The fusion of oil and politics is a Bush family tradition. For generations, the Bushes and their friends have been shuttling back and forth between energy industry boardrooms and Washington's hallowed halls.
Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, initiated the pattern. Shortly before winning a Connecticut Senate seat in 1952 he helped his son George raise $350,000 to start what would become Zapata Petroleum.
Sen. Bush also regularly looked out for the oil industry and his son's interests while in Washington. His biggest single favor, according to Herbert Parmet's book "George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee," came a year into his first Senate term, when he opposed legislation that would have federalized offshore resources -- including oil -- to raise money for education. In the name of states' rights and free enterprise, the bill's defeat helped both the oil companies and gave Zapata just what it needed to expand. In fact, soon after the legislation failed, Zapata moved into offshore drilling -- eventually one of Zapata's most lucrative ventures
George Bush made millions during the '50s and '60s Texas oil boom, and he also made many friends, most notably James Baker, who became Bush's company lawyer in 1963 after Zapata merged with Penn to become Pennzoil.
Bush later brought his friends to Washington, first as a representative in the House, then as head of the Republican National Committee and finally as vice president and president. He didn't stock his administration as full of oilmen and women as his son has, but like Prescott Bush, he didn't mind doing the industry's bidding either. His most public act for oil came in 1981. While serving as Ronald Reagan's vice president, he departed from the White House's official stance and visited Saudi Arabia to plead for an end to sliding prices. Bush argued that he was simply trying to protect American security interests by protecting domestic producers, who have higher costs than their Persian Gulf counterparts. But higher prices had another benefit: by protecting domestic oil jobs, they helped shore up support in Texas for what would eventually become his successful 1988 presidential campaign.
Higher prices also directly helped Bush's son, George W. Bush. George W.'s oil career started in 1978 -- 12 years after his father first entered Congress -- when several of his father's friends invested in his firm, Arbusto ("Bush" in Spanish). Unlike his father, George W. spent much of his oil career in the red. As Joe Conason pointed out in Harper's last year before the election, the company's original investors and others bailed out his firm at least three times. But after a final act of corporate CPR -- a merger with Harken Energy in 1986 -- Bush's connections to power really paid off. Two years after the merger, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a former director of Saudi Arabia's income tax department, purchased an 11 percent stake in Harken through his company Traco International. That same year, Harken won a contract for oil-drilling in Bahrain.
"Harken had no international experience at the time," says Eisner at the Center for Public Integrity, which published a detailed account of Bush's rise to power titled "The Buying of the President: 2000." "It was their first out of country contract."
Press reports at the time questioned Bahrain's motivations. Even the normally reserved Wall Street Journal reported in 1991 that the contract "raises the question of ... an effort to cozy up to a presidential son."
The Bush family countered that the contract was well deserved. Regardless, the deal in the Persian Gulf gave Bush a direct tie to the Saudi elite and set Bush on a suddenly successful path.
"It's not just the matter of a single contract," Eisner says. "It also has to do with converting Harken into a player that was then converted into a stake in the Texas Rangers and a run for governor. It's not incidental. The Bahrain deal is central to Bush's life."
Some experts suggest that it's not necessarily a bad thing to have a presidential family so steeped in oil knowledge, given the importance of oil to both national security and the domestic economy. But Bush has shown a pervasive willingness to let oil interests define energy and environmental policy. After accepting millions from the industry during his run for governor, he signed into law tax breaks for state energy producers, and in 1997, he gave them a hand in writing their own rules. Upon hearing that Texas' state environmental agency planned to end an exemption that allowed power plants built before 1971 to avoid complying with state pollution laws, Bush tapped two people to come up with an alternative plan: Vic Beghini, an executive with Marathon Oil Inc. and Ansel Condray, an executive with Mobil.
The plan they came up with initiated a voluntary pollution reduction program that didn't punish companies for noncompliance and thus essentially failed. A study by the Environmental Defense Fund published six months after Bush announced the program revealed that only three of the 26 companies had actually cut their emissions. Two years later, under increasing public pressure, Bush signed a bill forcing power plants to cut their emissions in half by 2003 -- but the essential exemption, as the industry wanted, still stands.
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