The Ties that Tarnish : The Web of Corruption that Surrounds George Bush

As the Mother of All Dirty Campaigns gathers its facts and innuendo for November, probable Democratic nominee Bill Clinton is already so smeared and so ready to return fire that George Bush, in his clean white shirt of upright Republicanism and family values, can look forward to a savaging of his own. How much of this dirt sticks could be critically important.

Political logic, press reports and recent Democratic mutterings all suggest the main fire will be directed against three targets. First, the business ethics of the Bush family, three presidential sons and three presidential brothers, some with eyes for a marginally tainted deal. Second, Bush’s personal relationships--about which there have been snide hints, but no proof. And third, far more important in its national implications, the argument that, under this Administration, U.S. foreign policy--ostensibly the laurel wreath on Bush’s imperial brow--has become a gravy train for Bush family members and policy advisers, and for GOP campaign functionaries, who openly double as registered foreign agents.

Significantly, this last point is bipartisan. Vivid indictments have been made by GOP nomination rival Patrick J. Buchanan. Moreover, potential third-party candidate H. Ross Perot, a nominal Republican, is given to making harsh charges about Bush’s Persian Gulf connections. But on the first two subjects, the messengers will be Democratic and the motivation as political as Election Day itself.

The length and intensity of the trail of vaguely sleazy deals, apparent influence-peddling and periodic legal wrist-slappings left by Bush family members while their relative is in the White House is only the second-biggest surprise. The biggest is that George Herbert Walker Bush, Mr. Patrician Probity, let it happen.

Other Presidents have had the problem with several sons ( Franklin D. Roosevelt) or one brother (Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter), and should have served as cautionary examples for Bush--which makes his paternal and fraternal permissiveness so hard to understand.

The most recent sweeping indictment came in a March 27 column on the New York Times Op-Ed page portraying: 1) son Neil’s grubby conflict-of-interest involvement with the failed Silverado savings and loan (he was fined a relative pittance of $50,000); 2) son Jeb’s “unwitting” acceptance of improper political contributions; 3) brother Prescott’s highly paid role as adviser to a Tokyo investment firm identified by Japanese police as a mob front, and 4) son George Jr.’s 1990 dumping of $848,000 of Harken Energy Co. stock in possible violation of SEC insider-trading regulations. The only consolation for the President must have come in the apparent space limitation: There was no room for brother Jonathan’s 1991 violation of securities laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut, for which he was fined more than $30,000 and (in Massachusetts) barred from trading with the public for one year.

Based on previous Administrations, one or perhaps two family transgressions could be taken as typical. Bush’s problem is that Democratic campaign commercials will make the multiplicity of it come alive--perhaps portraying the Bushes as the First Family of Financial Flimflam--and throwing dirt as well on the motivations in the President’s relentless advocacy of capital-gains tax cuts.

Meanwhile, Democratic National Chairman Ronald H. Brown and others have been tee-heeing that, if the press discusses allegations about Clinton’s girlfriends, it should deal with kindred speculation about Bush. Well, maybe, but not necessarily. Comedian Mark Russell has joked on TV about Republican girlfriends named Jennifer being classier--they spell their names with a “J.” But back in 1988, similar rumors that major media were about to pursue an old Bush relationship never came true. But, for 1992, Clinton’s Gennifer Flowers problem could mean that, at some point, Democrats have little to lose from recklessness or even irresponsibility.

Paradoxically, however, the less titillating charges may be most serious--that, under Bush, the conduct of U.S. foreign affairs is starting to resemble the “bank” at the House of Representatives: a cash club for the favored and faithful. Alas, it is hard to overstate the ethical and historical transformation of U.S. foreign policy since the days of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower or even Carter. No one had to examine Lend-Lease, the Marshall Plan or U.S.-Soviet detente for private economic deals involving the President’s family or the fingerprints of presidential campaign spokesmen who doubled as lobbyists for foreign interests and governments.

Compared with Bush, however, no previous President has had so many immediate family members involved in what can politely be called international consulting and deal-making. Until 1990, brother Prescott S. Bush Jr. was an adviser to New York-based Asset Management International, partly owned by West Tsusho, a Japanese investment company. In February, NBC News reported Prescott had stood to make $1 million by arranging U.S. deals for Tsusho, which Japanese police say is a front for the Inagawakai crime syndicate. Son George, meanwhile, is a significant shareholder--along with Saudi and South African investors--in a Texas company, Harken Energy. Just before the Gulf War, Harken won a major oil-drilling contract--one it had no obvious qualification for--from Bahrain.

