In later years other women would comment on the way Barbara “mothered” her husband. “I was working at CBS-TV when I first met the Bushes,” recalled Carol Ross Joynt. “He came into the Green Room with a gray-haired woman who I thought was his mother. Someone told me she was his wife, and I became fascinated by their dynamic because they were not a matched pair . . . He engaged women immediately. He’s not a lecher, but he makes eye contact with sexual energy. He’s polite and does not behave improperly—he’s no Bill Clinton—but the sexual message is there. She [Barbara] is oblivious to it all. She’s supremely confident and in charge of him like a mother overseeing her child. It’s clear that she’s the one in the relationship who totally wears the pants . . . and it’s also clear that he relies on her.”
Roberta Hornig Draper, whose husband was the U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem, met the Bushes when they visited Israel. “Barbara seemed to wet-nurse George like a little boy. She brushed the dandruff off his shoulders, she straightened his tie, and she was always pushing him along the way. She didn’t tie his shoes or wipe his runny nose, but you get the idea.”
“I can tell you that when I met Barbara Bush in China she was most sensitive to the plight of an unhappy marriage,” said the writer Phyllis Theroux. “My then-husband had taken the first group of American businessmen to China—the head of Cargill and Westinghouse and Manufacturers Hanover Trust and John Deere—all big guns . . . Our marriage was in deep trouble at the time, and I don’t know how Barbara Bush figured this out, but she knew I wasn’t happy. I was married to a very ambitious young man and there were strains . . . She said to me, ‘You know there are times when you really just have to sort of take a backseat and realize that your husband is in a phase in his life where you’re just not going to have a lot of time with him. But believe me, it will get better.’
“I remember being so grateful to her for those words that I impulsively grabbed her hand and kissed it. She was probably a little taken back by that but she was not overcome. She didn’t go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and she didn’t put her arms around me. She just accepted it . . . She obviously knew what she was talking about when it came to unhappiness within a marriage.”
By the time Barbara returned to China in 1975, after three months away, she had decided to fill her hyperactive husband’s life with a continual flow of visitors to occupy his attention—congressional tours, American businessmen, visiting diplomats, personal friends, and family. George noted his wife’s effort in his diary: “Bar is knocking herself out for these guests and I do hope they appreciate it. She is marvelous at showing people around and all of that.”
On April 30, 1975, George and Barbara were attending a reception at the Netherlands’ embassy when they received word that Saigon had fallen. Later George recalled the evening:
The Vietcong were there. Three little guys about four feet high that rushed happily out of the room. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese embassies are bedecked in flags and having understandable celebrations. Firecrackers . . . It is a rather sad thing and you can sense the hostility and certainly the tension when I walk by certain groups at these receptions . . . The whole aftermath of Vietnam making me slightly sick.
Four of the five Bush children arrived in Peking in June 1975. Twenty-two-year-old Jeb stayed in Houston, where he held a job with the Texas Commerce Bank. To his parents’ great consternation, he had recently married a young Mexican woman named Columba Garnica Gallo, who did not speak English. George had just graduated from Harvard Business School; Neil, twenty, was an undergraduate at Tulane; Marvin, nineteen, was about to enter the University of Virginia (thanks to the intercession of the Bemiss family); and Doro was about to turn sixteen. Since most of the family was together for the first time in years, Doro decided to celebrate her birthday by finally getting baptized, which George noted in his diary:
What an experience. Baptism in Communist China . . . The Chinese wonder why we were doing it. Bar explained that we wanted the family together and hadn’t been able to do it [before this] . . . We were happy the Chinese agreed to do it after they consulted in a meeting . . . A very special day, an occasion.
During that visit the family also celebrated young George’s twenty-ninth birthday, which his father noted in his diary on July 6, 1975: “He is off to Midland, starting a little later in life than I did, but nevertheless starting out on what I hope will be a challenging new life for him. He is able. If he gets his teeth into something semi-permanent or permanent, he will do just fine.”
Weeks before, George had expressed concern over his son’s future. “He talked about young George to me on occasion,” said Gene Theroux, a Washington, D.C., attorney who headed the National Council on U.S.-China Trade. “He didn’t think his son was headed in the right direction then to ever amount to much.” The elder Bush had met Sandy Randt Jr., who graduated from Yale in George’s class. Bemoaning young George’s footloose life, his father said, “Will he ever get his act together?” This was a family refrain for many years.
