by Russ Baker
At the Camp David gathering, George W. and Jeb took the lead in questioning the loyalty of the hired hands. A par ticular concern was Lee Atwater, whose GOP consulting firm partners were at the same time doing work for Jack Kemp, a rival to Poppy. According to some accounts, Atwater tried to reassure W., and even suggested the VP’s son move to Washington and keep an eye on him.7 Though it would be more than two years before W. physically moved to Washington, he would be very much involved with his father’s 1988 campaign from the outset, and would eventually be called on to serve as liaison to the evangelical community. The mere fact that W., of all people, was in charge of wooing this crucial group is striking. Without his own convincing redemption tale, he would never have been acceptable in that position.
Members of the media might start digging into the backgrounds of the Bush offspring. If they did, they would likely learn that W. had never accomplished anything of note, save for learning to fly a jet in the National Guard (and then cutting out prematurely), and that his businesses were family-and-friend-funded failures whose trail led to covert operations. They might also find that much of his social behavior since college had been an embarrassment. After all, he would soon turn forty.
W. Sees the Light
W. had reason to believe that his efforts to redefine himself would not receive heavy scrutiny in Texas. “Attacks on moral character are the province of the GOP,” said Mike Lavigne, a former Texas Democratic Party official. And being reborn was double insurance. “People figure what you did for forty years of your life doesn’t matter if you’re reborn. And Texas culture is very accepting of born-agains.”
W. saw how people turned to religion when everything seemed lost. He had seen it right there in Midland. At the same time, W. himself was looking for ways to cope with his worsening situation at home—where, according to some Midlanders, his relationship with Laura had become badly strained. And, with his father preparing to run for the White House, the whole family would have to bear up well under media scrutiny.
The beauty of the religious right as a political bloc was that it provided a large pool of voters that often acted in unison, based on a narrow set of issues that had relatively little to do with actual governance and did not inconvenience the corporate interests that finance the Republican Party. By and large, the things that mattered most to these voters mattered least in the Oval Office. Despite the Bush family’s traditional aversion to its culture, Rove and the other strategists knew that they had to have that bloc.
In March 1987, after years of reading and vetting Wead’s memos, W. finally met the influential evangelical. He quickly developed a close relationship with the man he came to call “Weadie.” Wead would later use his experience with W. and other members of the Bush family as a basis for his accounts of presidential family dynamics, including 2004’s All the President’s Children.8
One day, the two were sitting in W.’s office on Fourteenth Street in Washington, discussing strategies for approaching various evangelicals. “We’re going through a list of the names of these religious leaders,” Wead told me in a 2006 interview, “and . . . [W.]’s not into details at all . . . His eyes glaze over in thirty seconds; you got to be right to the point, quick. We’re going over these leaders and how his dad can win them over one by one, discussing different strategies. And he looks down the list and bing! He sees this guy’s name, the guy with the cross. He says, tell me about him, tell me about this guy.” The guy was Arthur Blessitt.
At the time, Blessitt was perhaps best known for earning a mention in The Guinness Book of Records by dragging a ninety-six-pound cross on wheels across six continents. (It is apparently the “world’s longest walk.”) Author Jacob Weisberg notes that a decade earlier, Blessitt “declared he was running for president, though it wasn’t clear which party, if any, he belonged to.”9 In August 2008, the ambitious evangelist fulfilled a lifelong dream by launching the first-ever cross into outer space.
Recalled Wead: “I said basically, well, he’s very beloved, an honest person, innocent person. The rap, which may be very unfair, is that before his conversion he was very much into drugs; he is like a born-again Cheech and Chong sort of thing. He’s got a great sense of humor and [is] a loveable guy, seen [as] a little bit of an oddball to some, but certainly seen as someone who has integrity and [is] without guile and . . . And [W.] said, ‘Yeah, yeah, uh-huh.’ ”
W.’s Ears Prick Up
In fact, W. was playing dumb with Wead, because he already knew all about the fortuitously named Blessitt. He had met him in April 1984 when the itinerant minister had come to Midland on a crusade. It was a particularly bad moment for the oil-dominated town. The bottom had fallen out of the oil business—including W.’s small piece of it—and former playboys found themselves facing hard times; some suffered the humiliation of having their luxury cars repossessed. In their extremity, some turned to religion. An oil industry Bible study group had been formed that year, and W.’s friend, the banker Don Jones, who had put W. on his bank board, was a member. But Bush himself had not felt the need to join at that time. Raised Episcopal, he had begun attending a Methodist church when he married Laura, but it had been the normal Sunday-morning brand of religiosity.
W. has never spoken about his encounter with Blessitt, but the story emerged on the preacher’s Web site in October 2001.10 According to Blessitt, an intermediary contacted him during his 1984 crusade stop in Midland to say that the vice president’s son had heard him on the radio and wished to meet with him discreetly. Blessitt invited Bush to meet with him, led him in a sinner’s prayer and praise, and then said, more or less: that’s it, your sins are forgiven, you’re a new creature, you’re born-again.
