PART ONE
It was a cool, crisp day in the spring of 2004 — a rarity for Houston — and George H.W. Bush chatted with a friend in his office suite on Memorial Drive. Tall and trim, his hair graying but by no means white, the former president was a few weeks shy of his eightieth birthday — it would take place on June 12, to be exact — and he was racing toward that milestone with the vigor of a man thirty years younger. In addition to golf, tennis, horseshoes, and his beloved Houston Astros, Bush’s near-term calendar was filled with dates for fishing for Coho salmon in Newfoundland, crossing the Rockies by train, and trout fishing in the River Test in Hampshire, England. He still prowled the corridors of power from London to Beijing. He still lectured all over the world. And, as if that weren’t enough, he was planning to commemorate his eightieth with a star-studded two-day extravaganza, culminating with him skydiving from thirteen thousand feet over his presidential library in College Station, Texas. All the celebratory fervor, however, could not mask one dark cloud on the horizon. The presidency of his son, George W. Bush, was imperiled.
One way of examining the growing crisis could be found in the prism of the elder Bush’s relationship with his son, a relationship fraught with ancient conflicts, ideological differences, and their profound failure to communicate with each other. On many levels, the two men were polar opposites with completely different belief systems. An old-line Episcopalian, Bush 41 had forged an alliance with Christian evangelicals during the 1988 presidential campaign because it was vital to winning the White House. But the truth was that real evangelicals had always regarded him with suspicion — and he had returned the sentiment.
But Bush 43 was different. A genuine born-again Christian himself, he had given hundreds of evangelicals key positions in the White House, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and various federal agencies. How had it come to pass that after four generations of Bushes at Yale, the family name now meant that progress, science, and evolution were out and stopping embryonic stem cell research was in? Why was his son turning back the hands of time to the days when Creationism held sway?
But this was nothing compared to the Iraq War and the men behind it. George H.W. Bush was a genial man with few bitter enemies, but his son had managed to appoint, as secretary of defense no less, one of the very few who fit the bill — Donald Rumsfeld. Once Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney took office, the latter supposedly a loyal friend, they had brought in one neoconservative policy maker after another to the Pentagon, the vice president’s office, and the National Security Council. In some cases, these were the same men who had battled the elder Bush when he was head of the CIA in 1976. These were the same men who fought him when he decided not to take down Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War. Their goal in life seemed to be to dismantle his legacy.
Which was exactly what was happening — with his son playing the starring role. A year earlier, President George W. Bush, clad in fighter-pilot regalia, strode triumphantly across the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, a “Mission Accomplished” banner at his back — the Iraq War presumably won. But the giddy triumphalism of Operation Shock and Awe had quickly faded. America had failed to form a stable Iraqi government. With Baghdad out of control, sectarian violence was on the rise. U.S. soldiers were becoming occupiers rather than liberators. Coalition forces were torturing prisoners. As for Saddam’s vast stash of weapons of mass destruction — the stated reason for the invasion — none had been found.
Bush 41 had always told his son that it was fine to take different political positions than he had held. If you have to run away from me, he said, I’ll understand. Few things upset him. But there were limits. He was especially proud of his accomplishments during the 1991 Gulf War, none more so than his decision, after defeating Saddam in Kuwait, to refrain from marching on Baghdad to overthrow the brutal Iraqi dictator. Afterward, he wrote about it with coauthor Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, in “A World Transformed,” asserting that taking Baghdad would have incurred “incalculable human and political costs,” alienated allies, and transformed Americans from liberators into a hostile occupying power, forced to rule Iraq with no exit strategy. His own son’s folly had confirmed his wisdom, he felt.
But now his son had not only reversed his policies, he had taken things a step further. “The stakes are high …” the younger Bush told reporters on April 21. “And the Iraqi people are looking — they’re looking at America and saying, are we going to cut and run again?”
