Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (27 page)

A battle to control the soul of the president, not unusual in any administration, was under way. While the conservative, hawkish independent oilmen thought he was insufficiently loyal to their cause, the Rockefeller Republicans felt the same from their side. Writing in the
Dallas Morning
News
, Robert Baskin noted fears among the Eastern corporate elite that Nixon was being dominated by the right wing.
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A few months later Baskin further underlined the point in an article headlined “Divisiveness Within GOP Rising.” In truth, Nixon’s reign was a highly complicated one, far from doctrinaire, with issues handled on a case-by-case basis. Thus, Attorney General John Mitchell could say the administration was against busing but for desegregation. Nixon himself could complain about people in his administration being too tough on corporations, yet his Justice Department aggressively pursued antitrust actions that angered industry. While waging the Vietnam War, Nixon held secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese Communists. He also produced a series of liberal-leaning reforms, including creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. And Nixon implemented the first major affirmative action program. But some of his Supreme Court nominees leaned far to the right, and Nixon and his attorney general championed tough law-and-order tactics against political protesters and dissidents.
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His presidency was a mixed bag, meaning no one was entirely happy, and everyone perceived someone else as having the inside track.

Thus, the July 1969
Dallas Morning News
article describing moderates as fearful of the influence of a cabal of conservatives—a cabal that included such names as Tower, Morton, Dent, and Allison. What was left unsaid was that all these people were in the Bush camp. If nothing else, it was a testament to Poppy’s dexterity: the embodiment of blue-blooded Wall Street interests had morphed into a champion of the radical, upstart Southwest.

Bush’s Run for the Money: The 1970 Campaign

As early as the 1968 GOP convention, Nixon had tried to keep the Bush family close but not too close. He assured Poppy that he would support him in another Senate bid, and Poppy took that seriously. By January 1969, even before Nixon’s inauguration, Poppy’s administrative aide Jimmy Allison was back in Houston to lay the groundwork for another campaign. (After several months in Houston, Allison would return to D.C. as deputy director of the Republican Party.) There was no mistaking Poppy’s ultimate goal, though—and “ultimate” in Poppy’s mind did not mean that far in the future. As his brother Jonathan commented, “It was a long shot but he wanted to get into position to run for President.”
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Nixon’s support for Poppy’s Senate bid made sense strategically for the Republicans, and besides, he had little choice. As congressman, Bush had supported him unfailingly, backing even the president’s most unpopular policies, from the continuation of the Vietnam War to the Supreme Court nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell, a purported racist.

Nixon knew that in running for the Senate, Bush risked giving up a safe House seat and his powerful position on the Ways and Means Committee, which was so crucial to the oil industry. To sweeten the pot, Nixon told Poppy that if he won, he’d be in the running for the VP slot in 1972, replacing Agnew; if Bush lost, Nixon would try to find him a desirable cabinet position.
³⁹

Bush’s prospects seemed bright in 1970. His presumptive Democratic opponent, Senator Ralph Yarborough, was an unreconstructed liberal populist in an increasingly conservative, buttoned-down state. Then disaster struck. Former congressman Lloyd Bentsen Jr. entered the Democratic primary—and he was even more conservative than Bush. In a summer 1970 newspaper column, Bush family friend William F. Buckley lamented Bentsen’s entry, praised Bush as “genuinely talented on the platform and in the ways of the world,” and quoted Rogers Morton that Poppy was the only one of his generation of GOP figures who could “go all the way to the top.”

Bush raised enormous amounts of money and campaigned relentlessly. But for a second time he fell short. This was particularly hard for the competitive Poppy, whose father had become U.S. senator from Connecticut without even bothering to run for the House. He was disconsolate and confessed to his old friend Robert Mosbacher, “I feel like Custer.”
⁴⁰

President Nixon offered pro forma condolences. “I am sure . . . that you will not allow this defeat to discourage you in your efforts to continue to provide leadership for our party and the nation,” he wrote in a cable on November 5, 1970, right after the election.
⁴¹

Bush waited for a more tangible form of consolation, and then waited some more. When a friend tipped him off that Treasury Secretary David Kennedy was leaving, Bush called Nixon and made a modest pitch for a job—not of secretary but of
undersecretary
.
⁴²
Poppy knew too little about finance to assume the top post. Besides, it was the undersecretary who dealt specifically with issues of concern to oil interests.

