Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (39 page)

More recently, the book
In Nixon’s Web
, the posthumous memoir of former acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray III, completed by his journalist son, Ed Gray, used Woodward’s own archival papers to demonstrate irrefutably that Woodward used the term “Deep Throat” to refer to at least three of his secret sources. At a minimum, that means that Deep Throat was not, as Woodward has maintained, Mark Felt alone.
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To be sure, the stakes must have always been high. Not just to get Nixon out, but also, decades later, to preserve the image of Nixon as a monster. In an interview with Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober for their book,
Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency
, Dean says:

Someone once said to me, “What is Richard Nixon’s presidency without Watergate?” This same person—if someone had asked him the question—would have answered it by saying, “Nixon’s presidency without Watergate is Hitler’s Reich without the Holocaust. How do you separate them?”
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As for Bob Woodward, he told the Strobers:

I disagree very strongly that [Nixon] has been rehabilitated. It’s like the three-headed monkey in the circus; he’s a bit of a freak. People are interested in him in the same way they are interested in Madonna, or other celebrities, because he does have stamina and endurance, and he has fought a rear-guard action against history to try to blot out what happened and encourage people to forget. It’s sad, but it’s also endearing, that somebody so old would keep trying to “out, damned spot!” The record is so voluminous on Watergate; there is nothing like it . . . It’s the most investigated event of all time, perhaps even more so than the Kennedy assassination.”
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As for the universally reviled Haldeman, whose credibility rating has steadily climbed with corresponding revelations over the years, in 1992 he would insist that the conventional account of Watergate, that Nixon and his top aides had been trying to cover up their illegal activities, was way off base:

We never set out to plan a planned, conscious cover-up operation. We reacted to Watergate just as we had to other [news-making events]: the Pentagon papers, ITT and the Laos Cambodia operations. We were highly sensitive to any negative PR, and our natural reaction was to contain or minimize any potential political damage.
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Haldeman and Ehrlichman would both claim that Nixon never explained his obsession with the Kennedy assassination and the Bay of Pigs. And Nixon wasn’t talking about it at all. He refused all interviews on the topic and took whatever he knew to his grave.

Nixon, of course, was no innocent. He played rough with his critics, and he liked intrigue. But the evidence indicates that, despite his documented penchant for dirty deeds, he wasn’t behind Watergate and the Watergate-related dirty deeds that ultimately brought him down.

As the former GOP official Ed DeBolt told me: “I think that [Weicker] wanted to hear that Nixon was a bad guy . . . I always say to people, especially if they are liberals, do you like having the Clean Water Act? Do you like having the EPA? Do you like having the government clean up the air?

“He was not controllable,” DeBolt said of Nixon. “You wouldn’t want to depend on Nixon if you were doing all kinds of clandestine crazy stuff . . . He had his own mind, and he was insecure. You want someone who is good and stable and solid, and who is going to carry out your bidding and do your thing for you . . . He was just a very strong-willed person who had his back up . . . That is not the kind of person, I wouldn’t think, that the intelligence people would want to have to deal with.”

DeBolt, who left Washington some years ago, said it was only when he got away that he gained some perspective. “There’s nothing real, and there’s nothing pleasant about the way people live there . . . The administrator of the RNC? I heard that he was CIA, he was running the business part of the RNC.” (According to Senate testimony, that man was the person who initially hired former CIA man James McCord, who became a key player in the Watergate burglary.)
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“When you get away from the city . . . you realize, wow, the tentacles of the CIA really, really are everywhere.”

IN THE END, Nixon acted toward Poppy as he always had—with a kind of restraint. Through all Nixon’s tribulations, through all his rants and firings, he had never said a single negative word in public or on tape about Poppy Bush. He had managed to avoid putting Poppy into certain powerful positions—always apologetic about it—but he had always found a consolation prize.

