Donald Evans Oral History

She was also at Texas?

Yes, she was at Texas. She went for a couple years. My first time to meet the President was in ’69. My then-fiancée and I, I don’t think we were actually engaged yet, but it was Christmas and she was coming to Houston to spend a few days of the holiday with me. She stayed with the Bushes, because they were dear friends from Midland days. My wife and the President went to elementary school together and were on the school patrol together, so they were good buddies. I met him then, but just at the front door of his house or his parents’ house. It was “Hello, how are you? Nice to meet you” kind of thing. That was about the extent of it.

You were what, early 20s, at this time?

I would have been 19. I remember just that one encounter at the front door of the house, and maybe walked in and said hello to his parents and then we were gone. First sign that the Bushes always welcomed friends as overnight guests.

So the President would have been a private citizen at that time.

He was. At that time, ’69, he’s out of school. He went back and got an MBA about the same time I did. He came to Houston and did a variety of things, worked for a feedlot operation up in Amarillo. He was also involved in some nonprofit organizations in Houston.

But the older President was at that time, in ’69—

In ’69 the older President was a Congressman, about to run for the Senate. He ran for the Senate in 1970. Anyway, my wife and I marry in ’70, in Midland. The Bush family is not there. Laura [Bush] is, she’s in our wedding, because my wife and Laura were good friends, also from Midland. I go on and get an MBA.

After the MBA, I came to Houston and worked a couple years with a friend of mine by the name of Corby Robertson. I wasn’t using my engineering degree and I wanted to, so I started looking around for opportunities to use it at about the time of the Arab oil embargo. The oil and gas industry was all of a sudden beginning to pick up. I got a job offer and while that was going on, while we were in Houston, I met the President again, at a party at River Oaks Country Club. It was about 1973. That night we just sat around the table and had some drinks and talked. But that was a one-night “Hello, how are you?” A little more than the greeting at the front door at his house.

I was looking around for a job and in ’74, I got a job offer in Midland, Texas, back where my wife had grown up. She always wanted to go back to Midland. In the ’60s and early ’70s, Midland was basically dead, because it was an energy town and the energy prices were low. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity in the late 60s and early 70s—that changed with the 1973 oil embargo. I went to work in Midland in February of 1975.

My dad was a lifer with Shell Oil, had gone to work for Shell out of Washington University in 1939. He had been in ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] at Washington University. Then he signed up for the war, and he was off for five years doing that. He returned and worked for Shell and we moved to Houston. My dad was always very active physically. One of the early joggers, a lot of exercise, so I caught that too. It was a pretty big part of my life. I mention that because it was one of the things that connected the President and me.

Yes.

He’s also a fitness kind of guy. So in ’75, I’m working for an oil and gas company, a drilling company. I got on a rig, in a roughneck group for 60 days. Right about the time I finished roughnecking, I moved into the office. The President had come through Midland because he was thinking about moving there. He was just out of Harvard Business School. He called up my wife, Susie [Evans], to say, “What are you all doing? I’m coming through town. I’m on my way to my mom and dad in China, but I’m coming here and checking things out.”

He came by my office, a little cubbyhole I had in ’75, and that was an opportunity to chat a lot more. He told me what he was planning on doing. He’s coming to Midland to get into the oil business. We talked about what I thought of it and how things were going. That was the first time to really sit down and get to know one another.

What did you think of him? Is this a guy who had the kind of experience that would translate well in Midland in that time?

Yes. He has a great analytical mind, he’s very engaging, we all know that. He wanted to be a land man and was getting started. That’s all about relationships and communication and meeting people well, and being able to analyze risk and what will I pay for it. There are a lot of elements to it, but a big piece of it is personal relationships and getting people comfortable with you quickly. He had that, as well as the analytical mind. He’s very quick with numbers and the land business is a lot of numbers, manipulating a lot of fractional numbers and a lot of math. He had all of that, quickly grasped all of that.

Were the Ivy League credentials unusual for somebody in that setting?

A little bit. There were others who were there. Of course his father and the [J. Hugh and Betty] Liedtkes and others had come through there. A lot of them had left, but a few were still there. Earle Craig was one of them. Bill Kennedy and Charlie [C. Fred] Chambers were really good friends of his father, and I think they were from the northeast as well.

His style wasn’t the Ivy League style. He’d been raised in Midland; those were his formative years. They moved there when he was about four and left when he was 12 or 13, so he had ten pretty solid years there, Little League baseball and all the things you do in a small town, backyard barbecues. He was really Midland, he grew up in west Texas, and while he went off to Andover [Phillips Academy Andover] and he went to school in the East, Yale and Harvard. He’s west Texas at heart and soul. He talks west Texas. Kent Hance used his East Coast connections against him in the Congressional race, and all the Trilateral Commission stuff and the northeast and the money coming from the outside. The Ivy League thing never surfaced at all early on in all of our personal discussions.

We became immediate good friends. He liked sports; I like sports. He wanted to run, I wanted to run. He wanted to play golf, I wanted to play golf. We enjoyed watching sports together, baseball, et cetera.

Do you have any specific memories, even if they are just impressions, of those first couple of times that you met President Bush?

Really easy to meet, comfortable, very informal, dressed down. The way he dressed was a joke. “Holy mackerel, look what he’s got on today. His socks don’t match.” That wasn’t important to him. He was really easy to meet. He’d look at you and talk to you, and the conversations were simple and easy.

I still have a picture in my head of that first meeting in my office. He had a very friendly, open personality, and we immediately started talking about my wife, how much he enjoyed her. I can remember talking a fair amount about the oil business, because we were both young, eager entrepreneurs. We were out there pursuing our dream. I could see the excitement in his whole style and demeanor. He was excited to be back out there and we were both excited about what was happening in the industry, because the oil embargo was a year and a half earlier. Oil prices were up and everybody’s just saying, “This really looks promising.”

That’s probably how I would characterize him mostly, very informal, very easy to meet, an attitude of “You’re more important than I am.” He’d obviously come from a background of his dad having done some big things. Granddad had done some big things and Great-granddad had done some big things, so it would be pretty easy for him to wear that on his sleeve, but I certainly never saw any of it.

That was one of the things that I was most curious to hear from you about, in your own background, was whether you had come from a similar condition of privilege, which evidently you didn’t.

Right.

So it’s striking in that sense that the two of you, with different backgrounds, managed to hit it off so well, because that doesn’t always happen.

See, he was coming down to my level.

That’s an important observation. Texas is a football state. Would you talk UT [University of Texas] football or was baseball something you were interested in?

Baseball. He loved professional baseball. I had grown up a big St. Louis Cardinals fan because of KMOX radio, and I’d blast it into my little bedroom in Houston back in the early ’50s. We talked a lot of professional baseball and we talked some UT football, but that wasn’t a big thing.

Wasn’t a big connection.

He was more interested in the baseball season and keeping up with that. So we talked a fair amount of baseball, probably a little bit of football, enjoyed hacking around the golf course together.

Not in a big way, but I had been involved in a couple of political campaigns. John Hill, who was the Attorney General of Texas. Before that, in ’66, he ran for Governor of Texas, and I volunteered, handed out flyers. I had done the same thing on the University of Texas campus. I never ran myself, but I helped a few friends, one guy who ran for president of the student body at the University of Texas and lost. I helped him and then I also volunteered on his dad’s campaign when his dad ran for Senate in 1970. I was a little more active in that, albeit just in the Austin area, but I remember spending more time on it than I had on the others. I liked the politics too. We’d talk about that.

Those were Republican candidates?

John Hill was a Democratic candidate, but I grew up with his kids. He went to our church, and his daughter, a good friend of mine, enlisted me to—and Texas was but for a few exceptions—John Tower was Senator and George H. W. Bush was a Congressman and he was going to run for—At the time we didn’t know it, but he ran for Senate in 1970. It was a Democratic state, conservative but a Democratic state. I enjoyed politics. I never had any intention of running myself, but I enjoyed getting into the mix and supporting people, working for them a little bit. On a variety of subjects we hit it off.

Do you recall your wife having any stories about the President’s childhood? Anything she would like to tell?

A few. Of course, everybody’s tried to think about him over the years.

Sure.

There was one story she repeated a number of times. He was always the guy on the playground who took up for the underdog. She always liked to say that whenever the bullies came around and started picking on those who weren’t quite as athletic or whatever, he would always take up for the underdog and tell the bullies to back off or do whatever you do when you’re in the third or fourth grade. It was in that grade level; it wasn’t when he was a senior in high school. It was when he was in the third grade, playing soccer or something. It stuck in her mind. I think others around him saw that and therefore he was caption on school patrol in sixth grade. You’ve done something to influence the principal or the teachers or whomever selected. The kids aren’t selecting who’s on the school patrol, it’s the principal or the teachers who are recognizing some maturity in a student. That was an interesting observation she made about him early in his life.

Sure.

This guy cares about the underdog, and I see that to this day. That’s how he lives his life and how he’s treated people along the way. He’s never been the big dog kind of guy. It’s always, “What can I do to help the little guy?” which people don’t see in him. Maybe some do, but I don’t think that’s really come out over the years as a quality that people recognize in him. I think they look at him more as being a tough, hardnosed leader. They don’t see that softer side. But we hit it off really well and we’re going along, ’75 and ’76.

During 2000, when he would be asked, “Did you ever do this” or “Did you ever do that,” he would often say, “When I was young and foolish, I did things that were young and foolish,” or words to that effect.

Right.

What did you see him doing that would fall under the category of young and foolish?

Drinking too much, that probably sums it up. Having said that, he’s not somebody who had to have a drink every day. It wasn’t that kind of stuff. It’s in the book, the classic one of—He called me up and said, “Remember when we went to Odessa and Willie Nelson and did that?” I said, “Yes, I remember it OK.” He said, “What do you remember about it?” I’m telling him what I remember about it and I said, “Why? Why do you care?” He said, “I’m going to put it in the book.”

I said, “Put it in the book?” It’s one thing to have done it, it’s something else to read about it. But it was important to him to show people what his behavior was earlier in life and why he felt it important to change that behavior. That was one of the young and ridiculous things we did. He said, “Don’t worry, you’ll come out looking OK,” and I said, “Easy for you to say.”

We were 29 years old when that was going on. It was the fall of ’75. That was one of them. Beyond that, I can’t think of anything other than—on a Friday night, he’d be drinking, he started out with beer and before you know it, he’s drinking B&Bs [cocktail of Benedictine and Brandy], and when he got into the B&Bs it was all over, just saying ridiculous stuff. “Why would you say something like that? That’s ridiculous.” It was a side of him that you certainly didn’t see when he wasn’t drinking. He would tend to get, I’m not sure I’d call it obnoxious, but he got pretty close up to it.

We’d play cards together. I loved playing bridge with him, and he and I would take on my wife and Laura. He’d start drinking and he’d say something stupid to my wife and she’d take offense to it and before you know it, things are blowing up. We’d be home, the phone would ring and he’d say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that. That was kind of stupid for me to say.”

The trip to Odessa and the Willie Nelson concert, that was—I won’t say it was the clincher, but it was that kind of silly stuff. Not anything that would hurt anybody and not anything illegal, other than probably driving while he’d been drinking, maybe something like that. He was caught for it before that, but just some silly stuff like that. It got blown out of proportion as far as I’m concerned, this whole drinking thing. People have asked me a lot about it and some people wanted to think this guy was a real drunk or something, or he had a serious problem. I wouldn’t call it a serious problem. He got to the point, as you’ve read, where he was, “I can’t be as good a father as I can be, as good a husband as I can be, as good a person as I could be if I drink, because I just go too far with it.” He has that compulsive personality, a type A, he gets going and can’t rein it back in, but it’s amazing that he had the discipline to just quit.

Sure.

“It’s over, done with, no more. I’m not going to do it anymore.” The only other really ridiculous thing was—and you’ve read this story too, no doubt. He knocked on my door one Sunday afternoon in the fall of ’75 and said, “Let’s go flying.” I said, “What do you mean flying?” He said, “I fly. Let’s go fly.” I was stupid enough to say OK, so we went and chartered a little old 150 Cessna. He had been used to flying the jets in the Air National Guard, and as soon as we took off, he stalled the airplane and the horns were going off.

We got it airborne and he wasn’t up very long, five minutes maybe, when he decided that he wasn’t very comfortable and we needed to land. “Let’s go put this thing back on the ground.” So we fly into the air park in Midland, which is just the airport within the city. There’s a bigger airport outside the city. He lands on the runway but immediately he’s off the runway out in the infield, and he says, “Oh, my gosh, we have to—” He pours the power back to it to get it up in the air again, reaches over and grabs my leg and says, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it. We’re going to be all right.”

What are you thinking through all of this?

“What am I doing here? This is ridiculous.” But he came around and we landed.

Are you saying he’d been drinking when he did this?

No, he had not been drinking.

OK. I want to make that clear for the record.

No, he had not been drinking. This was not a drinking thing. This was just a young and irresponsible or stupid, I don’t know what it was. It wasn’t very smart. It was being 29 years old and bulletproof. I can’t think of any other incident during those years, and we were together a whole lot, from the time he moved to Midland and the time he quit drinking and then left Midland. There weren’t too many weekends where we weren’t doing things together.

What are the kinds of things you would do?

Parties at somebody’s house or playing bridge or some other card game at each other’s houses, watching the baseball game or football game, or just having dinner. It was normal backyard barbecue kind of stuff, where there would be some alcohol involved. It was rare for me to think, Hey, you’ve gone too far tonight.

Of course.

Had too many B&Bs or it’s time to shut down or something. It didn’t seem like it was that big an issue except, when he finally started—his faith started growing, the oil and gas industry had collapsed. He’s in Bible study and he’s starting to think about priorities of life and what’s important, what matters, and the drinking thing is getting in the way of being as good a husband as he can be. “When I’m with my wife or with my friends and I drink too much, I say stupid things.” I can’t quote him because I can’t remember any of the stupid things that he said, or things that he probably wished he hadn’t said or didn’t mean to say.

I think what I want to put a lot of emphasis on is that this wasn’t an every-weekend event or an every-night event or an every-other-weekend event. It would come along once a month or something. That’s probably not even fair. Maybe it’s because I was doing too much at the same time, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think as he started looking at his life in the early to mid-’80s and the industry collapses and things are pretty rough. He’s seen a lot of friends lose their jobs and he’s thinking about himself and what he can do to be a better person.

You said that in 1970, you got involved in a greater way in Bush senior’s campaign for U.S. Senate than in other campaigns you’d gotten involved with. Could you talk about that some?

I spent more time as a volunteer down at the headquarters in Austin. I was in Austin going to graduate school, and the campaign was under way, and I volunteered more. Phone calls, handing out flyers, that kind of thing. It wasn’t a deep involvement where I had big responsibility of any sort. He was a Congressman from my parents’ home district in Houston, so I knew of him through that, although he became a Congressman in ’66, and I’d already gone to the University of Texas. Of course, he ran for Senate in ’64?

That’s right.

And lost there. So I’d seen the name around, I liked what he stood for. Interestingly enough, my family spent two years in Connecticut, in 1954 and ’55, when Prescott Bush was a Senator, so I’d seen his name there. Anyway, I liked what he stood for and liked what he had to say, and he was the Congressman from my parents’ district. I don’t know why; I just was attracted to it. I didn’t have any big-time responsibility.

When did your interest in politics first appear? Because this was now the third campaign. You had done more than 99 percent of your fellow citizens do, so at some point you decided that—

It’s an interesting question. I never have really thought about it, because in high school I didn’t run for student body president or anything like that. When I went off to college and got on the University of Texas campus, I enjoyed meeting people and getting to know new people and being involved. It was a way of public service for me. I grew up in a home that was all about public service and giving back. I grew up in a home that had strong core beliefs about the country, which I shared. I picked up on it some in college. I enjoyed engaging people, so when a friend of mine wanted to run for president of the student body and “Yes, let’s go for it.” I never had a desire to run myself. I was always more one to do what I could to help somebody else. I don’t know whether I didn’t feel like I had the tools to do it, it just wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.

Did it make a difference that you observed in George W. Bush, that his father was this prominent guy in Texas? Did that somehow color his sense of how he was doing in life or his ambitions in business? Did you see his father’s effect on him as a young man? I’m not asking you to put him on the couch. I’m just saying having the same name as a famous guy in your state may make a difference.

He certainly followed a similar pattern to his father. Very similar, although for his dad to take Barbara Bush from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Odessa, Texas, is pretty God-dang unbelievable. The adventuresome spirit he had, and for her to go along. So as his dad had gone to the oil field in west Texas, of course he’d never seen it before, whereas George W. had seen it before, so it wasn’t quite the same thing. But it was going to west Texas, like his father had done. He didn’t mess around, he got into politics quickly.

It was George Mahon’s seat; George Mahon had been in Congress for 42 or 44 years. So he’s saying, “How often do these things come around? If it’s every 44 years, I think we’d better go for it now.” But still he had that drive, the whole public service side of him. That’s one of the strong genes of the Bush family. In terms of being influenced by his dad, only that, “He’s my dad, yes, I’m proud of him.” He’d get the question a lot and it would irritate him, that people always asked, “Were you trying to be like your dad?” Comparing him with his dad. You want to be your own person. He liked to say, “I’m half my mom and half my dad, and I’ve got my dad’s eyes and my mother’s mouth.” He wants to be George W. Bush and he doesn’t want people to say, “Oh, you’re doing this because your dad did it.” He’s not doing it because his dad did, it’s because that’s what drives him, that’s his makeup. It happens to be similar to his dad.

That part of it irritated him from time to time, when people would try to suggest that he had to prove himself. You have to prove that you can do what your dad did, you can be that good, you can accomplish that much. He wasn’t wired that way. He was wired in a way, “I’m a driven guy, I’m going to accomplish what I can accomplish, but it’s not because my dad did it, it’s because it’s who I am.”

Let me rephrase Mike’s question. Did you get the sense, when you were first getting to know him in the mid ’70s, that this is a really ambitious guy or is this a guy who’s running from ambition?

No. He loved the free enterprise, “dream big” environment of west Texas. He was out there to make a big discovery. He was focused on finding a big oilfield. He wasn’t running from anything; he was dreaming big things that he wanted to accomplish. In Midland, he’d be saying, “The sky’s the limit,” and that’s how he lived life, a real optimistic, positive, hopeful, dream big, chase the dream core in him. Not trying to run, “I’ve got to get away from my dad because they’re going to compare me to him and that will make me feel like I’m inferior.” There wasn’t any of that.

I’ve lost the Laura thread through this.

She was in our wedding. She and my wife were friends in elementary school. They went to preschool together and then she didn’t go to the same elementary school that she and George went to, so Laura and George weren’t friends back in Midland, in the ’50s. But my wife and Laura were acquainted, so Laura was in our wedding and then Laura didn’t show up again on the scene until ’76 when they were introduced by the [Joseph, III and Jan] O’Neills, had a pretty quick dating and before you knew it they were getting married. She was out of my world and Susie’s world. I just met her at our wedding. I didn’t know her other than that.

I see. I didn’t know whether that connection had been reestablished before George W. gets to Midland.

I may have seen her again, but I didn’t get really connected to her, acquainted with her, until—she was off doing other things out in Midland. But no, I don’t think he was running for anything. He was driven to be successful, driven to serve very early on, as soon as he showed up in Midland, Texas, like I did. We both got involved in the United Way, did it at the lower level. I ran it one year and then he ran it the next year, that was in ’80 and ’81, so four or five years after we had moved to Midland. Getting involved in the community and being active in the church. This is in all the books too. When he came there, before he met Laura, he was teaching Sunday school at the First Presbyterian Church, which I thought was kind of a cool deal. He was teaching ninth graders, I believe, and there weren’t a lot of single guys his age in Midland, Texas, who were teaching Sunday school.

That was your church or that was not your church?

Not my church. He joined our church when he married Laura.

He was a member of the Presbyterian church before?

Yes. I’m not sure how that happened exactly, because his family is Episcopalian. The Presbyterian church was a very popular church in Midland, and a lot of friends went there. I don’t know what it was that had attracted him to that church. But he jumped into town, “I’m here to serve.” United Way and church and being a good neighbor. We weren’t too involved in politics really, I wasn’t. I can’t remember him being involved in it until he decided to run for Congress.

How did that come about?

George Mahon announced he was retiring and I’m not sure that the sun went down. He called me and said, “I need to talk to you,” and we had a conversation over at the Petroleum Club. He said, “I think I want to run for Congress.” I said, “What?” He said, “Yes, I think I want to run for Congress. Will you help me?”

I said, “Yes, I guess so. I mean I’ll help you.” It wasn’t much more than that. He thought, How often is this going to come around? I want to take advantage of it. So he started to organize and do it. But he was a complete natural, you couldn’t have a better skill set, for west Texas anyway. He was articulate, he knew the subject matter, he met people extremely well, he worked very hard at it, sunup until late into the night, and he had that drive. It was a big deal to win the primary because the Republican Party establishment was really not on our side.

You talked about the Ivy League thing earlier, that’s what I was thinking about when you said that, because it was the old guard of Midland that had been there a long time and it wasn’t the Ivy League crowd. There were a few, but it was the old guard that had pretty much—the former mayor and others who had been in local politics there, who weren’t on our side. The question is, can these young guys who just showed up here a few years ago come in and prevail? The odds-on favorite to win it was the mayor of Odessa, the sister city. We didn’t have the support of the old guard, but he outworked them. By that time, because of the oil embargo, there were a lot of young people just like us coming to Midland. They thought, This may be a pretty good career; let’s go to Midland. There was a lot of young energy that had come to town in the previous three or four years, so a lot of them helped out. He made a lot of friends, it was a fun thing and a way to participate in a campaign, and it got everybody excited.

I helped run the southern part of the campaign, which was Midland, and he said, “I’m going to have to spend all my time up north, because that’s yellow dog Democrat country up there.” That’s Lubbock and Plainview and beyond, and, “I’m going to have to spend all my time up there, so you hold the fort down here.”

Are you talking about the primary now or the general?

I’m talking about the general now. The primary was all right there, it was Midland and Odessa. Everybody thought the mayor of Odessa was going to win, and we beat him pretty handily, as I remember.

Is there a Midland, Odessa—you said sister city.

A lot of conflict. Back then, a big issue had come up where a university was going to get placed at the airport between the two cities. Lyndon Johnson weighed in at the last minute, with his friend [William] Noël from Odessa, and they moved it to Odessa. It really chapped a lot of the city fathers of Midland, and to this day it’s still out there at some level. Not like it was back in the ’70s when we showed up, but there was a lot of tension between the two cities. Having said that, the old guard of Midland still didn’t get behind our campaign. They saw the mayor of Odessa as being somebody who had, when it comes to just broader politics, earned his spurs. His beliefs were all about the same in terms of fundamental, how would you vote when you went to Congress. All very conservative positions that every candidate would take out there.

How was having the name George Bush a plus and minus?

It brought a lot of money in from outside the state. In the general, they used that against him. He got a lot of money, a little talent maybe, in terms of bringing in a few people from outside to help organize, that type of thing. I’d say it was money more than anything else. We did get a substantial amount of money from outside. I’d have to go back and look, was it half? Don’t think so, but it was probably 30 percent. We raised a lot of money, over $500,000.

Were these checks that just arrived in the mail or did you know whom to call?

No, we had some lists. We’d take George H. W.’s list and mail to those people, because he had some big lists. It was a pretty good chunk of money, but in the general I think it hurt us, particularly the whole Trilateral Commission stuff that they dropped on us. In west Texas, when you started talking Trilateral Commission, global conspiracies, whoa, those people just—“Man, we don’t need that clown in here.” I think that issue hurt us as much as anything. Second may have been Yale and Harvard. Again, you have a bunch of ranchers and yellow dog Democrats who don’t understand that Ivy League stuff at all. Those things hurt us. In the general, in Midland we got 82 or 84 percent of the vote, but we didn’t quite get enough north of us, in Lubbock, though that’s where he had spent all of his time.

Was Kent Hance a good candidate?

He was good and he was a local guy, a colorful guy. He taught at Texas Tech. Everybody around there knew him, a state senator, everybody liked him, he’s a very likable guy. I was with him yesterday, as a matter of fact, and he’s a likable guy and ran a smart campaign. He was a good candidate. We could have beaten a lesser candidate, but he had all the right credentials. He was from where the majority of the voting populace was, and that voting populace was heavily Democratic, conservative Democratic but Democratic. He had plenty of money and he knew how to attack Bush on the things that would get people out there excited, like the Trilateral and Yale and carpetbagger kind of stuff. “Don’t let this carpetbagger come down here and tell us how to run west Texas. What does he know about being a cotton farmer?”

In the campaign, President Bush was phenomenal in terms of meeting and greeting people. I saw how he could engage with people and how he remembered their names and the names of their children. And then on the issues. Coming down the home stretch, this was just days before the primary and we were at the Hilton [Hotel]. He was having a press conference after a meeting. All the questions were oil related or ranching or farming related, local stuff, and then all of a sudden some reporter asked about some issue, some international disturbance in Turkey. He was right on it, knew the right response, knew all about it. I didn’t know anything about this stupid thing. He had a lot of capacity and just was a natural.

The night of the election, we’re at his little duplex and the absentee boxes came in and we were way ahead, boy, and we’re high-fiving or whatever you did back then. I guess we didn’t high-five back then. The night wore on and more Lubbock boxes came in, and pretty late in the night we saw it wasn’t going to work. He called his dad because Bill Clements had surprisingly won the Governor’s race, so he called his dad and asked his dad what he thought about him. Would he call Bill Clements to see about him being secretary of state, which was an appointed position?

I think that happened. You would have to ask him precisely what happened, but I’m pretty sure his dad did call him and then Clements told him he had already pretty well decided he was going to appoint George Strake, who had been a Republican and a big supporter of his in Houston, as secretary of state. So even though he had lost that night, he was still looking for a way to get into the mix, and maybe that would be a way to do it, just because of the surprise Clements victory. The Clements victory was over John Hill, the guy I had worked for back in ’66.

It’s really interesting. His father never had any interest in running for state office in Texas, but George W. did. The fact that he would want a job in the Clements administration, and then of course he went on and ran for and was elected Governor, that’s a fork in the road that his father never took.

Politics is timing and opportunity, right? If you’ve got the bug at the moment, you’re trying to find your opening to get into it. I don’t know that this was in his brain, but he knew that these opportunities don’t come along all the time. He missed out on Congress and maybe we don’t get a shot at that for another 44 years. Is there another avenue? Maybe we should go the state route, maybe I can get secretary of state. The outcome was as it should have been. He really needed to get back into business, make some money, and get himself in a position to do what he did, run for Governor and run for President.

You showed a sort of surprised reaction when he came to you first and said, “I’m thinking about running for Congress. What do you think?” Was it because of the timing or had there not been discussions about his maybe taking a political career?

No, there hadn’t been any. I don’t remember any talk about it until then. I don’t ever remember him saying, “I’m going to run someday, would you help?” or “What do you think about it?” I remember more the surprise of him saying that he wanted to run.

That’s really interesting because you obviously spent a lot of time with him and knew him very well during this interval. From what you’ve said, it’s correct then to think that your conception was this is a guy who is committed to the oil business and basically wants to be a businessman, as opposed to somebody who wants to be a politician.

Very much so, but the opportunity came along and he jumped right on it. I’m trying to think if any of that was influenced by the fact that his dad had done what he had done and he had run for Congress, and “This is my chance to run for Congress, so I need to go do that.” I really don’t think so. I think it was more just the opportunity came up and he said, “I’m going to give it a shot.”

Is it unlike the man that you now know, that he would have done something like this on a whim, or is this the kind of thing that he would have percolated on?

He would have percolated on it because of Laura. She would have made him percolate. They hadn’t been married that long then, so he said, “Let’s go do this.”

What you saw of him in business, was he the kind of person who would jump on an opportunity like that, or was he the kind who would put careful thought into it?

He was more instinctive, yes.

So this was consistent in that way, he was the kind of guy who would make a judgment and act on it.

We didn’t run any polls; we didn’t do any surveys or focus groups or any of that. Not that people did it back then, but just to the point, gut instincts, which have served him pretty dadgum well over the years. I know he gets criticized some for it, but I think his instincts have been healthy and good. Laura probably influenced it somewhat in 1990, when we thought about it some. He decided not to run for Governor in ’90, and then did run for Governor in ’94 and won. But he realized that he needed to have her on board, and she’s not quite as instinctive. “Let’s think all the way through this, let’s make sure we’ve thought about all the issues and all of the consequences of this that we’re going to be dealing with in our life.”

Is that acting on gut instinct characteristic of the oil business? Do the successful people have that trait, or is the oil business more composed of people who are carefully analytical?

There are both and believe me, whenever you spend some—He spent a few years being a land man for some others out there who were professional land men, and trained him and helped him along and got him going. He made some deals and they worked out pretty well and then he started his own company. It was Bush Exploration and then Arbusto [Energy] and Spectrum 7, and then he sold everything to Harken [Energy]. But when he started his own company, he used other people’s money, and he was very careful about how he spent it, like it was his own money. He was very frugal, as you’ve heard. He would look at opportunities to invest his own and other people’s capital, and he would listen to and evaluate the science and do all the due diligence, but it’s not an exact science. At the end of the day, you have to be willing to take some risk.

The game has changed a lot in the last five or six years, but when you’re out drilling wildcats it’s a high-risk game. Back in those days, you found something you weren’t looking for, you might miss your target but something else comes along. A lot of it is just finding a good reason to go drill a well, a hole, knowing it’s high risk and hoping that hits that objective, but also knowing that you might run into something else along the way. You talk to most successful oilmen of that era, and they found a whole lot more oil and gas that they weren’t looking for than they’d found that they were looking for. That’s the nature of it.

Sure.

At the end of the day, you look at everything, you can analyze all the science and listen to everybody. Then it’s instincts and risk. It’s a high-risk game.

I’ve talked about him being frugal. One thing that I don’t think got enough attention as people tried to analyze George W. Bush and how he thought and his beliefs is the fact that yes, it was other people’s money or equity and not borrowed money, and people knew how frugal he was. They knew he was going to be very careful with their money and treat it like it was his own. They felt comfortable investing with him because of that, not necessarily because he had a big track record that everybody wanted to jump onto—“Oh, my gosh, look at all he’s found, look at all the discoveries. I want to invest with that person.” It was more they trusted this guy. He was frugal, he was going to be careful, and they knew they were going to get their money’s worth. He’s not somebody who was going to skim off excess money for overhead or for too many people. They’d give him a dollar and 99¢ would be invested wisely.

The other piece of that is that in the late ’70s and the early ’80s, it was very easy to go to the bank and borrow a bunch of money, and he resisted that. He knew he was in a very risky business, and he didn’t want to pile on a bunch of financial risk, whereas many people piled on way too much financial risk so they didn’t survive. He did survive. From a dollars-and-cents perspective, it wasn’t a robust success, but he survived, which is a lot more than you could say for a lot of people, just because he understood risk. He knew he had a lot of operating risk and he didn’t want to put a lot of financial risk on top of it, and because of that he did survive it. He was able to keep going with his Spectrum 7 and have an asset that was of value that he could sell to another enterprise, that being Harken.

Right.

He sold Harken to them and he got some stock out of it, and that differentiated him from a lot of the players of the time, because you have to have some pretty strong beliefs when you’re in an environment where oil prices are going through the roof, everybody’s making a whole lot of money, and banks are pounding on your door wanting to loan you money. As my beloved old boss used to say, “Banks would loan you money when you wouldn’t have loaned it to yourself.” It was a period like that and in the social circuit, the party circuit, whatever you want to call it, “Oh, yes, I just borrowed $5 million from this bank.” He could be thinking, Maybe I should be doing that.

But he knew he shouldn’t be doing that. I think that, from the point of pure business acumen, differentiated him from others, and that’s a core belief he’s carried throughout his life. I know it influenced his thinking a lot when he was President. He takes a lot of flak because we spent too much and we went from surpluses to deficits. That’s a whole different discussion. It’s more around Iraq and the cost of that, and Afghanistan, the war. That’s what caused us to go from surpluses to deficits.

Let’s take a break.

[BREAK]

That kind of optimistic attitude is still such a part of it. I went through the collapse with everybody else in the 1980s, and God-dang my boss at the time—the name of the company was Tom Brown, it was an oil and gas company. In 1980, my boss was worth about $500 million. By 1985, it was zippo, all gone. He never had a bad day though; he was optimistic every day. Every day he’d get up and we were going to fix it today, we’re going to make a big discovery or something. In the meantime, he didn’t have it one day and then he had it and then he didn’t have it again. It’s not like he hadn’t been there before, to not have anything. And that optimistic, positive amazing spirit is a big part of the personality of the President, no question about it.

So you were the campaign chairman of the Congressional campaign?

I don’t think I was ever described as a chairman, but in his mind I was. It seemed like he called me more than anybody else. I was helping organize the Midland/Odessa area, making sure we had the volunteers, we were capturing the names, getting the yard signs out, getting the press that we ought to get. I had a job, so this couldn’t be my full-time job, but at night and on the weekends I devoted as much time as I could to it and raised a lot of money, helped him raise the money, particularly there locally. Midland was the headquarters in terms of where money was coming in. His brother Neil [Bush] came and helped in the campaign as well. He knew what he had to do and he had his message, and it was an oil and gas message and a cotton farming message—conservative values. I’m sure he talked about education some.

I can remember coming down the home stretch. One smart thing we did is that we planned the campaign from election day backward to make sure we had enough money for the last two or three weeks, which is when everybody gets focused. But we also felt like we needed to introduce him to west Texas early and help defuse some of this Ivy League stuff. We ran some pretty robust TV spots in the summer, just to introduce him, and I can’t remember if we did it for two weeks or a week or three weeks or what, but it was a fundamental decision. Do we get him out there early on TV, or do we pull this back and make sure we have the money we need? As I said, by that time we were comfortable that we were going to have the financial resources. I think we raised like $550,000, which back then was a lot of money. That’s like two or three million today, so for a Congressional campaign that’s a big number. It was clear we were going to have the resources, so we ran some ads.

But then I remember him calling me. I was out at the airport for some reason and he called me. We didn’t have cell phones back then of course. I got a call out there. Hance was attacking him really hard on this money from out of the district. He had fudged the numbers and made it look like it was skewed a lot more than it really was. “What should we do? What are we going to do?” This is like three days before or something, and there’s nothing we can do except try to correct the record. We’ll call the press and tell them, but by then it’s too late, we couldn’t do anything.

Not that that changed the outcome of the election. I’m just trying to think of moments where he called me that I thought he was looking for some advice or some help. My point really is more that it wasn’t that often he was calling for advice or looking for help. He knew what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. He just wanted to know if everything was OK in Midland, which has been his style in that he always—and we will talk about this as we go on through the election—tries to find people he trusts and believes in and turns it over to them. Stay in touch with them, check in with them, find people he can depend on to get the job done and then let them go do it.

Other than you, was there anybody who came out of that campaign who stayed with him through the years?

Not to the extent that I did, but he’s got a lot of friends who were in that who have supported him through the years. Joe and Jan O’Neill, the couple who introduced George and Laura. Joe has always been supportive financially, not only writing checks, but being involved in the financial organization, playing a role in raising money in west Texas and beyond. Out of that particular campaign, Joe is the only other one I can think of, other than Mike Weiss out of Lubbock. Mike and Nancy Weiss became really good friends of the President and Laura. Mike helped in Lubbock in ’78 and they’re still very close friends. Mike is not into politics, not into fundraising. He’s been around these years, continued to support him through friendship as much as anything. I can’t think of anybody else.

