The Family (78 page)

Smoking pot was hardly a sin—particularly in the late 1960s—but it did not mesh with the straitlaced image the Bushes were now presenting to the voters.

Because of the anger that Clinton’s indiscretions had aroused with voters, W. loudly proclaimed that he had never committed adultery. “Everyone knows, or should know, that I have been faithful to my wife for the past twenty-one years,” George told Tucker Carlson of
Talk
magazine.

Potentially more damaging, in some ways, than free-floating rumors of adultery was something that wasn’t a mere rumor: George’s alcohol-induced behavior toward his wife. In W.’s drinking days, abusive behavior had, several times, driven Laura from their house. Often George would disappear at night, and Laura would not know where he was. Friends recalled a drunken George being bitingly sarcastic and pugnacious. One friend even worried about spousal abuse, but there was no official police report to document the allegation.

In December 1998, the Bush team—Karl Rove, Joe Allbaugh, and Don Evans—began in earnest to tidy up the governor’s past. They knew they could rely on Laura’s close girlfriends to keep mum and protect her from the hurtful rumors, accusations, and investigations of the abuse. And if there were extramarital affairs, George W. had been discreet. Rove and the others were able to maintain the image. The past, in many ways, had been erased.

George and Laura’s marriage had indeed survived all the ups and downs, but the toll was obvious to those close to the couple. Laura developed her own circle of friends, mostly women, with whom she shopped and regularly vacationed. She pursued her interests by herself, going alone to museums, the theater, and the ballet. When they were in the White House, she continued this pattern, taking her annual women-only hiking vacations.

George had declared that he could not tolerate a wife who stole his spotlight, and Laura never did. Even on the national stage, she appeared strangely removed. Some observers wondered if she was on antidepressants because her calm demeanor seemed slightly unnatural. She accompanied her husband to and from the helicopter Marine One on the weekends to fly to Camp David, but there was no public display of affection between them. They rarely held hands. In fact, they were more demonstrative toward their dogs than toward each other. Laura accompanied George to their ranch in Crawford and on some state trips, although she traveled more on her own than she did with him. She even made a few fund-raising trips for him during his drive for reelection, but she remained very much in her own world, not his. She continued her girlfriend outings and spent days and days shopping. Her Secret Service detail was frequently seen on the streets of Georgetown as Laura meandered in and out of antiques shops up and down Wisconsin Avenue.

She embraced literacy as her First Lady cause—causes became a requirement of all presidential wives after the Kennedy administration, when Jacqueline Kennedy made hers the restoration of the White House. To promote reading, Laura dutifully posed for pictures holding a book and reading to schoolchildren, but she never seemed to be actively engaged by making regular trips to schools, traveling to meet with educators and parents and students. She brought none of her mother-in-law’s hard-charging energy or commitment to the role of literacy’s First Lady. “She excels as an honorary chairman,” said a Washington, D.C., woman whose charity has benefited from being able to use Laura’s name on its invitations. “But, curiously, she insists on being called Mrs. Laura Bush, not Mrs. George Bush . . . I learned this the hard way when we listed her—properly—on an invitation as Mrs. George W. Bush. The White House called and said I had to have all the invitations redone so that she appeared as Mrs. Laura Bush. I explained that wasn’t the proper way to list the President’s wife, but her office insisted. ‘That’s the way Mrs. Bush wants to be presented.’ So that’s the way we presented her.”

As governor’s wife, Laura, who loved living in the liberal town of Austin, started the Texas Book Festival. As President’s wife, she appeared more reluctant, less involved. She told friends she resented being described as “a fifties throwback,” but, in truth, as First Lady she probably most resembled Bess Truman, who frequently left the White House to return to her home in Missouri. To enhance Laura’s image as the First Lady of literacy, her husband’s promoters portrayed her as a schoolteacher and a librarian devoted to books, although she had stopped working professionally the day she married George Bush in 1977.

In the early years of their marriage, Laura joined her husband in his revels, but after their hard struggle to conceive and her fragile pregnancy, she pulled back from the hell-raising, while he charged on, leaving her behind.

