Chapter 9
A YEAR AT LANGLEY
“For the last fifteen or more years, I don’t think I have once seen him speak about CIA when he didn’t begin to choke up. There is a special emotion that he has that I’ve never seen with the Vice Presidency or even the Presidency that in retrospect affects him emotionally. There was this bond made during 1976 that lasts to this day—both on his part and on the part of the folks at the Agency.”
—Bob Gates
One day, Dad found himself sitting in the Great Hall of the People in Peking, across the table from Deng Xiaoping. “Ah, I see you are leaving,” said Deng with a sly smile on his face. “Have you been spying on me all along?”
Dad laughed remembering it, and said of the Chinese leader, “He had a sense of humor.” Deng knew that my father had received a cable from President Ford, asking him to leave China and come home to run the CIA. Dad agreed to it, and soon the story was in the Chinese newspapers. Next thing he knew, Deng Xiaoping was hosting a farewell lunch for Dad and Mom in the Great Hall.
Even though it was just lunch, the other diplomats were amazed. Normally, Dad explained to me, Deng had no contact with ambassadors, only heads of state—“but I wasn’t even an ambassador!” Despite the fact that Dad’s title was “U.S. liaison to China,” Deng knew that Dad was someone he wanted to keep an eye on. A year or so later, when Deng was purged from power, one of Dad’s CIA associates, Jim Lilley, remembers writing up a memo about it, saying in effect that Deng may be down but he’s not out. He’ll be back.
“Your father sensed that himself,” Ambassador Lilley told me. “Although Deng was out, we knew he was coming back. And he did come back—roaring back.”
Why would Dad have agreed to leave when he was enjoying his posting in China so much? Mom and Dad still talk about how great their time in Peking was. Why go back to Washington? “When the cable came in,” Dad remembered years later, “I thought of Big Dad [Prescott Bush]. What would he do? What would he tell his kids? I think he would have said, ‘It’s your duty.’ It is my duty, and I’ll do it.”
Dad accepted the CIA job, although somewhat wistfully. He wrote to his good friend Congressman Bill Steiger, “I honestly feel my political future is behind me—but hell, I’m 51, and this new one gives me a chance to really contribute.”
It was controversial for Ford to name a politician—a former congressman and RNC chairman—to head the CIA. In fact, Senate Democrats stated that they would only confirm Dad if he would agree not to be Ford’s running mate the next year, in the 1976 reelection campaign.
James Baker, who went on to become Ford’s campaign manager for the reelection, remembers, “I thought it was an outrageous demand and told my friend that it would be a serious mistake to let his enemies dictate the terms of his career path. George disagreed with me. ‘This is something the president wants me to do,’ he said. ‘It’s something that interests me and I am going to do it.’”
“One of the great enigmas to me was the decision by President Ford, which I think he made in all good faith, to bring George back and put him in the CIA,” said Dean Burch, who was a member of Ford’s White House staff. “It was, I think, the ultimate tribute to George’s rectitude that he was thought of for a job like that. It also happened to be the worst thing, politically, that could have happened to him at the time. And then George had the terrible decision as to whether to push for confirmation without taking that blood oath that he wouldn’t seek the vice presidency. I know damn well he did not want to lock himself out, but he did, for a number of reasons. I think, first of all, he clearly wanted to be confirmed—he didn’t want to be turned down, which is an obvious thing. But secondly, I guess he, down deep, as did I, agreed that the CIA should not be a political resting place.” The finale to all this is that President Ford stated publicly he would not select Dad as his running mate. Thus Dad never had to pledge he would not be seeking the vice presidency.
The “great enigma” that Dean Burch referred to was what General Scowcroft called “the grand shuffle,” in which President Ford moved several members of his staff and cabinet around. President Nixon had made Henry Kissinger both secretary of state and national security adviser, and President Ford wanted to separate the two jobs, so he put General Scowcroft in as national security adviser. He also wanted William Colby out as CIA director, so he replaced him with Dad; and he wanted James Schlesinger out as defense secretary. Donald Rumsfeld, then White House chief of staff, wanted to move over to be defense secretary, and so Dick Cheney became White House chief of staff, replacing Rumsfeld.
