-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Fortunate Son
J. H. Hatfield
Omega Publishing Endeavours, Inc.©2000
Thomas Dunne Books
St. Martin’s Press
New York, NY 10010
-----
Well, the book has been pulled because the author is a convicted felon, and
has no credibility. GE is a convicted felon, I guess that means that NBS has
no credibility. To help each make-up their own minds, here are some
excerpts. The Book has very little on S&B, or history of the family, but is
very well researched and has an extensive source file. There is no index, I
guess from the speed of getting the book to print. This book has been
recalled by publisher and heads have rolled, whether the injured party is W
or the truth, I do not know. Any motive to making the story up, would seem to
be "stupid." Is it an intentional "strawman, " or a "planted" one? Just some
"lone nut," or an intelligent directed effort? Cui Bono? There would be great
motive for the Bush juggernaut to deny and besmirch.
Om
K
-----
FRAT BRAT
In the autumn of 1964, George W.'s grandfather, Prescott, physically
exhausted and crippled with arthritis, retired from the U.S. Senate after
serving for over a decade; George senior, chairman of the Harris County
Republican Party in Houston, unsuccessfully ran for the Senate against
liberal Democrat, incumbent Ralph Yarborough (losing by 300,000 votes); and a
year after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson began
his first elective term by deploying tens of thousands of young Americans to
South Vietnam in a U.S. effort to prevent a Communist takeover by the North
Vietnamese.
Yale University, like many college campuses across the country served as
well-publicized battlegrounds between the administration and cynical,
rebellious students who protested America's involvement in the war.* By his
own admission, junior spent his college years gratefully detached from campus
politics, protests over the government's deceitfulness on the conflict in
Vietnam, and the sixties counterculture. "I don't remember any kind of
heaviness ruining my time at Yale," he admitted later. (Although Yale student
body leaders signed an Ivy League manifesto saying they were "seriously
considering or have already decided to leave the country or go to jail rather
than serve in Vietnam," Bush was not among the signers.) [*The president's
wife, Lady Bird Johnson, visited several college campuses, including Yale,
where she saw the war polarizing the country. I was speaking to the Young
Democrats and realized that nothing was getting through to them," she later
said upon returning from the Ivy League campus, "not conservation, not the
cities, only the war."]
It was during this period of his life that friends say Junior first showed
signs of being a natural politician. His inherited skills—subtle, like any
personal touch, but distinct—were always evident, especially his photographic
memory.
Clay Johnson, a Bush classmate at both Andover and Yale, recalled the
time when he and junior were fraternity pledges during their sophomore year
at the university and the upperclassmen ordered them to stand and at-tempt to
name the other fifty initiates. "The average person stood up and named about
three," Johnson said. "George got up and named all fifty. He just has such an
interest in people that he remembered their names, which is his medium, like
writing numbers are for somebody else. He has such an in-terest in people.
They sense that and respond to him,"
Roland Betts, a friend from Yale and later president of Silver Screen
Management of New York, which finances motion pictures, remembered similar
incidents. "Someone may say that's just Bush the politician, something he
learned from his old man, said Betts. "But I can tell you when I ran into
George in 1964 ... he would wander up to anybody, absolutely anybody, and
stick his hand out and say, 'Hey, I'm George Bush,' and start talking. The
name George Bush didn't mean shit to anybody. That's just his nature. In the
twenty-five years we have known each other I don't think he's changed at all.
He's not pretentious, not exploitive. George is a very disarmingly charming
person.
Another former schoolmate, the New England-based fiction writer Christopher
Tilghman, added his own recollection of Bush: "That's exactly what it was. He
did have this certain ability with people. The way he'd look you in the eye
when he'd shake your hand, the direct way he talked-it's hard to describe,
but you just came away thinking he was more interesting than the average
preppy
Lanny J. Davis, a Yale classmate who later served as special counsel to
President Clinton, noted that Bush "could capture somebody's essence very
quickly. Was he a spoiled, wealthy kid? Absolutely not.... The one thing he
conveyed was a lack of pretense. You never would have known who his fa-ther
was, what kind of family he came from. There was nothing hierarchical about
him."
Junior was, however, a very average student, majoring in history. His parents
worried somewhat about their eldest son's attempts to prove his worthiness.
