Chapter XVII -- The Attempted Coup D'Etat of March 30, 1991
"Bizarre happenstance, a weird coincidence"
--Bush spokeswoman Shirley M. Green, March 31, 1981
cui prodest scelus, is fecit
--Seneca, first century AD
For Bush, the vice presidency was not an end in itself, but merely another stage in the ascent towards the pinnacle of the federal bureaucracy, the White House. With the help of his Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones network, Bush had now reached the point where but a single human life stood between him and the presidency.
Ronald Reagan was 70 years old when he took office, the oldest man ever to be inaugurated as president. His mind wandered; long fits of slumber crept over his cognitive faculties. On some days he may have kept bankers' hours with his papers and briefing books and meetings in the Oval Office, but he needed a long nap most afternoons and became distraught if he could not have one. His custom was to delegate all administrative decisions to the cabinet members, to the executive departments and agencies. Policy questions were delegated to the White House staff, who prepared the options and then guided Reagan's decisions among the pre-defined options. This was the staff that composed not just Reagan's speeches, but the script of his entire life: for normally every word that Reagan spoke in meetings and conferences, every line down to and including "Good morning, Senator," every word was typed on three by five file cards from which the Reagan would read.
Foreign leaders like the cunning Francois Mitterrand professed shock over Reagan's refusal to depart from the vaguest generalities in response to impromptu questions; Mitterrand had attempted to invite Reagan to a private tete-a-tete, but he had been overruled by Reagan's staff. French Foreign Minister Cheysson lamented that the exchanges had been "shallow." When asked for decisions in the National Security Council, Reagan would often respond with his favorite story about black welfare mothers chiseling the government out of money; aides would then interpret that as approval of the options they were putting forward.
But sometimes Reagan was capable of lucidity, and even of inspired greatness, in the way a thunderstorm can momentarily illuminate a darkling countryside; these moments often involved direct personal impressions or feelings. Reagan's instinctive contempt for Bush after the Nashua Telegraph debate was one of his better moments. Reagan's greatest moment of conceptual clarity came in his television speech of March 23, 1983 on the Strategic Defense Initiative, a concept that had been drummed into the Washington bureaucracy through the indefatigable efforts of Lyndon LaRouche and a few others. The idea of defending against nuclear missiles, of not accepting mutually assured destruction, and of using such a program as a science driver for rapid technological renewal was something Reagan permanently grasped and held onto even under intense pressure in Hofdie House in Reykjavik in October, 1986 during the summit with Gorbachov. In addition, during the early years of Reagan's first term, there were enough Reaganite loyalists, typified by William Clark, in the administration to cause much trouble for the Bushmen. But as the years went by, the few men like Clark that Reagan had brought with him from California would be ground up by endless bureaucratic warfare, and their replacements, like McFarlane at the NSC, would come more and more from the ranks of the Kissingerians. Unfortunately Reagan never developed a plan to make the SDI an irreversible political and budgetary reality, and this critical shortcoming grew out of Reagan's failed economic policies, which never substantially departed from Carter's.
But apart from rare moments like the SDI, Reagan tended to drift. Don Regan called it "the guesswork presidency;" for Al Haig, frustrated in his own lust for power, it was government by an all-powerful staff. Who were the staff? At first it was thought that Reagan would take most of his advice from his old friend Edwin Meese, his close associate from California days, loyal and devoted to Reagan, and sporting his Adam Smith tie. But it was soon evident that the White House was really run by a troika: Meese, Michael Deaver, and James Baker III, Bush's man.
Deaver's specialty was demagogic image-mongering. Deaver's images were made for television; they were edifying symbols without content, and took advantage of the fact that Reagan so perfectly embodied the national ideology of the Americans that most of them could not help liking him; he was the ideal figurehead. Deaver had another important job, for Reagan, as everybody knows, was uxorious: Nancy Reagan, the narrow-minded, vain, petty starlet was the one the president called "Mommy." Nancy was the mamba of the White House, the social-climbing arriviste of capital society, an evil-tongued presence on a thousand telephones a week complaining about the indignities she thought she was subjected to, always obsessed by public opinion and making Ronnie look good in the most ephemeral short term. Deaver was like a eunuch of the Topkapi harem, responsible for managing the humors of the sultan's leading odalisque.
