Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 9
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Destiny and Power Part 9

The fate of Vice President Rockefeller was central. Since at least 1964, when Goldwater and his conservative followers had triumphed at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, the GOP had been split into three broad factions. There were the "movement conservatives" (Goldwaterites who professed a strict antigovernment philosophy and a hard-line policy against the Soviets); moderate conservatives (men such as Ford, who favored fiscal probity but were more accepting of the public sector's role and were open to a detente, or diplomatic flexibility toward the Soviets); and the dwindling number of liberal Republicans (embodied by Rockefeller).

The hero of movement conservatism was Ronald Reagan, the good-looking former lifeguard, sportscaster, movie actor, television host, and corporate spokesman who had delivered the landmark televised speech for Goldwater in 1964 on the same night Bush had gone on the air with the antiRalph Yarborough broadcast. Born in Tampico, Illinois, in 1911, to a religious and theatrically inclined mother and a charming but hard-drinking shoe salesman father, Reagan had been a self-described "hemophiliac Democrat" (he had voted for FDR four times and campaigned for Truman) before converting to conservatism over high taxes, excessive government, and the Communist threat. In the 1950s he was the public face of General Electric, hosting its popular weekly TV series GE Theater and traveling the country to speak to GE employees about the virtues of free enterprise and the evils of statism. A gifted political performer in person, on radio, and on television, Reagan personified the growing power of the movement conservatives. A 1976 primary campaign between Ford and Reagan would be a test of where the party stood ideologically.

Ford knew this much even before the primary voting began in early 1976: The movement conservatives who loved Reagan were incapable of accepting Rockefeller, their longtime nemesis from New York, as a member of a national ticket headed by a moderate conservative such as Ford. Ford himself might be acceptable-the movement was not yet in complete control of the GOP-but the combination of a moderate and a liberal would be anathema to the Reaganite bloc. The numbers were revealing: In a mid-September 1975 Harris Poll, 25 percent of Republicans said they would not vote for Ford if Rockefeller were the vice presidential nominee. It was, Ford recalled, an "ominous" piece of data. "In his past Presidential campaigns, he'd established a reputation as a liberal, and he had outraged many ultra-conservative Republicans," Ford wrote. "Apparently, their antagonism wasn't going to fade away." Ford was right, and he realized that he had to do something about it. On Tuesday, October 28, 1975, in their weekly Oval Office meeting, Ford and Rockefeller discussed the conservative rebellion within the party.

"Mr. President, I'll do anything you want me to do," Rockefeller said. "I'll be on the ticket or I'll be off the ticket. You just say the word."

"There are serious problems," Ford said, "and to be brutally frank, some of these difficulties might be eliminated if you were to indicate that you didn't want to be on the ticket in 1976. I'm not asking you to do that, I'm just stating the facts."

"I understand," Rockefeller said. "Well, it's probably better that I withdraw. If I take myself out of the picture, that will clear the air. I'll give you a letter saying that I don't want to be considered as a Vice Presidential nominee."

Removing Rockefeller from contention in 1976-he would stay on as vice president until January 1977-was only one of the decisions Ford reached in the last days of October 1975 as he restructured the administration. The president disliked Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, a Nixon holdover, who was asked to resign. Rumsfeld left the White House to take over at Defense; Dick Cheney moved into Rumsfeld's post as chief of staff; and Kissinger gave up the national security adviser role to Brent Scowcroft, an air force lieutenant general. Elliot Richardson returned from London to become secretary of commerce, giving the Rockefeller wing of the party something to take the sting out of the decision on the vice presidency. And William Colby left as CIA director.

Colby's replacement? George H. W. Bush, who first learned about it on Saturday, November 1, 1975. A telegram from Kissinger arrived in Beijing while the Bushes were out bicycling. "The President is planning to announce some major personnel shifts on Monday, November 3, at 7:30 P.M., Washington time," Kissinger wrote. "Among those shifts will be the transfer of Bill Colby from CIA. The President asks that you consent to his nominating you as the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency."

