As President George H.W. Bush said in signing the Americans with Disabilities Act, "“Let the shameful walls of exclusion finally come tumbling down.” President Reagan vetoed it, but Bush signed it. That made history -- the first civil rights law in 20 years.
Bush also broke the logjam and signed landmark Clean Air Act Amendments. This saved countless lives.
Bush was a World War II pilot at 19, like my friend Abe Cohen and other young men who fought global fascism and defeated it. Not unlike our former St. Augustine Beach resident, 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee George Stanley McGovern, another World War II pilot and presidential candidate from the "Greatest Generation," Bush was modest about his wartime courage and heroism.
As a Texas Republican politician, Bush was a pragmatist, like a nudist crossing a barbed-wire fence: Bush opposed the John Birch Society, but campaigned against the 1964 Civil Rights Act but voted for the 1968 Fair Housing Act, a progressive act in the time and place in Houston.
Bush practiced civility and bipartisanship. Although his slimy 1988 and 1992 general election campaign tactics left much to be desired, Bush will always be fondly remembered for his revulsion at DONALD JOHN TRUMP, whom he did not vote for, calling him a "blowhard." Bush also trounced right-wing fascist PATRICK BUCHANAN in the 1992 primaries, rejecting his hate mongering.
On ADA, Fair Housing, the environment and several other issues, I agreed with President George H.W. Bush, and I salute his patriotism and wit.
Here's the extraordinary well-researched, reasoned, balanced news obituary by Adam Nagourney from The New York Times:
George Bush, 41st President, Dies at 94
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8:18George H.W. Bush: A Life of Public Service
Mr. Bush, part of a new generation of Republicans, was often referred to as the most successful one-term president.Published OnCreditCreditGeorge Tames/The New York Times
George Bush, the 41st president of the United States and the father of the 43rd, who steered the nation through a tumultuous period in world affairs but was denied a second term after support for his presidency collapsed under the weight of an economic downturn and his seeming inattention to domestic affairs, died on Friday night at his home in Houston. He was 94.
His death, which was announced by his office, came less than eight months after that of his wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush.
Mr. Bush had a form of Parkinson’s disease that forced him to use a wheelchair or motorized scooter in recent years, and he had been in and out of hospitals during that time as his health declined. In April, a day after attending Mrs. Bush’s funeral, he was treated for an infection that had spread to his blood. In 2013, he was in dire enough shape with bronchitis that former President George W. Bush, his son, solicited ideas for a eulogy.
But he proved resilient each time. In 2013 he told well-wishers, through an aide, to “put the harps back in the closet.
Mr. Bush, a Republican, was a transitional figurein the White House, where he served from 1989 to 1993, capping a career of more than 40 years in public service. A decorated Navy pilot who was shot down in the Pacific in 1944, he was the last of the World War II generation to occupy the Oval Office.
Mr. Bush was a skilled bureaucratic and diplomatic player who, as president, helped end four decades of Cold War and the threat of nuclear engagement with a nuanced handling of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe.
Yet for all his success in the international arena, his presidency faltered as voters seemed to perceive him as detached from their everyday lives. In an election that turned on the economy, they repudiated Mr. Bush in 1992 and chose a relatively little-known Democratic governor from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, a baby boomer, ushering in a generational shift in American leadership.
If Mr. Bush’s term helped close out one era abroad, it opened another. In January 1991 he assembled a global coalition to eject Iraqi invaders from Kuwait, sending hundreds of thousands of troops in a triumphant military campaign that to many Americans helped purge the ghosts of Vietnam.
But the victory also brought years of American preoccupation with Iraq, leading to the decision by George W. Bush in 2003 to topple the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, in a war that taxed American resources and patience.
The elder Mr. Bush entered the White House with one of the most impressive résumés of any president. He had been a two-term congressman from Texas, ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, United States envoy to China, director of the Central Intelligence Agency and vice president, under Ronald Reagan.
And he achieved what no one had since Martin Van Buren in 1836: winning election to the presidency while serving as vice president. (Van Buren did so in the footsteps of Andrew Jackson.)
A son of wealth and a graduate of Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and Yale, Mr. Bush was schooled in the good manners and graciousness of New England privilege and civic responsibility. He liked to frame his public service as an answer to the call to duty, like the one that had sent him over the Pacific and into enemy fire as a 20-year-old. (“The cockpit was full of smoke and I was choking from it,” he told his parents in a letter from the submarine that had plucked him from the sea.)
He underscored the theme of duty in accepting his party’s nomination for the presidency in 1988 in New Orleans. “I am a man who sees life in terms of missions — missions defined and missions completed,” he told Republican delegates in the Louisiana Superdome, acknowledging a swell of applause. He said he would “keep America moving forward” and strive “for a better America.”
“That is my mission,” he concluded, “and I will complete it.”
Tall, at 6 feet 2 inches, with an athlete’s graceful gait, Mr. Bush was genial and gentlemanly, except in the throes of a tough campaign. (Admonished by his mother against self-promotion, Mr. Bush, an inveterate note writer, in his clipped diction avoided the first person singular pronoun.) He represented a “kinder” and “gentler” strain of Republicanism — the often-quoted words he used in his Inaugural Address to describe his vision for the nation and the world — that has been all but buried in a seismic shift to the right in the party.
Generations in Politics
Mr. Bush’s post-presidency brought talk of a political dynasty. The son of a United States senator, Prescott S. Bush, Mr. Bush saw two of his own sons forge political careers that brought him a measure of redemption after he was ousted as commander in chief. George W. Bush became the first son of a president since John Quincy Adams to follow his father to the White House. (Unlike the father, the son won re-election.) Another son, Jeb Bush, was twice elected governor of Florida and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2016.
As the elder Mr. Bush watched troubles envelop the eight-year presidency of his son, however, what had been a source of pride became a cause of distress, friends said. The contrast between the two President Bushes — 41 and 43, as they came to call each other — served to burnish the father’s reputation in later years. As the younger Mr. Bush’s popularity fell, the elder Mr. Bush’s public standing rose. Many Americans came to appreciate the restrained, seasoned leadership the 41st president had displayed; in an opinion poll in 2012, 59 percent expressed approval. Democrats, including President Barack Obama, praised the father as a way of rebuking the son.
It was a subject Mr. Bush avoided discussing in public but one he finally addressed in conversations with Jon Meacham, his biographer, in a book published in 2015. Mr. Bush was quoted as saying that his son’s administration had been harmed by a “hard line” atmosphere that pushed an aggressive and ultimately self-destructive use of force around the world, and he placed the blame for that on men who had long been part of his own life and who became key figures in his son’s orbit — Dick Cheney, his son’s vice president, and Donald H. Rumsfeld, his son’s secretary of defense, with whom the elder Mr. Bush had feuded.
“I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there — some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him,” Mr. Bush said in the Meacham book, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.”
He was particularly critical of Mr. Rumsfeld. “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president, having his iron-ass view of everything,” he said, adding, “Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow and self-assured, swagger.”
Mr. Bush and his sons did not attend the Republican National Convention that nominated Donald J. Trump as its presidential candidate in 2016, and he pointedly did not endorse Mr. Trump in his race against Hillary Clinton.
During the primary, Mr. Trump had repeatedly belittled Jeb Bush as “low energy.” Mr. Bush, who had entered the contest as the son of a president with an inside track for the nomination, was forced to withdraw by February.
After his loss in 1992 to Mr. Clinton, in an election in which the billionaire independent candidate Ross Perot won almost a fifth of the vote, Mr. and Mrs. Bush repaired to their home in Houston and to their oceanfront compound in Kennebunkport, Me. By his own account the loss had left him dispirited and feeling humiliated. But he did not quite retire.
He celebrated several milestone birthdays, including his 90th, with parachute jumps. He traveled the globe on White House missions, joining Mr. Clinton to raise funds for the victims of the tsunami that ravaged Asia in 2004 and of Hurricane Katrina the next year.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton visited southern Thailand to review efforts to recover from the tsunami that ravaged Asia in 2004.CreditPool photo by Gerald Herbert
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Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton visited southern Thailand to review efforts to recover from the tsunami that ravaged Asia in 2004.CreditPool photo by Gerald Herbert
Until these undertakings, Mr. Bush had made little effort to mask his disdain for Mr. Clinton, but they forged an unlikely, almost familial, bond, growing so close that Mrs. Bush described her husband as the father Mr. Clinton never had.
The two former presidents became a symbol of bipartisanship in an increasingly partisan age. If Mr. Bush’s embrace helped scrub Mr. Clinton’s reputation of some of its tawdrier aspects, Mr. Clinton helped transform Mr. Bush’s image from that of a vanquished one-term president who had never fully escaped the shadow of his popular predecessor, Reagan, to one of a respected elder statesman.
Mr. Bush was president during a shift in the world order that had begun under Reagan. His measured response to upheaval in Eastern Europe drew complaints that he was not seizing the reins of history. But he chose a collaborative approach, working with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to allow for the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The two leaders signed treaties mandating historic reductions in their countries’ nuclear and chemical weapons.
“George H. W. Bush was the best one-term president the country has ever had, and one of the most underrated presidents of all time,” James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Mr. Bush’s closest adviser for nearly 50 years, said in an interview in 2013. “I think history is going to treat him very well.”
In his first year at the White House, Mr. Bush sent troops into Panamato oust its strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. The rapid, relatively bloodless conclusion of the Persian Gulf war of 1991 earned him a three-minute standing ovation and shouts of “Bush! Bush!” when he addressed a joint session of Congress that March. It also sent his voter approval ratings soaring to close to 85 percent during the four-day aerial bombardment of Baghdad, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. It was the pinnacle of his presidency, yet it lulled him, not to mention some potentially formidable Democrats, into assuming his re-election was certain.
The rapid, relatively bloodless conclusion of the Persian Gulf war earned President Bush a standing ovation when he addressed a joint session of Congress in March 1991.CreditRon Edmonds/Associated Press
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The rapid, relatively bloodless conclusion of the Persian Gulf war earned President Bush a standing ovation when he addressed a joint session of Congress in March 1991.CreditRon Edmonds/Associated Press
Iraq was not an unalloyed victory. Mr. Bush felt compelled to defend his decision to suspend the assault before it could topple Mr. Hussein, and his critics questioned his earlier effort to give Mr. Hussein financial aid and intelligence data. Still, foreign policy successes were the hallmark of his presidency. Not so his domestic record.
By the midpoint of his term, leaders of both the Republican and Democratic Parties complained that in the midst of the worst economy any American president had faced since the end of World War II, Mr. Bush had no domestic agenda. Many questioned his sensitivity to the worries of ordinary Americans. Though stung by the criticism, he did little to dispel that perception on a visit to an economically reeling New Hampshire during his re-election campaign, when he announced in January, “Message: I care.”
His signal domestic decision was almost certainly the 1990 budget deal, which sought to address deepening deficits by raising taxes on the wealthy. If it helped put the nation back on solid financial footing, it nevertheless reversed one of the most explicit campaign pledges ever uttered by a major-party presidential candidate: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”
That promise had been delivered to roars of approval in his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, and the turnabout provoked a chorus of reproach. Conservative Republicans revolted. Democrats found an opening for a bruising attack. And the stage was set for an unexpectedly strong third-party challenge by Mr. Perot, a fellow Texan who had made his fortune in computers. “It did destroy me,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Meacham years later as he assessed the damage he had suffered from breaking his 1988 campaign pledge.
Barely a year after the world had hailed his success in Iraq, Mr. Bush found himself almost losing the Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire to the conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan. Mr. Bush won the nomination but was weakened by the Buchanan challenge and accordingly veered sharply to the right. He then lost to Mr. Clinton. Mr. Perot’s 19 percent of the popular vote helped deny both Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton a majority.
A Measured Aristocrat
By any yardstick, Mr. Bush was an aristocrat, a product of moneyed Greenwich, Conn., where he was instilled with an enduring sense of noblesse oblige.
As a candidate, he was known to ask his Secret Service detail to stop at traffic lights. He wrote enough thank-you notes, courtesy cards and letters of sympathy — Mr. Bush seemed to know someone in every town in America — to fill a book, literally.
That book’s title was his customary signoff, “All the Best, George Bush.” Published in 1999, it appeared in lieu of a traditional presidential memoir, which he thought would be unseemly for a man whose mother, Dorothy W. Bush, had taught him the importance of modesty.
But the patrician image also hurt him politically. He drew barbs for his drawing-room mannerisms and expressions. When a waitress serving coffee at a New Hampshire truck stop during the 1988 presidential campaign asked him if he would like a refill, he nodded, saying yes, he’d have another “splash.”
His critics saw him as out of touch with ordinary Americans, pointing to what they portrayed as his amazed reaction during a demonstration of a supermarket scanner when he visited a grocers’ convention while president. (He later insisted that he had not been surprised.)
Critics saw Mr. Bush as out of touch with ordinary Americans during a demonstration of a supermarket scanner at a grocers’ convention in Orlando, Fla., in February 1992.CreditBarry Thumma/Associated Press
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Critics saw Mr. Bush as out of touch with ordinary Americans during a demonstration of a supermarket scanner at a grocers’ convention in Orlando, Fla., in February 1992.CreditBarry Thumma/Associated Press
In a debate during the 1992 campaign, Mr. Bush became flustered when a woman asked him how he could respond to the economic distress “of the common people” if he had “no experience with what’s ailing them.” Mr. Bush gazed uneasily at his questioner.
“Help me with the question, and I’ll try to answer it,” the president said.
Moments afterward, he watched as Mr. Clinton strode eagerly across the stage to engage the woman and, some said, win over much of the electorate.
Aware of his boarding-school image, Mr. Bush liked to point to his earthier chapters: his years in the Texas oil business, his wartime service. He reminded listeners that he did not wear button-down dress shirts or striped ties, thank you very much, and that he liked country music, horseshoes and pork rinds.
His courteousness was often taken — mistaken might be the better word — for docility. In 1987, Newsweek put his picture on the cover with the headline “Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’ ” (“The cheapest shot I’ve seen in my political life,” Mr. Bush fumed in his diary.) But he could be fiercely competitive in both politics and play. He ran a harsh campaign to beat Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts in 1988. He did not simply play golf, he played what the White House physician called “aerobic golf,” a mad rush from green to green.
Mr. Bush was given to malapropisms, a trait he may have handed down to his son George. He tangled his sentences, particularly when he was nervous. And he supplied a stream of entries into the American political lexicon. He talked about the “Big Mo” to describe the momentum that a victory in the Iowa caucuses had given his campaign. Tough moments were “tension city.” In asking voters not to pity him, he plucked a line from the musical “Evita,” saying, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.”
His speeches were delivered with a nasal voice and his signature clipped cadence that invited parody. The comedian Dana Carvey made his Bush imitation a staple of “Saturday Night Live.” (“Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.”) Rarely did Mr. Bush display the kind of emotional acuity that could move an audience. In a debate in 1992, a television camera captured him glancing at his wristwatch, as if he were bored.
Yet for all these moments, Mr. Bush could exhibit a gracious charm and authenticity. He was that rare figure in Washington: a man without enemies — or with very few, at any rate.
“You don’t see anybody trashing this president,” Mr. Baker said in the 2013 interview. “Whether they agreed with him on certain policy positions or not, people respected him and liked him.”
Besides his sons George and Jeb, Mr. Bush is survived by two other sons, Neil and Marvin; his daughter, Dorothy Bush Koch; a brother, Jonathan; a sister, Nancy Walker Bush Ellis; 17 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Robin, died of leukemia at age 3 in 1953. His older brother, Prescott S. Bush Jr., died in 2010 at 87, and his younger brother, William, died in March at 79.
Mr. Bush remained physically and mentally robust well into his later years, pursuing a retirement seemingly as active as his career had been. At Kennebunkport, when not golfing, he could be found piloting his speedboat, grinning as it roared atop the waves while often terrifying passengers who had dared to join him.
The day before he turned 80, in 2004, he gave a eulogy at Reagan’s funeral in California. Back in Texas two days later, he celebrated his birthday with about 5,000 invited guests, including Mr. Gorbachev, at a gala dinner in Houston’s baseball stadium. The day after that, as 3,000 people watched from below, Mr. Bush strapped on a parachute and jumped out of a plane.
Mr. Bush remained physically and mentally robust well into his 80s. He celebrated his 80th birthday in 2004 by parachuting out of a plane in a tandem jump.CreditArmy Golden Knights, via Associated Press
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Mr. Bush remained physically and mentally robust well into his 80s. He celebrated his 80th birthday in 2004 by parachuting out of a plane in a tandem jump.CreditArmy Golden Knights, via Associated Press
Privilege and Ambition
George Herbert Walker Bush — he was named after his mother’s father, George Herbert Walker — was born on June 12, 1924, the second of five children, in Milton, Mass., outside Boston. His family moved to Greenwich soon after. His father, besides his two terms in the United States Senate, was a banker who commuted to Wall Street as a managing partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, the white-shoe investment firm. His mother, the former Dorothy Walker, was a native of Maine. It was she who gave George his nickname, Poppy, when he was a toddler.
The children grew up sheltered from the Depression, tended to by maids and a driver. George enrolled at Greenwich Country Day School and Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. They spent summers in Kennebunkport.
Mr. Bush’s high school yearbook testifies to his ambitions and energy: He was president of the senior class, chairman of the student deacons and captain of both the baseball team and the soccer team.
If his father set the tone for Mr. Bush’s career, his mother shaped his values. His daughter, Ms. Koch, wrote in a memoir that he had been admonished to eschew self-promotion. “ ‘Nobody likes the big I am, George,’ my grandmother would say to him,” Ms. Koch wrote. “ ‘Don’t be talking about yourself.’ ”
Mr. Bush once boasted to his mother that he had scored three goals in a soccer match. “That’s nice, George,” his mother replied, “but how did the team do?”
Six months before he graduated from Phillips Academy, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “I could hardly wait to get out of school and enlist,” he wrote years later.
At 18, a handsome and strapping young man, Mr. Bush did enlist, as a seaman second class in the Navy’s flight training program. Soon he was flying combat missions in the Pacific. In September 1944, on a bombing run from the aircraft carrier San Jacinto, his plane was hit near the island of Chichi Jima by antiaircraft guns. He looked out and saw the wings on fire.
“I headed the plane out to sea and put on the throttle so as we could get away from the land as much as possible,” he told his parents in a letter. “I turned the plane up in an attitude so as to take the pressure off the back hatch so the boys could get out. After that I straightened up and started to get out myself.”
Two men on the plane died in the attack. Mr. Bush hit his head bailing out, he said, but landed safely in the ocean. He floated on a raft for hours, “violently sick to my stomach,” until a submarine rescued him. He was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross.
He returned home on Christmas Eve 1944. Days later, he married a young woman he had met at a dance three years earlier: Barbara Pierce, the daughter of Marvin Pierce, the publisher of Redbook and McCall’s magazines. Discharged from the Navy as a lieutenant junior grade, Mr. Bush enrolled at Yale, where he was admitted to the exclusive Skull and Bones club. With the arrival of the couple’s first child, their apartment in New Haven became the home of two future presidents.
