From ccs!ccs.covici.com!covici@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan 4 07:03:23 1993 Received: from relay1.UU.NET by css.itd.umich.edu (5.67/2.2) id AA14880; Mon, 4 Jan 93 07:03:17 -0500 Received: from uunet.uu.net (via LOCALHOST.UU.NET) by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA05685; Mon, 4 Jan 93 07:03:12 -0500 Received: from ccs.UUCP by uunet.uu.net with UUCP/RMAIL (queueing-rmail) id 070227.27898; Mon, 4 Jan 1993 07:02:27 EST Received: by ccs.covici.com (UUPC/extended 1.11x); Mon, 04 Jan 1993 03:40:58 est Date: Mon Jan 4 03:40:40 est 1993 From: "John Covici" Message-Id: <2b47f81c.ccs@ccs.covici.com> Reply-To: "John Covici" Organization: Covici Computer Systems To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: Part 13 Status: O X-Status: Chapter 11 Part 2 Rubbers Goes to Congress One of Bush's more important initiatives on the domestic side was his sponsorhip of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, brainchild of Sen. Joseph Tydings of Maryland. Signed into law by President Nixon on December 24, 1970, the Tydings-Bush bill drastically increased the federal financial commitment to population control, authorizing an initial $382 million for family planning sevices, population research, population education and information through 1973. Much of this money was funnelled through private institutions, particularly local clinics run by Bush's beloved Planned Parenthood. The Tydings-Bush measure mandated the notorious Title X, which explicitly provided ``family planning assistance'' to the poor. Bush and his zero-growth cohorts talked constantly about the importance of disseminating birth control to the poor. They claimed that there were over 5 million poor women who wanted to limit their families, but could not afford to do so. On October 23, 1969, Bush praised the Office of Economic Opportunity for carrying out some of the ``most successful'' family planning projects, and said he was ``pleased'' that the Nixon administration ``is giving them additional financial muscle by increasing their funds 50 percent--from $15 million to $22 million.'' This increased effort he attributed to the Nixon administration's ``goal to reach in the next five years the 5 million women in need of these services''--all of them poor, many of them from racial or ethnic minorities. He added: ``One needs only to look quickly at the report prepared by the Planned Parenthood-World Population Research Department to see how ineffective federal, state, and local governments have been in providing such necessary services. There is certainly nothing new about the fact that unwanted pregnancies of our poor and near-poor women keep the incidence of infant mortality and mental retardation in America at one of the highest levels of all the developed countries.'' The rates of infant mortality and mental retardation Bush was so concerned about, could have been significantly reduced, had the government provided sufficient financing to pre-natal care, nutrition, and other factors contributing to the health of infants and children. On the same day he signed the Tydings-Bush bill, Nixon vetoed--with Bush's support--legislation that would have set up a three-year, $225 million program to train family doctors. Bush seemed to be convinced that mental retardation, in particular, was a matter of heredity. The eugenicists of the 1920s had spun their pseudoscientific theories around ``hereditary feeble-mindedness,'' and claimed that the ``Kallikaks and the Jukes,'' by reproducing successive ``feeble-minded'' generations, had cost New York state tens of millions of dollars over decades. But what about learning disorders like dyslexia, which has been known to afflict oligarchical families Bush would consider wealthy, well-bred, and able? Nelson Rockefeller had dyslexia, a reading disorder, and both Bush's friend Nick Brady, and Bush's own son Neal suffer from it. But these oligarchs are not likely to fall victim to the involuntary sterilization as ``mental defectives'' which they wish to inflict on those they term the lower orders. In introducing the House version of the Tydings bill on behalf of himself and Bush, Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.) ranted that while middle-class women ``have been limiting the number of offspring for years ... women of low-income families'' did not. ``If poverty and family size are so closely related we ask, `Why don't poor women stop having babies?'