Bush was flabbergasted. CIA? The agency's public image was of an intelligence service gone mad. Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, was leading a damaging investigation into the darker elements of the CIA's record, and there were parallel hearings on the House side, under the leadership of Congressman Otis Pike, Democrat of New York. In post-Watergate, post-Vietnam Washington, the agency had become infamous for illegal covert operations, failed assassination plots against foreign leaders, and domestic spying (including on the antiVietnam War movement). Public confidence was low, as was morale at Langley, the CIA's headquarters in northern Virginia.

Bush handed the telegram to Barbara. Her only reaction: "I remember Camp David." Just four words, but they contained multitudes. She had not wanted him to leave a diplomatic assignment to take the Republican National Committee job in the fall of 1972, a time when Watergate threatened to overwhelm the party. And yet he had. Now it was all happening again, a request from the White House to, as Bush put it, "return to Washington and take charge of an agency battered by a decade of hostile Congressional investigations, exposes, and charges that ran from lawbreaking to simple incompetence."

Barbara already knew what was going to unfold. For her husband the matter was decided with the phrase "The President asks." Bush knew it, too. "The President had asked, and as long as what he'd asked me to do wasn't illegal or immoral, and I felt I could handle the job, there was only one answer I could give."

He would do his duty. That did not mean, however, that he could keep gloomy thoughts at bay. His political career seemed over. "In the best of times the CIA job wouldn't be considered a springboard to higher office, if only because the director of the agency has to be nonpolitical," Bush recalled. "Anyone who took the job would have to give up any and all political activity. As far as future prospects for elective office were concerned, the CIA was marked DEAD END." Even Deng joked about news of the appointment, telling Ford, who visited China in the first days of December 1975, "You have given him a post that is not considered to be very good," provoking laughter. "You're talking like my wife, Mr. Vice Premier," Bush replied.

Why Bush for CIA? Why not leave him in place through the election, or send him-the former entrepreneur-to Commerce, rather than Elliot Richardson, a lawyer? For forty years, well into the twenty-first century, Bush and his friends believed that Don Rumsfeld and the politics of 1976 were to blame. With Rockefeller off the ticket because of pressure from the Reaganites, Bush, having come so close to the number two spot in 1974, would be a likely prospect for the ticket at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1976, should Ford fend Reagan off. The same held true for Rumsfeld, who had also been in the final round of three with Rockefeller and Bush. The theory in political circles in late 1975 was that Rumsfeld had engineered his own move to the Pentagon to gain national security experience (he had plenty of domestic expertise from his jobs under Nixon) to position himself for the vice presidential nomination. Concurrently, the thinking went, Rumsfeld had manipulated Ford into pushing Bush to the CIA, widely considered, as Bush put it, a "political graveyard" from which he could never rise. As "point man for a controversial agency being investigated by two major Congressional committees," Bush recalled, he would be so scarred that the "experience would put me out of contention, leaving the spot open for others"-chiefly, according to the Bush circle's theory, Rumsfeld. Rogers Morton, the former congressman and incumbent commerce secretary who was leaving to manage Ford's campaign, believed this was precisely what had happened, as did others. "I think you ought to know what people up here are saying about your going to the CIA," a former House colleague said to Bush. "They feel you've been had, George. Rumsfeld set you up and you were a damned fool to say yes."

In face-to-face meetings with Bush both Rumsfeld and Ford denied any such machinations. "I want you to understand something," Ford said to Bush at the time. "Rumsfeld is being accused of keeping you from being in the Cabinet and wanting to push you off to the side out at CIA. That is not true, George." After this conversation in the Oval Office, Bush had a moment with Rogers Morton. "Man," Morton said, shaking his head, "Rummy just got your ass."

Or had he? Always real, the George H. W. BushDonald Rumsfeld rivalry began back in their days in the House when both were young Ivy League military pilots competing to rise in the party of Richard Nixon. (The two men were overtly friendly. The China-bound Bushes, for instance, loaned the Rumsfelds a car, a purple AMC Gremlin with denim seats, in 197475.) Each had been in the running for the vice presidency in 1974 when Ford chose Rockefeller, and then Ford chose Rumsfeld rather than Bush to be White House chief of staff less than a month later.

