FROM THE WORLD OF UP IS DOWN AND THE MEDIA DOES NOT NOTICE: "When Mr. Bush spoke to the commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, Mr. Betts said that the president took along Mr. Cheney not to present a consistent story but to show the panel that Mr. Bush was in charge. "What he told me was that he wanted people to see how deeply he understood all this," Mr. Betts said, "and how he was calling all the shots."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/politics/14betts.html?oref=login&pagewanted=2January 14, 2005
For President and Close Friend, Forget the Politics
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
hen people ask Roland Betts how a New York Democrat can be such a good friend of President Bush, he whips out a ready answer. "Which would you prefer: my being close to him, or some right-wing zealot being close to him?" Mr. Betts said in a recent interview. "Who do you want to have his ear? So it's not a bad thing. Maybe I give him a little balance."
It was Mr. Betts, after all, who persuaded Mr. Bush to hold the Republican National Convention last summer in the heart of Democratic America, the West Side of Manhattan, and it was Mr. Betts who stuck to that decision under incoming fire from the president.
"I had an anxious year, to tell you the truth," said Mr. Betts, recalling that as the threat of protests grew, Mr. Bush took to tormenting him with comments like: "You're ruining me politically. Why did you make me come to New York?" <snip>
Roland W. Betts and George W. Bush have been needling each other for more than 40 years, ever since the day they met as remarkably similar freshmen at Yale. Mr. Bush was the eldest child of a blue-blooded Republican transplanted in Texas and Mr. Betts the son of a man who managed money for Vincent Astor. Both came from families that stretched generations back into the aristocratic precincts of the East Coast, both had sharp senses of humor, both loved sports and jocks. Most important, both were rebels in their own fashion. <snip>