The unspoken etiquette of the Oval Office was that sitting and former presidents did not attack one another. “Cut and run” was precisely the phrase Bush 43 used to taunt his Democratic foes, but this time he had used it to take a swipe at his old man. Having returned recently from the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, the elder Bush was eagerly looking forward to his celebrity-studded birthday bash in June. But, to his dismay, the media didn’t miss his son’s slight of him. On CNN, White House correspondent John King characterized the president’s speech as an apparent “criticism of his father’s choice at the end of the first Gulf War.” Thanks to a raft of election season books, the press was asking questions about whether there was a rift between father and son.
So on that brisk spring day, a friend of Bush 41’s dropped by the Memorial Drive offices and asked the former president how he felt about his son’s controversial remarks. The elder Bush was stoic and taciturn as usual. But it was clear that he was not merely insulted or offended — his son’s remark had struck at the very heart of his pride. “I don’t know what the hell that’s about,” George H.W. Bush said, “but I’m going to find out. Scowcroft is calling him right now.”
The battle lines between father and son had been drawn even before the Iraq War started — a discreet, sub-rosa conflict that was both deeply personal and profoundly political. In the balance hung policies that would kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people, create millions of refugees, destabilize a volatile region that contained the largest energy deposits on the planet, and change the geostrategic balance of power for years to come.
Ultimately, it was the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history — one that could result in the end of American global supremacy.
The two men shared overlapping résumés — schooling at Andover and Yale, membership in Skull and Bones, and an affinity for Texas and the oil business. But that’s about where the similarities end. From the privileged confines of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he was raised, to Walker’s Point, the Bush family summer compound in Kennebunkport where his family golfed and ate lobster on the rugged Maine coast, to the posh River Oaks section of Houston after they settled in Texas, George H.W. Bush epitomized a blue-blooded, old money, Eastern establishment ethos that was abhorrent to the Bible Belt. By contrast, his son had been a fish out of water among the Andover and Yale elite, and scurried back to the West Texas town of Midland after graduating from the Harvard Business School. Nothing made him happier than clearing brush off the Texas plains.
People who knew both men tended to favor the father. “Bush senior finds it impossible to strut, and Bush junior finds it impossible not to,” said Bob Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who served as ambassador to Moscow under Bush 41 and remained a loyal friend. “That’s the big difference between the two of them.”
More profoundly, they epitomized two diametrically opposed forces. On one side was the father, George H.W. Bush, a realist and a pragmatist whose domestic and foreign policies fit comfortably within the age-old American traditions of Jeffersonian democracy. On the other was his son George W. Bush, a radical evangelical poised to enact a vision of American exceptionalism shared by the Christian Right, who saw American destiny as ordained by God, and by neoconservative ideologues, who believed that America’s “greatness” was founded on “universal principles” that applied to all men and all nations — and gave America the right to change the world.
And so an extraordinary constrained nonconversation of sorts between father and son had ensued. Real content was expressed only via surrogates. In August 2002, more than seven months before the start of the Iraq War, Brent Scowcroft, a man of modest demeanor but of great intellectual resolve, was the first to speak out. At seventy-seven, Scowcroft conducted himself with a self-effacing manner that belied his considerable achievements. Ever the loyal retainer, he was the public voice of Bush 41, which meant he had the tacit approval of the former president. “They are two old friends who talk every day,” says Bob Strauss. “Scowcroft knew it wouldn’t terribly displease his friend.”
Well aware that war was afoot, Scowcroft had tried to head it off with an August 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal op-ed piece titled “Don’t Attack Saddam” and TV interviews. As a purveyor of the realist school of foreign policy, and as a protégé of Henry Kissinger, Scowcroft believed that idealism should take a backseat to America’s strategic self-interest, and his case was simple. “There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations,” he wrote, “and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks.” To attack Iraq, while ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, “could turn the whole region into a cauldron and, thus, destroy the war on terrorism.” A few days later, former secretary of state James Baker, who had carefully assembled the massive coalition for the Gulf War in 1991, joined in, warning the Bush administration that if it were to attack Saddam, it should not go it alone.
