The Story of the Bush Crime Family
Former President George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush.
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Continued
Page 2
The Story of the Bush Crime Family
Former President George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush.
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Continued
Page 2
According to "Newsweek," "Bush's partner,
John Overbey, still remembers the dizzying whirl of a money-raising trip
to the East with George and Uncle Herbie: lunch at New York's 21 Club,
weekends at Kennebunkport where a bracing Sunday dip in the Atlantic off
Walker's Point ended with a servant wrapping you in a large terry towel
and handing you a martini." / Note #9 The result of the odyssey back East
was a capital of $300,000, much of it gathered from Uncle Herbie's clients
in the City of London, who were of course delighted at the prospect of
parasitizing Texas ranchers. One of those eager to cash in was "Jimmy Gammell"
of Edinburgh, Scotland, whose Ivory and Sime counting house put up $50,000
from its Atlantic Asset Trust. Gammell's father had been head of the British
military mission in Moscow in 1945, part of the Anglo-American core group
there with U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman. James Gammell is today the
eminence grise of the Scottish investment community, and he has retained
a close personal relation to Bush over the years. Mark this Gammell well;
he will return to our narrative shortly. "Eugene Meyer," the owner of the
"Washington Post" and the father of that paper's present owner, Katharine
Meyer Graham, anted up an investment of $50,000 on the basis of the tax-shelter
capabilities promised by Bush-Overbey. Meyer, a president of the World
Bank, also procured an investment from his son-in-law Phil Graham for the
Bush venture. Father Prescott Bush was also counted in, to the tune of
about $50,000. In the days of real money, these were considerable sums.
The London investors got shares of stock in the new company, called Bush-Overbey,
as well as Bush-Overbey bonded debt. Bush and Overbey moved into an office
on the ground floor of the Petroleum Building in Midland. The business
of the landman, it has been pointed out, rested entirely on personal relations
and schmooze. One had to be a dissembler and an intelligencer. One had
to learn to cultivate friendships with the geologists, the scouts, the
petty bureaucrats at the county court house where the land records were
kept, the journalists at the local paper, and with one's own rivals, the
other landmen, who might invite someone with some risk capital to come
in on a deal. Community service was an excellent mode of ingratiation,
and George Bush volunteered for the Community Chest, the YMCA, and the
Chamber of Commerce. It meant small talk about wives and kids, attending
church -- deception postures that in a small town had to pervade the smallest
details of one's life. It was at this time in his life that Bush seems
to have acquired the habit of writing ingratiating little personal notes
to people he had recently met, a habit that he would use over the years
to cultivate and maintain his personal network. Out of all this ingratiating
Babbitry and boosterism would come acquaintances and the bits of information
that could lead to windfall profits. There had been a boom in Scurry County,
but that was subsiding. Bush drove to Pyote, to Snyder, to Sterling City,
to Monahans, with Rattlesnake Air Force Base just outside of town. How
many Texas ranchers can remember selling their mineral rights for a pittance
to smiling George Bush, and then having oil discovered on the land, oil
from which their family would never earn a penny? Across the street from
Bush-Overbey were the offices of Liedtke & Liedtke, Attorneys-at-law.
"J. Hugh Liedtke" and "William Liedtke" were from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where
they, like Bush, had grown up rich, as the sons of a local judge who had
become one of the top corporate lawyers for Gulf Oil. The Liedtkes' grandfather
had come from Prussia, but had served in the Confederate Army. J. Hugh
Liedtke had found time along the way to acquire the notorious Harvard Master
of Business Administration degree in one year. After service in the Navy
during World War II, the Liedtkes obtained law degrees at the University
of Texas law school, where they rented the servants' quarters of the home
of U.S. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who was away in Washington most of the
time... The Liedtkes combined the raw, uncouth primitive accumulation mentality
of the oil boom town with the refined arts of usury and speculation as
Harvard taught them. Their law practice was such in name only; their primary
and almost exclusive activity was buying up royalty leases on behalf of
a moneybags in Tulsa who was a friend of their family... Hugh Liedtke was
always on the lookout for the Main Chance. Following in the footsteps of
his fellow Tulsan Ray Kravis, Hugh Liedtke schemed and schemed until he
had found a way to go beyond hustling for royalty leases: He concocted
a method of trading oil-producing properties in such a way as to permit
the eventual owner to defer all tax liabilities until the field was depleted.
Sometimes Hugh Liedtke would commute between Midland and Tulsa on an almost
daily basis. He would spend the daylight hours prowling the Permian Basin
for a land deal, make the 13-hour drive to Tulsa overnight to convince
his backers to ante up the cash, and then race back to Midland to close
the deal before the sucker got away. It was during this phase that it occurred
to Liedtke that he could save himself a lot of marathon commuter driving
if he could put together a million dollars in venture capital and "inventory"
the deals he was otherwise forced to make on a piecemeal, ad hoc basis.
/ Note #1 / Note #0 Zapata Petroleum The Liedtke brothers now wanted to
go beyond royalty leases and land sale tax dodges, and begin large-scale
drilling and production of oil. George Bush, by now well versed in the
alphas and omegas of oil as ground rent, was thinking along the same lines.
In a convergence that was full of ominous portent for the U.S. economy
of the 1980s, the Liedtke brothers and George Bush decided to pool their
capital and their rapacious talents by going into business together. Overbey
was on board initially, but would soon fall away. The year was 1953, and
Uncle Herbie's G.H. Walker & Co. became the principal underwriter of
the stock and convertible debentures that were to be offered to the public.
Uncle Herbie would also purchase a large portion of the stock himself.
When the new company required further infusions of capital, Uncle Herbie
would float the necessary bonds. Jimmy Gammell remained a key participant
and would find a seat on the board of directors of the new company. Another
of the key investors was the Clark Family Estate, meaning the trustees
who managed the Singer Sewing machine fortune. / Note #1 / Note #1 Some
other money came from various pension funds and endowments, sources that
would become very popular during the leveraged buyout orgy Bush presided
over in the 1980s. Of the capital of the new Bush-Liedtke concern, about
$500,000 would come from Tulsa cronies of the Liedtke brothers, and the
other $500,000 from the circles of Uncle Herbie. The latter were referred
to by Hugh Liedtke as "the New York guys." The name chosen for the new
concern was "Zapata Petroleum." According to Hugh Liedtke, the new entrepreneurs
were attracted to the name when they saw it on a movie marquee, where the
new release "Viva Zapata!," starring Marlon Brando as the Mexican revolutionary,
was playing. Liedtke characteristically explains that part of the appeal
of the name was the confusion as to whether Zapata had been a patriot or
a bandit. / Note #1 / Note #2 The Bush-Liedtke combination concentrated
its attention on an oil property in Coke County called JamesonField, a
barren expanse of prairie and sagebrush where six widely separated wells
had been producing oil for some years. Hugh Liedtke was convinced that
these six oil wells were tapping into a single underground pool of oil,
and that dozens or even hundreds of new oil wells drilled into the same
field would all prove to be gushers. In other words, Liedtke wanted to
gamble the entire capital of the new firm on the hypothesis that the wells
were, in oil parlance, "connected." One of Liedtke's Tulsa backers was
supposedly unconvinced, and argued that the wells were too far apart; they
could not possibly connect. "Goddamn, they do!" was Hugh Liedtke's rejoinder.
