The Family (66 page)

That she chose someone simple, unambitious, and removed from the turbulence of politics probably spoke to her need for stability. Her husband, who once considered becoming a hockey coach, reconsidered and became a carpenter. He worked for his brother’s construction firm, and Doro kept the firm’s books. In 1988, she wanted to join the family’s campaign for her father, but her father said she needed a skill. She took a secretarial course and learned how to type. She eventually went on the speaking circuit and told audiences that she loved her father “more than life itself,” frequently dissolving into racking sobs. Her two-year-old daughter, Ellie, was filmed in a Bush TV ad running into her grandfather’s arms.

The campaign changed Doro. “I’m a late bloomer,” she said. She lost weight, grew out her short-cropped hair, stopped wearing her father’s dungarees, and became a softer-looking version of her mother. Even the family noticed. “She used to be shy,” said Barbara Bush, “but now we’re all saying, ‘Doro, you’ve gotten positively aggressive.’ She’s gotten to be a big politician.”

By the time of her father’s inauguration, Doro had outgrown Billy LeBlond and his pickup truck. She told her mother she wanted a divorce. Barbara begged her to work things out for the sake of the children, but Doro was adamant. Billy moved out of the house, and in August 1989 the Bushes quietly announced their daughter’s separation. Two months later her husband was arrested for drunken driving and possession of marijuana in Maynard, Massachusetts. He spent the night in jail. He was convicted of drunk driving, fined $1,280, and prohibited from driving in the state for one year. The marijuana charge was dismissed. That week Doro filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable marital differences.” A mediator in Portland, Maine, handled the divorce. The records, like so many Bush family records, were sealed.

“We’re blessed that we love both of them,” the President told reporters. “They’re having marriage problems, and that comes under the heading of their business. And so we counsel our daughter, and we stay very close to Billy’s parents, who are good friends of ours. The last thing Doro and Billy need is pontificating from either of us. But if she needs somebody to hold her hand, well, we’re there.”

The American press remained silent, but British journalists started snooping. Margaret Hall, from London’s
Today
tabloid, flew to Maine to try to interview the couple. Billy LeBlond apologized politely. “I’m sorry. I can’t say anything because Doro and I have agreed not to talk about our problems publicly.”

He was rewarded with a tabloid headline:

FACE THAT COULD NEVER FIT THE FIRST FAMILY:
SECRET ANGUISH OF GEORGE BUSH’S DAUGHTER,
WED TO A BEER-SWILLING REBEL BRICKLAYER.

When Hall knocked on Doro’s door, the housekeeper answered and said that Doro was working at the Maine Tourism Bureau. The housekeeper asked the reporter to step inside while she got the phone number, but Hall remained on the porch. She gave the housekeeper her name and hotel number in case she could not reach Doro at work.

“A few hours later I got a screeching telephone call from Doro Bush: ‘How dare you come to my house, invade my privacy, and enter my domain . . . You are the lowest of the low . . .’ I stopped her right there,” Hall said, “and let her know in no uncertain terms that I could’ve easily entered her home, taken notes on her untidy kitchen, counted all the empty wine bottles in her bins, and probably nicked a few photographs while I was at it. But I had remained on the front porch because her housekeeper was very sweet and polite and I didn’t want to jeopardize her job.”

A few months later Doro moved to Washington with her children to be closer to her parents, but her mother would not let them move into the White House. So Doro rented a small house in Bethesda, Maryland, and found a job at the National Rehabilitation Hospital.

“She was very fragile then,” recalled Kim Elliott, whose children attended school with Doro’s children. “She was going through a tough divorce, but she was devoted to her children. Very hands-on and completely committed to those kids.”

Vice President Quayle did not realize how sensitive the White House was about Doro’s divorce until he kicked up an ideological firestorm by criticizing the popular TV character Murphy Brown for bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice. The headline in the
New York Daily News
: “Quayle to Murphy Brown: You Tramp!”

“Murphy Brown is the second most popular woman in America, next to Barbara Bush,” said Mary Matalin, political director of Bush’s reelection campaign. The White House staff panicked and pulled away from Quayle.

