Family Of Secrets-- Best Book On The Real Story Of The Bush Family: Part 3

Over the past couple of weeks, I've laid out short summaries of the chapters in Russ Baker's marvelous book about the Bushes, Family of Secrets. The first batch were here and the second installment was here. This evening I want to finish up with the last 9 chapters and the conclusion.

Chapter 15 : The Handoff

Despite his image as a spoiled goof-off,  George W. Bush was deep into the political and intelligence machinations of his father. The strange companies that W. ran or participated in bear the markings of covert intelligence activities.

The first of these was an international business that W. doesn’t talk much about. The second came over a summer during his years  at Harvard Business School. W. was supposed to be serving out his part-time Air National Guard obligation.  Instead he showed up in Alaska to work at a firm whose owner admits it did intelligence-related work.  This job never made it onto W.’s  thin resume.

After graduation, W. followed his father’s example, and headed to Texas, supposedly to seek his fortune in the oil industry.  The substantial funds that poured into his first venture did not seem to come from the people who signed the checks.  In any case, the ventures failed to make money for the investors, whoever they really were.

George W. took time out from business to mount his first Congressional campaign. Again, vast sums poured in, from family friends around the country and from  financial, oil, military and intelligence interests. With the campaign underway, W. met and quickly wed Laura Welch, whose claim that she did not know W. during his troubled National Guard days seems in doubt. 

After losing the election, Bush returned to the oil industry in a venture financed in part by figures connected to the Saudis and the Shah of Iran. When this venture too failed, he was rescued by wealthy Cincinnati businessmen, one of whom he will as president appoint to his foreign intelligence advisory board.

Chapter 16 : The Quacking Duck

W. keeps failing upwards. When the business that rescued his oil venture fails, it in turn is scooped up by yet another company. W. ends up with better compensation than ever, despite the new entity’s general lack of profits.  This new company, Harken Energy, is funded through mysterious offshore entities and figures tied to  corrupt dictatorships. Though investors make little, W’s involvement sets him up financially, and thus enables him buy into the popular Texas Rangers baseball team.

This alchemy remakes W. as a “success,” and paves the way for him to become governor of Texas and then president.  Evidence suggests that W. benefited from insider information when he sold his Harken stock, but an SEC inquiry while his father was president went nowhere.

Behind Harken is a fascinating story. Among the investors are the billionaire George Soros, assorted Saudis, figures tied to the Shah of Iran, the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the South African apartheid regime, a Swiss bank, a Little Rock-based investment house with intelligence ties, and the endowment of Harvard University. In fact, Harvard’s endowment fund risked tens of millions of dollars on this strange company; and this story leads to the secret life of one of its most powerful alumni, and to a large-scale gold-smuggling operation begun during the Pacific Campaign in World War II-- apparently designed to fund unauthorized US covert operations worldwide. 

Chapter 17 : Playing Hardball

George W. Bush’s resume for the first three decades of his adult life was defined by embarrassing public failures and private activities that were equally problematic. But careful repositioning as the “managing director” and front man for the Texas Rangers baseball team transformed him into an attractive candidate for political office. A look at the role of the Bushes and their friends in the ownership of sports enterprises-- not just baseball but also golf, tennis, horse racing, yachting and more-- shows that this is hardly the first time the family and friends have exerted influence through America’s pastimes. 

To assure a profit from the Rangers, Bush and his investor group relied on inside connections, favoritism,  and arm-twisting. The deal for a new stadium involved the government taking of private  land and increased taxes on local citizens, all of which contradicted positions that Bush will trumpet later. Bush’s eventual profits-- which set him up for life-- were subsidized not just by local taxpayers but by his influence-seeking partners as well.

Chapter 18 : Meet the Help

To ensure his early political success, Bush is surrounded by a team that blocks every attempt to dig deeply into his background and character.  His retinue embodied traits-- moral turpitude, viciousness and secretiveness-- that would later come to define his White House.

W.’s team guides him through win-win issues that are popular with Texas voters and big donors as well. He also does favors for major  backers that hurt the public but aid his own upward climb. These include curbs on class action lawsuits, which allow the weak and the poor to wrest justice from powerful economic interests. Bush also turned over management of the University of Texas’s vast financial resources to the investor who bought his shares in the Texas Rangers.

In a charm offensive, Bush adopts the tagline of  “compassionate conservative,” which state and national press readily embrace.  He assembles a crew of black and brown advisers-- some with sketchy backgrounds-- and presents himself as a  “uniter not a divider.” Bush’s handlers turn him into an instant “rancher” to scrub him of association with the Eastern elite that his father never overcame.  They also use falsified academic results from the Texas public schools to portray W. as an educational reformer.