The legend of the self-interested Rumsfeld-engineered Bush CIA appointment endured for more than four decades. Yet it is likely that this oft-cited cause of the tension between the two men is founded on a misunderstanding about what really happened in the complicated politics of late 1975. According to Dick Cheney, the Rumsfeld deputy who was to be White House chief of staff in the new order, the Ford restructuring initially called for Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and current ambassador to Great Britain, to become director of the CIA. In this scenario, Bush was to return from China and join the cabinet as secretary of commerce to set Bush up for a likely place as Ford's running mate on the 1976 ticket.

Then Ford personally switched Richardson and Bush's names-but not, according to Cheney, because of Rumsfeld's intervention or ambition (though Rumsfeld was happy to see it happen). Bush went to the CIA and Richardson to Commerce, Cheney recalled, because the president wanted to offer Henry Kissinger a gesture of respect and accommodation in what was, for Kissinger, an uncomfortable moment. Kissinger's old patron Rockefeller was being deposed, and Kissinger himself was giving up the national security adviser portfolio. To assuage Kissinger, who disliked Elliot Richardson, Ford sent Richardson to Commerce, which had few dealings with State, and Bush, whom Kissinger could deal with, to the CIA, which had so many. Ford's impression of the sensitivities of Henry Kissinger, not the ambitions of Donald Rumsfeld, was what had most likely led to a Bush political disappointment in the Age of Ford-and to a feeling of tension between Bush and Rumsfeld that never went away.

- Duty was duty, however, and Bush was ready to accept the new challenge. In his Sunday, November 2, 1975, cable to Kissinger agreeing to the CIA post-one also addressed to Ford-Bush wrote: "Your message came as a total and complete shock....Henry, you did not know my father. The President did. My Dad inculcated into his sons a set of values that have served me well in my own short public life. One of these values quite simply is that one should serve his country and his President."

Kissinger's reply: "You are a great patriot."

SEVENTEEN.

George Bush, Super Spook

It's a tough, mean world, and we must stay strong.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH Our life has changed.

-BARBARA BUSH IN RETROSPECT, THE CIA JOB seems a natural part of the Bush resume, an important and desirable assignment in the life of a man who had been thinking of the presidency since at least the mid-1960s. The reality of the time, however, was different. In submitting to President Ford's request, Bush thought he was consigning himself to electoral oblivion. The hope of his life-to be president, to climb the highest tree, to win the greatest of all matches-appeared to be over. Duty to country, understood as compliance with the wishes of the president, was to trump the dreams of the individual.

From China, Bush sent a message to his mother and to his children. "The President has asked us to leave China," Bush wrote from Beijing. "He wants me to head the CIA. I said yes. This new job will be full of turmoil and controversy and Mum and I know that it will not make things easy for you. Some of your friends simply won't understand. There is ugliness and turmoil swirling around the agency obscuring its fundamental importance to our country. I feel I must try to help."

Replying for the Bush children, George W. wrote back: "I look forward to the opportunities to hold my head high and declare ever so proudly that yes, George Bush, super spook, is my Dad and that yes I am damn glad for my country that he is head of the agency."

On Capitol Hill, Senator Church and other critics worried that Bush was too partisan and too eager to please his superiors-a combination that might put the agency at the political disposal of the White House. Little could be more frustrating for Bush. In his mind he was sacrificing his political career by going to the CIA at the request of the president, only to be attacked for being too political.

He arrived home at an abysmal hour for the CIA. As Bush recalled the sequence of events in his 1987 book Looking Forward, on Thursday, November 20, 1975, the Church committee released a report detailing assassination plots against Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. On Thursday, December 4, Church claimed that the CIA had played a role in the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. On Monday, December 15, the Pike committee asked the administration to detail the agency's covert involvement in the Angolan civil war-and three days later the Senate cut off funding to the pro-Western forces there. On Tuesday, December 23, Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was murdered on his doorstep after being outed as an operative in the Greek press.

Bush's confirmation hearings were held on Monday and Tuesday, December 15 and 16. "Now, let us assume you are appointed," Senator Thomas McIntyre, Democrat of New Hampshire, said to Bush. "Let us assume we are moving three or four months down the campaign trail....What if you get a call from the president...saying, 'George, I would like to see you.' You go to the White House. He takes you over in the corner and he says, 'Look, things are not going too well in my campaign. This Reagan is gaining on me all the time. Now, he is a movie star of some renown and has traveled with the fast set. He was a Hollywood star. I want you to get any dirt you can on this guy because I need it.' Now, what are you going to do in that situation?"

