GEORGE BUSH: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY - PART 4 of 8
As obtained via FTP in ZIP format from www.kmf.org/williams/bushbook.html.
CHAPTER 11 PART 1 RUBBERS GOES TO CONGRESS During the heat of the Senate campaign, Bush's redistricting lawsuit had progressed in a way that must have provided him much solace amidst the bitterness of his defeat. First, Bush won his suit in the Houston federal district court, and there was a loud squawk from Governor John Connally, who called that august tribunal a "Republican court." Bush whined that Connally was being "vitriolic." Then, during Bush's primary campaign, a three-judge panel of the federal circuit court of appeals also ruled that the state of Texas must be redistricted. Bush called that result "a real victory for all the people of Texas." By March, Bush's redistricting suit had received favorable action by the U.S. Supreme Court. This meant that the way was clear to create a no-incumbent, designer district for George in a masterpiece of gerrymandering that would make him an elected official, the first Republican congressman in the recent history of the Houston area. The new Seventh District was drawn to create a liberal Republican seat, carefully taking into account which areas Bush had succeeded in carrying in the Senate race. What emerged was for the most part a lily-white, silk-stocking district of the affluent upper-middle class and upper crust. There were also small black and Hispanic enclaves. In the precinct boxes of the new district, Bush had rolled up an eight-to-five margin over Yarborough. / Note #1 But before gearing up a congressional campaign in the Seventh District in 1966, Bush first had to jettison some of the useless ideological ballast he had taken on for his 1964 Goldwater profile. During the 1964 campaign, Bush had spoken out more frankly and more bluntly on a series of political issues than ever before or since. Apart from the Goldwater coloration, one comes away with the impression that much of the time the speeches were not just inventions, but often reflected his own oligarchical instincts and deeply rooted obsessions. In late 1964 and early 1965, Bush was afflicted by a hangover induced by what for him had been an unprecedented orgy of self-revelation. The 1965-66 model George Bush would become a moderate, abandoning the shrillest notes of the 1964 conservative crusade. First came an Episcopalian "mea culpa." As Bush's admirer Fitzhugh Green reports, "one of his first steps was to shuck off a bothersome trace from his 1964 campaign. He had espoused some conservative ideas that didn't jibe with his own moderate attitude." Previous statements were becoming inoperative, one gathers, when Bush discussed the matter with his Anglican pastor, John Stevens. "You know, John," said Bush, "I took some of the far right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it." His radical stance on the civil rights bill was allegedly a big part of his "regret." Stevens later commented: "I suspect that his goal on civil rights was the same as mine: It's just that he wanted to go through the existing authorities to attain it. In that way nothing would get done. Still, he represents about the best of noblesse oblige." / Note #2 Purge of County GOP It was characteristically through an attempted purge in the Harris County GOP organization that Bush signaled that he was reversing his field. His gambit here was to call on party activists to take an "anti-extremist and anti-intolerance pledge," as the "Houston Chronicle" reported on May 26, 1965. / Note #3 Bush attacked unnamed apostles of "guilt by association" and "far-out fear psychology," and his pronouncements touched off a bitter and protracted row in the Houston GOP. Bush made clear that he was targeting the John Birch Society, whose activists he had been eager to lure into his own 1964 effort. Now Bush beat up on the Birchers as a way to correct his right-wing profile from the year before. Bush said, with his usual tortured syntax, that Birch members claim to "abhor smear and slander and guilt by association, but how many of them speak out against it publicly?" This was soon followed by a Bush-inspired move to oust Bob Gilbert, who had been Bush's successor as the GOP county chairman during the Goldwater period. Bush's retainers put out the line that the "extremists" had been gaining too much power under Gilbert, and that he therefore must go. By June 12, 1965, the Bush faction had enough clout to oust Gilbert. The eminence grise of the right-wing faction, State Senator Walter Mengdon, told the press that the ouster of Gilbert had been dictated by Bush. Bush whined in response that he was very disappointed with Mengdon. "I have stayed out of county politics. I believed all Republicans had backed my campaign," Bush told the "Houston Chronicle" on the day Gilbert fell. On July 1, the Houston papers reported the election of a new, "anti-extremist" Republican county leader. This was James M. Mayor, who defeated James Bowers by a margin of 95 votes against 80 in the county executive committee. Mayor was endorsed by Bush, as well as by Senator Tower. Bowers was an auctioneer, who called for a return to the Goldwater "magic." GOP state chair O'Donnell hoped that the new chairman would be able to put an end to "the great deal of dissension within the party in Harris County for several years." Despite this pious wish, acrimonious faction fighting tore the county organization to pieces over the next several years. But at the same time, Bush took care to police his left flank, distancing himself from the beginnings of the movement against the war in Vietnam, which had been visible by the middle of 1965. A remarkable document of this maneuver is the text of the debate between Bush and Ronnie Dugger, the writer and editor of the "Texas Observer." / Note #4 The debate was held July 1, 1965 before the Junior Bar of Texas convention in Fort Worth. Dugger had endorsed Bush -- in a way Dugger said was "not without whimsical intent" in the GOP Senate primary the year before. Dugger was no radical; at this point he was not really against the Vietnam War; and he actually endorsed the policy of LBJ, saying that the President had "no easy way out of Vietnam, but he is seeking and seeking hard for an honorable way out." Nevertheless, Dugger found that LBJ had made a series of mistakes in the implementation of his policy. Dugger also embraced the provisos advanced by Senator Fulbright to the effect that "seeking a complete military victory would cost more than the requirements of our interest and honor." So Dugger argued against any further escalation, and argued that anti-war demonstrations and civil disobedience could be beneficial. Bush's first real cause for alarm was seeing "the civil rights movement being made over into a massive vehicle with which to attack the President's foreign policy in Vietnam." He started by attacking Conrad Lynn, a "Negro lawyer" who had told students at "my old university -- Yale University," that "the United States white supremacists' army has been sent to suppress the non-white people of the world." According to Bush, "The "Yale Daily News" reported that the audience applauded when [Lynn] announced that several Negroes had gone to Asia to enlist in the North Viet Nam army to fight against the United States." Then Bush turned to his real target, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King, he said, who is "identified with the freedom of the Negro cause, says in Boston the other day that he doesn't want to sit at a segregated lunch counter where you have strontium 90 in the milk, overlooking the fact that it's the communists who are testing in the atmosphere today, the Red Chinese. It's not the United States." Then there was Bayard Rustin, "a leading individual in the Negro struggle for freedom, [who] calls for withdrawal from Viet Nam." This is all hypocritical in Bush's view, since "they talk about civil rights in this country, but they are willing to sacrifice the individual rights in the communist countries." Bush was equally riled up over anti-war demonstrations, since they were peopled by what he called "extremists": "I am sure you know what an extremist is. That's a guy who takes a good idea and carries it to simply preposterous ends. And that's what's happened. Of course, the re-emergence of the political beatnik is causing me personally a good deal of pleasure. Many conservatives winced during 1964 as we were labeled extremists of the right. And certainly we were embarrassed by the booing of Nelson Rockefeller at the convention, and some of the comments that referred to the smell of fascism in the air at the Republican convention, and things like this, and we winced." Warming to the subject, Bush continued: "Let me give you some examples of this kind of left-wing extremism. Averell Harriman -- surely not known for his reactionary views -- speaking at Cornell University, talking about Viet Nam before a crowd that calls 'Liar!' [They] booed him to the state he could hardly finish, and finally he got so frustrated he asked, 'How many in the audience are communists?' And a bunch of people there -- small I will admit -- held up their hands." So extremists, for Bush, were those who assailed Rockefeller and Harriman. Bush defended the House Committee on Un-American Activities against the demonstrations organized by James Foreman and SNCC, commiserated with a State Department official who had been branded a fascist at Iowa State, and went on to assail the Berkeley "filthy speech" movement. As an example of the "pure naivete" of civil rights leaders, he cited Coretta Scott King, who "managed to link global peace and civil rights, somehow managed to tie these two things together philosophically" -- which Bush professed not to fathom. "If we can be non-violent in Selma, why can't we be non-violent in Viet Nam," Ossie Davis had said, and Bush proposed he be awarded the "green Wiener" for his "absurd theory," for "what's got to be the fuzziest thinking of the year." Beyond this inevitable obsession with race, Bush was frankly a hawk, frankly for escalation, opening the door to nuclear weapons in Vietnam only a little more subtly than he had the year before: "And so I stand here as one who says I will back up the President and military leaders no matter what weapons they use in Southeast Asia." Congress in his Sights As the 1966 congressional election approached, Bush was optimistic about his chances of finally getting elected. This time, instead of swimming against the tide of the Goldwater cataclysm, Bush would be favored by the classic mid-term election reflex which almost always helps the congressional candidates of the party out of power. And LBJ in the White House was vulnerable on a number of points, from the escalation of the Vietnam War to "stagflation" (stagnation + inflation). The designer gerrymandering of the new Houston congressional district had functioned perfectly, and so had his demagogic shift toward the "vital center" of moderate conservatism. Because the district was newly drawn, there would be no well-known incumbent to contend with. And now, by one of the convenient coincidences that seem to be strewn through Bush's life, the only obstacle between him and election was a troglodyte Democratic conservative of an ugly and vindictive type, the sort of figure who would make even Bush look reasonable. The Democrat in question was Frank Briscoe, a former district attorney. According to the "Texas Observer," "Frank Briscoe was one of the most vicious prosecutors in Houston's history. He actually maintained a 'ten most wanted convictions list' by which he kept the public advised of how much luck he had getting convictions against his chosen defendants then being held in custody. Now, as a candidate for Congress, Briscoe is running red-eyed for the right-wing in Houston. He is anti-Democratic; anti-civil rights; anti-foreign aid; anti-war on poverty. The fact that he calls himself a Democrat is utterly irrelevant." By contrast, from the point of view of the "Texas Observer": "His opponent, George Bush, is a conservative man. He favors the war in Vietnam; he was for Goldwater, although probably reluctantly; he is nobody's firebrand. Yet Bush is simply civilized in race relations, and he is now openly rejecting the support of the John Birch Society. This is one case where electing a Republican to Congress would help preserve the two-party balance of the country and at the same time spare Texas the embarrassment" of having somebody like Briscoe go to Washington. / Note #5 Bush's ideological face-lifting was working. "I want conservatism to be sensitive and dynamic, not scared and reactionary," Bush told the "Wall Street Journal." Briscoe appears in retrospect as a candidate made to order for Bush's new moderate profile, and there are indications that is just what he was. Sources in Houston recall that in 1966 there was another Democratic candidate for the new congressional seat, a moderate and attractive Democrat named Wildenthal. These sources say that Bush's backers provided large-scale financial support for Briscoe in the Democratic primary campaign, with the result that Wildenthal lost out to Briscoe, setting up the race that Bush found to his advantage. A designer district was not enough for George; he also required a designer opponent if he was to prevail -- a fact which may be relevant to the final evaluation of what happened in 1988. One of the key points of differentiation between Bush and Briscoe was on race. The district had about 15 percent black population, but making some inroads here among registered Democrats would be of decisive importance for the GOP side. Bush made sure that he was seen sponsoring a black baseball team, and talked a lot about his work for the United Negro College Fund when he had been at Yale. He told the press that "black power" agitators were not a problem among the more responsible blacks in Houston. "I think the day is past," Bush noted, "when we can afford to have a lily-white district. I will not attempt to appeal to the white backlash. I am in step with the 1960s." Bush even took up a position in the Office of Economic Opportunity anti-poverty apparatus in the city. He supported Project Head Start. By contrast, Briscoe "accused" Bush of courting black support, and reminded Bush that other Texas congressmen had been voting against civil rights legislation when it came up in Congress. Briscoe had antagonized parts of the black community by his relentless pursuit of the death penalty in cases involving black capital defendants. According to the "New York Times," "Negro leaders have mounted a quiet campaign to get Negroes to vote for [Bush]." Briscoe's campaign ads stressed that he was a right-winger and a Texan, and accused Bush of being "the darling of the Lindsey [sic] -Javits crowd," endorsed by labor unions, liberal professors, liberal Republicans and liberal syndicated columnists. Briscoe was proud of his endorsements from Gov. John Connally and the Conservative Action Committee, a local right-wing group. One endorsement for Bush that caused Briscoe some difficulty was that of Bush mentor Richard M. Nixon. By 1966, Nixon was on the comeback trail, having withstood the virtual nervous breakdown he had undergone after losing his bid for the governorship of California in 1962. Nixon was now in the course of assembling the delegates that would give him the GOP presidential nomination in Miami in 1968. Nixon came to Houston and made campaign appearances for Bush, as he had in 1964. Bush had brought in a new group of handlers and image-mongers for this 1966 race. His campaign manager was Jim Allison from Midland. Harry Treleaven was brought in to design Bush's propaganda. Treleaven had been working at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency in New York City, but he took a leave of absence from J. Walter to come to work for Bush in Texas. At J. Walter Thompson, Treleaven had sold the products of Pan American, RCA, Ford, and Lark cigarettes. He was attracted to Bush because Bush had plenty of money and was willing to spend it liberally. After the campaign was over, Treleaven wrote a long memo about what he had done. He called it "Upset: The Story of a Modern Political Campaign." One of the basic points in Treleaven's selling of Bush was that issues would play no role. "Most national issues today are so complicated, so difficult to understand, and have opinions on[,] that they either intimidate or, more often, bore the average voter.... Few politicians recognize this fact." In his memo, Treleaven describes how he walked around Houston in the hot August of 1966 and asked people what they thought of George Bush. He found that many considered Bush to be "an extremely likeable person," but that "there was a haziness about exactly where he stood politically." For Treleaven, this was an ideal situation. "There'll be few opportunities for logical persuasion, which is all right -- because probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." Treleaven's approach was that "politicians are celebrities." Treleaven put 85 percent of Bush's hefty campaign budget into advertising, and 59 percent of that was for television. Newspaper ads got 3 percent. Treleaven knew that Bush was behind in the polls. "We can turn this into an advantage," he wrote, "by creating a 'fighting underdog' image. Bush must convince voters that he really wants to be elected and is working hard to earn their vote. People sympathize with a man who tries hard: they are also flattered that anyone would really exert himself to get their vote. Bush, therefore, must be shown as a man who's working his heart out to win." As Joe McGinnis summed up the television ads that resulted: "Over and over, on every television set in Houston, George Bush was seen with his coat slung over a shoulder; his sleeves rolled up; walking the streets of his district; grinning, gripping, sweating, letting the voter know he cared. About what, was never made clear." / Note #6 Coached by these professional spin doctors, Bush was acting as mainstream, fair and conciliatory as could be. In an exchange with Briscoe in the "Houston Chronicle" a few days before the election, he came out for "a man's right to join a union and his right to strike, but I additionally would favor fair legislation to see that no strike can cripple this nation and endanger the general welfare." But he was still for the Texas right to work law. Bush supported LBJ's "present Vietnam position.... I would like to see an All-Asian Conference convened to attempt to settle this horrible war. The Republican leadership, President Johnson, and Secretary Rusk and almost all but the real 'doves' endorse this." Bush was against "sweeping gun control." Briscoe wanted to cut "extravagant domestic spending," and thought that money might be found by forcing France and the U.S.S.R. to finally pay up their war debts from the two world wars! When it came to urban renewal, Bush spoke up for the Charles Percy National Home Ownership Foundation, which carried the name of a leading liberal Republican senator. Bush wanted to place the federal emphasis on such things as "rehabilitating old homes." "I favor the concept of local option on urban renewal. Let the people decide," he said, with a slight nod in the direction of the emerging New Left. In Bush's campaign ads he invited the voters to "take a couple of minutes and see if you don't agree with me on six important points," including Vietnam, inflation, civil disobedience, jobs, voting rights and "extremism" (Bush was against the far right and the far left). And there was George, billed as "successful businessman ... civic leader ... world traveler ... war hero," bareheaded in a white shirt and tie, with his jacket slung over his shoulder in the post-Kennedy fashion. In the context of a pro-GOP trend that brought 59 freshmen Republican congressmen into the House, the biggest influx in two decades, Bush's calculated approach worked. Bush got about 35 percent of the black vote, 44 