Born to Run
What’s in a name? How about the Republican nomination for governor. Now the highly confident, but untested George W. Bush has to convince voters that he’s more than just a chip off the old block.
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Bush’s strong showing gave him his first taste of the power of the Bush name in Texas. But for the next decade, he barely mentioned politics again. It was as if his congressional campaign had been just another one of his impulsive ventures. He began to concentrate on building his oil business, now called Bush Exploration. “I became totally inebriated with hitting the big one,” he says. He raised more than $2 million from investors but lost most of the money in dry holes. He used to joke that he was “all name and no money.” In 1983, needing more funding, he merged with Spectrum 7, a Cincinnati oil company owned by friends. Bush was president of Spectrum 7 for three years, supervising more than 180 wells, until another oil bust came and prices plummeted, drying up the company’s drilling funds. But Bush landed on his feet again, which critics charge would never have happened if he hadn’t been named Bush. In a stock swap, Spectrum 7 merged with Harken Energy in Dallas in return for more than $2 million worth of Harken stock—a good deal considering Spectrum 7 had lost $400,000 in the six months before the sale. Bush received 200,000 shares of Harken and a seat on the board of directors at a salary of $120,000 a year (later reduced to $40,000).
A few years later, government regulators and investigative reporters would scrutinize every aspect of Bush’s deal with Harken, including reports that he had used his influence at the White House while his father was president to help the little-known Harken win a potentially lucrative contract to drill for oil off the coast of Bahrain. There were also allegations that Bush had conducted illegal insider stock trading in 1990, when he sold his Harken stock, worth $848,560. But a four-month Wall Street Journal investigation concluded that there was no evidence Bush had ever used his political influence to help Harken. Though Bush cannot deny he has received some business opportunities because he is a Bush, he points out that the Harken allegations illustrate the downside of the Bush name. “Look what happened to my brother Neil [who, according to George W., underwent a”completely unwarranted” investigation into his role in Colorado’s Silverado savings and loan scandal, even though a federal court approved a $49.5 million settlement to be paid by Neil and the other Silverado directors]. If you’re a Bush, you’re going to get politically attacked just because of who you are. Damn right it makes me more defensive of the Bush name—and more loyal to it.”
f there is one place where the narrative of Bush’sI life turns, it would be at Colorado Springs’ Broadmore Hotel in 1986. Bush, his wife, and some friends had flown there to celebrate his fortieth birthday. He woke up with a raging hangover and announced he would never drink again. He and his close friends and family members say he has not had a drink since.
Those who want to understand a key difference between the personalities of Bush and Ann Richards need only study the way each of them gave up alcohol. Richards went into a twelve-step program, discussing her recovery at length with others, contemplating her deeper emotional needs, studying what she was trying to avoid through alcohol. Bush says he simply got tired of drinking.
“I’m not sophisticated enough to figure out if I had a clinical problem,” Bush says now. “And I can’t say there was something significant that happened to make me change my life. All I know is I was a high-energy person, and alcohol began competing with my ability to keep up my energy level. I wish I could say there was some more profound reason. But I just stopped.”
It was a classic George W. Bush decision. “George is not an overly introspective person,” says Laura. “He has good instincts, and he goes with them. He doesn’t need to evaluate and reevaluate a decision. He doesn’t try to overthink. He likes action.”
Shortly after his decision to stop drinking, Bush also had a long conversation with an old family friend, evangelist Billy Graham, and he began reading the Bible daily. He then moved to Washington to work on his father’s 1988 presidential campaign. Bush family members say the relationship between the father and his firstborn son matured dramatically. Finally, the young rascal—the Yale frat president turned Houston bachelor turned beer-drinking Midland oilman—had grown up. He quickly became his father’s most trusted adviser. When the elder Bush had his children meet the campaign staff for the first time, George W. stood up, looked straight at campaign manager Lee Atwater, and said, “How can we trust you?” For once, the irrepressible Atwater was speechless. “Listen, pal,” George W. said, “if you go to war for our family, we want you completely on our side. We love George Bush, and you better bust your ass for him.”
