George, Washington
What his first stint there taught him about loyalty.
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Well, maybe a pressroom. One of the less cheerful aspects of his tenure in Washington was his combative relationship with the media. Though it’s true he played the game smoothly at times—successfully swatting down rumors of his father’s infidelity by volunteering to Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman, “The answer to the big A question is N-O”—he seemed predisposed to regard journalists with suspicion. “I was in charge of screening reporters,” he said in 1994. “These people would come in asking for interviews—some well meaning, some not—and my opening question was, ‘Why you?’ A lot of them just weren’t fair.” His worst fears were realized when another Newsweek reporter, Margaret Warner, wrote the famous “Fighting the Wimp Factor” cover story in October 1987. After it ran, George W. recalled, “Margaret called me on the phone, and I let her have it. I said, ‘This is disgraceful. You spent all this time to write a two-page article, and it had the word wimp in it seven times about George Bush?’ I was furious. I wasn’t yelling, but I was very firm. She blamed it on her editors, and I said, ‘Then you ought to quit. You ought to quit if that’s the kind of journalistic integrity you have.’” Warner, now the chief Washington correspondent of PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, disputes that account. “I agreed that the use of the word ‘wimp’ on the cover seemed unnecessarily cruel,” she says, “but I had no apologies for the story itself. It was a fair look at why Bush had this persistent image problem—that he was, to put it delicately, something less than his own man. The campaign, George W. included, didn’t like to admit it.”
FAST-FORWARD TO NOVEMBER 8, 1988: George H. W. Bush defeats Michael Dukakis. His eldest son and closest adviser could have cashed in with a high-profile job; instead, he checked out—but not before taking the lead in staffing the new administration with people who were, yes, loyal. Shortly after the election, George W. was named by his father to chair what was dubbed the Silent Committee. It comprised about fifteen blood-oath Bushies, from Untermeyer to Jane Kenny, who’d worked in Bush’s congressional office in the late sixties. Their mission, as Untermeyer explains it, was to “make sure that good people who were not pushy in the unattractive Washington way would be remembered.”
But the most loyal would-be applicant of all never got a chance to be so remembered. In December George W. decided against working in the administration or, for that matter, anywhere in Washington. Why live in a city you openly dislike—especially when the possibility of owning a piece of a major league baseball team awaits you back in Dallas? “People were shocked when I said that I wasn’t going to hang around,” he said. “The assumption was that I was up there to be a lobbyist or something. I knew from day one I was leaving the minute the campaign was over.”
Even from a distance, however, his power and influence could be keenly felt, leading one journalist to christen him “the Nancy Reagan of the Bush White House.” Although his days as loyalty thermometer were behind him, he was still in the business of rewarding the good and punishing the bad. “There was this minister we wanted to meet with during the campaign,” Wead says, “but he wouldn’t meet with us. He snubbed us continually. When we won the election, he said he wanted to meet with the president-elect. George W. said, ‘No. That’s not how it works.’”
After the transition gave way to the inauguration and actual governing, George W. continued to take an interest in who got hired and who didn’t. “Well into this period,” Untermeyer says, “he’d call to say someone on the Silent Committee list was being jerked around by a Cabinet officer. I’d frequently get calls asking that I see someone or not forget someone.” One example is Richard Fisher, an acquaintance of Junior’s from Dallas. During the 1994 U.S. Senate race, first against Democrat Jim Mattox in the primary and then against Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison in the general election, Fisher was attacked for having sought a job in the Bush administration—but it was George W., Untermeyer eventually determined, who referred him. There was also catalog baron Roger Horchow, another of Junior’s Dallas acquaintances, who early in 1989 sought—unsuccessfully, it turned out—the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1994 the Houston Chronicle reported that George W. spoke up for Horchow because “he gave money to my father.” Then there were the supplicants Bush reportedly rebuffed, including Craig Fuller, the vice president’s chief of staff, who wanted to serve the new president in the same capacity. According to Richard Ben Cramer’s book about the 1988 campaign, What It Takes, Junior thought Fuller too much the Reaganite and too inattentive to the Bushes. “He wouldn’t return a damn phone call,” Cramer has him complaining. But George W. denied recently that he had it in for Fuller. “Someone’s picking up a bunch of rumors,” he said.
George W. also remained on big-shot patrol during this period. In June 1989 Atwater was photographed by Esquire in gym shorts, his pants down around his ankles. “He said, ‘Man, this is great,’” George W. remembered. “I said, ‘No. This isn’t right at all. You’re not the center of attention. You’re representing a man of dignity and class, and this is an undignified picture. He said”—the governor breaks into an exaggerated Southern accent—“‘Well, y’all mad about that?’ And I said, ‘You need to pick up the phone and call my mother right now and apologize.’” Atwater, no dummy, did.
Occasionally, George W. got to affect staffing and whack big shots—as he did in the case of White House chief of staff John Sununu, whom, it is widely believed, he fired. As governor of New Hampshire, Sununu had delivered the state to Bush in 1988 and was rewarded with the plum job Craig Fuller had wanted. But the hyperintelligent Sununu was a clumsy and arrogant manager who alienated most everyone around him. His enemies in the administration were especially irritated when the stock market nose-dived following a speech in which Bush proposed lowering certain credit-card interest rates, and Sununu’s response was, “The president ad-libbed.” For George W., that was an unforgivable act of disloyalty. “If a grenade is rolling by the Man, you dive on it first,” he was quoted as saying at the time. “The guy violated the cardinal rule.”
When several loyal friends, including Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, refused to work on the 1992 reelection campaign if Sununu had anything to do with it, the elder Bush had to act. “In late ’91 he dispatched Junior to talk to all of us who were concerned about Sununu’s role,” Matalin says. “So W. came to see each one us confidentially. He assessed the situation from each of our perspectives and presented the case to the president with a final judgment”—that is, Sununu had to go.
What happened next doesn’t square with legend, which has George W.—whom Matalin calls “his father’s trusted consigliere”—marching into Sununu’s office with the equivalent of a horse’s head. In fact, his visit with the chief of staff was by all accounts less confrontational. “It was like, ‘Are you hurting my father? Is your presence doing more harm than good?’” recalls Marlin Fitzwater, the president’s spokesman at the time. All George W. will say today is, “The conversations between me and Mr. Sununu are going to be private. I talked to him, and then he and dad reached an agreement.” On December 3, 1991, Sununu resigned.
THAT STORY REVERBERATES MORE THAN SEVEN YEARS LATER: Sununu has signed on as a national co-chairman of Dan Quayle’s presidential campaign. It’s a nice dramatic twist in the overall loyalty play, and it’s made even better by the suggestion of one Bush family ally that it was Sununu who engineered Quayle’s attack on George W.’s “compassionate conservatism.” Not everyone sees revenge as a motive, but some do: “Sununu is exactly that petty and exactly that stupid,” says another loyal Bushie.
Meanwhile, the process of rewarding and punishing continues. As Junior has assembled the team for his own presidential bid, certain members of his father’s inner circle have been conspicuously absent. According to U.S. News and World Report, he told a visitor, “I’m not interested in the people who lost my dad’s election.” Will that kind of attitude serve George W. Bush well now that he’s looking out for his own interests? He seems to have asked himself that very question. “There’s a huge difference,” he acknowledged in April, “between being the loyal son and being the candidate.”
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