Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (59 page)

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 affirmative 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

G
EORGE 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.

In 1985 Poppy invited Reverend Graham to join the Bushes at their summer retreat in Kennebunkport. Though the Bush family was Episcopal and Graham Southern Baptist, Graham had for years been widely recognized as the religious leader in residence for the White House. Just associating publicly with him bestowed a certain moral legitimacy in the eyes of untold voters.

The Graham invite was likely part of an effort to build support for Poppy among self-identified Christian voters. But it included a bonus, because W. got his own path to validation too. According to a story that would later be repeated widely in the media, Graham preached at the tiny church favored by the Bushes. Afterward he engaged the Bush clan in private discussions of faith, including a chat beside the fireplace. W. would claim later that this chat, along with a walk on the beach, left him a changed man. He wrote in
A Charge to Keep
:

Over the course of that weekend, Reverend Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year. He led me to the path, and I began walking. It was the beginning of a change in my life. I had always been a “religious” person, had regularly attended church, even taught Sunday School and served as an altar boy. But that weekend my faith took on a new meaning. It was the beginning of a new walk where I would commit my heart to Jesus Christ . . .

When I returned to Midland, I began reading the Bible regularly. Don Evans talked me into joining him and another friend, Don Jones, at a men’s community Bible study.
¹

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION HAS long offered the ambitious more than just spiritual comfort. It presents opportunities for social and business networking, and for some a convenient counterweight to questionable behavior. John D. Rockefeller’s longtime involvement in the Baptist Church, along with his philanthropic activities, went a long way toward redeeming in some minds his ruthless business practices. Allen Dulles, the CIA’s master of assassinations and coups, served on the national board of the Presbyterian Church. Even Poppy Bush would become a board member of the Episcopal Church Foundation.

Among the moneyed and well-established, it once was typical that one son become an attorney and another a clergyman—occupations preferred over commerce, which was generally frowned upon. When the first wife of Poppy’s great-grandfather James Smith Bush died in childbirth, James entered divinity school. Originally trained as a lawyer at Yale, he ended up serving as minister to some of America’s most powerful congregations, from bastions of great wealth on the East Coast to San Francisco’s exclusive Nob Hill at the height of the California gold rush.

Of course, George W. Bush is not the first politician to tout his religious devotion. Certainly he will not be the last. The conversion narrative is a staple, and one that reporters are loath to question. It was especially appealing in 2000, given Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct and the consequent large role of “character” in the election.

As he noted in
Charge to Keep
, Bush had served communion during his Houston youth and taught Sunday school when he moved back to Midland in 1975.
²
But the Bush family had long treated such activities as civic and political obligations. Inge Honneus, the woman Bush pursued when he was in the National Guard, recalled how W. felt free to discuss all manner of topics with her since she was so far out of his normal circle. “We talked about religion,” she said, and “he thought it was a joke. And when he started going and running for president, and trying to get the religious votes, I’m thinking, ‘What a hypocrite.’ I don’t know if he all of a sudden turned religious. But the core of him was not a very nice man.” Nice man or not, one thing is certain: with his entry into Bible study, Bush was reinventing himself.

It was a politically savvy idea, but, in truth, it was not his own. It appears that it was neither W.’s Midland friends nor the Reverend Billy Graham who helped him see the light. It was Doug Wead, marketing man.

The Religion Coach

Before W. sought to establish his credentials with the religious right—during his father’s vice presidency—Wead had written the Bushes a memo stressing the potential political benefits of preaching to that particular choir.

Wead, a handsome, amiable former minister of the Assemblies of God, had built a career as a motivational speaker. He was a master networker who had moved up the ranks at Amway, the multilevel marketing company run by the fundamentalist DeVos family, big players in the Republican Party. And he had used his charm and his unusual position as a bridge between the moneymaking world and the evangelicals to meet and build relationships with a range of powerful people. He got to know Jimmy Carter. In 1980 he wrote a quickie book,
Reagan in Pursuit of the Presidency
, timed for release just before the Republican convention. He studied the potential of the evangelical vote, and was soon a hybrid marketer-author-speaker-historian-religious-political-consultant.

Wead’s entry into the Bush circle had nothing to do with religious politics. He came in as a ghostwriter. It was in this role that Wead was recommended to Senator Lowell Weicker in 1981 to help with the senator’s memoir—the revelations of which, Weicker believed, would finish off Vice President Poppy Bush. But as Weicker narrated his interactions with Poppy over the burning of the Townhouse documents, Wead began to imagine that Weicker was misreading his rival. And so, paradoxically, the more Weicker vented, the more Wead felt a growing sense of affection, from a distance, for Poppy Bush. (On a practical level, it also was certainly more useful to be friends with a vice president who might become president than with a maverick senator who most certainly would not.)

The ghostwriter contacted deputy assistant White House chief of staff Joe Canzeri, whom he knew. Almost immediately, Wead found himself ushered into a meeting in Poppy’s vice presidential offices at the Old Executive Office Building with Pete Teeley, the vice president’s press secretary. Teeley had been recruited onto Poppy’s 1980 campaign by none other than W., and the two men remained close.
³

“I tell him what Weicker has, the goods he has,” Wead recalled in one of numerous conversations I had with him over several years. “And Teeley says: ‘Maybe Weicker is right. Maybe George Bush shouldn’t be president of the United States.’ ” Wead realized that Teeley was egging him on. Moreover, Wead recalled, “I had the distinct impression later—after I got to know all these characters—that Herbert Walker [Bush] was sitting in the next room,” listening to the conversation through an open door.