Nancy was a potential problem for Bush; she did not like him; perhaps she sensed that he was organizing a putsch against Ronnie. "He's a nice man and very capable. But he's no Ronnie. He comes across as a 'wimp.' I don't think he can make it. He's a nice man, but his image is against him. It isn't macho enough." [fn 1] So spoke Nancy Reagan to her astrologer, Joan Quigley, in the White House in April, 1985. That could have been a very serious problem indeed, and that was where James Baker came in.
If Deaver played the eunuch for Nancy, Baker was to impersonate her squire and champion. In Nancy's provincial view, Baker was a sartorially elegant, old money aristocrat and charmer. His assignment for the Bush machine was to ingratiate himself with the adolescent old lady with flattery and schmooze, and Nancy appears to have been entranced by Baker's Princeton Ivy Club veneer --those ties! Those suits!
Deaver gravitated by instinct towards Baker; Deaver tells us in his memoirs that he was a supporter of Bush for vice president at the Detroit convention. This meant that Baker-Deaver became the dominant force over Ron and over Nancy; George Bush, in other words, already had an edge in the bureaucratic infighting.
Thus it was that White House press secretary James Brady could say in early March, 1981: "Bush is functioning much like a co-president. George is involved in all the national security stuff because of his special background as CIA director. All the budget working groups he was there, the economic working groups, the Cabinet meetings. He is included in almost all the meetings." [fn 2]
Even before the inauguration, James Baker had told a group of experienced Republican political operatives in Houston that Reagan was only interested in the public and symbolic aspects of the presidency, and that he had asked the Bush people to come in and take over the actual running of day to day government affairs. That was, of course, the self-interested view of the Bushmen. There were reports in the Bush camp that Reagan would quit after a year or two and let Bush entrench himself as the incumbent before the 1984 election. Later, after 1984, there were even more frequent rumors that Reagan would resign in favor of Bush. It did not happen, showing that Reagan was not the pushover that the Bushmen liked to pretend.
During the first months of the Reagan Administration, Bush found himself locked in a power struggle with Gen. Alexander Haig, whom Reagan had appointed to be Secretary of State. Haig was a real threat to the Bushmen. Haig was first of all a Kissinger clone with credentials to rival Bush's own; Haig had worked on Henry's staff during the Nixon years; he had been the White House chief of staff who had eased Nixon out the door with no trial, but with an imminent pardon. Haig's gifts of intrigue were considerable. And Haig was just as devoted to the Zionist neoconservatives as Bush was, with powerful ties in the direction of the Anti-Defamation League. It was, altogether, a challenge not to be taken lightly. Haig thought that he had been a rival to Bush for the vice-presidency at the Detroit convention, and perhaps he had been.
Inexorably, the Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones networks went into action against Haig. The idea was to paint him as a power-hungry megalomaniac bent on dominating the administration of the weak figurehead Reagan. This would then be supplemented by a vicious campaign of leaking by Baker and Deaver designed to play Reagan against Haig and vice-versa, until the rival to Bush could be eliminated.
The wrecking operation against Haig started during his confirmation hearings, during which he had to answer more questions about Watergate than Bush had faced in 1975, when the facts were much more recent. Senator Tsongas was wired in: Tsongas, motivating his negative vote against Haig's confirmation, told the nominee: "You are going to dominate this administration, if I may say so. You are by far the strongest personality that's going to be in there." [fn 3]
Three weeks into the new administration, Haig concluded that "someone in the White House staff was attempting to communicate with me through the press," by a process of constant leakage, including leakage of the contents of secret diplomatic papers. Haig protested to Meese, NSC chief Richard Allen, Baker, and Bush. Shortly thereafter, Haig noted that "Baker's messengers sent rumors of my imminent departure or dismissal murmuring through the press." Soon "'a senior presidential aide' was quoted in a syndicated column as saying, 'We will get this man [Haig] under control.'" [fn 4] It took a long time for Baker and Bush to drive Haig out of the administration. Ultimately it was Haig's attempted mediation of the Malvinas crisis in April, 1982 that weakened Haig to the point that he could be finished off. His fall was specifically determined by his action in giving Ariel Sharon a secret carte blanche for the Israeli government to invade Lebanon, including the city of Beirut. Reagan was justifiably enraged. Shortly before his ouster, Haig got a report of a White House meeting during which Baker was reported to have said, "Haig is going to go, and quickly, and we are going to make it happen." [fn 5]
Haig's principal bureaucratic ploy during the first weeks of the Reagan administration was his submission to Reagan on the day of his inauguration of a draft executive order to organize the National Security Council and interagency tasks forces, including the crisis staffs, according to Haig's wishes. Haig refers to this document as National Security Decision Directive 1 (NSDD 1), and laments that it was never signed in its original form, and that no comparable directive for structuring the NSC interagency groups was signed for over a year. Ultimately a document called NSDD 2 would be signed, formalizing the establishment of a Special Situation Group (SSG) crisis management staff chaired by Bush. Haig's draft would have made the Secretary of State the Chairman of the SSG crisis staff in conformity with Haig's demand to be recognized as Reagan's "vicar of foreign policy." This was unacceptable to Bush, who made sure with the help of Baker and probably also Deaver that Haig's draft of NSDD 1 would never be signed.
