Family Of Secrets-- All Your Worst Fears About The Bushes Were True

I don't know which single book I liked most in 2009. The DWT Bookstore has pages of my faves-- the ones Ken and I are always referring to-- from Idiot America, Nixonland, Dateline Havana, Bloggers on the Bus and Turkmeniscam to The Progressive Revolution, The Eliminationists and, of course, Russ Baker's Family of Secrets, a 600 page thriller that digs more deeply into the Bush Family than anyone has ever done. The paperback is now in its third edition and I've been urging Russ to work with someone on doing a synopsis that we could use to turn people on who are intimidated by books with hundreds of pages. Yesterday he finally sent me something that can be used here at DWT. He starts with the questions many of us have asked over and over again: "How did the spectacularly unqualified George W. Bush come to be the President of the United States, and arguably the most powerful person in the world? What lay behind his improbable rise and disastrous policies? Was there more to his controversial reign than the pundits’ standard bromides?"

These are the questions that launched Russ Baker into five years of research. The answers, based on hundreds of interviews, including with persons close to the Bush family who had never talked with reporters, proved astounding.

Not only, Baker found, had we missed the very essence of W., but also of his father and grandfather and in fact the entire clan. Moreover, behind the secrets of the Bushes and their circle lay larger ones that cast decades of American history in a new and revealing light.

The Bushes have been portrayed as everything from incompetents to ideologues to outright crooks. Many of their transgressions  are now well known-- from grandfather Prescott’s involvement with Nazi-era financiers to W.’s initiatives that weakened Americans’ constitutional rights at every turn.

But Baker’s research took him to far deeper levels of insight into the American power machine, as it unearthed material of the sort more commonly identified with shady foreign regimes or Hollywood thrillers than with the still-hallowed U.S. presidency.

Baker explained this in a post-publication interview: “As I discovered, there was an entire hidden stratum of truth underlying the rise of the Bushes-- a truth that, if not reckoned with, threatens to derail the reforms we all hope are on the horizon.”  
 
The copious evidence Baker assembles points to one jarring conclusion: that the parade of faces in the Bush White House were in fact bit players in a long-playing “shadow government” establishment that continues to influence events regardless of who-- or what party-- occupies the White House. Power cliques in this country, it turns out, function much as they do elsewhere in the world. Here, however, they are better hidden, in part-- paradoxically-- because we think our society is so open that hidden centers of power could not exist.

There is a tendency in America to tar anyone who sees larger configurations and coalescences of interests, irrespective of the quality of their research, as "conspiracy nuts." Yet the revelations and lessons of Family of Secrets come at us on practically every page, and with sourcing and documentation that have stood up to scrutiny. Moreover, they offer us a glimpse into something deeply embedded in our body politic, and profoundly dangerous to our democratic traditions.

 
Below are brief summaries of the first seven chapters, hopefully enough to mkae you want to buy a copy of the whole thing.

Chapter 1: How Did Bush Happen?

Baker explains how he came to write this book, and the extent to which his discoveries surprised him and forced him to re-examine popular assumptions about George W. Bush, his father George H.W. Bush-- and, ultimately, about how power in America works. He began with a sense that behind the George W. Bush presidency lay “something more consequential and pervasive-- well beyond the missteps, overreaching, and palace intrigues one finds in all presidential administrations.”

“Above all, the deception at the root of the decision to invade Iraq and the disastrous occupation that followed only confirmed my feeling that the assumption of power by Bush pointed to something deeper than a callow and entitled president surrounded by enablers and Iagos with dark schemes.”

The inquiry into W. quickly leads to W’s father. “To my surprise, I began to see that understanding George H. W. Bush (Senior, or Poppy, as his relatives and friends call him) was really the key to understanding the son-- and not just in the simplistic, psychoanalytical terms to which some commentators have resorted.” Despite the conventional narrative of a father-son rivalry, the two were basically members of a single team with a deep bench and a long, if little-known, track record. It was this team that put W. into play: “George Bush the younger was essentially cleaned up, reconditioned, and then ‘managed’ into becoming his father’s successor in the White House.”
 
After recounting some of the more egregious acts of George W.’s administration, he writes: “None of these developments looks so surprising when one considers the untold story of what came before. This book is about that secret history, and the people and institutions that created it.”  

