Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

Jeb Bush had an obvious reason to be in Washington on December 11, 2000. He was the Florida governor, and the Supreme Court was hearing a historic Florida case. It happened to be called Bush v. Gore, and it would determine whether his older brother, George, would win his state’s electoral votes and become the next president.

But that’s not why Jeb was in Washington. As the ultimate partisan battle played out at the court, Bush was attending a quiet bipartisan ceremony in the Oval Office, watching President Bill Clinton, the Democrat who had ousted Bush’s father from that office, sign a bill to save the dying Florida Everglades. The $8 billion plan to revive the so-called River of Grass was the most ambitious ecosystem restoration effort in history—and one of Bush’s key priorities. So while his brother fought Clinton’s vice president over Florida’s political swamp, Jeb stood beside Clinton to celebrate Florida’s literal swamp. After signing, the president handed Jeb the first ceremonial pen. “What a bizarre day,” recalls David Struhs, Jeb’s top environmental official at the time.


Once the event was over, Bush strolled out to the White House driveway for a news conference with Clinton’s aides and members of Congress from both parties. Predictably, reporters were less interested in hearing the governor discuss the panthers, gators and herons of the Everglades than hanging chads, butterfly ballots and the high-stakes oral arguments across town.

“No, no, no, no, you’re going the wrong way on that one,” he told them. “We’re here to talk about something that’s going to be long-lasting, way past counting votes. This is the restoration of a treasure for our country.”

Wetlands were once considered wastelands, and Florida’s early settlers yearned to drain the marshes of the Everglades, to “reclaim” and “improve” a vast liquid wilderness of snakes and mosquitoes into a subtropical paradise for people. But now that half the original watershed is gone, sucked dry for farms or paved over for development, people have embraced what’s left of the Everglades as an iconic paradise in its own right, a unique ecosystem stretching from Orlando in the center of the state all the way down to Florida Bay at the tip. It’s not a breathtaking geological marvel like Yosemite; it’s mostly a flat, muddy expanse of shallow water and razor-edged sawgrass, in uncomfortable proximity to the sprawling civilization that is modern South Florida. But the Everglades is one of America’s most important ecological jewels, providing kitchens and nurseries for flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth. It’s become a motherhood-and-apple-pie issue in the post-Earth Day era, forcing politicians of all stripes to pledge to save it and revive it.

Open In New Window OPTICS: America's Swamp (Click to view gallery.) | Mac Stone Photos

Jeb Bush certainly did. Fifteen years after that awkward Oval Office ceremony, as he hopes to follow his father and brother to the White House—perhaps after a showdown with Clinton’s wife—the Everglades is an issue that sets him apart from other Republican candidates, a deviation from GOP orthodoxy on Big Government eco-spending. He spent a lot of time slogging through the swamp of Everglades policy, and the saga reveals a lot about his approach to power and politics.

The Bushes in Glades President George H.W. Bush signed a modest expansion of Everglades National Park in 1989. In 2000, Governor Jeb Bush announced state funding for Everglades restoration. The next year, President George W. Bush promised (but did not deliver) federal money for his brother's project. (Getty; AP; Getty)

It wasn’t the slash-and-burn anti-green style some expected from a free-market conservative who was born in the Texas oil patch, became a Miami developer and raked in donations from real estate and agriculture interests at a time when green Republicans were becoming an endangered species. But it wasn’t a purely environmental approach, either. The restoration plan that Bush supported was not just about the Everglades. It was also about flood control and water supply for the residents and businesses that share South Florida with the Everglades and depend on aquifers underneath the Everglades. He shepherded the Army Corps of Engineers plan to re-engineer and replumb the ravaged watershed through the Florida legislature without a single dissenting vote, and despite his tightfisted reputation, he spent lavishly to get it started. But he also fought to make sure it did not prioritize nature over people, often siding with the sugar industry, development industry and other business allies against conservation groups. He routinely fought Everglades activists, over everything from an Enron subsidiary’s pitch to privatize the ecosystem’s water to Big Sugar’s push to delay water-quality deadlines to his own effort to create a sprawling biotech campus on the fringes of the marsh. But he still saw himself as the ecosystem’s champion, telling his team he didn’t need permission from environmentalists to save the Everglades.