Haig writes about this bureaucratic struggle as the battle for the IG's (Interagency Groups) and SIG's (Special or Senior Interagency Groups), generally populated by undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries within the NSC framework. As Haig points out, these Kissingerian structures are the locus of much real power, especially under a weak president like Reagan. Haig notes that "in organizational terms, the key to the system is the substructure of SIG's and IG's in which the fundamentals of policy (domestic and foreign) are decided. On instructions from the President, the IG's (as I will call the whole lot, for the sake of convenience), can summon up all the human and informational resources of the federal government, study specific issues, and develop policy options and recommendations. [...] IG chairmanships are parceled out to State and other departments and agencies according to their interests and their influence. As Kissinger, that canny veteran of marches and countermarches in the faculty of Harvard University, recognized, he who controls the key IG's controls the flow of options to the President and, therefore, to a degree, controls policy." [fn 6]
The struggle between Haig and Bush culminated towards the end of Reagan's first hundred days in office. Haig was chafing because the White House staff, meaning Baker, was denying him access to the president. Haig's NSDD 1 had still not been signed. The, on Sunday, March 22, Haig's attention was called to an elaborate leak to reporter Martin Schram that had appeared that day in the Washington Post under the headline "WHITE HOUSE REVAMPS TOP POLICY ROLES; Bush to Head Crisis Management." Haig's attention was drawn to the following paragraphs:
Partly in an effort to bring harmony to the Reagan high command, it has been decided that Vice President George Bush will be placed in charge of a new structure for national security crisis management, according to senior presidential assistants. This assignment will amount to an unprecedented role for a vice president in modern times. In the Carter administration, the crisis management structure was chaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser. [...]
On a broader, policy-making level, senior White House officials were unhappy with what they felt to be ill-timed and ill-considered actions by Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. that placed the brightest spotlight on El Salvador at a time when the administration was trying to focus maximum attention on Reagan's economic proposals. [...]
Bush's stature, by virtue of job title and experience, was cited as the reason that he was chosen to chair meetings in the Situation Room in time of crisis. Principal officials involved in crisis management will be the secretaries of state and defense, the Central Intelligence Agency director, the national security adviser, Meese, and Baker, officials said, adding that the structure has not been fully devised nor the presidential directive written.
Reagan officials emphasized that Bush, a former director of the CIA and former United Nations Ambassador, would be able to preserve White House control over crisis management without irritating Haig, who they stressed was probably the most experienced and able of all other officials who could serve in that function.
"The reason for this [choice of Bush] is that the secretary of state might wish he were chairing the crisis management structure," said one Reagan official, "but it is pretty hard to argue with the vice president being in charge." [fn 7]
Lower down on the page was a smaller article entitled "Anatomy of a Washington Rumor," to which we will return.
Haig says that he called Ed Meese at the White House to check the truth of this report, and that Meese replied that there was no truth to it. Haig went to see Reagan at the White House. Reagan was concerned about the leak, and reassured Haig: "I want you to know that the story in the Post is a fabrication. It means that George would sit in for me in the NSC in my absence, and that's all it means. It doesn't affect your authority in any way." Haig also says that he received a further call from Reagan assuring him that his authority was not to be diminished in the slightest.
