under O'Donnell was able to mount a more formidable bid than previously for the state house in
Austin. The Republican candidate was Jack Cox, aagreed to serve as the Harris County co-chairman of the Jack Cox for G party activist with a right-wing profiovernor finance committee.le. Bush (^)
In the gubernatorial election of 1962, Cox received 710,000 votes, a surprisingly large result.
Connally won the governorship, and it was in that capacity that he was present in the Kennedy
motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
During these years, a significant influence was exercised in the Texas GOP by the John Birch
Society, which had grown up during the 1950's through the leadership and financing of Robert
Welch. Water for the Birch mill was abundantly provided by the liberal Republicanism of the
Eisenhower administration, with counted Prescott Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, Gordon Gray, and
Robert Keith Gray among its most infleuntial figures. In reaction against this Wall Street liberalism,the Birchers offered an ideology of impotent negative protest based on self-righteous chauvinism in
foreign affairs and the mystifications of the free market at home. But they were highly suspicious of
the financier cliques of lower Manhattan, and to that extent they had George Bush's number.
Bush is still complaining about the indignities he suffered at the hands of these Birchers, withwhom he was straining to have as much as possible in common. But he met with repeated
frustration, because his Eastern Liberal Establishment pedigree was always there. In his campaign
autobiography, Bush laments that many Texans thought that Redbook Magazine, published by his
father-in-law Marvin Pierce of the McCall Coporation, was an official publication of the
Communist Party.
Bush recounts a campaign trip with his aide Roy Goodearle to the Texas panhandle, during which
he was working a crowd at one of his typical free food, free beer "political barbecues." Bush gave
one of his palm cards to a man who conceded that he had heard of Bush, but quickly added that he
could never support him. Bush thought this was because he was running as a Republican. "But,"[Bush] then realized, "my being a Republican wasn't the thing bothering the guy. It was something (^)
worse than that." Bush's interlocutor was upset over the fact that Zapata Offshore had eastern
investors. When Bush whined that all oil companies had eastern investors, for such was the nature
of the business, his tormentor pointed out that one of Bush's main campaign contributors, a
prominent Houston attorney, was not just a "sonofabitch," but also a member of the New YorkCouncil on Foreign Relations.
Bush explains, with the whine in his larynx in overdrive: "The lesson was that in the minds of some
voters the Council on Foreign Relations was nothing more than a One World tool of the
Communist-Wall Street internationalist conspiracy, and to make matters worse, the Houston lawyerhad also worked for President Eisenhower-- a known tool of the Communists, in the eyes of some
John Birch members." Further elucidation is then added in a footnote: "A decade and a half later,
running for President, I ran into some of the same political types on the campaign trail. By then,
they'd uncovered an international conspiracy even more sinister than the Council on Foreign
Relations-- the Trilateral Commission, a group tin 1981." This, as we shall see, is a reference to Lyndon Lhat President Reagan received at the White HouseaRouche's New Hampshire primary
campaign of 1979-80, which included the exposure of Bush's membership not just in David
Rockefeller's Trilateral, but also in Skull and Bones, about which Bush always refuses to comment.
When Ronald Reagan and other candidates took up this issue, Bush ended up loosing the New
Hampshire primary and with it his best hope of capturing the Presidency in 1980. Bushas been aware since the early sixties that serious attention to his oligarchical pedigree causes himh, in short, (^)
to lose elections. His response has been to seek to declare these very relevant matters off limits, and
to order dirty tricks and covert operations against those who persist in making this an issue, most
clearly in the case of LaRouche. [fn 7]