Bush’s aides see the Everglades saga as Jeb in his element, pursuing what he called Big Hairy Audacious Goals, grilling aides about wonky details, aggressively defending state prerogatives and private property at the same time that he sought to repair some of the injuries man had inflicted on nature. He was good about doing what he promised to do, less good at showing flexibility when others questioned the way he did it. He helped assemble the diverse coalition that got the Everglades plan into law, but when it came to executing the plan, his team had a rocky relationship with the feds, even though his brother was in charge of the feds. The federal-state Everglades partnership has been smoother under President Obama and Republican Governor Rick Scott, a Tea Party favorite who is basically Obama’s ideological opposite, than it was under the two Bushes.

“We thought: Hey, the president is our governor’s brother; the Everglades has got it made!” says longtime Florida environmentalist Maggy Hurchalla. “But almost nothing got done in those six years.”

Bush’s former aides recall that era as a time of gradual progress spearheaded by a cerebral, self-confident, demanding leader, tempered by immense frustration with foot-dragging federal bureaucrats and bellyaching environmental activists. They believe that if the other players in the restoration wars had spent less time whining about Jeb’s insistence on doing things Jeb’s way, and more time doing things Jeb’s way, the Everglades would be in much better shape today.

“There was so much nitpicking and distrust, when all Jeb wanted was to restore the Everglades as quickly as possible,” says Henry Dean, a top water management official under Bush. “You know, we gave it our best shot.”

***

‘Attention Must Be Paid’

George H.W. Bush is an avid fisherman who loves chasing bonefish off the Keys. Jeb prefers golf; his claim to angling fame came in 1990 while casting for bluefish in Maine with his father, when he accidentally hooked a presidential ear. But Michael Collins, a former fishing guide for the Bush family, says Jeb likes being out on Florida Bay, where fresh water from the Everglades drains into salt water from the ocean to fuel an explosion of biodiversity.

“Jeb’s more of a naturalist than a fisherman,” Collins says. “He gets into watching the birds and porpoises and so forth. Fishermen, we tend to focus on the fish.”

Bush’s interest in nature was not much in evidence as he established himself as a developer, a Miami Republican leader and Florida commerce secretary. “It wasn’t his thing back then,” says Allison DeFoor, a former sheriff in the Keys who got to know Bush when they both ran their county GOP committees. In 1994, when Bush ran against Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles as a self-described “head-banging conservative,” he mostly ignored the environment and lost a squeaker in a year when Republicans

nationwide—including his Texas brother, who had never been considered as bright a political prospect—were enjoying landslides.

“No environmental issue has ever gotten less than 72 percent of the vote in Florida,” DeFoor says. “If Jeb had run just a little green, he would’ve won.”

He learned his lesson, though. After his defeat, he began attending meetings of a commission Chiles had established to develop a sustainable plan for the Everglades and all of South Florida. Water is the lifeblood of the Everglades, and of the region’s agriculture and development, too; Bush watched quietly from the back of the room as the commission’s various stakeholders sought common ground. Charles Lee, director of advocacy for Audubon of Florida, remembers spending four hours in an Orlando conference room educating Bush about Everglades issues, down to the specific land parcels that might be needed and how much they might cost.

“He was really trying to absorb information,” Lee says. “We were all afraid of him in 1994, but he spent a lot of time with us the second time around.”

