From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: part 12
Date: 6 Apr 92 9:30:29 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

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CHAPTER 11/Part 1 

Rubbers Goes to Congress 

During the heat
of the Senate campaign, Bush's
redistricting lawsuit had progressed in
a way that must have provided him much
solace amidst the bitterness of his
defeat. First, Bush won his suit in the
Houston federal district court, and
there was a loud squawk from Governor
John Connally, who called that august
tribunal a ``Republican court.'' Bush
whined that Connally was being
``vitriolic.'' Then, during Bush's
primary campaign, a three-judge panel
of the federal circuit court of appeals
also ruled that the state of Texas must
be redistricted. Bush called that
result ``a real victory for all the
people of Texas.'' By March, Bush's
redistricting suit had received
favorable action by the U.S. Supreme
Court. This meant that the way was
clear to create a no-incumbent,
designer district for George in a
masterpiece of gerrymandering that
would make him an elected official, the
first Republican congressman in the
recent history of the Houston area. 
   The new Seventh District was drawn
to create a liberal Republican seat,
carefully taking into account which
areas Bush had succeeded in carrying in
the Senate race. What emerged was for
the most part a lily-white,
silk-stocking district of the affluent
upper-middle class and upper crust.
There were also small black and
Hispanic enclaves. In the precinct
boxes of the new district, Bush had
rolled up an eight-to-five margin over
Yarborough.@s1 
   But before gearing up a
congressional campaign in the Seventh
District in 1966, Bush first had to
jettison some of the useless
ideological ballast he had taken on for
his 1964 Goldwater profile. During the
1964 campaign, Bush had spoken out more
frankly and more bluntly on a series of
political issues than ever before or
since. Apart from the Goldwater
coloration, one comes away with the
impression that much of the time the
speeches were not just inventions, but
often reflected his own oligarchical
instincts and deeply rooted obsessions.
In late 1964 and early 1965, Bush was
afflicted by a hangover induced by what
for him had been an unprecedented orgy
of self-revelation. 
   The 1965-66 model George Bush
would become a moderate, abandoning the
shrillest notes of the 1964
conservative crusade. 
   First came an Episcopalian
{mea culpa.} As Bush's admirer
Fitzhugh Green reports, ``one of his
first steps was to shuck off a
bothersome trace from his 1964
campaign. He had espoused some
conservative ideas that didn't jibe
with his own moderate attitude.''
Previous statements were becoming
inoperative, one gathers, when Bush
discussed the matter with his Anglican
pastor, John Stevens. ``You know,
John,'' said Bush, ``I took some of the
far right positions to get elected. I
hope I never do it again. I regret
it.'' His radical stance on the civil
rights bill was allegedly a big part of
his ``regret.'' Stevens later
commented: ``I suspect that his goal on
civil rights was the same as mine: It's
just that he wanted to go through the
existing authorities to attain it. In
that way nothing would get done. Still,
he represents about the best of
noblesse oblige.''@s2 