By 1987, when W. saw Blessitt on Wead’s list of evangelical leaders, he was being a bit disingenuous in asking Wead to tell him about the man—or why he was so interested. Paying it no further heed, Wead continued reading names. “But later, when I heard the story that [Blessitt] said Bush [became born-again through him] . . . I believed him.”
However, Wead had warned the Bushes that they had to be careful how they couched their conversion story. It couldn’t be seen as something too radical or too tacky. Preachers who performed stunts with giant crosses would not do. Billy Graham, “spiritual counselor to presidents,” would do perfectly. “My point to him was that evangelicals are not popular in the media and therefore you take a risk by identifying with any of them, and Graham may be the only one that you can,” said Wead. “So G. W. was aware of that before he told me the story that he had a walk with Graham.” Thus, W. was just repeating back to Wead what Wead had advised the Bushes, but with a twist.
“Something in that exchange [about Blessitt] told me that Bush decided Billy Graham’s got to be the guy. It can’t be this guy. It’s got to be Billy Graham.”
The Corporate Confessor: Billy Graham to the Rescue
Billy Graham was a congenial political confessor.11 He was forgiving of the misdoings of his powerful friends—such as Nixon and former Texas governor John Connally. In 1975, when Connally went on trial, accused of taking ten thousand dollars to influence a milk-price decision, one of his character witnesses was Billy Graham. Connally was acquitted.
Graham was also a friend to the Bushes, one who met their test of loyalty. He reportedly had even been among those urging Nixon to make Poppy his running mate back in 1968. In the final Sunday before the 2000 election, Graham would travel to Florida and very publicly embrace his supposed disciple. Speaking on W.’s behalf, Graham said, “I don’t endorse candidates, but I’ve come as close to it now as any time in my life. I believe in the integrity of this man.”12
Of course Billy Graham was often around political families, and of course he talked about his work. And of course they probably took that walk on the beach to which W. would refer. The misdirection came in the way the conversion story was worded. Reporters leaped to the assumption that Bush and Graham had had a private walk and a heart-to-heart, but the words in Charge to K
eep don’t really say that. “We walked and talked at Walker’s Point,” Bush says, which is what everyone did while staying there. After W. began recounting the story publicly, Billy Graham admitted to one journalist that he didn’t remember the encounter.
In 2006, Graham told two Time reporters who tried to jog his memory: “I don’t remember what we talked about. There’s not much of a beach there. Mostly rocks. Some people have written—or maybe he has said, I don’t know—that it had an effect, our walk on the beach. I don’t remember. I do remember a walk on the beach.”13
Rocky Mountain Not High
Even after a conversion experience, it is hard to argue that you have changed your ways unless you actually . . . change your ways. And the iconic moment for that, a staple of virtually every profile written during Bush’s first presidential campaign, was the night he swore off drinking.
One of the rules of propaganda is that a transformative event must be dramatically staged. And so W.’s forswearing booze takes place the day after his fortieth birthday—July 7, 1986—and with the majestic Rocky Mountains as the backdrop. For the occasion, Bush had assembled a small group of close friends at the Broadmoor Hotel, a renowned resort in Colorado Springs.
As Bush tells it, he had had a few too many drinks at his birthday dinner the night before, and had awoken the next morning feeling awful. On the spot he decided never to drink again. Like all the significant changes in Bush’s life, this one was described without inner texture or process. He simply flipped a switch. “People later asked whether something special happened, some incident, some argument or accident that turned the tide, but no, I just drank too much and woke up with a hangover. I got out of bed and went for my usual run . . . I felt worse than usual, and about halfway through, I decided that I would drink no more.”
It was not that his drinking had taken so much of a toll. Rather it was an act of prudent foresight. “I realized that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people . . . When you’re drinking, it can be an incredibly selfish act,” Bush said. “Well, I don’t think I had [an addiction]. You know, it’s hard for me to say. I’ve had friends who were, you know, very addicted . . . and they required hitting bottom [to start] going to AA. I don’t think that was my case.”14
Actually it is quite believable that Bush could abruptly end a longtime habit in this way. He has a steely resolve and a self-assurance that in some contexts can be a plus. He has talked about “not getting into a debate with myself.”
In his professional as well as personal life, W. often made snap decisions and stuck to them, no matter what. “It took my breath away,” recalled Wead. “When he first came in, we had a long list of things that needed to be done. He just went down the list, yes, yes, no, no, yes—things that for months we couldn’t get any action on. I said, ‘Why yes to number three? I mean, I’m glad you said that, but why yes to three?’ Well, he’d give his answers that just blew me away. I never met anybody that decisive in my life.
