George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Part 4 of 8

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GEORGE BUSH: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY - PART 4 of 8

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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 - Chpater 11, Part 1

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 - Chapter 11, Part 2

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

PART 1

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.

Nixon had promised Bush an attractive and prestigious political plum in the

executive branch, and it was now time for Nixon to deliver. Bush's problem

was that in late 1970 Nixon was more interested in what another Texan could

contribute to his administration. That other Texan was John Connally, who

had played the role of Bush's nemesis in the elections just concluded, by

virtue of the encouragement and decisive support which Connally had given

to the Bentsen candidacy. Nixon was now fascinated by the prospect of

including the right-wing Democrat Connally in his cabinet in order to

provide himself with a patina of bipartisanship, while emphasizing the

dissension among the Democrats, strengthening Nixon's chances of

successfully executing his Southern Strategy a second time during the 1972

elections.

The word among Nixon's inner circle of this period was "The Boss is in

love," and the object of his affections was Big Jawn. Nixon claimed that he

was not happy with the stature of his current cabinet, telling his domestic

policy advisor John Ehrlichman in the fall of 1970 that "Every cabinet

should have at least one potential President in it. Mine doesn't." Nixon

had tried to recruit leading Democrats before, asking Senator Henry Jackson

to be secretary of defense and offering the post of United Nations

ambassador to Hubert Humphrey.

Within hours after the polls had closed in the Texas Senate race, Bush

received a call from Charles Bartlett, a Washington columnist who was part

of the Prescott Bush network. Bartlett tipped Bush to the fact that

Treasury Secretary David Kennedy was leaving, and urged him to make a grab

for the job. Bush called Nixon and put in his request. After that, he

waited by the telephone. But it soon became clear that Nixon was about to

recruit John Connally, and with him, perhaps, the important Texas electoral

votes in 1972. Secretary of the Treasury! One of the three or four top

posts in the cabinet! And that before Bush had been given anything for all

of his useless slogging through the 1970 campaign! But the job was about to

go to Connally. Over two decades, one can almost hear Bush's whining

complaint.

This move was not totally unprepared. During the fall of 1970, when

Connally was campaigning for Bentsen against Bush, Connally had been

invited to participate in the Ash Commission, a study group on government

re-organization chaired by Roy Ash. "This White House access was

dangerously undermining George Bush," complained Texas GOP chairman

O'Donnell. A personal friend of Bush on the White House staff named Peter

Flanigan, generated a memo to White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman with

the notation: "Connally is an implacable enemy of the Republican party in

Texas, and, therefore, attractive as he may be to the President, we should

avoid using him again." Nixon found Connally an attractive political

property, and had soon appointed him to the main White House panel for

intelligence evaluations: "On November 30, when Connally's appointment to

the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was announced, the senior Senator

from Texas, John Tower, and George Bush were instantly in touch with the

White House to express their 'extreme' distress over the appointment. /

Note #2 Tower was indignant because he had been promised by Ehrlichman some

time before that Connally was not going to receive an important post.

Bush's personal plight was even more poignant: "He was out of work, and he

wanted a job. As a defeated senatorial candidate, he hoped and fully

expected to get a major job in the administration. Yet the administration

seemed to be paying more attention to the very Democrat who had put him on

the job market. What gives? Bush was justified in asking." / Note #3

The appointment of Connally to replace David Kennedy as secretary of the

Treasury was concluded during the first week of December 1970. But it could

not be announced without causing an upheaval among the Texas Republicans

until something had been done for lame duck George. On December 7, Nixon

retainer H.R. Haldeman was writing memos to himself in the White House. The

first was: "Connally set." Then came: "Have to do something for Bush right

away." Could Bush become the director of NASA? How about the Small Business

Administration? Or the Republican National Committee? Or then again, he

might like to be White House congressional liaison, or perhaps

undersecretary of commerce. As one account puts it, "since no job

immediately came to mind, Bush was assured that he would come to the White

House as a top presidential adviser on something or other, until another

fitting job opened up."

