Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years Read online

  FAMILY OF SECRETS

  The Bush Dynasty,

  America’s Invisible Government,

  and the Hidden History of the

  Last Fifty Years

  RUSS BAKER

  Contents

  Foreword by James Moore

  1. How Did Bush Happen?

  2. Poppy’s Secret

  3. Viva Zapata

  4. Where Was Poppy?

  5. Oswald’s Friend

  6. The Hit

  7. After Camelot

  8. Wings for W.

  9. The Nixonian Bushes

  10. Downing Nixon,

  Part I: The Setup

  11. Downing Nixon,

  Part II: The Execution

  12. In from the Cold

  13. Poppy’s Proxy and the Saudis

  14. Poppy’s Web

  15. The Handoff

  16. The Quacking Duck

  17. Playing Hardball

  18. Meet the Help

  19. The Conversion

  20. The Skeleton in W.’s Closet

  21. Shock and . . . Oil?

  22. Deflection for Reelection

  23. Domestic Disturbance

  24. Conclusion

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Foreword

  When a governor or any state official seeks elective national office, his (or her) reputation and what the country knows about the candidate’s background is initially determined by the work of local and regional media. Generally, those journalists do a competent job of reporting on the prospect’s record. In the case of Governor George W. Bush, Texas reporters had written numerous stories about his failed businesses in the oil patch, the dubious land grab and questionable funding behind a new stadium for Bush’s baseball team, the Texas Rangers, and his various political contradictions and hypocrisies while serving in Austin.

  I was one of those Texas journalists. I spent about a decade trying to find accurate information on Bush’s record in the Texas National Guard. My curiosity had been prompted by his failure to adequately answer a question I had asked him as a panelist in a televised debate with Ann Richards during the 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Eventually I published three books on Bush and his political consigliere, Karl Rove. During Bush’s presidency, many other volumes, written by insiders and others, would add greatly to the picture of the man’s character and policies.

  So when Russ Baker first approached me about the book he was planning to write, I admit to being a bit dismissive. W. was concluding his second term, and given the number of capable authors who had scrutinized the president, there seemed little new that might be learned about this famous son of a former president or his family. Every source seemed to have been run to the ground already by his predecessors and there appeared to be no documents left undiscovered. In fact, it was hard not to feel a bit offended by Baker’s conviction that I and other reporters might have missed important material or witnesses. A new set of eyes can often recast a story with a fresh perspective, but additional information seemed difficult, if not impossible, to acquire from the collegial Texas political community. Even Texas Democrats had boarded the Bush train, and the extended circle of family and friends were famous for an unwavering loyalty that was unlikely to surrender any news.

  Baker, though, was undaunted; he was convinced the full story was untold. He went after the National Guard puzzle with a vigor that I had long since abandoned because I was convinced the Bush team had scrubbed the files in a manner that left little hope for revelation. Baker, however, chased down new witnesses; he dug deeper into the details of Bush’s friends in the “champagne unit” and uncovered close relationships to Saudi financiers that appeared to turn the unlikely into the possible for Bush and his broad protectorate. He found inexplicable money trails in the Permian Basin oil patch of West Texas and followed them wherever they led, which was not too distant from the bin Laden family and various Saudi princes. Baker does a much more comprehensive job of documenting Bush’s irresponsible behavior in his youth than did every journalist in Texas that had heard stories of pregnant girlfriends, secret abortions, drunk driving, and walking away from an officer’s commission in the Texas Air National Guard.

  While Family of Secrets records how Bush’s lack of youthful accountability informed the President’s faulty behavior as a leader, it goes far beyond just digging up lost nuggets of information. Baker turns the same unflinching scrutiny on W.’s father, the first President Bush, and the evidence that there was also an untold backstory to Bush Senior’s ascension. Through witnesses, documents, and analysis, Russ Baker views George H.W. Bush’s experiences through an entirely different historical lens, and the data are too compelling to be ignored. In fact, they are quite convincing that we, collectively, missed an entire dimension of the man’s life. In the tangle of dark and mysterious relationships that comprise the Bush power structure, Baker has gleaned new meaning in the connections. Baker brings to the table a mass of evidence that the first Bush president was secretly involved in the CIA long before he became the agency’s director, and appears to have spent decades developing lucrative financial and political relationships in the United States and abroad, which were foundational to almost every public achievement of the Bush family.

