The Family (59 page)

“The moral clock is ticking for the Bush campaign,” said Schumer. “Thinking people across the country are waiting to see how quickly he purges his campaign of anti-Semites, hate mongers and those who allowed them to have roles in the race for the White House.”

Malek resigned the next day, rather than let the charges against him be used against the Vice President. Bush praised him as a man of honor, and their close friendship remained unchanged. Malek continued raising large sums of money for Bush and was the financier to whom George W. Bush turned when he wanted to buy the Texas Rangers. In later years the Maleks were always invited to accompany the Bushes on their annual cruise of the Greek islands.

The Vice President’s glossy campaign pamphlet to American Jews with its impressive quotes and posed pictures seemed of little import on November 25, 1986, when the Iran-contra scandal hit the front pages. The President’s admission that the United States had been secretly selling weapons to the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose Iranian fanatics had taken Americans hostage and sponsored terrorism, dumbfounded people. They were further shocked to find out that funds from the arms sales were illegally funneled to the contras in Nicaragua. Both Republicans and Democrats assailed the White House. Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were stupefied.

“We’ve paid ransom, in effect, to the kidnappers of our hostages,” said President Carter. “The fact is that every terrorist in the world who reads a newspaper or listens to the radio knows that they’ve taken American hostages and we’ve paid them to get the hostages back. This is a very serious mistake in how to handle a kidnapping or hostage-taking.”

President Ford said, “Whoever initiated this covert operation and carried it out deserves some condemnation by certain people in Congress, by people on the outside.”

Criticism rained down on the President, who suffered the sharpest one-month drop in popularity ever recorded by pollsters measuring presidential job performance. For the first time in his presidency, Reagan’s lack of credibility was certified. He appointed a presidential commission to investigate the role of the National Security Council. The commission’s role was not to investigate charges but to examine the foreign policy apparatus that had led to the scandal. George suggested that Senator John Tower, his good friend from Texas, head the commission with another Bush friend, retired General Brent Scowcroft, and former Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. Attorney General Ed Meese was pressured into transferring the Justice Department’s investigation to a special prosecutor, and the morass known as Iran-contra stayed in the news for the next six years with congressional hearings, lawsuits, convictions, and eventually presidential pardons.

Suddenly the Bush campaign had a problem they had not anticipated. Their strategy of riding Reagan’s coattails into the White House seemed shaky in the wake of Iran-contra. Ten weeks later their relief was almost palpable when the Tower Commission issued its report, clearing everyone of wrongdoing. The report stated there had been an arms-for-hostages deal and a diversion of funds to the contras, but blamed the State Department for lack of oversight. As Richard Ben Cramer wrote in his campaign book,
What It Takes
, George had convinced the Tower Commission that he was “out of the loop”: “Of course, he had that wired with his friend John Tower and his friend Brent Scowcroft as two of the three members . . . but everyone had to admit—right?—he won! He showed he was unaware, not a player—not culpable of knowing anything!”

Throughout the spring of 1987, George fought the taint of Iran-contra and issued a string of denials, claiming he knew nothing about arms for hostages or funding the contras: “I can’t recall [when I heard of the sales]. I don’t know that I had a specific role in making any determinations of it.”

“I wish with clairvoyant hindsight that I had known we were trading arms for hostages.”

“Mistakes were made.”

“If we erred, the President and I, it was on the side of human life. It was an over concern about freeing Americans.”

He wrote to reassure his mother: “Some of our political friends worry about me and what all this will do to me . . . I don’t worry—really. I know the President is telling the whole truth. I know I have, too. And I also know that the American people are fair and forgiving.”

Dorothy Walker Bush did not believe the President had told the truth. George insisted he did and reiterated that in another letter to her:

Loved your post-visit letter; but let me clear up one point. The President did NOT know about the diversion of funds to the Contras. He had stated what his policy was on a limited amount of arms to Iran, but he has stated he did not know about the diversion of funds . . .

