by Russ Baker
The inside inside man was the mayor of Arlington, car dealer Richard Greene. Greene played a key role in the city’s decision to heavily subsidize Bush and his group. At the time he began working to secure a home on favorable terms for Bush’s Rangers, he was in trouble with federal banking regulators working for W.’s dad.
In 1990, at the same time he was talking with the Rangers about a new stadium, Greene was negotiating with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to settle a large lawsuit it had filed against him. He had headed the Arlington branch of Sunbelt Savings Association, which the local Fort Worth Star-Telegram described as “one of the most notorious failures of the S&L scandal.” Sunbelt lost an estimated $2 billion, and the feds (and the nation’s taxpayers) had to chip in about $297 million to clean it up. Greene and the FDIC reached an agreement on the pending suit just as he was signing the Rangers deal.
The Arlington mayor paid just $40,000 to settle the case—and walked away. “George had no knowledge of my problems; there is no connection,” he assured the New York Times in September 2000.21 All of the bank’s key figures were charged except for him. Not only was Greene not criminally indicted, but he also escaped with minimal monetary pain. Ten days before Arlington’s 1991 public referendum on a special sales tax hike to help finance the stadium, Greene, now charged in losses of $500 million, settled all of his civil litigation for a modest $165,000.22
Greene Becomes Green
Greene’s tenure was identified principally with pro-growth and business-friendly policies. Yet after George W. Bush became president, he appointed Greene to be a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, where he oversaw federal environmental programs throughout Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. These states have some of the nation’s most severe pollution problems, most of which are connected to petroleum, and thus of central interest to the Bush political clan— which has typically fought emissions controls.
The announcement of Greene’s EPA appointment, which required no Senate approval, cited no environmental accomplishments or related experience for Greene.23 It did note that his wife was founder and current director of the River Legacy Foundation, which created trails and a nature center along undeveloped portions by the Trinity River. But it failed to add that she had been named to that post by the city government that her husband ran. In 1997, then-governor George W. Bush appointed Mrs. Greene to the Trinity River Authority board of directors. It all raised the question: Why was a car dealer in charge of environmental protection efforts in a part of the country befouled by some of the most noxious emissions found anywhere?
Greene’s EPA appointment was a nice farewell gift from his friends in the White House. He will get a pension equivalent to 100 percent of the highest pay he received at the EPA—this for a man who helped bankrupt two S&L’s at massive cost to the public, and who walked away with just a forty-thousand-dollar fine.
Owning Up to It
It didn’t take special political acumen to see that association with the Rangers would be helpful for anyone with political aspirations. For one thing, it appealed to state pride. After all, this wasn’t the Arlington Rangers, or even the Dallas–Fort Worth Rangers; it was the Texas Rangers. Not only that, the team was named after an institution dear to the hearts and minds of all Texans. Since its founding in 1823, the original Texas Rangers, heroic upholders of law and order, have attained a near-mythic aura based on exploits that range from routing Comanches and Mexican soldiers to chasing down outlaws such as John Wesley Hardin.
Years later, W. would refer to his Ranger years as simply “a win-win for everyone involved.”24 But the business dealings that extracted $135 million from taxpayers should have made Bush a juicy media target in the 2000 presidential election. New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof ferreted out the truth behind W.’s baseball bonanza in a front-page article in September 2000.25 Unfortunately, it took the Times six paragraphs to even hint that the report was more than a puff piece about a successful Texas businessman.
Arlington attorney Jim Runzheimer was surprised that rival campaigns dismissed the reporting. “I thought at that point for sure the Gore campaign would have picked up on Nick Kristof’s article,” Runzheimer said. “I mean, they don’t know who some local yokel is, who might be saying certain negative things about Bush. But hey, if Nick Kristof . . . obviously he’s got some stature. He’s a Pulitzer Prize–winner, if nothing else. But they didn’t follow up.” Even if Gore had trouble untangling the thorny financial web of Harken Energy, the story of Bush and Arlington provided ripe material for debunking his supposedly antitax opponent. “The ballpark would have been an easy issue. Kerry didn’t do anything with it either . . . Bush would have been on defense if he would have had to explain, but not once did that come up in either campaign.”26
At the very least, voters would have realized that they were dealing with, per David Cay Johnston, “arguably the greatest salesman of our time,” who would end up “having sold not just friends but political opponents on a war costing more than a trillion dollars and thousands of lives with the kind of pay-no-attention-to-that-pool-of-oil-under-the-engine polish that used car salesmen only dream about.”27
W.’s public sales jobs thus began with his successful effort to sell the citizens of Arlington on a tax increase—one that ran counter to his stated an-titax principles, but also one where the beneficiary would be himself.
A Good Job—If You Can Get It
All W.’s Texas Rangers position really required was for him to show up at baseball games—which, of course, he was eager to do because of the public exposure it gave him. For this he received a salary of $200,000, about $350,000 in today’s dollars—his largest compensation ever—for what was at most a part-time job.
