Chapter XVI -- Campaign 1980
Le mercennarie et ausiliarie sono inutili e pericolose; e, se uno tiene lo stato suo fondato in sulle arme mercennarie, non sara' mai fermo ne' sicuro.
--Machiavelli, Il Principe
As we follow George Bush along the George Washington Parkway as he drives away from his Langley office in January, 1977, we enter an especially shadowy and inscrutable interlude in his career. During their superficial and dilatory 1988 inquiry into Bush's career, Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus did establish one typical phenomenon of Bush's activity between January, 1977 and his emergence as a presidential candidate: Bush kept key parts of his activity a secret from his own aides and office staff, even going so far as to manufacture alibis which would appear to have been inventions. Woodward and Pincus described a "mystery about Bush and the agency" which arose during the course of their interviews about the post-1977 period. "According to those involved in Bush's first political action committee, there were several occasions in 1978-79, when Bush was living in Houston and traveling the country in his first run for the presidency, that he set aside periods of up to 24 hours and told aides he had to fly to Washington for a secret meeting of former CIA Directors. Bush told his aides that he could not divulge his whereabouts, and that he would not be reachable."
The mystery described by Woodward and Pincus arose when other interviews cast grave doubt on the veracity of this cover story; "...according to former directors and other senior CIA officials, there were no meetings of former directors during that period, and Bush had no assignments of any kind from the CIA." Stansfield Turner commented that he "never knew former directors had meetings and there were none when I was there." Stephen Hart of Bush's staff told Woodward and Pincus that the keepers of Bush's schedule could "recall no CIA activity of any kind," but explained the absences as "personal time in Washington" for "tennis, visits with friends, and dinners." [fn 1] Such enigmas are typical of the 1977-1979 interlude in Bush's career.
Shortly after leaving Langley, Bush asserted his birthright as an international financier in the way he had indicated to his close friend Leo Cherne, that is to say by becoming 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 in 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., which was the holding company for the entire international group. Thus, less than two years before Margaret Thatcher came to power, Bush acquired the status of investment banker in the City of London, the home of the Eurodollar market and the home of British imperial financial circles in which such figures as Lord Victor Rothschild, Tiny Rowland, the Sultan of Brunei, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and the Emir of Kuwait were at home. An annual fee of $75,000 as a "consultant" also sweetened this pot. 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. Interfirst was then the largest bank in Texas and was reportedly running speculation all over South America, China, and Europe.
Later, after the Reagan-Bush orgy of speculation and usury had ruined the Texas economy, the Texas commercial banks began to collapse into bankruptcy. First International of Dallas (or "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 nomination locked up, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation awarded the assets of First RepublicBank to the North Carolina National Bank in exchange for no payment whatsoever on the part of NCNC, which is reputedly a darling of the intelligence community.
During the heady days of Bush's directorship at Interfirst, the bank retained a law firm in which one Lawrence Gibbs was a partner. Two partners of Gibbs "joined three representatives of the energy department of Interfirst Bank on a trip to Peking, where they conducted a week-long seminar on financing the production of natural resources for the Oil and Gas Ministry of the People's Republic of China." [fn 2] This visit was made in the context of trips to China by Bush for the purpose of setting up a lucrative oil concession for J. Hugh Lietdkte of Pennzoil, Bush's old business partner. Gibbs, a clear Bush asset, was made Commissioner of Internal Revenue on August 4, 1986. Here he engineered the sweeheart 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. 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.
During this time, Bush became a director of Baylor Medical College, a trustee of Trinity Medical College in San Antonio, and a trustee of Philips Academy in Andover. He was also listed as an adjunct professor at Rice University.
Bush also found time 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 1980's" 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-1980's. 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. It is also typical of the Bush style that Fred M. Zeder, the promoter of the Ponderosa deal, was made US Ambassador to the Marshall Island in the South Pacific by the Bush Administration after he had contributed over $30,000 to Bush's 1988 campaign.
In 1978, Bush crony and cabinet member Robert Mosbacher, a veteran of the Lietdtke-CREEP money transfers, devised a scheme to set up a partnership to buy some small barges to transport petroleum products. Bush invested $50,000 in this deal, which had netted him some $115,373 in income by 1988, when Bush's share had increased in value to $60,000. In 1988 it was forecast that this investment would continue to pay $20,000 per year for the foreseeable future. James Baker III also sank $50,000 into this deal, and has been rewarded by similar handsome payoffs. Mosbacher commented that this barge caper had turned out to be a "very, very good investment."
