Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

by Russ Baker

  It is necessary, of course, for the government to have a contingency plan for worst-case scenarios. But in focusing on an all-out response to a hypothetical aggressor, the “Cheney doctrine” paid little mind to the kinds of emergencies that, based on prior experience and study, were certain to come—such as major hurricanes—and to affect the largest numbers of people.

  Preparing the Turkey Shoot

  Whatever leading role Joe Allbaugh might have anticipated in this kind of “national security” activity vanished after 9/11, when Congress mandated that FEMA be absorbed into a new Department of Homeland Security. FEMA insiders say that the merger was a principal factor in Allbaugh’s decision to leave—and to turn the agency over to Michael Brown.

  Allbaugh had initially hired Brown, an old friend from Oklahoma, as FEMA general counsel, presiding over a legal staff of thirty. Allbaugh included him in all key deliberations, and even named him chief operating officer. Brown’s influence was apparent to all. Within six months of his arrival, Allbaugh was ready to promote him. First, though, he had to oust his current acting deputy director, John Magaw—a former director of the U.S. Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whom Clinton had placed in charge of coordinating domestic-terrorism efforts for FEMA.

  “One day, Mr. Allbaugh came in and said, ‘I know you’ve got these other things to do. I’m going to ask Mr. Brown to be deputy,’ ” recalled Magaw, who promptly returned to the subordinate position assigned him by Clinton.60 The timing was remarkable. Just a week before September 11, 2001, Allbaugh replaced a key anti-terrorism official with a crony who had close to zero relevant experience.

  Before Brown could take over permanently as deputy director, he had to face the Senate. In June 2002, he presented a résumé that was full of exaggerations about his experience and serious omissions about his financial and legal problems. Nevertheless, as with most presidential nominees, Brown was confirmed without ado.

  Later, after the Katrina disaster, Michael Brown’s incompetence, and Bush’s pronouncement that “Brownie” was doing “a heckuva job,” would turn him into a laugh line. By and large, the media treated him that way. We learned of his prior job with the International Arabian Horse Association and that his prime qualification was that he had been Joe Allbaugh’s college roommate. CNN even handed him its “Political Turkey of the Year” award.61 Yet as it turned on the hapless Brown, the media got its facts wrong. Brown and Allbaugh were not in fact college roommates, and did not even attend the same university. Instead, Michael Brown’s rise to prominence—and therefore the bumbling of the Katrina disaster—tracked back to the Poppy Bush organization.

  The Right Stable

  Before he joined FEMA, the pinnacle of Brown’s professional experience was as an inspector of Arabian-horse judges. His highest governmental executive position had been as an assistant to a city manager in Edmond, Oklahoma, decades before. (Brown had told the Senate that he was an “assistant city manager,” responsible for police, fire, and emergency services. In truth, he had been “more like an intern,” the town’s PR liaison told Time.)62

  After passing the Oklahoma bar in 1982, Brown moved to the oil boomtown of Enid, where he was hired by the law firm of Stephen Jones, the flamboyant, nationally known defense attorney. When the firm broke up, thirty-four staffers found immediate work. Brown was one of two not offered employment by the successor firms. “When I saw Brown up there at FEMA, I had a premonition of bad things to come,” Jones recalled when I visited him at his Enid office.63

  In the ensuing years, Brown would be sued for failing to pay his rent for shared law offices—a piece of civil litigation he neglected to mention in the Senate confirmation process, even though he was required to do so. He would also be accused by his sister-in-law of changing her father’s will in a way that benefited Brown and his wife while leaving the sister-in-law a virtual pauper.

  Brown found haven in another state, as commissioner of judges and stewards with the International Arabian Horse Association (IAHA), which is based in Colorado. He stayed there for a decade, by far his longest term of employment. His official bio on the FEMA Web site didn’t even mention this job, which suggests how irrelevant it was to the responsibilities that had been entrusted to him. Yet it turns out that Brown had his own reasons to be modest about this portion of his career.

  Brown supposedly was hired to root out cronyism and corruption in the horse world. Instead, he devoted the bulk of his energies to an Allbaugh-style crusade against the sport’s most successful trainer. That was a man named David Boggs, who had angered powerful people with connections at the top of the Republican Party. Karl Hart, a Florida lawyer and longtime IAHA member who headed the group’s legal review committee, describes Brown’s efforts against Boggs as an “obsessive vendetta.” According to Hart and others, the trainer was envied and even hated by several extremely rich Arabian-horse owners—who also happened to be very large Republican donors. These included the late Bob Magness, a founder of the TCI cable giant; David Murdock, the Dole food company billionaire; and the late Alec Courtelis, a Florida developer.64

  Courtelis had been a good friend of, and top fund-raiser for, Poppy Bush, and Poppy was a frequent guest at Courtelis’s horse farm during his presidency. At an April 1990 fund-raising dinner in Florida, Bush introduced Courtelis thus: “Here’s a man who breeds racehorses for the same reason he works so hard for the party: only one place will do for Alec—first place.”