|'' The Bush-Tydings bill took a giant step toward forcing them to do so. Population Task Force Among Bush's most important contributions to the neo-Malthusian cause while in Congress was his role in the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. The task force, which Bush helped found and then chaired, churned out a steady stream of propaganda claiming that the world was already seriously overpopulated; that there was a fixed limit to natural resources and that this limit was rapidly being reached; and that the environment and natural species were being sacrificed to human progress. Bush's task force sought to accredit the idea that the human race was being ``down bred,'' or reduced in genetic qualities by the population growth among blacks and other non-white and hence allegedly inferior races at a time when the Anglo-Saxons were hardly able to prevent their numbers from shrinking. Comprised of over 20 Republican Congressmen, Bush's Task Force was a kind of Malthusian vanguard organization which heard testimony from assorted ``race scientists,'' sponsored legislation and otherwise propagandized the zero-growth outlook. In its 50-odd hearings during these years, the task force provided a public forum to nearly every well-known zero-growth fanatic, from Paul Ehrlich, founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), to race scientist William Shockley, to the key zero-growth advocates infesting the federal bureaucracy. Giving a prestigious congressional platform to a discredited racist charlatan like William Shockley in the year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, points up the arrogance of Bush's commitment to eugenics. Shockley, like his co-thinker Arthur Jensen, had caused a furor during the 1960s by advancing his thesis, already repeatedly disproven, that blacks were genetically inferior to whites in cognitive faculties and intelligence. In the same year in which Bush invited him to appear before the GOP task force, Shockley had written: ``Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging dysgenics--retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged.... We fear that `fatuous beliefs' in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all segments of society.'' To halt what he saw as pervasive down-breeding of the quality of the U.S. gene pool, Shockley advocated a program of mass sterilization of the unfit and mentally defective, which he called his ``Bonus Sterilization Plan.'' Money bonuses for allowing oneself to be sterilized would be paid to any person not paying income tax who had a genetic deficiency or chronic disease, such as diabetes or epilepsy, or who could be shown to be a drug addict. ``If [the government paid] a bonus rate of $1,000 for each point below 100 IQ, $30,000 put in trust for some 70 IQ moron of 20-child potential, it might return $250,000 to taxpayers in reduced cost of mental retardation care,'' Shockley said. The special target of Shockley's prescriptions for mass sterilizations were African-Americans, whom he saw as reproducing too fast. ``If those blacks with the least amount of Caucasian genes are in fact the most prolific and the least intelligent, then genetic enslavement will be the destiny of their next generation,'' he wrote. Looking at the recent past, Shockley said in 1967: ``The lesson to be drawn from Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that eugenics is intolerable.'' As for Paul Ehrlich, his program for genocide included a call to the U.S. government to prepare ``the addition of ... mass sterilization agents'' to the U.S. food and water supply, and a ``tough foreign policy'' including termination of food aid to starving nations. As radical as Ehrlich might have sounded then, this latter point has become a staple of foreign policy under the Bush administration (witness the embargo against Iraq and Haiti). On July 24, 1969, the task force heard from Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., then national chairman of the Population Crisis Committee. Gen. Draper was a close friend of Bush's father, having served with the elder Bush as banker to Thyssen and the Nazi Steel Trust. According to Bush's resume@aa of his family friend's testimony, Draper warned that the population explosion was like a ``rising tide,'' and asserted that ``our strivings for the individual good will become a scourge to the community unless we use our God-given brain power to bring back a balance between the birth rate and the death rate.'' Draper lashed out at the Catholic Church, charging that its opposition to contraception and sterilization was frustrating population-control efforts in Latin America. A week later, Bush invited Oscar Harkavy, chief of the Ford Foundation's population program, to testify. In summarizing Harkavy's remarks for the August 4 {Congressional Record,} Bush commented: ``The population explosion is commonly recognized as one of the most serious problems now facing the nation and the world. Mr. Harkavy suggested, therefore, that we more adequately fund population research. It seems inconsistent that cancer research funds total $250-275 million annually, more than eight times the amount spent on reproductive biology research.'' In reporting on testimony by Dr. William McElroy of the National Science Foundation, Bush stressed that ``One of the crises the world will face as a result of present population growth rates is that, assuming the world population increases 2 percent annually, urban population will increase by 6 percent, and ghetto population will increase by 12 percent.'' In February 1969, Bush and other members proposed legislation to establish a Select Joint Committee on Population and Family Planning, that would, Bush said, ``seek to focus national attention on the domestic and foreign need for family planning. We need to make population and family planning household words,'' Bush told his House colleagues. ``We need to take the sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather, are using it as a