ON DECEMBER 15, 1975, a Senate committee opened hearings on whether George H.W. Bush should be confirmed as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It wasn’t going to be a slam dunk.

The Democrats had a huge majority in the Senate, and many were still angry over Bush’s role as a partisan apologist for former President Richard Nixon, who had resigned the year before as a result of the Watergate scandal. What’s more, in the wake of disclosures in the press of pervasive domestic spying by the CIA, the Senate had launched its first aggressive investigation into alleged abuses by the U.S. intelligence community.

Beginning in January 1975, the Church Committee, named for its chair, Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, unearthed one scandal after another at the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency. Long-hidden covert programs, including a series of plots to kill foreign leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, had been exposed, rocking the CIA. By late 1975, the agency’s public standing was at a low ebb, and the CIA and White House officials in the administration of President Gerald Ford were increasingly worried about the political impact of the disclosures. Bush Crime Family: The... Saint John Hunt, Roger... Best Price: $3.40 Buy New $5.99 (as of 05:30 UTC - Details)

For Bush, the CIA job was a major opportunity at a time when his political career was in flux. Until then, his greatest accomplishment in the Republican Party had been to win a House seat in Texas that had always been held by a Democrat. But he had lost a subsequent Senate bid in 1970 and had been bouncing around Republican establishment circles ever since. He had the ignominy to serve as chair of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, forcing him to make repeated public excuses for Nixon.

Bush had also served as United Nations ambassador under Nixon and as head of the U.S. Liaison Office in China under Ford, and now the Washington rumor mill was reporting that Bush, the loyal soldier, was under consideration for a major political prize — to be Ford’s vice presidential running mate in 1976. If he didn’t get the vice president’s slot in 1976, it seemed likely that he might run for the presidency on his own later.

But first he had to get confirmed to the CIA post.

Family of Secrets: The... Baker, Russ Buy New $10.99 (as of 12:40 UTC - Details) For the Ford White House and the CIA, Bush’s confirmation hearings set the stage for an all-out battle with congressional leaders. At a critical moment, the Ford administration, its allies in Congress, and the intelligence community collaborated to gin up outrage over a fake national security scandal that ultimately helped pull Bush across the finish line. That polarizing strategy has provided a winning model for Republican efforts to discredit and distract ever since, all the way down to Donald Trump, Devin Nunes, and the attempted sliming of the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.

The story of how Bush became CIA director is brilliantly told in “A Season of Inquiry Revisited” by Loch K. Johnson, a renowned historian of intelligence at the University of Georgia and former Church Committee staffer.

To get confirmed, Bush had to run a gauntlet through the Senate, where Democrats held 60 seats thanks to a post-Watergate Democratic landslide in the 1974 midterms. If he got the nod, he would be the first partisan political figure ever to run the CIA. Until then, the agency had been led by gray-flannel establishment figures from Wall Street, former senior military officers, or longtime agency professionals.

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