Authors: Russ Baker
Tags: #Political Science, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Presidents, #20th Century, #Government, #Political, #Executive Branch, #General, #United States, #Historical, #Biography & Autobiography, #Business and Politics, #Biography, #history
Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (85 page)
50
. Douglas E. Kneel, “Watergate Panel Begins an Inquiry into Charges Against Its Chief Investigator,”
New York Times
, August 4, 1973. Joseph Shimon, a retired investigator and former captain of the Washington, D.C., police, claimed in an affidavit that another investigator, Oliver Angelone, had asked him to help in bugging the hotel room of unidentified Republicans. Shimon said the other investigator had said the request originated with Bellino. Angelone called Shimon’s claim “absolutely untrue.”
51
. Bellino had been close to the Kennedy family and admitted that he had sought to investigate the source of anti-Catholic literature in the 1960 campaign. But he would heatedly deny engaging in anything like illegal wiretapping or bugging.
52
. Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin,
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
(Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992), p. 259.
53
. See, generally, Ken Gormley and Elliot Richardson,
Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation
(Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press, 1999); see also Colodny and Gettlin,
Silent Coup
, chapter 21.
54
. Leon Jaworski with Mickey Herskowitz,
Confession and Avoidance: A Memoir
(Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1979), p. 183. (Herskowitz would be George W. Bush’s temporary ghostwriter twenty years later. See chapter 20.)
55
. Jaworski,
Confession and Avoidance
, pp. 183, 195.
56
. See Seymour M. Hersh,
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House
(New York: Summit, 1984).
57
. Bernard A. Weisberger,
Cold War, Cold Peace: The United States and Rus sia Since 1945
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), p. 295.
58
. Joseph A. Califano Jr.,
Inside: A Public and Private Life
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 216–17.
59
. George Bush,
All the Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings
(New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 186.
60
. Ibid., p. 186.
61
. “Reagan Seeks Leon Jaworski’s Backing,”
Newsweek
, September 29, 1980.
62
. “Business Leaders Are Tied to CIA’s Covert Operations,”
Washington Post
, February 18, 1967.
63
. Memorandum from Charles Ruff, Assistant Special Prosecutor, to Leon Jaworski, Special Prosecutor,August 19, 1974. National Archives.
64
. Jaworski was not the only Texas Democrat who was cozy with Poppy in this period. Poppy would lunch weekly during his tenure as RNC chairman with his democratic National Committee counterpart, Robert Strauss of Dallas, a conservative oil-industry lawyer. In his book
All
the Best
, Poppy calls him “a great friend to this day.” As president, Poppy appointed Strauss ambassador to the USSR. The relationship underlines a longtime fact about Texas politics whose significance cannot be underlined too strongly. There were two types of Democrats in that state: the populists and the royalists, with the latter being Democrats more for historical and tribal reasons than ideological ones.
65
. Gray,
In Nixon’s Web
, p. 100.
66
. The five Democrats on the committee who voted against investigating seem to have had arange of motives, not the least of which was they were not inclined to support a controversial action close to election day. “House Panel Bars Pre-Nov. 7 Inquiry into Bugging Case,”
New
York Times
, October 4, 1972.
67
. Richard Harwood, “CIA Reported Ending Aid to Some Groups,”
Washington Post
, February 22, 1967.
68
. Philip Agee and Louis Wolf,
Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe
(New York: Lyle Stuart, 1978), p. 133.
69
. Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Success of the President’s Men,”
New York Times
, June 13, 1986.
70
. From 2000 to 2002, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter William Gaines and his journalism students at the University of Illinois attempted to uncover the identity of Deep Throat. At some point, according to the students’ Web site, John Dean “learned of the student project and helped with valuable first-person knowledge of the White House staff.” From an article about a Watergate documentary: “Dean says a younger generation has to be reminded of Watergate’s lessons—and that even those who remember the Watergate hearings need reminding exactly what happened. That’s why he was happy, he says, to be interviewed for ‘Watergate Plus 30.’ . . . In the documentary, Dean says, ‘Unfortunately, I think the lesson of Watergate is “Don’t get caught.” ’ ” Jonathan Curiel, “From Break-in to Murder: The Watergate Plot Thickens in ‘Plus 30,’ ”
San Francisco Chronicle
, July 30, 2003.
71
. Anne E. Kornblut, “Mystery Solved: The Sleuths,”
New York Times
, June 2, 2005.
72
. Ibid.
73
.
Daily Oklahoman
, June 17, 1992 (also distributed by the Associated Press).
