The Family (82 page)

At his father’s suggestion George appointed former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to interview possible running mates. Former Missouri Senator John Danforth, New York Governor George Pataki, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, and Representative John Kasich of Ohio were subjected to the laborious vetting process. George did not want to make the same mistake his father had made in selecting Dan Quayle.

Cheney, then CEO of the huge energy company Halliburton, spent three months on the process, conferring regularly with Bush, visiting him at his ranch in Crawford and at the statehouse in Austin. During the Gulf War, Cheney had become close to the senior Bush. Toward the end of the vetting process, George H.W. finally recommended Cheney to his son as a running mate when Colin Powell removed himself from consideration. The only concern was Cheney’s medical history, which included three heart attacks and a quadruple coronary bypass. His doctors assured the Bushes that Cheney’s heart could take the stress, but their assurances proved to be more optimistic than realistic.

George felt comfortable with the balding man who was five years his senior and looked as if he had never missed a meal. Both came from the oil business and shared the same hard-line conservative politics. As Wyoming’s only congressman from 1979 to 1990, Cheney had voted against affirmative action, Head Start, the Clean Water Act, and the Equal Rights Amendment. He also voted against freeing Nelson Mandela. Like George, he favored easy access to handguns, and he, too, had been arrested for drunk driving, once in November 1962 and again in July 1963. One of his two daughters, Mary, was an avowed lesbian, which the vehemently antigay Bush accepted as “no problem.” Cheney had flunked out of Yale after two years on an academic scholarship, which amused George, who had nothing but disdain for his alma mater. Apparently, Yale and Yalies felt the same way about them. In the general election of 2000 over 84 percent of the Yale student body voted against the Bush-Cheney ticket. They threw their support to Al Gore and Joe Lieberman (Yale 1964; Yale Law School 1967), the first Jew to run for national office.

George announced his running mate by taking another whack at the President. “Dick Cheney is a solid man . . . a man who understands what the definition of ‘is’ is.” The allusion was to Clinton’s maddening answer during his 1998 grand jury testimony in the Lewinsky scandal when he said, “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”

On the eve of the Republican convention, Clinton struck back. Appearing at a Rhode Island fund-raiser, he suggested that Bush was not qualified to hold the highest office in the land. He said Bush’s only credential was his highly inflated sense of entitlement. Mimicking him, the President said, “How bad can I be? I’ve been governor of Texas. My daddy was president. I own a baseball team. Their fraternity had it for eight years, give it to ours for eight years.”

The “our boy” contingent in Kennebunkport barked like seals. The next morning Bar and Poppy hit the morning shows. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” said President Bush on the
Today
show, his voice tight with rage. “I’m going to wait a month and then, you give a call . . . And if he continues that, then I’m going to tell the nation what I think about him as a human being and a person.” Barbara followed up on
Good Morning America
, implying that Clinton had brought too much disrespect to the presidency for Al Gore to restore. “It would be very difficult, I think, with some of the things he’s done,” she said. Lest there be any doubt about restoring the House of Bush,
Newsweek
featured the GOP ticket on its cover as “The Avengers.”

Clinton had drawn blood, pushing the candidate’s parents to give credence to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that showed 54 percent of those questioned believed that George W. Bush “has relied on family connections to get ahead.” That was by far the strongest perception, positive or negative, that applied to either candidate during the election.

The race between Bush and Gore, it was clear to all concerned, was going to be close. From the beginning both parties saw problems in Florida. A high turnout of black voters worried the GOP, because they knew that Jeb’s abolishing the state’s affirmative-action programs had made him no friends in the African American community.

In September, Jeb, whose positive poll ratings were over 60 percent in the state, met with Florida’s Republican leaders. “Please, I’m begging you,” he joked. “Don’t make me go home to Kennebunkport at Thanksgiving having not carried Florida.” He campaigned with George whenever he was in the state, but Jeb toned himself down considerably, because he worried about appearing brighter and more articulate. When George left the state, Jeb did not make speeches for him. He would not go on network talk shows, and he turned down all interview requests from national publications. He did not support his brother as prominently as other Republican governors like John Engler of Michigan, Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. The media noticed.

“Listen, I’m busting my hump,” Jeb said, stung by criticism that he was not doing enough. “I’ve raised a lot of money; I’ve campaigned when my brother has come to the state . . . I have a different relationship . . . I’m his brother, so I have to be a bit more careful about how I help. Because of the comparisons that might not help George in some cases.”

