The Family (46 page)

When testifying before Congress, George would make an opening statement to the committee, and then introduce an agency expert to address the substantive questions. He would prearrange for one of his staff to slip him a note that he was needed at the White House. Five minutes into the questioning, he would excuse himself and leave the expert in charge. “Worked every time,” he said.

His aides knew to prepare him “to the hilt” when he had to go toe-to-toe with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. “I remember one briefing at Langley when George excused himself and came out of the conference room embarrassed, confused, and very angry,” recalled an assistant. “He brought out his briefing papers, threw them on the table, and demanded that we correct all our mistakes at once.”

The staff examined the papers.

“These are all correct, sir,” Bush was told.

“Well, why the hell is that goddamn Kissinger yelling at me then?”

“Sir, I think the legends on Mr. Kissinger’s maps are incorrect.”

George smiled diabolically. He returned to the briefing room, and, as he said later, he “ate Kissinger out.”

George’s CIA staff played to his animosity toward the Secretary of State by downgrading “Dr.” Kissinger to “Mr.” Kissinger.

“I learned that one early,” said a staffer, who had made the mistake of referring to the Secretary of State respectfully as “Doctor.”

“‘The fucker doesn’t perform surgery or make house calls, does he?’ said George.

“‘No, sir,’ I replied . . . After that you can better well believe that it was never Dr. Kissinger again!”

George’s facility with “bending” and “stretching” gave him great expertise in keeping secrets, not just for the CIA, but also for his own family. At the time he was running the agency in 1976, his wife, Barbara, was dealing with a serious depression that more than once led her to the brink of suicide. His nephew Prescott S. Bush III was fighting schizophrenia; his uncle James Smith Bush, who had embezzled funds and fled the country, was dying in the Philippines; and George’s son George W. Bush, who by his own admission was “drinking and carousing and fumbling around,” was arrested that summer for driving under the influence.

George kept all those secrets, even from other members of the family. He had learned to compartmentalize his life so effectively that even within his immediate circle, he operated on a need-to-know basis. He did not tell all of his children the details of their cousin’s mental condition. Nor did he give all the sordid details of his Uncle Jim to Jim’s children. George did not tell anyone about young George’s run-in with the Kennebunkport police when the thirty-year-old had taken his underage sister, Doro, seventeen, out drinking and been arrested driving home drunk. Nor did George tell any of his children about their mother’s severe depression.

“George was the only one in the family who knew about it,” Barbara said many years later. “He was working such incredible long hours at his job, and I swore to myself I would not burden him.”

Barbara was fifty-one years old at the time and in the hormonal throes of menopause. She no longer had children to take care of, and her husband was rarely home. She said she did not like his job at the CIA because he could not tell her the agency’s secrets, but in truth she had never played a significant role in George’s work, except for his political campaigns. At the time, his confidential assistant, Jennifer Fitzgerald, was privy to all that Barbara was not.

“I was wallowing in self-pity,” Barbara admitted. “I almost wondered why he didn’t leave me. Sometimes the pain was so great, I felt the urge to drive into a tree or into an oncoming car. Then I would pull over to the side of the road until I felt okay.”

George suggested that his wife seek professional help, but she resisted. “I would feel like crying a lot and I really painfully hurt,” she recalled. “And I would think bad thoughts, I will tell you. It was not nice . . . I could have gotten help. But I was too sort of proud . . . I didn’t tell anyone . . . Not even Andy Stewart, my closest friend.

“I know now that drugs could have helped me but . . . I was ashamed of my depression. My code was, ‘You think about other people, stop thinking about yourself’ . . . I tried to work myself out of it . . . I know I should have gone to the doctor . . . But I didn’t. I gutted it out . . . and it was awful.”

In retrospect, the Bushes’ Christmas card indicated how Barbara was feeling. The card contained five family pictures: one of George W. and Doro at the Great Wall in China; one of Marvin at the Ming Tombs; one of Neil at the Great Wall; one of George senior at the Summer Palace; and one of Jeb and his wife, Columba, in Houston. There was no picture of the invisible wife and mother.

