Chapter –XVI

Campaign 1980

Le mercennarie et ausiliarie sono inutili e pericolose; e, se uno tiene lo stato suo fondato
in sulle arme mercennarie, non sara' mai fermo ne' sicuro.

--Machiavelli, Il Principe

As we follow George Bush along the George Washington Parkway as he drives away
from his Langley office in January, 1977, we enter an especially shadowy and inscrutable
interlude in his career. During their superficial and dilatory 1988 inquiry into Bush's
career, Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus did establish one typical phenomenon of
Bush's activity between January, 1977 and his emergence as a presidential candidate:
Bush kept key parts of his activity a secret from his own aides and office staff, even
going so far as to manufacture alibis which would appear to have been inventions.
Woodward and Pincus described a "mystery about Bush and the agency" which arose
during the course of their interviews about the post-1977 period. "According to those
involved in Bush's first political action committee, there were several occasions in 1978-
79, when Bush was living in Houston and travelling the country in his first run for the
presidency, that he set aside periods of up to 24 hours and told aides he had to fly to
Washington for a secret meeting of former CIA Directors. Bush told his aides that he
could not divulge his whereabouts, and that he would not be reachable."

The mystery described by Woodward and Pincus arose when other interviews cast grave
doubt on the veracity of this cover story; "...according to former directors and other
senior CIA officials, there were no meetings of former directors during that period, and
Bush had no assignments of any kind from the CIA." Stansfield Turner commented that
he "never knew former directors had meetings and there were none when I was there."
Stephen Hart of Bush's staff told Woodward and Pincus that the keepers of Bush's
schedule could "recall no CIA activity of any kind," but explained the absences as
"personal time in Washington" for "tennis, visits with friends, and dinners." [fn 1] Such
enigmas are typical of the 1977-1979 interlude in Bush's career.

Shortly after leaving Langley, Bush asserted his birthright as an international financier in
the way he had indicated to his close friend Leo Cherne, that is to say by becoming a
member of the board of directors of a large bank. On February 22, 1977 Robert H.
Stewart III, the chairman of the holding company for First International Bankshares of
Dallas, announced that Bush would become the chairman of the executive committee of