Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (82 page)

12
. Jerry Voorhis,
Confessions of a Congressman
(New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 331.

13
. To be sure, Dresser Industries did not want a union-friendly congressman any more than the local businessmen did. With the end of World War II, labor troubles had become endemic in the American economy. Dresser had been racked by union agitation, including work stoppages and strikes.

14
. During the 1952 campaign, Nixon had been accused of controlling a secret “slush fund” of contributions from shadowy backers. In response, Nixon went on TV to give his famous “Checkers speech,” in which he denied accepting any personal gifts, with one exception: a black-and-white cocker spaniel named Checkers, for his daughter. He emphasized that he was a man of modest means who could not afford a mink coat for his wife, only a “respectable Republican cloth coat.”

15
. Kelley,
The Family
, p. 162.

16
. Daniel Yergin,
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power
(New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 753.

17
. Yergin,
The Prize
, p. 215.

18
. Robert Caro,
The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
(New York: Knopf, 1982).

19
. Robert Bryce,
Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate
(New York: public affairs, 2004), p. 93.

20
. As president, Eisenhower stopped a grand jury investigation into the “International petroleum cartel” on the basis of “national security.” Eisenhower chose Robert B. Anderson, president of the Texas Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, as his secretary of the Navy, deputy secretary of defense, and secretary of the treasury.

21
. Rick Perlstein,
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 196.

22
. Ibid., p. 197.

23
. Letter from William C. Liedtke Jr. to Richard Nixon, July 16, 1968, Richard Nixon presidential library.

24
. Bill Clements, who would serve under both Nixon and Ford (where his boss was Donald Rums-feld),owned the giant offshore drilling equipment and drilling contractor SEDCO, which was deeply wired into the Bush political machine. During the 1950s, Dresser Industries had recommended SEDCO to the government of Argentine strongman Juan Perón, who was trying to develop Argentina’s oil reserves. SEDCO drilled about one thousand wells for Peron, and bought ten million dollars’ worth of supplies from Dresser. In 1964, Clements served as statewide campaign finance chair for Poppy’s 1964 U.S. Senate bid. When Bush decided to get out of the oil business, as noted in chapter 3, there was discussion about Clements taking over Zapata; instead, the two firms went into a joint venture in the Persian Gulf. Like many of the entities associated with the rise of the Bushes, SEDCO had its share of international crises requiring a friendly ear in Washington: the company was involved in the world’s largest oil spill (in the Gulf of Mexico) and later filed suit against the revolutionary Iranian government over the seizure of its rigs. When a
New York Times
reporter tried to interview Clements’s son, the company’s president, he declined, explaining, “We like to keep a low profile.” See William K. Stevens, “SEDCO: Growth in Adversity,”
New York Times
, October 20, 1981. In 1984, Clements sold SEDCO to Schlumberger, the firm that had assisted with clandestine operations against Castro and whose head had interacted with George de Mohrenschildt in 1962 and ’63. After becoming Texas’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Clements hired—first as his deputy chief of staff and later as direct mail consultant—the youthful Karl Rove at the request of Poppy Bush, helping the future political superstar get his start.

25
. The Federal Power Commission was replaced in 1977 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

26
. The commission allowed Pennzoil to divert natural gas that had been committed for low-pricedsale within hard-pressed Louisiana into other markets, where it could charge much more. Louisiana ended up with a severe natural gas shortage. “The health and physical safety of millions of Louisiana’s citizens are gravely threatened,” a 1972 state announcement warned.

27
. In April 1969, shortly after Morton was named Republican National Committee chair, he and Bush called for the IRS to create a division to begin examining nonprofit groups—then a quickly growing sector largely identified with liberal values and criticism of the establishment.

28
. Iwan W. Morgan,
Nixon
(London: Hodder Arnold, 2002), p. 125.

29
. Stephen E. Ambrose,
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 234.

30
. For the best account of this, see Robert Dallek,
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
(New York: Harper Collins, 2007).

31
. For detailed accounts of the so-called Moorer-Radford affair, see James Rosen,
The Strong Man:
John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate
(New York: Doubleday), pp. 165–81; and Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin,
Silent Coup: The Removal of a President
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), pp. 3–67, 373–403.

32
. Herbert S. Parmet,
George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), p. 126.

33
. The oil industry had actually asked Nixon to simply refrain from doing anything. He was to resistefforts to get him involved in reducing the oil depletion allowance and leave it to industry supporters to bottle up the legislation in Congress.

34
. Yergin,
The Prize
, p. 754.

