The Secrecy & Privilege: The Wedding
The
light from the setting sun streamed through the windows of the East
Room after the first White House wedding in more than two decades.
Guests were picking desserts from a buffet table and conversing, some
gesturing with crystal champagne flutes in hand.
Despite
the formality of the surroundings, the event had a relaxed air.
Earlier, President Bill Clinton had given a gracious toast in honor of
the wedding couple Tony Rodham and Nicole Boxer and played the
saxophone to entertain their families and friends.
The groom was
Clintons brother-in-law; the bride was the daughter of his political
ally, Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Many other guests had
supported his campaign for the White House two years earlier.
Clinton,
a tall man renowned for his personal magnetism and ability to focus on
each individual he meets at least for a few fleeting seconds, was
moving among the guests like a host at the latter stages of a house
party. Unlike many of the guests sipping from crystal or drinking from
coffee cups, Clinton carried in his large hands a mug with the
presidential seal.
As he came upon one knot of guests, Clinton
started talking like one might chat with neighbors about troubles at
work. He complained about how rancorous Washington had become, how
beleaguered he felt, how horribly the press was treating him.
He was unburdening himself, recalled Stuart Sender, a Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker who was one of the guests.
Sixteen
months into his Presidency, Clinton was learning about the
hard-knuckled realities of the new Washington where campaigns never
stop, where there is no respite for governance between elections.
Clinton
was getting clobbered by the Republicans and by the news media over an
old real-estate deal in Arkansas, known as Whitewater. The political
heat had gotten so searing that Clinton had consented to the
appointment of a special prosecutor.
Philandering
There
had been a firestorm, too, over allegations from Arkansas state
troopers about Clintons philandering as governor. A woman named Paula
Jones had emerged from that controversy with claims that Clinton had
crudely propositioned her.
He also was taking flak over the
firing of employees in the White House Travel Office, and there were
bizarre suspicions circulating about the suicide of White House deputy
counsel Vincent Foster, who had come with the Clintons from Arkansas.
Foster
shot himself in the head after growing despondent over the harsh press
criticism he had received for his role in the Travel Office affair, but
some conservatives were spreading rumors of a deeper mystery.
Clinton
felt besieged not only by aggressive Republicans but by the national
press corps. Since the last Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, left
office in 1981, a powerful conservative media had come into its own.
Every day, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh regaled his millions of
listeners with three hours of ridicule directed at Clinton and his
wife, Hillary.
Besides Limbaugh, there were scores of imitators
and wannabes all over talk radio, such as Watergate convict G. Gordon
Liddy and Iran-Contra figure, retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver
North.
Right-wing print outlets also were growing in number and
in influence, the likes of the American Spectator and The Washington
Times, not to mention The Wall Street Journals editorial pages and
conservative columnists in newspapers across the country. Many of the
commentators also appeared on TV political chat shows to reprise their
opinions for millions of more Americans nationwide.
Anti-Clinton
books and videos were selling fast, too. The annual Conservative
Political Action Conference in February 1994 looked like a trade show
for I-hate-Clinton paraphernalia.
Many mainstream journalists
at outlets such as NBC News and The New York Times also joined in the
Clinton bashing, seemingly eager to prove that they could be tougher on
a Democrat than any Republican. They were determined to show they
werent the liberal media that the conservatives had railed against
since the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that sank
Richard Nixons presidency in 1974.
Indeed, it was The
Washington Post, the newspaper credited with unraveling the Watergate
mystery, which had led the charge on the Whitewater case with
front-page stories that put Clinton in a public relations corner,
forcing him to acquiesce to a special prosecutor.
Spring Day
So,
on that warm spring day of May 28, 1994, Clinton hosted the
Rodham-Boxer wedding the first at the White House since Nixon hosted
the nuptials of his daughter Tricia and Edward Cox in 1971.
The
Boxer-Rodham wedding had started 90 minutes behind schedule because
Clinton returned late from a golf game. The anxious bride and groom
learned that nothing happens at the White House until the President is
ready.
But the nervousness was put into historical perspective
by Clintons toast. He recalled that the last time a wedding reception
was planned for the East Room was 1814, when the event was interrupted
by the British attack on Washington and the burning of the White House.
