by Russ Baker
There was nothing subtle about Hicks’s attempts to buy influence. He and his brother Steven gave a total of $146,000 to W.’s 1994 and 1998 gubernatorial campaigns. At the same time he was lobbying heavily for the creation of the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO)—the first external investment corporation ever formed by a public university system. In his first year in office, W. approved legislation creating UTIMCO; then he appointed Hicks as its first chair.
Acting in secrecy, UTIMCO handed out public funds to friends and cronies. About $252 million went to projects run by associates of Hicks and other large Republican donors. Among the investments: the Carlyle group (heavily into military contracting, with the involvement of Poppy Bush and James Baker and the bin Laden family); Maverick Capital Fund, a project of the Wyly brothers, who would in 2004 donate thousands of dollars to the Swift Boat Veterans’ attack on the military record of W.’s opponent John Kerry; and Bass Brothers Enterprises (investors in Harken Energy).
After the Houston Chronicle exposed these insider dealings in a 1999 article, Tom Hicks, while denying any improprieties, resigned from the board.23
When he bought the Texas Rangers, in which Bush had retained his stake after becoming governor, Hicks helped make his influential friend a multimillionaire. Hicks’s investment company would also be the fourth-largest overall donor to W.’s political career.
More controversially, Hicks aided W. through his control of Clear Channel Communications, the largest chain of radio stations in the United States. In 2003, affiliate stations sponsored and organized pro–Iraq War demonstrations, a clear show of support for W.’s most ambitious policy initiative.24 A year later, Clear Channel, which also handles outdoor advertising, blocked an antiwar group’s attempt to rent a Times Square billboard for a feisty message, complete with a red, white, and blue bomb, criticizing the war.25
The Seduction
Whether W. really needed this help is open to question. His cultivation of the news media was one of the great political seductions of the twentieth century. Perhaps never before had someone so flawed been treated so well.
In memos written in the 1980s to both George Bushes, presidential aide Doug Wead sought to convince Bush father and son that they needed to woo journalists and writers. Wead made a historical analogy. “I used the illustration . . . that Napoléon is seen in history as this great conqueror. He is quoted. It’s like he’s a winner or something. And Louisa of Prussia— nobody knows who she is, and she beat him socially and militarily and diplomatically and economically. But he’s a star because he cultivated the arts and had favored artists and he had favored writers, and so [while] she ends up on a trash heap . . . he’s romanticized and celebrated and glorified.”26
Karen Hughes understood this. A former television reporter turned Republican Party official, she became Bush’s communications director. Royal Masset, who worked for Hughes at the Texas Republican Party, gives her an enormous amount of credit for W.’s political success. “I didn’t like working with her, but she was the best,” said Masset. “She was absolutely relentless.” Masset believes that Hughes played a crucial role in winning media approval for Bush as governor by her constant attention to reporters’ needs, and her rapid response when anything controversial emerged. It was her style to strategically and selectively admit error before a scandal could grow—and be out like lightning with a response. “You guys have the power,” Masset told me. “She understood that better than a lot of us.”
Borrowing a Persona
Karl Rove loved legends. He understood their power to distract the media— and therefore the public—and to frame the entire political debate. And so he began constructing the legend of George W. Bush, reluctant candidate and compassionate conservative.
Rove began his research in 1998 as part of a professed effort to secure his long-delayed bachelor’s degree through so-called conference courses at the University of Texas, Austin. (Rove never did get that degree.) At a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, everything was done by phone and mail. Working with Professor Lewis L. Gould, Rove sought to identify a former president who could serve as a model for George W. He focused initially on Teddy Roosevelt, but Gould recommended William McKinley as a better choice. Rove quickly took to McKinley: though a Republican, he was a compassionate one, breaking with Gilded Age values to appeal to working-class immigrants.27
Even better, there was a Karl Rove in the story: Mark Hanna, the first political operative publicly identified as having created a president. Getting himself cast as the new Mark Hanna would serve him well professionally. It also would further the notion that W. was a reluctant politician, and shift blame for anything that went wrong to his Mark Hanna–like Svengali. Best of all was the way that it set Bush up as a compassionate conservative, covering up the fundamental pathology of W.’s character, including a deep-grained incomprehension of the problems of the less fortunate.
By the summer of 1999, Rove had hit on his formulation. He called Gould to let him know that he was drawing a parallel between Bush and McKinley for reporters, and that the professor might expect some calls from the media.
“McKinley fit into the compassionate conservatism they were pitching at that time,” Gould told me in a 2006 interview. The professor himself did not buy the comparison, but that did not matter. He did not think it appropriate to be offering his own opinion, so on background he simply answered reporters’ questions about McKinley.
