by Kitty Kelley
George had countered his wife’s objections about leaving the UN to return to Washington, D.C. “You can’t turn a president down,” he told her. Barbara had to know that her husband would have wrapped himself in a feather boa and tramped through Times Square in high heels before he would have said no to Richard Nixon.
Yet George frankly acknowledged in a letter to his sons that he did not have the President’s complete confidence because he was one of those “Ivy League bastards”:
The President’s hang-up on Ivy League is two-fold. The first relates to issues. He sees the Ivy League type as the Kennedy liberal Kingman Brewster on the war—arrogant, self-assured, soft professors moving the country left. Soft on Communism in the past—soft on socialistic programs at home—fighting him at every turn—close to the editors that hate him. In this issue context he equates Ivy League with anti-conservatism and certainly anti-Nixon.
Secondly I believe there is a rather insecure social kind of hang-up. Ivy League connotes privilege and softness in a tea sipping, martini drinking, tennis playing sense. There’s an enormous hang-up here that comes through an awful lot. I feel it personally. It stings but it doesn’t bleed . . . But I must confess that I am convinced that deep in his heart he feels I’m soft, not tough enough, not willing to do the “gut job” that his political instincts have taught him must be done.
A month after George’s appointment was announced, G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord were convicted of breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate and illegally wiretapping the premises. A week later the Senate established the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to be chaired by Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North Carolina. Televised hearings were to begin in May 1973.
George, an inveterate diarist, kept an RNC diary like the one he had kept at the UN and would keep in China and later as Vice President. He tried to dictate his thoughts into a tape recorder every day and gave the tapes to his secretary to transcribe. His diaries may have lacked the felicity of Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century British Admiralty officer whose diaries set the historical standard for delicious bons mots on the ways of court, but George’s unpublished comments provide a contemporaneous account of feelings that he later tried to deny. In one diary entry (March 13, 1974), he acknowledged his ability to squirm in and out of duplicity: “I have been calling them as I see them, so far. Bending, stretching a little here or there, insisting that things that I don’t want to put my name on have the White House name on them, not mine.”
From his diary it is clear that when George took over the Republican National Committee, he believed in President Nixon’s innocence. In fact, George was about the last Republican in Washington to finally recognize the President’s complicity.
On April 17, 1973, George seemed slightly concerned about “the grubby Watergate matter” because people were mailing in their RNC membership cards, saying they no longer desired to belong to the party. But he never faltered in his belief in Richard Nixon. He met with the Republican leadership, who recommended that he tell the President to waive executive privilege so that his White House counsel, John Dean, could testify before the Senate Watergate Committee. George requested a meeting with the President to relay the information: “I told him that his overall great record was being obscured by this mess . . . The President was cool, thoroughly understands the problem and that talk did much to reassure me that the matter will be cleared up.”
On July 11, 1973, it was revealed that Senator Lowell Weicker, a member of the Watergate Committee, had received money during his 1970 campaign from Operation Townhouse, the Nixon slush fund set up to funnel cash to Republican candidates.
The day after the story appeared, George called Weicker to tell him that he, too, had received funds from Operation Townhouse for his failed Texas Senate campaign. According to Weicker, Bush asked whether he should burn the record of all the Townhouse transactions. Weicker had received $6,000, all of which he had reported. Bush had received $106,000, of which only $66,000 had been reported. “George wanted to burn all the pay-outs,” said Weicker. “Not just his own.”
Weicker, who lived in Alexandria, Virginia, next to John Dean, had been warned that the illegal campaign contribution might be used against him if he continued speaking out against the administration. Weicker wondered if Bush’s phone call on July 12, 1973, might be a ploy to sabotage him.
“[George’s question about burning the list] was a very peculiar question, coming as it did not long after I had requested publicly that the special prosecutor’s office investigate the Townhouse fund,” Weicker recalled. “Destroying potential evidence is a criminal offense. It came to mind that the call might be an attempt to set me up, and I wondered if Bush was taping it. My response would have been the same whether he was or he wasn’t.
“‘Until now,’ I said, ‘Watergate has been a scandal of the Nixon reelection committee. You burn that list and you’re making it a scandal of the entire Republican Party.’”
George later denied that he had suggested burning the records. Weicker stood by his recollection. “I know what he said. That is one conversation, shall we say, that was burned in my mind.”
The Nixon White House had reason to fear Lowell Weicker. “He was a Republican who spoke out about the wrongfulness of their actions,” said Sam Dash, chief counsel to the select committee. “He was, to use the Nixon term at the time, ‘off the reservation.’ Without Lowell Weicker we would never have had John Dean’s testimony, because, according to the immunity statute, I needed a two-third’s vote of the committee. If it had just been three Democrats against three Republicans, I could never have given Dean immunity, but Weicker gave me his vote. This enabled us to get Dean’s testimony. Without that, there would have been no case.”
Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs that during one of their early meetings, George had expressed concern about the ever-widening Watergate scandal. As always, George’s concerns were practical rather than moral. “He privately pleaded for some action that would get us off the defensive.” George found that “action” on July 24, 1973, the day after the Senate Watergate Committee served the President with a subpoena ordering him to turn over the White House tapes. George managed to temporarily derail the committee’s investigation of the President by spearheading a campaign against the committee’s top investigator, Carmine Bellino.
At a hastily called press conference, George produced affidavits from three private investigators—one was dead, and the other two had been convicted of illegal wiretapping—alleging that Bellino, through an intermediary, had attempted to hire them in 1960 to bug the Washington hotel where Nixon had been preparing for his television debates with John F. Kennedy, for whom Bellino had been working as a campaign aide.
Bush said he believed that Nixon’s hotel suite had been illegally wiretapped before his 1960 debates and that if true, such bugging could very well have affected the outcome of the 1960 presidential election. “The Nixon-Kennedy election was a real cliff hanger,” said Bush, “and the debates bore heavily on the outcome . . . I cannot and do not vouch for the veracity of the statements contained in these affidavits but . . .”
Bush’s charges detonated an outcry from twenty-two Republicans, who signed a petition calling for an investigation of the allegations against Bellino. Senator Ervin appointed three members of the Senate Watergate Committee to look into the charges, and Sam Dash appointed the committee’s assistant chief counsel, David Dorsen, to oversee the investigation.
“It was a frame-up,” said Dash, now a professor of law at Georgetown University. “We were all angry about it. We thought Bellino was a man of great integrity, and we thought the charges against him were an effort by people who thought they could harm the integrity of the committee by harming its chief investigator. Both Sam Ervin and I believed then that this was a Nixon dirty trick—an effort by the Republicans to put us off the track from doing the work of the committee.”
Bellino denied Bush’s charge
s and accused him of slander and defamation. “Mr. Bush has attempted to distract me from carrying out what I consider one of the most important assignments of my life,” he said at the time.
The investigation of Bush’s charges lasted two and a half months before Bellino was cleared. After calling him “an honorable and faithful public servant,” Senator Ervin announced, “There was not a scintilla of competent or credible evidence . . . to sustain the charges against Bellino.”
The committee lawyers admitted that the investigation into Bush’s charges had indeed slowed them down. “It hurt us a lot,” Bellino said shortly before his death. “I think it was a terrible thing that George Bush did. His charges were absolutely false. Bush was doing the bidding of the White House. His real reason was to disrupt my work because I had all the financial records of H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Charles Colson. In fact, there were some things that have never come out. But once you had that smoking gun with Alexander Butterfield admitting to Nixon’s bugging the White House—that was enough to proceed on.
“Still Bush could have destroyed the case completely if Butterfield hadn’t come along . . . Without that they [the committee] would have given up. The Republicans didn’t want the investigation to continue for a long time.”
George Bush never apologized to Carmine Bellino before he died in 1990. Years later, when asked about Bush’s charges against Bellino, Sam Dash sighed. “Carmine Bellino was one of the finest financial investigators in the country. His integrity was beyond reproach . . . I guess the best that can be said of George Bush at the time was that he was vulnerable. He didn’t do enough checking himself, and he allowed himself to be used.”
Bush’s “dirty trick” bought the White House some time in 1973, but not enough to avoid scandal. On October 10, Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President for accepting cash payments from Maryland businessmen in the White House. Bush met with the President a few days later and expressed his support for Agnew. George said that he and Barbara planned to call upon the former Vice President, whom they personally liked and respected:
I said I might be criticized for this but I felt affection for the man. The President indicated I did just the right thing and he told me he himself had bought Agnew his Cabinet chair ($600) . . . Nixon talked at some length . . . on the Agnew matter saying that he was caught up in something that had been a way of life in Maryland, and others had done it for a long long time and that if the same spotlight was put on other public figures that was put on Agnew those figures would not measure up (paraphrase).
George was eager to show Richard Nixon how loyal he was:
I also told the President that I had been urged . . . to run for Governor of Texas but that I had decided not to do it now. I felt there was a chance for a Republican to win and it would be important but I felt that my leaving might inadvertently increase the speculation that I had no confidence in the administration—it might add an air of instability . . . The President agreed that it would be good to stay on the job.
Even after most of the Republican establishment accepted the inevitability of the President’s guilt, George remained committed to Nixon and continued sending out “Support the President” information from the Republican National Committee. One Republican senator called to complain that the party should remain separate from the presidency. “I made the distinction that I was speaking out against Watergate,” said George, “but we weren’t going to separate from the President.”
His fealty toward Nixon produced several snipes at Henry Kissinger, whom George felt had leapfrogged to prominence on the back of a beleaguered President. A diary entry from October 13, 1973, reads: “I also couldn’t help but think of the irony when Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize. Here was Nixon taking all the flack [sic] on the war, Kissinger executing his policies, and Henry walking away with a coveted honor.”
Kissinger’s “high-handed” tactics and his “enormous ego problem” continued to annoy George. On November 30, 1973, he wrote: “I am troubled by the fact that Kissinger gets the Nobel Prize. Kissinger gets credit for the Middle East and the President gets credit for bombing Hanoi and no credit for the Middle East.”