   Purge of County GOP

   It was characteristically through
an attempted purge in the Harris County
GOP organization that Bush signaled
that he was reversing his field. His
gambit here was to call on party
activists to take an ``anti-extremist
and anti-intolerance pledge,'' as the
{Houston Chronicle} reported on
May 26, 1965.@s3 Bush attacked unnamed
apostles of ``guilt by association''
and ``far-out fear psychology,'' and
his pronouncements touched off a bitter
and protracted row in the Houston GOP.
Bush made clear that he was targeting
the John Birch Society, whose activists
he had been eager to lure into his own
1964 effort. Now Bush beat up on the
Birchers as a way to correct his
right-wing profile from the year
before. Bush said, with his usual
tortured syntax, that Birch members
claim to ``abhor smear and slander and
guilt by association, but how many of
them speak out against it publicly?'' 
   This was soon followed by a
Bush-inspired move to oust Bob Gilbert,
who had been Bush's successor as the
GOP county chairman during the
Goldwater period. Bush's retainers put
out the line that the ``extremists''
had been gaining too much power under
Gilbert, and that he therefore must go.
By June 12, 1965, the Bush faction had
enough clout to oust Gilbert. The
eminence grise of the right-wing
faction, State Senator Walter Mengdon,
told the press that the ouster of
Gilbert had been dictated by Bush. Bush
whined in response that he was very
disappointed with Mengdon. ``I have
stayed out of county politics. I
believed all Republicans had backed my
campaign,'' Bush told the {Houston
Chronicle} on the day Gilbert fell. 
   On July 1, the Houston papers
reported the election of a new,
``anti-extremist'' Republican county
leader. This was James M. Mayor, who
defeated James Bowers by a margin of 95
votes against 80 in the county
executive committee. Mayor was endorsed
by Bush, as well as by Senator Tower.
Bowers was an auctioneer, who called
for a return to the Goldwater
``magic.'' GOP state chair O'Donnell
hoped that the new chairman would be
able to put an end to ``the great deal
of dissension within the party in
Harris County for several years.''
Despite this pious wish, acrimonious
faction fighting tore the county
organization to pieces over the next
several years. 
   But at the same time, Bush took
care to police his left flank,
distancing himself from the beginnings
of the movement against the war in
Vietnam, which had been visible by the
middle of 1965. A remarkable document
of this maneuver is the text of the
debate between Bush and Ronnie Dugger,
the writer and editor of the {Texas
Observer.}@s4 The debate was held
July 1, 1965 before the Junior Bar of
Texas convention in Fort Worth. Dugger
had endorsed Bush--in a way Dugger said
was ``not without whimsical intent'' in
the GOP Senate primary the year before.
Dugger was no radical; at this point
he was not really against the Vietnam War;
and he actually endorsed the policy of
LBJ, saying that the President had ``no
easy way out of Vietnam, but he is
seeking and seeking hard for an
honorable way out.'' Nevertheless,
Dugger found that LBJ had made a series
of mistakes in the implementation of
his policy. Dugger also embraced the
provisos advanced by Senator Fulbright
to the effect that ``seeking a complete
military victory would cost more than
the requirements of our interest and
honor.'' So Dugger argued against any
further escalation, and argued that
anti-war demonstrations and civil
disobedience could be beneficial. 
   Bush's first real cause for alarm
was seeing ``the civil rights movement
being made over into a massive vehicle
with which to attack the President's
foreign policy in Vietnam.'' He started
by attacking Conrad Lynn, a ``Negro
lawyer'' who had told students at ``my
old university--Yale University,'' that
``the United States white supremacists'
army has been sent to suppress the
non-white people of the world.''
According to Bush, ``The {Yale
Daily News} reported that the
audience applauded when [Lynn]
announced that several Negroes had gone
to Asia to enlist in the North Viet Nam
army to fight against the United
States.'' Then Bush turned to his real
target, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
King, he said, who is ``identified with
the freedom of the Negro cause, says in
Boston the other day that he doesn't
want to sit at a segregated lunch
counter where you have strontium 90 in
the milk, overlooking the fact that
it's the communists who are testing in
the atmosphere today, the Red Chinese.
It's not the United States.'' Then
there was Bayard Rustin, ``a leading
individual in the Negro struggle for
freedom, [who] calls for withdrawal
from Viet Nam.'' This is all
hypocritical in Bush's view, since
``they talk about civil rights in this
country, but they are willing to
sacrifice the individual rights in the
communist countries.'' 
   Bush was equally riled up over
anti-war demonstrations, since they
were peopled by what he called
``extremists'': ``I am sure you know
what an extremist is. That's a guy who
takes a good idea and carries it to
simply preposterous ends. And that's
what's happened. Of course, the
re-emergence of the political beatnik
is causing me personally a good deal of
pleasure. Many conservatives winced
during 1964 as we were labeled
extremists of the right. And certainly
we were embarrassed by the booing of
Nelson Rockefeller at the convention,
and some of the comments that referred
to the smell of fascism in the air at
the Republican convention, and things
like this, and we winced.'' 
   Warming to the subject, Bush
continued: ``Let me give you some
examples of this kind of left-wing
extremism. Averell Harriman--surely not
known for his reactionary
views--speaking at Cornell University,
talking about Viet Nam before a crowd
that calls `Liar!' [They] booed him to
the state he could hardly finish, and
finally he got so frustrated he asked,
`How many in the audience are
communists?' And a bunch of people
there--small I will admit--held up
their hands.'' 
   So extremists, for Bush, were
those who assailed Rockefeller and
Harriman. 
   Bush defended the House Committee
on Un-American Activities against the
demonstrations organized by James
Foreman and SNCC, commiserated with a
State Department official who had been
branded a fascist at Iowa State, and
went on to assail the Berkeley ``filthy
speech'' movement. As an example of the
``pure nai@auvete@aa'' of civil rights
leaders, he cited Coretta Scott King,
who ``managed to link global peace and
civil rights, somehow managed to tie
these two things together
philosophically''--which Bush professed
not to fathom. ``If we can be
non-violent in Selma, why can't we be
non-violent in Viet Nam,'' Ossie Davis
had said, and Bush proposed he be
awarded the ``green Wiener'' for his
``absurd theory,'' for ``what's got to
be the fuzziest thinking of the year.'' 
   Beyond this inevitable obsession
with race, Bush was frankly a hawk,
frankly for escalation, opening the
door to nuclear weapons in Vietnam only
a little more subtly than he had the
year before: ``And so I stand here as
one who says I will back up the
President and military leaders no
matter what weapons they use in
Southeast Asia.'' 
      