Almost
180 years later, the White House was under siege again or so it felt
to Clinton only this time the guys with the torches were the
Republicans and the target of their flames was the first Democratic
President in 12 years.
As the spring sun was setting and the
wedding event was winding down, Clintons mind was gearing back up. He
was thinking about the nasty political battles all around him. Making
the rounds at the party at his White House home, he was looking for a
sympathetic hearing.
Stuart Sender and his wife Julie Bergman
Sender were admiring the glorious scene in the ornate East Room. All
of a sudden we looked up and there was President Clinton, Stuart
Sender said.
The chitchat soon turned to Clintons complaints about his ill treatment at the hands of the news media.
He
started the conversation by saying how horrible the press is being to
him, said Julie Bergman Sender, a Hollywood producer, political
activist and daughter of songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman. I was
looking around at the planters. I was thinking, youre not standing in
your living room, really.
Questions for Clinton
Stuart
Sender, who had worked as a journalist on the Reagan-Bush-era
Iran-Contra and Iraqgate scandals, had a different reaction. He
wondered why Clinton had never pursued those investigations of
Republican wrongdoing when he became President in January 1993.
After
all, Sender thought, those were real scandals, involving secret
dealings with unsavory regimes. Top Republicans allegedly had helped
arm Iraqs Saddam Hussein as well as the radical Islamic mullahs of
Iran, violations both of law and constitutional principles.
Those
actions had then been surrounded by stout defenses by Republicans and
their media allies. The protection had taken on the look of systematic
cover-ups, sometimes even obstruction of justice, to spare the top
echelons of the Reagan-Bush administrations from accountability. These
werent like the trivial allegations besetting Clintons Presidency.
Indeed,
as Clinton was heading into office at the start of 1993, four
investigations were underway that implicated senior Republicans in
potential criminal wrongdoing.
The Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages
case was still alive, with special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh furious
over new evidence that President George H.W. Bush may have obstructed
justice by withholding his own notes from investigators and then
ducking an interview that Walsh had put off until after the 1992
elections.
Bush also had sabotaged the investigation by
pardoning six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve 1992, possibly
the first presidential pardon ever issued to protect the same President
from criminal liability. In granting the pardons, Bush had denigrated
the Iran-Contra charges as the criminalization of policy differences.
In
late 1992, Congress also was investigating Bushs alleged role in
secretly aiding Iraqs Saddam Hussein during and after Husseins
eight-year-long war with Iran.
Representative Henry Gonzalez, a
Democrat from Texas who had served three decades in Congress, led the
charge in exposing intricate financial schemes that the Reagan-Bush
administrations had employed to assist Hussein.
There also were
allegations of indirect U.S. military aid through third countries,
claims that Bush and other Republican leaders emphatically denied.
Lesser
known investigations were examining two other sets of alleged
wrongdoing: the so-called October Surprise issue (allegations that Bush
and other Republicans had interfered with Jimmy Carters hostage
negotiations with Iran during the 1980 campaign) and the Passportgate
affair (evidence that Bush operatives had improperly searched Clintons
passport file in 1992, looking for dirt that could be used to discredit
his patriotism and secure reelection for Bush).
All told, the
four sets of allegations, if true, would paint an unflattering portrait
of the 12-year Republican rule, with two illegal dirty tricks (October
Surprise and Passportgate) book-ending ill-considered national security
schemes in the Middle East (Iran-Contra and Iraqgate).
Had the
full stories been told, the American people might have perceived the
legacies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush quite differently than
they do today.
Dropped Investigations
But the Clinton
administration and congressional Democrats dropped all four
investigations beginning in early 1993, either through benign neglect
by failing to hold hearings and keeping the issues alive in the news
media or by actively closing the door on investigative leads.
Clintons
disinterest in these scandals had mystified some activists in the
Democratic base and some investigators who, like Stuart Sender, had
watched as the rug was pulled from under these historic inquiries.
After
the investigations died, some Democrats in Congress, who had
participated in the aborted probes, came under nasty Republican attacks
as did journalists who had pursued the stories.
Gonzalez had
raised the ire of George H.W. Bushs administration by revealing that
Bush and other senior Republicans had followed an ill-fated covert
policy of coddling Saddam Hussein, disclosures that had rained on
Bushs parade after the U.S. military victory over Iraq in the first
Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Now, Gonzalez was left looking like a foolish old man, a kind of modern-day Don Quixote tilting at windmills.