political steppingstone.... A thorough investigation into birth control and a collection of data which would give the Congress the criteria to determine the effectiveness of its programs must come swiftly to stave off the number of future mouths which will feed on an ever-decreasing proportion of food,'' Bush continued. ``We need an emphasis on this critical problem ... we need a massive program in Congress with hearings to emphasize the problem, and earmarked appropriations to do something about it. We need massive cooperation from the White House like we have never had before and we need a determination by the executive branch that these funds will be spent as earmarked.'' On August 6, 1969, Bush's GOP task force introduced a bill to create a Commission on Population and the American Future which, Bush said, would ``allow the leadership of this country to properly establish criteria which can be the basis for a national policy on population.'' The move came in response to President Nixon's call of July 18 to create a blue-ribbon commission to draft a U.S. population policy. Bush was triumphant over this development, having repeatedly urged such a step at various points in the preceeding few years. On July 21, he made a statement on the floor of the House to ``commend the President'' for his action. ``We now know,'' he intoned, ``that the fantastic rate of population growth we have witnessed these past 20 years continues with no letup in sight. If this growth rate is not checked now--in this next decade--we face a danger that is as defenseless as nuclear war.'' Headed by John D. Rockefeller III, the commission represented a radical, government-sanctioned attack on human life. Its final report, issued in 1972, asserted that ``the time has come to challenge the tradition that population growth is desirable: What was unintended may turn out to be unwanted, in the society as in the family.'' Not only did the commission demand an end to population growth and economic progress, it also attacked the foundations of Western civilization by insisting that man's reason had become a major impediment to right living. ``Mass urban industrialism is based on science and technology, efficiency, acquisition, and domination through rationality,'' raved the commission's report. ``The exercise of these same values now contain [sic] the potential for the destruction of our humanity. Man is losing that balance with nature which is an essential condition of human existence.'' The commission's principal conclusion was that ``there are no substantial benefits to be gained from continued population growth,'' Chairman Rockefeller explained to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The commission made a host of recommendations to curb both population expansion and economic growth. These included: liberalizing laws restricting abortion and sterilization; having the government fund abortions; and providing birth control to teenagers. The commission had a profound impact on American attitudes toward the population issue, and helped accelerate the plunge into outright genocide. Commission Executive Director Charles Westoff wrote in 1975 that the group ``represented an important effort by an advanced country to develop a national population policy--the basic thrust of which was to slow growth in order to maximize the `quality of life.'|'' The collapse of the traditional family-centered form of society during the 1970s and 1980s was but one consequence of such recommendations. It also is widely acknowledged that the commission Bush fought so long and so hard to create broke down the last barriers to legalized abortion on demand. Indeed, just one year after the commission's final report was issued, the Supreme Court delivered the Roe v. Wade decision which did just that. Aware that many blacks and other minorities had noticed that the population control movement was a genocide program aimed at reducing their numbers, the commission went out of its way to cover its real intent by stipulating that all races should cut back on their birth rates. But the racist animus of their conclusions could not be hidden. Commission Executive Director Westoff, who owed his job and his funding to Bush, gave a hint of this in a book he had written in 1966, before joining the commission staff, which was entitled {From Now to Zero}, and in which he bemoaned the fact that the black fertility rate was so much higher than the white. The population control or zero population growth movement, which grew rapidly in the late 1960s thanks to free media exposure and foundation grants for a stream of pseudoscientific propaganda about the alleged ``population bomb'' and the ``limits to growth,'' was a continuation of the old prewar, protofascist eugenics movement, which had been forced to go into temporary eclipse when the world recoiled in horror at the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. By the mid-1960s, the same old crackpot eugenicists had resurrected themselves as the population-control and environmentalist movement. Planned Parenthood was a perfect example of the transmogrification. Now, instead of demanding the sterilization of the inferior races, the newly-packaged eugenicists talked about the population