Did the President Use Cocaine?
By John K. Wilson
Writer James H. Hatfield, troubled by personal and financial problems, committed suicide in an Arkansas motel on July 20, 2001. However, the book Hatfield wrote about George W. Bush-and then saw recalled by his original publisher because of Hatfield's criminal history-continues to raise questions about the president even after the author's death.
Since George W. Bush first entered politics, allegations of past cocaine use have haunted him. A new edition of Hatfield's Bush biography Fortunate Son (published a month before his suicide by Soft Skull Press) names top Bush advisors who reportedly confirmed the cocaine story, and once again raises the possibility that the President of the United States once took cocaine, used his family's influence to have his criminal record erased, and has repeatedly lied about the incident.
The advisors named as sources are among the closest to Bush: his school buddy and lifelong friend Clay Johnson (now the White House director of presidential personnel), his Texas minister, Rev. James Mayfield, and his Senior White House Advisor Karl Rove. The question is, will anyone believe these charges and the new evidence offered to support them?
While rumors of his drug use have been floated since Bush's 1994 run for governor, and comedians filled their monologues with cocaine jokes, the media largely attacked the cocaine charges and stopped pursuing the story because author J. H. Hatfield, turned out to be an ex-felon who lied about his past. Hatfield's St. Martin's Press book was recalled by his publishers in October 1999 for nothing short of a book burning: St. Martin's Vice President Sally Richardson declared it "furnace fodder."
Initially, St. Martin's promoted Hatfield's scoop: a hastily-added afterword which reporting three Bush advisors confirmed a rumor that Bush had been arrested in 1972 for having cocaine and had the arrest expunged by a friendly judge in Texas.
George W. Bush fueled the swirl of rumors about cocaine in August, 1999, when he declared that he would be able to answer drug-use questions about the last seven years in an FBI background check. He added that in 1989 he could have passed the 15-year background check in place under his father's administration, but refused to discuss any drug use before 1974.
Phone records show that on September 2, 1999, at 4:45 p.m., Hatfield called Clay Johnson and talked to him for four minutes. At 4:56 p.m., Hatfield called Rev. Jim Mayfield and spoke for six minutes. At 5:10 p.m., Hatfield called Bush's closest adviser, Karl Rove, and spoke with him for two minutes. Rove asked if he was on a "goddamn cordless phone" and then called Hatfield back 30 minutes later. Hatfield says he has notes of his conversations in "half a dozen 6-ft. long boxes containing research material."
In the Afterword to Fortunate Son, Hatfield described what these sources told him. Johnson said, "George W. was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1972, but due to his father's connections, the entire record was expunged by a state judge whom the elder Bush helped get elected....In exchange for successfully completing community service at Project PULL, where Bush senior was a heavy contributor and honorary chairman, the judge purged George W.'s record." Rev. Mayfield confirmed the story, Hatfield said, as did Rove. (Johnson declared, through a White Press spokesperson, that he "has never spoken" to Hatfield.)
Mayfield declares, "I have no memory of having had a conversation with a person using the name of J. H. Hatfield although so many reporters called me in 1999 and 2000, it is possible he phoned me. However, I never talk about personal issues related to persons I serve as pastor and that was my reply to ALL reporters at that time." Mayfield adds, "Because of the nature of Mr. Hatfield's allegation, I will say that to the best of my knowledge the statements you say Mr. Hatfield has made are a lie."
Hatfield claimed, "I had to plead a little more with Mayfield: 'I've called several sources and they're willing to go on the record about the drug arrest. I'm going to give you an opportunity, since you know Bush so well, to come clean. Tell me what happened, the best you can, and be truthful and honest and we'll let the chips fall where they may.'"
Rove provides the most intriguing connection. In June, 1999, Hatfield reported receiving a call from someone in the Bush campaign who wouldn't identify himself. Hatfield met the man for a bass fishing weekend at Lake Eufaula in Oklahoma starting on June 26, 1999. According to Hatfield, "we met at an abandoned movie theater parking lot" near the lake. It was then that Hatfield saw his mysterious fishing partner: "I didn't know who he was before I saw his car parked in the grass-infested parking lot. Once I saw the face, I thought, 'Oh, shit!'" Hatfield reported, "Rove told me he lied to his wife, Darby, that he was going out bass fishing alone and then he swung around and got me. I was with him Saturday afternoon from 2:00 or 3:00 or so to dark, all day Sunday and then we went out Monday a.m. for a couple of hours." Later, Hatfield would call Rove to confirm the cocaine story.
The most common explanation for Hatfield's story, one that dominates the media, is that Hatfield simply made it all up. That's because Hatfield lied to his editors and reporters in order to conceal a conviction for hiring a hit man who unsuccessfully tried to kill one of Hatfield's co-workers (Hatfield claims he did it at the request of his boss, an allegation that led to a libel suit which caused Soft Skull's fearful distributor to halt selling the first Soft Skull edition of the book).
