Doug Wead's Hair Shirt Tour started shortly after news broke that he'd secretly tape-recorded President Bush back when Bush was Texas governor. In the tapes, Bush seemed to admit having smoked marijuana, he pondered how to handle questions about what he called "the cocaine thing" and he said he would not discriminate against gays in his administration.
Deluged with criticism over the surreptitious taping, what followed for Wead was a trajectory of defensiveness, then contrition, apology and shame.
Not to mention depression.
It was a sobering turn of events for the 58-year-old evangelical Christian who has longtime ties to the Bush clan and who has called the current president a friend.
Wead, a motivational speaker and author, has parlayed his interest in the presidency into a series of books about presidential families. The secret taping came to light after the New York Times received an advance copy of his most recent book, "The Raising of a President" and began pressing Wead to show that his assertions about Bush -- who, Wead wrote, was worried that questions about drug use would haunt a presidential campaign -- were based on fact or firsthand knowledge. Now Wead faces an uncertain future. Furious criticism has come from the right, left and center. And though the president joked at the recent Gridiron dinner about Wead, ("Anyone looking for a transcript of the program should call Doug Wead"), the Bushes are famous for remembering and punishing breaches of trust. All the apologies in the world are unlikely to reopen doors that have slammed in Wead's face.
Wead is a former Assemblies of God minister and motivational speaker who has written quickie political and religious-themed books aimed at the evangelical right. He was once a high-level distributor for Amway and said he speaks at Amway conventions three or four times a year. In 1992, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Arizona. In the last several years, he has produced two intensively researched books on presidential family dynamics. "For most of my life research and writing has paid the bills," he wrote on Wednesday in an e-mail.
His ties to the Bushes and to the evangelical movement conferred on him the kind of authority that led reporters to call him during last year's presidential campaign. In apparently good but somewhat distanced standing with the Bushes, Wead was never at a loss for a good quote or a slightly more-candid-than-usual anecdote.
Then came the Jan. 4 publication of "The Raising of a President," followed more than a month later by news that he'd secretly taped Bush over a period of time when Bush was mulling a run for the White House.
Wead defended taping Bush because he saw his friend as a "historical figure." He revealed the tapes' existence, he said, only after his publisher and the New York Times, which broke the story along with ABC, persuaded him to document his assertions.
The day after the Times splashed the secret tapes story on its front page, as Wead was being hammered far and wide by folks of all political persuasions for tactics many saw as sleazy, he threw in the towel.
Wead told CNN's Anderson Cooper he wouldn't be doing any more interviews. "I've already told my publicists here, I don't want any more TV," said Wead. "I'm going home, forget it."
Publicly, a Bush spokesman said the tapes were casual conversations that the president had "with someone he thought was a friend." Privately, the White House was said to be furious and urged, through intermediaries, the surrender of the tapes. On the "Today" show, Laura Bush said the secret tapes were "awkward" and "odd" though she refrained, when asked, from using the word "betrayal."
Three weeks after talking to Cooper, on March 14, Weed penned an essay for USA Today detailing how very sorry he still was. In that brief piece, headlined "I'm Sorry, Mr. President," Wead wrote that he had been "prideful," "arrogant," "foolish," "wrong" and had paid a "terrible price" for betraying the president in such a manner. He called off his book promotion, he wrote, and he'd be assigning all future royalties to charity.
On March 16, Wead appeared on "Hardball With Chris Matthews" and reiterated his abject apology but was able to make a number of references to his book, "The Raising of a President," which examines the role that parents of presidents have played in their sons' lives. His thesis about Bush is that the president's younger brother, Jeb, was the anointed son, which took pressure off George W., whom the Bushes regarded as "the family clown." George W. was therefore allowed to mature, slowly, out of the public glare.
On March 21, Wead was a guest on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" and repeated his apologies once more. In that interview, Wead implied he'd been nearly suicidal about his bad judgment.
