The Story of the Bush Crime Family
Former President George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush.
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Page 3
Nixon had promised Bush
an attractive and prestigious political plum in the executive branch, and
it was now time for Nixon to deliver. Bush's problem was that in late 1970
Nixon was more interested in what another Texan could contribute to his
administration. That other Texan was John Connally, who had played the
role of Bush's nemesis in the elections just concluded, by virtue of the
encouragement and decisive support which Connally had given to the Bentsen
candidacy. Nixon was now fascinated by the prospect of including the right-wing
Democrat Connally in his cabinet in order to provide himself with a patina
of bipartisanship, while emphasizing the dissension among the Democrats,
strengthening Nixon's chances of successfully executing his Southern Strategy
a second time during the 1972 elections. The word among Nixon's inner circle
of this period was "The Boss is in love," and the object of his affections
was Big Jawn. Nixon claimed that he was not happy with the stature of his
current cabinet, telling his domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman in
the fall of 1970 that "Every cabinet should have at least one potential
President in it. Mine doesn't." Nixon had tried to recruit leading Democrats
before, asking Senator Henry Jackson to be secretary of defense and offering
the post of United Nations ambassador to Hubert Humphrey. Within hours
after the polls had closed in the Texas Senate race, Bush received a call
from Charles Bartlett, a Washington columnist who was part of the Prescott
Bush network. Bartlett tipped Bush to the fact that Treasury Secretary
David Kennedy was leaving, and urged him to make a grab for the job. Bush
called Nixon and put in his request. After that, he waited by the telephone.
But it soon became clear that Nixon was about to recruit John Connally,
and with him, perhaps, the important Texas electoral votes in 1972. Secretary
of the Treasury! One of the three or four top posts in the cabinet! And
that before Bush had been given anything for all of his useless slogging
through the 1970 campaign! But the job was about to go to Connally. Over
two decades, one can almost hear Bush's whining complaint. This move was
not totally unprepared. During the fall of 1970, when Connally was campaigning
for Bentsen against Bush, Connally had been invited to participate in the
Ash Commission, a study group on government re-organization chaired by
Roy Ash. "This White House access was dangerously undermining George Bush,"
complained Texas GOP chairman O'Donnell. A personal friend of Bush on the
White House staff named Peter Flanigan, generated a memo to White House
Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman with the notation: "Connally is an implacable
enemy of the Republican party in Texas, and, therefore, attractive as he
may be to the President, we should avoid using him again." Nixon found
Connally an attractive political property, and had soon appointed him to
the main White House panel for intelligence evaluations: "On November 30,
when Connally's appointment to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
was announced, the senior Senator from Texas, John Tower, and George Bush
were instantly in touch with the White House to express their 'extreme'
distress over the appointment. / Note #2 Tower was indignant because he
had been promised by Ehrlichman some time before that Connally was not
going to receive an important post. Bush's personal plight was even more
poignant: "He was out of work, and he wanted a job. As a defeated senatorial
candidate, he hoped and fully expected to get a major job in the administration.
Yet the administration seemed to be paying more attention to the very Democrat
who had put him on the job market. What gives? Bush was justified in asking."
/ Note #3 The appointment of Connally to replace David Kennedy as secretary
of the Treasury was concluded during the first week of December 1970. But
it could not be announced without causing an upheaval among the Texas Republicans
until something had been done for lame duck George. On December 7, Nixon
retainer H.R. Haldeman was writing memos to himself in the White House.
The first was: "Connally set." Then came: "Have to do something for Bush
right away." Could Bush become the director of NASA? How about the Small
Business Administration? Or the Republican National Committee? Or then
again, he might like to be White House congressional liaison, or perhaps
undersecretary of commerce. As one account puts it, "since no job immediately
came to mind, Bush was assured that he would come to the White House as
a top presidential adviser on something or other, until another fitting
job opened up." Bush was called to the White House on December 9, 1970
to meet with Nixon and talk about a post as assistant to the President
"with a wide range of unspecified general responsibilities," according
to a White House memo initialed by H.R. Haldeman. Bush accepted such a
post at one point in his haggling with the Nixon White House. But Bush
also sought the U.N. job, arguing that there "was a dirth [sic] of Nixon
advocacy in New York City and the general New York area that he could fill
that need in the New York social circles he would be moving in as ambassador.
/ Note #4 Nix on's U.N. ambassador had been Charles Yost, a Democrat who
was now leaving. But the White House had already offered that job to Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, who had accepted. But then Moynihan decided that he did
not want the U.N. ambassador post after all, and, with a sigh of relief,
the White House offered it to Bush. Bush's appointment was announced on
December 11, Connally's on December 14. / Note #5 In offering the post
to Bush, Haldeman had been brutally frank, telling him that the job, although
of cabinet rank, would have no power attached to it. Bush, stressed Haldeman,
would be taking orders directly from Kissinger. Bush says he replied, "even
if somebody who took the job didn't understand that, Henry Kissinger would
give him a twenty-four hour crash course on the subject." / Note #6 Nixon
told his cabinet and the Republican congressional leadership on December
14, 1970 what had been in the works for some time: that Connally was "coming
not only as a Democrat but as Secretary of the Treasury for the next two
full years." Even more humiliating for Bush wasthe fact that our hero had
been on the receiving end of Connally's assistance. As Nixon told the cabinet:
"Connally said he wouldn't take it until George Bush got whatever he was
entitled to. I don't know why George wanted the U.N. appointment, but he
wanted it so he got it." Only this precondition from Connally, by implication,
had finally prompted Nixon to take care of poor George. Nixon turned to
Senator Tower, who was in the meeting: "This is hard for you. I am for
every Republican running. We need John Tower back in 1972." Tower replied:
"I'm a pragmatic man. John Connally is philosophically attuned to you.
He is articulate and persuasive. I for one will defend him against those
in our own party who may not like him." / Note #7 There is evidence that
Nixon considered Connally to be a possible successor in the presidency.
Connally's approach to the international monetary crisis then unfolding
was that "all foreigners are out to screw us and it's our job to screw
them first," as he told C. Fred Bergsten of Kissinger's National Security
Council staff. Nixon's bumbling management of the international monetary
crisis was one of the reasons why he was Watergated, and Big Jawn was certainly
seen by the financiers as a big part of the problem. Bush was humiliated
in this episode, but that is nothing compared to what later happened to
both Connally and Nixon. Connally would be indicted while Bush was in Beijing,
and later he would face the further humilation of personal bankruptcy.
In the view of James Reston, Jr., "George Bush was to maintain a smoldering,
visceral dislike of Connally, one that lasted well into the 1980s." / Note
#8 As others discovered during the Gulf war, Bush is vindictive. Confirmed
by the Senate Bush appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
for his pro forma and perfunctory confirmation hearings on February 8,
1971. It was a free ride. Many of the Senators had known Prescott Bush,
and several were still Prescott's friends. Acting like friends of the family,
they gave Bush friendly advice with a tone that was congratulatory and
warm, and avoided any tough questions. Stuart Symington warned Bush that
he would have to deal with the "duality of authority" between his nominal
boss, Secretary of State William Rogers, and his real boss, NSC chief Kissinger.
There was only passing reference to Bush's service of the oil cartel during
his time in the House, and Bush vehemently denied that he had ever tried
to "placate" the "oil interests." Claiborne Pell said that Bush would enhance
the luster of the U.N. post. On policy matters, Bush said that it would
"make sense" for the U.N. Security Council to conduct a debate on the wars
in Laos and Cambodia, which was something that the United States had been
attempting to procure for some time. Bush thought that such a debate could
be used as a forum to expose the aggressive activities of the North Vietnamese.
No senator asked Bush about China, but Bush told journalists waiting in
the hall that the question of China was now under intensive study. The
"Washington Post" was impressed by Bush's "lithe and youthful good looks."
Bush was easily confirmed. At Bush's swearing-in later in February, Nixon,
probably anxious to calm Bush down after the strains of the Connally affair,
had recalled that President William McKinley had lost an election in Ohio,
but neverthless gone on to become President. "But I'm not suggesting what
office you should seek and at what time," said Nixon. The day before, Senator
Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois had told the press that Bush was "totally
unqualified" and that his appointment had been "an insult" to the U.N.
Bush presented his credentials on March 1. Then Bush, "handsome and trim"
at 47, moved into a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, and
settled into his usual hyperkinetic, thyroid-driven lifestyle. The "Washington
Post" marveled at his "whirlwind schedule" which seemed more suitable for
a "political aspirant than one usually associated with a diplomat." He
rose every morning at 7:00 A.M., and then mountedhis exercycle for a twelve-minute
workout while taking in a television news program that also lasted exactly
twelve minutes. He ate a small breakfast and left the Waldorf at 8:00,
to be driven to the U.S. mission to the U.N. at Turtle Bay where he generally
arrived at 8:10. Then he would get the overnight cable traffic from his
secretary, Mrs. Aleene Smith, and then went into a conference with his
executive assistant, Tom Lais. Later there would be meetings with his two
deputies, Ambassadors Christopher Phillips and W. Tapley Bennett of the
State Department. Pete Roussel was also still with him as publicity man.
For Bush, a 16-hour work day was more the rule than the exception. His
days were packed with one appointment after another, luncheon engagements,
receptions, formal dinners -- at least one reception and one dinner per
day. Sometimes there were three receptions per day -- quite an opportunity
for networking with like-minded freemasons from all over the world. Bush
also traveled to Washington for cabinet meetings, and still did speaking
engagements around the country, especially for Republican candidates. "I
try to get to bed by 11:30 if possible, " said Bush in 1971, "but often
my calendar is so filled that I fall behind in my work and have to take
it home with me." Bush bragged that he was still a "pretty tough" doubles
player in tennis, good enough to team up with the pros. But he claimed
to love baseball most. He joked about questions on his ping pong skills,
since these were the months of ping pong diplomacy, when the invitation
for a U.S. ping pong team to visit Beijing became a part of the preparation
for Kissinger's China card. Mainly, Bush came on as an ultra-orthodox Nixon
loyalist. Was he a liberal conservative? asked a reporter. "People in Texas
used to ask me that in the campaigns," replied Bush. "Some even called
me a right-wing reactionary. I like to think of myself as a pragmatist,
but I have learned to defy being labeled.... What I can say is that I am
a strong supporter of the President. If you can tell me what he is, I can
tell you what I am." Barbara liked the Waldorf suite, and was an enthusiastic
hostess. Soon after taking up his U.N. posting, Bush received a phone call
from Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs Joseph Sisco,
one of Kissinger's principal henchmen. Sisco had been angered by some comments
Bush had made about the Middle East situation in a press conference after
presenting his credentials. Despite the fact that Bush, as a cabinet officer,
ranked several levels above Sisco, Sisco was in effect the voice of Kissinger.
Sisco told Bush that it was Sisco who spoke for the United States government
on the Middle East, and that he would do both the on-the-record talking
and the leaking about that area. Bush knuckled under, for these were the
realities of the Kissinger years. Kissinger's Clone Henry Kissinger was
now Bush's boss even more than Nixon was, and later, as the Watergate scandal
progres sed into 1973, the dominion of Kissinger would become even more
absolute. During these years Bush, serving his apprenticeship in diplomacy
and world strategy under Kissinger, became a virtual Kissinger clone in
two senses. First, to a significant degree, Kissinger's networks and connections
merged together with Bush's own, foreshadowing a 1989 administration in
which the NSC director and the number two man in the State Department were
both Kissinger's business partners from his consulting and influence-peddling
firm, Kissinger Associates. Secondly, Bush assimilated Kissinger's characteristic
British-style geopolitical mentality and approach to problems, and this
is now the epistemology that dictates Bush's own dealing with the main
questions of world politics. The most essential level of Kissinger was
the British one. / Note #9 This meant that U.S. foreign policy was to be
guided by British imperial geopolitics, in particular the notion of the
balance of power: The United States must always ally with the second strongest
land power in the world (Red China) against the strongest land power (the
U.S.S.R.) in order to preserve the balance of power. This was expressed
in the 1971-72 Nixon-Kissinger opening to Beijing, to which Bush would
contribute from his U.N. post. The balance of power, since it rules out
a positive engagement for the economic progress of the international community
as a whole, has always been a recipe for new wars. Kissinger was in constant
contact with British foreign policy operatives like Sir Eric Roll of S.G.
Warburg in London, Lord Victor Rothschild, the Barings bank and others.
On May 10, 1982, in a speech entitled "Reflections on a Partnership" given
at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London,
Henry Kissinger openly expounded his role and philosophy as a British agent-of-influence
within the U.S. government during the Nixon and Ford years: "The British
were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal
American deliberations, to a degree probably never before practiced between
sovereign nations. In my period in office, the British played a seminal
part in certain American bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union --
indeed, they helped draft the key document. In my White House incarnation
then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely
engaged than I did the American State Department.... In my negotiations
over Rhodesia I worked from a British draft with British spelling even
when I did not fully grasp the distinction between a working paper and
a Cabinet-approved document." Kissinger was also careful to point out that
the United States must support colonial and neo-colonial strategies against
the developing sector: "Americans from Franklin Roosevelt onward believed
that the United States, with its 'revolutionary' heritage, was the natural
ally of people struggling against colonialism; we could win the allegiance
of these new nations by opposing and occasionally undermining our European
allies in the areas of their colonial dominance. Churchill, of course,
resisted these American pressures.... In this context, the experience of
Suez is instructive.... Our humiliation of Britain and France over Suez
was a shattering blow to these countries' role as world powers. It accelerated
their shedding of international responsibilities, some of the consequences
of which we saw in succeeding decades when reality forced us to step into
their shoes -- in the Persian Gulf, to take one notable example. Suez thus
added enormously to America's burdens." Kissinger was the high priest of
imperialism and neocolonialism, animated by an instinctive hatred for Indira
Gandhi, Aldo Moro, Ali Bhutto, and other nationalist world leaders. Kissinger's
British geopolitics simply accentuated Bush's own fanatically Anglophile
point of view, which he had acquired from father Prescott and imbibed from
the atmosphere of the family firm, Brown Brothers Harriman, originally
the U.S. branch of a British counting house. Kissinger was also a Zionist,
dedicated to economic, diplomatic, and military support of Israeli aggression
and expansionism to keep the Middle East in turmoil, so as to prevent Arab
unity and Arab economic development while using the region to mount challenges
to the Soviets. In this he was a follower of British Prime Minister Benjamin
Disraeli and Lord Balfour. In the 1973 Middle East war which he had connived
to unleash, Kissinger would mastermind the U.S. resupply of Israel and
would declare a U.S.-worldwide thermonuclear alert. In later years, Kissinger
would enrich himself through speculative real estate purchases on the West
bank of the Jordan, buying up land and buildings that had been virtually
confiscated from defenseless Palestinian Arabs. Kissinger was also Soviet
in a sense that went far beyond his sponsorship of the 1970s detente, SALT
I, and the ABM treaty with Moscow. Polish KGB agent Michael Goleniewski
is widely reported to have told the British government in 1972 that he
had seen KGB documents in Poland before his 1959 defection which established
that Kissinger was a Soviet asset. According to Goleniewski, Kissinger
had been recruited by the Soviets during his Army service in Germany after
the end of World War II, when he had worked as a humble chauffeur. Kissinger
had allegedly been recruited to an espionage cell called ODRA, where he
received the code name of "BOR" or "COLONEL BOR." Some versions of this
story also specify that this cell had been largely composed of homosexuals,
and that homosexuality had been an important part of the way that Kissinger
had been picked up by the KGB. These reports were reportedly partly supported
by Golitsyn, another Soviet defector. The late James Jesus Angleton, the
CIA counterintelligence director for 20 years up to 1973, was said to have
been the U.S. official who was handed Goleniewski's report by the British.
Angleton later talked a lot about Kissinger being "objectively a Soviet
agent." It has not been established that Angleton ever ordered an active
investigation of Kissinger or ever assigned his case a codename. / Note
#1 / Note #0 Kissinger's Chinese side was very much in evidence during
1971-73 and beyond; during these years he was obsessed with anything remotely
connected with China and sought to monopolize decisions and contacts with
the highest levels of the Chinese leadership. This attitude was dictated
most of all by the British mentality and geopolitical considerations indicated
above, but it is also unquestionable that Kissinger felt a strong personal
affinity for Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and the other Chinese leaders, who
had been responsible for the genocide of 100 million of their own people
after 1949. Kissinger possessed other dimensions in addition to these,
including close links to the Zionist underworld. These will also loom large
in George Bush's career. For all of these Kissingerian enormities, Bush
now became the principal spokesman. In the process, he was to become a
Kissinger clone. The China Card The defining events in the first year of
Bush's U.N. tenure reflected Kissinger's geoplitical obsession with his
China card. Remember that in his 1964 campaign, Bush had stated that Red
China must never be admitted to the U.N. and that if Beijing ever obtained
the Chinese seat on the Security Council, the U.S.A. must depart forthwith
from the world body. This statement came back to haunt him once or twice.
His stock answer went like this: "That was 1964, a long time ago. There's
been an awful lot changed since.... A person who is unwilling to admit
that changes have taken place is out of things these days. President Nixon
is not being naive in his China policy. He is recognizing the realities
of today, not the realities of seven years ago." One of the realities of
1971 was that the bankrupt British had declared themselves to be financially
unable to maintain their military presence in the Indian Ocean and the
Far East, in the area "East of Suez." Part of the timing of the Kissinger
China card was dictated by the British desire to acquire China as a c ounterweight
to India in this vast area of the world, and also to insure a U.S. military
presence in the Indian Ocean, as seen later in the U.S. development of
an important base on the island of Diego Garcia. On a world tour during
1969, Nixon had told President Yahya Khan, the dictator of Pakistan, that
his administration wanted to normalize relations with Red China and wanted
the help of the Pakistani government in exchanging messages. Regular meetings
between the United States and Beijing had gone on for many years in Warsaw,
but what Nixon was talking about was a total reversal of U.S. China policy.
Up until 1971, the U.S.A. had recognized the government of the Republic
of China on Taiwan as the sole sovereign and legitimate authority over
China. The United States, unlike Britain, France, and many other Western
countries, had no diplomatic relations with the Beijing Communist regime.
The Chinese seat among the five permanent members of the United Nations
Security Council was held by the government in Taipei. Every year in the
early autumn there was an attempt by the non-alignedbloc to oust Taipei
from the Security Council and replace them with Beijing, but so far this
vote had always failed because of U.S. arm-twisting in Latin America and
the rest of the Third World. One of the reasons that this arrangement had
endured so long was the immense prestige of R.O.C. President Chiang Kai-shek
and the sentimental popularity of the Kuomintang with the American electorate.
There still was a very powerful China lobby, which was especially strong
among right-wing Republicans of what had been the Taft and Knowland factions
of the party, and which Goldwater continued. Now, in the midst of the Vietnam
War, with U.S. strategic and economic power in decline, the Anglo-American
elite decided in favor of a geopolitical alliance with China against the
Soviets for the foreseeable future. This meant that the honor of U.S. commitments
to the R.O.C. had to be dumped overboard as so much useless ballast, whatever
the domestic political consequences might be. This was the task given to
Kissinger, Nixon, and George Bush. The maneuver on the agenda for 1971
was to oust the R.O.C. from the U.N. Security Council and assign their
seat to Beijing. Kissinger and Nixon calculated that duplicity would insulate
them from domestic political damage: While they were opening to Beijing,
they would call for a "two Chinas" policy, under which both Beijing and
Taipei would be represented at the U.N., at least in the General Assembly,
despite the fact that this was an alternative that both Chinese governments
vehemently rejected. The U.S.A. would pretend to be fighting to keep Taipei
in the U.N., with George Bush leading the fake charge, but this effort
would be defeated. Then the Nixon administration could claim that the vote
in the U.N. was beyond its control, comfortably resign itself to Beijing
in the Security Council, and pursue the China card. What was called for
was a cynical, duplicitous diplomatic charade in which Bush would have
the leading part. This scenario was complicated by the rivalry between
Secretary of State Rogers and NSC boss Kissinger. Rogers was an old friend
of Nixon, but it was of course Kissinger who made foreign policy for Nixon
and the rest of the government, and Kissinger who was incomparably the
greater evil. Between Rogers and Kissinger, Bush was unhesitatingly on
the side of Kissinger. In later congressional testimony, former CIA official
Ray Cline tried to argue that Rogers and Bush were kept in the dark by
Nixon and Kissinger about the real nature of the U.S. China policy. The
implication is that Bush's efforts to keep Taiwan at the U.N. were in good
faith. According to Cline's fantastic account, "Nixon and Kissinger actually
'undermined' the department's efforts in 1971 to save Taiwan." / Note #1
/ Note #1 Rogers may have believed that helping Taiwan was U.S. policy,
but Bush did not. Cline's version of these events is an insult to the intelligence
of any serious person. The Nixon-era China card took shape during July
1971 with Kissinger's "Operation Marco Polo I," his secret first trip to
Beijing. Kissinger says in his memoirs that Bush was considered a candidate
to make this journey, along with David Bruce, Elliot Richardson, Nelson
Rockefeller, and Al Haig. / Note #1 / Note #2 Kissinger first journeyed
to India, and then to Pakistan. From there, with the help of Yahya Khan,
Kissinger went on to Beijing for meetings with Zhou Enlai and other Chinese
officals. He returned by way of Paris, where he met with North Vietnamese
negotiator Le Duc Tho at the Paris talks on Indo-China. Returning to Washington,
Kissinger briefed Nixon on his understanding with Zhou. On July 15, 1971
Nixon announced to a huge television and radio audience that he had accepted
"with pleasure" an invitation to visit China at some occasion before May
of 1972. He lamely assured "old friends" (meaning Chiang Kai-shek and the
R.O.C. government on Taiwan) that their interests would not be sacrificed.
Later in the same year, between October 16 and 26, Kissinger undertook
operation "Polo II," a second, public visit with Zhou in Beijing to decide
the details of Nixon's visit and hammer out what was to become the U.S.-P.R.C.
Shanghai Communique, the joint statement issued during Nixon's stay. During
this visit, Zhou cautioned Kissinger not to be disoriented by the hostile
Beijing propaganda line against the U.S.A., manifestations of which were
everywhere to be seen. Anti-U.S. slogans on the walls, said Zhou, were
meaningless, like "firing an empty cannon." Nixon and Kissinger eventually
journeyed to Beijing in February 1972. U.N. 'Two Chinas' Farce It was before
this backdrop that Bush waged his farcical campaign to keep Taiwan in the
U.N. The State Department had stated through the mouth of Rogers on August
2 that the United States would support the admission of Red China to the
U.N., but would oppose the expulsion of Taiwan. This was the so-called
"two Chinas" policy. In an August 12 interview, Bush told the "Washington
Post" that he was working hard to line up the votes to keep Taiwan as a
U.N. member when the time to vote came in the fall. Responding to the obvious
impression that this was a fraud for domestic political purposes only,
Bush pledged his honor on Nixon's commitment to "two Chinas." "I know for
a fact that the President wants to see the policy implemented," said Bush,
apparently with a straight face, adding that he had discussed the matter
with Nixon and Kissinger at the White House only a few days before. Bush
said that he and other members of his mission had lobbied 66 countries
so far, and that this figure was likely to rise to 80 by the following
week. Ultimately Bush would claim to have talked personlly with 94 delegations
to get them to let Taiwan stay, which a fellow diplomat called "a quantitative
track record." Diplomatic observers noted that the U.S. activity was entirely
confined to the high-profile "glass palace" of the U.N., and that virtually
nothing was being done by U.S. ambassadors in capitals around the world.
But Bush countered that if it were just a question of going through the
motions as a gesture for Taiwan, he would not be devoting so much of his
time and energy to the cause. The main effort was at the U.N. because "this
is what the U.N. is for," he commented. Bush said that his optimism about
keeping the Taiwan membership had increased over the past three weeks.
/ Note #1 / Note #3 By late September, Bush was saying that he saw a better
than 50-50 chance that the U.N. General Assembly would seat both Chinese
governments. By this time, the official U.S. position as enunciated by
Bush was that the Security Council seat should go to Beijing, but that
Taipei ought to be allowed to remain in the General Assembly. Since 1961,
the U.S. strategy for blocking the admission of Beijing had depended on
a procedural defense, obtaining a simple majority of the General Assembly
for a resolution defining the seating of Beijing as an Important Question,
which required a two-thirds majority in order to be implemented. Thus,
if the U.S .A. could get a simple majority on the procedural vote, one-third
plus one would suffice to defeat Beijing on the second vote. The General
Assembly convened on September 21. Bush and his aides were running a ludicrous
full-court press on scores of delegations. Twice a day, there was a State
Department briefing on the vote tally. "Yes, Burundi is with us.... About
Argentina we're not sure," etc. All this attention got Bush an appearance
on "Face the Nation," where he said that the two-Chinas policy should be
approved regardless of the fact that both Beijing and Taipei rejected it.
"I don't think we have to go through the agony of whether the Republic
of China will accept or whether Beijing will accept," Bush told the interviewers.
"Let the United Nations for a change do something that really does face
up to reality and then let that decision be made by the parties involved,"
said Bush with his usual inimitable rhetorical flair. The U.N. debate on
the China seat was scheduled to open on October 18; on October 12, Nixon
gave a press conference in which he totally ignored the subject, and made
no appeal for support for Taiwan. On October 16, Kissinger departed with
great fanfare for Beijing. Kissinger says in his memoirs that he had been
encouraged to go to Beijing by Bush, who assured him that a highly publicized
Kissinger trip to Beijing would have no impact whatever on the U.N. vote.
On October 25, the General Assembly defeated the U.S. resolution to make
the China seat an Important Question by a vote of 59 to 54, with 15 abstentions.
Ninety minutes later came the vote on the Albanian resolution to seat Beijing
and expel Taipei, which passed by a vote of 76 to 35. Bush then cast the
U.S. vote to seat Beijing, and then hurried to escort the R.O.C. delegate,
Liu Chieh, out of the hall for the last time. The General Assembly was
the scene of a jubilant demonstration led by Third World delegates over
the fact that Red China had been admitted, and even more so that the United
States had been defeated. The Tanzanian delegate danced a jig in the aisle.
Henry Kissinger, flying back from Beijing, got the news on his teletype
and praised Bush's "valiant efforts." Having connived in selling Taiwan
down the river, it was now an easy matter for the Nixon regime to fake
a great deal of indignation for domestic political consumption about what
had happened. Nixon's spokesman Ron Ziegler declared that Nixon had been
outraged by the "spectacle" of the "cheering, handclapping, and dancing"
delegates after the vote, which Nixon had seen as a "shocking demonstration"
of "undisguised glee" and "personal animosity." Notice that Ziegler had
nothing to say against the vote, or against Beijing, but concentrated the
fire on the Third World delegates, who were also threatened with a cutoff
of U.S. foreign aid. This was the line that Bush would slavishly follow.
On the last day of October, the papers quoted him saying that the demonstration
after the vote was "something ugly, something harsh that transcended normal
disappointment or elation." "I really thought we were going to win," said
Bush, still with a straight face. "I'm so ... disappointed." "There wasn't
just clapping and enthusiasm" after the vote, he whined. "When I went up
to speak I was hissed and booed. I don't think it's good for the United
Nations and that's the point I feel very strongly about." In the view of
a "Washington Post" staff writer, "the boyish looking U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations looked considerably the worse for wear. But he still
conveys the impression of an earnest fellow trying to be the class valedictorian,
as he once was described." / Note #1 / Note #4 Bush expected the Beijing
delegation to arrive in new York soon, because they probably wanted to
take over the presidency of the Security Council, which rotated on a monthly
basis. "But why anybody would want an early case of chicken pox, I don't
know," said Bush. When the Beijing delegation did arrive, Chinese Deputy
Foreign Minister Ch'aio Kuan-hua delivered a maiden speech full of ideological
bombast along the lines of passages Kissinger had convinced Zhou to cut
out of the draft text of the Shanghai communique some days before. Kissinger
then telephoned Bush to say in his own speech that the United States regretted
that the Chinese had elected to inaugurate their participation in the U.N.
by "firing these empty cannons of rhetoric." Bush, like a ventriloquist's
dummy, obediently mouthed Kissinger's one-liner as a kind of coded message
to Beijing that all the public bluster meant nothing between the two secret
and increasingly public allies. Notes 1. In 1970, Bush's portfolio included
29 companies in which he had an interest of more than $4,000. He had 10,000
shares of American General Insurance Co., 5,500 shares of American Standard,
200 shares of AT&T, 832 shares of CBS, and 581 shares of Industries
Exchange Fund. He also held stock in the Kroger Company, Simplex Wire and
Cable Co. (25,000 shares), IBM, and Allied Chemical. In addition, he had
created a trust fund for his children. 2. James Reston, Jr., "The Lone
Star: The Life of John Connally" (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p.
380. 3. William Safire, "Before the Fall" (New York: Doubleday, 1977),
p. 646. 4. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, "Presidential Posts and Dashed
Hopes," "Washington Post," Aug. 9, 1988. 5. Reston, "op. cit.," p. 382.
6. George Bush and Victor Gold, "Looking Forward" (New York: Doubleday,
1987), p. 110. 7. For the Nixon side of the Bush U.N. appointment, see
William Safire, "op. cit.," especially "The President Falls in Love," pp.
642 "ff." 8. Reston, "op. cit.," p. 382. Reston (pp. 586-87) tells the
story of how, years later in the 1980 Iowa caucuses campaign when both
Bush and Connally were in the race, Bush was enraged by Connally's denigration
of his manhood in remarks to Texans that Bush was 'all hat and no cattle.'
Bush was walking by a television set in the Hotel Fort Des Moines when
Connally came on the screen. Bush reached out toward Connally's image on
the screen as if to shake hands. Then Bush screamed, "Thank you, sir, for
all the kind things you and your friends have been saying about me!" Then
Bush slammed his fist on the top of the set, yelling "That prick!" 9. On
Kissinger, see Scott Thompson and Joseph Brewda, "Kissinger Associates:
Two Birds in the Bush," "Executive Intelligence Review," March 3, 1989.
10. Tom Mangold, "Cold Warrior", (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991),
p. 305. 11. See Tad Szulc, "The Illusion of Peace" (New York: Viking Press,
1978), p. 498. 12. Henry Kissinger, "White House Years" (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1979), p. 715. 13. Szulc, "op. cit.," p. 500, and "Washington Post,"
Aug. 12, 1971. 14. "Washington Post," Oct. 31, 1971. CHAPTER 12 UNITED
NATIONS AMBASSADOR, KISSINGER CLONE The farce of Bush's pantomime in support
of the Kissinger China card very nearly turned into the tragedy of general
war later in 1971. This involved the December 1971 war between India and
Pakistan, which led to the creation of an independent state of Bangladesh,
and which must be counted as one of the least-known thermonuclear confrontations
of the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. For Kissinger and Bush, what was at stake in
this crisis was the consolidation of the China card. In 1970, Yahya Khan,
the British-connected, Sandhurst-educated dictator of Pakistan, was forced
to announce that elections would be held in the entire country. It will
be recalled that Pakistan was at that time two separate regions, east and
west, with India in between. In East Pakistan or Bengal, the Awami League
of Sheik Mujibur Rahman campaigned on a platform of autonomy for Bengal,
accusing the central government in far-off Islamabad of ineptitude and
exploitation. The resentment in East Pakistan was made more acute by the
fact that Bengal had just been hit by a typhoon, which had caused extensive
flooding and devastation, and by the failure of the government in West
Pakistan to organize an effective relief effort. In the elections, the
Awami League won 167 out of 169 seats in the East. Yahya Khan delayed the
seating of the new nationa l assembly and on the evening of March 25 ordered
the Pakistani Army to arrest Mujibur and to wipe out his organization in
East Pakistan. Genocide in East Pakistan The army proceeded to launch a
campaign of political genocide in East Pakistan. Estimates of the number
of victims range from 500,000 to 3 million dead. All members of the Awami
League, all Hindus, all students and intellectuals were in danger of execution
by roving army patrols. A senior U.S. Foreign Service officer sent home
a dispatch in which he told of West Pakistani soldiers setting fire to
a women's dormitory at the University of Dacca and then machine-gunning
the women when they were forced by the flames to run out. This campaign
of killing went on until December, and it generated an estimated 10 million
refugees, most of whom fled across the nearby borders to India, which had
territory all around East Pakistan. The arrival of 10 million refugees
caused indescribable chaos in India, whose government was unable to prevent
untold numbers from starving to death. / Note #1 / Note #5 >From the very
beginning of this monumental genocide, Kissinger and Nixon made it clear
that they would not condemn Yahya Khan, whom Nixon considered a personal
friend. Kissinger referred merely to the "strong-arm tactics of the Pakistani
military," and Nixon circulated a memo in his own handwriting saying, "To
all hands. Don't squeeze Yahya at this time. RN" Nixon stressed repeatedly
that he wanted to "tilt" in favor of Pakistan in the crisis. One level
of explanation for this active complicity in genocide was that Kissinger
and Nixon regarded Yahya Khan as their indispensable back channel to Peking.
But Kissinger could soon go to Peking any time he wanted, and soon he could
talk to the Chinese U.N. delegate in a New York safe house. The essence
of the support for the butcher Yahya Khan was this: In 1962, India and
China had engaged in a brief border war, and the Peking leaders regarded
India as their geopolitical enemy. In order to ingratiate himself with
Zhou and Mao, Kissinger wanted to take a position in favor of Pakistan,
and therefore of Pakistan's ally China, and against India and against India's
ally, the U.S.S.R. (Shortly after Kissinger's trip to China had taken place
and Nixon had announced his intention to go to Peking, India and the U.S.S.R.
had signed a 20-year friendship treaty.) In Kissinger's view, the Indo-Pakistani
conflict over Bengal was sure to become a Sino-Soviet clash by proxy, and
he wanted the United States aligned with China in order to impress Peking
with the vast benefits to be derived from the U.S.-P.R.C. strategic alliance
under the heading of the "China card." Kissinger and Nixon were isolated
within the Washington bureaucracy on this issue. Secretary of State Rogers
was very reluctant to go on supporting Pakistan, and this was the prevalent
view in Foggy Bottom and in the embassies around the world. Nixon and Kissinger
were isolated from the vast majority of congressional opinion, which expressed
horror and outrage over the extent of the carnage being carried out week
after week, month after month, by Yahya Khan's armed forces. Even the media
and U.S. public opinion could not find any reason for the friendly "tilt"
in favor of Yahya Khan. On July 31, Kissinger exploded at a meeting of
the Senior Review Group when a proposal was made that the Pakistani army
could be removed from Bengal. "Why is it our business how they govern themselves?"
Kissinger raged. "The President always says to tilt to Pakistan, but every
proposal I get [from inside the U.S. government] is in the opposite direction.
Sometimes I think I am in a nut house." This went on for months. On December
3, at a meeting of Kissinger's Washington Special Action Group, Kissinger
exploded again, exclaiming, "I've been catching unshirted hell every half-hour
from the president who says we're not tough enough. He really doesn't believe
we're carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt toward Pakistan and he
believes that every briefing or statement is going the other way." / Note
#1 / Note #6 But no matter what Rogers, the State Department and the rest
of the Washington bureaucracy might do, Kissinger knew that George Bush
at the U.N. would play along with the pro-Pakistan tilt. "And I knew that
George Bush, our able U.N. ambassador, would carry out the President's
policy," wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, in describing his decision to
drop U.S. opposition to a Security Council debate on the subcontinent.
This made Bush one of the most degraded and servile U.S. officials of the
era. Indira Gandhi had come to Washington in November to attempt a peaceful
settlement to the crisis, but was crudely snubbed by Nixon and Kissinger.
The chronology of the acute final phase of the crisis can be summed up
as follows: "December 3, 1971": Yahya Khan ordered the Pakistani Air Force
to carry out a series of surprise air raids on Indian air bases in the
north and west of India. These raids were not effective in destroying the
Indian Air Force on the ground, which had been Yahya Khan's intent, but
Yahya Khan's aggression did precipitate the feared Indo-Pakistani war.
The Indian Army made rapid ad vances against the Pakistani forces in Bengal,
while the Indian Navy blockaded Pakistan's ports. At this time, the biggest-ever
buildup in the Soviet naval forces in the Indian Ocean also began. "December
4": At the U.N. Security Council, George Bush delivered a speech in which
his main thrust was to accuse India of repeated incursions into East Pakistan,
and challenging the legitimacy of India's resort to arms, in spite of the
plain evidence that Pakistan had struck first. Bush introduced a draft
resolution which called on India and Pakistan immediately to cease all
hostilities. Bush's resolution also mandated the immediate withdrawal of
all Indian and Pakistani armed forces back to their own territory, meaning
in effect that India should pull back from East Pakistan and let Yahya
Khan's forces there get back to their mission of genocide against the local
population. Observers were to be placed along the Indo-Pakistani borders
by the U.N. secretary general. Bush's resolution also contained a grotesque
call on India and Pakistan to "exert their best efforts toward the creation
of a climate conducive to the voluntary return of refugees to East Pakistan."
Ths resolution was out of touch with the two realities: that Yahya Khan
had started the genocide in East Pakistan back in March, and that Yahya
had now launched aggression against India with his air raids. Bush's resolution
was vetoed by the Soviet representative, Yakov Malik. "December 6": The
Indian government extended diplomatic recognition to the independent state
of Bangladesh. Indian troops made continued progress against the Pakistani
Army in Bengal. On the same day, an NBC camera team filmed much of Nixon's
day inside the White House. Part of what was recorded, and later broadcast,
was a telephone call from Nixon to George Bush at the United Nations, giving
Bush his instructions on how to handle the India-Pakistan crisis. "Some,
all over the world, will try to make this basically a political issue,"
said Nixon to Bush. "You've got to do what you can. More important than
anything else now is to get the facts out with regard to what we have done,
that we have worked for a political settlement, what we have done for the
refugees and so forth and so on. If you see that some here in the Senate
and House, for whatever reason, get out and misrepresent our opinions,
I want you to hit it frontally, strongly, and toughly; is that clear? Just
take the gloves off and crack it, because you know exactly what we have
done, OK?" / Note #1 / Note #7 "December 7": George Bush at the U.N. made
a further step forward toward global confrontation by branding India as
the aggressor in the crisis, as Kissinger approvingly notes in his memoirs.
Bush's draft resolution, described above, which had been vetoed by Malik
in the Security Council, was approved by the General Assembly by a non-binding
vote of 104 to 11, which Kissinger considered a triumph for Bush. But on
the same day, Yahya Khan informed the government in Washington that his
military forces in East Pakistan were rapidly disintegrating. Kissinger
and Nixon seized on a dubious report from an alleged U.S. agent at a high
level in the Indian government which purported to summarize recent remarks
of Indira Gandhi to her cabinet. According to this report, which may have
come from the later Prime Minister Moraji Desai, Mrs. Gandhi had pledged
to conquer the southern part of Pakistani-held Kashmir. If the Chinese
"rattled the sword," the report quoted Mrs. Gandhi as saying, the Soviets
would respond. This unreliable report became one of the pillars for further
actions by Nixon, Kissinger and Bush. "December 8": By this time, the Soviet
Navy had some 21 ships either in or approaching the Indian Ocean, in contrast
to a pre-crisis level of three ships. At this point, with the Vietnam War
raging unabated, the U.S.A. had a total of three ships in the Indian Ocean
-- two old destroyers and a seaplane tender. The last squadron of the British
Navy was departing from the region in the framework of the British pullout
from east of Suez. In the evening, Nixon suggested to Kissinger that the
scheduled Moscow summit might be canceled. Kissinger raved that India wanted
to detach not just Bengal, but Kashmir also, leading to the further secession
of Baluchistan and the total dismemberment of Pakistan. "Fundamentally,"
wrote Kissinger of this moment, "our only card left was to raise the risks
for the Soviets to a level where Moscow would see larger interests jeopardized"
by its support of India, which had been lukewarm so far. "December 9":
The State Department and other agencies were showing signs of being almost
human, seeking to undermine the Nixon-Kissinger-Bush policy through damaging
leaks and bureaucratic obstructionism. Nixon, "beside himself" over the
damaging leaks, called in the principal officers of the Washington Special
Action Group and told them that while he did not insist on their being
loyal to the President, they ought at least to be loyal to the United States.
Among those Nixon insulted was Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson.
But the leaks only increased. "December 10:" Kissinger ordered the U.S.
Navy to create Task Force 74, consisting of the nuclear aircraft carrier
"Enterprise", with escort and supply ships, and to have these ships proceed
from their post at Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam to
Singapore. / Note #1 / Note #8 In Dacca, East Pakistan, Major General Rao
Farman Ali Khan, the commander of Pakistani forces in Bengal, asked the
United Nations representative to help arrange a cease-fire, followed by
the transfer of power in East Pakistan to the elected representatives of
the Awami League and the "repatriation with honor" of his forces back to
West Pakistan. At first it appeared that this de facto surrender had been
approved by Yahya Khan. But when Yahya Khan heard that the U.S. fleet had
been ordered into the Indian Ocean, he was so encouraged that he junked
the idea of a surrender and ordered Gen. Ali Khan to resume fighting, which
he did. Colonel Melvin Holst, the U.S. military attache in Katmandu, Nepal,
a small country sandwiched between India and China in the Himalayas, received
a call from the Indian military attache, who asked whether the American
had any knowledge of a Chinese military buildup in Tibet. "The Indian high
command had some sort of information that military action was increasing
in Tibet," said Holst in his cable to Washington. The same evening, Col.
Holst received a call from the Soviet military attache, Loginov, who also
asked about Chinese military activity. Loginov said that he had spoken
over the last day or two with the Chinese military attache, Zhao Kuang-chih,
"advising Zhao that the P.R.C. should not get too serious about intervention
because U.S.S.R. would react, had many missiles, etc." / Note #1 / Note
#9 At the moment, the Himalaya mountain passes, the corridor for any Chinese
troop movement, were all open and free from snow. The CIA had noted "war
preparations" in Tibet over the months since the Bengal crisis had begun.
Nikolai Pegov, the Soviet ambassador to New Dehli, had assured the Indian
government that in the eventuality of a Chinese attack on India, the Soviets
would mount a "diversionary action in Sinkiang." "December 11": Kissinger
had been in town the previous day, meeting the Chinese U.N. delegate. Today
Kissinger would meet with the Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister Ali Bhutto,
in Bush's suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Huang Hua, the Chinese delegate,
made remarks which Kissinger chose to interpret as meaning that the "Chinese
might intervene militarily even at this late stage." "December 12:" Nixon,
Kissinger and Haig met in the Oval Office early Sunday morning in a council
of war. Kissinger later described this as a crucial meeting, where, as
it turned out, "the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American"
geopolitical relationship was taken. / Note #2 / Note #0 During Nixon's
1975 secret grand jury testimony to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force,
the former President insisted that the United States had come "close to
nuclear war" during the Indo-Pakistani conflict. According to one attorney
who heard Nixon's testimony in 1975, Nixon had stated that "we had threatened
to go to nuclear war with the Russians." / Note #2 / Note #1 These remarks
most probably refer to this December 12 meeting, and the actions it set
into motion. Navy Task Force 74 was ordered to proceed through the Straits
of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean, and it attracted the attention of
the world media in so doing the following day. Task Force 74 was now on
wartime alert. At 11:30 a.m. local time, Kissinger and Haig sent the Kremlin
a message over the Hot Line. This was the first use of the Hot Line during
the Nixon administration, and apparently the only time it was used during
the Nixon years, with the exception of the October 1973 Middle East War.