Chapter 19 : The Conversion

George W. Bush never would have won the presidency without the support of the evangelical Christian Right. His well-publicized conversion as a born-again Christian served both to appeal to this bloc, and also to wipe the slate clean on the sins of his past.

Bush’s conversion story has never been questioned.  But Doug Wead, the political-religious consultant who taught the Bushes how to use the Christian Right to win, here provides a blow by blow. Poppy was slow to grasp the import, but W. got it instantly-- and was far more adaptable. The timing of key memos suggests that Bush’s conversion had at least an element of political calculation-- and probably a large one.

The moneyed circles of which the Bushes are part, including the Rockefellers and Dulleses, long understood how public involvement with religion conferred honor upon their enterprises. But none came close to George W. Bush in mastering the inflections that could win over the religious masses. Planted anecdotes established an inspiring back story that explained how a self-centered hedonist turned his life around.  These included a probably fanciful conversation on a beach with the evangelist Billy Graham, complete with echoes from the Gospels, and the deliberate seeding of an almost Scriptural account of his redemption from demon rum.
Wead recounts W.’s  single-minded focus on results. He asserts that W.-- in contrast to his father-- was the most decisive man he ever met. Wead also shares stories of W’s confiding how he learned to manipulate the press. According to Wead, the purported rift between father and son was deliberately exaggerated; W. was a confidante on both high-level campaign decisions and extremely sensitive covert matters.

The Bush camp planted spies in the campaigns of opponents and used political covert ops to destroy those opponents. Wead further reveals how the Bushes panicked when they learned he had taped candid conversations with W. The result was a standoff: the tapes were locked away in a safe to which there are only two keys-- one held by Wead, the other by George W. Bush himself. 

Chapter 20 : The Skeleton in W’s Closet

At a televised debate during George W. Bush’s Texas gubernatorial campaign, a local tv reporter asked how he had gotten into a coveted Air National Guard squadron while thousands of his contemporaries were turned away and had to go to Vietnam. The reporter was surprised by the furious reaction from Bush’s handlers. Their concern, it turned out, was less about how Bush had gotten into the Guard, than about how he had gotten out.

For W. to succeed politically, he had to contain  a devastating secret-- that he had walked away from his Vietnam-era military service two years before it was up.  Desertion would not just have been a political liability but a federal crime as well. Once Bush was elected governor, his team went to work cleaning up the paper trail. Records disappeared; other, more helpful documents somehow materialized. Witnesses were co-opted or silenced. Anonymous allegations would surface that Bush had rewarded the silence of a former Texas Lt. Governor who knew details of Bush’s military record with a multi-million dollar lobbying contract. When a National Guard consultant, Bill Burkett, came forward to claim he had seen evidence that Bush’s Guard records were being suppressed-- and that the Guard under Bush was corrupt-- he began to face harassment that would destroy his career and his health.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, W. agrees to cooperate on a campaign biography with Mickey Herskowitz, an experienced journalist, ghost writer and family friend.  Herskowitz will eventually be ousted by Bush’s handlers, who are uncomfortable with the author’s inclusion of potentially embarrassing remarks from Bush. But years later, the ghostwriter tells Baker what Bush told him: that he felt his accomplishments were embarrassingly limited, and that he had few ideas of what he would do as president. He actually admitted that he had not finished his military service, and claimed  that he had been “excused” from duty.  Bush also told Herskowitz that in his view a great leader never admits a mistake.

Chapter 21: Shock and…Oil ?

Why did George W. Bush invade Iraq? Bush’s ghostwriter Herskowitz sheds new light on the question. It was an idée fixe in the mind of presidential candidate Bush that if he were elected in 2000, he would invade Iraq and drive Saddam Hussein from power.

This was long before the alleged justifications in the wake of 9/11. According to Herskowitz, GOP advisers had long counseled W. that a successful president  must also be seen as a heroic Commander in Chief, which requires launching and winning a war.

Bush’s simplistic notion dovetailed with the more sophisticated objectives of neocons and oilmen. The claims of revulsion and outrage  at the atrocities of Saddam were less than honest. Little-known testimony by former American officials revealed that the US was working with Saddam Hussein as far back as 1959. Saddam cooperated with US covert efforts that year  to overthrow another Iraqi leader.

Saddam was not the only US friend to fall out of favor. The Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega had a longstanding relationship with George W. Bush’s father dating back to when the latter served as CIA director. George H.W. Bush turned on Noriega when he failed to collaborate in operations against the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime.

As for the so-called Coalition of the Willing that created a pretense of broad international support for the invasion of Iraq, there are several back stories. One is the pressure-- including surveillance-- applied to allies before they relented and joined the effort. Another, involving oil and intelligence, explains the unexpectedly close relationship between Republican  Bush and his chief war partner, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair of the more liberal Labour Party.