Restoring the Everglades As governor, Jeb Bush supported efforts to restore the Everglades ecosystem—which stretches from Disney World in the center of the state all the way down to Florida Bay—but he often clashed with activists about the details. 1. Everglades Agricultural Area: The northern Everglades has been converted into 700,000 acres of farmland, mostly sugar fields that send polluted runoff south. Bush signed a bill that gave the sugar industry more time to clean up its act. 2. Everglades National Park: The southern Everglades was protected in 1947 as a national park, the first established for biodiversity. But Bush insisted the restoration plan could not elevate the needs of the parched park over the needs of farms and cities. 3. Shark River Slough: The main flow-way through the park is so dry that a small community sprouted in its headwaters. Bush held up a modest project to rehydrate the slough and protect that community; the plan has yet to move a drop of water. 4. Tamiami Trail: The highway from Tampa to Miami has dammed the flow of the River of Grass into the park. The Obama administration elevated one mile of the road, the most significant Everglades restoration effort yet, and hopes to bridge several more. 5. Florida Bay: The Bush family has done a lot of fishing on this turquoise estuary. Its sea grasses, pink shrimp and roseate spoonbills are in deep trouble; one goal of Everglades restoration is to restore freshwater flows to the bay. (Map by Lauren Simkin Berke for Politico Magazine )

Bush ran much greener in 1998, and won comfortably. He talked about preserving the natural beauty that helps attract tourists and retirees to Florida, about the environment being inextricably linked to the economy of paradise. And in the words of Mac Stipanovich, a Bush political adviser and Tallahassee lobbyist: “He realized the Everglades was important to Floridians, and attention must be paid.”

If Jeb began paying attention as a candidate, he kept paying attention as governor. In his first month in office, he promised the activists of the Everglades Coalition he was committed to funding restoration. “If it is possible for Nixon to go to China, I’m going to do that,” he pledged, and within a year, the coalition had honored him as a “Steward of the Everglades.” He urged his aides to go see the Everglades—not just from the air, where it looks like a ragged brown carpet, but up close. And he demanded action. DeFoor, who became Bush’s Everglades czar, recalls an early Everglades briefing that went horribly awry, a debacle known as Black Thursday inside the administration.

“We gave Jeb a half-baked overview, and within 30 seconds, he was kicking our asses,” he says. “‘How many reservoirs do we need? How do we finance them?’ I finally had to ask if we could come back in a week, and he let us crawl out of there.”

By the 1990s, the Everglades was in desperate shape, discombobulated by levees, canals and other engineering works that kept 7 million residents and 400,000 acres of sugar fields dry during the rainy season while providing them with drinking water and irrigation water in the dry season. The manhandled ecosystem was home to 69 endangered species, from panthers to wood storks to crocodiles. Toxic red tides were killing manatees and making it tough to breathe at the beach in resort communities like Stuart and Sanibel. Everglades National Park was parched. And Jeb’s father’s beloved Florida Bay, deprived of freshwater flows from the park, was in a state of collapse, as were its sea grasses, pink shrimp and spiny lobsters.

Some of Governor Bush’s early moves did not inspire green confidence. He let the successful Chiles commission die and launched a new Everglades commission that his own aides admit was a flop. He installed Collins, his family’s fishing guide, as chairman of the powerful South Florida Water Management District, the agency most directly responsible for the region’s plumbing; Collins would quickly become a pugnacious antagonist of Florida enviros. And early on, the district put the brakes on a project seen as a test drive for Everglades restoration.

A Vast Ecosystem | The original Everglades watershed covered most of South Florida, an area twice the size of New Jersey. Half of it has been drained and paved for farms and cities like Miami, but its marshes are still home to a vast array of wildlife. | Mac Stone Photos

In 1989, Congress had approved a modest effort to revive Shark River Slough, which was the national park’s main source of water, but had become so dry that a small community had sprouted in it—among the only homes on the wrong side of the levee dividing the Everglades from civilization. The project had been delayed for a decade, mostly by fervent opposition from residents who liked living in the depleted slough, but the district had finally approved a plan to buy them all out. Then Bush was elected. His new appointees fired the district’s director, Sam Poole, and scuttled the buyouts, sending the project back into limbo. The result was 15 more years of delay, gigantic cost overruns and sharply reduced ecological benefits. The project was recently completed, including a new protective levee for two-thirds of the community, but it still hasn’t delivered any water to the park.