According to Kissinger, this Hot Line message contained the ultimatum that
the Soviets respond to earlier American demands; otherwise Nixon would
order Bush to "set in train certain moves" in the U.N. Security Council
that would be irreversible. But is this all the message said? Kissinger
comments in his memoirs a few pages later: "Our fleet passed through the
Strait of Malacca into the Bay of Bengal and attracted much media attention.
Were we threatening India? Were we seeking to defend East Pakistan? Had
we lost our minds? It was in fact sober calculation. We had some seventy-two
hours to bring the war to a conclusion before West Pakistan would be swept
into the maelstrom. It would take India that long to shift its forces and
mount an assault. Once Pakistan's air force and army were destroyed, its
impotence would guarantee the country's eventual disintegration.... We
had to give the Soviets a warning that matters might get out of control
on our side too. We had to be ready to back up the Chinese if at the last
moment they came in after all, our U.N. initiative having failed. [...]
However unlikely an American military move against India, the other side
could not be sure; it might not be willing to accept even the minor risk
that we might act irrationally." / Note #2 / Note #2 These comments by
Kissinger led to the conclusion that the Hot Line message of December 12
was part of a calculated exercise in thermonuclear blackmail and brinksmanship.
Kissinger's reference to acting irrationally recalls the infamous RAND
Corporation theories of thermonculear confrontations as chicken games in
which it is useful to hint to the opposition that one is insane. If your
adversary thinks you are crazy, then he is more likely to back down, the
argument goes. Whatever threats were made by Kissinger and Haig that day
in their Hot Line message are likely to have been of that variety. All
evidence points to the conclusion that on December 12, 1971, the world
was indeed close to the brink of thermonuclear confrontation. Where Was
George? And where was George? He was acting as the willing mouthpiece for
madmen. Late in the evening December 12, Bush delivered the following remarks
to the Security Council, which are recorded in Kissinger's memoirs: "The
question now arises as to India's further intentions. For example, does
India intend to use the present situation to destroy the Pakistan army
in the West? Does India intend to use as a pretext the Pakistani counterattacks
in the West to annex territory in West Pakistan? Is its aim to take parts
of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir contrary to the Security Council resolutions
of 1948, 1949, and 1950? If this is not India's intention, then a prompt
disavowal is required. The world has a right to know: What are India's
intentions? Pakistan's aims have become clear: It has accepted the General
Assembly's resolution passed by a vote of 104 to 11. My government has
asked this question of the Indian Government several times in the last
week. I regret to inform the Council that India's replies have been unsatisfactory
and not reassuring. "In view of India's defiance of world opinion expressed
by such an overwhelming majority, the United States is now returning the
issue to the Security Council. With East Pakistan virtually occupied by
Indian troops, a continuation of the war would take on increasingly the
character of armed attack on the very existence of a Member State of the
United Nations." / Note #2 / Note #3 Bush introduced another draft resolution
of pro-Pakistan tilt, which called on the governments of India and Pakistan
to take measures for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of troops,
and for measures to help the refugees. This resolution was also vetoed
by the U.S.S.R. "December 14": Kissinger shocked U.S. public opinion by
stating off the record to journalists in a plane returning from a meeting
with French President Georges Pompidou in the Azores, that if Soviet conduct
continued in the present mode, the U.S. was "prepared to reevaluate our
entire relationship, including the summit." "December 15:" The Pakistani
commander in East Pakistan, after five additional days of pointless killing,
again offered a cease-fire. Kissinger claimed that the five intervening
days had allowed the United States to increase the pressure on India and
prevent the Indian forces from turning on West Pakistan. "December 16:"
Mrs. Gandhi offered an unconditional cease-fire in the west, which Pakistan
immediately accepted. Kissinger opined that this decision to end all fighting
had been "reluctant" on the part of India, and had been made possible through
Soviet pressure generated by U.S. threats. Zhou Enlai also said later that
the United States had saved West Pakistan. Kissinger praised Nixon's "courage
and patriotism" and his commitment to "preserve the balance of power for
the ultimate safety of all free people." Apprentice geopolitician George
Bush had carried out yeoman service in that immoral cause. After a self-serving
and false description of the Indo-Pakistani crisis of 1971, Kissinger pontificates
in his memoirs about the necessary priority of geopolitical machinations:
"There is in America an idealistic tradition that sees foreign policy as
a context between evil and good. There is a pragmatic tradition that seeks
to solve 'problems' as they arise. There is a legalistic tradition that
treats international issues as juridical cases. There is no geopolitical
tradition." In their stubborn pursuit of an alliance with the second strongest
land power at the expense of all other considerations, Kissinger, Nixon
and Bush were following the dictates of classic geopolitics. This is the
school in which Bush was trained, and this is how he has reacted to every
international crisis down through the Gulf war, which was originally conceived
in London as a "geopolitical" adjustment in favor of the Anglo-Saxons against
Germany, Japan, the Arabs, the developing sector and the rest of the world.
Genocide in Vietnam 1972 was the second year of Bush's U.N. tenure, and
it was during this time that he distinguished himself as a shameless apologist
for the genocidal and vindictive Kissinger policy of prolonging and escalating
the war in Vietnam. During most of his first term, Nixon pursued a policy
he called the "Vietnamization" of the war. This meant that U.S. land forces
were progressively withdrawn, while the South Vietnamese Army was ostensibly
built up so that it could bear the battle against the Viet Cong and the
North Vietnamese regulars. This policy went into crisis in March 1972 when
the North Vietnamese launched a 12-division assault across the Demilitarized
Zone against the south. On May 8, 1972, Nixon announced that the full-scale
bombing of the north, which had been suspended since the spring of 1968,
would be resumed with a vengeance: Nixon ordered the bombing of Hanoi and
the mining of Haiphong harbor, and the savaging of transportation lines
and military installations all over the country. This mining had always
been rejected as a tactic during the previous conduct of the war because
of the possibility that bombing and mining the harbors might hit Soviet,
Chinese, and other foreign ships, killing the crews and creating the risk
of retaliation by these countries against the U.S.A. Now, before the 1972
elections, Kissinger and Nixon were determined to "go ape," discarding
their previous limits on offensive action and risking whatever China and
the U.S.S.R. might do. It was another gesture of reckless confrontation,
fraught with incalculable consequences. Later in the same year, in December,
Nixon would respond to a breakdown in the Paris talks with the Hanoi government
by ordering the infamous Christmastide B-52 attacks on the north. It was
George Bush who officially informed the international diplomatic community
of Nixon's March decisions. Bush addressed a letter to the Presidency of
the U.N. Security Council in which he outlined what Nixon had set into
motion: "The President directed that the entrances to the ports of North
Vietnam be mined and that the delivery of seaborne supplies to North Vietnam
be prevented. These measures of collective self-defense are hereby being
reported to the United Nations Security Council as required by Article
51 of the United Nations Charter." Bush went on to characterize the North
Vietnamese actions. He spoke of "the massive invasion across the demilitarized
zone and international boundaries by the forces of North Vietnam and the
continuing aggression" of Hanoi. He accused the north of "blatant violation
of the understandings negotiated in 1968 in connection with the cessation
of the bombing of the territory of North Vietnam.... The extent of this
renewed aggression and the manner in which it has been directed and supported
demonstrate with great clarity that North Vietnam has embarked on an all-out
attempt to take over South Vietnam by military force and to disrupt the
orderly withdrawal of United States forces." Bush further accused the north
of refusing to negotiate in good faith to end the war. The guts of Bush's
message, the part that was read with greatest attention in Moscow, Peking
and elsewhere, was contained in the following summary of the way in which
Haiphong and the other harbors had been mined: "Accordingly, as the minimum
actions necessary to meet this threat, the Republic of Vietnam and the
United States of America have jointly decided to take the following measures
of collective self-defense: The entrances to the ports of North Vietnam
are being mined, commencing 0900 Saigon time May 9, and the mines are set
to activate automatically beginning 1900 hours Saigon time May 11. This
will permit vessels of other countries presently in North Vietnamese ports
three daylight periods to depart safely." In a long circumlocution, Bush
also conveyed that all shipping might also be the target of indiscriminate
bombing. Bush called these measures "restricted in extent and purpose."
The U.S. was willing to sign a cease-fire ending all acts of war in Indochina
(thus including Cambodia, which had been invaded in 1970, and Laos, which
had been invaded in 1971, as well as the Vietnams) and bring all U.S. troops
home within four months. There was no bipartisan supp ort for the bombing
and mining policy Bush announced. Senator Mike Mansfield pointed out that
the decision would only protract the war. Senator Proxmire called it "reckless
and wrong." Four Soviet ships were damaged by these U.S. actions. There
was a lively debate within the Soviet Politburo on how to respond to this,
with a faction around Shelest demanding that Nixon's invitation to the
upcoming Moscow superpower summit be rescinded. But Shelest was ousted
by Brezhnev, and the summit went forward at the end of May. The "China
card" theoreticians congratulated themselves that the Soviets had been
paralyzed by fear of what Peking might do if Moscow became embroiled with
Peking's new de facto ally, the United States. Bombing Civilian Targets
In July 1972, reports emerged in the international press of charges by
Hanoi that the U.S.A. had been deliberately bombing the dams and dikes,
which were the irrigation and flood control system around Vietnam's Red
River. Once again it was Bush who came forward as the apologist for Nixon's
"mad bomber" foreign policy. Bush appeared on the NBC Televison "Today"
show to assure the U.S. public that the U.S. bombing had created only "the
most incidental and minor impact" on North Vietnam's dike system. This,
of course, amounted to a backhanded confirmation that such bombing had
been done, and damage wrought in the process. Bush was in his typical whining
mode in defending the U.S. policy against worldwide criticism of war measures
that seemed designed to inflict widespread flooding and death on North
Vietnamese civilians. According to North Vietnamese statistics, more than
half of the north's 20 million people lived in areas near the Red River
that would be flooded if the dike system were breached. An article which
appeared in a Hanoi publication had stated that at flood crest many rivers
rise to "six or seven meters above the surrounding fields" and that because
of this situation "any dike break, especially in the Red River delta, is
a disaster with incalculable consequences." Bush had never seen an opportunity
for genocide he did not like. "I believe we are being set up by a massive
propaganda campaign by the North Vietnamese in the event that there is
the same kind of flooding this year -- to attribute it to bombs whereas
last year it happened just out of lack of maintenance," Bush argued. "There's
been a study made that I hope will be released shortly that will clarify
this whole question," he went on. The study "would be very helpful because
I think it will show what the North Vietnamese are up to in where they
place strategic targets." What Bush was driving at here was an allegation
that Hanoi customarily placed strategic assets near the dikes in order
to be able to accuse the U.S. of genocide if air attacks breached the dikes
and caused flooding. Bush's military spokesmen used similar arguments during
the Gulf war, when Iraq was accused of placing military equipment in the
midst of civilian residential areas. "I think you would have to recognize,"
retorted Bush, "that if there was any intention" of breaching the dikes,
"it would be very, very simple to do exactly what we are accused of --
and that is what we are not doing." / Note #2 / Note #4 The bombing of
the north continued and reached a final paroxysm at Christmas, when B-52s
made unrestricted terror bombing raids against Hanoi and other cities.
The Christmas bombing was widely condemned, even by the U.S. press: "New
Madness in Vietnam" was the headline of the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" on
Dec. 19; "Terror from the Skies" that of the "New York Times" Dec. 22;
"Terror Bombing in the Name of Peace" of the "Washington Post" Dec. 28;
and "Beyond All Reason" of the "Los Angeles Times" of Dec. 28. More Zionist
than Israelis Bush's activity at the U.N. also coincided with Kissinger's
preparation of the October 1973 Middle East war. During the 1980s, Bush
attempted to cultivate a public image as a U.S. politician who, although
oriented toward close relations with Israel, would not slavishly appease
every demand of the Israelis and the Zionist lobby in the United States,
but would take an independent position designed to foster U.S. national
interests. From time to time, Bush snubbed the Israelis by hinting that
they held hostages of their own, and that the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem
would not be accepted by the United States. For some, these delusions have
survived even a refutation so categoric as the events of the Kuwait crisis
of 1990-91. Bush would be more accurately designated as a Zionist, whose
differences with an Israeli leader like Shamir are less significant than
the differences between Shamir and other Israeli politicians. Bush's fanatically
pro-Israeli ideological-political track record was already massive during
the U.N. years. In September 1972, Palestinian terrorists describing themselves
as the "Black September" organization attacked the quarters of the Israeli
Olympic team present in Munich for the Olympic games of that year, killing
a number of the Israeli athletes. The Israeli government seized on these
events as carte blanche to launch a series of air attacks against Syria
and Lebanon, arguing that these countries could be held responsible for
what had happened in Munich. Somalia, Greece and Guinea came forward with
a resolution in the Security Council which simply called for the immediate
cessation of "all military operations." The Arab states argued that the
Israeli air attacks were totally without provocation or justification,
and had killed numerous civilians who had nothing whatever to do with the
terrorist actions in Munich. The Nixon regime, with one eye on the autumn
1972 elections and the need to mobilize the Zionist lobby in support of
a second term, wanted to find a way to oppose this resolution, since it
did not sufficiently acknowledge the unique righteousness of the Israeli
cause and Israel's inherent right to commit acts of war against its neighbors.
It was Bush who authored a competing resolution, which called on all interested
parties "to take all measures for the immediate cessation and prevention
of all military operations and terrorist activities." It was Bush who dished
up the rationalizations for U.S. rejection of the first resolution. That
resolution was no good, Bush argued, because it did not reflect the fact
that "the fabric of violence in the Middle East in inextricably interwoven
with the massacre in Munich.... By our silence on the terror in Munich
are we indeed inviting more Munichs?" he asked. Justifying the Israeli
air raids on Syria and Lebanon, Bush maintained that certain governments
"cannot be absolved of responsibility for the cycle of violence" because
of their words and deeds, or because of their tacit acquiescence. Slightly
later, after the vote had taken place, Bush argued that "by adopting this
resolution, the council would have ignored reality, would have spoken to
one form of violence but not another, would have looked to the effect but
not the cause." When the resolution was put to a vote, Bush made front-page
headlines around the world by casting the U.S. veto, a veto that had been
cast only once before in the entire history of the U.N. The vote was 13
to 1, with the U.S. casting the sole negative vote. Panama was the lone
abstention. The only other time the U.S. veto had been used had been in
1970, on a resolution involving Rhodesia. The Israeli U.N. ambassador,
Yosef Tekoah, did not attend the debate because of the Jewish holiday of
Rosh Hashanah. But Israel's cause was well defended -- by Bush. According
to an Israeli journalist observing the proceedings who was quoted by the
"Washington Post," "Bush sounds more pro-Israeli than Tekoah would have."
/ Note #2 / Note #5 Later in 1972, attempts were made by non-aligned states
and the U.N. Secretariat to arrange the indispensable basis for a Middle
East peace settlement -- the withdrawal of Israel from the territories
occupied during the 1967 war. Once again, Bush was more Zionist than the
Israelis. In February of 1972, the U.N.'s Middle East mediator, Gunnar
Jarring of Norway, had asked that the Security Council reaffirm the original
contents of Resolution 242 of 1967 by reiterating that Israel should surrender
Arab territory seized in 1967. "Land for peace" was anathema to the Israeli
government then as now. Bush undertook to blunt this non-aligned peace
bid. Late in 1972, the non-aligned group proposed a resolution in the General
Assembly which called for "immediate and unconditional" Israeli withdrawal
from the occupied territories while inviting other countries to withold
assistance that would help Israel to sustain its occupation of the Arab
land. Bush quickly rose to assail this text. In a speech to the General
Assembly in December 1972, Bush warned the assembly that the original text
of Resolution 242 was "the essential agreed basis for U.N. peace efforts
and this body and all its members should be mindful of the need to preserve
the negotiating asset that it represents." "The assembly," Bush went on,
"cannot seek to impose courses of action on the countries directly concerned,
either by making new demands or favoring the proposals or positions of
one side over the other." Never, never would George Bush ever take sides
or accept a double standard of this type. Bush in Africa >From January
28 through February 4, 1972, the Security Council held its first meeting
in twenty years outside of New York City. The venue chosen was Addis Ababa,
Ethiopia. Bush made this the occasion for a trip through the Sudan, Kenya,
Zambia, Zaire, Gabon, Nigeria, Chad and Botswana. Bush later told a House
subcommittee hearing that this was his second trip to Africa, with the
preceding one having been a junket to Egypt and Libya "in 1963 or 1964."
/ Note #2 / Note #6 During this trip, Bush met with seven chiefs of state,
including President Mobutu of Zaire, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia,
President Tombalbaye of Chad, and President Numayri of the Sudan. At a
press conference in Addis Ababa, African journalists destabilized Bush
with aggressive questions about the U.S. policy of ignoring mandatory U.N.
economic sanctions against the racist, white supremacist Ian Smith regime
in Rhodesia. The Security Council had imposed the mandatory sanctions,
but later the U.S. Congress had passed, and Nixon had signed into law,
legislation incorporating the so-called Byrd amendment, which allowed the
U.S.A. to import chrome from Rhodesia in the event of shortages of that
strategic raw material. Chrome was readily available on the world market,
especially from the U.S.S.R., although the Soviet chrome was more expensive
than the Rhodesian chrome. In his congressional testimony, Bush whined
at length about the extensive criticism of this declared U.S. policy of
breaching the Rhodesian sanctions on the part of "those who are just using
this to really hammer us from a propaganda standpoint.... We have taken
the rap on this thing," complained Bush. "We have taken the heat on it....
We have taken a great deal of abuse from those who wanted to embarrass
us in Africa, to emphasize the negative and not the positive in the United
Nations." Bush talked of his own efforts at damage control on the issue
of U.S. support for the racist Rhodesian regime: "... what we are trying
to do is to restrict any hypocrisy we are accused of.... I certainly don't
think the U.S. position should be that the Congress was trying to further
colonialism and racism in this action it took," Bush told the congressmen.
"In the U.N., I get the feeling we are categorized as imperialists and
colonialists, and I make clear this is not what America stands for, but
nevertheless it is repeated over and over and over again," he whined. /
Note #2 / Note #7 On the problems of Africa in general, Bush, ever true
to Malthusian form, stressed above all the overpopulation of the continent.
As he told the congressmen: "Population was one of the things I worked
on when I was in the Congress with many people here in this room. It is
something that the U.N. should do. It is something where we are better
served to use a multilateral channel, but it has got to be done efficiently
and effectively. There has [sic] to be some delivery systems. It should
not be studied to death if the American people are going to see that we
are better off to use a multilateral channel and I am convinced we are.
We don't want to be imposing American standards of rate of growth on some
country, but we are saying that if an international community decides it
is worth while to have these programs and education, we want to strongly
support it." / Note #2 / Note #8 Mouthpiece for Kissinger Bush spent just
under two years at the U.N. His tenure coincided with some of the most
monstrous crimes against humanity of the Nixon-Kissinger team, for whom
Bush functioned as an international spokesman, and to whom no Kissinger
policy was too odious to be enthusiatically proclaimed before the international
community and world public opinion. Through this doggedly loyal service,
Bush forged a link with Nixon that would be ephemeral but vital for his
career, while it lasted, and a link with Kissinger that would be decisive
in shaping Bush's own administration in 1988-89. The way in which Bush
set about organizing the anti-Iraq coalition of 1990-91 was decisively
shaped by his United Nations experience. His initial approach to the Security
Council, the types of resolutions that were put forward by the United States,
and the alternation of military escalation with consultations among the
five permanent members of the Security Council -- all this harkened back
to the experience Bush acquired as Kissinger's envoy to the world body.
Notes 15. See Seymour M. Hersh, "The Price of Power" (New York: Summit
Books, 1983), pp. 444 ff. 16. Henry Kissinger, "op. cit.," p. 897. The
general outlines of these remarks were first published in Jack Anderson's
syndicated column, and reprinted in Jack Anderson, "The Anderson Papers"
(New York: Random House, 1973). 17. Anderson, "op. cit.," p. 226. 18. Elmo
Zumwalt, "On Watch" (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1976),
p. 367. 19. Anderson, "op. cit.," pp. 260-61. 20. Kissinger, "op. cit.,"
p. 909. 21. Hersh, "op. cit.," p. 457. 22. Kissinger, "op. cit.," pp. 911-12.
23. See R.C. Gupta, "U.S. Policy Toward India and Pakistan" (Delhi: B.R.
Publishing Corp., 1977), pp. 84 "ff." 24. "Washington Post," July 27, 1972.
25. "Washington Post," Sept. 11, 1972. 26. U.S. House of Representatives,
Joint Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Africa and the Subcommittee on
International Organizations and Movements of the Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Ninety-Second Congress, Second Session, March 1, 1972, (Washington: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 12. 27. House of Representatives,
Joint Hearing, pp. 7, 10-11. 28. House of Representatives, Joint Hearing,
pp. 7-8. CHAPTER 13, Part I CHAIRMAN GEORGE IN WATERGATE In November 1972,
Bush's "most influential patron," Richard Nixon, / Note #1 won reelection
to the White House for a second term in a landslide victory over the McGovern-Shriver
Democratic ticket. Nixon's election victory had proceeded in spite of the
arrest of five White House-linked burglars in the offices of the Democratic
National Committee at the Watergate building in Washington, early on June
17 of the same year. This was the beginning of the infamous Watergate scandal,
which would overshadow and ultimately terminate Nixon's second term in
1974. After the election, Bush received a telephone call informing him
that Nixon wanted to talk to him at the Camp David retreat in the Catoctin
Mountains of Maryland. Bush had been looking to Washington for the inevitable
personnel changes that would be made in preparation for Nixon's second
term. Bush tells us that he was aware of Nixon's plan to reorganize his
cabinet around the idea of a "super cabinet" of top-level, inner cabinet
ministers or "super secretaries" who would work closely with the White
House while relegating the day-to-day functioning of their executive departments
to sub-cabinet deputies. One of the big winners under this plan was scheduled
to be George Shultz, the former Labor Secretary, who was now supposed to
become "S uper" Secretary of the Treasury. Shultz was a Bechtel executive
who went on to be Reagan's second Secretary of State after Al Haig. Bush
and Shultz were future members of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco and
of the Bohemian Grove summer gathering. Bush says he received a call from
Nixon's top domestic aide, John Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman told Bush that George
Shultz wanted to see him before he went on to meet with Nixon at Camp David.
As it turned out, Shultz wanted to offer Bush the post of undersecretary
of the treasury, which would amount to "de facto" administrative control
over the department while Shultz concentrated on his projected super secretary
policy functions. Bush says he thanked Shultz for his "flattering" offer,
took it under consideration, and then pressed on to Camp David. / Note
#2 Bush Takes RNC Chair At Camp David, Bush says that Nixon talked to him
in the following terms: "George, I know that Shultz has talked to you about
the Treasury job, and if that's what you'd like, that's fine with me. However,
the job I really want you to do, the place I really need you, is over at
the National Committee running things. This is an important time forthe
Republican Party, George. We have a chance to build a new coalition in
the next four years, and you're the one who can do it." / Note #3 But this
was not the job that George really wanted. He wanted to be promoted, but
he wanted to continue in the personal retinue of Henry Kissinger. "At first
Bush tried to persuade the President to give him, instead, the number-two
job at the State Department, as deputy to Secretary Henry Kissinger. Foreign
affairs was his top priority, he said. Nixon was cool to this idea, and
Bush capitulated." / Note #4 According to Bush's own account, he asked
Nixon for some time to ponder the offer of the RNC chairmanship. Among
those whom Bush said he consulted on whether or not to accept was Rogers
C.B. Morton, the former congressman whom Nixon had made Secretary of Commerce.
Morton suggested that if Bush wanted to accept, he insist that he continue
as a member of the Nixon cabinet, where, it should be recalled, he had
been sitting since he was named ambassador to the United Nations. Pennsylvania
Senator Hugh Scott, one of the Republican congressional leaders, also advised
Bush to demand to continue on in the cabinet: "Insist on it," Bush recalls
him saying. Bush also consulted Barbara. The story goes that Bar had demanded
that George pledge that the one job he would never take was the RNC post.
But now he wanted to take precisely that post, which appeared to be a political
graveyard. George explained his wimpish obedience to Nixon: "Boy, you can't
turn a President down." / Note #5 Bush then told Ehrlichman that he would
accept, if he could stay on in the cabinet. Nixon approved this condition,
and the era of Chairman George had begun. Of course, making the chairman
of the Republican Party an ex-officio member of the President's cabinet
seems to imply something resembling a one-party state. But George was not
deterred by such difficulties. While he was at the U.N., Bush had kept
his eyes open for the next post on the way up his personal "cursus honorum."
In November of 1971 there was a boomlet for Bush among Texas Republican
leaders who were looking for a candidate to run for governor. / Note #6
Nixon's choice of Bush to head the RNC was announced on December 11, 1972.
The outgoing RNC Chairman was Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, an asset of the
grain cartel, but, in that period, not totally devoid of human qualities.
According to press reports, Nixon palace guard heavies like Haldeman and
Charles W. Colson, later a central Watergate figure, were not happy with
Dole because he would not take orders from the White House. Dole also tended
to function as a conduit for grassroots resistance to White House directives.
In the context of the 1972 campaign, "White House" means specifically Clark
MacGregor's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), one of the protagonists
of the Watergate scandal. / Note #7 Dole was considered remarkable for
his "irreverence" for Nixon: "[H]e joked about the Watergate issue, about
the White House staff and about the management of the Republican convention
with its 'spontaneous demonstrations that will last precisely ten minutes.'|"
/ Note #8 Bush's own account of how he got the RNC post ignores Dole, who
was Bush's most serious rival for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination.
According to Dole's version, he conferred with Nixon about the RNC post
on November 28, and told the President that he would have to quit the RNC
in 1973 in order to get ready to run for reelection in 1974. According
to Dole, it was he who recommended Bush to Nixon. Dole even said that he
had gone to New York to convince Bush to accept the post. Dole sought to
remove any implication that he had been fired by Nixon, and contradicted
"speculation that I went to the mountaintop to be pushed off." What was
clear was that Nixon and his retainers had chosen a replacement for Dole,
whom they expected to be more obedient to the commands of the White House
palace guard. Bush assumed his new post in January 1973, in the midst of
the trial of the Watergate burglars. He sought at once to convey the image
of a pragmatic technocrat. "There's kind of a narrow line between standing
for nothing and imposing one's views," Bush told the press. He stressed
that the RNC would have a lot of money to spend for recruiting candidates,
and that he would personally control this money. "The White House is simply
not going to control the budget," said Bush. "I believe in the importance
of this job and I have confidence I can do it," he added. "I couldn't do
it if I were some reluctant dragon being dragged away from a three-wine
luncheon." / Note #9 Bush inaugurated his new post with a pledge that the
Republican Party, from President Nixon on down, would do "everything we
possibly can" to make sure that the GOP was not involved in political dirty
tricks in the future. "I don't think it is good for politics in this country
and I am sure I am reflecting the President's views on that as head of
the party," intoned Bush in an appearance on "Issues and Answers." / Note
#1 / Note #1 Whether or not Bush lived up to that pledge during his months
at the RNC, and indeed during his later political career, will be sufficiently
answered during the following pages. But now Chairman George, sitting in
Nixon's cabinet with such men as John Mitchell, his eyes fixed on Henry
Kissinger as his lodestar, is about to set sail on the turbulent seas of
the Watergate typhoon. Before we accompany him, we must briefly review
the complex of events lumped together under the heading of "Watergate,"
so that we may then situate Bush's remarkable and bizarre behavior between
January 1973 and August of 1974, when Nixon's fall became the occasion
for yet another Bush attempt to seize the vice-presidency. The Watergate
Coup By the beginning of the 1990s, it has become something of a commonplace
to refer to the complex of events surrounding the fall of Nixon as a coup
d'etat. / Note #1 / Note #2 It was, to be sure, a coup d'etat, but one
whose organizers and beneficiaries most commentators and historians are
reluctant to name, much less to confront. Broadly speaking, Watergate was
a coup d'etat which was instrumental in laying the basis for the specific
new type of authoritarian-totalitarian regime which now rules the United
States. The purpose of the coup was to rearrange the dominant institutions
of the U.S. government so as to enhance their ability to carry out policies
agreeable to the increasingly urgent dictates of the Morgan-Rockefeller-Mellon-Harriman
financier faction. The immediate beneficiaries of the coup have been that
class of technocratic administrators who have held the highest public offices
since the days of the Watergate scandal. It is obvious that George Bush
himself is one of the most prominent of such beneficiaries. As the Roman
playwright Seneca warns us, the one who derives advantage from the crime
is the one most likely to have committed it. The policies of th e Wall
Street investment banking interests named are those of usury and Malthusianism,
stressing the decline of a productive industrial economy in favor of savage
Third World looting and anti-population measures. The changes subsumed
by Watergate included the abolition of government's function as a means
to distribute the rewards and benefits of economic progress among the principal
constituency groups, upon whose support the shifting political coalitions
depended for their success. Henceforth, government would appear as the
means by which the sacrifices and penalties of austerity and declining
standards of living would be imposed on a passive and stupefied population.
The constitutional office of the President was to be virtually destroyed,
and the power of the usurious banking elites above and behind the presidency
was to be radically enhanced. The reason why the Watergate scandal escalated
into the overthrow of Nixon has to do with the international monetary crisis
of those years, and with Nixon's inability to manage the collapse of the
Bretton Woods system and the U.S. dollar in a way satisfactory to the Anglo-American
financial elite. One real-time observer of the events of these years who
emphasized the intimate relation between the international monetary upheavals
on the one hand and the "peripetea" of Nixon on the other was Lyndon LaRouche.
The following comments by LaRouche are excerpted from a July 1973 commentary
on the conjuncture of a revaluation of the deutschemark with John Dean's
testimony before Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate investigating committee:
"Last week's newest up-valuation of the West German D-Mark pushed the inflation-soaked
Nixon Administration one very large step closer toward 'Watergate' impeachment.
Broad bi-partisan support and press enthusiasm for the televised Senate
Select Committee airing of wide-ranging revelations coincides with surging
contempt for the government's handling of international and domestic financial
problems over the past six months." LaRouche went on to point out why the
same financiers and news media who had encouraged a coverup of the Watergate
scandal during 1972 had decided during 1973 to use the break-in and coverup
as a means of overthrowing Nixon: "Then came the January [1973] Paris meeting
of the International Monetary Fund. The world monetary system was glutted
with over $60 billions of inconvertible reserves. The world economy was
technically bankrupt. It was kept out of actual bankruptcy proceedings
throughout 1972 solely by the commitment of the U.S.A. to agree to some
January, 1973 plan by which most of these $60 billions would begin to become
convertible. The leading suggestion was that the excess dollars would be
gradually sopped in exchange for IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). With
some such White House IMF action promised for January, 1973, the financial
world had kept itself more or less wired together by sheer political will
throughout 1972. "Then, into the delicate January Paris IMF sessions stepped
Mr. Nixon's representatives. His delegates proceeded to break up the meeting
with demands for trade and tariff concessions -- a virtual declaration
of trade war. "Promptly, the financial markets registered their reaction
to Mr. Nixon's bungling by plunging into crisis. "To this, Mr. Nixon shortly
responded with devaluation of the dollar, a temporary expedient giving
a very brief breathing-space to get back to the work of establishing dollar
convertibility. Nixon continued his bungling, suggesting that this devaluation
made conditions more favorable for negotiating trade and tariff concessions
-- more trade war. "The financiers of the world weighed Mr. Nixon's wisdom,
and began selling the dollar at still-greater discounts. Through successive
crises, Mr. Nixon continued to speak only of John Connally's Holy Remedies
of trade and tariff concessions. Financiers thereupon rushed substantially
out of all currencies into such hedges as world-wide commodity speculation
on a scale unprecedented in modern history. Still, Mr. Nixon had nothing
to propose on dollar convertibility -- only trade wars. The U.S. domestic
economy exploded into Latin American style inflation. "General commodity
speculation, reflecting a total loss of confidence in all currencies, seized
upon basic agricultural commodities -- among others. Feed prices soared,
driving meat, poultry, and produce costs and prices toward the stratosphere.
"It was during this period, as Nixon's credibility seemed so much less
important than during late 1972, that a sudden rush of enthusiasm developed
for the moral sensibilities of Chairman Sam Ervin's Senate Select Committee."
/ Note #1 / Note #3 As LaRouche points out, it was the leading Anglo-American
financier factions which decided to dump Nixon, and availed themselves
of the preexisting Watergate affair in order to reach their goal. The financiers
were able to implement their decision all the more easily, thanks to the
numerous operatives of the intelligence community who had been embedded
within the Plumbers from the moment of their creation in response to an
explicit demand coming from George Bush's personal mentor, Henry Kissinger.
Watergate included the option of rapid steps in the direction of a dictatorship,
not so much of the military as of the intelligence community and the law
enforcement agencies, acting as executors of the will of the Wall Street
circles indicated. We must recall that the backdrop for Watergate had been
provided first of all by the collapse of the international monetary system,
as made official by Nixon's austerity decrees imposing a wage and price
freeze starting on the fateful day of August 15, 1971. What followed was
an attempt to run the entire U.S. economy under the top-down diktat of
the Pay Board and the Price Commission. This economic state of emergency
was then compounded by the artificial oil shortages orchestrated by the
companies of the international oil cartel during late 1973 and 1974, all
in the wake of Kissinger's October 1973 Middle East War and the Arab oil
boycott. In August 1974, when Gerald Ford decided to make Nelson Rockefeller,
and not George Bush, his vice president-designate, he was actively considering
further executive orders to declare a new economic state of emergency.
Such colossal economic dislocations had impelled the new Trilateral Commission
and such theorists as Samuel Huntington to contemplate the inherent ungovernability
of democracy and the necessity of beginning a transition toward forms that
would prove more durable under conditions of aggravated economic breakdown.
Ultimately, much to the disappointment of George Bush, whose timetable
of boundless personal ambition and greed for power had once again surged
ahead of what his peers of the ruling elite were prepared to accept, the
perspectives for a more overtly dictatorial form of regime came to be embodied
in the figure of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Skeptics will point
to the humiliating announcement, made by President Ford within the context
of his 1975 "Halloween massacre" reshuffle of key posts, that Rockefeller
would not be considered for the 1976 vice-presidential nomination. But
Rockefeller, thanks to the efforts of Sarah Jane Moore and Lynette "Squeaky"
Fromme, each of whom attempted to assassinate Ford, had already come very
close to the Oval Office on two separate occasions. Ford himself was reputedly
one of the most exalted freemasons ever to occupy the presidency. Preponderant
power during the last years of Nixon and during the Ford years was in any
case exercised by Henry Kissinger, the de facto President. The preserving
of constitutional form and ritual as a hollow facade behind which to realize
practices more and more dictatorial in their substance was a typical pragmatic
adaptation made possible by the ability of the financiers to engineer the
slow and gradual decline of the economy, avoiding upheavals of popular
protest. But in retrospect, there can be no doubt that Watergate was a
coup d'etat, a creeping and muffled cold coup in the institutions which
has extended its consequences over almost two dec ades. Among contemporary
observers, the one who grasped this significance most lucidly in the midst
of the events themselves was Lyndon LaRouche, who produced a wealth of
journalistic and analytical material during 1973 and 1974. The roots of
the administrative fascism of the Reagan and Bush years are to be found
in the institutional tremors and changed power relations set off by the
banal farce of the Watergate break-in. Hollywood's Watergate In the view
of the dominant school of pro-regime journalism, the essence of the Watergate
scandal lies in the illegal espionage and surveillance activity of the
White House covert operations team, the so-called Plumbers, who are alleged
to have been caught during an attempt to burglarize the offices of the
Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building near the
Potomac. The supposed goal of the break-in was to filch information and
documents while planting bugs. According to the official legend of the
"Washington Post" and Hollywood, Nixon and his retainers responded to the
arrest of the burglars by compounding their original crime with obstruction
of justice and all of the abuses of a coverup. Then, the "Washington Post"
journalists Bob Woodward and CarlBernstein, dedicated partisans of the
truth, blew the story open with the help of Woodward's mysterious source,
Deep Throat, setting into motion the investigation of the Senate committee
under Sam Ervin, leading to impeachment proceedings by Rep. Peter Rodino's
House Judiciary Committee which ultimately forced Nixon to resign. The
received interpretation of the salient facts of the Watergate episode is
a fantastic and grotesque distortion of historical truth. Even the kind
of cursory examination of the facts in Watergate which we can permit ourselves
within the context of a biography of Watergate figure George Bush will
reveal that the actions which caused the fall of Nixon cannot be reduced
to the simplistic account just summarized. There is, for example, the question
of the infiltration of the White House staff and of the Plumbers themselves
by members and assets of the intelligence community whose loyalty was not
to Nixon, but to the Anglo-American financier elite. This includes the
presence among the
Plumbers of numerous assets of the Central Intelligence
Agency, and specifically of the CIA bureaus traditionally linked to George
Bush, such as the Office of Security-Security Research Staff and the Miami
Station with its pool of Cuban operatives. Who Paid the Plumbers? The Plumbers
were created at the demand of Henry Kissinger, who told Nixon that something
had to be done to stop leaks in the wake of the "Pentagon Papers" affair
of 1971. But if the Plumbers were called into existence by Kissinger, they
were funded through a mechanism set up by Kissinger clone George Bush.
A salient fact about the White House Special Investigations Unit (or Plumbers)
of 1971-72 is that the money used to finance it was provided by George
Bush's business partner and lifelong intimate friend, Bill Liedtke, the
president of Pennzoil. Bill Liedtke was a regional finance chairman for
the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972, and he was one of the most successful.
Liedtke says that he accepted this post as a personal favor to George Bush.
In 1972, Bill Liedtke raised $700,000 in anonymous contributions, including
what appears to have been a single contribution of $100,000 that was laundered
through a bank account in Mexico. According to Harry Hurt, part of this
money came from Bush's bosom crony Robert Mosbacher, now Secretary of Commerce.
According to one account, "two days before a new law was scheduled to begin
making anonymous donations illegal, the $700,000 in cash, checks, and securities
was loaded into a briefcase at Pennzoil headquarters and picked up by a
company vice president, who boarded a Washington-bound Pennzoil jet and
delivered the funds to the Committee to Re-Elect the President at ten o'clock
that night." / Note #1 / Note #4 These Mexican checks were turned over
first to Maurice Stans of the CREEP, who transferred them in turn to Watergate
burglar Gordon Liddy. Liddy passed them on to Bernard Barker, one of the
Miami station Cubans arrested on the night of the final Watergate break-in.
Barker was actually carrying some of the cash left over from these checks
when he was apprehended. When Barker was arrested, his bank records were
subpoenaed by the Dade County, Florida district attorney, Richard E. Gerstein,
and were obtained by Gerstein's chief investigator, Martin Dardis. As Dardis
told Carl Bernstein of the "Washington Post," about $100,000 in four cashier's
checks had been issued in Mexico City by Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre, a prominent
lawyer who handled Stans's money-laundering operation there. / Note #1
/ Note #5 Liedtke eventually appeared before three grand juries investigating
the different aspects of the Watergate affair, but neither he nor Pennzoil
was ever brought to trial for the CREEP contributions. But it is a matter
of more than passing interest that the money for the Plumbers came from
one of Bush's intimates and, at the request of Bush, a member of the Nixon
cabinet from February 1971 on. The U.S. House of Representatives Banking
and Currency Committee, chaired by Texas Democrat WrightPatman, soon began
a vigorous investigation of the money financing the break-in, large amounts
of which were found as cash in the pockets of the burglars. Patman confirmed
that the largest amount of the funds going into the Miami bank account
of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, a CIA operative since the Bay of Pigs
invasion, was the $100,000 sent in by Texas CREEP chairman William Liedtke,
longtime business partner of George Bush. The money was sent from Houston
down to Mexico, where it was "laundered" to eliminate its accounting trail.
It then came back to Barker's account as four checks totaling $89,000 and
$11,000 in cash. A smaller amount, an anonymous $25,000 contribution, was
sent in by Minnesota CREEP officer Kenneth Dahlberg in the form of a cashier's
check. Patman relentlessly pursued the true sources of this money, as the
best route to the truth about who ran the break-in, and for what purpose.
CREEP National Chairman Maurice Stans
later described the situation just
after the burglars were arrested as made dangerous by "... Congressman
Wright Patman and several of his political hatchet men working on the staff
of the House Banking and Currency Committee. Without specific authorization
by his committee, Patman announced that he was going to investigate the
Watergate matter, using as his entry the banking transactions of the Dahlberg
and Mexican checks. In the guise of covering that ground, he obviously
intended to roam widely, and he almost did, but his own committee, despite
its Democratic majority, eventually stopped him." These are the facts that
Patman had established -- before "his own committee ... stopped him." The
anonymous Minnesota $25,000 had in fact been provided to Dahlberg by Dwayne
Andreas, chief executive of the Archer Daniels Midland grain trading company.
The Texas $100,000, sent by Liedtke, in fact came from Robert H. Allen,
a mysterious nuclear weapons materials executive. Allen was chairman of
Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation in Houston. His company controlled
half the world's supply of lithium, an essential component of hydrogen
bombs. On April 3, 1972 (75 days before the Watergate arrests), $100,000
was transferred by telephone from a bank account of Gulf Resources and
Chemical Corp. into a Mexico City account of an officially defunct subsidiary
of Gulf Resources. Gulf Resources' Mexican lawyer, Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre,
withdrew it and sent back to Houston the package of four checks and cash,
which Liedtke forwarded for the CIA burglars. / Note #1 / Note #6 Robert
H. Allen was Texas CREEP's chief financial officer, while Bush partner
William Liedtke was overall chairman. But what did Allen represent? In
keeping with its strategic nuclear holdings, Allen's Gulf Resources was
a kind of committee of the main components of the London-New York oligarchy.
Formed in the late 1960s, Gulf Resources had taken over the New York-based
Lithium Corporation of America. The president of this subsidiary was Gulf
Resources Executive Vice President Harry D. Feltenstein, Jr. John Roger
Menke, a director of both Gulf Resources and Lithium Corp., was also a
consultant and director of the United Nuclear Corporation, and a director
of the Hebrew Technical Institute. The ethnic background of the Lithium
subsidiary is of interest due to Israel's known preoccupation with developing
a nuclear weapons arsenal. Another Gulf Resources and Lithium Corp. director
was Minnesotan Samuel H. Rogers, who was also a director of Dwayne Andreas's
Archer Daniels Midland Corp. Andreas was a large financial backer of the
"Zionist lobby" through the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'nith. Gulf
Resources Chairman Robert H. Allen received the "Torch of Liberty" award
of the Anti-Defamation League in 1982. Allen was a white Anglo-Saxon conservative.
No credible reason for this award was supplied to the press, and the ADL
stated their satisfaction that Mr. Allen's financing of the Watergate break-in
was simply a mistake, now in the distant past. >From the beginning of Gulf
Resources, there was always a representative on its board of New York's
Bear Stearns firm, >whose partner Jerome Kohlberg, Jr., pioneered leveraged
buyouts and merged with Bush's Henry Kravis. The most prestigious board
member of Allen's Gulf Resources was George A. Butler, otherwise the chairman
of Houston's Post Oak Bank. Butler represented the ultra-secretive W. S.
