George W. Bush Interview With Mark K. Updegrove (Audio) 
Cast Away
During her 23-year marriage to a brother of the president of the United States, Sharon Bush dutifully played the role of stay-at-home mother while reaping the rewards of her famous last name. Only now does she understand the terms of inclusion in the world's most powerful family: Membership can be revoked at any time
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He has a gift for the fervent sell, and his mother saw it early. Neil, the fourth of six children, was six years old and home sick from school one day when Barbara asked him to read to her. "I discovered that not only could Neil not read, he didn't have a clue," she wrote in A Memoir. "Yet, he was getting all A's at school, including in reading. . . . So I went to his class to see this 'great little reader.' It was a fascinating study in manipulation. The teacher had the children read a line or two, and when she got to Neil, he flashed that great smile of his and paused. A student helped him with the first word, the teacher the next, and so it went. Neil had been faking his way through reading—not uncommon for children with reading problems—and nobody had noticed."
Neil was diagnosed with dyslexia soon after, but by then he had already learned something critical: that he could use his charm (his own, and later that of his powerful relations) to persuade others to do the tough stuff while he remained as blameless and buoyant as, well, a first-grader. His failings later in life would cause the press to paint him as a black sheep, the sorry sibling every free-world leader has to bear, but in fact, Neil has always been much more like the rest of his famous family—in his psychological makeup and in the way he conducts business—than anyone cares to admit.
LAST MARCH I ATTENDED a fundraiser in Houston for the Kinkaid School billed as "An Evening with the 41st President of the United States, George Bush, and Mrs. Barbara Bush." Three of the Bushes' sons had gone to Kinkaid (George, Jeb, and Neil), so the evening had an easy, familiar air that began and ended with a standing ovation. For the next hour exactly, George and Barbara Bush sat world-leader-like, in two white wing chairs on the stage—he was slouched and relaxed, she was poised and acerbic—and performed the engaging, self-deprecating shtick that has always separated the Bushes, in loyalists' eyes, from the doomed Kennedys, the glitzy Reagans, and the amoral Clintons. With nearly sixty years of marriage behind them, "Every day is a good day for us," Barbara confessed. Optimism should never be underrated: "You can't get down," George insisted. "When you lose one, you gotta get on with your life." His 1992 loss was a minor bump in the road. "There are a lot worse things than losing an election," Barbara said. George agreed. "What matters is family, and I can't emphasize that enough," he said, with a lot of emphasis.
Basking in the Bushes' confident, affectionate glow, I wanted to believe that the family had gotten where it is today not because of what Kevin Phillips suggests in American Dynasty—that the Bushes have endured because they created and maintained through four generations an ingenious and impregnable cabal of oil, intelligence, political, and investment banking interests—but because, as they said, they loved their children, stressed education, and exemplified good values.
The latter is a mythology they have sold just as well inside the family as outside. "If I had any complaints in those wonderful early days in Houston," Barbara wrote in A Memoir, "it was that George and I didn't have time to do a lot together. He was busy building a business, which involved a lot of travel, and we had five young children and a new house, which meant a lot of expenses." This was the template for the Bush marriage, one that shaped Neil's life and that of his brothers. He grew up with a father he deeply admired but rarely saw; instead of the man, he knew and loved the myth, the George Bush who had abandoned a privileged East Coast existence to make it on his own in Texas. Neil's mother stayed home and, virtually alone, raised the children, earning the nickname the Enforcer.
If this was what Neil was looking for in a mate, he probably satisfied most of the requirements when, campaigning for his father's first race for the Republican presidential nomination, in New Hampshire in 1979, he met 27-year-old Sharon Smith. The spunky young woman with the sparkling grin was not from wealth or privilege; she already had one marriage behind her and was working as a real estate agent and a schoolteacher to support herself. In contrast to the sorority girls Neil would have met while a student at Tulane and the debs he squired around Houston, Sharon would have probably seemed both sturdier and more ambitious. She didn't come from a fine old family, but she wanted to fit into Neil's. "I wanted to do the right thing," she told me.
Whatever that was. After a brief courtship and a wedding ceremony in the church in Maine where Neil's grandparents had married, Sharon—described as "darling" in Barbara's 1994 memoir—started to join in a family portrait requested by a photographer from a newsmagazine. Barbara, standing with her husband and children, asked the daughters-in-law to step out. "I'm sorry," she told Sharon on her wedding day. "We don't want you in this picture."
