Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (64 page)

Spellings is sensitive about inquiries. When he heard that I had been asking questions about him, he called me and demanded to know why. I arranged to see him at the Washington law firm he had joined after marrying LaMontagne, and through which he works as a lobbyist. When I arrived at his offices with a colleague in December 2006, he ushered us into a conference room, spent the first minutes or so in a tirade against the press, and then insisted he would only consent to an interview if he was allowed to videotape me—so that he could “study my body language” later.

Studying body language is a favorite gambit of George W. Bush, as Ron Suskind recounts in
The One Percent Doctrine
.
²³
It is not clear whether Spellings picked it up from the president. But videotaping a private meeting with a print journalist in which note taking and audio recording are the norm seemed in this instance an effort to intimidate. When Spellings insisted on this, I left.
²⁴

MORE THAN ANY other president in history, Bush would embrace the title “commander in chief” and wrap himself in the raiment of military service. This was evident long before 9/11 and the Iraq War, and long before he became unpopular. But this tendency was not apparent during his six years as Texas governor. Then, he steered clear of the base where his Guard secrets happened to be buried.

Texas governors from Republican Bill Clements to Democrat Ann Richards routinely visited Guard headquarters at Camp Mabry. All except George W. Bush. “In his eight years as governor, he never one time went to Camp Mabry,” said one Mabry veteran. “How far was it from the office? A five-minute drive if you are driving in a normal car. If you had an escort, it’s a three-minute drive. You could almost hit it with a tank round.”

A Flight of Fancy

All this makes doubly interesting a lengthy anecdote Evans shared during Bush’s first presidential race.
²⁵
According to Evans, during the summer of 1976, in Midland, W. took Evans up in a Cessna. Evans chortled over Bush’s problems with the controls—though Bush’s original flight training was in a Cessna. Evans actually had to issue instructions: “Give it some gas!” It was a heart-stopping landing and—according to Texas reporter and author Bill Minutaglio—“the last time [Bush] flew a plane.”

Evans told this story to Minutaglio in June 1998, at the precise time that Evans and his team were busy cleaning up the messy spots in Bush’s résumé, especially his National Guard service. In their world of deception, calculation and counter-calculation, it is impossible to know with certainty why Evans thought it important to share this seemingly embarrassing story about his friend and candidate with a reporter, or whether it simply slipped out. Nevertheless, while this story presents W. as a bumbler, it also appears to refute the evidence that W. never flew again after walking away from his duty as an Air National Guard pilot in 1972. That’s important, because of Janet Linke’s story, recounted in chapter 8, about W. being afraid to fly and having trouble handling the controls of his jet—a story that could have been politically damaging if it gained momentum.

And they cannot have it both ways. If the Evans story of W.’s shaky performance in a small, simple civilian plane were true, it would cast doubt upon the carefully choreographed moment in which Bush emerged in pilot’s garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln
in 2003 to celebrate “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The image—instantly telegraphed around the globe and reinforced by subsequent White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit—created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in flying the craft.

A Charge to Keep

During his presidential campaign, W. collaborated with a professional writer on
A Charge to Keep
, a book that was intended to introduce the candidate to the American public. Mickey Herskowitz was a longtime Texas journalist, known both as a sports columnist and as a prolific ghostwriter of biographies. He had worked with a wide range of political, media, and sports figures, including Texas governor John Connally, Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle, Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, and newsman Dan Rather.

The project originally had been his agent’s idea. Herskowitz considered himself a friend of the Bush family, and has been a guest at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport. In the late 1960s, Herskowitz designated President Bush’s father, then-congressman George H. W. Bush, to replace him briefly as a guest sports columnist at the
Houston Chronicle
, and the two had remained close since.

In 1999, when Herskowitz called the George W. Bush presidential campaign, to propose a book “by W.,” it was supposed to be Karl Rove’s decision on whether to green-light the book project. But Rove was busy with other things, and he said that if it was okay with W., it was okay with him. W. said he was amenable as long as he didn’t have to do too much. Most of all, he wanted to know how much money was involved. Herskowitz, whom I interviewed in 2004, said that he and Bush quickly arrived at an agreement in which they would split the proceeds.

W. did have one other concern: he worried whether there would be enough content for such a book. He openly fretted to Herskowitz: what had he accomplished that was worth talking about? Bush thought it a better idea for the book to focus on his policy objectives. And what might those be? Herskowitz inquired. Ask Karl, Bush replied.

Finally, though, the two began what would total approximately twenty meetings so Bush could share his thoughts. As a writer, Herskowitz knew that too much canned, self-serving material could be commercially toxic. Even in a book intended to be self-serving, it could destroy the credibility— and hence the marketability—of the product. So he hoped to tease out some unguarded revelations, on the assumption that these would simply humanize his subject. At the beginning, Herskowitz had no idea the extent to which W. was treading on eggshells.

