The Family (41 page)

After the Blount debacle, George returned to Houston, and a few weeks later he flew to Washington, D.C., to spend the Christmas holidays with his family. He was twenty-six years old. During that time he went out drinking with his favorite brother, sixteen-year-old Marvin. Driving home that evening, George smashed into several garbage cans before making his way into the driveway. He swaggered into the house with the bravado of someone who had drunk too much, and there was his father, sober and unsmiling.

“You want to go mano a mano right here?” George junior challenged.

Some have suggested this incident symbolized young George’s defensiveness in the presence of his far more successful father. George shrugged it off years later. “It was probably the result of two stiff bourbons,” he said. “Nothing more.”

Friends of the senior Bushes say their frustration with the carousing of their eldest son was no secret. “I remember the old man saying he didn’t ever think young George would get it together,” said Cody Shearer. “He talked about it all the time.”

“I covered the Popster [George H. W. Bush] in Houston and have known him since 1970,” said the journalist John Mashek. “He was always shaking his head in despair over what to do about George junior.”

At the time of the “mano a mano” incident, his father’s concern was over the lack of judgment that had prompted George to take his underage brother out drinking and to drive home under the influence of alcohol.

Once again George Herbert Walker Bush picked up the telephone. This time he called John L. White, formerly with the Houston Oilers. Ambassador Bush said that he wanted his son to perform community service with Project PULL (Professional United Leadership League), a mentoring program for inner-city youth started by White and his teammate Ernie “Big Cat” Ladd.

“John knew George Bush’s father very well,” said White’s widow, Otho Raye White. “They wanted to build his [son’s] character at the time.”

George Herbert Walker Bush, who was on the PULL board, thanked John White a year later by using his influence to get PULL additional funding from Congress. An internal memo in the Gerald R. Ford Library to the Honorable George Bush dated August 16, 1974, states:

We have arranged for John White to receive some new guidelines and assistance from the National office.

New LEAA [Law Enforcement Alliance of America] legislation pending before the House and Senate Conference Committee will include direct funding authority for youth offenders and PULL related programs.

Will keep you advised.

John Calhoun, Staff Assistant to the President

Young George reported for work in January 1973 at PULL headquarters: a warehouse on McGowen Street in Houston’s tough Third Ward. “His dad and John White brought him right to the black belt,” said Ladd. “Any white guy that showed up on McGowen was gonna get caught in some tough situations. You better be able to handle yourself.”

The PULL program offered kids up to seventeen years of age sports, crafts, field trips, free snacks, rap sessions, tutoring for those who had been expelled, and big-name mentors from the athletic, entertainment, business, and political worlds. The summer after George senior negotiated a “conditional release” from Andover rather than expulsion for Marvin, he sent him to Houston to join George at PULL. The bad Bush brothers were the only two white boys in the place.

“They stood out like a sore thumb,” said Muriel Simmons Henderson, one of PULL’s senior counselors. “John White was a good friend of their father. He told us that the father wanted George W. to see the other side of life. He asked John if he would put him in there.”

Ernie Ladd recalled young George as “a super, super guy . . . If he was a stinker, I’d say he was a stinker. But everybody loved him so much. He had a way with people . . . They didn’t want him to leave.”

George stayed only seven months at PULL before he announced he had been accepted at Harvard Business School. On September 5, 1973, he requested his discharge from the Texas Air National Guard to go to graduate school. Having served five years, four months, and five days toward his six-year obligation, he received an honorable discharge. He would receive a second honorable discharge from the Air Force Reserve in November 1974 at the end of his six-month penalty.

When George arrived at Harvard to join the class of 1975, his father was running the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate. George, who espoused his father’s politics, found himself in a hostile political environment where Nixon was considered the Antichrist.

“Cambridge was a miserable place then to be a Republican,” recalled George’s aunt Nan Bush Ellis, who lived in Massachusetts, a state known as a Democratic stronghold. In the environs of the town that surrounded Harvard, only four hundred people were registered Republicans. George spent many weekends with his aunt and her family outside of Boston, lambasting Harvard’s “smug guilt-ridden affected liberals.”

