The Story of the Bush Crime Family
Former President George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush.
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin
With this issue
of the New Federalist, Vol. V, No. 39, we begin to serialize the book,
"George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography," by Webster Griffin Tarpley and
Anton Chaitkin. This book will soon be published by "Executive Intelligence
Review". At the heart of any effort at biography is the attempt to discover
the essence of the subject as a human personality. The essential character
of the subject is what the biographer must strive to capture, since this
is the indispensable ingredient that will provide coherence to the entire
story whose unity must be provided by the course of a single human life.
During the preparation of the present work, there was one historical moment
which more than any other delineated the character of George Bush. The
scene was the Nixon White House during the final days of the Watergate
debacle. White House officials, including George Bush, had spent the morning
of that Monday, August 5, 1974 absorbing the impact of Nixon's notorious
"smoking gun" tape, the recorded conversation between Nixon and his chief
of staff, H.R. Haldemann, shortly after the original Watergate break-in,
which could now no longer be withheld from the public. In that exchange
of June 23, 1972, Nixon ordered that the CIA stop the FBI from further
investigating how various sums of money found their way from Texas and
Minnesota via Mexico City to the coffers of the Committee to Re-Elect the
President (CREEP) and thence into the pockets of the "Plumbers" arrested
in the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building. These revelations
were widely interpreted as establishing a "prima facie" case of obstruction
of justice against Nixon. That was fine with George, who sincerely wanted
his patron and benefactor Nixon to resign. George's great concern was that
the smoking gun tape called attention to a money-laundering mechanism which
he, together with Bill Liedtke of Pennzoil, and Robert Mosbacher, had helped
to set up at Nixon's request. When Nixon, in the "smoking gun" tape, talked
about "the Texans" and "some Texas people," Bush, Liedtke, and Mosbacher
were among the most prominent of those referred to. The threat to George's
political ambitions was great. The White House that morning was gripped
by panic. Nixon would be gone before the end of the week. In the midst
of the furor, White House Congressional liaison William Timmons wanted
to know if everyone who needed to be informed had been briefed about the
smoking gun transcript. In a roomful of officials, some of whom were already
sipping Scotch to steady their nerves, Timmons asked Dean Burch, "Dean,
does Bush know about the transcript yet?" "Yes," responded Burch. "Well,
what did he do?" inquired Timmons. "He broke out into assholes and shit
himself to death," replied Burch. In this exchange, which is recorded in
Woodward and Bernstein's "The Final Days," we grasp the essential George
Bush, in a crisis, and for all seasons. Introduction The thesis of this
book is simple: if George Bush were to be re-elected in November 1992 for
a second term as the President of the United States, this country and the
rest of the world would face a catastrophe of gigantic proportions. The
necessity of writing this book became overwhelming in the minds of the
authors in the wake of the ghastly slaughter of the Iraq war of January-February
1991. That war was an act of savage and premeditated genocide on the part
of Bush, undertaken in connivance with a clique in London which has, in
its historical continuity, represented both the worst enemy of the long-term
interests of the American people, and the most implacable adversary of
the progress of the human species. The authors observed George Bush as
the Gulf crisis and the war unfolded, and had no doubt that his enraged
public outbursts constituted real psychotic episodes, indicative of a deranged
mental state that was full of ominous portent for humanity. The authors
were also horrified by the degree to which their fellow citizens willfully
ignored the shocking reality of these public fits. A majority of the American
people proved more than willing to lend its support to a despicable enterprise
of killing. By their role-call votes of January 12, 1991, the Senate and
the House of Representatives authorized Bush's planned war measures to
restore the Emir of Kuwait, who owns and holds chattel slaves. That vote
was a crime against God's justice. This book is part of an attempt to help
the American people to survive this terrible crime, both for the sake of
the world and for their own sake. It is intended as a contribution to a
process of education that might help to save the American people from the
awesome destruction of a second Bush presidency. It is further intended
as a warning to all citizens that if they fail to deny Bush a second term,
they will deserve what they get after 1993. As this book goes to press,
public awareness of the long-term depression of the American economy is
rapidly growing. If Bush were re-elected, he would view himself as beyond
the reach of the American electorate; with the federal deficit rising over
a billion dollars a day, a second Bush administration would dictate such
crushing austerity as to bring the country to the brink of civil war. Some
examples of this point are described in the last chapter of this book.
Our goal has been to assemble as much of the truth about Bush as possible
within the time constraints imposed by the 1992 election. Time and resources
have not permitted us meticulous attention to certain matters of detail;
we can say, nevertheless, that both our commitment to the truth and our
final product are better than anything anyone else has been able to muster,
including news organizations and intelligence agencies with capabilities
that far surpass our own. Why do we fight the Bush power cartel with a
mere book? We have no illusions of easy success, but we were encouraged
in our work by the hope that a biography might stimulate opposition to
Bush and his policies. It will certainly pose a new set of problems for
those seeking to get Bush re-elected. For although Bush is now what journalists
call a world leader, no accurate account of his actual career exists in
the public domain. The volume which we submit to the court of world public
opinion is, to the best of our knowledge, the first book-length, unauthorized
biography of George Bush. It is the first approximation of the truth about
his life. This is the first biography worthy of the name, a fact that says
a great deal about the sinister and obsessive secrecy of this personage.
None of the other biographies (including Bush's campaign autobiography)
can be taken seriously; each of these books is a pastiche of lies, distortions
and banalities that run the gamut from campaign panegyric, to the Goebbels
Big Lie, to fake but edifying stories for credulous children. Almost without
exception, the available Bush literature is worthless as a portrait of
the subject. Bush's family pedigree establishes him as a network asset
of Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the most powerful political forces in
the United States during much of the twentieth century, and for many years
the largest private bank in the world. It suffices in this context to think
of Averell Harriman negotiating during World War II in the name of the
United States with Churchill and Stalin, or of the role of Brown Brothers
Harriman partner Robert Lovett in guiding John F. Kennedy's choice of his
cabinet, to begin to see the implications of Senator Prescott Bush's post
as managing partner of this bank. Brown Brothers Harriman networks pervade
government and the mass media. Again and again in the course of the following
pages we will see stories embarrassing to George Bush refused publication,
documents embarrassing to Bush suspiciously disappear, and witnesses inculpatory
to Bush be overtaken by mysterious and conveniently timed deaths. The few
relevant facts which have found their way into the public domain have necessarily
been filtered by this gigantic apparatus. This pro blem has been compounded
by the corruption and servility of authors, journalists, news executives
and publishers who have functioned more and more as kept advocates for
a governmental regime of which Bush has been a prominent part for a quarter-century.
The Red Studebaker Myth George Bush wants key aspects of his life to remain
covert. At the same time, he senses that his need for coverup is a vulnerability.
The need to protect this weak flank accounts for the steady stream of fake
biographical material concerning George, as well as the spin given to many
studies that may never mention George directly. Over the past several months,
we have seen a new book about Watergate that pretends to tell the public
something new by fingering Al Haig as Deep Throat, but ignoring the central
role of George Bush and his business partners in the Watergate affair.
We have a new book by Lt. Col. Oliver North which alleges that Reagan knew
everything about the Iran-Contra affair, but that George Bush was not part
of North's chain of command. The latter point merely paraphrases Bush's
own lame excuse that he was "out of the loop" during all those illegal
transactions. During the hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to
become director of Central Intelligence, nobody had anything new to add
about the role of George Bush, the boss of the National Security Council's
Special Situation Group crisis staff that was a command center for the
whole affair. These charades are peddled to a very credulous public by
operatives whose task goes beyond mere damage control to mind control --
the "MK" in the government's MK-Ultra operation. Part of the free ride
enjoyed by George Bush during the 1988 elections is reflected in the fact
that at no point in the campaign was there any serious effort by any of
the news organizations to provide the public with an accurate and complete
account of his political career. At least two biographies of Dukakis appeared
which, although hardly critical, were not uniformly laudatory either. But
in the case of Bush, all the public could turn to was Bush's old 1980 campaign
biography and a newer campaign autobiography, both of them a tissue of
lies. Early in the course of our research for the present volume it became
apparent that all books and most longer articles dealing with the life
of George Bush had been generated from a single print-out of thoroughly
approved "facts" about Bush and his family. We learned that during 1979-80,
Bush aide Pete Roussel attempted to recruit biographers to prepare a life
of Bush based on a collection of press releases, news summaries, and similar
pre-digested material. Most biographical writing about Bush consists merely
of the points from this printout, strung out chronologically and made into
a narrative through the interpretation of comments, anecdotes, embellishments,
or special stylistic devices. The canonical Bush-approved printout is readily
identified. One dead giveaway is the inevitability with which the hacks
out to cover up the substance of Bush's life refer to a 1947 red Studebaker
which George Bush allegedly drove into Odessa, Texas in 1948. This is the
sort of detail which has been introduced into Bush's real life in a deliberate
and deceptive attempt to humanize his image. It has been our experience
that any text that features a reference to Bush's red Studebaker has probably
been derived from Bush's list of approved facts, and is therefore practically
worthless for serious research into Bush's life. We therefore assign such
texts to the "red Studebaker school" of coverup and falsification. Some
examples? This is from Bush's campaign autobiography, "Looking Forward,"
ghost-written by his aide Vic Gold: "Heading into Texas in my Studebaker,
all I knew about the state's landscape was what I'd seen from the cockpit
of a Vultee Vibrator during my training days in the Navy." Note #1 Here
is the same moment as recaptured by Bush's crony Fitzhugh Green, a friend
of the Malthusian financier Russell Train, in his "George Bush: An Intimate
Portrait," published after Bush had won the presidency: "He (Bush) gassed
up his 1948 Studebaker, arranged for his wife and son to follow, and headed
for Odessa, Texas." Note #2 Harry Hurt III wrote the following lines in
a 1983 Texas magazine article that was even decorated with a drawing of
what apparently is supposed to be a Studebaker, but which does not look
like a Studebaker of that vintage at all: "When George Herbert Walker Bush
drove his battered red Studebaker into Odessa in the summer of 1948, the
town's population, though constantly increasing with newly-arrived oil
field hands, was still under 30,000." Note #3 We see that Harry Hurt has
more imagination than many Bush biographers, and his article does provide
a few useful facts. More degraded is the version offered by Richard Ben
Kramer, whose biography of Bush is expected to be published during 1992.
Cramer was given the unenviable task of breathing life once more into the
same tired old printout. But the very fact that the Bush team feels that
it requires another biography indicates that it still feels that it has
a potential vulnerability here. Cramer has attempted to solve his problem
by recasting the same old garbage into a frenetic and hyperkinetic, we
would almost say "hyperthyroid" style. The following is from an excerpt
of this forthcoming book that was published in "Esquire" in June 1991:
"In June, after the College World Series and graduation day in New Haven,
Poppy packed up his new red Studebaker (a graduation gift from Pres), and
started driving south." Note #4 Was that Studebaker shiny and new, or old
and battered? Perhaps the printout is not specific on this point; in any
case, as we see, our authorities diverge. Joe Hyams's 1991 romance of Bush
at war, the "Flight of the Avenger," Note #5 does not include the obligatory
"red Studebaker" reference, but this is more than compensated for by the
most elaborate fawning over other details of our hero's war service. The
publication of "Flight of the Avenger," which concentrates on an heroic
retelling of Bush's war record, and ignores all evidence that might tend
to puncture this myth, was timed to coincide with Bush's war with Iraq.
This is a vile tract written with the open assistance of Bush, Barbara
Bush, and the White House staff. "Flight of the Avenger" recalls the practice
of totalitarian states according to which a war waged by the regime should
be accompanied by propaganda which depicts the regime's strong man in a
martial posture. In any case, this book deals with Bush's life up to the
end of World War II; we never reach Odessa. Only one of the full-length
accounts produced by the Bush propaganda machine neglects the red Studebaker
story. This is Nicholas King's "George Bush: A Biography," the first book-length
version of Bush's life, produced as a result of Pete Roussel's efforts
for the 1980 campaign. Nicholas King had served as Bush's spokesman when
he was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. King admits in his preface
that he can be impugned for writing a work of the most transparent apologetics:
"In retrospect," he says , "this book may seem open to the charge of puffery,
for the view of its subject is favorable all around." Note #6 Indeed. Books
about Barbara Bush slavishly rehearse the same details from the same printout.
Here is the relevant excerpt from the warmly admiring "Simply Barbara Bush:
A Portrait of America's Candid First Lady," written by Donnie Radcliffe
and published after Bush's 1988 election victory: "With $3,000 left over
after he graduated in June, 1948, he headed for Texas in the 1947 red Studebaker
his father had given him for graduation after George's car died on the
highway." Note #7 Even foreign journalists attempting to inform their publics
about conditions in the United States have fallen victim to the same old
Bush printout. The German author and reporter Rainer Bonhorst, the former
Washington correspondent of the "Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung," in his
1988 book "George Bush: The New Man in the White House," named a chapter
of this Bush political biography "To Texas in the Red Studebaker." Bonhorst
writes as follows: "Then there was still the matter of the red Studebaker.
It plays -- right after the world war effort -- a central role in the life
history of George Bush. It is the history of his rebellion. The step which
made a careless Texan out of a stiff New Englander, a self-made man out
of a patrician's son, born into wealth.... Thus, George and Barbara Bush,
24 and 23 years old, he having just finished with his studies, she having
prematurely withdrawn from her university and become a mother a few months
earlier, packed their baby and their suitcases and loaded them into their
glaring red Studebaker coupe. "|'A supermodern, smart car, certainly somewhat
loud for the New England taste,' the Bushes later recalled. But finally
it departed towards Texas." Note #8 We see that Bonhorst is acutely aware
of the symbolic importance assumed by the red Studebaker in these hagiographic
accounts of Bush's life. What is finally the truth of the matter? There
is good reason to believe that George Bush did not first come to Odessa,
Texas, in a red Studebaker. One knowledgeable source is the well-known
Texas oil man and Bush campaign contributor Oscar Wyatt of Houston. In
a recent letter to the "Texas Monthly," Wyatt specifies that "when people
speak of Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry, it should be
noted that he rode down to Texas on Dresser's private aircraft. He was
accompanied by his father, who at that time was one of the directors of
Dresser Industries.... I hate it when people make statements about Mr.
Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry. It just didn't happen that
way," writes Mr. Wyatt. Note #9 Dresser was a Harriman company, and Bush
got his start working for one of its subsidiaries. One history of Dresser
Industries contains a photograph of George Bush with his parents, wife,
and infant son "in front of a Dresser company airplane in West Texas."
Note #1 Note #0 Can this be a photo of Bush's arrival in Odessa during
the summer of 1948? In any case, this most cherished myth of the Bush biographers
is very much open to doubt. The Roman Propaganda Machine Fawning biographies
of bloodthirsty tyrants are nothing new in world literature. The red Studebaker
school goes back a long way; these writers of today can be usefully compared
with a certain Gaius Velleius Paterculus, who lived in the Roman Empire
under the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and who was thus an approximate
contemporary of Jesus Christ. Velleius Paterculus was an historian and
biographer who is known today, if at all, for his biographical notes on
the Emperor Tiberius, which are contained within Paterculus's history of
Rome. Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, gave a very favorable treatment
of Julius Caesar, and became fulsome when he came to write of Augustus.
But the worst excesses of flattery came in Velleius Paterculus's treatment
of Tiberius himself. Here is part of what he writes about that tyrannical
ruler: "Of the transactions of the last sixteen years, which have passed
in the view, and are fresh in the memory of all, who shall presume to give
a full account? ... credit has been restored to mercantile affairs, sedition
has been banished from the forum, corruption from the Campus Martius, and
discord from the senate-house; justice, equity and industry, which had
long lain buried in neglect, have been revived in the state; authority
has been given to the magistrates, majesty to the senate, and solemnity
to the courts of justice; the bloody riots in the theatre have been suppressed,
and all men have had either a desire excited in them, or a necessity imposed
on them, of acting with integrity. Virtuous acts are honored, wicked deeds
are punished. The humble respects the powerful, without dreading him; the
powerful takes precedence of the humble without condemning him. When were
provisions more moderate in price? When were theb lessings of peace more
abundant? Augustan peace, diffused over all the regions of the east and
the west, and all that lies between the south and the north, preserves
every corner of the world free from all dread of predatory molestation.
Fortuitous losses, not only of individuals, but of cities, the munificence
of the prince is ready to relieve. The cities of Asia have been repaired;
the provinces have been secured from the oppression of their governors.
Honor promptly rewards the deserving, and the punishment of the guilty,
if slow, is certain. Interest gives place to justice, solicitation to merit.
For the best of princes teaches his countrymen to act rightly by his own
practice; and while he is the greatest in power, he is still greater in
example. "Having exhibited a general view of the administration of Tiberius
Caesar, let us now enumerate a few particulars respecting it.... How formidable
a war, excited by the Gallic chief Sacrovir and Julius Florius, did he
suppress, and with such amazing expedition and energy, that the Roman people
learned that they were conquerors, before they knew that they were at war,
and the news of the victory outstripped the news of the danger! The African
war too, perilous as it was, and daily increasing in strength, was quickly
terminated under his auspices and direction...." Note #1 Note #1 All of
this was written in praise of the regime that crucified Jesus Christ, and
one of the worst genocidal tyrannies in the history of the world. Paterculus,
we must sadly conclude, was a sycophant of the Tiberius administration.
Some of his themes are close parallels to the propaganda of today's Bush
machine. In addition to feeding the personality cult of Tiberius, Paterculus
also lavished praise on Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the Prefect of the Praetorian
Guard and for many years Tiberius's number one favorite, second in command,
and likely successor. In many respects Sejanus was not unlike James Baker
III under the Bush regime. While Tiberius spent all of his time in seclusion
on his island of Capri near Naples, Sejanus assumed day to day control
of the vast empire and its 100 million subjects. Paterculus wrote of Sejanus
that he was "a most excellent coadjutor in all the toils of government
... a man of pleasing gravity, and of unaffected cheerfulness ... assuming
nothing to himself." That was the voice of the red Studebaker school in
about 30 A.D. Paterculus should have limited his fawning to Tiberius himself;
somewhat later, the emperor, suspecting a coup plot, condemned Sejanus
and had him torn limb from limb in gruesome retribution. But why bring
up Rome? Some readers may be scandalized by the things that truth obliges
us to record about a sitting president of the United States. Are we not
disrespectful to this high office? No. One of the reasons for glancing
back at Imperial Rome is to remind ourselves that in times of moral and
cultural degradation like our own, rulers of great evil have inflicted
incalculable suffering on humanity. In our modern time of war and depression,
this is once again the case. If Caligula was possible then, who could claim
that the America of the New World Order should be exempt? Let us therefore
tarry for a moment with these old Romans, because they can show us much
about ourselves. In order to find Roman writers who tell us anything reliable
about the first dozen emperors, we must wait until the infamous Julio-Claudian
dynasty of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero,
and the rest had entirely passed from the scene, to be supplanted by new
ruling houses. Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37 A.D.; Caligula, his designated
successor, from 37 to 41 A.D.; and Nero from 54 to 68 A.D. But the first
accurate account of the crimes of some of these emperors comes from Publius
Cornelius Tacitus in about 115-17 A.D., late in the reign of the emperor
Trajan. It was feasible for Tacitus to write and publish a more realistic
account of the Julio-Claudian emperors because one of the constant themes
of Trajan's propaganda was to glorify himself as an enlightened emperor
through comparison with the earlier series of bloody tyrants. Tacitus manages
to convey how the destructiveness of these emperors in their pe rsonal
lives correlated with their mass executions and their genocidal economic
policies. Tacitus was familiar with the machinery of Roman Imperial power:
he was of senatorial rank, served as consul in Italy in 97 A.D., and was
the governor of the important province of western Anatolia (today's Turkey)
which the Romans referred to simply as Asia. Tacitus writes of Tiberius:
"... his criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrollable activity was worthy
of an oriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated
by beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types
of perversions were invented. Slaves were charged to locate and procure
his requirements.... It was like the sack of a captured city." Tiberius
was able to dominate the legislative branch of his government, the senate,
by subversion and terror: "It was, indeed, a horrible feature of this period
that leading senators became informers even on trivial matters -- some
openly, many secretly. Friends and relatives were as suspect as strangers,
old stories as damaging as new. In the Main Square, at a dinner-party,
a remark on any subject might mean prosecution. Everyone competed for priority
in marking down the victim. Sometimes this was self-defense, but mostly
it was a sort of contagion, like an epidemic.... I realize that many writers
omit numerous trials and condemnations, bored by repetition or afraid that
catalogues they themselves have found over-long and dismal may equally
depress their readers. But numerous unrecorded incidents, which have come
to my attention, ought to be known. "... Even women were in danger. They
could not be charged with aiming at supreme power. So they were charged
with weeping: one old lady was executed for lamenting her son's death.
The senate decided this case.... In the same year the high price of corn
nearly caused riots.... "Frenzied with bloodshed, (Tiberius) now ordered
the execution of all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus. It was
a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence or obscurity,
there they lay, strewn about -- or in heaps. Relatives and friends were
forbidden to stand by or lament them, or even gaze for long. Guards surrounded
them, spying on their sorrow, and escorted the rotting bodies until, dragged
to the Tiber, they floated away or grounded -- with none to cremate or
touch them. Terror had paralyzed human sympathy. The rising surge of brutality
drove compassion away." Note #1 Note #2 This is the same Tiberius administration
so extravagantly praised by Velleius Paterculus. Because of lacunae in
the manuscripts of Tacitus's work that have come down to us, much of what
we know of the rule of Caligula (Gaius Caesar, in power from 37 to 41 A.D.)
derives from "The Lives of the Twelve Caesars," a book by Gaius Suetonius
Tranquillus. The character and administration of Caligula present some
striking parallels with the subject of the present book. As a stoic, Caligula
was a great admirer of his own "immovable rigor." His motto was "Remember
that I have the right to do anything to anybody." He made no secret of
his bloodthirsty vindictiveness. Caligula was a fan of the green team in
the Roman arena, and when the crowd applauded a charioteer who wore a different
color, Caligula cried out, "I wish the Roman people had but a single neck."
At one of his state dinners Caligula burst into a fit of uncontrollable
laughter, and when a consul asked him what was so funny, he replied that
it was the thought that as emperor Caligula had the power to have the throats
of the top officials cut at any time he chose. Caligula carried this same
attitude into his personal life: whenever he kissed or caressed the neck
of his wife or one of his mistresses, he liked to remark: "Off comes this
beautiful head whenever I give the word." Above all, Caligula was vindictive.
After his death, two notebooks were found among his personalpapers, one
labelled "The Sword" and the other labelled "The Dagger." These were lists
of the persons he had proscribed and liquidated, and were the forerunners
of the enemies lists and discrediting committee of today. Suetonius frankly
calls Caligula "a monster," and speculates on the pyschological roots of
his criminal disposition: "I think I may attribute to mental weakness the
existence of two exactly opposite faults in the same person, extreme assurance
and, on the other hand, excessive timorousness." Caligula was "full of
threats" against "the barbarians," but at the same time prone to precipitous
retreats and flights of panic. Caligula worked on his "body language" by
"practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror."
Caligula built an extension of his palace to connect with the Temple of
Castor and Pollux, and often went there to exhibit himself as an object
of public worship, delighting in being hailed as "Jupiter Latiaris" by
the populace. Later Caligula would officially open temples in his own name.
Caligula was brutal in his intimidation of the senate, whose members he
subjected to open humiliations and covert attacks; many senators were "secretly
put to death." "He often inveighed against all the Senators alike.... He
treated the other orders with like insolence and cruelty." Suetonius recites
whole catalogues of "special instances of his innate brutality" toward
persons of all walks of life. He enjoyed inflicting torture, and revelled
in liquidating political opponents or those who had insulted or snubbed
him in some way. He had a taste for capital executions as the perfect backdrop
for parties and banquets. Caligula also did everything he could to denigrate
the memory of the great men of past epochs, so that their fame could not
eclipse his own: "He assailed mankind of almost every epoch with no less
envy and malice than insolence and cruelty. He threw down the statues of
famous men" and tried to destroy all the texts of Homer. Caligula "respected
neither his own chastity nor that of any one else." He was reckless in
his extravagance, and soon emptied out the imperial treasury of all the
funds that old Tiberius had squirreled away there. After that, Caligula
tried to replenish his coffers through a system of spies, false accusations,
property seizures, and public auctions. He also "levied new and unheard-of
taxes," to the point that "no class of commodities was exempt from some
kind of tax or other." Caligula taxed all foodstuffs, took a fortieth of
the award in any lawsuit, an eighth of the daily wages of the porters,
and demanded that the prostitutes pay him a daily fee equal to the average
price charged to each individual customer. (It is rumored that this part
of Caligula's career is under study by those planning George Bush's second
term.) Caligula also opened a brothel in his palace as an additional source
of income, which may prefigure today's White House staff. Among Caligula's
more singular hobbies Suetonius includes his love of rolling and wallowing
in piles of gold coins. Caligula kept his wife, Caesonia (described by
Suetonius as "neither beautiful nor young") with him until the very end.
But his greatest devotion was to his horse, whom he made consul of the
Roman state. Ultimately Caligula fell victim to a conspiracy of the Praetorian
Guard, led by the tribune Gaius Chaerea, a man whom Caligula had taken
special delight in humiliating. Note #1 Note #3 The authors of the present
study are convinced that these references to the depravity of the Roman
emperors, and to the records of that depravity provided by such authors
as Tacitus and Suetonius, are directly germane to our present task of following
the career of a member of the senatorial class of the Anglo-American elite
through the various stages of his formation and ultimate ascent to imperial
power. The Roman Imperial model is germane because the American ruling
elite of today is far closer to the world of Tiberius and Caligula than
it is to the world of the American Revolution or the Constitutional Conventionof
1789. The leitmotif of modern American presidential politics is unquestionably
an imperial theme, most blatantly expressed by Bush in his sl ogan for
1990, "The New World Order," and for 1991, the "pax universalis." The central
project of the Bush presidency is the creation and consolidation of a single,
universal Anglo-American (or Anglo-Saxon) empire very directly modelled
on the various phases of the Roman Empire. The Olympian Delusion There
is one other aspect of the biographical-historical method of the Graeco-Roman
world which we have sought to borrow. Ever since Thucydides composed his
monumental work on the Peloponnesian War, those who have sought to imitate
his style -- with the Roman historian Titus Livius prominent among them
-- have employed the device of attributing long speeches to historical
personages, even when it appears very unlikely that such lengthy orations
could have been made by the protagonists at the time. This has nothing
to do with the synthetic dialogue of current American political writing,
which attempts to present historical events as a series of trivial and
banal soap-opera exchanges, which carry on for such interminable lengths
as to suggest that the authors are getting paid by the word. Our idea of
fidelity to the classical style has simply been to let George Bush speak
for himself wherever possible, through direct quotation. We are convinced
that by letting Bush express himself directly in this way, we afford the
reader a more faithful -- and damning -- account of Bush's actions. George
Bush might agree that "history is biography," although we suspect that
he would not agree with any of our other conclusions. There may be a few
peculiarities of the present work as biography that are worthy of explanation
at the outset. One of our basic theses is that George Bush is, and considers
himself to be, an oligarch. The notion of oligarchy includes first of all
the idea of a patrician and wealthy family capable of introducing its offspring
into such elite institutions as Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones. Oligarchy
also subsumes the self-conception of the oligarch as belonging to a special,
exalted breed of mankind, one that is superior to the common run of mankind
as a matter of hereditary genetic superiority. This mentality generally
goes together with a fascination for eugenics, race science and just plain
racism as a means of building a case that one's own family tree and racial
stock are indeed superior. These notions of "breeding" are a constant in
the history of the titled feudal aristocracy of Europe, especially Britain,
towards inclusion in which an individual like Bush must necessarily strive.
At the very least, oligarchs like Bush see themselves as demigods occupying
a middle ground between the immortals above and the "hoi polloi" below.
The culmination of this insane delusion, which Bush has demonstrably long
since attained, is the obsessive belief that the principal families of
the Anglo-American elite, assembled in their freemasonic orders, by themselves
directly constitute an Olympian Pantheon of living deities who have the
capability of abrogating and disregarding the laws of the universe according
to their own irrational caprice. If we do not take into account this element
of fatal and megalomaniac hubris, the lunatic Anglo-American policies in
regard to the Gulf War, international finance, or the AIDS epidemic must
defy all comprehension. Part of the ethos of oligarchism as practiced by
George Bush is the emphasis on one's own family pedigree. This accounts
for the attention we dedicate in the opening chapters of this book to Bush's
family tree, reaching back to the nineteenth century and beyond. It is
impossible to gain insight into Bush's mentality unless we realize that
it is important for him to be considered a cousin, however distant, of
Queen Elizabeth II of the House of Mountbatten-Windsor and for his wife
Barbara to be viewed in some sense a descendant of President Franklin Pierce.
The Family Firm For related reasons, it is our special duty to illustrate
the role played in the formation of George Bush as a personality by his
maternal grandfather and uncle, George Herbert Walker and George Herbert
Walker, Jr., and by George H.W. Bush's father, the late Senator Prescott
Bush. In the course of this task, we must speak at length about the institution
to which George Bush owes the most, the Wall Street international investment
bank of Brown Brothers Harriman, the political and financial powerhouse
mentioned above. For George Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman was and remains
the family firm in the deepest sense. The formidable power of this bank
and its ubiquitous network, wielded by Senator Prescott Bush up through
the time of his death in 1972, and still active on George's behalf down
to the present day, is the single most important key to every step of George's
business, covert operations, and political career. In the case of George
Bush, as many who have known him personally have noted, the network looms
much larger than George's own character and will. The reader will search
in vain for strong principled commitments in George Bush's personality;
the most that will be found is a series of characteristic obsessions, of
which the most durable are race, vanity, personal ambition, and settling
scores with adversaries. What emerges by contrast is the decisive importance
of Bush's network of connections. His response to the Gulf crisis of 1991
will be largely predetermined, not by any great flashes of geopolitical
insight, but rather by his connections to the British oligarchy, to Kissinger,
to Israeli and Zionist circles, to Texas oilmen in his fundraising base,
to the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal houses. If the question is one of
finance, then the opinions of J. Hugh Liedtke, Henry Kravis, Robert Mosbacher,
T. Boone Pickens, Nicholas Brady, James Baker III and the City of London
will be decisive. If covert operations and dirty tricks are on the agenda,
then there is a whole stable of CIA old boys with whom he will consult,
and so on down the line. During much of 1989, despite his control over
the presidency, Bush appeared as a weak and passive executive, waiting
for his networks to show him what it was he was supposed to do. When German
reunification and the crumbling of the Soviet empire spurred those -- primarily
British -- networks into action, Bush was suddenly capable of violent and
daring adventures. As his battle for a second term approaches, Bush may
be showing increasing signs of a rage-driven self-starter capability, especially
when it comes to starting new wars designed to secure his re-election.
The United States in Decline Biography has its own inherent discipline:
It must be concerned with the life of its protagonist, and cannot stray
too far away. In no way has it been our intention to offer an account of
American history during the lifetime of George Bush. The present study
nevertheless reflects many aspects of that recent history of U.S. decline.
It will be noted that Bush has succeeded in proportion as the country has
failed, and that Bush's advancement has proceeded "pari passu" with the
degradation of the national stage upon which he has operated and which
he has come to dominate. At various phases in his career, Bush has come
into conflict with persons who were intellectually and morally superior
to him. One such was Senator Ralph Yarborough, and another was Senator
Frank Church. Our study will be found to catalogue the constant decline
in the qualities of Bush's adversaries as human types until the 1980s,
by which time his opponents, as in the case of Al Haig, are no better than
Bush himself. The exception to this trend is Bush's long-standing personal
vendetta against Lyndon LaRouche, his most consistent and capable adversary.
