Soviet news agency TASS criticized as "vicious attacks." [fn 18] Ford thought, probably because he
had been told by Kissinger, that the fact that Mao had accompanied him to the door of hithe meeting was a special honor, but he was disabused by Beijing-based correspondents who tolds villa after
him that this was Mao's customary practice. Ford's daughter Susan was sporting a full-length
muskrat coat for her trip to the Great Wall. "It's more than I ever expected," she gushed. "I feel like
I'm in a fantasy. It's a whole other world." Days after Ford departed from Beijing, Bush also left the
Chinese capital. It was time for a new step in his imperial cursus honorumBeijing, Bush had never stopped scheming for new paths of personal advancement towards the very. During his entire stay in (^)
apex of power. Before Bush went to Beijing, he had talked to his network asset and crony Rogers
C.B. Morton about his favorite topic, his own prospects for future career aggrandizement. Morton at
that time was Secretary of Commerce, but he was planning to step down before much longer.
Morton told Bush: "What you oughtwhen I leave. It's a perfect springboard for a place on the ticket." This idea is the theme of a Ford to think about is coming back to Washington to replace me (^)
White House memo preserved in the Jack Marsh Files at the Ford Library in Ann Arbor. The memo
is addressed to Jack Marsh, counsellor to the President, by Russell Rourke of Marsh's staff. The
memo, which is dated March 20, 1975, reads as follows: "It's my impression and partial
understanding that George Bush has probably had enough of eprobably gotten over his lost V.P. opportunity). He's one hell of a Presidential surrogate, and wouldgg rolls and Peking by now (and has (^)
be an outstanding spokesman for the White House between now and November '76. Don't you think
he would make an outstanding candidate for Secretary of Commerce or a similar post sometime
during the next six months?"
The Next Step
Bush was now obsessed with the idea that he had a right to become vice president in 1976. As a
member of the senatorial caste, he had a right to enter the senate, and if the plebeians with their
changeable humors barred the elective route, then the only answer was to be appointed to thesecond spot on the ticket and enter the senate as its presiding officer. As Bush wrote in his
campaign autobiography: "Having lost out to Rockefeller as Ford's vice presidential choice in 1974,
I might be considered by some as a leading contender for the number two spot in Kansas City...."
[fn 19]
Bush possessed a remarkable capability for the blackmailing of Ford: he could enter the 1976
Republican presidential primaries as a candidate in his own right, and could occasion a
hemorrhaging of liberal Republican support that might otherwise have gone to Ford. Ford, the first
non-elected president, was the weakest of all incumbents, and he was already preparing to face a
powerful challenge from his right mounted by the Ronald Reagan camp. The presence of anadditional rival with Bush's networks among liberal and moderate Republican layers might
constitute a fatal impediment to Ford's prospects of getting himself elected to a term of his own.
Accordingly, when Kissinger visited Bush in Beijing in October, 1975, he pointedly inquired as to
whether Bush intended to enter any of the Republican presidential primaries during the 1976season. This was the principal question that Ford had directed Kissinger to ask of Bush. Bush's exit (^)
from Beijing occurred within the context of Ford's celebrated Halloween Massacre of early
November, 1975. This "massacre," reminiscent of Nixon's cabinet purge of 1973 ("the Saturday
night massacre"), was a number of firings and transfers of high officials at the top of the executive
branch through winto the primaries and, if he were successful in the winter and spring, into the Republicanhich Ford sought to figure forth the political profile which he intended to carry
convention and, beyond that, into the fall campaign. So each of these changes had a purpose that
was ultimately rooted in electioneering.
In the Halloween massacre, it was announced that Vice President Nelson Rockefeller would under