“Nobody that owns land is comfortable with the thought of the government taking it away,” Collins explains. “It’s the kind of thing that keeps you up at night.”

Poole says Bush had every right to pick his own director, but says it was madness to protect homes in the headwaters of a slough the government planned to rehydrate. “It made no sense to spend so much to achieve so little for so few,” he says. And Poole wasn’t the only casualty of the new regime. Jeb’s board ousted the SFWMD’s head of land acquisition after he publicly criticized its interference in a deal. The head of research was fired after he was quoted asking why key officials were outside on their cellphones during a meeting. SFWMD employees began joking that the acronym stood for Speaking Freely Will Mean Dismissal.

“They sent a chilling message: If you say something Jeb doesn’t like, you’ll pay a price,” Poole says.

As Bush’s team began studying the much larger Everglades project envisioned by the Chiles commission, his attraction to bold ideas led to a flirtation with disaster. In September 1999, he took a meeting with a firm called Azurix, whose representatives included two former SFWMD leaders and a former official from Bush’s think tank. At the meeting, Azurix officials offered to help build the project in exchange for the right to sell water it captured, unheard of in a state where water legally belongs to the public. Bush’s policy director, Brian Yablonski, and top environmental regulator, David Struhs, were clearly intrigued by the possibility that Azurix could help pay the state’s $4 billion share of restoration costs. “It shows some outside-the-box thinking on a thorny issue,” Yablonski wrote in a note to DeFoor.

Other aides thought privatizing the Everglades sounded outside-the-brain. “No one likes out-of-the-box thinking more than I,” DeFoor replied to Yablonski. “However … we are going to get our ass handed to us on this.” Collins says he warned Struhs that anyone trying to steal Florida’s water would end up in jail. The issue soon became moot, because Azurix was a subsidiary of Enron, which was about to implode into bankruptcy. Still, DeFoor says the lesson is not that the Bush team considered selling Florida’s most precious resource to a firm on the brink of failure, but that a global conglomerate with well-connected local lobbyists got nowhere with the governor.

“Jeb is willing to listen to radical ideas,” DeFoor says. “So he listened, he asked tough questions, and nothing happened. That’s good government.”

But there’s evidence that Bush and his team were more interested in those radical ideas than was previously known. Woody Wodraska, a former SFWMD director who worked for Azurix and designed the company’s presentation to Bush, told me public accounts of that meeting—including accounts I wrote in the Washington Post and then a history of the Everglades called The Swamp—have been misleading. “I get it, ‘Enron Wants to Privatize the Everglades’ makes a good headline,” he says. “But that’s not what happened.” He says Struhs had been pushing hard for privatization, and it was actually Governor Bush, not the Azurix team, who first brought up the issue at the meeting. Wodraska’s initial pitch was simply that the state should hire Azurix to build some of the project. He says Bush sounded disappointed, and asked about market-oriented solutions, which prompted the Azurix CEO to start floating water privatization schemes.

“Jeb said: ‘I thought you’d be more entrepreneurial. Can’t you be more creative?’” Wodraska recalls. “You shouldn’t ask Enron people if they can be more creative. ‘Of course! We’re Enron! We’re full of hubris!’ I was thinking: ‘Oh, God, where is this going?’ It was a terrible idea. Even talking about it was a terrible idea.”

You shouldn’t ask Enron people if they can be more creative. It was a terrible idea. Even talking about it was a terrible idea.”

The Enron flap did not distract Bush from his larger mission of launching the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which the Chiles commission had conceived and the Army Corps had developed into a 4,000-page blueprint. “He was very constructive, very committed,” says Bob Graham, a former Democratic governor and U.S. senator who was the political godfather of Everglades restoration. The complex 30-year plan was essentially about water storage—new reservoirs that could keep floodwaters away from cities, farms and nature in the wet season, then make the water available for cities, farms and nature when it was needed in the dry season. It was supposed to have something for everyone.

