Bush praised the CIA in his speech: "It is a fantastic 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 domestic operations 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 Netherlands
governments. 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 pure white.
We're living in a world where [the US] has to have a covert capability." On the other
hand, Bush was "not unconcerned about the constitutional questions 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." Bush said that his policy on this matter was to
fight terrorism with better intelligence, for "the more the American people understand