The Evolver
(Page 3 of 4)
On the early afternoon of February 18, 1998, Bush and Hughes arrived at a juvenile prison in Marlin. Because the governor was running that year for reelection—and after that, who could say?—Hughes had arranged for the local and national press to attend. This was an extraordinary situation, since the identities of criminal youths were protected by state laws. But the photo op of Governor Bush dispensing tough (but compassionate!) love to his young wards was irresistible, and Hughes wanted it out there in the public domain. So the youth prison officials painstakingly obtained signed waivers from the parents of 22 juveniles, half of whom now sat in their orange jumpsuits beside Hughes’s boss. While the TV cameras rolled, one boy after the next recited his own litany of criminality—I’m Jimmy, I’m from Mineral Springs, at the age of thirteen I did steal the next-door neighbor’s car and I did run over my grandma with it, which did cripple her permanently—followed by his acknowledgment that he, rather than society, was to blame and his pledge to do better.
This was the Responsibility Era personified, as Bush well knew. It was also exploitative, and he knew that as well. This prefab moment was about winning votes by broadcasting images of a human transaction that never was. And so it was with an odd mixture of relish and embarrassment and finally impatience that he sat there, fidgeting a bit as the dreary testimonials proceeded. At 1:15 he had to be out of there. Other photo ops and glad-handings awaited in Terrell, Kaufman, Greenville, Richardson, and Garland, before the governor’s private plane would at last angle back south toward Austin.
A scrawny fifteen-year-old black kid raised his hand.
“Can I ask the governor a question?” said the boy, a petty thief from Tyler named Johnny Demon Baulkmon.
The juvenile officials blanched. Johnny had crossed a forbidden line, for which he would be punished later. But nothing could be done about it now.
That familiar jagged half-smile appeared on the governor’s face. “Sure you can,” he said.
“What do you think about us now?”
Bush fumbled with his fingers. He had no speech at the ready. No bubble to protect him. The cameras brought here to facilitate his photo op now bore down on George W. Bush, the most powerful man in Texas, at strange parity with a black juvenile delinquent. Only fifteen days ago, he had passed on the chance to grant a stay of execution to internationally renowned ax murderer and born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker. “I have concluded judgments about the heart and soul of an individual on death row are best left to a higher authority,” the governor had said in the prepared statement that sealed her fate. Nothing in it reflected the anguish that had compelled him to clear his entire calendar on the date of Tucker’s execution. That was the way it was. A leader had to be impersonal at times. He had to keep it in. Had to be . . . a policy personified. But right now, staring at Johnny Baulkmon, Bush could feel that he was about to cry.
His words, when he at last found them, sounded almost confessional: “You look like kids I see every day. And I’m impressed by the way you’re handling yourselves here. I think you can succeed. The state of Texas still loves you all. We haven’t given up on you. But we love you enough to punish you when you break the law.”
That was the answer to the question.
A strange euphoria overtook Bush and the other adults in the dormitory. Something had just taken place here that did not ordinarily occur, either in youth prisons or on the campaign trail. A sense of institutions humanized, of possibility. The Texas Youth Commission officials hugged and high-fived each other when the governor departed. But it was Bush who could not get over the encounter. For weeks thereafter, he recounted it to aides and friends the way other men might rhapsodize about a fishing tale or a chance bar stool flirtation with Sharon Stone.
Except that it was not myth. It was not braggadocio. It was anything but trivial. No: It was Big Picture collapsed into a singular, frail human moment. It was the Responsibility Era, Compassionate Conservatism—it was why he was in this. And when Bush was this seized by inspiration, the ever-attuned Hughes knew what to do next. There had been a similar moment four years ago, when her boss first ran for governor—a welfare mom he’d met in Dallas, or something like that, she couldn’t remember—and afterward Hughes had made it a point to put skeptical reporters in a car with George W., so that they wouldn’t have to take it from a paid flack that the guy was absolutely passionate about this stuff!
So she proceeded to work the Marlin tableau into his speeches, in language that one seldom heard from the lips of any politician, much less a conservative: “Each of us holds a piece of the promise of America. That young man at the jail in Marlin wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure the promise was meant for him. He didn’t know whether he still had a shot. Yet some spark was alive. He was willing to risk asking the governor, What do you think of me? He meant, Is there hope for me? Do I have potential? Can I make it? Do I own a piece of the promise of America? In the mightiest and wealthiest and freest nation in the world, he still wasn’t sure. And that’s a tragedy.”
(Sometime after his chance encounter with George W. Bush, Baulkmon was raped by another juvenile offender while serving time in a TYC detention facility. Though the meeting in Marlin would become a centerpiece of Bush’s nomination acceptance speech in 2000, Baulkmon did not learn of his fleeting fame until years later, after, apparently unconvinced by “the promise of America,” he had become an adult petty criminal. In 2006 Baulkmon would appraise Bush thusly, from a Beaumont prison visitation room: “He doesn’t care about anything but himself. He’s complete trash, a horrible, evil person.”)
People were talking about him, and that was fine. But as heady as it all was, Bush had just gotten comfortable in Austin and was not of the mind to make any sudden movements. When his dad’s old campaign manager, Bob Teeter, had come to town in 1997 and visited with Rove, Hughes, longtime Bush ally Don Evans, and others about the possibility—just the possibility—of the governor’s running for president, Hughes had shut down the whole thing. “This is way out in front of where I think the governor is,” she said.
Still, he let Rove talk him into a road trip.
On April 24, 1998, Bush arrived at the Palo Alto residence of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Inside were the big thinkers of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution: former Ronald Reagan economic advisers Martin and Annelise Anderson; economist John Cogan; the college’s impressive young provost and Sovietologist Condoleezza Rice; and the man who had organized the meeting, Michael Boskin, the former director of the Council of Economic Advisors under George H. W. Bush. Bush came prepared, but he was relaxed as Shultz made the introductions. Noticing that his host had a Hispanic housekeeper, the governor spoke to her in her native tongue, to her tittering delight.
They sat in Shultz’s living room, where coffee and cookies were laid out on a table. The host began by saying, “Some of you may remember another meeting we had here with a governor.” That governor had been Ronald Reagan, back in 1979, when many of these same big thinkers were sniffing him out to discern whether he was really the dunce everyone said he was. They came away thinking entirely the opposite, and thus did the conservative intelligentsia throw its gray matter behind Reagan’s 1980 campaign.
And now here was George W. Bush, about to provide a powerful dose of déjà vu. After listening to his hosts give presentations on budget policy, taxes, economic outlook, entitlements, Social Security, and international affairs—and being professors, each went overtime—Bush spoke his piece.
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things, some of them back when I was working on my dad’s campaign,” he said. “I’m thinking about running, but I’m not here to make any announcement. I’ll be making up my mind over the next few months.”