Finally, on December 3, 1973, George shared his indignation with the President:
I mentioned the fact that I did not appreciate the comment that Kissinger had made when he was in China. I told the President that although Al Haig had explained the matter to me I still wasn’t happy because it is Nixon’s bombing but it’s Kissinger’s Nobel Prize. It’s the President standing down the Russians but it’s Kissinger’s Middle East peace . . . I said that Haig had told me that he had fired off a cable to Kissinger asking about what Kissinger had meant when he said that no matter who is President the policy will go on. Kissinger came back and said he had been misquoted. The President looked knowingly at me on all of this, indicating that we both know where the support really lies. It all brought home to me that a President weakened by a scandal must indeed put up with certain things he never would put up with if he were not in that shape.
As much as Nixon said he despised Ivy Leaguers, he selected one to continue the short life of his second term. After Agnew resigned, the President nominated House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford (Yale Law School 1941) to take his place. It was the first use of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which had been added to the Constitution in 1967 after President Kennedy’s assassination to provide procedures for promptly filling the vacancy of Vice President or President. Ford was sworn in on December 6, 1973.
By January 1974 George’s diary had recorded the President’s growing agitation over the impeachment inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee. He considered stepping forward to say, “Impeach me or get off my back.” He sent George to the Republican leadership to see what they thought. George reported back, and Nixon dropped the idea. He told George: “We will be in for a tough two or three months.”
Again eager to show his unwavering devotion, George told the President how he was responding to criticisms against the administration: “I told him how I had answered some of the questions—that my kids were not being drafted, that nobody was shooting at George as a jet pilot. [George was attending Harvard Business School.] He [the President] seemed interested in how I was handling some of the issues.”
George groused about the “unfair” treatment Nixon was getting from the press and took a shot at the Kennedys, who he felt “always got a free pass”: “They talk about the bombing of Cambodia, but there is no mention of JFK and the Bay of Pigs.”
George’s need for the President’s approval comes through in his diary: “Al Haig told me that the President felt I was doing a good job . . . Rose Mary Woods [Nixon’s secretary] said the same thing.”
George continued to be in awe of Nixon, even as evidence of corruption piled up, pointing to the President’s illegal abuse of power. When experts determined one of the tapes in Nixon’s possession had been deliberately erased five times, showing an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, George jumped to his defense. “That deletion or whatever it was has nothing to do with the President,” he said. He accepted all of Nixon’s shifting explanations without question.
On April 5, 1974, George recorded in his diary that he had visited the President in the White House:
The desk was as clean as ever—shined—certain unreality about all of that at least compared to the way I do work and most everybody else does. There is never a scrap of paper on that desk except for a file or two in a very orderly fashion. I would say this is a positive thing in the President’s case—ordered, neat, tidy, ready for decision, etc.
During the spring of 1974, Dean Burch, formerly chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had been brought to the White House as counselor to the President and liaison between the White House and the Republican National Committee. He and George had the unpleasant task of telling the President about party defections and Republicans who would not step forward to support him. Again George recorded Nixon’s reactions with admirat
ion: “He recognized people were trying to get him or pile on but he remained very cool. His responses were manly and there was no anger. Frankly if things had gotten that screwed up as they were . . . I would have been inclined to blame me or Burch or somebody. But he didn’t do this at all.”
George recalled his reaction to one particularly difficult meeting in which the President had been told about the number of Republican candidates who did not want him to campaign for them:
My distinct feeling in being with the President to whom I feel loyalty and indebtedness but never very close on a personal basis—my distinct feeling at the end of this meeting was that I had left a real man. With all the problems that he had it is a sad thing when every chicken shit politician across the country can be joined by many of the Nixon haters in the press to put the worst possible cast on things.
George berated the media: “The press doesn’t understand this. It’s all very easy for them. You slam a guy. You carve him up. You do your thing. You get the story and the headline. But they don’t understand this question of loyalty, the question of what’s fair, what’s right.”
On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled 8–0 that the President did not have “absolute authority” to control material that had been subpoenaed. He was ordered to turn over the tapes. Among the shocking revelations on the transcripts was the “smoking gun” tape—a conversation recorded on June 23, 1972, in which Nixon told Haldeman to block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in, which had occurred six days earlier.
At that point Senator Barry Goldwater told George that the President did not have the votes in the Senate to survive an impeachment by the House. By then almost everyone, except George, had accepted the inevitable. On August 6, 1974, Nixon held his last cabinet meeting, which George recorded in his diary:
My heart went totally out to him even though I felt deeply betrayed by his lie of the day before. [He is referring to the “smoking gun” tape, which had become public.] The man is amoral. He has a different sense than the rest of people. He came up the hard way. He hung tough. He hunkered down, he stonewalled. He became President of the United States and a damn good one in many ways, but now it had all caught up with him. All the people he hated—Ivy League, press, establishment, Democrats, privileged—all of this ended up biting him and bringing him down.