A lot of people, the thing they hate most about politics is asking other people to donate money. Did you find that to be congenial or weren’t you good at it?

He was very good at it and I knew how to do it too. I’m not afraid to make the ask because I believed in the candidate. I did a lot of it and he did a lot of it, and we were successful at it. He’s not afraid to make the ask.

I’ll tell you one thing that’s interesting throughout the Presidential campaign. He’d never made a direct ask other than at the fundraisers. He wasn’t dialing for dollars. I don’t think he made one phone call asking for money when he ran for President. I did all of that, organized people to do all of it. I did some of it myself, but was more organizing people to do it. The only one I remember him calling was Ray Hunt. We were asking Ray to run Texas and be responsible for raising money in Texas. Other than Ray Hunt, I don’t remember him making—I was calling people, asking them to be the state chairs and all that kind of stuff.

But you had done United Way now and maybe you did stewardship campaigns in the church?

Yes, we did.

Asking people for money is something you’ve done outside of politics.

Yes. [laughs] The reason I laughed is because he didn’t—when he ran for President, he didn’t do it. I’m trying to think. He did some as Governor but not that much. For the library, this place right here, he’ll dadgum sure make the ask, and he won’t come in low. [laughter] He’ll come in high.

And it makes your job easier.

And he won’t flinch. When he ran for Governor, we enjoyed making the calls together, we did a lot of that. We’d go calling people together and we did good. We raised a lot of money when he ran for Governor and of course when he ran for President.

Did you ever have the impression, He’s got that out of his system, now we can go back?

Always thought he’d go back. I just didn’t know when.

Do you know why you thought that?

Just because he looked so natural. He was so comfortable with it and he enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. He really enjoyed it, got a big kick out of it.

And you?

I enjoyed it, had a lot of fun. We did. He did all the right things. When he thanked all those who worked so hard for him, no sour grapes when he lost. He went back to campaign headquarters and they were all there, and he said all the right things. He was just too natural at it to where it just felt like it was something he was going to do again for sure. Didn’t know when.

Right.

I think one thing he did do was probably, it didn’t take him too long to settle in and say, “I need to go make some money, begin to build a family.” He and Laura took a few years before they had children. In fact, they thought they might adopt, but they didn’t do that. It was on their mind, but then they had the twins and that was a blessing for them. Then he got plenty focused on making money.

Of course he helped his dad in the ’80 campaign. Just after he’d lost his campaign, he’s back out helping his dad some in his own Presidential bid, so he kept his juices flowing in that way. Of course his dad becoming Vice President, he’s around it all the time.

Sure.

Not as much as maybe you would think some would, in that I don’t think it was something he felt like he had to go do to satisfy something inside. But still, your dad’s the Vice President of the United States and you’re around it. He did get focused on business, and of course then it collapsed, it cratered.

In the Congressional campaign, we talked a little bit earlier about occasions when he would not be disciplined in drinking. Was there ever a problem in his campaign where—?

I never remember one iota of that.

So he was a disciplined candidate.

Totally. And I never remember any issues at all relating to that while he was—I don’t remember him even drinking during that period. I’m sure he did, but it wasn’t an issue.

Right.

It was not an issue at all. That night of the big celebration, I remember the election, it was a celebration and everybody was there and I don’t remember him having a drink that night. Just wasn’t a factor.

We’ve gotten from ’78 to ’80. Did you have any piece of the Presidential campaign that year?

A small piece. I helped raise some money. I’m on the org chart somewhere, but it’s pretty low down. It’s west Texas and I had my assignment of how much money I needed to go raise, and I pretty well did that. I did what I could to help in west Texas.

Is this the primary campaign for George H. W. Bush?

Right. When he was running for President against [Ronald] Reagan. Then I helped in the Presidential campaign too, but again, a small player.

So his dad becomes Vice President and how soon after that does the oil business go into its next bust cycle?

Oil prices peaked in 1980, right after the Iranian crisis, and a lot of the industry leaders, the majors, thought oil prices were going to go to a hundred dollars a barrel. I still had everybody in the industry saying to me—and banks were loaning money like it was going to go to a hundred.

Then in ’81, ’82 prices flattened out, about $30, $31. People had taken in all this debt, which was a much different program back then because interest rates were a whole lot higher than they are, they were 11, 12 percent, so people were beginning to choke on that. By ’83, people said, “Boy, this isn’t going like we thought it was going to go. Things are getting pretty soft.”

It got down to $12, didn’t it?

It did in ’86. January of ’86 is when it collapsed, but in ’83 people said, “This isn’t looking too good,” and then there was the slogan, “Stay alive till ’85.”

Banks were beginning to fail in ’83. The First National Bank of Midland failed in ’83. Penn Square failed in ’82, I believe. A lot of these banks loaned money to people who wouldn’t loan it to themselves. Way overextended, high interest rates and the whole financial system and the oil and gas sector, real estate, started to come under serious stress, and banks started failing. Through that period, I can’t remember exactly what he was doing other than keeping his company going, because he hadn’t borrowed any money. He didn’t have banks that he needed to worry about paying back, like most everybody else in town did. I know he raised a couple of funds in ’80 and I think ’81, raising funds meaning raising money to invest, explore risk in hopes of a discovery. That would have kept him going for several years.

Banks are failing, the industry is getting beaten up. This is when oil was still at $30, and it was in 1984 when I went to Bible study and suggested to him, the next season, “Hey, I think you’d like it and we ought to go to this.”

Why did you think he’d like it?

He was very active. He taught Sunday school when he came to town, he was active in our church, in the stewardship campaign. He was on the administrative board. We went to Sunday school together. This was a chance to start digging into one’s faith and digging into the word and trying to take it to a much deeper level than just on the surface or going to church on Sunday and being on the administrative board.

One thing that amazed me. Sunday afternoons in west Texas everything shut down for pro football, the Dallas Cowboys. He and I were big Oilers fans, we loved talking about that because we both grew up in Houston. We had a lot of Oilers players we’d talk about, and we were two of the guys who were gung-ho Houston Oilers. Everybody else was for the Dallas Cowboys. Sunday afternoon, all the men are home watching football games. He was on the administrative board and they’d have their meeting and he’d be there on Sunday afternoon. He was so conscientious about it. My wife was on the board and she wasn’t quite as conscientious. She came to one meeting, probably the first meeting she’d been to in who knows how long, and he said, “I’d like everybody to recognize we have a guest here.” [laughter] Oh, gosh, my wife still gives him a hard time for that.

I think this was in the book, wasn’t it? About him in Sunday school class one day when the instructor said, “What’s a prophet?” And he said, “That’s when your income exceeds your expenses.” That’s about how deep we were into the word. It was better than that, but it was a chance to—a nice, comfortable session, 30 minutes of a lecture and an hour of sitting down in a room with eight or nine guys, talking about the word.

Was there a leader of the group?

Leon Taylor started it, and he used a number of different references that first season I went. It was in the spring, and then in the fall he brought the Community Bible Study to Midland. I’ve got all the books, I could go back and look, but we did Romans and we did Luke. I was enjoying it, it felt pretty good to me.

You have to put it in the environment of this rough time, with a lot of banks going down, people losing their jobs. It was a time when we thought, Whoa, what’s going on here? Is that what it took? Maybe so. I had done a little Bible study work myself. My sister had gotten me into it, coming from the family that I grew up in. She was into it in a big way in college, and I did a little bit of it with her, but never was very consistent. I was too busy going through this ride of my own. This company that I was the president of at 32 years old, we had a market cap larger than Ford Motor Company’s. Whoa, 32 years old and this thing is bigger than Ford Motor Company, the market cap—key words. By 1986, we had survived it all, paid all of our debts, but we went from company value of about $3 billion to $50 million, so I was in the middle of some of that.

Sure.

I wasn’t there yet when I started the Bible study, but we were on our way. Anyway, I thought he’d like it and it took for him. One thing always irritated me. I’m an engineer, he’s a historian. He got a degree in history and then he got his MBA, and we were both pretty dadgum conscientious about it and would do the lesson and answer the questions, but he’d get the question and he’d write one word there. That’s all he’d need, one word, and then through the meetings, he’d talk about it for a long time. Maybe two words or three or something, and I’d written four or five paragraphs. Man, he’s using something different than I’m using. That was a really good period in our life, no question about it. It shaped us in many ways, and I think it was part of getting it set up where he was going to quit drinking, get focused a little more on the spiritual side of his life, a little less on the flesh side.

How big was the group?

We had about a hundred.

About a hundred, OK. But it started out as a small group.

Yes. A hundred is probably a little high, maybe 75. The first time I went, in the spring, there were 20 to 30, but in the fall it caught on and I think probably a hundred is too big for that first bunch. I’m going to say 70, but by the next year it kept growing, it kept getting bigger. I can remember us sitting in the chapel of the Presbyterian church and saying, “There are a lot of people in here.”

Yes.

We’d break into groups of ten groups or so.

Those were consistent groups or whoever happened to be there?

Consistent groups. Each session, the Book of Luke, when you break down into your core groups, they were all the same people.

So the small groups would be people, and George Bush was in your small group?

He was several times, not every time.

Would you continue conversations through the course of the week or were you in contact for prayer during the week, or was it pretty much isolated?

Pretty much isolated. We’d talk about the lessons a little bit during the week, but we weren’t having Wednesday morning prayer or breakfasts or just let’s go pray. It was more just working the Bible study and doing the lessons.

And the leader of the group?

Leon Taylor started it, and he continued on with it that spring. We had a number of leaders over time. One of them, who was the head of our core group, was a guy by the name of Bill Holmes, who runs it to this day. Now he’s on the executive committee. I haven’t been going, but if there’s an executive committee or something, he’s on it. But it was great, we had people from all walks of life. In our group, there was an African American guy who was a postman, so it wasn’t just oil and gas people. It was people living in the community. It was pretty cool.

The question about the leader interests me, because in my own experience, often these things are the product of a particularly charismatic person and they survive as long as you have the leadership of that one person. It’s striking to me that you said that there were successors, or multiple people, who were in that core leadership.

Very much so. I was just thinking, Mark Leaverton is the one who followed Leon Taylor, but there was also Skip Hedgpeth. I always thought of the leader as whoever was standing up and speaking and delivering the message for the week. Mark Leaverton did it more than others, but Skip did a number of them. When I went to Washington, they’d send me the tape every week, and I would listen to it during my workout or something like that. It’s still going very strong.

When you would break up into the smaller groups, were you engaging the word in terms of understanding it or in terms of relating it to your own lives?

I think a lot of both. The questions were thought-provoking. What does this really mean? I had a study Bible, so I’d always think about a verse and figure out what it meant. But people were—I can’t remember the President doing any of this. I distinctly remember Bill Holmes, who was our core group leader. His first wife had just left him and had an abortion. It was a brutal time in his life and he was sharing that with the core group, what the word meant to him at this moment in his life. There were other testimonies like that along the way, because there was a lot of pain. People were getting beaten up pretty bad. It wasn’t just financial issues, there were other issues people were struggling with. Certainly, the message coming from Mark Leaverton and Skip was always about how you apply this as part of your daily life. It was meant to be the practical, living application of the Bible in your life.

I’ve heard the term “accountability group.” Does that resonate with what you’re talking about here?

Not really. The only part of it I felt accountable for was to show up having done the lesson. People felt that kind of accountability that if you’re going to participate, then we want you to really participate, and it takes some preparation to do that. There was that element of accountability, but not the kind of accountability of are you living out your life according to the word. It was come prepared to talk about it.

It would have been 1986 then, when the President has this experience? Can you tell us about that?

The night it happened was actually my birthday. Our birthdays are three weeks apart. He’s three weeks older than I am, he’s the sixth and I’m the twenty-seventh, and we were at the Broadmoor, in Colorado Springs. There were eight of us there. We were at the Charles Court Room at the Broadmoor and had about five bottles of Silver Oak red wine and it was ridiculous. Before the night was over, the two of us are entertaining a lot of the people around us. We’d go table to table and introduce ourselves and say something stupid. Who knows what we said? I don’t know. Joe O’Neill was there and he was a dear friend. My second daughter, she’s a special needs daughter, and he toasted her about five times. One toast was enough, but we kept going and we had more toasts.

But that was the night when—and I didn’t do anything destructive or didn’t hurt anybody, didn’t say anything vulgar that I remember, but we were introducing ourselves to the various patrons there at the restaurant, who probably would just as soon not have had us introducing ourselves. He woke up the next morning and said, “That’s it, no more.” He didn’t tell me that at that moment.

This is your 40th birthday, right?

Fortieth birthday, yes. He didn’t tell me that at that moment, but he did. We got back home and a few days later—

Do you remember what he told you?

Just he wasn’t going to drink anymore. That was it.

Did he explain it?

I can’t remember if he said it then. I certainly have heard him say it a lot, “I couldn’t be as good a father as I could be, as good a husband I could be.” One of the great stories that I’ve heard just recently about that, I don’t think this one’s been out there. There was a lot going on out in the Midland Basin, in the oil and gas industry out there, and China came in and made a huge acquisition of some properties from a company here in Dallas called Pioneer [Natural Resources]. This story is going somewhere, don’t worry.

You’ve got rapt listeners. We love these kinds of stories.

The president of Pioneer said, “Look, the Sinochem [Group] people, or the Chinese people, are coming over. Would it be possible that they could meet with the President?” They didn’t have any real reason to see him other than as a friendly gesture. This guy was a friend of mine, an acquaintance of his here in Dallas. China sent some executives over here and he said, “OK, I’ll meet with them.” So they come to his office on Sherry Lane and they walk into the boardroom, six or seven of these Chinese executives, as well as the Pioneer guy, and I’m there with the President. They walk in and he does his normal deal of going all the way around the room, shaking everybody’s hand, looking them in the eye, “Where are you from?” and “Where did you go to school?” and he’d go around.

They’re aware that he’s spent a lot of time in Midland, and they ask us where we’re from and, “Aren’t you from Midland, didn’t you spend a lot of time out there?” which is where they just made the deal. He said, “Yes, I’m from Midland.” And a guy said, “That’s out in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?” He said, “It may be in the middle of nowhere, but it’s on top of something.” Talking about all the oil and gas obviously.

But then he quickly said, “Let me tell you how I’ve developed relationships with leaders around the world. My first meeting was with Jiang Zemin and we had our meeting, then I asked for them to clear the room, and asked the President if that would be OK. He said fine, OK, and left the two interpreters in there.” Everybody left and there’s the two of them in there, with their interpreters, and he said, “Mr. President, let me tell you about me. When I was younger, I drank too much. I did some things I wasn’t very proud of. I couldn’t be as good a father as I could be, I couldn’t be as good a husband as I could be, couldn’t be as good a person as I could be because of my drinking, and I’ll tell you what changed me was my faith. But for that, I wouldn’t be here right now. So when I come to China, I want you to know why I talk about religious freedom and I will talk about it every time. It’s not just about my faith, it’s anybody’s faith. I want you to know where it’s coming from, because of what it did in my life.” Pretty powerful stuff.

Sure.

These Chinese executives must have felt, God, you really told him that, that you drank too much and you did things you shouldn’t have done? Hot dang, man, holy mackerel, you’re the President.

There’s a story in the book about the King of Saudi Arabia, when the Saudi King was all exercised over the fact that [Ariel] Sharon had [Yasser] Arafat all surrounded and he had to have the private session with the King. It started with “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, that’s who I am, that’s my faith. Tell me about your faith.” It was a matter of letting people know, in an unabashed way, who he is. “I’m not ashamed of it, that’s who I am.” Using it in a way so he can talk about religious freedom and the importance of it in people’s lives. It’s a very powerful message to be able to deliver to somebody, that “Hey, I had my life off track and my faith brought me back on track.”

He talks about the time with Billy Graham. I remember him vividly calling me, “I was up in Maine, I just got back and I can’t believe, Reverend Graham, we talked about faith and we talked about sin and we talked about—and golly, it just changed me.” He wasn’t describing it as a born-again experience, but he was describing the impact it had on him, listening to Graham. He was all primed for him to have it, because he had been in the word and trying to figure this stuff out and trying to understand it and apply to his own life, and then to have the opportunity to sit down with Billy Graham, who would come to Kennebunkport every year or every other year, and boy, he couldn’t wait to call me and let me know when he got back home.

And you witnessed change in his behavior since then?

Only in the sense of not drinking. I can’t say that any of his core beliefs changed. He was always somebody, going back to elementary school, taking up for the guy getting pushed around by the bully. He’s the one who wants to help the people being pushed around by the bully or who have fallen on hard times or need a helping hand. A good soul and a good spirit about who you are, here to serve other people. I didn’t see this all of a sudden. It wasn’t he becomes a believer and all of a sudden, “I’m here to serve other people.” He was doing that beforehand. What I saw was he was not drinking anymore. I saw him being a better husband.

Sure.

Those kinds of responsibilities. It didn’t bother me that much, because I’m over there drinking too, but I’m sure his bride was like, I’m not sure I need to deal with this kind of thing. I don’t believe any of that nonsense I’ve read that she gave him some ultimatum. I don’t believe any of that stuff, but I do believe that he got the message himself. Not to say that he wasn’t helped along by a number of different forces. I’ve read some places that she put the ultimatum down. If it happened I’m not aware of it.

Maybe we should get back on the political track. I didn’t realize he was part of his father’s 1980 campaign, but I know in ’88 he was a big part of it.

Oh, a big part of it.

Was there anything in between, say the ’80, before ’88?

Let me, if I might, intrude on your question and maybe fine-tune it a little bit. You had earlier said that the opportunity presented itself for him to run for Congress, and he was thinking this happens only once every 40 years or so. Were there opportunities, to your mind, that might have presented themselves between the Congressional race and this interval, where he looked at it and decided “this isn’t it”?

The only time was 1990, when he looked at running for Governor. But between ’78 and ’88, no. Because you’d really need to make the decision in ’88 to crank up in ’89 and run in ’90.

We’re dealing with a lot of stuff in that point in time. Industry has collapsed, you’ve lost what wealth you may have accumulated. You don’t have a big bank account; you’ve got two new daughters. Then his dad is Vice President. But to your quick question, he sold the company to Harken in ’87, and then he moved to Washington to help with his dad’s campaign. I put him on the Tom Brown board in late ’87 or early ’88. I was reconstituting the board to take it back out in the public market. He had moved to Washington to help with his father’s campaign, and he was integrally involved in that. He was one of five or six of them who met every morning to plan out the day and the week and the month and the strategy. He was very much involved in that.

He wasn’t that involved in the ’80 campaign, only as kind of a surrogate speaker in the ’80 campaign. They’d call him, “Will you come to speak to this group in Iowa?” or someplace else, so he would hop around doing some of that, but not anything more than that. But ’87, ’88, he was big-time involved.

Are you in touch with him through all this?

Yes.

What was he doing, and what were you doing?

I was in west Texas still, and I was helping around the edges financially, helping organize Texas to raise money. Bear in mind that I’d just gone through this larger than Ford Motor Company, to $50 million, and trying to restart and reset and get through that. That was what the last half of the 1980s was about for me, but I was helping where I could.

We talked a lot on the phone. Most of the conversation on the phone was just two friends talking to each other. I remember his sweet assistant, Debbie, said, “I could always tell when you called because of the way he talked, the energy in his voice and the conversation. I could always tell it was you.” Because it was more just two friends talking than it was strategizing or “what do you think about this?” It really wasn’t any of that. It was just two buddies talking and, “How are you doing, what’s happening in west Texas? How’s the campaign, are you enjoying it?” “How are the girls?” We talked quite a bit. He’d call me a fair amount and I’d call him a fair amount, just to stay connected.

We came up that Christmas of ’88. His dad had won and our family came up and stayed with them. Wait a minute, I’m not telling you right. It was Christmas of ’87. They moved up here, we came up that Christmas and the campaign was under way. We stayed with them and had a nice time. He stayed here through the election and then as soon as the election was over, he headed home.

Did the family move up with him or did they stay in town?

They all came up.

About that time, when you all went out for that Christmas ’87 visit, his father was being criticized on really personal grounds—the wimp, lapdog, this rumor, which for some reason kept recurring, that he had had a longtime affair. Things that I would think a son would—

It really drove him crazy. It prepared him for the Presidency. He saw what a President goes through. It was like, if it’s you it’s OK, but if you see it’s your dad then that’s something else. Forty-three got criticized during that campaign for popping off against one of the news reporters or one of the magazines, about something that they said about his father, and I can’t remember the quote.

I think it was the wimp factor.

He got a fair amount of heat over it. People were taken aback that he would say something, whatever it was he said. I can’t remember the exact quote. Yes, it got to him. I think it got to all the family members, because you hate to see your loved one attacked like that, particularly when they know that it’s not well founded and that drives you crazy too. It’s just part of the territory and he learned that.

He was one of a group of five, I think you said. I would think the others in that small group would think, (a) what does this guy know about running a Presidential campaign, (b) how awkward is it, trying to speak frankly, when the Presidential candidate’s son is right there. So did those—

I never heard any of that.

What did he contribute?

Because he can hold his own. He’s very bright, he had been around his dad’s campaigns. They had all been around the Presidential campaign of ’80, Reagan’s and his dad, in ’84, and here we are. He had the qualities of a good CEO [chief executive officer], he knew his role and that he wasn’t there running it, somebody else was and they have skill sets he didn’t have. He’s not afraid to ask questions and not afraid to critique or challenge, but I think that was—I never heard of any tension like that among the four or five guys who were meeting every morning. You had [Lee] Atwater in there and [James Addison III] Baker and a couple others. Roger Ailes was the media guru of course, but I never felt or heard any of that tension. He never mentioned it. “I can’t believe they made this decision” or “I can’t believe they made—” Like I said, it was more the media attacks on his dad that would drive him crazy and his impulsiveness came out.

In a sense it was a kind of bullying, or I could see where he would think this was bullying. So he’s a son and he’s a guy who stands up against bullies.

Right, good connection.

He comes back and seriously considers running for Governor, is that right?

Yes, but he seriously considered buying a baseball team first.

Oh, of course.

Because he had met [John] McMullen, who was the owner of the [Houston] Astros, had lunch with him or had seen him in Washington right before the election. He said, “When you come back to Texas, come talk to me.” So he came back to Texas in December, he didn’t hang around up there. He went back for the inauguration but didn’t hang around. He moved back to Texas, and he went to see McMullen and McMullen said, “You ought to buy the Texas Rangers.”

“Hm, OK, that’s a good idea.” So he started plotting that and put together a group. Bill DeWitt, who runs the [St. Louis] Cardinals now, was in the group, and [Peter] Ueberroth told him that he didn’t have enough Texans in it. I’m not sure Bill wound up even being in it because of that, because Bill would have taken a pretty big piece of it. He brought in Richard Rainwater and some of that crowd, and he put the group together to buy the Rangers in ’88.

Did you have a piece of that yourself?

No, I didn’t.

Were you approached about it?

Remember, my company went from—

We haven’t hit the next upswing yet? My apologies.

No. He knew better. All of Texas was beat up, the banks all went down, real estate collapsed, oil and gas collapsed, so just a few of the financial whiz kids had some money, people like Rainwater and a few others. I would have loved to have done it, but it wasn’t in the cards.

He bought the baseball team and started focusing on the team, but then he got the bug. I can definitely remember a couple of things. One is that I was walking across Pennsylvania Avenue on the day of the inauguration in January of ’89, and saying to myself, My friend is going to be President of the United States someday.

Really?

I remember it clearly. I remember looking up at the Capitol. To show how naïve I was about it, it just didn’t feel that hard. It felt like this guy had the tools to do it, like he had all of the qualities that it would take to be the President. I remember that so friggin’ clearly.

Did you tell him?

Yes.

And what did he say?

Oh, he laughed. We both laughed, we both joked. It sounded like a joke at the time, but I remember saying it just seemed, this guy’s got—I saw his dad do it and I just thought, We can do this. He can be the President.

And you say this about somebody who at that point has never won an election.

Never won an election. Sometime along in there, it was in ’87, I think right before he left, it could have been ’86. It was back when video cameras were pretty big. We’d go down to my lake house. We’re loading up his two girls and they’re five years old. We’re out in front of Laura’s house and I’ve got the video camera going and of course you’re going to ask me and unfortunately, I’m going to tell you no, I don’t have the video. I have these eight tracks stacked up and I don’t know that I’ll ever get through them. I have to hire an archivist to go through them. But I’m taking the video and he’s talking about the broken education system in the state of Texas and, “We’ve got to fix it, and I’m going to fix it.” He’s joking but he’s also not. “I have these two little girls, we have a broken education system in the state of Texas, and I’m going to fix this education system someday, by God.” I remember that as a little vignette along the way. I said, “He’s going to do this.”

It was probably mid-’89, Karl Rove tried to get him interested in running for Governor, and he said, “Come with me and we’ll go down and talk to Karl.” So we talked to Karl and met a few of the leading Republicans. Karl was telling him, “You need to be chairman, we’re going to do this. We’re going to get him elected.”

Karl at the time was?

Karl was a political strategist, a political advisor, and he had done some work for his dad in the ’80 and ’88 campaigns. He’d been a political strategist for years, back into the ’70s when he was in college.

I remember driving down the highway one day and the President got a call from some reporter and he said, “Thank you very much. I’m flattered that some people think that I could be the Governor of the state of Texas, but I haven’t made up my mind if I’m going to pursue that or not. I’m flattered that somebody would even ask the question.” He hung up and I said, “What are you going to do? Are you going to do this?”

He said, “No, I don’t think so.” I think he was still remembering that he basically lost whatever financial, whatever he had, back in the ’80s. And he didn’t put a lot of money personally in the baseball team, but he assembled it, so he gets a carried interest in it.

Sure.

Plus, he didn’t have a lot of executive experience yet. He had run his smaller companies and there wasn’t a whole lot to talk about, so he didn’t have the financial resources, the wherewithal yet. I think he felt like he needed a little more of a track record. So he was going to stay and be the general partner of the Texas Rangers. And then he made some of those critical decisions in terms of who we’re going to hire, and bringing Nolan Ryan in and building baseball stadiums. All of a sudden he’s out there a lot too, because he’s out there selling the ball club. He’s talking to people all over the place and what a great game it is for the family and bring your kids. He became pretty well recognized, in part because of course his dad was the President. By that time he had Secret Service around him because his dad was the President, but people began to recognize him, particularly in the metroplex, because he’s out there selling the ball club so much.

He thought about it in ’88 and decided against it. I think he came to that decision on his own. Laura would have worked him over pretty good. “Are you sure this is what we want to do, are we in a position to do it?”

Was his decision “no” or “not yet”?

That’s a good question. To me it was a “not yet” but I always thought he was going to do it. I could see the bug, saw it in ’78, but ’78 was kind of, “Hey, that seat opened up. Let’s go do it.” I had him on video a year or so earlier, “I’m going to fix the education system in the state of Texas, by gosh. I’m not going to stand for this.” Then, being involved in his dad’s campaign and the excitement of winning that probably continued to add fuel to it. But he knew realistically it didn’t make a lot of sense at that point. He asked me what I thought, and I said my enthusiasm level wasn’t very high, mainly because financially he wasn’t ready, he’d have to worry about that. Where he did have a nice position at the Rangers and if that worked, he might make some money. And that’s what happened, he made some money.

His focus was on Texas at the time? Was there ever any consideration of a Senate seat or another Congressional race, to go to Washington?

I don’t ever remember him talking about it or even thinking about it. Somewhere along the way there, I think he saw himself as a principal or a CEO or the leader, as opposed to being one of many.

So John Tower leaves the Senate. Was there ever a time when a Senate seat became vacant and he thought about it?

If he thought about it, he didn’t tell me, and he would have said something to me. He would have been looking to me to help him.

It’s interesting, your characterization is that he preferred executive experience on his own. The other interpretation, “I don’t know that I want to go to Washington, where my dad is the President and I’m in a competing institution,” if you will. Does that resonate at all?

It doesn’t, to me. He never said anything to me about it, and I think he would have if it had crossed his mind.

Was there ever any consideration for you taking a position in his father’s administration? Did that ever come up?

No. Remember, I was trying to rebuild this company. I had a lot of people counting on me to rebuild it, and we did. So those years of ’86 through about ’94 were very important for me in terms of doing that.

If he had run in ’90, would you have been able to help him in the same way?

Not the same way I helped him in ’94, but I could have helped him some, yes. I had a lot more freedom in ’94 than I did in ’90, that’s for sure.

He becomes a presence in Washington again, in his father’s administration, when things begin to deteriorate a little bit. The one episode that I most remember hearing about is his engagement when they were getting rid of John Sununu. Do you have any recollections of this?

I know what happened and I know he was involved in it. Andy Card has the best view of what happened because Andy was right in the mix of all that. Have you interviewed him?

We have not because he had changed positions to go to Texas A&M [University], was out of—

Andy’s got a pretty clear view of what happened, so he’s the best one. Certainly the President, 43, was involved in it, but exactly what role he played and what role Andy played and what the President, 41, said to each one and who did what, I’m not going to go there. I’ll let the guys who were on the front lines sort that one out.

By ’92 he’s had a chance to observe a Presidential campaign from the inside and a Presidency to some degree from the inside. Did you get the sense, from conversations at the time or later, that there were specific things he learned from those experiences or attitudes he developed, alliances he laid the foundation for?

Having run his 2000 campaign and having to look back at how Baker and company set up on the ’88 campaign, one of the lessons was the importance of a very clear, simple, focused message and not trying to be all things to all people. You have to get three or four elements to your campaign and go over and over them relentlessly, not let up.

The other thing I remember is a conversation we had when he ran for Governor. In the state of Texas, constitutionally the Governor’s office is a pretty weak office. We had a discussion on a walk late one night about the fact that it’s the most powerful office in the state because you have the bully pulpit, if you use it. If you use it to drive policy, then you can make some effective change. He realized that constitutionally maybe there was some authority that he didn’t have, and a lot of it’s over with the Lieutenant Governor. But he knew the power of the bully pulpit having watched Presidents use the bully pulpit and how you can influence political opinion, therefore influence how people vote.

In the ’88 campaign, they had an overarching theme. I can’t remember the wording exactly, but I remember looking at a diagram of it. They had three or four fundamental points that they were going to drive, and that’s how they were going to do it and that’s how he set up on the ’94 campaign—education reform, tax reform, juvenile justice reform, tort reform. Those were it, and we were going to hammer those. He learned that aspect of it and ran a great campaign in ’94. He had Karen Hughes there at his side, helping him with the message and how to deliver it.

I’m trying to think what happened between ’94—not a whole lot other than he was running the baseball team and getting Nolan Ryan signed up and a few things like that, which changed the whole nature of that organization.

And his dad lost.

His dad lost in ’92, and he wasn’t immersed in the ’92 race like he was ’87, and Baker didn’t come in until late.

Right.

We had a Tom Brown board meeting in Denver in October of ’92, and he actually came in for it. I didn’t think he’d even be able to show up for it, but he did. He wasn’t in the daily strategy sessions, he was running his ball club and relying on others. He was doing some surrogate speaking and that was about it. He wasn’t trying to run the campaign and be on the executive team like he had been four years earlier.

How did his ’94 candidacy came about? When did he decide to run?

In the spring or summer of ’93 he started thinking and talking about it. He’d already talked about it back in ’89, so it was talking about it again. “We looked at it the last cycle, are we going to look at it again this go-round? What’s happened in the ensuing four years?”

“What’s happened is I run a ball club and it’s been successful, and they’re doing well.” He started thinking, I don’t like the way the state’s going, I want to get involved. I want to change some things, and I think I can beat Ann Richards. Of course nobody thought he could. She was a very popular Governor so it’s a big hill to climb, and leading up to that would have been Laura challenging him. “Are you sure we want to do this? Is this how we want to spend the next however many years of our life?”

They talked about it a lot. I wasn’t in on those discussions, but I know they did talk about it a lot and finally they both got comfortable with it. I think he—it wasn’t something that she said then, it wasn’t something she signed on for. You hear them make fun of that a lot. She was a librarian and said, “I don’t want to go out and give speeches, and here I get married to you and the first thing I know, we’re in a campaign. I didn’t sign on for this.” Running for Governor is a lot different than running for Congress, and you’re getting out there more. She’s a loyal and devoted wife, and it’s not anything she would be afraid of. She would just want to know, “Is this the best decision for the family” type of thing.

They decided yes, they were going to do this. It was August or September of ’93, at his friend Jim Francis’s house, who was the campaign chairman. He got a collection of us together, some people he had been talking to about the idea, “If I run, will you help?” There were about ten of us in the room, and he’s like me, an emotional guy, and telling everybody that he had decided to run for Governor. He started choking up and tearing up, and then he got it out finally and away we went.

This was instinctive for him and it gets back to who he is. He didn’t know how to message it necessarily, and he had Karen Hughes around to help him do some of this. How do you show the softer side of who you are? And how do you show that you’re going to take on the bullies or look out for the little guy, however you want to say it?

He had a setup from Pete Wilson in California, Proposition 187, saying, “If you’re in my state illegally, I’m not going to provide you with this, that, or something else.” And Bush said, “No. If you’re in my state, I’m going to take care of you. It’s the Federal Government’s responsibility at the border, that’s not my job, that’s the Federal Government. If you’re in my state, I’m taking care of you.” That was one point he made.

The other point was, in the Republican Party there was a pretty good movement around English only, we all have to speak the English language. He said, “No, it’s going to be the common language in this country, but I’m not English only, I’m English plus. We’re going to have English, plus we’re going to help those children who come from families that speak just the Spanish language. We’re going to help them into the system, so they learn English and can use it in their daily lives.” Things like that showed his softer and compassionate side and that really started, within the Republican Party, moving the whole Hispanic population in his direction, from probably a low 20s number in the last election in 2004, to where he got close to 50 percent. They saw this softer side, “I care about you, I’m here to help you.” “Compassionate Conservative.”

Running the campaign, I helped on the financial side. I did travel a fair amount with him, so I saw him on the stump a lot during the campaign. I remember one of the first meetings we had in Houston, a money-raising thing, but it was Enron, and I’m sure Ken Lay and those guys were all there, the big money guys of Houston who like to support Republican candidates. There were about 50 people in the room for a breakfast. He got up and delivered his four points: education reform, juvenile justice reform, tax reform, and tort reform, and he had something to say about each one of them. He got to tort reform and finished and “Any questions?”

He heard, “By gosh, tort reform, you need to stay away from that. All the plaintiff lawyers are over there funding her campaign, they’re going to write her big checks. You need to have something else and not that one.”

He said, “No, sorry, that’s not the way it needs to happen. It’s hurting business in the state of Texas and I feel strongly about it. If I can’t win on the issue then I don’t win, but these are the issues I feel strongly about and I’m staying with them,” which he did. And the plaintiff attorneys funded her in a huge way, which we all knew they would. But this is a guy who’s going to stand on his principles and try and get elected. He wants to do something good, make a difference. He’s not running just to say he won, he’s running to make a difference.

