by Russ Baker
I looked back and saw that my rear gunner [White] was out. He had been machine-gunned to death right where he was.19
There also exists a tape of Bush being interviewed by Wead, as part of a set of interviews the author conducted with famous figures, including Jimmy Carter and former Israeli leader Menachem Begin. On that tape, Bush can be heard to refer clearly to White, and to mention that he saw that White was very much in the plane before bailing out:
One of them jumped out and his parachute streamed. They had fighter planes over us and they could see the chute open, and the other one . . . he was killed in the plane. You can see, [in] a torpedo bomber, the pilot is separate from the crew, but you can look over and see the turret, and he was just slumped over. [emphasis mine]
Another claim of Poppy’s would later be challenged: that his plane was effectively crippled. In Looking Forward, a 1988 campaign book coauthored by Bush and campaign staffer Victor Gold, Poppy writes: “The flak was the heaviest I’d ever flown into . . . Suddenly there was a jolt, as if a massive fist had crunched into the belly of the plane. Smoke poured into the cockpit, and I could see flames rippling across the crease of the wing, edging toward the fuel tanks.”
Not so, said Chester Mierzejewski, the tail gunner in the plane directly ahead of Bush’s. Mierzejewski came forward to challenge Bush after noticing inconsistencies in public accounts of Bush’s mission that day. He was struck by how all the versions differed from what he saw. Mierzejewski had the best and most unobstructed view, and could see directly into Bush’s cockpit. A nonpolitical man who had been Bush’s partner in shipboard bridge games, Mierzejewski wrote a personal letter to the vice president in March 1988, stating that his memory of that day was “entirely different” from what Bush had been saying in television interviews. Bush, an assiduous letter writer, never responded, so Mierzejewski took his story to the New York Post in August 1988. The Post quoted the tail gunner as saying that only Bush himself had bailed out and that Bush’s plane was never on fire. “No smoke came out of his cockpit when he opened his canopy to bail out . . . I think he could have saved those lives if they were alive. I don’t know that they were, but at least they had a chance if he had attempted a water landing.”
In interviews with other papers over the next few days, Mierzejewski, also a recipient of a Distinguished Flying Cross, would say that he was inclined to give Bush the benefit of the doubt until he realized the extent of the inconsistencies.20
Perhaps this problem with story discrepancies, a problem that would resurface time and again in Poppy’s life, so often it became a virtual theme, explains why Poppy Bush never penned a comprehensive autobiography.21 There were too many secrets, too many different stories to keep straight.
More than half a century later, when he was seventy-two years old, Poppy again began parachuting out of planes, ostensibly as a birthday celebration. He would continue this show of bravado and virility into his eighties. “The reasons behind this are strictly personal,” Jim McGrath, Bush’s assistant, said when the 1997 jump was announced. “It has to do with World War Two. When it happens, we’ll explain it.” But when the time came, no satisfying explanation emerged. Poppy treated his skydive as a novelty and a thrill—and never clarified what happened on September 2, 1944.
