The Bush Family

Bush Family Value$
The Bush clan's family business

Stephen Pizzo
September/October 1992 Issue

In 1991, President Bush bristled at a flurry of news accounts that questioned the business ethics of three of his sons. "The media ought to be ashamed of itself for what they're doing," Bush complained. "They [the boys] have a right to make a living, and their relationships are appropriate," added a White House spokeswoman in June 1992.

Since George Bush has raised "family values" as a campaign issue repeatedly, though, it seems only fair to take a look at his own family. A computer search showed that over the past five years stories have periodically surfaced chronicling the individual business antics of the president's sons -- each riding comfortably through life in the slipstream of his father's growing power and influence.

Although a handful of good reporters for the New York Times, LA Times, Village Voice, and Wall Street Journal have diligently been digging through business records for months, something has been missing: an overview that "connects the dots" in the myriad deals that have been examined, making it clear that cashing in on influence has become a pattern of behavior extending through the first family.

Instead of criticizing reporters, the president might more wisely begin listening to those in government who have watched his sons with mounting worry. A year ago, I sat across a desk from a Secret Service agent who had been assigned to Bush-family security. I rattled off the names of a half-dozen questionable characters who had found their way into business deals with the Bush boys. How had these characters been allowed to get even close to the president's sons?

The agent slumped back in his chair and sighed. "We warn them," he said in a whisper. "But that's all we can do. We can't stop these kids from associating with someone they want to be with. All we can do after warning them is to sweep these guys with metal detectors when they come around."

What follows is a sourcebook of concerns about the president's three sons.

George W. Bush, Jr.

None of George Bush's offspring is more his father's son than George W. Bush. George Jr., or "Shrub" as Molly Ivins refers to him, began his own Texas oil career in the mid-1970s when he formed Bush Exploration. Like the business dealings of his brothers, George's company was not a success, and it was rescued in 1983 by another oil company, Spectrum 7, run by several staunch and well-heeled Reagan-Bush supporters. But by mid-1986, a soft oil market found Spectrum also near bankruptcy.

Many oil companies went belly-up during that time. But Spectrum had one asset the others lacked -- the son of the vice-president. Rescue came in 1986 in the form of Harken Energy, just in the nick of time. Harken absorbed Spectrum, and, in the process, Junior got $600,000 worth of Harken stock in return for his Spectrum shares. He also won a lucrative consulting contract and stock options. In all, the deal would put well over $1 million in his pocket over the next few years -- even though Harken itself lost millions.

Harken Energy was formed in l973 by two oilmen who would benefit from a successful covert effort to destabilize Australia's Labor Party government (which had attempted to shut out foreign oil exploration). A decade later, Harken was sold to a new investment group headed by New York attorney Alan G. Quasha, a partner in the firm of Quasha, Wessely & Schneider. Quasha's father, a powerful attorney in the Philippines, had been a staunch supporter of then-president Ferdinand Marcos. William Quasha had also given legal advice to two top officials of the notorious Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, a CIA operation.

After the sale of Harken Energy in 1983, Alan Quasha became a director and chairman of the board. Under Quasha, Harken suddenly absorbed Junior's struggling Spectrum 7 in 1986. The merger immediately opened a financial horn of plenty and reversed Junior's fortunes. But like his brother Jeb, Junior seemed unconcerned about the characters who were becoming his benefactors. Harken's $25 million stock offering in 1987, for example, was underwritten by a Little Rock, Arkansas, brokerage house, Stephens, Inc., which placed the Harken stock offering with the London subsidiary of Union Bank -- a bank that had surfaced in the scandal that resulted in the downfall of the Australian Labor government in 1976 and, later, in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal. (It was also Union Bank, according to congressional hearings on international money laundering, that helped the now-notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International skirt Panamanian money-laundering laws by flying cash out of the country in private jets, and that was used by Ferdinand Marcos to stash 325 tons of Philippine gold around the world.)

Stephens, Inc., also helped introduce the BCCI virus into US banking in 1978 when it arranged the sale of Bert Lance's National Bank of Georgia to BCCI front man Ghaith Pharoan. (The head of Stephens, Inc., Jackson Stephens, is a member of President Bush's exclusive "Team 100," a group of 249 wealthy individuals who have contributed at least $100,000 each to the GOP's presidential-campaign committee.)

If any of these associations raised questions in the mind of George Bush, Jr., he had little incentive to voice them. Besides getting Harken stock through the deal, Junior was paid $80,000 a year as a consultant (until 1989, when his wages were increased to $120,000; recently they were reduced to $45,000). He was also allowed to borrow $180,375 from the company at very low interest rates. In 1989 and 1990, according to the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Harken's board "forgave" $341,000 in loans to its executives. In addition, Junior took advantage of the company's ultraliberal executive stock purchase plan, which allowed him to buy Harken stock at 40 percent below market value.

Such lavish executive compensation would suggest a company doing quite well indeed. But in reality, Harken had little going for itself. One Wall Street analyst called Harken's web of insider stock deals and mounting debt "a lot of jiggery-pokery." Harken was not making money and could not have continued into 1990 without at least some means of convincing lenders and investors that the company would soon find a lot of oil.

Suddenly, in January 1990, Harken Energy became the talk of the Texas oil industry. The company with no offshore-oil-drilling experience beat out a more-established international conglomerate, Amoco, in bagging the exclusive contract to drill in a promising new offshore oil field for the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain. The deal had been arranged for Harken by two former Stephens, Inc., brokers. A company insider claims the president's son did not initiate the deal -- but feels that his presence in the firm helped with the Bahrainis. "Hell, that's why he's on the damn board," the insider says. "...You say, 'By the way, the president's son sits on our board.' You use that. There's nothing wrong with that."

Junior has told acquaintances conflicting stories about his own involvement in the deal. He first claimed that he had "recused" himself from the deal; "George said he left the room when Bahrain was being discussed 'because we can't even have the appearance of having anything to do with the government.' He was into a big rant about how unfair it was to be the president's son. He said, 'I was so scrupulous I was never in the room when it was discussed.'"

Junior alternately claimed, to reporters for the Wall Street Journal and D Magazine, that he had opposed the arrangement. But the company insider says, to the contrary, that Junior was excited about the Bahrain deal. "Like any member of the board, he was thrilled," the associate says. "His attitude was, 'Holy shit, what a great deal!'"

Through the Bahrain deal, the ties between BCCI and Harken Energy grew tighter. Sheikh Khalifah, the prime minister of Bahrain and brother of the emir, was also a shareholder in BCCI -- and it was Khalifah who played the key role in selecting Harken for the job. Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, in turn, was a business associate of BCCI front man Ghaith Pharoan; he bought a chunk of Harken's stock and placed his representative, Talat Othman, on Harken Energy's board of directors.

Did Junior or any of the other Harken Energy executives trade on the Bush name in these speculative business deals? None of the principals will answer questions. But this much is known: after the Harken-Bahrain deal was settled, Othman was added to the list of fifteen Arabs who met with President George Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft three times in 1990 -- once just two days after Iraq invaded Kuwait -- while serving on Harken's board of directors.

The promise of hitting it big in the oil-rich gulf was certainly critical for Harken. News of the Bahrain deal kept investors buying stock and lenders making loans. Still, Harken had nowhere near the capital required for such a large offshore operation halfway around the world. This required real money. But not to worry: The billionaire Bass brothers stepped up to the plate and said they'd be happy to underwrite the cost of the drilling in return for a piece of the action. (Robert Bass is a member of President Bush's Team 100; he and other Bass family members have contributed $226,000 to George, Sr.'s, cause since 1988.)

But even well-heeled friends like the Bass brothers could not protect Harken from the troubles of the world. Just four months after the Bahrain deal was sealed, storm clouds developed over the gulf region, threatening the oil-exploration deal. In May 1990, the U.S. State Department sent a chilling but still classified report to Scowcroft. The report warned that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was out of control and was threatening his neighbors:

May 16, 1990
SECRET
Attached is a paper containing a list of options for responding to recent actions and statements by the Government of Iraq. ...We ask that you pass this paper to Robert Gates [CIA] for his review.

Under "options" the memo suggested:

Ban Oil Purchases: The largest benefit Iraq receives from the US is through our oil purchases...
PRO -- A total ban on oil purchases would have some short-term impact.
CON -- Such action might also have an impact on US Oil prices.

Oil companies had learned, during the years of the long Iran-Iraq war, that trouble in the gulf hurts companies with oil interests because, for one thing, at the first sound of a rifle shot in the gulf region, Lloyds of London jacks up insurance rates on oil tankers and company installations. The "wartime" rates are very high and cut deeply into company profits and investor confidence. If things really get out of hand, pipelines are destroyed and waterways are mined.

The secret memo augured ill for Harken's fledgling venture. To compound matters, that same month, Harken's own financial advisers at Smith Barney produced a hand-wringing report voicing alarm at the company's rapidly deteriorating financial condition. (A former company official told Mother Jones that Harken owed more than $150 million to banks and other creditors at the time.) Since Harken wasn't producing anything, it was hard to find a revenue stream, unless you count the river of fees, stock options, and salaries running into the pockets of Junior and other top Harken executives. Junior, as a member of Harken's restructuring committee, could not have been ignorant of the report, since the board had met in May and worked directly with the Smith Barney consultants.

In June 1990, Junior suddenly unloaded the bulk of his Harken stock -- 212,140 shares -- for a tidy $848,560. A former business associate says that Junior's motivation was his desire to buy an expensive new house in Dallas, for which he wanted to pay cash. The June 1990 transaction was an insider stock sale, and security laws required that it be reported no later than July 10, 1990. But Junior filed no such report, at least not then.

Then, in August, Iraqi troops marched into Kuwait, and Harken shares plummeted 25 percent. Junior would have lost $212,140 if he'd waited to sell his shares until then. Still, he didn't file his SEC disclosure until seven months later, in March 1991 -- well after U.S. troops had finished fighting and the gulf war had moved off the front pages. Harken stock rebounded briefly, but quickly collapsed again.

Were government secrets discussed, directly or indirectly, that would have given Harken Energy a leg up in exploiting the Bahrain deal? The White House won't say. If Junior traded on exclusive, nonpublic, insider information, he committed a gross violation of SEC rules. Taken together, the company's critical need for success in its Bahraini deal and a possible oil embargo to be imposed by his father provided Junior with strong motivation to bail out of Harken stock before the public discovered either piece of news. (SEC spokesman John Heine says he is unaware of any enforcement action pending.)

The folks at Harken Energy weren't the only ones in Texas taking care of Junior during the 1980s. He was appointed the managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, even though his partnership contribution was only a fraction of the team's purchase price. Among those coughing up the money to buy the Rangers were William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, major contributors to the president's campaign who had also been in on the rescue of Junior's oil company.

Junior doesn't deny that being a Bush has helped him become a millionaire. "I recognize what my talents are and what my weaknesses are," he told Texas reporters last year. "I don't get hung up on it. Being George Bush's son has its pluses and minuses in some people's minds. In my thinking, it's a plus."

Junior might have been thinking that among the minuses were questions about his role at Harken. As this article was being prepared -- and in the midst of extensive interviewing of former and current Harken business associates -- Junior announced a six-month leave of absence as a consultant and member of the Harken board. His role in the presidential campaign, the statement said, precluded Junior's active involvement at Harken through the remainder of 1992.

In any case, Junior is stepping away from a company in deep trouble. Harken stock is trading near its all-time low. Recently, test wells in Bahrain turned up dry and the company has not produced anything else. "Harken is not hard to understand -- it's easy," says Charles Strain, an energy-company analyst in Houston. "The company has only one real asset -- its Bahrain contract. If that field turns out to be dry, Harken's stock is worth, at the most, 25 cents a share. If they hit it big over there, the stock could be worth $30 to $40 dollars a share. It's a pure crapshoot."