   Congress in his Sights
 
   As the 1966 congressional election
approached, Bush was optimistic about
his chances of finally getting elected.
This time, instead of swimming against
the tide of the Goldwater cataclysm,
Bush would be favored by the classic
mid-term election reflex which almost
always helps the congressional
candidates of the party out of power.
And LBJ in the White House was
vulnerable on a number of points, from
the escalation of the Vietnam War to
``stagflation'' (stagnation +
inflation). The designer gerrymandering
of the new Houston congressional
district had functioned perfectly, and
so had his demagogic shift toward the
``vital center'' of moderate
conservatism. Because the district was
newly drawn, there would be no
well-known incumbent to contend with.
And now, by one of the convenient
coincidences that seem to be strewn
through Bush's life, the only obstacle
between him and election was a
troglodyte Democratic conservative of
an ugly and vindictive type, the sort
of figure who would make even Bush look
reasonable. 
   The Democrat in question was Frank
Briscoe, a former district attorney.
According to the {Texas
Observer,} ``Frank Briscoe was one
of the most vicious prosecutors in
Houston's history. He actually
maintained a `ten most wanted
convictions list' by which he kept the
public advised of how much luck he had
getting convictions against his chosen
defendants then being held in custody.
Now, as a candidate for Congress,
Briscoe is running red-eyed for the
right-wing in Houston. He is
anti-Democratic; anti-civil rights;
anti-foreign aid; anti-war on poverty.
The fact that he calls himself a
Democrat is utterly irrelevant.'' By
contrast, from the point of view of the
{Texas Observer}: ``His
opponent, George Bush, is a
conservative man. He favors the war in
Vietnam; he was for Goldwater, although
probably reluctantly; he is nobody's
firebrand. Yet Bush is simply civilized
in race relations, and he is now openly
rejecting the support of the John Birch
Society. This is one case where
electing a Republican to Congress would
help preserve the two-party balance of
the country and at the same time spare
Texas the embarrassment'' of having
somebody like Briscoe go to
Washington.@s5 Bush's ideological
face-lifting was working. ``I want
conservatism to be sensitive and
dynamic, not scared and reactionary,''
Bush told the {Wall Street
Journal.} 
   Briscoe appears in retrospect as a
candidate made to order for Bush's new
moderate profile, and there are
indications that is just what he was.
Sources in Houston recall that in 1966
there was another Democratic candidate
for the new congressional seat, a
moderate and attractive Democrat named
Wildenthal. These sources say that
Bush's backers provided large-scale
financial support for Briscoe in the
Democratic primary campaign, with the
result that Wildenthal lost out to
Briscoe, setting up the race that Bush
found to his advantage. A designer
district was not enough for George; he
also required a designer opponent if he
was to prevail--a fact which may be
relevant to the final evaluation of
what happened in 1988. 
   One of the key points of
differentiation between Bush and
Briscoe was on race. The district had
about 15 percent black population, but
making some inroads here among
registered Democrats would be of
decisive importance for the GOP side.
Bush made sure that he was seen
sponsoring a black baseball team, and
talked a lot about his work for the
United Negro College Fund when he had
been at Yale. He told the press that
``black power'' agitators were not a
problem among the more responsible
blacks in Houston. ``I think the day is
past,'' Bush noted, ``when we can
afford to have a lily-white district. I
will not attempt to appeal to the white
backlash. I am in step with the
1960s.'' Bush even took up a position
in the Office of Economic Opportunity
anti-poverty apparatus in the city. He
supported Project Head Start. By
contrast, Briscoe ``accused'' Bush of
courting black support, and reminded
Bush that other Texas congressmen had
been voting against civil rights
legislation when it came up in
Congress. Briscoe had antagonized parts
of the black community by his
relentless pursuit of the death penalty
in cases involving black capital
defendants. According to the {New
York Times,} ``Negro leaders have
mounted a quiet campaign to get Negroes
to vote for [Bush].'' 
   Briscoe's campaign ads stressed
that he was a right-winger and a Texan,
and accused Bush of being ``the darling
of the Lindsey [sic] -Javits crowd,''
endorsed by labor unions, liberal
professors, liberal Republicans and
liberal syndicated columnists. Briscoe
was proud of his endorsements from Gov.
John Connally and the Conservative
Action Committee, a local right-wing
group. One endorsement for Bush that
caused Briscoe some difficulty was that
of Bush mentor Richard M. Nixon. By
1966, Nixon was on the comeback trail,
having withstood the virtual nervous
breakdown he had undergone after losing
his bid for the governorship of
California in 1962. Nixon was now in
the course of assembling the delegates
that would give him the GOP
presidential nomination in Miami in
1968. Nixon came to Houston and made
campaign appearances for Bush, as he
had in 1964. 
   Bush had brought in a new group of
handlers and image-mongers for this
1966 race. His campaign manager was Jim
Allison from Midland. Harry Treleaven
was brought in to design Bush's
propaganda. 
   Treleaven had been working at the