Don’t worry about all this stuff, please . . . the total truth will be out soon, and people will see that the President has told the truth. That’s the main thing. Of course there will be differences about arms to Iran, etc., but so be it.

George’s mother had not wanted him to run for President in 1980, because she felt politics had gotten too mean. She did not think George was up to it, but his slashing campaign had proved her wrong. Now she was even more concerned. She told her Hobe Sound friend Dolly Hoffman that George was not cut out to be President.

“Dotty told Aunt Dolly that George wasn’t up to the job because he didn’t have the killer in him,” said Dolly Hoffman’s niece. “Dotty said he lacked the necessary toughness to be President. She did not mean he was a weak man, just that he was too genteel and soft to be President.”

Within weeks young George W., neither genteel nor soft, was galloping to his father’s rescue. “I think [his] coming up here will be very helpful and I think he will be a good insight to me,” the Vice President wrote in his diary. “He is very level-headed and so is Jebby. I think some of our political people are thinking, ‘Oh, god, here come the Bush boys.’ But you know where their loyalty is and they both have excellent judgment and they are both spending a bunch of time on this project.”

Marvin, the youngest and least political of George’s four sons, had been sidelined with ulcerative colitis. To save his life, doctors had removed his large intestine. The surgery left him with a permanent colostomy bag attached to his abdomen to collect body waste. After several blood transfusions, Marvin later joked about his hospitalization. He said he knew he was dying when two things happened: his father spent the day by his side, and his brother Jeb called to say “I love you.”

His mother blamed his inflammatory bowel disease on political stress. “Marvin had his colon taken out because he worried about a lot of things,” said Barbara. “A lot of them were related to criticism about his father.”

Marvin pooh-poohed politics as the cause for his colitis. “Mom will never be a doctor,” he said. “I talked to an eleven-year-old who has it, but her dad didn’t run for president.” As a spokesman for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, Marvin said he wanted to help remove the shame attached to the disease. “The groups I talk to the most are people who aren’t married,” he said. “They think this ruins all that. It doesn’t.”

Marvin’s wife, Margaret, had been diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer at the age of five. She, too, almost died, and to save her life, doctors removed her ovaries, making it impossible for her to conceive. Shortly after Marvin’s hospitalization the couple adopted a baby girl and, four years later, a baby boy. Because of his long convalescence, Marvin dropped out of his father’s presidential campaign.

When his brother George W. moved to Washington, he did not want to live in the Vice President’s thirty-three-room mansion. Instead, he and Laura and their six-year-old twins rented a town house about a mile away. They had been keeping their distance from the family for several years, passing up the 1980 presidential race, forgoing summers in Kennebunkport, and even skipping the big surprise party in January 1986 that George threw for Barbara on their forty-first wedding anniversary. The Bushes’ friends had flown to Washington from all over the country to celebrate, and all the family was on hand, except for W. and Laura. Doro and William LeBlond, who married in 1982, had flown in from Maine; Neil and Sharon from Colorado; Jeb and Columba from Florida; Marvin and Margaret from Virginia; but young George and Laura remained in Texas. “It’s a long way,” Barbara said later, “and too expensive,” reminiscent of her comments after she did not attend her mother’s funeral.

She knew that distance and expense had nothing to do with the absence of her firstborn. Family members, including Louise Walker, confirmed that Barbara had stopped speaking to her son for more than a year. At that point George W.’s drinking was out of control, and his drunken outbursts had become a source of unending embarrassment to his wife and to his parents, who no longer wanted to be around him. The last eruption at a family gathering had been W.’s tactless crack to Gerry Bemiss’s wife during her fiftieth birthday party. “So, what’s sex like after 50, anyway?” George asked. It would be several more months before he finally decided to stop drinking. During that time he began attending a men’s Bible class in Midland. He was grappling with the prospect of turning forty on July 6, 1986, and trying to stay afloat in the oil business as prices collapsed. Following his company’s merger with Harken, he was paid $80,000 a year as a consultant (translation: for being the Vice President’s son), but he had no business to run, no office to manage, no professional responsibilities to uphold.

