Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (56 page)

Let’s hope she does well. If not there will be some folks after her . . . Sincerely, George.

Having egregiously gamed the system for years without being called to account, W. saw little reason to settle for so meager a prize as a congressional seat.

CHAPTER 18

Meet the Help

Tell me what company you keep, and I’ll tell
you what you are.

—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

T
HE MORAL ATMOSPHERE OF THE George W. Bush presidency—and a growing list of revelations concerning improprieties, politicizing of agencies, and self-dealing—should not have come as a surprise. Warning signs abounded in W.’s gubernatorial campaign, his term and a half as governor, and his presidential campaign. There were the issues he championed, his management of the press, and his intimidation of everyone who got in his way. Most telling of all: the kind of people with whom he chose to surround himself. Taken together, these factors strongly suggested what a W. presidency would be like.

Yet the signs were mainly overlooked, especially by the people in the best position to shed light on them—reporters. With some conspicuous exceptions, the media was positively gleeful about nailing Bush’s 2000 opponent, Al Gore, for alleged boasts and exaggerations (e.g., “I invented the Internet”) that were in reality either misquotes or taken out of context. But when it came to Bush, the “liberal” media was strangely silent. It took a conservative pundit, Tucker Carlson, to question the resolve of his media peers. After one Bush-Gore debate, Carlson put it this way on CNN:

There is this sense in which Bush is benefiting from something, and I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s the low expectations of the people covering him. You know, he didn’t drool or pass out onstage or anything, so he’s getting credit for that. But there is this kind of interesting reluctance on the part of the press to pass judgment on it. I think a lot of people—they don’t, necessarily, break down along ideological lines—believe that, you know, maybe Bush didn’t do as good a job as he might have. And yet, the coverage does not reflect that at all. It’s interesting.
¹

In many respects, the media was so eager to “discern” W.’s character— and to bend over backward to be “fair”—that reporters often ended up being suckers for spin. And whenever they tried to just tell it like it seemed to be, their editors had to worry about complaints from the Bush campaign and elements of their audience decrying perceived bias.

Certainly, W. did have an aw-shucks charm that was especially effective on Eastern reporters who didn’t want to appear prissy. But even more, he had better handlers. As Gore adviser Tony Coelho put it, “Karl Rove and Karen Hughes outmaneuvered and out-strategized us. We weren’t in the same league.”
²

Karl the Killer

The personnel protecting and propelling George W. Bush as he rose toward the governorship and then the presidency resembled less a team of policy advisers than an offensive blocking squad—or perhaps a gaggle of underworld capos. None better played the role than Karl Rove.

Few people realize that Rove, perhaps the most important figure in W.’s political rise, got his start as a handpicked apprentice to Poppy Bush.

A self-described nerd who spent his teenage years in Salt Lake City, Utah, carried a briefcase to school, and wore a pocket protector, Rove was a devoted high school Republican and avid debater with a remarkable mind for facts and figures. Rove attended four colleges but never graduated. Yet it was Rove’s role in College Republican circles that brought him to Washington, and in 1973, into the offices of Poppy Bush. At that time, Poppy was the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), and Karl Rove was an ambitious twenty-two-year-old who had just quit his position as executive director of the College Republican National Committee in order to spend five months campaigning for the position of chairman. He had been accused of engaging in dirty tricks and of teaching his methods to others. Worse, a rival candidate had leaked to the
Washington Post
a tape of Rove and a peer comparing notes on prior electoral espionage. In the middle of the Watergate scandal, a
Post
story titled “GOP Probes Official as Teacher of ‘Tricks’ ” couldn’t have pleased party elders.

Poppy “investigated” Rove, and even went so far as to have an FBI agent sent out to question him.
³
On what authority the chairman of the Republican Party could get the FBI at his disposal, and what such access might have meant, especially coming at the height of Watergate, is not clear. In any case, with that bit of business concluded, Poppy did what his friend, Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, would later do for Poppy with regard to the Townhouse affair. He declared young Rove clear of all charges—then hired him as a special assistant.

Not only did he clear him and hire him, but he went right after Rove’s critics. After the surrogate of one College Republican, Robert Edgeworth, spoke to the
Post
about the dirty tricks, Edgeworth asked Bush to explain the basis for his decision favoring Rove. “Bush sent me back the angriest letter I have ever received in my life,” Edgeworth said. “I had leaked to the
Washington
Post
, and now I was out of the Party forever.”
⁴

The irony of this lecture on disloyalty cannot be overstated, since this was the same Poppy Bush who appears to have been so diligently undermining his own president and boss at precisely this moment.

ROVE IMMEDIATELY REPAID Poppy’s kindness by introducing him to the man who would help him become president.

The new College Republican National Committee executive director, Lee Atwater, would become a top Bush operative and later Poppy’s RNC chairman. Atwater’s crowning achievement would be the political destruction of Michael Dukakis, Poppy’s Democratic opponent in the 1988 presidential election, who had started the race well in the lead.
⁵

When Poppy returned from his year in China to serve as CIA director in Langley, Virginia, Rove was nearby, working for the Virginia Republican Party. When Jimmy Carter ousted Poppy from his directorship and Poppy headed back to Texas to plot his presidential campaign, Karl Rove headed back there with him. Working from their Houston base in the First International Bank building, Rove helped James Baker run Poppy’s political action committee, the Fund for Limited Government, then hung out his shingle in Austin as a specialist in “direct mail”—the use of demographic and other information to send targeted letters for business and political purposes.

