trust me. I know what’s right.”
Bush 41 had been so excited when he finally became President in 1989 that for weeks after his inauguration, he greeted tourists at the White House gates. Housekeepers in the family residence fondly recall his bounding around like a friendly Labrador and inviting friends to watch movies, swim, bowl, and play tennis, after which he led them all on personal tours. In contrast, his less gregarious son was like a corgi, a nasty little nipper with a menacing bark. The father, who loved socializing, held twenty-nine state dinners. The son, who insisted on going to bed at 9:30 p.m., has held only four state dinners.
The differences between father and son as President are as marked as the differences between their wives. Barbara Bush was an activist First Lady who enjoyed the limelight as much as her husband. She sought a high profile through her activities on behalf of literacy and courted press coverage for herself by inviting select reporters to private luncheons in the White House family quarters. She also wrote a book in her dog’s name, which she promoted widely on television.
More reserved than her formidable mother-in-law, Laura Bush has preferred a lower profile, especially in the wake of her controversial predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton. From 2001 to 2004, Laura lent her name to many good causes but gave the country very little sense of who she was, other than a former school librarian who liked to read. Her friends hinted that her political views were “much more liberal” than her husband’s, especially on abortion—she was pro-choice—so she avoided speaking out on issues and remained on the periphery of his presidency rather than in its hot center.
The differences between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law became pronounced when both first ladies were asked to deliver commencement addresses. Students protested in each instance. At Wellesley, they said Barbara Bush was nothing more than “the college dropout wife” of the President; at UCLA, they objected to Laura Bush’s “shallow credentials,” saying she had “no merit [beyond] her political celebrity.” Unfazed, Barbara bulldozed her way to Wellesley in 1990 and delivered her speech. Laura responded to the protesters in 2002 by declining the invitation from UCLA.
“Laura is a very nice woman who’s got a lot of problems and smokes constantly,” said a Washington, D.C., interior designer who knows her well. “She spends a great deal of time shopping.”
“Everyone likes Laura,” said a family friend who knew W. before he was married, “and everyone feels she’s good influence on him, but if you’re asking, ‘Is their marriage a great love affair or some grand passion or whatever it was with the Reagans and the Carters and the Fords,’ I’d have to say no, but it’s a marriage that works, only because she does all the work . . . He can be quite impossible.”
Illustrating what was meant by “impossible,” the family friend related W.’s description of meeting Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. “George said, ‘I told Putin that in this country we own our own homes and because we own them we take great pride in them.’ Then he told me, ‘I don’t think the son of a bitch knew what the hell I was talking about.’
“I was speechless,” said the friend. “George acted like Putin was the dumb hayseed know-nothing and he, George, was the man of the world. I guess it never occurred to him that Putin, former head of the KGB, had been briefed to the gills on American capitalism . . . It was scary listening to the President of the United States sound so damn stupid and arrogant. I was dumbfounded that George had lectured the President of Russia like a first grader on the basics of home ownership in America . . . I’ve known George for many, many years, and I’ve watched him grow more arrogant . . .
“He has no humility whatsoever about being President. He really thinks he deserves the office, that it’s his by merit, not default. There’s no sense that he’s lucky to be there and that if not for a partisan vote by the Supreme Court, he’d still be pumping iron in the governor’s mansion in Austin . . . With each job he’s gotten worse, more arrogant. Now he’s unbearable. But Laura is terrific. Very down-to-earth.”
Linden von Eichel, a Canadian who lives in Washington, D.C., met the First Lady at a black-tie dinner at the Library of Congress shortly after Laura returned from Paris, where she had attended ceremonies marking the U.S. return to UNESCO. Traveling without the President, the First Lady had made front-page news when France’s President Jacques Chirac kissed her hand.
“Maybe it was because she knew her husband was flirting a little too aggressively that evening,” said von Eichel, “but when I met her, she looked like a cardboard cutout with a rictus grin and a glassy-eyed stare. Her face, which looks so pleasant from a distance, up close looked like a Stepford-wife mask, and her handshake . . . well . . . have you ever touched dry ice? But as I say, her husband was coming on strong to my friend [Mrs. John Kluge, the wife of Metromedia’s chairman] and also hitting on me . . . Laura reacted like the classic wife of an alcoholic—the police person who is constantly watching and waiting for her husband to screw up.”
