by Peter Baker
George W. Bush, meanwhile, was far from such weighty questions. While Cheney helped run the country, Bush could barely run his own life. After earning his MBA from Harvard, he returned to Midland, where like his father he dove into the oil business seeking his fortune. He trolled courthouses searching land records for properties adjacent to wells and lived a carefree existence. He wore hand-me-down shirts and relied on his friend Don Evans’s wife to do his laundry. His alley-side apartment resembled a “toxic waste dump,” remembered his friend Charlie Younger, and he drank prodigiously. Bush and Younger once bolted onstage during a Willie Nelson concert with a pack of beer. At dinner with his parents, Bush blurted out to a woman who was their close friend, “So, what’s sex like after fifty, anyway?” While visiting Kennebunkport in Septmeber 1976, he was arrested for drunk driving, later paying a $150 fine and temporarily losing driving privileges in Maine.
He was the “Bombastic Bushkin,” as friends called him, though there were limits. “He always lived on the edge,” Younger said. “He would get on the brink and then pull back in. But he would never really go over the edge. I mean, he would have a lot of fun and his IQ would go up the more he drank and get a little boisterous. But he never really did really crazy stuff that other people did.”
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“To be where the action is”
Gerald Ford’s defeat proved a turning point for both Bush and Cheney. Each had been tied to the ousted government, and now with Republicans in the wilderness, controlling neither the White House nor Congress, they began to explore their own ambitions. As it happened, in separate parts of the country, they both set sights on the same goal: the House of Representatives.
The 1978 midterm election campaign came during a moment of transition in American politics as the conservative movement found its champion in Ronald Reagan and positioned itself for a new era of influence. Both Bush and Cheney were part of the old order, and even if their personal philosophies might have aligned more with the emerging Reaganism, they had to prove their ideological bona fides and fight off carpetbagging charges.
They both targeted seats vacated by longtime incumbents, but neither was embraced by the local establishment. In Texas, Bush found himself discouraged by the former governor Allan Shivers when it was clear a popular Democratic state legislator would seek the House seat representing Midland, Odessa, and Lubbock. “Son, you can’t win,” Shivers told Bush. “This district is just made for Kent Hance.” As Bush later told his sister, Doro, “I listened to him, said okay, and decided to run anyway.” In Wyoming, Cheney talked with the former governor Stanley K. Hathaway about running for the Senate but also found a state legislator standing in his way. “Dick, if you run for Senate, Al Simpson will kick your fanny,” Hathaway told him. Unlike Bush, Cheney took the advice and backed off, only to get another opportunity when the state’s lone House member unexpectedly retired.
For Bush, the looming campaign came at a time of significant change in his personal life. One day in July 1977, he went to a barbecue at the Midland home of his friend Joe O’Neill, whose wife, Jan, had invited a friend, Laura Welch, a local librarian. Laura and George had actually grown up ten blocks away from each other, attended San Jacinto Junior High together, and at one point lived in the same apartment complex in Houston without knowing each other well. As they grilled hamburgers in the backyard that night, though, Laura in her blue sundress caught Bush’s eye. She was thirty years old with an easy smile and the shoulder-length feathered hair common to that era, the daughter of a loan company manager and a homemaker. The O’Neills realized he was serious when the early-to-bed Bush would not leave. “He stayed almost past midnight, which is unheard of for him,” O’Neill said later. “They hit it off right away.” That they were so different was part of the appeal. She liked to listen; he liked to talk. She curled up with a good book; he was in perpetual motion. “Laura stays in her own space,” he noticed. “I’ve always invaded other people’s spaces.” Four months later they were married.
Far apart as they were, Bush and Cheney found their campaigns playing out in similar ways. They both had to show they were homegrown, they both had to translate what they had seen at the national level to the local level, and they both had something to learn about themselves. Bush tapped his parents’ card file of supporters for campaign cash, including Rumsfeld, while striving to be his own man. Still mastering the art of the stump, he was driving home from a speech one day and asked Laura how it had gone; not well, she answered, shocking him so much that he crashed the car into a garage. Cheney, for his part, drove around the state listening to eight-track tapes of the Carpenters. Like Bush, Backseat was trying to make the transition to the front. He addressed crowds in a monotone, with none of the rhetorical flourishes or applause lines of most politicians. Pete Williams, then a young reporter covering the campaign, thought, “This guy doesn’t give a speech; he briefs the audience.”
Looming over both races was Ronald Reagan. Bush’s primary opponent had worked for Reagan, who in turn sent a letter supporting him for the Texas seat, a move that might have been rooted in loyalty but also reflected the chess match then under way for the 1980 presidential nomination with Bush’s father. Cheney, for his part, had to live down his work in the 1976 primaries against Reagan, who carried the Wyoming delegation at the convention. Reluctant to “run as Jerry Ford’s guy in Wyoming,” Cheney asked his former boss not to endorse him.
