r***@theoven.net
2009-01-22 19:18:39 UTC
Obama Should Worry About the Bush Family Tentacles Undermining His
Plans
By Russ Baker
Bush may be gone, but his influence -- and the forces that put him in
office -- aren't.
As George W. Bush leaves office and Barack Obama takes over, we are in
danger of missing the opportunity for change our new president has
promised -- unless we come to grips with what the great historian and
Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin called our "hidden history," not
just of the past eight years but of the past half-century and more.
President Obama will face a staggering array of challenges, most, if
not all, of which stem from the policies of Bush. But efforts at
reform will fall short if we fail to probe and confront the powerful
forces that wanted this disastrous administration in the White House
in the first place -- and that remain ready and able to maintain their
influence behind the scenes today.
Like most people, I took the failings of George W. Bush at face value:
an inattentive, poorly prepared man full of hubris, who committed
colossal blunders as a result. Then I spent five years researching my
new book, Family of Secrets and came to see that the origins go much
deeper. This backstory is getting almost no attention in the
talking-heads debate over the Bush legacy. Yet it will continue to
play, affecting our country and our lives, long after Bush leaves
office.
A more profound explanation for the rise of George W. Bush came as I
studied the concerted effort to convince the public that he was
independent of, and often in disagreement with, his father. The reason
for this, it turned out, was that exactly the opposite was true. W.
may have been bumptious where his father was discreet, but in fact the
son hewed closely to a playbook that guided his father and even his
grandfather.
Over much of the last century, the Bushes have been serving the aims
of a very narrow segment from within America's wealthiest interests
and families -- typically through involvement in the most anti-New
Deal investment banking circles, in the creation of a civilian
intelligence service after World War II, and in some of that service's
most secretive and still-unacknowledged operations.
Through declassified documents and interviews, I unearthed evidence
that George W. Bush's father, the 41st president of the United States,
had been working for the intelligence services no less than two
decades before he was named CIA director in 1976. Time and again, Bush
41 and his allies have participated in clandestine operations to force
presidents to do the bidding of oil and other resource-extraction
interests, military contractors and financiers. Whenever a president
showed independence or sought reforms that threatened entrenched
interests, this group helped to ensure that he was politically
attacked and neutralized, or even removed from office, through one
means or another.
We are not dealing here with what are commonly dismissed as
"conspiracy theories." We are dealing with a reality that is much
more subtle, layered and pervasive -- a matrix of power in which crude
conspiracies are rarely necessary and in which the execution or
subsequent cover-up of anti-democratic acts become practically a norm.
In 1953, 23 years before he became CIA director as a supposed
neophyte, George H.W. Bush began preparing to launch an
oil-exploration company called Zapata Offshore. His father, investment
banker Prescott Bush, had just taken a Senate seat from Connecticut;
and his father's close friend Allen Dulles had just taken over the
CIA. A staff CIA officer, Thomas J. Devine, purportedly "resigned" to
go into the oil business with young George.
Bush then began to travel around the world. His itineraries had little
apparent relationship to his limited and perennially unprofitable
business enterprises. But they do make sense if the object was
intelligence work. When his company at last put a few oil rigs in
place, they ended up in highly sensitive spots, such as just off
Castro's Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion.
As part of his travels, Bush senior even appeared in Dallas on the
morning of the Kennedy assassination, although he would famously claim
that he could not recall where he was at that historic moment. After
leaving the city, he called the FBI with a false tip about a possible
assassin, pointedly emphasizing that he was calling from outside
Dallas. It is also intriguing to learn that an old friend of Bush's, a
White Russian émigré with intelligence connections, shepherded Lee
Harvey Oswald upon his return to America in the year preceding the
assassination. In any event, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy, the
oilmen and the intelligence-military establishment once again had a
friend in the White House.