After graduating from Yale in 1948 with a degree in economics, Mr. Bush took his red 1947 Studebaker — a graduation present from his parents — and drove to Odessa, Tex. A wealthy family friend, Henry Neil Mallon, gave him an entry-level job at his Texas oil company, Dresser Industries, landing him in a state that he barely knew but that would become a part of his political identity.
But Mr. Bush grew bored in the job, and in 1951 he and a Texas entrepreneur formed an oil exploration business. Two years later, with the business struggling, they merged with another company to form Zapata Petroleum. Zapata had a reputation for never drilling a dry hole, and before long Mr. Bush had made his first million.
Politics on the Horizon
By 1963 he was living in Houston, and his thoughts turned to politics. There was a contest to lead the Harris County Republican committee, and, by his account, local Republicans pressed him to jump in to prevent the far-right John Birch Society from taking over.
Night after night Mr. Bush drove across the county to make speeches, with Mrs. Bush typically sitting behind him onstage, crocheting. He won, and the victory caught the attention of state Republican leaders, who urged him to challenge Senator Ralph Yarborough, a Democrat seeking a second term in 1964. Mr. Bush agreed.
It was not the easiest way to begin a career in elective politics. Mr. Yarborough had ridden in President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade at the time of the assassination in Dallas the previous year, and the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, a fellow Texan who was heading for a landslide election victory, supported him.
Mr. Yarborough tried to discredit Mr. Bush by tying him to Barry M. Goldwater, the conservative Arizona senator and overmatched Republican presidential candidate. Mr. Bush did not resist the association. He criticized the Civil Rights Act that was before Congress, denounced the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty and warned of a welfare state. He lost, but his 43 percent of the vote was hardly embarrassing in a still decidedly Democratic state.
In February 1966, Mr. Bush resigned as chairman and chief executive of Zapata to run for Congress in a wealthy Houston district. Surveying his electorate, he began moving to the center; he now spoke well of the Johnson agenda, declaring in a speech, “I generally favor the goals as outlined in the Great Society.” He told his minister: “I took some of the far-right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it.”
Mr. Bush was elected to the House of Representatives in 1966 from the Seventh Congressional District of Texas.CreditEd Kolenovsky/Associated Press
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Mr. Bush was elected to the House of Representatives in 1966 from the Seventh Congressional District of Texas.CreditEd Kolenovsky/Associated Press
Mr. Bush won the House seat handily, with 67 percent of the vote. In Washington, he was one of 47 Republican freshmen in a Democratic-controlled Congress. In his telling, his most consequential vote there was for the open housing bill of 1968, an extension of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which he had campaigned against. He still had concerns about the act’s constitutionality, he wrote about his evolution, but the “problem of discrimination troubled me deeply.”
Mr. Bush was re-elected without opposition in 1968. The next spring, President Richard M. Nixon encouraged him to challenge Mr. Yarborough again for a Senate seat, although it would mean giving up a safe House seat and a post on the Ways and Means Committee. With Mr. Yarborough appearing more vulnerable this time, Mr. Bush took the challenge for the 1970 election.
Once again things did not turn out as planned. Representative Lloyd Bentsen challenged Mr. Yarborough in the Democratic primary and, in an upset, won. Mr. Bush, suddenly confronting a much tougher opponent, lost by more than 150,000 votes.
Twice defeated as a Senate candidate, and with his term in the House about to expire, Mr. Bush was looking for work. He was shortly summoned to the White House, where H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, talked to him about a White House staff job. Mr. Bush, however, wanted to be the United States ambassador to the United Nations. Nixon agreed.
His nomination drew a tide of criticism — his qualifications, as a former two-term congressman, were not immediately apparent — but Mr. Bush won confirmation in February 1971.
Mr. Bush at a Security Council meeting in 1972. Although his nomination drew a tide of criticism, Mr. Bush was confirmed as the United States ambassador to the United Nations in 1971.CreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times
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Mr. Bush at a Security Council meeting in 1972. Although his nomination drew a tide of criticism, Mr. Bush was confirmed as the United States ambassador to the United Nations in 1971.CreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times
Diplomat and Partisan
His United Nations service began with an embittering defeat in a voteon whether to seat a delegation from China. The United States had wanted both Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China to be represented, but the United Nations General Assembly voted to expel Taiwan to make way for China. Delegates danced in the aisles, delighted to see the United States humiliated. When Mr. Bush rose to speak, he was hissed. “Gladiatorial ugliness at its worst,” he later called it.
In 1972, after the break-ins at the Democratic Party offices at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, Nixon had a more urgent need for Mr. Bush: to lead the Republican National Committee. He took the job, he wrote, certain of Nixon’s innocence in the scandal, and he defended Nixon, though it was not easy.
Meeting with editors and reporters of The Washington Post at the newspaper’s offices, he talked about the pressures he felt even from within his own party. “I had two stacks of mail,” he said. The first asked, “How come you’re not doing more to support the president?” The second asked, “How come you’re keeping the party so close to the president?”
But as the scandal deepened, his support for Nixon began to erode, particularly after the Supreme Court ordered the president to turn over 64 tapes, including one that recorded him ordering Mr. Haldeman to block an F.B.I. inquiry into the break-ins. “This was proof the president had lied,” Mr. Bush wrote in “All the Best, George Bush.”
“The man is amoral,” he said of Nixon in his diary.
After Nixon resigned, ceding the presidency to Vice President Gerald R. Ford, Mr. Bush hoped to fill the vice president’s office. Ford called him in Kennebunkport two weeks later to tell him that he had chosen former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York for the job.
Mr. Bush went instead to China, as head of the United States Liaison Office, serving as an unofficial ambassador at a time when the two countries did not have full diplomatic relations. He would describe the period as a sabbatical, free of stress and obligations.
Ford brought him back for another assignment in 1976: to lead the C.I.A., which was still reeling from accusations that it had abused its power under Nixon, including plotting to assassinate foreign leaders and overturn governments. Mr. Bush was credited with restoring morale at the agency, but it was another short-lived appointment, lasting just under a year. Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter that November, and Mr. Bush returned to Texas.
There he turned his sights toward running for president. “I am determined to make an all-out effort for 1980,” he wrote to Nixon in January 1979.
Mr. Bush was sworn in as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976. It was a short-lived appointment, but he was credited with restoring morale at the agency.CreditAssociated Press
Mr. Bush put together a cabinet of advisers — including Mr. Baker, a Houston lawyer who had managed his 1970 Senate campaign and Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign — and began traveling the country. He focused first on the Iowa caucuses, borrowing from Jimmy Carter’s strategy in 1976 of using a victory there to jump ahead of the field. He succeeded in Iowa, but then lost in New Hampshire, and by May the party was coalescing around Reagan. Mr. Bush met with his advisers. “A consensus was reached — the campaign had no future,” he wrote in his autobiography. “There was only one dissenting voice. Mine.”
Mr. Bush decided on a new goal: to become vice president. But that July he learned from television that Reagan was seeking to enlist Ford. To ask a former president to take the No. 2 spot was a surprising move, but Reagan, a former actor and California governor with hard-right views, hoped that Ford would bring to the ticket both Washington heft and political moderation. Their negotiation faltered, however, and Mr. Bush received the telephone call he had wanted.
“Hello, George,” Reagan said to Mr. Bush. “This is Ron Reagan. I’d like to go over to the convention and announce that you’re my choice for vice president, if that’s all right with you.”
That November, the Reagan-Bush ticket won in a landslide and Mr. Bush offered the new president his fealty. “I will never do anything to embarrass you politically,” he wrote to Reagan.
Former President Gerald R. Ford lent his support to Ronald Reagan, the Republican nominee for president, and Mr. Bush, his running mate, in Peoria, Ill., in 1980. The Reagan-Bush ticket won in a landslide.CreditAssociated Press
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Former President Gerald R. Ford lent his support to Ronald Reagan, the Republican nominee for president, and Mr. Bush, his running mate, in Peoria, Ill., in 1980. The Reagan-Bush ticket won in a landslide.CreditAssociated Press
Mr. Bush happily accepted his first assignment: leading a task force to reduce federal regulations. He rarely, if ever, said no to attending the funeral of a foreign dignitary, and he endured the ribbing that is the cost of being a vice president. “Let ’em laugh,” Mr. Bush said. “There’s a lot going on, and it’s substantive, and I like it.”
The Reagan-Bush team was even more convincing in the 1984 re-election campaign, when the Democratic challenger, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, chose as his running mate Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro, the first woman nominated for national office by a major party. She and Mr. Bush sparred throughout the campaign, and he came in for criticism when he was overheard after a debate bragging that “we tried to kick a little ass last night.” But almost as soon as the votes began piling up, he turned to his own political future.
Bumps Along the Trail
Early in 1986, wanting to shore up his shaky credentials on the right, Mr. Bush gave a series of speeches in which he backed constitutional amendments supporting a balanced budget and school prayer and restricting abortion. He also tied himself ever more tightly to Reagan by presenting himself as the rightful heir to his party’s presidential nomination.
But the risks in that strategy became all too apparent. With the exposure of the Iran-contra affair — the clandestine scheme to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of Iranian hostages and then to divert the proceeds to right-wing Nicaraguan rebels — the White House came under investigation, and Mr. Bush was hounded by questions about what he knew about the deal. He said he had expressed “certain reservations” about it in White House meetings, a recollection that at one point Reagan seemed to challenge.
The arms-for-hostages storm hurt Mr. Bush and emboldened his Republican opponents. In January 1988, when Mr. Bush faced an unexpectedly tough challenge in Iowa from Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, an interview with the CBS News anchor Dan Rather turned into a 10-minute confrontation. Mr. Rather pressed Mr. Bush about his role in the Iran-contra affair. “I want to talk about why I want to be president,” Mr. Bush said. “I don’t think it’s fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran.”
Mr. Bush came in third in the Iowa caucuses, behind Mr. Dole and the evangelical preacher Pat Robertson. It was an embarrassment for a vice president in office and the presumed heir to the nomination. Stung, Mr. Bush turned his hopes to New Hampshire, where his campaign was being run by Gov. John H. Sununu.
Mr. Sununu advised him to counter his image as a man of privilege. Soon the president was campaigning in a windbreaker, pumping hands at factory gates and, at one point, leaping from his motorcade to help a driver stuck in a snowbank.
Mr. Bush with Dan Quayle at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans. Even some Republicans questioned Mr. Bush’s choice of Mr. Quayle, a little-known Indiana senator, as his running mate.CreditBob Daugherty/Associated Press
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Mr. Bush with Dan Quayle at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans. Even some Republicans questioned Mr. Bush’s choice of Mr. Quayle, a little-known Indiana senator, as his running mate.CreditBob Daugherty/Associated Press
Mr. Bush won the New Hampshire primary with 37.8 percent of the vote, and Mr. Dole ended his dwindling chances that night when he flashed anger in a television interview. When the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Mr. Dole if he had anything to say to Mr. Bush, he responded by saying, “Stop lying about my record.”
By the spring, Mr. Bush had pivoted toward the Democratic field, where Mr. Dukakis had emerged as the party’s choice. The Bush camp decided to portray Mr. Dukakis as a Massachusetts liberal, highlighting his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union and his having supported a program that provided a weekend furlough to a prisoner, Willie Horton, who had raped a woman while free from jail one weekend.
As president, George Bush steered the United States through a pivotal, tumultuous period in world affairs, but he was denied a second term in 1992 as the economy slumped.CreditDiana Walker/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images
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As president, George Bush steered the United States through a pivotal, tumultuous period in world affairs, but he was denied a second term in 1992 as the economy slumped.CreditDiana Walker/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images
When Mr. Bush arrived in New Orleans for the Republican convention, Mr. Dukakis had a 17-point lead in opinion polls.
Mr. Bush did not get off to the most auspicious start. Even some Republicans questioned his choice for running mate: Dan Quayle, a young, boyish-looking, little-known Indiana senator who was just finishing his first term.
But Mr. Bush was focused on his opponent. He mocked Mr. Dukakis for being a “card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U.” and attacked him for refusing to sign a Massachusetts bill mandating that teachers lead students in a daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Mr. Bush pulled ahead of Mr. Dukakis in the polls. As Election Day neared, Mr. Dukakis faded under the pummeling of a campaign that even some Republicans would characterize as ugly. Lee Atwater, who had directed the campaign, apologized in 1991 for the tactics he had employed.
The day before the election, Mr. Bush was confident enough about the outcome that he decided to name Mr. Baker, his campaign manager in 1970 and 1980, as secretary of state and Mr. Sununu, who had saved his candidacy in New Hampshire, as chief of staff.
His victory, on Nov. 8, was convincing: He won 40 states and 54 percent of the popular vote, to Mr. Dukakis’s 46 percent. The next day, seeking to distance himself from harsher sides of his campaign, Mr. Bush assured reporters that they would never again see the candidate some had begun calling George the Ripper.
Mr. Bush was triumphant as he stood at the West Front of the Capitol on Inauguration Day in January 1989.CreditJose R. Lopez/The New York Times
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Mr. Bush was triumphant as he stood at the West Front of the Capitol on Inauguration Day in January 1989.CreditJose R. Lopez/The New York Times
The Bush White House
Denied the presidency earlier and overshadowed by Reagan for eight years, Mr. Bush was triumphant as he stood at the West Front of the Capitol on Inauguration Day in January 1989, a throng of well-wishers spread out below. He was 64 years old and eager to move into the office down the hall and around the corner from the quarters he had occupied as vice president — so eager that he exclaimed “I” before Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had finished asking him if he would solemnly swear to faithfully execute the office of president.
In his Inaugural Address, Mr. Bush pledged “to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.” He talked about a “thousand points of light,” a reference to community and charitable groups, “spread like stars throughout the nation.” But he soon met obstacles to that lofty ambition — some political, some economic, some of his own doing and some beyond his control.
The most immediate difficulty came from operating in Reagan’s shadow. Mr. Bush had replaced, and would be judged against, a two-term president who had come to embody a new era of Republicanism while presiding over what was, at the time, the longest period of economic growth in history. If things went wrong for Mr. Bush, he would not be able to blame his predecessor.
And clearly he did not approve of everything Reagan had done as president. The heavy budget deficit Reagan had left promised to complicate anything the new president might want to do.
Mr. Bush also faced a solidly Democratic Congress, a disadvantage he would later blame for his limited legislative record. And although Mr. Bush had defeated Mr. Dukakis soundly, he was not feared; Democrats were not inclined to afford him much of a ride.
Mr. Bush’s first test came with his nomination of an old ally, John G. Tower, as secretary of defense. Mr. Tower, a former senator from Texas, had served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Mr. Bush thought the nomination would, as he wrote, “glide through the Hill for two good reasons: He was more than qualified for the job, and Congress is usually kind to its own.
“I could not have been more wrong.”
The problems rose from the right. Paul M. Weyrich, an uncompromising leader of the conservative movement, testified before the committee that he had seen Mr. Tower inebriated in public and in the company of women other than his wife. Mr. Weyrich said he had “serious reservations” about Mr. Tower’s “moral character.” The next day, Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who was chairman of the committee, asked Mr. Tower if he had a drinking problem. “I have none, senator,” Mr. Tower said.
But the nomination was sliding off the tracks, and Mr. Bush responded with fury, denouncing what he called the “frenzied air of speculation” about Mr. Tower. He and Mr. Quayle began lobbying senators personally.
The Senate voted 53 to 47 to reject Mr. Tower’s nomination. It was the first time in 30 years that a president had been denied his choice of a cabinet member.
Mr. Bush’s first test as a Republican president with a solidly Democratic Congress came with his nomination of an old ally, John G. Tower, as secretary of defense. The Senate voted 53 to 47 to reject Mr. Tower’s nomination.CreditPaul Hosefros/The New York Times
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Mr. Bush’s first test as a Republican president with a solidly Democratic Congress came with his nomination of an old ally, John G. Tower, as secretary of defense. The Senate voted 53 to 47 to reject Mr. Tower’s nomination.CreditPaul Hosefros/The New York Times
Mr. Bush next nominated a popular House member for the defense secretary job: Mr. Cheney of Wyoming. But the Tower episode had taken a toll. The 41st president had not reached the benchmark first 100 days in office, yet he felt compelled to declare that his White House was “on track.”
“I would simply resist the clamor that nothing seems to be bubbling around, that nothing is happening,” he said. “A lot is happening, not all of it good, but a lot is happening.”
A World in Turmoil
In the spring, the Bush presidency turned to foreign affairs, where it stayed for much of the next two years. In Panama, Mr. Noriega claimed victory in an election in May that independent observers said had been stained with fraud. Mr. Bush declared the election stolen and called for international pressure to make the Panamanian strongman step aside. It would take almost eight months to accomplish that goal.
The Soviet bloc was in even greater upheaval. Mr. Gorbachev, who had come to power in 1985, had begun a campaign for economic and democratic change, shaking the foundations of communism across Eastern Europe. Mr. Bush found himself under pressure to respond with equal boldness.
In April 1989, he went to a Polish enclave in Michigan to salute the Polish government for its political liberalization, including providing for the labor union Solidarity to regain its legal status. “The winds of change are shaping a new European destiny,” Mr. Bush said. It was time, he declared in Texas a few weeks later, to “seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations.” And at a NATO meeting in May in Brussels, where many world leaders wanted to see if he could hold his own, he presented Mr. Gorbachev with a proposal for conventional arms cuts.
Still, Mr. Bush was criticized, even by allies, for having responded tentatively and tepidly to developments behind the Iron Curtain.
After the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, reporters asked Mr. Bush why he seemed subdued. “I’m just not an emotional kind of guy,” he replied.
He bristled at the criticism. “If we mishandle this,” he said, speaking of the rebellions in Eastern Europe, “and get way out looking like an American project, you could invite crackdown and invite negative reaction that could result in bloodshed.”
Mr. Bush had been similarly cautious in June that year, when Chinese troops cracked down on students demonstrating around Tiananmen Square in Beijing and opened fire, killing hundreds. He announced sanctions against China but said he did not want to cut off diplomatic relations.
That fall, Mr. Bush announced that he and Mr. Gorbachev would meet, albeit with no formal agenda, on vessels off the coast of Malta, in the Mediterranean. The summit meeting took place in early December 1989. Rough waters forced the cancellation of a negotiating session, but when the seas abated, the two leaders met and vowed to conclude treaties on long-range nuclear weapons and conventional arms by the end of the next year. They agreed, Mr. Gorbachev said, that “the characteristics of the Cold War should be abandoned.”
Mr. Bush and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev met and vowed to conclude treaties on long-range nuclear weapons and conventional arms at a summit meeting in December 1989.CreditBoris Yurchenko/Associated Press
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Mr. Bush and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev met and vowed to conclude treaties on long-range nuclear weapons and conventional arms at a summit meeting in December 1989.CreditBoris Yurchenko/Associated Press
At the time, Mr. Bush was frustrated by Mr. Noriega’s resilience. In October, dissident Panamanian defense forces had been crushed in an attempted coup that received some, but not enough, American support. Mr. Noriega appeared before cameras in a taunting show of defiance.
On Dec. 20, the United States invaded Panama in a swift overnight operation involving 11,000 troops; 23 Americans died. Mr. Noriega fled, eventually turning up at the residence of the Vatican’s representative in Panama City before surrendering to the United States to face narcotics-trafficking charges. Mr. Atwater, the chairman of the Republican National Committee at the time, said the capture was a “political jackpot” for Mr. Bush.
