Bush mounted his second bid to be chosen for vice president. A boiler room run by Nebraska Republican National Committeeman Richard “Dick” Herman was set up in a suite of rooms at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington. There, Richard L. Herman and two assistants began calling through George Bush’s deep Rolodex. Senator Howard Baker, Elliot Richardson, Governor William Scranton, Melvin Laird, Senator Bill Brock, Governor Dan Evans, Donald Rumsfeld, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and Senator Barry Goldwater were all under consideration.
My friend, syndicated Columnist Robert Novak, reported that “as the new president was sworn in, Rockefeller had become a considerably less likely prospect than either Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee or George Bush, the gregarious patrician and transplanted Texan who heads the Republican National Committee.” Bush’s elevation seemed assured.
On August 10, Ford announced that he would poll Republicans with the Republican National Committee to tabulate the results. Many Republicans who didn’t favor Bush didn’t want to tell him that, given George and Barbara’s reputation for vindictiveness. RNC members and Republican members of the House overwhelmingly supported Poppy. The matter of the poll itself was the subject of a complaint by Delaware Republican National Committeeman Thomas B. Evans, Jr., who attacked the poll in the press and also wrote to Ford. Evans, a former RNC co-chair, wrote “no one should campaign for the position, and I offer these thoughts only because of an active campaign that is being conducted on George Bush’s behalf, which I do not believe properly reflects Republican opinion. Certainly, one of the major issues confronting our country at this time is the economy and the related problems of inflation, unemployment, and high interest rates. I respectfully suggest that you need someone who can help substantively in these areas. George is great at PR, but he is not as good in substantive matters. This opinion can be confirmed by individuals who held key positions at the National Committee.”
Those favoring Rockefeller would counter attack. Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin report it in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography.
By August 19, the eve of Ford’s expected announcement, the Washington Post reported that unnamed White House sources were telling Newsweek magazine that Bush’s vice presidential bid “had slipped badly because of alleged irregularities in the financing of his 1970 Senate race in Texas.” Newsweek quoted White House sources that “there was potential embarrassment in reports that the Nixon White House had funneled about $100,000 from a secret fund called the ‘Townhouse Operation’ into Bush’s losing Senate campaign against Democrat Lloyd Bentsen four years ago.” Newsweek added that $40,000 of this money may not have been properly reported under the election laws. Bush was unavailable for comment that day, and retainers James Bayless and C. Fred Chambers scrambled to deliver plausible denials, but the issue would not go away.
Bush’s special treatment during the 1970 campaign was a subject of acute resentment, especially among senate Republicans whom Ford needed to keep on board. Back in 1970, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon had demanded to know why John Tower had given Bush nearly twice as much money as any other Senate Republican. Senator Tower had tried to deny favoritism, but Hatfield and Edward Brooke of Massachusetts had not been placated. Now, there was the threat that, if Bush had to go through lengthy confirmation hearings in the Congress, the entire Townhouse affair might be dredged up once again. According to some accounts, there were as many as eighteen Republican senators who had gotten money from Townhouse but whose names had not been divulged. Any attempt to force Bush through as vice president might lead to the fingering of these senators, and perhaps others, mightily antagonizing those who had figured that they were getting off with a whole coat. Ripping off the scabs of Watergate wounds in this way conflicted with Ford’s “healing time” strategy, which was designed to put an hermetic lid on the festering mass of Watergate. Bush was too dangerous to Ford. Bush could not be chosen.
Poppy would become Ford’s envoy to China and, recognizing conservative animosity towards Rockefeller, he began focusing on the 1976 vice presidential nomination. That effort was short-circuited by Ford’s request that Bush become director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bush believed that White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, soon to become Secretary of Defense, had maneuvered Bush into the CIA post to eliminate him from consideration as Ford’s 1976 running mate. Indeed, Senate Democrats sought and received a commitment from Ford that Bush would not be considered as a condition of Senate confirmation. The 1980 Bush operative David Keene—later national chairman of the National Rifle Association—told me “Bush thought Rummy screwed him.”
According to Rumsfeld, Bush began grumbling beginning in 1975 that Rumsfeld, then chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, had sent him to run the CIA, so that he wouldn’t be in the running to be on Ford’s 1976 ticket
Rumsfeld details the situation in his book Known and Unknown. “The circumstances surrounding George H. W. Bush’s nomination to be director of the CIA is a particularly stubborn chapter of the myth that I had stage-managed Ford’s staff reorganization,” he writes, according to Politico. “By repeating the myth instead of setting the record straight, Bush in effect endorsed it.”
The tension between Rumsfeld and George H. W. Bush was still alive in 2006. Salon reported that “Former President George H. W. Bush waged a secret campaign over several months early this year to remove Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The elder Bush went so far as to recruit Rumsfeld’s potential replacement, personally asking a retired four-star general if he would accept the position, a reliable source close to the general told me. But the former president’s effort failed, apparently rebuffed by the current president. When seven retired generals who had been commanders in Iraq demanded Rumsfeld’s resignation in April, the younger Bush leapt to his defense. “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain,” he said. His endorsement of Rumsfeld was a rebuke not only to the generals but also to his father.”