“I remember seeing Georgie at the Harvard Business School,” said Torbert Macdonald, his classmate from Andover, “but he looked so lost and forlorn I didn’t have the heart to say hello.”

Most of the class of 1975 at the B-school knew they were headed for Wall Street, but not George. “He was trying to figure out what to do with his life,” said his classmate Al Hubbard. “He was there to get prepared, but he didn’t know for what.”

Other classmates were not quite as generous in assessing George’s aptitude. “He was remarkably inarticulate,” said Steve Arbeit. “God, so inarticulate it was frightening. The reason I say that he is dumber than dumb is not that I saw his test scores or his grades; it’s the comments he made in the classes we had together that scared me . . . He was totally unimpressive in an atmosphere where you were judged completely on your class participation.

“There’s always a layer of kids who are in the school because their parents are somebody. It’s almost a legacy sort of thing. Most of them acted like everybody else, except for George, who would not say hello to someone like me if we passed in the hall . . . I’m not the same social class. My father is not chairman of something . . . So unlike most of the people who try to pretend you-don’t-know-who-my-dad-is type of thing, George was the opposite.”

Ruth Owades, chairman of Calyx and Corolla, a flower catalog company, and a member of George’s class, remembered people pointing him out. “At a place like Harvard Business School, you always knew who the sons or daughters of famous people were—but mostly the sons. And then there were the rest of us.”

Alf Nucifora, another classmate, recalled George as a “nonentity with a rich boy’s attitude who obviously got into school because of the divine right of kings . . . You did not see a great future for this man. There’s no way that any sane individual could ever have made such a prediction.”

During his first year George came to the attention of Yoshi Tsurumi when the macroeconomics professor announced his plan to show the film
The Grapes of Wrath
, based on John Steinbeck’s book about the Great Depression. “I wanted to give the class a visual reference for poverty and a sense of historical empathy,” Tsurumi explained. “George Bush came up to me and said, ‘Why are you going to show us that Commie movie?’

“I laughed because I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. After we viewed the film, I called on him to discuss the Depression and how he thought it affected people. He said, ‘Look. People are poor because they are lazy.’ A number of the students pounced on him and demanded that he support his statement with facts and statistics. He quickly backed down because he could not sustain his broadside.”

Professor Tsurumi continued: “His strong prejudices soon set him apart from the rest of the students. This has nothing to do with politics, because most business students are conservative, but they are not inhumane or unprincipled. Unlike most of the others in class, George Bush came across as totally lacking compassion, with no sense of history, completely devoid of social responsibility, and unconcerned with the welfare of others. Even among Republicans his kind was rare. He had no shame about his views, and that’s when the rest of the class started treating him like a clown—not someone funny, but someone whose views were not worthy of consideration . . . I did not judge him to be stupid, just spoiled and undisciplined . . . I gave him a ‘low pass.’ Of the one hundred students in that class, George Bush was in the bottom 10 percent. He was so abysmal that I once asked him how he ever got accepted in the first place. He said, ‘I had lots of help.’ I laughed, and then inquired about his military service. He said he had been in the Texas National Guard. I said he was very lucky not to have had to go to Vietnam. He said, ‘My dad fixed it so that I got into the Guard. I got an early discharge to come here.’”

From the eight hundred people in the class of 1975, George stood out, and not because of who his father was. “I don’t remember if he was one of the Texans who had Aggie horns on the front of his big American-made car—most of them did—but I can still see him in his cowboy boots and leather flight jacket walking into macroeconomics,” recalled one classmate. “He sat in the back of the class, chewing tobacco and spitting it into a dirty paper cup . . . He was one red-assed Texan who made sure he was in your Yankee face and up your New England nose.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
would pay to do this job,” Barbara told the reporter from the
New York Post
. She twirled around the State Room of the Waldorf-Astoria, pointing out the paintings on loan from the Whitney Museum. “That’s a Bellows, a Sargent . . . and you did notice the two Gilbert Stuarts? In our own rotunda. You did get that. Didn’t you?” She reeled off all the parties she had attended as the wife of the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

