BUSH POINT MAN HAS FULL PLATE
Parsky tries to remake state GOP as he deals with uneasy Simon alliance

By John Marelius
The San Diego Union - Tribune
Apr 24, 2002

LOS ANGELES -- In a videotaped testimonial to his old friend Gerry Parsky, former President Bush has this to say:

"Here's a man very successful in business. Many of his businesses have created jobs for California. But also he's a tremendous citizen in the community. He volunteers; he gives of himself. And then, of course, he's not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get involved in the political arena when a lot of people are running for cover."

Running for cover isn't an option now that Parsky is the principal California adviser to the second President Bush. But there are days when the wealthy businessman must surely be tempted to do just that.

Parsky, 59, has become the personification of ideologically squishy, country-club elitism to a vociferous band of conservatives unhappy with his efforts to restructure a fractious California Republican Party to the liking of George W. Bush's White House.

And what had been a historical footnote in the arcane world of financial deal-making has sprung back to life because of the landslide victory in the March primary election of Los Angeles businessman Bill Simon for the Republican nomination for governor. Simon trounced former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who White House operatives had hoped could put California in play for the president's 2004 re-election campaign.

Simon's surprising win created a forced partnership between two investment moguls who have been on the outs for more than a decade over a bitter business dispute between Parsky and the nominee's father, the late William Simon, secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Parsky managed to pour gasoline on the fire with election-night comments about "extremists," which Simon supporters took as an attack on their candidate. But a suggestion by a Simon campaign official that Parsky's standing with the White House was shaky reportedly resulted in the president forcefully reaffirming Parsky's status as his main man in California during an Oval Office meeting with Simon.

Simon and Parsky say they put their differences behind them in a clear-the-air meeting last fall. And they seem to have reached an accommodation to, if not work closely together, at least stay out of each other's way.

Whatever their personal relationship, they're stuck with each other. Simon will need plenty of help from the White House and elsewhere if he is to pull off an upset of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in November. And a Simon victory, or at least a solid showing, would give Parsky a compelling argument for Bush to compete aggressively in California in his 2004 bid for re-election.

These days, Parsky is plainly weary of reading about his role in GOP infighting and old business disputes. He may not be running for cover, but he's hardly running for the spotlight either. Parsky consented to a lengthy interview for this article, but he repeatedly asked whether it was really necessary.

The most influential California Republican that most California Republicans have never heard of commutes daily to his Westwood investment office in his Gulfstream jet from his Rancho Santa Fe estate. At home, he and wife Robin raise horses, including a newborn foal that he made a point of telling a reporter he helped deliver.

Parsky's admittedly short political resume would seem to make him an odd fit for a Texas-centric White House that critics say simply doesn't get California. But he possesses the quality that George W. Bush prizes above almost everything else: loyalty.

"Gerry cares about the president," said Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser. "He's got one priority -- President Bush."

Fresh out of law school in the early 1970s, Parsky followed a professor to Richard Nixon's Treasury Department, where he caught the eye of Treasury Secretary George Shultz.

The early-30ish whiz kid was suddenly on the fast track to becoming the Treasury's top official in international energy policy, where he made two acquaintances who would loom large later in life: Soon-to-be Treasury Secretary William Simon and CIA Director George Bush.

After President Ford's defeat in 1976, Parsky moved to Los Angeles to join the high-powered law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Parsky and the elder Simon, a leveraged-buyout specialist, collaborated on a series of investments and in 1990 formed WSGP Partners.

Simon, who had a reputation for obstreperousness, abruptly pulled the plug on the partnership two years later with a one-sentence fax to Parsky. He told an interviewer at the time that he "totally lost trust and confidence" in Parsky.

Preston Martin, a former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman, was chairman of the board of WSGP and a Simon ally.

In a recent interview, Martin said he and Simon considered Parsky a poor manager and that Parsky also resented the growing influence of Simon's sons, Bill Jr. and Peter, in the firm.

"He didn't come to the board meetings. He didn't do his homework," Martin said of Parsky. "But he knew what we ought to do anyway. Yeah, sure you do. So we broke up."

On this subject, the affable Parsky's gregariousness comes to a screeching halt.

"All I want to say is the following," he said deliberately. "Any disagreements that occurred more than 10 years ago were with Bill Simon Sr. He is passed away and I consider it a small chapter in history."

Simon's son doesn't relish the subject either. "I will work very well with Gerry Parsky. I'm not worried about that in the slightest," the nominee said after meeting with Bush at the White House.

Parsky's baptism into politics came when former San Diego Mayor Susan Golding asked him to help land the 1996 Republican National Convention and then serve as chairman of its host committee.

At the San Diego convention, he struck up a friendship with Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the convention's co-chairman. Three years later, Bush asked Parsky to head up his 2000 presidential campaign in California.

To this day, Parsky resolutely defends the decision to spend more than $15 million in California, where Democrat Al Gore rolled to a double-digit victory without spending money on television advertising.

He insists campaign polls showed Bush had closed the gap to five points a week before Election Day, but that the undecided vote broke heavily for Gore in the closing days. Besides, he says, no money was diverted from other states to California.

Last year, the newly inaugurated president designated Parsky to be his point man in California and handed him a varied portfolio. Bush asked Parsky to serve on a commission to recommend reforms of the Social Security system, and designated him to head a screening committee to designate prospective federal judges and prosecutors. And, oh, by the way, straighten out the California Republican Party.

Three assignments: two prestigious, one thankless.

Parsky engineered a party restructuring aimed at professionalizing the volunteer operation. The reorganization stripped conservative Chairman Shawn Steel of much of his power.

Some conservative activists regard the reorganization as an effort to impose a leftward ideological agenda, a perception Parsky disputes.

Last weekend, the California Republican Assembly, a statewide conservative grass-roots organization, passed a resolution branding the "Parsky plan" a "failed experiment" and called for its repeal.

"They weren't really as structural as they were aimed at liberalizing the party," said CRA Chairman Dick Mountjoy.

Parsky's rocky relations with conservatives are not helped by his periodic bouts of tone-deafness.

"If you are an extreme conservative, you cannot win in California," Parsky told The New York Times on election night last month. Coming after two weeks of denunciations of Simon by Riordan as an "unelectable extremist" -- a characterization immediately picked up by Davis -- the comment infuriated the Simon camp.

Parsky said he was speaking in general terms, not about Simon.

"I had been saying the same thing for a year and a half," he said. "So I didn't think I was saying anything different. I certainly didn't intend people to take it as they did."