He insisted on shooting the works in a "va-banque" operation. Uncle Herbie's
circles were nervous: "The New York guys were just about to pee in their
pants," boasted Leidtke years later. Bush and Hugh Liedtke obviously had
the better information: The wells were connected, and 127 wells were drilled
without encountering a single dry hole. As a result, the price of a share
of stock in Zapata went up from seven cents a share to $23. During this
time, Hugh Liedtke collaborated on several small deals in the Midland area
with a certain "T. Boone Pickens," later one of the most notorious corporate
raiders of the 1980s, one of the originators of the "greenmail" strategy
of extortion, by which a raider would accumulate part of the shares of
a company and threaten to go all the way to a hostile takeover unless the
management of the company agreed to buy back those shares at an outrageous
premium. Pickens is the buccaneer who was self-righteously indignant when
the Japanese business community attempted to prevent him from introducing
these shameless looting practices into the Japanese economy. Pickens, too,
was a product of the Bush-Liedtke social circle of Midland. When he was
just getting started in the mid-fifties, Pickens wanted to buy the Hugoton
Production Company, which owned the Hugoton field, one of the world's great
onshore deposits of natural gas. Pickens engineered the hostile takeover
of Hugoton by turning to Hugh Liedtke to be introduced to the trustees
of the Clark Family Estate, who, as we have just seen, had put up part
of the capital for Zapata. Pickens promised the Clark trustees a higher
return than was being provided by the current management, and this support
proved to be decisive in permitting Pickens's Mesa Petroleum to take over
Hugoton, launching this corsair on a career of looting and pillage that
still continues. In 1988, George Bush would give an interview to a magazine
owned by Pickens in which the Vice President would defend hostile leveraged
buyouts as necessary to the interests of the shareholders. In the meantime,
after two to three years of operations, the oil flow out of Zapata's key
Jameson field had begun to slow down. Although there was still abundant
oil in the ground, the natural pressure had been rapidly depleted, so Bush
and the Liedtkes had to begin resorting to stratagems in order to bring
the oil to the surface. They began pumping water into the underground formations
in order to force the oil to the surface. From then on, "enhanced recovery"
techniques were necessary to keep the Jameson field on line. During 1955
and 1956, Zapata was able to report a small profit. In 1957, the year of
the incipient Eisenhower recession, this turned into a loss of $155,183,
as the oil from the Jameson field began to slow down. In 1958, the loss
was $427,752, and in 1959, there was $207,742 of red ink. 1960 (after Bush
had departed from the scene) brought another loss, this time of $372,258.
It was not until 1961 that Zapata was able to post a small profit of $50,482.
/ Note #1 / Note #3 Despite the fact that Bush and the Liedtkes all became
millionaires through the increased value of their shares, it was not exactly
an enviable record; without the deep pockets of Bush's Uncle Herbie Walker
and his British backers, the entire venture might have foundered at an
early date. Bush and the Liedtkes had been very lucky with the Jameson
field, but they could hardly expect such results to be repeated indefinitely.
In addition, they were now posting losses, and the value of Zapata stock
had gone into a decline. Bush and the Liedtke brothers now concluded that
the epoch in which large oil fields could be discovered within the continental
United States was over. Mammoth new oil fields, they believed, could only
be found offshore, located under hundreds of feet of water on the continental
shelves, or in shallow seas like the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
By a happy coincidence, in 1954 the U.S. federal government was just beginning
to auction the mineral rights for these offshore areas. With father Prescott
Bush directing his potent Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones network
from the U.S. Senate while regularly hob-nobbing with President Eisenhower
on the golf links, George Bush could be confident of receiving special
privileged treatment when it came to these mineral rights. Bush and his
partners therefore judged the moment ripe for launching a for-hire drilling
company, Zapata Offshore, a Delaware corporation that would offer its services
to the companies making up the Seven Sisters international oil cartel in
drilling underwater wells. Forty percent of the offshore company's stock
would be owned by the original Zapata firm. The new company would also
be a buyer of offshore royalty leases. Uncle Herbie helped arrange a new
issue of stock for this Zapata offshoot. The shares were easy to unload
because of the 1954 boom in the New York stock market. "The stock market
lent itself to speculation," Bush would explain years later, "and you could
get equity capital for new ventures." / Note #1/ Note #4 1954 was also
the year that the CIA overthrew the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
This was the beginning of a dense flurry of U.S. covert operations in Central
America and the Caribbean, featuring especially Cuba. The first asset of
Zapata Offshore was the SCORPION, a $3.5 million deep-sea drilling rig
that was financed by $1.5 million from the initial stock sale plus another
$2 million from bonds marketed with the help of Uncle Herbie. The SCORPION
was the first three-legged, self-elevating mobile drilling barge, and it
was built by R. G. LeTourneau, Inc. of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The platform
weighed some 9 million pounds and measured 180 by 150 feet, and the three
legs were 140 feet long when fully extended. The rig was floated into the
desired drilling position before the legs were extended, and the main body
was then pushed up above the waves by electric motors. The SCORPION was
delivered early in 1956, was commissioned at Galveston in March, 1956 and
was put to work at exploratory drilling in the Gulf of Mexico during the
rest of the year. During 1956, the Zapata Petroleum officers included J.
Hugh Liedtke as president, George H.W. Bush as vice president, and William
Brumley of Midland, Texas, as treasurer. The board of directors lined up
as follows: / Note #b|George H.W. Bush, Midland, Texas; / Note #b|J.G.S.
Gammell, Edinburgh, Scotland, manager of British Assets Trust, Ltd.; /
Note #b|J. Hugh Liedtke, Midland, Texas; / Note #b|William C. Liedtke,
independent oil operator, Midland, Texas; / Note #b|Arthur E. Palmer, Jr.,
New York, N.Y., a partner in Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam, and Roberts; /
Note #b|G.H. Walker, Jr. (Uncle Herbie), managing partner of G.H. Walker
and Co., New York, N.Y.; / Note #b|Howard J. Whitehill, independent oil
producer, Tulsa, Oklahoma; / Note #b|Eugene F. Williams, Jr., secretary
of the St. Louis Union Trust Company of St. Louis, Missouri; fellow member
with "Poppy" Bush in the class of 1942 AUV secret society at Andover prep,
later chairman of the Andover board; / Note #b|D.D. Bovaird, president
of the Bovaird Supply Co. of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and chairman of the board
of the Oklahoma City branch of the Tenth Federal District of the Federal
Reserve Board; and / Note #b|George L. Coleman, investments, Miami, Oklahoma.
An interim director that year had been Richard E. Fleming of Robert Fleming
and Co., London, England. Counsel were listed as Baker, Botts, Andrews
& Shepherd of Houston, Texas; auditors were Arthur Andersen in Houston,
and transfer agents were J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc., of New York City
and the First National Bank and Trust Company of Tulsa. / Note #1 / Note
#5 George Bush personally was much more involved with the financial management
of the company than with its actual oil-field operations. His main activity
was not finding oil or drilling wells but, as he himself put it, "stretching
paper" -- rolling over debt and making new financial arrangements with
the creditors. / Note #1 / Note #6 During 1956, despite continuing losses
and thanks again to Uncle Herbie, Zapata was able to float yet another
offering, this time a convertible debenture for $2.15 million, for the
purchase of a second Le Tourneau drilling platform, the VINEGAROON, named
after a west Texas stinging insect. The VINEGAROON was delivered during
1957, and soon scored a "lucky" hit drilling in block 86 off Vermilion
Parish, Louisiana. This was a combination of gas and oil, and one well
was rated at 113 barrels of distillate and 3.6 million cubic feet of gas
per day. / Note #1 / Note #7 This was especially remunerative, because
Zapata had acquired a half-interest in the royalties from any oil or gas
that might be found. VINEGAROON then continued to drill offshore from Vermilion
Parish, Louisiana, on a farmout from Continental Oil. As for the SCORPION,
during part of 1957 it was under contract to the Bahama-California Oil
Company, drilling between Florida and Cuba. It was then leased by Gulf
Oil and Standard Oil of California, on whose behalf it started drilling
during 1958 at a position on the Cay Sal Bank, 131 miles south of Miami,
Florida, and just 54 miles north of Isabela, Cuba. Cuba was an interesting
place just then; the U.S.-backed insurgency of Fidel Castro was rapidly
undermining the older U.S.-imposed regime of Fulgencio Batista. That meant
that SCORPION was located at a hot corner. We note that Allen Dulles, then
director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had previously been legal
counsel to Gulf Oil for Latin American operations, and counsel to George
Bush's father at Brown Brothers Harriman for eastern Europe. During 1957
a certain divergence began to appear between Uncle Herbie Walker, Bush,
and the "New York guys" on the one hand, and the Liedtke brothers and their
Tulsa backers on the other. As the annual report for that year noted, "There
is no doubt that the drilling business in the Gulf of Mexico has become
far more competitive in the last six months than it has been at any time
in the past." Despite that, Bush, Walker and the New York investors wanted
to push forward into the offshore drilling and drilling services business,
while the Liedtkes and the Tulsa group wanted to concentrate on acquiring
oil in the ground and natural gas deposits. The 1958 annual report notes
that, with no major discoveries made, 1958 had been "a difficult year."
It was, of course, the year of the brutal Eisenhower recession. SCORPION,
VINEGAROON, and NOLA I, the offshore company's three drilling rigs, could
not be kept fully occupied in the Gulf of Mexico during the whole year,
and so Zapata Offshore had lost $524,441, more than Zapata Petroleum's
own loss of $427,752 for that year. The Liedtke viewpoint was reflected
in the notation that "disposing of the offshore business had been considered."