In addition to the congressional Democrats’ concerns, some inside the Agency harbored concerns as well: “At the outset there was a lot of nervousness about it—mainly on the grounds that, traditionally, the Agency is not politicized,” Angus Thuermer, a loyal CIA man, told me. “It’s never been Republican. It’s never been Democrat. It just has to call them as it sees them, regardless of who’s in power, and it prides itself on its professionalism and not its political status. And your dad having been, at one time, chairman of the Republican National Committee—that carried an impression of a politician, and we had never experienced that kind of leadership before . . . that same thing made it pretty difficult for your dad to get confirmed when he was before the Senate.”
Eventually, of course, Dad was confirmed by the Senate.
James Lilley, who returned to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, after the Jack Anderson column ended his China tour, was happy to hear the news that Dad would be heading the CIA. Moreover, in an agency that values “Duty, Honor, Country” more than most, Dad’s military service was appreciated by the agents. As one agent put it, “I’d worked for many navy men before, but never one who had flown fifty-eight combat missions and been shot down.”
So not everyone was a skeptic.
Dad stepped into the shoes of William Colby, who had led the CIA during Watergate and the stormy months afterward. The “smoking gun” tape, in which President Nixon directed his aides to have the CIA call off the FBI investigation of Watergate because of “national security concerns,” was particularly damaging to the CIA.
In addition, at one point Director Colby had revealed CIA assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, prompting outrage on Capitol Hill. Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, and Congressman Otis Pike, a Democrat from New York, had led the charge in investigating the CIA abuses. (Church made such a name for himself in these hearings that he later ran for president in the 1976 Democratic primaries, but lost to Jimmy Carter.)
The Church Committee in the Senate was writing its final report to be published in April, and many of its recommendations changed the way the CIA operates to this day. But first Dad had to deal with recommendations of the Pike Committee in the House, whose final report in January of that year was so outrageous the full House refused to accept it. It ended up being leaked to the Village Voice rather than being published in the Congressional Record, and it was the talk of the town. The Rockefeller Commission, appointed by President Ford, was also preparing a report with the help of some of its members, including Governor Ronald Reagan of California.
Dad looked back on the hearings: “I still will never forget the effect those young staffers had when they went out there and almost accused everybody there of being a crook—‘You know you’re guilty, and we’re going to find it out!’ And it just sent terrible vibrations through the building. That was pretty well wrapped up by the time I got there. People were down. They were discouraged. They wanted a leader who would stand up for them. That’s what I did. I was no expert on intelligence, but they knew that I believed in the importance of their mission, the importance of intelligence for the president, and conforming to the law.”
On his first day on the job, according to Angus Thuermer, Dad walked into the morning staff meeting with a newspaper in his hand. “What are they doing to us?” he asked as he slammed the paper on the table. Within ten minutes, the fact that he had said “u
s” was all over the building.
There was pressure on Dad to show that the president was serious about cleaning house at the CIA in the wake of the hearings. “I did make the changes,” Dad told me. “I forget how many, but a lot. It’s how you do it. You don’t have to be confrontational. You have to empathize with the family and say, ‘Look, I know this is a change. You just have to work through it.’ I made a lot of changes in the top people at CIA, but I did it by getting people new assignments or encouraging some of them to retire.”
In July, Dad chose Hank Knoche to be his deputy. Hank had been there since 1953 and been the right-hand man of other directors, so he knew the Agency in a way that would be indispensable to Dad. He was a great athlete—he was a 6'4" center who had been the first pick in the first-ever NBA draft in 1946 before joining the CIA. He was Dad’s kind of guy, and he was well respected by the staff.
