and significant political pressure to repudiate them. Bush wanted to go to China because
he found Chinese communists genuinely congenial.
When Bush was about to leave for China, his crony Dean Burch (no longer troubled, as
we see, by Bush's dermal diarrhea) arranged for a fifteen minute sendoff meeting with
Ford, but this was reduced to 10 minutes by NSC director Scowcroft, at that time the
most important Kissinger clone of them all. Before he left for Beijing, Bush could not
resist making some sententious and self-serving pronouncements to the press about his
experience in Watergate. He told David Broder of the Washington Post: "We've done a
lot of running just to stay in place, and I was sometimes depressed by the amount of
bickering that goes on. But then I look across town at Bob Strauss and his problems, and
I feel like this was a 20-month honeymoon." Bob Strauss was at this time Bush's
counterpart at the Democratic National Committee. Bush noted that there was
"philosophical discontent" among right-wing Republicans about the policies of Nixon
and Ford, but opined that these would never lead to a third party on the right. Bush
defended "patronage" and said he was "worried about the health of the two-party system"
even though he worried that this cause is "really not very popular right now." [fn 4]
Bush's staff in Beijing included deputy chief of mission John Holdridge, Don Anderson,
Herbert Horowitz, Bill Thomas, and Bush's "executive assistant," Jennifer Fitzgerald,
who has remained very close to Bush, and who has sometimes been rumored to be his
mistress. Jennifer Fitzgerald in 1991 was the deputy chief of protocol in the White
House; when German Chacellor Kohl visited Bush in the sping of 1991, he was greeted
on the White House steps by Jennifer Fitzgerald. Bush's closest contacts among Chinese
officialdom included vice minister of foreign affairs Qiao Guanhua and his wife Zhang
Hanzhi, also a top official of the foreign ministry. This is the same Qiao who is
repeatedly mentioned in Kissinger's memoirs as one of his most important Red Chinese
diplomatic interlocutors. This is the "Lord Qiao" enigmatically mentioned by Mao during
Kissinger's meeting with Mao and Zhou En-lai on November 12, 1973. Qiao and Zhang
later lost power because they sided with the left extremist Gang of Four after the death of
Mao in 1976, Bush tells us. But in 1974-75, the power of the proto-Gang of Four faction
was at its height, and it was towards this group that Bush quickly gravitated. In moving
instinctively towards the hardline Mao faction, Bush was also doubtless aware of of
Mao's connections with the Yale in China program around the time of the First World
War. The Skull and Bones network could turn up in unexpected places.
Bush and Barbara were careful to create the impression that they were rusticating away in
Beijing. Barbara told Don Oberdorfer in early December: "Back in Washington or at the
United Nations the telephone was ringing all the time. George would come home and say,
excuse me, and pick up the phone. It's very different here. In the first five weeks I think
he received two telephone calls, except for the ones from me. I try to call him once a day.
I think he misses the phone as much as anything."
Was Mrs. Bush being entirely candid? Even if she was, Bush could console himself and
his hyperkinetic thyroid with the fact that if there were no calls, there were also no
subpoenas. Bush himself added: "A lot of people said, 'You don't know what you're