percent of the usually yellow-dog Democrat rural vote, and 70 percent in the exclusive River Oaks suburb. Still, his margin was not large: Bush got 58 percent of the votes in the district. Bob Gray, the candidate of the Constitution Party, got less than 1 percent. Despite the role of black voters in his narrow victory, Bush could not refrain from whining. "If there was a disappointing aspect in the vote, it was my being swamped in the black precincts, despite our making an all-out effort to attract black voters. It was both puzzling and frustrating," Bush observed in his 1987 campaign autobiography. / Note #7 After all, Bush complained, he had put the GOP's funds in a black-owned bank when he was party chairman; he had opened a party office with full-time staff near Texas Southern, a black college; he had worked closely with Bill Trent of the United Negro College Fund, all with scant payoff as Bush saw it. Many black voters had not been prepared to reward Bush's noblesse oblige, and that threw him into a rage state, whether or not his thyroid was already working overtime in 1966. Bush in Washington When Bush got to Washington in January 1967, the Brown Brothers Harriman networks delivered: Bush became the first freshman member of the House of either party since 1904 to be given a seat on the Ways and Means Committee. And he did this, it must be recalled, as a member of the minority party, and in an era when the freshman congressman was supposed to be seen and not heard. The Ways and Means Committee in those years was still a real center of power, one of the most strategic points in the House along with the Rules Committee and a few others. By constitutional provision, all tax legislation had to originate in the House of Representatives, and given the traditions of committee organization, all tax bills had to originate in the Ways and Means Committee. In addition to the national importance of such a committee assignment, Ways and Means oversaw the legislation touching such vital Texas and district concerns as oil and gas depletion allowances and the like. Later writers have marveled at Bush's achievement in getting a seat on Ways and Means. For John R. Knaggs, this reflected "the great potential national Republicans held for George Bush." The "Houston Chronicle," which had supported Briscoe in the election, found that with this appointment "the GOP was able to point up to the state one benefit of a two-party system." / Note #8 In this case, unlike so many others, we are able to establish how the invisible hand of Skull and Bones actually worked to procure Bush this important political plum. This is due to the indiscretion of the man who was chairman of Ways and Means for many years, Democratic Congressman Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas. Mills was hounded out of office because of an alcoholism problem, and later found work as an attorney for a tax law firm. Asked about the Bush appointment to the committee he controlled back in 1967, Mills said: "I put him on. I got a phone call from his father telling me how much it mattered to him. I told him I was a Democrat and the Republicans had to decide; and he said the Republicans would do it if I just asked Gerry Ford." Mills said that he had asked Ford and John W. Byrnes of Wisconsin, who was the ranking Republican on Ways and Means, and Bush was in, thanks once again to Daddy Warbucks, Prescott Bush. / Note #9 Wilbur Mills may have let himself in for a lot of trouble in later years by not always treating George with due respect. Because of Bush's o bsession with birth control for the lower orders, Mills gave Bush the nickname "Rubbers," which stuck with him during his years in Congress. / Note #1 / Note #0 Poppy Bush was not amused. One day Mills might ponder in retrospect, as so many others have, on Bush's vindictiveness. Uprooting Western Values In January 1968, LBJ delivered his State of the Union message to Congress, even as the Viet Cong's Tet offensive was making a shambles of his Vietnam War policy. The Republican reply came in a series of short statements by former President Eisenhower, House Minority leader Gerry Ford, Rep. Melvin Laird, Senator Howard Baker and other members of Congress. Another tribute to the efforts of the Prescott Bush-Skull and Bones networks was the fact that amid this parade of Republican worthies there appeared, with tense jaw and fist clenched to pound on the table, Rep. George Bush. The Johnson administration had claimed that austerity measures were not necessary during the time that the war in Vietnam was being prosecuted. LBJ had promised the people "guns and butter," but now the economy was beginning to go into decline. Bush's overall public rhetorical stance during these years was to demand that the Democratic administration impose specific austerity measures and replace big-spending programs with appropriate deficit-cutting rigor. Here is what Bush told a nationwide network television audience on January 23, 1968: "The nation faces this year just as it did last a tremendous deficit in the federal budget, but in the President's message there was no sense of sacrifice on the part of the government, no assignment of priorities, no hint of the need to put first things first. And this reckless policy has imposed the cruel tax of rising prices on the people, pushed interest rates to their highest levels in 100 years, sharply reduced the rate of real economic growth and saddled every man and woman and child in American with the largest tax burden in our history. "And what does the President say? He says we must pay still more taxes and he proposes drastic restrictions on the rights of Americans to invest and travel abroad. If the President wants to control inflation, he's got to cut back on federal spending and the best way, the best way to stop the gold drain is to live within our means in this country." / Note #1 / Note #1 Those who wanted to read Bush's lips at a distance back in those days found that he was indeed committed to a kind of austerity. In May of 1968, with Johnson already a lame duck, the Ways and Means Committee approved what was dubbed on Capitol Hill the "10-8-4" deficit control package. This mandated a tax increase of $10 billion per year, coupled with a $4 billion cut in expenditures. Bush joined with four Ways and Means Republicans (the others were Conable, Schneebeli and Battin) to approve the measure. / Note #1 / Note #2 But the principal focus of Bush's activity during his tenure in the House of Representatives centered on a project that was much more sinister and far-reaching than the mere imposition of budget austerity, destructive as that demand was at the time. With a will informed by the ideas about population, race and economic development that we have seen current in Prescott Bush's circles at Brown Brothers Harriman, George Bush would now become a protagonist of a series of institutional changes which would contribute to that overall degradation of the cultural paradigm of Western civilization which was emergent at the end of the 1960s. In 1969, Bush told the House of Representatives that, unless the menace of human population growth were "recognized and made manageable, starvation, pestilence and war will solve it for us." Bush repeatedly compared population growth to a disease. / Note #1 / Note #3 In remarks to the House July 30, 1969, he likened the fight against the polio virus to the crusade to reduce the world's population. Urging the federal government to step up population control efforts, he said: "We have a clear precedent: When the Salk vaccine was discovered, large-scale programs were undertaken to distribute it. I see no reason why similar programs of education and family planning assistance should not be instituted in the United States on a massive scope." As Jessica Mathews, vice president of one of Washington's most influential zero-growth outfits, the World Resources Institute, later wrote of Bush in those years: "In the 1960s and '70s, Bush had not only embraced the cause of domestic and international family planning, he had aggressively sought to be its champion.... As a member of the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bush shepherded the first major breakthrough in domestic family planning legislation in 1967," and "later co-authored the legislation commonly known as Title X, which created the first federal family planning program...." "On the international front," Mathews wrote, Bush "recommended that the U.S. support the United Nations Population Fund.... He urged, in the strongest words, that the U.S. and European countries make modern contraceptives available 'on a massive scale,' to all those around the world who wanted them." Bush belonged to a small group of congressmen who successfully conspired to force a profound shift in the official U.S. attitude and policy toward population expansion. Embracing the "limits to growth" ideology with a vengeance, Bush and his coterie, which included such ultraliberal Democrats as then-Senator Walter Mondale (Minn.) and Rep. James Scheuer (N.Y.), labored to enact legislation which institutionalized population control as U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Bush began his Malthusian activism in the House in 1968, the year that Pope Paul VI issued his enyclical "Humanae Vitae," with its prophetic warning of the danger of coercion by governments for the purpose of population control. The Pope wrote: "Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would be placed in the hands of those public authorities who place no heed of moral exigencies.... Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their people, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious?" For poorer countries with a high population rate, the encyclical identified the only rational and humane policy: "No solution to these difficulties is acceptable which does violence to man's essential dignity.... The only possible solution ... is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society...." This was a direct challenge to the cultural paradigm transformation which Bush and other exponents of the oligarchical world outlook were promoting. Not for the first time nor for the last, Bush issued a direct attack on the Holy See. Just days after "Humanae Vitae" was issued, Bush declared: "I have decided to give my vigorous support for population control in both the United States and the world." He continued, "For those of us who who feel so strongly on this issue, the recent enyclical was most discouraging." Population Control Leader During his four years in Congress, Bush not only introduced key pieces of legislation to enforce population control both at home and abroad. He also continuously introduced into the congressional debate reams of propaganda about the threat of population growth and the inferiority of blacks, and he set up a special Republican task force which functioned as a forum for the most rabid Malthusian ideologues. "Bush was really out front on the population issue," a population-control activist recently said of this period of 1967-71. "He was saying things that even we were reluctant to talk about publicly." Bush's open public advocacy of government measures tending towards zero population growth was a radical departure from the policies built into the federal bureaucracy up until that time. The climate of opinion just a few years earlier, in December 1959, is illustrated by the comments of President Eisenhower, who had said, "birth control is not our business. I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity . .. or responsibility." As a congressman, Bush played an absolutely pivotal role in this shift. Shortly after arriving in Washington, he teamed up with fellow Republican Herman Schneebeli to offer a series of amendments to the Social Security Act to place priority emphasis on what was euphemistically called "family planning services." The avowed goal was to reduce the number of children born to women on welfare. Bush's and Schneebeli's amendments reflected the Malthusian-genocidalist views of Dr. Alan Guttmacher, then president of Planned Parenthood, and a protege of its founder, Margaret Sanger. In the years before the grisly outcome of the Nazi cult of race science and eugenics had inhibited public calls for defense of the "gene pool," Sanger had demanded the weeding out of the "unfit" and the "inferior races," and had campaigned vigorously for sterilization, infanticide and abortion, in the name of "race betterment." Although Planned Parenthood was forced, during the fascist era and immediately thereafter, to tone down Sanger's racist rhetoric from "race betterment" to "family planning" for the benefit of the poor and blacks, the organization's basic goal of curbing the population growth rate among "undesirables" never really changed. Bush publicly asserted that he agreed "1,000 percent" with Planned Parenthood. During hearings on the Social Security amendments, Bush and witness Alan Guttmacher had the following colloquy: "Bush": Is there any [opposition to Planned Parenthood] from any other organizations or groups, civil rights groups? "Guttmacher": We do have problems. We are in a sensitive area in regard particularly to the Negro. There are some elements in the Negro group that feel we are trying to keep down the numbers. We are very sensitive to this. We have a community relations department headed by a most capable Negro social worker to try to handle that part of the problem. This does, of course, cause us a good bit of concern. "Bush": I appreciate that. For the record, I would like to say I am 1,000 percent in accord with the goals of your organization. I think perhaps more than any other type of organization you can do more in the field of poverty and mental health and everything else than any other group that I can think of. I commend you. Like his father before him, Bush supported Planned Parenthood at every opportunity. Time after time, he rose on the floor of the House to praise Planned Parenthood's work. In 1967, Bush called for "having the government agencies work even more closely with going private agencies such as Planned Parenthood." A year later, he urged those interested in "advancing the cause of family planning," to "call your local Planned Parenthood Center" to offer "help and support." The Bush-Schneebeli amendments were aimed at reducing the number of children born to blacks and poor whites. The legislation required all welfare recipients, including mothers of young children, to seek work, and barred increases in federal aid to states where the proportion of dependent children on welfare increased. Reducing the welfare rolls was a prime Bush concern. He frequently motivated his population-control crusade with thinly veiled appeals to racism, as in his infamous Willie Horton ads during the 1988 presidential campaign. Talking about the rise in the welfare rolls in a July 1968 statement, Bush lamented that "our national welfare costs are rising phenomenally." Worse, he warned, there were far too many children being born to welfare mothers: "The fastest-growing part of the relief rolls everywhere is Aid For Dependent Children [sic] -- AFDC. At the end of the 1968 fiscal year, a little over $2 billion will be spent for AFDC, but by fiscal 1972 this will increase by over 75 percent." Bush emphasized that more children are born into non-white poor families than to white ones. Blacks must recognize, he said, "that they cannot hope to acquire a larger share of American prosperity without cutting down on births...." Forcing mothers on welfare to work was believed to be an effective means of reducing the number of black children born, and Bush sponsored a number of measures to do just that. In 1970, he helped lead the fight on the Hill for President Nixon's notorious welfare bill, the Family Assistance Program, known as FAP. Billed as a boon to the poor because it provided an income floor, the measure called on every able-bodied welfare recipient, except mothers with children under six, to take a job. This soon became known as Nixon's "workfare" slave-labor bill. Monetarist theoreticians of economic austerity were quick to see that forced labor by welfare recipients could be used to break the unions where they existed, while lowering wages and worsening working conditions for the entire labor force. Welfare recipients could even be hired as scabs to replace workers being paid according to normal pay scales. Those workers, after they had been fired, would themselves end up destitute and on welfare, and could then be forced to take workfare for even lower wages than those who had been on welfare at the outset of the process. This was known as "recycling." Critics of the Nixon workfare bill pointed out that it contained no minimum standards regarding the kinds of jobs or the level of wages which would be forced upon welfare recipients, and that it contradicted the original purpose of welfare, which was to allow mothers to stay home with their children. Further, it would set up a pool of virtual slave labor, which could be used to replace workers earning higher wages. But Bush thought these tough measures were exactly what the explosion of the welfare rolls demanded. During House debate on the measure April 15, 1970, Bush said he favored FAP because it would force the lazy to work: "The family assistance plan ... is oriented toward work," he said. "The present federal-state welfare system encourages idleness by making it more profitable to be on welfare than to work, and provides no method by which the State may limit the number of individuals added to the rolls." Bush had only "one major worry, and that is that the work incentive provisions will not be enforced.... [It] is essential that the program be administered as visualized by the Ways and Means Committee; namely, if an individual does not work, he will not receive funds." The Manchester School's Iron Law of Wages as expounded by George Bush, self-styled expert in the dismal science.... In 1967, Bush joined with Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.), to successfully sponsor legislation that removed prohibitions against mailing and importing contraceptive devices. More than opening the door to French-made condoms, Bush's goal here was a kind of ideological "succes de scandale." The zero-growth lobby deemed this a major breakthrough in making the paraphernalia for domestic population control accessible. In rapid succession, Bush introduced legislation to create a National Center for Population and Family Planning and Welfare, and to redesignate the Department of the Interior as the Department of Resources, Environment and Population. On the foreign policy front, he helped shift U.S. foreign assistance away from funding development projects to grapple with the problem of hunger in the world, to underwriting population control. "I propose that we totally revamp our foreign aid program to give primary emphasis to population control," he stated in the summer of 1968, adding: "In my opinion, we have made a mistake in our foreign aid by concentrating on building huge steel mills and concrete plants in underdeveloped nations...." Notes - Chpater 11, Part 1 1. See Fitzhugh Green, "George Bush: A Biography" (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980), p. 92, and George Bush and Victor Gold, "Looking Forward" (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 90. 2. Stevens's remarks were part of a Public Broadcasting System "Frontline" documentary program entitled "Campaign: The Choice," Nov. 24, 1988. Cited by Fitzhugh Green, "op. cit.," p. 91. 3. For the chronicles of the Harris County GOP, see local press articles available on microfiche at the Texas Historical Society in Houston. 4. "Geor ge Bush vs. Observer Editor," "Texas Observer," July 23, 1965. 5. "Texas Observer," Oct. 14, 1966. 6. Joe McGinniss, "The Selling of the President 1968" (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 42-45. 7. Bush and Gold, "op. cit.," p. 91. 8. See John R. Knaggs, "Two-Party Texas" (Austin: Eakin Press, 1985), p. 111. 