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1990 One Big Thing
Bush had learned from Bill DeWitt, his old Spectrum 7 partner and a major donor to his father, that the Texas Rangers were going up for sale. The team was owned by yet another Bush family friend, Eddie Chiles, who decided out of admiration for Bush's father to give George W. a chance to buy it. George W. had been a baseball zealot since his Little League days in Midland. He had played at Andover and briefly at Yale. (He was cut from the team. Dad, of course, was team captain there in 1948.)
Bush hustled to bag the Rangers. He assembled a group of investors, including DeWitt, Reynolds and Yale chum Roland Betts. Peter Ueberroth, then commissioner of baseball, persuaded financier Richard Rainwater to join forces with Bush. Together they bought the team for $83 million in April 1989. To fund his minuscule $500,000 share (eventually his investment grew to $606,000), George W. borrowed from a Midland bank where he was a director, using his Harken stock as collateral. He and Edward ("Rusty") Rose, front man for Rainwater's investment syndicate, became the team's managing general partners.
Bush acknowledges that his name and connections played a major role in his success. "Look, I don't deny it. How could I?" he says. "Being George Bush's son has its pluses and negatives. Eddie [Chiles] felt comfortable with me because he felt comfortable with my family. But I was also the person that aggressively sought the deal. I was a pit bull on the pant leg of opportunity. I wouldn't let go."
Bush critics charged that he was just a front for the moneymen who actually ran the team, an empty suit with p.r. skills. But according to his former partners and people close to the team, Bush was an engaged manager who played a substantial role in transforming the Rangers from a shabby franchise to a success story. Along with Rose and Rangers president Tom Schieffer, Bush led the drive to build a fine new stadium, paid for by local bonds. (The Ballpark in Arlington opened in April 1994, seven months before he was elected Governor.) "George did a valuable thing for the franchise," says Schieffer. "He gave it glitter and celebrity."
To see Bush during the Rangers years was to witness the emergence of a major Texas politician, one who finally found an identity distinct from his father's. He exploited his Rangers power base, giving speeches across Texas in support of the team, and he sat in the stands next to the dugout for all 80-plus home games--visible to local TV cameras, munching peanuts, signing autographs. His well-crafted, down-home style was always on display. He hated to ride in a limo, even someone else's, and the Bushes lived in a modest brick house. Their main luxury was private school for their twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna. He dressed as indifferently as ever, in cheap suits and eel-skin boots emblazoned with the flag of Texas. At the Rangers office, he insisted on wearing a pair of shoes with a large hole in them, prompting his colleague Rose to buy him a $120 pair of Gucci loafers for his birthday. "George took them back to Neiman Marcus and exchanged them for cash," says Schieffer.
Bush describes these years as idyllic. "I am sure all families have got interesting anchors, little memory scraps and moments of history that remind them of the importance of family," he says. "For me it was taking the kids to the ballpark." By 1992 he was everywhere--in his box seat signing autographs; out in the towns of North Texas delivering what he called the "Baseball, Apple Pie and First Family" speech. Once he'd been a dutiful, uninspired speaker, but all those years of surrogate stumping had paid off. As his father's re-election campaign rolled around, his message became more overtly political, though never on his own behalf. Instead the pitch was either for his father or for Republican Congressmen, who had begun to view him as a real asset. He peppered his speeches with references to his parents. "I know you wished the most famous Bush could be here tonight," he would say, "but Mom was busy." Or: "I know I'm here to talk about baseball, but I need to help the old man stay employed."
Baseball was how he talked to his dad, raised his kids, made his money and ran for office. His political base was built on twin platforms: his Rangers celebrity and the prodigious campaigning he had done for his father throughout Texas in 1980, 1984, 1988 and 1992. All the while, hammers were ringing and saws whining at the new stadium in Arlington. The ballpark fulfilled Bush's desire to do One Big Thing for Texas. Bush also knew it was increasing the value of his Rangers holdings, though he didn't realize how drastically. When his group sold the team in 1998, Bush's initial $500,000 investment paid him almost $15 million. He had finally followed his dad's rule: provide for your family before stepping into politics.
