George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley

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PART 1 OF 2

Chapter IX -- Bush Challenges Yarborough for the Senate

Bush's unsuccessful attempt in 1964 to unseat Texas Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough is a matter of fundamental interest to anyone seeking to probe the wellsprings of Bush's actual political thinking. In a society which knows nothing of its own recent history, the events of a quarter century ago might be classed as remote and irrelevant. But as we review the profile of the Bush Senate campaign of 1964, what we see coming alive is the characteristic mentality that rules the Oval Office today. The main traits are all there: the overriding obsession with the race issue, exemplified in Bush's bitter rejection of the civil rights bill before the Congress during those months; the genocidal bluster in foreign affairs, with proposals for nuclear bombardment of Vietnam, an invasion of Cuba, and a rejection of negotiations for the return of the Panama Canal; the autonomic reflex for union-busting expressed in the rhetoric of "right to work"; the paean to free enterprise at the expense of farmers and the disadvantaged, with all of this packaged in a slick, demagogic television and advertising effort.

During this Senate race, Bush assumed the coloration of a Goldwater Republican. It remains highly significant that Bush began his public political career in the ideological guise of a southern Republican, specifically in Texas. The Republican Party in Texas had been in total eclipse since the time of Reconstruction, with the state GOPers complaining that they were living in a one-party state. During the 1950's, the personal popularity of Eisenhower and the increasing visibility of ultra-left Wall Street investment bankers in the circle of Adlai Stevenson's backers began to offer the Texas Republicans some openings. In 1952 and 1956, Texas Democratic Governor Allan Shivers supported Eisenhower, who carried Texas with a substantial majority both times. In 1960, Texas had given its electoral votes to Kennedy, although the margin of Democratic victory was so thin as to constitute an embarrassment to Kennedy's running mate, Texas Senator and Democratic Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. But Nixon had carried the city of Houston and Harris County, which turned out to be the largest metropolitan area to go for the Nixon-Lodge ticket that year. In 1960, Texas Republicans scored their greatest success in a century by elected John Tower to the US Senate on a platform that was a harbinger of the Goldwater movement. Tower was once asked if there was a single domestic legislative program of John F. Kennedy that he could support, and his answer was that he could not think of a single one. This is the same Tower who would join with Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft in early 1987 to concoct the absurd whitewash of the Iran- contra affair that would exonerate Bush and attribute the central responsibility to White House chief of Staff Don Regan, forcing his ouster. This was the same Tower whose nomination by Bush to the post of Secretary of Defense would be derailed by accusation of alcoholism and womanizing, followed by Tower's death in a mysterious airplane crash in early 1991.

The Texas Democratic Party was divided in those days into two wings which fought each other in the Democratic primaries, which were often tantamount to election. One of these wings was called liberal and was identified above all with Bush's opponent, Senator Ralph Yarborough. The "liberal" here is largely a misnomer; more accurate would be populist, but populist ennobled by the revival of the classic nineteenth century American system that occurred in Texas during Franklin D. Roosevelt's World War II mobilization, when dirigist recovery policies pulled the Texas economy out of a stagnation that had its roots in the failure of post-1865 reconstruction. The strong suits of these populist Democrats were education and infrastructure-- a good first approximation of the actual business of government.

The other wing was called conservative, and was grouped around figures like Allan Shivers and LBJ's protege John Connally, with whom Bush has had a history of alternating stretches of conflict and moments of rapprochement. LBJ himself was close to the Shivers-Connally group. The typical figure here is Connally, the governor who was wounded in Dealey Plaza in Dallas the day that Kennedy was killed, and who later went on the join the Nixon Administration as the Secretary of the Treasury who approved the abolition of the post-1944 Bretton Woods gold reserve standard in Camp David on August 15, 1971. Connally subsequently played out the logic of becoming not just a Republican, but indeed a Republican presidential candidate, and of clashing with George Bush once or twice in the snows of New Hampshire in 1979-80.

The Texas Democratic Party also contained an array of personalities of national importance whose positive traits are part of what has been lost in the descent into today's crisis: call them populists, call them the post-New Deal or the post-Fair Deal, but do not mistake the fact that they were better for the country than their successors. These were politicians like the legendary Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, Congressman Wright Patman of the House Banking Committee, who was a source of continuing populist irritation to the New York banking community, and Tom Clark, who was Attorney General under Truman and who later went on to the US Supreme Court, and whose son, Ramsay Clark, has been distinguished by his denunciation of the war crimes of the Bush regime in the Gulf war of 1991. A later generation of this same circle was represented by former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, who was hounded from office during the first year of George Bush's Presidential tenure, and by Congressman Henry Gonzalez. Gonzalez stands out as one of the very few of the old Texas populist Democrats left in elected office today. Gonzalez has put new luster on the time-honored maverick tradition by offering a bill of impeachment for Ronald Reagan in the wake of the Iran-contra revelations of 1986, more recently by submitting a bill for the impeachment of George Bush for his illegal conduct of Operation Desert Shield, and by raising his voice as first in the Congress for the cause of humanity against genocide with a call for the lifting of the economic sanctions against Iraq to prevent the needless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of children after the bombing campaign had ended. And even today there are still others of this tradition left in positions of key influence: for example, Congressman Jack Brooks of the ninth district of Texas, the salty chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who dared to subpoena Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to appear before his committee with a ducis tecum of the documents of the Department of Justice theft of computer software in the Inslaw case.

One of the continuing projects of George Bush's life has been the extirpation of precisely this populist and sometimes dirigist group of Democrats, and their replacement with "free enterprise" Republican ideologues, or financier Democrats of the Lloyd Bentsen variety.

The Texas and Oklahoma populist Democrats must be distinguished from their colleagues of the Old South of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. But for the Eastern Liberal Establishment, it has proven more convenient to lump them all together under the purveyed image of the racist, bourbon-swilling southern Congressional committee chairman conspiring in cigar-clouded rooms to defy the popular will as expressed by the television networks. All southern Democrats of the old school tended to have crippling weaknesses on the race issue and on the question of union-busting. But on the other side of the ledger, many southern Democrats had an excellent grasp of infrastructure in the broadest sense: internal improvements like highways, canals, water projects, rural electrification, quality accessible public education, health services, electric power generation.

The nascent southern Republicans of the fifties and sixties, by contrast, were generally as bad or worse than the Democrats on race and labor relations, and were at the same such fanatics of Adam Smith's "free market" mystification that all government commitment to maintaining infrastructure, health care, and education went by the boards. The only positive point left for some of these emerging southern Republicans, such as those who followed Barry Goldwater in 1964, was a patriotic rejection of the machinations of the Eastern Liberal Establishment as embodied most graphically in the figure of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Bush was indeed a Goldwater man in those days, as we will see. But since Bush was himself an organ of that same hated Eastern Liberal Establishment, he stood utterly bereft of redeeming grace.

The enterprise in which we now find Bush engaged, the creation of a Republican Party in the southern states during the 1960's, (including the so-called post-1961 "two-party Texas") has proven to be an historical catastrophe. In order to create a Republican Party in the south, it was first necessary to smash the old FDR New Deal constituent coalition of labor, the cities, farmers, blacks, and the Solid South. As Bush complains in his campaign autobiography:

"The state was solidly Democratic, and the allegiance of Texans to the 'party of our fathers' became even stronger during the lean years of the Depression. The Democratic campaign line in the 1930's was that the 'Hoover Republicans' were responsible for unemployment and farm foreclosures; Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party were said to be the only friends the people had." [fn 1]

But as far as George Bush was concerned, all this was of no consequence: "Philosophically, I was a Republican...." [fn 2] After Bush had declared his candidacy for Yarborough's seat, the veteran political writers at the state capital in Austin shook their heads: Bush had "two crosses to bear - running as a Republican and not a native Texan." [fn 3]

The method that the southern Republicans devised to breach this solid front was the one theorized years later by Lee Atwater, the manager of Bush's 1988 Presidential campaign. This was the technique of the "wedge issues," so called precisely because they were chosen to split up the old New Deal coalition using the chisels of ideology. The wedge issues are also known as the "hot-button social issues," and the most explosive among them has always tended to be race. The Republicans could win in the south by portraying the Democratic Party has pro-black. Atwater had learned to be a cunning and vicious practitioner of the "wedge issue" method in the school of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina after the latter had switched over to the Republicans in the sixties. Racial invective, anti-union demagogy, jingoistic chauvinism, the smearing of opponents for their alleged fealty to "special interests"-- none of this began in the Baker-Atwater effort of 1968. These were the stock in trade of the southern strategy, and these were all Leitmotivs of Bush's 1964 effort against Yarborough.

From the vantage point of the police state conditions of the early 1990's, we can discern a further implication of the southern Republican project of which Bush was in several moments of the 1960's a leading operative. As the southern GOP emerged out of the play of gang and counter-gang between McGovernite left liberal investment bankers and Nixon-Reagan right liberal investment bankers (and Bush has been both), it made possible that Southern Strategy which elected Nixon in 1968 and which has given the Republicans a virtual lock on the electoral college ever since. The Watergate-Carter anomaly of 1976 confirms rather than alters this overall picture.

The Southern Strategy that Bush turns out to have been serving in the sixties was not called to the attention of the public until somewhat after the 1964 election in which Goldwater had garnered electoral votes exclusively in the south. As William Rusher wrote in the National Review: "The Democrats had for years begun each race with an assured batch of delegates from the South." "The Republican Party strategy," argued Rusher, needs refiguring, given a chance to break into this bloc once denied them...." His conclusion was that ""Republicans can put themselves in the position of having the Southern bloc as a starting handicap; after that, they can compete for the rest of the country, needing only that 50 per cent minus (say) 111 [of the electoral college votes]." Doing all this, Rusher contended, would allow Republican Presidential candidates to ignore the " traditional centers of urban liberalism," especially in the northeast. [fn 4] These ideas were further refined in Richard Nixon's brain trust, presided over by Wall Street bond lawyer John Mitchell at 445 Park Avenue, and received their definitive elaboration from Kevin Phillips, who in those years advanced the thesis that the "whole secret of politics" is in "knowing who hates who," which is of course another way of speaking of wedge issues.

The result of the successful application of the Southern Strategy in 1968 and in the following years has been a a period of more than two decades of one-party Republican control over the Executive Branch, of which George Bush personally has been the leading beneficiary, first through his multiple appointments, then through the vice-presidency, and now through the possession of the White House itself. This has had the decisive structural consequence of making possible the kind of continuous, entrenched bureaucratic power that we see in the Bush regime and its leading functionaries. As we will see, such administrators of the corporate state as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, for whom the exercise of executive power has long since become a way of life, appear to themselves and to others as immune to the popular reckoning. The democratic republic requires the moment of catharsis, of throwing the bums out, if the arrogance of the powerful is ever to be chastened. If there is no prospect for the White House changing hands, this amounts to a one- party state. The southern Republican Party, including two-party Texas, has provided the Republican lock on the White House which has proven a mighty stimulus to those tendencies towards authoritarian and even totalitarian rule which have culminated in the Administrative Fascism of the current Bush regime.

Bush's opponent in that Goldwater year of 1964 was Senator Ralph Webster Yarborough. Yarborough had been born in Chandler, Texas in 1903 as the seventh of eleven children. He attended public schools in Chandler and Tyler, worked on a farm, and went on to attend Sam Houston State Teachers College and, for one year, the US Military Academy at West Point. He was a member of the 36th division of the Texas National Guard, in which he advanced from private to sergeant. After World War I he worked a passage to Europe on board a freighter, and found a job in Germany working in the offices of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. He also pursued studies in Stendahl, Germany. He returned to the United States to earn a law degree at the University of Texas in 1927, and worked as a lawyer in El Paso. At one point he found a job as a harvest hand in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the late 1920's, and also served a stint as a roughneck in the oil fields. Yarborough entered public service as an Assistant Attorney General of Texas from 1931 to 1934. After that, he was a founding director of the Lower Colorado River Authority, a major water project in central Texas, and was then elected as a district judge in Austin.

Yarborough served in the US Army ground forces during World War II, and was a member of the only division which took part in the postwar occupation of Germany as well as in MacArthur's administration of Japan. When he left the military in 1946 he had attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. It clear from an overview of Yarborough's career that his victories and defeats were essentially his own, that for him there was no Prescott Bush to secure lines of credit or to procure important posts by telephone calls to bigwigs in freemasonic networks.

Yarborough had challenged Allan Shivers in the governor's contest of 1952, and had gone down to defeat. Successive bids for the state house in Austin by Yarborough were turned back in 1954 and 1956. Then, when Senator (and former governor) Price Daniel resigned his seat, Yarborough was finally victorious in a special election. He had then been re-elected to the Senate for a full term in 1958.

Yarborough was distinguished first of all for his voting record on civil rights. Just months after he had entered the Senate, he was one of only five southern senators (including LBJ) to vote for the watershed Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1960, Yarborough was one of four southern senators -- again including LBJ -- who cast votes in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Yarborough would be the lone senator from the eleven states formerly composing the Confederate States of America to vote for the 1964 civil rights bill, the most sweeping since Reconstruction. This is the bill which, as we will see, provided Bush with the ammunition for one of the principal themes of his 1964 election attacks. Later, Yarborough would be one of only three southern senators supporting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and one of four supporting the 1968 open housing bill. [fn 5]

After Yarborough had left the Senate, his bitter enemies at the Dallas Morning News felt obliged to concede that "his name is probably attached to more legislation than that of any other senator in Texas history." Yarborough had become the chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. Here his lodestar was infrastructure, infrastructure in the form of education and infrastructure in the form of physical improvements.

In education, Yarborough was either the author or a leading supporter of virtually every important piece of legislation to become law between 1958 and 1971, including some nine major bills. As a freshman senator, Yarborough was the co-author of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which was the basis for federal aid to education, particularly to higher education.

Under the provisions of NDEA, a quarter of a million students were at any given time enabled to pursue undergraduate training with low-cost loans and other benefits. For graduate students, there were three-year fellowships that paid tuition and fees plus grants for living expenses in the amount of $2200, $2400, and $2600 over the three years--an ample sum in those days. Yarborough also sponsored bills for medical education, college classroom construction, vocational education, aid to the mentally retarded, and library facilities. Yarborough's Bilingual Education Bill provided special federal funding for schools with large numbers of students from non-English speaking backgrounds. Some of these points were outlined by Yarborough during a campaign speech of September 18, 1964, with the title "Higher Education as it relates to our national purpose."

As chairman of the veterans' subcommittee, Yarborough authored the Cold War GI Bill of Rights, which sought to extend the benefits accorded veterans of World War II and Korea, and which was to apply to servicemen on duty between January, 1955 and July 1, 1965. For these veterans Yarborough proposed readjustment assistance, educational and vocational training, and loan assistance to allow veterans to purchase homes and farms at a maximum interest rate of 5.25% per annum. This bill was finally passed after years of dogged effort by Yarborough against the opposition of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Yarborough was instrumental in obtaining a five year extension of the Hill-Burton act, which provided 4,000 additional beds in Veterans Administration Hospitals. In physical improvements, Yarborough supported appropriations for coastal navigation. He fought for $29 million for the Rural Electrification Administration for counties in the Corpus Christi area alone. In eleven counties in that part of Texas, Yarborough had helped obtain federal grants for $4.5 million and loans of $.64 million under the Kennedy Administration accelerated public works projects program to provide clean water and sewers for towns and cities that could not otherwise afford them. Concerning his commitment to this type of infrastructure, Yarborough commented to a dinner in Corpus Christi: "These are the projects, along with the ship channels, dams and reservoirs, water research programs, hurricane and flood control programs that bring delegations of city officials, members of county court, members of river and watershed authorities, co-op delegations, into my office literally by the thousands year after year for aid, which is always given, never refused." Yarborough went on: "While our efforts and achievements are largely unpublicized...there is satisfaction beyond acclaim when a small town without a water system is enabled to provide its people for the first time with water and sewerage...when the course of a river is shored up a little to save a farmer's crops, when a freeway opens up new avenues of commerce." [fn 6] In the area of oil policy, always vital in Texas, Yarborough strained to give the industry everything it could reasonably expect, and more. Despite this, he was implacably hated by many business circles. In short, Ralph Yarborough had a real commitment to racial and economic justice, and was, all in all, among the best that the post-New Deal Democratic Party had to offer. Certainly there were weaknesses: one of the principal ones was to veer in the direction of environmentalism. Here Yarborough was the prime mover behind the Endangered Species Act.

Bush moved to Houston in 1959, bringing the corporate headquarters of Zapata Offshore with him. Houston was by far the biggest city in Texas, a center of the corporate bureaucracies of firms doing business in the oil patch. There was also the Baker and Botts law firm, which would function in effect as part of the Bush family network, since Baker and Botts were the lawyers who had been handling the affairs of the Harriman railroad interests in the southwest. One prominent lawyer in Houston at the time was James Baker III, a scion of the family enshrined in the Baker and Botts name, but himself a partner in another firm because of the so-called anti- nepotism rule that prevented the children of Baker and Botts partners from joining the firm themselves. Soon Bush would be hob-nobbing with Baker and other representatives of the Houston oligarchy, of the Hobby and Cullen families, at the Petroleum Club and at garden parties in the hot, humid, subtropical summers. George, Barbara and their children moved into a new home on Briar Drive.

Less than an hour's drive by car south of Houston lies Galveston, a port on the Gulf of Mexico. Houston itself is connected to the Gulf by a ship channel which has permitted the city to became a large port in its own right. Beyond Galveston there was the Gulf, and beyond the Gulf the Greater Antilles with Cuba set in the middle of the archipelago, and beyond Cuba Guatemala, Nicaragua, Granada, targets of filibusterers old and new.

Before long, Bush became active in the Harris County Republican Party, which was in the process of becoming one of the GOP strongpoints in the statewide apparatus then being assembled by Peter O'Donnell, the Republican state chairman, and his associate Thad Hutcheson. By now George Bush was a millionaire in his own right, and given his impeccable Wall Street connections it was not surprising to find him on the Harris County GOP finance committee, a function that he had undertaken in Midland for the Eisenhower-Nixon tickets in 1952 and 1956. He was also a member of the candidates committee.

In 1962 the Democrats were preparing to nominate John Connally for governor, and the Texas GOP under O'Donnell was able to mount a more formidable bid than previously for the state house in Austin. The Republican candidate was Jack Cox, a party activist with a right-wing profile. Bush agreed to serve as the Harris County co-chairman of the Jack Cox for Governor finance committee. In the gubernatorial election of 1962, Cox received 710,000 votes, a surprisingly large result. Connally won the governorship, and it was in that capacity that he was present in the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

During these years, a significant influence was exercised in the Texas GOP by the John Birch Society, which had grown up during the 1950's through the leadership and financing of Robert Welch. Water for the Birch mill was abundantly provided by the liberal Republicanism of the Eisenhower administration, with counted Prescott Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, Gordon Gray, and Robert Keith Gray among its most influential figures. In reaction against this Wall Street liberalism, the Birchers offered an ideology of impotent negative protest based on self-righteous chauvinism in foreign affairs and the mystifications of the free market at home. But they were highly suspicious of the financier cliques of lower Manhattan, and to that extent they had George Bush's number.

Bush is still complaining about the indignities he suffered at the hands of these Birchers, with whom he was straining to have as much as possible in common. But he met with repeated frustration, because his Eastern Liberal Establishment pedigree was always there. In his campaign autobiography, Bush laments that many Texans thought that Redbook Magazine, published by his father-in-law Marvin Pierce of the McCall Corporation, was an official publication of the Communist Party.

Bush recounts a campaign trip with his aide Roy Goodearle to the Texas panhandle, during which he was working a crowd at one of his typical free food, free beer "political barbecues." Bush gave one of his palm cards to a man who conceded that he had heard of Bush, but quickly added that he could never support him. Bush thought this was because he was running as a Republican. "But," [Bush] then realized, "my being a Republican wasn't the thing bothering the guy. It was something worse than that." Bush's interlocutor was upset over the fact that Zapata Offshore had eastern investors. When Bush whined that all oil companies had eastern investors, for such was the nature of the business, his tormentor pointed out that one of Bush's main campaign contributors, a prominent Houston attorney, was not just a "sonofabitch," but also a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.

Bush explains, with the whine in his larynx in overdrive: "The lesson was that in the minds of some voters the Council on Foreign Relations was nothing more than a One World tool of the Communist-Wall Street internationalist conspiracy, and to make matters worse, the Houston lawyer had also worked for President Eisenhower-- a known tool of the Communists, in the eyes of some John Birch members." Further elucidation is then added in a footnote: "A decade and a half later, running for President, I ran into some of the same political types on the campaign trail. By then, they'd uncovered an international conspiracy even more sinister than the Council on Foreign Relations-- the Trilateral Commission, a group that President Reagan received at the White House in 1981." This, as we shall see, is a reference to Lyndon LaRouche's New Hampshire primary campaign of 1979-80, which included the exposure of Bush's membership not just in David Rockefeller's Trilateral, but also in Skull and Bones, about which Bush always refuses to comment. When Ronald Reagan and other candidates took up this issue, Bush ended up loosing the New Hampshire primary and with it his best hope of capturing the Presidency in 1980. Bush, in short, has been aware since the early sixties that serious attention to his oligarchical pedigree causes him to lose elections. His response has been to seek to declare these very relevant matters off limits, and to order dirty tricks and covert operations against those who persist in making this an issue, most clearly in the case of LaRouche. [fn 7]

Part of the influence of the Birch Society in those days was due to the support and financing afforded by the Hunt dynasty of Dallas. In particular, the fabulously wealthy oilman H.L. Hunt, one of the richest men in the world, was an avid sponsor of rightwing propaganda which he put out under the name of LIFE LINE. On at least one occasion Hunt called Bush to Dallas for a meeting during one of the latter's Texas political campaigns. "There's something I'd like to give you," Hunt told Bush. Bush appeared with remarkable alacrity, and Hunt engaged him in a long conversation about many things, but mentioned neither politics nor money. Finally, as Bush was getting ready to leave, Hunt handed him a thick brown envelope. Bush eagerly opened the envelope in the firm expectation that it would contain a large sum in cash. What he found instead was a thick wad of LIFE LINE literature for his ideological reformation. [fn 8]

It was in this context that George Bush, mediocre oilman, fortified by his Wall Street and Skull and Bones connections, but with almost no visible qualifications, and scarcely known in Texas outside of Odessa, Midland, and Houston, decided that he had attained senatorial caliber. In the Roman Empire, membership in the Senate was an hereditary attribute of patrician family rank. Prescott Bush had left the Senate in early January of 1963. Before the year was out, George Bush would make his claim. As Senator Yarborough later commented, it would turn out to be an act of temerity.

During the spring of 1963 Bush set about assembling an institutional base for his campaign. The chosen vehicle would be the Republican chairmanship of Harris County, the area around Houston, a bulwark of the Texas GOP. Bush had been participating in the Harris County organization since 1960.

One Sunday morning Bush invited some county Republican activists to his home on Briar Drive. Present were Roy Goodearle, a young independent oil man who, before Barbara Bush appropriated it, was given the nickname of "the Silver Fox" in the Washington scene. Also present were Jack Steel, Tom and Nancy Thawley, and some others.

Goodearle, presumably acting as the lawyer for the Bush faction, addressed the meeting on the dangers posed by the sectarians of the John Birch Society to the prospects of the GOP in Houston and elsewhere. Over lunch prepared by Barbara Bush, Goodearle outlined the tactical situation in the Harris County organization: a Birchite faction under the leadership of state senator Walter Mengdon, although still a minority, was emerging as a powerful inner-party opposition against the liberals and moderates. In the last vote for GOP county leader, the Birch candidate had been narrowly defeated. Now, after three years in office, the more moderate county chairman, James A. Bertron, would announce on February 8, 1963 that he could no longer serve as chairman of the Harris County Republican Executive Committee. His resignation, he would state, was "necessitated by neglect of my personal business due to my political activities." [fn 9] This was doubtless very convenient in the light of what Bush had been planning.

Bertron was quitting to move to Florida. In 1961, Bertron had been attending a Republican fundraising gathering in Washington DC, when he was accosted by none other than Senator Prescott Bush. Bush took Bertron aside and demanded: "Jimmy, when are you going to get George involved?" "Senator, I'm trying," Betron replied, evidently with some vexation. "We're all trying." [fn 10] In 1961 or at any other time it is doubtful that George Bush could have found his way to the men's room without the help of a paid informant sent by Senator Prescott Bush.

Goodearle went on to tell the assembled Republicans that unless a "strong candidate" now entered the race, a Bircher was likely to win the post of county chairman. But in order to defeat the well-organized and zealous Birchers, said Goodearle, an anti-Bircher would have to undertake a grueling campaign, touring the county and making speeches to the Republican faithful every night for several weeks. Then, under the urging of Goodearle, the assembled group turned to Bush: could he be prevailed on to put his hat in the ring? Bush, by his own account, needed no time to think it over, and accepted on the spot.

With that, George and Barbara were on the road in their first campaign in what Bush later called "another apprenticeship." While Barbara busied herself with needlepoint in order to stay awake through a speech she had heard repeatedly, George churned out a pitch on the virtues of the two-party system and the advantages of having a Republican alternative to the entrenched Houston establishment. In effect, his platform was the Southern Strategy avant la lettre. Local observers soon noticed that Barbara Bush was able to gain acceptance as a campaign comrade for Republican volunteers, in addition to being esteemed as the wealthy candidate's wife.

When the vote for county chairman came, the candidate opposing Bush, Russell Prior, pulled out of the race for reasons that have not been satisfactorily explained, thus permitting Bush to be elected unanimously by the executive committee. Henceforth, winning unopposed has been Bush's taste in elections: this is how he was returned to the House for his second term in 1968, and Bush propagandists flirted with a similar approach to the 1992 presidential contest.

At the time of his election, 38-year old George was not exactly a household word, not even in Houston. In announcing his victory, the Houston Chronicle printed the picture of a totally different person, captioned as "George Bush," the man who wanted to "hone the party to a fine edge for the important job ahead in 1964"--that is to say, for the Goldwater for President campaign. [fn 11] As chairman, Bush was free to appoint the officers of the county GOP. Some of these choices are not without relevance for the future course of world history. For the post of party counsel, Bush appointed William B. Cassin of Baker and Botts, Shepherd and Coates law firm. For his assistant county chairmen, Bush tapped Anthony Farris, Gene Crossman, Roy Goodearle, and for executive director, William R. Simmons. Not to be overloooked is the choice of Anthony J.P. "Tough Tony" Farris. He had been a Marine gunner aboard dive bombers and torpedo bombers during the war, and had later graduated from the University of Houston Law School, subsequently setting up a general law practice in the Sterling Building in downtown Houston. The "P" stood for Perez, and Farris was a wheelhorse in the Mexican-American community with the "Amigos for Bush" in a number of campaigns. Farris was an unsuccessful Congressional candidate, but was later rewarded by the Nixon administration with the post of United States Attorney in Houston. Then Farris was elected to the Harris County bench in 1980. When George Bush's former business partner and constant crony, J. Hugh Liedtke of Pennzoil, sued Texaco for damages in the celebrated Getty Oil case of 1985, it was Judge Tough Tony Farris who presided over most of the trial and made the key rulings on the way to the granting of the biggest damage award in history, an unbelievable $ 11,120,976,110.83, all for the benefit of Bush's good friend J. Hugh Liedtke. [fn 12]

On March 21, Bush told the Houston Chronicle that the Harris County GOP is "conservative," and not "extremist:" "The Republican party in the past -- and sometimes with justification-- has been connected in the mind of the public with extremism," said Bush. "We're not, or at least most of us are not, extremists. We're just responsible people." Bush pledged that his message would be the same all over the county, and that he would "say the same things in River Oaks as in the East End, or in Pasadena."