LaRouche was jailed seven days after Bush's inauguration in the most infamous
political frameup of recent U.S. history. As our study will document, at
critical moments in Bush's career, LaRouche's political interventions have
frustrated some of Bush's best-laid political plans: A very clear example
is LaRouche's role in defeating Bush's 1980 presidential bid in the New
Hampshire primary. Over the intervening years, LaRouche has become George
Bush's "man in the iron mask," the principled political adversary whom
Bush seeks to jail and silence at all costs. The restoration of justice
in this country must include the freeing of Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche's
political associates, and all the other political prisoners of the Bush
regime. As for the political relevance of our project, we think that it
is very real. During the Gulf crisis, it would have been important for
the public to know more about Bush's business dealings with the Royal Family
of Kuwait. During the 1992 presidential campaign, as Wall Street's recent
crop of junk-bond assisted leveraged buyouts line up at the entrance to
bankruptcy court, and state workers all across the United States are informed
that the retirement pensions they had been promised will never be paid,
the relations between George Bush and Henry Kravis will surely constitute
an explosive political issue. Similarly, once Bush's British and Kissingerian
pedigree is recognized, the methods he is likely to pursue in regard to
situations such as the planned Romanian-style overthrow of the Castro regime
in Cuba, or the provocation of a splendid little nuclear war involving
North Korea, or of a new Indo-Pakistani war, will hardly be mysterious.
The authors have been at some pains to make this work intelligible to readers
around the world. We offer this book to those who share our aversion to
the imperialist-colonialist New World Order, and our profound horror at
the concept of a return to a single, worldwide Roman Empire as suggested
by Bush's "pax universalis" slogan. This work is tangible evidence that
there is an opposition to Bush inside the United States, and that the new
Caligula is very vulnerable indeed on the level of the exposure of his
own misdeeds. It will be argued that this book should have been published
before the 1988 election, when a Bush presidency might have been avoided.
That is certainly true, but it is an objection which should also be directed
to many institutions and agencies whose resources far surpass our modest
capabilities. We can only remind our fellow citizens that when he asks
for their votes for his re-election, George Bush also enters that court
of public opinion in which he is obliged to answer their questions. They
should not waste this opportunity to grill him on all aspects of his career
and future intentions, since it is Bush who comes forward appealing for
their support. To aid in this process, we have provided a list of Twenty
Questions for Candidate George Bush on the campaign trail, and this will
be found in the appendix. We do not delude ourselves that we have said
the last word about George Bush. But we have for the first time sketched
out at least some of the most salient features and gathered them into a
comprehensible whole. We encourage an aroused citizenry, as well as specialized
researchers, to improve upon what we have been able to accomplish. In so
doing, we recall the words of the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio when he
reluctantly accepted the order of a powerful king to produce an account
of the old Roman Pantheon: "If I don't succeed completely in this exposition,
at least I will provide a stimulus for the better work of others who are
wiser." -- Boccaccio, "Genealogy of the National Gods" "To be continued."
Notes 1. George Bush and Vic Gold, "Looking Forward," (New York: Doubleday,
1987), p. 47. 2. Fitzhugh Green, "Looking Forward," (New York: Hippocrene,
1989), p. 53. 3. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," "Texas Monthly,"
June, 1983, p. 142. 4. Richard Ben Cramer, "How He Got Here," "Esquire,"
June, 1991, p. 84. 5. Joe Hyams, "Flight of the Avenger" (New York, 1991).
6. Nicholas King, "George Bush: A Biography" (New York, Dodd, Mead, 1980),
p. xi. 7. Donnie Radcliffe, "Simply Barbara Bush," (New York: Warner, 1989),
p. 103. 8. Rainer Bonhorst, "George Bush, Der Neue Mann im Weissen Haus,"
(Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Luebbe Verlag, 1988), pp. 80-81. 9. See "The
Roar of the Crowd," "Texas Monthly," November, 1991. See also Jan Jarboe,
"Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog," "Texas Monthly," April 1991, p. 122 ff. Here
Wyatt observes: "I knew from the beginning George Bush came to Texas only
because he was politically ambitious. He flew out here on an airplane owned
by Dresser Industries. His daddy was a member of the board of Dresser."
10. Darwin Payne, "Initiative in Energy" (New York: Simon and Shuster,
1979), p. 233. 11. John Selby Watson (translator), "Sallust, Florus, and
Velleius Paterculus" (London: George Bell and Son, 1879), pp. 542-46. 12.
Cornelius Tacitus, "The Annals of Imperial Rome" (Penguin, 1962), pp. 193-221.
13. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, "The Lives of the Twelve Caesars" (New
York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 165-204, " passim. CHAPTER 2 THE HITLER
PROJECT Bush Property Seized -- Trading with the Enemy In October 1942,
ten months after entering World War II, America was preparing its first
assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner
of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S.
President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot. On October
20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking
operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.
Under the "Trading with the Enemy Act", the government took over the "Union
Banking Corporation," in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property
Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were
owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland "Bunny" Harriman, three Nazi executives,
and two other associates of Bush. Note #1 The order seizing the bank "vest[ed]
[seized] all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York
corporation," and named the holders of its shares as: See #b|"E. Roland
Harriman -- 3991 shares." Harriman was chairman and director of Union Banking
Corp. (UBC); this is "Bunny" Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a
place holder who didn't get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed
his personal investments. See #b|"Cornelis Lievense -- 4 shares." Lievense
was president and director of UBC, and a New York resident banking functionary
for the Nazis. See #b|"Harold D. Pennington -- 1 share." Pennington was
treasurer and director of UBC, and an office manager employed by Bush at
Brown Brothers Harriman. See #b|"Ray Morris -- 1 share." Morris was director
of UBC, and a partner of Bush and the Harrimans. See #b|"Prescott S. Bush
-- 1 share." Bush was director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored
by his father-in-law George Walker; he was senior managing partner for
E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman. See #b|"H.J. Kouwenhoven -- 1
share" Kouwenhoven was director of UBC; he organized UBC as the emissary
of Fritz Thyssen in negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman;
he was also managing director of UBC's Netherlands affiliate under Nazi
occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany, and also director and
chief foreign financial executive of the German Steel Trust. See #b|"Johann
G. Groeninger -- 1 share." Groeninger was director of UBC and of its Netherlands
affiliate; he was an industrial executive in Nazi Germany. The order also
specified: "all of which shares are held for the benefit of ... members
of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals ... of a designated
enemy country...." By October 26, 1942, U.S. troops were underway for North
Africa. On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front
organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the "Holland-American Trading
Corporation" and the "Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation." Note #2 U.S.
forces landed under fire near Algiers on November 8, 1942; heavy combat
raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the "Silesian-American Corporation,"
long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker,
were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on November 17, 1942.
In this action, the government announced that it was seiz ing only the
Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on the business.
Note #3 These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime
were, tragically, too little and too late. President Bush's family had
already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for
his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi
war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and
in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with
their well-known results. The facts presented here must be known, and their
implications reflected upon, for a proper understanding of President George
Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to mankind that he represents. The
President's family fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project.
The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him
into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his
father's partners in the Hitler project. President Franklin Roosevelt's
Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248
seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act.
The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of
the news, Note #4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that
the Union Banking Corporation was run for the "Thyssen family" of "Germany
and/or Hungary" -- "nationals ... of a designated enemy country." By deciding
that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corp. were
legally "front men for the Nazis", the government avoided the more important
historical issue: In what way "were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed,
and instructed by" the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush
was an executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler project
from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer for
that question. 2. Origin and Extent of the Project Fritz Thyssen and his
business partners are universally recognized as the most important German
financiers of Adolf Hitler's takeover of Germany. At the time of the order
seizing the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had
already published his famous book, "I Paid Hitler", Note #5 admitting that
he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923.
Thyssen's role as the leading early backer of Hitler's grab for power in
Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932. Note #6 The
order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about
the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed. But two weeks before
the official order, government investigators had reported secretly that
"W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time
became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist." Harriman
and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. "[C]ertain
of [Harriman's] associates would serve as directors...." Thyssen agent
"H.J. Kouwenhoven ... came to the United States ... prior to 1924 for conferences
with the Harriman Company in this connection...." Note #7 When exactly
was "Harriman in Europe sometime prior to 1924"? In fact, he was in Berlin
in 1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George
Walker's presidency. The Union Banking Corporation was established formally
in 1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co.,
interlocking with the Thyssen-owned "Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart" (BHS)
in the Netherlands. The investigators concluded that "the Union Banking
Corporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it
through the Dutch bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment."
Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in
1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be
transferring funds back and forth between New York and the "Thyssen interests"
in Germany. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization would
be joint owner and manager of Thyssen's banking operations outside of Germany.
"How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President Bush's father
was the New York banker?" The 1942 U.S. government investigative report
said that Bush's Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte
Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or "German Steel Trust") led
by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, congressional investigators
probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units.
The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the
following approximate proportions of total German national output: "50.8%
of Nazi Germany's pig iron; 41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate; 36.0%
of Nazi Germany's heavy plate; 38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet;
45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes; 22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire;
35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives." Note #8 This accounts for many, many
Nazi submarines, bombs, rifles, gas chambers, etc. Prescott Bush became
vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That same year, a friend
of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz
Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new "German Steel
Trust," Germany's largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926
by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade of Prescott
Bush's father Sam Bush from the "Merchants of Death" bureau in World War
I. In return for putting up $70 million to create his organization, majority
owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company two or more representatives
on the board of the new Steel Trust. Note #9 Thus there is a division of
labor: Thyssen's own confidential accounts, for political and related purposes,
were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the Steel Trust did its
corporate banking through Dillon Read. - * * * - The Walker-Bush firm's
banking activities were not just politically neutral money-making ventures
which happened to coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm's
European business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political
forces. In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this
retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to Averell Harriman:
"It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted's
views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent....
I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it." Note #1 Note
#0 Averell Harriman met with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed good news back to
his chief executive Bert Walker: "... During these last days ... Mussolini
... has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15 June." Note #1 Note #1
The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America, Germany, and Britain,
weakening all governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush
even more willing to do whatever was necessary to retain his new place
in the world. It was in this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined
on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany. W.A. Harriman &
Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets from their
German and Russian business, merged with the British-American investment
house, Brown Brothers, on January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own
G.H. Walker & Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush, and
Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers Harriman
firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm continued operating
under its historic name -- Brown, Shipley.) Robert A. Lovett also came
over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman's lawyer
and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott's
father. Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the junior
Lovett soon replaced his father as chief exexcutive of Union Pacific Railroad.
Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for the Hitler
project. American patriots had cursed its name back in Civil War days.
Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A. and in Engla nd, had carried
on their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton from the American South
over to British mill owners; through their usurious credit they controlled
and manipulated the slave-owners. Now, in 1931, the virtual dictator of
world finance, Bank of England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former
Brown Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown Brothers
during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as the most avid of
Hitler's supporters within British ruling circles, and Norman's intimacy
with this firm was essential to his management of the Hitler project. In
1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown Brothers Harriman,
Prescott's partner was Montagu Norman's intimate friend Thatcher Brown.
The Bank of England chief always stayed at the home of Prescott's partner
on his hush-hush trips to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm's
German actitivites, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old England,
under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman. Note #1 Note #2 3. Hitler's
Ladder to Power Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933,
and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive and violent
lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the Bush-Harriman organization
played great parts in this criminal undertaking: Thyssen's German Steel
Trust; and the Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives. Note
#1 Note #3 Let us look more closely at the Bush family's German partners.
"Fritz Thyssen" told Allied interrogators after the war about some of his
financial support for the Nazi Party: "In 1930 or 1931 ... I told [Hitler's
deputy Rudolph] Hess ... I would arrange a credit for him with a Dutch
bank in Rotterdam, the Bank fussaur Handel und Schiff [i.e. Bank voor Handel
en Scheepvaart (BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate]. I arranged the credit
... he would pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank because
I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my position, and because
I thought it was better to do business with a Dutch bank, and I thought
I would have the Nazis a little more in my hands.... "The credit was about
250-300,000 [gold] marks -- about the sum I had given before. The loan
has been repaid in part to the Dutch bank, but I think some money is still
owing on it...." Note #1 Note #4 The overall total of Thyssen's political
donations and loans to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including
funds he raised from others -- in a period of terrible money-shortage in
Germany. "Friedrich Flick" was the major co-owner of the German Steel Trust
with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's longtime collaborator and sometime competitor.
In preparation for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. government
said that Flick was "one of leading financiers and industrialists who from
1932 contributed large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of 'Circle of
Friends' of Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS." Note #1 Note
#5 Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their private armies
called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm
troops or Brown Shirts). The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised
by Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker, President
Bush's grandfather. The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements
for the German Steel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast
operations in Germany by no later than 1926. The "Harriman Fifteen Corporation"
(George Walker, president, Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman, sole directors)
held a substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the
merger with Brown Brothers, January 1, 1931. This holding correlated to
Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the "Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation,"
the American group owning one-third of a complex of steelmaking, coal-mining
and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich Flick
owned two-thirds. Note #1 Note #6 The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized
Flick as follows: "Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises
(coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating plants) ... 'Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer,'
1938 [title awarded to prominent industrialists for merit in armaments
drive -- 'Military Economy Leader']...." Note #1 Note #7 For this buildup
of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel, and arms production, using
slave laborers, the Nazi Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at
the Nuremberg trials; he served three years. With friends in New York and
London, however, Flick lived into the 1970s and died a billionaire. On
March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush -- then director of the German Steel Trust's
Union Banking Corporation -- initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman
about a problem which had developed in the Flick partnership. Note #1 Note
#8 Bush sent Harriman a clipping from the "New York Times" of that day,
which reported that the Polish government was fighting back against American
and German stockholders who controlled "Poland's largest industrial unit,
the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company...." The "Times" article continued:
"The company has long been accused of mismanagement, excessive borrowing,
fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued
in December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German
citizens and they fled. They were replaced by Poles. Herr Flick, regarding
this as an attempt to make the company's board entirely Polish, retaliated
by restricting credits until the new Polish directors were unable to pay
the workmen regularly." The "Times" noted that the company's mines and
mills "employ 25,000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland's total steel
output and 12 percent of her coal production. Two-thirds of the company's
stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel industrialist,
and the remainder is owned by interests in the United States." In view
of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported to Hitler's
Germany under depression conditions, the Polish government thought that
Bush, Harriman, and their Nazi partners should at least pay full taxes
on their Polish holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout.
The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their European
representative: "Have undertaken new steps London Berlin ... please establish
friendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington]." A 1935 Harriman
Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had
been made "in Berlin" to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated
Silesian Steel. Note #1 Note #9 But the dispute with Poland did not deter
the Bush family from continuing its partnership with Flick. Nazi tanks
and bombs "settled" this dispute in September, 1939 with the invasion of
Poland, beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick,
Harriman, Walker, and Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.
There were probably few people at the time who could appreciate the irony,
that when the Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their
vehicles were fueled by oil pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush
enterprise. Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazis'
share in the Silesian-American Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy
Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49 percent of the common stock and
41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company. The order characterized
the company as a "business enterprise within the United States, owned by
[a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft
George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation...." Note #2 Note #0 Bert
Walker was still the senior director of the company, which he had founded
back in 1926 simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust.
Ray Morris, Prescott's partner from Union Banking Corp. andBrown Brothers
Harriman, was also a dir ector. The investigative report prior to the government
crackdown explained the "NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is
an American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries, which own
large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany.
Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and
have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of
considerable assistance to that country in its war effort." Note #2 Note
#1 The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control
of the European properties after the war. 4. Control of Nazi Commerce Bert
Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of the
Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the "American Ship
and Commerce Corp." as a unit of the W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual
power over Hamburg-Amerika's affairs. As the Hitler project went into high
gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held
by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker. Note
#2 Note #2 It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic, handsome
Prescott Bush. From the Brown Brothers Harriman skyscraper at 59 Wall Street
-- where he was senior managing partner, confidential investments manager
and advisor to Averell and his brother "Bunny" -- he walked across to the
Harriman Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H.
Walker & Co. -- and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at
39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman & Co., and still
the offices for American Ship and Commerce, and of the Union Banking Corporation.
In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire
Hitler project. Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over
the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I
chief executive, "Wilhelm Cuno", and with the line's bankers, M.M. Warburg.
Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became
a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for
a Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi
Party. Note #2 Note #3 "Albert Voegler" was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick
German Steel Trust for which Bush's Union Banking Corp. was the New York
office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS Bank in Rotterdam,
and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined
Thyssen and Flick in their heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped
organize the final Nazi leap into national power. Note #2 Note #4 The "Schroeder"
family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities of Harriman and
Prescott Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.
Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Huette
foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush's New York bank partner.
Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer of the support organization for the Nazi
Party's private armies, to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von
Schroeder and Montagu Norman's proteaageaa Hjalmar Schacht together made
the final arrangments for Hitler to enter the government. Note #2 Note
#5 Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika
Line. Long an intimate contact of Averell Harriman's in Germany, Baron
Rudolph sent his grandson Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush's
Brown Brothers Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932 -- on
the eve of their Hitler-triumph. Note #2 Note #6 Certain actions taken
directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932 must be ranked among
the gravest acts of treason in this century. The U.S. Embassy in Berlin
reported back to Washington that the "costly election campaigns" and "the
cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men" had raised
questions as to the Nazis' financial backers. The constitutional government
of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the
Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. Embassy reported that the
"Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks
against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown
on Hitler's forces." Note #2 Note #7 Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism
were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this
connection, we note that the original "Merchant of Death," Samuel Pryor,
was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American
Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman
of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world's private arms traffic,
his use to the Hitler project was enhanced as the Bush family's partner
in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping. The U.S. Senate arms-traffic
investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement
on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading
up to Hitler's seizure of power, the senators found that "German political
associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American
... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in
the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They
then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference.
The Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner.
The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and
revolvers. The number is great." Note #2 Note #8 The beginning of the Hitler
regime brought some bizarre changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line -- and
more betrayals. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified
Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to
be the corporation's official, designated representative on the board of
Hamburg-Amerika. Note #2 Note #9 Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933,
assuring his American sponsors that the Hitler government was good for
Germany: "For the last few years business was considerably better than
we had anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some months.
We are actually suffering also under the very active propaganda against
Germany, caused by some unpleasant circumstances. These occurrences were
the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were
extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly
resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly
convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever."
Note #3 Note #0 This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous
Jew, was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated rather
serious "alarm" inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi operations. On March
29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman, Max's son Erich sent
a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman
railroad system. He asked Frederick to "use all your influence" to stop
all anti-Nazi activity in America, including "atrocity news and unfriendly
propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc." Frederick cabled back
to Erich: "No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of] German
goods[,] merely excited individuals." Two days after that, On March 31,
1933, the "American-Jewish Committee," controlled by the Warburgs, and
the "B'nai B'rith," heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers' ("New York Times"),
issued a formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counselling
"that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged, [and advising]
... that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation
be employed." Note #3 Note #1 The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai
B'rith (mother of the "Anti-Defamation League") continued with this hardline,
no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the fight mounted
by many Jews and other anti-fascists. Thus the decisive interchange reproduced
above, taking place entirely within the orbit of the Harriman/Bush firm,
may explain something of the relation ship of George Bush to American Jewish
and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his family,
played an ugly part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why "professional
Nazi-hunters" have never discovered how the Bush family made its money?
-* * *- The executive board of the "Hamburg Amerika Line" "(Hapag)" met
jointly with the North German Lloyd company board in Hamburg on September
5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two firms were merged. Prescott
Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a
longtime Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North
America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines "(Hapag-Lloyd)") on November
4, 1933. According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress
in 1934, a supervisor from the "Nazi Labor Front" rode with every ship
of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly
organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided
free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes;
and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done
in Germany against the constitutional German government. Note #3 Note #2
In mid-1936, Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. cabled M.M.
Warburg, asking Warburg to represent the company's heavy share interest
at the forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika stockholders meeting. The Warburg office
replied with the information that "we represented you" at the stockholders
meeting and "exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm [gold marks]
3,509,600 Hapag stock deposited with us." The Warburgs transmitted a letter
received from Emil Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd
and of the Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: "It is the intention
to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as heretofore...."
In a colorful gesture, Hapag's Nazi chairman Helfferich sent the line's
president across the Atlantic on a Zeppelin to confer with their New York
string-pullers. After the meeting with the Zeppelin passenger, the Harriman-Bush
office replied: "I am glad to learn that Mr. Hellferich [sic] has stated
that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be
continued on the same basis as heretofore." Note #3 Note #3 Two months
before moving against Bush's Union Banking Corp., the U.S. government ordered
the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German
Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in
the pre-seizure report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney
representing the Nazi firm. Note #3 Note #4 In May 1933, just after the
Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for
the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The "Harriman International
Co.," led by Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate
of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct "all exports from Hitler's Germany
to the United States". Note #3 Note #5 This pact had been negotiated in
Berlin between Hitler's economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster
Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the
counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder. John Foster Dulles would
later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican
Party of the 1950s. Foster's friendship and that of his brother Allen (head
of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become
the Republican U.S. senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable
value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of "covert action government,"
that both of these Dulles brothers were the lawyers for the Bush family's
far-flung enterprise. Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged
debt restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued by
Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between the interest
owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of the growing Nazi warmaking
apparatus for producing tanks, poison gas, etc. Dulles wrote to Prescott
Bush in 1937 concerning one such arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable
Company, owning Nazi Germany's only telegraph channel to the United States,
had made debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank during
the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements, which had originally
been reached with non-Nazi corporate officials. Dulles asked Bush, who
managed these affairs for Averell Harriman, to get Averell's signature
on a letter to Nazi officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote: "Sept.
22, 1937 "Mr. Prescott S. Bush "59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y. "Dear Press,
"I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic] Cable Company
to Averell Harriman.... It would appear that the only rights in the matter
are those which inure in the bankers and that no legal embarrassment would
result, so far as the bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in
the modification of the bankers' agreement. "Sincerely yours, "John Foster
Dulles" Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman's signature,
and the changes went through. Note #3 Note #6 In conjunction with these
arrangements, the German Atlantic Cable Company attempted to stop payment
on its debts to smaller American bondholders. The money was to be used
instead for arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government.
Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court decided that
this particular Hitler "law" was invalid in the United States; small bondholders,
not parties to deals between the bankers and the Nazis, were entitled to
get paid. Note #3 Note #7 In this and a few other of the attempted swindles,
the intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi financial
and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic climax. For his part
in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune. This is the
legacy he left to his son, President George Bush. Notes 1. Office of Alien
Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 248. Signed by Leo T. Crowley,
Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568;
Filed, November 6, 1942. 7 Fed. Reg. 9097 (November 7, 1942). The "New
York City Directory of Directors", 1930s-40s, list Prescott Bush as a director
of Union Banking Corp. from 1934 through 1943. 2. Alien Property Custodian
Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order
Number 261: Holland-American Trading Corp. 3. Alien Property Custodian
Vesting Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. 4. "New York Times," December
16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York
State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank,
as follows: "The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has
received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway."
The "Times" omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been
seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and the fact that
120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian.
5. Fritz Thyssen, "I Paid Hitler", 1941, reprinted in (Port Washington,
N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says his contributions began
with 100,000 marks given in October 1923, for Hitler's attempted "putsch"
against the constitutional government. 6. Confidential memorandum from
U.S. Embassy, Berlin, to the U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932, on
microfilm in "Confidential Reports of U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany,"
at major U.S. libraries. 7. October 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive
Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL,
from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now
declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex.
Note Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports,
in file box relating to Vesting Order Number 248. 8. "Elimination of German
Resources for War": Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Com mittee on
Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5,
Testimony of [the United States] Treasury Department, July 2, 1945. Page
507: Table of Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German
total as of 1938; Thyssen organization including Union Banking Corporation
pp. 727-731. 9. Robert Sobel, "The Life and Times of Dillon Read" (New
York: Dutton-Penguin, 1991), pp. 92-111. The Dillon Read firm cooperated
in the development of Sobel's book. 10. George Walker to Averell Harriman,
August 11, 1927, in W. Averell Harriman papers, Library of Congress (hereafter
"WAH papers"). 11. "Iaccarino" to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12,
1927. 12. Andrew Boyle, "Montagu Norman" (London: Cassell, 1967). Sir Henry
Clay, "Lord Norman" (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957), pp. 18, 57, 70-71.
John A. Kouwenhouven, "Partners in Banking ... Brown Brothers Harriman"
(Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969). 13. Coordination of much of the
Hitler project took place at a single New York address. The Union Banking
Corporation had been set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management
of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, carried out through Harriman's American Ship
and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. 14.
Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in U.S. Control
Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony Sutton, "An Introduction
to The Order" (Billings, Mt.: Liberty House Press, 1986). 15. "Nazi Conspiracy
and Aggression, Supplement B", by the Office of United States Chief of
Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, U. S. Government Printing
Office, (Washington, D.C., 1948), pp. 1597, 1686. 16. "Consolidated Silesian
Steel Corporation - [minutes of the] Meeting of Board of Directors," October
31, 1930 (WAH papers), shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board.
Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum December 19, 1930 on their Harriman
Fifteen Corp. Annual Report of United Konigs and Laura Steel and Iron Works
for the year 1930 (WAH papers) lists "Dr. Friedrich Flick ... Berlin" and
"William Averell Harriman ... New York" on the Board of Directors. "Harriman
Fifteen Coporation Securities Position February 28, 1931," WAH papers.
This report shows Harriman Fifteen Corporation holding 32,576 shares in
Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C. worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1,628,800,
just over half the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's total holdings.
The "New York City Directory of Directors" volumes for the 1930s (available
at the Library of Congress) show Prescott Sheldon Bush and W. Averell Harriman
as the directors of Harriman Fifteen Corp. "Appointments," (three typed
pages) marked "Noted May 18 1931 W.A.H.," (among the papers from Prescott
Bush's New York Office of Brown Brothers Harriman, WAH papers), lists a
meeting between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00
P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by a meeting
with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. The "Report
To the Stockholders of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation," October 19, 1933
(WAH papers) names G.H. Walker as president of the corporation. It shows
the Harriman Fifteen Corp.'s address as 1 Wall Street -- the location of
G.H. Walker and Co. 17. "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B",
"op. cit.," p. 1686. 18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush's employee),
March 19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman. "Dear Averell: "In Roland's absence Pres[cott]
thought it adviseable for me to let you know that we received the following
cable from [our European representative] Rossi dated March 17th [relating
to conflict with the Polish government]...." 19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation
notice to stockholders January 7, 1935, under the name of George Walker,
President. 20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed November
17, 1942. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Prop. Custodian. F.R. Doc. 42-14183;
Filed, December 31, 1942; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1, 1943). The order confiscated
the Nazis' holdings of 98,000 shares of common and 50,000 shares of preferred
stock in Silesian-American. The Nazi parent company in Breslau, Germany
wrote to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with "an invitation
to take part in the regular meeting of the members of the Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft
Georg von Giesche's Erben...." WAH papers. 21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum
To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped
CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones,
Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland
annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports,
in file box relating to Vesting Order Number 370. 22. George Walker was
a director of American Ship and Commerce from its organization through
1928. Consult "New York City Directory of Directors". "Harriman Fifteen
Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931," "op. cit." The report
lists 46,861 shares in the American Ship & Commerce Corp. See "Message
from Mr. Bullfin," August 30, 1934 (Harriman Fifteen section, WAH papers)
for the joint supervision of Bush and Walker, respectively director and
president of the corporation. 23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk,
Third Reich Press Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk's postwar
jail cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking power.
William L. Shirer, L., "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement
B", "op. cit.," p. 1688. 24. See "Elimination of German Resources for War,"
"op. cit.," pages 881-882 on Voegler. See Annual Report of the (Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft
(Hapag or Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors.
A copy is in the New York Public Library Annex at 11th Avenue, Manhattan.
25. "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression -- Supplement B," "op. cit.," pp. 1178,
1453-1454, 1597, 1599. See "Elimination of German Resources for War," "op.
cit.," pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger. 26. Annual Report
of Hamburg-Amerika, "op. cit." Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell
Harriman, November 14, 1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft
reply letter, December 9, 1932. In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to
the family's American affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of
which Allen Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was
the principal attorney. Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was
adviser to Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, and Baron Bruno's partner
Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman's co-director of the Bank of England throughout
Norman's career. Kurt von Schroeder was Hjalmar Schacht's delegate to the
Bank for International Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial
arrangements for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and
the Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the outbreak
of World War II. 27. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin,
"op. cit." 28. U.S. Senate "Nye Committee" hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp.
1197-1198, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated June
27, 1932 and January 9, 1933. 29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation
to Dr. Max Warburg, March 7, 1933. Max Warburg had brokered the sale of
Hamburg-Amerika to Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max's brothers controlled
the Kuhn Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had
staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union Pacific
Railroad. Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the
racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa and Eastern
Europe. He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for several decades and was
a top executive of Hitler's Reichsbank. The reader may consult David Farrer,
"The Warburgs: The Story of A Family" (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).
30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill [sic] Harriman,
c/o Messrs. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York,
N.Y., March 27, 1933. 31. This correspondence, and the joint statement
of the Jewish organizations, are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, "American
Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis" (New York: Ktav
Publishing House, 1982). 32. "Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities
and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities": Public Hearings
before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities,
United States House of Representatives, Seventy Third Congress, New York
City, July 9-12, 1934 -- Hearings No. 73-NY-7 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Govt.
Printing Office, 1934). See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John
Schroeder, Paul von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members.
See "New York Times," July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of Nazi Labor
Front at North German Lloyd, leading to Hamburg-Amerika after merger. 33.
American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph Brinckmann at
M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936. Rudolph Brinckmann to Averell Harriman at
59 Wall St., June 20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helferrich's
letter. Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinkmann c/o M.M. Warburg and Co, July 6,
1936, WAH papers. The file copy of this letter carries no signature, but
is presumably from Averell Harriman. 34. Office of Alien Property Custodian,
Vesting Order Number 126. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian,
executed August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc. 42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942, 10:55
A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (Number 176, Sept. 5, 1942.) July 18, 1942, Memorandum
To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped
CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones,
Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland
annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports,
in file box relating to Vesting Order Number 126. 35. "New York Times,"
May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement is a telegram which somehow
escaped the shredder. It is addressed to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht
at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: "Much disappointed
to have missed seeing you Tueday afternoon.... I hope to see you either
in Washington or New York before you sail. with my regards W.A. Harriman"
(WAH papers). 36. Dulles to Bush, letter and draft reply in WAH papers.
37. "New York Times," Jan. 19, 1938. Chapter 3 RACE HYGIENE: Three Bush
Family Alliances "The [government] must put the most modern medical means
in the service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and mentally
unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body
of their children.... The prevention of the faculty and opportunity to
procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over
a period of only 600 years, would ... free humanity from an immeasurable
misfortune." See #1 "The per capita income gap between the developed and
the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher
birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted babies
in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain
for millions of people -- how should we tackle these problems?.... It is
quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be to
curb the world's fertility." These two quotations are alike in their mock
show of concern for human suffering, and in their cynical remedy for it:
Big Brother must prevent the "unworthy" or "unwanted" people from living.