Chapter 22 : Deflection for Reelection
 
SUMMARY: This chapter details the campaign of propaganda and intimidation to support the Iraq invasion, destroy Bush’s opponents, and ensure his re-election.

DETAIL: When it becomes clear that the public has been sold a bill of goods on Iraq, Democratic candidates emerge to oppose Bush for re-election, and reporters start sniffing around his National Guard record. In response, the Bush forces move quickly. Their counter-campaign will involve subterfuge, disinformation, misdirection and the destruction of critics and opponents –the dark arts of the intelligence trade. Many reporters accept  misleading answers as truth. Dubious sources are produced, yet their credibility problems are not explored.

The Bush team soon takes counteroffensive to extreme lengths, and deflects public scrutiny from Bush to his critics. It is one of the most elaborate domestic covert operations ever conducted.

In the end, Bush’s opponent John Kerry is tarnished by a supposedly independent group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Bush’s most visible national media questioner, Dan Rather, is destroyed by embracing what are later characterized as fake documents, but no one asks where those documents came from or who was behind them. In the final stretch of the 2004 campaign, the media are too cowed to question. 

Chapter 23 : Domestic Disturbance

The Bush enterprise benefited from a wide and chronic gap between the public’s perception and reality. When people looked at the family, they typically saw a genial, largely rudderless Poppy, and a more determined, principled, and deeply religious W. 
 
Campaign themes stressed the younger Bush’s apparent moderation. The talking points were compassionate conservatism and an ability to work with adversaries; a patrician concern for the environment; a desire to shrink the federal government but only so as to empower people to control their own lives and destinies; an aversion to liberal-- and costly-- nation- building exercises abroad.  

But the reality was something else entirely: a taste for wars aimed at the acquisition of natural resources and the preservation of class prerogative, abetted by secrecy, intimidation, and the darkest arts of the intelligence establishment (both psychological and covert ops). W. differed from his father largely in terms of his bumptious, in-your-face aggression, and his failure to camouflage his moves.  

Instead of operating mostly in the shadows, as the elder Bush had done, W. and his team concentrated on blocking the flow of information about everything they did. Virtually their first order of business was to ensure that embarrassing secrets from the past remained under lock and key. There was an assault on open government laws, and a determination to reclassify documents already released. Data was slanted for political purposes, records were destroyed, elaborate chains of blame-shifting became commonplace.

While the administration sought to protect its own secrets, it wanted to know everything about everyone else. In the wake of 9/11, a million Americans were put  on a watch list; and the administration claimed practically unlimited authority to snoop on ordinary citizens. Color-coded terror alerts were sounded to keep Americans on edge. The vigilance was suspended, however, when it came to chemical plants and port facilities, where the administration found the inconvenience to corporate owners unduly costly or unnecessary.  

While talking about making government smaller, Bush and his team rerouted public dollars to their own friends and preferred projects. Most of the cuts came in benefits to the most vulnerable. A host of cronies were hired to regulate their old bosses in industry. W. followed the example of his father and took care of retainers who had kept his secrets.  He made his longtime aide Alberto Gonzales the Attorney General and tried to get his personal lawyer Harriet Miers onto the Supreme Court.
 
The epitome of all this was Bush’s Federal Emergency Management Agency.  FEMA’s failures during Hurricane Katrina under an inexperienced and vain director are well known.  Less known are the checkered pasts of the small-time GOP operatives whom W. appointed to head this crucial agency-- mainly on the basis of their loyalty to himself.
 
Chapter 24 : Conclusion
 
Throughout this book, Baker reveals how so many of our basic assumptions about recent American history are wrong. This is no accident. Our perceptions and our opinions are the result of the information we receive. Nobody understood that better than the Bushes and their team. And nobody was better at controlling and influencing that information flow.
 
Falsehood becomes “conventional wisdom” by sheer repetition, and the media through its passivity becomes an accomplice. From this springs a paradox: it is those things we take most for granted about which we may be most deceived. 
 
The growing gap between perception and reality cries out for energetic investigation, independent analysis, and perhaps most of all, an acute alertness to the techniques of the intelligence game and their role in our politics and daily dialogue. This suggests what may be the number-one unreported political story of our era: how American democracy itself has become a casualty of the psychological-warfare operations developed decades ago, purportedly for use against an enemy that no longer exists, and now turned, with dire consequences, on the American people and our system of government.

UPDATE: Win A Free Copy

I'm going to sleep. When I wake up tomorrow, I'll look at all the contributions that come in on this brand new Blue America page and I'll put all the donors' names in a hat-- regardless of the amount-- and pick one to get a brand new copy of the book.