George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography

The rise of the Bush dynasty and the political career of George H.W. Bush
-- by: Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, 1991, source: Tarpley.net
MHP hypertext version for non-profit educational use only

22.2  Bush Takes the Presidency (part 2)

Gary Hart exposed, Dan Quayle picked for VP, Bush defeats Dukakis

Gary Hart and the Donna Rice Affair

On the Democratic side, Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado who had run second to Walter Mondale through the 1984 primaries, was emerging as a clear front-runner. With his own efforts foundering, Bush had every reason to fear succumbing in a long season of photo opportunities in competition with Hart. But if politics was fickle, there was always the bedrock of covert action.

Gary Hart talked about being the candidate with new ideas, but he had an immense vulnerability. He was a habitue of Turnberry Isle, a 234 acre earthly paradise located north of Miami. Part of the complex was a 29 story condomium. Turnberry was frequented by celebrities of the sports and entertainment world, by politicians, and by Mafiosi like Joey Ippolito, a convicted marijuana kingpin.

The developer and manager of Turnberry was Don Soffer, who was also the owner of a yacht named the Monkey Business. After the February, 1987 murder of Don Aronow, Soffer received a telephone call, from a person who told him, "You're next". Soffer hired extra bodyguards and went for a one-week Atlantic cruise on the Monkey Business. Soffer was a friend of Don Aronow. Ben Kramer was also a frequent visitor to Turnberry Isle (see Chapter 20). The establishment employed a staff of hostesses who were termed "Donnie's girls" or "the party girls". According to some, these hostesses doubled as luxury prostitutes for the Turnberry clientele of wealthy male patrons.

Among the employees of Turnberry was the sometime model Donna Rice. Another woman, Lynn Armandt, was in charge of the staff of party girls, and also had retail space for a bikini boutique in an upscale and remunerative Turnberry shopping complex. Lynn Armandt was the widow of a reputed Ben Kramer associate, a Miami drug dealer and underworld figure who had disappeared and never been found. The car of Armandt's husband was eventually found, riddled with machine-gun slugs and stained with blood. In the glove compartment, investigators found the telephone number of Ben Kramer. When federal agents raided Ben Kramer's Fort Apache Marina on August 28, 1987, they examined the contents of Kramer's safe and found the original manuscripts of early primary stump speeches by Gary Hart. [28]

At 8:30 PM on the evening of Monday, April 27, 1987, journalist Tom Fiedler, who had just written a story on the rumors of sexual promiscuity that had begun to surface around the Gary Hart campaign, received a telephone call at his office. It was just after Gary Hart had told E.J. Dionne of the New York Times, "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me. go ahead. They'd be very bored." An extensive and well-organized network in the media was hyping the story that Hart was promiscuous.

The telephone call received that day by Fiedler was from a woman who told him, "Gary Hart is having an affair with a friend of mine. We don't need another president who lies like that." The next morning at 10:30 AM the same woman called back with the report that her female friend was likely to accept an invitation to spend the weekend with Gary Hart at his Washington townhouse, and that the friend was likely to make the trip by air Friday evening. Published sources and unnamed aides in the Gary Hart campaign have identified Lynn Armandt as the woman who made this call to Tom Fiedler of the Miami Herald, although Fiedler denies this is true. [29]

These telephone calls led to the stakeout of Hart's townhouse by Fiedler and other reporters of the Miami Herald who came upon Hart together with Donna Rice, detonating the scandal which destroyed Hart's candidacy.

The woman caller described herself as a liberal Democrat but a foe of mendacity. She told Fiedler that she and her girlfriend had spent time on a yacht with Hart and an older man named Bill who was supposedly Hart's lawyer. This turned out to be a cruise by Hart, Donna Rice, Lynn Armandt and Hart's lawyer William Broadhurst plus a crew of five on board the Soffer-owned "chartered yacht" Monkey Business to Bimini and back in the springtime. Donna Rice later confirmed she had met Hart at Turnberry.

William Broadhurst or "Billy B." was a Washington lawyer and Hart backer who served the candidate as an operative on the campaign trail. Broadhurst had a Capitol Hill townhouse near Hart's. Broadhurst later explained that Lynn Armandt had come to Washington to consider his offer to be a social director for his lobbying and entertaining activities in Washington. Broadhurst said that Donna Rice had come along with her friend Lynn Armandt, and that both women had stayed overnight at his house, not at Hart's. Lynn Armandt soon left Washington after the story had broken, and the Hart campaign people said they never heard from her again.

There is no need to recount the ostracism and revelations that followed, leading to the destruction of Gary Hart as a political figure. Nor is it our intention here to defend the lost cause of the decidedly unsavory former Senator Hart. But given the situation of the Bush campaign in April-May, 1987, we are reminded by Seneca's "Cui prodest" proposition that the Bushmen as prime beneficiaries would necessarily qualify as prime suspects if any "naughty stuff" were to overtake Hart, as it did. Our suspicions can only be heightened by the obvious degree to which Bush, Aronow, Kramer, Soffer, Armandt, and Rice must be seen virtually as one interrelated social amalgam in the setting of Miami, Thunderboat Alley, Turnberry Isle, and the Monkey Business. Perhaps an old score was being settled here as well, dating back to December, 1975, hearings in which Gary Hart had taunted Bush about the Liedkte money laundering apparatus referenced in Richard M. Nixon's "smoking gun" tape.

Shaping the Campaign Strategy

James Baker was the titular head of the Bush campaign, but the person responsible for the overall concepts and specific tactics of the Bush campaign was Lee Atwater, a political protege of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Thurmond had been a Democrat, then a Dixiecrat in 1948, then a Democrat again, and finally a Republican. The exegencies of getting elected in South Carolina on the GOP ticket had taught Thurmond to reach deeply into that demagogue's bag of tricks called the "wedge issues". Under Thurmond's tutelage, Atwater had become well versed in the essentials of the Southern Strategy, the key to that emergent Republican majority in presidential elections which Kevin Phillips had written about in 1968.