J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency
in New York City, but he took a leave
of absence from J. Walter to come to
work for Bush in Texas. At J. Walter
Thompson, Treleaven had sold the
products of Pan American, RCA, Ford,
and Lark cigarettes. He was attracted
to Bush because Bush had plenty of
money and was willing to spend it
liberally. After the campaign was over,
Treleaven wrote a long memo about what
he had done. He called it ``Upset: The
Story of a Modern Political Campaign.''
One of the basic points in Treleaven's
selling of Bush was that issues would
play no role. ``Most national issues
today are so complicated, so difficult
to understand, and have opinions on[,]
that they either intimidate or, more
often, bore the average voter.... Few
politicians recognize this fact.'' In
his memo, Treleaven describes how he
walked around Houston in the hot August
of 1966 and asked people what they
thought of George Bush. He found that
many considered Bush to be ``an
extremely likeable person,'' but that
``there was a haziness about exactly
where he stood politically.'' 
   For Treleaven, this was an ideal
situation. ``There'll be few
opportunities for logical persuasion,
which is all right--because probably
more people vote for irrational,
emotional reasons than professional
politicians suspect.'' Treleaven's
approach was that ``politicians are
celebrities.'' Treleaven put 85 percent
of Bush's hefty campaign budget into
advertising, and 59 percent of that was
for television. Newspaper ads got 3
percent. Treleaven knew that Bush was
behind in the polls. ``We can turn this
into an advantage,'' he wrote, ``by
creating a `fighting underdog' image.
Bush must convince voters that he
really wants to be elected and is
working hard to earn their vote. People
sympathize with a man who tries hard:
they are also flattered that anyone
would really exert himself to get their
vote. Bush, therefore, must be shown as
a man who's working his heart out to
win.'' 
   As Joe McGinnis summed up the
television ads that resulted: ``Over
and over, on every television set in
Houston, George Bush was seen with his
coat slung over a shoulder; his sleeves
rolled up; walking the streets of his
district; grinning, gripping, sweating,
letting the voter know he cared. About
what, was never made clear.''@s6 
   Coached by these professional spin
doctors, Bush was acting as mainstream,
fair and conciliatory as could be. In
an exchange with Briscoe in the
{Houston Chronicle} a few days
before the election, he came out for
``a man's right to join a union and his
right to strike, but I additionally
would favor fair legislation to see
that no strike can cripple this nation
and endanger the general welfare.'' But
he was still for the Texas right to
work law. Bush supported LBJ's
``present Vietnam position.... I would
like to see an All-Asian Conference
convened to attempt to settle this
horrible war. The Republican
leadership, President Johnson, and
Secretary Rusk and almost all but the
real `doves' endorse this.'' Bush was
against ``sweeping gun control.''
Briscoe wanted to cut ``extravagant
domestic spending,'' and thought that
money might be found by forcing France
and the U.S.S.R. to finally pay up
their war debts from the two world
wars! 
   When it came to urban renewal,
Bush spoke up for the Charles Percy
National Home Ownership Foundation,
which carried the name of a leading
liberal Republican senator. Bush wanted
to place the federal emphasis on such
things as ``rehabilitating old homes.''
``I favor the concept of local option
on urban renewal. Let the people
decide,'' he said, with a slight nod in
the direction of the emerging New Left. 
   In Bush's campaign ads he invited
the voters to ``take a couple of
minutes and see if you don't agree with
me on six important points,'' including
Vietnam, inflation, civil disobedience,
jobs, voting rights and ``extremism''
(Bush was against the far right and the
far left). And there was George, billed
as ``successful businessman ... civic
leader ... world traveler ... war
hero,'' bareheaded in a white shirt and
tie, with his jacket slung over his
shoulder in the post-Kennedy fashion. 
   In the context of a pro-GOP trend
that brought 59 freshmen Republican
congressmen into the House, the biggest
influx in two decades, Bush's
calculated approach worked. Bush got
about 35 percent of the black vote, 44
percent of the usually yellow-dog
Democrat rural vote, and 70 percent in
the exclusive River Oaks suburb. Still,
his margin was not large: Bush got 58
percent of the votes in the district.
Bob Gray, the candidate of the
Constitution Party, got less than 1
percent.
   Despite the role of black
voters in his narrow victory, Bush
could not refrain from whining. ``If
there was a disappointing aspect in the
vote, it was my being swamped in the
black precincts, despite our making an
all-out effort to attract black voters.
It was both puzzling and frustrating,''
Bush observed in his 1987 campaign
autobiography.@s7 After all, Bush
complained, he had put the GOP's funds
in a black-owned bank when he was party
chairman; he had opened a party office
with full-time staff near Texas
Southern, a black college; he had
worked closely with Bill Trent of the
United Negro College Fund, all with
scant payoff as Bush saw it. Many black
voters had not been prepared to reward
Bush's noblesse oblige, and that threw
him into a rage state, whether or not
his thyroid was already working
overtime in 1966. 

