Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

by Russ Baker

  One specific result of Poppy Bush’s suit was the drawing of a “super-Republican” district tailor-made for him.29 Many of the people who lived there were East Coast transplants like Poppy himself, Ivy League graduates for whom tennis and martinis were a more natural choice than horseshoes and tequila. Poppy had done especially well in that area in his Senate race. So in 1966, Poppy sold his shares in Zapata Offshore, left the company in the hands of trusted associates, ran hard, won, and headed for Washington.

  There’s a Spy in the House

  Congress was a great place for a spy—even better, in some ways, than the CIA. Congressmen were expected to travel the world, looking into matters of interest to the United States. In December 1967, less than a year after Bush was sworn in, he was off to Indochina, with his CIA partner Thomas Devine in tow. It was Christmas break, a time when congressmen often make overseas trips, but Bush and Devine did not have a typical agenda. Correspondence indicates that having arrived in Vietnam, Bush and Devine hastily canceled an appointment with the U.S. ambassador in favor of other, unstated activities.30

  For the CIA, the hot item at the time was the so-called Phoenix Program, a secret plan to imprison and “neutralize” suspected Vietcong. This was being rolled out at precisely the moment that Poppy and Devine arrived “in country.” By the time CIA director William Colby admitted to the program in July 1971, more than twenty thousand people had been killed—many of them possibly innocent, officials later concluded. One person involved in Phoenix’s early stages was Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban exile and CIA operative. Rodriguez would go on to become a great friend of Poppy Bush’s, even visiting him in the White House.

  If J. Edgar Hoover’s 1963 memo was correct in mentioning “George Bush of the CIA” as an intermediary with Cuban exiles, the coincidence of Rodriguez’s activities in Vietnam with that of Bush’s visit raises questions as to how the two were connected. In 1970 Rodriguez joined the CIA front company Air America, which allegedly played a role in trafficking heroin from Laos to the United States. The Laotian operation was led by Donald Gregg, who would later serve as national security adviser during Poppy Bush’s presidency.

  When Bush and Devine traveled to Vietnam the day after Christmas 1967, Devine was in his new CIA capacity, operating under commercial cover.31 Handwritten notes from the trip show that Poppy was especially interested in the Phoenix Program, which he referred to by the euphemism “pacification.”

  The two remained in Vietnam until January 11, 1968. Whatever information they were seeking, they left just in time. Only three weeks after the freshman congressman from Texas and his CIA sidekick departed Saigon, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong launched the massive Tet Offensive.

  Poppy and Lyndon

  Meanwhile, the Kennedy assassination had put into the White House Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had a long-standing but little-known relationship with the Bush family. This dates back at least to 1953, when Prescott Bush joined Johnson in the U.S. Senate. Johnson was the powerful majority leader and Prescott had his own pipeline to the highest levels at the Eisenhower White House. That same year, Poppy Bush started Zapata Petroleum with Hugh and William Liedtke, who as law students at the University of Texas several years earlier had rented LBJ’s guesthouse. Later, Bush became close with LBJ’s chief financiers, George and Herman Brown, the founders of the construction giant Brown and Root (which later became part of Hal-liburton).

  Pat Holloway, former attorney to both Poppy Bush and Jack Crichton, recounted to me an incident involving LBJ that had greatly disturbed him. This was around one P.M. on November 22, 1963, just as Kennedy was being pronounced dead. Holloway was heading home from the office and was passing through the reception area. The switchboard operator excitedly noted that she was patching the vice president through from Parkland Hospital to Holloway’s boss, firm senior partner Waddy Bullion, who was LBJ’s personal tax lawyer. The operator invited Holloway to listen in. LBJ was talking “not about a conspiracy or about the tragedy,” Holloway recalled. “I heard him say: ‘Oh, I gotta get rid of my goddamn Halliburton stock.’ Lyndon Johnson was talking about the consequences of his political problems with his Halliburton stock at a time when the president had been officially declared dead. And that pissed me off . . . It really made me furious.”32