John Ellis ("Jeb") Bush

After graduating from Texas University, Jeb Bush served a short apprenticeship at the Venezuelan branch of Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas before settling in Miami, in 1980, to work on his father's unsuccessful primary bid against Ronald Reagan. Campaigning for Dad was hardly a paying job. But Jeb was about to learn that being one of George Bush's sons means never having to circulate a résumé.

In the next few years, financial support flowed to Jeb through Miami's right-wing Cuban community. Republican party politics and a series of business scandals -- including Medicaid fraud and shady S&L deals -- were inextricably intertwined. A former federal prosecutor told MJ that, when he looked into Jeb's lucrative business dealings with a now-fugitive Cuban, he considered two possibilities -- Jeb was either crooked or stupid. At the time, he concluded Jeb was merely stupid.

Jeb and Armando Codina
Shortly after arriving in Miami, Jeb was hired by Cuban-American developer Armando Codina to work at his Miami development company as an agent leasing office space. A couple of years later, Jeb and Codina became business partners, and in 1985 they purchased an office building in a deal partly financed by a savings and loan that later failed.

The $4.56 million loan, from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida, was granted in such a way that neither Codina's nor Bush's name appeared on the loan papers as the borrowers. A third man, J. Edward Houston, borrowed the $4.56 million from Broward and then re-lent it to the Bush partnership. When federal regulators closed Broward Savings in 1988, they found the loan, which had been secured by the Bush partnership, in default.

As Jeb's father was finishing his second term as vice-president and running for the presidency, federal regulators had two options: to get Jeb Bush and his partner to repay the loan, or to foreclose on their office building. But regulators came up with a third solution. After reappraising the building, regulators decided it wasn't worth as much as was owed for it. The regulators reduced the amount owed by Bush and his partner from $4.56 million to just $500,000. The pair paid that amount and were allowed to keep their office building. Taxpayers picked up the tab for the unpaid $4 million.

After the Broward Savings deal was revealed, Jeb described himself and his partner as "victims of circumstances."

Jeb and Camilo Padrera
By 1984, Jeb had been made chairman of the Dade County Republican party, and it was as Republican party chief that he nuzzled up to con man Camilo Padreda. Padreda was serving as Dade County GOP finance chairman and had raised money for the party from Miami's Cuban community. (He had also been a counterintelligence officer for deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.) Padreda made his living as a developer who specialized in deals with the corrupt Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1986, he hired Jeb as the leasing agent for a vacant commercial-office building, which Padreda had built with $1.4 million in federal loans -- loans approved by HUD officials, oddly enough, even though they knew there was already a glut of vacant office space in Miami.

Like so many of those who would attach themselves to the Bush sons over the years, Padreda brought some hefty luggage with him. In 1982, four years before teaming up with Jeb, Padreda, along with another right-wing Cuban exile, Hernandez Cartaya, was indicted and accused of looting Jefferson Savings and Loan Association in McAllen, Texas. The federal indictment charged that the pair had embezzled over $500,000 from the thrift. (Cartaya was also charged with drug smuggling, money laundering, and gun running.) But the Jefferson Savings case would never go to trial.

Soon after the indictment, FBI officials got a call from someone at the CIA warning the agents that Cartaya was one of their own -- a veteran of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion -- according to a prosecutor who worked on the case. In short order, the charges against Padreda were dropped and the charges against Cartaya were reduced to a single count of tax evasion. (Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerome Sanford was furious and filed a demand with the CIA, under the Freedom of Information Act, for all documents relating to the agency's interference in his case. The CIA, citing national-security reasons, denied Sanford's request.)

In 1989, Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton wrote about Jefferson Savings and Cartaya in a series of stories alleging that CIA operatives and contractors had systematically misused at least twenty-six savings and loans during the 1980s as part of a secret program to fund illegal "off-the-shelf" covert operations, particularly those aiding the Nicaraguan contras. (CIA officials denied the charge, but admitted to the House intelligence Committee in 1990 that former CIA operatives had been working at four of the S&Ls named in Brewton's article. A CIA spokesman claimed that agency operatives had done nothing illegal.)

The Jefferson Savings affair occurred four years before Jeb Bush met Padreda, and it is possible he missed earlier reports. But he could hardly have passed over the next batch of stories involving Padreda's questionable practices, because they were spread across the front pages of Miami's papers in 1985, just months before the two teamed up. These stories, in Jeb's hometown paper, alleged that Padreda had improperly influenced a local politician -- the Dade County manager, to be precise, who'd been made a secret partner when Padreda ran into trouble getting a parcel of land rezoned. The property was promptly rezoned, and the county official made a quick $127,000 profit when Padreda, in turn, "sold" it to an offshore Padreda partnership. That partnership was controlled from Panama by a fugitive Miami attorney, who had already been indicted for laundering drug money. (The official resigned, but Padreda was not charged in the case.)

Yet the 1985 scandal did not seem to lessen Jeb's enthusiasm for Camilo Padreda. Jeb enthusiastically accepted the task of finding tenants for Padreda's empty HUD-financed office building. Padreda, the government officials involved, and Jeb all refused to answer questions about the scandal. But of allegations that Padreda engaged in illegal behavior, there remains no doubt. In 1989, he pleaded guilty to charges that he defrauded HUD of millions of dollars during the 1980s.

Jeb and Miguel Recarey
With Miami awash in empty office space in 1986, it was no small event when bagged International Medical Centers as a key tenant for Padreda's HUD-financed building. IMC, which leased nearly all the space in Padreda's vacant building, was at the time one of the nation's fastest-growing health-maintenance organizations (HMO) and had become the largest recipient of federal Medicare funds.

IMC was run by Cuban-American Miguel Recarey, a character with a host of idiosyncrasies. He carried a 9-mm Heckler & Koch semiautomatic pistol under his suit coat and kept a small arsenal of AR-15 and Uzi assault rifles at his Miami estate, where his bedroom was protected by bullet-proof windows and a steel door. It apparently wasn't his enemies Recarey feared so much as his friends. He had a long-standing relationship with Miami Mafia godfather Santo Trafficante, Jr., and had participated in the illfated, CIA-inspired mob assassination plot against Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. (Associates of Recarey add that Trafficante was the money behind Recarey's business ventures.)

Recarey's brother, Jorge, also had ties to the CIA. So it was no surprise that IMC crawled with former spooks. Employee résumés were studded with references to the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Cuban Intelligence agency; there was even a fellow who claimed to have been a KGB agent, An agent with the U.S. Office of Labor Racketeering in Miami would later describe IMC as a company in which "a criminal enterprise interfaced with intelligence operations."

Recarey also surrounded himself with those who could influence the political system. He hired Jeb Bush as IMC's "real-estate consultant." Though Jeb would never close a single real-estate deal, his contract called for him to earn up to $250,000 (he actually received $75,000). Jeb's real value to Recarey was not in real estate but in his help in facilitating the largest HMO Medicare fraud in U.S. history.

Jeb phoned top Health and Human Services officials in Washington in 1985 to lobby for a special exemption from HHS rules for IMC. This highly unusual waiver was critical to Recarey's scam. Without it, the company would have been limited to a Medicare patient load of 50 percent. The balance of IMC's patients would have had to be private -- that is, paying -- customers. Recarey preferred the steady flow of federal Medicare money to the thought of actually running a real HMO. Former HHS chief of staff McClain Haddow (who later became a paid consultant to IMC) testified in 1987 Jeb that directly phoned then-HHS secretary Margaret Heckler and that it was that call that swung the decision to approve IMCs waiver.

Jeb admits lobbying HHS for the waiver, but denies talking to Secretary Heckler -- and denies as well the charge that his call won the HHS exemption. "I just asked that IMC get a fair hearing," said later. After the IMC scandal broke in 1987, Heckler left the country, having been appointed U.S. ambassador to Ireland, a post she held until 1989. (Heckler is now a private citizen living in Virginia. We left a detailed message with her secretary, outlining our questions, but she declined to respond.)

In any case, the highly unusual waiver by federal officials allowed IMCs Medicare patient load to swell -- to 80 percent -- and the money poured in. At its height in 1986, IMC was collecting over $30 million a month in Medicare payments; in all, the company would collect $1 billion from Medicare. (Jeb would not discuss the IMC affair with Mother Jones. But in an opinion piece he wrote for the Miami Herald last May, he insisted that he had worked hard for IMC, looking for real-estate deals, and had earned his $75,000 in commissions. While acknowledging making a telephone call to one of Heckler's assistants on IMC Is behalf, he claimed the waiver was not granted on his account. The allegation of a connection, Jeb wrote, "is unfair and untrue.")

Despite Jeb's involvement, trouble began brewing for IMC when a low-level HHS special agent in Miami, Leon Weinstein, discovered that Recarey was defrauding Medicare through overcharges, false invoicing, and outright embezzlement. Weinstein had been following Recarey's activities since 1977, and as early as 1983 he believed he had enough information to put together a case. However, he found his HHS superiors less than receptive; they took no action on Weinstein's information.

But Weinstein kept digging and in 1986 renewed his investigation of Recarey and IMC -- and again his HHS superiors blocked the probe. "Washington just refused to pursue my evidence," Weinstein, now retired, told Mother Jones last spring. "And they made it perfectly clear that I was not to pursue IMC. When I did, they threatened me and threatened my job."

Weinstein dug in his heels. "I had them this time. I told my superiors I would fight this time because I had nothing to fear. I had just reached retirement age. They immediately backtracked," he says. Weinstein was allowed to continue his investigation -- though HHS still took no formal action against Recarey. Eventually Weinstein turned to Congressmen Barney Frank (D-NY) and Pete Stark (D-CA) with his information, sparking congressional hearings into the scandal.

Had it been up to HHS, Recarey would still be running his Medicare racket. But by chance, the now-disbanded U.S. Miami Organized Crime Strike Force was also investigating Recarey. (Recarey was bribing union officials in order to get them to sign workers up as patients at IMC, apparently so that IMC could meet its reduced non-Medicare patient requirements of 20 percent.) "We didn't know anything about the HHS investigation," former Organized Crime Strike Force special attorney Joe DeMaria says. "Recarey was bribing union officials.... But HHS never contacted us or told us anything."

Before Recarey's trial on bribery charges began, DeMaria's investigators also caught Recarey using his former spooks to wiretap IMC employees in an effort to discover who was talking to federal agents. DeMaria had Recarey indicted a second time, for the illegal listening devices. During Recarey's trial on the bribery charge, a lawyer who handled the bribe money testified that the money IMC gave him was not bribe money but "commissions" he had earned while doing work for the company. "See, that commission thing was Recarey's MO. They didn't call them bribes, they called them commissions," DeMaria explains.

After he was convicted, Recarey resigned from IMC and was immediately replaced by John Ward. (Ward had been law partner to Reagan-Bush campaign manager John Sears. And Sears had also been a lobbyist for IMC.) But Recarey's Medicare scam would never get to a public courtroom airing. Before his trial on the wiretap charge, Recarey skipped the country. His getaway was remarkable: just in time for his flight, the normally tight-fisted IRS expedited a $2.2 million income-tax refund, which Recarey claimed he had coming.

The tax refund was a windfall for Recarey. "Yeah, that was his getaway money," says a former IRS investigator who worked in the Miami office at the time but asked not to be named. "Though there is a special IRS procedure to expedite tax refunds for companies in financial distress, I don't think you can overlook the possibility that there was influence from the administration."