On one side, aligned with Bush 41, were pragmatic moderates who had served at the highest levels of the national security apparatus — Scowcroft, Baker, former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, and Colin Powell, with only Powell, as the sitting secretary of state, having a seat at the table in the new administration. On the other side, under the younger George Bush, were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Advisory Board Committee — all far more hawkish and ideological than their rivals.
Of course, both Scowcroft and Baker would have preferred to give their advice to the young president directly rather than through the media, and as close friends to Bush senior for more than thirty years, that should not have been difficult. After all, Scowcroft’s best friend was the president’s father, his close friend Dick Cheney was vice president, and Scowcroft counted National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley among his protégés. And James Baker had an even more storied history with the Bushes.
“Am I happy at not being closer to the White House?” Scowcroft asked. “No. I would prefer to be closer. I like George Bush personally, and he is the son of a man I’m just crazy about.”
But in the wake of Scowcroft’s piece in the Journal, both men were denied access to the White House. When the elder Bush tried to intercede on Scowcroft’s behalf, he met with no success. “There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren’t conducive to talking about substantive issues,” a Scowcroft confidant told The New Yorker.
Meanwhile, Bush senior did not dare tell his son that he shared Scowcroft’s views. According to the Bushes’ conservative biographers, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, family members could see his torment. When his sister, Nancy Ellis, asked him what he thought about his son’s plan for the war, Bush 41 replied, “But do they have an exit strategy?”
In direct talks between father and son, however, such vital policy issues were verboten. “[Bush senior is] so careful about his son’s prerogatives that I don’t think he would tell him his own views,” a former aide to the elder Bush told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. When the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward told Bush 43 that it was hard to believe he had not asked his father for advice about Iraq, the president insisted the war was never discussed. “If it wouldn’t be credible,” Bush added, “I guess I better make something up.”
Likewise, friends who saw them together found that they had absolutely nothing to say to each other on matters of vital national importance. “I was curious to see how they related to one another, and I’ll be damned,” said Bob Strauss, who shared an intimate dinner with them in the White House. “They never discussed the war, never discussed politics. We talked about social things, friendships, what was going on back in Texas. It was like a couple of old friends just gossiping about the past.”
PART TWO
Conventional wisdom has it that George W. Bush became a “born-again” Christian in the summer of 1985, after extended private talks with Reverend Billy Graham. As recounted by Bush himself in “A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House,” a ghostwritten autobiography prepared for the 2000 presidential campaign, one evening at Walker’s Point, the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, Graham, spiritual confidant to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan and a close friend of the Bush family, sat down by the fireplace and gave a talk. “I don’t remember the exact words,” Bush wrote. “It was more the power of his example. The Lord was so clearly reflected in his gentle and loving demeanor.”
The next morning, Bush and Graham went for a walk along the rugged Maine shore, past the Boony Wild Pool where Bush had skinny-dipped as a child. “I knew I was in the presence of a great man …” Bush wrote. “He was like a magnet; I felt drawn to seek something different. He didn’t lecture or admonish; he shared warmth and concern. Billy Graham didn’t make you feel guilty; he made you feel loved.”
“Over the course of that weekend, Reverend Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year,” he continued. “He led me to the path, and I began walking.”
There’s just one problem with Bush’s account of his conversion experience: it’s not true. For one thing, when Billy Graham was asked about the episode by NBC’s Brian Williams, he declined to corroborate Bush’s account. “I’ve heard others say that [I converted Bush], and people have written it, but I cannot say that,” Graham said. “I was with him and I used to teach the Bible at Kennebunkport to the Bush family when he was a younger man, but I never feel that I in any way turned his life around.”
