Bush was indeed to be a candidate for the Senate from Texas in 1970. In Bush's
campaign autobiography, he attempts to portray his decision to run for the Senate a
second time as a decision assisted by former President Lyndon B. Johnson. That, we
should say, is already bad enough. But in reality, the decisive encouragement, funds, and
the promise of future advancement that moved Bush to attempt the leap into the Senate
once again came from one Richard Milhous Nixon, and the money involved came from
the circles of Nixon's CREEP.
Nixon, it will be recalled, had campaigned for Bush in 1964 and 1966, and would do so
also in 1970. During these years, Bush's positions came to be almost perfectly alligned
with the the line of the Imperial Presidency. And, thanks in large part to the workings of
his father's Brown Brothers, Harriman networks--Prescott had been a fixture in in
Eisenhower White House where Nixon worked, and in the Senate over which Nixon from
time to time presided-- Bush became a Nixon ally and crony. Bush's Nixon connection,
which pro-Bush propaganda tends to minimze, was in fact the key to Bush's career
choices in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
Bush's intimate relations with Tricky Dick are best illustrated in Bush's close brush with
the 1968 GOP vice-presidential nomination at the Miami convention of that year.
Richard Nixon came into Miami ahead of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and
California Governor Ronald Reagan in the delegate count, but just before the convention
Reagan, encouraged by his growing support, announced that he was switching from being
a favorite son of California to the status of an all-out candidate for the presidential
nomination. Reagan attempted to convince many conservative southern delegations to
switch from Nixon to himself, since he was the purer ideological conservative and better
loved in the south than the new (or old) Tricky Dick. Nixon's defense of his southern
delegate base was spearheaded by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who kept
the vast majority of the delegates in line, sometimes with the help of the unit rule.
"Thurmond's point of reasoning with Southern delegates was that Nixon was the best
conservative they could get and still win, and that he had obtained assurances from Nixon
that no vice-presidential candidate intolerable to the South would be selected," wrote one
observer of the Miami convention. [fn 20] With the southern conservatives guaranteed a
veto power over the second spot on the ticket, Thurmond's efforts were successful; a
leader of the Louisiana caucas was heard to remark: "It breaks my heart that we can't get
behind a fine man like Governor Reagan, but Mr. Nixon is deserving of our choice, and
he must receive it."
These were the circumstances in which Nixon, having won the nomination on the first
ballot, met with his advisers amidst the grotesque architecture of the fifteenth floor of the
Miami Plaza-Hilton in the early morning of August 9, 1968. The way Nixon tells the
story in his memoirs, he had already pretty much settled on Gov. Spiro Agnew of
Maryland, reasoning that "with George Wallace in the race, I could not hope to sweep he
South. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, to win the entire rimland of the South--the
border states--as well as the major states of the Midwest and West." Therefore, says
Nixon, he let his advisors mention names without telling them what he had already