Let us now further inquire into the family background of our President,
so as to help illustrate how the second quoted author, "George Bush" Note
#1 came to share the outlook of the first, "Adolf Hitler". Note #2 We shall
examine here the alliance of the Bush family with three other families:
"Farish, Draper" and "Gray." The private associations among these families
have led to the President's relationship to his closest, most confidential
advisers. These alliances were forged in the earlier Hitler project and
its immediate aftermath. Understanding them will help us to explain George
Bush's obsession with the supposed overpopulation of the world's non-Anglo-Saxons,
and the dangerous means he has adopted to deal with this "problem." Bush
and Farish When George Bush was elected vice president in 1980, Texas mystery
man William Stamps Farish III took over management of all of George Bush's
personal wealth in a "blind trust." Known as one of the richest men in
Texas, Will Farish keeps his business affairs under the most intense secrecy.
Only the source of his immense wealth is known, not its employment. Note
#3 Will Farish has long been Bush's closest friend and confidante. He is
also the unique private host to Britain's Queen Elizabeth: Farish owns
and boards the studs which mate with the Queen's mares. That is her public
rationale when she comes to America and stays in Farish's house. It is
a vital link in the mind of our Anglophile President. President Bush can
count on Farish not to betray the violent secrets surrounding the Bush
family money. For Farish's own family fortune was made in the same Hitler
project, in a nightmarish partnership with George Bush's father. On March
25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced that
William Stamps Farish (grandfather of the President's money manager) had
pleaded "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis.
Farish was the principal manager of a worldwide cartel between Standard
Oil Co. of New Jersey and the I.G. Farben concern. The merged enterprise
had opened the Auschwitz slave labor camp on June 14, 1940, to produce
artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government supplied
political opponents and Jews as the slaves, who were worked to near death
and then murdered. Arnold disclosed that Standard Oil of New Jersey (later
known as Exxon), of which Farish was president and chief executive, had
agreed to stop hiding from the United States patents for artificial rubber
which the company had provided to the Nazis. Note #4 A Senate investigating
committee under Senator (later U.S. President) Harry Truman of Missouri
had called Arnold to testify at hearings on corporations' collaboration
with the Nazis. The Senators expressed outrage at the cynical way Farish
was continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that had begun back in
1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn't he know there
was a war on? The Justice Department laid before the committee a letter,
written to Standard president Farish by his vice president, shortly after
the beginning of World War II (September 1, 1939) in Europe. The letter
concerned a renewal of their earlier agreements with the Nazis: Report
on European Trip Oct. 12, 1939 Mr. W.S. Farish 30 Rockefeller Plaza Dear
Mr. Farish: ... I stayed in France until Sept. 17th.... In England I met
by appointment the Royal Dutch [Shell Oil Co.] gentlemen from Holland,
and ... a general agreement was reached on the necessary changes in our
relations with the I.G. [Farben], in view of the state of war.... [T]he
Royal Dutch Shell group is essentially British.... I also had several meetings
with ... the [British] Air Ministry.... I required help to obtain the necessary
permission to go to Holland.... After discussions with the [American] Ambassador
[Joseph Kennedy] .. the situation was cleared completely.... The gentlemen
in the Air Ministry ... very kindly offered to assist me [later] in reentering
England.... Pursuant to these arrangements, I was able to keep my appointments
in Holland [having flown there on a British Royal Air Force bomber], where
I had three days of discussion with the representatives of I.G. They delivered
to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents and "we did our best to
work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which could operate through
the term of the war, whether or not the U.S. came in...." [emphasis added]
Very truly yours, F[rank] A. Howard Note #5 Here are some cold realities
behind the tragedy of World War II, which help explain the Bush-Farish
family alliance -- andtheir peculiar closeness to the Queen of England:
Note #b|Shell Oil is principally owned by the British Royal family. Shell's
chairman, Sir Henri Deterding, helped sponsor Hitler's rise to power, Note
#6 by arrangement with the Royal Family's Bank of England Governor, Montagu
Norman. Their ally, Standard Oil, would take part in the Hitler project
right up to the bloody, gruesome end. Note #b|When grandfather Farish signed
the Justice Department's consent decree in March 1942, the government had
already started picking its way through the tangled web of world-monopoly
oil and chemical agreements between Standard Oil and the Nazis. Many patents
and other Nazi-owned aspects of the partnership had been seized by the
U.S. Alien Property Custodian. Uncle Sam would not seize Prescott Bush's
Union Banking Corporation for another seven months. The Bush-Farish axis
had begun back in 1929. In that year, the Harriman bank bought Dresser
Industries, supplier of oil-pipeline couplers to Standard and other companies.
Prescott Bush became a director and financial czar of Dresser, installing
his Yale classmate Neil Mallon as chairman. Note #7 George Bush would later
name one of his sons after the Dresser executive. William S. Farish was
the main organizer of the Humble Oil Co. of Texas, which Farish merged
into the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Farish built up the Humble-Standard
empire of pipelines and refineries in Texas. Note #8 The stock market crashed
just after the Bush family got into the oil business. The world financial
crisis led to the merger of the Walker-Harriman bank with Brown Brothers
in 1931. Former Brown partner Montagu Norman and his protege Hjalmar Schacht,
who was to become Hitler's economics minister, paid frantic visits to New
York that year and the next, preparing the new Hitler regime for Germany.
The Congress on Eugenics The most important American political event in
those preparations for Hitler was the infamous Third International Congress
on Eugenics, held at New York's American Museum of Natural History August
21-23, 1932, supervised by the International Federation of Eugenics Societies.
Note #9 This meeting took up the stubborn persistence of African-Americans
and other allegedly "inferior" and "socially inadequate" groups in reproducing,
expanding their numbers, and "amalgamating" with others. It was recommended
that these "dangers" to the "better" ethnic groups and to the "well-born,"
could be dealt with by sterilization or "cutting off the bad stock" of
the "unfit." Italy's fascist government sent an official representative.
Averell Harriman's sister Mary, director of "entertainment" for the Congress,
lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her state supplied the speaker
on "racial purity," W.A. Plecker, Virginia commissioner of vital statistics.
Plecker reportedly held the delegates spellbound with his account of the
struggle to stop race-mixing and interracial sex in Virginia. The Congress
proceedings were dedicated to Averell Harriman's mother; she had paid for
the founding of the race-science movement in America back in 1910, building
the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of the Galton National Laboratory
in London. She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races
by old George Herbert Walker -- they shared with the Bushes and the Farishes
a fascination with "breeding thoroughbreds" among horses and humans. Note
#1 Note #0 Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush Hamburg-Amerika
Line to transport Nazi ideologues from Germany to New York for this meeting.
Note #1 Note #1 The most famous among those transported was Dr. Ernst Rudin,
psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography
in Berlin, where the Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Rudin to occupy an
entire floor with his eugenics "research." Dr. Rudin had addressed the
International Federation's 1928 Munich meeting, speaking on "Mental Aberration
and Race Hygiene," while others (Germans and Americans) spoke on race-mixing
and sterilization of the unfit. Rudin had led the German delegation to
the 1930 Mental Hygiene Congress in Washington, D.C. At the Harrimans'
1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Rudin was unanimously elected President
of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. This was recognition
of Rudin as founder of the German Society for Race Hygiene, with his co-founder,
Eugenics Federation vice president Alfred Ploetz. As depression-maddened
financiers schemed in Berlin and New York, Rudin was now official leader
of the world eugenics movement. Components of his movement included groups
with overlapping leadership, dedicated to: Note #b|sterilization of mental
patients ("mental hygiene societies"); Note #b|execution of the insane,
criminals and the terminally ill ("euthanasia societies"); and Note #b|eugenical
race-purification by prevention of births to parents from inferior blood
stocks ("birth control societies"). Before the Auschwitz death camp became
a household word, these British-American-European groups called openly
for the elimination of the "unfit" by means including force and violence.
Note #1 Note #2 Ten months later, in June 1933, Hitler's interior minister
Wilhelm Frick spoke to a eugenics meeting in the new Third Reich. Frick
called the Germans a "degenerate" race, denouncing one-fifth of Germany's
parents for producing "feeble-minded" and "defective" children. The following
month, on a commission by Frick, Dr. Ernst Rudin wrote the "Law for the
Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity," the sterilization law
modeled on previous U.S. statutes in Virginia and other states. Special
courts were soon established for the sterilization of German mental patients,
the blind, the deaf, and alcoholics. A quarter million people in these
categories were sterilized. Rudin, Ploetz, and their colleagues trained
a whole generation of physicians and psychiatrists -- as sterilizers and
as killers. When the war started, the eugenicists, doctors, and psychiatrists
staffed the new "T4" agency, which planned and supervised the mass killings:
first at "euthanasia centers," where the same categories which had first
been subject to sterilization were now to be murdered, their brains sent
in lots of 200 to experimental psychiatrists; then at slave camps such
as Auschwitz; and finally, for Jews and other race victims, at straight
extermination camps in Poland, such as Treblinka and Belsen. Note #1 Note
#3 In 1933, as what Hitler called his "New Order" appeared, John D. Rockefeller,
Jr. appointed William S. Farish the chairman of Standard Oil Co. of New
Jersey (in 1937 he was made president and chief executive). Farish moved
his offices to Rockefeller Center, New York, where he spent a good deal
of time with Hermann Schmitz, chairman of I.G. Farben; his company paid
a publicity man, Ivy Lee, to write pro-I.G. Farben and pro-Nazi propaganda
and get it into the U.S. press. Now that he was outside of Texas, Farish
found himself in the shipping business -- like the Bush family. He hired
Nazi German crews for Standard Oil tankers. And he hired "Emil Helfferich,"
chairman of the Walker/Bush/Harriman Hamburg-Amerika Line, as chairman
also of the Standard Oil Company subsidiary in Germany. Karl Lindemann,
board member of Hamburg-Amerika, also became a top Farish-Standard executive
in Germany. Note #1 Note #4 This interlock between their Nazi German operations
put Farish together with Prescott Bush in a small, select group of men
operating from abroad through Hitler's "revolution," and calculating that
they would never be punished. In 1939, Farish's daughter Martha married
Averell Harriman's nephew, Edward Harriman Gerry, and Farish in-laws became
Prescott Bush's partners at 59 Broadway. Note #1 Note #5 Both Emil Helfferich
and Karl Lindemann were authorized to write checks to Heinrich Himmler,
chief of the Nazi SS, on a special Standard Oil account. This account was
managed by the German-British-American banker, Kurt von Schroeder. According
to U.S. intelligence d ocuments reviewed by author Anthony Sutton, Helfferich
continued his payments to the SS into 1944, when the SS was supervising
the mass murder at the Standard-I.G. Farben Auschwitz and other death camps.
Helfferich told Allied interrogators after the war that these were not
his personal contributions -- they were corporate Standard Oil funds. Note
#1 Note #6 After pleading "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy
with the Nazis, William Stamps Farish was fined $5,000. (Similar fines
were levied against Standard Oil -- $5,000 each for the parent company
and for several subsidiaries.) This of course did not interfere with the
millions of dollars that Farish had acquired in conjunction with Hitler's
New Order, as a large stockholder, chairman, and president of Standard
Oil. All the government sought was the use of patents which his company
had given to the Nazis -- the Auschwitz patents -- but had withheld from
the U.S. military and industry. But a war was on, and if young men were
to be asked to die fighting Hitler .. something more was needed. Farish
was hauled before the Senate committee investigating the national defense
program. The committee chairman, Senator Harry Truman, told newsmen before
Farish testified: "I think this approaches treason." Note #1 Note #7 Farish
began breaking apart at these hearings. He shouted his "indignation" at
the senators, and claimed he was not "disloyal." After the March-April
hearings ended, more dirt came gushing out of the Justice Department and
the Congress on Farish and Standard Oil. Farish had deceived the U.S. Navy
to prevent the Navy from acquiring certain patents, while supplying them
to the Nazi war machine; meanwhile, he was supplying gasoline and tetraethyl
lead to Germany's submarines and air force. Communications between Standard
and I.G. Farben from the outbreak of World War II were released to the
Senate, showing that Farish's organization had arranged to deceive the
U.S. government into passing over Nazi-owned assets: They would nominally
buy I.G.'s share in certain patents because "in the event of war between
ourselves and Germany ... it would certainly be very undesireable to have
this 20 percent Standard-I.G. pass to an alien property custodian of the
U.S. who might sell it to an unfriendly interest." Note #1 Note #8 John
D. Rockefeller, Jr. (father of David, Nelson, and John D. Rockefeller III),
the controlling owner of Standard Oil, told the Roosevelt administration
that he knew nothing of the day-to-day affairs of his company, that all
these matters were handled by Farish and other executives. Note #1 Note
#9 In August, Farish was brought back for more testimony. He was now frequently
accused of lying. Farish was crushed under the intense, public grilling;
he became morose, ashen. While Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the
government seized his Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had
been nailed. He collapsed and died of a heart attack on November 29, 1942.
The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William Stamps Farish,
Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge
that his father was fueling the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training
accident in Texas six months later. Note #2 Note #0 With this double death,
the fortune comprising much of Standard Oil's profits from Texas and Nazi
Germany was now to be settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William
("Will") Stamps Farish III. Will Farish grew up a recluse, the most secretive
multimillionaire in Texas, with investments of "that money" in a multitude
of foreign countries, and a host of exotic contacts overlapping the intelligence
and financial worlds -- particularly in Britain. The Bush-Farish axis started
George Bush's career. After his 1948 graduation from Yale (and the Skull
and Bones secret society), George Bush flew down to Texas on a corporate
jet and was employed by his father's Dresser Industries. In a couple of
years he got help from his uncle, George Walker, Jr., and Farish's British
banker friends, to set him up in the oil property speculation business.
Soon thereafter, George Bush founded the Zapata Oil Company, which put
oil drilling rigs into certain locations of great strategic interest to
the Anglo-American intelligence community. Twenty-five-year-old Will Farish
was personal aide to Zapata chairman George Bush in Bush's unsuccessful
1964 campaign for Senate. Farish used "that Auschwitz money" to back George
Bush financially, investing in Zapata. When Bush was elected to Congress
in 1966, Farish joined the Zapata board. Note #2 Note #1 When George Bush
became U.S. vice president in 1980, the Farish and Bush family fortunes
were again completely, secretly commingled. As we shall see, the old projects
were now being revived on a breathtaking scale. Bush and Draper Twenty
years before he was U.S. President, George Bush brought two "race-science"
professors in front of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and
Population. As chairman of the Task Force, then-Congressman Bush invited
Professors William Shockley and Arthur Jensen to explain to the committee
how allegedly runaway birth-rates for African-Americans were "down-breeding"
the American population. Afterwards, Bush personally summed up for the
Congress the testimony his black-inferiority advocates had given to the
Task Force. Note #2 Note #2 George Bush held his hearings on the threat
posed by black babies on August 5, 1969, while much of the world was in
a better frame of mind -- celebrating mankind's progress from the first
moon landing 16 days earlier. Bush's obsessive thinking on this subject
was guided by his family's friend, Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., the founder
and chairman of the Population Crisis Committee, and vice chairman of the
Planned Parenthood Federation. Draper had long been steering U.S. public
discussion about the so-called "population bomb" in the non-white areas
of the world. If Congressman Bush had explained to his colleagues "how
his family had come to know General Draper," they would perhaps have felt
some alarm, or even panic, and paid more healthy attention to Bush's presentation.
Unfortunately, the Draper-Bush population doctrine is now official U.S.
foreign policy. William H. Draper, Jr. had joined the Bush team in 1927,
when he was hired by Dillon Read & Co., New York investment bankers.
Draper was put into a new job slot at the firm: handling the Thyssen account.
We recall that in 1924, Fritz Thyssen set up his Union Banking Corporation
in George Herbert Walker's bank at 39 Broadway, Manhattan. Dillon Read
& Co.'s boss, Clarence Dillon, had begun working with Fritz Thyssen
some time after Averell Harriman first met with Thyssen -- at about the
time Thyssen began financing Adolf Hitler's political career. In January
1926, Dillon Read created the "German Credit and Investment Corporation"
in Newark, New Jersey and Berlin, Germany, as Thyssen's short-term banker.
That same year, Dillon Read created the "Vereinigte Stahlwerke" (German
Steel Trust), incorporating the Thyssen family interests under the direction
of New York and London finance. Note #2 Note #3 William H. Draper, Jr.
was made director, vice president, and assistant treasurer of the German
Credit and Investment Corp. His business was short-term loans and financial
management tricks for Thyssen and the German Steel Trust. Draper's clients
sponsored Hitler's terroristic takeover; his clients led the buildup of
the Nazi war industry; his clients made war against the United States.
The Nazis were Draper's direct partners in Berlin and New Jersey: Alexander
Kreuter, residing in Berlin, was president; Frederic Brandi, whose father
was a top coal executive in the German Steel Trust, moved to the United
States in 1926 and served as Draper's co-director in Newark. Draper's role
was crucial for Dillon Read & Co., for whom Draper was a partner and
eventually vice president. The German Credit and Investment Corp. (GCI)
was a "front" for Dillon Read: It had the same New Jersey address as U.S.
& International Securities Corp. (USIS), and the same man served as
treasu rer of both firms. Note #2 Note #4 Clarence Dillon and his son C.
Douglas Dillon were directors of USIS, which was spotlighted when Clarence
Dillon was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee's famous "Pecora"
hearings in 1933. USIS was shown to be one of the great speculative pyramid
schemes which had swindled stockholders of hundreds of millions of dollars.
These investment policies had rotted the U.S. economy to the core, and
led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. But William H. Draper, Jr.'s
GCI "front" was not "apparently" affiliated with the USIS "front" or with
Dillon, and the GCI escaped the congressmen's limited scrutiny. This oversight
was to prove most unfortunate, particularly to the 50 million people who
subsequently died in World War II. Dillon Read hired public relations man
Ivy Lee to prepare their executives for their testimony and to confuse
and further baffle the congressmen. Note #2 Note #5 Lee apparently took
enough time out from his duties as image-maker for William S. Farish and
the Nazi I.G. Farben Co.; he managed the congressional thinking so that
the congressmen did not disturb the Draper operation in Germany -- and
did not meddle with Thyssen, or interfere with Hitler's U.S. moneymen.
Thus, in 1932, Willam H. Draper, Jr. was free to finance the International
Eugenics Congress as a "Supporting Member." Note #2 Note #6 Was he using
his own income as a Thyssen trust banker? Or did the funds come from Dillon
Read corporate accounts, perhaps to be written off income tax as "expenses
for German project: race purification"? Draper helped select Ernst Rudin
as chief of the world eugenics movement, who used his office to promote
what he called Adolf Hitler's "holy, national and international racial
hygienic mission." Note #2 Note #7 W.S. Farish was publicly exposed in
1942, humiliated and destroyed. Just before Farish died, Prescott Bush's
Nazi banking office was quietly seized and shut down. But Prescott's close
friend and partner in the Thyssen-Hitler business, William H. Draper, Jr.,
"neither died nor moved out of German affairs." Draper listed himself as
a director of the German Credit and Investment Corp. through 1942, and
the firm was not liquidated until November 1943. Note #2 Note #8 But a
war was on. Draper, a colonel from previous military service, went off
to the Pacific theater and became a general. General Draper apparently
had a hobby: magic -- illusions, sleight of hand, etc. -- and he was a
member of the Society of American Magicians. This is not irrelevant to
his subsequent career. The Nazi regime surrendered in May 1945. In July
1945, General Draper was called to Europe by the American military government
authorities in Germany. Draper was appointed head of the Economics Division
of the U.S. Control Commission. He was assigned to take apart the Nazi
corporate cartels. There is an astonishing but perfectly logical rationale
to this -- Draper knew a lot about the subject! General Draper, who had
spent about 15 years financing and managing the dirtiest of the Nazi enterprises,
was now authorized to decide "who was exposed, who lost and who kept his
business, and in practical effect, who was prosecuted for war crimes."
Note #2 Note #9 (Draper was not unique within the postwar occupation government.
Consider the case of John J. McCloy, U.S. Military Governor and High Commissioner
of Germany, 1949-1952. Under instructions from his Wall Street law firm,
McCloy had lived for a year in Italy, serving as an adviser to the fascist
government of Benito Mussolini. An intimate collaborator of the Harriman/Bush
bank, McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the 1936 Olympic games in
Berlin, at the invitation of Nazi chieftains Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering.)
Note #3 Note #0 William H. Draper, Jr., as a "conservative," was paired
with the "liberal" U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in a vicious
game. Morgenthau demanded that Germany be utterly destroyed as a nation,
that its industry be dismantled and it be reduced to a purely rural country.
As the economic boss in 1945 and 1946, Draper "protected" Germany from
the Morgenthau Plan ... but at a price. Draper and his colleagues demanded
that Germany and the world accept the "collective guilt of the German people"
as "the "explanation for the rise of Hitler's New Order, and the Nazi war
crimes. This, of course, was rather convenient for General Draper himself,
as it was for the Bush family. It is still convenient decades later, allowing
Prescott's son, President Bush, to lecture Germany on the danger of Hitlerism.
Germans are too slow, it seems, to accept his New World Order. After several
years of government service (often working directly for Averell Harriman
in the North Atlantic Alliance), Draper was appointed in 1958 chairman
of a committee which was to advise President Dwight Eisenhower on the proper
course for U.S. military aid to other countries. At that time, Prescott
Bush was a U.S. senator from Connecticut, a confidential friend and golf
partner with National Security Director Gordon Gray, and an important golf
partner with Dwight Eisenhower as well. Prescott's old lawyer from the
Nazi days, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State, and his brother
Allen Dulles, formerly of the Schroder bank, was head of the CIA. This
friendly environment emboldened our General Draper to pull off a stunt
with his military aid advisery committee. He changed the subject under
study. The following year, the Draper committee recommended that the U.S.
government react to the supposed threat of the "population explosion" by
formulating plans to depopulate the poorer countries. The growth of the
world's non-white population, he proposed, should be regarded as dangerous
to the national security of the United States! Note #3 Note #1 President
Eisenhower rejected the recommendation. But in the next decade, General
Draper founded the "Population Crisis Committee" and the "Draper Fund,"
joining with the Rockefeller and DuPont families to promote eugenics as
"population control." The administration of President Lyndon Johnson, advised
by Draper on the subject, began financing birth control in the tropical
countries through the Agency for International Development. General William
Draper was George Bush's guru on the population question. Note #3 Note
#2 But there was also Draper's money -- from that uniquely horrible source
-- and Draper's connections on Wall Street and abroad. Draper's son and
heir, William H. Draper III, was co-chairman for finance (chief of fundraising)
of the Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980. With
George Bush in the White House, the younger Draper heads up the depopulation
activities of the United Nations throughout the world. Draper was vice
president of Dillon Read until 1953. During the 1950s and 1960s, the chief
executive there was Frederic Brandi, the German who was Draper's co-director
for the Nazi investments and his personal contact man with the Nazi Steel
Trust. Nicholas Brady was Brandi's partner from 1954, and replaced him
as the firm's chief executive in 1971. Nicholas Brady, who knows where
all the bodies are buried, was chairman of his friend George Bush's 1980
election campaign in New Jersey, and has been United States Treasury Secretary
throughout Bush's presidency. Note #3 Note #3 Bush and Grey The U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID) says that surgical sterilization
is the Bush administration's "first choice" method of population reduction
in the Third World. Note #3 Note #4 The United Nations Population Fund
claims that 37 percent of contraception users in Ibero-America and the
Caribbean have already been surgically sterilized. In a 1991 report, William
H. Draper III's U.N. agency asserts that 254 million couples will be surgically
sterilized over the course of the 1990s; and that if present trends continue,
80 percent of the women in Puerto Rico and Panama will be surgically sterilized.
Note #3 Note #5 The U.S. government pays directly for these sterilizations.
Mexico is first among targeted nations, on a list which was drawn up in
July 1991, at a USAID str ategy session. India and Brazil are second and
third priorities, respectively. On contract with the Bush administration,
U.S. personnel are working from bases in Mexico to perform surgery on millions
of Mexican men and women. The acknowledged strategy in this program is
to sterilize those young adults who have not already completed their families.
George Bush has a rather deep-seated personal feeling about this project,
in particular as it pits him against Pope John Paul II in Catholic countries
such as Mexico. (See Chapter 4 below, on the origin of a Bush-family grudge
in this regard.) The spending for birth control in the non-white countries
is one of the few items that is headed upwards in the Bush administration
budget. As its 1992 budget was being set, USAID said its Population Account
would receive $300 million, a 20 percent increase over the previous year.
Within this project, a significant sum is spent on political and psychological
manipulations of target nations, and rather blatant subversion of their
religions and governments. Note #3 Note #6 These activities might be expected
to cause serious objections from the victimized nationalities, or from
U.S. taxpayers, especially if the program is somehow given widespread publicity.
Quite aside from moral considerations, "legal" questions would naturally
arise, which could be summed up: "How does George Bush think he can get
away with this?" In this matter the President has expert advice. Mr. (Clayland)
Boyden Gray has been counsel to George Bush since the 1980 election. As
chief legal officer in the White House, Boyden Gray can walk the President
through the dangers and complexities of waging such unusual warfare against
Third World populations. Gray knows how these things are done. When Boyden
Gray was four and five years old, his father organized the pilot project
for the present worldwide sterilization program, from the Gray family household
in North Carolina. It started in 1946. The eugenics movement was looking
for a way to begin again in America. Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz
had just then seared the conscience of the world. The Sterilization League
of America, which had changed its name during the war to "Birthright, Inc.,"
wanted to start up again. First they had to overcome public nervousness
about crackpots proposing to eliminate "inferior" and "defective" people.
The League tried to surface in Iowa, but had to back off because of negative
publicity: a little boy had recently been sterilized there and had died
from the operation. They decided on North Carolina, where the Gray family
could play the perfect host. Note #3 Note #7 Through British imperial contacts,
Boyden Gray's grandfather Bowman Gray had become principal owner of the
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Boyden's father, Gordon Gray, had recently founded
the Bowman Gray (memorial) Medical School in Winston-Salem, using his inherited
cigarette stock shares. The medical school was already a eugenics center.
As the experiment began, Gordon Gray's great aunt, Alice Shelton Gray,
who had raised him from childhood, was living in his household. Aunt Alice
had founded the "Human Betterment League," the North Carolina branch of
the national eugenical sterilization movement. Aunt Alice was the official
supervisor of the 1946-47 experiment. Working under Miss Gray was Dr. Claude
Nash Herndon, whom Gordon Gray had made assistant professor of "medical
genetics" at Bowman Gray medical school. Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the
Proctor and Gamble soap fortune, was the sterilizers' national field operations
chief. The experiment worked as follows. "All children enrolled in the
school district of Winston-Salem, N.C., were given a special "intelligence
test." Those children who scored below a certain arbitrary low mark were
then cut open and surgically sterilized." We quote now from the official
story of the project: "In Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County,
North Carolina, the [Sterilization League's] field committee had participated
in testing projects to identify school age children who should be considered
for sterilization. The project in Orange County was conducted by the University
of North Carolina and wasfinanced by a 'Mr. Hanes,' a friend of Clarence
Gamble and supporter of the field work project in North Carolina. The Winston-Salem
project was also financed by Hanes. ["Hanes" was underwear mogul James
Gordon Hanes, a trustee of Bowman Gray Medical School and treasurer of
Alice Gray's group].... "The medical school had a long history of interest
in eugenics and had compiled extensive histories of families carrying inheritable
disease. In 1946, Dr. C. Nash Herndon ... made a statement to the press
on the use of sterilization to prevent the spread of inheritable diseases....
"The first step after giving the mental tests to grade school children
was to interpret and make public the results. In Orange County the results
indicated that three percent of the school age children were either insane
or feebleminded.... [Then] the field committee hired a social worker to
review each case ... and to present any cases in which sterilization was
indicated to the State Eugenics Board, which under North Carolina law had
the authority to order sterilization...." Race science experimenter Dr.
Claude Nash Herndon provided more details in an interview in 1990: Note
#3 Note #8 "Alice Gray was the general supervisor of the project. She and
Hanes sent out letters promoting the program to the commissioners of all
100 counties in North Carolina.... What did I do? Nothing besides riding
herd on the whole thing! The social workers operated out of my office.
I was at the time also director of outpatient services at North Carolina
Baptist Hospital. We would see the [targeted] parents and children there....
I.Q. tests were run on all the children in the Winston-Salem public school
system. Only the ones who scored really low [were targeted for sterilization],
the real bottom of the barrel, like below 70. "Did we do sterilizations
on young children? Yes. This was a relatively minor operation.... It was
usually not until the child was eight or ten years old. For the boys, you
just make an incision and tie the tube.... We more often performed the
operation on girls than with boys. Of course, you have to cut open the
abdomen, but again, it is relatively minor." Dr. Herndon remarked coolly
that "we had a very good relationship with the press" for the project.
This is not surprising, since Gordon Gray owned the "Winston-Salem Journal,"
the "Twin City Sentinel," and radio station WSJS. In 1950 and 1951, John
Foster Dulles, then chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, led John D.
Rockefeller III on a series of world tours, focusing on the need to stop
the expansion of the non-white populations. In November 1952, Dulles and
Rockefeller set up the Population Council, with tens of millions of dollars
from the Rockefeller family. At that point, the American Eugenics Society,
still cautious from the recent bad publicity vis-a-vis Hitler, left its
old headquarters at Yale University. The Society moved its headquarters
into the office of the Population Council, and the two groups melded together.
The long-time secretary of the Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborne, became
the first president of the Population Council. The Gray family's child-sterilizer,
Dr. C. Nash Herndon, became president of the American Eugenics Society
in 1953, as its work expanded under Rockefeller patronage. Meanwhile, the
International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in London, in the
offices of the British Eugenics Society. The undead enemy from World War
II, renamed "Population Control," had now been revived. George Bush was
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972, when with prodding from
Bush and his friends, the United States Agency for International Development
first made an official contract with the old Sterilization League of America.
The league had changed its name twice again, and was now called the "Association
for Voluntary Surgical Contraception." The U.S. government began paying
the old fascist group to ster ilize non-whites in foreign countries. The
Gray family experiment had succeeded. In 1988, the U.S. Agency for International
Development signed its latest contract with the old Sterilization League
(a.k.a. "Association for Voluntary Sterilization"), committing the U.S.
government to spend $80 million over five years. Having gotten away with
sterilizing several hundred North Carolina school children, "not usually
less than eight to ten years old," the identical group is now authorized
by President Bush to do it to 58 countries in Asia, Africa, and Ibero-America.
The group modestly claims it has directly sterilized only 2 million people,
with 87 percent of the bill paid by U.S. taxpayers. Meanwhile, Dr. Clarence
Gamble, Boyden Gray's favorite soap manufacturer, formed his own "Pathfinder
Fund" as a split-off from the Sterlization League. Gamble's Pathfinder
Fund, with additional millions from USAID, concentrates on penetration
of local social groups in the non-white countries, to break down psychological
resistance to the surgical sterilization teams. Notes 1. Phyllis Tilson
Piotrow, "World Population Crisis: The United States Response" (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1973), "Forward" by George H.W. Bush, pp. vii-viii.
2. Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971),
p. 404. 3. "The Ten Richest People in Houston," in "Houston Post Magazine,"
March 11, 1984. "$150 milion to $250 million from ... inheritance, plus
subsequent investments ... chief heir to a family fortune in oil stock....
As to his financial interests, he is ... coy. He once described one of
his businesses as a company that 'invests in and oversees a lot of smaller
companies ... in a lot of foreign countries.'|" 4. The announcements were
made in testimony before a Special Committee of the U.S. Senate Investigating
the National Defense Program. The hearings on Standard Oil were held March
5, 24, 26, 27, 31, and April 1, 2, 3 and 7, 1942. Available on microfiche,
law section, Library of Congress. See also "New York Times," March 26 and
March 27, 1942, and "Washington Evening Star," March 26 and March 27, 1942.