Bush was called to the White House on December 9, 1970 to meet with Nixon

and talk about a post as assistant to the President "with a wide range of

unspecified general responsibilities," according to a White House memo

initialed by H.R. Haldeman. Bush accepted such a post at one point in his

haggling with the Nixon White House. But Bush also sought the U.N. job,

arguing that there "was a dirth [sic] of Nixon advocacy in New York City

and the general New York area that he could fill that need in the New York

social circles he would be moving in as ambassador. / Note #4 Nix on's U.N.

ambassador had been Charles Yost, a Democrat who was now leaving. But the

White House had already offered that job to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who

had accepted.

But then Moynihan decided that he did not want the U.N. ambassador post

after all, and, with a sigh of relief, the White House offered it to Bush.

Bush's appointment was announced on December 11, Connally's on December 14.

/ Note #5 In offering the post to Bush, Haldeman had been brutally frank,

telling him that the job, although of cabinet rank, would have no power

attached to it. Bush, stressed Haldeman, would be taking orders directly

from Kissinger. Bush says he replied, "even if somebody who took the job

didn't understand that, Henry Kissinger would give him a twenty-four hour

crash course on the subject." / Note #6

Nixon told his cabinet and the Republican congressional leadership on

December 14, 1970 what had been in the works for some time: that Connally

was "coming not only as a Democrat but as Secretary of the Treasury for the

next two full years." Even more humiliating for Bush wasthe fact that our

hero had been on the receiving end of Connally's assistance. As Nixon told

the cabinet: "Connally said he wouldn't take it until George Bush got

whatever he was entitled to. I don't know why George wanted the U.N.

appointment, but he wanted it so he got it." Only this precondition from

Connally, by implication, had finally prompted Nixon to take care of poor

George. Nixon turned to Senator Tower, who was in the meeting: "This is

hard for you. I am for every Republican running. We need John Tower back in

1972." Tower replied: "I'm a pragmatic man. John Connally is

philosophically attuned to you. He is articulate and persuasive. I for one

will defend him against those in our own party who may not like him." /

Note #7

There is evidence that Nixon considered Connally to be a possible successor

in the presidency. Connally's approach to the international monetary crisis

then unfolding was that "all foreigners are out to screw us and it's our

job to screw them first," as he told C. Fred Bergsten of Kissinger's

National Security Council staff. Nixon's bumbling management of the

international monetary crisis was one of the reasons why he was Watergated,

and Big Jawn was certainly seen by the financiers as a big part of the

problem. Bush was humiliated in this episode, but that is nothing compared

to what later happened to both Connally and Nixon. Connally would be

indicted while Bush was in Beijing, and later he would face the further

humilation of personal bankruptcy. In the view of James Reston, Jr.,

"George Bush was to maintain a smoldering, visceral dislike of Connally,

one that lasted well into the 1980s." / Note #8 As others discovered during

the Gulf war, Bush is vindictive.

Confirmed by the Senate

Bush appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his pro

forma and perfunctory confirmation hearings on February 8, 1971. It was a

free ride. Many of the Senators had known Prescott Bush, and several were

still Prescott's friends. Acting like friends of the family, they gave Bush

friendly advice with a tone that was congratulatory and warm, and avoided

any tough questions. Stuart Symington warned Bush that he would have to

deal with the "duality of authority" between his nominal boss, Secretary of

State William Rogers, and his real boss, NSC chief Kissinger. There was

only passing reference to Bush's service of the oil cartel during his time

in the House, and Bush vehemently denied that he had ever tried to

"placate" the "oil interests." Claiborne Pell said that Bush would enhance

the luster of the U.N. post.

On policy matters, Bush said that it would "make sense" for the U.N.

Security Council to conduct a debate on the wars in Laos and Cambodia,

which was something that the United States had been attempting to procure

for some time. Bush thought that such a debate could be used as a forum to

expose the aggressive activities of the North Vietnamese. No senator asked

Bush about China, but Bush told journalists waiting in the hall that the

question of China was now under intensive study. The "Washington Post" was

impressed by Bush's "lithe and youthful good looks." Bush was easily

confirmed.