("Auschwitz") Farish III, confidant of George Bush and U.S. host of Queen
Elizabeth. Farish was the founder and controlling owner of Butler's Post
Oak Bank, and was chairman of the bank's executive committee as of 1988.
/ Note #1 / Note #7 A decade after Watergate, it was revealed that the
Hunt family had controlled about 15 percent of Gulf Resources shares. This
Texas oil family hired George Bush in 1977 to be the executive committee
chairman of their family enterprise, the First International Bank in Houston.
In the 1980s, Ray Hunt secured a massive oil contract with the ruler of
North Yemen under the sponsorship of then-Vice President Bush. Ray Hunt
continues in the 1991-92 presidential campaign as George Bush's biggest
Texas financial angel. Here, in this one powerful Houston corporation,
we see early indications of the alliance of George Bush with the "Zionist
lobby" -- an alliance which for political reasons the Bush camp wishes
to keep covert. These, then, are the Anglo-American moguls whose money
paid for the burglary of the Watergate Hotel. It was their money that Richard
Nixon was talking about on the famous "smoking gun" tape which lost him
the presidency. The Investigation Is Derailed On Oct. 3, 1972, the House
Banking and Currency Committee voted 20-15 against Chairman Wright Patman's
investigation. The vote prevented the issuance of 23 subpoenas for CREEP
officials to come to Congress to testify. The margin of protection to the
moguls was provided by six Democratic members of the committee who voted
with the Republicans against Chairman Patman. As CREEP Chairman Maurice
Stans put it, "There were ... indirect approaches to Democratic [committee]
members. An all-out campaign was conducted to see that the investigation
was killed off, as it successfully was." / Note #1 / Note #8 Certain elements
of this infamous "campaign" are known. Banking Committee member Frank Brasco,
a liberal Democratic congressman from New York, voted to stop the probe.
New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had arranged a meeting between Brasco
and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell. Brasco had been a target of a
Justice Department investigation for alleged fraud and bribery since 1970,
and Mitchell successfully warned Brasco not to back Patman. Later, in 1974,
Brasco was convicted of bribery. Before Watergate, both John Mitchell and
Henry Kissinger had FBI reports implicating California Congressman Richard
Hanna in the receipt of illegal campaign contributions from the Korean
Central Intelligence Agency. Hanna surprised Patman by voting against the
investigation. Hanna was later (1978) convicted for his role in the Koreagate
scandal in 1978. The secretary of Congressman William Chappell complained
in 1969 that the Florida Democrat had forced her to kick back some of her
salary. The Justice Department, holding this information, had declined
to prosecute. Chappell, a member of the Banking Committee, voted to stop
Patman's investigation. Kentucky Democratic Congressman William Curlin,
Jr. revealed in 1973 that "certain members of the committee were reminded
of various past political indiscretions, or of relatives who might suffer
as a result of [a] pro-subpoena vote." The Justice Department worked overtime
to smear Patman, including an attempt to link him to "Communist agents"
in Greece. / Note #1 / Note #9 The day before the committee vote, the Justice
Department released a letter to Patman claiming that any congressional
investigation would compromise the rights of the accused Watergate burglars
before their trial. House Republican leader Gerald Ford led the attack
on Patman from within the Congress. Though he later stated his regrets
for this vicious campaign, his eventual reward was the U.S. presidency.
Canceling the Patman probe meant that there would be no investigation of
Watergate before the 1972 presidential election. The "Washington Post"
virtually ended reference to the Watergate affair, and spoke of Nixon's
opponent, George McGovern, as unqualified for the presidency. The Republican
Party was handed another four-year administration. Bush, Kissinger, Rockefeller
and Ford were the gainers. But then Richard Nixon became the focus of all
Establishment attacks for Watergate, while the money trail that Patman
had pursued was forgotten. Wright Patman was forced out of his committee
chairmanship in 1974. On the day Nixon resigned the presidency, Patman
wrote to Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asking
him not to stop investigating Watergate. Though Patman died in 1976, his
advice still holds good. The CIA Plumbers As the late FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover told the journalist Andrew Tully in the days before June 1972, "By
God, he's [Nixon's] got some former CIA men working for him that I'd kick
out of my office. Someday, that bunch will serve him up a fine mess." /
Note #2 / Note #0 The CIA men in question were among the Plumbers, a unit
allegedly created in the first place to stanch the flow of leaks, including
the Jack Anderson material about such episodes as the December 1971 brush
with nuclear war discussed above. Leading Plumbers included retired high
officials of the CIA. Plumber and Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt had
been a GS-15 CIA staff officer; he had played a role in the 1954 toppling
of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and later had been one of
the planners in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. After the failure of
the Bay of Pigs, Hunt is thought to have been a part of the continuing
CIA attempts to assassinate Castro, code-named Operation Mongoose, ongoing
at the time of the Kennedy assassination. All of this puts him in the thick
of the CIA Miami station. One of Hunt's close personal friends was Howard
Osborne, an official of the CIA Office of Security who was the immediate
superior of James McCord. In the spring of 1971 Hunt went to Miami to recruit
from among the Cubans the contingent of Watergate burglars, including Bernard
Barker, Eugenio Martinez, and the rest. This was two months before the
publication of the "Pentagon Papers," leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, provided
Kissinger with the pretext he needed to get Nixon to initiate what would
shortly become the Plumbers. Another leading Watergate burglar was James
McCord, a former top official of the CIA Office of Security, the agency
bureau which is supposed to maintain contacts with U.S. police agencies
in order to facilitate its basic task of providing security for CIA installations
and personnel. The Office of Security was thus heavily implicated in the
CIA's illegal domestic operations, including "Cointelpro" operations against
political dissidents and groups, and was the vehicle for such mind-control
experiments as Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK-Ultra. The Office
of Security also utilized male and female prostitutes and other sex operatives
for purposes of compromising and blackmailing public figures, information
gathering, and control. According to Hougan, the Office of Security maintained
a "fag file" of some 300,000 U.S. citizens, with heavy stress on homosexuals.
The Office of Security also had responsibility for Soviet and other defectors.
James McCord was at one time responsible for the physical security of all
CIA premises in the U.S. McCord was also a close friend of CIA Counterintelligence
Director James Jesus Angleton. McCord was anxious to cover the CIA's role;
at one point he wrote to his superior, General Gaynor, urging him to "flood
the newspapers with leaks or anonymous letters" to discredit those who
wanted to establish the responsibility of "the company." / Note #2 / Note
#1 But according to one of McCord's own police contacts, Garey Bittenbender
of the Washington, D.C. Police Intelligence Division, who recognized him
after his arrest, McCord had averred to him that the Watergate break-ins
had been "a CIA operation," an account which McCord heatedly denied later.
/ Note #2 / Note #2 The third leader of the Watergate burglars, G. Gordon
Liddy, had worked for the FBI and the Treasury. Liddy's autobiography,
"Will," published in 1980, and various statements show that Liddy's world
outlook had a number of similarities with that of George Bush: He was,
for example, obsessed with the maintenance and transmission of his "family
gene pool." Another key member of the Plumbers unit was John Paisley, who
functioned as the official CIA liaison to the White House investigative
unit. It was Paisley who assumed responsibility for the overall "leak analysis,"
that is to say, for defining the problem of unauthorized divulging of classified
material which the Plumbers were supposed to combat. Paisley, along with
Howard Osborne of the Office of Security, met with the Plumbers, led by
Kissinger operative David Young, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia
on August 9, 1971. Paisley's important place on the Plumbers' roster is
most revealing, since Paisley was later to become an important appointee
of CIA Director George Bush. In the middle of 1976, Bush decided to authorize
a group of experts, ostensibly from outside the CIA, to produce an analysis
which would be compared with the CIA's own National Intelligence Estimates
on Soviet capabilities and intentions. The panel of outside experts was
given the designation of "Team B." Bush chose Paisley to be the CIA's "coordinator"
of the three subdivisions of Team B. Paisley would later disappear while
sailing on Chesapeake Bay in September of 1978. In a White House memorandum
by David Young summarizing the August 9, 1971 meeting between the Plumbers
and the official CIA leaders, we find that Young "met with Howard Osborn
and a Mr. Paisley to review what it was that we wanted CIA to do in connection
with their files on leaks from January 1969 to the present." There then
follows a 14-point list of leaks and their classification, including the
frequency of leaks associated with certain journalists, the gravity of
the leaks, and so forth. A data base was called for, and "it was decided
that Mr. Paisley would get this done by next Monday, August 16, 1971."
On areas where more clarification was needed, the memo noted, "the above
questions should be reviewed with Paisley within the next two days." /
Note #2 / Note #3 The lesser Watergate burglars came from the ranks of
the CIA Miami station Cubans: Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, Felipe
de Diego, Frank Surgis, Virgilio Gonzalez and Reinaldo Pico. Once they
had started working for Hunt, Martinez asked the Miami station chief, Jake
Esterline, if he was familiar with the activities now being carried out
under White House cover. Esterline in turn asked Langley for its opinion
of Hunt's White House position. A reply was written by Cord Meyer, later
openly profiled as a Bush admirer, to Deputy Director for Plans (that is
to say, covert operations) Thomas Karamessines. The import of Meyer's directions
to Esterline was that the latter should "not ... concern himself with the
travels of Hunt in Miami, that Hunt was on domestic White House business
of an unknown nature and that the Chief of Station should 'cool it.'|"
/ Note #2 / Note #4 Notes for Chapter 13 1. Fitzhugh Green, "George Bush:
An Intimate Portrait" (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 137. 2. George
Bush and Victor Gold, "Looking Forward" (New York: Doubleday, 1987), pp.
120-21. 3. "Ibid.," p. 121. 4. Green, "op. cit.," p. 129. 5. Harry Hurt
III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," in "Texas Monthly," June 1983. 6. "Dallas
Morning News," Nov. 25, 1971. 7. "Washington Post," Dec. 12, 1972. 8. "Ibid."
9. "Washington Post," Jan. 22, 1973. 11. "Washington Post," Jan. 22, 1973.
12. See for example Len Cholodny and Robert Gettlin, "Silent Coup" (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). 13. Lyn Marcus, "Up-Valuation of German
Mark Fuels Watergate Attack on Nixon," "New Solidarity," July 9-13, 1973,
pp. 10-11. 14. See Thomas Petzinger, "Oil and Honor" (New York: Putnam,
1987), pp. 64-65. See also Harry Hurt's article mentioned above. Wright
Patman's House Banking Committee revealed part of the activities of Bill
Liedtke and Mosbacher during the Watergate era. 15. Carl Bernstein and
Bob Woodward, "All the President's Men" (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1974), present the checks received by Barker as one of the ways they breached
the wall of secrecy around the CREEP, with the aid of their anonymous source
"Bookkeeper." But neither in this book nor in "The Final Days" (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1976), do "Woodstein" get around to mentioning that
the Mexico City money came from Bill Liedtke. This marked pattern of silence
and reticence on matters pertaining to George Bush, certainly one of the
most prominent of the President's men, is a characteristic of Watergate
journalism in general. For more information regarding William Liedtke's
role in financing the CREEP, see Hearings Before the Select Committee on
Presidential Campaign Activities, 93rd Congress, including testimony by
Hugh Sloan, June 6, 1973; and by Maurice Stans, June 12, 1973; see also
the Final Report of the committee, issued in June, 1974. Relevant press
coverage from the period includes "Stans Scathes Report," by Woodward and
Bernstein, "Washington Post," Sept. 14, 1972; and "Liedtke Linked to FPC
Choice," United Press International, June 26, 1973. Liedtke also influenced
Nixon appointments in areas of interest to himself. 16. "New York Times,"
Aug. 26, 1972 and Nov. 1, 1972. 17. Interview with a Post Oak Bank executive,
Nov. 21, 1991. See also "Houston Post," Dec. 27, 1988. 18. Maurice H. Stans,
"The Terrors of Justice: The Untold Side of Watergate" (New York: Everest,
1978). 19. Stanley L. Kutler, "The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of
Richard Nixon" (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1990), pp.
229-33. 20. See Jim Hougan, "Secret Agenda" (New York: Random House, 1984),
p. 92. 21. Ervin Committee Hearings, Book 9, pp. 3441-46, and Report of
the Nedzi Committee of the House of Representatives, p. 201, cited by Hougan,
"op. cit.," p. 318. 22. Nezdi Committee Report, pp. 442-43, quoted in Hougan,
"op. cit.," p. 261. 23. Hougan, "op. cit.," pp. 46-47. 24. Ervin Committee
Final Report, pp. 1146-49, and Hougan, "op. cit.," pp. 131-32. Chapter
13 Part 2 CHAIRMAN GEORGE IN WATERGATE During the spring of 1973, George
Bush was no longer simply a long-standing member of the Nixon cabinet.
He was also, de facto, a White House official, operating out of the same
Old Executive Office Building, which is adjacent to the Executive Mansion
and forms part of the same security compound. As we read in the Jack Anderson
column for March 10, 1973, in the "Washington Post": "Republican National
Chairman George Bush, as befitting the head of a party whose coffers are
overflowing, has been provided with a plush office in the new Eisenhower
Building here. He spends much of his time, however, in a government office
next to the White House. When we asked how a party official rated a government
office, a GOP spokesman explained that the office wasn't assigned to him
but was merely a visitor's office. The spokesman admitted, however, that
Bush spends a lot of time there." This means that Bush's principal office
was in the building where Nixon most liked to work; Nixon had what was
called his "hideaway" office in the Old Executive Office Building. As to
the state of George's relations with Nixon at this time, we have the testimony
of a "Yankee Republican" who had known and liked father Prescott, as cited
by journalist Al Reinert: "I can't think of a man I've ever known for whom
I have greater respect than Pres Bush ... I've always been kind of sorry
his son turned out to be such a jerk. George has been kissing Nixon's ass
ever since he came up here." / Note #2 / Note #5 Reinert comments that
"when Nixon became president, Bush became a teacher's pet," "a presidential
favorite, described in the press as one of 'Nixon's men.'|" Bush's Role
On the surface, George was an ingratiating sycophant. But he dissembled.
The Nixon White House would seem to have included at least one highly placed
official who betrayed his President to Bob Woodward of the "Washington
Post," making it possible for that newspaper to repeatedly outflank Nixon's
attempts at stonewalling. This was the celebrated, and still anonymous,
source Woodward called "Deep Throat." Al Haig has often been accused of
having been the figure of the Nixon White House who provided Woodward and
Bernstein with their leads. If there is any consensus about the true identity
of Deep Throat, it would appear to be that Al Haig is the prime suspect.
However, there is no conclusive evidence about the true identity of the
person or persons called Deep Throat, assuming that such a phenomenon ever
existed. As soon as Haig is named, we must become suspicious: The propaganda
of the Bush networks has never been kind to Haig. Haig and Bush, as leading
clones of Henry Kissinger, were locked on a number of occasions into a
kind of sibling rivalry. On the one hand, it cannot be proven that Haig
was Deep Throat. On the other hand, George Bush has frequently escaped
any scrutiny in this regard. It may therefore be useful, as a kind of "reductio
ad absurdum" permitting us a fresh approach to certain long-standing Watergate
enigmas, to ask the question: Could Bush have been Deep Throat? Or, could
Bush have been one part of a composite of sources which Woodward has chosen
to popularize as his legendary Deep Throat? Or, could Bush have been a
source who chose to use Deep Throat as his cut-out? The novelty of Bush
as Deep Throat is not due to any objective circumstance, but rather to
the selective omissions of sources, journalists, press organs, publishers,
and editors, none of whom is immune to the influence of the Skull and Bones/Brown
Brothers, Harriman powerhouse we have already seen in action so many times.
Some years after Nixon's fall, "Time" magazine listed what it considered
to be the possible sources for the leaks attributed by "Woodstein" to Deep
Throat. These were: Richard Nixon, Rose Mary Woods, Alexander Haig, Charles
Colson, Stephen Bull, Fred Buzhardt, Leonard Garment, and Samuel Powers.
/ Note #2 / Note #6 Woodward and Bernstein do not list Bush among the Cast
of Characters in "All the President's Men," although he was a member of
the Nixon cabinet. In these authors' later book, "The Final Days," he does
appear. But the exclusion of Bush from the list of suspects is arbitrary
and highly suspicious, especially on the part of "Time" magazine, founded
by Henry Luce of Skull and Bones. Discounting the coverups, both crude
and sophisticated, we can state that Bush is a plausible candidate to be
Deep Throat, or to be one of his voices if these should prove to be multiple.
What intimate of Nixon, what cabinet member and quasi-White House official
had a better line of communication to the Wall Street investment banking
circles who were the prime movers of the overthrow of Nixon? Who had a
better working relationship with Henry Kissinger, the chief immediate beneficiary
of Nixon's downfall? Who had links to the dirty tricks and black operations
divisions of the CIA, especially to the Miami station? Whose business partner
and cronies had financed the CREEP? And who could count on the loyalty
of a far-flung freemasonic network ensconced in positions of power in the
media, the courts, the executive branch, the Congress, and law enforcement
agencies? Surely Bush is more than a plausible candidate; by any realistic
reckoning, he is a formidable candidate. In terms of the immediate tactical
mechanics of the Watergate scandal, Bush possessed undeniable trump cards.
The first was his long-standing family and business relationship with the
owners of the "Washington Post," the flagship news organ of the scandal.
The paper was controlled by Katherine Meyer Graham, and both her father,
Eugene Meyer, and her late husband, Philip Graham, had been among the investers
of the Bush-Overbey oil firm in 1951-52. With Eugene Meyer, Bush says,
he "had other oil-business dealings over the years, most of them profitable,
all enjoyable." / Note #2 / Note #7 In addition, there are a few details
of the personal background of reporter Bob Woodward which may suggest a
covert link to Chairman George. Woodward was a naval intelligence officer
with a government security clearance of the highest level ("top secret
crypto"). He was specifically one of the briefers sent by the Joint Chiefs
of Staff to provide verbal intelligence and operational summaries for top
officials, including those of the National Security Council. Woodward was
also, like Bush, a graduate of Yale, where he took his degree in 1965.
Also like Bush, Woodward had been a member of a Yale secret society. Woodward
had not been tapped for Skull and Bones, however; he had joined Book and
Snake, thought to be among the four most prestigious of these masonic institutions.
Book and Snake, like Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head, functions as a satellite
of Skull and Bones, receiving as members the best young oligarchs not culled
by Skull and Bones. Dean Acheson, of Wolf's Head, for example, was an asset
of the political-financial faction headed up by Averell Harriman of Skull
and Bones. Some delving into the details of the Deep Throat-Woodward relationship
may further substantiate the Bush candidacy. If we wish literally to believe
what Woodward recounts, we obtain the following picture of his contacts
with Deep Throat. First we have a series of telephone contacts between
June 19 and October 8, 1972. Even if we posit that Bush was busily fulfilling
his diplomatic commitments in New York City on the days when he was not
attending cabinet meetings in Washington, there is no practical reason
why Bush could not have provided the tips Woodward describes. Then we have
the legendary late-night garage meetings, starting Monday, October 9, 1972,
and repeated on Saturday, October 21, and Friday, October 27, with a further
likely garage meeting in late December. Since all of these but the first
were on weekends, there is no reason to conclude that they could not have
been accommodated within Bush's U.N. schedule. Any time after December
12, 1972 (the date Bush's GOP appointment was announced), his presence
in Washington would have fit easily into the reorientation of his work
schedule toward his new job at the White House. A garage meeting in January
1973, a bar meeting in February, phone calls in April, another garage meeting
in May, and a further one in November -- none of this would have presented
any difficulty. What does Woodward tell us about Deep Throat? "The man's
position in the Executive Branch was extremely sensitive." "Deep Throat
had access to information from the White House, Justice, the FBI and CRP.
What he knew represented an aggregate of hard information flowing in and
out of many stations." He was someone whom Woodward had known for some
time : "His friendship with Deep Throat was genuine, not cultivated. Long
before Watergate, they had spent many evenings talking about Washington,
the government, power." / Note #2 / Note #8 Deep Throat was a man who "could
be rowdy, drink too much, overreach. He was not good at concealing his
feelings, hardly ideal for a man in his position." Could this be the precursor
of the Bush of Panama, the Gulf, and civil rights controversies, unable
to suppress periodic episodes of public rage? Perhaps. We also learn from
Woodward that Deep Throat was "an incurable gossip." Perhaps this can be
related to Bush's talent as a mimic, described by Fitzhugh Green. / Note
#2 / Note #9 It was on May 16, 1973 Deep Throat told Woodward: "Everyone's
life is in danger." He added that "electronic surveillance is going on
and we had better watch it." Who is doing it? Bernstein asked. "CIA," was
Woodward's reply. Woodward typed a summary of Deep Throat's further remarks,
including these comments: "The covert activities involve the whole U.S.
intelligence community and are incredible.
Deep Throat refused to give
specifics because it is against the law. The cover-up had little to do
with the Watergate, but was mainly to protect the covert operations." /
Note #3 / Note #0 Butwh at were the covert operations to which Deep Throat
so dramatically refers? Enter Lou Russell One of the major sub-plots of
Watergate, and one that will eventually lead us back to the documented
public record of George Bush, is the relation of the various activities
of the Plumbers to the wiretapping of a group of prostitutes who operated
out of a brothel in the Columbia Plaza Apartments, located in the immediate
vicinity of the Watergate buildings. / Note #3 / Note #1 Among the customers
of the prostitutes there appear to have been a U.S. Senator, an astronaut,
A Saudi prince (the Embassy of Saudi Arabia is nearby), U.S. and South
Korean intelligence officials, and above all, numerous Democratic Party
leaders whose presence can be partially explained by the propinquity of
the Democratic National Committe offices in the Watergate. The Columbia
Plaza Apartments brothel was under intense CIA surveillance by the Office
of Security/Security Research Staff through one of their assets, an aging
private detective out of the pages of Damon Runyon who went by the name
of Louis James Russell. Russell was, according to Hougan, especially interested
in bugging a hotline phone that linked the DNC with the nearby brothel.
During the Watergate break-ins, James McCord's recruit to the Plumbers,
Alfred C. Baldwin, would appear to have been bugging the telephones of
the Columbia Plaza brothel. Lou Russell, in the period between June 20
and July 2, 1973, was working for a detective agency that was helping George
Bush prepare for an upcoming press conference. In this sense, Russell was
working for Bush. Russell is relevant because he seems (although he denied
it) to have been the fabled sixth man of the Watergate break-in, the burglar
who got away. He may also have been the burglar who tipped off the police,
if indeed anyone did. Russell was a harlequin who had been the servant
of many masters. Lou Russell had once been the chief investigator for the
House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had worked for the FBI. He
had been a stringer for Jack Anderson, the columnist. In December 1971,
he had been an employee of General Security Services, the company that
provided the guards who protected the Watergate buildings. In March of
1972, Russell had gone to work for James McCord and McCord Associates,
whose client was the CREEP. Later, after the scandal had broken, Russell
worked for McCord's new and more successful firm, Security Associates.
Russell had also worked directly for the CREEP as a night watchman. Russell
had also worked for John Leon of Allied Investigators, Inc., a company
that later went to work for George Bush and the Republican National Committee.
Still later, Russell found a job with the headquarters of the McGovern
for President campaign. Russell's lawyer was Bud Fensterwald, and sometimes
Russell performed investigative services for Fensterwald and for Fensterwald's
Committee to Investigate Assassinations. In September 1972, well after
the scandal had become notorious, Russell seems to have joined with one
Nick Beltrante in carrying out electronic countermeasures sweeps of the
DNC headquarters, and during one of these he appears to have planted an
electronic eavesdropping device in the phone of DNC worker Spencer Oliver
which, when it was discovered, refocused public attention on the Watergate
scandal at the end of the summer of 1972. Russell was well acquainted with
Carmine Bellino, the chief investigator on the staff of Sam Ervin's Senate
Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Practices. Bellino was a Kennedy
operative who had superintended the seamy side of the JFK White House,
including such figures as Judith Exner, the President's alleged paramour.
Later, Bellino would become the target of George Bush's most revealing
public action during the Watergate period. Bellino's friend, William Birely,
later provided Russell with an apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, a
new car, and sums of money. Russell had been a heavy drinker, and his social
circle was that of the prostitutes, whom he sometimes patronized and sometimes
served as a bouncer and goon. His familiarity with the brothel milieu facilitated
his service for the Office of Security, which was to oversee the bugging
and other surveillance of Columbia Plaza and other locations. Lou Russell
was incontestably one of the most fascinating figures of Watergate. How
remarkable, then, that the indefatigable ferrets Woodward and Bernstein
devoted so little attention to him, deeming him worthy of mention in neither
of their two books. Woodward and Bernstein met with Russell, but had ostensibly
decided that there was "nothing to the story." Woodward claims to have
seen nothing in Russell beyond the obvious "old drunk." / Note #3 / Note
#2 The FBI had questioned Russell after the DNC break-ins, probing his
whereabouts on June 16-17 with the suspicion that he had indeed been one
of the burglars. But this questioning led to nothing. Instead, Russell
was contacted by Carmine Bellino, and later by Bellino's broker Birely,
who set Russell up in the new apartment (or safe house) already mentioned,
where one of the Columbia Plaza prostitutes moved in with him. By 1973,
minority Republican staffers at the Ervin committee began to realize the
importance of Russell to a revisionist account of the scandal that might
exonerate Nixon to some extent by shifting the burden of guilt elsewhere.
On May 9, 1973, the Ervin committee accordingly subpoenaed Russell's telephone,
job, and bank records. Two days later, Russell replied to the committee
that he had no job records or diaries, had no bank account, made long-distance
calls only to his daughter, and could do nothing for the committee. On
May 16-17, Deep Throat warned Woodward that "everybody's life is in danger."
On May 18, while the staff of the Ervin committee were pondering their
next move vis-a-vis Russell, Russell suffered a massive heart attack. This
was the same day that McCord, advised by his lawyer and Russell's, Fensterwald,
began his public testimony to the Ervin committee on the coverup. Russell
was taken to Washington Adventist Hospital, where he recovered to some
degree and convalesced until June 20. Russell was convinced that he had
been the victim of an attempted assassination. He told his daughter after
leaving the hospital that he believed that he had been poisoned, that someone
had entered his apartment and "switched pills on me." / Note #3 / Note
#3 Leaving the hospital on June 20, Russell was still very weak and pale.
But now, although he remained on the payroll of James McCord, he also accepted
a retainer from his friend John Leon, who had been engaged by the Republicans
to carry out a counterinvestigation of the Watergate affair. Leon was in
contact with Jerris Leonard, a lawyer associated with Nixon, the GOP, the
Republican National Committee, and with Chairman Ge orge Bush. Leonard
was a former assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Nixon administration.
Leonard had stepped down as head of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration
(LEAA) on March 17, 1973. In June 1973, Leonard was special counsel to
George Bush personally, hired by Bush and not by the RNC. Leonard says
today that his job consisted in helping to keep the Republican Party separate
from Watergate, deflecting Watergate from the party "so it would not be
a party thing." / Note #3 / Note #4 As Hougan tells it, "Leon was convinced
that Watergate was a set-up, that prostitution was at the heart of the
affair, and that the Watergate arrests had taken place following a tip-off
to the police; in other words, the June 17 burglary had been sabotaged
from within, Leon believed, and he intended to prove it." / Note #3 / Note
#5 "Integral to Leon's theory of the affair was Russell's relationship
to the Ervin committee's chief investigator, Carmine Bellino, and the circumstances
surrounding Russell's relocation to Silver Spring in the immediate aftermath
of the Watergate arrests. In an investigative memorandum submitted to GOP
lawyer Jerris Leonard, Leon described what he hoped to prove: that Russell,
reporting to Bellino, had been a spy for the Democrats within the CRP,and
that Russell had tipped off Bellino (and the police) to the June 17 break-in.
The man who knew most about this was Leon's new employee, Lou Russell."
Is it possible that Jerris Leonard communicated the contents of Leon's
memorandum to the RNC and to its chairman George Bush during the days after
he received it? It is possible. But for Russell, the game was over: On
July 2, 1973, barely two weeks after his release from the hospital, Russell
suffered a second heart attack, which killed him. He was buried with quite
suspicious haste the following day. The potential witness with perhaps
the largest number of personal ties to Watergate protagonists, and the
witness who might have redirected the scandal, not just toward Bellino,
but toward the prime movers behind and above McCord and Hunt and Paisley,
had perished in a way that recalls the fate of so many knowledgeable Iran-Contra
figures. With Russell silenced forever, Leon appears to have turned his
attention to targeting Bellino, perhaps with a view to forcing him to submit
to questioning about his relationship to Russell. Leon, who had been convicted
in 1964 of wiretapping in a case involving El Paso Gas Co. and Tennessee
Gas Co., had weapons in his own possession that could be used against Bellino.
During the time that Russell was still in the hospital, on June 8, Leon
had signed an affidavit for Jerris Leonard in which he stated that he had
been hired by Democratic operative Bellino during the 1960 presidential
campaign to "infiltrate the operations" of Albert B. "Ab" Hermann, a staff
member of the Republican National Committee. Leon asserted in the affidavit
that although he had not been able to infiltrate Hermann's office, he observed
the office with field glasses and employed "an electronic device known
as 'the big ear' aimed at Mr. Hermann's window." Leon recounted that he
had been assisted by former CIA officer John Frank, Oliver W. Angelone
and former congressional investigator Ed Jones in the anti-Nixon 1960 operations.
Leon collected other sworn statements that all went in the same direction,
portraying Bellino as a Democratic dirty tricks operative unleashed by
the Kennedy faction against Nixon. Joseph Shimon, who had been an inspector
for the Washington Police Department, told of how he had been approached
by Kennedy operative Oliver W. Angelone, who alleged that he was working
for Bellino, with a request to help Angelone gain access to the two top
floors of the Wardman Park Hotel just before they were occupied by Nixon
on the eve of the Nixon-Kennedy television debate. Edward Murray Jones,
then living in the Philippines, said in his affidavit that he had been
assigned by Bellino to tail individuals at Washington National Airport
and in downtown Washington. / Note #3 / Note #6 According to Hougan, "these
sensational allegations were provided by Leon to Republican attorneys on
July 10, 1973, exactly a week after Russell's funeral. Immediately, attorney
Jerris Leonard conferred with RNC Chairman George Bush. It appeared to
both men that a way had been found to place the Watergate affair in a new
perspective, and, perhaps, to turn the tide. A statement was prepared and
a press conference scheduled at which Leon was to be the star witness,
or speaker. Before the press conference could be held, however, Leon suffered
a heart attack on July 13, 1973, and died the same day." / Note #3 / Note
#7 Two important witnesses, each of whom represented a threat to reopen
the most basic questions of Watergate, dead in little more than a week!
Bush is likely to have known of the import of Russell's testimony, and
he is proven to have known of the content of Leon's. Jerris Leonard later
told Hougan that the death of John Leon "came as a complete shock. It was
... well, to be honest with you, it was frightening. It was only a week
after Russell's death, or something like that, and it happened on the very
eve of the press conference. We didn't know what was going on. We were
scared." / Note #3 / Note #8 Hougan comments: "With the principal witness
against Bellino no longer available, and with Russell dead as well, Nixon's
last hope of diverting attention from Watergate -- slim from the beginning
-- was laid to rest forever." Diversion and Damage Control But George Bush
went ahead with the press conference that had been announced, even if John
Leon, the principal speaker, was now dead. According to Nixon, Bush had
been "privately pleading for some action that would get us off the defensive"
since back in the springtime. / Note #3 / Note #9 On July 24, 1973, Bush
made public the affidavits by Leon, Jones, and Shimon which charged that
the Ervin committee chief investigator Carmine Bellino had recruited spies
to help defeat Nixon back in 1960. "I cannot and do not vouch for the veracity
of the statements contained in the affidavits," said Bush, "but I do believe
that this matter is serious enough to concern the Senate Watergate committee,
and particularly since its chief investigator is the subject of the charges
contained in the affidavits. If these charges are true, a taint would most
certainly be attached to some of the committee's work." Bush specified
that on the basis of the Shimon and Leon affidavits, he was "confident"
that Jones and Angelone "had bugged the Nixon space or tapped his phones
prior to the television debate." He conceded that "there was corruption"
in the ranks of the GOP. "But now I have presented some serious allegations
that if true could well have affected the outcome of the 1960 presidential
race. The Nixon-Kennedy election was a real cliff-hanger, and the debates
bore heavily on the outcome of the people's decision." Bush rejected any
charge that he was releasing the affidavits in a bid to "justify Watergate."
He asserted that he was acting in the interest of "fair play." Bush said
that he had taken the affidavits to Sen. Sam Ervin, the chairman of the
Senate Watergate Committee, and to GOP Sen. Howard Baker, that committee's
ranking Republican, but that the committee had failed to act so far. "I
haven't seen much action on it," Bush added. When the accuracy of the affidavits
was challenged, Bush replied, "We've heard a lot more hearsay bandied about
the [Watergate] committee than is presented here. I'd like to know how
serious it is. I'd like to see it looked into," said Bush. He called on
Sam Ervin and his committee to probe all the charges forthwith. Bush was
"convinced that there is in fact substance to the allegations." In 1991,
the Bush damage control line is that events relating to the "October Surprise"
deal of the Reagan-Bush campaign with the Khomeini mullahs of Iran to block
the freeing of the U.S. hostages are so remote in the past that nobody
is interested in them anymore. But in 1973, Bush thought that events of
1960 were highly relevant to Watergate. Bellino lab eled Bush's charges
"absolutely false." "I categorically and unequivocally deny that I have
ever ordered, requested, directed, or participated in any electronic surveillance
whatsoever in connection with any political campaign," said Bellino. "By
attacking me on the basis of such false and malicious lies, Mr. Bush has
attempted to distract me from carrying out what I consider one of the most
important assignments of my life. I shall continue to exert all my efforts
to ascertain the facts and the truth pertinent to this investigation."
Here Bush was operating on several levels of reality at once. The implications
of the Russell-Leon interstices would be suspected only in retrospect.
What appeared on the surface was a loyal Republican mounting a diversionary
attack in succor of his embattled President. At deeper levels, the reality
might be the reverse: the stiffing of Nixon in order to defend the forces
behind the break-in and the scandal. Back in April, as the Ervin committee
was preparing to go into action against the White House, Bush had participated
in the argument about whether the committee sessions should be televised
or not. Bush discussed this issue with Senators Baker and Brock, both Republicans
who wanted the hearings to be televised -- in Baker's case, so that he
could beon television himself as the ranking Republican on the panel. Ehrlichman,
to whom Bush reported in the White House, mindful of the obvious potential
damage to the administration, wanted the hearings not televised, not even
public, but in executive session with a sanitized transcript handed out
later. So Bush, having no firm convictions of his own, but always looking
for his own advantage, told Ehrlichman he sympathized with both sides of
the argument, and was "sitting happily on the middle of the fence with
a picket sticking up my you know what. I'll see you." / Note #4 / Note
#0 But Nixon's damage control interest had been sacrificed by Bush's vacillating
advocacy.... Bush had talked in public about the Ervin committee during
a visit to Seattle on June 29 in response to speculation that Nixon might
be called to testify. Bush argued that the presidency would be diminished
if Nixon were to appear. Bush was adamant that Nixon could not be subpoenaed
and that he should not testify voluntarily. Shortly thereafter, Bush had
demanded that the Ervin committee wrap up its proceedings to "end the speculation"
about Nixon's role in the coverup. "Let's get all the facts out, let's
get the whole thing over with, get all the people up there before the Watergate
committee. I don't believe John Dean's testimony." / Note #4 / Note #1
Senator Sam Ervin placed Bush's intervention against Carmine Bellino in
the context of other diversionary efforts launched by the RNC. Ervin, along
with Democratic Senators Talmadge and Inouye were targeted by a campaign
inspired by Bush's RNC which alleged that they had tried to prevent a full
probe of LBJ intimate Bobby Baker back in 1963. Later, speaking on the
Senate floor on October 9, 1973, Ervin commented: "One can but admire the
zeal exhibited by the Republican National Committee and its journalistic
allies in their desperate effort to invent a red herring to drag across
the trail which leads to the truth concerning Watergate." / Note #4 / Note
#2 But Ervin saw Bush's Bellino material as a more serious assault. "Bush's
charge distressed me very much for two reasons. First, I deemed it unjust
to Bellino, who denied it and whom I had known for many years to be an
honorable man and a faithful public servant; and, second, it was out of
character with the high opinion I entertained of Bush. Copies of the affidavits
had been privately submitted to me before the news conference, and I had
expressed my opinion that there was not a scintilla of competent or credible
evidence in them to sustain the charges against Bellino." / Note #4 / Note
#3 Sam Dash, the chief counsel to the Ervin committee, had a darker and
more detailed view of Bush's actions: "In the midst of the pressure to
complete a shortened witness list by the beginning of August, a nasty incident
occurred that was clearly meant to sidetrack the committee and destroy
or immobilize one of my most valuable staff assistants -- Carmine Bellino,
my chief investigator. On July 24, 1973, the day after the committee subpoena
for the White House tapes was served on the President, the Republican national
chairman, George Bush, called a press conference.... Three days later,
as if carefully orchestrated, twenty-two Republican senators signed a letter
to Senator Ervin, urging the Senate Watergate Committee to investigate
Bush's charges and calling for Bellino's suspension pending the outcome
of the investigation. Ervin was forced into a corner, and on August 3 he
appointed a subcommittee consisting of Senators Talmadge, Inouye, and Gurney
to investigate the charges. The White House knew that Carmine Bellino,
a wizard at reconstructing the receipts and expenditures of funds despite
laundering techniques and the destruction of records, was hot on the trail
of Herbert Kalmbach and Bebe Rebozo. Bellino's diligent, meticulous work
would ultimately disclose Kalmbach's funding scheme for the White House's
dirty tricks campaign and unravel a substantial segment of Rebozo's secret
cash transactions on behalf of Nixon." / Note #4 / Note #4 Dash writes
that Bellino was devastated by Bush's attacks, "rendered emotionally unable
to work because of the charges." The mechanism targeted by Bellino is of
course relevant to Bill Liedtke's funding of the CREEP described above.
Perhaps Bush was in fact seeking to shut down Bellino solely to defend
only himself and his confederates. Members of Dash's staff soon realized
that there had been another participant in the process of assembling the
material that Bush had presented. According to Dash, "the charges became
even murkier when our staff discovered that the person who had put them
together was a man named Jack Buckley. In their dirty tricks investigation
of the 1972 presidential campaign, Terry Lenzner and his staff had identified
Buckley as the Republican spy, known as Fat Jack, who had intercepted and
photographed Muskie's mail between his campaign and Senate offices as part
of Ruby I (a project code named in Liddy's Gemstone political espionage
plan)." It would appear that Fat Jack Buckley was now working for George
Bush. Ervin then found that Senators Gurney and Baker, both Republicans,
might be willing to listen to additional charges made by Buckley against
Bellino. Dash says he "smelled the ugly odor of blackmail on the part of
somebody and I did not like it." Later, Senators Talmadge and Inouye filed
a report completely exonerating Bellino, while Gurney conceded that there
was no direct evidence against Bellino, but that there was some conflicting
testimony that ought to be noted. Dash sums up that in late November 1973,
"the matter ended with little fanfare and almost no newspaper comment.
The reputation of a public official with many years' service as a dedicated
and incorruptible investigator had been deeply wounded and tarnished, and
Bellino would retire from federal service believing -- rightly -- that
he had not been given the fullest opportunity he deserved to clear his
good name." Another Bush concern during the summer of 1973 was his desire
to liquidate the CREEP, not out of moralistic motives, but because of his
desire to seize the CREEP's $4 millon-plus cash surplus. During the middle
of 1973, some of this money had already been used to pay the legal fees
of Watergate conspirators, as in the case of Maurice Stans. / Note #4 /
Note #5 During August, Bush went into an offensive of sanctimonious moralizing.
Bush appears to have concluded that Nixon was doomed, and that it was imperative
to distance himself and his operation from Nixon's impending downfall.
On the NBC "Today" show, Bush objected to John D. Ehrlichman's defense
before the Ervin committee of the campaign practice of probing the sex
and drinking habits of political opponents. "Crawling around in the gutter
to find some weakness of a man, I don't think we need that," said Bush.
"I think opponent research is valid. I think if an opponent is thought
to have done something horrendous or thought to be unfit to serve, research
is valid. But the idea of just kind of digging up dirt with the purpose
of blackmail or embarrassing somebody so he'd lose, I don't think that
is a legitimate purpose," postured Bush. By this time Ehrlichman, who had
hired retired cops to dig up such dirt, had been thrown to the wolves.
/ Note #4 / Note #6 A couple of days later, Bush delivered a speech to
the American Bar Association on "The Role and Responsibility of the Political
Candidate." His theme was that restoring public trust in the political
system would require candidates who would set a higher moral tone for their
campaigns. "A candidate is responsible for organizing his campaign well
-- that is, picking people whom he trusts, picking the right people." This
was an oblique but clear attack on Nixon, who had clearly picked the wrong
people in addition to whatever else he did. Bush was for stricter rules,
but even more for "old-fashioned conscience" as the best way to keep politics
clean. He again criticized the approach which set out to "get dirt" on
political adversaries -- again a swipe at Nixon's notorious "enemies list"
practices. Bush said that there were "gray areas in determining what was
in good taste." Bush has never been noted for his sense of self-irony,
and it appears that he was not aware of his own punning reference to L.
Patrick Gray, the acting FBI Director who had "deep-sixed" Howard Hunt's
incriminating records and who had then been left by Ehrlichman to "hang
there" and to "twist slowly, slowly in the wind." Bush actually commented
that Ehrlichman's comments on Gray had been in questionable taste. / Note
#4 / Note #7 The next day Bush was at it again, announcing that he was
reopening an investigation into alleged courses in dirty tricks taught
by the GOP to college Republicans in weekend seminars during 1971 and 1972.
Bush pledged to "get to the bottom" of charges that the College Republican
National Committee, with 1,000 campus clubs and 100,000 members listed
had provided instruction in dirty tricks. "I'm a little less relaxed and
more concerned than when you first brought it to our attention," Bush told
journalists. / Note #4 / Note #8 Bush had clearly distanced himself from
the fate of the Nixon White House. By the time Spiro Agnew resigned as
Vice President on October 10, 1973, Bush praised Agnew for his "great personal
courage" while endorsing the resignation as "in the best interest of the
country." / Note #4 / Note #9 Later the same month came Nixon's "Saturday
night massacre," the firing of Special Prosecutor Cox and the resignation
of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus.
To placate public opinion, Nixon agreed to obey a court order compelling
him to hand over his White House tapes. Bush had said that Nixon was suffering
from a "confidence crisis" about the tapes, but now commented that what
Nixon had done "will have a soothing effect. Clearly it will help politically....