According to Herskowitz, W. was a confusing combination of cautious and candid. Sometimes, he would say something in an offhanded way that would later prove to be explosive. One such bombshell concerned his military service.

Herskowitz says that Bush was reluctant to discuss his time in the Texas Air National Guard—and inconsistent when he did so. Among other things, he provided conflicting explanations of how he came to bypass a waiting list and obtain a coveted Guard slot as a domestic alternative to Vietnam.

When the subject came up, W. sought to quickly deflect the conversation to the summer of 1972—when he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to work on the Winton Blount senatorial campaign. And what did you do about your remaining military service? Herskowitz asked. “Nothing,” Bush replied. “
I
was excused
.” [emphasis added]

Of course, W. had not been excused, so this was not true. Even more interesting, however, is that this would constitute Bush’s only admission that he had not continued to fulfill his military service obligation. Thus, he was directly contradicting what he had said earlier, and what he and his spokespeople would later claim.

At the time, however, Bush’s service record had not become a subject of contention, so his answers seemed only mildly interesting to Herskowitz. Pressing on, the biographer asked W. if he ever flew a plane again after leaving the Texas Air National Guard in 1972. He said Bush told him he never flew any plane—military or civilian—again.

But a story had circulated among the press, in which W. took some of the inner-city children at PULL up in a plane in 1973—and stalled the engine to teach the unruly kids a lesson.
²⁶
If Herskowitz is correct, then the PULL story, combined with Evans’s yarn during the 2000 election, look like deliberate attempts to foster the impression that he did indeed fly again. The bit about scaring the children looks like the kind of compelling detail that ensures the wide circulation of a story. This is an apt example of Bush’s favored technique, as described in chapter 19, of intentionally burying stories in plain sight for enterprising reporters to find and publicize.

Getting Rid of Mickey

Herskowitz began writing W.’s book in May 1999. Within two months, he says, he had completed and submitted some ten chapters, with a remaining four to six chapters still on his computer. Then he began hearing of concern from within the Bush campaign.

Ostensibly, the matter that troubled the Bush team the most was a trifling one. W. had described his Midland-based oil companies as “floundering,” seemingly an innocuous and even understated characterization of his undistinguished business career. But his handlers were steamed. “I got a call from one of the campaign lawyers,” Herskowitz recalled. “He was kind of angry, and he said, ‘You’ve got some wrong information.’ I didn’t bother to say, ‘Well, you know where it came from.’ [The lawyer] said, ‘We do not consider that the governor struggled or floundered in the oil business. We consider him a successful oilman who started up at least two new businesses.’ ”

It was downhill from there. Before long, Herskowitz was told that he was being pulled off the project, that his work would not be used, and they demanded all his materials back. “The lawyer called me and said, ‘Delete it. Shred it. Just do it.’ ”

A campaign official arrived at his home unexpectedly at seven A.M. on a Monday morning and took his notes and computer files. He had not expected them to come so abruptly, nor so early in the morning, nor to be quite so aggressive in seizing and removing all his documentation of Bush’s thoughts. Mickey summed up the end of his book labors this way: “They took it, and [communications director] Karen [Hughes] rewrote it.”

After Herskowitz was pulled from the Bush book project, he learned that a scenario was being prepared to explain his departure. “I got a phone call from someone in the Bush campaign, confidentially, saying, ‘Watch your back.’ ”

Reporters covering Bush say that when they asked why Herskowitz was no longer on the project, Hughes intimated that Herskowitz was hitting the bottle—a claim Herskowitz said was unfounded. Later, the campaign put out the word that Herskowitz had been removed for missing a deadline. Hughes subsequently finished the book herself; it received largely negative reviews for its self-serving qualities and lack of spontaneity or introspection. Meanwhile, Poppy took care of Mickey.

In 2002, three years after he had been pulled off the George W. Bush biography, Herskowitz got a message that the senior Bush wanted to see him. At that meeting Poppy asked him to write a book about the current president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush. “Former president Bush just handed it to me. We were sitting there one day, and I was visiting him there in his office . . . He said, ‘I wish somebody would do a book about my dad.’ ”

“He said to me, ‘I know this has been a disappointing time for you, but it’s amazing how many times something good will come out of it.’ I passed it on to my agent; he jumped all over it. I asked [Bush Senior], ‘Would you support it and would you give me access to the rest of family?’ He said yes.” The resulting book,
Duty, Honor, Country: The Life and Legacy of Prescott
Bush
, was published in 2003. Not surprisingly for an authorized biography, it was a sympathetic portrait.

As for
A Charge to Keep
, Herskowitz keeps thinking about what might have happened if the public had learned how W. really thinks. “He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake,” Herskowitz said. “That was one of the keys to being a leader.”