It was a very disciplined campaign; we raised a lot of money. There’s a classic story. We’re coming down the home stretch and we’re in Houston and it’s Tuesday. We had an event at lunch and another event at the Junior League that night, a big fundraiser. Between events, we went by his parents’ house to work out. They had a little exercise room on the top floor. We go there and we’re working out, and we come back down, it’s three-thirty, four o’clock, the phone rings and it’s his dad. “Did you see what happened on TV? Did you see what Ross Perot did?” He said, “No, what happened?” “Ross Perot came out and endorsed Ann Richards today.” This is a week before the election, so something like that happens in a political campaign that’s a surprise and oh, what’s going to happen, how is the needle going to move and all that kind of stuff.

Sweet Barbara Bush was there at her breakfast room table autographing her memoirs to people. She says, “I can’t believe Ross Perot did that. I wonder what I said about Ross Perot.” She goes to the index of her book, Ross Perot, page 284. “Oh, gosh, I can’t believe I said that about him.” Ross Perot, page 393, “Did I really say that about him?”

We went to the event that night, all the press is there, and oh, man, they’re “Oh, Ross Perot endorsed Ann Richards. What do you have to say about that, Bush?” And he said, “She can have Ross Perot and I’ll take Nolan Ryan.” [laughter] And that’s all it took. But it was a very close race and going into that night even, going into the weekend, the chatter was Jeb [John Ellis Bush] was going to win and George was going to lose, and it turned out to be the reverse.

I don’t know anything unbelievable that happened in the last 72 hours. A few little things popped up. We had some momentum and we carried on through Election Day and people felt comfortable with him at the right time. We did have a good organization, we could get the vote out, and it worked well. He did a couple of things he knew he had to do, which was bring some of the Hispanic vote. As well, he knew he had to treat Ann Richards with respect because Claytie [Clayton Williams], who had not, had lost four years earlier. He was very disrespectful of her and that cost him the election. He made some off-color remarks to her coming down the home stretch, but more than anything, it was not being respectful of a woman. You do that and it’s over. So he was very respectful, not that he needed to be told to do that, that’s just who he is too, as a person.

How hard was that? They were taking some pretty good shots.

Yes, they were. He’d seen his dad take some pretty good shots. It’s the rough-and-tumble world of politics. You deal with it and if you overreact, then you’re going to hurt yourself.

Of course.

You have to decide when to push back. It’s the old, you can’t let false accusations go unanswered, you have to respond at some level. They took some pitiful shots at him, but it turned out pretty well.

If Ann Richards hadn’t been so popular going into ’94, would Bush have gotten the nomination without a strong primary fight? In other words, did a lot of Republicans pass on that because they thought it was unwinnable?

They may have. Most people thought she was pretty unbeatable, that’s for sure. Tom Pauken—I can’t remember anybody of any stature who wanted to run against her. She was kind of, “How dare you run against me, don’t you know my numbers? Don’t you know that I have a 65 percent approval rating?” But he thought he could beat her. He really did study this one. He started sometime early in ’93 talking to some Democrats about areas that he knew he could agree with them, education issues and juvenile justice reform.

He talked to a number of, not just on his side of the aisle but the other side of the aisle, to get a feel for whether or not he could win. Part of it is just sensing how the politicians, elected officials on the other side, feel about Ann Richards. He actually talked to [Robert] Bullock before the election, and he knew that there was some tension there between Governor and Lieutenant Governor. And he had talked to enough of the Senators or reps [representatives] from the other side to know that she had some weaknesses and that if he could talk to them, work with them, they may be rather neutral about the race or maybe, “I had a chance to talk to Bush. I think he’s reasonable,” as opposed to ignoring him. He was smart in that way. It’s something that worked in Texas that it was hard to make work in Washington, in terms of the other side of the aisle thing.

I’m thinking on this election, he was able to run essentially a general election strategy from Day One.

From Day One.

If he’d had a primary opponent, he might not have had the latitude to be soft on immigration.

Like today. But that’s right. He might not have gotten the nomination. He feels strongly, as do I, about this whole immigration issue. I think the party is way off base on that, or part of our party is.

Where does he get that? Because he really stands out as a leader on immigration and as you said, “If they’re in my state, I’m going to take care of them.” Even at the time, that wasn’t by any means a mainstream Republican approach, but it seems to be something that comes out of his gut.

It comes out of his soul. It comes from being a man of the Lord. We’re all children of God, nothing that differentiates us, and that’s how he feels, that’s who he is, that’s where his faith enters into it. I’ve seen him reach out to minorities ever since I’ve known him. When he was in Houston, he worked with the Houston Oilers. He worked with Ernie Ladd some, in the black neighborhoods of Houston. That softer side of him has always been there and it’s very real. He’s kind of color blind. Black, white, brown, it doesn’t make any difference to him. He doesn’t like the way the Hispanic community is being treated. He thinks it’s wrong and wants to do something about it. I think it comes from his higher calling. “I’m here to serve other people, that’s my purpose in life.”

Was the fundraising component that year a relatively simple proposition?

We had to work at it. I go back to his natural talents. He gets people excited, pumped up, and there’s not a lot of talent out there in the political arena. When one comes along, people recognize it and they’re going to write a check. I think that’s what they saw in him. Having been one who’s been out there on the stump some, you do it enough you get pretty good at it and you can get people excited, fired up.

Don, I have a feeling that we’re not getting the full portrait of what Don Evans does to bring in this money. You’re always drawing attention to the boss and I think that’s commendable.

Seriously, it’s a lot of phone calls, and it’s putting an organization together and getting people excited and fired up and being optimistic and positive and consistent and well organized. Get a structure in place, put goals out there, challenge people, make them feel a part of it, give them some ownership. But at the end of the day, you put him in front of them and he has to sell it. When he gets up there and sells it and gets people excited, the word spreads and everybody wants to get on—“This thing feels pretty good, I want to be part of it.”

My role was more of—people know he trusts me, believes in me. If there’s a little element that I bring to it, it’s the element that I’m doing it because I want to serve other people. I’m not doing it for me, there’s nothing in it for me. When he gets elected Governor, I’m going back to running the company. I’m not a professional fundraiser and there’s not some reason other than I just think he would be an extraordinarily good Governor and he’s a wonderful person and a dear friend and by gosh, if he needs some help, I’m going to go help him.

Along the way, I did get some feedback, from the Governor’s race, to the second Governor’s, to the Presidential races. People who have watched our friendship along the way have witnessed it. In some small way, I had some trust factor in all of it. This is a guy that you can trust, because, “I know Don Evans, I can trust Don Evans.” There may have been a little bit of that, but most of it is just getting people organized and making the phone calls and setting up the meetings and having some fun with it. We had a lot of fun with it, we got people excited.

You’re taking time away from your own business to take care of this. Did that ever become a problem for you?

No. I always had more of a problem taking away from my family than the business.

That was the next question.

Exactly. My wife loves the President and loved him from Day One and I want to go help her dear friend from kindergarten, so I’ll help him. You have to balance all that stuff and you have to balance out your life. It can present its challenges and you have to sacrifice over here to get over there. If you’re doing it for the right reasons, people see that. From the job standpoint, I always had a good team of people and I’m there to make sure that capital is being invested wisely and we have good people in the right places. I’m leading that team and I have a good board. It wasn’t that big a problem.

I’m glad we’re talking about all this. I wasn’t sure we were going to. I’ve read this and it has a lot of stuff in it and that’s all interesting, but this whole part of his life and my relationship is much more important and interesting than all of this.

I think so too.

It is more interesting, you’re right. This is unique testimony.

Yes, this is a guy—when nobody else was watching, right? When nobody else was paying any attention. We’ll go through it and it’s interesting and important and I have some fun stories around all of that. Some of them relate to both of us, some of them are more personal.

We’ll break here for a little bit and let you catch your breath.

[BREAK]

One quick vignette. Mike, you asked me about the President and why Hispanics, “I’m going to take care of you.” I said faith, which is true, that’s at his core. I remember he had just returned from Washington in early ’88. Susie and I were staying with him in Dallas, and we had gone to work out and were coming back, driving down Preston, one of the big streets in town. We were driving along talking and it was like three lanes in each direction, and then he looked ahead. He saw a guy standing, holding one of the little cardboard signs, “Need food” or “Homeless.”

“Will work for food.”

Right. He did what he would call a three-lane Johnny, which is pull across three lanes and drive over, handed the guy $20 and went on. There’s a lot of little acts of kindness like that, that people don’t see. He doesn’t say anything about it, it’s instinctive, that’s who he is. He saw somebody who needed help and instinctively does it. It wasn’t me telling him, “Look at that guy. Go pull over there.” He just pulls across three lanes and hands the guy $20. That’s who he is down deep in his soul.

What’s it like having a friend elected Governor?

He gave me one of my favorite jobs of my life—chairman of the Board of Regents in the University of Texas system, so that was a pretty good thing, to be his friend. He then moved to Austin and me being a Texas ex, I’m down in Austin a fair amount.

Their home is always open to you. They made sure that whenever I was in Austin I stayed with them. “You won’t be staying in some motel or hotel, stay at our house. The Sam Houston bedroom is right there and it’s yours, you stay in it.” That was both of them, their home is always open to other people.

I was in town frequently for Board of Regents activity and for a few football games or basketball games. I wasn’t engaged in the activities around state policies. He was doing that and I was on the Board of Regents and focused on that. That was a great job, a great experience for me. The way that works is you’re elected to a six-year term. There are nine board members, three elected new members every two years. When I got on, there were three Bush appointees and six Ann Richards appointees. I became a good friend of one of the six Ann Richards appointees, B [Bernard] Rapoport, he was the chairman for my first two years on the board. We were focused on common issues and common goals around the University of Texas system. He was a colorful big-time Democrat and big union Democrat. He made a lot of money selling insurance policies to the unions. I was a member of the board for two years, and then the last four years I was the chairman. The board elects the chairman but the Governor gives the signal to the board of whoever they want to be the chairman.

I got to be the chairman of the Board of Regents in one of the great university systems and hired a football coach and a basketball coach. I was there when we hired Mack [William] Brown and when we hired Rick Barnes, the football coach and the basketball coach. That’s important. Mack Brown is the highest paid employee in the whole system by far, so that’s a pretty important selection. All I did was put the selection committee together, and I put some people on there that I trusted and knew something about the game of football, and had played at the University of Texas themselves.

But the most important part of that job is hiring presidents of the institutions. We had 15 institutions in the University of Texas system, nine of them higher education and six of them health-science centers. I was really fortunate that I got to be a chairman when we hired quite a few of the presidents, some who are still there. One was doing an extraordinarily good job at the University of Texas campus, Larry Faulkner. He’s not there now. When I became chairman, Bob Berdahl was there, and I’m not the kind of guy who comes in and starts wielding an axe and firing people, but he was pretty liberal, more so than I am, and that’s just the way it is, you just run that out. But he wound up leaving pretty quickly and going to [University of California at] Berkeley. That gave our board a chance to bring in somebody else. We brought in Larry Faulkner, who did a fabulous job. Berdahl did a nice job as well. He had been there for about four years. People ask me about it all the time. We have 15 institutions and the average term of a president is about five years. You’ve got at least three a year, sometimes four president search committees, and that’s very important and time consuming.

Any particular controversies that you had to deal with?

One big one. Being an engineer, I’m a process guy and I’m a good governance guy. You put processes in place, follow them, stick to them. Part of my term as chairman of the Board of Regents was focused on developing, or upgrading in some cases, the master plans of all the campuses. Some of them didn’t have any like they should and a few of them needed to be upgraded, so we did all that. Part of it is having architecture across the campus and a plan across the campus that people feel comfortable with. Anyway, there was the Blanton Museum of Art that was to be designed and built on the University of Texas campus. Unfortunately, the campus didn’t handle the process right and they got way out in front of the board. The University of Texas at Austin has a very strong architecture college and they started searching, with the blessing of the president, for an architect to design an art museum with an architectural style that would fit on the campus.

They selected this renowned global architecture firm from Paris, and they came up with a design that—in some people’s views anyway—didn’t fit the design of the campus. When it came time to bring the design and present it to the Board of Regents, which also has a facilities and planning committee, and it should come through the committee and then it would come to the full board, they hadn’t worked the committee or the board and it winds up coming to a full board meeting. Being a public university, it’s all open and press everywhere. They lay out the design, and some of the board members immediately start attacking the design itself. These four architects can’t believe their work is being attacked in public and it’s going to show up in the press. Sure enough, it shows up in the press.

I spent the next month or so trying to settle the architects down, and making late night—actually it was late night for them. It was four o’clock in the afternoon for me, but it was ten or eleven o’clock in Paris, “We can work through it, it’s all going to be OK.” Finally, they pulled the plug. They felt like their reputation had been challenged, and it made some of the trade journals. They started seeing things in the trade journals that weren’t too friendly to their work. Then I have the whole board thing to deal with, because it was just a couple of them, one of them being Bill Clements’s wife, Rita [Clements], very much a traditionalist and conservative, compatible architecture across the Texas campus, that’s what we’re going to have across the Texas campus. Others would say, “Yes, but it’s an art museum, it’s got to have other features to it that will be different.” That didn’t sell.

The other one was with the chairman of the facilities and planning committee, a friend, Tony Sanchez. Tony ran for Governor in Texas a few years ago and lost, pretty bad. He’s a Democrat. He’s appointed by then-Governor Bush, and he had supported the Governor. A pretty conservative guy, but he all of a sudden had this drive himself to run, and he started to act it out in decisions, in his behavior. He became a handful on this project. He got pretty aggressive in some of his commentary, and I’d tell him he probably ought to try to be a little more tempered and a little more statesmanlike, that there are ways to do it, in a tone that was reasonable and temperament that’s—I’m giving him some of that lecture.

One of the other board members who didn’t want to talk to him like that got quoted in the paper. The board reporter calls up Charles Miller, who’s also on the board, and asks, “What do you think about Tony Sanchez? He made pretty bold statements on the art building the other day, what do you think about that?”

He said, “I think Tony had a bad hair day.” [laughter] That makes the press and Tony gets all fired up. I had that one and got it cooled. As I said, we lost the architecture firm from Paris, but we wound up with a wonderful, beautiful building, but it is more traditional. It doesn’t have some of the lines and curves that the other had.

Tony continued to be a problem. He suddenly started leaking stuff to the press to make himself look good, as opposed to maybe the chairman or that the chairman has some issues. One quote was a discrimination issue, which was totally outrageous, but he was trying to pit me, a friend of the Governor, against the Hispanic community. We had a selection committee for the UT Health Science Center of San Antonio, and I put him and a couple of other Hispanics on that committee. But he decided he wanted to leak to the San Antonio Light that I should have put more on it or hadn’t put the right ones on it, that it was clear discrimination, which was total BS [bullshit].

I was in Colorado and he called me one Friday night just to let me know that was going to be in the paper the next morning. I said, “Oh, thanks, Tony.” Actually he had written me a letter and he had put it in print. He made some outrageous comments that were so far off the mark it was ridiculous. He sent it to me and I said, “Tony, the problem with you putting things like this in print, with a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request this could get in the paper.” He said, “It’s going to be tomorrow morning. I’ve already given it to him.” Those aren’t really big deals, but those were a few little skirmishes.

We basically had a very collegial board, and we got a lot of good, solid, constructive things accomplished at the board level. The board now is unfortunately chaotic. It seems we have a dysfunctional Board of Regents right now. Back to the Governor and how important is the Governor of the state of Texas. He may not have a lot of constitutional authority, but he does appoint 5,000 people to different things in the state of Texas, and some of the most important ones are who’s going to serve on the Board of Regents, that the Governor has the stewardship of higher education in the state, as well as the health science centers.

President Bush had a very strong record of appointing solid people who weren’t put there because they’d written a big check, they were bringing substance to the discussion. We had a very collegial board, they worked well, and as I said, for six of the years, there were three Republicans and six Democratic appointees. In another two years, there were six Republicans and three Democrats. Up until the last round, when he had his third round of appointments, there was a mix of Ann Richards and George Bush appointees and it all seemed to work OK, as opposed to now. Anyway, it was great being the friend of a Governor, being involved in the system.

Did you talk with him about taking any other positions in the government?

No, because I actually was chairman the year that he ran for President.

Chairman of the Board of Regents.

Yes. I was on that assignment, so there wasn’t any other.

OK. But even before then, at the point that he appoints you to that, there wasn’t consideration that you might go into the government?

Oh, no. That was to me the crown jewel. I didn’t have any desire to serve there. There were great appointments, but having two degrees from Texas and my love for the university, my involvement in the university. I was involved on the advisory board of the business school and I kept myself involved.

Did that take you out of commission for the reelection in ’98, or were you able to do—

That was pretty much a walk in the park. I helped with some of the fundraising. After the ’94 election, I was chairman of the finance side. After that, he asked me to come in and be chairman of his political apparatus. I said I would, and I became chairman of the political apparatus, which was really the fundraising apparatus.

Right.

It didn’t have anything to do with appointments, that all was handled in his office. This was a political apparatus outside of the Governor’s office, and I was chairman of that. Therefore, I was, in name, chairman of the campaign in ’98.

What is that political apparatus doing beyond the campaign years?

You’re staying in touch with your supporters, having events. The Governor’s Circle was part of it. The Governor’s Circle is $25,000 a year, and you have events where you have speakers come. The then-Governor would come and speak to the people about the issues of the moment and issues of the state. It was all about staying connected to your supporters, and you have different levels of supporters. Those higher donor supporters who would bring the events like I just described, and they would also be coming to Christmas at the Governor’s Mansion, so a lot of that had to be handled by the political operation. State dollars aren’t going to pay for that. Just the political activities that would be ongoing.

And through the political apparatus you’re building a war chest in anticipation of another campaign, or are you spending down those dollars in some activities?

I’d have to go back and look exactly, but you’re trying to build. You’re trying to not just meet expenses, because the whole idea in running a campaign is to get the money early. Campaign later and get the money early, and part of it is just so the candidate is not out there raising money later, but part of it is to keep others out. If they see you have a big war chest, they’re not as inclined to get in. It was always trying to build a nice reserve, a nice solid account of dollars going into the upcoming campaign, and it did its job. Nobody ran against him to speak of in ’98 and really didn’t have anybody in the other party. Garry Mauro ran against him, but he wasn’t much competition.

Any specific recollections of things that worked really well for you in that interval where you’re raising money?

We never had any problems raising money. We broke some new ground in terms of $25,000 a year for the Governor’s Circle. That was a big number then, asking people at that level, and we had a lot of people sign up for it. I can’t remember the numbers exactly, but I know we weren’t ever really worried about having the resources to run a competitive, full campaign, as well as the resources that we thought it would take to discourage others from getting into the race.

Is the Governor himself enthusiastic about this?

He is. Let me tell you, being the Governor of the state of Texas is an unbelievably great job. You’re only in session 140 days every other year. There’s a lot of downtime, and the mansion is right across from the capitol. Even when they’re in session, you go to the office at nine o’clock and get back home at eleven thirty, and we’d have a grilled cheese sandwich, then we’d go work out, and then you go back over there for two or three hours. When they’re not in session, he has a lot of time on his hands, and you fill it by traveling the state and going to events, and people come by to see the Governor. He loved the job, he enjoyed what he was doing, and I think they had the time of their life. A lot of friends coming to see them all the time and that’s the kind of home they’ve always had, “You’re welcome, come on in.” It was a fun time.

It’s a whole lot different from being the President, and he was always up for the next fundraiser or the next event. It wasn’t ever a big challenge to get him to go do it.

You mentioned Bob Bullock earlier, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about his relationship with the Democrats.

That’s a big one. Lots has been written about it and it’s all true. They had great respect for one another. The President delivered the eulogy at Bullock’s funeral, so that says something about the relationship between the two. Bullock was the first one who came out and said, “This guy is going to be the next President of the United States.” He did that at his 50th birthday party at the Governor’s Mansion in 1996. They had a really good, sound relationship. Didn’t agree on everything. Bullock would dig in and take some hard positions on some things and he just wouldn’t budge, and it would make the Governor mad. I can’t remember any specific issues, but they got a lot accomplished between the two of them. Tort reform, education reform, juvenile justice stuff, they absolutely got that. Tax reform—he didn’t accomplish quite as much as he had hoped to with that. He had trouble inside his own party with that one.

Bullock embraced him immediately. The two had a constructive relationship, as opposed to the kind of divisive relationship Bullock had with Governor Richards.

Who gets the credit for that?

I would say both of them, but you have to give Bush a lot of credit for being quick to reach across the aisle. Again, he talked to Bullock before the election and had a dialogue going with him.

Before he first became Governor.

Yes. “If I get elected, I want to work with you, I want to do this and that.” That helped. In some ways they had the same kind of personality, just got along well. They talked straight to each other and liked to joke around. Jack Martin, Bob Bullock’s best friend, became a good buddy of mine. Bullock appointed him to be his side of the inauguration committee, and Bush appointed me to be the chairman of the inauguration committee. We hit it off well and all of a sudden, Bullock’s friend is my friend and Bush’s friend is Jack Martin’s friend, so the chemistry worked well. Bush knew how far he could push him and how far he couldn’t, respected his authority under the constitution. It was a very solid friendship, working for what’s best for Texas.

Have you thought about the question of why that worked so effectively in Texas and not so much with the opposition in Washington?

I’ve thought about it. I think the word is “trust.” It was a lot more difficult to establish that trust relationship in Washington, D.C., during Bush’s eight years, than what I saw in Texas. Whose fault is that? I’ll let people judge that themselves, but he reached out really early on to Ted [Edward] Kennedy. He got No Child Left Behind. I remember going over to the White House, one of the first events where they had a movie there, it was Thirteen Days. The Kennedy family came and Ted was there and Caroline [Kennedy], they were all there. They got No Child Left Behind, and then some of the things Ted Kennedy said about him were just unbelievable. And that was just one. I think that they play the game a little differently up there and power is everything, power is king, and I’ve got to get it however I can get it.

In Texas, the Democrats are by and large pretty conservative, Republicans are conservative, so there’s some common ground you can grab hold of. Unfortunately, in Washington some of the principal ideas, the ideologies of each party, are pretty far apart.

Sure.

He took a crack at it, but it seemed to me he got burned pretty bad. He never has said this to me but I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t sour him some on it. People ask it all the time—he was able to do it in Texas, why not Washington? It’s a different game up there, you’re talking about the power of the world. People want to get it, some of them any way they can. It’s that whole trust thing.

It’s interesting, this period we’re going through, and listening to them talk about Reagan and [Thomas P.] O’Neill. At least they could have a drink with each other, at some level trusted each other. They didn’t agree a lot, but there was a camaraderie there, a trust there that just doesn’t seem to be around right now, unfortunately.

What’s the Genesis 1:1 of the Bush Presidential campaign? In the beginning what and when?

There was a little chatter probably in ’96, ’97. Bob Bullock said, “He’s going to be the next President.” People are seeing that. His dad was President, he’s showing as Governor that he’s got some stature. I don’t remember what year he was head of the RGA [Republican Governors Association], but it wasn’t too long after he got in. The Republican Governors were saying, “Look at this guy. This guy could do it.”

The first meeting in earnest that I recall was—I have to go back and look at the records. In ’98, we had a lot of events in Austin where we were inviting leadership groups, state by state across the country, to come in and visit with the Governor about his plans, if he were to run, “Here’s what I stand for, here’s what I would want to accomplish,” and getting feedback from them. Those all went extraordinarily well. That was Karl Rove’s idea. He came up with that, to bring them here. It’s important for me to get the date for you, because it’s either ’97—

You can put it in when the transcript comes to you.

It was the Texas A&M game in College Station. A group of the Republican financial leadership wanted to meet with the Governor, and his dad helped arrange it.

This is national Republican funding leadership?

Yes. I can name just about all of them who were there, but they were all the big money raisers of the Republican Party at a national level.

And who are some of the people we’re talking about?

Al Hoffman was there, Bob Mosbacher, Mel Sembler, Heinz Prechter, Brad Freeman, and there were a couple of others in the room. They wanted to meet with him, because they told him he needed to do this, “You’re the man for the party in 2000.” I’m pretty sure that was fall of 1997. A&M won 27-16. The reason I say that is because he was totally noncommittal, and it was before there had been any talk out there to speak of, whereas in ’98 we had all these meetings, so there was a lot of chatter.

And ’96 was too early because you might have had a Republican President then.

Right, ’96 was too early. This crowd had lost in ’96, and Bob Dole was defeated, so they’re like, “OK, who are we going to choose in 2000?” They were looking around and decided he was the guy. They were there and all I can remember saying is, “I don’t know if he’s going to run or not, but if he does run, we will raise the money. You don’t need to worry about that, this guy can get that part of it done. Your support will be helpful and we appreciate it and that’s all great, but we know how to raise it. We’ll raise the money; this is the guy who can do it.”

That next year we started the sequence of events. The tricky thing was he was running for Governor, but it wasn’t tricky because he’d faced it head-on, he didn’t take that off the table. He told the Texas people, “I’m going to consider it. I’m not giving you a pledge that I’m not going to run for President, so if that’s important to you, just know that I’m not giving you that pledge.” We had those and all of them were blown away and they said, “He’s our guy.” He’s got his canned little talk down and it started in Midland, Texas. “The sky’s the limit, you dream big in this country and we’ve got to get it on the right track” and some of his core beliefs around taxes and Hispanics. Everybody left blown away.

I remember [Willard Mitt] Romney being at one of them, and I got to know Mitt pretty well. He came down for one, and after that meeting the Governor and I were talking about the crowd. William Weld, the former Governor of Massachusetts, was there, Dick Egan, who was a big tech guy up there, Mitt Romney, Ron Kaufman, and there were several other people there, probably ten to 12 people. He gave his pitch and we were talking about it afterward and he asked me, “What did you think?” I said, “You saw Romney here.” He said, “Yes, I saw him here. You watch him, he’s got an eye on this job someday.” He had a sense that Mitt had it in his brain that he ought to be President someday.

That was how it happened. His dad had been beaten, he was enjoying being the Governor, doing a pretty good job, getting good reviews, good Governors liked him. Among the 33 Governors they said, “This will be our guy,” and they were all pointing to him. All these states were coming in, “We like him.” The money guys who showed up a lot earlier, “You’re our guy. We need you to run.”

How often are you attending the meetings?

I attended quite a few of them. I don’t think I attended all of them but I don’t know, I could have. But I knew if he ran, these were all going to be people I needed to know, so it was a great opportunity for me to meet them.

Sure.

I attended quite a few of them and all of them walked away, “He’s our guy,” blown away.

When did you start raising money?

In March of 1999. You have to be very careful around all of that. You form an exploratory committee, and we raised some money for that, and there are some limits around how you spend that money and how you raise it. We filed in the second week of March that yes, we’re going to make the run.

Early March of ’99?

Ninety-nine, yes. The first reporting day is then March 31, so we’ve got two or three weeks. But with all of the success we’d had raising money in Texas, we were able to raise a fair amount of money pretty quickly. It impressed people how much we got him, $3 million or something in two or three weeks at $1,000 a pop, so that’s quite a bit.

Beginning in February, we started putting an organization together, got the chairmen state by state, and them getting their teams. The first place we were going to focus was Texas, and that was the call I mentioned to Ray Hunt, because Ray wanted to talk to him. Ray agreed to do it and we set a very focused agenda in Texas to get it done early, and I mean really early, which was a theme of the whole thing—we’re going to get it done early and let him campaign later.

We had a big event in Austin in late June, end reporting period of June 30. We’ve been having events and the President had not been out yet, he stayed at home because it was a legislative session. He wasn’t out on the campaign trail so we were doing it ourselves, with the organization we were building. I think his first one may have been the big event we had in Austin. We had two events in Austin. We had one that was just a “Come to Austin, let’s get organized.” That was a May event, and then we had a big blowout fundraiser in June. The President came to that and that’s when, “OK, the legislative session is over, I’m going to announce our travel,” and in the next day or so he went to Iowa, the first crack out of the box.

We’re in California in early July and I have a deputy press secretary who I think is leaking to the press. He’s a good guy but a press secretary, that’s a currency, right? “I’ll give you something if you’ll give me something back,” that’s how they work. I didn’t particularly like that idea. This is a Friday and I think we’re going to set a record on this June 30 fundraising date. Dole had raised $14 million or something and that was the record up to then. I said, “I think we’re going to raise $20 million.”

Two days later in the Sunday New York Times, “Bush campaign will announce they have raised $20 million.” So we’re in California and all the press is there, and he was getting ready to have a press conference. They know this is when we’re going to announce the number. We’re counting the money, calling back to Austin, “How much do we have?” and they kept counting more and more coming in. He announces, “We’ve raised $35 million.” The press corps couldn’t believe it. There was an audible gasp.

The Bush 2000 campaign is famous for this, Pioneers, Rangers, that system.

That was all in the spring of ’99.

Can you explain where the idea came from and how it actually worked?

They actually came to Midland and it was me and Jim Francis and Jeanne Johnson Phillips. I’d have to go back and look, but Jim Francis is the one who said “Pioneer.” In campaigns, you get an organizational structure that gives people an incentive to hit a certain level. If you get a certain level, you raise that much, then there are different kinds of benefits accrued to you and maybe you get to attend this event that others can’t attend, which is mainly what it is.

The word “Pioneer” is out there a lot, that was a Jim Francis word. It was all about state by state, getting organized with the chairmen, goals for each state, getting buy-in from the chairman of each state, “This is your goal.” Part of the strategy was to encourage people to become a Pioneer within their own state or across the country. You get an elaborate system set up, so people feel like they’re getting appropriate credit for the dollars that come in, sometimes it will get double counted. A guy in Pennsylvania may raise something from somebody in Florida. Florida is getting to their goal and this guy over in Pennsylvania is getting to his goal of being a Pioneer. You have to work through some of that, but it’s putting an organizational structure together that makes sense and gives people the right kind of incentives and you’re holding them accountable. Reports come out regularly that people can look at and see their numbers.

That’s the basics of it. It’s knowing how to organize and hold people accountable and keep track of it. I was notorious for—the poor guys would reach one goal, so I’d put another one out there. And what happened was we had to make a choice on whether we’d take government dollars (matching funds) or not and I made the call early on. People thought I was crazy but I said, “I think we can—” If you raised more than $50 million, it made sense not to take matching funds. Pretty early on I said, “I think we can raise $65 or $70 million,” and they thought I was crazy, but time went along, before we had to make the final call on it, and I think I got more believers. Anyway, as it turned out, we raised over $100 million.

Who had the authority to make that call?

I would say the Governor, but it was really a recommendation that had come from me and Karl. Karl was a political strategist and we had—and I would say all of us. You had Karl and Joe Allbaugh and Karen and me, the group of four driving the effort. I was the assumed chairman, but not in title, of the campaign itself. I was chairman of the finance committee, but because of my relationship with the President, people knew that if there was a problem the President would go to me or expect me to deal with it. But I wasn’t going to get in the way of him talking to Karl or Karen or whomever he wanted to talk to. I couldn’t be in on all those conversations, and I couldn’t know everything that everybody was saying to him or he was saying to them. That changed a little bit when I was made chairman of the campaign in May of 2000, but I was pretty much acting as chairman before that. In May, I became chairman in title and took care of a few little things, like who talks to the [Albert Jr.] Gore campaign. As soon as Bill Daley was announced as chairman I called him up, chairman to chairman. You have to have that kind of relationship.

In terms of making the decision not to take matching funds, we all four agreed on it and told the President, the then-Governor, that’s what we were going to do and he said, “Fine.”

By 2000, there were at least enough people who had online connections from their home offices and so on that the possibility for fundraising through the Web was there. Did you support that?

We were the front end of that, we tapped it a little bit but it wasn’t very robust. People weren’t there yet. I don’t think people really got there until 2008. We did it more in 2004, everybody did. The Democrats really cranked it up in ’08, and then 2012, it was mind-boggling to me what they raised on the Internet. The whole game is so much different now than it was back in 2000, it’s just unbelievable. We were out in front of the other side in 2000 and 2004. I think we fell behind in 2008. They passed us in the use of technology and software, and those are powerful tools that no doubt cost the Republicans the election in 2012. We just didn’t do as good a job as the other side did by far, on the money-raising side and the get-out-the-vote side, getting the people who are going to vote for you to the polls.

We started using the technology a lot in 2004, some in 2000 but not as much. The whole get-out-the-vote effort in terms of being able to send out blast emails to the precinct chairmen and what they needed to do, and coordinate them in a much more efficient way. Now the science of it is off the charts, and the money-raising side of it is off the charts. We were the first to not take matching funds in the primary, but now they don’t even take them in the general, I don’t think at all. So much money is raised now, inside the campaign as well as outside, it’s just breathtaking.

So as chairman, even before you had the title, were you overseeing the spending side as well as the fundraising side?

Yes.

Money was going out. It was coming in awfully fast, but it was going out awfully fast through ’99. Did you feel like you were getting good value for the money being spent?

I kept my eye on the budget. Joe Allbaugh was the operations of the campaign. He ran the budget, which I looked at all the time, and I would be involved in the spending decisions, particularly when it came to big expenditures like advertising. Big dollars would go out for TV buys and other kinds of buys. But no, I was never too concerned about it. I thought we had a good process in place, we had a good budget in place, and we had a powerful money-raising machine in that cycle. It didn’t match up anywhere close to what they do now, but for that cycle—Karl would come in wanting some money for advertising, need it for this market or that market, and I would acquiesce and was watching. It just didn’t seem like it moved the needle. I said, “God-dang, we’re spending this money and it’s not moving the needle. How come?”

The one thing we did that looked like it moved the needle, later on in the campaign, we produced some really effective ads that had the Governor looking straight into the camera, talking to the American people, in a casual shirt and casual surroundings. Just talking to the people and delivering it very effectively, instead of some real busy kind of thing that was probably trying to deliver too much at once. Not that I’m any rocket scientist on this stuff, but I did make the suggestion to Mark McKinnon that we ought to go from 30-second ads to 60-second ads and see what the 60-second spots look like. And according to Mark, they moved the needle and changed the game at some level. So for our money, that election at that time, going to 60-second spots helped some and every little bit counted. As close as that friggin’ thing was, every little bit made the difference. It always felt like we had the money that we needed and we did have a budget process, but I can’t remember any request that came in that didn’t get approved.

What was the strategy to win the nomination?

Compassionate conservative was the key. Going back to what I said earlier, four or five—tax reform, Social Security reform, education reform, that was the big stuff. The Social Security reform or Medicare reform, just entitlement reform. I don’t think we had immigration in that mix that first time, but there were four or five of them. But it was really delivering that compassionate conservative message, because the Republican Party is often viewed as this hardcore, survival of the fittest, get out there and compete if you can make it. The Republicans don’t do a very good job as a party of talking about the softer side. We’re against abortion, we’re against gay rights, we’re against all of this stuff. “Where’s your heart? Don’t you understand other people’s concerns, or do you care about them? They have issues in their own lives and you’re holier than thou and you’ve got all the answers.” It softened that up a lot and we found ways to take that compassionate conservative message and use it as a platform for a variety of different messages or themes or programs.

The faith-based initiative. Whenever we went into the city, we went into the toughest part of the city we could find, where there were drugs and government housing projects. He showed up and he went into churches and talked to the black people. There was a black inner-city Philadelphia school, and we were in the gymnasium. He’s sitting up front and the room is filled with a lot of African Americans. One of the ladies in the back said, “Tell me what you think about the Lord.” He said, “The Lord Jesus Christ is my Savior.” And people said, “Whoa, God-dang, did he really say that?”

“Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior; he saved my life.” Just out there, making sure that you’re touching people, going places they don’t expect you to go, and the press catches on to that sooner or later. They can’t help but start to pay attention to that and they start thinking, Maybe some of this is real.

The theme was ushering in the era of responsibility, and one of the big themes, which was a big seller, was people being individually responsible for their own lives and the compassionate conservative message. That’s what I told Mitt Romney. He came to see me, “What do you think I should do?”

I said, “I don’t know, but I can tell you this. If you don’t show the American people your heart, you can’t win. You’ve got to be able to show them that you care about them and it would be particularly tough for you, Mitt, because they look at you and you’re a handsome guy, you’ve got five handsome sons, a beautiful wife, made a whole lot of money.”

People are like, “How can he possibly understand the issues I’ve got in my life?” But I think he did that, and so it’s keep the message on four or five things, but in the bigger themes about the whole, working off of the compassionate conservatism. Tax cuts are compassionate, they stimulate the economy, that creates jobs. What’s more compassionate than creating more jobs for people? Find in each one of those areas where you can talk about the compassionate side of it, that was the strategy. A lot of education speeches, a lot of speeches on Social Security reform. He had the big speech on military reform, reforming the military to be more strategic, more tactical, more technology, lighter, quicker. I don’t think it was much more than that. I really do believe that the whole compassionate conservative message made a difference.

Were there sectors of the Republican Party, particularly in fundraising, that were difficult for you to approach in 2000?

Probably the most difficult one, and among the most generous, was California, but California wanted to know that the money was going to be spent in California. It wasn’t, “We’ll raise it for you, and you can spend it where you think is best.” It was, “We’ll raise it for you, but you need to spend it here in California.” We got that message loud and clear. We didn’t sign contracts or that kind of thing.

But you ended up not spending that money.

No, we did. I’m not sure we didn’t spend everything we raised out there. Coming down the home stretch, going into the weekend or the week before, the numbers were moving our way in California. We got convinced to go ahead and spend some more there in advertising, and it all went out the window. First, we had the big issue the Friday night before the election, on the whole DWI [driving while intoxicated] thing, and that blew us up. We weren’t going to win California.

Sure.

But we spent the money in California. I can’t remember another state like that. New York wasn’t like that; Florida wasn’t like that. We were going to spend money in Florida because that was a battleground state. But we didn’t consider California a battleground state for us.

Since you’ve raised that, is the condition of the electoral map a factor in your fundraising apparatus as well, or is it apart from it?

It’s apart from it. You raise the money wherever you need to raise the money. And then you want to spend it wherever you think it’s going to do you the most good.

Going back to the early part of the campaign, did you have a sense about where your most likely challenge was going to come from in terms of the vote side?

Yes, we had a really good idea. We knew it was Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, and West Virginia. Those were the battleground states we needed to go after.

My question was more about at the time of the primary, whether you had projected early on where the most likely challenges were going to come from.

Yes, we had, and of course we knew the sequence. We made the decision to go at Iowa hard. We did the Iowa Straw Poll. I think Karl thought we probably blew a bunch of money there, around $4 or $5 million, it was just crazy. We felt like we needed to, so we did. But then when it all starts, you’ve got Iowa and then New Hampshire and then South Carolina and then you’ve got Michigan. We felt good coming out of the Iowa Straw Poll, for whatever that’s worth. Lamar Alexander was in the mix and Elizabeth Dole was in the mix, but they didn’t look like—Steve Forbes was in the mix. He didn’t look like he was going to go anywhere, flamed out pretty early. Then you had [John] McCain, who was the darling of the media, they really kept him going.

We targeted those early states with the intention of winning all of them and not leaving anything to chance. We won Iowa, we got beat in New Hampshire, which was a big night, a big statement about the President in terms of how he handled it, and then we went to South Carolina and won that. That was another big moment. We won the Iowa thing, people probably expected us to win it, and then we went to New Hampshire and we thought we were doing pretty well there.

I remember Karl coming in that weekend. You go straight from Iowa and arrive in New Hampshire at some ungodly, three o’clock in the morning you’re getting off the plane and the press is there. Then you have three or four days in New Hampshire, but by the weekend—the vote was on a Tuesday. And on the weekend Karl said, “The numbers are coming our way.” Paul [Argeo] Cellucci was there and was then the Governor of Massachusetts, a wonderful guy. He knew the area and said, “Yes, I think it’s looking good.” Then we have the day of the election. I was in the suite with the President and Karl came in, “We’re down 17 points.” And it was just a jaw-dropper. I said, “What? You said yesterday we were—”

Then I said to the President, “Let me tell you what’s getting ready to happen. What’s getting ready to happen is the American people are going to find out how you handle adversity, so think about that one and how you will handle it.” He went out that night and was positive, upbeat, congratulating McCain, thanked all the people who participated in the election, thanked all of his supporters and volunteers, “You all did a terrific job, I’m very proud of you,” and delivered his optimistic, upbeat remarks for America, where he wanted to take the country. And we’re on to South Carolina.

The next morning, we’re heading to the airport to go to South Carolina. Tom Rath was one of the guys who helped us in New Hampshire. Joel Maiola was another guy who had helped us. We called them on the way to the airport, “Thank you, you all did a great job,” patted them on the back and got on the plane and headed to South Carolina.

There’s an important meeting that I think happens the night of South Carolina, right? Where the staff is assembled. I think you were in attendance.

It was the following morning and I don’t know the specifics, when we met in his suite that morning.

I’d like to hear your recollection.

My recollection was him again delivering a positive, upbeat, “We’re going to go win South Carolina.” So to me it was, you got kicked in the teeth a little bit but hey, keep everybody positive and upbeat, because he knows people will draw from the way the leader is behaving. And if he’s beaten up or worn down, everybody’s that way. It gets back to you, how you’re going to handle adversity, people are going to watch that.

Any discussion of heads rolling?

No, nothing like that, it’s too late for that. He had picked his team and he was comfortable with it. We go to Bob Jones University there and God-durn, boy, that’s a different world, when you drive on the campus. Have you been there?

No, I have not.

I have.

You look around and “Whoa, what are we doing here?” The girls have all got long dresses on and there’s a totally different feel to it, and everybody was—at least the South Carolina people. You’re looking to your local people to tell you where you need to go. And they were saying, “This is a part of the base you have to talk to.” Boy, going there was painful, but that was the first thing we did when we got to South Carolina. He gave his remarks and then we went on. We had some rough-and-tumble times there, got accused by McCain of going after him in ways that were inaccurate or mean-spirited or whatever. But the difference was stark. Bush coming out of New Hampshire upbeat and positive. “We’re going to go win, here’s our view for America.” And McCain came out of South Carolina angry, he was mad. I remember watching it on TV. He was not happy. It says a lot about a person and how they lead.

I don’t call any of that necessarily a defining moment in the primary, but it was about as close to a defining moment as you could get, because we lost New Hampshire a whole lot worse than we expected to. Then we go to South Carolina, which we know is going to be very competitive, and win that one and that gets us back on track and we’re back in the game. We go to Michigan, the same kind of deal, two o’clock in the morning and you go to the hotel. Then get up at seven o’clock the next morning to go to one of the evangelical churches with Betty Voss and her husband, which was great, a lot of music and upbeat people singing. And it was wonderful, I enjoyed it.

Then we get on the plane with John Engler, the Governor of Michigan, and Governor Bush is sitting next to Engler. We knew we were going to have a struggle in Michigan. Bush gets on the plane with him, the first time they’ve seen each other since coming to Michigan, and they haven’t talked. The Governor looks at Governor Engler and he said, “John, how much are we going to win by, eight or nine points or what?” when we knew we were underwater. Governor Bush is dead serious, but Engler is sort of stammering. We lost Michigan but it still wasn’t the death blow, and we’re able to get to some of our friendlier states in the South and started picking some up, carried it on from there. I can’t remember the exact sequence. I’d have to go back and look, but McCain didn’t last too much past that.

It sounds like the key was winning South Carolina. That’s the only loss that really could have taken—

That loss could have been a big blow. I won’t say devastating, but I’d say it would have been a big blow to come back from. But we won it.

Are the money people calling you after New Hampshire?

I’m calling them. We had regular across-the-country calls. You have to be careful what you say, because everybody in the world is on the call. It’s an upbeat message. Individual calls, yes, I’m getting them, but it all happened so fast. There wasn’t much time between these primaries, so they can be wringing their hands and this and that, but it’s kind of baked in.

At that point, you’ve already put in the bank what you’re going to draw down on.

No, absolutely. Our whole goal was to have our fundraising completed by the end of ’99. Get it all done by then and let him campaign. Now, that’s not a hundred percent, but it’s much—we were really aggressive in working him hard in the fall of ’99 to raise the money, the summer and the fall.

So you don’t have to do it.

So you don’t have to do it while the primaries are going on. Then in the general, we took federal funds. He’d do an event for the Republican Party, do a little bit of that, but in terms of running the primary and spending money on the primary within the campaign itself, we accomplished most of that by December 31, 1999.

When did you start acting on the assumption that the nomination is won and it’s time to in effect start the general?

I’d have to go back and look; I can’t tell you exactly. I’m going to say early March.

Right after Super Tuesday?

Yes, right after Super Tuesday we figured we had it. I think McCain saw it was virtually over. I can’t remember any real strategic change in the message itself. The message stayed consistent with all of that. Karl had the calendar, the messages he would be delivering along the way, and we would have our morning meeting and go over the calendar every day. So Karl was driving that based on what the numbers looked like, what part of the country we wanted to go to, to deliver what message.

If you’re going to be accepting federal funding, are you still undertaking a big fundraising effort?

We helped the Republican National Committee and in fact, we put people in place in the Republican National Committee headquarters, because the way it was set up then, we could control that money and decide which state it was going to. The laws and the rules keep changing, but back then it was hard dollars and soft dollars and all that kind of stuff, and we had to be very careful of how the hard dollars got spent and the soft dollars got spent.

The main point being that there’s a Victory 2000 campaign run out of the RNC [Republican National Committee], and we put people in place to run it out of there, and they used our network of names and people to raise money across the states. We had Pioneers, they had Regents and other kinds of things. You can write much larger checks to the RNC than you can to an individual candidate, so it’s a different setup.

Are you yourself playing a role in this?

I’m helping. I know what’s going on there. I’m talking to them; I know how much money they’re raising. I coordinate the President’s time for fundraisers that they want to have. So yes, there’s a coordination role between the campaign itself and the RNC.

I’m trying to get a sense about what precisely your role is. It’s fairly easy for me to figure out when you’re developing the fundraising efforts for the primary campaign, but I’m less certain that I know your job description when we get into this second phase.

It was a big moment and an interesting moment. In May of 2000, the President decided that we needed to have a chairman to keep going forward, and it needed to be very clear who within the campaign was going to be the chairman of it all. It just makes the lines of authority simple; it makes people know where to go if they have an issue with the campaign. So he appointed me chairman and moved me from being chairman of the finance effort to being chairman of the campaign, even though I’d been the assumed chairman throughout the campaign. I would always run the morning meetings, with a group of four or five people in my office, and they’d last an hour and everybody would go do their thing. But in May he said, “OK, you’re the chairman.”

The next day happened to be a Washington correspondents dinner in Washington, which I attended. I was there as a guest of the Wall Street Journal, and somebody came up to me and said, “Terry McAuliffe wants to meet you.” OK, I’m happy to meet Terry. They dragged me over to Terry’s table next to the stage. The President and First Lady were up on the stage, and I get over there and meet Terry. He’s a pretty excitable guy and he’s, “Oh, God-dang.” I could tell he got to the cocktail party early, you know what I’m saying. “God-dang, I can’t believe all the money you’ve raised. How did you raise all that money? That’s phenomenal.” He said, “Have you ever met the President?”

I said, “No, I’ve never met the President.” He said, “Come here, you need to meet the President.” OK, fine. He grabs my arm and we charge up the steps onto the stage, blowing by the Secret Service guys. And this is all new to me, so I say, “I don’t know, I’m just with him.” He gets up on the back of the stage, hollers at [William J.] Clinton, “Mr. President!” Clinton dutifully looks around at him and Terry says, “Come here.” So he comes back and McAuliffe says, “This is the guy who has raised all that money for Bush. He’s the finance chairman for the Bush campaign. I can’t believe how much money he’s raised.”

Clinton looked at him and said, “No, he’s not the finance chairman, he’s the campaign chairman.” It had been announced in the New York Times that day that I was the chairman of the campaign. Typical Clinton, totally on his game. But we have some mutual friends, including this B. Rapoport I talked about earlier, who was a big Democrat but a good friend of mine. He said, “B. Rapoport has told me about you. I’m good friends with him.” We have several mutual friends we’re talking about—And look, I’ve been talking to him for it seemed like 30 minutes—It was probably five minutes or so, but it’s the President, I don’t want to—So I’m getting ready to excuse myself, it’s time to move on and end the discussion. He looks at me and in that famous two-fisted grip he grabs my hand and says, “Don, it’s an honor to meet you.” I thought, Shit! I just started laughing. [laughter] What can you do except laugh? I said, “No, that’s my line. That’s not your line, that’s mine.” Then I went over and said hello to Hillary [Rodham Clinton], who happens to be good friends of the Rapoports also.

McAuliffe was quite the character. But in terms of job description I would become the chairman of the campaign. We were talking earlier, when Bill Daley was selected chairman of the Gore campaign, I called Bill and said, “I’m looking forward to meeting you. I know we have to talk about this debate thing, but if we do anything that’s over the top, give me a call. Or if I see something that you’re doing that’s over the top, I’ll give you a call.”

He said, “Perfect.” Bill became a good friend. My job description at that point is running the campaign and overseeing it all, like I had been doing. The money raising, but for the RNC stuff, was pretty well done.

Right.

We have to spend the general campaign money wisely; we had a convention to pull off. I wasn’t in charge of the convention, but I was in charge of picking the people like Andy Card to be in charge of the convention, and to make sure that all happened correctly. There were a lot of moving parts to the convention itself, who’s speaking when and who’s this and that. Had all that to do, and I started working on what these debates are going to look like.

Really? You started working on it that early?

Yes, because we weren’t sure we wanted to do the Presidential Commission debates. I soon learned, probably the hard way, that yes, we were going to do the Presidential Commission debates. We had meetings with Tim Russert and Tony Snow and a few others about maybe doing something slightly different. Russert and a few others were interested, but it became eminently clear that we weren’t going to be able to sell that to the media. The Presidential Debate Commission had the hand on that and they were going to run it. The media expected them to run it, so that’s how it was going to work.

Another money question. Was it an actual decision to take the federal money for the general or did you consider—?

No, it was a decision. We didn’t think we could top that. The number was $86 or $87 million, and we said no. One reason was we didn’t want him out there raising money for the next four or five months. We wanted him campaigning, focused on the message. I felt bad for poor Romney. I don’t think it changed the outcome of the election, but he would run it raising money to the bitter end, and I have to tell you, those things are exhausting. You go to these events and there are three, four, five hundred people, and you have to take two or three hundred pictures and shake everybody’s hand. And everybody’s got something they want to tell you—how you can fix your campaign or comb your hair differently or do something. That poor guy was continuing to do those and they wear you out, and when you get worn out, you make mistakes.

That’s one of the principles we tried to keep. One of my responsibilities was trying to keep him rested and getting his exercise, keep him as fresh as we possibly could. It’s hard, it’s a big country, a lot of ground to cover. Demands come in like crazy and you have to prioritize. At the end of the day you have a two-hour block of time for him to exercise, and you have to get him the down time. I think we did as well as we could. He got a head cold coming down the home stretch, and it’s exhausting, no matter how much you try to do, it’s an exhausting experience for everybody involved.

How often were you traveling with him?

During the fundraising, a whole lot. During ’99, I was in all of it. I was shaking hands, talking with people. There would be a long line for pictures and I’d shake hands with every single one of those people and introduce myself and tell them, “Thank you, appreciate the support.” During the money-raising cycles, I traveled with him a whole lot, I think just about all of them, all the big ones certainly and some more on top of that. I traveled with him a lot during the primaries. It does all seem to go pretty quickly.

After that, I spent the majority of my time in Austin. I’d go to Washington every now and then to coordinate with the RNC, but most of it was in Austin, making sure the trains were running on time and staying in touch with him.

If you’re not on the road with him, who takes the—

Karen was with him a lot.

Karen is not running with him?

No, he’s going to go exercise himself. He’s not running. You can’t get out and do that. He had a treadmill in his room, make sure he has an elliptical in his room. You got exercise equipment there so he didn’t have to leave his room. You’d go outside and people are grabbing hold of you for pictures and everything.

But you’re staying in touch by telephone.

Staying in touch by telephone, but not as much as you might think. This thing is running, I’m making sure it’s running. If he had an issue he’d call me and we’d talk about it, but he’s pretty much programmed.

Right. But somebody has to be on the plane with him.

Yes, Karen was there.

So Karen’s the one who’s traveling.

Karen is there with him because she’s in charge of the message. It’s what is he going to say and how is he going to say it, and if some bad press story comes in, how do we respond to that? He’s going to have mikes in front of him when he gets off the plane, what does he need to say? She was the one with those talents. Logan Walters—his aide—handled notes, correspondence, messages, etc.

Were you involved in the Vice Presidential search at all?

Totally on the periphery. I called Dick Cheney and asked him if he’d conduct the search, which he said he would do, and from that point on it was pretty much his thing. The President often would look to Karl for political instincts, so Karl was in that mix a fair amount. As Karl famously said, “He shouldn’t pick Dick Cheney.” But I think the President made absolutely the right choice. I think it was a huge boost to the campaign, particularly after the Vice Presidential debate against Joe Lieberman, because the Vice President performed extremely well. The last time people saw him was during the Gulf War, when he was Secretary of Defense. On TV, at those hearings in front of the Congressional committees, he was stable, solid, steady. People saw a guy they had confidence in. He is thinking through this and very calm about it and very thoughtful. That’s what I think a lot of people remembered when they thought of Dick Cheney.

So the President selects him, that was a big boost in and of itself, but after the Vice Presidential debate I think it just confirmed that the Governor, now President, had made a wise choice. That being his very first big decision, it was very important that it be a clear, good choice, and a choice one could clearly argue that this person is ready to be the President, which is the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth question you have to ask. There are some others way down there someplace that you can ask if you want to, but this whole thing about what state or what this or that, forget it. The big one is, is this person ready to be the President?

Speaking of which state, was there a problem with his voter registration at the time?

Yes.

Since he’s from Texas, did that set off alarm bells in a campaign?

A little bit, yes, it got people excited for a day or two.

What did you hope to accomplish with the convention? I know in general make a good impression, but what was it that you wanted to leave the audience thinking about or impressed by?

He has to deliver, because it’s all about the President. It’s all about his delivery. The reason I was hesitating a little bit, Wendy Smith, the young lady with Down syndrome who wrote a letter to the campaign. It came to my desk. She had Down syndrome and worked in a grocery store, and she wanted to explain how she was saving 25 cents a day to contribute to the campaign. Powerful letter. We got to know her and gave her a role at the convention, and she spoke. Her family has actually written a book about all of this that will get published at some point, it’s very much a spiritual message. It says a lot of powerful things about the President and the way he dealt with her over these years and how he treated her. He remembered her every time he saw her, and the family was just blown away by it. It’s not something you hear anything about. People will hear about it when they read the book and see what the family thinks about him as a person, and how he related to her and how important he is in her life. It has a very nice spiritual tone to it. I say that because again, I would hope that in a way to show the soft side of the man. The guy’s got a heart and he cares about people and it’s real. She was part of that.

The main thing is the speech he delivers. And when he delivers it, people think he’s ready to be the President. That’s what you’re trying to accomplish—is this somebody they want to lead the country for the next four years? A lot of time goes into that speech and preparing for it, delivering it, practicing it.

Did you play a role in that?

Not really, no, that was Karen and Mike Gerson. That’s their skill set.

I remember that Bush’s first postconvention campaign stop was in Bartlett, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis, and making a move for his opponent’s home state, which of course turned out to be decisive in the election.

Was that the one that Hank Williams Jr. showed up for?

I don’t know.

I think it was. I can’t remember which town we were in, but there was a big bar, a big structure. I think it was at the airport, but Hank Williams Jr. was the entertainment. I’m positive it was in Tennessee, and he was the entertainment. Where is that in Tennessee?

Bartlett is a suburb of Memphis, so clearly the strategy was win Tennessee by winning the suburbs, along with east Tennessee, which is traditionally Republican. And it worked, it wasn’t even close.

We haven’t talked about Gore very much, but what was the sense of how to beat Gore, or was it just a sense of you run your own campaign and it really doesn’t matter?

Here’s another one and we’ll get to Gore in just a second. Another one you just made me think of was the way the President and I operate. We knew West Virginia was a critical state. There are several great stories about that. I was in New York and I was talking to David Gergen. The phone rings and it was the President, who was in West Virginia. He had just stopped there and met a guy, Bill Raney, who was the head of the West Virginia Coal Association, and of course Gore the environmentalist is hammered in West Virginia, but it had been a traditionally Democratic state.

Yes.

They vote Democratic big-time. He had a meeting at the airport with this guy Raney, and Raney was impressed with him and said, “I need to talk to someone in your campaign about the policies that are important for West Virginians.”

My phone rings and I can see it’s the President calling. He says, “I just talked to Bill Raney. He’s the head of the coal association, and I said I’d have you call him.” I said, “OK, fine, what’s his number?” He gave me his number and I called the guy right up. “Hey, Bill Raney, this is Don Evans, for Governor Bush.” He said, “God-dang, you’re already calling me up. Holy mackerel.” It was that quick response to people, the guy was saying, “Whoa, man, they’re on it.” We wound up winning West Virginia. Those are two, Tennessee and West Virginia both, that Gore would have thought would be in his camp.

Karl was good at that. Karl was watching the numbers and looking at where we needed to be and who we needed to go after, and that was all of his “strategery,” as we like to say.

You mentioned the debates earlier. Were you pleased with how they turned out or not?

Yes, I was, very much so. It was a great experience. I had talked to Bill Daley earlier and we’d been in Washington for the debates. I said, “I’m staying at the Willard [Hotel], come by and we’ll get to know each other. We’ll have breakfast.”

Daley’s a wonderful guy and he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Evans, if your side wins the election, you need to be Secretary of Commerce.” He had been the Secretary of Commerce. He said, “That’s the best job in this town. You get to travel all over the world, you write your own agenda, nobody bothers you, it’s just a great job.” I love Bill Daley; I still talk to him a fair amount. But it told me a lot about the campaigns. These were professional guys who weren’t there because they were really about their candidate, whereas the Bush campaign is totally different. Everybody on there just loved the guy and would do anything for him. They were there not because they wanted the Republican Party to win, but because they wanted George W. Bush to win. The other side was, “The Democrats needed to control the White House, so let’s see if we can get a Democrat elected.” Gore happened to be the most likely suspect.

That was a big difference, but the day of the debates was interesting and I will tell you that Bill Daley was a wonderful guy to work with. On my side was myself, Joe Allbaugh, and Andy Card, and on his side was Jimmy Johnson, Alexis Herman, and Bill Daley. We started off and there was a lot of the structure of them and their demands and the moderators. They came at us pretty hard with wanting diversity among moderators and the structure—I was more, “Let’s just let them talk, give them a lot of room to run. Find a good moderator who can keep it in the fairway.” But no, they were pretty strict and he had a list of things that they were demanding, a lot of them were pretty silly. No cameras in the back so you could see his bald spot, the temperature of the room had to be 55 degrees or something, a lot of stuff like that.

We talked about that back and forth and I said to Daley, “Let’s the two of us talk,” so we went and talked. I said, “Look, we can talk about these moderators all we want, but let’s get a guy who has done this before, a pro. Jim Lehrer has done it, he’s steady, he’s solid.” It doesn’t need to be about the moderator, it needs to be about the candidates, and if you start trying to get some colorful figures, anchors in there, all of a sudden it’s more about them than it is about anybody.

To Bill’s credit, he talked about his great admiration for the Bush family, for George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, which he hadn’t really mentioned to me before. What decent, wonderful people, public servants, just how classy they are. His great admiration and affection for them and Bill just said, “Let’s do something that makes sense here.” So we wound up with Jim Lehrer. We ran the same kind of debates basically they had before, the town hall–style deal and then the stand-up deal and the sit-down deal, and a little bit of the same clock as before, a little different. I think we gave them a little more room to run, a little more time to answer, but it didn’t change that much. We announced, “Here’s what we’re doing, here’s where we’re going to have the debates, and here’s the format.” He was a fair-minded guy and a pleasure to work with.

The President, like anybody, is not too fired up about getting in front of 75 million people and making a whatever out of himself. That’s a pretty big deal and that’s why I tried to see if we could structure this thing differently to make him a little more comfortable. I was pleased that we had Jim Lehrer because I thought he would be comfortable with him, somebody he knew wasn’t going to try to attack him or trick him.

But Gore sets up this debate camp down in Florida. He’s got professionals coming in, and it’s all set up exactly like the studios were going to be set up, coat and ties and this and that and going through it all. It was really hard to get President Bush to practice for the debates. He’d last about 30 minutes and he’d say, “Over with, we’ve done enough.” I knew Gore had his debate camp, going through with note cards, all his one-liners that he wanted to throw out there for his moment. Ours was a very relaxed, laid-back approach. Judd Gregg was Gore and he did a great job, but as I said, we couldn’t get the President to stay with it very long.

The first debate was at the [John F.] Kennedy [Presidential] Library. I remember going across the lake to go over to the library, and we got off the boat and went in. I’m sitting in the front row and all of a sudden here they come out and I look at Al Gore and think, We’re going to win. I saw how he was all painted up and all sprayed on him this and sprayed on him that, and I just thought, We’re going to win. Look at this guy. Then they had the debate and Gore’s over there huffing and puffing and making noise and racket and stuff, and just trying—it was so ridiculous.

You’re watching this in the studio.

Yes, I’m front row, right there looking at it, and I’m seeing it but not believing it. I didn’t lead up to it like I should have, in terms of telling you the day before, which I will in a second. Bush did well, but Gore just looked silly, the way he was behaving. One of the things that got him was in the whole debate negotiations, they had certain things about the cameras, where the cameras could be and this and that. I looked at it and said, “OK, we’ll sign on to this,” but the way you sign on to it is there’s an agreement that’s signed by the Presidential Debate Commission and then by each campaign, but who produces it is separate. There’s a production box or whichever one is doing it. They produce it however the heck they want to produce it.

The first one was CNN [Cable News Network] and in the agreement it said no split screen, not showing them both at the same time, and by God, they had split screens. So they showed Gore when he was huffing and puffing and grunting and groaning, and Daley goes, “God-dang it, I thought in the agreement we said no split screen.” I said, “The producer doesn’t sign the agreement. He can do whatever he wants.”

This sounds silly, all this stuff. I had one guy say to me, “God-dang it, the split screen, Gore got 57 percent of the screen and Bush only got 43 percent of the screen, so it looked like Gore was bigger than Bush.” I had to call Tom Johnson who was running CNN. “Tom, what are you doing? God-dang it, your split screen is not even down the middle.” You get all that little stuff.

Probably the pivotal moment was that third one, which was the town hall job in St. Louis. We were staying at a friend’s farm outside of St. Louis. The night before the debate, the Governor died in a plane crash. Governor Bush came and asked me, “Do you think we’re going to have the debate tomorrow?” I said, “Yes, I think we’re probably going to have it.” He said, “OK, I’ll go back to bed.”

We got up the next morning, had our breakfast, “OK, let’s do a little debate prep this morning.” He said, “No, I don’t want to do it.” I said, “Well, let’s talk about a few of the issues.” He said, “Nah.” But we sat around and talked about a few of the issues. It wasn’t 30 minutes and I said, “What are you going to do now?” He said, “I’m going fishing.” This guy has a big lake there, so he did, he went and fished.

Did you go with him?

No. I let him be by himself. He wanted to be out by himself and I wanted to let him be by himself. Just be out there and relax and see if he can catch a fish, and I guarantee at that same time, Gore was in there going through the note cards, grinding away. During the debate, the big moment when Gore moved over into his space, it was some stupid—and Bush looked at him like, “What are you doing?” It just made him look so silly and so small, and it was a very big moment. I had a lot of people mention that to me outside of the campaign, “What was Gore doing? Why did he do that?” He was trying to be cute and tricky or throw Bush off guard.

One interesting thing—and you can check this with him—I gave him a lot of pocket crosses along the way, and he had one in his pocket and he had hold of it. That was his security blanket, if you will. I’m pretty sure that’s right.

But going up to the first debate, there’s a big decision. We’re in Austin, and we have to go to Boston. Do we fly all day or what do we do? No, we’ll go halfway, so the advance team got a look at everything and said, “We can go to Huntington, West Virginia. We need to win West Virginia, so we can have a little campaign rally there and then we’ll go on.” They picked the hotel, and we had the campaign rally right there on the river, all set up, and then it’s over, it’s time to go have dinner.

West Virginia is a sad state, the economy is in the tank, but the President’s room is set up like it normally is, with a treadmill and peanut butter and jelly and things like that. We go downstairs to have dinner, but there’s nobody in the dadgum restaurant. Not only is there nobody in the restaurant, there’s really nobody in the kitchen to cook anything. There were a few people, but after I wait there for a while, I finally get frustrated and go back in the kitchen and tell them, “I’ve got a group out here that would like to have dinner. Could you maybe get somebody?” They said, “Oh, OK.”

We finally get through that fiasco, but then that night, on one side of the hotel are the friggin’ train tracks and the other side is the friggin’ river, and these boats are going up and down blowing their friggin’ air horns all night long, and the trains are going up and down, clackity, clackity, clack. I don’t know if he got any sleep and this is the night before the debate. We want him all rested and fresh and ready for the debate the next night. It was pretty crazy.

We have reached our appointed hour, and we’re exactly where I had hoped to be.

[BREAK]

November 20, 2013

This is day two of the Don Evans interview. You said, before we started the recorder rolling, that there were things you thought about last night.

Some of what I was thinking about was that I did a reasonably decent job of trying to bring out the compassionate side of this guy. I think people miss that and they don’t know how grounded it is and who he is as a person, beginning as a very young man. I think the war probably masked that and people haven’t been—him being the leader of America, the U.S., the free world, for those seven years or so that we were at war, still are at war for that matter, people lost that softer side or compassionate side of him. I wanted to make sure that came through when people start diving into the history of this guy and who he is.

As they get to know him better through the years, they’ll see what a principled person he is and how he had a set of principles by which he made decisions. One of those fundamental principles is that we’re here to serve other people and make other people’s lives better. That stands in some people’s minds when they think short-term. A pretty stark contrast to “Let’s go to war and a lot of people are going to die.”

Sure.

And a lot of our own are going to die, which means, as he always says, and you’ve read it a hundred times, “It’s the toughest decision a President ever has to make.” I want history to know that when he was making that decision, he was making it with the same compassionate heart that he’s always had. He has to look long-term at what’s in the best interest and the general well-being of the American people. He’s trying to make an assessment that there are some bad people out there and if we don’t go after them now and begin to take them down, they’re going to come back and it’s not going to be 3,000 next time, it’s going to be 50,000, 100,000, 200,000. That’s the assessment he has to make.

I think it’s important that people understand he was making that assessment and making that decision with the same compassionate heart that he’s always had. He was thinking, What’s in the long-term best interests of this country?, which is how a President ought to make decisions, not “maybe I can be more popular if we don’t go to war and I can kick the can down the road and let somebody else deal with it.” He felt like he should deal with it.

That was the main thing in my brain, that because of the guy I’ve seen through the years and know to this day, I’ve known him pretty well for 45 years or so. I know his heart. That was the main thing on my mind.

Do you think that’s something that he got from his family?

I think so. The seeds were certainly planted there, and he built on that as he grew in his personal faith. The basic, fundamental message of “we’re here to serve other people and make other people’s lives better,” that’s fundamental principle number one and “I’ve got to think about that when I make decisions, even though they are decisions that are—I’ve been elected by the people to serve the people under the Constitution of the United States of America.” There’s still something else in this human being, that he’s a person of faith, and the idea that that won’t enter into how he makes decisions and be part of the screen through which he makes decisions is just not—doesn’t understand this guy.

Let me go back and ask one question that I had intended to ask yesterday, particularly because your wife had a long experience with him, and that was the loss of his sister. Is that a piece of this equation? Does your wife have any memory of that?

She remembers when they came to take him out of class. She absolutely remembers that. The President and I have not talked about that in any depth at all. He’s referred to it a time or two that I can remember, along the way, when he lost his sister, Robin [Pauline Robinson Bush]. My wife has talked about it. “Oh, yes, I remember when they came and—it was the second grade. They got him out of our second grade class.”

I just read a book about his father, Being Poppy, it’s a great little book and it really talked about the core of the man. If you want to see the interpersonal side of George H. W. Bush, it’s a wonderful book.

Who wrote the book, Don, do you remember?

I don’t remember.

Mike, do you know this one?

I think it’s the guy who wrote the book on Joe DiMaggio.

So it’s not somebody close to the family.

No. But it’s a guy who can really get into the inner person of the individual. The President said, “You ought to read this and tell me what you think.” It was not a number-one best seller or anything like that, but what I enjoyed so much about the book was the first—through the Midland years and maybe a little bit beyond, but it really showed—and it talked about Robin and her death and how and Barbara reacted to that. They were doing all they could, taking her to New York—Barbara’s cousin, I think, is a doctor from New York, got him involved.

I would suggest it to you because it tells a lot about those years in Midland in the ’50s and ’60s, and building friendships and backyard barbeques and how things functioned there, which had a big impact on 43. It tells you a lot about 43, along with telling you a lot about Poppy. I think the seeds were planted there among the family, then the guy grew in his faith and developed his own deep spiritual—here’s a guy who when President, woke up every morning and the first thing he did was go to the Bible, and he was there for 30 minutes or so before he started his day.

Right.

Are there any books or writers about George W. Bush who you think have gotten him right, in the way that you think this writer got his father right?

Good question. He’s about the only one, his own.

His own book?

Yes. I don’t know what I’d recommend to you, to tell you the dadgum truth. I’m trying to think who really hit the mark, but I’m not sure I can come up with one.

What you’ve been describing is an interesting characterization, because there is the popular conception of the Texas bravado, right?

Right.

Which is there?

Totally.

Totally there?

It’s totally there and he brought it out himself. “Get ’em dead or alive” and “bring ’em on,” and some of that kind of language that got loose early on. But I think it’s more of the competitive spirit that we feel in west Texas, back to the free enterprise and “dream big” and “go compete.” I don’t think it’s arrogance. One thing the gas industry will do for you is deliver you a lot of humility, so I don’t think it’s that. He’s an active, loud guy. He’s got a lot of energy and it comes out. Down deep, the guy has an incredibly soft heart, you’ll see him tear up over just about anything. It’s maybe his type A personality getting into overdrive every now and then.