From that day on, she followed Neil's lead. They moved to oil-rich Denver in the early eighties because that's where Neil could best replicate the success his father had had in oil-rich fifties Midland. Like his father and his brothers, Neil started out with a lot of money and power behind him. George H. W. Bush was then vice president and heading Ronald Reagan's task force on regulatory relief, as part of the push for deregulation of financial institutions. "Thus throughout the eighties, in their own ways, George and Neil Bush led parallel lives, members of an old family lending the imprimatur of legitimacy to the fast new money," Sidney Blumenthal wrote in the Guardian in 1990.
In Denver, Neil and Sharon followed family imperatives; they joined the right church and made the right friends, as George H. W. Bush had, the ones necessary to make a small fortune and, as Neil frequently hinted, to launch a political career. Neil founded his own oil company, JNB Exploration, as his father and oldest brother had done. Sharon showed a gritty ability to climb the social ladder, chairing charity balls and creating her own foundation for abused children while raising three kids, Lauren, Pierce, and Ashley. "They were the golden couple back then," said Rex John, a Houston publicist who befriended the Bushes in Denver.
It may be, as John said, that Neil's ingenuousness—as opposed to, say, greed or ambition—got him into trouble. "He's exceedingly naive and well intentioned," said John, a subscriber to the tragic-figure thesis. Neil gladly accepted a board position with a rapidly expanding savings and loan called Silverado, at the request of the thrift's chairman. "He told me he wanted me because I was younger than anyone else on the board, that I could add freshness, new blood," Neil, who was 29 at the time, would explain later. "I never pretended to be an expert in the savings and loan business, and that wasn't what he was looking for." As chronicled in Silverado, by Steven Wilmsen, he also allowed himself to be taken under the wing of two high-flying real estate speculators, who happily invested in his oil company. One partner gave Neil $100,000 to invest in a particular deal and told him that if the deal went bad, Neil wouldn't have to pay him back. It did, and Neil didn't.
But when oil prices collapsed, followed by the collapse of real estate, followed by the collapse of the thrifts that had floated that game—a story familiar to lots of Texans—Neil's business dealings attracted the attention of federal regulators. His oil company had never found much oil; it had survived instead on a series of ever more generous loans from his backers. (George W. Bush got a similar start: His unsuccessful Arbusto oil company was eventually merged into Harken Energy, which returned to him $500,000 in stock, along with consulting fees and, according to Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty, "the unmistakable message that his financing rested on his name and connections.") Neil ran into trouble, however, when, in August 1988, Silverado posted the biggest loss in Colorado history—$100 million—and it was revealed that he had allowed his two biggest backers to borrow prodigiously from the thrift without disclosing his connections to them.
The year the regulators moved to close Silverado, 1988, was also the year that George H. W. Bush was running for president; Neil resigned from the board, claiming that he didn't want the bank regulators to feel that his presence could affect their investigations. (As Silverado notes, there is still argument over whether the Reagan-Bush administration interfered with regulators to postpone the investigation until after the election.) In press interviews, Neil denied that he had turned a blind eye to conflicts of interest and accused government investigators of using him as "a political football." He told reporters he was drinking fruit juices and taking care of himself and still spoke about running for public office. But the once glamorous Bushes were having a hard time: Neil was driving a borrowed car, and his parents were helping pay the bills. As Sharon would later explain in a deposition, "I just assumed Neil was in the spot because of his father being president. It was a political thing." In the meantime, angry Denverites were picketing their home. Sharon heard that the FDIC was seeking $200 million from Neil and ten other Silverado officials while she was picking up her kids at school.
In 1991 the Office of Thrift Supervision sanctioned Neil, saying that his actions while a Silverado board member constituted "multiple conflicts of interest." Because Silverado was FDIC-insured, its fall left the American taxpayers with a bill for $1.3 billion. Neil gave a half-hearted apology to the Washington Post, stating: "I happened to be one of hundreds of other American businessmen and women who served as an outside director on the board of a savings and loan institution that failed during the eighties. I regret that the institution's failure cost taxpayers so much money."
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