The SEC’s finding did not pass the smell test with Governor Richards. During the 1994 campaign she pointed out that the SEC chairman, Richard Breeden, had worked for George Bush when he was Vice President and later when Bush was President before Bush appointed him to the SEC. Breeden had been the principal architect of the President’s plan to restructure the savings-and-loan industry, for which Neil Bush had become the poster child. The general counsel of the SEC, James Doty, a big Bush supporter, had helped George W. put together his deal with the Texas Rangers, but Doty said he recused himself from George’s SEC investigation. Doty, who later joined James A. Baker’s law firm, Baker Botts, explained why the SEC took no action against George for his blatant disregard of reporting regulations: “Half of corporate America was filing those forms late at that time.”
Breeden, who lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and named his first son Prescott, said, “I knew that to protect the integrity of the investigation, I had to leave the investigation up to the career staff. I told them to do it the regular way—which means no holds barred—and I will stand up for you. If anything had been found, it would have been prosecuted. In the end, we didn’t bring a case because there was no case there.”
The Dallas Morning News
reported that the SEC had dropped its case, but said the action “must in no way be construed that he [George W. Bush] has been exonerated.”
Toward the end of the campaign Governor Richards ran ads suggesting George was guilty of insider trading when he sold his Harken stock—a criminal act. The Bush campaign responded by rolling out its biggest gun to blast the governor: George’s mother.
“It makes me pretty darn mad,” said Barbara Bush, “to see these ads that just plain aren’t true. [George has] been a good, successful, decent, honest businessman. Why doesn’t Ann Richards talk about the issues? That’s what George is doing. She should be so lucky as to have a son like George.”
The voters agreed with the former First Lady. Despite Richards’s popularity—she maintained a 60 percent rating through Election Day—George won by more than 300,000 votes. Exit polls showed his strongest support to be among white Republican males. It was a stunning victory. But the Florida election was even more stunning. Jeb had been expected to win fairly easily, but he lost by 64,000 votes. The incumbent Governor Lawton Chiles defeated W.’s younger brother by fewer than two percentage points in the closest gubernatorial election in the state’s history. At home in Houston the elder Bushes were astounded. They had expected the results to be reversed—Jeb to win, George to lose. Having traveled throughout Florida helping Jeb raise over $3 million for his campaign, they were heartsick about his loss.
As George prepared to make his victory speech that night, his father phoned from Houston. After a few minutes, George hung up, dispirited. “It sounds like Dad’s only heard that Jeb lost,” he told his aunt Nancy. “Not that I’ve won.” George felt even worse when he saw his father interviewed on television. “The joy is in Texas,” said the former President. “My heart is in Florida.”
The mean streak that once fueled George as a bullyboy playing pig ball at Andover now surfaced to smack his brother. “Jeb would have been a great governor,” George told the press. “But such is life in the political world. You cannot go into politics fearing failure.” Earlier he had taken a whack at his father. “Bill Clinton drove the agenda against my father,” he told
The New York Times
. “My father let Bill Clinton decide what issues the two of them were going to talk about. That was a major mistake, and I wasn’t going to let it happen to me this year.”
The 1994 election put even greater distance between the two brothers: George sailed on the crest of his success, while Jeb nearly drowned in the undertow of his failure. The campaign almost cost him his family. His marriage was ruptured; his daughter, Noelle, seventeen, was on drugs, and his two sons, Jebby, eleven, and George P., eighteen, were unruly and out of control. His wife blamed him for the wreckage of their lives. Relatives told the writers Peter and Rochelle Schweizer that Columba Bush felt she and the children had paid too high a price for Jeb’s political ambition. The Schweizers quote her as saying, “You have ruined my life.”
Jeb would spend the next two years like Humpty Dumpty, trying to put himself back together again. Having grown up wanting to be President, he would not give up his political dreams, but he tried to make amends to his family as well as to the minority voters of Florida. He committed to Catholicism so he could share the religion of his wife and children. He attended classes at Informed Families, a drug-prevention agency in Miami. He started a public policy foundation to collect money to keep himself in the public eye. And he joined forces with a leader in the African American community of Miami to start a charter school.