Hopefully, his move will cool the emotions and permit the President to
deal with matters of enormous domestic and international concern." / Note
#5 / Note #0 Later, in November, Bush bowed out of a possible candidacy
in the 1974 Texas gubernatorial race. Speculation was that "the specter
of Watergate" would have been used against him, but Bush preferred sanctimonious
explanations. "Very candidly," he said, "being governor of Texas has enormous
appeal to me, but our political system is under fire and I have an overriding
sense of responsibility that compels me to remain in my present job." Bush
said that Watergate was "really almost ... nonexistent" as an issue in
the Texas race. "Corruption and clean government didn't show up very high
at all," he concluded. / Note #5 / Note #1 In May of 1974, after a meeting
of the Republican congressional leadership with Nixon, Bush told his friend
Congressman Barber Conable that he was considering resigning from the RNC.
A few days later, John Rhodes, who had replaced Gerald Ford as House Minority
Leader when Ford was tapped by Nixon for the vice-presidency, told a meeting
of House Republicans that Bush was getting ready to resign, and if he did
so, it would be impossible for the White House to "get anybody of stature
to take his place." / Note #5 / Note #2 But even in the midst of the final
collapse, Bush still made occasional ingratiating gestures to Nixon. Nixon
pathetically recounts how Bush made him an encouraging offer in July 1974,
about a month before the end: "There were other signs of the sort that
political pros might be expected to appreciate: NC Chairman George Bush
called the White House to say that he would like to have me appear on a
fund-raising telethon." / Note #5 / Note #3 This is what Bush was telling
Nixon. But during this same period, Father John McLaughlin of the Nixon
staff asked Bush for RNC lists of GOP diehards across the country for the
purpose of generating support statements for Nixon. Bush refused to provide
them. / Note #5 / Note #4 The Smoking Gun On August 5, 1974, the White
House released the transcript of the celebrated "smoking gun" taped conversation
of June 23, 1972 in which Nixon discussed ways to frustrate the investigation
of the Watergate break-ins. Chairman George was one of the leading Nixon
administration figures consulting with Al Haig in the course of the morning.
When Bush heard the news, he was very upset, undoubtedly concerned about
all the very negative publicity that he himself was destined to receive
in the blowback of Nixon's now-imminent downfall. Then, after a while,
he calmed down somewhat. One account describes Bush as "somewhat relieved"
by the news that the tape was going to be made public. "Finally there was
some one thing the national chairman could see clearly. The ambiguities
in the evidence had been tearing the party apart, Bush thought." / Note
#5 / Note #5 At this point, Bush became the most outspoken and militant
organizer of Nixon's resignation, a Cassius of the Imperial Presidency.
A little later, White House Congressional liaison William Timmons wanted
to make sure that everyone had been fully briefed about the transcripts
going out, and he turned to Nixon's political counselor Dean Burch. "Dean,
does Bush know about the transcript yet?" Timmons asked. Burch replied,
"Yes." "Well, what did he do?" Timmons asked. "He broke out in assholes
and shit himself to death," was Burch's answer. / Note #5 / Note #6 Notes
for Chapter 13 25. Al Reinert, "Bob and George Go to Washington or The
Post-Watergate Scramble," "Texas Monthly," April 1974. 26. "Deep Throat:
Narrowing the Field," "Time," May 3, 1976, pp. 17-18. 27. Bush and Gold,
"op. cit.," pp. 65-66. 28. Bernstein and Woodward, "All the President's
Men" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 72, 130-31. 29. Green, "op.
cit.," p. 80. 30. Bernstein and Woodward, "All the President's Men," p.
318. 31. The question of the Columbia Plaza Apartments is a central theme
of Jim Hougan's "Secret Agenda, op. cit." We have also relied on Hougan's
version of the Russell-Leon-Bellino subplot described below. 32. Hougan,
"op. cit.," pp. 324. 33. "Ibid.," p. 370. 34. Interview of Jerris Leonard
with Anton Chaitkin, Aug. 26, 1991. 35. Hougan, "op. cit.," p. 374-75.
36. See Jules Witcover, "Political Spies Accuse Committee Investigator,"
"Washington Post," July 25, 1973, and John Geddie, "Bush Alleges Bugs,"
"Dallas News," July 25, 1973. See also Victor Lasky, "It Didn't Start with
Watergate" (New York: Dial Press, 1977), pp. 41-55. 37. Hougan, "op. cit.,"
p. 376. Notice that the day of Leon's death was also the day that White
House staffer Butterfield told congressional investigators of the existence
of Nixon's taping system. 38. "Ibid." 39. Richard Nixon, "The Memoirs of
Richard Nixon" (New York: Warner Books, 1979), p. 811. 40. Walter Pincus
and Bob Woodward, "Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes," "Washington Post,"
Aug. 9, 1988. 41. "Washington Post," July 12, 1973. 42. Sam J. Ervin, Jr.,
"The Whole Truth" ( New York: Random House, 1980), p. 28. 43. "Ibid.,"
p. 29. 44. Samuel Dash, "Chief Counsel" (New York: Random House, 1976),
p. 192. 45. Evans and Novak, July 11, 1973. 46. "Washington Post," Aug.
7, 1973. 47. "Washington Post," Aug. 9, 1973. 48. "Washington Post," Aug.
10, 1973. 49. "Washington Post," Oct. 11, 1973. 50. "Washington Post,"
Oct. 24, 1973. 51. "Washington Post," Nov. 17, 1973. 52. Bernstein and
Woodward, "The Final Days," pp. 159, 176. 53. Nixon, "op. cit.," p. 1042.
54. Green, "op cit.," p. 135. 55. Bernstein and Woodward, "The Final Days,"
p. 368. 56. "Ibid.," p. 369. CHAPTER 13 CHAIRMAN GEORGE IN WATERGATE Why
should Bush be so distraught over the release to the press of the transcript
of the notorious White House meeting of June 23, 1972? As we have seen,
there is plenty of evidence that the final fall of Nixon was just the denouement
that Bush wanted. The answer is that Bush was upset about the fabulous
"smoking gun" tape because his friend Mosbacher, his business partner Bill
Liedtke, and himself were referred to in the most sensitive passages. Yes,
a generation of Americans has grown up recalling something about a "smoking
gun" tape, but not many now recall that when Nixon referred to "the Texans,"
he meant George Bush. The open secret of the "smoking gun" tape is that
it refers to Nixon's desire to mobilize the CIA to halt the FBI investigation
of the Watergate burglars on the grounds that money can be traced from
donors in Texas and elsewhere to the coffers of the CREEP, and thence to
the pockets of Bernard Barker and the other Cubans arrested. The money
referred to, of course, is part of Bill Liedtke's $700,000 discussed above.
A first crucial passage of the "smoking gun" tape goes as follows, with
the first speaker being Haldeman: "H: Now, on the investigation, you know
the Democratic break-in thing, we're back in the problem area because the
FBI is not under control, because [FBI chief] Gray doesn't exactly know
how to control it and they have -- their investigation is leading into
some productive areas because they've been able to trace the money -- not
through the money itself -- but through the bank sources -- the banker.
And, and it goes in some directions we don't want it to go. Ah, also there
have been some things -- like an informant came in off the street to the
FBI in Miami who was a photographer or has a friend who was a photographer
who developed some films through this guy Barker and the films had pictures
of Democratic National Committee letterhead documents and things. So it's
things like that that are filtering in. Mitchell came up with yesterday,
and John Dean analyzed very carefully last night and concludes, concurs
now with Mitchell's recommendation that the only way to solve this, and
we're set up beautifully to do it, ah, in that and that -- the only network
that paid any attention to it last night was NBC -- they did a massive
story on the Cuban thing. "P: [Nixon] That's right. "H: That the way to
handle this now is for us to have [CIA Deputy Director Vernon] Walters
call Pat Gray and just say 'Stay the hell out of this -- this is ah, business
here we don't want you to go any further on it.' That's not an unusal development,
and ah, that would take care of it. "P: What about Pat Gray -- you mean
Pat Gray doesn't want to? "H: Pat does want to. He doesn't know how to,
and he doesn't have, he doesn't have any basis for doing it. Given this,
he will then have the basis. He'll call Mark Felt in, and the two of them
-- and Mark Felt wants to cooperate because he's ambitious -- "P: Yeah
"H: He'll call him in and say, 'We've got the signal from across the river
to put the hold on this.' And that will fit rather well because the FBI
agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that's what it is.
"P: This is CIA? They've traced the money? Who'd they trace it to? "H:
Well they've traced it to a name, but they haven't gotten to the guy yet.
"P: Would it be somebody here? "H: Ken Dahlberg. "P: Who the hell is Ken
Dahlberg? "H: He gave $25,000 in Minnesota and, ah, the check went directly
to this guy Barker. "P: It isn't from the committee though, from Stans?
"H: Yeah. It is. It's directly traceable and there's some more through
some Texas people that went to the Mexican bank which can also be traced
to the Mexican bank -- they'll get their names today. And (pause) "P: Well,
I mean, there's no way -- I'm just thinking if they don't cooperate, what
do they say? That they were approached by the Cubans. That's what Dahlberg
has to say, the Texans too, that they -- "H: Well, if they will. But then
we're relying on more and more people all the time. That's the problem,
and they'll stop if we could take this other route. "P: All right. "H:
And you seem to think the thing to do is get them to stop? "P: Right, fine."
Kenneth Dahlberg was a front man for Dwayne Andreas of Archer Daniels Midland.
Nixon wanted to protect himself, of course, but there is no doubt that
he is talking about Liedtke, Pennzoil, Robert Mosbacher -- his Bush-league
Texas money-raising squad. With that comment, Nixon had dug his own grave
with what was widely viewed as a "prima facie" case of obstruction of justice
when this tape was released on August 5. But Nixon and Haldeman had a few
other interesting things to say to each other that day, several of which
evoke associations redolent of Bush. Shortly after the excerpts provided
above, Nixon himself sums up why the CIA ought to have its own interest
in putting a lid on the Watergate affair: "P: Of course, this Hunt .. will
uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there's a hell of a lot of
things and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this
thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky
that we have nothing to do with ourselves. Well what the hell, did Mitchell
know about this? "H: I think so. I don't think he knew the details, but
I think he knew. "P: He didn't know how it was going to be handled through
-- with Dahlberg and the Texans and so forth? Well who was the asshole
that did? Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts!" Shortly
after this, the conversation turned to Bus Mosbacher, who was resigning
as the chief of protocol. Nixon joked that while Mosbacher was escorting
the visiting dignitaries, bachelor Henry Kissinger always ended up escorting
Mosbacher's wife. But before too long Nixon was back to the CIA again:
"P: When you get in -- when you get in (unintelligible) people, say, "Look
the whole problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs
thing and the President just feels that ah, without going into the details
-- don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement,
but just say this is a comedy of errors, without getting into it, the President
believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.
And, ah, because these people are plugging for (unintelligible) and that
they should call the FBI in and (unintelligible) don't go any further into
this case period! (inaudible) our cause." It would also appear that Nixon's
references to Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs are an oblique allusion to
the Kennedy assassination, about which Nixon may have known more than he
has ever told. Later the same day Haldeman reported back to Nixon about
his meeting with Walters: "H: Well, it was kind of interesting. Walters
made the point and I didn't mention Hunt. I just said that the thing was
leading into directions that were going to create potential problems because
they were exploring leads that led back into areas that would be harmful
to the CIA and harmful to the government (unintelligible) didn't have anything
to do (unintelligible)." Later, Haldeman returned to this same theme: "H:
Gray called Helms and said I think we've run right into the middle of a
CIA covert operation. "P: Gray said that? "H: Yeah. And (unintelligible)
said nothing we've done at this point and ah (unintellibible) says well
it sure looks to me like it is (unintelligible) and ah, that was the end
of that conversation (unintelligible) the problem is it tracks back to
the Bay of Pigs and it tracks back to some other the leads run out to people
who had no involvement in this, except by contracts and connection, but
it gets to areas that are liable to be raised? The whole problem (unintelligible)
Hunt. So at that point he kind of got the picture. He said, he said we'll
be very happy to be helpful (unintelligible) handle anything you want.
I would like to know the reason for being helpful, and I made it clear
to him he wasn't going to get explicit (unintelligible) generality, and
he said fine. And Walters (unintelligible), Walters is going to make a
call to Gray. That's the way we put it and that's the way it was left.
"P: How does that work though, how they've got to (unintelligible) somebody
from the Miami bank. "H: (Unintelligible) The point John makes -- the Bureau
is going on this because they don't know what they are uncovering (unintelligible)
continue to pursue it. They don't need to because they already have their
case as far as the charges against these men (unintelligible) One thing
Helms did raise. He said. Gray -- he asked Gray why they thought they had
run into a CIA thing and Gray said because of the amount of money involved,
a lot of dough (unintelligible) and ah (unintelligible) "P: (Unintelligible)
"H: Well, I think they will. If it runs (unintelligible) what the hell,
who knows (unintelligible) contributed CIA. "H: Ya, it's money CIA gets
money (unintelligible) I mean their money moves in a lot of different ways,
too." / Note #5 / Note #7 Nixon's train of associations takes him from
the Pennzoil-Liedtke Mosbacher-Bush slush fund operation to Howard Hunt
and the Bay of Pigs and "a lot of hanky-panky" and then back to Bus Mosbacher,
Robert's elder brother. Later on, Haldeman stresses that the FBI, discovering
a large money laundering operation between Pennzoil and Bill Liedtke in
Houston, Mexico City, Maurice Stans and the CREEP in Washington, and some
CIA Miami station Cubans, simply concluded that this was all a CIA covert
operation. As Haldeman himself later summed it up: "If the Mexican bank
connection was actually a CIA operation all along, unknown to Nixon; and
Nixon was destroyed for asking the FBI to stop investigating the bank because
it might uncover a CIA operation (which the Helms memo seems to indicate
it actually was after all) the multiple layers of deception by the CIA
are astounding." / Note #5 / Note #8 Moves for Impeachment Later, on Nixon's
last Monday, Bush joined White House Counsel J. Fred Buzhardt and Dean
Burch on a visit to Congressman Rhodes, and showed him the transcript of
the smoking gun tape. "This means that there's just no chance in the world
that he's not going to be impeached," said Rhodes. "In fact, there's no
chance in the world that I won't vote to impeach him." Bush must have heaved
a sigh of relief, since this is what he had wanted Rhodes to tell Nixon
to get him to quit. "Rhodes later let it be known that he was offended
that Bush had been briefed before he was," but of course, Bush was a top
official of the Nixon White House. / Note #5 / Note #9 But Nixon still
refused to quit, raising the prospect of a trial before the Senate that
could be damaging to many besides Nixon. The next day, Tuesday, August
6, 1974, saw the last meeting of the Nixon cabinet, with Chairman George
in attendance. Nixon's opening statement was: "I would like to discuss
the most important issue confronting this nation, and confronting us internationally
too -- inflation." Nixon then argued adamantly for some minutes that he
had examined the course of events over the recent past and that he had
"not found an impeachable offense, and therefore resignation is not an
acceptable course." Vice President Ford predicted that there would be certain
impeachment by the House, but that the outcome in the Senate could not
be predicted. Ford then said he was an interested party on the resignation
issue and would make no further comment. Nixon then wanted to talk about
the budget again, and about an upcoming summit conference on the economy.
Attorney General Saxbe interrupted him. "Mr. President, I don't think we
ought to have a summit conference. We ought to make sure you have the ability
to govern." Nixon quietly assured Saxbe that he had the ability to govern.
Then Chairman George piped up, in support of Saxbe. The President's ability
to govern was impaired, said George. Watergate had to be brought to an
end expeditiously, Bush argued. >From his vantage point at Nixon's right
elbow, Kissinger could see that Bush was advancing toward the conclusion
that Nixon had to resign. "It was cruel. And it was necessary," thought
Kissinger. "More than enough had been said," was the Secretary of State's
impression. Kissinger was seeking to avoid backing Nixon into a corner
where he would become more stubborn and more resistant to the idea of resignation,
making that dreaded Senate trial more likely. And this was the likely consequence
of Bush's line of argument. "Mr. President, can't we just wait a week or
two and see what happens?" asked Saxbe. Bush started to support Saxbe again,
but now Nixon was getting more angry. Nixon glared at Bush and Saxbe, the
open advocates of his resignation. "No," he snapped. "This is too important
to wait." Now the senior cabinet officer decided he had to take the floor
to avoid a total confrontation that would leave Nixon besieged but still
holding the Oval Office. Kissinger's guttural accents were heard in the
cabinet room: "We are not here to offer excuses for what we cannot do.
We are here to do the nation's business. This is a very difficult time
for our country. Our duty is to show confidence. It is essential that we
show it is not safe for any country to take a run at us. For the sake of
foreign policy we must act with assurance and total unity. If we can do
that, we can vindicate the structure of peace." The main purpose of this
pompous tirade had been to bring the meeting to a rapid end, and it worked.
"There was a moment of embarrassed silence around the table," recalls Nixon,
and after a few more remarks on the economy, the meeting broke up. Kissinger
stayed behind with Nixon to urge him to resign, which Nixon now said he
felt compelled to do. Bush sought out Al Haig to ponder how Nixon might
be forced out. "What are we going to do?" asked Bush. Haig told Bush to
calm down, explaining: "We get him up to the mountaintop, then he comes
down again, then we get him up again." / Note #6 / Note #0 Kissinger walked
back to his office in the West Wing and met Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the NSC
director. Kissinger told Scowcroft that "there was precious little support"
for the President. Kissinger, no mean hypocrite in his own right, thought
that Saxbe had been "weak-livered." Bush and Saxbe had both been petty
and insensitive, Kissinger thought. He compared Bush and Saxbe and the
rest to a seventeenth-century royal court with the courtiers scurrying
about, concerned with themselves rather than with their country. During
this cabinet meeting, Bush was already carrying a letter to Nixon that
would soon become the unkindest cut of all for Chairman George's wretched
patron. This letter was delivered to Nixon on August 7. It read as follows:
Dear Mr. President, It is my considered judgment that you should now resign.
I expect in your lonely embattled position this would seem to you as an
act of disloyalty from one you have supported and helped in so many ways.
My own view is that I would now ill serve a President whose massive accomplishments
I will always respect and whose family I love, if I did not now give you
my judgment. Until this moment resignation has been no answer at all, but
given the impact of the latest development, and it will be a lasting one,
I now firmly feel resignation is best for the country, best for this President.
I believe this view is held by most Republican leaders across the country.
This letter is much more difficult because of the gratitude I will always
have for you. If you do leave office history will properly record your
achievements with a la sting respect. / Note #6 / Note #1 The next day,
August 8, 1974, Nixon delivered his resignation to Henry Kissinger. Kissinger
could now look forward to exercising the powers of the presidency at least
until January 1977, and perhaps well beyond. For a final evaluation of
Bush in Watergate, we may refer to a sketch of his role during those times
provided by Bush's friend Maurice Stans, the finance director of the CREEP.
This is how Stans sizes up Bush as a Watergate player: "George Bush, former
member of Congress and former Ambassador to the United Nations. Bush, who
proved he was one of the bravest men in Washington in agreeing to head
the Republican National Committee during the 1973-74 phase of Watergate,
kept the party organization together and its morale high, despite massive
difficulties of press criticism and growing public disaffection with the
administration. Totally without information as to what had gone on in Watergate
behind the scenes, he was unable to respond knowledgeably to questions
and because of that unjustly became the personal target of continuing sarcasm
and cynicism from the media."/ Note #6 / Note #2 But there are many indications
that Bush was in reality someone who, while taking part in the fray, actually
helped to steer Watergate toward the strategic outcome desired by the dominant
financier faction, the one associated with Brown Brothers Harriman and
with London. As with so much in the life of this personage, much of Bush's
real role in Watergate remains to be unearthed. To borrow a phrase from
James McCord's defense of his boss, Richard Helms, we must see to it that
"every tree in the forest will fall." Notes for Chapter 13 57. For the
"smoking gun" transcript of June 23, 1972, see "Washington Post," Aug.
6, 1974. 58. H.R. Haldeman, "The Ends of Power" (New York: Times Books,
1978), p. 64. 59. Bernstein and Woodward, "The Final Days," p. 374. 60.
Available accounts of Nixon's last cabinet meeting are fragmentary, but
see: "The Memoirs of Richard Nixon," p. 1066; "The Final Days," pp. 386-89;
Theodore H. White, "Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon" (New York:
Atheneum Publishers, 1975), p. 24; Henry Kissinger, "Years of Upheaval"
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), pp. 1202-3; J. Anthony Lukas, "Nightmare:
The Underside of the Nixon Years" (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 558-59.
61. The ostensible full text of this letter is found in Nicholas King,
"George Bush: A Biography" (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980),
p. 87. 62. Maurice H. Stans, "The Terrors of Justice: The Untold Side of
Watergate" (New York: Everest, 1978), p. 66. insert chapter subhead here
Chapter 14 1974: Bush Attempts the Vice-Presidency Those who betray their
benefactors are seldom highly regarded. In Dante's "Divine Comedy," traitors
to benefactors and to the established authorities are consigned to the
ninth circle of the Inferno, where their souls are suspended, like insects
in amber, in the frozen River Cocytus. This is the Giudecca, where the
three arch-traitors -- Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius -- are chewed
for all eternity in the three mouths of Lucifer. The crimes of Nixon were
monstrous, especially in Vietnam and in the India-Pakistan war, but in
these Bush had been an enthusiastic participant. Now Bush's dagger, among
others, had found its target; Nixon was gone. In the depths of his Inferno,
Dante relates the story of Frate Alberigo to illustrate the belief that
in cases of the most heinous treachery, the soul of the offender plunges
at once into hell, leaving the body to live out its physical existence
under the control of a demon. Perhaps the story of old Frate Alberigo will
illuminate us as we follow the further career of George Bush. As Nixon
left the White House for his home in San Clemente, California, in the early
afternoon of August 9, 1974, Chairman George was already plotting how to
scale still further up the dizzy heights of state. Ford was now President,
and the vice presidency was vacant. According to the 25th Amendment, it
was now up to Ford to designate a Vice President who would then require
a majority vote of both houses of Congress to be confirmed. Seeing a golden
opportunity to seize an office that he had long regarded as the final stepping
stone to his ultimate goal of the White House, Bush immediately mobilized
his extensive Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones network, including
as many Zionist lobby auxiliaries as he could muster. One of the first
steps was to set up a boiler shop operation in a suite of rooms at the
Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington. Here Richard L. Herman, the Nebraska
GOP national committeeman, and two assistants began churning out a cascade
of calls to Republicans and others around the country, urging, threatening,
cajoling, calling in chits, promising future favors if Chairman George
were to become Vice President George. / Note #1 There were other, formidable
candidates, but none was so aggressive as Chairman George. Nelson Rockefeller,
who had resigned as governor of New York some months before to devote more
time to his own consuming ambition and to his Commission on Critical Choices,
was in many ways the front runner. But Nelson was the incarnation of the
Eastern Liberal Establishment internationalists against whom Goldwater
had campaigned so hard in 1964. His support was considerable, but he had
more active opposition than any other candidate. This meant that Ford had
to hesitate in choosing Nelson because of what the blowback might mean
for a probable Ford candidacy in 1976. The conservative Republicans all
regarded Goldwater as their sentimental favorite, but they also knew that
Ford would be reluctant to select him because of a different set of implications
for 1976. Beyond Rockefeller and Goldwater, each a leader of a wing of
the party, the names multiplied: Senator Howard Baker, Elliot Richardson,
Governor William Scranton, Melvin Laird, Senator Bill Brock, Governor Dan
Evans, Donald Rumsfeld and many others. Bush knew that if he could get
Goldwater to show him some support, the Goldwater conservatives could be
motivated to make their influence felt for Bush, and this might conceivably
put him over the top. First, Chairman George had to put on the mask of
conciliation and moderation. As Nixon was preparing his departure speech,
Bush lost no time in meeting with Ford, now less than 24 hours away from
being sworn in as President. Bush told the press that Ford had "said he'd
be pleased if I stayed on" at the RNC, but had to concede that Ford had
given no indication as to his choice for the Vice President. Bush's network
in the House of Representatives was now fully mobilized, with "a showing
of significant support in the House and among GOP officials" for Bush on
the day before Nixon left town. Bush also put out a statement from the
RNC, saying, "The battle is over. Now is the time for kindness.... Let
us all try now to restore to our society a climate of civility." But despite
the hypocritical kinder and gentler rhetoric, Chairman George's struggle
for power was just beginning. / Note #2 Melvin Laird soon came out for
Rockefeller, and there were sentimental displays for Goldwater in many
quarters. With Bush's network in full gear, he was beginning to attract
favorable mention from the columnists. Evans and Novak on August 11 claimed
that "as the new President was sworn in, Rockefeller had become a considerably
less likely prospect than either Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee or George
Bush, the gregarious patrician and transplanted Texan who heads the Republican
National Committee." On August 10, Ford announced that he would poll Republicans
at all levels across the country. Some expressed their preferences directly
to the White House, but the Republican National Committee members had to
report their choices through Chairman George. Many of them, fearing the
price they might have to pay for lese majeste, indicated Bush as their
first choice. This matter was the subject of a complaint by Tom Evans of
the RNC, who talked to the press and also wrote letters to the Ford White
House, as we will see. By August 14, the "Washington Post" was reporting
a "full scale campaign" on behalf of Bush, with an "impressive array of
support" against Rockefeller. Bush's campaign manager and chief boiler
room operator, Richard L. Herman of Nebraska, summed up his talking points:
Bush, said Herman, "is the only one in the race with no opposition. He
may not be the first choice in all cases, but he's not lower than second
with anyone." Herman said he was "assisting" a broader organization on
the Hill and of course at the RNC itself that was mobilized for Bush. Bush
"can do more to help the Republican Party than anyone else and is totally
acceptable throughout the country," blathered Herman. Bush was "obviously
aware of what we're doing," said Herman. Support for Goldwater was apt
to turn into support for Bush at any time, so Bush was gaining mightily,
running second to Rocky alone. Taking note of the situation, even Bush's
old allies at the "Washington Post" had to register some qualms. In an
editorial published on August 15, 1974 on the subject of "The Vice Presidency,"
"Post" commentators quoted the ubiquitous Richard Herman on Bush's qualifications.
The "Post" found that Bush's "background and abilities would appear to
qualify him for the vice-presidency in just about all respects, except
for the one that seems to us to really matter: What is conspicuously lacking
is any compelling or demonstrable evidence that he is qualified to be President."
But despite these darts, Chairman George continued to surge ahead. The
big break came when Barry Goldwater, speaking in Columbia, South Carolina,
told a Republican fundraiser that he had a "gut feeling" that Ford was
going to select Bush for the vice presidency. On August 15, a source close
to Ford told David Broder and Lou Cannon that Bush now had the "inside
track" for the vice-presidency. Rockefeller's spokesman Hugh Morrow retorted
that "we're not running a boiler shop or calling anyone or doing anything,"
unlike the strong-arm Bush team. / Note #3 Inside the Ford White House,
responses to Ford's solicitaton were coming in. Among the top White House
counselors, Bush got the support of Kenneth Rush, who had almost become
Nixon's Secretary of State and who asserted that Bush "would have a broader
appeal to all segments of the political spectrum than any other qualified
choice." Dean Burch wrote a memo to Ford pointing out that among the prominent
candidates, "only a few have a post-1980 political future." "My own choice,"
Burch told Ford, "would be a Vice President with a long term political
future -- a potential candidate, at least, for the Presidency in his own
right." In Burch's conclusion, "Still operating on this assumption, my
personal choice is George Bush." / Note #4. The cabinet showed more sentiment
for Rockefeller. Rogers Morton of the Interior, Weinberger of HEW, James
Lynn of HUD, Frederick Dent of Commerce, and Attorney General Saxbe were
all for Rocky. Earl Butz of Agriculture was for Goldwater, and James R.
Schlesinger of Defense was for Elliot Richardson. No written opinion by
Henry Kissinger appears extant at the Ford Library. Then the White House
staff was polled. Pat Buchanan advised Ford to avoid all the younger men,
including Bush, and told the president that Rockefeller would "regrettably"
have to be his choice. John McLaughlin also told Ford to go for Rocky,
although he mentioned that Bush "would also be a fine vice president."
/ Note #5 Richard A. Moore was for Bush based on his economic credentials,
asserting that Bush's "father and gradfather were both highly respected
investment bankers in New York." In the White House staff, Bush won out
over Rockefeller and Scranton. Among personal friends of Ford, Bush won
out over Rocky by a four to three margin. Among Republican governors, there
was significant resistance to Bush. Former Pennsylvania Governor William
Scranton, who had been considered of presidential caliber, wrote to Ford
aide Phillip Buchen of Bush: "Quite frankly, in my experience with him
his one drawback is a limitation of his administrative ability." / Note
#6 Among the Republican Senators, Bush had intense competition, but the
Prescott Bush network proved it could hold its own. Howard Baker put Bush
second, while Henry Bellmon and Dewey Bartlett sent in a joint letter in
support of Bush. Bob Dole put Chairman George last among his list of preferences,
commenting that the choice of Bush would be widely regarded as "totally
partisan." Pete Dominici put Bush as his first choice, but also conceded
that he would be seen as a partisan pick. Roth of Delaware had Bush in
third place after John J. Williams and Rocky. Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania
wanted Rocky or Goldwater, but put Bush in third place. James Pearson of
Kansas had Bush as first choice. Jesse Helms mentioned Bush, but in fifth
place after Goldwater, Harry Byrd, Reagan and James Buckley. / Note #7
In the final tally, Rocky edged out Bush with 14 choices to Bush's 12,
followed by Goldwater with 11. Bush was stronger in the House, where many
members had served side by side with their old friend Rubbers. Bush was
the first choice of Bill Archer of Texas (who had inherited Bush's old
district, and who praised Bush for having "led the fight in Congress for
disclosure and reform"), Skip Bafalis of Florida, William G. Bray of Indiana,
Dan Brotzman of Colorado, Joe Broyhill of Virginia, John Buchanan of Alabama,
Charles Chamberlain of Michigan, Donald Clancy of Ohio, Del Dawson of California,
and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. William Armstrong of Colorado struck a
discordant note by urging Ford to pick "a person who has extensive experience
in "elected" public office." William S. Cohen of Maine found that Bush
did "not have quite the range of experience of Richardson or Rockefeller."
James Collins favored Bush "as a Texan." Glenn Davis of Wisconsin, Derwinksi
of Illinois (a long-term ally who eventually rose to the Bush cabinet after
having served with Bush at the U.N. mission in New York), Sam Devine of
Ohio, and Pierre S. Du Pont IV of Delaware -- all for Bush. William Dickinson
of Alabama found Bush "physically attractive" with "no political scars
I am aware of" and "personally very popular." But then came John J. Duncan
of Tennessee, who told Ford that he could not "support any of the fifteen
or so mentioned in the news media." Marvin Esch of Michigan was for Bush,
as was Peter Frelinghuysen of New Jersey. Edwin D. Eshelman told Ford to
go for Bush "if you want a moderate." The Bush brigade went on with Charles
Gubser of California, and Hammerschmidt of Arkansas, still very close to
Bush today. John Heinz of Pennsylvania was having none of Bush, but urged
Ford to take Rockefeller, Scranton or Richardson, in that order. John Erlenborn
of Illinois was more than captivated by Bush, writing Ford that Bush "is
attractive personally -- people tend to like him on sight." Why, "he has
almost no political enemies" that Erlenborn knew of. Bud Hillis of Indiana,
Andrew Hinshar of California, Marjorie Holt -- for Bush. Lawrence Hogan
of Maryland was so "disturbed" about the prospect of Rockefeller that he
was for Bush, too. Hudnut of Indiana put Bush as his second choice after
favorite son Gov. Otis Bowen because Bush was "fine, clean." Jack Kemp
of New York, now in the Bush cabinet, was for Bush way back then. Lagomarsino
of California put Bush third, Latta of Ohio put him second only to Rocky.
Trent Lott of Mississippi, who has since moved up to the Senate, told Ford
that he needed somebody "young and clean" and that "perhaps George Bush
fits that position." Manuel Lujan of New Mexico, who also made the Bush
cabinet, was a solid Bush rooter, as was Wiley Mayne of Iowa. Pete McCloskey
put Bush second to Richardson, but ahead of Rocky. John McCollister of
Nebraska deluded himself that Bush could be confirmed without too much
trouble: McCollister was for Bush because "I believe he could pass the
Judiciary Committee's stern test" because "he had no policy-making role
in the sad days now ended," but perhaps Ford knew better on that one. Clarence
Miller of Ohio was for Bush. Congressman Bob Michel, ever climbing in the
House GOP hierarchy, ha d long-winded arguments for Bush. Rocky, he thought,
could "help most" over the remainder of Ford's term, but Bush would be
a trump card for 1976. "George Bush would not command all the immediate
adulation simply because he hasn't had as long a proven track record in
the business and industrial community, but his credentials are good," wrote
Michel. "He is young and he would work day and night and he would never
attempt to 'upstage the boss.' Aside from projecting a 'straight arrow
image,' he would be acceptable to the more conservative element in the
party that would be offended by the appointment of Rockefeller." In addition,
assured Michel, Bush enjoyed support among Democrats "from quarters I would
not have believed possible, ... and they are indeed influential Democrats....
Over and above this, we may be giving one of our own a good opportunity
to follow on after a six-year Ford administration," Michel concluded. Donald
Mitchell of New York was for Bush because of his "rich background," which
presumably meant money. Ancher Nelson thought Bush had "charisma," and
he was for him. But George O'Brien of Illinois was also there with that
bothersome request for "someone who was elected and was serving in a federal
position." Stan Parris of Alexandria, Virginia, a faithful yes-man for
Bush until his defeat in 1990, was for Bush -- of course. Jerry Pettis
o f California was for Bush. Bob Price of Texas urged Ford to tap Bush,
in part because of his "excellent" ties to the Senate, which were "due
to his own efforts and the friendships of his father." Albert Quie of Minnesota
had some support of his own for the nod, but he talked favorably about
Bush, whom he also found "handsome." "He has only one handicap," thought
Quie, "and that is, he lost an election for the Senate." Make that two
handicaps. Score J. Kenneth Robinson of Virginia for Bush, along with Philip
Ruppe of Michigan, who lauded Bush's "human warmth." Earl Ruth of northern
California and William Steigler of Wisconsin for Bush. Steve Symms of Idaho,
later a Senator, wanted "a Goldwater man" like Reagan, or Williams of Delaware.
But, Symms added, "I would accept our National Chairman Bush." Guy Vander
Jagt of Michigan confided to his former colleague Ford that "my personal
recommendation is George Bush." John H. Ware broke a lance for Chairman
George, and then came the endorsement of G. William Whitehurst of Virginia.
According to Whitehurst, Bush demonstrates "those special characteristics
that qualify a man for the highest office if fate so designates." Bob Wilson
of California was for Bush, also considering the long term perspectives;
he liked Bush's youthful enthusiasm and saw him as "a real leader for moderation."
Larr Winn of Kansas, Wendell Wyatt of Oregon, Bill Young of Florida, Don
Young of Alaska, Roger Zion of Indiana -- all listed Bush as their prime
choice. The Republican House Steering Committee went for Bush because of
his "general acceptance." / Note #8 When Ford's staff tabulated the House
results, Bush's combined total of 101 first, second and third choice mentions
put him in the lead, over Rocky at 68 and Reagan at 23. Among all the Republican
elected and appointed officials who had expressed an opinion, Bush took
first place with 255 points, with Rockefeller second with 181, Goldwater
third with 83, Reagan with 52, followed by Richardson, Melvin Laird and
the rest. It was a surprise to no one that Bush was the clear winner among
the Republican National Committee respondents. But all in all it was truly
a monument to the Bush network, achieved for a candidate with no qualifications
who had very much participated in the sleaze of the Nixon era. The vox
populi saw things slightly differently. In the number of telegrams received
by the White House, Goldwater was way ahead with 2,280 in his favor, and
only 102 against. Bush had 887 for him and 92 against. Rocky had 544 in
favor, and a whopping 3,202 against. / Note #9 But even here, the Bush
network had been totally mobilized, with a very large effort in the Dallas
business community, among black Republicans, and by law firms with links
to the Zionist lobby. Ward Lay of Frito-Lay joined with Herman W. Lay to
support Bush. The law firm of McKenzie and Baer of Dallas assured Ford
that Bush was "Mr. Clean." Bad Blood The full court press applied by the
Bush machine also generated bad blood. Rockefeller supporter Tom Evans,
a former RNC co-chair, wrote to Ford with the observation that "no one
should campaign for the position and I offer these thoughts only because
of an active campaign that is being conducted on George Bush's behalf which
I do not believe properly reflects Republican opinion." Evans was more
substantive than most recommendations: "Certainly one of the major issues
confronting our country at this time is the economy and the related problems
of inflation, unemployment, and high interest rates. I respectfully suggest
that you need someone who can help substantively in these areas. George
is great at PR but he is not as good in substantive matters. This opinion
can be confirmed by individuals who held key positions at the National
Committee." Evans also argued that Bush should have put greater distance
between the GOP and Nixon sooner than he did. / Note #1 / Note #0 So Nelson's
networks were not going to take the Bush strong-arm approach lying down.
Bush's most obvious vulnerability was his close relationship to Nixon,
plus the factthat he had been up to his neck in Watergate. It was lawful
that Bush's ties to one of Nixon's slush funds came back to haunt him.
This was the "Townhouse" fund again, the one managed by Jack A. Gleason
and California attorney Herbert W. Kalmbach, Nixon's personal lawyer, who
had gained quite some personal notoriety during the Watergate years. These
two had both pleaded guilty earlier in 1974 to running an illegal campaign
fundraising operation. On August 19, the eve of Ford's expected announcement,
the "Washington Post" reported that unnamed White House sources were telling
"Newsweek" magazine that Bush's vice-presidential bid "had slipped badly
because of alleged irregularities in the financing of his 1970 Senate race
in Texas." "Newsweek" quoted White House sources that "there was potential
embarrassment in reports that the Nixon White House had funneled about
$100,000 from a secret fund called the "Townhouse Operation" into Bush's
losing Senate campaign against Democrat Lloyd Bentsen four years ago."
"Newsweek" also added that $40,000 of this money may not have been properly
reported under the election laws. Bush's special treatment during the 1970
campaign was a subject of acute resentment, especially among Senate Republicans
Ford needed to keep on board. Back in 1970, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon
had demanded to know why John Tower had given Bush nearly twice as much
money as any other Senate Republican. Senator Tower had tried to deny favoritism,
but Hatfield and Edward Brooke of Massachusetts had not been placated.
Now there was the threat that if Bush had to go through lengthy confirmation
hearings in the Congress, the entire Townhouse affair might be dredged
up once again. According to some accounts, there were as many as 18 Republican
Senators who had gotten money from Townhouse, but whose names had not been
divulged. / Note #1 / Note #1 Any attempt to force Bush through as Vice
President might lead to the fingering of these Senators, and perhaps others,
mightily antagonizing those who had figured they were getting off with
a whole coat. Ripping off the scabs of Watergate wounds in this way conflicted
with Ford's "healing time" strategy, which was designed to put a hermetic
lid on the festering mass of Watergate. Bush was too dangerous to Ford.
Bush could not be chosen. Because he was so redolent of Nixonian sleaze,
Bush's maximum exertions for the vice-presidency were a failure. Ford announced
his choice of Nelson Rockefeller on August 20, 1974. It was nevertheless
astounding that Bush had come so close. He was defeated for the moment,
but he had established a claim on the office of the vice-presidency that
he would not relinquish. Despite his hollow, arrogant ambition and total
incompetence for the office, he would automatically be considered for the
vice-presidency in 1976 and then again in 1980. For George Bush was an
aristocrat of senatorial rank, although denied the Senate, and his conduct
betrayed the conviction that he was owed not just a place at the public
trough, but the accolade of national political office. Notes for Chapter
14 1. "Washington Post," Aug. 16, 1974. 2. "Washington Post," Aug. 9, 1974.
3. "Washington Post," Aug. 16, 1974. 4. Gerald R. Ford Library, Robert
T. Hartman Files, Box 21. 5. Hartman Files, Box 19. 6. Philip Buchen Files,
Box 63. 7. Hartman Files, Box 21. 8. Hartman Files, Boxes 19 and 20. 9.
Hartman Files, Box 21. 10. Hartman Files, Box 20. 11. Walter Pincus and
Bob Woodward, "Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes," "Washington Post,"
Aug. 9, 1988. XV: Bush in Beijing ""Whatever benign star it is that tends
George Bush's destiny, lights his ambition, it was early on trapped in
the flawed orbit of Richard Nixon. Bush's meteoric ascent, in a decade's
time, from county GOP chairman to national chairman, including his prestigious
ambassadorship to the United Nations, was due largely to the strong tug
of Nixonian gravity. Likewise, his blunted hopes and dimmed future, like
the Comet Kohoutek, result from the too-close approach to a fatal sun.""
/ Note #1 Several minutes before President Ford appeared for the first
time before the television cameras with Nelson Rockefeller, his Vice President
designate, he had placed a call to Bush to inform him that he had not been
chosen, and to reassure him that he would be offered an important post
as a consolation. Two days later, Bush met Ford at the White House. Bush
claims that Ford told him that he could choose between a future as U.S.
envoy to the Court of St. James in London, or presenting his credentials
to the Elysee Palace in Paris. Bush would have us believe that he then
told Ford that he wanted neither London nor Paris, but Beijing. Bush's
accounts then portray Ford, never the quickest, as tapping his pipe, scratching
his head, and asking, "Why Beijing?" Here Bush is lying once again. Ford
was certainly no genius, but no one was better situated than he to know
that it would have been utter folly to propose Bush for an ambassadorship
that had to be approved by the Senate. Why Beijing? The first consideration,
and it was an imperative one, was that under no circumstances could Bush
face Senate confirmation hearings for any executive branch appointment
for at least one to two years. There would have been questions about the
Townhouse slush fund, about his intervention on Carmine Bellino, perhaps
about Leon and Russell, and about many other acutely embarrassing themes.
After Watergate, Bush's name was just too smelly to send up to the Hill
for any reason. As Bush himself slyly notes: "The United States didn't
maintain formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic at the
time, so my appointment wouldn't need Senate confirmation." An asterisk
sends us to the additional fact that "because I'd been ambassador to the
United Nations I carried the title 'ambassador' to China." The person that
would have to be convinced, Bush correctly noted, was Henry Kissinger,
who monopolized all decisions on his prized China card. / Note #2 But George
was right about the confirmation. In 1974, what Bush was asking for was
the U.S. Liaison Office (USLO), which did not have the official status
of an embassy. The chief of that office was the President's personal representative
in China, but it was a post that did not require Senate confirmation. Bush's
notorious crony Robert Mosbacher was uncharacteristically close to the
heart of the matter when he opined that Bush "wanted to get as far away
from the stench [of Watergate] as possible." / Note #3 His own story that
Beijing would be a "challenge, a journey into the unknown" is pure tripe.