“You should be supporting me,” the Vice President told the chief of staff.

“This thing’s a loser.”

“It’s not a loser. If you handle it right, it’s a winner.”

“Well, you’re a minority of one. Everybody around here is concerned about it. It looks like you’re criticizing single mothers . . . They’re even worried it looks as if you’re indirectly criticizing Doro Bush.”

Barbara Bush was more determined than ever to see her daughter remarry. She believed that only through marriage could Doro and her children find their safest haven. To that end Barbara encouraged Doro to date.

“We spent a weekend up at Camp David with the Bushes . . . They had two dogs up there at the time and the divorced daughter,” recalled one congressional wife. “Barbara told me she was concerned because Doro had dated Representative David Dreier for a year and he never touched her . . . ‘Never laid a hand on her,’ said Barbara . . . I think Doro had better luck when she started dating a Democrat.”

Doro met Robert Koch, a Democrat, who had worked for House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and Democratic Representative Tony Coelho of California. Her mother assisted their courtship by inviting them to several White House state dinners. During this time the President dispatched his daughter as the U.S. representative to Paraguay’s presidential inauguration; to Morocco for the anniversary of the King’s ascension; and to the winter Olympics in Albertville, France. By 1992, Robert Koch had proposed to Doro. The First Lady ordered a mother-of-the-bride dress for herself and a bridal gown for her daughter from their favorite designer, Arnold Scaasi. The family gathered on June 28, 1992, and watched the President walk his only daughter down the aisle of the chapel at Camp David.

“That was one of the happiest days of my presidency,” said George Bush. He was still staggering from his unhappiest day two years before, when he had betrayed the most famous words he ever uttered: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”

He knew at the time he made the promise that it was a lie, but, as he said, he was prepared to do anything to get elected. His budget director, Richard Darman, convinced him that a tax increase would generate money for domestic spending and be his political salvation. Everyone else said it would be political suicide.

Lee Atwater, whom Bush had made chairman of the Republican National Committee, was flabbergasted. “The guy has no political instincts whatsoever,” he told the Republican consultant Roger Stone. “Bush and this crowd are going to screw it up. Bush won’t get reelected.”

Reneging on his campaign promise to Americans, the President agreed to a tax increase in 1990 as part of the $492 billion deficit-reduction package passed by Congress. He felt compelled to compromise because of the rapidly escalating costs of salvaging the savings-and-loan industry, whose estimated losses exceeded $230 billion. In exchange for agreeing to a tax increase, Bush insisted on cutting the capital-gains tax to benefit those who earned more than $200,000 a year. As a consequence, his poll numbers fell twenty points within twenty days, and he was taunted by newspaper headlines that read: “Waffle,” “Retreat,” “Blink,” “Flip Flop.” He admitted later that it was the “biggest mistake” of his presidency. “If I had to do that over, I wouldn’t do it.”

Democrats applauded him. “It was a profile in courage for George Bush,” said Dan Rostenkowski, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “He laid the economic foundation for the prosperity that Bill Clinton took credit for in the 1990s.”

Republicans thought it was a profile in lunacy. “You are going to get killed [in the midterm elections],” Ed Rollins, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told Bush’s pollster. “This is the most sacred pledge Bush ever made. If you raise taxes in this term, he can kiss his ass away in ’92, and he’s going to take a bunch of House members with him.”

Rollins immediately issued a memo to all House Republicans on the tax pledge: “Do not hesitate to distance yourself from the President.” He even went on a morning television show with the Republican consultant Doug Bailey to criticize the President for breaking his campaign promise.

The President, who watched television constantly in the White House, blanched when he saw the show. Demanding blind loyalty no matter what, he insisted that Ed Rollins be fired. “There wasn’t anything he could do about me,” said Doug Bailey, co-founder of the prestigious Republican consulting firm Bailey/Deardourff and Associates, “but poor Ed lost his job simply because he could not in good conscience tell Republicans running for reelection to fall on the sword of the President’s broken promise . . . Bush, of course, didn’t see it that way. He is obsessed with loyalty, loyalty, loyalty, which affects the entire family and inevitably leads all of them to their unhealthy preoccupation with enemies: ‘If you’re not for us, you’re against us, and if you’re against us, by God, you’ll pay.’”