CHAPTER 3
Viva Zapata
IN 1945, WITH THE END OF THE WAR, George H. W. “Poppy” Bush entered Yale University. The CIA recruited heavily at all of the Ivy League schools in those days, with the New Haven campus the standout. “Yale has always been the agency’s biggest feeder,” recalled CIA officer Osborne Day (class of ’43). “In my Yale class alone there were thirty-five guys in the agency.”1 Bush’s father, Prescott, was on the university’s board, and the school was crawling with faculty serving as recruiters for the intelligence services.2 Most notable was Norman Holmes Pearson, a professor of American studies who had headed wartime counterintelligence in London and was instrumental in setting up systems after the war for recruitment and vetting of potential agents.3
The school’s secret societies helped to make it a happy hunting ground. Journalist Alexandra Robbins, who wrote a book-length study of Skull and Bones, describes how these groups serve as a “social pyramid, because the process successively narrowed down the elite of a class.”4 Yale’s society boys were the cream of the crop, and could keep secrets to boot. And no secret society was more suited to the spy establishment than Skull and Bones, for which Poppy Bush, like his father, was tapped in his junior year. Established in 1832, Skull and Bones is the oldest secret society at Yale, and thus at least theoretically entrusted its membership with a more comprehensive body of secrets than any other campus group. Bones alumni would appear throughout the public and private history of both wartime and peacetime intelligence; names such as William Bundy, William Sloane Coffin Jr., Richard Drain, and Evan Galbraith would be associated with the fledgling CIA. And these spies would regularly return to the Skull and Bones tomb, writes Robbins, where “they would speak openly about things they shouldn’t have spoken about.”5 Famous spies would also emerge from other Yale secret societies and from the general campus population.6
Bush and his friends weren’t quite the Edward Wilson character portrayed in the 2006 movie The Good Shepherd, which shows a Yale poetry student and Skull and Bones member being wooed at every turn by the Office of Strategic Services. But they weren’t far off.7
One of the OSS recruiters was James Burnham, a philosophy instructor and covert operations adviser whose catches included a young Connecticut oil scion named William F. Buckley Jr. in 1950. He introduced the future conservative intellectual to a CIA officer named E. Howard Hunt. The latter was already on a career trajectory that would include a supporting role in the toppling of Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, more central participation in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and Watergate in 1972. Buckley, who was inducted into Skull and Bones and finished Yale shortly after Bush, went to work in the CIA’s Mexico City station under Hunt, something Buckley did not acknowledge until 2005, though their friendship had long been recognized.8
When Bush entered Yale, the university was welcoming back countless veterans of the OSS to its faculty. Sherman Kent, a member of the research and analysis division of the OSS, played a major role in the pipeline. Bush, with naval intelligence work already under his belt by the time he arrived at Yale, would have been seen as a particularly prime candidate for recruitment.
Bush’s Proving Ground
Out of Yale, Bush went directly into the employ of Dresser Industries, a peculiar, family-connected firm providing essential services to the oil industry. Dresser has never received the scrutiny it deserves. Between the lines of its official story can be discerned an alternate version that could suggest a corporate double life.
For roughly the first half century of its existence, the S. R. Dresser Manufacturing Company had been a small, solid, unexceptional outfit. By the late 1920s, the children of founder Solomon Dresser wanted to liquidate the company in order to finance their high-society lifestyle. They found eager buyers in Prescott Bush’s Yale friends Roland and W. Averell Harriman— the sons of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman—who had only recently set up a merchant bank to assist wealthy families in such endeavors. At the time, Dresser’s principal assets consisted of two very valuable patents in the rapidly expanding oil industry. One was for a packer that made it much easier to remove oil from the ground; the other was for a coupler that made long-range natural gas pipelines feasible. Instead of controlling the oil, Dresser’s strategy was to control the technology that made drilling possible. W. A. Harriman and Company, which had brought Prescott Bush aboard two years earlier, purchased Dresser in 1928.
Prescott Bush and his partners installed an old friend, H. Neil Mallon, at the helm. Mallon’s primary credential was that he was “one of them.” Like Prescott Bush, Mallon was from Ohio, and his family seems both to have known the Bushes and to have had its own set of powerful connect
ions. He was Yale, and he was Skull and Bones, so he could be trusted.
A quiet, modest, balding man, Mallon remained a bachelor until his sixties and became essentially a chosen member of the Bush family. Poppy would name his third son Neil Mallon Bush, after this “favorite uncle.” Evidence of the special relationship appears in a November 23, 1944, letter Ensign George H. W. Bush sent from the aircraft carrier San Jacinto to his parents:
Here is something which pleased me. Today I got a package of Xmas presents from Neil Mallon. There were some books, a knife set, couple of games, picture frame and some little soap pills. A fine present and it made me very happy. I shall write Neil this afternoon—he has always been such a good friend to us children, hasn’t he?