9. "Congressional Quarterly," "President Bush: The Challenge Ahead" (Washington, 1989), p. 94. 10. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," in "Texas Monthly," June 1983. 11. "New York Times," Jan. 24, 1968. 12. "New York Times," May 7, 1968. 13. The following account of Bush's congressional record on population and related issues is derived from the ground-breaking research of Kathleen Klenetsky, to whom the authors acknowledge their indebtedness. The material that follows incorporates sections of Kathleen Klenetsky, "Bush Backed Nazi 'Race Science,'|" "New Federalist", Vol 5, No. 16, April 29, 1991. CHAPTER 11 PART 2 RUBBERS GOES TO CONGRESS One of Bush's more important initiatives on the domestic side was his sponsorhip of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, brainchild of Sen. Joseph Tydings of Maryland. Signed into law by President Nixon on December 24, 1970, the Tydings-Bush bill drastically increased the federal financial commitment to population control, authorizing an initial $382 million for family planning sevices, population research, population education and information through 1973. Much of this money was funnelled through private institutions, particularly local clinics run by Bush's beloved Planned Parenthood. The Tydings-Bush measure mandated the notorious Title X, which explicitly provided "family planning assistance" to the poor. Bush and his zero-growth cohorts talked constantly about the importance of disseminating birth control to the poor. They claimed that there were over 5 million poor women who wanted to limit their families, but could not afford to do so. On October 23, 1969, Bush praised the Office of Economic Opportunity for carrying out some of the "most successful" family planning projects, and said he was "pleased" that the Nixon administration "is giving them additional financial muscle by increasing their funds 50 percent -- from $15 million to $22 million." This increased effort he attributed to the Nixon administration's "goal to reach in the next five years the 5 million women in need of these services" -- all of them poor, many of them from racial or ethnic minorities. He added: "One needs only to look quickly at the report prepared by the Planned Parenthood-World Population Research Department to see how ineffective federal, state, and local governments have been in providing such necessary services. There is certainly nothing new about the fact that unwanted pregnancies of our poor and near-poor women keep the incidence of infant mortality and mental retardation in America at one of the highest levels of all the developed countries." The rates of infant mortality and mental retardation Bush was so concerned about, could have been significantly reduced, had the government provided sufficient financing to pre-natal care, nutrition, and other factors contributing to the health of infants and children. On the same day he signed the Tydings-Bush bill, Nixon vetoed -- with Bush's support -- legislation that would have set up a three-year, $225 million program to train family doctors. Bush seemed to be convinced that mental retardation, in particular, was a matter of heredity. The eugenicists of the 1920s had spun their pseudoscientific theories around "hereditary feeble-mindedness," and claimed that the "Kallikaks and the Jukes," by reproducing successive "feeble-minded" generations, had cost New York state tens of millions of dollars over decades. But what about learning disorders like dyslexia, which has been known to afflict oligarchical families Bush would consider wealthy, well-bred, and able? Nelson Rockefeller had dyslexia, a reading disorder, and both Bush's friend Nick Brady, and Bush's own son Neal suffer from it. But these oligarchs are not likely to fall victim to the involuntary sterilization as "mental defectives" which they wish to inflict on those they term the lower orders. In introducing the House version of the Tydings bill on behalf of himself and Bush, Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.) ranted that while middle-class women "have been limiting the number of offspring for years ... women of low-income families" did not. "If poverty and family size are so closely related we ask, 'Why don't poor women stop having babies?'|" The Bush-Tydings bill took a giant step toward forcing them to do so. Population Task Force Among Bush's most important contributions to the neo-Malthusian cause while in Congress was his role in the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. The task force, which Bush helped found and then chaired, churned out a steady stream of propaganda claiming that the world was already seriously overpopulated; that there was a fixed limit to natural resources and that this limit was rapidly being reached; and that the environment and natural species were being sacrificed to human progress. Bush's task force sought to accredit the idea that the human race was being "down bred," or reduced in genetic qualities by the population growth among blacks and other non-white and hence allegedly inferior races at a time when the Anglo-Saxons were hardly able to prevent their numbers from shrinking. Comprised of over 20 Republican Congressmen, Bush's Task Force was a kind of Malthusian vanguard organization which heard testimony from assorted "race scientists," sponsored legislation and otherwise propagandized the zero-growth outlook. In its 50-odd hearings during these years, the task force provided a public forum to nearly every well-known zero-growth fanatic, from Paul Ehrlich, founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), to race scientist William Shockley, to the key zero-growth advocates infesting the federal bureaucracy. Giving a prestigious congressional platform to a discredited racist charlatan like William Shockley in the year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, points up the arrogance of Bush's commitment to eugenics. Shockley, like his co-thinker Arthur Jensen, had caused a furor during the 1960s by advancing his thesis, already repeatedly disproven, that blacks were genetically inferior to whites in cognitive faculties and intelligence. In the same year in which Bush invited him to appear before the GOP task force, Shockley had written: "Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging dysgenics -- retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged.... We fear that 'fatuous beliefs' in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all segments of society." To halt what he saw as pervasive down-breeding of the quality of the U.S. gene pool, Shockley advocated a program of mass sterilization of the unfit and mentally defective, which he called his "Bonus Sterilization Plan." Money bonuses for allowing oneself to be sterilized would be paid to any person not paying income tax who had a genetic deficiency or chronic disease, such as diabetes or epilepsy, or who could be shown to be a drug addict. "If [the government paid] a bonus rate of $1,000 for each point below 100 IQ, $30,000 put in trust for some 70 IQ moron of 20-child potential, it might return $250,000 to taxpayers in reduced cost of mental retardation care," Shockley said. The special target of Shockley's prescriptions for mass sterilizations were African-Americans, whom he saw as reproducing too fast. "If those blacks with the least amount of Caucasian genes are in fact the most prolific and the least intelligent, then genetic enslavement will be the destiny of their next generation," he wrote. Looking at the recent past, Shockley said in 1967: "The lesson to be drawn from Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that eugenics is intolerable." As for Paul Ehrlich, his program for genocide included a call to the U .S. government to prepare "the addition of ... mass sterilization agents" to the U.S. food and water supply, and a "tough foreign policy" including termination of food aid to starving nations. As radical as Ehrlich might have sounded then, this latter point has become a staple of foreign policy under the Bush administration (witness the embargo against Iraq and Haiti). On July 24, 1969, the task force heard from Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., then national chairman of the Population Crisis Committee. Gen. Draper was a close friend of Bush's father, having served with the elder Bush as banker to Thyssen and the Nazi Steel Trust. According to Bush's resume of his family friend's testimony, Draper warned that the population explosion was like a "rising tide," and asserted that "our strivings for the individual good will become a scourge to the community unless we use our God-given brain power to bring back a balance between the birth rate and the death rate." Draper lashed out at the Catholic Church, charging that its opposition to contraception and sterilization was frustrating population-control efforts in Latin America. A week later, Bush invited Oscar Harkavy, chief of the Ford Foundation's population program, to testify. In summarizing Harkavy's remarks for the August 4 "Congressional Record," Bush commented: "The population explosion is commonly recognized as one of the most serious problems now facing the nation and the world. Mr. Harkavy suggested, therefore, that we more adequately fund population research. It seems inconsistent that cancer research funds total $250-275 million annually, more than eight times the amount spent on reproductive biology research." In reporting on testimony by Dr. William McElroy of the National Science Foundation, Bush stressed that "One of the crises the world will face as a result of present population growth rates is that, assuming the world population increases 2 percent annually, urban population will increase by 6 percent, and ghetto population will increase by 12 percent." In February 1969, Bush and other members proposed legislation to establish a Select Joint Committee on Population and Family Planning, that would, Bush said, "seek to focus national attention on the domestic and foreign need for family planning. We need to make population and family planning household words," Bush told his House colleagues. "We need to take the sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather, are using it as a political steppingstone.... A thorough investigation into birth control and a collection of data which would give the Congress the criteria to determine the effectiveness of its programs must come swiftly to stave off the number of future mouths which will feed on an ever-decreasing proportion of food," Bush continued. "We need an emphasis on this critical problem ... we need a massive program in Congress with hearings to emphasize the problem, and earmarked appropriations to do something about it. We need massive cooperation from the White House like we have never had before and we need a determination by the executive branch that these funds will be spent as earmarked." On August 6, 1969, Bush's GOP task force introduced a bill to create a Commission on Population and the American Future which, Bush said, would "allow the leadership of this country to properly establish criteria which can be the basis for a national policy on population." The move came in response to President Nixon's call of July 18 to create a blue-ribbon commission to draft a U.S. population policy. Bush was triumphant over this development, having repeatedly urged such a step at various points in the preceeding few years. On July 21, he made a statement on the floor of the House to "commend the President" for his action. "We now know," he intoned, "that the fantastic rate of population growth we have witnessed these past 20 years continues with no letup in sight. If this growth rate is not checked now -- in this next decade -- we face a danger that is as defenseless as nuclear war." Headed by John D. Rockefeller III, the commission represented a radical, government-sanctioned attack on human life. Its final report, issued in 1972, asserted that "the time has come to challenge the tradition that population growth is desirable: What was unintended may turn out to be unwanted, in the society as in the family." Not only did the commission demand an end to population growth and economic progress, it also attacked the foundations of Western civilization by insisting that man's reason had become a major impediment to right living. "Mass urban industrialism is based on science and technology, efficiency, acquisition, and domination through rationality," raved the commission's report. "The exercise of these same values now contain [sic] the potential for the destruction of our humanity. Man is losing that balance with nature which is an essential condition of human existence." The commission's principal conclusion was that "there are no substantial benefits to be gained from continued population growth," Chairman Rockefeller explained to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The commission made a host of recommendations to curb both population expansion and economic growth. These included: liberalizing laws restricting abortion and sterilization; having the government fund abortions; and providing birth control to teenagers. The commission had a profound impact on American attitudes toward the population issue, and helped accelerate the plunge into outright genocide. Commission Executive Director Charles Westoff wrote in 1975 that the group "represented an important effort by an advanced country to develop a national population policy -- the basic thrust of which was to slow growth in order to maximize the 'quality of life.'|" The collapse of the traditional family-centered form of society during the 1970s and 1980s was but one consequence of such recommendations. It also is widely acknowledged that the commission Bush fought so long and so hard to create broke down the last barriers to legalized abortion on demand. Indeed, just one year after the commission's final report was issued, the Supreme Court delivered the Roe v. Wade decision which did just that. Aware that many blacks and other minorities had noticed that the population control movement was a genocide program aimed at reducing their numbers, the commission went out of its way to cover its real intent by stipulating that all races should cut back on their birth rates. But the racist animus of their conclusions could not be hidden. Commission Executive Director Westoff, who owed his job and his funding to Bush, gave a hint of this in a book he had written in 1966, before joining the commission staff, which was entitled "From Now to Zero", and in which he bemoaned the fact that the black fertility rate was so much higher than the white. The population control or zero population growth movement, which grew rapidly in the late 1960s thanks to free media exposure and foundation grants for a stream of pseudoscientific propaganda about the alleged "population bomb" and the "limits to growth," was a continuation of the old prewar, protofascist eugenics movement, which had been forced to go into temporary eclipse when the world recoiled in horror at the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. By the mid-1960s, the same old crackpot eugenicists had resurrected themselves as the population-control and environmentalist movement. Planned Parenthood was a perfect example of the transmogrification. Now, instead of demanding the sterilization of the inferior races, the newly-packaged eugenicists talked about the population bomb, giving the poor "equal access" to birth contol, and "freedom of choice." But nothing had substantively changed -- including the use of coercion. While Bush and other advocates of government "family planning" programs insisted these were strictly voluntary, the reality was far different. By the mid-1970s, the number of involun tary sterilizations carried out by programs which Bush helped bring into being, had reached huge proportions. Within the black and minority communities, where most of the sterilizations were being done, protests arose which culminated in litigation at the federal level. In his 1974 ruling on this suit, Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell found that, "Over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs. Although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis," Judge Gesell wrote, "there is uncontroverted evidence ... that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization." Gesell concluded from the evidence that the "dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky." As we have seen, George Bush inherited his obsession with population control and racial "down-breeding" from his father, Prescott, who staunchly supported Planned Parenthood dating back at least to the 1940s. In fact, Prescott's affiliation with Margaret Sanger's organization cost him the Senate race in 1950, as we have seen, a defeat his son has always blamed on the Catholic Church, and which is at the root of George's lifelong vendetta against the Papacy. Prescott's 1950 defeat still rankled, as shown by Bush's extraordinary gesture in evoking it during testimony he gave on Capitol Hill before Senator Gruening's subcommittee of the Senate Government Operations Committee on November 2, 1967. Bush's vengeful tirade is worth quoting at length: "I get the feeling that it is a little less unfashionable to be in favor of birth control and planned parenthood today than it used to be. If you will excuse one personal reference here: My father, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1950, was defeated by 600 or 700 votes. On the steps of several Catholic Churches in Connecticut, the Sunday before the election, people stood there passing out pamphlets saying, 'Listen to what this commentator has to say tonight. Listen to what this commentator has to say.' That night on the radio, the commentator came on and said, 'Of interest to voters in Connecticut, Prescott Bush is head of the Planned Parenthood Birth Control League,' or something like this. Well, he lost by about 600 votes and there are some of us who feel that this had something to do with it. I do not think that anybody can get away with that type of thing any more." Bush and Draper As we saw in Chapter 3, Gen. William H. Draper, Jr. had been director and vice president of the German Credit and Investment Corp., serving short-term credit to the Nazi Party's financiers from offices in the U.S.A and Berlin. Draper became one of the most influential crusaders for radical population control measures. He campaigned endlessly for zero population growth, and praised the Chinese Communists for their "innovative" methods of achieving that goal. Draper's most influential outlet was the Population Crisis Committee (PCC)-Draper Fund, which he founded in the 1960s. In 1967-68, a PCC-Draper Fund offshoot, the Campaign to Check the Population Explosion, ran a nationwide advertising campaign hyping the population explosion fraud, and attacking those -- particularly at the Vatican -- who stood in the way of radical population control. In a 1971 article, Draper likened the developing nations to an "animal reserve," where, when the animals become too numerous, the park rangers "arbitrarily reduce one or another species as necessary to preserve the balanced environment for all other animals.... But who will be the park ranger for the human race?," he asked. "Who will cull out the surplus in this country or that country when the pressure of too many people and too few resources increases beyond endurance? Will the death-dealing Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- war in its modern nuclear dress, hunger haunting half the human race, and disease -- will the gaunt and forbidding Horsemen become Park Ranger for the two-legged animal called man?" Draper collaborated closely with George Bush during the latter's congressional career. As noted above, Bush invited Draper to testify to his Task Force on Earth Resources and Population; reportedly, Draper helped draft the Bush-Tydings bill. Bush felt an overwhelming