  Indeed. The year after Poppy made these remarks, Michael Brown, whose experience also included work as a lobbyist for an Allbaugh venture called Campground Associates, suddenly emerged as the Inspector Javert of the show horse circuit. A year after Brown was installed at the horse association, Poppy rewarded Allbaugh himself by appointing him to the Arkansas-Oklahoma Arkansas River Compact Commission, a modest but telling acknowledgment of service.

  At the IAHA, Brown got special treatment. While other staffers had to report to work each day, Brown, on a full salary, was allowed to work from his sprawling home in Lyons, which was more than an hour’s drive north of IAHA’s headquarters in Denver. His lifestyle was so pleasant and relaxed that some in Lyons assumed him to be semi-retired. James Van Dyke, chef-owner at Lyons’s Gateway Café, said Brown had leisurely lunches there almost daily. “He seemed to have a lot of time on his hands,” Van Dyke told me when I visited the village.65

  Brown’s single-minded pursuit of David Boggs contrasted sharply with a pronounced reluctance to pursue another case that seemed to have considerable merit—one involving Murdock’s trainer, who was accused of filing false papers for a show horse. Boggs initiated a battery of lawsuits against both the association and Brown, the financial toll of which contributed to the association’s near bankruptcy and eventual merger with another group.

  Ironically, it would be the GOP titan Murdock himself who would eventually sink Brown, in his zeal to help the horse inspector’s cause. One day, Murdock mentioned to Hart that he’d written Brown a fifty-thousand-dollar personal check at Brown’s request, ostensibly for a legal-defense fund to deal with the Boggs suits. Hart was surprised, since the association was paying Brown’s legal bills already. Hart took Brown aside at an IAHA board meeting and told him what he knew. Brown panicked. “He grabbed me, literally, and pushed me into a closet,” said Hart. “He said, ‘Is there any way you and I can work this out?’ ”

  There wasn’t, and Brown was terminated immediately.

  But only a few months later, in February 2001, he resurfaced—first as general counsel and ultimately director at FEMA. While most folks who knew Brown over the years were startled, the IAHA brass was not. As Hart recalled, “Brown had been saying for six months or more that, if Bush was elected, he was going to have a high position in Washington because he was very close to someone who was very active in Bush’s campaign.”

  Like Allbaugh, Brown appeared to have well-connected angels looking after him. His bumpy career was punctuated by timely assists fr
om his self-described “longtime friend and family attorney,” Andrew Lester. An Andover prep-school mate of George W.’s brother Marvin, and onetime employee in the Washington office of the Bush-family-connected Dresser Industries, Lester pops up at crucial points in Brown’s life. When Brown lost his job with the Jones law firm, Lester brought him in for a brief stint as his law partner. When horse-association problems engulfed Brown, Lester rushed to his defense. And on September 27, 2005, at a House Select Committee hearing investigating the Katrina blunders, there was the pin-striped Lester conspicuously whispering legal advice in Brown’s ear.

  Lester, a regional director for the Federalist Society, an association of rightward lawyers, represented the Oklahoma Republican Party in a 2002 reapportionment battle. He was also short-listed for a federal judgeship under George W. Bush. Over lunch at an Oklahoma City steak house, Lester told me that his support for Brown arises merely from their friendship. He continued to maintain, even in the wake of the Katrina debacle, that Brown was eminently qualified for FEMA.66

  AFTER 9/11, WITH pressure building for coordinated antiterror responses, it was evident that FEMA could not remain independent. Bush initially opposed the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, but eventually he caved to congressional demands, and Joe Allbaugh began to look for an exit strategy. The moment Homeland Security swallowed FEMA, Allbaugh departed for the private sector, leaving Brown in charge.

  Initially, Brown seemed to be a better FEMA director than Allbaugh. This was because Brown realized that he didn’t know much about the job and was smart enough to turn to Whatever experts remained on staff. He also was a welcome relief to staffers after the fearsome Allbaugh. “I was pretty impressed with him,” said Trey Reid. “He was articulate, bright, a quick study. I didn’t have to spend much time going over things with him.” In terms of disaster management, there were two possibilities FEMA lifers always worried about: a really big California earthquake and levee breaks in New Orleans. But worrying and fixing were two different things. Brown, on the advice of aides, asked for more money for levee improvements and catastrophic planning, but neither the Republican-controlled Congress nor the White House would agree.

  If Allbaugh had been disinclined to press Bush for strong remedial action, the inconsequential Brown lacked even that option. He didn’t really have a relationship with the president, his diminutive nickname notwithstanding, and the Department of Homeland Security was focused almost exclusively on terrorism. “I don’t think any of the budget requests we submitted went through,” said Reid. “Everything went for terrorism.”

  With the defections of several senior managers and the firing of others, compounded by the denial or reduction of budget requests, FEMA’s staff was left paper thin. “At this point, there’s only one person in the building who knows how to do certain things,” Reid told me in our 2005 interview. “If that person gets sick or dies, you’re shit out of luck.”