The pattern continued. New evidence suggests that Bush senior and his
associates in the intelligence services, far from being the loyalists
to Richard Nixon they claimed to be, had turned on the 35th president
early in his administration, unceasingly working to weaken and
eventually force him out. These efforts culminated in what appears to
have been a deliberately botched Watergate office burglary -- led by
former CIA officers.
Ironically, Nixon's career had been launched with the quiet backing of
Wall Street finance figures upset with the man Nixon would defeat, a
leading congressional supporter of banking reform, and Prescott Bush
himself had played a key role. Yet, when Nixon finally achieved the
presidency, he became surprisingly resistant to pressure from the very
power centers that had helped him get to the top. He turned a deaf ear
to the demands of the oil industry, battled with the CIA and cut the
Pentagon out of the loop as he (and his aide Henry Kissinger)
negotiated secretly with Moscow and Beijing.
These acts estranged Nixon from those who felt he had betrayed his
sponsors -- men who had the means to do him in. Bush senior, it turns
out, was closely allied with the surprising number of White House
officials with covert ties to the intelligence service that surrounded
Nixon. Through it all, Bush senior would routinely claim to be "out of
the loop," as he would later pretend during the Iran-Contra scandal of
the Reagan era, although we know that as vice president he was at the
center of that and other abuses of power.
None of this let up after Nixon was forced to resign. His pliant
successor, Gerald Ford, brought in young staffers named Richard Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld, and the two participated in the so-called
Halloween massacre, which saw the administration veer in a far-right
direction on foreign policy, a development that paved the way for the
appointment of Bush senior as CIA director. This happened just as
Congress was launched into the deepest investigation ever of
intelligence abuses, and public voices were clamoring to reopen
official inquiries into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his
brother, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Then came Jimmy Carter, whose plans to reform the CIA were an echo of
JFK's intent to scatter the CIA to the winds after the ruinous Bay of
Pigs invasion. When Carter defeated Ford, ousted Bush from the CIA
helm and sought to bring the intelligence juggernaut under control, he
ended up deeply compromised by complex financial shenanigans
orchestrated by figures from the same intelligence circles -- and
undermined by the crisis with Iran, exacerbated by covert dissident
CIA elements tied to Bush. Carter was a one-term president, defeated
by a ticket with none other than George H.W. Bush, backed by a phalanx
of CIA officers, as vice president. And then Bush senior became
president himself.
Bill Clinton apparently grasped the pattern. He cultivated a friendly
relationship with the elder Bush and instituted virtually no
significant reforms in, or issued challenges to, either the
intelligence or military establishments.
All this is relevant today because the furtive forces and pressures
that haunted, and ultimately dominated, these past presidents have not
abated.
Indeed, what the presidency of George W. Bush truly represented was
the unfettered, most reckless manifestation of the objectives this
group has pursued for many decades. In Bush 43's trademark pattern of
showing the old man how it's done, the son was bringing virtually into
the open the kinds of things his father preferred pursued sub-rosa.
But behind the different façade it was the same game all over again.
The dirty tricks of Karl Rove, who got his first job under Bush 41 at
the Republican Party during Watergate; the use of the Supreme Court to
force an election their way; an early move to suppress the records of
prior presidencies; the maniacal secrecy of Vice President Cheney; the
false rationale used to justify the seizure of Iraqi oil reserves
through invasion; the clampdown on dissent and the unauthorized
domestic eavesdropping, the efforts to smear independent voices like
Joseph Wilson (the husband of CIA officer Valerie Plame) and newsman
Dan Rather; and last and perhaps most significant, the unleashing from
government oversight of their friends and allies in finance and
industry -- these and more emerged from the old dreams and methods of
this anti-democratic culture.
Now, as a new president enters the White House promising reform, how
much will he be able to achieve if his reforms step on the same big
toes? We must begin to take seriously, and speak openly about, the
true nature of the forces behind the Bush family enterprise. If we do
not, we will find ourselves, several years from now, shaking our heads
at new disaster, still unable to comprehend what has happened -- and
why.