But when the Army Corps released the details, the plan didn’t seem to have much for the Everglades. The national park’s scientists submitted brutal comments at the end of 1998 complaining that it “does not represent a restoration scenario,” portraying it as a water supply boondoggle that might or might not provide a few environmental benefits in a few decades. The Clinton administration rushed to shoehorn new environmental commitments into the plan, promising additional water for the park and giving the Interior Department much more power over the project.

Those commitments were not acceptable to Bush. He argued that tinkering with the plan would destroy the consensus that produced it. He insisted on a “balanced approach” that did not elevate the Everglades over other interests or the feds over the state. His aides say restoration would have been doomed if it had threatened powerful industries; as Bush said, it couldn’t be a zero-sum game. Any Florida politician had to be sensitive to the economic concerns of his constituents; even then-Senator Graham sided with Bush and the business community against the park.

“Saving wood storks is a great thing to do, but the governor understood that there would be no way to maintain political momentum if this was all about saving wood storks,” Struhs says.

Troubled Waters | The Bush family has done lots of fishing on Florida Bay, where fresh water from the Everglades drains into salt water from the ocean. But the wetland ecosystem has been ravaged by man-made levees and canals that interrupt the natural flow of the River of Grass. As a result, some canals (like the one at bottom left) have been plugged to stop salt water intrusion. | Mac Stone Photos

Bush and his team warned environmentalists that their opposition could fritter away a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pour $8 billion into the ecosystem. DeFoor convened a meeting of sugar executives and some of Florida’s less confrontational conservationists at the Islamorada estate of the hedge fund billionaire and Everglades activist Paul Tudor Jones. Over stone crabs and Heinekens, the longtime antagonists agreed to try to set aside their differences to push the restoration plan.

“We had to get everyone singing ‘Kumbaya,’” DeFoor says.

Bush and his administration then pushed the Everglades plan through the Florida Legislature without opposition. “Jeb tended to get his way with us,” says former GOP state senator Lee Constantine, who chaired a legislative committee on the Everglades. In May 2000, Jeb came to Washington to testify before a U.S. Senate committee, touting his state’s commitment to the Everglades, getting Republicans comfortable with the costly plan for his state, but also threatening to walk away if the Clinton add-ons for the environment were included. They were quickly subtracted.

“If you didn’t know the history, it probably sounded like: Take it or leave it,” Collins says. “But it took years to get everyone on board. We couldn’t blow that.”

Congress overwhelmingly approved the project without the assurances for the Everglades, and Bush got to visit the White House on that tense December afternoon.

“I’m honored to be part of this, and look forward to the hard work,” he told the press. “It will be exciting to do this in partnership with the federal government.”

The next day, the court ruled in Bush v. Gore, setting up a partnership of brothers.

***

‘ We Need Adult Supervision!’

Nathaniel Reed, the 81-year-old dean of the Florida conservation movement, had high hopes for that partnership. Reed had served as assistant Interior secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford, so he didn’t see the environment as a Democratic issue. And Jeb and George’s grandparents, as well as several of their uncles, had been close friends with Reed’s family on Jupiter Island, a genteel enclave for wintering Northerners that the Reeds had developed. Reed figured the two younger Bushes could surely come together to support a popular ecosystem in the quintessential swing state. And there were moments when his hopes were realized, like the time Jeb persuaded his drilling-friendly presidential brother to buy out oil and gas leases around the Everglades.

But those moments were rare.

“It turned out to be a rather frustrating time,” Reed says.

The first rift was over money. Jeb and the Florida legislature kept their end of the Everglades bargain, providing full funding of roughly $200 million per year for the project. George W. and Congress did not come close. President Bush had never shown much interest in restoration, and members of Congress who had been happy to vote to preserve an ecological treasure were less keen to send actual dollars to Florida. “Jeb was a bit of a control freak, but he kept the money flowing,” Reed says. “I wish I could say the same for his brother.”