“Of course we went to the wedding,” she said, referring to the White House nuptials of Tricia Nixon in the Rose Garden. “Then last week we had a reception of about 50 late one afternoon. African ambassadors of five nations came to meet 12 black college presidents and their wives who are going to spend six weeks in Africa. And we took six people from the Japanese embassy . . . to Greenwich . . . Before that we had a seated dinner of 36. And we had six Mets over yesterday . . . They had lunch with George at the UN and came over here in the afternoon.”

Barbara loved the social whirl and never wanted it to end. But after President Nixon was reelected, in 1972, he called for the resignations of all political appointees. George had made twenty-eight major speeches during the campaign, so he was assured another position in the administration, but he didn’t know what it would be.

“If it’s the Republican National Committee, promise me you won’t take it,” Barbara said as he was leaving to meet with the President. “Anything but the R.N.C.”

The last thing Barbara wanted was to descend from her lofty perch as an Ambassador’s wife and chase around the rubber-chicken circuit as the wife of a party hack. Having spent twelve months dealing with diplomats at the United Nations, George fancied himself an expert in foreign policy, and he longed to be named Secretary of State or, at the very least, Deputy Secretary. In a letter to the President promoting himself as a diplomat, George said: “I have been dealing happily, and I hope effectively, with the top international leadership.”

The President, who described George as “a total Nixon man,” had other ideas. While cursing “Ivy League bastards,” Nixon knew George to be one Ivy Leaguer he could count on for slavish loyalty. “Eliminate the politicians,” he told his chief of staff, “except George Bush. He’ll do anything for the cause.” H. R. Haldeman agreed. “[George] takes our line beautifully.” On November 20, 1972, the President invited George to Camp David and offered him the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. George accepted on the spot.

The next day, after talking to Barbara, he wrote to the President:

Frankly, your choice for me came as quite a surprise particularly to Barbara. The rarefied atmosphere of international affairs plus the friendships in New York and the Cabinet seem threatened to her. She is convinced that all our friends in Congress, in public life, in God knows where—will say, “George screwed it up at the U.N. and the President has loyally found a suitable spot.” Candidly, there will be some of this. But—here’s my answer—Your first choice was the Republican National Committee. I will do it!

Previous George H.W. Bush biographers, all handpicked and approved by Bush, have written that George “very reluctantly” accepted the “unenviable job” as if he were a servant beholden to his master. “It was to be . . . a sacrifice on the altar of loyalty,” wrote Nicholas King. “It was . . . more of a political albatross,” wrote Herbert Parmet. “It was . . . like being made Captain of the Titanic,” wrote Fitzhugh Green.

Not so. George might have indicated such feelings after Watergate became an international scandal and forced Nixon’s resignation, but at the time he was offered the Republican National Committee, he did not hesitate. Not for one second. He knew that a President was made by a hundred thousand chicken dinners and a million handshakes in small towns across America. According to unpublished entries in his diary, he saw the RNC as an important stepping-stone. Not only was he serving the President he admired; he was meeting the people he needed to know in order to make another tilt at national office. Looking toward 1976, George knew that being on a first-name basis with Republican National Committeemen, precinct chairmen, and major fund-raisers was crucial if he was to position himself for the presidency.

William J. Clark (Yale 1945W), who was in Skull and Bones with George, outlined the strategy he was to follow in a “Dear Poppy” letter dated January 31, 1973:

Tactics: The first step is to name Bush as Chairman of the Republican Party, fresh from his prestigious assignment at the U.N. For two years Bush travels around the country meeting every state and county chairman, establishing his credentials, charming the big money amateurs, and setting up a lot of debts during the ’74 campaign for later collection.