The truth is that with Washington teeming with congressional committees,
special prosecutors and grand juries, Bush wanted to get as far away as
he could, and Beijing was ideal. Otherwise, serving in Beijing meant further
close subordination to Henry Kissinger. Kissinger told Bush before he left
that policy would be implemented directly by Kissinger himself, in contact
with the Chinese liaison in Washington and the Chinese representative at
the United Nations. Finally, anyone who has observed Bush's stubborn, obsessive,
morally insane support for Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, and Yang Shankun during
the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989 is driven toward the
conclusion that Bush gravitated toward China because of an elective affinity,
because of a profound attraction for the methods and outlook of Chinese
leaders like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Deng, for whom Bush has manifested
a steadfast and unshakeable devotion in the face of heinous crimes and
significant political pressure to repudiate them. Bush's staff in Beijing
included Deputy Chief of Mission John Holdridge, Don Anderson, Herbert
Horowitz, Bill Thomas and Bush's "executive assistant," Jennifer Fitzgerald,
who has remained very close to Bush, and who has sometimes been rumored
to be his mistress. Jennifer Fitzgerald in 1991 was the deputy chief of
protocol in the White House; when German Chancellor Kohl visited Bush in
the sping of 1991, he was greeted on the White House steps by Jennifer
Fitzgerald. Bush's closest contacts among Chinese officialdom included
Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Qiao Guanhua and his wife Zhang Hanzhi,
also a top official of the foreign ministry. This is the same Qiao who
is repeatedly mentioned in Kissinger's memoirs as one of his most important
Red Chinese diplomatic interlocutors. This is the "Lord Qiao" enigmatically
mentioned by Mao during Kissinger's meeting with Mao and Zhou Enlai on
November 12, 1973. Qiao and Zhang later lost power because they sided with
the left extremist Gang of Four after the death of Mao in 1976, Bush tells
us. But in 1974-75, the power of the proto-Gang of Four faction was at
its height, and it was toward this group that Bush quickly gravitated.
When Bush had been in Beijing for about a month, Henry Kissinger arrived
for one of his periodic visits to discuss current business with the Beijing
leadership. Kissinger arrived with his usual army of retainers and Secret
Service guards. During this visit, Bush went with Kissinger to see Vice-Premier
Deng Xiaoping and Foreign Minister Qiao. This was one of three reported
visits by Kissinger that would punctuate Bush's stay. Bush's tenure in
Beijing must be understood in the context of the Malthusian and frankly
genocidal policies of the Kissinger White House. These are aptly summed
up for reference in the recently declassified National Security Study Memorandum
200, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and
Overseas Interests," dated December 10, 1974. / Note #6 NSSM 200, a joint
effort by Kissinger and his deputy, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, provided a hit
list of 13 developing countries for which the NSC posited a "special U.S.
political and strategic interest" in population reduction or limitation.
The list included India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia,
Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.
Demographic growth in these and other Third World nations was to be halted
and if possible reversed for the brutal reason that population growth represented
increased strategic, and military power for the countries in question.
Population growth, argues NSSM 200, will also increase pressure for the
economic and industrial development of these countries, an eventuality
which the study sees as a threat to the United States. In addition, bigger
populations in the Third World are alleged to lead to higher prices and
greater scarcity of strategic raw materials. As Kissinger summed up: "Development
of a worldwide political and popular commitment to population stabilization
is fundamental to any effective strategy.... The U.S. should encourage
LDC leaders to take the lead in advancing family planning." When NSSM 200
goes on to ask, "would food be considered an instrument of national power?"
it is clear to all that active measures of genocide are at the heart of
the policy being propounded. A later Kissinger report praises the Chinese
Communist leadership for their commitment to population control. During
1975, these Chinese Communists, Henry Kissinger and George Bush were to
team up to create a demonstration model of the NSSM 200 policy: the Pol
Pot regime in Cambodia. Target Cambodia One of the gambits used by Kissinger
to demonstrate to the Beijing Communist leaders the utility of rapprochement
with the U.S.A. has to do with the unhappy nation of Cambodia. The pro-U.S.
government of Cambodia was headed by Marshal Lon Nol, who had taken power
in 1970, the year of the public and massive U.S. ground incursion into
the country. By the spring of 1975, while the North Vietnamese advanced
on Saigon, the Lon Nol government was fighting for its life against the
armed insurrection of the Cambodian Communist Party or Khmer Rouge guerrillas,
who were supported by mainland China. Kissinger was as anxious as usual
to serve the interests of Beijing, and now even more so, because of the
alleged need to increase the power of the Chinese and their assets, the
Khmer Rouge, against the triumphant North Vietnamese. The most important
consideration remained to ally with China, the second strongest land power,
against the U.S.S.R. Secondarily, it was important to maintain the balance
of power in Southeast Asia as the U.S. policy collapsed. Kissinger's policy
was therefore to jettison the Lon Nol government, and to replace it with
the Khmer Rouge. George Bush, as Kissinger's liaison man in Beijing, was
one of the instruments through which this policy was executed. Bush did
his part, and the result is known to world history under the heading of
the Pol Pot regime, which committed a genocide against its own population
proportionally greater than any other in recent world history. Until 1970,
the government of Cambodia was led by Prince Sihanouk, a former king who
had stepped down from the throne to become Prime Minister. Under Sihanouk,
Cambodia had maintained a measure of stability and had above all managed
to avoid being completely engulfed by the swirling maelstrom of the wars
in Laos and in Vietnam. But during 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had ordered
a secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese troop concentrations
on Cambodian territory under the code name of "Menu." This bombing would
have provided real and substantive grounds for the impeachment of Nixon,
and it did constitute the fourth proposed article of impeachment against
Nixon submitted to the House Judiciary Committee on July 30, 1974. But
after three articles of impeachment having to do with the Watergate break-ins
and subsequent coverup were approved by the committee, the most important
article, the one on genocide in Cambodia, was defeated by a vote of 26
to 12. Cambodia was dragged into the Indo-China war by the U.S.-sponsored
coup d'etat in Phnom Penh in March 1970, which ousted Sihanouk in favor
of Marshal Lon Nol of the Cambodian Army, whose regime was never able to
achieve even a modicum of stability. Shortly thereafter, at the end of
April 1970, Nixon and Kissinger launched a large-scale U.S. military invasion
of Cambodia, citing the use of Cambodian territory by the North Vietnamese
armed forces for their "Ho Chi Minh trail" supply line to sustain their
forces deployed in South Vietnam. The "parrot's beak" area of Cambodia,
which extended deep into South Vietnam, was occupied. Prince Sihanouk,
who described himself as a neutralist, established himself in Beijing after
the seizure of power by Lon Nol. In May of 1970, he became the titular
leader and head of state of a Cambodian government in exile, the Gouvernement
Royal d'Union Nationale du Kampuchea, or GRUNK. The GRUNK was in essence
a united front between Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge, with the latter exercising
most of the real power and commanding the armed forces and secret police.
Sihanouk was merely a figurehead, and he knew it. During these years, the
Khmer Rouge, which had launched a small guerrilla insurrection during 1968,
was a negligible military factor in Cambodia, fielding only a very few
thousand guerrilla fighters. One of its leaders was Saloth Sar, who had
studied in Paris, and who had then sojourned at length in Red China at
the height of the Red Guards' agitation. Saloth Sar was one of the most
important leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and would later become infamous under
his nom de guerre of Pol Pot. Decisive support for Pol Pot and for the
later genocidal policies of the Khmer Rouge always came from Beijing, despite
the attempts of misguided or lying commentators (like Henry Kissinger)
to depict the Khmer Rouge as a creation of Hanoi. But in the years after
1970, the Khmer Rouge, who were determined immediately to transform Cambodia
into a Communist "utopia" beyond the dreams even of the wildest Maoist
Red Guards, made rapid gains. The most important single ingredient in the
rise of the Khmer Rouge was provided by Kissinger and Nixon, through their
systematic campaign of terror bombing against Cambodian territory during
1973. This was called Arclight, and began shortly after the January 1973
Paris Accords on Vietnam. With the pretext of halting a Khmer Rouge attack
on Phnom Penh, U.S. forces carried out 79,959 officially confirmed sorties
with B-52 and F-111 bombers against targets inside Cambodia, dropping 539,129
tons of explosives. Many of these bombs fell upon the most densely populated
sections of Cambodia, including the countryside around Phnom Penh. The
number of deaths caused by this genocidal campaign has been estimated at
between 30,000 and 500,000. / Note #7 Accounts of the devastating impact
of this mass terror-bombing leave no doubt that it shattered most of what
remained of Cambodian society and provided ideal preconditions for the
further expansion of the Khmer Rouge insurgency. During 1974, the Khmer
Rouge consolidated their hold over parts of Cambodia. In these enclaves,
they showed their characteristic methods of genocide, dispersing the inhabitants
of the cities into the countryside, while executing teachers, civil servants,
intellectuals -- sometimes all those who could read and write. This policy
was remarkably similar to the one being carried out by the United States
under Theodore Shackley's Operation Phoenix in neighboring South Vietnam,
and Kissinger and other officials began to see the potential of the Khmer
Rouge for implementing the genocidal population reductions that had now
been made the official doctrine of the U.S. regime. Support for the Khmer
Rouge was even more attractive to Kissinger and Nixon because it provided
an opportunity for the geopolitical propitiation of the Maoist regime in
China. Indeed, in the development of the China card between 1973 and 1975,
during most of Bush's stay in Beijing, Cambodia loomed very large as the
single most important bilateral issue between the U.S.A. and Red China.
Already, in November 1972, Kissinger told Bush's later prime contact, Qiao
Guanhua, that the United States would have no real objection to a Sihanouk-Khmer
Rouge government of the type that later emerged: "Whoever can best preserve
it [Cambodia] as an independent neutral country, is consistent with our
policy, and we believe with yours," said Kissinger. / Note #8 When Bush's
predecessor David Bruce arrived in Beijing to open the new U.S. Liaison
Office in the spring of 1973, he sought contact with Zhou Enlai. On May
18, 1973, Zhou stressed that the only solution for Cambodia would be for
North Vietnamese forces to leave that country entirely. A few days later,
Kissinger told Chinese delegate Huang Hua in New York that U.S. and Red
Chinese interests in Cambodia were compatible, since both sought to avoid
"a bloc which could support the hegemonial objectives of outside powers,"
meaning North Vietnam and Hanoi's backers in Moscow. The genocidal terror-bombing
of Cambodia was ordered by Kissinger during this period. Kissinger was
apoplectic over the move by the U.S. Congress to prohib it further bombing
of Cambodia after August 15, 1973, which he called "a totally unpredictable
and senseless event." / Note #9 Kissinger always pretends that the Khmer
Rouge were a tool of Hanoi, and in his memoirs he spins out an absurd theory
that the weakening of Zhou and the ascendancy of the Gang of Four was caused
by Kissinger's own inability to keep bombing Cambodia. In reality, Beijing
was backing its own allies, the Khmer Rouge, as is obvious from the account
that Kissinger himself provides of his meeting with Bush's friend Qiao
in October 1973. / Note #1 / Note #0 Starting in the second half of 1974,
George Bush was heavily engaged on this Sino-Cambodian front, particularly
in his contacts with his main negotiating partner, Qiao. Bush had the advantage
that secret diplomacy carried on with the Red Chinese regime during those
days was subject to very little public scrutiny. The summaries of Bush's
dealings with the Red Chinese now await the liberation of the files of
the foreign ministry in Beijing or of the State Department in Washington,
whichever comes first. Bush's involvement on the Cambodian question has
been established by later interviews with Prince Sihanouk's chef de cabinet,
Pung Peng Cheng, as well as with French and U.S. officials knowledgeable
about Bush's activities in Beijing during that time. What we have here
is admittedly the tip of the iceberg, the merest hints of the monstrous
iniquity yet to be unearthed. / Note #1 / Note #1 The Khmer Rouge launched
a dry-season offensive against Phnom Penh in early 1974, which fell short
of its goal. They tried again the following year with a dry-season offensive
launched on January 1, 1975. Soon supplies to Phnom Penh were cut off,
both on the land and along the Mekong River. Units of Lon Nol's forces
fought the battle of the Phnom Penh perimeter through March. On April 1,
1975, President Lon Nol resigned and fled the country under the pressure
of the U.S. embassy, who wanted him out as quickly as possible as part
of the program to appease Beijing. / Note #1 / Note #2 When Lon Nol had
left the country, Kissinger became concerned that the open conquest of
Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge Communist guerrillas would create public
relations and political problems for the shaky Ford regime in the United
States. Kissinger accordingly became interested in having Prince Sihanouk,
the titular head of the insurgent coalition of which the Khmer Rouge was
the leading part, travel from Beijing to Phnom Penh so that the new government
in Cambodia could be portrayed more as a neutralist-nationalist, and less
as a frankly Communist, regime. This turns out to be the episode of the
Cambodian tragedy in which George Bush's personal involvement is most readily
demonstrated. Prince Sihanouk had repeatedly sought direct contacts with
Kissinger. At the end of March 1975, he tried again to open a channel to
Washington, this time with the help of the French embassy in Beijing. Sihanouk's
chef de cabinet, Pung Peng Chen, requested a meeting with John Holdridge,
Bush's deputy station chief. This meeting was held at the French Embassy.
Pung told Holdridge that Prince Sihanouk had a favor to ask of President
Ford: "[I]n [Sihanouk's] old home in Phnom Penh were copies of the films
of Cambodia he had made in the sixties when he had been an enthusiastic
cineast. They constituted a unique cultural record of a Cambodia that was
gone forever: would the Americans please rescue them? Kissinger ordered
Dean [the U.S. ambassador in Cambodia] to find the films and also instructed
Bush to seek a meeting with Sihanouk. The Prince refused, and during the
first ten days of April, as the noose around Phnom Penh tightened, he continued
his public tirades" against the United States and its Cambodian puppets.
/ Note #1 / Note #3 On the same day, April 11, Ford announced that he would
not request any further aid for Cambodia from the U.S. Congress, since
any aid for Cambodia approved now would be "too late" anyway. Ford had
originally been asking for $333 million to save the government of Cambodia.
Several days later, Ford would reverse himself and renew his request for
the aid, but by that time it was really too late. On April 11, the U.S.
embassy was preparing a dramatic evacuation, but the embassy was being
kept open as part of Kissinger's effort to bring Prince Sihanouk back to
Phnom Penh. "It was now, on April 11, 1975, as Dean was telling government
leaders he might soon be leaving, that Kissinger decided that Sihanouk
should be brought back to Cambodia. In Peking, George Bush was ordered
to seek another meeting; that afternoon John Holdridge met once more with
Pung Peng Cheng at the French embassy. The American diplomat explained
that Dr. Kissinger and President Ford were now convinced that only the
Prince could end the crisis. Would he please ask the Chinese for an aircraft
to fly him straight back to Phnomn Penh? The United States would guarantee
to remain there until he arrived. Dr. Kissinger wished to impose no conditions....
On April 12, at 5 a.m. Peking time, Holdridge again met with Pung. He told
him that the Phnom Penh perimeter was degenerating so fast that the Americans
were pulling out at once. Sihanouk had already issued a statement rejecting
and denouncing Kissinger's invitation." / Note #1 / Note #4 Sihanouk had
a certain following among liberal members of the U.S. Senate, and his presence
in Phnom Penh in the midst of the debacle of the old Lon Nol forces would
doubtless have been reassuring for U.S. public opinion. But Sihanouk at
this time had no ability to act independently of the Khmer Rouge leaders,
who were hostile to him and who held the real power, including the inside
track to the Red Chinese. Prince Sihanouk did return to Phnom Penh later
in 1975, and his strained relations with Pol Pot and his colleagues soon
became evident. Early in 1976, Sihanouk was placed under house arrest by
the Khmer Rouge, who appear to have intended to execute him. Sihanouk remained
under detention until the North Vietnamese drove Pol Pot and his forces
out of Phnom Penh in 1978 and set up their own government there. In following
the Kissinger-Bush machinations to bring Prince Sihanouk back to Cambodia
in mid-April 1975, one is also suspicious that an included option was to
increase the likelihood that Sihanouk might be liquidated by the Khmer
Rouge. When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, they immediately carried
out a massacre on a grand scale, slaying any members of the Lon Nol and
Long Boret cabinets they could get their hands on. There were mass executions
of teachers and government officials, and all of the 2.5 million residents
of Phnom Penh were driven into the countryside, including seriously ill
hospital patients. Under these circumstances, it would have been relatively
easy to assassinate Sihanouk amidst the general orgy of slaughter. Such
an eventuality was explicitly referred to in a Kissinger NSC briefing paper
circulated in March 1975, in which Sihanouk was quoted as follows in remarks
made December 10, 1971: "If I go on as chief of state after victory, I
run the risk of being pushed out the window by the Communists, like Masaryk,
or that I might be imprisoned for revisionism or deviationism." More than
2 million Cambodians out of an estimated total population of slightly more
than 7 million perished under the Khmer Rouge; according to some estimates,
the genocide killed 32 percent of the total population. / Note #1 / Note
#5 The United States and Red China, acting together under the Kissinger
"China card" policy, had liquidated one Cambodian government, destroyed
the fabric of civil society in the country, ousted a pro-U.S. government,
and installed a new regime they knew to be genocidal in its intentions.
For Kissinger, it was the exemplification of the new U.S. strategic doctrine
contained in NSSM 200. For George Bush, it was the fulfillment of his family's
fanatically held belief in the need for genocide to prevent the more prolific,
but "inferior," races of the earth, in this case those with yellow skins,
from "out-breeding" the imperial Anglo-Saxon racial stock. Making Mon ey
in Beijing In addition to opportunities to promote genocide, Bush's tenure
in Beijing presented him with numerous occasions to exploit public office
for the private gain of financiers and businessmen who were a part of his
network. In September 1975, as Ford was preparing for a year-end visit
to China, Kissinger organized a presidential reception at the White House
for a delegation from the Beijing China Council for the Promotion of International
Trade. The meeting was carefully choreographed by Kissinger and Scowcroft.
The Ford Library has preserved a supplementary memo to Scowcroft, at that
time the NSC chief, from Richard H. Solomon of the NSC staff, which reads
as follows: "Regarding the President's meeting with the Chinese trade group,
State has called me requesting that Ambassador Bush and [Kissinger henchman]
Phil Habib attend the meeting. You will recall having approved Bush's sitting
in on the President's meeting with the Congressional delegation that recently
returned from China. Hence, Bush will be floating around the White House
at this period of time anyway. I personally think it would be useful to
have Bush and Habib sit in. The Cabinet Room should be able to hold them.
Win[ston] Lord is someone else who might be invited." This meeting was
eventually held on September 8, 1975. A little earlier, Bush, en route
to Washington, had sent a hand-written note to Scowcroft dated August29,
1975. This missive urged Scowcroft to grant a request from Codel Anderson,
who had just completed a visit to China complete with a meeting with Deng
Xiaoping, to be allowed to report back to Ford personally. These were the
type of contacts which later paid off for Bush's cronies. During 1977,
Bush returned to China as a private citizen, taking with him his former
Zapata business partner, J. Hugh Liedtke. In January 1978, Liedtke was
on hand when the Chinese oil minister was Bush's guest for dinner at his
home in Houston. In May 1978, Liedtke and Pennzoil were at the top of the
Chinese government's list of U.S. oil firms competing to be accorded contracts
for drilling in China. Then, in the late summer of 1978, J. Hugh Liedtke
of Pennzoil made another trip to China, during which he was allowed to
view geological studies which had previously been held as state secrets
by Beijing. Pennzoil was in the lead for a contract to begin oil drilling
in the South China Sea. / Note #1 / Note #6 Kissinger made four visits
to Beijing during Bush's tenure there. On October 19, 1975, Kissinger arrived
in Beijing to prepare for Ford's visit, set for December. There were talks
between Kissinger and Deng Xiaoping, with Bush, Habib, Winston Lord and
Foreign Minister Qiao taking part. It was during this visit that, Bush
would have us believe, he had his first face-to-face meeting with Mao Zedong,
the leader of a Communist revolution which had claimed the lives of some
100 million Chinese since the end of the Second World War. Meeting of the
Monsters Mao, one of the greatest monsters of the twentieth century, was
81 years old at that time. He was in very bad health; when he opened his
mouth to meet Kissinger, "only guttural noises emerged." Mao's study contained
tables covered with tubes and medical apparatus, and a small oxygen tank.
Mao was unable to speak coherently, but had to write Chinese characters
and an occasional word in English on a note pad which he showed to his
interpreters. Kissinger inquired as to Mao's health. Mao pointed to his
head saying, "This part works well. I can eat and sleep." Then Mao tapped
his legs: "These parts do not work well. They are not strong when I walk.
I also have some trouble with my lungs. In a word, I am not well. I am
a showcase for visitors," Mao summed up. The croaking, guttural voice continued:
"I am going to heaven soon. I have already received an invitation from
God." If Mao was a basso profondo of guttural croaking, then Kissinger
was at least a bass-baritone: "Don't accept it too soon," he replied. "I
accept the orders of the Doctor," wrote Mao on his note pad. Mao at this
point had slightly less than a year to live. Bush provided counterpoint
to these lower registers with his own whining tenor. Bush was much impressed
by Mao's rustic background and repertoire of Chinese barnyard expressions.
Referring to a certain problem in Sino-American relations, Mao dismissed
it as no more important than a "fang go pi," no more important than a dog
fart. Mao went on, commenting about U.S. military superiority, and then
saying: "God blesses you, not us. God does not like us because I am a militant
warlord, also a Communist. No, he doesn't like me. He likes you three."
Mao pointed to Kissinger, Bush and Winston Lord. Toward the end of the
encounter, this lugubrious monster singled out Bush for special attention.
Mao turned to Winston Lord. "This ambassador," said Mao while gesturing
toward Bush, "is in a plight. Why don't you come visit?" "I would be honored,"
Bush replied according to his own account, "but I'm afraid you're very
busy." "Oh, I'm not busy," said Mao. "I don't look after internal affairs.
I only read the international news. You should really come visit." Bush
claims / Note #1 / Note #7 that he never accepted Chairman Mao's invitation
to come around for private talks. Bush says that he was convinced by members
of his own staff that Mao did not really mean to invite him, but was only
being polite. Was Bush really so reticent, or is this another one of the
falsifications with which his official biographies are studded? The world
must await the opening of the Beijing and Foggy Bottom archives. In the
meantime, we must take a moment to contemplate that gathering of October
1975 in Chairman Mao's private villa, secluded behind many courtyards and
screens in the Chungnanhai enclave of Chinese rulers not far from the Great
Hall of the People and Tiananmen, where less than a year later an initial
round of pro-democracy demonstrations would be put down in blood in the
wake of the funeral of Zhou Enlai. Mao, Kissinger, and Bush: Has history
ever seen a tete-a-tete of such mass murderers? Mao, identifying himself
with Chin Shih Huang, the first Emperor of all of China and founder of
the Chin dynasty, who had built the Great Wall, burned the books, and killed
the Confucian scholars -- this Mao had massacred ten percent of his own
people, ravaged Korea, strangled Tibet. Kissinger's crimes were endless,
from the Middle East to Vietnam, from the oil crisis of 1973-74, with the
endless death in the Sahel, to India-Pakistan, Chile and many more. Kissinger,
Mao and Bush had collaborated to install the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime
in Cambodia, which was now approaching the zenith of its genocidal career.
Compared to the other two, Bush may have appeared as an apprentice of genocide:
He had done some filibustering in the Caribbean, had been part of the cheering
section for the Indonesia massacres of 1965, and then he had become a part
of the Kissinger apparatus, sharing in the responsibility for India-Pakistan,
the Middle East, Cambodia. But as Bush advanced through his personal "cursus
honorum," his power and his genocidal dexterity were growing, foreshadowing
such future triumphs as the devastation of El Chorillo in Panama in December
1989, and his later masterwork of savagery, the Gulf war of 1991. By the
time of Bush's own administration, Anglo-American finance and the International
Monetary Fund were averaging some 50 million needless deaths per year in
the developing sector. But Mao, Kissinger and Bush exchanged pleasantries
that day in Mao's sitting room in Chungnanhai. If the shades of Hitler
or Stalin had sought admission to that murderers colloquium, they might
have been denied entrance as pikers. Later, in early December, Gerald Ford,
accompanied by his hapless wife and daughter, came to see the moribund
Mao for what amounted to a photo opportunity with a living cadaver. The
Associated Press wire issued that day hyped the fact that Mao had talked
with Ford for one hour and 50 minutes, nearly twice as long as the Great
Steersman had given to Nixon in 1972. Participants in this meeting included
Kissinge r, Bush, Scowcroft and Winston Lord. Bush was now truly a leading
Kissinger clone. A joint communique issued after this session said that
Mao and Ford had had "earnest and significant discussions ... on wide-ranging
issues in a friendly atmosphere." At this meeting, Chairman Mao greeted
Bush with the words, "You've been promoted." Mao turned to Ford, and added:
"We hate to see him go." At a private lunch with Vice Premier Deng Xiao-ping,
the rising star of the post-Mao succession, Deng assured Bush that he was
considered a friend of the Chinese Communist hierarchy who would always
be welcome in China, "even as head of the CIA." For, as we will see, this
was to be the next stop on Bush's "cursus honorum." Later, Kissinger and
Bush also met with Qiao Guanhua, still the Foreign Minister. According
to newspaper accounts, the phraseology of the joint communique suggested
that the meeting had been more than usually cordial. There had also been
a two-hour meeting with Deng Xiaoping reported by the Ford White House
as "a constructive exchange of views on a wide range of international issues."
At a banquet, Deng used a toast for an anti-Soviet tirade which the Soviet
news agency TASS criticized as "vicious attacks." / Note #1 / Note #8 Ford
thought, probably because he had been told by Kissinger, that the fact
that Mao had accompanied him to the door of his villa after the meeting
was a special honor, but he was disabused by Beijing-based correspondents
who told him that this was Mao's customary practice. Ford's daughter Susan
was sporting a full-length muskrat coat for her trip to the Great Wall.
"It's more than I ever expected," she gushed. "I feel like I'm in a fantasy.
It's a whole other world." The Next Step Days after Ford departed from
Beijing, Bush also left the Chinese capital. It was time for a new step
in his imperial "cursus honorum." During his entire stay in Beijing, Bush
had never stopped scheming for new paths of personal advancement toward
the very apex of power. Before Bush went to Beijing, he had talked to his
network asset and crony Rogers C.B. Morton about his favorite topic, his
own prospects for future career aggrandizement. Morton at that time was
Secretary of Commerce, but he was planning to step down before much longer.
Morton told Bush: "What you ought to think about is coming back to Washington
to replace me when I leave. It's a perfect springboard for a place on the
ticket." This idea is the theme of a Ford White House memo preserved in
the Jack Marsh Files at the Ford Library in Ann Arbor. The memo is addressed
to Jack Marsh, counselor to the President, by Russell Rourke of Marsh's
staff. The memo, which is dated March 20, 1975, reads as follows: "|'It's
my impression and partial understanding that George Bush has probably had
enough of egg rolls and Peking by now (and has probably gotten over his
lost V.P. opportunity). He's one hell of a Presidential surrogate, and
would be an outstanding spokesman for the White House between now and November
'76. Don't you think he would make an outstanding candidate for Secretary
of Commerce or a similar post sometime during the next six months?'|" Bush
was now obsessed with the idea that he had a right to become Vice President
in 1976. As a member of the senatorial caste, he had a right to enter the
Senate, and if the plebeians with their changeable humors barred the elective
route, then the only answer was to be appointed to the second spot on the
ticket and enter the Senate as its presiding officer. As Bush wrote in
his campaign autobiography: "Having lost out to Rockefeller as Ford's vice-presidential
choice in 1974, I might be considered by some as a leading contender for
the number two spot in Kansas City...." / Note #1 / Note #9 Bush possessed
a remarkable capability for the blackmailing of Ford: He could enter the
1976 Republican presidential primaries as a candidate in his own right,
and could occasion a hemorrhaging of liberal Republican support that might
otherwise have gone to Ford. Ford, the second non-elected President [Andrew
Johnson was the first], was the weakest of all incumbents, and he was already
preparing to face a powerful challenge from his right mounted by the Ronald
Reagan camp. The presence of an additional rival with Bush's networks among
liberal and moderate Republican layers might constitute a fatal impediment
to Ford's prospects for getting himself elected to a term of his own. Accordingly,
when Kissinger visited Bush in Beijing in October 1975, he pointedly inquired
as to whether Bush intended to enter any of the Republican presidential
primaries during the 1976 season. This was the principal question that
Ford had directed Kissinger to ask of Bush. Bush's exit from Beijing occurred
within the context of Ford's celebrated "Halloween massacre" of early November
1975. This "massacre," reminiscent of Nixon's cabinet purge of 1973 ("the
Saturday night massacre"), was a number of firings and transfers of high
officials at the top of the executive branch, through which Ford sought
to figure forth the political profile which he intended to carry into the
primaries and, if he were successful in the winter and spring, into the
Republican convention and, beyond that, into the fall campaign. So each
of these changes had a purpose that was ultimately rooted in electioneering.
In the Halloween massacre, it was announced that Vice President Nelson
Rockefeller would under no circumstances be a candidate to continue in
that office. Nelson's negatives were simply too high, owing in part to
a vigorous campaign directed against him by Lyndon LaRouche. James "Rodney
the Robot" Schlesinger was summarily ousted as the Secretary of Defense;
Schlesinger's "Dr. Strangelove" overtones were judged not presentable during
an election year. To replace Schlesinger, Ford's White House chief of staff,
Donald Rumsfeld, was given the Pentagon. Henry Kissinger, who up to this
moment had been running the administration from two posts, NSC Director
and Secretary of State, had to give up his White House office and was obliged
to direct the business of the government from Foggy Bottom. In consolation
to him, the NSC job was assigned to his devoted clone and later business
associate, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, a Mormon who would
later play the role of exterminating demon during Bush's Gulf war adventure.
At the Department of Commerce, the secretary's post that had been so highly
touted to Bush was being vacated by Rogers Morton. Finally, William Colby,
his public reputation thoroughly dilapidated as a result of the revelations
made during the Church Committee and Pike Committee investigations of the
abuses and crimes of the CIA, especially within the U.S. domestic sphere,
was canned as Director of Central Intelligence. Could this elaborate reshuffle
be made to yield a job for Bush? It was anything but guaranteed. The post
of CIA Director was offered to Washington lawyer and influence broker Edward
Bennett Williams. But he turned it down. Then there was the post at Commerce.
This was one that Bush came very close to getting. In the Jack Marsh files
at the Gerald Ford Library there is a draft marked "Suggested cable to
George Bush," but which is undated. The telegram begins: "Congratulations
on your selection by the President as Secretary of Commerce." The job title
is crossed out, and "Director of the Central Intelligence Agency" is penciled
in. So Bush almost went to Commerce, but then was proposed for Langley
instead. Bush in his campaign autobiography suggests that the CIA appointment
was a tactical defeat, the one new job that was more or less guaranteed
to keep him off the GOP ticket in 1976. As CIA Director, if he got that
far, he would have to spend "the next six months serving as point man for
a controversial agency being investigated by two major Congressional committees.
The scars left by that experience would put me out of contention, leaving
the spot open for others." / Note #2 / Note #0 Bush suggests that "the
Langley thing" was the handiwork of Donald Rumsfeld, who had a leading
role in designing the reshuffle. (Some time later, Fo rd's Secretary of
the Treasury William Simon confided privately that he himself had been
targeted for proscription by "Rummy," who was more interested in taking
the Treasury than he was in the Pentagon.) On All Saints' Day, November
1, 1975, Bush received a telegram from Kissinger informing him that "the
President is planning to announce some major personnel shifts on Monday,
November 3, at 7:30 PM, Washington time. Among those shifts will be the
transfer of Bill Colby from CIA. The President asks that you consent to
his nominating you as the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency."
/ Note #2 / Note #1 Bush promptly accepted. Notes for Chapter 15 1. Al
Reinert, "Bob and George Go to Washington or The Post-Watergate Scramble,"
in "Texas Monthly," April 1974. 2. George Bush and Victor Gold, "Looking
Forward" (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 130. 3. Walter Pincus and Bob
Woodward, "Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes," "Washington Post," Aug.
9, 1988. 6. See Hassan Ahmed and Joseph Brewda, "Kissinger, Scowcroft,
Bush Plotted Third World Genocide," "Executive Intelligence Review," May
3, 1991, pp. 26-30. 7. Russell R. Ross ed., "Cambodia: A Country Study"
(Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1990), p. 46. 8. Henry Kissinger, "Years of Upheaval"
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 341. 9. "Ibid.," p. 367. 10. "Ibid.,"
p. 681. 11. See William Shawcross, "Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the
Destruction of Cambodia" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 360-61.
12. See Sutsakhan's "The Khmer Republic at War and the Final Collapse"
(Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980) pp. 163, 166.
13. Shawcross, "op. cit.," p. 360. 14. "Ibid.," p. 361. 15. Ross, "op.
cit.," p. 51. 16. "Forbes," Sept. 4, 1978. 17. See Bush and Gold, "op.
cit.," pp. 145-49 for Bush's account of his alleged first meeting with
Mao. 18. "New Orleans Times-Picayune," Dec. 3, 1975. 19. Bush and Gold,
"op. cit.," p. 157. 20. "Ibid.," pp. 157-58. 21. "Ibid.," p. 153. "XVI:
CIA Director" In late 1975, as a result in particular of his role in Watergate,
Bush's confirmation as CIA director was not automatic. And though the debate
at his confirmation was superficial, some senators, including in particular
the late Frank Church of Idaho, made some observations about the dangers
inherent in the Bush nomination that have turned out in retrospect to be
useful. The political scene on the home front, from which Bush had been
so anxious to be absent during 1975, was the so-called "Year of Intelligence,"
in that it had been a year of intense scrutiny of the illegal activities
and abuses of the intelligence community, including CIA domestic and covert
operations. On December 22, 1974, the "New York Times" published the first
of a series of articles by Seymour M. Hersh, which relied on leaked reports
of CIA activities assembled by Director James Rodney Schlesinger to expose
alleged misdeeds by the agency. It was widely recognized at the time that
the Hersh articles were a self-exposure by the CIA that was designed to
set the agenda for the Ford-appointed Rockefeller Commission, which was
set up a few days later, on January 4. The Rockefeller Commission was supposed
to examine the malfeasance of the intelligence agencies and make recommendations
about how they could be reorganized and reformed. In reality, the Rockefeller
Commission proposals would reflect the transition of the structures of
the 1970s toward the growing totalitarian tendencies of the 1980s. While
the Rockefeller Commission was a tightly controlled vehicle of the Eastern
Anglophile Liberal Establishment, congressional investigating committees
were impaneled during 1975 whose proceedings were somewhat less rigidly
controlled. These included the Senate Intelligence Committee, known as
the Church Committee, and the corresponding House committee, first chaired
by Rep. Lucien Nedzi (who had previously chaired one of the principal Watergate-era
probes), and then (after July) by Rep. Otis Pike. One example was the Pike
Committee's issuance of a contempt of Congress citation against Henry Kissinger
for his refusal to provide documentation of covert operations in November
1975. Another was Church's role in leading the opposition to the Bush nomination.
The Church Committee launched an investigation of the use of covert operations
for the purpose of assassinating foreign leaders. By the nature of things,
this probe was led to grapple with the problem of whether covert operations
sanctioned to eliminate foreign leaders had been re-targeted against domestic
political figures. The obvious case was the Kennedy assassination. Frank
Church -- who, we must keep in mind, was himself an ambitious politician
-- was especially diligent in attacking CIA covert operations, which Bush
would be anxious to defend. The CIA's covert branch, Church thought, was
a "self-serving apparatus." "It's a bureaucracy which feeds on itself,
and those involved are constantly sitting around thinking up schemes for
[foreign] intervention which will win them promotions and justify further
additions to the staff.... It self-generates interventions that otherwise
never would be thought of, let alone authorized." / Note #1 It will be
seen that, at the beginning of Bush's tenure at the CIA, the congressional
committees were on the offensive against the intelligence agencies. By
the time that Bush departed Langley, the tables were turned, and it was
the Congress which was the focus of scandals, including Koreagate. Soon
thereafter, the Congress would undergo the assault of Abscam. Preparation
for what was to become the "Halloween massacre" began in the Ford White
House during the summer of 1975. The Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan
preserves a memo from Donald Rumsfeld to Ford dated July 10, 1975, which
deals with an array of possible choices for CIA director. Rumsfeld had
polled a number of White House and administration officials and asked them
to express preferences among "outsiders to the CIA." / Note #2 Dick Cheney
of the White House staff proposed Robert Bork, followed by Bush and Lee
Iacocca. Among the officials polled by Cheney was Henry Kissinger, who
suggested C. Douglas Dillon, Howard Baker and Robert Roosa. Nelson Rockefeller
was also for C. Douglas Dillon, followed by Howard Baker, and James R.
Schlesinger. Rumsfeld himself listed Bork, Dillon, Stanley Resor, Lee Iacocca
and Walter Wriston, but not Bush. The only officials putting Bush on their
"possible" lists, other than Cheney, were Jack O. Marsh, a White House
counselor to Ford, and David Packard. When it came time for Rumsfeld to
sum up the aggregate number of times each person was mentioned, minus one
point for each time a person had been recommended against, among the names
on the final list were the following: Robert Bork (rejected in 1987 for
the Supreme Court), John S. Foster of PFIAB (formerly of the Department
of Defense), C. Douglas Dillon, Stanley Resor, and Robert Roosa. It will
be seen that Bush was not among the leading candidates, perhaps because
his networks were convinced that he was going to make another attempt for
the vice-presidency and that therefore the Commerce Department or some
similar post would be more suitable. The summary profile of Bush sent to
Ford by Rumsfeld found that Bush had "experience in government and diplomacy"
and was "generally familiar with components of the intelligence community
and their missions" while having management experience. Under "Cons" Rumsfeld
noted: "RNC post lends undesirable political cast." As we have seen, the
CIA post was finally offered by Ford to Edward Bennett Williams, perhaps
with an eye on building a bipartisan bridge toward a powerful faction of
the intelligence community. But Williams did not want the job. Bush, originally
slated for the Department of Commerce, was given the CIA appointment. The
announcement of Bush's nomination occasioned a storm of criticism, whose
themes included the inadvisability of choosing a Watergate figure for such
a sensitive post so soon after that scandal had finally begun to subside.
References were made to Bush's receipt of financial largesse fr om Nixon's
Townhouse fund and related operations. There was also the question of whether
the domestic CIA apparatus would get mixed up in Bush's expected campaign
for the vice-presidency. These themes were developed in editorials during
the month of November 1976, while Bush was kept in Beijing by the requirements
of preparing the Ford-Mao meetings of early December. To some degree, Bush
was just hanging there and slowly, slowly twisting in the wind. The slow-witted
Ford soon realized that he had been inept in summarily firing William Colby,
since Bush would have to remain in China for some weeks and then return
to face confirmation hearings. Ford had to ask Colby to stay on in a caretaker
capacity until Bush took office. The delay allowed opposition against Bush
to crystallize to some degree, but his own network was also quick to spring
to his defense. Former CIA officer Tom Braden, writing in the "Fort Lauderdale
News", noted that the Bush appointment to the CIA looked bad, and looked
bad at a time when public confidence in the CIA was so low that everything
about the agency desperately needed to look good. Braden's column was entitled
"George Bush, Bad Choice for CIA Job." Rowland Evans and Robert Novak,
writing in the "Washington Post", commented that "the Bush nomination is
regarded by some intelligence experts as another grave morale deflator.
They reason that any identified politician, no matter how resolved to be
politically pure, would aggravate the CIA's credibility gap. Instead of
an identified politician like Bush ... what is needed, they feel, is a
respected non-politician, perhaps from business or the academic world."
The "Washington Post" came out against Bush in an editorial entitled "The
Bush Appointment." Here the reasoning was that this position "should not
be regarded as a political parking spot," and that public confidence in
the CIA had to be restored after the recent revelations of wrongdoing.
After a long-winded argument, the conservative columnist George Will came
to the conclusion that Ambassador Bush at the CIA would be "the wrong kind
of guy at the wrong place at the worst possible time." Senator Church viewed
the Bush appointment in the context of a letter sent to him by Ford on
October 31, 1975, demanding that the committee's report on U.S. assassination
plots against foreign leaders be kept secret. In Church's opinion, these
two developments were part of a pattern, and amounted to a new stonewalling
defense by what Church had called "the rogue elephant." Church issued a
press statement in response to Ford's letter attempting to impose a blackout
on the assassination report. "I am astonished that President Ford wants
to suppress the committee's report on assassination and keep it concealed
from the American people," said Church. Then, on November 3, Church was
approached by reporters outside of his Senate hearing room and asked by
Daniel Schorr about the firing of Colby and his likely replacement by Bush.
Church responded with a voice that was trembling with anger. "There is
no question in my mind but that concealment is the new order of the day,"
he said. "Hiding evil is the trademark of a totalitarian government." /
Note #3 The following day, November 4, Church read Leslie Gelb's column
in the "New York Times" suggesting that Colby had been fired, among other
things, "for not doing a good job containing the congressional investigations."
George Bush, Gelb thought, "would be able to go to Congress and ask for
a grace period before pressing their investigations further." A "Washington
Star" headline of this period summed up this argument: "CIA Needs Bush's
PR Talent." Church talked with his staff that day about what he saw as
an ominous pattern of events. He told reporters: "First came the very determined
administration effort to prevent any revelations concerning NSA, their
stonewalling of public hearings. Then came the president's letter. Now
comes the firing of Colby, Mr. Schlesinger, and the general belief that
Secretary Kissinger is behind these latest developments." For Church, "clearly
a pattern has emerged now to try and disrupt this [Senate Intelligence
Committee] investigation. As far as I'm concerned, it won't be disrupted,"
said Church grimly. One of Church's former aides, speech writer Loch K.
Johnson, describes how he worked with Church to prepare a speech scheduled
for delivery on November 11, 1975, in which Church would stake out a position
opposing the Bush nomination: "The nomination of George Bush to succeed
Colby disturbed him and he wanted to wind up the speech by opposing the
nomination.... He hoped to influence Senate opinion on the nomination on
the eve of Armed Services Committee hearings to confirm Bush. "I rapidly
jotted down notes as Church discussed the lines he would like to take against
the nomination. 'Once they used to give former national party chairmen
[as Bush had been under President Nixon] postmaster generalships -- the
most political and least sensitive job in government,' he said. 'Now they
have given this former party chairman the most sensitive and least political
agency.' Church wanted me to stress how Bush 'might compromise the independence
of the CIA -- the agency could be politicized.'|" Some days later, Church
appeared on the CBS program "Face the Nation." He was asked by George Herman
if his opposition to Bush would mean that anyone with political experience
would be "a priori" unacceptable for such a post. Church replied: "I think
that whoever is chosen should be one who has demonstrated a capacity for
independence, who has shown that he can stand up to the many pressures."