The great tycoon Bush conceded in the Zapata Offshore annual report for
1958: "We erroneously predicted that most major [oil] companies would have
active drilling programs for 1958. These drilling programs simply did not
materialize...." In 1990, Bush denied for months that there was a recession,
and through 1991 claimed that the recession had ended, when it had, in
fact, long since turned into a depression. His current blindness about
economic conjunctures would appear to be nothing new. By 1959, there were
reports of increasing personal tensions between the domineering and abrasive
J. Hugh Liedtke, on the one hand, and Bush's Uncle Herbie Walker on the
other. Liedtke was obsessed with his plan for creating a new major oil
company, the boundless ambition that would propel him down a path littered
with asset-stripped corporations into the devastating Pennzoil-Getty-Texaco
wars of a quarter-century later. During the course of this year, the two
groups of investors arrived at a separation that was billed as "amicable,"
and which in any case never interrupted the close cooperation among Bush
and the Liedtke brothers. The solution was that the ever-present Uncle
Herbie would buy out the Liedtke-Tulsa 40 percent stake in Zapata Offshore,
while the Liedtke backers would buy out the Bush-Walker interest in Zapata
Petroleum. For this to be accomplished, George Bush would require yet another
large infusion of capital. Uncle Herbie now raised yet another tranche
for George, this time over $800,000. The money allegedly came from Bush-Walker
friends and relatives. / Note #1 / Note #8 Even if the faithful efforts
of Uncle Herbie are taken into account, it is still puzzling to see a series
of large infusions of cash into a poorly managed small company that had
posted a series of substantial losses and whose future prospects were anything
but rosy. At this point it is therefore legitimate to pose the question:
Was Zapata Offshore an intelligence community front at its foundation in
1954, or did it become one in 1959, or perhaps at some later point? This
question cannot be answered with finality, but some relevant evidence will
be discussed in the following chapter. George Bush was now the president
of his own company, the undisputed boss of Zapata Offshore. Although the
company was falling behind the rest of the offshore drilling industry,
Bush made a desultory attempt at expansion through diversification, investing
in a plastics machinery company in New Jersey, a Texas pipe lining company,
and a gas transmission company; none of these investments proved to be
remunerative. Notes 1. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," "Texas
Monthly," June 1983. 2. See Sarah Bartlett, "The Money Machine: How KKR
Manufactured Power and Profits" (New York, 1991), pp. 9-12. 3. Darwin Payne,
"Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc., 1880-1978" (New York:
Simon and Schuster, ca. 1979), p. 232 "ff." 4. Bartlett, "op. cit.," p.
268. 5. Darwin Payne, "op. cit.," p. 232-33. 6. Hurt, "op. cit." 7. "Ibid."
8. "Bush Battles the 'Wimp Factor'," "Newsweek," Oct. 19, 1987. 9. See
Richard Ben Kramer, "How He Got Here," "Esquire," June 1991. 10. See Thomas
Petzinger, Jr., "Oil and Honor: The Texaco-Pennzoil Wars" (New York, 1987),
p. 37 "ff." 11. "Ibid.," p. 93. 12. "Ibid.," p. 40. 13. See Zapata Petroleum
annual reports, Library of Congress Microform Reading Room. 14. Petzinger,
"op. cit.," p. 41. 15. See Zapata Petroleum Corporation Annual Report for
1956, Library of Congress, Microform Reading Room. 16. Hurt, "op. cit.,"
p. 194. 17. "Zapata Petroleum Corp.," "Fortune," April 1958. 18. Walter
Pincus and Bob Woodward, "Doing Well With Help From Family, Friends," "Washington
Post," Aug. 11, 1988. CHAPTER 9 THE BAY OF PIGS AND THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION
"JM/WAVE ... proliferated across [Florida] in preparation for the Bay of
Pigs invasion. A subculture of fronts, proprietaries, suppliers, transfer
agents, conduits, dummy corporations, blind drops, detective agencies,
law firms, electronic firms, shopping centers, airlines, radio stations,
the mob and the church and the banks: a false and secret nervous system
twitching to stimuli supplied by the cortex in Clandestine Services in
Langley. After defeat on the beach in Cuba, JM/WAVE became a continuing
and extended Miami Station, CIA's largest in the continental United States.
A large sign in front of the ... building complex reads: U.S. GOVERNMENT
REGULATIONS PROHIBIT DISCUSSION OF THIS ORGANIZATION OR FACILITY." -- Donald
Freed, "Death in Washington" (Westport, Connecticut, 1980), p. 141. The
review offered so far of George Bush's activities during the late 1950s
and early 1960s is almost certainly incomplete in very important respects.
There is good reason to believe that Bush was engaged in something more
than just the oil business during those years. Starting about the time
of the Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of 1961, we have the first hints
that Bush, in addition to working for Zapata Offshore, may also have been
a participant in certain covert operations of the U.S. intelligence community.
Such participation would certainly be coherent with George's role in the
Prescott Bush, Skull and Bones, and Brown Brothers Harriman networks. During
the twentieth century, the Skull and Bones/Harriman circles have always
maintained a sizeable and often decisive presence inside the intelligence
organizations of the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Office
of Naval Intelligence, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Central
Intelligence Agency. A body of leads has been assembled which suggests
that George Bush may have been associated with the CIA at some time before
the autumn of 1963. According to Joseph McBride of "The Nation," "a source
with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush
started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business
as a cover for clandestine activities." / Note #1 By the time of the Kennedy
assassination, we have an official FBI document which refers to "Mr. George
Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency," and despite official disclaimers,
there is every reason to think that this is indeed the man in the White
House today. The mystery of George Bush as a possible covert operator hinges
on four points, each one of which represents one of the great political
and espionage scandals of postwar American history. These four cardinal
points are: 1. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, launched on April
16-17, 1961, prepared with the assistance of the CIA's "Miami Station"
(also known under the code name JM/WAVE). After the failure of the amphibious
landings of Brigade 2506, Miami station, under the leadership of Theodore
Shackley, became the focus for Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations
directed against Castro, Cuba, and possibly other targets. 2. The assassination
of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the coverup
of those responsible for this crime. 3. The Watergate scandal, beginning
with an April 1971 visit to Miami, Florida by E. Howard Hunt on the tenth
anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion to recruit operatives for the White
House Special Investigations Unit (the "Plumbers" and later Watergate burglars)
from among Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veterans. 4. The Iran-Contra affair,
which became a public scandal during October-November 1986, several of
whose central figures, such as Felix Rodriguez, were also veterans of the
Bay of Pigs. George Bush's role in both Watergate and the October Surprise/Iran-Contra
complex will be treated in detail at later points in this book. Right now,
it is important to see that thirty years of covert operations, in many
respects, form a single continuous whole. This is especially true in regard
to the "dramatis personae." Georgie Anne Geyer points to the obvious in
a recent book: " ... an entire new Cuban cadre now emerged from the Bay
of Pigs. The names Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, Rolando Martinez, Felix
Rodriguez and Eugenio Martinez would, in the next quarter century, pop
up, often decisively, over and over again in the most dangerous American
foreign policy crises. There were Cubans flying missions for the CIA in
the Congo and even for the Portuguese in Africa; Cubans were the burglars
of Watergate; Cubans played key roles in Nicaragua, in Irangate, in the
American move into the Persian Gulf." / Note #2 Felix Rodriguez tells us
that he was infiltrated into Cuba with the other members of the "Grey Team"
in conjunction with the Bay of Pigs landings; this is the same man we will
find directing the Contra supply effort in Central America during the 1980s,
working under the direct supervision of Don Gregg and George Bush. / Note
#3 Theodore Shackley, the JM/WAVE station chief, will later show up in
Bush's 1979-80 presidential campaign. To a very large degree, such covert
operations have drawn upon the same pool of personnel. They are to a significant
extent the handiwork of the same crowd. It is therefore revealing to extrapolate
forward and backward in time the individuals and groups of individuals
who appear as the cast of characters in one scandal, and compare them with
the cast of characters for the other scandals, including the secondary
ones that have not been enumerated here. E. Howard Hunt, for example, shows
up as a confirmed part of the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of
Jacopo Arbenz in 1954, as an important part of the chain of command in
the Bay of Pigs, as a person repeatedly accused of having been in Dallas
on the day Kennedy was shot, and as one of the central figures of Watergate.
