Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (50 page)

W.’s 1978 congressional campaign, unfolding as Poppy was in the planning stages of his 1980 presidential campaign, could be seen as a kind of test run of the money machine for the larger cause. Indeed, it’s likely that the donors understood what they were investing in. W.’s campaign raised $450,000—at that time an astronomical amount. Thus, twenty-two years before his presidential candidacy, at a time when his own father was preparing for a losing presidential race, the people who mattered were already betting smart money on George W. Bush’s long-term prospects, or at least responding to the entreaties of his famously persistent father.

Asked later about his fund-raising success, W. explained that he had relied on his parents’ Christmas card list. For context, one must consider that this document combined the cachet of an all-American social register and the heft of a big-city phone book. W.’s 1978 donor list, which goes on for pages, is a who’s who from Midland, Houston, and Dallas—and includes entries substantiating the Bush family’s long-standing ties to national elites. Contributors included William Ford of the Ford Motor Company; Robert Taft (whose ancestor was a founder of Skull and Bones); Frank Shakespeare, the longtime CBS president who headed the government’s propaganda entity Radio Liberty; and a massive outpouring from every corner of the oil and energy industry. W.’s future defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld also contributed.

Bath also helped Bush by introducing him to big-money people in Houston. This included members of the Houston Chamber of Commerce, where Bath was a major player.

One day in 1978, Bath picked up his business partner Bill White en route to a Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
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“As we were driving downtown, he said, ‘Bill, I can’t wait for you to meet the guest speaker . . . the two of you are cut from the same cloth. You’re both fighter pilots. You’re both Harvard Business School graduates. You’re going to love this guy.’ ”
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White recalls that day, on which he first met George W. Bush, several months after White had moved to Texas:

I’ll never forget as long as I live, it was the first time I saw somebody dress in a suit wearing high-heeled cowboy boots. And it just struck me as a guy who was desperately trying to be six foot tall, irrespective of his natural height. Somehow he equated importance with height, which I thought was ludicrous because most of the fighter pilots that I flew with were shorter in stature, but were guys who were seven feet tall in my mind’s eye because they had integrity, confidence and they didn’t care about the superficial.

My observation was that he was not comfortable around people who were “looking down” on him. I think that if you check the Presidential cabinet appointments and study photos of W. with his staff that you’ll see what I mean. The company surrounding the President in 99% of the photo ops that I see are carefully staged to make W. look like “the big man.”
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White recalled that Bath was animated on the way back from the luncheon and kept pressing his partner to say what he thought of Bath’s friend. There was a long silence. Bath could see that White was not impressed. Finally White spoke up. “Jim, I’ve known a lot of fighter pilots and this guy didn’t have any of the fighter pilot’s attributes . . . that I admire and respect.”

Bath was annoyed, according to White, who recalled Bath saying, “ ‘God-dammit, that guy is going to be President of the United States one day. He’s going to be President of the United States.’ ”

The reason Bath could imagine such a thing in those early days was that he had personally experienced the power of the Bush family connections. Bath was already trustee for Salem bin Laden, and a millionaire. And he had seen the skill with which the Bush family repeatedly made W.’s problems— girlfriends, military service, and other matters—simply go away.

Yet Bath’s prescient assertion that W. would one day be president seemed astonishing, so White merely bit his tongue. But at the time, he mused upon how bizarre it was: “And I just thought, no way in hell . . . Famous last words.”

And He Shall Have a Wife

Back in Midland, there was other matchmaking going on.

By their own accounts, George and Laura Bush first met at a Midland barbecue in the summer of 1977. According to the official story, W.’s good friend Joe O’Neill and his wife, Jan Donnelly O’Neill, a close friend and former roommate of Laura’s, thought W. was a bit lonely and in need of a good woman. And they thought they had the perfect one: Laura Welch, who had grown up in Midland and then gone away to college and become a librarian. The whole purpose of the barbecue, we are told, was to introduce George and Laura.

That made sense. Even today, but especially in those days, and especially in a place like West Texas, there was something fishy about a candidate who did not have a wife. Though most in his circle were already married, it seemed to his friends as if finding a mate was the furthest thing from W.’s mind when he announced his candidacy for Congress in July 1977. But when he met Laura at the O’Neills’ just two weeks later, he quickly reversed himself. They would wed in three months’ time.

In a family where many things don’t add up, the claim that George and Laura hadn’t met before was certainly one of them. Laura and W. had both spent childhood years in Midland, if only minimally overlapping. Even if they did not meet then, or did not notice each other, by 1970, Laura and W. were both living in the same wild-and-crazy Houston apartment complex known for its eligible bachelors on the make and women looking to get made. Moreover, Laura’s Houston roommate was Jan Donnelly, who was dating Joe O’Neill, already one of W.’s pals from Midland.
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It’s hard to believe that when Joe O’Neill came to visit his girlfriend at Chateaux Dijon, his old friend W. and his girlfriend’s roommate Laura never encountered each other.

But a connection to those Chateaux days would not have fit the need in 1978 to clean up W.’s party-boy past—and indeed present.

At the barbecue, according to Bush biographer Bill Minutaglio, “Bush talked nonstop, and Laura Welch seemed to listen to every word.”
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In any case, the result was that W. the bachelor candidate instantly became a “family man”—and Laura a highly visible part of the campaign team. Laura would become W.’s best asset, even years later when his own popularity plunged.

Back to Business

Bush lost the 1978 election but collected a respectable 47 percent of the vote. The victor was the Democratic conservative Kent Hance, a thirty-five-year-old good old boy and state senator. The Bushes were reported to be utterly disconsolate about the loss.