Jeb and his wife attended George’s inauguration in January 1995, and the new governor did not let his brother’s presence go unremarked. From the podium he nodded toward Jeb. “He’s looking happy and proud, but also something else, maybe a little sad, too,” George said. “It’s a tough moment, tough for me to look at. I love my brother, you see.”
That morning Barbara gave George a letter from his father with a set of cuff links that Prescott had given to him when he won his Navy wings in 1943. The former President said the gift was “my most prized possession.” George hastily read his father’s letter. “At first I didn’t think about the continuity, the grandfather part,” he recalled. “The main thing I thought was that it was from my dad. He was saying that he was proud of me. But later I reread the letter and thought about it. It ended with, ‘Now it’s your turn.’ It was a powerful moment.”
George and Barbara were not just passing out presents. They had rushed into their retirement with both hands out. Within weeks of leaving the White House, they were cashing in on their previous high office by charging stupendous speaking fees. Barbara offered herself for $40,000–$60,000 a speech, and her husband charged even more. For a speech in the States, he charged $80,000 plus first-class expenses, including limousines and hotel suites. For a speech abroad, he charged $100,000. The Bushes had left the White House in 1993 with a net worth of $4 million. Within ten years they were worth in excess of $20 million.
Like all former Presidents, George H.W. Bush received a yearly federal pension ($157,000), plus an additional pension (estimated to be about $100,000) for his government service as congressman (four years), UN Ambassador (two years), liaison to China (one year), CIA director (one year), and Vice President (eight years). He also received a budget for office, staff, travel, and rent ($623,000) and full Secret Service protection for himself and his wife. In addition, the Republican National Committee, unlike the Democratic National Committee, offers its former presidents $150,000 a year for administrative expenses. George Bush did not need his party’s offer, so he turned it down, saying that he would not trade on his high office by sitting on corporate boards or lobbying the U.S. government. “I will now try to conduct myself with dignity,” he said, “and in a way not to dishonor the office I was so proud to hold.” Still, he managed to derive stupendous profit from his presidency, proving that privilege pays.
“You can’t believe all the money the Bushes have,” said Sharon Bush, Neil’s former wife. “Bar doesn’t like anyone to think they’re rich because then people might not contribute to her sons’ political campaigns, but she and Gampy [George Senior] are really, really rich . . . They are paid thousands just to appear at corporate events—they don’t even have to speak, but when they do, they get huge fees . . . They have a full-time Secret Service protection—twelve agents all the time . . . they fly all over the world on private planes. They cruise for free on John Latsis’s yacht every summer, which has twelve marble bathrooms on board . . . Mr. Latsis only gives his yacht to two people in the world—Prince Charles and George Bush . . . Every time they go to Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Singapore or Thailand, you can’t believe all the money they are paid and the presents they are given.”
The Bushes’ former daughter-in-law described splendid gifts of diamond-encrusted jewelry, Cartier watches, ruby-inlaid bracelets, emerald necklaces, platinum rings, precious porcelain, silk carpets, leather goods, and 24-karat gold sculptures that she said were worth “hundreds and thousands of dollars, probably millions.” She asserted that the gifts collected by President Bush during his three-day trip to Kuwait in April 1993 took his Houston staff four months to catalog.
Sharon Bush saw firsthand how easy it was for her father-in-law to accumulate wealth. In her view, he simply turned on money spigots all over the world, especially in Asia and the Middle East. She witnessed oil-rich potentates lining up to befriend the Bushes at any cost. She watched lucrative contracts and extravagant consulting fees flow into the family coffers as the former President traveled the world, steering foreign business to his sons Neil and Marvin. Seeing the wealth of goods and services that rained down on the family, Sharon Bush could be forgiven for describing their lifestyle as one of “never-ending luxury.”