  Family of Secrets probes not only the little-known, but the utterly inexplicable. Why, in the hours following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, did George H. W. Bush call investigators to finger a possible suspect who, Baker’s research shows, turns out to have been an innocuous fellow actually serving as a minor functionary at the Houston Republican Party offices run by the future president himself? Bush had claimed for years to not be able to recall where he was the day Kennedy was gunned down, but Baker has the record of H. W. Bush’s whereabouts and anyone who reads his reconstruction of them will want an accounting less facile than “I can’t remember.” There is no conspiracy theory here, simply information that has been corroborated and never before reported, and it cries out for an explanation.

  As damning as Baker’s work is for the Bush family, it is also revelatory regarding our nation’s government. The disturbing reality revealed in fine detail here is that there are unseen forces at work on every presidency, and their interests are rarely, if ever, the same as those of the electorate. Defense contractors, multi-national energy corporations, pharmaceutical giants, Wall Street princes— indeed virtually all businesses that can afford to hire a lobbyist—are constantly engaged in trying to shape a policy that improves their bottom lines and gets the president to over-value their perspectives.

  Evidence that their power has not waned is manifest in many of the Bush policies that remain unchanged in the administration of President Barack Obama. The new president has continued to funnel money into the bailout of megalithic financial services firms even as their former executives become members of his cabinet and guide his policies. The Obama White House is also investing American taxpayer funds in auto manufacturing firms that the market appears to have already decided no longer have a viable product. Warrantless surveillance, which he condemned on the campaign trail, lingers and risks infecting the integrity of every other promise made by the current president. If you wonder why the “Change” president has so far made relatively few substantive structural changes, Family of Secrets suggests an answer.

  Russ Baker’s masterwork frightens, not just because of what it documents about th
e Bush family, but because it also demonstrates the extent to which crude and simple tactics enable corporate and political leviathans to affect the course of American history. In a different frame of reference, one which Baker builds through relentless investigation, we come to a new critical analysis about our country and its leadership. Baker’s case here is so convincing that it tends to make previous versions of history and journalism appear naïve, and as difficult as that makes his challenge of proving that we have missed the true story, he writes and reports with the confidence of a man who has seen the dark lands beyond the mountains.

  History is not what we know; it is what has truly happened. Often, the reality of events is hard to process because it shakes our system of beliefs. A crazy, lone gunman is a much more comforting notion in our democracy than a vast apparatus that can bring down presidents. Give us a simple explanation that easily encapsulates the horrible and then we can retain forever all that we have held to be true. If there was any genius in the Bush administration, it was the understanding that Americans did not want to confront complexities and had a great need of “bad guys” to blame for what had gone wrong. They gave us the black and white images that assuaged our lazy intellects and reinforced our comforting misconceptions about the way our country and the wider world conducts its business. Family of Secrets will force every reader to confront conventional wisdom about our democracy and our presidency. This book is a significant contribution to our national discourse and is the type of journalism that is essential if a free republic is to be sustained.

  A hundred years from now historians will be reading this book to understand what happened in America in the first part of the twenty-first century. The rest of us need to read Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets today and make certain we do not shirk from the important task of shining lights into the dark corners of our democracy.

  James Moore

  Austin, Texas

  July 7, 2009

  CHAPTER 1

  How Did Bush Happen?

  The real truth of the matter is, as you and I

  know, that a financial element in the larger

  centers has owned the Government ever since

  the days of Andrew Jackson.

  —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT TO COLONEL

  EDWARD HOUSE, NOVEMBER 21, 1933

  History is not history unless it is the truth.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  THIS IS THE TRUE STORY OF A FAMILY we thought we knew—and a country we have barely begun to comprehend.

  George Bush, father and son, are vastly more complicated, and their doings are vastly more troubling, than the conventional wisdom would have it. This book reveals the story behind their story, documenting the secrets that the House of Bush has long sought to obscure.

  These revelations about the Bushes lead in turn to an even more disturbing truth about the country itself. It’s not just that such a clan could occupy the presidency or vice presidency for twenty of the past twenty-eight years and remain essentially unknown. It’s that the methods of stealth and manipulation that powered their rise reflect a deeper ill: the American public’s increasingly tenuous hold upon the levers of its own democracy.

  As HIS SECOND term came to a close, George W. Bush’s approval ratings reached new lows. The prospect that Bush might go down in history as the worst president in a century, and quite possibly the worst ever, became a topic of grim speculation, even among those who had once voted for him. W. had become the lamest of lame ducks. Bush’s own father, the forty-first president of the United States—along with his influential friends—watched in silent dismay.

