Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (26 page)

Nixon himself would demonstrate a more effective response to criticism. His storied “Checkers speech,” answering charges that he had accepted political donations under the table, was a masterful appeal to middle-class sensibilities, with a maudlin self-pity that went up to the edge but not over.
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Telegrams of support came pouring in to Republican headquarters; and one of the first politicians to write was the silver-haired U.S. senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush:

No fair-minded person who heard Senator Nixon bare his heart and soul to the American people Tuesday night could fail to hold him in high respect. I have felt all along that the charges against Dick Nixon were a dirty smear attempt to hurt him and the Republican ticket . . . [These smears] will boomerang in his favor. Nixon is absolutely honest, fearless and courageous. I’m proud of him.
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Nixon saved his political skin that night, but money problems would continue to plague him. This increased his seething resentment of Jack Kennedy, who never had to grovel for money (and who was smooth and handsome to boot). As anyone who knew Nixon, including the Bushes, must have realized, his dependence on the financial resources of others constituted a vulnerability. That vulnerability would later lead to his undoing. The essence of Nixon’s relationship with the Bushes, as with other key backers, was that they had the wherewithal and he didn’t. And since money was behind the relationship that made Nixon, it was only fitting that when Watergate undid him, it was to a large extent money—as we shall see in chapters 10 and 11—that was behind his downfall.

Symbiotic Relationship

During the Eisenhower years, the Texas oil industry really took off. Poppy was now part of a “swarm of young Ivy Leaguers,” as
Fortune
magazine put it, who had “descended on an isolated west Texas oil town—Midland—and created a most unlikely outpost of the working rich.”
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Central to these ambitions was continued congressional support for the oil depletion allowance, which greatly reduced taxes on income derived from the production of oil. The allowance was first enacted in 1913 as part of the original income tax. At first it was a 5 percent deduction but by 1926 it had grown to 27.5 percent. This was a time when Washington was “wading shoulder-deep in oil,” the
New Republic
reported. “In the hotels, on the streets, at the dinner tables, the sole subject of discussion is oil. Congress has abandoned all other business.”
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Following the discovery of the giant East Texas oil fields in 1931, there was nothing Texas oilmen fought for more vigorously than their depletion allowance.
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From its inception to the late 1960s, the oil depletion allowance had cost taxpayers an estimated $140 billion in lost revenue.
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Nixon supported the allowance in 1946, while Voorhis opposed it. Six years later, General Dwight D. Eisenhower supported it, and he got the oilmen’s blessings—and substantial contributions as well.
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The Bushes backed Nixon passionately in his 1960 presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy. After Nixon lost—and then lost again when he ran for governor of California two years later—the oil lobby began to look for another horse. Poppy Bush saw his opening. He knew which way the political winds were blowing: toward an ultraconservatism based on new wealth, in particular the wealth of independent oilmen.

In 1964 the Bushes gave their support to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, even though this meant turning against their longtime allies, the Rockefellers. One can only speculate as to their motives, though Prescott Bush’s puritanical streak may have played a role. Goldwater’s opponent, Nelson Rockefeller, recently divorced, had decided in 1958 to wed Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, an even more recently divorced mother of four. Prescott delivered Rockefeller a public tongue lashing that
Time
called “the most wrathful any politician had suffered in recent memory.”
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This may have been just a convenient target. As political historian Rick Perlstein put it, conservatives genuinely preferred Goldwater, “and welcomed the remarriage as an excuse to cut loose from someone they were never excited about in the first place.”
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Goldwater’s success in snatching the 1964 Republican nomination from Rockefeller changed the ideological dynamics of the Grand Old Party. Even though Goldwater lost the presidential race, the party would never be the same. So-called movement conservatives managed to build an uneasy alliance between social issue ground troops and the corporate libertarians who finance the party. The ever-nimble Bushes managed to straddle both camps.

Political ambition ran in the Bush family. According to his mother, Prescott had wanted to be president and regretted not getting into politics sooner. The lesson was not lost on Poppy. If he wanted to be president, he would have to take the long view and get started early. An alliance with Richard Nixon could be useful. Nixon would vouch for his rightward bona fides, and thereby make moot the patrician residues of Yale that still clung to him.

Nixon Presidency, 1969

As for Nixon, he understood only too well the perils he faced. With his paranoid tendencies, he worried constantly about where the next challenge would come from. Robert Dallek’s biography
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
describes Nixon as “an introspective man whose inner demons both lifted him up and brought him down.” When he looked at George Bush—a handsome, patrician Yale man with no worries about money—he likely saw another version of Jack Kennedy, which for him was not a recommendation.

But people were nagging Nixon, people he couldn’t ignore—all the more so once he locked up the nomination in 1968. “As your finance chairman in Texas,” wrote Bill Liedtke, “I am committed, and will back you up whatever you decide [about a running mate]. However . . . George Bush, in spite of his short service in the House, could help you win. George has appeal to young people and can get them fired up. He’s got plenty of energy. Lastly, Dick, he’s a loyal kind of guy and would support you to the hilt.”
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Instead Nixon chose a running mate who was less capable and ambitious, and consequentially, less threatening. Having angered both Prescott and Poppy with his choice of Agnew, he knew that he would need to make amends to them and their allies.

