Altruistic World Online Library

Chapter V -- Poppy and Mommy

"Oh Mother, Mother! What have you done? Behold! the heavens do open. 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, Prescott, 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. [fn1 ]

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 yachting. 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....'' [fn2 ]

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....'' [fn3] 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.'' [fn4]

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....'' [fn5]

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.'' [fn6]

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.'' [fn7]

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.''' [fn8]

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.''' [fn9]

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 possession. 'Have half, have half,' he kept repeating, and for a while around the house we called him 'Have half.''' [fn10]

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 fair 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....'' [fn11]

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.'' [fn12]

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.'' [fn13]

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 alumni'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 American Revolution.

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 blue-blooded Anglophiles. Andover missionaries were eventually jailed in Georgia; their too-modern Cherokee allies were murdered and driven into exile by pro-slavery 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.

Andover installed a new headmaster in 1933. Claude Moore Fuess (rhymes with fleece) replaced veteran headmaster Alfred E. Stearns, 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, ready 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. [fn14]

During George Bush's years at Andover, Feuss, his headmaster, 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 blue bloods, 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. [fn15]

Headmaster Fuess used to say to his staff, "I came to power with Hitler and Mussolini.'' [fn16] 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. [fn17]

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.

The Secret Societies

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. [fn18]

A retired teacher, who was an adviser 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 apparently 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 inquisitor]....

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....

Shortly after 1915 the present [A.U.V.] house was constructed. From then until the Society crisis of the 1940s, A.U.V. continued strong and successful. There were, to be sure, some problems. In the mid-1920s, the scholarship average of the Society dropped abysmally. The members had also been pledging students illegally--without the approval of the Faculty guardian. In one initiation a boy had been so battered that he was unable to run in the Andover-Exeter track meet.... Yet the Society managed to overcome these problems and well deserved its position as one of the big three among the school's Societies.... [fn19]

From all available evidence, at Andover prep George Bush was completely obsessed with status, with seeming to be important. His 1980 campaign biography boasts that he achieved this goal:

"There was, as there always is at any institution, an elitism in terms of the group that ran things, the power group among the boys who recognized each other as peers. George was among this group, but for him it was natural....'' [fn20]

The A.U.V. roster, 32 members including George Bush, is given in the Andover Class of 1942 yearbook. Why was it "natural'' for George to be "among this group''?

The hierarchical top banana of the A.U.V. in George's class was Godfrey Anderson ("Rocky'') Rockefeller. In the yearbook just above the A.U.V. 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 A.U.V. 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.

But this kind of backing, by itself, cannot ensure that a person will rise to the top, to authentic `` big-shot '' status. You have to want it very, very badly.

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. '' [fn21]

Leaving academic studies aside, 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. [fn22]

Student records show a massive list of offices and titles for Poppy, perhaps more than for any other student:

A.U.V.

President of Senior Class (1 term)

Secretary of Student Council (1 term)

Student Council (1941-42) (surveillance of students during tests, keeping order in the movies, investigating student thieves)

President of Society of Inquiry (1941-42)

Senior Prom Committee

Chairman of Student Deacons (1941-42)

Advisory Board (management of sports, choosing of P.A. Police to control student body, choosing of cheerleaders)

President of Greeks (1940-42)

Captain of Baseball (1942)

Captain of Soccer (1941)

Manager of Basketball (1941)

Society of Inquiry (1940-42) (formerly a Christian mission group, now management of extra-curricular activities)

Student Deacon (1940-42)

Editorial Board of the Phillipian (1938-39)

All-club Soccer (1938)

Business Board of the Pot Pourri (1940-42)

Deputy Housemaster

Varsity Soccer Squad (1939-41)

Varsity Basketball Team (1941-42)

Junior Varsity Baseball Team (1939)

Varsity Baseball Squad (1940)

Varsity Baseball Team (1941-42)

Johns Hopkins Prize (1938)

Treasurer of Student Council (1 term)

To be sure, some of these distinctions were, well, a bit less than he had hoped for.

The Class of 1942 was officially polled, to see who had the most status among the students themselves.

For "Best All-Around Fellow,'' Poppy Bush was third. Bush did not show up in the "Most Intelligent'' category.

Interestingly, Bush came in second on "Most Faculty Drag'' -- the teachers' pets -- even though Bush did not appear at all on the school's Scholastic Honors list. In fact, no member of the Rockefeller-Bush A.U.V. was on the Honors list -- despite chanting incantations, being smeared with filth and urinating on porches.

Barbara Pierce's Tradition

The Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, bringing America into World War II. Because of his family's involvement with the Nazis, this would later pose a very different problem for Andover senior Poppy Bush than for the ordinary young man his age.

Meanwhile, the social whirl went on. A couple of weeks after Pearl Harbor, during Christmas vacation, George went to a "cotillion at the Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was a social affair attended by upcoming debutantes and acceptable young men.'' [fn23]

Here George Bush met his future wife, Barbara Pierce, whose family was in the High Society set in nearby Rye, New York. Barbara was an attractive 16-year-old girl, athletic like George's mother. She was home for the holidays from her exclusive boarding school, Ashley Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her breeding was acceptable:

"Barbara's background, though not quite so aristocratic as George's, was also socially impressive in a day when Society was defined by breeding rather than wealth. Her father, Marvin Pierce, was a distant nephew of President Franklin Pierce (1853-57).... Barbara's mother, Pauline Robinson ... was [the daughter of] an Ohio Supreme Court justice.'' [fn24]

Barbara's father, Marvin Pierce, was then vice president of McCall Corporation, publisher of Redbook and McCall's magazines. After his daughter joined the banking oligarchy by marrying into the Bush family (1945), Pierce became McCall's chief executive. Pierce and his magazine's theme of "Togetherness''--stressing family social existence divorced from political, scientific, artistic or creative activities--played a role in the cult of conformity and mediocrity which crushed U.S. mental life in the 1950s.

A great deal is made about Barbara Pierce Bush's family connection to U.S. President Franklin Pierce. It is inserted in books written by Bush friends and staff members. Barbara Bush's gossip-column biographer says: "Her own great-great-great uncle President Franklin Pierce had his [White House] office in the Treaty Room....'' In fact, President Pierce was a distant cousin of Barbara Pierce's great-great grandfather, not his brother, as this claim would imply.**

**[Established through consultation with the New Hampshire Historical Society and Pierce family experts in Pennsylvania, this fact is acknowledged by Mrs. Bush's White House staff.]

Like the Henry III ancestral claim, Franklin Pierce may be a bad omen for George Bush. The catastrophic Pierce was refused renomination by his own political party. Pierce backed schemes to spread slavery by having mercenaries, called "filibusters,'' invade Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean islands. During the Civil War, he attacked the Emancipation Proclamation that outlawed black slavery in the rebel states. His former backers among the wealthy New England families abandoned him and treated him like dirt. He died unmourned in 1869.

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 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. [fn25] Darling's The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950 was classified Secret on its completion in December 1953. For 36 years it was only to be consulted for self-justification by the Harrimanites. 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.

Crisis

Having met his future wife Barbara, Poppy Bush returned from the Christmas holidays after New Year's Day, 1942, for his final months at Andover. The U.S. entry into World War II made things rather awkward for Bush and some of his schoolmates, and cast a dark shadow on his future.

Since early 1941, the Justice Department had been investigating the Nazi support apparatus among U.S. firms. This probe centered on the Harriman, Rockefeller, Du Pont and related enterprises, implicating George's father Prescott, his partners and the Bushes' close family friends.

On March 5, 1942--at about the time Poppy Bush and Rocky Rockefeller were contemplating the tortures they would inflict on the Class of 1943 A.U.V. recruits--the Special Committee of the U.S. Senate Investigating the National Defense Program began explosive public hearings in Washington, D.C. The subject: cartel agreements between U.S. and Nazi firms that should be hit with anti-trust actions. Pearl Harbor, the draft of American boys, and these sensational hearings were causing a popular attitude quite dangerous for the higher-level Nazi collaborators (see Chapter 2).

But on March 20, 1942, Henry L. Stimson, U.S. Secretary of War and president of Andover prep's Board of Trustees, sent a memorandum to President Franklin Roosevelt recommending stopping the investigations of the U.S.-Nazi trusts: the resulting lawsuits would "unavoidably consume the time of executives and employees of those corporations which are engaged in war work.'' Stimson got Navy Secretary Frank Knox and Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold to co-sign the memo. President Roosevelt agreed to Stimson's request, but conceded to Arnold and his antitrust staff that he would press for extended statutes of limitation to make postwar prosecutions possible. [fn26]

Stimson's intervention for his friends could not, however, entirely cancel the already ongoing exposure and prosecution of Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey, as we saw in Chapter 4. After Farish's death, the prosecutions were suspended, but the seizures of Nazi corporate assets continued, and this would soon lead to Prescott Bush and to Grandfather Walker. Could aristocratic friends be relied upon to prevent scandal or legal trouble from smashing up Poppy's world, and wrecking his carefully prepackaged golden future?

As George wound up his Andover career, and paid court to Barbara, U.S. government investigators sifted through the affairs of the Hitler-Harriman-Bush steamship lines, Hamburg-Amerika and North German Lloyd. Their final report, issued under confidential seal on July 18, 1942, would show that long-time Harriman-Bush executive Christian J. Beck was still the New York attorney for the merged Nazi firms. (See Chapter 3 for details and description of sources.)

Seizure orders on the shipping lines would be issued in August. The government would seize other Nazi assets, still managed by the Bush family, in the autumn. Prescott Bush, legally responsible for Nazi German banking operations in New York, would have to be named in a seizure order. Could friends in high places keep all this out of the public eye?

Along about this time, something was going very wrong with the secret societies at Andover prep school.

Andover's historian, as quoted above, affirmed that "until the Society crisis of the 1940s, A.U.V. continued strong and successful.'' But a few months after Poppy Bush and Rocky Rockefeller left the school, Headmaster Fuess and his trustees announced they were closing and banning the secret societies forever. This set off a storm of controversy.

Bush's A.U.V. had been humiliating students and teaching anti-Christian rituals since 1877. Fuess was himself a member of one of the Societies. What had happened, to precipitate this drastic decision?

The great Society crisis at Andover was highly charged, because so many of the alumni and parents of current students were leaders of government and finance. An ugly scandal there would reverberate around the world. Whatever really prompted the close-down decision was kept a tight secret, and remains wrapped in mystery today, a half-century later.

Headmaster Fuess claimed that an event which happened nine years earlier had moved him to the decision. This event was duly recorded in the Andover history book:

"In 1934 one undergraduate had been killed during the course of a Society initiation. A group of alumni had joined the undergraduates for part of the ceremonies that were held in a barn on the outskirts of Andover. On the way back the initiate rode on the running board of a car driven by one of the alumni. The roads were slippery, and the car crashed into a telegraph pole, crushing the boy, who died in Dr. Fuess's presence in the hospital a few hours later.'' [fn27]

But this tragedy had been brushed off by the school administration, with no suggestion of interfering with the satanic Societies. Was there another, significantly worse disaster, that happened to Class of 1943 secret society recruits?

When the alumni heard about the decision, they exploded into action. They accused Fuess of "fascism'' and attacked his "star-chamber proceedings.'' A Boston newspaper headline proclaimed, "10,000 Andover Alumni Battle Trustees on Abolishing Secret Societies.'' The headmaster, releasing no specifics to back up his proposal, said, "the purpose for which the secret societies were founded no longer seems apparent.'' His allies said, quite vaguely, that the Societies "promoted exclusiveness,'' operated "on a special privilege basis,'' and created "social cleavage.'' [fn28]

The stealthy shut-down decision, having now become loudly public, had to be squelched. Andover's Board of Trustees president, Secretary of War Stimson, settled the matter and kept a lid on things with his familiar refrain that the war effort should not be disturbed. Whatever had pushed Fuess and the trustees to act, was never disclosed. The Societies were quietly closed down in 1950.

Secretary of War Stimson 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), 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 five 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.'' [fn29]

_______________

Notes:

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, p. 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, Hanover, N.H.), pp. 505-7.

20. King, op. cit., p. 21.

21. Spoke on condition of non-attribution.

22. Hyams, op. cit., pp. 23-24.

23. Ibid., p. 24.

24. Ibid., p. 27.

25. See New York Times, Nov. 29, 1971.

26. Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1978), p. 89.

27. Allis, op. cit., p. 512.

28. Newsweek, August 9, 1943; Boston Globe, July 22, 1943.

29. Green, op. cit., page 28.

Chapter VI -- Bush in World War II

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 exploits as a naval aviator 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.

But George Bush has always traded shamelessly on his alleged war record. 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 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), and appeared during the time of the Middle East conflagration that was the product of Bush's obsessions. Hyams's work had the unmistakable 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 USSR 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, and the commencement speaker was Secretary of War Henry Stimson, eminence grise of the US 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 Theordore Roosevelt's secretary of state. Stimson had been Theodore Roosevelt's anti-corruption, trust-busting US 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 US 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 Two 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.

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. [fn 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 training. 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 the Naval 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 Anna 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.

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 crewmembers, gunner Leo Nadeau and radioman-tail gunner John L. Delaney, were picked up by a US 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 thirteen air strikes, many in connection with the US 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. (jg) 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 antiaircraft 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 antiaircraft 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. [fn 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 crewmembers 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. [fn 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 Chi-Chi Jima. The chute of the other person who bailed out did not open. Bush has not yet been returned to the squadron...so this information is incomplete. While Lt. j.g. 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." [fn 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 1960's, 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. [fn 5]

King's account in 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 planemates 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 crewmember this was. As he jumped, however, his parachute snarled and failed to open. [fn 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."

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. [fn 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 US 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 Mierzejewksi, who was the rear turret gunner in the aircraft flown by Squadron Commander Douglas Melvin. During 1987-88, Mierzejewksi 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, Mierzekewski, 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. [fn 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." Mierzejewksi 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.

Mierzejewki, 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 Mierzejewksy, 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 Mierzejewki'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, and referred to the alleged fire on board Bush's plane, "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 1980's, 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," Mierzejewksi 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 Mierzejeweski 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 Mierzejewksi to offer him a copy of the report.

It is typical of Joe Hyams' hack work for Bush in The Flight of the Avenger that he never mentions Mierzejewksi'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." [fn 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. [fn10]

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 brother Jack had not always spoken of you as the best pilot in the squadron. [fn 11]

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." [fn 12]

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. [fn 13]

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:

1. For details of Bush's navy career, see Joe Hyams, Flight of the Avenger (New York, 1991), passim.

2. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 36.

3. Hyams, Flight of the Avenger, pp. 106-107.

4. Hyams, Flight of the Avenger, p. 111.

5. Nicholas King, George Bush: A Biography (New York, 1980), pp. 30-31.

6. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York, 1989), pp. 36-37.

7. Richard Ben Cramer, "George Bush" How He Got Here," Espquire, June 1991.

8. Allan Wolper and Al Ellenberg, "The Day Bush Bailed Out," New York Post, August 12, 1988, p. 1 ff.

10. Bush and Gold, p. 36.

11. Washington Post, August 7, 1988

12. Hyams, p. 143.

13 bis. Bush and Gold, pp. 40-41.

14. Hyams, p. 134

Chapter VII -- Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale

"Wise statesmen ... established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began....'' [fn1]

-- Abraham Lincoln

Honeymoon

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.

George's next assignment was to train pilots at Norfolk, Virginia Naval Air Station. "George's duty ... was light. As for other young marrieds, whose husbands were between warzone tours, this was kind of an extended (and paid) honeymoon.'' [fn2 ]

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.

Bush and his friends remember it all fondly, as representatives of the Fashionable Set: "[M]embers of [Bush's] class have since sighed with nostalgia for those days of the late 1940s.... Trolley cars still rumbled along the New Haven streets. On autumn afternoons they would be crowded with students going out to football games at the Yale Bowl, scattering pennies along the way and shouting `scramble' to the street kids diving for them'' [emphasis added]. [fn3]

In 1947, Barbara gave birth to George W. Bush, the President's namesake.

By the time of his 1948 graduation, he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, an honor traditionally associated with academic achievement. A great deal is known about George Bush's career at Yale, except 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 resume 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.'' [fn4]

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. [fn5]

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 undoubted political and financial power associated with Skull and Bones has given rise to many popular questions about the nature and origin of the group. Its members have fed the mystery with false leads and silly speculations.

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 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.

Observers of Skull and Bones, apologists and critics alike, have accepted various deceptive notions about the order. There are two outstanding, among these falsehoods:

1) that it is essentially an American group, an assembly of wealthy, elite "patriots''; it is in fact, an agency for British Empire penetration and subversion of the American republic; and

2) that it is somehow the unique center of conspiratorial control over the United States. This misconception is certainly understandable, given the rather astonishing number of powerful, historically important and grotesquely anti-human individuals, who have come out of Skull and Bones. But there are in fact congruent organizations at other Ivy League colleges, which reflect, as does Skull and Bones, the over-arching oligarchical power of several heavily intermarried financier families.

The mistaken, speculative notions may be corrected by examining the history of Skull and Bones, viewed within the reality of the American Eastern Establishment.

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 (see accompanying chart). 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.

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 "blue bloods'' 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. 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 auspices.

** Certain of the prominent Boston opium families, such as Cabot and Weld, did not affiliate directly with Russell, Connecticut and Yale, but were identified instead with Harvard.

John Quincy Adams and other patriots had fought these men for a quarter century by the time the Russell Trust Association was set up with its open pirate emblem--Skull and Bones.

With British ties of family, shipping and merchant banking, the old New England Tories had continued their hostility to American independence after the Revolutionary War of 1775-83. These pretended conservative patriots proclaimed Thomas Jefferson's 1801 presidential inauguration "radical usurpation.''

The Massachusetts Tories ("Essex Junto'') joined with Vice President Aaron Burr, Jr. (a member of the Connecticut Edwards and Pierpont families) and Burr's cousin and law partner Theodore Dwight, in political moves designed to break up the United States and return it to British allegiance.

The U.S. nationalist leader, former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, exposed the plan in 1804. Burr shot him to death in a duel, then led a famous abortive conspiracy to form a new empire in the Southwest, with territory to be torn from the U.S.A. and Spanish Mexico. For the ``blue bloods,'' the romantic figure of Aaron Burr was ever afterwards the symbol of British feudal revenge against the American republic.

The Connecticut Tory families hosted the infamous Hartford Convention in 1815, toward the end of the second war between the U.S. and Britain (the War of 1812). Their secessionist propaganda was rendered impotent by America's defensive military victory. This faction then retired from the open political arena, pursuing instead entirely private and covert alliances with the British Empire. The incestuously intermarried Massachusetts and Connecticut families associated themselves with the British East India Company in the criminal opium traffic into China. These families made increased profits as partners and surrogates for the British during the bloody 1839-42 Opium War, the race war of British forces against Chinese defenders.

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 British 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.''

A police-blotter type review of Russell's organization will show why the secret order, though powerful, was not the unique organ of "conspiracy'' for the U.S. Eastern Establishment. The following gentlemen were among Russells' partners:

Augustine Heard (1785-1868): ship captain and pioneer U.S. opium smuggler.

John Cleve Green (1800-75): married to Sarah Griswold; gave a fortune in opium profits to Princeton University, financing three Princeton buildings and four professorships; trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary for 25 years.

Abiel Abbott Low (1811-93): his opium fortune financed the construction of the Columbia University New York City campus; father of Columbia's president Seth Low.

John Murray Forbes (1813-98): his opium millions financed the career of author Ralph Waldo Emerson, who married Forbes's daughter, and bankrolled the establishment of the Bell Telephone Company, whose first president was Forbes's son.

Joseph Coolidge: his Augustine Heard agency got $10 million yearly as surrogates for the Scottish dope-runners Jardine Matheson during the fighting in China; his son organized the United Fruit Company; his grandson, Archibald Cary Coolidge, was the founding executive officer of the Anglo-Americans' Council on Foreign Relations.

Warren Delano, Jr.: chief of Russell and Co. in Canton; grandfather of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Russell Sturgis: his grandson by the same name was chairman of the Baring Bank in England, financiers of the Far East opium trade.

Such persons as John C. Green and A.A. Low, whose names adorn various buildings at Princeton and Columbia Universities, made little attempt to hide the criminal origin of their influential money. Similarly with the Cabots, the Higginsons and the Welds for Harvard. The secret groups at other colleges are analogous and closely related to Yale's Skull and Bones.

Princeton has its "eating clubs,'' especially Ivy Club and Cottage Club, whose oligarchical tradition runs from Jonathan Edwards and Aaron Burr through the Dulles brothers. At Harvard there is the ultra-blue-blooded Porcelian (known also as the Porc or Pig club); Theodore Roosevelt bragged to the German Kaiser of his membership there; Franklin Roosevelt was a member of the slightly "lower'' Fly Club.

A few of the early initiates in Skull and Bones went on to careers in obvious defiance of the order's oligarchical character; two such were the scientists Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (Skull and Bones 1837), and William Chauvenet (Skull and Bones 1840). This reflects the continued importance of republican factions at Yale, Harvard and other colleges during the middle three decades of the nineteenth century. Silliman and Chauvenet became enemies of everything Skull and Bones stood for, while the Yale secret group rapidly conformed to the Russells' expectations.

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 Carolinan defender of slavery against nationalism, and Judah P. Benjamin, later Secretary of State for the slaveowners' Confederacy.

Young South Carolinan Joseph Heatly Dulles, whose family bought their slaves with the money from contract-security work for the British conquerors in India, was in a previous secret Yale group, the "Society of Brothers in Unity.'' At Yale Dulles worked with the Northern secessionists and attached himself to Daniel Lord; their two families clove together in the fashion of a gang. The Lords became powerful Anglo-American Wall Street lawyers, and J.H. Dulles's grandson was the father of Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles.

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 (thus the false accounts of the ``good old slavery days'' and the "bad northern invaders''); John Perkins, Jr. (S&B 1840), chairman of the 1861 Louisiana Secession Convention, who fled abroad for 13 years after the Civil War; 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.''

Other pre-Civil War Bonesmen were:

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;

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;

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;

Andrew D. White (S&B 1853): founding president of Cornell University; psychic researcher; and diplomatic cohort of the Venetian, Russian and British oligarchies;

Chauncey M. Depew (S&B 1856): general counsel for the Vanderbilt railroads, he helped the Harriman family to enter into high society.

By about the mid-1880s, the Skull and Bones membership roster began to change from its earlier, often "scholarly,'' coloration; the change reflected the degradation of American political and economic life by imperialist, neo-pagan and racialist ideology.

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.

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.

Helping Pinchot initiate this century's racialist environmentalism were his cohorts George W. Woodruff (S&B 1889), Teddy Roosevelt's Assistant Attorney General and Acting Interior Secretary; and Henry Solon Graves (S&B 1892), chief U.S. forester 1910-20. Frederick E. Weyerhauser (S&B 1896), owner of vast tracts of American forest, was a follower of Pinchot's movement, while the Weyerhauser family were active collaborators of British-South African super-racist Cecil Rhodes. This family's friendship with President George Bush is a vital factor in the present environmentalist movement.

With Henry L. Stimson (S&B 1888) we come to the Eastern Liberal Establishment which has ruled America during the twentieth century. Stimson was President Taft's Secretary of War (1911-13), and President Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State (1929-33). As Secretary of War (1940-45), this time under President Harry Truman, Stimson pressed 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 U.S. and the Atom had better be dreaded, they thought.

The present century owes much of its record of horrors to the influential Anglophile American families which came to dominate and employ the Skull and Bones Society 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. At that time, the Morgan bank was 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 dilettantes, 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. [fn6]

Lovett was transferred to the U.S. Navy after the U.S. 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.'' [fn7]

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 (see Chapter 4).

British Empire loyalists flew right from the Yale Unit into U.S. strategymaking positions:

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.

Robert Lovett was Assistant Secretary of War for Air from 1941-45.

Lovett's 1918 Bonesmate Artemus Gates (chosen by Prescott and his fellows) became Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air in 1941. Gates retained this post throughout the Second World 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

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., had put the U.S. insurance industry's inside knowledge of all fire-insured industrial plants at the disposal of government planners during World War I.

The senior Bissell, a powerful Yale alumnus, was also 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 major 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 then joined Harriman's entourage in the U.S. government. Bissell was an economist for the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board in 1942-43, while Averell Harriman was the U.S. leader of that board in London.

In 1947 and 1948, Bissell was executive secretary of the "Harriman Commission,'' otherwise known as the President's Commission on Foreign Aid. When Harriman was the administrator of the Marshall Plan, Bissell was assistant administrator.

Harriman was director of Mutual Security (1951-53), while Bissell was consultant to the director of Mutual Security 1952.

Bissell then joined F. Trubee Davison at the Central Intelligence Agency. When Allen Dulles became CIA Director, Bissell was one of his three aides.

Why could this be of interest to our Floridians? We saw in Chapter 4, that the great anti-Castro covert initiative of 1959-61 was supervised by an awesome array of Harriman agents. We need now add to that assessment only the fact that 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. 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.

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), co-authored 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.

There was also Henry Luce, a Bonesman of 1920 with David S. 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.

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 the 1950s.

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 B'rith to protect the Harriman-Bush deals with Hitler. This made it nice for Averell Harriman, just like family, when Amory Howe Bradford worked on the Planning Group of Harriman's NATO secretariat in London, 1951-52. Bradford was meanwhile assistant to the publisher of the New York Times, and went on to become general manager of the Times.

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 director 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 covert operations 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 assistant to the director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, and a propaganda analyst for the U.S. Information Agency, before graduating from Yale. Thus while he was imbibing the British view at Oxford University (1963-65), Boren was already an Anglo-American intelligence operative, listed in the "speakers bureau'' of the American embassy in London. David Boren 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.

Bush's Own Bones

Among the traditional artifacts 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 was finally interned at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He became a farmer and joined a Christian congregation. He died at the age of 79 years in 1909, and was buried at Fort Sill. 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. [fn8]:

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 watching 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.

Outraged, Anderson traveled to New Haven. He did some investigation on the Yale campus and held numerous discussions, to learn what the Apaches would be up against when they took action, and what type of action would be most fruitful.

Through an attorney, Ned 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 toward 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 general 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 Ned 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 Udahl and John McCain III, but with no results. George Bush refused Congressman McCain's request that he meet with Anderson.

Anderson wrote to Udahl, enclosing a photograph of the wall case and skull at the "Tomb,'' showing a black 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 Clubs [i.e. 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....'' [fn9]

The other grave robber whose name is given, Ellery James, we encountered in Chapter 1--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, originating from the Establishment-line Arizona Republic, entitled "Skull for Scandal: Did Bush's Father Rob Geronimo's Grave?'' The article included 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 Endicott Davison tried to get the Apache leader to sign, stipulated that Ned 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. [fn10]

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'' [fn11][emphasis added].

George Bush's crowning as a Bonesman was intensely, personally important to him. These men were tapped for the Class of 1948:

Thomas William Ludlow Ashley
Lucius Horatio Biglow, Jr.
George Herbert Walker Bush
John Erwin Caulkins
William Judkins Clark
William James Connelly, Jr.
George Cook III
David Charles Grimes
Richard Elwood Jenkins
Richard Gerstle Mack
Thomas Wilder Moseley
George Harold Pfau, Jr.
Samuel Sloane Walker, Jr.
Howard Sayre Weaver
Valleau Wilkie, Jr.

Survivors of this 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 Bonesmen who are still alive.

Several described in detail the ritual in the organization that builds the bonds. Before giving his life history, each member had 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.'' [fn12]

Here is our future U.S. President with the other wealthy, amoral young men, excited about their future unlimited power over the ignorant common people, sharing their sex secrets in a mausoleum surrounded by human remains. The excited young men are entirely directed by the "Patriarchs,'' the cynical alumni financiers who are the legal owners of the Order.

The Yale Tories Who Made Skull and Bones

This chart depicts family relationships which were vital to the persons appearing on the chart. At less exalted levels of society, one is supposed to be praised or blamed only according to one's own actions. But in these Yale circles, "family''--genealogy--is an overwhelming consideration when evaluating individuals. Thus what we present here is more than simply a system of associations. It is a tradition which has operated powerfully on the emotions and judgment of the leaders of Yale University; they have merged their own identities into this tradition.

