The Family (60 page)

“They’re just not true,” said big George.

Junior called Howard Fineman: “The answer to the Big A question is N-O.”

Fineman mentioned that supporters of Senator Bob Dole and other Republican presidential contenders were fanning the infidelity rumors.

“They’re trying to undermine one of my father’s great political strengths—the strength of our family,” said George W.

Newsweek
ran the story under the headline “Bush and the ‘Big A Question.’” “I have no idea what the Bush people were thinking when they came up with that response,” Fineman said later. “We wouldn’t have run anything at all if the son of the vice president hadn’t called us in this really extraordinary fashion.”

George W. did not realize then that he had lied for his father, who was angry about the incident. According to an Evans and Novak column, “[The Vice President] expressed the opinion that his son and staff would have been well advised to follow his example and keep silent.”

Many reporters felt conflicted about prying into a politician’s personal life. Some were revulsed at the prospect of inquiring about extramarital affairs. Others, like William Greider, a
Rolling Stone
columnist and formerly with
The Washington Post
, said the topic was legitimate. “The press didn’t invent the practice of candidates using their families as a selling point. Politicians who use their families to create a public image have no grounds for complaint when the press demonstrates that image is false.”

Four months later
Newsweek
dropped a bomb on Bush that nearly obliterated his candidacy. On the eve of his formal announcement for the presidency in October 1987, the magazine ran a cover story titled “Bush Battles the Wimp Factor.” George never totally recovered from the fallout of that article, which seemed to ratify the knocks against him as “a lapdog,” “an empty suit,” and “Ronald Reagan’s little echo.” The word “wimp,” with all its implications of weakness, was a wallop to a politician struggling to be seen as strong and decisive.

George immediately went on the attack but sounded pitiful as he struck back. “It’s a lousy cheap shot,” he told a crowd in Red Oak, Iowa, “and the American people don’t make up their minds over what some elite publication in the East is going to think.”

He went on CNN’s
Larry King Live
and talked about his exploits during World War II and the death of his child:

Nobody on our carrier when I landed there in the water with four depth charges in my plane or after I got back to the ship after being dropped down, said, “Hey, you wimp, I want to talk to you about something.” Nobody ever said that when Barbara and I . . . went through a tragedy of seeing our daughter wrenched away from us by cancer, six months sitting at that child’s bedside . . . Nobody said that at the CIA when I went out there and said, “Look, we’re going to make some changes here and then I’m going to lead you people, I’m going to lift you up and lead you . . .” Here’s my heartbeat, here’s my pulse right here. Here’s what I’ve done in my life. Now you call me a wimp.

He ranted against
Newsweek
editors for months and berated Evan Thomas, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief. The Bush family rallied and tried to help restore his manhood.

“I’m infuriated,” said Barbara Bush. “It was a cheap shot . . . It hurt. It hurt our children, truthfully. It hurt George’s mother. It hurt me. I mean it was hurtful . . . I never want to hear that word again.”

“My father is a hero,” said Marvin Bush.

Nancy Bush Ellis wrote a scathing letter to Katharine Graham, the owner of
Newsweek
and one of Nan’s occasional tennis partners. “I felt there were terrible misconceptions,” she said. “The whole wimp, elitist, preppy thing.”

Neil Bush weighed in. “I get very upset when people try to portray my father as not being a man of character,” he said. “There is a four-letter word that begins with a ‘w’ and ends with i-m-p. It’s so outrageous.”

No one was more irate than George W. Bush, who unleashed a stream of coarse vulgarities against the magazine and all its writers. To their faces he called them “assholes,” and behind their backs he cursed their mothers. He also cut them off from any further access to his father. “I felt responsible, because I had approved the interview,” he said. “I was livid, and I let a lot of people know exactly how I felt.”

Young George saw the wimp cover as nothing less than a public castration. Like the hotheaded Sonny Corleone in
The Godfather
, he became savage about avenging his father’s honor and preserving the family’s political fortunes. Profane, abusive, and ugly, he lashed out at reporters whose stories he did not like, sometimes becoming frighteningly confrontational.