  There are many other examples of LBJ’s apparent unconcern after the assassination, though none so immediate. For instance, on the evening of November 25, LBJ and Martin Luther King talked, and LBJ said, “It’s just an impossible period—we’ve got a budget coming up.” That morning, he told Joe Alsop that “the President must not inject himself into, uh, local killings,” to which Alsop immediately replied, “I agree with that, but in this case it does happen to be the killing of the President.” Also on the same day LBJ told Hoover, “We can’t be checking up on every shooting scrape in the country.”33

  By 1964, with LBJ in the White House and Poppy Bush the Texas GOP nominee for U.S. Senate, their relationship was highly cordial. An intriguing, if oblique, note from LBJ’s assistant Leslie Carpenter to Walter Jenkins, a top LBJ adviser, dated August 14, 1964, referred to Poppy: “Some one may like to know that George Bush was in town today for the day . . . [Bush] also had a press conference. During it, he carefully refrained from saying anything critical of the President.”34 LBJ has also been plausibly characterized as secretly rooting for Bush to beat the liberal Democratic candidate for Senate, Ralph Yarborough, whom LBJ disliked greatly; since the Democrats held a solid two-thirds majority in the Senate, LBJ knew that his party could afford to lose the seat.

  In any case, while in Washington, Poppy had a warm relationship with Johnson, notwithstanding Bush’s persistent attacks on the Democratic Party, especially back in Texas.

  One of the more peculiar relationships in an already bizarre enterprise resulted from Bush’s choice of a surrogate to run Zapata Offshore’s office in Medellín, Colombia. To begin with, there was the question of why a small, unprofitable company needed such far-flung outposts. Why, in particular, did it need one in Medellín, 150 miles from any offshore drilling locale—a city whose very name would later become synonymous with the cocaine trade? Bush’s choice to represent Zapata in Colombia was Judge Manuel B. Bravo, of Zapata County, Texas.35

  Judge Bravo’s singular claim to fame was his role in Lyndon Johnson’s fraud-ridden election to the U.S. Senate in 1948. As reports of an extraordinarily close race came in on election night, Bravo continually revised upward the Johnson count from Zapata County’s Ballot Box 3, until LBJ was assured victory. A federal investigation led to a trial, but by that time the ballots from Box 13 in Jim Wells County had conveniently disappeared from the judge’s office. The lack of evidence effectively ended Johnson’s peril. Johnson won by eighty-seven votes.36

  In 1967, President Johnson sent Poppy a note wishing him a happy birthday. The following year, LBJ’s decision not to seek reelection paved the way for Richard Nixon’s ascent to the presidency—and Nixon’s steady sponsorship of Poppy Bush’s own ascent to power. When Nixon was inaugurated in 1969, Bush took the unusual step of leaving the GOP festivities to see LBJ off at the airport. Soon thereafter, he was a guest at the LBJ ranch. There is no public record of what the two men talked about.

  CERTAINLY, IT HAD been a tumultuous few years for America, and busy ones for Poppy. His astonishing ability to carry on parallel lives, one visible, one deeply hidden, continued undiminished. But soon, there would be an understudy: his namesake, George W. Bush.

  CHAPTER 8

  Wings for W.

  THE REPLACEMENT OF JOHN F. KENNEDY with Lyndon Baines Johnson was certainly good for the Texans close to both LBJ and Poppy Bush. The Houston-based Brown and Root company, for example, joined a consortium that won a $380 million ($2.5 billion in current dollars) no-bid contract to build Navy facilities in South Vietnam.

  The problem was that all this war-making required fresh cannon fodder, and Poppy wasn’t about to let eldest son George W. Bush be part of that.