Lines are directed downwards from parents to their children. A double hyphen--signifies the marriage of the persons on either side.

GUIDE TO THE YALE FAMILY CHART

1) Rev. Nodiah Russell: One of 10 or 12 men who founded Yale University in 1701. Yale Trustee 1701-13. Pastor, First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. ca. 1691-1716.

2) Rev. James Pierpont: Most celebrated of the Yale founders. Yale Trustee, 1701-14.

3) William Russell: Yale Trustee 1745-61. Pastor, First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. 1716-61.

4) Jonathan Edwards: Graduated Yale 1720. Ultra-Calvinist theologian, president of Princeton University (called then "College of New Jersey'').

5) Rev. Nodiah Russell: Graduated Yale 1750.

6) Pierpont Edwards (1750-1826): Made Master of Connecticut Masons by the British Army occupying New York in 1783; he administered the estate of the traitor Benedict Arnold.

7) Aaron Burr, Sr.: Graduated Yale 1735. President of Princeton University ("College of New Jersey'').

8) Matthew Talcott Russell: Graduated Yale 1769. Deacon of First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. for 30 years. Lawyer for the Middletown Russell family. Died ca. 1817.

9) Captain John Russell. Died 1801 or 1802.

10) Henry W. Edwards: Governor of Connecticut 1833, 1835-38. Protector of Samuel Russell's opium-financed enterprises, patron of William Huntington Russell's new secret society, Skull and Bones.

11) Aaron Burr, Jr.: U.S. Vice President 1801-08. Killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Secession conspirator. Acquitted of treason in 1807, but wanted for murder, he fled to England. Returned to U.S.A. in 1812. Wall Street lawyer, 1812-36. Hero of imperial Anglo-Americans.

12) Theodore Dwight (1764-1846): Law partner of his cousin Aaron Burr, Jr. Secretary of the secessionist Hartford Convention, 1815. He united the Connecticut pro-British party with Massachusetts "Essex Junto.''

13) Timothy Dwight: Secessionist. President of Yale, 1795-1817.

14) William Huntington Russell (1809-85): Graduated Yale 1833. Founder of Skull and Bones Society (or Russell Trust Association), which came to dominate Yale. Founded prep school for boys, 1836. His secret organization spread in the 1870s to Phillips Academy, the Andover, Massachusetts prep school.

15) Samuel Russell: Born in 1789 in the main ancestral house of the Russell family of Middletown. This house had been owned by the co-founder of Yale, Nodiah Russell (1), and by William Russell (3) and his wife Mary, sister-in-law to Jonathan Edwards.

He became head of the Middletown Russells. He established Russell and Co. in 1823, which by the 1830s superseded Perkins syndicate as largest American opium smuggling organization. His partners included leading Boston families.

He founded the Russell Manufacturing Company, Middletown, in 1837; he was president of Middlesex County Bank. During the formative years of Skull and Bones, the fabulously wealthy Samuel Russell was undisputed king of Middletown.

Note to Reader:

For the sake of clarity, we have omitted from this chart the ancestral line from Rev. James Pierpont (2) to his great grandson Rev. John Pierpont. Rev. John Pierpont wrote poetry for the pro-British secessionists; he denounced President Thomas Jefferson for saying that Pierpont's New England relatives were ``under the influence of the whore of England.'' Rev. John was an employee of Aaron Burr's family during Burr's western conspiracy. Rev. John's daughter Juliet married Connecticut-born British banker Junius Morgan and gave birth to U.S. financial kingpin John Pierpont Morgan, named for his grandfather Rev. John.

_______________

Notes:

1. Speech at Lewistown, Illinois, August 17, 1858; quoted in James Mellon (editor), The Face of Lincoln (New York: Viking Press, 1979), p. 35.

2. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 41.

3. Nicholas King, George Bush: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980), p. 38.

4. Green, op. cit., p. 47.

5. Ibid., 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), pp. 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 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, Aug. 7, 1988.

PART 1 OF 2

Chapter VIII -- The Permian Basin Gang, 1948-59

Pecunia non olet.
-- 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 despatched 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 1890's. Since the assassination of William McKinley and the advent 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 towards the formation of regional factions be pre-empted 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 London.

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." [fn 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. If we assume that the Bush-Walker clan as an extended oligarchical family decided to send cadet son George Bush into the Texas and Oklahoma oilfields, we will not be far wrong.

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% to a mere 15%. 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. [fn 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 1980's, 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. And, as we will also see, Henry Kravis was to become one of the leaders of the leveraged buyout gang which became a mainstay of the political machine of George Bush. But in 1948, these events were all far in the future.

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 & Company in 1928-1929.

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.

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 was exclaimed, "Dresser! Dresser!." Mallon was then 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. [fn 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 twenty-two years, until 1952, when he entered the United States Senate. Father Prescott was thus calling in a chit when 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 twenty 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 towards the top, said that 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." [fn 4] 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 already noted, 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. [fn 5] This stint in Cleveland is hardly mentioned by the pro-Bush biographers, making us wonder what is being covered up. The Dresser history also has George Bush working for another subsidiary, Pacific Pumps, before working for IDECO. 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 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 Huntongton 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. [fn 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-friend steak for dinner. Perhaps his affected liking for country and western music, 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 a thousand miles a week through the Carrizo Plains and the Cuyama Valley. During that same year (or was it 1950?) 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. In Midland, George and Bar first stayed at a motel while he commuted by car each day to the IDECO warehouse in Odessa, twenty miles to the southwest. Then, for $7,500, they bought a home on Maple Street in a postwar mini-Levittown development called Easter Egg Row.

Reality was somewhat more complex. 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 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 Liedkte, 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 Liedkte 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." [fn 7] 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 land man 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 1940's, 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 could change hands repeatedly in the course 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 fellow man. 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. [fn 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. According to Esquire, "Bush's partner, John Overbey, still remembers the dizzying whirl of a money-raising trip to the East with George and Uncle Herbie: lunch at New York's 21 Club, weekends at Kennebunkport where a bracing Sunday dip in the Atlantic off Walker's Point ended with a servant wrapping you in a large terry towel and handing you a martini." [fn 9]

The result of the odyssey back east was a capital of $300,000, much of it gathered from Uncle Herbie's clients in the City of London, who were of course delighted at the prospect of parasitizing Texas ranchers. One of those eager to cash in was Jimmy Gammell of Edinburgh, Scotland, whose Ivory and Sime counting house put up $50,000 from its Atlantic Asset Trust. Gammell is today the eminence grise of the Scottish investment community, and he has retained a close personal relation to Bush over the years. Mark this Gammell well; he will return to our narrative shortly.

Eugene Meyer, the owner of the Washington Post and the father of that paper's present owner, Katharine Meyer Graham, anted up an investment of $50,000 on the basis of the tax-shelter capabilities promised by Bush-Oberbey. Meyer, a president of the World Bank, also procured an investment from his son-in-law Phil Graham for the Bush venture. Father Prescott Bush was also counted in, to the tune of about $50,000. In the days of real money, these were considerable sums. The London investors got shares of stock in the new company, called Bush-Overbey, as well as Bush-Overbey bonded debt. Bush and Overbey moved into an office on the ground floor of the Petroleum Building in Midland.

The business of the landman, it has been pointed out, rested entirely on personal relations and schmooze. One had to be a dissembler and an intelligencer. One had to learn to cultivate friendships with the geologists, the scouts, the petty bureaucrats at the county court house where the land records were kept, the journalists at the local paper, and with one's own rivals, the other landmen, who might invite someone with some risk capital to come in on a deal. Community service was an excellent mode of ingratiation, and George Bush volunteered for the Community Chest, the YMCA, and the Chamber of Commerce. It meant small talk about wives and kids, attending church-- deception postures that in a small town had to pervade the smallest details of one's life. It was at this time in his life that Bush seems to have acquired the habit of writing ingratiating little personal notes to people he had recently met, a habit that he would use over the years to cultivate and maintain his personal network. Out of all this ingratiating Babbitry and boosterism would come acquaintances and the bits of information that could lead to windfall profits.

There had been a boom in Scurry County, but that was subsiding. Bush drove to Pyote, to Snyder, to Sterling City, to Monahans, with Rattlesnake Air Force Base just outside of town. How many Texas ranchers can remember selling their mineral rights for a pittance to smiling George Bush, and then having oil discovered on the land, oil from which their family would never earn a penny?

Across the street from Bush-Overbey were the offices of Liedtke & Liedtke, Attorneys at law. J. Hugh Liedtke and William Liedtke were from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they, like Bush, had grown up rich as the sons of a local judge who had become one of the top corporate lawyers for Gulf Oil. The Liedtke's grandfather had come from Prussia, but had served in the Confederate Army. J. Hugh Liedtke had found time along the way to acquire the notorious Harvard Master of Business Administration degree in one year. After service in the navy during the war, the Liedtkes obtained law degrees of the University of Texas law school, where they rented the servant's quarters of the home of US Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who was away in Washington most of the time. During those years, Johnson's home was occupied most of the time by his protege, John Connally.

The Liedtkes combined the raw, uncouth primitive accumulation mentality of the oil boom town with the refined arts of usury and speculation as Harvard taught them. Their law practice was a law practice in name only; their primary and almost exclusive activity was buying up royalty leases on behalf of a money bags in Tulsa who was a friend of their family; the Liedtkes got a 5% commission on every deal they handled.

Hugh Liedtke was always on the lookout for the Main Chance. Following in the footsteps of his fellow Tulsan Ray Kravis, Hugh Liedtke schemed and schemed until he had found a way to go beyond hustling for royalty leases: he concocted a method of trading oil-producing properties in such a way as to permit the eventual owner to defer all tax liabilities until the field was depleted. Sometimes Hugh Liedtke would commute between Midland and Tulsa on an almost daily basis. He would spend the daylight hours prowling the Permian Basin for a land deal, make the thirteen hour drive to Tulsa overnight to convince his backers to ante up the cash, and then race back to Midland to close the deal before the sucker got away. It was during this phase that it occurred to Liedtke that he could save himself a lot of marathon commuter driving if he could put together a million dollars in venture capital and "inventory" the deals he was otherwise forced to make a piecemeal and ad hoc basis. [fn 10]

The Liedtke brothers now wanted to go beyond royalty leases and land sale tax dodges, and begin large-scale drilling for and production of oil. George Bush, by now well versed in the alphas and omegas of oil as ground rent, was thinking along the same lines. In a convergence that was full of ominous portent for the US economy of the 1980's, the Liedtke brothers and George Bush decided to pool their capital and their rapacious talents by going into business together. Overbey was on board initially, but would soon fall away.

The year was 1953, and Uncle Herbie's G.H. Walker & Co. became the principal underwriter of the stock and convertible debentures that were to be offered to the public. Uncle Herbie would also purchase a large portion of the stock himself. When the new company required further infusions of capital, Uncle Herbie would float the necessary bonds. Jimmy Gammell remained a key participant and would find a seat on the board of directors of the new company. Another of the key investors was the Clark Family Estate, meaning the trustees who managed the Singer Sewing machine fortune. [fn 11] Some other money came from various pension funds and endowments, sources that would become very popular during the leveraged buyout orgy Bush presided over during the 1980's. Of the capital of the new Bush-Liedtke concern, about $500,000 would come from Tulsa cronies of the Liedtke brothers, and the other $500,000 from the circles of Uncle Herbie. The latter were referred to by Hugh Liedtke as "the New York guys."

The name chosen for the new concern was Zapata Petroleum. According to Hugh Liedtke, the new entrepreneurs were attracted to the name when they saw it on a movie marquee, where the new release Viva Zapata!, starring Marlon Brando as the Mexican revolutionary, was playing. Liedtke characteristically explains that part of the appeal of the name was the confusion as to whether Zapata had been a patriot or a bandit. [fn 12]

The Bush-Liedtke combination concentrated its attention on an oil property in Coke County called Jameson Field, a barren expanse of prairie and sagebrush where six widely separated wells had been producing oil for some years. Hugh Liedtke was convinced that these six oil wells were tapping into a single underground pool of oil, and that dozens or even hundreds of new oil wells drilled into the same field would all prove to be gushers. In other words, Liedtke wanted to gamble the entire capital of the new firm on the hypothesis that the wells were, in oil parlance, "connected." One of Liedtke's Tulsa backers was supposedly unconvinced, and argued that the wells were too far apart; they could not possibly connect. "Goddamn, they do!" was Hugh Liedtke's rejoinder. He insisted on shooting the works in a va-banque operation. Uncle Herbie's circles were nervous: "The New York guys were just about to pee in their pants," boasted Leidtke years later. Bush and Hugh Liedtke obviously had the better information: the wells were connected, and 127 wells were drilled without encountering a single dry hole. As a result, the price of a share of stock in Zapata went up from 7 cents a share to $23.

During this time, Hugh Liedtke collaborated on several small deals in the Midland area with a certain T. Boone Pickens, later one of the most notorious corporate raiders of the 1980's, one of the originators of the "greenmail" strategy of extortion by which a raider would accumulate part of the shares of a company and threaten to go all the way to a hostile takeover unless the management of the company agreed to buy back those shares at an outrageous premium. Pickens is the buccaneer who was self-righteously indignant when the Japanese business community attempted to prevent him from introducing these shameless looting practices into the Japanese economy.

Pickens, too, was a product of the Bush-Liedtke social circle of Midland. When he was just getting started in the mid-fifties, Pickens wanted to buy the Hugoton Production Company, which owned the Hugoton field, one of the world's great onshore deposits of natural gas. Pickens engineered the hostile takeover of Hugoton by turning to Hugh Liedtke to be introduced to the trustees of the Clark Family Estate, who, as we have just seen, had put up part of the capital for Zapata. Pickens promised the Clark Trustees a higher return than was being provided by the current management, and this support proved to be decisive in permitting Pickens's Mesa Petroleum to take over Hugoton, launching this corsair on a career of looting and pillage that still continues. In 1988, George Bush would give an interview to a magazine owned by Pickens in which the Vice President would defend hostile leveraged buyouts as necessary to the interests of the shareholders.

In the meantime, after two to three years of operations, the oil flow out of Zapata's key Jameson field had begun to slow down. Although there was still abundant oil in the ground, the natural pressure had been rapidly depleted, so Bush and the Liedtkes had to begin resorting to stratagems in order to bring the oil to the surface. They began pumping water into the underground formations in order to forced the oil to the surface. From then on, "enhanced recovery" techniques were necessary to keep the Jameson field on line.

During 1955 and 1956, Zapata was able to report a small profit. In 1957, the year of the incipient Eisenhower recession, this turned into a loss of $155,183, as the oil from the Jameson field began to slow down. In 1958, the loss was $427,752, and in 1959 there was $207,742 of red ink. 1960 (after Bush had departed from the scene) brought another loss, this time of $372,258, It was not until 1961 that Zapata was able to post a small profit of $50,482. [fn 13] Despite the fact that Bush and the Liedtkes all became millionaires through the increased value of their shares, it was not exactly an enviable record; without the deep pockets of Bush's Uncle Herbie Walker and his British backers, the entire venture might have foundered at an early date.

Bush and the Liedtkes had been very lucky with the Jameson field, but they could hardly expect such results to be repeated indefinitely. In addition, they were now posting losses, and the value of Zapata stock had gone into a decline. Bush and the Liedtke brothers now concluded that the epoch in which large oil fields could be discovered within the continental United States was now over. Mammoth new oil fields, they believed, could only be found offshore, located under hundreds of feet of water on the continental shelves, or in shallow seas like the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. By a happy coincidence, in 1954 the US federal government was just beginning to auction the mineral rights for these offshore areas. With father Prescott Bush directing his potent Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones network from the US Senate while regularly hob-nobbing with President Eisenhower on the golf links, George Bush could be confident of receiving special privileged treatment when it came to these mineral rights. Bush and his partners therefore judged the moment ripe for launching a for-hire drilling company, Zapata Offshore, a Delaware corporation that would offer its services to the companies making up the Seven Sisters international oil cartel in drilling underwater wells. 40% of the offshore company's stock would be owned by the original Zapata firm. The new company would also be a buyer of offshore royalty leases. Uncle Herbie helped arrange a new issue of stock for this Zapata offshoot. The shares were easy to unload because of the 1954 boom in the New York stock market. "The stock market lent itself to speculation," Bush would explain years later, "and you could get equity capital for new ventures." [fn 14]

1954 was also the year that the US overthrew the government of Jacopo Arbenz in Guatemala. This was the beginning of a dense flurry of US covert operations in central America and the Caribbean, featuring especially Cuba.

The first asset of Zapata Offshore was the SCORPION, a $ 3.5 million deep-sea drilling rig that was financed by $1.5 million from the initial stock sale plus another $2 million from bonds marketed with the help of Uncle Herbie. The SCORPION was the first three-legged self-elevating mobile drilling barge, and it was built by R. G. LeTourneau, Inc., of Vicksburg, Mississippi. The platform weighed some 9 million pounds and measured 180 by 150 feet, and the three legs were 140 feet long when fully extended. The rig was floated into the desired drilling position before the legs were extended, and the main body was then pushed up above the waves by electric motors. The SCORPION was delivered early in 1956, and was commissioned at Galveston in March, 1956, and was put to work at exploratory drilling in the Gulf of Mexico during the rest of the year.

During 1956, the Zapata Petroleum officers included J. Hugh Liedtke as president, George H.W. Bush as vice president, and William Brumley of Midland, Texas as treasurer. The board of directors lined up as follows:

George H.W. Bush, Midland, Texas;

J.G.S. Gammell, Edinburgh. Scotland, Manager of British Assets Trust, Limited;

J. Hugh Liedtke, Midland, Texas;

William C. Liedtke, independent oil operator, Midland, Texas;

Arthur E. Palmer, Jr., New York, NY, a partner in Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam, and Roberts;

G.H. Walker Jr. (Uncle Herbie), managing partner of G.H. Walker and Co., New York, NY;

Howard J. Whitehill, independent oil producer of Tulsa, Oklahoma;

Eugene F. Williams, Jr., secretary of the St. Louis Union Trust Company of St. Louis, Missouri;

D.D. Bovaird, president of the Bovaird Supply Co. of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and chairman of the board of the Oklahoma City branch of the Tenth Federal District of the Federal Reserve Board; and

George L. Coleman, investments, Miami, Oklahoma.

An interim director that year had been Richard E. Fleming of Robert Fleming and Co., London, England. Counsel were listed as Baker, Botts, Andrews & Shepherd of Houston, Texas; auditors were Arthur Andersen in Houston, and transfer agents were J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc., of New York City and the First National Bank and Trust Company of Tulsa. [fn 15]

George Bush personally was much more involved with the financial management of the company than with its actual oil-field operations. His main activity was not finding oil or drilling wells but, as he himself put it, "stretching paper" -- rolling over debt and making new financial arrangements with the creditors. [fn 16]

During 1956, despite continuing losses and thanks again to Uncle Herbie, Zapata was able to float yet another offering, this time a convertible debenture for $2.15 million for the purchase of a second Le Tourneau drilling platform, the VINEGAROON, named after a west Texas stinging insect. The VINEGAROON was delivered during 1957, and soon scored a "lucky" hit drilling in block 86 off Vermilion Parish, Louisiana. This was a combination of gas and oil, and one well was rated at 113 barrels of distillate and 3.6 million cubic feet of gas per day. [fn 17] This was especially remunerative because Zapata had acquired a half-interest in the royalties from any oil or gas that might be found. VINEGAROON then continued to drill of Louisiana on a farmout from Continental Oil, also off Vermilion Parish.

As for the SCORPION, during part of 1957 it was under contract to the Bahama-California Oil Company, drilling between Florida and Cuba. It was then leased by Gulf Oil and Standard Oil of California, on whose behalf it started drilling during 1958 at a position on the Cay Sal Bank, 131 miles south of Miami, Florida, and just 54 miles north of Isabela, Cuba. Cuba was an interesting place just then; the US-backed insurgency of Fidel Castro was rapidly undermining the older US-imposed regime of Fulgencio Batista. That meant that SCORPIO was located at a hot corner.

During 1957 a certain divergence began to appear between Uncle Herbie Walker, Bush, and the "New York guys" on the one hand, and the Liedtke brothers and their Tulsa backers on the other. As the annual report for that year noted, "There is no doubt that the drilling business in the Gulf of Mexico has become far more competitive in the last six months than it has been at any time in the past." Despite that, Bush, Walker and the New York investors wanted to push forward into the offshore drilling and drilling services business, while the Liedtkes and the Tulsa group wanted to concentrate on acquiring oil in the ground and natural gas deposits.

The 1958 annual report notes that with no major discoveries made, 1958 had been "a difficult year." It was, of course, the year of the brutal Eisenhower recession. SCORPION, VINEGAROON, and NOLA I, the offshore company's three drilling rigs, could not be kept fully occupied in the Gulf of Mexico during the whole year, and so Zapata Offshore had lost $524,441, more than Zapata Petroleum's own loss of $427,752 for that year. The Liedtke viewpoint was reflected in the notation that "disposing of the offshore business had been considered." The great tycoon Bush conceded in the Zapata Offshore annual report for 1958: "We erroneously predicted that most major [oil] companies would have active drilling programs for 1958. These drilling programs simply did not materialize..." In 1990 Bush denied for months that there was a recession, and through 1991 claimed that the recession had ended when it had long since turned into a depression. His blindness about economic conjunctures would appear to be nothing new.

By 1959, there were reports of increasing personal tensions between the domineering and abrasive J. Hugh Liedtke on the one hand and Bush's Uncle Herbie Walker on the other. Liedtke was obsessed with his plan for creating a new major oil company, the boundless ambition that would propel him down a path littered with asset-stripped corporations into the devastating Pennzoil-Getty-Texaco wars of a quarter century later. During the course of this year, the two groups of investors arrived at a separation that was billed as "amicable," and which in any case never interrupted the close cooperation among Bush and the Liedtke brothers. The solution was that the ever-present Uncle Herbie would buy out the Liedtke-Tulsa 40% stake in Zapata Offshore, while the Liedtke backers would buy out the Bush-Walker interest in Zapata Petroleum.

For this to be accomplished, George Bush would require yet another large infusion of capital. Uncle Herbie now raised yet another tranche for George, this time over $800,000. The money allegedly came from Bush-Walker friends and relatives. [fn 18] Even if the faithful efforts of Uncle Herbie are taken into account, it is still puzzling to see a series of large infusions of cash into a poorly managed small company that had posted a series of substantial losses and whose future prospects were anything but rosy. At this point it is therefore legitimate to pose the question: was Zapata Offshore an intelligence community front at its foundation in 1954, or did it become one in 1959, or perhaps at some later point? This question cannot be answered with finality.

George Bush was now the president of his own company, the undisputed boss of Zapata Offshore. Although the company was falling behind the rest of the offshore drilling industry, Bush made a desultory attempt at expansion through diversification, investing in a plastics machinery company in New Jersey, a Texas pipe lining company, and a gas transmission company; none of these investments proved to be remunerative.

By contrast, Hugh Liedtke's approach to business was aggressive to the point of being picaresque. Liedtke decided that he would use the money he had gotten back for selling his interest in Zapata Offshore ot Uncle Herbie in order to take a giant step on the road to building the top-flight oil company of his dreams, a new sister for the Anglo-American oil cartel. In Liedtke's Malthusian mentality, drilling for oil no longer made sense, since all the major finds had been made: what counted now was buying up the oil that already existed. His immediate target was South Penn Oil Company, the owner of a piece of the Bradford oil field, and the producer of a brand of motor oil called Pennzoil, which it sold by the quart in characteristic yellow cans. South Penn possessed a significant quantity of oil in the ground. In order to seize control of South Penn, Liedtke capitalized on his personal acquaintance with J. Paul Getty, the founder of Getty Oil, whom he had known since Getty had shown up at an engagement party in honor of Liedtke at the Tulsa home of the Skelly family during the waning years of World War II. J. Paul Getty owned about 10% of the stock of South Penn. Liedtke assembled an investment partnership and matched Getty's stake with a 10% interest of his own. Liedtke hypocritically reassured the management of Southe Penn that he was accumulating their stock "for investment purposes only." When Liedtke had bought as much stock as he had funds to afford, he appealed to Getty to honor a previous commitment and install J. Hugh Liedtke as the new president of South Penn. Getty, who had been a corsair of the stock market during the 1920's, when he had engineered the hostile takeover of Tide Water Associated Oil, supported Liedtke, and the previous South Penn management was ousted in favor of the Liedtke team. J. Hugh Liedkte merged Zapata Petroleum with South Penn, and gave the new corporation the name Pennzoil.

Now J. Hugh Liedtke, following in the footsteps of J. Paul Getty, had carried out a hostile takeover of his own. Within a couple of years, Liedtke would execute a second corporate raid, this time the takeover of United Gas Pipeline Company of Shreveport, Louisiana. United Gas operated 8,800 miles of gas pipeline, and carried about 7% of the natural gas consumed in the United States. Hugh and Bill Liedtke calculated that the infrastructure of United Gas had been expensive to build and install, but that it would be cheap to operate. Running United Gas into the ground could generate prodigious quantities of cash. This cash could then be mobilized by the Liedtkes to buy up other companies. In addition, United Gas owned oil, copper, sulphur, and other mineral deposits. United Gas was a corporation about six times the size of Pennzoil, but the Liedtkes began to acquire shares.

Problems arose when the Liedtke brothers' intentions became public knowledge: the price of United Gas went up sharply, and a rival group of buyers of United Gas stock appeared. "As the Pennzoil board pondered its next move, a Scotsman serving as director suggested a new strategy: a cash tender offer, a takeover practice that was virtually unheard of in the US, but was widely used in Britain. Pennzoil could publicly announce an offering price to the public for only a portion of the shares; the stockholders, fearful that the stock price would tumble once the offer was closed, would 'tender' as many shares as Pennzoil could afford to buy. The company's thunderstruck management resisted in every way possible, but the shares flooded in and before long Pennzoil owned 42% of [United Gas]." [fn 19] The Scotsman in question could only have been J.G.S. Gammell, who had remained with the Liedtkes as a member of their board. This was the same Gammell whom Bush and Uncle Herbie had brought into the United States to invest in Bush-Overbey back in 1950. Gammell had brought with him the particularly virulent bacillus of British stockjobbing methods. Pennzoil had to borrow a quarter of a billion dollars to buy up the United gas stock, but when the dust had settled, Pennzoil had grown by 500%, almost exclusively on the basis of borrowed money, usury and debt.

The rapacious Liedtke brothers then proceeded to subject United Gas to a brutal process of asset stripping. They forced United Gas to pay $20 million more in dividends to Pennzoil than United Gas ever earned. They detached the more profitable branches of United Gas, especially the oil and mineral deposits, and transferred them to Pennzoil. They forced United Gas to fork over $100 million worth of preferred stock to Pennzoil in the form of yet another dividend. This amounted to a transfer of $100 million of United Gas capital into the Liedtke coffers.

By 1972, George Bush was a Nixon Administration cabinet member and insider, speaking for Tricky Dick and Kissinger at the United Nations. George's influence must have been conducive to the efforts of the Liedkte brothers to place two of their lawyers from Baker & Botts on the Federal Power Commission. With these Liedtke stooges in place, the Federal Power Commission proceeded to approve a series of transactions by which United Gas, ignoring existing contracts, diverted natural gas destined for delivery in Louisiana in favor of other markets where the price was much higher. The result of this high-handed greed was a severe gas shortage in Louisiana, which impacted both industrial users and home consumption. The then Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards declared during the winter of 1972 that "the health and safety of millions of Louisiana's citizens are gravely threatened" as a result of these Liedtke machinations. Governor Edwards denounced an "absolute disregard for the public interest in this state" on the part of Pennzoil/United Gas. There were layoffs at industrial plants, and at least one lawsuit accused the Liedkte concerns of breaching their existing contracts. All in all it was estimated (by Middle South utilities) that a whopping extra $200 million had been added to the gas and electric bills of customers in the Deep South, the poorest part of the United States, in order to provide alternate supplies of boiler fuels. But the Liedtke brothers were not disturbed by all this, for they were becoming multimillionaires through the looting and asset-stripping of United Gas.

