George had previously debated the issue of who goes to heaven with his mother. He pointed to a passage in his daily Bible readings that said “only Christians had a place in heaven.” Barbara disagreed.
“Surely, God will accept others,” she said.
“Mom, here’s what the New Testament says,” insisted George, who read the passage aloud.
Barbara picked up the phone and called Billy Graham.
Graham sided with George. “From a personal perspective, I agree with what George is saying,” he said. “The New Testament has been my guide. But I want to caution you both. Don’t play God. Who are you two to be God?”
Over the course of their lives Graham and George W. had struggled with negative feelings toward Jews. As a student at Andover, George had played a prank on a Jewish student. Billy Graham had demonstrated raw anti-Semitism in a taped conversation with Richard Nixon on February 1, 1972, in which he characterized “Jewish control” of the American media as a “stranglehold.”
“This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain,” he told the President. Later in the ninety-minute conversation Graham said, “A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.”
When the tapes were released in 2002, the Southern Baptist evangelist issued a public apology for his remarks. George, too, was forced to backtrack on his views. He blamed the reporter who quoted him. “It was, of course, picked up and politicized,” he told
The New York Times
. “You know, ‘Bush to Jews: Go to Hell!’ It was very ugly. It hurt my feelings.”
Shortly after George won the election in 1994, he met with a group of Jewish leaders in Houston. “I know, really, why you all are here,” he said. “You’re here to know whether this governor condemns you to hell. I can tell . . . It hurt me. It hurt to think that you think I’ve condemned you to hell, because I would never do that. That’s not my role in life.” Yet a few years later, when he announced that he would be making a National Jewish Coalition–sponsored trip to Israel, he was asked what he was going to say to Israeli Jews. Obviously joking, Bush said the first thing he would tell them is that they were “all going to hell.” Anti-Defamation League national president Abraham Foxman asked George in a letter to clarify his remarks, and George responded in December 1998: “I am troubled that some people were hurt by the remarks. I never intended to make judgments about the faith of others.”
In Jerusalem, George had his picture taken wearing a yarmulke and praying at the Wailing Wall, just like his father had done before running for President.
Throughout the 1994 campaign Ann Richards tried to trigger George’s volcanic temper. She chided him as “a jerk,” “shrub,” “little Bush,” “Boy George,” and “Baby Bush.” When he did not respond in kind, she began to look mean-mouthed and slightly desperate. George’s cousin Elsie Walker said she cowered behind the bathroom door as she watched their television debate, fully expecting George to blow sky-high each time Richards needled him. When he did not bite her head off and instead smiled amiably, Walker fired off a telegram to Barbara Bush: “What’s he on, animal tranquilizers?”
No one in the family denied that George had decided to challenge Ann Richards partly because she had poked fun at his father during the 1988 Democratic National Convention. “Years ago George’s emotions related to Ann Richards’s statements about my father would have been transparent,” said Marvin Bush. “It may have gotten to him. He may have publicly said something that he would regret. By the time the election rolled around in 1994, he was a different guy. He was disciplined. I think he surprised a lot of people who didn’t know him.”
Demonstrating robotic self-control, George stayed on message, which exasperated the governor, who could not rattle him. Later she said, on
Larry King Live
, “You know, if you said to George, ‘What time is it?’ he would say, ‘We must teach our children to read.’” Karl Rove had stressed four issues that mattered most to Texans—crime, education, welfare reform, and guns, guns, guns. Richards had defied the NRA by vetoing the concealed-weapons legislation, which George promised to sign, saying he supported guns for everyone. He also would sign a bill allowing Texans to carry guns in churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship. As his reward, he received the NRA’s endorsement and all their campaign money.
Remembering the effectiveness of his father’s Willie Horton ads, George aired a commercial of a man abducting a woman and holding a gun to her head while an announcer intoned that “in the last three years seventy-seven hundred criminals have been released early from prison.”