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 seizing power in Washington, tendencies towards the edification of an authoritarian police state with marked totalitarian tendencies would inevitably increase.
But first let us review some of Bush's public activities during the pre-campaign interlude. In April, 1978 Bush appeared along with E. Henry Knoche and William Colby at Senate hearings on proposed legislation to modify the methods by which Congress exercised oversight of the intelligence agencies. The bill being discussed had a provision to outlaw assassinations of foreign officials and to punish violations with life in prison. The measure would also have prohibited covert operations involving "torture," "the creation of epidemics of diseases," and "the creation of food or water shortages or floods." Bush and Knoche both objected to the ban on assassinations (which Colby accepted), and both were critical of the entire bill. Knoche said his fear was that if enacted the bill might create "a web woven so tight around the average intelligence officer that you're going to deaden his creativity."
Bush denounced the Senate bill for its "excessive" reporting requirements. "The Congress should be informed, fully informed, but it ought not to micro-manage the intelligence business," protested Bush. He was especially indignant about a provision that would have required notification of the House and Senate oversight committees every time a US intelligence agency wanted to stipulate an agreement with a foreign intelligence agency, or domestic security service. "I don't believe that kind of intimate disclosure is essential," said Bush. Bush was convinced that "some US sources are drying up because foreign services don't believe the US Congress can keep secrets." This, from the man who had leaked the Team B report to the New York Times, and then had gone on television to say that he was appalled.
Bush urged the senators to drop language in the bill that would have severed the DCI post from the CIA. Bush warned vehemently that an intelligence czar sitting in the White House "and separated from his CIA troops...would be virtually isolated. He needs the CIA as his principal source of support to be most effective. And the CIA needs its head to be the chief foreign intelligence adviser to the president." [fn 3]
A few months later he participated in a singular round table organized by the Washington Quarterly of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies with none other than Michael Ledeen as moderator. (Ledeen, who vaunted intimate connections to Israeli intelligence, was later one of the central figures in the mid-1980's acceleration of US arms shipments to Iran.) In this round table, Bush was joined by former DCIs Richard Helms and William Colby as well as by Ray Cline.
According to Bush there was "an underlying feeling on the part of the American people that we must have clandestine services." Above all he regretted "that some of the thrust of the legislation before the Hill is still flogging CIA for something that was long corrected, or that never happened." Even Hollywood was against the CIA, Bush thought, "and you get movies and television programs and it has a very sinister kind of propagandistic overtone." Here Bush wanted to defend his own record: "I'll give you one example that happened on my watch: One of these rather ribald magazines described a purported destabilization effort against [Prime Minister Michael] Manley in Jamaica." "But," said Bush with that self-righteous whine, "it never happened. There wasn't any truth in it."
An important question came from Ledeen: "Is the agency penetrated?" Bush was ready to admit that it might be: "Nobody is saying that there's nothing." "How about double agents?" Ledeen wanted to know. "Well, obviously we've had double agents but that's not officers of the agency," was Bush's ambiguous reply. Bush went on:
The great Soviet agents were recruited when the Soviet represented something ideologically. When they represented antifascism. That's when they got people like Philby. But the fact is that we've just went [sic] through a period in which we had hundreds of thousands of our young people out screaming against their government. Now they were totally opposed to their government, but they weren't pro-Soviet.
Bush and Cline joined to praise the "benign covert political action" of the 1940's and 1950's by which the CIA sent US intellectuals to Europe to talk to the Europeans. "We essentially won that ideological battle," said Bush.[fn 4]
When Carter and Brzezinski played their treacherous China card in December, 1978, Bush was quick, despite his own miserable record on this issue, to launch a pre-election attack on Carter with an op-ed in the Washington Post. Bush harkened back to the day in December, 1975 (although Bush wrote October) when he, Ford, and Kissinger had sat down with Chairman Mao. From Mao's remarks that day, Bush says, it was clear that Red China was obsessed with the Soviet threat, and was willing to wait indefinitely for China to be reunited with Taiwan. Now Carter had broken diplomatic relations with Taiwan, begun the pullout of US forces, abrogated the US-Taiwan security treaty, and was winding down arms assistance to Taiwan. Bush was the man who had presided over the ejection of the Republic of China from the UN. It was a cheap shot for him to quote Peter Berger about the primieval principle of morality that "one must not deliver one's friends to their enemies." After Bush's support for Deng Xiao-ping after the 1989 Tein An Men massacre, the hypocrisy is even more obvious.