I probably bring some of that, because I’m a little bit the same way in terms of being pretty loud. As I said yesterday, whenever I’d talk to him when he was in Washington, during his dad’s campaigns, his sweet little assistant would always know who he was talking to, because he’d get real loud and he’d start hollering about something. It wasn’t an arrogant “we’ve got all the answers” kind of thing. It was more of “we’re ready, we’re confident.” I think he let the “dead or alive” get away from him.

I wanted to come back and ask about the DWI situation. Had you been aware that this was lurking in his background?

I was aware of it, yes.

And was there discussion of trying to get it out at an earlier stage, where it could be a controlled burn rather than a sprung on?

Yes, and it was what he said publicly. He had teenage daughters at the time and he was trying to raise them, and he’d just as soon not have it out there and have a big show around it.

And it was ultimately his decision to make.

Yes.

What could you tell us about the atmosphere in the campaign when the news hit?

It’s like when Ross Perot endorsed Ann Richards. There’s all of a sudden a huge uncertainty. “What’s going to happen? How do the people react to this?” I remember being at campaign headquarters that Friday afternoon when it hit. We got him on the phone and told him he had to go out and say something. I’m positive Karen was on the road with him. I remember talking with Dan Bartlett and Joe Allbaugh, and they were saying, “He’s got to get out there and say something. We can’t ignore this.” And he did and he got hurt. If you had it to do all over again, you’d get it out there a lot earlier. That’s a cardinal rule of politics. When you have some issues that you’re going to have to deal with and explain and get people comfortable with, you get them out there early. That was a mistake and we should have gotten it out there early.

Were you or others who knew about this reluctant to press him about getting it out early, when he raised the personal—?

Mike, I can’t say I was in on all of those discussions. I have a recollection that he made the decision and quite frankly, I would have to say the decision was made six years earlier when he ran for Governor. It was out there then and it never surfaced. When you run for Governor, you’re getting pretty well screened in your life and history, so I think people assumed if it was going to surface, it would have surfaced. People got comfortable with it, including him, and I think that it was something—today, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

Compared to—

A lot of the other stuff, right? At the time, it seemed like a pretty big deal, when you’re dealing with all the drinking-related teenage whatever things, and it was clearly an embarrassment to him. Been through two gubernatorial campaigns, nothing had come up. People said, “It’s not going to surface.” I think that was probably how he got comfortable with it. I wasn’t in on a “Let’s all get together and decide what we’re going to do with this.” I think he had pretty well decided himself.

You might ask Karl if he talked to him about it, or Karen, because they were much more involved in the whole strategy and messaging than I was in the early part of the campaign. I’m the finance guy, I’m a friend, I knew it was out there. I didn’t feel like I was the guy who had all the political wisdom in the shop. If he had discussed it with Karl, discussed it with Karen, discussed it with himself and was comfortable with it, I was good with that. If we had made it another four days, it might have looked like—I don’t know if you’d say it looked like a good decision. I think the best decision is to get all that stuff out there, where it’s not a thing that you’re going to even think about or worry about. Not that it was in the back of my mind, it wasn’t.

But he got out there and said something and he pushed back, which I would expect him to. “Do you really think I need to do this? Do you really think I ought to go out there? Why do I need to do it?” Which is a natural reaction. “Is that something I really want to do? It’s been out there for a long time; I haven’t said anything about it. Now it’s out there, what about it?” And certainly it hurt us in the evangelical wing of the party, in that we didn’t get the turnout that we thought we were going to get. I think that had an impact on it. I don’t know the numbers exactly, Karl knows them, maybe he can say, because we were looking really good going into Tuesday, going into the weekend, and our numbers clearly slipped over the weekend, driven, in everybody’s judgment, by that revelation.

What did you think on Election Day? What did you expect to happen when returns came in? Did you think you had a safe lead?

I thought it was close. We had been through the ups and downs of the polls in the fall. We were up and then we were down and then we got back up. We looked pretty good all through. Not big gaping leads, but things encouraging, like I mentioned yesterday, California looks like it’s in play. Wow, if California is in play, then we’re looking really good. If we think we could win California? We made a decision based on thinking we could win California, we had a shot at it and put a bunch of money out there, coming down the home stretch the last week or week and a half.

I felt pretty optimistic, but we took a pretty good body blow with the DWI thing. “What does it mean? How are people going to react?” I didn’t go into that day with an extraordinary amount of confidence. I think about that day and you’re pretty numb and just, “Wow, OK, let’s see what the results are.” It’s an unbelievably exhausting experience.

I didn’t go into the day with any degree of overconfidence or “We’ve got this” or “It’s in the bag.” We had some lead, not a big one, and we took a pretty big hit over the weekend so what does that mean? Let’s find out.

You start getting the exit polls in the afternoon.

Yes. I don’t think they were terribly definitive. The defining moment of that day—we had the family dinner planned at the Four Seasons. You’ve got it down to where it’s Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida. You need to win three out of the four and we had Ohio and Michigan, and Florida was the key and we win Florida. Early in the evening we were thinking, We’ve got a great shot at winning. You’ve heard the story: the family is all showing up at the Four Seasons for dinner, mom and dad and brothers and a few friends like myself. Golly, everybody walked into the room, we had the TVs, of course, and they walked into the room and the then Governor and Laura and Jeb and his wife, Columba [Bush], and all of a sudden they put the big checkmark up there for Gore in Florida. Man, just a huge downer. That brought that event to an end. The Governor and Laura left and went back to the mansion. I got a few bites of something, and I remember Jeb left. He was staying there at the Four Seasons, so I don’t think he hung around too long.

Did he seem to think that that was—

He was shocked. Jeb really thought we were going to win Florida.

So the reaction in that room was not, “They’ve got it wrong.” It was, “We lost Florida.” Is that right? Assuming the networks knew what they were doing.

That’s right.

When did you start thinking maybe they didn’t know what they were doing?

When they took it down and took the checkmark off Gore later in the evening. I can’t remember if it was another hour later or what it was, but they decided to pull it down. It may have been a little longer.

The President and his mom and dad went over to the mansion. I had stayed at the Four Seasons. We had a war room set up there. I had a laptop; I was watching state by state. Karl was in there and they took it down, and all of a sudden we’re back in the game. I went to find Jeb in his room. He’s got a bottle of scotch out, and I said, “Jeb, we’ve got a shot at this. We could still win this thing. You need to come out and do drive-home radio on the West Coast.” So he put his clothes back on and we got back in the mix.

I spent that evening watching the numbers. Cheney was there on the top floor with all his pals, Baker was there and [Alan] Simpson, the Vice President’s family, Nick Brady, and all his pals from previous administrations, and they were watching it. I went up and started watching it with them and about the time that Florida—all of a sudden we had a big lead. There are over 100,000 votes and like 92 percent of the vote’s in. “Hey, we’re going to win this thing.” That’s when Bill Daley called me up and said, “My friend is going to call the Governor and concede here in a few minutes. He’s in with his family right now and he’ll call him.”

Did he congratulate you at the time?

I can’t remember his exact words. He was dealing with it professionally, as his campaign manager. Did he say congratulations? He maybe did, but I’m not going to be quoted on that. He was always a very gracious guy. I immediately called the Governor and said, “I just talked to Daley. He said that Gore is going to concede. He’s talking to his family; he’ll call you in about ten minutes.” I immediately broadcast that to the room and cheers, and I get in the car and go to the mansion to meet the Governor. He comes out the back door, a big embrace and congratulations. We’re both pretty exhausted but of course elated, got a little adrenaline shot with that news. We walk inside, ten minutes goes by and nothing. Fifteen minutes goes by, nothing. In the meantime, the numbers are collapsing and the fact of the matter is, before I left the Four Seasons, I saw that 100,000-plus go down, it was 90, then it was 80, then it’s 50, then it’s 30 and whoa, what in the world is going on?

I had seen Florida collapsing and here’s the part I should remember that I don’t. The Governor was getting anxious. “Is he going to call?” I don’t know how many minutes went by, maybe 20, and Daley called me back. I can’t remember if I called him because the Governor was getting anxious. “Let’s call and see what’s going on.” Anyway, in 20 minutes we were talking and he says, “Don, we have a problem. The spread is down to 1,500 votes, so we can’t—” I said, “Wait a minute.” What can you say? There’s not a whole lot to say, but that was an interesting night. This will take a while to go through it.

I have some great pictures of this. I’m sitting there and the Governor is staring at me and I’m on the phone. The next thing you know, I’m handing the phone to him and it’s “What’s going on here?” It’s all compressed down to—“It’s hard to concede with 1,500 votes, but he’ll call you in a few minutes.” So the Governor went upstairs for a few minutes, the call came in from Gore, he took the call up there. I wasn’t up there at the time. I think it was a short conversation. You’d have to ask him exactly what the conversation was, other than I’m sure Gore was saying, “I’m not conceding. I know that it was called, but the vote is too narrow so I’m not conceding.”

He came back down and Jeb is over there, everybody’s looking at Jeb. “What the heck is going on in your state?” He’s gone from having the check over in Gore’s box, to taking the check off, to putting the check over in Bush’s box, to now the check is off. You can imagine what he’s going through. We go on through the night watching Florida as they continue to count and count, and precincts still coming in and the spread remaining narrow.

Then I was looking at Jeb, “What is going on here?” Alan Simpson was there, of course he’s the biggest character of all time and he said he was going to call. “You’re leading, just go out and declare victory.”

“No, I don’t think so.” The Vice President and Lynne [Cheney] had come over and like I said, Simpson was over there now, Jeb and his wife. Karen Hughes was there and I was there.

The evening goes on without any resolution. Jeb’s calling his state. He’s the Governor, trying to figure out what the heck is going on. I finally called the secretary of state’s office, Katherine Harris, and “Is she there?” “No, she’s not here.” I said, “Where is she?” I heard, “She’s at home.” I said, “At home? What’s she doing at home? Give me her number.” I got her number, called her and woke her up. It’s about two o’clock in the morning where she is and I said, “Is this Katherine Harris?”

She said, “Yes, this is.” I said, “Do you know what’s going on? We’re trying to elect a President of the United States and your office is responsible for the vote in your state, and we can’t get any kind of final resolution or answer out of your office.” She mumbled something and I hung up. I can’t remember exactly what she said. We’ve since laughed about it and chatted about it some, but it was a pretty amazing moment. The whole thing was still in play and in balance because her office, everybody’s looking to it and she’s home in bed.

After that, I sat down with Karen Hughes and we wrote out a statement that I would deliver. I delivered the statement at two o’clock in the morning or something in Austin. “We’re still confident we’ll prevail, but we don’t have a final resolution now. In the end we’ll win,” and that kind of thing. Actually, we were in the Governor’s Mansion and there were thousands of people on Congress Avenue. It was raining, but they were still waiting for somebody to come out. It was a short distance from the mansion to the platform. Notwithstanding that, they put me in a van and I got in a van and we drove the half block. Four or five people were with me and I got up and made the statement and then came down, got in the van and was going back. It’s now whatever, three o’clock in the morning and a lot of the feeling of the moment is that you’re ready for it to end. You get on a countdown, how many days. It’s so exhausting.

The van drove me over to the west gate, which is still just half a block away, it’s just a tower there next to the mansion. I walked in the front door and said, “Wait a minute, I can’t go in here. I have to get back down the office, because what’s getting ready to happen?” So I got back in the van and went back down to the office. Fortunately, Ben Ginsberg, our general counsel, was there. Ben and I said, “OK, what’s next? What do we need to get geared up to do?” The Gore campaign came out early that morning and announced that Warren Christopher was going to help spearhead their side, as we went through whatever we were getting ready to go through. At six or seven o’clock in the morning, Karl and I and Karen and Joe Allbaugh sat down and “OK, what’s our game plan?” We said, “We ought to call Jim Baker and see if he could—”

I called Jim. He had flown back to Houston the night before, so he was already back home. I woke him up and said, “Would you mind leading the effort in Florida, to be down there and settle on what the count is going to be in Florida?” He quickly agreed to do it. But before I called him, I called the Governor and said, “I think we ought to call Jim Baker and see if he’ll help spearhead this thing.” He was all in on that so I called Baker and he said he’d do it. Then I believe there was a call that he made back to the Governor, “I’m willing to go do this.”

We had a plane already getting teed up to go to Florida, set up shop in Tallahassee. Joe Allbaugh was going and we were going pick up Jim Baker on the way. Jim’s secretary’s only request was that he could bring his team in. His team was Margaret Tutwiler and Bob Zoellick, whom he had worked with before, and he wanted them there in terms of communication and message and all that kind of stuff. That’s how that night worked.

When did you get to sleep?

I don’t know, I don’t think the next day. The next night sometime. I’m sure I kept going that day. That was an amazing, historic night, and Baker went down and started assembling a team of strong constitutional lawyers. I called John Danforth, who happened to be in Mexico, to see if he may help us. He had been on the VP [Vice President] list and I called him up after talking to Baker about it. Baker thought maybe he could use his support. Danforth already had a plane dispatched. Ray Hunt had offered his plane to fly to Mexico and pick up Danforth. Had it arranged, then I talked to Danforth and he started worrying about some constitutional questions about where we were headed, not that we had a huge game plan at the moment. We were prepared to challenge whatever we needed to challenge, and started asking a lot of questions around it.

I called Baker and told him that John was concerned about—he said, “We don’t need him. No, thank you.” So I called John and said thanks but no thanks. Obviously, Baker’s plenty good and he made a quick decision. He built a heck of a team, Ted Olson and others, and we were battling it on many fronts, as the books have all recorded.

I don’t know if it’s recorded as well as it should be, but the one who said, before anybody else that I can remember, that this was going to the Supreme Court was Alan Simpson. He said it very early, when a lot of people were focused in the state and slugging it out in the county and slugging it out in the state. Simpson said, “This is going to the Supreme Court. You’d better get ready for it.” It seemed like that was in the first week or so that he said that, not that we weren’t looking far and trying to get a good, strong constitutional lawyer on board. Laurence Tribe is the one everybody talks about, and of course he’s on the other side of the aisle. So who is on our side of the aisle that we think is strong? Ted Olson stepped up and filled that slot and did a great job.

What kind of organization did you have in Florida? Did you invest the same efforts in building an organization in Florida, or did you defer to Jeb to handle that?

Used a lot of Jeb’s people. Jeb’s people were very much involved on both the political side and the fundraising side. I was more familiar with the people on the fundraising side, for obvious reasons, but we had good people on the political side as well. We had our own political operation there, some people we had put in place and some who were just transferred over from Jeb. We took that and built on it and of course, people were coming out of the woodwork wanting to help. It was a matter of trying to manage that energy and get it directed in a constructive way, because there were going to be a lot of different issues to deal with.

Where we beat them badly was the first legal team. We put together a very strong legal team across the board, but they relied pretty much on David Boies. He was their guy and he tried to do it all, and you can’t do it all. I don’t know how many lawyers we had down there but a whole bunch, and we had a good team handling within the counties and at the Florida State Supreme Court. We had to argue that, and then of course we had to argue at the U.S. Supreme Court. We built a great legal team and then—we had pretty loose organizations. You controlled them as best you could. I remember Miami-Dade County, we had some people down there from New York who got real aggressive and started pounding on doors, “Let us in.”

The Brooks Brothers Riot they called it.

Yes. But people were excited and exercised. That all settled down and then we got into counting chads. That’s where John Bolton became—he was on TV a lot, looking at cards and counting chads one at a time, so we had to put in place people we had confidence in who could be part of that team. It was all being run out of Tallahassee, with Baker and Joe Allbaugh. I went down there a couple of times to relieve Joe and Baker, give them a little break, but it was basically being run and supported out of there.

One other moment in the campaign—this was early. I can’t remember the issue exactly. We had Baker on the phone, it was in my office, and Karl was in there. Baker was suggesting a direction, a path, a strategy, and Karl started to challenge it, didn’t think it was the right way to go. Baker was quick to say, “It’s the way I want to go.” Baker wanted to make the point that he was in charge, because I had told him he was in charge and the Governor had told him he was in charge. Karl challenged him a couple of times and Baker hung up the telephone. Karl looked at me and said, “Do you think I made him mad?” I said, “Yes, you probably did.” Anyway, I quickly called Baker up and said, “I can handle this end of it, you’re in charge, no question about it. You’re down there doing what you need to do.”

That was not a defining moment, but a moment that it was clear that we had asked him to be in charge and he was going to be in charge. We don’t want to be sitting around second guessing every move he made.

What is George Bush’s role in this now? Has he delegated pretty much everything?

Yes, that was an interesting part of all this. He totally delegated it. The Vice President was in the suite in the Four Seasons. He had four or five TVs brought to his suite so he could be watching every channel. He’s in there laser focused on those TVs all day long and through the night, and the President’s up at the ranch chopping wood. I’d check in with him or he’d check in with me once or twice a day, but he was fishing and chopping wood.

I’m trying to think of key decisions that he was—I told him about Danforth, he said, “Fine, forget it.” He was comfortable with letting the team run it, and he wasn’t trying to make a bunch of decisions or weigh in on them himself, nor was he parked in front of the TV, trying to watch every little nuance of this thing, because the emotions of it were just unbelievable. You’re on a high, you’re on a low, you’re on a high, these court hearings start coming out, the judge says something and everybody’s high-fiving, and the next guy goes against you and everybody is down in the dumps. It was an emotional roller coaster and the President stayed above all that.

Was the line of communication that you and George Bush talked and then you and Baker talked, or was he talking to Baker?

I don’t know that he was talking to Baker. He may have called him. That’s interesting. I’m not sure we’ve talked about that much. He is the kind who would pick up the telephone and call Baker, and not worry about calling him through me, that’s no big deal. That’s kind of the way we worked, as I said yesterday. “If you want to talk to Karl, go talk to Karl. Don’t feel like you’ve got to tell me you’re talking to Karl.” I’m not sure how much he talked to Baker. I was talking to Baker, and I was giving him daily reports. As I think back on it, it didn’t feel like he was getting them from someplace else, not to say—I’m sure he did talk to Baker some, I just don’t remember how much.

I was going to ask you what seems like a nonsensical question, but it has a purpose. Why was he chopping wood and fishing?

One, he’s an active guy. Two, at some level it was to take his mind off it, get out there, back to nature. He didn’t feel like there was a whole lot he could do. He had his team, trusted his team, turned it over to his team, which is how he functioned as a President and as a CEO. You build your team, you count on them, you give them some direction. It was relaxing to chop wood and fish, and he was ready for a little bit of that. I think we all were. It’s a different style.

You’ve got Cheney over there focused every minute, every second, and the President trying to see and hear the big picture. He feels like he’s given the orders. “Keep me informed. If you need me, call me,” that kind of thing. He had confidence in his team.

That’s what I thought the answer was, but I wanted to be clear.

What did you and Baker talk about?

People. We’d talk about who he’s bringing in and who the talent is, and I would give him some help on the talent we had in the organization already, people he wouldn’t know. Ben Ginsberg, what role he’s going to play, Joe Allbaugh, what role he’ll play, those types. It was more personnel, and I’m trying to help recruit anybody I can. Who did I recruit, I can’t tell you. Took a shot at Danforth and that didn’t work, and came up with some ideas around some others. I don’t know where Ted Olson—he maybe came from Ben Ginsberg. I certainly told him to communicate with Baker about Ginsberg and the role he had played for us, and he can be helpful on the legal side. They were in the middle of the action down there.

Joe Allbaugh was there to be the field operations guy, and Karl was helping with that too. We sent Ken Mehlman down there. He was our field engineer. He had actually worked the Midwest, but we sent him down to Florida to run what is happening in the field and what are the counts and what are the votes. He had the book on that. I went down a couple of times. They had shut down the vote again on a Saturday, in the Miami-Dade box. It was close and it looked like maybe this was it. Mehlman is counting all the votes and I said, “How does it look?” The number that sticks in my mind is 116. It may have been 160, I don’t know, but it was like we were ahead by 116 votes out of a hundred million. I called the President and said, “They shut down the voting again, it looks like we’re in pretty good shape. I think we’ve got a 116-vote lead, so don’t worry about it.” It was one of those comical kind of calls, “We’re fine, no big deal.” That was one of the lighter moments, not that there weren’t a lot more, I’m sure there were. That’s one that comes to mind.

I went down one time for a long weekend, four or five days, and Baker said on one Sunday, “Let’s go hunting. I’ve got a friend over in Georgia who has a plantation called Mandalay.” We took off one Sunday afternoon and went over there, hunted and had a nice time, relaxed a little bit. I liked going down there and meeting the legal team. We had a great legal team, some real stars out of Florida. Barry Richard comes to mind; he did a superb job arguing in the state supreme court. Baker brought some of his in, from Baker Botts. We had a couple of guys come in from Illinois who had real talent. He had put together a great legal team and we had this whole cadre of strong lawyers. Gore had David Boies on the other side, his team.

Where was the money coming from for all this, and were there legal considerations and how much people could contribute? This isn’t something anybody prepares for.

I need to reconstruct that, Mike, because I don’t have it clearly. I do know that we went back out and raised some money. I don’t remember how much, under what auspices legal-wise that we did it. We had some money left over. We didn’t spend every dime. I have to reconstruct that, I’m not sure exactly how that happened.

One of the characteristics of this five weeks was that it seemed like Bush was operating on the assumption the whole time that he had won, that he could begin planning the transition and so on. Gore did not give the impression that he had won. Before the Supreme Court decision ends all of this, are you having conversations with the President about his administration?

Yes. That was a very conscious decision, to have the message out there that we believed we were going to win this. There was still some of that messaging going on to influence public opinion. Does it influence how a judge is going to—I don’t know, but we really felt like it was important to have that, because I’d said it that night, “We’re going to win. It’s just a matter of time, so you need to behave like you’re going to win.”

The other part of it is, it was the right thing to do. It would have been the right thing to do for Gore’s side, because you don’t know when the final decision is coming down, but you do know there are only so many days until the inauguration and you’d better get on with planning it. You don’t have a lot of days to begin with, and if you keep delaying then it’s just going to make it a lot harder to execute on the inauguration, all the decisions you have to make. It was the right thing to do from a public perception standpoint, and the right thing to do in terms of planning and organizing and being ready for the inauguration. He was chopping wood and fishing, but that would give him something to do, right? Begin to make some decisions on who the Cabinet was going to be, some of that kind of stuff.

Who’s taking the lead on the transition to governance plan?

Clay Johnson, who was his good buddy, a very good organizer and organizational structure guy. He had that whole transition thing. He became the Director of Personnel at the White House. On the one hand we’re fighting the Florida thing, but on the other hand we’re planning for the inauguration and Cabinet and being prepared to govern. Part of it was just, “We will be able to manage this.” People began to talk about a constitutional crisis.

Yes.

You don’t want those alarm bells to be going off, you want to say, “No, we’re going to be able to manage this and we’re going to be prepared for it. There’s no reason to be concerned about a constitutional crisis.” That was one way of dealing with it, not the only way. I think that helped.

Was there internal game planning about worst case scenarios for a constitutional crisis? I’m not talking about if we lose, it comes down and—but are the lawyers spinning out scenarios where there is a significant constitutional—?

I don’t remember any of that. Maybe some lawyers in some corner office were talking about it, but there was so much energy and focus on winning and the court battles—and we had them going everywhere in Florida—and getting prepared for the Supreme Court, there’s so much there. Then the whole transition, the Cabinet and who’s going to be in it and all that kind of stuff.

What was your plan, or did you have one, if the Supreme Court ruled the other way and the recount had continued?

We didn’t have one. That was the end game as far as everybody was concerned, and just like Gore, that was his end game. When he lost that, it was over.

Right.

He called with congratulations. You’re going to have to get Baker to explain this, but Baker always says, “Everybody talks about the 5-4 vote, but there were several votes and one of the key votes was a 7-2 vote.” So really it wasn’t 5-4. The idea that it was this narrow 5-4 is not factual. One of the key votes was 7-2, so it was a more definitive outcome from the Supreme Court.

As you said, before the election there was this implicit countdown, like we know that if we can keep these long, exhausting hours, we know that there’s a time when that period of exhaustion will end, when the results are in. Now you’ve got to find a fifth gear and a sixth gear. Did you ever feel, We’re in danger of making some bad decisions because we’re just so tired? Just as a matter of man-hours.

No, I think that all went away when Baker agreed to step in. He’s fresh, ready to go, in charge, he’s going to bring some of his own team in to help him, supplemented with a lot of people from our organization. I think that freshness helped a lot. Clearly took a heck of a lot of pressure off me. The idea that I would have been the right guy to go do that, with all the legal knowledge and court system knowledge, that didn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense. I’m an engineer from west Texas, so let’s get somebody in there who’s done this before. That took a lot of pressure off the whole organization, no question about it. We were there to support him and help him, and I did and others did. I was not worried about that, that we’re so exhausted, because I knew we had a good fresh mind that had been through plenty of campaigns before. This guy knows what the game is all about. We had the right guy in charge.

It’s interesting that we had people like Alan Simpson around. People hadn’t focused on that early on. We’d focused on “This is going to be fought out in Florida,” and Simpson and people thought, The Florida State Supreme Court is going to decide which way Florida goes, but—

They were all Democratic appointees.

Yes. We were clearly worried about that, and it put a heck of a lot of pressure on Jeb too. There were some things we felt like we could do in the state legislature that would put us in a preferred position. There was a lot of pressure on Jeb to take the fall. “If you do this in the state legislature, it’s going to give us this advantage in this particular issue.” I can’t remember exactly what the issue was, but there was a lot of pressure on him, which he pushed back on. He didn’t think it was his role to get himself—to take the move that maybe others were suggesting that he should. It wasn’t a brother-brother thing, it was more of, “I’ve got my own constitutional responsibilities within my state.” It was more him being respectful of his own fiduciary duties and how the state government works in Florida and the role the Governor should play.

That’s an interesting piece of it, and I’m not the one to articulate it, I’m only the one to point out what was going on and that he had some tough decisions to make. He had already been through the emotional roller coaster of Election Day and felt bad. “I told him I was going to deliver Florida and I didn’t deliver Florida. I thought we had it, I thought we were going to win it, and I intend to win it, it’s my brother.” This is a guy who had to make some very principled decisions with a tremendous amount of pressure on him.

Pressure from whom?

Pressure from the campaign suggesting that—You’ve got all kinds of people concocting, “We did this or made this move on the chessboard,” and there was a move, and it wasn’t James Baker. Baker wasn’t in there telling him, “You need to do this.” It was more from within the Florida political operatives. It was more coming out of—again, I’m not the best one to talk about it—but it felt like it was coming out of the state legislature, that there were some there who saw some moves that they could make to put Bush in a preferred position. I remember the Lieutenant Governor saying something, so I think it was coming out of the state legislature, that they were trying to figure out a way to deliver the state for Bush and they thought there were some things they could do that Jeb didn’t think it would be right for the legislature to do. It wasn’t coming from our tent—because Karl wouldn’t know, we wouldn’t know within our organization what the state may be able to do or not do.

We had a dinner in Tallahassee with Jeb. The issue came up, and this was during the 30-something days. He was pretty strong that the state, “No, we just can’t do that, it’s not the right thing to do.” It’s an interesting piece of history, but I’m not the right one to give you all the details.

Jeb has not been on our list of people to talk with, but he probably should be.

He should be.

If we can get him to.

He was critical in that, he truly was.

Exactly.

I think it would say a lot about him as a person, not that he was getting a lot of heat from his brother to do anything, but he was feeling some heat. This was out there in the press, “The state can do this,” so he’s feeling some of the heat.

Can I ask you to tell us a little bit about the relationship between these two brothers? The conventional wisdom was always that Jeb was going to be the one who—

I still remember that interview with Larry King in 1988, when they’re both in Houston at the Republican Convention being interviewed. Larry King would ask a question and George W. would jump in and start answering it real fast, and then Jeb would get to it and he was softer, quieter, more thoughtful. Two different personalities, two different styles. Both of them clearly have big-time strengths, coming out of that family, and the relationship between them is the relationship of two brothers who love each other but who have different styles.

I told you yesterday when we were talking about the Governor’s race that it looked like Jeb was going to win and George was going to lose, and then the opposite happened. That’s a key moment in the history of American politics. What if it had been the reverse? Then Jeb’s probably running for President in 2000 and George, maybe he’s running again for Governor, but he’s not running for President.

I’m guessing the election returns in Texas aren’t in the balance the way they were in Florida, if Jeb were to have run. I’m making a joke that’s not working very well.

Oh, no, they’re not going to run against each other, if that’s what you’re saying.

No. What I was saying is if George W. ran and Jeb’s state was teetering on the edge, if Jeb had run, my guess is Texas wouldn’t have been teetering on the edge.

No, it wouldn’t have been teetering on the edge.

All right, sorry about that.

No, that’s fine. But that’s an interesting point in history. We’ll see what Jeb does, running now. I’ve seen them do a lot together over the last several years, playing golf and being around each other more. Jeb’s been very helpful in this operation here, with the advisory board, and they talk on a relatively frequent basis. I don’t know if that means once a month or once every two months or what.

Is Jeb as competitive as George W.?

They’re both competitive. I never played tennis with Jeb, but he’s a dadgum good tennis player and not a bad golfer. In ways he is as competitive, yes. He probably doesn’t show it quite as much. He doesn’t have his brother’s type A personality. Forty-three is going wide open all the time and he’s ready to compete in just about anything. Jeb is not quite that same personality.

Had there been a transition team set up before the election to lay the groundwork?

Again, Clay Johnson. We identified that in the fall sometime. You start thinking about that before the election, so he had been working on that separately from the campaign itself. It came out of the Vice President selection process. I don’t remember if Clay was involved in that piece of it. I don’t think he was; I think that came along after. By September, I would say, Clay had been identified to run the transition.

You finally secure victory. Anything worth recording about that?

I went to the Supreme Court arguments and ran into my friend Bill Daley again. We were standing in line, being checked in, and I said, “Daley, you know what we ought to do that would really be interesting for the whole world? We ought to go into that courtroom and sit right next to each other.”

He said, “That’s a good idea, let’s do that.” The thought kind of deteriorated when we got in and people were grabbing him and grabbing me, but we had that conversation and he said, “We ought to do that, sit right next to each other.” We weren’t far, it’s not that big, but I thought that would be an interesting little touch.

This other story we might as well record for history, because from a personal standpoint it was pretty powerful. My son was 11, and he loved to hunt. Dad had taken him hunting just about every hunting season since he was eight years old. When it came down to the final day of the election, because I’d been gone quite a bit that year and that fall in particular, in the early part of the hunting season, we couldn’t go. The week before the election I said, “This is all going to be over on Tuesday, and this next weekend we’re going hunting.” And of course it wasn’t all over on Tuesday and we had to keep going. I called him the night of the Supreme Court ruling and said to him, “Your godfather is going to be President of the United States,” and he said, “Does that mean we get to go hunting this weekend?” [laughter] Which was pretty cool. There are sacrifices you make when you get into these things, and that’s one of them that I don’t think people recognize enough. It can be a terrible sacrifice for the family. Whenever I’m talking in Washington about people who serve up there, I say that it’s not just whoever the elected official is, it’s their spouse or their kids or whatever. They all are in it and sacrifice a lot.

Did you go hunting?

We sure did.

When did you first talk with the President-elect, and maybe it was before he was President-elect. When did you first talk about a role for you in the administration?

That fall he asked me if I was interested. We had a conversation at the mansion and he said, “You need to go with me. We’re going to win this thing, and I need you up there. It’s the center of power in the world. This is going to be an amazing experience.” I’m sure the Commerce thing was probably in his brain and in my brain. If I was going to do anything it was follow the pattern of his dad and Bob Mosbacher, who was his Secretary of Commerce. It was the natural place for me to be.

In the Cabinet, was there any thought about White House staff?

A little bit. I’m just so dadgum glad I didn’t do that, I’ll tell you. That is such a—the Chief of Staff thing.

Right.

It was his instincts. I got over the “should I go do this,” and it was a public service chance to serve the country. It certainly wasn’t the perfect time for me in my business career. It was not a good time, but timing is never perfect and it wasn’t a perfect time for the family. I still had a son at home and I knew that was going to be a sacrifice when they moved up to Washington, and I knew I was going to be gone a lot and that’s not a good thing.

I hadn’t been in the military but my dad was big in it, and I needed to balance out some public service part of it. I got over it and said, “Yes, I’m going to go.” The Chief of Staff job I could have done, but I wasn’t the right person for it. Andy Card was the right person. We had selected Andy to run the convention and I’d gone to see him and asked him. He had served in his father’s administration as Secretary of Transportation and was really capable, very organized, very loyal, trusted. So I asked Andy to do it. He did a wonderful job in running the convention, flawless, and the President felt like that’s who he wanted to be his Chief of Staff. I think he asked Andy about that time, “If I’m elected, I’d like you to be my Chief of Staff.” Anyway, he knew that I could do it, I knew that I could do it, but I wasn’t the right guy to do it.

Why weren’t you the right guy to do it?

I didn’t know Washington as well as Andy Card knew Washington, how the whole place worked. He had been there before, he had seen it work, he’d seen the pressures on the President. He saw how the Chief of Staff office works and its responsibilities, what its role should be. That’s a much more grueling job than the one I had in terms of hours and commitment and pressure. You’d better go in there with not only your A game, but you’d better go in there with some experience of how the whole place runs. I didn’t have that. I had a family up there. Andy’s family were already out of the house. He could be up there six, seven days a week, early in the morning until late, and beat the President there at six-thirty. You have to be there in front of the President, you’ve got to be after the President. It’s a really tough job and I wasn’t the man who was prepared for it. After a year or so I maybe could have gotten my legs under me, but at the same time, I just go back to what Daley said, “Go be Secretary of Commerce, that’s the best job in town,” and he was totally right. It was a wonderful experience.

I’ll tell you what else, put a feather in my cap or whatever, trying to sell Don Evans, but I was a damn good Secretary of Commerce. I was built for that kind of job. I’ve got the personality for that kind of job, people knew the President was my friend, they knew he trusted me. When I went out there, I was kind of taking the President out there. When you’re dealing with world leaders, that had a whole lot of heft to it, and others didn’t have that same kind of relationship. I was able to do things around the world, particularly in China and in Russia, that others could not have done. Our success in Russia dwindled somewhat, but still I think I played an important role in that relationship. China, an important role in that relationship, and other countries around the world. I was better suited to be a Commerce Secretary than I was the Chief of Staff.

We’ll do what they call a 30-second timeout.

[BREAK]

Going back to the transition period, were you involved in the other personnel decisions about Cabinet or staff?

Not really. I certainly didn’t have any kind of veto. Some of the names were run by me. I didn’t get involved in the Colin Powell decision. A little bit in the [Paul] O’Neill decision but not really. That was going on between the Vice President and the President. O’Neill was a Dick Cheney man, and of course Dick had worked with Colin Powell in the 41 administration. Many of the others I didn’t know. I didn’t know Gale Norton or Norm Mineta or Mel [Melquíades] Martinez or Ann Veneman.

How about Energy?

I knew Spence [Abraham]. I didn’t have a big role in that one either. I had a big role in [Samuel] Bodman, when he went. I told the President I thought Bodman would be a good Secretary of Energy in the second term, but Bodman came and worked with me in Commerce in the first term. No, I really didn’t have a big role in that. A bigger role I had was putting my own team together.

Of course.