At Bush's swearing-in later in February, Nixon, probably anxious to calm

Bush down after the strains of the Connally affair, had recalled that

President William McKinley had lost an election in Ohio, but neverthless

gone on to become President. "But I'm not suggesting what office you should

seek and at what time," said Nixon. The day before, Senator Adlai Stevenson

III of Illinois had told the press that Bush was "totally unqualified" and

that his appointment had been "an insult" to the U.N. Bush presented his

credentials on March 1.

Then Bush, "handsome and trim" at 47, moved into a suite at the

Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, and settled into his usual

hyperkinetic, thyroid-driven lifestyle. The "Washington Post" marveled at

his "whirlwind schedule" which seemed more suitable for a "political

aspirant than one usually associated with a diplomat." He rose every

morning at 7:00 A.M., and then mountedhis exercycle for a twelve-minute

workout while taking in a television news program that also lasted exactly

twelve minutes. He ate a small breakfast and left the Waldorf at 8:00, to

be driven to the U.S. mission to the U.N. at Turtle Bay where he generally

arrived at 8:10. Then he would get the overnight cable traffic from his

secretary, Mrs. Aleene Smith, and then went into a conference with his

executive assistant, Tom Lais. Later there would be meetings with his two

deputies, Ambassadors Christopher Phillips and W. Tapley Bennett of the

State Department. Pete Roussel was also still with him as publicity man.

For Bush, a 16-hour work day was more the rule than the exception. His days

were packed with one appointment after another, luncheon engagements,

receptions, formal dinners -- at least one reception and one dinner per

day. Sometimes there were three receptions per day -- quite an opportunity

for networking with like-minded freemasons from all over the world. Bush

also traveled to Washington for cabinet meetings, and still did speaking

engagements around the country, especially for Republican candidates. "I

try to get to bed by 11:30 if possible, " said Bush in 1971, "but often my

calendar is so filled that I fall behind in my work and have to take it

home with me." Bush bragged that he was still a "pretty tough" doubles

player in tennis, good enough to team up with the pros. But he claimed to

love baseball most. He joked about questions on his ping pong skills, since

these were the months of ping pong diplomacy, when the invitation for a

U.S. ping pong team to visit Beijing became a part of the preparation for

Kissinger's China card.

Mainly, Bush came on as an ultra-orthodox Nixon loyalist. Was he a liberal

conservative? asked a reporter. "People in Texas used to ask me that in the

campaigns," replied Bush. "Some even called me a right-wing reactionary. I

like to think of myself as a pragmatist, but I have learned to defy being

labeled.... What I can say is that I am a strong supporter of the

President. If you can tell me what he is, I can tell you what I am."

Barbara liked the Waldorf suite, and was an enthusiastic hostess.

Soon after taking up his U.N. posting, Bush received a phone call from

Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs Joseph Sisco, one

of Kissinger's principal henchmen. Sisco had been angered by some comments

Bush had made about the Middle East situation in a press conference after

presenting his credentials. Despite the fact that Bush, as a cabinet

officer, ranked several levels above Sisco, Sisco was in effect the voice

of Kissinger. Sisco told Bush that it was Sisco who spoke for the United

States government on the Middle East, and that he would do both the

on-the-record talking and the leaking about that area. Bush knuckled under,

for these were the realities of the Kissinger years.

Kissinger's Clone

Henry Kissinger was now Bush's boss even more than Nixon was, and later, as

the Watergate scandal progres sed into 1973, the dominion of Kissinger

would become even more absolute. During these years Bush, serving his

apprenticeship in diplomacy and world strategy under Kissinger, became a

virtual Kissinger clone in two senses. First, to a significant degree,

Kissinger's networks and connections merged together with Bush's own,

foreshadowing a 1989 administration in which the NSC director and the

number two man in the State Department were both Kissinger's business

partners from his consulting and influence-peddling firm, Kissinger

Associates. Secondly, Bush assimilated Kissinger's characteristic

British-style geopolitical mentality and approach to problems, and this is

now the epistemology that dictates Bush's own dealing with the main

questions of world politics.