Recarey's last act before becoming a fugitive was an attempt to wire $30,000 into the bank account of Washington consultant and lobbyist Nick Panuzio -- whose partner was then managing George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. (The wire transfer failed only because, in his haste, Recarey had gotten Panuzio's account number wrong.) It was only after Recarey was safely out of the country that the U.S. attorney in Miami -- a political appointee -- filed formal charges of Medicare fraud against him.

Whistle-blower Leon Weinstein retired in disgust from HHS and tried to get the IMC case before a judge by filing a Qui Tam suit. Such suits allow a private citizen to sue to recover money for the government in return for a share of any settlement. In his case, Weinstein named IMC and Recarey as defendants. But HHS continued to fight Weinstein, first challenging his right to bring such a suit and later accusing him of stealing HHS documents before leaving his job. When the courts supported Weinstein, HHS then stepped in, took over his lawsuit, and shouldered him out. The case remains in the courts and is still unresolved.

HHS officials now pursuing the litigation claim that Recarey defrauded the Medicare system of at least $12 million. Leon Weinstein says the government is lowballing the loss and that Recarey's take from his IMC scam could easily be many times that figure.

Since skipping Miami in 1987, Recarey has been living comfortably in Caracas, Venezuela. Thomas Holladay, the consul general of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, told Mother Jones that officials there were aware of Recarey's presence and had formally requested his extradition. "We made a formal request for his extradition," Consul General Holladay says. "But we can't do anything until the Venezuelans turn him over to us, and they have not done that." The conversation then ended abruptly. "You know, I'm really not supposed to be talking to you about this," Holladay says.

In May, following inquiries from Mother Jones, Congressman Pete Stark, who sits on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, wrote to both the Department of Justice and the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, demanding an explanation for six years of inaction on the Recarey case.

Jeb and the Contras
The fact that Recarey is living free in Caracas rather than in shackles at Fort Leavenworth could well be a result of the role IMC may have played in Oliver North's secret contra-supply network. Though members of the House Intelligence Committee claimed they found no reason to believe that Recarey was using IMC's Medicare facilities and funds to aid the contras, the evidence that IMC was involved remains compelling. In 1985, the same year that Jeb Bush was dialing for dollars to HHS officials for IMC, Jeb also hand-carried a letter from Guatemalan physician Dr. Mario Castejon to the White House -- directly to his father's office in the Executive Office Building. Dr. Castejon's letter to Vice President Bush requested U.S. medical aid for the contras. George Bush penned a note back to the doctor, referring him to Lt. Col. Oliver North -- whose pro-contra activities the president now claims he knew little about.

An entry in North's diary reads:

22-Jan-85
Medical Support System for wounded FDN in Miami -- HMO in Miami has oked to help all WIA [wounded in action] ... Felix Rodriguez.

(Rodriguez was a former CIA official who advised Vice-President Bush's national-security adviser, Donald Gregg, currently U.S. ambassador to South Korea.)

Veteran CIA operative Jose Basulto told the Wall Street Journal in 1987 that he had personally attended meetings at IMC headquarters in Miami along with contra leader Adolfo Calero and Felix Rodriguez. Basulto also said that he had personally brought sick and wounded contras to IMC hospitals in Miami, where they received free medical treatment. Former HHS agent Leon Weinstein is not surprised that Recarey has not been returned to the United States. "My investigation," Weinstein says, "led me to conclude that there may have been a deliberate attempt to obstruct justice...because Recarey, his hospital, and his clinics were treating wounded contras from Nicaragua...and part of the $30 million a month he was given by the government to treat Medicare patients was used to set up field hospitals for the contras."

Jeb and "Manny" Diaz
Manuel C. Diaz, another Jeb Bush business associate, runs a commercial nursery with headquarters in Homestead, Florida. Manny Diaz's previous business sidekick, Charles Keating, Jr., is now sitting in a California prison. But during Keating's days at the helm of the $6 billion Lincoln Savings, Diaz became a Keating insider, confidant, and beneficiary. For example, in 1987, as federal regulators closed in on his crumbling empire, Keating instructed his attorneys to transfer a large chunk of prime Phoenix real estate to Diaz, for just $1. And right before filing for personal bankruptcy, Keating transferred his $2 million mansion on the island of Cat Cay in the Bahamas to Diaz.

At the same time Diaz was palling around with Keating, Jeb, then serving as Florida's secretary of commerce, arranged a private meeting for Diaz with Florida's Republican governor Bob Martinez. Promptly afterward, Diaz Farms landed a lucrative, $1.72 million, state-highway-landscaping contract -- despite the fact that Diaz had little prior highway-landscaping experience. This raised howls of protest and charges of political influence-peddling from other contractors. But state officials explained that the extraordinary speed in issuing the contract had occurred because the state was anxious to spruce up 113 miles of freeway for the coming visit of the pope.

Did Jeb know about Diaz's business association with Charles Keating? Did he have reason to believe Diaz was qualified for the Florida highway contract that he helped Diaz land? These are the kinds of detailed questions that the Florida chairman of the Bush re-election campaign refuses to answer.

Neil Bush

In the March/April issue of Mother Jones, I detailed Neil Bush's activities and therefore only sketch his involvement here. Neil served as a director of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan in Denver, Colorado, from 1985 until 1988. During that time, the now-dead thrift made over $200 million in loans to Neil's two partners in JNB Exploration, Neil's abysmally unsuccessful oil company. Silverado's failure was due at least in part to the fact that Neil's two partners welshed on $132 million in loans.

Federal regulators determined that, while Silverado was pumping loans to Neil's two associates, Neil was completely dependent on the two men for his income. The failure of Silverado -- its closure delayed until after the 1988 election -- cost taxpayers about $1 billion. After almost two years of hand-wringing had passed, an expert hired by regulators declared that Neil suffered from an "ethical disability," and he was required to pay a $50,000 fine for his ethical lapses at Silverado. Neil's estimated $250,000 in legal bills generated by the scandal are reportedly being paid for him by a banking-industry lobbyist who is fighting to get banks deregulated.

After Silverado failed, Neil started a new oil company, Apex Energy. This time, his money came from a $2.35 million loan through a Small Business Administration program, a loan arranged by an old family friend. When news of this reached the press in March 1991, the SBA discovered that the companies through which the loan was approved were technically insolvent, and it gave them up to thirty months to "self-liquidate." This meant that Apex would have to repay its SBA-guaranteed loans. Neil took this as his cue to move on, and he left Apex -- and its debts -- for others to worry about. If Apex Energy can't be sold for more than it owes, the SBA, and ultimately the taxpayers, will be stuck with the difference. The last time we checked, Apex's only known asset was an oil lease, which the company had purchased from Neil for $150,000 before he bailed out. That means taxpayers could get stiffed for another $2.2 million as a result of Neil Bush's wheeling and dealing. The public won't learn the precise outcome until later this year, though. The SBA allowed thirty months for liquidation of the SBA investment in Apex, putting the resolution date just past the 1992 general election.

President George [H.W] Bush claims that only a return to traditional family values can cure the "poverty of spirit" that plagues places like our decaying inner cities. But after a closer look, particularly at his adult children, one cannot help but wonder about the values that matter to his own family.

Bush says he is proud of his sons. One of them rented himself out to a crooked developer who scammed HUD and helped pry millions out of Medicare to fuel a giant health-care scam. A second may have profited from an insider stock transaction in a gulf oil deal at the very time that U.S. soldiers were dying to make that region safe for oil. And the third son ran a savings and loan into the ground while shoveling millions of its taxpayer-backed dollars into the pockets of two deadbeat partners.

When President Bush speaks of the lack of family values he, of course, is referring to broken marriages, single mothers, and inner-city kids who join gangs and sell dope. But are these the only villains -- or the most important ones -- responsible for the shredded social fabric? What about well-to-do white boys who trade on family connections, welsh on loans, run with con men, and leave financial ruin in their wake as they line their own pockets? What about grown men, with access to the most powerful public office in the land, who participate in scandal but show no remorse for any of it -- and who take no responsibility for the consequences of their own actions?

It's certainly reasonable for candidate Bush to engage the public in a discussion of family values, to use his office as a bully pulpit on modern morals. But what of George Bush's inability or unwillingness to grasp the crisis of values festering within his own family? The pattern of behavior by the president's three sons raises questions -- about them and their father. These issues have yet to get the prime-time exposure of fictional Murphy Brown's fictional fatherless child.

Stephen Pizzo is author of Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans.

Research assistance by Peter Willmert and Chris Rosché.

© 1992 The Foundation for National Progress

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1992/09/bushboys.html

Minor Indiscretion
Jenna Bush Ticketed for Alcohol Possession
April 27, 2001

April 27 — First daughter Jenna Bush was cited early today for alcohol possession by a minor, police in Austin, Texas said.

The 19-year-old daughter of President Bush, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, was ticketed at about 1:30 this morning by plainclothed officers from the Austin Police Department at the Cheers Shot Bar, police said. The officers were checking for minors in possession of alcohol at nightclubs along the city's popular East Sixth Street.
In a statement, the Austin Police Department said the officers had ticketed four other people inside the club before questioning Jenna and another woman they believed to be under age 21. The women were given citations but were not arrested.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer would not comment on the incident, which he described as a private "family matter."

Jenna has a twin sister, Barbara, who is a freshman at Yale University. Minor possession of alcohol in Texas is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine or community service. Police said minor consumption of alcohol, particularly in downtown Austin, is an ongoing problem as 270 people, including 42 this month, have been arrested so far this year.

ABCNEWS' Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/bushdaughter010427.html

Bush twin's alcohol citation dismissed after terms met
Sept. 10, 2001, 9:09PM
Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN -- An underage drinking citation against one of President Bush's daughters was dismissed Monday after 19-year-old Barbara Bush completed the requirements of her deferred sentence.

Barbara Bush pleaded no contest June 7 to possession of alcohol by a minor. Austin police cited Bush for possession after she was served a margarita at Chuy's, a popular South Austin Mexican restaurant, May 29.

Bush was at the restaurant with a small group of friends and her twin sister, Jenna, who was cited for attempting to buy an alcoholic beverage with someone else's Texas driver's license.

Municipal Court Judge Karrie Key ordered Barbara Bush to work eight hours of community service, attend an alcohol awareness course and pay $100 in court costs.

The court dismissed the citation after she met the requirements of her deferred sentence. She completed the community service July 20 and had taken the course and paid the fine earlier.

Jenna Bush has until Oct. 6 to complete terms of her deferred sentence. After pleading no contest to the underage drinking charge, Jenna Bush was ordered to perform 36 hours of community service, pay a $500 fine and not drive for 30 days. The fine and the license suspension were the maximum penalties allowed under the law.

She received stiffer penalties than her sister because she had violated a deferred sentence for an earlier underage drinking violation she received at a Sixth Street bar April 27.

If she commits a third alcohol-related violation, she could face up to a $2,000 fine, six months in jail and the loss of her driver's license for six months.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1042530

The Bushes
Portrait of a Dynasty
ABCNEWS.com
April 6— Based on interviews with family members and close family friends, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, gives an inside look at the family's inner workings. Here is an excerpt.

CHAPTER 10

ONE-ON-ONE

Anytime the rains came to Midland, rejoicing could be heard in the Bush home. Little George would anxiously pace around the living room in a soiled T-shirt and jeans waiting for it to let up. When it did, he would burst out the front door and join his friends at a nearby pond.
Thousands of frogs would be there, croaking and hopping about. "Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them," recalls Terry Throckmorton, a childhood friend. "Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up."

For the Bush children, Midland was an idyllic place of adventuresome days and placid, star-filled nights. Little George, Jebbie, Marvin, and Neil had the run of the house. Each had their own place in the family, and each tried to define himself within it.