Nixon’s response came as a shock. His new treasury secretary would be John Connally, the Texas governor and conservative Democrat who had just helped defeat Bush by throwing his weight behind Lloyd Bentsen. Connally would most certainly not want Bush on his staff—not that Bush would have wanted to serve under him anyway. And even if Connally had been willing, it was unlikely that Nixon would okay having two Texans in top Treasury Department posts. For Nixon’s part, he wanted at least one Democrat in his cabinet, to create a perception of bipartisanship, and also help his Southern strategy in the 1972 campaign. He also greatly admired the confident, handsome Connally. But the move must have raised suspicions in Bush’s mind about which candidate Nixon really had wanted to win the Texas Senate race.

Bush’s suspicions were on target. It would subsequently be shown that Nixon often secretly backed conservative Democrats, especially Southern hard-liners like Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who would support his policies while staying out of Republican internecine squabbling.
⁴³

Now, with the Connally business, Bush was livid. This is what he got for his loyalty to Nixon? John Tower put it this way: “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?”
⁴⁴

It was the kind of political snub that could not—and perhaps would not—be easily forgotten. Nixon had already disappointed Poppy by choosing Spiro Agnew over him as a running mate. Now this.

But Poppy was nothing if not resilient. Once again, he suggested a job to Nixon: ambassador to the United Nations. The case he made shows a keen grasp of Nixon’s neurosis and class envy, and a willingness to exploit it. There was a “dirth [sic] of Nixon advocacy in New York City,” where the U.N. was based, Bush wrote the president, noting that he was well suited to “fill that need in New York social circles.”
⁴⁵

Nixon complied. Parmet described the meeting where the matter was settled:

Bush did most of the talking. He told the president that he preferred going to New York as ambassador to the United Nations . . . He and Barbara could . . . become invaluable . . . Nothing in the record of the session indicates any discussion of global factors, or, for that matter, US relationships with that world body.
⁴⁶

The inexperienced Poppy was again being offered something for which he was ill-prepared—an important diplomatic post at a time of global turmoil. Among the hot-button issues on which he was expected to hold forth were the China-Taiwan dispute, Vietnam, and the Middle East conflict. Some of his closest friends were astonished. Congressman Lud Ashley, an old chum from his Skull and Bones days, put it this way: “George, what the fuck do you know about world affairs?” To which Poppy replied, “You ask me that in ten days.”
⁴⁷

In private, neither Nixon nor his top adviser on foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger, thought much of Bush’s capacities. On April 27, 1971, several months after Poppy’s appointment, Nixon raised the possibility of sending Poppy on a secret diplomatic mission to China.

PRESIDENT NIXON: How about [UN Ambassador George H.W.] Bush?

KISSINGER: Absolutely not, he is too soft and not sophisticated enough.

PRESIDENT NIXON: I thought of that myself.
⁴⁸

In a 1992 letter to Herbert Parmet, Nixon claimed that he had made the U.N. appointment because Bush “not only had the diplomatic skills to be an effective ambassador, but also because it would be helpful to him in the future to have this significant foreign-policy experience.”
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Although Bush was an amiable fellow, it is a stretch to believe that either the first or the second part of that statement fully conveyed Nixon’s true motives. But one thing was clear: Nixon did not feel he could leave Poppy entirely out in the cold.

Not only did Nixon appoint Poppy to the U.N.; he also upgraded the post to that of full ambassador, a title previously conferred only upon envoys to foreign states. He even made Bush a member of his cabinet. This was most unusual, but it put Bush in a unique position: although he traveled to Washington regularly for cabinet meetings, he was “a Washington outsider” by dint of his being based in New York. Whatever Nixon’s ultimate purpose in continuing to mollify him, these decisions clearly worked to Poppy’s advantage. When the Watergate scandal erupted, nobody thought to include George H. W. Bush in the circle of blame. He was literally out of sight, out of mind. But not necessarily out of the loop.

CHAPTER 10

Downing Nixon, Part I: The Setup

Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Priest?

—ASCRIBED TO HENRY II

O
N JUNE 17, 1972, A GROUP OF BURGLARS, carrying electronic surveillance equipment, was arrested inside the Democratic National Committee offices at 2650 Virginia Avenue, NW, in Washington, D.C., the Watergate building complex. The men were quickly identified as having ties to the Nixon reelection campaign and to the White House.

Though at the time the incident got little attention, it would snowball into one of the biggest crises in American political history, define Richard Nixon forever, and drive him out of the White House.

Most historical accounts judge Nixon responsible in some way for the Watergate burglary—or at least for an effort to cover it up. And many people believe Nixon got what he deserved.

But like other epic events, Watergate turns out to be an entirely different story than the one we thought we knew.