On the opening day of dove season, George shot a songbird known as a killdeer, an endangered species. Ann Richards ripped into him. “Guns don’t kill killdeer,” she said. “People kill killdeer.” George promptly confessed, paid a $130 fine, and opened a press conference that afternoon by saying, “Thank goodness it wasn’t deer season. I might have shot a cow.” He took so much ribbing for his mistake that he began introducing himself as “killdeer slayer.”
With this humorous exception, George kept to Rove’s script and never deviated. Polling highest among white males, he played to their visceral dislike of President Clinton, who had raised taxes and admitted gays into the military. Bush painted Ann Richards as an old-fashioned liberal tied to the Democratic administration in Washington. “While I’m going to win on issues that matter to Texans, the Clinton connection and Ann Richards’ affection for Clinton is not going to help her at all,” George told reporters. Being able to hog-tie both of his father’s foes gave the avenging son a powerful one-two punch. Because Ann Richards kept swiping at him as “Daddy’s little boy,” George banished his father from the campaign and never mentioned him by name. “The minute the other George Bush wades into the process, my message gets totally obscured,” he said. When he finally allowed “the old man” to appear with him in public a few days before the election, he introduced the elder Bush by saying, “Mr. President—Dad—we’re glad you’re here. After two years our country understands how much we miss you.” The white male Republican crowd characterized by the Texas writer Molly Ivins as “Clinton-hating, Christian-right, gay-bashing gun toters” gave both Bushes a foot-stomping ovation.
Early on George had become slightly testy when a
Houston Chronicle
reporter asked him whether he had ever used illegal drugs.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” he said. “What’s the difference?”
When the story broke, he held a news conference in Lubbock.
“What I did as a kid? I don’t think it’s relevant. I just don’t . . . don’t think it matters. I think what matters is my view on prisons, welfare reform and education . . . Did I behave irresponsibly as a kid at times? Sure did. You bet.” He had flown to Lubbock on his campaign plane, which he had named
Accountability One
.
When the issue of infidelity surfaced in Florida, Jeb Bush told reporters that the only woman he had ever slept with was his wife. When George heard his brother’s declaration, he was shocked. “Jeb said that? Oh, boy. No comment. I mean Jeb is setting a tough standard for the rest of us in that generation.”
Even as a married man, George had a whispered past, which almost surfaced during the campaign. A woman appeared in Austin, claiming to have been a call girl from Midland with an intimate knowledge of him during his days in the oil patch. “Supposedly she was ‘the other woman’ in his life, or one of them,” said Peck Young, an Austin political consultant. “She set herself up in a hotel here and was prepared to sell her story to the highest bidder . . . Word got around town, and she claimed she got a visit from some men who made her realize it was better to turn tricks in Midland than to stop breathing. She said she had been approached by what she described as ‘intelligence types.’ She left town abruptly.”
Some people felt that George’s past did not seep out and embarrass him and his family because he was protected by a coterie of former CIA men with an allegiance to his father.
“I know for a fact that during the early nineties in Houston there was an outfit we called Rent-A-Spook,” said Young. “They were retired Agency guys from NSA [National Security Agency] and CIA, and they were selling their expertise to companies that wanted to avoid corporate espionage. There were some unkind souls in Houston who claimed they would also commit corporate espionage if there were enough money involved . . . I ran into them once working on a political campaign, and they were very real and very professional and very scary . . . George junior has seemed to be protected by some invisible mechanism . . . and the speculation has been for years that that mechanism was Daddy’s old retainers from the agency . . . They have made young George bulletproof.”
The elder Bush’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency were so strong that when the former President built his presidential library at Texas A&M, the university also established the George Bush School of Government and Public Service next to the library, and installed a CIA career officer to teach and recruit for the CIA on campus. The school was dedicated on September 10, 1997, and the ceremony marked the debut of “The George Bush Presidential March,” played by the Texas A&M University band.