At the same time that he was inveighing against extremism, Bush was dragooning his party apparatus to mount the Houston Draft Goldwater drive The goal of this effort was to procure 100,000 signatures for Goldwater, with each signer also plunking down a dollar to fill the GOP coffers. "An excellent way for those who support Goldwater-like me- to make it known," opined Chairman George. Bush fostered a partisan --one might say vindictive-- mood at the county GOP headquarters: the Houston Chronicle of June 6, 1963 reports that GOP activists were amusing themselves by tossing darts at a balloons suspended in front of a photograph of President Johnson. Bush told the Chronicle: "I saw the incident and it did not offend me. It was just a gag."

But Bush's pro-Goldwater efforts were not universally appreciated. In early July Craig Peper, the current chairman of the party finance committee, stood up in a party gathering and attacked the leaders of the Draft Goldwater movement, including Bush as "right wing extremists." Bush had not been purging any Birchers, but he was not willing to permit such attacks from his left. Bush accordingly purged Peper, demanding his resignation after a pro-Goldwater meeting at which Bush had boasted that he was "100% for the draft Goldwater move."

A few weeks after ousting Peper, Bush contributed one of his first public political statements as an op ed in the Houston Chronicle of 28 July 1963. Concerning he recent organizational problems, he whined that the county organization was "afflicted with some dry-martini critics who talk and don't work." Then, in conformity with his family doctrine and his own dominant obsession, Bush turned to the issue of race. As a conservative, he had to lament that fact that "Negroes" "think that conservatism means segregation." Nothing could be further from the truth. This was rather the result of slanderous propaganda which Republican public relations men had not sufficiently refuted: "First, they attempt to present us as racists. The Republican party of Harris County is not a racist party. We have not presented our story to the Negroes in the county. Our failure to attract the Negro voter has not been because of a racist philosophy; rather, it has been a product of our not having had the organization to tackle all parts of the country." What then was the GOP line on the race question? "We believe in the basic premise that the individual Negro surrenders the very dignity and freedom he is struggling for when he accept money for his vote or when he goes along with the block vote dictates of some Democratic boss who couldn't care less about the quality of the candidates he is pushing." So the GOP would try to separate the black voter from the Democrats. Bush conceded: "We have a tough row to hoe here."

After these pronouncements on race, Bush then want on to the trade union front. Yarborough's labor backing was exceedingly strong, and Bush lost no time in assailing the state AFL-CIO and its Committee on Political Education (COPE) for gearing up to help Yarborough in his race. For Bush this meant that the AFL-CIO was not supporting the "two -party system." "A strong pitch is being made to dun the [union] membership to help elect Yarborough"-- he charged -- "long before Yarborough's opponent is even known."

Bush also spoke out during this period on foreign affairs, He demanded that President Kennedy "muster the courage" to undertake a new attack on Cuba. [fn 13]

Before announcing his bid for the senate, Bush decided to take out what would appear in retrospect to be a very important insurance policy for his future political career. On April 22, Bush, with the support of Republican state chairman Peter O'Donnell, filed a suit in federal court calling for the reapportionment of the Congressional districts in the Houston area. The suit argued that the urban voters of Harris County were being partially disenfranchised by a system that favored rural voters and demanded as a remedy that a new Congressional district be drawn in the area. "This is not a partisan matter," commented the civic-minded Bush. "This is something of concern to all Harris County citizens." Bush would later win this suit, and that would lead to a court-ordered redistricting which would create the Seventh Congressional District, primarily out of those precincts which Bush had managed to carry in the 1964 Senate race. Was this the invisible hand of Skull and Bones? This would also mean that there would be no entrenched incumbent, no incumbent of any kind, in that Seventh District when Bush got around to making his bid there in 1966. But for now, this was all still in the future.

On September 10, 1963 Bush announced his campaign for the US Senate. He was fully endorsed by the state Republican organization and its chairman, Peter O'Donnell, who according to some accounts had encouraged Bush to run. By December 5 Bush had further announced that he was planning to step down as Harris County chairman and devote himself to full-time state-wide campaigning starting early in 1964. At this point, Bush's foremost strategic concern appears to have been money--big money. On October 19, the Houston Chronicle carried his comment that ousting Yarborough would require nearly $2 million "if you want to do it right." Much of this would go to the Brown and Snyder advertising agency in Houston for television and billboards. In 1963, this was a considerable sum, but Bush's crony C. Fred Chambers, also an oilman, was committed to raising it. During these years Chambers appears to have been one of Bush's closest friends, and he received the ultimate apotheosis of having one of the Bush family dogs named in his honor. [fn 14]

It is impossible to establish in retrospect how much Bush spent in this campaign. State campaign finance filings do exist, but they are fragmentary and grossly underestimate the money that was actually committed.

In terms of the tradeoffs of the campaign, Bush and his handlers were confronted with the following configuration: there were three competitors for the Republican senatorial nomination. The most formidable competition came from Jack Cox, the Houston oilman who had run for governor against Connally in 1962, and whose statewide recognition was much higher than Bush's. Cox would position himself to the right of Bush and who would receive the endorsement of General Edwin Walker, who had been forced to resign his infantry command in Germany because of his radical speeches to the troops. A former Democrat, Cox was reported to have financial backing from the Hunts of Dallas. Cox campaigned against medicare, federal aid to education, the war on poverty, and the loss of US sovereignty to the UN.

Competing with Cox was Dr. Milton Davis, a thoracic surgeon from Dallas who was expected to be the weakest candidate but whose positions were perhaps the most distinctive: Morris was for "no treaties with Russia," the repeal of the federal income tax, and the "selling off of excess government industrial property such as TVA and REA"--what the Reagan-Bush administrations would later call privatization.

Competing with Bush for the less militant conservatives was Dallas lawyer Robert Morris, who recommended depriving the US Supreme Court of appellate jurisdiction in school prayer cases. [fn 15] In order to avoid a humiliating second-round runoff in the primary, Bush would need to score an absolute majority the first time around. To do that he would have to first compete with Cox on a right-wing terrain, and then move to the center after the primary in order to take votes from Yarborough there.

But there was also primary competition on the Democratic side for Yarborough. This was Gordon McLendon, the owner of a radio network, the Liberty Broadcasting System, that was loaded with debt. Liberty Broadcasting's top creditor was Houston banker Roy Cullen, a Bush crony. Roy Cullen's name appears, for example, along with such died-in -the wool Bushmen as W.S. Farrish III, James A. Baker III, C. Fred Chambers, Robert Mosbacher, William C. Liedtke, Jr., Joseph R. Neuhaus, and William B. Cassin in a Bush campaign ad in the Houston Chronicle of late April, 1964. When McLendon finally went bankrupt, it was found that he owed Roy Cullen more than a million dollars. So perhaps it is not surprising that McLendon's campaign functioned as an auxiliary to Bush's own efforts. McLendon specialized in smearing Yarborough with the Billie Sol Estes issue, and it was to this that McLendon devoted most of his speaking time and media budget.

Billie Sol Estes in those days was notorious for his conviction for defrauding the US government of large sums of money in a scam involving the storage of chemicals that turned out not to exist. Billie Sol was part of the LBJ political milieu. As the Estes scandal developed, a report emerged that he had given Yarborough a payment of $50,000 on Nov. 6, 1960. But later, after a thorough investigation, the Department of Justice had issued a statement declaring that the charges involving Yarborough were "without any foundation in fact and unsupported by credible testimony." "The case is closed," said the Justice Department. But this did not stop Bush from using the issue to the hilt: "I don't intend to mud-sling with [Yarborough] about such matters as the Billie Sol Estes case since Yarborough's connections with Estes are a simple matter of record which any one can check," said Bush. "[Yarborough is] going to have to prove to the Texas voters that his connections with Billie Sol Estes were as casual as he claims they were." [fn 16] In a release issued on April 24, Bush "said he welcomes the assistance of Gordon McLendon, Yarborough's primary opponent, in trying to force the incumbent Senator to answer." Bush added that he planned to "hammer at Yarborough every step of the way" "until I get some sort of answer."

The other accusation that was used against Yarborough during the campaign was advanced most notably in an article published in the September, 1964 issue of Reader's Digest. The story was that Yarborough had facilitated backing and subsidies through the Texas Area Reconstruction Administration for an industrial development project in Crockett, Texas, only to have the project fail owing to the inability of the company involved to build the factory that was planned. The accusation was that Audio Electronics, the prospective factory builders, had received a state loan of $383,000 to build the plant, while townspeople had raised some $60,000 to buy the plant site, before the entire deal fell through.

The Reader's Digest told disapprovingly of Yarborough addressing a group of 35 Crockett residents on a telephone squawk box in March, 1963, telling them that he was authorized by the White House to announce "that you are going to gain a fine new industry-one that will provide new jobs for 180 people, add new strength to your area."

The Reader's Digest article left the distinct impression that the $60,000 invested by local residents had been lost. "Because people believed that their Senator's 'White House announcement' of the ARA loan to Audio guaranteed the firm's soundness, several Texans invested in it and lost all. One man dropped $40,000. A retired Air Force officer plowed in $7000." It turned out in reality that those who had invested in the real estate for the plant site had lost nothing, but had rather been made an offer for their land that represented a profit of one third on the original investment, and thus stood to gain substantially.

Bush campaign headquarters immediately got into the act with a statement that "it is a shame" that Texans had to pick up the Reader's Digest and find their senator "holding the hand of scandal." "The citizens of the area raised $60,000 in cash, invested it in the company, and lost it because the project was a fraud and never started." Yarborough shot back with a statement of his own, pointing out that Bush's claims were "basely false," and adding that the "reckless, irresponsible false charges by my opponent further demonstrate his untruthfulness and unfitness for the office of US Senator." Most telling was Yarborough's charge on how the Reader's Digest got interested in Crockett, Texas, in the first place: "The fact that my opponent's multi-millionaire father's Wall Street investment banking connections enable the planting of false and libelous articles about me in national magazine like the Reader's Digest will not enable the Connecticut candidate to buy a Texas seat in the US Senate." That was on target, that hurt. Bush whined in response that it was Yarborough's statement which was "false, libelous, and hogwash," and challenging the senator to prove it or retract it. [fn 17]

Beyond these attempts to smear Yarborough, it is once again characteristic that the principal issue around which Bush built his campaign was racism, expressed this time as opposition to the civil rights bill that was before the Congress during 1964. Bush did this certainly in order to conform to his pro-Goldwater ideological profile, and in order to garner votes (especially in the Republican primary) using racist and states' rights backlash, but most of all in order to express the deepest tenets of the philosophical world-outlook of himself and his oligarchical family.

Very early in the campaign Bush issued a statement saying: "I am opposed to the Civil Rights bill now before the Senate." Not content with that, Bush proceeded immediately to tap the wellsprings of nullification and interposition: "Texas has a comparably good record in civil rights," he argued, "and I'm opposed to the Federal Government intervening further into State affairs and individual rights." At this point Bush claimed that his quarrel was not with the entire bill, but rather with two specific provisions, which he claimed had not been a part of the original draft, but which he hinted had been added to placate violent black extremists. According to his statement of March 17, "Bush pointed out that the original Kennedy Civil Rights bill in 1962 did not contain provisions either for a public accommodations section or a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) section." "Then, after the hot, turbulent summer of 1962, when it became apparent that in order to get the Civil Rights leaders' support and votes in the 1964 election something more must be done, these two bad sections were added to the bill," according to Bush. "I suggest that these two provisions of the bill-- which I most heatedly oppose -- were politically motivated and are cynical in their approach to a most serious problem." But soon abandoned this hair-splitting approach, and on March 25 he told the Jaycees of Tyler "I oppose the entire bill." Bush explained later that beyond the public accommodations section and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, he found that "the most dangerous portions of the bill are those which make the Department of Justice the most powerful police force in the Nation and the Attorney General the Nation's most powerful police chief."

When Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered his maiden speech to the Senate in April of 1964, he included a passage referring to the late John F. Kennedy, saying that the dead President had believed that "we should not hate, but love one another." Bush lashed out at Kennedy for what he called "unfair criticism of those who oppose the Civil Rights bill." In Bush's interpretation, "Kennedy's dramatic, almost tearful plea for passage of the bill presented all those who disagree with it as hate mongers." "The inference is clear," Bush said. "In other words, Ted Kennedy was saying that any one who opposes the present Civil Rights bill does so because there is hate in his heart. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not a question of hate or love, but of Constitutionality." Bush "and other responsible conservatives" simply think that the bill is politically inspired. "This bill," Bush said, would make further inroads into the rights of individuals and the States, and even provide for the ultimate destruction of our trial by jury system. We simply feel that this type of class legislation, based on further federal control and intervention, is bad for the nation." "Bush said the Civil Rights problem is basically a local problem, best left to the States to handle." Here surely was a respectable-sounding racism for the era of Selma and Bull Connor.

Bush was provided with new rhetorical ammunition when Alabama Governor George Wallace ventured into the presidential primaries of that year and demonstrated unexpected vote-getting power in certain northern states, using a pitch that included overtly racist appeals. In the wake of one such result in Wisconsin, Bush campaign issued a release quoting the candidate as being "sure that a majority of Americans are opposed to the Civil Rights bill now being debated in the Senate." "Bush called attention to the surprising 25% of the Wisconsin primary vote received by Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama," said the release. In Bush's view, "you can be sure this big vote was not cast for Wallace himself, but was used as a means of showing public opposition to the Civil Rights Bill." "If a flamboyant Governor Wallace can get that kind of a vote in a northern state such as Wisconsin, it indicates to me that there must be general concern from many responsible people over the Civil Rights bill all over the nation," Bush said in Houston. "If I were a member of the Senate today, I would vote against this bill in its entirety."

Bush was described in the Texas press as attempting a melange of "Goldwater's policies, Kennedy's style." [fn 18] This coverage reveals traits of the narcissistic macho in the 40-year old plutocrat: "he is the sort of fellow the ladies turn their heads to see at the country club charity ball." Abundant campaign financing allowed Bush "to attract extra people to rallies with free barbecue, free drinks, and musical entertainers." These were billed by the Bush campaign as a return to the "old fashioned political rally," and featured such musical groups as the Black Mountain Boys and the Bluebonnet Belles. At Garcia's Restaurant in Austin Bush encountered a group of two dozen or so sporty young Republican women holding Bush campaign placards. "Oh girls!" crooned the candidate. "You all look great.! You look terrific. All dolled up." The women "were ga-ga about him in return," wrote political reporter Ronnie Dugger in the Texas Observer, adding that Bush's "campaign to become this state's second Republican senator gets a lot of energy and sparkle from the young Republican matrons who are enthusiastic about him personally and have plenty of money for baby sitters and nothing much to do with their time." But in exhortations for militaristic adventurism abroad, the substance was indeed pure Goldwater.

As could be expected from the man who had so recently challenged John F. Kennedy to "muster the courage" to attack Cuba, any of Bush's most vehement pronouncements concerned Castro and Havana, and were doubtless much appreciated by the survivors of Brigade 2506 and the Miami Cubans. Bush started off with what passed for a moderate position in Texas Goldwater circles: "I advocate recognition of a Cuban government in exile and would encourage this government every way to reclaim its country. This means financial and military assistance." "I think we should not be found wanting in courage to help them liberate their country," said Bush. Candidate Morris had a similar position, but both Cox and Davis called for an immediate restoration of the naval blockade of Cuba. Bush therefore went them one up, and endorsed a new invasion of Cuba. A Bush for Senate campaign brochure depicted a number of newspaper articles about the candidate. The headline of one of these, from an unidentified newspaper, reads as follows: "CUBA INVASION URGED BY GOP CANDIDATE." The subtitle reads: "George Bush, Houston oilman, campaigning for the Republican nomination to the US Senate called for a new government-in- exile invasion of Cuba, no negotiation of the Panama Canal treaty, and a freedom package in Austin." Other campaign flyers state that "Cuba...under Castro is a menace to our national security. I advocate recognition of a Cuban government in exile and support of this government to reclaim its country. We must reaffirm the Monroe Doctrine." Another campaign handout characterizes Cuba as "an unredeemed diplomatic disaster abetted by a lack of a firm Cuban policy."

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PART 2 OF 2

What Bush was proposing would have amounted to a vast and well-funded program for arming and financing anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami, and putting the United States government at the service of their adventures-- presumably far in excess of the substantial programs that were already being funded. Beneficiaries would have included Theodore Shackley, who was by now the station chief at CIA Miami station, Felix Rodriguez, Chi Chi Quintero, and the rest of the boys from the Enterprise.

Bush attacked Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, for the latter's call in a speech for a more conciliatory policy towards Cuba, ending the US economic boycott. "I view the speech with great suspicion," said Bush. "I feel this is a trial balloon on the part of the State Department to see whether the American people will buy another step in a disastrous, soft foreign policy." Bush called on Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a leading hawk, to hold firm against the policy shift that Fulbright was proposing. "Fulbright says Cuba is a 'distasteful nuisance', but I believe that Castro's Communist regime 90 miles from our shores is an intolerable nuisance. I am in favor only of total liberation of Cuba," proclaimed Bush, "and I believe this can only be achieved by recognition of a Cuban government in exile, backed up to the fullest by the United States and the Organization of American States."

In the middle of April a Republican policy forum held in Miami heard a report from a Cuban exile leader that the Soviets had position missiles on the ocean floor off Cuba, with the missiles pointed at the United States, and that this had been confirmed by diplomatic sources in Havana. This would appear in retrospect to have been a planted story. For Bush it was obvious grist for his campaign mill. Bush, speaking in Amarillo, called the report "the most alarming news in this hemisphere in two years." He called for efforts to "drive the Communists out of Cuba."

But, in keeping with the times, Bush's most genocidal campaign statements were made in regard to Vietnam. Here Bush managed to identify himself with the war, with its escalation, and with the use of nuclear weapons.

Senator Goldwater had recently raised the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons as the most effective defoliants to strip away the triple canopy jungle of Vietnam. In a response to this, an Associated Press story quoted Bush as saying that he was in favor of anything that could be done safely toward finishing the fighting in Southeast Asia. "Bush said he favors a limited extension of the war in Viet Nam, including restricted use of nuclear weapons if 'militarily prudent,'" according to the AP release. [fn 19] A Bush campaign release of June 1 has him saying he favors a "cautious, judicious, and militarily sound extension of the war in Vietnam." This was all before the Gulf of Tonkin incident and well before US ground troops were committed to Vietnam.

Bush had several other notes to sound concerning the looming war in Southeast Asia. In May he attacked the State Department for "dawdling" in Vietnam, a policy which he said had "cost the lives of so many young Americans." He further charged that the US troops in Vietnam were being issued "shoddy war material." Responding to a prediction from Defense Secretary McNamara that the war might last 10 years, Bush retorted: "This would not be the case if we had developed a winning policy from the start of this dangerous brush fire." Also in May, Bush responded to a Pathet Lao offensive in Laos as follows: "This should be a warning to us in Vietnam. Whenever the Communist world--either Russian or Chinese-- sign a treaty, or any other agreement, with a nation of the free world, that treaty isn't worth the paper it's written on."

Bush pugnaciously took issue with those who wanted to disengage from the Vietnam quagmire before the bulk of the war's human losses had occurred. He made this part of his "Freedom Package," which was a kind of manifesto for a worldwide US imperialist and colonialist offensive --a precursor of the new world order ante litteram. A March 30 campaign release proclaims the "Freedom Package" in these terms: "'I do not want to continue to live in a world where there is no hope for a real and lasting peace,' Bush said. He decried 'withdrawal symptoms' propounded by UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and Senators William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield. 'Adlai has proposed we [inter]nationalize the Panama Canal,' Bush pointed out, 'Fulbright asks us to accommodate Red Cuba and renegotiate our Panama treaty, and Mansfield suggests we withdraw from the Viet Nam struggle. This is the kind of retreatism we have grown accustomed to among our supposed world leaders and it is just what the Kremlin ordered.'"

Nor did Bush's obsession with Panama and the Panama Canal begin with Noriega. In his campaign literature Bush printed his basic position that the "Panama canal...is ours by right of treaty and historical circumstance. The Canal is critical to our domestic security and US sovereignty over the Canal must be maintained." What is meant by the right of historical circumstance? "I am opposed to further negotiation in Panama," Bush stated repeatedly in his campaign speeches and releases.

If Bush saw a Saddam Hussein, a dark-skinned, Moslem non-aligned third world nationalist in the world of 1964, then that foreign leader was President Sukarno of Indonesia. Sukarno, along with Nehru, Nasser, Nkruma, Tito, and Bourguiba was one of the central figures of the non- aligned movement of the developing nations that had emerged from the Bandung Conference of 29 Afro-Asian states in 1955. During 1964 Sukarno was attempting to prevent the creation of Malaysia out of the British Confederation of Malaya. Part of Sukarno's blocking manuever was the deployment of pro-Indonesian guerillas into the Malaccan peninsula above Singapore, and into certain areas of northern Borneo, including Sarawak and Sabah. From there, these guerillas were causing problems for Bush's business partner in the oil trade, the Sultan of Brunei. Bush targeted Indonesia and Sukarno personally for a series of violent and abusive attacks.

In April, Sukarno told the US Ambassador Howard P. Jones that "there is one country threatening to stop its foreign aid to Indonesia. That country thinks it can scare Indonesia. I say go to hell with your aid." Bush, from Big Spring, commented in an April 23 statement: "It's easy for President Sukarno of Indonesia to tell us to 'got to hell' with our foreign aid-- now that he has already received $894 million worth." Bush explained that he had been in Borneo during 1963, during the time that the Malysian Federation was coming into existence "in favor of the Free World." "That," said Bush, "was the mistake the Malaysian Federation made; coming into the world of nations in favor of America and the free world. The very next day Sukarno, whom we've tried to buy with $894 million in aid, turned on Malaysia and announced he would destroy the new Federation." Bush's release notes that "Bush, who was President of Zapata Off-Shore, said one of the firm's drilling rigs was at that time, and is today, working off the coast of Borneo." Was this a conflict of interest?

With accents that provide an eerie presentiment of the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis, Bush went on: "Today the borders of the Malaysian Federation are lined with Indonesian troops, bearing Russian-made arms, purchased with American dollars. The Indonesians are still poised to crush Malaysia. And what have we done? We gently slapped Sukarno on the wrist, then loaned him another $20 million, which he used to buy a couple of jet aircraft, one of which he uses to fly his foul assignations around the far east. What we should have done, and still should do, is tell Sukarno: 'You violate the sanctity of the Malaysian border and you have to deal with the force of the entire free world!'"

Shortly thereafter, Texas GOP Senator John Tower sponsored a cutoff of US aid to Sukarno, which passed, although Yarborough voted to maintain the aid. Bush made this the occasion for a new onslaught. In a contorted argument, Bush pointed out that Yarborough's vote for aid to Indonesia had come one day after Sukarno had extended "the friendly hand of recognition to the communist government of North Viet Nam. This country, Sukarno's friend, is waging a war in which scarcely a day before Yarborough's vote, communist bullets slammed through the body of a young helicopter pilot from Texas. Yarborough voted to give US aid to a country that is friends with a mob that is killing young Americans and Texans...He votes to aid the friends of a mob that is killing Texas boys." Yarborough rejected this "wild criticism," and said that the charges illustrated Bush's lack of comprehension of the "delicate balance of power in foreign affairs, and his lack of knowledge of the state of affairs in Southeast Asia." Yarborough's point was that the important thing was to prevent any war between Indonesia and Malaysia, and that this task must override any desire to humiliate Sukarno.

Bush's remarks in this campaign mesh perfectly with the US buildup for the 1965 military coup d'etat in Indonesia, in which more than 200,000 persons were killed, primarily during the course of anti- communist massacres carried out by the army with the encouragement of US advisors.

In economic policy, Bush's starting point was always "unbridled free enterprise," as he stressed in a statement on unemployment on March 16: "Only unbridled free enterprise can cure unemployment. But, I don't believe the federal government has given the private sector of our economy a genuine opportunity to relieve this unemployment. For example, the [Johnson war on poverty program] contains a new version of the CCC, a Domestic Peace Corps, and various and sundry half-baked pies in the sky." Bush's printed campaign literature stated under the heading of "federal economy" that "the free enterprise system must be unfettered. A strong economy means jobs, opportunity, and prosperity. A controlled economy means loss of freedom and bureaucratic bungling." On April 21 Bush told the voters: "We must begin a phase of re- emphasizing the private sector of our economy, instead of the public sector."

By April 15, Bush had been informed that there were some 33 million Americans living in poverty, to which he replied: "I cannot see how draping a socialistic medicare program around the sagging neck of our social security program will be a blow to poverty. And I can see only one answer to [the problem of poverty]: Let us turn our free enterprise system loose from government control." Otherwise, Bush held it "the responsibility of the local government first to assume the burden of relieving poverty wherever its exists, and I know of many communities that are more than capable of working with this problem."

Bush's approach to farm policy was along similar lines, combining the rhetoric of Adam Smith with intransigent defense of the food cartels. his campaign brochure he opined that "Agriculture...must be restored to a free market economy, subject to the basic laws of supply and demand." On April 9 in Waco, Bush assailed the Wheat-Cotton subsidy bill which had just received the approval of the House. "If I am elected to the Senate," said Bush, I will judge each agricultural measure on the basis of whether it gets the Government further into, or out of, private business." Bush added that farm subsidies are among "our most expensive federal programs."

Another of Bush's recurrent obsessions was his desire to break the labor movement. During the 1960's, he expressed this in the context of campaigns to prevent the repeal of section 14 (b) of the Taft-Hartley law, which permitted the states to outlaw the closed shop and union shop, and thus to protect state laws guaranteeing the so- called open shop or "right to work," a device which in practice prevented the organization of large sectors of the working population of these states into unions. Bush's editorializing takes him back to the era when the Sherman Anti-trust Act was still being used against labor unions.

"I believe in the right-to-work laws," said Bush to a group of prominent Austin businessmen at a luncheon in the Commodore Perry Hotel on March 5. "At every opportunity, I urge union members to resist payment of political assessments. If there's only one in 100 who thinks for himself and votes for himself, then he should not be assessed by COPE."

On March 19 Bush asserted that "labor's blatant attack on right-to- work laws is open admission that labor does have a monopoly and will take any step to make this monopoly. Union demands are a direct cause of the inflationary spiral lowering the real income of workers and increasing the costs of production." This is, from the point of scientific economics, an absurdity. But four days later Bush returned to the topic, attacking United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, a figure whom Bush repeatedly sought to identify with Yarborough, for demands which "will only cause the extinction of free enterprise in America. A perfect example of labor's pricing a product out of existence is found in West Virginia. John L. Lewis' excessive demands on the coal industry raised the price of coal, forced the consumer to use a substitute cheaper product, killed the coal industry and now West Virginia has an excessive rate of unemployment."

On Labor Day, Bush spoke to a rally in the court house square of Quanah, and called for "protection of the rights of the individual laborer through the state rather than the federal government. The individual laboring man is being forgotten by the Walter Reuthers and Ralph Yarboroughs, and it's up to the business community to protect our country's valuable labor resources from exploitation by these left -wing labor leaders," said Bush, who might just as well have suggested that the fox be allowed to guard the chicken coop.

East Texas was an area of unusually high racial tension, and Bush spent most of his time there attacking the civil rights bill. But the alliance between Yarborough and big labor was one of his favorite themes. The standard pitch went something like this, as before the Austin businessmen. Yarborough, he would start off saying "more nearly represents the state of Michigan than he does Texas." This, as we will see, was partly an attempted, lame rebuttal of Yarborough's charge that Bush was a northeastern carpetbagger. Bush would then continue: "One of the main reasons Yarborough represents Texas so badly is that he's spending most of his time representing labor interests in Detroit. His voting record makes men like Walter Reuther and James Hoffa very happy. This man has voted for every special interest bill, for every big spending measure that's come to his attention."