In 1974, the Liedtkes decided that the despoiled carcass of United Gas should now be cast adrift. The story of this squalid final chapter of the pillaging of United Gas was entitled "Love Her and Leave Her" by Forbes magazine: "That, say the critics, is just what the Liedkte brothers did with United Gas-- acquiring it, deflowering it, then dumping it." [fn 20] As Forbes also noted, "contacts with men like Johnson, Connally, and Bush never did the Liedktes any harm." It was considered dubious that the post-Liedtke United Gas could avoid collapse as a result of its vastly weakened condition. But, with Watergate and the crumbling of the Nixon power cartel, the Liedktes had now gone beyond what the Washington traffic would bear. Federal regulators forced the greedy brothers to return the $100 million preferred stock capital transfer. The Liedtkes were also nailed for insider trading in buying 125,000 Pennzoil shares just before the stock went up as the news of the $100 million transfer became known on Wall Street; they had to cough up $108,125 in profits thus realized, and they were obliged to sign a consent decree that they would never repeat a caper of this sort. But this was a wholly insignificant sum when measured against the large oil reserves from United Gas that Pennzoil was allowed to retain.

During the late 1970's, the Liedkte brothers would receive an entree into the People's Republic of China thanks to the personal connections acquired there by their former business partner and lifetime crony, George Bush. And later, during the Reagan-Bush years, when federal regulatory intervention against monstrous stock market swindles virtually disappeared as a result of George Bush's Task Force on Regulatory Relief, J. Hugh Liedtke, by that time sporting the nickname of "Chairman Mao," would be the protagonist of the Pennzoil/Getty/Texaco war, a conflagration that laid waste to whole chunks of a fatally weakened US economy. And in those future days, J. Hugh Liedtke would repeatedly flaunt his continuing close friendship with his old business partner George Bush. [fn 21]

In 1959-60, George Bush was operating out of his new corporate base in Houston, Texas, where Zapata Offshore had transferred upon separating from the Liedktes. Economic conditions were slowly improving, and Uncle Herbie's ability to mobilize capital permitted George to move towards expanding his fleet of offshore drilling equipment. By 1963 Zapata Offshore had four operational rigs: SIDEWINDER, VINEGAROON, SCORPION/NOLA I, and NOLA III. Bush's interest was attracted down to the Gulf at Galveston, east to New Orleans, then further east and south to Miami, and still further south the Cuba, the target of the immense covert action operation which the Eisenhower Administration, advised by father Prescott Bush, was assembling in south Florida and in Guatemala under the code name of JM/WAVE, which in the spring of 1961 would become manifest to the world in the form of the Bay of Pigs attempted invasion of Cuba.

In a Zapata Offshore Annual Report issued a couple of years later, Bush published the following description of the nature of the company's business:

Historically, few major oil companies have owned their own offshore drilling rigs. These operators prefer to contract for the services of rigs and their crews from independent contractors, normally on a fixed cost per day basis. This policy enables operators to secure the best type of rig for each job and relieves them of the responsibility of keeping their own rigs busy when their programs are curtailed.

The contractors who supply these rigs compete with each other to provide the most efficient crews and equipment. Since the cost of moving such equipment is great, contractors must also have the right type of rig available at or near the operator's lease at the time the operator wants to drill his well.

Off-shore contract drilling differs from contract drilling on land in many ways. Most land contractors agree to drill a hole to a certain depth for a fixed cost. Thus, the drilling hazards encountered on land are normally borne by the drilling contractor. Since off-shore contractors normally furnish equipment on a day-rate basis, most risks in connection with a hole drilled offshore are borne by the operator. Operators have representatives aboard off-shore rigs which they have engaged to direct the actions to be taken in the event problems are encountered while drilling.

A typical land rig costs between $500,000 and $1,100,000. A self-contained offshore rig costs from $3,500,000 to $7,500,000. Thus, off-shore contractors have a much greater investment in equipment than do land contractors. For this reason, the number of competing off-shore firms is smaller. [fn 22]

This account makes clear that the most important factor for Zapata Offshore was contracts from the big oil companies of the Seven Sisters Anglo-American cartel, the world oil oligopoly which during these years defended its domination of the world oil market with the assassination of Enrico Mattei, the President of the Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, the Italian State Oil Company, who had dared to undercut the arrogant looting methods of the Seven Sisters and challenge the oligopoly in north Africa and the Arab world. In the early years of Zapata Offshore, contracts had come from Gulf Oil and Standard Oil of California, as we have seen. During the early 1960's, more and more contracts came from components of Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch heart of the Seven Sisters cartel, the dominant strategic force in the oligopoly. Zapata Offshore soon had British insurance, British contracts, British investors, a British director, and drilling sites in British Commonwealth oil fields in many parts of the world. This should come as no surprise: after all, Prescott Bush's partner, Averell Harriman, had been Franklin D. Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill during the first years of World War II, and Averell later married the divorced former wife of Churchill's son Randolph.

Although Zapata Offshore was a company of modest dimensions, Bush nevertheless created a network of subsidiaries which was suspiciously complex. This topic is difficult to research because of the very convenient disappearance of the Zapata Offshore filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington for the year 1960-1966 which were "inadvertently" destroyed by a federal warehouse. This is the kind of convenient tampering with official records from which Bush has benefited again and again over his career, from the combat report on the San Jacinto in 1944 to the disappearance of the Hashemi-Pottinger tapes and the shredding of Iran-contra documents more recently.

Some illumination is provided by a short profile of the Zapata Offshore corporate substructure researched by a Mr. Allan Mandel and submitted to Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough on October 13, 1964, in the midst of Bush's attempt to unseat the senator. [fn 23] This report was based on "Standard and Poors, oil industry publications, [and] personal interviews with Interior Department officials."

At this time, Mr. Mandel found, Zapata Offshore owned 50% of Seacat-Zapata Offshore Compnay, which operated the drilling rig NOLA III in the Persian Gulf. In addition, Mandel identified the following Zapata Offshore subsidiaries:

A. Zapata de Mexico

B. Zapata International Corporation

C. Zapata Lining Corporation

D. Zavala Oil Company

E. Zapata Overseas Corporation

F. Zapata owns 41 percent of Amata Gas Corporation.

Zapata Lining was the pipe lining concern; it was divested in 1964. Ownership of Amata Gas was shared with the American Research and Development Corporation of Boston. The Zapata Annual Report for 1964 is strangely silent about the other companies, with the exception of Seacat Zapata.

George Bush has always loved secrecy, and this appears to have extended to the business activities -- or alleged business activities -- of Zapata Offshore. A small window on a whole range of secret and semisecret activities and transactions during these years is provided by recently published information about Bush's shady business relations with Jorge Diaz Serrano of Mexico, the former head (1976-1981) of the Mexican national oil company Pemex, who was convicted and jailed for defrauding the Mexican government of $58 million. During 1960, Bush and Diaz Serrano secretly worked together to set up a Mexican drilling company called Perforaciones Marinas del Golfo, or Permargo. At that time Diaz Serrano had been working as a salesman for Dresser Industries, Bush's old firm. Diaz Serrano came into contact with an American oilman who wanted to drill in Mexico; a new Mexican law stipulated that drilling contracts could be awarded only to Mexican nationals. The American oilman was Edwin Pauley of Pan American Petroleum Corp. When Diaz Serrano wanted to buy drilling equipment from Dresser Industries, Dresser demanded that Diaz take on Bush as a co-owner in the venture. Bush's spokesman Peter Hart conceded in 1988 that Bush and Zapata had been partners with Diaz Serrano, but alleged that the partnership had lasted for only seven months.

Diaz Serrano is very open about being a personal friend of Bush. "One remembers a man that one likes and appreciates," says Diaz, who wanted to become the president of Mexico before he was sentenced to five years in jail for appropriating government monies; the business dealings spawned "a friendship of which I am most proud." In 1982, Diaz Serrano was made Mexican Ambassador to Moscow, and he stopped off to talk with Bush in the White House on his way to his new assignment.

Bush reciprocates the friendship: "I have high regard for Jorge," Bush told People Magazine in 1981; "I consider him a friend."

One of Jorge Diaz Serrano's associates in the drilling deal was his long-time partner, Jorge Escalante, who has also remained in contact with Bush over the intervening years, a fact that Bush's office also confirms.

Bush was clearly dishonest in that the annual reports of Zapata Offshore do not mention this deal with Permargo, which created a company that was in direct competition with Zapata Offshore itself, much to the detriment of that "shareholder value" which Bush professed to hold sacred whenever his clique of cronies was on the track of a new leveraged buyout. Bush may also have illegally concealed his dealings from the government. The Zapata Offshore filings with the SEC between 1955 and 1959 are cryptic, and the SEC files on Zapata Offshore between 1960 and 1966, when Bush had exclusive control of the company, were destroyed by the SEC either in 1981, when Bush had just become vice president, or somewhat later, in October, 1983, according to various SEC officials. Perhaps these files were removed not just to protect Bush, but also to protect Zapata Offshore as a front operation for the US intelligence community. The 1964 Zapata offshore Annual report does note that the drilling barge NOLA I was sold "to a subsidiary of a Mexican drilling company" because it had become "a marginal operation" in that it could only be used in the summer because of a lack of seaworthiness in bad weather, but even this annual report does not name Permargo, which appears to be the Mexican company that bought NOLA I. [fn 24]

Diaz recalls that Bush was a highly political businessman back in 1960: "In those days, I remember very clearly, he was a very young chap and when we were talking business with him at his office he spent more time on the telephone talking about politics than paying attention to the drilling affairs. He was a born politician."

Bush's business dealings had brought him into direct contact with a number of the corporate raiders who would later act out the paroxysm of speculation, looting, and usury that would mark the Reagan-Bush years. The Permian basin of the 1940's and 1950's had attracted such figures as the Liedtke brothers, their friend Blaine Kerr, and T. Boone Pickens, all leading practitioners of the leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, greenmail, mergers and acquisitions of the 1980's. George Bush was in touch with them, and with the Kravis family of Tulsa. Nick Brady of Dillon, Reed was an old friend of the family who would also join in the orgy of the eighties. Frank Lorenzo would also come into the picture a little later on. Bush's main business success was in assembling this legion of greed as a base of political support for later on.

Otherwise Bush was a businessman of very mediocre success, kept afloat by constant capital infusions from his doting Uncle Herbie.

PART 2 OF 2

PART 2 OF CHAPTER 8: THE BAY OF PIGS AND THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION

"...JM/WAVE ...proliferated across [Florida] in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. A subculture of fronts, proprietaries, suppliers, transfer agents, conduits, dummy corporations, blind drops, detective agencies, law firms, electronic firms, shopping centers, airlines, radio stations, the mob and the church and the banks: a false and secret nervous system twitching to stimuli supplied by the cortex in Clandestine Services in Langley. After defeat on the beach in Cuba, JM/WAVE became a continuing and extended Miami Station, CIA's largest in the continental United States. A large sign in front of the [...] building complex reads: US GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS PROHIBIT DISCUSSION OF THIS ORGANIZATION OR FACILITY.

-- Donald Freed, Death in Washington (Westport, Connecticut, 1980), p. 141.

The review offered so far of George Bush's activities during the late 1950's and early 1960's is almost certainly incomplete in very important respects. There is good reason to believe that Bush was engaged in something more than just the oil business during those years. Starting about the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of 1961, we have the first hints that Bush, in addition to working for Zapata Offshore, may also have been a participant in certain covert operations of the US intelligence community.

Such participation would certainly be coherent with George's role in the Prescott Bush, Skull and Bones, and Brown Brothers, Harriman networks. During the twentieth century, the Skull and Bones/Harriman circles have always maintained a sizable and often decisive presence inside the intelligence organizations of the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, the Harriman and related Anglophile financier factions of Wall Street have generally regarded those parts of the state apparatus dealing with intelligence and covert operations as their own very special property, property which had to be kept seeded with control networks in order to be effectively steered from above. For George Bush to interface with the intelligence community while ostensibly engaged in his business career would be coherent with that well-established pattern.

A body of leads has been assembled which suggests that George Bush may have been associated with the CIA at some time before the autumn of 1963. According to Joseph McBride of The Nation, "a source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities." 1 By the time of the Kennedy assassination, we have an official FBI document which refers to "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency," and despite official disclaimers there is every reason to think that this is indeed the man in the White House today. The mystery of George Bush as a possible covert operator hinges on four points, each one of which represents one of the great political and espionage scandals of postwar American history. These four cardinal points are:

1. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, launched on April 16-17, 1961, prepared with the assistance of the CIA's "Miami Station" (also known under the code name JM/WAVE). After the failure of the amphibious landings of Brigade 2506, Miami station, under the leadership of Theodore Shackley, became the focus for Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations directed against Castro, Cuba, and possibly other targets.

2. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the coverup of those responsible for this crime.

3. The Watergate scandal, beginning with an April, 1971 visit to Miami, Florida by E. Howard Hunt on the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion to recruit operatives for the White House Special Investigations Unit (the "Plumbers" and later Watergate burglars) from among Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veterans.

4. The Iran-contra affair, which became a public scandal during October-November 1986, several of whose central figures, such as Felix Rodriguez, were also veterans of the Bay of Pigs.

George Bush's role in both Watergate and the October surprise/Iran-contra complex will be treated in detail at later points in this book. Right now it is important to see that thirty years of covert operations, in many respects, form a single continuous whole. This is especially true in regard to the dramatis personae. Georgie Anne Geyer points to the obvious in a recent book: "...an entire new Cuban cadre now emerged from the Bay of Pigs. The names Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, Rolando Martinez, Felix Rodriguez and Eugenio Martinez would, in the next quarter century, pop up, often decisively, over and over again in the most dangerous American foreign policy crises. There were Cubans flying missions for the CIA in the Congo and even for the Portuguese in Africa; Cubans were the burglars of Watergate; Cubans played key roles in Nicaragua, in Irangate, in the American move into the Persian Gulf." 2 Felix Rodriguez tells us that he was infiltrated into Cuba with the other members of the "Grey Team" in conjunction with the Bay of Pigs landings; this is the same man we will find directing the contra supply effort in central American during the 1980's, working under the direct supervision of Don Gregg and George Bush. 3 Theodore Shackley, the JM/WAVE station chief, will later show up in Bush's 1979-80 presidential campaign.

To a very large degree, such covert operations (and the great political scandals attendant upon them) have drawn upon the same pool of personnel. They are a significant extent the handiwork of the same crowd. It is therefore revealing to extrapolate forward and backward in time the individuals and groups of individuals who appear as the cast of characters in one scandal and compare them with the cast of characters for the other scandals, including the secondary ones that have not been enumerated here. Howard Hunt, for example, shows up as a confirmed part of the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Jacopo Arbenz in 1954, as an important part of the chain of command in the Bay of Pigs, as a person repeatedly accused of having been in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, and as one of the central figures of Watergate. (One wonders what secrets, after all, were contained in Howard Hunt's safe, the contents of which were so conveniently "deep sixed" by FBI Director Patrick Gray.)

George Bush is demonstrably one of the most important protagonists of the Watergate scandal, and was the overall director of Iran-contra. Since he appears especially in Iran-contra in close proximity to Bay of Pigs holdovers, it is surely legitimate to wonder when his association with those Bay of Pigs Cubans might have started.

1959 was the year that Bush started operating out of his Zapata Offshore headquarters in Houston; it was also the year that Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George was now a businessman whose work took him at times to Louisiana, where Zapata had offshore drilling operations. George must have been a frequent visitor to New Orleans. Because of his family's estate on Jupiter Island, he would also have been a frequent visitor to the Hobe Sound area. And then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations in the Florida Strait. On all of these activities, the official "red Studebaker" biographical material and the Zapata Offshore annual reports are extremely cryptic.

The Jupiter Island connection and father Prescott's Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones networks are doubtless the key. Jupiter Island meant Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, C. Douglas Dillon and other Anglophile financiers who had directed the US intelligence community long before there had been a CIA at all. And, in the back yard of the Jupiter Island Olympians, and under their direction, a powerful covert operations base was now being assembled, in which George Bush would have been present at the creation as a matter of birthright.

During 1959-60, Allen Dulles and the Eisenhower Administration began to assemble in south Florida the infrastructure for covert action against Cuba. This was the JM/WAVE capability, later formally constituted as the CIA Miami station. JM/WAVE was an operational center for the Eisenhower regime's project of staging an invasion of Cuba using a secret army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles organized, armed, trained, transported, and directed by the CIA. The Cubans, called Brigade 2506, were trained in secret camps in Guatemala, and they had air support from B-26 bombers based in Nicaragua. This invasion was crushed by Castro's defending forces in less than three days.

Before going along with the plan so eagerly touted by Allen Dulles, Kennedy had established the pre-condition that under no circumstances whatsoever would there be direct intervention by US military forces against Cuba. On the one hand, Dulles had assured Kennedy that the news of the invasion would trigger an insurrection which would sweep Castro and his regime away. On the other, Kennedy had to be concerned about provoking a global thermonuclear confrontation with the USSR, in the eventuality that N.S. Khrushchev decided to respond to a US Cuban gambit by, for example, cutting off US access to Berlin.

Hints of the covert presence of George Bush are scattered here and there around the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to some accounts, the code name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Pluto. 4 But Bay of Pigs veteran Howard Hunt scornfully denies that this was the code name used by JM/WAVE personnel; Hunt writes: "So perhaps the Pentagon referred to the Brigade invasion as PLUTO. CIA did not." 5 But Hunt does not tell us what the CIA code name was, and the contents of Hunt's Watergate era White House safe, which might have told us the answer, were of course "deep-sixed" by FBI Director Patrick Gray. One code name frequently used by CIA Miami Station personnel appears to have been "Don Eduardo," roughly the Spanish equivalent of "Mr. Edward" or perhaps "Mr. Ed." 6

According to reliable sources and published accounts, the CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation Zapata, and the plan was so referred to by Richard Bissell of the CIA, one of the plan's promoters, in a briefing to President Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on March 29, 1961. 7 Does Operation Zapata have anything to do with Zapata Offshore? The run-of-the-mill Bushman might respond that Emiliano Zapata, after all, had been a public figure in his own right, and the subject of a recent Hollywood movies starring Marlon Brando. As J. Hugh Liedtke had observed, he was the classic figure for the revolutionary-cum-bandit. A more knowledgeable Bushman might argue that the main landing beach, the Playa Giron, is located south of the city of Cienfuegos on the Zapata Peninula, on the south coast of Cuba.

Then there is the question of the Brigade 2506 landing fleet, which was composed of five older freighters bought or chartered from the Garcia Steamship Lines, bearing the names of Houston, Rio Esondido, Caribe, Atlantic, and Lake Charles. In addition to these vessels, which were outfitted as transport ships, there were two somewhat better armed fire support ships, the Blagar and the Barbara. (In some sources Barbara J.) 8 The Barbara was originally an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) of earlier vintage. Our attention is attracted at once to the Barbara and the Houston, in the first case because we have seen George Bush's habit of naming his combat aircraft after his wife, and, in the second case, because Bush was at this time a resident, booster, and Republican activist of Houston, Texas. But of course, the appearance of names like "Zapata," Barbara, and Houston can by itself only arouse suspicion, and proves nothing.

After the ignominious defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion, there was great animosity against Kennedy among the survivors of Brigade 2506, some of whom eventually made their way back to Miami after being released from Castro's prisoner of war camps. There was also great animosity against Kennedy on the part of the JM/WAVE personnel.

During the early 1950's, E. Howard Hunt had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City. As David Atlee Phillips (another embittered JM/WAVE veteran) tells us in his autobiographical account, The Night Watch, Howard Hunt had been the immediate superior of a young CIA recruit named William F. Buckley, the Yale graduate and Skull and Bones member who later founded the National Review. In his autobiographical account written during the days of the Watergate scandal, Hunt includes the following tirade about the Bay of Pigs:

No event since the communization of China in 1949 has had such a profound effect on the United States and its allies as the defeat of the US-trained Cuban invasion brigade at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.

Out of that humiliation grew the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, guerrilla warfare throughout Latin American and Africa, and our Dominican Republic intervention. Castros' beachhead triumph opened a bottomless Pandora's box of difficulties that affected not only the United States, but most of its allies in the Free World. These bloody and subversive events would not have taken place had Castro been toppled. Instead of standing firm, our government pyramided crucially wrong decisions and allowed Brigade 2506 to be destroyed. The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away.9

Hunt was typical of the opinion that the debacle had been Kennedy's fault, and not the responsibility of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, who had designed it and recommended it. After the embarrassing failure of the invasion, which never evoked the hoped-for spontaneous anti-Castro insurrection, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, his Harrimanite deputy Bissell, and CIA deputy Director Charles Cabell (whose brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time Kennedy was shot).

During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was deeply suspicious of the intelligence community and of proposals for military escalation in general, including in places like South Vietnam. Kennedy sought to procure an outside, expert opinion on military matters. For this he turned to the former commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Theatre during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur. Almost ten years ago, a reliable source shared with one of the authors an account of a meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the veteran general warned the young president that there were elements inside the US government who emphatically did not share his patriotic motives, and who were seeking to destroy his administration from within. MacArthur's warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community.

It is a matter of public record that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the latter part of April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, "The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house." 10 At the same meeting, according to Sorenson, MacArthur "warned [Kennedy] against the commitment of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this advice." 11 This point is grudgingly confirmed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying MacArthur, who wrote that "MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland [of Asia] should have his head examined." 12 MacArthur restated this advice during a second meeting with Kennedy when the General returned from his last trip to the Far East in July, 1961.

Kennedy valued MacArthur's professional military opinion highly, and used it to keep at arms length those advisers who were arguing for escalation in Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly invited those who proposed to send land forces to Asia to convince MacArthur that this would as good idea. If they could convince MacArthur, then he, Kennedy, might also go along. At this time, the group proposing escalation in Vietnam (as well as preparing the assassination of President Diem) had a heavy Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones overtone: the hawks of 1961-63 were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some key London oligarchs and theoreticians of counterinsurgency wars. And of course, George Bush during these years was calling for escalation in Vietnam and challenging Kennedy to "muster the courage" to try a second invasion of Cuba. In the meantime, the JM/WAVE-Miami station complex was growing rapidly to become the largest of Langley's many satellites. Its center was at the former Richmond Naval Air Station south of Miami, which had been a base for antisubmarine blimps during World War II. During the years after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, this complex had as many as 3,000 Cuban agents and subagents, with a small army of case officers to direct and look after each one. According to one account, there were at least 55 dummy corporations to provide employment, cover, and commercial disguise for all these operatives. There were detective bureaus, gun stores, real estate brokerages, boat repair shops, and party boats for fishing and other entertainments. There was the clandestine Radio Swan, later renamed Radio Americas. There were fleets of specially modified boats based at Homestead Marina, and at other marinas throughout the Florida Keys. Agents were assigned to the University of Miami and other educational institutions.

The raison d'être of the massive capability commanded by Theodore Shackley was now Operation Mongoose, a program for sabotage raids and assassinations to be conducted on Cuban territory, with a special effort to eliminate Fidel Castro personally. In order to run these operations from US territory, flagrant and extensive violation of federal and state laws was the order of the day. Documents regarding the incorporation of businesses were falsified. Income tax returns were faked. FAA regulations were violated by planes taking off for Cuba or for forward bases in the Bahamas and elsewhere. Explosives moved across highways that were full of civilian traffic. The Munitions Act, the Neutrality Act, the customs and immigrations laws were routinely flaunted. 13 Above all, the drug laws were massively violated as the gallant anti-communist fighters filled their planes and boats with illegal narcotics to be smuggled back into the US when they returned from their missions. By 1963, the drug-running activities of the covert operatives were beginning to attract attention. JM/WAVE, in sum, accelerated the slide of south Florida towards the status of drug and murder capital of the United States it achieved during the 1980's, when it became as notorious as Chicago during Prohibition.

It cannot be the task of this study to even begin to treat the reasons for which certain leading elements of the Anglo-American financial oligarchy, perhaps acting with certain kinds of support from continental European aristocratic and neofascist networks, ordered the murder of John F. Kennedy. The British and the Harrimanites wanted escalation in Vietnam; by the time of his assassination Kennedy was committed to a pullout of US forces. Kennedy, as shown by his American University speech of 1963, was also interested in seeking a more stable path of war avoidance with the Soviets, using the US military superiority demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis to convince Moscow to accept a policy of world peace through economic development. Kennedy was interested in the possibilities of anti-missile strategic defense to put an end to that nightmare of mutually assured destruction which appealed to Henry Kissinger, a disgruntled former employee of the Kennedy administration whom the president had denounced as a madman. Kennedy was considering moves to limit or perhaps abolish the usurpation of authority over the national currency by the Wall Street and London interests controlling the Federal Reserve System. If re-elected to a second term, Kennedy was likely to have re-asserted presidential control, as distinct from Wall Street control, over the intelligence community. There is good reason to believe that Kennedy would have ousted J. Edgar Hoover from his self-appointed life tenure at the FBI, subjecting that agency to presidential control for the first time in many years. Kennedy was committed to a vigorous expansion of the space program, the cultural impact of which was beginning to alarm the finance oligarchs. Above all, Kennedy was acting like a man who thought he was president of the United States, violating the collegiality of oligarchical trusteeship of that office that had been in force

since the final days of Roosevelt. Kennedy furthermore had two younger brothers who might succeed him, putting a strong presidency beyond the control of the Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment for decades. George Bush joined in the Harrimanite opposition to Kennedy on all of these points.

After Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, it was alleged that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis had both been present, possibly together, in Dallas on the day of the shooting, although the truth of these allegations has never been finally established. Both Hunt and Sturgis were of course Bay of Pigs veterans who would later appear center stage in Watergate. There were also allegations that Hunt and Sturgis were among a group of six to eight derelicts who were found in boxcars sitting on the railroad tracks behind the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza, and who were rounded up and taken in for questioning by the Dallas police on the day of the assassination. Some suspected that Hunt and Sturgis had participated in the assassination. Some of these allegations were at the center of the celebrated 1985 defamation case of Hunt v. Liberty Lobby, in which a Florida federal jury found against Hunt. But, since the Dallas Police Department and County Sheriff never photographed or fingerprinted the "derelicts" in question, it has so far proven impossible definitively to resolve this question. But these allegations and theories about the possible presence and activities of Hunt and Sturgis in Dallas were sufficiently widespread so as to compel the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) to attempt to refute them in its 1975 report. 14

According to George Bush's official biography, he was during 1963 a well-to-do businessman residing in Houston, the busy president of Zapata Offshore and the chairman of the Harris County Republican Organization, supporting Barry Goldwater as the GOP's likely 1964 presidential candidate, while at the same time actively preparing his own 1964 bid for the US Senate. But during that same period of time, Bush may have shared some common acquaintances with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Between October, 1962 and April, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina were in frequent contact with a Russian emigré couple living in Dallas: these were George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne. During the Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination, de Mohrenschildt was interviewed at length about his contacts with Oswald. When, in the spring of 1977, the discrediting of the Warren Commission report as a blatant coverup had made public pressure for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination irresistible, the House Assassinations Committee planned to interview de Mohrenschildt once again. But in March, 1977, just before de Mohrenschildt was scheduled to be interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi of the House committee's staff, he was found dead in Palm Beach, Florida. His death was quickly ruled a suicide. One of the last people to see him alive was Edward Jay Epstein, who was also interviewing de Mohrenschildt about the Kennedy assassination for an upcoming book. Epstein is one of the writers on the Kennedy assassination who enjoyed excellent relations with the late James Angleton of the CIA. If de Mohrenschildt were alive today, he might be able to enlighten us about his relations with George Bush, and perhaps afford us some insight into Bush's activities during this epoch.