Baker explains the inherent paradox that defines the Bush clan: “[W]hile serving forces that operate best in the shadows, the Bushes craved for themselves a place in the spotlight. To get what they wanted and to do what they felt they must, they had to live what amounts to double lives. Even as the Bushes gained fame and power, they managed to somehow avoid careful scrutiny… So adept were they at this game that they are almost never mentioned in their colleagues’ writings… It is almost as if this clan never existed until the moment it occupied the White House.” 

Chapter 2: Poppy’s Secret

In the first of Family of Secrets’ many dramatic scenes, an entertainment reporter stumbles upon an obscure declassified document that reveals George H.W. “Poppy” Bush’s secret: Long before he was appointed CIA director under Gerald Ford in 1976, and labeled as an “intelligence virgin,” Poppy Bush already was connected to the CIA. More particularly, he had been working with extremist Cuban exiles at the time of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Poppy tried to ascribe the reference found by the reporter to “another George Bush.” But other documents indicate that he had been involved in super-secret covert domestic operations some two decades before his directorship, and that his 1950s offshore drilling company was a cover operation. Baker bolsters this discovery with evidence that Poppy Bush was engaged in intelligence work as early as World War II. Further, he provides background on the role of banking circles around Poppy’s father, Prescott, in creating America’s modern intelligence establishment.

Chapter 3: Viva Zapata

This chapter deals with the Bush family’s ties to the origins of the American intelligence establishment. We learn how the Bushes got into the “family business” of munitions, finance and intelligence work. And we take a behind-the-scenes look at Dresser Industries, an oilfield services firm through which the Bushes got into defense contracting and the petroleum industry.

After his Naval Intelligence work in World War II, Poppy goes to Yale, where the early CIA is busy recruiting-- particularly through secret societies like the Bush family favorite, Skull and Bones. Then we see how Poppy’s early days as an apprentice in oil and defense contractor affiliates of his family’s investment bank coincided with the growth of an oil-defense-intelligence hub in Texas. This led to Poppy Bush’s decision to leave the East Coast behind and move to the Lone Star State.

Meanwhile, US senator Prescott Bush and his former business partners are powers behind the throne during the Eisenhower presidency, a relationship sharpened by their close ties to Ike’s new CIA director, Allen Dulles, and Prescott’s personal role as a senator in supervising assassination activities abroad. In this context, it becomes apparent why powerful Washington figures, including the owner of the Washington Post, enamored of the spy apparatus and transfixed by the Cold War struggles, step up and fund Poppy’s obscure little oil company.
 
As the evidence builds that Poppy’s tiny offshore drilling outfit was an intelligence cover, we see how the Bush circle began moving against Fidel Castro after he expropriated their Cuban holdings.

Chapter 4: Where Was Poppy?

Poppy Bush has claimed not to remember where he was on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas. That’s odd, since almost every other American alive at that time can recall where he or she was. Poppy’s amnesia become stranger still-- or perhaps, more understandable-- when declassified documents show (1) that he was working in Dallas for the CIA at the time, and (2) that he called the FBI from a town near Dallas at the very hour Kennedy’s death was being announced.

In that call, Bush Sr. introduced himself as a private citizen, and offered a supposed tip about a possible suspect-- a man who turned out to be innocent, and to have ties back to Bush himself.  Though the tip was a red herring, it served a clear purpose: to establish that Poppy was not in Dallas at the time of his call. Baker exhaustively explores Bush’s activities that week and day, which included spending time with a top CIA expert on removing government leaders. He also dissects a peculiar Nov. 22 letter purportedly written by Barbara Bush and published by her decades later, that explains-- too artfully by half-- the couple’s movements at the time.

Baker reveals the deep animus toward President John Kennedy harbored by the Bushes and their friend, CIA director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster.  And he describes the dramatic, sudden changes in the lives of both Prescott Bush and his son in the wake of that firing.

Chapter 5: Oswald’s Friend

In 1976, a letter arrives for CIA director George H. W. Bush. His aides assume it is from a crackpot-- the writer claims that some kind of net is closing in on him, and attributes this to his having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Bush acknowledges to his perplexed staff that he actually knows the man, who is an anti-communist Russian émigré named George de Mohrenschildt. Poppy Bush confirms in an internal memo that de Mohrenschildt did indeed have some connection to Oswald-- but says he cannot recall the details of the Oswald connection. This is strange, stranger still for the head of the US spy agency.

Bush writes back to de Mohrenschildt that he has nothing to fear. Yet within a year the man is dead from a shotgun blast to the head. The official verdict is suicide. Baker begins a lengthy exploration of de Mohrenschildt’s ties to the Bush family, and to oil interests generally, dating back many decades. And he details the previously unknown military-oil-intelligence pipeline that brought anti-communist Russians out of the Soviet Union and settled them in Dallas, where they were plugged into business and society at the highest level. 