  W., as friends call him, was not only Poppy’s namesake; he was in many respects a chip off the old block, if a more rough-edged one. In fact, his adolescence and young adulthood mirrored Poppy’s to a remarkable extent—same prep school, same university, same fraternity and secret society. The acting-out and the pranks, emphasized so strongly in conventional biographies, had all been within the boundaries of the acceptable for someone of his station— summed up in the proverbial “sowing of wild oats.” Indeed, his grandfather Prescott quite outshone him in that regard. His grandfather’s exploits ranged from purportedly stealing the skull of Geronimo to falsely claiming to his parents that as a World War I artillery officer, he had saved the lives of the top military commanders of the United States, Britain, and France. In a letter home, Prescott claimed that during a battlefield tour for the trio, he deflected an incoming shell with his bolo knife—and said that for this he had been recommended for the three nations’ highest honors.1 His parents proudly arranged for a front-page story in the local Columbus, Ohio, newspaper, only to face the deep embarrassment of learning that it had all been a joke. Measured by this yardstick, George W.’s own high jinks were clearly par for the family course.

  Indeed, W. was essentially a dutiful son, dedicated to the family and its ethos. He worked hard to meet his father’s standards. Even W.’s summer jobs had been an apprenticeship in the Bush family business, broadly speaking. In 1962 he was a messenger for the Baker Botts law firm, and in 1963 he spent the summer laboring for Poppy’s pal John Greenway at his Quarter Circle XX Ranch in northern Arizona. By the following summer, he was ready to work on Dad’s Senate campaign. One was never too young to be exposed to the family trade: his father had even taken him as a young boy on business trips, including a visit to Zapata Offshore’s branch office in Medellín, Colombia. On one such trip, W. met the Gammells, a Scottish banking family that had helped bankroll Poppy’s early ventures. (Poppy’s ties to the Gammell clan would prove so enduring that half a century later— as we shall see in chapter 21—a Gammell would help President George W. Bush forge a relationship with British prime minister Tony Blair that would pave the way for agreement on the invasion of Iraq.)

  Like his father, W. from an early age lived a life full of carefully guarded secrets and sub rosa intrigues—essentially a double life, populated with faithful old boys, strange mishaps, and the recurrent need for incomplete reminiscences, disinformation, and dissembling. Above all, father and son share a code of loyalty worthy of a Sicilian Mafia clan. “The Bushes are loyal to each other to the hilt,” one family friend observed. “You make one of them mad, you make all of them mad.”2 Poppy and W. have been much closer over the years than is widely understood. The fact of this closeness is in itself crucial to understanding how and why W. was propelled to the top, and what shaped the views that led him to do what he did as president.

  One of the first notes of intrigue concerns his sudden announcement, January 1, 1967, of his engagement to Cathryn Wolfman—a beautiful blonde from Houston whom Bush had met at a party when he was at Yale and she was attending Smith College (Barbara’s alma mater). Following a sledding accident, Wolfman had returned to Houston to recuperate and transferred to Rice University. The engagement announcement, which appeared in a local newspaper after Wolfman had returned to Houston, was not followed up by anything concrete. No specific wedding date was set, and the whole thing seems to have petered out. “We grew apart,” W. told the Houston Chronicle.3 Like so many events in W.’s life, this seemingly simple matter is clouded by multiple accounts and vagueness. W.’s parents appear to have disapproved for personal reasons. “[Barbara Bush] couldn’t abide the fact that Cathryn’s stepfather was Jewish,” onetime Bush family friend Cody Shearer told the author Kitty Kelley. “ ‘There’ll be no Jews in our family,’ she said.”4 W. later claimed that after being deployed to basic training, he never spent time with Wolfman again.

  What is not widely known is that within two years of her engagement to George W. Bush, Wolfman was offered and accepted a job with the Central Intelligence Agency as an economic analyst in the North Vietnamese section, and after graduation she moved to Washington. In a 2006 interview at her home in Palo Alto, California, Wolfman5 told me that, since she was offered the CIA position while still a Rice student, she had always assumed her recruitment by the agency that Poppy would later head was merely a coincidence.6 Wolfman had no reason to know of Poppy’s history of CIA activities (documented in earlier chapters) or his extensive personal connections within the agency. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but several people I interviewed told me how Poppy liked to arrange favorable outcomes for those who had to be erased from the Bush family album.