Once he sobered up, his mother told him he could join his father’s campaign, although his father never directly asked for his assistance. “He didn’t want me to disrupt my life for him, when in fact, I was looking for, you know, the invitation to come and go to battle with him,” said George W. The decision to move to Washington was also one of self-preservation, knowing that the son also rises. “If his father lost, he would be the forgotten son of a Vice President,” said his cousin John Ellis. “If his father won, a whole world would open up. His fate would rise and fall with his father’s.”

Years later George said that the eighteen months he spent in his father’s presidential campaign were the best months of his life and reignited his interest in politics. His wife agreed. “I think working with his dad, like George got to do in 1988 . . . if there was any sort of leftover competition with being named George Bush and being the eldest, that it really at that point was resolved.”

Junior, as he was called, signed on to the Bush presidential campaign for five thousand dollars a month to be, in his words, “an organizer, hand-holder and surrogate for my father.” He told a reporter: “When your name is George Bush, you don’t need a title in the George Bush campaign.”

The Vice President’s staff called him “the enforcer from hell” and gave him a wide berth. “He was mean, tough, and focused,” said the deputy chief of staff. “We treated him the same way we’d treat any hit man.”

The dauphin strutted into Bush headquarters in his cowboy boots, chewing tobacco and carrying a Styrofoam cup as his spittoon. “Just call me Maureen,” he told the receptionist, taking a swipe at President Reagan’s daughter, who was notorious for bossing her father’s staff. George bonded immediately with Lee Atwater, also keen, quick, and nasty. George won over the rest of the staff when he said: “Just let me know what I can do to help. All I want to do is get my father elected President.” He made few demands, other than to take time out every day to jog. He also took weekends off. On road trips he insisted on spending no more than two nights away from D.C. Part of staying sober depended on maintaining a strict routine. He had fallen off the wagon a few times since his fortieth birthday, but was trying hard to stay sober. So if he was in California for more than forty-eight hours, he insisted the campaign fly him back to Washington for a few days to decompress, then fly him back to California.

Presidential politics—as well as politicans’ relationships with the media—changed abruptly that spring, when the Democratic front-runner, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, lost his candidacy over an extramarital dalliance. Long plagued by rumors of womanizing, Hart, a married man with children, had spent the night with a young model named Donna Rice. She was photographed sitting on his lap aboard a yacht in Bimini ludicrously named
Monkey Business
. Hart denied allegations of their affair published in
The Miami Herald
and challenged reporters to follow him if they did not believe him. Their stakeout of his Washington town house generated massive media frenzy and unleashed a series of investigations into his personal life.

He tried to recoup his standing at a press conference a few days later, but his career was over when he refused to answer a
Washington Post
reporter’s question: “Have you ever committed adultery?” Faced with future disclosures of his indiscretions, Hart withdrew from the presidential race on May 8, 1987, in a bitter farewell speech.

That episode shook the timbers of presidential politics. The once-unmentionable subject of a man’s personal life was now fair game for reporters. It became a measure of a candidate’s character. Every candidate scrambled for cover, including the Republican front-runner. The Bush campaign became particularly concerned when a gossip columnist in the
Chicago Sun-Times
mentioned that several people were working on a story about George Bush that would link “Mr. Boring” to “a prominent east coast socialite and the wife of a close supporter.” The exposé never materialized, but it threw Lee Atwater into manic overdrive. He grabbed the phones and peppered reporters. “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya workin’ on? Whadda ya got?”

Over lunch with editors from
Newsweek
, Atwater claimed that his candidate did not have “a pecker problem.” The magazine’s Howard Fineman called him later for an official denial. Atwater said he would get back to him, and sprinted into young George’s office. Together they approached the Vice President. The campaign’s press spokesman argued against addressing the rumors, and giving journalists an excuse to broadcast them, and the Vice President agreed, but Atwater and George W. insisted they had to respond. With characteristic bluntness, George asked his father: “Well? You’ve heard the rumors. What do you say?” The adoring son had no doubt about his father’s response.