George’s position at the Republican National Committee did nothing for the social aspirations of his wife, and Barbara did not hide her disappointment from the President. The writer Gore Vidal recalled a conversation with his friend Murray Kempton shortly after one of the journalist’s periodic lunches with Richard Nixon. Kempton had mentioned George Bush, and according to Vidal, Nixon had responded: “Total light-weight. Nothing there—sort of person you appoint to things—but now that Barbara, she’s something else again! She’s really vindictive!” Vidal characterized the comment as “the highest Nixonian compliment.”

George had countered his wife’s objections about leaving the UN to return to Washington, D.C. “You can’t turn a president down,” he told her. Barbara had to know that her husband would have wrapped himself in a feather boa and tramped through Times Square in high heels before he would have said no to Richard Nixon.

Yet George frankly acknowledged in a letter to his sons that he did not have the President’s complete confidence because he was one of those “Ivy League bastards”:

The President’s hang-up on Ivy League is two-fold. The first relates to issues. He sees the Ivy League type as the Kennedy liberal Kingman Brewster on the war—arrogant, self-assured, soft professors moving the country left. Soft on Communism in the past—soft on socialistic programs at home—fighting him at every turn—close to the editors that hate him. In this issue context he equates Ivy League with anti-conservatism and certainly anti-Nixon.

Secondly I believe there is a rather insecure social kind of hang-up. Ivy League connotes privilege and softness in a tea sipping, martini drinking, tennis playing sense. There’s an enormous hang-up here that comes through an awful lot. I feel it personally. It stings but it doesn’t bleed . . . But I must confess that I am convinced that deep in his heart he feels I’m soft, not tough enough, not willing to do the “gut job” that his political instincts have taught him must be done.

A month after George’s appointment was announced, G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord were convicted of breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate and illegally wiretapping the premises. A week later the Senate established the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to be chaired by Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North Carolina. Televised hearings were to begin in May 1973.

George, an inveterate diarist, kept an RNC diary like the one he had kept at the UN and would keep in China and later as Vice President. He tried to dictate his thoughts into a tape recorder every day and gave the tapes to his secretary to transcribe. His diaries may have lacked the felicity of Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century British Admiralty officer whose diaries set the historical standard for delicious bons mots on the ways of court, but George’s unpublished comments provide a contemporaneous account of feelings that he later tried to deny. In one diary entry (March 13, 1974), he acknowledged his ability to squirm in and out of duplicity: “I have been calling them as I see them, so far. Bending, stretching a little here or there, insisting that things that I don’t want to put my name on have the White House name on them, not mine.”

From his diary it is clear that when George took over the Republican National Committee, he believed in President Nixon’s innocence. In fact, George was about the last Republican in Washington to finally recognize the President’s complicity.

On April 17, 1973, George seemed slightly concerned about “the grubby Watergate matter” because people were mailing in their RNC membership cards, saying they no longer desired to belong to the party. But he never faltered in his belief in Richard Nixon. He met with the Republican leadership, who recommended that he tell the President to waive executive privilege so that his White House counsel, John Dean, could testify before the Senate Watergate Committee. George requested a meeting with the President to relay the information: “I told him that his overall great record was being obscured by this mess . . . The President was cool, thoroughly understands the problem and that talk did much to reassure me that the matter will be cleared up.”

On July 11, 1973, it was revealed that Senator Lowell Weicker, a member of the Watergate Committee, had received money during his 1970 campaign from Operation Townhouse, the Nixon slush fund set up to funnel cash to Republican candidates.

The day after the story appeared, George called Weicker to tell him that he, too, had received funds from Operation Townhouse for his failed Texas Senate campaign. According to Weicker, Bush asked whether he should burn the record of all the Townhouse transactions. Weicker had received $6,000, all of which he had reported. Bush had received $106,000, of which only $66,000 had been reported. “George wanted to burn all the pay-outs,” said Weicker. “Not just his own.”

Weicker, who lived in Alexandria, Virginia, next to John Dean, had been warned that the illegal campaign contribution might be used against him if he continued speaking out against the administration. Weicker wondered if Bush’s phone call on July 12, 1973, might be a ploy to sabotage him.