Little George, the eldest by more than six years and also his father's namesake, spent his free time riding around on his bicycle looking for adventure. It could be something very simple like throwing dirt clods, or catching the matinee at the theater in town. "On Saturdays we'd meet at the ball field and put together a ball game," recalled Robert McCleskey. "In the afternoons we would ride our bikes down to the Ritz and watch the serials, mostly Buck Rogers and cowboy movies."

Little George was, like his father, a great collector of friends. They came from school, the neighborhood, or the baseball diamond. To those he was particularly close to, he would assign nicknames. It was his mark of friendship. Most of his time was spent dreaming about baseball. He had heard from family and friends about the great triumphs of his grandfather, father, and uncles on the baseball diamond. Little George played catcher on the Midland little league team and was a member of the Midland All-Stars. While not the most gifted athlete, he more than made up for it with an innate aggressiveness. He swung the bat so fiercely, coaches would have to urge him to loosen his grip. "He tries so very hard," his father wrote to his friends.

George often arrived early at Sam Houston Elementary School to play baseball with his friends. The school principal, John Bizilo, would come out on the field, take off his jacket, loosen his tie, and hit a few balls for the boys. Some neighborhood girls would come and watch. One who didn't was a small, pretty girl named Laura Welch, who lived only a few blocks away. Laura and her friends were interested in more refined matters, at least as defined by a young girl. They spent their Saturdays at the Rexall Drug Store sipping Cokes and passed their free time reading or listening to 45s-mostly Buddy Holly, the Drifters, and Roy Orbison-and dancing in their socks.

Little George didn't have much interest in that sort of thing. If his father was a gentle and obedient child, this son was different. George Walker Bush was, many in the family said, more Walker than Bush. He did little reading except for the occasional Hardy Boys story or a series of mystery books about baseball. He did make one early run at electoral politics, however. In the seventh grade he ran for class president against Jack Hanks, a popular kid. Few expected him to win, but with heavy campaigning and a smile he managed to do so narrowly. (Hanks went on to a political triumph of his own. Four years later he went to Boys Nation and was elected vice president, defeating a young candidate from Arkansas named Bill Clinton.) Perhaps baseball more than anything gave George something to share with his father. Big George coached his son's team, which usually played its games on Saturday mornings. Then in the afternoon the fathers would play a pickup game. Word got out-not from George himself-that the coach had been a star player at Yale. And his skills were on display for all to see during the afternoon dads' game.

"If he was standing in the outfield when someone hit a fly ball, he could put his glove behind him at belt level, drop his head forward, and catch the ball behind his back," recalls Joe O'Neill, a childhood friend. "We'd try to do it too, but the ball would always hit us on the back of the head. We all had scabs on our heads from trying to catch the fly balls like Mr. Bush did."

For Little George, life would be defined by the need to live up to his name. He had seen his father's photos of the Yale team and heard stories from his uncles and great uncles about Poppy's playing days. Little George would have trouble matching those accomplishments. Fay Vincent, a family friend who later went on to be baseball commissioner, remembers visiting Texas in the 1950s and watching Little George play. "I remember him striking out a lot. Wild swings with lots of muscle; but he was swinging so hard, trying so hard, he didn't take the chance to watch the ball."

Little George loved the game and became fixated on becoming a star.

"All George ever wanted to be was a major league baseball player," recalls Terry Throckmorton. "That's all he ever talked about." In an instant he could recall the batting averages and slugging percentages of his favorite players. He swapped baseball cards with a passion and proved to be so shrewd at it that his friends had to carefully think through any deal or they might be taken. "He would sit there on the floor with his brothers and they would argue for hours about the value of a Pee Wee Reese card," recalls Elsie Walker. "He was so tenacious about it, it was ridiculous. He either convinced them to make a bad trade, or he just waited them out." Soon he was writing notes to famous players, offering words of encouragement and enclosing a baseball card with return postage. His diligence paid off as he got signed cards returned from Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and some of his other favorite players.

At school Little George was not exactly a serious student. He would get into trouble because of that Walker swagger. In the fourth grade he was clowning around in class and used an ink pen to draw a mustache, beard, and long sideburns on his face. When he shared his artistic work with his classmates, they erupted in laughter. The teacher, Frances Childress, promptly grabbed him by the arm and took him down the corridor to see the principal.

"Just look at him," she said. "He's been making a disturbance in class."

The principal took George by the hand and told him to bend over and reach for the ground. He then promptly administered three licks with a paddle.

"When I hit him, he cried," John Bizilo recalls. "Oh, did he cry! He yelled as if he'd been shot."

When Bar found out, she was furious. With the death of Robin, she had become fiercely protective of her oldest son. She called Bizilo immediately. "My husband's going to kill you," she said with slight exaggeration. "He's out of town, but he's coming home to kill you immediately."

Bizilo calmly explained what Little George had done: When sent to the principal's office to explain his actions, he had been far from contrite. Instead, George had "swaggered in as though he had done the most wonderful thing in the world." When Bar heard the full story, she ended up supporting Bizilo. When George Sr. was at home, he sometimes clashed with his oldest son. "Georgie aggravates the hell out of me at times (I am sure I do the same to him)," he wrote his father-in-law, "but then at times I am so proud of him I could die."

Little George was strong-willed and stubborn. Even as a young boy, Little George constantly butted heads with his father, recalls Gerry Bemiss, who saw them frequently in Kennebunkport. Otha Taylor, who helped out in the Bush home, recalls the two Georges "were always tussing about something."

His younger brothers each seemed to move in a different path to make room for themselves in this busy and active family. Marvin grew up with a wicked sense of humor, trying to communicate and establish himself by making fun. He would pee in the housecleaner's iron or switch the liquids in the kitchen. When you reached for the apple juice, you'd find vegetable oil instead. Neil was the attractive little kid. Pleasant and well-mannered with shining white blond hair, his father would call him Whitey. He became the good kid, the one who got attention and identity by being the most obedient son.

For Jebbie, being the middle child proved to be the most difficult. Too young to compete with his older brother as a boy, he had also spent scarce time as the family baby, with Neil being born just two years after him. He quickly emerged as the most serious of the Bush children, but also the one that family members saw go through the most changes. "Jeb I thought of as somebody who as a kid was experimenting and trying to figure out his role," recalls cousin John Ellis. Despite their age differences, the boys were expected to compete on an equal footing. It was the family's currency of communication, a way of showing that you were a Bush. Competition was also a way to channel their natural rivalries. "The boys absorbed the family's competitive nature at an early age," says Bucky Bush, their uncle. "I remember watching them playing baseball, basketball, board games, just about everything, and just going nuts, playing over and over again, each one trying to win one over on the other."

Robert Mosbacher, a longtime family friend, remembers that when the Bushes would visit in Houston, the Bush boys were always eager for a game. "We played touch football in the backyard and a game called wonder tennis, a game of table tennis with a larger table," he told us. "What was so interesting was that the sense of competitiveness was much greater at wonder tennis than touch football. Touch football is a team sport and they weren't as fiercely competitive at that. But wonder tennis-it's one-on-one, that really brought it out in them." One-on-one sports-not team sports-really brought out the competition among them, particularly as the boys became older. "We played basketball," recalls Neil Bush, "and we'd throw elbows at each other and duke it out."

"I remember one afternoon up in Maine," Marvin Bush recalls. "My brother George and I were playing tennis when things got a little tight on the tennis court. I was about ten years younger than he and it got to an especially tense point in the match. I think I was fairly brash and was making sure he knew exactly what the score was. The next I knew he was chasing me up a fence." In those early years, Little George was the lead boy. It was a function of both his age and personality, which could come on strong at times. But as they grew older, Jeb began to assert himself. "At first George was in charge and Jeb always seemed to be finding the place where he fit in," recalls John Ellis. "But as they got older, Jeb started to chart his own path and at one point had surpassed his brother in terms of success."

In Midland the boys would fight over toys, the rules of the game, or the proverbial pecking order. When a fight did break out, it was Barbara who usually got in the middle to break it up. "Sometimes they'd come up the driveway yelling dirty words at each other and Barbara would send them to their rooms and that kind of discipline," George Bush said. "She would say, 'Your dad will be disappointed in you.' "

That was the family's most powerful tool for imposing discipline: instilling a profound sense of disappointment that you had let the family down and hurt everyone. George Bush says he considers it the most effective parenting tool they had; he rarely spanked his boys.

George and Barbara still reserved a special place for Robin. They placed a portrait of their late daughter in the living room for everyone to see. Barbara worried at the time whether it was fair to "our boys and to our friends" to give her such a prominent place in the home. George never thought so.

Barbara and George were desperate to have another girl. "What I'm going to do," Barbara told everyone, "I'm going to keep trying until I get another girl." In August 1959, Barbara gave birth to Dorothy Walker Bush, whom they called Doro. Big George in particular was beaming. Robin was still very much on his mind, and Doro added a touch of softness in a home with four rowdy boys. She instantly received special attention from her father. It was as if he had a special place in his heart reserved for a little girl. "My dad would just spoil me with love," Doro Bush recalls. When she was a small girl and George was in town, he would tuck her into bed at night, telling her about Robin. "We would both cry," she says. The whole family saw Doro as a living reminder of Robin. "Dorothy is enchanting," George wrote his friend Lud Ashley. "She is a wild dark version of Robin. They look so much alike that Mom and Dad [Pres and Dottie] both called Dorothy 'Robin' all last week when Bar went to visit at Hobe Sound."

****

Despite the time he tried to reserve for his children, George spent most of his time traveling on business. Zapata was now heavily involved in offshore drilling. That meant, instead of trips to West Texas or Houston, George was increasingly venturing to Europe, Latin America, and the Persian Gulf. He was in many respects a distant figure for his sons, much as his father had been to him.

His heavy travel schedule also caused tension at home. "I had moments where I was jealous of attractive young women out in a man's world," Bar later recalled. "I would think, well, George is off on a trip doing all these exciting things and I'm sitting home with these absolutely brilliant children, who say one thing a week of interest."

Compounding the problem was the fact that Barbara was often left to handle problems on her own. When Jebbie was diagnosed with what was thought to be a rare bone disease, Barbara had to handle it by herself. "George was away, so my friends held my hand," she recalled later. "But it turned out to be only an infection in his heel. Neil had an eye emergency and I had to rush him from Midland to Houston, but it turned out to be nothing." George and Bar would argue. She would complain about the burdens on her, and George would counter with how hard he was working for the family. Bar finally figured that the arguing did little to improve anything. "What's the point?" she recalls. "He would just let you flail and flounder … I mean, it's no fun to argue in a one-sided argument. He knows what he thinks and he's perfectly willing to let you scream and yell, but I gave that up. That was a waste of our energy."

****

After the early years of euphoria in the marriage, their relationship was changing. Teensie Bush Cole recalls seeing how the two, who were very much in love, started relating to each other differently. "Love matures and becomes more understanding," she told us. "You become friends and if you're not friends, you don't have a good marriage. Somehow when he was away it didn't matter, they stayed close. She understood George. You've got to understand your husband if you are going to be happy. If Barbara had said, 'I can't take another house, I can't take the politics,' he might not have done it and really been damaged, because he loved her that much."

George could sometimes be less than sensitive. One day George and his friend C. Fred Chambers were sitting and drinking beers when Bar called them in for dinner. They sat down at the table. George took one bite and grimaced. "You expect me to eat this s--t?" Bar ran away in tears as George and Fred laughed. This sort of bantering went on until Barbara developed her own defenses. Shellie Bush Jansing recalls having dinner with George and Bar one night. When Bar reached to take another helping, George said, "Don't you think you've had enough?" It was a particularly insensitive comment because Barbara was always concerned about her weight. This time, rather than get upset, Bar simply smiled and began humming the tune "Old Gray Mare." "And he shut up," says Jansing. "That was her way of saying absolutely cut this out or you've had it."