The most essential level of Kissinger was the British one. / Note #9 This

meant that U.S. foreign policy was to be guided by British imperial

geopolitics, in particular the notion of the balance of power: The United

States must always ally with the second strongest land power in the world

(Red China) against the strongest land power (the U.S.S.R.) in order to

preserve the balance of power. This was expressed in the 1971-72

Nixon-Kissinger opening to Beijing, to which Bush would contribute from his

U.N. post. The balance of power, since it rules out a positive engagement

for the economic progress of the international community as a whole, has

always been a recipe for new wars. Kissinger was in constant contact with

British foreign policy operatives like Sir Eric Roll of S.G. Warburg in

London, Lord Victor Rothschild, the Barings bank and others.

On May 10, 1982, in a speech entitled "Reflections on a Partnership" given

at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London,

Henry Kissinger openly expounded his role and philosophy as a British

agent-of-influence within the U.S. government during the Nixon and Ford

years:

"The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a

participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never

before practiced between sovereign nations. In my period in office, the

British played a seminal part in certain American bilateral negotiations

with the Soviet Union -- indeed, they helped draft the key document. In my

White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better

informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State

Department.... In my negotiations over Rhodesia I worked from a British

draft with British spelling even when I did not fully grasp the distinction

between a working paper and a Cabinet-approved document."

Kissinger was also careful to point out that the United States must support

colonial and neo-colonial strategies against the developing sector:

"Americans from Franklin Roosevelt onward believed that the United States,

with its 'revolutionary' heritage, was the natural ally of people

struggling against colonialism; we could win the allegiance of these new

nations by opposing and occasionally undermining our European allies in the

areas of their colonial dominance. Churchill, of course, resisted these

American pressures.... In this context, the experience of Suez is

instructive.... Our humiliation of Britain and France over Suez was a

shattering blow to these countries' role as world powers. It accelerated

their shedding of international responsibilities, some of the consequences

of which we saw in succeeding decades when reality forced us to step into

their shoes -- in the Persian Gulf, to take one notable example. Suez thus

added enormously to America's burdens."

Kissinger was the high priest of imperialism and neocolonialism, animated

by an instinctive hatred for Indira Gandhi, Aldo Moro, Ali Bhutto, and

other nationalist world leaders. Kissinger's British geopolitics simply

accentuated Bush's own fanatically Anglophile point of view, which he had

acquired from father Prescott and imbibed from the atmosphere of the family

firm, Brown Brothers Harriman, originally the U.S. branch of a British

counting house.

Kissinger was also a Zionist, dedicated to economic, diplomatic, and

military support of Israeli aggression and expansionism to keep the Middle

East in turmoil, so as to prevent Arab unity and Arab economic development

while using the region to mount challenges to the Soviets. In this he was a

follower of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Balfour. In

the 1973 Middle East war which he had connived to unleash, Kissinger would

mastermind the U.S. resupply of Israel and would declare a U.S.-worldwide

thermonuclear alert. In later years, Kissinger would enrich himself through

speculative real estate purchases on the West bank of the Jordan, buying up

land and buildings that had been virtually confiscated from defenseless

Palestinian Arabs.

Kissinger was also Soviet in a sense that went far beyond his sponsorship

of the 1970s detente, SALT I, and the ABM treaty with Moscow. Polish KGB

agent Michael Goleniewski is widely reported to have told the British

government in 1972 that he had seen KGB documents in Poland before his 1959

defection which established that Kissinger was a Soviet asset. According to

Goleniewski, Kissinger had been recruited by the Soviets during his Army

service in Germany after the end of World War II, when he had worked as a

humble chauffeur.

Kissinger had allegedly been recruited to an espionage cell called ODRA,

where he received the code name of "BOR" or "COLONEL BOR." Some versions of

this story also specify that this cell had been largely composed of

homosexuals, and that homosexuality had been an important part of the way

that Kissinger had been picked up by the KGB. These reports were reportedly

partly supported by Golitsyn, another Soviet defector. The late James Jesus

Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence director for 20 years up to 1973, was

said to have been the U.S. official who was handed Goleniewski's report by

the British. Angleton later talked a lot about Kissinger being "objectively

a Soviet agent." It has not been established that Angleton ever ordered an

active investigation of Kissinger or ever assigned his case a codename. /

Note #1 / Note #0

Kissinger's Chinese side was very much in evidence during 1971-73 and

beyond; during these years he was obsessed with anything remotely connected

with China and sought to monopolize decisions and contacts with the highest

levels of the Chinese leadership. This attitude was dictated most of all by

the British mentality and geopolitical considerations indicated above, but

it is also unquestionable that Kissinger felt a strong personal affinity

for Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and the other Chinese leaders, who had been

responsible for the genocide of 100 million of their own people after 1949.