Hatfield's credibility also took a hit when Jacob Weisberg of Slate pointed out that Hatfield's description of a phone conversation with Rove (then unidentified) spitting tobacco couldn't be true. According to Hatfield, the St. Martin's Press lawyer, Celeste Phillips, "recommended it. I had too many identifying characteristics of the sources in the original draft....example: chubby-cheeked, balding and bespectacled....She chewed my ass out."
Hatfield claimed, "we started playing with throwing out some red herrings." Hatfield said that only two parts of the Afterword were fictionalized: the tobacco-spitting detail and the description of Rev. Mayfield as a "longtime Bush friend and unofficial political adviser."
If Hatfield was simply inventing the afterword out of thin air, why would he go to all the trouble of inventing phone records at the time with a series of phone calls to the principals he now cites as sources? St. Martin's Press certainly wasn't pressing him for anything like that info-they didn't even ask for the names of the three sources until after the scandal blew up in their faces.
Moreover, if Hatfield was totally lying, why wouldn't he immediately disclose these imagined Republican sources and the phone records as support for his contentions? Why wait almost two years when an immediate revelation might have added credibility (and publicity) to his anonymous charges?
Perhaps Hatfield really believed it when he declared, "I've always said I'll never reveal my sources." A Rumor in Hand Is Worth a Rove in the Bush Campaign The second theory for what happened to Hatfield is offered by Soft Skull publisher Sander Hicks in the new foreword to Fortunate Son. According to Hicks, Hatfield was set up by Rove in order to help the Bush campaign quash rumors about the cocaine arrest.
As ex-Love Boat star and Republican member of Congress Fred Grandy observed, "this is gold for George Bush. I think this essentially inoculates him from the cocaine thing."
If Bush ever was arrested for cocaine possession and got away with it, it seems doubtful that he could have appeared in a courtroom without any records or witnesses stepping forward. Could Bush's arrest have been quietly disposed of? It's certainly possible-Houston was hardly a paragon of clean politics-but the evidence can't be found, and no sources have stepped forward to come on the record.
But if a Bush operative such as Rove felt that the cocaine story was inevitably going to come out, Hatfield would have been the ideal source to reveal it. Even if Rove didn't know about Hatfield's criminal past, he would much rather have the cocaine story come from the author of an X-Files trivia book than from the New York Times. Once the story was released, especially if the main figures involved refused to talk, it could be handled with some evasive denials. The political damage would be harsh, but the whole scandal might blow over long before the general election a year later.
There is also supporting evidence that another Bush adviser carelessly admitted that George W. Bush had used cocaine. Toby Rogers, a reporter for the Houston Public News, spoke with Michael Dannenhauer, the Chief of Staff for former President Bush. Dannenhauer told Rogers that George W. "was out of control since college. There was cocaine use, lots of women, but drinking was the worst" and he had some "lost weekends in Mexico."
Dannenhauer denied saying this, and denied ever speaking with Rogers-a claim that was difficult to believe because there is a photo showing the two of them together at the meeting. Rogers' notes, provided by Soft Skull Press (which published his story as a preface to Hatfield's book), show that Dannenhauer began his statement by saying "between you and me," so he may have thought the admission would be off the record.
Biographer Bill Minutaglio noted that during Bush's 1994 campaign for governor, his opponents tried to "find Bush's records for driving while intoxicated-even though there had apparently never been any such arrest." It turned out that this widely-circulated rumor was true, and it became a news story a few days before the 2000 election.
When asked in 1994 about his use of illegal drugs, Bush evaded the question by saying, "Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. What's the relevance?" Bush's cocaine past cannot be dismissed as irrelevant because the Bush family's endorsement of the drug war has helped to spur dramatic increases in penalties for possessing illegal drugs. In a country obsessed with harsh minimum sentences for drug use instead of treatment programs, it would be odd to have a former drug user as president demanding ever increasing penalties for those who follow in his footsteps. Yet that's what Bush has done, signing a Texas law in 1997 giving first-time felons a minimum of 180 days in jail for possessing less than a gram of cocaine, instead of probation and drug treatment.
What makes the story in Fortunate Son so believable is how neatly it ties together the themes of George W. Bush's life: born of privilege, using family connections to get him out of every problem, Bush wasted his youth partying and used the advantage of his name to gain access to the corridors of power in business and politics. Even Bush's friends cannot deny the likelihood that cocaine was a part of the mysterious "wild" youth that the president refuses to discuss. Given the large number of rumors and various confirmations by Bush's friends, and the refusal of the president to issue a denial or discuss his drug past, it is hard to believe that Bush never used cocaine, even if an arrest for cocaine may forever be a murky part of a lost history.
In a country with more than two million people in prison, many of them due to nonviolent drug crimes, the president's use of cocaine will never be irrelevant or an old story. George W. Bush has proven that by refusing to answer questions, attacking the media, and evading the issue, he can continue to escape responsibility for his past. And if the media pursue Bush's drug history with the same fervor that J.H. Hatfield was investigated, and refuse to let the issue be silenced, perhaps the truth about the president and cocaine may finally be revealed. |