But later the same afternoon, White House press secretary James Brady read the following statement to the press:
I am confirming today the President's decision to have the Vice President chair the Administration's "crisis management" team, as a part of the National Security Council system....President Reagan's choice of the Vice President was guided in large measure by the fact that management of crises has traditionally--and appropriately-- been done in the White House. [fn 8]
Haig says he then drew up his letter of resignation, but hesitated to sign it. He called Bush to complain: "The American people can't be served by this. It's an impossible situation for you and me to be in. Of course, you chair the NSC in the President's absence. We didn't need to say it. This is all mischief. Why the hell did they do this without discussing it with me." Haig went on: "I have been dealt with duplicitously, George. The President has been used. I need a public reaffirmation of my role or I can't stay here." Can it be that Haig was so naive that he did not realize that Bush was his ruthless rival and the source of many of his problems? Haig undoubtedly knew, but chose not to say so in memoirs written after he had been defeated. For Haig also knew that Bush was vindictive. Haig does note that he was convinced that Meese was not part of the cabal out to get him. Haig had further conversations with Reagan during these days, which often seemed to have cleared up the confusion, but which in retrospect were never conclusive. In the meantime, George Bush had seized control of the Special Situation Group, which would take control of the Executive Branch in time of crisis or national emergency. It was a superb starting point for a coup d'etat.
The other article in the Washington Post of Sunday, March 22 was also a harbinger of things soon to come. This piece was entitled "Anatomy of a Washington Rumor," and the rumor it traced was that "Vice President George Bush had been nicked by a bullet in a predawn shooting outside a townhouse somewhere on Capitol Hill." According to this story, the source of the rumor in question was a young woman artist living on Capitol Hill who had rushed into the street on the evening of February 22 when she heard the sound of a traffic accident near her home. There she was met a by a police officer whom she had met previously, on the occasion of the murder a few weeks earlier of a young Supreme Court Librarian in the same spot. According to the woman artist, the policeman told her: "The vice president was shot today." When the woman artist tried to check on this story with the news media, the article alleged, the rumor took on a life of its own and became an inchoate news story, with Jack Anderson and others trying to verify it.
Vice President Bush was reportedly very angry when he was told about the rumor: "Peter Teeley, the vice president's press secretary, told Bush of the inquiries. The vice president was incredulous and was as angry as Teeley had ever seen him. 'Jesus, this is the craziest thing I have ever heard,' he said. Bush though the whole thing was silly. 'You should call Barbara,' he told Teeley, ' and let her know what this is all about." Why would Bush be so angry about a spurious report?
As reporters dug deeper into the alleged shooting, one asked a Secret Service contact if there had been any recent shooting incidents monitored by his agency. "The answer came back. On March 8, as a motorcade drove west on Canal Road, officers had heard a 'popping sound' from a 'steep, rocky cliff' on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. But it had been President Reagan's motorcade, not Bush's. And the noises never proved to be gunfire." [fn 9] Had there been an attempt to assassinate Reagan, or to intimidate him? In any case Senator Howard Baker, the GOP majority leader at that time, was overheard making jokes about the allegedly discredited Rumor at a weekend party, and this was duly noted in the Washington Post of March 25.
In the midst of the Bush-Baker cabal's relentless drive to seize control over the Reagan administration, John Warnock Hinckley Jr. carried out his attempt to assassinate President Reagan on the afternoon of March 30, 1981. George Bush was visiting Texas that day. Bush was flying from Fort Worth to Austin in his Air Force Two Boeing 707. In Fort Worth, Bush had unveiled a plaque at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the old Hotel Texas, designating it as a national historic site. This was the hotel, coincidentally, in which John F. Kennedy had spent the last night of his life, before going on to Dallas the next day, November 22, 1963. Here was a sinister symbolism!
In Austin Bush was scheduled to deliver an address to a joint session of the Texas state legislature. It was Al Haig who called Bush in the clear and told him that the President had been shot, while forwarding the details of Reagan's condition, insofar as they were known, by scrambler as a classified message. Haig was in touch with James Baker III, who was close to Reagan at George Washington University hospital. Bush's man in the White House situation room was Admiral Dan Murphy, who was standing right next to Haig. Bush agreed with Haig's estimate that he ought to return to Washington at once. But first his plane needed to be refueled, so it landed at Carswell Air Force Base near Austin.
