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 came by this lack of contrition naturally; throughout this period Neil's parents remained faithful and supportive. "I can't believe that [Neil's] name would appear in the paper if it was Jones, not Bush. In any event, I know that the guy is totally honest," President Bush wrote to Congressman Lud Ashley, a former Yale classmate, who would eventually raise the $50,000 needed to pay off Neil's portion of a $49.5 million settlement in the FDIC lawsuit. Barbara suffered privately. "[Neil's] whole problem is that he is our son," she wrote in her journal during this period. "He was investigated by the government and the press, who decided Neil was guilty before he even had his say." But, as she wrote in A Memoir, there was a bright side: "When Neil moved from Denver to Houston, his longtime friends there welcomed him with open arms."
HOUSTON IN THE EARLY NINETIES was not unlike Denver in the eighties. It had made a dramatic, ego-boosting recovery from its own oil bust, and people in the energy and tech businesses—particularly highfliers at Enron—were making more money than seemed humanly possible. Those people could not have cared less about Neil's Silverado issues; Houston has always had a forgiving attention span, and more to the point, Neil's father, whom Houstonians have regarded as one of their own since he represented them in Congress, was in the White House.
Neil came to town with an impressive enough title: director of finance for a sports cable company called Transmedia Communications. Sharon, when not busy with the kids, volunteered with myriad charities. "I wanted to be a Point of Light," she told me. The local press couldn't get enough of the couple. Houston LifeStyle magazine profiled them in 1995 with the headline "The Bushes Are Correct . . . Privately, Professionally, and Politically." The glowing story ended with "We're glad Neil said, 'We're not perfect,' 'cause we were beginning to think they are."
Actually, there was a great deal of imperfection in the Neil Bush family at that time. The couple had arrived with little money, and Neil was effectively banned from working in banking because of Silverado. An older and wealthier version of his childhood reading circle had come to the family's aid: The $60,000-a-year Transmedia job had been arranged through a friend and backer of his father who had raised more than $300,000 for his 1988 campaign. Friends of the elder Bushes' also treated Neil, Sharon, and their three kids to free housing their first few years in town. It wasn't until 1993 that they bought a modest ranch home in a pricey section of Memorial, the neighborhood that is the epicenter of prosperous Republican life in Houston.
Despite his public denials, Silverado had caused Neil some pain. He was in his mid-thirties and more determined than ever to prove that he could be as successful as his father and his brothers. By the early nineties, George W. was the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers and on his way to becoming governor of Texas; Jeb was successful in Florida real estate and launching a political career; and Marvin, the baby of the family, was showing a knack for making real money running a hedge fund. Neil, in contrast, had trouble finding real work, either because of his own misdeeds or in deference to the family's political ambitions.
In Houston, however, there were always people close to—or wanting to be close to—the senior Bushes who were willing to help out. Nijan Fares, the son of a prominent Lebanese businessman, gave Neil a job traveling around the world selling tops to oil storage tanks. It was through Fares that Neil and Sharon met Jamal Daniel, a tall, courtly heir to an enormous Syrian fortune. Very few people in Houston's wealthy social circles seemed to know or care exactly who Daniel was or what he did. His family was rumored to have been involved with the founding of the Syrian Ba'ath party; he seemed to have a great many companies (Uniteg, Finial, Carnavon and Grailwood at one time or another); and he liked to drop the names of the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon. He was a big contributor to George W. Bush's gubernatorial race in 1994 and early on displayed a keen generosity toward Neil: He put him on the board of his Crest Financial Services and paid him $60,000 a year for what Neil would eventually describe in a deposition as "miscellaneous consulting services as co-chairman of the company . . . such as answering the phone when [the other co-chairman] Jamal Daniel calls."
Daniel took Neil, Sharon, and the kids to EuroDisney in 1992 and bought a $380,000 cottage for the family in Kennebunkport. The Financial Times recently reported that Neil wrote letters on Daniel's behalf to potential investors; currently Daniel is also serving as an advisory board member of New Bridge Strategies, which counsels companies interested in rebuilding Iraq. New Bridge is chaired by former FEMA chief and George W. Bush's staff chief, Joe Allbaugh, and boasts several former senior Bush administration officials on its board.