Which started with Sam Bodman, a longtime friend, very smart, very able. In some of the other departments, some of the people who came in were individuals I got to know during the campaign, so others would call me and say, “Are you OK with this person?” I had a conversation with Gale Norton about one of the individuals she was wanting to appoint. But not too much of that either. I had my hands full with my own department. I have to interview a lot of people, make some selections. It’s not just one person coming in to see you. I had 150 appointments to make, so that’s a lot of meetings, meeting a lot of people and making decisions. I was pretty firm on wanting to put my own team together. A lot of the names came to me through the Personnel Office, through Clay Johnson’s operation, but I didn’t want him telling me who to put where. I wanted to be able to talk to them.

When did your designation get settled? How soon after the Supreme Court decision or was it before the Supreme Court decision?

It was pretty quick; I think it was right after.

December 20 is the day it was announced.

Yes, so it was after. Mel Martinez and Ann Veneman and I were announced together, in Austin, and we were pretty early.

Was the whole process of confirmation arduous, the background checks, the financials, all that?

Yes, it was. It goes back to when you’re 18 years old. And they dig and dig, and that gets pretty interesting because it’s back during your college years. They check with all your old roommates. I had one roommate I hadn’t talked to in a long time and I called him, Ronnie Boyer was his name, and I said, “Ronnie, the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] is going to be calling you and they want to talk to you about the time we shared an apartment, and ask you questions about that. But I need a number, where you live. I’ve got your phone number and it’s asking where you live.” And he said, “I don’t know.” I said, “You don’t know where you live?”

He said, “I just got remarried and we’re going to live in her house and I don’t know the address.” So those are some of the kind of characters the FBI was dealing with. It was time consuming and trying to go through your life from 18 years old to the time I was 54. A lot of interviews myself with the FBI, a lot of remembering, tracking down old friends.

Do you think the process is so arduous that it’s a disincentive to people?

It totally is, no question about it. I mentioned it wasn’t the perfect time for me career-wise. I had run Tom Brown for 20-plus years and all my future wealth I would have or would not have was tied up in that. It certainly wasn’t a very good time to exit that, but I had to. I had to sell all of my equities, all my interests. Basically had to put everything in cash, and it was certainly not a good time for me to do it. There’s that part of it.

Then you’re exposing yourself to all the criticism that goes with the territory. You meet people wanting to take shots at you. A lot of people wind up saying, “Why would I put myself through it?”

Then there are people like Deputy Sam Bodman, who had an illustrious career. This guy was a PhD in chemical engineering, a professor at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], he built Fidelity [Investments], the big money management firm, he ran Cabot [Corporation], and he wanted to have a public service part of his life. I’m talking to him about that, “Come on and work with me in Congress and be Deputy.” He said, “OK, I’ll do that.”

He had to resign as chairman and CEO of Cabot in January, and he did not get confirmed until June. So he has to resign without knowing if or when he’s going to be confirmed. That was an even worse situation than I was in. I had a pretty good feeling that I was going to be confirmed right away, but Sam didn’t know when he would be. There’s that aspect of it, there’s the financial sacrifice aspect of it for a lot of people. There’s the not knowing when and if you’ll be confirmed, before you make some other pretty serious commitments to just put yourself in the process. Then there’s exposing yourself to all the criticism that’s going to show up, which just goes with the territory.

Was there any concern that because you had been Bush’s campaign chairman and because there was still a bad feeling among Democrats about the outcome of the election, that you would be a target during the confirmation process?

I never heard any concern of that at all and the confirmation process was very smooth, very easy. The toughest one was McCain. All the others were simple and easy. I did learn that if you go up there and you’re respectful and nice to people and friendly, it works pretty good. It’s not that hard. I made good friends on the other side of the aisle that I was able to work with. I was able to work with the press well. A lot of those that others even in our own administration had trouble dealing with I seemed to work OK with. I don’t know what it was, other than just being friendly and nice to people, being interested in them and their families and who they are. Chris Matthews even liked me. Some people on the left wrote some pretty nice things.

When I left, Charlie Rangel was a good friend. He was one of those who called me right at the very end, “Sure enjoyed working with you, we got some things done. It was constructive and it was good work.” Going through it, doing the whole job, it just didn’t seem like it was—as I said, I had a great job, but the process of getting there, you’re making some sacrifices—your family, financially, exposing yourself to lots of criticism. The confirmation process is not hard as long as you haven’t done anything crazy in your life that all of a sudden is going to get exposed. Why would you get in it if you had? You fill out a lot of documents and do a lot of interviews and that is time consuming. That, in and of itself, is not going to dissuade you from doing it. The confirmation process shouldn’t, certainly for me.

Now, I said that about me, but I also made a comment about Sam Bodman, and the guy has to quit his one job before he knows. Sam would have had some issues, because he had done a lot of international work. Cabot was an international conglomerate and “You’ve been traveling around the world. What have you done around the world that maybe we should know about before we confirm you?” There’s some of that, but I think it’s more of the family sacrifice, the financial sacrifice, and exposing yourself to the white-hot lights of it all, knowing that right or wrong, people are going to take some shots at you.

Was there any concern, on either your part or the President’s part, that after having had a relationship that seems to have involved contact on a daily basis, you were about to go out of the inner circle and be responsible for running something on your own that would have maybe deprived both of you of that kind of contact and the feedback that you got from him?

No, there wasn’t much of that concern. I was going to see him a lot on a friend-to-friend basis. That was by Laura’s design. Not that he didn’t want it, just that she knew it was important for him to have friends around him. Because of that, I was around him a lot. As I already said, it was extremely powerful for me to be in the office I was in and have the relationship I had with the President. It was not a relationship that required daily conversation. It was a relationship that had built up over 30-something years.

Right.

And people knew that. Not only did people in town know that, but people around the world knew that, so it gave me more heft when it came to not only international issues, but domestic issues. I played an important role on the economic team, more so than maybe the typical Commerce Secretary would have played, just because of the relationship I had with the President and the fact that I had run a big publicly owned company, knew something about free enterprise and taking risks and how the whole economic system worked, how the private sector worked. Knowing how the private sector works, which is where all the wealth is created in the country, is important to structuring economic policy. Bringing my private sector experience to the economic policy discussions in government, I could bring something to the table because I’d done it. I know how to run a company, create value for shareholders, create wealth and create jobs. I’d done that, and that was a big deal. I think the relationship with the President, and the fact that I had been in the private sector myself, running a publicly owned company, made my voice pretty loud at the economic table and allowed me to be out there on the tube talking about it a lot.

The flip side of that question is whether the President was worried in any way about not having you immediately at his disposal, having had a long relationship with you. Was there anxiety that putting you in Commerce would, because of the nature of the job, create inevitable distractions, and it would suck up your time when he might have needed your guidance and counsel on things on a closer basis?

No, I don’t think that. The President, going into the fall, was making decisions about his team and who was going to be around him. In his political life, he had Karen Hughes, who had been with him since 1994. He had Karl Rove, who had been with him since 1993. He had Dan Bartlett, who had been with him, and Andy Card he had known for years. So he had a good cadre of people around him that he had great confidence in. I was going to see him on a regular basis, friend-to-friend basis.

Right.

At the White House or at Camp David or something. We got into our lanes, talked about economic issues some, because I was on the economic team. We talked about Commerce issues some, particularly early on, before 9/11 hit and sucked all the oxygen out of everything. He was laser focused on dealing with that, as well as the economy, which we talked about.

He called me real early, and we had some census issues because it was 2000 and that was the year of the census, so we were going to have to report on it in 2001. That was coming out of the Department of Commerce, so he was concerned how all that looked and how it was going to play out in the press. There are always all those questions about the methodology. The methodology you use can drive some economic issues, county by county across the country, so people are sensitive to “Did you count the minorities correctly?” There was some of that stuff we talked about a little bit.

We had a big energy crisis in California in the spring. I went on the Cheney energy taskforce and got involved with that.

It’s the biggest job in the world, you have to put a structure in place, put the right people in place and let them do their jobs, and that’s how he did it. He had selected Dick Cheney to be the Vice President, and he was looking to Dick for his wisdom in terms of the town and direction and policy decisions. So, no, that wasn’t a problem.

Did you have an agenda, things you wanted to accomplish when you became Secretary of Commerce?

You have to focus on a few things. The Commerce Department needs to be restructured but won’t be. It’s very hard to restructure anything in Washington, D.C., because there’s always an interest group that has great interest on the Hill in a particular agency. We had a number of agencies that really didn’t belong in the Commerce Department. I tried forever to—and we did it finally—change the title of one of the agencies. It was the Export Control Agency, and we changed it to BIS, Bureau of Industry and Security. There are a lot of issues like that within the Commerce Department. We’ve got Patents and Trademark, Minority Business Development, the Economic Development Agency, the Technology and Information Agency, the Export Control Department, the International Trade Department. We had NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]—that’s the biggest part of the budget by far.

But I knew that the best work I could do was to try to deliver the message to the world that the world could trust America. My relationship with the President helped me with that, but we were in a time when globalization was really starting to come into focus for everybody, and it was a time when people were realizing that the world had gone from socialist economic systems to free market systems, and China was at the forefront.

People were waking up to how all this stuff that Deng Xiaoping did in the late ’70s and early ’80s in terms of changing the direction of the China economy was starting to grow. China is growing pretty fast. When I was there it was a $1.2 trillion economy, growing at 10 percent a year. That was, “Whoa, can you believe that? And what’s going to happen?” China was big on what we needed to be focused on. And the way you strengthen that relationship is by sitting down and talking to people.

I wanted to be an ambassador for the country, for business around the world. That was my agenda, and I wanted to find really good people to run the Economic Development Agency or NTIA [National Telecommunications and Information Administration] or the International Trade Group or NOAA. I got a great team to run NOAA, and Sam Bodman, my Deputy, that was in his sweet spot. We worked a lot on global climate change and did some very constructive things there, but Sam was doing that. What I wanted him to do was go around the world as these free market economies are emerging and show people how it works in America and why it works the way it does. Try and take the message to them in a way that says, “We’re not telling you what to do, but here’s what works for us.”

My own agenda really got teed up by a conversation I had with Vladimir Putin in Crawford, in November of 2001, just a couple of months after 9/11. The President had him there to Crawford because Vladimir Putin was the first global leader who called him on 9/11. “I’m here to help you. We’ve got all the resources, the right teams, we’ve got all this equipment, we know how to deal with these terrorists, so call me if you need me.” The President returned the favor and there’s an interesting part of the story that hasn’t been told before, which I’ll tell you.

So he had him to Crawford and I think he was the first—

The leader of Mexico.

Yes, [Vicente] Fox was there, we had the state dinner right before. So he had Vladimir there and there were about 30 of us. Condi Rice was there, Van Cliburn was there playing the piano, because he had played in Russia back in the ’50s and was a big deal. Putin stood up and made a really powerful toast to the President immediately after we sat down for dinner. This is at the ranch, in a little patio area, a little breezeway area of the house. It was a November night and it was kind of cool and misty, but Vladimir got up and made this powerful toast to the President, in Russian, it was translated. He talked about the character and strength and courage of the man, and how important it was for the world to have this man in the Oval Office at this defining moment in history. This is all extemporaneous and coming across pretty strong.

Vladimir said, “I’ve been President of Russia for—” at that time it had been a little over a year. He said, “And I’ve traveled around the world and met a lot of leaders, but this is the first leader who has invited me into his home.” It was a big deal and it goes back to the way the President operates, how he relates to people. He wants to invite them into his home and to feel comfortable in his home, therefore feeling comfortable with him. I thought it was an interesting observation. I’ve seen it so much I just took it for granted, but to have a President of any country say that, it got my attention.

We got up from dinner, and I told Vladimir, “That was a powerful toast and I appreciated your remarks about the President.” So we’re standing around the fire talking about energy, oil and gas. I’m telling him about campfires and Texas and hunting in the winter, bird hunting and coming in at night and telling stories about the day. Vladimir said, “It’s pretty easy to relax around here, isn’t it?” This guy is so Goddamn wired up. I said, “Yes, it is, it’s OK, everything is all right.”

And then he asked me, “How has America accomplished so much in only 200 years?” And you’re kind of, wait a minute, 200 years is a long time, and then you say, well, no, we’re really a young country, right?

Yes.

I said, “It’s our freedoms that are grounded in our Constitution. It’s this incredible democratic capitalism, the free enterprise system that creates an environment for competition and competition leads to innovation, which leads to higher productivity, economic growth, higher standards of living, better quality of life.” And then I said, “The people of America are people of faith and they’re good people, and they wake up every morning trying to do the right thing. I don’t care what kind of system you have, what kind of regulations and rules you have, if people are not basically decent, honest people, it won’t work.”

That was the message I wanted to carry around the world, because I got that question wherever I went. As countries were moving away from leaders coming in and having discussions about military issues or defense issues, they were becoming more about economic issues and jobs for their people, raising the standard of living of their people, or moving toward a market-based system in all the Eastern Bloc and Asian countries. It was a matter of taking those elements, of how has America accomplished so much in only 200 years, around the world and telling people how we did it in America. Not telling you, “Here’s how you have to do it,” but “Here’s what’s worked for us.”

The other big moment for me was when I sat down and talked to Jiang Zemin for the first time. I told you the President’s story about the first time he met Jiang Zemin, which I did not know about until he told it just a few weeks ago to this group from China, but it was fascinating to me. The first time I sat down with Jiang Zemin and got to know him—I can’t say I got to know him well. I got to know his son well, his son and I still communicate and I’ve had some really interesting conversations with him. But his dad had his whole briefing down. “Yes, you’re the President’s good buddy and yes, he’s a little older than you but not much.” He knew our birthdays were three weeks apart and that we were good friends. He proceeded to hammer me on Taiwan, like they have to do. Then I’m leaving and he said, “Mr. Secretary, thanks for coming. But if you want to come back as our friend, go west, figure out what I’ve got going on out there. I have 700 million people living in poverty, that’s my challenge.” He said, “If you want to come back as our friend—” I wanted to come back as their friend, and I wanted him to understand that.

One of the first meetings I had when I got to Washington was with Jim Wolfensohn at the World Bank. He said, “There are six billion people on the planet, and half of them live on less than two dollars a day.” Whoa. In that conversation with Jiang Zemin I thought, The number one problem in the world is poverty. We have other problems, but none of them bigger than that one, and we ought to be doing something about it in the world and America ought to be leading it. That all started to sync up for me. I am a year in the office at that point and that shaped the direction I wanted to go. It was natural for me, the relationship with the President, I enjoy meeting people, and this brought a faith element into it for me, because I care about serving people.

The next time I went over there, I went west like Jiang Zemin had asked me to do, and I met two blind brothers. One was nine and the other one was eleven. We flew into Xi’an, which is the gateway to the west, and we then drove an hour and a half or so out to this little peasant farming community. China had, through an NGO [nongovernmental organization], started a program to help those who were visually impaired in a couple of provinces, and Shaanxi Province was one of them. These two blind brothers were in this program. I go to meet them and they live in a little old two-room house. I walk in and the mother is just in tears, she can’t believe I’ve come to see her two boys. And they take me to their little school. The education system actually started to be put in place, a program for the visually impaired, and these two blind boys are going to class and learning.

I go and watch them function in their classroom, and one of the younger ones is showing me how you learn to read and write in Braille, and he was just amazing. He had only been doing it for several months, but it’s amazing how he can in Braille write out—I said, “Look, here’s what to do. I’m going to see Premier Wen Jiabao tomorrow and I want you to write him a letter in Braille. Just say, ‘Dear Premier Wen Jiabao, Don Evans is my good friend,’ and sign your name.” He knocked that out and I went to see the Premier the next day and we went through our normal talking point kind of thing and then I said, “By the way, I was out—”

By that time, Jiang Zemin was gone, Hu Jintao was in, and then Premier Wen Jiabao. I said, “I saw Jiang Zemin, and he asked me to go out west. I did and I met these two blind boys and they’ve sent you a letter in Braille.” They had it translated into Chinese characters, and he read it and teared up on me, because he was a man from the country, from a rural part of China. We got into a long discussion and he said, “Don’t ever forget those two boys.”

I said, “You don’t need to worry about that. They’re going to be two of your best entrepreneurs in this country someday.” I have not forgotten them; I keep up with them. I’ve been back to see them another four times, maybe five, and I talk to them twice a year. Helped them through school, sent them off to school for training in what they wanted to do, which is therapy, which is a big thing in China. Being visually impaired, they can do that. Vice Premier Madame Wu Yi got to be a really dear friend of mine; she was in charge of all of healthcare in China. I asked her one time if I could bring the boys to the U.S. I wanted to see if I could get them surgery in the U.S., and she said, “No, I’ll take care of it.” They went and found the younger boy, and I got him into surgery and now he has some vision.

But the big point of all that is trying to show other countries that you care. When Premier Wen Jiabao traveled the United States giving talks across the country, he said, “I hope the business community in the U.S. looks at China like Secretary Evans looks at China. Go west, see our challenges out there, understand them.” That’s important. China, rightfully so, has the concern, “You capitalists want to come into China. We have a lot of people, and you want to build something and haul a bunch of money out of here.” Is that the impression you want them to have of us, or do you want them to have the impression that we’re here to help you solve the problem of 600 million people living in poverty? We’re not telling you how to do it, we’re telling you how we did it and what’s important in terms of economic policy.

It was a powerful message to me and I tell everybody I talk to who wants to go to China, go west before you go east, because if you go west and show them you care about the people and you’re sensitive to that, then all of a sudden those in the east trust you and think you’re there for the right reasons. I can’t tell you what it did for me in terms of trust that the country, the leadership had in me. I got to know Xi Jinping, the current President, fairly well. I’ve had three meetings with the guy and the last one was a few years ago, before he was President. I was out of government and I went by to see him because we had gotten to know each other a little bit, had a nice visit. We were talking about the economy and he said, “You’re going to see those blind boys tomorrow, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, sir, I am.” He said, “You really love those boys, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, sir, I do.” That about God-dang blew me away, this official of the hierarchy of China, now he’s the President, would use that word, that you love those boys. That’s not something I expected to come out of his mouth.

That gave me a feeling of what role I could play that could do something positive in the world. The people in America are good people, they’re people of faith, they’re trying to do the right thing. Just trying to show that a little bit.

I spent a lot of time in Russia, I have a lot of good friends in Russia. The Vladimir Putin relationship went from hopeful in the early years as Russia’s financial challenges during 2001-2003 were severe. That all changed when oil prices went up and he didn’t need America. When oil prices were down, he needed our capital, our investment, and maybe technology, needed American dollars to come in to invest. I had quite a few meetings with him and when I got out of office, he asked me to come see him. I went to see him, and he asked if I would consider being the chairman of Rosneft, which is his large oil company in Russia. It blew me away. “Me, an American. You want me to be chairman of your Russian company?” He said, “Yes, I’d like for you to think about it. I think you’ll be able to manage it coming over four or five times a year.”

Was I flattered? I guess I was. I thought about it a little bit, turned it down for a wide variety of reasons. I did think about it because it was a big deal. I can go back to my core issue of the number one problem in the world is poverty, and you can’t solve poverty without growing your global economy at its full potential, and you can’t grow your global economy at its full potential without affordable, available energy. They were the number one producer of energy in the world, and this was their largest oil company. If I could influence any of that, that would probably be pretty cool. But I think more than anything, I would say—and I don’t know if it was Vladimir so much, but the leaders and friends, like German Grey, I had in Russia trusted me and therefore felt comfortable in suggesting me to him as somebody to be the chairman of Rosneft.

Let me ask you this, and I’m going to phrase it in a harsh way, even though it’s not harsh.

Sure.

You have these warm, personal encounters in China and Russia, with leaders, with blind boys, and so on, and think that makes a difference for the country, but at the end of the day, when the Soviet Union doesn’t need American investment anymore, they become hard to deal with. In other words, do these personal relationships amount to anything when economic interest or political interest is driving their behavior?

Probably only slightly at the margin. I can’t in any way suggest that it’s moving the needle or it overtakes the economic interest. I think at some level, not great but some level, while I was in office and some since I’ve left office, I’ve changed the thinking of American companies as to how they should think about China. When Penny Pritzker asked for my advice I said that basic thing. “Madam Secretary, I’d go west before I went east. If you want to get them to trust you, you have to show you care about their people.” She took me up on that and she did it. From that, maybe there’s a little bit of pattern where she’s going to be saying the same thing to people, “Don’t go over there with the attitude that you’re going to just make a whole bunch of money and haul it out of there. Go with the attitude that you’re there to participate in the economy but yes, the ultimate goal here for the country is to lift people out of poverty and provide jobs for them.”

So what I hear you saying is you go to other countries, you tell them this is America’s story, make what use of it applies to you. Also, you come home and say to American companies, “Here’s something you didn’t know about this country, if you want to go over there and do business in a way that’s going to be mutually beneficial.”

That’s right and you have to be respectful of their system. Maybe our system doesn’t work for them, so don’t go over there trying to say, “I have all the answers. We have it all figured out.” We may have it figured out at some levels for our own system, but not for their system. Be respectful of whatever system they have. I’m not saying that you don’t want to encourage market-based systems, but I’m not going over there hammering the communists, “I can’t believe you’ve got a Communist Party here still. What is going on?” Quite frankly, I think it probably works pretty well for them right now.

I was always impressed with the fact that they have a standing committee of 12, and when I was in office 11 of the top 12 leaders were engineers, problem solvers, know how to set up on a problem and go fix it. We’re different. We elect a new Congressman every two years, the President every four years, Senators every six years. There’s always an election cycle and there’s always a lot of focus on the upcoming election and that tends to cause people to think short-term instead of long-term. Sometimes really short-term, the next year, this fall, as opposed to being able to look at the problems and put something in place you think is a long-term solution, knowing there may be a little pain between here and there.

[BREAK]

I’ll tell you two quick stories about me in the museum. I’m aware of three spots. I’m in a picture when you first walk in, and he’s being sworn in as Governor. At the end, I’m in a picture of the groundbreaking for the library itself, where we’ve all got shovels in our hands. Then in the middle there’s a glass case right outside the Oval Office. We were wandering through there about five or six days before it was to open, the President and I and some others with us get to this glass case with three items in it. It has a letter that his daughter Jenna [Bush] wrote him in 2004, saying that she wanted to be involved in the election. It has the badge that he held up when he talked to Congress. And there’s a Bible in there and he said, “That’s the Bible that Evans gave me.”

It’s not the exact Bible I gave him, I’ve given him several along the way, but the first one I gave him was when we had just started bible study. It was that fall of 1984, our first Bible study that he was attending and I was attending. I gave him the classic one-year Bible, the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs, for a Christmas gift. He read it, start to finish, the next year. I had never asked him the question before, but I knew he read it often. I said, “I’m going to get asked this question, so how many times have you read it start to finish?” And he said, “I have read it since then every other year.” The odd number years he would read it start to finish. I would say that’s 13 times. I thought that was an interesting little—Who would have read all the way through it 13 times? Pretty strong.

Absolutely.

That was just a little aside.

It strikes me in listening to you talk about your experiences in China, that what we’re looking at is a version of compassionate conservatism abroad that has parallels in other things that the President is very much involved in, that we know about and for the historical record want to get more on. One being the Millennium Challenge Account and the other being PEPFAR [President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief]. Were you engaged with him in either of these two efforts?

I was aware of them and knew what they were doing. Those were all coming out of the White House and his policy thinkers over there. I remember certainly being involved particularly with the Millennium Challenge Account, and being in meetings where that was being discussed and how it was going to be structured, what the incentives were going to be and what the guidelines would be for countries to participate. I can remember all that, but just as somebody who was receiving the information and would deliver the message around the world.

When you’re having these international trips, are you, on a regular basis, reporting back to the President?

I report back to the White House. We’d always send over a memo or something.

To whom?

The policy shop would look at it. In some cases, things might be plucked out of it and sent up to the President. The stories that I’ve told you, those were personal discussions I would have with him. We’re up at Camp David and, “I just got back from China and here’s what happened.”

Right. That’s what I was eliciting.

I would tell him about those discussions and my conversation with Putin and my conversation with Jiang Zemin and the blind brothers and that type of thing. He knew all about what I was doing with Putin. We’d have those discussions.

I think you’re right, it’s the compassionate conservative thing or two guys of faith trying to do something that impacts people’s lives in a positive way, trying to think about a bigger picture. Realizing that hey, it’s just at the margin. I don’t have a lot of power, and it’s a lot of thinking one heart, one soul at a time. I can’t change the world, but I may be able to change one heart. I’ve affected the lives of two blind boys in China, and I don’t know where that goes. I know one thing, I talked to the older brother a couple years ago and he said, “I heard you’re kind of a religious man.” I said, “Yes, I’m a man of faith.” And he said, “God bless you,” which he said to me in English, which he wanted to kind of brag on the fact that he can say that in English. All the rest was with translation.

So I impacted those lives, and that’s really all you can do and hope it spreads in some way. But it gave me a mission, it totally did, where I felt very comfortable with my personal beliefs and how I could impart those to other people. People know I’m a person of faith, that I don’t wear it on my sleeve but I hope through my actions they can see it. And hopefully through my actions, it made them comfortable with who I am and it made it easier for me to talk to them.

Again, you focus on a few things, I was primarily Russia and China. The feedback I got from others—Carlos Gutierrez, you can talk to him—was such that I felt like I made a difference. He went around the world and talked to people and heard comments they made.

There wasn’t any big policy thing. I was very involved in all the economic issues. The three big economic bills that passed and were signed in Congress, ’01, ’02, and ’03, particularly the one in ’03, which was the big one. I worked that hard on the Hill, I worked it hard on TV. The other one was trade promotion authority, which gives the President the ability to negotiate a trade agreement. You cannot move aggressively on free trade without it. I took a lot of hits on that; I’ve read some about the steel tariffs and the administration coming out in favor of those. That’s all totally misunderstood. We can talk about that too, if you want to.

Sure.

Those were the big policy things, three of them. The economic bills, the trade promotion authority, and then that led to trade agreements that were negotiated by the President and by the USTR [United States Trade Representative], Bob Zoellick. Then, third, on a lesser scale but from a policy standpoint, the whole climate change thing. When I got there, there was no structure around it, there was money being spent all over government and nobody coordinating any of it.

My first question was how much money are we spending on it? It was $550 or $600 million, and then they came back a day later, “But over here we’re spending another $400 and then over here it’s another $700.” When it was all said and done with, we were spending close to $6 billion on climate change science and technology, and that’s ridiculous. We have to put the structure in place where people know what others are doing and break down all these silos and put some priorities to how we spend all this money.

We did that and that was really the architecture of Sam Bodman. Sam was a fabulous deputy. He worked hard on it. We both did it and we accomplished a lot with it. The structure that it wound up being, all of the Cabinet offices were in it because every department seemed to have some piece of the action, but the two leaders of it were Commerce and Energy, and we would flip back and forth in terms of who the chairman would be of it year to year, but Commerce would basically have the science side, which comes out of NOAA, and Energy would have the technology side.

We’ve brought the world together on sharing data, which had not been shared effectively. There’s probably still more work to be done bringing countries of the world together and sharing weather data and economic data. I think annually they have a big summit, but what got my attention was we all talked about La Niña and El Niño and all that stuff, and that was all because we got monitoring systems out in the Pacific, buoys out there where we could watch water temperatures and that kind of thing. What about the rest of the world? We need to have that data from the rest of the world, try and get better data as we make decisions. It was all an effort to get priorities in terms of how this money was being spent and put some structure around it and some sharing of information. We made some headway on that.

I wouldn’t say I’m a skeptic, but I would say that as opposed to—the department, even the guy who was running it for me, Jim Mahoney, a wonderful guy. He had done the acid rain stuff for H. W. Bush back in ’91, in the middle of the Clean Air Act, and he was very good. He really was pretty strong about, “There’s something going on here,” but I was always, “We don’t know what’s going on. These models are flawed and they may help you, but there are too many variables that you cannot accurately measure.” The IPPC [International Plant Protection Convention] report that just came out suggested some of that, that a lot of the forecasting done 15 or 20 years ago was somewhat off. They were forecasting higher temperatures than we’re seeing. My main point being that, to me anyway, it’s not irrefutable, what’s going on. We’re still trying to figure this out.

I tried to bring some rational thinking and structure to how we think about it and tried to set up something where policy decisions are being made with good data. I think unfortunately decisions are being made as political decisions, that it sells well, the whole environmental block, we have to do something about this or we have to have more solar panels, more windmills, and more green this or that. I’m pro-environment big-time, but we’re being told this data is irrefutable, which it is not. I also think relative to, we’ve got 300 million people here, there are 6.5 billion people someplace else who are not going to be subjected to whatever we’re trying to subject our own economy to. So what are you doing?

I was reading something on it not too long ago that he sent me, that that climate summit is still, it came out of our work, they’re still out there and there are still relationships and they’re still sharing the data, which made me feel good. To me it’s not as impactful as my work in China and in Russia and the message I was able to deliver when I went to the Eastern Bloc countries of Europe or even South America or Africa. I think I was able to deliver a message that “we care about you.”

Any country I went to, I wanted to make sure that I was going to see those in need, some that needed a helping hand. That took me to a lot of interesting places, particularly when I went to Ghana and Morocco and saw some of the suffering there. It got my attention. I went to Russia early on. The Foreign Minister, [Mikhail] Kasyanov, and O’Neill were there. We had flown in on a government plane and had dinner the first night in the White House, which is kind of the Congress up in Duma, that’s where they meet. I talked to AmCham in Moscow, American Chamber of Commerce, encouraging a United Way type of program.

I went to dinner that night—I quit drinking 20 years ago myself, not that I had any big issue with it, I was like the President in some ways. Actually, I was probably drinking a beer or something every now and then, up until the time I’m with the government, and then I totally quit. So I’m in Russia and they drink over there, in case you didn’t know that.

I’ve never heard that.

Jeez almighty. So the vodka is coming and everything is showing up before the meal and during the meal and after the meal, and I’m trying to slog my way through it without drinking anything, and listening to the conversation get louder and louder. I had talked about my day and AmCham and United Way, and Kasyanov said, “What’s United Way?”

I said, “That’s when people make contributions, nonprofit, and they help other people in need.” A totally foreign concept, why would you do something like that? Why would you give money to somebody to give to somebody else who may need a helping hand? It’s a totally foreign concept, which was an eye-opener for me.

You asked me what I did that was important. I’ve been carrying this message. I’m in Morocco and I’m talking to a crowd of about 300 people at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence. I’ve got my normal remarks about global trade and the ports of Morocco, the U.S. relationship, what their economy is doing. I started talking about the global economy and I said, “There are six billion people on the planet and three billion live on less than two dollars a day. There’s too much despair and not enough hope, and too much poverty and not enough opportunity in too many parts of the world, and it’s our responsibility to do something about it,” ours being America’s. “We have to lead on this issue.”

I finished my remarks and people came up to me and said, “You really care, don’t you?” I said, “Yes, America cares.” Just the fact that they would think we don’t care or we’re not that interested—I don’t think people really understand the generosity of America.

I met a Minister from Egypt, Youssef Ghali, a wonderful man. He was a Trade Minister. He’d come by to see me early, and we talked about the U.S. supporting people around the world. He said, “America’s problem is they fly in overhead and they dump a bunch of baskets out of their airplanes and just drop them on people,” or money or whatever. He said, “You have to go hand it to them, you have to put it in their hand, you have to look at them and touch them.” The idea that you dump it on these countries, they don’t appreciate it. Those two things fed into my whole “America cares, we want to help the world, we want to make this world a better place.” Domestically, I was economic issues, and then of course the trade thing that I mentioned, a little bit on the climate change, but I got into, “We care and we want to make a difference in the world and we want to lead the world. We want the world to grow at its full potential, so we can create jobs for people, so people can put roofs over their heads and feed their families.” It was that kind of rhythm that I got into, where I really felt comfortable and felt that I was taking a more compassionate message to the world and showing it to them.

I went to China; I’d go to church. Trying to be the third part of that whole religious freedom, competition, good people, trying to do the right thing, and really believed it and developed it.

It’s interesting that in all you’ve talked about so far concerning your time in the Bush administration, 9/11 really hasn’t come up. People in the administration usually say there was pre-9/11 and then there was everything after. Is that because your work really wasn’t dramatically affected by 9/11? The things you’re telling us about are things that were as important before as after, it seems.

Look, 9/11 impacted me in a big way. I was on the Hill with my legislative affairs officer, Brenda Becker, seeing Jim Gibbons, the Congressman from Nevada, in a nine o’clock meeting. I was fortunate to have Brenda as she was the best in town. The first plane hit at just before nine. I walk into his office, the second plane hits and my legislative affairs lady and I said, “We’d better go back to the office.” I walked out of his office, walked out on Constitution Avenue, looked up at the Capitol and said, “What if they’d hit that? That would have been something, wouldn’t it?”

I called my office and they said, “We’re not in those towers, but we have an office across the street.” I said, “OK, I have to go to my office.” I go back down to my office, which faces out across the lawn of the Washington Monument and across the Potomac. And I saw the Pentagon was on fire. Oh, my gosh, it was a surreal moment. What’s going on?

From that moment, it was what do you do? I wanted to stay until we get evacuated and they’re saying, “No, you have to go.” Finally, they hauled me out of there and I got some security on me. We leave and I go to my house. My son and wife had arrived four days earlier, they arrived on the seventh.

Where are you living?

McLean, right around the corner from the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]. My wife has been there for four days and my son’s in school, and I get to the house and we need to go get him. We call the school and some of the parents have picked up their kids and others haven’t, and, “Let’s go get him.” So they went to get him, brought him home, and in the meantime, the two towers had come down and they were going to take me to the undisclosed location, which is Mount Weather [Emergency Operations Center], and by the time he’s coming home, there are about eight motorcycles and a motorcade of about five cars in front of the house, and they’re getting ready to throw me in there and take me off to Mount Weather.

Just you?

Just me. Well, other Cabinet secretaries.

But just you out of your family.

Yes, just me out of my family. I go up there. Tommy Thompson shows up, Gale Norton shows up, and I can’t remember who else. There were certain members of the Cabinet who couldn’t be in line, like Elaine Chao and Mel Martinez, so they weren’t there. I go up there and spend the night.

Had you been aware before this time of a contingency plan?

Yes.

OK. So you knew that this was going to happen if there were some emergency.

I knew how it sort of worked. That was in the first orientation. Anything ever happens, you’re going here and we’ll take you up there and show you how it works. We had not done that but—

[BREAK]

I was up there for a few nights and then I come back for a Cabinet meeting on September 13 or 14.

And in this interval you haven’t talked with the President?

No. I didn’t see him until the Cabinet meeting. He came in and made his remarks. That was an eye contact thing as much as anything else. He had a lot on his mind. The main thing for me at the moment was to be there.

Yes.

Not much else, because that wasn’t in my sweet spot, where we were heading with this, but I was there. We had a Cabinet meeting and then we ran, and from that point on one Cabinet officer who was in line to be the President had to be out of the city or up at Mount Weather. For the next couple of years we did that, so that put me up at Mount Weather or out on the road quite a bit for the next couple of years.