The nonstop stream of houseguests provided constant distraction, and so many requests for visas that the State Department complained George was doing too much entertaining.
“There wasn’t anything else for him to do,” said the administrative officer of the U.S. mission. “Our [U.S.] embassy was in Taipei and Kissinger was on top of that, so George didn’t have a thing to do but maintain an American presence in Peking . . . Ambassador Bruce had paved the way and he was the best choice to be our first representative after recognizing China because he was our most illustrious diplomat. The Chinese would’ve taken exception if we had sent anyone with less prestige than David Bruce . . . George was a good replacement because by then the Chinese revered Richard Nixon, and they knew that George, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, had been Nixon’s man, so they felt they were getting the President’s right hand when George arrived. You needed to tell the Chinese that they had someone powerful in the U.S. compound, otherwise they would lose face. Because of George’s close relationship with Nixon he looked powerful to the Chinese. They didn’t care about Watergate. They tape-record people all the time, so that was no big deal. Breaking into offices to steal papers was routine to them, and lying was all in a day’s work, so Watergate was not a detriment to George in China.
“Although it was a nothing job and George had nothing to do but eat and drink and play Ping-Pong, he did it well. He was not at all like David Bruce, who was a grandee and would not attend diplomatic receptions because, as head of the liaison office, he would have had to stand in line behind the Palestine Liberation Organization and David Bruce was simply not going to do that. Nor was Bruce about to socialize with a bunch of tacky second-rate diplomats at a Nigerian festival or the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia, but the Bushes loved those sorts of things and went to every reception they could. Bruce was a Brahmin; George was just a schmoozer . . . We would never have thought of calling Mr. Bruce anything but Mr. Ambassador, whereas everyone called George by his first name . . . The Chinese let us know in no uncertain terms that George was not considered an Ambassador. They said his title from the UN was simply a courtesy moniker without diplomatic weight. They called him ‘Busher’ and did not accommodate him like they did Ambassador Bruce. They never said no. But if we’d ask if ‘Busher’ could see the Chairman, the Chinese would say, ‘Not convenient right now.’ Never no.”
George would not be permitted to meet Chairman Mao Tse-tung until President Ford visited China in December 1975. By then, George had packed his bags and was ready to go home.
He had started growing restless in the spring of 1975. After six months, China had lost its exotic appeal, national-day celebrations had grown stale, and his political juices had started percolating. Always restless for the next appointment that might put him closer to becoming President, George rarely lasted more than a year in any of his jobs. There was never enough time for him to make a substantive contribution, other than acquiring an impressive credential. He wrote to his friend Nicholas Brady, chairman of Wall Street’s Dillon, Read: “I’m sitting out here trying to figure out what to do with my life.”
His boredom seemed to communicate itself to members of the Andover board of trustees, who were perplexed by his obsession with parietals—the rules governing dormitory visits by the opposite sex. “He seemed to have an unhealthy interest in parietals,” recalled Gene Young, an Andover board member. “Parietals—that’s what his main concern was when he was in Beijing. I mean, messages would float in from him about parietals . . . Probably one of his sons had gotten into trouble in an earlier time, but it struck us all as a funny thing for an Ambassador to China to be worried about.”
George began to consider his political career. He noted in his diary:
Giving a little thought to possibly running for governor of Texas. I have time to think this out. The plan might be to go home after the elections in ’76, settle down in Houston in a rather flexible business thing, shoot for the governorship in ’78, though it might be extremely difficult to win. Should I win it, it would be an excellent position again for national politics, and should I lose, it would be a nice way to get statewide politics out of my system once and for all. I hate to undertake another losing campaign and I am a little out of touch with what it all means down there, but I can get a little quiet work done on the situation.
George would not have to face another losing campaign. On November 1, 1975, he received a wire from Henry Kissinger marked “Secret sensitive exclusively eyes only”:
The President is planning to announce some major personnel shifts on Monday, November 3 . . . The President asks that you consent to his nominating you as the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency . . . Regretfully, we have only the most limited time before the announcement and the President would therefore appreciate a most urgent response.
