The Family (73 page)

“That one statement made by Mr. Bush has truly angered the African-American community,” said the Democratic state senator from Fort Lauderdale, Matthew Meadows, “and we’re going to show him on Election Day.”

Compounding his insensitivity, Jeb later told welfare mothers: “Get your life together and find a husband.”

In Texas, George was running against one of the most popular figures in the state—incumbent Governor Ann Richards—so he worked hard not to offend. In a predominantly Republican state, the demographics were in his favor, but he put more stock in his likability. “Looking back on our race [in 1978], I saw that the more people George met, the better he did,” said Kent Hance, W.’s Democratic opponent in that early congressional campaign. “People liked him . . . And I’ve always said that if people like you, there’s more potential they’ll vote for you. He was so good getting people to like him that I started to worry, until he ran that first ad of himself jogging . . . Then I knew I had him. At that time in West Texas if you were jogging, folks figured you were a bank robber and someone was chasing you or else you were late to work.”

When Jeb had announced his plan to challenge Florida’s incumbent Governor Lawton Chiles, George decided he had to take on Ann Richards, or, as he called her, “Mrs. Big Hair.” His wife and his mother were adamantly opposed. Laura saw the race as nothing more than sibling competition for his father’s approval and an effort to stomp someone who had belittled the family name on national television. Laura wanted no part of it. “She’s throwing water on it,” George complained to friends. His mother felt the same way. Barbara bluntly told her son he did not stand a chance against Ann Richards. “She’s too popular,” she said. “You’ll lose.”

His father was not as outspoken, but just as dubious. “George W. was doing very well in business with the Texas Rangers baseball team,” President Bush told
Time
’s Hugh Sidey. “It surprised me a little when he decided to run for Governor. I’ve always felt that people in public life should have done something in the private sector before. But, yes, it was kind of interesting when he told us his plans.”

George, who had learned from Lee Atwater to read and rely on polls, hired Karl Rove to test Ann Richards’s strength in the state. His early polling showed her with a 58 percent approval rating. She was well liked as a colorful Texas character, but not highly regarded as an effective governor. “They like her hair,” said Rove, “but they’re not strongly anchored to her.” Rove’s polls showed Richards’s record on crime, education, and welfare reform was spotty. George, on the other hand, had no record to defend, except the success of the Texas Rangers.

“Let’s go for it,” Rove urged. Described by some as “Bush’s brain,” although he attended nearly half a dozen colleges but never got a degree, Rove defined himself as “a diehard Nixonite.” He had worked with Atwater at the Republican National Committee when the elder Bush was GOP chairman and had met young George in 1973, when he came to Washington to spend Thanksgiving with his parents. Rove had picked him up at the train station, and recalled the meeting for the writer Nicholas Lemann thirty years later, sounding like a breathless schoolgirl describing her first big crush.

“I can literally remember what he was wearing,” said Rove. “An Air National Guard flight jacket, cowboy boots, blue-jeans, complete with the—in Texas you see it a lot—one of the back pockets will have a circle worn in the pocket from where you carry your tin of snuff, your tin of tobacco. He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have.”

A short, squatty self-made man, Rove was enthralled by the natural assurance of the self-entitled Bushes. He was especially drawn to the magnetism of the first son, whom he saw as the ideal political candidate. “He’s the kind of guy political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with,” he said. The two stayed in touch over the years, and Rove emerged as Texas’s leading Republican political consultant. Over time he became to George W. Bush what Uncle Herbie had been to George H.W. Bush—adoring, worshipful, and absolutely indispensable.

Young George had learned early that there is no education in the second kick of a mule. When he ran for Congress in 1978, he used up a lot of money and energy running in the primary and then the runoff, which depleted his resources for the general election. By the time he lost to Kent Hance, he felt as if he had run three campaigns. He did not want to go through the same ordeal in 1994, so he made sure he had no primary opposition, unlike his brother Jeb, who was facing a five-way primary in Florida. George personally visited each of the three men in Texas who had evinced an interest in running against Ann Richards. He laid out his plans for a full-throated campaign, which would cost $15 million. He made each man understand that the son of the former President of the United States was a formidable opponent with limitless funds and immediate name recognition in a Republican state that revered Bushes. By the end of each meeting the prospective rival had taken himself out of contention. “The wholesale capitulation to George W. Bush had happened with almost perfect precision,” wrote his biographer Bill Minutaglio. “It was, old Lone Star pols said admiringly, the only one-day gubernatorial primary in Texas’s history.”