Not that weekend but the following weekend, my wife and I went to Camp David with the President. I was going through my Bible the other day and I was looking at Micah. I can’t remember the exact chapter and verse, but that’s the sermon that Evergreen Chapel came out of, the Book of Micah, chapter 6, verses 1-8. At Camp David we did all the activities on Saturday, playing golf or bowling, watching a movie. Then on Sunday morning, we’d get up and do a bike ride, get some exercise, go to Evergreen Chapel, and then head down to Laurel Lodge, which is where you ate. He’d always have his big old Belgian waffle with a lot of whipped cream on it and a bunch of berries or something, piled up the syrup on it too. “OK, be at the helicopters in 45 minutes.” Of course we always worried, but it was that weekend, as we were preparing to leave, when he’s there at the helicopters, we had the ceremony of bringing the flags back up to full mast. They had been at half-mast until that Sunday, which would have been some ten or 12 days later, I don’t know exactly.

The morning of 9/11, I did all the five shows early, about the economy. We were having trouble with the economy and coming out of the recession, so I did the five morning shows, which means you get there like at six o’clock and start doing them. I was back on a week later doing the same thing, only dealing with 9/11 and the shock to the economy and the stock market and getting it back up and going. Trying to give people confidence that we can manage this and we’re going to be OK, because there were all kinds of concerns that the economy was struggling a little bit, but a lot of concerns that man, this is really going to throw us in the tank here, no telling what the numbers were going to look like. I tried to get out there and be a face on the economy. “We can get through it; we can manage our way through it. The stock market is up and going.” I focused on the economy, and others were a face on the military side of all this and what that response was going to be.

I called my friend Bill Daley and said, “Bill, we need to show people it’s OK to fly and OK to move around. Do you mind flying to Washington with me? We’re going to get on a plane to Kansas City and just show people that it’s OK to fly again.” He said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” He came to Baltimore and we had a morning press thing and then jumped on a flight and flew to Kansas City, had a big old steak and a nice visit, and then he went home and I went home.

I went to Detroit and sat down with the motor companies and talked about what they could do to give people confidence in the economy, and they stepped right up. They provided some incentives for people to buy cars, and that was helpful. I had several big events around tourism, so I worked the whole tourism side of the U.S. economy and tried to figure out ways we could support that. We found a little money for advertising in spots around the world, but there wasn’t a lot of that. It was more just talking about how it was safe and “Come to America.”

I’m going to institute a full stop here, because if we work through this lunch, it’s not going to be the break we think.

[BREAK]

You were saying that on PEPFAR the President—

PEPFAR he was able—at the core of that is what I’ve already talked about to where you’re probably tired of it, but we’re placed here to help other people. That’s our highest calling. Here is a huge problem in the world that is not being addressed like it should be. There are millions of people dying over there and nobody is dealing with it like they should. So by gosh, America, we lead the world and we’re going to deal with it. He was able to lead that charge. Is it using political capital? Maybe it is, maybe that’s using political capital, because he’s going to drive it through a Congress, Democrat and Republican, that oftentimes one of the first things people say, “What about the budget, can we afford to do this?” And he says, “We can’t afford not to do it. This is something we have to do if we’re going to legitimately call ourselves leaders of this world.”

Not only did he get it through, but it has created some momentum that those who follow him, including the current President, are in a position where they have to keep funding it, keep working it, because it’s based on such sound fundamental principles of us as human beings and us as a country. It’s hard to argue, what are we going to stand for? If we can’t stand for this, what are we going to stand for?

From this institute we’ll continue to shine the spotlight on that, as well as continuing with what we call pink ribbon and red ribbon, which is going after breast cancer and cervical cancer in Africa. Just an example of what I was talking about and he’s able to get out now and begin to talk more about his philosophy, his ideology, how we ought to make decisions as Americans. We’ll have a human freedom agenda and an economic agenda, there will be a global health agenda. He’ll have a chance to use this as a platform to get out and talk about the country and its direction. What are our responsibilities here as Americans? What does the world look for us to do, as well as his views on keeping us anchored in the values and the beliefs that brought us to the point where the whole world marvels at America. How do you accomplish so much in only 200 years?

How did you go about deciding to put the facility here?

Many would think it was a foregone conclusion. That’s probably about 75 percent true, not 100 percent true, because this is an urban setting here with a lot of land. We control about 25 acres, which is an extremely valuable piece of property. We wanted the competition and to look at other ideas that might come to us. We opened it up and looked at the University of Texas, we looked at A&M, where his dad’s is, at Texas Tech, at [University of Texas at] Arlington. We looked at a nice site out next to the University of Dallas and we looked at Baylor [University]. Those are the main ones we looked at and a lot of them brought very solid proposals. We narrowed it down to Baylor and here, and we were looking at Texas Tech, and both of those brought very strong proposals to the table, but at the end it was—they were going to live here, so being able to be in their backyard was a big draw to having it here. It meant they could spend a little more time here, which is one of the big attractions. People have an opportunity to engage with the President and Laura and that’s a big deal, that’s what enables you to attract the talent that we have around here, is that they can engage with a former President.

You look at the Clinton Library, it’s a nice setup, but he makes it there once every few months, whereas this President is going to be here every week and her as well. Laura’s on the board here, she went to school here. It’s a fabulous location. It came down to this report would get out, the SMU [Southern Methodist University] alumni, and we were pretty comfortable that we’d get healthy financial support out of it, which we did.

I know there was some controversy with SMU, I guess mostly faculty. Was that a tempest in a teapot, or did that have a serious effect on your work?

It made them nervous, them being SMU, at some level, hoping that they could manage it, thinking they could, but it’s not a cinch until it’s done. I knew the history about Reagan and Stanford [University] and that Reagan wanted his library on the Stanford campus. That was announced and some of the faculty members immediately went to the media and said, “No, we’re not going to have a partisan facility here on our campus.” They could have gotten through it, but Reagan said, “They don’t want it, fine. I’ll take it someplace else, not a problem.”

Right.

I think it goes without saying that generally speaking, if you took a vote across the campuses of America, George Bush is not going to get 50 percent of the vote, he’s going to get something less than that. There was a time when there was certainly still a lot of heat on him with respect to the war and the people questioning that now, so there was that concern. The pushback from the campus, the faculty—the President has to be able to manage the faculty.

Sure.

Then them worrying about it being a partisan facility, which we knew it wasn’t going to be, but it’s hard to convince them of that until you see it, and you’re not going to see it if it’s not built. There was a lot of angst around it. There was even some angst among the Methodist bishops, which surprised me, but I think that was maybe just stirred up in a few little spots here and there, some of the bishops had to work their way through it. I had a couple of meetings with them and it all worked out fine. I think they wanted to have their points heard and they were heard.

People come here now and walk through the museum and say, “This is not a monument to George W. Bush, it’s about his Presidency.” We have a section in there on [Hurricane] Katrina. We mention weapons of mass destruction six or seven times. We talk about the financial collapse. We put it all out there. The main theme of the museum and of this institute is how you make decisions and how you lead, and the principles on which he based his decisions and being true to them. It’s about leadership, freedom, being faced with tough decisions and how you make them. You haven’t seen it, Russell, part of it’s called the Decision Points Theater.

Right.

You have Katrina in there, the financial crisis, and the surge, and you try to set it up so that you present to the visitor the facts that were presented to the President on both sides. And then you have to make a decision.

Is there a negotiation of any kind that goes on between the foundation and NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] over what will be in the museum, or do you all control that or do they control it?

We control the setting up of the museum and its design and what’s in it. Once we’ve done that and we open this place, we turn the keys over to them. Basically, if you make changes in there, then it’s going to be in cooperation and coordination with NARA.

Oh, is that right?

There’s an exhibit hall that they also control, but we’ll work very closely with them on what we put in there. They’re setting up right now for Christmas season.

You mean special changing exhibits?

Yes. Special exhibits will be there for a few months, and right now there’s the one on Christmastime. I think it’s gingerbread houses that were in the White House those eight years, and a few other odds and ends like that. We’ll have the Magna Carta. We were going to have it in ’14, now it looks like it’s going to be ’15, but that came through NARA.

George Washington’s Annals of Congress?

Stuff like that. There will be rotating exhibits and we’ll have to work with NARA on that. It’s a very detailed joint use agreement. We built this place and we operate it except for where the museum and the archives are. They have the keys to all those doors and they decide when to lock them and when to unlock them. We run the rest of this place. They’re pretty tough to deal with, and you need to go in with your eyes wide open when you sit down and negotiate with them each time. We learned a lot by talking to Clinton and Reagan, all the others. “What are the issues that came up and how did you deal with them? How do you divide up the space and who’s paying for what?” All that kind of stuff. In the end it worked fine. We have a great archivist here, Alan Lowe, and in the future we have a say in who the archivist is, but we don’t have absolute control over that. They decide who’s going to go there.

Do you know how the document processing is going? It’s typically very slow.

I do not know.

Slowly and unevenly with weird topics.

I don’t know, I haven’t heard any of that. I just know we have a lot of people going through the museum. I don’t know about the archives.

It’s a question of interest to us because, within the scholarly community, there are skeptics about oral history, the value of relying on memory for creating a historical record, and particularly among the historians there are a lot of document fetishists who think that history is only what the contemporaneous documents are going to tell you. One of the most powerful countervailing arguments that we can offer is that we don’t disagree with the importance of documents, but you don’t have any documents to look at.

Right.

The last time I checked with the library at College Station, and this was about a year ago, roughly something under 20 percent of H. W. Bush’s Presidential records would be available for public inspection. This is 20 years or so after, and I think the rule of thumb is a new percent every year. So after 50 years, you’re going to have about 50 percent, but that was before email.

Oh, no, the numbers are off the chart.

And I don’t think that there’s any greater processing capacity. So you have probably the same size archival staff here processing the regular paper record that you have at the Clinton Library, and on top of that all of the electronic stuff that would have been a fixture of this Presidency. It would be terrific if we could convince Congress to spend another billion dollars a year on archival staff to process, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen.

No, he explained it really well. I always go back to the same thing I’ve already talked about, which is his faith. He didn’t worship the power of the office, he worshiped a much higher authority than the power of the office and was very comfortable that even though those were really tough decisions, he’s making decisions based on what he thinks is in the long-term best interest of the American people. Short-term, there’s going to be some pain here, but my job is long-term, protecting this—trying to take this country to where you want to take it. I saw a little clip on [Jay] Leno on TV this morning. “How do you feel? God-durn, man, your approval numbers were pretty low.”

He said, “I just finished reading a book on George Washington. They’re still writing about him, still trying to figure him out. It’s going to be a long time before they figure out his Presidency, so I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over it. It will be long after I’m gone and they’re still studying it and trying to understand what happened.” I think in the oral history you’ll get some of this more personal stuff that you hear. As far as I’m concerned, he is a decent man with very strong faith, trying to make the right decisions for the right reasons. It wasn’t about him being more popular or more powerful. It was just about him making the right decisions for the right reasons.

Let’s take a five-minute break.

[BREAK]

You mentioned earlier the trip to Camp David that you made the second week after 9/11. Was that the first chance you had to speak to the President?

Yes.

What could you tell us about his state of mind and what you were finding with your old friend, given the weight of the problems he was confronting?

We were able to laugh a little bit. I don’t remember exactly about what, but I think we were able to laugh about whatever it was we happened to be talking about at the time. He seemed very comfortable and steady, on top of things, continuing to take in information. He spent a lot of time on the phone while we were there. He has the Aspen House and I’d be over there with him and the phone would ring or an aide would come in with something. I know we did the bike thing; we’d go up there and play a little golf and a few little activities during the day and he’d find time to take a little nap or have some quiet time in the afternoon. But he was focused on his job.

Did you ever worry about him because of the weight of the problems?

No, I never did. I think back to the core of the person and who he is. I certainly saw the pressure of the Presidency in terms of there’s always something. Even when I would go over there on a weeknight, just to have dinner with him or sit around and visit, you could have a conversation but it wouldn’t last too long before there was something else that had to come into the mix, or a briefing book, which he was always very conscientious about. A briefing book every night that he has to go through, and phone calls coming in, always weighty problems. The toughest of the problems come to his desk, and it’s all relative. The toughest of the toughest is sending young men and women to war, but always the toughest ones come there and they can’t be solved someplace else, so they come to his office.

So many of the decisions that come to the President’s desk, most people are going to come down on them the same way. I watch what’s happening right now, and I feel some fundamental shifts in the direction of the country, in terms of how we’re steering it. But having said that, I always felt like in the course of a Presidency there are six or seven or eight really tough decisions that come to you, and how are you going to handle those? And the importance of having somebody there you can trust a hundred percent of the time that they’re making the right decision for the right reason.

I think his whole discipline of having a balanced life, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and mentally, prepared him for each decision that came across his desk, not to mention the fact that he came into the office with some fundamental core beliefs and principles. He had also observed his dad in the Vice Presidential office for eight years and in the Oval Office for four years. He had a feel for what happens there and he was prepared for it. He was even, in terms of being able to handle it emotionally and mentally, prepared to have a 9/11 event. Nobody wants one, but you’d better have somebody who can handle it if it happens.

Of course.

That goes back to my comment to him back in the campaign. “How do you handle a crisis? Or how do you handle adversity?” After 9/11 I saw a guy who was in charge and knew his job and his responsibility and focused on, “What’s our next step going to be? It’s going to be Afghanistan, what we’re going to do there,” and then I’m sure began to think longer term. This thing is larger, what do we do about that? He wasn’t uncomfortable with the position he was in. There’s a lot of pressure on the job.

One of the things I would think you must have been very much involved in is the effort to restore some semblance of economic health in the aftermath of 9/11.

Right.

You’ve talked about getting on the airplane with Bill Daley, but I wonder if you could talk a little more about your role in trying to get things back on the right path after this extraordinary shock to the economic system.

The first thing was to get the stock market going, not that I had a lot of control of that, other than just talking to the leadership of the stock market and assuring them that the government was here to give them all the support that they needed or wanted. I can remember a couple of conversations around that in the early days after 9/11, and trying to keep my eye on when were we going to get it up and going. It wasn’t too long, five days or six days. That was making sure that those officials knew that the Federal Government was there with all of its resources, and of course O’Neill was doing the same thing from the Department of Treasury.

Mine was more, as I told Penny Pritzker not too long ago, I said, “The most important thing you can do is be out there and be a voice and let people see you, and deliver an optimistic, positive message with some substance to it. But they have to see you.” That goes back to what Youssef Ghali told me. You have to show up, you have to touch people, but they have to see you and hear from you. That gives them some comfort. I was doing that by being on the tube a fair amount, but then having events, like I already talked about—the General Motors event, the Ford event, the tourism event, those kinds of things that show you’re back out there on the economy.

The good thing is that the data and the response pretty quickly defied all the concerns the people had. Economic data started coming in and people said, “Whoa, looks like we’re still doing OK economically.” I think that helped more than anything. What nobody knew, with a huge uncertain event like that, and when people pull in their horns in a big way and the fact is they didn’t. The economy was coming out of a recession in the second quarter and it continued. The third quarter wouldn’t have been hit much by it anyway, just the last two or three weeks, but the fourth quarter was a big, strong quarter. So the economy was coming out of recession and kept coming out and was fine. And particularly against some of the prognosticators, “Oh, my gosh, what’s going to happen to unemployment? What’s going to happen to growth? Whoa, man, this is a devastating blow to the economy,” when in fact it wasn’t. The positive economic indicators gave people confidence and comfort that it was going to be OK economically.

And that’s mainly credited to the resiliency of the free market system, or is it also some credit to the administration for taking—

A light amount of credit to the administration and not panicking, that we were going to get through this. That was what I was doing the next week, emphasizing that the long-term economic fundamentals still look very sound and very good. No reason to think that this economy is not going to continue to do well and respond. We’re resilient and we’re seeing the recovery and have been seeing the recovery, coming out of recession and moving into the spring, being positive and optimistic because it’s all built around consumer confidence.

If the consumer feels good, then he or she is going to spend money. If they don’t, they’re panicking. If they’re nervous, then they’re not. It’s trying to keep a very positive message out there that the economy is sound, the fundamentals are fine, and then people will go spend money. The resilience of the economy is allowed by creating an environment of confidence. The Federal Government’s role is to create the environment for the private sector to do what it does so well, which is create the wealth, grow the economy. Part of creating the environment is policies you put into place. Another part of it is just what you say and optimism and being positive, particularly in a time like that.

Right.

We can go up there and panic, saying, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, this thing could really get bad.” Then everybody is going to pull in, “Whoa, he just said everything might get bad. I’m going to sit on my checkbook.” Or instead say, “No, everything is going to be fine,” and they’ll be more inclined to spend. At that moment it’s not pessimism, it’s confidence.

But there were some sectoral dimensions to this, where there was some, not bailout money but there were rescue funds available on an emergency basis for certain sectors.

The airlines, we did some of that. That wouldn’t have been in my bailiwick, it would have been more over in Transportation, Norm Mineta’s. I’ll tell you a great story about Norm Mineta in a minute. I mentioned the tourism thing, we provided a little funding for that. They were clamoring and oh, my gosh, motel sales and hotels and that’s bad, and the airlines are obviously a piece of that. We didn’t have to do much, the thing turned around really—kept on going, just a number of surprises. I remember being surprised by the numbers, because I was preparing myself for it to be a pretty big hit to the economy.

Let me ask you more generally about the first year. The President was coming from Texas and a political environment where there had been the possibility of bipartisanship, and I wonder if you could think about your journey into Washington more generally. Were you finding a city that was consistent with your expectations, or were there some realities about Washington life that you had to learn fairly quickly that were different from your expectations?

I thought the vast majority of the people within the Commerce Department were outstanding. I immediately had great comfort in the individuals, the people within the department, the lifetime civil servants who were there. I relied on their judgment and experience and knowledge, and there was the feeling of a department that welcomed me showing up. Maybe we didn’t all have the same exact political beliefs on everything, but I felt like I was warmly received in all the briefings I’d had with the civil servants who were bureaucrats or whatever you want to call them. There’s some real talent in this building that I was going to be relying on over the course of the next four years or so. I made the rounds quickly to all the departments and all the buildings, not only in Washington but outside of Washington, and talked to people and made speeches to them and tried to get them comfortable with who I was as quickly as I could. That all seemed to work well.

Did I think as a businessman that this place could run a lot more efficiently and do we need this many people? I thought, No, we don’t need this many people and it could run more efficiently. The people here are really good people and that’s how they run it, and the idea that I’m going to change it anytime in the next two or three, four years is ridiculous. I was happy with what I saw and happy to know that I could rely on these people and they didn’t bring a partisan attitude to the table or the discussions.

When it came to the political side of it, my first experience with Congress was going through the confirmation, so I’m talking to Senators on both sides of the aisle and that was certainly a very comfortable experience. I got to know several of them well, Fritz [Ernest] Hollings being one. John Kerry was very respectful, others on the other side of the aisle seemed to genuinely respect the fact that we’d won the election and I was the President’s selection. No doubt it helped that I was a friend of the President and they wanted to be a friend of the President.

The confirmation process went very smoothly. The only one who beat up on me a little bit was John McCain, for the wrong reason. He didn’t really know what he was talking about, quite frankly, but that didn’t matter that much, it all went fine. I, by the way, had a good relationship with John McCain. I saw a group that I thought I could work with early on, within that first year. I developed with not only the Senate but the House side some really good relationships that were helpful as I tried to move trade policy and other policies forward. My attitude, when I left there, it just didn’t seem that complicated, not that I had that many controversial things to deal with. Trying to push trade promotion authority, that was a very tight vote. We decided on it with one vote at three o’clock in the morning, and that was a tough one. I had to twist some arms pretty hard on the Republican Party side.

The other big one was tax cuts, pushing those, but those were also—really came through with a big bipartisan vote. If you’re respectful to people and come in with a big dose of humility, “I don’t have all the answers to this. I’m here to express my views, tell you what I think, and I’m going to push the policies that I know the President is interested in.” You have good relationships with people and they were friendly. Sometimes you have to take a hard position on something, but it doesn’t have to be done in a mean-spirited way. “It’s the way I feel about this, here’s where I am on this.”

I don’t think there was anything that terribly surprised me about the town. I was pleased with what I saw in the department, with the people, because that’s something I didn’t know about. You hear about the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats. I got a little bit of it. There was this lady who came up to me after my speech to one of the groups and she wanted me to know that she was a head of the unions and in charge of the grievance committee, wanted me to know that she was there and she was watching me, and “Watch yourself.” OK, whatever you say. There was a little bit of that.

I got really close to the department when 9/11 occurred, as we lost a few, so I had to make some remarks about that and talk to the employees and do the kind of things that are appropriate to do when you have a loss of life on your team. I think I got pretty close to them then, when they saw me handle that the way we handled it. Not that I handled it any way that others wouldn’t have too, but it was an opportunity for them to see a little more of who I am. It’s a whirlwind, things are going by you so fast.

Not quite like the President, but I had a briefing book every night to take home and read through. And you show up at the office the next morning, and minute by minute your day is scheduled for you.

I was just going back through all these pictures the other day. I was trying to get all that organized and I looked through them and said, “Golly, I met that person? I had a meeting with that person?” There are so many of them that you’re just, whoa. People ask me all the time, did you meet this—“Maybe.” Anyway, it was a great run, but there wasn’t anything that really shocked me. My philosophy was we have to take a lot of humility up there, be yourself, be friendly to people, be respectful of their viewpoint and their opinion, not try and pull any gotcha stuff. Talk to people straight.

I came out of there, and we had no issues in the Department of Commerce in any newspapers anywhere. Al Hunt wrote some awfully nice things about me. Al Hunt is not considered a big-time Republican whatever, but I got to know Al and his wife, Judy [Woodruff], pretty well. As I said, Chris Matthews hammered away at Bush and he’s still hammering away at him, he doesn’t let up. The other side of that is, were you too nice? Did you get anything done, what the heck did you do? Don’t you have to be tough to drive something through? I knew how to be tough; I’ve done the tough things in my life. Going through economic downturns like I went through in the 80s, believe me, I did plenty of tough things that weren’t pleasant.

You mentioned some of them and I wanted to come back and see if I could get you to give us a longer, start to finish, on trade promotion in particular, which I think is historically very important and tends to get overlooked. How does that get teed up for you? The vote occurs in ’02?

I think that’s correct. We got it early.

Your predecessor couldn’t get it done. How did you do it?

You get down to counting votes. I talked to a lot of Congressmen, in the House and Senate side, and you know where they are. You know the ones who fall into one camp or the other, and then those who are in the middle—you have to really work them. States like North Carolina were tough because the textile industry had gotten crushed, so their plants were shutting down. Then you talk about the whole steel sector. The steel industry was getting crushed and they don’t want free trade. “God-dang, man, they’re flooding the friggin’ market with steel and prices are in the tank, and I’m losing—”

You focus in those areas where you know the Congressmen and the Senators are going to have—it’s a tough vote back home for them. What you do is find ways to take some programs back to their home district or their state that can be supportive of trade, like technical training for people so that they can shift careers or find a career in another industry. You have some of those dollars to move around and that’s what they’ll ask for, “OK, we need to increase the TAA [Trade Adjustment Assistance].” There were some of those dollars, and I would go into the states and into the cities where the plants are shut down and talk about things we can do. A lot of them were education related, some of them were a suggestion of policies that could help them. But you’d show up and try to give those Congressmen and those Senators some cover.

The steel bloc and the textile bloc were the tough ones. The steel one was dropped right into my lap, along with O’Neill and Zoellick. The steel lobby had a lot of votes and they wanted some tariffs. “We’ve got a lot of subsidized steel coming into this market and it’s crushing us. You need to do something about it.” We had a lot of discussions around that and a lot of meetings with the steel coalition—not the politicians, the industry—coming to my office and to the Secretary of the Treasury’s office, trying to push us in that direction.

It became clear to me that there was a block of votes, Phil English and others, in the Steel Belt. To get those votes, we’re going to have to do something. Our economists at the Department of Commerce looked at it hard, suggested to me that OK, if we put some temporary tariffs on, it would maybe affect the price by 3 or 4 percent. I remember the meeting well, because I’m getting ready to make a tough recommendation to the President on what we ought to do. This is not going to be popular in our circles, with our supporters, our free market thinkers. “You’re going to put a tariff on that?” The steel industry was collapsing, bankruptcies here and there, while we were sitting there thinking about it. You either continue to allow these bankruptcies or you try to do something that may give them a little bit of support. I had a hard time computing that if we put a tariff on and we’re getting a 3 percent bump in the price, if that’s going to make the difference between bankruptcy or not bankruptcy.

But I got comfortable thinking that the overriding, long-term important policy for America and the world was free trade. You cannot drive it, lead on it, if you don’t have a trade promotion authority where you let the President negotiate the trade agreements. If you’re relying on 535 members of Congress, it’s not going to work, so you had to have it. Clinton had it and it expired. We needed to do it. The overarching policy for me was giving the President the tools to negotiate free trade agreements. What do we have to do to get there? I got comfortable myself in saying, “OK, we can give a little bit of support”—and I’m thinking a 3 percent kind of thing—to the steel industry, to get the votes but also give them a little time, a little help, they’re getting beaten up by all this. Steel is being dumped on our market, subsidized from governments around the world. Let’s do that and in return, I think we can deliver trade promotion authority to the President. He said OK, we went and imposed the tariffs, caused a lot of noise. The Wall Street Journal just went berserk, couldn’t believe we’d do this, the issue of free enterprise and so on.

Fortunately for the steel industry, maybe somewhat unfortunately in terms of the perception of the policy, is what happened at that moment—Here’s an area where I’m not sure I had as good data as I would like to have had, and I’m relying on my economic team to tell me what this is going to mean to steel prices. I’ve done enough forecasting in my own world of oil and gas over the years, I had a feel for what goes into all of that so it wasn’t foreign to me. I’m looking at a steel industry that is shutting down, I’m seeing supply come off the market, and if you get enough supply off the market and the demand stays about the same, prices are going to move. It seemed like it kept getting pushed out and it hasn’t happened yet. We’re about to go bankrupt, the banks are calling this or calling that. And at the same time, we’re trying to get trade promotion authority passed.

I took the path of wanting to deliver trade promotion authority, provide a light amount of subsidy or a light amount of support to the steel industry, and think that was best for the long-term health of the U.S. economy, because it knew the tariffs were temporary. The free trade agreements would be permanent. So we did it and the President took a lot of heat. I probably took the brunt of the heat. It seemed like my other Cabinet partners went a little squishy on me, and they got pretty laser focused on me, which was all right. I met with the Wall Street Journal editorial board and I couldn’t convince them.

Prices spiked hard, they went up 40 percent, 50 percent, just boom. But what happened was the whole supply-demand thing finally caught up and there was so much capacity, production being shut down, the supply quit coming into the market, demand was about the same, and prices spiked up. Everybody wanted to blame the steel tariffs, but that wasn’t the reason. The reason was the free market finally worked. But we were out of time in terms of allowing it to work, we were pressed with getting trade promotion authority, we needed to have that block of votes in order to get it. I don’t know how many votes it was. Was it ten, was it 12? It was something like that, but we got down to the last vote. It was Robin Hayes out of North Carolina, and God, that poor guy, he’s a Republican living in a textile district. I’d been down to his district, and he was just sweating it. He was kind of the last guy who came in, at three or four o’clock in the morning, to deliver free trade to the President. So it was a very close vote.

Why for steel and not for textiles?

That’s a good question. This isn’t a great answer but it’s the only one I’ve got right now, is steel was organized. They were organized, they were working it. The textile guys were hurting, but they didn’t come see me.

Was it a WTO [World Trade Organization] action that had taken place?

There were a number of WTO actions around textiles and I had—

Oh, is that right, OK. I was thinking steel in particular had one that precipitated part of this, but I can’t recall the story well enough.

There were a lot of WTO actions going on and a lot of just Commerce actions. The industry would come and file—People don’t get the connection exactly right, but what happens is USTR negotiates the trade agreements and Commerce enforces them. All the countervailing duty, doing any dumping actions that the industry wanted to file, they came into our department to file it. I had a world-class guy handling the textile industry’s complaints when it came to WTO, but oftentimes it was just dumping stuff they filed or countervailing duty stuff they filed. It was coming into the department, but they were not as organized as the steel industry in terms of coming in and pounding the table and saying, “You need to do this for us now.”

Maybe the textile side was just more complex, I’m not sure. Down deep too, I’m a free market guy, a level playing field, right? That’s important and you try to do all you can to maintain a level playing field. That’s hard to do too. They’d file these antidumping cases against China and India and somebody else, the textile industry too, against Malaysia, against Taiwan, and they’d win it so you take action against those countries. All of a sudden, it’s coming in from some other country, therefore steel wanted to just tariff against everybody, whereas when you do the countervailing duty dumping stuff, that’s against a country. They can always find someplace else to get it into the country. Maybe it comes up through Mexico, shipping it there and then bringing that up. That was happening in steel a lot because they had won some dumping stuff in steel, but it wasn’t universal and they wanted something universal.

I wonder if we could take you back to the first year, because you said that you were part of the economic policy group and clearly that was a major—maybe the major—Bush administration legislative initiative. That first year I think it was a $1.6 billion proposed tax cut. Could you talk about your role in helping put that together and promoting it on Capitol Hill and in the media?

Yes, I’ll do that, but I want to put that aside for just a second, because I want to tell you another story that I think is instructive around 9/11. It’s an economic story and how we dealt with that. Shortly after 9/11, everybody’s working on their respective responsibilities in terms of a response, and part of the response is how do we make our country more secure. We’ve just been attacked, guys flying airplanes into buildings, flew them into the Pentagon. We have to stop that.

This was not too many weeks after. I’m in Paul O’Neill’s office with Mitch Daniels, Larry Lindsey, Paul O’Neill, and Norm Mineta. Norm comes in and he’s making his proposal that we’re going to be taking to the White House, here’s what we’re going to do in these airports. He came in with his plan of a different kind of security that we’re now going to set up in airports across America and we’re going to make it harder for people to get knives or guns or whatever through security and on airplanes. It involves equipment that’s going to screen people, and Mitch Daniels, Director of OMB [Office of Management and Budget] at the time, said, “Norm, do you have any idea how much this is going to cost?” Norm said, “No, but a lot of money, billions of dollars.”

Mitch scratched something on a pad real quick and came up with the billions of dollars that this was going to cost. He said, “Do you know how much of the risk that we face in America this is going to protect us against?” Norm said, “I don’t know.” Mitch said, “Less than 1 percent. It’s costing us, whatever the billions, $10 billion in a year, and we’re going to protect ourselves against 1 percent of the risk we’re exposed to in the country. We can’t afford this. You cannot have a 100 percent secure—”

The point being that Mitch Daniels is in there slugging it out for keeping the risk and cost in perspective. Yes, it’s bad, these guys got on airplanes, flew them into buildings. We don’t want it to happen again, but there are a lot of other risks to think about—our water reservoirs, our ports, and other stuff. If we’re going to set up this elaborate system and it’s going to cost this much, wow, this is going to break the bank.

We went forward and set up an elaborate screening process that we all go through every time we go through a commercial airport. I think it was important to have that conversation on the front end of it. I can’t tell you it had any huge impact other than impact on me and it’s, “I’m glad Mitch was thinking about that. I’m glad he’s thinking about the fact that there are 99 other ways that they can attack us and what are we going to do to protect against those?”

The economic stuff, in the first year we had a recession. In the second quarter, we had the big power issue in California, but the President didn’t run on tax cuts and we’re going to—the government creating the environment for the private sector to do what it does so well. That first year I sat in on those discussions with Larry Lindsey driving them. He was the point person the President was listening to in terms of economic policy, tax policy. O’Neill was in the discussions as well, but to me Lindsey clearly had the strongest voice, and this was all pretty new territory for me in terms of macroeconomic policy that the government should push to create the environment. I understand tax cuts and lower taxes, people take more risk and all that kind of stuff, but when you got down to the specifics of what a tax bill should look like, as well as one that you can get passed through Congress, that wasn’t in my sweet spot in terms of designing it, but it may have been in my sweet spot to go out and try to sell it, particularly on TV. So I didn’t have a big hand in designing the policy.

Early on we were trying to put in some tax credits for those at the lower end of the income scale, so you would be taking care of them, helping them. But then working toward continuing to drive the tax code toward a friendlier tax code for economic growth. I can’t even recite to you exactly what was in the ’01 and ’02 recommendations. I remember the ’03 well, because it was such a big one with respect to rates and capital gains and dividends, and I certainly weighed in on that.

The one voice that I do remember bringing to the table, after I thought I got my legs under me a little bit, understanding the bigger picture, would have been the latter part of 2002. I did start worrying about the deficits. We came in with a high surplus and everybody was thinking, Wow, how big is the surplus going to be? Got to thinking, God, the surplus is getting too big. As we started going into a lot of the tax cut stuff and watching what spending was doing, I started worrying about the deficit sum, and that was a voice I put out there. That just wasn’t my long suit. I’m not an economist, I didn’t come in having studied the American economy and all the issues around it.

I was sitting in the meetings, listening to the discussion, adding two cents here and there, but more once we settled on something I was going out and trying to sell it. In that year, I befriended Alan Greenspan. He wanted to have lunch every two or three weeks, so we did. I liked Alan. We had a lot of data over at the Department of Commerce that was used by the Federal Reserve. He was always saying, “More real-time data.” We had a lot of those discussions, but the more interesting part of that, for the record, is me talking to Alan about what I had been through personally in the ’80s, when I saw all those banks collapse and the industry collapse and how undercapitalized all those banks were, how levered they all were.

I told him many stories around it because I’d lived them. I remember telling him, “You walk into Continental Bank of Illinois, it’s a massive lobby, huge marble columns and God-dang ceilings 50 feet high, and you think, How could this thing ever go under?” Well, they did. I can’t tell you how many times I talked to Greenspan about everybody thinking these banks were big and sound and solid, but they just collapsed. What about now? I feel the same kind of thing, that we’re taking a lot of risk. He was the man, right? He’s going up to the Hill and he said, “Everything is OK.” He had a way of speaking and delivering that just made everybody comfortable, including me, and it’s not a problem. These instruments, tools we have now, spread risk around the world, so they’re able to manage the risk much more efficiently, much better than they could ever do it before. With all these new kinds of instruments we’re using, the world takes all the risk and you balance the global banking system against it and we’re fine.

One of the critical discussions that we had around it was when we were in the Chief of Staff’s office and we were battling the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac stuff. The one thing that bothered me, as Secretary of Commerce, was when I saw the amount of money that people were pulling out of their homes every year. It was $500 and $600 billion a year, and being old school, remembering how my parents bought their house and paid it off and that was part of their retirement, I said, “God, this is crazy.” I’m just a guy who came out of the oil patch, but common sense was telling me this is crazy. And particularly, when I put it up against our economy of $13 trillion, I said, “Dadgum, man, that’s 4 percent of the economy. That’s the growth of the economy, right?” Home prices are going up, and people are pulling more money out and putting more debt on it. This is nuts.

I’m going to go back and find this graph. Greenspan is sitting here and I’m sitting here, Andy Card is sitting there, and John Snow might have been over there, he probably was Secretary of the Treasury by then, and maybe somebody else. We’re trying to figure out how we’re going to get this Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under control, which were totally out of control. Jimmy Johnson had put a bunch of financial instruments in place that made the stock take off, and hauled out a bunch of money, tens of millions, and they were all financial instruments that didn’t belong in Fannie Mae. It was way out of their zone, where their mission statement was. We have to get this under control.