Through all of this, Mr. Bush, trying to establish a presidential identity distinct from Reagan’s, was moving away from his predecessor’s policies. He slowed spending on the missile defense shield and the Strategic Defense Initiative (known as Star Wars), and delayed production of the Stealth bomber. He proposed a tougher Clean Air Act to curb major sources of hazardous air pollution, including emissions from coal-burning power plants. And he agreed to send humanitarian aid, but not military aid, to the Nicaraguan contras, the rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government.
Mr. Bush also negotiated and signed the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, largely fulfilling a 1988 campaign pledge. Nearly 3,000 people, many in wheelchairs, attended the White House signing. “Let the shameful walls of exclusion finally come tumbling down,” he said.
Mr. Bush fulfilled a 1988 campaign pledge by signing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act in July 1990.CreditBarry Thumma/Associated Press
Supporters of the bill called it the most significant piece of civil rights legislation in two decades. It barred discrimination against people with handicaps in places of public accommodation, transportation and employment, and mandated that many new public and private buildings be made easily accessible to people with disabilities. Similar rules applied to buses and trains.
Environmental groups praised Mr. Bush’s record on climate change and the environment. As president, he signed the United States to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, which led to the Paris Agreement on a plan to reduce global emissions. Mr. Bush also created the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the federal body that produces a sweeping government climate change report every four years.
Mr. Bush’s popularity and spirits were soaring when he stepped before Congress for his first State of the Union address, in January 1990. He used the speech to hail what he called the “revolution of ’89,” with “changes so striking that it marks the beginning of a new era in the world’s affairs.”
In the spring, Mr. Bush and Mr. Gorbachev concluded a summit meeting in Washington with broad agreements to commit to reduce arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons and to eliminate most of their chemical weapons.
On the domestic front, Mr. Bush was ready to negotiate a deal on the growing budget deficit. But in doing so he opened the door to what he would come to see as the worst mistake of his presidency.
“We need a deal,” he wrote in his diary. “I’m willing to eat crow, but the others are going to have to eat crow. I’ll have to yield on ‘Read My Lips,’ and they’re going to have to yield on some of their rhetoric on taxes and on entitlements.”
Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary at the time, said the administration had “no preconditions” as it entered negotiations with congressional leaders. But Democrats, seeking to guard against Republican attacks in elections that fall, said they would not consider any tax increases unless Mr. Bush publicly endorsed such a step.
The White House issued a statement by the president on June 26. “It is clear to me,” it said, “that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following.” There was a short list of actions. One was “tax revenue increases.”
Mr. Bush and congressional Democrats agreed on a budget proposalthat included raising taxes on gasoline, cigarettes, liquor and luxury items. The reaction was scathing. “The president gave away the crown jewel of his campaign promise to bring the Democrats to the table: That was ‘no new taxes,’ ” said Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California.
The House voted down the budget proposal, 254 to 179, in October 1990. It took several weeks to reach a final deal, which included raising the tax rate on upper income earners to 31 percent from 28 percent. Mr. Bush said that he would sign it, but that he was “absolutely going to hold the line on taxes from now on.”
War in the Gulf
In the early hours of Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi forces under the command of Saddam Hussein rumbled into Kuwait and seized its oil fields. “This is radical Saddam Hussein moving,” Mr. Bush wrote in his diary as he sat in the Oval Office at 6 a.m. In an address to the nation a few days later, Mr. Bush signaled that the United States was prepared to respond with force. “This will not stand,” he said.
Over the next two weeks, Mr. Bush moved the nation toward war while trying to reassure leaders like Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, who told him, “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.” He sent paratroopers to Saudi Arabia and ordered warships to the Persian Gulf to enforce United Nations trade sanctions against Iraq.
From the start, Mr. Bush was dubious that Mr. Hussein would respond to diplomacy. But while Mrs. Thatcher was trying to steel him, other European allies, as well as Mr. Gorbachev and Democrats in Congress, were pressuring him not to act too aggressively. Mr. Bush pressed his case, saying publicly that he wanted to avoid a military solution, while preparing for just that. “Vital issues of principle are at stake,” he declared to Congress on Sept. 11. “Saddam Hussein is literally trying to wipe a country off the face of the earth.”
In November, Mr. Bush nearly doubled the size of the United States presence in the Persian Gulf.
Mr. Bush nearly doubled the size of the United States presence in the Persian Gulf region after Iraqi forces rumbled into Kuwait in 1990.CreditGreg English/Associated Press
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Mr. Bush nearly doubled the size of the United States presence in the Persian Gulf region after Iraqi forces rumbled into Kuwait in 1990.CreditGreg English/Associated Press
Democrats in Congress were concerned. “Howling in the Congress was loud,” Gen. Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Bush, wrote in his memoir. “Was this George Bush, whom some people criticized as a ‘wimp,’ trying to prove his manhood by starting a war?
The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution at the end of November authorizing the use of force against Iraq if it did not leave Kuwait by Jan. 15, 1991. It did not. On Jan. 12, the House and Senate, with bipartisan support, authorized military action in the Persian Gulf. By then Mr. Bush had built a foundation for it: 28 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, were behind him.
At 3 a.m. in Iraq on Jan. 16, after a midnight deadline had passed without an Iraqi withdrawal, Mr. Bush ordered airstrikes. Waves of bombers and cruise missiles hit Baghdad and targets elsewhere in Iraq and in Kuwait.
“Our goal is not the conquest of Iraq, it is the liberation of Kuwait,” Mr. Bush said in a televised address. Mr. Hussein proclaimed that the “mother of all battles has begun.”
The war began with a spectacular display of United States air power, as precision missile and bombing runs appeared to be inflicting grave damage on Baghdad. The White House held out hope that this assault alone would win the war, without American casualties, but Pentagon officials realized that a ground invasion was inevitable.
When it came, the ground war lasted almost exactly 100 hours, with minimal American casualties. Encircled, the Iraqi Army surrendered. Mr. Bush called a cease-fire, even though it allowed members of the Republican Guard, an elite Iraqi unit, to escape, and even though it left Mr. Hussein in power.
General Powell advised Mr. Bush to end the fighting. “Mr. President, it’s going much better than we expected,” he recalled saying, according to his memoir. “The Iraqi Army is broken. All they’re trying to do now is get out. We don’t want to be seen as killing for the sake of killing.” Mr. Bush, by General Powell’s account, responded, “If that’s the case, why not end it today?”
Mr. Bush would be called to defend that decision time and again, saying that he had been convinced that Mr. Hussein would be overthrown once the war ended. “We underestimated his brutality and cruelty to his own people and the stranglehold he has on his country,” Mr. Bush wrote in February 1991, years before Mr. Hussein was actually ousted. “We were disappointed, but I still do not regret my decision to end the war when we did.”
In the next six months, Mr. Bush balanced urgent demands both abroad and at home. He went to Moscow in July 1991 and signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which slashed the American and Soviet long-range nuclear arsenals by 25 percent to 35 percent. But Mr. Gorbachev was losing his battle to hold on to power. Less than three weeks later, Mr. Bush’s loyalty was put to the test when Mr. Gorbachev, his country in economic turmoil, was ousted by hard-liners.
Mr. Bush denounced the coup as a “misguided and illegitimate effort” and demanded that Mr. Gorbachev be returned to power. For Mr. Bush, it was an uncharacteristically risky move, considering what might have happened to United States-Soviet relations had the generals behind the coup succeeded.
The takeover did not last the week. But the disintegration of the Soviet Union was nearly complete. Mr. Gorbachev stepped down on Dec. 25.
Picking Clarence Thomas
In Washington, Mr. Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas, a 43-year-old United States appeals court judge for the District of Columbia Circuit, to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall, a champion of civil rights and the first black person to serve on that bench. Judge Thomas, who is also black, soon faced questions about his conservative ideology and accusations of sexual harassment by a former aide, Anita F. Hill.
Mr. Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, faced questions about his conservative ideology and accusations of sexual harassment. He was confirmed by one of the narrowest margins ever for a Supreme Court nomination.CreditJose R. Lopez/The New York Times
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Mr. Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, faced questions about his conservative ideology and accusations of sexual harassment. He was confirmed by one of the narrowest margins ever for a Supreme Court nomination.CreditJose R. Lopez/The New York Times
The White House responded by trying to discredit Ms. Hill, and after a pitched battle with Congress, the Senate confirmed Judge Thomas by a vote of 52 to 48, one of the narrowest margins ever for a Supreme Court nomination. (It was a far more contentious nomination than Mr. Bush’s choice of David H. Souter, who had been confirmed by the Senate, 90 to 9, the year before.)
The 1992 election was still more than a year away, but Mr. Bush was considering his prospects for a second term when he took note of a governor who sought to run against him. “The stories keep saying I will be very hard to beat: The more we hear of this, the more worried I become,” he wrote in his diary. “Bill Clinton, a very nice man, may get into the race.”
Then came an Election Day jolt in 1991: Harris Wofford, an obscure Democrat running for the Senate in Pennsylvania and appealing to the economic concerns of the middle class, defeated Dick Thornburgh, an attorney general under both Mr. Bush and Reagan.
The next day, Mr. Bush canceled a trip to the Far East, wary of giving Democrats ammunition in portraying him as interested only in foreign policy. He summoned reporters to say the economy was basically sound.
“You see, there’s some fairly good fundamentals getting out there,” he said. “Inflation is down. Interest rates are down. Personal debt is down. Inventories are down.”
But Americans, including Republicans, were dubious. One opinion poll found that only one in four respondents approved of Mr. Bush’s handling of the economy. Signaling more trouble, Mr. Buchanan, the conservative commentator, announced that he would challenge Mr. Bush for the Republican nomination.
Mr. Bush’s 12-day trip to the Far East opened the last full year of his presidency. The White House presented the trip, six weeks before the New Hampshire primary, as an effort to open export markets. Instead it produced what Mr. Bush saw as one of the most damaging moments of his time in office.
At a state dinner in Tokyo hosted by Kiichi Miyazawa, the Japanese prime minister, Mr. Bush turned white, vomited on his host and fainted. Mr. Miyazawa cradled Mr. Bush’s head as the president crumpled to the floor, an unsettling image that dominated the news for days.
Mr. Bush came home to a bleak domestic picture. Unemployment was at 7.1 percent, the highest level in six years. A New York Times/CBS News opinion poll found that just one-fifth of Americans thought Mr. Bush cared about their problems. When Mr. Bush visited New Hampshire in mid-January, his anxiety was evident the moment he stepped off Air Force One.
“I probably have made mistakes in assessing the fact that the economy would recover,” he said. “I think I’ve known, look, this economy is in free fall. I hope I’ve known it. Maybe I haven’t conveyed it as well as I should have, but I do understand it.”
Mr. Buchanan drew 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, unwelcome news for the beleaguered Mr. Bush.
A Loss and a Rebound
The president’s advisers promptly sent him to 22 cities in 20 days. He attacked welfare, big government and trial lawyers, and rued the day he had agreed to raise taxes, calling his decision to renege on his tax pledge the biggest mistake of his presidency.
Mr. Bush stopped his slide by solidly beating Mr. Buchanan in South Carolina. Clearly relieved, the president said he would cut back his campaign trips.
But Mr. Buchanan’s candidacy had highlighted Mr. Bush’s political frailty, forced him to act as a candidate rather than as a president, and pushed him rightward as Mr. Clinton seized the center.
The conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan challenged Mr. Bush for the 1992 Republican nomination.CreditPeter Cosgrove/Associated Press
There was little respite for Mr. Bush as he prepared for the nominating convention in Houston. At that point he had to deal with the prospect of a populist third-party challenge from Mr. Perot. Mr. Bush shrugged off the threat at first.
“Perot will be defined, seen, as a weirdo,” he wrote that spring, referring to Mr. Perot’s eccentric ways and folksy style. (He was drawn to conspiracy theories, among other things, and hired private detectives to chase his suspicions.) But Mr. Perot had captured the public’s imagination. He presented himself as the symbol of change and did not play by the rules of traditional politics.
Alarmed Republicans were blunt. At a fund-raiser in Charlotte, N.C., the president was visibly uncomfortable watching a video in which Senator Jesse Helms complained about Mr. Bush’s campaign. “Mr. President,” Mr. Helms said, “tell them once again, ‘Read my lips,’ but this time with gusto.”
Mr. Bush fixated on Mr. Clinton’s political skills. Mr. Clinton was “better at facts-figures, than I am,” he wrote to an adviser. “I am better at life.”
He also complained to supporters that he was not getting the credit he deserved for the fall of communism, the handling of the Persian Gulf war and the arms control treaties. “I have worked my heart out as president of the United States,” he said.
Mr. Clinton was nominated by a confident, united Democratic Party in New York in July. Republicans went on the attack, portraying him as a man of character flaws that made him unfit to lead. Mr. Clinton responded with equal force. “George Bush,” he said, “if you won’t use your power to help people, step aside. I will.”
Mr. Clinton’s convention was a success. In a New York Times/CBS News opinion poll, he had the biggest postconvention bounce in 50 years, leading Mr. Bush 55 percent to 31 percent.
Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, with his running mate, Senator Al Gore, at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1992. After the convention, an opinion poll showed Mr. Clinton leading Mr. Bush 55 percent to 31 percent.CreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times
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Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, with his running mate, Senator Al Gore, at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1992. After the convention, an opinion poll showed Mr. Clinton leading Mr. Bush 55 percent to 31 percent.CreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Republicans despaired. Under pressure to shake up his White House, Mr. Bush pressed his old friend Mr. Baker to leave the State Department and return as White House chief of staff.
Mr. Bush accepted the nomination to run for a second term with a promise to cut taxes, a pledge to curb spending, an attack on Mr. Clinton’s credentials and — once again — an apology for having broken his tax cut pledge.
“Who do you trust in this election?” he said as Republican delegates in Houston roared their approval. “The candidate who raised taxes one time and regrets it, or the other candidate, who raised taxes and fees 128 times and enjoyed it every time?”
The convention was dominated by angry appeals to the party’s conservative wing, notably by Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Robertson, who were given prime-time slots to speak against abortion rights and gay rights. By the end of the month, a New York Times/CBS News poll showed that Mr. Clinton still had a resounding lead of 51 percent to 26 percent.
The Final Election
Mr. Bush remained ostensibly confident. “I can make it; I can out hustle Clinton; out work him; out jog him; out campaign him; and we’ll win,” he wrote in his diary. But his campaign was frantic. He jumped from offering an economic plan one day to attacking Mr. Clinton’s character the next, referring to Mr. Clinton’s military draft exemptions, his dabbling with marijuana and his protests against the Vietnam War while a student.
Mr. Bush’s attacks escalated as the weather turned cold. “My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than those two bozos,” he said of Mr. Clinton and his running mate, Senator Al Gore of Tennessee.
But on Nov. 3, Mr. Clinton defeated Mr. Bush, 43 percent to 37 percent, with Mr. Perot drawing almost 19 percent. Mr. Bush believed he would have won were it not for Mr. Perot, Mr. Baker said. That weekend, a dispirited Mr. Bush retreated with General Powell to Camp David in Maryland, where they watched the movie “Enchanted April” and tried to understand what had just happened.
Mr. Clinton, Ross Perot and Mr. Bush at their final presidential debate in October 1992. On Nov. 3, Mr. Clinton defeated Mr. Bush, 43 percent to 37 percent, with Mr. Perot drawing almost 19 percent.CreditJ. David Ake/Agence France-Presse
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Mr. Clinton, Ross Perot and Mr. Bush at their final presidential debate in October 1992. On Nov. 3, Mr. Clinton defeated Mr. Bush, 43 percent to 37 percent, with Mr. Perot drawing almost 19 percent.CreditJ. David Ake/Agence France-Presse
“I just never thought they’d elect him,” Mr. Bush told General Powell. “Don’t understand it. But life goes on.”
Mr. Bush had not expected such an early retirement. He and Mrs. Bush did not even really have a place to go: Their base in Houston was a hotel suite, and the Kennebunkport retreat had not been winterized.
But Mr. Bush was not finished with his presidency. At Christmas, he pardoned six Reagan administration officials who had been involved in the arms-for-hostages scandal. One, former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, was about to stand trial on charges that he had lied to Congress about his knowledge of arms sales to Iran. The trial would have opened up private notes referring to Mr. Bush’s support for the secret arms shipment.
The special prosecutor in the case, Lawrence E. Walsh, assailed the pardons. “The Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed,” he said.
Mr. Bush returned to Russia for a final foreign policy triumph. He and President Boris N. Yeltsin signed a Start II agreement providing for the steepest rollback of nuclear arms yet. Then, on Jan. 20, 1993, Mr. Bush took one last walk around the White House grounds.
Mr. Bush spent the rest of his life more as an observer than as a player, watching as one son was elected president twice and as another was elected governor twice before attempting his own run for the presidency. He joined Mr. Clinton in raising money for disaster relief efforts. His public profile dropped as criticism of his son’s presidency mounted, and there were reports that foreign policy advisers to the elder Mr. Bush had counseled against the war in Iraq that so troubled George W. Bush’s presidency.
Mr. Bush boarding Marine One en route to Camp David in January 1993.CreditDoug Mills/Associated Press
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Mr. Bush boarding Marine One en route to Camp David in January 1993.CreditDoug Mills/Associated Press
As Mr. Bush moved into the final years of his life, there were signs that time had left him behind. A handful of women accused him of inappropriately touching them as they were having their pictures taken with him. Mr. Bush’s office said the gestures, he patted them on the rear, were meant in a good-natured matter, but said: “to anyone he has offended, President Bush apologizes most sincerely.”
Mr. Bush was never a man comfortable with self-examination, but in an interview with Mr. Meacham, his biographer, he evinced some insecurity about how history might judge him. “I am lost between the glory of Reagan — monuments everywhere, trumpets, the great hero — and the trials and tribulations of my sons,” Mr. Bush said.
At another point, he asked of those who would examine his career, “What if they just find an empty deck of cards?”
But the 41st president may have best summed up his talents and ambitions in a diary entry on the last day of 1989, as the first year of his presidency drew to a close.
“I’m certainly not seen as visionary,” Mr. Bush wrote. “But I hope I’m seen as steady and prudent and able.”
Correction:
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the percentage of the popular vote that Michael Dukakis won in the 1988 presidential election. It was 46 percent, not 35 percent.
Peter Baker and Manny Fernandez contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Genial President Who Guided the Nation.
In February, 1989, at the beginning of President George H.W. Bush's Presidency, I was in Denver for a midyear meeting of the American Bar Association, working on security clearance reform and Gay rights resolutions before the ABA Young Lawyers Division Assembly and ABA House of Delegates, respectively.
While there, I attended a three hour seminar on civil rights issues in the Bush Administration. The career Deputy of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division spoke. He bragged on what the Bush Administration was going to do for civil rights.
So I asked him about 15th Amendment violations in Memphis, where I'd gone to law school and researched he issues of the white power structure's intentional dilution of minority strength. The racist City of Memphis had long annexed vast tracts of white areas of Shelby County, while using a scheme of at-large and district seats, preventing African-Americans from ever electing a Mayor or other city-wide elected officials.