After the election, George W. moved himself and his family to Dallas. He initiated the $85 million purchase of the Texas Rangers, recruited financial partners, and added around $600,000 of his own money (a small percentage compared with the multimillion dollar investments of other investors). As a reward for putting together the deal, Bush received 1.8 percent of the team (worth more than $1.3 million at the time of the team’s purchase) and was paid approximately $200,000 annually to act as managing partner of the team.
Although Bush says there was no political motivation to buy the Rangers—his youthful dream, he says, was to buy the Houston Astros and build an apartment for himself in the right-field wall—the Rangers job did make him a Texas celebrity. During games, he sat near the first-base dugout (never upstairs in a box), signing autographs, chewing sunflower seeds, and getting face time whenever the television cameras would turn his way. (Not all of it was good: During Nolan Ryan’s 300th victory, the cameras showed Bush picking his nose.) He traveled the state on the mashed potato circuit, giving a canned speech about the glories of the Rangers, throwing in a few jokes about the family (“Ladies and gentlemen, I know you wished the most famous Bush could be here tonight.” Pause. “But Mom was busy”).
State Republican party leaders salivated at the idea of Bush’s running for office. He was a natural. So what if he didn’t have a great grasp of state government? The last Republican governor, Bill Clements, didn’t even know the names of most state agencies when he first ran in 1978, and he ended up beating the experienced Mark White. Moreover, Texas voted for Bush’s father during the presidential elections; surely, they would vote tfor the son too.
Bush did consider running for governor in 1990, then he decided the timing wasn’t right while his father was still president. (Another story has it that the White House vetoed a George W. race because it would be too embarrassing to the father if the son lost.) But the political bug had returned. In late 1991 the elder Bush asked George W. to visit Washington to interview members of the Cabinet about the upcoming 1992 campaign. George W. got the message that White House chief of staff John Sununu needed to go. After talking to his father, George W. spent the night at the White House and the next morning walked into Sununu’s office and came out with his resignation. Some White House staff members were stunned that the coup de grace was administered by such an outsider. But George W. was proving himself to be a savvy political player, the type who would confront people and take stands in a way his father wouldn’t.
In retrospect, George W. says he learned two lessons from his father’s 1992 defeat: Baby boomers were looking for a generational change in leadership, and if you campaign on the status quo, you lose. “People don’t care what you did for them last year,” says Bush. “They want to know what next year is like. Richards is telling people that we’re all getting better because the level of crime has gone down a few percentage points. No one cares about that. Everyone is still scared to leave their homes.”
He also recognizes that Richards, despite her national stardom, is vulnerable simply because Texas is increasingly becoming a Republican state. Republican leaders still believe the only reason Richards won in 1990 was because Clayton Williams turned out to be such a stereotypical good old boy who infuriated many Republican women with his rape-and-weather joke. “George W. Bush is too smart to screw up like that,” says state Republican chairman Fred Meyer. “If you look at results of the 1990 Williams-Richards race [in which Williams lost by less than 100,000 votes], all George has to do is get back the upscale Republican female voters from Houston and Dallas who abandoned us last time—and he wins.” It’s a hopeful analysis: In the past four years, Richards has probably won back her share of Democrats who crossed over to vote for Clayton Williams, and she still has a great following among women, Republican and Democrat.
Nevertheless, George W. Bush, the master of timing, sees the 1994 gubernatorial election as his greatest opportunity of all. He has bought four new suits from the Culwell and Son men’s store in Dallas. He has paid visits to many older GOP fat cats, former supporters of his father’s, some of whom have been skeptical of his candidacy. A few privately say they aren’t sure they appreciate the idea of a Kennedy-like dynasty emerging among Republicans. But supremely confident that “they’ll like me if they just get a whiff of me,” Bush has persuaded the old fat cats to come through. Of the first twenty donors who gave $20,000 or more to the Bush campaign, seventeen were contributors to his father’s presidential campaign.
Most importantly, he has made it to the general election without a primary. (Early last summer, Bush made sure to visit his potential Republican gubernatorial rivals or to take them to a Rangers game to quietly let them know he was going to run and persuade them to dropout-which they did.) Without a primary opponent, Bush had time to develop his platform, which was nonexistent. He also spared himself a bruising fight with an opponent who could have forced him to debate such social issues as abortion or gun control, which might have isolated Republicans on the far right or given Richards more fodder to use against him in the general election.
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