Besides the constant association of his candidate with this beloved team in this beloved sport, Karl Rove loved to promote the public impression that Bush played an important role in the administration of the team. Given his conspicuous lack of experience in running ventures of any size or success, Bush needed to be seen as substantially engaged with the team’s operations in order to ask the people of Texas to elect him governor. Rove would insist that newspapers refer to Bush as the “Rangers owner,” though W. was just one of many owners, and certainly not the principal or most active one.28 He also was not at all engaged in daily operations. As Glenn Sodd, the opposing attorney on the Rangers’ land seizures recalled: “Bush never showed up at any of the key meetings about the [stadium deal]. If Bush spent two hours a week working on the baseball team, I’d be surprised.”
While he was ostensibly toiling for the Rangers, Bush traveled widely on the company budget and delivered hundreds of speeches. He was building a following throughout Texas—as Bush explained in an exchange of notes with David Rosen, an oil geologist and acquaintance from Midland. Rosen had seen W.’s face on the cover of Newsweek, and an accompanying article in which he said he might run for governor. “I dropped him a letter suggesting that he would be much better suited for the House of Representatives, inasmuch as it’s a gentleman’s club, a lot of Yale graduates there,” recalled Rosen. “Not a rough job. But I think he dropped back this note that he was more interested in what he could do for Texas.”29
To be precise, the note read:
Dear David, thanks for the letter and thoughts. I will not run for the House. It is a young man’s seat and you and I are not young. I don’t have any specific plans except to run the Rangers and work hard for candidates and the party—100 plus speeches in 1990.
W. commented on how the Republican gubernatorial nominee Clayton Williams had virtually handed the nomination to Democrat Ann Richards through his intemperate remarks,30 then added:
Let’s hope she does well. If not there will be some folks after her . . . Sincerely, George.
Having egregiously gamed the system for years without being called to account, W. saw little reason to settle for so meager a prize as a congressional seat.
Meet the Help
Tell me what company you keep, and I’ll tell you what you are.
—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
THE MORAL ATMOSPHERE OF THE George W. Bush presidency—and a growing list of revelations concerning improprieties, politicizing of agencies, and self-dealing—should not have come as a surprise. Warning signs abounded in W.’s gubernatorial campaign, his term and a half as governor, and his presidential campaign. There were the issues he championed, his management of the press, and his intimidation of everyone who got in his way. Most telling of all: the kind of people with whom he chose to surround himself. Taken together, these factors strongly suggested what a W. presidency would be like.
Yet the signs were mainly overlooked, especially by the people in the best position to shed light on them—reporters. With some conspicuous exceptions, the media was positively gleeful about nailing Bush’s 2000 opponent, Al Gore, for alleged boasts and exaggerations (e.g., “I invented the Internet”) that were in reality either misquotes or taken out of context. But when it came to Bush, the “liberal” media was strangely silent. It took a conservative pundit, Tucker Carlson, to question the resolve of his media peers. After one Bush-Gore debate, Carlson put it this way on CNN:
There is this sense in which Bush is benefiting from something, and I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s the low expectations of the people covering him. You know, he didn’t drool or pass out onstage or anything, so he’s getting credit for that. But there is this kind of interesting reluctance on the part of the press to pass judgment on it. I think a lot of people—they don’t, necessarily, break down along ideological lines—believe that, you know, maybe Bush didn’t do as good a job as he might have. And yet, the coverage does not reflect that at all. It’s interesting.1
In many respects, the media was so eager to “discern” W.’s character— and to bend over backward to be “fair”—that reporters often ended up being suckers for spin. And whenever they tried to just tell it like it seemed to be, their editors had to worry about complaints from the Bush campaign and elements of their audience decrying perceived bias.
Certainly, W. did have an aw-shucks charm that was especially effective on Eastern reporters who didn’t want to appear prissy. But even more, he had better handlers. As Gore adviser Tony Coelho put it, “Karl Rove and Karen Hughes outmaneuvered and out-strategized us. We weren’t in the same league.”2
Karl the Killer
The personnel protecting and propelling George W. Bush as he rose toward the governorship and then the presidency resembled less a team of policy advisers than an offensive blocking squad—or perhaps a gaggle of underworld capos. None better played the role than Karl Rove.
Few people realize that Rove, perhaps the most important figure in W.’s political rise, got his start as a handpicked apprentice to Poppy Bush.
A self-described nerd who spent his teenage years in Salt Lake City, Utah, carried a briefcase to school, and wore a pocket protector, Rove was a devoted high school Republican and avid debater with a remarkable mind for facts and figures. Rove attended four colleges but never graduated. Yet it was Rove’s role in College Republican circles that brought him to Washington, and in 1973, into the offices of Poppy Bush. At that time, Poppy was the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), and Karl Rove was an ambitious twenty-two-year-old who had just quit his position as executive director of the College Republican National Committee in order to spend five months campaigning for the position of chairman. He had been accused of engaging in dirty tricks and of teaching his methods to others. Worse, a rival candidate had leaked to the Washington Post a tape of Rove and a peer comparing notes on prior electoral espionage. In the middle of the Watergate scandal, a Post story titled “GOP Probes Official as Teacher of ‘Tricks’ ” couldn’t have pleased party elders.