During this period Camco, an oilfield equipment company of which Bush was a director, was embroiled in some bitter labor disputes. The regional office of the National Labor Relations Board sought a federal injunction against Camco in order to force the firm to re-hire four union organizers who had been illegally fired. Officials of the Machinists' Union, which was trying to organize Camco, also accused Bush of being complicit in what they said was Camco's illegal failure to carry out a 1962 NLRB order directing Camco to re-hire eleven workers fired because they had attended a union meeting. Bush answered that he was not going to be intimidated by labor. "As everybody knows, the union bosses are all-out for Sen. Ralph Yarborough, " countered Bush, and he had been too busy with Zapata to pay attention to Camco anyway. [fn 20] According to Roy Evans, the Secretary-Treasurer of the Texas AFL-CIO, Bush was "a member of the dinosaur wing of the Republican Party." Evans called Bush "the Houston throwback," and maintained that Bush had "lost touch with anyone in Texas except the radicals of the right."

Back in February, Yarborough had remarked in his typical populist vein that his legislative approach was to "put the jam on the lower shelf so the little man can get his hand in." This scandalized Bush, who countered on February 27 that "it's a cynical attitude and one that tends to set the so-called little man apart from the rest of his countrymen." For Bush, the jam would always remain under lock and key, except for the chosen few of Wall Street. A few days later, on March 5, Bush elaborated that he was "opposed to special interest legislation because it tends to hyphenate Americans. I don't think we can afford to have veteran-Americans, Negro-Americans, Latin-Americans and labor-Americans these days." Here is Bush as political philosopher, maintaining that the power of the authoritarian state must confront its citizens in a wholly atomized form, not organized into interest groups capable of defending themselves.

Bush was especially irate about Yarborough's Cold War GI Bill, which he branded the senator's "pet project." "Fortunately," said Bush, "he has been unable to cram his Cold War GI Bill down Congress' throat. It's bad legislation and special interest legislation which will erode our American way of life. I have four sons, and I'd sure hate to think that any of them would measure their devotion and service to their country by what special benefits Uncle Sam could give them." Neil Bush would certainly never do that! Anyway, the Cold War GI Bill was nothing but a "cynical effort to get votes," Bush concluded.

There was a soft spot in Bush's heart for at least a few special interests, however. He was a devoted supporter of the "time-proven" 27.5% oil depletion allowance, a tax writeoff which allowed the seven sisters oil cartel to escape a significant portion of what they otherwise would have paid in taxes. Public pressure to reduce this allowance was increasing, and the oil cartel was preparing to concede a minor adjustment in the hopes that this would neutralize attempts to get the depletion allowance abolished entirely. Bush also called for what he described as a "meaningful oil import program, one which would restrict imports at a level that will not be harmful to our domestic oil industry." "I know what it is to earn a paycheck in the oil business," he boasted. Bush also told Texas farmers that he wanted to limit the imports of foreign beef so as to protect their domestic markets.

Yarborough's counterattack on this issue is of great relevance to understanding why Bush was so fanatically committed to wage war in the Gulf to restore the degenerate, slaveholding Emir of Kuwait. Yarborough pointed out that Bush's company, Zapata Offshore, was drilling for oil in Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, Borneo, and Trinidad. "Every producing oil well drilled in foreign countries by American companies means more cheap foreign oil in American ports, fewer acres of Texas land under oil and gas lease, less income to Texas farmers and ranchers..," Yarborough stated. "this issue is clear-cut in this campaign - a Democratic senator who is fighting for the life of the free enterprise system as exemplified by the independent oil and gas producers in Texas, and a Republican candidate who is the contractual driller for the international oil cartel." In those days the oil cartel did not deal mildly with those who attacked it in public. One thinks again of the Italian oilman Enrico Mattei. For Bush, these cartel interests would always be sacrosanct. On April 1, Bush talked of the geopolitics of oil: "I was in London at the time of the Suez crisis and I quickly saw how the rest of the free world can become completely dependent on American oil. When the Canal was shut down, free nations all over the world immediately started crying for Texas oil."

Later in the campaign, Yarborough visited the town of Gladewater in East Texas. There, standing in view of the oil derricks, Yarborough talked about Bush's ownership of Pennzoil stock, and about Pennzoil's quota of 1,690 barrels per day of imported oil, charging that Bush was undermining the Texas producers by importing cheap foreign oil.

Then, according to a newspaper account, "the senator spiced his charge with a reference to the 'Sheik of Kuwait and his four wives and 100 concubines' who, he said, are living in luxury off the oil from Bush- drilled wells in the Persian Gulf and sold at cut-rate prices in the United States. He said that imported oil sells for $1.25 a barrel while Texas oil, selling at $3, pays school, city, county, and federal taxes and keeps payrolls going. Yarborough began his day of campaigning at a breakfast with supporters in Longview. Later, in Gladewater, he said he had seen a "Bush for Senator" bumper sticker on a car in Longview. 'Isn't that a come-down for an East Texan to be a strap-hanger for a carpetbagger from Connecticut who is drilling oil for the Sheik of Kuwait to help keep that harem going?'" [fn 21]

Yarborough challenged Bush repeatedly to release more details about his overseas drilling and producing interests. He spoke of Bush's "S.A. corporations drilling in the Persian Gulf in Asia." He charged that Bush had "gone to Latin America to incorporate two of his companies to drill in the Far East, instead of incorporating them in the United States." That in turn, thought Yarborough, "raises questions of tax avoidance." "Tell them, George," he jeered, "what your 'S.A.' companies, financed with American dollars, American capital, American resources, are doing about American income taxes." Bush protested that "every single tax dollar due by any company that I own an interest in has been paid." [fn 22]

The status of the Rural Electrification Administration was also a campaign issue. Goldwater had said in Denver, Colorado on May 3, 1963 that the time had come "to dissolve the Rural Electrification Administration." Wishing to appear as an orthodox Goldwater clone in every respect, Bush had failed to distance himself from this demand. The REA was justly popular for its efforts to bring electric power to impoverished sectors of the countryside. Yarborough noted first of all that Bush "wouldn't know a cotton boll from a corn shuck," but he insisted on leveling "so un-Texan a blow at the farmers and ranchers of Texas. To sell the REA's in Texas to the private power monopoly would be carrying out the demands of the big Eastern power structure and the wishes of the New York investment bankers who handle the private power monopoly financing. My opponent is in line to inherit his share of that New York investment banking structure," Yarborough told a gathering of Texas REA officials.

Following in Prescott Bush's footsteps, George Bush was implacably hostile to government-sponsored infrastructure projects. Such projects are of course the essence of the American System of political economy as understood by Franklin, Hamilton, Lincoln, and FDR. One ongoing water project in Texas in 1964 was the Trinity River project. Early in the campaign, Bush said that he could not support this project because it was exacerbating a federal budget deficit that was already too high. But this stance proved so unpopular in the Texas electorate that Bush later flip-flopped, saying that he had been sympathetic to the Trinity River project all along, and that maybe there was a way to get it done without adding to the deficit.

On other issues, Bush had the following positions:

On education: "Education is a responsibility of the States. Federal aid inevitably means eventual federal control. I favor retention of more tax money by the States so as to build the local and state education programs. We must meet the challenge of education BUT at the State and local levels." Has the Education President advocated anything different?

On Food stamps: Bush called them a "New Frontier gimmick" with "interesting black market possibilities here."

On school prayer Bush was duly sanctimonious: "I am concerned about the erosion of our moral fibre and religious heritage. I believe that prayers in the public schools on a voluntary basis are in keeping with the great traditions upon which this country was founded...Vicious attacks in the courts on prayers in the schools or in reference to God in our lives must be repudiated."

On Red China: Beijing, said Bush in 1964 "must never be admitted to the UN. In the event this does occur, then I advocate withdrawal from the United Nations." Bush was the man who later cast his vote for the admission of Red China to the world body in 1971.

On the UN: The United Nations "as presently constituted is gravely deficient and has been a failure in preserving peace. The United States has taken the responsibility for the freedom of the western world. This responsibility we must not relinquish to the General Assembly. All nations should pay their dues or lose their vote."

Foreign Aid, Bush's campaign brochure recommends, "should be reduced drastically except in those areas where technological and military assistance is necessary to the defense of the free world and is economically advantageous to the United States. We should use our foreign aid to strengthen our friends and extend freedom, not to placate our enemies."

The Nuclear test Ban treaty, although negotiated by Averell Harriman himself, was rejected by Bush. According to campaign handouts, the treaty "as ratified by the Senate, will not work. I would be for a treaty with adequate, foolproof safeguards." Bush added that he was taking this position "although anyone opposed [to the treaty] is accused of war- mongering. I'm the father of five children and just as concerned as anyone else about the cleanliness of the air and the sanctity of the home, but this is a half-way measure and doesn't do the job."

As the Republican senatorial primary approached, Bush declared that he was confident that he could win an absolute majority and avoid a runoff. On April 30, he predicted that Hill Rise would win the Kentucky Derby without a runoff, and that he would also carry the day on the first round. There was no runoff in the Kentucky Derby, but Bush fell short of his goal. Bush did come in first with about 44% of the vote or 62,579 votes, while Jack Cox was second with 44,079, with Morris third and Davis fourth. The total number of votes cast was 142,961, so a second round was required.

Cox, who had attracted 710,000 votes in his 1962 race against Connally for the governorship, was at this point far better known around the state than Bush. Cox had the backing of Gen. Edwin Walker, who had made a bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1962 himself and gotten some 138,000 votes. Cox also had the backing of H.L. Hunt.

Morris had carried Dallas County, and he urged his supporters to vote against Bush. Morris told the Dallas Morning New of May 5 that Bush was "too liberal" and that Bush's strength in the primary was due to "liberal" Republican support.

Between early May and the runoff election of June 6, Cox mounted a vigorous campaign of denunciation and exposure of Bush as a creature of the Eastern Liberal Establishment, Wall Street banking interests, and of Goldwater's principal antagonist for the GOP Presidential nomination, the hated Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York. According to a story filed by Stuart Long of the Long News Service in Austin on May 25 and preserved among the Yarborough papers in the Barker Texas History Center in Austin, Cox's supporters circulated letters pointing to Prescott Bush's role as a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman as the basis for the charge that George Bush was the tool of "Liberal Eastern Kingmakers." According to Long, the letters also include references to the New York Council on Foreign Relations, which he described as a "black-tie dinner group." [fn 23] The pro-Cox letters also asserted that Bush's Zapata Offshore Company had a history of bidding on drilling contracts for Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey.

One anti-Bush brochure preserved among the Yarborough papers at the Barker Center in Austin is entitled "Who's Behind the Bush?" , published by the Coalition of Conservatives to Beat the Bushes, with one Harold Deyo of Dallas listed as chairman. The attack on Bush here centers on the Council on Foreign Relations, of which Bush was not at that time a public member. The brochure lists a number of Bush campaign contributors and then identifies these as members of the CFR. These include Dillon Anderson and J.C. Hutcheson III of Baker and Botts, Andrews and Shepherd, Leland Anderson of Anderson, Clayton and Company, Lawrence S. Reed of Texas Gulf Producing, Frank Michaux, W.A. Kirkland of the board of First City National Bank. The brochure then focuses on Prescott Bush, identified as a "partner with Averell Harriman in Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Company. Averell Harriman is listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Could it be that Prescott S. Bush, in concert with his Eastern CFR friends, is raising all those 'Yankee Dollars' that are flowing into George's campaign? It is reliably reported that Mr. George Bush has contracted for extensive and expensive television time for the last week of the Runoff." The brochure also targets Paul Kayser of Anderson, Clayton and Bush's Harris County campaign chairman. Five officers of this company, named as W.L. Clayton, L. Fleming, Maurice McAshan, Leland Anderson, and Syndor Oden, are said to be members of the CFR.

On the CFR itself, the brochure quotes from Helen P. Lasell's study entitled "Power Behind Government Today," which found that the CFR "from its inception has had an important part in planning the whole diabolical scheme of creating a ONE WORLD FEDERATION of socialist states under the United Nations." "These carefully worked out, detailed plans, in connection with the WORLD BANK and the use of billions of tax-exempt foundation dollars, were carried out secretively over a period of years. Their fruition could mean not only the absolute destruction of our form of government, national independence and sovereignty, but to a degree at least, that of every nation in the world." The New World Order, we see, is really nothing new. The brochure further accuses one Mrs. M. S. Acherman, a leading Bush supporter in Houston, of having promoted a write-in campaign for liberal, Boston Brahmin former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in the Texas presidential primary. Lodge had won the 1964 New Hampshire primary, prompting Bush to announce that this was merely a regional phenomenon and that he was "still for Goldwater."

As the runoff vote approached, Cox focused especially on the eastern financing that Bush was receiving. On May 25 in Abilene, Cox assailed Bush for having mounted "one of the greatest spending sprees ever seen in any political campaign." Cox said that he could not hope to match this funding "because Jack Cox is not, nor will ever be, connected in any manner with the Eastern kingmakers who seek to control political candidates. Conservatives of Texas will serve notice on June 6 that just as surely as Rockefeller's millions can't buy presidential nomination, the millions at George Bush's disposal can't buy him a senate nomination." Cox claimed that all of his contributions had come from inside Texas.

O'Donnells's Texas Republican organization was overwhelmingly mobilized in favor of Bush. Bush had the endorsement of the state's leading newspapers. When the runoff finally came, Bush was the winner with some 62% of the votes cast. Yarborough commented that Bush "smothered Jack Cox in greenbacks."

Gordon McLendon, true to form, had used his own pre-primary television broadcast to rehash the Billie Sol Estes charges against Yarborough. Yarborough nevertheless defeated McLendon in the Democratic senatorial primary with almost 57% of the vote. Given the lopsided Texas Democratic advantage in registered voters, and given LBJ's imposing lead over Goldwater at the top of the Democratic ticket, it might have appeared that Yarborough's victory was now a foregone conclusion. That this was not so was due to the internal divisions within the Texas Democratic ranks.

First were the Democrats who came out openly for Bush. The vehicle for this defection was called Conservative Democrats for Bush, chaired by Ed Drake, the former leader of the state's Democrats for Eisenhower in 1952. Drake was joined by former Governor Allan Shivers, who had also backed Ike and Dick in 1952 and 1956. Then there was the "East Texas Democrats for George Bush Committee," chaired by E.B. Germany, the former state Democratic leader and in 1964 the chairman of the board of Lone Star Steel.

Then there were various forms of covert support for Bush. Millionaire Houston oilman Lloyd Bentsen, who had been in Congress back in the late 1940's, had been in discussion as a possible senate candidate. Bush's basic contention was that LBJ had interfered in Texas politics to tell Bentsen to stay out of the senate race, thus avoiding a more formidable primary challenge to Yarborough. On April 24 Bush stated that Bentsen was a "good conservative" who had been kept out of the race by "Yarborough's bleeding heart act." This and other indications point to a covert political entente between Bush and Bentsen which re-appeared during the 1988 presidential campaign.

Then there were the forces associated with Governor Big John Connally. Yarborough later confided that Connally had done everything in his power to wreck his campaign, subject only to certain restraints imposed by LBJ. Even these limitations did not amount to real support for Yarborough on the part of LBJ, but were rather attributable to LBJ's desire to avoid the embarrassment of seeing his native state represented by two Republican senators during his own tenure in the White House. But Connally still sabotaged Yarborough as much as LBJ would let him get away with. [fn 24] Bush and Connally have had a complex relation, with points of convergence and many points of divergence. Back in 1956, a lobbyist working for Texas oilman Sid Richardson had threatened to "run [Bush's] ass out of the offshore drilling business" unless Prescott Bush voted for gas deregulation in the Senate. [fn 25] Connally later became the trustee for some of Richardson's interests. While visiting Dallas on March 19, Bush issued a statement saying that he agreed with Connally in his criticisms of attorney Melvin Belli, who had condemned the District Court in Dallas when his client, Jack Ruby, was given the death sentence for having slain Lee Harvey Oswald the previous November.

In public, LBJ was for Yarborough, although he could not wholly pass over the frictions between the two. Speaking at Stonewall after the Democratic national convention, LBJ had commented: "You have heard and you have read that Sen. Yarborough and I have had differences at times. I have read a good deal more about them than I was ever aware of. But I do want to say this, that I don't think that Texas has had a senator during my lifetime whose record I am more familiar with than Sen. Yarborough's. And I don't think Texas has had a senator that voted for the people more than Sen. Yarborough has voted for them. And no member of the US Senate has stood up and fought for me or fought for the people more since I became President than Ralph Yarborough." For his part, Bush years later quoted a Time Magazine analysis of the 1964 senate race which concluded that "if Lyndon would stay out of it, Republican Bush would have a chance. But Johnson is not about to stay out of it, which makes Bush the underdog." [fn 26]

Yarborough for his part had referred to LBJ as a "power-mad Texas politician," and had called on President Kennedy to keep LBJ out of Texas politics. Yarborough's attacks on Connally were even more explicit and colorful: he accused Connally of acting like a "viceroy, and we got rid of those in Texas when Mexico took over from Spain." According to Yarborough, "Texas had not had a progressive governor since Jimmy Alfred," who had held office in 1935-39. Bush took pains to spell out that this was an attack on Democrats W. Lee O'Daniel, Coke Stevenson, Buford H. Jester, Allan Shivers, Price Daniel, and John Connally.

Yarborough also criticized the right-wing oligarchs of the Dallas area for having transformed that city from a Democratic town to a "citadel of reaction." For Yarborough, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was "worse than Pravda."

Yarborough's strategy in the November election centered on identifying Bush with Goldwater in the minds of voters, since the Arizona Republican's warlike rhetoric was now dragging him down to certain defeat. Yarborough's first instinct had been to run a substantive campaign, stressing issues and his own legislative accomplishments. Yarborough in 1988 told Bush biographer Fitzhugh Green: "When I started my campaign for re-election I was touting my record of six years in the senate. But my speech advisors said, all you have to do is quote Bush, who had already called himself 100 per cent for Goldwater and the Vietnam war. So that's what I did, and it worked very well." [fn 27]

Campaigning in Port Arthur on Oct. 30, a part of the state where his labor support loomed large, Yarborough repeatedly attacked Bush as "more extreme than Barry Goldwater." According to Yarborough, even after Barry Goldwater had repudiated the support of the John Birch Society, Bush said that he "welcomed support of the Birch Society and embraced it." "Let's you elect a senator from Texas, and not the Connecticut investment bankers with their $2,500,000," Yarborough urged the voters. [fn 28]

These attacks were highly effective, and Bush's response was to mobilize his media budget for more screenings of his World War II "flight of the Avenger" television spot, while he prepared a last- minute television dirty trick. There was to be no debate between Bush and Yarborough, but this did not prevent Bush from staging a televised "empty chair" debate, which was aired on more than a dozen stations around the state on October 27. The Bush campaign staff scripted a debate in which Bush answered doctored quotes from audio tapes of Yarborough speaking, with the sentences often cut in half, taken out of context, and otherwise distorted. Yarborough responded by saying: "The sneaky trick my opponent is trying to pull on me tonight of pulling sentences of mine out of context with my recorded voice and playing my voice as a part of his broadcast is illegal under the law, and a discredit to anyone who aspires to be a US Senator. I intend to protest this illegal trick to the Federal Communications Commission." Bush's method was to "cut my statements in half, then let his Madison Avenue speech writers answer those single sentences." "My opponent is an exponent of extremism, peddling smear and fear wherever he goes." "His conduct looks more like John Birch Society conduct than United States Senate conduct," Yarborough added. Bush also distorted the sound of Yarborough's voice almost beyond recognition.

Yarborough protested to the FCC in Washington, alleging that Bush had violated section 315 of the Federal Communications Act as it then stood, because Yarborough's remarks were pre-censored and used without his permission. Yarborough also accused Bush of violation of section 325 of the same act, since it appeared that parts of the "empty chair" broadcast were material that had been previously broadcast elsewhere, and which could not be re-used without permission. The FCC responded by saying that the tapes used had been made in halls where Yarborough was speaking.

All during the campaign, Yarborough had been talking about the dangers of electronic eavesdropping. He had pointed out that "anybody can be an eavesdropper, a wiretapper, a bugger, who has a few dollars for the cheaper devices on the market. Tiny recorders and microphones are now made to resemble lapel buttons or tie clasps...Recorders can also be found the size of a book or a cigarette pack. There is a briefcase available with a microphone built into the lock, and many available recorders may be carried in briefcases, while the wrist-watch microphone is no longer a product used by Dick Tracy-- it can actually be bought for $37.50." Yarborough charged during the primary campaign period that his Washington office had been wiretapped, and years later indicated that the CIA had been bugging all of Capitol Hill during those years. [fn 29]

Bush was also smarting under Yarborough's repeated references to his New England birth and background. Bush claimed that he was no carpetbagger, but a Texan by choice, and compared himself in that regard to Sam Rayburn, Sam Houston, Austin, Colonel Bill Travis, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and other heroes of the Alamo. Bush was not hobbled by any false modesty. At least, Bush asserted lamely, he was not as big a carpetbagger as Bobby Kennedy, who could not even vote in New York state, where he was making a successful bid for election to the Senate. It "depends on whose bag is being carpeted," Bush whined.

In the last days of the campaign, Allan Duckworth of the pro-Bush Dallas Morning News was trying to convince his readers that the race was heading for a "photo finish." But in the end, Prescott's networks, the millions of dollars, the recordings, and the endorsements of 36 newspapers were of no avail for Bush. Yarborough defeated Bush by a margin of 1,463,958 to 1,134,337. Within the context of the LBJ landslide victory over Goldwater, Bush had done somewhat better than his party's standard bearer: LBJ beat Goldwater in Texas by 1,663,185 to 958,566. Yarborough, thanks in part to his vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act, won a strong majority of the black districts, and also ran well ahead among Latinos. Bush won the the usual Republican counties, including the pockets of GOP support in the Houston area.

Yarborough would continue for one more term in the Senate, vocally opposing the war in Vietnam. In the closing days of the campaign he had spoken of Bush and his retinue as harbingers of a "time and society when nobody speaks for the working man." George Bush, defeated though he was, would now redouble his struggle to make such a world a reality. Yarborough, although victorious, appears in retrospect as the fading rearguard of an imperfect but better America that would disappear during the late sixties and seventies.

_______________

Notes:

1. George Bush and Victor Gold, Looking Forward (New York, 1987), p. 84.

2. Bush and Gold, p. 84.

3. John R. Knaggs, Two-Party Texas (Austin, 1985), p. 34.

4. For a summary of the southern strategy, see Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (Boston, 1970), pp. 262 ff.

5. For a profile of Yarborough's voting record on this and other issues, see Chandler Davidson, Race and Class in Texas Politics ( Princeton, 1990), pp. 29 ff.

6. For Yarborough's Senate achievements up to 1964, see Ronnie Dugger, "The Substance of the Senate Contest," in The Texas Observer, Sept. 18, 1964.

7. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 77 ff.

8. See Harry Hurt III, Texas Rich (New York), p. 191.

9. On Bush's drive to become Harris County chairman, it is instructive to compare his Looking Forward with the clippings from the Houston Chronicle of those days preserved on microfiche in the Texas Historical Society in Houston. Bush says that he decided to run for the post in the spring of 1962, but the Houston press clearly situates the campaign in the spring of 1963. Bush also claims to have been county chairman for two years, whereas the Houston papers show that he served from February 20 1963 to around December 5 1963, less than one year.

10. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," Texas Monthly, June, 1983, p. 196.

11. Houston Chronicle, 21 February 1963.

12. For Anthony Farris in the Pennzoil vs. Texaco case, see below and also Thomas Petzinger, Jr., Oil and Honor (New York, 1987), passim.

13. Boston Globe, June 12, 1988, cited in Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years, p. 581.

14. See Barbara Bush, C. Fred's Story (New York, 1984), p.2. This is an example of Mrs. Bush's singular habit of composing books in which she speaks through a canine persona, a feat she has repeated for the current family pet and public relations ploy, Millie. In her account of how C. Fred the dog got his name, George Bush is heard ruling out usual dog names with the comment: "Not at all. We Bushes have always named our children after people we loved." So, writes C. Fred, "I am named after George Bush's best friend, C. Fred Chambers of Houston, Texas. I have met him many times and he doesn't really seem to appreciate the great honor that the Bushes bestowed upon him."

15. See Ronnie Dugger, "The Four Republicans," in The Texas Observer, April 17, 1964.

16. Quotations from Bush and Yarborough campaign material, except as otherwise indicated, are from Senator Yarborough's papers on deposit in the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

17. See Ronnie Dugger, "The Substance of the Senate Contest," in The Texas Observer, September 18, 1964.

18. See "The Historic Texas Senate Race," in The Texas Observer, October 30, 1964.

19. Cited in Ronnie Dugger, "The Substance of the Senate Contest," The Texas Observer, September 18, 1964.

20. Ibid.

21. Dallas News, October 24, 1964.

22. Dallas News, October 3, 1964.

23. An untitled report among the Yarborough papers in the Barker Texas History Center refers to "Senator Bush's affiliation in a New York knife-and-fork-club type of organization called, 'The Council on Foreign Relations.' In a general smear--mainly via the "I happen to know' letter chain of communication--the elder Bush was frequently attacked, and the younger Bushes were greatly relieved when Barry Goldwater volunteered words of affectionate praise for his former colleague during a $100-a-plate Dallas dinner."

24. Just how far these efforts might have gone is a matter of speculation. Douglas Caddy in his book, The Hundred Million Dollar Payoff (New Rochelle), p. 300, reprints an internal memorandum of the machinists Non-Partisan Political League which expresses alarm about the election outlook for Yarborough, who is described as "the last stand-up Democratic liberal we have in the south." The memo, from Jack O'Brien to A.J. Hayes, is dated October 27, 1964, and cites reports from various labor operatives to the effect that "the 'fix is in' to defeat Ralph Yarborough and to replace him with a Republican, Bush, the son of Prescott Bush of Connecticut. The only question at issue is whether this 'fix' is a product of Governor Connally alone or is the product of a joint effort between Connally and President Johnson." According to the memo, "Walter Reuther called Lyndon Johnson to express his concern with the failure to invite Mrs. Yarborough to accompany" LBJ's plane through Texas. Labor leaders were trying to help raise money for last-minute television broadcasts by Yarborough, and also to extract more vocal support for the senator from LBJ.

25. See Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 82.

26. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 87.

27. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York, 1989) , p. 85.

28. Dallas News, October 31, 1964

29. Ronnie Dugger, "Goldwater's Policies, Kenndy's Style" in Texas Observer, October 30, 1964.

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PART 1 OF 3

Chapter X -- Rubbers Goes to Congress

During the heat of the senate campaign, Bush's redistricting lawsuit had progressed in a way that must have provided him much solace amidst the bitterness of his defeat. When Bush won his suit in the Houston federal district court, there was a loud squawk from Governor John Connally, who called that august tribunal as a "Republican court." Bush whined that Connally was being "vitriolic." During Bush's primary campaign, a three-judge panel of the federal circuit court of appeals had ruled that the state of Texas must be redistricted. Bush called that result "a real victory for all the people of Texas." By March, Bush's redistricting suit had received favorable action by the US Supreme Court. This meant that the way was clear to create a no-incumbent, designer district for George in a masterpiece of gerrymandering that would make him an elected official, the first Republican Congressman in the recent history of the Houston area.