affinity for the bestial and degraded image of man reflected in the raving statements of Draper. In September 1969, Bush gave a glowing tribute to Draper that was published in the "Congressional Record." "I wish to pay tribute to a great American," said Bush. "I am very much aware of the significant leadership that General Draper has executed throughout the world in assisting governments in their efforts to solve the awesome problems of rapid population growth. No other person in the past five years has shown more initiative in creating the awareness of the world's leaders in recognizing the economic consequences of our population explosion." In a 1973 publication, Bush praised the PCC itself for having played a "major role in assisting government policy makers and in mobilizing the United States' response to the world population challenge...." The PCC made no bones about its admiration for Bush; its newsletters from the late 1960s-early 1970s feature numerous articles highlighting Bush's role in the congressional population-control campaign. In a 1979 report assessing the history of congressional action on population control, the PCC/Draper Fund placed Bush squarely with the "most conspicuous activists" on population-control issues, and lauded him for "proposing all of the major or controversial recommendations" in this arena which came before the U.S. Congress in the late 1960s. Draper's son, William III, has enthusiastically carried out his father's genocidal legacy -- frequently with the help of Bush. In 1980, Draper, an enthusiastic backer of the Carter administration's notorious "Global 2000" report, served as national chairman of the Bush presidential campaign's finance committee; in early 1981, Bush convinced Reagan to appoint Draper to head the U.S. Export-Import Bank. At the time, a Draper aide, Sharon Camp, disclosed that Draper intended to reorient the bank's functions toward emphasizing population control projects. In 1987, again at Bush's behest, Draper was named by Reagan as administrator of the United Nations Development Program, which functions as an adjunct of the World Bank, and has historically pushed population reduction among Third World nations. In late January of 1991, Draper gave a speech to a conference in Washington, in which he stated that the core of Bush's "new world order" should be population reduction. The Nixon Touch Nixon, it will be recalled, had campaigned for Bush in 1964 and 1966, and would do so also in 1970. During these years, Bush's positions came to be almost perfectly aligned with the the line of the Imperial Presidency. And, thanks in large part to the workings of his father's Brown Brothers Harriman networks -- Prescott had been a fixture in the Eisenhower White House where Nixon worked, and in the Senate over which Nixon from time to time presided -- Bush became a Nixon ally and crony. Bush's Nixon connection, which pro-Bush propaganda tends to minimize, was in fact the key to Bush's career choices in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bush's intimate relations with Nixon are best illustrated in Bush's close brush with the 1968 GOP vice-presidential nomination at the Miami convention of that year. Richard Nixon came into Miami ahead of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and California Governor Ronald Reagan in the delegate count, but just before the convention, Reagan, encouraged by his growing support, announced that he was switching from being a favorite son of California to the status of an all-out candidate for the presidential nomination. Reagan attempted to convince many conservative southern delegations to switch from Nixon to himself, since he was the purer ideological conservative and better loved in the South than the new (or old) Nixon. Nixon's defense of his southern delegate base was spearheaded by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who kept the vast majority of the delegates in line, sometimes with the help of the unit rule. "Thurmond's point of reasoning with Southern delegates was that Nixon was the best conservative they could get and still win, and that he had obtained assurances from Nixon that no vice-presidential candidate intolerable to the South would be selected," wrote one observer of the Miami convention. / Note #1 / Note #4 With the southern conservatives guaranteed a veto power over the second spot on the ticket, Thurmond's efforts were successful; a leader of the Louisiana caucus was heard to remark: "It breaks my heart that we can't get behind a fine man like Governor Reagan, but Mr. Nixon is deserving of our choice, and he must receive it." These were the circumstances in which Nixon, having won the nomination on the first ballot, met with his advisers amidst the grotesque architecture of the fifteenth floor of the Miami Plaza-Hilton in the early morning of August 9, 1968. The way Nixon tells the story in his memoirs, he had already pretty much settled on Gov. Spiro Agnew of Maryland, reasoning that "with George Wallace in the race, I could not hope to sweep the South. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, to win the entire rimland of the South -- the border states -- as well as the major states of the Midwest and West." Therefore, says Nixon, he let his advisors mention names without telling them what he had already largely decided. "The names most mentioned by those attending were the familiar ones: Romney, Reagan, John Lindsay, Percy, Mark Hatfield, John Tower, George Bush, John Volpe, Rockefeller, with only an occasional mention of Agnew, sometimes along with Governors John Love of Colorado and Daniel Evans of Washington." / Note #1 / Note #5 Nixon also says that he offered the vice presidency to his close friends Robert Finch and Rogers Morton, and then told his people that he wanted Agnew. But this account disingenuously underestimates how close Bush came to the vice-presidency in 1968. According to a well-informed, but favorable, short biography of Bush published as he was about to take over the presidency, "at the 1968 GOP convention that nominated Nixon for President, Bush was said to be on the four-name short list for Vice President. He attributed that to the campaigning of his friends, but the seriousness of Nixon's consideration was widely attested. Certainly Nixon wanted to promote Bush in one way or another." / Note #1 / Note #6 Theodore H. White puts Bush on Nixon's conservative list along with Tower and Howard Baker, with a separate category of liberals and also "political eunuchs" like Agnew and Massachusetts Governor John Volpe. / Note #1 / Note #7 Jules Witcover thought the reason that Bush had been eliminated was that he "was too young, only a House member, and his selection would cause trouble with John Tower," who was also an aspirant. / Note #1 / Note #8 The accepted wisdom is that Nixon decided not to choose Bush because, after all, he was only a one-term congressman. Most likely, Nixon was concerned with comparisons that could be drawn with Barry Goldwater's 1964 choice of New York Congressman Bill Miller for his running mate. Nixon feared that if he, only four years later, were to choose a Congressman without a national profile, the hostile press would compare him to Goldwater and brand him as yet another Republican loser. Later in August, Bush traveled to Nixon's beachfront motel suite at Mission Bay, California to discuss campaign strategy. It was decided that Bush, Howard Baker, Rep. Clark MacGregor of Minnesota and Governor Volpe would all function as "surrogate candidates," campaigning and standing in for Nixon at engagements Nixon could not fill. And there is George, in a picture on the top of the front page of the "New York Times" of August 17, 1968, joining with the other three to slap a grinning and euphoric Nixon on the back and shake his hand before they went forth to the hustings. Bush had no problems of his own with the 1968 election, since he was running unopposed -- a neat trick for a Republican in Houston, even taking the designer gerrymandering into account. Running unopposed seems to be Bush's idea of an ideal election. According to the "Houston Chronicle", "Bush ha[d] become so politically formidable nobody cared to take him on," which should have become required reading for Gary Hart some years later. Bush had great hopes that he could help deliver the Texas electoral votes into the Nixon column. The GOP was counting on further open warfare between Yarborough and Connally, but these divisions proved to be insufficient to prevent Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, from carrying Texas as he went down to defeat. As one account of the 1968 vote puts it: Texas "is a large and exhausting state to campaign in, but here special emphasis was laid on 'surrogate candidates': notably Congressman George Bush, a fit-looking fellow of excellent birth who represented the space-town suburbs of Houston and was not opposed in his district -- an indication of the strength of the Republican technocracy in Texas." (Perhaps, if technocracy is a synonym for "plumbers.") Winning a second term was no problem; Bush was, however, mightily embarrassed by his inability to deliver Texas for Nixon. "|'I don't know what went wrong,' Bush muttered when interviewed in December. 'There was a hell of a lot of money spent,'|" much of it coming from the predecessor organizations to the CREEP. / Note #1 / Note #9 When in 1974 Bush briefly appeared to be the front-runner to be chosen for the vice presidency by the new President Gerald Ford, the "Washington Post" pointed out that although Bush was making a serious bid, he had almost no qualifications for the post. That criticism applied even more in 1968: For most people, Bush was a rather obscure Texas pol, and he had lost one statewide race previous to the election that got him into Congress. The fact that he made it into the final round at the Miami Hilton was another tribute to the network mobilizing power of Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman, and Skull and Bones. As the 1970 election approached, Nixon made Bush an attractive offer. If Bush were willing to give up his apparently safe congressional seat and his place on the Ways and Means Committee, Nixon would be happy to help finance the Senate race. If Bush won a Senate seat, he would be a front-runner to replace Spiro Agnew in the vice-presidential spot for 1972. If Bush were to lose the election, he would then be in line for an appointment to an important post in the executive branch, most likely a cabinet position. This deal was enough of an open secret to be discussed in the Texas press during the fall of 1970: At the time, the "Houston Post" quoted Bush in response to persistent Washington newspaper reports that Bush would replace Agnew on the 1972 ticket. Bush said that was "the most wildly speculative piece I've seen in a long time." "I hate to waste time talking about such wild speculation," Bush said in Austin. "I ought to be out there shaking hands with those people who stood in the rain to support me." / Note #2 / Note #0 In September, the "New York Times" reported that Nixon was actively recruiting Republican candidates for the Senate. "Implies He Will Participate in Their Campaigns and Offer Jobs to Losers"; "Financial Aid is Hinted," said the subtitles. / Note #2 / Note #1 It was more than hinted, and the article listed George Bush as first on the list. As it turned out, Bush's Senate race was the single most important focus of Nixon's efforts in the entire country, with both the President and Agnew actively engaged on the ground. Bush would receive money from a Nixon slush fund called the "Townhouse" fund, an operation in the CREEP orbit. Bush was also the recipient of the largesse of W. Clement Stone, a Chicago insurance tycoon who had donated heavily to Nixon's 1968 campaign. Bush's friend Tower was the chairman of the GOP Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Bush's former campaign aide, Jim Allison, was now the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee. Losing Again Bush himself was ensconced in the coils of the GOP fundraising bureaucracy. When in May, 1969, Nixon's crony Robert Finch, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, met with members of the Republican Boosters Club, 1969, Bush was with him, along with Tower, Rogers Morton, and Congressman Bob Wilson of California. The Boosters alone were estimated to be good for about $1 million in funding for GOP candidates in 1970. / Note #2 / Note #2 By December of 1969, it was clear to all that Bush would get almost all of the cash in the Texas GOP coffers, and that Eggers, the party's candidate for governor, would get short shrift indeed. On December 29, the "Houston Chronicle" front page opined: "GOP Money To Back Bush, Not Eggers." The Democratic Senate candidate would later accuse Nixon's crowd of "trying to buy" the Senate election for Bush: "Washington has been shovelling so much money into the George Bush campaign that now other Republican candidates around the country are demanding an accounting," said Bush's opponent. / Note #2 / Note #3 But that opponent was Lloyd Bentsen, not Ralph Yarborough. All calculations about the 1970 Senate race had been upset when, at a relatively late hour, Bentsen, urged on by John Connally, announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary. Yarborough, busy with his work as chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, started his campaigning late. Bentsen's pitch was to attack anti-war protesters and radicals, portraying Yarborough as being a ringleader of the extremists. Yarborough had lost some of his vim over the years since 1964, and had veered into support for more ecological legislation and even for some of the anti-human "population planning" measures that Bush and his circles had been proposing. But he fought back gamely against Bentsen. When Bentsen boasted of having done a lot for the Chicanos of the Rio Grande Valley, Yarborough countered: "What has Lloyd Bentsen ever done for the valley? The valley is not for sale. You can't buy people. I never heard of him doing anything for migrant labor. All I ever heard about was his father working these wetbacks. All I ever heard was them exploiting wetbacks," said Yarborough. When Bentsen boasted of his record of experience, Yarborough counterattacked: "The only experience that my opponents have had is in representing the financial interest of big business. They have both shown marked insensitivity to the needs of the average citizen of our state." But, on May 2, Bentsen defeated Yarborough, and an era came to an end in Texas politics. Bush's 10 to 1 win in his own primary over his old rival from 1964, Robert Morris, was scant consolation. Whereas it had been clear how Bush would have run against Yarborough, it was not at all clear how he could differentiate himself from Bentsen. Indeed, to many people the two seemed to be twins: Each was a plutocrat oilman from Houston, each one was aggressively Anglo-Saxon, each one had been in the House of Representatives, each one flaunted a record as a World War II airman. In fact, all Bentsen needed to do for the rest of the race was to appear plausible and polite, and let the overwhelming Democratic advantage in registered voters, especially in the yellow-dog Democrat rural areas, do his work for him. This Bentsen posture was punctuated from time to time by appeals to conservatives who thought that Bush was too liberal for their tastes. Bush hoped for a time that his slick television packaging could save him. His man Harry Treleaven was once more brought in. Bush paid more than half a million dollars, a tidy sum at that time, to Glenn Advertising for a series of Kennedyesque "natural look" campaign spots. Soon Bush was cavorting on the tube in all of his arid vapidity, jogging across the street, trotting down the steps, bounding around Washington and playing touch football, always filled with youth, vigor, action and thyroxin. The Plain Folks praised Bush as "just fantastic" in these spots. Suffering the voters to come unto him, Bush responded to all comers that he "understands," with the shot fading out before he could say what it was he understood or what he might propose to do. / Note #2 / Note #4 "Sure, it's tough to be up against the machine, the big boys," said the Skull and Bones candidate in these spots; Bush actually had more money to spend than even the well-heeled Bentsen. The unifying slogan for imparting the proper spin to Bush was "He can do more." "He can do more" had problems that were evident even to some of the 1970 Bushmen: "A few in the Bush camp questioned that general approach because once advertising programs are set into motion they are extremely difficult to change and there was the concern that if Nixon should be unpopular at campaign's end, the theme line would become, 'He can do more for Nixon,' with obvious downsides." / Note #2 / Note #5 Although Bentsen's spots were said to give him "all the animation of a cadaver," he was more substantive than Bush, and he was moving ahead. Were there issues that could help George? His ads put his opposition to school busing to achieve racial balance at the top of the list, but this wedge-mongerging got him nowhere. Because of his servility to Nixon, Bush had to support the buzz-word of a "guaranteed annual income," which was the label under which Nixon was marketing the workfare slave-labor program already described; but to many in Texas that sounded like a new give-away, and Bentsen was quick to take advantage. Bush bragged that he had been one of the original sponsors of the bill that had just semi-privatized the U.S. Post Office Department as the Postal Service -- not exactly a success story in retrospect. Bush came on as a "fiscal conservative," but this also was of little help against Bentsen. In an interview on women's issues, Bush first joked that there really was no consensus among women -- "the concept of a women's movement is unreal -- you can't get two women to agree on anything." On abortion he commented: "I realize this is a politically sensitive area. But I believe in a woman's right to choose. It should be an individual matter. I think ultimately it will be a constitutional question. I don't favor a federal abortion law as such." After 1980, for those who choose to believe him, this changed to strong opposition to abortion. ... Could Nixon and Agnew help Bush? Agnew's message fell flat in Texas, since he knew it was too dangerous to try to get to the right of Bentsen and attack him from there. Instead, Agnew went through the follwing contortion: A vote for Bentsen, Agnew told audiences in Lubbock and Amarillo, "is a vote to keep William Fulbright chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee," and that was not what "Texans want at all." Agnew tried to put Bentsen in the same boat with "radical liberals" like Yarborough, Fulbright, McGovern and Kennedy. Bentsen invited Agnew to move on to Arkansas and fight it out with Fulbright, and that was that. Could Nixon himself help Bush? Nixon did campaign in the state. Bentsen then told a group of "Anglo-American" businessmen: Texans want "a man who can stand alone without being propped up by the White House." In the end, Bentsen defeated Bush by a vote of 1,197,726 to Bush's 1,035,794, about 53 percent to 47 percent. The official Bushman explanation was that there were two proposed amendments to the Texas constitution on the ballot, one to allow saloons, and one to allow all undeveloped land to be taxed at the same rate as farmland. According to Bushman apologetics, these two propositions attracted so much interest among "yellow dog" rural conservatives that 300,000 extra voters came out, and this gave Bentsen his critical margin of victory. There was also speculation that Nixon and Agnew had attracted so much attention that more voters had come out, but many of these were Bentsen supporters. On the night of the election, Bush said that he "felt like General Custer. They asked him why he had lost and he said 'There were too many Indians. All I can say at this point is that there were too many Democrats,'|" said the fresh two-time loser. Bentsen suggested that it was time for Bush to be appointed to a high position in the government. / Note #2 / Note #6 Bush's other consolation was a telegram dated November 5, 1970: "From personal experience I know the disappointment that you and your family must feel at this time. I am sure, however, that you will not allow this defeat to discourage you in your efforts to continue to provide leadership for our party and the nation. Richard Nixon. This was Nixon's euphemistic way of reassuring Bush that they still had a deal. / Note #2 / Note #7 Footnotes - Chapter 11, Part 2 14. Norman Mailer, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (New York: D.I. Fine, 1968), pp. 72-73. 