Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (81 page)

31
. “Memorandum: MESSRS. George Bush and Thomas J. Devine,” CIA document, January 30,1968. Available through the Mary Ferrell Foundation (NARA record number 104-10310-10271).

32
. Author interview with Pat Holloway, March 11, 2008. Halliburton had merged with Brown and Root in 1962.

33
. “Telephone Conversation Between the President and J. Edgar Hoover, 23 Nov 1963.” Transcript available through Mary Ferrell Foundation.

34
. Produced under Freedom of Information Act request to in de pendent researcher Bruce Campbell Adamson.

35
. J. Gilberto Quezada,
Border Boss: Manuel B. Bravo and Zapata County
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999).

36
. Mary Kahl,
Ballot Box 13: How Lyndon Johnson Won His 1948 Senate Race by 87 Contested Votes
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1983).

8: WINGS FOR W.

1
. Jacob Weisberg,
The Bush Tragedy
(New York: Random House, 2008), p. 13.

2
. Todd S. Purdum, “43+ 41 = 84,”
Vanity Fair
, September 2006.

3
. Alan Bernstein, “Bush: The Houston Years,”
Houston Chronicle,
April 11, 1999.

4
. Kitty Kelley,
The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
(New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 262.

5
. She married a fellow CIA employee and later divorced him; though in 1967 she went by Wolf-man,it is no longer her surname.

6
. Author interview with Cathryn Wolfman, November 21, 2006. Wolfman recalled that W. rarely displayed any interest in politics. “I thought he’d be a stockbroker,” she said. Had the two discussed politics, they might have broken up sooner: Wolfman says she was against the Vietnam War; in 2004 she donated to John Kerry’s bid to unseat W.

7
. Tina’s uncle Igor was prosecuted in this period on tax charges by the crusading attorney general Bobby Kennedy a few months before the JFK assassination—one of numerous Bush family friends to face investigation by the Kennedy White House—and would later write in a book how he planned to “tear the robe of respectability” off RFK. See Igor Cassini,
Pay the Price
(New York: Kensington, 1983).

8
. Bill Minutaglio,
First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), pp. 124–125. This book, published before the 2000 election, provides the most comprehensive study of W.’s rise to power in Texas.

9
. Richard Ben Cramer,
What It Takes: The Way to the White House
(New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 419.

10
. George Lardner Jr., “Texas Speaker Reportedly Helped Bush Get Into Guard,”
Washington Post
, September 21, 1999.

11
. Richard A. Serrano, “Bush Received Quick Air Guard Commission,”
Los Angeles Times
, July 4, 1999.

12
. Author interview with Bill White, July 18, 2004.

13
. R. G. Ratcliffe, “Debate Renewed over Military Choices,”
Houston Chronicle
, August 19, 1988.

14
. Serrano, “Bush Received Quick Air Guard Commission.”

15
. Elizabeth Mitchell,
W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty
(New York: Berkley, 2000), pp. 120–121.

16
. Honneus was the name from her first marriage, and the name she used at the time. She hassince readopted her maiden name.

17
. Author interview with Inge Honneus, April 11, 2006.

18
. Honneus says that besides Bush, she had no other partners for a considerable period beforeand after that episode.

19
. Ellington Air Force Base press release, March 24, 1970.

20
. Kenneth T. Walsh, “From Boys to Men,”
U.S. News & World Report
, May 3, 2004.

21
. Jo Thomas, “After Yale, Bush Ambled Amiably into His Future,”
New York Times
, July 22, 2000.

22
. R. W. Apple Jr., “Bush Implies He Has Used No Drugs in Last 25 Years,”
New York Times,
August 20, 1999.

23
. Kelley,
The Family
, p. 575.

24
. Ibid., p. 300.

25
. Lowman was her maiden name, and she now uses her married name.

26
. Compilation of unpublished reporting by four journalists from separate major news organizations.

27
. Author interview with Jo Thomas, Syracuse, New York, August 28, 2004.

28
. Author interview with David Klausmeyer, November 14, 2006.

29
. Minutaglio,
First Son
, p. 139.

30
. Associated Press, “Bush Flew in Training Planes Before Losing Pilot Privileges,” September 11,2004. Also see Susan Cooper Eastman, “Fear of Flying,”
Folio Weekly
(Jacksonville, FL), September 23, 2004.