When Al Gore started leading in the polls, the Bush family hit Florida with full force. The former President, who had won the state in 1988 and 1992, exhorted Republicans to support “my boy because he will restore honor and dignity to the White House.” Laura Bush read to elementary-school students; Jeb’s handsome son, George P. Bush, spoke Spanish to Miami’s Hispanics; Columba Bush promoted arts projects in Fort Lauderdale; Barbara Bush visited senior-citizen centers; and George W. Bush promised Cuban exiles that as President he would never lift the sanctions against Fidel Castro until Cuba was free.

The day before the election Bush flew to Bentonville, Arkansas, confident he could humiliate the President by winning his state. When he did, he told his cheering supporters, “They misunderestimated me.”

On Election Day, November 7, 2000, the country looked toward Florida as the deciding state for the White House. At 8:00 p.m. the networks called the state for Vice President Gore; by 2:20 a.m. they had reversed themselves for Bush. The Vice President called the governor to concede, only to call back and retract his concession when he found out how close the vote was. Out of 6 million votes cast, the differential was 6,000 votes, and Florida law required a recount for any margin of less than a half percent. By 6:00 a.m. the difference was down to 1,784 votes. Weeks later, the final difference was 537 votes. The official Florida tally was 2,912,790 votes for Bush, 2,912,253 votes for Gore.

All of the canvassing boards in Florida’s sixty-seven counties were required by state law to order a recount of the votes cast. What followed was a bewildering procedure that dragged on for thirty-five days as the nation sat on the edge of its seat, breathlessly waiting to see who would become the next President of the United States. Bush immediately assumed the role by publicly setting up a transition office and meeting with staff to discuss the new administration. The family dispatched its consigliere James A. Baker III to Florida to oversee the recount, to insist on counting the overseas military ballots, and to get the votes from the Democratic precincts discarded. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher tried to fulfill the same role for the Democrats, but he was overmatched by the stealth of Baker, who kept repeating for television cameras, “The vote in Florida was counted . . . The vote in Florida has been recounted . . .” The Democrats never challenged the premise, although it was not true.

Lawyers swarmed into the state from both parties to protect their candidate’s rights during the tumultuous process of machine and manual recounts for which the state was ill prepared. Lawsuits flew back and forth as the parties lodged legal challenges against each other, and the nation became embroiled in a numbing discourse on chads—the minuscule squares of paper on punch-out votes. There were descended chads, those that had been properly punched out; dimpled chads, which had been slightly punched; and hanging chads, which had been punched halfway. Weeks later Bush would joke about appointing his brother Governor Jeb Bush of Florida the Ambassador to Chad.

Two weeks into the process, the recount in Miami-Dade, where Al Gore had received a majority of the votes, was shut down by a GOP demonstration that threatened mayhem. In Washington, Doro Bush, disguised in a scarf and dark glasses, joined two hundred protesters to picket the Vice President’s mansion, screaming insults. She called her mother that night and said that standing on Massachusetts Avenue shouting at the Gores took care of a lot of her frustrations. The partisan free-for-all in Florida had ignited tempers across the country. The Florida state supreme court had ruled that manual recounts could go forward, but Baker shrewdly appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The next day Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney, suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalized for emergency surgery. Bush appeared on television and denied that Cheney had had a heart attack. He said it was “just a scare.” Reporters noticed he was sporting an angry red boil near his eye and they asked if the festering sore was from stress. “Hell, no,” Bush snapped.

On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 5–4, stopped the Florida recount, overturning the December 8 decision of the Florida Supreme Court. The majority consisted of five conservative justices, all Republican appointees: William Rehnquist (Nixon); Antonin Scalia (Reagan); Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush); Anthony Kennedy (Reagan); Sandra Day O’Connor (Reagan). The minority included Stephen Breyer (Clinton); David Souter (George H.W. Bush); Ruth Ginsburg (Clinton); John Paul Stevens (Ford). The headline in
The New York Times
:

BUSH PREVAILS
BY SINGLE VOTE, JUSTICES END RECOUNT,
BLOCKING GORE AFTER 5-WEEK STRUGGLE

The final tally showed:

A fractured Court and a splintered nation awaited the Vice President’s concession. The next day, despite winning the popular vote by 540,520 votes, Al Gore ended the national nightmare with the best speech of his political career.

“Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States, and I promised him that I wouldn’t call him back this time,” said the Vice President in his televised address. He quoted Senator Stephen Douglas in his loss to Abraham Lincoln. “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.” While strongly disagreeing with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Vice President gracefully accepted the outcome and conceded the election for the sake of national unity.

After the Electoral College certified him as President-elect, George W. Bush resigned as governor of Texas. In a bar near the Austin capitol several legislators hoisted a glass. “Here’s to our post turtle,” one said. A tourist asked what a post turtle was. The legislator said: “When you’re driving down a country road in Texas and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.” The tourist looked puzzled. The legislator explained: “You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he can’t get anything done while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor stupid critter get down.” They all gulped their drinks.

Later a crowd gathered outside the governor’s mansion, where one protester held up a sign: “His Fraudulency.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

F
or years George Herbert Walker Bush has acted indignant if anyone describes his family as a political dynasty. “That’s a bad word you’ve used,” he told a reporter from
Time
, wagging his finger. “Almost taboo . . . I don’t like that word ‘dynasty’ as it relates to the Bushes. Dynasty seems to me to have the connotation of something other than individual achievement.”

By the time his son became President, the father’s protestations had begun to sound disingenuous. Perhaps he did not want to admit that dynasties have been a fact of life from the time of Moses to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt.

Sovereignty, dominion, and lordship had devolved through the ages from the kaisers of Germany, the shahs of Persia, the maharajas of India, the tsars of Russia, China’s Great Moguls, Egypt’s pharaohs, and the mikados of Japan to a familial line of kings and queens in Britain, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

By the time the word “dynasty” made its way into democracy, the definition had been stripped of its monarchical trappings. The Founding Fathers were adamant when they framed the Constitution: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Shorn of its crowns and coronets, the word still held allure, and the concept of looking up to a prominent family for leadership became an immediate and accepted verity in America. Dynasties were especially potent in colonial politics: the Winthrops of New England, the Lees of Virginia, the Frelinghuysens of New Jersey, the Carrolls of Maryland, and the Adamses of Massachusetts.

From the beginning, people who believed that all men were created equal also accepted that some men were born more equal than others. Those so fortunate were not only spared resentment at the ballot box but were also frequently rewarded. In a land of opportunity where the electorate yearns to be rich and important, people vote their aspirations. Robert Perrucci, a sociologist at Purdue University, explains this attitude by saying, “People accept inequality if they think there is opportunity.” In politics, a dynasty proves to be a positive, not a pejorative.

In 1966, Stephen Hess, a historian with the Brookings Institution, wrote an incisive study of American political dynasties. He defined a dynasty as “any family that has had at least four members, in the same name, elected to federal office.” Hess found twenty-two families that qualified under his definition, and he scrutinized fourteen of them in his book
America’s Political Dynasties from Adams to Kennedy
. He found that the majority of political dynasties shared certain characteristics: they were well-to-do white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from the Eastern Seaboard with Ivy League educations and advanced degrees in law. Many traced their wealth to advantageous marriages, a few to the grand vision and driving ambition of one self-made man. Some dynasties were highly mobile; others were defined by region. Yet for all the advantages, none escaped its share of insanity, suicide, alcoholism, mental retardation, financial reverses, acts of embezzlement, and sexual scandals.

Since Hess published his book, numerous families have watched their sons and daughters become governors and take their place in the House of Representatives and the Senate. But none has risen as far and as fast as the Bushes. Despite their loud disavowals, they have come to epitomize the American political dynasty. By the year 2000, they had taken an exclusive place in history with the Adamses—the only other family with a father and a son elected President of the United States.

Although Americans are not constitutionally inclined to support royalty, they have historically gravitated to political dynasties like the Roosevelts, the Tafts, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys, and now the Bushes. These dynastic politicians, who have been described as “Democracy’s Dukes” and “Princes of Populism,” launch their campaigns with a phalanx of relatives, which invigorates the political process as voters identify with the family’s trials and triumphs. No institution is more highly prized and praised in our country than the family. People can become so seduced by the image of a good, solid family that they will overlook transgressions that might not be so readily forgiven in someone else, the rationale being “He can’t be all that bad, because he comes from such a good family,” or “His mother is terrific,” or “I so admired his grandfather.” As the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough said, “If you thought George Bush was just wonderful, you think it’s great that his son is coming along. You hope that he’ll be as good or maybe even better than his father.