15. Richard Nixon, "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon" (New York: Warner Books, 1978), p. 312. 16. "Congressional Quarterly," "President Bush," (Washington: 1989) p. 94. 17. Theodore H. White, "The Making of the President 1968" (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1969),p. 251. 18. Jules Witcover, "The Resurrection of Richard Nixon" (New York: Putnam, 1970), p. 352. 19. Lewis Chester et al., "An American Melodrama: the Presidential Campaign of 1968" (London: Deutch, 1969), p. 622. 20. "Houston Post," Oct. 29, 1970. 21. "New York Times," Sept. 27, 1969. 22. "New York Times," May 13, 1969. 23. "Houston Chronicle," Oct. 6, 1970. 24. See "Tubing with Lloyd/George," "Texas Observer," Oct. 30, 1970. 25. Knaggs, "op. cit.," p. 148. 26. "Houston Post," Nov. 5, 1970. 27. Bush and Gold, "op. cit.," p. 102. CHAPTER 12 PART 1 UNITED NATIONS AMBASSADOR, KISSINGER CLONE At this point in his career, George Bush entered into a phase of close association with both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. As we will see, Bush was a member of the Nixon cabinet from the spring of 1971 until the day that Nixon resigned. We will see Bush on a number of important occasions literally acting as Nixon's speaking tube, especially in international crisis situations. During these years, Nixon was Bush's patron, providing him with appointments and urging him to look forward to bigger things in the future. On certain occasions, however, Bush was upstaged by others in his quest for Nixon's favor. Then there was Kissinger, far and away the most powerful figure in the Washington regime of those days, who became Bush's boss when the latter became the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in New York City. Later, on the campaign trail in 1980, Bush would offer to make Kissinger secretary of state in his administration. Bush was now listing a net worth of over $1.3 million / Note #1, but the fact is that he was now unemployed, but anxious to assume the next official post, to take the next step of what in the career of a Roman Senator was called the "cursus honorum," the patrician career, for this is what he felt the world owed him. Nixon had promised Bush an attractive and prestigious political plum in the executive branch, and it was now time for Nixon to deliver. Bush's problem was that in late 1970 Nixon was more interested in what another Texan could contribute to his administration. That other Texan was John Connally, who had played the role of Bush's nemesis in the elections just concluded, by virtue of the encouragement and decisive support which Connally had given to the Bentsen candidacy. Nixon was now fascinated by the prospect of including the right-wing Democrat Connally in his cabinet in order to provide himself with a patina of bipartisanship, while emphasizing the dissension among the Democrats, strengthening Nixon's chances of successfully executing his Southern Strategy a second time during the 1972 elections. The word among Nixon's inner circle of this period was "The Boss is in love," and the object of his affections was Big Jawn. Nixon claimed that he was not happy with the stature of his current cabinet, telling his domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman in the fall of 1970 that "Every cabinet should have at least one potential President in it. Mine doesn't." Nixon had tried to recruit leading Democrats before, asking Senator Henry Jackson to be secretary of defense and offering the post of United Nations ambassador to Hubert Humphrey. Within hours after the polls had closed in the Texas Senate race, Bush received a call from Charles Bartlett, a Washington columnist who was part of the Prescott Bush network. Bartlett tipped Bush to the fact that Treasury Secretary David Kennedy was leaving, and urged him to make a grab for the job. Bush called Nixon and put in his request. After that, he waited by the telephone. But it soon became clear that Nixon was about to recruit John Connally, and with him, perhaps, the important Texas electoral votes in 1972. Secretary of the Treasury! One of the three or four top posts in the cabinet! And that before Bush had been given anything for all of his useless slogging through the 1970 campaign! But the job was about to go to Connally. Over two decades, one can almost hear Bush's whining complaint. This move was not totally unprepared. During the fall of 1970, when Connally was campaigning for Bentsen against Bush, Connally had been invited to participate in the Ash Commission, a study group on government re-organization chaired by Roy Ash. "This White House access was dangerously undermining George Bush," complained Texas GOP chairman O'Donnell. A personal friend of Bush on the White House staff named Peter Flanigan, generated a memo to White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman with the notation: "Connally is an implacable enemy of the Republican party in Texas, and, therefore, attractive as he may be to the President, we should avoid using him again." Nixon found Connally an attractive political property, and had soon appointed him to the main White House panel for intelligence evaluations: "On November 30, when Connally's appointment to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was announced, the senior Senator from Texas, John Tower, and George Bush were instantly in touch with the White House to express their 'extreme' distress over the appointment. / Note #2 Tower was indignant because he had been promised by Ehrlichman some time before that Connally was not going to receive an important post. Bush's personal plight was even more poignant: "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? Bush was justified in asking." / Note #3 The appointment of Connally to replace David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury was concluded during the first week of December 1970. But it could not be announced without causing an upheaval among the Texas Republicans until something had been done for lame duck George. On December 7, Nixon retainer H.R. Haldeman was writing memos to himself in the White House. The first was: "Connally set." Then came: "Have to do something for Bush right away." Could Bush become the director of NASA? How about the Small Business Administration? Or the Republican National Committee? Or then again, he might like to be White House congressional liaison, or perhaps undersecretary of commerce. As one account puts it, "since no job immediately came to mind, Bush was assured that he would come to the White House as a top presidential adviser on something or other, until another fitting job opened up." Bush was called to the White House on December 9, 1970 to meet with Nixon and talk about a post as assistant to the President "with a wide range of unspecified general responsibilities," according to a White House memo initialed by H.R. Haldeman. Bush accepted such a post at one point in his haggling with the Nixon White House. But Bush also sought the U.N. job, arguing that there "was a dirth [sic] of Nixon advocacy in New York City and the general New York area that he could fill that need in the New York social circles he would be moving in as ambassador. / Note #4 Nix on's U.N. ambassador had been Charles Yost, a Democrat who was now leaving. But the White House had already offered that job to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had accepted. But then Moynihan decided that he did not want the U.N. ambassador post after all, and, with a sigh of relief, the White House offered it to Bush. Bush's appointment was announced on December 11, Connally's on December 14. / Note #5 In offering the post to Bush, Haldeman had been brutally frank, telling him that the job, although of cabinet rank, would have no power attached to it. Bush, stressed Haldeman, would be taking orders directly from Kissinger. Bush says he replied, "even if somebody who took the job didn't understand that, Henry Kissinger would give him a twenty-four hour crash course on the subject." / Note #6 Nixon told his cabinet and the Republican congressional leadership on December 14, 1970 what had been in the works for some time: that Connally was "coming not only as a Democrat but as Secretary of the Treasury for the next two full years." Even more humiliating for Bush wasthe fact that our hero had been on the receiving end of Connally's assistance. As Nixon told the cabinet: "Connally said he wouldn't take it until George Bush got whatever he was entitled to. I don't know why George wanted the U.N. appointment, but he wanted it so he got it." Only this precondition from Connally, by implication, had finally prompted Nixon to take care of poor George. Nixon turned to Senator Tower, who was in the meeting: "This is hard for you. I am for every Republican running. We need John Tower back in 1972." Tower replied: "I'm a pragmatic man. John Connally is philosophically attuned to you. He is articulate and persuasive. I for one will defend him against those in our own party who may not like him." / Note #7 There is evidence that Nixon considered Connally to be a possible successor in the presidency. Connally's approach to the international monetary crisis then unfolding was that "all foreigners are out to screw us and it's our job to screw them first," as he told C. Fred Bergsten of Kissinger's National Security Council staff. Nixon's bumbling management of the international monetary crisis was one of the reasons why he was Watergated, and Big Jawn was certainly seen by the financiers as a big part of the problem. Bush was humiliated in this episode, but that is nothing compared to what later happened to both Connally and Nixon. Connally would be indicted while Bush was in Beijing, and later he would face the further humilation of personal bankruptcy. In the view of James Reston, Jr., "George Bush was to maintain a smoldering, visceral dislike of Connally, one that lasted well into the 1980s." / Note #8 As others discovered during the Gulf war, Bush is vindictive. Confirmed by the Senate Bush appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his pro forma and perfunctory confirmation hearings on February 8, 1971. It was a free ride. Many of the Senators had known Prescott Bush, and several were still Prescott's friends. Acting like friends of the family, they gave Bush friendly advice with a tone that was congratulatory and warm, and avoided any tough questions. Stuart Symington warned Bush that he would have to deal with the "duality of authority" between his nominal boss, Secretary of State William Rogers, and his real boss, NSC chief Kissinger. There was only passing reference to Bush's service of the oil cartel during his time in the House, and Bush vehemently denied that he had ever tried to "placate" the "oil interests." Claiborne Pell said that Bush would enhance the luster of the U.N. post. On policy matters, Bush said that it would "make sense" for the U.N. Security Council to conduct a debate on the wars in Laos and Cambodia, which was something that the United States had been attempting to procure for some time. Bush thought that such a debate could be used as a forum to expose the aggressive activities of the North Vietnamese. No senator asked Bush about China, but Bush told journalists waiting in the hall that the question of China was now under intensive study. The "Washington Post" was impressed by Bush's "lithe and youthful good looks." Bush was easily confirmed. At Bush's swearing-in later in February, Nixon, probably anxious to calm Bush down after the strains of the Connally affair, had recalled that President William McKinley had lost an election in Ohio, but neverthless gone on to become President. "But I'm not suggesting what office you should seek and at what time," said Nixon. The day before, Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois had told the press that Bush was "totally unqualified" and that his appointment had been "an insult" to the U.N. Bush presented his credentials on March 1. Then Bush, "handsome and trim" at 47, moved into a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, and settled into his usual hyperkinetic, thyroid-driven lifestyle. The "Washington Post" marveled at his "whirlwind schedule" which seemed more suitable for a "political aspirant than one usually associated with a diplomat." He rose every morning at 7:00 A.M., and then mountedhis exercycle for a twelve-minute workout while taking in a television news program that also lasted exactly twelve minutes. He ate a small breakfast and left the Waldorf at 8:00, to be driven to the U.S. mission to the U.N. at Turtle Bay where he generally arrived at 8:10. Then he would get the overnight cable traffic from his secretary, Mrs. Aleene Smith, and then went into a conference with his executive assistant, Tom Lais. Later there would be meetings with his two deputies, Ambassadors Christopher Phillips and W. Tapley Bennett of the State Department. Pete Roussel was also still with him as publicity man. For Bush, a 16-hour work day was more the rule than the exception. His days were packed with one appointment after another, luncheon engagements, receptions, formal dinners -- at least one reception and one dinner per day. Sometimes there were three receptions per day -- quite an opportunity for networking with like-minded freemasons from all over the world. Bush also traveled to Washington for cabinet meetings, and still did speaking engagements around the country, especially for Republican candidates. "I try to get to bed by 11:30 if possible, " said Bush in 1971, "but often my calendar is so filled that I fall behind in my work and have to take it home with me." Bush bragged that he was still a "pretty tough" doubles player in tennis, good enough to team up with the pros. But he claimed to love baseball most. He joked about questions on his ping pong skills, since these were the months of ping pong diplomacy, when the invitation for a U.S. ping pong team to visit Beijing became a part of the preparation for Kissinger's China card. Mainly, Bush came on as an ultra-orthodox Nixon loyalist. Was he a liberal conservative? asked a reporter. "People in Texas used to ask me that in the campaigns," replied Bush. "Some even called me a right-wing reactionary. I like to think of myself as a pragmatist, but I have learned to defy being labeled.... What I can say is that I am a strong supporter of the President. If you can tell me what he is, I can tell you what I am." Barbara liked the Waldorf suite, and was an enthusiastic hostess. Soon after taking up his U.N. posting, Bush received a phone call from Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs Joseph Sisco, one of Kissinger's principal henchmen. Sisco had been angered by some comments Bush had made about the Middle East situation in a press conference after presenting his credentials. Despite the fact that Bush, as a cabinet officer, ranked several levels above Sisco, Sisco was in effect the voice of Kissinger. Sisco told Bush that it was Sisco who spoke for the United States government on the Middle East, and that he would do both the on-the-record talking and the leaking about that area. Bush knuckled under, for these were the realities of the Kissinger years. Kissinger's Clone Henry Kissinger was now Bush's boss even more than Nixon was, and later, as the Watergate scandal progres sed into 1973, the dominion of Kissinger would become even more absolute. During these years Bush, serving his apprenticeship in diplomacy and world strategy under Kissinger, became a virtual Kissinger clone in two senses. First, to a significant degree, Kissinger's networks and connections merged together with Bush's own, foreshadowing a 1989 administration in which the NSC director and the number two man in the State Department were both Kissinger's business partners from his consulting and influence-peddling firm, Kissinger Associates. Secondly, Bush assimilated Kissinger's characteristic British-style geopolitical mentality and approach to problems, and this is now the epistemology that dictates Bush's own dealing with the main questions of world politics. The most essential level of Kissinger was the British one. / Note #9 This meant that U.S. foreign policy was to be guided by British imperial geopolitics, in particular the notion of the balance of power: The United States must always ally with the second strongest land power in the world (Red China) against the strongest land power (the U.S.S.R.) in order to preserve the balance of power. This was expressed in the 1971-72 Nixon-Kissinger opening to Beijing, to which Bush would contribute from his U.N. post. The balance of power, since it rules out a positive engagement for the economic progress of the international community as a whole, has always been a recipe for new wars. Kissinger was in constant contact with British foreign policy operatives like Sir Eric Roll of S.G. Warburg in London, Lord Victor Rothschild, the Barings bank and others. On May 10, 1982, in a speech entitled "Reflections on a Partnership" given at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London, Henry Kissinger openly expounded his role and philosophy as a British agent-of-influence within the U.S. government during the Nixon and Ford years: "The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never before practiced between sovereign nations. In my period in office, the British played a seminal part in certain American bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union -- indeed, they helped draft the key document. In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department.... In my negotiations over Rhodesia I worked from a British draft with British spelling even when I did not fully grasp the distinction between a working paper and a Cabinet-approved document." Kissinger was also careful to point out that the United States must support colonial and neo-colonial strategies against the developing sector: "Americans from Franklin Roosevelt onward believed that the United States, with its 'revolutionary' heritage, was the natural ally of people struggling against colonialism; we could win the allegiance of these new nations by opposing and occasionally undermining our European allies in the areas of their colonial dominance. Churchill, of course, resisted these American pressures.... In this context, the experience of Suez is instructive.... Our humiliation of Britain and France over Suez was a shattering blow to these countries' role as world powers. It accelerated their shedding of international responsibilities, some of the consequences of which we saw in succeeding decades when reality forced us to step into their shoes -- in the Persian Gulf, to take one notable example. Suez thus added enormously to America's burdens." Kissinger was the high priest of imperialism and neocolonialism, animated by an instinctive hatred for Indira Gandhi, Aldo Moro, Ali Bhutto, and other nationalist world leaders. Kissinger's British geopolitics simply accentuated Bush's own fanatically Anglophile point of view, which he had acquired from father Prescott and imbibed from the atmosphere of the family firm, Brown Brothers Harriman, originally the U.S. branch of a British counting house. Kissinger was also a Zionist, dedicated to economic, diplomatic, and military support of Israeli aggression and expansionism to keep the Middle East in turmoil, so as to prevent Arab unity and Arab economic development while using the region to mount challenges to the Soviets. In this he was a follower of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Balfour. In the 1973 Middle East war which he had connived to unleash, Kissinger would mastermind the U.S. resupply of Israel and would declare a U.S.