The First Lady had opened the National Book Festival gala that evening by sharing a poem she said her husband had written to her. “President Bush is a great leader and husband, but I bet you didn’t know he is also quite the poet. Upon returning home last night from my long trip, I found a lovely poem waiting for me. Normally, I wouldn’t share something so personal, but since we’re celebrating great writers, I can’t resist.” She then read:
Dear Laura,
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh, my lump-in-the-bed
/> How I’ve missed you.
Roses are redder
Bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.
The dogs and the cat, they missed you too
Barney’s still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.
At the end of the evening, the Kluges said good night to the First Lady, and the President made another beeline for von Eichel.
“That was a pretty funny poem you wrote,” she said.
“Ha! Never heard the damn thing before tonight!” said the President. “Didn’t write a word of it.”
The First Lady admitted a few weeks later on NBC’s Meet the Press that her husband did not write the poem she read that evening. She did not say who did, or why she had presented it as his, but she left the impression that someone with a sense of public relations might have been trying to make the Bushes’ marriage appear more affectionate. “Some woman from across the table said, ‘You just don’t know how great it is to have a husband who would write a poem for you,’” Laura told Tim Russert.
The family friend who described the Bushes’ marriage as workable, thanks to Laura, purposely did not address the issue of the Bushes’ indulged twins, Barbara and Jenna. Barbara, who went to Yale, heard much more criticism of her father and his policies at college than Jenna, who went to the University of Texas.
“There is plenty that the Bushes don’t ask their daughters to do, that much is clear,” Ann Gerhart wrote in her biography of Laura Bush, The Perfect Wife. “Jenna and Barbara have not been asked to campaign. They have not been asked to rein in their adolescent rebellions. They have not been asked to appear even nominally interested in any of the pressing issues affecting this world their generation will inhabit . . . These girls have all the noblesse with none of the oblige.”
The girls’ various arrests for underage drinking during their father’s presidency seemed to mirror their parents’ past behavior with alcohol and drugs. One observer quoted Euripides to remind the President that “the gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.” Pictures of Jenna Bush drunk with a cigarette in her hand and rolling on the floor on top of another woman appeared in a supermarket tabloid. Cited twice for trying to use a false ID to drink, Jenna was fined six hundred dollars and ordered to perform thirty-six hours of community service and to attend sessions where victims of alcohol-related crimes talk. After two convictions, she was put on probation for three months. Soon T-shirts sprouted on campuses around the country with huge letters asking: “WWJD? What Would Jenna Drink?”
Jenna’s twin compiled a similar record of misdemeanors. Photos of Barbara dancing suggestively in nightclubs, where she was reported to be partying late into the night in “pot-clouded” rooms, appeared in New York newspapers. Barbara, too, made it into the supermarket tabloids. She was arrested with her sister for using a false ID to buy alcohol in Austin, Texas. She was caught a second time in a bar in New Haven. Both girls made the cover of People: “Oops! They Did It Again.” Barbara pleaded “no contest,” and was ordered to pay a hundred-dollar fine, perform eight hours of community service, and attend six hours of alcohol-awareness class.
As the President coped with the police-blotter publicity of his two daughters, his brother Jeb was dealing with a similar situation in Florida. The governor’s daughter, Noelle, was arrested in Tallahassee in January 2002 for trying to fill a false prescription for the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. She was sent to a drug-rehabilitation program in Orlando. Six months later she was jailed for three days in Florida’s Orange County Correctional Center for violating the rules of her drug-treatment program. She reportedly had stolen pills from the nurse’s office at the rehab center. Her father e-mailed the state’s political reporters:
My family is saddened to share that our daughter Noelle has not abided by the conditions of her drug treatment plan. Unfortunately, this happens to many individuals even as they continue their journey to full recovery. There are consequences for every action we take in our lives, and as her parents, Columba and I wish we could have prevented our daughter from making the wrong choices.
After her jail time, Noelle returned to the rehab center. On September 9, 2002, one of the rehab patients called 911 to report that staffers had found crack cocaine in Noelle’s shoe.
“She does this all the time, and she gets out of it because she’s the governor’s daughter,” the caller told the police. “But we’re sick of it here, ’cause we have to do what’s right, but she gets treated like some kind of princess . . . We’re just trying to get our lives together, and this girl’s bringing drugs on [the] property.”