Church hinted that Bush had never stood up for principle at the cost of
political office. Moreover, "a man whose background is as partisan as a
past chairman of the Republican Party does serious damage to the agency
and its intended purposes." / Note #4 The Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull
and Bones crowd counterattacked in favor of Bush, mobilizing some significant
resources. One was none other than Leon Jaworski, the former Watergate
special prosecutor. Jaworski's mission for the Bush network appears to
have been to get the Townhouse and related Nixon slush fund issues off
the table of the public debate and confirmation hearings. Jaworski, speaking
at a convention of former FBI special agents meeting in Houston, defended
Bush against charges that he had accepted illegal or improper payments
from Nixon and CREEP operatives. "This was investigated by me when I served
as Watergate special prosecutor. I found no involvement of George Bush
and gave him full clearance. I hope that in the interest of fairness, the
matter will not be bandied about unless something new has appeared on the
horizon." More Opposition Negative mail from both houses of Congress was
also coming in to the White House. On November 12, GOP Congressman James
M. Collins of Dallas, Texas wrote to Ford: "I hope you will reconsider
the appointment of George Bush to the CIA. At this time it seems to me
that it would be a greater service for the country for George to continue
his service in China. He is not the right man for the CIA." There was also
a letter to Ford from Democratic Congressman Lucien Nedzi of Michigan,
who had been the chairman of one of the principal House Watergate investigating
committees. Nedzi wrote as follows: "The purpose of my letter is to express
deep concern over the announced appointment of George Bush as the new Director
of the Central Intelligence Agency. "... [H]is proposed appointment would
bring with it inevitable complications for the intelligence community.
Mr. Bush is a man with a recent partisan political past and a probable
near-term partisan political future. This is a burden neither the Agency,
nor the legislative oversight committee, nor the Executive should have
to bear as the CIA enters perhaps the most difficult period of its history.
"Accordingly, I respectfully urge that you reconsider your appointment
of Mr. Bush to this most sensitive of positions." / Note #5 Within just
a couple of days of making Bush's nomination public, the Ford White House
was aware tha t it had a significant public relations problem. To get reelected,
Ford had to appear as a reformer, breaking decisively with the bad old
days of Nixon and the Plumbers. But with the Bush nomination, Ford was
putting a former party chairman and future candidate for national office
at the head of the entire intelligence community. Ford's staff began to
marshal attempted rebuttals for the attacks on Bush. On November 5, Jim
Connor of Ford's staff had some trite boiler-plate inserted into Ford's
Briefing Book in case he were asked if the advent of Bush represented a
move to obstruct the Church and Pike Committees. Ford was told to answer
that he "has asked Director Colby to cooperate fully with the Committee"
and "expects Ambassador Bush to do likewise once he becomes Director. As
you are aware, the work of both the Church and Pike Committees is slated
to wind up shortly." / Note #6 In case he were asked about Bush politicizing
the CIA, Ford was to answer: "I believe that Republicans and Democrats
who know George Bush and have worked with him know that he does not let
politics and partisanship interfere with the performance of public duty."
That was a mouthful. "Nearly all of the men and women in this and preceding
administrations have had partisan identities and have held partisan party
posts.... George Bush is a part of that American tradition and he will
demonstrate this when he assumes his new duties." But when Ford, in an
appearance on a Sunday talk show, was asked if he were ready to exclude
Bush as a possible vice-presidential candidate, he refused to do so, answering,
"I don't think people of talent ought to be excluded from any field of
public service." At a press conference, Ford said, "I don't think he's
eliminated from consideration by anybody, the delegates or the convention
or myself." Confirmation Hearings Bush's confirmation hearings got under
way on December 15, 1975. Even judged by Bush's standards of today, they
constitute a landmark exercise in sanctimonious hypocrisy so astounding
as to defy comprehension. Bush's sponsor was GOP Senator Strom Thurmond
of South Carolina, the ranking Republican on Senator John Stennis's Senate
Armed Services Committee. Thurmond unloaded a mawkish panegyric in favor
of Bush: "I think all of this shows an interest on your part in humanity,
in civic development, love of your country, and willingness to serve your
fellow man." Bush's opening statement was also in the main a tissue of
banality and cliches. He indicated his support for the Rockefeller Commission
report without having mastered its contents in detail. He pointed out that
he had attended cabinet meetings from 1971 to 1974, without mentioning
who the President was in those days. Everybody was waiting for this consummate
pontificator to get to the issue of whether he was going to attempt the
vice-presidency in 1976. Readers of Bush's propaganda biographies know
that he never decides on his own to run for office, but always responds
to the urging of his friends. Within those limits, his answer was that
he was available for the second spot on the ticket. More remarkably, he
indicated that he had a hereditary right to it -- it was, as he said, his
"birthright." Would Bush accept a draft? "I cannot in all honesty tell
you that I would not accept, and I do not think, gentlemen, that any American
should be asked to say he would not accept, and to my knowledge, no one
in the history of this Republic has been asked to renounce his political
birthright as the price of confirmation for any office. And I can tell
you that I will not seek any office while I hold the job of CIA Director.
I will put politics wholly out of my sphere of activities." Even more,
Bush argued, his willingness to serve at the CIA reflected his sense of
noblesse oblige. Friends had asked him why he wanted to go to Langley at
all, "with all the controversy swirling around the CIA, with its obvious
barriers to political future?" Magnanimously, Bush replied to his own rhetorical
question: "My answer is simple. First, the work is desperately important
to the survival of this country, and to the survival of freedom around
the world. And second, old fashioned as it may seem to some, it is my duty
to serve my country. And I did not seek this job but I want to do it and
I will do my very best." / Note #7 Stennis responded with a joke that sounds
eerie in retrospect: "If I thought that you were seeking the Vice Presidential
nomination or Presidential nomination by way of the route of being Director
of the CIA, I would question your judgment most severely." There was laughter
in the committee room. Senators Barry Goldwater and Stuart Symington made
clear that they would give Bush a free ride not only out of deference to
Ford, but also out of regard for the late Prescott Bush, with whom they
had both started out in the Senate in 1952. Senator Thomas McIntyre was
more demanding, and raised the issue of enemies list operations, a notorious
abuse of the Nixon (and subsequent) administrations: "What if you get a
call from the President, next July or August, saying 'George, I would like
to see you.' You go in the White House. He takes you over in the corner
and says, 'Look, things are not going too well in my campaign. This Reagan
is gaining on me all the time. Now, he is a movie star of some renown and
has traveled with the fast set. He was a Hollywood star. I want you to
get any dirt you can on this guy because I need it.'|" What would Bush
do? "I do not think that is difficult, sir," intoned Bush. "I would simply
say that it gets back to character and it gets back to integrity; and furthermore,
I cannot conceive of the incumbent doing that sort of thing. But if I were
put into that kind of position where you had a clear moral issue, I would
simply say 'no,' because you see I think, and maybe -- I have the advantages
as everyone on this committee of 20-20 hindsight, that this agency must
stay in the foreign intelligence business and must not harass American
citizens, like in Operation Chaos, and that these kinds of things have
no business in the foreign intelligence business." This was the same Bush
whose 1980 campaign was heavily staffed by CIA veterans, some retired,
some on active service and in flagrant violation of the Hatch Act. This
is the Vice President who ran Iran-Contra out of his own private office,
and so forth. Gary Hart also had a few questions. How did Bush feel about
assassinations? Bush "found them morally offensive and I am pleased the
President has made that position very, very clear to the Intelligence Committee...."
How about "coups d'etat in various countries around the world," Hart wanted
to know. "You mean in the covert field?" replied Bush. "Yes." "I would
want to have full benefit of all the intelligence. I would want to have
full benefit of how these matters were taking place but I cannot tell you,
and I do not think I should, that there would never be any support for
a coup d'etat; in other words, I cannot tell you I cannot conceive of a
situation where I would not support such action." In retrospect, this was
a moment of refreshing candor. Gary Hart knew where at least one of Bush's
bodies was buried: Senator Hart: You raised the question of getting the
CIA out of domestic areas totally. Let us hypothesize a situation where
a President has stepped over the bounds. Let us say the FBI is investigating
some people who are involved, and they go right to the White House. There
is some possible CIA interest. The President calls you and says, I want
you as Director of the CIA to call the Director of the FBI to tell him
to call off this operation because it may jeopardize some CIA activities.
Mr. Bush: Well, generally speaking, and I think you are hypothecating a
case without spelling it out in enough detail to know if there is any real
legitimate foreign intelligence aspect.... There it was: the smoking gun
tape again, the notorious Bush-Liedtke-Mosbacher-Pennzoil contribution
to the CREEP again, the money that had been found in the pockets of Bernard
Barker and the Plumbers after the Watergate break-in. But Hart did not
mention it overtly, only in this oblique, Byzantine manner. Hart went on:
I am hypothesizing a case that actually happened in June 1972. There might
have been some tangential CIA interest in something in Mexico. Funds were
laundered and so forth. Mr. Bush: Using a 50-50 hindsight on that case,
I hope I would have said the CIA is not going to get involved in that if
we are talking about the same one. Senator Hart: We are. Senator [Patrick]
Leahy: Are there others? Bush was on the edge of having his entire Watergate
past come out in the wash, but the liberal Democrats were already far too
devoted to the one-party state to grill Bush seriously. In a few seconds,
responding to another question from Hart, Bush was off the hook, droning
on about plausible deniability, of all things. The next day, December 16,
1975, Church, appearing as a witness, delivered his philippic against Bush.
After citing evidence of widespread public concern about the renewed intrusion
of the CIA in domestic politics under Bush, Church reviewed the situation:
"So here we stand. Need we find or look to higher places than the Presidency
and the nominee himself to confirm the fact that this door [of the Vice
Presidency in 1976] is left open and that he remains under active consideration
for the ticket in 1976? We stand in this position in the close wake of
Watergate, and this committee has before it a candidate for Director of
the CIA, a man of strong partisan political background and a beckoning
political future. "Under these circumstances I find the appointment astonishing.
Now, as never before, the Director of the CIA must be completely above
political suspicion. At the very least this committee, I believe, should
insist that the nominee disavow any place on the 1976 Presidential ticket....
Otherwise his position as CIA Director would be hopelessly compromised.....
"If Ambassador Bush wants to be Director of the CIA, he should seek that
position. If he wants to be Vice President, then that ought to be his goal.
It is wrong for him to want both positions, even in a Bicentennial year."
It was an argument that conceded far too much to Bush in the effort to
be fair. Bush was incompetent for the post, and the argument should have
ended there. Church's unwillingness to demand the unqualified rejection
of such a nominee no matter what future goodies he was willing temporarily
to renounce has cast long shadows over subsequent American history. But
even so, Bush was in trouble. Church was at his ironic best when he compared
Bush to a recent chairman of the Democratic National Committee: "... [I]f
a Democrat were President, Mr. Larry O'Brien ought not to be nominated
to be Director of the CIA. Of all times to do it, this is the worst, right
at a time when it is obvious that public confidence needs to be restored
in the professional, impartial, and nonpolitical character of the agency.
So, we have the worst of all possible worlds." Church tellingly underlined
that "Bush's birthright does not include being Director of the CIA. It
includes the right to run for public office, to be sure, but that is quite
a different matter than confirming him now for this particular position."
Church said he would under no circumstance vote for Bush, but that if the
latter renounced the '76 ticket, he would refrain from attempting to canvass
other votes against Bush. It was an ambiguous position. Bush came back
to the witness chair in an unmistakably whining mood. He was offended above
all by the comparison of his august self to the upstart Larry O'Brien:
"I think there is some difference in the qualifications," said Bush in
a hyperthyroid rage. "Larry O'Brien did not serve in the Congress of the
United States for four years. Larry O'Brien did not serve, with no partisanship,
at the United Nations for two years. Larry O'Brien did not serve as the
Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China." Not
only Bush but his whole "cursus honorum" was insulted! "I will never apologize,"
said Bush a few seconds later, referring to his own record. Then Bush pulled
out his "you must resign" letter to Nixon: "Now, I submit that for the
record that that is demonstrable independence. I did not do it by calling
the newspapers and saying, 'Look, I am having a press conference. Here
is a sensational statement to make me, to separate me from a President
in great agony.'|" The Ford Letter Bush had been savaged in the hearings,
and his nomination was now in grave danger of being rejected by the committee,
and then by the full Senate. Later in the afternoon of November 16, a damage
control party met at the White House to assess the situation for Ford.
/ Note #8 According to Patrick O'Donnell of Ford's Congressional Relations
Office, the most Bush could hope for was a bare majority of 9 out of 16
votes on the Stennis Committee. Ford was inclined to give the senators
what they wanted, and exclude Bush "a priori" from the vice-presidential
contest. When Ford called George over to the Oval Office on December 18,
he already had the text of a letter to Stennis announcing that Bush was
summarily ruled off the ticket if Ford were the candidate (which was anything
but certain). Ford showed Bush the letter. We do not know what whining
may have been heard in the White House that day from a senatorial patrician
deprived (for the moment) of his birthright. Ford could not yield; it would
have thrown his entire election campaign into acute embarrassment just
as he was trying to get it off the ground. When George saw that Ford was
obdurate, heproposed that the letter be amended to make it look as if the
initiative to rule him out as a running mate had originated with Bush.
The fateful letter read: Dear Mr. Chairman: As we both know, the nation
must have a strong and effective foreign intelligence capability. Just
over two weeks ago, on December 7 while in Pearl Harbor, I said that we
must never drop our guard nor unilaterally dismantle our defenses. The
Central Intelligence Agency is essential to maintaining our national security.
I nominated Ambassador George Bush to be CIA Director so we can now get
on with appropriate decisions concerning the intelligence community. I
need -- and the nation needs -- his leadership at CIA as we rebuild and
strengthen the foreign intelligence community in a manner which earns the
confidence of the American people. Ambassador Bush and I agree that the
Nation's immediate foreign intelligence needs must take precedence over
other considerations and there should be continuity in his CIA leadership.
Therefore, if Ambassador Bush is confirmed by the Senate as Director of
Central Intelligence, I will not consider him as my Vice Presidential running
mate in 1976. He and I have discussed this in detail. In fact, he urged
that I make this decision. This says something about the man and about
his desire to do this job for the nation.... On December 19, this letter
was received by Stennis, who announced its contents to his committee. The
committee promptly approved the Bush appointment by a vote of 12 to 4,
with Gary Hart, Leahy, Culver and McIntyre voting against him. Bush's name
could now be sent to the floor, where a recrudescence of anti-Bush sentiment
was not likely, but could not be ruled out. Then, two days before Christmas,
the CIA chief in Athens, Richard Welch, was gunned down in front of his
home by masked assassins as he returned home with his wife from a Christmas
party. A group calling itself the "November 19 Organization" later claimed
credit for the killing. Certain networks immediately began to use the Welch
assassination as a bludgeon against the Church and Pike Committees. An
example came from columnist Charles Bartlett, writing in the now-defunct
"Washington Star": "The assassination of the CIA Station Chief, Richard
Welch, in Athens is a direct consequence of the stagy hearings of the Church
Committee. Spies traditionally function in a gray world of immunity from
such crudities. But the Committee's prolonged focus on CIA activities in
Greece left agents there exposed to random vengeance." / Note #9 Staffers
of the Church Committee point ed out that the Church Committee had never
said a word about Greece or mentioned the name of Welch. CIA Director Colby
first blamed the death of Welch on "Counterspy" magazine, which had published
the name of Welch some months before. The next day, Colby backed off, blaming
a more general climate of hysteria regarding the CIA which had led to the
assassination of Richard Welch. In his book, "Honorable Men", published
some years later, Colby continued to attribute the killing to the "sensational
and hysterical way the CIA investigations had been handled and trumpeted
around the world." The Ford White House resolved to exploit this tragic
incident to the limit. Liberals raised a hue and cry in response. Les Aspin
later recalled that "the air transport plane carrying [Welch's] body circled
Andrews Air Force Base for three-quarters of an hour in order to land live
on the "Today Show."" Ford waived restrictions in order to allow interment
at Arlington Cemetery. The funeral on January 7 was described by the "Washington
Post" as "a show of pomp usually reserved for the nation's most renowned
military heroes." Anthony Lewis of the "New York Times" described the funeral
as "a political device" with ceremonies "being manipulated in order to
arouse a political backlash against legitimate criticism." Norman Kempster
in the "Washington Star" found that "only a few hours after the CIA's Athens
station chief was gunned down in front of his home, the agency began a
subtle campaign intended to persuade Americans that his death was the indirect
result of congressional investigations and the direct result of an article
in an obscure magazine." Here, in the words of a "Washington Star" headline,
was "one CIA effort that worked." Bush and the ADL Between Christmas and
New Year's in Kennebunkport, looking forward to the decisive floor vote
on his confirmation, Bush was at work tending and mobilizing key parts
of his network. One of these was a certain Leo Cherne. Leo Cherne is not
a household word, but he has been a powerful figure in the U.S. intelligence
community over the period since World War II. Leo Cherne was to be one
of Bush's most important allies when he was CIA Director and throughout
Bush's subsequent career. Cherne has been a part of B'nai B'rith all his
life. He was (and still is) an ardent Zionist. He is typical to that extent
of the so-called "neoconservatives" who have been prominent in government
and policy circles under Reagan-Bush, and Bush. Cherne was the founder
of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a conduit for neo-Bukharinite
operations between East and West in the Cold War, and it was also reputedly
a CIA front organization. Cherne was a close friend of William Casey, who
was working in the Nixon administration as undersecretary of state for
economic affairs in mid-1973. That was when Cherne was named to the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) by Nixon. On March 15, 1976,
Cherne became the chairman of this body, which specializes in conduiting
the demands of financier and related interests into the intelligence community.
Cherne, as we will see, would be, along with Bush, a leading beneficiary
of Ford's spring 1976 intelligence reorganization. Bush's correspondence
with Cherne leaves no doubt that theirs was a very special relationship.
Cherne represented for Bush a strengthening of his links to the Zionist-neoconservative
milieu, with options for backchanneling into the Soviet bloc. Bush wrote
to Cherne: "I read your testimony with keen interest and appreciation.
I am really looking forward to meeting you and working with you in connection
with your PFIAB chores. Have a wonderful 1976," Bush wrote. January 1976
was not auspicious for Bush. He had to wait until almost the end of the
month for his confirmation vote, hanging there, slowly twisting in the
wind. In the meantime, the Pike Committee report was approaching completion,
after months of probing and haggling, and was sent to the Government Printing
Office on January 23, despite continuing arguments from the White House
and from the GOP that the committee could not reveal confidential and secret
material provided by the executive branch. On Sunday, January 25, a copy
of the report was leaked to Daniel Schorr of CBS News, and was exhibited
on television that evening. The following morning, the "New York Times"
published an extensive summary of the entire Pike Committee report. Despite
all this exposure, the House voted on January 29 that the Pike Committee
report could not be released. A few days later, it was published in full
in the "Village Voice", and CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr was held responsible
for its appearance. The Pike Committee report attacked Henry Kissinger,
"whose comments," it said, "are at variance with the facts." In the midst
of his imperial regency over the United States, an unamused Kissinger responded
that "we are facing a new version of McCarthyism." A few days later, Kissinger
said of the Pike Committee: "I think they have used classified information
in a reckless way, and the version of covert operations they have leaked
to the press has the cumulative effect of being totally untrue and damaging
to the nation." / Note #1 / Note #0 Thus, as Bush's confirmation vote approached,
the Ford White House, on the one hand, and the Pike and Church Committees
on the other, were close to "open political warfare," as the "Washington
Post" put it at the time. One explanation of the leaking of the Pike report
was offered by Otis Pike himself on February 11: "A copy was sent to the
CIA. It would be to their advantage to leak it for publication." By now,
Ford was raving about mobilizing the FBI to find out how the report had
been leaked. On January 19, George Bush was present in the Executive Gallery
of the House of Representatives, seated close to the unfortunate Betty
Ford, for the President's State of the Union Address. This was a photo
opportunity so that Ford's CIA candidate could get on television for a
cameo appearance that might boost his standing on the eve of confirmation.
Confirmed, at Last Senate floor debate was underway on January 26, and
Senator McIntyre lashed out at the Bush nomination as "an insensitive affront
to the American people." In further debate on the day of the vote, January
27, Senator Joseph Biden joined other Democrats in assailing Bush as "the
wrong appointment for the wrong job at the wrong time." Church appealed
to the Senate to reject Bush, a man "too deeply embroiled in partisan politics
and too intertwined with the political destiny of the President himself"
to be able to lead the CIA. Goldwater, Tower, Percy, Howard Baker and Clifford
Case all spoke up for Bush. Bush's floor leader was Strom Thurmond, who
supported Bush by attacking the Church and Pike Committees. Finally it
came to a roll call and Bush passed by a vote of 64-27, with Lowell Weicker
of Connecticut voting present. Church's staff felt they had failed lamentably,
having gotten only liberal Democrats and the single Republican vote of
Jesse Helms. / Note #1 / Note #1 It was the day after Bush's confirmation
that the House Rules Committee voted 9 to 7 to block the publication of
the Pike Committee report. The issue then went to the full House on January
29, which voted, 146 to 124, that the Pike Committee must submit its report
to censorship by the White House and thus by the CIA. At almost the same
time, Senator Howard Baker joined Tower and Goldwater in opposing the principal
final recommendation of the Church Committee, such as it was -- the establishment
of a permanent intelligence oversight committee. Pike found that the attempt
to censor his report had made "a complete travesty of the whole doctrine
of separation of powers." In the view of a staffer of the Church Committee,
"all within two days, the House Intelligence Committee had ground to a
halt, and the Senate Intelligence Committee had split asunder over the
centerpiece of its recommendations. The White House must have rejoiced;
the Welch death and leaks from the Pike Committee report had produced,
at last, a backlash against the congressional inv estigations." / Note
#1 / Note #2 Riding the crest of that wave of backlash was George Bush.
The constellation of events around his confirmation prefigures the wretched
state of Congress today: a rubber stamp parliament in a totalitarian state,
incapable of overriding even one of Bush's 22 vetoes. On Friday, January
30, Ford and Bush were joined at the CIA auditorium for Bush's swearing-in
ceremony before a large gathering of agency employees. Colby was also there:
Some said he had been fired primarily because Kissinger thought that he
was divulging too much to the congressional committees, but Kissinger later
told Colby that the latter's stratagems had been correct. Colby opened
the ceremony with a few brief words: "Mr. President, and Mr. Bush, I have
the great honor to present you to an organization of dedicated professionals.
Despite the turmoil and tumult of the last year, they continue to produce
the best intelligence in the world." This was met by a burst of applause.
/ Note #1 / Note #3 Ford's line was: "We cannot improve this agency by
destroying it." Bush promised to make the "CIA an instrument of peace and
an object of pride for all our people." Notes for Chapter 16 1. Nathan
Miller, "Spying for America" (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 399. 2.
Gerald R. Ford Library, Richard B. Cheney Files, Box 5. 3. See Loch K.
Johnson, "A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation" (University
Press of Kentucky, 1985), pp. 108-9. 4. "Ibid.", pp. 115-16. 5. Nedzi to
Ford, Dec. 12, 1975, Ford Library, John O. Marsh Files, Box 1. 6. "Ibid."
7. U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Nomination of George Bush
to be Director of Central Intelligence, Dec. 15-16, 1975, p. 10. 8. Memo
of Dec. 16, 1975 from O'Donnell to Marsh through Friedersdorf on the likely
vote in the Stennis Senate Armed Services Committee. Ford Library, William
T. Kendall Files, Box 7. 9. For an account of the exploitation of the Welch
incident by the Ford administration, see Johnson, "op. cit.", pp. 161-62.
10. For an account of the leaking of the Pike Committee Report and the
situation in late Jan. and Feb. 1976, see Daniel Schorr, "Clearing the
Air" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977) especially pp. 179-207, and Johnson,
"op. cit.", pp. 172-91. 11. Johnson, "op. cit.", p. 180. 12. "Ibid.", p.
182. 13. Thomas Powers, "The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and
the CIA" (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 12. When Bush became director of Central
Intelligence (DCI), the incumbent principal deputy director was Gen. Vernon
Walters, a former Army lieutenant general. This is the same Gen. Vernon
Walters who was mentioned by Haldeman and Nixon in the notorious "smoking
gun" tape already discussed, but who of course denied that he ever did
any of the things that Haldeman and Ehrlichman said that he had promised
to do. Walters had been at the CIA since May 1972 -- a Nixon appointee
who had been with Nixon when the then-Vice President's car was stoned in
Caracas, Venezuela. Ever since then, Nixon had seen him as part of the
old guard. Walters left to become a private consultant in July 1976. To
replace Walters, Bush picked Enno Henry Knoche, who had joined the CIA
in 1953 as an intelligence analyst specializing in Far Eastern political
and military affairs. Knoche came from the Navy and knew Chinese. From
1962 to 1967, he had been the chief of the National Photographic Interpretation
Center. In 1969, he had become deputy director of planning and budgeting,
and chaired the internal CIA committee in charge of computerization. Next,
Knoche was deputy director of the Office of Current Intelligence, which
produces ongoing assessments of international events for the President
and the National Security Council. After 1972, Knoche headed the Intelligence
Directorate's Office of Strategic Research, charged with evaluating strategic
threats to the U.S. In 1975, Knoche had been a special liaison between
Colby and the Rockefeller Commission, as well as with the Church and Pike
Committees. This was a very sensitive post, and Bush clearly looked to
Knoche to help him deal with continuing challenges coming from the Congress.
In the fall of 1975, Knoche had become number two on Colby's staff for
the coordination and management of the intelligence community. According
to some, Knoche was to function as Bush's "Indian guide" through the secrets
of Langley; he knew "where the bodies were buried." Knoche was highly critical
of Colby's policy of handing over limited amounts of classified material
to the Pike and Church committees, while fighting to save the core of covert
operations. Knoche told a group of friends during this period: "There is
no counterintelligence any more." This implies a condemnation of the congressional
committees with whom Knoche had served as liaison, and can also be read
as a lament for the ousting of James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA's
counterintelligence operations until 1975 and director of the mail-opening
operation that had been exposed by various probers. / Note #1 / Note #4
Adm. Daniel J. Murphy was Bush's deputy director for the intelligence community,
and later became Bush's chief of staff during his first term as vice president.
Much later, in November 1987, Murphy visited Panama in the company of South
Korean businessman and intelligence operative Tongsun Park, and met with
Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega. Murphy was later obliged to testify to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee about his meeting with Noriega. Murphy
claimed that he was only in Panama to "make a buck," but there are indications
that he was carrying messages to Noriega from Bush. Tongsun Park, Murphy's
ostensible business associate, will soon turn out to have been the central
figure of the Koreagate scandal of 1976, a very important development on
Bush's CIA watch. / Note #1 / Note #5 Other names on the Bush flow chart
included holdover Edward Proctor, followed by Bush appointee Sayre Stevens
in the slot of deputy director for intelligence; holdover Carl Duckett,
followed by Bush appointee Leslie Dirks as deputy director for science
and technology; John Blake, holdover as deputy director for administration;
and holdover William Nelson, followed by Bush appointee William Wells,
deputy director for operations. William Wells as deputy director for operations
was a very significant choice. He was a career covert operations specialist
who had graduated from Yale a few years before Bush. Wells soon acquired
his own deputy, recommended by him and approved by Bush: This was the infamous
Theodore Shackley, whose title thus became associate deputy director for
covert operations. Shackley later emerged as one of the central figures
of the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. He is reputedly one of the dominant
personalities of a CIA old boys' network known as The Enterprise, which
was at the heart of Iran-Contra and the other illegal covert operations
of the Reagan-Bush years. During the early 1960s, after the Bay of Pigs,
Theodore Shackley had been the head of the CIA Miami Station during the
years in which Operation Mongoose was at its peak. This was the E. Howard
Hunt and Watergate Cubans crowd, circles familiar to Felix Rodriguez (Max
Gomez), who in the 1980s ran Contra gun-running and drug-running out of
Bush's vice-presidential office. Later, Shackley was reportedly the chief
of the CIA station in Vientiane, Laos, between July 1966 and December 1968.
Some time after that, he moved on to become the CIA station chief in Saigon,
where he directed the implementation of the Civilian Operations and Rural
Development Support (CORDS) program, better known as Operation Phoenix,
a genocidal crime against humanity which killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese
civilians because they were suspected of working for the Vietcong, or sometimes
simply because they were able to read and write. As for Shackley, there
are also reports that he worked for a time in the late 1960s in Rome, during
the period when the CIA's GLADIO capabilities were being used to launch
a wave of terrorism in that country that went on for well over a decade.
Such was the man whom Bush chose to appoint to a position of responsibility
in the CIA. Later, Shackley will turn up as a "speechwriter" for Bush during
the 1979-80 campaign. Along with Shackley came his associate and former
Miami Station second in command, Thomas Clines, a partner of Gen. Richard
Secord and Albert Hakim during the Iran-Contra operation, convicted in
September 1990 on four felony tax counts for not reporting his ill-gotten
gains, and sentenced to 16 months in prison and a fine of $40,000. Another
career covert operations man, John Waller, became the inspector general,
the officer who was supposed to keep track of illegal operations. For legal
advice, Bush turned first to holdover General Counsel Mitchell Rogovin,
who had in December 1975 theorized that intelligence activities belonged
to the "inherent powers" of the presidency, and that no special congressional
legislation was required to permit such things as covert operations to
go on. Later, Bush appointed Anthony Lapham, Yale '58, as CIA general counsel.
Lapham was the scion of an old San Francisco banking family, and his brother
was Lewis Lapham, the editor of "Harper's" magazine. Lapham would take
a leading role in the CIA coverup of the Letelier assassination case. /
Note #1 / Note #6 Typical of the broad section of CIA officers who were
delighted with their new boss from Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones
was Cord Meyer, who had most recently been the station chief in London
from 1973 on, a wild and woolly time in the tight little island, as we
will see. Meyer, a covert action veteran and Watergate operative, writes
at length in his autobiography about his enthusiasm for the Bush regime
at CIA, which induced him to prolong his own career there. / Note #1 /
Note #7 And what did other CIA officers, such as intelligence analysts,
think of Bush? A common impression is that he was a superficial lightweight
with no serious interest in intelligence. Deputy Director for Science and
Technology Carl Duckett, who was ousted by Bush after three months, commented
that he "never saw George Bush feel he had to understand the depth of something....
[He] is not a man tremendously dedicated to a cause or ideas. He's not
fervent. He goes with the flow, looking for how it will play politically."
According to Maurice Ernst, the head of the CIA's Office of Economic Research
from 1970 to 1980, "George Bush doesn't like to get into the middle of
an intellectual debate .. he liked to delegate it. I never really had a
serious discussion with him on economics." Hans Heymann was Bush's national
intelligence officer for economics, and he remembers having been impressed
by Bush's Phi Beta Kappa Yale degree in economics. As Heymann later recalled
Bush's response, "He looked at me in horror and said, 'I don't remember
a thing. It was so long ago, so I'm going to have to rely on you.'|" /
Note #1 / Note #8 Intelligence Czar During the first few weeks of Bush's
tenure, the Ford administration was gripped by a "first strike" psychosis.
This had nothing to do with the Soviet Union, but was rather Ford's desire
to preempt any proposals for reform of the intelligence agencies coming
out of the Pike or Church Committees with a pseudo-reform of his own, premised
on his own in-house study, the Rockefeller report, which recommended an
increase of secrecy for covert operations and classified information. Since
about the time of the Bush nomination, an interagency task force armed
with the Rockefeller Commission recommendations had been meeting under
the chairmanship of Ford's counselor Jack O. Marsh. This was the Intelligence
Coordinating Group, which included delegates of the intelligence agencies,
plus NSC, Office of Management and the Budget (OMB), and others. This group
worked up a series of final recommendations that were given to Ford to
study on his Christmas vacation in Vail, Colorado. At this point, Ford
was inclined to "go slow and work with Congress." But on January 10, Marsh
and the intelligence agency bosses met again with Ford, and the strategy
began to shift toward preempting Congress. On January 30, Ford and Bush
came back from their appearance at the CIA auditorium swearing-in session
and met with other officials in the Cabinet Room. Attending besides Ford
and Bush were Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, Attorney General Edward Levi, Jack Marsh, Philip Buchen, Brent
Scowcroft, Mike Duval, and Peter Wallison representing Vice President Rockefeller,
who was out of town that day. / Note #1 / Note #9 Here Ford presented his
tentative conclusions for further discussion. The general line was to preempt
the Congress, not to cooperate with it, to increase secrecy, and to increase
authoritarian tendencies. Ford scheduled a White House press conference
for the evening of February 17. In his press conference of February 17,
Ford scooped the Congress and touted his bureaucratic reshuffle of the
intelligence agencies as the most sweeping reform and reorganization of
the United States' intelligence agencies since the passage of the National
Security Act of 1947. "I will not be a party to the dismantling of the
CIA or other intelligence agencies," he intoned. He repeated that the intelligence
community had to function under the direction of the National Security
Council, as if that were something earth-shaking and new; from the perspective
of Oliver North and Admiral Poindexter we can see in retrospect that it
guaranteed nothing. A new NSC committee chaired by Bush was entrusted with
the task of giving greater central coordination to the intelligence community
as a whole. This committee was to consist of Bush, Kissinger clone William
Hyland of the National Security Council staff, and Robert Ellsworth, the
assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. This committee was jointly
to formulate the budget of the intelligence community and allocate its
resources to the various tasks. The 40 Committee, which had overseen covert
operations, was now to be called the Operations Advisory Group, with its
membership reshuffled to include Scowcroft of NSC, Kissinger, Rumsfeld,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff George Brown, plus observers from
the attorney general and OMB. An innovation was the creation of the Intelligence
Oversight Board (in addition to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board), which was chaired by Ambassador Robert D. Murphy, the old adversary
of Charles de Gaulle during World War II. The IOB was supposed to be a
watchdog to prevent new abuses from coming out of the intelligence community.
Also on this board were Stephen Ailes, who had been undersecretary of defense
for Kennedy and secretary of the Army for LBJ. The third figure on this
IOB was Leo Cherne, who was soon to be promoted to chairman of PFIAB as
well. The increasingly complicit relationship of Cherne to Bush meant that
all alleged oversight by the IOB was a mockery. Ford also wanted a version
of the Official Secrets Act, which we have seen Bush supporting: He called
for "special legislation to guard critical intelligence secrets. This legislation
would make it a crime for a government employee who has access to certain
highly classified information to reveal that information improperly" --
which would have made the Washington leak game rather more dicey than it
is at present. The Official Secrets Act would have to be passed by Congress,
but most of the rest of what Ford announced was embodied in Executive Order
11905. Church thought that this was overreaching, since it amounted to
changing some provisions of the National Security Act by presidential fiat.
But this was now the new temper of the times. As for the CIA, Executive
Order 11905 authorized it "to conduct foreign counterintelligence activities
.. in the United States," which opened the door to many things. Apart from
restrictions on physical searches and electronic bugging, it was still
open season on Americans abroad. The FBI was promised the Levi guidelines,
and other agencies would get charters written for them. In the interim,
the power of the FBI to combat various "subversive" activities was reaffirmed.
Political assassination was ban ned, but there were no limitations or regulations
placed on covert operations, and there was nothing about measures to improve
the intelligence and analytical product of the agencies. In the view of
the "New York Times", the big winner was Bush: "From a management point
of view, Mr. Ford tonight centralized more power in the hands of the director
of Central Intelligence than any had had since the creation of the CIA.
The director has always been the nominal head of the intelligence community,
but in fact has had little power over the other agencies, particularly
the Department of Defense." Bush was now de facto intelligence czar. /
Note #2 / Note #0 Congressman Pike said that Ford's reorganization was
bent "largely on preserving all of the secrets in the executive branch
and very little on guaranteeing a lack of any further abuses." Church commented
that what Ford was really after was "to give the CIA a bigger shield and
a longer sword with which to stab about." The Bush-Kissinger-Ford counteroffensive
against the congressional committees went forward. On March 5, the CIA
leaked the story that the Pike Committee had lost more than 232 secret
documents which had been turned over from the files of the executive branch.
Pike said that this was another classic CIA provocation designed to discredit
his committee, which had ceased its activity. Bush denied that he had engineered
the leak. By September, Bush could boast in public that he had won the
immediate engagement: His adversaries in the congressional investigating
committees were defeated. "The CIA," Bush announced, "has weathered the
storm.... The mood in Congress has changed," he crowed. "No one is campaigning
against strong intelligence. The adversary thing, how we can ferret out
corruption, has given way to the more serious question how we can have
better intelligence." Such was the public profile of Bush's CIA tenure
up until about the time of the November 1976 elections. If this had been
the whole story, then we might accept the usual talk about Bush's period
of uneventful rebuilding and morale boosting while he was at Langley. Bush's
Real Agenda Reality was different. The administration Bush served had Ford
as its titular head, but most of the real power, especially in foreign
affairs, was in the hands of Kissinger. Bush was more than willing to play
along with the Kissinger agenda. The first priority was to put an end to
such episodes as contempt citations for Henry Kissinger. Thanks to the
presence of Don Gregg as CIA station chief in Seoul, South Korea, that
was easy to arrange. This was the same Don Gregg of the CIA who would later
serve as Bush's national security adviser during the second vice-presidential
term, and who would manage decisive parts of the Iran-Contra operations
from Bush's own office. Gregg knew of an agent of the Korean CIA, Tongsun
Park, who had for a number of years been making large payments to members
of Congress, above all to Democratic members of the House of Representatives,
in order to secure their support for legislation that was of interest to
Park Chung Hee, the South Korean leader. It was therefore a simple matter
to blow the lid off this story, causing a wave of hysteria among the literally
hundreds of members of Congress who had attended parties organized by Tongsun
Park. The Koreagate headlines began to appear a few days after Bush had
taken over at Langley. In February, there was a story by Maxine Cheshire
of the "Washington Post" reporting that the Department of Justice was investigating
Congressmen Bob Leggett and Joseph Addabbo for allegedly accepting bribes
from the Korean government. Both men were linked to Suzi Park Thomson,
who had been hosting parties of the Korean embassy. Later, it turned out
that Speaker of the House Carl Albert had kept Suzi Park Thomson on his
payroll for all of the six years that he had been speaker. The "New York
Times" estimated that as many as 115 Congressmen were involved. In reality
the number was much lower, but former Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon
Jaworski was brought back from Houston to become special prosecutor for
this case as well. This underlined the press line that "the Democrats'
Watergate" had finally arrived. It was embarrassing to the Bush CIA when
Tongsun Park's official agency file disappeared for several months, and
finally turned up shorn of key information on the CIA officers who had
been working most closely with Park. With "Koreagate," the Congress was
terrorized and brought to heel. In this atmosphere, Bush moved to reach
a secret foreign policy consensus with key congressional leaders of both
parties of the one-party state. According to two senior government officials
involved, limited covert operations in such places as Angola were continued
under the pretext that they were necessary for phasing out the earlier,
larger, and more expensive operations. Bush's secret deal was especially
successful with the post-Church Senate Intelligence Committee. Because
of the climate of restoration that prevailed, a number of Democrats on
this committee concluded that they must break off their aggressive inquiries
and make peace with Bush, according to reports of remarks by two senior
members of the committee staff. The result was an interregnum during which
the Senate committee would neither set specific reporting requirements,
nor attempt to pass any binding legislation to restrict CIA covert and
related activity. In return, Bush would pretend to make a few disclosures
to create a veneer of cooperation. / Note #2 / Note #1 The Letelier Affair
One of the most spectacular scandals of Bush's tenure at the CIA was the
assassination in Washington, D.C. of Orlando Letelier, the Chilean exile
leader. Letelier had been a minister in the Allende government, which had
been overthrown by Kissinger in 1973. Letelier, along with Ronnie Moffitt
of the Washington Institute for Policy Studies, died on September 21, 1976
in the explosion of a car bomb on Sheridan Circle, in the heart of Washington's
Embassy Row district along Massachusetts Avenue. Relatively few cases of
international terrorism have taken place on the territory of the United
States, but this was certainly an exception. Bush's activities before and
after this assassination amount to one of the most bizarre episodes in
the annals of secret intelligence operations. One of the assassins of Letelier
was unquestionably one Michael Vernon Townley, a CIA agent who had worked
for David Atlee Phillips in Chile. Phillips had become the director of
the CIA's Western Hemisphere operations after the overthrow of Allende
and the advent of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, and its
Milton Friedman/Chicago School economic policies. In 1975, Phillips founded
AFIO, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, which has supported
George Bush in every campaign he has ever waged since that time. Townley,
as a "former" CIA agent, had gone to work for the DINA, the Chilean secret
police, and had been assigned by the DINA as its liaison man with a group
called CORU. CORU was the acronym for Command of United Revolutionary Organizations,
a united front of four anti-Castro Cuban organizations based primarily
in the neighborhood of Miami called Little Havana. With CORU, we are back
in the milieu of Miami anti-Castro Cubans, whose political godfather George
Bush had been since very early in the 1960s. It was under these circumstances
that the U.S. ambassador to Chile, George Landau, sent a cable to the State
Department with the singular request that two agents of the DINA be allowed
to enter the United States with Paraguayan passports. One of these agents
is likely to have been Townley. The cable also indicated that the two DINA
agents also wanted to meet with Gen. Vernon Walters, the outgoing deputy
director of central intelligence, and so the cable also went to Langley.
Here, the cable was read by Walters, and also passed into the hands of
Director George Bush. Bush not only had this cable in his hands; Bush and
Walters discussed the contents of the cable and what to do about it, including
whether Walters ought to meet with th e DINA agents. The cable also reached
the desk of Henry Kissinger. One of Landau's questions appears to have
been whether the mission of the DINA men had been approved in advance by
Langley; his cable was accompanied by photocopies of the Paraguayan passports.
(Later on, in 1980, Bush denied that he had ever seen this cable; he had
not just been out of the loop, he claims; he had been in China.) The red
Studebaker hacks, including Bush himself in his campaign autobiography,
do not bother denying anything about the Letelier case; they simply omit
it. / Note #2 / Note #2 On August 4, on the basis of the conversations
between Bush and Vernon Walters, the CIA sent a reply from Walters to Landau,
stating that the former "was unaware of the visit and that his Agency did
not desire to have any contact with the Chileans." Ambassador Landau responded
by revoking the visas that he had already granted and telling the Immigration
and Naturalization Service to put the two DINA men on their watch list
to be picked up if they tried to enter the United States. The two DINA
men entered the United States anyway on August 22, with no apparent difficulty.
The DINA men reached Washington, and it is clear that they were hardly
traveling incognito: They appear to have asked a Chilean embassy official
to call the CIA to repeat their request for a meeting. According to other
reports, the DINA men met with New York Senator James Buckley, the brother
of conservative columnist William Buckley of Skull and Bones. It is also
said that the DINA men met with Frank Terpil, a close associate of Ed Wilson,
and no stranger to the operations of the Shackley-Clines Enterprise. According
to one such version, "Townley met with Frank Terpil one week before the
Letelier murder, on the same day that he met with Senator James Buckley
and aides in New York City. The explosives sent to the United States on
Chilean airlines were to replace explosives supplied by Edwin Wilson, according
to a source close to the office of Assistant U.S. Attorney Lawrence Barcella."
/ Note #2 / Note #3 The bomb that killed Letelier and Moffitt was of the
same type that the FBI believed that Ed Wilson was selling, with the same
timer mechanism. Bush therefore had plenty of warning that a DINA operation
was about to take place in Washington, and it was no secret that it would
be wetwork. As authors John Dinges and Saul Landau point out, when the
DINA hitmen arrived in Washington they "alerted the CIA by having a Chilean
embassy employee call General Walters' office at the CIA's Langley headquarters.