“She was never part of the family scene at Kennebunkport,” recalled her former sister-in-law, Sharon Bush. “Laura just sat around on the porch reading and smoking cigarettes. She let the rest of us plan activities for her children and take care of them. She was just in her own world. Not a joiner at all . . . I suppose there were strains in her marriage, just because he’s so difficult and high-energy and . . . she isn’t, but she never talked about it . . . She really didn’t talk much at all. Just read paperbacks and smoked cigarettes.”

In 1998 the governor’s tidy-up team was not as concerned about Laura as they were about George. Fanning out across the country, they made sure that Andover would not release the governor’s personal records as a prep-school student, and they received assurances from Yale and Harvard that his records would be secure unless he gave permission for release. They contacted the Texas Air National Guard to make sure that his service record was “in order.”

Retired Guard officer Colonel Bill Burkett is said to have been present during a speakerphone call between Joe Allbaugh of the governor’s staff and General Daniel James III during the summer of 1997. Burkett said he overheard Allbaugh tell the general to make sure there were no embarrassments in Bush’s Guard record. Both Allbaugh and James deny Burkett’s assertions, but another former Guard officer, Dennis Adams of Austin, Texas, said in 2004 that Burkett told him in 1997 about the records cleanup. “I have no doubt he [Burkett] is telling the truth,” Adams said. “Bill is one of my heroes. He was trying to take on certain rotten SOBs inside the Guard.”

The governor’s top aides knew that the long reach of the Bush family worked to their advantage. People naturally want to please, not alienate, those in positions of great power and wealth. The psychological fear of retribution from a family whose patriarch was former director of Central Intelligence automatically worked to silence pesky girlfriends, talkative associates, and grudge-bearing enemies. In Texas especially, the Bushes ruled. Even people who disliked them did not want to run afoul of them socially. “Why disturb a lion that could maim you and eat your young?” said a member of the Houston Country Club.

The first hurdle facing the tidy-up team was to deal with the governor’s past drug use. Over the years George had been very careful not to lie about doing or dealing illegal drugs, because he knew there were too many people who could testify to the truth. The steel triumvirate found an honor-among-thieves mentality within the group of those who had been “young and irresponsible” with George. As successful adults, most knew better than to talk about their adolescent use of illegal drugs.

When George had been asked about drugs in the past, he always finessed the question. “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.”

As governor, he required security drug tests for all state employees, so Sam Attlesey of
The Dallas Morning News
asked if he could meet a similar standard. “Could you pass the White House security clearance as it relates to drugs?”

Bush flicked him off. “I’ve answered that kind of question already.”

He later asked one of his aides to get him a copy of the federal guidelines. After reading it, he called the reporter back.

“If you’re asking me if I’ve done drugs in the last seven years,” Bush said, “the answer is no.”

The next day’s headline: “Governor Says He Hasn’t Done Drugs in Seven Years.” This prompted David Bloom of NBC to ask Bush if he had ever used drugs as a pilot in the National Guard.

“Were you ever high when you were flying the fighter jet?”

The Bush team expected Bloom’s question to explode the never-confirmed rumors that George had been grounded by the Guard in 1972 because he had cocaine in his system and knew he would be unable to pass his required physical. Bloom did not get a satisfactory answer to his question and was not permitted to follow up.

Tim Russert, NBC’s moderator on
Meet the Press
, tried to engage the governor on the issue of his past drug use, but George dodged the question. “I’ve said all I’m going to say,” he told Russert. “I don’t want to provide any excuse for your 14-year-old child to say, ‘Hey, maybe if old Governor Bush did something, I think I’m going to try it, that [
sic
].’”

Watching George bob and weave around the drug question prompted a
Washington Post
reporter to ask, “So why won’t you just deny that you’ve used cocaine?”

“I’m not going to talk about what I did years ago,” George said. “This is a game where they float rumors, force a person to fight off a rumor, then they’ll float another rumor. And I’m not going to participate. I saw what happened to my dad with rumors in Washington. I made mistakes. I’ve asked people to not let the rumors get in the way of the fact. I’ve told people I’ve learned from my mistakes and I have. And I’m going to leave it at that.”