The problem was that the lobbying force of Fannie Mae, while yes, they did a heck of a job on the Democratic side of the aisle, they didn’t do a bad job on the Republican side of the aisle. They had enough over there that they felt protected and could take on some of these new products without getting a lot of heat. So we were sitting in there, and I don’t know if it’s ’04 or ’03, but we’re trying to do something about it, trying to shift the oversight of it to the Secretary of the Treasury instead of over at Housing and some group inside Housing that watches over them. That’s kind of silly. Let’s get somebody who knows about some financial kind of—We’re looking at a graph, and it was showing the mortgages inside Fannie Mae, the amount, and the graph was just spiking up. I looked at it and said to the chairman, “That’s a problem, isn’t it?” “Yes, if anything goes wrong, that’s a problem. It would be systemic. It’s going to hit the whole economy and it’s not going to be good.” He saw it, as far as I was concerned, I saw it, we all saw it but seemed paralyzed to do anything about it.

This is probably ’04. My mistake was not going to the President and telling him, “You need to get out there and talk about this issue. It needs to be your voice talking about it.” My mistake, but I really felt like it was—I should have done it, take anything off me, but the Secretary of the Treasury or the Chief of Staff? One of the problems, quite frankly, was just Greenspan going, “Everything’s OK.”

The maestro.

Yes, exactly, he was the man. But we saw it in ’03, and it didn’t collapse until ’07, ’08. I think if there was a mistake where the team let the President down—you can’t expect him to know that. The team let the President down by not going to the President and telling him, “You need to get aggressive on this.” Now, some of that is just hindsight. Because at the moment, the maestro is saying everything is OK. He pointed out to me that it was a problem, but for whatever reason he didn’t think it was a problem for him to say much about it other than “Everything’s OK.”

In terms of my own involvement in the economy, I got to where I could certainly talk about it, and talk to all the tax cuts. It was very simple for me to weigh in on the whole 2003, which was capital gains and dividends and rates, because that all was in my sweet spot of running a company and that type of thing.

We had an economic summit at Baylor. Chuck Schwab showed up and said, “We have to cut the dividend tax.” I think he would eliminate the dividend tax, but anyway it was, “Whoa, eliminate the dividend tax?” We wound up cutting it in half, which was a big deal. But that was the most interesting part of the history that I can contribute that related to the financial collapse of 2008. We were seeing the signs of it. I saw it in the people pulling their money out of their homes. I made the comments a few times. I’m not an economist, I just look at the numbers, and I’m pretty good at numbers.

What was the impetus for the ’03 tax cut, because ’01, you had these big surpluses of which you thought the tax cut would be a portion, and by ’03 the surplus is no longer there, the country is fighting two wars. What was the impetus for the ’03 tax cut?

I think it’s just a philosophy of long-term economic growth.

It was more structural then.

Yes. It’s long-term economic growth, trying to get the incentives lined up where people have incentives to take risks, to invest. You invest more, the economy grows more.

Where did the idea come from?

We had an economic summit at Baylor to kick around ideas, and one day we had various sessions. I led a session about the economy, the President came in and talked a little bit, and mine was on small business stuff and corporate responsibility. I remember that because I was a corporate responsibility guy. I was the guy who—Ken Lay was calling me when the company is collapsing. I remember the picture of the President and me in there talking to the group, and behind us there was a big sign that says, “corporate responsibility,” and how we’re going to do things the right way. Be transparent. People are going to know what the financial statement says and what it means. But the idea was that the economic summit would bring practitioners in, people who are running companies and investing capital. What are their ideas?

We had a number of people there. We showed up in a big auditorium and there were about 20 of us on stage. OK, what are we going to do to create the environment for long-term economic growth, which is investment and getting people willing to take the risk to invest capital. And out of that came Chuck Schwab saying, “You ought to cut capital gains tax.” The big one was the dividends.

This is a naïve reaction I’m sure, but it doesn’t strike me as a new idea that Chuck Schwab would say, “Make investing in stocks more desirable, more attractive.” Why was that any different from what presumably he’d been saying and other people in that industry have been saying for years?

I don’t think capital gains was, but I think the dividend was certainly. Nobody had talked about that. If we talked about it, if Larry Lindsey was thinking about it, it hadn’t surfaced where I was. Maybe he was thinking about it, and maybe Larry had talked to Chuck, and Chuck gets the credit for it because he said it in this open forum. In terms of the economists, I don’t think it was an idea that Larry Lindsey hadn’t ever thought of and maybe he had talked about it. You try to set the stage to think about policies you can introduce that will drive growth in the economy. And you set the stage by having your people come together with those who are out there in the private sector doing it and say, “Let’s talk about all this and see if we come up with some ideas.”

You have to talk to Larry about it. He and Chuck may have talked about this, “We ought to cut capital gains.” Probably did, I don’t know. But it got introduced in the public domain by Chuck Schwab. Not by Larry Lindsey or the President or anybody else. It was somebody who is in the private sector, trying to be a part of creating the wealth and growing the economy, “Here’s something constructive you can do.” If it was coming from the private sector, this is what they’re telling us and these are the ones we’re asking to create the wealth. We’re just trying to create the environment for them to create the wealth, and they’re telling us part of creating that environment is cutting the dividends tax and cutting the capital gains tax. I think coming from that voice within the room, it’s got a little more punch to it than if the President just shows up with it one day.

Did it matter that there was now a Republican Congress, after the ’02 midterm?

Yes, sure.

Would you think that opens a window?

Yes, to get more done.

I want to shift gears because we’ve got about an hour left. The history of the first term of the Presidency will largely be focused on foreign policy issues after 9/11. I’m wondering if you can tell us about your role, to the extent that you had any. The briefing book indicates that there were some bits and pieces, but on Afghanistan and Iraq. Where were you engaged as Secretary, and then maybe more importantly, where are you engaged as a confidant of the President as he’s grappling with the issues in these two places?

I was the first Secretary to go into Iraq, maybe behind [Donald] Rumsfeld. I went in October of ’03.

At the President’s request?

Yes, at the President’s request and at Rumsfeld’s request. “Go show that we can get this economy going again.” My partner and deputy Sam Bodman joined me and had a separate schedule. So we went to Iraq and took an economic message with us, met with a lot of businesspeople, met with some women who were entrepreneurs and had ideas of what they wanted to do in their economy. There’s a great story around me stopping on the motorcade, going down the highway, and all of a sudden I’d see what I would refer to as a lemonade stand, which is just a couple of little boys selling Cokes, and I’d say, “Pull over.” So we stopped there, bought a few drinks from them, and I was able to use that to illustrate the entrepreneurial spirit, like in America, where kids set up little lemonade stands, and they’re doing it in Baghdad as well.

I went over there with an economic message. I was also the one on the ground and we timed it with introducing the new currency into Iraq. That was on live TV back to the U.S. We did it on Fox and Friends, and I’m holding up the currency and I’m in the storage barn and there’s all the money stacked to the ceiling. So I introduced that and I was trying to take an economic message over there. I saw a lot of the destruction. [Paul] Bremer was there, [Ricardo] Sanchez was there, and while I was there, a few of the skirmishes in outlying regions of Iraq were starting to heat up again. I remember Bremer saying, “These aren’t going to last. We’ve got the election scheduled for January, so they’re trying to be disruptive of the elections. As soon as the elections are over, that will all dissipate.” That was his attitude.

Before that trip, I got a call from Secretary Powell. No, it wasn’t before, it was after, so anyway, I’ll get to that in a minute. I was in Baghdad for a few days and I made the tours, saw the deputy mayor, saw these women and talked economic issues, and then from there I went to Afghanistan. I spent the night in Bahrain and saw the king, had dinner with the crown prince at his house, got up early in the morning and flew to Afghanistan and spent the day on the ground there. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Afghanistan or not, but you go in there and you can see why they wouldn’t ever be able to find Osama Bin Laden. It’s just crazy. That country looks so rough and so barren. If there was a time when I was frightened for my life, that was it. I had security around me and not only my own, but other security in the area—Blackwater.

I had a meeting with the Trade Minister of Afghanistan in his office. From the airport, you drive through the center of town to the other side of town, four or five miles, and you get to his building. There we are, I have a meeting with him. Not a lot to talk about really, other than the road we’re going to build, and textiles. That’s kind of it. After that, we went outside and we were having a press conference, and a bomb exploded, not right there but not too far away, and so I kind of said, “Whoa, what’s that?” He keeps on talking like—OK. I was leaving that night, and I got in the vehicle to go back out, and the siren is blaring, we’re going fast, and we get to the center of town and get locked down. There are people coming into the center of town, and it’s packed and we can’t move. I’m in this Suburban and these guys—Oh, man, it’s just so sad. The life expectancy for a man is 42 years, it’s just terrible. They’re looking right at you and he’s right there, and here’s the window, but he’s not happy.

Our guys get out of the car and they have their guns and they’re getting people to move out of the way so we can go on. I think that was the moment where I thought, I’ll just see somebody dropping a bomb under the car or some friggin’ thing. Anyway, we made it out of there.

I was communicating with both countries, working with both countries, “What can we do to help?” I went to Afghanistan, went to Iraq, but not a whole lot to do. Afghanistan is just about war, they’ve been at war forever, and they want war, they don’t want peace. At least that’s what it felt like to me.

Then Iraq didn’t go like people hoped it would. Saddam Hussein is going to go, everybody’s going to cheer, and you’re going to start to see the democracy. There was an election, a lot of people lined up and voted and percentages were high, but the bad guys were still out there. Powell called me and said, “We have to get some people, we have to get security on the ground.” I could sense a little bit of frustration—those weren’t my discussions, that wasn’t my sweet spot. You have to respect the system, the people the President’s relying on. But that’s where I think everybody who looks back on it, they’d all say, a couple of fundamental mistakes. Number one, not having enough security on the ground to lock the place down, and bringing the Iraqi Army into our fold and working with them early on. That was a Bremer decision. Again, it’s not my bailiwick exactly, but that whole structure didn’t get set up like it should have.

I was involved in it at some level, not in the Bremer decision and how he fits into the structure, who he reports to and all that. I was helping some on the oil and gas side so, “Who would be good to come in and help us with that piece of it?” I had a few names for them. I think we were a little optimistic about what we could do to turn around the declining oil production and get production moving to a much higher level. The resource is there, no question about it. If you get security there, there’s a lot you can do with it, but if you don’t have security there’s not a whole lot you can do. It’s tough. I was always one of the more optimistic guys. “We’re going to get security in place and we’re going to be able to come in and turn these fields around and really ramp up the oil production, which will help the economy.” Of course that never happened, because we could never get the security where we wanted it. I was quoted by AP [Associated Press] that I thought we could help get oil production up to 4 to 5 million barrels a day in a few years. Never happened.

Another part of my role was trying to help convince Russia that they should jump in and help. I had a really good relationship with German Gref, the Economic Minister, and with President Putin. I wasn’t talking directly with President Putin about it, but I was talking to him through Gref. I made a trip to Paris at one point to talk to Gref about it, trying to encourage him to get on board with this. One of the issues was Russia’s economic interest in Iraq. Not only oil traders on the ground, but controlling a couple of the big fields in southern Iraq. They were worried about losing control of those operations, or I would just say profit interest in those. Not ownership of them but just profit interest in them. I think that was an issue.

Wrongly, and I think I proved to be right, maybe why Putin called me later, but they were worried that if we went in, oil prices would collapse. This whole thing about Iraq for oil was ridiculous. That didn’t have anything to do with it at all, it was not a factor. Their concern was that if we went in, the price of oil would collapse. Everybody else would open up the valves and here comes a bunch of oil. At the time their economy was still teetering. “You go in there and everybody’s going to open up the supply.”

I said, “No, that’s not going to happen, because if you looked at supply and demand in the world the market was very tight.” I did have a good feel for the macro piece of oil in the world. I knew that if you looked at it globally, the world was struggling more and more for supply to keep up with this growing demand, from this change with more and more economies going to free-market economies. I said, “No. First of all, oil prices are not going to collapse, but over the near to maybe the longer term, oil prices are going to move higher.”

He said, “No, I can’t stand for them to move too far, our budget is between $18 and $25 a barrel,” which was ridiculous. They could manage a much higher oil price, as we’ve already talked about. That’s where their hard currency comes from.

I played a tiny role in trying to persuade them that it would be a good thing for them to join us and be part of the coalition to go into Iraq, but obviously it didn’t happen. About that time oil prices started to move pretty hard, and it wasn’t because of the action really, because it didn’t change that much in the way of production in the world. Iraq was already down to 1.5 million barrels per day—they wanted 2.5 million barrels a day and they stayed around that. They’ve moved back up in the last couple of years. I played that role because of my relationship with Russia.

I also tried to help some with Mexico. I had a really good relationship with Fox. Luis Derbez, who was his number-two guy in Mexico, was also a good friend. I was trying to help with Mexico, which they didn’t get there either, that was a big disappointment for the President. Here was a guy, our neighbor, and the first state dinner and had come to his ranch, yet he didn’t have the political courage to take on.

We moved into Iraq in ’03. I made the trip over there and I did work with some of the Ministers, but at that point the war was getting tougher, more skirmishes, so the whole military side of it was moving right back into the forefront. It was the military side for three or four months, then things calmed down. It looked like maybe it was going to be all right, and then it started to heat back up again.

Mike mentioned the midterm elections earlier. Did you have a piece of that?

I did fundraisers and that kind of thing, but I wasn’t part of the leadership. I was doing my job as Secretary of Commerce. It was a fundraiser here, a fundraiser there, that type of thing.

Why don’t we take a little break, then come back and finish up. We’ve got about another 45 minutes.

[BREAK]

We touched on the Vice President’s energy taskforce, but I don’t know that we asked you to give your own account of what happened there, what your role in it was, and your own assessment of what it did.

I can’t say I remember a whole lot that it did. I was on the taskforce, I sat at a few meetings. Andrew Lundquist was the director, out of the Vice President’s Office. We got a lot of heat from it without much really accomplished. I don’t remember anything significant that I think we did, that we’re out of step with free-market principles. We looked at the energy mix. At that point in time, it was focused on the power industry. We had this wreck out in California, so there was a lot of work around that, what’s going on with our infrastructure and the utility space and how did that market work out there, how did it get so far out of whack, which of course led in part to the demise of Enron.

That wasn’t all of it but it was part of it. I remember the Vice President coming over to my office and having a climate change discussion, which was in the mix of Energy also. I know there’s a report on our work, but I just can’t remember anything that got too far out of the fairway of letting market forces work. The one thing I was focused on in that was nuclear power. Sam Bodman, my Deputy, a brilliant engineer. I was at the table, I remember this discussion with the President, promoting nuclear energy. Clean burning, safe energy, no CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions.

We hadn’t built a nuclear power plant since the late ’70s. Unfortunately, our nuclear engineering colleges had basically disappeared. Having looked at the macro data, I really believed we had some serious issues related to natural gas supply longer term, which was providing for a very large portion of our utility power, electric power, retail power, industrial power. Therefore, we have to get the nuclear power industry going again, and the President bought into that. He agreed with me that that’s what we needed to do.

There was a meeting with the guys from the EIA [Energy Information Administration]. They brought their chart that showed how gas power generation was much more economical than nuclear power generation, and therefore, we want to stay with gas power generation. I said, “That’s all very interesting. The only problem with it is that you’re wrong.” I was basing my point of view on the fact that I thought gas prices were going to increase in the near future. They had gas prices growing at 5 percent over two dollars for however long, and I said, “I think we’re getting ready to go through a period when we’re going to have much higher gas prices, so we ought to create the environment that the power industry will build them, build nuclear power plants.”

Sam Bodman was on this assignment. Sam would talk to the power industry CEOs and find out what they needed in order to build nuclear power plants. He came back with, “One of the big things they need is to have the certainty of the permit before they build the plant. They can’t spend billions of dollars to build the plant and not know whether or not they’re going to be able to crank the thing up.” From an energy standpoint, the 2005 energy bill was probably the biggest thing that came out of the Bush years. I had been a part of getting it to the point, including the part of putting Sam in charge of the Energy Department, because he’s prepared to put in front of Congress a bill that can be impactful with respect to energy. And a big element of it was this restructuring of the regulatory process on nuclear power plants, so that companies would know, on the front end, that they’d have a permit to operate their plant once they built it.

I can’t think of anything on the natural gas side or the oil side, other than opening up some lands or some waters, some places out in the Gulf. There’s some of that stuff. Also trying to be as friendly as we could, being environmentally responsible in federal lands, and getting permits to drill on federal lands. That all happens in the Department of Interior. They’re the ones that have to manage that process, and if you’ve got a friendly kind of look, you can try to be cooperative and work it. Or you can try to be an obstacle. We were trying to be cooperative and work it and get things done.

ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] was a big public issue, but did you see it as a big piece of the puzzle?

I knew it was a dead duck. It was the environmentalists’ litmus test; it wasn’t going to go anywhere. It’s just too tough, too big a political lift, to get anything done. We would have done it in a heartbeat but Kerry and a few others would have filibustered it if they had to, so we didn’t. We talked about it. The pipeline from Alaska was a big deal. That came to my desk, and they were arguing for government subsidies and I was arguing against them. “No, we’re not going to subsidize your pipeline. If it works economically, then go build it. If it doesn’t, then I’m sorry.” That didn’t make me too popular with the oil and gas operators in Alaska. That was something that came to my desk, but the big one was nuclear power, and because of that we got a lot of nuclear power plant permitting into the queue.

I’m in the power industry now, I know something about it. And then the government also tried to put in a loan guarantee program to allow for it to be financially friendly, able to borrow the money to build the plants. We were on that, we being Energy Future Holdings, which I’m the chairman of now, we were on the list. We really didn’t want to win it, because we felt that at the end of the day the economics weren’t going to hold up in the current environment. What has happened is gas prices collapsed. We’ve got this gas shale revolution we all know about, both on the oil and gas side, which is just unbelievable, it’s breathtaking, it’s transformational. Nobody on the planet saw it coming. That’s changed the whole mix.

And that’s since you left office.

Yes. That happened in ’08. Gas prices spiked in ’08 and then collapsed in ’09. I think we were right in thinking that, from a policy standpoint, with respect to energy, the markets work. Make sure you’re doing things, holding people to do them in an environmentally responsible way in terms of how you drill and complete. But the focus needed to be on nuclear power, because there’s plenty of supply, environmentally it’s friendly, no CO2, and it’s safe. People hear about all the catastrophic whatever, but even in Fukushima there has not been a single death because of exposure to nuclear radiation. A couple of guys drowned because of the tsunami, but not a single death from radiation. A few people died over there trying to get away from it, but in terms of the plant itself—and even that’s in spite of the weak design that they had, and we tried to get them to fix it years ago—it’s still nothing. Three Mile Island, nothing, we didn’t lose any lives on that. And even Chernobyl, I don’t know how big it was, but it’s not that many. It’s not near as many as people think. So it’s safe.

From an energy standpoint, that was the fundamental policy that we were moving. Based on the macroeconomics of the world and views of it, it was the right thing to do.

The other thing that comes up in the briefing book a lot, that you’ve touched on once or twice but we haven’t gotten your full account, was the census data, and it may not be a big deal ultimately.

It’s not too big a deal. It relates back to me having confidence in the individuals I was working with. Bill Barron was the guy with all the background and all the knowledge. He came out of the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He had run that, and in the previous administration he had been put over there to run the census. He wasn’t my guy, but we hit it off immediately and he taught me quickly all the hotspots around it, taught me the complications around the methodology that is used and some of the issues that members had on the Hill.

But I got it from both sides. I remember Tom DeLay calling me and getting all exercised because he didn’t think I was doing it how he’d like to see it done, in certain areas of Texas. I said, “Tom, listen. We’re running the process in a transparent and open way and I’m going to look at the data, but I trust the methodology, so the results are going to be the results.” I was getting heat from both sides, a lot of heat from my side really, but you’re not going to get me to monkey with any numbers.

I would think any Commerce Secretary who takes office at a year ending in a one, it’s going to be an issue because, depending on how you count, Democrats benefit or Republicans benefit. Some towns get more money, some counties get less money. There’s a lot at stake there, just in nuts-and-bolts politics, and whoever takes office in ’01 or ’11 or ’21 is inheriting that every-ten-year fight.

Yes.

So your approach was to trust in the professionals.

Yes. I had to trust them first and get to know them and how they think, at a pretty personal level. It wasn’t just go in and trust them, it wasn’t the trust was verified, it wasn’t quite that. It was just knowing that I could trust them, and I spent a lot of time. I remember a lot of Saturdays and Sundays, and we’d talk about, all of a sudden I’m up here all day Saturday and all day Sunday trying to figure out all this census stuff, because I didn’t have time to deal with it during the week, I had so many other things on my schedule. It was idle time I had, where I could really sit down and try to understand how this whole process worked. But it was in that process that I came to the viewpoint that Bill Barron is a trustworthy, solid person trying to do the right thing. He didn’t have any hidden agenda and he knew this stuff well. He was a good, solid civil servant. I felt like he was trying to play the thing right down the middle.

Karl called me once and he was fired up about it, but the whole methodology is terribly complicated. But we actually, according to Bill, and I believed him, had taken much greater efforts to make sure that we had a much larger collection of data, which we think gave us a more accurate representation of the minority communities. I got to where I was comfortable with that.

You said Karl called you once. What was he concerned with?

How is the data going to come out and what are you thinking, trying to emphasize the importance of it, which are the kind of comments you just got through making. It defines where the money goes, which I knew, but it was right there on my doorstep as soon as I walked in the door.

Was this another case where your close relationship with the President may have helped insulate you a little bit from in-party yelling?

Maybe a little, not that much. Tom DeLay was exercised.

I would think it might put a target on your back for the other party to say, “Look, he’s Bush’s political guy.”

Oh, it did. Carolyn Maloney was all over me. She was convinced that I was somehow manipulating the numbers, did her a disadvantage and her district a disadvantage. That’s her right to think I was. I didn’t have any problem with that. If that’s what you want to think, let them think that, not a problem. But I had Barron there, who was pretty good at testifying, and he was a career guy and he was doing most of the talking. I’m sitting there with him, but he’s doing the talking and defending the numbers and had the history of it, had been through one before. He was an expert in labor statistics and data like that, so if they started going too deep he could run circles around them.

I don’t know how much time you spend with other people who have been Secretary of Commerce, but I wonder, it used to be the Postmaster General was where the President’s campaign chairman would have gone, Jim Farley and so on. I’m thinking Daley, Evans, Pritzker. Has Commerce become the place where strong political campaign advisors, is that the Cabinet department of choice now?

I don’t know. I think of Carlos—Gutierrez is not like that, right?

No.

He came right out of the private sector and did a wonderful job, so he wasn’t really any campaign something or other.

But Bush wasn’t running for reelection.

No, he wasn’t running for reelection. But there have been a lot of them, that’s a fair comment. I was a fundraiser, Mosbacher was a fundraiser, Pritzker was a fundraiser, and you’re fundraising because you have relationships in the business community or people in that crowd, right?

Yes.

That maybe helps in the fundraising side of it. I’m not sure what Bill Daley was doing. Clinton brought him in to run the whole NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] thing back in the early ’90s, and then he put him in as Secretary of Commerce. I’m not sure what Bill was doing before that. He’s a lawyer. But no, that’s a fair comment.

It’s not even a comment, it’s just an observation.

Observation or maybe a question, is it going that direction? Yes, you could say. There are probably examples going the other direction. Barbara Franklin wasn’t a big fundraiser. She was around for Bush, and Malcolm Baldrige was there for Reagan, he and Malcolm were good friends. I’m sure he was a fundraiser, but he wasn’t the number one guy. But as of late, there’s been a lot of that, yes.

Did you have anything significant to do in ’04?

No. I was talking at fundraisers and stuff like that, but I wasn’t involved in running anything. There’s a whole different apparatus doing it then. I stayed away from it.

When did you decide you had had enough of Washington?

In the fall of ’04 is when I finally wrestled with myself. It was a family thing; it wasn’t a Don Evans thing. I would have loved to stay for another four years if I could. I really loved what I was doing. It was a wonderful experience, I would have liked to keep going, even as ugly as it got. It goes with the territory and it’s not something I would have lost a lot of sleep over.

I just liked to be there involved and helping him, but it had been six years for me, because I ran the campaign and that was two years, and I was gone a lot during those two years, gosh. And then four years. It wasn’t the perfect time for me. I had run a company, built it, it collapsed, we came back, but there wasn’t a payday yet so I felt like I needed to get back and make some money, and I wasn’t going to do it in government. So, family, get back and make some money so my retirement was OK, and six years. Ideally, I would have made a bunch of money before and my kids would already have all been gone, but this isn’t the way it works for everybody.

Exactly.

I would have kept going.

Had you been approached at any point while you were in Washington about doing something else in the administration? The briefing book suggests that there was discussion of you being a Chief of Staff at a later time.

There was that. He even thought Defense a little bit; he thought Treasury. Chief of Staff, I didn’t ever feel like—I wanted to be a principal. I didn’t want to be somebody trying to protect a principal, I wanted to be a principal. It was something I was good at, I can lead people, I can inspire people. I could be a gatekeeper if I needed to be, but I didn’t want to be. If I could run a department and lead a bunch of people, I felt good about that.

There was one comical thing. I knew that he was not going to select me to be Secretary of the Treasury, we’d already had that discussion.

Why would he not?

I was leaving in ’04. Before I had announced to the world that I was going, there was a lot of speculation around me. We went someplace and his dad was with us, we were getting off the helicopter and I said, “I’ll wear my green tie today, that will really get them cranked up.” Sure enough, we get off the helicopter and they’re taking pictures of us and we heard, “There’s Evans, getting off the helicopter, he’s got his green tie, that must be his money tie, he must be Secretary of the Treasury.” [laughter] It was a fun thing but no, it wasn’t going to be me.

Looking back on it, boy, I’m glad it wasn’t me. That was an almost impossible task and I wouldn’t have had the right skills. I could have fought my way through it, but I didn’t have the right skill set for it and I’m not sure anybody did. [Henry] Paulson probably had it closer than anybody else, because he could get up and talk big numbers and big capital and investment banking community and big banks. He had all that stuff and knew all those players and they knew him well. So he could slog his way through it.

I was at the White House in the spring of ’08 and that was the first crack, Fannie Mae, that this is—I remember the President having a conversation in the Solarium. He’s talking to Paulson and telling him, “Do what you need to do.” That was just Fannie and Freddie.

Right.

And it wasn’t near enough. Getting back to just little fun anecdotes, to Greenspan and what he said about spreading risk around the world. There was a G20 [Group of 20] or one of those meetings the President was at in early ’08, maybe mid ’08, and Vladimir Putin came up to him, asked him how his subprime paper was doing. He had some U.S. subprime debt. Things were starting to crater and crumble and collapse. I don’t know what the President told him but probably, “It’s not very good, Vladimir, that’s for sure.”

No, I would have liked to stay, but it wasn’t in the cards for me.

Was there any particular unfinished business that you felt disappointed not to be able to reach closure on?

Not really. I knew the second four years of any eight-year Presidency is a tough four years. It’s really hard to get stuff done. He tried hard on Social Security and immigration, struck out on both of them. Both of them should have been passed, but it’s just hard that second four years, particularly the heat of the first four, with the war and people are tired.

I told Penny Pritzker that. I said, “The second four years are tough years, and you need to get ready for it. If I were you, I’d focus on the world and see the world and develop relationships and sell America around the world. Back home it’s going to be rough.”

Did you observe any changes in the President during the four years that you served with him in office?

While I was in office, those four years, or the eight years?

You can do whatever you want with that question.

Exactly. I learned to do that pretty well, I really did. God, Wolf Blitzer had me in there. I had just come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’m the first Cabinet Secretary to go over there. It’s Sunday morning, we flew all night, and I’m getting on with Wolf Blitzer, and I come onto the Sunday morning shows. I come back and God-dang, man, he threw up some recording of the President of Malaysia or something. It was talking about some obscure, human rights, Jewish-related something or other, and wanted to know what I thought about it. I just got back from Iraq and Afghanistan. He went on and then it was the gay marriage thing. I’ll answer the question anyway.

It’s a really hard job, and there was a lot of pressure on him. The change I’ve seen since he left office and is back to his old self, he’s just more at ease and relaxed and easier to take the conversation in any direction you want to take it, not being distracted by other things on his mind.

The friendship has been there throughout, easy to get in touch with him throughout, but you can’t help but see the stress of the moment. There’s always something else you have to be thinking about, and people are counting on you to make the decision. It’s tough. I was around the Oval Office enough, around him enough, to say that in spite of seeing the pressure on him and having evenings over there at the White House, where we’d be in the Map Room or the Treaty Room, and we’d be talking. He’d wander off someplace after a few minutes, he was still able to laugh, which is so gosh-darn important, and I attribute a lot of it to that daily discipline he had of his spiritual life, emotional, and exercising. There was a lot of pressure on the job, but I didn’t see any—his faith remained strong, his principles didn’t change, his core beliefs didn’t change. People often asked, “Did you see any change in the President?” No, he’s the same guy down in his gut, in his core, in his heart, in his soul.

His support structure was much different. His second term, you’re gone, Karen’s not there very long and then she’s in and out. Karl leaves at some point in the second term. I’m curious about who—

But here’s the thing. Of course he had the tough issues to deal with. He was still dealing with Iraq. And the economy in ’08. He had six months of that. Give the guy credit. He said, “OK, these four years, what are we going to accomplish?” He burned up a lot of political capital on Social Security and lost it, and burned a lot with immigration and lost it. You think, It’s going to be hard to get anything that has really meaningful impact, but I tried on two big issues. I think the rest gets down to dealing with the big issues. He had the Rumsfeld thing he had to deal with, and that was a tough one. Then of course he had the financial crisis.

Is he touching base with you on the financial crisis?

I’m seeing him, but he’s not asking my opinion on anything. He is the ultimate decision maker and remained comfortable and confident in that role.

I just wondered, because you, as somebody who is so fundamentally committed to free enterprise, as a political matter as well as a moral matter—

No, he’s been clear on that. We talked about that a number of times; I’ve heard him talk about it to other people. When your Fed [Federal Reserve] chairman and your Secretary of Treasury come in and say, “We’re getting ready to have a major meltdown depression in this country,” that’s about what it takes to make you say, “In spite of my core free enterprise, I don’t care how big you are, you fail, you fail” kind of attitude.

He said, “I don’t want to be the President to put this country into depression.” That’s how he was weighing it. He hadn’t lost his faith in the free enterprise system. He just knew near term, we have to build a bridge between here and getting back to free enterprise, so we’re going to need to help some of these people.

In this new book by Peter Baker, he quotes President Bush in his conversation with Paulson and [Ben Shalom] Bernanke, where Bernanke says, “This will be worse than the Great Depression.”

Yes.

Of course Bush is saying, “If I’m going to be [Herbert] Hoover or [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt, I’m going to be Roosevelt.”

It sounds like not a choice this President would prefer to make.

Not for a Republican.

He said, “When they walked into my office, they were both white as your shirt.”

What can you do?

They said, “Man, this is over.” And what can you do? That’s what you do. You’re not going to say you’re going to be Hoover. We’re going to help this thing along until we come out the other side. That’s what you take on, and keep your core beliefs and core values, and he had all those from start to finish. Does it wear on you? Yes, it does, but he’s back to his old self in terms of—

I have to tell this story. I mentioned this a little bit earlier, that he called me two years ago now, and he said, “Hey, you won’t believe what I’m going to do.” I said, “What’s that?” he said, “I’m going to take art lessons.” I said, “You aren’t.” he said, “No, I’m going to, I’m going to take art lessons.” I said, “OK, have at it.”

A month or two goes by and I call his office. It’s a Wednesday afternoon about two o’clock and I asked, “Logan, is he in? What’s he doing, is he around?” Logan said, “Well, no.” I said, “Is he out playing golf?” Because he played a lot of golf and enjoyed that a lot. Logan said, “No, he’s not.” And I said, “Where is he?” Logan said, “He’s at home.” I said, “At home? It’s two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. What is he doing at home?” He’d be working or something. “Transfer me to the house.”

He picked up the telephone and said in a very soft voice, unusual, “Hello?” I said, “What are you doing? It’s Wednesday afternoon, it’s two o’clock. Why aren’t you working? What are you doing?” Our conversation has been like that for 40 years. On the front end, there’s always a whole lot of energy, going back and forth, and he’s hollering at me about something or I’m hollering at him. So I said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “I’m painting.” I said, “You’re doing what?” He said, “I’m painting.” I said, “Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry I bothered you. Call me back when you have some time.” [laughter]

It’s been great to see though, it’s just so wonderful that he enjoys it and he’s very good. He’s painted portraits of 25 world leaders that he’s worked with, and he’s got quite a talent, he totally does. It blows people away. I saw it years ago. His type A personality everybody sees, always riding his bike or running or doing something, always moving. I saw it in fishing. All of a sudden he loved bass fishing, so he’s sitting in a boat all afternoon. His painting thing, he’ll go up in his little man cave studio thing and he says, “I can go up there at one o’clock, and all of a sudden I look at my watch and it’s six o’clock.” He’s enjoying it a lot. But the personality and core beliefs, his strong faith, his soul, are all the same as when he went in.

And his friends?

Yes, they’re all there.

That doesn’t always happen.

No, they’re all there. I go back to what I said earlier, about the campaign in 2000. Our success was our friends, and he had an incredible number of devoted, trustworthy friends who were ready to put it all out there for him. You didn’t see that in the other campaign. You saw a bunch of people who liked politics, who wanted to be able to win a Presidency for the Democratic Party, but you didn’t see a bunch of tight, close personal friends of Al Gore in there running anything or helping him. I think that was one of the keys, along with the whole compassionate side that I talked about ad nauseam yesterday.

I always say at this point that we never exhaust all the possible topics we could talk about, but we do a pretty good job of exhausting the person seated in the hot seat. It has been a real pleasure and a privilege for us to hear from you. This is a rich addition to the portrait that we are painting of this man, and collecting over the next couple of years. We have a very broad definition of public service, which included taking the time to do something like this when you could be golfing or out earning money.

He’s always griping at me, “God-dang it, get over here and play golf with me. You’re not doing it enough.”

I say, “I have a library to run, an institute to stand up.” I talked to him Monday, I said, “I’m going to be over there Tuesday and Wednesday, I’m doing the oral history. When do I have time to play golf? I’m doing all this stuff for you.”

It’s a dear and true friendship, I’m blessed to have it. I go across the country and people always refer to, “You’re the guy who brought him to faith, aren’t you?” I don’t see it that way. I think that seed was planted many years ago in his home life. I always said, in terms of faith he’s done a lot more for me than I’ve done for him.

I don’t want history to look at me as the guy who had all the answers when it came to faith and was the guy who brought him to it. Maybe we built our faith together, strengthened our faith together. He helped me more than I helped him.

One moment I still remember. When you’re in the oilfield, the language can get pretty colorful. This is probably ’83 or something, and we were talking one time and I used some fairly colorful language that sounded like oilfield language. He said, “You don’t need to talk like that. Why do you do that?” So he helped me a lot along the way.

You’ve helped us a lot today and yesterday. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. This has been terrific.

I enjoyed it very much, I’m glad I did it.

[END OF INTERVIEW]