The Family (79 page)

On the juror form, the governor also avoided answering the question about his wife’s sustaining any injury that required medical attention. He did not intend to open a line of inquiry into Laura’s painful past. At that time, not even their fifteen-year-old twins knew about the death their mother had caused when she was a senior at Robert E. Lee High School in Midland. Laura had been driving her parents’ car toward the intersection of State Highway 349 and Farm Road. Smoking and talking to her friend Judy Dykes, Laura did not see the stop sign. Flying across the road at fifty-five miles an hour, she smashed her 1963 Chevrolet into the side of a 1962 Corvair. The driver, Michael Douglas, never had a chance. He was dead on arrival at Midland Memorial Hospital. No charges were filed. The police report noted that no one was wearing seat belts, and concluded that there was no indication of drinking, even though no one was tested for alcohol. Laura Lane Welch and her friend were bruised and banged up, but released that evening. Emotionally, they were shattered when they realized that Laura had killed Midland’s golden boy, an all-around athlete at their high school who was one of the most popular boys in their class and someone Laura herself had tried to date. She did not return to school for several weeks after the accident and could not bring herself to attend the young man’s funeral.

“It was a very, very tragic accident I was involved in when I was 17 years old,” she said thirty-seven years later when the story appeared in the
New York Post
. “It was terrible for everyone involved . . . I know this as an adult, and even more as a parent, it was crushing . . . for the family involved and for me as well.”

George avoided answering the jury question about being accused in a criminal case because of his arrest in Maine on September 4, 1976, for driving under the influence. His Texas license, suspended at the time, was restored on July 25, 1978. But shortly after he was elected governor in 1995, he applied for a new driver’s license with an entirely new number. The new license would make tracing an arrest record through his previous license virtually impossible. Perhaps it was this confidence that emboldened him to lie to Wayne Slater of
The Dallas Morning News
in 1998:

SLATER:
Governor, were you ever arrested after 1968?

BUSH:
No.

When George first reported for jury duty at the Travis County Courthouse on September 30, 1996, he smiled for the television cameras. “I’m glad to serve,” he said. “I think it’s important. It’s one of the duties of citizenship . . . I’m just an average guy showing up for jury duty.”

Inside the courthouse he found out that he was a potential juror for a drunk-driving case. He summoned his general counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, to petition the court to exempt him because of the possibility that as governor he might be called upon to pardon the accused. Despite the far-fetched premise, the judge agreed as a courtesy to excuse him from jury duty. Bush would later appoint his lawyer to the Texas Supreme Court.

The Houston Chronicle
reported the governor’s dismissal as “a development that allowed him to avoid potentially embarrassing questions about whether he had ever climbed behind the wheel after drinking.”

When reporters asked George if he had ever been arrested for driving while intoxicated, he said, “I do not have a perfect record as a youth.” No one thought to check the arrest records in places where he had lived as a youth—until November 2, 2000. Five days before Election Day, Tom Connolly, a longtime Maine Democrat, stumbled upon the twenty-four-year-old police report that the governor had concealed all his public life. The disclosure cost George more than a modicum of respect, especially since he had been presenting himself as honest and truthful in contrast to the Democrats. His obvious attempt to hide his arrest made reporters skeptical. They used the term “Clintonesque” to describe his squirmy attempts to handle questions about the cover-up. Karl Rove later estimated the revelation had cost Bush about 1 million votes, enough to make him lose the national popular vote.

When the Travis County prosecutor Ken Oden, a Democrat, learned of the governor’s arrest record, he felt Bush and his attorney had purposely misled him. “He used his position as governor to avoid having to answer potentially embarrassing questions about his past,” Oden told
Salon.com
. The defense attorney P. David Wahlberg said, “Everybody understood [Bush] just didn’t want to answer questions about drinking and drugs and things like that.”

Predictably, Barbara Bush rushed to her son’s defense. She claimed he had been arrested because he was “driving too slowly.” The arresting officer, Calvin Bridges, said he had cited George for “driving erratically and [running] off the road into some hedges.”

In her book
Reflections
, Barbara dismissed the arrest as “much ado about nothing.” She wrote, “Frankly, I think that instead of the effect that some hoped for, this might have reminded people that George had the discipline to give up drinking and that he was strong.”

Those closest to George agreed that the key to his new persona lay in his steely discipline. His sister described him as a fat boy who deprived himself to stay thin. His mother depicted a drinker who denied himself to stay dry. Both acknowledged that the effort to control these appetites was monumental. In order to maintain his rigid discipline, George imposed an inflexible order on his life. Like any addict in recovery, he needed a regular schedule, rising early and retiring early. He prayed daily from his
One-Year Bible
, which was divided into 365 readings, each from the New Testament, the Old Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs. Edgy and impatient, he exercised at least one hour, sometimes two hours, a day. With martinet punctuality, he started and ended meetings exactly on time. He refused to read memos longer than two pages. He thrived on making quick decisions. His religiosity allowed him to live in a black-and-white world of absolutes with no bedeviling in-betweens. His decisiveness sprang from his need to control and to establish order amid chaos. Once he made a decision, he rarely looked back. Reversing himself might be misinterpreted as a sign of weakness, and he dreaded nothing so much as looking wimpish. There would never be a “wimp factor” with George W. Bush.

He swaggered and smirked and seemed to enjoy shocking people with his exaggerated machismo. He cursed constantly, which his father, no stranger to ribald language, said started when he was five years old. In a 1951 letter to a friend, the elder Bush wrote, “Georgie aggravates the hell out of me talking dirty.” Years later reporters would be astonished by some of George’s obscenities. David Fink, formerly with
The Hartford Courant
, was stunned when he asked George what he and his father talked about. George’s response: “Pussy.”