“[George’s question about burning the list] was a very peculiar question, coming as it did not long after I had requested publicly that the special prosecutor’s office investigate the Townhouse fund,” Weicker recalled. “Destroying potential evidence is a criminal offense. It came to mind that the call might be an attempt to set me up, and I wondered if Bush was taping it. My response would have been the same whether he was or he wasn’t.

“‘Until now,’ I said, ‘Watergate has been a scandal of the Nixon reelection committee. You burn that list and you’re making it a scandal of the entire Republican Party.’”

George later denied that he had suggested burning the records. Weicker stood by his recollection. “I know what he said. That is one conversation, shall we say, that was burned in my mind.”

The Nixon White House had reason to fear Lowell Weicker. “He was a Republican who spoke out about the wrongfulness of their actions,” said Sam Dash, chief counsel to the select committee. “He was, to use the Nixon term at the time, ‘off the reservation.’ Without Lowell Weicker we would never have had John Dean’s testimony, because, according to the immunity statute, I needed a two-third’s vote of the committee. If it had just been three Democrats against three Republicans, I could never have given Dean immunity, but Weicker gave me his vote. This enabled us to get Dean’s testimony. Without that, there would have been no case.”

Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs that during one of their early meetings, George had expressed concern about the ever-widening Watergate scandal. As always, George’s concerns were practical rather than moral. “He privately pleaded for some action that would get us off the defensive.” George found that “action” on July 24, 1973, the day after the Senate Watergate Committee served the President with a subpoena ordering him to turn over the White House tapes. George managed to temporarily derail the committee’s investigation of the President by spearheading a campaign against the committee’s top investigator, Carmine Bellino.

At a hastily called press conference, George produced affidavits from three private investigators—one was dead, and the other two had been convicted of illegal wiretapping—alleging that Bellino, through an intermediary, had attempted to hire them in 1960 to bug the Washington hotel where Nixon had been preparing for his television debates with John F. Kennedy, for whom Bellino had been working as a campaign aide.

Bush said he believed that Nixon’s hotel suite had been illegally wiretapped before his 1960 debates and that if true, such bugging could very well have affected the outcome of the 1960 presidential election. “The Nixon-Kennedy election was a real cliff hanger,” said Bush, “and the debates bore heavily on the outcome . . . I cannot and do not vouch for the veracity of the statements contained in these affidavits but . . .”

Bush’s charges detonated an outcry from twenty-two Republicans, who signed a petition calling for an investigation of the allegations against Bellino. Senator Ervin appointed three members of the Senate Watergate Committee to look into the charges, and Sam Dash appointed the committee’s assistant chief counsel, David Dorsen, to oversee the investigation.

“It was a frame-up,” said Dash, now a professor of law at Georgetown University. “We were all angry about it. We thought Bellino was a man of great integrity, and we thought the charges against him were an effort by people who thought they could harm the integrity of the committee by harming its chief investigator. Both Sam Ervin and I believed then that this was a Nixon dirty trick—an effort by the Republicans to put us off the track from doing the work of the committee.”

Bellino denied Bush’s charges and accused him of slander and defamation. “Mr. Bush has attempted to distract me from carrying out what I consider one of the most important assignments of my life,” he said at the time.

The investigation of Bush’s charges lasted two and a half months before Bellino was cleared. After calling him “an honorable and faithful public servant,” Senator Ervin announced, “There was not a scintilla of competent or credible evidence . . . to sustain the charges against Bellino.”

The committee lawyers admitted that the investigation into Bush’s charges had indeed slowed them down. “It hurt us a lot,” Bellino said shortly before his death. “I think it was a terrible thing that George Bush did. His charges were absolutely false. Bush was doing the bidding of the White House. His real reason was to disrupt my work because I had all the financial records of H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson. In fact, there were some things that have never come out. But once you had that smoking gun with Alexander Butterfield admitting to Nixon’s bugging the White House—that was enough to proceed on.