On Labor Day weekend in 1976, when Bush was 30 years old and single, he had been arrested for drunken driving near his parents’ summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. A month later he’d gone to court, pleaded guilty, paid a $150 fine and lost driving privileges in the state for two years. “Go ahead and get the story out,” Bush told Hughes. But by then it was too late. Fox already was broadcasting it.
So here was an “October Surprise”–on the second of November–and a potentially important twist in the endgame of one of the closest races for president in decades. But it was not clear who would benefit. As the contest between Bush and Al Gore wound down, the governor held high ground on matters of honesty and candor, drawing thunderous cheers every time he promised to “bring honor and dignity to the office.” But now his lead in the character contest was threatened by the belated disclosure–and by reminders that he was a son of privilege who’d been able to take his time growing up. It didn’t help that his running mate, Dick Cheney, had earlier admitted to two youthful drunken-driving arrests of his own.
There was another theory: that the last-minute explosion might actually help Bush. After all, he’d long been candid, in an oblique way, about his unsettled early decades. That might stand him in good stead with a public grown weary of personality attacks. More important, it quickly became clear that Democrats in Maine, and perhaps elsewhere, were involved in digging up the ancient records of Bush’s arrest. One prominent member of Gore’s inner circle–press secretary Christopher Lehane from Kennebunk–had tenuous ties to those involved. Voters often see last-minute attacks as acts of desperation, and reward the victim. The Texas governor was eager to play the role. “I’ve got my suspicions,” he said. “Why now? Why four days before the election?”
Still, it was hard for even the most-rabid Republican to portray the last-minute emergence of the drunken-driving story as a good thing. The race, after all, was too close for anyone’s comfort. As the candidates crisscrossed the country on late-night flights, the final NEWSWEEK Poll indicated the race was a statistical dead heat, with Gore leading Bush 44-41 percent among registered voters and Bush leading 45-43 among likely ones. Ralph Nader remained a small but potentially decisive presence, garnering 5 percent of the vote in both categories.
Last-minute “surprises” have become lore in campaigns, and now it’s happened again. While the candidates blanketed paid media with advertising, the Bush arrest story dominated “free media”–the news. In sum, the endgame devolved into a desperate spin war between those trying to portray Bush as a feckless cover-up artist and others eager to paint Democrats as pathetic mudslingers looking for a break.
There was some ammunition for each side in that shoot-out. The Bush camp’s first reaction was defensive. After the story broke, word spread that Bush, who hadn’t held a “press avail” in a month, would have nothing to say. Instead, at a hastily convened mass interview on the tarmac at O’Hare airport, Hughes confirmed the essence of the story. On the flight to Milwaukee, Bush flashed a thumbs-up to the press, as if to demonstrate he hadn’t a care in the world.
But he obviously did. By the time Bush finished his next speech, his handlers knew that he needed to come forward. “I was pulled over and admitted to the policeman that I was drinking,” he said as he faced a hornet’s nest of reporters and cameras. But he, too, was fuzzy about the rest. He couldn’t recall how many beers he’d had (“several”), or that he had needed to appear at a court hearing a month after his arrest. “I’ve oftentimes said that years ago I made some mistakes,” he said simply. Why hadn’t he been specific about this one? Because he thought doing so would harm the message of caution he wanted to impart to his own twin daughters, teenagers now in college. But when the story broke, Bush finally had to tell them anyway–calling them hastily before they heard about it on TV.
Bush has tried to have it both ways on the personal-redemption story: lots of detail on the uplift, little on the murky depths whence he arose. He has acknowledged that two college pranks got him taken into police custody, but either bristles at discussing them or is hazy about the facts. Until forced to do so last week, he had never publicly admitted that there had been any legal consequence from what he freely describes as a drinking problem. (He quit cold turkey in 1986.)
In fact, NEWSWEEK learned, the drunken-driving story has been known and discussed in the inner circle for years. They knew all about the records–and the key fact that they had not been expunged and could surface at any moment. In debate prep, advisers war-gamed the truthful but minimalist answers Bush finally gave last week. Why hadn’t he opted for pre-emptive disclosure of such a mildly controversial matter? Because, sources told NEWSWEEK, Bush and his wife, Laura, flatly refused to do so in the name of family privacy. “The political advice was all the other way,” said one key adviser.