Atwater had also imbibed political doctrine from the first practitioner of the Southern Strategy, the dark-jowled Richard M. Nixon himself. In January 1983, for example, Lee Atwater, at that time deputy director of the White House office of political affairs (and a creature of the Bush-Baker connection), met with Nixon for three and a half hours in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon held forth on three points: the decisive political importance of the Sun Belt, the numerical relations within the Electoral College, and the vast benefits of having no primary competition when seeking re-election. Atwater found that Nixon knew the Electoral College like the back of his hand, and knew that the electoral votes of the southern states were the key to the ball game as presently constituted. Nixon had railed against two Congressmen, Pete McCloskey of California and John Ashbrook of Ohio, who had challenged him from the left and right when he sought re-election in 1972. "Those guys were two gnats on my ass," complained Nixon. [30] Bush has obviously attributed great importance to Nixon's advice that all primary competition be banned during the quest for a second term. Nixon's advice underlines the real problems posed for Bush by a candidacy like that of television commentator Pat Buchanan.

In 1988 as well, Nixon was brought in to be the spiritus rector of the Bush campaign. During March of 1988, when it was clear that Bush was going to win the nomination, Nixon "slipped into town" to join George Bush, Bar[bara], and Lee Atwater for dinner at the Naval Observatory. This time it was Bush who received a one hour lecture from Tricky Dick on the need to cater to the Republican right wing, the imperative of a tough line on crime in the streets and the Soviets (again to propitiate the rightists), to construct an independent identity only after the convention, and to urge Reagan to campaign actively. And of course, where Nixon shows up, Kissinger cannot be far away. [31]

1988 saw another large-scale mobilization of the intelligence community in support of Bush's presidential ambitions. The late Miles Copeland, a high-level former CIA official who operated out of London during the 1980's, contributed a piece frankly titled "Old Spooks for Bush" to the March 18, 1988 issue of National Review. (Since the magazine's editor, William Buckley, was a notorious Skull and Bones cultist, the allusion to "spooks" assumed the character of an insider pun.) Copeland based his endorsement of Bush on the candidate's anti-Soviet firmness, a viewpoint that seems odd in retrospect. Copeland suggested that Bush would go back to the procedures of staff work that had been standard under Eisenhower:

"Ronald Reagan is apparently oblivious of this simple 'Standard Operation procedure,' but we know from experience that Bush isn't. This is why my old friends and I are in George Bush's corner in the presidential race: we see him not only as one who has the wisdom, discretion, and ability to grasp the facts of our situation on the international gameboard, but as one who will appoint as his key advisors real experts in the relevant fields -- unlike the inexperienced men with whom President Reagan has surrounded himself. [...] It happens that we are in a state of national crisis, but, due to the Soviets' success at dezinformatzia and to our peculiar susceptibilities, it isn't recognizable. We see Bush as the candidate who, speaking with a voice of authority, can make it recognizable."

This statement is doubly interesting because it is a clear precursor of the mood of bureaucratic triumphalism that marked the early weeks of the Bush Administration, when the new team launched what was billed as a "policy review" on Soviet relations to get back to hard bargaining after the departure of the slobbering sentimentalist Reagan.

Bush and Atwater feared all their competition. They feared former Gov. Pierre DuPont of Delaware because of his appeal to liberal and blueblood Republicans who might otherwise automatically gravitate to Bush. They feared New York Congressman Jack Kemp because of his appeal to the GOP right wing, to the blue-collar Reagan Democrats, and his disturbing habit of talking about the Strategic Defense Initiative and many other issues. They feared that Senator Bob Dole of Kansas with his "root canal economics," right-wing populism, and his solid backing from the international grain cartel might appear more credible to the Wall Street bankers than Bush as an enforcer of austerity and sacrifices.

But at the same time, they knew that Bush had more money to spend and incomparably more state by state organization than any of his GOP rivals, to say nothing of the fabled Brown Brothers, Harriman media edge. Bush also ruled the Republican National Committee with Stalin-like ferocity, denying these assets to all of his rivals. This allowed Bush to wheel towards the right in 1986-87 to placate some of his critics there, and then move back towards the center by the time of the primaries. Indeed, Bush's many layers of money and political apparatchiki made it possible for him to absorb even stunning defeats like the outcome of the Iowa caucuses without folding. Victory, thought Bush, would belong to the big battalions.

The Republican Primaries

But all the money and the organization could not mask the fact that Bush was fundamentally a weak candidate. This began to become obvious to Atwater and his team of perception mongers as the Iowa caucuses began to shape up. These were the caucuses that Bush had so niftily won in 1980, imparting to him the fickle charisma of the 'Big Mo'. By 1988, Bush's Iowa effort had become complicated by reality, in the form of a farm crisis that was driving thousands of farmers into bankruptcy every week. Farm voters were now enraged against the avuncular thespian Ronald Reagan and were looking for a way to send a message to the pointy-headed set in Washington DC. Governor Branstad of Iowa complained as early as February, 1986: "I don't think his advisors are even keeping [Bush] informed on the extent of the farm crisis. We've got a crisis in agriculture and no one is in charge." Bush's Iowa campaign was dripping with lucre, but this now brought forth resentment among the grim and grey-faced rural voters.

In mid-October, 1987, five of the six declared Republican candidates attended a traditional Iowa GOP rally in Ames, just north of Des Moines, on the campus of Iowa State University. Televangelist Pat Robertson surprised all the others by mobilizing 1,300 enthusiastic supporters for the Saturday event. The culmination of this rally was a presidential straw poll, which Robertson won with 1,293 votes to 958 for Dole. Bush trailed badly with 864. This was the occasion for Bush's incredible explanation of what had happened:

"A lot of people that support me, they were off at the air show, they were at their daughters' coming out parties, or teeing up at the golf course for that all-important last round." [32]

Many Iowans, including Republicans, had to ask what a debutante cotillion was, and began to meditate on the fact that they were not socially acceptable. But most concluded that George Bush was the imperial candidate from another planet, bereft of the foggiest notion of their lives and their everyday problems.

During the buildup to the Iowa caucus, Bush continued to dodge questions on Iran-Contra. The famous "tension city" encounter with Dan Rather took place during this time. Lee Atwater considered that performance Bush's defining event for the campaign, a display which made him look like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Gary Cooper, especially in the south, where people like a pol who "can kick somebody's ass" and where that would make a big difference on Super Tuesday.

But Bush's handlers were nevertheless shocked when Dole won the Iowa caucuses with 37% of the vote, followed by Robertson with 25%. Bush managed only a poor show, with 19%, a massive collapse in comparison with 1980, when he had been far less known to the public.