Outside the small circle of longtime Nixon loyalists, the Bush group seems to have fared better than any other party faction in Nixon’s first administration. Bill Clements, Poppy’s friend and sometime oil drilling partner, became deputy secretary of defense, a position that involved securing oil for the U.S. military.
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Bush’s ex-business partner Bill Liedtke of Pennzoil (formerly Zapata Petroleum), the prodigious Nixon fund-raiser, successfully recommended former Baker Botts lawyers for positions on the Federal Power Commission.
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The FPC made crucial decisions affecting the natural gas industry, including one that directly benefited Pennzoil.
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For his chief political adviser, Nixon chose Harry S. Dent of South Carolina, the architect of his “Southern strategy,” which had centered on wooing conservative Democrats to the Republican cause. Poppy Bush’s election from Texas’s Seventh Congressional District had benefited greatly from this strategy. As his top aide, Dent chose Tom Lias, who had run the candidate selection process for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee during that election cycle. These men, especially Lias, are little known today. But they would play crucial roles in the process that would lead ultimately to Nixon’s resignation.

Meanwhile, to head the Republican National Committee (RNC), Nixon picked Rogers Morton, a congressman from Kentucky, who had been his convention floor manager. Morton, a Yale graduate, was an old friend of the Bushes who had served with Poppy on the Ways and Means Committee.
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Morton in turn named as his deputy chairman Jimmy Allison, Poppy’s longtime friend, administrative assistant, and former campaign manager. Because at the time the RNC chairmanship was a part-time position and Morton was busy on Capitol Hill, Allison was the defacto day-to-day manager of the Republican Party. This was a huge step up for Allison, and quite a triumph for the Bushes. In a phrase, they had the place wired.

Once in the Oval Office, some presidents have warmed to the public aspects of their role. FDR, Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton come to mind. Others retreat into a kind of self-imposed exile. They cut themselves off from outside advice and effectively hunker down against attack. That was the case with Nixon, whose reclusive tendencies were abetted by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.

As a longtime protégé of the Rockefeller family, Kissinger was suspect on both the left and right. Movement conservatives in particular feared that the Rockefellers had a grand global design that included accommodation, rather than confrontation, with the Russians and Chinese. Nixon would become embroiled in this growing dispute within the Republican Party, between the two factions known as the “traders” and the “warriors.”

The traders were the Eastern Establishment internationalists who supported free trade, arguing that it would prevent another world war. They generally had a sense of noblesse oblige that translated into the “corporate liberalism” of a Nelson Rockefeller, then New York governor, who believed that ameliorative social programs for the needy were the price of a healthy business climate. The warriors, on the other hand, generally represented new money from the Southwest and Southern California. Although they lacked experience in foreign policy, they resented having to take backseats to their Eastern rivals, especially when it came to the increasingly important task of securing oil and mineral resources in such places as Southeast Asia.

Personally, Nixon felt more comfortable with the warriors. But especially in his first term, he worked to accommodate both sides, while he and Kissinger fashioned foreign policy themselves, in a way that bypassed the Pentagon, the CIA, and even the State Department. He wasn’t about to let the “the striped-pants faggots on Foggy Bottom” tell him what to do, he said, and that included the Yalies at the CIA.
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As his secretary of state Nixon chose his old friend William Rogers, with whom he had worked on the Al-ger Hiss spy case. Rogers knew little about foreign policy, but Nixon considered that a good thing, because Rogers would keep quiet and do as he was told. “Few Secretaries of State can have been selected because of their President’s confidence in their ignorance of foreign policy,” Kissinger wryly observed.
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However, this determined effort to conduct foreign policy in secret and exclude the entities normally charged with that function caused growing alarm, particularly within the military and the defense industry.
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Eventually, the Nixon administration would discover that the military had its own powerful “back channel.” That apparatus, little recalled today, was the equivalent of a spy ring inside the Nixon White House. Its operatives passed top-secret documents from the National Security Council to the Joint Chiefs of Staff without Nixon’s knowledge. On discovering what seemed to him not only disloyalty but also borderline treason, Nixon expressed his fury to aides, who convinced him that the only option was to handle the matter quietly.
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The First Challenge

Despite his earlier attempts to keep the peace among the party’s factions, Nixon was soon embroiled in a series of power struggles. Perhaps the most important concerned the oil depletion allowance, as members of Congress in 1969 launched new attempts to rein in the costly giveaway. Representative George H. W. Bush was the industry’s Horatio at the bridge—or perhaps its George Wallace. “In an era when civil rights became the great moral issue that galvanized liberals,” observed Bush biographer Herbert S. Parmet, “the targeted oil depletion allowance was not far behind.”
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Poppy had barely completed his first term in the House. But he had an urgent task. President Nixon was under pressure to support a reduction in the depletion allowance, and some signals were emerging from the administration that he might do just that. Poppy, joined by Senator Tower, flew to Nixon’s vacation home in California to help save the day. The trip was apparently a success. Nixon affirmed his intention to block the reform efforts.
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Bush later wrote Nixon’s treasury secretary, David Kennedy, to thank him for reversing an earlier statement hinting that the White House might cave in to popular pressure for reform, adding: “I was also appreciative of your telling how I bled and died for the oil industry.”
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The moment passed, but protecting the allowance remained uppermost in the minds of independent oilmen—and Nixon was not proving sufficiently stalwart on the matter. The White House sent political operative Jack Gleason out to West Texas to calm flaring tempers. “Harry [Dent] sent me down to Midland, to the Midland Petroleum Club, to talk to them about the depletion allowance,” Gleason told me in a 2008 interview.
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Gleason had trouble understanding the complex issue, so he was not clear on precisely what the oilmen were mad about. “Almost got lynched and run out of town . . . It was a very ugly scene. Fortunately one guy . . . saved my ass, or otherwise I’d still be buried somewhere at the Petroleum Club.”