The Texas Hustle

There was direct mail, and then there was indirect mail. Former
Newsweek
senior editor John Taliaferro and his business partner found out about the latter form of communication when they were late in paying Rove’s bills for work he did on behalf of their Austin-based magazine
Third Coast
. Rove had been calling repeatedly demanding payment. Suddenly, the magazine’s post office box began filling up with blank subscription cards. “These, we came to realize, were [the result of ] Karl Rove, madly pulling these cards out of magazines and stuffing them in the mailbox, knowing we would be required to pay twenty-five cents each or whatever,” recalled Taliaferro.
⁶
“It was a huge annoyance, and a prank that made sure we got the message that Karl Rove didn’t like being messed with. It was petty—rat fucking. But you could just see that instinct magnified twenty years later.”
⁷

In 1986, on the eve of a gubernatorial debate between Rove’s candidate, former governor Bill Clements, and Democratic incumbent Mark White, and with Clements’s opponent closing the gap in the polls, Rove called a press conference to announce the discovery of a bugging device behind a picture frame near his desk. “Obviously, I do not know who did this,” Rove said, “but there is no doubt in my mind that the only ones who could have benefited from this detailed, sensitive information, would have been the political opposition.”
⁸

The story easily trumped news coverage of a debate on public policy and left White flustered. According to his speechwriter, “Mark White was told all about this minutes before going on, and it just really rattled him. And he didn’t give a very good performance. It was really from that moment on that things started going not so well for Mark White.”
⁹
Indeed, White’s poll numbers dropped precipitously, and he lost.

Meanwhile the FBI concluded that the bug’s tiny battery would have needed to be changed every few hours, and thus didn’t look like the work of Democratic operatives. Nevertheless, it was a brilliant tactical move. “I will go to my grave convinced [Rove] planted the bug,” said former Texas Republican Party political director and campaign consultant Royal Masset. “He’s one of these art-of-war guys. To him, winning is everything. With Karl it’s all a game; it’s all a pure zero-sum game: we win, you lose—always.”
¹⁰

Rove’s growing repertoire of tricks was tradecraft of the type that Poppy Bush’s CIA associates would have admired. It was what they themselves routinely did around the world, ostensibly in the service of the nation. And Rove was hardly alone: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose Republican revolution of 1994 bedeviled Bill Clinton’s presidency, quietly brought a military psy-ops specialist onto his staff.
¹¹

Like Poppy, Rove would develop informal relationships with FBI and other law enforcement personnel.
¹²
Rove was not just ambitious and often brilliant. He was, in fact, the most effective of a long line of covert operatives recruited as young men into a pervasive extralegal apparatus. Perhaps more than any other person, Rove represented the sub rosa convergence of politics with intelligence and espionage—truly the embodiment of the Bush political psyche.

Rove at First Sight

When Rove first met George W. Bush, in 1973 at RNC headquarters in Washington, the circumstances couldn’t have been more humdrum. As the story goes, W. was visiting from Harvard Business School, and Poppy assigned Rove the mundane task of delivering his car keys to the eldest son. But Rove, his eye ever on the main chance, was impressed: One look at W., handsome and brimming with charisma, in his cowboy boots and flight jacket, struck a chord in the pudgy, bespectacled Rove. “Bush is the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with,”
¹³
Rove would muse years later.

They stayed in touch over the years, as W. served as an adviser to and sometimes surrogate speaker for his father. In 1978, as W. sought the congressional seat from Midland, Rove was already providing guidance. By the late eighties, he was actively touting W.’s political prospects. And by 1994, he was orchestrating the manufacture of a legend.

So dedicated was Rove to George W. Bush that not only would he labor assiduously to muddy W.’s opponents, from Ann Richards to Al Gore to John Kerry; often he took it upon himself to clean George W. Bush up—sometimes literally. On one occasion, shortly after W. filed to run for governor, when Rove brought his client around for a meeting with Texas Republican Party officials, it soon became apparent to everyone present—apparently excepting W.—that the aspiring candidate had stepped in some dog poop. Eventually, Rove got Bush to the men’s room for some corrective action, which was when political director Royal Masset walked in.

“Karl’s there on his hands and knees wiping off the dogshit,” Masset recalled with a chuckle.

The Rainbo Coalition

In one sense, George W. Bush has led a charmed political life. With a little help from his friends, he has consistently managed to avoid critical scrutiny of dubious public and private behavior. One incident that might have derailed his political rise came while Karl Rove was working as an independent political consultant and W. was using the Rangers to build his political legitimacy.

In 1991, Bush was invited to buy a house in an exclusive fishing resort— a twelve-hundred-acre lakeside reserve near Athens, about ninety miles from Dallas, called Rainbo Club Inc. Among the members was Harvey “Bum” Bright, a Dallas oil, real estate, banking, and trucking magnate, who owned more than 120 companies, including, for a number of years, the Dallas Cowboys.

Bright was a member of a group of powerful right-wing businessmen and a friend to Poppy Bush, who had helped pay for a vitriolic, black-bordered anti-Kennedy ad that ran in the
Dallas Morning News
on the day JFK was assassinated.

Through an artful arrangement, the Rainbo Club members managed to have their private retreat declared a recreation sanctuary, thereby reducing their property taxes, while keeping the land effectively closed to the public. This neat little dodge, while hardly on the scale of the Arlington stadium deal, epitomizes the double standard that the rich and powerful apply to maintain, and extend, their privileges.

Press exposure of this arrangement could have been embarrassing to George W. Bush when he ran for president in 2000. But by that time, W. had sold his stake in the Rainbo Club, and the press showed little inclination to pursue this “old” news.