The President laid down the law to House Republican leaders: “I’ll never do anything for you guys as long as Rollins is up there.” Within months Ed Rollins would resign.

The Vice President was in the shower when CNN reported that the President conceded to the Democrats and would be raising taxes. “I probably should have looked at the drain, because that’s where the Republican Party’s best issue . . . was headed,” said Dan Quayle. To say nothing of his own political career.

On the eve of the midterm elections the President announced his intention to sign the deficit-reduction bill, saying, “I can’t say this is the best thing that has happened to us . . . since the elimination of broccoli . . . but it represents a corrective action on a pattern of federal spending gone out of control.”

Republicans wished the President had simply backed down on broccoli. Months earlier he had banished the vegetable from the White House menu. “I do not like broccoli,” he said. “I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. I’m President of the United States now and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.” The crew of Air Force One put a sign in the galley of a broccoli floret with a red slash through it.

Now Republicans had to contend with bumper stickers that said, “Nixon lied to me about Watergate, Reagan lied to me about Iran-contra, and now Bush is lying to me about taxes.”

Just as Ed Rollins predicted, Republican voters stayed home in droves on November 6, 1990. “It was the lowest Republican off-year turnout since Watergate, and it was all because of Bush’s tax increase,” Rollins wrote in his rollicking memoir,
Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms
. “We had a net loss of nine seats, but I’m convinced that my memo . . . saved fifteen incumbent seats that otherwise would have gone down the drain.”

One Republican disappointment was California’s seventeenth congressional district, where the Democrat Calvin Dooley was elected. Dooley made sport of President Bush when, in 1992, after redistricting occurred he was elected to the twentieth district. During the ’92 campaign, he regaled constituents about his experience as a first-term congressman in the Bush administration. He told voters in Fresno and Bakersfield how the President showed solidarity with the House of Representatives by coming up to the Hill just like other former House members to use the House gym. The President arrived at the Capitol in his bulletproof limousine accompanied by twenty-six motorcycle police, fourteen Secret Service agents, and enough firepower to arm Paraguay. Amid all this security, Bush worked out, showered, and returned to the White House.

“It’s quite an experience to be a lowly freshman congressman in the shower with the President of the United States (pause) and to look over and see (long pause) that the leader of the free world is (longer pause) . . . a . . . well . . . er . . . just an average little guy.”

Audiences guffawed each time he told the story, and at one Dooley fund-raiser in California a delegation from Washington, D.C., including the Speaker of the House of Representatives, had to struggle for composure as the congressman described the commander in chief’s “little stick.”

Determined to recoup his manhood, the President had a plan in place, thanks to the advice of a tough woman. When Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the President conferred with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Aspen, Colorado. “Remember, George,” she said. “I was almost to be defeated in England when the Falkland conflict happened. I stayed in office for eight years after that.”

Mrs. Thatcher was referring to Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, when she had dispatched England’s armed forces to establish British sovereignty. Known as the Iron Lady, she proved her mettle in that war and emerged victorious. At the time, George Bush characterized her as a “broad with steel balls.” Now she would provide the spine he needed to confront Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. When the President started to waver, she would back up his resolve by saying, “Don’t go wobbly on me, George. Don’t go wobbly.”

Continuing his August vacation at Kennebunkport, the President met with visiting heads of state, including King Hussein of Jordan, who arrived after meeting with Saddam in Iraq. The King argued for negotiations, but Bush demanded immediate withdrawal. Not surprisingly, the President’s focus was on the one subject he knew best. “I will not allow this little dictator to control 25 percent of the civilized world’s oil,” he told Hussein. Queen Noor recalled her husband’s describing the meeting as “quite a raw experience.” She said the King was shocked by the President’s choice of words and his implication that there were only two worlds—the Arab world and “the civilized world.”