"He was not the smartest," recalled Clay Johnson. "He was not the most
athletic." Although he was tapped for Skulls and Bones,* the prestigious and
secret campus society to which his grandfather and father had belonged, young
Bush couldn't make varsity as a catcher on the school's baseball team and
later switched to rugby.[ *This exceptionally morbid, death- celebrating
order, its name unmentionable before outsiders, assisted Wall Street
financiers in discovering young men of "good birth" for prosperous careers
once they graduated from Yale. As one of only a handful of new members, Bush
was initiated into the society's secret rituals in a triple- padlocked crypt
where he was reportedly placed naked into a coffin and immersed in mud.
The Skull and Bones Society, which was first established among the Yale
graduating class of 1833, was an inner sanctum where the truly elite could
separate themselves from the merely privileged. Twice a week after six in the
evening on Thursdays and Sundays during the academic year, Bonesmen met in
the society's "Tomb," a windowless stone building resembling a mausoleum on
High Street to "celebrate one's brief life on earth" Much like the members of
California's Bohemian Club, they conducted their rituals in exclusive
solitude.
A traditional session usually required one member to dutifully reveal his
innermost thoughts and detail another chapter in his "sexual autobiography,"
holding the others in a state of "CB," or connubial bliss. The sexual
histories helped break down the normal defenses of the members, according to
Lucius H. Biglow, a retired Seattle attorney and a former Bonesman. "That way
you get everybody committed to a certain extent," he remembered. "It was a
gradual way of building confidence." The blackmail potential of such
information, however, had obvious permanent uses in enforcing loyalty among
the society's members.
As with Prescott and George senior, the younger Bush, made lifelong friends
in the inner sanctum of the Skull and Bones Society, which along with the
base that had already been built as early as Andover, formed the core of a
network for his future careers in business and politics. As the years
progressed, George W. and his fellow Bonesmen would periodically gather for a
private dinner and Bush would "unburden himself" as he struggled with the
life-changing decisions of whether to run for governor of Texas and president
of the United States. After forming his presidential exploratory committee in
March 1999, George W. tapped many of these now successful businessmen for
substantial campaign contributions.]
Although he concedes he was "never a great intellectual" during his college
years, Junior was nevertheless quite popular on campus, literally the life of
the party, and was elected president of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity "sort
of by acclamation," said University of Colorado law professor Robert Dieter,
a close friend of George W.'s at Andover and Yale.
He is remembered by former fraternity brother, Don Ensenat, as an
enthusiastic participant in a college party atmosphere, often mixing a
garbage can full of screwdrivers before football games. "Did you ever see the
movie Animal House?" asked Ensenat. "The DKE frat house was the site of soul
bands and dancing and dates. There was a lot of alcohol,' and junior was "a
high-energy guy, fun to be around."†[ † A November 16, 1998 Newsweek profile
of George W. noted: "He went to Yale, but seems to have majored in beer
drinking at the Deke House."]
Russ Walker, a former classmate and Bush friend from Oklahoma City, recalled
returning from a frat party one night when drunken junior fell to the ground
and started rolling down the middle of the street. "He literally rolled back
to the dorm," Walker said.
Bush's friend, Tom Seligson, added, "I think George, like all of us, felt the
constraints and probably wanted to make up for lost time. College is a time
to explode." While Seligson never saw Bush use drugs, he said, "if he didn't
use marijuana at that point, then he wasn't alive."
In 1966, while serving as fraternity president, junior had his first
brush with the law, involving the theft of a holiday decoration from a store
display so he could hang it on the door of his frat house. "We evidently made
a lot of noise," George W. said, recalling how the police responded to the
theft scene, (I because the local gendarmes came and said, 'What are you
doing?' I said, 'We are liberating a Christmas tree wreath. Don't you
understand the Delta Kappa Epsilon house is short of a Christmas wreath?'
They didn't un-derstand." The police booked him on a misdemeanor charge but
later dropped it after the intervention of one of his father's friends.
Bush, the leader of the frat pack, got into more publicized trouble after
Steve Weisman, a Yale student and occasional contributor to the New York
Times, reported in a Yale Daily News article accusations that campus
fraternities had carried on "sadistic and obscene" initiation procedures
against pledges.
"The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus," Weisman
wrote, "is that Delta Kappa Epsilon applied a 'hot branding iron' to the
small of the back of its 40 new members in ceremonies two weeks ago. A
photograph showing a scab in the shape of the Greek letter delta,
approximately a half-inch wide, appeared with the article. A former president
of Delta said that the branding is done with a hot coat hanger. But the
former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound
is 'only a cigarette burn.'"