The new Seventh District was drawn to create a liberal Republican seat, carefully taking into account which areas Bush had succeeded in carrying in the senate race. What emerged was for the most part a lily-white, silk-stocking district of the affluent upper middle and upper crust. There were also small black and Hispanic enclaves. In the precinct boxes of the new district, Bush had rolled up an eight to five margin over Yarborough. [fn 1]

But before gearing up a Congressional campaign in the Seventh District in 1966, Bush first had to jettison some of the useless ideological ballast he had taken on for his 1964 Goldwater profile. During the 1964 campaign, Bush had spoken out more frankly and more bluntly on a series of political issues than he ever has before or since. Apart from the Goldwater coloration, one comes away with the impression that much of the time the speeches were not just inventions, but often reflected his own oligarchical instincts and deeply-rooted obsessions. In late 1964 and early 1965, Bush was afflicted by a hangover induced by what for him had been an unprecedented orgy of self-revelation.

The 1965-66 model George Bush would become a moderate, abandoning the shrillest notes of the 1964 conservative crusade.

First came an Episcopalian mea culpa. As Bush's admirer Fitzhugh Green reports, "one of his first steps was to shuck off a bothersome trace from his 1964 campaign. He had espoused some conservative ideas that didn't jibe with his own moderate attitude." Previous statements were becoming inoperative, one gathers, when Bush discussed the matter with his Anglican pastor, John Stevens. "You know, John," said Bush, "I took some of the far right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it." His radical stance on the Civil Rights bill was allegedly a big part of his "regret." Stevens later commented: "I suspect that his goal on civil rights was the same as mine: it's just that he wanted to go through the existing authorities to attain it. In that way nothing would get done. Still, he represents about the best of noblesse oblige." [fn 2]

It was characteristically through an attempted purge in the Harris County GOP organization that Bush signaled that he was reversing his field. His gambit here was to call on party activists to take an "anti -extremist and anti-intolerance pledge," as the Houston Chronicle reported on May 26, 1965. [fn 3] Bush attacked unnamed apostles of "guilt by association" and "far-out fear psychology, and his pronouncements touched off a bitter and protracted row in the Houston GOP. Bush made clear that he was targeting the John Birch Society, whose activists he had been eager to lure into his own 1964 effort. Now Bush beat up on the Birchers as a way to correct his right-wing profile from the year before. Bush said with his usual tortured syntax that Birch members claim to "abhor smear and slander and guilt by association, but how many of them speak out against it publicly?"

This was soon followed by a Bush-inspired move to oust Bob Gilbert, who had been Bush's successor as the GOP county chairman during the Goldwater period. Bush's retainers put out the line that the "extremists" had been gaining too much power under Gilbert, and that he therefore must go. The Bush faction by now had enough clout to oust Gilbert on June 12, 1965. The eminence grise of the right-wing faction, State senator Walter Mengdon, told the press that the ouster of Gilbert had been dictated by Bush. Bush whined in response that he was very disappointed with Mengdon. "I have stayed out of county politics. I believed all Republicans had backed my campaign," Bush told the Houston Chronicle on the day Gilbert fell.

On July 1 the Houston papers reported the election of a new, "anti- extremist" Republican county leader. This was James M. Mayor, who defeated James Bowers by a margin of 95 votes against 80 in the county executive committee. Mayor was endorsed by Bush, as well as by Senator Tower. Bowers was an auctioneer who called for a return to the Goldwater "magic." GOP state chair O'Donnell hoped that the new chairman would be able to put an end to "the great deal of dissension within the party in Harris County for several years." Despite this pious wish, acrimonious faction fighting tore the county organization to pieces over the next several years. At one point the Ripon Society, a nationwide liberal Republican grouping which claimed to be part of a moderating rebuilding effort after the Goldwater debacle, intervened in the county to protect Mayor against the right-wing opposition. In so doing, the Ripon Society was also intervening in favor of Bush. The Ripon people pointed to the guerilla warfare against Mayor as "another demonstration of the persistent strength of the far right within the Texas GOP." Shortly after this scaramouche, the dissident faction of the Harris County GOP controlled 87 of 189 precinct chairs.

But at the same time Bush took care to police his left flank, distancing himself from the beginnings of the movement against the war in Vietnam which had been visible by the middle of 1965. A remarkable document of this maneuver is the text of the debate between Bush and Ronnie Dugger, the writer and editor of the Texas Observer. The debate was held July 1, 1965 before the Junior Bar of Texas convention in Fort Worth. Dugger had endorsed Bush--in a way Dugger said was "not without whimsical intent" in the GOP senate primary the year before. Dugger was no radical; at this point was not really against the Vietnam war, and he actually endorsed the policy of LBJ, saying that the President had "no easy way out of Viet Nam, but he is seeking and seeking hard for an honorable way out." [fn 4] Nevertheless, Dugger found that LBJ had made a series of mistakes in the implementation of his policy. Dugger also embraced the provisos advanced by Senator Fulbright to the effect that "seeking a complete military victory would cost more than the requirements of our interest and honor." So Dugger argued against any further escalation, and argued that anti-war demonstrations and civil disobedience could be beneficial.

Bush's first real cause for alarm was seeing "the civil rights movement being made over into a massive vehicle with which to attack the President's foreign policy in Vietnam." He started by attacking Conrad Lynn, a "Negro lawyer" who had told students at "my old university- Yale University" - that "The United States white supremacists' army has been sent to suppress the non-white people of the world." According to Bush "The Yale Daily News reported that the audience applauded when [Lynn] announced that several Negroes had gone to Asia to enlist in the North Viet Nam army to fight against the United States." Then Bush turned to his real target, Martin Luther King. King, he said, who is "identified with the freedom of the Negro cause, says in Boston the other day that he doesn't want to sit at a segregated lunch counter where you have strontium 90 in the milk, overlooking the fact that it's the communists who are testing in the atmosphere today, the Red Chinese. It's not the United States." Then there was Bayard Rustin, "a leading individual in the Negro struggle for freedom, [who] calls for withdrawal from Viet Nam." This is all hypocritical in Bush's view, since "they talk about civil rights in this country, but they are willing to sacrifice the individual rights in the communist countries."

Bush was equally riled up over anti-war demonstrations, since they were peopled by what he called "extremists:" "I am sure you know what an extremist is. That's a guy who takes a good idea and carries it to simply preposterous ends. And that's what's happened. Of course, the re-emergence of the political beatnik is causing me personally a good deal of pleasure. Many conservatives winced during 1964 as we were labeled extremists of the right. And certainly we were embarrassed by the booing of Nelson Rockefeller at the convention, and some of the comments that referred to the smell of fascism in the air at the Republican convention, and things like this, and we winced."

Warming to the subject, Bush continued: "Let me give you some examples of this kind of left wing extremism. Averell Harriman-- surely not known for his reactionary views-- speaking at Cornell University, talking about Viet Nam before a crowd that calls "Liar!" [They] booed him to the state he could hardly finish, and finally he got so frustrated he asked, 'How many in the audience are communists?' And a bunch of people there --small I will admit--held up their hands."

So extremists, for Bush, were those who assailed Rockefeller and Harriman.

Bush defended the House Committee on Unamerican Activities against the demonstrations organized by James Foreman and SNCC, commiserated with a State Department official who had been branded a fascist at Iowa State, and went on to assail the Berkeley "filthy speech" movement. As an example of the "pure naivete" of civil rights leaders, he cited Coretta Scott King who "managed to link global peace and civil rights, somehow managed to tie these two things together philosophically" -- which Bush professed not to fathom. "If we can be non-violent in Selma, why can't we be non-violent in Viet Nam," Ossie Davis had said, and Bush proposed he be awarded the "green Wiener" for his "absurd theory," for "what's got to be the fuzziest thinking of the year."

Beyond this inevitable obsession with race, Bush was frankly a hawk, frankly for escalation, opening the door to nuclear weapons in Viet Nam only a little more subtly than he had the year before: "And so I stand here as one who says I will back up the President and military leaders no matter what weapons they use in Southeast Asia."

During 1964, 1965 and 1966, Bush was still functioning as the full- time president of Zapata Offshore, although some of his co-workers complained that he was even less single-minded about making money. During this period, the company's operations were rapidly expanding and LeTourneau's Vicksburg yard turned out a series of offshore drilling platforms, including some of new design. Business had been good during 1964, with net income up 85% over the previous year. Bush wrote in the 1964 Zapata Petroleum Annual Report: "The offshore drilling industry in which we operate continues strong and active, with virtually all equipment in the Gulf of Mexico employed 100% of the time. Furthermore, other market around the world are active, and new markets are opening up."

The latest LeTourneau drilling platform was the MAVERICK, which was at that time the largest self-elevating drilling barge in action anywhere in the world. The self-elevating barges were mobile rigs with legs that rested on the bottom of the ocean. "The maximum depth of water in which self-elevating barges can work is limited by the length of their legs," Bush reminded the shareholders. Maverick went to work for the California Company. The MAVERICK design was so promising, Bush told the shareholders, that Zapata had completed negotiations to build two new rigs of the MAVERICK class," which would go to work for Shell. Gulf oil was also anxious to hire one of Zapata's new rigs.

The SCORPION, which had been the first of the self-elevating mobile barges, spent 1964 off the coast of Louisiana, under contract to Shell oil. The VINEGAROON spent the first half of the year off Trinidad, and then moved to a position off the coast of Louisiana. The SIDEWINDER, Zapata's ship-shaped floating drilling vessel, had been towed by Royal Dutch Shell's Brunei Shell Petroleum Company Ltd. to a position off the sultanate of Brunei on the north coast of Borneo. Bush wrote in the 1964 Zapata annual report that "Brunei Shell Petroleum Company, Ltd., has notified your company of Shell's intention to exercise its option, contained in the drilling contract, to purchase the SIDEWINDER. Money derived from the sale of SIDEWINDER will be used to defray part of the cost of the new rigs. Shell plans to move the SIDEWINDER to the Persian Gulf where Seacat-Zapata, our Persian Gulf affiliate, will operate the SIDEWINDER with another Shell subsidiary."

Among the older rigs, the NOLA I, the World War II freighter hull with a drilling apparatus built in, was now considered obsolete. The NOLA I was sold to a Mexican drilling company, presumably one connected to Diaz Serrano or one of his corporate fronts. The NOLA III, which had been sold in 1961 to Zapata-Seacat Offshore Company, one of Bush's subsidiaries, was still active in the "relatively calm waters" of the Persian Gulf. "During 1964, NOLA III worked for Kuwait Shell Petroleum Development Company and Continental Oil Company," Bush wrote in his 1964 annual report. So the Sultan of Brunei and the Emir of Kuwait were indeed Bush's business partners.

The Zapata fleet of drilling rigs was undergoing continuous modernization, with the ship-shaped floating rigs being phased out in favor of the self-elevating drilling platforms. In 1964, three of Zapata's five rigs were ship-shaped floaters, but by 1966, Bush wrote, only the NOLA III would remain active in this class. One threat to the Zapata fleet was posed by the hurricanes in the Gulf: in 1964 hurricane Hilda had done some damage to SCORPION, VINEGAROON, and the new MAVERICK.

Surveying the world market for drilling rigs, Bush pointed out that "discoveries off the coast of Nigeria are drawing rigs to that area." There was also the recent discovery of oil in the North Sea, with the result that, "during the summer, the United Kingdom leased a vast area off its east coast for offshore exploration." "Most of the world's major oil companies are investing heavily in the North Sea," Bush observed. There was also the Persian Gulf, where "a major lease sale off the Northern Coast of the Persian Gulf is being completed by the Iranian government as this report goes to press." "All of these developments are expected to have a beneficial effect on Zapata's business over the next several years," Bush concluded.

In 1965, Bush was able to boast in his last Zapata Annual Report that earnings per share had risen for the sixth year out of the seven of his tenure. One severe setback had been the destruction of the MAVERICK platform by Hurricane Betsy in the Gulf. But Bush was able to reassure the shareholders: "I am pleased to note that within three weeks of Hurricane Betsy, your company had been paid the full value by the insurance companies. The coverage was carried with Lloyds of London and British Insurance Companies, and the offshore drilling business should be grateful for the way in which these companies have responded when disaster has struck."

Bush's world offshore drilling market survey now included the coast of Nigera, the Iranian leases in the northern Persian Gulf, Austrailian off-shore fields then opening up, the Gulf of Suez, and the beginning of drilling in the North Sea fields by both Britain and Norway. Zapata, said Bush, was keeping in close contact with British Petroleum, Continental, and Shell. On the world oil market overall, Bush quoted John Loudon, the senior managing director of the Royal Dutch Shell Group as saying that in 25 years the free world was going to require three times the current amount of oil for its consumption.

Later, the SIDEWINDER completed its trip from the Sultan of Brunei's domains off the coast of northern Borneo, and began operating in the Persian Gulf. But to replace SIDEWINDER, Southeastern-Zaapata Drilling, a one-third owned affiliate, had built a new rig in Japan at a cost of some $6.5 million, and this rig had been moved to the Borneo coast under contract to Shell. Seacat Zapata's NOLA III had left the Persian Gulf and was now operating in the Gulf of Tunis, whence it would proceed to the Red Sea coast of Ethiopia. VINEGAROON was working off the coast of Louisiana for Chevron, and a new rig, tentatively labelled RIG 8, was also destined for the Gulf of Mexico. Opportunities seemed imminent in Australia, where Zapata had set up a special relationship with Oil Drilling and Exploration Ltd. of Australia.

In 1966, the year that Bush says he left the management of Zapata to devote himself full-time to politics, Zapata experienced another increase in earnings per share. According to the 1966 Zapata Annual Report, Zapata's "net profits for 1966 exceeded the net profits of several Fortune 500 companies." The value of Zapata's offshore drilling fleet was an estimated $34 million, and the company's stock was now trading on the American Stock Exchange. With departure of George H.W. Bush as chairman of the board, the corporate personalities of Zapata underwent a shakeup. Along with Bush departed his maternal Uncle Herbie, aka G.H. Walker Jr., the Managing Director of G.H. Walker and Co., New York. J.W. Gardner was out as president, replaced by William H. Flynn. The new chairman of the board and chief executive officer was now D. Doyle Mize, who had previously been a member of the board. The Underwood, Neuhaus Co. interests kept their seat on the Zapata board, but their representative changed from Milton R. Underwood to William Stamps Farrish III, Bush's Beeville hunting partner and the grandson of the Standard Oil executive who had been exposed for dealing with Nazi firms. Added to the board were also two representatives of leading Houston law firms, including R.P. Bushman of Vinson, Elkins, Weems, and Searls and B.J. Mackin of Baker, Botts, Shepherd and Coates. Judging from the presence of Farrish and the Houston lawyers, we may conclude that although Bush had departed from the formal structure of Zapata, he still had board members to represent his interests, which was important in light of the Zapata stock he continued to hold. The sole New Yorker on the post-Bush board was also a new face, Michael M. Thomas of Lehman Brothers.

New drilling platforms included the ENDEAVOUR, HERON, and CHAPPARAL, plus a 60% share of a ship-shaped floating vessel off the coast of Austrialia. Gulf Oil of Denmark had signed a $9 million contract for a new platform called the MAERSK EXPLORER, the first of a new generation of LeTourneau drilling units. CHAPPARAL was under contract to AGIP, a subsidiary of the Italian state oil compnay ENI, for operations in the Adriatic Sea. VINEGAROON was under contract to Petrobras of Brazil. Zapata's offshore drilling activity by now comprehended areas off Denmark, Brazil, Italy, England, the Persian Gulf, Australia, and Louisiana.

Turning to the world drilling market, the new post-Bush management offered the following overview: "The offshore drilling industry, in which Zapata is a significant participant, has undergone a substantial change in character and scope in the past five years. Five years ago, almost all the offshore drilling units were operating in one geographical area, the Gulf of Mexico. Today, six separate offshore provinces have emerged as showing solid evidence of having major hydrocarbon deposits." World horizons were vast, with the Zapata management counting seventeen countries with offshore oil or gas production already underway, and fifty other countries exploring or drilling for oil. Zapata's ability to operate in such places as the North Sea, Australia, and Kuwait is indicative not just of a very close relationship between Zapata and the seven sisters oil cartel, but of an excellent entree with the inner sanctum of that cartel, the Royal Dutch Shell-British Petroleum nexus, which exercised the decisive influence on the policies and contingency planning of the cartel. Royal Dutch Shell was for example the company that availed itself of the services of Lord Victor Rothschild for its future planning.

The 1966 Zapata Annual report estimated that about 50% of the company's profits came from US operations, 20% from the North Sea, 10% from the Middle East, 10% from Australia, and 10% from a subsidiary called Williams-McWilliams, which carried on dredging operations in the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi River. One can imagine that George Bush had to some degree participated in the negotiations for these operations. During his years with Zapata, it would thus appear that he had been able to extend the scope of his activity from the Cuban-Caribbean arena to the Persian Gulf, other parts of the Arab world, Brazil, Scandinavia, and the Adriatic waters between Italy and Yugoslavia.

As the 1966 Congressional election approached, Bush was optimistic about his chances of finally getting elected. This time, instead of swimming against the tide of the Goldwater cataclysm, Bush would be favored by the classic mid-term election reflex which almost always helps the Congressional candidates of the party out of power. And LBJ in the White House was vulnerable on a number of points, from the escalation of the Viet Nam war to stagflation. The designer gerrymandering of the new Houston congressional district had functioned perfectly, and so had his demagogic shift towards the "vital center" of moderate conservatism. Because the district was newly drawn, there would be no well-known incumbent to contend with. And now, by one of the convenient coincidences that seem to be strewn through Bush's life , the only obstacle between him and election was a troglodyte Democratic conservative of an ugly and vindictive type, the sort of figure who would make even Bush look reasonable.

The Democrat in question was Frank Briscoe, a former district attorney. According to the Texas Observer, "Frank Briscoe was one of the most vicious prosecutors in Houston's history. He actually maintained a 'ten most wanted convictions list' by which he kept the public advised of how much luck he had getting convictions against his chosen defendants then being held in custody. Now, as a candidate for Congress, Briscoe is running red-eyed for the right-wing in Houston. He is anti-Democratic,; anti-civil rights; anti-foreign aid; anti-war on poverty. The fact that he calls himself a Democrat is utterly irrelevant." By contrast, from the point of view of the Texas Observer, "His opponent, George Bush, is a conservative man. He favors the war in Vietnam; he was for Goldwater, although probably reluctantly; he is nobody's firebrand. Yet Bush is simply civilized in race relations, and he is now openly rejecting the support of the John Birch Society. This is one case where electing a Republican to Congress would help preserve the two-party balance of the country and at the same time spare Texas the embarrassment" of having somebody like Briscoe go to Washington. [fn 5] Bush's ideological face-lifting was working. "I want conservatism to be sensitive and dynamic, not scared and reactionary," Bush told the Wall Street Journal.

Briscoe appears in retrospect as a candidate made to order for Bush's new moderate profile, and there are indications that is just what he was. Sources in Houston recall that in 1966 there was another Democratic candidate for the new Congressional seat, a moderate and attractive Democrat named Wildenthal. These sources say that Bush's backers provided large-scale financial support for Briscoe in the Democratic primary campaign, with the result that Wildenthal lost out to Briscoe, setting up the race that Bush found to his advantage. A designer district was not enough for George; he also required a designer opponent if he was to prevail-- a fact which may be relevant to the final evaluation of what happened in 1988.

One of the key points of differentiation between Bush and Briscoe was on race. The district had about 15% black population, but making some inroads here among registered Democrats would be of decisive importance for the GOP side. Bush made sure that he was seen sponsoring a black baseball team, and talked a lot about his work for the United Negro College Fund when he had been at Yale. He told the press that "black power" agitators were not a problem among the more responsible blacks in Houston "I think the day is past," Bush noted, "when we can afford to have a lily white district. I will not attempt to appeal to the white backlash. I am in step with the 1960's." Bush even took up a position in the Office of Economic Opportunity anti-poverty apparatus in the city. He supported Project Head Start. By contrast, Briscoe "accused" Bush of courting black support, and reminded Bush that other Texas Congressmen had been voting against civil rights legislation when it came up in Congress. Briscoe had antagonized parts of the black community by his relentless pursuit of the death penalty in cases involving black capital defendants. According to the New York Times, "Negro leaders have mounted a quiet campaign to get Negroes to vote for [Bush]."

Briscoe's campaign ads stressed that he was a right-winger and a Texan, and accused Bush of being "the darling of the Lindsey [sic]- Javits crowd," endorsed by labor unions, liberal professors, liberal Republicans and liberal syndicated columnists. Briscoe was proud of his endorsements from Gov. John Connally and the Conservative Action Committee, a local right-wing group. One endorsement for Bush that caused Briuscoe some difficulty was that of Bush mentor Richard M. Nixon. By 1966, Nixon was on the comeback trail, having withstood the virtual nervous breakdown he had undergone after losing his bid for the governorship of California in 1962. Nixon was now in the course of assembling the delegates that would give him the GOP presidential nomination in Miami in 1968. Nixon came to Houston and made campaign appearances for Bush, as he had in 1964.

Bush had brought in a new group of handlers and image-mongers for this 1966 race. His campaign manager was Jim Allison from Midland. Harry Treleaven was brought in to design Bush's propaganda.

Treleaven had been working at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency in New York City, but he took a leave of absence from J. Walter to come to work for Bush in Texas. At J. Walter Thompson, Treleaven had sold the products of Pan American, RCA, Ford, and Lark cigarettes. He was attracted to Bush because he had plenty of money and was willing to spend it liberally. After the campaign was over, Treleaven wrote a long memo about what he had done. He called it "Upset: The Story of a Modern Political Campaign." One of the basic points in Treleaven's selling of Bush was that issues would play no role. "Most national issues today are so complicated, so difficult to understand, and have opinions on that they either intimidate or, more often, bore the average voter...Few politicians recognize this fact." In his memo, Treleaven describes how he walked around Houston in the hot August of 1966 and asked people what they thought of George Bush. He found that many considered Bush to be "an extremely likeable person," but that "there was a haziness about exactly where he stood politically."

For Treleaven, this was an ideal situation. "There'll be few opportunities for logical persuasion, which is all right-- because probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." Treleaven's approach was that "politicians are celebrities." Treleaven put 85% of Bush's hefty campaign budget into advertising, and 59% of that was for television. Newspaper ad got 3%. Treleaven knew that Bush was behind in the polls. "We can turn this into an advantage," he wrote, "by creating a 'fighting underdog ' image. Bush must convince voters that he really wants to be elected and is working hard to earn their vote. People sympathize with a man who tries hard: they are also flattered that anyone would really exert himself to get their vote. Bush, therefore, must be shown as a man who's working his heart out to win."

As Joe McGinnis summed up the television ads that resulted: "Over and over, on every television set in Houston, George Bush was seen with his coat slung over a shoulder; his sleeves rolled up; walking the streets of his district; grinning, gripping, sweating, letting the voter know he cared. About what, was never made clear." [fn 7]

Coached by these professional spin doctors, Bush was acting as mainstream, fair, and conciliatory as could be. In an exchange with Briscoe in the Houston Chronicle a few days before the election, he came out for "a man's right to join a union and his right to strike, but I additionally would favor fair legislation to see that no strike can cripple this nation and endanger the general welfare." But he was still for the Texas right to work law. Bush supported LBJ's "present Vietnam position.. I would like to see an All -Asian Conference convened to attempt to settle this horrible war. The Republican leadership, President Johnson, and Secretary Rusk and almost all but the real 'doves' endorse this." Bush was against "sweeping gun control." Briscoe wanted to cut "extravagant domestic spending," and thought that money might be found by forcing France and the USSR to finally pay up their war debts from the two world wars!

When it came to urban renewal, Bush spoke up for the Charles Percy National Home Ownership Foundation, which carried the name of a leading liberal Republican senator. Bush wanted to place the federal emphasis on such things as "rehabilitating old homes." "I favor the concept of local option on urban renewal. Let the people decide," he said, with a slight nod in the direction of the emerging New Left.

In Bush's campaign ads he invited the voters to "take a couple of minutes and see if you don't agree with me on six important points," including Vietnam, inflation, civil disobedience, jobs, voting rights, and "extremism" (Bush was against the far right and the far left). And there was George, billed as "successful businessman...civic leader...world traveler..war hero," bareheaded in a white shirt and tie, with his jacket slung over his shoulder in the post-Kennedy fashion.

In the context of a pro-GOP trend that brought 59 freshman Republican Congressmen into the House, the biggest influx in two decades, Bush's calculated approach worked. Bush got about 35% of the black vote, 44% of the usually yellow-dog Democrat rural vote, and 70% in the exclusive River Oaks suburb. Still, his margin was not large: Bush got 58% of the votes in the district. Bob Gray, the candidate of the Constitution Party, got less than 1%. Despite the role of black voters in his narrow victory, Bush could not refrain from whining. "If there was a disappointing aspect in the vote, it was my being swamped in the black precincts, despite our making an all-out effort to attract black voters. It was both puzzling and frustrating," Bush observed in his 1987 campaign autobiography. [fn 6] After all, Bush complained, he had put the GOP's funds in a black-owned bank when he was party chairman; he had opened a party office with full-time staff near Texas Southern a black college; he had worked closely with Bill Trent of the United Negro College Fund, all with scant payoff as Bush saw it. Many black voters had not been prepared to reward Bush's noblesse oblige and that threw him into a rage state, whether or not his thyroid was already working overtime in 1966.

When Bush got to Washington in January, 1967, the Brown Brothers, Harriman networks delivered: Bush became the first freshman member of the House of either party to be given a seat on the Ways and Means Committee since 1904. And he did this, it must be recalled, as a member of the minority party, and in an era when the freshman Congressman was supposed to be seen and not heard. The Ways and Means Committee in those years was still a real center of power, one of the most strategic points in the House along with the Rules Committee and a few others. By Constitutional provision, all tax legislation had to originate in the House of Representatives, and given the traditions of committee organization, all tax bills had to originate in the Ways and Means Committee. In addition to the national importance of such a committee assignment, Ways and Means oversaw the legislation impacting such vital Texas and district concerns as oil and gas depletion allowances, and the like.

Later writers have marveled at Bush's achievement in getting a seat on Ways and Means. For John R. Knaggs, this reflected "the great potential national Republicans held for George Bush." The Houston Chronicle, which had supported Briscoe in the election, found that with this appointment "the GOP was able to point up to the state one benefit of a two-party system." [fn 8]

In this case, unlike so many others, we are able to establish how the invisible hand of Skull and Bones actually worked to procure Bush this important political plum. This is due to the indiscretion of the man who was chairman of Ways and Means for many years, Democratic Congressman Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas. Mills was hounded out of office because of an alcoholism problem, and later found work as an attorney for a tax law firm. Asked about the Bush appointment to the committee he controlled back in 1967, Mills said: "I put him on. I got a phone call from his father telling me how much it mattered to him. I told him I was a Democrat and the Republicans had to decide; and he said the Republicans would do it if I just asked Jerry Ford." Mills said that he had asked Ford and John W. Byrnes of Wisconsin, who was the ranking Republican on Ways and Means, and Bush was in, thanks once again to Daddy Warbucks, Prescott Bush. [fn 9]

Wilbur Mills may have let himself in for a lot of trouble in later years by not always treating George with due respect. Because of Bush's obsession with birth control for the lower orders, Mills gave Bush the nickname "Rubbers," which stuck with him during his years in Congress. [fn 10] Poppy Bush was not amused. One day Mills might ponder in retrospect, as so many others have, on Bush's vindictiveness.