“Our cadet code of honor at Texas A&M is ‘Aggies do not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do,’” said Zach Leonard (class of 2002), “and that’s why the CIA wants to recruit from our corps of cadets. We have a sense of national service and a sense of duty to the country. Jim Olson, who is with the CIA, teaches ‘Cold War Intelligence’ at the George Bush School and does the CIA recruiting on campus. Allowing the CIA to recruit at Texas A&M is one of the reasons George Bush put his library here . . . He turned down Yale and Rice and the University of Texas to build here at College Station . . . He also made his former CIA director [1991–93] Robert M. Gates president of Texas A&M.”
Whether his father’s agency contacts insulated George from scrutiny during the 1994 campaign, it looked that way to many in the Richards camp. George appeared particularly invincible to the governor when she tried to make an issue of his insider trades of Harken stock. He had served on the board of Harken from 1986 until 1993, when he resigned to run for office. During those seven years he made four stock transactions for a total of $1 million, none of which was reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission within the legally specified time—the tenth of each month after the sale.
In December 1986, George borrowed $96,000 from Harken to buy 80,000 shares of Harken stock. He used the 212,000 shares of stock he already owned as collateral. He reported the sale to the SEC in April 1987, four months late. He said the SEC lost the original filing.
In June 1989, George borrowed $84,375 from Harken to buy 25,000 shares of Harken stock. He reported the sale to the SEC on October 23, 1989, fifteen weeks late. He blamed the Harken lawyers.
In 1989, Harken instituted a policy that relieved its directors of any personal obligation to repay their loans. This effectively freed up the 212,000 shares that George had used for collateral in 1986 so that he could sell them.
In June 1990, he sold 212,140 shares of Harken stock for $835,000. He reported the sale on March 4, 1991, thirty-four weeks late. One week before he sold the stock, Harken lawyers circulated a memo—one that George definitely saw—stating that Bush and other members of the troubled oil company’s board faced possible insider-trading risks if they unloaded their shares.
The reason for the memo was that questions were raised in 1989 as to whether Harken posted an improper profit on the sale of a subsidiary in order to obscure the company’s overall losses. The SEC forced them to restate their earnings. In August 1990, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss that was a result of trading in commodity futures and liabilities incurred through its subsidiary Aloha Petroleum. Eight days before this announcement George sold his stock. If he had known about the company’s impending loss and sold his shares beforehand because of it, he would have been guilty of profiting illegally from insider information. Businessmen go to prison for such offenses. Because he sat on the directors’ audit committee and the restructuring committee, he was assumed to know what was happening to the company’s finances and thus able to decide when best to sell his shares.
When confronted, he professed ignorance about the company’s loss—such ignorance would not have made him a very effective board member—and blamed the Harken accountants. His only comment on the matter: “All I can tell you is that in the corporate world, sometimes things aren’t exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures. [It’s up to the SEC] to determine whether or not the decision by the auditors was the appropriate decision. And they did look, and they decided that the earnings ought to be restated, and the company did so immediately.”
After an article in
The Wall Street Journal
, the SEC investigated George’s stock sale but never questioned him personally. “In its investigation the staff reviewed thousands of pages of documents produced by Harken and Bush,” said the SEC memorandum. One critical document
not
available to the SEC investigators: the memo from Harken lawyers warning the board that they faced possible insider-trading risks if they sold their shares. Not until the day
after
the SEC closed its investigation of George did his lawyer, Robert Jordan, turn over that memorandum of June 15, 1990, titled “Liability for Insider Trading and Short-Term Swing Profits.” By then the SEC had already reached its conclusion. When George became President, he appointed Robert Jordan to be Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
On August 21, 1991, while President Bush was in Kennebunkport preparing for the arrival of British Prime Minister John Major, the SEC released its report clearing the first son: “In light of the facts uncovered, it would be difficult to establish that, even assuming Bush possessed material nonpublic information, he acted with scienter [deliberately or knowingly] or intent to defraud.”