In 1978, George’s mother bankrolled his campaign with her Christmas card list, a roster of 4,738 names of “close family friends” collected during her husband’s Yale years, oil years, campaign years, and UN, China, and congressional years. Bar sent a beguiling letter to every name on her list, including Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, former U.S. Ambassador to England Anne Armstrong, and the once and future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. On July 8, 1978, Barbara wrote:

I have never done this before, and I feel a little funny about it now, but much more than that, I feel so proud of our George. He is running for the U.S. Congress from the 19th District in West Texas . . . George is bright and is eager to represent this district as they should be represented. He is getting geared up for a big race in the fall . . . You guessed it—George will need lots of money to run a first class campaign. I hope you will join us in contributing to his campaign. Please forgive a very proud mother for hitting you up for a little (or a lot) of your hard-earned cash for her son.

Barbara’s begging bowl collected over $400,000 for her son’s campaign, four times what his Democratic opponent raised.

“How could we say no?” said one of the 4,738 “family friends,” who felt obliged to send a check. Most responded like Herbert Brownell, former Attorney General in the Eisenhower Administration, who wrote like an investor in a family dynasty: “Doris and I were very pleased to receive your letter and hear about your young George’s candidacy. Of course we would like to help in a small way and I am enclosing our check with best wishes for success. If he can do half as good as his grandfather and father, that will suit us fine.”

“Our George” lost the race in 1978, principally because his opponent, Kent Hance, denounced him for raising all his money from contributors outside the district. By the time George ran for governor in 1994, his mother concentrated her appeals on the Texas part of her Christmas card list; as a result, only 13 percent of W.’s reported contributions came from out of state.

During the 1978 campaign Mel Turner, a West Texas radio personality and a Republican, said he was leaning toward voting for George but was turned off by his temper. At a candidates’ forum in Odessa, Turner had asked him a question about the Trilateral Commission and whether his father was working for one-world government.

“He jumped like he’d been pricked,” said Turner. After the forum, Turner stood at the door to say good-bye to the candidates.

“Junior Bush comes up, refused to shake my hand, looked me square in the eye and said, ‘You [epithet],’” said Turner. “Then Kent Hance came up and said, ‘Mel, I’ll see you at the Tech game.’”

Recalling the incident, Turner said of George: “Here’s a Republican candidate stepping on the wrong toes. He was an arrogant rich kid, a spoiled brat.”

The man who beat George in 1978 became one of his biggest supporters in 1994. “Timing is everything in politics, and Bush’s timing in his first campaign was not right,” said Kent Hance, who later switched parties and donated ten thousand dollars to George’s first campaign for governor. “In our race for the House of Representatives, he was young, just thirty-two years old, and newly married . . . the campaign through West Texas was their honeymoon. There were no issues we really differed on. I was a state senator and a conservative Democrat. He was for a tax cut and so was I. He wanted to cut back on government spending and so did I. Fact, what it came right down to in the end was Yale versus Texas Tech . . . And in the Panhandle, if it’s Texas Tech versus Yale, Tech will win every time. Not even a close game . . . I had to hit him with being an outsider and me being a good ole boy.”

Nobody “talked Texas” better than Kent Hance, who entertained rural farmers with country jokes, usually at George’s expense. For example: “I was on a ranch in Dimmitt during my high-school days, and a guy drove up and asked for directions to the next ranch. I said, ‘Go north five miles, turn and go east five miles, then turn again after you pass a cattle guard.’ As he turned around, I noticed he had Connecticut license plates. He stopped and said, ‘Just one more question. What color uniform will that cattle guard be wearing?’”

The West Texas farmers voted for the down-home guy, who won 53 percent to 47 percent and taught George something he would never forget. “Kent Hance gave me a lesson on country-boy politics,” Bush said. “He was a master at it, funny and belittling. I vowed never to get out-countried again.” Fifteen years later George was seen on national television sitting behind the Rangers’ dugout picking his nose. He was unembarrassed. “Anything that makes me look like the common man is great,” he said. “Just great.”