“I think one thing people love about the Bushes is that against all the modern-day odds, they look like this huge happy family that gets together all the time . . . If you’re a president who is trying to make a connection with people, the fact that you’re at the center of that kind of family goes a long way.”

If the foundation of a dynasty is its image as a good, solid family, then its binding elements are marriages that defy divorce or scandal. Frequently, a dynasty draws its strength from merger, or intermarriage between two strong families—the Aldriches and the Rockefellers, the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, the Walkers and the Bushes. Here, the dynamic of extended families works to propel the family name into high political office and becomes practically unbeatable.

A dynasty’s heaviest burden is carried by its women—the mothers, who produce the progeny and make the presidents. These wives must be as indomitable as the ambitious men they marry. In that sense, Abigail Adams shares much in common with Dorothy Walker Bush. Both sturdy, independent women of intelligence, they were gifted writers with no college educations who did not hesitate to express themselves. Both religious, they cherished their marriages, shared their husbands’ careers, and produced sons who adored them.

History shows that most presidents are beloved by their mothers and that these mama’s boys grow up having what Freud called “the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.”

No political dynasty can survive without strong and enduring mothers like Abigail Adams, Sara Delano Roosevelt, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Dorothy Walker Bush. It’s the women who give such families their ballast and longevity. For a dynasty to survive and thrive, the mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives must be warriors, as tough and battle-tested as the fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands.

Within the Bush family, it’s the women, not the men, who elevate the lineage. After studying the bloodlines of American presidents, Gary Boyd Roberts of the New England Historic Genealogical Society found that the Bush men are far less important than the women they marry. “The Bushes’ line of royal descent is traced through the females, not the males, as is the family’s
Mayflower
lines,” he said. He found the Bushes are even “kin of kin” of Pocahontas, the Native American princess: she’s said to have saved the life of Captain John Smith by holding his head in her arms to prevent her father’s warriors from clubbing him to death.

George Herbert Walker Bush seemed to finally accept his family’s place in history when he threw open the doors of his presidential library in College Station, Texas, on March 11, 2002, to an exhibit on the American political dynasty. The display was organized with his blessing, and the highlight of the exposition, titled Fathers and Sons: Two Families, Four Presidents, focused on the dynasties of the Adamses and the Bushes.

The two presidential families span the history of America: John Adams, the second President, was inaugurated in the eighteenth century; his son John Quincy Adams became President in the nineteenth century. The elder Bush assumed the presidency in the twentieth century, and his son George Walker Bush was the first President inaugurated in the twenty-first century.

The dynastic similarities between the Adams family and the Bush family are slight, but those that exist are basic to their political success.

John Adams grew up on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, milking cows. George Herbert Walker Bush grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, playing tennis. Both New Englanders were well educated—Adams went to Harvard, Bush went to Yale—and both shared a respect for writing letters. Several pieces of correspondence in the exhibit at College Station contrasted Adams’s elegant cursive with Bush’s jerky left-handed scrawl. Adams, a voracious reader, devoured books and studied in Latin and Greek. Bush earned a Phi Beta Kappa key after three years of college, although he read little as an adult. Each man carried the title Ambassador, and each served eight years as Vice President under a beloved President.

Adams chafed at the ceremonial role he had to play for George Washington, but George Bush relished standing in for Ronald Reagan.

As president of the Senate, John Adams frequently lectured the legislators on their responsibilities; in the same position, George H.W. Bush backslapped his way through the corridors of power, eager to be liked and loath to offend.

Both men became President, but when running for reelection, each suffered a crushing defeat. Historians judged both harshly, pronouncing their presidencies failures. Both fathers lived to see their firstborn sons become President, albeit amid extraordinary controversies. John Quincy Adams and George Walker Bush each won the White House while losing the popular vote. Adams’s presidency had to be decided by the House of Representatives; Bush’s by the Supreme Court. Both men defeated challengers from Tennessee.

David McCullough described John Quincy Adams as “the most intelligent man ever to occupy the Oval Office.” Q., as his father called him, was a child prodigy. He traveled to Europe at the age of ten, learned to speak several languages, including fluent French, wrote the Monroe Doctrine, and served as Secretary of State.