  Whether or not Poppy Bush helped ease Cathryn Wolfman out of his son’s life, he almost surely helped a more acceptable woman in. Once Wolf-man was gone, W. began dating Tina Cassini, the daughter of Oleg Cassini, George de Mohrenschildt’s good friend and Jackie Kennedy’s fashion designer, and a White Russian.7 “Mr. Bush knew exactly what he was doing,” W.’s friend Doug Hannah recalled about Poppy. “He would set up guys and girls that he thought belonged together. He even set up his own brother Jonathan with the daughter of a stockbroker, tried his damnedest to get that working. Mr. Bush would set people up, get them dates, give them money to go out and have a good time, and just revel in his abilities to put those things together.”8

  By the mid-1960s, Poppy had settled into the operational persona that would characterize his adult life. The elder Bush was a master intriguer. He reveled in knowing everyone’s business, in doing favors and then calling them in. He kept tabs on his growing network of personal contacts through a massive system of index cards, and he kept this network alive and growing through small kindnesses, ingratiating notes, and the thousands of Christmas cards he sent each year.

  The old intelligence hand generally knew about everything—including, of course, the bigger challenges in his children’s lives. And no bigger challenge faced W. than the prospect of military service. The family knew that after he graduated from Yale in the spring of 1968, he would lose his draft deferment. As a single man, he faced almost certain deployment to Vietnam.

  But as Poppy and his fellow politicians knew only too well, Vietnam was a charnel house. Even those who supported the war generally weren’t eager for their own sons to go—especially not eldest sons carrying both their first and last names. On the other hand, evading military service was tricky for a Bush scion because the men in the family were all hawks. Grandfather Prescott Bush, the World War I vet, had been a supporter of military force in Vietnam. Poppy, the World War II vet, had championed the Vietnam cause in his losing Senate campaign of 1964; he had even endorsed the use of nuclear weapons.9 Two years later, after winning a congressional seat from a wealthy part of Houston, he supported Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the conflict. And during W.’s final college Christmas break, right at the time that the younger Bush was confronting his own military future, his father happened to be in Vietnam, ostensibly on a congressional fact-finding mission and to show support for the troops.

  What made W.’s position even more awkward was that he had personally supported the war while studying on the Yale campus, where the antiwar movement was dominant. Now he was boxed in. He certainly could not become a draft dodger, and if he ever hoped to follow his family forebears into elective office, he would need a requisite show of bravery and patriotism. At the very least he would have to avoid the appearance of cowardice and hypocrisy. He also could not escape the looming shadow of his father, who had enlisted at age eighteen; and the views of the Republican base, which skewed heavily toward veterans and military-minded voters.

  One way out was the National Guard, which in those days offered what amounted to safe service: you could claim to have done your duty without much risk or inconvenience. Many young men volunteered to be called by the Guard, but only a lucky few were chosen. Fortunately, the deck was notably stacked in Texas, where the Guard was highly politicized. The
solution was therefore obvious: obtain a berth in the Guard, even if it meant jumping to the front of the long waiting list of candidates. But there were also serious risks to a high-profile political family—if the patriarch was revealed to have pulled strings to keep his son out of Vietnam.

  The family’s calculated leveraging of power and manipulation of connections for favorable treatment, as well as its relentless efforts to hide what had been done, constitute the larger story behind W.’s avoidance of Vietnam service. The real story has been obscured through a cover-up carefully orchestrated and sustained for more than three decades. The striking success of this disinformation campaign is a sobering demonstration of the effectiveness of propaganda management techniques more commonly associated with the cold war.

  As a result, the particulars of W.’s military service remain only vaguely understood by the public. No authoritative explanation has been provided for how Bush got into the National Guard, much less what he did while he was there, or whether he served his obligatory term as opposed to skipping out on his commitment. The public has been left with a gnawing sense that something had gone deeply wrong—something that went to the very core of Bush’s character. The fog of uncertainty surrounding Bush’s Guard service seems especially remarkable when one considers that military force was the signature of W.’s presidency. The truth behind the fog reveals a great deal not just about W. himself, but also about class and privilege in America and about the relationship of the media to the ruling elite.