The rumor float he referred to concerned an alleged narcotics arrest in 1972, which supposedly prompted his father to persuade a Texas judge to accept a deal whereby George would perform a certain amount of community service in exchange for getting his record expunged. Although this rumor has never been confirmed, George W. Bush did, in fact, participate in a community-service program right around that time, just before he entered Harvard Business School. The official story is that it was W.’s drinking and driving incident involving his underage brother Marvin that led to their stint of community service. They maintain that this community service—at PULL—was strictly voluntary (or at least dictated by nothing more than parental discipline).

As governor and presidential candidate, George denied he had ever been arrested for dealing drugs; no one ever produced proof of such an arrest, and his father vehemently denied ever trying to obstruct justice on his son’s behalf. “It’s a lie,” said George Herbert Walker Bush. “A vicious lie. And I’ll tell you, it’s one of the things that makes a lot of people stay out of public service.”

As governor of Texas, George took a hard line on drugs. He supported and signed legislation increasing penalties for drug possession in the state. He also signed legislation mandating jail time for people caught with less than a single gram of cocaine. Yet as Sharon Bush’s claims show, he could have been subject to jail time himself had he been caught “doing coke” with his brother Marvin and a friend at Camp David during his father’s presidency. “There is a long history of biochemical disorders in the family,” said Sharon in 2003, in the midst of her unfriendly divorce from Neil. “Schizophrenia, alcoholism, and drug abuse.”

The governor’s answers to questions about his use of illegal drugs grew so convoluted during the campaign that he became the butt of late-night-comedy jokes. “George Bush has given a half a dozen different answers to this today,” Jay Leno said on
The Tonight Show
. “First, he said that he hadn’t done drugs in the past fifteen years. Then, later, he changed that. He said, no, no, he hadn’t done drugs in the past twenty-five years. Then really, just like an hour ago, what he really meant to say was, he hadn’t done drugs since he was twenty-eight. And, then finally, he admitted, he said, ‘Look, I’m so high, I don’t know what the hell I’m saying.’”

During his first term as governor, George had been summoned for jury duty in Travis County. He filled in the jury questionnaire (number 85009809) but left the following unanswered:

Have you ever been a party to a civil law suit? If yes, what type?

Has your spouse or any child ever sustained an injury requiring medical attention? If yes, describe the injury:

Have you ever served on a jury? Civil? Criminal? Was a verdict reached?

Have you ever been an accused or a complainant or a witness in a criminal case?

It was not carelessness that caused him to leave these questions unanswered. There are specific reasons he did not respond to each of the above queries. Having been a party to a civil lawsuit, George did not want the matter publicized. Few people knew that in 1994, the caretaker of the Rainbo Club—an exclusive hideaway in East Texas for Dallas millionaires, in Henderson County—and his wife had accused club members of conspiring to terminate him out of “spite and ill will” and had sued George W. and other members. The plaintiffs claimed the caretaker had been discharged after filing for workmen’s compensation after being injured on the job. After two years of litigation, George managed to get his part of the lawsuit dismissed on summary judgment, but only after the plaintiff’s attorney, Kay Davenport of Tyler, Texas, had deposed him. George did not want that deposition to surface, because in it he admitted that the Rainbo Club was “whites only.” He had received less than 9 percent of the black vote in his race against Ann Richards, and the rejection by the black community bothered him. He said it had been the only disappointment in an otherwise ideal campaign. He did not want to further exacerbate the problem. Nor did he want to draw attention to the tax write-off he used for his luxury lakeside home. He and the other home owners in the Rainbo Club had halved their tax liability through a law that permitted club properties to be designated as recreational, park, and scenic land. They had formed a private nonprofit corporation, Rainbo Club Inc., to operate a private hunting and fishing club for eighteen members. As a result of the loophole, Bush paid only $543.07 in property taxes in 1998 on a house and guest cottage valued at $101,770. The Rainbo Club lawsuit cost him enough in lawyer’s fees over two years to make tort reform a major part of his campaign.