When he saw Al Hunt of
The Wall Street Journal
having dinner in a restaurant with his family, Junior blasphemed him in front of Hunt’s four-year-old son for an article he had written criticizing the elder Bush. “You [expletive] son of a bitch,” Bush yelled. “I saw what you wrote. We’re not going to forget this.”

George accosted a television correspondent and demanded to know: “Who the hell do you think you are talking about my father that way?” He became so crazed that Lee Atwater limited his press dealings. “I gotta keep the boy caged,” Atwater joked. Unfortunately, Atwater was not around when George started bullying female reporters.

“I had a terrifying experience with George W. when I was writing a feature on his mother for
Lear’s
magazine,” said the Washington journalist Sandra McElwaine. “I was having lunch at the Federal City Club in Washington and saw George W. as I was leaving. So I went over to introduce myself. ‘Excuse me for interrupting you but I’ve been trying to reach you by phone for weeks on a story that . . .’ I couldn’t even finish my sentence before he started yelling at me. ‘That’s not true. You have NOT tried to reach me. You’re lying.’

“‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘I’ve called several times and spoken with your secretary and her name is . . .’

“‘That’s a goddamn lie and furthermore who are you to be interrupting my lunch.’

“He got red in the face and pig-eyed and became so hostile I got scared. I should never have interrupted his meal, but I assure you that the reaction I got was an overreaction to what I had done. When he started screaming at me, I backed away and apologized and ran off. He was one of the nastiest people I have ever encountered.”

Susan Watters, the Washington correspondent for
Women’s Wear Daily
, was equally shaken after her unnerving encounter with the first son. During a White House reception that the press had been invited to cover, Watters approached Doro Bush to get a correct identification for a picture the
WWD
photographer had taken of Doro and her escort.

“George W. raced across the room and started yelling at me for talking to his sister,” Watters said. “I was so taken aback . . . by his anger and his offensive language . . . that I didn’t know what to say . . . I needed an ID caption . . . He snarled, ‘Leave us alone. Why don’t you just leave us alone, you so-and-so.’

“‘This is my job,’ I said . . . He was scary, really scary.”

While George W. was working in the Washington campaign headquarters, his younger brother Neil was working in Iowa as his father’s surrogate at forums around the state. When the results of the Ames straw poll arrived and the Vice President finished a humiliating fourth, Neil became petulant.

“Let me just tell you a thing or two,” he said. “Iowa isn’t the only state that matters. There’s New Hampshire and we’ve got the governor [John Sununu].”

Neil’s father reverted to type in explaining his defeat. “A lot of the people that support me . . . were at their daughters’ coming-out parties, or teeing up at the golf course for that all-important last round.”

After Iowa the Vice President was derided as weak and unelectable. He trailed the Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis by double digits in the polls, and his negative ratings were among the highest of any presidential candidate in history. George was desperate to turn things around. “We got to get me out there,” he told his campaign aides. “We got to get more of me out there.” He decided the best way to restore his image was to play up his war record, but in the end he overplayed it. He wrote a book with Doug Wead, an evangelical on his campaign staff, titled
Man of Integrity
. Instead of establishing himself as a genuine hero, George created doubts in the minds of many about what actually happened when he bailed out of his plane over Chichi-Jima in World War II. One of the gunners in his unit, Chester Mierzejewski, was so upset by what George told David Frost in an interview in December 1987 that he publicly challenged George and left the impression that he had not fully told the truth about the tragedy that killed his crew.

George had always maintained that he never knew exactly what had happened to his two-man crew. He had repeatedly said that when he finished his bombing run, he flew out to sea and kept his plane aloft long enough for the crew to jump. Only in the Wead book does he imply that he saw what happened to his crew. Contrary to what he had claimed in the past, George now put down in print that he saw his gunner, Lieutenant William G. White, killed by machine-gun fire and his radioman, John Delaney, parachute out. George also claimed that a second parachute, Delaney’s, was fired on.