The Dallas years were marred, however, by a p.r. nightmare that arose from his sale of his Harken stock. In June 1990, Bush sold all 212,140 shares for $848,560, more than two-and-a-half times their original value. His mistake was to sell the stock less than two months before Harken reported a stunning $23 million second-quarter loss. (Bush says he did not know Harken was going to report the loss and thought he was selling into good news--the forthcoming announcement of a new drilling contract.) But it was widely assumed that Bush, a director of the company, had insider knowledge and dumped his stock in advance of the bad news. He compounded the problem by failing to file a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure form.
The stock sale put him on the front pages and proved an embarrassment to his father's 1992 campaign. It also called attention to the little-known fact that in early 1990 Harken was awarded an exclusive contract from the government of Bahrain to drill for oil off that country's coast. With no offshore-drilling experience, Harken was an implausible choice. It was easy to assume that Bahrain was trying to curry favor with the President by giving business to a company tied to his son. Harken insiders say Bush had no role in negotiating the contract. But the press had a field day drawing lines from the Middle East to the White House.
Bush was stung, though not fatally. An SEC investigation concluded that he had done nothing to merit punishment. One month after he was cleared, Bush resigned from Harken's board--and declared his candidacy for Governor. "I knew he was going to run again at some point," says Laura, "if ever the timing was right. We didn't know that his dad would be Vice President and President. That kept us from running for a lot of years." In 1992, when President Bush lost to Bill Clinton, she says, "George and Jeb were freed, for the first time in their lives, to say what they thought about issues."
And he was off. As Bush traveled the state, running as a baseball man and stadium builder as well as Famous Son, moving toward an upset of popular incumbent Ann Richards, he applied the lessons he'd learned from his father, his mother, Kent Hance and Lee Atwater: trust your instincts, stay on message, be down-home, enforce discipline. His campaign deftly exploited Texans' fear of crime, though crime had been dropping in the state for years (somewhere, Atwater was smiling). Richards baited Bush mercilessly, calling him an litist and a "Shrub," and everyone expected Bush to display his famous temper. He never did. He stayed sunny and folksy and "on message" all the way to the statehouse.
And now, he's eyeing the Big House in Washington. Important Republican backers have virtually fallen at his feet offering the nomination on a velvet cushion, and Bush's team tries hard to portray it all as a lucky accident. Bush himself tells TIME: "I never dreamt about being president. It hasn't been part of my life's game plan. All of a sudden, people start talking to me about the presidency..." But aides also whisper that if they avoid any major blunders, the G.O.P. nomination might be all wrapped up in the next few weeks. That is a breathtaking admission of a breathtaking strategy: raise so much money, lock down so many endorsements that the spotlight follows you everywhere, your opponents freeze to death in your shadow and, best of all, you cruise straight past the primaries and into the general election in the enviable role of "a uniter, not a divider."
The Republican faithful would put up with Bush's soggy message of "compassionate conservatism" because he has a message for them too. Three words: I can win. Of course, there are already party-spoilers, and their ranks are sure to grow. "People don't know what he stands for," said one rival, former Vice President Dan Quayle, in Iowa last month. "He's got to come in and fight for this nomination. I'll be darned if we're going to have this nomination inherited by a particular candidate." Maybe not, Dan. "This is the closest thing the party has ever had to a genuine draft," says Bush campaign guru Karl Rove. Others see more skill than luck. "Nothing in politics just happens," says veteran political consultant Scott Reed. "What they have done is nothing short of awesome."
But with the Republican Party's nominating convention a full year away, only a madman would be calling the game over just yet. "No matter how much support you get from insiders, activists, fund raisers, you still gotta run the gauntlet," says longtime Republican strategist Charles Black. "You gotta earn it at the polls. That's the beauty of the system. You won't know until February how he's gonna do."
And so the curtain goes up on a race for George W. Bush that may just be beginning, or may already be in its last act. "If he does well, it's his. If he doesn't, he could fall so fast," says Steve Merksamer, a top California strategist who is working for the Steve Forbes campaign. "You wonder if they are building a schoolhouse here out of straw. It's big and shiny, built in 90 days, but the contractor put it together in a way that when the first stiff wind comes, the house blows down." For Bush supporters, that's their greatest fear. For his opponents, that's their strongest hope.