by Russ Baker
9. Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes: The Way to the White House (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 419.
10. George Lardner Jr., “Texas Speaker Reportedly Helped Bush Get Into Guard,” Washington Post, September 21, 1999.
11. Richard A. Serrano, “Bush Received Quick Air Guard Commission,” Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1999.
12. Author interview with Bill White, July 18, 2004.
13. R. G. Ratcliffe, “Debate Renewed over Military Choices,” Houston Chronicle, August 19, 1988.
14. Serrano, “Bush Received Quick Air Guard Commission.”
15. Elizabeth Mitchell, W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty (New York: Berkley, 2000), pp. 120–121.
16. Honneus was the name from her first marriage, and the name she used at the time. She hassince readopted her maiden name.
17. Author interview with Inge Honneus, April 11, 2006.
18. Honneus says that besides Bush, she had no other partners for a considerable period beforeand after that episode.
19. Ellington Air Force Base press release, March 24, 1970.
20. Kenneth T. Walsh, “From Boys to Men,” U.S. News & World Report, May 3, 2004.
21. Jo Thomas, “After Yale, Bush Ambled Amiably into His Future,” New York Times, July 22, 2000.
22. R. W. Apple Jr., “Bush Implies He Has Used No Drugs in Last 25 Years,” New York Times, August 20, 1999.
23. Kelley, The Family, p. 575.
24. Ibid., p. 300.
25. Lowman was her maiden name, and she now uses her married name.
26. Compilation of unpublished reporting by four journalists from separate major news organizations.
27. Author interview with Jo Thomas, Syracuse, New York, August 28, 2004.
28. Author interview with David Klausmeyer, November 14, 2006.
29. Minutaglio, First Son, p. 139.
30. Associated Press, “Bush Flew in Training Planes Before Losing Pilot Privileges,” September 11,2004. Also see Susan Cooper Eastman, “Fear of Flying,” Folio Weekly (Jacksonville, FL), September 23, 2004.
31. Jimmy Allison had been a newspaper publisher in Midland. He left that to run Poppy’s congressional campaigns and D.C. congressional office, as well as Edward Gurney’s 1968 Florida Senate campaign, with which W. had been involved. The wealthy Blount was seeking political office for the first time, and Allison’s job was to get him elected—and importantly to add Alabama’s electoral votes to Richard Nixon’s landslide.
32. Manuel Roig-Franzia and Lois Romano, “Few Can Offer Confirmation of Bush’s Guard Service,” Washington Post, February 15, 2004.
33. Minutaglio, First Son, p. 143; and Kelley, The Family, pp. 304–5.
34. Author interview with Linda Allison, July 20, 2004.
35. James Moore, Bush’s War for Reelection: Iraq, the White House, and the People (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), p. 150.
36. In a crisp letter dated May 31, 1972, the director of personnel resources at the Denver headquarters of the Air Reserve Personnel Center noted in his rejection that Bush had a “Military Service Obligation until 26 May 1974”—that is, to do serious and meaningful duty for another two years.
37. Walter V. Robinson, “Questions Remain on Bush’s Service as Guard Pilot,” Boston Globe, October 31, 2000.
38. Much of the Alabama material, reported by the author, appeared in “Why Bush Left Texas,” the Nation, September 14, 2004.
39. Unpublished 2004 C. Murphy Archibald interview with Alabama freelancer Glynn Wilson.
40. Author interview with Janet Linke, September 29, 2004.
41. Author interview with Dr. Richard Mayo, July 23, 2004.
42. Minutaglio, First Son, p. 148.
43. Author interview with Linda Allison, July 20, 2004.
44. Author interview with Dr. John Andrew Harris, the dentist who examined Bush, August 23,2004, and dental record released by the Bush White House.
45. Tom Wicker, George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Viking, 2004). For the PULL donation story, see Alan Bernstein, “Bush: The Houston Years,” Houston Chronicle, April 11, 1999.
46. Kenneth T. Walsh, “The Lost Years of Al and Dubya,” U.S. News & World Report, November 1, 1999.
47. Meg Laughlin, “Former Workers Dispute Bush’s Pull in Project P.U.L.L.,” Knight-Ridder,October 23, 2004.
48. The effort to tap into state and federal grants would be a precursor to a veritable industry in which Republican-favored, minority-headed charities, often with a “faith-based” component, would garner out sized grants.