"There's no scarring mark, physically or mentally," Bush told Weisman at the
time, defending the practice to the Yale Daily News. The frat prankster
stated that he was amazed that anyone was making a fuss about the branding,
adding that at Texas colleges they used cattle prods on pledges.*[ *Bush
downplayed the controversy of the branding, claiming he once spent a weekend
with a classmate driving through New York and New Jersey in an unsuccessful
effort to find a tattoo parlor that would apply a Skull and Bones symbol, to
permanently mark his membership in the exclusive campus society.]
Another headline-making college experience for the legendary party boy
occurred in his senior year after the Yale football team defeated Princeton
for the first time in five years. Junior called for an immediate celebration,
though the game was played on their Ivy League rival's home field.
"A well-lubricated group of select Yale students decided to remove the
Princeton goal posts," Clay Johnson said, noting that young Bush was the
ringleader. A skirmish ensued and they were arrested and then released a few
minutes later by the campus police, a transgression made more problematic by
the fact that his father had just been elected to Congress.
"It was a college exuberance," George W. now says with a laugh, noting that
he was "young and irresponsible," repeating the standard three-word
descriptive phrase he would use countless times over the years. I was
escorted to the campus police place, and the guy said, 'Leave town.' So I was
once in Princeton, New Jersey, and haven't been back since."
His father, however, never mentioned the embarrassing incident. "In Dad's
case he never really tried to direct your life," George W. later said. About
the worst the oldest son could expect from the senior Bush was for him to
tell his namesake he was "disappointed" in something he did. That was his
reaction upon learning that junior had walked out on a summer job as an oil
field roughneck in Louisiana a week early to be with his girlfriend before
they both returned to college. Actually, Junior had abruptly quit a variety
of summer jobs between his Yale school years-as a sporting goods salesman at
a Houston Sears & Roebuck store, a clerk in a brokerage firm, a ranch hand in
Arizona-but the oil field walkout was the proverbial straw that broke the
camel's back.
"Before long I was called to my father's office in downtown Houston"
George W. remembered. "He simply told me: 'In our family, and in life, you
fulfill your commitments. You've disappointed me'-and that was it."
Typi-cally, the elder Bush did not stay angry for long. Three hours after the
office confrontation, he invited his son—and his girlfriend-to a Houston
Astros baseball game, "which says a lot about him and how he disciplines,"
George W. told PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose shortly before the 1988
Republican convention.
Although Bush outwardly excused his son's "youthful irresponsibility" at the
time as mere frat-boy high jinks, family friends say that his father was the
first to realize that junior had a serious drinking problem.
"George's dad had a spy network of Yale teachers, fraternity brothers, and
even his roommates, calling him in Houston with detailed reports of
all-nighters, weekend binges, showing up at classes drunk, and driving way
too fast while drinking way too much," said one of Bush's close friends who
attended college with him. "When he suddenly quit his summer job as an oil
field roughneck, the old man knew he'd been out chugging beers all night long
and just wanted to keep the party going with his girlfriend before they went
back to school. He didn't say anything to George about his drinking, though,
hoping instead that he would 'outgrow it' by the time he got out of college,*
which was like leaving the landing lights on for Amelia Earhart."[ *Barbara
Bush, who never minced words, gave her drunken son a tongue-lashing during
his Christmas break from Yale when he upset one of her dear friends at a
cocktail party by asking, "So, what's sex like after fifty, anyway?"]
THE WOMAN HE LOVED
Junior's girlfriend at the time, Cathryn Lee Wolfman, grew up in the same
upper crust Tanglewood area of west Houston where the Bushes lived. A
standout athlete at St. John's, the city's premiere private school, Cathryn
lived with her mother and stepfather, the Jewish proprietor of a high-end
clothing store that bore his name: Wolfman's.
The young couple dated occasionally during George W.'s visits home from
Andover prep school, but their romance grew more serious after they both
enrolled in college on the East Coast. She attended Smith College in
Northampton, Massachusetts, like Barbara Bush, but after being injured in a
sledding accident, she came home to recuperate and eventually transferred to
Rice University in Houston, where she majored in economics and joined the
Elizabeth Baldwin Literary Society. When Junior returned to Texas for summer
vacation or holiday breaks from Yale, the couple were usually seen
hand-in-hand at a pirouette of cocktail parties, tennis matches, and other
social events associated with oil-town privilege.