Kissinger possessed other dimensions in addition to these, including close

links to the Zionist underworld. These will also loom large in George

Bush's career.

For all of these Kissingerian enormities, Bush now became the principal

spokesman. In the process, he was to become a Kissinger clone.

The China Card

The defining events in the first year of Bush's U.N. tenure reflected

Kissinger's geoplitical obsession with his China card. Remember that in his

1964 campaign, Bush had stated that Red China must never be admitted to the

U.N. and that if Beijing ever obtained the Chinese seat on the Security

Council, the U.S.A. must depart forthwith from the world body. This

statement came back to haunt him once or twice. His stock answer went like

this: "That was 1964, a long time ago. There's been an awful lot changed

since.... A person who is unwilling to admit that changes have taken place

is out of things these days. President Nixon is not being naive in his

China policy. He is recognizing the realities of today, not the realities

of seven years ago."

One of the realities of 1971 was that the bankrupt British had declared

themselves to be financially unable to maintain their military presence in

the Indian Ocean and the Far East, in the area "East of Suez." Part of the

timing of the Kissinger China card was dictated by the British desire to

acquire China as a c ounterweight to India in this vast area of the world,

and also to insure a U.S. military presence in the Indian Ocean, as seen

later in the U.S. development of an important base on the island of Diego

Garcia.

On a world tour during 1969, Nixon had told President Yahya Khan, the

dictator of Pakistan, that his administration wanted to normalize relations

with Red China and wanted the help of the Pakistani government in

exchanging messages. Regular meetings between the United States and Beijing

had gone on for many years in Warsaw, but what Nixon was talking about was

a total reversal of U.S. China policy. Up until 1971, the U.S.A. had

recognized the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan as the sole

sovereign and legitimate authority over China. The United States, unlike

Britain, France, and many other Western countries, had no diplomatic

relations with the Beijing Communist regime.

The Chinese seat among the five permanent members of the United Nations

Security Council was held by the government in Taipei. Every year in the

early autumn there was an attempt by the non-alignedbloc to oust Taipei

from the Security Council and replace them with Beijing, but so far this

vote had always failed because of U.S. arm-twisting in Latin America and

the rest of the Third World. One of the reasons that this arrangement had

endured so long was the immense prestige of R.O.C. President Chiang

Kai-shek and the sentimental popularity of the Kuomintang with the American

electorate. There still was a very powerful China lobby, which was

especially strong among right-wing Republicans of what had been the Taft

and Knowland factions of the party, and which Goldwater continued. Now, in

the midst of the Vietnam War, with U.S. strategic and economic power in

decline, the Anglo-American elite decided in favor of a geopolitical

alliance with China against the Soviets for the foreseeable future. This

meant that the honor of U.S. commitments to the R.O.C. had to be dumped

overboard as so much useless ballast, whatever the domestic political

consequences might be. This was the task given to Kissinger, Nixon, and

George Bush.

The maneuver on the agenda for 1971 was to oust the R.O.C. from the U.N.

Security Council and assign their seat to Beijing. Kissinger and Nixon

calculated that duplicity would insulate them from domestic political

damage: While they were opening to Beijing, they would call for a "two

Chinas" policy, under which both Beijing and Taipei would be represented at

the U.N., at least in the General Assembly, despite the fact that this was

an alternative that both Chinese governments vehemently rejected. The

U.S.A. would pretend to be fighting to keep Taipei in the U.N., with George

Bush leading the fake charge, but this effort would be defeated. Then the

Nixon administration could claim that the vote in the U.N. was beyond its

control, comfortably resign itself to Beijing in the Security Council, and

pursue the China card. What was called for was a cynical, duplicitous

diplomatic charade in which Bush would have the leading part.