bomb, giving the poor ``equal access'' to birth contol, and ``freedom of choice.'' But nothing had substantively changed--including the use of coercion. While Bush and other advocates of government ``family planning'' programs insisted these were strictly voluntary, the reality was far different. By the mid-1970s, the number of involuntary sterilizations carried out by programs which Bush helped bring into being, had reached huge proportions. Within the black and minority communities, where most of the sterilizations were being done, protests arose which culminated in litigation at the federal level. In his 1974 ruling on this suit, Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell found that, ``Over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs. Although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis,'' Judge Gesell wrote, ``there is uncontroverted evidence ... that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization.'' Gesell concluded from the evidence that the ``dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky.'' As we have seen, George Bush inherited his obsession with population control and racial ``down-breeding'' from his father, Prescott, who staunchly supported Planned Parenthood dating back at least to the 1940s. In fact, Prescott's affiliation with Margaret Sanger's organization cost him the Senate race in 1950, as we have seen, a defeat his son has always blamed on the Catholic Church, and which is at the root of George's lifelong vendetta against the Papacy. Prescott's 1950 defeat still rankled, as shown by Bush's extraordinary gesture in evoking it during testimony he gave on Capitol Hill before Senator Gruening's subcommittee of the Senate Government Operations Committee on November 2, 1967. Bush's vengeful tirade is worth quoting at length: ``I get the feeling that it is a little less unfashionable to be in favor of birth control and planned parenthood today than it used to be. If you will excuse one personal reference here: My father, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1950, was defeated by 600 or 700 votes. On the steps of several Catholic Churches in Connecticut, the Sunday before the election, people stood there passing out pamphlets saying, `Listen to what this commentator has to say tonight. Listen to what this commentator has to say.' That night on the radio, the commentator came on and said, `Of interest to voters in Connecticut, Prescott Bush is head of the Planned Parenthood Birth Control League,' or something like this. Well, he lost by about 600 votes and there are some of us who feel that this had something to do with it. I do not think that anybody can get away with that type of thing any more.'' Bush and Draper As we saw in Chapter 3, Gen. William H. Draper, Jr. had been director and vice president of the German Credit and Investment Corp., serving short-term credit to the Nazi Party's financiers from offices in the U.S.A and Berlin. Draper became one of the most influential crusaders for radical population control measures. He campaigned endlessly for zero population growth, and praised the Chinese Communists for their ``innovative'' methods of achieving that goal. Draper's most influential outlet was the Population Crisis Committee (PCC)-Draper Fund, which he founded in the 1960s. In 1967-68, a PCC-Draper Fund offshoot, the Campaign to Check the Population Explosion, ran a nationwide advertising campaign hyping the population explosion fraud, and attacking those--particularly at the Vatican--who stood in the way of radical population control. In a 1971 article, Draper likened the developing nations to an ``animal reserve,'' where, when the animals become too numerous, the park rangers ``arbitrarily reduce one or another species as necessary to preserve the balanced environment for all other animals.... But who will be the park ranger for the human race?,'' he asked. ``Who will cull out the surplus in this country or that country when the pressure of too many people and too few resources increases beyond endurance? Will the death-dealing Horsemen of the Apocalypse--war in its modern nuclear dress, hunger haunting half the human race, and disease--will the gaunt and forbidding Horsemen become Park Ranger for the two-legged animal called man?'' Draper collaborated closely with George Bush during the latter's congressional career. As noted above, Bush invited Draper to testify to his Task Force on Earth Resources and Population; reportedly, Draper helped draft the Bush-Tydings bill. Bush felt an overwhelming affinity for the bestial and degraded image of man reflected in the raving statements of Draper. In September 1969, Bush gave a glowing tribute to Draper that was published in the {Congressional Record.