   Bush in Washington
 
   When Bush got to Washington in
January 1967, the Brown Brothers
Harriman networks delivered: Bush
became the first freshman member of the
House of either party since 1904 to be
given a seat on the Ways and Means
Committee. And he did this, it must be
recalled, as a member of the minority
party, and in an era when the freshman
congressman was supposed to be seen and
not heard. The Ways and Means Committee
in those years was still a real center
of power, one of the most strategic
points in the House along with the
Rules Committee and a few others. By
constitutional provision, all tax
legislation had to originate in the
House of Representatives, and given the
traditions of committee organization,
all tax bills had to originate in the
Ways and Means Committee. In addition
to the national importance of such a
committee assignment, Ways and Means
oversaw the legislation touching such
vital Texas and district concerns as
oil and gas depletion allowances and
the like. 
   Later writers have marveled at
Bush's achievement in getting a seat on
Ways and Means. For John R. Knaggs,
this reflected ``the great potential
national Republicans held for George
Bush.'' The {Houston
Chronicle,} which had supported
Briscoe in the election, found that
with this appointment ``the GOP was
able to point up to the state one
benefit of a two-party system.''@s8 
   In this case, unlike so many
others, we are able to establish how
the invisible hand of Skull and Bones
actually worked to procure Bush this
important political plum. This is due
to the indiscretion of the man who was
chairman of Ways and Means for many
years, Democratic Congressman Wilbur D.
Mills of Arkansas. Mills was hounded
out of office because of an alcoholism
problem, and later found work as an
attorney for a tax law firm. Asked
about the Bush appointment to the
committee he controlled back in 1967,
Mills said: ``I put him on. I got a
phone call from his father telling me
how much it mattered to him. I told him
I was a Democrat and the Republicans
had to decide; and he said the
Republicans would do it if I just asked
Gerry Ford.'' Mills said that he had
asked Ford and John W. Byrnes of
Wisconsin, who was the ranking
Republican on Ways and Means, and Bush
was in, thanks once again to Daddy
Warbucks, Prescott Bush.@s9 
   Wilbur Mills may have let himself
in for a lot of trouble in later years
by not always treating George with due
respect. Because of Bush's obsession
with birth control for the lower
orders, Mills gave Bush the nickname
``Rubbers,'' which stuck with him
during his years in Congress.@s1@s0
Poppy Bush was not amused. One day
Mills might ponder in retrospect, as so
many others have, on Bush's
vindictiveness. 

