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THE night after the election, William Bennett recommended on Larry King Live that "everybody in the Republican Party" talk to the Bush brothers, whose success running for governor in Texas and Florida stood out on an otherwise dismal day for Republicans. Watching from his home outside Milwaukee, Michael Joyce, head of the influential Bradley Foundation, agreed. "Your insight is absolutely on target," he wrote on November 6 in a four-page letter to Bennett. Joyce then promised financial support if Bennett's Empower America wanted to sponsor "a major conference . . . helping the Bushes refine their themes with the best advice and counsel available from the stable of experts that Bradley has been nurturing over the years." Bennett, through an intermediary, said he was up for it.

Two weeks later, Joyce received a handwritten note from George W. Bush. "Dear Mike," it started (though the two don't really know each other). "I read with interest and pride your letter . . . [and] would attend a conference highlighting the 'new citizenship' and how we can change America." Joyce didn't know how Bush had come across the letter (a Bennett aide passed it along to a Bush advisor), but was impressed with its implications. Bush's father had built a career by sending personal notes to world leaders, GOP donors, and others. Yet Joyce, who plays a vital role in funding the modern conservative movement, never received one from the elder Bush. Here was the son employing the same useful habit, but keeping a different address book.

Joyce's isn't the only name in it. Over the last several years, Bush has quietly courted conservative intellectuals through the mail and in a series of private meetings. It's an overstatement to call these conservatives advisors-some have met with him only once-but they clearly represent the beginnings of a brain trust. Among those making a pilgrimage to Austin, at the governor's request, have been Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity; David Horowitz of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture; Myron Magnet of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal; Father Richard John Neuhaus; World editor Marvin Olasky (who is a neighbor, teaching at the University of Texas at Austin); and writer James Q. Wilson of UCLA. Others, such as crime expert John DiIulio and historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, have not met with Bush personally (despite standing invitations) but have influenced him through their books and articles.

All of these persons are conservative social-policy experts, and most of them have been linked to what was once called neoconservatism. Bush will need their help if he runs for President in 2000. "Successful candidates all must do one thing: talk to the idea people," says the Hoover Institution's Martin Anderson, who set up task forces of conservative intellectuals for Ronald Reagan before the 1980 election. "It sounds like Bush is in the first phase of doing that." Although most of the Republican presidential field routinely gives speeches at friendly redoubts such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, none is approaching right-wing thinkers in the same one-by-one fashion as Bush, who by flattery and genuine intellectual engagement is making them a hidden strength of his candidacy.

The process of assembling this team-whose members often aren't aware of one another as Bush's quasi-advisors-began several years ago, when Bush was preparing to challenge Democrat Ann Richards for the Texas governorship. Bush had decided to run his 1994 campaign on themes of individual responsibility set against the values of the counterculture. In 1993, Karl Rove, Bush's political impresario, slipped him a copy of Myron Magnet's just-published book, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, which sold fewer than 15,000 copies in hardcover and is now out of print.

Magnet's book had a galvanizing effect on Bush, helping him think through a set of ideas and issues the Texan had only started to consider. Magnet convinced him that the country's biggest challenges weren't economic, but cultural. The Dream and the Nightmare made the case that the problems plaguing the underclass have mainly to do with values, and that reckless attitudes forged in the 1960s about sex, family structure, and drug use decimated the weakest members of society.

Last year, Bush invited Magnet to Austin, where the two met privately for several hours. Bush told Magnet that he had related personally to The Dream and the Nightmare because he was a veteran of the 1960s himself and had performed an ethical re-evaluation of his own life. He bought copies for his entire senior staff. "I was hugely impressed with him," says Magnet. "He clearly believes in the power of ideas." A key paragraph in one of Bush's stump speeches on personal responsibility is essentially a restatement of Magnet's thesis.

Bush received a handsome payback this summer. City Journal (Magnet's magazine) ran a glowing article on the governor. Then in October, the Manhattan Institute (which publishes City Journal) distributed a twenty-page memo featuring three positive articles on Bush from The Economist, The New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. The Manhattan Institute regularly sends out clips that highlight the organization's role in shaping public policy, but this mailing was different. One of the articles in the package mentioned that Bush had read Magnet's book, and another made a glancing reference to the City Journal piece. But they were largely about Bush, and might have come from his campaign office.

While Magnet calls himself an enthusiastic Bush-for-President man, other members of the inchoate advisory club are more cautious. "It's too soon for that," says Neuhaus, "although I see some promise." All of them, however, walk away impressed that Bush combines serious conservative principle with a winning personality. "I like him for two reasons," says Chavez. "First, he talks about issues few politicians talk about, and he does it with some sophistication. Second, he can do it in a warm and appealing way. He makes a good sales pitch."

Sometimes Bush meets his guests in the governor's mansion ("Right out of Gone with the Wind," says Magnet), and other times he meets them at his office in the Texas capitol, where he surrounds himself with baseball memorabilia. To break the ice, Bush likes to joke, "You just want to meet me because I have a famous mother." He is easygoing, quick witted, and willing to listen. "Some politicians think they have to make me relax because I'm black," says Robert Woodson of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. "Bush treats me like a regular person and goes right to the issues." Woodson won his audience with Bush in 1995 after arranging a protest in San Antonio over a renegade state agency that had tried to shut down a faith-based drug-rehabilitation program. Bush quickly took care of the problem. Since then, the governor has worked to tap the potential of religious groups as social-service providers (which he describes briefly in a short piece for the November/December issue of Policy Review).

Bush is not afraid to spar with his guests; he made clear to Chavez, for instance, that he does not share her opposition to bilingual education. Yet there is generally a lot of agreement. Often the discussions turn to illegitimacy, with a special emphasis on teenage pregnancy. Reading James Q. Wilson's work, according to Rove, helped convince Bush to make this one of his signature issues. Bush constantly touts group homes for unwed teenage mothers. "This is one of the things that really pleases me about the governor," says Wilson. "Politicians do not systematically seek out advice from writers. When they do, it's easy to be impressed."

In addition to Magnet's book, Bush has read and admired Wilson's The Moral Sense and On Character, Himmelfarb's The Demoralization of Society, and Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion. Earlier this year, he also read Paul Johnson's mammoth History of the American People, and with Rove kept a running list of Johnson's minor mistakes (there are many, in what is otherwise a grand book). In the December books issue of The American Spectator, Bush recommends Magnet and another work, Robert Samuelson's The Good Life and Its Discontents (along with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which he reports was one of his daughters' favorites).

Bush is not limiting himself to social policy. In recent months, he has held closed-door discussions on foreign affairs with former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, former National Security Council aide Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State George Shultz, and Paul Wolfowitz of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. In January, he is scheduled to meet with the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Fred Smith on environmental and regulatory policy.

And he wants to expand his base. Last fall, he met David Horowitz for the first time. "I knew he had read my book Destructive Generation [co-written by Peter Collier] because he had referred to it in some of his speeches," says Horowitz. "But I wasn't expecting the call." It came from Rove, and offered Horowitz a private get-together with the governor and his top staff. Afterwards, the pair started to correspond, and this spring Horowitz sponsored a major speech by Bush to Hollywood elites, in which he stressed the importance of abstinence. During the speech, Horowitz nearly panicked. "Right message, wrong crowd," he says.

In the end, however, Bush-the current darling of the coming GOP presidential field-received a standing ovation. He has not yet won similar raves from conservative intellectuals, or at least those he hasn't met. But perhaps that's because he is only starting to speak to them.

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