Boston University’s presidential historian Robert Dallek pronounced W., as George Walker Bush is called, “the stupidest man ever to sit in the Oval Office.” A mediocre student, young Bush sailed into Yale on the legacy coattails of his father, his grandfather, his great-great-grandfather, his five uncles, his seven great-uncles, and his five great-great-uncles. Until he became President at the age of fifty-four, W. had never traveled to Europe. As governor of Texas for five years, he learned Spanish
por la calle
(by the street) and dismissed as effete anyone who spoke fluent French.

Despite their many differences, the Adams and Bush families share one dominant characteristic that defines their success. Both are anchored by strong marriages, which enable each to be admired as a good family. Nothing sustains political success more than the image of a good, moral, and happy family—it is a dynasty’s pearl and most potent appeal. The electorate is reassured by the picture of supportive parents, hearty children, and scampering grandchildren. The image of a good family is embraced by voters as worthy of admiration and automatically imbues a candidate with the characteristics necessary for leadership.

“What matters is family and I can’t emphasize that enough,” George Herbert Walker Bush has said on numerous occasions. “Family and faith and friends . . .” To his supporters, the elder Bush embodies the American ideal of a good family man. People bask in the glow of his public image as a faithful husband and faultless father; people want to believe that he and his family have achieved their prominence in American life not because they have spun a shadowy web of oil and money and influence that they sustained through four generations with political muscle but because, as the Bushes have said so often about themselves, they cherish their children, they practice their religion, and they encourage public service. Most important, they exemplify good values.

The politicians in the family—George Herbert Walker Bush and his two sons George and Jeb—have accepted the need for a good family image as an undeniable fact of life. This accounts, in part, for the deceptions of each in presenting his marriage to the electorate as a solid partnership. At various points in their political careers, all three men proclaimed themselves ideal husbands who had been faithful to their wives. Those who knew differently kept a discreet silence, which enabled the Bushes to advance politically and present their dynasty as a moral bulwark.

Still, the word “dynasty” continues to annoy the elder Bush. Even surrounded by dynastic artifacts at his presidential library, he railed against “all this legacy crud” and “dynasty crap.” He appeared to be insulted by the unfair advantage implied by the words, especially the sense of entitlement.

“No legacy,” he insisted. “No feeling of ‘This is a generational thing, we must pass the torch.’ No feeling like now the mantle must fall on our grandson George P. Bush.” The subject of his grandson—the eldest child of Jeb and Columba Bush—had not been raised, but the former President offered his unsolicited assessment of the young man: “He’s a very attractive kid.”

Years before, in an unguarded moment, George H.W. Bush had bragged about the dynastic potential of his children over that of the Kennedys. “Just wait until my boys get out there,” he said. His mother was appalled by his boastfulness and pounced on him for sounding like “the great I am.” Dorothy Walker Bush reminded her adult son that she had not raised him to be a braggart. Abruptly chastened, George deflected any and all comparisons to the Kennedys.

“We’re not like them,” he told
The New York Times
on January 31, 2000. “We don’t do press about everything, and we certainly don’t see ourselves as a dynasty. ‘D’ and ‘L’—those words, dynasty and legacy—irritate me. We don’t feel entitled to anything.”

His son sang the same song. “I don’t hate the word dynasty, but it’s not really true,” George W. Bush told
Time
magazine when he was running for President and his brother Jeb was running for governor of Florida. “Dynasty means something inherited . . . Both Jeb and I know you don’t inherit a vote. You have to win a vote. We inherited a good name, but you don’t inherit a vote.”

Their father had spent his political life trying to camouflage his country-club roots. He had traded tasseled loafers for cowboy boots when he moved from Connecticut to Texas, but it was always a tight squeeze. Figuratively, he could not drop Greenwich lockjaw for a folksy Texas drawl. Now, in 2001, at the age of seventy-seven, with one son in the White House and another the governor of Florida, the former President, whose father had been a U.S. senator, sounded ridiculous as he protested against the word “dynasty.” His friends said he was understandably proud of the political success his family had achieved but he was afraid to admit it for fear he might sound arrogant. He had always grappled with the contradictions of being an elitist while trying to look like a man of the people.