In retrospect, Gould realizes just how inapt the comparison was. “The differences between McKinley and Bush have become so palpable—McKinley was a very kind man, in a genuine kind of way,” said Gould. “He was able to work with Democrats. One of his sayings was, Never keep books in politics, don’t hold grudges. He would say, ‘I will always love you no matter what you do.’ ”28
Gould thinks the press was easily bamboozled. “In your business, people love historical parallels, but they don’t [ feel they] have to check them . . . Some reporters’ sense of history ended when their college [years] did.”
The better parallel, but only in a limited and superficial sense, was with Reagan. As the first actor in presidential politics, the Californian had quickly mastered every aspect of the public stage—the uniforms, the gestures, the stirring words and music. Reagan was photographed chopping wood and riding horses, and the media lapped it up.
Then there was Poppy. Image-wise, he had gotten it all wrong: preppy, goofy, bad speaker, no “vision thing,” stood for nothing, inspired nobody. A disaster in every way. Pretending to enjoy pork rinds.
Clinton was much better. Forget the Oxford stint; here was a colorful, exuberant everyman: jogging, living large, tooting the saxophone. Not quite Reagan, but a good act nonetheless. Bush and Rove and their team watched and discussed. When they moved into action, they took nothing for granted. If there were an Academy Award for Best Pre-Presidential Set Design, they would have won hands-down. The secretive Rainbo Club membership disappeared, and in its place came a more acceptable “ranch.” The ranch was as improbable as the rest. Purchased in 1999, it played a crucial role as a campaign prop, making the Andover-bred W. into a cowboy. By 2004 the notion seemed ludicrous enough that an ad for the anti-Bush group America Coming Together cast comedian Will Ferrell as a convincingly bumbling W. who fears horses and pretends to mend his fence with tools he hardly knows how to hold. But in the early days the imagery held sway.
The real W., a man with no interest in foreign affairs, was suddenly receiving foreign leaders and dignitaries, in a carefully manipulated limelight. A governor whose state had the dirtiest air in America was now talking about protecting the environment. And a contentious, bullheaded fellow was cast as a thoughtful moderate, a “uniter not a divider.”
The Texas Education Miracle
During the 2000 campaign, Bush made clear that he wanted to be the “education president.” His staff would tout to reporters his success in improving educational results, which they dubbed the “Te
xas Miracle.” It was a catchy phrase, but truth in advertising would have required Bush admit the only “miracle” was the fact that anyone believed it.
A report by the nonprofit RAND Corporation debunked the “miracle” story just two weeks before the election. Though Texas students had made gains on statewide tests—the result of classroom coaching, RAND said— they did not score better on national standardized tests. “The very foundation of the Bush campaign just crumbled,” Gore’s deputy campaign manager said at the time, in a bout of wishful thinking.29 The truth about Bush and the schools received a mere fraction of the media coverage given to the myth.
Credit for W.’s supposed success was initially given to Houston school superintendent Rod Paige, whose popularity reached across party lines. Dropout rates in Houston had dwindled, and test scores had soared. Once W. was elected president, he named Paige as his education secretary, and used Houston as the model for “No Child Left Behind.” Despite the fact that polls consistently show education as a primary voter concern, few have heard of Rod Paige—and few realize what actually happened in the Texas schools.
It turns out that Paige’s district was cooking the books. According to a 60 Minutes II investigation, one high school “reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country.”30 Though Houston’s school district reported a dropout rate of 1.5 percent, experts estimated the true rate as being between 25 and 50 percent. The lower rate was cited by W. on the campaign trail as evidence of his educational prowess.
Upon leaving the administration, Paige joined the board of News Corp, the parent of the Fox News Channel, and cofounded a firm that offers consulting on education reform, ostensibly attempting to spread Texas-style “miracles” across the country.
Compassionate Conservative
The same kind of “creative fiction” approach to political campaigning could be seen in the way the Bush team deployed faces of color to imply a kind of egalitarianism and embracing social concern—a concern that seemed to vanish the moment he gained the White House.
While W. followed the conservative playbook in preaching against affirmative action for minorities “on principle,” he practiced the most morally repugnant form of it: the advancement of easily manipulated second-raters to serve his own purposes.
The notion seems to have originated with W.’s elders. Prescott Bush, who, as noted in chapter 10, did not like Italians in Greenwich getting into Andover, had served as Connecticut chairman of the United Negro College Fund. Early in his political career, Poppy had gone after black votes, hoping to win just enough to eke out a victory. Recalled Poppy’s friend and employee Bob Gow: “Most of the blacks in Texas at that time were Democrats, but George had one prominent black man who was staunchly for him. This man ran a tire distribution company . . . [that] was failing and George asked me to go and meet with this man . . . with the objective of helping them make the company prosper, if possible, but if not, at least stay solvent through the election.”31
Poppy nevertheless did badly among blacks in 1964, and resolved to reposition himself from a “Goldwater Republican” to a moderate for his 1970 Senate race. He got in contact with Ernie Ladd, who had recently moved to Houston to join the Oilers, and the two became friends. In a published account, Ladd claims that he met Poppy Bush because Bush “wanted to know who the most popular black person was in the city of Houston and someone told them Ernie Ladd was getting a lot of newspaper coverage.”32
Besides appearing in a video presented at the 2000 Republican National Convention, Ladd, a professional wrestler and minister after retiring from football, helped organize W.’s inauguration.
