Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (91 page)

59
. The official story of how Bahrain found Harken is as follows: The Bahraini oil minister contacteda longtime friend, a Houston oil consultant with Mideast experience named Michael Ameen. For a previous employer, Ameen had dealt closely with the Saudi royal family, including Kamal Adham, the former chief of Saudi intelligence and a key BCCI figure. Ameen was also close to Ghaith Pharaon’s family and had been a friend of Abdullah Bakhsh, the big Harken shareholder, for twenty-five years. Ameen says that ten minutes after he got the oil minister’s call for his advice on which of hundreds of oil companies should get the Bahrain contract, and while pondering this deeply, his phone happened to ring. On the other end was a Harken investment banker at Stephens Inc. in Little Rock. Soon Ameen, who would later receive a $100,000 fee from Harken, was escorting Harken delegations to London and Bahrain.

60
. An unnamed institutional client “offered” to take W.’s shares off his hands. Bush is said to have initially declined, but to have told the stockbroker on the deal, Ralph Smith at the Los Angeles– based Sutro & Co., to check back in two weeks. Meanwhile, Harken’s lawyers issued a memo to Harken staffers warning against selling stock based on insider information. One week passed, and Bush called Smith back. Despite the apparent warning not to do so, he went ahead and sold 212,140 Harken shares for $4 per share, netting $848,560.

61
. Author interview with Steve Rose, September 27, 2006.

62
. Documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission and elsewhere, gathered by Harvard Watch, a student and alumni group, and the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.

63
. Cited by the Center for Public Integrity. It’s worth noting that Harken itself did business with Enron, as confirmed by a 1990 letter of credit between the two firms.

64
. “President Urges Congress to Support Nation’s Priorities,” George W. Bush press conference,July 8, 2002.

65
. R. G. Ratcliffe, “Business Associates Profit During Bush’s Term as Governor,”
Houston Chronicle
, August 16, 1998.

66
. Alan Quasha’s ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were detailed in Baker and Fed-erman,“Hillary’s Mystery Money Men.”

67
. Eamon Javers, “Is Obama Good for Business?”
Business Week
, February 13, 2008.

17: PLAYING HARDBALL

1
. Prescott Bush was captain of the varsity baseball team at Yale, where he played first base. George H. W. Bush lacked his father’s physical prowess, and batted near the bottom of the lineup, but he too eventually served as Yale team captain. W. “played sparingly” for the Yale freshman team. For more, see Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer,
The Bushes: Portrait of
a Dynasty
(New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 90. Prescott, Poppy, and W. were all members of the Yale cheerleading squad. See Simone Berkower, “Cheerleading of the ’20s: Epitome of Masculinity,”
Yale Daily News
, January 28, 2008.

2
. James Moore and Wayne Slater,
Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), p. 152.

3
. For Barbara’s public comments, see Bill Minutaglio,
First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush
Family Dynasty
(New York: Three Rivers, 1999), p. 243. The concern that it would be seen as a referendum was expressed by several sources interviewed by the author.

4
. Author interview with Doug Wead, December 14, 2006.

5
. Kevin Sack, “George Bush the Son Finds That Oil and Blood Do Mix,”
New York Times
, May 8, 1999.

6
. Author interview with Comer Cottrell, June 20, 2006.

7
. Because shares were bought from various owners over time, there is some disagreement onthe total amount paid.

8
. W. served on the board of Carlyle subsidiary Cater Air. Carlyle Group’s advisers and board members have included Poppy Bush, James Baker, Clinton chief of staff Mack McLarty, former British prime minister John Major, and former Philippine president Fidel Ramos.

9
. Author interview with Glenn Sodd, June 9, 2006.

10
. Jim Landers, “Lawyer Represented Bush on Harken,”
Dallas Morning News
, September 19, 2004.

11
. Elisabeth Bumiller, “For President and Close Friend, Forget the Politics,”
New York Times
, January 14, 2005.

12
. Betts’s father, Allan W. Betts, had, after Yale, been a partner at G. H. Walker and Company,the company run by Poppy Bush’s favorite uncle, Herbie—himself one of the principal owners of a baseball team, the New York Mets. And Allan Betts and his wife had a home in the exclusive enclave of Hobe Sound, Florida, as did the Bushes and many in their intelligence-finance circle. Allan Betts was also for many years director of the Astor Foundation and co-executor of the Vincent Astor estate. Astor not only ran intelligence in the New York area circa World War II, but he also started
Newsweek
, which was known to have strong ties to intelligence circles in its early days. (Vincent Astor bought
Newsweek
with Mary Harriman Rumsey, the sister of Averell and Roland Harriman.) Even Betts’s mother had a spy background, having worked in Washington for the OSS during World War II. For the latter point, see the
New York Times’
wedding announcement for Allan Whitney Betts and Evelyn Ohman, April 21, 1945.

