Nixon's Secret (70 page)

The Bush family–Nixon relationship would be rife with brownnosing, cultivation, political support, financial support, appointments, treachery, and betrayal. The extraordinarily intense political and corporate pressure put on Nixon to select a mere congressman George H. W. Bush as his running mate was rejected by Nixon. Senator Prescott Bush would write Governor Tom Dewey (who had strongly urged Nixon to select young Bush) that Nixon had made a “serious error.”
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William Middendorf, II, a longtime GOP fundraiser for Barry Goldwater, Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan who later served as Secretary of the Navy, describes the major effort in the 1968 GOP convention to bring Bush on the ticket in his memoir
Potomac Fever: A Memoir of Politics and Public Service
. On the day after Nixon was nominated, Middendorf and his associate, New York financier Jerry Milbank, went to Nixon’s hotel room to talk about the vice presidential choices. “It was pretty early, I think it was about 7:30, I think it was his bedroom, actually, reading the paper. I said we’ve got delegates pretty much lined up for George, and it looks like he’d be a very popular choice among the delegates,” Middendorf recalled. “That’s when he told me that, ‘Oh, gee, fellas, I’m going with my man Spiro T. Agnew,’” the little-known governor of Maryland who would later resign in a scandal.
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Prescott Bush was furious with Nixon’s passing over Bush for the little-known Agnew; he would share his anger in a letter to Tom Dewey, the Eastern kingmaker who had “made” Eisenhower.

After being rejected by Nixon for the 1968 ticket, George Bush moved his trajectory to the White House into 1976. Bush would serve four years as vice president in Nixon’s second term and then become the presumptive Republican nominee. In order to put this plan in motion, Bush would first need to win the Texas US Senate seat in 1970, which would force Nixon to dump Agnew and replace him with the son of Senator Prescott Bush. Bush’s brother Jon would confirm the 1970 race was to position Bush as a vice presidential contender and presidential candidate.
Washington Post
reporter, Bob Woodward would write that “Bush led the short list for the ‘72 nomination,” while his colleague David Broder reported that Bush’s selection was assured. A funny thing happen on the way to the 1972 Republican nominating convention, Bush would be derailed in his 1970 race would have to delay his presidential ambitions for a full ten years—despite mounting two more intense secret campaigns to be picked for vice presidential nominations.
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Washington Post
syndicated columnist Robert Novak was convinced that Nixon had promised Bush the vice presidency in 1972 as an inducement for Bush to leave a safe House seat and make his second unsuccessful bid for the US Senate in 1970. Despite Bush’s longtime cultivation of Lyndon Johnson, LBJ and his Bourbon Democrat ally John Connally had killed Bush’s Senate aspirations by defeating vulnerable liberal Ralph Yarborough in the Democratic primary and replacing him with conservative Democrat Lloyd Bentsen. Bentsen held on to conservative Democrats but ran up Democrat-like majorities in the black and Hispanic communities to trounce Bush.
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Encouraged to run for the US Senate in 1970, Nixon promised Bush he would be on the short list for vice president in 1972. Indeed, Lee Atwater would tell me Harry Dent told him Nixon told Prescott Bush that George would replace Agnew in ‘72. Lyndon Johnson and Texas Governor John Connally would block that ascendancy, ironically when Bush was defeated in the Texas Senate race. Yet Nixon would loyally provide appointed jobs as UN ambassador and Republican National chairman that would, in the end, allow Bush to revive his presidential ambitions.

George Bush inherited his desire to be president from his father. Investment banker Prescott Bush would often times tell his wife that he regretted never establishing a political career early in life to eventually mount a presidential bid. The family patriarch, Prescott was a tall, ramrod straight, and imposing man. As an investment banker with Brown Brothers-Harriman, a bipartisan powerhouse, Prescott worked with his partners to manipulate the levers of power in order reap financial gain from national and international policy. In this vain, Russ Baker has speculated that Prescott Bush was the Eastern banker who visited Southern California in 1946 to bring big eastern money to rookie congressional candidate Richard Nixon.
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Nixon’s opponent incumbent Jerry Voorhis had offended the eastern financial elite with a proposal to eliminate the Federal Reserve.
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Prescott Bush indeed decided to enter politics late in life. He narrowly lost the US Senate seat in 1950 when it was revealed in the heavily Catholic state of Connecticut that he and his wife has contributed to Planned Parenthood. Bush, a friend and golfing partner of Dwight Eisenhower, was among those who urged Ike to take Nixon on the 1952 ticket. That same year, Prescott would win a special election to fill the seat of US Senator Brien McMahon, who died unexpectedly.