Jeanne de Mohrenschildt rejected the finding of suicide in her husband's death. "He was eliminated before he got to that committee," the widow told a journalist in 1978, "because someone did not want him to get to it." She also maintained that George de Mohrenschildt had been surreptitiously injected with mind-altering drugs. 15 After de Mohrenschildt's death, his personal address book was located, and it contained this entry: "Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland." There is of course the problem of dating this reference. George Bush had moved his office and home from Midland to Houston in 1959, when Zapata Offshore was constituted, so perhaps this reference goes back to some time before 1959. There is also the number: "4-6355." There are, of course, numerous other entries, including one W.F. Buckley of the Buckley brothers of New York City, William S. Paley of CBS, plus many oil men, stock brokers, and the like. 16

George de Mohrenschildt recounted a number of different versions of his life, so it is very difficult to establish the facts about him. According to one version he was the Russian Count Sergei de Mohrenschildt, but when he arrived in the United States in 1938 he carried a Polish passport identifying him as Jerzy Sergius von Mohrenschildt, born in Mozyr, Russia in 1911. He may in fact have been a Polish officer, or a correspondent for the Polish News Service, or none of these. He worked for a time for the Polish embassy in Washington DC. Some say that de Mohrenschildt met the Chairman of Humble Oil, Blaffer, and that Blaffer procured him a job. Other sources say that during this time de Mohrenschildt was affiliated with the War Department. According to some accounts, he later went to work for the French Deuxième Bureau, which wanted to know about petroleum exports from the United States to Europe.

De Mohrenschildt in 1941 became associated with a certain Baron Konstantin von Maydell in a public affairs venture called "Facts and Film." Maydell was considered a Nazi agent by the FBI, and in September 1942 he was sent to North Dakota for an internment that would last four years. De Mohrenschildt was also reportedly in contact with Japanese networks at this time. In June, 1941, de Mohrenschildt was questioned by police at Port Arthur, Texas, on the suspicion of espionage after he was found making sketches of port facilities. During 1941 de Mohrenschildt applied for a post in the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS). According to the official account, he was not hired. Soon after he made the application, he went to Mexico where he stayed until 1944. In the latter year he established his name as de Mohrenschildt, jettisoning the German version of von Mohrenschildt, and began study for a master's degree in petroleum engineering at the University of Texas. According to some accounts, during this period de Mohrenschildt was investigated by the Office of Naval Intelligence because of alleged communist sympathies. After the war, de Mohrenschildt worked as a petroleum engineer in Cuba and Venezuela, and in Caracas he had several meetings with the Soviet ambassador. During the postwar years he also worked in the Rangely oil field in Colorado. During the 1950's, after having married Winifred Sharpless, the daughter of an oil millionaire, de Mohrenschildt was active as an independent oil entrepreneur.

In 1957, de Mohrenschildt was approved by the CIA Office of Security to be hired as a US government geologist for a mission to Yugoslavia. Upon his return he was interviewed by one J. Walter Moore of the CIA's Domestic Contact Service, with whom he remained in contact. During 1958, de Morhenschildt visited Ghana, Togo, Dahomey; during 1959 he visited Africa again and returned by way of Poland. In 1959 he married Jeanne, his fourth wife, a former ballet dancer and dress designer who had been born in Manchuria, where her father had been one of the directors of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. During the summer of 1960, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt told their friends that they were going to embark on a walking tour of 11,000 miles along Indian trails from Mexico to Central America. One of their principal destinations was Guatemala City, where they were staying at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961, after which they made their way home by way of Panama and Haiti. After two months in Haiti, the Mohrenschildts returned to Dallas, where they came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, who had come back to the United States from his sojourn in the Soviet Union in June, 1962. By this time de Mohrenschildt was also frequenting Admiral Henry C. Bruton and his wife, to whom he introduced the Oswalds. Admiral Bruton was the former director of naval communications, and had superintended a comprehensive modernization and reorganization of the navy's means of keeping in touch with ships, planes, missiles, submarines, and the like.

It is established that between October, 1962 and late April, 1963, de Mohrenschildt was a very important figure in the life of Oswald and his Russian wife. Despite Oswald's lack of social graces, de Mohrenschildt introduced him into Dallas society, took him to parties, assisted him in finding employment, and much more. It was through de Mohrenschildt that Oswald met a certain Volkmar Schmidt, a young German geologist who had studied with Professor Wilhelm Kuetemeyer, an expert in psychosomatic medicine and religious philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, who compiled a detailed psychological profile of Oswald. Jeanne and George helped Marina move her belongings during one of her many estrangements from Oswald. According to some accounts, de Mohrenschildt's influence on Oswald was so great during this period that he could virtually dictate important decisions to the young ex-marine simply by making suggestions. Oswald was in awe of de Mohrenschildt, according to some.

According to some versions, de Mohrenschildt was aware of Oswald's alleged April 10, 1963 attempt to assassinate the well-known right-wing General Edwin Walker. According to Marina, de Mohrenschildt once asked Oswald, "Lee, how did you miss General Walker?" On April 19, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt went to New York City, and on April 29 the CIA Office of Security found that it had no objection to de Mohrenschildt's acceptance of a contract with the Duvalier regime of Haiti in the field of natural resource development. De Mohrenschildt appears to have departed for Haiti on May 1, 1963. In the meantime Oswald had left Dallas and traveled to New Orleans.

According to Mark Lane, "there is evidence that de Mohrenschildt served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald's actions." Much of the extensive published literature on de Mohrenschildt converges on the idea that he was a baby sitter, handler, case officer, or control agent for Oswald on behalf of some intelligence agency. 17 De Mohrenschildt's pedigree evokes haunting parallels to the typical figures of the PERMINDEX networks of Georges Mandel, Ferenc Nagy, Max Hagerman, Max Seligman, Carlo d'Amelio, Lewis Mortimer Bloomfield, and Clay Shaw, to which public attention was called during the investigations of New Orleans district attorney James Garrison.

It is therefore highly interesting that George Bush's name turned up in the personal address book of George de Mohrenschildt. The Warren Commission went to absurd lengths to cover up the fact that George de Mohrenschildt was a denizen of the world of the intelligence agencies. This included ignoring the well-developed paper trial on de Mohrenschildt as Nazi and communist sympathizer, and later as a US asset abroad. The Warren Commission concluded:

The Commission's investigation has developed no signs of subversive or disloyal conduct on the part of either of the de Mohrenschildts. Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witnesses contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking the de Mohrenschildts to subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy. 18

On the day of the Kennedy assassination, FBI records show George Bush as reporting a right-wing member of the Houston Young Republicans for making threatening comments about President Kennedy. According to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act,

On November 22, 1963 Mr. GEORGE H.W. BUSH, 5525 Briar, Houston, Texas, telephonically advised that he wanted to relate some hear say that he had heard in recent weeks, date and source unknown. He advised that one JAMES PARROTT had been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.

PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in politics in the Houston area.

According to related FBI documentation, "a check with Secret Service at Houston, Texas revealed that agency had a report that PARROTT stated in 1961 he would kill President Kennedy if he got near him." Here Bush is described as "a reputable businessman." FBI agents were sent to interrogate Parrott's mother, and later James Milton Parrott himself. Parrott had been discharged from the US Air Force for psychiatric reasons in 1959. Parrott had an alibi for the time of the Dallas shootings; he had been in the company of another Republican activist. According to press accounts, Parrott was a member of the right-wing faction of the Houston GOP which was oriented towards the John Birch Society and which opposed Bush's chairmanship. 19 According to the San Francisco Examiner, Bush's press office in August, 1988 first said that Bush had not made any such call, and challenged the authenticity of the FBI documents. Several days later Bush's spokesman said that the candidate "does not recall" placing the call.

One day later after he reported Parrott to the FBI, Bush received a highly sensitive, high-level briefing from the Bureau:

Date: November 29, 1963
To: Director

Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State

From: John Edgar Hoover, Director
Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963 advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in US policy, which is not true.

Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the US but to all Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.

An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that those individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.

The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W.T. Forsyth of this Bureau.

William T. Forsyth, since deceased, was an official of the FBI's Washington headquarters; during the time he was attached to the Bureau's subversive control section, he ran the investigation of Rev. Martin Luther King. Was he also a part of the FBI's harassment of Dr. King? The efforts of journalists to locate Captain Edwards have not been successful.

This FBI document identifying George Bush as a CIA agent in November, 1963 was first published by Joseph McBride in The Nation in July, 1988, just before Bush received the Republican nomination for president. McBride's source observed: "I know [Bush] was involved in the Caribbean. I know he

was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy assassination. There was a very definite worry that some Cuban groups were going to move against Castro and attempt to blame it on the CIA." 20 When pressed for confirmation or denial, Bush's spokesman Stephen Hart commented: "Must be another George Bush." Within a short time the CIA itself would peddle the same damage control line. On July 19, 1988 in the wake of wide public attention to the report published in The Nation, CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso departed from the normal CIA policy of refusing to confirm or deny reports that any person is or was a CIA employee. CIA spokeswoman Basso told the Associated press that the CIA believed that "the record should be clarified." She said that the FBI document "apparently" referred to a George William Bush who had worked in 1963 on the night shift at CIA headquarters, and that "would have been the appropriate place to have received such an FBI report." According to her account, the George William Bush in question had left the CIA to join the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1964.

For the CIA to volunteer the name of one of its former employees to the press was a shocking violation of traditional methods, which are supposedly designed to keep such names a closely guarded secret. This revelation may have constituted a violation of federal law. But no exertions were too great when it came to damage control for George Bush.

George William Bush had indeed worked for the CIA, the DIA, and the Alexandria, Virginia Department of Public Welfare before joining the Social Security Administration, in whose Arlington, Virginia office he was employed as a claims representative in 1988. George William Bush told The Nation that while at the CIA he was "just a lowly researcher and analyst" who worked with documents and photos and never received interagency briefings. He had never met Forsyth of the FBI or Captain Edwards of the DIA. "So it wasn't me," said George William Bush. 21

Later, George William Bush formalized his denial in a sworn statement to a federal court in Washington, DC. The affidavit acknowledges that while working at CIA headquarters between September 1963 and February 1964, George William Bush was the junior person on a three to four man watch shift which was on duty when Kennedy was shot. But, as George William Bush goes on to say,

I have carefully reviewed the FBI memorandum to the Director, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State dated November 29, 1963 which mentions a Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency....I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the CIA. In fact, during my time at the CIA. I did not receive any oral communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI.

Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memorandum. [22]

So we are left with the strong suspicion that the "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" referred to by the FBI is our own George Herbert Walker Bush, who, in addition to his possible contact with Lee Harvey Oswald's controller, may thus also join the ranks of the Kennedy assassination cover-up. It makes perfect sense for George Bush to be called in on a matter involving the Cuban community in Miami, since that is a place where George has traditionally had a constituency. George inherited it from his father, Prescott Bush of Jupiter Island, and later passed it on to his own son, Jeb.

_______________

Notes to Part 1:

1. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," Texas Monthly, June 1983.

2. See Sarah Bartlett, The Money Machine: How KKR Manufactured Power and Profits (New York, 1991), pp. 9-12.

3. Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc., 1880-1978 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 232 ff.

4. Bartlett, The Money Machine, p. 268.

5. Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy, p. 232-233.

6. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," Texas Monthly, June 1983.

7. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," Texas Monthly, June 1983.

8. "Bush Battle the 'Wimp Factor', Newsweek, October 19, 1987.

9. See Richard Ben Kramer, "How He Got Here," Esquire, June 1991.

10. See Thomas Petzinger, Jr., Oil and Honor: The Texaco-Pennzoil Wars (New York, 1987), p. 37 ff.

11. Petzinger, p. 93.

12. Petzinger, p. 40.

13. See Zapata Petroleum annual reports, Library of Congress Microform Reading Room.

14. Petzinger, p. 41.

15. See Zapata Petroleum Corporation annual report for 1956, Microform Reading Room, Library of Congress.

16. Harry Hurt III, p. 194.

17. "Zapata Petroleum Corp.," Fortune, April, 1958.

18. Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward, "Doing Well With Help From Family, Friends," Washington Post, August 11, 1988.

19. Petzinger, p. 63.

20. "Love Her And Leave Her," Forbes, September 15, 1974, pp. 54-5.

21. See Petzinger, pp. 64-67.

22. Zapata Offshore Annual Report 1964, Microform Reading Room, Library of Congress.

23. See Bush folder, Yarborough Papers, Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas, Austin.

24. See Jonathan Kwitny, "The Mexican Connection of George Bush," Barron's, September 19, 1988.

Notes to Part 2:

1. Joseph McBride, "'George Bush,' CIA Operative," The Nation, July 16, 1988.

2. Georgie Anne Geyer, Guerilla Prince (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).

3. Felix Rogriquez, Shadow Warrior (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1989).

4. On Pluto, see the East German study by Guenter Schumacher, Operation Pluto (Berlin, Deutscher Militaerverlag, 1964).

5. E. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1973), p. 214.

6. Secret Agenda.

7. For Operation Zapata, see Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-63 (New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), p. 89.

8. For the names of the ships at the Bay of Pigs, see Quintin Pino Machado, La Batalla de Giron (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1983), pp. 79-80. This source quotes one ship as the Barbara J." See also Schumacher, Operation Pluto, pp. 98-99. See also Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs, The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1979), which also has the Barbara J. According to Quintin Pino macahdo, the Houston had been given the new name of Aguja (Swordfish) and the Barbara that of Barracuda for the purposes of this operation.

9. Howard Hunt, Give Us This Day, pp. 13-14.

10. Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1966), p. 329.

11. Sorenson, Kennedy, p. 723.

12. Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (Boston, 1965), p. 339.

13. See Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish is Red (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 112 ff.

14. Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Washington: US Goverment Printing Office, 1975), pp. 251-267.

15. Jim Marrs, "Widow disputes suicide," Fort Worth Evening Star-Telegram, May 11, 1978

16. A photocopy of George de Mohrenschildt's personal address book is preserved at the Assassination Archives and Research Center, Washington, DC. The Bush entry is also cited in Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), p. 332.

17. For de Mohrenschildt, see Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (London: Hutchinson, 1978); C. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings, The Plot to Kill the President (New York: Times Books, 1981); and Robert Sam Anson, "They've Killed The President!" (New York: Bantam, 1975).

18. Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (New York: Bantam, 1964), p. 262.

19. Miguel Acoca, "FBI: 'Bush' called about JFK killing," San Francisco Examiner, August 25, 1988.

20. Joseph McBride, "'George Bush,' CIA Operative," The Nation, July 16/23, 1988, p. 42

21. Joseph McBride, "Where Was George?", The Nation, August 13/20, 1988, p. 117.

22. United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Civil Action 88-2600 GHR, Archives and Research Center v. Central Intelligence Agency, Affidavit of George William Bush, September 21, 1988.

PART 1 OF 2

Chapter IX -- Bush Challenges Yarborough for the Senate

Bush's unsuccessful attempt in 1964 to unseat Texas Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough is a matter of fundamental interest to anyone seeking to probe the wellsprings of Bush's actual political thinking. In a society which knows nothing of its own recent history, the events of a quarter century ago might be classed as remote and irrelevant. But as we review the profile of the Bush Senate campaign of 1964, what we see coming alive is the characteristic mentality that rules the Oval Office today. The main traits are all there: the overriding obsession with the race issue, exemplified in Bush's bitter rejection of the civil rights bill before the Congress during those months; the genocidal bluster in foreign affairs, with proposals for nuclear bombardment of Vietnam, an invasion of Cuba, and a rejection of negotiations for the return of the Panama Canal; the autonomic reflex for union-busting expressed in the rhetoric of "right to work"; the paean to free enterprise at the expense of farmers and the disadvantaged, with all of this packaged in a slick, demagogic television and advertising effort.

During this Senate race, Bush assumed the coloration of a Goldwater Republican. It remains highly significant that Bush began his public political career in the ideological guise of a southern Republican, specifically in Texas. The Republican Party in Texas had been in total eclipse since the time of Reconstruction, with the state GOPers complaining that they were living in a one-party state. During the 1950's, the personal popularity of Eisenhower and the increasing visibility of ultra-left Wall Street investment bankers in the circle of Adlai Stevenson's backers began to offer the Texas Republicans some openings. In 1952 and 1956, Texas Democratic Governor Allan Shivers supported Eisenhower, who carried Texas with a substantial majority both times. In 1960, Texas had given its electoral votes to Kennedy, although the margin of Democratic victory was so thin as to constitute an embarrassment to Kennedy's running mate, Texas Senator and Democratic Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. But Nixon had carried the city of Houston and Harris County, which turned out to be the largest metropolitan area to go for the Nixon-Lodge ticket that year. In 1960, Texas Republicans scored their greatest success in a century by elected John Tower to the US Senate on a platform that was a harbinger of the Goldwater movement. Tower was once asked if there was a single domestic legislative program of John F. Kennedy that he could support, and his answer was that he could not think of a single one. This is the same Tower who would join with Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft in early 1987 to concoct the absurd whitewash of the Iran- contra affair that would exonerate Bush and attribute the central responsibility to White House chief of Staff Don Regan, forcing his ouster. This was the same Tower whose nomination by Bush to the post of Secretary of Defense would be derailed by accusation of alcoholism and womanizing, followed by Tower's death in a mysterious airplane crash in early 1991.

The Texas Democratic Party was divided in those days into two wings which fought each other in the Democratic primaries, which were often tantamount to election. One of these wings was called liberal and was identified above all with Bush's opponent, Senator Ralph Yarborough. The "liberal" here is largely a misnomer; more accurate would be populist, but populist ennobled by the revival of the classic nineteenth century American system that occurred in Texas during Franklin D. Roosevelt's World War II mobilization, when dirigist recovery policies pulled the Texas economy out of a stagnation that had its roots in the failure of post-1865 reconstruction. The strong suits of these populist Democrats were education and infrastructure-- a good first approximation of the actual business of government.

The other wing was called conservative, and was grouped around figures like Allan Shivers and LBJ's protege John Connally, with whom Bush has had a history of alternating stretches of conflict and moments of rapprochement. LBJ himself was close to the Shivers-Connally group. The typical figure here is Connally, the governor who was wounded in Dealey Plaza in Dallas the day that Kennedy was killed, and who later went on the join the Nixon Administration as the Secretary of the Treasury who approved the abolition of the post-1944 Bretton Woods gold reserve standard in Camp David on August 15, 1971. Connally subsequently played out the logic of becoming not just a Republican, but indeed a Republican presidential candidate, and of clashing with George Bush once or twice in the snows of New Hampshire in 1979-80.

The Texas Democratic Party also contained an array of personalities of national importance whose positive traits are part of what has been lost in the descent into today's crisis: call them populists, call them the post-New Deal or the post-Fair Deal, but do not mistake the fact that they were better for the country than their successors. These were politicians like the legendary Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, Congressman Wright Patman of the House Banking Committee, who was a source of continuing populist irritation to the New York banking community, and Tom Clark, who was Attorney General under Truman and who later went on to the US Supreme Court, and whose son, Ramsay Clark, has been distinguished by his denunciation of the war crimes of the Bush regime in the Gulf war of 1991. A later generation of this same circle was represented by former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, who was hounded from office during the first year of George Bush's Presidential tenure, and by Congressman Henry Gonzalez. Gonzalez stands out as one of the very few of the old Texas populist Democrats left in elected office today. Gonzalez has put new luster on the time-honored maverick tradition by offering a bill of impeachment for Ronald Reagan in the wake of the Iran-contra revelations of 1986, more recently by submitting a bill for the impeachment of George Bush for his illegal conduct of Operation Desert Shield, and by raising his voice as first in the Congress for the cause of humanity against genocide with a call for the lifting of the economic sanctions against Iraq to prevent the needless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of children after the bombing campaign had ended. And even today there are still others of this tradition left in positions of key influence: for example, Congressman Jack Brooks of the ninth district of Texas, the salty chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who dared to subpoena Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to appear before his committee with a ducis tecum of the documents of the Department of Justice theft of computer software in the Inslaw case.

One of the continuing projects of George Bush's life has been the extirpation of precisely this populist and sometimes dirigist group of Democrats, and their replacement with "free enterprise" Republican ideologues, or financier Democrats of the Lloyd Bentsen variety.

The Texas and Oklahoma populist Democrats must be distinguished from their colleagues of the Old South of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. But for the Eastern Liberal Establishment, it has proven more convenient to lump them all together under the purveyed image of the racist, bourbon-swilling southern Congressional committee chairman conspiring in cigar-clouded rooms to defy the popular will as expressed by the television networks. All southern Democrats of the old school tended to have crippling weaknesses on the race issue and on the question of union-busting. But on the other side of the ledger, many southern Democrats had an excellent grasp of infrastructure in the broadest sense: internal improvements like highways, canals, water projects, rural electrification, quality accessible public education, health services, electric power generation.

The nascent southern Republicans of the fifties and sixties, by contrast, were generally as bad or worse than the Democrats on race and labor relations, and were at the same such fanatics of Adam Smith's "free market" mystification that all government commitment to maintaining infrastructure, health care, and education went by the boards. The only positive point left for some of these emerging southern Republicans, such as those who followed Barry Goldwater in 1964, was a patriotic rejection of the machinations of the Eastern Liberal Establishment as embodied most graphically in the figure of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Bush was indeed a Goldwater man in those days, as we will see. But since Bush was himself an organ of that same hated Eastern Liberal Establishment, he stood utterly bereft of redeeming grace.

The enterprise in which we now find Bush engaged, the creation of a Republican Party in the southern states during the 1960's, (including the so-called post-1961 "two-party Texas") has proven to be an historical catastrophe. In order to create a Republican Party in the south, it was first necessary to smash the old FDR New Deal constituent coalition of labor, the cities, farmers, blacks, and the Solid South. As Bush complains in his campaign autobiography:

"The state was solidly Democratic, and the allegiance of Texans to the 'party of our fathers' became even stronger during the lean years of the Depression. The Democratic campaign line in the 1930's was that the 'Hoover Republicans' were responsible for unemployment and farm foreclosures; Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party were said to be the only friends the people had." [fn 1]

But as far as George Bush was concerned, all this was of no consequence: "Philosophically, I was a Republican...." [fn 2] After Bush had declared his candidacy for Yarborough's seat, the veteran political writers at the state capital in Austin shook their heads: Bush had "two crosses to bear - running as a Republican and not a native Texan." [fn 3]

The method that the southern Republicans devised to breach this solid front was the one theorized years later by Lee Atwater, the manager of Bush's 1988 Presidential campaign. This was the technique of the "wedge issues," so called precisely because they were chosen to split up the old New Deal coalition using the chisels of ideology. The wedge issues are also known as the "hot-button social issues," and the most explosive among them has always tended to be race. The Republicans could win in the south by portraying the Democratic Party has pro-black. Atwater had learned to be a cunning and vicious practitioner of the "wedge issue" method in the school of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina after the latter had switched over to the Republicans in the sixties. Racial invective, anti-union demagogy, jingoistic chauvinism, the smearing of opponents for their alleged fealty to "special interests"-- none of this began in the Baker-Atwater effort of 1968. These were the stock in trade of the southern strategy, and these were all Leitmotivs of Bush's 1964 effort against Yarborough.

From the vantage point of the police state conditions of the early 1990's, we can discern a further implication of the southern Republican project of which Bush was in several moments of the 1960's a leading operative. As the southern GOP emerged out of the play of gang and counter-gang between McGovernite left liberal investment bankers and Nixon-Reagan right liberal investment bankers (and Bush has been both), it made possible that Southern Strategy which elected Nixon in 1968 and which has given the Republicans a virtual lock on the electoral college ever since. The Watergate-Carter anomaly of 1976 confirms rather than alters this overall picture.

The Southern Strategy that Bush turns out to have been serving in the sixties was not called to the attention of the public until somewhat after the 1964 election in which Goldwater had garnered electoral votes exclusively in the south. As William Rusher wrote in the National Review: "The Democrats had for years begun each race with an assured batch of delegates from the South." "The Republican Party strategy," argued Rusher, needs refiguring, given a chance to break into this bloc once denied them...." His conclusion was that ""Republicans can put themselves in the position of having the Southern bloc as a starting handicap; after that, they can compete for the rest of the country, needing only that 50 per cent minus (say) 111 [of the electoral college votes]." Doing all this, Rusher contended, would allow Republican Presidential candidates to ignore the " traditional centers of urban liberalism," especially in the northeast. [fn 4] These ideas were further refined in Richard Nixon's brain trust, presided over by Wall Street bond lawyer John Mitchell at 445 Park Avenue, and received their definitive elaboration from Kevin Phillips, who in those years advanced the thesis that the "whole secret of politics" is in "knowing who hates who," which is of course another way of speaking of wedge issues.

The result of the successful application of the Southern Strategy in 1968 and in the following years has been a a period of more than two decades of one-party Republican control over the Executive Branch, of which George Bush personally has been the leading beneficiary, first through his multiple appointments, then through the vice-presidency, and now through the possession of the White House itself. This has had the decisive structural consequence of making possible the kind of continuous, entrenched bureaucratic power that we see in the Bush regime and its leading functionaries. As we will see, such administrators of the corporate state as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, for whom the exercise of executive power has long since become a way of life, appear to themselves and to others as immune to the popular reckoning. The democratic republic requires the moment of catharsis, of throwing the bums out, if the arrogance of the powerful is ever to be chastened. If there is no prospect for the White House changing hands, this amounts to a one- party state. The southern Republican Party, including two-party Texas, has provided the Republican lock on the White House which has proven a mighty stimulus to those tendencies towards authoritarian and even totalitarian rule which have culminated in the Administrative Fascism of the current Bush regime.

Bush's opponent in that Goldwater year of 1964 was Senator Ralph Webster Yarborough. Yarborough had been born in Chandler, Texas in 1903 as the seventh of eleven children. He attended public schools in Chandler and Tyler, worked on a farm, and went on to attend Sam Houston State Teachers College and, for one year, the US Military Academy at West Point. He was a member of the 36th division of the Texas National Guard, in which he advanced from private to sergeant. After World War I he worked a passage to Europe on board a freighter, and found a job in Germany working in the offices of the American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin. He also pursued studies in Stendahl, Germany. He returned to the United States to earn a law degree at the University of Texas in 1927, and worked as a lawyer in El Paso. At one point he found a job as a harvest hand in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the late 1920's, and also served a stint as a roughneck in the oil fields. Yarborough entered public service as an Assistant Attorney General of Texas from 1931 to 1934. After that, he was a founding director of the Lower Colorado River Authority, a major water project in central Texas, and was then elected as a district judge in Austin.

Yarborough served in the US Army ground forces during World War II, and was a member of the only division which took part in the postwar occupation of Germany as well as in MacArthur's administration of Japan. When he left the military in 1946 he had attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. It clear from an overview of Yarborough's career that his victories and defeats were essentially his own, that for him there was no Prescott Bush to secure lines of credit or to procure important posts by telephone calls to bigwigs in freemasonic networks.

Yarborough had challenged Allan Shivers in the governor's contest of 1952, and had gone down to defeat. Successive bids for the state house in Austin by Yarborough were turned back in 1954 and 1956. Then, when Senator (and former governor) Price Daniel resigned his seat, Yarborough was finally victorious in a special election. He had then been re-elected to the Senate for a full term in 1958.

Yarborough was distinguished first of all for his voting record on civil rights. Just months after he had entered the Senate, he was one of only five southern senators (including LBJ) to vote for the watershed Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1960, Yarborough was one of four southern senators -- again including LBJ -- who cast votes in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Yarborough would be the lone senator from the eleven states formerly composing the Confederate States of America to vote for the 1964 civil rights bill, the most sweeping since Reconstruction. This is the bill which, as we will see, provided Bush with the ammunition for one of the principal themes of his 1964 election attacks. Later, Yarborough would be one of only three southern senators supporting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and one of four supporting the 1968 open housing bill. [fn 5]

After Yarborough had left the Senate, his bitter enemies at the Dallas Morning News felt obliged to concede that "his name is probably attached to more legislation than that of any other senator in Texas history." Yarborough had become the chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. Here his lodestar was infrastructure, infrastructure in the form of education and infrastructure in the form of physical improvements.

In education, Yarborough was either the author or a leading supporter of virtually every important piece of legislation to become law between 1958 and 1971, including some nine major bills. As a freshman senator, Yarborough was the co-author of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which was the basis for federal aid to education, particularly to higher education.