“Oh, no, George,” said Barbara with tears in her eyes.
Congressional hearings had exposed the CIA’s felonious misdeeds—secret drug testing on human beings, spying on U.S. citizens, and assassination plots against foreign leaders. But after fourteen months in China, George was ready to leave. He wired Kissinger immediately and accepted:
Henry, you did not know my father. The President did. My dad inculated into his sons a set of values that have served me well. In my own short public life, one of these values quite simply is that one should serve his country and his president. And so if this is what the President wants me to do the answer is a firm “yes.” In all candor I would not have selected this controversial position if the decision had been mine, but I serve at the pleasure of our president and I do not believe in complicating his already enormously difficult job.
George asked that prior to the public announcement his mother and his five children be called and told the following:
The president has asked us to leave China. He wants me to head the CIA. I said yes. This new job will be full of turmoil and controversy and Mum and I know that it will not make things easy for you. Some of your friends simply won’t understand. There is ugliness and turmoil swirling around the agency obscuring its fundamental importance to our country. I feel I must try to help. I hope you understand. Soon we can talk it over. Love.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
P
rescott S. Bush III was the elder son of George H.W. Bush’s older brother, Prescott Jr. Prescott III, or P3, as his family called him, liked to regale friends with wild tales of trolling through the Lower East Side bars of Canal Street in New York City. One friend recalled: “He used to tell us crazy stories of hanging out with black hookers, who were shooting up noca crystalline, and one hooker in particular, who was pregnant. She sat on a bar stool and squeezed milk from her breasts into an arc which Prescott tried to catch in his mouth.”
The namesake grandson of Senator Prescott Bush had not followed his family’s trajectory to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He had made it from Andover through Yale (class of 1970), and in the tradition of all Bush men he even married well, albeit briefly. The young woman had come from what the Bushes called “a good family”—a socially recognized family with money. She was acceptable on all counts, save one: she was a Democrat. When she mailed her wedding invitations, she made sure each envelope carried a stamp that bore the picture of a Democratic President. “Just a subtle little rebellion,” recalled one of her bridesmaids. The invitations to Greenwich arrived with the jaunty image of FDR, condemned by the Bushes’ country-club set as a traitor to his class.
Shortly after the wedding the newlyweds traveled to Europe intending to live in Greece, but once there Prescott went out for a walk one afternoon and never returned to the marital bed. The intimacy required of marriage, plus the weight of his family’s impossible expectations, came crashing down on him. P3 could no longer cope. He wandered through Europe for a while and stayed with relatives in Switzerland while his parents flew to his young wife’s side and helped her return to the United States.
“He stayed with us for a while,” said a cousin, “but then his family called because they were concerned and they were looking for him, which absolutely scared him stiff. He had a thing about the family not finding him. I don’t know what the basis of that was, because Prescott junior and his wife are both very kind people, but whatever had shifted in their son was directed to hiding from his family.”
A discreet divorce ensued on the grounds of abandonment, and the young bride never saw Prescott S. Bush III again. He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
“I met him years after that and he said he had been institutionalized for a long time. He talked a lot about it. He appeared to be heavily medicated, but he was a sweet guy, although obviously odd and highly eccentric. We all hung out in Florida with mutual friends, and then got together in New York for a while. We even visited his parents in Greenwich, but I got the feeling that they just wished he’d go away,” said a friend. “His father was a harrumphy type of guy, and he considered Pressy an embarrassment, because, of course, Pressy had the family name . . . but he obviously wasn’t going anywhere with it—he wasn’t going to be a senator like his grandfather or even president of the Greenwich Country Club like his father—so his parents acted like they didn’t want to have much to do with him.”
By January 27, 1976, Prescott S. Bush III had moved to a scabby apartment in the East Village of Manhattan. “He hadn’t been in touch with his family for many years, and he didn’t pay attention to the news. He told us he was sitting in a coffee shop with his roommates, who claimed to be part of the Weathermen Underground movement. I’m sure Pressy wasn’t involved in any of their revolutionary actions—planting bombs in government buildings and blowing up town houses and the like . . . Pressy’s refuge was bird-watching and reading Greek and studying the literature he had read at Yale . . . But he said he happened to see a newspaper lying on the floor and he noticed on the front page that his uncle George Herbert Walker Bush had just been made head of the CIA . . . Pressy kicked the paper under the table because he didn’t think it would be a good idea for the Weathermen to know that he was related to the head of the CIA.”