George Bush is demonstrably one of the most important protagonists of the
Watergate scandal, and was the overall director of Iran-Contra. Since he
appears especially in Iran-Contra in close proximity to Bay of Pigs holdovers,
it is surely legitimate to wonder when his association with those Bay of
Pigs Cubans might have started. 1959 was the year that Bush started operating
out of his Zapata Offshore headquarters in Houston; it was also the year
that Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George
was now a businessman whose work took him at times to Louisiana, where
Zapata had offshore drilling operations. George must have been a frequent
visitor to New Orleans. Because of his family's estate on Jupiter Island,
he would also have been a frequent visitor to the Hobe Sound area. And
then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations in the Florida strait.
The Jupiter Island connection and father Prescott's Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull
and Bones networks are doubtless the key. Jupiter Island meant Averell
Harriman, Robert Lovett, C. Douglas Dillon and other Anglophile financiers
who had directed the U.S. intelligence community long before there had
been a CIA at all. And, in the backyard of the Jupiter Island Olympians,
and under their direction, a powerful covert operations base was now being
assembled, in which George Bush would have been present at the creation
as a matter of birthright. Operation Zapata During 1959-60, Allen Dulles
and the Eisenhower administration began to assemble in south Florida the
infrastructure for covert action against Cuba. This was the JM/WAVE capability,
later formally constituted as the CIA Miami station. JM/WAVE was an operational
center for the Eisenhower regime's project of staging an invasion of Cuba
using a secret army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, organized, armed, trained,
transported, and directed by the CIA. The Cubans, called Brigade 2506,
were trained in secret camps in Guatemala, and they had air support from
B-26 bombers based in Nicaragua. This invasion was crushed by Castro's
defending forces in less than three days. Before going along with the plan
so eagerly touted by Allen Dulles, Kennedy had established the precondition
that under no circumstances whatsoever would there be direct intervention
by U.S. military forces against Cuba. On the one hand, Dulles had assured
Kennedy that the news of the invasion would trigger an insurrection which
would sweep Castro and his regime aw ay. On the other, Kennedy had to be
concerned about provoking a global thermonuclear confrontation with the
U.S.S.R., in the eventuality that Nikita Khrushchev decided to respond
to a U.S. Cuban gambit by, for example, cutting off U.S. access to Berlin.
Hints of the covert presence of George Bush are scattered here and there
around the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to some accounts, the code name
for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Pluto. / Note #4 But Bay of Pigs veteran
E. Howard Hunt scornfully denies that this was the code name used by JM/WAVE
personnel; Hunt writes: "So perhaps the Pentagon referred to the Brigade
invasion as Pluto. CIA did not." / Note #5 But Hunt does not tell us what
the CIA code name was, and the contents of Hunt's Watergate-era White House
safe, which might have told us the answer, were, of course, "deep-sixed"
by FBI Director Patrick Gray. According to reliable sources and published
accounts, the CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation
Zapata, and the plan was so referred to by Richard Bissell of the CIA,
one of the plan's promoters, in a briefing to President Kennedy in the
Cabinet Room on March 29, 1961. / Note #6 Does Operation Zapata have anything
to do with Zapata Offshore? The run-of-the-mill Bushman might respond that
Emiliano Zapata, after all, had been a public figure in his own right,
and the subject of a recent Hollywood movie starring Marlon Brando. A more
knowledgeable Bushman might argue that the main landing beach, the Playa
Giron, is located south of the city of Cienfuegos on the Zapata Peninsula,
on the south coast of Cuba. Then there is the question of the Brigade 2506
landing fleet, which was composed of five older freighters bought or chartered
from the Garcia Steamship Lines, bearing the names of "Houston," "Rio Escondido,"
"Caribe," "Atlantic," and "Lake Charles." In addition to these vessels,
which were outfitted as transport ships, there were two somewhat better
armed fire support ships, the "Blagar" and the "Barbara." (In some sources
"Barbara J.") / Note #7 The "Barbara" was originally an LCI (Landing Craft
Infantry) of earlier vintage. Our attention is attracted at once to the
"Barbara" and the "Houston," in the first case because we have seen George
Bush's habit of naming his combat aircraft after his wife, and, in the
second case, because Bush was at this time a resident and Republican activist
of Houston, Texas. But of course, the appearance of names like "Zapata,"
"Barbara," and "Houston" can by itself only arouse suspicion, and proves
nothing. After the ignominious defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion, there
was great animosity against Kennedy among the survivors of Brigade 2506,
some of whom eventually made their way back to Miami after being released
from Castro's prisoner of war camps. There was also great animosity against
Kennedy on the part of the JM/WAVE personnel. During the early 1950s, E.
Howard Hunt had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City. As David Atlee
Phillips (another embittered JM/WAVE veteran) tells us in his autobiographical
account, "The Night Watch," E. Howard Hunt had been the immediate superior
of a young CIA recruit named William F. Buckley, the Yale graduate and
Skull and Bones member who later founded the "National Review." In his
autobiographical account written during the days of the Watergate scandal,
Hunt includes the following tirade about the Bay of Pigs: "No event since
the communization of China in 1949 has had such a profound effect on the
United States and its allies as the defeat of the U.S.-trained Cuban invasion
brigade at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. "Out of that humiliation grew
the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, guerrilla warfare throughout Latin
America and Africa, and our Dominican Republic intervention. Castro's beachhead
triumph opened a bottomless Pandora's box of difficulties that affected
not only the United States, but most of its allies in the Free World. "These
bloody and subversive events would not have taken place had Castro been
toppled. Instead of standing firm, our government pyramided crucially wrong
decisions and allowed Brigade 2506 to be destroyed. The Kennedy administration
yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island
of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban
issue would simply melt away." / Note #8 Kennedy and MacArthur Hunt was
typical of the opinion that the debacle had been Kennedy's fault, and not
the responsibility of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, who had
designed it and recommended it. After the embarrassing failure of the invasion,
which never evoked the hoped-for spontaneous anti-Castro insurrection,
Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, his Harrimanite deputy Bissell, and CIA Deputy
Director Charles Cabell (whose brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time
Kennedy was shot). During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy
was deeply suspicious of the intelligence community and of proposals for
military escalation in general, including in places like South Vietnam.
Kennedy sought to procure an outside, expert opinion on military matters.
For this he turned to the former commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific
Theatre during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur. Almost ten years
ago, a reliable source shared with one of the authors an account of a meeting
between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the veteran general warned the young
President that there were elements inside the U.S. government who emphatically
did not share his patriotic motives, and who were seeking to destroy his
administration from within. MacArthur warned that the forces bent on destroying
Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various
tentacles in the intelligence community. It is a matter of public record
that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the latter part of April 1961, after
the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur
told Kennedy, "The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to
have just moved into the chicken house." / Note #9 At the same meeting,
according to Sorenson, MacArthur "warned [Kennedy] against the commitment
of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never
forgot this advice." / Note #1 / Note #0 This point is grudgingly confirmed
by Arthur M. Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying
MacArthur, who wrote that "MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone
wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland [of Asia] should
have his head examined." / Note #1 / Note #1 MacArthur restated this advice
during a second meeting with Kennedy when the General returned from his
last trip to the Far East in July 1961. Kennedy valued MacArthur's professional
military opinion highly, and used it to keep at arms length those advisers
who were arguing for escalation in Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly
invited those who proposed to send land forces to Asia to convince MacArthur
that this was a good idea. If they could convince MacArthur, then he, Kennedy,
might also go along. At this time, the group proposing escalation in Vietnam
(as well as preparing the assassination of President Diem) had a heavy
Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones overtone: The hawks of 1961-63
were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some
key London oligarchs and theoreticians of counterinsurgency wars. And of
course, George Bush during these years was calling for escalation in Vietnam
and challenging Kennedy to "muster the courage" to try a second invasion
of Cuba. In the meantime, the JM/WAVE-Miami station complex was growing
rapidly to become the largest of Langley's many satellites. During the
years after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, this complex had as many as
3,000 Cuban agents and subagents, with a small army of case officers to
direct and look after each one. According to one account, there were at
least 55 dummy corporations to provide employment, cover, and commercial
disguise for all these operatives. There were detective bureaus, gun stores,
real estate b rokerages, boat repair shops, and party boats for fishing
and other entertainments. There was the clandestine Radio Swan, later renamed
Radio Americas. There were fleets of specially modified boats based at
Homestead Marina, and at other marinas throughout the Florida Keys. Agents
were assigned to the University of Miami and other educational institutions.