But Bush had some other points to make against Carter. One was that when "black moderates in Rhodesia arranged with Prime Minister Ian Smith for the transfer of power and free elections, we [meaning Carter] threw in our lot with Marxist radicals."
Then there was the Middle East, where "the Israelis announced that they were prepared to accept a final plan drafted with American help. But when Egypt raised the ante, we modified our position to accept the new Egyptian proposals, and when the Israelis refused to go along, we publicly kicked them in the shins." Even the Carter of Camp David, who split the Arab front with a separate peace between Israel and Egypt, was not Zionist enough for Bush.
Apart from these public pronouncements, Bush was at work assembling 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 partisans of the Confederate cause. Judge Peter Gray and Walter Browne Botts established a law partnership in 1866, and this became Baker & Botts during the 1870's when James Baker (the great-grandfather of Bush's Secretary of State) joined the firm.
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 general 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 US amnesty for rebels because he was thought to have induced Indians to commit massacres and war crimes.
Pike and Toombs re-established the "Southern Jurisdiction" of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, of which Pike had been the leader in the slave states before the war of the rebellion. 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. [fn 5]
The policy of the Scottish Rite was to regroup unreconstructed 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 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. Robert S. Lovett, a Baker & Botts partner from 1882 on, later became the chairman of Harriman's Union Pacific Railroad and chief counsel to E.H. Harriman. 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 of 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. [fn 6] 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. [fn 7]
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 Ivy Club, a traditional preserve of Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment oligarchs. Nancy Reagan was enchanted by Baker's sartorial elegance and smooth savoir-faire. Nancy liked Baker far more than she ever did Bush, and this was a key advantage for Bush-Baker during the factional struggles of the Reagan years.
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 USSR and later, to Russia.
In 1990, the New York Times offered a comparison of Bush and Baker, and sought to convey the impression that Baker was the far more devious of the duo:
When you sit across from the President, it is like holding an X-ray plate up to the light. You can see if he feels defensive or annoyed or amused. He is often distracted, toying with something on his desk. His thoughts start and stop and start again, as though he had call-waiting in his brain. There is a spontaneity and warmth about him.
When you sit across from Baker, it is like looking at a length of black silk. There is a stillness, as Baker holds you locked in his gaze and Southern comfort voice, occasionally flashing a rather wintry smile...He has a compelling presence, but he is such a fox that you feel the impulse to check your wallet when you leave his office. [fn 8]
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.
Cline later said that his approach to Bush's 1979-80 primary campaign was to "organize something like one of my old CIA staffs." "I found there was a tremendous constituency for the CIA when everyone in Washington was still urinating all over it," commented Cline to the Washington Post of March 1, 1980. "It's panned out almost too good to be true. The country is waking up just in time for George's candidacy."
Heading up the Bush campaign muck-raking "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. It will be recalled that the Office of Security constitutes the interface between Langley and state and local police departments all across the United States with whom it must cooperate to protect the security of CIA buildings and CIA personnel, as for example in cases in which these latter may run afoul of the law. 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." [fn 9]
Other high-level spooks active in the Bush campaign included Lt. General Sam V. Wilson and Lt. General Harold A. Aaron, both former directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Another enthusiastic Bushman was retired General 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 were 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 was 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. According to an unnamed former CIA deputy director for intelligence who allegedly talked to Rolling Stone magazine in March, 1980, "the Bush campaign is, I think, embarrassed by all the crazy spooks running around trying to help them." Another retired top spook told the Washington Post that "there is a very high level of support for George Bush among current and former CIA employees."
Some worried that all this intelligence community support might have damaging by-products for Bush. "I can see the headlines [now]," said one former clandestine officer during the primaries: "BUSH SPRINKLES CAMPAIGN WITH FORMER SPOOKS."