And in 1974, after fighting on and on and on, when Nixon finally agreed to go, it would be after Poppy gave the word. Poppy himself has acknowledged (in his quiet and “unboastful” way) that the day before Nixon resigned, he wrote him and suggested that it was time to go—a view that Poppy said was shared “by most Republican leaders across the country.”
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When Bush tried to arrange a visit with Nixon the day after the gloomy cabinet meeting and personally convince him to resign, Nixon refused to see him. “The President,” Haig explained to an astonished and “somewhat offended” Poppy, “simply cannot bring himself to talk to people outside of a tiny, tiny circle and this has brought him to his knees.”
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In the midst of this upheaval, Poppy could barely contain his excitement, writing in his diary as if he was in the final stages of his own covert operation. “Suspense mounting again. Deep down inside I think maybe it should work this time. I have that inner feeling that it
will finally abort
.” [emphasis added]

He also noted that Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, was considering him for vice president. “
Another defeat in this line
is going to be rough but then again, it is awful egotistical to think I should be selected.” [emphasis added]

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Less than two weeks after Richard Nixon left Washington in disgrace, and Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office,
Newsweek
reported that the vice presidential prospects of George H. W. Bush—a “youthful, middleground . . . appealing” figure—had suddenly taken a nose dive.

The Bush item appeared within a larger article and few people noticed it. Unnamed White House sources cited questions over Bush’s apparent failure to report forty thousand of one hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions he had received from the secret Townhouse Operation.
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Whether the real story was his failure to report the funds—or a more general pressing need to move Poppy far off-screen for a while—within a week Bush was “offered” a job by President Ford at the other end of the world.

And not a bad job. Poppy was to be the United States’ envoy to the People’s Republic of China, a significant posting in the aftermath of Nixon’s diplomatic breakthrough with the Communist country.

Once again, Bush seemed an improbable choice. The awkwardness was apparent when, shortly before he departed for Beijing in October 1974, Poppy was granted an audience with Ford. The meeting lasted under ten minutes and unfolded as follows:

FORD: You will be leaving soon.

BUSH: The day after tomorrow.
Don’t ask me about China!
. . . I know you’re busy. I just wanted to say goodbye.

FORD:
We couldn’t have found anyone more qualified.

BUSH:
If there is anything I can do to help you politically as ’76 approaches
, just let me know. [emphasis added]

FORD: Thanks. I may try to visit you there by then.

BUSH: That would be great! Many thanks for the time.
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Bush’s jocular admonition not to ask him about China brings to mind a similar, earlier incident, in which a friend had asked what could possibly qualify Poppy to be U.N. ambassador. At that time, Bush had replied, “Ask me in ten days.” This time around, Ford was clearly in on the joke.
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But shipping Poppy seven thousand miles away made a different kind of sense. With this move, Ford had effectively put Bush outside both domestic politics and the reach of congressional investigators. So important did this piece of business seem to be that Ford took care of it even before he got around to his most famous act: pardoning Nixon.

The Nixon pardon could seem as strange in its own way as sending Bush to Beijing. Nixon had not even been charged with a crime, so he was in essence being given a “premature” pardon. Although this act insulated Nixon against later prosecution, it also branded him forever with the mark of Watergate and its felonious cover-up. As for Ford, while he cast himself as a healer whose only motive was to bring peace to a badly fractured country, the pardon infuriated anyone who wanted to see the full story brought out in open court; the backlash ended up damaging Ford’s political future. That he was willing to risk this outcome may say something about the pressures brought to bear to curtail further inquiry into the origins of Watergate. In effect, Ford was sealing away “Exhibit A” of the Watergate mess—before investigators could dig deeper and find out who really was behind it and why.

In explaining away Bush’s China appointment, the media reported that he was getting a consolation prize after losing out to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller as Ford’s vice presidential pick. According to that version, Poppy had his choice of London or Paris, and he surprised Ford by countering with a third option: Beijing.