“I was the inside guy for the most part,” Knoche explained afterward. “Director Bush was very busy on the Hill with the Congress, in the White House with the administration, and the consumers of intelligence and the cabinet, and he did a lot of speaking on the outside. This was a new thing for the CIA—the need to explain ourselves publicly. Before, we’d always been a silent service. But the investigations and reviews made it necessary for us to get out there and explain our raison d’être and what we were trying to accomplish. So he did a lot of that.”
As a result of the congressional committees’ findings, the rules on Capitol Hill had changed for the Agency. According to Knoche, “We had to forge new relationships with Congress and respond to the new kinds of oversight we would be getting both from the executive branch and from Congress; and with your dad having been a congressman at one time and having been close to the White House . . . this put him in an ideal position to help us build new bridges.”
My parents went on a morale-boosting trip to Europe right after Dad was sworn in, and they were gone for several weeks. Dad met with leaders of other intelligence agencies. Security was very tight, because a CIA station chief named Richard Welch was assassinated on December 23, 1975, outside of his home in Athens, Greece, right before the Senate voted on Dad’s nomination.
Once they returned, Dad plunged into his new job, working long hours. I also recall how my mother started to spend a great deal of time in her room with the door shut. Maybe I should have picked up on this warning signal, but the truth is, it wasn’t until Mom’s 1994 memoirs came out that my brothers and I learned she had suffered from depression during that CIA period. We had no idea.
Mom hid her depression from everyone except Dad. He tried to convince her to get professional help, but she didn’t talk to a doctor about it for many years. I was shocked that this indomitable, dynamic woman thought about driving off the road into the trees. But I also admire her decision later to disclose her problem publicly; no doubt she helped many women struggling with the same condition to seek the help they need.
As it was, I wish I could have helped her when it was happening.
Meanwhile, at work, Dad was a man on a mission. A government official who knew Dad during his CIA tenure said: “Bush was absolutely outraged by what the Congress was doing to the CIA in the worst years of 1974 and 1975 . . . He really felt there was a serious need for somebody who had some public credibility to get to the CIA and help to restore its effectiveness, help repair the damage the Church Committee had been doing. He saw this as a very important mission.”
I think that’s true. Dad told me, “I loved defending the Agency.”
“There were a lot of high-powered people in this country who, at that stage [1975] were wondering whether you could have an intelligence service as a part of a free and democratic society,” explained Hank Knoche. “And when your whole career and your whole purpose for being is questioned—well, I think many good organizations would break . . . We did have the feeling we were terribly alone, that there was nobody out there defending us or championing the cause. George brought that to us. He became a champion.”
So morale at the CIA was at an all-time low. “Basically, the agency was taking body blows,” recalls Bill Barr, a lawyer in the legislative affairs office who accompanied Dad to the Hill for some of his appearances before Congress as the new oversight committees were being formed. Dad immediately did what previous directors had not done: he treated the people who worked there with dignity and respect. He ate often in the employee cafeteria and rode the main elevator instead of the director’s elevator. CIA headquarters was located across the river from the White House, and Dad got office space right across from the Executive Office Building for the intelligence staff so they’d have less of a commute for meetings. Moreover, in December 1976, Dad invited Lionel Hampton, the great jazz vibraphonist, to play a concert in “the Bubble”—the auditorium at CIA headquarters—for all employees.
During the Cold War, Dad was very concerned about the Soviet military, and he fostered an objective look at the Soviet threat. “I put into effect a thing called Plan B,” he told me. “We had a bunch of ardent—you might say more conservative—analysts look at the same information as the professional analysts looked at and see what they came up with—to see how objective the intelligence was. It was always pretty much the same.”
Dad said the debate within the CIA today is the same as it was back then, especially regarding the issue of intelligence—whether it was analysis of the Soviet threat then or North Korea and Iran today: “The question is, how effective is the operation? It’s almost déjà vu. Are we getting enough human intelligence? Science and technology has moved forward. Most people would realize that it’s a question of analytical work—how good is the analysis?”
