The Family (42 page)

“Still Bush could have destroyed the case completely if Butterfield hadn’t come along . . . Without that they [the committee] would have given up. The Republicans didn’t want the investigation to continue for a long time.”

George Bush never apologized to Carmine Bellino before he died in 1990. Years later, when asked about Bush’s charges against Bellino, Sam Dash sighed. “Carmine Bellino was one of the finest financial investigators in the country. His integrity was beyond reproach . . . I guess the best that can be said of George Bush at the time was that he was vulnerable. He didn’t do enough checking himself, and he allowed himself to be used.”

Bush’s “dirty trick” bought the White House some time in 1973, but not enough to avoid scandal. On October 10, Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President for accepting cash payments from Maryland businessmen in the White House. Bush met with the President a few days later and expressed his support for Agnew. George said that he and Barbara planned to call upon the former Vice President, whom they personally liked and respected:

I said I might be criticized for this but I felt affection for the man. The President indicated I did just the right thing and he told me he himself had bought Agnew his Cabinet chair ($600) . . . Nixon talked at some length . . . on the Agnew matter saying that he was caught up in something that had been a way of life in Maryland, and others had done it for a long long time and that if the same spotlight was put on other public figures that was put on Agnew those figures would not measure up (paraphrase).

George was eager to show Richard Nixon how loyal he was:

I also told the President that I had been urged . . . to run for Governor of Texas but that I had decided not to do it now. I felt there was a chance for a Republican to win and it would be important but I felt that my leaving might inadvertently increase the speculation that I had no confidence in the administration—it might add an air of instability . . . The President agreed that it would be good to stay on the job.

Even after most of the Republican establishment accepted the inevitability of the President’s guilt, George remained committed to Nixon and continued sending out “Support the President” information from the Republican National Committee. One Republican senator called to complain that the party should remain separate from the presidency. “I made the distinction that I was speaking out against Watergate,” said George, “but we weren’t going to separate from the President.”

His fealty toward Nixon produced several snipes at Henry Kissinger, whom George felt had leapfrogged to prominence on the back of a beleaguered President. A diary entry from October 13, 1973, reads: “I also couldn’t help but think of the irony when Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize. Here was Nixon taking all the flack [
sic
] on the war, Kissinger executing his policies, and Henry walking away with a coveted honor.”

Kissinger’s “high-handed” tactics and his “enormous ego problem” continued to annoy George. On November 30, 1973, he wrote: “I am troubled by the fact that Kissinger gets the Nobel Prize. Kissinger gets credit for the Middle East and the President gets credit for bombing Hanoi and no credit for the Middle East.”

Finally, on December 3, 1973, George shared his indignation with the President:

I mentioned the fact that I did not appreciate the comment that Kissinger had made when he was in China. I told the President that although Al Haig had explained the matter to me I still wasn’t happy because it is Nixon’s bombing but it’s Kissinger’s Nobel Prize. It’s the President standing down the Russians but it’s Kissinger’s Middle East peace . . . I said that Haig had told me that he had fired off a cable to Kissinger asking about what Kissinger had meant when he said that no matter who is President the policy will go on. Kissinger came back and said he had been misquoted. The President looked knowingly at me on all of this, indicating that we both know where the support really lies. It all brought home to me that a President weakened by a scandal must indeed put up with certain things he never would put up with if he were not in that shape.

As much as Nixon said he despised Ivy Leaguers, he selected one to continue the short life of his second term. After Agnew resigned, the President nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford (Yale Law School 1941) to take his place. It was the first use of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which had been added to the Constitution in 1967 after President Kennedy’s assassination to provide procedures for promptly filling the vacancy of Vice President or President. Ford was sworn in on December 6, 1973.

By January 1974 George’s diary had recorded the President’s growing agitation over the impeachment inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee. He considered stepping forward to say, “Impeach me or get off my back.” He sent George to the Republican leadership to see what they thought. George reported back, and Nixon dropped the idea. He told George: “We will be in for a tough two or three months.”

Again eager to show his unwavering devotion, George told the President how he was responding to criticisms against the administration: “I told him how I had answered some of the questions—that my kids were not being drafted, that nobody was shooting at George as a jet pilot. [George was attending Harvard Business School.] He [the President] seemed interested in how I was handling some of the issues.”

George groused about the “unfair” treatment Nixon was getting from the press and took a shot at the Kennedys, who he felt “always got a free pass”: “They talk about the bombing of Cambodia, but there is no mention of JFK and the Bay of Pigs.”

George’s need for the President’s approval comes through in his diary: “Al Haig told me that the President felt I was doing a good job . . . Rose Mary Woods [Nixon’s secretary] said the same thing.”

George continued to be in awe of Nixon, even as evidence of corruption piled up, pointing to the President’s illegal abuse of power. When experts determined one of the tapes in Nixon’s possession had been deliberately erased five times, showing an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, George jumped to his defense. “That deletion or whatever it was has nothing to do with the President,” he said. He accepted all of Nixon’s shifting explanations without question.

On April 5, 1974, George recorded in his diary that he had visited the President in the White House:

The desk was as clean as ever—shined—certain unreality about all of that at least compared to the way I do work and most everybody else does. There is never a scrap of paper on that desk except for a file or two in a very orderly fashion. I would say this is a positive thing in the President’s case—ordered, neat, tidy, ready for decision, etc.