A close friend of Ladd’s, Ernest L. Johnson, the head of the Louisiana NAACP, provided Bush with another kind of cover during the 2000 campaign. This took place when W. attended a lunch honoring Governor Mike Foster, a Bush supporter with ties to former KKK grand wizard David Duke. Johnson actually joined Bush at the lunch and waded through a crowd of African American protesters. That same year, Johnson received a state contract for affirmative-action programs. Johnson also endorsed a chemical plant that was vigorously resisted by environmental and citizen groups outraged by Louisiana’s role as a kind of toxic dumping ground, especially in areas whose large poor black populations were historically bedeviled by high cancer rates.
Johnson, who claims to have known W. since the early 1980s, described him as “a person we could sit down with and talk to about issues.”33 (Although W. may have been willing to sit down with his friend Johnson, he was considerably more leery of the NAACP itself. He declined five straight annual invitations to address the NAACP’s national convention, before relenting in 2006 in the wake of his government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, many of whose victims were African Americans.)
In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Johnson as alternate representative to the General Assembly of the United Nations. Oddly, this fact does not seem to have been publicized in Johnson’s home state. When I mentioned it to several prominent community figures in Louisiana who know Johnson well, they laughed out loud in disbelief.
Bush’s most illustrious and accomplished black appointee was Colin Powell. During the tumult in Florida after the 2000 election, the campaign promoted the idea that Powell was Bush’s “near-certain choice” for secretary of state,34 a move that seemed intended to silence the accusation that thousands of Florida blacks had been disenfranchised. But after W. took office, Powell was largely ignored and disrespected by administration insiders. Eventually, he was put in the untenable position of trumpeting false evidence on behalf of a war in Iraq he dreaded.
Meanwhile, Education Secretary Rod Paige strove assiduously to fit in, right down to his black cowboy boots. Yet, Bush basically ignored him. The New Republic noted, “In any administration, the blatant marginalization of the only African American domestic cabinet secretary would be noteworthy. In an administration that loudly trumpets its commitment to cabinet government and racial diversity, it’s stunning.”35
W.’s high-profile African American hires besides Powell and Con-doleezza Rice also included housing secretary Alphonso Jackson, whose inattentive and misdirected policies may have contributed to the collapse of the home mortgage market—a disaster that hit African Americans especially hard. A front-page Washington Post article written the week Jackson left office characterized the secretary as a spendthrift who had a private chef and commissioned expensive personal portraits at taxpayers’ expense. His office also spent seven million dollars on a new auditorium and cafeteria at Housing and Urban Development headquarters. “How can you spend that much money on building a shrine to yourself?”36 asked the vice president of the fiscally conservative National Taxpayers Union. Meanwhile, said the Post, Jackson repeatedly ignored warnings from his colleagues that his policies on mortgage loans were putting poor families at risk.37 Perhaps the most striking fact about Jackson—generally ignored by the media—was that Bush’s housing chief had rather quietly exited the administration right in the middle of the housing crisis. That few noticed was in itself telling.
W.’s domestic policy adviser was Claude Allen, a black Republican who had served as campaign spokesman for Senator Jesse Helms, the man the Washington Post’s David Broder once referred to as “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country.”38 W. appointed Allen after his nomination for a federal judgeship stalled in the Senate. In 2006, Allen resigned from his White House position ostensibly to spend more time with the family. But it soon came out that he had perpetrated a refund scam to swindle five thousand dollars out of Target and Hecht’s department stores. On at least twenty-five occasions Allen attempted to collect refund money on items he hadn’t purchased.39 At the time, he was the highest-ranking African American on the White House staff.
The irony was that W., an opponent of af
firmative action designed to help minorities get a leg up, was using his own distorted form of it to reward loyal hangers-on, and to help perpetuate a self-serving myth of compassionate, diversity-friendly conservatism.
CHAPTER 19
The Conversion
I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in
heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more
than over ninety and nine just persons, which
need no repentance.
—LUKE 15:7
GEORGE W. BUSH AND HIS HANDLERS knew that his behavior before becoming governor—his partying, his womanizing, and in particular his military service problems—posed a serious threat to his presidential ambitions. Their solution was to wipe the slate clean—through a religious transformation.
The wholesale remaking of the man would require a credible conversion experience and a presentable spiritual guide. For the latter, they settled on the popular and respectable Billy Graham. He had proven a trustworthy friend to the powerful, and he happened to have visited the Bushes at a crucial time for W. and the Bush family.