5. "Ibid.," Exhibit No. 368, printed on pp. 4584-87 of the hearing record.
See also Charles Higham, "Trading With The Enemy" (New York: Delacorte
Press, 1983), p. 36. 6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin,
"op. cit.," chapter 2. Sir Henri Deterding was among the most notorious
pro-Nazis of the early war period. 7. See sections on Prescott Bush in
Darwin Payne, "Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc." (New York:
Distributed by Simon and Schuster, 1979) (published by the Dresser Company).
8. William Stamps Farish obituary, "New York Times," Nov. 30, 1942. 9.
"A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the Third International
Congress of Eugenics held at American Museum of Natural History New York,
August 21-23, 1932." (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company, September,
1934). The term "eugenics" is taken from the Greek to signify "good birth"
or "well-born," as in aristocrat. Its basic assumption is that those who
are not "well-born" should not exist. 10. See among other such letters,
George Herbert Walker, 39 Broadway, N.Y., to W. A. Harriman, London, February
21, 1925, in W.A. Harriman papers. 11. Averell Harriman to Dr. Charles
B. Davenport, President, The International Congress of Eugenics, Cold Spring
Harbor, L.I., N.Y.: January 21, 1932 Dear Dr. Davenport: I will be only
too glad to put you in touch with the Hamburg-American Line .. they may
be able to co-operate in making suggestions which will keep the expenses
to a minimum. I have referred your letter to Mr. Emil Lederer [of the Hamburg-Amerika
executive board in New York] with the request that he communicate with
you. Davenport to Mr. W.A. Harriman, 59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y. January
23, 1932 Dear Mr. Harriman: Thank you very much for your kind letter of
January 21st and the action you took which has resulted at once in a letter
from Mr. Emil Lederer. This letter will serve as a starting point for correspondence,
which I hope will enable more of our German colleagues to come to America
on the occasion of the congresses of eugenics and genetics, than otherwise.
Congressional hearings in 1934 established that Hamburg-Amerika routinely
provided free transatlantic passage for those carrying out Nazi propaganda
chores. See "Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation
of Certain Other Propaganda Activities," "op. cit.," chapter 2. 12. Alexis
Carrel, "Man the Unknown" (New York: Halcyon House, published by arrangement
with Harper & Brothers, 1935), pp. 318-19. The battle cry of the New
Order was sounded in 1935 with the publication of "Man the Unknown," by
Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute in New York. This Nobel
Prize-winner said "enormous sums are now required to maintain prisons and
insane asylums.... Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings?
This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the
criminals and the insane in a more economical manner? ... The community
must be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements.... Perhaps
prisons should be abolished.... The conditioning of the petty criminal
with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay
in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. [Criminals, including
those] who have ... misled the public on important matters, should be humanely
and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied
with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied
to the insane, guilty of criminal acts." Carrel claimed to have transplanted
the head of a dog to another dog and kept it alive for quite some time.
13. Bernhard Schreiber, "The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to the
World," France: La Hay-Mureaux, ca. 1975), English language edition supplied
by H. & P. Tadeusz, 369 Edgewere Road, London W2. A copy of this book
is now held by Union College Library, Syracuse, N.Y. 14. Higham, "op. cit.,"
p. 35. 15. Engagement announced Feb. 10, 1939, "New York Times," p. 20.
See also "Directory of Directors" for New York City, 1930s and 1940s. 16.
Higham, "op. cit.," pp. 20, 22 and other references to Schroeder and Lindemann.
Anthony Sutton, "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler" (Seal Beach: '76 Press,
1976). Sutton is also a good source on the Harrimans. 17. "Washington Evening
Star," March 27, 1942, p. 1. 18. Higham, "op. cit." p. 50. 19. "Ibid.,"
p. 48. 20. "Washington Post," April 29, 1990, p. F4. Higham, "op. cit.,"
pp. 52-53. 21. Zapata annual reports, 1950s-1960s, Library of Congress
microforms. 22. See "Congressional Record" for Bush speech in the House
of Representatives, Sept. 4, 1969. Bush inserted in the record the testimony
given before his Task Force on August 5, 1969. 23. Sobel, "op. cit.," pp.
92-111. See also Boyle, "op. cit.," chapter 1, concerning the Morgan-led
Dawes Committee of Germany's foreign creditors. Like Harriman, Dillon used
the Schroeder and Warburg banks to strike his German bargains. All Dillon
Read & Co. affairs in Germany were supervised by J.P. Morgan &
Co. partner Thomas Lamont, and were authorized by Bank of England Governor
Montagu Norman. 24. See "Poor's Register of Directors and Executives,"
(New York: Poor's Publishing Company, late 1920s, '30s and '40s). See also
"Standard Corporation Records" (New York: Standard & Poor), 1935 edition
pp. 2571-25, and 1938 edition pp. 7436-38, for description and history
of the German Credit and Investment Corporation. For Frederic Brandi, See
also Sobel, "op. cit.," p. 213-214. 25. Sobel, "op. cit.," pp. 180, 186.
Ivy Lee had been hired to improve the Rockefeller family image, particularly
difficult after their 1914 massacre of striking miners and pregnant women
in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee got old John D. Rockefeller to pass out dimes
to poor people lined up at his porch. 26. Third International Eugenics
Congress papers "op. cit.," footnote 7, p. 512, "Supporting Members." 27.
Schreiber, "op. cit.," p. 160. The Third Int. Eugenics Congress papers,
p. 526, lists the officers of the International Federation as of publication
date in September, 1934. Rudin is listed as president -- a year after he
has written the sterilizationlaw for Hitler. 28. "Directory of Directors
for New York City," 1942. Interview with Nancy Bowles, librarian of Dillon
Read & Co. 29. Higham, "op. cit.," p. 129, 212-15, 219-23. 30. Walter
Isaacson and Evan Thomas, "The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They
Made -- Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy" (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1986), pp. 122, 305. 31. Piotrow, "op. cit.," pp. 36-42.
32. "Ibid.," p. viii. "As chairman of the special Republican Task Force
on Population and Earth Resources, I was impressed by the arguments of
William H. Draper, Jr.... General Draper continues to lead through his
tireless work for the U.N. Population Fund." 33. Sobel, "op. cit.," pp.
298, 354. 34. Interview July 16, 1991, with Joanne Grossi, an official
with the USAID's Population Office. 35. Dr. Nafis Sadik, "The State of
World Population," 1991, New York, United Nations Population Fund. 36.
See "User's Guide to the Office of Population," 1991, Office of Population,
Bureau for Science and Technology, United States Agency for International
Development. Available from S&T/POP, Room 811 SA-18, USAID, Washington
D.C. 20523-1819. 37. "History of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization
[formerly Sterilization League of America], 1935-64," thesis submitted
to the faculty of the graduate school of the University of Minnesota by
William Ray Van Essendelft, March, 1978, available on microfilm, Library
of Congress. This is the official history, written with full cooperation
of the Sterilization League. 38. Interview with Dr. C. Nash Herndon, June
20, 1990. CHAPTER 4: "THE CENTER OF POWER IS IN WASHINGTON" Brown Brothers
Harriman & Co. 59 Wall Street, New York Cable Address "Shipley-New
York" Business Established 1818 Private Bankers September 5, 1944 The Honorable
W. A. Harriman American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. American Embassy, Moscow,
Russia Dear Averell: Thinking that possibly Bullitt's article in the recent
issue of "LIFE" may not have come to your attention, I have clipped it
and am sending it to you, feeling that it will interest you. At present
writing all is well here. With warm regards, I am, Sincerely yours, Pres
'At present writing all is well here." Thus the ambassador to Russia was
reassured by the managing partner of his firm, Prescott Bush. Only 22 and
a half months before, the U.S. government had seized and shut down the
Union Banking Corporation, which had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany
by Bush and the Harrimans. But that was behind them now, and they were
safe. There would be no publicity on the Harriman-Bush sponsorship of Hitlerism.
Prescott's son George, the future U.S. President, was also safe. Three
days before this note to Moscow was written, George Bush had parachuted
from a Navy bomber airplane over the Pacific Ocean, killing his two crew
members when the unpiloted plane crashed. Five months later, in February
1945, Prescott's boss Averell Harriman escorted President Franklin Roosevelt
to the fateful summit meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta.
In April Roosevelt died. The agreement reached at Yalta, calling for free
elections in Poland once the war ended, was never enforced. Over the next
eight years (1945 through 1952), Prescott Bush was Harriman's anchor in
the New York financial world. The increasingly powerful Mr. Harriman and
his allies gave Eastern Europe over to Soviet dictatorship. A Cold War
was then undertaken, to "counterbalance" the Soviets. This British-inspired
strategy paid several nightmarish dividends. Eastern Europe was to remain
enslaved. Germany was "permanently" divided. Anglo-American power was jointly
exercised over the non-Soviet "Free World." The confidential functions
of the British and American governments were merged. The Harriman clique
took possession of the U.S. national security apparatus, and in doing so,
they opened the gate and let the Bush family in. - * * * - Following his
services to Germany's Nazi Party, Averell Harriman spent several years
mediating between the British, American, and Soviet governments inthe war
to stop the Nazis. He was ambassador to Moscow from 1943 to 1946. President
Harry Truman, whom Harriman and his friends held in amused contempt, appointed
Harriman U.S. ambassador to Britain in 1946. Harriman was at lunch with
former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill one day in 1946, when Truman
telephoned. Harriman asked Churchill if he should accept Truman's offer
to come back to the U.S. as Secretary of Commerce. According to Harriman's
account, Churchill told him: "Absolutely. The center of power is in Washington."
Note #1 Jupiter Island The reorganization of the American government after
World War II -- the creation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency along
British lines, for example -- had devastating consequences. We are concerned
here with only certain aspects of that overall transformation, those matters
of policy and family which gave shape to the life and mind of George Bush,
and gave him access to power. It was in these postwar years that George
Bush attended Yale University, and was inducted into the Skull and Bones
society. The Bush family's home at that time was in Greenwich, Connecticut.
But it was just then that George's parents, Prescott and Dorothy Walker
Bush, were wintering in a peculiar spot in Florida, a place that is excluded
from mention in literature originating from Bush circles. Certain national
news accounts early in 1991 featured the observations on President Bush's
childhood by his elderly mother Dorothy. She was said to be a resident
of Hobe Sound, Florida. More precisely, the President's mother lived in
a hyper-security arrangement created a half-century earlier by Averell
Harriman, adjacent to Hobe Sound. Its correct name is Jupiter Island. During
his political career, George Bush has claimed many different "home" states,
including Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. It has not been
expedient for him to claim Florida, though that state has a vital link
to his role in the world, as we shall see. And George Bush's home base
in Florida, throughout his adult life, has been Jupiter Island. The unique,
bizarre setup on Jupiter Island began in 1931, following the merger of
W.A. Harriman and Co. with the British-American firm Brown Brothers. The
reader will recall Mr. Samuel Pryor, the "Merchant of Death." A partner
with the Harrimans, Prescott Bush, George Walker, and Nazi boss Fritz Thyssen
in banking and shipping enterprises, Sam Pryor remained executive committee
chairman of Remington Arms. In this period, the Nazi private armies (SA
and SS) were supplied with American arms -- most likely by Pryor and his
company -- as they moved to overthrow the German republic. Such gun-running
as an instrument of national policy would later become notorious in the
"Iran-Contra" affair. Sam Pryor's daughter Permelia married Yale graduate
Joseph V. Reed on the last day of 1927. Reed immediately went to work for
Prescott Bush and George Walker, as an apprentice at W.A. Harriman and
Co. During World War II, Joseph V. Reed had served in the "special services"
section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. A specialist in security, codes
and espionage, Reed later wrote a book entitled "Fun with Cryptograms".
Note #2 Sam Pryor had had property around Hobe Sound, Florida, for some
time. In 1931, Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed bought the entirety of Jupiter
Island. This is a typically beautiful Atlantic coast "barrier island,"
a half-mile wide and nine miles long. The middle of Jupiter Island lies
just off Hobe Sound. The south bridge connects the island with the town
of Jupiter, to the north of Palm Beach. It is about 90 minutes by auto
from Miami -- today, a few minutes by helicopter. Early in 1991, a newspaper
reporter asked a friend of the Bush family about security arrangements
on Jupiter Island. He responded, "If you called up the White House, would
they tell you h ow many security people they had? It's not that Jupiter
Island is the White House, although he [George Bush] does come down frequently."
But for several decades before Bush was President, Jupiter Island had an
ord inance requiring the registration and fingerprinting of all housekeepers,
gardeners, and other non-residents working on the island. The Jupiter Island
police department says that there are sensors in the two main roads that
can track every automobile on the island. If a car stops in the street,
the police will be there within one or two minutes. Surveillance is a duty
of all employees of the Town of Jupiter Island. News reporters are to be
prevented from visiting the island. Note #3 To create this astonishing
private club, Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed sold land only to those who
would fit in. Permelia Reed was still the grande dame of the island when
George Bush was inaugurated President in 1989. In recognition of the fact
that the Reeds know where "all" the bodies are buried, President Bush appointed
Permelia's son, Joseph V. Reed, Jr., chief of protocol for the U.S. State
Dept., in charge of private arrangements with foreign dignitaries. Averell
Harriman made Jupiter Island a staging ground for his 1940s takeover of
the U.S. national security apparatus. It was in that connection that the
island became possibly the most secretive private place in America. Let
us briefly survey the neighborhood, back then in 1946-48, to see some of
the uses various of the residents had for the Harriman clique. Residence
on Jupiter Island Note #b|Jupiter Islander "Robert A. Lovett," Note #4,
Prescott Bush's partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, had been Assistant
Secretary of War for Air from 1941 to 1945. Lovett was the leading American
advocate of the policy of terror-bombing of civilians. He organized the
Strategic Bombing Survey, carried out for the American and British governments
by the staff of the Prudential Insurance Company, guided by London's Tavistock
Psychiatric Clinic. In the postwar period, Prescott Bush was associated
with Prudential Insurance, one of Lovett's intelligence channels to the
British secret services. Prescott was listed by Prudential as a director
of the company for about two years in the early 1950s. Their Strategic
Bombing Survey failed to demonstrate any real military advantage accruing
from such outrages as the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. But the Harrimanites
nevertheless persisted in the advocacy of terror from the air. They glorified
this as "psychological warfare," a part of the utopian military doctrine
opposed to the views of military traditionalists such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Robert Lovett later advised President Lyndon Johnson to terror-bomb Vietnam.
President George Bush revived the doctrine with the bombing of civilian
areas in Panama, and the destruction of Baghdad. On October 22, 1945, Secretary
of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert
A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization
of U.S. intelligence activities. The existence of this committee was unknown
to the public until an official CIA history was released from secrecy in
1989. But the CIA's author (who was President Bush's prep school history
teacher; see chapter 5) gives no real details of the Lovett Committee's
functioning, claiming: "The record of the testimony of the Lovett Committee,
unfortunately, was not in the archives of the agency when this account
was written." Note #5 The CIA's self-history does inform us of the advice
that Lovett provided to the Truman cabinet, as the official War Department
intelligence proposal. Lovett decided that there should be a separate Central
Intelligence Agency. The new agency would "consult" with the armed forces,
but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage
and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget,
and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings.
Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy on November
14, 1945. He spoke highly of the FBI's work because it had "the best personality
file in the world." Lovett said the FBI was expert at producing false documents,
an art "which we developed so successfully during the war and at which
we became outstandingly adept." Lovett pressed for a virtual resumption
of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in a new CIA. U.S. military
traditionalists centered around Gen. Douglas MacArthur opposed Lovett's
proposal. The continuation of the OSS had been attacked at the end of the
war on the grounds that the OSS was entirely under British control, and
that it would constitute an American Gestapo. Note #6 But the CIA was established
in 1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter Island.
/ Note #b|"Charles Payson" and his wife, "Joan Whitney Payson," were extended
family members of Harriman's and business associates of the Bush family.
Joan's aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a relative of the Harrimans.
Gertrude's son, Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, long-time chairman
of Pan American Airways (Prescott was a Pan Am director), became assistant
secretary of the U.S. Air Force in 1947. Sonny's wife Marie had divorced
him and married Averell Harriman in 1930. Joan and Sonny's uncle, Air Marshal
Sir Thomas Elmhirst, was director of intelligence for the British Air Force
from 1945 to 1947. Joan's brother, John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, was to be
ambassador to Great Britain from 1955 to 1961 ... when it would be vital
for Prescott and George Bush to have such a friend. Joan's father, grandfather,
and uncle were members of the Skull and Bones secret society. Charles Payson
organized a uranium refinery in 1948. Later, he was chairman of Vitro Corporation,
makers of parts for submarine-launched ballistic missiles, equipment for
frequency surveillance and torpedo guidance, and other subsurface weaponry.
Naval warfare has long been a preoccupation of the British Empire. British
penetration of the U.S. Naval Intelligence service has been particularly
heavy since the tenure of Joan's Anglophile grandfather, William C. Whitney,
as secretary of the Navy for President Grover Cleveland. This traditional
covert British orientation in the U.S. Navy, Naval Intelligence and the
Navy's included service, the Marine Corps, forms a backdrop to the career
of George Bush -- and to the whole neighborhood on Jupiter Island. Naval
Intelligence maintained direct relations with gangster boss Meyer Lansky
for Anglo-American political operations in Cuba during World War II, well
before the establishment of the CIA. Lansky officially moved to Florida
in 1953. / Note #7 / Note #b|"George Herbert Walker, Jr." (Skull and Bones,
1927), was extremely close to his nephew George Bush, helping to sponsor
his entry into the oil business in the 1950s. "Uncle Herbie" was also a
partner of Joan Whitney Payson when they co-founded the New York Mets baseball
team in 1960. His son, G.H. Walker III, was a Yale classmate of "Nicholas
Brady" and Moreau D. Brown (Thatcher Brown's grandson), forming what was
called the "Yale Mafia" on Wall Street. / Note #b|"Walter S. Carpenter,
Jr." had been chairman of the finance committee of the Du Pont Corporation
(1930-40). In 1933, Carpenter oversaw Du Pont's purchase of Remington Arms
from Sam Pryor and the Rockefellers, and led Du Pont into partnership with
the Nazi I.G. Farben company for the manufacture of explosives. Carpenter
became Du Pont's president in 1940. His cartel with the Nazis was broken
up by the U.S. government. Nevertheless, Carpenter remained Du Pont's president,
as the company's technicians participated massively in the Manhattan Project
to produce the first atomic bomb. He was chairman of Du Pont from 1948
to 1962, retaining high-level access to U.S. strategic activities. Walter
Carpenter and Prescott Bush were fellow activists in the Mental Hygiene
Society. Originating at Yale University in 1908, the movement had been
organized into the World Federation of Mental Health by Montague Norman,
himself a frequen t mental patient, former Brown Brothers partner and Bank
of England Governor. Norman had appointed as the federation's chairman,
Brigadier John Rawlings Rees, director of the Tavistock Clinic, chief psychiatrist
and psychological warfare expert for the British intelligence services.
Prescott was a director of the society in Connecticut; Carpenter was a
director in Delaware. / Note #b|"Paul Mellon" was the leading heir to the
Mellon fortune, and a long-time neighbor of Averell Harriman's in Middleburg,
Virginia, as well as Jupiter Island, Florida. Paul's father, Andrew Mellon,
U.S. treasury secretary 1921-32, had approved the transactions of Harriman,
Pryor, and Bush with the Warburgs and the Nazis. Paul Mellon's son-in-law,
"David K.E. Bruce," worked in Prescott Bush's W.A. Harriman & Co. during
the late 1920s; was head of the London branch of U.S. intelligence during
World War II; and was Averell Harriman's Assistant Secretary of Commerce
in 1947-48. Mellon family money and participation would be instrumental
in many domestic U.S. projects of the new Central Intelligence Agency.
/ Note #b|"Carll Tucker" manufactured electronic guidance equipment for
the Navy. With the Mellons, Tucker was an owner of South American oil properties.
Mrs. Tucker was the great-aunt of "Nicholas Brady," later George Bush's
Iran-Contra partner and U.S. treasury secretary. Their son Carll Tucker,
Jr. (Skull and Bones, 1947), was among the 15 Bonesmen who selected George
Bush for induction in the class of 1948. / Note #b|"C. Douglas Dillon"
was the boss of William H. Draper, Jr. in the Draper-Prescott Bush-Fritz
Thyssen Nazi banking scheme of the 1930s and 40s. His father, Clarence
Dillon, created the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (Thyssen's German Steel Trust)
in 1926. C. Douglas Dillon made "Nicholas Brady" the chairman of the Dillon
Read firm in 1971 and himself continued as chairman of the Executive Committee.
C. Douglas Dillon would be a vital ally of his neighbor Prescott Bush during
the Eisenhower administration. / Note #b|"Publisher Nelson Doubleday" headed
his family's publishing firm, founded under the auspices of J.P. Morgan
and other British Empire representatives. When George Bush's "Uncle Herbie"
died, Doubleday took over as majority owner and chief executive of the
New York Mets baseball team. Some other specialized corporate owners had
their place in Harriman's strange club. / Note #b|"George W. Merck," chairman
of Merck & Co., drug and chemical manufacturers, was director of the
War Research Service: Merck was the official chief of all U.S. research
into biological warfare from 1942 until at least the end of World War II.
After 1944, Merck's organization was placed under the U.S. Chemical Warfare
Service. His family firm in Germany and the United States was famous for
its manufacture of morphine. / Note #b|"James H. McGraw, Jr.," chairman
of McGraw Hill Publishing Company, was a member of the advisory board to
the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service and a member of the Army Ordnance Association
Committee on Endowment. / Note #b|"Fred H. Haggerson," chairman of Union
Carbide Corp., produced munitions, chemicals, and firearms. / Note #b|"A.L.
Cole" was useful to the Jupiter Islanders as an executive of "Readers Digest."
In 1965, just after performing a rather dirty favor for George Bush [which
will be discussed in a coming chapter -- ed.], Cole became chairman of
the executive committee of the "Digest," the world's largest-circulation
periodical. >From the late 1940s, Jupiter Island has served as a center
for the direction of covert action by the U.S. government and, indeed,
for the covert management of the government. Jupiter Island will reappear
later on, in our account of George Bush in the Iran-Contra affair. ======
Target: Washington George Bush graduated from Yale in 1948. He soon entered
the family's Dresser oil supply concern in Texas. We shall now briefly
describe the forces that descended on Washington, D.C. during those years
when Bush, with the assistance of family and powerful friends, was becoming
"established in business on his own." >From 1948 to 1950, Prescott Bush's
boss Averell Harriman was U.S. "ambassador-at-large" to Europe. He was
a non-military "Theater Commander," the administrator of the multi-billion-dollar
Marshall Plan, participating in all military/strategic decision-making
by the Anglo-American alliance. The U.S. secretary of defense, James Forrestal,
had become a problem to the Harrimanites. Forrestal had long been an executive
at Dillon Read on Wall Street. But in recent years he had gone astray.
As secretary of the navy in 1944, Forrestal proposed the racial integration
of the Navy. As defense secretary, he pressed for integration in the armed
forces and this eventually became the U.S. policy. Forrestal opposed the
utopians' strategy of appeasement coupled with brinkmanship. He was simply
opposed to communism. On March 28, 1949, Forrestal was forced out of office
and flown on an Air Force plane to Florida. He was taken to "Hobe Sound"
(Jupiter Island), where Robert Lovett and an army psychiatrist dealt with
him. / Note #8 He was flown back to Washington, locked in Walter Reed Army
Hospital and given insulin shock treatments for alleged "mental exhaustion."
He was denied all visitors except his estranged wife and children -- his
son had been Averell Harriman's aide in Moscow. On May 22, Forrestal's
body was found, his bathrobe cord tied tightly around his neck, after he
had plunged from a sixteenth-story hospital window. The chief psychiatrist
called the death a suicide even before any investigation was started. The
results of the Army's inquest were kept secret. Forrestal's diaries were
published, 80 percent deleted, after a year of direct government censorship
and rewriting. - * * * - North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June
1950, after U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Harriman's very close
friend) publicly specified that Korea would not be defended. With a new
war on, Harriman came back to serve as President Truman's adviser, to "oversee
national security affairs." Harriman replaced Clark Clifford, who had been
special counsel to Truman. Clifford, however, remained close to Harriman
and his partners as they gained more and more power. Clifford later wrote
about his cordial relations with Prescott Bush: "Prescott Bush ... had
become one of my frequent golfing partners in the fifties, and I had both
liked and respected him.... Bush had a splendid singing voice, and particularly
loved quartet singing. In the fifties, he organized a quartet that included
my daughter Joyce.... They would sing in Washington, and, on occasion,
he invited the group to Hobe Sound in Florida to perform. His son [George],
though, had never struck me as a strong or forceful person. In 1988, he
presented himself successfully to the voters as an outsider -- no small
trick for a man whose roots wound through Connecticut, Yale, Texas oil,
the CIA, a patrician background, wealth, and the Vice Presidency." / Note
#9 With Forrestal out of the way, Averell Harriman and Dean Acheson drove
to Leesburg, Virginia, on July 1, 1950, to hire the British-backed U.S.
Gen. George C. Marshall as secretary of defense. At the same time, Prescott's
partner, Robert Lovett, himself became assistant secretary of defense.
Lovett, Marshall, Harriman, and Acheson went to work to unhorse Gen. Douglas
MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in Asia. MacArthur kept Wall Street's
intelligence agencies away from his command, and favored real independence
for the non-white nations. Lovett called for MacArthur's firing on March
23, 1951, citing MacArthur's insistence on defeating the Communist Chinese
invaders in Korea. MacArthur's famous message, that there was "no substitute
for victory," was read in Congress on April 5; MacArthur was fired on April
10, 1951. That September, Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary
of defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual Security
Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American military alliance.
By now, Brown Brothers Harriman was everything but commander-in-chief.
- * * * - These were, of course, exciting times for the Bush family, whose
wagon was hitched to the financial gods of Olympus -- to Jupiter, that
is. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. 59 Wall Street, New York 5, N.Y.
Business Established 1818 Cable Address "Shipley-NewYork" Private Bankers
April 2, 1951 The Honorable W.A. Harriman, The White House, Washington,
D.C. Dear Averell: I was sorry to miss you in Washington but appreciate
your cordial note. I shall hope for better luck another time. I hope you
had a good rest at Hobe Sound. With affectionate regard, I am, Sincerely
yours, Pres [signed] Prescott S. Bush A central focus of the Harriman security
regime in Washington (1950-53) was the organization of covert operations,
and "psychological warfare." Harriman, together with his lawyers and business
partners, Allen and John Foster Dulles, wanted the government's secret
services to conduct extensive propaganda campaigns and mass-psychology
experiments within the U.S.A., and paramilitary campaigns abroad. This
would supposedly ensure a stable world-wide environment favorable to Anglo-American
financial and political interests. The Harriman security regime created
the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director
of the PSB, Gordon Gray, is familiar to the reader as the sponsor of the
child sterilization experiments, carried out by the Harrimanite eugenics
movement in North Carolina following World War II. Gordon Gray was an avid
Anglophile, whose father had gotten controlling ownership of the R.J. Reynolds
Tobacco Company through alliance with the British Imperial tobacco cartel's
U.S. representatives, the Duke family of North Carolina. Gordon's brother,
R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray Jr., was also a naval intelligence officer,
known around Washington as the "founder of operational intelligence." Gordon
Gray became a close friend and political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's
son became for Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his
covert policy. But President Harry Truman, as malleable as he was, constituted
an obstacle to the covert warriors. An insular Missouri politician vaguely
favorable to the U.S. Constitution, he remained skeptical about secret
service activities that reminded him of the Nazi Gestapo. So, "covert operations"
could not fully take off without a change of the Washington regime. And
it was with the Republican Party that Prescott Bush was to get his turn.
Prescott Runs for Senate Prescott had made his first attempt to enter national
politics in 1950, as his partners took control of the levers of governmental
power. Remaining in charge of Brown Brothers Harriman, he ran against Connecticut's
William Benton for his seat in the U.S. Senate. (The race was actually
for a two-year unexpired term, left empty by the death of the previous
senator). In those days, Wisconsin's drunken Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
was making a circus-like crusade against communist influence in Washington.
McCarthy attacked liberals and leftists, State Department personnel, politicians,
and Hollywood figures. He generally left unscathed the Wall Street and
London strategists who donated Eastern Europe and China to communist dictatorship
-- like George Bush, their geopolitics was beyond left and right. Prescott
Bush had no public ties to the notorious Joe McCarthy, and appeared to
be neutral about his crusade. But the Wisconsin senator had his uses. Joe
McCarthy came into Connecticut three times that year to campaign for Bush
and against the Democrats. Bush himself made charges of "Korea, Communism
and Corruption" into a slick campaign phrase against Benton, which then
turned up as a national Republican slogan. The response was disappointing.
Only small crowds turned out to hear Joe McCarthy, and Benton was not hurt.
McCarthy's pro-Bush rally in New Haven, in a hall that seated 6,000, drew
only 376 people. Benton joked on the radio that "200 of them were my spies."
Prescott Bush resigned from the Yale Board of Fellows for his campaign,
and the board published a statement to the effect that the "Yale vote"
should support Bush -- despite the fact that Benton was a Yale man, and
in many ways identical in outlook to Bush. Yale's Whiffenpoof singers appeared
regularly for Prescott's campaign. None of this was particularly effective,
however, with the voting population. / Note #1 / Note #0 Then Papa Bush
ran into a completely unexpected problem. At that time, the old Harriman
eugenics movement was centered at Yale University. Prescott Bush was a
Yale trustee, and his former Brown Brothers Harriman partner, Lawrence
Tighe, was Yale's treasurer. In that connection, a slight glimmer of the
truth about the Bush-Harriman firm's Nazi activities now made its way into
the campaign. Not only was the American Eugenics Society itself headquartered
at Yale, but all parts of this undead fascist movement had a busy home
at Yale. The coercive psychiatry and sterilization advocates had made the
Yale/New Haven Hospital and Yale Medical School their laboratories for
hands-on practice in brain surgery and psychological experimentation. And
the Birth Control League was there, which had long trumpeted the need for
eugenical births -- fewer births for parents with "inferior" bloodlines.
Prescott's partner Tighe was a Connecticut director of the league, and
the Connecticut league's medical advisor was the eugenics advocate, Dr.
Winternitz of Yale Medical School. Now in 1950, people who knew something
about Prescott Bush knew that he had very unsavory roots in the eugenics
movement. There were then, just after the anti-Hitler war, few open advocates
of sterilization of "unfit" or "unnecessary" people. (That would be revived
later, with the help of General Draper and his friend George Bush.) But
the Birth Control League was public -- just about then it was changing
its name to the euphemistic "Planned Parenthood." Then, very late in the
1950 senatorial campaign, Prescott Bush was publicly exposed for being
an activist in that section of the old fascist eugenics movement. Prescott
Bush lost the election by about 1,000 out of 862,000 votes. He and his
family blamed the defeat on the expose. The defeat was burned into the
family's memory, leaving a bitterness and perhaps a desire for revenge.
In his foreword to a population control propaganda book, George Bush wrote
about that 1950 election: "My own first awareness of birth control as a
public policy issue came with a jolt in 1950 when my father was running
for United States Senate in Connecticut. Drew Pearson, on the Sunday before
Election day, 'revealed' that my father was involved with Planned Parenthod....
Many political observers felt a sufficient number of voters were swayed
by his alleged contacts with the birth controllers to cost him the election...."