Six police cars arrived at the center to investigate the complaint. The staff admitted finding the drug on Noelle but refused to cooperate with the police, and the employee who made the discovery ripped up her written statement to protect Noelle and uphold the center’s confidentiality policy. No charges were filed, but a judge sent the governor’s daughter to jail for ten days for violating the terms of her treatment.
Jeb and Columba did not appear in court with their daughter. “I just can’t believe that they weren’t there for Noelle,” said Sharon Bush. “My kids are my life, and I know I would be at their side in a courtroom if they were in trouble, no matter how politically embarrassing it might be . . . My former in-laws think it’s shameful about all the arrests of George’s daughters and Jeb’s daughter because it hurts the family’s image, . . . but if they practiced the family values they preach all the time, they would’ve been in that courtroom beside Noelle . . . I feel so sorry for her. She’s almost thirty years old.”
On the day Noelle was sentenced, her father was raising funds in Florida with his brother George, but neither the governor nor the President appeared in court to stand beside the young woman. Noelle’s brother George P. Bush was there, along with their Aunt Dorothy Bush Koch.
The public scrutiny of his family’s substance abuse was only part of the new President’s problems. By Labor Day 2001, he faced a deteriorating economy, a lopsided federal budget, slumping consumer confidence, and limited political capital to push through his legislative agenda. He confronted an opposition-controlled Senate with controversial proposals that included education reform, a new missile-defense system, a trade bill opposed by labor, an HMO-reform bill, a proposal to restructure Social Security, and an energy bill that contained drilling rights in wilderness areas, which pleased oilmen and angered environmentalists. His approval ratings had dropped below 50 percent, because a majority of Americans felt he was not up to the job of being President.
Then the gates of hell flew open.
At 8:45 a.m. and 9:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001, two hijacked airliners carrying twenty thousand gallons of jet fuel dove into two towers of concrete, steel, and glass in New York City. As the north and south towers of the World Trade Center collapsed in the inferno, sending 2,821 people to their deaths, a similar conflagration shook Washington, D.C.—another hijacked plane hit the west face of the Pentagon, killing 184 people. Less than thirty minutes later a fourth plane aimed for the U.S. Capitol crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 40 passengers on board, who had overtaken the hijackers, diverted the plane, and saved the lives of many people in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. At the end of the day of the worst terror attack the United States had ever endured, a shattered nation faced the loss of 3,000 lives and financial wreckage estimated to be over $27 billion.
At the time of the first attack, the President was sitting on a little wooden stool speaking to second graders at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. Early on he had dubbed himself “The Education President” after declaring, “The illiteracy level of our children are appalling.” He sought to prove his commitment to learning by reading to seven-year-olds, which is what he was doing when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispered in his ear th
at the United States was under attack. The President continued sitting with the children for seven more minutes, reading from their textbook My Pet Goat and posing for the cameras. Then he moved to the school library to make a statement.
“Today we’ve had a national tragedy,” he said. “Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.” He said that the federal government would “conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.”
After characterizing the terrorists as “folks,” the President departed and flew from Sarasota to Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Louisiana, where he got off Air Force One to make another statement: “I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help victims of those attacks. Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”
He returned to his flying bunker and headed for Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska. He emerged from his plane, which was now guarded by Humvees and soldiers in fatigues gripping machine guns. His motorcade passed through the security gate outside U.S. Strategic Command headquarters, but the President did not go into the command building. Instead, he entered a squared-off structure that looked like the top of an elevator shaft, where he was to receive a briefing from his National Security Council. The White House press corps was left on the plane. When the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings later asked Ann Compton where the President had gone, the White House correspondent replied, “He went down the bunny hole.”
While the President was in hiding, his role as commander in chief was shouldered by New York City’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who rushed to survey the devastation at Ground Zero. He was on television all day and all night—informative, accessible, and spontaneously human. The death toll, he said, will be “more than we can bear.” He was a constant reassuring presence to a frightened nation reeling from the attacks and the searing images of airplanes smashing into buildings and human beings leaping to their deaths to escape incineration. In the absence of presidential leadership, the President’s televangelist friends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson stepped forward to fan fear and hatred by suggesting the bombings might be God’s wrath on homosexuals, lesbians, feminists, and civil libertarians—words that George W. Bush never repudiated.