It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage
functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation by
a foreign intelligence service in Washington, D.C., or anywhere in the
United States. It is equally implausible that Bush, Walters, [Ambassador
George] Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of international
assassinations that had been attributed to DINA." / Note #2 / Note #4 Bush's
complicity deepens when we turn to the post-assassination coverup. The
prosecutor in the Letelier-Moffitt murders was Assistant U.S. Attorney
Eugene M. Propper. Nine days after the assassinations, Propper was trying
without success to get some cooperation from the CIA, since it was obvious
enough to anyone that the Chilean regime was the prime suspect in the killing
of one of its most prominent political opponents. The CIA had been crudely
stonewalling Propper. He had even been unable to secure the requisite security
clearance to see documents in the case. Then Propper received a telephone
call from Stanley Pottinger, assistant attorney general in charge of the
Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Pottinger said that he
had been in contact with members of the Institute for Policy Studies, who
had argued that the Civil Rights Division ought to take over the Letelier
case because of its clear political implications. Propper argued that he
should keep control of the case since the Protection of Foreign Officials
Act gave him jurisdiction. Pottinger agreed that Propper was right, and
that he ought to keep the case. When Pottinger offered to be of help in
any possible way, Propper asked if Pottinger could expedite cooperation
with the CIA. As Propper later recounted this conversation: "Instant, warm
confidence shot through the telephone line. The assistant attorney general
replied that he happened to be a personal friend of the CIA Director himself,
George Bush. Pottinger called him 'George.' For him, the CIA Director was
only a phone call away. Would Propper like an appointment? By that afternoon
he [an FBI agent working on the case] and Pottinger were scheduled for
lunch with Director Bush at CIA headquarters on Monday. A Justice Department
limousine would pick them up at noon. Propper whistled to himself. This
was known in Washington as access." / Note #2 / Note #5 At CIA headquarters,
Pottinger introduced Propper to Director Bush, and Bush introduced the
two lawyers to Tony Lapham, his general counsel. There was some polite
conversation. Then, "when finally called on to state his business, Propper
said that the Letelier-Moffitt murders were more than likely political
assassinations, and that the investigation would probably move outside
the United States into the Agency's realm of foreign intelligence. Therefore,
Propper wanted CIA cooperation in the form of reports from within Chile,
reports on assassins, reports on foreign operatives entering the United
States, and the like. He wanted anything he could get that might bear upon
the murders." If Bush had wanted to be candid, he could have informed Propper
that he had been informed of the coming of the DINA team twice, once before
they left South America and once when they had arrived in Washington. But
Bush never volunteered this highly pertinent information. Instead, he went
into a sophisticated stonewall routine: "|'Look,' said Bush, 'I'm appalled
by the bombing. Obviously we can't allow people to come right here into
the capital and kill foreign diplomats and American citizens like this.
It would be a hideous precedent. So, as director, I want to help you. As
an American citizen, I want to help. But, as director, I also know that
the Agency can't help in a lot of situations like this. We've got some
problems. Tony, tell him what they are.'|" Lapham launched into a consummate
Aristotelian obfuscation, recounted in Lapham and Propper's "Labyrinth".
Lapham and Propper finally agreed that they could handle the matter best
through an exchange of letters between the CIA Director and Attorney General
Levi. George Bush summed up: "If you two come up with something that Tony
thinks will protect us, we'll be all right." The date was October 4, 1976.
Contrary to that pledge, Bush and the CIA began actively to sabotage Propper's
investigation in public as well as behind the scenes. By Saturday, the
"Washington Post" was reporting many details of Propper's arrangement with
the CIA. Even more interesting was the following item in the "Periscope"
column of "Newsweek" magazine of October 11: "After studying FBI and other
field investigations, the CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police
were not involved in the death of Orlando Letelier.... The agency reached
its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and
because the murder, coming while Chile's rulers were wooing U.S. support,
could only damage the Santiago regime." On November 1, the "Washington
Post" reported a leak from Bush personally: "CIA officials say ... they
believe that operatives of the present Chilean military junta did not take
part in Letelier's killing. According to informed sources, CIA Director
Bush expressed this view in a conversation last week with Secretary of
State Kissinger, the sources said. What evidence the CIA has obtained to
support this initial conclusion was not disclosed." Most remarkably, Bush
is reported to have flown to Miami on November 8 with the purpose or pretext
of taking "a walking tour of little Havana." As author Donald Freed tells
it, "Actually [Bush] met with the Miami FBI Spec ial Agent in Charge Julius
Matson and the chief of the anti-Castro terrorism squad. According to a
source close to the meeting, Bush warned the FBI against allowing the investigation
to go any further than the lowest level Cubans." / Note #2 / Note #6 In
a meeting presided over by Pottinger, Propper was only able to get Lapham
to agree that the Justice Department could ask the CIA to report any information
on the Letelier murder that might relate to the security of the United
States against foreign intervention. It was two years before any word of
the July-August cables was divulged. Ultimately, some low-level Cubans
were convicted in a trial that saw Townley plea bargain and get off with
a lighter sentence than the rest. Material about Townley under his various
aliases strangely disappeared from the Immigration and Naturalization Service
files, and records of the July-August cable traffic with Vernon Walters
(and Bush) were expunged. No doubt there had been obstruction of justice;
no doubt there had been a coverup. Team A and Team B Now, what about the
intelligence product of the CIA, in particular the National Intelligence
Estimates that are the centerpiece of the CIA's work? Here Bush was to
oversee a maneuver to markedly enhance the influence of the pro-Zionist
wing of the intelligence community. In June 1976, Bush accepted a proposal
from Leo Cherne to carry out an experiment in "competitive analysis" in
the area of National Intelligence Estimates of Soviet air defenses, Soviet
missile accuracy, and overall Soviet strategic objectives. Bush and Cherne
decided to conduct the competitive analysis by commissioning two separate
groups, each of which would present and argue for its own conclusions.
On the one, Team A would be the CIA's own National Intelligence Officers
and their staffs. But there would also be a separate Team B, a group of
ostensibly independent outside experts. The group leader of Team B was
Harvard history professor Richard Pipes, who was working in the British
Museum in London when he was appointed by Bush and Cherne. The liaison
between Pipes's Team B and Team A, the official CIA, was provided by John
Paisley, who had earlier served as the liaison between Langley and the
McCord-Hunt-Liddy Plumbers. In this sense, Paisley served as the staff
director of the Team A-Team B experiment. Team B's basic conclusion was
that the Soviet military preparations were not exclusively defensive, but
rather represented the attempt to acquire a first-strike capability that
would allow the U.S.S.R. to unleash and prevail in thermonuclear war. The
U.S. would face a window of vulnerability during the 1980s. But it is clear
from Pipes's own discussion of the debate, / Note #2 / Note #7 that Team
B was less interested in the Soviet Union and its capabilities than in
seizing hegemony in the intelligence and think-tank community in preparation
for seizing the key posts in the Republican administration that might follow
Carter in 1980. The argument in Team B quarters was that, since the Soviets
were turning aggressive once again, the U.S.A. must do everything possible
to strengthen the only staunch and reliable American ally in the Middle
East or possibly anywhere in the world, Israel. This meant not just that
Israel had to be financed without stint, but that Israel had to be brought
into Central America, the Far East, and Africa. There was even a design
for a new NATO, constructed around Israel, while junking the old NATO because
it was absorbing vital U.S. resources needed by Israel. By contrast, Team
B supporters like Richard Perle, who served as assistant secretary of defense
under Reagan, were bitterly hostile to the Strategic Defense Initiative,
which was plainly the only rational response to the Soviet buildup, which
was very real indeed. The "window of vulnerability" argument had merit,
but the policy conclusions favored by Team B had none, since their idea
of responding to the Soviet threat was, once again, to subordinate everything
to Israeli demands. Team A and Team B were supposed to be secret, but leaks
appeared in the "Boston Globe" in October. Pipes was surprised to find
an even more detailed account of Team B and its grim estimate of Soviet
intent in the "New York Times" shortly after Christmas, but Paisley told
him that Bush and CIA official Richard Lehman had already been talking
to the press, and urged Pipes to begin to offer some interviews of his
own. / Note #2 / Note #8 Typically enough, Bush appeared on "Face the Nation"
early in the new year, before the inauguration of the new President, Jimmy
Carter, to say that he was "appalled" by the leaks of Team B's conclusions.
Bush confessed that "outside expertise has enormous appeal to me." He refused
to discuss the Team B conclusions themselves, but did say that he wanted
to "gun down" speculation that the CIA had leaked a tough estimate of the
Soviet Union's military buildup in order to stop Carter from cutting the
defense budget. After the Team B conclusions had been bruited around the
world, Pipes became a leading member of the Committee on the Present Danger,
where his fellow Team B veteran, Paul Nitze, was already ensconced, along
with Eugene V. Rostow, Dean Rusk, Lane Kirkland, Max Kampelman, Richard
Allen, David Packard and Henry Fowler. About 30 members of the Committee
on the Present Danger went on to become high officials of the Reagan administration.
Ronald Reagan himself embraced the "window of vulnerability" thesis, which
worked as well for him as the bomber gap and missile gap arguments had
worked in previous elections. When the Reagan administration wasbeing assembled,
Bush and James Baker had a lot to say about who got what appointments.
Bush was the founder of Team B, and that is the fundamental reason why
such pro-Zionist neoconservatives as Max Kampelman, Richard Perle, Steven
Bryen, Noel Koch, Paul Wolfowitz and Dov Zakem showed up in the Reagan
administration. In a grim postlude to the Team B exercise, Bush's hand-picked
staff director for the operation, John Paisley, the Soviet analyst (Paisley
was the former deputy director of the CIA's Office of Strategic Research)
and CIA liaison to the Plumbers, disappeared on September 24, 1978 while
sailing on Chesapeake Bay in his sloop, the "Brillig." Several days later,
a body was found floating in the bay in an advanced state of decomposition,
and with a gunshot wound behind the left ear. The corpse was weighted down
by two sets of ponderous diving belts. The body was four inches shorter
than Paisley's own height, and Paisley's wife later asserted that the body
found was not that of her husband. Despite all this, the body was positively
identified as Paisley's, the death summarily ruled a suicide, and the body
quickly cremated at a funeral home approved by the Office of Security.
Parting Shots As he managed the formidable world-wide capabilities of the
CIA during 1976, Bush was laying the groundwork for his personal advancement
to higher office and greater power in the 1980s. As we have seen, there
was some intermittent speculation during the year that, in spite of what
Ford had promised the Senate, Bush might show up as Ford's running mate
after all. But, at the Republican convention, Ford chose Kansas Senator
Bob Dole for Vice President. If Ford had won the election, Bush would certainly
have attempted to secure a further promotion, perhaps to secretary of state,
defense, or treasury as a springboard for a new presidential bid of his
own in 1980. But if Carter won the election, Bush would attempt to raise
the banner of the non-political status of the CIA in order to convince
Carter to let him stay at Langley during the period 1977-81 as a "non-partisan"
administrator. In the close 1976 election, Carter prevailed by vote fraud
in New York, Ohio, and other states, but Ford was convinced by William
Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, as well as by his own distraught wife Betty,
that he must concede in order to preserve the work of "healing" that he
had accomplished since Watergate. Carter would therefore enter the White
House. Bush prepared to make his bid for continuity at the CI A. Shortly
after the election, he was scheduled to journey to Plains to brief Carter
with the help of his deputy Henry Knoche. The critical meeting with Carter
went very badly indeed. Bush took Carter aside and argued that in 1960
and 1968, CIA directors were retained during presidential transitions,
and that it would make Carter look good if he did the same. Carter signaled
that he wasn't interested. Then Bush lamely stammered that if Carter wanted
his own man in Langley, Bush would be willing to resign, which is of course
standard procedure for all agency heads when a new President takes office.
Carter said that that was indeed exactly what he wanted, and that he would
have his own new DCI ready by January 21, 1977. Bush and Knoche then briefed
Carter and his people for some six hours. Carter insiders told the press
that Bush's briefing had been a "disaster." "Jimmy just wasn't impressed
with Bush," said a key Carter staffer. / Note #2 / Note #9 Bush and Knoche
then flew back to Washington, and on the plane Bush wrote a memo for Henry
Kissinger describing his exchanges with Carter. At midnight, Bush drove
to Kissinger's home and briefed him for an hour. Bush left Langley with
Carter's inauguration, leaving Knoche to serve a couple of months as acting
DCI. George Bush now turned to his family business of international banking.
Notes for Chapter XVI 14. William Colby, "Honorable Men" (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1978), p. 452. 15. On Murphy and Noriega, see Frank McNeil,
"War and Peace in Central America" (New York: Scribners, 1988), p.278.
16. See John Prados, "Presidents' Secret Wars" (New York: William Morrow,
1986); Powers, "op. cit."; and John Ranelagh, "The Agency: The Rise and
Decline of the CIA" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 17. Cord Meyer,
"Facing Reality: >From World Federalism to the CIA" (Washington, D.C.:
University Press of America, 1982), pp. 225-26. 18. "Washington Post",
Aug. 10, 1988. 19. Ford Library, Philip W. Buchen Files, Box 2. 20. For
Ford's reorganization, see Johnson, "op. cit.", pp. 194-97, and "New York
Times", Feb. 18, 1976. 21. Scott Armstrong and Jeff Nason, "Company Man,"
"Mother Jones", October 1988. 22. See Armstrong and Nason, "op. cit.",
p. 43. 23. Freed, "op. cit.", p. 174. 24. Dinges and Landau, "op. cit.",
p. 384. 25. Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, "Labyrinth" (New York:
Viking Press, 1982), p. 72. 26. Freed, "op. cit.", p. 174. 27. Richard
Pipes, "Team B: The Reality Behind the Myth," "Commentary", Oct. 1986.
28. "Ibid.", p. 34. Pipes makes clear that it was Bush and Richard Lehman
who both leaked to David Binder of the "New York Times." Lehman also encouraged
Pipes to leak. The version offered by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento
and Joseph J. Trento in "Widows" (New York: Crown, 1989), namely that Paisley
did the leaking, may also be true, but will not exonerate Bush. 29. Evans
and Novak column, "Houston Post", Dec. 1, 1976. For the pro-Bush account
of these events, see Nicholas King, "George Bush: A Biography" (New York:
Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980), pp. 109-10. "XVII: Campaign 1980" Shortly
after leaving Langley, Bush asserted his birthright as an international
financier, that is to say, he became a member of the board of directors
of a large bank. On February 22, 1977, Robert H. Stewart III, the chairman
of the holding company for First International Bankshares of Dallas, announced
that Bush would become the chairman of the executive committee of First
International Bank of Houston, and would simultaneously become a director
of First International Bankshares Ltd. of London, a merchant bank owned
by First International Bankshares, Inc. Bush also became a director of
First International Bankshares, Inc. ("Interfirst"), which was the Dallas-based
holding company for the entire international group. During the 1988 campaign,
Bush gave the implacable stonewall to any questions about the services
he performed for the First International Bankshares group or about any
other aspects of his business activities during the pre-1980 interlude.
Later, after the Reagan-Bush orgy of speculation and usury had ruined the
Texas economy, the Texas commercial banks began to collapse into bankruptcy.
Interfirst merged with RepublicBank during 1987 to form First RepublicBank,
which became the biggest commercial bank in Texas. Bankruptcy overtook
the new colossus just a few months later, but federal regulators delayed
their inevitable intervention until after the Texas primary, in the spring
of 1988, in order to avoid a potentially acute embarrassment for Bush.
Once Bush had the presidential nomination locked up, the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation, with the connivance of the IRS, awarded the assets
of First RepublicBank to the North Carolina National Bank in exchange for
no payment whatsoever on the part of NCNB (now NationsBank). During the
heady days of Bush's directorship at Interfirst, the bank retained a law
firm in which one Lawrence Gibbs was a partner. Gibbs, a clear Bush asset,
was made commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service on August 4, 1986.
Here, he engineered the sweetheart deal for NCNB by decreeing $1.6 billion
in tax breaks for this bank. This is typical of the massive favors and
graft for pro-Bush financier interests at the expense of the taxpayer which
are the hallmark of the Bush machine. Lawrence Gibbs also approved IRS
participation in the October 6, 1986 federal-state police raid against
premises and persons associated with the political movement of Lyndon H.
LaRouche in Leesburg, Virginia. This raid was a leading part of the Bush
machine's long term effort to eliminate centers of political opposition
to Bush's 1988 presidential bid. And LaRouche had been a key adversary
of Bush dating back to the 1979-80 New Hampshire primary campaign, as we
will shortly document. Bush also joined the board of Purolator Oil Company
in Rahway, New Jersey, where his crony, Wall Street raider Nicholas Brady
(later Bush's Secretary of the Treasury) was the chairman. Bush also joined
the board of Eli Lilly & Co., a very large and very sinister pharmaceutical
company. The third board Bush joined was that of Texas Gulf, Inc. Bush's
total 1977 rakeoff from the four companies with which he was involved was
$112,000, according to Bush's 1977 tax return. Bush also found time to
line his pockets in a series of high-yield deals that begin to give us
some flavor of what would later be described as the "financial excesses
of the 1980s," in which Bush's circle was to play a decisive role. A typical
Bush venture of this period was Ponderosa Forest Apartments, a highly remunerative
speculative play in real estate. Ponderosa bought up a 180-unit apartment
complex near Houston that was in financial trouble, gentrified the interiors,
and hiked the rents. Horace T. Ardinger, a Dallas real estate man who was
among Bush's partners in this deal, described the transaction as "a good
tax gimmick ... and a typical Texas joint venture offering." According
to Bush's tax returns from 1977 through 1985, the Ponderosa partnership
accrued to Bush a paper loss of $225,160, which allowed him to avoid payment
of some $100,000 in federal taxes alone, plus a direct profit of over $14,000
and a capital gain of $217,278. This type of windfall represents precisely
the form of real estate swindle that contributed to the Texas real estate
and banking crisis of the mid-1980s. The deal illustrates one of the important
ways in which the federal tax base has been eroded through real estate
scams. We also see why it is no surprise that the one fiscal innovation
which has earned Bush's sustained attention is the idea of a reduction
in the capital gains tax to allow those who engage in swindles like these
to pay an even smaller federal tax bite. But Bush's main preoccupation
during these years was to assemble a political machine with which he could
bludgeon his way to power. After his numerous frustrations of the past,
Bush was resolved to organize a campaign that would go far beyond the innocuous
exercise of appealing for citizens' votes. If such a machine were actually
to succeed in seizin g power in Washington, tendencies toward the creation
of an authoritarian police state would inevitably increase. The Spook Campaign
Machine Bush assembled quite a campaign machine. One of the central figures
of the Bush effort would be James Baker III, Bush's friend of ten years'
standing. Baker's power base derived first of all from his family's Houston
law firm, Baker & Botts, which was founded just after the end of the
Civil War by defeated partizans of the Confederate cause. Baker & Botts
founder Peter Gray had been assistant treasurer of the Confederate States
of America and financial supervisor of the CSA's "Trans-Mississippi Department."
Gray, acting on orders of Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs,
financed the subversive work of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike among the
Indian tribes of the Southwest. The close of the war in 1865 had found
Pike hiding in Canada, and Toombs in exile in England. Pike was excluded
from the general U.S. amnesty for rebels because he was thought to have
induced Indians to commit massacres and war crimes. Pike and Toombs reestablished
the "Southern Jurisdiction" of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, of which
Pike had been the leader in the slave states before the Civil War. Pike's
deputy, one Phillip C. Tucker, returned from Scottish Rite indoctrination
in Great Britain to set up a Scottish Rite lodge in Houston in the spring
of 1867. Tucker designated Walter Browne Botts and his relative Benjamin
Botts as the leaders of this new Scottish Rite lodge. / Note #1 The policy
of the Scottish Rite was to regroupunrecon structed Confederates to secure
the disenfranchisement of black citizens and to promote Anglophile domination
of finance and business. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there
were two great powers dominating Texas: On the one hand, the railroad empire
of E.H. Harriman, served by the law firm of Baker & Botts; and on the
other, the British-trained political operative Colonel Edward M. House,
the controller of President Woodrow Wilson. The close relation between
Baker & Botts and the Harriman interests has remained in place down
to the present. And since the time that Captain James A. Baker founded
the Texas Commerce Bank, the Baker family has helped the London-New York
axis run the Texas banking system. In 1901, the discovery of large oil
deposits in Texas offered great promise for the future economic development
of the state, but also attracted the Anglo-American oil cartel. The Baker
family law firm in Texas, like the Bush and Dulles families in New York,
was aligned with the Harriman-Rockefeller cartel. The Bakers were prominent
in supporting eugenics and utopian-feudalist social engineering. Captain
James A. Baker, so the story goes, the grandfather of the current boss
of Foggy Bottom, solved the murder of his client William Marsh Rice and
took control of Rice's huge estate. Baker used the money to start Rice
University and became the chairman of the school's board of trustees. Baker
sought to create a center for diffusion of racist eugenics, and for this
purpose brought in Julian Huxley of the infamous British oligarchical family
to found the biology program at Rice starting in 1912. / Note #2 Huxley
was the vice president of the British Eugenics Society and actually helped
to organize "race science" programs for the Nazi Interior Ministry, before
becoming the founding director general of UNESCO in 1946-48. James A. Baker
III was born April 28, 1930, in the fourth generation of his family's wealth.
Baker holdings have included Exxon, Mobil, Atlantic Richfield, Standard
Oil of California, Standard Oil of Indiana, Kerr-McGee, Merck, and Freeport
Minerals. Baker also held stock in some large New York banks during the
time that he was negotiating the Latin American debt crisis in his capacity
as secretary of the treasury. / Note #3 James Baker grew up in patrician
surroundings. His social profile has been described as "Tex-prep." Like
his father, James III attended the Hill School near Philadelphia, and then
went on to Princeton, where he was a member of the Ivy Club, a traditional
preserve of Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment oligarchs. Baker &
Botts maintains an "anti-nepotism" policy, so James III became a boss of
Houston's Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Jones law firm, a satellite of
Baker & Botts. Baker's relation to Bush extends across both law firms:
In 1977, Baker & Botts partner Blaine Kerr became president of Pennzoil,
and in 1979, Baker & Botts partner B.J. Mackin became chairman of Zapata
Corporation. Baker & Botts have always represented Zapata, and are
often listed as counsel for Schlumberger, the oil services firm. James
Baker and his Andrews, Kurth partners were the Houston attorneys for First
International Bank of Houston when George Bush was chairman of the bank's
executive committee. During the 1980 campaign, Baker became the chairman
of the Reagan-Bush campaign committee, while fellow Texan Bob Strauss was
chairman of the Carter-Mondale campaign. But Baker and Strauss were at
the very same time business partners in Herman Brothers, one of America's
largest beer distributors. Bush Democrat Strauss later went to Moscow as
Bush's ambassador to the U.S.S.R., and later, to Russia. Another leading
Bush supporter was Ray Cline. During 1979, it was Ray Cline who had gone
virtually public with a loose and informal, but highly effective, campaign
network mainly composed of former intelligence officers. Cline had been
the CIA station chief in Taiwan from 1958 to 1962. He had been deputy director
of central intelligence from 1962 to 1966, and had then gone on to direct
the intelligence-gathering operation at the State Department. Cline became
a de facto White House official during the first Bush administration, and
wrote the White House boiler plate entitled "National Security Strategy
of the United States," under which the Gulf war was carried out. Heading
up the Bush campaign muckraking "research" staff was Stefan Halper, Ray
Cline's son-in-law and a former official of the Nixon White House. A member
of Halper's staff was a CIA veteran named Robert Gambino. Gambino had held
the sensitive post of director of the CIA's Office of Security. The Office
of Security is reputed to possess extensive files on the domestic activities
of American citizens. David Aaron, Brzezinski's deputy at the Carter National
Security Council, recalled that some high Carter officials were "upset"
that Gambino had gone to work for the Bush camp. According to Aaron, "several
[CIA] people took early retirement and went to work for Bush's so-called
security staff. The thing that upset us, was that a guy who has been head
of security for the CIA has been privy to a lot of dossiers, and the possibility
of abuse was quite high, although we never heard of any occasion when Gambino
called someone up and forced them to do something for the campaign." /
Note #4 Other high-level spooks active in the Bush campaign included Lt.
Gen. Sam V. Wilson and Lt. Gen. Harold A. Aaron, both former directors
of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Another enthusiastic Bushman was retired
Gen. Richard Stillwell, formerly the CIA's chief of covert operations for
the Far East. The former deputy director for operations, Theodore Shackley,
was also on board, reportedly as a speechwriter, but more likely for somewhat
heavier work. According to one estimate, at least 25 former intelligence
officials worked directly for the Bush campaign. As Bill Peterson of the
"Washington Post" wrote on March 1, 1980, "Simply put, no presidential
campaign in recent memory -- perhaps ever -- has attracted as much support
from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA Director
George Bush." Further intelligence veterans among the Bushmen included
Daniel C. Arnold, the former CIA station chief in Bangkok, Thailand, who
retired early to join the campaign during 1979. Harry Webster, a former
clandestine agent, became a member of Bush's paid staff for the Florida
primary. CIA veteran Bruce Rounds was Bush's "director of operations" during
the key New Hampshire primary. Also on board with the Bushmen wa s Jon
R. Thomas, a former clandestine operative who had been listed as a State
Department official during a tour of duty in Spain, and who later worked
on terrorism and drug-trafficking at the State Department. Andrew Falkiewicz,
the former spokesman of the CIA in Langley, attended some of Bush's pre-campaign
brainstorming sessions as a consultant on foreign policy matters. One leading
bastion of the Bushmen was predictably David Atlee Philips's AFIO, the
Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Jack Coakley was a former
director and Bush's campaign coordinator for Virginia. He certified that
at the AFIO annual meeting in the fall of 1979, he counted 190 "Bush for
President" buttons among 240 delegates to the convention. / Note #5 James
Baker was the obvious choice to be Bush's campaign manager. He had served
Bush in this function in the failed Senate campaign of 1970. During the
Ford years, Baker had advanced to become deputy secretary of commerce.
Baker had been the manager of Ford's failed 1976 campaign. In 1978, Baker
had attempted to get himself elected attorney general of Texas, but had
been defeated. David Keene was political adviser. And, as always, no Bush
campaign would be complete without Robert Mosbacher heading up the national
finance operation. Mosbacher's experience, as we have seen, reached back
to the Bill Liedtke conveyances to Maurice Stans of the CREEP in 1972.
With the help of Baker and Mosbacher, Bush began to set up political campaign
committees that could be used to convoy quasi-legal "soft money" into his
campaign coffers. This is the classic stratagem of setting up political
action committees that are registered with the Federal Election Commission
for the alleged purpose of channeling funds into the campaigns of deserving
Republican (or Democratic) candidates. In reality, almost all of the money
is used for the presidential candidate's own staff, office, mailings, travel
and related expenses. Bush's principal vehicle for this type of funding
was called the Fund for Limited Government. During the first six months
of 1987, this group collected $99,000 and spent $46,000, of which only
$2,500 went to other candidates. Despite the happy facade, Bush's campaign
staff was plagued by turmoil and morale problems, leading to a high rate
of turnover in key posts. One who has stayed on all along has been Jennifer
Fitzgerald, a British woman born in 1932 who had been with Bush at least
since Beijing. Fitzgerald later worked in Bush's vice-presidential office,
first as appointments secretary, and later as executive assistant. According
to some Washington wags, she controlled access to Bush in the same way
that Martin Bormann controlled access to Hitler. According to Harry Hurt,
among former Bush staffers, "Fitzgerald gets vituperative reviews. She
has been accused of bungling the 1980 presidential campaign by canceling
Bush appearances at factory sites in favor of luncheon club speeches. Critics
of her performance say she misrepresents staff scheduling requests and
blocks access to her boss.... A number of the vice president's close friends
worry that 'the Jennifer problem' -- or the appearance of one -- may inhibit
Bush's future political career. 'There's just something about her that
makes him feel good,' says one trusted Bush confidant. 'I don't think it's
sexual. I don't know what it is. But if Bush ever runs for president again,
I think he's going to have to make a change on that score." / Note #6 The
Establishment's Candidate Bush formally announced his presidential candidacy
on May 1, 1979. One of Bush's themes was the idea of a "Union of the English-Speaking
Peoples." Bush was asked later in his campaign by a reporter to elaborate
on this. Bush stated at that time that "the British are the best friend
America has in the world today. I believe we can benefit greatly from much
close collaboration in the economic, military, and political spheres. Sure,
I am an Anglophile. We should all be. Britain has never done anything bad
to the United States." / Note #7 Together with James Baker III, always
the idea man of the Bush-Baker combo, the Bush campaign studied Jimmy Carter's
success story of 1976. They knew they were starting with a "George Who?"
virtually unknown to most voters. First of all, Bush would ape the Carter
strategy of showing up in Iowa and New Hampshire early and often. Thanks
to Mosbacher's operation, the Bush campaign would advance on a cushion
of money -- he spent $1.3 million for the Illinois primary alone. The biggest
item would be media buys -- above all television. This time Bush brought
in Baltimore media expert Robert Goodman, who designed a series of television
shorts that were described as "fast-moving, newsfilmlike portraits of an
energetic, dynamic Bush creating excitement and moving through crowds,
with an upbeat musical track behind him. Each of the advertisements used
a slogan that attempted to capitalize on Bush's experience, while hitting
Carter's wretched on-the-job performance and Ronald Reagan's inexperience
on the national scene: 'George Bush,' the announcer intoned, 'a President
we won't have to train.'|" / Note #8 On November 3, 1979, Bush bested Sen.
Howard Baker in a "beauty contest" straw poll taken at the Maine Republican
convention in Portland. Bush won by a paper-thin margin of 20 votes out
of 1,336 cast, and Maine was really his home state, but the Brown Brothers
Harriman networks at the "New York Times" delivered a front-page lead story
with a subhead that read, "Bush Gaining Stature as '80 Contender." Bush's
biggest lift of the 1980 campaign came when he won a plurality in the January
21 Iowa caucuses, narrowly besting Reagan, who had not put any effort into
the state. At this point, the Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones media
operation went into high gear. That same night Walter Cronkite told viewers:
"George Bush has apparently done what he hoped to do, coming out of the
pack as the principal challenger to front-runner Ronald Reagan." In the
interval between January 21 and the New Hampshire primary of February 26,
the Eastern Liberal Establishment labored mightily to put George Bush into
power as President that same year. The press hype in favor of Bush was
overwhelming. "Newsweek"'s cover featured a happy and smiling Bush talking
with his supporters: "Bush Breaks Out of the Pack," went the headline.
"Time", which had been founded by Henry Luce of Skull and Bones, showed
a huge, grinning Bush and a smaller, very cross Reagan, headlined: "BUSH
SOARS." The leading polls, always doctored by the intelligence agencies
and other interests, showed a Bush boom: Lou Harris found that whereas
Reagan had led Bush into Iowa by 32-6 nationwide, Bush had pulled even
with Reagan at 27-27 within 24 hours after the Iowa result had become known.
Robert Healy of the "Boston Globe" stuck his neck out even further for
the neo-Harrimanite cause with a forecast that "even though he is still
called leading candidate in some places, Reagan does not look like he'll
be on the Presidential stage much longer." NBC's Tom Brokaw started calling
Reagan the "former front-runner." Tom Pettit of the same network was more
direct: "I would like to suggest that Ronald Reagan is politically dead."
The Eastern Liberal Establishment had left no doubt who its darling was:
Bush, and not Reagan. In their arrogance, the Olympians had once again
committed the error of confusing their collective patrician whim with real
processes ongoing in the real world. The New Hampshire primary was to prove
a devastating setback for Bush, in spite of all the hype the Bushman networks
were able to crank out. How did it happen? New Hampshire: The LaRouche
Factor George Bush was, of course, a lifelong member of the Skull and Bones
secret society of Yale University, through which he advanced toward the
freemasonic upper reaches of the Anglo-American Establishment, toward those
exalted circles of London, New York and Washington, in which the transatlantic
destiny of the self-styled Anglo-Saxon master race is elaborated. The entrees
provided by Skull and Bones membership would always be, for Bush, the most
vital ones. But, in addition to such exalted feudal brotherhoods as Skull
and Bones, the Anglo-American Establishment also maintains a series of
broader-based elite organizations whose function is to manifest the hegemonic
Anglo-American policy line to the broader layers of the Establishment,
including bureaucrats, businessmen, bankers, journalists, professors and
other such assorted retainers and stewards of power. George Bush had thus
found it politic over the years to become a member of the New York Council
on Foreign Relations. By 1979, Bush was a member of the board of the CFR,
where he sat next to his old patron Henry Kissinger. The president of the
CFR during this period was Kissinger clone Winston Lord of the traditional
Skull and Bones family. George was also a member of the Bohemian Club of
San Francisco, which had been founded by Ambrose Bierce after the Civil
War to cater to the Stanfords, Huntingtons, Crockers, Hopkinses and the
other nouveau-riche tycoons that had emerged from the gold rush. Then there
was the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller in 1973-74.
The Trilateral Commission emerged at the same time that the Rockefeller-Kissinger
interests perpetrated the first oil hoax. Some of its first studies were
devoted to the mechanics of imposing authoritarian-totalitarian forms of
government in the United States, Europe, and Japan to manage the austerity
and economic decay that would be the results of Trilateral policies. As
we saw briefly during Bush's Senate campaign, the combination of bankruptcy
and arrogance which was the hallmark of Eastern Liberal Establishment rule
over the United States generated resentments which could make membership
in such organizations a distinct political liability. That the issue exploded
in New Hampshire during the 1979-80 campaign in such a way as to wreck
the Bush campaign was largely the merit of Lyndon LaRouche, who had launched
an outsider bid in the Democratic primary. LaRouche conducted a vigorous
campaign in New Hampshire during late 1979, focusing on the need to put
forward an economic policy to undo the devastation being wrought by the
22 percent prime rate being charged by many banks as a result of the high-interest,
usurious policies of Paul Volcker, whom Carter had made the head of the
Federal Reserve. But in addition to contesting Carter, Ted Kennedy and
Jerry Brown on the Democratic side, LaRouche's campaign also noticed George
Bush, whom LaRouche correctly identified as a liberal Republican in the
Theodore Roosevelt-House of Morgan "Bull Moose" tradition of 1912. During
late 1979, the LaRouche campaign began to call attention to Bush as a threat
against which other candidates, Republicans and Democrats, ought to unite.
LaRouche attacked Bush as the spokesman for "the folks who live on the
hill," for petty oligarchs and blue bloods who think that it is up to them
to dictate political decisions to the average citizen. These broadsides
were the first to raise the issue of Bush's membership in David Rockefeller's
Trilateral Commission and in the New York Council on Foreign Relations.
While on the hustings in New Hampshire, LaRouche observed the high correlation
between preppy, liberal Republican, blue-blooded support for Bush and mental
pathology. As LaRouche wrote, "In the course of campaigning in New Hampshire
during 1979 and 1980, I have encountered minds, especially in western New
Hampshire, who represent, in a decayed sort of way, exactly the treasonous
outlook our patriotic forefathers combatted more than a century or more
ago. Naturally, since I am an American Whig by family ancestry stretching
back into the early 19th century, born a New Hampshire Whig, and a Whig
Democrat by profession today, the blue-blooded kooks of certain 'respected'
Connecticut River Valley families get my dander up." / Note #9 LaRouche's
principal charge was that George Bush was a "cult-ridden kook, and more
besides." He cited Bush's membership in "the secret society which largely
controls George Bush's personal destiny, the Russell Trust Association,
otherwise known as 'Skull and Bones'.... Understanding the importance of
the Russell Trust Association in Bush's adult life will help the ordinary
citizen to understand why one must place a question mark on Bush's political
candidacy today. Is George Bush a 'Manchurian candidate'?" After noting
that the wealth of many of the Skull and Bones families was derived from
the British East India Company's trade in black slaves and in opium, LaRouche
went on to discuss "How Yale Turned 'Gay'|": "Today, visiting Yale, one
sees male students walking hand in hand, lovers, blatantly, on the streets.
One does not permit one's boy children to visit certain of the residences
on or around that campus. There have been too many incidents to be overlooked.
One is reminded of the naked wrestling in the mud which initiates to the
Yale Skull and Bones Society practice. One thinks of 'Skull and Boneser'
William F. Buckley's advocacy of the dangerous, mind-wrecking substance,
marijuana, and of Buckley's recent, publicly expressed sympathies for sodomy
between male public school teachers and students.... "As the anglophile
commitments [of the blue-blooded families] deepened and decayed, the families
reflected this in part by a growth of the incidence of 'homosexuality'
for which British public schools and universities are rightly notorious.
Skull and Bones is a concentrated expression of that moral and intellectual
degeneration." LaRouche pointed out that the symbol of Skull and Bones
is the skull and crossbones of the pirate Jolly Roger with "322" placed
under the crossbones. The 322 is thought to refer to 322 B.C., the year
of the death of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, whom LaRouche identified
as a traitor to Athens and an agent provocateur in the service of King
Philip of Macedonia. The Skull and Bones ceremony of induction and initiation
is modeled on the death and resurrection fetish of the cult of Osiris in
ancient Egypt. LaRouche described the so-called "Persian model" of oligarchical
rule sought by Skull and Bones: "The 'oligarchical' or 'Persian' model
was what might be called today a 'neo-Malthusian' sort of 'One World' scheme.
Science and technological progress were to be essentially crushed and most
of the world turned back into labor-intensive, 'appropriate' technologies.
By driving civilization back toward barbarism in that way, the sponsors
of the 'oligarchical model' proposed to ensure the perpetuation of a kind
of 'one world' rule by what we would term today a 'feudal landlord' class.
To aid in bringing about that '"One World Order",' the sponsors of the
project utilized a variety of religious cults. Some of these cults were
designed for the most illiterate strata of the population, and, at the
other extreme, other cults were designed for the indoctrination and control
of the ruling elite themselves. The cult-organization under the Roman Empire
is an excellent example of what was intended." LaRouche went on: "Skull
and Bones is no mere fraternity, no special alumni association with added
mumbo-jumbo. It is a very serious, very dedicated cult-conspiracy against
the U.S. Constitution. Like the Cambridge Apostles, the initiate to the
Skull and Bones is a dedicated agent of British secret intelligence for
life. The fifteen Yale recruits added each year function as a powerful
secret intelligence association for life, penetrating into our nation's
intelligence services as well as related high levels of national policy-making.
"Representatives of the cult who have functioned in that way include Averell
Harriman, Henry Luce, Henry Stimson, Justice Potter Stewart, McGeorge Bundy,
Rev. William Sloane Coffin (who recruited William F. Buckley), William
Bundy, J. Richardson Dilworth, and George Bush ... and many more notables.
The list of related Yalies in the history of the CIA accounts for many
of the CIA's failures and ultimate destruction by the Kennedy machine,
including the reason Yalie James Jesus Angleton failed to uncover H. 'Kim'
Philby's passing of CIA secrets to Moscow. "Now, the ordinary citizen should
begi n to realize how George Bush became a kook-cultist, and also how so
incompetent a figure as Bush was appointed for a while Director of Central
Intelligence for the CIA.... "On the record, the ordinary citizen who knew
something of Bush's policies and sympathies would class him as a 'Peking
sympathizer,' hence a Communist sympathizer." Focusing on Bush's links
with the Maoist regime, LaRouche stressed the recent genocide in Cambodia:
"The genocide of three out of seven million Cambodians by the Peking puppet
regime of Pol Pot (1975-78) was done under the direction of battalions
of Peking bureaucrats controlling every detail of the genocide -- the worst
genocide of the present century to date. This genocide, which was aimed
especially against all merely literate Cambodians as well as professional
strata, had the purpose of sending all of Southeast Asia back into a 'dark
age.' That 'dark age' policy is the policy of the present Peking regime.
That is the regime which Kissinger, Bush and Brzezinski admire so much
as an 'ally'.... "The leading circles of London have no difficulty in recognizing
what 'Peking Communism' is. It is their philosophy, their policy in a Chinese
mandarin culture form. To the extent that Yalies of the Skull and Bones
sort are brought into the same culture as their superiors in London, such
Yalies, like Bush, also have deep affection for 'Peking Communism.' "Like
Bush, who supports neo-Malthusian doctrines and zero-growth and anti-nuclear
policies, the Peking rulers are dedicated to a 'one world' order in which
the population is halved over the next twenty years (i.e. genocide far
greater than Hitler's), and most of the survivors are driven into barbarism
and cultism under the rule of parasitical blue blood families of the sort
represented in the membership of the Skull and Bones. "In that sense, Bush
is to be viewed without quibble as a 'Manchurian candidate.' From the vantage
point of the U.S. Constitution and American System of technological progress
and capital formation, Bush is in effect an agent of the same evil philosophies
and policies as the rulers of Peking. "That, dear friends, is not mere
opinion; that is hard fact." / Note #1 / Note #0 This leaflet represented
the most accurate and devastating personal and political indictment Bush
had ever received in his career. It was clear that LaRouche had Bush's
number. The linking of Bush with the Cambodian genocide is all the more
surprising, since most of the evidence on Bush's role was at that time
not in the public domain. Other aspects of LaRouche's comments are prophetic:
Bush's "deep affection" for Chinese communism was to become an international
scandal when Bush maintained his solidarity with Deng Xiaoping after the
Tiananmen massacre of 1989. Outstanding is LaRouche's reference to the
'One World Order' which the world began to wonder about as the 'New World
Order' in the late summer of 1990, during the buildup for Bush's Gulf war;
LaRouche had identified the policy content of the term way back in 1980.
Bush's handlers were stunned, then enraged. No one had ever dared to stand
up to George Bush and Skull and Bones like this before. The Bush entourage
wanted revenge. A vote fraud to deprive LaRouche of virtually all the votes
cast in the Democratic primary, and transfer as many of them as possible
to the Bush column, would be the first installment. Later, Gary Howard
and Ron Tucker, two agents provocateur from Midland, Texas, were dispatched
to try to infiltrate pro-LaRouche political circles. From 1986 on, Bush
would emerge as a principal sponsor of a judicial vendetta by the Department
of Justice that would see LaRouche and several of his supporters twice
indicted, and finally convicted, on a series of trumped-up charges. One
week after George Bush's inauguration as President, his most capable and
determined opponent, Lyndon LaRouche, would be thrown into federal prison,
where he remains to this day. But in the New Hampshire of 1979-80, LaRouche's
attacks on Bush brought into precise focus many aspects of Bush's personality
that voters found profoundly distasteful. LaRouche's attack sent out a
shock wave, which, as it advanced, detonated one turbulent assault on Bush
after the other. One who was caught up in the turbulence was William Loeb,
the opinionated curmudgeon of Pride's Crossing, Massachusetts who was the
publisher of the Manchester "Union Leader", the most important newspaper
in the state. Loeb had supported Reagan in 1976 and was for him again in
1980. Loeb might have dispersed his fire against all of Reagan's Republican
rivals, including Howard Baker, Robert Dole, Phil Crane, John Anderson,
John Connally and Bush. It was the LaRouche campaign which demonstrated
to Loeb long before the Iowa caucuses that Bush was the main rival to Reagan,
and therefore the principal target. As a result, Loeb would launch a barrage
of slashing attacks on Bush. Loeb had assailed Ford as "Gerry the Jerk"
in 1976; his attacks on Sen. Edmund Muskie reduced the latter to tears
during the 1972 primary. Loeb began to play up the theme of Bush as a liberal,
as a candidate controlled by the "internationalist" (or Kissinger) wing
of the GOP and the Wall Street bankers, always soft on communism and always
ready to undermine liberty through Big Government here at home. A February
editorial by Loeb reacted to Bush's Iowa success with these warnings of
vote fraud: "The Bush operation in Iowa had all the smell of a CIA covert
operation.... Strange aspects of the Iowa operation [included] a long,
slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point,
with Bush having a six per cent bulge over Reagan.... Will the elite nominate
their man, or will we nominate Reagan?" / Note #1 / Note #1 For Loeb, the
most damning evidence was Bush's membership in the Trilateral Commission,
the creature of David Rockefeller and the international bankers. Carter
and his administration had been packed with Trilateral members; there were
indications that the Establishment choice of Carter to be the next U.S.