One leading bastion of the Bushmen was predictably David Atlee Philip'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. [fn 10]
During the course of the 1984 Debategate investigation, a number of Bush campaign activists were depositioned about possible abuses in the course of this campaign. Most revealing was the sworn statement of Angelo Codevilla, a former naval intelligence officer who was a fixture for a number of years on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Under questioning by John Fitzgerald, who was acting as counsel for the House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Don Albosta, Codevilla responded:
I am aware that active duty agents of the Central Intelligence Agency worked for the George Bush primary campaign. However, I cannot now remember some of these persons and I am not at liberty to identify others by names or positions because to do so would compromise their cover. [fn 11]
But before signing this as an affidavit, Codevilla crossed out "am aware" to "have heard" in the first sentence. In the second sentence, he cancelled "identify others" and put in "discuss these rumors." Active intelligence community officers who might have worked for the Bush campaign while still drawing their federal payroll checks were likely to have been in violation the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.
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. Bringing Baker into the Bush campaign meant that he could bring with him many of the Ford political operatives and much of the Ford political apparatus and volunteers in a number of states. In the 1978, Baker had attempted to get himself elected attorney general of Texas, but had been defeated. David Keene was political advisor. 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 Lietdke conveyances to Maurice Stans of the CREEP in 1972. Teaming up with Mosbacher were Fred Bush in Houston and Jack Sloat in Washington.
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 6 months of 1987, this group collected $99,000 and spent $46,000, of which only $2,500 went to other candidates. The rest was in effect spent to finance Bush's campaign preparations. Bush had a second PAC called the Congressional Leadership Committee, with Senator Howard Baker and Congressman John Rhodes on the board, which did manage to dole out the princely sum of $500 to each of 21 GOP office-seekers.
The cash for the Fund for Limited Government came from 54 fat cat contributors, half of them in Texas, including Pennzoil, Haggar Slacks, McCormick Oil and Gas, Houston Oil and Minerals, and Texas Instruments. Money also came in from Exxon, McDonnell-Douglas, and Clairol cosmetics. [fn 12]
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 since at least 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.'" [fn 13]
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." [fn 14]
Jules Witcover and Jack Germond, two experienced observers of presidential campaigns, observed that Bush's was the first campaign in history to have peaked before it ever started.
During the summer of 1979, Bush grappled with what has since been called "the Vision Thing." What could he tell the voters when he was asked why he wanted to be president? During that summer Bush invited experts on various areas of policy to come to Kennebunkport and give him the benefit of their views. Bush met with these experts from business, academia, and government in seminars three days a week from 9 to 5 over a period of six weeks. Many were invited to the family house at Walker's Point for lunch. In the evenings there were barbecues and cocktails on the ocean front.
It is an indication of the extraordinary intellectual aridity of George Bush that these blab sessions produced almost no identifiable policy ideas for Bush's 1980 campaign. Bush had wanted to avoid the fate of Ted Kennedy had been widely ridiculed when he had proven unable to respond to the question of why he wanted to be president. But Bush never developed an answer to this question either.
Or, more precisely, it was the imperative to avoid any identifiable idea content that emerged as Bush's strategy. For, just as much as Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, George Bush was one of the pioneers of the hollow, demagogic, television-based campaign style that had become dominant during the 1980's, greasing the skids to political atrophy and national decline.
Together with James Baker III, always the idea man of the Bush-Baker combo, the Bush campaign studied Jimmy Carter's success story of 1980. 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 offer, attempting to ingratiate himself with the little people by assiduous cultivation. Bush spent 27 days in Iowa before the caucuses there, and 54 days in New Hampshire.
During this period, Bush was overheard telling a New York Times reporter that he didn't want to "resist the Carter analogy." Bush readily admitted that he was "an elitist candidate." "If Carter could do it with no credentials, I can do it with fantastic credentials," Bush blurted out. He conceded that the fact that nobody knew anything about his "fantastic credentials" was a little discouraging. "But they will! They will!"
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.'" [fn 15] One of these shorts showed Bush talking about inflation to a group of approving factory workers. In another, Bush climbed out of a private plane at a small airport, surrounded by supporters with straw hats and placards and yelled "We're going all the way" to the accompaniment of applause and music Goodman hoped would sound "presidential." The inevitable footage of Bush getting fished out of the drink off Chichi Jima shootdown was also aired.
Network camera crews were offered repeated chances to film Bush while he was jogging. This was an oblique way of pointing out that Reagan would be 70 years old by the beginning of the primary season. "I'm up for the 1980's," was a favorite Bush quote for interviews. There were no attacks on Reagan; indeed Bush was seeking to come across as a moderate conservative, in order first to fend off the challenge of Sen. Howard Baker, who was also running, and to gain on Reagan.