-worldwide thermonuclear alert. In later years, Kissinger would enrich himself through speculative real estate purchases on the West bank of the Jordan, buying up land and buildings that had been virtually confiscated from defenseless Palestinian Arabs. Kissinger was also Soviet in a sense that went far beyond his sponsorship of the 1970s detente, SALT I, and the ABM treaty with Moscow. Polish KGB agent Michael Goleniewski is widely reported to have told the British government in 1972 that he had seen KGB documents in Poland before his 1959 defection which established that Kissinger was a Soviet asset. According to Goleniewski, Kissinger had been recruited by the Soviets during his Army service in Germany after the end of World War II, when he had worked as a humble chauffeur. Kissinger had allegedly been recruited to an espionage cell called ODRA, where he received the code name of "BOR" or "COLONEL BOR." Some versions of this story also specify that this cell had been largely composed of homosexuals, and that homosexuality had been an important part of the way that Kissinger had been picked up by the KGB. These reports were reportedly partly supported by Golitsyn, another Soviet defector. The late James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence director for 20 years up to 1973, was said to have been the U.S. official who was handed Goleniewski's report by the British. Angleton later talked a lot about Kissinger being "objectively a Soviet agent." It has not been established that Angleton ever ordered an active investigation of Kissinger or ever assigned his case a codename. / Note #1 / Note #0 Kissinger's Chinese side was very much in evidence during 1971-73 and beyond; during these years he was obsessed with anything remotely connected with China and sought to monopolize decisions and contacts with the highest levels of the Chinese leadership. This attitude was dictated most of all by the British mentality and geopolitical considerations indicated above, but it is also unquestionable that Kissinger felt a strong personal affinity for Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and the other Chinese leaders, who had been responsible for the genocide of 100 million of their own people after 1949. Kissinger possessed other dimensions in addition to these, including close links to the Zionist underworld. These will also loom large in George Bush's career. For all of these Kissingerian enormities, Bush now became the principal spokesman. In the process, he was to become a Kissinger clone. The China Card The defining events in the first year of Bush's U.N. tenure reflected Kissinger's geoplitical obsession with his China card. Remember that in his 1964 campaign, Bush had stated that Red China must never be admitted to the U.N. and that if Beijing ever obtained the Chinese seat on the Security Council, the U.S.A. must depart forthwith from the world body. This statement came back to haunt him once or twice. His stock answer went like this: "That was 1964, a long time ago. There's been an awful lot changed since.... A person who is unwilling to admit that changes have taken place is out of things these days. President Nixon is not being naive in his China policy. He is recognizing the realities of today, not the realities of seven years ago." One of the realities of 1971 was that the bankrupt British had declared themselves to be financially unable to maintain their military presence in the Indian Ocean and the Far East, in the area "East of Suez." Part of the timing of the Kissinger China card was dictated by the British desire to acquire China as a c ounterweight to India in this vast area of the world, and also to insure a U.S. military presence in the Indian Ocean, as seen later in the U.S. development of an important base on the island of Diego Garcia. On a world tour during 1969, Nixon had told President Yahya Khan, the dictator of Pakistan, that his administration wanted to normalize relations with Red China and wanted the help of the Pakistani government in exchanging messages. Regular meetings between the United States and Beijing had gone on for many years in Warsaw, but what Nixon was talking about was a total reversal of U.S. China policy. Up until 1971, the U.S.A. had recognized the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan as the sole sovereign and legitimate authority over China. The United States, unlike Britain, France, and many other Western countries, had no diplomatic relations with the Beijing Communist regime. The Chinese seat among the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council was held by the government in Taipei. Every year in the early autumn there was an attempt by the non-alignedbloc to oust Taipei from the Security Council and replace them with Beijing, but so far this vote had always failed because of U.S. arm-twisting in Latin America and the rest of the Third World. One of the reasons that this arrangement had endured so long was the immense prestige of R.O.C. President Chiang Kai-shek and the sentimental popularity of the Kuomintang with the American electorate. There still was a very powerful China lobby, which was especially strong among right-wing Republicans of what had been the Taft and Knowland factions of the party, and which Goldwater continued. Now, in the midst of the Vietnam War, with U.S. strategic and economic power in decline, the Anglo-American elite decided in favor of a geopolitical alliance with China against the Soviets for the foreseeable future. This meant that the honor of U.S. commitments to the R.O.C. had to be dumped overboard as so much useless ballast, whatever the domestic political consequences might be. This was the task given to Kissinger, Nixon, and George Bush. The maneuver on the agenda for 1971 was to oust the R.O.C. from the U.N. Security Council and assign their seat to Beijing. Kissinger and Nixon calculated that duplicity would insulate them from domestic political damage: While they were opening to Beijing, they would call for a "two Chinas" policy, under which both Beijing and Taipei would be represented at the U.N., at least in the General Assembly, despite the fact that this was an alternative that both Chinese governments vehemently rejected. The U.S.A. would pretend to be fighting to keep Taipei in the U.N., with George Bush leading the fake charge, but this effort would be defeated. Then the Nixon administration could claim that the vote in the U.N. was beyond its control, comfortably resign itself to Beijing in the Security Council, and pursue the China card. What was called for was a cynical, duplicitous diplomatic charade in which Bush would have the leading part. This scenario was complicated by the rivalry between Secretary of State Rogers and NSC boss Kissinger. Rogers was an old friend of Nixon, but it was of course Kissinger who made foreign policy for Nixon and the rest of the government, and Kissinger who was incomparably the greater evil. Between Rogers and Kissinger, Bush was unhesitatingly on the side of Kissinger. In later congressional testimony, former CIA official Ray Cline tried to argue that Rogers and Bush were kept in the dark by Nixon and Kissinger about the real nature of the U.S. China policy. The implication is that Bush's efforts to keep Taiwan at the U.N. were in good faith. According to Cline's fantastic account, "Nixon and Kissinger actually 'undermined' the department's efforts in 1971 to save Taiwan." / Note #1 / Note #1 Rogers may have believed that helping Taiwan was U.S. policy, but Bush did not. Cline's version of these events is an insult to the intelligence of any serious person. The Nixon-era China card took shape during July 1971 with Kissinger's "Operation Marco Polo I," his secret first trip to Beijing. Kissinger says in his memoirs that Bush was considered a candidate to make this journey, along with David Bruce, Elliot Richardson, Nelson Rockefeller, and Al Haig. / Note #1 / Note #2 Kissinger first journeyed to India, and then to Pakistan. From there, with the help of Yahya Khan, Kissinger went on to Beijing for meetings with Zhou Enlai and other Chinese officals. He returned by way of Paris, where he met with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho at the Paris talks on Indo-China. Returning to Washington, Kissinger briefed Nixon on his understanding with Zhou. On July 15, 1971 Nixon announced to a huge television and radio audience that he had accepted "with pleasure" an invitation to visit China at some occasion before May of 1972. He lamely assured "old friends" (meaning Chiang Kai-shek and the R.O.C. government on Taiwan) that their interests would not be sacrificed. Later in the same year, between October 16 and 26, Kissinger undertook operation "Polo II," a second, public visit with Zhou in Beijing to decide the details of Nixon's visit and hammer out what was to become the U.S.-P.R.C. Shanghai Communique, the joint statement issued during Nixon's stay. During this visit, Zhou cautioned Kissinger not to be disoriented by the hostile Beijing propaganda line against the U.S.A., manifestations of which were everywhere to be seen. Anti-U.S. slogans on the walls, said Zhou, were meaningless, like "firing an empty cannon." Nixon and Kissinger eventually journeyed to Beijing in February 1972. U.N. 'Two Chinas' Farce It was before this backdrop that Bush waged his farcical campaign to keep Taiwan in the U.N. The State Department had stated through the mouth of Rogers on August 2 that the United States would support the admission of Red China to the U.N., but would oppose the expulsion of Taiwan. This was the so-called "two Chinas" policy. In an August 12 interview, Bush told the "Washington Post" that he was working hard to line up the votes to keep Taiwan as a U.N. member when the time to vote came in the fall. Responding to the obvious impression that this was a fraud for domestic political purposes only, Bush pledged his honor on Nixon's commitment to "two Chinas." "I know for a fact that the President wants to see the policy implemented," said Bush, apparently with a straight face, adding that he had discussed the matter with Nixon and Kissinger at the White House only a few days before. Bush said that he and other members of his mission had lobbied 66 countries so far, and that this figure was likely to rise to 80 by the following week. Ultimately Bush would claim to have talked personlly with 94 delegations to get them to let Taiwan stay, which a fellow diplomat called "a quantitative track record." Diplomatic observers noted that the U.S. activity was entirely confined to the high-profile "glass palace" of the U.N., and that virtually nothing was being done by U.S. ambassadors in capitals around the world. But Bush countered that if it were just a question of going through the motions as a gesture for Taiwan, he would not be devoting so much of his time and energy to the cause. The main effort was at the U.N. because "this is what the U.N. is for," he commented. Bush said that his optimism about keeping the Taiwan membership had increased over the past three weeks. / Note #1 / Note #3 By late September, Bush was saying that he saw a better than 50-50 chance that the U.N. General Assembly would seat both Chinese governments. By this time, the official U.S. position as enunciated by Bush was that the Security Council seat should go to Beijing, but that Taipei ought to be allowed to remain in the General Assembly. Since 1961, the U.S. strategy for blocking the admission of Beijing had depended on a procedural defense, obtaining a simple majority of the General Assembly for a resolution defining the seating of Beijing as an Important Question, which required a two-thirds majority in order to be implemented. Thus, if the U.S .A. could get a simple majority on the procedural vote, one-third plus one would suffice to defeat Beijing on the second vote. The General Assembly convened on September 21. Bush and his aides were running a ludicrous full-court press on scores of delegations. Twice a day, there was a State Department briefing on the vote tally. "Yes, Burundi is with us.... About Argentina we're not sure," etc. All this attention got Bush an appearance on "Face the Nation," where he said that the two-Chinas policy should be approved regardless of the fact that both Beijing and Taipei rejected it. "I don't think we have to go through the agony of whether the Republic of China will accept or whether Beijing will accept," Bush told the interviewers. "Let the United Nations for a change do something that really does face up to reality and then let that decision be made by the parties involved," said Bush with his usual inimitable rhetorical flair. The U.N. debate on the China seat was scheduled to open on October 18; on October 12, Nixon gave a press conference in which he totally ignored the subject, and made no appeal for support for Taiwan. On October 16, Kissinger departed with great fanfare for Beijing. Kissinger says in his memoirs that he had been encouraged to go to Beijing by Bush, who assured him that a highly publicized Kissinger trip to Beijing would have no impact whatever on the U.N. vote. On October 25, the General Assembly defeated the U.S. resolution to make the China seat an Important Question by a vote of 59 to 54, with 15 abstentions. Ninety minutes later came the vote on the Albanian resolution to seat Beijing and expel Taipei, which passed by a vote of 76 to 35. Bush then cast the U.S. vote to seat Beijing, and then hurried to escort the R.O.C. delegate, Liu Chieh, out of the hall for the last time. The General Assembly was the scene of a jubilant demonstration led by Third World delegates over the fact that Red China had been admitted, and even more so that the United States had been defeated. The Tanzanian delegate danced a jig in the aisle. Henry Kissinger, flying back from Beijing, got the news on his teletype and praised Bush's "valiant efforts." Having connived in selling Taiwan down the river, it was now an easy matter for the Nixon regime to fake a great deal of indignation for domestic political consumption about what had happened. Nixon's spokesman Ron Ziegler declared that Nixon had been outraged by the "spectacle" of the "cheering, handclapping, and dancing" delegates after the vote, which Nixon had seen as a "shocking demonstration" of "undisguised glee" and "personal animosity." Notice that Ziegler had nothing to say against the vote, or against Beijing, but concentrated the fire on the Third World delegates, who were also threatened with a cutoff of U.S. foreign aid. This was the line that Bush would slavishly follow. On the last day of October, the papers quoted him saying that the demonstration after the vote was "something ugly, something harsh that transcended normal disappointment or elation." "I really thought we were going to win," said Bush, still with a straight face. "I'm so ... disappointed." "There wasn't just clapping and enthusiasm" after the vote, he whined. "When I went up to speak I was hissed and booed. I don't think it's good for the United Nations and that's the point I feel very strongly about." In the view of a "Washington Post" staff writer, "the boyish looking U.S. ambassador to the United Nations looked considerably the worse for wear. But he still conveys the impression of an earnest fellow trying to be the class valedictorian, as he once was described." / Note #1 / Note #4 Bush expected the Beijing delegation to arrive in new York soon, because they probably wanted to take over the presidency of the Security Council, which rotated on a monthly basis. "But why anybody would want an early case of chicken pox, I don't know," said Bush. When the Beijing delegation did arrive, Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Ch'aio Kuan-hua delivered a maiden speech full of ideological bombast along the lines of passages Kissinger had convinced Zhou to cut out of the draft text of the Shanghai communique some days before. Kissinger then telephoned Bush to say in his own speech that the United States regretted that the Chinese had elected to inaugurate their participation in the U.N. by "firing these empty cannons of rhetoric." Bush, like a ventriloquist's dummy, obediently mouthed Kissinger's one-liner as a kind of coded message to Beijing that all the public bluster meant nothing between the two secret and increasingly public allies. Notes - Chapter 12, Part 1 1. In 1970, Bush's portfolio included 29 companies in which he had an interest of more than $4,000. He had 10,000 shares of American General Insurance Co., 5,500 shares of American Standard, 200 shares of AT&T, 832 shares of CBS, and 581 shares of Industries Exchange Fund. He also held stock in the Kroger Company, Simplex Wire and Cable Co. (25,000 shares), IBM, and Allied Chemical. In addition, he had created a trust fund for his children. 2. James Reston, Jr., "The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally" (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 380. 3. William Safire, "Before the Fall" (New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 646. 4. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, "Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes," "Washington Post," Aug. 9, 1988. 5. Reston, "op. cit.," p. 382. 6. George Bush and Victor Gold, "Looking Forward" (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 110. 7. For the Nixon side of the Bush U.N. appointment, see William Safire, "op. cit.," especially "The President Falls in Love," pp. 642 "ff." 8. Reston, "op. cit.," p. 382. Reston (pp. 586-87) tells the story of how, years later in the 1980 Iowa caucuses campaign when both Bush and Connally were in the race, Bush was enraged by Connally's denigration of his manhood in remarks to Texans that Bush was 'all hat and no cattle.' Bush was walking by a television set in the Hotel Fort Des Moines when Connally came on the screen. Bush reached out toward Connally's image on the screen as if to shake hands. Then Bush screamed, "Thank you, sir, for all the kind things you and your friends have been saying about me!" Then Bush slammed his fist on the top of the set, yelling "That prick!" 9. On Kissinger, see Scott Thompson and Joseph Brewda, "Kissinger Associates: Two Birds in the Bush," "Executive Intelligence Review," March 3, 1989. 10. Tom Mangold, "Cold Warrior", (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 305. 11. See Tad Szulc, "The Illusion of Peace" (New York: Viking Press, 1978), p. 498. 12. Henry Kissinger, "White House Years" (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 715. 13. Szulc, "op. cit.," p. 500, and "Washington Post," Aug. 12, 1971. 