Bush Friends, Loyal and Texan, Remain a Force
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — Israel Hernandez was a fresh-faced college graduate from the Texas border town of Eagle Pass in the summer of 1993 when he landed a job in Dallas as the personal aide to the part-owner of the Texas Rangers George W. Bush.
Together, they spent months driving the dusty back roads of the Lone Star State to promote the team, Mr. Hernandez behind the wheel of Mr. Bush’s Lincoln Town Car.
“He would speak to a rotary or chamber and say, ‘You need to come to the ballpark and we’ll make it Athens, Texas, Day. We’ll put you in your own special section; we can say ‘Welcome Athens, Texas,’ on the big screen; you can come to batting practice, ‘’ Mr. Hernandez recalled.
Today, after nearly 14 years in Mr. Bush’s employ, with a short break to get a master’s degree, Mr. Hernandez, 37, travels the world promoting free trade as an assistant secretary of commerce. From his sun-drenched corner office, with its sweeping view of the Washington Monument, he can sit at his desk and watch the presidential helicopter, Marine One, ferry around the man to whom he owes his career.
“In many ways,” Mr. Hernandez said of Mr. Bush, “I feel like I have grown up with him.”
He is not the only one. Six years into Mr. Bush’s presidency, the corps of loyal Texans who accompanied him to Washington from Austin remains a powerful force inside the administration, a steady source of comfort for an increasingly isolated president. No matter how grim the polls or dire the news in Iraq, they have stood by Mr. Bush — and been rewarded with plum jobs — as their lives have grown increasingly intertwined with one another’s and with his.
“We’ve gotten married, gotten remarried, had babies,” said Margaret Spellings, who was a single mother with two children when she followed Mr. Bush to Washington and has since been promoted from a domestic policy adviser to secretary of education. “I remember the Bush twins when they were just little squirts.”
To hear these people talk about the president is to meet a man many Americans have either forgotten or no longer recognize. Their George W. Bush is the compassionate conservative who helped soften the harsh image of the Republican Party, a man who chokes up at going-away parties, as he did last year for Andrew H. Card Jr., his departing chief of staff; a man unafraid of giving promotions to openly gay people, as he did with Mr. Hernandez, and who always remembers to ask how the family is.
“There’s a lot of devotion to George Bush the person,” said Clay Johnson, a prep school buddy of Mr. Bush who is now a deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.
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