   Uprooting Western Values
 
   In January 1968, LBJ delivered his
State of the Union message to Congress,
even as the Viet Cong's Tet offensive
was making a shambles of his Vietnam
War policy. The Republican reply came
in a series of short statements by
former President Eisenhower, House
Minority leader Gerry Ford, Rep. Melvin
Laird, Senator Howard Baker and other
members of Congress. Another tribute to
the efforts of the Prescott Bush-Skull
and Bones networks was the fact that
amid this parade of Republican worthies
there appeared, with tense jaw and fist
clenched to pound on the table, Rep.
George Bush. 
   The Johnson administration had
claimed that austerity measures were
not necessary during the time that the
war in Vietnam was being prosecuted.
LBJ had promised the people ``guns and
butter,'' but now the economy was
beginning to go into decline. Bush's
overall public rhetorical stance during
these years was to demand that the
Democratic administration impose
specific austerity measures and replace
big-spending programs with appropriate
deficit-cutting rigor. Here is what
Bush told a nationwide network
television audience on January 23,
1968: 
   ``The nation faces this year just
as it did last a tremendous deficit in
the federal budget, but in the
President's message there was no sense
of sacrifice on the part of the
government, no assignment of
priorities, no hint of the need to put
first things first. And this reckless
policy has imposed the cruel tax of
rising prices on the people, pushed
interest rates to their highest levels
in 100 years, sharply reduced the rate
of real economic growth and saddled
every man and woman and child in
American with the largest tax burden in
our history. 
   ``And what does the President say?
He says we must pay still more taxes
and he proposes drastic restrictions on
the rights of Americans to invest and
travel abroad. If the President wants
to control inflation, he's got to cut
back on federal spending and the best
way, the best way to stop the gold
drain is to live within our means in
this country.''@s1@s1 
   Those who wanted to read Bush's
lips at a distance back in those days
found that he was indeed committed to a
kind of austerity. In May of 1968, with
Johnson already a lame duck, the Ways
and Means Committee approved what was
dubbed on Capitol Hill the ``10-8-4''
deficit control package. This mandated
a tax increase of $10 billion per year,
coupled with a $4 billion cut in
expenditures. Bush joined with four
Ways and Means Republicans (the others
were Conable, Schneebeli and Battin) to
approve the measure.@s1@s2 
   But the principal focus of Bush's
activity during his tenure in the House
of Representatives centered on a
project that was much more sinister and
far-reaching than the mere imposition
of budget austerity, destructive as
that demand was at the time. With a
will informed by the ideas about
population, race and economic
development that we have seen current
in Prescott Bush's circles at Brown
Brothers Harriman, George Bush would
now become a protagonist of a series of
institutional changes which would
contribute to that overall degradation
of the cultural paradigm of Western
civilization which was emergent at the
end of the 1960s. 
   In 1969, Bush told the House of
Representatives that, unless the menace
of human population growth were
``recognized and made manageable,
starvation, pestilence and war will
solve it for us.'' Bush repeatedly
compared population growth to a
disease.@s1@s3 In remarks to the House
July 30, 1969, he likened the fight
against the polio virus to the crusade
to reduce the world's population.
Urging the federal government to step
up population control efforts, he said:
``We have a clear precedent: When the
Salk vaccine was discovered,
large-scale programs were undertaken to
distribute it. I see no reason why
similar programs of education and
family planning assistance should not
be instituted in the United States on a
massive scope.'' 
   As Jessica Mathews, vice president
of one of Washington's most influential
zero-growth outfits, the World
Resources Institute, later wrote of
Bush in those years: ``In the 1960s and
'70s, Bush had not only embraced the
cause of domestic and international
family planning, he had aggressively
sought to be its champion.... As a
member of the Ways and Means Committee,
Rep. Bush shepherded the first major
breakthrough in domestic family
planning legislation in 1967,'' and
``later co-authored the legislation
commonly known as Title X, which
created the first federal family
planning program....'' 
   ``On the international front,''
Mathews wrote, Bush ``recommended that
the U.S. support the United Nations
Population Fund.... He urged, in the
strongest words, that the U.S. and
European countries make modern
contraceptives available `on a massive
scale,' to all those around the world
who wanted them.'' 
   Bush belonged to a small group of
congressmen who successfully conspired
to force a profound shift in the
official U.S. attitude and policy
toward population expansion. Embracing
the ``limits to growth'' ideology with
a vengeance, Bush and his coterie,
which included such ultraliberal
Democrats as then-Senator Walter
Mondale (Minn.) and Rep. James Scheuer
(N.Y.), labored to enact legislation
which institutionalized population
control as U.S. domestic and foreign
policy. 
   Bush began his Malthusian activism
in the House in 1968, the year that
Pope Paul VI issued his enyclical
{Humanae Vitae,} with its
prophetic warning of the danger of
coercion by governments for the purpose
of population control. The Pope wrote:
``Let it be considered also that a
dangerous weapon would be placed in the
hands of those public authorities who
place no heed of moral exigencies....
Who will stop rulers from favoring,
from even imposing upon their people,
the method of contraception which they
judge to be most efficacious?'' For
poorer countries with a high population
rate, the encyclical identified the
only rational and humane policy: ``No
solution to these difficulties is
acceptable which does violence to man's
essential dignity.... The only possible
solution ... is one which envisages the
social and economic progress both of
individuals and of the whole of human
society....'' 
   This was a direct challenge to the
cultural paradigm transformation which
Bush and other exponents of the
oligarchical world outlook were
promoting. Not for the first time nor
for the last, Bush issued a direct
attack on the Holy See. Just days after
{Humanae Vitae} was issued,
Bush declared: ``I have decided to give
my vigorous support for population
control in both the United States and
the world.'' He continued, ``For those
of us who who feel so strongly on this
issue, the recent enyclical was most
discouraging.'' 