Bush had known that defeat was looming in Iowa, and he had scuttled out of the state and gone to New Hampshire before the results were known. Bush was nevertheless stunned by his ignominious third-place finish, and he consulted with Nick Brady, Lee Atwater, chief of staff Craig Fuller and pollster Bob Teeter. Atwater had boasted that he had built a "fire wall" in the southern Super Tuesday states that would prevent any rival from seizing the nomination out of Bush's grasp, but the Bush image-mongers were well aware that a loss in New Hampshire might well prove a fatal blow to their entire effort, the advantages of money, networks, and organization notwithstanding.

Atwater accordingly ordered a hugh media buy of 1,800 gross rating points, enough to ensure that the theoretical New Hampshire television viewer would be exposed to a Bush attack ad 18 times over the final three days before the election. The ad singled out Bob Dole, judged by the Bushmen as their most daunting New Hampshire challenger, and savaged him for "straddling" the question of whether or not new taxes out to be imposed. The ad proclaimed that Bush "won't raise taxes," period. Bush was glorified as opposing an oil import tax, and for having supported Reagan's INF treaty on nuclear forces in Europe from the very beginning. It was during this desperate week in New Hampshire that Bush became indissolubly wedded to his lying and demagogic "no new taxes" pledge, which he repudiated with considerable fanfare during the spring of 1990.

The Bush campaign brought in former Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams, test pilot Chuck Yeager, and finally even old Barry Goldwater to help humanize George's appearance on the hustings. George worked a long day, putting in five or six radio interviews before 7:30 AM, proceeding to a staged telegenic campaign event for the local evening news and then campaigning intensively at locations suggested to him by New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, his principal supporter in the state.

When Bush had arrived in Manchester the night of the disastrous Iowa result, Sununu had promised a nine point victory for Bush in his state. Oddly enough, that turned out to be exactly right. The final result was 38% for Bush, 29% for Dole, 13% for Kemp, 10% for DuPont, and 9% for Robertson. Was Sununu a clairvoyant? Perhaps he was, but those familiar with the inner workings of the New Hampshire quadrennials are aware of a very formidable ballot-box stuffing potential assembled there by the blueblood political establishment.

Some observers pointed to pervasive vote fraud in the 1988 New Hampshire primaries, and Pat Robertson, as we shall see, also raised this possibility. The Sununu machine delivered exactly as promised, securing the governor the post of White House chief of staff. Sununu soon became so self-importantly inebriated with the trappings of the imperial presidency as reflected in his travel habits that it was suggested that the state motto appearing on New Hampshire license plates be changed from "Live Free or Die" to "Fly Free or Die." In any case, for Bush the heartfelt "Thank You, New Hampshire" he intoned after his surprising victory signalled that his machine had weathered its worst crisis.

Bush's real thank you to New Hampshire would come gradually, in the form of an accelerated economic depression. Soon after the 1988 vote, the bottom fell out of the state's real estate boom, banks began failing, and the unemployment rate spiked upward. During 1991, food stamp usage there went up 51% -- an object lesson of what happens to those who fail to resist George Bush.

In the South Carolina primary, the Bushmen were concerned about a possible threat from television evangelist Pat Robertson, who had mounted his major effort in the Palmetto state. Robertson was widely known through his appearances on his Christian Broadcasting Network. Shortly before the South Carolina vote, a scandal became public which involved another television evangelist, Jimmy Swaggart, a close friend of Robertson and an active supporter of Robertson's presidential campaign. Swaggart admitted to consorting with a prostitute, and this caused a severe crisis in his ministry. Jim Baker of the PTL television ministry had already been tainted by a sex scandal. Robertson accused the Bush campaign of orchestrating the Swaggart revelations at a time that would be especially advantageous to their man. Talking to reporters, Robertson pointed to "the evidence that two weeks before the primary...it suddenly comes to light." Robertson added that the Bush campaign was prone to "sleazy" tricks, and suggested that his own last-place finish in New Hampshire was "quite possibly" the result of "dirty tricks" by the Bush campaign. Bush responded by dismissing Robertson's charges as "crazy" and "absurd." Robertson had been linking Bush to the "international banking community" in his South Carolina campaigning. [33]

True to his Southern Strategy, Atwater had "front-loaded" Bush's effort in the southern states with money, political operatives, and television, straining the legal limit of what could be spent during the primary season as whole. A few days before Super Tuesday came the South Carolina primary. Here Bush appeared before a group of two dozen evangelical fundamentalist ministers and declared with a straight face: "Jesus Christ is my personal savior". The state's governor, Carol Campbell, was a former customer of Lee Atwater's. Strom Thurmond was for Dole, but his endorsement proved to be valueless. Here Bush got all the state's 37 delegates by scoring 48% of the vote to 21% for Dole, 19% for Robertson, and 11% for Kemp.

On the way to Super Tuesday, Bush stopped off in Miami to address a constituency with which he had been closely associated for three decades: the Miami Cubans. Bush was joined by Barry Goldwater and Florida Governor Bob Martinez, later chosen as field marshal of Bush's phony war on drugs. There was a good turnout of Republican Cuban Americans, who lionized George and also his son Jeb Bush, the former Dade County GOP chair who was now the Florida Secretary of Commerce. Obviously with some help from the family network, Jeb had been lobbying the Immigration and Naturalization Service to procure work permits for the wave of Nicaraguan emigres flooding into south Florida, not a few of whom were part of the contra drug-running operations. The rally was held at Florida International University (FIU), and before his main speech Bush talked to a class in international relations, where he wore his old obsessions on his sleeve. Had there been any sign of a change in Fidel Castro, a student wanted to know. "No," said Bush, "and our policy will not change toward Fidel Castro."