Hanky-Panky, Cuban-Style

Almost no one has better expressed reasons to doubt Nixon’s involvement than Nixon himself. In his memoirs, Nixon described how he learned about the burglary while vacationing in Florida, from the morning newspaper. He recalled his reaction at the time:

It sounded preposterous. Cubans in surgical gloves bugging the DNC! I dismissed it as some sort of prank . . . The whole thing made so little sense. Why, I wondered. Why then? Why in such a blundering way . . . Anyone who knew anything about politics would know that a national committee headquarters was a useless place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign. The whole thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked like some kind of a setup.
¹

Nixon was actually suggesting not just a setup, but one intended to harm
him
.

Perhaps because anything he might say would seem transparently self-serving, this claim received little attention and has been largely forgotten.

NOTWITHSTANDING NIXON’S initial reaction to the news of the break-in, less than a week later he suddenly learned more—and this gave him much to ponder.

On June 23, Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, came into the Oval Office to give the president an update on a variety of topics, including the investigation of the break-in. Haldeman had just been briefed by John Dean, who had gotten his information from FBI investigators.

HALDEMAN: . . . The FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that’s what it is. This is CIA. . . .

Nixon’s response would show that he had already realized this:

NIXON: Of course, this is a, this is a [E. Howard] Hunt [operation, and exposure of it] will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves . . . This will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing . . .

Of course, it is important to remember that Nixon knew every word he uttered was being recorded. Like his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson, he had decided to install a taping system so that he could maintain a record of his administration. He was, in a way, dictating a file memo for future historians.

But that doesn’t make everything he said untrue. While Nixon undoubtedly spun some things, he still had to communicate with his subordinates, and the tape was rolling while he was trying to run the country. Those were actual meetings and real conversations, tape or no tape. And though the result was 3,700 hours of White House tape recordings, Nixon evinced merely sporadic consciousness of the fact that the tape was rolling. Only after his counsel John Dean defected to the prosecutors did Nixon appear to be tailoring his words.

Nixon’s memoirs, combined with the tape of June 23, make clear that Nixon recognized certain things about the implementation of the burglary. The caper was carried out by pros, yet paradoxically was amateurish, easily detected—an instigation of the crime more easily pinned on someone else. A break-in at Democratic Party headquarters: On whom would that be blamed? Well, who was running against a Democrat for reelection that fall? Why, Richard Nixon of course. Nixon, who frequently exhibited a grim and self-pitying awareness of how he generally was portrayed, might have grasped how this would play out publicly. Dick Nixon: ruthless, paranoid, vengeful—
Tricky Dick
. Wouldn’t this burglary be just the kind of thing that
that
Dick Nixon—the “liberal media’s” version of him—would do? Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, made this charge repeatedly during the 1972 campaign.

Though Nixon would sweep the election, it would become increasingly apparent to him that, where Watergate was concerned, the jury was stacked. The path was set. Someone had him in a corner.

But who?

Many people, including those within Nixon’s own base of support, were not happy with him—even from early in his administration. As Haldeman noted in his diary, one month after the inauguration in 1969:

Also got cranking on the political problem. [President’s] obviously concerned about reports (especially Buchanan’s) that conservatives and the South are unhappy. Also he’s annoyed by constant right-wing bitching, with never a positive alternative. Ordered me to assemble a political group and really hit them to start defending us, including Buchanan . . . [and political specialist Harry] Dent.
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There would be growing anger in the Pentagon about Nixon and Kissinger’s secret attempts to secure agreements with China and the Soviet Union without consulting the military. And there were the oilmen, who found Nixon wasn’t solid enough on their most basic concerns, such as the oil depletion allowance and oil import quotas.

As for the burglary crew, Nixon recognized them instantly, because he knew what they represented. While serving as vice president, Nixon had overseen some covert operations and served as the “action officer” for the planning of the Bay of Pigs, of which these men were hard-boiled veterans.
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They had been out to overthrow Fidel Castro, and if possible, to kill him.

Nixon had another problem. These pros were connected to the CIA, and as we shall see, Nixon was not getting along well with the agency.

One of the main reasons we fundamentally misunderstand Watergate is that the guardians of the historical record focused only on selected parts of Nixon’s taped conversations, out of context. Consider a widely cited portion of a June 23 meeting tape, which would become known forever as the “smoking gun” conversation:

HALDEMAN: The way to handle this now is for us to have [CIA deputy director Vernon] Walters call [FBI interim director] Pat Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this . . . this is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.”

NIXON: Um hum.

Short excerpts like this seem especially damning. This one sounds right off the bat like a cover-up—Nixon using the CIA to suppress an FBI investigation into the break-in.