Teeley soon introduced Wead to Poppy’s aide Ron Kaufman, with whom he began having long discussions about the importance of the evangelical vote.

Some time later, Wead was speaking at a conference in Miami when he got an emergency phone call from Teeley, who informed the surprised Wead that he was staying at the hotel next door. “Now, I’ve always assumed, and always thought, it was a coincidence,” said Wead. “We ended up meeting together for lunch several times that week. I literally just walked down the beach and met with him.” Teeley claimed to have taken a leave of absence to write a book about the Colombian cocaine kingpin Carlos Lehder. “[The Vice President’s office] had all this CIA information on him, and they couldn’t go public with it and they couldn’t get him legally, and they were trying to put him out of business. They had finally decided a book was the best way,” Wead said.

In fact, on January 28, 1982, around the time Teeley reached out to Wead, President Reagan had created the high-profile South Florida Task Force, under Poppy’s leadership, ostensibly to control narcotics flowing into the United States. Poppy’s “war on drugs” as vice president and later president would become one of his signature issues.

Teeley told Wead that since he himself lacked experience writing books, he was hoping that Wead might offer guidance. Whatever the true reason for Teeley to be in Florida and seek out Wead, it did not benefit the purported Lehder book. Said Wead: “Come to think of it . . . I don’t think he ever wrote the book.”

In fact, Wead is correct. Teeley never wrote the book—if there ever was a book to write. But Teeley did use this tropical interlude to develop a closer relationship with Wead, and to examine him up close. In retrospect, Wead wondered whether Teeley’s confiding in him on this “confidential topic” was some kind of test.
⁴

Wead soon was being ushered into the presence of Poppy himself. The ostensible reason was an opportunity for Wead to interview the VP for a cover story in an obscure publication Wead put out called
On Magazine—
Positive News of People and Events
. This first meeting with Poppy, Wead recalled, took place in early 1982—not long after his lunch with Pete Teeley in Florida, and while Wead was still working with Senator Weicker. Soon Wead was a regular in Bush circles.

Doug Wead’s relationship with Poppy Bush grew stronger in June 1984, when Wead sat next to Barbara Bush, and Poppy sat next to Wead’s wife, at a Washington charity dinner honoring Poppy for the “humanitarian” work he had done in Central America. (The Reagan administration’s secret arming of the Nicaraguan rebels, and Bush’s role in the so-called Iran-contra scandal, were not yet publicly known.)

In February 1985, the new friends got down to business. “One day I’m sitting in the office with Pete Teeley, and we’re talking about how to get some water-treatment systems for the vice president to take to Africa,” Wead recalled. “The vice president was there, and he said, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to go speak to the National Religious Broadcasters. I’d like to stay here and shoot the’—whatever he said it was—‘with you guys, but I’ve got to go speak to the National Religious Broadcasters.’ And Pete Teeley said, ‘Well, Mr. Vice President, Doug here is a born-again Christian.’ And he was bowled over. He couldn’t believe it. It was like he was stunned. He said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ I said, ‘No, I am. Sorry.’ He said, ‘I can’t believe that. You’re a born-again Christian?’ I said, yeah . . . I think he didn’t know anybody in his circle that was born-again. He had never met one.” Poppy was almost certainly being disingenuous and making Wead feel special. After all, there were many evangelicals around Reagan, and the GOP in general.

Wead then explained to Poppy that the wife of Poppy’s close friend James Baker was a Catholic Pentecostal, which is not unlike an evangelical, and again, though it is hard to see how the vice president could not have already known about Mrs. Baker, he expressed amazement. And then he asked Wead what he was doing right that minute, whether he would come with him to the National Religious Broadcasters speech.

“So we’re sitting in the car, in the motorcade . . . and he said, can you look at my speech. And I said sure. So I start to read his speech, and it’s just awful—for evangelicals it’s just terrible. He’s quoting Thomas Dewey. And I said . . . you know, you don’t want to quote him.” Wead felt it showed Poppy’s tin ear that he imagined evangelicals would want to hear sayings from Dewey, the mustachioed New York Episcopalian.

Certainly, it was a challenge for someone perceived as a preppy moderate to play well to that crowd. But Poppy could hardly have been unaware of the growing influence of the religious right on American politics. Indeed, even the pro-choice, socially liberal Jimmy Carter had very effectively garnered fundamentalist support in 1976 as the first self-described born-again Christian president. And of course Poppy would have known how effectively Ronald Reagan had wooed the same constituency.

When Reagan stood in front of a crowd of fifteen thousand evangelicals in Dallas in August 1980, his message had been framed in the most reassuring terms: “All the complex and horrendous questions confronting us at home and worldwide have their answer in that single book.”
⁵
He eagerly tore into the ACLU, the NEA, and the USSR. Evolution, he assured his audience, “is a scientific theory only.”
⁶

Poppy did not have Reagan’s oratorical gifts—nor his actor’s relish for a good role. Instinctively, he was uncomfortable with pandering to the masses, and uncomfortable too with ascribing deep personal values to himself. For that matter he didn’t like to reveal much of anything about himself, which was partly patrician reserve and partly, perhaps, an instinct reinforced by his covert endeavors over the years.