“I once met a guy named Nicholson . . . He was working for Gerald Ford, and he went on to corporate work, and he was like that. You’d be having a conversation like this, and he’d say, wait, that’s a good idea. And he’d get the phone, and he’d call somebody and say, sell this, do this, do that, build that. And then he’d say, OK, go on. And he was amazing, a businessman, a multimillionaire. But other than him, I’ve never met anybody else like that—and Bush Jr. was far more decisive than Nicholson. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Alcohol served well as a representative sin—a part that avoided the need to talk about the whole. It is a far more acceptable sin than, say, buying, selling, or using illegal drugs, or committing spousal abuse. And millions of Americans would relate to him. A weakness overcome could end up actually attracting voters. A negative would become a positive.
W. had been dipped into the cleansing waters, and he was triply absolved: 1) No one could criticize him for anything he had done before he had found the Lord and abandoned the bottle; 2) fundamentalist Christians would embrace him in large numbers; and 3) by emphasizing his “wild youth” he would create a striking contrast to stuffed shirts like his father, Al Gore, and John Kerry. To pollster after pollster, voters would admit that they liked George W. Bush largely because of what a regular guy he was. And he certainly was—even when in his post-born-again life, he didn’t take his conversion experience too seriously. When a Midland Bible teacher asked W.’s prayer group to define a prophet, the irreverent Harvard Business School grad piped up with this quip: “That is when revenues exceed expenditures. No one’s seen one out here in years.”15
Spy vs. Spy
If there were ever any doubts about just how crucial the religious right vote was to political success, they evaporated the moment the televangelist Pat Robertson entered the 1988 GOP race against Poppy. Then things moved beyond simple outreach.
“I ran spies in our opponents’ political camps,” Wead said. “We recruited precinct delegates that ran for office for Pat Robertson in Michigan. We helped them win, get elected, go to the state, and totally infiltrate Robertson’s campaign. I ran them essentially for [Lee] Atwater, but W. knew about them.”16 Wead said that front-page headlines in Detroit were declaring “Robertson Delegates Switch to Bush,” but of course these delegate spies were supporting Bush from the get-go. The spy argot here is suggestive. In the Bush milieu, an intelligence mentality spills over not just into politics generally, but even into dealings with the church-based right. Domestic political constituencies have replaced the citizens of Communist countries as a key target of American elites. They seek to win the hearts and minds of devout Christians through quasi-intelligence techniques.
Wead was struck by W.’s own mastery of the dark arts. “I’ve had long discussions with W. about planting stories deep so that journalists who find them have a great sense of authorship and so that they have great authenticity,” Wead said. “Like doing a good deed and planting it real, real deep, knowing it will be found.” It was subtle, and therefore it was effective, a classic strategy of misdirection that is one of the oldest weapons in the arsenal of the covert operative. “We talked about the importance of things that the press would have to find, that you leave a little nugget there, and you got to bury it deep enough that as [ for example, Washington Post reporter] Lois Romano goes for it and finds it, she would never ever guess that it was planted. She would die for her story—pride of authorship. She’d fight her editors all the way. We talked about that.”
Once, Wead recalled with amusement, they were talking about Mad magazine, and which features were their favorites. W. volunteered that he particularly loved the intrigues of Spy vs. Spy. “He was talking about the subtlety of politics and how what meets the eye is so different from the political [reality],” Wead told me. “I’m still amazed how naïve so many journalists are who have covered politics all their life.”
In former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s 2008 tell-all, What Happened, he recounts being invited to W.’s hotel suite during the 2004 campaign while the president is on the phone with a supporter. “The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,” W. says into the phone as he motions for McClellan to sit and relax. “You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day,” the president continues.
In his book, McClellan recalls his own bewilderment. “How can that be? How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine?” Though McClellan remembers that the phone call was arranged, and that W. “brought up the [cocaine] issue,” he doesn’t seem to realize that the president is indirectly relaying a message to the man who serves as his mouthpiece. If W. could only convince his press secretary, through an offhand moment of candor, that he didn’t remember using cocaine, then McClellan might repeat the statement to the press with all the conviction of someone telling the truth as he saw it.
17
In politics, the essence of deceit is deniability: getting something done in such a way that you can plausibly claim that you had nothing to do with it. Not surprisingly, the first son of a longtime CIA operative was obsessed with deniability for both himself and his father. “What they did in ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88, ’89, is they didn’t have me write the memo to him,” said Wead. “They had me write the memo to Atwater or to Fuller or to Kaufman, so I’ve got a ton of memos that I can show you that are written to Kaufman, but they were for [both Georges] Bush.”
W. went to great lengths to remind “Weadie” of his value to the operation. “He would say to me, ‘Did you get reimbursed for that airline ticket?’ And I’d say, no, but it’s no problem. He’d yell to Gina or whatever her name was, ‘Get in here.’ And she’d come in, and he’d say, ‘Why haven’t you reimbursed him?’
“ ‘Well, we were going to do it.’
“ ‘Pay him now, now!’
“ ‘Well, I’ve got to—’
“ ‘Now!’
“ ‘OK.’ ”
The Safe with Two Keys
Given all they had to hide, it makes sense that the obsession with secrecy by George Bush, father and son, would be all-consuming.