Before He Was President, George HW Bush Was The Man Who Fixed The CIA
Before George H.W. Bush found himself seated in the Oval Office, he was appointed by former President Gerald Ford to be director of the then scandal-ridden CIA.
As reported by the Daily Beast, it wasn’t exactly Bush’s first choice, given that he had been on the shortlist to be Ford’s vice-president. The climate at the agency at the time didn’t appeal to Bush either, and he felt that Ford was trying to kill his political career with the unexpected appointment.
At the time, the CIA was caught up in a major scandal after an expose was posted in the New York Times by Seymour Hersch, in which it was shared that the agency had been spying on anti-war groups within its own borders. That expose was written just 13 months before Bush took the reigns. The internal surveillance hit the agency hard when it became public knowledge, and their popularity was in the gutter.