Under the provisions of NDEA, a quarter of a million students were at any given time enabled to pursue undergraduate training with low-cost loans and other benefits. For graduate students, there were three-year fellowships that paid tuition and fees plus grants for living expenses in the amount of $2200, $2400, and $2600 over the three years--an ample sum in those days. Yarborough also sponsored bills for medical education, college classroom construction, vocational education, aid to the mentally retarded, and library facilities. Yarborough's Bilingual Education Bill provided special federal funding for schools with large numbers of students from non-English speaking backgrounds. Some of these points were outlined by Yarborough during a campaign speech of September 18, 1964, with the title "Higher Education as it relates to our national purpose."

As chairman of the veterans' subcommittee, Yarborough authored the Cold War GI Bill of Rights, which sought to extend the benefits accorded veterans of World War II and Korea, and which was to apply to servicemen on duty between January, 1955 and July 1, 1965. For these veterans Yarborough proposed readjustment assistance, educational and vocational training, and loan assistance to allow veterans to purchase homes and farms at a maximum interest rate of 5.25% per annum. This bill was finally passed after years of dogged effort by Yarborough against the opposition of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Yarborough was instrumental in obtaining a five year extension of the Hill-Burton act, which provided 4,000 additional beds in Veterans Administration Hospitals. In physical improvements, Yarborough supported appropriations for coastal navigation. He fought for $29 million for the Rural Electrification Administration for counties in the Corpus Christi area alone. In eleven counties in that part of Texas, Yarborough had helped obtain federal grants for $4.5 million and loans of $.64 million under the Kennedy Administration accelerated public works projects program to provide clean water and sewers for towns and cities that could not otherwise afford them. Concerning his commitment to this type of infrastructure, Yarborough commented to a dinner in Corpus Christi: "These are the projects, along with the ship channels, dams and reservoirs, water research programs, hurricane and flood control programs that bring delegations of city officials, members of county court, members of river and watershed authorities, co-op delegations, into my office literally by the thousands year after year for aid, which is always given, never refused." Yarborough went on: "While our efforts and achievements are largely unpublicized...there is satisfaction beyond acclaim when a small town without a water system is enabled to provide its people for the first time with water and sewerage...when the course of a river is shored up a little to save a farmer's crops, when a freeway opens up new avenues of commerce." [fn 6] In the area of oil policy, always vital in Texas, Yarborough strained to give the industry everything it could reasonably expect, and more. Despite this, he was implacably hated by many business circles. In short, Ralph Yarborough had a real commitment to racial and economic justice, and was, all in all, among the best that the post-New Deal Democratic Party had to offer. Certainly there were weaknesses: one of the principal ones was to veer in the direction of environmentalism. Here Yarborough was the prime mover behind the Endangered Species Act.

Bush moved to Houston in 1959, bringing the corporate headquarters of Zapata Offshore with him. Houston was by far the biggest city in Texas, a center of the corporate bureaucracies of firms doing business in the oil patch. There was also the Baker and Botts law firm, which would function in effect as part of the Bush family network, since Baker and Botts were the lawyers who had been handling the affairs of the Harriman railroad interests in the southwest. One prominent lawyer in Houston at the time was James Baker III, a scion of the family enshrined in the Baker and Botts name, but himself a partner in another firm because of the so-called anti- nepotism rule that prevented the children of Baker and Botts partners from joining the firm themselves. Soon Bush would be hob-nobbing with Baker and other representatives of the Houston oligarchy, of the Hobby and Cullen families, at the Petroleum Club and at garden parties in the hot, humid, subtropical summers. George, Barbara and their children moved into a new home on Briar Drive.

Less than an hour's drive by car south of Houston lies Galveston, a port on the Gulf of Mexico. Houston itself is connected to the Gulf by a ship channel which has permitted the city to became a large port in its own right. Beyond Galveston there was the Gulf, and beyond the Gulf the Greater Antilles with Cuba set in the middle of the archipelago, and beyond Cuba Guatemala, Nicaragua, Granada, targets of filibusterers old and new.

Before long, Bush became active in the Harris County Republican Party, which was in the process of becoming one of the GOP strongpoints in the statewide apparatus then being assembled by Peter O'Donnell, the Republican state chairman, and his associate Thad Hutcheson. By now George Bush was a millionaire in his own right, and given his impeccable Wall Street connections it was not surprising to find him on the Harris County GOP finance committee, a function that he had undertaken in Midland for the Eisenhower-Nixon tickets in 1952 and 1956. He was also a member of the candidates committee.

In 1962 the Democrats were preparing to nominate John Connally for governor, and the Texas GOP under O'Donnell was able to mount a more formidable bid than previously for the state house in Austin. The Republican candidate was Jack Cox, a party activist with a right-wing profile. Bush agreed to serve as the Harris County co-chairman of the Jack Cox for Governor finance committee. In the gubernatorial election of 1962, Cox received 710,000 votes, a surprisingly large result. Connally won the governorship, and it was in that capacity that he was present in the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

During these years, a significant influence was exercised in the Texas GOP by the John Birch Society, which had grown up during the 1950's through the leadership and financing of Robert Welch. Water for the Birch mill was abundantly provided by the liberal Republicanism of the Eisenhower administration, with counted Prescott Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, Gordon Gray, and Robert Keith Gray among its most influential figures. In reaction against this Wall Street liberalism, the Birchers offered an ideology of impotent negative protest based on self-righteous chauvinism in foreign affairs and the mystifications of the free market at home. But they were highly suspicious of the financier cliques of lower Manhattan, and to that extent they had George Bush's number.

Bush is still complaining about the indignities he suffered at the hands of these Birchers, with whom he was straining to have as much as possible in common. But he met with repeated frustration, because his Eastern Liberal Establishment pedigree was always there. In his campaign autobiography, Bush laments that many Texans thought that Redbook Magazine, published by his father-in-law Marvin Pierce of the McCall Corporation, was an official publication of the Communist Party.

Bush recounts a campaign trip with his aide Roy Goodearle to the Texas panhandle, during which he was working a crowd at one of his typical free food, free beer "political barbecues." Bush gave one of his palm cards to a man who conceded that he had heard of Bush, but quickly added that he could never support him. Bush thought this was because he was running as a Republican. "But," [Bush] then realized, "my being a Republican wasn't the thing bothering the guy. It was something worse than that." Bush's interlocutor was upset over the fact that Zapata Offshore had eastern investors. When Bush whined that all oil companies had eastern investors, for such was the nature of the business, his tormentor pointed out that one of Bush's main campaign contributors, a prominent Houston attorney, was not just a "sonofabitch," but also a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.

Bush explains, with the whine in his larynx in overdrive: "The lesson was that in the minds of some voters the Council on Foreign Relations was nothing more than a One World tool of the Communist-Wall Street internationalist conspiracy, and to make matters worse, the Houston lawyer had also worked for President Eisenhower-- a known tool of the Communists, in the eyes of some John Birch members." Further elucidation is then added in a footnote: "A decade and a half later, running for President, I ran into some of the same political types on the campaign trail. By then, they'd uncovered an international conspiracy even more sinister than the Council on Foreign Relations-- the Trilateral Commission, a group that President Reagan received at the White House in 1981." This, as we shall see, is a reference to Lyndon LaRouche's New Hampshire primary campaign of 1979-80, which included the exposure of Bush's membership not just in David Rockefeller's Trilateral, but also in Skull and Bones, about which Bush always refuses to comment. When Ronald Reagan and other candidates took up this issue, Bush ended up loosing the New Hampshire primary and with it his best hope of capturing the Presidency in 1980. Bush, in short, has been aware since the early sixties that serious attention to his oligarchical pedigree causes him to lose elections. His response has been to seek to declare these very relevant matters off limits, and to order dirty tricks and covert operations against those who persist in making this an issue, most clearly in the case of LaRouche. [fn 7]

Part of the influence of the Birch Society in those days was due to the support and financing afforded by the Hunt dynasty of Dallas. In particular, the fabulously wealthy oilman H.L. Hunt, one of the richest men in the world, was an avid sponsor of rightwing propaganda which he put out under the name of LIFE LINE. On at least one occasion Hunt called Bush to Dallas for a meeting during one of the latter's Texas political campaigns. "There's something I'd like to give you," Hunt told Bush. Bush appeared with remarkable alacrity, and Hunt engaged him in a long conversation about many things, but mentioned neither politics nor money. Finally, as Bush was getting ready to leave, Hunt handed him a thick brown envelope. Bush eagerly opened the envelope in the firm expectation that it would contain a large sum in cash. What he found instead was a thick wad of LIFE LINE literature for his ideological reformation. [fn 8]

It was in this context that George Bush, mediocre oilman, fortified by his Wall Street and Skull and Bones connections, but with almost no visible qualifications, and scarcely known in Texas outside of Odessa, Midland, and Houston, decided that he had attained senatorial caliber. In the Roman Empire, membership in the Senate was an hereditary attribute of patrician family rank. Prescott Bush had left the Senate in early January of 1963. Before the year was out, George Bush would make his claim. As Senator Yarborough later commented, it would turn out to be an act of temerity.

During the spring of 1963 Bush set about assembling an institutional base for his campaign. The chosen vehicle would be the Republican chairmanship of Harris County, the area around Houston, a bulwark of the Texas GOP. Bush had been participating in the Harris County organization since 1960.

One Sunday morning Bush invited some county Republican activists to his home on Briar Drive. Present were Roy Goodearle, a young independent oil man who, before Barbara Bush appropriated it, was given the nickname of "the Silver Fox" in the Washington scene. Also present were Jack Steel, Tom and Nancy Thawley, and some others.

Goodearle, presumably acting as the lawyer for the Bush faction, addressed the meeting on the dangers posed by the sectarians of the John Birch Society to the prospects of the GOP in Houston and elsewhere. Over lunch prepared by Barbara Bush, Goodearle outlined the tactical situation in the Harris County organization: a Birchite faction under the leadership of state senator Walter Mengdon, although still a minority, was emerging as a powerful inner-party opposition against the liberals and moderates. In the last vote for GOP county leader, the Birch candidate had been narrowly defeated. Now, after three years in office, the more moderate county chairman, James A. Bertron, would announce on February 8, 1963 that he could no longer serve as chairman of the Harris County Republican Executive Committee. His resignation, he would state, was "necessitated by neglect of my personal business due to my political activities." [fn 9] This was doubtless very convenient in the light of what Bush had been planning.

Bertron was quitting to move to Florida. In 1961, Bertron had been attending a Republican fundraising gathering in Washington DC, when he was accosted by none other than Senator Prescott Bush. Bush took Bertron aside and demanded: "Jimmy, when are you going to get George involved?" "Senator, I'm trying," Betron replied, evidently with some vexation. "We're all trying." [fn 10] In 1961 or at any other time it is doubtful that George Bush could have found his way to the men's room without the help of a paid informant sent by Senator Prescott Bush.

Goodearle went on to tell the assembled Republicans that unless a "strong candidate" now entered the race, a Bircher was likely to win the post of county chairman. But in order to defeat the well-organized and zealous Birchers, said Goodearle, an anti-Bircher would have to undertake a grueling campaign, touring the county and making speeches to the Republican faithful every night for several weeks. Then, under the urging of Goodearle, the assembled group turned to Bush: could he be prevailed on to put his hat in the ring? Bush, by his own account, needed no time to think it over, and accepted on the spot.

With that, George and Barbara were on the road in their first campaign in what Bush later called "another apprenticeship." While Barbara busied herself with needlepoint in order to stay awake through a speech she had heard repeatedly, George churned out a pitch on the virtues of the two-party system and the advantages of having a Republican alternative to the entrenched Houston establishment. In effect, his platform was the Southern Strategy avant la lettre. Local observers soon noticed that Barbara Bush was able to gain acceptance as a campaign comrade for Republican volunteers, in addition to being esteemed as the wealthy candidate's wife.

When the vote for county chairman came, the candidate opposing Bush, Russell Prior, pulled out of the race for reasons that have not been satisfactorily explained, thus permitting Bush to be elected unanimously by the executive committee. Henceforth, winning unopposed has been Bush's taste in elections: this is how he was returned to the House for his second term in 1968, and Bush propagandists flirted with a similar approach to the 1992 presidential contest.

At the time of his election, 38-year old George was not exactly a household word, not even in Houston. In announcing his victory, the Houston Chronicle printed the picture of a totally different person, captioned as "George Bush," the man who wanted to "hone the party to a fine edge for the important job ahead in 1964"--that is to say, for the Goldwater for President campaign. [fn 11] As chairman, Bush was free to appoint the officers of the county GOP. Some of these choices are not without relevance for the future course of world history. For the post of party counsel, Bush appointed William B. Cassin of Baker and Botts, Shepherd and Coates law firm. For his assistant county chairmen, Bush tapped Anthony Farris, Gene Crossman, Roy Goodearle, and for executive director, William R. Simmons. Not to be overloooked is the choice of Anthony J.P. "Tough Tony" Farris. He had been a Marine gunner aboard dive bombers and torpedo bombers during the war, and had later graduated from the University of Houston Law School, subsequently setting up a general law practice in the Sterling Building in downtown Houston. The "P" stood for Perez, and Farris was a wheelhorse in the Mexican-American community with the "Amigos for Bush" in a number of campaigns. Farris was an unsuccessful Congressional candidate, but was later rewarded by the Nixon administration with the post of United States Attorney in Houston. Then Farris was elected to the Harris County bench in 1980. When George Bush's former business partner and constant crony, J. Hugh Liedtke of Pennzoil, sued Texaco for damages in the celebrated Getty Oil case of 1985, it was Judge Tough Tony Farris who presided over most of the trial and made the key rulings on the way to the granting of the biggest damage award in history, an unbelievable $ 11,120,976,110.83, all for the benefit of Bush's good friend J. Hugh Liedtke. [fn 12]

On March 21, Bush told the Houston Chronicle that the Harris County GOP is "conservative," and not "extremist:" "The Republican party in the past -- and sometimes with justification-- has been connected in the mind of the public with extremism," said Bush. "We're not, or at least most of us are not, extremists. We're just responsible people." Bush pledged that his message would be the same all over the county, and that he would "say the same things in River Oaks as in the East End, or in Pasadena."

At the same time that he was inveighing against extremism, Bush was dragooning his party apparatus to mount the Houston Draft Goldwater drive The goal of this effort was to procure 100,000 signatures for Goldwater, with each signer also plunking down a dollar to fill the GOP coffers. "An excellent way for those who support Goldwater-like me- to make it known," opined Chairman George. Bush fostered a partisan --one might say vindictive-- mood at the county GOP headquarters: the Houston Chronicle of June 6, 1963 reports that GOP activists were amusing themselves by tossing darts at a balloons suspended in front of a photograph of President Johnson. Bush told the Chronicle: "I saw the incident and it did not offend me. It was just a gag."

But Bush's pro-Goldwater efforts were not universally appreciated. In early July Craig Peper, the current chairman of the party finance committee, stood up in a party gathering and attacked the leaders of the Draft Goldwater movement, including Bush as "right wing extremists." Bush had not been purging any Birchers, but he was not willing to permit such attacks from his left. Bush accordingly purged Peper, demanding his resignation after a pro-Goldwater meeting at which Bush had boasted that he was "100% for the draft Goldwater move."

A few weeks after ousting Peper, Bush contributed one of his first public political statements as an op ed in the Houston Chronicle of 28 July 1963. Concerning he recent organizational problems, he whined that the county organization was "afflicted with some dry-martini critics who talk and don't work." Then, in conformity with his family doctrine and his own dominant obsession, Bush turned to the issue of race. As a conservative, he had to lament that fact that "Negroes" "think that conservatism means segregation." Nothing could be further from the truth. This was rather the result of slanderous propaganda which Republican public relations men had not sufficiently refuted: "First, they attempt to present us as racists. The Republican party of Harris County is not a racist party. We have not presented our story to the Negroes in the county. Our failure to attract the Negro voter has not been because of a racist philosophy; rather, it has been a product of our not having had the organization to tackle all parts of the country." What then was the GOP line on the race question? "We believe in the basic premise that the individual Negro surrenders the very dignity and freedom he is struggling for when he accept money for his vote or when he goes along with the block vote dictates of some Democratic boss who couldn't care less about the quality of the candidates he is pushing." So the GOP would try to separate the black voter from the Democrats. Bush conceded: "We have a tough row to hoe here."

After these pronouncements on race, Bush then want on to the trade union front. Yarborough's labor backing was exceedingly strong, and Bush lost no time in assailing the state AFL-CIO and its Committee on Political Education (COPE) for gearing up to help Yarborough in his race. For Bush this meant that the AFL-CIO was not supporting the "two -party system." "A strong pitch is being made to dun the [union] membership to help elect Yarborough"-- he charged -- "long before Yarborough's opponent is even known."

Bush also spoke out during this period on foreign affairs, He demanded that President Kennedy "muster the courage" to undertake a new attack on Cuba. [fn 13]

Before announcing his bid for the senate, Bush decided to take out what would appear in retrospect to be a very important insurance policy for his future political career. On April 22, Bush, with the support of Republican state chairman Peter O'Donnell, filed a suit in federal court calling for the reapportionment of the Congressional districts in the Houston area. The suit argued that the urban voters of Harris County were being partially disenfranchised by a system that favored rural voters and demanded as a remedy that a new Congressional district be drawn in the area. "This is not a partisan matter," commented the civic-minded Bush. "This is something of concern to all Harris County citizens." Bush would later win this suit, and that would lead to a court-ordered redistricting which would create the Seventh Congressional District, primarily out of those precincts which Bush had managed to carry in the 1964 Senate race. Was this the invisible hand of Skull and Bones? This would also mean that there would be no entrenched incumbent, no incumbent of any kind, in that Seventh District when Bush got around to making his bid there in 1966. But for now, this was all still in the future.

On September 10, 1963 Bush announced his campaign for the US Senate. He was fully endorsed by the state Republican organization and its chairman, Peter O'Donnell, who according to some accounts had encouraged Bush to run. By December 5 Bush had further announced that he was planning to step down as Harris County chairman and devote himself to full-time state-wide campaigning starting early in 1964. At this point, Bush's foremost strategic concern appears to have been money--big money. On October 19, the Houston Chronicle carried his comment that ousting Yarborough would require nearly $2 million "if you want to do it right." Much of this would go to the Brown and Snyder advertising agency in Houston for television and billboards. In 1963, this was a considerable sum, but Bush's crony C. Fred Chambers, also an oilman, was committed to raising it. During these years Chambers appears to have been one of Bush's closest friends, and he received the ultimate apotheosis of having one of the Bush family dogs named in his honor. [fn 14]

It is impossible to establish in retrospect how much Bush spent in this campaign. State campaign finance filings do exist, but they are fragmentary and grossly underestimate the money that was actually committed.

In terms of the tradeoffs of the campaign, Bush and his handlers were confronted with the following configuration: there were three competitors for the Republican senatorial nomination. The most formidable competition came from Jack Cox, the Houston oilman who had run for governor against Connally in 1962, and whose statewide recognition was much higher than Bush's. Cox would position himself to the right of Bush and who would receive the endorsement of General Edwin Walker, who had been forced to resign his infantry command in Germany because of his radical speeches to the troops. A former Democrat, Cox was reported to have financial backing from the Hunts of Dallas. Cox campaigned against medicare, federal aid to education, the war on poverty, and the loss of US sovereignty to the UN.

Competing with Cox was Dr. Milton Davis, a thoracic surgeon from Dallas who was expected to be the weakest candidate but whose positions were perhaps the most distinctive: Morris was for "no treaties with Russia," the repeal of the federal income tax, and the "selling off of excess government industrial property such as TVA and REA"--what the Reagan-Bush administrations would later call privatization.

Competing with Bush for the less militant conservatives was Dallas lawyer Robert Morris, who recommended depriving the US Supreme Court of appellate jurisdiction in school prayer cases. [fn 15] In order to avoid a humiliating second-round runoff in the primary, Bush would need to score an absolute majority the first time around. To do that he would have to first compete with Cox on a right-wing terrain, and then move to the center after the primary in order to take votes from Yarborough there.

But there was also primary competition on the Democratic side for Yarborough. This was Gordon McLendon, the owner of a radio network, the Liberty Broadcasting System, that was loaded with debt. Liberty Broadcasting's top creditor was Houston banker Roy Cullen, a Bush crony. Roy Cullen's name appears, for example, along with such died-in -the wool Bushmen as W.S. Farrish III, James A. Baker III, C. Fred Chambers, Robert Mosbacher, William C. Liedtke, Jr., Joseph R. Neuhaus, and William B. Cassin in a Bush campaign ad in the Houston Chronicle of late April, 1964. When McLendon finally went bankrupt, it was found that he owed Roy Cullen more than a million dollars. So perhaps it is not surprising that McLendon's campaign functioned as an auxiliary to Bush's own efforts. McLendon specialized in smearing Yarborough with the Billie Sol Estes issue, and it was to this that McLendon devoted most of his speaking time and media budget.

Billie Sol Estes in those days was notorious for his conviction for defrauding the US government of large sums of money in a scam involving the storage of chemicals that turned out not to exist. Billie Sol was part of the LBJ political milieu. As the Estes scandal developed, a report emerged that he had given Yarborough a payment of $50,000 on Nov. 6, 1960. But later, after a thorough investigation, the Department of Justice had issued a statement declaring that the charges involving Yarborough were "without any foundation in fact and unsupported by credible testimony." "The case is closed," said the Justice Department. But this did not stop Bush from using the issue to the hilt: "I don't intend to mud-sling with [Yarborough] about such matters as the Billie Sol Estes case since Yarborough's connections with Estes are a simple matter of record which any one can check," said Bush. "[Yarborough is] going to have to prove to the Texas voters that his connections with Billie Sol Estes were as casual as he claims they were." [fn 16] In a release issued on April 24, Bush "said he welcomes the assistance of Gordon McLendon, Yarborough's primary opponent, in trying to force the incumbent Senator to answer." Bush added that he planned to "hammer at Yarborough every step of the way" "until I get some sort of answer."

The other accusation that was used against Yarborough during the campaign was advanced most notably in an article published in the September, 1964 issue of Reader's Digest. The story was that Yarborough had facilitated backing and subsidies through the Texas Area Reconstruction Administration for an industrial development project in Crockett, Texas, only to have the project fail owing to the inability of the company involved to build the factory that was planned. The accusation was that Audio Electronics, the prospective factory builders, had received a state loan of $383,000 to build the plant, while townspeople had raised some $60,000 to buy the plant site, before the entire deal fell through.

The Reader's Digest told disapprovingly of Yarborough addressing a group of 35 Crockett residents on a telephone squawk box in March, 1963, telling them that he was authorized by the White House to announce "that you are going to gain a fine new industry-one that will provide new jobs for 180 people, add new strength to your area."

The Reader's Digest article left the distinct impression that the $60,000 invested by local residents had been lost. "Because people believed that their Senator's 'White House announcement' of the ARA loan to Audio guaranteed the firm's soundness, several Texans invested in it and lost all. One man dropped $40,000. A retired Air Force officer plowed in $7000." It turned out in reality that those who had invested in the real estate for the plant site had lost nothing, but had rather been made an offer for their land that represented a profit of one third on the original investment, and thus stood to gain substantially.

Bush campaign headquarters immediately got into the act with a statement that "it is a shame" that Texans had to pick up the Reader's Digest and find their senator "holding the hand of scandal." "The citizens of the area raised $60,000 in cash, invested it in the company, and lost it because the project was a fraud and never started." Yarborough shot back with a statement of his own, pointing out that Bush's claims were "basely false," and adding that the "reckless, irresponsible false charges by my opponent further demonstrate his untruthfulness and unfitness for the office of US Senator." Most telling was Yarborough's charge on how the Reader's Digest got interested in Crockett, Texas, in the first place: "The fact that my opponent's multi-millionaire father's Wall Street investment banking connections enable the planting of false and libelous articles about me in national magazine like the Reader's Digest will not enable the Connecticut candidate to buy a Texas seat in the US Senate." That was on target, that hurt. Bush whined in response that it was Yarborough's statement which was "false, libelous, and hogwash," and challenging the senator to prove it or retract it. [fn 17]

Beyond these attempts to smear Yarborough, it is once again characteristic that the principal issue around which Bush built his campaign was racism, expressed this time as opposition to the civil rights bill that was before the Congress during 1964. Bush did this certainly in order to conform to his pro-Goldwater ideological profile, and in order to garner votes (especially in the Republican primary) using racist and states' rights backlash, but most of all in order to express the deepest tenets of the philosophical world-outlook of himself and his oligarchical family.

Very early in the campaign Bush issued a statement saying: "I am opposed to the Civil Rights bill now before the Senate." Not content with that, Bush proceeded immediately to tap the wellsprings of nullification and interposition: "Texas has a comparably good record in civil rights," he argued, "and I'm opposed to the Federal Government intervening further into State affairs and individual rights." At this point Bush claimed that his quarrel was not with the entire bill, but rather with two specific provisions, which he claimed had not been a part of the original draft, but which he hinted had been added to placate violent black extremists. According to his statement of March 17, "Bush pointed out that the original Kennedy Civil Rights bill in 1962 did not contain provisions either for a public accommodations section or a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) section." "Then, after the hot, turbulent summer of 1962, when it became apparent that in order to get the Civil Rights leaders' support and votes in the 1964 election something more must be done, these two bad sections were added to the bill," according to Bush. "I suggest that these two provisions of the bill-- which I most heatedly oppose -- were politically motivated and are cynical in their approach to a most serious problem." But soon abandoned this hair-splitting approach, and on March 25 he told the Jaycees of Tyler "I oppose the entire bill." Bush explained later that beyond the public accommodations section and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, he found that "the most dangerous portions of the bill are those which make the Department of Justice the most powerful police force in the Nation and the Attorney General the Nation's most powerful police chief."

When Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered his maiden speech to the Senate in April of 1964, he included a passage referring to the late John F. Kennedy, saying that the dead President had believed that "we should not hate, but love one another." Bush lashed out at Kennedy for what he called "unfair criticism of those who oppose the Civil Rights bill." In Bush's interpretation, "Kennedy's dramatic, almost tearful plea for passage of the bill presented all those who disagree with it as hate mongers." "The inference is clear," Bush said. "In other words, Ted Kennedy was saying that any one who opposes the present Civil Rights bill does so because there is hate in his heart. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not a question of hate or love, but of Constitutionality." Bush "and other responsible conservatives" simply think that the bill is politically inspired. "This bill," Bush said, would make further inroads into the rights of individuals and the States, and even provide for the ultimate destruction of our trial by jury system. We simply feel that this type of class legislation, based on further federal control and intervention, is bad for the nation." "Bush said the Civil Rights problem is basically a local problem, best left to the States to handle." Here surely was a respectable-sounding racism for the era of Selma and Bull Connor.

Bush was provided with new rhetorical ammunition when Alabama Governor George Wallace ventured into the presidential primaries of that year and demonstrated unexpected vote-getting power in certain northern states, using a pitch that included overtly racist appeals. In the wake of one such result in Wisconsin, Bush campaign issued a release quoting the candidate as being "sure that a majority of Americans are opposed to the Civil Rights bill now being debated in the Senate." "Bush called attention to the surprising 25% of the Wisconsin primary vote received by Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama," said the release. In Bush's view, "you can be sure this big vote was not cast for Wallace himself, but was used as a means of showing public opposition to the Civil Rights Bill." "If a flamboyant Governor Wallace can get that kind of a vote in a northern state such as Wisconsin, it indicates to me that there must be general concern from many responsible people over the Civil Rights bill all over the nation," Bush said in Houston. "If I were a member of the Senate today, I would vote against this bill in its entirety."