The raison d'etre of the massive capability commanded by Theodore Shackley
was now Operation Mongoose, a program for sabotage raids and assassinations
to be conducted on Cuban territory, with a special effort to eliminate
Fidel Castro personally. In order to run these operations from U.S. territory,
flagrant and extensive violation of federal and state laws was the order
of the day. Documents regarding the incorporation of businesses were falsified.
Income tax returns were faked. FAA regulations were violated by planes
taking off for Cuba or for forward bases in the Bahamas and elsewhere.
Explosives moved across highways that were full of civilian traffic. The
Munitions Act, the Neutrality Act, the customs and immigrations laws were
routinely flaunted. / Note #1 / Note #2 Above all, the drug laws were massively
violated as the gallant anticommunist fighters filled their planes and
boats with illegal narcotics to be smuggled back into the United States
when they returned from their missions. By 1963, the drug-running activities
of the covert operatives were beginning to attract attention. JM/WAVE,
in sum, accelerated the slide of south Florida towards the status of drug
and murder capital of the United States it achieved during the 1980s. The
Kennedy Assassination It cannot be the task of this study even to begin
to treat the reasons for which certain leading elements of the Anglo-American
financial oligarchy, perhaps acting with certain kinds of support from
continental European aristocratic and neofascist networks, ordered the
murder of John F. Kennedy. The British and the Harrimanites wanted escalation
in Vietnam; by the time of his assassination Kennedy was committed to a
pullout of U.S. forces. Kennedy, as shown by his American University speech
of 1963, was also interested in seeking a more stable path of war avoidance
with the Soviets, using the U.S. military superiority demonstrated during
the Cuban missile crisis to convince Moscow to accept a policy of world
peace through economic development. Kennedy was interested in the possibilities
of anti-missile strategic defense to put an end to that nightmare of Mutually
Assured Destruction which appealed to Henry Kissinger, a disgruntled former
employee of the Kennedy administration whom the President had denounced
as a madman. Kennedy was also considering moves to limit or perhaps abolish
the usurpation of authority over the national currency by the Wall Street
and London interests controlling the Federal Reserve System. If elected
to a second term, Kennedy was likely to reassert presidential control,
as distinct from Wall Street control, over the intelligence community.
There is good reason to believe that Kennedy would have ousted J. Edgar
Hoover from his purported life tenure at the FBI, subjecting that agency
to presidential control for the first time in many years. Kennedy was committed
to a vigorous expansion of the space program, the cultural impact of which
was beginning to alarm the finance oligarchs. Above all, Kennedy was acting
like a man who thought he was President of the United States, violating
the collegiality of oligarchical trusteeship of that office that had been
in force since the final days of Roosevelt. Kennedy furthermore had two
younger brothers who might succeed him, putting a strong presidency beyond
the control of the the Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment for decades.
George Bush joined in the Harrimanite opposition to Kennedy on all of these
points. After Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, it was
alleged that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis had both been present, possibly
together, in Dallas on the day of the shooting, although the truth of these
allegations has never been finally established. Both Hunt and Sturgis were
of course Bay of Pigs veterans who would later appear center stage in Watergate.
There were also allegations that Hunt and Sturgis were among a group of
six to eight derelicts who were found in boxcars sitting on the railroad
tracks behind the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza, and who were rounded
up and taken in for questioning by the Dallas police on the day of the
assassination. Some suspected that Hunt and Sturgis had participated in
the assassination. Some of these allegations were at the center of the
celebrated 1985 defamation case of "Hunt v. Liberty Lobby," in which a
Florida federal jury found against Hunt. But, since the Dallas Police Department
and County Sheriff never photographed or fingerprinted the "derelicts"
in question, it has so far proven impossible definitively to resolve this
question. But these allegations and theories about the possible presence
and activities of Hunt and Sturgis in Dallas were sufficiently widespread
as to compel the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States
(the Rockefeller Commission) to attempt to refute them in its 1975 report.
/ Note #1 / Note #3 According to George Bush's official biography, he was
during 1963 a well-to-do businessman residing in Houston, the busy president
of Zapata Offshore and the chairman of the Harris County Republican Organization,
supporting Barry Goldwater as the GOP's 1964 presidential candidate, while
at the same time actively preparing his own 1964 bid for the U.S. Senate.
But during that same period of time, Bush may have shared some common acquaintances
with Lee Harvey Oswald. The De Mohrenschildt Connection Between October
1962 and April 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina were
in frequent contact with a Russian emigre couple living in Dallas: These
were George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne. During the Warren Commission
investigation of the Kennedy assassination, De Mohrenschildt was interviewed
at length about his contacts with Oswald. When, in the spring of 1977,
the discrediting of the Warren Commission report as a blatant coverup had
made public pressure for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination
irresistible, the House Assassinations Committee planned to interview De
Mohrenschildt once again. But in March 1977, just before de Mohrenschildt
was scheduled to be interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi of the House committee's
staff, he was found dead in Palm Beach, Florida. His death was quickly
ruled a suicide. One of the last people to see him alive was Edward Jay
Epstein, who was also interviewing De Mohrenschildt about the Kennedy assassination
for an upcoming book. Epstein is one of the writers on the Kennedy assassination
who enjoyed excellent relations with the late James Angleton of the CIA.
If de Mohrenschildt were alive today, he might be able to enlighten us
about his relations with George Bush, and perhaps afford us some insight
into Bush's activities during this epoch. Jeanne De Mohrenschildt rejected
the finding of suicide in her husband's death. "He was eliminated before
he got to that committee," the widow told a journalist in 1978, "because
someone did not want him to get to it." She also maintained that George
de Mohrenschildt had been surreptitiously injected with mind-altering drugs.
/ Note #1 / Note #4 After De Mohrenschildt's death, his personal address
book was located, and it contained this entry: "Bush, George H.W. (Poppy)
1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland." There is of course the problem
of dating this reference. George Bush had moved his office and home from
Midland to Houston in 1959, when Zapata Offshore was constituted, so perhaps
this reference goes back to some time before 1959. There is also the number:
"4-6355." There are, of course, numerous other entries, including one W.F.
Buckley of the Buckley brothers of New York City, William S. Paley of CBS,
plus many oil men, stockbrokers, and the like. / Note #1 / Note #5 George
De Mohrenschildt recounted a number of different versions of his li fe,
so it is very difficult to establish the facts about him. According to
one version, he was the Russian Count Sergei De Mohrenschildt, but when
he arrived in the United States in 1938 he carried a Polish passport identifying
him as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt, born in Mozyr, Russia in 1911.
He may in fact have been a Polish officer, or a correspondent for the Polish
News Service, or none of these. He worked for a time for the Polish Embassy
in Washington, D.C. Some say that de Mohrenschildt met the chairman of
Humble Oil, Blaffer, and that Blaffer procured him a job. Other sources
say that during this time De Mohrenschildt was affiliated with the War
Department. According to some accounts, he later went to work for the French
Deuxieme Bureau, which wanted to know about petroleum exports from the
United States to Europe. De Mohrenschildt in 1941 became associated with
a certain Baron Konstantin von Maydell in a public affairs venture called
"Facts and Film." Maydell was considered a Nazi agent by the FBI, and in
September 1942 he was sent to North Dakota for an internment that would
last four years. De Mohenschildt was also reportedly in contact with Japanese
networks at this time. In June 1941, De Mohrenschildt was questioned by
police at Port Arthur, Texas, on the suspicion of espionage after he was
found making sketches of port facilities. During 1941, De Mohrenschildt
applied for a post in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS). According
to the official account, he was not hired. Soon after he made the application,
he went to Mexico where he stayed until 1944. In the latter year, he began
study for a master's degree in petroleum engineering at the University
of Texas. According to some accounts, during this period De Mohrenschildt
was investigated by the Office of Naval Intelligence because of alleged
communist sympathies. After the war, De Mohrenschildt worked as a petroleum
engineer in Cuba and Venezuela, and in Caracas he had several meetings
with the Soviet ambassador. During the postwar years, he also worked in
the Rangely oil field in Colorado. During the 1950s, after having married
Winifred Sharpless, the daughter of an oil millionaire, de Mohrenschildt
was active as an independent oil entrepreneur. In 1957, De Mohrenschildt
was approved by the CIA Office of Security to be hired as a U.S. government
geologist for a mission to Yugoslavia. Upon his return he was interviewed
by one J. Walter Moore of the CIA's Domestic Contact Service, with whom
he remained in contact. During 1958, de Mohrenschildt visited Ghana, Togo,
and Dahomey (now Benin); during 1959, he visited Africa again and returned
by way of Poland. In 1959, he married Jeanne, his fourth wife, a former
ballet dancer and dress designer who had been born in Manchuria, where
her father had been one of the directors of the Chinese Eastern Railroad.
