Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [16]
The Rapoports have one son, whom they adore. Alas for the purposes of inherited wealth, they raised him so well, he won’t take B’s money either. Ronnie is a professor of political science at the College of William and Mary. His mother and father are so proud of him, and so crazy about his daughters, Abby and Emily, it almost makes your heart hurt with happiness to hear them talk about the family.
So here’s B, a workaholic with a passion for social justice and a ton of money. What to do? Put both the money and his energy back into this country, of course. This country gave him the opportunity to get rich—you think he’s going to forget that? How did he get rich? First, he got a free education. B and Audre fully fund a charter school for disadvantaged kids in Waco (“where the teachers can by-God hug the kids!”). He has given untold amounts to the University of Texas over the years and served as chairman of the board of regents when Ann Richards was governor. He gives money to politicians at local, state, and national levels who demonstrate concern for economic justice. One wall of his old office at American Income Life used to be covered with signed pictures to B from famous folk—think of any liberal politician of the past fifty years, and there was a picture on B’s wall. Presidents, senators, congressmen, statehouse pols. He absolutely adored the late Paul Wellstone.
B didn’t just support them when they were in office; when some broken-down pol, felled in electoral combat or even tainted by scandal, came adrift into private life, B Rapoport was there, a foul-weather friend. He has hired so many demoralized Democrats who were forced to leave office one way or another, it’s amazing he could keep the insurance company running.*
In one of the more comical capers of his career, when Bill Clinton’s old buddy Webb Hubbell was being investigated by the absurd Kenneth Starr, B got hauled in front of a grand jury in Little Rock to explain why he had thrown a six-month consulting contract Hubbell’s way. He did it because a guy he knows named Truman Arnold, an oilman in Texarkana, called him one day and said Hubbell was a good guy and asked B for the favor. B does favors for friends—what are you gonna do? Shoot him? (Keep in mind, Texas is still a state where multimillion-dollar deals are done on a handshake. In order to do this, you have to know the people you deal with.) B reports that the grand jurors looked like mushrooms from having been kept in the windowless basement of the courthouse for so long. The prosecutor asked him, “What is your name?”
The response ran, approximately, “My name is Bernard Rapoport, and if you dumb sons of bitches don’t understand why someone would help a guy who is down and being kicked, you are contemptible! I don’t know what your Christian religion demands of you, but this poor bastard never would have gotten into troubleif he hadn’t been a friend of Bill Clinton’s, and I have helped at least a hundred guys who have been through some version of this same political hanging, and I tell you I have a right to help any down-and-out son of a bitch who needs it!” The prosecutors barely got another question in edgewise. Then they dismissed him. As he left, one grand juror said to another, “He must be innocent. He sure wasn’t nervous.”
To this day, B will occasionally muse on what “Papa” would have said about where his son is today. (Papa didn’t have much use for the rich; he used to roust his son out of bed in the morning with “Workers of the world, unite!”) Like most American Jews of