Plans
By Russ Baker
Bush may be gone, but his influence -- and the forces that put him in
office -- aren't.
As George W. Bush leaves office and Barack Obama takes over, we are in
danger of missing the opportunity for change our new president has
promised -- unless we come to grips with what the great historian and
Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin called our "hidden history," not
just of the past eight years but of the past half-century and more.
President Obama will face a staggering array of challenges, most, if
not all, of which stem from the policies of Bush. But efforts at
reform will fall short if we fail to probe and confront the powerful
forces that wanted this disastrous administration in the White House
in the first place -- and that remain ready and able to maintain their
influence behind the scenes today.
Like most people, I took the failings of George W. Bush at face value:
an inattentive, poorly prepared man full of hubris, who committed
colossal blunders as a result. Then I spent five years researching my
new book, Family of Secrets and came to see that the origins go much
deeper. This backstory is getting almost no attention in the
talking-heads debate over the Bush legacy. Yet it will continue to
play, affecting our country and our lives, long after Bush leaves
office.
A more profound explanation for the rise of George W. Bush came as I
studied the concerted effort to convince the public that he was
independent of, and often in disagreement with, his father. The reason
for this, it turned out, was that exactly the opposite was true. W.
may have been bumptious where his father was discreet, but in fact the
son hewed closely to a playbook that guided his father and even his
grandfather.
Over much of the last century, the Bushes have been serving the aims
of a very narrow segment from within America's wealthiest interests
and families -- typically through involvement in the most anti-New
Deal investment banking circles, in the creation of a civilian
intelligence service after World War II, and in some of that service's
most secretive and still-unacknowledged operations.
Through declassified documents and interviews, I unearthed evidence
that George W. Bush's father, the 41st president of the United States,
had been working for the intelligence services no less than two
decades before he was named CIA director in 1976. Time and again, Bush
41 and his allies have participated in clandestine operations to force
presidents to do the bidding of oil and other resource-extraction
interests, military contractors and financiers. Whenever a president
showed independence or sought reforms that threatened entrenched
interests, this group helped to ensure that he was politically
attacked and neutralized, or even removed from office, through one
means or another.
We are not dealing here with what are commonly dismissed as
"conspiracy theories." We are dealing with a reality that is much
more subtle, layered and pervasive -- a matrix of power in which crude
conspiracies are rarely necessary and in which the execution or
subsequent cover-up of anti-democratic acts become practically a norm.
In 1953, 23 years before he became CIA director as a supposed
neophyte, George H.W. Bush began preparing to launch an
oil-exploration company called Zapata Offshore. His father, investment
banker Prescott Bush, had just taken a Senate seat from Connecticut;
and his father's close friend Allen Dulles had just taken over the
CIA. A staff CIA officer, Thomas J. Devine, purportedly "resigned" to
go into the oil business with young George.
Bush then began to travel around the world. His itineraries had little
apparent relationship to his limited and perennially unprofitable
business enterprises. But they do make sense if the object was
intelligence work. When his company at last put a few oil rigs in
place, they ended up in highly sensitive spots, such as just off
Castro's Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion.
As part of his travels, Bush senior even appeared in Dallas on the
morning of the Kennedy assassination, although he would famously claim
that he could not recall where he was at that historic moment. After
leaving the city, he called the FBI with a false tip about a possible
assassin, pointedly emphasizing that he was calling from outside
Dallas. It is also intriguing to learn that an old friend of Bush's, a
White Russian émigré with intelligence connections, shepherded Lee
Harvey Oswald upon his return to America in the year preceding the
assassination. In any event, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy, the
oilmen and the intelligence-military establishment once again had a
friend in the White House.