The offshore side of the oil business was still in its infancy, and George was determined to see it through because he believed it had so much promise. Several offshore ventures had already failed: The rigs tipped over or never found any oil; others had been destroyed by tropical storms.

Zapata was using new rigs designed by L. G. LeTourneau of Vicksburg, Mississippi. LeTourneau had designed a self-elevating platform on three legs that he thought would be stable enough to withstand major storms. George was intrigued enough by the idea that he struck a bargain with him. In exchange for a $400,000 advance, LeTourneau would build a rig at his own expense. If the thing actually worked, LeTourneau would receive some Zapata stock and $550,000 more. LeTourneau tested the rig in the Mississippi River, where it worked fine. But when it began operations in the Gulf of Mexico, saltwater destroyed the gearboxes. George spent considerable time with him, watching over his investment. It was a slapdash operation most of the time. "His design was questionable," George Bush later recalled, "but if something didn't work — if one of the legs squeaked when the barge was jammed up — he'd climb up there with a piece of chalk and just start marking up the steel. He'd tell his workers to cut this out here and cut that off there, and they'd get a welding torch out to do it. That inspired confidence in us because he could fix something and get it going. He was a creative genius. But more conservative engineers would have been horrified by the way he did things…"

The first rig was the Scorpion, a $3.5 million project financed by a bond offering in 1956. The next year Zapata financed construction of another rig, the Vinegaroon, named for a West Texas insect. The Vinegaroon began drilling in Block 86 off Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, and it was the first offshore rig to make a major find. Soon it was producing 113 barrels of oil and 3.6 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. Zapata received a half interest in all the royalties that came from the field.

The international offshore oil business was a high stakes game influenced by a variety of political factors. In 1956, while meeting in London with Zapata investors and other oil company executives, the Suez Crisis erupted. George watched anxiously as the Suez Canal was closed, threatening the northward flow of Persian Gulf oil. In 1958, Zapata's Scorpion rig was moved from the Gulf of Mexico to a location in the Cay Sal Bank, just fifty-four miles north of Isabela, Cuba. Tensions were high because of a festering revolution being led by Fidel Castro. During the latter half of the 1950s, George Bush turned Zapata into a global company, with operations in the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, Trinidad, and the north coast of Borneo. Negotiations for these contracts were tough and George was often directly involved, meaning he oftentimes was not home.

In his foreign travels George would sometimes bring Little George along. They traveled together to Latin America and went to Scotland several times, where they stayed with Jimmy Gammell, a Scottish investor who had a major stake in Zapata and sat on the board. They spent time at the Gammell's family farm in Perthshire, going over finances and discussing their contract with the Kuwait Shell Petroleum Development Company. Over the course of those visits, Little George became friends with Gammell's son, Bill. It would prove to be an enormously helpful relationship later in life. Gammell's son went off to boarding school and became good friends with a classmate named Tony Blair. At a critical juncture in the days after September 11, Gammell would solidify the relationship between the two men and convince Blair that Bush was someone to take seriously.

Little George would also travel with his father to Medellín, Colombia, where Zapata had an office headed by Judge Manuel B. Bravo, a Texan. While George Bush would visit, Little George would go to the Bravos' house for homemade meals. "My mother fed him tortillas and arroz and frijoles," recalls Manuel B. Bravo, Jr. "He didn't want to go back home… He would say that this is the best food I ever had."

Like his father, George Sr. was focused on his work. In Midland he helped start two banks and soon was involved in several other ventures, including serving on the board of an oil field equipment company named Camoc, Inc. He joined the boards of the American Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors, the Independent Petroleum Association, and the Texas Mid-Continental Oil and Gas Association.

By the late 1950s, Zapata was going in two different directions. The firm was not really making much money. George saw the firm's future in offshore drilling. His partners Hugh and Bill Liedtke wanted instead to concentrate on building a larger presence on land in Texas.

The two visions might have been reconciled, but there was also friction concerning the interference of George's uncle, Herbie Walker. A major investor in the firm who had helped round up other investors, Herbie wanted his voice heard on just about every matter. Forceful and tough, Herbie irritated Hugh Liedtke to no end. Finally it was decided that the business should be split. George would take Zapata Offshore and the Liedtkes would take Zapata Petroleum. Herbie and his fellow investors bought out the Liedtkes' 40 percent stake in Zapata Offshore while the Liedtkes bought out the Bush-Walker interest in Zapata Petroleum. At the time, George owned about 15 percent of the company, a stake worth about six hundred thousand dollars.

Despite the split, however, the friendship between George Bush and Hugh Liedtke would last, as they so often do with George Bush, for a lifetime. Liedtke would go on to run the oil giant Pennzoil, and by 1973, fifteen years after their split, Liedtke wanted drilling rights in China. George Bush, who had just ended his term as the U.S. representative there, accompanied him to Beijing to meet with Chinese officials. Shortly afterward, Liedtke was granted the first drilling rights in China.

By splitting Zapata, George was now a self-made man. He was running his own operation, and the gamble on offshore oil was paying off. "He was the first in our group, along with Hugh Liedtke, to make a million, and in that day a million was a bundle," recalls Earle Craig, Jr., a Midland friend. "I was pea green with envy." George would no longer need to spend his days driving through the bone-dry fields of West Texas. He was working with larger companies now, renting out his rigs to the world. That meant a change in his work and a change for his family. Tiny, comfortable Midland, which seemed so very much to be home, was no longer big enough for George or Zapata. To be a player with the big companies would mean moving east, to the booming city of Houston.

Midland had been comfortably middle-class, a community too small and tight-knit to allow for the formation of wealthy enclaves. Little George and Jebbie had gone to public schools there and played with the children of laborers, lawyers, and teachers. In Midland the family had attended First Presbyterian Church, a congregation made up of a cross-section of people from the community. Houston was very different. Settling into Oak Haven, with its large homes, graceful oaks, and expansive green lawns, their world changed overnight. They joined St. Martin Episcopal Church, a formal and wealthy congregation made up of people from Houston's nicest suburbs. George joined the Houston Country Club, the Ramada Club, and the Bayou Club.

For Little George the change was most dramatic. Gone was San Jacinto Junior High School, where he knew just about every kid. Now he was attending the Kinkaid School, a prestigious prep school for the children of wealthy Houstonians. It was competitive, and prestige suddenly mattered. Little George quickly realized how different things were going to be.

"One day at Kinkaid a guy walks up to me after practice and says, 'Hey, you want a ride home, Bush?' " he recalled years later. "I was waiting for the bus. This was an eighth grader, who might have been fourteen at the time, and he was driving a GTO — in the eighth grade! I remember saying, 'No thanks, man.' It was just a different world." In Houston, George Bush set about making friends and social contacts as his business operations expanded, just as his father had done in New York City some forty years earlier. In Washington, Prescott had joined every social club that he could. George did the same in Houston. At parties and socials, he developed friendships and alliances with families that would make critical contributions to his family's success for the next two generations.

While playing tennis at the Houston Country Club, he met a young lawyer named James A. Baker, scion of a family of Texas lawyers going back three generations. Baker had gone to the Hill School in Pennsylvania (where three of George's Walker uncles had also gone), then on to Princeton University and the University of Texas Law School. His grandfather had founded Baker and Botts, the second oldest law firm in the state.

Though George and Jimmy had never met, their families were not exactly strangers. Robert S. Lovett, Pres's friend and partner at Brown Brothers, had been a partner at Baker and Botts and was counsel to the Harriman family's Union Pacific Railroad. "My father had done some work with Brown Brothers Harriman before I met George," James Baker said. "And Baker Botts had contributed to Prescott Bush's Senate campaign."

On the day Bush and Baker first met, they played a match of doubles tennis. They complemented each other on the court in a way that would serve as a metaphor for their entire relationship. "George was good at the net, and I was good on the baseline," Baker said. Each, it seemed, had different strengths. Another one of the young bucks that George met was Robert Mosbacher, a charismatic independent oilman who had set up his own oil company in Houston. Like George, Mosbacher had been born back East, in Mount Vernon, New York. His father Emil was a wealthy stockbroker who had managed to sell his holdings before Wall Street crashed, and like George, Mosbacher had gone through the Depression largely untouched by the tumult around him. Educated at Choate and Washington and Lee University, he headed west after college in September 1948, only a few months after Bush had done the same. Mosbacher settled in Houston and became a wildcatter, poring over county real estate records searching for possible oil leases. After a few failed attempts, in 1954 he found a million-dollar natural gas field in South Texas at just about the same time George and Zapata Petroleum made their first major find.

Like George, Mosbacher was interested in expanding his operations overseas, and the two talked about offshore drilling together. In the end the business plan fell through, but the two later invested in Hollywood Marine of Houston, a limited partnership that operated barges moving petroleum supplies along the Gulf Coast.

George also became friends with a Houston attorney named Leon Jaworski. Founder of Fulbright and Jaworski, a law firm, he had served as chief of the War Crimes Trials Section during the Nuremberg tribunals after World War II. A conservative Democrat like Baker, Jaworski ran in George's social circles. In 1974, Jaworski would be appointed special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation, which would lead to Nixon's resignation. In 1980 he would run an organization called Democrats for Reagan and Bush. Another Houston lawyer he became close to in these years was Robert Strauss. A lawyer with great influence and many friends, Strauss would later serve as head of the Democratic National Committee during Watergate, at the same time that George was head of the GOP.

As the universe of Bush family friends continued to expand, Barbara took to writing out note cards to keep track of them all. The list included Poppy's friends from Andover, his war buddies, his teammates and classmates at Yale, friends and neighbors from Midland, investors and partners in Zapata, and new acquaintances in Houston. She even had the names and addresses of the men who had rescued George in WWII. Friendships were becoming institutionalized, so they could be tracked and nurtured. Barbara would take meticulous care of the card file, noting birthdays, funerals, hobbies, and interests. At first the cards were kept in a small recipe box. By the time George was president, they would number in the tens of thousands.

****

The move to Houston had been about more than business. George was also thinking seriously about politics. Certainly he had taken an interest in his father's career and had participated at the local level in politics. In 1952, while living in Midland, he had arranged an airport reception at the request of his father for a young vice presidential candidate named Richard Nixon. Nixon arrived and started to speak when a couple of protesters began to disrupt the event. "Bush took one look at them and tore over there," recalls John Overbey. "He ripped up their signs and told them to get the hell out of there." George could think about getting involved in politics because he was financially secure for the first time in his life. His father had established the threshold: Take care of the family first. But the road would not be easy. In the early 1960s, Texas was largely a one-party state controlled by Democrats. They held every major statewide office but one. In 1961 a Republican college professor named John Tower had managed to win the Senate seat vacated by LBJ when he became vice president. But the GOP was a minor factor in the state. Even George's friends like Jimmy Baker wouldn't consider leaving the Democratic Party. Another challenge for George: Larger-than-life Democratic personalities, true-blue Texans like LBJ and John Connally, dominated the process.

Compounding the problem was the disarray of Texas Republicans. At the local level in Houston, Jimmy Bertron, the Harris County GOP chairman, had been besieged by squabbles over how to define the party while mainline conservatives battled more extreme elements, including members of the John Birch Society. Robert Welch, head of the Birch Society, declared in 1961 that Los Angeles and Houston were the organization's two strongest cities. Bertron was trying to broaden the base of the party by promoting conservative economic issues and appealing to the business community. But the Birchers were making it difficult, with talk of blowing up the United Nations, violently resisting the income tax, and claims of a global conspiracy. The Birchers in Houston were far from a group of ragtag protesters; they were a formidable force. Some of the most powerful and influential Texans at the time supported the organization. H. L. Hunt, the legendary oilman and patriarch of the powerful Dallas family, was sending large contributions to the organization, and his son Nelson Bunker Hunt was friends with Robert Welch. The local leader of the Birch Society was a state senator named Walter Mengdon, and a charismatic former general named Edwin Walker was very active in the Houston chapter. Bertron had battled them for several years, but by 1963 had had enough. He was moving to Florida and wanted to turn the Harris County GOP chairmanship over to someone else.

