By helping out Bush, Miers built her career

DALLAS -- When Governor George W. Bush faced a scandal at the Texas state lottery, he turned to Harriet Miers to chair the lottery commission and to deal with the problems. When Bush faced questions about his National Guard service, while running for a second term as governor, he asked Miers, his trusted lawyer, to quell the questions.

In announcing the nomination of Miers yesterday to be a US Supreme Court justice, President Bush said she has ''devoted her life to the law." But for more than a decade, she has also has devoted much of her career to him.

Miers has been Bush's fixer, gatekeeper, and Lone Star State soulmate, the person most likely to be called upon when Bush is in trouble, or when he needs hard-boiled political advice. Bush once described Miers, now 60 years old and short in stature, as a ''pit bull in size-6 shoes."

''He is in a sense reciprocating her loyal service," said Bruce Buchanan, who has followed Bush's career while specializing in presidential studies at the University of Texas at Austin. ''She tells him what he needs to hear, not just what he wants to hear, but also is . . . very loyal and competent."

Both Bush and Miers spent much of their lives in Texas. Miers was born and raised in Dallas and attended Southern Methodist University there, receiving degrees in math and law.

Several years after Miers was elected in 1989 to the Dallas City Council, she made a comment to Texas Lawyer magazine: ''I'm not universally liked by everyone because I have very strong views of what's right and wrong, and I take my positions seriously and I fight for them strongly."

Those positions are believed to be conservative, although she once donated $1,000 to the 1988 presidential campaign of Al Gore, with larger donations to Republicans.

A Texas Supreme Court Justice, Nathan Hecht, who has maintained a 30-year friendship with Miers, said in a telephone interview that she ''will be more on the conservative side of the court."

Hecht described Miers -- they once dated, and they once worked at the same law firm -- as a devout member of an evangelical church congregation

He said she has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to her church, and on the care of her mother. Asked if she opposes abortion, he said: ''I think that is where she is personally."

Miers got her start in law after working in the summer of 1969 for the San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli, known as the ''King of Torts." Miers then was a clerk for two years for US District Judge Joe Estes, a Texan who was appointed to the bench by President Dwight David Eisenhower.

Estes became one of her biggest boosters. Years later, Miers was quoted in a Dallas Bar Association publication as saying Estes had been ''shocked in his discussions with firms to learn of the concerns the firms had about hiring a woman, and was joyous when I was able to tell him I had an offer from a major firm."

Miers joined the Dallas law firm now known as Locke Liddell & Sapp in 1972, where she worked until 1999 and rose to be comanaging partner.

In 1992, Miers was elected president of the Texas Bar Association. Clients ranged from Microsoft Corp. to the Walt Disney Co.

Miers is also known for community work, including contributions to minority scholarship funds at Southern Methodist University.

Jerry Clements, a lawyer who has faced Miers in court and has worked with her, said Miers would be an independent justice.

''In my experiences with her, whatever her personal views are" on abortion, ''I don't think that will come into play. She's going to look at the facts of each case," Clements said.

In her role with the Texas Bar Association, Miers challenged the American Bar Association's position in favor of the Supreme Court ruling in favor of abortion rights, questioning whether the ABA should ''be trying to speak for the entire legal community" on an issue that ''has brought on tremendous divisiveness." Her proposal to put the matter to a vote of the ABA membership was defeated.

Miers's position on the abortion-rights matter is bound to be a focus of the nomination hearings.

Kyleen Wright, president of Texans for Life, an antiabortion group, said Miers had contributed $150 to the group's predecessor organization, Texans United for Life, in 1989. But Wright said: ''The jury's still out for me. We just don't know her in the prolife, profamily community in this area."

Miers, who has never married, also served on the board of the Dallas-based Exodus Ministries, a nondenominational group that gives housing and assistance to former inmates with children, who are re-entering society.

Miers met Bush in the 1980s and became his personal lawyer, helping to resolve a title dispute in the 1990s on his East Texas fishing house, and then working with Bush's campaign when he ran for governor of Texas in 1994.

During the 1998 reelection campaign, when Bush was facing questions about his National Guard service, his campaign paid $19,000 to Miers to help investigate. Bush also named Miers head of the Texas Lottery Commission, when it was mired in scandal.

While Bush has praised her tenure, it became controversial when an investigation into a company in charge of running the sweepstakes was halted despite allegations that it was violating state auditing procedures.

After he was elected president, Bush appointed Miers as White House staff secretary, a crucial post in which she reviewed key documents that went to the president, and in which she acted as a gatekeeper, even for top staff who wanted to meet with Bush. She later served as deputy chief of staff.

In that post, Miers vetted Supreme Court nominees, and reportedly pushed for Bush to pick John G. Roberts Jr., who was sworn in yesterday as chief justice.

But when it came time to pick a second nominee, Miers was surprised to find herself under consideration. ''I never came here for this," she told Hecht, the Texas Supreme Court justice, in a conversation last Friday, according to Hecht. ''I never imagined this would happen."

Kranish reported from Washington; Milligan from Dallas.