/ Note #1 / Note #1 Prescott Bush gave a graphic description of these events
in his "oral history" interview at Columbia University: "In the 1950 campaign,
when I ran against Benton, the very last week, Drew Pearson, famous columnist,
was running a radio program at that time.... In this particular broadcast,
just at the end of our campaign [Pearson said]: "I predict that Benton
will retain his seat in the United States Senate, because it has just been
made known that Prescott Bush, his opponent, is president of the Birth
Control Society" or chairman, member of the board of directors, or something,
"of the Birth Control Society. In this country, and of course with Connecticut's
heavy Catholic population, and its laws against birth control ... this
is going to be too much for Bush to rise above. Benton will be elected.
I predict." The next Sunday, they handed out, at these Catholic Churches
in Waterbury and Torrington and Bridgeport, handbills, quoting Drew Pearson's
statement on the radio about Prescott Bush, you see -- I predict. Well,
my telephone started ringing that Sunday at home, and when I'd answer,
or Dotty [Prescott's wife, George's mother] would answer -- "Is this true,
what they say about Prescott Bush? This can't be true. Is it true?" She'd
say, "No, it isn't tru e." Of course, it wasn't true. But you never catch
up with a thing like this -- the election's just day after tomorrow, you
see? So there's no doubt, in the estimate of our political leaders, that
this one thing cost me many thousand votes -- whether it was 1, 3, 5 or
10 thousand we don't know, we can't possibly tell, but it was enough. To
have overcome that thousand vote, it would only have had to be 600 switch
[sic]. [Mrs. Bush then corrected the timing in Prescott Bush's recollections.]
"I'd forgotten the exact sequence, but that was it.... The state then --
and I think still is -- probably about 55 percent Catholic population,
with all the Italian derivation people [sic], and Polish is very heavy,
and the Catholic church is very dominant here, and the archbishop was death
on this birth control thing. They fought repeal every time it came up in
the legislature, and "we never did get rid of that prohibition until just
a year or two ago," as I recall it [emphasis added]. / Note #1 / Note #2
Prescott Bush was defeated, while the other Republican candidates fared
well in Connecticut. He attributed his loss to the Catholic Church. After
all, he had dependable friends in the news media. The "New York Times"
loved him for his bland pleasantness. He just about owned CBS. Twenty years
earlier, Prescott Bush had personally organized the credit to allow William
S. Paley to buy the CBS (radio, later television) network outright. In
return, Prescott was made a director and the financial leader of CBS; Paley
himself became a devoted follower and servitor of Averell Harriman. Well,
when he tried again, Prescott Bush would not leave the outcome to the blind
whims of the public. Prescott Bush moved into action in 1952 as a national
leader of the push to give the Republican presidential nomination to Gen.
Dwight D. ("Ike") Eisenhower. Among the other team members were Bush's
Hitler-era lawyer John Foster Dulles, and Jupiter Islander C. Douglas Dillon.
Dillon and his father were the pivots as the Harriman-Dulles combination
readied Ike for the presidency. As a friend put it: "When the Dillons ...
invited [Eisenhower] to dinner it was to introduce him to Wall Street bankers
and lawyers." / Note #1 / Note #3 Ike's higher level backers believed,
correctly, that Ike would not interfere with even the dirtiest of their
covert action programs. The bland, pleasant Prescott Bush was in from the
beginning: a friend to Ike, and an original backer of his presidency. On
July 28, 1952, as the election approached, Connecticut's senior U.S. senator,
James O'Brien McMahon, died at the age of 48. (McMahon had been Assistant
U.S. Attorney General, in charge of the Criminal Division, from 1935 to
1939. Was there a chance he might someday speak out about the unpunished
Nazi-era crimes of the wealthy and powerful?) This was "extremely" convenient
for Prescott. He got the Republican nomination for U.S. senator at a special
delegated meeting, with backing by the Yale-dominated state party leadership.
Now he would run in a special election for the suddenly vacant Senate seat.
He could expect to be swept into office, since he would be on the same
electoral ticket as the popular war hero, General Ike. By a technicality,
he would instantly become Connecticut's senior senator, with extra power
in Congress. And the next regularly scheduled senatorial race would be
in 1956 (when McMahon's term would have ended), so Prescott could run again
in that presidential election year ... once again on Ike's coattails! With
this arrangement, things worked out very smoothly. In Eisenhower's 1952
election victory, Ike won Connecticut by a margin of 129,507 votes out
of 1,092,471. Prescott Bush came in last among the statewide Republicans,
but managed to win by 30,373 out of 1,088,799, his margin nearly 100,000
behind Eisenhower. He took the traditionally Republican towns. In Eisenhower's
1956 re-election, Ike won Connecticut by 303,036 out of 1,114,954 votes,
the largest presidential margin in Connecticut's history. Prescott Bush
managed to win again, by 129,544 votes out of 1,085,206 -- his margin this
time 290,082 smaller than Eisenhower's. / Note #1 / Note #4 In January
1963, when this electoral strategy had been played out and his second term
expired, Prescott Bush retired from government and returned to Brown Brothers
Harriman. The 1952 Eisenhower victory made John Foster Dulles Secretary
of State, and his brother Allen Dulles head of the CIA. The reigning Dulles
brothers were the "Republican" replacements for their client and business
partner, "Democrat" Averell Harriman. Occasional public posturings aside,
their strategic commitments were identical to his. Undoubtedly the most
important work accomplished by Prescott Bush in the new regime was on the
golf links. Those who remember the Eisenhower presidency know that Ike
played ... quite a bit of golf! Democrats sneered at him for mindlessness,
Republicans defended him for taking this healthy recreation. Golf was Ike's
ruling passion. And there at his side was the loyal, bland, pleasant Senator
Prescott Bush, former president of the U.S. Golf Association, son-in-law
of the very man who had reformulated the rules of the game. Prescott Bush
was Dwight Eisenhower's favorite golf partner. Prescott could reassure
Ike about his counselors, allay his concerns, and monitor his moods. Ike
was very grateful to Prescott, who never revealed the President's scores.
The public image of his relationship to the President may be gleaned from
a 1956 newspaper profile of Prescott Bush's role in the party. The "New
York Times," which 11 years before had consciously protected him from public
exposure as a Nazi banker, fawned over him in an article entitled, "His
Platform: Eisenhower":"A tall, lean, well-dressed man who looks exactly
like what he is -- a wealthy product of the Ivy League -- is chairman of
the Republican Convention's platform committee. As such, Prescott Bush,
Connecticut's senior United States Senator, has a difficult task: he has
to take one word and expand it to about 5,000. "The one word, of course,
is 'Ike' -- but no party platform could ever be so simple and direct....
"Thus it is that Senator Bush and his fellow committee members ... find
themselves confronted with the job of wrapping around the name Eisenhower
sufficient verbiage to persuade the public that it is the principles of
the party, and not the grin of the man at the head of it, which makes it
worthy of endorsement in [the] November [election]. "For this task Prescott
Bush, a singularly practical and direct conservative, may not be entirely
fitted. It is likely that left to his own devices he would simply offer
the country the one word and let it go at that. "He is ... convinced that
this would be enough to do the trick ... if only the game were played that
way. "Since it is not, he can be expected to preside with dignity, fairness
and dispatch over the sessions that will prepare the party credo for the
1956 campaign. "If by chance there should be any conflicts within the committee
... the Senator's past can offer a clue to his conduct. "A former Yale
Glee Club and second bass in the All-Time Whiffenpoofs Quartet, he is ...
[called] 'the hottest close-harmony man at Yale in a span of twenty-five
years.' "Close harmony being a Republican specialty under President Eisenhower,
the hottest close-harmony man at Yale in twenty-five years would seem to
be an ideal choice for the convention job he holds at San Francisco....
"[In addition to his business background, he] also played golf, competing
in a number of tournaments. For eight years he was a member of the executive
committee of the United States Golf Association.... "As a Senator, Connecticut's
senior spokeman in the upper house has followed conservative policies consistent
with his business background. He resigned all his corporate directorships,
took a leave from Brown Brothers, Harriman, and proceeded to go down the
line for the Eisenhower program.... "Around the Senate, he is known as
a man who does his committee work faithfully, defends the Administration
stoutly, and f its well into the clublike atmosphere of Capitol Hill...."
/ Note #1 / Note #5 "To be continued." Notes 1. Walter Isaacson and Evan
Thomas, "The Wise Men": Six Friends and the World They Made -- Acheson,
Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy" (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1986), p. 377. 2. Reed was better known in high society as a minor diplomat,
the founder of the Triton Press and the president of the American Shakespeare
Theater. 3. "Palm Beach Post," January 13, 1991. 4. For Lovett's residency
there see Isaacson and Thomas, "op. cit.," p. 417. Some Jupiter Island
residencies were verified by their inclusion in the 1947 membership list
of the Hobe Sound Yacht Club, in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress;
others were established from interviews with long-time Jupiter Islanders.
5. Arthur Burr Darling, "The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument
of Government, to 1950", (College Station: Pennsylvania State University,
1990), p. 59. 6. The "Chicago Tribune", Feb 9, 1945, for example, warned
of "Creation of an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar
world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home. "Cf. Anthony Cave
Brown, "Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero", (New York: Times Books, 1982),
p. 625, on warnings to FDR about the British control of U.S. intelligence.
7. Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, Eli Landau, "Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob"
(New York: Paddington Press, 1979) pp. 227-28. 8. See John Ranelagh, "The
Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA", (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1987), pp. 131-32. 9. Clark Clifford, "Counsel to the President" (New York:
Random House, 1991). 10. Sidney Hyman, "The Life of William Benton" (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 438-41. 11. Phyllis Tilson
Piotrow, "World Population Crisis: The United States Response" (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1973), "Forward" by George H.W. Bush, p. vii. 12. Interview
with Prescott Bush in the Oral History Research Project conducted by Columbia
University in 1966, Eisenhower Administration Part II; pp. 62-4. 13. Herbert
S. Parmet, "Eisenhower and the American Crusades" (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1972), p. 14. 14. "New York Times", Sept. 6, 1952, Nov. 5, 1952,
Nov. 7, 1956. 15. "New York Times", Aug. 21, 1956. Continuing CHAPTER 4:
"THE CENTER OF POWER IS IN WASHINGTON" Prescott Bush was a most elusive,
secretive senator. By diligent research, his views on some issues may be
traced: He was opposed to the development of public power projects like
the Tennessee Valley Authority; he opposed the constitutional amendment
introduced by Ohio Senator John W. Bricker, which would have required congressional
approval of international agreements by the executive branch. But Prescott
Bush was essentially a covert operative in Washington. In June 1954, Bush
received a letter from Connecticut resident H. Smith Richardson, owner
of Vick Chemical Company (cough drops, Vapo-Rub). It read, in part, "...
At some time before Fall, Senator, I want to get your advice and counsel
on a [new] subject -- namely what should be done with the income from a
foundation which my brother and I set up, and which will begin its operation
in 1956...." / Note #1 / Note #6 This letter presages the establishment
of the "H. Smith Richardson Foundation", a Bush family-dictated private
slush fund which was to be utilized by the Central Intelligence Agency,
and by Vice President Bush for the conduct of his Iran-Contra adventures.
The Bush family knew Richardson and his wife through their mutual friendship
with Sears Roebuck's chairman, General Robert E. Wood. General Wood had
been president of the America First organization, which had lobbied against
war with Hitler's Germany. H. Smith Richardson had contributed the start-up
money for America First and had spoken out against the United States "joining
the Communists" by fighting Hitler. Richardson's wife was a proud relative
of Nancy Langehorne from Virginia, who married Lord Astor and backed the
Nazis from their Cliveden Estate. General Wood's daughter Mary had married
the son of Standard Oil president William Stamps Farish. The Bushes had
stuck with the Farishes through their disastrous exposure during World
War II (See Chapter 3). Young George Bush and his bride Barbara were especially
close to Mary Farish, and to her son W.S. Farish III, who would be the
great confidante of George's presidency. / Note #1 / Note #7 H. Smith Richardson
was Connecticut's leading "McCarthyite." He planned an elaborate strategy
for Joe McCarthy's intervention in Connecticut's November 1952 elections,
to finally defeat Senator Benton. / Note #1 / Note #8 (Benton's 1950 victory
over Prescott Bush was only for a two-year unexpired term. He was running
in this election for a full term, at the same time that Prescott Bush was
running to fill the seat left vacant by Senator McMahon's death). / Note
#1 / Note #8 The H. Smith Richardson Foundation was organized by Eugene
Stetson, Jr., Richardson's son-in-law. Stetson (Skull and Bones, 1934)
had worked for Prescott Bush as assistant manager of the New York branch
of Brown Brothers Harriman. In the late 1950s, the Smith Richardson Foundation
took part in the "psychological warfare" of the CIA. This was not a foreign,
but a domestic covert operation, carried out mainly against unwitting U.S.
citizens. CIA director Allen Dulles and his British allies organized "MK-Ultra,"
the testing of psychotropic drugs including LSD on a very large scale,
allegedly to evaluate "chemical warfare" possibilities. In this period,
the Richardson Foundation helped finance experiments at Bridgewater Hospital
in Massachusetts, the center of some of the most brutal MK-Ultra tortures.
These outrages have been graphically portrayed in the movie, "Titticut
Follies." During 1990, an investigator for this book toured H. Smith Richardson's
"Center for Creative Leadership" just north of Greensboro, North Carolina.
The tour guide said that in these rooms, agents of the Central Intelligence
Agency and the Secret Service are trained. He demonstrated the two-way
mirrors through which the government employees are watched, while they
are put through mind-bending psychodramas. The guide explained that "virtually
everyone who becomes a general" in the U.S. armed forces also goes through
this "training" at the Richardson Center. Another office of the Center
for Creative Leadership is in Langley, Virginia, at the headquarters of
the Central Intelligence Agency. Here also, Richardson's center trains
leaders of the CIA. The Smith Richardson Foundation will be seen in a later
chapter, performing in the Iran-Contra drama around Vice President George
Bush. - * * * - Prescott Bush worked throughout the Eisenhower years as
a confidential ally of the Dulles brothers. In July 1956, Egypt's President
Gamel Abdul Nasser announced he would accept the U.S. offer of a loan for
the construction of the Aswan dam project. John Foster Dulles then prepared
a statement telling the Egyptian ambassador that the U.S.A. had decided
to retract its offer. Dulles gave the explosive statement in advance to
Prescott Bush for his approval. Dulles also gave the statement to President
Eisenhower, and to the British government. / Note #1 / Note #9 Nasser reacted
to the Dulles brush-off by nationalizing the Suez Canal to pay for the
dam. Israel, then Britain and France, invaded Egypt to try to overthrow
Nasser, leader of the anti-imperial Arab nationalists. However, Eisenhower
refused (for once) to play the Dulles-British game, and the invaders had
to leave Egypt when Britain was threatened with U.S. economic sanctions.
During 1956, Senator Prescott Bush's value to the Harriman-Dulles political
group increased when he was put on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Bush toured U.S. and allied military bases throughout the world, and had
increased access to the national security decision-making process. In the
later years of the Eisenhower presidency, Gordon Gray rejoined the government.
As an intimate friend and golfing partner of Prescott Bush, Gray complemented
the Bush influence on Ike. The Bus h-Gray family partnership in the "secret
government" continues up through the George Bush presidency. Gordon Gray
had been appointed head of the new Psychological Strategy Board in 1951
under Averell Harriman's rule as assistant to President Truman for national
security affairs. From 1958 to 1961 Gordon Gray held the identical post
under President Eisenhower. Gray acted as Ike's intermediary, strategist
and hand-holder, in the President's relations with the CIA and the U.S.
and allied military forces. Eisenhower did not oppose the CIA's covert
action projects; he only wanted to be protected from the consequences of
their failure or exposure. Gray's primary task, in the guise of "oversight"
on all U.S. covert action, was to protect and hide the growing mass of
CIA and related secret government activities. It was not only covert "projects"
which were developed by the Gray-Bush-Dulles combination; it was also new,
hidden "structures" of the United States government. Senator Henry Jackson
challenged these arrangements in 1959 and 1960. Jackson created a Subcommittee
on National Policy Machinery of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations,
which investigated Gordon Gray's reign at the National Security Council.
On January 26, 1960, Gordon Gray warned President Eisenhower that a document
revealing the existence of a secret part of the U.S. government had somehow
gotten into the bibliography being used by Senator Jackson. The unit was
Gray's "5412 Group" within the administration, officially but secretly
in charge of approving covert action. Under Gray's guidance, Ike "|'was
clear and firm in his response' that Jackson's staff "not" be informed
of the existence of this unit [emphasis in the original]." / Note #2 /
Note #0 On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. Thereafter,
in the last Eisenhower years, with Castro as a target and universal pretext,
the fatal Cuban-vectored gangster section of the American government was
assembled. Several figures of the Eisenhower administration must be considered
the fathers of this permanent Covert Action monolith, men who continued
shepherding the monster after its birth in the Eisenhower era: / Note #b|"Gordon
Gray", the shadowy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs,
Prescott Bush's closest executive branch crony and golf partner along with
Eisenhower. By 1959-60, Gray had Ike's total confidence and served as the
Harrimanites' monitor on all U.S. military and non-military projects. British
intelligence agent Kim Philby defected to the Russians in 1963. Philby
had gained virtually total access to U.S. intelligence activities beginning
in 1949, as the British secret services' liaison to the Harriman-dominated
CIA. After Philby's defection, it seemed obvious that the aristocratic
British intelligence service was in fact a menace to the western cause.
In the 1960s, a small team of U.S. counterintelligence specialists went
to England to investigate the situation. They reported back that the British
secret service could be thoroughly trusted. The leader of this "expert"
team, Gordon Gray, was the head of the counterespionage section of the
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) for Presidents
Kennedy through Ford. / Note #b|"Robert Lovett," Bush's Jupiter Island
neighbor and Brown Brothers Harriman partner, from 1956 on a member of
the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Lovett later claimed
to have criticized -- from the "inside" -- the plan to invade Cuba at the
Bay of Pigs. Lovett was asked to choose the cabinet for John Kennedy in
1961. / Note #b|"CIA Director Allen Dulles," Bush's former international
attorney. Kennedy fired Dulles after the Bay of Pigs invasion, but Dulles
served on the Warren Commission, which whitewashed President Kennedy's
murder. / Note #b|"C. Douglas Dillon," neighbor of Bush on Jupiter Island,
became undersecretary of state in 1958 after the death of John Foster Dulles.
Dillon had been John Foster Dulles's ambassador to France (1953-57), coordinating
the original U.S. covert backing for the French imperial effort in Vietnam,
with catastrophic results for the world. Dillon was treasury secretary
for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. / Note #b|"Ambassador to Britain
Jock Whitney," extended family member of the Harrimans and neighbor of
Prescott Bush on Jupiter Island. Whitney set up a press service in London
called Forum World Features, which published propaganda furnished directly
by the CIA and the British intelligence services. Beginning in 1961, Whitney
was chairman of the British Empire's "English Speaking Union." / Note #b|"Senator
Prescott Bush," friend and counselor of President Eisenhower. Bush's term
countinued on in the Senate after the Eisenhower years, throughout most
of the aborted Kennedy presidency. In 1962, the National Strategy Information
Center was founded by Prescott Bush and his son Prescott, Jr., William
Casey (the future CIA chief), and Leo Cherne. The center came to be directed
by Frank Barnett, former program officer of the Bush family's Smith Richardson
Foundation. The center conduited funds to the London-based Forum World
Features, for the circulation of CIA-authored "news stories" to some 300
newspapers internationally. / Note #2 / Note #1 "Democrat" Averell Harriman
rotated back into official government in the Kennedy administration. As
assistant secretary and undersecretary of state, Harriman helped push the
United States into the Vietnam War. Harriman had no post in the Eisenhower
administration. Yet he was perhaps more than anyone the leader and the
glue for the incredible evil that was hatched by the CIA in the final Eisenhower
years: a half-public, half-private Harrimanite army, never since demobilized,
and increasingly associated with the name of Bush. Following the rise of
Castro, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency contracted with the organization
of Mafia boss Meyer Lansky to organize and train assassination squads for
use against the Cuban government. Among those employed were John Rosselli,
Santos Trafficante, and Sam Giancana. Uncontested public documentation
of these facts has been published by congressional bodies and by leading
Establishment academics. / Note #2 / Note #2 But the disturbing implications
and later consequences of this engagement are a crucial matter for further
study by the citizens of every nation. This much is established: On August
18, 1960, President Eisenhower approved a $13 million official budget for
a secret CIA-run guerrilla war against Castro. It is known that Vice President
Richard M. Nixon took a hand in the promotion of this initiative. The U.S.
military was kept out of the covert action plans until very late in the
game. The first of eight admitted assassination attempts against Castro
took place in 1960. The program was, of course, a failure, if not a circus.
The invasion of Cuba by the CIA's anti-Castro exiles was put off until
after John Kennedy took over the presidency. As is well known, Kennedy
balked at sending in U.S. air cover and Castro's forces easily prevailed.
But the progam continued. In 1960, Felix Rodriguez, Luis Posada Carriles,
Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero, Frank Sturgis (or "Frank Fiorini") and other
Florida-based Cuban exiles were trained as killers and drug-traffickers
in the Cuban initiative; their supervisor was E. Howard Hunt. Their overall
CIA boss was Miami station chief Theodore G. Shackley, seconded by Thomas
Clines. In later chapters we will follow the subsequent careers of these
characters -- increasingly identified with George Bush -- through the Kennedy
assassination, the Watergate coup, and the Iran-Contra scandal. Chapter
5 Poppy and Mommy ""Oh Mother, Mother! What have you done? Behold! the
heavens do ope. The gods look down, and this unnatural scene they laugh
at." -- "Coriolanus," Shakespeare." The Silver Spoon George Herbert Walker
Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, on June 12, 1924. During the next
year the family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and established their
permanent residency. Prescott and Dorothy Walker Bush had had a son, Pre
scott, Jr., before George. Later there was a little sister, Nancy, and
another brother, Jonathan; a fourth son, William ("Bucky"), was born 14
years after George, in 1939. George was named after his grandfather, George
Herbert Walker. Since George's mother called Grandfather Walker "Pop,"
she began calling her son, his namesake, "little Pop," or "Poppy." Hence,
Poppy Bush is the name the President's family friends have called him since
his youth. Prescott, Sr. joined W.A. Harriman & Co. May 1, 1926. With
his family's lucrative totalitarian projects, George Bush's childhood began
in comfort and advanced dramatically to luxury and elegance. The Bushes
had a large, dark-shingled house with "broad verandas and a portecochere"
(originally a roofed structure extending out to the driveway to protect
the gentry who arrived in coaches) on Grove Lane in the Deer Park section
of Greenwich. / Note #1 Here they were attended by four servants -- three
maids, one of whom cooked, and a chauffeur. The U.S.A. was plunged into
the Great Depression beginning with the 1929-31 financial collapse. But
George Bush and his family were totally insulated from this crisis. Before
and after the crash, their lives were a frolic, sealed off from the concerns
of the population at large. During the summers, the Bushes stayed in a
second home on the family's ten-acre spread at Walker's Point at Kennebunkport,
Maine. Flush from the Soviet oil deals and the Thyssen-Nazi Party arrangements,
Grandfather Walker had built a house there for Prescott and Dorothy. They
and other well-to-do summer colonists used Kennebunkport's River Club for
tennis and the club's yachting facilities. In the winter season, they took
the train to Grandfather Walker's plantation, called "Duncannon," near
Barnwell, South Carolina. The novices were instructed in skeet shooting,
then went out on horseback, following the hounds in pursuit of quail and
dove. George's sister Nancy recalled "the care taken" by the servants "over
the slightest things, like the trimmed edges of the grapefruit. We were
waited on by the most wonderful black servants who would come into the
bedrooms early in the morning and light those crackling pine-wood fires...."
/ Note #2 The money poured in from the Hamburg-Amerika steamship line,
its workforce crisply regulated by the Nazi Labor Front. The family took
yet another house at Aiken, South Carolina. There the Bush children had
socially acceptable "tennis and riding partners. Aiken was a southern capital
of polo in those days, a winter resort of considerable distinction and
serenity that attracted many Northerners, especially the equestrian oriented.
The Bush children naturally rode there, too...." / Note #3 Averell Harriman,
a world-class polo player, also frequented Aiken. Poppy Bush's father and
mother anxiously promoted the family's distinguished lineage, and its growing
importance in the world. Prescott Bush claimed that he "could trace his
family's roots back to England's King Henry III, making George a thirteenth
cousin, twice removed of Queen Elizabeth." / Note #4 This particular conceit
may be a bad omen for President Bush. The cowardly, acid-tongued Henry
III was defeated by France's Louis IX (Saint Louis) in Henry's grab for
power over France and much of Europe. Henry's own barons at length revolted
against his blundering arrogance, and his power was curbed. As the 1930s
economic crisis deepened, Americans experienced unprecedented hardship
and fear. The Bush children were taught that those who suffered these problems
had no one to blame but themselves. A hack writer, hired to puff President
Bush's "heroic military background," wrote these lines from material supplied
by the White House: "Prescott Bush was a thrifty man.... He had no sympathy
for the nouveau riches who flaunted their wealth -- they were without class,
he said. As a sage and strictly honest businessman, he had often turned
failing companies around, making them profitable again, and he had scorn
for people who went bankrupt because they mismanaged their money. Prescott's
lessons were absorbed by young George...." / Note #5 When he reached the
age of five, George Bush joined his older brother Pres in attending the
Greenwich Country Day School. The brothers' "lives were charted from birth.
Their father had determined that his sons would be ... educated and trained
to be members of America's elite.... Greenwich Country Day School [was]
an exclusive all-male academy for youngsters slated for private secondary
schools.... "Alec, the family chauffeur, drove the two boys to school every
morning after dropping Prescott, Sr. at the railroad station for the morning
commute to Manhattan. The Depression was nowhere in evidence as the boys
glided in the family's black Oldsmobile past the stone fences, stables,
and swimming pools of one of the wealthiest communities in America." /
Note #6 But though the young George Bush had no concerns about his material
existence, one must not overlook the important, private anxiety gnawing
at him from the direction of his mother. The President's wife, Barbara,
has put most succinctly the question of Dorothy Bush and her effect on
George: ""His mother was the most competitive living human."" / Note #7
If we look here in his mother's shadow, we may find something beyond the
routine medical explanations for President Bush's "driven" states of rage,
or hyperactivity. Mother Bush was the best athlete in the family, the fastest
runner. She was hard. She expected others to be hard. They must win, but
they must always "appear" not to care about winning. This is put politely,
delicately, in a "biography" written by an admiring friend of the President:
"She was with them day after day, ... often curbing their egos as only
a marine drill instructor can. Once when ... George lost a tennis match,
he explained to her that he had been off his game that morning. She retorted,
'You don't have a game.'|" / Note #8 According to this account, Barbara
was fascinated by her mother-in-law's continuing ferocity: "George, playing
mixed doubles with Barbara on the Kennebunkport court, ran into a porch
and injured his right shoulder blade. 'His mother said it was my ball to
hit, and it happened because I didn't run for it. She was probably right,'
Barbara told [an interviewer].... When a discussion of someone's game came
up, as Barbara described it, 'if Mrs. Bush would say, "'She had some good
shots," it meant she stank. That's just the way she got the message across.
When one of the grandchildren brought this girl home, everybody said, "We
think he's going to marry her," and she said, "Oh, no, she won't play net.'|"
/ Note #9 (I.e., she was not tough enough to stand unflinchingly and return
balls hit to her at close range.) A goad to "rapid motion" became embedded
in his personality. It is observable throughout George Bush's life. A companion
trait was Poppy's uncanny urge, his master obsession with the need to "kiss
up," to propitiate those who might in any way advance his interests. A
life of such efforts could at some point reach a climax of released rage,
where the triumphant one may finally say, "Now it is only I who must be
feared." This dangerous cycle began very early, a response to his mother's
prodding and intimidation; it intensified as George became more able to
calculate his advantage. His mother says: "George was a most unselfish
child. When he was only a little more than two years old ... we bought
him one of those pedal cars you climb into and work with your feet. "[His
brother] Pres knew just how to work it, and George came running over and
grabbed the wheel and told Pres he should 'have half,' meaning half of
his new posession. 'Have half, have half,' he kept repeating, and for a
while around the house we called him 'Have half.'|" / Note #1 / Note #0
George "learned to ask for no more than what was due him. Although not
the school's leading student, his report card was always good, and his
mother was particularly pleased that he was always graded 'excellent' in
one category she thought of great importance: 'Claims no more than his
fa ir share of time and attention.' This consistent ranking led to a little
family joke -- George always did best in 'Claims no more.' "He was not
a selfish child, did not even display the innocent possessiveness common
to most children...." / Note #1 / Note #1 At Andover George Bush left Greenwich
Country Day School in 1936. He joined his older brother at Phillips Academy
in Andover, Massachusetts, 20 miles north of Boston. "Poppy" was 12 years
old, handsome, and rich. Though the U.S. economy took a savage turn for
the worse the following year, George's father was piling up a fortune,
arranging bond swindles for the Nazis with John Foster Dulles. Only about
one in 14 U.S. secondary school students could afford to be in private
schools during George Bush's stay at Andover (1936-42). The New England
preparatory or "prep" schools were the most exclusive. Their students were
almost all rich white boys, many of them Episcopalians. And Andover was,
in certain strange ways, the most exclusive of them all. A 1980 campaign
biography prepared by Bush's own staff concedes that "it was to New England
that they returned to be educated at select schools that produce leaders
with a patrician or aristocratic stamp -- adjectives, incidentally, which
cause a collective wince among the Bushes.... At the close of the 1930s
... these schools ... brought the famous 'old-boy networks' to the peak
of their power." / Note #1 / Note #2 These American institutions have been
consciously modeled on England's elite private schools (confusingly called
"public" schools because they were open to all English boys with sufficient
money). The philosophy inculcated into the son of a British Lord Admiral
or South African police chief, was to be imbibed by sons of the American
republic. George made some decisive moral choices about himself in these
first years away from home. The institution which guided these choices,
and helped shape the peculiar obsessions of the 41st President, was a pit
of Anglophile aristocratic racialism when George Bush came on the scene.
"Andover was ... less dedicated to 'elitism' than some [schools].... There
were even a couple of blacks in the classes, tokens of course, but this
at a time when a black student at almost any other Northeastern prep school
would have been unthinkable." / Note #1 / Note #3 Andover had a vaunted
"tradition," intermingled with the proud bloodlines of its students and
alumni, that was supposed to reach back to the school's founding in 1778.
But a closer examination reveals this "tradition" to be a fraud. It is
part of a larger, highly significant historical fallacy perpetrated by
the Anglo-Americans -- and curiously stressed by Bush's agents in foreign
countries. Thomas Cochran, a partner of the J.P. Morgan banking firm, donated
considerable sums to construct swanky new Andover buildings in the 1920s.
Among these were George Washington Hall and Paul Revere Hall, named for
leaders of the American Revolution against the British Empire. These and
similar "patriotic" trappings, with the allumni's old school-affiliated
genealogies, might seem to indicate an unbroken line of racial imperialists
like Cochran and his circle, reaching back to the heroes of the Revolution!
Let us briefly tour Andover's history, and then ponder whether General
Washington would want to be identified with Poppy Bush's school. Thirty
years after Samuel Phillips founded the Academy at Andover, Massachusetts,
the quiet little school became embroiled in a violent controversy. On one
side were certain diehard pro-British families, known as Boston Brahmins,
who had prospered in the ship transportation of rum and black slaves. They
had regained power in Boston since their allies had lost the 1775-83 Revolutionary
War. In 1805 these cynical, neo-pagan, "Tory" families succeeded in placing
their representative in the Hollis chair of Philosophy at Harvard College.