In a rather slavish imitation of the Carter victory scenario, Bush also chose to imitate what had been called Carter's "fuzziness," or unwillingness to say anything of substance about issues. Bush was the unabashed demagogue, telling Diane Sawyer of CBS when he would finally talk about the issues: "if they can show me how it will get me more votes someplace, I'll be glad to do it."
Bush talked vaguely about tax cuts to spur business and investment; he was unhappy about the "decline in America's stature overseas" due to Carter; he was against excessive government regulation. Military aggression overseas has never been far below the surface of Bush's psyche; in 1979 he talked about the need to overcome the post-Vietnam guilt syndrome. He was, he proclaimed, "sick and tired of hearing people apologize for America." Bush was striving to appear as similar to Reagan, but more moderate in packaging, younger and more dynamic, and above all, a Winner.
But in the midst of Bush's summer, 1979 preparations for his presidential bid, there was one very serious moment of preparation that addressed the some real issues, albeit in a way virtually invisible from the campaign trail. This was a conference Bush attended at the Jonathan Institute in Jerusalem on July 2-5. Instead of mugging for the television cameras while eating hotdogs on the Fourth of July at a picnic in Iowa or New Hampshire, Bush journeyed to Israel for what was billed as the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism.
The Jonathan Institute had been founded earlier the same year by Benjamin Netanyahu, a young crazy of the Likud block, in memory of his brother Jonathan, who had been killed during the Israeli raid on Entebbe in 1976. The Jonathan Institute was a semi-covert propaganda operation and could only be defined as a branch of the Israeli government. The committee sponsoring this conference on terrorism was headed up by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, followed by Moshe Dayan and many other prominent Israeli politicians and generals.
The US delegation to the conference was divided according to partisan lines, but was generally united by sympathy for the ideas and outlook of the Bush-Cherne Team B. The Democratic delegation was led by the late Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. This group included civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, plus Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter of Commentary Magazine, two of the most militant and influential Zionist neoconservatives. Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute was also on hand. Although the group that arrived with Scoop Jackson were supposedly Democrats, most of them would support Reagan-Bush in the November, 1980 election.
Then there was the GOP delegation, which was led by George Bush. Here were Bush activist Ray Cline, Major General George Keegan, a stalwart supporter of Team B, and Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard, the leader of Team B. Here were Senator John Danforth of Missouri and Brian Crozier, a "terrorism expert." Pseudo-intellectual columnist George Will ("Will the Shill") was also on hand, as was Rome-based journalist Claire Sterling, who had been active in covering up the role of Henry Kissinger in the 1978 assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, and who would later be blind to indications of an Anglo-American role in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.
International participation was also notable: Annie Kriegel and Jacques Soustelle of France, Lord Alun Chalfont, Paul Johnson, and Robert Moss of the United Kingdom, and many leading Israelis.
The keynote statement was made by Prime Minister Begin, who told the participants that they should spread through the world the main idea of the conference, which was that all terrorism in the world, whatever its origin, is controlled by the Soviet Union. Ray Cline made a major presentation, developing his theory that terrorism should not be seen as a spontaneous response to oppression by frustrated minorities, but rather only as the preferred tool of Soviet bloc subversion. For Cline, the great watershed was an alleged 1969 decision by the Poliburo in Moscow to use the Palestine Liberation Organization as the Kremlin's fifth column in the Middle East, and specifically to subsidize PLO terrorist attacks with money, training, and communications provided by the KGB. For Cline, the PLO, despite the fact that it enjoyed the support of the vast majority of Palestinians, was merely a synthetic tool of Soviet intelligence. It was a very convenient argument for Zionist hardliners.
Richard Pipes then drew on Russian history to illustrate the singular thesis that terrorism was a product of Russian history, and of no other history. "The roots of Soviet terrorism, indeed of modern terrorism," according to Pipes, "date back to 1879...It marks the beginning of that organization which is the source of all modern terrorist groups, whether they be named the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhof group, the Weathermen, Red Brigades or PLO. I refer you to the establishment in 1879 of a Congress in the small Russian town of Lipesk, of an organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or the People's Will."