The pattern continued. New evidence suggests that Bush senior and his
associates in the intelligence services, far from being the loyalists
to Richard Nixon they claimed to be, had turned on the 35th president
early in his administration, unceasingly working to weaken and
eventually force him out. These efforts culminated in what appears to
have been a deliberately botched Watergate office burglary -- led by
former CIA officers.
Ironically, Nixon's career had been launched with the quiet backing of
Wall Street finance figures upset with the man Nixon would defeat, a
leading congressional supporter of banking reform, and Prescott Bush
himself had played a key role. Yet, when Nixon finally achieved the
presidency, he became surprisingly resistant to pressure from the very
power centers that had helped him get to the top. He turned a deaf ear
to the demands of the oil industry, battled with the CIA and cut the
Pentagon out of the loop as he (and his aide Henry Kissinger)
negotiated secretly with Moscow and Beijing.
These acts estranged Nixon from those who felt he had betrayed his
sponsors -- men who had the means to do him in. Bush senior, it turns
out, was closely allied with the surprising number of White House
officials with covert ties to the intelligence service that surrounded
Nixon. Through it all, Bush senior would routinely claim to be "out of
the loop," as he would later pretend during the Iran-Contra scandal of
the Reagan era, although we know that as vice president he was at the
center of that and other abuses of power.
None of this let up after Nixon was forced to resign. His pliant
successor, Gerald Ford, brought in young staffers named Richard Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld, and the two participated in the so-called
Halloween massacre, which saw the administration veer in a far-right
direction on foreign policy, a development that paved the way for the
appointment of Bush senior as CIA director. This happened just as
Congress was launched into the deepest investigation ever of
intelligence abuses, and public voices were clamoring to reopen
official inquiries into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his
brother, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Then came Jimmy Carter, whose plans to reform the CIA were an echo of
JFK's intent to scatter the CIA to the winds after the ruinous Bay of
Pigs invasion. When Carter defeated Ford, ousted Bush from the CIA
helm and sought to bring the intelligence juggernaut under control, he
ended up deeply compromised by complex financial shenanigans
orchestrated by figures from the same intelligence circles -- and
undermined by the crisis with Iran, exacerbated by covert dissident
CIA elements tied to Bush. Carter was a one-term president, defeated
by a ticket with none other than George H.W. Bush, backed by a phalanx
of CIA officers, as vice president. And then Bush senior became
president himself.
Bill Clinton apparently grasped the pattern. He cultivated a friendly
relationship with the elder Bush and instituted virtually no
significant reforms in, or issued challenges to, either the
intelligence or military establishments.
All this is relevant today because the furtive forces and pressures
that haunted, and ultimately dominated, these past presidents have not
abated.
Indeed, what the presidency of George W. Bush truly represented was
the unfettered, most reckless manifestation of the objectives this
group has pursued for many decades. In Bush 43's trademark pattern of
showing the old man how it's done, the son was bringing virtually into
the open the kinds of things his father preferred pursued sub-rosa.
But behind the different façade it was the same game all over again.
The dirty tricks of Karl Rove, who got his first job under Bush 41 at
the Republican Party during Watergate; the use of the Supreme Court to
force an election their way; an early move to suppress the records of
prior presidencies; the maniacal secrecy of Vice President Cheney; the
false rationale used to justify the seizure of Iraqi oil reserves
through invasion; the clampdown on dissent and the unauthorized
domestic eavesdropping, the efforts to smear independent voices like
Joseph Wilson (the husband of CIA officer Valerie Plame) and newsman
Dan Rather; and last and perhaps most significant, the unleashing from
government oversight of their friends and allies in finance and
industry -- these and more emerged from the old dreams and methods of
this anti-democratic culture.
Now, as a new president enters the White House promising reform, how
much will he be able to achieve if his reforms step on the same big
toes? We must begin to take seriously, and speak openly about, the
true nature of the forces behind the Bush family enterprise. If we do
not, we will find ourselves, several years from now, shaking our heads
at new disaster, still unable to comprehend what has happened -- and
why.
