must have clandestine services." Above all he regretted "that some of the thrust of the legislation
before the Hill is still flogging CIA for something that was long corrected, or that never happened."Even Hollywood was against the CIA, Bush thought, "and you get movies and television programs
and it has a very sinister kind of propagandistic overtone." Here Bush wanted to defend his own
record: "I'll give you one example that happened on my watch: One of these rather ribald magazines
described a purported destabilization effort against [Prime Minister Michael] Manley in Jamiaca."
"But," said Bush with that self-righteous whine, "it never happened. There wasn't any truth in it."
An important question came from Ledeen: "Is the agency penetrated?" Bush was ready to admit that
it might be: "Nobody is saying that there's nothing." "How about double agents?" Ledeen wanted to
know. "Well, obviously we've had double agents but that's not officers of the agency," was Bush's
ambiguous reply. Bush went on: The great Soviet agents were recruited when the Soviet represented something ideologically. When
they represented antifascism. That's when they got people like Philby. But the fact is that we've just
went [sic] through a period in which we had hundreds of thousands of our young people out
screaming against their government. Now they were totally opposed to their government, but they
weren't pro-Soviet.
Bush and Cline joined to praise the "benign covert political action" of the 1940's and 1950's by
which the CIA sent US intellectuals to Europe to talk to the Europeans. "We essentially won that
ideological battle," said Bush.[fn 4]
When Carter and Brzezinski played their treacherous China card in December, 1978, Bush was
quick, despite his own miserable record on this issue, to launch a pre-election attack on Carter with
an op-ed in the Washington Post. Bush harkened back to the day in December, 1975 (although Bush
wrote October) when he, Ford, and Kissinger had sat down with Chairman Mao. From Mao's
remarks that day, Bush says, it was clear that Red China was obsessed with the Soviet threat, andwas willing to wait indefinitely for China to be reunited with Taiwan. Now Carter had broken
diplomatic relations with Taiwan, begun the pullout of US forces, abrogated the US-Taiwan
security treaty, and was winding down arms assistance to Taiwan. Bush was the man who had
presided over the ejection of the Republic of China from the UN. It was a cheap shot for him to
quote Peter Berger about the primaeval principle of morality that "one must not deliver one's friendsto their enemies." After Bush's support for Deng Xiao-ping after the 1989 Tein An Men massacre,
the hypocrisy is even more obvious.
But Bush had some other points to make against Carter. One was that when "black moderates in
Rhodesia arranged with Prime Minister Ian Smith for the transfer of pow[meaning Carter] threw in our lot with Marxist radicals." er and free elections, we
Then there was the Middle East, where "the Israelis announced that they were prepared to accept a
final plan drafted with American help. But when Egypt raised the ante, we modified our position to
accept the new Egyptian proposthem in the shins." Even the Carter of Camp David, who split the Arab front with a separate peaceals, and when the Israelis refused to go along, we publicly kicked (^)
between Israel and Egypt, was not Zionist enough for Bush.
Apart from these public pronouncements, Bush was at work assembling a campaign machine.
One of the central figures of the Bush effort would be James Baker III, Bush's friend of ten years'
standing. Baker's power base derived first of all from his family's Houston law firm, Baker & Botts,
which was founded just after the end of the Civil War by defeated partizans of the Confederate
cause. Judge Peter Gray and Walter Browne Botts established a law partnership in 1866, and this
became Baker & Botts during the 1870's when James Baker (the great-grandfather of Bush's