Bush was described in the Texas press as attempting a melange of "Goldwater's policies, Kennedy's style." [fn 18] This coverage reveals traits of the narcissistic macho in the 40-year old plutocrat: "he is the sort of fellow the ladies turn their heads to see at the country club charity ball." Abundant campaign financing allowed Bush "to attract extra people to rallies with free barbecue, free drinks, and musical entertainers." These were billed by the Bush campaign as a return to the "old fashioned political rally," and featured such musical groups as the Black Mountain Boys and the Bluebonnet Belles. At Garcia's Restaurant in Austin Bush encountered a group of two dozen or so sporty young Republican women holding Bush campaign placards. "Oh girls!" crooned the candidate. "You all look great.! You look terrific. All dolled up." The women "were ga-ga about him in return," wrote political reporter Ronnie Dugger in the Texas Observer, adding that Bush's "campaign to become this state's second Republican senator gets a lot of energy and sparkle from the young Republican matrons who are enthusiastic about him personally and have plenty of money for baby sitters and nothing much to do with their time." But in exhortations for militaristic adventurism abroad, the substance was indeed pure Goldwater.

As could be expected from the man who had so recently challenged John F. Kennedy to "muster the courage" to attack Cuba, any of Bush's most vehement pronouncements concerned Castro and Havana, and were doubtless much appreciated by the survivors of Brigade 2506 and the Miami Cubans. Bush started off with what passed for a moderate position in Texas Goldwater circles: "I advocate recognition of a Cuban government in exile and would encourage this government every way to reclaim its country. This means financial and military assistance." "I think we should not be found wanting in courage to help them liberate their country," said Bush. Candidate Morris had a similar position, but both Cox and Davis called for an immediate restoration of the naval blockade of Cuba. Bush therefore went them one up, and endorsed a new invasion of Cuba. A Bush for Senate campaign brochure depicted a number of newspaper articles about the candidate. The headline of one of these, from an unidentified newspaper, reads as follows: "CUBA INVASION URGED BY GOP CANDIDATE." The subtitle reads: "George Bush, Houston oilman, campaigning for the Republican nomination to the US Senate called for a new government-in- exile invasion of Cuba, no negotiation of the Panama Canal treaty, and a freedom package in Austin." Other campaign flyers state that "Cuba...under Castro is a menace to our national security. I advocate recognition of a Cuban government in exile and support of this government to reclaim its country. We must reaffirm the Monroe Doctrine." Another campaign handout characterizes Cuba as "an unredeemed diplomatic disaster abetted by a lack of a firm Cuban policy."

PART 2 OF 2

What Bush was proposing would have amounted to a vast and well-funded program for arming and financing anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami, and putting the United States government at the service of their adventures-- presumably far in excess of the substantial programs that were already being funded. Beneficiaries would have included Theodore Shackley, who was by now the station chief at CIA Miami station, Felix Rodriguez, Chi Chi Quintero, and the rest of the boys from the Enterprise.

Bush attacked Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, for the latter's call in a speech for a more conciliatory policy towards Cuba, ending the US economic boycott. "I view the speech with great suspicion," said Bush. "I feel this is a trial balloon on the part of the State Department to see whether the American people will buy another step in a disastrous, soft foreign policy." Bush called on Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a leading hawk, to hold firm against the policy shift that Fulbright was proposing. "Fulbright says Cuba is a 'distasteful nuisance', but I believe that Castro's Communist regime 90 miles from our shores is an intolerable nuisance. I am in favor only of total liberation of Cuba," proclaimed Bush, "and I believe this can only be achieved by recognition of a Cuban government in exile, backed up to the fullest by the United States and the Organization of American States."

In the middle of April a Republican policy forum held in Miami heard a report from a Cuban exile leader that the Soviets had position missiles on the ocean floor off Cuba, with the missiles pointed at the United States, and that this had been confirmed by diplomatic sources in Havana. This would appear in retrospect to have been a planted story. For Bush it was obvious grist for his campaign mill. Bush, speaking in Amarillo, called the report "the most alarming news in this hemisphere in two years." He called for efforts to "drive the Communists out of Cuba."

But, in keeping with the times, Bush's most genocidal campaign statements were made in regard to Vietnam. Here Bush managed to identify himself with the war, with its escalation, and with the use of nuclear weapons.

Senator Goldwater had recently raised the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons as the most effective defoliants to strip away the triple canopy jungle of Vietnam. In a response to this, an Associated Press story quoted Bush as saying that he was in favor of anything that could be done safely toward finishing the fighting in Southeast Asia. "Bush said he favors a limited extension of the war in Viet Nam, including restricted use of nuclear weapons if 'militarily prudent,'" according to the AP release. [fn 19] A Bush campaign release of June 1 has him saying he favors a "cautious, judicious, and militarily sound extension of the war in Vietnam." This was all before the Gulf of Tonkin incident and well before US ground troops were committed to Vietnam.

Bush had several other notes to sound concerning the looming war in Southeast Asia. In May he attacked the State Department for "dawdling" in Vietnam, a policy which he said had "cost the lives of so many young Americans." He further charged that the US troops in Vietnam were being issued "shoddy war material." Responding to a prediction from Defense Secretary McNamara that the war might last 10 years, Bush retorted: "This would not be the case if we had developed a winning policy from the start of this dangerous brush fire." Also in May, Bush responded to a Pathet Lao offensive in Laos as follows: "This should be a warning to us in Vietnam. Whenever the Communist world--either Russian or Chinese-- sign a treaty, or any other agreement, with a nation of the free world, that treaty isn't worth the paper it's written on."

Bush pugnaciously took issue with those who wanted to disengage from the Vietnam quagmire before the bulk of the war's human losses had occurred. He made this part of his "Freedom Package," which was a kind of manifesto for a worldwide US imperialist and colonialist offensive --a precursor of the new world order ante litteram. A March 30 campaign release proclaims the "Freedom Package" in these terms: "'I do not want to continue to live in a world where there is no hope for a real and lasting peace,' Bush said. He decried 'withdrawal symptoms' propounded by UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson and Senators William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield. 'Adlai has proposed we [inter]nationalize the Panama Canal,' Bush pointed out, 'Fulbright asks us to accommodate Red Cuba and renegotiate our Panama treaty, and Mansfield suggests we withdraw from the Viet Nam struggle. This is the kind of retreatism we have grown accustomed to among our supposed world leaders and it is just what the Kremlin ordered.'"

Nor did Bush's obsession with Panama and the Panama Canal begin with Noriega. In his campaign literature Bush printed his basic position that the "Panama canal...is ours by right of treaty and historical circumstance. The Canal is critical to our domestic security and US sovereignty over the Canal must be maintained." What is meant by the right of historical circumstance? "I am opposed to further negotiation in Panama," Bush stated repeatedly in his campaign speeches and releases.

If Bush saw a Saddam Hussein, a dark-skinned, Moslem non-aligned third world nationalist in the world of 1964, then that foreign leader was President Sukarno of Indonesia. Sukarno, along with Nehru, Nasser, Nkruma, Tito, and Bourguiba was one of the central figures of the non- aligned movement of the developing nations that had emerged from the Bandung Conference of 29 Afro-Asian states in 1955. During 1964 Sukarno was attempting to prevent the creation of Malaysia out of the British Confederation of Malaya. Part of Sukarno's blocking manuever was the deployment of pro-Indonesian guerillas into the Malaccan peninsula above Singapore, and into certain areas of northern Borneo, including Sarawak and Sabah. From there, these guerillas were causing problems for Bush's business partner in the oil trade, the Sultan of Brunei. Bush targeted Indonesia and Sukarno personally for a series of violent and abusive attacks.

In April, Sukarno told the US Ambassador Howard P. Jones that "there is one country threatening to stop its foreign aid to Indonesia. That country thinks it can scare Indonesia. I say go to hell with your aid." Bush, from Big Spring, commented in an April 23 statement: "It's easy for President Sukarno of Indonesia to tell us to 'got to hell' with our foreign aid-- now that he has already received $894 million worth." Bush explained that he had been in Borneo during 1963, during the time that the Malysian Federation was coming into existence "in favor of the Free World." "That," said Bush, "was the mistake the Malaysian Federation made; coming into the world of nations in favor of America and the free world. The very next day Sukarno, whom we've tried to buy with $894 million in aid, turned on Malaysia and announced he would destroy the new Federation." Bush's release notes that "Bush, who was President of Zapata Off-Shore, said one of the firm's drilling rigs was at that time, and is today, working off the coast of Borneo." Was this a conflict of interest?

With accents that provide an eerie presentiment of the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis, Bush went on: "Today the borders of the Malaysian Federation are lined with Indonesian troops, bearing Russian-made arms, purchased with American dollars. The Indonesians are still poised to crush Malaysia. And what have we done? We gently slapped Sukarno on the wrist, then loaned him another $20 million, which he used to buy a couple of jet aircraft, one of which he uses to fly his foul assignations around the far east. What we should have done, and still should do, is tell Sukarno: 'You violate the sanctity of the Malaysian border and you have to deal with the force of the entire free world!'"

Shortly thereafter, Texas GOP Senator John Tower sponsored a cutoff of US aid to Sukarno, which passed, although Yarborough voted to maintain the aid. Bush made this the occasion for a new onslaught. In a contorted argument, Bush pointed out that Yarborough's vote for aid to Indonesia had come one day after Sukarno had extended "the friendly hand of recognition to the communist government of North Viet Nam. This country, Sukarno's friend, is waging a war in which scarcely a day before Yarborough's vote, communist bullets slammed through the body of a young helicopter pilot from Texas. Yarborough voted to give US aid to a country that is friends with a mob that is killing young Americans and Texans...He votes to aid the friends of a mob that is killing Texas boys." Yarborough rejected this "wild criticism," and said that the charges illustrated Bush's lack of comprehension of the "delicate balance of power in foreign affairs, and his lack of knowledge of the state of affairs in Southeast Asia." Yarborough's point was that the important thing was to prevent any war between Indonesia and Malaysia, and that this task must override any desire to humiliate Sukarno.

Bush's remarks in this campaign mesh perfectly with the US buildup for the 1965 military coup d'etat in Indonesia, in which more than 200,000 persons were killed, primarily during the course of anti- communist massacres carried out by the army with the encouragement of US advisors.

In economic policy, Bush's starting point was always "unbridled free enterprise," as he stressed in a statement on unemployment on March 16: "Only unbridled free enterprise can cure unemployment. But, I don't believe the federal government has given the private sector of our economy a genuine opportunity to relieve this unemployment. For example, the [Johnson war on poverty program] contains a new version of the CCC, a Domestic Peace Corps, and various and sundry half-baked pies in the sky." Bush's printed campaign literature stated under the heading of "federal economy" that "the free enterprise system must be unfettered. A strong economy means jobs, opportunity, and prosperity. A controlled economy means loss of freedom and bureaucratic bungling." On April 21 Bush told the voters: "We must begin a phase of re- emphasizing the private sector of our economy, instead of the public sector."

By April 15, Bush had been informed that there were some 33 million Americans living in poverty, to which he replied: "I cannot see how draping a socialistic medicare program around the sagging neck of our social security program will be a blow to poverty. And I can see only one answer to [the problem of poverty]: Let us turn our free enterprise system loose from government control." Otherwise, Bush held it "the responsibility of the local government first to assume the burden of relieving poverty wherever its exists, and I know of many communities that are more than capable of working with this problem."

Bush's approach to farm policy was along similar lines, combining the rhetoric of Adam Smith with intransigent defense of the food cartels. his campaign brochure he opined that "Agriculture...must be restored to a free market economy, subject to the basic laws of supply and demand." On April 9 in Waco, Bush assailed the Wheat-Cotton subsidy bill which had just received the approval of the House. "If I am elected to the Senate," said Bush, I will judge each agricultural measure on the basis of whether it gets the Government further into, or out of, private business." Bush added that farm subsidies are among "our most expensive federal programs."

Another of Bush's recurrent obsessions was his desire to break the labor movement. During the 1960's, he expressed this in the context of campaigns to prevent the repeal of section 14 (b) of the Taft-Hartley law, which permitted the states to outlaw the closed shop and union shop, and thus to protect state laws guaranteeing the so- called open shop or "right to work," a device which in practice prevented the organization of large sectors of the working population of these states into unions. Bush's editorializing takes him back to the era when the Sherman Anti-trust Act was still being used against labor unions.

"I believe in the right-to-work laws," said Bush to a group of prominent Austin businessmen at a luncheon in the Commodore Perry Hotel on March 5. "At every opportunity, I urge union members to resist payment of political assessments. If there's only one in 100 who thinks for himself and votes for himself, then he should not be assessed by COPE."

On March 19 Bush asserted that "labor's blatant attack on right-to- work laws is open admission that labor does have a monopoly and will take any step to make this monopoly. Union demands are a direct cause of the inflationary spiral lowering the real income of workers and increasing the costs of production." This is, from the point of scientific economics, an absurdity. But four days later Bush returned to the topic, attacking United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, a figure whom Bush repeatedly sought to identify with Yarborough, for demands which "will only cause the extinction of free enterprise in America. A perfect example of labor's pricing a product out of existence is found in West Virginia. John L. Lewis' excessive demands on the coal industry raised the price of coal, forced the consumer to use a substitute cheaper product, killed the coal industry and now West Virginia has an excessive rate of unemployment."

On Labor Day, Bush spoke to a rally in the court house square of Quanah, and called for "protection of the rights of the individual laborer through the state rather than the federal government. The individual laboring man is being forgotten by the Walter Reuthers and Ralph Yarboroughs, and it's up to the business community to protect our country's valuable labor resources from exploitation by these left -wing labor leaders," said Bush, who might just as well have suggested that the fox be allowed to guard the chicken coop.

East Texas was an area of unusually high racial tension, and Bush spent most of his time there attacking the civil rights bill. But the alliance between Yarborough and big labor was one of his favorite themes. The standard pitch went something like this, as before the Austin businessmen. Yarborough, he would start off saying "more nearly represents the state of Michigan than he does Texas." This, as we will see, was partly an attempted, lame rebuttal of Yarborough's charge that Bush was a northeastern carpetbagger. Bush would then continue: "One of the main reasons Yarborough represents Texas so badly is that he's spending most of his time representing labor interests in Detroit. His voting record makes men like Walter Reuther and James Hoffa very happy. This man has voted for every special interest bill, for every big spending measure that's come to his attention."

During this period Camco, an oilfield equipment company of which Bush was a director, was embroiled in some bitter labor disputes. The regional office of the National Labor Relations Board sought a federal injunction against Camco in order to force the firm to re-hire four union organizers who had been illegally fired. Officials of the Machinists' Union, which was trying to organize Camco, also accused Bush of being complicit in what they said was Camco's illegal failure to carry out a 1962 NLRB order directing Camco to re-hire eleven workers fired because they had attended a union meeting. Bush answered that he was not going to be intimidated by labor. "As everybody knows, the union bosses are all-out for Sen. Ralph Yarborough, " countered Bush, and he had been too busy with Zapata to pay attention to Camco anyway. [fn 20] According to Roy Evans, the Secretary-Treasurer of the Texas AFL-CIO, Bush was "a member of the dinosaur wing of the Republican Party." Evans called Bush "the Houston throwback," and maintained that Bush had "lost touch with anyone in Texas except the radicals of the right."

Back in February, Yarborough had remarked in his typical populist vein that his legislative approach was to "put the jam on the lower shelf so the little man can get his hand in." This scandalized Bush, who countered on February 27 that "it's a cynical attitude and one that tends to set the so-called little man apart from the rest of his countrymen." For Bush, the jam would always remain under lock and key, except for the chosen few of Wall Street. A few days later, on March 5, Bush elaborated that he was "opposed to special interest legislation because it tends to hyphenate Americans. I don't think we can afford to have veteran-Americans, Negro-Americans, Latin-Americans and labor-Americans these days." Here is Bush as political philosopher, maintaining that the power of the authoritarian state must confront its citizens in a wholly atomized form, not organized into interest groups capable of defending themselves.

Bush was especially irate about Yarborough's Cold War GI Bill, which he branded the senator's "pet project." "Fortunately," said Bush, "he has been unable to cram his Cold War GI Bill down Congress' throat. It's bad legislation and special interest legislation which will erode our American way of life. I have four sons, and I'd sure hate to think that any of them would measure their devotion and service to their country by what special benefits Uncle Sam could give them." Neil Bush would certainly never do that! Anyway, the Cold War GI Bill was nothing but a "cynical effort to get votes," Bush concluded.

There was a soft spot in Bush's heart for at least a few special interests, however. He was a devoted supporter of the "time-proven" 27.5% oil depletion allowance, a tax writeoff which allowed the seven sisters oil cartel to escape a significant portion of what they otherwise would have paid in taxes. Public pressure to reduce this allowance was increasing, and the oil cartel was preparing to concede a minor adjustment in the hopes that this would neutralize attempts to get the depletion allowance abolished entirely. Bush also called for what he described as a "meaningful oil import program, one which would restrict imports at a level that will not be harmful to our domestic oil industry." "I know what it is to earn a paycheck in the oil business," he boasted. Bush also told Texas farmers that he wanted to limit the imports of foreign beef so as to protect their domestic markets.

Yarborough's counterattack on this issue is of great relevance to understanding why Bush was so fanatically committed to wage war in the Gulf to restore the degenerate, slaveholding Emir of Kuwait. Yarborough pointed out that Bush's company, Zapata Offshore, was drilling for oil in Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, Borneo, and Trinidad. "Every producing oil well drilled in foreign countries by American companies means more cheap foreign oil in American ports, fewer acres of Texas land under oil and gas lease, less income to Texas farmers and ranchers..," Yarborough stated. "this issue is clear-cut in this campaign - a Democratic senator who is fighting for the life of the free enterprise system as exemplified by the independent oil and gas producers in Texas, and a Republican candidate who is the contractual driller for the international oil cartel." In those days the oil cartel did not deal mildly with those who attacked it in public. One thinks again of the Italian oilman Enrico Mattei. For Bush, these cartel interests would always be sacrosanct. On April 1, Bush talked of the geopolitics of oil: "I was in London at the time of the Suez crisis and I quickly saw how the rest of the free world can become completely dependent on American oil. When the Canal was shut down, free nations all over the world immediately started crying for Texas oil."

Later in the campaign, Yarborough visited the town of Gladewater in East Texas. There, standing in view of the oil derricks, Yarborough talked about Bush's ownership of Pennzoil stock, and about Pennzoil's quota of 1,690 barrels per day of imported oil, charging that Bush was undermining the Texas producers by importing cheap foreign oil.

Then, according to a newspaper account, "the senator spiced his charge with a reference to the 'Sheik of Kuwait and his four wives and 100 concubines' who, he said, are living in luxury off the oil from Bush- drilled wells in the Persian Gulf and sold at cut-rate prices in the United States. He said that imported oil sells for $1.25 a barrel while Texas oil, selling at $3, pays school, city, county, and federal taxes and keeps payrolls going. Yarborough began his day of campaigning at a breakfast with supporters in Longview. Later, in Gladewater, he said he had seen a "Bush for Senator" bumper sticker on a car in Longview. 'Isn't that a come-down for an East Texan to be a strap-hanger for a carpetbagger from Connecticut who is drilling oil for the Sheik of Kuwait to help keep that harem going?'" [fn 21]

Yarborough challenged Bush repeatedly to release more details about his overseas drilling and producing interests. He spoke of Bush's "S.A. corporations drilling in the Persian Gulf in Asia." He charged that Bush had "gone to Latin America to incorporate two of his companies to drill in the Far East, instead of incorporating them in the United States." That in turn, thought Yarborough, "raises questions of tax avoidance." "Tell them, George," he jeered, "what your 'S.A.' companies, financed with American dollars, American capital, American resources, are doing about American income taxes." Bush protested that "every single tax dollar due by any company that I own an interest in has been paid." [fn 22]

The status of the Rural Electrification Administration was also a campaign issue. Goldwater had said in Denver, Colorado on May 3, 1963 that the time had come "to dissolve the Rural Electrification Administration." Wishing to appear as an orthodox Goldwater clone in every respect, Bush had failed to distance himself from this demand. The REA was justly popular for its efforts to bring electric power to impoverished sectors of the countryside. Yarborough noted first of all that Bush "wouldn't know a cotton boll from a corn shuck," but he insisted on leveling "so un-Texan a blow at the farmers and ranchers of Texas. To sell the REA's in Texas to the private power monopoly would be carrying out the demands of the big Eastern power structure and the wishes of the New York investment bankers who handle the private power monopoly financing. My opponent is in line to inherit his share of that New York investment banking structure," Yarborough told a gathering of Texas REA officials.

Following in Prescott Bush's footsteps, George Bush was implacably hostile to government-sponsored infrastructure projects. Such projects are of course the essence of the American System of political economy as understood by Franklin, Hamilton, Lincoln, and FDR. One ongoing water project in Texas in 1964 was the Trinity River project. Early in the campaign, Bush said that he could not support this project because it was exacerbating a federal budget deficit that was already too high. But this stance proved so unpopular in the Texas electorate that Bush later flip-flopped, saying that he had been sympathetic to the Trinity River project all along, and that maybe there was a way to get it done without adding to the deficit.

On other issues, Bush had the following positions:

On education: "Education is a responsibility of the States. Federal aid inevitably means eventual federal control. I favor retention of more tax money by the States so as to build the local and state education programs. We must meet the challenge of education BUT at the State and local levels." Has the Education President advocated anything different?

On Food stamps: Bush called them a "New Frontier gimmick" with "interesting black market possibilities here."

On school prayer Bush was duly sanctimonious: "I am concerned about the erosion of our moral fibre and religious heritage. I believe that prayers in the public schools on a voluntary basis are in keeping with the great traditions upon which this country was founded...Vicious attacks in the courts on prayers in the schools or in reference to God in our lives must be repudiated."

On Red China: Beijing, said Bush in 1964 "must never be admitted to the UN. In the event this does occur, then I advocate withdrawal from the United Nations." Bush was the man who later cast his vote for the admission of Red China to the world body in 1971.

On the UN: The United Nations "as presently constituted is gravely deficient and has been a failure in preserving peace. The United States has taken the responsibility for the freedom of the western world. This responsibility we must not relinquish to the General Assembly. All nations should pay their dues or lose their vote."

Foreign Aid, Bush's campaign brochure recommends, "should be reduced drastically except in those areas where technological and military assistance is necessary to the defense of the free world and is economically advantageous to the United States. We should use our foreign aid to strengthen our friends and extend freedom, not to placate our enemies."

The Nuclear test Ban treaty, although negotiated by Averell Harriman himself, was rejected by Bush. According to campaign handouts, the treaty "as ratified by the Senate, will not work. I would be for a treaty with adequate, foolproof safeguards." Bush added that he was taking this position "although anyone opposed [to the treaty] is accused of war- mongering. I'm the father of five children and just as concerned as anyone else about the cleanliness of the air and the sanctity of the home, but this is a half-way measure and doesn't do the job."

As the Republican senatorial primary approached, Bush declared that he was confident that he could win an absolute majority and avoid a runoff. On April 30, he predicted that Hill Rise would win the Kentucky Derby without a runoff, and that he would also carry the day on the first round. There was no runoff in the Kentucky Derby, but Bush fell short of his goal. Bush did come in first with about 44% of the vote or 62,579 votes, while Jack Cox was second with 44,079, with Morris third and Davis fourth. The total number of votes cast was 142,961, so a second round was required.

Cox, who had attracted 710,000 votes in his 1962 race against Connally for the governorship, was at this point far better known around the state than Bush. Cox had the backing of Gen. Edwin Walker, who had made a bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1962 himself and gotten some 138,000 votes. Cox also had the backing of H.L. Hunt.

Morris had carried Dallas County, and he urged his supporters to vote against Bush. Morris told the Dallas Morning New of May 5 that Bush was "too liberal" and that Bush's strength in the primary was due to "liberal" Republican support.

Between early May and the runoff election of June 6, Cox mounted a vigorous campaign of denunciation and exposure of Bush as a creature of the Eastern Liberal Establishment, Wall Street banking interests, and of Goldwater's principal antagonist for the GOP Presidential nomination, the hated Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York. According to a story filed by Stuart Long of the Long News Service in Austin on May 25 and preserved among the Yarborough papers in the Barker Texas History Center in Austin, Cox's supporters circulated letters pointing to Prescott Bush's role as a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman as the basis for the charge that George Bush was the tool of "Liberal Eastern Kingmakers." According to Long, the letters also include references to the New York Council on Foreign Relations, which he described as a "black-tie dinner group." [fn 23] The pro-Cox letters also asserted that Bush's Zapata Offshore Company had a history of bidding on drilling contracts for Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey.

One anti-Bush brochure preserved among the Yarborough papers at the Barker Center in Austin is entitled "Who's Behind the Bush?" , published by the Coalition of Conservatives to Beat the Bushes, with one Harold Deyo of Dallas listed as chairman. The attack on Bush here centers on the Council on Foreign Relations, of which Bush was not at that time a public member. The brochure lists a number of Bush campaign contributors and then identifies these as members of the CFR. These include Dillon Anderson and J.C. Hutcheson III of Baker and Botts, Andrews and Shepherd, Leland Anderson of Anderson, Clayton and Company, Lawrence S. Reed of Texas Gulf Producing, Frank Michaux, W.A. Kirkland of the board of First City National Bank. The brochure then focuses on Prescott Bush, identified as a "partner with Averell Harriman in Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Company. Averell Harriman is listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Could it be that Prescott S. Bush, in concert with his Eastern CFR friends, is raising all those 'Yankee Dollars' that are flowing into George's campaign? It is reliably reported that Mr. George Bush has contracted for extensive and expensive television time for the last week of the Runoff." The brochure also targets Paul Kayser of Anderson, Clayton and Bush's Harris County campaign chairman. Five officers of this company, named as W.L. Clayton, L. Fleming, Maurice McAshan, Leland Anderson, and Syndor Oden, are said to be members of the CFR.

On the CFR itself, the brochure quotes from Helen P. Lasell's study entitled "Power Behind Government Today," which found that the CFR "from its inception has had an important part in planning the whole diabolical scheme of creating a ONE WORLD FEDERATION of socialist states under the United Nations." "These carefully worked out, detailed plans, in connection with the WORLD BANK and the use of billions of tax-exempt foundation dollars, were carried out secretively over a period of years. Their fruition could mean not only the absolute destruction of our form of government, national independence and sovereignty, but to a degree at least, that of every nation in the world." The New World Order, we see, is really nothing new. The brochure further accuses one Mrs. M. S. Acherman, a leading Bush supporter in Houston, of having promoted a write-in campaign for liberal, Boston Brahmin former Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in the Texas presidential primary. Lodge had won the 1964 New Hampshire primary, prompting Bush to announce that this was merely a regional phenomenon and that he was "still for Goldwater."

As the runoff vote approached, Cox focused especially on the eastern financing that Bush was receiving. On May 25 in Abilene, Cox assailed Bush for having mounted "one of the greatest spending sprees ever seen in any political campaign." Cox said that he could not hope to match this funding "because Jack Cox is not, nor will ever be, connected in any manner with the Eastern kingmakers who seek to control political candidates. Conservatives of Texas will serve notice on June 6 that just as surely as Rockefeller's millions can't buy presidential nomination, the millions at George Bush's disposal can't buy him a senate nomination." Cox claimed that all of his contributions had come from inside Texas.

O'Donnells's Texas Republican organization was overwhelmingly mobilized in favor of Bush. Bush had the endorsement of the state's leading newspapers. When the runoff finally came, Bush was the winner with some 62% of the votes cast. Yarborough commented that Bush "smothered Jack Cox in greenbacks."

Gordon McLendon, true to form, had used his own pre-primary television broadcast to rehash the Billie Sol Estes charges against Yarborough. Yarborough nevertheless defeated McLendon in the Democratic senatorial primary with almost 57% of the vote. Given the lopsided Texas Democratic advantage in registered voters, and given LBJ's imposing lead over Goldwater at the top of the Democratic ticket, it might have appeared that Yarborough's victory was now a foregone conclusion. That this was not so was due to the internal divisions within the Texas Democratic ranks.

First were the Democrats who came out openly for Bush. The vehicle for this defection was called Conservative Democrats for Bush, chaired by Ed Drake, the former leader of the state's Democrats for Eisenhower in 1952. Drake was joined by former Governor Allan Shivers, who had also backed Ike and Dick in 1952 and 1956. Then there was the "East Texas Democrats for George Bush Committee," chaired by E.B. Germany, the former state Democratic leader and in 1964 the chairman of the board of Lone Star Steel.