We exchanged cards. He was sincere. Six weeks later, he was in Memphis, in the office of attorney Dan M. Norwood, for whom I clerked 1984-1986.
That summer, the Bush Justice Department sued Memphis for the first time on voting rights, eventually winning an end to illegal annexations and use of at-large districts to disenfranchise African-Americans. Memphis later elected two African-American Mayors.
Healing took place in Memphis, Tennessee thanks to the administration of George H.W. Bush.
I went to law school in racist Memphis, Tennessee, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in 1968 and where a cruel white power structure maintained Iron Heel control into the early 1980s. When taking the bus downtown to my judicial clerkship, I would often be the only non-African American person on the 50 bus, passing the Lorraine Motel, abandoned, the site of the murder (later turned into a world class National Civil Rights Museum by one of my law professors, D'Army Bailey, later a judge, for whom Shelby County Courthouse is now named.). I had researched annexation issues for Dan Norwood, a Democratic lawyer for unions and civil rights plaintiffs. But the problem was solved by a Republican President, one who made a difference on civil rights.
Bush also signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Reagan had vetoed it.
DJT's thuggery reminds me of Jimmy Breslin's books, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, and How The Good Guys Finally Won (fiction about a mafia family and nonfiction about Watergate).
DJT's thuggery reminds me of St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR, who legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994. He's covered up crimes and looked the other way for five years while his direct report, his Finance Director, embezzlement some $700,000 (and counting -- forensic audit is pending).
DJT's thuggery reminds me of the late Anderson County, Tennessee Sheriff DENNIS O. TROTTER, twice Tennessee Sheriff of the Year, who through the efforts of ethical lawmen and journalists eventually served four years time in federal prisons in La Tuna, Texas, and Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.
Good article on TRUMP's perjurious pals from the Los Angeles Times:
Mueller’s targets seem to share a problem: They tell whoppers
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign chairman. (Patrick T. Fallon / Tribune News Service)
After lying to the Internal Revenue Service to avoid paying taxes and lying to banks to obtain fraudulent mortgages, Paul Manafort was convicted last August — and then pledged to tell the truth as part of a plea deal to avert a second trial.
But prosecutors say Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, lied about that too — and they told a federal judge Friday they may file new charges against him. A day earlier, Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about seeking a Moscow real estate deal.
The back-to-back court hearings highlighted how, one after another, Trump’s closest former aides and associates have told brazen, audacious and criminal whoppers in the wide-ranging investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
“It’s like an organized crime consortium where everyone is lying and obfuscating, except it’s an investigation of the president of the United States and his campaign,” said Harry Litman, a University of California law professor and former federal prosecutor. “It’s such a hall of mirrors.”
At the center of the drama is Trump, who has exhausted independent fact checkers with a blizzard of falsehoods. The Washington Post says he has made more than 6,400 false or misleading statements publicly since taking office and averaged 30 a day in the weeks before last month’s midterm election.
President Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House shortly after Michael Cohen pleaded guilty on Thursday. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
Moreover, Trump has cheered witnesses who resist cooperating with the special counsel’s office, and he accused prosecutors on Mueller’s team of encouraging Manafort and other suspects to lie.
“If you told the truth, you go to jail,” the president complained to the New York Post on Wednesday.
Deception is a challenge for any prosecutor. Nick Akerman, who worked with the Watergate special prosecutor, said witnesses "baldly lied" to the grand jury investigating the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972 and the subsequent cover-up by the Nixon White House.
“If I had to charge everybody with perjury and convict all of them, I’d still be there,” Akerman said.
Still, the Mueller investigation — which has led to charges against 33 people so far, including Manafort and Cohen — has swamped prosecutors with a flood of falsehoods.
George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor, was the first to go down. He pleaded guilty in October 2017 to lying to FBI agents about his conversations with a Maltese professor who told him that Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton that included “thousands of emails.” Papadopoulos entered prison Monday to serve a two-week term.
In December 2017, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, pleaded guilty to falsely denying that he’d discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. He agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s team, and his sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 18.
Richard Gates, Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, pleaded guilty in February 2018 to lying about a meeting he attended while working for Ukraine’s pro-Russian government. As part of his plea deal, he testified against Manafort and is awaiting sentencing.
Alex van der Zwaan, a formerly London-based Dutch lawyer who worked with Gates and Manafort, also pleaded guilty that month to lying about his communications with a suspected Russian agent. He served 30 days in federal prison and was deported.
“This many liars is unusual,” said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan. "This group seems particularly persistent."
Despite his prosecutions, Mueller has struggled to stem the tide of lies. Among his apparent targets is Jerome Corsi, the far-right writer previously best known for spreading the falsehood that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
According to a draft court document that Corsi shared with the media last month, prosecutors believe he lied to them about his conversations with Roger Stone, a longtime Trump political advisor and Republican operative, during the 2016 campaign.
The document said Stone had asked Corsi to contact WikiLeaks, which was releasing Democratic Party emails that had been hacked by Russian military intelligence officers.
Corsi told prosecutors that he rebuffed the request, but the document said he passed the message to someone in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy to avoid prosecution.
Corsi has denied any wrongdoing. As for Stone, he said his only offense was “punking and bluffing and posturing to drive the Democrats crazy.” Neither has been charged.
Prosecutors know it is risky to put known fabricators on the stand during trials. When Gates testified against Manafort during his trial in Virginia, for example, defense lawyers accused him of embezzling money and cheating on his wife in a “secret life” overseas.
The attack on Gates’ credibility did not scuttle the case, and Manafort was convicted of eight counts of bank fraud and tax evasion from his work in Ukraine. Prosecutors buttressed their case with reams of financial records, emails and other evidence.
"They had so much corroboration. And they had so much independent evidence. A jury could convict without crediting the Gates testimony,” said Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional and criminal law scholar at Harvard Law School. “But that’s not always going to be the case.”
Solomon Wisenberg, a white-collar defense attorney and former federal prosecutor, said a paper trail often isn’t enough to convince a jury unless prosecutors can call witnesses with inside knowledge of a crime.
“You can never win it on documents alone,” he said. “You need those people.”
After his conviction, Manafort agreed to cooperate with prosecutors to avoid a second trial on related charges in Washington. He pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy and began meeting with the special counsel’s team.
But the plea deal unraveled when prosecutors said Manafort continued to lie, and they’re scheduled to detail their concerns to the court next Friday. Defense attorneys said Manafort “believes he has provided truthful information.”
McQuade, the former U.S. attorney, said it’s unusual for a cooperation deal to fall apart, especially when a defendant can get a lighter prison sentence by cooperating. But sometimes, she said, white-collar criminals think they can evade detection.
“There are people who think they are smarter than investigators,” she said. “They have spent their whole life developing strategies for navigating challenging situations, and they think they’ll be able to talk their way out of it.”
Sometimes getting caught hasn’t chastened liars in the Russia probe. When Papadapoulos was sentenced in September, the federal judge said he sensed “genuine remorse” from the defendant.
But before he went to prison last week, Papadopoulos cast aspersions on the Mueller investigation and accused officials of entrapping him.
TRUMP is a real estate developer with mafia connections. As my great grandmother would say, "He's typical of his type."
The same type kind of developers who are building in swamps, destroying forests, killing wildlife, destroying our future here in St. Augustine and St. Johns County, Florida?
You tell me.
From The Washington Post:
Trump borrows his rhetoric — and his view of power — from the mob
The president’s background in New York real estate taught mob values that still persist.
President Trump talks with reporters on Thursday at the White House. His longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, is cooperating with federal prosecutors, which Trump dislikes. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
Marc Fisher, a senior editor, writes about most anything. He has been The Washington Post’s enterprise editor, local columnist and Berlin bureau chief, and he has covered politics, education, pop culture and much else in three decades on the Metro, Style, National and Foreign desks.
November 29
President Trump’s reaction to a new guilty plea Thursday from his longtime attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, was predictably pugnacious: Cohen, one of Trump’s strongest defenders for more than a decade, was “a weak person and not a very smart person.” Asked why he had kept such a character on his payroll for so many years, the president sounded like a parody of a lousy mob flick: “Because a long time ago, he did me a favor.”
That was predictable, too.
An affinity for mobsters and their rhetoric has been a consistent thread through Trump’s adult life. From his early professional mentor, the New York lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn , to his many years of dealing with mob-connected union and construction industry bosses, Trump has formed close alliances with renegades and rogues who sometimes ended up on the wrong side of the law. He’s long learned from and looked up to tough, street-smart guys who didn’t mind breaking some rules to get things done. Trump also admires mobsters’ no-nonsense language and bais for action; he cites “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas” among his favorite movies.
His attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller III’s investigation into the 2016 campaign often include language usually reserved for stories about mobsters. In August, when Cohen first pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the investigation, Trump lashed out at people he called “rats” — his advisers, employees and erstwhile friends who had been talking to the feds about his campaign. “I know all about flipping,” Trump said in a Fox News interview. “For 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful, and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go.”
Before Trump’s ex-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, the president complimented himon Twitter because “he refused to ‘break’ — make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ ”
The president last summer also praised his outgoing White House counsel, Don McGahn, tweeting that the lawyer was no “John Dean type ‘RAT,’ ” a reference to the former Nixon White House counsel who cooperated with Watergate prosecutors, helping to end Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974. Trump didn’t argue that Dean got his facts wrong, just that he’d flipped — making him, in Trump’s conception, a snitch.
Trump calls Cohen 'weak,' dismisses scrutiny of Moscow project
President Trump on Nov. 29 said his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen is lying to federal prosecutors about a Trump real estate project in Moscow.(Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
So when Trump told his favorite interviewers on “Fox and Friends” in August that the standard prosecutorial practice of granting leniency to criminals who cooperate with investigations into larger matters “almost ought to be illegal,” and when he acknowledged that “I’ve had many friends involved in this stuff,” the idea that a president of the United States might lean toward the side of wrongdoers seemed not so much outrageous as very much in character.
Trump’s work as a developer put him in close touch with mobsters from the very start. Early on, he believed that politics and real estate were dirty businesses, riddled with corruption, and he resolved to master the game.
On his first building project in Manhattan, the 1970s rehab of the Grand Hyatt New York, Trump hired a notorious demolition company partly owned by a Philadelphia mobster, as well as a concrete firm run by a man later convicted of being part of a mob-run cartel, and a carpentry company controlled by the Genovese organized-crime family. He used some of the same contractors that his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, had employed, including S&A Concrete, which worked on Trump Tower and was owned in part by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, who ran the Genovese mob.
In 1981, as he made his first move into casino gambling, New Jersey’s gaming regulators concluded that Trump had been in contact with organized-crime figures.
Two men — Daniel Sullivan, a former truck driver and Teamster, and Kenny Shapiro, an ex-scrap-metal dealer and real estate developer — played vital roles in finding and acquiring the land on which Trump would build his first casino hotel, Trump Plaza. Sullivan and Shapiro were mob associates. Sullivan had served time for larceny and was listed in FBI records as someone intimately familiar with La Cosa Nostra — the Mafia. Shapiro worked in Atlantic City for Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, a Philadelphia mob boss. According to an FBI report, Trump said at the time that he knew Sullivan was “in a very rough business” and “knows people,” some of whom “may be unsavory.”
But in this murky underworld, things aren’t always as they seem: Sullivan had been an FBI informant, and when FBI agents visited Trump to talk about his deal with Sullivan and Shapiro, Trump told them he wanted to cooperate, even suggesting that the feds put undercover agents inside his casino, an FBI report said.
Trump’s loyalty runs in two directions. One of Cohn’s clients, John Cody, ran the Teamsters union that controlled cement truckers in New York, and Cody turned out to be greatly helpful to Trump as his signature project, Trump Tower, rose on Fifth Avenue in 1982. Cody — whom the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice later cited as “the most significant labor racketeer preying on the construction industry in New York” — warned Trump before a strike shut down work on many major building sites that summer. Work on the tower didn’t miss a beat.
When the tower opened the next year, Trump arranged for Cody’s girlfriend, Verina Hixon, to acquire three large duplexes on the 64th and 65th floors, just below Trump’s own apartment. Hixon insisted on adding an indoor swimming pool to her spread. The building had not been designed to withstand the weight of an indoor pool, so Trump’s structural engineers built a special frame to support it.
For six months, Hixon had more than 30 workmen in her units every day, installing a sauna and cedar and lacquer closets. At one point, when Cody said Hixon wanted space that had been planned for a hallway to instead be added to one of her apartments, Trump replied, “Anything for you, John,” as Hixon later recalled to Trump biographer Wayne Barrett.
Working with unsavory types was second nature to Trump, who watched closely as his father succeeded, in good part by tirelessly massaging his bonds with the Brooklyn and Queens Democratic organizations and mob-influenced construction businesses and trade unions. As Fred Trump built thousands of middle-income housing units in New York’s outer boroughs, he made deals with contractors such as Willie Tomasello , who had worked with the Genovese organized-crime family on several New York real estate projects.
After his father, Trump’s primary tutor on the power calculus of New York was Cohn, the first and most important in a long series of lawyer-fixers he would employ. Cohn’s client list included alleged crime bosses, and his reputation for unbridled aggression in defense of his clients was hard-earned.
Like the real-life and movie mobsters he’d studied so closely, Trump concluded that the way to insulate himself from the betrayals and backstabbing of the business world was to place a premium on loyalty — to construct his organization as a tight family circle, assisted only by a handful of long-standing, totally committed outsiders. That structure allowed the organization to survive bankruptcies, business failures, oceans of bad publicity, and legions of angry competitors, contractors and former employees.
In the presidency as in the Trump Organization, Trump listens mainly to a close coterie of family members and longtime associates. The revolving door of top aides is a symptom of his deep belief that only lifelong loyalists can truly be trusted.
In the Fox interview in August, Trump grumbled about his then-attorney general, Jeff Sessions, asking, “What kind of a man is this? ” The president recalled “the only reason I gave him the job: because I felt loyalty.” When Sessions recused himself from supervising the special counsel’s investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign, the president felt betrayed.
Much of Trump’s personality and professional style overlaps with the folkways of the mob — his sense of how power works, his belief in the primacy of strength and the supreme importance of being surrounded by loyalists who share cultural bonds. He prefers the company of plain-speaking men who talk a big game and never back down. On breaks from work at Trump Tower, he often stepped out onto Fifth Avenue to hang out not with his top executives but with his bodyguards.
He can even sound like a mobster, or the movie version of one, anyway. In conversation, Trump has a chummy, intimate way of connecting with people — often accompanied by thinly veiled threats. He loves to share secrets, shower with praise and warn, amiably enough, that if things don’t go as he expects, he will take aggressive action.
In 2016, when Washington Post reporter Michael Kranish and I were interviewing Trump for The Post’s biography, “Trump Revealed ,” Trump repeatedly told us that if he didn’t like the book, he would take action against it. He pointedly told the story of his $5 billion lawsuit against an earlier biographer, Timothy O’Brien. Although that suit was dismissed, Trump contended that he had never expected to win any money; his purpose, he told us, was simply to destroy the author, to force him to spend his savings and time defending himself against the suit.
“If you think enough of yourself, you have a legacy,” Trump told us. “And you don’t want people reading in a hundred years a book that you were best friends with Two Ton Tony Soprano and all of the different people.” So, in the case of O’Brien’s book, Trump said, “I knocked the hell out of it.”
Developer fanboy STUART KORFHAGE's latest puff piece -- partly based on an e-mail from a developer. Not even an interview. Sad. Pitiful puff piece (yawn) is unadorned by any data analysis or sophisticated sensitivity to environmental issues that are causing flooding in 30 different places in St. Johns County. That's what happens when your local newspaper is a longtime fan of Florida developers who build clearcut forests, fill in wetlands and build houses in swamps and on sandy beaches. That happens when secretive foreign investors fuel misbegotten misanthropic developers who corrupt governments under one-party Republican misrule. Founded in 1895 by a frontman for HENRY FLAGLER's railroad, the St. Augustine Record, has a checkered past of supporting corruption and racism in St. Johns County. Under successive owners, the Record never developed an adversarial relationship with power structure -- it supports it, and all of its works and pomps.
Thus, I feel sorry for STUART KORFHAGE, a former sports reporter who is now the newsroom lead and "Development" beat reporter for a newspaper that does not care about exposing corporate greed, you grind out dupey stories that never mention what will happen when global ocean level rise and climate change destroy homes built in swamps. It's time for SK and other Record reporters to sign union cards and join the Newspaper Guild, so that they won't be pressured any longer to print developer handouts, as GateHouse reporters have done at other newspapers in Florida, in Jacksonville, Lakeland and Sarasota newspapers. It's time to talk sense to the people about the costs and benefits of developments, its adverse effects, and how government can make corporations obey the Rule of Law. What do you reckon? From The St. Augustine Record:
HIDE CAPTION
The RiverTown development in Northwest St. Johns County is between County Road 13 to the west and Longleaf Pine Parkway to the east. With the economy surging in St. Johns County and throughout most of the country, this area has seen a surge in building in recent years. [CONTRIBUTED]
Posted Dec 1, 2018 at 5:39 PMUpdated Dec 1, 2018 at 5:39 PM
It’s nearly impossible to drive anywhere in the county — with the possible exception of farm-heavy spots — without running into a new neighborhood or an old one starting a new phase of building.
Even in the St. Augustine city limits, there are several large multi-family developments like The Landing at St. Augustine and Antigua.
That can’t be a surprise knowing how the county has nearly doubled its population since 2000 to more than 240,000 residents as of 2017, according U.S. Census Bureau numbers.
But it’s also natural to wonder how a county with no major industry other than tourism can possibly absorb one huge development after another.
The growth in St. Johns County hasn’t been a few hundred homes here and there. It’s a few hundred here, a few thousand there and 10,000 over there.
Rick Pariani, now a member of the Davidson Development team, is the original designer of the World Golf Village development in what was once rural central St. Johns County.
He said the numbers certainly sound staggering when you start thinking about how many potential homes are being planned as new developments are being approved or simply restarted after year of dormancy.
“Large-scale projects such as Nocatee, RiverTown, Shearwater, Bannon Lakes and TrailMark, together with the combination of the County Road 210 neighborhoods of Beachwalk, Beacon Lake and Creekside collectively have entitlements for over 30,000 new homes,” Pariani said in an email to The Record. “SilverLeaf adds an additional 10,700 residential entitlements. All of these communities are under construction with infrastructure improvements and home building.”
Those are just some the biggest developments in one section of the county. There are others coming off of State Road 16, State Road 207 and all up and down U.S. 1. Some are approved for more than 1,000 homes.
With the economy surging here and throughout most of the country, this area has seen a surge in building in recent years. In the last fiscal year, ending in September, there were more than 4,500 single-family home permits issued here.
That’s right around record pace for the county. So looking at what’s planned here, one might assume that it would require unprecedented building for the next decade just to fill what what’s been granted to developers.
Is that right? Is that possible?
Well, no, but yes.
Pariani points out that just because a developer puts a timeline on a particular project, that doesn’t mean anyone really expects to sell out in that amount of time. Even a wildly successful project like Nocatee is subject to downturns in the market.