Described by friends as "outgoing, happy people," it came as no surprise when
the twenty-year-old college juniors' summer wedding plans were proclaimed in
a January 1, 1967, Houston Chronicle society column under the headline
"Congressman's Son to Marry Rice Co-Ed," with an accompanying fireside
portrait of the couple: he in a suit, tie, and crewcut; she in a sleeveless
dress, smiling, her hair cropped short. Like his parents had done twenty
years earlier, they planned to live in New Haven, Connecticut during junior's
senior year. (Yale was still an all-male school at the time, and would not
begin accepting female students until the year after Bush graduated.)
According to Bush, within six months of the engagement announcement, the
young couple "just grew apart" due to their long-distance relationship. "I
was crazy about her, but we decided not to get married in between my junior
and senior year in college," Bush later said. When they graduated in early 196
8, they decided to delay the nuptials for a year, and then eventually
cancelled their wedding plans completely.
Bush's ex-fiancee, who married a Harvard MBA two years later in Houston, was
equally tight-lipped regarding the particulars of their breakup, saying only,
"I loved him. But I have no thoughts of 'what if '—no regrets. I was engaged
to him. I was glad I was engaged to him. The relationship died and that was
that."
Friends of the couple surmised otherwise about the reasons for the couple's
breakup, noting that in an essentially old-money social circle, there were
some "nasty, snobbish whispers" about the young Wolfman woman's "merchant"
family.
"Given her last name and her stepfather's prominence in the garment industry,
the Bush family pressured their son to call off the wedding because the
prospective bride had a Jewish background," even though they were
Episcopalians, claimed one friend who knew the couple ever since the Bushes
moved into the Tanglewood neighborhood. "They were very good friends and they
both took it hard, especially George. He was always a wild and crazy party
guy, but the losing of the woman he loved, combined with the fear of going to
Vietnam, kind of pushed him over the edge."*[ *As this book went to press, a
representative of the Bush family called my publisher and said that the
Bushes vehemently denied this explanation for the breakup. She said the
family was "enthusiastic" about the engagement and did nothing to discourage
it.]
pps, 31-36
=====
Two years later, Bush would promote himself to the American people as the
Texas governor responsible for the largest single tax cut in state history,
but most residents of the Lone Star State never saw any tax savings. Within
weeks of the voter referendum, twenty-two of the thirty-five largest school
districts in Texas raised their tax rates, effectively negating whatever
relief a homeowner would have experienced through the higher homestead
deduction.
Bush failed both substantively and tactically in his attempt to achieve real
tax reform as governor, but the Texan who might have been the most
disappointed with the defeat of Bush's original property tax-cut initiative
was Fort Worth billionaire, Richard Rainwater, a major financial backer of
the governor's political career and a partner in the ownership of the Texas
Rangers.
If the Bush-sponsored tax cut bill had passed as it was originally proposed,
Rainwater would have saved $2.5 million in school property taxes for his
Crescent Real Estate Equities investment company. The bill would have also
capped business real estate taxes, saving Rainwater millions on valuable
commercial property his company owned in Houston, Austin, Dallas, and Fort
Worth.
Although Bush wasn't able to provide his wealthy benefactor with a
substantial tax break, the governor made certain that Rainwater and the
companies he controlled, received millions of dollars through business
dealings with the state of Texas.
THE MAN BEHIND THE THRONE
Richard Rainwater has been described in business magazines as "one of the
financial greats of the age," "a deal-making legend," and "one of the
nation's most astute investors." The billionaire speculator, ranked among the
wealthiest 100 Americans, has made his money by buying or obtaining
controlling interest in corporations that are faltering in what appear to be
intrinsically unstable industries. He hires experts in the field to
restructure those companies and then sits back and waits for economic cycles
to change and bring them back to profitability. Along the way he has
assembled the world's largest hospital chain and one of the world's largest
drilling companies.
According to financial disclosure reports he filed as a gubernatorial
candidate in 1994, Bush had profited handsomely from his ties with Rainwater
in four business ventures, including the Texas Rangers baseball team.
Rainwater Management Partners and Continental Plaza Ventures had contributed
to Bush's personal wealth, but G.F.W. Energy, which Rainwater formed in 1988 b
y bringing together a top natural gas financier and major investors, had paid
Bush sizable dividends several times since his initial investment in 1993.
During the 1994 governor's race, Ann Richards contended that Rainwater
"owned" the Republican candidate. "Mr. Rainwater is responsible for giving
George W. Bush the job he has today as president of the Texas Rangers. It's
not just the $100,000 he invested in the Bush candidacy, but Bush is
completely beholden to Mr. Rainwater for his paycheck," alleged Richards
spokesperson Chuck McDonald.