} ``I wish to pay tribute to a great American,'' said Bush. ``I am very much aware of the significant leadership that General Draper has executed throughout the world in assisting governments in their efforts to solve the awesome problems of rapid population growth. No other person in the past five years has shown more initiative in creating the awareness of the world's leaders in recognizing the economic consequences of our population explosion.'' In a 1973 publication, Bush praised the PCC itself for having played a ``major role in assisting government policy makers and in mobilizing the United States' response to the world population challenge....'' The PCC made no bones about its admiration for Bush; its newsletters from the late 1960s-early 1970s feature numerous articles highlighting Bush's role in the congressional population-control campaign. In a 1979 report assessing the history of congressional action on population control, the PCC/Draper Fund placed Bush squarely with the ``most conspicuous activists'' on population-control issues, and lauded him for ``proposing all of the major or controversial recommendations'' in this arena which came before the U.S. Congress in the late 1960s. Draper's son, William III, has enthusiastically carried out his father's genocidal legacy--frequently with the help of Bush. In 1980, Draper, an enthusiastic backer of the Carter administration's notorious {Global 2000} report, served as national chairman of the Bush presidential campaign's finance committee; in early 1981, Bush convinced Reagan to appoint Draper to head the U.S. Export-Import Bank. At the time, a Draper aide, Sharon Camp, disclosed that Draper intended to reorient the bank's functions toward emphasizing population control projects. In 1987, again at Bush's behest, Draper was named by Reagan as administrator of the United Nations Development Program, which functions as an adjunct of the World Bank, and has historically pushed population reduction among Third World nations. In late January of 1991, Draper gave a speech to a conference in Washington, in which he stated that the core of Bush's ``new world order'' should be population reduction. The Nixon Touch Nixon, it will be recalled, had campaigned for Bush in 1964 and 1966, and would do so also in 1970. During these years, Bush's positions came to be almost perfectly aligned with the the line of the Imperial Presidency. And, thanks in large part to the workings of his father's Brown Brothers Harriman networks--Prescott had been a fixture in the Eisenhower White House where Nixon worked, and in the Senate over which Nixon from time to time presided--Bush became a Nixon ally and crony. Bush's Nixon connection, which pro-Bush propaganda tends to minimize, was in fact the key to Bush's career choices in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bush's intimate relations with Nixon are best illustrated in Bush's close brush with the 1968 GOP vice-presidential nomination at the Miami convention of that year. Richard Nixon came into Miami ahead of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and California Governor Ronald Reagan in the delegate count, but just before the convention, Reagan, encouraged by his growing support, announced that he was switching from being a favorite son of California to the status of an all-out candidate for the presidential nomination. Reagan attempted to convince many conservative southern delegations to switch from Nixon to himself, since he was the purer ideological conservative and better loved in the South than the new (or old) Nixon. Nixon's defense of his southern delegate base was spearheaded by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who kept the vast majority of the delegates in line, sometimes with the help of the unit rule. ``Thurmond's point of reasoning with Southern delegates was that Nixon was the best conservative they could get and still win, and that he had obtained assurances from Nixon that no vice-presidential candidate intolerable to the South would be selected,'' wrote one observer of the Miami convention.@s1@s4 With the southern conservatives guaranteed a veto power over the second spot on the ticket, Thurmond's efforts were successful; a leader of the Louisiana caucus was heard to remark: ``It breaks my heart that we can't get behind a fine man like Governor Reagan, but Mr. Nixon is deserving of our choice, and he must receive it.'' These were the circumstances in which Nixon, having won the nomination on the first ballot, met with his advisers amidst the grotesque architecture of the fifteenth floor of the Miami Plaza-Hilton in the early morning of August 9, 1968. The way Nixon tells the story in his memoirs, he had already pretty much settled on Gov. Spiro Agnew of Maryland, reasoning that ``with George Wallace in the race, I could not hope to sweep the South. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, to win the entire rimland of the South--the border states--as well as the major states of the Midwest and West.'' Therefore, says Nixon, he let his advisors mention names without telling them what he had already largely decided. ``The names most mentioned by those attending were the familiar ones: Romney, Reagan, John Lindsay, Percy, Mark Hatfield, John Tower, George Bush, John Volpe, Rockefeller, with only an occasional mention of Agnew, sometimes along with Governors John Love of Colorado and Daniel Evans of Washington.''