Hiring decisions by the Bonesmen at the Harriman firm were presented as jolly and distinctly informal, with club and family being prime qualifications. The way one Harriman partner, Knight Woolley, a Yale and Bones confrere of Prescott Bush’s, tells it, Mallon simply wandered into their offices at the precise moment they were deciding who should run the newly acquired Dresser.9 Mallon was flush from a recent six-month mountaineering holiday in the Swiss Alps when he stopped in for a visit.10 Roland Harriman turned and pointed at Mallon, then uttered the words, “Dresser! Dresser!” upon which Mallon was escorted into the office of Prescott’s father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, then president of Harriman and Company, for a pro form a job interview. Walker promptly installed Mallon at Dresser’s helm. Mallon had been a factory manager at the giant Continental Can Company, but had no oil, gas, or CEO experience. He was a trusted insider, however, in a group that prized loyalty and secrecy. He was what Prescott’s grandson George W. Bush would come to euphemistically refer to in his letters of introduction for friends and colleagues as “a good man.” And, as Poppy’s brother William Henry Trotter “Bucky” Bush put it, Mallon “could charm the fangs off a snake.”11
Under Mallon, the company underwent an astonishing transformation.12 As World War II approached, Dresser began expanding, gobbling up one militarily strategic manufacturer after another. While Dresser was still engaged in the mundane manufacture of drill bits, drilling mud, and other products useful to the oil industry, it was also moving closer to the heart of the rapidly growing military-industrial sector as a defense contractor and subcontractor. It also assembled a board that would epitomize the cozy relationships between titans of industry, finance, media, government, military, and intelligence—and the revolving door between those sectors.13
Prescott Bush himself remained on the board for two decades, but he was more than a mere director. “I was Neil Mallon’s chief adviser and consultant in connection with every move that he made,” Prescott asserted in an oral history.14
Have Briefcase, Will Travel
After graduating from Yale in 1948, Poppy headed out to visit “Uncle Neil” at Dresser headquarters, which were then in Cleveland. Mallon dispatched the inexperienced Yale grad and Navy vet, with his wife, Barbara, and firstborn, George W., in tow, to Odessa, the remote West Texas boomtown that, with neighboring Midland, was rapidly becoming the center of the oil extraction business.
Oil was certainly a strategic business. A resource required in abundance to fuel the modern navy, army, and air force, oil had driven the engine of World War II. With the end of hostilities, America still had plenty of petroleum, but the demands of the war had exhausted many oil fields.
As President Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior and later his petroleum administrator for war, Harold Ickes had warned in 1943, “If there should be a World War III it would have to be fought with someone else’s petroleum, because the United States wouldn’t have it.” He elegantly laid out the challenge: “America’s crown, symbolizing supremacy as the oil empire of the world, is sliding down over one eye . . . We should have available oil in different parts of the world . . . The time to get going is now.”15 Ickes’s eye was then on Saudi Arabia, the only place in the Middle East that had huge untapped oil pools under the control of an American oil company, the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of California.
If the young George H. W. Bush understood anything about the larger game, and his expected role in it, he and his wife, Barbara, certainly did not let on to the neighbors in those early days in dusty West Texas. “They didn’t want anything from their parents,” recalls Valta Ree Casselman, who lived next door to the Bushes in Odessa and frequently babysat while Barbara was at bridge games. “[Barbara] told me, he wanted to make it on his own.” Yet there was something that his father had that Poppy very much wanted: connections, without which the young family would have been adrift on an unfriendly sea. “George was paid well,” says Casselman. “He was paid a lot more than my husband”—who, she notes, as a warehouse man, was technically at a higher-level job than Bush. Whether Bush took his advantages for granted is not clear, though in their memoirs, he and Barbara characterize themselves as living lives of modest privation.16
Poppy’s initial jobs included sweeping out warehouses and painting machinery used for oil drilling, but he was soon asked to handle more challenging tasks. In 1948, at precisely the time that the United States was encouraging Communist Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito in his split with Moscow, one of Poppy’s assignments as an employee of Dresser’s International Derrick and Equipment Company (Ideco) subsidiary was to squire around town a man he described as a potential client from the Balkan country. In his memoir, Poppy tells us nothing about the substance of the visit, but does regale us with tales from the culture gap:17
It was during the peak of the season of ’48, my first autumn as an Ideco trainee, that Bill Nelson gave me my first real sales assignment . . . “Dallas is sending over a customer,” Bill said glumly after hanging up the phone one morning . . . “Not just a foreigner but a damn communist.”