Poppy “investigated” Rove, and even went so far as to have an FBI agent sent out to question him.3 On what authority the chairman of the Republican Party could get the FBI at his disposal, and what such access might have meant, especially coming at the height of Watergate, is not clear. In any case, with that bit of business concluded, Poppy did what his friend, Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, would later do for Poppy with regard to the Townhouse affair. He declared young Rove clear of all charges—then hired him as a special assistant.
Not only did he clear him and hire him, but he went right after Rove’s critics. After the surrogate of one College Republican, Robert Edgeworth, spoke to the Post about the dirty tricks, Edgeworth asked Bush to explain the basis for his decision favoring Rove. “Bush sent me back the angriest letter I have ever received in my life,” Edgeworth said. “I had leaked to the Washington Post, and now I was out of the Party forever.”4
The irony of this lecture on disloyalty cannot be overstated, since this was the same Poppy Bush who appears to have been so diligently undermining his own president and boss at precisely this moment.
ROVE IMMEDIATELY REPAID Poppy’s kindness by introducing him to the man who would help him become president.
The new College Republican National Committee executive director, Lee Atwater, would become a top Bush operative and later Poppy’s RNC chairman. Atwater’s crowning achievement would be the political destruction of Michael Dukakis, Poppy’s Democratic opponent in the 1988 presidential election, who had started the race well in the lead.5
When Poppy returned from his year in China to serve as CIA director in Langley, Virginia, Rove was nearby, working for the Virginia Republican Party. When Jimmy Carter ousted Poppy from his directorship and Poppy headed back to Texas to plot his presidential campaign, Karl Rove headed back there with him. Working from their Houston base in the First International Bank building, Rove helped James Baker run Poppy’s political action committee, the Fund for Limited Government, then hung out his shingle in Austin as a specialist in “direct mail”—the use of demographic and other information to send targeted letters for business and political purposes.
The Texas Hustle
There was direct mail, and then there was indirect mail. Former Newsweek senior editor John Taliaferro and his business partner found out about the latter form of communication when they were late in paying Rove’s bills for work he did on behalf of their Austin-based magazine Third Coast. Rove had been calling repeatedly demanding payment. Suddenly, the magazine’s post office box began filling up with blank subscription cards. “These, we came to realize, were [the result of ] Karl Rove, madly pulling these cards out of magazines and stuffing them in the mailbox, knowing we would be required to pay twenty-five cents each or whatever,” recalled Taliaferro.6 “It was a huge annoyance, and a prank that made sure we got the message that Karl Rove didn’t like being messed with. It was petty—rat fucking. But you could just see that instinct magnified twenty years later.”7
In 1986, on the eve of a gubernatorial debate between Rove’s candidate, former governor Bill Clements, and Democratic incumbent Mark White, and with Clements’s opponent closing the gap in the polls, Rove called a press conference to announce the discovery of a bugging device behind a picture frame near his desk. “Obviously, I do not know who did this,” Rove said, “but there is no doubt in my mind that the only ones who could have benefited from this detailed, sensitive information, would have been the political opposition.”8
The story easily trumped news coverage of a debate on public policy and left White flustered. According to his speechwriter, “Mark White was told all about this minutes before going on, and it just really rattled him. And he didn’t give a very good performance. It was really from that moment on that things started going not so well for Mark White.”9 Indeed, White’s poll numbers dropped precipitously, and he lost.
Meanwhile the FBI concluded that the bug’s tiny battery would have needed to be changed every few hours, and thus didn’t look like the work of Democratic operatives. Nevertheless, it was a brilliant tactical move. “I will go to my grave convinced [Rove] p
lanted the bug,” said former Texas Republican Party political director and campaign consultant Royal Masset. “He’s one of these art-of-war guys. To him, winning is everything. With Karl it’s all a game; it’s all a pure zero-sum game: we win, you lose—always.”10
Rove’s growing repertoire of tricks was tradecraft of the type that Poppy Bush’s CIA associates would have admired. It was what they themselves routinely did around the world, ostensibly in the service of the nation. And Rove was hardly alone: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose Republican revolution of 1994 bedeviled Bill Clinton’s presidency, quietly brought a military psy-ops specialist onto his staff.11
Like Poppy, Rove would develop informal relationships with FBI and other law enforcement personnel.12 Rove was not just ambitious and often brilliant. He was, in fact, the most effective of a long line of covert operatives recruited as young men into a pervasive extralegal apparatus. Perhaps more than any other person, Rove represented the sub rosa convergence of politics with intelligence and espionage—truly the embodiment of the Bush political psyche.