On one occasion Mills prolonged the questioning of Walter Reuther of the UAW, who was appearing as a witness in hearings before the committee, to let George Bush get a few questions in and look good for the home-town press. Mills' career in public life was destroyed during the Ford Presidency when he was found cavorting drunk in public with the dancer Fanny Foxe. This came in an era when the Church and Pike committees of Congress had been pounding the CIA, and when George Bush was about to take over as CIA Director. The fall of Wilbur Mills, together with the Koreagate scandal of alleged Congressional influence peddling, appeared at the time as retaliation designed to knock the Congress on the defensive.

George and Barbara claim to have bought a home on Hillbrook Lane in northwest Washington sight unseen over the telephone from Sen. Milward Simpson of Wyoming, the father of Sen. Al Simpson, the current GOP minority whip. Later the family moved to Palisade Lane.

Bush's Congressional office in the Longworth Building was run by administrative assistant Rose Zamaria, with Pete Roussel acting as the Congressman's press secretary, and Jim Allison and Aleene Smith also on the staff. Bush says that his closest cronies in those day included Bill Steiger of Wisconsin, Rep. Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi, liberal Republican Barber Conable of New York (later attacked as "Barbarian Cannibal" in some developing countries when he was President of the World Bank in the Reagan-Bush years), Tom Kleppe of North Dakota and John Paul Hammerschmidt of Arkansas (a long-term ally).

In January, 1968, LBJ delivered his State of the Union message to Congress, even as the Viet Cong's Tet offensive was making a shambles of his Vietnam war policy. The Republican reply came in a series of short statements by former President Eisenhower, House Minority leader Jerry Ford, Rep. Melvin Laird, Senator Howard Baker, and other members of Congress. Another tribute to the efforts of the Prescott Bush-Skull and Bones networks was the fact that amid this parade of Republican worthies there appeared, with tense jaw and fist clenched to pound on the table, Rep. George Bush.

The Johnson Administration had claimed that austerity measures were not necessary during the time that the war in Vietnam was being prosecuted. LBJ had promised the people "guns and butter," but now the economy was beginning to go into decline. Bush's overall public rhetorical stance during these years was to demand that the Democratic administration impose specific austerity measures and replace big- spending programs with appropriate deficit-cutting rigor. Here is what Bush told a nationwide network television audience on Jan. 23, 1968:

"The nation faces this year just as it did last a tremendous deficit in the Federal budget, but in the President's message there was no sense of sacrifice on the part of the Government, no assignment of priorities, no hint of the need to put first things first. And this reckless policy has imposed the cruel tax of rising prices on the people, pushed interest rates to their highest levels in 100 years, sharply reduced the rate of real economic growth and saddled every man and woman and child in American with the largest tax burden in our history.

"And what does the President say? He says we must pay still more taxes and he proposes drastic restrictions on the rights of Americans to invest and travel abroad. If the President wants to control inflation, he's got to cut back on Federal spending and the best way, the best way to stop the gold drain is to live within our means in this country." [fn 11]

Those who wanted to read Bush's lips at a distance back in those days found that he was indeed committed to a kind of austerity. In May of 1968, with Johnson already a lame duck, the Ways and Means Committee approved what was dubbed on Capitol Hill the "10-8-4" deficit control package. This mandated a tax increase of $10 billion per year, coupled with a $4 billion cut in expenditures. Bush joined with four Ways and Means Republicans (the others were Conable, Schneebeli, and Battin) to approve the measure. [fn 12]

But the principal focus of Bush's activity during his tenure in the House of Representatives centered on a project that was much more sinister and far-reaching than the mere imposition of budget austerity, destructive as that demand was at the time. With a will informed by the ideas about population, race, and economic development that we have seen current in Prescott Bush's circles at Brown Brothers, Harriman, George Bush would now become a protagonist of a series of institutional changes which would contribute to that overall degradation of the cultural paradigm of western civilization which was emergent at the end of the 1960's.

The backdrop for this transformation in the cultural matrix of North America, western Europe, and the rest of the world was the end of the global postwar economic boom that had begun at the end of the 1940's. The expansion of the US economy had been exhausted by the time of the 1958 recession, although it had been revived to some degree by the impulse imparted to the space program by the Kennedy Administration. But even before the Apollo astronauts had reached the moon, NASA was in the process of being gutted by the cost- accountants of the Johnson regime. US capital structures were supported into the sixties on the basis of a round of investments in western Europe, but the Italian and Federal German recessions of 1964 and 1966 were the signal that the postwar reconstruction boom was over. In the fall of 1967, some months after Bush had entered Congress, the terminal agony of the British pound sterling as a reserve currency had gripped the currency exchanges of the world. In the spring of 1968, the gold and dollar crisis would bring the entire world monetary system to the brink of a panic collapse. The world was beginning to experience the first paroxysms of that collapse of the 1944 Bretton Woods monetary system which would become official at Camp David on August 15, 1971, when Nixon would announce the end of the gold convertibility of the dollar and also proclaim "Phase One" of a wage and price freeze austerity for the American labor force. [fn 13]

To understand Bush's actions during these years, we must understand the highly subjective and idealogical reactions of the Anglo-American finance oligarchy to these events. As we have seen reflected in the mentality of Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush, the Anglo-American financier elite is fundamentally hostile to modern industrial-technological development and to large-scale modern urban life. The hopes of the Anglo-American elite for the postwar world were expressed in the Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of German industry and the depopulation of central Europe. These plans had proven to be untenable in the light of the Soviet threat to Europe, and the oligarchy had been obliged to accept a postwar European recovery which was very lucrative for Wall Street, brutally austere for the Germans, and which kept the Soviets at bay for the duration of the Cold War. But even within the context of the postwar boom, the Malthusian disposition of the oligarchy remained, as expressed in the accelerated looting of the former colonial sector, the raping of the oil cartel, and the sabotage of industrial and infrastructural expansion inside the US to the extent that traffic would bear. As the postwar boom showed increased signs of exhaustion at the end of the 1960's, the oligarchical elite felt that the moment had come to assert the Malthusian impulse more aggressively.

For the Anglo-American finance oligarchs, the leading problems of the world then as now could be summed up under the headings of overpopulation, especially among the non-white ethnic groups of the planet, and industrial pollution. The remedies, then as now, were to be sought in limiting population growth, or better yet reducing the existing population wherever possible, while at the same time shutting down industry. In this way the oligarchs sought to return to their bucolic and medieval dream world, and especially to a degraded and servile mass psychology agreeable to oligarchical forms of domination. For oligarchs like Bush are well aware that there are only two ways to organize human affairs, namely the republican and the oligarchical modes. The republican mode depends upon the presence of citizens-- well educated, technology-oriented, mature, and courageous people who are willing to think for themselves. Oligarchical forms function best in the presence of a culturally pessimistic, hedonist, superstitious mass of passive witnesses to the passing scene.

Thus, at the end of the 1960's, London financiers and their Wall Street counterparts made available abundant foundation funding for such projects as the Triple Revolution, which proposed the now- accomplished transition from a productive society to a post-industrial society, and the 1968 founding of the Club of Rome with its absurd "Limits to growth" hoax of a few years later, the international flagship for the Malthusian revival. What the oligarchy had in mind was not just a minor adjustment of the Zeitgeist: the greening of the western cultural paradigm made mandatory the quick erosion of the imperatives of subduing and dominating nature contained in the first book of Genesis, the demolition of the beliefs in education, science and progress which had animated the philosophy and nation building of St. Augustine, Charlemagne, the Italian Renaissance, Leibnitz, Franklin, and the American Revolution.

The implementation of this intent on the home front dictated the dismantling of a constituency-based political structure that assumed that the purpose of government was to manage economic development and equitably to distribute the fruits of material and cultural progress. This had to be replaced by an authoritarian-totalitarian regime whose main function was the imposition of austerity and sacrifices. Malthusianism at home also generated problems abroad, to which the Kissinger NSC and the Kissinger State Department were to prove themselves especially sensitive. Although the Malthusian oligarchy sought to deny that industry and population growth represented real power, they were at pains to slow demographic and industrial growth abroad, using various hollow pretexts. Alexander King, along with Aurelio Peccei one of the founders of the Club of Rome, once conceded that the real purpose of his institution was to block the demographic expansion of the non-white peoples of the world. For Prescott Bush and George Bush, the depopulation of the third world, the genocide of non-white populations, was and is a life-long and consuming obsession.

By any definition a racist like Bush might offer, the white race, or more precisely the Anglo-Saxon race, is a small and dwindling minority of humanity. Nevertheless, the compulsive imperative of the London-New York financiers is their commitment to Anglo-Saxon domination of the planet. This means that in the view of the financiers, non-whites and non-Anglo-Saxons must be prevented from multiplying inside the imperial homeland and if possible decimated, so as to avoid challenges to Anglo-Saxon financier rule. Outside US borders, the Anglo-American elite prescribes war, famine, and pestilence to cut a bloody swath through the brown, black, red and yellow races so as to reduce their military and economic potential. If possible, in the view of the oligarchs, non-white populations in areas of great oil and other strategic raw materials wealth should be wiped out completely so that these areas can be re-colonized by the Anglo-Saxon master race, who will enjoy the use of the raw materials into the future. These are the points at which we see George Bush in action during his Congressional years.

The economics of Malthus, the Club of Rome, and of Yale economist George Bush lead inexorably to world depression and an economic breakdown crisis so severe as to put the future prospects of world civilization itself into the gravest jeopardy. Bush's most fanatically held beliefs concerning Anglo-Saxon race superiority are equally bankrupt and grotesque. Human beings have no genetic-racial identity. Human beings belong to cultures, which are learned as children are reared in the home and educated in schools, but which have nothing to do with heredity or blood, as the American experience itself in its better moments most impressively documents. Indeed, there is no such thing as a race or breed among humans as these categories exist among dogs and horses. Among these animals, race or breed defines a fixed repertoire of behavior and reaction, a fixed mental disposition which rules out most changes that education might bring. Among human beings, it is just the opposite: any child of whatever color or ethnic background, if placed as an infant in a family of a different color and language, will invariably be acculturated into the civilization of the new family. This reflects the universality of the human personality beyond all distinctions of race, color, religion, culture, and nationality, and proves the thesis of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. The universality of apostolic Christianity as a world religion seeking to reach out to all ethnic groups on the planet without exception is expressed in the idea that each and every concrete human individual is very practically the living image of God, and no difference of color or "race" can change this in the slightest.

Oligarchical thinking rejects all this. Oligarchs have historically been obsessed with justifying and perpetuating the irrational and destructive domination of a feudal aristocracy, generally in the form of a titled nobility ruling through usurious banking practices, secret intelligence agencies, and militarism, at the expense of the progress of humanity. If the human personality is indeed universal, then there is no such thing as an hereditary aristocracy, and the concept of oligarchy itself is in big trouble. But feudal aristocrats, breeding horses and dogs as their status symbols, are often imbecilic enough to think that they have become authorities on human genetics.

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PART 2 OF 3

There is also a reason why American elitists like the Harrimans and the Bushes become such fanatics for eugenics and population reduction. This has to do with the position of such families as virtual parvenu upstarts within the Anglo-American hierarchy. In order to have standing in the oligarchy it is necessary to have a patent of nobility going back at the very least a century or two, with four to five hundred years being preferable. This puts families like Harriman or Bush into a virtual status frenzy. When W. Averell Harriman was a child, President Theodore Roosevelt publicly attacked his father, the railroad builder E.J. Harriman, as a robber baron and a public menace for the country. An associate of W. Averell Harriman in the State Department once recounted his impression that the younger Harriman and indeed the rest of his family had never gotten over the colossal humiliation of this incident. This interesting fact casts light on the tireless efforts of Averell's mother to buy the family status and respectability by funding eugenics research to investigate the criminal tendencies of those incorrigible lower orders and mental defectives. The Harrimans were by implication a race apart. It also helped to explain what the associate described Averell's life-long history as a compulsive liar whenever a situation emerged in which he could improve his image at the expense of others by lying.

Although perhaps impressive by American standards, George Bush's pedigree displayed its own grave weaknesses when examined within the frame of reference of the trans-Atlantic Anglo-American oligarchy of the twentieth century, and this doubtless imparted extra fanaticism to George's fanatical pursuit of racial purity in the halls of Congress.

In 1969 Bush told the House of Representatives that, unless the menace of human population growth were "recognized and made manageable, starvation, pestilence and war will solve it for us." Bush repeatedly compared population growth to a disease. [fn 9] In remarks to the House on July 30, 1969, he likened the fight against the polio virus to the crusade to reduce the world's population. Urging the federal government to step up population control efforts, he said: "We have a clear precedent: When the Salk vaccine was discovered, large-scale programs were undertaken to distribute it. I see no reason why similar programs of education and family planning assistance should not be instituted in the United States on a massive scope."

As Jessica Mathews, vice-president of one of Washington's most influential zero-growth outfits, the World Resources Institute, later wrote of Bush in those years: "In the 1960s and '70s, Bush had not only embraced the cause of domestic and international family planning, he had aggressively sought to be its champion.... As a member of the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bush shepherded the first major breakthrough in domestic family planning legislation in 1967," and "later co -authored the legislation commonly known as Title X, which created the first federal family planning program...."

"On the international front," Mathews wrote, Bush "recommended that the U.S. support the United Nations population fund.... He urged, in the strongest words, that the U.S. and European countries make modern contraceptives available "on a massive scale," to all those around the world who wanted them.

Bush belonged to a small group of congressmen who successfully conspired to force a profound shift in the official U.S. attitude and policy toward population expansion. Embracing the "limits to growth" ideology with a vengeance, Bush and his coterie, which included such ultraliberal Democrats as then- Senator Walter Mondale (Minn.) and Rep. James Scheuer (N.Y.), labored to enact legislation which institutionalized population control as U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Bush began his Malthusian activism in the House in 1968, which was the year in which Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical "Humanae Vitae," which contained a prophetic warning of the danger of coercion by governments for the purpose of population control. The Pope wrote: "Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would be placed in the hands of those public authorities who place no heed of moral exigencies.... Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their people, the method of contraception which they judged to be most efficacious?" For poorer countries with a high population rate, the encyclical identified the only rational and humane policy: "No solution to these difficulties is acceptable which does violence to man's essential dignity....The only possible solution ... is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society...."

This was a direct challenge to the cultural paradigm transformation which Bush and other exponents of the oligarchical world outlook were promoting. Not for the first time nor for the last time, Bush issued a direct attack on the Holy See. Just days after Humanae Vitae was issued, Bush declared: "I have decided to give my vigorous support for population control in both the United States and the world." He also lashed out at the Pope. "For those of us who who feel so strongly on this issue, the recent encyclical was most discouraging."

During his four years in Congress, Bush not only introduced key pieces of legislation to enforce population control both at home and abroad. He also continuously introduced into the congressional debate reams of propaganda about the threat of population growth and the inferiority of blacks, and he set up a special Republican task force which functioned as a forum for the most rabid Malthusian ideologues.

"Bush was really out front on the population issue," a population- control activist recently said of this period of 1967-71. "He was saying things that even we were reluctant to talk about publicly."

Bush's open public advocacy of government measures tending towards zero population growth was a radical departure from the policies built into the federal bureaucracy up until that time. The climate of opinion just a few years earlier, in December 1959, is illustrated by the comments of President Eisenhower, who had said, "birth control is not our business. I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity ... or responsibility."

As a congressman, Bush played an absolutely pivotal role in this shift. Shortly after arriving in Washington, he teamed up with fellow Republican Herman Schneebeli to offer a series of amendments to the Social Security Act to place priority emphasis on what was euphemistically called "family planning services." The avowed goal was to reduce the number of children born to women on welfare.

Bush's and Schneebeli's amendments reflected the Malthusian- genocidalist views of Dr. Alan Guttmacher, then president of Planned Parenthood, and a protege of its founder, Margaret Sanger. In the years before the grisly outcome of the Nazi cult of race science and eugenics had inhibited public calls for defense of the "gene pool," Sanger had demanded the weeding out of the "unfit" and the "inferior races," and had campaigned vigorously for sterilization, infanticide and abortion, in the name of "race betterment."

Although Planned Parenthood was forced during the fascist era and immediately thereafter to tone down Sanger's racist rhetoric from "race betterment" to "family planning" for the benefit of the poor and blacks, the organization's basic goal of curbing the population growth rate among "undesirables" never really changed. Bush publicly asserted that he agreed "1,000 percent" with Planned Parenthood.

During hearings on the Social Security amendments, Bush and witness Alan Guttmacher had the following colloquy: Bush: Is there any [opposition to Planned Parenthood] from any other organizations or groups, civil rights groups?

Guttmacher: We do have problems. We are in a sensitive area in regard particularly to the Negro. There are some elements in the Negro group that feel we are trying to keep down the numbers. We are very sensitive to this. We have a community relations department headed by a most capable Negro social worker to try to handle that part of the problem. This does, of course, cause us a good bit of concern.

Bush: I appreciate that. For the record, I would like to say I am 1,000 percent in accord with the goals of your organization. I think perhaps more than any other type of organization you can do more in the field of poverty and mental health and everything else than any other group that I can think of. I commend you.

Guttmacher [to Bush]: May I use you as a public speaker?

Like his father before him, Bush supported Planned Parenthood at every opportunity. Time after time, he rose on the floor of the House to praise Planned Parenthood's work. In 1967, Bush called for "having the government agencies work even more closely with going private agencies such as Planned Parenthood." A year later, he urged those interested in "advancing the cause of family planning," to "call your local Planned Parenthood Center" to offer "help and support."

The Bush-Schneebeli amendments were aimed at reducing the number of children born to blacks and poor whites. The legislation required all welfare recipients, including mothers of young children, to seek work, and barred increases in federal aid to states where the proportion of dependent children on welfare increased.

Reducing the welfare rolls was a prime Bush concern. He frequently motivated his population-control crusade with thinly veiled appeals to Willie Horton-style racism. Talking about the rise in the welfare rolls in a July 1968 statement, Bush lamented that "our national welfare costs are rising phenomenally." Worse, he warned, there were far too many children being born to welfare mothers: "The fastest-growing part of the relief rolls everywhere is aid for dependent children--AFDC. At the end of the 1968 fiscal year, a little over $2 billion will be spent for AFDC, but by fiscal 1972 this will increase by over 75 percent."

Bush emphasized that more children are born into non-white poor families than to white ones. Blacks must recognize, he said, "that they cannot hope to acquire a larger share of American prosperity without cutting down on births...."

Forcing mothers on welfare to work was believed to be an effective means of reducing the number of black children born, and Bush sponsored a number of measures to do just that. In 1970, he helped lead the fight on the Hill for President Nixon's notorious welfare bill, the Family Assistance Program, known as FAP. Billed as a boon to the poor because it provided an income floor, the measure called on every able-bodied welfare recipient, except mothers with children under six, to take a job . This soon became known as Nixon's "workfare" slave-labor bill. Monetarist theoreticians of economic austerity were quick to see that forced labor by welfare recipients could be used to break the unions where they existed, while lowering wages and worsening working conditions for the entire labor force. Welfare recipients could even be hired as scabs to replace workers being paid according to normal pay scales. Those workers, after they had been fired, would themselves end up destitute and on welfare, and could then be forced to take workfare for even lower wages than those who had been on welfare at the outset of the process. This was known as "recycling."

Critics of the Nixon workfare bill pointed out that it contained no minimum standards regarding the kinds of jobs or the level of wages which would be forced upon welfare recipients, and that it contradicted the original purpose of welfare, which was to allow mothers to stay home with their children. Further, it would set up a pool of virtual slave- labor, which could be used to replace workers earning higher wages.

But Bush thought these tough measures were exactly what the explosion of the welfare rolls demanded. During House debate on the measure April 15, 1970, Bush said he favored FAP because it would force the lazy to work: "The family assistance plan ... is oriented toward work," he said. "The present federal-state welfare system encourages idleness by making it more profitable to be on welfare than to work, and provides no method by which the State may limit the number of individuals added to the rolls."

Bush had only "one major worry, and that is that the work incentive provisions will not be enforced.... it is essential that the program be administered as visualized by the Ways and Means Committee; namely, if an individual does not work, he will not receive funds." The Manchester School's Iron Law of Wages as expounded by George Bush, self -styled expert in the dismal science..

In 1967, Bush joined with Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.), to successfully sponsor legislation that removed prohibitions against mailing and importing contraceptive devices. More than opening the door to French-made condoms, Bush's goal here was a kind of ideological success de scandale. The zero- growth lobby deemed this a major breakthrough in making the paraphernalia for domestic population control accessible.

In rapid succession, Bush introduced legislation to create a National Center for Population and Family Planning and Welfare, and to redesignate the Department of the Interior as the Department of Resources, Environment and Population.

On the foreign policy front, he helped shift U.S. foreign assistance away from funding development projects to grapple with the problem of hunger in the world, to underwriting population control. "I propose that we totally revamp our foreign aid program to give primary emphasis to population control," he stated in the summer of 1968, adding: "In my opinion, we have made a mistake in our foreign aid by concentrating on building huge steel mills and concrete plants in underdeveloped nations...."

One of Bush's more important initiatives on the domestic side was his sponsorship of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, brainchild of Sen. Joseph Tydings of Maryland. Signed into law by President Nixon on December 24, 1970, the Tydings-Bush bill drastically increased the federal financial commitment to population control, authorizing an initial $382 million for family planning sevices, population research, population education and information through 1973. Much of this money was funneled through private institutions, particularly local clinics run by Bush's beloved Planned Parenthood. The Tydings-Bush measure mandated the notorious Title X, which explicitly provided "family planning assistance" to the poor. Bush and his zero-growth cohorts talked constantly about the importance of disseminating birth control to the poor. They claimed that there were over 5 million poor women who wanted to limit their families, but could not afford to do so.

On October 23, 1969, Bush praised the Office of Economic Opportunity for carrying out some of the "most successful" family planning projects, and said he was "pleased" that the Nixon administration "is giving them additional financial muscle by increasing their funds 50 percent--from $15 million to $22 million."

This increased effort he attributed to the Nixon administration's "goal to reach in the next five years the 5 million women in need of these services"--all of them poor, many of them from racial or ethnic minorities. He added: "One needs only to look quickly at the report prepared by the Planned Parenthood-World Population Research Department to see how ineffective federal, state, and local governments have been in providing such necessary services. There is certainly nothing new about the fact that unwanted pregnancies of our poor and near-poor women keep the incidence of infant mortality and mental retardation in America at one of the highest levels of all the developed countries."

The rates of infant mortality and mental retardation Bush was so concerned about, could have been significantly reduced, had the government provided sufficient financing to pre-natal care, nutrition, and other factors contributing to the health of infants and children. On the same day he signed the Tydings-Bush bill, Nixon vetoed--with Bush's support- -legislation that would have set up a three-year, $225 million program to train family doctors.

Bush seemed to be convinced that mental retardation, in particular, was a matter of heredity. The eugenicists of the 1920's had spun their pseudoscientific theories around "hereditary feeble- mindedness," and claimed that the "Kallikaks and the Jukes" by reproducing successive "feeble-minded" generations had cost New York state tens of millions of dollars over decades. But what about learning disorders like dyslexia, which has been known to afflict oligarchical families Bush would consider wealthy, well-bred, and able? Nelson Rockefeller, Bush's friend Nick Brady, and Bush's own son Neal have suffered from dyslexia, a reading disorder. But these oligarchs are not likely to fall victim to the involuntary sterilization as "mental defectives" which they wish to inflict on those they term the lower orders.

In introducing the House version of the Tydings bill on behalf of himself and Bush, Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.) ranted that while middle-class women "have been limiting the number of offspring for years ... women of low-income families" did not. "If poverty and family size are so closely related we ask, `Why don't poor women stop having babies?'" The Bush-Tydings bill took a giant step toward forcing them to do so.

Among Bush's most important contributions to the neo-Malthusian cause while in Congress was his role in the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. The task force, which Bush helped found and then chaired, churned out a steady stream of propaganda claiming that the world was already seriously overpopulated; that there was a fixed limit to natural resources and that this limit was rapidly being reached; and that the environment and natural species were being sacrificed to human progress. Bush's task force sought to accredit the idea that the human race was being "down bred," or reduced in genetic quality by the population growth among blacks and other non-white and hence allegedly inferior races at a time when the Anglo- Saxons were hardly able to prevent their numbers from shrinking.

Comprised of over 20 Republican congressmen, Bush's Task Force was a kind of Malthusian vanguard organization which heard testimony from assorted "race scientists, sponsored legislation and otherwise propagandized the zero- growth outlook. In its 50-odd hearings during these years, the task force provided a public forum to nearly every well-known zero-growth fanatic, from Paul Ehrlich, founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), to race scientist William Shockley to the key zero-growth advocates infesting the federal bureaucracy.

Giving a prestigious Congressional platform to a discredited racist charlatan like William Shockley in the year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King points up the arrogance of Bush's commitment to eugenics. Shockley, like his co-thinker Arthur Jensen, had caused a furor during the 1960's by advancing his thesis, already repeatedly disproven, that blacks were genetically inferior to whites in cognitive faculties and intelligence. In the same year in which Bush invited him to appear before the GOP task force, Shockley had written: "Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging dysgenics--retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged...We fear that 'fatuous beliefs' in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all segments of society."

To halt what he saw as pervasive down breeding of the quality of the US gene pool, Shockley advocated a program of mass sterilization of the unfit and mentally defective which he called his "Bonus Sterilization Plan." Money bonuses for allowing oneself to be sterilized would be paid to any person not paying income tax who had a genetic deficiency or chronic disease, such as diabetes or epilepsy, or who could be shown to be a drug addict. "If [the government paid] a bonus rate of $1,000 for each point below 100 IQ, $30,000 put in trust for some 70 IQ moron of 20- child potential, it might return $250,000 to taxpayers in reduced cost of mental retardation care, " Shockley said.

The special target of Shockley's prescriptions for mass sterilizations were blacks, whom he saw as reproducing too fast. "If those blacks with the least amount of Caucasian genes are in fact the most prolific and the least intelligent, then genetic enslavement will be the destiny of their next generation," he wrote. Looking at the recent past, Shockley said in 1967: "The lesson to be drawn from Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that eugenics is intolerable."

As for Paul Ehrlich, his program for genocide included a call to he US government to prepare "the addition of...mass sterilization agents" to the US food and water supply, and a "tough foreign policy" including termination of food aid to starving nations. As radical as Ehrlich might have sounded then, this latter point has become a staple of foreign policy under the Bush Administration.

On July 24, 1969, the task force heard from Gen. William Draper, then national chairman of the Population Crisis Committee, and a close friend of Bush's father, Prescott. According to Bush' resume of his family friend's testimony, Draper warned that the population explosion was like a "rising tide," and asserted that "our strivings for the individual good will become a scourge to the community unless we use our God- given brain power to bring back a balance between the birth rate and the death rate." Draper lashed out at the Catholic Church, charging that its opposition to contraception and sterilization was frustrating population -control efforts in Latin America.

A week later, Bush invited Oscar Harkavy, chief of the Ford Foundation's population program, to testify. In summarizing Harkavy's remarks for the August 4 Congressional Record, Bush commented: "The population explosion is commonly recognized as one of the most serious problems now facing the nation and the world. Mr. Harkavy suggested, therefore, that we more adequately fund population research. It seems inconsistent that cancer research funds total $250-275 million annually, more than eight times the amount spent on reproductive biology research."

In reporting on testimony by Dr. William McElroy of the National Science Foundation, Bush stressed that "One of the crises the world will face as a result of present population growth rates is that, assuming the world population increases 2 percent annually, urban population will increase by 6 percent, and ghetto population will increase by 12 percent."