@s1@s5 Nixon also says that he offered the vice presidency to his close friends Robert Finch and Rogers Morton, and then told his people that he wanted Agnew. But this account disingenuously underestimates how close Bush came to the vice-presidency in 1968. According to a well-informed, but favorable, short biography of Bush published as he was about to take over the presidency, ``at the 1968 GOP convention that nominated Nixon for President, Bush was said to be on the four-name short list for Vice President. He attributed that to the campaigning of his friends, but the seriousness of Nixon's consideration was widely attested. Certainly Nixon wanted to promote Bush in one way or another.''@s1@s6 Theodore H. White puts Bush on Nixon's conservative list along with Tower and Howard Baker, with a separate category of liberals and also ``political eunuchs'' like Agnew and Massachusetts Governor John Volpe.@s1@s7 Jules Witcover thought the reason that Bush had been eliminated was that he ``was too young, only a House member, and his selection would cause trouble with John Tower,'' who was also an aspirant.@s1@s8 The accepted wisdom is that Nixon decided not to choose Bush because, after all, he was only a one-term congressman. Most likely, Nixon was concerned with comparisons that could be drawn with Barry Goldwater's 1964 choice of New York Congressman Bill Miller for his running mate. Nixon feared that if he, only four years later, were to choose a Congressman without a national profile, the hostile press would compare him to Goldwater and brand him as yet another Republican loser. Later in August, Bush traveled to Nixon's beachfront motel suite at Mission Bay, California to discuss campaign strategy. It was decided that Bush, Howard Baker, Rep. Clark MacGregor of Minnesota and Governor Volpe would all function as ``surrogate candidates,'' campaigning and standing in for Nixon at engagements Nixon could not fill. And there is George, in a picture on the top of the front page of the {New York Times} of August 17, 1968, joining with the other three to slap a grinning and euphoric Nixon on the back and shake his hand before they went forth to the hustings. Bush had no problems of his own with the 1968 election, since he was running unopposed--a neat trick for a Republican in Houston, even taking the designer gerrymandering into account. Running unopposed seems to be Bush's idea of an ideal election. According to the {Houston Chronicle}, ``Bush ha[d] become so politically formidable nobody cared to take him on,'' which should have become required reading for Gary Hart some years later. Bush had great hopes that he could help deliver the Texas electoral votes into the Nixon column. The GOP was counting on further open warfare between Yarborough and Connally, but these divisions proved to be insufficient to prevent Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, from carrying Texas as he went down to defeat. As one account of the 1968 vote puts it: Texas ``is a large and exhausting state to campaign in, but here special emphasis was laid on `surrogate candidates': notably Congressman George Bush, a fit-looking fellow of excellent birth who represented the space-town suburbs of Houston and was not opposed in his district--an indication of the strength of the Republican technocracy in Texas.'' (Perhaps, if technocracy is a synonym for ``plumbers.'') Winning a second term was no problem; Bush was, however, mightily embarrassed by his inability to deliver Texas for Nixon. ``|`I don't know what went wrong,' Bush muttered when interviewed in December. `There was a hell of a lot of money spent,'|'' much of it coming from the predecessor organizations to the CREEP.@s1@s9 When in 1974 Bush briefly appeared to be the front-runner to be chosen for the vice presidency by the new President Gerald Ford, the {Washington Post} pointed out that although Bush was making a serious bid, he had almost no qualifications for the post. That criticism applied even more in 1968: For most people, Bush was a rather obscure Texas pol, and he had lost one statewide race previous to the election that got him into Congress. The fact that he made it into the final round at the Miami Hilton was another tribute to the network mobilizing power of Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman, and Skull and Bones. As the 1970 election approached, Nixon made Bush an attractive offer. If Bush were willing to give up his apparently safe congressional seat and his place on the Ways and Means Committee, Nixon would be happy to help finance the Senate race. If Bush won a Senate seat, he would be a front-runner to replace Spiro Agnew in the vice-presidential spot for 1972. If Bush were to lose the election, he would then be in line for an appointment to an important post in the executive branch, most likely a cabinet position. This deal was enough of an open secret to be discussed in the Texas press during the fall of 1970: At the time, the {Houston Post} quoted Bush in response to persistent Washington newspaper reports that Bush would replace Agnew on the 1972 ticket. Bush said that was ``the most wildly speculative piece I've seen in a long time.'' ``I hate to waste time talking about such wild speculation,'' Bush said in Austin. ``I ought to be out there shaking hands with those people who stood in the rain to support me.'' @s2@s0 In September, the {New York Times} reported that Nixon was actively recruiting Republican candidates for the Senate. ``Implies He Will Participate in Their Campaigns and Offer Jobs to Losers''; ``Financial Aid is Hinted,'' said the subtitles.