Refueling took about forty minutes; during this time Bush talked on board the plane with Texas Governor William Clements, his wife, Rita, and Texas Secretary of State George Strake. Texas Congressman Jim Wright was also travelling on Bush's plane that day, as were Congressmen Bill Archer of Houston and Jim Collins of Dallas. Bush's top aide Chase Untermeyer was also with the party on Air Force Two. [fn 10]
Bush says that his flight from Carswell to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington took about two and one half hours, and that he arrived at Andrews at abouit 6:40 PM. Bush says he was told by Ed Meese that the operation to remove the bullet that had struck Reagan was a success, and that the president was likely to survive. Bush's customary procedure was to land at Andrews and then take a helicopter to the vice presidential residence, the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue. His aides Ed Pollard and John Matheny suggested that he would save time by going by helicopter directly to the White House south lawn, where he could arrive in time to be shown on the 7 PM Eastern time evening news broadcasts. Bush makes much oif the fact that he refused to do this, allegedly on the symbolic grounds that "Only the President lands on the south lawn."
Back at the White House, the principal cabinet officers had assembled in the situation room and had been running a crisis management committee during the afternoon. Haig says he was at first adamant that a conspiracy, if discovered, should be ruthlessly exposed: "It was essential that we get the facts and publish them quickly. Rumor must not be allowed to breed on this tragedy. Remembering the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, I said to Woody Goldberg, 'No matter what the truth is about this shooting, the American people must know it." [fn 11] But the truth has never been established.
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's memoir of that afternoon reminds us of two highly relevant facts. The first is that a "NORAD [North American Air Defense Command] exercise with a simulated incoming missile attack had been planned for the next day." Weinberger agreed with General David Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that this exercise should be cancelled. [fn 12]
Weinberger also recalls that the group in the Situation Room was informed by James Baker that "there had been a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] exercise scheduled for the next day on presidential succession, with the general title 'Nine Lives.' By an immediate consensus, it was agreed that exercise should also be cancelled." [fn 13]
As Weinberger further recalls, "at almost exactly 7:00, the Vice President came to the Situation Room and very calmly assumed the chair at the head of the table." [fn 14] According to Weinberger, the first item discussed was the need for someone to sign the Dairy Price Support Bill the next day so as to reassure the public. Bush asked Weinberger for a report on the status of US forces, which Weinberger furnished.
Another eyewitness of these transactions was Don Regan, whom the Tower Board later made the fall-guy for Bush's Iran-contra escapades. Regan records that "the Vice President arrived with Ed Meese, who had met him when he landed to fill him in on the details. George asked for a condition report: 1) on the President; 2) on the other wounded; 3) on the assailant; 4) on the international scene. [...] After the reports were given and it was determined that there were no international complications and no domestic conspiracy, it was decided that the US government would carry on business as usual. The Vice President would go on TV from the White House to reassure the nation and to demonstrate that he was in charge." [fn 15]
As Weinberger recounts the same moments: "[Attorney General Bill French Smith] then reported that all FBI reports concurred with the information I had received; that the shooting was a completely isolated incident and that the assassin, John Hinckley, with a previous record in Nashville, seemed to be a 'Bremmer' type, a reference to the attempted assassin of George Wallace." [fn 16]
Those who were not watching carefully here may have missed the fact that just a few minutes after George Bush had walked into the room, he had presided over the sweeping under the rug of the decisive question regarding Hinckley and his actions: was Hinckley a part of a conspiracy, domestic or international? Not more than five hours after the attempt to kill Reagan, on the basis of the most fragmentary early reports, before Hinckley had been properly questioned, and before a full investigation had been carried out, a group of cabinet officers chaired by George Bush had ruled out a priori any conspiracy. Haig, whose memoirs talk most about the possibility of a conspiracy, does not seem to have objected to this incredible decision.
From that moment on, "no conspiracy" became the official doctrine of the US regime, for the moment a Bush regime, and the most massive efforts were undertaken to stifle any suggestion to the contrary. The iron curtain came down on the truth about Hinckley.
What was the truth of the matter? The Roman common sense of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (who had seen so many of Nero's intrigues, and who would eventually fall victim to one of them) would have dictated that the person who would have profited most from Reagan's death be scrutinized as the prime suspect. That was obviously Bush, since Bush would have assumed the presidency if Reagan had succumbed to his wounds. The same idea was summed up by an eighth grade student at the Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC who told teachers on March 31: "It is a plot by Vice President Bush to get into power. If Bush becomes President, the CIA would be in charge of the country." The pupils at this school had been asked for their views of the Hinckley assassination attempt of the previous day. [fn 17]
Curiously enough, press accounts emerging over the next few days provided a compelling prima facie case that there had been a conspiracy around the Hinckley attentat, and that the conspiracy had included members of Bush's immediate family. Most of the overt facts were not disputed, but were actually confirmed by Bush and his son Neil.