In February 1969, Bush and other members proposed legislation to establish a Select Joint Committee on Population and Family Planning, that would, Bush said, "seek to focus national attention on the domestic and foreign need for family planning.' We need to make population and family planning household words," Bush told his House colleagues. "We need to take the sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather, are using it as a political steppingstone." "A thorough investigation into birth control and a collection of data which would give the Congress the criteria to determine the effectiveness of its programs must come swiftly to stave off the number of future mouths which will feed on an ever -decreasing proportion of food," Bush continued. "We need an emphasis on this critical problem... we need a massive program in Congress with hearings to emphasize the problem, and earmarked appropriations to do something about it. We need massive cooperation from the White House like we have never had before and we need a determination by the executive branch that these funds will be spent as earmarked."

On August 6, 1969, Bush's GOP task force introduced a bill to create a Commission on Population and the American Future which, Bush said, would "allow the leadership of this country to properly establish criteria which can be the basis for a national policy on population." The move came in response to President Nixon's call of July 18 to create a blue-ribbon commission to draft a U.S. population policy. Bush was triumphant over this development, having repeatedly urged such a step at various points in the preceding few years. On July 21, he made a statement on the floor of the House to "commend the President" for his action. "We now know," he intoned, "that the fantastic rate of population growth we have witnessed these past 20 years continues with no letup in sight. If this growth rate is not checked now-- in this next decade--we face a danger that is as defenseless as nuclear war."

Headed by John D. Rockefeller III, the commission represented a radical, government-sanctioned attack on human life. Its final report, issued in 1972, asserted that "the time has come to challenge the tradition that population growth is desirable: What was unintended may turn out to be unwanted, in the society as in the family." Not only did the commission demand an end to population growth and economic progress, it also attacked the foundations of Western civilization by insisting that man's reason had become a major impediment to right living. "Mass urban industrialism is based on science and technology, efficiency, acquisition, and domination through rationality," raved the commission's report. "The exercise of these same values now contain the potential for the destruction of our humanity. Man is losing that balance with nature which is an essential condition of human existence."

The commission's principal conclusion was that "there are no substantial benefits to be gained from continued population growth," Chairman Rockefeller explained to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The commission made a host of recommendations to curb both population expansion and economic growth. These included: liberalizing laws restricting abortion and sterilization; having the government fund abortions; and providing birth control to teenagers. The commission had a profound impact on American attitudes toward the population issue, and helped accelerate the plunge into outright genocide. Commission Executive director Charles Westoff wrote in 1975 that the group "represented an important effort by an advanced country to develop a national population policy--the basic thrust of which was to slow growth in order to maximize the "quality of life." The collapse of the traditional family-centered form of society during the 1970's and 1990's was but one consequence of such recommendations. It also is widely acknowledged that the commission Bush fought so long and so hard to create broke down the last barriers to legalized abortion on demand. Indeed, just one year after the commission's final report was issued, the Supreme Court delivered the Roe v. Wade decision which did just that.

Aware that many blacks and other minorities had noticed that the population control movement was a genocide program aimed at reducing their numbers, the commission went out of its way to cover its real intent by stipulating that all races should cut back on their birth rates. But the racist animus of their conclusions could not be hidden. Commission Executive Director Westoff, who owed his job and his funding to Bush gave a hint of this in a book he had written in 1966, before joining the commission staff, which was entitled From Now to Zero, and in which he bemoaned the fact that the black fertility rate was so much higher than the white.

The population control or zero population growth movement which grew rapidly in the late 1960s thanks to free media exposure and foundation grants for a stream of pseudoscientific propaganda about the alleged "population bomb" and the "limits to growth," was a continuation of the old prewar protofascist eugenics movement, which had been forced to go into temporary eclipse when the world recoiled in horror at the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. By the mid-1960s, the same old crackpot eugenicists had resurrected themselves as the population- control and environmentalist movement. Planned Parenthood was a perfect example of the transmogrification. Now, instead of demanding the sterilization of the inferior races, the newly packaged eugenicists talked about the population bomb, and giving the poor "equal access" to birth control, and "freedom of choice." But nothing had substantively changed--including the use of coercion. While Bush and other advocates of government "family planning" programs insisted these were strictly voluntary, the reality was far different. By the mid-1970s, the number of involuntary sterilizations carried out by programs which Bush helped bring into being, had reached huge proportions. Within the black and minority communities, where most of the sterilizations were being done, protests arose which culminated in federal litigation as a suit was brought.

In his 1974 ruling on this suit, Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell found that, "Over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs. Although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis," Judge Gesell wrote, "there is uncontroverted evidence ... that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization." Gesell concluded from the evidence that the "dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky."

As we have seen, George Bush inherited his obsession with population control and racial "down breeding" from his father, Prescott, who staunchly supported Planned Parenthood dating back at least to the 1940s. In fact, Prescott's affiliation with Margaret Sanger's organization cost him the Senate race in 1950, a defeat his son has always blamed on the Catholic Church, and which is at the root of George's lifelong vendetta against the Papacy.

Prescott's 1950 defeat still rankled, as shown by Bush's extraordinary gesture in evoking it during testimony he gave on the other side of Capitol Hill before Senator Gruening's subcommittee of the Senate Government Operations Committee on November 2, 1967. Bush's vengeful tirade is worth quoting at length:

"I get the felling that it is a little less unfashionable to be in favor of birth control and planned parenthood today than it used to be. If you will excuse one personal reference here: My father, when he ran for the US Senate in 1950, was defeated by 600 or 700 votes. On the steps of several Catholic Churches in Connecticut, the Sunday before the election, people stood there passing out pamphlets saying, 'Listen to what this commentator has to say tonight. Listen to what this commentator has to say.' That night on the radio, the commentator came on and said, "Of interest to voters in Connecticut, Prescott Bush is head of the Planned Parenthood Birth Control League,' or something like this. Well, he lost by about 600 votes and there are some us who feel that this had something to do with it. I do not think that anybody can get away with that type of thing any more."

The Harriman family sponsored the creation of the eugenics movement in the United States, which successfully campaigned for the mass sterilization of the "feeble-minded" and "racially inferior" during the 1920s--practices later copied, not originated, by the Nazis. As part of this campaign, the Harrimans helped organize a series of international eugenics conferences. At the 1932 conference, held at the Museum of Natural History in New York, the guest of honor was none other than Dr. Ernst Rudin, the head of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, who, just a few years later, drafted the Nazi miscegenation laws against the Jews, gypsies, and Slavs.

Among the Americans who rubbed shoulders with Rudin at the 1932 conference was Gen. William Draper, a New York investment banker and close personal friend of Prescott Bush, who became one of the most influential crusaders for radical population control measures. He campaigned endlessly for zero population growth, and praised the Chinese Communists for their "innovative" methods of achieving that goal. Draper's most influential outlet was the Population Crisis Committee (PCC)-Draper Fund, set up in 1965 by Hugh Moore, who had taken over the Human Betterment Association, a leading eugenics outfit, in 1937, renaming it the Association for Voluntary Sterilization.

In 1967-68, a PCC-Draper Fund offshoot, the Campaign to Check the Population Explosion, ran a nationwide advertising campaign hyping the population explosion fraud, and attacking those--particularly at the Vatican--who stood in the way of radical population control.

In a 1971 article, Draper likened the developing nations to an "animal reserve,'' where, when the animals become too numerous, the park rangers "arbitrarily reduce one or another species as necessary to preserve the balanced environment for all other animals. "But who will be the park ranger for the human race?,'' he asked. "Who will cull out the surplus in this country or that country when the pressure of too many people and too few resources increases beyond endurance? Will the death-dealing Horsemen of the Apocalypse--war in its modern nuclear dress, hunger haunting half the human race, and disease--will the gaunt and forbidding Horsemen become Park Ranger for the two-legged animal called man?''

Draper collaborated closely with George Bush during the latter's congressional career. As noted above, Bush invited Draper to testify to his Task Force on Earth Resources and Population; reportedly, Draper helped draft the Bush-Tydings bill.

Bush felt an overwhelming affinity for the bestial and degraded image of man reflected in the raving statements of Draper. In September 1969, Bush gave a glowing tribute to Draper that was published in the cf2 Congressional Record cf1 . "I wish to pay tribute to a great American,'' said Bush. "I am very much aware of the significant leadership that General Draper has executed throughout the world in assisting governments in their efforts to solve the awesome problems of rapid population growth. No other person in the past five years has shown more initiative in creating the awareness of the world's leaders in recognizing the economic consequences of our population explosion.''

In a 1973 publication, Bush praised the PCC itself for having played a "major role in assisting government policy makers and in mobilizing the United States' response to the world population challenge....'' The PCC made no bones about its admiration for Bush; its newsletters from the late 1960s-early 1970s feature numerous articles highlighting Bush's role in the congressional population-control campaign. In a 1979 report assessing the history of Congressional action on population control, the PCC/Draper Fund placed Bush squarely with the "most conspicuous activists,'' on population-control issues, and lauded him for "proposing all of the major or controversial recommendations'' in this arena which came before the U.S. Congress in the late 1960s.

Draper's son, William III, has enthusiastically carried out his father's genocidal legacy--frequently with the help of Bush. In 1980, Draper, an enthusiastic backer of the Carter administration's notorious cf2 Global 2000 cf1 report, served as national chairman of the Bush presidential campaign's finance committee; in early 1981, Bush convinced Reagan to appoint Draper to head the U.S. Export-Import Bank. At the time, a Draper aide, Sharon Camp, disclosed that Draper intended to reorient the bank's functions toward emphasizing population control projects.

In 1987, again at Bush's behest, Draper was named by Reagan as administrator of the United Nations Development Program, which functions as an adjunct of the World Bank, and has historically pushed population reduction among Third World nations. In late January of 1991, Draper gave a speech to a conference in Washington, in which he stated that the core of Bush's "new world order'' should be population reduction.

Bush was not reluctant to feature anti-black backlash themes in other parts of his political repertoire. In the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in April, 1968, large scale riots and looting broke out in Washington and other cities. Bush was quick to introduce a bill which provided that any person convicted of breaking the law during civil disorders would be henceforth prohibited from retaining or getting federal jobs. Bush claimed that during the Washington riot that followed the murder of King, of the first 119 riot suspects brought to court, 10% said they worked for the federal government. [fn 15]

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PART 3 OF 3

Bush's campaign autobiography and the authorized and adulatory campaign biography by Fitzhugh Green make virtually no mention of these Congressional activities in the service of racism, Malthusianism, and depopulation. Instead, Bush and his image-mongers prefer to focus on the Congressman's heroic fight against racism as expressed in an April, 1968 opposition in Bush's district against the bill that was later to become the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This bill contained "open housing" provisions prohibiting the discrimination in the sale, renting, or financing of housing on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Bush decided to vote for the bill. "Letters from the district were overwhelmingly against the bill. After I voted for it, the mail got heavier. And uglier," he wrote later. "Threats were directed not only against me but against members of my staff."

As Bush tells it, he then decided to confront his critics at a rally scheduled to be held in the Memorial-West section of his district. "The place was jammed. Judging from the boos and catcalls when I was introduced, it was also seething. The tone was set by another speaker on the program, who predicted that the open housing bill 'will lead to government control of private property, the Communists' number one goal.'"

In order to reduce the seething masses to docility, Bush began by citing the British Empire liberal, cultural relativism, and theoretician of "organic change," Edmund Burke: "Your representative owes you not only his industry, but his judgment," Burke had said. Bush then recalled that blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities were risking their lives in the Vietnam war. How could they be denied open housing? "Somehow it seems fundamental that a man should not have a door slammed in his face because he is a Negro or speaks with a Latin American accent." Open housing would be a ray of hope for blacks and other minorities "locked out by habit and discrimination," Bush concluded. Bush says he looked at the now silent faces of the audience, and then turned to thank the moderator. ""It was then that the applause began, growing louder until there was a standing ovation. All the ugliness that had gone before seemed to wash away, and I sensed that something special had happened." Conjuring up the vision of this alleged triumph in the late 1980's, Bush had the gall to write: "More than twenty years later I can truthfully say that nothing I've experienced in public life, before or since, has measured up to the feeling I had when I went home that night." His sycophant, the mythograph Fitzhugh Green, adds: "Bush had spoken from his personally held values. He clearly had found the decent core of those who had heard him. Complaints against his vote on this issue slowed to a trickle. This matter was another marker on his trail toward the acceptance of black Americans." [fn 16]

These accounts have nothing to do with a true historical record, but rather illustrate the blatant, Goebbels-style big lies which are shamelessly dished up by the Bush propagandists. The mythologized accounts of this episode wish to leave the distinct impression of Bush as a 1960's fighter for civil rights, in contradiction to his entire political career, from the 1964 civil rights bill to racist eugenics to Willie Horton. Comparing these fantastic accounts to the reality of Bush's genocidal daily work in the Congress, we also obtain the proper framework in which to evaluate the truth of Bush's public explanations of his role in Iran-contra and other scandals. Bush stands out as one of the most accomplished liars in the highly competitive field of postwar American politics.

But we shall not conclude that Bush devoted the entirety of his Congressional career to the promotion of race science and global depopulation. He was also concerned with providing constituent service. This service came in the form of Bush's central role in the implementation of a sophisticated strategy by the oil cartel to maintain its ground-rent tax privileges at the highest rate that the climate of public opinion would permit. Within this strategy, Bush worked to protect the oil depletion allowance as the principal tax giveaway enjoyed by the cartel.

The oil depletion allowance was a 27.5% tax writeoff for oil producers that had been introduced in 1926, allegedly to strengthen the US petroleum industry. The impact of a 27.5% depletion allowance was that many of the largest oil companies, including some of the wealthiest corporate giants, paid a very low rate of corporate income tax. On July 10, 1969, Congressman Bertram Podell of New York wrote an open letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills in which he pointed out that, primarily as a result of the high oil depletion allowance, Gulf oil had paid an effective tax rate of only .81% on more than a billion dollars of 1968 income, while Mobil had paid 3.3%, and Atlantic Richfield had paid 1.2%. In his letter, Podell paid ironic tribute to the oil cartel's "passionate devotion to old- fashioned virtues, such as greed" to the point that the "oil industry makes the mafia look like a pushcart operation" while "through our various tax loopholes, professional tax evaders like the oil industry churn like panzers over foot soldiers." [fn 17]

In 1950, President Truman had declared that no tax loophole was "so inequitable" as the depletion allowance, and cited the example of one oilman who enjoyed a tax-free income of almost $5 million thanks to this provision. Truman claimed that he wanted to cut the depletion allowance to 15%, but Congressmen opposed to the high depletion allowance later claimed that he had done very little to carry out this pledge. Senators of the stripe of Humphrey, Douglas, Williams of Delaware and other offered amendments to reduce the depletion allowance to 15%, or to restrict the 27.5% to oil producers with incomes below a certain level, but these efforts were defeated in 1951, 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, and 1967. But in 1969 the issue was back in the form of a clamor for tax reform as the economy deteriorated, and a great deal of public heat was focused on the 27.5% for Rockefeller's oil cartel.

Congressman Charles Vanick of Ohio, who was profiling himself as a leading tax reformer, calculated that the oil depletion allowance had resulted in the loss of over $140 billion in tax revenues since the time it was instituted.

In response to this public hue and cry against the 27.5%, the public relations men of the oil cartel devised an elaborate public charade, with the depletion allowance to be cut slightly in order to turn off the public pressure and save the bulk of the write-off. In May of 1969 chairman Mills said that the 27.5% was a "symbolic" figure and could be slightly trimmed.

In July, the Ways and Means Committee reported out a measure to cut the depletion allowance to 20%. Congressman Vanick was happy to have something to show for his efforts: "We've really got a reform bill now," he told the press. Bush was going along with the 20%, but defended the principle of a substantial depletion allowance. According to Bush, "unrefuted" expert testimony had proven that a tax incentive was necessary for oil and gas exploration "due to the serious gas reserve shortages in this country." "Depletion," said Bush, "has become a symbol to some people and without examining the reasons for its existence or its fundamental importance to this country, some want to slug away at it." [fn 18]

On August 28, 1969 Congressman George Bush and Texas Senator John Tower flew to San Clemente to meet with President Nixon on this issue. Nixon had said during the 1968 campaign that he favored the 27.5% allowance, but he was willing to play ball with the oil cartel. Nixon, Bush and Tower were joined in San Clemente by Treasury Secretary David Kennedy, who was preparing to testify on oil taxes before the Russell Long's Senate Finance Committee. Tower and Bush instructed Nixon that the oil cartel was willing to accept some reduction of the depletion allowance, and that the Administration should merely state that it was willing to accept whatever the Congress approved. According to one historian of the oil industry, "This was the first step in preparation for the 'sting.' But there was one slight stumble before the con men got their signals worked out perfectly." [fn 19]

Kennedy got confused by the 20% figure that had been bandied about in the public debate. He told the Senate that while Nixon would prefer to keep the 27.5% figure, he was also willing to come down to 20%. This was more than the token concession that the oil cartel had been prepared to make. On October 7 the House passed the 20% figure by a vote of 394 to 30, with Bush voting for the cut. This entailed very little risk, since Senator Russell Long of the Senate Finance Committee, himself an oil producer through his participation in the Long family Win or Lose Corporation, was unwilling to reduce the depletion allowance below 23%. Nixon's deputy White House counsel Harry S. Dent wrote a letter to a county judge in Midland, Texas, of all places, which stated that Treasury Secretary Kennedy had been in error about Nixon seeing two alternatives, 27.5% or 20%, and that "the President will abide by the judgment of Congress." An aide of Senator Proxmire complained: "If the committee cuts back the depletion allowance by a modest amount--say to 23%--it may represent a low enough profile that Senate liberals will have a more difficult time cutting it further." The 23% figure was the one that was ultimately accepted, and the reduction in the depletion allowance thus accomplished was calculated to have increased the tax bill of the domestic US oil and gas companies by the trifling sum of $175 million per year. The issue had been defused, and the cartel could resume its normal operations, thanks in part to the stewardship of George Bush.

By the time of the House Ways and Means Committee vote of July, 1969, referenced above, the New York Times was already touting Bush as a likely Senate candidate, and Bush was indeed to be a candidate for the Senate from Texas in 1970. In Bush's campaign autobiography, he attempts to portray his decision to run for the Senate a second time as a decision assisted by former President Lyndon B. Johnson. That, we should say, is already bad enough. But in reality, the decisive encouragement, funds, and the promise of future advancement that moved Bush to attempt the leap into the Senate once again came from one Richard Milhous Nixon, and the money involved came from the circles of Nixon's CREEP.

Nixon, it will be recalled, had campaigned for Bush in 1964 and 1966, and would do so also in 1970. During these years, Bush's positions came to be almost perfectly aligned with the the line of the Imperial Presidency. And, thanks in large part to the workings of his father's Brown Brothers, Harriman networks--Prescott had been a fixture in the Eisenhower White House where Nixon worked, and in the Senate over which Nixon from time to time presided-- Bush became a Nixon ally and crony. Bush's Nixon connection, which pro-Bush propaganda tends to minimize, was in fact the key to Bush's career choices in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

Bush's intimate relations with Tricky Dick are best illustrated in Bush's close brush with the 1968 GOP vice-presidential nomination at the Miami convention of that year.

Richard Nixon came into Miami ahead of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and California Governor Ronald Reagan in the delegate count, but just before the convention Reagan, encouraged by his growing support, announced that he was switching from being a favorite son of California to the status of an all-out candidate for the presidential nomination. Reagan attempted to convince many conservative southern delegations to switch from Nixon to himself, since he was the purer ideological conservative and better loved in the south than the new (or old) Tricky Dick. Nixon's defense of his southern delegate base was spearheaded by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who kept the vast majority of the delegates in line, sometimes with the help of the unit rule. "Thurmond's point of reasoning with Southern delegates was that Nixon was the best conservative they could get and still win, and that he had obtained assurances from Nixon that no vice-presidential candidate intolerable to the South would be selected," wrote one observer of the Miami convention. [fn 20] With the southern conservatives guaranteed a veto power over the second spot on the ticket, Thurmond's efforts were successful; a leader of the Louisiana caucus was heard to remark: "It breaks my heart that we can't get behind a fine man like Governor Reagan, but Mr. Nixon is deserving of our choice, and he must receive it."

These were the circumstances in which Nixon, having won the nomination on the first ballot, met with his advisers amidst the grotesque architecture of the fifteenth floor of the Miami Plaza-Hilton in the early morning of August 9, 1968. The way Nixon tells the story in his memoirs, he had already pretty much settled on Gov. Spiro Agnew of Maryland, reasoning that "with George Wallace in the race, I could not hope to sweep the South. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, to win the entire rimland of the South--the border states--as well as the major states of the Midwest and West." Therefore, says Nixon, he let his advisors mention names without telling them what he had already largely decided. "The names most mentioned by those attending were the familiar ones: Romney, Reagan, John Lindsay, Percy, Mark Hatfield, John Tower, George Bush, John Volpe, Rockefeller, with only an occasional mention of Agnew, sometimes along with Governors John Love of Colorado and Daniel Evans of Washington." [fn 21] Nixon also says that he offered the vice presidency to his close friends Robert Finch and Rogers Morton, and then told his people that he wanted Agnew.

But this account disingenuously underestimates how close Bush came to the vice-presidency in 1968. According to a well-informed, but favorable, short biography of Bush published as he was about to take over the White House, "at the 1968 GOP convention that nominated Nixon for President, Bush was said to be on the four-name short list for vice president. He attributed that to the campaigning of his friends, but the seriousness of Nixon's consideration was widely attested. Certainly Nixon wanted to promote Bush in one way or another." [fn 22] Theodore H. White puts Bush on Nixon's conservative list along with Tower and Howard Baker, with a separate category of liberals and also "political eunuchs" like Agnew and Massachusetts Governor John Volpe. [fn 23] Jules Witcover thought the reason that Bush had been eliminated was that he "was too young, only a House member, and his selection would cause trouble with John Tower," who was also an aspirant. [fn 24] The accepted wisdom is that Nixon decided not to choose Bush because, after all, he was only a one -term Congressman. Most likely, Nixon was concerned with comparisons that could be drawn with Barry Goldwater's 1964 choice of New York Congressman Bill Miller for his running mate. Nixon feared that if he, only four years later, were to choose a Congressman without a national profile, the hostile press would compare him to Goldwater and brand him as yet another Republican loser.

Later in August, Bush traveled to Nixon's beachfront motel suite at Mission Bay, California to discuss campaign strategy. It was decided that Bush, Howard Baker, Rep. Clark MacGregor of Minnesota, and Gov. Volpe would all function as "surrogate candidates," campaigning and standing in for Nixon at engagements Nixon could not fill. And there is George, in a picture on the top of the front page of the New York Times of August 17, 1968, joining with the other three to slap a grinning and euphoric Nixon on the back and shake his hand before they went forth to the hustings.

Bush had no problems of his own with the 1968 election, since he was running unopposed -- a neat trick for a Republican in Houston, even taking the designer gerrymandering into account. Running unopposed seems to be Bush's idea of an ideal election. According to the Houston Chronicle, "Bush ha[d] become so politically formidable nobody cared to take him on," which should have become required reading for Gary Hart some years later. Bush had great hopes that he could help deliver the Texas electoral votes into the Nixon column. The GOP was counting on further open warfare between Yarborough and Connally, but these divisions proved to be insufficient to prevent Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, from carrying Texas as he went down to defeat. As one account of the 1968 vote puts it: Texas "is a large and exhausting state to campaign in, but here special emphasis was laid on 'surrogate candidates': notably Congressman George Bush, a fit-looking fellow of excellent birth who represented the space-town suburbs of Houston and was not opposed in his district--an indication of the strength of the Republican technocracy in Texas." (Perhaps, if technocracy is a synonym for "plumbers.") Winning a second term was no problem; Bush was, however mightily embarrassed by his inability to deliver Texas for Tricky Dick. "'I don't know what went wrong,' Bush muttered when interviewed in December. 'There was a hell of a lot of money spent,'" much of it coming from the predecessor organizations to the CREEP. [fn 25] As usual, Bush had a post festum theory of what had gone wrong: he blamed it on the black voters. In Houston, Bush found, there were 58,000 voters, and Nixon only got 800 of them. "You'd think," said Bush, "that there would have been more people just come in there and make a mistake!" [fn 26]

When in 1974 Bush briefly appeared to be the front-runner to be chosen for the vice presidency by the new President Gerald Ford, the Washington Post pointed out that although Bush was making a serious bid, he had almost no qualifications for the post. That criticism applied even more in 1968: for most people, Bush was a rather obscure Texas pol, and he had one lost statewide race previous to the election that got him into Congress. The fact that he made it into the final round at the Miami Hilton was another tribute to the network mobilizing power of Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Skull and Bones.

As the 1970 election approached, Nixon made Bush an attractive offer. If Bush were willing to give up his apparently safe Congressional seat and his place on the Ways and Means Committee, Nixon would be happy to help finance the senate race. If Bush won a Senate seat, he would be a front-runner to replace Spiro Agnew in the vice-presidential spot for 1972. If Bush were to lose the election, he would then be in line for an appointment to an important post in the Executive Branch, most likely a cabinet position. This deal was enough of an open secret to be discussed in the Texas press during the fall of 1970: at the time, the Houston Post quoted Bush in response to persistent Washington newspaper reports that Bush would replace Agnew on the 1972 ticket. Bush said that was "the most wildly speculative piece I've seen in a long time." "I hate to waste time talking about such wild speculation," Bush said in Austin. "I ought to be out there shaking hands with those people who stood in the rain to support me." [fn 27]

At this time Bush calculated that a second challenge to Yarborough would have a greater chance for success than his first attempt. True, 1970 was another off-year election in which Democrats running against the Republican Nixon White House would have a certain statistical advantage. 1970 was also the great year of the Silent Majority, Middle America backlash against the Vietnam war protesters. This was to be the year in which Pat Buchanan and William Safire of the Nixon White House would arm Agnew with a series of vulcanized, one-line zingers which the vice president would then take on the political low road: "pusillanimous pussyfooters," "vicars of vacillation," "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs," "nattering nabobs of negativism," "radic-libs" and "effete snobs," so went the alliterating Agnew sound bites. This was the Congressional election year that peaked in the near- insurrection against Nixon in San Jose, California on October 29, 1970, when Nixon, Governor Reagan, and Senator George Murphy came close to being lapidated by and angry crowd in an incident so perfect for Nixon's propaganda needs that perhaps only the most accomplished agents provocateurs could have carried it off. In such an atmosphere, Bush could see himself veering off sharply to hard-hat rhetoric, attacking Yarborough for being in league with violent and obscene demonstrators after Yarborough's endorsement of the very tame October, 1970 Moratorium demonstrations against the war in Washington.

In an obvious sleight of hand, Bush uses his campaign autobiography to make it look like it was LBJ, not Nixon, who urged him to run. He tells of how he had been the only Republican at Andrews Air Force Base to see LBJ off after Nixon was inaugurated. He tells us that he visited LBJ on his celebrated ranch on the banks of the Pedernales River, and was driven by the former President over dirt roads in LBJ's Lincoln Continental at speeds of 80 miles per hour. All a cliche, as is the scene where Bush asks LBJ whether he should try to unseat Yarborough. Bush has LBJ answer with the little story that every schoolboy knew in the late 1960's, and which LBJ must have recounted ten thousand times over his career, which was that he had served in both the House and the Senate, and that "the difference between being a member of the Senate and a member of the House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit." [fn 30] We should also recall that poor old LBJ in these declining years was a hated recluse, so desperate for companionship that he eagerly even welcomed the psychosexual analytic sessions of Doris Kearns of the Kennedy School of Government. Of course, Bush was angling to ingratiate himself wherever he could, of course LBJ still had some assets that might make a difference in a Texas senate race, and Bush would never be indifferent to marginal advantage. Part of it was George's instinctive ploy of trading on Prescott's old friendships: LBJ and Prescott had served together on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1950's. But Bush's account is ultimately, as is typical of him, a calculated deception. No, no, George: LBJ resented Yarborough for having opposed him on Vietnam, but LBJ was a has-been in 1970, and it was Tricky Dick who told you to make your senate bid in 1970, and who sweetened the pot with big bucks and the promise of prestigious posts if you failed.