His guest arrived with a Yugo slav-English dictionary. Bush showed him Ideco’s inventory, then he and Barbara took the man to a rowdy Odessa-Midland football game:
Our guest put his hands to his ears, then shook his head. This wasn’t the sport called football that he’d grown up with back in Belgrade.
Bush does not say whether he made the sale. Coincidentally or not, however, around that same time, the National Security Council was preparing papers on Yugoslavia titled “Economic Relations Between the U.S. and Yugoslavia” and “U.S. Policy Toward the Conflict Between the USSR and Yugoslavia.”18
Finally, there is the not-surprising fact that Dresser was well-known in the right circles as providing handy cover to CIA operatives. Three former CIA officials, one a former Bonesman, confirmed the arrangement to author Joseph Trento.19 Dresser’s global sales and acquisition efforts provided excuses for travel and technical inquiries virtually anywhere.
Continuing his whirlwind “training,” Dresser transferred Bush to California, where the company had begun acquiring subsidiaries in 1940. Poppy has never written or spoken publicly in any depth about the California period of his career. He has made only brief references to work on the assembly line at Dresser’s Pacific Pump Works in the Los Angeles suburb of Huntington Park and sales chores for other companies owned by Dresser. In later years, when criticized for his anti-union stands, he would pull out a union card, which he claimed came from his membership in the United Steelworkers Union.20 Why Bush joined the Steelworkers (and attended their meetings) is something of a mystery, since that union was not operating inside Pacific Pump Works.
To be sure, the company was not just pumping water out of the ground anymore. During World War II, Pacific Pump became, like Dresser, an important cog in the war machine. The firm supplied hydraulic-actuating assemblies for airplane landing gear, wing flaps, and bomb doors, and even provided crucial parts for the top-secret process that produced the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.21
While in California training for Dresser, Poppy, the pregnant Barbara, and little George W. were constantly on the go, with at least five residences in a period of nine months—Huntington Park, Bakersfield
, Whittier, Ventura, and Compton. Poppy was often absent, according to Barbara, even from their brief-tenure outposts. Was he truly a Willy Loman, peddling drill bits, dragging a pregnant wife and a one-year-old child with him? Or was he doing something else? Although “ordinary” scions often toil briefly at the bottom, Bush was no ordinary scion.
Bush would so effectively obscure his life that even some of his best friends seemed to know little about what he was actually doing—though they may have intuited it. Roderick Hills, a longtime friend of Bush’s, said in a 1991 interview that Bush probably would have been happiest as a career intelligence officer.22 And another longtime Bush associate told a reporter anonymously that Poppy’s own accounts of various periods in his life “are often off 10 to 30 percent . . . there is a certain reserve, even secretiveness.”23
From Dallas, with Love
In 1950, during the time that Poppy Bush had squired a Yugoslav Communist around the oil fields for Dresser Industries, the cold war got hot in an unexpected quarter when North Korean Communist forces launched an invasion of the south. Their attack had not been even vaguely anticipated in the National Intelligence Estimate—from the fledgling CIA—which had arrived on the president’s desk just six days before. Heads rolled, and in the ensuing shake-up, Allen Dulles became deputy director in charge of clandestine operations, which included both spying and proactive covert operations. For the Bushes, who had a decades-long personal and business relationship to the Dulles family, this was certainly an interesting development.