"I do not think that is difficult, sir," Bush replied. "I would simply say that it gets back to character and it gets back to integrity....If I were put into that kind of position where you had a clear moral issue, I would simply say no." Again and again, the committee's Democratic majority returned to Bush's political future, pressing him to pledge absolutely that he would not be on the ticket in 1976. (They apparently did not share Bush's view that heading the CIA in this period meant an end to national political advancement.) He would not do it. The White House had asked Bryce Harlow to work on the Bush nomination. After a head count, Harlow returned with his verdict. "They want a blood oath you won't be on the ticket next fall," Harlow told Bush. "Otherwise I don't think we've got the votes."

No, Bush said. It was too much; they were just trying to humiliate him and tie Ford's hands. Harlow listened, then repeated himself: "They still want it."

"I won't do it," Bush said.

Fearing the nomination would fail, Bush agreed to a compromise. The president, not Bush, would make the pledge. "I know it's unfair," Bush told Ford, "but you don't have much of a choice if we are to get on with the job of rebuilding and strengthening the agency." On Thursday, December 18, 1975, Ford sent Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, the Armed Services chairman, a letter promising that Bush would not be a candidate for vice president in 1976. The committee supported the nomination 12 to 4 (McIntyre, Gary Hart of Colorado, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and John Culver of Iowa voted against Bush).

On the Senate floor, Bush won confirmation 64 to 27. Among the first to congratulate Barbara in the Senate gallery was Mrs. Frank Church, a friend, who told Barbara that the senator had not meant anything personal in his opposition. "I don't think the average American understands that in Washington you can be friends with your political opponents," Barbara wrote. Potter Stewart swore the new director in at Langley on Friday, January 30, 1976. President Ford made a point of being there. So did Donald Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce.

- A memorandum from four senior CIA officers shaped Bush's first decision. The document had an unambiguous title: "Where You Should Sit." There were proposals for Bush to make the Old Executive Office Building his main office or perhaps to create an "intelligence community" structure in downtown Washington, away from the CIA's headquarters at Langley. "Any move by a [Director of Central Intelligence]," the memorandum said, "that could be interpreted as an attempt to disassociate himself from CIA would be destructive indeed." (The italics were the authors'. They wanted to make themselves very clear.) Bush agreed. "Going through the southwest gate of West Executive Avenue every morning, with a reserved White House parking place, would be good for the image," Bush recalled, but not so good for the substance of his new job. "The message had to say, 'I'm on your side, we're in this together.'"

Bush moved into the director's seventh-floor office at Langley, a sparely furnished room that offered splendid views of the northern Virginia countryside. Bush worked hard to raise morale at the agency. Referring to the newspapers and the congressional investigators, he asked his senior staff: "What are they trying to do to us?" He was one of them, he was saying. He would stand by them.

Credit 17.1 As CIA director from 1976 to 1977, Bush restored morale to a battered American intelligence community. He took the post believing he was consigning himself to what he called a "political graveyard."

At home-the Bushes had moved back to northwest Washington-the CIA sent men out to add extra locks and bolts to the doors. The Bushes' mail was no longer delivered to the house but to the agency. Packages that arrived at the house were not to be opened unless expected or from someone they knew. There were family concerns throughout the year. George W. had been planning a trip to Saudi Arabia on oil business, but the CIA advised against the journey, citing safety issues. "We are sick about it, but they feel that this is just the kind of thing or opportunity the terrorists are looking for," Barbara wrote Jeb and his wife, Columba, in July 1976.

- A chauffeured Chevrolet with a CIA security officer picked Bush up every weekday morning at seven thirty. Most days the car took Bush from northwest Washington out to Langley, where the director often went through the front door, flashed his ID badge, and walked past the marble walls where rows of simple stars anonymously commemorated the CIA personnel killed in action. By ten to eight he would be at his desk on the seventh floor, reviewing overnight cables. He met weekly with Ford and Scowcroft. Many days were taken up with congressional testimony (Bush appeared before Senate and House committees fifty-one times in his year as director). If he could, he spent his lunch hour jogging three miles outside or, in the event of rain or cold, on an indoor track in the basement at Langley. Late in the afternoons, he often dropped by the State Department to spend some time with Kissinger, just checking in and chatting about the day. By seven P.M., if the social calendar was clear-and it often was, since Bush declined to attend overtly political functions-he would head home to Barbara.