74
. Gray,
In Nixon’s Web
, pp. 291–300. Woodward and Bernstein’s archival papers were purchased by the University of Texas for $5 million and are now housed at the university’s Austin campus.
75
. Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober,
Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 528.
76
. Ibid., 519.
77
. H. R. Haldeman,
The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), p. 472.
78
. For McCord testimony on this, see U.S. Congress, Senate Select Committee on presidential Campaign Activities,
Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972, Senate Resolution 60: Watergate
and Related Activities: Hearings
, 93rd Cong. 1st [2nd] sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 205.
79
. Herbert S. Parmet,
George Bush, The Life of the Lone Star Yankee
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001), p. 166.
80
. George Bush,
All the Best
, pp. 188–91.
81
. “The Sun Is Shining Again,”
Newsweek
, August 26, 1974: “Behind the scenes, NEWSWEEK learned, Republican National Chairman George Bush, the other heavy favorite, had slipped badly because of alleged irregularities in the financing of his 1970 Senate race in Texas . . . Bush’s youthful, middle-ground image was clearly appealing. But White House sources told NEWSWEEK there was potential embarrassment and reports that the Nixon White House funneled about $100,000 from a secret fund called the ‘townhouse operation’ into Bush’s losing Senate campaign against Lloyd Bentsen four years ago. There were indications that $40,000 of the money may not have been properly reported as required by election law.”
82
. Verbatim from a memorandum of conversation between Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush,declassified in 1992. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
83
. “He was an embarrassment,” recalled Sydney M. “Terry” Cone III, a member of the heavily Rockefeller-dominated Council on Foreign Relations. “The man knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was my opinion that he had no concept of the world; no understanding of foreign policy. He was obviously a political appointee that Nixon had to do something for . . . George was only a meeter and a greeter.” Kelley,
The Family
, p. 287.
84
. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, “Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes,”
Washington Post
, August 9, 1988.
85
. George Bush with Victor Gold,
Looking Forward
(New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 130.
12: IN FROM THE COLD
1
. Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus, “CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry,”
Washington Post
, June 22, 2007.
2
. As a member of the Warren Commission, Gerald Ford made numerous handwritten edits to the draft report. The original text on page 5 read, “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” Ford changed that sentence to read, “A bullet had entered the back of his neck at a point slightly to the right of the spine.” That change suggested a different trajectory from the initial description of the bullet wound in Kennedy’s back to an entry point higher up in his body. See the document reproduced at JFK Lancer,
www.jfklancer.com/docs.maps/ford1.gif
.
3
. Several weeks after the
New York Times
published Seymour Hersh’s expose of the “family jewels,” President Ford invited the
Times
’ editorial board to an “off the record” White House lunch to discuss CIA abuses. Ford broached the subject of the agency’s role in foreign assassinations and then attempted to retract his comment on the subject, which the Ford administration had not wanted the Rockefeller Commission to touch.
Time
magazine observed, the commission “final report pleads—not too convincingly—that there was not enough time to examine the subject fully.” See “Lunch with the President,”
Time
, June 23, 1975.
4
. Author interview with William G. Ronan, June 12, 2007.
5
. December 1954 to December 1955.
6
. The full declassified report available at the National Security Archive, George Washington University,Web site,
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm
.
7
. It was, in fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church that the Rockefeller Commission had been set up to preempt, if not to convince Congress that its own investigation was not needed.
8
. Together, the Church Committee’s reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but more than fifty thousand pages have since been declassified under the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, and most are available online at the National Security Archive at George Washington University,
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv
.
9
. Among the matters investigated were CIA attempts to assassinate foreign leaders in the Congo,the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Chile, as well as the agency’s having withheld from the Warren Commission information on the CIA’s efforts to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. The Church Committee also discovered a host of domestic programs aimed at American citizens: COINTELPRO, Operation Chaos, and other related domestic political operations. The committee found that the CIA, in tandem with the FBI, the NSA, and other military intelligence agencies, ran a clandestine and highly illegal surveillance operation called Project MINARET. Americans deemed “subversive” were placed on “watch lists” for electronic surveillance. The watch lists were populated by civil rights and antiwar leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Joan Baez.
10
. “Assassination Ban and E.O. 12333: A Brief Summary,” available at the Federation of American Scientists Web site
www.fas.org/irp/crs/RS21037.pdf
.
11
. “Of Moles and Molehunters: Spy Stories,” Center for the Study of Intelligence, October 1993.
12
. Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board, chapter 1.