The relationship would not have done George Bush any good either. His confirmation process had been contentious. Both Democrats and Republicans had objected to him as being too partial, too political, and too partisan. Imagine the outcry had those senators learned that George’s nephew was living with members of a covert terrorist organization whose stated goal was inciting armed revolution to topple the U.S. government.
At the same time President Ford submitted George’s nomination, he forced Nelson Rockefeller to announce that he would not seek reelection as Vice President in 1976. Rockefeller’s politics were too liberal for the right wing of the Republican Party, and Ford wanted to be reelected without opposition within the GOP. When the President was asked if being the director of the CIA would eliminate George as a possible running mate, Ford said that George would be very much in the running. The President’s response triggered another barrage of brickbats. The
Washington Star
editorialized, “Nice Man, Wrong Job,” saying that George did not meet the Rockefeller CIA Commission recommendation for “persons with judgment, courage and independence to resist improper pressure and importuning.”
The Baltimore Sun
said, “Who will believe in the independence of a former national party chairman?”
The Wall Street Journal
dismissed George as “just another upward-striving office seeker.”
George’s nomination looked insane to most Democrats and some sane Republicans. Republican Senator William V. Roth of Delaware and Republican Representative James M. Collins of Texas wrote to the President and begged him to reconsider. Collins, a Texas colleague of George’s, praised him, saying he was “as fine as any man in Washington,” but added, “He is not the right man for the CIA . . . As the former Chairman of the National Republican Committee he is a partisan voice . . . They [Democrats] are going to crucify him on this job and Senator Church will lead the procession.”
Senator Frank Church of Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not disappoint. The Democrat blasted George as “the poorest choice possible.” Church stated that an ambitious politician like Bush should not be put in control of the government’s intelligence agencies. As CIA director, George would also be director of Central Intelligence, which meant he would be the President’s coordinator for the country’s entire intelligence apparatus and oversee the intelligence activities of every federal agency, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and diplomatic intelligence at the State Department. Church charged that the White House was using George’s appointment to further his political ambitions. Democratic Senator Thomas McIntyre of New Hampshire declared the nomination “an insensitive affront to the American people.”
Senator Church argued that the position of CIA director was too important to be a “political parking spot” for an ambitious politician. The agency needed a director who was independent of political pressure when advising the President, rather than one who hoped to be the President’s running mate. George, who was transparently ambitious, had never demonstrated political independence. He argued that he had recommended resignation to President Nixon, but as Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont noted, that recommendation came quite late in the day.
During George’s two days of hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he would not withdraw from consideration as Vice President, which inflamed resistance on both sides of the aisle and caused David Cohen, president of Common Cause, to withhold his endorsement: “A CIA head who is ready to consider high elective office less than one year after his appointment will be perceived to service the short-term political needs of a sitting president rather than the duties of the agency and the best interests of the nation.”
Senator Church offered to mute his opposition if George would remove himself from political consideration in 1976. George refused, adding, “To my knowledge no one in the history of the Republic has been asked to renounce his political birthright as the price of confirmation for any office.” Democratic Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri urged him to change his position and promise that if confirmed, he would stay on the job for at least two years. George, who had never come this close to the vice presidency before, would not budge. “If I was offered the nomination,” he said, “I can’t tell you I wouldn’t accept it.”
Even so, the Senate committee voted 12–4 to confirm George as director of the CIA. But three of the four members voting against him signed a minority report, stating:
Rightly or wrongly, the public will be understandably suspicious of the potential for political abuse of the agency by a director who once chaired one of the major political parties. We cannot, and should not, ignore this public reaction, for it can undermine the rebuilding of confidence so necessary if the CIA is to fulfill its proper role.
We are also concerned that Mr. Bush’s nomination sets a precedent of political appointments to a post that should be completely insulated from political considerations.