Bush told Hughes of the arrest when he first ran for governor in 1994; rumors circulated that year, but never hit print. He might have been forced to disclose it under oath in 1996, when he was called to jury duty, but escaped by offering a novel excuse. The episode piqued reporters’ curiosity in Austin, Texas, however, and they asked him afterward whether he had ever been arrested for drunken driving. Bush, as usual, dodged the question. “I do not have a perfect record as a youth,” he told them. Last week Democrats set to work combing the record looking for a flat denial–and soon found one. In 1998, Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News asked Bush if he’d ever been arrested after 1968, the year he’d been taken into custody after a postgame fracas in Princeton. “No,” said Bush. That was all the anti-Bush spinners thought they needed. “This isn’t about the crime, it’s about the cover-up,” one declared.
But while the Democrats were charging a cover-up, attention shifted from the substance of the story to how it emerged. And on that score it was the Democrats who were on the defensive. The process of unearthing the story seems to have begun in earnest in late October. The focus of the search for dirt was the district clerk’s office in Biddeford, near Kennebunkport. A mysterious figure walked into the office and asked to see any records they might have on George W. Bush. The records were voluminous and filed in old-fashioned ways that made the search fruitless. But last Thursday at 11:45 a.m. another person, whom the clerk declined to identify, called with a case number. Within minutes the clerk found the records. She made several copies. Somehow–and quickly–the word got out. That afternoon two or three individuals, identifying themselves as reporters, called for copies.
Early that morning a man who identified himself as Bill Childs called the Maine secretary of State’s office, seeking companion records. Within hours reporters were on the line, also asking for them. By midday officials had found a sheaf of documents–which were soon being faxed to the reporters, including the one from Fox in Portland. Childs, who declined to be interviewed, was heard bragging that afternoon in the courthouse in Portland about his knowledge of the matter. “He started telling anyone who would listen,” said Paul DeGrinney, a local GOP lawyer.
As word spread at the courthouse in Portland, reporter Erin Fehlau of the local Fox affiliate heard about them. She confronted Tom Connolly, one of the lawyers she’d been told knew the story. Sure enough, Connolly did, and soon returned from his office with a copy of the documents that the Biddeford court clerk had found only a few hours earlier. Connolly told her that he had heard all about it from an unidentified source who fit Childs’s description. How did this source know? From a chance meeting in a chiropractor’s office with a patient who had happened to have been in court with Bush 24 years ago. Or so Connolly was told.
And just who were Connolly and Childs? Connolly was a Democratic lawyer and gadfly, a candidate for governor in 1998. Childs was a Democratic lawyer and part-time probate judge. Both were part of the interconnected world of Maine party politics, and Republicans tried strenuously to tie them to the Gore campaign. The best they could do was to focus on Lehane, whose sister worked in a prominent Portland law firm in which former governor Tom Curtis is a senior partner–and Curtis is said to have backed Childs for his probate judgeship. But Lehane, his sister and the law firm all vehemently denied any involvement. Connolly said that he tried to fax the arrest documents to the Gore campaign in Nashville, Tenn., but that the line was busy.
It was, somehow, a dismally appropriate finale for the Clinton Era, a time in which voters increasingly were asked to judge politicians on personal acts, rather than political ones. Bill Clinton, master of empathy, used the new rules to his benefit–and survived impeachment when his personal weaknesses were exposed. Gore has presented himself as a model of Boy Scout rectitude, the thoughtful Good Son with perfect posture and the perfect marriage. But, ironically, the Clinton saga may have prepared the way for Bush. For one, Clinton lowered the standards of conduct–or removed them altogether. Among those who still care about the personal story, Bush realized that his own narrative might sell: a Drifting Son able to mature through self-discipline, family and the power of prayer. Whether that story would still sell on Election Day was the last question up for debate as the campaign ended. “I’ll see you on Inauguration Day,” Bush jauntily told a longtime acquaintance after his press avail. But on the plane the next day he seemed preoccupied, wound tight as he chewed lozenges and stared off in the distance. He would know soon enough if his prediction had been correct.