In September, the New York Times reported that Nixon was actively recruiting Republican candidates for the Senate. "Implies He Will Participate in Their Campaigns and Offer Jobs to Losers"; "Financial Aid is Hinted," said the subtitles [fn 28]. It was more than hinted, and the article listed George Bush as first on the list. As it turned out, Bush's senate race was the single most important focus of Nixon's efforts in the entire country, with both the President and Agnew actively engaged on the ground. Bush would receive money from a Nixon slush fund called the "Townhouse" fund, an operation in the CREEP orbit. Bush was also the recipient of the largesse of W. Clement Stone, a Chicago insurance tycoon who had donated heavily to Nixon's 1968 campaign. Bush's friend Tower was the chairman of the GOP Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Bush's former campaign aide, Jim Allison, was now the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Bush himself was ensconced in the coils of the GOP fund-raising bureaucracy. When in May, 1969, Nixon's crony Robert Finch, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare met with members of the Republican Boosters Club, 1969, Bush was with him, along with Tower, Rogers Morton, and Congressman Bob Wilson of California. The Boosters alone were estimated to be good for about $1 million in funding for GOP candidates in 1970. [fn 29]

By December of 1969 it was clear to all that Bush would get almost all of the cash in the Texas GOP coffers, and that Eggers, the party's candidate for governor, would get short shrift indeed. On December 29 the Houston Chronicle front page opined: "GOP Money To Back Bush, Not Eggers." The Democratic Senate candidate would later accuse Nixon's crowd of "trying to buy" the Senate election for Bush: "Washington has been shoveling so much money into the George Bush campaign that now other Republican candidates around the country are demanding an accounting," said Bush's opponent. [fn 31]

But that opponent was Lloyd Bentsen, not Ralph Yarborough. All calculations about the 1970 Senate race had been upset when, at a relatively late hour, Bentsen, urged on by John Connally, announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary. Yarborough, busy with his work as Chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, started his campaigning late. Bentsen's pitch was to attack anti-war protesters and radicals, portraying Yarborough as being a ringleader of the extremists.

Yarborough had lost some of his vim over the years since 1964, and had veered into support for more ecological legislation and even for some of the anti-human "population planning" measures that Bush and his circles had been proposing. But he fought back gamely against Bentsen. When Bentsen boasted of having done a lot for the Chicanos of the Rio Grande Valley, Yarborough countered: "What has Lloyd Bentsen ever done for the valley? The valley is not for sale. You can't buy people. I never heard of him doing anything for migrant labor. All I ever heard about was his father working these wetbacks. All I ever heard was them exploiting wetbacks," said Yarborough. When Bentsen boasted of his record of experience, Yarborough counter-attacked: "The only experience that my opponents have had is in representing the financial interest of big business. They have both shown marked insensitivity to the needs of the average citizen of our state."

But, on May 2, Bentsen defeated Yarborough, and an era came to an end in Texas politics. Bush's 10 to 1 win in his own primary over his old rival from 1964, Robert Morris, was scant consolation. Whereas it had been clear how Bush would have run against Yarborough, it was not at all clear how he could differentiate himself from Bentsen. Indeed, to many people the two seemed to be twins: each was a plutocrat oilman from Houston, each one was aggressively Anglo-Saxon, each one had been in the House of Representatives, each one flaunted a record as a World War II airman. In fact, all Bentsen needed to do for the rest of the race was to appear plausible and polite, and let the overwhelming Democratic advantage in registered voters, especially in the yellow-dog Democrat rural areas, do his work for him. This Bentsen posture was punctuated from time to time by appeals to conservatives who thought that Bush was too liberal for their tastes.

Bush hoped for a time that his slick television packaging could save him. His man Harry Treleaven was once more brought in. Bush paid more than half a million dollars, a tidy sum at that time, to Glenn Advertising for a series of Kennedyesque "natural look" campaign spots. Soon Bush was cavorting on the tube in all of his arid vapidity, jogging across the street, trotting down the steps, bounding around Washington and playing touch football, always filled with youth, vigor, action, and thryoxin. The Plain Folks praised Bush as "Just fantastic" in these spots. Suffering the voters to come unto him, Bush responded to all comers that he "understands," with the shot fading out before he could say what it was he understood or what he might propose to do. [fn 32] "Sure, it's tough to be up against the machine, the big boys," said the Skull and Bones candidate in these spots; Bush actually had more money to spend than even the well-heeled Bentsen. The unifying slogan for imparting the proper spin to Bush was "He can do more." "He can do more" had problems that were evident even to some of the 1970 Bushmen: "A few in the Bush camp questioned that general approach because once advertising programs are set into motion they are extremely difficult to change and there was the concern that if Nixon should be unpopular at campaign's end, the theme line would become, 'He can do more for Nixon,' with obvious downsides. [fn 33] Although Bentsen's spots were said to give him "all the animation of a cadaver," he was more substantive than Bush, and he was moving ahead.

Were there issues that could help George? His ads put his opposition to school busing to achieve racial balance at the top of the list, but this wedge-mongering got him nowhere. Because of his servility to Nixon, Bush had to support the buzz-word of a "guaranteed annual income," which was the label under which Nixon was marketing the workfare slave labor program already described, but to many in Texas that sounded like a new give-away, and Bentsen was quick to take advantage. Bush bragged that he had been one of the original sponsors of the bill that had just semi-privatized the US Post Office Department as the Postal Service. Bush came on as a "fiscal conservative," but this also was of little help against Bentsen.

In an interview on women's issues, Bush first joked that there really was no consensus among women -- "the concept of a women's movement is unreal--you can't get two women to agree on anything." On abortion he commented: "I realize this is a politically sensitive area. But I believe in a woman's right to chose. It should be an individual matter. I think ultimately it will be a constitutional question. I don't favor a federal abortion law as such." After 1980, for those who choose to believe him, this changed to strong opposition to abortion.

One issue that helped Bentsen was "inflationary recession," also called stagflation. "I think [the President] should use the moral persuasion of the White House to help keep wages and prices within reason, instead of following policies which have put nearly 2 million Americans out of jobs without stopping inflation," said Bentsen. Bush was stuck with parroting the lines of the 1970 model Nixon, which was about ready for a closeout.

Could Nixon and Agnew help Bush? Agnew's message fell flat in Texas, since he knew it was too dangerous to try to get to the right of Bentsen and attack him from there. Instead, Agnew went through the following contortion: a vote for Bentsen, Agnew told audiences in Lubbock and Amarillo, "is a vote to keep William Fulbright chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee," and that was not what "Texans want at all." Agnew tried to put Bentsen in the same boat with "radical liberals" like Yarborough, Fulbright, McGovern, and Kennedy. Bentsen invited Agnew to move on to Arkansas and fight it out with Fulbright, and that was that.

Could Nixon himself help Bush? Nixon did campaign in the state. Bentsen then told a group of "Anglo-American" businessmen: Texans want "a man who can stand alone without being propped up by the White House."

In the end Bentsen defeated Bush by a vote of 1,197,726 to Bush's 1,035,794, about 53% to 47%. The official Bushman explanation was that there were two proposed amendments to the Texas constitution on the ballot, one to allow saloons, and one to allow all undeveloped land to be taxed at the same rate as farmland. According to Bushman apologetics, these two propositions attracted so much interest among "yellow dog" rural conservatives that 300,000 extra voters came out, and this gave Bentsen his critical margin of victory. There was also speculation that Nixon and Agnew had attracted so much attention that more voters had come out, but many of these were Bentsen supporters. On the night of the election, Bush said that he "felt like General Custer. They asked him why he had lost and he said "There were too many Indians.' All I can say at this point is that there were too many Democrats," said the fresh two-time loser. Bentsen suggested that it was time for Bush to be appointed to a high position in the government. [fn 34]

Bush's other consolation was a telegram dated November 5, 1970:

FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE I KNOW THE DISAPPOINTMENT THAT YOU AND YOUR FAMILY MUST FEEL AT THIS TIME. I AM SURE, HOWEVER, THAT YOU WILL NOT ALLOW THIS DEFEAT TO DISCOURAGE YOU IN YOUR EFFORTS TO CONTINUE TO PROVIDE LEADERSHIP FOR OUR PARTY AND THE NATION.

RICHARD NIXON

This was Nixon's euphemistic way of reassuring Bush that they still had a deal. [fn 35]

_______________

Notes:

1. See Fitzhugh Green, George Bush, p. 92, and Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 90.

2. Stevens' remarks were part of a Public Broadcasting System "Frontline" documentary program entitled "Campaign: The Choice," of November 24, 1988. Cited by Fitzhugh Green, p. 91.

3. For the chronicles of the Harris County GOP, see local press articles available on microfiche at the Texas Historical Society in Houston.

4. "George Bush vs. Observer Editor," The Texas Observer, July 23, 1965.

5. Texas Observer, October 14, 1966.

6. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 91.

7. Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President 1968 (New York, 1968), pp. 42-45.

8. See Knaggs, Two-Party Texas, p. 111.

9. Congressional Quarterly, President Bush: The Challenge Ahead ( Washington, 1989), p. 94.

10. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," in Texas Monthly, June 1983.

11. New York Times, January 24, 1968.

12. New York Times, May 7, 1968.

13. The developments just summarized had been accurately forecast by economist Lyndon H. LaRouche in 1957.

14. The following account of Bush's Congressional record on population and related is issues is derived from the ground-breaking research of Kathleen Klenetsky, to whom the authors are pleased to acknowledge their indebtedness. The material that follows incorporates sections of Kathleen Klenetsky, "Bush Backed Nazi 'Race Science,'" Executive Intelligence Review, May 3, 1991 and New Federalist, April 29, 1991.

15. New York Times, April 11, 1968.

16. Bush, Looking Forward, pp. 92-93, and Green, George Bush, pp. 106- 107.

17. See Robert Sherrill, The Oil Follies of 1970-1980 (New York, 1983) , pp. 61-65.

18. New York Times, July 22, 1969.

19. Sherrill, p. 64.

20. Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1968), pp. 72-73.

21. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, p. 312.

22. Congressional Quarterly, President Bush (Washington, 1989), p. 94.

23. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968 (New York, 1969), p. 251.

24. Jules Witcover, The Resurrection of Richard Nixon, p. 352.

25. Lewis Chester et al., The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (London: Deutch, 1969), p. 622.

26. Chester et al., p. 763.

27. Houston Post, October 29, 1970.

28. New York Times, May 13, 1969.

29. New York Times, Sept, 27, 1969.

30. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, pp. 98-103.

31. Houston Chronicle, October 6, 1970.

32. See "Tubing with Lloyd/George," The Texas Observer, October 30, 1970.

33. Knaggs, Two-Party Texas, p. 148.

34. Houston Post, November 5, 1970.

35. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, page 102.

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PART 1 OF 2

Chapter XI -- United Nations Ambassador, Kissinger Clone

At this point in his career, George Bush entered into a phase of close association with both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. As we will see, Bush was a member of the Nixon cabinet from the spring of 1971 until the day that Nixon resigned. We will see Bush on a number of important occasions literally acting as Nixon's speaking tube, especially in international crisis situations. During these years, Nixon was Bush's patron, providing him with appointments and urging him to look forward to bigger things in the future. On certain occasions, however, Bush was upstaged by others in his quest for Nixon's favor. Then there was Kissinger, far and away the most powerful figure in the Washington regime of those days, who became Bush's boss when the latter became the US Ambassador to the United Nations in New York City. Later, on the campaign trail in 1980, Bush would offer to make Kissinger Secretary of State in his administration.

Bush was now listing a net worth of over $1.3 million [fn 1], but the fact is that he was now unemployed, but anxious to assume the next official post, to take the next step of what in the career of a Roman Senator was called the cursus honorum, the patrician career, for this is what he felt the world owed him.

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 bi-partisanship, while emphasizing the dissension among the Democrats, strengthening Tricky Dick'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 Ehrlichmann 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 was 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 Tricky Dick 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 tof 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 Wite House panel for intelligence evaulations: "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. [fn 2] Tower was indigant 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." [fn 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. Haldemann 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. Haldemann. Bush accepted such a post at one point in his haggling with the Nixon White House. But Bush also sought the UN 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. [fn 4] Nixon's UN 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, apparently a few hours after the Bush-Nixon meeting, word came in that Moynihan was not interested.

But then Moynihan decided that he did not want the UN 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." [fn 5] In offering the post to Bush, Haldemann had been brutally frank, telling him that the job, although of cabinet rank, would have no power attached to it. Bush, stressed Haldemann, would be taking orders directly from Kissinger. "I commented that 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," Bush says he replied. [fn 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." [fn 7] Even more humiliating for Bush was the 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 UN 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." [fn 8]

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 NSC 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 Peking, and later he would face the further humiliation 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 1980's." [fn 9] As others discovered during the Gulf war, Bush is vindictive.

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 UN post.

On policy matters, Bush said that it would "make sense" for the UN Security Council to conduct a debate on the wars in Laos and Cambodia, which was something that the US 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 nevertheless 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 UN. 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, thyrroid-driven life style. 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 AM, and then mounted his 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, to be driven to the US mission to the UN 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 US ping pong team to visit Peking 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 the enthusiastic host and hostess soon laid on a demanding schedule of receptions, dinners, and entertainments.

Soon after taking up his UN 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.

Henry Kissinger was now Bush's boss even more than Nixon was, and later, as the Watergate scandal progressed 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 Kissinger networks in question can be summed up here under four headings. Kissinger was at once British imperialist, Zionist, Soviet, and Red Chinese in his orientation, all wrapped up in a parcel of greed, megalomania, and perversion. [fn 9] Kissinger was one of the few persons in the world who still had anything to teach George Bush in any of these categories.

The most essential level of Kissinger was the British one. This meant that US 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 USSR) in order to preserve the balance of power. This was expressed in the 1971 -72 Nixon-Kissinger opening to Peking, to which Bush would contribute from his UN 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 Trend, 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 US 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 US 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. Kissinger's soul-mates were figures like Gen. Ariel Sharon, the harbinger of endless wars in the Middle East. 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 US resupply of Israel and would declare a US-world wide 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 pro-Soviet in a sense that went far beyond his sponsorship of the 1970's 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 counter-intelligence director for twenty years up to 1973 was said to have been the US official who was handed Goleniewski's report by the British. Angleton later talked a lot about Kissinger being "objectively a Soviet agent," but that was a throw-away line by that time. It has not been established that Angleton ever ordered an active investigation of Kissinger or ever assigned his case a codename.

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 Chou En-Lai, Mao Tse-tung, and their group of Chinese leaders, who had been responsible for the genocide of 100,000,000 million of their own people after 1949.

Kissinger possessed other dimensions in addition to these, including close links to the Meyer Lansky 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 defining events in the first year of Bush's UN tenure reflected Kissinger's geopolitical obsession with his China card. Remember that in his 1964 campaign, Bush had stated that Red China must never be admitted to the UN and that if Peking ever obtained the Chinese seat on the Security Council, the US 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 counterweight to Russia and India in this vast area of the world, and also to insure a US military presence in the Indian Ocean, as seen later in the US 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 US and Peking had gone on for many years in Warsaw, but what Nixon was talking about was a total reversal of US China policy. Up until 1971, the US had recognized the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan as the sole sovereign and legitimate authority over China. The US, unlike Britain, France, and many other western countries, had no diplomatic relations with the Peking 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-aligned bloc to oust Taipei from the Security Council and replace them with Peking, but so far this vote had always failed because of US 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 ROC President Chiang Kai-Shek and the sentimental popularity of the Kuomintang in the United States 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 US 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 US commitments to the ROC 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 ROC from the UN Security and assign their seat there to Peking. Kissinger and Nixon calculated that duplicity would insulate them from domestic political damage: while they were opening to Peking, they would call for a "two Chinas" policy, under which both Peking and Taipei would be represented at the UN, at least in the General Assembly, despite the fact that this was an alternative that both Chinese governments vehemently rejected. The US would pretend to be fighting to keep Taipei in the UN, with George Bush leading the fake charge, but this effort would be defeated. Then the Nixon Administration could claim that the vote in the UN was beyond its control, comfortably resign itself to Peking 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 Ray Cline, a wheelhorse of the Bush faction of the CIA, has tried to argue that Rogers and Bush were kept in the dark by Nixon and Kissinger about the real nature of the US China policy. The implication is that Bush's efforts to keep Taiwan at the UN were in good faith. According to Cline's fantastic account, "Nixon and Kissinger actually 'undermined' the department's efforts in 1971 to save Taiwan." [fn 10] Rogers may have believed that helping Taiwan was US 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 Peking. 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. [fn 11] 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 Chou En-Lai and other Chinese officials. 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 Chou. 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 ROC government on Taiwan) that their interests would not be sacrificed. Later in he same year, between October 16th and 26th, Kissinger undertook operation "Polo II," a second, public visit with Chou in Peking to decide the details of Nixon's visit and hammer out what was to become the US-PRC Shanghai Communique', the joint statement issued during Nixon's stay. During this visit Chou cautioned Kissinger not to be disoriented by the hostile Peking propaganda line against the US, manifestations of which were everywhere to be seen. Anti-US slogans on the walls, said Chou, were meaningless, like "firing an empty cannon." Nixon and Kissinger eventually journeyed to Peking in February, 1972.

It was before this backdrop that Bush waged his farcical campaign to keep Taiwan in the UN. The State Department had stated through the mouth of Rogers on August 2 that the US would support the admission of Red China to the UN, 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 UN 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 personally with 94 delegations to get them to let Taiwan stay, which a fellow diplomat called "a quantitative track record."

Diplomatic observers noted that the US activity was entirely confined to the high-profile "glass palace" of the UN, and that virtually nothing was being done by US 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 UN because "this is what the UN is for," he commented. Bush said that his optimism about keeping the Taiwan membership had increased over the past three weeks. [fn 12]

By late September, Bush was saying that he saw a better than 50-50 chance that the UN General Assembly would seat both Chinese governments. By this time, the official US position as enunciated by Bush was that the Security Council seat should go to Peking, but that Taipei ought to be allowed to remain in the General Assembly. Since 1961, the US strategy for blocking the admission of Peking had depended on a procedural defense, obtaining a simple majority of the General Assembly for a resolution defining the seating of Peking as an Important Question, which required a two-thirds majority in order to be implemented. Thus, if the US could get a simple majority on the procedural vote, one third plus one would suffice to defeat Peking on the second vote.

The General Assembly convened on September 21. Bush and his aides were running a ludicrous all-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-China policy should be approved regardless of the fact that both Peking 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 Peking 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 UN 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 China. Kissinger says in his memoirs that he had been encouraged to go to China by Bush, who assured him that a highly publicized Kissinger trip to Peking would have no impact whatever on the UN vote. On October 25, the General Assembly defeated the US 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 Peking and expel Taipei, which passed by a vote of 76 to 35. Bush then cast the US vote to seat Peking, and then hurried to escort the ROC 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 US had been defeated. The Tanzanian delegate danced a jig in the aisle. Henry Kissinger, flying back from Peking, 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 Peking, but concentrated the fire on the third world delegates, who were also threatened with a cutoff of US 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 US 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." [ fn 13] Bush expected the Peking 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 Peking 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 Chou 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 US regretted that the Chinese had elected to inaugurate their participation in the UN 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 Peking that all the public bluster meant nothing between the two secret and increasingly public allies.

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 US and the USSR. 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 and 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 national assembly and on the evening of March 25 ordered the Pakistani army to arrest Mujibur and to wipe out his organization 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 three 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 US 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 ten million refugees caused indescribable chaos in India, whose government was unable to prevent untold numbers from starving to death. [fn 14]

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 anytime he wanted, and soon he could talk to the Chinese UN delegate in one of the CIA's New York safe houses. 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 Chou 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 USSR. (Shortly after Kissinger's trip to China had taken place and Nixon had announced his intention to go to Peking, India and the USSR had signed a twenty 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 US-PRC 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. Tricky Dick and Fat Henry 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 US 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 US 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 towards Pakistan and he believes that every briefing or statement is going the other way." [fn 15]

But no matter what Rogers, the State Department and the rest of the Washington bureaucracy might do, Kissinger knew that George Bush at the UN would play along with the pro-Pakistan tilt. "And I knew that George Bush, our able UN ambassador, would carry out the President's policy," wrote Kissinger in his memoirs in describing his decision to drop US opposition to a Security Council debate on the subcontinent. This made Bush one of the most degraded and servile US 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-- 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 advances 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.

Dec. 4-- At the UN 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 UN Secretary General. Bush's resolution also contained a grotesque call on India and Pakistan to "exert their best efforts towards the creation of a climate conducive to the voluntary return of refugees to East Pakistan." This 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?" [fn 16]

December 7- George Bush at the UN made a further step forward towards 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 the in 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 CIA 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 3 ships. At this point, with the Vietnam war raging unabated, the US 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 cancelled. Kissinger raved that India wanted to detach not just Bengal, but Kashmir also, leading to the further secession of Baluchistan and the total dismemberment og 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 US 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. [fn 17]

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 in 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 US 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 US 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 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, Chao Kuang-chih "advising Chao that the PRC should not get too serious about intervention because USSR would react, had many missiles, etc." [fn 18] 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 Delhi, 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 UN delegate. Today Kissinger would meet with the Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister, Ali Bhutto, in Bush's suit 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" relation was taken. [fn 19]

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." [fn 20] 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 AM 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 UN 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 UN 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." [fn 21]

These comments by Kissinger lead 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 thermonuclear 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.

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."

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PART 2 OF 2

"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." [fn 22]

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 USSR.

December 14-- Kissinger shocked US 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 US 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 US 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 US threats. Chou En-lai also said later that the US 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.

1972 was the second year of Bush's UN 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 US 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 twelve- 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 US. 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 USSR 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 UN 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 US 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) within four months, as well as the Vietnams) and bring all US troops home within four months.

There was no bipartisan support 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 US 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 what Peking might do if Moscow became embroiled with Peking's new de facto ally, the US.

In July, 1972, reports emerged in the international press of charges by Hanoi that the US 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 Television "Today" show to assure the US public that the US bombing had created only "the most incidental and minor impact" on North Viet Nam's dike system. This, of course, amounted to a backhanded conformation that such bombing had been done, and damage wrought in the process. Bush was in his typical whining mode in defending the US 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 US 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." [fn 23]

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 US 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 Rason" of the Los Angeles Times of Dec. 28.

Bush's activity at the UN also coincided with Kissinger's preparation of the October, 1973 Middle East war. During the 1980's, Bush attempted to cultivate a public image as a US politician who, although oriented towards 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 US 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 categorical 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 Zionist pedigree is the reflex of a Zionist, neo-conservative network and a fanatically pro-Israeli ideological-political track record which was already massive during the UN 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 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 Tricky Dick's 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 US rejection of the first resolution. That resolution was no good because it did not reflect the fact that "the fabric of violence in the Middle East in inextricably interwoven with the massacre in Munich," Bush argued. '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 US veto, a veto that had been cast only once before in the entire history of the UN. The vote was 13 to 1, with the US casting the sole negative vote. Panama was the lone abstention. The only other time the US veto had been used had been in 1970, on a resolution involving Rhodesia.

The Israeli UN 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." [fn 24]

Later in 1972, attempts were made by non-aligned states and the UN 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 UN'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 withhold 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 UN 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 did claim that the US continued to support 242 and the Jarring mission. But Bush was suggesting that Israel and Egypt begin talks under US mediation for an interim, bilateral deal to re-open the Suez canal. Here we can observe the policy thrust which culminated in Camp David not so many years later, after the 1973 war had been fought..

An interesting document of this period is the text of secret conversations between Bush and the Egyptian Foreign Minister and the between Bush and the Israeli Foreign Minister. These conversations were part of secret State Department cables that were leaked to the columnist Jack Anderson, who published their contents.

The first conversation is between Bush and Mahmoud Riad, the Foreign Minister of Egypt. "Ambassador Bush...sought out Formin Riad in UN Indonesian Lounge to discuss Egyptian draft res re Middle East...Noting that Egyptian draft res appeared from initial reading to be generally satisfactory,, Bush stated that major stumbling block for USG [ie, the Nixon regime] was placing of language re Jarring mission in operative paragraph section...Bush asked if Riad willing to consider removal of this language from operative section to preamble."

What Bush was clearly trying to do was to weaken the references to Jarring, who was identified with the idea that the Israelis must quit the occupied territories in order to make peace possible. The cable continues:

"Riad replied in negative but not before he stressed that for Egyptians inclusion of this language in operative section not repeat not merely semantic exercise, on contrary, Egypt convinced that Israel trying to get out of giving favorable reply to Jarring and that only way to force Israel is by means of explicit UN resolution."

Bush responded to this by making several proposal for minor changes, but then submitted these to Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban. A cable marked "Eyes Only-Special Exclusive" describes the Bush-Eban conversation: "Bush...had meeting the Formin Abba Eban this afternoon...Eban said Israel could not repeat not accept USG proposal...He noted ...that Jarring has not been too helpful and characterized him as 'negativistic individual.' On the other hand he opined that if Jarring would would make move toward Israel 'We'll see what we can do to help him.'" At another meeting between Eban and Bush, Eban "observed...that on political grounds Israel not have any reference [sic] to Jarring but appreciated that parliamentary reasons may dictate need for some thing. Both Eban and Tekoah summed up that from Israel point of view, best course would be to limit resolution language to 'complimentary reference to Jarring.'"

What all these machinations finally yielded was a resolution that passed with the United States abstaining and Israel opposed. At the same time, the US promised Israel a continuing supply of Phantom jets, and there was war in the Middle East before the year was out, just as Kissinger had planned.

Bush himself has always been reluctant about flaunting his own impeccable Zionist credentials, probably because of his desire to maintain close ties to the money and power centers of the Arab world. In his campaign autobiography, Bush seeks repeatedly to profile himself as a target of the extremists of the Jewish Defense League. On one occasion, Bush recounts, he was accosted at the entrance to the US mission to the United Nations by Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the JDL. "Why won't you talk to me? All I want is a dialogue," said Kahane, according to Bush's account. Bush says he refused to stop, but told Kahane in passing: "Because I've seen your idea of a dialogue-those shots fired into the Soviet Embassy, and I don't condone your group's violence any more than violence directed at Jews by Arab terrorists," which was a marvel of even-handed rhetoric in full career. Another Bush anecdote of unconfirmed veracity is attributed by Fitzhugh Green to New York East Side restaurateur Walter J. Ganzi, who recounted after the 1988 election that Bush had pacified and dispersed a menacing crowd of several thousand angry JDL demonstrators one day by making an impromptu speech suffused with leadership charisma. Bush's admirers claim that he was responsible for Nixon's creation of a new police force, the Executive Protective Service, which is assigned to guard foreign officials visiting the US. [fn 25]

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." [fn 26] 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 Nimeiri of the Sudan.