On Tuesday, March 31 the Houston Post published a copyrighted story under the headline: "BUSH'S SON WAS TO DINE WITH SUSPECT'S BROTHER, by Arthur Wiese and Margaret Downing." The lead paragraph read as follows:
Scott Hinckley, the brother of John Hinckley Jr., who is charged with shooting President Reagan and three others, was to have been a dinner guest Tuesday night at the home of Neil Bush, son of Vice President George Bush, The Houston Post has learned.
ccording to the article, Neil Bush had admitted on Monday, March 30 that he was personally acquainted with Scott Hinckley, having met with him on one occasion in the recent past. Neil Bush also stated that he knew the Hinckley family, and referred to large monetary contributions made by the Hinckleys to the Bush 1980 presidential campaign. Neil Bush and Scott Hinckley both lived in Denver at this time. Scott Hinckley was the vice president of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, and Neil Bush was employed as a land man for Standard Oil of Indiana. John W. Hinckley Jr., the would-be assassin, lived on and off with his parents in Evergreen, Colorado, not far from Denver.
Neil Bush was reached for comment on Monday, March 30, and was asked if, in addition to Scott Hinckley, he also knew John W. Hinckley Jr., the would-be killer. "I have no idea," said Neil Bush. "I don't recognize any pictures of him. I just wish I could see a better picture of him."
Sharon Bush, Neil's wife, was also asked about her acquaintance with the Hinckley family. "I don't even know the brother," she replied, suggesting that Scott Hinckley was coming to dinner as the date of a woman whom Sharon did know. "From what I know and have heard, they [the Hinckleys] are a very nice family...and have given a lot of money to the Bush campaign. I understand he [John W. Hinckley Jr.] was just the renegade brother in the family. They must feel awful."
It also proved necessary for Bush's office to deny that the vice-president was familiar with the "Hinckley-Bush connection." Bush's press secretary, the British-born Peter Teeley, said when asked to comment: "I don't know a damn thing about it. I was talking to someone earlier tonight, and I couldn't even remember his [Hinckley's] name. All I know is what you're telling me." Teeley denied that Bush had revealed that he knew Hinckley or the Hinckley family when he first heard the assassin's name; the vice president "made no mention of it whatsoever." Bush, repeated Teeley, "certainly didn't indicate anything like that."
Chase Untermeyer of Bush's staff, who had been with him throughout the day, put in that in his recollection Bush had not been told the assailant's name through the time that Bush reached the Naval Observatory in Washington on his way to the White House.
On April 1, 1981, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver carried an account of a press conference given the previous day in Denver by Neil Bush. During most of the day on March 31, Neil Bush had refused to answer phone calls from the media, referring them to the vice presidential press office in Washington. But then he appeared in front of the Amoco Building at East 17th Avenue and Broadway in Denver, saying that he was willing to meet the media once, but then wanted to "leave it at that." As it turned out, his wishes were to be scrupulously respected, at least until the Silverado Savings and Loan scandal got out of hand some years later.
The Rocky Mountain News article signed by Charles Roos carried Neil Bush's confirmation that if the assassination had not happened, Scott Hinckley would have been present at a dinner party at Neil Bush's home that very same night. According to Neil, Scott Hinckley had come to the home of Neil and Sharon Bush on January 23, 1981 to be present along with about 30 other guests at a surprise birthday party for Neil, who had turned 26 one day earlier. Scott Hinckley had come "through a close friend who brought him," according to this version, and this same close female friend was scheduled to come to dinner along with Scott Hinckley on that last night of March, 1981.
"My wife set up a surprise party for me, and it truly was a surprise, and it was an honor for me at that time to meet Scott Hinckley," said Neil Bush to reporters. "He is a good and decent man. I have no regrets whatsoever in saying Scott Hinckley can be considered a friend of mine. To have had one meeting doesn't make the best of friends, but I have no regrets in saying I do know him."
Neil Bush told the reporters that he had never met John W. Hinckley, Jr., the gunman, nor his father, John W. Hinckley, president and chairman of the board of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation of Denver. But Neil Bush also added that he would be interested in meeting the elder Hinckley: "I would like [to meet him]. I'm trying to learn the oil business, and he's in the oil business. I probably could learn something from Mr. Hinckley.
