Bush's inner circle

According to people close to him, George W. Bush makes friends easily, and even former opponents speak kindly of him. Bobby Valentine, now manager of the New York Mets, was fired by Bush and his partners at the Texas Rangers; today, he says he would campaign for Bush. At the core of Bush's campaign are a few of his closest friends, people he has known for decades from school or growing up in Midland, Texas, long before he entered politics.

Bush prizes loyalty highly -- and the friends that form his inner circle are, if nothing else, unflaggingly loyal to the governor. In a break with common practice, Bush has not brought in inside-the-Beltway hired guns; his top strategy advisers are all people he knows from Texas. While he has not made many close political friends, he has brought his friends into national politics.

Don Evans

Perhaps Bush's closest friend, Evans and his wife Susan, an elementary school classmate of Bush's, helped the bachelor with meals and laundry when he settled in Midland after earning his MBA from Harvard. Bush and Evans were both in the oil business in Midland, and Evans' business thrived while Bush's struggled. As Bush's chief fundraiser, Evans led an effort that brought in some $90 million -- twice as much as any other presidential campaign in history. In late April, Evans was tapped to be chairman of the Bush campaign.

Update: Evans was nominated by Bush on December 20, 2000, to be commerce secretary.

Karl Rove

Virtually unknown outside Texas, Rove may be on the way to the kind of fame achieved by campaign strategists James Carville and Lee Atwater. Atwater, the strategist behind the elder George Bush's 1988 campaign, worked for Rove's successful 1972 run for chairman of the national College Republicans. An extremely tough -- some say, cutthroat -- competitor, Rove met George W. when Bush Senior was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Rove worked on W.'s failed 1978 Congressional bid and has worked for the last 20 years to boost the Republican Party's fortunes in Texas which, like much of the South, were solidly Democratic for several decades.

Update: Rove was made a senior White House adviser by Bush on January 4, 2001.

Karen Hughes

Hughes, the campaign's communications director, is a former television reporter who served as Bush's press secretary in the governor's office. Before he decided to run for president, one aide told the Washington Post, Bush told Hughes, "If you're not going, I'm not going." Hughes, a graduate of Southern Methodist University, was a TV reporter for seven and a half years before signing on as the Texas press coordinator for the Reagan-Bush campaign. As executive director of the Texas Republican Party, she worked with Karl Rove to bedevil then-governor Ann Richards. She left the party office to join Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign.

Update: Hughes was named by Bush as a counselor to the president on December 17, 2000.

Joe Allbaugh

Allbaugh is well suited to run interference for Bush -- at 6'4" and 275 pounds, he even looks like a football lineman. As Bush's campaign manager, he has described himself as the "heavy" who takes care of campaign logistics and says "no" when someone has to. Formerly an aide to Oklahoma governor Henry Bellmon, Allbaugh was introduced to Bush by mutual friends and was brought aboard to bring stability to the first Bush gubernatorial campaign. With Rove and Hughes, Allbaugh is part of what is often called the "Iron Triangle" at the heart of Bush's campaign strategy.

Update: Allbaugh was nominated by Bush on January 4, 2001, to be the new director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

George Herbert Walker Bush

The former president has maintained a low profile in his son's campaign, as W. sought to establish himself. But the son clearly reveres his father and has acknowledged going to him for advice. W.'s top economic and international policy advisers are veterans of the Bush administration. Whether by plan or coincidence, W.'s career has avenged his father's political setbacks; Ann Richards, whom W. defeated for governor, famously mocked "poor George" at the 1988 Democratic convention, and W. is now running against Al Gore, half of the ticket that defeated Bush Senior in 1992.

Clay Johnson, III

A classmate of Bush's at Andover and Yale, Johnson is one of Bush's oldest friends -- they've known each other for some 40 years, beginning when the two men were Texans new to the environment of a New England prep school. Johnson went into marketing, and months before the 1994 election that brought Bush into the governor's mansion, Bush offered Johnson the job of overseeing gubernatorial appointments. Since then, he has served as the governor's appointment secretary and executive assistant. He is also the person most often quoted in press accounts about Bush's relationships with his other friends.

Mark McKinnon

One testament to Bush's skill at building consensus is his media adviser. A former songwriter for Kris Kristofferson, McKinnon was a lifelong Democrat and a rising star as a consultant in the early '90s. He worked for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and for Texas governor Ann Richards, whom Bush defeated in 1994. Disillusioned, McKinnon dropped out of politics in 1996. But, while he was working on non-political advertising, he was convinced to meet Bush -- and was so taken with him that he became the media adviser on the governor's 1998 re-election campaign.

Laura Bush

George W. Bush and Laura Welch went to the same junior high school and lived in the same apartment complex in the early 1970s. But they never met until June 1977, when they were fixed up by mutual friends. They married three months later. During what Bush calls his "nomadic years," Laura was a literally sobering influence -- she is credited with helping him stop drinking and settle down in 1986. While she was never very politically outspoken, and until recently shunned the limelight, Laura has become more skilled as a public speaker and has championed the arts and literacy as Texas' first lady.

Condoleezza Rice

Rice, the Bush campaign's senior adviser on international policy, helped shape the end of the Cold War as the Bush administration's senior director for Soviet affairs at the National Security Council. A college student at the age of 15, Rice graduated from the University of Denver with honors at 19 and earned a master's degree from Notre Dame at 20. She is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and has worked at Stanford in various capacities since 1991, including as provost from 1993 to 1999.

Update: Rice was named by Bush to be his national security adviser on December 17, 2000.

Lawrence Lindsey

Lindsey, the Bush campaign's senior economic adviser, is a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. He was a governor of the Federal Reserve System, a White House adviser during the Bush administration and a staff economist in President Ronald Reagan's first term. Educated at Harvard, Lindsey has been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, and is the author of "Economic Puppetmasters: Lessons from the Halls of Power."

Update: Lindsey was named by Bush on January 3, 2001, to be the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Stephen Goldsmith

Goldsmith is the senior domestic policy adviser for the Bush campaign and the executive chairman of netgov.com, a company that assists governments in bringing services on-line. He is also the chairman of the Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that promotes a free-market approach to public policy. From 1992 to 1999, Goldsmith was mayor of Indianapolis, Indiana, during which time he launched IndyGov.org, the Web site for the Indianapolis and Marion County governments, and championed the "Building Better Neighborhoods" infrastructure improvement program. Goldsmith also served as Marion County prosecutor for 12 years and received his law degree from the University of Michigan.