There is no doubt that the KGB and its east bloc satellite agencies were massively involved in running terrorism, as former Soviet bloc archives opened after 1989 definitively show. But is it really true that terrorism was invented in Lipesk in 1879? And is terrorism really the absolute monopoly of the KGB? Did that include Menachem Begin, who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem? Did it include other members of the Irgun and Stern gangs? Everyone present seems to have found good reasons for believing that the ludicrous thesis of the conference was true. For the Israelis, it was a new reason not to negotiate with the PLO, who could be classed as Soviet terrorist puppets. For the immediate needs of Bush's election-year demagogy, it was an argument that could be used against Carter's equally demagogic "human rights" sloganeering. More broadly, it could be used to allege a clear and present universal danger that made it mandatory to close the book once and for all on the old Church committee-Pike committee mentality. All the participants, from CIA, MI-6, SDECE, Mossad, and so on down the line could readily agree that only the KGB, and never they themselves ran terrorism. Hardly ever.
Begin had been a terrorist himself; Soustelle had been in the French OAS during the Algerian war where the SDECE had committed monumental crimes against humanity; Bush and Cline were godfathers of the Enterprise; the Mossad was reputed to have an agent on the Abu Nidal central committee, and also exercised influence over the Italian Red Brigades; while the chaps from MI-6 had the longest and bloodiest imperial records. But Ian Black wrote in the Jerusalem Post wrote that "the conference organizers expect the event to initiate a major anti-terrorist offensive." In Paris, the right-wing L'Aurore ran an article under the headline "Toujours le KGB," which praised the conference for having confirmed that when it comes to international terrorism, the Soviets pull all the strings. [fn 16]
There were skeptics, even in the US intelligence community, where Ray Cline's monomania was recognized. At the 1980 meeting of AFIO, Cline was criticized by Howard Bane, the former CIA station chief in Moscow, who suggested "We've got to get Cline off this Moscow control of terrorists. It's divisive. It's not true. There's not one single but of truth to it." A retired CIA officer named Harry Rostizke put in: "It's that far-right stuff, that's all. It's horseshit."
Nevertheless, the absurd thesis of the Jerusalem Conference was soon regurgitated by several new top officials of the Reagan Administration. In Alexander Haig's first news conference as Secretary of State on January 28, 1981, Haig thundered that the Kremlin was trying to "foster, support, and expand" terrorist activity worldwide through the "training, funding, and equipping" of terrorist armies. Haig made it official that "international terrorism will take the place of human rights" as the central international concern of the Reagan Administration. And that meant the KGB.
During 1978 and 1979, the Carter Administration deliberately toppled the Shah of Iran, and deliberately replaced him with Khomeini. The US had shipped arms to the Shah, and never stopped such shipments, despite the advent of Khomeini and the taking of US hostages. The continuity of the arms deliveries, sometimes mediated through Israel, would later lead into the Iran-contra affair. In the meantime Bush and his partners in the Israeli Mossad had sealed a pact and signaled it in public with a new ideological smoke-screen that, they hoped, would cover a new world-wide upsurge in covert operations during the 1980's.
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 frontpage 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. Smaller pictures showed a scowling Senator Baker and a decidedly un-telegenic Reagan grimacing before a microphone. The Newsweek reporters played up Bush's plan to redo the Carter script from 1976, and went on to assert that Bush's triumph in Iowa "raised the serious possibility that he could accomplish on the Republican side this year what Carter did in 1976--parlay a well-tuned personal appetite for on-the-ground campaigning into a Long March to his party's Presidential nomination." So wrote the magazine controlled by the family money of Bush's old business associate Eugene Meyer, and Bush was appreciative; doubly so for the reference to his old friend Mao.
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.
Savvy Republican operatives were reported to be flocking to the Bush bandwagon. Even seasoned observers stuck their necks out; Witcover and Germond wrote in their column of February 22 that "a rough consensus is taking shape among moderate Republican politicians that George Bush may achieve a commanding position within the next three weeks in the contest for the Republican nomination. And those with unresolved reservations about Bush are beginning to wonder privately if it is even possible to keep an alternative politically alive for the late primaries."
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." It was even possible, Healy gushed that Bush "will go through 1980...without losing an important Presidential primary." William Safire of the New York Times claimed that his contacts with Republican insiders across the country had yielded "a growing suspicion that Reagan may once again be bypassed for the historic role...a general feeling that he may be a man whose cause may triumph, but whose own time may never come." [fn 17]
NBC's Brokaw started calling Reagan the "former front-runner." Tom Petit of the same network was more direct: "I would like to suggest that Ronald Reagan is politically dead." Once again the choice of pictures made Bush look good, Reagan bad.