The second tension between the two Bush administrations involved Big Sugar, which had degraded the water quality of the Everglades for decades. This time, it was Jeb who infuriated the activists, while his brother’s administration in Washington resisted his efforts to give growers extra time to clean up their act.

There was history to these hostilities. A dozen years before Congress passed the restoration plan to get Everglades waters flowing, the federal government had sued Florida to get Everglades waters clean, leading to a settlement that forced the state to build massive filter marshes under the supervision of a federal judge. The Everglades was in fact getting cleaner, slowing the spread of cattails in its sawgrass marshes. But it still wasn’t as pristine as the natural Everglades, which had been even cleaner than Evian, and scientists were warning that restoring its flows with even slightly tainted water could be worse than not restoring it at all.

The issue simmered throughout Bush’s first term as governor—he resented the judicial babysitting—and then boiled after his 2002 reelection, when an army of 46 sugar lobbyists persuaded the Florida legislature to delay the cleanup deadline from 2006 to 2016. Bush’s aides say the original deadline was simply unrealistic for the entire Everglades, and had to be changed to avoid protracted litigation that would have jeopardized water-quality progress. They credit Bush with getting legislative leaders to drop even harsher changes to the state’s Everglades Forever Act.

Man vs. Nature | The modern Everglades sits uncomfortably close to a sprawling civilization of red-roof subdivisions, like this residential community in Palm Beach County; massive highways, like the Interstate 75 cloverleaf, known as Alligator Alley; and well-irrigated farms, producing lucrative crops like the oranges awaiting transport to an Indiantown juicing factory. | Mac Stone Photos

“There was no point trying to force sugar to do the impossible,” says Dave Aronberg, a former Democratic state senator who chaired an Everglades committee. “Did a lot of sugar lobbyists get involved? Sure! Welcome to Florida!” Bush’s aides point out that ultimately, the industry could do much more damage by growing condos in the northern Everglades than by growing sugar—and that in any case, history had made it clear that the legislature was never going to do anything Big Sugar violently opposed. “It’s not as sexy as Google or Amazon, but hey, it’s an economic engine in Florida,” says Bush adviser Stipanovich, who lobbied for U.S. Sugar during the water-quality fight. “It’s got political heft, no question.”

Still, the judge went ballistic, declaring the governor had been “misled by persons who do not have the best interests of the Everglades at heart.” Enviros were also outraged by what they called the “Everglades Whenever Act.” So were some of the leading supporters of the Everglades in Congress, including Florida Republicans like the late Clay Shaw, the dean of the state’s House delegation, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose husband had been the prosecutor who filed the original Everglades lawsuit. They summoned Bush to a contentious meeting in Washington, where they complained that Florida’s waffling on its cleanup would doom their efforts to secure funding for the larger restoration. The governor angrily suggested they didn’t understand the issue, and hadn’t been securing much funding for restoration anyway. Hurchalla, the activist, got a sense of the irritation with Jeb on Capitol Hill in those days when she ran into GOP Senator John McCain.

“He asked me: ‘Does that SOB think we’re stupid?’” Hurchalla says.

The environmentalists were insatiable. The feds were paralyzed. Jeb said: ‘OK, how can we move this forward by ourselves?’”

The furor led to a new round of hearings in the water-quality litigation, and Jeb’s team tried to persuade his brother’s administration to switch to Florida’s side. “They were pressuring Karl Rove, people at Justice, people at Interior—it was intense,” says an Interior official. Eventually, Interior Secretary Gale Norton decided not to support Florida, and the White House backed her, though it did reject a proposed op-ed condemning the Florida law. “They didn’t let us slap Jeb in public, but they didn’t take Jeb’s side,” the Interior official remembers. “It’s a shame. We could’ve gotten a lot done back then, but there was so much bad blood between the two administrations.”

