Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [151]
And so, in early 1999, Marty Rathbun, who'd been spending most of his time in Florida handling the Lisa McPherson case, was called back to Los Angeles by Miscavige and assigned a new task: "recover" Tom Cruise, in earnest. Neither Rathbun nor Cruise has ever spoken about the details of this "recovery," but over the next two years, Rathbun steered Cruise back to the OT levels. By 2002, he'd reached OT 4. That year, during Cruise's publicity tour for his film Vanilla Sky, he and his new girlfriend, the actress Penelope Cruz, lobbied the U.S. ambassadors in France, Greece, and Germany, countries where Scientology was under investigation, to support the church in its cause of "religious freedom." This lobbying was not unlike Travolta's efforts, begun in the late 1990s, but Cruise took up the cause with even more passion. In June 2003, for instance, he secured a meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to further press his concerns about the Church of Scientology's treatment in Germany. The next day, Cruise met with Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, to discuss the same topic.
Cruise also took on the cause of education, hoping to win government funding for Scientology's Applied Scholastics supplemental education program. Over lunch with Secretary of Education Ron Paige and his chief of staff, John Danielson, Cruise, according to a report in theWashington Post, asked numerous questions about the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Bush administration's mandate that schools found to "need improvement" must set aside 20 percent of the annual budget to provide students with supplemental education. By the summer of 2003, Applied Scholastics, now headed by Bennetta Slaughter, had been approved in the state of Missouri as one such provider and soon met with similar endorsement in Florida, California, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C.
During this phase of Cruise's activism he began to float a story that became a key part of the rewritten script of his life: that his dyslexia had rendered him a "functional illiterate" until he was "cured" by Hubbard's study technology. By the summer of 2003, Cruise was openly promoting Scientology as a cure for learning disabilities, often plugging a Scientology-backed tutoring program, the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project (H.E.L.P.), that he'd helped found.
By the fall of that year, Cruise garnered even more publicity for his sponsorship of the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project, a Scientology-endorsed clinic in lower Manhattan that used Hubbard's controversial Purification Rundown to treat first responders at the World Trade Center on 9/11, who now, two years later, suffered from health problems related to the disaster. In an interview with Larry King on November 28, 2003, Cruise, who donated more than $1 million to the effort, defended the clinic, whose techniques some physicians had criticized. "Doctors do not know how to diagnose chemical exposures, because it can actually have mental ramifications," he said. "You go to a doctor and now he's going to put you on more and more drugs, steroids, things that are ineffective." But Scientologists, he suggested, had far more potent solutions. "I've actually helped people that have been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD," Cruise said, giving a plug for Hubbard's study technology.
"I watched Tom promoting those causes and I just felt a shiver," said Karen Pressley, who'd left Scientology in 1998, disillusioned with David Miscavige's leadership.