Jim Hightower, author, radio talk-show host, and former populist Agriculture
Commissioner in Texas, claimed, "For more than a decade, George W. Bush has
not made a move without consulting The Man—and I don't mean his father,"
Hightower said of Rainwater, adding that he had "done very nicely while his
pal has been governor."
Bush has adamantly denied that his business partners, especially Rainwater,
have profited since his election. "I swear I didn't get into politics to
feather my nest or feather my friends' nest," he told the press after the Hous
ton Chronicle published an extensive look at his business dealings and
alleged collusion and conflicts of interest. "Any insinuation that I have
used my office to help my friends is simply not true."
An examination of business transactions raises numerous questions about
certain state government actions and proposals that have provided
considerable benefits, actual or potential, to Rainwater and other Bush
business partners.
In 1997, the state-run Teacher Retirement System of Texas (TRS) pension fund
sold two office buildings and a mortgage on a third building to Rainwater's
Crescent Real Estate Equities corporation, which the governor became an
investor in when Rainwater rolled Continental Plaza into Crescent's real
estate portfolio.* All three sales were conducted without engaging in the
usual open-bid process because TRS Chairman Ronald Steinhart believed "the
very generous price that we are receiving [from Crescent] eliminates the
need."[ *The vice-chairman of Crescent, John C. Goff, and the corporation's
president, Gerald Haddock, were limited partners in the Texas Rangers with
Rainwater and Bush. Crescent's vice president for administration was William
D. Miller, the attorney who assembled the financial package for The Ballpark
at Arlington.]
The teacher retirement system lost $44 million when it sold the first
property, an Austin office building known as Frost Bank Plaza, to Crescent
for $35 million after the pension fund invested more than $90 million in the
complex over the years. The second deal, however, proved quite profitable
when Rainwater's company purchased a downtown Dallas office building for $238
million, exceeding TRS's original investment of $65 million. But the third
property transaction between TRS and Crescent, the purchase of the mortgage
to the Trammel Crow Center for $162 million, forced the teacher retirement
system to write off $7 million in principle and $19.4 million in interest.
(The Trammel Crow Center was owned by a partnership headed by the influential
Trammel Crow family of Texas, which had contributed more than $100,000 to
President Bush's 1988 campaign and also $27,000 to George W.'s 1994
gubernatorial campaign, even when the family's real estate business was in
dire financial straits.)
"I don't talk to my business associates about doing business with state
government one way or the other," the governor claimed.* Officials in his
office and TRS also stated there was no record that Bush or his aides were
involved in the Crescent deals with the state-run teacher retirement system.[
*After Bush proposed in his January 1997 State of the State address to the
Legislature that lawmakers consider privatizing Texas mental institutions,
Rainwater struck a $400 million deal the very next day to buy ninety-five
psychiatric hospitals, including eight in Texas, from Magellan Health
Services, Inc. Although the Legislature eventually failed to pass the
privatization initiative, Rainwater was well positioned to prosper enormously
if the Bush proposal had become law.]
However, a 1995 letter from TRS acting executive director, John R. Mercer, to
the governor demonstrated the Bush administration's interest in TRS
activities, noting that the pension fund's board, at the governor's request,
had delayed selecting a new executive director until Bush could make
appointments to the TRS governing board. Ronald Steinhart was later appointed
chairman and urged the other members to accept Crescent's "very generous"
offers for the office buildings without accepting other bids. (Steinhart
became one of Texas' leading financiers in the late 1980s and early 1990s
through Team Bank, which experienced accelerated growth by purchasing the
assets of failed financial institutions from the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corp. during President Bush's administration.)
Another transaction that resulted in Rainwater profiting during his business
partner's tenure as governor occurred when Bush signed a sports facility
financing bill into law during the Seventy-fifth Legislature. The bill
allowed Texas cities to levy new taxes on rental cars and other items to
finance the construction of new professional sports stadiums.
While the Bush-supported legislation was being debated by lawmakers, Crescent
had purchased a $400 million real estate portfolio from a Dallas businessman
that included a twelve percent stake in the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and a
pledge that Ross Perot, Jr., the sport franchise's majority owner, would pay
Crescent a $10 million bonus once a new arena was built within seventy-five
miles of Dallas.