“I just couldn’t use the word,” said Fink years later. “I wrote instead that he had made an unflattering reference to women. I know that he said it on the record, but part of me thought that . . . well, I would not talk that way to a stranger, much less to a reporter on the record . . . so I guess I protected him, because I thought maybe he was trying to be a guy ingratiating himself to another guy.”

When Tucker Carlson interviewed the governor for
Talk
magazine, he, too, was surprised by George’s vulgarity. Carlson asked about a rumor that the Gore campaign had a photograph of Bush dancing nude on top of a bar.

“They think it’s like a high school election,” George said, “where if you beat up your opponent enough you can win. They’ve lost their fucking minds.”

When a right-wing friend accused the born-again governor of taking the Lord’s name in vain, George exploded. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “Total bullshit.”

Whether talking to reporters, congressmen, or heads of state, George made no effort to curb his trash mouth. He called Adam Clymer of
The New York Times
a “major league asshole.” After praising Republican Representative Charles Whitlow Norwood Jr. of Georgia, George said, “So now that I’ve kissed your ass, what do I have to do to get a deal?” Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was taken aback to hear, “I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that.”

George’s cock-o’-the-walk manner served him well as governor of Texas. During his six years in the statehouse he allowed 152 executions (150 men and 2 women), a record unmatched by any other governor in modern history. He claimed he reviewed each execution case carefully, but research by
The Atlantic Monthly
suggested that he and his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, exhibited a shocking lack of attention to the facts of the cases that came before them. Gonzales’s memos, which never made specific recommendations to the governor, were found to be cursory summaries lacking crucial specifics about the execution cases. The final page of each summary contained the “Governor’s Clemency Decision” with a space for George to check “Deny” or “Grant” and affix his signature. In 152 out of 153 cases Bush checked “Deny.” Only once in six years did he intercede with his Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop an execution—that of an alleged serial killer who had been sentenced to die for a murder that two attorneys general concluded he did not commit.

The most famous plea for clemency came from Karla Faye Tucker, who had been convicted of a drug-induced murder of two people with a pickax. During her fourteen-year incarceration, Tucker apparently experienced a religious conversion and became a model prisoner who repented her crimes and asked for forgiveness. She petitioned the governor to stay her execution and commute her sentence to life. Texas had not executed a woman since 1863, and her plea received international attention. Her story was featured on
60 Minutes
,
The 700 Club
, and
Larry King Live
for two consecutive nights. The televangelist Pat Robertson championed her case, as did the human rights activist Bianca Jagger and Pope John Paul II. Governor Bush would not meet with any of them. “If the crime fits the penalty, the penalty is given,” he said.

Two weeks before Tucker’s scheduled execution by lethal injection, CNN’s Larry King traveled to Gatesville, Texas, to interview the condemned prisoner from death row. She broke down and sobbed as she described her crime. She talked about her religious salvation and how she placed her faith in God.

KING:
Do you think . . . politics and everything . . . that politics are involved? That part of the decision [for Governor Bush] is, will it hurt me with the electorate or help me with the electorate, if I decide this? You do think that?

TUCKER:
Oh, yes. I am not crazy. I do believe that.

KING:
And Texans like capital punishment?

TUCKER:
Yes.

KING:
So you’re in trouble there?

TUCKER:
Naturally speaking, it would look like there’s no hope but I . . . my hope is in God.

Two nights before the scheduled execution, Jenna Bush, then sixteen years old, told her father over dinner that he should commute the sentence. George refused. “If the crime fits the penalty,” he repeated, “the penalty is given.” On February 3, 1998, he signed the execution order.

“May God bless Karla Faye Tucker,” he said, “and may God bless her victims and their families.”

The next day’s editorial in the
Austin American-Statesman
sided with Jenna Bush. “[Tucker’s execution] was so poignant and unnecessary that it gave all but the most determined death penalty advocates pause,” said the paper. “Her death . . . should prompt every judge, jury, and legislator to reconsider the death penalty that Texas indulges with such abandon.”

A year later the governor was still smarting from the criticism. Unable or unwilling to hide his mean streak, he spoke sarcastically to a reporter about the execution.

“I didn’t meet with Larry King when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’”

“What was her answer?”

George pursed his lips in mock fear and whimpered, “‘Please, don’t kill me.’”

But King never asked her that question and she never gave that answer. Bush’s ridicule of the woman executed the previous year seemed exceedingly callous, even cruel.

George would never match his father’s graciousness, but he was capable of nice gestures. Ruth Gilson, a realtor with Millicent Chatel, recalled a touching moment during a 1999 fund-raiser at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“I had paid one thousand dollars to meet the governor,” she said. “I very much wanted to see him because I had voted for his father and I was going to vote for him.”

She recalled that she was one of very few women to attend the event. “All the men looked to be lobbyists in expensive suits with huge stomachs. The room filled up fast and we were all squished together. I was at the front of the rope line. A little old lady about eighty-five years old crept in beside me. She said she needed to see the governor. ‘I just have to talk to him,’ she said.”

The elderly woman was frail and wearing clothes that looked worn and dated. Perched on her head was a little hat with a veil. “She looked like a church lady from the 1950s,” said Gilson.

George arrived, made a short speech, and then started working the crowd. The little woman stepped forward and asked if she could say something. He reached out and took her hand. She whispered in his ear to please do something about the price of prescription drugs for the elderly. He nodded. “I’ll try,” he said. Then he stepped back to look at her.

“Did you pay a thousand dollars to come here?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“Well, I want you to get your money back.” He turned to the man with him. “Get her name and address and see that she gets a check for a thousand dollars.”