George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography --- by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin
Whatever benign star it is that tends George Bush's destiny, lights his ambition, it was early on trapped in the flawed orbit of Richard Nixon. Bush's meteoric ascent, in a decade's time, from county GOP chairman to national chairman, including his prestigious ambassadorship to the United Nations, was due largely to the strong tug of Nixonian gravity. Likewise, his blunted hopes and dimmed future, like the Comet Kohoutek, result from the too-close approach to a fatal sun. [fn 1]
Several minutes before Ford appeared for the first time before the television cameras with Nelson Rockefeller, his vice president designate, he had placed a call to Bush to inform him that he had not been chosen, and to reassure him that he would be offered an important post as a consolation. Two days later, Bush met Ford at the White House. Bush claims that Ford told him that he could choose between a future as US envoy to the Court of St. James in London, or presenting his credentials to the Palais de l'Elysee in Paris. Bush would have us believe that he then told Ford that he wanted neither London nor Paris, but Beijing. Bush's accounts then portray Ford, never the quickest, as tamping his pipe, scratching his head, and asking, "Why Beijing?" Here Bush is lying once again. Ford was certainly no genius, but no one was better situated than he to know that it would have been utter folly to propose Bush for an ambassadorship that had to be approved by the Senate.
Why Beijing? The first consideration, and it was an imperative one, was that under no circumstances could Bush face Senate confirmation hearings for any executive branch appointment for at least one to two years. There would have been questions about the Townhouse slush fund, about his intervention on Carmine Bellino, perhaps about Leon and Russell, and about many other acutely embarrassing themes. All of the reasons which had led Ford to exclude Bush as vice president, for which he would have needed the approval of both Houses of Congress, were valid in ruling out any nomination that had to get past the senate. After Watergate, Bush's name was just too smelly to send up to the Hill for any reason, despite all the power of the usual Brown Brother, Harriman/Skull and Bones network mobilization. It would take time to cauterize certain lesions and to cool off certain investigative tracks. Certain scandals had to be fixed. Perhaps in a year or two things might cool down, and the climate of opinion alter. But while the psychology of Watergate dominated the legislative branch, a high-profile job for Bush was out of the question.
As Bush himself slyly notes: "The United States didn't maintain formal diplomatic relations with the People's Republic at the time, so my appointment wouldn't need Senate confirmation." An asterisk sends us to the additional fact that "because I'd been ambassador to the United Nations I carried the title 'ambassador' to China." The person that would have to be convinced, Bush correctly noted, was Henry Kissinger, who monopolized all decisions on his prized China card. [fn 2] But George was right about the confirmation. Official diplomatic relations between the US and mainland China came only with the Carter China card of 1979. In 1974, what Bush was asking for was the US Laison Office (USLO), which did not have the official status of an embassy. The chief of that office was the president's personal representative in China, but it was a post that did not require senate confirmation.
Bush's notorious crony Robert Mosbacher, certainly well versed enough to qualify as a conoisseur of sleaze, was uncharacteristically close to the heart of the matter when he opined that in late August, 1974, Bush "wanted to get as far away from the stench [of Watergate] as possible." [fn 3] Like Don Gregg in 1989, Bush wanted to get out of town and let things blow over for a while. His own story that Beijing would be a "challenge, a journey into the unknown" is pure tripe. More imaginative, but equally mendacious is the late Dean Burch's explanation that Bush had "a Marco Polo complex, thinking he could pentrate the mystery of the place." The truth is that with Washington teeming with Congressional committees, special prosecutors, grand juries, all in a furor of ostracism, Bush wanted to get as far away as he could, and Beijing was ideal.
Other attractions inherent in the Beijing posting are suggested by the fact that Bush's predecessor in Beijing was David K.E. Bruce, who had opened the liason office in March, 1973. Bruce had been the chief of the London bureau of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, which meant that he had been the boss of all European OSS operations, including Allen Dulles in Switzerland and all the rest. The presence in Beijing of Bruce, a true eminence grise of Anglo-American intelligence, points up the importance of the post, especially in the covert and intelligence domain.
Otherwise, as Bush has already mentioned, serving in Beijing meant further close subordination to Henry Kissinger. Kissinger told Bush before he left that policy would be implemented directly by Kissinger himself, in contact with the Chinese liaison in Washington and the Chinese representative at the United Nations. In practice, Bush would be ordered about by such Kissinger clones as Richard Solomon of the NSC, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Habib, and Winston Lord, director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and the scion of an old Skull and Bones family. But then again, Bush was a leading Kissinger clone in his own right.
Finally, anyone who has observed Bush's stubborn, obsessive, morally insane support for Deng Xiao-ping, Li Peng, and Yang Shankun during the aftermath of the Tien An Men massacre of June, 1989 is driven towards the conclusion that Bush gravitated towards China because of an elective affinity, because of a profound attraction for the methods and outlook of Chinese leaders like Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Deng, for whom Bush has manifested a steadfast and unshakeable devotion in the face of heinous crimes and significant political pressure to repudiate them. Bush wanted to go to China because he found Chinese communists genuinely congenial.
When Bush was about to leave for China, his crony Dean Burch (no longer troubled, as we see, by Bush's dermal diarrhea) arranged for a fifteen minute sendoff meeting with Ford, but this was reduced to 10 minutes by NSC director Scowcroft, at that time the most important Kissinger clone of them all. Before he left for Beijing, Bush could not resist making some sententious and self-serving pronouncements to the press about his experience in Watergate. He told David Broder of the Washington Post: "We've done a lot of running just to stay in place, and I was sometimes depressed by the amount of bickering that goes on. But then I look across town at Bob Strauss and his problems, and I feel like this was a 20-month honeymoon." Bob Strauss was at this time Bush's counterpart at the Democratic National Committee. Bush noted that there was "philosophical discontent" among right-wing Republicans about the policies of Nixon and Ford, but opined that these would never lead to a third party on the right. Bush defended "patronage" and said he was "worried about the health of the two-party system" even though he worried that this cause is "really not very popular right now." [fn 4]
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