An admission by Bush’s close friend Robert Mosbacher probably came closer to the truth—namely, that Bush “wanted to get as far away from the stench [of Watergate] as possible.”
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Of course, historians generally attributed that to Bush’s desire to keep his own seemingly clear political future unsullied rather than any sort of admission.

Certainly, Poppy urgently needed to get away from the scene of the crime. Throughout his life thus far, and on into the future, Poppy would evince a real talent for edging to the periphery of the crowd, watching like any other bystander while subtly guiding the main action—before slipping away entirely to deny that he had been there at all. In the case of Watergate, his getaway path was clear. A brief exile to China would keep him out of the line of fire, cleanse him of the stench, and burnish his credentials too.

More important, the London and Paris postings would have required Senate confirmation, which could have opened up the very questions he wanted to escape. But the United States did not have full diplomatic relations with Beijing, so that post required no confirmation process (as Bush himself noted in his memoirs).
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As for his lack of experience and knowledge, that hardly mattered, as things turned out. The job was largely pro form a, because, as Ford noted to Bush, Henry Kissinger was determined to handle the sensitive Sino-American relationship himself. Poppy Bush’s published recollections of his time in China are dominated by leisurely bike rides and barbecues.

The Beijing posting was a fortuitous breather for Poppy, but soon he was ready for the main act. He was finally ready to come in from the cold.

CHAPTER 12

In from the Cold

S
HORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1974, the
New York Times
published an article by Seymour Hersh that chronicled years of CIA covert operations worldwide, known among historians and CIA officials as the “family jewels.” These operations ranged from assassination attempts against foreign leaders to CIA-funded drug experiments on unwitting American citizens. Hersh’s reporting led to the revelations that the CIA, under director Richard Helms, used physical surveillance and wiretapping against several journalists, notably the investigative columnist Jack Anderson, as well as Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer turned agency critic.

The CIA’s new director, William Colby, had taken office just four months earlier, but he knew all about these embarrassments. On December 31, 1974, Colby briefed the Justice Department on the extent of the transgressions, which had begun in 1953, under then-director Allen Dulles. There was a twenty-year program of reading mail sent back and forth between the United States and both the Soviet Union and China
at American locations
—this despite an explicit prohibition on such domestic activities by the CIA. There were plots to assassinate foreign leaders such as Castro and LSD tests on humans. Several days after Colby brought his information to the Ford administration, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sent a memo to the president that asserted Hersh’s article was “just the tip of the iceberg.” “When the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA,” Kissinger added, “this could end up worse for the country than Watergate.”
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IN THIS MILIEU in which Americans learned about the extent of the CIA’s involvement in unsavory activities at home and abroad, it was only natural that the public would demand answers to the unresolved questions surrounding the assassination of John E. Kennedy. This subject was not unfamiliar to the new president, Gerald R. Ford. He had been a member of the Warren Commission and had slightly altered text in the commission’s report in a manner that supported the “lone gunman” scenario.
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Ford appointed a presidential commission to study the indelicate ways of America’s spy sector. Commonly known as the Rockefeller Commission, it issued a single report in 1975, which touched on certain CIA abuses such as the mail opening and surveillance of domestic dissident groups. It also conducted a narrow study of issues relating to the Kennedy assassination: the backward head snap evident in the Zapruder film and the possible presence of CIA (and later Watergate) operatives E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis in Dallas at the time of the assassination.

The Rockefeller Report is seen by many historians as a whitewash—an attempt to preclude a more thorough investigation.
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Even so, there has been little consideration of what it meant that Nelson Rockefeller was chairing such an inquiry to begin with. Rockefeller was himself a devotee of the black arts. As his own former longtime aide William G. Ronan told me in an interview, “Nelson was very active in covert operations. As a matter of fact, he was very supportive, even before we got into World War II.”
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First as coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under President Roosevelt, and then as assistant secretary of state during the war, Nelson had shared oversight of intelligence operations in the western hemisphere with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Early in the Eisenhower administration,
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Rockefeller had been Ike’s special assistant on psychological warfare and cold war strategy. He also chaired the National Security Council’s special group that oversaw all CIA covert activities. These included some of the agency’s supersecret family jewels that CIA director Colby later revealed to Senate investigators.
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Given this, and the intelligence background of several other Rockefeller Commission members, one can hardly be surprised at the final verdict. The commission concluded simply that there was “no credible evidence” of CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