During the summer of 1960, George and Jeanne De Mohrenschildt told their
friends that they were going to embark on a walking tour of 11,000 miles
along Indian trails from Mexico to Central America. One of their principal
destinations was Guatemala City, where they were staying at the time of
the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, after which they made their way
home by way of Panama and Haiti. After two months in Haiti, the De Mohrenschildts
returned to Dallas, where they came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald,
who had come back to the United States from his sojourn in the Soviet Union
in June 1962. By this time, de Mohrenschildt was also in frequent contact
with Admiral Henry C. Bruton and his wife, to whom he introduced the Oswalds.
Admiral Bruton was the former director of naval communications. It is established
that between October 1962 and late April 1963, de Mohrenschildt was a very
important figure in the life of Oswald and his Russian wife. Despite Oswald's
lack of social graces, De Mohrenschildt introduced him into Dallas society,
took him to parties, assisted him in finding employment and much more.
It was through De Mohrenschildt that Oswald met a certain Volkmar Schmidt,
a young German geologist who had studied with Professor Wilhelm Kuetemeyer,
an expert in psychosomatic medicine and religious philosophy at the University
of Heidelberg, who compiled a detailed psychological profile of Oswald.
Jeanne and George helped Marina move her belongings during one of her many
estrangements from Oswald. According to some accounts, De Mohrenschildt's
influence on Oswald was so great during this period that he could virtually
dictate important decisions to the young ex-Marine simply by making suggestions.
According to some versions, de Mohrenschildt was aware of Oswald's alleged
April 10, 1963 attempt to assassinate the well-known right-wing General
Edwin Walker. According to Marina, De Mohrenschildt once asked Oswald,
"Lee, how did you miss General Walker?" On April 19, George and Jeanne
De Mohrenschildt went to New York City, and on April 29, the CIA Office
of Security found that it had no objection to De Mohrenschildt's acceptance
of a contract with the Duvalier regime of Haiti in the field of natural
resource development. De Mohrenschildt appears to have departed for Haiti
on May 1, 1963. In the meantime, Oswald had left Dallas and traveled to
New Orleans. According to Mark Lane, "there is evidence that De Mohrenschildt
served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald's actions." Much of
the extensive published literature on de Mohrenschildt converges on the
idea that he was a control agent for Oswald on behalf of some intelligence
agency. / Note #1 / Note #6 It is therefore highly interesting that George
Bush's name turns up in the personal address book of George de Mohrenschildt.
The Warren Commission went to absurd lengths to cover up the fact that
George De Mohrenschildt was a denizen of the world of the intelligence
agencies. This included ignoring the well-developed paper trail on De Mohrenschildt
as Nazi and communist sympathizer, and later as a U.S. asset abroad. The
Warren Commission concluded: "The Commission's investigation has developed
no signs of subversive or disloyal conduct on the part of either of the
de Mohrenschildts. Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witnesses contacted by
the Commission has provided any information linking the De Mohrenschildts
to subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence
linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy." /
Note #1 / Note #7 Bush, the CIA, and Kennedy On the day of the Kennedy
assassination, FBI records show George Bush as reporting a right-wing member
of the Houston Young Republicans for making threatening comments about
President Kennedy. According to FBI documents released under the Freedom
of Information Act, "On November 22, 1963 Mr. GEORGE H.W. BUSH, 5525 Briar,
Houston, Texas, telephonically advised that he wanted to relate some hear
say that he had heard in recent weeks, date and source unknown. He advised
that one JAMES PARROTT had been talking of killing the President when he
comes to Houston. "PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston
and is active in politics in the Houston area." According to related FBI
documentation, "a check with Secret Service at Houston, Texas revealed
that agency had a report that PARROTT stated in 1961 he would kill President
Kennedy if he got near him." Here Bush is described as "a reputable businessman."
FBI agents were sent to interrogate Parrott's mother, and later James Milton
Parrott himself. Parrott had been discharged from the U.S. Air Force for
psychiatric reasons in 1959. Parrott had an alibi for the time of the Dallas
shootings; he had been in the company of another Republican activist. According
to press accounts, Parrott was a member of the right-wing faction of the
Houston GOP, which was oriented toward the John Birch Society and which
opposed Bush's chairmanship. / Note #1 / Note #8 According to the "San
Francisco Examiner," Bush's press office in August 1988 first said that
Bush had not made any such call, and challenged the authenticity of the
FBI documents. Several days later Bush's spokesman said that the candi
date "does not recall" placing the call. One day after he reported Parrott
to the FBI, Bush received a highly sensitive, high-level briefing from
the Bureau: "Date: November 29, 1963 "To: Director of Intelligence and
Research Department of State "From: John Edgar Hoover, Director "Subject:
ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963 "Our Miami,
Florida Office on November 23, 1963 advised that the Office of Coordinator
of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some
misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and
undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U.S. policy, which
is not true. "Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in
the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban
community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not
entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling
is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the U.S.
but to all Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized
action against Cuba. "An informant who has furnished reliable information
in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised
that those individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President
may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and,
although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination. "The substance
of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of
the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense
Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W.T. Forsyth of this Bureau."
William T. Forsyth, since deceased, was an official of the FBI's Washington
headquarters; during the time he was attached to the bureau's subversive
control section, he ran the investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King. Was
he also a part of the FBI's harassment of Dr. King? The efforts of journalists
to locate Captain Edwards have not been successful. This FBI document identifying
George Bush as a CIA agent in November 1963 was first published by Joseph
McBride in "The Nation" in July 1988, just before Bush received the Republican
nomination for President. McBride's source observed: "I know [Bush] was
involved in the Caribbean. I know he was involved in the suppression of
things after the Kennedy assassination. There was a very definite worry
that some Cuban groups were going to move against Castro and attempt to
blame it on the CIA." / Note #1 / Note #9 When pressed for confirmation
or denial, Bush's spokesman Stephen Hart commented: "Must be another George
Bush." Within a short time, the CIA itself would peddle the same damage
control line. On July 19, 1988, in the wake of wide public attention to
the report published in "The Nation," CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso departed
from the normal CIA policy of refusing to confirm or deny reports that
any person is or was a CIA employee. CIA spokeswoman Basso told the Associated
Press that the CIA believed that "the record should be clarified." She
said that the FBI document "apparently" referred to a George William Bush
who had worked in 1963 on the night shift at CIA headquarters, and that
"would have been the appropriate place to have received such an FBI report."
According to her account, the George William Bush in question had left
the CIA to join the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1964. For the CIA to
volunteer the name of one of its former employees to the press was a shocking
violation of traditional methods, which are supposedly designed to keep
such names a closely guarded secret. This revelation may have constituted
a violation of federal law. But no exertions were too great when it came
to damage control for George Bush. George William Bush had indeed worked
for the CIA, the DIA, and the Alexandria, Virginia Department of Public
Welfare before joining the Social Security Administration, in whose Arlington,
Virginia office he was employed as a claims representative in 1988. George
William Bush told "The Nation" that while at the CIA he was "just a lowly
researcher and analyst" who worked with documents and photos and never
received interagency briefings. He had never met Forsyth of the FBI or
Captain Edwards of the DIA. "So it wasn't me," said George William Bush.
/ Note #2 / Note #0 Later, George William Bush formalized his denial in
a sworn statement to a federal court in Washington, D.C. The affidavit
acknowledges that while working at CIA headquarters between September 1963
and February 1964, George William Bush was the junior person on a three-
to four-man watch which was on duty when Kennedy was shot. But, as George
William Bush goes on to say, "have carefullyreviewed the FBI memorandum
to the Director, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State
dated November 29, 1963 which mentions a Mr. George Bush of the Central
Intelligence Agency.... I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum
as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was
at the CIA. In fact, during my time at the CIA, I did not receive any oral
communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did
not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during
my time at the CIA from the FBI. "Based on the above, it is my conclusion
that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred
to in the memorandum." / Note #2 / Note #1 So we are left with the strong
suspicion that the "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" referred to by the FBI
is our own George Herbert Walker Bush, who, in addition to his possible
contact with Lee Harvey Oswald's controller, may thus also join the ranks
of the Kennedy assassination coverup. It makes perfect sense for George
Bush to be called in on a matter involving the Cuban community in Miami,
since that is a place where George has traditionally had a constituency.