But these utterances take on a different meaning when considered with other, less publicized parts of the same conversation. A prime example: Haldeman went on to tell Nixon that Pat Gray, the acting FBI director, had called CIA director Richard Helms and said, “I think we’ve run right into the middle of a CIA covert operation.”

Although the first excerpt above sounds like a discussion of a cover-up, when we consider the information about the CIA involvement, it begins to seem as if Nixon is not colluding. He may well have been refusing to take the rap for something he had not authorized—and certainly not for something that smelled so blatantly like a trap. Nixon would have understood that if the FBI were to conduct a full investigation and conclude that the break-in was indeed an illegal operation of the CIA, it would all be blamed squarely on the man who supposedly had ultimate authority over both agencies—him. And doubly so, since between the burglars and their supervisors were tied not just to the CIA but also directly back to Nixon’s reelection committee and the White House itself.

Yet, however concerned Nixon certainly must have been at this moment, he played it cool. He concurred with the advice that his chief of staff was passing along from the counsel John Dean, which was to press the CIA to clean up its own mess.

If the CIA was involved, then the agency would have to ask the FBI to back off. The CIA itself would have to invoke its perennial escape clause— say that national security was at stake.

This must have sounded to Nixon like the best way to deal with a vexing and shadowy situation. He had no way of knowing that, two years later, his conversation with Haldeman would be publicly revealed and construed as that of a man in control of a plot, rather than the target of one.

Sniffing Around the Bay of Pigs

How could Nixon have so quickly gotten a fix on the Watergate crew? He might have recognized that the involvement of this particular group of Cubans, together with E. Howard Hunt—and the evidence tying them back to the White House—was in part a message to him. One of the group leaders, G. Gordon Liddy, would even refer to the team as a bunch of “professional killers.” Indeed, several of this Bay of Pigs circle had gone to Vietnam to participate in the assassination-oriented Phoenix Program; as noted in chapter 7, Poppy Bush and his colleague, CIA operative Thomas Devine, had been in Vietnam at the peak of Phoenix, and Bush had ties to at least some from this émigré group.

So Nixon recognized this tough gang, but this time, they weren’t focused on Fidel Castro; they were focused on Dick Nixon.

Hunt was a familiar figure from the CIA old guard. A near contemporary of Poppy Bush’s at Yale, Hunt had, as noted in earlier chapters, gone on to star in numerous agency foreign coup operations, including in Guatemala. He had worked closely with Cuban émigrés and had been in sensitive positions at the time John F. Kennedy was murdered and Lee Harvey Oswald named the lone assassin. Moreover, Hunt had been a staunch loyalist of Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had ousted over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion; he allegedly even collaborated on Dulles’s 1963 book,
The Craft of Intelligence.
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Hunt was one connected fellow, and his presence in an operation of this sort, particularly with veterans of the Cuba invasion, was not something to pass over lightly.

Nixon had further basis for viewing the events of Watergate with special trepidation. From the moment he entered office until the day, five and a half years later, when he was forced to resign, Nixon and the CIA had been at war. Over what? Over records dating back to the Kennedy administration and even earlier.

Nixon had many reasons to be interested in the events of the early 1960s. As noted, he had been the “action officer” for the planning of the Bay of Pigs and the attempt to overthrow Castro. But even more interestingly, Nixon had, by coincidence, been in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and had left the city just hours before the man he barely lost to in 1960 had been gunned down.

FIVE YEARS AFTER the Kennedy assassination, as Richard Nixon himself assumed the presidency, one of his first and keenest instincts was to try to learn more about these monumental events of the past decade.

Both of Nixon’s chief aides, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, noted in their memoirs that the president seemed obsessed with what he called the “Bay of Pigs thing.” Both were convinced that when Nixon used the phrase, it was shorthand for something bigger and more disturbing. Nixon did not tell even those closest to him what he meant.

When Nixon referred to the Bay of Pigs, he could certainly have been using it as a euphemism, because any way one thought about it, it spelled trouble. The Bay of Pigs invasion itself had been a kind of setup of another president. JFK had made clear that he would not allow U.S. military forces to be used against Castro. When the invasion by U.S.-backed Cuban exiles failed, the CIA and the U.S. military hoped this would force Kennedy to launch an all-out invasion. Instead, he balked, and blamed Dulles and his associates for the botched enterprise, and, to their astonishment, forced them out of the agency. As noted in chapter 4, these were the roots of the hatred felt by Hunt, Dulles, and the Bush family toward Kennedy.

Nixon was keenly aware that Kennedy’s battle with powerful internal elements had preceded JFK’s demise. After all, governments everywhere have historically faced the reality that the apparatus of state security might have the chief of state in its gun sights—and that it certainly possesses the ability to act.