The two memos detailing Bush’s connection to the events of November 22 are troubling enough, but in 1978, when Lee Harvey Oswald’s “handler” George de Mohrenschildt committed suicide only a days before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the name and phone number of George “Poppy” Bush was found in de Mohrenschildt’s personal phone book.
In fact, Bush had a decades-long friendship with George de Mohrenschildt, a man who was in daily touch with Oswald throughout 1963. De Mohrenschildt and Oswald became acquainted after Oswald had returned from the Soviet Union. In 1977, de Mohrenschildt was interviewed by Edward Jay Epstein, an American investigative journalist and former political science professor at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT, who wrote three controversial books on the Kennedy assassination, eventually collected in The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend. De Mohrenschildt told Epstein that he had been ordered by CIA operative J. Walton Moore to meet Oswald, and he said that he would not have done so if he had not been ordered to.
More troubling is the letter exchange between de Mohrenschildt and Bush when the latter was the director of Central Intelligence:
You will excuse this handwritten letter. Maybe you will be able to bring a solution to the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. Either the FBI is involved in this, or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by the situation. I have been behaving like a damn fool ever since my daughter Nadya died [cystic fibrosis] over three years ago. I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people—I do not know. But to punish an elderly man like myself and my highly nervous and sick wife is really too much. Could you do something to remove the net around us? This will be my last request for help, and I will not annoy you anymore. Good luck in your important job. Thank you so much.10
George Bush wrote back:
&nbs
p; Let me say first that I know it must have been difficult for you to seek my help in the situation outlined in your letter. I believe I can appreciate your state of mind in view of your daughter’s tragic death a few years ago, and the current poor state of your wife’s health. I was extremely sorry to hear of these circumstances. In your situation, I can well imagine how the attentions you described in your letter affect both you and your wife. However, my staff has been unable to find any indication of interest in your activities on the part of federal authorities in recent years. The flurry of interest that attended your testimony before the Warren Commission has long subsided. I can only speculate that you may have become “newsworthy” again in view of the renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination, and thus may be attracting the attention of people in the media. I hope this letter had been of some comfort to you, George, although I realize I am unable to answer your question completely.”11
House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator Gaeton Fonzi obtained an address book from de Mohrenschildt’s briefcase after his death. In the address book was an entry for “Bush, George H. W. (Poppy), 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum, Midland.” Only intimates called George Bush “Poppy.”
Once again, Bush would have a memory lapse. He insisted that he had never asked for CIA files and records on the JFK assassination. “Yet the agency would release eighteen documents (under the Freedom of Information Act) that showed he had, as the director of Central Intelligence, requested information from agency files—not once, but numerous times—on a wide range of questions regarding the Kennedy assassination.”
Was George Bush trying to find out if his name was in the CIA Kennedy Assassination file?
If Bush’s actions on November 22, 1963 are curious, consider the case of his friend and 1964 Republican running mate John Alston Crichton, a former World War II spy, Cold War military intelligence officer, and Big Oil millionaire.
Born in Louisiana in 1916, Crichton served in the Army after graduation and landed in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. Soon after World War II, he used his intelligence and business contacts to build an international network of companies, which were the epitome of “Big Oil” during the era.
By most accounts, Crichton first encountered Poppy Bush in 1964 when he earned the Republican nomination for Governor in an uphill challenge to popular incumbent Democrat Governor John Connelly, Jr. Bush had the nomination for the Senate—both men went down in defeat. Still, they formed a friendship sharing many political stages across Texas.
Fabian Escalante, the chief of a Cuban counterintelligence unit during the late 1950s and early 1960s, describes in his 1995 book a National Security Council plan called “Operation 40,” a CIA assassination squad debuted at the Bay of Pigs. Escalante charges that Vice President Richard Nixon assembled an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton to gather the necessary funds for the operation. At the time, Crichton had big investments at stake in Cuban oil rights.
An owner, investor, and board member in innumerable companies, Crichton knew or worked with nearly every player in Texas. A founder of the Dallas Civil Defense, he was a popular figure in Texas’s growing rightwing movement. He was also director of Dorchester Gas Producing Co. with D. H. Byrd, who owned the Texas School Book Depository building and was a close friend of Lyndon Johnson. Clint Murchison, Sr., a connected oil man who hosted an assassination-eve party at his Dallas mansion, served on a Crichton company board.
Crichton also became commander of the 488th Military Intelligence Detachment in 1956, an Army Reserve unit based in Dallas. According to him, dozens of the men in his unit worked in the Dallas Police Department. Some of them were in Dealey Plaza on November 22.
As we saw earlier, Crichton would actually be involved in the arrangements for President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas. His close friend, Deputy Police Chief George L. Lumpkin, a fellow member of the the Dallas Army Intelligence unit that Crichton headed, drove the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade. Also riding in the car was Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmeyer, commander of all Army Reserve units in East Texas. Crichton himself was thought to be in a command-center bunker established by Crichton’s Army Intelligence unit.