Years later, when Barbara admitted suffering from depression, she said she had felt totally insignificant as a person. “I went through a sort of difficult time because suddenly women’s lib had made me feel that my life had been wasted . . . I felt inadequate and that I hadn’t accomplished enough . . . But I got over it, thank heavens.”

Some wonder if she ever conquered those feelings because she seemed to harbor real resentment toward the professional women on her husband’s staff. “She’d always say to me, ‘When are you going to have more children?’” recalled a female lawyer who worked for George Bush. “I only had one child at the time, and Barbara seemed to take it as a personal affront that I hadn’t stopped my career then and there to have more.”

Barbara snapped defensively at female reporters who asked if she had any regrets about dropping out of college. “If I had regrets,” she said, “I would have gone back.”

In 1978 she defined herself to
Women’s Wear Daily
: “I’m not a feminist. I’m for women’s rights, but I haven’t those interests. I’ve been a kept woman for 33 years and very happily. I live in the very large shadow of this man. We’re not a team. He should make his own mistakes. Sure, I feed him and get his clothes ready, but I don’t discuss the issues with him.”

Barbara sounded like Mamie Eisenhower, who once boasted, “Ike runs the country and I turn the lamb chops.” As a political wife, Barbara had paid a heavy price to support George’s ambitions, but she never admitted the emotional cost. “You have two choices in life,” she said. “You can either like what you do or you can dislike it. I have chosen to like my life.”

Her choice sometimes required a superhuman effort that could be seen in the clenched teeth of a forced smile or the biting jab of a bitter comment.

Barbara’s depression, which lasted most of 1976, began to lift only after the election, when President-elect Jimmy Carter made it clear that he would not consider keeping George on as CIA director. George, who had been giving Carter national security briefings, could not believe that the Georgia peanut farmer was dismissing him. He tried to negotiate. He suggested that by keeping him on, Carter would prove that the CIA was above politics. Carter smiled his half smile. During the campaign he had called the agency a “dumping ground” for failed political candidates. Now he was dumping George.

During their last intelligence briefing one of George’s deputies outlined a long-range national security problem due to surface in 1985. Carter waved him off.

“I don’t need to worry about that. By then, George will be President and he can take care of it.”

George seemed perplexed by the comment. He wrote in his autobiography: “It was an odd statement, coming from Jimmy Carter. I wondered what he meant by that.”

The President-elect, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, obviously saw George as a rampagingly ambitious man who was not going to rest until he made himself President of the United States, and in that observation Carter was absolutely correct. Even as George watched the 1976 Republican National Convention on television in Kennebunkport that summer, he confided his frustration to his Midland friend John Ashmun: “I think those guys could have relented . . . and at least thrown my name in the hat. I told Ford I wouldn’t actively campaign, but I really hoped some of those fellows would say, ‘What the heck, let’s put his name in the pot.’”

George wrote to his friend Jack Mohler: “I am staying the hell out of politics, but it isn’t easy.”

He also revealed a melancholic tone when he wrote to Neil Mallon: “I dictate this as the Republican Convention gets under way . . . When I see all my political friends charging around Kansas City, I have a twinge of regret.”

When Jimmy Carter beat Jerry Ford for President in 1976, George began making plans to grab the White House for himself in 1980. He decided to return to Texas, join the boards of companies controlled by some of his rich friends, set up a political action committee (Fund for Limited Government), and lay the foundation for his presidential campaign. He told Barbara to head for Houston and find a new house. She felt as if she had regained her life.

“I looked at about thirty houses,” she said, “and fell in love with one on Indian Trail.” George bought the $325,000 house sight unseen and was dismayed to find out that it needed extensive renovation, but Barbara now had an all-consuming project. He took one room to set up a home office, deducting all the expenses on his 1977 tax returns, right down to the coffeemaker. He identified himself as a “business consultant.”

When George learned that President Carter intended to name Kingman Brewster the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, he wrote to the former Yale president and obtained a job for Jennifer Fitzgerald as special assistant. Conveniently, one of the boards George was on had business that took him to London frequently. “Jennifer only lasted for about a year,” said Brewster’s biographer Geoffrey Kabaservice. “Kingman was irritated at her frequent absences going to the states to see George . . . Their relationship was no secret to the embassy staff. Everyone knew that she was George’s mistress.”

