Chapter –XIII

Bush Attempts The Vice Presidency, 1974

Those who betray their benefactors are seldom highly regarded. In Dante's Divine
Comedy, traitors to benefactors and to the established authorities are consigned to the
ninth circle of the Inferno, where their souls are suspended, like insects in amber, in the
frozen River Cocytus. This is the Giudecca, where the three arch-traitors Judas Iscariot,
Brutus, and Cassius are chewed for all eternity in the three mouths of Lucifer. The crimes
of Nixon were monstrous, especially in Vietnam and in the India-Pakistan war, but in
these Bush had been an enthusiastic participant. Now Bush's dagger, among others, had
now found its target; Nixon was gone. In the depths of his Inferno, Dante relates the story
of Frate Alberigo to illustrate the belief that in cases of the most heinous treachery, the
soul of the offender plunges at once into hell, leaving the body to live out its physical
existence under the control of a demon. Perhaps the story of old Frate Alberigo will
illuminate us as we follow the further career of George Bush.

As Nixon left the White House for his home in San Clemente, California, in the early
afternoon of August 9, 1974, Chairman George was already plotting how to scale still
further up the dizzy heights of state. Ford was now president, and the vice-presidency
was vacant. According to the XXV Amendment, it was now up to Ford to designate a
vice president who would then require a majority vote of both houses of Congress to be
confirmed. Seeing a golden opportunity to seize an office that he had long regarded as the
final stepping stone to his ultimate goal of the White House, Bush immediately mobilized
his extensive Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones network, including as many
Zionist lobby auxiliaries as he could muster. George had learned in 1968 that an
organized effort commensurate with his own boundless lust for power would be required
to succeed. One of the first steps was to set up a boiler shop operation in a suite of rooms
at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Washington. Here Richard L. Herman, the Nebraska GOP
national committeeman and two assistants began churning out a cascade of calls to
Republicans and others around the country, urging, threatening, cajoling, calling in chits,
promising future favors if Chairman George were to become Vice President George. [fn
1] Since Bush controlled the RNC apparatus, this large machinery could also be thrown
into the fray.

There were other, formidable candidates, but none was so aggressive as Chairman
George. Nelson Rockefeller, who had resigned as Governor of New York some months
before to devote more time to his own consuming ambition and to his Commission on
Critical Choices, was in many ways the front runner. Nelson's vast notoriety, his