George inherited it from his father, Prescott Bush of Jupiter Island, and
later passed it on to his own son, Jeb. Notes to Chapter 9 1. Joseph McBride,
"|'George Bush,' C.I.A. Operative," "The Nation" July 16, 1988. 2. Georgie
Anne Geyer, "Guerrilla Prince" (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). 3. Felix
Rodriguez, "Shadow Warrior" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 4. On
Pluto, see the East German study by Guenter Schumacher, "Operation Pluto"
(Berlin, Deutscher Militarverlag, 1966). 5. E. Howard Hunt, "Give Us This
Day" (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1973), p. 214. 6. For Operation Zapata,
see Michael R. Beschloss, "The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-63"
(New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), p. 89. 7. For the names of the
ships at the Bay of Pigs, see Quintin Pino Machado, "La Batalla de Giron"
(La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1983), pp. 79-80. This source
quotes one ship as the "Barbara J." See also Schumacher, "Operation Pluto,"
pp. 98-99. See also Peter Wyden, "Bay of Pigs, The Untold Story" (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1979), which also has the "Barbara J." According to
Quintin Pino Machado, the "Houston" had been given the new name of "Aguja"
(Swordfish) and the "Barbara" that of "Barracuda" for the purposes of this
operation. 8. E. Howard Hunt, "op. cit.," pp. 13-14. 9. Theodore Sorenson,
"Kennedy" (New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 329. 10. "Ibid.," p. 723. 11. Arthur
M. Schlesinger, "A Thousand Days" (Boston, 1965), p. 339. 12. See Warren
Hinckle and William W. Turner, "The Fish is Red" (New York: Harper and
Row, 1981), pp. 112 ff. 13. "Report to the President by the Commission
on CIA Activities Within the United States" (Washington: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1975), pp. 251-267. 14. Jim Marrs, "Widow disputes suicide,"
"Fort Worth Evening Star-Telegram," May 11, 1978. 15. A photocopy of George
de Mohrenschildt's personal address book is preserved at the Assassination
Archives and Research Center, Washington, D.C. The Bush entry is also cited
in Mark Lane, "Plausible Denial" (New York: Thunder's Mou th Press, 1991),
p. 332. 16. For De Mohrenschildt, see Mark Lane, "op. cit."; Edward Jay
Epstein, "Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald" (London: Hutchinson,
1978); C. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, "The Plot to Kill the
President" (New York: Times Books, 1981); and Robert Sam Anson, ""They've
Killed The President!"" (New York: Bantam, 1975). 17. "Report of the Warren
Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy" (New York: Bantam,
1964), p. 262. 18. Miguel Acoca, "FBI: 'Bush' called about JFK killing,"
"San Francisco Examiner," Aug. 25, 1988. 19. Joseph McBride, "|'George
Bush,' CIA Operative," "The Nation," July 16/23, 1988, p. 42. 20. Joseph
McBride, "Where "Was" George?" "The Nation," Aug. 13/20, 1988, p. 117.
21. United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Civil Action
88-2600 GHR, Assassination Archives and Research Center v. Central Intelligence
Agency, Affidavit of George William Bush, Sept. 21, 1988. CHAPTER 10 Part
I The Senate Race 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.... Bush's opponent, Senator Ralph Webster
Yarborough, had been born in Chandler, Texas in 1903 as the seventh of
11 children. After graduating from Tyler High School as Salutatorian, he
received an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which
he attended for one year. After working in the wheat fields of Oklahoma
and a six-month stint teaching in a small rural school, he went on to Sam
Houston State Teachers College for two terms. 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.... 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 U.S. 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 is 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 reelected to the Senate for a full term
in 1958. Yarborough in the Senate 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 11 states formerly comprising 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. / Note #5 ... 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 G.I. Bill, 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 percent 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 11 counties in that part of Texas, Yarborough had
helped obtain federal grants of $4.5 million and loans of $640,000 under
the Kennedy administration accelerated public works projects program, to
provide clean water and sewage for towns and cities which 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 ship channels, dams and reservoirs, water research programs,
hurricane and flood control programs, that bring delegations of city officials,
me mbers of county courts, 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." / Note #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 economicjustice, 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. Climbing the Republican Ladder 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,
satellite 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.... 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 claimed
to have become 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 1950s through the leadership and financing of Robert
Welch. Grist for the Birch mill was abundantly provided by the liberal
Republicanism of the Eisenhower administration, which 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." / Note #7 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 Commission, 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 losing 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. 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. / Note #8 It was in this context that George Bush, medio cre
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. Harris County Chair 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." / Note #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, D.C., 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," Bertron replied,
evidently with some vexation. "We're all trying." / Note #1 / Note #0 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. 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 and 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.
/ Note #1 / Note #2 ... 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 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 percent 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 July
28, 1963. Concerning the 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
present ed 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 county." 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 accepts 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 went on to the trade union front. Yarborough's labor
backing was exceedingly strong, and Bush lost no time in assailing thestate
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. / Note #1 / Note #3 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 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. The Senate Race On September 10, 1963, Bush announced his
campaign for the U.S. 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, statewide 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. / Note #1 / Note #4 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 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
U.S. sovereignty to the U.N. 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 U.S. Supreme Court of appellate jurisdiction
in school prayer cases. / Note #1 / Note #5 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. Farish 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 U.S. 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." / Note #1 / Note #6 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 Reconstructio n 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 announcment' 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 U.S. 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 a national magazine like the "Reader's Digest" will
not enable the Connecticut candidate to buy a Texas seat in the U.S. Senate."
(This was not mere rhetoric: "Reader's Digest General Manager Albert Cole
was Prescott Bush's neighbor and fellow member of the Harrimans' secret
enclave on Jupiter Island, Florida.) Yarborough's shot was on target, it
hurt. Bush whined in response that it was Yarborough's statement which
was "false, libelous, and hogwash," and challenged the Senator to prove
it or retract it. / Note #1 / Note #7 Racial Theme 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 Bush 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, the 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 percent 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." Footnotes 5. For a profile of Yarborough's
voting record on this and other issues, see Chandler Davidson, "Race and
Class in Texas Politics" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 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, "op. cit.," p. 77 "ff." 8. See Harry
Hurt III, "Texas Rich" (New York: Putnam, 1987), p. 191. 9. On Bush's drive
t o 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 sping 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.... 12. For Anthony Farris in the Pennzoil
vs. Texaco case, see below and also Thomas Petzinger, Jr., "Oil and Honor"
(New York: Putnam, 1987), "passim." 13. "Boston Globe," June 12, 1988,
cited in Michael R. Beschloss, "The Crisis Years" (New York: Edward Burlingame
Books, 1991), p. 581. 14. See Barbara Bush, "C. Fred's Story" (New York:
Doubleday, 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,"
Sept. 18, 1964. CHAPTER 10 Part II The Senate Race Bush was described in
the Texas press as attempting a melange of "Goldwater's policies, Kennedy's
style." / Note #1 / Note #8 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. "Y'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,
some 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 U.S. 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."
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 toward Cuba, ending the U.S. 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 positioned
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. / Note #1 / Note
#9 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
troops in Vietnam were being issued "shoddy war material." Responding to
a prediction from Defense Secretary McNamara that the war might last ten
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 kindof manifesto for a worldwide
U.S. 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 U.N. 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 U.S. 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....