During the 1978 campaign he had vehemently opposed abortion rights, gay rights (“I have done nothing to promote homosexuality in our society”), and affirmative action. He called the appointment of Andrew Young, the African American preacher from Atlanta, Georgia, as UN Ambassador “a mistake.” Fitting in with the Bush family’s view of women, W. said the Equal Rights Amendment was “unnecessary.” He also said that Social Security would be bankrupt in ten years unless people were allowed to invest the money themselves. Not exactly the views of a “compassionate conservative,” as he later labeled himself. He took the same positions during his 1994 campaign for governor, adding to the political mix two more items key to his agenda: guns and God.

Ever since George had come to Jesus in April 1984, his religion had ruled his life. He became born-again after the bottom dropped out of the oil boom in Midland, Texas. When the National Bank of Midland, the largest independent bank in the nation, failed, fortunes crashed and overnight millionaires tumbled into life-wrecking debt. “What happened in this town was a catastrophe,” said Bill Meyers, one of George’s friends from Community Bible Study. “Everyone was affected.” In a desperate effort to rescue lives and restore morale, some of the church elders invited the evangelist Arthur Blessitt to stage a revival. Among born-agains, Blessitt was known as the man who had wheeled a ninety-six-pound cross of Jesus into sixty countries on six continents, making a place for himself in
The Guinness Book of Records
.

Posters around Midland advertised the meeting as “A Mission of Love and Joy to the Permian Basin.” Loudspeakers on flatbed trucks exhorted the populace to gather at the Chaparral Center in the evening “to experience the love of God, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” Residents lined the streets during the day and watched Blessitt roll his twelve-foot-high cross through the boomtown gone bust. Many bowed their heads as he passed. One little boy shouted, “It’s the Lord Jesus on wheels!”

“I was speaking during the day all around the city and carrying the cross in the streets,” said Blessitt. “It was the focus point of the city of Midland for that week with the meeting being broadcast on the local radio.”

George felt uncomfortable about attending the revival, but he listened to the broadcast. On the second day he asked his friend Don Pogue to arrange a meeting with Blessitt. “I want to talk to him about Jesus,” George said.

The three men met the next day at the coffee shop in the Best Western hotel. As Blessitt recalled the meeting, George began with a few pleasantries, and then plunged in.

“I want to talk to you about how to know Jesus Christ and how to follow Him.”

“I was quite shocked at his direct and sincere approach,” said Blessitt. “I slowly leaned forward and lifted the Bible that was in my hand and asked him about his relationship with the Lord . . . ‘If you died this moment do you have the assurance you would go to heaven?’”

“No.”

“Then let me explain to you how you can have that assurance and know for sure that you are saved.”

“I’d like that.”

The evangelist read from the Book of Romans. He quoted Mark and John and Luke to the Vice President’s son, who held hands with the two men, repented his sins, and proclaimed Jesus Christ as his savior.

“It was an awesome and glorious moment,” recalled Blessitt. He later wrote in his diary on April 3, 1984: “A good and powerful day—Led Vice President Bush’s son to Jesus—George Bush Jr!! This is great. Glory to God. But I won’t speak about it.”

That coffee-shop conversion eventually led George to give up tobacco, alcohol, and drugs at the age of forty, illustrating the wisdom of William James, who said “the only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania.”

In his memoir,
A Charge to Keep
, George W. credited his family’s good friend the Reverend Billy Graham with planting “a mustard seed in my soul.” He did not mention coming to Jesus with the flamboyant Blessitt and his cross on wheels, figuring, perhaps, that Graham was more palatable to churchgoing voters.

George spoke openly about his religious beliefs during his 1994 campaign for governor. He told a reporter from
The Houston Post
that the path to heaven came only from acceptance of Jesus as one’s personal savior. He cited the New Testament, which to him represented reality, not metaphor. His comment raised concern among Houston’s Jews when
The Jewish Herald-Voice
of November 2, 1994, ran the headline: “Can a Texas Jew Go to Heaven? George W. Bush Says ‘No.’”