During that year, while Jennifer was often absent from her job, George was living in Houston and traveling the country in his first run for the presidency. But he set aside several intervals in which he told aides he would not be reachable. He also said that he could not divulge his whereabouts. He claimed that he was flying to Washington for a secret meeting of former CIA directors. But according to former CIA directors, there were no meetings—secret or otherwise—during that period, and George had no assignments of any kind from the CIA.

“That’s a new one on me,” said former CIA Director Richard Helms a few months before he died in 2002. “And, as you know, I was at the CIA from the time they opened the doors.”

Stansfield Turner, who was CIA director from 1977 to 1981, was equally dubious. “I never knew former directors had meetings and there were none when I was there,” he told
The Washington Post
.

Moving back to normalcy in Houston had demoralized George. He felt like a racehorse under wraps. In March 1977 he wrote to his good friend Gerry Bemiss:

There has [
sic
] been withdrawal symptoms. I’ve been tense as a coiled spring hopefully not a shit about it, but up tight . . . I just get bored silly about whose daughter is a Pi Phi or even bored about whose [
sic
] banging old Joe’s wife. I don’t want to slip into that 3 or 4 martini late dinner rich social thing . . . I think I want to run or at least be in a position to run in ’80—but it seems so overwhelmingly presumptuous and egotistical; yet I’ll think some on that.

Barbara, on the other hand, was revitalized to be back home, where Jeb and his wife, Columba, were living with their two young children, George Prescott Bush, age one, and a new baby, Noelle.

Years before, Barbara had interfered with the engagement of her eldest son, supposedly because W.’s fiancée’s stepfather was Jewish, but there was nothing she could do when her second son fell in love with a young Mexican woman. Jeb met Columba Garnica Gallo in León, Mexico, in 1971, when he was an exchange student from Andover. He never dated anyone else, and he said he would not be happy until he married her, which he did in 1974 at the Catholic student center at the University of Texas. He was twenty-one and she was twenty. He gave her a wedding ring that had belonged to Barbara’s grandmother Mabel Pierce. He introduced Columba to his parents for the first time on the day of the wedding.

“I’m not going to lie to you and say we were thrilled,” Barbara told one writer.

In fact, Barbara was so worried about her son’s marriage to a Mexican that she sought advice from her friend the society columnist Ymelda (née Chavez) Dixon.

“I remember Barbara calling me and asking what she should do. She said there were racial problems in Texas and immense discrimination against Mexicans there. Apparently, the only Mexicans in Houston were maids and gardeners. I told Barbara, ‘As long as the girl hangs a sign around her neck that says “Bush,” she’ll be fine.’ Barbara was too smart to say she was heartsick about the marriage, but I know she was.”

Shortly after his son’s wedding George noted in his China diary that he had received “a beautiful letter from Jeb about the problems of Columba adjusting, how much he loves her, how marvelous she is, and what she needs is self-confidence. It was a thoughtful, sensitive piece—an attractive kid who has got it all. I just hope he is fully happy because, knowing him and his sensitivity, he would be deeply hurt if she was ever hurt.”

Jeb, who spoke with his wife in fluent Spanish, was spared her further social discomfort in Houston when the Texas Commerce Bank transferred him to Venezuela in 1977 for two years to handle international loans. Jeb had been given the job by his father’s good friend Ben Love, who was chairman of the board. The bank had been founded by the family of James A. Baker III, one of George Bush’s best friends.

At that time Jeb, twenty-three, looked like the family’s standard-bearer for success. He was six feet four, and, with his Phi Beta Kappa key, he seemed to have it all, as his father said. Jeb certainly had more than his reckless older brother, who at the age of thirty was still footloose and foolhardy.

George W. was living in Midland during this period and hustling the gusher fantasies of all oilmen. He spent his days in the courthouse researching titles to mineral rights and negotiating deals to lease them. He lived above a garage in an apartment that was piled so high with dirty clothes that his friends’ wives periodically washed them just to keep the public health service at bay. Most of his nights were spent in bars, drinking with buddies in the business.