49. Author interview with Jack Gazelle, August 2, 2004.
50. Author interview with Jimmy Wynn, July 24, 2004.
51. Moore, Bush’s War for Reelection, p. 171.
52. Jim Drinkard and Dave Moniz, “Memos Debate Eclipses Content,” USA Today, September 13, 2004.
53. E-mail to author from Jim Moore, July 22, 2008.
54. Minutaglio, First Son, p. 148.
9: THE NIXONIAN BUSHES
1. Robert Dallek, “The Kissinger Presidency,” Vanity Fair, May 2007.
2. Membership on the House Ways and Means Committee has historically been a stepping-stoneto the highest office in American government. Bush joined seven past presidents on that ladder to power.
3. The official Senate history refers to this shameless nepotism in a more flattering light: “Both Nixon and Ford had known Prescott Bush in Washington. Due to his father’s prominence and his own well-publicized race for the Senate, George Bush arrived in the House better known than most of the forty-six other freshmen Republicans. As a freshman he won a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee (which put the Bushes on everyone’s ‘list’ of social invitations).” Available on www.senate.gov.
4. Kitty Kelley, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 245.
5. Ibid., p. 246.
6. Ibid., p. 47.
7. Irwin F. Gellman, The Contender: Richard Nixon, the Congress Years, 1946–1952 (New York: Free Press, 1999), pp. 25–26, 31–32.
8. Although Voorhis was characterized as a leftist, his record was more that of a moderately liberalman with an independent streak. In fact, when the Council of Industrial Organizations rated members of Congress based on their votes on labor issues from 1943 to 1946, Voorhis scored only 84.6, well below the 100 percent awarded Henry M. Jackson of Washington, below the 86.9 awarded Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and only nominally higher than the conservative Democratic congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas.
9. Letter from Richard Nixon to Norman Chandler, December 28, 1960, Richard Nixon PresidentialLibrary, Yorba Linda, California.
10. Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 46–47.
11. Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), pp. 257, 261.
12. Jerry Voorhis, Confessions of a Congressman (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 331.
13. To be sure, Dresser Industries did not want a union-friendly congressman any more than the local businessmen did. With the end of World War II, labor troubles had become endemic in the American economy. Dresser had been racked by union agitation, including work stoppages and strikes.
14. During the 1952 campaign, Nixon had been accused of controlling a secret “slush fund” of contributions from shadowy backers. In response, Nixon went on TV to give his famous “Checkers speech,” in which he denied accepting any personal gifts, with one exception: a black-and-white cocker spaniel named Checkers, for his daughter. He emphasized that he was a man of modest means who could not afford a mink coat for his wife, only a “respectable Republican cloth coat.”
15. Kelley, The Family, p. 162.
16. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 753.
17. Yergin, The Prize, p. 215.
18. Robert Caro, The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 1982).
19. Robert Bryce, C
ronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate (New York: public affairs, 2004), p. 93.
20. As president, Eisenhower stopped a grand jury investigation into the “International petroleum cartel” on the basis of “national security.” Eisenhower chose Robert B. Anderson, president of the Texas Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, as his secretary of the Navy, deputy secretary of defense, and secretary of the treasury.
21. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 196.
22. Ibid., p. 197.
23. Letter from William C. Liedtke Jr. to Richard Nixon, July 16, 1968, Richard Nixon presidential library.
24. Bill Clements, who would serve under both Nixon and Ford (where his boss was Donald Rums-feld),owned the giant offshore drilling equipment and drilling contractor SEDCO, which was deeply wired into the Bush political machine. During the 1950s, Dresser Industries had recommended SEDCO to the government of Argentine strongman Juan Perón, who was trying to develop Argentina’s oil reserves. SEDCO drilled about one thousand wells for Peron, and bought ten million dollars’ worth of supplies from Dresser. In 1964, Clements served as statewide campaign finance chair for Poppy’s 1964 U.S. Senate bid. When Bush decided to get out of the oil business, as noted in chapter 3, there was discussion about Clements taking over Zapata; instead, the two firms went into a joint venture in the Persian Gulf. Like many of the entities associated with the rise of the Bushes, SEDCO had its share of international crises requiring a friendly ear in Washington: the company was involved in the world’s largest oil spill (in the Gulf of Mexico) and later filed suit against the revolutionary Iranian government over the seizure of its rigs. When a New York Times reporter tried to interview Clements’s son, the company’s president, he declined, explaining, “We like to keep a low profile.” See William K. Stevens, “SEDCO: Growth in Adversity,” New York Times, October 20, 1981. In 1984, Clements sold SEDCO to Schlumberger, the firm that had assisted with clandestine operations against Castro and whose head had interacted with George de Mohrenschildt in 1962 and ’63. After becoming Texas’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Clements hired—first as his deputy chief of staff and later as direct mail consultant—the youthful Karl Rove at the request of Poppy Bush, helping the future political superstar get his start.