The governor signed the bill at the close of the Legislature in June 1997,
prompting final negotiations on an arena deal between the city, the
Mavericks, and the Stars, a National Hockey League team. A few months later,
Dallas voters approved construction of a $230 million indoor sports facility,
the completion of which would trigger the $10 million bonus payment to
Crescent.
Bush's biggest cash windfall due to his association with Rainwater came in
1998 when media mogul Tom Hicks,* the owner of the Dallas Stars, agreed to
purchase the Texas Rangers for $250 million, the second-highest franchise fee
paid in baseball history.[* As chairman of the University of Texas Investment
Management Company, a little-known, quasi-state agency chaired by Hicks, the
nonprofit corporation managed the state's $9 billion higher education trust,
known as the Permanent University Fund. Since Bush had been governor, the PUF
had investments in Rainwater's Crescent Equities exceeding $8.9 million.]
"When it is all said and done, I will have made more money than I ever
dreamed I would make," Bush told reporters the day after the sale to Hicks
was announced. In 1986, the West Texas oilman had claimed he was "all name
and no money," but a dozen years later George W. was all of both.
Since Bush, Rainwater, and the other partners had purchased the Rangers in
1989, the value of the team had surged, in large part because of the
lucrative arrangement the Rangers organization made for the state-of-the-art
Ballpark at Arlington. After the stadium was completed in September 1993, the
team's value escalated from $106 million to $132 million, according to the
annual assessment of major league sports franchises by Financial World magazin
e, and increased considerably in the next five years.
When Hicks offered $250 million for the Rangers, he was not only paying for
the team, but also the stadium—which the Rangers owned but taxpayers paid for
through a half-cent sales-tax levy—and three hundred acres of prime
development land next to the sports facility and the Six Flags amusement
park. (Financial World named The Ballpark at Arlington in 1997 the most
profitable venue in major league baseball.)
"Taxpayers put up the money that increased the value of this franchise, and
Governor Bush is the beneficiary," claimed one state legislator who
questioned the ethics of the deal and unsuccessfully pushed his colleagues
for an investigation.
With Hicks' purchase of the Rangers for $250 million, Bush became an instant
multimillionaire, receiving almost $15 million on an initial investment in
1989 that totaled a mere $606,000—a profit of more than 2,300 percent.*
Rangers President Tom Schieffer, who became the team's managing general
partner when Bush became governor in 1995, explained that Bush earned a
return of $2.7 million on his 1.8 percent ownership interest and another
$12.2 million "promote fee" bonus for having put together the original team
of investors of Rainwater and others in 1989. As part of the original
contract, Schieffer said, once his partners recouped their investment with
interest, Bush's share of the team would jump from less than 2 percent to
more than 11 percent.[ *In April 1999, Bush and his wife Laura paid $3.77
million in federal income taxes on 1998 income of $18.4 million, the bulk of
the amount coming from his share of the Rangers' sale. The tax return marked
a dramatic increase over Bush's 1997 income, when he paid $77,084 in taxes on
$258,375 in earnings, including his $88,008 salary as governor.
Bush's 1998 income tax return also disclosed that he had two money market
accounts with a total value of between $600,000 and $1.25 million, three
checking accounts with a total value of between $30,000 and $45,000, and no
debts. The governor also earned capitalgains income of between $100,000 and
$1 million from the sale of real estate investments, capital-gains income of
$100,000 to $1 million from Advance Paradigm stock and capitalgains income of
between $50,000 and $100,000 from the sale of investments in oil and gas.
Bush reported his largest asset was his investment in U.S. Treasury notes,
which he valued at between $7.2 million and $14 million. He claimed on his
income tax return that those notes earned him between $35 1,000 and $1.2
million in 1998. Additionally, he received the first half of a $250,000
advance from William Morrow & Co. for his presidential campaign biography A
Charge to Keep. Bush's share, after commission, was $106,250, which he
donated to four youth charities.]
The most troubling aspect of the Rangers sale was the fact that Bush never
placed his financial interest in the team in a blind trust when he became
governor, fomenting conflict-of-interest allegations. According to financial
disclosure filings at the Texas Ethics Commission, Bush voluntarily
transferred his stock portfolio and other assets into a blind trust in
January 1995, but neglected to do so with his general partnership interest in
the Rangers because it would have amounted to a change in team ownership. The
measure "would have required a vote of the baseball owners," Bush explained
at a press conference. "We just didn't think it was necessary to get that
vote," because it would have forced the governor to essentially abandon
control of the team.