Also, after Oswald’s arrest, the Dallas Police Department would contact Crichton to provide a interpretor for a distraught Marina Oswald. According to the Warren Commission report, Ilya Mamanto translated for Oswald during her initial questioning by the Dallas authorities in the hours immediately after her husband had been arrested. According to author Russ Baker in Family of Secrets, these “were far from literal translations of her Russian words and had the effect of implicating her husband in Kennedy’s death.”
Incredibly, Crichton was never questioned by the Warren Commission.
Every way the JFK assassination story turns, you see the specter of the swashbuckling Crichton. A very public man, he died in 2007, a pillar of his community. He was ninety-one years old.
Today, John Alston Crichton’s papers are stored at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. They are sealed.
NOTES
1. Interview with Beverly Tipton.
2. Baker, Family of Secrets, pg. 12.
3. Steiger, Brad, Sherry Hansen Steiger, Conspiracies and Secret Societies: The Complete Dossier, pg. 69.
4. Baker, Family of Secrets, pg. 61.
5. NSAM, 273.
6. Middendorft, John William, Potomac Fever: A Memoir of Politics and Public Service, pg. 75
7. Baker, Family of Secrets, pg. 161.
8. Baker, Family of Secrets, pg. 171
9. American Experience: George H. W. Bush, PBS, 2008
10. Baker, Family of Secrets, pg. 268.
11. Baker, Family of Secrets, pg. 270.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A FEW GOOD MEN
In 1906, the Good Government Association (GGA), a group formed in Boston to root out and stop unnecessary taxation, expenditures, and corruption, petitioned the state legislature for the authority to investigate Mayor John F. Fitzgerald. For years, the mayor, who was elected under the promise that ward politics and patronage jobs would not be a part of his administration, was repeatedly accused of graft. Fitzgerald was putting major donors under city employ, many in jobs for which they were vastly unqualified. James Doyle, a barkeep who had worked for Fitzgerald’s campaign, was named superintendent of streets; another barkeep was appointed to the board of health as a physician.1 James Nolan, a liquor distributor, was named superintendent of public buildings.2
In anticipation of the danger that could come from an independent organization investigating cronyism and fraud in his administration, Fitzgerald sought to cut off the GGA by proposing an independent commission be created by the city. The purpose of the commission would be to launch “a comprehensive inquiry”3 into the corruption in city hall.
“By making this proposal,” wrote Thomas H. O’Connor in The Boston Irish: A Political History, “Fitzgerald obviously hoped to sidestep the Republican thrust, co-opt the process, name the members of the commission himself, and manipulate the investigation to show him in the most favorable light.”4
It is doubtful that Fitzgerald would have found humor in the irony of a commission being formed nearly six decades later under similar pretenses. That this second commission, the Warren Commission, was formed to manipulate the evidence in relation to the death of his grandson, President John F. Kennedy, would no doubt come with less laughter. Fitzgerald would, however, understand the purpose of such a commission.
There would be no trial for Lee Harvey Oswald, but investigations into the assassination being held on federal and state levels would have to be quashed to ensure information contradictory to Oswald’s guilt was not found. The lone gunman story was admittedly flimsy.
“We, of course, charged him with the murder of the president,” J. Edgar Hoover said to Johnson on the morning after the assassination. “The evidence that they hav
e at the present time is not very, very strong.”5
Having stolen the presidency, Johnson, with a hand in the killing, and Hoover, with a measurable knowledge and association in the conspiracy, were as thick as thieves.
“Me and you are going to talk just like brothers,” Johnson told Hoover.
Both Hoover and Johnson realized the importance of controlling the inquest.
“I think it would be very, very bad to have a rash of investigations on this thing,” said Hoover.
“Well, the only way we can stop them is probably to appoint a high-level one to evaluate your report and put somebody that’s pretty good on it that I can select,”6 answered Johnson.
The FBI report on the assassination was clear in its determination of Oswald as the lone gunman and would serve as a blueprint for the Warren Commission. However, a few of the facts present in the report would have to be altered to pin the tail on the donkey.
The bureau report said that two bullets had killed President Kennedy and one wounded Governor Connally. The theory that the president and Connally were wounded by three separate bullets was damaged irreparably by James Tauge, who, standing near the underpass, was injured by a stray bullet while watching the motorcade. The bullet, more than two hundred feet from the fatal Kennedy shot, had hit the curb and deflected bits of concrete, one of which hit Tauge.7 In the words of Deputy Sheriff Eddy Walthers “the projectile struck so near the underpass, it was, in my opinion, probably the last shot that was fired and apparently went high and above the president’s car.”8
To fit into the time that one assassin could potentially have committed the act, the Commission would turn two bullets into one: a single bullet that caused all the nonfatal injuries to Kennedy and Connally.9 Another fact that would have to be amended is the discovery of a bullet on the president’s stretcher. The FBI report concluded that the bullet must have dropped out of the wound on the upper back of the president, the wound that, according to the report had “no point of exit.”10 Because the path of the bullet had not been not tracked during the official autopsy, the wound could be turned from a penetrating gunshot wound—one that has an entrance but no exit—into a perforating gunshot wound with a track leading from the upper right back up and through the base of the neck.
The Man Who Killed Kennedy Page 31