Miers ties to Bush include personal lawyer

updated 12:53 p.m. ET Oct. 3, 2005

WASHINGTON - Among a host of qualities that White House counsel Harriet Ellan Miers shares with new Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is the apparent lack of any personal legal agenda. Known for an exacting, no-nonsense style, Miers — like Roberts — tends to avoid the limelight.

Once described by White House chief of staff Andrew Card as “one of the favorite people in the White House,” Miers has been there for President Bush at every turn for more than a decade.

She was Bush’s personal lawyer in Texas, took on the thankless job of cleaning up the Texas Lottery when he was governor, and followed him to Washington to serve as staff secretary, the person who controls every piece of paper that crosses the president’s desk.

In 2004, Bush appointed her White House counsel, calling her “a talented lawyer whose great integrity, legal scholarship and grace have long marked her as one of America’s finest lawyers.” He articulated his high regard for her more memorably during a 1996 awards ceremony when he called her “a pit bull in size 6 shoes.”

Miers, 60, has a string of firsts on her resume that track her quiet but steady march to the top echelons of power: first woman hired by her law firm in 1972, first woman president of the Dallas Bar Association in 1985, first woman president of the Texas State Bar in 1992, first woman president of her law firm in 1996.

Helped hide drunk driving arrest
Miers’ loyalty to Bush is above question. When he first decided to run for governor in the early 1990s, he hired Miers to comb his background for anything derogatory that opponents might try to use to defeat him.

Miers also introduced Bush to Alberto Gonzales, who served as Bush’s counsel while governor and later in Washington, before being named U.S. attorney general.

During Bush’s first term as governor, Gonzales used information turned up by Miers to persuade a local judge to excuse Bush from jury duty, a civic task that would have forced him to disclose his 1976 arrest for drunken driving in Maine. The incident was not divulged until the waning days of Bush’s 2000 campaign for the White House.

Federal Election Commission records show Miers contributed $1,000 to Bush when he first ran for the White House in 2000 and $5,000 to the Bush-Cheney Recount Fund in the post-election struggle that finally sealed his victory over Al Gore.

Ironically, she had donated $1,000 to Gore a dozen years earlier, when he first sought the White House.

Miers also gave $1,000 to another prominent Democrat — Lloyd Bentsen, the longtime Texas senator who in 1988 ran for re-election and also was Dukakis’ vice presidential choice on the Democratic ticket that year.

Bentsen won another term in the Senate, but the Republican ticket of George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle defeated Dukakis and Bentsen.

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