Then there were various forms of covert support for Bush. Millionaire Houston oilman Lloyd Bentsen, who had been in Congress back in the late 1940's, had been in discussion as a possible senate candidate. Bush's basic contention was that LBJ had interfered in Texas politics to tell Bentsen to stay out of the senate race, thus avoiding a more formidable primary challenge to Yarborough. On April 24 Bush stated that Bentsen was a "good conservative" who had been kept out of the race by "Yarborough's bleeding heart act." This and other indications point to a covert political entente between Bush and Bentsen which re-appeared during the 1988 presidential campaign.

Then there were the forces associated with Governor Big John Connally. Yarborough later confided that Connally had done everything in his power to wreck his campaign, subject only to certain restraints imposed by LBJ. Even these limitations did not amount to real support for Yarborough on the part of LBJ, but were rather attributable to LBJ's desire to avoid the embarrassment of seeing his native state represented by two Republican senators during his own tenure in the White House. But Connally still sabotaged Yarborough as much as LBJ would let him get away with. [fn 24] Bush and Connally have had a complex relation, with points of convergence and many points of divergence. Back in 1956, a lobbyist working for Texas oilman Sid Richardson had threatened to "run [Bush's] ass out of the offshore drilling business" unless Prescott Bush voted for gas deregulation in the Senate. [fn 25] Connally later became the trustee for some of Richardson's interests. While visiting Dallas on March 19, Bush issued a statement saying that he agreed with Connally in his criticisms of attorney Melvin Belli, who had condemned the District Court in Dallas when his client, Jack Ruby, was given the death sentence for having slain Lee Harvey Oswald the previous November.

In public, LBJ was for Yarborough, although he could not wholly pass over the frictions between the two. Speaking at Stonewall after the Democratic national convention, LBJ had commented: "You have heard and you have read that Sen. Yarborough and I have had differences at times. I have read a good deal more about them than I was ever aware of. But I do want to say this, that I don't think that Texas has had a senator during my lifetime whose record I am more familiar with than Sen. Yarborough's. And I don't think Texas has had a senator that voted for the people more than Sen. Yarborough has voted for them. And no member of the US Senate has stood up and fought for me or fought for the people more since I became President than Ralph Yarborough." For his part, Bush years later quoted a Time Magazine analysis of the 1964 senate race which concluded that "if Lyndon would stay out of it, Republican Bush would have a chance. But Johnson is not about to stay out of it, which makes Bush the underdog." [fn 26]

Yarborough for his part had referred to LBJ as a "power-mad Texas politician," and had called on President Kennedy to keep LBJ out of Texas politics. Yarborough's attacks on Connally were even more explicit and colorful: he accused Connally of acting like a "viceroy, and we got rid of those in Texas when Mexico took over from Spain." According to Yarborough, "Texas had not had a progressive governor since Jimmy Alfred," who had held office in 1935-39. Bush took pains to spell out that this was an attack on Democrats W. Lee O'Daniel, Coke Stevenson, Buford H. Jester, Allan Shivers, Price Daniel, and John Connally.

Yarborough also criticized the right-wing oligarchs of the Dallas area for having transformed that city from a Democratic town to a "citadel of reaction." For Yarborough, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was "worse than Pravda."

Yarborough's strategy in the November election centered on identifying Bush with Goldwater in the minds of voters, since the Arizona Republican's warlike rhetoric was now dragging him down to certain defeat. Yarborough's first instinct had been to run a substantive campaign, stressing issues and his own legislative accomplishments. Yarborough in 1988 told Bush biographer Fitzhugh Green: "When I started my campaign for re-election I was touting my record of six years in the senate. But my speech advisors said, all you have to do is quote Bush, who had already called himself 100 per cent for Goldwater and the Vietnam war. So that's what I did, and it worked very well." [fn 27]

Campaigning in Port Arthur on Oct. 30, a part of the state where his labor support loomed large, Yarborough repeatedly attacked Bush as "more extreme than Barry Goldwater." According to Yarborough, even after Barry Goldwater had repudiated the support of the John Birch Society, Bush said that he "welcomed support of the Birch Society and embraced it." "Let's you elect a senator from Texas, and not the Connecticut investment bankers with their $2,500,000," Yarborough urged the voters. [fn 28]

These attacks were highly effective, and Bush's response was to mobilize his media budget for more screenings of his World War II "flight of the Avenger" television spot, while he prepared a last- minute television dirty trick. There was to be no debate between Bush and Yarborough, but this did not prevent Bush from staging a televised "empty chair" debate, which was aired on more than a dozen stations around the state on October 27. The Bush campaign staff scripted a debate in which Bush answered doctored quotes from audio tapes of Yarborough speaking, with the sentences often cut in half, taken out of context, and otherwise distorted. Yarborough responded by saying: "The sneaky trick my opponent is trying to pull on me tonight of pulling sentences of mine out of context with my recorded voice and playing my voice as a part of his broadcast is illegal under the law, and a discredit to anyone who aspires to be a US Senator. I intend to protest this illegal trick to the Federal Communications Commission." Bush's method was to "cut my statements in half, then let his Madison Avenue speech writers answer those single sentences." "My opponent is an exponent of extremism, peddling smear and fear wherever he goes." "His conduct looks more like John Birch Society conduct than United States Senate conduct," Yarborough added. Bush also distorted the sound of Yarborough's voice almost beyond recognition.

Yarborough protested to the FCC in Washington, alleging that Bush had violated section 315 of the Federal Communications Act as it then stood, because Yarborough's remarks were pre-censored and used without his permission. Yarborough also accused Bush of violation of section 325 of the same act, since it appeared that parts of the "empty chair" broadcast were material that had been previously broadcast elsewhere, and which could not be re-used without permission. The FCC responded by saying that the tapes used had been made in halls where Yarborough was speaking.

All during the campaign, Yarborough had been talking about the dangers of electronic eavesdropping. He had pointed out that "anybody can be an eavesdropper, a wiretapper, a bugger, who has a few dollars for the cheaper devices on the market. Tiny recorders and microphones are now made to resemble lapel buttons or tie clasps...Recorders can also be found the size of a book or a cigarette pack. There is a briefcase available with a microphone built into the lock, and many available recorders may be carried in briefcases, while the wrist-watch microphone is no longer a product used by Dick Tracy-- it can actually be bought for $37.50." Yarborough charged during the primary campaign period that his Washington office had been wiretapped, and years later indicated that the CIA had been bugging all of Capitol Hill during those years. [fn 29]

Bush was also smarting under Yarborough's repeated references to his New England birth and background. Bush claimed that he was no carpetbagger, but a Texan by choice, and compared himself in that regard to Sam Rayburn, Sam Houston, Austin, Colonel Bill Travis, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and other heroes of the Alamo. Bush was not hobbled by any false modesty. At least, Bush asserted lamely, he was not as big a carpetbagger as Bobby Kennedy, who could not even vote in New York state, where he was making a successful bid for election to the Senate. It "depends on whose bag is being carpeted," Bush whined.

In the last days of the campaign, Allan Duckworth of the pro-Bush Dallas Morning News was trying to convince his readers that the race was heading for a "photo finish." But in the end, Prescott's networks, the millions of dollars, the recordings, and the endorsements of 36 newspapers were of no avail for Bush. Yarborough defeated Bush by a margin of 1,463,958 to 1,134,337. Within the context of the LBJ landslide victory over Goldwater, Bush had done somewhat better than his party's standard bearer: LBJ beat Goldwater in Texas by 1,663,185 to 958,566. Yarborough, thanks in part to his vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act, won a strong majority of the black districts, and also ran well ahead among Latinos. Bush won the the usual Republican counties, including the pockets of GOP support in the Houston area.

Yarborough would continue for one more term in the Senate, vocally opposing the war in Vietnam. In the closing days of the campaign he had spoken of Bush and his retinue as harbingers of a "time and society when nobody speaks for the working man." George Bush, defeated though he was, would now redouble his struggle to make such a world a reality. Yarborough, although victorious, appears in retrospect as the fading rearguard of an imperfect but better America that would disappear during the late sixties and seventies.

_______________

Notes:

1. George Bush and Victor Gold, Looking Forward (New York, 1987), p. 84.

2. Bush and Gold, p. 84.

3. John R. Knaggs, Two-Party Texas (Austin, 1985), p. 34.

4. For a summary of the southern strategy, see Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (Boston, 1970), pp. 262 ff.

5. For a profile of Yarborough's voting record on this and other issues, see Chandler Davidson, Race and Class in Texas Politics ( Princeton, 1990), pp. 29 ff.

6. For Yarborough's Senate achievements up to 1964, see Ronnie Dugger, "The Substance of the Senate Contest," in The Texas Observer, Sept. 18, 1964.

7. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 77 ff.

8. See Harry Hurt III, Texas Rich (New York), p. 191.

9. On Bush's drive to become Harris County chairman, it is instructive to compare his Looking Forward with the clippings from the Houston Chronicle of those days preserved on microfiche in the Texas Historical Society in Houston. Bush says that he decided to run for the post in the spring of 1962, but the Houston press clearly situates the campaign in the spring of 1963. Bush also claims to have been county chairman for two years, whereas the Houston papers show that he served from February 20 1963 to around December 5 1963, less than one year.

10. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," Texas Monthly, June, 1983, p. 196.

11. Houston Chronicle, 21 February 1963.

12. For Anthony Farris in the Pennzoil vs. Texaco case, see below and also Thomas Petzinger, Jr., Oil and Honor (New York, 1987), passim.

13. Boston Globe, June 12, 1988, cited in Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years, p. 581.

14. See Barbara Bush, C. Fred's Story (New York, 1984), p.2. This is an example of Mrs. Bush's singular habit of composing books in which she speaks through a canine persona, a feat she has repeated for the current family pet and public relations ploy, Millie. In her account of how C. Fred the dog got his name, George Bush is heard ruling out usual dog names with the comment: "Not at all. We Bushes have always named our children after people we loved." So, writes C. Fred, "I am named after George Bush's best friend, C. Fred Chambers of Houston, Texas. I have met him many times and he doesn't really seem to appreciate the great honor that the Bushes bestowed upon him."

15. See Ronnie Dugger, "The Four Republicans," in The Texas Observer, April 17, 1964.

16. Quotations from Bush and Yarborough campaign material, except as otherwise indicated, are from Senator Yarborough's papers on deposit in the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas in Austin.

17. See Ronnie Dugger, "The Substance of the Senate Contest," in The Texas Observer, September 18, 1964.

18. See "The Historic Texas Senate Race," in The Texas Observer, October 30, 1964.

19. Cited in Ronnie Dugger, "The Substance of the Senate Contest," The Texas Observer, September 18, 1964.

20. Ibid.

21. Dallas News, October 24, 1964.

22. Dallas News, October 3, 1964.

23. An untitled report among the Yarborough papers in the Barker Texas History Center refers to "Senator Bush's affiliation in a New York knife-and-fork-club type of organization called, 'The Council on Foreign Relations.' In a general smear--mainly via the "I happen to know' letter chain of communication--the elder Bush was frequently attacked, and the younger Bushes were greatly relieved when Barry Goldwater volunteered words of affectionate praise for his former colleague during a $100-a-plate Dallas dinner."

24. Just how far these efforts might have gone is a matter of speculation. Douglas Caddy in his book, The Hundred Million Dollar Payoff (New Rochelle), p. 300, reprints an internal memorandum of the machinists Non-Partisan Political League which expresses alarm about the election outlook for Yarborough, who is described as "the last stand-up Democratic liberal we have in the south." The memo, from Jack O'Brien to A.J. Hayes, is dated October 27, 1964, and cites reports from various labor operatives to the effect that "the 'fix is in' to defeat Ralph Yarborough and to replace him with a Republican, Bush, the son of Prescott Bush of Connecticut. The only question at issue is whether this 'fix' is a product of Governor Connally alone or is the product of a joint effort between Connally and President Johnson." According to the memo, "Walter Reuther called Lyndon Johnson to express his concern with the failure to invite Mrs. Yarborough to accompany" LBJ's plane through Texas. Labor leaders were trying to help raise money for last-minute television broadcasts by Yarborough, and also to extract more vocal support for the senator from LBJ.

25. See Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 82.

26. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 87.

27. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York, 1989) , p. 85.

28. Dallas News, October 31, 1964

29. Ronnie Dugger, "Goldwater's Policies, Kenndy's Style" in Texas Observer, October 30, 1964.

PART 1 OF 3

Chapter X -- Rubbers Goes to Congress

During the heat of the senate campaign, Bush's redistricting lawsuit had progressed in a way that must have provided him much solace amidst the bitterness of his defeat. When Bush won his suit in the Houston federal district court, there was a loud squawk from Governor John Connally, who called that august tribunal as a "Republican court." Bush whined that Connally was being "vitriolic." During Bush's primary campaign, a three-judge panel of the federal circuit court of appeals had ruled that the state of Texas must be redistricted. Bush called that result "a real victory for all the people of Texas." By March, Bush's redistricting suit had received favorable action by the US Supreme Court. This meant that the way was clear to create a no-incumbent, designer district for George in a masterpiece of gerrymandering that would make him an elected official, the first Republican Congressman in the recent history of the Houston area.

The new Seventh District was drawn to create a liberal Republican seat, carefully taking into account which areas Bush had succeeded in carrying in the senate race. What emerged was for the most part a lily-white, silk-stocking district of the affluent upper middle and upper crust. There were also small black and Hispanic enclaves. In the precinct boxes of the new district, Bush had rolled up an eight to five margin over Yarborough. [fn 1]

But before gearing up a Congressional campaign in the Seventh District in 1966, Bush first had to jettison some of the useless ideological ballast he had taken on for his 1964 Goldwater profile. During the 1964 campaign, Bush had spoken out more frankly and more bluntly on a series of political issues than he ever has before or since. Apart from the Goldwater coloration, one comes away with the impression that much of the time the speeches were not just inventions, but often reflected his own oligarchical instincts and deeply-rooted obsessions. In late 1964 and early 1965, Bush was afflicted by a hangover induced by what for him had been an unprecedented orgy of self-revelation.

The 1965-66 model George Bush would become a moderate, abandoning the shrillest notes of the 1964 conservative crusade.

First came an Episcopalian mea culpa. As Bush's admirer Fitzhugh Green reports, "one of his first steps was to shuck off a bothersome trace from his 1964 campaign. He had espoused some conservative ideas that didn't jibe with his own moderate attitude." Previous statements were becoming inoperative, one gathers, when Bush discussed the matter with his Anglican pastor, John Stevens. "You know, John," said Bush, "I took some of the far right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it." His radical stance on the Civil Rights bill was allegedly a big part of his "regret." Stevens later commented: "I suspect that his goal on civil rights was the same as mine: it's just that he wanted to go through the existing authorities to attain it. In that way nothing would get done. Still, he represents about the best of noblesse oblige." [fn 2]

It was characteristically through an attempted purge in the Harris County GOP organization that Bush signaled that he was reversing his field. His gambit here was to call on party activists to take an "anti -extremist and anti-intolerance pledge," as the Houston Chronicle reported on May 26, 1965. [fn 3] Bush attacked unnamed apostles of "guilt by association" and "far-out fear psychology, and his pronouncements touched off a bitter and protracted row in the Houston GOP. Bush made clear that he was targeting the John Birch Society, whose activists he had been eager to lure into his own 1964 effort. Now Bush beat up on the Birchers as a way to correct his right-wing profile from the year before. Bush said with his usual tortured syntax that Birch members claim to "abhor smear and slander and guilt by association, but how many of them speak out against it publicly?"

This was soon followed by a Bush-inspired move to oust Bob Gilbert, who had been Bush's successor as the GOP county chairman during the Goldwater period. Bush's retainers put out the line that the "extremists" had been gaining too much power under Gilbert, and that he therefore must go. The Bush faction by now had enough clout to oust Gilbert on June 12, 1965. The eminence grise of the right-wing faction, State senator Walter Mengdon, told the press that the ouster of Gilbert had been dictated by Bush. Bush whined in response that he was very disappointed with Mengdon. "I have stayed out of county politics. I believed all Republicans had backed my campaign," Bush told the Houston Chronicle on the day Gilbert fell.

On July 1 the Houston papers reported the election of a new, "anti- extremist" Republican county leader. This was James M. Mayor, who defeated James Bowers by a margin of 95 votes against 80 in the county executive committee. Mayor was endorsed by Bush, as well as by Senator Tower. Bowers was an auctioneer who called for a return to the Goldwater "magic." GOP state chair O'Donnell hoped that the new chairman would be able to put an end to "the great deal of dissension within the party in Harris County for several years." Despite this pious wish, acrimonious faction fighting tore the county organization to pieces over the next several years. At one point the Ripon Society, a nationwide liberal Republican grouping which claimed to be part of a moderating rebuilding effort after the Goldwater debacle, intervened in the county to protect Mayor against the right-wing opposition. In so doing, the Ripon Society was also intervening in favor of Bush. The Ripon people pointed to the guerilla warfare against Mayor as "another demonstration of the persistent strength of the far right within the Texas GOP." Shortly after this scaramouche, the dissident faction of the Harris County GOP controlled 87 of 189 precinct chairs.

But at the same time Bush took care to police his left flank, distancing himself from the beginnings of the movement against the war in Vietnam which had been visible by the middle of 1965. A remarkable document of this maneuver is the text of the debate between Bush and Ronnie Dugger, the writer and editor of the Texas Observer. The debate was held July 1, 1965 before the Junior Bar of Texas convention in Fort Worth. Dugger had endorsed Bush--in a way Dugger said was "not without whimsical intent" in the GOP senate primary the year before. Dugger was no radical; at this point was not really against the Vietnam war, and he actually endorsed the policy of LBJ, saying that the President had "no easy way out of Viet Nam, but he is seeking and seeking hard for an honorable way out." [fn 4] Nevertheless, Dugger found that LBJ had made a series of mistakes in the implementation of his policy. Dugger also embraced the provisos advanced by Senator Fulbright to the effect that "seeking a complete military victory would cost more than the requirements of our interest and honor." So Dugger argued against any further escalation, and argued that anti-war demonstrations and civil disobedience could be beneficial.

Bush's first real cause for alarm was seeing "the civil rights movement being made over into a massive vehicle with which to attack the President's foreign policy in Vietnam." He started by attacking Conrad Lynn, a "Negro lawyer" who had told students at "my old university- Yale University" - that "The United States white supremacists' army has been sent to suppress the non-white people of the world." According to Bush "The Yale Daily News reported that the audience applauded when [Lynn] announced that several Negroes had gone to Asia to enlist in the North Viet Nam army to fight against the United States." Then Bush turned to his real target, Martin Luther King. King, he said, who is "identified with the freedom of the Negro cause, says in Boston the other day that he doesn't want to sit at a segregated lunch counter where you have strontium 90 in the milk, overlooking the fact that it's the communists who are testing in the atmosphere today, the Red Chinese. It's not the United States." Then there was Bayard Rustin, "a leading individual in the Negro struggle for freedom, [who] calls for withdrawal from Viet Nam." This is all hypocritical in Bush's view, since "they talk about civil rights in this country, but they are willing to sacrifice the individual rights in the communist countries."

Bush was equally riled up over anti-war demonstrations, since they were peopled by what he called "extremists:" "I am sure you know what an extremist is. That's a guy who takes a good idea and carries it to simply preposterous ends. And that's what's happened. Of course, the re-emergence of the political beatnik is causing me personally a good deal of pleasure. Many conservatives winced during 1964 as we were labeled extremists of the right. And certainly we were embarrassed by the booing of Nelson Rockefeller at the convention, and some of the comments that referred to the smell of fascism in the air at the Republican convention, and things like this, and we winced."

Warming to the subject, Bush continued: "Let me give you some examples of this kind of left wing extremism. Averell Harriman-- surely not known for his reactionary views-- speaking at Cornell University, talking about Viet Nam before a crowd that calls "Liar!" [They] booed him to the state he could hardly finish, and finally he got so frustrated he asked, 'How many in the audience are communists?' And a bunch of people there --small I will admit--held up their hands."

So extremists, for Bush, were those who assailed Rockefeller and Harriman.

Bush defended the House Committee on Unamerican Activities against the demonstrations organized by James Foreman and SNCC, commiserated with a State Department official who had been branded a fascist at Iowa State, and went on to assail the Berkeley "filthy speech" movement. As an example of the "pure naivete" of civil rights leaders, he cited Coretta Scott King who "managed to link global peace and civil rights, somehow managed to tie these two things together philosophically" -- which Bush professed not to fathom. "If we can be non-violent in Selma, why can't we be non-violent in Viet Nam," Ossie Davis had said, and Bush proposed he be awarded the "green Wiener" for his "absurd theory," for "what's got to be the fuzziest thinking of the year."

Beyond this inevitable obsession with race, Bush was frankly a hawk, frankly for escalation, opening the door to nuclear weapons in Viet Nam only a little more subtly than he had the year before: "And so I stand here as one who says I will back up the President and military leaders no matter what weapons they use in Southeast Asia."

During 1964, 1965 and 1966, Bush was still functioning as the full- time president of Zapata Offshore, although some of his co-workers complained that he was even less single-minded about making money. During this period, the company's operations were rapidly expanding and LeTourneau's Vicksburg yard turned out a series of offshore drilling platforms, including some of new design. Business had been good during 1964, with net income up 85% over the previous year. Bush wrote in the 1964 Zapata Petroleum Annual Report: "The offshore drilling industry in which we operate continues strong and active, with virtually all equipment in the Gulf of Mexico employed 100% of the time. Furthermore, other market around the world are active, and new markets are opening up."

The latest LeTourneau drilling platform was the MAVERICK, which was at that time the largest self-elevating drilling barge in action anywhere in the world. The self-elevating barges were mobile rigs with legs that rested on the bottom of the ocean. "The maximum depth of water in which self-elevating barges can work is limited by the length of their legs," Bush reminded the shareholders. Maverick went to work for the California Company. The MAVERICK design was so promising, Bush told the shareholders, that Zapata had completed negotiations to build two new rigs of the MAVERICK class," which would go to work for Shell. Gulf oil was also anxious to hire one of Zapata's new rigs.

The SCORPION, which had been the first of the self-elevating mobile barges, spent 1964 off the coast of Louisiana, under contract to Shell oil. The VINEGAROON spent the first half of the year off Trinidad, and then moved to a position off the coast of Louisiana. The SIDEWINDER, Zapata's ship-shaped floating drilling vessel, had been towed by Royal Dutch Shell's Brunei Shell Petroleum Company Ltd. to a position off the sultanate of Brunei on the north coast of Borneo. Bush wrote in the 1964 Zapata annual report that "Brunei Shell Petroleum Company, Ltd., has notified your company of Shell's intention to exercise its option, contained in the drilling contract, to purchase the SIDEWINDER. Money derived from the sale of SIDEWINDER will be used to defray part of the cost of the new rigs. Shell plans to move the SIDEWINDER to the Persian Gulf where Seacat-Zapata, our Persian Gulf affiliate, will operate the SIDEWINDER with another Shell subsidiary."

Among the older rigs, the NOLA I, the World War II freighter hull with a drilling apparatus built in, was now considered obsolete. The NOLA I was sold to a Mexican drilling company, presumably one connected to Diaz Serrano or one of his corporate fronts. The NOLA III, which had been sold in 1961 to Zapata-Seacat Offshore Company, one of Bush's subsidiaries, was still active in the "relatively calm waters" of the Persian Gulf. "During 1964, NOLA III worked for Kuwait Shell Petroleum Development Company and Continental Oil Company," Bush wrote in his 1964 annual report. So the Sultan of Brunei and the Emir of Kuwait were indeed Bush's business partners.

The Zapata fleet of drilling rigs was undergoing continuous modernization, with the ship-shaped floating rigs being phased out in favor of the self-elevating drilling platforms. In 1964, three of Zapata's five rigs were ship-shaped floaters, but by 1966, Bush wrote, only the NOLA III would remain active in this class. One threat to the Zapata fleet was posed by the hurricanes in the Gulf: in 1964 hurricane Hilda had done some damage to SCORPION, VINEGAROON, and the new MAVERICK.

Surveying the world market for drilling rigs, Bush pointed out that "discoveries off the coast of Nigeria are drawing rigs to that area." There was also the recent discovery of oil in the North Sea, with the result that, "during the summer, the United Kingdom leased a vast area off its east coast for offshore exploration." "Most of the world's major oil companies are investing heavily in the North Sea," Bush observed. There was also the Persian Gulf, where "a major lease sale off the Northern Coast of the Persian Gulf is being completed by the Iranian government as this report goes to press." "All of these developments are expected to have a beneficial effect on Zapata's business over the next several years," Bush concluded.

In 1965, Bush was able to boast in his last Zapata Annual Report that earnings per share had risen for the sixth year out of the seven of his tenure. One severe setback had been the destruction of the MAVERICK platform by Hurricane Betsy in the Gulf. But Bush was able to reassure the shareholders: "I am pleased to note that within three weeks of Hurricane Betsy, your company had been paid the full value by the insurance companies. The coverage was carried with Lloyds of London and British Insurance Companies, and the offshore drilling business should be grateful for the way in which these companies have responded when disaster has struck."

Bush's world offshore drilling market survey now included the coast of Nigera, the Iranian leases in the northern Persian Gulf, Austrailian off-shore fields then opening up, the Gulf of Suez, and the beginning of drilling in the North Sea fields by both Britain and Norway. Zapata, said Bush, was keeping in close contact with British Petroleum, Continental, and Shell. On the world oil market overall, Bush quoted John Loudon, the senior managing director of the Royal Dutch Shell Group as saying that in 25 years the free world was going to require three times the current amount of oil for its consumption.

Later, the SIDEWINDER completed its trip from the Sultan of Brunei's domains off the coast of northern Borneo, and began operating in the Persian Gulf. But to replace SIDEWINDER, Southeastern-Zaapata Drilling, a one-third owned affiliate, had built a new rig in Japan at a cost of some $6.5 million, and this rig had been moved to the Borneo coast under contract to Shell. Seacat Zapata's NOLA III had left the Persian Gulf and was now operating in the Gulf of Tunis, whence it would proceed to the Red Sea coast of Ethiopia. VINEGAROON was working off the coast of Louisiana for Chevron, and a new rig, tentatively labelled RIG 8, was also destined for the Gulf of Mexico. Opportunities seemed imminent in Australia, where Zapata had set up a special relationship with Oil Drilling and Exploration Ltd. of Australia.

In 1966, the year that Bush says he left the management of Zapata to devote himself full-time to politics, Zapata experienced another increase in earnings per share. According to the 1966 Zapata Annual Report, Zapata's "net profits for 1966 exceeded the net profits of several Fortune 500 companies." The value of Zapata's offshore drilling fleet was an estimated $34 million, and the company's stock was now trading on the American Stock Exchange. With departure of George H.W. Bush as chairman of the board, the corporate personalities of Zapata underwent a shakeup. Along with Bush departed his maternal Uncle Herbie, aka G.H. Walker Jr., the Managing Director of G.H. Walker and Co., New York. J.W. Gardner was out as president, replaced by William H. Flynn. The new chairman of the board and chief executive officer was now D. Doyle Mize, who had previously been a member of the board. The Underwood, Neuhaus Co. interests kept their seat on the Zapata board, but their representative changed from Milton R. Underwood to William Stamps Farrish III, Bush's Beeville hunting partner and the grandson of the Standard Oil executive who had been exposed for dealing with Nazi firms. Added to the board were also two representatives of leading Houston law firms, including R.P. Bushman of Vinson, Elkins, Weems, and Searls and B.J. Mackin of Baker, Botts, Shepherd and Coates. Judging from the presence of Farrish and the Houston lawyers, we may conclude that although Bush had departed from the formal structure of Zapata, he still had board members to represent his interests, which was important in light of the Zapata stock he continued to hold. The sole New Yorker on the post-Bush board was also a new face, Michael M. Thomas of Lehman Brothers.