At the CIA, for the first time since their marriage, Bush could not talk openly with his wife about his day or about what was on his mind. This official silence unnerved Barbara, who had grown accustomed to proximity and partnership in New York and in Beijing. "I can't believe it, but I think that George is working longer hours than ever," she wrote in February 1976. Her favorite part of the week came on Sundays, when Bush was at home and they had guests over for lunch. "I must confess that he adores the work," she wrote a friend in the diplomatic corps in China in July. "I say confess for I am not too mad about his job for he can't very well share it with me, darn it all!!!" The lighthearted tone was forced. She was, she recalled, "very depressed, lonely, and unhappy" in the first six months or so of 1976. "I felt ashamed," Barbara recalled. "I had a husband whom I adored, the world's greatest children, more friends than I could see-and I was severely depressed. I hid it from everyone, including my closest friends. Everyone but George Bush."

Nothing since Robin's death had been this awful. He was a patient husband; his wife was a permanent part of his world, a fixed force, and he responded to her in these months out of love and duty. "Barbara had depression, serious depression," Bush recalled. "We didn't really know much about it. She wouldn't confide in others." She did confide in him, and he urged her to put away her embarrassment and consult a doctor. "He would suggest that I get professional help, and that sent me into deeper gloom," recalled Barbara. "He was working such incredibly long hours at his job, and I swore to myself I would not burden him. Then he would come home, and I would tell him all about it. Night after night George held me weeping in his arms while I tried to explain my feelings."

In Washington, they spent late hours in much the same way they had spent those terrible months in Midland after Robin died. In the darkness there were tears, and uncertainty, and a sense of inconsolable loss. Yet there was also warmth, and his arms, and the reassuring reality that he was with her, and always would be. "I almost wonder," Barbara wrote, "why he didn't leave me." "Almost" was the key word. At a deep and fundamental level, she knew that George Bush loved her. However much he traveled, however much he seemed consumed by the great game of politics, however much the concerns of others-the moving men, the staff, anybody-appeared to take precedence over hers, Bush was driven by loyalty and by commitment. The vicissitudes of marriage, particularly of marriages that began in youth, were real. There is no doubt that the Bushes had bad days through the years. Bad days were part of the deal, inescapable yet endurable. And the Bushes endured.

Nineteen seventy-six was among the most difficult hours. "Sometimes the pain was so great, I felt the urge to drive into a tree or an oncoming car," Barbara wrote of that year. "When that happened, I would pull over to the side of the road until I felt okay." Then she would drive on, arriving home, where she knew that her husband would be before long-a husband she believed so dazzling and wonderful that his powers extended to the alleviation of thoughts so dark they could turn suicidal. "It seems so simple to me now: I was just the right age, fifty-one years old, for menopause; I could not share in George's job after years of being so involved; and our children were all gone," Barbara recalled. "I was a classic case for depression. My 'code' told me that you should not think about self, but others. And yet, there I was, wallowing in self-pity. I knew it was wrong, but couldn't seem to pull out of it. I wish I could pinpoint the day it went away, but I can't. All I know is that after about six months, it just did. I was so lucky."

As was her husband, who loved her and needed her.

- The CIA post moved at a much more rapid clip than the United Nations, the Republican National Committee, or China. The range of concerns that Bush confronted at Langley was evident from one of his Thursday morning briefings with the president in March. Bush first discussed an impending trip to Europe and the possible effect the congressional investigations were having on the CIA's relationships. ("Some of those who have cooperated with us have been genuinely concerned," Bush told Ford.) Bush raised the possibility of coups in Thailand, Argentina, and Peru.

In 1976, Bush was furious about the steady leaks about the CIA from the investigating committees on the Hill. As he remembered it, he confronted too many messages on too many mornings detailing the damage such reports were causing to agency assets and relationships. "Four Latin American countries drastically reduced their contact with the CIA, citing press leaks," Bush recalled. One Eastern European source active "since 1972 stopped cooperating with us, out of fear of publicity and exposure"; a "Communist-bloc diplomat" who seemed cooperative "broke off all contact after saying he couldn't risk working with an intelligence agency whose internal affairs were in the news every day."

