Within hours after the polls had closed in the Texas senate race, Bush was received a call
from Charles Bartlett, a Washington columnist who was part of the Prescott Bush
network. Bartlett tipped Bush to the fact that Treasury Secretary David Kennedy was
leaving, and urged him to make a grab for the job. Bush called Nixon and put in his
request. After that, he waited by the telephone. But it soon became clear that Tricky Dick
was about to recruit John Connally and with him, perhaps, the important Texas electoral
votes in 1972. Secretary of the Treasury! One of the three or four top posts in the cabinet!
And that before Bush had been given anything for all of his useless slogging through the
1970 campaign! But the job was about to go to Connally. Over two decades, one can
almost hear Bush's whining complaint.
This move was not totally unprepared. During the fall of 1970, when Connally was
campaigning for Bentsen against Bush, Connally had been invited to participate in the
Ash Commission, a study group on government re-organization chaired by Roy Ash.
"This White House access was dangerously undermining George Bush," complained
Texas GOP chairman O'Donnell. A personal friend of Bush on the White House staff
named Peter Flanigan, generated a memo to White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman
with the notation: "Connally is an implacable enemy tof the Republican party in Texas,
and, therefore, attractive as he may be to the President, we should avoid using him
again." Nixon found Connally an attractive political property, and had soon appointed
him to the main Wite House panel for intelligence evaulations: "On November 30, when
Connally's appointment to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was announced, the
senior senator from Texas, John Tower, and George Bush were instantly in touch with the
White House to express their 'extreme' distress over the appointment. [fn 2] Tower was
indigant because he had been promised by Ehrlichman some time before that Connally
was not going to receive an important post. Bush's personal plight was even more
poignant: "He was out of work, and he wanted a job. As a defeated senatorial candidate,
he hoped and fully expected to get a major job in the administration. Yet the
administration seemed to be paying more attention to the very Democrat who had put him
on the job market What gives? Bush was justified in asking." [fn 3]
The appointment of Connally to replace David Kennedy as Secretary of the Treasury was
concluded during the first week of December, 1970. But it could not be announced
without causing an upheaval among the Texas Republicans until something had been
done for lame duck George. On December 7, Nixon retainer H.R. Haldemann was
writing memos to himself in the White House. The first was: "Connally set." Then came:
"Have to do something for Bush right away." Could Bush become the Director of
NASA? How about the Small Business Administration? Or the Republican National
Committee? Or then again, he might like to be White House Congressional liaison, or
perhaps undersecretary of commerce. As one account puts it, "since no job immediately
came to mind, Bush was assured that he would come to the White House as a top
presidential adviser on something or other, until another fitting job opened up." Bush was
called to the White House on December 9, 1970 to meet with Nixon and talk about a post
as Assistant to the President "with a wide range of unspecified general responsibilities,"
according to a White House memo initialed by H.R. Haldemann. Bush accepted such a
post at one point in his haggling with the Nixon White House. But Bush also sought the