This scenario was complicated by the rivalry between Secretary of State

Rogers and NSC boss Kissinger. Rogers was an old friend of Nixon, but it

was of course Kissinger who made foreign policy for Nixon and the rest of

the government, and Kissinger who was incomparably the greater evil.

Between Rogers and Kissinger, Bush was unhesitatingly on the side of

Kissinger. In later congressional testimony, former CIA official Ray Cline

tried to argue that Rogers and Bush were kept in the dark by Nixon and

Kissinger about the real nature of the U.S. China policy. The implication

is that Bush's efforts to keep Taiwan at the U.N. were in good faith.

According to Cline's fantastic account, "Nixon and Kissinger actually

'undermined' the department's efforts in 1971 to save Taiwan." / Note #1 /

Note #1 Rogers may have believed that helping Taiwan was U.S. policy, but

Bush did not. Cline's version of these events is an insult to the

intelligence of any serious person.

The Nixon-era China card took shape during July 1971 with Kissinger's

"Operation Marco Polo I," his secret first trip to Beijing. Kissinger says

in his memoirs that Bush was considered a candidate to make this journey,

along with David Bruce, Elliot Richardson, Nelson Rockefeller, and Al Haig.

/ Note #1 / Note #2 Kissinger first journeyed to India, and then to

Pakistan. From there, with the help of Yahya Khan, Kissinger went on to

Beijing for meetings with Zhou Enlai and other Chinese officals. He

returned by way of Paris, where he met with North Vietnamese negotiator Le

Duc Tho at the Paris talks on Indo-China. Returning to Washington,

Kissinger briefed Nixon on his understanding with Zhou. On July 15, 1971

Nixon announced to a huge television and radio audience that he had

accepted "with pleasure" an invitation to visit China at some occasion

before May of 1972. He lamely assured "old friends" (meaning Chiang

Kai-shek and the R.O.C. government on Taiwan) that their interests would

not be sacrificed. Later in the same year, between October 16 and 26,

Kissinger undertook operation "Polo II," a second, public visit with Zhou

in Beijing to decide the details of Nixon's visit and hammer out what was

to become the U.S.-P.R.C. Shanghai Communique, the joint statement issued

during Nixon's stay. During this visit, Zhou cautioned Kissinger not to be

disoriented by the hostile Beijing propaganda line against the U.S.A.,

manifestations of which were everywhere to be seen. Anti-U.S. slogans on

the walls, said Zhou, were meaningless, like "firing an empty cannon."

Nixon and Kissinger eventually journeyed to Beijing in February 1972.

U.N. 'Two Chinas' Farce

It was before this backdrop that Bush waged his farcical campaign to keep

Taiwan in the U.N. The State Department had stated through the mouth of

Rogers on August 2 that the United States would support the admission of

Red China to the U.N., but would oppose the expulsion of Taiwan. This was

the so-called "two Chinas" policy. In an August 12 interview, Bush told the

"Washington Post" that he was working hard to line up the votes to keep

Taiwan as a U.N. member when the time to vote came in the fall. Responding

to the obvious impression that this was a fraud for domestic political

purposes only, Bush pledged his honor on Nixon's commitment to "two

Chinas." "I know for a fact that the President wants to see the policy

implemented," said Bush, apparently with a straight face, adding that he

had discussed the matter with Nixon and Kissinger at the White House only a

few days before. Bush said that he and other members of his mission had

lobbied 66 countries so far, and that this figure was likely to rise to 80

by the following week. Ultimately Bush would claim to have talked personlly

with 94 delegations to get them to let Taiwan stay, which a fellow diplomat

called "a quantitative track record."

Diplomatic observers noted that the U.S. activity was entirely confined to

the high-profile "glass palace" of the U.N., and that virtually nothing was

being done by U.S. ambassadors in capitals around the world. But Bush

countered that if it were just a question of going through the motions as a

gesture for Taiwan, he would not be devoting so much of his time and energy

to the cause. The main effort was at the U.N. because "this is what the

U.N. is for," he commented. Bush said that his optimism about keeping the

Taiwan membership had increased over the past three weeks. / Note #1 / Note

#3

By late September, Bush was saying that he saw a better than 50-50 chance

that the U.N. General Assembly would seat both Chinese governments. By this

time, the official U.S. position as enunciated by Bush was that the

Security Council seat should go to Beijing, but that Taipei ought to be

allowed to remain in the General Assembly. Since 1961, the U.S. strategy

for blocking the admission of Beijing had depended on a procedural defense,

obtaining a simple majority of the General Assembly for a resolution

defining the seating of Beijing as an Important Question, which required a

two-thirds majority in order to be implemented. Thus, if the U.S .A. could

get a simple majority on the procedural vote, one-third plus one would

suffice to defeat Beijing on the second vote.