14. "Washington Post," Oct. 31, 1971. CHAPTER 12 PART 2 UNITED NATIONS AMBASSADOR, KISSINGER CLONE The farce of Bush's pantomime in support of the Kissinger China card very nearly turned into the tragedy of general war later in 1971. This involved the December 1971 war between India and Pakistan, which led to the creation of an independent state of Bangladesh, and which must be counted as one of the least-known thermonuclear confrontations of the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. For Kissinger and Bush, what was at stake in this crisis was the consolidation of the China card. In 1970, Yahya Khan, the British-connected, Sandhurst-educated dictator of Pakistan, was forced to announce that elections would be held in the entire country. It will be recalled that Pakistan was at that time two separate regions, east and west, with India in between. In East Pakistan or Bengal, the Awami League of Sheik Mujibur Rahman campaigned on a platform of autonomy for Bengal, accusing the central government in far-off Islamabad of ineptitude and exploitation. The resentment in East Pakistan was made more acute by the fact that Bengal had just been hit by a typhoon, which had caused extensive flooding and devastation, and by the failure of the government in West Pakistan to organize an effective relief effort. In the elections, the Awami League won 167 out of 169 seats in the East. Yahya Khan delayed the seating of the new nationa l assembly and on the evening of March 25 ordered the Pakistani Army to arrest Mujibur and to wipe out his organization in East Pakistan. Genocide in East Pakistan The army proceeded to launch a campaign of political genocide in East Pakistan. Estimates of the number of victims range from 500,000 to 3 million dead. All members of the Awami League, all Hindus, all students and intellectuals were in danger of execution by roving army patrols. A senior U.S. Foreign Service officer sent home a dispatch in which he told of West Pakistani soldiers setting fire to a women's dormitory at the University of Dacca and then machine-gunning the women when they were forced by the flames to run out. This campaign of killing went on until December, and it generated an estimated 10 million refugees, most of whom fled across the nearby borders to India, which had territory all around East Pakistan. The arrival of 10 million refugees caused indescribable chaos in India, whose government was unable to prevent untold numbers from starving to death. / Note #1 / Note #5 From the very beginning of this monumental genocide, Kissinger and Nixon made it clear that they would not condemn Yahya Khan, whom Nixon considered a personal friend. Kissinger referred merely to the "strong-arm tactics of the Pakistani military," and Nixon circulated a memo in his own handwriting saying, "To all hands. Don't squeeze Yahya at this time. RN" Nixon stressed repeatedly that he wanted to "tilt" in favor of Pakistan in the crisis. One level of explanation for this active complicity in genocide was that Kissinger and Nixon regarded Yahya Khan as their indispensable back channel to Peking. But Kissinger could soon go to Peking any time he wanted, and soon he could talk to the Chinese U.N. delegate in a New York safe house. The essence of the support for the butcher Yahya Khan was this: In 1962, India and China had engaged in a brief border war, and the Peking leaders regarded India as their geopolitical enemy. In order to ingratiate himself with Zhou and Mao, Kissinger wanted to take a position in favor of Pakistan, and therefore of Pakistan's ally China, and against India and against India's ally, the U.S.S.R. (Shortly after Kissinger's trip to China had taken place and Nixon had announced his intention to go to Peking, India and the U.S.S.R. had signed a 20-year friendship treaty.) In Kissinger's view, the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Bengal was sure to become a Sino-Soviet clash by proxy, and he wanted the United States aligned with China in order to impress Peking with the vast benefits to be derived from the U.S.-P.R.C. strategic alliance under the heading of the "China card." Kissinger and Nixon were isolated within the Washington bureaucracy on this issue. Secretary of State Rogers was very reluctant to go on supporting Pakistan, and this was the prevalent view in Foggy Bottom and in the embassies around the world. Nixon and Kissinger were isolated from the vast majority of congressional opinion, which expressed horror and outrage over the extent of the carnage being carried out week after week, month after month, by Yahya Khan's armed forces. Even the media and U.S. public opinion could not find any reason for the friendly "tilt" in favor of Yahya Khan. On July 31, Kissinger exploded at a meeting of the Senior Review Group when a proposal was made that the Pakistani army could be removed from Bengal. "Why is it our business how they govern themselves?" Kissinger raged. "The President always says to tilt to Pakistan, but every proposal I get [from inside the U.S. government] is in the opposite direction. Sometimes I think I am in a nut house." This went on for months. On December 3, at a meeting of Kissinger's Washington Special Action Group, Kissinger exploded again, exclaiming, "I've been catching unshirted hell every half-hour from the president who says we're not tough enough. He really doesn't believe we're carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt toward Pakistan and he believes that every briefing or statement is going the other way." / Note #1 / Note #6 But no matter what Rogers, the State Department and the rest of the Washington bureaucracy might do, Kissinger knew that George Bush at the U.N. would play along with the pro-Pakistan tilt. "And I knew that George Bush, our able U.N. ambassador, would carry out the President's policy," wrote Kissinger in his memoirs, in describing his decision to drop U.S. opposition to a Security Council debate on the subcontinent. This made Bush one of the most degraded and servile U.S. officials of the era. Indira Gandhi had come to Washington in November to attempt a peaceful settlement to the crisis, but was crudely snubbed by Nixon and Kissinger. The chronology of the acute final phase of the crisis can be summed up as follows: "December 3, 1971": Yahya Khan ordered the Pakistani Air Force to carry out a series of surprise air raids on Indian air bases in the north and west of India. These raids were not effective in destroying the Indian Air Force on the ground, which had been Yahya Khan's intent, but Yahya Khan's aggression did precipitate the feared Indo-Pakistani war. The Indian Army made rapid ad vances against the Pakistani forces in Bengal, while the Indian Navy blockaded Pakistan's ports. At this time, the biggest-ever buildup in the Soviet naval forces in the Indian Ocean also began. "December 4": At the U.N. Security Council, George Bush delivered a speech in which his main thrust was to accuse India of repeated incursions into East Pakistan, and challenging the legitimacy of India's resort to arms, in spite of the plain evidence that Pakistan had struck first. Bush introduced a draft resolution which called on India and Pakistan immediately to cease all hostilities. Bush's resolution also mandated the immediate withdrawal of all Indian and Pakistani armed forces back to their own territory, meaning in effect that India should pull back from East Pakistan and let Yahya Khan's forces there get back to their mission of genocide against the local population. Observers were to be placed along the Indo-Pakistani borders by the U.N. secretary general. Bush's resolution also contained a grotesque call on India and Pakistan to "exert their best efforts toward the creation of a climate conducive to the voluntary return of refugees to East Pakistan." Ths resolution was out of touch with the two realities: that Yahya Khan had started the genocide in East Pakistan back in March, and that Yahya had now launched aggression against India with his air raids. Bush's resolution was vetoed by the Soviet representative, Yakov Malik. "December 6": The Indian government extended diplomatic recognition to the independent state of Bangladesh. Indian troops made continued progress against the Pakistani Army in Bengal. On the same day, an NBC camera team filmed much of Nixon's day inside the White House. Part of what was recorded, and later broadcast, was a telephone call from Nixon to George Bush at the United Nations, giving Bush his instructions on how to handle the India-Pakistan crisis. "Some, all over the world, will try to make this basically a political issue," said Nixon to Bush. "You've got to do what you can. More important than anything else now is to get the facts out with regard to what we have done, that we have worked for a political settlement, what we have done for the refugees and so forth and so on. If you see that some here in the Senate and House, for whatever reason, get out and misrepresent our opinions, I want you to hit it frontally, strongly, and toughly; is that clear? Just take the gloves off and crack it, because you know exactly what we have done, OK?" / Note #1 / Note #7 "December 7": George Bush at the U.N. made a further step forward toward global confrontation by branding India as the aggressor in the crisis, as Kissinger approvingly notes in his memoirs. Bush's draft resolution, described above, which had been vetoed by Malik in the Security Council, was approved by the General Assembly by a non-binding vote of 104 to 11, which Kissinger considered a triumph for Bush. But on the same day, Yahya Khan informed the government in Washington that his military forces in East Pakistan were rapidly disintegrating. Kissinger and Nixon seized on a dubious report from an alleged U.S. agent at a high level in the Indian government which purported to summarize recent remarks of Indira Gandhi to her cabinet. According to this report, which may have come from the later Prime Minister Moraji Desai, Mrs. Gandhi had pledged to conquer the southern part of Pakistani-held Kashmir. If the Chinese "rattled the sword," the report quoted Mrs. Gandhi as saying, the Soviets would respond. This unreliable report became one of the pillars for further actions by Nixon, Kissinger and Bush. "December 8": By this time, the Soviet Navy had some 21 ships either in or approaching the Indian Ocean, in contrast to a pre-crisis level of three ships. At this point, with the Vietnam War raging unabated, the U.S.A. had a total of three ships in the Indian Ocean -- two old destroyers and a seaplane tender. The last squadron of the British Navy was departing from the region in the framework of the British pullout from east of Suez. In the evening, Nixon suggested to Kissinger that the scheduled Moscow summit might be canceled. Kissinger raved that India wanted to detach not just Bengal, but Kashmir also, leading to the further secession of Baluchistan and the total dismemberment of Pakistan. "Fundamentally," wrote Kissinger of this moment, "our only card left was to raise the risks for the Soviets to a level where Moscow would see larger interests jeopardized" by its support of India, which had been lukewarm so far. "December 9": The State Department and other agencies were showing signs of being almost human, seeking to undermine the Nixon-Kissinger-Bush policy through damaging leaks and bureaucratic obstructionism. Nixon, "beside himself" over the damaging leaks, called in the principal officers of the Washington Special Action Group and told them that while he did not insist on their being loyal to the President, they ought at least to be loyal to the United States. Among those Nixon insulted was Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson. But the leaks only increased. "December 10:" Kissinger ordered the U.S. Navy to create Task Force 74, consisting of the nuclear aircraft carrier "Enterprise", with escort and supply ships, and to have these ships proceed from their post at Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam to Singapore. / Note #1 / Note #8 In Dacca, East Pakistan, Major General Rao Farman Ali Khan, the commander of Pakistani forces in Bengal, asked the United Nations representative to help arrange a cease-fire, followed by the transfer of power in East Pakistan to the elected representatives of the Awami League and the "repatriation with honor" of his forces back to West Pakistan. At first it appeared that this de facto surrender had been approved by Yahya Khan. But when Yahya Khan heard that the U.S. fleet had been ordered into the Indian Ocean, he was so encouraged that he junked the idea of a surrender and ordered Gen. Ali Khan to resume fighting, which he did. Colonel Melvin Holst, the U.S. military attache in Katmandu, Nepal, a small country sandwiched between India and China in the Himalayas, received a call from the Indian military attache, who asked whether the American had any knowledge of a Chinese military buildup in Tibet. "The Indian high command had some sort of information that military action was increasing in Tibet," said Holst in his cable to Washington. The same evening, Col. Holst received a call from the Soviet military attache, Loginov, who also asked about Chinese military activity. Loginov said that he had spoken over the last day or two with the Chinese military attache, Zhao Kuang-chih, "advising Zhao that the P.R.C. should not get too serious about intervention because U.S.S.R. would react, had many missiles, etc." / Note #1 / Note #9 At the moment, the Himalaya mountain passes, the corridor for any Chinese troop movement, were all open and free from snow. The CIA had noted "war preparations" in Tibet over the months since the Bengal crisis had begun. Nikolai Pegov, the Soviet ambassador to New Dehli, had assured the Indian government that in the eventuality of a Chinese attack on India, the Soviets would mount a "diversionary action in Sinkiang." "December 11": Kissinger had been in town the previous day, meeting the Chinese U.N. delegate. Today Kissinger would meet with the Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister Ali Bhutto, in Bush's suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Huang Hua, the Chinese delegate, made remarks which Kissinger chose to interpret as meaning that the "Chinese might intervene militarily even at this late stage." "December 12:" Nixon, Kissinger and Haig met in the Oval Office early Sunday morning in a council of war. Kissinger later described this as a crucial meeting, where, as it turned out, "the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American" geopolitical relationship was taken. / Note #2 / Note #0 During Nixon's 1975 secret grand jury testimony to the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the former President insisted that the United States had come "close to nuclear war" during the Indo-Pakistani conflict. According to one attorney who heard Nixon's testimony in 1975, Nixon had stated that "we had threatened to go to nuclear war with the Russians." / Note #2 / Note #1 These remarks most probably refer to this December 12 meeting, and the actions it set into motion. Navy Task Force 74 was ordered to proceed through the Straits of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean, and it attracted the attention of the world media in so doing the following day. Task Force 74 was now on wartime alert. At 11:30 a.m. local time, Kissinger and Haig sent the Kremlin a message over the Hot Line. This was the first use of the Hot Line during the Nixon administration, and apparently the only time it was used during the Nixon years, with the exception of the October 1973 Middle East War. According to Kissinger, this Hot Line message contained the ultimatum that the Soviets respond to earlier American demands; otherwise Nixon would order Bush to "set in train certain moves" in the U.N. Security Council that would be irreversible. But is this all the message said? Kissinger comments in his memoirs a few pages later: "Our fleet passed through the Strait of Malacca into the Bay of Bengal and attracted much media attention. Were we threatening India? Were we seeking to defend East Pakistan? Had we lost our minds? It was in fact sober calculation. We had some seventy-two hours to bring the war to a conclusion before West Pakistan would be swept into the maelstrom. It would take India that long to shift its forces and mount an assault. Once Pakistan's air force and army were destroyed, its impotence would guarantee the country's eventual disintegration.... We had to give the Soviets a warning that matters might get out of control on our side too. We had to be ready to back up the Chinese if at the last moment they came in after all, our U.N. initiative having failed. [...] However unlikely an American military move against India, the other side could not be sure; it might not be willing to accept even the minor risk that we might act irrationally." / Note #2 / Note #2 These comments by Kissinger led to the conclusion that the Hot Line message of December 12 was part of a calculated exercise in thermonuclear blackmail and brinksmanship. Kissinger's reference to acting irrationally recalls the infamous RAND Corporation theories of thermonculear confrontations as chicken games in which it is useful to hint to the opposition that one is insane. If your adversary thinks you are crazy, then he is more likely to back down, the argument goes. Whatever threats were made by Kissinger and Haig that day in their Hot Line message are likely to have been of that variety. All evidence points to the conclusion that on December 12, 1971, the world was indeed close to the brink of thermonuclear confrontation. Where Was George? And where was George? He was acting as the willing mouthpiece for madmen. Late in the evening December 12, Bush delivered the following remarks to the Security Council, which are recorded in Kissinger's memoirs: "The question now arises as to India's further intentions. For example, does India intend to use the present situation to destroy the Pakistan army in the West? Does India intend to use as a pretext the Pakistani counterattacks in the West to annex territory in West Pakistan? Is its aim to take parts of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir contrary to the Security Council resolutions of 1948, 1949, and 1950? If this is not India's intention, then a prompt disavowal is required. The world has a right to know: What are India's intentions? Pakistan's aims have become clear: It has accepted the General Assembly's resolution passed by a vote of 104 to 11. My government has asked this question of the Indian Government several times in the last week. I regret to inform the Council that India's replies have been unsatisfactory and not reassuring. "In view of India's defiance of world opinion expressed by such an overwhelming majority, the United States is now returning the issue to the Security Council. With East Pakistan virtually occupied by Indian troops, a continuation of the war would take on increasingly the character of armed attack on the very existence of a Member State of the United Nations." / Note #2 / Note #3 Bush introduced another draft resolution of pro-Pakistan tilt, which called on the governments of India and Pakistan to take measures for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of troops, and for measures to help the refugees. This resolution was also vetoed by the U.S.S.R. "December 14": Kissinger shocked U.S. public opinion by stating off the record to journalists in a plane returning from a meeting with French President Georges Pompidou in the Azores, that if Soviet conduct continued in the present mode, the U.S. was "prepared to reevaluate our entire relationship, including the summit." "December 15:" The Pakistani commander in East Pakistan, after five additional days of pointless killing, again offered a cease-fire. Kissinger claimed that the five intervening days had allowed the United States to increase the pressure on India and prevent the Indian forces from turning on West Pakistan. "December 16:" Mrs. Gandhi offered an unconditional cease-fire in the west, which Pakistan immediately accepted. Kissinger opined that this decision to end all fighting had been "reluctant" on the part of India, and had been made possible through Soviet pressure generated by U.S. threats. Zhou Enlai also said later that the United States had saved West Pakistan. Kissinger praised Nixon's "courage and patriotism" and his commitment to "preserve the balance of power for the ultimate safety of all free people." Apprentice geopolitician George Bush had carried out yeoman service in that immoral cause. After a self-serving and false description of the Indo-Pakistani crisis of 1971, Kissinger pontificates in his memoirs about the necessary priority of geopolitical machinations: "There is in America an idealistic tradition that sees foreign policy as a context between evil and good. There is a pragmatic tradition that