Bush was shocked when Professor Mark Rosenberg of the FIU Latin American Caribbean Center introduced him to the rally in terms that were somewhat short of panegyric. Rosenberg noted that Bush had been part of "questionable political decision making" in the Iran-Contra scandal and also referred to the "high sleaze factor" of the Reagan-Bush regime. "Does [Bush] have the will to clean up the Reagan economic mess?," asked Rosenberg. "Time will tell." Rosenberg was grabbed by the shoulders and hustled off the platform by FIU President and presumed Bushman Modesto Madique. Bush built his speech around a promise that no Cuban-Americans would be deported to Cuba under a Bush administration. "They are fleeing oppressive Marxism under Fidel Castro and they will not be treated as though they were coming in here for some other [economic] purpose," intoned Bush. There were shouts of "Ariba!" from a crowd that contained knots of 'marielitos', those who came during Castro's boat lift. It was a promise that Bush was to violate in any case, as some prison riots later on would remind the public. [34]

Then, in the March 8 Super Tuesday polling, Bush scored an across-the board triumph, winning in Florida, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri, and Maryland, plus Massachusetts and Rhode Island outside of the region. It was better than one of Napoleon Bonaparte's plebiscites. With this, Bush took 600 of 803 delegates at stake that day. 4.5 million Republicans had voted, the best turnout ever in southern GOP primaries. Most of the votes were votes for Reagan in the part of the country that felt least disillusioned by the Great Communictor, but they were all scored as votes for Bush. When Bush beat Dole by a three to two margin in Illinois, supposedly a part of Dole's base, it was all over. Bush prepared for the convention and the choice of a vice president.

Themes of the Campaign

The Bush campaign of 1988 had no issues, but only demagogic themes. These were basically all on the table by June, well before the Republican convention. The first was the pledge of no new taxes, later embroidered with the Clint Eastwood tough-guy overtones of "Read My Lips: No New Taxes." The other themes reflected Atwater's studies of how to drive up the negatives of Bush's Democratic opponent, who would be Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

Very early on, Bush began to harp on Dukakis's veto of a bill requiring teachers to lead their class each day in the pledge of allegiance. Speaking in Orange County, California on June 7, Bush said:

"I'll never understand, when it came to his desk, why he vetoed a bill that called for the pledge of allegiance to be said in the schools of Massachusetts. I'll never understand it. We are one nation under God. Our kids should say the pledge of allegiance." [35]

This theme lent itself very well to highly cathexized visual portrayal, with flags and bunting. Atwater was assisted in these matters by Roger Ailes, a television professional who had been the executive producer of the Mike Douglas Show by the time he was 27 years old. That was in 1967, when he was hired by Richard Nixon and Leonard Garment. Ailes had been one of the most cynical designers of the selling of the president in 1968, and he had remained in the political media game ever since. Between them, Atwater and Ailes would produce the modern American television equivalent of a 1930's Nurmeburg party rally.

At about this time, the Bush network we have seen in operation at the Reader's Digest since the 1964 campaign conveniently printed an article about a certain Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who was released from a Masschusetts jail on a furlough, and then absconded to Maryland, where he raped a white woman and stabbed her fiance. The Massachusetts furlough program had been started by Republican Governor Frank Sargent, but this meant nothing. Bush was to use Willie Horton in the same way that Hitler and the Nazis exploited the grisly crimes of one Harmann, a serial killer in Germany of the early 1930's, in their calls for law and order.

In Illinois in mid-June, Bush began to talk about how Dukakis let "murderers out on vacation to terrorize innocent people." "Democrats can't find it in their hearts to get tough on criminals," Bush ranted.

"What did the governor of Massachusetts think he was doing when he let convicted first-degree murderers out on weekend passes, even after one of them criminally, brutally raped a woman and stabbed her fiance? Why didn't he admit his mistake? Eight months later, he was still defending his program, and only when the Massachusetts legislature voted by an overwhelming majority to abolish this program did he finally give in. I think Governor Dukakis owes the American people an explanation of why he supports this outrageous program."

As packaged by Bush's handlers, it was throughly racist without being nominally so, like Nixon's "crime in the streets" shorthand for racist backlash during the 1968 campaign. Later, Bush would embroider this theme with his demand for the death penalty, his own Final Solution to the problem of criminals like Willie Horton. These themes fit very well into the standard Bush campaign event, which was very often Bush appearing before a local police department to receive their endorsement. Bush's ability to organize these events in places like Boston, to the great embarrassment of Dukakis, doubtless reflected strong support from the CIA Office of Security, which was the bureau that kept in contact with police departments all over the country and, inevitably, infiltrated them.

All of Bush's themes corresponded to wedge issues, the divisive Pavlovian ploys the southern Republicans had become expert in during their decades of battering and dismantling the classic Franklin D. Roosevelt coalition of labor, the cities, blacks, farmers, and intellectuals. They were designed to propitiate the vilest prejudices of a majority, while offending a minority, and studiously avoiding any real politics or economics that might be deterimental to the imperatives of Wall Street or the Washington bureaucracy.

To crown this demagogy, George H.W. Bush of Skull and Bones portrayed Dukakis as an elitist insider: "Governor Dukakis, his foreign-policy views born in Harvard Yard's boutique, would cut the muscle of our defense." Bush's frequent litany of "liberal Massachusetts governor" was shameless in its main purpose of suggesting that Bush himself was NOT a liberal. Later, in 1990, Barbara Bush would confess that both she and George "cared about people" and were thus both liberals.

Profile of J. Danforth Quayle

When Bush arrived in New Orleans for the Republican National Convention, he displayed signs of being unusually race-conscious. The image-mongers had set up a Reagan-Bush meeting on the airbase taxiway; Reagan was departing the convention after a long nostalgic-platitudinous farewell the day before. Now he would pass the mantle to George, with the appropriate camera angles. After a few seconds of small talk with Reagan, Bush and Bar called over three of their grandchildren, all from the family of their son Jeb, the Miami GOP party boss, and his Ibero-American wife Columba. "That's Jebbie's kids from Florida," Bush said, in a voice that was picked up by the airport public address system. "The little brown ones. Jebbie's the big one in the yellow shirt saying the pledge of allegiance tonight." "Oh, really," observed Nancy Reagan. Skin color has always meant a lot to Bush, but he really had been born with a silver foot in his mouth. [36]

Bush now repaired to the admiral's house at the Belle Chase Naval Air Station where this scene had played. Bush was accompanied by Baker, Teeter, Fuller, Atwater, Ailes, and Baker's girl Friday, Margaret Tutwiler. Up to this point Bush's staff had expected him to generate a little suspense around the convention by withholding the name of his vice presidential choice until the morning of the last day of the convention, when Bush could share his momentous secret with the Texas caucus and then tell it to the world.