The Tories, parading publicly as liberal religionists called Unitarians,
were opposed by American nationalists led by the geographer-historian Rev.
Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826). The nationalists rallied the Christian churches
of the northeastern states behind a plan to establish, at Andover, a new
religious institution which would counter the British spies, atheists,
and criminals who had taken over Harvard. British Empire political operatives
Stephen Higginson, Jr. and John Lowell, Jr. published counterattacks against
Rev. Morse, claiming he was trying to rouse the lower classes of citizens
to hatred against the wealthy merchant families. Then the Tories played
the "conservative" card. Ultra-orthodox Calvinists, actually business partners
to the Harvard liberals, threatened to set up their own religious institution
in Tory-dominated Newburyport. Their assertion, that Morse was not conservative
enough, split the resources of the region's Christians, until the Morse
group reluctantly brought the Newburyport ultras as partners into the management
of the Andover Theological Seminary in 1808. The new theological seminary
and the adjacent boys' academy were now governed together under a common
board of trustees (balanced between the Morse nationalists and the Newburyport
anti-nationalists, the opposing wings of the old Federalist Party). Jedidiah
Morse made Andover the headquarters of a rather heroic, anti-racist, Christian
missionary movement, bringing literacy, printing presses, medicine, and
technological education to Southeast Asia and American Indians, notably
the Georgia Cherokees. This activist Andover doctrine of racial equality
and American Revolutionary spirit was despised and feared by British opium
pushers in East Asia and by Boston's blueblood Anglophiles. Andover missionaries
were eventually jailed in Georgia; their too-modern Cherokee allies were
murdered and driven into exile by proslavery mobs. When Jedidiah Morse's
generation died out, the Andover missionary movement was crushed by New
England's elite families -- who were then Britain's partners in the booming
opium traffic. Andover was still formally Christian after 1840; Boston's
cynical Brahmins used Andover's orthodox Protestant board to prosecute
various of their opponents as "heretics." Neo-paganism and occult movements
bloomed after the Civil War with Darwin's new materialist doctrines. In
the 1870s, the death-worshipping Skull and Bones Society sent its alumni
members back from Yale University, to organize aristocratic secret satanic
societies for the teenagers at the Andover prep school. But these cults
did not yet quite flourish. National power was still precariously balanced
between the imperial Anglo-American financiers, and the old-line nationalists
who built America's railroads, steel and electrical industries. The New
Age aristocrats proclaimed their victory under Theodore Roosevelt's presidency
(1901-09). The Andover Theological Seminary wound up its affairs and moved
out of town, to be merged with the Harvard Divinity School! Andover prep
school was now largely free of the annoyance of religion, or any connection
whatsoever with the American spirit. Secret societies for the school's
children, modeled on the barbarian orders at Yale, were now established
in permanent, incorporated headquarters buildings just off campus at Andover.
Official school advisers were assigned to each secret society, who participated
in their cruel and literally insane rituals. When J.P. Morgan partner Thomas
Cochran built Andover's luxurious modern campus for boys like Poppy Bush,
the usurpers of America's name had cause to celebrate. Under their supervision,
fascism was rising in Europe. The new campus library was named for Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Andover class of 1825. This dreadful poet of the "leisure
class," a tower of Boston blue-blooded conceit, was famous as the father
of the twentieth century U.S. Supreme Court justice. His son, Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., symbolized the arbitrary rule of the racial purity advocates,
the usurpers, over American society. The Secret Societies Andover installed
a new headmaster in 1933. Claude Moore Fuess (rhymes with fleece) replaced
veteran headmaster Alfred E. Stear ns, whom the Brahmins saw as a dyed-in-the-wool
reactionary. Stearns was forced out over a "scandal": a widower, he had
married his housekeeper, who was beneath his social class. The new headmaster
was considered forward-looking and flexible, to meet the challenges of
the world political crisis: for example, Fuess favored psychiatry for the
boys, something Stearns wouldn't tolerate. Claude Fuess had been an Andover
history teacher since 1908, and gained fame as an historian. He was one
of the most skillful liars of the modern age. Fuess had married into the
Boston Cushing family. He had written the family-authorized whitewash biography
of his wife's relative, Caleb Cushing, a pro-slavery politician of the
middle nineteenth century. The outlandish, widely known corruption of Cushing's
career was matched by Fuess's bold, outrageous coverup. / Note #1 / Note
#4 During George Bush's years at Andover, his headmaster, Fuess, wrote
an authorized biography of Calvin Coolidge, the late U.S. President. This
work was celebrated in jest as a champion specimen of unwholesome flattery.
In other books, also about the bluebloods, Fuess was simply given the family
papers and designated the chief liar for the "Bostonian Race." Both the
Cushing and Coolidge families had made their fortunes in opium trafficking.
Bush's headmaster named his son John Cushing Fuess, perhaps after the fabled
nineteenth century dope kingpin who had made the Cushings rich. / Note
#1 / Note #5 Headmaster Fuess used to say to his staff, "I came to power
with Hitler and Mussolini."/ Note #1 / Note #6 This was not merely a pleasantry,
referring to his appointment the year Hitler took over Germany. In his
1939 memoirs, Headmaster Fuess expressed the philosophy which must guide
the education of the well-born young gentlemen under his care: "Our declining
birth rate ... may perhaps indicate a step towards national deterioration.
Among the so-called upper and leisure classes, noticeably among the university
group, the present birth rate is strikingly low. Among the Slavonic and
Latin immigrants, on the other hand, it is relatively high. We seem thus
to be letting the best blood thin out and disappear; while at the same
time our humanitarian efforts for the preservation of the less fit, those
who for some reason are crippled and incapacitated, are being greatly stimulated.
The effect on the race will not become apparent for some generations and
certainly cannot now be accurately predicted; but the phenomenon must be
mentioned if you are to have a true picture of what is going on in the
United States." / Note #1 / Note #7 Would George Bush adopt this anti-Christian
outlook as his own? One can never know for sure how a young person will
respond to the doctrines of his elders, no matter how cleverly presented.
There is a much higher degree of certainty that he will conform to criminal
expectations, however, if the student is brought to practice cruelty against
other youngsters, and to degrade himself in order to get ahead. At Andover,
this was where the secret societies came in. Nothing like Andover's secret
societies existed at any other American school. What were they all about?
Bush's friend Fitzhugh Greene wrote in 1989: "Robert L. 'Tim' Ireland,
Bush's longtime supporter [and Brown Brothers Harriman partner], who later
served on the Andover board of trustees with him, said he believed [Bush]
had been in AUV. 'What's that?' I asked. 'Can't tell you,' laughed Ireland.
'It's secret!' Both at Andover and Yale, such groups only bring in a small
percentage of the total enrollment in any class. 'That's a bit cruel to
those who don't make AU[V] or 'Bones,'|" conceded Ireland. / Note #1 /
Note #8 A retired teacher, who was an advisor to one of the groups, cautiously
disclosed in his bicentennial history of Andover, some aspects of the secret
societies. The reader should keep in mind that this account was published
by the school, to celebrate itself: "A charming account of the early days
of K.O.A, the oldest of the Societies, was prepared by Jack [i.e. Claude
Moore] Fuess, a member of the organization, on the occasion of their Fiftieth
Anniversary. The Society was founded in ... 1874.... "[A] major concern
of the membership was the initiation ceremony. In K.O.A. the ceremony involved
visiting one of the local cemeteries at midnight, various kinds of tortures,
running the gauntlet -- though the novice was apparrently punched rather
than paddled, being baptized in a water tank, being hoisted in the air
by a pulley, and finally being placed in a coffin, where he was cross-examined
by the members.... K.O.A. was able to hold the loyalty of its members over
the years to become a powerful institution at Phillips Academy and to erect
a handsome pillared Society house on School Street. "The second Society
of the seven that would survive until 1950 was A.U.V. [George Bush's group].
The letters stood for Auctoritas, Unitas, Veritas. [Authority, Unity, Truth].
This organization resulted from a merger of two ... earlier Societies ...
in 1877. A new constitution was drawn up ... providing for four chief officers
-- Imperator [commander], Vice Imperator [vice-commander], Scriptor [secretary],
and Quaestor [magistrate or inquistor].... "Like K.O.A, A.U.V. had an elaborate
initiation ceremony. Once a pledge had been approved by the Faculty, he
was given a letter with a list of rules he was to follow. He was to be
in the cemetery every night from 12:30 to 5:00, deliver a morning paper
to each member of the Society each morning, must not comb or brush his
hair nor wash his face or hands, smoke nothing but a clay pipe with Lucky
Strike tobacco, and not speak to any student except members of A.U.V. "After
the pledge had memorized these rules, his letter of instruction was burned.
The pledge had now become a 'scut' and was compelled to learn many mottoes
and incantations. On Friday night of initiation week the scut was taken
to Hartigan's drugstore downtown and given a 'scut sundae,' which consisted
of pepper, ice cream, oysters, and raw liver. Later that night he reported
to the South Church cemetery, where he had to wait for two hours for the
members to arrive. There followed the usual horseplay -- the scut was used
as a tackling dummy, threats were made to lock him in a tomb, and various
other ceremonies observed. On Saturday afternoon the scut was taken on
a long walk around town, being forced to stop at some houses and ask for
food, to urinate on a few porches, and generally to make a fool of himself.
On Saturday night came the initiation proper. The scut was prepared by
reporting to the cellar in his underwear and having dirt and flour smeared
all over his body. He was finally cleaned up and brought to the initiation
room, where a solemn ceremony followed, ending with the longed-for words
'Let him have light,' at which point his blindfold was removed, some oaths
were administered, and the boy was finally a member...." Notes for Chapter
4 16. Richardson to Prescott Bush, June 10, 1954, H. Smith Richardson Papers,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 17. Wayne S. Cole, "America
First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941" (Madison: the University
of Wisconsin Press, 1953); Interviews with Richardson family employees;
H. Smith Richardson Foundation annual reports; Richardson to Prescott Bush,
March 26, 1954, Richardson Papers. "Washington Post", April 29, 1990. 18.
Richardson to Chase Bank executive Cole Younger, Sept. 17, 1952, H. Smith
Richardson Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 19. Parmet,
Herbert S., "Eisenhower and the American Crusades" (New York: MacMillan
Company, 1972), p. 481. 20. John Prados, "Keepers of the Keys: A History
of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush" (New York: William
Morrow, 1991) pp. 92-95. 21. Robert Callaghan in "Covert Action", No. 33,
Winter 1990. Prescott, Jr. was a board member of the National Strategy
Information Center as of 1991. Both Prescott Sr. and Jr. were deeply involved
along with Casey in the circles of Pan American Airlines, Pan Am's owners
the Grace family, and the CIA's Latin American a ffairs. The Center, based
in Washington D.C., declines public inquiries about its founding. See also
"EIR Special Report", "American Leviathan: Administrative Fascism under
the Bush Regime" (Wiesbaden, Germany: Executive Intelligence Review Nachrichtenagentur,
April, 1990), p. 192. 22. For example, see Trumbull Higgins, "The Perfect
Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs" (New York:
W.W. Norton and Co., 1987), pp.55-56, 89-90. Unverified information on
the squads is provided in the affidavit of Daniel P. Sheehan, attorney
for the Christic Institute, reproduced in "EIR Special Report" "Project
Democracy: The 'Parallel Government' behind the Iran Contra Affair" (Washington,
D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1987), pp. 249-50. Some of the hired
assassins have published their memoirs. See, for example Felix Rodriguez
and John Weisman, "Secret Warrior" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989);
and E. Howard Hunt, "Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent" (New
York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1974). Notes for Chapter 5 1. Nicholas King,
"George Bush: A Biography" (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980),
pp. 13-14. 2. "Ibid.," p. 19. 3. "Ibid." 4. Joe Hyams, "Flight of the Avenger:
George Bush at War" (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1991), p.
14. 5. "Ibid.," p. 17. 6. "Ibid.," pp. 16-17. 7. Donnie Radcliffe, "Simply
Barbara Bush" (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 132. 8. Fitzhugh Green,
"George Bush: An Intimate Portrait" (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989),
p. 16. 9. Radcliffe, "op. cit.," p. 133. 10. King, "op. cit," p. 14. 11.
Hyams, "op. cit.," pp. 17-19. 12. King, "op. cit.," pp. 10, 20. 13. "Ibid.,"
p. 21. 14. Claude M. Fuess, "The Life of Caleb Cushing," 2 vols. (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1923). 15. John Perkins Cushing was a multi-millionaire
opium smuggler who retired to Watertown, Massachusetts with servants dressed
as in a Canton gangster carnival. See Vernon L. Briggs, "History and Genealogy
of the Cabot Family, 1475-1927" (Boston: privately printed, 1927), Vol.
II, pp. 558-559. John Murray Forbes, "Letters and Recollections", (reprinted
New York: Arno Press, 1981), Vol. I, p. 62-63. Mary Caroline Crawford,
"Famous Families of Massachusetts" (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1930),
2 vols. 16. Interview with a retired Andover teacher. 17. Claude M. Fuess,
"Creed of a Schoolmaster" (reprinted Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries
Press, 1970), pp. 192-93. 18. Green, "op. cit.," p. 49. 19. Frederick S.
Allis, "Youth from Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History of Phillips Academy,
Andover" (Andover, Mass.: Phillips Academy, 1979), distributed by the University
Press of New England, Hanvover, N.H.), pp. 505-7. The hierarchical top
banana of the AUV secret society in George's 1942 Andover class was Godfrey
Anderson ("Rocky") Rockefeller. In the yearbook just above the AUV roster
is a photograph of "Rocky Rockefeller" and "Lem [Lehman F.] Beardsley";
Rockefeller stands imperiously without a shirt, Beardsley scowls from behind
sunglasses. Certainly the real monarch of George Bush's Andover secret
society, and George's sponsor, was this "Rocky'|"s father, "Godfrey S.
Rockefeller." The latter gentleman had been on the staff of the Yale University
establishment in China in 1921-22. Yale and the Rockefellers were breeding
a grotesque communist insurgency with British Empire ideology; another
Yale staffer there was Mao Zedong, later the communist dictator and mass
murderer. While he was over in China, Papa Godfrey's cousin Isabel had
been the bridesmaid at the wedding of George Bush's parents. His Uncle
Percy had co-founded the Harriman bank with George Walker, and backed George
Bush's father in several Nazi German enterprises. His grandfather had been
the founding treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, and had made the Harrimans
(and thus ultimately George Bush) rich. Faculty adviser to AUV in those
days was Norwood Penrose Hallowell; his father by the same name was chairman
of Lee, Higginson & Co. private bankers, the chief financiers of Boston's
extreme racialist political movements. The elder Hallowell was based in
London throughout the 1930s, on intimate terms with Montagu Norman and
his pro-Hitler American banking friends.... One of Poppy Bush's teachers
at Andover, now in retirement, offered to an interviewer for this book,
a striking picture of his former pupil. How was the President as a student?
"He never said a word in class. He was bored to death. And other teachers
told me Bush was the worst English student ever in the school." But was
this teenager simply slow, or dull? On the contrary. "He was the classic
'BMOC' (Big Man On Campus). A great glad-hander. Always smiling." / Note
#2 / Note #1.... George Bush was the most insistent self-promoter on the
campus. He was able to pursue this career, being fortunately spared from
the more mundane chores some other students had to do. For example, he
mailed his dirty laundry home each week, to be done by the servants. It
was mailed back to him clean and folded. / Note #2 / Note #2.... One may
ask, in what way are President Bush and his backers conscious of an oligarchical
tradition? For a clue, let us look at the case of Arthur Burr Darling,
George Bush's prep school history teacher. Just after Claude Fuess "came
into power with Hitler and Mussolini" in 1933, Fuess brought [Arthur Burr]
Darling in to teach. Dr. Darling was head of the Andover history department
from 1937 to 1956, and Faculty Guardian of one of the secret societies.
His "Political Changes in Massachusetts, 1824 to 1848" covered the period
of Andover's eclipse by Boston's aristocratic opium lords. Darling's book
attacks Andover's greatest humanitarian, Jedidiah Morse, as a dangerous
lunatic, because Morse warned about international criminal conspiracies
involving these respectable Bostonians. The same book attacks President
John Quincy Adams as a misguided troublemaker, responsible with Morse for
the anti-freemasonic movement in the 1820s-30s. Arthur Burr Darling, while
still head of Andover's history department, was chosen by the Harrimanites
to organize the historical files of the new Central Intelligence Agency,
and to write the CIA's own official account of its creation and first years.
Since this cynical project was secret, Darling's 1971 obituary did not
reflect his CIA employment. / Note #3 / Note #0 Darling's "The Central
Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950" was classified
Secret on its completion in December 1953.... This mercenary work was finally
declassified in 1989 and was published by Pennsylvania State University
in 1990. Subsequent editions of "Who Was Who in America" were changed,
in the fashion of Joe Stalin's "history revisers," to tell the latest,
official version of what George Bush's history teacher had done with his
life.... Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who was also the president of
the board of Andover Prep, made a famous speech in June 1942, to Poppy
Bush and the other graduating Andover boys. Stimson told them the war would
be long, and they, the elite, should go on to college. But George Bush
had some very complicated problems. The decision had already been made
that he would join the service and get quite far away from where he had
been. For reasons of family (which will be discussed in Chapter 7 on Skull
and Bones) there was a very special niche waiting for him in naval aviation.
There was one serious hitch in this plan. It was illegal. Though he would
be 18 years old on June 12, he would not have the two years of college
the Navy required for its aviators. Well, if you had an "urgent" problem,
perhaps the law could be simply "set aside, for you and you alone," ahead
of all the 5 million poor slobs who had to go in the mud with the infantry
or swab some stinking deck -- especially if your private school's president
was currently Secretary of War (Henry Stimson), if your father's banking
partner was currently Assistant Secretary of War for Air (Robert Lovett),
and if your father had launched the career of the current Assistant Navy
Secretary for Air (Artemus Gates). And it was done. As a Bush-authorized
version puts it, "One wonders why the Navy relaxed its two years of college
requirement for flight training in George Bush's case. He had built an
outstanding record at school as a scholar [sic], athlete and campus leader,
but so had countless thousands of other youths. "Yet it was George Bush
who appeared to be the only beneficiary of this rule-waiving, and thus
he eventually emerged as the youngest pilot in the Navy -- a fact that
he can still boast about and because of which he enjoyed a certain celebrity
during the war." / Note #3 / Note #4 Notes 21. Spoke on condition of non-attribution.
22. Hyams, "op. cit.," pp. 23-24. 30. See "New York Times," Nov. 29, 1971.
32. Allis, "op. cit.," p. 512. 33. "Newsweek," August 9, 1943; "Boston
Globe," July 22, 1943. 34. Green, "op. cit.," page 28. "Plut aux dieux
que ce fut le dernier de ses crimes! -- Racine, "Britannicus" George Bush
has always traded shamelessly on his alleged record as a naval aviator
during the Second World War in the Pacific theatre. During the 1964 Senate
campaign in Texas against Senator Ralph Yarborough, Bush televised a grainy
old film which depicted young George being rescued at sea by the crew of
the submarine "USS Finnback" after his Avenger torpedo bomber was hit by
Japanese anti-aircraft fire during a bombing raid on the island of Chichi
Jima on September 2, 1944. That film, retrieved from the Navy archives,
backfired when it was put on the air too many times, eventually becoming
something of a maladroit cliche. Bush's campaign literature has always
celebrated his alleged military exploits and the Distinguished Flying Cross
he received. As we become increasingly familiar with the power of the Brown
Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones network working for Senator Prescott
Bush, we will learn to become increasingly skeptical of such official accolades
and of the official accounts on which they are premised. During Bush's
Gulf war adventure of 1990-91, the adulation of Bush's ostensible warrior
prowess reached levels that were previously considered characteristic of
openly totalitarian and militaristic regimes. Late in 1990, after Bush
had committed himself irrevocably to his campaign of bombing and savagery
against Iraq, hack writer Joe Hyams completed an authorized account of
George Bush at war. This was entitled "Flight of the Avenger," and appeared
during the time of the Middle East conflagration that was the product of
Bush's obsessions. Hyams's work had the unmistakeable imprimatur of the
regime: Not just George, but also Barbara had been interviewed during its
preparation, and its adulatory tone placed this squalid text squarely within
the "red Studebaker" school of political hagiography. The appearance of
such a book at such a time is suggestive of the practice of the most infamous
twentieth-century dictatorships, in which the figure of the strong man,
Fuehrer, duce, or vozhd as he might be called, has been used for the transmission
of symbolic-allegorical directives to the subject population. Was fascist
Italy seeking to assert its economic autarky in food production in the
face of trade sanctions by the League of Nations? Then a film would be
produced by the MINCULPOP (the Ministry of Popular Culture, or propaganda)
depicting Mussolini indefatigably harvesting grain. Was Nazi Germany in
the final stages of preparation of a military campaign against a neighboring
state? If so, Goebbels would orchestrate a cascade of magazine articles
and best-selling pulp evoking the glories of Hitler in the trenches of
1914-18. Closer to our own time, Leonid Brezhnev sought to aliment his
own personality cult with a little book called "Malaya Zemlya," an account
of his war experiences which was used by his propagandists to motivate
his promotion to Marshal of the U.S.S.R. and the erection of a statue in
his honor during his own lifetime. This is the tradition to which "Flight
of the Avenger" belongs. Bush tells us in his campaign autobiography that
he decided to enlist in the armed forces, specifically naval aviation,
shortly after he heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. About six
months later, Bush graduated from Phillips Academy at Andover, and the
commencement speaker was Secretary of War Henry Stimson, eminence grise
of the U.S. ruling elite. Stimson was possibly mindful of the hecatomb
of young members of the British ruling classes which had occurred in the
trenches of World War I on the western front. In any event, Stimson's advice
to the Andover graduates was that the war would go on for a long time,
and that the best way of serving the country was to continue one's education
in college. Prescott Bush supposedly asked his son if Stimson's recommendation
had altered his plan to enlist. Young Bush answered that he was still committed
to join the Navy. Henry L. Stimson was certainly an authoritative spokesman
for the Eastern Liberal Establishment, and Bushman propaganda has lately
exalted him as one of the seminal influences on Bush's political outlook.
Stimson had been educated at both Yale (where he had been tapped by Skull
and Bones) and Harvard Law School. He became the law partner of Elihu Root,
who was Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State. Stimson had been Theodore
Roosevelt's anti-corruption, trust-busting U.S. Attorney in New York City
during the first years of the FBI, then Taft's secretary of war, a colonel
of artillery in World War I, governor general of the Philippines for Coolidge,
secretary of state for Hoover, and enunciator of the "Stimson doctrine."
This last was a piece of hypocritical posturing directed against Japan,
asserting that changes in the international order brought about by force
of arms (and thus in contravention of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928)
should not be given diplomatic recognition. This amounted to a U.S. commitment
to uphold the Versailles system, the same policy upheld by Baker, Eagleburger
and Kissinger in the Serbian war on Slovenia and Croatia during 1991. Stimson,
though a Republican, was brought into Roosevelt's war cabinet in 1940 in
token of bipartisan intentions. But in 1942, Bush was not buying Stimson's
advice. It is doubtless significant that in the mind of young George Bush,
World War II meant exclusively the war in the Pacific, against the Japanese.
In the Bush-approved accounts of this period of his life, there is scarcely
a mention of the European theatre, despite the fact that Roosevelt and
the entire Anglo-American establishment had accorded strategic priority
to the "Germany first" scenario. Young George, it would appear, had his
heart set on becoming a Navy flier. Rules Bent for Bush Normally the Navy
required two years of college from volunteers wishing to become naval aviators.
But, for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained, young
George was exempted from this requirement. Had father Prescott's crony
Artemus Gates, the assistant secretary of the navy for air, been instrumental
in making the exception, which was the key to allowing George to become
the youngest of all navy pilots? On June 12, 1942, his eighteenth birthday,
Bush joined the Navy in Boston as a seaman second class. / Note #1 He was
ordered to report for active duty as an aviation cadet on August 6, 1942.
After a last date with Barbara, George was taken to Penn Station in New
York City by father Prescott to board a troop train headed for Chapel Hill,
North Carolina. At Chapel Hill Naval Air Station, one of Bush's fellow
cadets was the well-known Boston Red Sox hitter Ted Williams, who would
later join Bush on the campaign trail in his desperate fight in the New
Hampshire primary in February 1988. After preflight training at Chapel
Hill, Bush moved on to Wold-Chamberlain Naval Airfield in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, where he flew solo for the first time in November 1942. In February
1943 Bush moved on to Corpus Christi, Texas for further training. Bush
received his commission as an ensign at Corpus Christi on June 9, 1943.
After this, Bush moved through a number of naval air bases over a period
of almost a year for various types of advanced trai ning. In mid-June 1943,
he was learning to fly the Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo-bomber at Fort Lauderdale,
Florida. In August, he made landings on the "USS Sable," a paddle-wheel
ship that was used as an aircraft carrier for training purposes. During
the summer of 1943, Bush spent a couple of weeks of leave with Barbara
at Walker's Point in Kennebunkport; their engagement was announced in the
"New York Times" of December 12, 1943. Later in the summer of 1943, Bush
moved on to theNaval Air Base at Norfolk, Virginia. In September 1943 Bush's
new squadron, called VT-51, moved on to the Naval Air Station at Chincoteague,
Virginia, located on the Delmarva peninsula. On December 14, 1943 Bush
and his squadron were brought to Philadelphia to attend the commissioning
of the "USS San Jacinto" (CVL30), a light attack carrier built on a cruiser
hull. Since the name of the ship recalled Sam Houston's defeat of the Mexican
leader Santa Ana in 1836, and since the ship flew a Lone Star flag, Bushman
propaganda has made much of these artifacts in an attempt to buttress "carpetbag"
Bush's tenuous connections to the state of Texas. Bush's VF-51 squadron
reported on board this ship for a shakedown cruise on February 6, 1944,
and on March 25, 1944 the "San Jacinto" left for San Diego by way of the
Panama Canal. The "San Jacinto" reached Pearl Harbor on April 20, 1944,
and was assigned to Admiral Marc A. Mitscher's Task Force 58/38, a group
of fast carriers, on May 2, 1944. Bush Bails Out In June, Bush's ship joined
battle with Japanese forces in the Marianas archipelago. Here Bush flew
his first combat missions. On June 17, a loss of oil pressure forced Bush
to make an emergency landing at sea. Bush, along with his two crew members,
gunner Leo Nadeau and radioman-tail gunner John L. Delaney, were picked
up by a U.S. destroyer after some hours in the water. Bush's first Avenger,
named by him the Barbara, was lost. During July 1944 Bush took part in
13 air strikes, many in connection with the U.S. Marines' landing on Guam.
In August, Bush's ship proceeded to the area of Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima
in the Bonin Islands for a new round of sorties. On September 2, 1944 Bush
and three other Avenger pilots, escorted by Hellcat fighter planes, were
directed to attack a radio transmitter on Chichi Jima. Planes from the
"USS Enterprise" would also join in the attack. On this mission Bush's
rear-seat gunner would not be the usual Leo Nadeau, but rather Lt. Junior
Grade William Gardner "Ted" White, the squadron ordnance officer of VT-51,
already a Yale graduate and already a member of Skull and Bones. White's
father had been a classmate of Prescott Bush. White took his place in the
rear-facing machine gun turret of Bush's TBM Avenger, the Barbara II. The
radioman-gunner was John L. Delaney, a regular member of Bush's crew. What
happened in the skies of Chichi Jima that day is a matter of lively controversy.
Bush has presented several differing versions of his own story. In his
campaign autobiography published in 1987 Bush gives the following account:
"The flak was the heaviest I'd ever flown into. The Japanese were ready
and waiting: their anti-aircraft guns were set up to nail us as we pushed
into our dives. By the time VT-51 was ready to go in, the sky was thick
with angry black clouds of exploding anti-aircraft fire. "Don Melvin led
the way, scoring hits on a radio tower. I followed, going into a thirty-five
degree dive, an angle of attack that sounds shallow but in an Avenger felt
as if you were headed straight down. The target map was strapped to my
knee, and as I started into my dive, I'd already spotted the target area.
Coming in, I was aware of black splotches of gunfire all around. "Suddenly
there was a jolt, as if a massive fist had crunched into the belly of the
plane. Smoke poured into the cockpit, and I could see flames rippling across
the crease of the wing, edging towards the fuel tanks. I stayed with the
dive, homed in on the target, unloaded our four 500-pound bombs, and pulled
away, heading for the sea. Once over water, I leveled off and told Delaney
and White to bail out, turning the plane to starboard to take the slipstream
off the door near Delaney's station. "Up to that point, except for the
sting of dense smoke blurring my vision, I was in fair shape. But when
I went to make my jump, trouble came in pairs." / Note #2 In this account,
there is no more mention of White and Delaney until Bush hit the water
and began looking around for them. Bush says that it was only after having
been rescued by the "USS Finnback," a submarine, that he "learned that
neither Jack Delaney nor Ted White had survived. One went down with the
plane; the other was seen jumping, but his parachute failed to open." The
Hyams account of 1991 was written after an August 1988 interview with Chester
Mierzejewski, another member of Bush's squadron, had raised important questions
about the haste with which Bush bailed out, rather than attempting a water
landing. Mierzejewski's account, which is summarized below, contradicted
Bush's own version of these events, and hinted that Bush might have abandoned
his two crew members to a horrible and needless death. The Hyams account,
which is partly intended to refute Mierzejewski, develops as follows: "...
Bush was piloting the third plane over the target, with Moore flying on
his wing. He nosed over into a thirty-degree glide, heading straight for
the radio tower. Determined to finally destroy the tower, he used no evasive
tactics and held the plane directly on target. His vision ahead was occasionally
cancelled by bursts of black smoke from the Japanese antiaircraft guns.
The plane was descending through thickening clouds of flak pierced by the
flaming arc of tracers. "There was a sudden flash of light followed by
an explosion. 'The plane was lifted forward, and we were enveloped in flames,'
Bush recalls. 'I saw the flames running along the wings where the fuel
tanks were and where the wings fold. I thought, This is really bad! It's
hard to remember the details, but I looked at the instruments and couldn't
see them for the smoke.' "Don Melvin, circling above the action while waiting
for his pilots to drop their bombs and get out, thought the Japanese shell
had hit an oil line on Bush's Avenger. 'You could have seen that smoke
for a hundred miles.'|" Perhaps so, but it is difficult to understand why
the smoke from Bush's plane was so distinctly visible in such a smoke-filled
environment. Hyams goes on to describe Bush's completion of his bombing
run. His account continues: "By then the wings were covered in flames and
smoke, and the engine was blazing. He considered making a water landing
but realized it would not be possible. Bailing out was absolutely the last
choice, but he had no other option. He got on the radio and notified squadron
leader Melvin of his decision. Melvin radioed back, 'Received your message.
Got you in sight. Will follow.' "[...] Milt Moore, flying directly behind
Bush, saw the Avenger going down smoking. 'I pulled up to him; then he
lost power and I went sailing by him.' "As soon as he was back over water,
Bush shouted on the intercom for White and Delaney to 'hit the silk!' [...]
Dick Gorman, Moore's radioman-gunner, remembers hearing someone on the
intercom shout, 'Hit the silk!' and asking Moore, 'Is that you, Red?' "|'No,'
Moore replied. 'It's Bush, he's hit!' "Other squadron members heard Bush
repeating the command to bail out, over and over, on the radio. "There
was no response from either of Bush's crewmen and no way he could see them;
a shield of armor plate between him and Lt. White blocked his view behind.