@s2@s1 It was more than hinted, and the article listed George Bush as first on the list. As it turned out, Bush's Senate race was the single most important focus of Nixon's efforts in the entire country, with both the President and Agnew actively engaged on the ground. Bush would receive money from a Nixon slush fund called the ``Townhouse'' fund, an operation in the CREEP orbit. Bush was also the recipient of the largesse of W. Clement Stone, a Chicago insurance tycoon who had donated heavily to Nixon's 1968 campaign. Bush's friend Tower was the chairman of the GOP Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Bush's former campaign aide, Jim Allison, was now the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee. Losing Again Bush himself was ensconced in the coils of the GOP fundraising bureaucracy. When in May, 1969, Nixon's crony Robert Finch, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, met with members of the Republican Boosters Club, 1969, Bush was with him, along with Tower, Rogers Morton, and Congressman Bob Wilson of California. The Boosters alone were estimated to be good for about $1 million in funding for GOP candidates in 1970.@s2@s2 By December of 1969, it was clear to all that Bush would get almost all of the cash in the Texas GOP coffers, and that Eggers, the party's candidate for governor, would get short shrift indeed. On December 29, the {Houston Chronicle} front page opined: ``GOP Money To Back Bush, Not Eggers.'' The Democratic Senate candidate would later accuse Nixon's crowd of ``trying to buy'' the Senate election for Bush: ``Washington has been shovelling so much money into the George Bush campaign that now other Republican candidates around the country are demanding an accounting,'' said Bush's opponent.@s2@s3 But that opponent was Lloyd Bentsen, not Ralph Yarborough. All calculations about the 1970 Senate race had been upset when, at a relatively late hour, Bentsen, urged on by John Connally, announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary. Yarborough, busy with his work as chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, started his campaigning late. Bentsen's pitch was to attack anti-war protesters and radicals, portraying Yarborough as being a ringleader of the extremists. Yarborough had lost some of his vim over the years since 1964, and had veered into support for more ecological legislation and even for some of the anti-human ``population planning'' measures that Bush and his circles had been proposing. But he fought back gamely against Bentsen. When Bentsen boasted of having done a lot for the Chicanos of the Rio Grande Valley, Yarborough countered: ``What has Lloyd Bentsen ever done for the valley? The valley is not for sale. You can't buy people. I never heard of him doing anything for migrant labor. All I ever heard about was his father working these wetbacks. All I ever heard was them exploiting wetbacks,'' said Yarborough. When Bentsen boasted of his record of experience, Yarborough counterattacked: ``The only experience that my opponents have had is in representing the financial interest of big business. They have both shown marked insensitivity to the needs of the average citizen of our state.'' But, on May 2, Bentsen defeated Yarborough, and an era came to an end in Texas politics. Bush's 10 to 1 win in his own primary over his old rival from 1964, Robert Morris, was scant consolation. Whereas it had been clear how Bush would have run against Yarborough, it was not at all clear how he could differentiate himself from Bentsen. Indeed, to many people the two seemed to be twins: Each was a plutocrat oilman from Houston, each one was aggressively Anglo-Saxon, each one had been in the House of Representatives, each one flaunted a record as a World War II airman. In fact, all Bentsen needed to do for the rest of the race was to appear plausible and polite, and let the overwhelming Democratic advantage in registered voters, especially in the yellow-dog Democrat rural areas, do his work for him. This Bentsen posture was punctuated from time to time by appeals to conservatives who thought that Bush was too liberal for their tastes. Bush hoped for a time that his slick television packaging could save him. His man Harry Treleaven was once more brought in. Bush paid more than half a million dollars, a tidy sum at that time, to Glenn Advertising for a series of Kennedyesque ``natural look'' campaign spots. Soon Bush was cavorting on the tube in all of his arid vapidity, jogging across the street, trotting down the steps, bounding around Washington and playing touch football, always filled with youth, vigor, action and thyroxin. The Plain Folks praised Bush as ``just fantastic'' in these spots. Suffering the voters to come unto him, Bush responded to all comers that he ``understands,'' with the shot fading out before he could say what it was he understood or what he might propose to do.