But what if, instead of baseball, Bush were involved in a lucrative oil deal
in which he ultimately was paid almost $15 million cash by a wealthy Dallas
businessman, and the entire amount went straight to the governor's bank
account and not his blind trust? How long would it take before the media
demanded an investigation?
Although Bush said there was nothing wrong with the Rangers sale, and claimed
that his success in making money should be seen as plus, not a liability, it
could be argued that Hicks-who normally could only contribute to Bush's
campaign account—was influence peddling with the governor when he purchased
the Rangers and paid Bush several millions of dollars.
Bush's ties to wealthy entrepreneurs affected by state government action and
the millions in profit he reaped from the sale of the Rangers should have
raised eyebrows in 1998, but press coverage generally overlooked the
controversy, and his approval rating with the voters hovered close to seventy
percent.
More intense scrutiny by the media outside of Texas would come later, when he
decided to make a run for the presidency. After all, the home-state business
dealings of a Southern governor occupying the White House at the time had
been under investigation by a special prosecutor for years.
"He's the darling of the press," Jim Hightower said of the governor.
"Everybody says, 'Well, you've got to like George Bush.' Well, I don't like
him—just another rich son-of-a-Bush. He's a do-nothing governor. He's
completely tied to corporate money and to the corporate wish list."
pps. 176-181
=====
EPILOGUE:
BRAND NAME
Some folks are born made to wave the flag
—Creedence Clearwater Revival
"Fortunate Son"
WITH A COMMANDING LEAD IN THE POLLS AND A MOUNTAIN OF MONEY IN THE BANK,
GEORGE W. BUSH LEADS THE GOP FIELD NATIONALLY AND IS, BY ANY MEASURE, THE
FAVORITE for the Republican presidential nomination in the year 2000. He even
beats Vice President Al Gore, the putative Democratic nominee, in trial heats.
"High hopes can be troublesome," noted Weekly Standard editor Bill Kirstol, fo
rmer chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. "One need only recall
George Romney's '68 campaign. There's a history of early frontrunners
faltering, never to be heard from again."
This particular bit of history, George Romney, won a landslide reelection as
Michigan governor in 1966, and instantly became the favorite for the 1968
Republican presidential nomination. His campaign imploded, however, and
didn't last through the first primary in New Hampshire when he unwisely
commented that he had been "brainwashed" during a trip to Vietnam.
During the next presidential campaign in 1972, another White House hopeful,
Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie, who had been the 1968 vice presidential
nominee, looked in similarly strong shape as his party's leader. Many
Democrats endorsed Muskie for the 1972 nomination early, much the same way
the GOP virtually anointed Bush as the 2000 Republican nominee, more than a
year before the national convention. Before the primaries, Muskie not only
led the Democratic pack but beat President Nixon by five percentage points in
the polls. When the press reported Muskie broke down in tears after an attack
by a New Hampshire newspaper (he always insisted snowflakes had dampened his
cheeks), his campaign ended practically overnight. The weakest candidate,
George McGovern, won the nomination and was annihilated by Nixon in the
general election. In the process, Democrats were left with a left-wing image
that plagued them into the 1990s.
Romney and Muskie, and Edward Kennedy in 1980, looked like certain winners
more than a year before the primaries and the presidential conventions. But
eventually they had to campaign in other states, take a stand on the
political issues, counter their opponents' charges, avoid blunders, and prove
to the voters they had the prerequisite "fire in the belly" to run for
president. The results proved disastrous to their campaigns.
Will the surging energy behind Bush's campaign propel him to the Oval Office
once occupied by his father? Or will it meet with inglorious defeat as did
the presidential aspirations of Romney, Muskie, and Kennedy? Bush's political
consultants and strategists cite a half dozen reasons why they believe their
candidate will end the Democrat's eight-year hold on the presidency:
1. Brand name. His is the second-best in Republican politics. Only Ronald
Reagan is more admired among the GOP's faithful than former president
Bush and his wife Barbara, George W.'s parents. "If his name was Gover-
nor Smith, he might not be so popular," asserted Bruce Buchanan, a po--
litical scientist at the University of Texas. "A lot of this is name
recognition." In addition, many Americans now admit that they regret
their vote for Bill Clinton over then-President Bush in 1992. A May 1999
Fox News-Opinion Dynamics Poll showed Governor Bush thrashing
Clinton, 56 percent to 34 percent in a theoretical match-up. A second
Bush presidency offers voters an opportunity to seek repentance for the
error of their ways.