Bertron had tried for quite some time to get George Bush involved in the party, but with little success. Now, with Bertron retiring, the GOP needed a new man to serve as county chairman. And they wanted George Bush.

Party leaders came to the Bush house for lunch, and Bar served up a meal and drinks while they explained the situation. Would George consider running for county chairman?

It was not an easy decision. Zapata Offshore now had four rigs in operation. They had contracts with Gulf Oil and Standard Oil of California and Royal Dutch Shell to drill oil in the Persian Gulf, Latin America, and the Far East. Zapata also had two hundred people on the payroll. The company made great demands on his time.

Yet the desire to get involved in politics was great. It was what had animated his father more than anything. And the idea of service, hammered into his head by his mother, seemed to have no greater expression than in public life. The next year, at the February 1963 Harris County GOP Committee meeting, George appeared as a candidate for county chairman. He was the unanimous choice. In his acceptance speech George promised to end the factionalism, bring all elements of the party together, and work with both moderates and Birchers.

George's selection as county chair was widely touted around Houston as evidence that the GOP was heading in a new, youthful, and vibrant direction. But it failed to get off to a good start. The Houston Chronicle ran a short article on his election, declaring that George Bush wanted to "hone the party to a fine edge for the important job ahead in 1964." Unfortunately, the photo that appeared above the caption was not George Bush at all, but somebody else.

In the weeks that followed he had various faction leaders over to his house, hoping to forge a conservative coalition. Friendship was his great gift, and he considered it one of the most powerful tools in his arsenal. But it would not be easy. George, like his father, was a conservative by temperament, not ideology. The Birchers, with their strong views on every single issue, were an alien force to him. George had underestimated the extent of the divide.

Instead of getting bogged down in ideological disputes, George took the reins of the party and immediately began working on organization, assembling a group of friends to help him remake the party. William B. Cassin, a lawyer with Baker and Botts, was appointed party counsel. A group of business friends became committeemen. William R. Simmons, a young Houstonian, was appointed executive director. George started a research library to help the party keep up on the issues and launched a county newspaper that could be sent to party activists. Then he made a point of visiting each of the county's 202 precincts. "My job is primarily an organizational job since the Republican Party has quite a few unorganized precincts," he wrote to his friend (now congressman) Lud Ashley. "So far I like it a lot and although it takes a tremendous amount of time I think it is worthwhile."

Using his contacts and a large base of friends, George set about to raise $90,000 for the party, an unheard-of amount in local Texas politics. He moved the headquarters out of the old digs on Audley Street and into a spacious house on more desirable Waugh Drive. George took an office upstairs in the front bedroom. Increasingly he spent his time at party headquarters rather than at Zapata. Barbara began spending more of her time there, too, stuffing envelopes or knitting while George met with party officials. The hard work quickly paid off. In a matter of six months he had raised his $90,000.

Yet despite his success in energizing the Harris County GOP, it didn't take George long to get entangled in the web of political disputes. After one of his first speeches in a small town south of Houston, George was asked by one activist about his position on the Liberty Amendments. The Birch Society had proposed a series of constitutional amendments designed to get the U.S. out of the United Nations, abolish the Federal Reserve, and get rid of the income tax. George was dumbfounded by the question and didn't know anything about the so-called "Liberty Amendments." All he could tell the man was that he would study the issue in depth. Days later, George went public with his views of what the party should stand for. As he told the Houston Chronicle, he wanted to focus on convincing the public that the GOP was not "extremist" but "conservative." "The Republican Party in the past," he said, "and sometimes with justification, has been connected in the mind of the public with extremism. We're not, or at least most of us are not, extremists. We're just responsible people."

What George was facing with the Birchers was similar to what his father had faced with McCarthy in the 1950s. Determined to chart a course as what he called a mainstream conservative, he was loath to offend hard-liners. George no doubt drew from his father's experience in Connecticut, and his choice of words was remarkably similar. The Birchers engaged in what he called "smear and slander and guilt by association," the exact phrase his father had used against McCarthy supporters.

Even so, George was no Republican moderate. In 1963 he supported Sen. Barry Goldwater for president. This was more than a question of party loyalty. George believed that Goldwater was a good man, based on what his father had told him. As George's brother Bucky recalls, "Dad liked Barry a lot. They had their differences, in part because Arizona and Connecticut are very different states. But dad thought Barry was a good and decent man." George also embraced quite a bit of the Goldwater message. He read Goldwater's seminal Conscience of a Conservative and gave a copy to Little George. People who considered Goldwater an extremist didn't understand him, George told his friends. The mood in the Houston office was enthusiastic the first year of Bush's tenure. GOP activists at headquarters tossed darts at balloons that covered a photograph of Lyndon Johnson. The number of volunteers was rising along with campaign contributions. But the fissures continued as George was attacked by both sides. The Birchers called him a "Rockefeller Republican," even though he was supporting Goldwater and not Rockefeller for the nomination. Liberal Republicans were upset because of his early and active support for Goldwater. George tried to ignore his critics and stuck closely to the Goldwater message.

In public speeches he was aggressive when he discussed issues ranging from Vietnam to race relations. Like his father, he was convinced that black voters were a natural for the GOP. They simply had never received accurate information about what the party stood for. "First they [the Democrats] attempt to present us as racist," he told one newspaper. "The Republican Party of Harris County is not a racist party. We have not presented our story to the Negroes in the county. Our failure to attract the Negro voter has not been because of a racist philosophy; rather, it has been a product of our not having the organization to tackle all parts of the county." He went on to blast Democrats, who were the biggest segregationists in Texas and still managed to attract a large black vote because of their stance on poverty programs. "We believe in the basic premise that the individual Negro surrenders the very dignity and freedom he is struggling for when he accepts money for his vote or when he goes along with the block vote dictates of some Democratic boss who couldn't care less about the quality of the candidates he is pushing." ****

In late 1961, Sen. Prescott Bush went to see his doctor in Greenwich. He had served ten years in the Senate and was sixty-eight years old. His spirit was still strong and he was making plans to run for reelection the next year. But his body seemed to be failing him. His six-and-a-half-foot frame was slightly stooped now and plagued with arthritis. The doctor checked him over, and as Pres was getting dressed he asked about his condition in light of the coming reelection campaign. The words from the doctor were direct: "You would be crazy to run for reelection," he was told. If he did, he might not live to see election day.

Pres went home and discussed the matter with Dottie and his sons. It didn't take Dottie long to make her feelings clear: No campaign was worth dying for. The boys, particularly Pressy, shared their mother's concern. But as they talked the matter over, they could see in their father's eyes that he was being asked to give up a job that meant almost everything to him.

A few weeks later, his office in Washington issued a press release. The senior senator from Connecticut would not seek reelection. "Fortunately, we have able younger men available," it declared. After the news went public, Pres sat in the study of his Georgetown home and quietly wept.

One month after the announcement, Pres traveled to New Haven and his beloved Yale University. Pres sat on the stage in front of the graduating students as the university president read a citation for his honorary doctorate. Seated next to Pres was his friend and fellow senator (now president) John F. Kennedy. "You have served your country well," read his citation, "and personified the best in both political parties." Pres Bush received his award graciously, but family members left the ceremony feeling they had attended not an awards ceremony but a funeral. The decision to retire would haunt Pres Bush the rest of his life. He would live another ten years in generally good health. After the Senate, he returned to Brown Brothers as a senior advisory partner. He was by now a relic of an earlier era of the firm. New partners never consulted him on serious business. He was bored and frustrated and deeply bitter about having given up his seat.

"He was always bitter about that decision," recalls Pres Bush, Jr. "He was simply miserable after he left the Senate. He was bored and felt that he had made the biggest mistake of his life in leaving."

Excerpted from THE BUSHES by Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer Copyright 2004 by Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/Books/The_bushes_excerpt_040406-1.html

May 21, 2000, Sunday
NATIONAL DESK

A Philosophy With Roots In Conservative Texas Soil
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF ( Series ) 4016 words
MIDLAND, Tex. -- The fourth-grade classroom erupted in titters as George W. Bush, one of the class clowns, faced his friends. He had quietly used an ink pen to draw a beard and long sideburns on his cheeks.
The teacher, Frances Childress, grabbed George by the arm, yanked him out of class and marched him down the long outside corridor to the principal's office near the main entrance to Sam Houston Elementary School.

''Just look at him,'' the principal, John Bizilo, recalls Mrs. Childress telling him. ''He's been making a disturbance in class.''

The next step was pretty obvious for anyone in the 1950's version of the West Texas oil town of Midland: Mr. Bizilo told George to bend over and then reached for his paddle, the thickness of a Ping-Pong paddle but narrower and twice as long. Mr. Bizilo gave George three ''licks,'' and the boy's shrieks filled the office.

''When I hit him, he cried,'' Mr. Bizilo remembered the other day. ''Oh, did he cry! He yelled as if he'd been shot. But he learned his lesson.''

So he did.

Many of the roots of Mr. Bush's political philosophy as a presidential candidate -- including his belief in tough love for juvenile offenders -- seem to go back to his childhood. Midland, a conservative, up-from-the-bootstraps town that has grown from 25,000 when he was a little boy to almost 100,000 today, mirrors Mr. Bush's optimism, his faith in business and his doubts about an activist government. While playing Little League baseball, running for class president, or even sobbing in the principal's office, George W. Bush absorbed West Texas values that many old friends say are central to understanding who he is today.

''I think his political philosophy comes completely from the philosophy of the independent oil man,'' said Joe O'Neill, a fellow rapscallion in childhood. ''His homage to his parents, his respect for his elders, his respect for tradition, his belief in religion, his opposition to abortion -- that's the philosophy he grew up with here.''

Mr. Bush himself, in a long interview about his roots, made a similar point. ''I don't know what percentage of me is Midland,'' he said, ''but I would say people, if they want to understand me, need to understand Midland and the attitude of Midland.''

It is in the soil of Midland that Mr. Bush has said he would like to be buried when he dies, and it was to Midland that he returned in the 1970's to marry and start a family. It gave him an anchor in real America.

Mr. Bush has often said that ''the biggest difference between me and my father is that he went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High.'' That may be an exaggeration of the younger Mr. Bush's populist credentials, because he is also a product of Andover, Yale and Harvard. But there is still something to it.

The father, chauffeured to and from private school in Connecticut in a black sedan, suffered politically because of the perception that he was a blue blood who could not relate to ordinary people. The younger Mr. Bush also has been tainted by the idea that he was born into privilege with a visa to effortless wealth and prominence. Yet George W. Bush actually had a rather ordinary childhood, and his years biking around small-town streets in jeans and a white T-shirt left him with a common touch that is among his greatest assets as a politician.

''He understands Bubba because there is more Bubba in him,'' Karl Rove, the longtime political adviser to the Bushes, told a reporter in 1992, when Mr. Bush's friends were still carefree enough to say colorful things about him. ''He is clearly the wild son -- even today. Part of it is rooted in Midland, where he grew up in an ordinary neighborhood, where houses are close together and risk was a way of life.''

The Midland childhood is a striking contrast to that of another boy growing up at the same time, Al Gore, who instead of being paddled in Mr. Bizilo's office was attending the elite St. Albans School in Washington, swimming in the Senate pool and listening on an extension as his father the senator spoke on the telephone to President John F. Kennedy.