By the mid-nineties, Neil was calling himself a consultant, and what he was selling was Bush Inc. The senior Bushes, and Neil himself, have always denied that anyone has profited from an association with the family, but Neil in fact was simply bringing a family practice from the shadows into the light. (Consider George H. W. Bush's Carlyle Group, where former administration officials now use their influence to create investment opportunities.) And though Neil usually stayed away from deals that had direct links to his brother's presidential administration and earned a fairly modest annual salary that ranged in recent years from $60,000 to $180,000, he gained more than $1 million or so in various stock sales, all for doing precious little. Neil's most promising consulting deal was more than $2 million in stock options for serving as a consultant to China's Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing, even though he had no expertise in semiconductors at all.
Despite his globe-trotting, by 2000 Neil was financially strapped. He had invested his wealth in the stock market just as the tech bubble burst, and by his own admission, his family was spending more than he earned. He was on the road constantly, leaving the domestic details to his wife, as his father had done. Now Sharon was the Enforcer. Her good works—and perhaps her last name—had earned her the title of Outstanding Mother of the Year from the National Mother's Day Committee, but she was unhappy. Lauren and Ashley were smart, good-natured, and compliant, but Pierce, though inordinately bright and engaging, was prone to rages that his mother, and his school, found increasingly problematic. After a doctor recommended medication, Sharon turned to her mother-in-law for help, hoping that Barbara could persuade Neil to follow the lead of another sibling who had put one of his children on medication. Barbara's response was to hold a family conference—without Sharon.
"We see Neil and Sharon and their delightful children a lot," Barbara wrote in a letter in 1999, "every Sunday, if they are in town and if we are in town." But relations between Sharon Bush and her mother-in-law, never the best, had deteriorated. They were both strong-willed women who liked things their way, and their ways were different. When Sharon wanted Lauren to debut at the glitzy Hôtel de Crillon, in Paris, for instance, the professionally reserved senior Bushes disapproved; Sharon got Jamal Daniel to foot the bill. Sharon bristled when Neil was demoted in the family pecking order; she was insulted, for instance, when he was sent to campaign in small, out-of-the-way New Hampshire towns when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000. Sharon, who wasn't always averse to using the family name to ease the progress of her own life, may have never understood that rebellion has its price. "She talked all over town about her mother-in-law, and of course it got back to Barbara," said a friend of Neil's. "She was disloyal."
IN PUBLIC NEIL AND SHARON looked like rich, accomplished members of the country's most successful family. But in reality they were floating on a sea of largesse. ("Can you help me buy Ashley a horse?" a new Bush friend asked an old Bush friend once, at a dinner party.) Sharon liked the limelight, but she knew she was losing her family. Pierce's problems were escalating, and Neil was rarely home. When he was there, he was distant and distracted.
One reason for Neil's distance was that he had started a new Austin-based business in 1999, Ignite. The educational-software firm gave him something he had never had in his life: a purpose beyond extending the Bush family brand. Ignite was inspired, he often said, by Pierce's learning problems, but developing the company was also a way to redress the difficulties that he too experienced as a child. As Sharon said, "Ignite was his therapy."
I saw that and more as I watched Neil try to sell his concept to some teachers attending a workshop in Houston on a rainy Saturday last February. Ignite's one finished product, an early-American-history course, is tailored, like most educational software, for today's students' attention spans and for overburdened teachers. A unit on the cotton gin, for instance, is accompanied by a hip-hop jingle that goes: "Cotton was king/Cotton so easy to grow/It was a cash crop/Oh, yeah!/And it led to a boom in the Southern eee-kon-oh- meeee!" If this approach to learning sounds familiar, maybe it is because Neil is not the first Bush sibling to display a preference for ingesting information in small bites.
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