Before the commission could issue its report, however, an eight-hundred-pound gorilla appeared on the scene. That was the Church Committee, set up in January 1975 by the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate. The Rockefeller Commission was in part an attempt to preempt a serious congressional probe of intelligence, but in that it utterly failed.
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In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee would publish fourteen reports, which covered the formation of U.S. intelligence agencies, their operations, and their alleged abuses, together with recommendations for reform.
⁸
Some of these—such as a law requiring warrants for domestic wiretapping—were actually instituted.
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The Church Committee documented a mind-boggling array of domestic “dirty tricks.” The CIA and FBI would send anonymous letters designed to induce employers to fire politically suspect workers, for example. Similar letters went to spouses in an effort to destroy marriages. The committee also documented criminal break-ins and disinformation campaigns aimed at provoking violent attacks against selected individuals, including Martin Luther King Jr.. The FBI also mailed King a tape recording taken from microphones hidden in his hotel rooms—accompanied by a note warning that the recording, with its evidence of marital indiscretions, would be released to the public unless King committed suicide.

Under pressure from the Church Committee, President Ford issued an executive order banning U.S.-sanctioned assassinations of foreign leaders. In a brief reference to the murder of President John F. Kennedy, the order hinted at a possible scenario that the official investigations had denied. It barred foreign assassinations that “involved the murder of a political leader for political purposes accomplished through a surprise attack,” and actually mentioned Kennedy’s murder as one that could fit this rubric.
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The House of Representatives ran its own investigation, through what came to be known as the Pike Committee. A thorough audit of the foreign-intelligence budget led the committee to conclude that expenditures on overseas spying were three or four times larger than Congress had been told. Meanwhile, in quick succession, former CIA officers began publishing tell-all books about a chilling array of covert schemes. Philip Agee’s
Inside
the Company: CIA Diary
is probably the best-known of these memoirs. Until then, only books written by outsiders (such as journalists) had been so critical of the agency’s activities.
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In March 1975, more than eleven years after Henry Luce had purchased the Zapruder film and removed it from circulation, the film was finally shown to a national audience in its entirety. These images spawned a new round of questions regarding the Warren Commission’s findings. That September, one of Church’s subcommittees was given a staff of nine to investigate the intelligence agencies with respect to the JFK assassination. The subcommittee interviewed over fifty witnesses and gained access to five thousand pages of intelligence agency material.
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The probe left many lingering questions, but it ran out of steam due to lack of witness cooperation.

Home at Last

On November 1, 1975, while U.S. envoy George H. W. Bush was with his wife, Barbara, riding bicycles through Beijing, he was approached by a breathless messenger with a telegram. It was from Henry Kissinger, and it informed Bush that the president was about to appoint him director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
¹³

The current director, William Colby, had been too candid and forthcoming. Without consulting Nixon or Ford, he had released to the Justice Department the 693-page “Family Jewels” document, and confirmed details after it was leaked to
New York Times
reporter Seymour Hersh.
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Colby was not the one to hold the fort during the coming onslaught; and his ouster was part of what came to be called the “Halloween Massacre,” in which the White House rid the administration of elements it deemed undesirable. The orchestrators were Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s young chief of staff, and his deputy, Dick Cheney.

After the putsch, Rumsfeld would become defense secretary and Cheney would take Rumsfeld’s post. The new national security adviser, taking Kissinger’s place, was Air Force Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft. Finally, the moderate Vice President Rockefeller was removed from the ticket for the upcoming 1976 reelection campaign.