Neil Bush then announced that he wanted to "set straight" certain inaccuracies that had appeared the previous day in the Houston Post about the relations between the Bush and Hinckley families. The first was his own wife Sharon's reference to the large contributions from the Hinckleys to the Bush campaign. Neil asserted that the 1980 Bush campaign records showed no money whatever coming in from any of the Hinckleys. All that could be found, he argued, was a contribution to that "great Republican," John Connally.
The other issue the Houston Post had raised regarded the 1978 period, when George W. Bush of Midland, Texas, Neil's oldest brother, had run for Congress in Texas' 19th Congressional district. At that time Neil Bush had worked for George W. Bush as his campaign manager, and in this connection Neil had lived in Lubbock, Texas during most of the year. This raised the question of whether Neil might have been in touch with gunman John W. Hinckley during that year of 1978, since gunman Hinckley had lived in Lubbock from 1974 through 1980, when he was an intermittent student at Texas Tech University there. Neil Bush ruled out any contact between the Bush family and gunman John W. Hinckley in Lubbock during that time.
The previous day, elder son George W. Bush had been far less categorical about never having met gunman Hinckley. He had stated to the press: "It's certainly conceivable that I met him or might have been introduced to him." "I don't recognize his face from the brief, kind of distorted thing they had on TV, and the name doesn't ring any bells. I know he wasn't on our staff. I could check our volunteer rolls." But now Neil was adamant: there had been no contact.
Neil was a chip off the old block, and could not resist some hypocritical posturing at the end of the press conference: "Let me say that my heart goes out--as does the heart of every American--to the people suffering in this tragedy." He mentioned Reagan, Brady, the wounded Secret Service agent and District of Columbia policeman. "And the Hinckley family, for the tremendous pain they must be suffering now." And finally: "I only ask now that we can try to put this behind us and move forward in dealing with the problems."
Neil Bush's confirmation of his relations with Scott Hinckley was matched by a parallel confirmation from the Executive Office of the Vice President. This appeared in The Houston Post, April 1, 1981 under the headline "VICE PRESIDENT CONFIRMS HIS SON WAS TO HAVE HOSTED HINCKLEY BROTHER" by Post Washington Bureau Chief Arthur Wiese. Here the second-string press secretary, Shirley Green, was doing the talking. "I've spoken to Neil," she said, "and he says they never saw [Scott] Hinckley again [after the birthday party]. They kept saying 'we've got to get together,' but they never made any plans until tonight." Contradicting Neil Bush's remarks, Ms. Green asserted that Neil Bush knew Scott Hinckley "only slightly."
Shirley Green described the Tuesday night dinner appointment as "a bizarre happenstance, a weird occurrence."
Later in the day Bush spokesman Peter Teeley surfaced to deny any campaign donations from the Hinckley clan to the Bush campaign. When asked why Sharon Bush and Neil Bush had made reference to large political contributions from the Hinckleys to the Bush campaign, Teeley responded, "I don't have the vaguest idea." "We've gone through our files," said Teeley, "and we have absolutely no information that he [John W. Hinckley Sr.] or anybody in the family were contributors, supporters, anything."
A summary of this material was made generally available through the Associated Press, which published the following short note on March 31:
The family of the man charged with trying to assassinate President Reagan is acquainted with the family of Vice President George Bush and had made large contributions to his political campaign....Scott Hinckley, brother of John W. Hinckley Jr. who allegedly shot at Reagan, was to have dined tonight in Denver at the home of Neil Bush, one of the Vice President's sons....The Houston Post said it was unable to reach Scott Hinckley, vice president of his father's Denver-based firm, Vanderbilt Energy Corp., for comment. Neil Bush lives in Denver, where he works for Standard Oil Co. of Indiana. In 1978, Neil Bush served as campaign manager for his brother, George W. Bush, the Vice President's eldest son, who made an unsuccessful bid for Congress. Neil lived in Lubbock, Texas, throughout much of 1978, where John Hinckley lived from 1974 through 1980.