The General Assembly convened on September 21. Bush and his aides were

running a ludicrous full-court press on scores of delegations. Twice a day,

there was a State Department briefing on the vote tally. "Yes, Burundi is

with us.... About Argentina we're not sure," etc. All this attention got

Bush an appearance on "Face the Nation," where he said that the two-Chinas

policy should be approved regardless of the fact that both Beijing and

Taipei rejected it. "I don't think we have to go through the agony of

whether the Republic of China will accept or whether Beijing will accept,"

Bush told the interviewers. "Let the United Nations for a change do

something that really does face up to reality and then let that decision be

made by the parties involved," said Bush with his usual inimitable

rhetorical flair.

The U.N. debate on the China seat was scheduled to open on October 18; on

October 12, Nixon gave a press conference in which he totally ignored the

subject, and made no appeal for support for Taiwan. On October 16,

Kissinger departed with great fanfare for Beijing. Kissinger says in his

memoirs that he had been encouraged to go to Beijing by Bush, who assured

him that a highly publicized Kissinger trip to Beijing would have no impact

whatever on the U.N. vote. On October 25, the General Assembly defeated the

U.S. resolution to make the China seat an Important Question by a vote of

59 to 54, with 15 abstentions. Ninety minutes later came the vote on the

Albanian resolution to seat Beijing and expel Taipei, which passed by a

vote of 76 to 35. Bush then cast the U.S. vote to seat Beijing, and then

hurried to escort the R.O.C. delegate, Liu Chieh, out of the hall for the

last time. The General Assembly was the scene of a jubilant demonstration

led by Third World delegates over the fact that Red China had been

admitted, and even more so that the United States had been defeated. The

Tanzanian delegate danced a jig in the aisle. Henry Kissinger, flying back

from Beijing, got the news on his teletype and praised Bush's "valiant

efforts."

Having connived in selling Taiwan down the river, it was now an easy matter

for the Nixon regime to fake a great deal of indignation for domestic

political consumption about what had happened. Nixon's spokesman Ron

Ziegler declared that Nixon had been outraged by the "spectacle" of the

"cheering, handclapping, and dancing" delegates after the vote, which Nixon

had seen as a "shocking demonstration" of "undisguised glee" and "personal

animosity." Notice that Ziegler had nothing to say against the vote, or

against Beijing, but concentrated the fire on the Third World delegates,

who were also threatened with a cutoff of U.S. foreign aid.

This was the line that Bush would slavishly follow. On the last day of

October, the papers quoted him saying that the demonstration after the vote

was "something ugly, something harsh that transcended normal disappointment

or elation." "I really thought we were going to win," said Bush, still with

a straight face. "I'm so ... disappointed." "There wasn't just clapping and

enthusiasm" after the vote, he whined. "When I went up to speak I was

hissed and booed. I don't think it's good for the United Nations and that's

the point I feel very strongly about." In the view of a "Washington Post"

staff writer, "the boyish looking U.S. ambassador to the United Nations

looked considerably the worse for wear. But he still conveys the impression

of an earnest fellow trying to be the class valedictorian, as he once was

described." / Note #1 / Note #4

Bush expected the Beijing delegation to arrive in new York soon, because

they probably wanted to take over the presidency of the Security Council,

which rotated on a monthly basis. "But why anybody would want an early case

of chicken pox, I don't know," said Bush.

When the Beijing delegation did arrive, Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister

Ch'aio Kuan-hua delivered a maiden speech full of ideological bombast along

the lines of passages Kissinger had convinced Zhou to cut out of the draft

text of the Shanghai communique some days before. Kissi