The Republicans

(8 of 12)

No man had a better eye for the usable Eastern Establishment Republican than Richard Nixon. He loved to manipulate those he suspected of despising him. He took early notice of George Bush's organizational work in the 1950s, encouraged his Goldwater phase and campaigned for him in 1964. Bush in his early oil travels lived briefly in Nixon's hometown of Whittier, Calif. But the tie with Nixon was deeper than that. The ex-Vice President of the early 1960s, while cultivating Goldwaterites, was also acquiring a covey of "walking gentlemen" to escort him back onto the public scene -- young talents like Robert Finch and William Ruckelshaus. Bush was one of this circle -- and one who would fall for Nixon's own locker-room bravado as a political style. It did not work well for Nixon, but he managed to persuade some people, including Bush, that they could do it better (Bush actually does it worse).

When Bush reached Congress two years later, he showed signs of reverting to type. He was concerned about family planning. In 1968, after trying to amend the civil rights bill on open housing, he voted for it, much to the disgust of his constituents. But Nixon won the nomination later that year and reasserted his mastery over Bush, holding out for a while a hope of the vice presidency (the first of Bush's lunges at an office others try to evade). When Prescott Bush advised his son against running for the Senate in 1970, Nixon urged him on, financing his race with an illegal campaign fund and promising him a Government job if he lost.

The job Bush asked for and got was to go to the U.N., where he was to represent Taiwan's hapless effort to remain a member while Kissinger and Nixon were making that impossible by their secret dealings with the People's Republic of China. Bush was not informed of their policy, which made his impassioned U.N. speeches part of a charade. I asked if he felt betrayed. "No, I didn't feel betrayed. I would like to have known what was going on . . . but not betrayed -- that's too strong a word."

After his Senate loss to Lloyd Bentsen in 1970, Bush saw all the upward paths to elective office blocked in Texas, and decided to risk his future with Nixon and diplomacy. Secret notes in the Nixon archives show that Bush admitted, after serving in the U.N., that he could hardly go back and run for office in the state where he had begun his career by denouncing the U.N. Less clear was that taking favors from Richard Nixon was a way of getting in line for trouble. Barbara Bush seems to have sensed this when she warned her husband not to let Nixon saddle him with the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. This was during the shake-up following Nixon's re-election in 1972, when Watergate was a faint underground rumble. Nixon, in the flush of victory, was going to do wonders, mainly by firing or demoting almost everyone in sight -- but not George Bush. "He'd do anything for the cause," Nixon privately told John Ehrlichman. The qualification for service in the second term was spelled out with ruthless clarity: "Not brains, loyalty."

NICE MAN, NASTY SITUATIONS