With so much to do—dealing with Capitol Hill, assessing the Soviet threat in the midst of the Cold War, “the challenge of managing morale,” as he put it—Dad’s days were full. On a typical day, he’d get to work at 7:30 a.m., sometimes earlier. He would start in his office, then head to the morning staff meeting, where he would hear reports from the department heads—the directors of intelligence, operations, and science and technology. He did not personally brief the president at the White House on a daily basis—as later CIA directors often did for him when he was president—“but if there was a crisis or something happened, then I’d go down there and take the experts with me.”
It was during this busy time that my parents’ first grandchild was born. He was named George Prescott Bush after my father and grandfather and is affectionately known as George P. My parents were ecstatic when he was born—we all were. At sixteen years old, I was honored when Jeb and Columba asked me to be George P.’s godmother. After all, I had only been baptized myself about a year earlier. It was a big deal for me.
George P. was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. Everyone wanted to hold him because he was so soft—with those round baby cheeks, and dimples on the backs of his little round hands. His baby fat turned out to be a valuable asset: when he was about a year old, George P. fell out of a window at Mom and Dad’s house in Houston. He crawled over to a floor-to-ceiling window on the second floor of the house, and—in every mother’s nightmare—he pushed on the screen and out he went. Thankfully, he landed on a very forgiving hedge and was fine. It was the adults who never quite recovered.
When Dad left the CIA at the end of the Ford administration in 1977, there was no discussion of the possibility of his staying on. Being a political appointee rather than a career CIA man, Dad assumed that President Jimmy Carter would want his own man in place. Dad was fine with that—in fact, he recalled recently, “I am profoundly grateful he did not ask me to stay on for a transition.” He knew that Carter had run against the “Washington establishment” as a peanut farmer from Georgia and would want a different kind of director. (In fact, President Carter’s initial nominee to replace Dad was Ted Sorenson, a JFK speechwriter who had become a Washington lawyer. During the confirmation fight, it came out that he was a committed pacifist. His nomination was withdrawn, and A
dmiral Stansfield Turner was confirmed as the new director.)
One of the last things Dad did as CIA director was to spend a day briefing the incoming president on intelligence matters. Hank Knoche remembers Dad’s day, which started out with a meeting with the budget director; followed by meetings with Vice President Rockefeller and President Ford to tell them he’d be stepping down as CIA director; then a flight to Plains, Georgia, during which Dad told his staff he’d be resigning. When they arrived to meet with President-elect Carter and Vice President-elect Walter Mondale, Dad took a few minutes alone with them first to tell them of his resignation. Then, with both staffs present, he began what was scheduled to be a one- to two-hour briefing but ended up being a six-hour session. Knowing that Secretary Kissinger was going to Plains the next day for his briefings, Dad wrote notes for him on the flight back, then personally delivered them to Kissinger’s home at about midnight.
Hank Knoche commented, “When I think back on that day during which George had met with the budget director, the president of the United States, the vice president, the president-elect, the vice president-elect, the secretary of state—through it all there was a true professional continuity and gracefulness. Even though it was a very serious time for him, I was terribly impressed. As a matter of fact, the next day we were so impressed that at our 9:00 a.m. staff meeting I gave him, personally, just about the highest award that the agency has to give, and told the staff what George had done that previous day. It was a very touching moment.”
On his last day in office, a note arrived from Dad’s secretary at the CIA to my brothers and me, reading, “Today is January 21, and thus your father is no longer with us. He is no longer with us in body, but he will live on here in spirit. He gave us so much.” She attached Dad’s farewell letter to his fellow CIA employees, which ended with this: “I am leaving, but I am not forgetting. I hope I can find some ways in the years ahead to make the American people understand more fully the greatness that is CIA.”
My Father, My President Page 15