Even if one doesn’t accept Graham’s candid response, there’s another good reason to believe that the account in Bush’s book is fiction. Mickey Herskowitz, a sportswriter for the Houston Chronicle who became close friends with the Bush family and was originally contracted to ghostwrite “A Charge to Keep,” recalled interviewing Bush about it when he was doing research for the book. “I remember asking him about the famous meeting at Kennebunkport with the Reverend Billy Graham….” Herskowitz said. “And you know what? He couldn’t remember a single word that passed between them.”
Herskowitz was so stunned by Bush’s memory lapse that he began prompting him. “It was so unlikely he wouldn’t remember anything Billy Graham said, especially because that was a defining moment in his life. So I asked, ‘Well, Governor, would he have said something like, “Have you gotten right with God?'”
According to Herskowitz, Bush was visibly taken aback and bristled at the suggestion. “No,” Bush replied. “Billy Graham isn’t going to ask you a question like that.”
Herskowitz met with Bush about twenty times for the project and submitted about ten chapters before Bush’s staff, working under director of communications Karen Hughes, took control of it. But when Herskowitz finally read “A Charge to Keep” he was stunned by its contents. “Anyone who is writing a memoir of George Bush for campaign purposes knew you had to have some glimpse of what passed between Bush and Billy Graham,” he said. But Hughes and her team had changed a key part. “It had Graham asking Bush, ‘George, are you right with God?'”
In other words, Herskowitz’s question to Bush was now coming out of Billy Graham’s mouth. “Karen Hughes picked it off the tape,” said Herskowitz.
There is yet another reason why the episode in Maine could not possibly have been the first time George Bush gave his soul to Christ. That’s because Bush had already been born again more than a year earlier, in April 1984 — thanks to an evangelical preacher named Arthur Blessitt.
Whereas Billy Graham was a distinguished public figure whose fame grew out of frequent visits to the Oval Office over several decades, Arthur Blessitt had a very different background. His evangelicalism was rooted in the Jesus movement of the sixties counterculture. To the extent he was famous it was because he had preached at concerts with the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, and others, and had run a “Jesus coffeehouse” called His Place on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip during that turbulent decade. His flock consisted of bikers, druggies, hippies, and two Mafia hit men. The most celebrated ritual at Blessitt’s coffeehouse was the “toilet baptism,” a rite in which hippies announced they were giving up pot and LSD for Jesus, flushed the controlled substances down the toilet, and proclaimed they were “high on the Lord.”
In 1969, however, Blessitt was evicted from his coffeehouse and, in protest, chained himself to a cross in Hollywood and fasted for the next twenty-eight days. Over the next fifteen years, “The Minister of Sunset Strip,” as he was known, transformed himself into “The Man who Carried the Cross Around the World” by lugging a twelve-foot-long cross for Jesus through sixty countries all over the world, on what would become, according to the “Guinness Book of World Records,” the longest walk in human history. Blessitt delivered countless lost souls to Jesus. He went to Jerusalem. He prayed on Mount Sinai. He crossed the Iron Curtain. Finally, in 1984, he came to Midland, Texas, to preach for six nights at the Chaparral Center before thousands of Texans night after night on a “Mission of Love and Joy.” He did not know it, but he was about to bring George W. Bush to Jesus.
Thirty-seven years old when Blessitt came to Midland, Bush had yet to make much of a name for himself and still struggled with the giant shadow cast by his father. The pattern had begun early, when Bush was playing sports in school. “His father had been the captain of the baseball team and star first baseman at Yale,” said Mickey Herskowitz. “He had met Babe Ruth at home plate at the stadium at Yale to accept the manuscript of the Babe’s autobiography. Dad was a star, a scholar, the leader of the team and the captain. And George never got much beyond Little League. He wanted to be a catcher, but one of his coaches said he had an unfortunate flaw — he blinked every time the guy swung the bat.” Whatever he did, his meager achievements were dwarfed by his father’s spectacular résumé.