“Typically, no major planned mixed-use community ever meets its declared phasing schedule nor achieves its build-out target date,” Pariani said. “All such projects must roll with, and respond to, the market variables and the competition.
“It is not uncommon for a large project to easily take over 25 years to reach actual complete sell-out and build-out. The time frames dictating development and sales success are far more lengthy than usually anyone anticipates. Therefore, the question of sustainability is one with a 50-year horizon — not 10.”
So there really isn’t as much pressure to fill all of those lots as quickly as one might think.
Even popular projects take some time to sell. The fastest-growing master-planned community in the country is The Villages near Ocala. It sold about 1,100 units in the first half of the year.
The most successful major project in this county is Nocatee. It ranked No. 7 on the list with about 500 homes sold through the first six months of 2018.
Roger O’Steen is the chairman of the PARC Group, which developed Nocatee. He has been glad to see Nocatee moving along so quickly, but he agreed with Pariani about expectations for achieving full build-out.
“Yes, the market will support these communities,” O’Steen said. “The increase in the number of communities and available lots may result in a longer sellout, but the demand and absorption is definitely there. It just may take a little longer.”
Of course, it’s easy for those in the development business to be bullish on building. But Florida Realtors chief economist Brad O’Connor also sees a real reason to be optimistic.
He stressed that he hasn’t studied the North Florida new home market closely, but he can see the growth numbers as well as the other economic indicators like low unemployment and high household incomes.
“There’s been a lot of construction in places like St. Johns County and other parts of the state, too, where you’ve got a lot of bigger homes being built,” he said. (Growth) is still pretty strong and these people do need places to live.”
O’Connor noted that St. Johns County is so popular right now that it’s ahead of national building trends.
“The larger national builders are starting to cut back on construction in lots of parts of the country, so that makes me think that at least from the national builders perspective if they’re still building somewhere, they must think they have a good reason to do it,” O’Connor said.
One of the reasons for that is the thriving economy. The Jacksonville metro area added about 21,000 jobs between August 2017 and August 2018. St. Johns County in particular has enjoyed unemployment rates of around 4 percent or lower in the last three years.
As long as the area keeps creating jobs, developers like O’Steen think North Florida will continue to attract enough homebuyers to justify so many major projects. In fact, he’s confident enough that the PARC Group is developing a 1,500-acre community in Jacksonville called eTown, which will be opening in the summer of 2019.
“The significant North Florida job creation is occurring south of downtown Jacksonville in the I-95 coastal corridor of southern Duval and northern St. Johns counties,” O’Steen said. “Most of southern Duval is developed, so there is a great opportunity for northern St. Johns for both quality housing and job creation.”
O’Connor provided one suggestion that something less cataclysmic than a major economic downturn could potentially slow the rapid growth of the county.
He said that while St. Johns County’s growth is generally sustainable for various reasons, the one factor that could alter the current trend is home price increases, especially as interest rates rise. The median sales price of homes in this county is more than $300,000. By comparison, the Northeast Florida Association of Realtors reported the median sales price in Duval County to be $195,275, year-to-date, in October.
And it’s getting harder for builders to keep prices in check with increased costs for labor and materials as well as rising impact fees in St. Johns County.
“We have been creating a lot of jobs,” O’Connor said. “I question how many of those jobs are really providing the kind of salary you need to buy the homes they are building because the homes they’re building are a lot more expensive than the existing homes that are for sale.
“There’s a ton of demand there (in entry-level housing), but there’s no one building that kind of housing. The builders cite either the land use restrictions or the labor market for construction and raw materials. It’s crazy because that’s where most of the demand is.”
President Ronald Reagan's daughter compares and contrasts GHW Bush and DONALD JOHN TRUMP:
"We might also want to mourn the loss of dignity that we have long associated with the office of the presidency and that is no longer there. No matter what you thought of George H.W. Bush’s time in office, he never attacked or abused people or institutions. He was never crude or dismissive of people who were hurting. And he had reverence for the Constitution and the pillars of democracy that built this nation — the pillars that are now being chipped away, crudely and casually. He understood that peace is a fragile thing, and that to maintain it, nations have to work together, employ diplomacy and treat one another with respect. That tone is set by leaders."
"He spoke of “a better America . . . an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of light.” President Trump once mocked that vision, but his mockery cannot diminish the importance of Bush’s words."
Patti Davis, daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
From The Washington Post:
We mourn George H.W. Bush, and the presidency’s loss of dignity
George H.W. Bush dies at 94
George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States who helped guide the world out of a four-decade U.S.-Soviet Cold War, died Nov. 30 at age 94.(The Washington Post)
By Patti Davis
December 2 at 8:04 AM
Patti Davis is the author of, most recently, “The Earth Breaks in Colors” and is the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
On June 11, 2004, President George H.W. Bush walked slowly down the center aisle of Washington National Cathedral to eulogize my father. Outside, gray mist fell. We had walked in somber procession into the cathedral, light rain mingling with tears, my father’s flag-draped coffin carried by uniformed pallbearers. Presidents are laid to rest with great ceremony and tradition, but they are still human beings who left imprints on other people’s lives. That day, Bush told us about the imprints my father had left on his.
Eulogies are difficult to compose. The best ones are a fine mingling of heart, humor and poignancy. That day, in the hushed space of the cathedral, as rain drifted down outside, Bush spoke about the man who had touched his life. He spoke about my father’s gentleness and humor, about his strength and his deep, abiding love for America. At one point, his voice broke as he fought back tears. He said, “As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life. I learned kindness — we all did. I learned courage — the nation did.” The tears he fought against brought my family and me to tears. It was one of those moments when you know that the person who is speaking is stripping his soul bare and letting you in.
I wish now that we had told him how deeply his eulogy moved us. We talked about it on the long flight back across the country to California, where my father would be buried and our time of private mourning would begin. It came up often — that moment when Bush’s voice cracked, when tears intruded upon his words, when he was raw and honest in how much his heart was hurting.
He also did what is so difficult to do in eulogies — he turned everyone’s tears to laughter with humor. He recalled that when asked how his meeting with South African Bishop Desmond Tutu went, my father — playing on the bishop’s name — responded, “So-so.”
America will lay to rest a man who served his country. We will pause, and mourn, and reflect. We might also want to mourn the loss of dignity that we have long associated with the office of the presidency and that is no longer there. No matter what you thought of George H.W. Bush’s time in office, he never attacked or abused people or institutions. He was never crude or dismissive of people who were hurting. And he had reverence for the Constitution and the pillars of democracy that built this nation — the pillars that are now being chipped away, crudely and casually. He understood that peace is a fragile thing, and that to maintain it, nations have to work together, employ diplomacy and treat one another with respect. That tone is set by leaders.
A visitor signs at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Tex., on Saturday. (Larry W Smith/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
He spoke of “a better America . . . an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of light.” President Trump once mocked that vision, but his mockery cannot diminish the importance of Bush’s words.
What a beautiful image, encouraging people to aim for the heavens instead of groveling in the shadows, inspiring people to leave a mark that lights up the darkness.
My wish for the Bush family is that they look into the night sky and see a thousand and one points of light.
Unsafe for St. Augustine pedestrians, bicyclists, rickshaw drivers or automobile and truck drivers, the intersection of State Route A1A, Old Quarry Road and Red Cox Drive is unsafe at any speed. It needs a traffic light and traffic calming devices. Now.
Kudos to Lighthouse Neighborhood Association (LHNA), Debbie Wicker, Carl Blow, John Depreter and Jim Tunstall for their concise definition of the problem at Red Cox Drive, Anastasia Blvd. and Anastasia Blvd (SR A1A). The City and FDOT will now proceed to solve the problem, thanks to LHNA, et al. helping provide a spinal and testicular implant. Past fatalities did not persuade the City or FDOT to do anything.
Our neighborhood associations and citizens deserve a friendly first floor liaison, as Cathy DuPont once provided in St. Augustine City Hall.
"Government is a customer service organization," as Mayor Nancy Shaver reminds us.
Our disgraced then-Mayor JOE BOLES booted the neighborhood council office from City Hall, replacing it with a seldom used Fabric Guild two-room suite for Mayor BOLES' mother, MAURINE BOLES, and her friends, including the wife of unfriendly Assistant General Services Director and Purchasing Director Timothy Fleming.
We need to put our best foot forward in City Hall and restore democratizing staff functions like the one once held by Cathy DuPont.
Every time I see the Fabric Guild's empty two room office, it reminds me of the empty heads of certain City Hall bureaucrats who need to reform or retire. Now.
As JFK said during the Cuban Missile Crisis, "There's always some poor SOB who doesn't get the word."
GUEST COLUMN: Time to tackle Red Cox Road traffic morass
By Debbie Wicker / St. Augustine Posted Dec 1, 2018 at 9:43 PM On Oct. 29, there was yet another traffic-related death at the intersection of Red Cox Road, Old Quarry Road and Anastasia Boulevard. Over the course of the past five years there have been multiple fatalities in this immediate vicinity, along with numerous traffic accidents.
The Alligator Farm Zoological Park (St. Augustine’s second most popular tourist attraction), St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum (our town’s third most popular attraction), R.B. Hunt Elementary School, the R. B. Hunt Athletic Fields, Upchurch Park, Surf Station and the main entrance to Anastasia Island State Park are all located within a 500 yard radius of this intersection.
Meanwhile, Red Cox Road serves as the primary entrance and exit for R.B. Hunt school buses, its athletic field’s many users, the St. Augustine Lighthouse, Lighthouse Park and Lighthouse Boat Ramp patrons.
Adding to the volume and complexity of traffic, the St. Augustine Amphitheatre’s main entrance is approximately 400 yards south on Anastasia Boulevard. On any given day or night, attempting to navigate the confluence of traffic in this immediate area is — at the very least — an adventure steeped in chaos and risk.
Over the past three years the Lighthouse Park Neighborhood Association has worked with our city commissioners, senior management and local stakeholders to develop and provide traffic calming solutions in this exceedingly dangerous area. In working with the city on viable solutions, we have had the support of several proactive stakeholders. These include the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum, The St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park and R. B. Hunt Elementary School. They have systematically provided sound ideas in our effort to enhance the safety of visitors, students and residents alike.
City leadership is aggressively pursuing traffic calming and enhanced safety measures in this exceedingly dangerous area. We sincerely appreciate and strongly support the city and fellow stakeholders on this decisive action. We most strongly encourage the state of Florida and other area stakeholders to join in this time-critical effort.
The time for us to act on this dangerous situation is now, before additional deaths and injuries occur due to inaction on our collective parts.
Wicker is president of the Lighthouse Park Neighborhood Association. Association members Carl Blow, John Depreter and Jim Tunstall co-signed the submission.
Traffic lights cost about $130,000. FDOT spends more on paper clips. What's FDOT's imputed value of a human life? Who makes these rules? Do they have the force and effect of law? We need more information to empower us to talk to our leaders. Thanks to the Lighthouse Park Neighborhood Assn. and to Debbie Wicker, Carl Blow, John Depreter and Jim Tunstall for raising this issue. Excellent editorial in the St. Augustine Record:
RECORD EDITORIAL: City sits down with FDOT on Anastasia intersection
Posted Dec 1, 2018 at 9:43 PM
Monday Jan. 21, 2013, this headline ran on the front page of The Record: “City wants deadly Anastasia Blvd. curve investigated.”
On Nov. 18, 2018, a front page story was headlined: “Call for change at troubled A1A/Red Cox Drive Intersection.”
Little has changed in the five years between the two stories. An increasing upsurge of community concern on Anastasia Island seems determined to ensure another five years doesn’t go by without some answer to the puzzle of Red Cox/A1A safety.
And we picked the word puzzle, because that’s the sticks & stones reality there. The intersection is a conundrum, a difficulty, a dilemma, a quandary, a threat and a danger. It’s a four-lane highway dividing neighborhoods, with meager means to cross it. It’s a curve that needs negotiating. It’s a backup of traffic.
And most everything with the likelihood of causing traffic sits on the east side of A1A — with the exception of the Alligator Farm. There’s a skate park, the Lighthouse and Museum, a fire department, a soccer field, an elementary school, offsite parking for Amphitheatre concerts, a surf shop, Sno Cone truck, Anastasia State Park and two vibrant Davis shores communities — straddling their only way on or off the island — Anastasia Boulevard. One way leads immediately to a backed up bridge, the other way ... to another bridge.
Let’s toss in the word “perplexity” for good measure.
On Wednesday, City Manager John Regan, Mobility Director Reuben Franklin and Commissioner Nancy Sikes-Kline have a sit-down with Florida Department of Transportation Secretary for our district, Greg Evans.
The FDOT has, for years, insisted a traffic light at the intersection isn’t warranted. That’s the single key word in this issue, and likely the single key point of contention or consideration in the meeting Wednesday.
The FDOT runs on a standard methodology when looking at traffic issues. And, in truth, its most basic transportation precept is moving traffic more efficiently, not holding it up — which traffic lights do.
But it certainly understands tipping points, and engineering efficiencies of moving traffic meeting at 45-degree angles. The FDOT, though, makes data-driven decisions and engineering-intensive solutions. When it adds up its numbers, the sum does not equal a traffic light on that curve.
What Regan and the city crew hope to impress upon Mr. Evans is the human side of this equation. There have been deaths there, one recently, three others back in 2013 when the initial push for a safer intersection began. However, the FDOT uses “preventable” accidents in its equations. The three fatality investigations in 2013 were all closed as caused by drugs or alcohol.
But, from where we sit, the issue isn’t what has happened there, but what’s waiting to happen, as trucks pulling 30-foot sportfishing boats make left-hand turns to get to the boat ramp or neighborhood kids try to cross the four lanes of traffic to get to elementary school. Then there’s the daily backups of parents dropping off their children in long lines each morning and picking them back up in the afternoon.
Many of these parents drive their kids to school because they won’t allow them to bike to school and cross the highway to get there.
Some cyclists try to cheat the puzzle by riding against traffic rather than with it. That’s against the law. It’s also dangerous for several reasons, but the main one is pure physics. The relative closure rate for a bicyclist traveling 15 mph and a motorist traveling 35 mph is the same direction is 20 mph. The rate is 50 mph in opposite directions.
From years of writing about the FDOT and local projects, we’ve found their people accessible and honest. It has bent over backwards to plan projects with local input rather than simply “do” them their way. The May Street intersection and the San Marco facelift are both good examples. St. Augustine’s unique 450-year-old mobility eccentricities must make FDOT higher-up draws straws to see who doesn’t have to do a project here. We appreciate that they do, and understand how efficiency can, and usually does, chafe against history.
The Red Cox Drive puzzle won’t get solved with data. We’d bet the FDOT understands that and takes the human side into account when seeking a solution to a small intersection affecting a big community in a bad way.
Shirley Chisholm, first African-American woman member of Congress, retired to nearby Palm Coast in 1991, and lived there for some fourteen years, until she died in 2005. Perhaps NYC and Palm Coast could work together so that there are two statues from the same cast, with one of them located in Palm Coast. Does that work for you?
NYC to honor trailblazer Shirley Chisholm with statue
NEW YORK (AP) — Pioneering lawmaker Shirley Chisholm will be honored with a statue in the New York City borough she served as the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.
City officials announced Friday that a monument to Chisholm will be installed at the entrance to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
The Brooklyn-born Chisholm served in Congress from 1969 to 1983. In 1972 she became the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. She died in 2005 at age 80.
The statue’s artist will be announced in early 2019, and city officials say it will be installed by the end of 2020.
The decision to honor Chisholm grew out of an initiative to erect more monuments to women in New York City’s public spaces. There are now just five statues of historical women.
VINCENT ROSS SPANO, the Tampa Republican Congressman-elect from the 15th Congressional District, may have conspired with his friends to violate federal election laws. These are the same federal election laws that President DONALD JOHN TRUMP's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has pled guilty to violating. My mother said that "Republicans never steal anything small." Did SPANO and TRUMP both steal elections, SPANO in 2018 and TRUMP in 2016? Looks like Florida lawyer VINCENT ROSS SPANO (Florida Bar No. 147923) is in a heap of trouble.
Ross Spano acknowledges possible ‘violation’ of campaign finance law
The newly elected congressman made a news release Saturday.
Rep. Ross Spano, R- Dover on the floor of the Florida House. (SCOTT KEELER | Times, 2017)
Newly elected congressman Ross Spano has acknowledged that his campaign financing "may have been in violation" of federal law.
In a filing with the Federal Elections Commission which Spano released publicly Saturday afternoon, he acknowledged borrowing $180,000 from two people he has described as personal friends from June through October this year, and then lending his campaign $167,000 in roughly the same time period.
When he made the loans to his campaign, Spano said on campaign finance reports that the money came from his "personal funds."
But under federal campaign finance law, a loan made to a candidate with the intent of providing money for a campaign must be considered a campaign contribution, not the candidate's personal funds.
Any such loan must adhere to campaign contribution limits — $2,700 each for the primary and general elections, far less than the loans Spano acknowledges having received.
Several election law experts have said that if Spano's loans to his campaign came from money from money borrowed from friends, it appears to violate campaign finance law.
The purpose of the law, those experts said, is to prevent one or more wealthy individuals from single-handedly financing a candidate for office.
At the time of the loans, Spano "believed he was acting in full compliance with the law" as did the two lenders, "based on the consultations they had at the time," stated a letter to the Commission that was released Saturday afternoon.
But the letter, written by attorney Elliott Berke of Washington, said Spano and the lenders "now recognize that some of the proceeds from the personal loans … may have been in violation of the Federal Campaign Finance Act."
Berke said in the letter that he was submitting it on behalf of Spano and the two people who gave Spano the loans, retiree Karen Hunt of Plant City and businessman Cary Carreno of Valrico.
Spano, currently a state House member from Dover, is himself a lawyer who specializes in wills and probate law.
Spano's Democratic opponent in the congressional District 15 election, Kristen Carlson, has asked for a federal investigation of whether Spano illegally funded his campaign.
His opponent in the Republican primary for the seat, former state Rep. Neil Combee, R-Polk City, has also accused him of breaking the law, but had no comment on whether he was seeking any legal recourse.
Carlson denied that she's pushing the matter just because she lost.
"I don't know if that amount of money would have affected the outcome of my race," she said, "but I really do believe it affected the primary race."
"The elections laws are in place for a reason and they're intended to give the public fair and honest elections."
Berke's letter, which was sent to Assistant General Counsel Jeff Jordan of the Commission, said in response to the problems, Spano has fired his previous campaign accountant and hired Berke's firm and a new accountant.
Jamie C. Jodoin of the St. Petersburg-based Spoor Bunch Franz accounting firm has served previously as the treasurer for Spano's campaign.
In a filing with the Commission last week, Spano listed a new treasurer, Robert Phillips III.
But in an interview Sunday, Jodoin denied that she ever approved using any loan proceeds to fund the campaign.
When Spano loaned money to his campaign, she said, "I was given checks and the only information I received was they were drawn from his personal account."
There are no limits on a candidate's contributions or loans to his own campaign.
Jodoin she didn't find out about the personal loans to Spano until the Times reported on them just before the election. If she had been told that personal loans were the source of his loans to the campaign, she said, she would have researched whether it was legal before putting the money into the campaign.