13
. Author interview with Comer Cottrell.

14
. Attorney Glenn Sodd, who represented plaintiffs in the suit against the Rangers’ owners, said that he had been led to believe that Eisner may have been one of the investors in W.’s owner group.

15
. “Yale Corporation Members,”
Yale Herald
, October 5, 2001,
www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxxii/10.05.01/news/p3yalecorp.html
.

16
. David Cay Johnston,
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government
Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
(New York: Portfolio, 2007), p. 79.

17
. Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose,
Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush
(New York: Random House, 2000), p. 38.

18
. Johnston,
Free Lunch
, p. 80.

19
. “Best and Worst Legislators Since 1973,”
Texas Monthly
,
www.texasmonthly.com/bestworst
.

20
. James Langdon’s father had been a member of the all-powerful Texas Railroad Commission,the misleadingly named entity that regulates oil production in the state, during the agency’s primacy in the 1960s and ’70s.

21
. Nicholas D. Krist of, “Breaking Into Baseball; Road to Politics Ran Through a Texas Ballpark,”
New York Times
, September 24, 2000.

22
. Greene was also president of the Savings Banc, an Arlington thrift that lost $41.1 million and wastaken over by the federal government. Greene admitted no wrongdoing, and said he was “not unlike literally hundreds of people in the state of Texas and thousands nationwide that were caught up in the disastrous takeover of the S&Ls by the federal government.” See Laura Vozzella, “Many Texas Officials Starred in S&L Scandals,”
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, January 1, 1996.

23
. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Richard E. Greene Appointed EPA Region 6 Administrator,”March 17, 2003, yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/e8f4ff7f7970934e85257359004 00c2e/a0386518e18d1d88852570d6005e7e41!OpenDocument

24
. Johnston,
Free Lunch
, p. 82.

25
. Kristof, “Breaking Into Baseball.”

26
. Author interview with Jim Runzheimer, June 20, 2006.

27
. Johnston,
Free Lunch
, pp. 77–78.

28
. Bill Minutaglio,
The President’s Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 99.

29
. Author interview with David Rosen, Midland, Texas, June 24, 2006.

30
. Clayton Williams commented that poor weather is just like rape—“if it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” “Texas Primary; Higher Aspirations from Low Campaign,”
New York Times
, April 15, 1990.

18: MEET THE HELP

1
. Tucker Carlson,
Inside Politics
, CNN, October 4, 2000. Also see Eric Alterman,
What Liberal
Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News
(New York: Basic, 2003), p. 156.

2
. Eric Boehlert, “The Press vs. Al Gore,”
Rolling Stone
, November 26, 2001.

3
. Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl M. Cannon,
Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Brains Behind the Remarkable
Political Triumph of George W. Bush
(New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 12.

4
. Nicholas Lemann, “The Controller,”
New Yorker
, May 12, 2003.

5
. Atwater, who built his arsenal based on weapons he and Rove first developed in the College Republicans,was a notoriously brash dirty trickster and claimed to think of politics as war. He spearheaded a smear on behalf of Poppy’s campaign that sought to exploit Dukakis’s liberal political stances on such topics as gun control, environmental policy, mandatory pledge of allegiance in schools, and the death penalty, among others. Atwater’s most famous attempt to “strip the bark off the little bastard” was an attack-ad project that employed the image of convicted murderer William R. Horton, who was furloughed under a program begun by a Republican governor but supported by Dukakis. Horton kidnapped a couple, torturing the man and raping his girlfriend. Although Horton went by “William,” Atwater rebranded him “Willie” for the television ads. See Tim Hope and Richard Sparks, editors,
Crime, Risk and Insecurity
(New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 266.

6
. Author interview with John Taliaferro, July 11, 2006.

7
. In the same period, Taliaferro’s partner, publisher Chris Hearne, remembers going to the P.O. box and finding that someone had mailed in
bricks
—postage due.

8
. James Moore and Wayne Slater,
Bush’s Brain
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), p. 38.

9
. Ibid., p. 40. The statement was attributed to speech writer Matt Lyon, now deceased, by a friend,Patricia Tierney Alofsin, a longtime fixture in Austin governmental circles.

10
. Author interview with Royal Masset, May 27, 2004.

11
. Psy-ops, or psychological operations, are sophisticated propaganda techniques meant to influence the behavior and state of mind of a targeted person or group. The U.S. military includes special units devoted to psy-ops.

12
. Rove made much of bringing the FBI into the bugging affair; the agent on the case went on toinvestigate nearly every statewide Democratic officeholder in Texas during Rove’s tenure in Austin. See Moore and Slater,
Bush’s Brain
, p. 34.

13
. Miriam Rozen, “The Nerd Behind the Throne,”
Dallas Observer
, May 13, 1999.