Bush's vetting of vice presidents was carried out between Bush and Robert Kimmitt, the Washington lawyer and Baker crony who later joined Baker's ruling clique at the State Department before being put up for Ambassador to Germany when Vernon Walters quit in the spring of 1991. United Germany can now boast a U.S. Ambassador whose greatest achievement was to guide Bush towards the choice of J. Danforth Quayle. Bush and Kimmitt reviewed the obvious choices: Kemp was out because he lectured Bush on the SDI and was too concerned about issues. Dole was out because he kept sniping at Bush with his patented sardonic zingers. Elizabeth Dole was a choice to be deemed imprudent. John Danforth, Pete Domenici, Al Simpson and some others were eliminated. Many were the possible choices who had to be ruled out not because of lack of stature, but because they might seem to have more stature than Bush himself.

Quayle had shown up on lists prepared by Fuller and Ailes. Ed Rollins, attuned to the Reagan Democrats, could not believe that Quayle was being seriously considered. But now, at Belle Chase Naval Air Station north of New Orleans, Bush told his staffs that he had chosen Dan Quayle. Not only was it Quayle, but Bush's thyroid was now in overdrive: he wanted to announce his selection within hours. Quayle was contacted by telephone and instructed to meet Bush at the dock in New Orleans when the paddle-wheel steamer Natchez brought Bush down the Missisippi to that city's Spanish Plaza.

Quayle turned up at the dock in a state of inebriated euphoria, grabbing Bush's arm, prancing and capering around Bush. Bush was momentarily taken aback: had he engaged a dervish? As soon as the dossiers on Quayle came out, a few questions were posed. Had his senate office been a staging point for contra resupply efforts? One of the Iran-Contra figures, Rob Owen, had indeed worked for Quayle, but Quayle denied everything. Had Quayle, now a hawk, been in Vietnam? Tom Brokaw asked Quayle if he had gotten help in joining the National Guard as a way of ducking the draft? Quayle stammered that it had been twenty years earlier, but maybe "phone calls were made."

Then Dan Rather asked Quayle what his worst fear was. "Paula Parkinson," was the reply. This was the woman lobbyist and Playboy nude model who had been present with Quayle at a wild weekend at a Florida country club back in 1980. The Bush image-mongers hurriedly convened damage control sessions, and Quayle was given two professional handlers, Stuart Spencer and Joe Canzeri. Spencer was an experienced GOP operative who had done public relations and consulting work worth $350,000 for Gen. Noriega of Panama during the mid-1980's. [37] After a couple of Bush-Quayle joint appearances before groups of war veterans to attempt to dissipate Quayle's National Guard issue, Quayle was then shunted into the secondary media markets under the iron control of his new handlers.

Although Bush's impulsive proclamation of his choice of Quayle does indeed raise the question of the hyperthyroid snap decision, the choice of Quayle was not impuslve, but rather perfectly coherent with Bush's profile and pedigree. Bush told Baker that Quayle had been "my first and only choice." [38] Bush's selection of political appointees is very often the product of Bush-Walker family alliances over more than a generation, as in the case of Baker, Brady, Boy Gray, and Henry Kravis, or at least of a long and often lucrative business collaboration, as in the case of Mosbacher. The choice of Quayle lies somewhere in between, and was strengthened by a deep ideological affinity in the question of racism.

J. Danforth Quayle's grandfather was Eugene C. Pulliam, who built an important press empire starting with his purchase of the Atchison (Kansas) Champion in 1912. The bulk of these papers were in Indiana, the home state of the Pulliam clan, and in Arizona. "Gene" Pulliam had died in 1975, but his newspaper chain was worth an estimated $1.4 [billion] by the time Dan Quayle became a household word.

Pulliam was a self-proclaimed ideologue: "If I wanted to make money, I'd go into the bond business. I've never been interested in the money I make but the influence we have." [39] Gene Pulliam was one of the first power brokers to encourage the political career of young Barry Goldwater in 1949 through the support of the Pulliam Arizona Republic and Gazette of Phoenix. When Gene Pulliam died, his last word was not "Rosebud" but "Goldwater," scratched onto a pad just before he expired.

Old Gene was a firm opponent of racial integration. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Gene Pulliam sent a note to the editors of his papers in Indianapolis, Indiana ordering them not to give the King tragedy "much exposure" because he considered the civil rights leader a "rabble rouser." He instructed that the news of King's death be summarized in as few words as possible and relegated to the bottom of the front page.

The Bush-Quayle alliance thus reposed first of all on a shared premiss of racism.

Old man Pulliam also had a vendetta against the Kennedy family. During the 1968 primaries, he sent a memo to his editors instructing them: "Give Sen. [Eugene] McCarthy full coverage, but this does not apply to a man named Kennedy." Pulliam was supporting Tricky Dick. Bobby Kennedy also held the Pulliam chain in contempt. Once when he came to Indianapolis he found that he was being refused a permit to hold a rally downtown. When when of his supporters urged him to go ahead and have the rally without the permit, Kennedy retorted that he couldn't think of a worse fate than having to spend the night in the Marion County Jail and having nothing to read but the Indianapolis Star, the Pulliam paper.

Dan Quayle had been a mediocre student at DePauw University, where he managed to graduate with a 2.4 grade point average. He was a party boy, and received numerous 'D's in his political science major. Quayle lived at the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity (the same fraternity of which Bush had been a member at Yale.) During the fall of 1968, the DKE house, according to one account, "unleashed a party without a house mother for the first time and sponsored a frat party known as 'The Trip.'" According to some, this actually was a party at which the hallucingoen LSD was dispensed. According to one published account, a photograph of J. Danforth Quayle that appears in the DePauw University yearbook has a caption which reads: "'The Trip' is a colorful psychedelic journey into the wild sights and sounds produiced by LSD." [40]

Quayle is known to the vast majority of the American public as a virtual cretin. Quayle is the first representative of the post-war Baby Boom to advance to national elective office. Unfortunately, he seems to exhibit some of the mental impairment that is known to overtake long-term, habitual marijuana users.