If one accepts contemporaneous accounts in 1944 and official Navy documentation, the story Bush tells in the book he co-wrote with Wead is a fabrication. There were no machine guns, and no dogfights involving machine guns, only anti-aircraft fire. George neither saw nor heard White or Delaney after his plane was hit. No one else saw anyone shoot at the second parachute. Previous accounts of the second parachute indicate simply that it failed to open. There were only American planes around at the time Bush bailed out, and not one person in any of those planes was in a position to say for sure who was wearing the parachute that did not open.

The inescapable conclusion is that George lied about his heroism during World War II for political gain in 1988. In doing so, he violated the report card category at the Greenwich Country Day School: “Claims no more than his fair share of time and attention.” In
Man of Integrity
, with its vaunted title and inflated text, George had definitely claimed more than his fair share.

Now that he was a declared candidate for President, George was forced to face tougher scrutiny from the media. In January 1988 he agreed to sit down with Dan Rather of CBS, who was determined to get answers to the unasked questions of Iran-contra.

Craig Fuller warned his boss that he was going to be ambushed.

“No way,” said George. “Dan’s a friend.”

No one could convince the Vice President that reporters were not his friends. He believed that if he was nice to them, they would be nice to him.

“Look,” said Fuller. “If Rather really trashes you on Iran Contra, why don’t you tell him, ‘How would you like to be judged, your whole career on the seven minutes you walked off the set?’”

Fuller was referring to the time Rather left his anchor seat in September 1987 in a fit of pique and let the broadcast go dark.

“Yeah, that’s it,” said the media consultant Roger Ailes, who had joined the Bush campaign for twenty-five thousand dollars a month. “That’s it. Hit Dan with his own crap.”

The campaign had insisted on a live interview so the Vice President’s answers could not be edited. They had not figured on what Marlin Fitzwater called “a prosecutorial lead-in” about Iran-contra. Rather conducted the interview from his studio in Manhattan, and the Vice President faced the camera in his office on Capitol Hill. Even before Rather asked the first question, Bush heard the lead-in and was ready to blow a gasket.

“Mr. Vice President, we want to talk about the record . . .”

“Let’s talk about the whole record . . .”

“One-third of the Republicans in this poll, one-third . . . say that, you know, they rather like you, [but] believe you’re hiding something . . . Here’s a chance to get it out . . . You have said that if you had known . . . this was an arms-for-hostages swap . . .”

“Yes.”

“That you would have opposed it.”

“Exactly.”

“You also said that you did not know . . .”

“May I answer that?”

“That wasn’t a question, it was a statement.”

“It was a statement, and I’ll answer it.”

“Let me ask the question, if I may, first.”

“The President created this program, as testified or stated publicly, he did not think it was arms for hostages.”

“That was the President, Mr. Vice President.”

“And that’s me. Because I went along with it because—you know why, Dan?—because—”

They fenced and sparred for nine minutes as George tried to eat up time. Finally he stopped stonewalling and spat out his calculated response.

“I don’t think it’s fair to judge a whole career, it’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? Would you like that?”

Rather went to a commercial, and George ripped out his earpiece while blasting away at the camera with his mic still on.

“Well, I had my say, Dan . . . That guy makes Lesley Stahl look like a pussy . . . The worst time I’ve had in twenty years of public life. But it’s going to help me, because that bastard didn’t lay a glove on me . . . I’m really upset. You can tell your goddamn network that if they want to talk to me they can raise their hands at a press conference. No more ‘Mr. Insider’ stuff.”

Watching the confrontation at the White House, President Reagan nodded with approval. George had finally shown some spunk. Reagan said to an aide, “I didn’t see any wimp in that.”

The next day George W. roared into campaign headquarters with both fists raised above his head in jubilation. “Macho!” he yelled. “Macho!”