For Cheney, the seminal event of the campaign came late one night. He had been at his friend Bill Thomson’s house in Cheyenne, talking late into the evening. Then he and Lynne retired back to Joe Meyer’s house, where they were spending the night. About two or three in the morning on June 18, Cheney woke up complaining that two fingers on his left hand were tingling. Lynne rushed downstairs and woke Meyer, who drove them to a hospital. At thirty-seven, Cheney had had a heart attack and was confronted with a medical reality that would haunt him the rest of his life. “That was devastating to them,” Meyer recalled. “They didn’t have any money set aside. They had two young girls. Neither one of them came from rich families. Lynne, I saw her at the kitchen table; she was kind of weepy.”
Cheney stuck with the campaign. “Look, hard work never killed anybody,” his doctor told him. “What takes a toll is spending your life doing something you don’t want to do.” Cheney quit his three-pack-a-day smoking habit and pared back on coffee. He sent a letter to voters assuring them of his fortitude and ultimately overcame two name brands for the Republican nomination: Ed Witzenburger, the state treasurer; and Jack Gage, son of a former governor. Cheney won the primary with a 42 percent plurality, then cruised to victory in the general election with 59 percent. He was heading back to Washington.
Not so Bush. A “feisty fighter,” in his father’s judgment, Bush won the Republican nomination by overcoming Jim Reese, a former mayor of Odessa. But as warned, Kent Hance proved a formidable opponent in the fall. Both of his opponents painted Bush as an outsider. Reese brandished Bush’s birth certificate to prove he was born in Connecticut. Hance ran a radio ad noting Bush’s pedigree from Andover, Yale, and Harvard. “I don’t think he’s ever been in the back of a pool hall in Dimmitt, Texas,” Hance told an audience.
At another appearance, Hance said Bush was trying “to ride the coattails, I think, of his father.”
Bush was frustrated. “Would you like me to run as Sam Smith?” he replied. “The problem is I can’t abandon my background.”
Bush joked that he would have preferred being born in Texas but he thought he ought to be close to his mother that day and she happened to be in Connecticut. He distinguished himself from his famous father by establishing his Texas pedigree. “He went to Greenwich Country Day School,” the candidate said repeatedly, “and I went to San Jacinto Junior High.” Never mind that he went there for just a year.
When a conservative radio talk show host asked him if he was associated with the Trilateral Commission, Bush snapped, “I won’t be persuaded by anyone, inc
luding my father.” Leaving the interview, he refused to shake the host’s hand, muttering, “You asshole.”
His loss was sealed when a student supporter placed an ad in a campus newspaper promising free beer at a Bush rally and the Hance camp sent a letter criticizing it to religious voters. Advisers urged Bush to retaliate by pointing out that Hance leased property to a bar near campus, but he refused, deeming that dishonorable. Hance beat Bush with 53 percent, instilling a lesson for life. “He allowed Hance to define him as an easterner carpetbagger, which was not the case,” Joe O’Neill said. Bush resolved “never to get out-countried again.”
Years later, Bush and Cheney would trade notes on that 1978 election. “We talked on more than one occasion about his campaign for Congress” and his vow to never be painted as an outsider again, Cheney said. “I could identify with that because I always believed, and still do to this day, that I benefited politically when it was time for me to run for office by virtue of the fact that I had graduated not from Yale but from the University of Wyoming.”
BUSH THREW HIMSELF back into the oil business through a company he started with the help of investors referred by his uncle Jonathan Bush. He called it Arbusto, the Spanish word for “bush,” and began drilling holes with modest success. Intent on work, he devoted little time to his father’s presidential campaign in 1980 and only learned of his selection as Reagan’s running mate from television while dining with investors at New York’s ‘21’ Club. George H. W. Bush got the nod after Cheney and others talked Gerald Ford out of joining Reagan’s ticket.
George W. and Laura were having trouble conceiving and had begun exploring adoption when she finally became pregnant with twins. Jenna and Barbara were born in November 1981, and suddenly the Bombastic Bushkin was forced to be a responsible father. But business was problematic. Wells came up empty, oil prices fell, and Bush felt the pressure of losing money invested by family friends. Arbusto was looking more like Ar-bust-o, so he changed the name to Bush Exploration Company. By the end of 1983, it ranked 993rd in oil production in Texas. Nearly half of the ninety-five holes it drilled were dry. In 1984, Bush merged it with Spectrum 7, a Dallas-based company looking for distressed oil firms. Bush was made chairman with a $75,000-a-year salary and 1.1 million shares.
While Bush struggled in Texas, Cheney was accumulating influence in Washington. Young and smart with a sober demeanor, Cheney was tapped in December 1980 by Robert H. Michel, the House Republican leader, to run for chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, the party’s number-four position. Cheney won and became the youngest member of the leadership in a century. Michel picked him to balance his own conservatism, and the Wednesday Club, a group of moderates, invited Cheney to join. But Michel and his colleagues misjudged personality for policies. When it came time to vote, Cheney supported tax cuts, prayer in school, and the contra rebels in Nicaragua and, in his own words, “never met a weapons system he didn’t vote for.” He opposed abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, creation of the Education Department, a ban on armor-piercing bullets, and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa. He voted against funding for the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He opposed Head Start and Superfund. He earned a 91 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, edging out his classmate Newt Gingrich, with 90 percent. “I had no idea he was that conservative,” Michel said later. “Nobody ever checked the voting record,” Cheney said. “I was consistently one of the most conservative members of the House in terms of how I voted.”