35
. Author interview with Jack Gleason, April 2008.

36
. Robert Baskin, “Liberals Conclude Nixon Lost to Right,”
Dallas Morning News
, July 9, 1969.

37
. Rosen,
The Strong Man
, pp. 65–114.

38
. Gail Sheehy,
Character: America’s Search for Leadership
(New York: William Morrow, 1988), p. 174.

39
. Fitzhugh Green,
George Bush: An Intimate Portrait
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 113.

40
. Kelley,
The Family
, p. 284.

41
. George Bush with Victor Gold,
Looking Forward: An Autobiography
(New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 102.

42
. Parmet,
George Bush
, p. 146.

43
. By 1972, the White House would secretly support 42.5 percent of all Democrats running for Congress—so long as their conservative views generally comported with the administration’s. See Lowell P. Weicker with Barry Sussman,
Maverick
:
A Life in Politics
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), pp. 79–80.

44
. William Safire,
Before the Fall: An Inside Look at the Pre-Watergate White House
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), p. 646.

45
. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, “Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes; Appointive Jobs Were Turning Point,”
Washington Post
, August 9, 1988.

46
. Parmet,
George Bush
, p. 147.

47
. Ibid., p. 148.

48
. Dallek, “The Kissinger Presidency.”

49
. Parmet,
George Bush,
p. 148.

10: DOWNING NIXON, PART I: THE SETUP

1
. Richard M. Nixon,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap), pp. 626–29.

2
. H. R. Haldeman,
The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), p. 31.

3
. Howard Hunt,
Give Us This Day
(New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), p. 40.

4
. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
The CIA and American Democracy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 99.

5
.
The Haldeman Diaries
, p. 26.

6
. Deposition of Richard Helms, in
Hunt v. Weberman
. See A. J. Weberman, Coup dEtat in America Data Base,
www.ajweberman.com/nodules2/nodulec24.htm
.

7
. H. R. Haldeman,
The Ends of Power
(New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 37–38.

8
. Carl Freund, “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson,”
Dallas Morning News
(early edition), November 22, 1963.

9
. Stephen Ambrose,
Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 32.

10
. Jules Witcover,
The Resurrection of Richard Nixon
(New York: Putnam, 1970), p. 61.

11
. Author interview with Donald Kendall, September 12, 2008.

12
. “Nixon to Robert Humphreys, 11/7/63,” Nixon vice presidential papers (Laguna Niguel, California),quoted in Ambrose,
Nixon, 1962–72
, p. 31.

13
. February 1, 1966, call from President Lyndon Johnson to Senator Eugene McCarthy, cited by James Rosen, “What’s Hidden in the LBJ Tapes,”
Weekly Standard
, September 29, 2003.

14
. Rudy Rochelle, “Little Relief Seen for Sugar Problem,”
Dallas Morning News
, November 22, 1963.

15
. Haldeman’s notes were first published in James Rosen’s “An Insider’s Notes from the OvalOffice,”
Newsday
, April 25, 1994.

16
. Years later, Kendall became a member of the International Council at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

17
. FBI JFK Assassination File 62-109060. Available through the Mary Ferrell Foundation.

18
. Jack Langguth, “Group of Businessmen Rules Dallas Without a Mandate from the Voters,”
New
York Times
, January 19, 1964.

19
. Robert Dallek,
Partners in Power: Nixon and Kissinger
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 434.

20
. George Bush,
All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writing
(New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 191.

21
.
The Haldeman Diaries
, December 16, 1969, pp. 115–16.

22
. Author interview with Jack Gleason, April 6, 2008.

23
.
The Haldeman Diaries
, December 11, 1969, p. 114.

24
. Prior to a new stricter law that went into effect in April 1972, the then-governing Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 required campaign contributions over one hundred dollars to be reported by a candidate’s election committee. Each committee was to have a formal chairman and treasurer who did the reporting. The national committees of political parties were then supposed to file postelection reports regarding their contributions to individual candidates. Up until 1970, this law was rarely followed, let alone enforced by the Justice Department. But in 1970, a new public interest group called Common Cause, heavily financed by Rockefeller interests—whose philanthropy has certainly mitigated to some extent the methods of an earlier generation—sued both the Republican and Democratic Parties for violating the Corrupt Practices Act, triggering a public clamor for election reform. The public, quite simply, was disgusted over influence-buying of politicians by large donors. It was in this milieu that the townhouse Operation warily functioned. See Herbert E. Alexander, ed.,
Campaign Money: Reform
and Reality in the States
(New York: Macmillan, 1976), pp. vii–ix.