The
same could be said of Lawrence Walsh, a lifelong Republican who crossed
his own party by challenging the cover stories that had shielded top
Republicans caught up in the Iran-Contra Affair.
In pressing
investigations into alleged obstructions of justice, Walsh had found
his reputation under ad hominem attacks from The Washington Times and
other parts of the conservative news media for petty matters such as
ordering room-service meals and flying first-class.
Walsh was so
stunned by the ferocity of the Republican defensive strategy that he
entitled his memoirs Firewall in recognition of the impenetrable
barrier that was built to keep the Iran-Contra scandal away from Reagan
and Bush.
Walsh, too, was dismissed by many Washington insiders
as a foolish old man, though the literary metaphor for Walsh was Moby
Dicks Captain Ahab, obsessively pursuing the white whale.
But letting the outgoing Reagan-Bush team off the hook hadnt earned the Democrats any measure of bipartisan reciprocity.
In
spring 1994, in the weeks before the Rodham-Boxer wedding, Clinton had
begun to sense the rising tide of political danger that the non-stop
attacks against him represented.
By damaging Clintons public
image, the Republicans were also undercutting his legislative plans on
economic, budget and health-care policies. He was looking for allies
and some sympathy.
Clintons Thinking
As waiters poured
coffee at the wedding reception and Clinton voiced his complaints about
the media hostility, Stuart Sender saw his chance to ask Clinton why he
hadnt pursued leads about the Reagan-Bush secret initiatives in the
Middle East.
I had this moment to say to him, What are you
going to do about this? Why arent you going after them about
Iran-Contra and Iraqgate? Sender said. If the shoe were on the other
foot, theyd sure be going after our side.
Why dont you go back
after them, their high crimes and misdemeanors?
But Clinton brushed aside the suggestion.
It
was very clear that that wasnt what he had in mind at all, Sender
said. He said he felt that Judge Walsh had been too strident and had
probably been a bit too extreme in how he had pursued Iran-Contra.
Clinton didnt feel that it was a good idea to pursue these
investigations because he was going to have to work with these people.
To
me what was amazingly telling was his dig at Walsh, this patrician
Republican jurist who had been put in charge of this but even the
Democratic President had decided that this was somewhere that he
couldnt go. He was going to try to work with these guys, compromise,
build working relationships.
Sender, like others who had been
in the trenches of the national security scandals of the 1980s, thought
the retreat on the investigations by Clinton and the Democrats after
they won the 1992 elections was wrong for a host of reasons.
Most
importantly, it allowed an incomplete, even false history to be written
about the Reagan-Bush era, glossing over many of the worst mistakes.
The
bogus history denied the American people the knowledge needed to assess
how relationships had evolved between the United States and Middle East
leaders, including Iraqs Saddam Hussein, the Saudi royal family and
the Iranian mullahs. The corruption was left to fester.
Though
the Middle East crises had receded by the time Clinton took office in
1993, the troubles had not gone away and were sure to worsen again.
When that time came, the American people would have only a sanitized
version of how the country got where it was.
Even government
officials responsible for the policies would have only a partial
history of how these entangling alliances crisscrossed through the
deals and betrayals of the prior two decades.
Dynastic Revival
The
Democratic retreat from the investigative battles in 1993 would have
another profound effect on the future of American politics. By letting
George H.W. Bush leave the White House with his reputation intact and
even helping Bush fend off accusations of serious wrongdoing the
Democrats unwittingly cleared the way for a restoration of the Bush
political dynasty eight years later.
If investigators had dug
out the full truth about alleged secret operations involving George
H.W. Bush, the familys reputation would have been badly tarnished, if
not destroyed.
Since that reputation served as the foundation
for George W. Bushs political career, its unlikely that he ever would
have gained the momentum to propel him to the Republican presidential
nomination, let alone to the White House.
The political future
of the Bush family was at a crossroads as Bill Clinton was taking
office in January 1993. The Bushes fate also was largely in the hands
of Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress, the White House
and the Justice Department.
Beyond that, the Democrats had a potential Republican ally in Iran-Contra special prosecutor Walsh.
A
different set of decisions by the Democrats in those months could have
set the nation on a very different course. The Democratic control of
the Executive Branch might not have ended after eight years.