Three months after he left office, George H.W. Bush made his triumphant entry into Kuwait, where he was hailed as “Abu Abdullah,” which is Arabic for “Worshipper of God.” Kuwait Airways had provided a special plane for the presidential party, which included the elder Bushes; their sons Neil and Marvin and their wives; Laura Bush; former Secretary of State James A. Baker III; former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu; former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady; Bush’s good friend Lud Ashley; and retired Army Lieutenant General Thomas Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1992 Persian Gulf War.
Having already contributed over $1 million to the George Bush Presidential Library, the Kuwaitis planned a three-day Festival of Gratitude to fete their “liberator,” which Kuwaiti newspapers dubbed “Operation Love Storm.” Bush was bathed in adulation from the moment he arrived. He addressed the Kuwaiti parliament and received the nation’s highest medal from the Emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah. Chanting women lined the streets as robed swordsmen danced to the rhythm of beating drums and little children waved banners that read: “Oh dear Bush you are the delight of our smiling eyes.”
After the three-day festival, George and Barbara flew home, leaving their entourage to drum up business in the little kingdom. John Sununu, representing Westinghouse, and General Kelly and James Baker, representing Enron, negotiated for contracts to rebuild bomb-damaged Kuwaiti power plants. The rights to rebuild three plants and operate them over twenty years were worth $4 billion. Marvin Bush had been retained by his father’s former military aide Admiral Daniel J. Murphy to negotiate bidding for American defense firms. Neil Bush, representing two Houston firms in which he was a partner, tried to get contracts for oil-related ventures from Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity and Water.
Weeks later the Kuwaiti government uncovered an Iraqi plan to assassinate President Bush during his visit. They arrested sixteen people, including eleven Iraqi nationals, and seized 550 pounds of explosives. An attempt on the life of a former President is considered an act of aggression against the United States itself, which forced the Clinton administration to react. After two months of investigation, the United States initiated air strikes against Baghdad and launched twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iraq’s intelligence agency. In a televised address to the nation on June 26, 1993, President Clinton called Iraq’s “attempt at revenge by a tyrant against the leader of the world coalition that defeated him in war . . . particularly loathsome and cowardly.”
The former National Security Council chief of counterterrorism Richard Clarke recalled on
60 Minutes
: “We responded by blowing up Iraqi intelligence headquarters and by sending a very clear message through diplomatic channels to the Iraqis, saying if you do any terrorism against the United States again, it won’t just be Iraqi intelligence headquarters, it’ll be your whole government. It was a very chilling message. And apparently it worked because there’s absolutely no evidence of Iraqi terrorism since that day until we invaded [March 19, 2003] them. Now there’s Iraqi terrorism against the United States.”
Nevertheless, ten years later Saddam Hussein’s assassination attempt against his father would provoke George W. Bush to wage an all-out war against Iraq—claiming it was still a threat to the United States and linked to Al Qaeda terrorists—that would bitterly divide the United States and alienate European allies.
During the early months of his retirement the relationship between President Bush and the man who defeated him remained cordial enough so that George returned to the White House on occasion. He joined former presidents Ford and Carter in September 1993 in support of NAFTA. He was so impressed by President Clinton’s articulate command of the issue that he said, “Now I know why he’s inside looking out and I’m outside looking in.” George told
The Washington Times
that Barbara refused to accompany him to the White House because she was uncomfortable socializing with the Clintons. She remained bitter and intractable about losing the election and wanted nothing to do with her husband’s successor. Later, as President Clinton became mired in the scandal of his sexual involvement with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, George became as vociferous as his wife in his criticism of Clinton.
“I did my job with honor,” Bush told an audience at Eckerd College. “I take pride that Barbara and I treated the White House with respect and dignity and we didn’t have those scandals in our administration.”
While her husband focused disdain on the President, Barbara took aim at the First Lady. When a reporter asked what she thought about Hillary Clinton’s plans to run for the U.S. Senate from New York, Barbara looked as if she might regurgitate. “Let her do what she wants,” she snapped. “And when she loses, I think she’ll feel very badly.” Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the Senate in November 2000.