2. Bipartisanship. Bush talks of changing the political culture of Washing-
ton and the country is eager to put an end to governmental shutdowns
and party bickering. "Without question, he's the best governor I ever
worked with," stated the late Democratic Lieutenant Governor of Texas,
Bob Bullock, when he endorsed Republican Bush for reelection in 1998.
Although Texas Democrats are more conservative than those he would
face in the House of Representatives, Bush could plausibly claim to offer
a fresh start as a Washington outsider.
3. Clinton/Gore fatigue. Despite one of the strongest peacetime economies,
soaring stock prices, and violent crime numbers at the lowest level in
twenty-five years of reporting, voters have grown weary of Monica Lewinsky,
fund-raising controversies, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, and a host of
other White House scandals associated with the Clinton/ Gore years. They're
ready to throw the rascals out of the palace.
4. Personality. Bush projects his father's likability, draws strength from a
crowd like Clinton, and smiles with Reagan's lopsided grin. Like the 1996
Republican vice presidential candidate, Jack Kemp, Bush's crossover appeal is
high with women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and others in the Democratic
Party's base, judging by the turnout for his landslide reelection to the
governorship and, more importantly, by presidential preference polls.
5. "Compassionate conservative." In other words, Bush claims he is not
the stereotypical right-wing extremist usually associated with the Repub-
lican Party. He is at times described as Reaganesque, blending fiscal and
social conservatism, but with a more "communitarian" focus on society
and government's role in helping the less fortunate. He'd rather talk
about limited government, inclusion, and a new prosperity than abor-
tion, race quotas, or immigration. Just as Clinton often talks like a mod-
erate Republican while offering new government programs, Bush often
sounds like a new Democrat, even when governing from the right in
Texas. "What you're seeing, for the first time, is a primary campaign
made-up of tactics rather than ideology," noted Jay Severin, a New York-
based Republican consultant who worked for conservative presidential
candidate Pat Buchanan in the 1996 election. "He's saying to conservative
primary voters, with a wink, 'Trust me. You know I'm really one of you, but
if I say that, I will damage myself such that I may not be able to win the
general election."
6. The Republicans will pull out all the stops to win. "There is a very,
very strong desire to win," said Whit Ayres, a GOP consultant in Atlanta.
"We're tired of losing!" After two lost presidential races and the disastrous
1998 midterm congressional elections, the only litmus for a Republican
candidate in 2000 is the ability to win elections and to raise significant
amounts of campaign contributions, both of which Bush has proven quite
convincingly that he is capable of doing.
It is somewhat ironic that the GOP could find itself turning to a man named
Bush to reclaim the presidency after eight years of Democratic rule. After
all, the elder Bush lost the White House to Clinton at a time when the
Republican Party had made winning the presidency an almost routine event
every four years.
Privately, however, Governor Bush has told aides and political strategists
that his campaign won't be a rerun of his father's and that he won't surround
himself with former advisers from the Bush White House. "I'm not interested
in the people who lost my dad's election," Bush has said. "This is going to
be my race, not my dad's."
And this is the great paradox with George W. Bush. This is a man who, had he
not been George Herbert Walker Bush's son, would not now be the favorite for
the Republican presidential nomination. Despite attempts to step out of his
father's intimidating shadow over the years, his life has been one lucky
break after another because of their relationship: acceptance and graduation
from Ivy League schools; avoidance of serving in Vietnam; the rescue of his
failed oil companies in West Texas; the Harken Energy Corporation stock sale;
ownership in the Texas Rangers (which eventually transformed him into a
multimillionaire when the baseball franchise was sold); and election and
subsequent reelection to the governorship of the Lone Star State. The pattern
continued to persist in mid-1999 when Bush set a new record for presidential
campaign fund-raising, due mostly to the wealthy GOP connections of his
father, a former chairman of the Republican Party. The best investment
strategy, of course, is to have a wealthy and influential father. Bush seems
aware of that and has acknowledged on occasion that he is "a blessed person,"
but he doesn't quite seem to understand that with a different last name he
could be just another Texan who failed in the oil business and now operates a
shrimp boat in the Gulf of Mexico.
"I was born on second base but got to third on my own," the fortunate son
professed to members of the press during the first summer of his presidential
campaign. The next day, however, a poll was released indicating that Bush
fared so well in nationwide presidential surveys primarily because
respondents erroneously believed that his father was once again running for
the White House.
Attempting to save face, George W. Bush made light of the confusion. "In
politics, an easily recalled name is a very, very important thing."
pps. 294-298
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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