Conceivably, the calamities of the last four years, including a renewed
war in Iraq, might have been averted.
But, in 1993, Clinton and
the Democratic congressional leadership concluded that pursuit of these
old scandals would only embitter the Republicans, make the Democratic
Party look vindictive and endanger the bipartisanship that Clinton saw
as essential for his domestic policy agenda.
The scandals also
were complicated affairs, requiring detailed understanding of the
underlying facts. Much of what happened had occurred in secret and
involved foreign witnesses spread over several continents. The events
covered more than a decade in time.
Washington Outsider
An
outsider to Washington, Clinton also didnt comprehend how the nations
capital had changed, how nasty the partisan conflict had become, and
how effectively the Republicans were building a media machine that
could churn out a coordinated message day-in, day-out, 365 days a year.
Besides
serving Republican political interests, this machine had taken on a
life of its own. With 24-hour news cycles and endless hours to fill on
talk radio shows, it needed controversy to survive.
When no
longer playing defense for the Republicans, the conservative media
machine was freed up to go on the offensive. Clinton and his wife would
become its primary targets.
Rather than his hoped-for bipartisan
cooperation on domestic issues, Clinton soon encountered a solid wall
of Republican opposition. In a break with tradition, every Republican
in the House and Senate voted against Clintons budget plan, which
included tax increases aimed mostly at the wealthy.
Backed with
only Democratic votes, Clinton managed to push through his plan by the
narrowest of margins. Some Democrats sacrificed their political careers
in the House by supporting the tax provisions and Vice President Al
Gore was needed to break a tie vote in the Senate.
By spring 1994, Clintons health care plan also was under fierce Republican attack.
He
really did have this idea that hed be able to work with these guys,
Sender recalled about his White House encounter with Clinton. It
seemed even at the time terribly naïve that these same Republicans were
going to work with him if he backed off on congressional hearings or
possible independent prosecutor investigations.
How ironic that he decides hes not going to pursue this when later on they impeach him for the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Attack Machine
Though
the Bush family wasnt intimately associated with the building of the
Republican attack machine that so bedeviled Clinton in the 1990s, the
rise of the Bush Dynasty paralleled the growth of what some observers
have called the conservative Counter-Establishment.
Pieces of
this Counter-Establishment date back to the 1950s and 1960s, but it
gained powerful motivation from the political disasters of the 1970s.
By
the middle of that decade, embattled conservatives were cursing the
fates that had plagued them through the Watergate scandal, the U.S.
defeat in Vietnam and the exposure of intelligence abuses inside the
CIA.
Those reversals, particularly the forced resignation of
Richard Nixon over Watergate, had devastated the Republican Party. By
1977, Republicans were shut out of the White House and both houses of
Congress.
Conservatives also viewed the federal courts and the
national news media as bastions of liberalism that had aided and
abetted the Republican reversals of the mid-1970s.
Watergate
also was where George H.W. Bush entered this picture, as Republican
National Committee chairman during the latter half of the scandal.
A
clean-cut former Texas congressman with ties both to Texas oil money
and Wall Street financiers, Bush was given the task of containing the
spreading political cancer of Watergate after the initial cover-up of
the White House role in the break-in had bought Nixon enough time to
secure his reelection in 1972.
In his RNC post, Bush tested out some of the tactics that would recur throughout his career.
He
used counter-disclosures to throw Democratic investigators on the
defensive. He pushed Nixons argument that there was nothing new about
the covert political espionage at the heart of the Watergate scandal.
Bush also tried to cajole members of the Washington Establishment into
agreeing that the disorder from Nixons impeachment would hurt the
nation.
But eventually the evidence of Nixons guilt grew too
overwhelming even for the cleverest of tricks to overcome. Bush was one
of Nixons last loyalists to conclude that the President had no choice
but to resign and hand over the White House to Vice President Gerald
Ford on August 9, 1974.
CIA Scandals
A little more than
a year later, as another flood of scandals lapped around the
foundations of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bush got the call again
to perform damage control.
This time, to keep the dikes around
the CIAs most sensitive secrets from giving way, Bush alternately
cooperated with Congress in limited oversight and attacked the spy
agencys critics for jeopardizing the nations security.