It is not known how many newspapers chose to print this AP dispatch; it would appear that the Washington Post for one did not do so. The electronic media also do not appear to have devoted much attention to this story. Once the cabinet had decided that there had been no conspiracy, all such facts were irrelevant anyway. There is no record of Neil Bush, George W. Bush, or Vice President George H.W. Bush ever having been questioned by the FBI in regard to the contacts described. They never appeared before a grand jury or a Congressional investigating committee. No special prosecutor was ever appointed. Which is another way of saying that by March, 1981, the United States government had degenerated into total lawlessness, with special exemptions for the now ruling Bush family. Government by laws had dissolved.
The media were not interested in the dinner date of Neil Bush and Scott Hinckley, but they were very interested indeed in the soap opera of what had gone on in the Situation Room in the White House during the afternoon of March 30. Since the media had been looking for ways to go after Haig for weeks, they simply continued this line into their coverage of the White House scene that afternoon. Haig had appeared before the television cameras to say:
Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State, in that order, and should the President decide that he wants to transfer the helm he will do so. He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending the return of the Vice President and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.
This led to an immense hue and cry, mightily stoked by the Bush networks, on the theme that Haig wanted to usurp the presidential succession. More than this garbled statement by Haig, Bush was certain to have been disturbed by Haig's refusal a few seconds later to rule out conspiracy a priori :
Q: Any additional measures being taken --was this a conspiracy or was this a....
Haig: We have no indication of anything like that now, and we are not going to say a word on that subject until the situation clarifies itself. [fn 18 ]
But when Bush returned, the cabinet soon decided otherwise.
The "I'm in control here" story on Haig was made into the Leitmotif for his sacking, which was still a year in the future. Reagan's own ghostwritten biography published the year after he left office gives some idea what Baker and Deaver fed the confused and wounded president about what had gone during his absence:
On the day I was shot, George Bush was out of town and Haig immediately came to the White House and claimed he was in charge of the country. Even after the vice-president was back in Washington, I was told he maintained that he, not George, should be in charge. I didn't know about this when it was going on. But I heard later that the rest of the cabinet was furious. They said he acted as if he thought he had the right to sit in the Oval office and believed it was his constitutional right to take over-- a position without any legal basis. [fn 19]
This fantastic account finds no support in the Regan or Weinberger memoirs, but is a fair sample of the Bushman line.
What did interest the media very much was the story of John W. Hinckley Jr.'s obsession with the actress Jodie Foster, who had played the role of a teenage prostitute in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver. The prostitute is befriended by a taxi driver, Travis Bickle, who threatens to kill a senator who is running for president in order to win the love of the girl. Young John Hinckley had imitated the habits and mannerisms of Travis Bickle.
When John Hinckley Jr. had left his hotel room in Washington DC on his way to shoot Reagan, he had left behind a letter to Jodie Foster:
Dear Jodie,
There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my attempt to get Reagan. It is for this reason that I am writing you this letter now. As you well know by now, I love you very much. The past seven months I have left you dozens of poems, letters, and messages in the faint hope you would develop an interest in me. [...] Jodie, I'm asking you to please look into your heart and at least give me the chance with this historical deed to gain your respect and love.
I love you forever.
[signed] John Hinckley [fn 20]
In 1980, Jodie Foster was enrolled at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, as an undergraduate. Hinckley spent three weeks in September, 1980 in a New Haven hotel, according to the New York Daily News. In early October he spent several days in New Haven, this time at the Colony Inn motel. Two bartenders in a bar near the Yale campus recalled Hinckley as having bragged about his relationship with Jodie Foster. Hinckley had been arrested by airport authorities in Nashville, Tennessee on October 9, 1980 for carrying three guns, and was quickly released. Reagan had been in Nashville on October 7, and Carter arrived there on October 9. The firearms charge on the same day that the President was coming to town should have landed Hinckley on the Secret Service watch list of potential presidential assassins, but the FBI apparently neglected to transmit the information to the Secret Service.
In February 1981, Hinckley was again near the Yale campus. During this time, Hinckley claimed that he was in contact with Jodie Foster by mail and telephone. Jodie Foster had indeed received a series of letters and notes from Hinckley, which she had passed on to her college dean. The dean allegedly gave the letters to the New Haven police, who supposedly gave them to the FBI. Nevertheless, nothing was done to restrain Hinckley, who had a record of psychiatric treatment. Hinckley had been buying guns in various locations across the United States. Was Hinckley a Manchurian candidate, brainwashed to carry out his role as an assassin? Was a network operating through the various law enforcement agencies responsible for the failure to restrain Hinckley or to put him under special surveillance?