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The “Townhouse Operation” was an early campaign finance scheme devised by John M. King that eventually evolved into Watergate. The general outline of the operation, as suggested by King, was a system whereby large donors were able to directly contribute to Senate and House candidates, rather than using the traditional method of donating money to the National Party Committee and allowing the party elites to determine where to distribute it. President Nixon directly approved of the scheme in late 1969 after Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman presented it to him in the Oval Office.
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No one would benefit from this secret fund more than US Senate candidate George Bush. The Nixon White House’s sensitivity regarding the Townhouse Operation would surface during the so-called ITT scandal in which it was alleged that the communications giant contributed $400,000 to the Republican National Convention effort in San Diego in return for a favorable antitrust ruling from John Mitchell’s Justice Department. Jack Gleason, who had run the day-to-day operations of the Townhouse Operation, had gone to work as a consultant for ITT in the run-up to the 1972 convention. White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman and Domestic Advisor John Erlichman would instruct White House counsel John Dean to contact Gleason’s lawyer when Gleason was subpoenaed. The Teutonic Christian Scientist duo wanted Gleason to assert his Fifth Amendment rights if questioned by the committee regarding the White House fundraising operation. Dean warily convinced the two that a Fifth Amendment declination to answer questions would bring greater scrutiny and cause a minor furor expanding the ITT investigation into troublesome areas for the White House.

Following the receipt of approval from Nixon, Haldeman and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans set up the “Townhouse Operation—so-called because it was run out of a townhouse in northwest DC—to ensure that the Republican Party fielded candidates whose primary loyalty was to Nixon, not the Eastern Establishment of the party.
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Nixon had never trusted the Eastern Establishment of the GOP and saw the opportunity to establish an independent location for party supporters to donate as, “one of our most important projects for 1970.”
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While Bush was a scion of an old Establishment Republican family through his father, former Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, Nixon was confident that Bush, “[would] do anything for the cause.”
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Indeed, Bush’s 1970 Texas Senate campaign was a primary beneficiary of the Townhouse Operation, with Bush receiving $106,000, of which the Bush campaign failed to report $55,000.
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Pulitzer prize–winning author J. Anthony Lukas would report: “In March 1970 Haldeman; Harry Dent, a White House political adviser; and Dent’s assistant, Jack A. Gleason, decided that a special fund was needed for that fall’s Senate and House races. Haldeman asked Kalmbach to do the bulk of the fund-raising, urging him to ‘get cash whenever you can get it.’ And ‘old reliable’ Herb did raise some $2.8 million of the $3.9 eventually garnered for the fund. According to a confidential memo from Kalmbach to Haldeman, two of the President’s friends—W. Clement Stone, a Chicago insurance executive, and Donald Kendall, board chairman of PepsiCo, Inc.—each pledged $250,000. H. Ross Perot, a Texas millionaire, also came in with $250,000. Claude C. Wild, Jr., Gulf Oil’s Washington vice president, was listed for $25,000. Edward J. Gerrity, Jr., International Telephone and Telegraph’s vice president for public relations, was listed for $50,000 (although Gerrity says he never paid it).

“The money was collected and the funds disbursed by Jack Gleason out of a back-room office in the basement of a townhouse at 1310 19th Street, N.W., and thus the operation known as the Townhouse Project. The contributions were siphoned into congressional campaigns in at least nineteen states, including crucial contest in Maryland, Tennessee, Florida, Indiana, and North Dakota. The whole project was illegal because Dent, Gleason
et al.
were functioning as a political committee and such committees could not support candidates in two or more states without having a treasurer who filed public reports to Congress.”