When
new scandals emerged on his watch, such as the Chilean juntas
assassination of political opponent Orlando Letelier on the streets of
Washington in September 1976, Bush again demonstrated his skills,
stonewalling investigators and diverting the worst of the damage away
from the CIA.
His performance during the year made Bush something of a hero to the beleaguered intelligence officers at Langley, Virginia.
With
the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, conservatives surveyed a
bleak landscape left by the rubble of the Nixon resignation and the
Vietnam defeat. Some felt desperation that like a hangmans noose
concentrated their minds. Others saw opportunities.
Whatever the
motivations, the next four years marked the start of a historic
comeback for American conservatism, both in the construction of a new
political infrastructure and the emergence of a fighting style that
would transform the tone of the nations political discourse.
Led
by former Treasury Secretary William Simon, conservative foundations
banded together to direct tens of millions of dollars into strategic
investments in a network of think tanks, media outlets and pressure
groups that went after perceived enemies in the news media, academia
and politics.
Though this network would eventually become famous
for taking the fight to its adversaries, particularly Bill and Hillary
Clinton, its original purpose was essentially defensive. It was built
to ensure that the Republican Party would never suffer another
catastrophe like Watergate.
By 1980, the Republicans were
fighting fiercely to regain the White House that many conservatives
felt was unjustly taken from them in 1976.
President Carter
struggled with a slumping economy, rising inflation and energy
shortages. His reelection campaign also played out against the backdrop
of an international crisis with Islamic fundamentalists in Iran holding
52 Americans hostage.
This early experience with Islamic extremism captivated the interest of the American people and incited their anger.
Every
day, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reported the number of days that
America had been held hostage. ABCs Ted Koppel launched a nightly
news show about the hostage crisis that would later turn into Nightline.
Many
world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the
Saudi royal family, felt that Carter was making a mess of policy in the
Middle East and elsewhere.
Angry Agency
Carter was
unpopular at the CIA, too, where his CIA Director Stansfield Turner had
cashiered scores of covert operatives. Longtime CIA officers, such as
associate deputy director for operations Ted Shackley, saw their
careers abruptly come to an end.
Shackley and other former CIA
officers saw a hope for redemption in Election 1980 as their ex-boss,
George H.W. Bush, sought the Republican presidential nomination.
Though
Bush lost to Ronald Reagan in the Republican primaries, Bush accepted
the second spot on the ticket at the GOP convention in Detroit. In
merging the two campaigns, Bush brought into the Reagan-Bush team many
retired CIA officers who had been part of Bushs political operation.
They
began putting to use their intelligence skills against Carter. Former
CIA officers took on the job of monitoring Carters attempts to gain
the release of the hostages before Election Day. Some of their
intelligence reports went through Bush.
In the months before the
1980 election, Carter failed to gain the hostages freedom. The
publics frustration over the humiliating standoff helped turn a close
race in October into a Reagan landslide in November.
The
hostages were finally released just as Reagan was sworn in as the
nations 40th President on January 20, 1981. Bush became Vice President
and served as the administrations chief national security expert.
Over
the next decade, a mixed bag of intelligence operatives, arms dealers
and Iranian officials began to allege that the Republicans had gone
beyond monitoring Carters hostage negotiations and had engaged in
parallel negotiations behind Carters back.
Some witnesses
claimed that Bush had personally participated in these so-called
October Surprise contacts. Those clandestine Republican-Iranian
relationships allegedly merged by the mid-1980s with the secret
Iran-Contra deals.
When those Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage swaps
surfaced in late 1986, the Reagan-Bush team suffered its worst scandal
of its 12-year reign. Some investigators viewed Bush as the
well-protected eminence grise behind the secret operations.
Saddam Suspicions
New
suspicions about Bush arose in 1991 as other allegations bubbled to the
surface about secret dealings with Iraqs Saddam Hussein during the
1980s. Faced with these investigative threats to continued Republican
rule, conservatives mounted powerful rearguard defenses, made possible
by the new infrastructure that had been built in the years since
Watergate.
Soon, it was the investigators who found themselves on the defensive, often labeled conspiracy theorists or worse.
The
other Bush-related scandal pending at the start of the Clinton
Presidency came directly from Campaign 1992. It had the look of a
classic dirty trick out of Richard Nixons playbook.