  Despite the cuts, however, there was always money for political purposes. Ever mindful of avoiding his father’s mistakes—among them the disastrous handling of Hurricane Andrew in 1992—Bush was not about to lose to John Kerry over disaster relief. Under Brown, the response to a series of hurricanes that battered Florida during the 2004 presidential campaign was as choreographed as Bush’s landing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln the previous year. Agency staffers were everywhere, in FEMA T-shirts, and Brown was especially visible. An investigation by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel later found that FEMA had handed out tens of millions of dollars following Hurricane Frances to residents and businesses in the Miami-Dade County area, where no deaths and only mild damage had occurred. There was much less assistance to areas that were harder hit but less politically crucial.67

  Contracts

  Like most federal agencies under George W., FEMA received little attention until disaster struck, and the attention vanished soon thereafter. But there were warning signs at the agency well before the hurricane. One such example was FEMA’s abrupt decision in 2003, not long after Brown had taken over, to award an exclusive contract for emergency water supplies.

  Over the years, FEMA had entered into water contracts with a variety of companies. One, not surprisingly, was Nestlé Waters North America, easily the continent’s biggest producer. Then, after W.’s inauguration, without explanation, FEMA went sole-source, and picked a little-known, family-run firm called Lipsey Mountain Spring Water. The company, based in Norcross, Georgia, had just fifteen full-time employees, no production capacity, and no distribution network.

  “The father and son came in and said, ‘We want you to sell us water,’ ” recalled Kim Jeffery, president and CEO of Nestlé Waters North America. “I said, ‘Why would I do that? I have a contract with FEMA.’ He said, ‘Because we have the contract now.’ ”68

  Lipsey trumpeted a sophisticated computer system that supposedly would ensure speedy water deliveries and so justify its exclusive five-year contract. But the system did not work so well during the crisis, according to some in the industry. Joe Doss, president of the trade group for water suppliers, said his members were besieged with reports of delays in water deliveries after the hurricane. Within one twenty-four-hour period they voluntarily trucked in 1.5 million bottles.

  Lipsey Mountain Spring Water may have been new to the world of federal water contracts, but its principals were not new to politics. The Lipseys are part of a politically connected family that gives regularly to both political parties and owns one of the country’s largest gun wholesalers. The gun lobby is among the nation’s most powerful, and a group whose events both Cheney and Allbaugh attended with regularity.

  The Pentagon later confirmed that its inspector general was investigating Lipsey in response to complaints from truck drivers, trucking brokers, and ice producers, who did much of the actual work under Lipsey’s FEMA contract. These said Lipsey had not paid its bills or even answered its phone calls. (In 2005, following my request for an interview, company president Joe Lipsey III asked to see a list of questions, then never responded.) In 2007, Department of Defense auditors determined that the company owed the government $881,000 in overpayments in cases where the company erroneously received multiple duplicate fees.69

  BY AUGUST 2005, Brown was already rumored to be preparing his own exit into the private sector. And just as Allbaugh had a reliable understudy in Brown, Brown was readying his own—Patrick Rhode, his chief of staff, whom he elevated to deputy director. Rhode was a former Bush campaign advance man; and while he too lacked experience in emergency management, his PR and media skills had been sharpened as a former television news anchor and reporter. Perhaps they’d been sharpened a bit too much: it was Rhode who, several days into the Katrina disaster, would call FEMA’s performance “one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country’s history.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Conclusion

  DESPITE IT ALL, THERE ARE THINGS for which we can thank George W. Bush. Perhaps most important, he has, inadvertently, invited us to examine anew many things we have long taken for granted. He enabled me, for instance to gain a whole new understanding of how power works in America.

  Were it not for W. and his self-dramatizing swagger, his blustery excesses, and his cavalier indifference to the havoc he wrought, I might not have asked myself how such a man came to be president in the first place.

  Because I did ask myself that question, I was compelled to study W.’s life carefully. So doing, I discovered the extent to which conventional portraits of him miss the mark. W. was not the dimwit that some writers have claimed. Lazy and incurious, yes. Rigid and unimaginative, yes. But not dumb—and possessed of a kind of shrewdness where his own interests were concerned. Moreover, George W. Bush never was the rebel in chief he sometimes has been made out to be. To the contrary, he and his father were in many respects a team. At times, the son served as enforcer and trusted operative, while the two shared secrets and connections with the powerful.

  Once I began focusing
on the continuity between father and son, I realized that I had to reexamine Poppy. When I did that, I learned the conventional picture of him too was wrong. And not just wrong; it omitted a major part of the story that lay behind the political rise of the entire Bush clan. Reading the Bush bios I began to feel that I was examining Soviet-era photographs of the politburo, in which disfavored persons were made to vanish, leaving a curious hole in the ensemble. Except in this case, what was missing was not a person but an entire dimension of power in the United States.

  I discovered that Poppy was not really the sentimental preppy, the oft-bumbling public servant most of us believed him to be. Poppy had led what amounted to a double life, and the secret portion of that life included participation in an astonishing range of covert operations. As I began to examine Poppy’s most improbable statements about himself, I found myself struggling through the miasma surrounding the John F. Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the American relationship with the Saudis, and other chapters of the American experience that have never been properly explained. While I was in my reporting phase and sharing some of my more surprising findings with colleagues, one of them suggested, only half in jest, that the book be called “Everything You Thought You Knew Is Wrong.”