He was certain that White and Delaney had bailed out the moment they got
the order." / Note #3 Hyams quotes a later entry by Melvin in the squadron
log as to the fate of Bush's two crewmen: "At a point approximately nine
miles bearing 045'T (degrees) from Minami Jima, Bush and one other person
were seen to bail out from about 3,000 feet. Bush's chute opened and he
landed safely in the water, inflated his raft, and paddled farther away
from Chichi Jima. The chute of th e other person who bailed out did not
open. Bush has not yet been returned to the squadron ... so this information
is incomplete. While Lt. junior grade White and J.L. Delaney are reported
missing in action, it is believed that both were killed as a result of
the above described action." / Note #4 But it is interesting to note that
this report, contrary to usual standard Navy practice, has no date. This
should alert us to that tampering with public records, such as Bush's filings
at the Securities and Exchange Commission during the 1960s, which appears
to be a specialty of the Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull and Bones network.
For comparison, let us now cite the cursory account of this same incident
provided by Bush's authorized biographer in the candidate's 1980 presidential
campaign biography: "On a run toward the island, Bush's plane was struck
by Japanese antiaircraft shells. One of his two crewmen was killed instantly
and the aircraft was set on fire. Bush was able to score hits on the enemy
installations with a couple of five-hundred pound bombs before he wriggled
out of the smoking cockpit and floated towards the water. The other crewman
also bailed out but died almost immediately thereafter because, as the
fighter pilot behind Bush's plane was later to report, his parachute failed
to open properly. Bush's own parachute became momentarily fouled on the
tail of the plane after he hit the water." / Note #5 King's account is
interesting for its omission of any mention of Bush's injury in bailing
out, a gashed forehead he got when he struck the tail assembly of the plane.
This had to have occurred long before Bush had hit the water, so this account
is garbled indeed. Let us also cite parts of the account provided by Fitzhugh
Green in his 1989 authorized biography. Green has Bush making his attack
"at a 60-degree angle." "For his two crew members," notes Green, "life
was about to end." His version goes on: "Halfway through Bush's dive, the
enemy found his range with one or more shells. Smoke filled his cabin;
his plane controls weakened; the engine began coughing, and still he wasn't
close enough to the target. He presumed the TBM to be terminally damaged.
Fighting to stay on course, eyes smarting, Bush managed to launch his bombs
at the last possible moment. He couldn't discern the result through black
fumes. But a companion pilot affirmed later that the installation blew
up, along with two other buildings. The Navy would decorate Bush for literally
sticking to his guns until he completed his mission under ferocious enemy
fire. "Good! Now the trick was to keep the plane aloft long enough to accomplish
two objectives: first, get far enough away from the island to allow rescue
from the sea before capture or killing by the enemy; second, give his plane
mates time to parachute out of the burning aircraft. "The TBM sputtered
on its last few hundred yards. Unbeknownst to Bush, one man freed himself.
Neither fellow squadron pilots nor Bush ever were sure which crew member
this was. As he jumped, however, his parachute snarled and failed to open."
/ Note #6 Green writes that when Bush was swimming in the water, he realized
that "his crew had disappeared" and that "the loss of the two men numbed
Bush." Still Another Story For the 1992 presidential campaign, the Bushmen
have readied yet another rehash of the adulatory "red Studebaker" printout
in the form of a new biography by Richard Ben Cramer. This is distinguished
as a literary effort above all by the artificial verbal pyrotechnics with
which the author attempts to breathe new life into the dog-eared Bush canonical
printout. For these, Cramer relies on a hyperkinetic style with non-verbal
syntax, which to some degree echoes Bush's own disjointed manner of speaking.
The resulting text may have found favor with Bush when he was gripped by
his hyperthyroid rages during the buildup for the Gulf war. A part of this
text has appeared in "Esquire" magazine. / Note #7 Here is Cramer's description
of the critical phase of the incident: "He felt a jarring lurch, a crunch,
and his plane leaped forward, like a giant had struck it from below with
a fist. Smoke started to fill the cockpit. He saw a tongue of flame streaming
down the right wing toward the crease. Christ! The fuel tanks! "He called
to Delaney and White -- We've been hit! He was diving. Melvin hit the tower
dead-on -- four five hundred pounders. West was on the same beam. Bush
could have pulled out. Have to get rid of these bombs. Keep the dive....
A few seconds.... "He dropped on the target and let 'em fly. The bombs
spun down, the plane shrugged with release, and Bush banked away hard to
the east. No way he'd get to the rendezvous point with Melvin. The smoke
was so bad he couldn't see the gauges. Was he climbing? Have to get to
the water. They were dead if they bailed out over land. The Japs killed
pilots. Gonna have to bail out. Bush radioed the skipper, called his crew.
No answer. Does White know how to get to his chute? Bush looked back for
an instant. God, was White hit? He was yelling the order to bail out, turning
right rudder to take the slipstream off their hatch ... had to get himself
out. He leveled off over water, only a few miles from the island ... more,
ought to get out farther ... that's it, got to be now.... He flicked the
red toggle switch on the dash -- the IFF, Identification Friend or Foe
-- supposed to alert any U.S. ship, send a special frequency back to his
own carrier ... no other way to communicate, had to get out now, had to
be ... NOW." It will be seen that these versions contain numerous internal
contradictions, but that the hallmark of "red Studebaker" orthodoxy, especially
after the appearance of the Mierzejewsky account, is that Bush's plane
was on fire, with visible smoke and flames. The Bush propaganda machine
needs the fire on board the Avenger in order to justify Bush's precipitous
decision to bail out, leaving his two crew members to their fate, rather
than attempting the water landing which might have saved them. The only
person who has ever claimed to have seen Bush's plane get hit, and to have
seen it hit the water, is Chester Mierzejewski, who was the rear turret
gunner in the aircraft flown by Squadron Commander Douglas Melvin. During
1987-88, Mierzejewski became increasingly indignant as he watched Bush
repeat his canonical account of how he was shot down. Shortly before the
Republican National Convention in 1988, Mierzejewski, by then a 68-year-old
retired aircraft foreman living in Cheshire, Connecticut, decided to tell
his story to Allan Wolper and Al Ellenberg of the "New York Post," which
printed it as a copyrighted article. / Note #8 "That guy is not telling
the truth," Mierzejewski said of Bush. As the rear-looking turret gunner
on Commander Melvin's plane, Mierzejewski had the most advantageous position
for observing the events in question here. Since Melvin's plane flew directly
ahead of Bush's, he had a direct and unobstructed view of what was happening
aft of his own plane. When the "New York Post" reporters asked former Lt.
Legare Hole, the executive officer of Bush's squadron, about who might
have best observed the last minutes of the Barbara II, Hole replied: "The
turret gunner in Melvin's plane would have had a good view. If the plane
was on fire, there is a very good chance he would be able to see that.
The pilot can't see everything that the gunner can, and he'd miss an awful
lot," Hole told the "New York Post." Gunner Lawrence Mueller of Milwaukee,
another former member of Bush's squadron who flew on the Chichi Jima mission,
when asked who would have had the best view, replied: "The turret gunner
of Melvin's plane." Mierzejewski for his part said that his plane was flying
about 100 feet ahead of Bush's plane during the incident -- so close that
he could see into Bush's cockpit. Mierzejewski, who is also a recipient
of the Distinguished Flying Cross, told the "New York Post" that he saw
"a puff of smoke" come out of Bush's plane and quickly dissipate. He asserted
that after that there was no more smoke visible, that Bush's "plane was
never on fire" and that "no smoke came out of his cockpit when he opened
his canopy to bail out." Mierzejewski stated that only one man ever got
out of the Barbara II, and that was Bush himself. "I was hoping I would
see some other parachutes. I never did. I saw the plane go down. I knew
the guys were still in it. It was a helpless feeling." Mierzejewski has
long been troubled by the notion that Bush's decision to parachute from
his damaged aircraft might have cost the lives of Radioman second class
John Delaney, a close friend of Mierzejewski, as well as gunner Lt. junior
grade William White. 'I think [Bush] could have saved those lives, if they
were alive. I don't know that they were, but at least they had a chance
if he had attempted a water landing," Mierzejewski told the "New York Post."
Former executive officer Legare Hole summed up the question for the "New
York Post" reporters as follows: "If the plane is on fire, it hastens your
decision to bail out. If it is not on fire, you make a water landing."
The point is that a water landing held out more hope for all members of
the crew. The Avenger had been designed to float for approximately two
minutes, giving the tailgunner enough time to inflate a raft and giving
everyone an extra margin of time to get free of the plane before it sank.
Bush had carried out a water landing back in June when his plane had lost
oil pressure. The official -- but undated -- report on the incident among
the squadron records was signed by Commander Melvin and an intelligence
officer named Lt. Martin E. Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick is deceased, and Melvin
in 1988 was hospitalized with Parkinson's disease and could not be interviewed.
Mierzejewski in early August 1988 had never seen the undated intelligence
report in question. "Kilpatrick was the first person I spoke to when we
got back to the ship," he said. "I told him what I saw. I don't understand
why it's not in the report." Gunner Lawrence Mueller tended to corroborate
Mierzejewski's account. Mueller had kept a log book of his own in which
he made notations as the squadron was debriefed in the ready room after
each mission. For September 2, 1944, Mueller's personal log had the following
entry: "White and Delaney presumed to have gone down with plane." Mueller
told the "New York Post" that "no parachute was sighted except Bush's when
the plane went down." The "New York Post" reporters were specific that,
according to Mueller, no one in the "San Jacinto" ready room during the
debriefing had said anything about a fire on board Bush's plane. Mueller
said: "I would have put it in my logbook if I had heard it." According
to this "New York Post" article, the report of Bush's debriefing aboard
the submarine "Finnback" after his rescue makes no mention of any fire
aboard the plane. When the "New York Post" reporters interviewed Thomas
R. Keene, an airman from another carrier, who had been picked up by the
"Finnback" a few days after Bush, they referred to the alleged fire on
board Bush's plane and "Keene was surprised to hear" it. "|'Did he say
that?,'|" Keene asked. Leo Nadeau, Bush's usual rear turret gunner, who
had been in contact with Bush during the 1980s, attempted to undercut Mierzejewski's
credibility by stating that "Ski," as Mierzejewski was called, would have
been "too busy shooting" to have been able to focus on the events involving
Bush's plane. But even the pro-Bush accounts agree that the reason that
White had been allowed to come aloft in the first place was the expectation
that there would be no Japanese aircraft over the target, making a thoroughly
trained and experienced gunner superfluous. Indeed, no account alleges
that any Japanese aircraft appeared over Chichi Jima. Bush and Mierzejewski
met again on board the "San Jacinto" after the downed pilot was returned
from the "Finnback" about a month after the loss of the Barbara II. According
to the "New York Post" account, about a month after all these events Bush,
clad in Red Cross pajamas, returned to the "San Jacinto." "He came into
the ready room and sat down next to me," Mierzejewski recounted. "He [Bush]
knew I saw the whole thing. He said, 'Ski, I'm sure those two men were
dead. I called them on the radio three times. They were dead.' When he
told me they were dead, I couldn't prove they weren't. He seemed distraught.
He was trying to assure me he did the best he could. I'm thinking what
am I going to say to him," Mierzejewski commented in 1988. Mierzejewski
began to become concerned about Bush's presentation of his war record while
watching Bush's December 1987 interview with David Frost, which was one
of the candidate's most sanctimonious performances. In March 1988, Mierzejewski
wrote to Bush and told him that his recollections were very different from
the Vice President's story. Mierzejewski's letter was not hostile in tone,
but voiced concern that political opponents might come forward to dispute
Bush. There was no reply to this letter, and Chester Mierzejewski ultimately
elected to tell his own unique eye-witness version of the facts to the
"New York Post." Certainly his authoritative, first-hand account places
a large question mark over the events of September 2, 1944, which Bush
has so often sought to exploit for political gain. Several days after Mierzejewski's
interview was published, Bush's office obtained and released to the press
a copy of the (undated) squadron log report. One Donald Rhodes of Bush's
office called Mierzejewski to offer him a copy of the report. It is typical
of Joe Hyams's hack work for Bush in "The Flight of the Avenger" that he
never mentions Mierzejewski's critical account, although he is obviously
acutely aware of the objections raised by Mierzejewski and wants very much
to discredit those objections. Indeed, Hyams totally ignores Mierzejewski
as a source, and also studiously ignores the other witness who would have
supported Mierzejewski, that is to say Mueller. Hyams had the support of
Bush's White House staff in arranging interviews for his book, but somehow
he never got around to talking to Mierzejewski and Mueller. This must increase
our suspicion that Bush has some damning cicrumstance he wishes to hide.
Bush himself admits that he was in a big hurry to get out of his cockpit:
"The wind was playing tricks, or more likely, I pulled the rip cord too
soon." / Note #9 This caused his gashed forehead and damaged his parachute.
Concerning the ability of Brown Brothers Harriman to fix a combat report
in naval aviation, it is clear that this could be accomplished as easily
as fixing a parking ticket. Artemus Gates is someone who could have helped
out. Other Brown Brothers Harriman assets in powerful posts included Secretary
of War Stimson, Secretary of War for Air Robert Lovett, Special Envoy W.
Averell Harriman, and even President Roosevelt's confidant and virtual
alter ego, Harry Hopkins, an asset of the Harriman family. Bush was very
upset about what had happened to his two crewmen. Later, during one of
his Skull and Bones "Life History" self-exposures, Bush referred to Lt.
White, the Skull and Bones member who had gone to his death with the Barbara
II: "I wish I hadn't let him go," said Bush, according to former Congressman
Thomas W. L. (Lud) Ashley, a fellow Skull and Bones member and during 1991
one of the administrators of the Neil Bush legal defense fund. According
to Ashley, "Bush was heartbroken. He had gone over it in his mind 100,000
times and concluded he couldn't have done anything.... He didn't feel guilty
about anything that happened.... But the incident was a source of real
grief to him. It tore him up, real anguish. It was so fresh in his mind.
He had a real friendship with this man," said Ashley. / Note #1 / Note
#0 Bush later wrote letters to the families of the men who had died on
his plane. He received a reply from Delaney's sister, Mary Jane Delaney.
The letter read in part: "You mention in your letter that you would like
to help me in some way. There is a way, and that is to stop thinking you
are in any way responsible for your plane accident and what has happened
to your men. I might have thought you were if my br other Jack had not
always spoken of you as the best pilot in the squadron." / Note #1 / Note
#1 Bush also wrote a letter to his parents in which he talked about White
and Delaney: "I try to think about it as little as possible, yet I cannot
get the thought of those two out of my mind. Oh, I'm OK -- I want to fly
again and I won't be scared of it, but I know I won't be able to shake
the memory of this incident and I don't believe I want to completely."
/ Note #1 / Note #2 As Bush himself looked back on all these events from
the threshold of his genocidal assault on Iraq, he complacently concluded
that the pagan fates had preserved his life for some future purpose. He
told Hyams: "There wasn't a sudden revelation of what I wanted to do with
the rest of my life, but there was an awakening. There's no question that
underlying all that were my own religious beliefs. In my own view there's
got to be some kind of destiny and I was being spared for something on
earth." / Note #1 / Note #3 After having deliberately ignored the relevant
dissenting views about the heroism of his patron, Hyams chooses to conclude
his book on the following disturbing note: "When flying his Avenger off
the deck of the San Jac, Bush was responsible for his own fate as well
as his crewmen's. As President he is responsible for the fate of all Americans
as well as that of much of the world." And that is precisely the problem.
Notes * Would to the gods that this be the last of his crimes! 1. For details
of Bush's Navy career, see Joe Hyams, "Flight of the Avenger: George Bush
at War" (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1991), "passim." 2. George
Bush and Victor Gold, "Looking Forward," (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p.
36. 3. Hyams, "op. cit.," pp. 106-7. 4. "Ibid.," p. 111. 5. Nicholas King,
"George Bush: A Biography" (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980),
pp. 30-31. 6. Fitzhugh Green, "George Bush: An Intimate Portrait" (New
York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), pp. 36-37. 7. Richard Ben Cramer, "George
Bush: How He Got Here," "Esquire," June 1991. 8. Allan Wolper and Al Ellenberg,
"The Day Bush Bailed Out," "New York Post," August 12, 1988, p. 1 "ff."
9. Bush and Gold, "op. cit.," p. 36. 10. "Washington Post," August 7, 1988.
For the Skull and Bones Society and its "life history" self-exposure, see
Chapter 7. 11. Hyams, "op. cit.," p. 143. 12. Bush and Gold, "op. cit.,"
pp. 40-41. 13. Hyams, "op. cit.," p. 134. Correction Corrections to errors
in Chapter 3, in volume 6, No. 1, Jan. 6, 1992: There was an extraneous
footnote ("1") following the first paragraph, which might have made that
quote appear to be from George Bush, rather than Hitler. Bush's (similar)
quote in fact follows that one. "After his 1948 graduation ... George Bush
flew down to Texas on a corporate jet" should have read "on a corporate
aircraft." The U.S. Navy delivered George Bush back home for good on Christmas
Eve 1944; the war in the Pacific raged on over the next half year, with
Allied forces taking Southeast Asia, the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia),
and islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Barbara Pierce quit Smith College
in her sophomore year to marry George. Prescott and Mother Bush gave a
splendid prenuptial dinner at the Greenwich Field Club. The wedding took
place January 6, 1945, in the Rye, New York Presbyterian Church, as the
U.S. Third Fleet bombarded the main Philippine island of Luzon in preparation
for invasion. Afterwards there was a glamorous reception for 300 at Appawamis
Country Club. The newlyweds honeymooned at The Cloisters, a five-star hotel
on Sea Island, Georgia, with swimming, tennis, and golf.... Japan surrendered
in August. That fall, George and Barbara Bush moved to New Haven where
Bush entered Yale University. He and Barbara moved into an apartment at
37 Hillhouse Avenue, across the street from Yale President Charles Seymour.
College life was good to George, what he saw of it. A college career usually
occupies four years. But we know that George Bush is a rapidly moving man.
Thus he was pleased with the special arrangement made for veterans, by
which Yale allowed him to get his degree after attending classes for only
two and a half years.... In 1947, Barbara gave birth to George W. Bush,
Jr. By the time of his 1948 graduation, he had been elected to Phi Beta
Kappa, an honor traditionally associated with academic achievement. Not
a great deal is known about George Bush's career at Yale, especially the
part about books and studies. Unfortunately for those who would wish to
consider his intellectual accomplishment, everything about "that" has been
sealed shut and is top secret. The Yale administration says they have turned
over to the FBI custody of all of Bush's academic records, allegedly because
the FBI needs such access to check the resumes of important office holders.
>From all available testimony, his mental life before college was anything
but outstanding. His campaign literature claims that, as a veteran, Bush
was "serious" at Yale. But we cannot check exactly how he achieved election
to Phi Beta Kappa, in his abbreviated college experience. Without top secret
clearance, we cannot consult his test results, read his essays, or learn
much about his performance in class. We know that his father was a trustee
of the university, in charge of "developmental" fundraising. And his family
friends were in control of the U.S. secret services. A great deal is known,
however, about George Bush's "status" at Yale. His fellow student John
H. Chafee, later a U.S. senator from Rhode Island and secretary of the
navy, declared: "We didn't see much of him because he was married, but
I guess my first impression was that he was -- and I don't mean this in
a derogatory fashion -- in the inner set, the movers and shakers, the establishment.
I don't mean he put on airs or anything, but .. just everybody knew him."
Chafee, like Bush and Dan Quayle, was in the important national fraternity,
Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE or the "Dekes"). But Chafee says, "I never remember
seeing him there. He wasn't one to hang around with the fellows." / Note
#5 The Tomb George Bush, in fact, passed his most important days and nights
at Yale in the strange companionship of the senior-year Skull and Bones
Society. / Note #6 Out of those few who were chosen for Bones membership,
George was the last one to be notified of his selection -- this honor is
traditionally reserved for the highest of the high and mighty. His father,
Prescott Bush, several other relatives and partners, and Roland and Averell
Harriman, who sponsored the Bush family, were also members of this secret
society.... The order was incorporated in 1856 under the name "Russell
Trust Association." By special act of the state legislature in 1943, its
trustees are exempted from the normal requirement of filing corporate reports
with the Connecticut secretary of state. As of 1978, all business of the
Russell Trust [which founded Skull and Bones] was handled by its lone trustee,
Brown Brothers Harriman partner John B. Madden, Jr. Madden started with
Brown Brothers Harriman in 1946, under senior partner Prescott Bush, George
Bush's father. Each year, Skull and Bones members select ("tap") 15 third-year
Yale students to replace them in the senior group the following year. Graduating
members are given a sizeable cash bonus to help them get started in life.
Older graduate members, the so-called "Patriarchs," give special backing
in business, politics, espionage and legal careers to graduate Bonesmen
who exhibit talent or usefulness. The home of Skull and Bones on the Yale
campus is a stone building resembling a mausoleum, and known as "the Tomb."
Initiations take place on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River (an island
owned by the Russell Trust Association), with regular reunions on Deer
Island and at Yale. Initiation rites reportedly include strenuous and traumatic
activities of the new member, while immersed naked in mud, and in a coffin.
More important is the "sexual autobiography": The initiate tells the order
all the sex secrets of his young life. Weakened mental defenses against
manipulation, and the blackmail potential of such information, have obvious
permanent uses in enforcing loyalty among members. The loyalty is intense.
One of Bush's former teachers, whose own father was a Skull and Bones member,
told our interviewer that his father used to stab his little Skull and
Bones pin into his skin to keep it in place when he took a bath. Members
continue throughout their lives to unburden themselves on their psycho-sexual
thoughts to their Bones Brothers, even if they are no longer sitting in
a coffin. This has been the case with President George Bush, for whom these
ties are reported to have a deep personal meaning. Beyond the psychological
manipulation associated with freemasonic mummery, there are very solid
political reasons for Bush's strong identification with this cult.... Skull
and Bones -- the Russell Trust Association -- was first established among
the class graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was William Huntington
Russell of Middletown, Connecticut. The Russell family was the master of
incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminal organization
of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, the great opium syndicate.
There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion against,
freemasonry and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in
particular by the anti-masonic writings of former U.S. President John Quincy
Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically powerful
international secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic
republic. But the Russells were protected as part of the multiply intermarried
grouping of families then ruling Connecticut. The blood-proud members of
the Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day, Alsop, and Hubbard
families were prominent in the pro-British party within the state. Many
of their sons would be among the members chosen for the Skull and Bones
Society over the years. Opium and Empire The background to Skull and Bones
is a story of Opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle for political control
over the new U.S. republic. Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder
William H., established Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to
acquire opium from Turkey and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly
prohibited, under the armed protection of the British Empire. The prior,
predominant American gang in this field had been the syndicate created
by Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an aggregation
of the self-styled "bluebloods" or Brahmins of Boston's north shore. Forced
out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave
revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing, and
Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and children. The Perkins
opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families,
under the direct protection of the British navy and British imperial finance.
By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made
Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium racket. Massachusetts
families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes, and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop)
and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell (and British)
auspices.... Samuel and William Huntington Russell were quiet, wary builders
of their faction's power. An intimate colleague of opium gangster Samuel
Russell wrote this about him: "While he lived no friend of his would venture
to mention his name in print. While in China, he lived for about twenty-five
years almost as a hermit, hardly known outside of his factory [the Canton
warehouse compound] except by the chosen few who enjoyed his intimacy,
and by his good friend, Hoqua [Chinese security director for the East India
Company], but studying commerce in its broadest sense, as well as its minutest
details. Returning home with well-earned wealth he lived hospitably in
the midst of his family, and a small circle of intimates. Scorning words
and pretensions from the bottom of his heart, he was the truest and staunchest
of friends; hating notoriety, he could always be absolutely counted on
for every good work which did not involve publicity." The Russells' Skull
and Bones Society was the most important of their domestic projects "which
did not involve publicity." ... Yale was the northern college favored by
southern slaveowning would-be aristocrats. Among Yale's southern students
were John C. Calhoun, later the famous South Carolina defender of slavery
against nationalism, and Judah P. Benjamin, later secretary of state for
the slaveowners' Confederacy.... In 1832-33, Skull and Bones was launched
under the Russell pirate flag. Among the early initiates of the order were
Henry Rootes Jackson (S&B 1839), a leader of the 1861 "Georgia" Secession
Convention and post-Civil War president of the Georgia Historical Society;
... John Perkins, Jr. (S&B 1840), chairman of the 1861 "Louisiana"
Secession Convention;... and William Taylor Sullivan Barry (S&B 1841),
a national leader of the secessionist wing of the Democratic Party during
the 1850s, and chairman of the 1861 "Mississippi" Secession Convention.
Alphonso Taft was a Bonesman alongside William H. Russell in the Class
of 1833. As U.S. attorney general in 1876-77, Alphonso Taft helped organize
the backroom settlement of the deadlocked 1876 presidential election. The
bargain gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency (1877-81) and withdrew
the U.S. troops from the South, where they had been enforcing blacks' rights.
Alphonso's son, William Howard Taft (S&B 1878), was U.S. President
from 1909 to 1913. President Taft's son, Robert Alphonso Taft (S&B
1910), was a leading U.S. senator after World War II; his family's Anglo-Saxon
racial/ancestral preoccupation was the disease which crippled Robert Taft's
leadership of American nationalist "conservatives." Leading Bonesmen Other
pre-Civil War Bonesmen were: / Note #b|""William M. Evarts "(S&B 1837),
Wall Street attorney for British and southern slaveowner projects, collaborator
of Taft in the 1876 bargain, U.S. secretary of state 1877-81; / Note #b|"Morris
R. Waite "(S&B 1837), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court 1874-88,
whose rulings destroyed many rights of African-Americans gained in the
Civil War; he helped his cohorts Taft and Evarts arrange the 1876 presidential
settlement scheme to pull the rights-enforcing U.S. troops out of the South;
/ Note #b|"Daniel Coit Gilman "(S&B 1852), co-incorporator of the Russell
Trust; founding president of Johns Hopkins University as a great center
for the racialist eugenics movement; / Note #b|"Andrew D. White "(S&B
1853), founding president of Cornell University; psychic researcher; and
diplomatic cohort of the Venetian, Russian and British oligarchies; / Note
#b|"Chauncey M. Depew "(S&B 1856), general counsel for the Vanderbilt
railroads, he helped the Harriman family to enter into high society....
/ Note #b|"Irving Fisher "(S&B 1888) became the racialist high priest
of the economics faculty (Yale professor 1896-1946), and a famous merchant
of British Empire propaganda for free trade and reduction of the non-white
population. Fisher was founding president of the American Eugenics Society
under the financial largesse of Averell Harriman's mother. / Note #b|"Gifford
Pinchot "(S&B 1889) invented the aristocrats' "conservation" movement.
He was President Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester, substituting federal
land-control in place of Abraham Lincoln's free-land-to-families farm creation
program. Pinchot's British Empire activism included the Psychical Research
Society and his vice presidency of the first International Eugenics Congress
in 1912.... / Note #b|"Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser "(S&B 1896), owner
of vast tracts of American forest, was a follower of Pinchot's movement,
while the Weyerhaeusers were active collaborators of British-South African
super-racist Cecil Rhodes. This family's friendship with President George
Bush is a factor in the present environmentalist movement. "Henry L. Stimson"
(S&B 1888) was President Taft's secretar y of war (1911-13), and President
Herbert Hoover's secretary of state (1929-33). As secretary of war (1940-45),
Stimson pressed President Truman to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese.
This decision involved much more than merely "pragmatic" military considerations.
These Anglophiles, up through George Bush, have opposed the American republic's
tradition of alliance with national aspirations in Asia. And they worried
that the invention of nuclear energy would too powerfully unsettle the
world's toleration for poverty and misery. Both the United States and the
atom had better be dreaded, they thought. The present century owes much
of its record of horrors to certain Anglophile American families which
have employed Skull and Bones as a political recruiting agency, particularly
the Harrimans, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and their lawyers, the
Lords and Tafts and Bundys. The politically aggressive Guaranty Trust Company,
run almost entirely by Skull and Bones initiates, was a financial vehicle
of these families in the early 1900s. Guaranty Trust's support for the
Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions overlapped the more intense endeavors in
these fields by the Harrimans, George Walker, and Prescott Bush a few blocks
away, and in Berlin. Skull and Bones was dominated from 1913 onward by
the circles of Averell Harriman. They displaced remaining traditionalists
such as Douglas MacArthur from power in the United States. For George Bush,
the Skull and Bones Society is more than simply the British, as opposed
to the American, strategic tradition. It is merged in the family and personal
network within which his whole life has been, in a sense, handed to him
prepackaged. Britain's Yale Flying Unit During Prescott Bush's student
days, the Harriman set at Yale decided that World War I was sufficiently
amusing that they ought to get into it as recreation. They formed a special
Yale Unit of the Naval Reserve Flying Corps, at the instigation of "F.
Trubee Davison". Since the United States was not at war, and the Yale students
were going to serve Britain, the Yale Unit was privately and lavishly financed
by F. Trubee's father, Henry Davison, the senior managing partner at J.P.
Morgan and Co. (the official financial agency for the British government
in the United States). The Yale Unit's leader was amateur pilot Robert
A. Lovett. They were based first on Long Island, New York, then in Palm
Beach, Florida. The Yale Unit has been described by Lovett's family and
friends in a collective biography of the Harriman set: "Training for the
Yale Flying Unit was not exactly boot camp. Davison's father ... helped
finance them royally, and newspapers of the day dubbed them "the millionaires'
unit." They cut rakish figures, and knew it; though some dismissed them
as diletantes, the hearts of young Long Island belles fluttered at the
sight.... "[In] Palm Beach ... they ostentatiously pursued a relaxed style.
'They were rolled about in wheel chairs by African slaves amid tropical
gardens and coconut palms,' wrote the unit's historian.... 'For light exercise,
they learned to glance at their new wristwatches with an air of easy nonchalance'....
[Lovett] was made chief of the unit's private club, the Wags, whose members
started their sentences, 'Being a Wag and therefore a superman'.... "Despite
the snide comments of those who dismissed them as frivolous rich boys,
Lovett's unit proved to be daring and imaginative warriors when they were
dispatched for active duty in 1917 with Britain's Royal Naval Air Service."
/ Note #7 Lovett was transferred to the U.S. Navy after the United States
joined Britain in World War I. The Yale Flying Unit was the glory of Skull
and Bones. Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush, and their 1917 Bonesmates selected
for 1918 membership in the secret order these Yale Flying Unit leaders:
"Robert Lovett, F. Trubee Davison, Artemus Lamb Gates," and "John Martin
Vorys." Unit flyers "David Sinton Ingalls" and F. Trubee's brother, "Harry
P. Davison" (who became Morgan vice chairman), were tapped for the 1920
Skull and Bones. Lovett did not actually have a senior year at Yale: "He
was tapped for Skull and Bones not on the Old Campus but at a naval station
in West Palm Beach; his initiation, instead of being conducted in the 'tomb'
on High Street, occurred at the headquarters of the Navy's Northern Bombing
Group between Dunkirk and Calais." / Note #8 Some years later, Averell
Harriman gathered Lovett, Prescott Bush, and other pets into the utopian
oligarchs' community a few miles to the north of Palm Beach, called Jupiter
Island. British Empire loyalists flew right from the Yale Unit into U.S.
strategy-making positions: / Note #b|"F. Trubee Davison was assistant U.S.
secretary of war for air from 1926 to 1933. David S. Ingalls (on the board
of Jupiter Island's Pan American Airways) was meanwhile assistant secretary
of the navy for aviation (1929-32). Following the American Museum of Natural
History's Hitlerite 1932 eugenics congress, Davison resigned his government
Air post to become the museum's president. Then, under the Harriman-Lovett
national security regime of the early 1950s, F. Trubee Davison became director
of personnel for the new Central Intelligence Agency. / Note #b|"Robert
Lovett was assistant secretary of war for Air from 1941-45. / Note #b|"Lovett's
1918 Bonesmate, Artemus Gates (chosen by Prescott and his fellows), became
assistant navy secretary for air in 1941. Gates retained this post throughout
the war until 1945. Having a man like Gates up there, who owed his position
to Averell, Bob, Prescott, and their set, was quite reassuring to young
naval aviator George Bush; especially so, when Bush would have to worry
about the record being correct concerning his controversial fatal crash.