31
. Jimmy Allison had been a newspaper publisher in Midland. He left that to run Poppy’s congressional campaigns and D.C. congressional office, as well as Edward Gurney’s 1968 Florida Senate campaign, with which W. had been involved. The wealthy Blount was seeking political office for the first time, and Allison’s job was to get him elected—and importantly to add Alabama’s electoral votes to Richard Nixon’s landslide.

32
. Manuel Roig-Franzia and Lois Romano, “Few Can Offer Confirmation of Bush’s Guard Service,”
Washington Post
, February 15, 2004.

33
. Minutaglio,
First Son
, p. 143; and Kelley,
The Family
, pp. 304–5.

34
. Author interview with Linda Allison, July 20, 2004.

35
. James Moore,
Bush’s War for Reelection: Iraq, the White House, and the People
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), p. 150.

36
. In a crisp letter dated May 31, 1972, the director of personnel resources at the Denver headquarters of the Air Reserve Personnel Center noted in his rejection that Bush had a “Military Service Obligation until 26 May 1974”—that is, to do serious and meaningful duty for another two years.

37
. Walter V. Robinson, “Questions Remain on Bush’s Service as Guard Pilot,”
Boston Globe
, October 31, 2000.

38
. Much of the Alabama material, reported by the author, appeared in “Why Bush Left Texas,” the
Nation
, September 14, 2004.

39
. Unpublished 2004 C. Murphy Archibald interview with Alabama freelancer Glynn Wilson.

40
. Author interview with Janet Linke, September 29, 2004.

41
. Author interview with Dr. Richard Mayo, July 23, 2004.

42
. Minutaglio,
First Son
, p. 148.

43
. Author interview with Linda Allison, July 20, 2004.

44
. Author interview with Dr. John Andrew Harris, the dentist who examined Bush, August 23,2004, and dental record released by the Bush White House.

45
. Tom Wicker,
George Herbert Walker Bush
(New York: Viking, 2004). For the PULL donation story, see Alan Bernstein, “Bush: The Houston Years,”
Houston Chronicle
, April 11, 1999.

46
. Kenneth T. Walsh, “The Lost Years of Al and Dubya,”
U.S. News & World Report
, November 1, 1999.

47
. Meg Laughlin, “Former Workers Dispute Bush’s Pull in Project P.U.L.L.,” Knight-Ridder,October 23, 2004.

48
. The effort to tap into state and federal grants would be a precursor to a veritable industry in which Republican-favored, minority-headed charities, often with a “faith-based” component, would garner out sized grants.

49
. Author interview with Jack Gazelle, August 2, 2004.

50
. Author interview with Jimmy Wynn, July 24, 2004.

51
. Moore,
Bush’s War for Reelection
, p. 171.

52
. Jim Drinkard and Dave Moniz, “Memos Debate Eclipses Content,”
USA Today
, September 13, 2004.

53
. E-mail to author from Jim Moore, July 22, 2008.

54
. Minutaglio,
First Son
, p. 148.

9: THE NIXONIAN BUSHES

1
. Robert Dallek, “The Kissinger Presidency,”
Vanity Fair
, May 2007.

2
. Membership on the House Ways and Means Committee has historically been a stepping-stoneto the highest office in American government. Bush joined seven past presidents on that ladder to power.

3
. The official Senate history refers to this shameless nepotism in a more flattering light: “Both Nixon and Ford had known Prescott Bush in Washington. Due to his father’s prominence and his own well-publicized race for the Senate, George Bush arrived in the House better known than most of the forty-six other freshmen Republicans. As a freshman he won a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee (which put the Bushes on everyone’s ‘list’ of social invitations).” Available on
www.senate.gov
.

4
. Kitty Kelley,
The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
(New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 245.

5
. Ibid., p. 246.

6
. Ibid., p. 47.

7
. Irwin F. Gellman,
The Contender: Richard Nixon, the Congress Years, 1946–1952
(New York: Free Press, 1999), pp. 25–26, 31–32.

8
. Although Voorhis was characterized as a leftist, his record was more that of a moderately liberalman with an independent streak. In fact, when the Council of Industrial Organizations rated members of Congress based on their votes on labor issues from 1943 to 1946, Voorhis scored only 84.6, well below the 100 percent awarded Henry M. Jackson of Washington, below the 86.9 awarded Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and only nominally higher than the conservative Democratic congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas.

9
. Letter from Richard Nixon to Norman Chandler, December 28, 1960, Richard Nixon PresidentialLibrary, Yorba Linda, California.

10
. Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon
(New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 46–47.

11
. Roger Morris,
Richard Milhous Nixon
(New York: Henry Holt, 1990), pp. 257, 261.