On Wednesday, June 16, 1976, Francis E. Meloy, Jr., the American ambassador to Lebanon, was assassinated in Beirut, prompting what Bush recalled as "the most important intelligence estimate I ever brought before the President and the [National Security Council]." As Bush recalled it, the issue was whether Ford should order a general evacuation of Americans from Lebanon. In a tense meeting in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House, Ford was joined by Kissinger and Scowcroft. They were seated. Bush was on his feet, relaying information from the ground and presenting aerial images of possible escape routes for Americans then in Lebanon. As Bush recalled, the "assassination signaled a new, more dangerous level of terrorist activity in Beirut-enough to warrant instructing the U.S. embassy there to advise all American nationals in Lebanon to leave the country."

One thing Bush took away from the Lebanese crisis was an appreciation for the way Brent Scowcroft handled himself in the role of national security adviser. As a man who himself liked to ask questions and weigh every option, approaching issues without many, if any, ideological presuppositions, Bush recognized Scowcroft as a kindred spirit. The respect was mutual. Scowcroft had admired Bush for several years. "He was genial and thoughtful," Scowcroft recalled, "and it was no easy task to navigate Washington as well as he did at the end of the Nixon administration." When Bush went to China, he and Scowcroft grew closer. "Kissinger frankly didn't have time to hold his hand out there," recalled Scowcroft, "and so I got to know Bush better as his liaison, if you will, with the administration when he was out in Asia."

- As the agency's overarching concern, the Soviet Union brought Bush into contact with the kinds of hawkish conservatives who believed Ronald Reagan, not Gerald Ford, should be trusted with the security of the nation. Detente with Moscow had been the order of the day since 1969, when Nixon and Kissinger took over American foreign policy. After August 1974, Ford carried on Nixon's engagement with the Soviets, eschewing, as had Nixon, harsh Cold War rhetoric in an ongoing diplomatic bid to ease tensions between the superpowers. Cold War hawks (including Reagan, the patron saint of the hard-liners) distrusted the Soviets; Cold War moderates (including Nixon, a recovering Cold War hawk) were convinced that there was something to be gained by negotiation and arms control agreements.

February 1960 had marked a little-noted turning point in the history of the Cold War when the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate that suggested the Soviets were not the offensive threat Americans had long believed them to be. According to NIE 11-4-59, "The Soviet armed forces are intended in the first instance to deter attacks on the USSR and other communist states, and to insure survival of communist power should such an attack occur....They are probably not intended for any consistent and far-reaching policy of outright military conquest." As noted by Raymond L. Garthoff, a historian writing for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, the chief of Air Force Intelligence dissented strongly.

This clash of views within intelligence, governmental, and academic circles over Soviet objectives and Soviet strength had endured through the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. Conservative observers, many from outside the government, believed the CIA underestimated Soviet capacity and ambitions. From the Pentagon, the new secretary of defense, Don Rumsfeld, was pushing for a harder line on the Soviets, as was Reagan out on the Republican primary campaign trail.

Bush acknowledged the conservative sentiment on Wednesday, May 26, 1976, when he approved the idea of the formation of a "Team B" to write a complementary-and almost certainly competing-report at the same time the standard group of intelligence professionals produced its annual estimate of the Soviets. "Let her fly!! O.K. G.B.," Bush wrote on the proposal. "One intelligence veteran" later told The New York Times that Bush had made a mistake with Team B-that it was "a bad idea that he permitted in the interests of getting along with everybody."

Yet Bush's job as CIA director, as he often said, was not to make policy but to produce intelligence as a means to guide the policy makers. "Getting along with everybody" in this context was not a bad thing. Under the circumstances, it was wisest, Bush decided, to keep the right-wingers close, to allow them to examine the data that the CIA had, and see what they came up with. The results were evident to the world on the day after Christmas, 1976, when The New York Times reported that "New C.I.A. Estimate Finds Soviets Seek Superiority in Arms." The story quoted a "top-level military intelligence officer" saying that the Team B analysis "was more than somber-it was very grim." The front-page headline was hard to miss.

"All the evidence points to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called the 'worldwide triumph of socialism,'" Team B wrote, "but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony."