@s2@s4 ``Sure, it's tough to be up against the machine, the big boys,'' said the Skull and Bones candidate in these spots; Bush actually had more money to spend than even the well-heeled Bentsen. The unifying slogan for imparting the proper spin to Bush was ``He can do more.'' ``He can do more'' had problems that were evident even to some of the 1970 Bushmen: ``A few in the Bush camp questioned that general approach because once advertising programs are set into motion they are extremely difficult to change and there was the concern that if Nixon should be unpopular at campaign's end, the theme line would become, `He can do more for Nixon,' with obvious downsides.''@s2@s5 Although Bentsen's spots were said to give him ``all the animation of a cadaver,'' he was more substantive than Bush, and he was moving ahead. Were there issues that could help George? His ads put his opposition to school busing to achieve racial balance at the top of the list, but this wedge-mongerging got him nowhere. Because of his servility to Nixon, Bush had to support the buzz-word of a ``guaranteed annual income,'' which was the label under which Nixon was marketing the workfare slave-labor program already described; but to many in Texas that sounded like a new give-away, and Bentsen was quick to take advantage. Bush bragged that he had been one of the original sponsors of the bill that had just semi-privatized the U.S. Post Office Department as the Postal Service--not exactly a success story in retrospect. Bush came on as a ``fiscal conservative,'' but this also was of little help against Bentsen. In an interview on women's issues, Bush first joked that there really was no consensus among women--``the concept of a women's movement is unreal--you can't get two women to agree on anything.'' On abortion he commented: ``I realize this is a politically sensitive area. But I believe in a woman's right to choose. It should be an individual matter. I think ultimately it will be a constitutional question. I don't favor a federal abortion law as such.'' After 1980, for those who choose to believe him, this changed to strong opposition to abortion. ... Could Nixon and Agnew help Bush? Agnew's message fell flat in Texas, since he knew it was too dangerous to try to get to the right of Bentsen and attack him from there. Instead, Agnew went through the follwing contortion: A vote for Bentsen, Agnew told audiences in Lubbock and Amarillo, ``is a vote to keep William Fulbright chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,'' and that was not what ``Texans want at all.'' Agnew tried to put Bentsen in the same boat with ``radical liberals'' like Yarborough, Fulbright, McGovern and Kennedy. Bentsen invited Agnew to move on to Arkansas and fight it out with Fulbright, and that was that. Could Nixon himself help Bush? Nixon did campaign in the state. Bentsen then told a group of ``Anglo-American'' businessmen: Texans want ``a man who can stand alone without being propped up by the White House.'' In the end, Bentsen defeated Bush by a vote of 1,197,726 to Bush's 1,035,794, about 53 percent to 47 percent. The official Bushman explanation was that there were two proposed amendments to the Texas constitution on the ballot, one to allow saloons, and one to allow all undeveloped land to be taxed at the same rate as farmland. According to Bushman apologetics, these two propositions attracted so much interest among ``yellow dog'' rural conservatives that 300,000 extra voters came out, and this gave Bentsen his critical margin of victory. There was also speculation that Nixon and Agnew had attracted so much attention that more voters had come out, but many of these were Bentsen supporters. On the night of the election, Bush said that he ``felt like General Custer. They asked him why he had lost and he said `There were too many Indians. All I can say at this point is that there were too many Democrats,'|'' said the fresh two-time loser. Bentsen suggested that it was time for Bush to be appointed to a high position in the government.@s2@s6 Bush's other consolation was a telegram dated November 5, 1970: ``From personal experience I know the disappointment that you and your family must feel at this time. I am sure, however, that you will not allow this defeat to discourage you in your efforts to continue to provide leadership for our party and the nation. Richard Nixon. This was Nixon's euphemistic way of reassuring Bush that they still had a deal.@s2@s7 Footnotes 14. Norman Mailer, {Miami and the Siege of Chicago} (New York: D.I. Fine, 1968), pp. 72-73. 15. Richard Nixon, {RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon} (New York: Warner Books, 1978), p. 312. 16. {Congressional Quarterly,} ``President Bush,'' (Washington: 1989) p. 94. 17. Theodore H. White, {The Making of the President 1968} (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1969), p. 251. 18. Jules Witcover, {The Resurrection of Richard Nixon} (New York: Putnam, 1970), p. 352. 19. Lewis Chester et al., {An American Melodrama: the Presidential Campaign of 1968} (London: Deutch, 1969), p. 622. 20. {Houston Post,} Oct. 29, 1970. 21. {New York Times,} Sept. 27, 1969. 22. {New York Times,} May 13, 1969. 23. {Houston Chronicle,} Oct. 6, 1970. 24. See ``Tubing with Lloyd/George,'' {Texas Observer,} Oct. 30, 1970. 25. Knaggs, {op. cit.,} p. 148. 26. {Houston Post,} Nov. 5, 1970. 27. Bush and Gold, {op. cit.,} p. 102. ---- John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com