Back in Florida, Governor Bush and his aides took the controversy as proof that their critics were grandstanders, more concerned with optics than results, more anxious to punish Big Sugar than fix the Everglades. They couldn’t believe the feds were still harassing them about Everglades water quality, which was actually improving, while providing so little help and so much red tape for Everglades restoration, which was stalled.

“Everything was mired in inaction,” says Colleen Castille, another one of Bush’s senior aides. “The environmentalists were insatiable. The feds were paralyzed. Jeb said: ‘OK, how can we move this forward by ourselves?’”

In October 2004, Bush tried to do just that, suddenly announcing that the state would start building eight components of the Everglades project on its own, essentially declaring a trial separation in Florida’s four-year marriage with Uncle Sam. His “Acceler8” initiative would have been shocking even if the president hadn’t been his brother—and in the final month of a reelection campaign to boot. The proposal split the environmental community; Audubon praised Bush’s willingness to spend money and move dirt, but others pointed out that Acceler8 tilted toward urban and agricultural water supplies.

“It was astonishing,” Reed says. “Jeb announced it like he was mounting his silver horse and saving the Everglades. It certainly didn’t turn out that way.”

Acceler8 did lead to a flurry of groundbreakings and costly land acquisitions, but it ran into a slew of problems. Environmentalists sued to halt construction of a key reservoir on a former sugar farm, arguing that there were no guarantees the project would help the environment and that it could even hurt by sending dirty water into the Everglades. Another reservoir was bogged down by technical difficulties, enormous cost overruns and a corruption scandal that sent two county commissioners to jail. A “spreader canal” was held up by fears that it would drain more water out of Everglades National Park. And a Southwest Florida wetlands restoration that the Army Corps originally priced at $15 million was eventually completed for more than $600 million. When one landowner who had bought his homestead for $60,000 refused to sell, Bush took the landowner’s side, and the state ended up paying nearly $5 million for the property.

The water quality lawsuit also continued to poison relations between the two Bush administrations. Federal prosecutors kept pressing Florida to clean up the Everglades. Governor Bush kept appealing to his brother’s White House for relief, and expressing frustration when that relief did not arrive, as the governor’s newly released emails from that time show. One afternoon in August 2005, just as Jeb was meeting with his brother’s political team, the Justice Department submitted an expert report critical of Acceler8’s environmental impact. Afterward, the governor forwarded the “injurious and flawed” report to Karl Rove’s top aide, Barry Jackson, emailing that the lack of a heads-up “typifies our problem re Everglades.”

“We need adult supervision!” Jeb complained.

The very next morning, while Jeb was meeting with EPA chief Stephen Johnson, a Florida newspaper published an EPA employee’s email warning that the Acceler8 reservoirs could produce damaging algal blooms, “creating a system full of toxic ooze.” Again, the annoyed governor forwarded the story to Rove’s aides: “No communication with our agency or the water management district. Fyi.” The White House responses were polite but noncommittal; for federal bureaucrats, speaking freely does not usually mean dismissal. As Castille emailed Jeb after confronting an EPA official about the “toxic ooze” leak: “No promise of any action of substance.”

The Bushes did share one relatively drama-free Everglades achievement. In October 2003, Jeb wrote to George—he crossed out “Mr. President”—to inform him Florida was donating the last acreage needed to complete an Everglades National Park expansion that their father had signed into law in 1989. Jeb called it “a great environmental legacy,” concluding with a phrase that would always be associated with his brother’s presidency after appearing on a banner on an aircraft carrier.

“We should share the news with Dad that his mission has been accomplished,” Jeb wrote.

Gov. Jeb Bush, left, tours the Florida Everglades from the air with Michael Collins, right, chairman of the governing board with the South Florida Water Management District in June 1999. | AP Photo

***

Bogged Down

The larger rescue mission for the Everglades has not been accomplished.