Quayle was admitted by the University of Indiana Law School in violation of that school's usual policy of rejecting all applicants with an academic average of less than 2.6. He wanted to be a lawyer because he had heard that "lawyers make lots of money and do little," as he told his fraternity brothers at De Pauw. As it turned out, the dean of admissions at the University of Indiana Law School was one G. Kent Frandsen, who was a Republican city judge in Lebanon, Indiana, a town where the Pulliam family controls the local newspaper. He had always been endorsed by the Pulliam interests. Two years later, Frandsen would officiate at the marriage of J. Danforth Quayle to Marilyn Tucker. Still later Frandsen would serve as Quayle's campaign manager in Boone County during the 1986 senate race. It was thus no surprise that Frandsen was willing to admit Dan Quayle to law school as part of a program for disadvantaged students, primarily those from the black community.

After all this, it may appear as a mircale that Dan Quayle was ever able to obtain a law degree. J. Danforth's receipt of that degree appears to have been mightily facilitated by the plutocratic Quayle family, who made large donations to the law school each year during Dan's time as a law student.

What were Quayle's passtimes during his law school years? According to one account, they included recreational drugs. During the summer of 1988, a Mr. Brett Kimberlin told Dennis Bernstein and a radio audience of WBAI in New York that he had first met J. Danforth during this period at a fraternity party at which marijuana was indeed being consumed.

"He found out that I had marijuana avilable at the time," said Kimberlin. "It was good quality, and he asked if I had any for sale....I thought it was kind of strange. He looked kind of straight. I thought he might be a narc [DEA agent] at first. But we talked and I felt a little more comfortable, and finally I gave him my phone number and said, 'Hey, well, give me a call.' He called me a couple weeks later, and said, 'Hey, this is DQ. Can we get together?' and I said 'Yes, meet me at the Burger Chef restaurant.' We struck up a relationship that lasted for 18 months. I sold him small quantities of marijuana for his personal use about once a month during that period. He was a good customer. He was a friend of mine. We had a pretty good relationship. He always paid cash. [...] When him and Marilyn got married in 1972, I gave him a wedding present of some Afghanistan hashish and some Acapulco gold." [41]

Kimberlin repeated these charges in a pre-election interview on NBC News on November 4, 1988. Kimberlin was a federal prisoner serving time in Tennessee after conviction on charges of drug smuggling and explosives. Later that same day Kimberlin was scheduled to address a news conference by telephone conference call. But before Kimberlin could speak to the press, he was placed in solitary confinement, and was moved in and out of solitary confinement until well after the November 8 presidential election. A second attempted press conference by telephone hookup on the eve of the election did not take place because Kimberlin was still being held incommunicado. On August 6, 1991, U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene ruled that the allegations made by Kimberlin against U.S. Bureau of Prisons Director J. Michael Quinlan were "tangible and detailed" enough to justify a trial. Kimberlin had accused Quinlan of ordering solitary confiment for him when it became clear that his ability to further inform the media about Quayle's drug use would damage the Bush-Quayle effort.

In March, 1977, Congressman Dan Quayle contributed an article to the Fort Wayne Indiana News-Sentinel in which he recommended that Congress take a "serious" look at marijuana decriminalization. In April, 1978, Quayle repeated this proposal, specifying he supported decriminalization for first-time users. [42]

As for Quayle's military service, he had enlisted in the Indiana National Guard on May 19, 1969, in the midst of a freeze on further recruiting which had been ordered because the Indiana National Guard had exceeded its legally mandated full complement of manpower. Guard service was popular among those threatened by the draft, since it virtually guaranteed that service in Vietnam could be avoided. Dan Quayle had been declared 1-A on May 25, 1969, when he was about to graduate from DePauw University. Quayle-Pulliam family influence was instrumental in inducing National Guard Major General Wendell Phillippi to admit Quayle and assign him to a desk job. At this time Wendell Phillippi was also the managing editor of the Indianapolis News, a Pulliam family property. [43] Dan Quayle spent about one year in the National Guard working as a reporter for the quarterly publication, Indiana National Guard, a sinecure.

In contrast with all this, Quayle campaigned as a "Vietnam-era veteran" and a warmonger of apocalyptic proportions. He once told a gathering of fundamentalist preachers that a nuclear war "would hurry Jesus's second coming" [44] During the Gulf crisis and the Iraq war of 1990-91, Quayle was the principal voice in the Bush Administration threatening the use of nuclear weapons by the United States against Baghdad. This points to Quayle's important role in cementing Bush's own Armageddon connection to the apocalyptic-millenarian strata among the Protestant evangelical fundamentalists.

The power behind Dan Quayle is widely acknowledged to be his consort, Marilyn Tucker Quayle. Mrs, Quayle has been described as a "prototype of the new-age political spouse: an asset to her husband as a polished professional, not just a decorative surrogate." [45] Mrs. Quayle comes from an evangelical family; her father, of Nineveh, Indiana, believes that Satan is trying to destroy the world and agrees with Ronald Reagan that the best president of his lifetime was "Silent Cal" Coolidge. Mrs. Quayle advocates the death penalty and says she grew up in a home environment in which daily Bible study was a duty for all. The Quayle family was Presbyterian at first, but later broke with this denomination to gravitate towards the teachings of Houston, Texas spiritual leader Colonel R.B. Thieme, whose taped messages were an institution in the Tucker household.

Marilyn's sister Nancy Tucker Northcott told a journalist that Thieme's taped sermons were a constant background refrain in the Tucker home. Mrs. Tucker "played them all day, every day." This sister also pointed out that Marilyn "uses some of [Thieme's] Sunday school things.. in her home as a supplement for thir own church," which latter is a branch of the Prebyterian Church of America. Marilyn Quayle herself endorsed R.B. Thieme's devotional materials as "very good." But Quayle and his handlers have attempted to distance the family from Thieme.

Colonel R.B. Thieme is the pastor of the Berachah Church, an interdenominational-fundamentalist institution located in the Galleria neighborhood of Houston, Texas. Thieme is a preacher of decidedly military cast who sometimes wears his World War II U.S. Army Air Force unform during his appearances in the pulpit. The Bulletin and Prayer List for the Berachah Church stresses the military motif, with a quarter of its space being devoted to parishioners who are on active duty with the U.S. military. Thieme sees the world approaching the end-time, and exhorts his congregation to "prepare for battle," while "preparing for the rapture." His ideal is one of "Christian knights, soldiers going to war for Jesus."