Jodoin confirmed that she has been fired as campaign treasurer. She said she was told of the firing in a phone call from Carreno the day before Thanksgiving.
Carlson lost to Spano by 6 points in the Nov. 6 election in the district, which covers northeastern Hillsborough, northwestern Polk and southern Lake counties.
The race became one of Florida's most competitive, top-tier congressional races after the retirement of former U.S. Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Lakeland left the seat open.
Berke's letter said he was making the filing under a Commission rule that allows for lighter penalties if a candidate discovers a mistake or impropriety in campaign finance and voluntarily reports it. But according to the rule, the commission may consider whether the violation was "knowing and willful," as opposed to an inadvertent error.
It also says the Commission may consider whether the candidate reports the impropriety "before the violation had been or was about to be discovered by any outside party."
In this case, the Tampa Bay Times reported just before the election that Spano had failed to file a personal financial disclosure report due in May that would have revealed the loans from Hunt and Carreno. He filed the disclosure the day after the Times asked him about it.
The Times then reported it appeared the personal loans to Spano may have been the source of his loans to his campaign, and Carlson sent her request for an investigation to the FBI Nov. 15.
In a previous interview, Carlson said Spano's failure to file the financial disclosure suggests "an apparent coverup … which suggests it was intentional, not just a mistake."
In an email Saturday, Spano spokesman Sandi Poreda said he hasn't spoken with any investigators, "nor has he received any letter of inquiry from the (Commission)," but "took the proactive step to voluntarily disclose this information in an effort to rectify the situation as quickly as possible."
The Commission has the power to investigate and impose fines, or it can refer a violation to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal investigation.
The House ethics committee, meanwhile, oversees candidates' financial disclosures and can investigate complaints of violations of disclosure requirements.
With Democrats winning control of the House in the Nov. 6 election, the incoming chairman of the ethics committee is expected to be Rep. Peter Deutch, D-Boca Raton. A spokesman said Deutch declined comment.
In the letter to the FEC, Spano included copies of promissory notes for the loans that said they would carry 5 percent interest, but didn't state the purpose of the loans.
But the letter said he expects them to be fully repaid by the end of the coming week.
President Bush's funeral will end with a funeral train in Texas. How cool is that?
My mother and I were two of the millions who watched U.S. Senator Robert Francis Kennedy's funeral train in June 1968.
Here's the Washington Post article about President George Herbert Walker Bush's funeral train, to take his remains from Spring, Texas to their final resting place. As Bush once said to a demonstrator whose sign he tore up, "Finis!"
An echo of history as Locomotive 4141 carries George H.W. Bush to his final resting place
Locomotive 4141 to escort George H.W. Bush to burial site
A blue Union Pacific locomotive named after George H.W. Bush will carry the 41st president to his final resting place in College Station, Tex., on Dec. 6.(Reuters)
ByBrittney Martin
December 2 at 1:17 PM
HOUSTON — When the curtain parted in College Station, Tex., revealing a two-toned blue locomotive standing nearly 16 feet tall and bearing the number 4141 in his honor, former president George H.W. Bush looked around excitedly, his face breaking into a smile.
One word left his lips: Wow.
Thirteen years later, that same Union Pacific locomotive will escort the 41st president to his final resting place in College Station on Thursday afternoon after funeral ceremonies in Washington and Houston.
The train carrying his remains will leave a Union Pacific Railroad facility in Spring, a community north of Houston, and travel the 70 miles to College Station. Bush will be buried there, alongside his late wife and daughter, on the site of his presidential library at Texas A&M University.
The locomotive, painted the same blue colors that adorned Air Force One during Bush’s presidency, was unveiled by the company in October 2005. At the time, Bush was fascinated by the train’s mechanics and asked whether he could take it for a spin, according to Mike Iden, a retired Union Pacific general director of car and locomotive engineering.
After some brief training and under the supervision of an engineer, “the former president operated the locomotive for about two miles,” Iden said.
An Associated Press article at the time said the unveiling stirred memories in Bush of his childhood travels with his family. “We just rode on the railroads all the time, and I’ve never forgotten it,” the AP quoted Bush as saying.
During previous centuries, numerous presidents incorporated trains into their funeral proceedings. Abraham Lincoln’s body — with that of his son, Willie, who had died three years earlier — was carried by train more than 1,600 miles from Washington to Springfield, Ill. The slain leader’s portrait was affixed to the front of the engine for the entirety of the trip.
The remains of Ulysses Grant, James Garfield, William McKinley, Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt also took their final journeys by rail. The last such cortege, for Dwight Eisenhower in 1969, involved a specially prepared baggage car. The train traveled through seven states — Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri — before reaching its final destination in Kansas.
“It’s an opportunity for a large swath of the population to pay their final respects to someone who has done so much for our country,” Scott Moore, a Union Pacific senior vice president, noted in a news release Saturday about the plans for Bush’s funeral week. “Having a train like this pulled by a locomotive specifically about this man is just really unprecedented.”
The route from Spring to College Station will pass through several towns, including Hufsmith, Pinehurst, Magnolia and Navasota. Hufsmith is barely a dot on the map these days. As the Texas State Historical Association details, “By the 1980s only a cemetery, an abandoned railroad station and scattered dwellings remained.”
Texas mourns George H.W. Bush
Officials in College Station, Tex., and mourners are preparing for the funeral of President George H.W. Bush, who died Nov. 30 in Houston.(Reuters)
But two miles away, the mayor of Tomball fondly remembers Bush’s visit for the city’s centennial celebration in 2007. It was the first time a president past or present had been there, according to news reports at the time.
“He came out, and we presented him with a key to the city, and he actually kissed me on the cheek,” Mayor Gretchen Fagan said. “My mother-in-law said that she got home and there were messages on her voice mail saying, ‘Oh my gosh, the president of the United States just kissed your daughter-in-law!’ ”
Bush took pictures with people for over an hour after the event. “It was such a pleasure,” Fagan recalled. “The people of Tomball were just so excited.”
Navasota Mayor Bert Miller says he’s not sure whether Bush ever visited the city, but he has memories campaigning for him in 1980.
“I remember — with my grandfather — doing some politicking for him back when he was vice president with President [Ronald] Reagan,” Miller said Saturday. “I was real young at the time.”
Navasota is about 20 miles from Bush’s presidential library at Texas A&M, where Miller has been “many times.” Touring the library is listed as one of the “things to do” on the Visit Navasota website.The former president had been a regular fixture on Texas A&M’s campus since his library opened there in 1997. According to its website, he occasionally dropped in on classes at the Bush School of Government and Public Service and was even spotted at the rec center when in good health.
By car, the ride from Houston to College Station typically takes 90 minutes, but the announced schedule for Locomotive 4141 will be twice as long. The university said Saturday that the president’s casket would be unloaded at a railroad stop near campus. The funeral procession will then travel down George Bush Drive, with a brief arrival ceremony followed by a private interment. The campus will be closed Thursday.
At the locomotive’s unveiling in 2005, Bush stuck his head out of a window and flashed Texas A&M’s familiar “gig ’em” sign: a thumbs up.
A hotel guest carries his shoes through a flooded street in Miami Beach. [AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File]
By The Gainesville Sun editorial board
Posted Dec 2, 2018 at 2:01 AM
Florida is on the front lines of climate change and its elected officials should be leading the charge to prevent its most severe consequences.
A recently released scientific report from 13 federal agencies found that if significant measures aren’t taken to reduce global warming, the United States could take a 10 percent hit to its gross domestic product by the end of the century.
“The cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of action,” said Andrea Dutton, an associate professor of geology at the University of Florida and an expert on rising sea levels.
Rising sea levels, which lead to greater storm surge and coastal flooding, are just one way that Florida is already feeling the effects of climate change. Worsening heat waves, increasing rainfall and the wider spread of insect-borne diseases are other ways climate change hurts the economy, environment and health in the Southeast, according to the report.
Thankfully some in Florida’s congressional delegation are seeking to reduce the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Last week U.S. Reps. Charlie Crist, D-St. Petersburg; Ted Deutch, D-Boca Raton; and Francis Rooney, R-Naples; were among lawmakers who introduced a carbon tax that would return the revenue back to the public to offset higher energy costs.
Supporters say the measure would reduce carbon pollution by 40 percent within a decade and 91 percent by 2050. Those reductions would be larger than former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan or the U.S. commitment under the Paris climate agreement.
President Donald Trump has sought to roll back the Clean Power Plan and exit the Paris agreement, while expressing doubt about climate change as well as the conclusions of the recent report from his own government.
Florida can’t afford to let such anti-science sentiment cause additional years of inaction on climate change. The public needs to press climate change skeptics who are among Florida’s elected officials — including U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho of Gainesville and newly elected Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott — to protect our state by working to reduce emissions and mitigate the damage that can’t be stopped.
The “Green New Deal” proposed by newly elected U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., would help our country transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Here in Gainesville, the City Commission passed a resolution in August pledging that Gainesville Regional Utilities will get all of its energy from renewable sources by 2045.
Gainesville is already a state leader with 27 percent of its energy coming from renewable resources, with about 25 percent from the biomass plant and 2 percent from solar power. Efforts such as the local League of Women Voters’ solar co-op will hopefully continue to increase the use of solar panels on area homes.
Florida and the nation can’t afford to delay action on climate change. Investing now in the transition to renewable energy will save far greater costs to our economy and our lives for generations to come.
Like all good Republicans, the first President Bush believed in environmental stewardships. DONALD JOHN TRUMP stands out like a broken sore thumb among the history of Republican leaders since Lincoln who have seen themselves as stewards of our air, land, wildlife and water.
Here's climate expert Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd's climate from Forbes:
The Surprising Climate And Environmental Legacy Of President George H. W. Bush
I awaken to the news that the 41st President of the United States passed. President George H. W. Bush was a Republican, a conservative, and even had ties to the fossil fuel industry. However, you might be surprised at some of the positive things about the environment and climate change that happened under his watch. My perspective here is not about his broader ideology or whether we agreed with everything that he said or did. I often didn't. Herein, I provide a respectful analysis of the climate change and environmental legacy of President Bush.
Ozone hole at its peak on September 11th, 2017.NASA
Oh, I am certain that there are many things that I will overlook herein. I am also certain there were policies and actions by President Bush that were harmful to the environment and climate as well. However, there were major actions that deserve highlighting as we reflect on the loss of this statesman.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program was established during President George H.W. Bush's administration in 1989 by a Presidential Initiative. Congress then mandated further action with the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The law specifically mandated the following key actions: Directs the President to establish an interagency United States Global Change Research Program to improve understanding of global change. Requires the Chairman of the Council, through the Committee, to develop a National Global Change Research Plan for implementation of the Program. Sets forth required Plan contents and research elements, including that the Plan provide recommendations for collaboration within the Federal Government and among nations.
The Global Change Research Act of 1990, signed by President George H.W. Bush, also "requires the Council, at least every four years, through the Committee, to submit to the President and the Congress an assessment regarding the findings of the Program and associated uncertainties, the effects of global change, and current and major long-term trends in global change." There have been four assessments to date including the most recent report. The 4th Assessment, based on the most current peer-reviewed science evidence, established that our economy, public health, national security, water supply, and other societal sectors are suffering because of climate change. The report was rather candid in its "here and now" perspective. Climate change is often framed as "far in the future" thing. Ironically, scientists are often framed by some contrarians as alarmists, but my experience is that my scientific colleagues have been overly conservative. Many changes are happening at a more accelerated rate than expected. Climate expert Don Wuebbles of the University of Illinois was an author on the recent assessment. He echoed this sentiment recently in an Associated Press article written by outstanding science journalist Seth Borenstein. Wuebbles said, "I don’t think any of us imagined that it would be as bad as it’s already gotten.”
Trends in several indicators as pollution has declined.EPA
In June 1989 President Bush proposed sweeping revisions to the Clean Air Act. Building on Congressional proposals advanced during the 1980s, the President proposed legislation designed to curb three major threats to the nation's environment and to the health of millions of Americans: acid rain, urban air pollution, and toxic air emissions. The proposal also called for establishing a national permits program to make the law more workable, and an improved enforcement program to help ensure better compliance with the Act.
By the way, have you heard of this challenging "little thing" called the Ozone Hole? As a brief review, the ozone layer within the Stratosphere absorbs harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun. Without it, UV radiation would be detrimental to anything, including us, living here. Science (by the way, what a novel concept) revealed that certain ozone-destroying chemicals were creating a whole. Ultimately, these scientific revelations led to the international Montreal Protocol limiting the use of such chemicals. The Clean Air Act of 1990 with Title VI sought to protect the ozone layer. It specifically required the EPA to regulate ozone-depleting substances like hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), methyl bromide, halons, carbon tetrachloride, hydrobromofluorocarbons, chlorobromomethane, and methyl chloroform. Many of these things were commonly found in air conditioning refrigerants and spray cans used by the public. As with the current climate change- fossil fuel industry "tug-and-pull," there was push back to the Montreal Protocol and limits on ozone-depleting substances. The Act also ensured the U.S. commitment to the Montreal Protocol. Recent reports show that these things have worked and the Ozone Hole is starting to "fill in" but will still take several more years.
The original Clean Air Act of 1970, signed by Republican President Richard Nixon, was probably the most comprehensive federal air pollution legislation of its generation. It established National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) that the EPA could use to regulate emissions into the air. The graphic above clearly shows that our air is "cleaner." The Clean Air Acts and Amendments of 1970 and 1990, respectively, are directly attributable to this progress. However, it is important to understand that cleaning the air or mending the Ozone Layer is a separate and distinct challenge from the looming and gigantic probably of climate change associated with excessive greenhouse gases.
Rest in Peace President Bush.
President George H.W. BushWHITEHOUSE.GOV
Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, a leading international expert in weather and climate, was the 2013 President of American Meteorological Society (AMS) and is Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program. Dr. Shepherd is the Georgia Athletic Associatio...
Dr. Marshall Shepherd, Dir., Atmospheric Sciences Program/GA Athletic Assoc. Distinguished Professor (Univ of Georgia), Host, Weather Channel's Popular Podcast, Weather Geeks, 2013 AMS President
City of St. Augustine Beach City Manager BRUCE MAX ROYLE was sleeping on the job -- again -- while Rose Bailey spoke at the December 3, 2018 City Commission meeting. Watch tape. Ms. Bailey, her husband, Mark Bailey, Tom Reynolds and I, rightly criticized ROYLE for his failings during general public comment at the beginning of the 6 PM meeting. While Ms. Bailey spoke, ROYLE was sleeping. The City Manager of St. Augustine Beach has written columns where he joked about sleeping meetings. Last night, he did it again. Ms. Bailey mentioned the fact of ROYLE's sleeping, twice, but ROYLE did not wake up. When ROYLE did awake, he did not apologize. And mediocre Mayor UNDINE CELESTE PAWLOWSKI GEORGE did nothing to inquire as to whether ROYLE was sick, or needed medical help, or when he will retire. Like a dysfunctional family, the City of St. Augustine Beach does not discuss its problems -- it ignores them, as disappointing Mayor George does all of the time now. We in the reality-based community agree that St. Augustine Beach has an incompetent, somnambulistic, senile, forgetful City Manager who tolerates: o lax financial management, o alleged sexual harassment, o lax regulation of landlords, o lax regulation of hoteliers, o lax regulation of tree killers, o lax regulation of developers, o violations of Open Records laws. It's time for him to go. Now. BRUCE MAX ROYLE is 80 years old and has encumbered the position for some 30 years. To MAX ROYLE: It's time for you to go. Now. He's a disgrace to the human race.
At last night's St. Augustine Beach City Commission meeting, Mayor Undine Celeste Pawlowski George stated she had unilaterally removed from the agenda of the November meeting an item about the no-bid, $1/year least to St. Augustine Beach Civic Association for a garage next to the St. Augustine Beach Pier Park a/k/a "St. Johns Ocean and Fishing Pier Park." Mayor Undine George said the police did not need it, and she did not "want to rub salt in [SABCA's] wounds" since the County did not renew its lease for the Farmer's Market. In fact and in reality, the SABCA garage lease has EXPIRED. See correspondence below. The purpose of the lease no longer exists. It was a breach of fiduciary duty when entered into. When a dodgy 501(c)(3) and its officers act like they are the government of St. Augustine Beach, throws its weight around opposing reformers, supports corrupt Sheriff DAVID SHOAR, and generally acts like a bumptious bully, anything can happen, including corruption. JFK said "there are three things in life that are real-- God, human folly and laughter. The first two are incomprehensible, so we must do what we can with the third." We're laughing at Mayor Undine George and her ineffectual favoritism toward the St. Augustine Beach Civic Association, a dodgy 501(c)(3) which once denied membership to her and her husband, former Mayor Edward George. With a "Mayor" like that, St. Augustine Beach is a laughingstock. It's bad enough that the City Manager, BRUCE MAX ROYLE, falls asleep in meetings, and ignores an expiring lease to favor his pals at the Civic Association. But to Mayor George, let me ask, "Do you even remember when you sold out?"
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin To: comugeorge ; commkostka ; comrobrien ; comdsamora ; commengland ; mroyle ; braddatz Cc: sabcivic ; rvbailey ; mrbailey ; sheldon.gardner ; jim.sutton ; hardwickra ; sgarysnodgrass ; judgelitt10 ; waltbog Sent: Tue, Dec 4, 2018 5:11 pm Subject: Request No. 2018-520: Expired SABCA garage lease; St. Augustine Beach City Manager sleeping during Commission meetings; National search.
Dear Mayor George, Vice Mayor England, Commissioners Kostka, Samora, and Mr. Royle: 1. Please place the enclosed expired St. Augustine Beach Civic Association (SABCA) garage lease on the agenda for the next St. Augustine Beach Commission meeting.
2. Please send me a copy of any document notifying St. Augustine Beach City Commissioners that the SABCA garage lease has expired.
3. It was a breach of fiduciary duty for the City of St. Augustine to enter into the no-bid $1/year lease and to renew it repeatedly, amidst hectoring and harassment by angry SABCA members, including nonresidents. The enclosed no-bid lease was no model of legal draftsmanship by your former City Attorney, DOUGLAS NELSON BURNETT and St. Johns Law Group, conflicted counsel for BOTH the City of St. Augustine Beach and developers.
4. It was a breach of fiduciary duty for City staff not to notify Commissioners that the SABCA garage has expired.
5. The purpose of the garage lease (Farmer's Market) no longer exists -- SABCA lost its Farmer's Market contract earlier this year when St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners rightly ordered competitive bidding for the first time in twenty (20) years -- SABCA was the lowest-rated bidder.
6. Do I understand correctly that SABCA has some three (3) subleases for the garage that were never approved by City Commission? Who is using the garage space today? Please arrange a site visit tomorrow.
7. Curiously, the no-bid $1/year SABCA garage lease gives SABCA's address as 2200 A1A Blvd -- St. Augustine Beach City Hall. Government documents show that SABCA often gave the current City Hall as its address. Is SABCA paying rent at City Hall? Did it ever pay rent at City Hall at any time?
8. Before City Hall moved to its current location, SABCA gave the prior City Hall building as its address. Did SABCA ever pay rent at the old City Hall address?