When he was in his twenties, his alcohol-fueled clashes with his father disturbed his parents so much that they asked friends to rein in their unruly son. In the spring of 1972, the elder Bush, then ambassador to the United Nations, called Jimmy Allison, an old friend from Midland, Texas, who was a political consultant and the owner of the Midland Reporter-Telegram, to ask if George W. could work on a Senate campaign Allison was running in Alabama for Winton “Red” Blount. “Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy’s wing,” Allison’s widow, Linda, told Salon’s Mary Jacoby. “[The Bushes] wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on him.”
When the younger Bush got to Alabama, however, he continued drinking, according to Allison, often ambling into work at midday, boasting about how much he’d drunk the night before. One night at a party, she saw George W. urinating on a car in the parking lot. He reportedly shouted obscenities at police officers, and trashed a home he rented, leaving behind broken furniture he refused to pay for. “He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions,” a member of the family who rented the house told the Birmingham News.
When Bush returned to Washington for Christmas that year, he got drunk with his sixteen-year-old brother Marvin, ran over the neighbor’s garbage cans, and found himself standing unsteadily in the doorway at home, confronting his father. “I hear you’re looking for me,” he said. “You wanna go mano a mano right here?”
The elder George Bush didn’t say a word. “He just looked at him over his glasses that had slid down the end of his nose,” Barbara Bush told a friend of the family. “And he just looked until [George W.] walked away. Everything he needed to communicate was in that glance.”
When young George went off to Harvard Business School in 1974, the differences between him and his father became more clearly defined. Where the older Bush embodied a genial and patrician preppy ethos, the son embraced the iconography of Texas as if determined to eradicate the last vestiges of East Coast elitism in his veins. At Harvard, his classmates “were drinking Chivas Regal, [but] he was drinking Wild Turkey,” April Foley, who dated Bush briefly, told the Washington Post. “They were smoking Benson and Hedges and he’s dipping Copenhagen, and while they were going to the opera he was listening to [country-and-western singer] Johnny Rodriguez over and over and over and over.”
After graduation, rather than join his classmates in the glittering canyons of Wall Street, Bush struck out for Midland’s arid landscape of oil rigs and pump jacks, mesquite trees and horned lizards — where he fit right in. But it was still unclear what he was doing with his life. A 1978 attempt to run for Congress was a disaster. Various stabs at making it in the oil industry — with companies named Arbusto Energy, Spectrum 7, and Harken Energy — failed. Even after marrying Laura Welch in 1977 and becoming the father of twins four years later, Bush’s reputation was that of an aging frat boy who worshipped what he called the four B’s — beer, bourbon, and B&B. Family members still wondered what he was going to be when he grew up.
Meanwhile, oil-rich Midland was going through its own spiritual crisis. When the price of oil soared in the seventies and early eighties, Midland had become a heady boomtown minting a new generation of hard-driving Texas oil barons. Its population exploded from 70,000 in 1980 to 92,000 just three years later. There were shimmering skyscrapers, Lear jets, and Rolls-Royce dealerships.
But in the eighties, as oil plummeted from $40 a barrel to $8, Midland’s boom gave way to unemployment lines, repo signs, and bankruptcies. In 1983, the First National Bank of Midland collapsed. “Fear set in…” said Midland evangelical Mark Leaverton. “Marriages broke up. People started having pretty serious emotional problems… It was a scary time for all of us… People started asking questions.”
By the time Arthur Blessitt came to Midland, several of Bush’s friends had become born-again Christians, including two Midland oilmen named Don Poage and Jim Sale. After preaching one night, Blessitt went over to Sale’s house with Poage and a few other followers. Before Blessitt left, Poage asked if they could pray together. Blessitt anointed him with Mazola oil because the Sales had no olive oil in their kitchen. “I got down on the floor with him and a group of people,” Poage said in the 2004 documentary, “With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right.” “We prayed a very powerful prayer for me. And … I felt big white lightning bolts coming out of my shoulders and even though I was on my knees, I felt like I was about three feet off the ground.”