But there were some lessons to take away from this. W. had been tarred as a carpetbagger, and leaflets warned that his father was a member of the ominous-sounding Trilateral Commission. Also, some things that bordered on dirty tricks were used
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Bush. A Texas Tech student or ganized a “Bush bash” to recruit new voters, promising free beer to all attendees. Though the event was essentially harmless, a Hance surrogate drafted a public letter condemning Bush’s campaign, and sent four thousand copies to the Church of Christ in Lubbock. “Maybe it’s a cool thing to do at Harvard or Yale,” Hance told local newspapers.
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Hance also accused W. of trying to buy the election with out-of-state money.
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That was the last time W. would allow an opponent to define him.

The lost election also served as the first indication of what the extended Bush operation could, and would, do on W.’s behalf. Younger brother Neil had moved temporarily to the district to help manage the operation. Other clan members were constantly in and out. Poppy’s involvement as always was quiet and arm’s length. But most significant was that one of Poppy’s lieutenants, a young man named Karl Rove, was frequently on the phone offering advice to W.

That 1978 campaign was also an indication of the remarkable willingness of people who knew the Bushes to step up and put their own (or someone else’s) money on the table. And it hardly mattered whether it was nominally for a political campaign or a business venture. That became evident after the election, when W. turned back to business and began aggressively working the same circles that had backed his campaign.

Monopoly Money

In 1982, Ronald Reagan instituted a huge tax cut. This boon to the wealthy had an unintended though inevitable by-product: it eliminated the attractiveness of oil and gas investments as tax shelters, and the oil business began to experience a drastic slide in prices and an exodus of capital.

Arbusto was hitting one dry hole after another, and running out of ready sources of cash. In the same year, Arbusto was renamed Bush Exploration. Perhaps this was an acknowledgment that a less subtle approach to the game was now required, a slight reminder that the supplicant was the son of the man a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Soon people were again salivating at the prospect of betting a fortune on businessman George W. Bush. One such investor was Philip Uzielli, an associate and sometime trustee of the New York–based Toqueville Asset Management, who flew into Midland with a check for a million dollars. When Robert K. Whitt, the attorney handling the paperwork, began reciting boilerplate about the inherent risks of such a deal, Uzielli brushed it off. “Not my money,” he said.
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Uzielli had never met W., but he did know James Baker, Uzielli’s best friend at Princeton. Uzielli later explained that he had been asked to invest the money by George L. Ohrstrom Jr., a friend of Poppy Bush’s from Greenwich Country Day School. When I questioned the late Ohrstrom’s son, Wright, about this, he volunteered that his father was very secretive and that he heard rumors about his being in the intelligence services.
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For his million dollars, Uzielli received a 10 percent stake in Bush’s venture. But given that the company’s entire valuation at the time was under four hundred thousand dollars, Uzielli had paid about twenty-five times more than book value.
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Uzielli’s cash infusion came in January 1982, about the time of another large and equally carefree cash injection—this one never previously reported. It came from a small Houston-based independent oil company called Moran Exploration, which had done some business with Dresser Industries, the company that had long been run by W.’s “favorite uncle” Neil Mallon, with Prescott Bush a longtime board member. At Moran’s Midland, Texas, office, the geologist James Lee Brown got an odd request from the company’s then-headquarters in Houston: put about $1.4 million into some wells Bush’s company was hoping to drill, despite geological data showing they would be a bust. When he and a colleague objected, the word came back from the main office: just do it.

“I didn’t even know George W. Bush, the son, existed, until he came in,” Brown explained to me in a 2006 interview at his home in Midland. At the time of the early-eighties meeting, Brown knew about Poppy, of course, because he was vice president. But the son had never registered significantly on his radar up to that time, notwithstanding his losing 1978 congressional bid.

As for the investment W. was now touting, Brown said, “Dick Kramer Sr., my immediate boss, he and I didn’t think it was a good deal, so we recommended they not do it. [Later] he popped his head in my door, told me it didn’t matter what we thought—we’re doing it anyway.”

Brown, who was well paid at Moran, shrugged and went to work. If he was unenthusiastic about the prospects, meeting Bush did nothing to persuade him otherwise. “At the two or three meetings I sat in with him . . . he was usually the guy in the corner sound asleep,” said Brown. “Trying to work over a hangover.

“Years later, I thought, ‘Mr. Moran must have pissed away that million bucks because he’s trying to grease the skids for something,’ ” Brown added.
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In 2006, I met with Dick Moran, head of the company, at his office in Wichita Falls, Texas. Moran was by then an octogenarian who still reported to work every day. He recalled making donations to various Bush campaigns but couldn’t remember his company putting more than a million dollars into Bush’s company. However, he didn’t register surprise when I raised the issue.

The next time W. crossed James Lee Brown’s radar was when he was running for governor. “I was hearing a completely different story than the story that I knew about him,” he said. “All of a sudden he was this big-time oil man, doing quite well. He was a mover and shaker in the Midland oil business. And of course Midland was in love with him.”

Saudis in Early

Another investor was W.’s old Guard buddy Jim Bath. Or at least he appeared to be. His deal with the Saudis and his own circumstances suggest that he may have been simply a middleman for the fifty thousand dollars he plunked down for stakes in two oil exploration partnerships that George W. had put together. “I know that it was Saudi money because Bath had no money of his own,” said Bath’s former partner Bill White. “We were in business together. I saw his personal financial statements. I knew the amount of cash he had available at any given time. And he also confided in me that the money invested both in our real estate business and in Dubya’s energy business was Saudi money . . . One hundred percent of it was Saudi money.”
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