9. Please direct SABCA to vacate the garage. Its lease has expired and the purpose for the lease no longer exists.
10. It is not "rubbing salt' in SABCA's "wounds" for the City of St. Augustine Beach as a municipal corporation to preserve and protect the rights of its citizens to City property. (hat was Mayor George's dicta expressed at the December 3, 2018 meeting in Commissioner comments, expressing the reasons for her pulling and deleting a prior agenda item on the SABCA lease, sua sponte.
11. Commissioners, please do your jobs without fear or favor of a dodgy unaccountable 501(c)(3), from this day forward.
12. At last night's (December 2, 2018) Commission meeting, City Manager BRUCE MAX ROYLE was asleep. Ms. Rosetta Bailey pointed this out, several times during her public comments on Embassy Suites. I thought perhaps Mr. ROYLE had suffered a stroke. Mr. ROYLE has written in his monthly newspaper column of his propensity to sleep in meetings. None of you have ever addressed this habit of sleeping on the job, even in City meetings, correct?
13. Mayor George, you never asked Mr. ROYLE last night if he was ill or needed a break after he sat sleeping for several minutes. Why?
14. If Mr. ROYLE reported to me, I would have a candid conversation with him about his health, and whether he is up to the job. This is basic management skills, and a matter of basic human empathy and kindness.
15. Please commence a national search for a new City Manager. No more excuses are desired or required. Letting a lease expire without advising you is a firing offense. It is time for BRUCE MAX ROYLE to go, after 30 years.
-----Original Message----- From: Beverly Raddatz <braddatz@cityofsab.org> To: Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com> Sent: Tue, Dec 4, 2018 4:17 pm Subject: RE: Request No. 2018-519: SABCA subleases for City garage at St. Augustine Beach Pier Park
Mr. Slavin:
After a reasonable review, the City has no responsive documents for your request.
Sincerely,
Beverly Raddatz, MMC
City Clerk
City of St. Augustine Beach
2200 A1A South
St. Augustine Beach, FL 32080
(904) 471-2122 FAX (904) 471-4108
Confidentiality Notice: This Email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which they are addressed. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited, and that you have received this E-Mail and any accompanying files in error. You should notify the City of St. Augustine Beach immediately by replying to this message and deleting them from your system. City of St. Augustine Beach does not accept responsibility for changes to E-Mails that occur after they have been sent.
-----Original Message----- From: Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com> To: braddatz <braddatz@cityofsab.org> Sent: Tue, Dec 4, 2018 2:45 pm Subject: Fwd: Request No. 2018-519: SABCA subleases for City garage at St. Augustine Beach Pier Park
Dear Ms. Raddatz: Who decided not to tell Commissioners the lease has expired? Mr. Royle? Please provide documents.
-----Original Message----- From: Beverly Raddatz <braddatz@cityofsab.org> To: Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com> Sent: Tue, Dec 4, 2018 2:40 pm Subject: RE: Request No. 2018-519: SABCA subleases for City garage at St. Augustine Beach Pier Park
Mr. Slavin:
The lease speaks for itself. I have provided the lease which you requested.
Sincerely,
Beverly Raddatz, MMC
City Clerk
City of St. Augustine Beach
2200 A1A South
St. Augustine Beach, FL 32080
(904) 471-2122 FAX (904) 471-4108
Confidentiality Notice: This Email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which they are addressed. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited, and that you have received this E-Mail and any accompanying files in error. You should notify the City of St. Augustine Beach immediately by replying to this message and deleting them from your system. City of St. Augustine Beach does not accept responsibility for changes to E-Mails that occur after they have been sent.
From: Ed Slavin [mailto:easlavin@aol.com] Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2018 2:35 PM To: Beverly Raddatz <braddatz@cityofsab.org> Subject: Re: Request No. 2018-519: SABCA subleases for City garage at St. Augustine Beach Pier Park
Dear Ms. Raddatz:
Do I understand correctly that the SABCA lease has expired, and a key term is no longer met -- SABCA lost the Farmer's Market contract. Thank you.
-----Original Message----- From: Beverly Raddatz <braddatz@cityofsab.org> To: Ed Slavin <easlavin@aol.com> Sent: Tue, Dec 4, 2018 7:50 am Subject: RE: Request No. 2018-519: SABCA subleases for City garage at St. Augustine Beach Pier Park
Mr. Slavin:
Please see attached per your public records request.
Sincerely,
Beverly Raddatz, MMC
City Clerk
City of St. Augustine Beach
2200 A1A South
St. Augustine Beach, FL 32080
(904) 471-2122 FAX (904) 471-4108
Confidentiality Notice: This Email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which they are addressed. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited, and that you have received this E-Mail and any accompanying files in error. You should notify the City of St. Augustine Beach immediately by replying to this message and deleting them from your system. City of St. Augustine Beach does not accept responsibility for changes to E-Mails that occur after they have been sent.
Forgiveness is like a muscle -- if you don't exercise it, it atrophies. While President George H.W. Bush allowed himself to ally with some of the darker forces in American politics -- the Monster Raving Looney Party of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the like -- he mellowed after his presidency.
Likewise, St. Johns County's all-Republican Commission once proposed twice in 2008 a starter County Charter that omitted sexual orientation and gender identity from its nondiscrimination provision, section 10.06. When the County enacts a charter proposal to present to the voters in 2020, we expect both to included in the nondiscrimination provision. Yes we can!
‘He Did Not Lead on AIDS’: With Bush, Activists See a Mixed Legacy
President George Bush fulfilled a 1988 campaign pledge by signing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, which forbade discrimination against people living with AIDS, in July 1990.CreditBarry Thumma/Associated Press
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President George Bush fulfilled a 1988 campaign pledge by signing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, which forbade discrimination against people living with AIDS, in July 1990.CreditCreditBarry Thumma/Associated Press
The death of George Bush on the eve of World AIDS Day was a painful reminder of some of the most lethal days of the epidemic, when people — predominantly gay and bisexual — were struck down by an illness that few in the White House seemed to lose sleep over.
For them, the 41st president was a slow-moving leader whose response to the crisis was hard to separate from his public uneasiness with gay men and lesbians.
“If one was being charitable one could say it was a mixed legacy, but in truth it was a bad legacy of leadership,” said Urvashi Vaid, who led the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force from 1989 to 1992. “He did not lead on AIDS.”
Mr. Bush, who died Friday at 94, took two significant steps to address the epidemic, which had killed roughly 59,000 Americans by the end of 1989: He signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which forbade discrimination against people living with the disease, and the Ryan White Care Act, which remains the largest federally funded program for H.I.V./AIDS patients.
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Both did more to address the crisis than anything done by Mr. Bush’s predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who was criticized for not using the word AIDS in public until 1987, years after the epidemic had begun. Mr. Bush served as Mr. Reagan’s vice president for eight years.
Hilary Rosen, who lobbied for the Human Rights Campaign during the Bush administration, said those initiatives marked a “turnaround” in AIDS policy. But she said the president “didn’t do nearly enough.”
“I know this week it feels like we’re the skunk at the ‘Celebrate George Bush’ party, but this was our reality: We were kids and our friends were dying and the government was ignoring it because they were gay,” she said. “He just didn’t lead at a time when we were desperate for leaders.”
Critics said Mr. Bush did not do enough to provide funding for AIDS research and treatment. He was also critical of policy proposals, like a federally funded needle exchange, that activists believed could help slow the spread of the virus.
By the end of his term, H.I.V. infection was the leading cause of deathfor men in the United States from ages 25 to 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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“When you talk to AIDS activists of that era and L.G.B.T. activists, we experienced his leadership as actively hostile and not friendly,” Ms. Vaid said. “I don’t know that Ronald Reagan would have signed those bills, though, so that is something.”
Mr. Bush described his approach to the epidemic as one shaped by compassion, but he often appeared to be uncomfortable when addressing the issue.
Jennifer Brier, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said Mr. Bush’s claim to compassion was largely rhetorical.
She pointed to less-than-compassionate Bush policies like a provision that forbade the use of federal money for “the promotion of homosexuality,” such as safe-sex pamphlets that mentioned gay sex.
She also pointed to the resignation of Magic Johnson, the H.I.V.-positive basketball star, from the National Commission on AIDS in 1992. Mr. Johnson said the president “dropped the ball” on AIDS and “utterly ignored” the commission’s recommendations on issues like sex education and needle exchange.
“He had a love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin attitude, and that was considered progress at the time by some, although not in the gay movement,” Ms. Vaid said of Mr. Bush. She described his approach as “a basic avoidance of the L.G.B.T. community.”
But he did mention the community sometimes, especially with the approach of the 1992 presidential election, when he faced a primary challenge from the conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan.
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In 1991, Mr. Bush counseled “behavioral change” as a way to fight H.I.V. and described AIDS as “a disease where you can control its spread by your own personal behavior.” Many gay activists took it as a slight that blamed them for the public health crisis.
In one interview in 1992, he said he opposed the idea of same-sex couples raising children. In another, he said if his grandchild came out as gay he would “love that child” but also tell him that he was not “normal.”
“I would put my arm around him and I would hope he wouldn’t go out and try to convince people that this was the normal lifestyle, that this was appropriate lifestyle, that this was the way it ought it be,” Mr. Bush said. “I would say, ‘I hope you wouldn’t become an advocate for a lifestyle that in my view is not normal.’”
Mr. Bush lost his bid for re-election in 1992. In the years since, expensive new treatments for H.I.V./AIDS have turned the virus into a manageable long-term illness for many people. But poverty and poor access to health care have kept those drugs out of reach for millions both in the United States and around the world.
And the virus continues to spread. There were almost 40,000 new diagnoses in 2016, 70 percent of which occurred among gay and bisexual men and 44 percent of which occurred among African-Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It said over 1.1 million Americans currently live with H.I.V.
Social acceptance of L.G.B.T. people in America has grown in ways that seemed almost unthinkable during the Bush administration, and the attitudes of many have softened.
Mr. Bush appeared to have been among them.
In 2013, he served as the witness for the wedding of Bonnie Clement and Helen Thorgalsen, two longtime friends in Maine. Afterward, he sent a note to his biographer, Jon Meacham, explaining how his thoughts on same-sex marriage had changed over time.
“Personally, I still believe in traditional marriage,” Mr. Bush wrote. “But people should be able to do what they want to do, without discrimination. People have a right to be happy. I guess you could say I have mellowed.”
Delightful story by Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd about her relationship with President George Herbert Walker Bush, 1988-2018.
I love Maureen Dowd.
Footnote: I hope that one day that Maureen Dowd is going to write a column about St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR, who legally changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994, and has covered up the Michelle O'Connell case since September 2, 2010, as documented by three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times Walt Bogdanich. The latest: SHOAR's Finance Director embezzled $700,000 and she's married to an FDLE supervisor. Our SHOAR-directed developer-coddling political machine is in disarray. A County Charter will help ride herd over constitutional officers, as in other counties.
The Patrician President and the Reporterette: a Screwball Story
My faithful correspondent, Poppy Bush, scribbling and typing notes through decades of history.
Nobody understood our relationship — least of all us.
It was, admittedly, odd.
“I like you,” the first President Bush wrote me once, after he was out of office. “Please don’t tell anyone.”
In decades of correspondence, he tried to figure out why we stayed in touch, beginning one note “Darn you Maureen Dowd” and mischievously observing in another, “Sometimes I found it better around my family to go ‘Maureen who?’”
At times, typing on what he called “my little IBM,’’ he signed off “Con afecto, GB,’’ or if I was writing critically about his sons, “Con Afecto, still, just barely though! gb.’’ Or “Love” scratched out and replaced with the handwritten rebuke, “not quite there yet.”
I come from a line of Irish maids who worked for the first families of America, the Mellons and the Gores, wealthy, aristocratic families like the Bushes.
George Herbert Walker Bush, known by his childhood nickname of Poppy, was cared for by maids and chauffeured to kindergarten at Greenwich Country Day School. His idea of cursing like a sailor entailed unleashing a string of epithets like “Golly!” “Darn!” and “Oh, shoot!
His father was a Wall Street banker turned Connecticut senator who was straight out of central casting: craggy, 6-foot-4, wearing gray worsted suits even in warm weather. My brothers, Michael and Martin, teenage pages at the Capitol in the ’50s, were in awe of him. Michael was in the Senate mail room one day when the young man sorting letters held up one addressed to the Connecticut senator and mused: “You just know a guy with a name like Prescott Bush is not driving a bus.”
If the Clintons are the careless Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Barack Obama is a Camus-like figure of existential estrangement and Donald Trump is a flimflam man out of “Huckleberry Finn,’’ H.W. was Bertie Wooster, an airy WASP propelled to the top by the old boys’ network.
George H.W. Bush at Yale in 1948.CreditYale University
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George H.W. Bush at Yale in 1948.CreditYale University
In another life, I probably would have been serving President Bush his vodka martini, made to perfection with a splash of dry vermouth, two olives and a cocktail onion. But I came along just as the old world of Ivy League white men running everything was breaking up. My mom had applied for a job as a reporter at The Washington Post in 1926 and had been told by a gruff city editor that it was too rough a trade for a young lady.
But by 1988, I could be The New York Times White House reporter.
And that was a shock to the system for H.W. He was all noblesse oblige and I was all class rage. He was clearly expecting someone with a name like Horatio Farnsworth III, a Harvard man who would bat around the finer points of the North Atlantic alliance over highballs on Air Force One. And he got a newfangled, irreverent “reporterette,’’ as Rush Limbaugh called us in those days, who was just as focused on character and personality as politics and policy.
At dinner one night, President Bush’s pollster, Bob Teeter, had a couple of martinis and got frank with me: “We just don’t see you as The New York Times White House reporter. We see you more at a newspaper like the New York Daily News or the Chicago Tribune.”
Dumbfounded, I stammered, “You mean because I’m a woman with an ethnic, working-class background?’’
Yes, Teeter replied.
And thus began the screwball story, spanning decades, mystifying everyone, of the patrician president and the impertinent reporter.
I wrote a lot about how the preppy with the striped watchband transformed his blue-blooded Yale background to seem more red-blooded Texas, putting Tabasco sauce on his tuna fish sandwiches, wearing cowboy boots emblazoned with “GB,” listening to the Oak Ridge Boys and Reba McEntire, and pretending that pork rinds were his favorite snack rather than popcorn.
He protested that his mesquite side was genuine. “Can I name drop right here?” he wrote me once. “I am mad about Reba and she likes me, too — so there!”
George H.W. Bush with his wife, Barbara, and their children Pauline and George W. on a horse in the yard of their Midlands, Tex., ranch.
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George H.W. Bush with his wife, Barbara, and their children Pauline and George W. on a horse in the yard of their Midlands, Tex., ranch.
Fortunately, H.W. was too gracious to hold my background and writing style against me for long. He adapted and treated me with utter fairness and kindness, even when I dubbed him “goofy” for bouncing around like Tom Hanks in “Big,” an irrepressible boy in a dignified man’s body. “Ants on a hot pan,’’ the Chinese christened him, for his frenetic personality.
What other commander in chief wore a bunny tie on Easter and a pumpkin tie on Halloween? Who else would sit in the White House reading women’s magazines with his wife and then look up to ask, “Bar, what’s a bikini wax?” Who else would go to the magic shop near the White House and fill his office with items like a red rope that turned white, a calculator that squirted water and cash on a string so you could yank it back when someone tried to pick it up? He also had a crystal ball with a disembodied voice that gave Delphic answers to questions about tax increases: “The images are cloudy. Have someone else ask.”
Who else would send me a Polaroid of himself wearing a T-shirt that said “Broccoli Lover”? Or a picture of himself and Barbara parodying that famous attenuated Al and Tipper Gore convention kiss?
George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush parody Al and Tipper Gore's kiss at the 2000 Democratic convention.
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George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush parody Al and Tipper Gore's kiss at the 2000 Democratic convention.
Who else would jump out of a plane on his 90th birthday, years after he began using a wheelchair? Waiting for her husband on the landing pad of their church in Kennebunkport, Barbara dryly noted that if the parachute didn’t open, at least they wouldn’t have to go far for the funeral.
Poppy wasn’t perfect. I recoiled when he beat Michael Dukakis with the race-baiting Willie Horton campaign designed by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes. And again when he sent his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to Beijing for a secret midnight champagne toast with the leaders who perpetrated the Tiananmen Square massacre. And again when he didn't do nearly enough to combat the AIDS epidemic. And again when his White House directed the defense of his Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas, that tried to discredit Anita Hill. Unlike President Trump, who does his own wet work, the Bushes took the more refined route of outsourcing their ends-justify-the-means moves.
But I came along just as the old world of Ivy League white men running everything was breaking up. My mom had applied for a job as a reporter at The Washington Post in 1926 and had been told by a gruff city editor that it was too rough a trade for a young lady.
But by 1988, I could be The New York Times White House reporter.
In the absence of stories about impeachment, porn stars and white-collar criminal transgressions, I was left writing about Bush-speak, 41’s tangled syntax. At a Knoxville high school, when he was asked about ideas to improve schools, he replied: “Well, I’m going to kick that one right into the end zone of the Secretary of Education.’’ Sometimes he forgot and read his stage directions, like: “Message: I care.” As Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine, the president treated words as “perverse, buzzing little demons that need to be brushed away periodically like flies.” This did not help H.W. in debates with Bill Clinton, which is why he was caught impatiently checking his watch.
He once tried to dismiss a reporter who asked about his role in the Iran-contra scandal, chiding: “You’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.” He went past dialoguing with other world leaders to “trialoguing.” He often quoted some advice from his mother, using it for all occasions: “So tomorrow there’s going to be another tidal wave, so keep your snorkel above the water level.”
He shunned personal pronouns because his beloved mother, Dorothy, always warned him not to gloat or focus on “the big I.” Asked what the Malta summit with Mikhail Gorbachev would mean for the world, Bush replied: “Grandkids. All of that. Very important.” In his State of the Union message, he asked: “Ambitious aims? Of course. Easy to do? Far from it.’’ Once on his beloved cigarette boat, the Fidelity, he told me, “Can’t act. Just have to be me.”
Dana Carvey mocked the president by standing in front of the Berlin Wall on “Saturday Night Live” and intoning: “Before Bush, wall. With Bush, no wall.’’ Bush, who loved to laugh and who traded barbershop jokes with his Secretary of State James Baker and his image wizard Sig Rogich, ended up putting a tape of Carvey mimicking him in his presidential library. (His fondness for dirty jokes grew antiquated, colliding in the end with the #MeToo wave, for which he apologized.)
After 43 became president, 41 wrote to Time’s Hugh Sidey with a self-deprecating comparison to John Adams, the only other president whose son also became president: “A prolific reader, he loved the classics, prided himself on his ability to speak Latin, and had a library of extraordinary proportions. I couldn’t wait to stop studying Latin. Big difference there between me and John.”
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I wrote about Bush’s grueling schedule, not of governing but of sporting: shooting, casting, jogging, putting, pitching, lobbing, boating, diving and body surfing. I dug up the dirt on his floating backhand, unsteady putting stroke and a basketball shot that his son Marvin called “an ugly air ball.” Many a summer morning at 6 a.m., I could be found on the Kennebunkport golf course, sitting cross-legged and watching Bush play “aerobic golf’’ or “golf polo.”