As it turned out, Team B overestimated Soviet strength and nuclear intentions. The exercise energized the right wing in American foreign policy, partly setting the intellectual stage for the defense increases of the Reagan years-which, though no one could know it at the time, would be the Reagan-Bush years.

- In late June, Jimmy Carter, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, had approached President Ford with what CIA historians noted was an unusual request: The former Georgia governor asked the president for the courtesy of intelligence briefings before the Democratic National Convention. After consulting with Scowcroft and Bush, Ford decided to dispatch Bush himself to a series of meetings with Carter through the general election.

Bush met Carter in Hershey, Pennsylvania, for an initial conversation on Monday, July 5, 1976. Deputy Director Richard Lehman accompanied Bush to Pennsylvania and supervised the preparation of the briefings themselves. In the Hershey meeting, Lehman recalled, Carter's questions covered subjects "from the future of Rhodesia to morale in the Agency."

Bush traveled to Plains, Georgia, to meet with Carter at the Democratic nominee's house later in July. (Kissinger was due the next day to brief Carter on foreign policy.) To reporters beforehand, Carter said he hoped Bush would brief him on "confidential information concerning Lebanon and the Middle East, Rhodesia, South Africa, and South Korea, plus the interrelationships between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China."

The meeting with Carter lasted nearly six hours. According to CIA records, for the first half hour the discussion touched on "Lebanon, Iraqi-Syrian relations, strains between Egypt and Libya, the Taiwan Straits, Rhodesia, the Cuban presence in Angola, and developments in Uganda." The rest of the day was taken up by the Soviet Union and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.

Two weeks later, on Thursday, August 12, 1976, Bush returned to Plains with eight agency experts. The CIA contingent had some time to kill before they saw Carter at his home, and so they paid a visit to his campaign headquarters. There they encountered Carter's mother, Miss Lillian Carter. When Miss Lillian learned the delegation had come from Langley, a CIA memo reported, she said "Jimmy was going to clear the government of all vestiges of Republicans, including...Bush."

Bush was polite and unfazed. The CIA delegation traveled the short distance from town to the Carters' house on Woodland Drive, where the Democratic nominee met them. Bush led a conversation, CIA records show, that touched on Soviet conventional forces, the Backfire bomber, the SS-X-20 missile programs, and the status of arms control negotiations; developments in China; Greek-Turkish and Egyptian-Libyan tensions; a Rhodesian raid into Mozambique; Somalia and Djibouti; action at the demilitarized zone in Korea; and Lebanon. The briefing did not end until five P.M.

The Ford-Carter general election was a closely contested race. "Now I find myself thinking too much about going home," Barbara wrote after a preliminary house-hunting trip to Houston in October-a sign that the Bushes, at least privately, believed they were not long for Washington. Ford made a noble stand against Carter, but finally could not prevail, losing 50.1 to 48 percent on Tuesday, November 2, 1976.

Bush called Carter on the Friday after the election to congratulate the president-elect and to resign as CIA director. He said that the two should meet in order for Bush to brief Carter on "exotic and very closely held items relating to sources and methods." Carter accepted both the resignation and the overture to get together. According to CIA records, Bush offered to send along a letter making his resignation official, but Carter said that "was not necessary and thanked Bush for his call."

Two Fridays later, on November 19, Bush returned to Plains with six senior CIA officials. The day began with a small forty-five-minute session in the Carters' living room with Carter and Vice Presidentelect Walter Mondale. Sitting on the Carters' sofa, his back to the bay windows, Bush raised the question of his own retention as director. Though he had offered his resignation two weeks earlier, Bush wanted to talk the issue out.

No incoming president had replaced the incumbent CIA director upon assuming office since Eisenhower had named Allen Dulles to the job in 1953. None of Eisenhower's successors-Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford-had made an immediate change at the agency, the idea being that the job should seem impervious to partisan political shifts in power. After raising the question with Carter, however, Bush proceeded to argue against his own proposition. He understood that the new president almost certainly needed to choose a new director, someone in whom Carter had total confidence and with whom he could create an atmosphere of trust.