Unbridled Free Enterprise 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 medi-care 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. In 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 1960s, 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 Antitrust Act was still being use d 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's 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 courthouse 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 11 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. / Note #2 / Note
#0 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 G.I. Bill, which he branded the Senator's "pet project." "Fortunately,"
said Bush, "he has been unable to cram his Cold War G.I. 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 G.I. Bill was nothing
but a "cynical effort to get votes," Bush concluded. The Oil Cartel's Candidate
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 percent oil
depletion allowance, a tax write-off 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
hope 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?'|" / Note #2 / Note #1 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." / Note
#2 / Note #2 Forced into a Runoff 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 percent
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 News" 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." / Note #2 / Note #3 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; and 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, Bush's Harris County campaign chairman. Five officers
of this company, named as W.L. Clayton, L. Fleming, Maurice McAshan, Leland
Anderson and Sydnor 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'Donnell'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 percent 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 percent 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. Senate Seat Can't Be Bought 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, a leader of
Scottish Rite Freemasons in Texas and in 1964 the chairman of the board
of Lone Star Steel. Then there were various forms of covert support for
Bush. Millionaire Houston oil man Lloyd Bentsen, who had been in Congress
back in the late 1940s, 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 reappeared 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. / Note #2 / Note
#4 Bush and Connally have had a complex political relationship, 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. / Note #2 / Note #5 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 U.S. 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 cha nce. But Johnson is not about to stay
out of it, which makes Bush the underdog." / Note #2 / Note #6 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 Allred," who had held office from 1935 to 1939. 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 advisers
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." / Note #2 / Note #7 Campaigning in Port Arthur on
October 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. / Note #2 / Note #8 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
U.S. 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. / Note #2 / Note #9
Had the James McCords or other plumbers been lending Bush a hand? 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,
Stephen 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
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. Footnotes
18. See "The Historic Texas Senate Race," in "The Texas Observer," Oct.
30, 1964. 19. Cited in Ronnie Dugger, "op. cit." 20. "Ibid." 21. "Dallas
News," Oct. 24, 1964. 22. "Dallas News," Oct. 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 Yarbor ough 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, "op. cit.,"
p. 82. 26. "Ibid.," p. 87. 27. Fitzhugh Green, "George Bush: An Intimate
Portrait" (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 85. 28. "Dallas News,"
Oct. 31, 1964. 29. Ronnie Dugger, "Goldwater's Policies, Kennedy's Style"
in "Texas Observer," Oct. 30, 1964. CHAPTER 11 Part 1 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. First, Bush won his suit in the Houston federal
district court, and there was a loud squawk from Governor John Connally,
who called that august tribunal a "Republican court." Bush whined that
Connally was being "vitriolic." Then, during Bush's primary campaign, a
three-judge panel of the federal circuit court of appeals also 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 U.S. 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 class 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. /
Note #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 ever 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." / Note #2 Purge of County GOP 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. / Note #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. By June 12, 1965, the Bush
faction had enough clout to oust Gilbert. 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. 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."
/ Note #4 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 he 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 Vietnam, but he is seeking and seeking hard for
an honorable way out." 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, Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. 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 Un-American 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 Vietnam 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." Congress in his Sights 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 Vietnam War to "stagflation" (stagnation + inflation). The designer
gerrymandering of the new Houston congressional district had functioned
perfectly, and so had his demagogic shift toward 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. / Note #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 percent
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 1960s." 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 Briscoe 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 Bush 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 percent of Bush's
hefty campaign budget into advertising, and 59 percent of that was for
television. Newspaper ads got 3 percent. 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." / Note
#6 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 U.S.S.R. 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 freshmen Republican congressmen into the House, the biggest
influx in two decades, Bush's calculated approach worked. Bush got about
35 percent of the black vote, 44 percent of the usually yellow-dog Democrat
rural vote, and 70 percent in the exclusive River Oaks suburb. Still, his
margin was not large: Bush got 58 percent of the votes in the district.
Bob Gray, the candidate of the Constitution Party, got less than 1 percent.
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. / Note #7 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. Bush in Washington 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 since 1904 to be
given a seat on the Ways and Means Committee. 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 touching 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." / Note #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 Gerry 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. / Note #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 o bsession with birth control
for the lower orders, Mills gave Bush the nickname "Rubbers," which stuck
with him during his years in Congress. / Note #1 / Note #0 Poppy Bush was
not amused. One day Mills might ponder in retrospect, as so many others
have, on Bush's vindictiveness. Uprooting Western Values 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 Gerry 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 January 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." / Note #1 / Note #1 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. / Note #1 / Note #2 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 1960s.
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. / Note #1 / Note #3 In remarks to the House 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, the year
that Pope Paul VI issued his enyclical "Humanae Vitae," with its 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 judge 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, 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 continued, "For those of us who who feel so strongly
on this issue, the recent enyclical was most discouraging." Population
Control Leader 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. 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 racism, as in his infamous Willie Horton ads during the
1988 presidential campaign. 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 [sic] -- 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 "succes 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...."
Notes 1. See Fitzhugh Green, "George Bush: A Biography" (New York: Dodd,
Mead & Company, 1980), p. 92, and George Bush and Victor Gold, "Looking
Forward" (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 90. 2. Stevens's remarks were
part of a Public Broadcasting System "Frontline" documentary program entitled
"Campaign: The Choice," Nov. 24, 1988. Cited by Fitzhugh Green, "op. cit.,"
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. "Geor ge Bush vs. Observer Editor," "Texas Observer," July 23, 1965.
5. "Texas Observer," Oct. 14, 1966. 6. Joe McGinniss, "The Selling of the
President 1968" (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 42-45. 7. Bush and
Gold, "op. cit.," p. 91. 8. See John R. Knaggs, "Two-Party Texas" (Austin:
Eakin Press, 1985), 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,"
Jan. 24, 1968. 12. "New York Times," May 7, 1968. 13. The following account
of Bush's congressional record on population and related issues is derived
from the ground-breaking research of Kathleen Klenetsky, to whom the authors
acknowledge their indebtedness. The material that follows incorporates
sections of Kathleen Klenetsky, "Bush Backed Nazi 'Race Science,'|" "New
Federalist", Vol 5, No. 16, April 29, 1991. Chapter 11 Part 2 Rubbers Goes
to Congress One of Bush's more important initiatives on the domestic side
was his sponsorhip 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
funnelled 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 1920s 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 had dyslexia, a reading disorder, and both Bush's friend
Nick Brady, and Bush's own son Neal suffer from it. 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. Population Task Force 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 qualities 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 1960s 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 U.S.
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 African-Americans, 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 the U .S. government
to prepare "the addition of ... mass sterilization agents" to the U.S.
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 (witness the embargo against Iraq and Haiti). On July
24, 1969, the task force heard from Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., then national
chairman of the Population Crisis Committee. Gen. Draper was a close friend
of Bush's father, having served with the elder Bush as banker to Thyssen
and the Nazi Steel Trust. According to Bush's 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 preceeding 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 [sic] 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 1970s and 1980s 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, giving the
poor "equal access" to birth contol, 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 involun tary 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 litigation at the federal level.
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, as we have seen, 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 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 feeling 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 U.S. 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 of 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." Bush and Draper As we saw in Chapter 3, Gen. William
H. Draper, Jr. had been director and vice president of the German Credit
and Investment Corp., serving short-term credit to the Nazi Party's financiers
from offices in the U.S.A and Berlin. Draper 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, which he
founded in the 1960s. 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 "Congressional Record." "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 "Global 2000" 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.
The Nixon Touch 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 1960s and early 1970s.
Bush's intimate relations with Nixon 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) Nixon. 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. / Note #1 / Note #4 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." / Note #1 / Note
#5 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 presidency,
"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." / Note #1 / Note #6 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. / Note #1 / Note #7 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. / Note #1 / Note #8 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 Governor
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
Nixon. "|'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. / Note #1 / Note #9 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 lost one
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." / Note #2 / Note #0 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. / Note #2 / Note #1 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. Losing Again Bush himself was ensconced in the coils
of the GOP fundraising 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. / Note #2 / Note #2 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 shovelling so much money into the George Bush campaign that now
other Republican candidates around the country are demanding an accounting,"
said Bush's opponent. / Note #2 / Note #3 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 counterattacked: "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
thyroxin. 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. / Note #2 / Note #4 "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."
/ Note #2 / Note #5 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-mongerging 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 U.S. Post Office Department as the Postal Service -- not exactly a
success story in retrospect. 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 choose. 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. ...
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 follwing 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 percent to 47 percent. 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. / Note #2 / Note #6 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. / Note #2 / Note #7 Footnotes 14. Norman Mailer,
"Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (New York: D.I. Fine, 1968), pp. 72-73.
15. Richard Nixon, "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon" (New York: Warner
Books, 1978), p. 312. 16. "Congressional Quarterly," "President Bush,"
(Washington: 1989) p. 94. 17. Theodore H. White, "The Making of the President
1968" (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1969),p. 251. 18. Jules Witcover,
"The Resurrection of Richard Nixon" (New York: Putnam, 1970), p. 352. 19.
Lewis Chester et al., "An American Melodrama: the Presidential Campaign
of 1968" (London: Deutch, 1969), p. 622. 20. "Houston Post," Oct. 29, 1970.
21. "New York Times," Sept. 27, 1969. 22. "New York Times," May 13, 1969.
23. "Houston Chronicle," Oct. 6, 1970. 24. See "Tubing with Lloyd/George,"
"Texas Observer," Oct. 30, 1970. 25. Knaggs, "op. cit.," p. 148. 26. "Houston
Post," Nov. 5, 1970. 27. Bush and Gold, "op. cit.," p. 102. CHAPTER 12
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
U.S. 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
/ Note #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.