George Brown, the chairman of the joint chiefs, was quoted to be the effect that Israeli and its
armed forces had "got to be considered a burden" for the United States.
In April, Bush told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that he was just back from a secret
visit to three countries in Europe, which he refused to name, during which he conceded that he
"might or might not" have met with Frank Sinatra. (Brother Jonathan Bush had said in February that
Sinatra had offered his services to the new CIA boss.) Bush praised the CIA in his speech: "It is afantastic reservoir of discipline in the CIA. Our personnel people say the quality of appplications is (^)
up. This is an expression of confidence in the agency. Morale is A-one." There was speculation that
Bush might have gone to Italy, where terrorist activity was increasing and the Italian Communist
Party, profiting from the vogue of "Euro-communism," was rapidly increasing its vote share during
1975-76.
In May, FBI Director Clarence Kelley apologized to the American people for the abuses committed
by his secret police. Kelley said that he was "truly sorry" for past abuses of power, all of which
were neatly laid at the door of the deceased former director, J. Edgar Hoover. Bush, for his part,
aggressively refused to apologize. Bush conceded that he felt "outrage" at the illegal CIA domesticoperations of the Watergate era, but that "that's all I'm going to say about it...you can interpret it any (^)
way you want." Bush's line was that all abuses had already been halted under Colby by the latter's
"administrative dictum," and that the issue now was the implementation of the Rockefeller
Commission report, to which Bush once again pledged fealty. Bush had no comment on the
Lockheed scandal, which had begun to destabilize the Japanese, German, Italian, and Netherlandsgovernments. The advance of the Italian communists and the Panama canal treaties were all "policy (^)
questions for the White House" in his view. Although China was being rocked by the "democracy
wall" movement and the first Tien An Men massacre of 1976, Bush, ever loyal to his Chinese
communist cronies, found that all that did not add up to anything "dramatically different."
A visit to the Texas Breakfast Club on May 27 found Bush trying to burnish his image as a good
guy by talking about the existential dilemmas of a good man in any imperfect world, while pleading
for more covert opoerations all the time. "I know in a limited way there are conflicts of conscience,"
Bush told the breakfasters. "But we're not living in a particularly moral world. We're living in a
world that's not pure black or purecovert capability." On the other hand, Bush was "not unconcerned about the constitutional questions white. We're living in a world where [the US] has to have a (^)
that the excesses of the past have raised." "I'm not going to defend the things that were done but I'm
not going to dwell on them either." "I'm happy to say I think things are moving away from the more
sensational revelations of the past," leaving the CIA as an institution "intact." Necessity,
pontificated Bush, sometimes demands "compromise with the purity of moral decisions."
On June 3, the Houston Post touted Bush as a good vice presidential candidate after all, moderate
and southern, no matter what Ford had promised to the senate to get Bush confirmed. Bush was
mum.
A few days later Bush paid tribute to the Israeli Defense Forces, who had just rescued a group of
hostages at Entebbe. Bush denigrated US capabilities in comparison with those of Israel, saying that
the US could not match what Israel was able to do: "We do have a very important role in furnishing
intelligence to policy makers and our friends on the movement of international terrorists, but to
indicate that we have that kind of action capability--the answer is very frankly no." Bushis policy on this matter was to fight terrorism with better intelligence, for "the more the Americanh said that (^)
people understand this, the more support the CIA will have." Yet, Bush was unable to stop a
terrorist murder in Washington DC, despite the fact that he had personally received a telergam
informing him that the assassins were coming to visit him-- scarcely a good example of using
intelligence to fight terrorism.