seeks to solve 'problems' as they arise. There is a legalistic tradition that treats international issues as juridical cases. There is no geopolitical tradition." In their stubborn pursuit of an alliance with the second strongest land power at the expense of all other considerations, Kissinger, Nixon and Bush were following the dictates of classic geopolitics. This is the school in which Bush was trained, and this is how he has reacted to every international crisis down through the Gulf war, which was originally conceived in London as a "geopolitical" adjustment in favor of the Anglo-Saxons against Germany, Japan, the Arabs, the developing sector and the rest of the world. Genocide in Vietnam 1972 was the second year of Bush's U.N. tenure, and it was during this time that he distinguished himself as a shameless apologist for the genocidal and vindictive Kissinger policy of prolonging and escalating the war in Vietnam. During most of his first term, Nixon pursued a policy he called the "Vietnamization" of the war. This meant that U.S. land forces were progressively withdrawn, while the South Vietnamese Army was ostensibly built up so that it could bear the battle against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regulars. This policy went into crisis in March 1972 when the North Vietnamese launched a 12-division assault across the Demilitarized Zone against the south. On May 8, 1972, Nixon announced that the full-scale bombing of the north, which had been suspended since the spring of 1968, would be resumed with a vengeance: Nixon ordered the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong harbor, and the savaging of transportation lines and military installations all over the country. This mining had always been rejected as a tactic during the previous conduct of the war because of the possibility that bombing and mining the harbors might hit Soviet, Chinese, and other foreign ships, killing the crews and creating the risk of retaliation by these countries against the U.S.A. Now, before the 1972 elections, Kissinger and Nixon were determined to "go ape," discarding their previous limits on offensive action and risking whatever China and the U.S.S.R. might do. It was another gesture of reckless confrontation, fraught with incalculable consequences. Later in the same year, in December, Nixon would respond to a breakdown in the Paris talks with the Hanoi government by ordering the infamous Christmastide B-52 attacks on the north. It was George Bush who officially informed the international diplomatic community of Nixon's March decisions. Bush addressed a letter to the Presidency of the U.N. Security Council in which he outlined what Nixon had set into motion: "The President directed that the entrances to the ports of North Vietnam be mined and that the delivery of seaborne supplies to North Vietnam be prevented. These measures of collective self-defense are hereby being reported to the United Nations Security Council as required by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter." Bush went on to characterize the North Vietnamese actions. He spoke of "the massive invasion across the demilitarized zone and international boundaries by the forces of North Vietnam and the continuing aggression" of Hanoi. He accused the north of "blatant violation of the understandings negotiated in 1968 in connection with the cessation of the bombing of the territory of North Vietnam.... The extent of this renewed aggression and the manner in which it has been directed and supported demonstrate with great clarity that North Vietnam has embarked on an all-out attempt to take over South Vietnam by military force and to disrupt the orderly withdrawal of United States forces." Bush further accused the north of refusing to negotiate in good faith to end the war. The guts of Bush's message, the part that was read with greatest attention in Moscow, Peking and elsewhere, was contained in the following summary of the way in which Haiphong and the other harbors had been mined: "Accordingly, as the minimum actions necessary to meet this threat, the Republic of Vietnam and the United States of America have jointly decided to take the following measures of collective self-defense: The entrances to the ports of North Vietnam are being mined, commencing 0900 Saigon time May 9, and the mines are set to activate automatically beginning 1900 hours Saigon time May 11. This will permit vessels of other countries presently in North Vietnamese ports three daylight periods to depart safely." In a long circumlocution, Bush also conveyed that all shipping might also be the target of indiscriminate bombing. Bush called these measures "restricted in extent and purpose." The U.S. was willing to sign a cease-fire ending all acts of war in Indochina (thus including Cambodia, which had been invaded in 1970, and Laos, which had been invaded in 1971, as well as the Vietnams) and bring all U.S. troops home within four months. There was no bipartisan supp ort for the bombing and mining policy Bush announced. Senator Mike Mansfield pointed out that the decision would only protract the war. Senator Proxmire called it "reckless and wrong." Four Soviet ships were damaged by these U.S. actions. There was a lively debate within the Soviet Politburo on how to respond to this, with a faction around Shelest demanding that Nixon's invitation to the upcoming Moscow superpower summit be rescinded. But Shelest was ousted by Brezhnev, and the summit went forward at the end of May. The "China card" theoreticians congratulated themselves that the Soviets had been paralyzed by fear of what Peking might do if Moscow became embroiled with Peking's new de facto ally, the United States. Bombing Civilian Targets In July 1972, reports emerged in the international press of charges by Hanoi that the U.S.A. had been deliberately bombing the dams and dikes, which were the irrigation and flood control system around Vietnam's Red River. Once again it was Bush who came forward as the apologist for Nixon's "mad bomber" foreign policy. Bush appeared on the NBC Televison "Today" show to assure the U.S. public that the U.S. bombing had created only "the most incidental and minor impact" on North Vietnam's dike system. This, of course, amounted to a backhanded confirmation that such bombing had been done, and damage wrought in the process. Bush was in his typical whining mode in defending the U.S. policy against worldwide criticism of war measures that seemed designed to inflict widespread flooding and death on North Vietnamese civilians. According to North Vietnamese statistics, more than half of the north's 20 million people lived in areas near the Red River that would be flooded if the dike system were breached. An article which appeared in a Hanoi publication had stated that at flood crest many rivers rise to "six or seven meters above the surrounding fields" and that because of this situation "any dike break, especially in the Red River delta, is a disaster with incalculable consequences." Bush had never seen an opportunity for genocide he did not like. "I believe we are being set up by a massive propaganda campaign by the North Vietnamese in the event that there is the same kind of flooding this year -- to attribute it to bombs whereas last year it happened just out of lack of maintenance," Bush argued. "There's been a study made that I hope will be released shortly that will clarify this whole question," he went on. The study "would be very helpful because I think it will show what the North Vietnamese are up to in where they place strategic targets." What Bush was driving at here was an allegation that Hanoi customarily placed strategic assets near the dikes in order to be able to accuse the U.S. of genocide if air attacks breached the dikes and caused flooding. Bush's military spokesmen used similar arguments during the Gulf war, when Iraq was accused of placing military equipment in the midst of civilian residential areas. "I think you would have to recognize," retorted Bush, "that if there was any intention" of breaching the dikes, "it would be very, very simple to do exactly what we are accused of -- and that is what we are not doing." / Note #2 / Note #4 The bombing of the north continued and reached a final paroxysm at Christmas, when B-52s made unrestricted terror bombing raids against Hanoi and other cities. The Christmas bombing was widely condemned, even by the U.S. press: "New Madness in Vietnam" was the headline of the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" on Dec. 19; "Terror from the Skies" that of the "New York Times" Dec. 22; "Terror Bombing in the Name of Peace" of the "Washington Post" Dec. 28; and "Beyond All Reason" of the "Los Angeles Times" of Dec. 28. More Zionist than Israelis Bush's activity at the U.N. also coincided with Kissinger's preparation of the October 1973 Middle East war. During the 1980s, Bush attempted to cultivate a public image as a U.S. politician who, although oriented toward close relations with Israel, would not slavishly appease every demand of the Israelis and the Zionist lobby in the United States, but would take an independent position designed to foster U.S. national interests. From time to time, Bush snubbed the Israelis by hinting that they held hostages of their own, and that the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem would not be accepted by the United States. For some, these delusions have survived even a refutation so categoric as the events of the Kuwait crisis of 1990-91. Bush would be more accurately designated as a Zionist, whose differences with an Israeli leader like Shamir are less significant than the differences between Shamir and other Israeli politicians. Bush's fanatically pro-Israeli ideological-political track record was already massive during the U.N. years. In September 1972, Palestinian terrorists describing themselves as the "Black September" organization attacked the quarters of the Israeli Olympic team present in Munich for the Olympic games of that year, killing a number of the Israeli athletes. The Israeli government seized on these events as carte blanche to launch a series of air attacks against Syria and Lebanon, arguing that these countries could be held responsible for what had happened in Munich. Somalia, Greece and Guinea came forward with a resolution in the Security Council which simply called for the immediate cessation of "all military operations." The Arab states argued that the Israeli air attacks were totally without provocation or justification, and had killed numerous civilians who had nothing whatever to do with the terrorist actions in Munich. The Nixon regime, with one eye on the autumn 1972 elections and the need to mobilize the Zionist lobby in support of a second term, wanted to find a way to oppose this resolution, since it did not sufficiently acknowledge the unique righteousness of the Israeli cause and Israel's inherent right to commit acts of war against its neighbors. It was Bush who authored a competing resolution, which called on all interested parties "to take all measures for the immediate cessation and prevention of all military operations and terrorist activities." It was Bush who dished up the rationalizations for U.S. rejection of the first resolution. That resolution was no good, Bush argued, because it did not reflect the fact that "the fabric of violence in the Middle East in inextricably interwoven with the massacre in Munich.... By our silence on the terror in Munich are we indeed inviting more Munichs?" he asked. Justifying the Israeli air raids on Syria and Lebanon, Bush maintained that certain governments "cannot be absolved of responsibility for the cycle of violence" because of their words and deeds, or because of their tacit acquiescence. Slightly later, after the vote had taken place, Bush argued that "by adopting this resolution, the council would have ignored reality, would have spoken to one form of violence but not another, would have looked to the effect but not the cause." When the resolution was put to a vote, Bush made front-page headlines around the world by casting the U.S. veto, a veto that had been cast only once before in the entire history of the U.N. The vote was 13 to 1, with the U.S. casting the sole negative vote. Panama was the lone abstention. The only other time the U.S. veto had been used had been in 1970, on a resolution involving Rhodesia. The Israeli U.N. ambassador, Yosef Tekoah, did not attend the debate because of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. But Israel's cause was well defended -- by Bush. According to an Israeli journalist observing the proceedings who was quoted by the "Washington Post," "Bush sounds more pro-Israeli than Tekoah would have." / Note #2 / Note #5 Later in 1972, attempts were made by non-aligned states and the U.N. Secretariat to arrange the indispensable basis for a Middle East peace settlement -- the withdrawal of Israel from the territories occupied during the 1967 war. Once again, Bush was more Zionist than the Israelis. In February of 1972, the U.N.'s Middle East mediator, Gunnar Jarring of Norway, had asked that the Security Council reaffirm the original contents of Resolution 242 of 1967 by reiterating that Israel should surrender Arab territory seized in 1967. "Land for peace" was anathema to the Israeli government then as now. Bush undertook to blunt this non-aligned peace bid. Late in 1972, the non-aligned group proposed a resolution in the General Assembly which called for "immediate and unconditional" Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories while inviting other countries to withold assistance that would help Israel to sustain its occupation of the Arab land. Bush quickly rose to assail this text. In a speech to the General Assembly in December 1972, Bush warned the assembly that the original text of Resolution 242 was "the essential agreed basis for U.N. peace efforts and this body and all its members should be mindful of the need to preserve the negotiating asset that it represents." "The assembly," Bush went on, "cannot seek to impose courses of action on the countries directly concerned, either by making new demands or favoring the proposals or positions of one side over the other." Never, never would George Bush ever take sides or accept a double standard of this type. Bush in Africa From January 28 through February 4, 1972, the Security Council held its first meeting in twenty years outside of New York City. The venue chosen was Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Bush made this the occasion for a trip through the Sudan, Kenya, Zambia, Zaire, Gabon, Nigeria, Chad and Botswana. Bush later told a House subcommittee hearing that this was his second trip to Africa, with the preceding one having been a junket to Egypt and Libya "in 1963 or 1964." / Note #2 / Note #6 During this trip, Bush met with seven chiefs of state, including President Mobutu of Zaire, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, President Tombalbaye of Chad, and President Numayri of the Sudan. At a press conference in Addis Ababa, African journalists destabilized Bush with aggressive questions about the U.S. policy of ignoring mandatory U.N. economic sanctions against the racist, white supremacist Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia. The Security Council had imposed the mandatory sanctions, but later the U.S. Congress had passed, and Nixon had signed into law, legislation incorporating the so-called Byrd amendment, which allowed the U.S.A. to import chrome from Rhodesia in the event of shortages of that strategic raw material. Chrome was readily available on the world market, especially from the U.S.S.R., although the Soviet chrome was more expensive than the Rhodesian chrome. In his congressional testimony, Bush whined at length about the extensive criticism of this declared U.S. policy of breaching the Rhodesian sanctions on the part of "those who are just using this to really hammer us from a propaganda standpoint.... We have taken the rap on this thing," complained Bush. "We have taken the heat on it.... We have taken a great deal of abuse from those who wanted to embarrass us in Africa, to emphasize the negative and not the positive in the United Nations." Bush talked of his own efforts at damage control on the issue of U.S. support for the racist Rhodesian regime: "... what we are trying to do is to restrict any hypocrisy we are accused of.... I certainly don't think the U.S. position should be that the Congress was trying to further colonialism and racism in this action it took," Bush told the congressmen. "In the U.N., I get the feeling we are categorized as imperialists and colonialists, and I make clear this is not what America stands for, but nevertheless it is repeated over and over and over again," he whined. / Note #2 / Note #7 On the problems of Africa in general, Bush, ever true to Malthusian form, stressed above all the overpopulation of the continent. As he told the congressmen: "Population was one of the things I worked on when I was in the Congress with many people here in this room. It is something that the U.N. should do. It is something where we are better served to use a multilateral channel, but it has got to be done efficiently and effectively. There has [sic] to be some delivery systems. It should not be studied to death if the American people are going to see that we are better off to use a multilateral channel and I am convinced we are. We don't want to be imposing American standards of rate of growth on some country, but we are saying that if an international community decides it is worth while to have these programs and education, we want to strongly support it." / Note #2 / Note #8 Mouthpiece for Kissinger Bush spent just under two years at the U.N. His tenure coincided with some of the most monstrous crimes against humanity of the Nixon-Kissinger team, for whom Bush functioned as an international spokesman, and to whom no Kissinger policy was too odious to be enthusiatically proclaimed before the international community and world public opinion. Through this doggedly loyal service, Bush forged a link with Nixon that would be ephemeral but vital for his career, while it lasted, and a link with Kissinger that would be decisive in shaping Bush's own administration in 1988-89. The way in which Bush set about organizing the anti-Iraq coalition of 1990-91 was decisively shaped by his United Nations experience. His initial approach to the Security Council, the types of resolutions that were put forward by the United States, and the alternation of military escalation with consultations among the five permanent members of the Security Council -- all this harkened back to the experience Bush acquired as Kissinger's envoy to the world body. Notes - Chapter 12, Part 2 15. See Seymour M. Hersh, "The Price of Power" (New York: Summit Books, 1983), pp. 444 ff. 16. Henry Kissinger, "op. cit.," p. 897. The general outlines of these remarks were first published in Jack Anderson's syndicated column, and reprinted in Jack Anderson, "The Anderson Papers" (New York: Random House, 1973). 17. Anderson, "op. cit.," p. 226. 18. Elmo Zumwalt, "On Watch" (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1976), p. 367. 19. Anderson, "op. cit.," pp. 260-61. 20. Kissinger, "op. cit.," p. 909. 21. Hersh, "op. cit.," p. 457. 22. Kissinger, "op. cit.," pp. 911-12. 23. See R.C. Gupta, "U.S. Policy Toward India and Pakistan" (Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corp., 1977), pp. 84 "ff." 24. "Washington Post," July 27, 1972. 25. "Washington Post," Sept. 11, 1972. 26. U.S. House of Representatives, Joint Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Africa and the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Ninety-Second Congress, Second Session, March 1, 1972, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 12. 27. House of Representatives, Joint Hearing, pp. 7, 10-11. 28. House of Representatives, Joint Hearing, pp. 7-8.
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