President had been made at a meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Kyodo,
Japan, where Carter had been introduced by Gianni Agnelli of Italy's FIAT
motor company. Loeb simplified all that: "George Bush is a Liberal" was
the title of his editorial published the day before the primary. Loeb flayed
Bush as a "spoiled little rich kid who has been wet-nursed to succeed and
now, packaged by David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission, thinks he is
entitled to the White House as his latest toy." Shortly before the election
Loeb ran a cartoon entitled "Silk Stocking Republicans," which showed Bush
at a cocktail party with a cigarette and glass in hand. Bush and the other
participants, all male, were wearing women's pantyhose. Paid political
ads began to appear in the "Union Leader" sponsored by groups from all
over the country, some helped along by John Sears of the Reagan campaign.
One showed a drawing of Bush juxtaposed with a Mr. Peanut logo: "The same
people who gave you Jimmy Carter want now to give you George Bush," read
the headline. The text described a "coalition of liberals, multinational
corporate executives, big-city bankers, and hungry power brokers" led by
David Rockefeller, whose "purpose is to control the American government,
regardless of which political party -- Democrat or Republican -- wins the
presidency this coming November! ... The Trojan horse for this scheme,"
the ad went on, "is Connecticut-Yankee-turned-Texas oilman George Bush
-- the out-of-nowhere Republican who openly admits he is using the same
'game-plan' developed for Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential nomination
campaign." The ad went on to mention the Council on Foreign Relations and
the "Rockefeller money" that was the lifeblood of Bush's effort. While
campaigning, Bush was asked once again about the money he received from
Nixon's 1970 Townhouse slush fund. Bush's stock reply was that his friend
Leon Jaworski had cleared him: "The answer came back, clean, clean, clean,"
said Bush. By now the Reagan camp had caught on that something important
was happening, something which could benefit Reagan enormously. First Reagan's
crony Edwin Meese piped up an oblique reference to the Trilateral membership
of some candidates, including Bush: "[A]ll these people come out of an
international economic industrial organization with a pattern of thinking
on world affairs" that led to a "softening on defense." That played well,
and Reagan decided he would pick up the theme. On February 7, 1980, Reagan
observed in a speech that 19 key members of the Carter administration,
including Carter, were members of the Trilateral Commission. According
to Reagan, this influence had indeed led to a "softening on defense" because
of the Trilateraloids' belief that business "should transcend, perhaps,
the national defense." / Note #1 / Note #2 Bush realized that he was faced
with an ugly problem. He summarily resigned from both the Trilateral Commission
and from the New York Council on Foreign Relations. But his situation in
New Hampshire was desperate. His cover had been largely blown. Now the
real polls, the ones that are generally not published, showed Bush collapsing,
and even media that would normally have been rabidly pro-Bush were obliged
to distance themselves from him in order to defend their own "credibility."
Bush was now running scared, sufficiently so as to entertain the prospect
of a debate among candidates. Notes for Chapter XVII 1. Albert Pike to
Robert Toombs, May 20, 1861 in "The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation
of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies" (Washington:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1881), Series I, Vol. III, pp. 580-81.
See also James David Carter, "History of the Supreme Council, 330 (Mother
Council of the World), Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
Southern Jurisdiction, U.S.A., 1861-1891" (Washington: The Supreme Council,
330, 1967), pp. 5-24, and James David Carter, Ed., "The First Century of
Scottish Rite Masonry in Texas: 1867-1967" (Texas Scottish Rite Bodies,
1967), pp. 32-33, 42. 2. Fredericka Meiners, "A History of Rice University:
The Institute Years, 1907-1963" (Houston: Rice University, 1982). 3. Ronald
Brownstein and Nina Easton, "Reagan's Ruling Class" (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1983), p. 650. 4. Joe Conason, "Company Man," "Village Voice," Oct.
1988. 5. Bob Callahan, "Agents for Bush," "Covert Action Information Bulletin,"
No. 33 (Winter 1990), pp. 5 ff. 6. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky
Lad," "Texas Monthly," June 1983, p. 206. 7. L. Wolfe, "King George VII
Campaigns in New Hampshire," "New Solidarity," Jan. 8, 1980. 8. Jeff Greenfield,
"The Real Campaign" (New York: Summit Books, 1982), pp. 36-37. 9. See Lyndon
LaRouche, "Is Republican George Bush a 'Manchurian Candidate'?" issued
by Citizens for LaRouche, Manchester, New Hampshire, Jan. 12, 1980. 10.
Quoted in Greenfield, "op. cit.," p. 44. 11. Manchester "Union Leader,"
Feb. 24, 1980. 12. Sidney Blumenthal, "The Rise of the Counter-Establishment"
(New York: Perennial Library, 1988), pp. 82-83. "XVII: Campaign 1980" Epiphany
of a Scoundrel John Sears of the Reagan campaign signaled to the "Nashua
Telegraph", a paper published in southern New Hampshire, that Reagan would
accept a one-on-one debate with Bush. James Baker was gulled: He welcomed
the idea because the debate format would establish Bush as the main alternative
to Reagan. "We thought it was the best thing since sliced bread," said
Baker. Bob Dole complained to the Federal Elections Commission about being
excluded, and the Reagan camp suggested that the debate be paid for out
of campaign funds, half by Reagan and half by Bush. Bush refused to pay,
but Reagan pronounced himself willing to defray the entire cost. Thus it
came to pass that a bilateral Bush-Reagan debate was scheduled for February
23 at a gymnasium in Nashua. For many, this evening would provide the epiphany
of George Bush, a moment when his personal essence was made manifest. Bush
propaganda has always tried to portray the "Nashua Telegraph" debate as
some kind of ambush planned by Reagan's diabolical campaign manager, John
Sears. Established facts include that the "Nashua Telegraph" owner, blueblood
J. Herman Pouliot, and "Telegraph" editor John Breen, were both close personal
friends of former Governor Hugh Gregg, who was Bush's campaign director
in the state. Bush had met with Breen before the debate. Perhaps it was
Bush who was trying to set some kind of a trap for Reagan. On the night
of February 23, the gymnasium was packed with more than 2,400 people. Bush's
crony, Rep. Barber Conable (or "Barbarian Cannibal," later Bush's man at
the World Bank), was there with a group of congressmen for Bush. Then the
excluded GOP candidates, John Anderson, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Phil
Crane, all arrived and asked to meet with Reagan and Bush to discuss opening
the debate up to them as well. (Connally, also a candidate, was in South
Carolina.) Reagan agreed to meet with them and went backstage into a small
office with the other candidates. He expressed a general willingness to
let them join in. But Bush refused to talk to the other candidates, and
sat on the stage waiting impatiently for the debate to begin. John Sears
told Bush's press secretary, Peter Teeley, that Sears wanted to talk to
Bush about the debate format. "It doesn't work that way," hissed the liberal
Teeley, who sent James Baker to talk with Sears. Sears said it was time
to have an open debate. Baker passed the buck to the "Nashua Telegraph".
>From the room behind the stage where the candidates were meeting, the
Reagan people sent U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey out to urge Bush to come
and confer with the rest of them. "If you don't come now," said Humphrey
to Bush, "you're doing a disservice to party unity." Bush whined in reply:
"Don't tell me about unifying the Republican Party! I've done more for
this party than you'll ever do! I've worked too hard for this and they're
not going to take it away from me!" In the back room, there was a proposal
that Reagan, Baker, Dole, Anderson, and Crane should go on stage together
and announce that Reagan would refuse to debate unless the others were
included. "Everyone seemed quite irritated with Bush, whom they viewed
as acting like a spoiled child," wrote an aide to Anderson later. / Note
#1 / Note #3 Bush refused to even acknowledge the presence of Dole, who
had helped him get started as GOP chairman; of Anderson and Crane, former
House colleagues; and of Howard Baker, who had helped him get confirmed
at the CIA. George kept telling anybody who came close that he was sticking
with the original rules. The audience was cheering for the four excluded
candidates, demanding that they be allowed to speak. Publisher Pouliot
addressed the crowd: "This is getting to sound more like a boxing match.
In the rear are four other candidates who have not been invited by the
"Nashua Telegraph"," said Pouliot. He was roundly booed. "Get them chairs,"
cried a woman, and she was applauded. Bush kept staring straight ahead
into space, and the hostility of the crowd was focusing more and more on
him. Reagan started to speak, motivating why the debate should be opened
up. Editor Breen, a rubbery-looking hack with a bald pate and glasses,
piped up: "Turn Mr. Reagan's microphone off." There was pandemonium. "You
Hitler!" screamed a man in the front row right at Breen. Reagan replied:
"I'm paying for this microphone, Mr. Breen." The crowd broke out in wild
cheers. Bush still stared straight ahead in his temper tantrum. Reagan
spoke on to ask that the others be included, saying that exclusion was
unfair. But he was unsure of himself, looking to Nancy Reagan for a sign
as to what he should do. At the end, Reagan said he would prefer an open
debate, but that he would accept the bilateral format if that were the
only way. With that, the other candidates left the podium in a towering
rage. "There'll be another day, George," growled Bob Dole. Reagan and Bush
then debated, and those who were still paying attention agreed that Bush
was the loser. A staff member later told Bush, "The good news is that nobody
paid any attention to the debate. The bad news is y ou lost that, too."
Film footage of Reagan grabbing the microphone while Bush stewed in his
temper tantrum was all over local and network television for the next 48
hours. It was the epiphany of a scoundrel. Now the Bush damage control
apparatus went into that mode it finds so congenial: lying. A radio commercial
was prepared under orders from James Baker for New Hampshire stations:
Here an announcer, not Bush, intoned that "at no time did George Bush object
to a full candidate forum. This accusation by the other candidates is without
foundation whatsoever." Walter Cronkite heard a whining voice from Houston,
Texas as he interviewed Bush on his new program: "I wanted to do what I
agreed to do," said the whine. "I wanted to debate with Ronald Reagan."
The New Hampshire primary was a debacle for Bush. Reagan won 50 percent
of the votes to George's 23 percent, with 13 percent for Baker and 10 percent
for Anderson. / Note #1 / Note #4 Bush played out the string through the
primaries, but he won only four states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania
and Michigan) plus Puerto Rico. Reagan took 29. Even in Pennsylvania, where
the Bushmen outspent Reagan by a colossal margin, Reagan managed to garner
more delegates even though Bush got more votes. Bush was able to keep going
after New Hampshire because Mosbacher's machinations had given him a post-New
Hampshire war chest of $3 million. The Reagan camp had spent two-thirds
of their legal total expenditure of $18 million before the primaries had
begun. This had proven effective, but it meant that in more than a dozen
primaries, Reagan could afford no televis ion purchases at all. This allowed
Bush to move in and smother Reagan under a cascade of greenbacks in a few
states, even though Reagan was on his way to the nomination. That was the
story in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The important thing for Bush now was
to outlast the other candidates and to build his credentials for the vice-presidency,
since that was what he was now running for. Seeking his 'Birthright' All
the money and organization had not sufficed. After some expensive primary
failures, Bush now turned his entire attention to the quest for his "birthright,"
the vice-presidency. This would be his fifth attempt to attain that office,
and once again, despite the power of Bush's network, success was uncertain.
Inside the Reagan camp, one of Bush's greatest assets would be William
Casey, who had been closely associated with the late Prescott Bush. Casey
was to be Reagan's campaign manager for the final phase of the 1980 elections.
In 1962, Prescott and Casey had co-founded a think tank called the National
Strategy Information Center in New York City, a forum where Wall Street
lawyers like Casey could join hands with politicians from Prescott's wing
of the Republican Party, financiers, and the intelligence community. The
National Strategy Information Center provided material for a news agency
called Forum World Features, a CIA proprietary that operated in London,
and which was in liaison with the British Information Research Department,
a Cold War propaganda unit set up by Christopher Mayhew of British intelligence
with the approval of Prime Minister Clement Attlee. This Prescott Bush-William
Casey think tank promoted the creation of endowed chairs in strategic analysis,
national intelligence and the like on a number of campuses. The Georgetown
Center for Strategic and International Studies, later the home of Kissinger,
Michael Ledeen and a whole stable of ideologues of the Anglo-American empire,
was in part a result of the work of Casey and Prescott. Casey was also
a close associate of George Bush. During 1976, Ford appointed Casey to
PFIAB, where Casey was an enthusiastic supporter of the Team B operation
along with Bush and Leo Cherne. George Bush and Casey would play decisive
roles in the secret government operations of the Reagan years. As the Republican
convention gathered in Detroit in July 1980, the problem was to convince
Reagan of the inevitability of tapping Bush as his running mate. But Reagan
did not want Bush. He had conceived an antipathy, even a hostility, for
George. What Reagan had experienced personally from Bush during the "Nashua
Telegraph" debate had left a lasting and highly derogatory impression.
According to one account of this phase, "ever since the episode in Nashua
in February, Reagan had come to hold the preppy Yankee transplant in, as
the late Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma used to say, minimum high regard.
'Reagan is a very gracious contestant,' one of his inner circle said, 'and
he generally views his opponents with a good deal of respect. The thing
he couldn't understand was Bush's conduct at the "Nashua Telegraph" debate.
It imprinted with Reagan that Bush was a wimp. He remembered that night
clearly when we had our vice-presidential discussions. He couldn't understand
how a man could have sat there so passively. He felt it showed a lack of
courage." And now that it was time to think about a running mate, the prospective
presidential nominee gave a sympathetic ear to those who objected to Bush
for reasons that ran, one of the group said later, from his behavior at
Nashua to 'anti-Trilateralism.'|" According to this account, conservatives
seeking to stop Bush at the convention were citing their suspicions about
a "|'conspiracy' backed by Rockefeller to gain control of the American
government." / Note #1 / Note #5 Drew Lewis was a leading Bushman submarine
in the Reagan camp, telling the candidate that Bush could help him in electoral
college mega-states like Pennsylvania and Michigan where Ted Kennedy had
demonstrated that Carter was vulnerable during the primaries. Lewis badgered
Reagan with the prospect that if he waited too long, he would have to accept
a politically neutral running mate in the way that Ford took Dole in 1976,
which might end up costing him the election. According to Lewis, Reagan
needed to broaden his base, and Bush was the most palatable and practical
vehicle for doing so. Much to his credit, Reagan resisted; "[H]e told several
staff members and advisers that he still harbored 'doubts' about Bush,
based on Nashua. 'If he can't stand up to that kind of pressure,' Reagan
told one intimate, 'how could he stand up to the pressure of being President?'
To another, he said: 'I want to be very frank with you. I have strong reservations
about George Bush. I'm concerned about turning the country over to him.'|"
As the convention came closer, Reagan continued to be hounded by Bushmen
from inside and outside his own campaign. A few days before the convention,
it began to dawn on Reagan that one alternative to the unpalatable Bush
might be former President Gerald Ford, assuming the latter could be convinced
to make the run. Two days before Reagan left for Detroit, according to
one of his strategists, Reagan "came to the conclusion that it would be
Bush, but he wasn't all that happy about it." / Note #1 / Note #6 But this
was not yet the last word. Casey, Meese and Michael Deaver sounded out
Ford, who was reluctant but did not issue a categorical rejection. Stuart
Spencer, Ford's 1976 campaign manager, reported to Reagan on his contacts
with Ford. "Ron," Spencer said, "Ford ain't gonna do it, and you're gonna
pick Bush." But judging from Reagan's reaction, Spencer recalled later,
"There was no way he was going to pick Bush," and the reason was simple:
Reagan just didn't like the guy. "It was chemistry," Spencer said. / Note
#1 / Note #7 Reagan now had to be ground down by an assortment of Eastern
Liberal Establishment perception-mongers and political heavies. Much of
the well-known process of negotiation between Reagan and Ford for the "Dream
Ticket" of 1980 was simply a charade to disorient and demoralize Reagan
while eating up the clock, until the point was reached when Reagan would
have no choice but to make the classic phone call to Bush. It is obvious
that Reagan offered the vice-presidency to Ford, and that the latter refused
to accept it outright, but engaged in a process of negotiations ostensibly
in order to establish the conditions under which he might, eventually,
accept. / Note #1 / Note #8 Casey called in Henry Kissinger and asked him
to intercede with Ford. What then developed was a marathon of haggling
in which Ford was represented by Kissinger, Alan Greenspan, Jack Marsh
and Bob Barrett. Reagan was represented by Casey, Meese and perception-monger
Richard Wirthlin. Dick Cheney, Ford's former chief of staff, who is now
Bush's pro-genocide secretary of defense, also got into the act. This complex
strategy of intrigue culminated in Ford's notorious interview with Walter
Cronkite, in which the CBS anchorman asked Ford if "It's got to be something
like a co-presidency?" "That's something Governor Reagan really ought to
consider," replied Ford, which was not what a serious vice-presidential
candidate might say, but did correspond rather well to what "Gerry the
Jerk" would say if he wanted to embarrass Reagan and help Bush. The best
indication that Ford had been working all along as an agent of Bush was
provided by Ford himself to Germond and Witcover: "Ford, incidentally,
told us after the election that one of his prime objectives at the convention
had been 'to subtly help George Bush get the [vice-presidential] nomination.'|"
/ Note #1 / Note #9 Drew Lewis helped Reagan make the call that he found
so distasteful. Reagan came on the line: "Hello, George, this is Ron Reagan.
I'd like to go over to the convention and announce that you're my choice
for vice president ... if that's all right with you." "I'd be honored,
Governor." Reagan now proceeded to the convention floor, where he would
announce his choice of Bush. Knowing that this decision would alienate
many of Reagan's ideological backers, the Reagan campaign leaked the news
that Bush had been chosen to the media, so that it would quickly spread
to the convention floor. They were seeking to cushion the blow, to avoid
mass expressions of disgust when Bush's name was announced. Even as it
was, there was much groaning and booing among the Reagan faithful. As the
Detroit convention came to a close, the Reagan and Bush campaign staffs
were merged, with James Baker assuming a prominent position in the Casey-run
Reagan campaign. The Ray Cline, Halper, and Gambino operations were all
continued. From this point on, Reagan's entourage would be heavily infiltrated
by Bushmen. The October Surprise The Reagan-Bush campaign, now chock full
of Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones assets, announced a campaign
of espionage. This campaign told reporters that it was going to spy on
the Carter regime. Back in April, Carter had taken to live television at
7:00 a.m. one morning to announce some ephemeral progress in his efforts
to secure the release of State Department officials and others from the
U.S. embassy in Teheran, who were being held as hostages by the Khomeini
forces in Iran. This announcement was timed to coincide with Democratic
primaries in Kansas and Wisconsin, in which Carter was able to overwhelm
challenges from Teddy Kennedy and Jerry Brown. A memo from Richard Wirthlin
to Casey and Reagan initiated a discussion of how the Carter gang might
exploit the advantages of incumbency in order to influence the outcome
of the election, perhaps by attempting to stampede the public by some dramatic
event at the last minute, such as the freeing of the hostages in Teheran.
On April 24, a military task force failed to free the hostages. Casey began
to institute countermeasures even before the Detroit GOP convention. During
the convention, at a July 14 press conference, Casey told reporters of
his concern that Carter might spring an "October Surprise" in foreign or
domestic policy on the eve of the November elections. He announced that
he had set up what he called an "incumbency watch" to monitor Carter's
activities and decisions. Casey explained that an "intelligence operation"
directed against the Carter White House was functioning "already in germinal
form." Ed Meese, who was with Casey at this press conference, added that
the October Surprise "could be anything from a summit conference on energy"
or development in Latin America, or perhaps the imposition of "wage and
price controls" on the domestic economy. "We've talked about the October
surprise and what the October surprise will be," said Casey. "I think it's
immoral and improper." / Note #2 / Note #0 The previous evening, in a television
appearance, Reagan had suggested that "the Soviet Union is going to throw
a few bones to Mr. Carter during this coming campaign to help him continue
as President." Although Casey and Meese had defined a broad range of possibilities
for the October Surprise, the most prominent of these was certainly the
liberation of the American hostages in Iran. A poll showed that if the
hostages were to be released during the period between October 18 and October
25, Carter could receive a 10 percent increase in popular vote on election
day. The "incumbency watch" set up by Casey would go beyond surveillance
and become a dirty tricks operation against Carter. What followed was in
essence a pitched battle between two fascist gangs, the Carter White House
and the Bush-Casey forces. Out of this 1980 gang warfare, the post-1981
United States regime would emerge. Carter and Brzezinski had deliberately
toppled the Shah of Iran, and deliberately installed Khomeini in power.
This was an integral part of Brzezinski's "arc of crisis" geopolitical
lunacy, another made-in-London artifact which called for the United States
to support the rise of Khomeini, and his personal brand of fanaticism,
a militant heresy within Islam. U.S. arms deliveries were made to Iran
during the time of the Shah; during the short-lived Shahpour Bakhtiar government
at the end of the Shah's reign; and continuously after the advent of Khomeini.
Subsequently, President Carter and senior members of his administration
have suggested that the Reagan/Bush campaign cut a deal with the Khomeini
regime to block the liberation of the hostages before the November 1980
election. By early 1992, the charges and countercharges reached such a
fever pitch that a preliminary congressional investigation of the affair
had been initiated. In March 1992, "Executive Intelligence Review" issued
a Special Report titled, "Treason in Washington: New Evidence on the 'October
Surprise,'|" / Note #2 / Note #1 which presented extensive new evidence
from internal FBI and CIA documents, released under the Freedom of Information
Act, that suggests that the then-Republican vice-presidential candidate
played a personal role in keeping the hostages in Khomeini's hands until
after Election Day 1980; and that Casey, a personal friend of Bush's father
and Reagan's CIA director, coordinated the operation. The central link
suggesting Bush's role in the scandal was Cyrus Hashemi, an Iranian arms
dealer and agent of the Iranian SAVAK secret police, whom Casey seems to
have recruited as a liaison to the mullahs. On December 7, 1979, less than
two months after the hostages were seized, Carter's assistant secretary
of state, Harold Saunders, was contacted by an intermediary for Cyrus Hashemi.
The Iranian arms merchant proposed a deal to free the hostages, and submitted
a memorandum calling for the following: removal of the ailing expatriate
Shah from U.S. territory; an apology by the United States to the people
of Iran for past U.S. interference; the creation of a United Nations Commission;
the unfreezing of the Iranian financial assets seized by Carter; and arms
and spare parts deliveries by the United States to Iran. All of this was
summed up in a memorandum submitted to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance following
meetings with Hashemi and his attorney. / Note #2 / Note #2 The notable
aspect of this encounter is the identity of the American lawyer who was
both the business partner and the intermediary for the Iranian gun-runner:
John Stanley Pottinger. The account of the 1976 Letelier case provided
above (see Chapter 16) has established that Pottinger was a close friend
of George Bush. Pottinger, it will be recalled, had served as assistant
attorney general for civil rights in the Nixon and Ford administration
s between 1973 and 1977, after having directed the U.S. Office of Civil
Rights in the Justice Department between 1970 and 1973. Pottinger had also
stayed on into the early Carter administration, serving as special assistant
to the attorney general from February to April 1977. Pottinger had then
joined the law firm of Tracy, Malin and Pottinger of Washington, London,
and Paris. After the 1980 election, Pottinger was being considered for
a high-level post in the Reagan/Bush administration. This same Pottinger
was now the representative for gun-runner Cyrus Hashemi. Given Pottinger's
proven relation to Bush, we may wonder to what extent was Bush informed
of Hashemi's proposal, and of the responses of the Carter administration.
Relevant evidence that might help us to determine what Bush knew and when
he knew it is still being withheld by the Bush regime. The FBI bugged Cyrus
Hashemi's phones and office from August 1980 to February 1981, and many
of the conversations that were recorded were between Hashemi and Bush's
friend Pottinger. Ten years later, in November 1991, the FBI released heavily
redacted summaries of some of the conversations, but most of the summaries
and transcripts are still classified. "EIR"'s Special Report thoroughly
documented how Pottinger was protected from indictment by the Reagan-Bush
Justice Department. For years, prosecution of Hashemi and Pottinger, for
illegally conspiring to ship weapons to the Khomeini regime, was blocked
by the administration on "national security" grounds. Declassified FBI
documents show that an indictment of Pottinger had been drawn up, but that
the indictment was killed at the last minute in 1984 when the FBI "lost"crucial
taped evidence. The FBI conducted an extensive internal investigation of
the missing "Pottinger tapes" but the results have never been disclosed.
Other information on the intentions of the Khomeini regime and secret dealings
may have reached Bush from his old friend and associate Mitchell Rogovin,
the former CIA general counsel. During 1976, Rogovin had accompanied Bush
on many trips to the capital to testify before congressional committees;
the two were known to be close. Rogovin was credited with having saved
the CIA after it came under major congressional and media attack in the
mid-1970s. In the spring of 1980, Rogovin told the Carter administration
that he had been approached by Iranian-American arms dealer Houshang Lavi
with an offer to start negotiations for the release of the hostages. Lavi
claimed to be an emissary of Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr; Rogovin
at this time was working as the lawyer for the John Anderson GOP presidential
campaign. Bush's family friend Casey had also been in direct contact with
Iranian representatives. Jamshid Hashemi, the brother of Cyrus Hashemi
(who died under suspicious circumstances during 1986), had told Gary Sick,
a former official of Carter's National Security Council, that he met with
William Casey at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. in March of 1980
to discuss the hostages. According to Jamshid Hashemi, "Casey quickly made
clear that he wanted to prevent Jimmy Carter from gaining any political
advantage from the hostage crisis. The Hashemis agreed to cooperate with
Casey without the knowledge of the Carter administration." / Note #2 /
Note #3 Casey's "intelligence operation" included the spying on the opposing
candidate that has been routine in U.S. political campaigns for decades,
but went far beyond it. As journalists like Witcover and Germond knew during
the course of the campaign, and as the 1984 Albosta committee "Debategate"
investigation showed, Casey set up at least two "October Surprise" espionage
groups. The first of these watched the Carter White House, the Washington
bureaucracy, and diplomatic and intelligence posts overseas. This group
was headed by Reagan's principal foreign policy adviser and later NSC chairman,
Richard Allen. Allen was in touch with some 120 foreign policy and national
security experts sympathetic to the Reagan campaign. Casey helped Allen
to interface with the Bush campaign network of retired and active duty
assets in the intelligence community. This network reached into the Carter
NSC, where Bush crony Don Gregg worked as the CIA liaison man, and into
Carter's top-secret White House situation room. Another October Surprise
monitoring group was headed by Adm. Robert Garrick. The task of this group
was the physical surveillance of U.S. military bases by on-the-ground observers,
often retired and sometimes active duty military officers. Lookouts were
posted to watch Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, Andrews Air Force Base
near Washington, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey (where weapons already
bought and paid for by the Shah were stockpiled), and Norton and March
Air Force bases in California. Garrick, Casey, Meese, Wirthlin, and other
campaign officials met each morning in Falls Church, Virginia, just outside
of Washington, to review intelligence gathered. This group soon became
operational. It was clear that Khomeini was keeping the hostages to sell
them to the highest bidder. Bush and Casey were not reticent about putting
their own offer on the table. Shortly after the GOP convention, Casey appears
to have traveled to Europe for a meeting in Madrid in late July with Mehdi
Karrubi, a leading Khomeini supporter, now the speaker of the Iranian Parliament.
Jamshid Hashemi said that he and his late brother Cyrus were present at
this meeting and at another one in Madrid during August, which they say
Casey also attended. The present government of Iran has declined to confirm
or deny this contact, saying that "the Islamic Government of Iran sees
no benefit to involve itself in the matter." Casey's whereabouts in the
last days of July 1980 are officially unknown. Part of the coverup on the
story has been to create uncertainty and confusion on Casey's travels at
the time. What is known is that as soon as Casey surfaced again in Washington
on July 30, he reported back to vice-presidential candidate George Bush
in a dinner meeting held at the Alibi Club. It is certain from the evidence
that there were negotiations with the mullahs by the Reagan-Bush camp,
and that Bush was heavily involved at every stage. In early September,
Bush's brother, Prescott Bush, Jr., became involved, with a letter to James
Baker in which he described his contacts with a certain Herbert Cohen,
a consultant to the Carter administration on Middle East matters. Cohen
had promised to abort any possible Carter moves to "politicize" the hostage
issue by openly denouncing any machinations that Carter might attempt.
Prescott offered Baker a meeting with Cohen. Sometime in fall 1980, there
was a meeting at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington among Richard Allen,
Bud McFarlane, Laurence Silberman of the Reagan-Bush campaign, and a mysterious
Iranian representative, thought to be an emissary of Hashemi Rafsanjani,
currently Iranian President and an asset of U.S. intelligence who was then
becoming one of the most powerful mullahs in Khomeini's entourage. The
Iranian representative offered a deal whereby "he could get the hostages
released directly to our campaign before the election," Silberman recalls.
(Silberman went on to become a judge in the District of Columbia Appeals
Court and led the vote in overturning Oliver North's conviction.) Allen
has claimed that he cut this meeting short after 20 minutes. Allen, McFarlane,
and Silberman all failed to report this approach to the White House, the
State Department or other authorities. On September 22, Iraq invaded Iran,
starting a war that would last until the middle of 1988 and which would
claim more than a million lives. The U.S. intelligence estimate had been
that Khomeini and the mullahs were in danger of losing power by the end
of 1980 because of their incompetence, corruption and benighted stupidity.
U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies, especially the French, thereupon
encouraged Iraq to attack Iran, offering the prospect of an easy victory.
The "easy victory" analysis was incorporated into a "secret" CIA report
which was delivered to the Saudi Arabian government with the suggestion
that it be leaked to Iraq. The real U.S. estimate was that a war with Iraq
would strengthen Khomeini against reformers who looked to President Bani-Sadr,
and that the war emergency would assist in the imposition of a "new dark
ages" regime in Iran. An added benefit was that Iran and Iraq as warring
states would be forced vastly to increase their oil production, forcing
down the oil price on the world market and thus providing the bankrupt
U.S. dollar with an important subsidy in terms of the dollar's ability
to command basic commodities in the real world. Bani-Sadr spoke in this
connection of "an oil crisis in reverse" as a result of the Iran-Iraq war.
President Bani-Sadr, who was later deposed in a coup d'etat by Khomeini,
Rafsanjani and Beheshti, has recalled that during this period, Khomeini
decided to bet on Reagan-Bush. "So what if Reagan wins," said Khomeini.
"Nothing will really change since he and Carter are both enemies of Islam."
/ Note #2 / Note #4 This was the time of the Reagan-Carter presidential
debates, and Casey's operation had also yielded booty in this regard. Bush
ally and then-Congressman David Stockman boasted in Indiana in late October
that he had used a "pilfered copy" of Carter's personal briefing book to
coach Reagan prior to the debates. Many sources agree that a conclusive
series of meetings between the Reagan-Bush and Khomeini forces took place
in the weeks and months prior to Election Day 1980. In late 1991, as the
campaign season heated up, close to a score of articles appeared in the
U.S. press responding to Gary Sick's "October Surprise" book, which gave
credibility to the charge that the Reagan-Bush campaign had indeed made
a dirty deal with the mullahs to prevent the release of the hostages. Even
Carter, who said that he had heard such rumors back in 1980, now agreed
that a congressional investigation would be helpful in settling the matter.
President Bush and an entire gaggle of political operatives and neoconservative
journalists denounced Sick's book and the accusation as the fantasies of
"conspiracy theorists." Sick and other journalists who published articles
about the affair were severely criticized for retailing the stories of
an assortment of intelligence informants, gun-runners, money launderers,
pilots, and other flotsam and jetsam from the seamy side of international
espionage and intrigue by pro-Bush journalists and congressional leaders
opposed to probing the accusations. Immediately after the Iran-Contra scandal
made headlines in early 1987, numerous sources surfaced and began to contact
journalists with purported eyewitness accounts of meetings between Reagan/Bush
campaign representatives and Khomeini intermediaries. Several of the sources
said they had seen Bush and Casey at meetings in Europe with Khomeini's
emissaries. Others offered bits and pieces of information complementing
the eyewitness reports. One source, Richard Brenneke, a self-admitted money
launderer and pilot for the CIA, was indicted for perjury by a U.S. attorney
in Colorado for saying he had been told by another alleged CIA pilot, Heinrich
Rupp, that he had seen Bush in Paris in October 1980. Brenneke said that
he had personally seen Casey and Donald Gregg in Paris at the same time.
But a jury acquitted Brenneke. Later, Frank Snepp, a former CIA officer
turned investigative reporter, did an expose published in the "Village
Voice", allegedly proving that Brenneke could not have been in Paris in
October 1980 because he had obtained credit card receipts showing that
Brenneke was in Oregon at the time he had told others he had been in Paris.
The original source on Bush's secret trip to Paris was Oscar LeWinter,
a German-based professional snitch, who seems to have done some work for
both the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. LeWinter later admitted that he had
been paid, allegedly by the CIA, to spread false information about Bush
and Casey's secret trips to Europe for meetings with messengers from the
mullahs. Does that mean there is no smoking gun linking Bush to the "coincidence"
that the hostages were only released on Inauguration Day 1981, within minutes
of Reagan taking his presidential oath? No. What is clear, is that some
intelligence apparatus deployed an elaborate disinformation campaign which
created a false trail which could be discredited. The intelligence community
operation of "damage-control" is premised on revealing some of the truth,
mixed with half-truths and blatantly false facts, which allows the bigger
story to be undermined. It is possible that Bush was not in Paris in October
1980 to meet with an Iranian delegation to seal the deal. Bush has heatedly
denied that he was in Paris at this time, and has said that he personally
did not negotiate with Khomeini envoys. But he has generally avoided a
blanket denial that the campaign, of which he was a principal, engaged
in surreptitious dealings with the Khomeini mullahs. There is another intriguing
possibility: During the same time frame that LeWinter and Brenneke (Oct.
18-19, 1980) say Bush was in Paris, an adversary of then-President Bani-Sadr
and puppet of Khomeini, Prime Minister Ali Rajai, was in New York preparing
to depart for Algiers after consultations at the United Nations. Rajai
had refused all contact with Carter, Muskie, and other U.S. officials,
but he may have been more interested in meeting Bush or one of his representatives.
What is now well documented is, that throughout 1980, many Reagan/Bush
campaign officials were tripping over themselves to meet with anyone purporting
to be an Iranian. If a deal were to be authenticated, there is no question
that Khomeini and crew would have sought a handshake from someone who could
not later deny the agreement. Between October 21 and October 23, Israel
dispatched a planeload of much-needed F-4 Phantom jet spare parts to Iran
in violation of the U.S. arms boycott. Who in Washington had sanctioned
these shipments? In Teheran, the U.S. hostages were reportedly dispersed
into a multitude of locations on October 22. Also on October 22, Prime
Minister Rajai, back from New York and Algiers, announced that Iran wanted
neither American spare parts nor American arms. The Iranian approach to
the ongoing contacts with the Carter administration now began to favor
evasive delaying tactics. There were multiple indications that Khomeini
had decided that Reagan-Bush was a better bet than Carter, and that Reagan-Bush
had made the more generous offer. Barbara Honegger, then an official of
the Reagan-Bush campaign, recalls that "on October 24th or 25th, an assistant
to Stephan Halper's 'October Surprise' intelligence operation echoed William
Casey's newfound confidence, boasting to the author in the operations center
where [Reagan-Bush Iran-watcher Michel] Smith worked that the campaign
no longer needed to worry about an 'October Surprise' because Dick [Allen]
cut a deal." / Note #2 / Note #5 On October 27, Bush campaigned in Pittsburgh,
where he addressed a gathering of labor leaders. His theme that day was
the Iranian attempt to "manipulate" the outcome of the U.S. election through
the exertion of "last-minute leverage" involving the hostages. "It's no
secret that the Iranians do not want to see Ronald Reagan elected President,"
Bush lied. "They want to play a hand in the election -- with our 52 hostages
as the 52 cards in their negotiating deck." It was a "cool, cynical, unconscionable
ploy" by the Khomeini regime. Bush asserted that it was "fair to ask how
come right now there's talk of releasing them [the hostages] after nearly
a year." His implication was that Carter was the one with the dirty deal.
Bush concluded that he wanted the hostages "out as soon as possible....
We want them home and we'll worry about who to blame later." / Note #2
/ Note #6 During the first week of December, "Executive Intelligence Review"
reported that Henry Kissinger "held a series of meetings during the week
of November 12 in Paris with representatives of Ayatollah Beheshti, leader
of the fundamentalist clergy in Iran.... Top-level intelligence sources
in Reagan's inner circle confirmed Kissinger's unreported talks with the
Iranian mullahs, but stressed that the Kissinger initiative was totally
unauthorized by the president-elect." According to "EIR", "it appears that
the pattern of cooperation between the Khomeini people and circles nominally
in Reagan's camp began approximately six to eight weeks ago, at the height
of President Carter's efforts to secure an arms-for-hostages deal with
Teheran. Carter's failure to secure the deal, which a number of observers
believe cost him the November 4 election, apparently resulted from an intervention
in Teheran by pro-Reagan British circles and the Kissinger faction." /
Note #2 / Note #7 These revelations from "EIR" are the first mention in
the public record of the scandal which has come over the years to be known
as the October Surprise. The hostages were not released before the November
election, which Reagan won convincingly. Khomeini kept the hostages imprisoned
until January 20, the day of the Reagan-Bush inauguration, and let the
hostage plane take off just as Reagan and Bush were taking their oaths
of office. Whether George Bush was personally present in Paris, or at other
meetings with Iranian representatives where the hostage and arms questions
were on the agenda, has yet to be conclusively proven. Here a thorough
and intrusive congressional investigation of the Carter and Reagan machinations
in this regard is long overdue. Such a probe might also shed light on the
origins of the Iran-Iraq war, which set the stage for the more recent Gulf
crisis. But, quite apart from questions regarding George Bush's presence
at this or that meeting, there can be no doubt that both the Carter regime
and the Reagan-Bush campaign were actively involved in dealings with the
Khomeini regime concerning the hostages and concerning the timing of their
possible release. In the case of the Reagan-Bush Iran connection, there
is reason to believe that federal crimes in violation of the Logan Act
and other applicable laws may have taken place. George Bush had now grasped
the interim prize that had eluded him since 1968: After more than a dozen
years of effort, he had now become the Vice President of the United States.
Notes for Chapter XVII 13. Mark Bisnow, "Diary of a Dark Horse: The 1980
Anderson Presidential Campaign" (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1983), p. 136. 14. For the "Nashua Telegraph" debate, see: Jeff
Greenfield, "op. cit.," pp. 44 ff.; Mark Bisnow, "op. cit.," pp. 134 ff.;
Jules Witcover and Jack Germond, "Blue Smoke and Mirrors" (New York: Viking,
1981), pp. 116 ff. 15. Germond and Witcover, "op. cit.," p. 169. 16. "Ibid.,"
p. 170. 17. "Ibid.," p. 171. 18. The best testimony on this is Reagan's
own response to a question from Witcover and Germond. Asked if "it was
true that he was trying to get President Ford to run with him," Reagan
promptly responded, "Oh, sure. That would be the best." See Germond and
Witcover, "op. cit.," p. 178. 19. "Ibid.," p. 188. 20. "Washington Star,"
July 15, 1980. 21. "EIR Special Report:" "Treason in Washington: New Evidence
on the October Surprise," March 1992. 22. See "EIR Special Report:" "Project
Democracy: The 'Parallel Government' Behind the Iran-Contra Affair" (Washington,
1987), pp. 88-101. 23. Gary Sick, "The Election Story of the Decade," "New
York Times," April 15, 1991. 24. Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, "My Turn to Speak"
(New York: Brassey's, U.S., 1991), p. 33. 25. Barbara Honegger, "October
Surprise" (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1989) p. 58. 26. "Washington
Post," Oct. 28, 1980. 27. "Executive Intelligence Review," Dec. 2, 1980.
"XVIII: The Attempted Coup d'Etat of March 30, 1981" For Bush, the vice-presidency
was not an end in itself, but merely another stage in the ascent toward
the White House. With the help of his Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and
Bones network, Bush had now reached the point where but a single human
life stood between him and the presidency. Ronald Reagan was 70 years old
when he took office, the oldest man ever to be inaugurated as President.
His mind wandered; long fits of slumber crept over his cognitive faculties.
His custom was to delegate all administrative decisions to the cabinet
members, to the executive departments and agencies. Policy questions were
delegated to the White House staff, who prepared the options and then guided
Reagan's decisions among the pre-defined options. This was the staff that
composed not just Reagan's speeches, but the script of his entire life.
But sometimes Reagan was capable of lucidity, and even of inspired greatness,
in the way a thunderstorm can momentarily illuminate a darkling countryside.
Reagan's greatest moment of conceptual clarity came in his television speech
of March 23, 1983 on the Strategic Defense Initiative, a concept that had
been drummed into the Washington bureaucracy through the indefatigable
efforts of Lyndon LaRouche and a few others. The idea of defending against
nuclear missiles, of not accepting Mutually Assured Destruction, and of
using such a program as a science driver for rapid technological renewal
was something Reagan permanently grasped and held onto, even under intense
pressure. In addition, during the early years of Reagan's first term, there
were enough Reaganite loyalists in the administration, typified by William
Clark, to cause much trouble for the Bushmen. But as the years went by,
the few men like Clark whom Reagan had brought with him from California
would be ground up by endless bureaucratic warfare, and their replacements,
like McFarlane at the NSC, would come more and more from the ranks of the
Kissingerians. Unfortunately, Reagan never developed a plan to make the
SDI an irreversible political and budgetary reality, and this critical
shortcoming grew out of Reagan's failed economic policies, which never
substantially departed from Carter's. But apart from rare moments like
the SDI, Reagan tended to drift. Don Regan called it "the guesswork presidency";
for Al Haig, frustrated in his own lust for power, it was government by
an all-powerful staff. Who were the staff? At first, it was thought that
Reagan would take most of his advice from his old friend Edwin Meese, his
close associate from California days, loyal and devoted to Reagan, and
sporting his Adam Smith tie. But it was soon evident that the White House
was really run by a troika: Meese, Michael Deaver, and James Baker III,
Bush's man. Deaver gravitated by instinct toward Baker; Deaver tells us
in his memoirs that he was a supporter of Bush for vice president at the
Detroit convention. This meant that James Baker-Michael Deaver became the
dominant force over Ron and over Nancy; George Bush, in other words, already
had an edge in the bureaucratic infighting.