   Population Control Leader
 
   During his four years in Congress,
Bush not only introduced key pieces of
legislation to enforce population
control both at home and abroad. He
also continuously introduced into the
congressional debate reams of
propaganda about the threat of
population growth and the inferiority
of blacks, and he set up a special
Republican task force which functioned
as a forum for the most rabid
Malthusian ideologues. 
   ``Bush was really out front on the
population issue,'' a
population-control activist recently
said of this period of 1967-71. ``He
was saying things that even we were
reluctant to talk about publicly.'' 
   Bush's open public advocacy of
government measures tending towards
zero population growth was a radical
departure from the policies built into
the federal bureaucracy up until that
time. The climate of opinion just a few
years earlier, in December 1959, is
illustrated by the comments of
President Eisenhower, who had said,
``birth control is not our business. I
cannot imagine anything more
emphatically a subject that is not a
proper political or governmental
activity ... or responsibility.'' 
   As a congressman, Bush played an
absolutely pivotal role in this shift.
Shortly after arriving in Washington,
he teamed up with fellow Republican
Herman Schneebeli to offer a series of
amendments to the Social Security Act
to place priority emphasis on what was
euphemistically called ``family
planning services.'' The avowed goal
was to reduce the number of children
born to women on welfare. 
   Bush's and Schneebeli's amendments
reflected the Malthusian-genocidalist
views of Dr. Alan Guttmacher, then
president of Planned Parenthood, and a
prote@aage@aa of its founder, Margaret
Sanger. In the years before the grisly
outcome of the Nazi cult of race
science and eugenics had inhibited
public calls for defense of the ``gene
pool,'' Sanger had demanded the weeding
out of the ``unfit'' and the ``inferior
races,'' and had campaigned vigorously
for sterilization, infanticide and
abortion, in the name of ``race
betterment.'' 
   Although Planned Parenthood was
forced, during the fascist era and
immediately thereafter, to tone down
Sanger's racist rhetoric from ``race
betterment'' to ``family planning'' for
the benefit of the poor and blacks, the
organization's basic goal of curbing
the population growth rate among
``undesirables'' never really changed.
Bush publicly asserted that he agreed
``1,000 percent'' with Planned
Parenthood. 
   During hearings on the Social
Security amendments, Bush and witness
Alan Guttmacher had the following
colloquy: 

   {Bush}: Is there any
[opposition to Planned Parenthood] from
any other organizations or groups,
civil rights groups? 
   {Guttmacher}: We do have
problems. We are in a sensitive area in
regard particularly to the Negro. There
are some elements in the Negro group
that feel we are trying to keep down
the numbers. We are very sensitive to
this. We have a community relations
department headed by a most capable
Negro social worker to try to handle
that part of the problem. This does, of
course, cause us a good bit of concern. 
   {Bush}: I appreciate that.
For the record, I would like to say I
am 1,000 percent in accord with the
goals of your organization. I think
perhaps more than any other type of
organization you can do more in the
field of poverty and mental health and
everything else than any other group
that I can think of. I commend you.
 

