From Family of Secrets
By Russ Baker

In our haste to say goodbye to all things Bush, we could endanger precisely the kind of substantive change President Obama would like to bring about. Instead of averting our eyes from the past, we need to confront the powerful forces that created the disastrous Bush II administration in the first place. That means coming to grips with what the great historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin called our “hidden history,” not just of the last eight years but of the last half century and more.

Like most people, I took the failings of George W. Bush at face value: an arrogant and lazy man who was an easy mark for aides who told him what he wanted to believe. Then I spent five years researching my new book, Family of Secrets, and came to see that Bush II represented something that goes much deeper. This back story is getting almost no attention. Yet it will continue to affect our country and our lives long after Mr. Bush fades into a bad memory.

I began with the accepted notion, much promoted by the Bush camp, that George W. Bush was independent of, and often in disagreement with, his father. It turns out that exactly the opposite is true. W. may have been bumptious where his father was discreet. But in fact the acorn did not fall far from the tree. 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 a very narrow segment of America’s wealthiest interests and families. Typically these were clustered around anti-New Deal investment banking circles, and the non-military intelligence service that emerged after World War II. The Bushes in fact were involved in some of that service’s most secretive operations that still have not been acknowledged. The history of these covert operations is the prologue for what has been playing out since the millennium.

Through declassified documents and interviews, I unearthed evidence that George W. Bush’s father, the 41st president, had been working for the intelligence services no less than two decades before he was named CIA director in 1976. Time and again we see Bush 41 and his allies participating in clandestine operations that pressured presidents to do the bidding of oil (and other resource extraction) interests, military contractors and financiers. Whenever a president like John F. Kennedy showed independence or sought reforms that threatened these entrenched interests, this group helped to neutralize them one way 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, twenty-three years before Gerald Ford’s surprise announcement that he was selecting the supposed intelligence “virgin” George H.W. Bush to head the CIA, Bush was really getting his feet wet. His father, the investment banker Prescott Bush, had just taken a senate seat from Connecticut; and his father’s close friend Allen Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer and intelligence officer, had just become director of the CIA. Bush prepared to launch an oil exploration company called Zapata Offshore, in coordination with a staff CIA officer, Thomas J. Devine, who purportedly “resigned” to go into the oil business with young George.

Bush then began to travel extensively around the world. His itineraries had little apparent relationship to his modest and largely unprofitable business, but did neatly fit the patterns of intelligence work. When his company 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.

After that invasion ended in disaster, John F. Kennedy fired Dulles from the CIA, an act angrily denounced in private correspondence by Prescott Bush. It was again purportedly oil business that brought George H.W. Bush to Dallas on the morning of the Kennedy assassination—though he would later claim that he could not recall where he was at that historic moment. Bush left the city and traveled to nearby Tyler, from where, 15 minutes before Kennedy was declared dead, Bush called the FBI with a false tip about a possible assassin—pointedly emphasizing that he was calling from outside Dallas. Meanwhile, it was an old friend of Bush’s, a White Russian émigré with intelligence connections, who had shepherded Lee Harvey Oswald upon his return to America in the year preceding the assassination. In the wake of that tragedy, of course, Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency—and the oilmen and the intelligence-military establishment once again had a friend in the White House.

The pattern continued. Seeking to understand some unstated obligation to the Bush family on the part of Richard Nixon, who repeatedly promoted an inexperienced George H.W. Bush to positions for which he was ill-qualified, I learned of some secret history. The selection of Nixon as a congressional candidate in 1946 appears to have been the doing of a small group of Wall Street financiers clustered around Prescott Bush.

Despite this, when Nixon finally achieved the presidency 22 years later, the Californian became stubbornly resistant to pressure from the very power centers that had helped his ascent. He turned a deaf ear to the demands of Wall Street and 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. Though no great liberal, he also initiated a range of reforms encompassing labor, environment and other policy areas. These acts estranged Nixon from his former sponsors.

New evidence suggests that Bush Senior and his associates in the intelligence services, far from being the Nixon loyalists 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 burglary—led by former CIA officers.

Bush Senior, whose tenure as Republican national chairman coincided with the deluge of Watergate revelations that inflicted mortal political damage on Nixon, was closely allied with a surprising number of White House officials who had covert ties to the intelligence service. Bush Senior would characteristically claim to be “out of the loop” during this period—as he would later pretend to be during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan era, though we know that as vice president he was at the center of that and other abuses of power.

The pressure from these interests never let up after Nixon was forced to resign. His successor, Gerald Ford, brought in young staffers named Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the two participated in the so-called Halloween massacre, in which the Ford administration veered sharply to the right on foreign policy. This in turn paved the way for the appointment of Bush Senior as CIA director. At just this time, Congress was launching the deepest investigation ever of intelligence abuses, including the toppling or assassinations of elected officials abroad, and public voices were clamoring to reopen official inquiries into whether John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had all truly been the victims of gunmen operating solely on their own initiative.

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, he ousted Bush from the CIA helm and sought to bring the intelligence juggernaut under control. He soon found himself deeply compromised by complex financial shenanigans orchestrated by figures from the same intelligence circles. The Iran hostage crisis, which finished off Carter’s presidency, was exacerbated by dissident CIA elements tied to Bush Senior. When Carter ran for a second term, he was 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, did not challenge either the intelligence or military establishment in any significant way.

The forces that dogged and ultimately dominated these past presidents have not abated. Indeed, the presidency of George W. Bush brought into the open—through W.’s reckless desire to “show the old man how it should be done”—the same strategic interests that this group has pursued covertly for many decades.

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 of their allies in finance and industry from government oversight—these and more emerged from the old dreams and methods of this insular group, as it brought the culture of covert and psychological operations into the political arena.

The first rule of successful combat is, Know your enemy. As our new president moves to enact his promised reforms, the same forces that gave us George W. Bush are most certainly mobilizing to resist any changes that threaten their hold on the hidden levers of power. If Obama is to succeed in remaking our country, we must begin to take seriously, and speak openly, about the true nature of the interests 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.

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Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter with a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com. Information on his new book, Family of Secrets: the Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America, may be found at www.familyofsecrets.com .