Midland, impatient with ideas and introspection, was a world of clear rights and wrongs, long on absolutes and devoid of ethical gray shades. It may be the source of some of Mr. Bush's greatest political strengths, the unpretentiousness and mellow bonhomie that warm up voters, and also of his weaknesses, including an image of an intellectual lightweight that is underscored whenever he mixes up the likes of Slovenia and Slovakia.

Boomtown in Black and White

It is easy to see why Midland does not support a postcard industry. It rests on an expanse of flat, baked nothingness. Even its residents, searching for a kind analogy, fumble a bit before coming up with ''moonscape.'' The surrounding land, home to tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes, would depress even a camel, but in the 1950's it had one redeeming feature -- it was loaded with oil.

The oil made Midland a boomtown, attracting ambitious businessmen like the elder Mr. Bush and many other out-of-staters as well. These people made for a conservative town but not a redneck one; Midland had a large proportion of geologists, engineers, lawyers and accountants, and Ivy League college graduates were everywhere.

Mr. Bush recalls it in Norman Rockwell pastels, and so do many other residents. Children bicycled everywhere on their own, crime was almost nonexistent and if anyone suspicious -- say, someone with a beard -- showed up in town, then-Sheriff Ed Darnell (known as Big Ed) would stop him, escort him to the edge of town, and tell him to ''get out.''

Yet what no one volunteers is that it was also rigidly segregated in those days, like most places in the South. Black children went to their own school rather than to Sam Houston Elementary with George Bush. The bus station and train station had separate waiting rooms for blacks and whites, and there were separate, dilapidated drinking fountains marked ''colored'' at the stations and at the courthouse.

The Bushes' first encounter with West Texas racism came when they casually invited a black man, working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to come by their temporary home in neighboring Odessa. The man had the tact to stay away, but neighbors heard about this and warned the elder George Bush to stop these invitations unless he wanted to be tarred and feathered.

Racial slurs were routine, and young George picked up the words from neighbors. Once when he was about 7 years old he used one in the living room in front of his mother, Barbara.

Michael Proctor, who lived across the street and was playing with George at the time, remembers watching as Mrs. Bush grabbed her son by the ear and dragged him into the bathroom. She washed his mouth out with soap as he spluttered indignantly.

''His family was probably the only one around that didn't use racial slurs,'' Mr. Proctor said. ''I probably didn't realize it was wrong until I saw that.''

Alongside the racism directed at blacks, there was a measured respect for the Mexicans who came over the border to work in the oil fields. As a boomtown, Midland needed laborers and welcomed Mexican immigrants, who were regarded as hard-working and thrifty. Some old friends find an echo of that attitude in Mr. Bush's efforts to push the Republican Party to reach out to immigrants.

''We saw these people cross the border and just wanting a good job,'' recalls Randall Roden, a neighbor boy and best friend. Mr. Roden recalls going out with George and his father to an oil well and spending the night sleeping in the back of the Bushes' station wagon as the crew -- Mexicans among them -- struggled to get the well going.

''I formed the very strong impression, and I think George has the same one, that these people came for economic opportunity and worked very hard,'' Mr. Roden said. ''If you wanted a Mexican worker to have a new pair of boots, you'd have to buy it for him. Because if you gave him money, he'd send it home.''

Gaining a Foothold in Texas

George W. Bush, though born in 1946 in New Haven, Conn., while his father was still an over-achieving student at Yale, moved to West Texas when he was not quite 2 and grew up in this nurturing environment. These days, as the son of a president and scion of a wealthy family, he is often perceived as a child of privilege, but neighbors in those days insist that in the 1950's that was not the case.

The Bush family in the Northeast had money, but the elder George left all that behind to make his own fortune in West Texas. Equipped with connections but initially without seed money, George and Barbara Bush and little George, their firstborn, settled in a tiny apartment in the hard-driving oil town of Odessa, where they shared a bathroom with a mother-daughter team of prostitutes living next door.

Local people say that you raise hell in Odessa but raise a family in nearby Midland, a much more respectable place. So, after a one-year interlude in California, the Bushes moved to Midland, living in a bright blue 847-square-foot bungalow on a newly built street in which every home was identical -- but painted bright colors to make them seem different. It was called Easter Egg Row, because the houses looked like colored eggs.

The family prospered in the oil business and moved into a series of nicer houses in Midland, culminating in one with a swimming pool. But this was not as much of a draw as it might have been. Just down the street lived Peggy Porter, one of the cutest girls in school, and because she had a pool as well, it was in much greater demand than the Bush family's.

Occasionally George W.'s grandfather, Senator Prescott S. Bush of Connecticut, would visit and cause a mild stir of interest in the neighborhood. But for the most part, the Bush family was regarded as fairly typical of the out-of-staters.

These days, Governor Bush is often seen as a princeling, the son of a president, the scion of a famous family, and Al Gore as more of his own man. But in the 1950's and early 1960's, it was the other way around. Back then, the name George Bush belonged only to an obscure Texas businessman. George W.'s closest connection to the White House was that he was a descendant on his mother's side of Franklin Pierce, America's 14th president. In contrast, in those days ''Albert Gore'' was virtually a household name, belonging to a prominent senator (the present candidate's father and namesake) who was sometimes mentioned as presidential or vice-presidential timber. The senator lost his seat in 1970 and faded into obscurity.

Yet young George was not some country hick, and he also learned to fit into the world of his Connecticut grandparents. The family regularly spent part of the summer at the family retreat in Kennebunkport, Me., and in 1954 the father took George and his best friend, Randall Roden, to Washington to see the White House, the United States Capitol and a baseball game with the Washington Senators (whose later incarnation would move to Texas and become the Rangers, owned in part by George W. Bush).

They had lunch at the senator's home in Georgetown, and a thirsty Randall promptly demonstrated the distance from Midland to Georgetown by drinking from his finger bowl.

When they are tracked down, the boys and girls who once played dodgeball at Sam Houston Elementary School, while now scattered around the country, offer recollections that are very similar: Midland was an idyllic place in which to grow up, and George W. Bush was a very typical child. In contrast to other recent presidential candidates, Mr. Bush in childhood is remarkable primarily for his ordinariness.

''He wasn't any different from anybody else,'' recalled Robert A. McCleskey, an old playmate. ''You read about Clinton and Gore and how at that age they were planning to be president. Not Bush.''

As a boy, Mr. Bush's ambition was to be another Mickey Mantle.

''All George ever wanted to be was a Major League baseball player,'' recalled a buddy, Terry Throckmorton. ''That's all he ever talked about.''

A Student of Baseball

No one has ever accused Mr. Bush of being an intellectual, and the indifference to books started early. Childhood friends recall Mr. Bush reading only two sets of books for pleasure -- the Hardy boys and a series of mystery books about baseball. As one asks about his reading habits, there are a few snickers.

''Did we sit around in those days reading books?'' asked Mr. McCleskey, smiling broadly. ''No.''

George and Barbara Bush led a drive to build a school library (the school did not previously have one), but books were not a major part of a boy's childhood in Midland. Erstwhile acquaintances, while deeply admiring of the Bushes' goodness and decency, have trouble recalling early signs of greatness in the son.

''Well, no, I never did think about what he might do in life,'' said Austine Crosby, his third-grade teacher. ''He was just a good, well-rounded young man, and he did his work.''

And academically? ''He was O.K.,'' Mrs. Crosby said, a bit defensively. ''He was O.K.''

So was he in the top quarter of his class academically?

''Well, in the upper half, anyway.''

Even if he did not distinguish himself as a student, former classmates describe him as smart and blessed with an excellent memory. He had a passion for baseball statistics, a first-rate collection of baseball cards and a reputation as such a shrewd trader that boys were careful not to agree to a trade with George Bush without thinking it over very carefully.

In the mid-1950's, George came up with a scheme that showed remarkable ingenuity and helped make his collection of baseball cards the best around. He began sending baseball cards to famous players, enclosing return postage and a cheery good-luck message, and asking the players to autograph the cards and send them back.

This way, he got autographed cards from Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and other famous players. Some of those cards are now worth thousands of dollars.

Mr. Bush's lifelong adoration of baseball began when he and other neighborhood boys would go early to school to play ball. Mr. Bizilo, the principal, would take off his jacket, loosen his tie and hit balls for the boys to field.

George was a good ballplayer, friends say, a bit on the small side but making up for it with enthusiasm and aggressiveness. He played catcher for the Cubs, a Little League team, and made it to the town's Little League All-Star team.

Becoming a Texan

Midland may not have had the best schools, George's onetime playmates say, but -- like Hot Springs, Ark., where Bill Clinton grew up -- it offered a nurturing environment and self-confidence for life.

''There's an assurance that you have growing up in a place like Midland, a self-confidence and a real genuine interest in connecting with people,'' said Marge Petty, the other politician in the group (a Democratic state senator in Kansas).

In particular, it was in Midland that Mr. Bush first learned to fit in, even if his parents were Yankees and his grandfather a senator. That ability to adapt and bridge groups has never left him.

Moreover, Midland values were remarkably unshaken by the 1960's. Some Midland alumni say they let their hair grow a bit longer, but -- like George W. Bush -- they mostly stood with the establishment instead of rejecting it. Very few seem to have protested significantly against the Vietnam War, seriously used drugs, thought of police as ''pigs,'' denounced their parents as oppressors or picked up a copy of Das Kapital.

''It's a town of embedded values,'' Mr. Bush recalled, adding that it had ''a heavy dose of individualism and fairly healthy disrespect for government.'' Asked if his own skepticism about the role for government is a product of Midland attitudes, Mr. Bush paused and finally nodded, saying: ''I think there's a parallel there, I do.''

Midland was steeped in optimism, and for many people growing up here in the 1950's, the moral of childhood was that the system worked, that anyone who struggled enough in that baking desert had a good chance of finding oil and striking it rich. The trajectory of the Bush family itself, from the apartment with the shared bathroom to the sprawling house and pool, underscored the point.

''The lesson lasted with George W. for years,'' said Bill Minutaglio, a Texan who has written a biography of Mr. Bush. ''I think he truly believes that people can win the lottery if they work hard, that if they put their nose to the grindstone it'll all work out without government help or intrusion.''

The antipathy for government seems a little odd, from afar, because in those days the oil business depended heavily on quirks in the tax code to encourage investments. Still, when the people of Midland sought a theater, a hospital and a new baseball diamond, they did not ask the government but raised money themselves and turned out on the weekends to do much of the work on their own.

When Mr. Bush talks about ''compassionate conservatism'' or ''faith-based initiatives,'' he evokes what old classmates remember as the spirit of Midland of the 1950's. Asked if that is what he has in mind, Mr. Bush interrupts half-way through the question. ''Yeah, absolutely,'' he said.

Those who know Midland are convinced that Mr. Bush is sincere when he preaches compassion and calls for a ''responsibility era.'' But some also admit that it is fair to question the relevance of lessons from a town where raw capitalism made so many people rich and where community spirit wove such a strong safety net.

Surviving a Family Loss

In addition to church groups, various civic organizations were also active, and one of the local rituals for children was the meetings with cookies and milk at the home of a nice old lady who represented the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The cookies were digested more thoroughly than the teachings.

''We were terrible to animals,'' recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. A dip behind the Bush home turned into a small lake after a good rain, and thousands of frogs would come out.

''Everybody would get BB guns and shoot them,'' Mr. Throckmorton said. ''Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up.''

When he was not blowing up frogs, young George -- always restless and something of a natural leader -- would lead neighborhood children on daredevil expeditions around town, seeing how close they could come to breaking their necks. George also quickly acquired a colorful vocabulary.

''Georgie has grown to be a near-man, talks dirty once in a while and occasionally swears, aged 4 and a half,'' his father despaired in a letter to a friend in 1951. In another letter four years later, he lamented: ''Georgie aggravates the hell out of me at times.''