Desperate
for a silver bullet to kill Clintons electoral viability, State
Department political appointees pawed through the passport files of
Clinton and his mother, looking for information that could be used to
challenge Clintons patriotism.
The goal of the search was a
rumored letter in which Clinton supposedly sought to renounce his
citizenship during the Vietnam War.
The search failed to find
such a letter but administration officials noticed a torn corner of
Clintons passport application and cited that to fashion a criminal
referral to the FBI, suggesting that someone may have tampered with the
file to remove the supposed letter.
The existence of the
criminal referral was then leaked to the press allowing President Bush
to question Clintons loyalty. However, when the weakness of Bushs
case was revealed, the passport search boomeranged on Bush, creating
political embarrassment and leading to appointment of a special
prosecutor.
Failed Strategy
If President Clintons
motive for turning his back on those four investigations October
Surprise, Iran-Contra, Iraqgate and Passportgate was to curry favor
with the Republicans, it didnt work.
Senator Bob Dole and other
Republicans even cited a lack of incriminating findings against Reagan
and Bush as justification for aggressively investigating the Clinton
administration.
The reasoning went that since the Democrats had
investigated bogus scandals and found no wrongdoing, Republican
probes of seemingly minor infractions by the Clinton administration
were only a fair turnabout.
The conservative news media, which
had lambasted investigations of the Republicans as excessive, also
flipped sides, arguing that it was the duty of journalists to explore
every suspicion raised about the Clintons.
Those investigations
of Clinton would consume the next eight years, although ultimately the
Whitewater probe would be closed with no charges against either Bill or
Hillary Clinton.
The suspicions about Vincent Fosters death
also would come to nothing. But the confluence of Clinton scandals
eventually led to Clintons deceptive testimony in a civil lawsuit that
delved into his dalliance with former White House intern Monica
Lewinsky.
The House Republican leadership then pushed through an
impeachment resolution against Clinton in December 1998, making him the
first U.S. President to be impeached since Andrew Johnson after the
Civil War. Like Johnson, Clinton prevailed in a trial before the U.S.
Senate. But the impeachment will forever stain his legacy.
The
so-called Clinton fatigue that the nation felt from the eight years
of scandal also would take a toll on the candidacy of Vice President
Al Gore, who stood behind Clinton during the impeachment but tried to
distance himself from the tainted President during Campaign 2000.
Dynastic Comeback
The
Clinton scandals and the damage they inflicted on the Democratic
Party set the stage for the most remarkable dynastic comeback in
American history, the ascension of George W. Bush, the eldest son of
the 41st President.
During his early adulthood, the younger
George Bush epitomized the wastrel son of a successful father. Given
every opportunity at elite schools and spared a tour in Vietnam by
latching onto a prized spot in the Texas Air National Guard, Bush was
better known for his partying than for any accomplishments.
He
drank heavily though he denied he was an alcoholic. In business, as an
oil man, Bush squandered the financial backing of his patrons but
always failed up, with new investors including some from Saudi Arabia
arriving to bail him out of one foundering business after another.
Bush also dabbled in politics, losing a congressional race and working on some of his fathers campaigns.
When
Bush did set his sights on his own political career after his fathers
1992 defeat, the younger Bushs principal qualification for office
one might say his only qualification was his family pedigree.
When
people had doubts about the younger George Bush, they would comfort
themselves with the knowledge that his father was a decent man who
could give his son guidance as needed.
George W. Bushs rise also tracked with the arc of the Clinton scandals.
By
November 1994, after months of sordid allegations about Clintons
personal life, there was already a public longing for the good old days
of the first Bush administration, a kind of buyers regret for making
the switch to the Democrat.
That attitude helped Republicans
across the country score major victories in the mid-term elections.
Bush won the Texas governorship in a surprise landslide over the
popular Democratic Governor Ann Richards. National Republicans also
gained control of the House and Senate.
In 1998, Governor Bush
won a resounding reelection amid the congressional Republican drive to
impeach Clinton. Bush soon was aiming at the Presidency with a promise
that he would restore honor and dignity to the White House.
Everyone understood that the pledge was a coded reference to Clintons sexual shenanigans with Monica Lewinsky.