At the meeting in Addis Ababa, Bush was blind-sided by a speech delivered by the delegate of Panama, one of the rotating members of the Security Council. The Panamanian representative, Aquilino Boyd, vigorously attacked the US "occupation" of the Panana Canal Zone. Bush was forced into parliamentary maneuvering to avoid further discussion of the Panamanian complaint, claiming that Boyd was out of order in that the Canal Zone matter was not on the agenda, which was supposed to be oriented towards African matters. This marks one of Bush's earliest public encounters with the Panama issue, which was destined to become his bloody obsession during the first year of his presidency. [fn 27]

Bush in Addis Ababa voted in favor of two resolutions on Namibia, one of which set up the machinery under which the UN Secretary General was empowered to contact the South African government about the status of the trusteeship territory usurped by Pretoria. Bush thought that this first Namibia resolution had been "the most positive thing that came out." Bush also voted for a further resolution on apartheid, and abstained on the resolutions concerning Portuguese colonies and on Rhodesia. Bush's vote on the Rhodesian resolution amounted to a vote of confidence in a mission led by the British Lord Pearce on the Rhodesian question, a mission which many African states opposed.

At a press conference in Addis Ababa, African journalists destabilized Bush with aggressive questions about the US policy of ignoring mandatory UN economic sanctions against the racist, white supremacist Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia. The Security Council had imposed the mandatory sanctions, but later the US Congress had passed, and Nixon had signed into law, legislation incorporating the so-called Byrd amendment, which allowed the US president 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 USSR, 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 US 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 US 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 US position should be that the Congress was trying to further colonialism and racism in this action it took," Bush told the Congressmen. "In the UN, 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. [fn 28]

During the hearings, Bush was confronted by Congressman Diggs with an account published in the Los Angeles Times of February 26, 1972, according to which the US had threatened to use the veto against a draft resolution stating that all sanctions against Rhodesia should remain fully in force until the people of Rhodesia had freely and equally exercised their right to self-determination. Rep. Diggs referred to a report in this article that the African and third world sponsors of this resolution had been forced to water it down in order to avoid a veto to be cast by Bush. Bush ducked any direct answer on this behind-the-scenes veto threat. "...we simply cannot, given the restrictions placed on us by law, appear to be two-faced on these things," Bush told Diggs.

Some weeks later, Bush gave a lecture to students at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he announced that the US was now using the provisions of the Byrd amendment actually to purchase Rhodesian chrome, and conceded that this was indeed a violation of the UN economic sanctions. Noting that the policy was causing the Nixon regime "considerable embarrassment," Bush nevertheless defended the chrome purchases, saying that the US was acting "not in support of colonialism or totalitarianism but it seemed the realistic solution," more desirable than paying "twice the price" for Russian chrome. Bush lamely pointed out that many other countries were violating the sanctions covertly, whereas the US was doing so overtly, which he suggested was less reprehensible. [fn 29]

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 UN 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 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." [fn 30]

On individual African countries, Bush asked the Congressmen to increase US aid to Chad, making it obliquely clear that his interest in Chad came from the country's "fierce independence" in a "pressure area vis-a-vis the north," meaning Qaddafi's Libya. Bush discussed the Middle East crisis at length with Nimeiri of the Sudan, with whom the US had no diplomatic relations. Bush thought that Nimieri was interested in restoring and improving relations with the US. These exchanges are historically ironic in the light of Bush's later role in the coup that overthrew Nimieri in the mid-1980's. By contrast, Bush said that Somalia, where the US had recently cut off aid, had shown no interest in improving ties with the US. In Botswana, Bush says he was impressed by the ministers he met. In Zambia, the big emphasis was on the problems of the front-line states. In all of the African capitals on his itinerary, Bush was struck by the intensity of the commitment of governments to progress and to sovereignty: "...in whatever part of Africa and however diverse Africa is, there was always a large amount of time devoted to development, economics, and, again, independence, nationhood, this kind of thing." It was clear that Bush would never have much sympathy for the "nationhood thing." But he was aware that Africa had 42 votes out of 132 UN member states in the General Assembly.

Two aspects of Bush's testimony on his African trip throw light on the permanent axioms of his thinking process. In one such revealing incident, Bush describes his "not hostile" but "very frank" dialogue with "a bunch of the intellectuals in Nigeria." Bush told the Congressmen that these intellectuals "were inclined to equate our quest for peaceful change with the status quo, no change at all, and they would state, 'Look, your own Revolution was a nonpeaceful change.'" This exchange became a way for Bush to state that the principles of natural law in the struggle against colonialism which were expressed in the American Revolution had now been superceded by the supernational principle of the United Nations as a world government which must validate all political change. Here is the way Bush expressed this idea: "And my answer to that was, one, we mean both peaceful and change, and two, the United Nations Charter was not in existence at the time of the US Revolution. We are not going to give up on the United Nations, which commits itself to peaceful change." [fn 31]

The second revealing exchange involved Bush's relation to the policies that he was carrying out. Asked by Congressman Diggs to pinpoint where decisions on Rhodesian policy and related issues were made, Bush replied: "That is something you can never do in the State Department." He then went on to describe his relations to machinery of policy making: "I would be happy to take responsibility for it [the Rhodesian vote], if you are looking for somebody to do that, because I am the President's representative to the United Nations, and the buck stops with some of these things with me. But I don't profess to be that big a deal that I can say this is the way it is going to be, and that is the way it happens. But in terms of responsibility for this position, I would be happy to accept it." Then Bush added: "I do think that there is room for some criticism about the kind of facelessness of the process, but I would say for these resolutions, or anything that we have done in terms of policy, whether it is subcontinent, or Middle East, or China, I have been in accord with these major decisions, and I take the responsibility for them as the presidentially appointed representative to the United Nations. Yet I sometimes am frustrated by the machinery, I must say."

One senses that this is Bush's pledge of personal allegiance to the Kissinger policies that dominated in the areas he mentions, and that his frustration is reserved for the passive resistance that still from time to time merged from the Rogers State Department. Among other things, Bush was endorsing the Nixon-Kissinger regime's support for the military junta of the Greek colonels, a matter which became a minor issue in the 1988 presidential campaign.

As the former Guyana Foreign Minister Fred Wills has pointed out in several speaking engagements for the Schiller Institute over recent years, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations presides over an immense covert apparatus of espionage, arm-twisting, intimidation, entrapment, and blackmail, all directed against foreign delegates whom the US is seeking to compromise, bribe, or turn. The gambits habitually employed in this brutal and squalid game range from baskets of fruit delivered to the hotel rooms and residences of ambassadors and ministers, to the deployment of a stable of male and female sex operatives to entrap unwary foreign diplomats, to black-bag operations and occasional wetwork. It may also be relevant that the Mayor of New York City during these years was John V. Lindsay, a Yale graduate and Skull and Bones member, with whom Bush had dealings on matters of police and security policy affecting the UN diplomatic community.

In the course of the many Congressional investigations of domestic covert operations during the Watergate period, attention was called to a number of mysterious and unsolved break-ins related to United Nations functions which took place in the New York area during the approximate time that George Bush was UN ambassador, which was from February 1971 until January 1973. These included a break-in at the home of Victor Rioseco, an economic counselor for the Chilean mission to the United Nations, on February 10, 1971; a break-in at the home of Humberto Diaz-Casaneuva, the Chilean Ambassador to the United Nations, on April 5, 1971, and another burglary at the New York apartment of Javier Urrutia, the chief of the Chilean Development Corporation, on April 11, 1971. It will be noted that one common denominator of these break-ins was a targeting of Chilean representatives; the Chilean government at this time was that of President Salvador Allende Gossens, later toppled by a US-directed coup in September, 1973. The Chilean Embassy in Washington was the scene of yet another break-in on May 13-14, 1972.

Naturally, Bush's authorized biography and campaign autobiography say nothing about any of these interesting events. Fitzhugh Green describes the "gracious, professional teamwork" of Barbara and George at diplomatic receptions, with Bush's personal assistant Rudolph "Foxy" Carter fingering diplomats and wives to be buttonholed by Mrs. Bush and then taken over to meet George. It was also during these UN years that Bush consolidated his habit of writing large quantities of short personal longhand notes and cards to friends and acquaintances. Bush's habit was to personally sit though the long speeches of diplomats representing US allies and others whom Bush wished to propitiate. But in order to use the time, Foxy Carter would make sure that he had a sufficient supply of small note cards to be able to turn out a continuous flow of bread and butter notes, greetings, and working communications, some of which could be delivered to diplomats present in the room where Bush was sitting. In this way, Bush succeeded in ingratiating himself with many delegates. This practice foreshadows his later "speed-dialing mode" of contacts with world leaders during crises such as the Gulf adventure. [fn 32]

Bush spent just less than two years at the UN. His tenure coincided with some of the most monstrous crimes against humanity of the Nixon- Kissinger duo, for whom Bush functioned as an international spokesman to whom no Kissinger policy was too odious to be enthusiastically 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 US, 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.

Towards the close of Bush's posting to the UN, his father, Prescott Bush, died at the Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City. It was October 8, 1972. Prescott Bush had been diagnosed as suffering from lung cancer.

_______________

Notes:

1. In 1970, Bush's portfolio included 29 companies in which he had an interest of more than $4000. 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 Cale 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, 1989), p. 380.

3 Safire, Before the Fall, p. 646.

4. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, "Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes," Washington Post, August 9, 1988.

5. Reston, p. 382.

6. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 110.

7. For the Nixon side of the Bush UN appointment, see William Safire, Before the Fall (New York, 1977), especially "The President Falls in Love," pp. 642 ff.

8. Reston, p. 382. Reston (pp. 586-587) 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. See Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace (New York, 1978), p. 498.

11. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston, 1979), p. 715.

12. Szulc, p. 500, and Washington Post, August 12, 1971.

13. Washington Post, October 31, 1971.

14. See Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power (New York, 1983), pp. 444 ff.

15. Henry Kissinger, White House Years, p. 897. The general outlines of these remarks were first published in the Jack Anderson column, and reprinted in Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers ( New York, 1973).

16. Kissinger, p. 896.

17. Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers, p. 226.

18. Elmo Zumwalt, On Watch (New York, 1976), p. 367.

19. Anderson, p. 260-1.

20. Kissinger, p. 909.

21. Hersh, The Price of Power, p. 457.

22. Kissinger, pp. 911-912.

23. See R.C. Gupta, US Policy Towards India and Pakistan (Delhi, 1977) , p. 84 ff.

24. Washington Post, July 27, 1972.

25. Washington Post, September 11, 1972.

26. Bush and Gold, p. 114; Green, p. 122.

27. US 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: US Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 12.

28. In March, 1973, the US veto was used to block a resolution in the Security Council which called for the "full respect for Panama's effective sovereignty over all its territory." This resolution otherwise received 13 positive votes, and there was one abstention. See Casting Out Panama's Demon, Panama City, 1990, p. 22.

29. House of Representatives, Joint Hearing, pp. 10-11, 7.

30. Washington Post, April 23, 1972.

31. House of Representatives, Joint Hearing, pp. 7-8.

32. Ibid, p. 15.

33. Green, pp. 118, 125.

[admin]

PART 1 OF 2

Chapter XII -- Chairman George in Watergate

In November, 1972, Bush's "most influential patron," Richard Nixon [fn 1], won re-election 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, after the departure of Connally, supposed to become Super 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. Shultz was a Princeton graduate who was reputed to have a tiger, the school's symbol, tatooed on his rump. Bush says he received a call from Nixon's top domestic aide, John Ehrlichman (along with Haldemann a partner in the "Chinese wall" around Nixon maintained by the White House palace guard). 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. [fn 2] 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 for the 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." [ fn 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." [fn 4] According to Bush's own account, he asked Nixon for some time to ponder the offer of the RNC chairmanship. Among those who 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 to the UN. 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." [fn 5] Bush then told Ehrlichman that he would accept provided 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 UN, 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. [fn 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 grass roots complaints and resistance to White House directives from the GOP rank and file. In the context of the 1972 campaign, "White House" means specifically Clark MacGregor's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), one of the collective protagonists of the Watergate scandal. [fn 7] Dole was considered remarkable for his "irreverence" for Nixon: "he 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.'" [ fn 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 re-election 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," for "that was not the case." What was clear was that Nixon and 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 on the lookout for Republican candidates who could win, rather than an ideologue. "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." [fn 9] Bush appointed Tom Lias as his principal political assistant. Harry Dent, the former chief counsel to Nixon, was named the chief counsel to the GOP. Dent had been one of the ideologues of the party's southern strategy. D.K. "Pat" Wilson became the party finance chairman, and Rep. William Steiger of Wisconsin became the leader of a special committee that was supposed to broaden the electoral base of the party. Steiger was immediately attacked by the right-wing Human Events magazine as "very much a part of the defeated liberal reform movement" in the party. [fn 10] Richard Thaxton was the RNC patronage director. John Lofton, the editor of the GOP weekly journal called Monday, was eased out, and went to join Howard Phillips in the task of liquidating the Office of Economic Opportunity. Janet J. Johnston of California became the RNC co- chair. 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." [fn 11] 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. By the beginning of the 1990's, it has become something of a commonplace to refer to the complex of events surrounding the fall of Nixon as a coup d'etat. [fn 12] 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 US government so as to enhance their ability to carry out policies agreeable to the increasingly urgent dictates of the British-dominated Morgan- Rockefeller-Mellon-Harriman financier faction. The immediate beneficiaries of the coup have been that class of bureaucratic, technocratic administrators who have held the highest public offices, exercising power in many cases almost without interruption, 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, "Cui prodest scelus, is fecit"-- the one who derives advantage from the crime is the one most likely to have committed it. The policies of the 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 US 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 article on the conjuncture of a re-valuation of the Deutsche Mark 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 "Water- gate" 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 USA 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 US 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. [fn 13]

As LaRouche points out, it was the leading Anglo-American financier factions who decided to dump Nixon, and availed themselves of the pre-existing 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. The "Seven Days in May" overtone of Watergate, the more or less overt break with constitutional forms and rituals was never excluded. 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 US 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 towards 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, about whose pedigree and strategy something has been said above. 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 decades. 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.

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 Carl Bernstein, 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.

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, reportedly exceeding his quota by the largest margin among all his fellow regional chairmen. 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." [fn 14]

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' money-laundering operation there. [fn 15] 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. How much did Bush himself know about the activities of the Plumbers, and when did he know it?

The U.S. House of Representatives Banking and Currency Committee, chaired by Texas Democrat Wright Patman, 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. Chairman Patman opened the following explosive leads: Patman confirmed that the largest amount of the funds going into 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, 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." [fn 16]

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. [fn 17]

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 1960's, 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'rith.

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. [fn 18]

A decade after Watergate, it was revealed that the Hunt family had controlled about 15 per cent 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. (In 1983, British investor Alan Clore moved in for a hostile takeover of Gulf Resources and Chemical Corp. Senator John Tower, Republican from Texas, argued that the government should stop the takeover on grounds of "national security", since the company controlled the materials for the world's nuclear weapons. Certainly, the management of such an enterprise is closely supervised by the U.S. intelligence community. It is then obvious why a Congressional probe that led through Liedtke and Bush to the secret services had to be sabotaged.)

On Oct. 3, 1972, the House Banking and Currency Committee voted 20-15 against continuing chairman Wright Patman's investigation. The vote prevented the issuance of 23 subpoenas for CREEP officials to come testify to Congress. 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." Certain elements of this infamous "campaign" are known. Banking Committee member Frank Brasco, a lieral 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 was 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. [fn 19]

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. ***

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." [fn 20] 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 US 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 US 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 US. 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." [fn 21] But according to one of McCord's own police contacts, Garey Bittenbender of the Washington DC 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. [fn 22]

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 of 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 fourteen-point list of leaks and their classification, including the frequency of leaks associated with certain journalists, the gravity of the leaks, the frequency 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." [fn 23]

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.'" [fn 24]

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 (or old State-War-Navy) which is adjacent to the Executive Mansion and forms part of the same security compound. As we read, for example, in the Jack Anderson "Washington Merry-Go- Round" column for March 10, 1973, in the Washington Post: "Washington Whirl- Bush's Office--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 OEOB. How often did George drop in on Dick, or Dick on George, or how often did they just meet in the hall?

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." [fn 25] 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.'"

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, a rivalry which became especially acute during the first months of the Reagan Administration.

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. [fn 26] Among the customers of the prostitutes there appear to have been a US Senator, an astronaut, A Saudi prince (the Embassy of Saudi Arabia is nearby), US 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 Committee 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 hot line 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, re-focused 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, (thus allowing him to leave his room in a rooming house on Q Street in the District), 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 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." [fn 27]

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, 1973, 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-avis 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 (the Bellino-Birely safe house in Silver Spring) and "switched pills on me." [fn 28]

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 counter investigation 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 George 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." [fn 29] 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." [fn 30] "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, of course, 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 re-directed the scandal, not just towards 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 depositioning or other questioning in which questions about his relationship to Russell might be asked. 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 Kenndy 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 (now the Sheraton Park) just before they were occupied by Nixon on the even 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. [fn 31] 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." [fn 32 ]

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." [fn 33] 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."

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. [fn 34] 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's statement to the press prediscounted Democratic charges that his revelations were part of a Nixon Administration counter-offensive to deflect Watergate.

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PART 2 OF 2

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 hear 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 1980 "October surprise" deal of the Reagan-Bush campaign with the Iranian Khomeini mullahs of Iran to block the freeing of the US hostages are so remote in the past that nobody is interested in them any more. But in 1973, Bush thought that events of 1960 were highly relevant to Watergate.

Bellino labeled 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 be on television himself as the ranking Republican on the panel. Ehrlichmann, 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." [fn 35] But Nixon's damage control interest had been sacrificed by Bush's vacillating advocacy, and the devastating testimony of figures like Dean and McCord would have its maximum impact.

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." [fn 36]

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 targetted 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." [fn 37]

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." [fn 38]

Sam Dash, the chief counsel to the Ervin committee, had a darker and more detailed view of Bush's actions. Dash later recounted: "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." [fn 39] 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 million 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. [fn 40]

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. [fn 41]

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. At this conference, Bush rubbed shoulders with Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. [fn 42]

The next day Bush was at it again, announcing that he was re- opening an investigation into alleged courses in political sabotage and 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 1000 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. [fn 43]

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 was in a position to praise Agnew for his "great personal courage" while endorsing the resignation as "in the best interest of the country." [fn 44]

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." [fn 45]

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 in issue in the Texas race. "Corruption and clean government didn't show up very high at all," he concluded. [fn 46]

By the spring of 1974, the impending doom of the Nixon regime was the cue for Bush's characteristic reedy whining. 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. Conable did not urge him to stay on. 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." [fn 47]

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." [fn 48] 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. [fn 49]

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 coup de grace tape was going to be made public, "an act probably fatal," as Haig had said. "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." [fn 50] 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. [fn 51]

But why, it may be asked, the dermal diarrhea? 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, whose exchanges between Nixon and Haldeman were to prove the coup de grace to the agony of the Nixon regime? 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. ("Das Bekannte ueberhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt," as even old Hegel knew.)

The open secret of the much-cited but little analyzed "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 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 unusual 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, that 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 (unintelligible) 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. [fn 52]

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. [fn 53]

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. [fn 54]

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. This was the Cabinet meeting described as "unreal" by Bush later. 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. Otherwise, said Ford, 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. The Republican Party was in a shambles, he went on, and the forthcoming Congressional election threatened to be a disaster. 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 towards 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." [fn 55] 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 lasting respect. [fn 56]

During Bush's confirmation hearings for the post of CIA Director in December, 1976, when it became important to show how independent Bush had been, Senator Barry Goldwater volunteered that Bush had been "the first man to my knowledge to let the President know he should go." That presumably meant, the first among cabinet and White House officials.

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." [fn 57]

But there are many indications that Bush was in reality someone who, while taking part in the fray, actually helped to steer Watergate towards the strategic outcome desired by the dominant financier faction, the one associated with Brown Brother, 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:

1. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush, p. 137.

2. Bush and Gold, pp. 120-121.

3. Bush and Gold, p. 121.

4. Fitzhugh Green, p. 129.

5. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," in Texas Monthly, June 1983.

6. Dallas Morning News, November 25, 1971.

7. Washington Post, December 12, 1972.

8. Ibid.

9. Washington Post, January 22, 1973.

10. Washington Post, February 6, 1973.

11. Washington Post, January 22, 1973.

12. See for example Len Cholodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup (New York, 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, 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, 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, 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, September 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. Maurice H. Stans, The Terrors of Justice: The Untold Side of Watergate.

17. New York Times, August 26, 1972, and Nov. 1, 1972.

18. Interview with a Post Oak Bank executive Nov. 21, 1991. Houston Post, Dec. 27, 1988.

19. Stanley L. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York, 1990), pp. 229-33.

20. See Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York, 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, p. 318.

22. Nezdi Committee report, pp. 442-43, quoted in Hougan, p. 21.

23. Hougan, pp. 46-47.

24. Ervin Committee Final Rport, pp. 1146-49, and Hougan, pp. 131-132.

25. Al Reinert, "Bob and George Go To Washington or The Post-Watergate Scramble," Texas Monthly, April, 1974.

26. The question of the Columbia Plaza Apartments is a central theme of Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda (New York, 1984). We have also relied on Hougan's version of the Russell-Leon-Bellino subplot described below. Hougan's book, although it studiously avoids drawing obvious conclusions about Bush, Kissinger, Rockefeller, and many others, is a convenient starting point for the necessary metacritique of Watergate. By contrast, the Colodny-Gettlin Silent Coup (New York, 1991) represents a step backward, away from the truth of the matter on numerous points.

27. Hougan, p. 324.

28. Hougan, p. 370.

29. Interview of Jerris Leonard with Tony Chaitkin, August 26, 1991.

30. Hougan, p. 374-375.

31. 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, 1977), pp. 41-55.

32. Hougan, 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.

33. Ibid.

34. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, p. 811.

35. Pincus and Woodward, Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes, Washington Post, August 9, 1988.

36. Washington Post, July 12, 1973.

37. Sam J. Ervin, Jr., The Whole Truth (New York, 1980), p. 28.

38. Ervin, p. 29.

39. Sam Dash, Chief Counsel (New York, 1976), p. 192.

40. Evans and Novak, July 11, 1973.

41. Washington Post, August 7, 1973.

42. Washington Post, August 9, 1973.

43. Washington Post, August 10, 1973.

44. Washington Post, October 11, 1973.

45. Washington Post, October 24, 1973.

46. Washington Post, November 17, 1973.

47. Bernstein and Woodward, The Final Days, pp. 159, 176.

48. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, p. 1042.

49. Fitzhugh Green, p. 135.

50. The Final days, p. 368.

51. The Final Days, p. 369.

52. For the "smoking gun" transcript of June 23, 1972, see Washington Post, August 6, 1974.

53. H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (New York, 1978), p. 64.

54. The Final Days, p. 374.

55. Available accounts of Nixon's last cabinet meeting are fragmentary, but see: RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, p. 1066; The Final Days, pp. 386-389; Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York, 1975), p. 24; Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 1202-1203; J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (New York, 1976), pp 558-559. These have been collated for the account offered here.

56. The ostensible full text of this letter is found in Nicholas King, George Bush: A Biography (New York, 1980), p. 87. Vic Gold gives only seven lines of excerpts. Fitzhugh Green, in his post November 1988 hagiography, liquidates the matter in fewer than five lines. In each case the calculating eye of the public relations man is observing the reader like the sucker in a medicine show. Apparently Bush's handlers concluded that there was less and less to gain from distancing their candidate from Nixon; perhaps their polls were showing that popular resentment of Nixon had somewhat declined.

57. Maurice H. Stans, The Terrors of Justice: The Untold Side of Watergate, p. 66.

[admin]

Chapter XIII -- Bush Attempts The Vice Presidency, 1974

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 now 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 XXV 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. George had learned in 1968 that an organized effort commensurate with his own boundless lust for power would be required to succeed. 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. [fn 1] Since Bush controlled the RNC apparatus, this large machinery could also be thrown into the fray.

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. Nelson's vast notoriety, his imposing cursus honorum, his own powerful Wall Street network, his financial and banking faction-- all of these would count heavily in his favor. But Nelson, having been the incarnation of the Eastern Liberal Establishment internationalists against whom Goldwater had campaigned so hard in 1964, also had a very high negative. People hated Nelson. 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, despite Rockefeller's strength in the financial and intelligence communities. Part of the battle would be to convince Ford that Bush would be a bigger asset for 1976.

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, maintained since his Rubbers days, 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. [fn 2]

Melvin Laird soon came out for Rockefeller, and there were sentimental displays for Goldwater in many quarters. With Bush's network in full career, 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." Columns like this one went on at length about the many disadvantages of choosing Rockefeller, not the least of which was that he would eclipse Ford.

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. The old Prescott Bush networks were still a big plus, he stressed. A group of House conservatives came out for Goldwater, with Bush in second place.

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." Nelson might be better, suggested the Post. In any case, "we have the recent example of Mr. Agnew to remind us of the pitfalls in the choice of Vice Presidents by the application of irrelevant criteria."

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 fund-raiser that he had a "gut feeling" that Ford was going to select Bush for the vice presidency. Barry, we recall, had been very cozy with father Prescott in the old days. Goldwater portrayed Bush and Rockefeller as the two competing front-runners. This was precisely where Bush wanted to position himself so that he could benefit from the widespread and vocal opposition to Rockefeller. 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. [fn 3]

Inside the Ford White House, responses to Ford's solicitation were coming in. Among the top White House councilors, 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. His relative youth, Texas residence with a New England background, wide popularity in business and political circles, and unqualified integrity and ability, combined with his personal qualities of charm and tact, would make him a natural for the new Presidential/Vice Presidential team." This encomium is quoted at length because it seems to be a form letter or printout that was distributed by the Bush operation as talking points for Bush supporters. [fn 4] 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." [fn 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 Eliott Richardson. No written opinion by Henry Kissinger appears extant at the Ford Library. Among the cabinet and the senior White House counselors, therefore, Rocky had bested Bush 7 to 3, with Burch and Rush providing Chairman George's most convinced support.

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." [fn 5] Richard A. Moore was for Bush based on his economic credentials, asserting that Bush's "father and grandfather 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 4 to 3 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." [fn 6] Among serving governors, only Thomas J. Meskill of Connecticut, and Otis R. Bowen of Indiana put Bush in first place. When all the governors' preferences were tabulated, Bush came in third, trailing Rockefeller and Governor Daniel J. Evans of Washington.

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 but 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. [fn 7] In the final tally of Senate picks, 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 Buchana 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 UN 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, interestingly enough. 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, had 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 of California 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, an endorsement that stood out for its freemasonic overtones in a field where freemasonic modulations were rife. According to Whitehurst, who has a parkway with his name on it in the capital, Bush demonstrates "those special characteristics that qualify a man for the highest office if fate so designates." This is one Ford would have had no trouble understanding. 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 Winnof 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." [fn 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, which he had personally solicited and screened, and even Ford's people do not seem to have been overly impressed by this part of the result. 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 2280 in his favor, and only 102 against. Bush had 887 for him and 92 against. Rocky had 544 in favor, and a whopping 3202 against. [fn 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." There was a telegram from Charles Pistor of the Republic National Bank of Dallas, and many others.

The all 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. [fn 10]

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 fact that 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 fun-raising operation, with none of the required reports ever filed.

By August 19, the even 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 was unavailable for comment that day, and retainers James Bayless and C. Fred Chambers scrambled to deliver plausible denials, but the issue would not go away.

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. [fn 11] 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 an 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.

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Notes:

1. Washington Post, August 16, 1974.

2. Washington Post, August 9, 1974.

3. Washington Post, August 16, 1974.

4. Gerald R. Ford Library, Robert T. Hartman Files, Box 21.

5. Gerald R. Ford Library, Robert T. Hartmann Files, Box 19.

6. Philip Buchen Files, Box 63.

7. Robert T. Hartman Files, Box 21.

8. Robert T. Hartmann Files, Boxes 19 and 20.

9. Robert T. Hartmann Files, Box 21.

10. Robert T. Hartmann Files, Box 20.

11. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, "Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes," Washington Post, August 9, 1988.