We learn of de Mohrenschildt’s involvement with lucrative oil investment schemes in Cuba that were upset by Fidel Castro’s revolution, and his ties to what is described as a “private CIA” serving the interests of wealthy Americans abroad. Also revealed are De Mohrenschildt’s links to many figures identified in one way or another with the JFK assassination story-- from Abe Zapruder, whose footage of the assassination became a crucial piece of the conventional narrative of that day, to the leader of a military intelligence unit whose members included many members of the Dallas police department, and whose associate forced himself into the pilot car of Kennedy’s motorcade.
 
Chapter 6: The Hit

In this chapter Baker identifies the large array of powerful interests who were furious at John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, the attorney general-- and explains why these interests were glad to see an end to Camelot. Central to this story is JFK’s feud with the CIA and especially Allen Dulles.  Another important element is the threat posed by the Kennedys to the oil depletion allowance – the foundation of much of the oil barons’ wealth.The Pentagon also had reasons to want the Kennedys out of power. In revealing how Kennedy’s replacement, Lyndon Johnson, was tied to the same interests as the Bushes, Baker lays bare the close links between Johnson and the Bush family.

In weaving an alternative narrative of the Kennedy assassination, Baker details Allen Dulles’s activities after he was fired by Kennedy and relates them to Oswald’s background with intelligence and the military that suggests that his “defection” to the USSR was part of a US-run “false defector program.” There are indications that Oswald was actually doing intelligence work at the time he took his job in the Texas School Book Depository.

Poppy Bush’s old friend George de Mohrenschildt and his wife began to “manage” Lee Harvey Oswald’s life in the year prior to the assassination. Was this part of an elaborate attempt to focus attention on Oswald, and away from prominent Dallas figures and the CIA group? Baker also reports how de Mohrenschildt was moved offshore prior to November 1963, thereby minimizing his direct connection (and that of Bush and others) to the events of Nov. 22nd.

Baker unpacks the evidence that Oswald was falsely implicated in the assassination to cover for the real culprits. He reveals De Mohrenschildt’s ties to the owner of the Texas School Book Depository, the building from which Oswald purportedly fired the fatal shots. Baker shows how Oswald was guided into his job in the building, and reveals the military connections of the company that hired him. Finally, we see these key figures, all tied to super-secret military and intelligence activities, converging on November 22. In summarizing the copious facts that place Poppy and his circle much closer to the assassination than has ever been revealed, he asks the simple question: Can all this be coincidence?
 
Chapter 7: After Camelot

Beyond the outlines of a sophisticated operation behind Kennedy’s death, Baker’s research turns up new indications of something more enduring and hence perhaps even more unsettling. Namely, an ongoing effort to dissuade the public from connecting the dots and to perpetuate the increasingly untenable official story: that Oswald, operating alone, killed Kennedy.

We start with the role of Bush associates in the aftermath of the assassination and the ensuing investigation. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of Jack Crichton, an oil industry operative with an intelligence background who was, along with Poppy Bush, part of the cadre at the top of the small Texas GOP. 

Crichton was also head of a Dallas-based military intelligence unit tied to the Russian exile community. His role included controlling Marina Oswald’s translated comments to police, which were actually modified to implicate her husband. This circle used Oswald’s purported ties to the Soviets and Cubans to set off a chain of events that nearly precipitated a missile attack on Cuba.

Baker reveals how the discredited Warren Commission was practically run by Bush family friend Allen Dulles, the CIA director deposed by JFK. It was staffed almost exclusively by figures with ties to the CIA, the military-industrial complex, and right-wing business interests arrayed against the Kennedys. This explains the Commission’s transparent effort to ensure that their interviews of de Mohrenschildt would not lead back to powerful figures. De Mohrenschildt himself expressed bewilderment at the Commission’s feeble questioning of him.

In the fall of 1963, Poppy’s reason for traveling around the state was a futile bid for a US Senate seat. Having lost, he gets to Washington soon enough-- elected in 1966 to the House of Representatives. He quickly takes advantage of his official capacity to travel to Vietnam with the ex CIA-man who helped him launch his earlier intelligence-cover offshore oil business. Declassified documents show the man requesting that the Agency arrange cover for his trip with Bush.

It gets even better. You should consider picking up a copy. Here's a link to the paperback.