There were other things that W. told Herskowitz about what makes a successful leader. Prominent among them, the future president of the United States confided, was the benefit of starting a war.

CHAPTER 21

Shock and . . . Oil?

I
t didn’t take Herskowitz and Bush long to work through W.’s life story and accomplishments. Soon they were discussing what Bush hoped to achieve as president. While W. seemed somewhat hazy on specifics, on one point he was clear: the many benefits that would accrue if he were to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Herskowitz recalled that Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to realize his legislative agenda without the high approval numbers that accompany successful—even if modest—wars.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told me in our 2004 interview, leaning in a little to make sure I could hear him properly. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade . . . if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed, and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’ ”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow.

That opportunity, of course, would come in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at ninety-one percent in the polls,” Herskowitz said, “and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker.” Just four days before, according to a Gallup poll, his approval rating was 51 percent.

Herskowitz said that George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House, and ascribed in part to Dick Cheney, who was then a powerful congressman. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”

Bush’s circle of preelection advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had amassed from the Falklands War with Argentina. Said Herskowitz: “They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches.” It was a masterpiece of “perception management”—a lesson in how to maneuver the media and public into supporting a war, irrespective of the actual merits.

The neocons backing Bush believed that Jimmy Carter’s political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. Herskowitz noted that President Reagan and President George H. W. Bush had (in addition to the narrowly focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents—Grenada and Panama—and gained politically. But there were successful small wars and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H. W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye on the difference. Poppy, the consummate CIA professional, preferred behind-the-scenes solutions over grand-scale confrontation—indeed, Poppy is remembered largely for that. In 2008, with memory of Poppy’s 1989 invasion of Panama long faded, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama praised the elder Bush for his seemingly prudent foreign policy.
¹

Not surprisingly, Poppy harbored serious doubts about his son’s plan to finish the job with Saddam. Said Herskowitz: “I know [Poppy] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to [the 2003 Iraq invasion]. I asked him if he had talked to W. about [it]. He said, ‘No I haven’t, and I won’t, but Brent [Scowcroft] has.’ Brent would not have talked to him without the old man’s okaying it.” Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush’s administration and chairman of W.’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.

Herskowitz’s revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush’s preelection thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the
Boston Globe
’s David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a New Hampshire primary event that got little notice. As Nyhan described the event for his readers:

It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam’s weapons stash. “I’d take ’em out,” [Bush] grinned cavalierly, “take out the weapons of mass destruction . . . I’m surprised he’s still there,” said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.’s father . . . It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush’s first big clinker.
²

The suspicion that W. held unrealistic or naïve views about the consequences of war was further corroborated by a supporter, the evangelist Pat Robertson, who revealed that Bush had assured him the Iraq invasion would yield no casualties.

For George W. Bush, careful and rational calculations were not important. If he could become a heroic commander in chief, he’d have the political capital to go quickly through the Republican wish list: appoint right-thinking Supreme Court nominees; make massive tax cuts to starve the federal government; bury evidence of climate change. It all flowed from that irresistible That cherite image. Plus, there would be the oil, and the contracts for an expanded military.
³
It was a fantasy that mesmerized the neocon imagination.

IN THEIR THINK tanks—most notably the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute—the neocons had made no secret of their desire to use Iraq as a showcase for a reprojection of American military might. Some spoke of installing a U.S-style democracy in the heart of the Arab Middle East; others of Iraq’s huge oil reserves. Lurking just offstage was the inescapable fact that America’s vast military economy needed a steady stream of projects and perceived threats—a particularly vexing challenge in a post-Communist world. As
Shock Doctrine
author Naomi Klein astutely noted, the war on terror forms an unbeatable economic proposition: “Not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.”
⁴

The big kahuna, without question, was the seizure of the Middle Eastern country sitting on some of the world’s largest untapped oil reserves. One 2000 PNAC study,
Rebuilding America’s Defenses
, called for an increased defense budget, Saddam Hussein’s removal, and the presence of U.S. troops in the Middle East even after regime change in Iraq. It noted suggestively that these steps would be difficult “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
⁵

Vice in Charge

Once W. settled into the White House, foreign policy, and in particular Iraq, was largely Dick Cheney’s show. Cheney had spent most of his adult life catering to corporate interests, particularly military contractors. He and his mentor Donald Rumsfeld had seized power by orchestrating Gerald Ford’s Halloween Massacre, in which they marginalized the “realists,” Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller, and began destroying détente. Ever since, Cheney had been obsessed with restoring a strong executive branch. He wanted it unencumbered by other branches of government, the public, and even by law itself. Cheney would take all the power W. would give him, and become by far the most powerful vice president in American history.

