Poppy & Former Exec's
Web of Ties


By BOB PORT
Daily News Staff Writer

hen Kenneth Lay was booted from his perch at Enron and his reputation and that of his company were being trashed, he turned to former President George Bush for comfort.

"Ken has talked to George Sr.," Kenneth Lay's wife, Linda Lay, said last week. The fellow Texan, she said, was "very supportive."

Kenneth Lay's friendship with Poppy Bush is actually written in stone.

The Lays donated $50,000 to the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation, according to a source. Kenneth Lay has his name etched on the wall as a patron. He is also a trustee.

Others, however, say that doesn't make them buddies.

"The relationship is more institutional than personal," one source said of Kenneth Lay and No. 41. "They may have played golf together a few times and they show up at a lot of the same charitable events, but I wouldn't call them close."

Kenneth Lay spent a night in the senior Bush's White House, and the two men have lavished money and time on each other's pet projects.

The Bush-Lay nexus grew out of the Texas business scene, with Lay at Enron, the natural gas giant in Houston, and Bush as a West Texas oil executive.

Bush senior had considered making Lay his secretary of commerce.

Lay's friendship with the elder Bush paid off with a major federal deregulation bill for natural gas.

In the late 1980s, Lay, a regent at the University of Houston, lobbied the ex-President to place his presidential library at the Houston campus. It was during that effort, Lay would tell reporters, that he first had a chance to spend "quality time" with Bush's son George W.

Lay lost that bid. George Herbert Walker Bush built his library at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Nevertheless, through 1997, Lay's Enron Inc. gave the Bush library $250,000, the source said. The company made another $150,000 pledge last September. The library has seen only $50,000 of that pledge.

In 1990, Kenneth Lay was tapped by Bush to chair an economic summit in Houston.

And since Bush left Washington, the Lays and elder Bushes have become a fixture on Houston's charity circuit. Linda Lay, in particular, has been cited for helping raise money for Barbara Bush's literacy project and other causes.

With Thomas M. DeFrank