George H.W. Bush celebrating his 85th birthday in a tandem jump with the Army’s Golden Knight parachute team in Kennebunkport, Me. He repeated the feat on his 90th birthday.CreditU.S. Army Parachute Team
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George H.W. Bush celebrating his 85th birthday in a tandem jump with the Army’s Golden Knight parachute team in Kennebunkport, Me. He repeated the feat on his 90th birthday.CreditU.S. Army Parachute Team
He complained in one of his “blue notes’’ from the Oval to his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, that I was sitting in a “hinayanistic” Buddha pose on the first tee, “off meditating in Sri Lanka.” It was giving him the yips. He worried I was trying to figure out “what makes this crazy guy tick.”
Once, to pay him back for all the break-of-day golf games, I thought it would be funny to wear a “Jesse Jackson for President ’88” cap and a “Bob Dole for President ’88” T-shirt on the course. As H.W. came hurtling down in his golf cart toward the ninth hole, I was waiting for him to see my get-up and laugh. But he didn’t look my way. His golf partner, his oldest son, then known as “Junior” and the Roman candle in the family, did look, though, and leveled a fierce glare at me.
“No worries,” I comforted myself. “Jeb’s the comer. Junior’s the black sheep.”
H.W. used sports as a way to do personal diplomacy, playing horseshoes with heads of state at Camp David or driving them maniacally on his motorboat at Kennebunkport. (Francois Mitterrand begged off, saying he’d get mal de mer.)
I was in the press contingent when 41 took Hosni Mubarak to his first baseball game to see the Baltimore Orioles. The crowd cheered as Ted Williams, who was in the stands, was introduced and then reacted in flummoxed silence when the announcer boomed “the president of Egypt — Mubarak.”
One of the only things that 41 ever boasted about was when he began hilariously claiming, after he got out of office, that he had coined the phrase “You da man” in the ’60s. “He maintains he was inspired to shout it to the Houston Astros’ Rusty Staub as he rounded third base following a home run, and it slowly caught on from there,’’ Doro Bush wrote in her book on her dad.
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I interviewed President Bush about popular culture and he accused me of doing a “psychoanalytical” piece and trying to put him “on the couch.” I found out that Greer Garson was his favorite actress, that he had had a crush on Doris Day as a teenage Navy pilot in World War II, that he loved glee club music, that he was a bust at the fox trot, and that he once dozed off while watching the Ronald Reagan movie “Santa Fe Trail.”
I didn’t spare the journalistic rod. When I took my mother, who was on crutches, to a White House Christmas party, President Bush kissed her sweetly. On the way home, she said, “I knew he had a cold, but he was so handsome, I just went for it.’’ Then she glowered at me, muttering, “I don’t want you to write anything mean about that man ever again.’’
President George W. Bush and former President George H.W. Bush in conversation in 2008.CreditPool photo by Dennis Brack
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President George W. Bush and former President George H.W. Bush in conversation in 2008.CreditPool photo by Dennis Brack
Somewhere along the way, H.W. and I grew to appreciate each other.
“We have a love-hate relationship,’’ he told me when I ran into him in 2001 at a book party in Georgetown. “I talk to my shrink about it.” He knew that I knew he was kidding; he avoided introspection at all costs, often ending debates in the White House by saying “I’m president and you’re not.”
Like the current occupant of the White House, 41 was obsessed with The New York Times. (Both men’s fathers read the Times.) But while he tweaked the liberal press — a 1992 bumper sticker said “Annoy the media, re-elect Bush” — Poppy understood we are not the Enemy of the People. His critiques were more along the lines of this one in a note he sent me: “Booh!, editorial page.’’
When I asked the ex-president if he would like to meet with our editorial board, he replied, “Only after 3 root canal jobs. Thanks anyway.’’
He reminisced in one note that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. had covered his campaign a bit in 1980: “We liked him, but then he got to be an editor then top gun — publisher. A lib, yes, but not a mean one.’’
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H.W. wrote that he was not as anti-press as his sister, Nancy Ellis, who had once excoriated the Taylors, who used to own the Boston Globe. “I am not like my beloved sister, who has re-cancelled her Boston Globe subscription four different times,’’ he said, “and who took on one of the sacred Taylor family in a letter-to-the-ed as a ‘Droopy Drawers.’’’
He would complain when I used the “d word” (dynasty) and when he thought I was making the family sound elitist, telling me to lay off the “legacy crud’’ and “the Gatsby stuff,’’ fretting that it could hurt Jeb. He told me to ignore his stationery with the drawing of the posh Kennebunkport compound. He sometimes signed off sardonically, “Sincerely, My Excellency, GHWB, Eastern Elitist.”
Mostly, he agonized about how strange it was that we stayed in touch when I was so hard on W. about the invasion of Iraq. (Even though H.W. and I both believed that ousting Saddam would cause more trouble than containing him.)
“Where do you and I stand,’’ he pondered. “It is not hate (underlined). How can I feel a warm spot in my heart for someone who day in and day out brutalizes my son? I don’t know but I do. End of Confession — Con Afecto, GB #41.”
Another time, he wrote: “I don’t like it that you don’t like my oldest son; but it’s a bit of a stand off cuz he doesn’t like you either. But then he doesn’t know you as well as I do. Time may heal.”
Jean Becker, 41’s lovely chief of staff, joked that the former president and I needed “couples counseling.”
First Lady Barbara Bush sharing a quiet moment with the president and First Dog Millie in 1989.CreditDavid Valdez/White House
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First Lady Barbara Bush sharing a quiet moment with the president and First Dog Millie in 1989.CreditDavid Valdez/White House
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Sometimes, H.W. talked about his “madness Richter scale” or declared himself “double dip angry” with me after a tough column on W.
“You see, I like this exchange with you, but, as confessed before, I get angry with you!’’ he wrote. Another time, he teased: “Now I am off to the clinic to take a little Prozac, stretch out, and get some shrinkster to figure out this love/hate thing about you that plagues me.’’ At one point, he pleaded: “Do not prescribe shock therapy.’’
He said he preferred to keep his advice to his eldest son private, noting: “I am even very careful around close friends having learned that the propensity to leak is stronger than the sex drive.”
Once, in return for being on a panel at the Bush Library — we had to wait until Barbara was out of town because she was peeved about my W. columns — 41 gave me a copy of a book which was the closest he got to a memoir, “A World Transformed,” written with Scowcroft. The inscription said it was “better than Sominex if you ever need a tranquilizer.’’ And he trepidatiously gave me a quirky, raffish, 11-page typed parody of my Bush parodies portraying W. as a Boy Emperor being controlled by his malevolent regents, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
His satire was laced with “forsooths,’’ “lyres,’’ “nobles and peasants,’’ “courtiers,’’ “verilys” and other Old English touches. It was funny, bringing alive the fantasy court of Bushland with Poppy as “the old warrior king”; “Queen Bar”; “King Prescott of Greenwich, now in heaven”; “Princess Doro”; “Earl Jeb of Tallahassee”; “Lady Dowd, charming princess of Op-ed land”; “Queen Hillary of Chappaqua"; “Sir Algore”; “Maid Monica” frolicking with “King Bill” in the Oval Office, ushering in “a new permissiveness, a new standard that confuses the old man.” And there was George of Crawford, “the new King” who took the throne after “the Battle of Chads in November.’’
But an even funnier thing that happened in the course of this unique relationship came after the ascension of W. — whom 41 sometimes referred to in his notes as “my boy, Quincy.” In 2006, 43 made a rare trip to Kennebunkport one weekend for a wedding, a christening and a funeral, and I went with the press corps. I was surprised when Karl Rove called me to tell me he was involved in a cloak-and-dagger plot with Bush senior, who wanted to meet me for coffee but didn’t want his son to find out because it would irritate him.
The former C.I.A. director who liked to sign his notes at the agency, “Head Spook,’’ still had some tricks up his sleeve. I loved the idea of one president with a Secret Service detail sneaking around behind the back of another president with a Secret Service detail, when they were both staying in the same family compound in the small Maine town.
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Talk about Skull and Bones skulduggery. We didn’t pull it off, but I liked the derring-do of it, recalling the days when President Bush used to try to lose his security detail when he was careering around in his speedboat in Maine.
After he was out of office, I sent H.W. and Barbara books and small Christmas mementos. Once, I told my assistant, Ashley Parker — now a Washington Post White House reporter — to send him a glasses case embroidered with a lobster. She got distracted and sent him some cheap drugstore hand warmers that you put inside gloves.
Naturally, since we’re talking about the most polite man who ever lived, I soon got a thank-you note for the 50-cent present: “I shall use the handwarmers as Pres. Obama comes in and we Bushes leave town,’’ he said.
When my mom died at 97 in 2005, he sent me a kind email that made me cry.
“It hurts to lose a parent,’’ he wrote. “It hurts an awful lot. When my own Mom died I went up to Greenwich to check on her. She was close to death and her breathing was so labored that I literally prayed to God, as I knelt right there by her bed, that she would go on to heaven. She was prepared to do just that.
“I hope your own Mom had a peaceful passing; and that she felt joyous about going on to heaven. Heck with politics. Heck with the NYT and all my hang ups about” it.
I flew down to Houston to have lunch with H.W. in 2011.
“Did you come because you think I’m going to die?” the then 87-year-old in a wheelchair asked me as we dined at his favorite pizza dive.
No, I replied. I told him I was enlisting to go with him on his ninetieth birthday parachute jump.
He spoke fondly of Bill Clinton and respectfully of President Obama. Then I asked him about Donald Trump, who was leading the birther charge against Obama. Neither of us could have imagined then that Trump would dispatch H.W.’s long-nurtured dreams of his son Jeb becoming president with two words: “low energy.”
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At the mere mention of Trump’s name, 41 made a face. “He’s an ass,’’ he snapped.
When Trump began plowing his way through Republican rivals, H.W. was known to throw his shoe at the television set.
The narcissistic, amoral, vulgar reality-TV president and the modest, principled, classy, old-world president could not be more different.
With Poppy, there was decency and sweetness.
CreditLeonard McCombe/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
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CreditLeonard McCombe/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
“Put it this way,’’ he wrote me once. “I reserve the right to whine, to not read, to use profanity, but if you ever get really hurt or if you ever get really down and need a shoulder to cry on or just need a friend — give me a call. I’ll be there for you. I’ll not let you down.
“Now, go on out and knock my knickers off. When you do, I might just cancel my subscription.”
A selection of Maureen Dowd’s articles about George H.W. Bush:
Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995. @MaureenDowd•Facebook
My mother told me that Big Business and Republicans never steal anything small.
Boldly, this wannabe right-wing Republican Congress critter, VINCENT ROSS SPANO took some $167,000 in illegal campaign contributions -- friends loaned him money and he invested it in his campaign. Sadly for this wannabe Congress critter, our Constitution provides that the House of Representatives is the sole judge of the qualifications of its members. Stealing an election with illegal campaign contributions may be enough to deny his seat. Quo vobis videtor (What do you reckon?)
Florida Dem chair says incoming GOP Congressman should be “disqualified”
Republican Congressman-elect Ross Spano is getting hammered from both sides of the aisle following his admission over the weekend that he may have used illegal campaign contributions to help win his Congressional seat.
Spano, an attorney who won the Central Florida U.S. House seat last month, revealed in a Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filing that he borrowed $180,000 between June and October from two individuals.
He then gave himself a loan of $167,000 at around the same time period, according to a letter sent to the FEC.
During the campaign, Spano had said that the sudden burst of campaign cash came from his own personal funds. In a statement released on Saturday, he said he believed he was acting in compliance with the law.
But critics are questioning what happened.
“Ross Spano knew exactly what he was doing when he took personal loans and used them as campaign funds, which is against the law,” Florida Democratic Party chair Terrie Rizzo in a statement. “This should disqualify Spano from serving in Congress. This matter needs to be fully investigated, and appropriate actions taken.”
A former state representative from eastern Hillsborough County, Spano’s original ambition this year was to become Florida’s next Attorney General.
But when that effort failed to gain traction, he dropped out of that race and decided to run for the open seat in Florida’s 15th Congressional District centered in Polk County, where he defeated former state Rep. Neil Combee in the Republican primary.
If found in violation of campaign finance law, Spano faces fines and possible jail time. However, the Federal Election Commission does have a policy to reduce the financial penalties for violating campaign contribution limits when a candidate self-reports the matter.
The list reminds me of a rotten mullet by moonlight -- it both shines and stinks. It shines with the wattage and intelligence of the appointees, but it stinks with the lack of visionaries and academics. So sad.
Evidently, DeSANTIS has no intention of doing what George H.W. Bush called "the vision thing" -- he's doing the business thang -- or "Business As Usual," which the St. Augustine Record recommended in 2014, in endorsing anti-environmental St. Augustine Mayor JOE BOLES, trounced by Nancy Shaver.
Unadorned by a single law or environmental science professor, DeSANTIS' list of 40 environmental and agricultural advisors is fodder for Kremlinologists and anyone interested in knowing more about the unfolding DeSANTIS administration.
We hope that Rep. Brian Mast, head of the committee, will conduct open meetings in the Sunshine and will discuss the urgent need for a St. Augustine National Historical Park and National Seashore, first proposed in 1939 by Mayor Walter Fraser and supported by both Senators and Congressman at the time.
DeSantis names 40 to environment, agriculture transition team
Tyler Treadway, Treasure Coast NewspapersPublished 5:03 p.m. ET Dec. 3, 2018 | Updated 11:24 a.m. ET Dec. 4, 2018
Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis and Lt. Gov.-elect Jeanette Nuñez announced Monday the names of over 40 advisers who will serve on the Transition Advisory Committee on the Environment, Natural Resources & Agriculture.
The list is comprised of policy experts, state leaders and executives who will advise the administration and help shape the future of Florida's policies to restore and protect the state's unique environment, natural resources and agriculture industry.
The committee will be chaired by U.S. rep. Brian Mast, a Palm City Republican.
"I look forward to working with Governor-elect DeSantis again, as we did in Congress, to protect Florida’s natural environment," Mast said in a prepared statement. "We will work tirelessly to help start his administration off on the right foot."
Members of the committee include:
Bob Bailey: president of Facilities & Urban Environments Market, CH2M HILL Companies, Ltd.
Ernie Barnett: executive director, Florida Land Council and Principal, Water and Land Advisors Inc.
Mike Beale: senior vice president & regional manager of Orlando Operations, Highwoods Properties Inc.
Ron Bergeron: founder & CEO, Bergeron Family of Companies
Ken Bryan: state director, Florida Field Office, Rails to Trails Conservancy
In its 17-page plea agreement, USDOJ agrees not to object to probation or supervised release and mentions the possibility of "cooperation, if any" by Ms. Long being reported to other offices. Source: plea agreement, paragraphs 6 & 8. Good work by Jacksonville lawyer Henry Coxe, III, criminal defense lawyer for esteemed former St. Augustine Planning and Zoning Board Deltra Long on FEMA fraud charges (false claims to obtain FEMA money for 148 Twine Street rental house, falsely claiming it was her principal residence). Ms. Long is a lifelong civil rights activist and was one of the first African-Americans to graduate from St. Augustine High School. Her classmates and colleagues all admire her. She ran for Commission in 2008, coming within twelve votes of being in the runoff (held between Bruce Maguire, who lost, and Roxanne Horvath, who was elected). Until the indictment, there were hopes Ms. Long would be St. Augustine's first African-American Mayor. Query: will Deltra Long provide evidence re: any possible felonies by developers, their lobbyists and lawyers, or St. Augustine Planning and Zoning staff or board members?
From United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida files:
Case No. 3:18-cr-67-J-39JRK Defense Atty: Henry M. Coxe, III, Esquire & Michael Halkitis, Esquire
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURTMIDDLE DISTRICT OF FLORIDAJACKSONVILLE DIVISION
AUSA: Jay C. Taylor, Esquire
JUDGE
James R. Klindt U. S. Magistrate Judge
DATE AND TIME
12/3/2018 3:08 p.m. - 3:40 p.m.
DEPUTY CLERK
Megan D. Chaddock
TAPE/REPORTER
Digital
INTERPRETER
None Present
PRETRIAL/PROBATION
None Present
PROCEEDINGS:
CLERK’S MINUTES CHANGE OF PLEA
Defendant placed under oath and questioned regarding Magistrate Judge conducting the plea hearing. Defendant consents. Defendant advised of rights, charge, penalties, special assessment, and forfeiture provision. Defendant entered a plea of guilty to Count Two of the Indictment. Count One of the Indictment will be dismissed at sentencing, pursuant to the Plea Agreement. Court finds Defendant alert, intelligent, and willingly entered plea of guilty. Counsel waive the 14 day objection period to the Report and Recommendation. Report and Recommendation to enter. Sentencing to be set by District Judge. Order of Detention shall remain in effect. FILED IN OPEN COURT: NOTICE REGARDING ENTRY OF A PLEA OF GUILTY PLEA AGREEMENT
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT MIDDLE DISTRICT OF FLORIDA JACKSONVILLE DIVISION UNITED STATES OF AMERICA vs. DELTRA LONG. CASE NO. 3:18-cr-67-J-39JRK
REPORT AND RECOMMENDATION1CONCERNING PLEA OF GUILTY
The Defendant, by consent, has appeared before me pursuant to Rule 11, Fed. R. Crim. P. and Rule 6.01(c)(12), M. D. Fla. Rules, and has entered a plea of guilty to Count Two of the Indictment. After cautioning and examining the Defendant under oath concerning each of the subjects mentioned in Rule 11, I determined that the guilty plea was knowledgeable and voluntary, and that the offense charged is supported by an independent basis in fact containing each of the essential elements of such offense. I therefore recommend that the plea of guilty be accepted and that the Defendant be adjudged guilty and have sentence imposed accordingly. DONE AND ENTERED at Jacksonville, Florida, this 3rd day of December, 2018. Copies to: Honorable Brian J. Davis United States District Judge Chloe Swinton, Courtroom Deputy Assistant United States Attorney (J. Taylor) Henry M. Coxe, III, Esquire United States Probation United States Pretrial Services --------- Here's the incomplete 174 word story from the St. Augustine Record, which omitted any mention of USDOJ's agreement not to object to probation or supervised release:
Deltra Long pleads guilty to one charge in FEMA fraud case; sentencing to be scheduled
By Sheldon Gardner Posted Dec 5, 2018 at 2:01 AM Former St. Augustine Planning and Zoning Board member Deltra Long has agreed to a plea deal in a fraud case involving the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Her sentencing has yet to be scheduled, and it will be up to a U.S. Middle District Court judge to decide whether to accept the agreement, according to court documents.
Long was charged this year with theft of government funds and making a false claim against the government. Authorities believe she applied for and received about $10,000 to repair a rental property that she claimed was her primary residence, according to court documents. She applied for the help after Hurricane Matthew.
Long had entered a plea of not guilty but changed her plea to guilty to one charge this week as part of a plea deal, which will drop the theft of government funds charge. While Long is seeking to avoid prison time, the maximum sentence for the charge includes 5 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, or both, and supervised release, according to the plea agreement.
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