   Like his father before him, Bush
supported Planned Parenthood at every
opportunity. Time after time, he rose
on the floor of the House to praise
Planned Parenthood's work. In 1967,
Bush called for ``having the government
agencies work even more closely with
going private agencies such as Planned
Parenthood.'' A year later, he urged
those interested in ``advancing the
cause of family planning,'' to ``call
your local Planned Parenthood Center''
to offer ``help and support.'' 
   The Bush-Schneebeli amendments
were aimed at reducing the number of
children born to blacks and poor
whites. The legislation required all
welfare recipients, including mothers
of young children, to seek work, and
barred increases in federal aid to
states where the proportion of
dependent children on welfare
increased. 
   Reducing the welfare rolls was a
prime Bush concern. He frequently
motivated his population-control
crusade with thinly veiled appeals to
racism, as in his infamous Willie
Horton ads during the 1988 presidential
campaign. Talking about the rise in the
welfare rolls in a July 1968 statement,
Bush lamented that ``our national
welfare costs are rising
phenomenally.'' Worse, he warned, there
were far too many children being born
to welfare mothers: ``The
fastest-growing part of the relief
rolls everywhere is Aid For Dependent
Children [sic]--AFDC. At the end of the 1968
fiscal year, a little over $2 billion
will be spent for AFDC, but by fiscal
1972 this will increase by over 75
percent.'' 
   Bush emphasized that more children
are born into non-white poor families
than to white ones. Blacks must
recognize, he said, ``that they cannot
hope to acquire a larger share of
American prosperity without cutting
down on births....'' 
   Forcing mothers on welfare to work
was believed to be an effective means
of reducing the number of black
children born, and Bush sponsored a
number of measures to do just that. In
1970, he helped lead the fight on the
Hill for President Nixon's notorious
welfare bill, the Family Assistance
Program, known as FAP. Billed as a boon
to the poor because it provided an
income floor, the measure called on
every able-bodied welfare recipient,
except mothers with children under six,
to take a job. This soon became known
as Nixon's ``workfare'' slave-labor
bill. Monetarist theoreticians of
economic austerity were quick to see
that forced labor by welfare recipients
could be used to break the unions where
they existed, while lowering wages and
worsening working conditions for the
entire labor force. Welfare recipients
could even be hired as scabs to replace
workers being paid according to normal
pay scales. Those workers, after they
had been fired, would themselves end up
destitute and on welfare, and could
then be forced to take workfare for
even lower wages than those who had
been on welfare at the outset of the
process. This was known as
``recycling.'' 
   Critics of the Nixon workfare bill
pointed out that it contained no
minimum standards regarding the kinds
of jobs or the level of wages which
would be forced upon welfare
recipients, and that it contradicted
the original purpose of welfare, which
was to allow mothers to stay home with
their children. Further, it would set
up a pool of virtual slave labor, which
could be used to replace workers
earning higher wages. 
   But Bush thought these tough
measures were exactly what the
explosion of the welfare rolls
demanded. During House debate on the
measure April 15, 1970, Bush said he
favored FAP because it would force the
lazy to work: ``The family assistance
plan ... is oriented toward work,'' he
said. ``The present federal-state
welfare system encourages idleness by
making it more profitable to be on
welfare than to work, and provides no
method by which the State may limit the
number of individuals added to the
rolls.'' 
   Bush had only ``one major worry,
and that is that the work incentive
provisions will not be enforced....
[It] is essential that the program be
administered as visualized by the Ways
and Means Committee; namely, if an
individual does not work, he will not
receive funds.'' The Manchester
School's Iron Law of Wages as expounded
by George Bush, self-styled expert in
the dismal science.... 
   In 1967, Bush joined with Rep.
James Scheuer (D-N.Y.), to successfully
sponsor legislation that removed
prohibitions against mailing and
importing contraceptive devices. More
than opening the door to French-made
condoms, Bush's goal here was a kind of
ideological {succes de
scandale.} The zero-growth lobby
deemed this a major breakthrough in
making the paraphernalia for domestic
population control accessible. 
   In rapid succession, Bush
introduced legislation to create a
National Center for Population and
Family Planning and Welfare, and to
redesignate the Department of the
Interior as the Department of
Resources, Environment and Population. 
   On the foreign policy front, he
helped shift U.S. foreign assistance
away from funding development projects
to grapple with the problem of hunger
in the world, to underwriting
population control. ``I propose that we
totally revamp our foreign aid program
to give primary emphasis to population
control,'' he stated in the summer of
1968, adding: ``In my opinion, we have
made a mistake in our foreign aid by
concentrating on building huge steel
mills and concrete plants in
underdeveloped nations....'' 

   Notes
 
   1.
 See Fitzhugh Green, {George
Bush: A Biography} (New York: Dodd,
Mead & Company, 1980), p. 92, and
George Bush and Victor Gold,
{Looking Forward} (New York:
Doubleday, 1987), p. 90.

   2.
 Stevens's remarks were part of
a Public Broadcasting System
``Frontline'' documentary program
entitled ``Campaign: The Choice,'' Nov.
24, 1988. Cited by Fitzhugh Green,
{op. cit.,} p. 91.

   3.
 For the chronicles of the
Harris County GOP, see local press
articles available on microfiche at the
Texas Historical Society in Houston.
 
   4.
 ``George Bush vs. Observer
Editor,'' {Texas Observer,}
July 23, 1965.

   5.
 {Texas Observer,} Oct.
14, 1966.

   6.
 Joe McGinniss, {The Selling
of the President 1968} (New York:
Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 42-45.

   7.
 Bush and Gold, {op.
cit.,} p. 91.

   8.
 See John R. Knaggs,
{Two-Party Texas} (Austin:
Eakin Press, 1985), p. 111.

   9.
 {Congressional
Quarterly,} ``President Bush: The
Challenge Ahead'' (Washington, 1989),
p. 94.

   10.
 Harry Hurt III, ``George Bush,
Plucky Lad,'' in {Texas
Monthly,} June 1983.

   11.
 {New York Times,} Jan.
24, 1968.

   12.
 {New York Times,} May
7, 1968.

   13.
 The following account of
Bush's congressional record on
population and related issues is
derived from the ground-breaking
research of Kathleen Klenetsky, to whom
the authors acknowledge their
indebtedness. The material that follows
incorporates sections of Kathleen
Klenetsky, ``Bush Backed Nazi `Race
Science,'|'' {New Federalist},
Vol 5, No. 16, April 29, 1991.



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         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com