After the President read the minority report, he sensed trouble for full confirmation. He drafted a letter to the chairman of the committee, stating in part: “If Ambassador Bush is confirmed by the Senate as Director of Central Intelligence, I will not consider him as my Vice Presidential running mate in 1976.”
President Ford called George in to approve the letter, and George asked the President to say that it was his idea to forfeit political consideration in 1976, not the President’s. Ford, who had granted Rockefeller this courtesy when he forced him to not seek reelection as Vice President, now did the same for George. The President added to his letter of December 18, 1975: “He and I had discussed this in detail. In fact, he urged that I make this decision. This says something about the man and about his desire to do this job for the Nation.”
“That was about the shortest-lived campaign for V.P. in history,” Barbara wrote to a society columnist at the
Washington Star
.
George, who later wondered if he had not played into a wily scheme by Ford to deprive him of the vice presidency, was confirmed by the Senate (64–27) on January 27, 1976.
As a precondition to accepting the President’s appointment, George had insisted on bringing Jennifer Fitzgerald with him to the CIA as his confidential assistant. A memo in the Ford Presidential Library dated November 23, 1975, indicated that his demand was to be met: “Please advise me as soon as you have completed office space arrangements for George Bush and Miss Fitzgerald. JOM [John O. Marsh, White House lawyer] has maintained close contact with Bush and wants to give him the details of whatever accommodations are set up.”
George was sworn in by Justice Potter Stewart (Yale 1937), a close family friend whose wife, Andy, was Barbara Bush’s best friend. George invited five hundred people to attend his swearing-in ceremony. After the oath, the President accompanied him into the main building of the CIA to greet about one thousand employees who could not attend the swearing-in ceremony because of the presence of the press.
Being named CIA director finally gave George what he had always wanted: a real seat at the table. He had been begging for “cabinet status” ever since he was appointed UN Ambassador. He had been allowed to attend a few meetings then and later as chairman of the National Republican Committee, but now he was finally entitled to a regular place within the cabinet, as well as on the National Security Council. Just sitting in the dugout with the varsity seemed to be enough for George.
“The guy never said a word during NSC meetings,” recalled Roger Molander, who received his Ph.D. in engineering science and nuclear engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. Molander’s principal area of responsibility in the NSC was strategic nuclear-arms control, and he observed George on a regular basis. “He was a total cipher. He came into the NSC meetings, sat down, and never said a word. Nothing. No proposals. No rebuttals. No initiatives. Nothing. I was there from the end of Nixon [1972], all of Ford [1976], and through Carter [1980], and I can tell you that George Bush was not even a bit player in any of those meetings. Ever. The most memorable dynamic was between the big brains of Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger . . . Bush was a nonentity.”
While George did not impress the President’s counselors, he wowed the CIA’s beleaguered bureaucrats. “He was perfect for the agency,” said Osborne Day (Yale 1943). “I’d retired from the CIA by the time George took over, but I’ve known him and his family for years, and I can tell you the guys in the Outfit [the insiders’ term for the CIA] loved him . . . He was temperamentally suited for the job, more so than most of the damn fools the White House sent over. First of all, George already knew a lot of the fellows there. After all, he had gone to Yale, and Yale has always been the agency’s biggest feeder . . . In my Yale class alone there were thirty-five guys in the agency.”
The late Robin Winks, author of
Cloak and Gown
, an examination of Ivy League predominance in U.S. intelligence work, said that the Office of Strategic Services and the CIA wanted “young men with high grades, a sense of grace, with previous knowledge of Europe . . . and ease with themselves, a certain healthy self-respect and independent means . . . Oh, yes, and good social connections.” He said that Yale was a great place to look for such characteristics, which is also why people said that OSS stood for “Oh So Social.”
Professor Winks said most Ivy Leaguers (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn, Brown, and Columbia) met the elite qualifications for intelligence work, but Yale had an advantage, because of its system of residential colleges, plus its secret societies, particularly Skull and Bones. For many years Yale contributed more men to “the Outfit” than any other Ivy League school. In fact, the Yale University library was once used as an overseas cover for an intelligence operation run by the OSS, and most of the mythic spy figures, from James Jesus Angleton to Richard McGarrah Helms, were Yalies. But in the wake of the Church hearings, both Angleton and Helms were driven from the agency.