Goring Gore
In
Campaign 2000, the increasingly powerful conservative news media now
bolstered by Rupert Murdochs highly rated Fox News cable network
would again play a decisive role, often aided and abetted by mainstream
journalists who intuitively understood that their careers could be
helped by slapping around Democrats.
The news medias hostility
toward Vice President Al Gore also may have reflected a residual
frustration over Clinton somehow surviving all the scandal reporting of
the prior eight years.
The press corps tilt toward Bush
continued through the disputed Florida election even though Gore built
a lead in the national popular vote of more than 500,000.
Little
media outrage was expressed when national Republicans dispatched to
Florida demonstrators who staged a minor riot in Miami that apparently
intimidated voting officials into scrapping their recount plans.
Led
by Bush family lawyer James Baker III, the Bush-Cheney campaign also
took its hardball strategies into the federal courts to stop Florida
state courts from ordering a recount to determine who actually got the
most legally cast ballots.
Five conservative Republicans on the
U.S. Supreme Court agreed to stop the vote counting, effectively
handing Floridas 25 electoral votes and the Presidency to George W.
Bush.
Upon taking office, one of Bushs first acts was to clamp
down on release of historic records from the 12 years when his father
was Vice President and then President.
Lack of Competence
The
second Bush administration didnt work out with the smoothness and
competence that many Washington commentators had expected.
On
Sept. 11, 2001, just short of nine months into the second Bush
Presidency, 19 terrorists working with Osama bin Ladens al-Qaeda
organization hijacked four commercial jets.
The terrorists then
crashed two jetliners into the World Trade Center towers, one into the
Pentagon and one into a field in Pennsylvania, after passengers
apparently battled the hijackers for control.
The attacks, which
killed about 3,000 people, again turned the nations attention to the
Middle East, but Americans had only a limited understanding of the
cross-currents of secret history that connected the new Presidents
family to the regions dangerous intrigue.
Few citizens had more
than an inkling about the Bush family ties to Iran, Iraq and Saudi
Arabia even to Osama bin Ladens family.
By 2001, many
chapters of that history had been lost in a haze of conflicting claims,
withheld documents and failed investigations.
Out of that
confusion, it wasnt hard for George W. Bush and his administration to
persuade large numbers of Americans to merge the images of Iraqs
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaedas Osama bin Laden into a composite enemy,
even though the two men were themselves bitter adversaries in the Arab
world.
After attacking al-Qaeda base of operation in
Afghanistan, the Bush administration turned its attention to Saddam
Hussein and Iraq with Bush ordering a U.S.-led invasion on March 19,
2003.
Lingering Questions
Today, as U.S. and Iraqi casualties from the Iraq War continue to mount, the historical questions still hang in the air:
Did
the Reagan-Bush administration help Hussein get the chemical weapons
that George W. Bush would later cite to justify an invasion?
Were
secret Republican-Iranian negotiations in 1980 the start of entangling
relationships that drew the United States deeper into the Middle East
violence?
Did the subterranean financial tunnels connecting the
Bush family and the Saudi royal family contribute to al-Qaedas
determination to strike at the United States in 2001?
Would
American history have taken a very different course if the
investigations of the Reagan-Bush era had gone forward and the archives
of secret documents been thrown open?
Did the pattern of
suppressing fair-minded inquiry in the 1980s and 1990s contribute to
the shallowness of the Iraq War debate in 2002 and 2003?
In a
May 23, 2004, article, Washington Post associate editor Robert Kaiser
observed that the catastrophic developments in the Iraq War, including
the international opprobrium from photographs of U.S. soldiers
humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, had finally brought
unease to the Washington Establishment.
We have come to a
delicate moment in an absorbing drama, Kaiser wrote. The actors seem
unsure of their roles. The audience is becoming restless with the
confusion on stage. But the scriptwriters keep trying to convince the
crowd that the ending they imagined can still, somehow, come to pass.
The
authors stick to their plotline even as its plausibility melts away,
and why not? For months the audience kept applauding, many of the
reviewers were admiring, while many others kept still.
A goal
of this book is to explain why so many of Kaisers reviewers swooned
over the second Bush administrations policies for so long while so
many other Americans who should have joined a critical debate about war
and peace stayed silent.
Those reasons can only be understood if
viewed in the sweep of events over the past three decades and by
examining the secret history of the Bush family dynasty.