[snip]

R.B. Thieme has been described as "a cult figure" by James Dunn, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in Washington. Controversial through he may be even among fundamentalists, Thieme is one of the Quayle family's contact points with the legions of Armageddon, who provided a decisive base of support for the Bush-Quayle administration during the Gulf war.

Bush himself has a very strong apocalyptic streak, which he has more often expressed in the doomsday language of the RAND Corporation than in the theological terminology of an R.B. Thieme. But there is ample convergence, as shown in this interview with Robert Scheer on the campaign trail in early 1980. Scheer started by asking Bush, "How do you win in a nuclear exchange?" Bush's response:

Bush: You have a survivability of command in control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you. That's the way you can have a winner, and the Soviets' planning is based on the ugly concept of a winner in a nuclear exchange.

Scheer: Do you mean like five percent would survive? Two percent?

Bush: More than that-- if everybody fired everything he had, you'd have more than that survive. [46]

A Lackluster Campaign and Low Voter Turnout

Bush's presidential campaign offered nothing of value. In his acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention on August 18, 1988, Bush professed the Calvinistic creed of a man who sees life in terms of "missions"; the mission now, he thought, was to make sure that the crumbling "American Century" of Col. Stimson and his World War II cabal which "lit the world with our culture" were followed by "another American century." Bush promised to avoid war: "We have peace, and I am not going to let anyone take it away from us." Bush harped on his theme of voluntarism-boosterism-corporatism with his celebration of "the idea of community" and his notorious "thousand points of light" as a recipe to deal with the human wreckage being piled up by the unbridled free enterprise he had stood for all his life. The irreverent soon transformed that into "a thousand points of blight."

Remarkably, Bush still had a few promises on the economic front. He went on record once again with his "Read my lips: no new taxes." He boasted that the Reagan-Bush forces had created 17 million jobs over the previous five years of recovery. He pledged to create "30 in eight, 30 million jobs in the next eight years." Non-farm payrolls were slightly over 107 million when Bush took office, and rose to slightly more than 110 million by the middle of 1990. Then, with layoffs averaging 2,000 a day, total unemployment sagged through the early autumn of 1991, with a net loss of about 1 1/2 million jobs. Bush is not on track to filfill this promise, which nobody has heard him repeating since the election. There has been no "kinder, gentler nation."

The final stages of the campaign were played out amid great public indifference. Some interest was generated in the final weeks by a matter of prurient, rather than policy interest: rumors were flying of a Bush sex scandal. This talk, fed by the old Jennifer Fitzgerald story, had surfaced during 1987 in the wake of the successful covert operation against Gary Hart. The gossip became intense enough that George W. Bush asked his father if he had been guilty of philandering. The young Bush reported back to the press that "the answer to the Big A [adultery] question is N-O." Lee Atwater accused David Keene of the Dole campaign of helping to circulate the rumor, and Keene, speaking on a television talk show, responded that Atwater was "a liar." Shortly thereafter, a "sex summit" was convened between the Bush and Dole camps for the purpose of maintaing correct GOP decorum even amidst the acrimony of the campaign. [47]

Evans and Novak opined that "Atwater and the rest of the Bush high command, convinced that the rumors would soon be published, reacted in a way that spelled panic to friend anmd foe alike." On June 17, 1987, Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times had written that "several major newspapers are sifting ...reported dalliances of Mr. Boring." [48] But during that summer of 1988, the Brown Brothers, Harriman / Skull and Bones networks were powerful enough to suppress the story and spare Bush any embarrassment.

During the weeks before the election, the LA Weekly, an alternative paper in Los Angeles, devoted an entire issue to "the dark side of George Bush." British newspapers like the tabloid London Evening Standard repeated some details, but U.S. news organizations were monolithic in refusing to report anything; the Bush networks were in total command. Then rumors began to fly that the Washington Post was preparing to publish an account of Bush's sex pecadillos. On Wednesday, October 19, the New York Stock Exchange was swept by reports that stories damaging to Bush were about to appear, and this was cited as a contributing factor in a 43 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Wall Street Journal and USA Today gingerly picked up the story, albeit in very vague terms. The Wall Street Journal wrote that the Washington Post was preparing a story that "Bush had carried on an extramarital affair," with a "report that he [Bush] has had a mistress for several years." One of the allegations was that Bush had had an extramarital affair during the mid-1970's with a woman who was no longer in his entourage.

Donna Brazile of the Dukakis campaign staff told reporters in New Haven, Connecticut: "I wasn't on the stock market yesterday but I understood they got a little concerned that George was going to the White House with somebody other than Barbara. I think George Bush owes it to the American people to 'fess up...." "The American people have every right to know if Barbara Bush will share that bed with him in the White House. I'm talking about Barbara Bush and someone with the initials J.F. or whatever the names are," said Ms. Brazile. Was this a reference to Jennifer Fitzgerald?

A few hours later, Donna Brazile, a young black woman who had also accused the Bushmen of using "every code word and racial symbol to package their little racist campaign," was fired from the Dukakis campaign. Paul Brountas, one of Dukakis's close advisers, said that he would not accuse the Bush campaign of being racist. With the Willie Horton ads running full clip everywhere, many could not believe their ears. After an Associated Press wire sent out on Thursday, October 20 had offered another summary of the rumor, Bush's press aide Sheila Tate dismissed the entire story as "warmed over garbage." [49] But in the end, the Washington Post published no story, and the entire issue was stifled by the brutal power of the Bush media networks.

In the end, the greatest trump card of Bush's 1988 campaign was Bush's opponent Michael Dukakis. There is every reason to believe that Dukakis was chosen by Bush Democrat power brokers and the Eastern Establishment bankers primarily because he was so manifestly unwilling and unable seriously to oppose Bush. Many are the indications that the Massachusetts governor had been selected to take a dive. The gravest suspicions are in order as to whether there ever was a Dukakis campaign at all. Reagan soon made his celebrated quip, "I'm not going to pick on an invalid," focussing intense public attention on Dukakis's refusal to release his medical records.

The colored maps used by the television networks on the night of November 8 presented a Bush victory which, although less convincing than Reagan's two landslides, nevertheless seemed impressive. A closer examination of the actual vote totals reveals a much different lesson: even in competition with the bumbling and craven Dukakis campaign, Bush remained a pitifully weak candidate who, despite overwhelming advantages of incumbency, money, organization, years of enemies' list operations, a free ride from the controlled media, and a pathetic opponent, just managed to eke out a hairsbreadth margin.