And whose idea was this dramatic reshuffling? “I did it totally on my own,” the relatively moderate Ford assured the press. “It was my decision. I fitted the pieces together and they fitted excellently.”
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This was hardly convincing, since the net effect was to re-empower elements of the security-intelligence elite that had been shunted aside by Nixon and was seriously threatened by the post-Watergate cascade of disclosures.

Ushered into control in one fell swoop was a group that would periodically surface in top positions in Republican administrations over the next three-plus decades. Under President George H.W. Bush, Cheney became defense secretary, with Scowcroft again serving as national security adviser. Under George W. Bush, Cheney returned to power, this time as vice president, and with Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, engineered the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

The appointment that on the surface made the least sense was the decision to place Poppy Bush at the head of the CIA. Why install a purported intelligence virgin—and, moreover, a fellow widely regarded as a lightweight—in this highly sensitive post, and in this period of intense pressure on the agency? The newspapers at the time seemed bewildered, though unwilling to say so explicitly. In an unsigned profile headlined “A Breezy Head of the C.I.A.,” the
New York Times
struggled to find some achievements. “As a chief American representative in China, George Bush has succeeded, at least in a limited degree, in erasing the image that many persons in Peking had of America as an elitist country. Instead of formal dinners and receptions, the Bushes entertain by serving soft drinks and popcorn while showing old movies.”
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Another
Times
article noted that on a visit to China, Kissinger “did not set aside any time for consultations with Mr. Bush before plunging into dealings with Chinese leaders.”
¹⁷

Yet, just as his brief and undistinguished congressional service had supposedly qualified him for the United Nations, and his unexceptional United Nations service somehow qualified him for the China post, George H. W. Bush’s brief experience in China was now invoked as somehow qualifying him to run the CIA. The central assumption in all this was that Poppy did not have an intelligence background. To some, this was seen as a liability, to others an asset. But no one considered the possibility that his supposed lack of experience in spycraft was, in fact, part of that craft, and his long-running cover story.

Indeed, it was unlikely that with all the Sturm und Drang over intelligence, the kind of person that George H. W. Bush appeared to be in public could possibly be the choice of insiders and hard-liners. There had to be more to it. Looking back at old clippings from that period, one can see the tide of inquiry just barely lapping at the story.

Several articles mentioned that Bush had been on the receiving end of largess from the Townhouse fund (covered in chapters 10 and 11), but they failed to inquire into his deeper connections. And there was absolutely no discussion of how Poppy Bush had devoted a substantial chunk of his adult life to intelligence-connected activity. Even the barest hint of this would not emerge until many years later, with Joseph McBride’s little-noticed
Nation
article mentioning “George Bush of the CIA.”

The Townhouse problem was mitigated by Poppy’s old friend Leon Ja-worski during the Senate’s confirmation hearings. Speaking at a convention of former FBI special agents in Houston, Jaworski gave Bush a clean bill of health on the Townhouse matter: “This was investigated by me when I served as Watergate special prosecutor. I found no involvement of George Bush and gave him full clearance. I hope that in the interest of fairness, the matter will not be bandied about unless something new has appeared on the horizon.”
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Later, in 1980, when Poppy was campaigning for the presidency and he was asked about the townhouse fund, he always answered that Leon Jaworski had cleared him: “The answer came back, clean, clean, clean.”
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Not mentioned, perhaps because it was not widely known, was the close relationship between Bush and Jaworski, or Jaworski’s own CIA ties—as noted in chapter 11. This mutual admiration resurfaced at Jaworski’s funeral, where Bush, Richard Nixon’s supposedly loyal retainer, served as an honorary pallbearer for the man who played a key role in driving Nixon from office.

Despite having dodged all the possible bullets related to his questionable personal connections, Poppy nevertheless had a difficult time with the Senate confirmation process. Because of his partisan background and his aspirations to higher office, he was a somewhat controversial choice for a post that required at least the appearance of political neutrality. Senator Frank Church expressed his concern that a political figure would lead what was intended to be the “least political and most sensitive agency in Washington.”
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