Halfway through the 30-year restoration project, none of its reservoirs have been built. The Obama administration elevated a mile of a key highway to let a bit more water flow into the north end of the park, and after Bush left the governor’s office, the water management district completely redesigned that potentially destructive Acceler8 “spreader canal” so that it’s actually increasing flows down the east side of the park. Otherwise, though, there has been virtually nothing done to resuscitate the historic Everglades—or to help farms or cities, either. Jeb’s flush budgets for restoration cratered after the financial crisis dried up state revenues, and Governor Scott has only recently started pouring cash back into the project. Obama has made the Everglades a federal priority, and his team has revamped the plan to enhance future environmental benefits, but congressional support has remained spotty.

“Jeb and his people said: ‘We know what we’re doing. Get out of our way. We’re here to get stuff done,’” says Everglades Foundation chief scientist Tom Van Lent, a former hydrologist at the national park. “Except they didn’t get stuff done.”

Jeb announced it like he was mounting his silver horse and saving the Everglades. It certainly didn’t turn out that way.”

In an op-ed last October designed to boost Scott’s reelection campaign, Bush blamed the lack of progress on his successor, Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist. Crist installed environmentalists on the SFWMD board, ended the go-it-alone Acceler8 program and tried to jump-start restoration with a swing-for-the-fences purchase of U.S. Sugar’s lands and assets, a deal that mostly fell apart after the financial crisis. “From the day the boondoggle deal was announced, Everglades restoration stalled out, stuck in litigation and political controversy,” Jeb wrote. His aides argue that if Crist had stayed the course, several reservoirs would be near completion, which would mean less precious water dumped out to sea, which in turn would mean less damage to fragile estuaries plagued by red tides and fish die-offs.

“Jeb was breaking through the quagmire, but now everything’s gotten bogged down,” says Henry Dean, who helped devise Acceler8 when he was SFWMD director. “In 30 years in government, that was my biggest disappointment.”

While the replumbing of the Everglades hasn’t happened yet, and Bush’s critics say it was lagging long before he left office, the cleanup of the Everglades is moving forward, in part because Scott has chosen not to imitate Bush’s confrontational strategy. Instead, the Tea Party governor cut a surprising deal with the Obama administration, agreeing to spend $880 million on additional filter marshes that could finally achieve the strict cleanup requirements. Scott now plans to build several of those water-quality marshes on Acceler8 sites that Jeb’s administration had planned as water-quantity reservoirs.

Old Ingraham Highway, which leads into Everglades National Park. | Mac Stone Photos

The day he watched Clinton sign Everglades restoration into law, Bush predicted that “over the next 20 years, we will accomplish something that will be a model, I think, for the rest of the world.” But at best, his legacy in the Everglades is mixed. It’s hard to argue for better considering how little of his vision has come to fruition, even if you accept his claim that his vision was foolishly abandoned by a successor who listened too carefully to shortsighted Everglades activists.

So what does the Everglades reveal about a potential third President Bush? He’s smart, decisive, hardworking and detail-oriented; he resents being told what to do by tree-hugging activists, federal judges, rogue bureaucrats or anyone else; his team couldn’t even get along with his brother’s team. He isn’t reflexively anti-environment, which can get a Republican branded as a moderate these days, but environmental protection for its own sake was never his overarching goal, especially when it conflicted with the economic interests of his business allies. He hasn’t even endorsed the scientific consensus that human activities are changing the climate, even though sea-level rise is threatening to drown the low-lying Everglades.

Still, his critics and allies agree he’s formidable. When it came to the Everglades, he did his homework, devised a plan and stuck to it.

“You can disagree violently with what he wants to do, but you’ve got to admit he’s relentless about doing it,” Stipanovich says.

His loyalists cite the Everglades as an example, and in many ways it is. Nevertheless, after eight years of Jeb’s leadership, after hundreds of hours of his personal attention, after countless promises that resuscitating the River of Grass would be his top environmental priority, the Everglades is still dying.