Carter agreed, saying, "Okay." The matter was closed. Bush would go. But why had Bush opened the door to staying on to serve a Democratic president? There were several reasons. He liked the job. He liked the people. And he liked the power. "He has never enjoyed a job more," Barbara wrote. And like many other CIA veterans at the time, Bush believed the appearance of bipartisanship would be helpful to Langley-a vote of confidence in the direction the CIA had taken in the past year.

Carter was uninterested. He wanted to move on. His objection to retaining Bush, even for a time, was that Bush was "too wedded to existing structure to be an agent of change" within the intelligence community. "If I had acceded to his request, then he would not have been president," Carter recalled decades later, alluding to the fact that a man who had served in the Carter administration would have been an unlikely candidate for the Republican national ticket in 1980.

After the directorship question was settled, Bush briefed Carter on a range of "highly sensitive" operations and assets. Carter, Bush wrote in a memorandum of the meeting, "never indicated that he thought these operations were good or bad, that he was surprised or unsurprised. He registered no emotion of any kind." Bush also warned Carter about trusting the telephone too much, alluding to "the Soviet capabilities to read phone calls...and to penetrate in many ways."

At one point during this final briefing in Plains, the new president alluded to what he clearly thought was the departing director's new career path. When an issue arose that a CIA officer said would require action around 1985, Carter interrupted. "I don't need to worry about that," Carter said. "By then George will be President and he can take care of it." As Bush recalled, a "half smiling" Carter then nodded at Mondale across the room and added, "Either George or Fritz Mondale there."

- The Bushes spent some time in Florida at the turn of the year. The bluefish were biting, and Barbara was elated that Bush had trusted her choice of house in Houston, signing the papers on her word alone. There were different options for the new year on the table as they unwound in the sun. "Pop has made no major decisions about the future," Barbara wrote, "but he has been offered many exciting things and I can see that spark coming back when he talks of the future."

In his year at Langley, Bush had raised morale in the wake of the work of the investigating committees, providing a needed lift to a deflated agency. He also received an education about national security that would have been difficult to impossible to replicate in any other job. "You learn what the intelligence community really is," Bush recalled of the CIA posting. "You learn what it can do and what it can't and what it should not be asked to do. You know the importance of human intelligence, and you know the limitations of human intelligence. You begin to understand the science and technology, the S&T departments, the satellites and all of that. Being there you get a realistic view of our intelligence and its capabilities. You can count the divisions and know where they were, but you couldn't measure intent as well as you would like." One could, in other words, learn what was knowable, but even the finest intelligence service had its limitations and could not foresee every eventuality.

For now, such things were someone else's problem, someone else's privilege. In January 1977 the Bushes returned to Houston. It was the first time since his election to the House a decade before that George Bush was a private citizen. "I wonder," Barbara asked her diary, "if George will ever be happy at home again??"

PART V.

The Age of Reagan.

1977 to 1989.

I...thought that it was prudent-and important for the country-for the vice-president to play as large a role in the affairs of the administration as possible.

-RONALD REAGAN.

Credit p5.1.

On January 22, 1981, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush held the first of their many Thursday lunches. (They favored Mexican food.).

EIGHTEEN.

A President We Won't Have to Train.

I'm so digging in, so tense....Just this one goal...no time to think at all. That troubles me a little bit. Drive, drive forward.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH, campaigning for president, 1979.

Bush has to be "acceptable" to Right Wing-not necessarily "favorite of."

-JAMES A. BAKER III, in a private 1980 campaign note.

HOUSTON BORED HIM. "I went home and couldn't figure out what the hell to do," Bush recalled three decades later. "There [have] been withdrawal symptoms," he wrote a friend in early 1977. "I've been tense as a coiled spring-hopefully not a shit about it, but up-tight." He lived in terror of becoming...well, of becoming ordinary. "There is a missing of stimulating talk," Bush wrote an old friend. "I just get bored silly about whose daughter is a Pi Phi or even bored about who's banging old Joe's wife. I don't want to slip into that 3 or 4 martini late late dinner rich social thing. There is too much to learn still."

He tried, a little, to be happy in repose, speaking warmly of "normalcy," of the fun of the new house, of his grandson George P., Jeb and Columba's little boy. Yet Bush was too driven, too ambitious, too restless, to remain still. He understood himself well enough, he wrote a friend, to know that "somehow I will churn until I can find the formula to be involved, to be doing."