Other Important Bonesmen / Note #b|""Richard M. Bissell, Jr." was a very
important man to the denizens of Jupiter Island. He graduated from Yale
in 1932, the year after the Harrimanites bought the island. Though not
in Skull and Bones, Bissell was the younger brother of William Truesdale
Bissell, a Bonesman from the class of 1925. Their father, Connecticut insurance
executive Richard M. Bissell, Sr., was a powerful Yale alumnus, and the
director of the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute of the Hartford Retreat for
the Insane. There, in 1904, Yale graduate Clifford Beers underwent mind-destroying
treatment which led this mental patient to found the Mental Hygiene Society,
a Yale-based Skull and Bones project. This would evolve into the CIA's
cultural engineering effort of the 1950s, the drugs and brainwashing adventure
known as "MK-Ultra." Richard M. Bissell, Jr. studied at the London School
of Economics in 1932 and 1933, and taught at Yale from 1935 to 1941. He
worked as an assistant or adviser to Averell Harriman in various government
posts between 1942 and 1952, participating in the Harriman clique's takeover
of the Truman administration. Bissell then joined F. Trubee Davison at
the Central Intelligence Agency. When Allen Dulles became CIA director
in 1953, Bissell was one of his three aides. The great anti-Castro covert
initiative of 1959-61 was supervised by an awesome array of Harriman agents
-- and the detailed management of the invasion of Cuba, and of the assassination
planning, and the training of the squads for these jobs, was given into
the hands of Richard M. Bissell, Jr. This 1961 invasion failed. President
Kennedy refused to give air cover at the Bay of Pigs. Fidel Castro survived
the widely discussed assassination plots against him. But the initiative
succeeded in what was probably its core purpose: to organize a force of
multi-use professional assassins. The Florida-trained killers stayed in
business under the leadership of Ted Shackley. They were all around the
assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. They kept going with the Operation
Phoenix mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, with Middle East drug and
terrorist programs, and with George Bush's Contra wars in Central America.
/ Note #b|""Harvey Hollister Bundy" (S&B 1909) was Henry L. Stimson's
assistant secretary of state (1931-33); then he was Stimson's special assistant
secretary of war, alongside Assistant Secretary Robert Lovett of Skull
and Bones and Brown Brothers Harriman. Harvey's son "William P. Bundy"
(S&B 1939) was a CIA officer from 1951 to 1961; as a 1960s defense
official, he pushed the Harriman-Dulles scheme for a Vietnam war. Harvey's
other son, "McGeorge Bundy" (S&B 1940) coauthored Stimson's memoirs
in 1948. As President John Kennedy's director of national security, McGeorge
Bundy organized the whitewash of the Kennedy assassination, and immediately
switched the U.S. policy away from the Kennedy pullout and back toward
war in Vietnam. / Note #b|"There was also "Henry Luce," a Bonesman of 1920
with David Ingalls and Harry Pomeroy. Luce published "Time" magazine, where
his ironically named "American Century" blustering was straight British
Empire doctrine: Bury the republics, hail the Anglo-Saxon conquerors. /
Note #b|""William Sloane Coffin," tapped for 1949 Skull and Bones by George
Bush and his Bone companions, was from a long line of Skull and Bones Coffins.
William Sloane Coffin was famous in the Vietnam War protest days as a leader
of the left protest against the war. Was the fact that he was an agent
of the Central Intelligence Agency embarrassing to William Sloane? This
was no contradiction. His uncle, the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin (S&B
1897), had also been a "peace" agitator, and an oligarchical agent. Uncle
Henry was for 20 years president of the Union Theological Seminary, whose
board chairman was Prescott Bush's partner Thatcher Brown. In 1937, Henry
Coffin and John Foster Dulles led the U.S. delegation to England to found
the "World Council of Churches", as a "peace movement" guided by the pro-Hitler
faction in England. The Coffins have been mainstays of the liberal death
lobby for euthanasia and eugenics. The Coffins outlasted Hitler, arriving
into the CIA in 1950s. / Note #b|"Amory Howe Bradford" (S&B 1934) married
Carol Warburg Rothschild in 1941. Carol's mother, Carola, was the acknowledged
head of the Warburg family in America after World War II. This family had
assisted the Harrimans' rise into the world in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries; in concert with the Sulzbergers at the "New York Times,"
they had used their American Jewish Committee and B'nai Brith to protect
the Harriman-Bush deals with Hitler. This made it nice for Averell Harriman,
just like family, when Amory Howe worked on the Planning Group of Harriman's
NATO secretariat in London, 1951-52. Howe was meanwhile assistant to the
publisher of the "New York Times," and went on to become general manager
of the "Times." Thus, we could be assured of "responsible news coverage,"
with due emphasis on the necessary role of "moderates" named Harriman and
Bush. / Note #b|Other modern Bonesmen have been closely tied to George
Bush's career. "George Herbert Walker, Jr." (S&B 1927) was the President's
uncle and financial angel. In the 1970s he sold G.H. Walker & Co. to
White, Weld & Co. and became a vice president of White, Weld; company
heir William Weld, the original federal prosecutor of Lyndon LaRouche and
current Massachusetts governor, is an active Bush Republican. Publisher
"William F. Buckley" (S&B 1950) had a family oil business in Mexico.
There, Buckley was a close ally to CIA assassinations manager E. Howard
Hunt, whose lethal antics were performed under the eyes of Miami Station
and Jupiter Island. "David Lyle Boren" (S&B 1963) ... was elected to
the U.S. Senate in 1979 and became chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee. Though a Democrat (who spoke knowingly of the "parallel government"
operating in Iran-Contra), Boren's Intelligence Committee rulings have
been (not unexpectedly) more and more favorable to his "Patriarch" in the
White House. Among the traditional artifacts the Skulland collected and
maintained within the High Street Tomb are human remains of various derivations.
The following concerns one such set of Skull and Bones. Geronimo, an Apache
faction leader and warrior, led a party of warriors on a raid in 1876,
after Apaches were moved to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona territory.
He led other raids against U.S. and Mexican forces well into the 1880s;
he was captured and escaped many times. Geronimo became a farmer and joined
a Christian congregation. He died at the age of 79 years in 1909, and was
buried at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Three-quarters of a century later, his tribesmen
raised the question of getting their famous warrior reinterred back in
Arizona. Ned Anderson was Tribal Chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe
from 1978 to 1986. This is the story he tells / Note #9: Around the fall
of 1983, the leader of an Apache group in another section of Arizona said
he was interested in having the remains of Geronimo returned to his tribe's
custody. Taking up this idea, Anderson said that the remains properly belonged
to his group as much as to the other Apaches. After much discussion, several
Apache groups met at a kind of summit meeting held at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
The army authorities were not favorable to the meeting, and it only occurred
through the intervention of the office of the Governor of Oklahoma. As
a result of this meeting, Ned Anderson was written up in the newspapers
as an articulate Apache activist. Soon afterwards, in late 1983 or early
1984, a Skull and Bones member contacted Anderson and leaked evidence that
Geronimo's remains had long ago been pilfered -- by Prescott Bush, George's
father. The informant said that in May of 1918, Prescott Bush and five
other officers at Fort Sill desecrated the grave of Geronimo. They took
turns on guard while they robbed the grave, taking items including a skull,
some other bones, a horse bit and straps. These prizes were taken back
to the Tomb, the home of the Skull and Bones Society at Yale in New Haven,
Connecticut. They were put into a display case, which members and visitors
could easily view upon entry to the building. The informant provided Anderson
with photographs of the stolen remains, and a copy of a Skull and Bones
log book in which the 1918 grave robbery had been recorded. "The informant
said that Skull and Bones members used the pilfered remains in performing
some of their Thursday and Sunday night rituals, with Geronimo's skull
sitting out on a table in front of them".... Through an attorney, Anderson
asked the FBI to move into the case. The attorney conveyed to him the Bureau's
response: If he would turn over every scrap of evidence to the FBI, and
completely remove himself from the case, they would get involved. He rejected
this bargain, since it did not seem likely to lead towards recovery of
Geronimo's remains. Due to his persistence, he was able to arrange a September,
1986 Manhattan meeting with Jonathan Bush, George Bush's brother. Jonathan
Bush vaguely assured Anderson that he would get what he had come after,
and set a followup meeting for the next day. But Bush stalled -- Anderson
believes this was to gain time to hide and secure the stolen remains against
any possible rescue action. The Skull and Bones attorney representing the
Bush family and managing the case was Endicott Peabody Davison. His father
was the F. Trubee Davison mentioned above, who had been president of New
York's American Museum of Natural History, and personnel director for the
Central Intelligence Agency. The attitude of this Museum crowd has long
been that "Natives" should be stuffed and mounted for display to the Fashionable
Set. Finally, after about 11 days, another meeting occurred. A display
case was produced, which did in fact match the one in the photograph the
informant had given to Anderson. But the skull he was shown was that of
a ten-year-old child, and Anderson refused to receive it or to sign a legal
document promising to shut up about the matter. Anderson took his complaint
to Arizona Congressmen Morris Udall and John McCain III, but with no results.
George Bush refused Congressman McCain's request that he meet with Anderson.
Anderson wrote to Udall, enclosing a photograph of the wall case and skull
at the "Tomb," showing a bla ck and white photograph of the living Geronimo,
which members of the Order had boastfully posted next to their display
of his skull. Anderson quoted from a Skull and Bones Society internal history,
entitled "Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration,
17 June 1933, by The Little Devil of D'121." "From the war days [W.W. I]
also sprang the mad expedition from the School of Fire at Fort Sill, Oklahoma,
that brought to the T[omb] its most spectacular 'crook,' the skull of Geronimo
the terrible, the Indian Chief who had taken forty-nine white scalps. An
expedition in late May, 1918, by members of four [graduating-class years
of the Society], Xit D.114, Barebones, Caliban and Dingbat, D.115, S'Mike
D.116, and Hellbender D.117, planned with great caution since in the words
of one of them: 'Six army captains robbing a grave wouldn't look good in
the papers.' The stirring climax was recorded by Hellbender in the Black
Book of D.117: '... The ring of pick on stone and thud of earth on earth
alone disturbs the peace of the prairie. An axe pried open the iron door
of the tomb, and Pat[riarch] Bush entered and started to dig. We dug in
turn, each on relief taking a turn on the road as guards.... Finally Pat[riarch]
Ellery James turned up a bridle, soon a saddle horn and rotten leathers
followed, then wood and then, at the exact bottom of the small round hole,
Pat[riarch] James dug deep and pried out the trophy itself.... We quickly
closed the grave, shut the door and sped home to Pat[riarch] Mallon's room,
where we cleaned the Bones. Pat[riarch] Mallon sat on the floor liberally
applying carbolic acid. The Skull was fairly clean, having only some flesh
inside and a little hair. I showered and hit the hay ... a happy man...."
/ Note #1 / Note #0 The other grave robber whose name is given, Ellery
James, we encountered in Chapter One -- he was to be an usher at Prescott's
wedding three years later. And the fellow who applied acid to the stolen
skull, burning off the flesh and hair, was "Neil Mallon." Years later,
Prescott Bush and his partners chose Mallon as chairman of Dresser Industries;
Mallon hired Prescott's son, George Bush, for George's first job; and George
Bush named his son, "Neil Mallon Bush," after the flesh-picker. In 1988
the "Washington Post" ran an article entitled "Skull for Scandal: Did Bush's
Father Rob Geronimo's Grave?" There was a small quote from the 1933 Skull
and Bones "History of Our Order": "An axe pried open the iron door of the
tomb, and ... Bush entered and started to dig...." and so forth, but neglected
to include other names beside Bush. According to the "Washington Post,"
the document which Bush attorney Davison tried to get the Apache leader
to sign, stipulated that Anderson agreed it would be "inappropriate for
you, me [Jonathan Bush] or anyone in association with us to make or permit
any publication in connection with this transaction." Anderson called the
document "very insulting to Indians." Davison claimed later that the Order's
own history book is a hoax, but during the negotiations with Anderson,
Bush's attorney demanded Anderson give up his copy of the book. / Note
#1 / Note #1 Bush crony Fitzhugh Green gives the view of the President's
backers on this affair, and conveys the arrogant racial attitude typical
of Skull and Bones: "Prescott Bush had a colorful side. In 1988 the press
revealed the complaint of an Apache leader about Bush. This was Ned Anderson
of San Carlos, Oklahoma [sic], who charged that as a young army officer
Bush stole the skull of Indian Chief [sic] Geronimo and had it hung on
the wall of Yale's Skull and Bones Club. After exposure of 'true facts'
by Anderson, and consideration by some representatives in Congress, the
issue faded from public sight. Whether or not this alleged skullduggery
actually occurred, "the mere idea casts the senior Bush in an adventurous
light"" / Note #1 / Note #2 [emphasis added]. George Bush's crowning as
a Bonesman was intensely, personally important to him.... Survivors of
his 1948 Bones group were interviewed for a 1988 "Washington Post" campaign
profile of George Bush. The members described their continuing intimacy
with and financial support for Bush up through his 1980s vice presidency.
Their original sexual togetherness at Yale is stressed: The relationships
that were formed in the "Tomb" ... where the Society's meetings took place
each Thursday and Sunday night during the academic year, have had a strong
place in Bush's life, according to all 11 of his fellow Bonsemen who are
still alive. Several described in detail the ritual in the organization
that builds the bonds. Before giving his life history, each memberhad to
spend a Sunday night reviewing his sex life in a talk known in the Tomb
as CB, or "connubial bliss".... "The first time you review your sex life....
We went all the way around among the 15, said Lucius H. Biglow Jr., a retired
Seattle attorney. "That way you get everybody committed to a certain extent....
It was a gradual way of building confidence." The sexual histories helped
break down the normal defenses of the members, according to several of
the members from his class. William J. Connelly Jr. ... said, "In Skull
and Bones we all stand together, 15 brothers under the skin. [It is] the
greatest allegiance in the world.".... / Note #1 / Note #3 - Notes - 5.
Fitzhugh Green, "George Bush: An Intimate Portrait", (New York: Hippocrene
Books, 1989), p. 48. 6. Among the sources used for this section are: Skull
and Bones membership list, 1833-1950, printed 1949 by the Russell Trust
Association, New Haven Connecticut, available through the Yale University
Library, New Haven. Biographies of the Russells and related families, in
the Yale University Library, New Haven, and in the Russell Library, Middletown,
Connecticut. Ron Chernow, "The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty
and the Rise of Modern Finance", (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).
Anthony C. Sutton, "How the Order Creates War and Revolution", (Phoenix:
Research Publications, Inc., 1984). Anthony C. Sutton, "America's Secret
Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones", (Billings,
Mt:, Liberty House Press, 1986). Anton Chaitkin, "Treason in America: From
Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman", second edition, (New York: New Benjamin
Franklin House, 1985). Anton Chaitkin, "Station Identification: Morgan,
Hitler, NBC," "New Solidarity", Oct. 8, 1984. Interviews with Bones members
and their families. 7. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, "The Wise Men:
Six Friends and the World They Made -- Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan,
Lovett, McCloy", (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 90-91. 8. "Ibid.",
p. 93. 9. Interview with Ned Anderson, Nov. 6, 1991. 10. Quoted in Ned
Anderson to Anton Chaitkin, Dec. 2, 1991, in possession of the present
authors. 11. Article by Paul Brinkley-Rogers of the "Arizona Republic",
in the "Washington Post", Oct. 1, 1988. 12. Green, "op. cit.", p. 50. 13.
Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, "Bush Opened Up To Secret Yale Society,"
"Washington Post", August 7, 1988. Chapter 8 THE PERMIAN BASIN GANG, 1948-59
Pecunia non olet. [Money doesn't smell.] -- Vespasian During the years
following the Second World War, the patrician families of the Eastern Anglophile
Liberal Establishment sent numbers of their offspring to colonize those
geographic regions of the United States which, the families estimated,
were likely to prosper in the postwar period. On the surface, this appears
as a simple reflex of greed: Cadet sons were dispatched to those areas
of the provinces where their instinctive methods of speculation and usury
could be employed to parasitize emerging wealth. More fundamentally, this
migration of young patrician bankers answered the necessity of political
control. The Eastern Establishment, understood as an agglomeration of financier
factions headquartered in Wall Street, had been the dominant force in American
politics since J.P. Morgan had bailed out the Grover Cleveland regime in
the 1890s. Since the assassination of William McKinley and the ad vent
of Theodore Roosevelt, the power of the Wall Street group had grown continuously.
The Eastern Establishment may have had its earliest roots north of Boston
and in the Hudson River Valley, but it was determined to be, not a mere
regional financier faction, but the undisputed ruling elite of the United
States as a whole, from Boston to Bohemian Grove and from Palm Beach to
the Pacific Northwest. It was thus imperative that the constant tendency
toward the formation of regional factions be preempted by the pervasive
presence of men bound by blood loyalty to the dominant cliques of Washington,
New York, and the "mother country," the City of Londo n. If the Eastern
Liberal Establishment were thought of as a cancer, then after 1945 that
cancer went into a new phase of malignant metastasis, infecting every part
of the American body politic. George Bush was one of those motile, malignant
cells. He was not alone; Robert Mosbacher also made the journey from New
York to Texas, in Mosbacher's case directly to Houston. The various sycophant
mythographers who have spun their yarns about the life of George Bush have
always attempted to present this phase of Bush's life as the case of a
fiercely independent young man who could have gone straight to the top
in Wall Street by trading on father Prescott's name and connections, but
who chose instead to strike out for the new frontier among the wildcatters
and roughnecks of the west Texas oil fields and become a self-made man.
As George Bush himself recounted in a 1983 interview, "If I were a psychoanalyzer,
I might conclude that I was trying to, not compete with my father, but
do something on my own. My stay in Texas was no Horatio Alger thing, but
moving from New Haven to Odessa just about the day I graduated was quite
a shift in lifestyle." / Note #1 These fairy tales from the "red Studebaker"
school seek to obscure the facts: that Bush's transfer to Texas was arranged
from the top by Prescott's Brown Brothers Harriman cronies, and that every
step forward made by Bush in the oil business was assisted by the capital
resources of our hero's maternal uncle, George Herbert Walker, Jr., "Uncle
Herbie," the boss of G.H. Walker & Co. investment firm of Wall Street.
Uncle Herbie had graduated from Yale in 1927, where he had been a member
of Skull and Bones. This is the Uncle Herbie who will show up as lead investor
and member of the board of Bush-Overbey oil, of Zapata Petroleum, and of
Zapata Offshore after 1959... Father Prescott procured George not one job,
but two, in each case contacting cronies who depended at least partially
on Brown Brothers Harriman for business. One crony contacted by father
Prescott was "Ray Kravis," who was in the oil business in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Oklahoma had experienced a colossal oil boom between the two world wars,
and Ray Kravis had cashed in, building up a personal fortune of some $25
million. Ray was the son of a British tailor whose father had come to America
and set up a haberdashery in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Young Ray Kravis
had arrived in Tulsa in 1925, in the midst of the oil boom that was making
the colossal fortunes of men like J. Paul Getty. Ray Kravis was primarily
a tax accountant, and he had invented a very special tax shelter which
allowed oil properties to be "packaged" and sold in such a way as to reduce
the tax on profits earned from the normal oil property rate of 81 percent
to a mere 15 percent. This meant that the national tax base was eroded,
and each individual taxpayer bilked, in order to subsidize the formation
of immense private fortunes; this will be found to be a constant theme
among George Bush's business associates down to the present day. Ray Kravis's
dexterity in setting up these tax shelters attracted the attention of Joseph
P. Kennedy, the bucaneering bootlegger, entrepreneur, political boss and
patriarch of the Massachusetts Kennedy clan. For many years Ray Kravis
functioned as the manager of the Kennedy family fortune (or fondo), the
same job that later devolved to Stephen Smith. Ray Kravis and Joe Kennedy
both wintered in Palm Beach, where they were sometimes golf partners. /
Note #2 In 1948-49, father Prescott was the managing partner of Brown Brothers
Harriman. Prescott knew Ray Kravis as a local Tulsa finance mogul and wheeler-dealer,
who was often called upon by Wall Street investment houses as a consultant
to evaluate the oil reserves of various companies. The estimates that Ray
Kravis provided often involved the amount of oil in the ground that these
firms possessed, and these estimates went to the heart of the oil business
as a ground-rent exploitation in which current oil production was far less
important than the reserves still beneath the soil. Such activity imparted
the kind of primitive-accumulation mentality that was later seen to animate
Ray Kravis's son Henry. During the 1980s, as we will see, Henry Kravis
personally generated some $58 billion in debt for the purpose of acquiring
36 companies and assembling the largest corporate empire, in paper terms,
of all time. Henry Kravis would be one of the leaders of the leveraged
buyout gang which became a mainstay of the political machine of George
Bush.... So father Prescott asked Ray if he had a job for young George.
The answer was, of course he did. But in the meantime, Prescott Bush had
also been talking with another crony beholden to him, "Henry Neil Mallon,"
who was the president and chairman of the board of Dresser Industries,
a leading manufacturer of drill bits and related oil well drilling equipment.
Dresser had been incorporated in 1905 by Solomon R. Dresser, but had been
bought up and reorganized by W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1928-29. Henry
Neil Mallon, for whom the infamous Neil Mallon Bush of Hinckley and Silverado
fame is named, came from a Cincinnati family who were traditional retainers
for the Taft clan, in the same way that the Bush-Walker family were retainers
for the Harrimans. As a child, Neil Mallon had gone with his family to
visit their close friends, President William Howard Taft and his family,
at the White House. Mallon had then attended the Taft School in Watertown,
Connecticut, and had gone on to Yale University in the fall of 1913, where
he met Bunny Harriman, Prescott Bush, Knight Wooley, and the other Bonesmen.
As we recall from the previous chapter: the society's internal history
boasted that in 1918, Mallon burned the flesh and hair off the skull of
Geronimo, which Prescott Bush and his friends stole from the despoiled
grave at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. One day in December 1928, Bunny Harriman,
father Prescott and Knight Wooley were sitting around the Harriman counting
house discussing their reorganization of Dresser Industries. Mallon, who
was returning to Ohio after six months spent mountaineering in the Alps,
came by to visit. At a certain point in the conversation, Bunny pointed
to Mallon and exclaimed, "Dresser! Dresser!" Mallon was subsequently interviewed
by George Herbert Walker, the president of W.A. Harriman & Co. As a
result of this interview, Mallon was immediately made president of Dresser,
although he had no experience in the oil business. Mallon clearly owed
the Walker-Bush clan some favors. / Note #3 Prescott Bush had become a
member of the board of directors of Dresser Industries in 1930, in the
wake of the reorganization of the company, which he had personally helped
to direct. Prescott Bush was destined to remain on the Dresser board for
22 years, until 1952, when he entered the United States Senate. Father
Prescott was thus calling in a chit which procured George a second job
offer, this time with Dresser Industries or one of its subsidiaries. George
Bush knew that the oil boom in Oklahoma had passed its peak, and that Tulsa
would no longer offer the sterling opportunities for a fast buck it had
presented 20 years earlier. Dresser, by contrast, was a vast international
corporation, ideally suited to gaining a rapid overview of the oil industry
and its looting practices. George Bush accordingly called Ray Kravis and,
in the ingratiating tones he was wont to use as he clawed his way toward
the top, said th at he wished respectfully to decline the job that Kravis
had offered him in Tulsa. His first preference was to go to work for Dresser.
Ray Kravis, who looked to Prescott for business, released him at once.
"I know George Bush well," said Ray Kravis years later. "I've known him
since he got out of school. His father was a very good friend of mine."
/ Note #4 Bush in Odessa This is the magic moment in which all the official
Bush biographies show our hero riding into Odessa, Texas in the legendary
red Studebaker, to take up a post as an equipment clerk and trainee for
the Dresser subsidiary IDECO (International Derrick and Equipment Company).
But the red Studebaker myth, as alreadynoted, misrepresents the facts.
According to the semi-official history of Dresser Industries, George Bush
was first employed by Dresser at their corporate headquarters in Cleveland,
Ohio, where he worked for Dresser executive R.E. Reimer, an ally of Mallon.
/ Note #5 This stint in Cleveland is hardly mentioned by the pro-Bush biographers,
making us wonder what is being covered up. On the same page that relates
these interesting facts, there is a picture that shows father Prescott,
Dorothy, Barbara Bush, and George holding his infant son George Walker
Bush. Young George W. is wearing cowboy boots. They are all standing in
front of a Dresser Industries executive airplane, apparently a DC-3. Could
this be the way George really arrived in Odessa? The Dresser history also
has George Bush working for Pacific Pumps, another Dresser subsidiary,
before finally joining IDECO. According to Bush's campaign autobiography,
he had been with IDECO for a year in Odessa, Texas before being transferred
to work for Pacific Pumps in Huntington Park and Bakersfield, California.
Bush says he worked at Huntington Park as an assemblyman, and it was here
that he claims to have joined the United Steelworkers Union, obtaining
a union card that he will still pull out when confronted for his long history
of union-busting, as for example when he was heckled at a shipyard in Portland,
Oregon during the 1988 campaign. Other accounts place Bush in Ventura,
Compton and "Richard Nixon's home town of Whittier" during this same period.
/ Note #6 If Bush actually went to California first and only later to Odessa,
he may be lying in order to stress that he chose Texas as his first choice,
a distortion that may have been concocted very early in his political career
to defend himself against the constant charge that he was a carpetbagger.
Odessa, Texas, and the nearby city of Midland were both located in the
geological formation known as the "Permian Basin," the scene of an oil
boom that developed in the years after the Second World War. Odessa at
this time was a complex of yards and warehouses, where oil drilling equipment
was brought for distribution to the oil rigs that were drilling all over
the landscape. At IDECO, Bush worked for supervisor Bill Nelson, and had
one Hugh Evans among his co-workers. Concerning this period, we are regaled
with stories about how Bush and Barbara moved into a shotgun house, an
apartment that had been divided by a partition down the middle, with a
bathroom they shared with a mother and daughter prostitute team. There
was a pervasive odor of gas, which came not from a leak in the oven, but
from nearby oil wells where the gas was flared off. George and Barbara
were to spend some time slumming in this setting. But Bush was anxious
to ingratiate himself with the roughnecks and roustabouts; he began eating
the standard Odessa diet of a bowl of chili with crackers and beer for
lunch, and chicken-fried steak for dinner. Perhaps his affected liking
for country and western music and pork rinds, and other public relations
ploys go back to this time. Bush is also fond of recounting the story of
how, on Christmas Eve, 1948, he got drunk during various IDECO customer
receptions and passed out, dead drunk, on his own front lawn, where he
was found by Barbara. George Bush, we can see, is "truly a regular guy."
According to the official Bush version of events, George and "Bar" peregrinated
during 1949 far from their beloved Texas to various towns in California
where Dresser had subsidiaries. Bush claims that he drove 1,000 miles a
week through the Carrizo Plains and the Cuyama Valley. Some months later
they moved to Midland, another tumbleweed town in west Texas. Midland offered
the advantage of being the location of the west Texas headquarters of many
of the oil companies that operated in Odessa and the surrounding area....
The Bush social circle in Odessa was hardly composed of oil field roughnecks.
Rather, their peer group was composed more of the sorts of people they
had known in New Haven: a clique of well-heeled recent graduates of prestigious
eastern colleges who had been attracted to the Permian Basin in the same
way that Stanford, Hopkins, Crocker and their ilk were attracted to San
Francisco during the gold rush. Here were Toby Hilliard, John Ashmun, and
Pomeroy Smith, all from Princeton. Earle Craig had been at Yale. Midland
thus boasted a Yale Club and a Harvard Club and a Princeton Club. The natives
referred to this clique as "the Yalies." Also present on the scene in Midland
were J. Hugh Liedtke and William Liedtke, who had grown up in Oklahoma,
but who had attended college at Amherst in Massachusetts. Many of these
individuals had access to patrician fortunes back East for the venture
capital they mobilized behind their various deals. Toby Hilliard's full
name was "Harry Talbot Hilliard" of Fox Chapel near Pittsburgh, where the
Mellons had their palatial residence. "Earle Craig" was also hooked up
to big money in the same area. The "Liedtke brothers," as we will see,
had connections to the big oil money that had emerged around Tulsa. Many
of these "Yalies" also lived in the Easter Egg Row neighborhood. A few
houses away from George Bush there lived a certain "John Overbey." According
to Overbey, the "people from the East and the people from Texas or Oklahoma
all seemed to have two things in common. They all had a chance to be stockbrokers
or investment bankers. And they all wanted to learn the oil business instead."
/ Note #7 The Landman Overbey made his living as a landman. Since George
Bush would shortly also become a landman, it is worth investigating what
this occupation actually entails; in doing so, we will gain a permanent
insight into Bush's character. The role of the landman in the Texas oil
industry was to try to identify properties where oil might be found, sometimes
on the basis of leaked geological information, sometimes after observing
that one of the major oil companies was drilling in the same locale. The
landman would scout the property, and then attempt to get the owner of
the land to sign away the mineral rights to the property in the form of
a lease. If the property owner were well informed about the possibility
that oil might in fact be found on his land, the price of the lease would
obviously go up, because signing away the mineral rights meant that the
income (or "royalties") from any oil that might be found would never go
to the owner of the land. A cunning landman would try to gather as much
insider information as he could and keep the rancher as much in the dark
as possible. In rural Texas in the 1940s, the role of the landman could
rather easily degenerate into that of the ruthless, money-grubbing con
artist, who would try to convince an ill-informed and possibly ignorant
Texas dirt farmer, who was just coming up for air after the great depression,
that the chances of finding oil on his land were just about zero, and that
even a token fee for a lease on the mineral rights would be eminently worth
taking. Once the farmer or rancher had signed away his right to future
oil royalties, the landman would turn around and attempt to "broker" the
lease by selling it at an inflated price to a major oil company that might
be interested in drilling, or to some other buyer. There was a lively market
in such leases in the restaurant of the Scharbauer Hotel in Midland, where
maps of the oil fields hung on the walls and oil leases coul d change hands
repeatedly in the course of a single day. Sometimes, if a landman were
forced to sell a lease to the mineral rights of land where he really thought
there might be oil, he would seek to retain an override, perhaps amounting
to a sixteenth or a thirty-second of the royalties from future production.
But that would mean less cash or even no cash received now, and small-time
operators like Overbey, who had no capital resources of their own, were
always strapped for cash. Overbey was lucky if he could realize a profit
of a few hundred dollars on the sale of a lease. This form of activity
clearly appealed to the mean-spirited and the greedy, to those who enjoyed
rooking their fellowman. It was one thing for Overbey, who may have had
no alternative to support his family. It was quite another thing for George
Herbert Walker Bush, a young plutocrat out slumming. But Bush was drawn
to the landman and royalty game, so much so that he offered to raise capital
back East if Overbey would join him in a partnership. / Note #8 Overbey
accepted Bush's proposition that they capitalize a company that would trade
in the vanished hopes of the ranchers and farmers of northwest Texas. Bush
and Overbey flew back East to talk with Uncle Herbie in the oak-paneled
board room of G.H. Walker & Co. in Wall Street.