25. The Federal Power Commission was replaced in 1977 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
26. The commission allowed Pennzoil to divert natural gas that had been committed for low-pricedsale within hard-pressed Louisiana into other markets, where it could charge much more. Louisiana ended up with a severe natural gas shortage. “The health and physical safety of millions of Louisiana’s citizens are gravely threatened,” a 1972 state announcement warned.
27. In April 1969, shortly after Morton was named Republican National Committee chair, he and Bush called for the IRS to create a division to begin examining nonprofit groups—then a quickly growing sector largely identified with liberal values and criticism of the establishment.
28. Iwan W. Morgan, Nixon (London: Hodder Arnold, 2002), p. 125.
29. Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 234.
30. For the best account of this, see Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
31. For detailed accounts of the so-called Moorer-Radford affair, see James Rosen, The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (New York: Doubleday), pp. 165–81; and Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), pp. 3–67, 373–403.
32. Herbert S. Parmet, George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000), p. 126.
33. The oil industry had actually asked Nixon to simply refrain from doing anything. He was to resistefforts to get him involved in reducing the oil depletion allowance and leave it to industry supporters to bottle up the legislation in Congress.
34. Yergin, The Prize, p. 754.
35. Author interview with Jack Gleason, April 2008.
36. Robert Baskin, “Liberals Conclude Nixon Lost to Right,” Dallas Morning News, July 9, 1969.
37. Rosen, The Strong Man, pp. 65–114.
38. Gail Sheehy, Character: America’s Search for Leadership (New York: William Morrow, 1988), p. 174.
39. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 113.
40. Kelley, The Family, p. 284.
41. George Bush with Victor Gold, Looking Forward: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 102.
42. Parmet, George Bush, p. 146.
43. By 1972, the White House would secretly support 42.5 percent of all Democrats running for Congress—so long as their conservative views generally comported with the administration’s. See Lowell P. Weicker with Barry Sussman, Maverick: A Life in Politics (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), pp. 79–80.
44. William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside Look at the Pre-Watergate White House (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), p. 646.
45. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, “Presidential Posts and Dashed Hopes; Appointive Jobs Were Turning Point,” Washington Post, August 9, 1988.
46. Parmet, George Bush, p. 147.
47. Ibid., p. 148.
48. Dallek, “The Kissinger Presidency.”
49. Parmet, George Bush, p. 148.
10: DOWNING NIXON, PART I: THE SETUP
1. Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap), pp. 626–29.
2. H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), p. 31.
3. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), p. 40.
4. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 99.
5. The Haldeman Diaries, p. 26.
6. Deposition of Richard Helms, in Hunt v. Weberman. See A. J. Weberman, Coup dEtat in America Data Base, www.ajweberman.com/nodules2/nodulec24.htm.
7. H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 37–38.
8. Carl Freund, “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson,” Dallas Morning News (early edition), November 22, 1963.
9. Stephen Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 32.
10. Jules Witcover, The Resurrection of Richard Nixon (New York: Putnam, 1970), p. 61.
11. Author interview with Donald Kendall, September 12, 2008.
12. “Nixon to Robert Humphreys, 11/7/63,” Nixon vice presidential papers (Laguna Niguel, California),quoted in Ambrose, Nixon, 1962–72, p. 31.
13. February 1, 1966, call from President Lyndon Johnson to Senator Eugene McCarthy, cited by James Rosen, “What’s Hidden in the LBJ Tapes,” Weekly Standard, September 29, 2003.