Brother William (Bucky) Bush is an international consultant who has been advising Samsung, the Korean conglomerate, on U.S. investments. Son John E. (Jeb), running his father’s reelection campaign in Florida, is an international real-estate investor, who has received multimillion-dollar backing from Japan’s Mitsui Trust. Lawyers in a suit filed against the shadowy Bank of Commerce and Credit International have just identified Jeb as a potential witness because his company invested in real estate with a company controlled by a major BCCI borrower.

Several of the President’s closest foreign-policy advisers have been mired in financial conflict-of-interest situations. In 1988, Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III, approved policies that permitted U.S. banks to avoid having to write off a portion of their hefty loans to Brazil. Baker himself was a prime beneficiary of this policy, because stock in New York’s Chemical Bank, where he had a large chunk, quickly rose 40%.

Conflict-of-interest issues have even been raised about the Gulf War. In October, 1990, the President denied, no doubt justly, that son George’s Bahrain oil connection had any influence on his commitment of troops to rescue Kuwait. However, the President himself had a commercial connection with Kuwait. Many years earlier, as he told White House dinner guests, his company had built Kuwait’s first offshore oil well.

In a more speculative vein, there is the possible Washington pro-war leverage of several Gulf owners of BCCI, the shadowy international bank that helped finance Iran-Contra. Press accounts suggest that Sheik Kamal Adham, former head of Saudi intelligence, and Sheik Zayed ibn Sultan al Nuhayan of Abu Dhabi, the bank’s dominant shareholder, were both able to use BCCI as their piggy bank, which presumably gave them enormous influence in Washington. Zayed, meanwhile, has been treated with kid gloves at every point of the U.S. government’s continuing BCCI investigation.

Quite extraordinarily, Zayed’s chief Washington strategist happens to be James A. Lake, deputy manager of the Bush reelection campaign, who also butters his bread as U.S. public-relations adviser to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one vehicle by which Zayed holds majority control of BCCI. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who has been chairing the Senate BCCI investigation, recently demanded Lake’s resignation: “I have to question the propriety of the President of the United States’ campaign being managed by someone who is simultaneously being paid over $200,000 every three months to represent BCCI’s biggest shareholder.”

Democratic researchers have thick folders to amplify these and other reported incidents. White House strategists may be making a mistake in assuming that voters now judging Clinton harshly won’t do the same for Bush.

Part of the explanation for the collapse of any serious conflict-of-interest yardstick to restrain the mingling of party politics, personal business and the for-profit modification of U.S. foreign policy is simple. Back in the mid-1980s, the line between private industry, private financial bankrollers and foreign policy was dissolved in the Iran-Contra blueprint to aid the Nicaraguan rebels. Since then, Persian Gulf bankers and Washington consultants have become de facto assistant secretaries of state and assistant U.S. trade representatives. In 1987, leading members of Congress involved in the Iran-Contra investigation voiced fears about the dangers of the privatization of foreign policy. They were prophetic.

Further proof of the privatization pudding has since emerged in the central role that registered agents or lobbyists for foreign interests have played in the 1992 GOP presidential campaign. But not everyone was pleased. Buchanan ran TV commercials and made speeches criticizing Lake’s status as a lobbyist for various Japanese interests, while the firm of Charles Black, another senior Bush adviser, also has foreign clients. Buchanan’s campaign manager said, “Bush has Japanese foreign agents running his campaign, (and) a Panamanian agent running the Republican Party.”

No other major nation was so permissive, but old barriers had dissolved, and with them, old proprieties. In late February, another presidential candidate, Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey attacked the financial dealings of Bush and his family, noting that brother Prescott was “building a golf course” in China for the “butcher of Tien An Men Square,” and charging that Bush policy “is pretty closely tied to his own family interests.” In March, Perot, revealing his plans for a possible third-party presidential bid, spiced his anti-Washington rhetoric by proposing “a law making it a criminal offense for foreign companies or individuals to influence U.S. laws or policies with money.” Legislation like that would strike at the heart of both privatized foreign policy and Washington’s international influence bazaar. But Perot--the derring-do businessman who arranged for a commando raid into Iran to free two of his employees a decade ago--understands what Iran-Contra unleashed.

In a year of profound public disillusionment, the politics could be incendiary. Just as the House of Representatives’ check-bouncing scandal essentially represents Democratic institutional corruption--though 25%-30% of congressmen involved are Republicans--the executive branch’s moral breakdown on foreign-policy corruption and self-dealing is institutionally Republican--though a fair minority of Washington’s foreign agents and international consultants are Democrats.

If his eventual presidential rivals pick up the criticisms now beginning to swirl, Bush could find the 1992 foreign-policy debate turning ugly.