Some days later Church appeared on the CBS program Face the Nation, he was asked by
George Herman if his opposition to Bush would mean that anyone with political
experience would be a priori unacceptable for such a post? Church replied: "I think that
whoever is chosen should be one who has demonstrated a capacity for indpendence, who
has shown that he can stand up to the many pressures." Church hinted that Bush had
never stood up for principle at the cost of political office. Moreover, "a man whose
background is as partisan as a past chairman of the Republican party does serious damage
to the agency and its intended purposes." [fn 4]
The Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones crowd counterattacked in favor of Bush,
mobilizing some significant resources. One was none other than Leon Jaworski, the
former Watergate special prosecutor. Jaworski's mission for the Bush network appears to
have been to get the Townhouse and related Nixon slushfund issues off the table of the
public debate and confirmation hearings. Jaworski, speaking at a convention of former
FBI Special Agents meeting in Houston, defended Bush against charges that he had
accepted illegal or improper payments from Nixon and CREEP operatives. "This was
investigated by me when I served as Watergate special prosecutor. I found no
involvement of George Bush and gave him full clearance. I hope that in the interest of
fairness, the matter will not be bandied about unless something new has appeared on the
horizon." Jaworski, who by then was back in Houston working for his law firm of
Fulbright and Jaworski, sent a copy of the Houston Post article reporting this statement to
Ford's White House counselor Philip Buchen. [fn 5]
Saul Kohler of the Newhouse News Service offered the Ford White House an all-purpose
refutation of the arguments advanced by the opponents of Bush during November and
into December. "And now," wrote Kohler, "President Ford is catching all sorts of heat
from a lot of people for appointing Bush to the non-political sensitive CIA because he
once served as Chairman of the Republican national Committee." How unfair, thought
Kohler, "for of all the appointments Ford made last weekend, the nomination of Bush
was the best." For one thing, "you'd have to go a long way to find a man with less guile
than George Bush." Bush had been great at the RNC- "he managed to keep the RNC
away from the expletive deleted of that dark chapter in American political history." "Not
only did he keep the party apparatus clean, he kept his own image clean..." And then:
"Was Cordell Hull less distinguished a Secretary of State because he had headed the
Democratic National Committee?," and so forth. Kohler quoted a White House official
commenting on the Bush nomination: "The gag line around here ever since The Boss
announced George for the CIA is that spying is going to be a bore from now on because
George is such a clean guy." [fn 6]
In the meantime, Bush got ready for his second meeting with Mao and prepared the
documentation for his conflict of interest and background checks. In a letter to John C.
Stennis, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which would hold the
hearings on his nomination, Bush stated that his only organizational affiliations were as a
trustee of Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and as a member of the Board of
the Episcopal Church Foundation in New York City. In this letter, Bush refers to the
"Bush Children Trust" he had created for his five children, and "funded by a diversified