Baptized as an Episcopalian in Connecticut, Bush had been a regular churchgoer his entire life, but for the most part he had just been going through the motions. As Stephen Mansfield reported in “The Faith of George W. Bush,” when a Midland pastor asked his congregation what a “prophet” was, Bush replied, “That’s when revenues exceed expenditures.” Obvious quips were more important to Bush than spiritual quest. But when Bush heard about Poage’s encounter with Blessitt, he was so interested that a meeting was arranged.
So, on the afternoon of April 3, 1984, Blessitt and Sale went to the coffeeshop in the local Holiday Inn. Bush had already arrived, and got straight to the point. “I didn’t bring up the subject of Jesus,” Blessitt recalled. “He did. That’s his personality.”
“Arthur,” Bush said, “I did not feel comfortable attending the meeting, but I want to talk to you about how to know Jesus Christ and how to follow Him.”
Stunned by Bush’s directness, Blessitt silently prayed, “Oh Jesus put your words in my mouth and lead him to understand and be saved.”
Then he picked up the Bible and leaned forward. “What is your relationship with Jesus?” Blessitt asked.
“I’m not sure,” Bush replied.
“Let me ask you this question. If you died this moment do you have the assurance you would go to heaven?”
“No,” Bush said.
“Then let me explain to you how you can have that assurance and know for sure that you are saved.”
“I like that.”
Blessitt then quoted several verses on sin and salvation — from Matthew, Romans, Mark, and John. “The call of Jesus is for us to repent and believe!” he explained. “The choice is like this. Would you rather live with Jesus in your life or live without Him?”
“With Him,” Bush replied.
“Had you rather spend eternity with Jesus or without Him?”
“With Jesus,” said Bush.
Blessitt told Bush that Jesus wanted to write his name in the Book of Life, and extended his hand. “I want to pray with you now,” he said.
“I’d like that,” Bush replied. He joined hands with Sale and Blessitt. Then, Blessitt prayed a variation on the Sinner’s Prayer aloud, one phrase at a time, with Bush repeating after him:
Dear God, I believe in you and I need you in my life. Have mercy on me as a sinner. Lord Jesus as best as I know how, I want to follow you. Cleanse me from my sins and come into my life as my Savior and Lord. I believe You lived without sin, died on the cross for my sins and arose again on the third day and have now ascended unto the Father. I love you Lord, take control of my life. I believe you hear my prayer. I welcome the Holy Spirit of God to lead me in Your way. I forgive everyone and ask You to fill me with Your Holy Spirit and give me love for all people. Lead me to care for the needs of others. Make my home in Heaven and write my name in Your book in Heaven. I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my Savior and desire to be a true believer in and follower of Jesus. Thank you God for hearing my prayer. In Jesus’ name I pray.
The three men smiled. “It was a happy and glorious time,” said Blessitt. He explained to Bush exactly what had just happened. “Jesus has come to live within your heart,” he told Bush. “Your sins are forgiven … You are saved … You have received eternal life … You are now the Child of God … The Holy Spirit abides within you … You have become a new person.”
Jim Sale was present during the entire discourse. “You can never tell what goes on in a man’s heart and soul,” he said. “But the question was asked and answered.” George W. Bush had invited Christ into his life. “Why God chose to move in our president’s heart at that time, I don’t know,” Sale said. “I’m just glad he did.”
“A good and powerful day,” Blessit wrote in his diary. “Led Vice President Bush’s son to Jesus today. George Bush Jr.! This is great! Glory to God.”
Craig Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of “House of Bush, House of Saud” and a frequent analyst on CNN, ABC Radio, Air America, “The Charlie Rose Show,” NBC’s “Today” show and other broadcast outlets. He has written for the New Yorker, Esquire and many other publications and is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He lives in New York, where he is a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at NYU’s School of Law.
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