Bush had won 53% of the popular vote, but if just 535,000 voters in eleven states (or 600,000 voters in 9 states) had switched to Dukakis, the latter would have been the winner. The GOP had ruled the terrain west of the Mississippi for many moons, but Bush had managed to lose three Pacific states, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Bush won megastates like Illinois and Pennsylvania by paper-thin margins of 51%, and the all-important California vote, which went to Bush by just 52%, had been too close for George's comfort. Missouri had also been a 52% close call for George. In the farm states, the devastation of GOP free enteprise caused both Iowa and Wisconsin to join Minnesota in the Democratic column. Chronically depressed West Virginia was having none of George. In the oil patch, the Democrats posted percentage gains even though Bush carried these states: in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana the Democratic presidential vote was up between 7 and 11 percent compared to the Mondale disaster of 1984. In the Midwest, Dukakis managed to carry four dozen counties that had not gone for a Democratic presidential contender since 1964. All in all half of Bush's electoral votes came from states in which he got less than 55.5% of the two-party vote, showing that there was no runaway Bush landslide.

Exit polls showed that less than half of Bush's voters were strongly committed to him, underlining the fact that Bush has never succeeded in winning the loyalty of any identifiable groups in the population, except the spooks and the bluebloods. At the time of the election, the official statistics of the Reagan regime were alleging a yearly consumer inflation rate of 5.2% and an unemployment figure of 4.1%. Exit polls that 53% of all voters through that the economy was getting better. As the economic depression worsens into 1992, all of those figures will belong to the good old days. A comparison of Bush's victory in the Iowa caucuses of 1980 with his wretched third-place finish there in 1988 is a good indicator of how utterly support for Bush can collapse as a result of a dramatic deterioration in economic conditions, given once again that Bush has no loyal base of political support.

The voter turnout hit a new postwar low, with just 49.1% of eligible voters showing up at the polls, significantly worse than the Truman-Dewey matchup of 1948, when just 51% had deemed it worthwile to vote. This means that Bush expected to govern the country with the votes of just 26.8% of the eligible voters in his pocket. Bush had won a number of southern states by lop-sided margins of about 20%, but this was correlated in many cases with very low overall voter turnout, which dipped below 40% in Georgia and South Carolina. A big plus factor for George was the very low black voter turnout in the south, where a significant black vote had helped the Democrats retake control of the Senate in 1986. With Dukakis capturing 90% of the black vote, a bigger black turnout would have created some serious problems for George. Bush knows that victory in 1992 will depend on keeping the black turnout low, and this is part of the rationale behind his "wedge issue" nomination of the black rightist Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, which successfully split national black organizations in such a way that Bush hopes he will be able to ignore them in 1992.

More generally, it would appear that Bush would be very happy to keep across the board voter turnout at such depressed levels, since a larger vote could only threaten his results. Dukakis was able to attract only about half of the Reagan Democrats back to their traditional party, despite the preppy-blueblood aura of the Bush campaign, which these voters would normally have found highly offensive. The Bush cause is therefore well served by public scandals and media campaigns that tend to elicit widespread disgust with politics and government, since these increase the probability that citizens will stay home on election day, leaving George to dominate the field. It is no surprise that precisely such scandals, from Congressional pay raises and the Keating Five to the Thomas nomination hearings have proliferated during the years of the Bush regime.

Among those Republicans who had succeeded in winning the White House in two-way races (excluding years like 1948 or 1968, when the totals were impacted by Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats, or by George Wallace), Bush's result was the weakest since fellow Skull and Bones alumnus William Howard Taft in 1908. [50] These patterns might also indicate that the dominant role of the electoral votes of the former Confederate States of America within the Electoral College under the post-1968 Southern Strategy of the national Republican Party may be subjected to erosion in 1992, especially under the impact of the Bush economic depression.

Modern Media Campaigns as 'Menticide'

It is also to be hoped that 1988 will prove in retrospect to have represented the high-water mark of hired gun media and campaign consultants in presidential elections. Atwater at one time boasted that his staff contained at least 28 media experts and political operatives who had worked in at least three previous presidential elections, many of which were also winning efforts for the GOP. These men were drawn from New York's Madison Avenue and from Washington's Connecticut Avenue "Power Alley," where many of the best-connected political consulting firms have their offices. It is clear that men like Atwater, Ailes, Spencer, Deaver and others have performed a function in the consoldation of a modern American leviathan state that is exactly analagous to the vital services rendered to the Third Reich by Propaganda Minister Dr. Josef Goebbels between 1933 and 1945.

There is a crime of 'menticide' which consists in the deliberate destruction of the cognitive powers of another human being, and the campaigns organized by these consultants have represented menticide on a mass scale. Further: if the international economic policies inflicted on the world by the Reagan-Bush and Bush regimes have exacted a yearly global death toll of upwards of 50 million needless deaths, primarily in the developing sector, it has been the image mongers and public relations men who have organized the U.S. domestic electoral consensus that has permitted those genocidal policies to go forward. For all of these reasons, the media and campaign consultants are fascists. They are virulent fascists typical of the American totalitarian state of the late twentieth century, and this is true even if these consultants lack the bombastic trappings of the central European fascists of more than a half century ago.

Lee Atwater celebrated the Bush inauguration by playing his electric guitar at a rhythm and blues concert in which his gyrations bordered on the outright obscene. Although Lee Atwater had masterminded the most racist presidential campaign in modern history, he still had the gall during the spring of 1989 to be a candidate for a post on the Board of Trustees of Howard University, the historically black institution of higher learning in Washington, DC. Atwater was forced to abandon this outrageous candidacy by a mass mobilization of the Howard students.

Some months later, Atwater was found to be suffering from a malignant brain cancer. It is rumored around Washington that Atwater in his final days became a convert to Roman Catholicism and expressed repentance for many of the deeds he performed during his political career. It appears certain that he personally apologized to some of the candidates whom he had vilified during the course of various political campaigns. When Atwater died in April, 1991 at the age of 40, it was widely rumored in Washington that he had expressed the deepest remorse for having contributed to the creation of the Bush administration.