Kalmbach, Gleason, and Dent were all convicted for their activities in the project. Kalmbach served six months of a six-to-ten-month sentence and was fined $10,000. Dent was sentenced to one month of unsupervised probation. Gleason received a suspended sentence.
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There is also evidence that an integral part of the rationale for the Townhouse Operation was not simply an opportunity to win seats for loyal Nixonites, but also to provide leverage over those very same elected officials. In short, the Townhouse funds were used up front as a “carrot,” but the Nixon White House was not above using it as a “stick” after the fact.
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Referred to as the “six project,” Haldeman ordered that $6,000 in cash be delivered to approximately fifteen Republican candidates. Among the fifteen candidates listed was Mr. Bush, with Nixon White House records indicating that either Bush or his campaign manager accepted the funds from a Townhouse operative named Jack Gleason.
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Bush would claim, I believe correctly, that state campaign regulation did not require the filing in Texas of the Townhouse contributions in 1970 and that his campaign treasurer had adhered to all relevant campaign laws at the time. Nonetheless, the Townhouse “scandal” would be a meme for the duration of Bush’s political career. It would be surfaced his intra-party rivals in 1976 when he ran a boiler room operation to urge Gerald Ford to select him as vice president as well as being raised again when Ford again passed over Bush for VP when he dumped Nelson Rockefeller. It would surface yet again after Bush won the Iowa caucuses when old Nixon hand John Sears, then managing the campaign of Ronald Reagan, fed the information to vitriolic
Manchester Union Leader
publisher William Loeb. While it is true that Bush received more from the secret fund than any other candidate, it is important to note that most of the Townhouse cash was generated by Bush money men Bill Liedtke and Robert Mosbacher, who later served as Bush’s secretary of commerce. As we shall see, it also the Bush money apparatus that financed the actual Watergate break-in; the bills found on the Watergate burglars by police came from a Mexican bank where the Bush money had been laundered.

While Poppy was never charged with campaign finance violations in connection with the Townhouse Operation, President Nixon’s personal attorney Herbert Kalbach, Nixon political strategist Harry S. Dent Jr., and former White House aide Jack Gleason—the operation’s chief fundraiser—and the later two administrators of the fund, all pled guilty to violations of federal election law in 1974.

When former Congressman Donald J. Irwin, who sought the Democratic nomination to challenge Weicker in 1976, pointed out that Weicker had never reported the great bulk of the Townhouse moneys, the Connecticut press ignored him. After all, Nixon had no greater critic than Lowell Weicker.

Weicker would later claim that as Republic National Chairman Bush would call him and say, “I have the Townhouse records right here, what do you think I should do with them? Burn them?” Bush for his part admits speaking to Weicker but denies any suggestion that he would burn the Townhouse records as ridiculous as the originals of the files had already been sent to the Senate Watergate Committee and the Watergate Special Prosecutor. Bush insisted that he sent copies of the records that pertained specifically to Weicker’s received contributions to the Senator which Weicker would subsequently deny ever receiving. A more likely interpretation to the bombastic Connecticut senator is that Bush was letting Weicker know that the White House was well aware of Weicker’s hypocrisy.

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From the very beginning Weicker made no secret of his intention of “getting” Richard Nixon. Author Victor Lasky would offer a hard-boiled analysis of Weicker’s actions: “Probably the biggest leaker was Weicker. For a Republican, the senator was an oddity. He had actually fought for his job on the committee while most Republicans were running the other way. From the very beginning Weicker operated on his own with a team of five investigators who became known as the Third Front.

Ironically Weicker had been elected to the Senate with Nixon’s support. At the behest of the president’s chief political adviser, Murray Chotiner, money from a secret White House fund collected for the 1970 congressional campaign was siphoned off to aid a duly appreciate Weicker. As a result Weicker held Chotiner in high esteem. When Chotiner died in 1974, one of those prominent in attendance at the Washington Hebrew Congregation services was Weicker (Also there was President Nixon, bidding farewell to an old comrade; such are the vagaries of politics.).

Weicker made his way into the Senate through a fluke. He ran against two opponents. The endorsed Democrat was a freelance clergyman and ADA pooh-bah named Joseph Duffey; but a great may unreconstructed Democrats preferred the incumbent Tom Dodd, who had been censured by his peers on charges most people by now have forgotten. “It was a delightful campaign,” wrote C. H. Simonds in
The Alternative
. “While Weicker went about portraying him as a one-man Weatherman bomb-and-orgy squad, poor Duffey devoted his scanty energies to refereeing staff disputes over whether or not to bill himself as
The Reverend
; Dodd, meanwhile, bumbled along with chin up and smile bright and every hair in place . . . and so Weicker went to Washington, giving the last laugh to Dodd, who must be laughing still as he beholds the pompous clowns who censured him, yawning and squirming through his successor’s weepy tirades.”