Cheney had respect for government, though. The son of a career government worker, he would cross out the word “bureaucrat” in news releases produced by aides and insert “public servant” instead. Nor was he a deficit hawk. When red ink flowed in Reagan’s first year in office, he advised riding it out. “The deficit isn’t the worst thing that could happen,” he said. Indeed, fiscal conservatism took a backseat to national security. He was an ardent supporter of Reagan’s anti-Communist defense buildup and proxy wars in Central America. During a 1983 congressional trip to Moscow, Representative Tom Downey, a Democrat, needled him. “You can’t expect them to accept all our terms,” Downey said. “You can’t expect them to surrender.” Cheney answered, “Yeah, yes I can.”
Cheney was absorbed with the struggle with the Soviet Union and the prospect of Armageddon-like war. Unknown to almost anyone at the time, he was a regular participant in a secret program conducted by the Reagan administration intended to reestablish a rudimentary government in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Every year, Cheney would disappear for three or four days, spirited out of Washington in the middle of the night along with a team of several dozen federal officials and a single Reagan cabinet secretary to a remote military base or underground bunker. The cabinet secretary would play the president, and Cheney would reprise his role as White House chief of staff. Leading one of the other continuity-of-government teams was his old friend Donald Rumsfeld as they prepared for the ultimate doomsday scenario.
The exercises reinforced Cheney’s views about the need for a strong executive. When Reagan tripped up with the Iran-contra scandal, Cheney came to his defense, seeing the affair through the lens of his Ford experience. Congress had no right to bar a president from arranging funding for the contras, he argued, and he called Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the White House aide at the heart of the scheme, “the most effective and impressive witness” of the congressional hearings. Cheney, who spent a lot of time on his assignment to the House Intelligence Committee, served on an investigative commission and collaborated with a tall, aggressive staff lawyer named David Addington. Cheney signed a 155-page minority report in 1987 that provided a template for his views of a muscular presidential authority in the areas of national security and foreign policy.
Along the way, Cheney kept moving up the ranks despite continuing health problems. He suffered a second heart attack in 1984 and a third one in 1988. He had bypass surgery the day after the Republican convention that nominated George H. W. Bush for president but after recovering was poised to become Republican whip, the number-two position. His eye on the top spot, he and Lynne wrote a book, Kings of the Hill, profiling famous Speakers.
His friend Joe Meyer once asked why. “Dick, what in the hell would possess anybody to fly every other weekend back to here?”
“To be where the action is,” Cheney replied. “I just truly get a buzz out of the policy side of all this stuff.”
Lynne Cheney liked the action as well, becoming a leader of the culture wars as the outspoken chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
While Dick Cheney’s star rose, Bush was still aimless and irresponsible, ricocheting from one venture to another. He remained the family scamp, the contrarian who would keep his father’s motorcade waiting because he had not dressed yet. “Go get George,” an irritated Barbara Bush would shout to one of her husband’s aides. The aide would roust the younger Bush. “George, goddamn it, get in that car! You are pissing everyone off!”
Now with his father again running for president, Bush tried to get his act together. He joined the rest of his family at Camp David in the spring of 1985 to hear from Lee Atwater, the rough-and-tumble political strategist from South Carolina.
“How do we know we can trust you?” George asked.
“If someone throws a grenade at our dad,” Jeb added, “we expect you to jump on it.”
Atwater responded with a challenge: if they were so worried about his loyalty, then one of them should move to Washington to keep an eye on him. George took the dare.
His life was changing in other ways too. That summer, as Bush later recalled the moment, he took a walk with the Reverend Billy Graham, who was visiting the family compound in Kennebunkport and talked about seeking salvation by embracing Jesus Christ. Graham, he later said, “planted a seed in my heart and I began to change.” Bush started weekly Bible studies that fall. In recounting his religious awakening, Bush general
ly leaves out an earlier encounter with a flamboyant evangelist named Arthur Blessitt, who traveled the world by foot carrying a twelve-foot cross. While Blessitt was in Midland in 1984, Bush went to meet with him. “I want to talk to you about how to know Jesus Christ and how to follow him,” Bush told him.
With the collapse in oil prices, Bush was still struggling. “I’m all name and no money,” he ruefully observed to a reporter at the time. In 1986, he sold Spectrum 7 to Harken Energy, a Texas firm, which gave him $600,000 in shares and a title as director and consultant earning up to $120,000 a year. That would free him to move to Washington, where he and his family rented a town house near the vice president’s residence. Bush’s drinking worsened, though. When he saw the journalist Al Hunt in a Mexican restaurant in Dallas in April 1986, Bush marched over and berated him in front of his family for predicting that Jack Kemp would win the nomination. “You no good fucking sonofabitch,” he shouted. “I will never fucking forget what you wrote!”