During the spring of 1974, Dean Burch, formerly chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had been brought to the White House as counselor to the President and liaison between the White House and the Republican National Committee. He and George had the unpleasant task of telling the President about party defections and Republicans who would not step forward to support him. Again George recorded Nixon’s reactions with admiration: “He recognized people were trying to get him or pile on but he remained very cool. His responses were manly and there was no anger. Frankly if things had gotten that screwed up as they were . . . I would have been inclined to blame me or Burch or somebody. But he didn’t do this at all.”

George recalled his reaction to one particularly difficult meeting in which the President had been told about the number of Republican candidates who did not want him to campaign for them:

My distinct feeling in being with the President to whom I feel loyalty and indebtedness but never very close on a personal basis—my distinct feeling at the end of this meeting was that I had left a real man. With all the problems that he had it is a sad thing when every chicken shit politician across the country can be joined by many of the Nixon haters in the press to put the worst possible cast on things.

George berated the media: “The press doesn’t understand this. It’s all very easy for them. You slam a guy. You carve him up. You do your thing. You get the story and the headline. But they don’t understand this question of loyalty, the question of what’s fair, what’s right.”

On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled 8–0 that the President did not have “absolute authority” to control material that had been subpoenaed. He was ordered to turn over the tapes. Among the shocking revelations on the transcripts was the “smoking gun” tape—a conversation recorded on June 23, 1972, in which Nixon told Haldeman to block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in, which had occurred six days earlier.

At that point Senator Barry Goldwater told George that the President did not have the votes in the Senate to survive an impeachment by the House. By then almost everyone, except George, had accepted the inevitable. On August 6, 1974, Nixon held his last cabinet meeting, which George recorded in his diary:

My heart went totally out to him even though I felt deeply betrayed by his lie of the day before. [He is referring to the “smoking gun” tape, which had become public.] The man is amoral. He has a different sense than the rest of people. He came up the hard way. He hung tough. He hunkered down, he stonewalled. He became President of the United States and a damn good one in many ways, but now it had all caught up with him. All the people he hated—Ivy League, press, establishment, Democrats, privileged—all of this ended up biting him and bringing him down.

Al Haig told George on August 7, 1974, that the President would announce his intention to resign the next day. Only then did George write a letter calling for just such a resignation:

Dear Mr. President:

It is my considered judgment that you should now resign. I expect in your lonely embattled position this would seem to you as an act of disloyalty from one you have supported and helped in so many ways . . . [G]iven the impact of the latest development, and it will be a lasting one, I now feel that resignation is best for the country, best for this President. I believe this view is held by most Republican leaders across the country. This letter is much more difficult because of the gratitude I will always feel toward you.

He had his letter delivered to the White House hours before the President went on television to announce his resignation. To some stalwarts George looked like he had dismounted his white horse long enough to kick the corpse before it was dragged out of town. By the time he called for the President’s resignation, his letter looked almost gratuitous, as if it were nothing more than a breathless dash for the history books. “I wanted to be fair,” George told Roy Reed of
The New York Times
, “but I didn’t want to step in it and track it into the living room.”

George exonerated himself in his diary:

I don’t want to pile on. I don’t want to add to the woes of the President. I don’t want to increase the agony of his family. And yet I want to make damn clear the lie is something we can’t support . . . I suppose when it is written one can establish that perhaps I should have done more, but I am not made up to walk on the body of a man whom I don’t love but whom I respect for his accomplishments.

Again he scorched the media:

The incivility of the press had been a disturbing and paralyzing kind of thing over the last few months. And now it continues, that blood lust, the talons sharpened and clutched, ready to charge in there and grab the carrion of this President . . . Nixon’s enemies can now gloat because they have proved he is what they said he is. No credit, no compassion, no healing, simply the meat-grinder at work.

He told friends he was relieved his father had not lived through the Watergate scandal. “I’m really glad Dad is not alive. It would have killed him to see this happen. He thought we were the party of virtue and all bosses were Democrats.”

In the last Nixon cabinet meeting as reconstructed by Henry Kissinger, George was described as “petty and insensitive,” bowing and scraping like a “courtier” to improve his own position, concerned with himself rather than his country.

Gerald Ford was sworn in as President on August 9, 1974, after Nixon had left the White House in a helicopter. To the end the former President refused to accept disgrace. His parting gesture was to stand at the top of the steps with his arms outstretched and his fingers extended in Vs for victory. His bizarre ear-to-ear grin exuded sheer defiance.

George did not wait twenty-four hours before making his lunge for the vice presidency:

We have had a lot of press calls about Ford picking me for Vice President. [Rep.] Bill Steiger [R-WI] called and said that he and Martha Griffiths [D-MI] had decided that I was the guy. . . . Mary Matthews in [Rep.] Barber Conable’s office said that Barber [R-NY] had said that’s what it should be. Jerry Pettis [R-CA] said that he and many are undertaking it. The press are hypothecating [
sic
].

Ford had announced that he would poll Republicans in and out of government for their recommendations. Telegrams were sent by the RNC, specifying that preferences be wired back to the chairman—none other than George H.W. Bush—which may or may not have skewed the results: 255 for Bush and 181 for Rockefeller. No one else was close.

On August 9, 1974, George recorded in his diary: “Suspense mounting again. Deep down inside I think maybe it should work this time. I have that inner feeling that it will finally abort. I sure hope not. Another defeat in this line is going to be tough but then again it is awful egotistical to think I should be selected.”

After previous attempts to get himself on the national ticket, George had become proficient in self-promotion. In 1968 he had bombarded Nixon with letters from America’s financial establishment. This time he went for the Republican heartland, and President Ford was inundated with letters from congressmen, state legislators, governors, and mayors.

On August 12, 1974, the new President summoned George to the White House to ask his views about the vice presidency.