There was one terrible interruption in this relaxed life, occurring when George was 7. He was at school when he saw his parents' green Oldsmobile drive up in the parking lot. At first he thought he saw his 3-year-old sister, Robin, through the window.

But his eyes were playing tricks on him. His parents had come to break the news to him that Robin had just died of leukemia. The loss staggered the Bush family, and some friends say that George's closeness to his mother dates partly from his efforts to comfort her at that time.

His mother's hair began to turn gray, though she was just 28, and she often dissolved into tears. George's father worked hard and traveled frequently, and so the boy spent much more time with his mother than his father -- acquiring in particular her lacerating wit.

Robin's death is something that he has talked about very rarely with friends, and even some of his roommates at boarding school and college did not know about her. But occasionally when the moment was right, he would confide to friends about his tears and grief at the time, about his incomprehension that Robin could have been dying without his parents telling him.

Close friends say he had nightmares for years afterward. The death also left him as a quasi-only child, for his next-oldest sibling, Jeb, was six and a half years younger. Neil and Marvin were 9 and 10 years younger than George, and Dorothy was 13 years younger. So while George occasionally used Jeb as a punching bag in childhood squabbles, and always relished his role as elder brother, most of the time his playmates and confidants were friends and roommates rather than siblings.

Soon after Robin's death, George returned to school. Most of the time, the despair was hidden, and on the surface he soon reverted to the wise-cracking imp they had known before.

The Seeds of Leadership

Mr. Bush's political debut appears to have come in the seventh grade, although both he and his wife, Laura, (who was in the same seventh grade but barely knew him) say they have no recollection of it. Classmates recall that he ran for seventh-grade class president against Jack Hanks.

Jack was a formidable candidate, and four years later at Boys Nation he would be elected vice president, defeating a personable candidate from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. Yet in running against George, Jack was less fortunate, and classmates say that George was elected by a narrow margin.

''I voted for George because he was cuter,'' recalled Peggy Porter Weiss, ''and in the seventh grade that's what counted.''

Still, former classmates say that if they had been told that one of their number would become a presidential candidate, they would not have thought of George Bush. Instead, they say, the assumption would have been that it would be Bill Wood.

Mr. Wood, as bright and ambitious as he was athletic, beat out George Bush on the football field and was the first-string quarterback on the seventh-grade team (Mr. Bush was the second-string quarterback). Mr. Wood eventually became the junior high school and high school student council president and even headed the statewide association of student councils. If any young man in Midland seemed destined for the White House, classmates remember, it was he.

''Since then, the only thing I ever ran for,'' said Mr. Wood, now a lawyer and a bit flattered and amused by the memories of his classmates, ''was the school board.''

Political Journeys

Articles in this series will examine the lives of the presidential candidates ast the campaign progresses. The nest article will explore Al Gore's dual boyhood, in Washington and in Carthage, Tenn.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
http://www.makethemaccountable.com/articles/A_Philosophy_With_Roots_in_Conservative_Texas_Soil.htm

Did the Bush twins inhale? Kutcher won't say
By Karen Thomas, USA TODAY
May 7, 2003

The White House didn't return phone calls Wednesday, but the president and first lady must be reeling over Ashton Kutcher's comments about their twin daughters in the new Rolling Stone.

Ashton Kutcher tells Rolling Stone that he partied with the Bush twins more than a year ago.

The shaggy-haired TV star tells the magazine he met Barbara and Jenna Bush, now 21, at a party about a year and a half ago, and the sisters (along with a Secret Service agent) went back to his place afterward. "The Bushes were underage-drinking at my house. When I checked outside, one of the Secret Service guys asked me if they'd be spending the night. I said no.

"And then I go upstairs to see another friend, and I can smell the green (marijuana) wafting out under his door. I open the door, and there he is, smoking out the Bush twins on his hookah."

Kutcher wasn't apologetic Wednesday, because in the article "he didn't say what was being smoked or who was doing the smoking," says spokeswoman Leslie Sloane Zelnik.

Nor is he going to.

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/2003-05-07-ashton_x.htm

Laura's Girls
Mrs. Bush Sought Privacy for Her Twins. They Had Their Own Idea About What to Do With It.

By Ann Gerhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2004; Page C01

Adapted from "The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush," by Ann Gerhart, published this week by Simon & Schuster

The armored black limousine glides to a stop near a U.S. military jet at Andrews Air Force Base early one morning in May 2002. Laura Bush is about to embark on her first solo trip as first lady, a 10-day visit to three European nations, where she will speak out for Afghan women's rights.

An aide opens the door, and Mrs. Bush slides her legs carefully out and steps onto the tarmac. By this point, she knows her part well: Pause to smile, wave and let the photographers dutifully record the image. The small press corps knows its part, too, and watches the routine preflight maneuver with no expectations. Suddenly, one leg in worn corduroy, then the other, swings off the smooth leather limo seat. Jenna Bush stands up to follow her mother into the plane for this spring fling, and the reporters go on alert. It's the rowdy twin, the one who has been busted twice in four weeks for underage drinking, who has run her Secret Service detail ragged, who was captured in the National Enquirer falling down, a cigarette in her hand.

The corduroy jeans are ratty at their too-long hems, where Jenna has ground them into the pavement too many times. She is wearing a short black T-shirt, and her exposed tummy pooches out over the low-riding waistband. Flip-flops are on her feet. Her blond hair has been pinned carelessly up with a plastic clip. Sunglasses cover her eyes. Hoisting a backpack, she clomps up the plane stairs and disappears.

She hardly looks appropriately presidential daughterly, but then again, she has time to get herself together before the entourage lands in Paris, where French and American officials will greet Mrs. Bush and hand her flowers. The girl is hardly flying coach: Her mother has a hairdresser and a makeup artist on board the military plane, and there's a lovely wide bed and full shower.

But upon arrival 71/2 hours later, while her ladylike mother smiles and embraces the waiting welcomers, Jenna appears at the plane door looking exactly the same. The flip-flops still on the feet, the belly still exposed, the hair still not brushed. Suddenly, she darts back inside. The twin has spied the telephoto lenses of several French photographers far away, behind a fence. For a few moments, nothing happens, and then the limousine trunk floats open by electronic remote. A White House valet retrieves one of Mrs. Bush's Neiman Marcus garment bags, carefully laid out in the trunk, and he carries it back up the plane's steps. The reporters watch in wonder. While he holds it aloft, Jenna slips behind it, and he walks back down the stairs, shielding the first daughter from the prying eyes of all media, foreign and domestic. Only the top of her blond head, bobbing up and down, and those flip-flops are visible.

Jenna is hiding, literally, behind her mother's skirts.

There are only two possible explanations for what the reporters have just witnessed. Either, A) Laura Bush has asked her 20-year-old to please make herself more presentable, more fitting as a representative of the United States using taxpayer dollars on an official visit, and her daughter has adamantly refused, or B) Laura hasn't even bothered to ask.

Blessed Ambivalence

There is plenty that the Bushes don't ask their daughters to do, that much is clear. They are college seniors now, 22, Jenna an English major at the University of Texas in Austin, and Barbara, like her father a Yalie, majoring in humanities. Both are considering graduate school, their parents say, but not before working first, perhaps as teachers.

Jenna and Barbara have not campaigned or reined in their adolescent rebellions. They have not appeared engaged in any of the pressing issues their generation will inherit, nor shown empathy for the struggles facing their mother and their father, the president of the United States. They have not treated with respect their Secret Service details, those highly trained men and women who literally would take a bullet for them. They don't show their faces at the White House often. So far, they have shown little inclination to embrace the life of public service modeled by their parents, uncle and grandparents.

They are girls born rich, blessed with intelligence, good looks, trust funds, loving parents, boundless opportunities, freedom from many of life's daily vexing challenges. Yet they persist in seeing themselves as victims of daddy's job. In this attitude, they have been subtly encouraged by their mother. Laura Bush would never permit herself to feel victimized by her husband's decisions. She regards herself as a full partner who embraced his ambitions because she wanted for him what he wanted for himself. His happiness has been as important to her as her own, or greater. No, any victimization she might have felt has all been transferred onto her girls. Once George sought political office when his girls were 12, Laura's guiding principle in mothering became "they didn't really ask for this," as if the life that followed for Jenna and Barbara was some disastrous, bumpy detour from the normal smooth path toward adulthood.

"They just want to do like every other teenager does," the first lady has insisted often. This declaration is dead opposite from most parents' insistence, which is, of course, "I don't care what the 'other' kids do. You are not other kids."

Laura Bush left her career as teacher and librarian at 31. By the time the twins were born in 1981, Laura was 35. The couple hadn't been sure they would ever be able to have children of their own, and then Laura nearly lost the babies late in her pregnancy, so she and George felt doubly blessed. Their gratitude was so deep and persistent that over time, it seems to have turned into indulgence.

Growing Pains

In many ways, the Bush twins were excellent candidates to make a good transition to life as children of a political figure. It was the family business, after all, and the twins' parents entered it only after they had addressed their concerns about what it would mean for family life, they told the Dallas Morning News in 1995. "She was the last one to sign on, the most reluctant," the president said of Laura. "Our girls were so little," she said. But the timing was good: After their father became governor, Jenna and Barbara were able to go to high school in the relatively laid-back town of Austin. By the time their parents landed in the White House, they were away at college.

When the Bushes first moved from Dallas into the governor's mansion, Barbara and Jenna went to the private St. Andrew's Episcopal School and later the public Austin High, and their mother worked hard to integrate her life as a mother with her duties as first lady. Even as the couple traveled around the state, Laura insisted that at least she or George be home by 4 in the afternoon, to help with homework. The four of them ate dinner together most nights. "You'd see them at back-to-school night, just like all the other parents, sitting at the student desks in the classroom," said an Austinite whose kids were friends with the Bush girls. "It was no big deal. They were just part of the parent population."

There was plenty of staff and few chores. Texas Department of Public Safety troopers chauffeured the girls to and from school. Laura recognized she had been deprived of an excellent way to gather teenage intelligence. Being relieved of driving "is actually a wonderful luxury for someone who drove 20 carpools a week in Dallas," Laura said. "At the same time, you learn a lot about your kids when you have them captive in a car."

In interviews during the gubernatorial years, both Bushes referred again and again to how embarrassing their children found them. Always, they seemed to think this was perfectly normal behavior for teenagers.

Every time he went to one of Jenna's volleyball games, the opposing team would ask for an autograph and picture. "Jenna and Barbara's reaction, of course, was total humiliation," he said. Laura seemed resigned to being an object of ridicule for her girls. They made fun of her clothes, her shoes, her hair. "Mom," they would tell her, "your hair is so stiff it would stay put in a hurricane."

Rarely were the girls asked to come downstairs and say hello to dinner guests. "We've been very careful not to make them go to things or be in the limelight," Laura explained. "At this age, they don't even like to admit they have parents." Later, during the presidential campaign, Laura would return to this theme again. The twins were proud of their father, she said, "and they want him, of course, to do whatever he wants to do, but at the same time, they want the privacy that I think every senior in high school wants. You know, most seniors in high school don't want to even admit they have parents, you know, much less a parent who is a governor or a presidential candidate."

The Clinton Model

Partly out of respect for their privacy, mostly out of sensitivity toward their distaste for their dad's high profile, Laura also asked photographers not to take the twins' pictures. Requests for a family portrait to illustrate a magazine or newspaper story were routinely denied. "The girls would be totally humiliated having to do a photo," said Laura.

When, at 16, the twins demanded separate cars, their mother assented, and their father disagreed. "You can share one car," he said, "and learn to work together." It was one of his rare victories in an attempt to impose some limitations.

As the family began to discuss whether George should run for presi