Cheney and Rumsfeld’s role in the Ford White House coincided with Poppy Bush’s rising influence—as a result of Richard Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s subsequent decision to appoint Poppy director of Central Intelligence. After Poppy became president, he named Cheney as secretary of defense, and it was Cheney who presided over Poppy’s war with Iraq following the latter’s invasion of Kuwait. Cheney remained in the Bush orbit after Bill Clinton’s victory in 1992, with his selection to head Halliburton, the company that he would merge in 1998 with Dresser Industries to create the largest oil field services firm in the world.

Halliburton was also deeply involved in defense contracting, through its subsidiary Brown and Root (later Kellogg Brown and Root: KBR), the politically wired Texas engineering firm. Brown and Root had taken a giant leap into military contracting when Lyndon Johnson, its political protégé, became president. It would receive giant contracts from both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. The company, with forty thousand employees in Iraq and twenty-eight thousand more in Afghanistan and Kuwait, had a near monopoly on a wide range of services, from construction to food handling to disco nights for the troops. By 2008 Halliburton had been paid more than $24 billion.
⁶
Halliburton’s contract in Iraq has been repeatedly marked by corruption: In 2004 the company had to repay the government for $6.3 million in “improper payments” to its employees.
⁷
Halliburton also overcharged the government for importing gasoline into Iraq and even for meals supplied to the troops.
⁸
Most recently, KBR admitted a “systemic problem” with its electrical work at U.S. military bases in Iraq. The company had to conduct its own study after a six-month period in which there were 283 electrical fires, and numerous soldiers were electrocuted.
⁹

Dick Cheney was the right partner for President Bush. W. was short on experience, had an attention span that was even shorter, and was a serial delegator. Cheney knew Washington inside and out, was hardworking and focused, and was a practiced courtier who knew how to get his way with a boss. W. had to count heavily on Cheney, especially with so much of W.’s senior staff having come directly from Austin with little Washington experience.

As Texas journalists Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein note in their book
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
, Cheney was not supposed to generate fireworks. “Cheney had served three presidents, had spent ten years in Congress, and as secretary of defense had coordinated the first Gulf War. He was Bush père’s preferred candidate, the Washington insider who would provide adult supervision in the White House. Nothing exciting, just competent and steady. Dick Cheney was the safe, reassuring presence whose experience would ensure that public policy, in particular foreign policy, would not careen off track.”
¹⁰

The public would soon learn that as Halliburton chief executive, Cheney had grown used to calling the shots. The full extent of Cheney’s clout would not become apparent for years, in part because of his extraordinary penchant for secrecy. So much so that six and a half years into the administration, when the
Washington Post
released an excellent series on Cheney’s power and influence, it was still something of a shock.

Cheney dominated more than foreign policy. Noted the
Post
:

In roles that have gone largely undetected, Cheney has served as gatekeeper for Supreme Court nominees, referee of Cabinet turf disputes, arbiter of budget appeals, editor of tax proposals and regulator in chief of water flows in his native West. On some subjects, officials said, he has displayed a strong pragmatic streak. On others he has served as enforcer of ideological principle, come what may.
¹¹

Practically the first thing Cheney did when he took office was to convene a secretive energy task force whose advisers would meet with officials from the oil and energy industry.
¹²
It soon became clear that securing additional oil reserves and projecting American power in oil-rich regions was the top priority. A lawsuit, filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative group that opposes abuses of government power, unearthed maps of Iraqi oil fields prepared by the task force, along with lists of the American oil companies interested in each field.

At the time, Iraqi oil was under an embargo and controlled by the United Nations as part of the peace accords imposed after the first Gulf War. Yet the documents, dated March 2001, list “foreign suitors for Iraqi oilfield contracts” long before the administration began justifying an invasion of the country. “These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton.
¹³

If Cheney’s interest in Iraqi oil fields seemed speculative at the time, it was no longer so after the September 11 attacks. The administration would turn quickly to manipulating intelligence in order to achieve what had always been its goal.

From One Bunker to Another

From the time of his inauguration, Bush’s approval ratings had been hovering around 55 percent. Then came the 9/11 attacks, and a surge of support. PNAC’s 2000 report had been prescient when it anticipated the potential response to a catastrophic and catalyzing event—to the “new Pearl Harbor.”

For a time, the world rallied around the United States. Americans generally backed Bush and what seemed his decisive and appropriate response to the attack: an assault on al-Qaeda and the ruling Taliban regime of its host country, Afghanistan. Yet, as time passed, Bush’s poll numbers gradually eroded, at least in part due to the failure to capture Osama bin Laden. By the spring of 2002, the White House political team was growing concerned, and others were beginning to speculate as to what an administration devoted to the so-called permanent campaign might do next.