George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

agents?" Ledeen wanted to know. "Well, obviously we've had double agents but that's not
officers of the agency," was Bush's ambiguous reply. Bush went on:
The great Soviet agents were recruited when the Soviet represented something ideologically.
When they represented antifascism. That's when they got people like Philby. But the fact is that
we've just went [sic] through a period in which we had hundreds of thousands of our young people
out screaming against their government. Now they were totally opposed to their government, but
they weren't pro-Soviet.
Bush and Cline joined to praise the "benign covert political action" of the 1940's and
1950's by which the CIA sent US intellectuals to Europe to talk to the Europeans. "We
essentially won that ideological battle," said Bush.[fn 4]
When Carter and Brzezinski played their treacherous China card in December, 1978,
Bush was quick, despite his own miserable record on this issue, to launch a pre-election
attack on Carter with an op-ed in the Washington Post. Bush harkened back to the day in
December, 1975 (although Bush wrote October) when he, Ford, and Kissinger had sat
down with Chairman Mao. From Mao's remarks that day, Bush says, it was clear that Red
China was obsessed with the Soviet threat, and was willing to wait indefinitely for China
to be reunited with Taiwan. Now Carter had broken diplomatic relations with Taiwan,
begun the pullout of US forces, abrogated the US-Taiwan security treaty, and was
winding down arms assistance to Taiwan. Bush was the man who had presided over the
ejection of the Republic of China from the UN. It was a cheap shot for him to quote Peter
Berger about the primaeval principle of morality that "one must not deliver one's friends
to their enemies." After Bush's support for Deng Xiao-ping after the 1989 Tein An Men
massacre, the hypocrisy is even more obvious.
But Bush had some other points to make against Carter. One was that when "black
moderates in Rhodesia arranged with Prime Minister Ian Smith for the transfer of power
and free elections, we [meaning Carter] threw in our lot with Marxist radicals."
Then there was the Middle East, where "the Israelis announced that they were prepared to
accept a final plan drafted with American help. But when Egypt raised the ante, we
modified our position to accept the new Egyptian proposals, and when the Israelis refused
to go along, we publicly kicked them in the shins." Even the Carter of Camp David, who
split the Arab front with a separate peace between Israel and Egypt, was not Zionist
enough for Bush.
Apart from these public pronouncements, Bush was at work assembling a campaign
machine.
One of the central figures of the Bush effort would be James Baker III, Bush's friend of
ten years' standing. Baker's power base derived first of all from his family's Houston law
firm, Baker & Botts, which was founded just after the end of the Civil War by defeated
partizans of the Confederate cause. Judge Peter Gray and Walter Browne Botts
established a law partnership in 1866, and this became Baker & Botts during the 1870's
when James Baker (the great-grandfather of Bush's Secretary of State) joined the firm.