  The litany of Bush disasters was as dismally familiar as the brash one-liners that accompanied them: the failed pursuit of Osama bin Laden (“Wanted: Dead or Alive”); the bungled federal response to Katrina (“Heck-uva job, Brownie”); the mishandled occupation of Iraq (“Mission Accomplished”); the collapsed housing bubble that sent the economy sliding toward recession and millions of Americans into foreclosure (“We’re creating an own ership society”).

  No wonder that by George W. Bush’s final year in office, 81 percent of Americans told pollsters they believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. And it was becoming clearer to many that this wrongness was a matter not just of flawed policy decisions, but more fundamentally, of W.’s personal limitations. Which raised an obvious question—so obvious that just about everyone passed it by: How did Bush happen? Why was this particular man out of all possible aspirants encouraged and even propelled to the top?

  During his meteoric career, George W. Bush has been treated as a singular if highly controversial man, an island unto himself. Many books—from the favorable Misunderestimated to the critical The Bush Tragedy—have sought to unpack, dissect, and psychoanalyze the forty-third president. Most brought some new insight, but none of the portraits seemed to fully capture the essence of the man. And as the end of his presidency neared, there was an understandable rush to move on. We had seen what happened; we were mostly appalled or, in fewer cases, ambivalent or, in fewer still, supportive. But the consensus seemed to be that whatever damage W. had wrought, his presidency was at worst some kind of aberration, a glitch in the system that could and would be patched over by his successors, who would return Washington to some semblance of representative democracy. The George W. Bush chapter would soon recede into history.

  From the beginning of his first term I had doubts. There were signs of something more consequential and pervasive—well beyond the missteps, overreaching, and palace intrigues one finds in all presidential administrations. The fanatical secrecy, the proclivity for police state tactics and contempt for democratic safeguards, the blatant determination to advance the interests of those who already had so much, the efforts to politicize government services from top to bottom—these were evidence of a mind-set rarely seen in American politics. 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.

  In 2004, as George W. Bush headed toward reelection, I began the research that would lead to this book. I resolved to grapple with questions that went beyond the sound bites of the twenty-four-hour news cycle: What did the ascendancy of this frighteningly inadequate man signify? Could anything be learned from the George W. Bush phenomenon that would help us understand how we Americans choose our leaders and chart our collective course?

  Certain things were already apparent. The Iraq War was not, and never had been, about an imminent threat to the safety of America and its allies; even Republicans like former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan were publicly acknowledging that it was mostly about oil. George W. Bush, who had run as a moderate “uniter,” had in fact done everything in his power to exacerbate the divisions in our society for political gain. As a direct result of his administration’s policies, the distribution of wealth in America had been further skewed toward the wealthiest fraction of Americans at the very top. An administration headed by a Republican who preached limited government with limited powers was both shrouded in secrecy and aggressively intrusive in the name of national security.

  All this was generally attributed to the actions of one man, aided and abetted by a small coterie of loyal associates. Some Bush critics talked about a larger network of backers who had nurtured Bush and were benefiting from his actions. But these allusions were general and vague, and supporting facts were few. Few of the critiques succeeded in putting the Bush phenomenon in a larger context that would help people understand what forces in America had helped to bring about this state of affairs.

  Seeking answers, I crisscrossed the United States, speaking with all kinds of people—Washington insiders and Texas muckrakers, old friends of Bush and dedicated foes, tycoons and typists. I interviewed scores of people familiar with the Bush family, many of whom had never spoken publ
icly (or in such detail) before. I read everything I could get my hands on, from popular histories to arcane treatises and self-published memoirs, along with obscure and moldering documents of every description. Old drilling records, campaign finance filings, and little-read oral history transcripts became my constant companions.

  My Bush library grew to approximately five hundred books, which occupied an entire wall in my New York apartment. I reexamined the Bushes from all angles: their history, family dynamics, business dealings, the social world they inhabit, and the networks of associates, employees, and funders who were instrumental in their rise. I worked from the bottom up and the outside in—questioning neighbors and factotums, ex-girlfriends and exemployees, and hundreds of ordinary people whose personal experiences and observations came to provide an entirely new view of this purportedly overexposed dynasty.

  The more I learned, the broader my questions grew. And as my research deepened, disturbing patterns coalesced.