New drilling platforms included the ENDEAVOUR, HERON, and CHAPPARAL, plus a 60% share of a ship-shaped floating vessel off the coast of Austrialia. Gulf Oil of Denmark had signed a $9 million contract for a new platform called the MAERSK EXPLORER, the first of a new generation of LeTourneau drilling units. CHAPPARAL was under contract to AGIP, a subsidiary of the Italian state oil compnay ENI, for operations in the Adriatic Sea. VINEGAROON was under contract to Petrobras of Brazil. Zapata's offshore drilling activity by now comprehended areas off Denmark, Brazil, Italy, England, the Persian Gulf, Australia, and Louisiana.

Turning to the world drilling market, the new post-Bush management offered the following overview: "The offshore drilling industry, in which Zapata is a significant participant, has undergone a substantial change in character and scope in the past five years. Five years ago, almost all the offshore drilling units were operating in one geographical area, the Gulf of Mexico. Today, six separate offshore provinces have emerged as showing solid evidence of having major hydrocarbon deposits." World horizons were vast, with the Zapata management counting seventeen countries with offshore oil or gas production already underway, and fifty other countries exploring or drilling for oil. Zapata's ability to operate in such places as the North Sea, Australia, and Kuwait is indicative not just of a very close relationship between Zapata and the seven sisters oil cartel, but of an excellent entree with the inner sanctum of that cartel, the Royal Dutch Shell-British Petroleum nexus, which exercised the decisive influence on the policies and contingency planning of the cartel. Royal Dutch Shell was for example the company that availed itself of the services of Lord Victor Rothschild for its future planning.

The 1966 Zapata Annual report estimated that about 50% of the company's profits came from US operations, 20% from the North Sea, 10% from the Middle East, 10% from Australia, and 10% from a subsidiary called Williams-McWilliams, which carried on dredging operations in the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi River. One can imagine that George Bush had to some degree participated in the negotiations for these operations. During his years with Zapata, it would thus appear that he had been able to extend the scope of his activity from the Cuban-Caribbean arena to the Persian Gulf, other parts of the Arab world, Brazil, Scandinavia, and the Adriatic waters between Italy and Yugoslavia.

As the 1966 Congressional election approached, Bush was optimistic about his chances of finally getting elected. This time, instead of swimming against the tide of the Goldwater cataclysm, Bush would be favored by the classic mid-term election reflex which almost always helps the Congressional candidates of the party out of power. And LBJ in the White House was vulnerable on a number of points, from the escalation of the Viet Nam war to stagflation. The designer gerrymandering of the new Houston congressional district had functioned perfectly, and so had his demagogic shift towards the "vital center" of moderate conservatism. Because the district was newly drawn, there would be no well-known incumbent to contend with. And now, by one of the convenient coincidences that seem to be strewn through Bush's life , the only obstacle between him and election was a troglodyte Democratic conservative of an ugly and vindictive type, the sort of figure who would make even Bush look reasonable.

The Democrat in question was Frank Briscoe, a former district attorney. According to the Texas Observer, "Frank Briscoe was one of the most vicious prosecutors in Houston's history. He actually maintained a 'ten most wanted convictions list' by which he kept the public advised of how much luck he had getting convictions against his chosen defendants then being held in custody. Now, as a candidate for Congress, Briscoe is running red-eyed for the right-wing in Houston. He is anti-Democratic,; anti-civil rights; anti-foreign aid; anti-war on poverty. The fact that he calls himself a Democrat is utterly irrelevant." By contrast, from the point of view of the Texas Observer, "His opponent, George Bush, is a conservative man. He favors the war in Vietnam; he was for Goldwater, although probably reluctantly; he is nobody's firebrand. Yet Bush is simply civilized in race relations, and he is now openly rejecting the support of the John Birch Society. This is one case where electing a Republican to Congress would help preserve the two-party balance of the country and at the same time spare Texas the embarrassment" of having somebody like Briscoe go to Washington. [fn 5] Bush's ideological face-lifting was working. "I want conservatism to be sensitive and dynamic, not scared and reactionary," Bush told the Wall Street Journal.

Briscoe appears in retrospect as a candidate made to order for Bush's new moderate profile, and there are indications that is just what he was. Sources in Houston recall that in 1966 there was another Democratic candidate for the new Congressional seat, a moderate and attractive Democrat named Wildenthal. These sources say that Bush's backers provided large-scale financial support for Briscoe in the Democratic primary campaign, with the result that Wildenthal lost out to Briscoe, setting up the race that Bush found to his advantage. A designer district was not enough for George; he also required a designer opponent if he was to prevail-- a fact which may be relevant to the final evaluation of what happened in 1988.

One of the key points of differentiation between Bush and Briscoe was on race. The district had about 15% black population, but making some inroads here among registered Democrats would be of decisive importance for the GOP side. Bush made sure that he was seen sponsoring a black baseball team, and talked a lot about his work for the United Negro College Fund when he had been at Yale. He told the press that "black power" agitators were not a problem among the more responsible blacks in Houston "I think the day is past," Bush noted, "when we can afford to have a lily white district. I will not attempt to appeal to the white backlash. I am in step with the 1960's." Bush even took up a position in the Office of Economic Opportunity anti-poverty apparatus in the city. He supported Project Head Start. By contrast, Briscoe "accused" Bush of courting black support, and reminded Bush that other Texas Congressmen had been voting against civil rights legislation when it came up in Congress. Briscoe had antagonized parts of the black community by his relentless pursuit of the death penalty in cases involving black capital defendants. According to the New York Times, "Negro leaders have mounted a quiet campaign to get Negroes to vote for [Bush]."

Briscoe's campaign ads stressed that he was a right-winger and a Texan, and accused Bush of being "the darling of the Lindsey [sic]- Javits crowd," endorsed by labor unions, liberal professors, liberal Republicans and liberal syndicated columnists. Briscoe was proud of his endorsements from Gov. John Connally and the Conservative Action Committee, a local right-wing group. One endorsement for Bush that caused Briuscoe some difficulty was that of Bush mentor Richard M. Nixon. By 1966, Nixon was on the comeback trail, having withstood the virtual nervous breakdown he had undergone after losing his bid for the governorship of California in 1962. Nixon was now in the course of assembling the delegates that would give him the GOP presidential nomination in Miami in 1968. Nixon came to Houston and made campaign appearances for Bush, as he had in 1964.

Bush had brought in a new group of handlers and image-mongers for this 1966 race. His campaign manager was Jim Allison from Midland. Harry Treleaven was brought in to design Bush's propaganda.

Treleaven had been working at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency in New York City, but he took a leave of absence from J. Walter to come to work for Bush in Texas. At J. Walter Thompson, Treleaven had sold the products of Pan American, RCA, Ford, and Lark cigarettes. He was attracted to Bush because he had plenty of money and was willing to spend it liberally. After the campaign was over, Treleaven wrote a long memo about what he had done. He called it "Upset: The Story of a Modern Political Campaign." One of the basic points in Treleaven's selling of Bush was that issues would play no role. "Most national issues today are so complicated, so difficult to understand, and have opinions on that they either intimidate or, more often, bore the average voter...Few politicians recognize this fact." In his memo, Treleaven describes how he walked around Houston in the hot August of 1966 and asked people what they thought of George Bush. He found that many considered Bush to be "an extremely likeable person," but that "there was a haziness about exactly where he stood politically."

For Treleaven, this was an ideal situation. "There'll be few opportunities for logical persuasion, which is all right-- because probably more people vote for irrational, emotional reasons than professional politicians suspect." Treleaven's approach was that "politicians are celebrities." Treleaven put 85% of Bush's hefty campaign budget into advertising, and 59% of that was for television. Newspaper ad got 3%. Treleaven knew that Bush was behind in the polls. "We can turn this into an advantage," he wrote, "by creating a 'fighting underdog ' image. Bush must convince voters that he really wants to be elected and is working hard to earn their vote. People sympathize with a man who tries hard: they are also flattered that anyone would really exert himself to get their vote. Bush, therefore, must be shown as a man who's working his heart out to win."

As Joe McGinnis summed up the television ads that resulted: "Over and over, on every television set in Houston, George Bush was seen with his coat slung over a shoulder; his sleeves rolled up; walking the streets of his district; grinning, gripping, sweating, letting the voter know he cared. About what, was never made clear." [fn 7]

Coached by these professional spin doctors, Bush was acting as mainstream, fair, and conciliatory as could be. In an exchange with Briscoe in the Houston Chronicle a few days before the election, he came out for "a man's right to join a union and his right to strike, but I additionally would favor fair legislation to see that no strike can cripple this nation and endanger the general welfare." But he was still for the Texas right to work law. Bush supported LBJ's "present Vietnam position.. I would like to see an All -Asian Conference convened to attempt to settle this horrible war. The Republican leadership, President Johnson, and Secretary Rusk and almost all but the real 'doves' endorse this." Bush was against "sweeping gun control." Briscoe wanted to cut "extravagant domestic spending," and thought that money might be found by forcing France and the USSR to finally pay up their war debts from the two world wars!

When it came to urban renewal, Bush spoke up for the Charles Percy National Home Ownership Foundation, which carried the name of a leading liberal Republican senator. Bush wanted to place the federal emphasis on such things as "rehabilitating old homes." "I favor the concept of local option on urban renewal. Let the people decide," he said, with a slight nod in the direction of the emerging New Left.

In Bush's campaign ads he invited the voters to "take a couple of minutes and see if you don't agree with me on six important points," including Vietnam, inflation, civil disobedience, jobs, voting rights, and "extremism" (Bush was against the far right and the far left). And there was George, billed as "successful businessman...civic leader...world traveler..war hero," bareheaded in a white shirt and tie, with his jacket slung over his shoulder in the post-Kennedy fashion.

In the context of a pro-GOP trend that brought 59 freshman Republican Congressmen into the House, the biggest influx in two decades, Bush's calculated approach worked. Bush got about 35% of the black vote, 44% of the usually yellow-dog Democrat rural vote, and 70% in the exclusive River Oaks suburb. Still, his margin was not large: Bush got 58% of the votes in the district. Bob Gray, the candidate of the Constitution Party, got less than 1%. Despite the role of black voters in his narrow victory, Bush could not refrain from whining. "If there was a disappointing aspect in the vote, it was my being swamped in the black precincts, despite our making an all-out effort to attract black voters. It was both puzzling and frustrating," Bush observed in his 1987 campaign autobiography. [fn 6] After all, Bush complained, he had put the GOP's funds in a black-owned bank when he was party chairman; he had opened a party office with full-time staff near Texas Southern a black college; he had worked closely with Bill Trent of the United Negro College Fund, all with scant payoff as Bush saw it. Many black voters had not been prepared to reward Bush's noblesse oblige and that threw him into a rage state, whether or not his thyroid was already working overtime in 1966.

When Bush got to Washington in January, 1967, the Brown Brothers, Harriman networks delivered: Bush became the first freshman member of the House of either party to be given a seat on the Ways and Means Committee since 1904. And he did this, it must be recalled, as a member of the minority party, and in an era when the freshman Congressman was supposed to be seen and not heard. The Ways and Means Committee in those years was still a real center of power, one of the most strategic points in the House along with the Rules Committee and a few others. By Constitutional provision, all tax legislation had to originate in the House of Representatives, and given the traditions of committee organization, all tax bills had to originate in the Ways and Means Committee. In addition to the national importance of such a committee assignment, Ways and Means oversaw the legislation impacting such vital Texas and district concerns as oil and gas depletion allowances, and the like.

Later writers have marveled at Bush's achievement in getting a seat on Ways and Means. For John R. Knaggs, this reflected "the great potential national Republicans held for George Bush." The Houston Chronicle, which had supported Briscoe in the election, found that with this appointment "the GOP was able to point up to the state one benefit of a two-party system." [fn 8]

In this case, unlike so many others, we are able to establish how the invisible hand of Skull and Bones actually worked to procure Bush this important political plum. This is due to the indiscretion of the man who was chairman of Ways and Means for many years, Democratic Congressman Wilbur D. Mills of Arkansas. Mills was hounded out of office because of an alcoholism problem, and later found work as an attorney for a tax law firm. Asked about the Bush appointment to the committee he controlled back in 1967, Mills said: "I put him on. I got a phone call from his father telling me how much it mattered to him. I told him I was a Democrat and the Republicans had to decide; and he said the Republicans would do it if I just asked Jerry Ford." Mills said that he had asked Ford and John W. Byrnes of Wisconsin, who was the ranking Republican on Ways and Means, and Bush was in, thanks once again to Daddy Warbucks, Prescott Bush. [fn 9]

Wilbur Mills may have let himself in for a lot of trouble in later years by not always treating George with due respect. Because of Bush's obsession with birth control for the lower orders, Mills gave Bush the nickname "Rubbers," which stuck with him during his years in Congress. [fn 10] Poppy Bush was not amused. One day Mills might ponder in retrospect, as so many others have, on Bush's vindictiveness.

On one occasion Mills prolonged the questioning of Walter Reuther of the UAW, who was appearing as a witness in hearings before the committee, to let George Bush get a few questions in and look good for the home-town press. Mills' career in public life was destroyed during the Ford Presidency when he was found cavorting drunk in public with the dancer Fanny Foxe. This came in an era when the Church and Pike committees of Congress had been pounding the CIA, and when George Bush was about to take over as CIA Director. The fall of Wilbur Mills, together with the Koreagate scandal of alleged Congressional influence peddling, appeared at the time as retaliation designed to knock the Congress on the defensive.

George and Barbara claim to have bought a home on Hillbrook Lane in northwest Washington sight unseen over the telephone from Sen. Milward Simpson of Wyoming, the father of Sen. Al Simpson, the current GOP minority whip. Later the family moved to Palisade Lane.

Bush's Congressional office in the Longworth Building was run by administrative assistant Rose Zamaria, with Pete Roussel acting as the Congressman's press secretary, and Jim Allison and Aleene Smith also on the staff. Bush says that his closest cronies in those day included Bill Steiger of Wisconsin, Rep. Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi, liberal Republican Barber Conable of New York (later attacked as "Barbarian Cannibal" in some developing countries when he was President of the World Bank in the Reagan-Bush years), Tom Kleppe of North Dakota and John Paul Hammerschmidt of Arkansas (a long-term ally).

In January, 1968, LBJ delivered his State of the Union message to Congress, even as the Viet Cong's Tet offensive was making a shambles of his Vietnam war policy. The Republican reply came in a series of short statements by former President Eisenhower, House Minority leader Jerry Ford, Rep. Melvin Laird, Senator Howard Baker, and other members of Congress. Another tribute to the efforts of the Prescott Bush-Skull and Bones networks was the fact that amid this parade of Republican worthies there appeared, with tense jaw and fist clenched to pound on the table, Rep. George Bush.

The Johnson Administration had claimed that austerity measures were not necessary during the time that the war in Vietnam was being prosecuted. LBJ had promised the people "guns and butter," but now the economy was beginning to go into decline. Bush's overall public rhetorical stance during these years was to demand that the Democratic administration impose specific austerity measures and replace big- spending programs with appropriate deficit-cutting rigor. Here is what Bush told a nationwide network television audience on Jan. 23, 1968:

"The nation faces this year just as it did last a tremendous deficit in the Federal budget, but in the President's message there was no sense of sacrifice on the part of the Government, no assignment of priorities, no hint of the need to put first things first. And this reckless policy has imposed the cruel tax of rising prices on the people, pushed interest rates to their highest levels in 100 years, sharply reduced the rate of real economic growth and saddled every man and woman and child in American with the largest tax burden in our history.

"And what does the President say? He says we must pay still more taxes and he proposes drastic restrictions on the rights of Americans to invest and travel abroad. If the President wants to control inflation, he's got to cut back on Federal spending and the best way, the best way to stop the gold drain is to live within our means in this country." [fn 11]

Those who wanted to read Bush's lips at a distance back in those days found that he was indeed committed to a kind of austerity. In May of 1968, with Johnson already a lame duck, the Ways and Means Committee approved what was dubbed on Capitol Hill the "10-8-4" deficit control package. This mandated a tax increase of $10 billion per year, coupled with a $4 billion cut in expenditures. Bush joined with four Ways and Means Republicans (the others were Conable, Schneebeli, and Battin) to approve the measure. [fn 12]

But the principal focus of Bush's activity during his tenure in the House of Representatives centered on a project that was much more sinister and far-reaching than the mere imposition of budget austerity, destructive as that demand was at the time. With a will informed by the ideas about population, race, and economic development that we have seen current in Prescott Bush's circles at Brown Brothers, Harriman, George Bush would now become a protagonist of a series of institutional changes which would contribute to that overall degradation of the cultural paradigm of western civilization which was emergent at the end of the 1960's.

The backdrop for this transformation in the cultural matrix of North America, western Europe, and the rest of the world was the end of the global postwar economic boom that had begun at the end of the 1940's. The expansion of the US economy had been exhausted by the time of the 1958 recession, although it had been revived to some degree by the impulse imparted to the space program by the Kennedy Administration. But even before the Apollo astronauts had reached the moon, NASA was in the process of being gutted by the cost- accountants of the Johnson regime. US capital structures were supported into the sixties on the basis of a round of investments in western Europe, but the Italian and Federal German recessions of 1964 and 1966 were the signal that the postwar reconstruction boom was over. In the fall of 1967, some months after Bush had entered Congress, the terminal agony of the British pound sterling as a reserve currency had gripped the currency exchanges of the world. In the spring of 1968, the gold and dollar crisis would bring the entire world monetary system to the brink of a panic collapse. The world was beginning to experience the first paroxysms of that collapse of the 1944 Bretton Woods monetary system which would become official at Camp David on August 15, 1971, when Nixon would announce the end of the gold convertibility of the dollar and also proclaim "Phase One" of a wage and price freeze austerity for the American labor force. [fn 13]

To understand Bush's actions during these years, we must understand the highly subjective and idealogical reactions of the Anglo-American finance oligarchy to these events. As we have seen reflected in the mentality of Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush, the Anglo-American financier elite is fundamentally hostile to modern industrial-technological development and to large-scale modern urban life. The hopes of the Anglo-American elite for the postwar world were expressed in the Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of German industry and the depopulation of central Europe. These plans had proven to be untenable in the light of the Soviet threat to Europe, and the oligarchy had been obliged to accept a postwar European recovery which was very lucrative for Wall Street, brutally austere for the Germans, and which kept the Soviets at bay for the duration of the Cold War. But even within the context of the postwar boom, the Malthusian disposition of the oligarchy remained, as expressed in the accelerated looting of the former colonial sector, the raping of the oil cartel, and the sabotage of industrial and infrastructural expansion inside the US to the extent that traffic would bear. As the postwar boom showed increased signs of exhaustion at the end of the 1960's, the oligarchical elite felt that the moment had come to assert the Malthusian impulse more aggressively.

For the Anglo-American finance oligarchs, the leading problems of the world then as now could be summed up under the headings of overpopulation, especially among the non-white ethnic groups of the planet, and industrial pollution. The remedies, then as now, were to be sought in limiting population growth, or better yet reducing the existing population wherever possible, while at the same time shutting down industry. In this way the oligarchs sought to return to their bucolic and medieval dream world, and especially to a degraded and servile mass psychology agreeable to oligarchical forms of domination. For oligarchs like Bush are well aware that there are only two ways to organize human affairs, namely the republican and the oligarchical modes. The republican mode depends upon the presence of citizens-- well educated, technology-oriented, mature, and courageous people who are willing to think for themselves. Oligarchical forms function best in the presence of a culturally pessimistic, hedonist, superstitious mass of passive witnesses to the passing scene.

Thus, at the end of the 1960's, London financiers and their Wall Street counterparts made available abundant foundation funding for such projects as the Triple Revolution, which proposed the now- accomplished transition from a productive society to a post-industrial society, and the 1968 founding of the Club of Rome with its absurd "Limits to growth" hoax of a few years later, the international flagship for the Malthusian revival. What the oligarchy had in mind was not just a minor adjustment of the Zeitgeist: the greening of the western cultural paradigm made mandatory the quick erosion of the imperatives of subduing and dominating nature contained in the first book of Genesis, the demolition of the beliefs in education, science and progress which had animated the philosophy and nation building of St. Augustine, Charlemagne, the Italian Renaissance, Leibnitz, Franklin, and the American Revolution.

The implementation of this intent on the home front dictated the dismantling of a constituency-based political structure that assumed that the purpose of government was to manage economic development and equitably to distribute the fruits of material and cultural progress. This had to be replaced by an authoritarian-totalitarian regime whose main function was the imposition of austerity and sacrifices. Malthusianism at home also generated problems abroad, to which the Kissinger NSC and the Kissinger State Department were to prove themselves especially sensitive. Although the Malthusian oligarchy sought to deny that industry and population growth represented real power, they were at pains to slow demographic and industrial growth abroad, using various hollow pretexts. Alexander King, along with Aurelio Peccei one of the founders of the Club of Rome, once conceded that the real purpose of his institution was to block the demographic expansion of the non-white peoples of the world. For Prescott Bush and George Bush, the depopulation of the third world, the genocide of non-white populations, was and is a life-long and consuming obsession.

By any definition a racist like Bush might offer, the white race, or more precisely the Anglo-Saxon race, is a small and dwindling minority of humanity. Nevertheless, the compulsive imperative of the London-New York financiers is their commitment to Anglo-Saxon domination of the planet. This means that in the view of the financiers, non-whites and non-Anglo-Saxons must be prevented from multiplying inside the imperial homeland and if possible decimated, so as to avoid challenges to Anglo-Saxon financier rule. Outside US borders, the Anglo-American elite prescribes war, famine, and pestilence to cut a bloody swath through the brown, black, red and yellow races so as to reduce their military and economic potential. If possible, in the view of the oligarchs, non-white populations in areas of great oil and other strategic raw materials wealth should be wiped out completely so that these areas can be re-colonized by the Anglo-Saxon master race, who will enjoy the use of the raw materials into the future. These are the points at which we see George Bush in action during his Congressional years.

The economics of Malthus, the Club of Rome, and of Yale economist George Bush lead inexorably to world depression and an economic breakdown crisis so severe as to put the future prospects of world civilization itself into the gravest jeopardy. Bush's most fanatically held beliefs concerning Anglo-Saxon race superiority are equally bankrupt and grotesque. Human beings have no genetic-racial identity. Human beings belong to cultures, which are learned as children are reared in the home and educated in schools, but which have nothing to do with heredity or blood, as the American experience itself in its better moments most impressively documents. Indeed, there is no such thing as a race or breed among humans as these categories exist among dogs and horses. Among these animals, race or breed defines a fixed repertoire of behavior and reaction, a fixed mental disposition which rules out most changes that education might bring. Among human beings, it is just the opposite: any child of whatever color or ethnic background, if placed as an infant in a family of a different color and language, will invariably be acculturated into the civilization of the new family. This reflects the universality of the human personality beyond all distinctions of race, color, religion, culture, and nationality, and proves the thesis of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. The universality of apostolic Christianity as a world religion seeking to reach out to all ethnic groups on the planet without exception is expressed in the idea that each and every concrete human individual is very practically the living image of God, and no difference of color or "race" can change this in the slightest.

Oligarchical thinking rejects all this. Oligarchs have historically been obsessed with justifying and perpetuating the irrational and destructive domination of a feudal aristocracy, generally in the form of a titled nobility ruling through usurious banking practices, secret intelligence agencies, and militarism, at the expense of the progress of humanity. If the human personality is indeed universal, then there is no such thing as an hereditary aristocracy, and the concept of oligarchy itself is in big trouble. But feudal aristocrats, breeding horses and dogs as their status symbols, are often imbecilic enough to think that they have become authorities on human genetics.

PART 2 OF 3

There is also a reason why American elitists like the Harrimans and the Bushes become such fanatics for eugenics and population reduction. This has to do with the position of such families as virtual parvenu upstarts within the Anglo-American hierarchy. In order to have standing in the oligarchy it is necessary to have a patent of nobility going back at the very least a century or two, with four to five hundred years being preferable. This puts families like Harriman or Bush into a virtual status frenzy. When W. Averell Harriman was a child, President Theodore Roosevelt publicly attacked his father, the railroad builder E.J. Harriman, as a robber baron and a public menace for the country. An associate of W. Averell Harriman in the State Department once recounted his impression that the younger Harriman and indeed the rest of his family had never gotten over the colossal humiliation of this incident. This interesting fact casts light on the tireless efforts of Averell's mother to buy the family status and respectability by funding eugenics research to investigate the criminal tendencies of those incorrigible lower orders and mental defectives. The Harrimans were by implication a race apart. It also helped to explain what the associate described Averell's life-long history as a compulsive liar whenever a situation emerged in which he could improve his image at the expense of others by lying.

Although perhaps impressive by American standards, George Bush's pedigree displayed its own grave weaknesses when examined within the frame of reference of the trans-Atlantic Anglo-American oligarchy of the twentieth century, and this doubtless imparted extra fanaticism to George's fanatical pursuit of racial purity in the halls of Congress.

In 1969 Bush told the House of Representatives that, unless the menace of human population growth were "recognized and made manageable, starvation, pestilence and war will solve it for us." Bush repeatedly compared population growth to a disease. [fn 9] In remarks to the House on July 30, 1969, he likened the fight against the polio virus to the crusade to reduce the world's population. Urging the federal government to step up population control efforts, he said: "We have a clear precedent: When the Salk vaccine was discovered, large-scale programs were undertaken to distribute it. I see no reason why similar programs of education and family planning assistance should not be instituted in the United States on a massive scope."

As Jessica Mathews, vice-president of one of Washington's most influential zero-growth outfits, the World Resources Institute, later wrote of Bush in those years: "In the 1960s and '70s, Bush had not only embraced the cause of domestic and international family planning, he had aggressively sought to be its champion.... As a member of the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bush shepherded the first major breakthrough in domestic family planning legislation in 1967," and "later co -authored the legislation commonly known as Title X, which created the first federal family planning program...."

"On the international front," Mathews wrote, Bush "recommended that the U.S. support the United Nations population fund.... He urged, in the strongest words, that the U.S. and European countries make modern contraceptives available "on a massive scale," to all those around the world who wanted them.

Bush belonged to a small group of congressmen who successfully conspired to force a profound shift in the official U.S. attitude and policy toward population expansion. Embracing the "limits to growth" ideology with a vengeance, Bush and his coterie, which included such ultraliberal Democrats as then- Senator Walter Mondale (Minn.) and Rep. James Scheuer (N.Y.), labored to enact legislation which institutionalized population control as U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

Bush began his Malthusian activism in the House in 1968, which was the year in which Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical "Humanae Vitae," which contained a prophetic warning of the danger of coercion by governments for the purpose of population control. The Pope wrote: "Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would be placed in the hands of those public authorities who place no heed of moral exigencies.... Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their people, the method of contraception which they judged to be most efficacious?" For poorer countries with a high population rate, the encyclical identified the only rational and humane policy: "No solution to these difficulties is acceptable which does violence to man's essential dignity....The only possible solution ... is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society...."

This was a direct challenge to the cultural paradigm transformation which Bush and other exponents of the oligarchical world outlook were promoting. Not for the first time nor for the last time, Bush issued a direct attack on the Holy See. Just days after Humanae Vitae was issued, Bush declared: "I have decided to give my vigorous support for population control in both the United States and the world." He also lashed out at the Pope. "For those of us who who feel so strongly on this issue, the recent encyclical was most discouraging."

During his four years in Congress, Bush not only introduced key pieces of legislation to enforce population control both at home and abroad. He also continuously introduced into the congressional debate reams of propaganda about the threat of population growth and the inferiority of blacks, and he set up a special Republican task force which functioned as a forum for the most rabid Malthusian ideologues.

"Bush was really out front on the population issue," a population- control activist recently said of this period of 1967-71. "He was saying things that even we were reluctant to talk about publicly."

Bush's open public advocacy of government measures tending towards zero population growth was a radical departure from the policies built into the federal bureaucracy up until that time. The climate of opinion just a few years earlier, in December 1959, is illustrated by the comments of President Eisenhower, who had said, "birth control is not our business. I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity ... or responsibility."

As a congressman, Bush played an absolutely pivotal role in this shift. Shortly after arriving in Washington, he teamed up with fellow Republican Herman Schneebeli to offer a series of amendments to the Social Security Act to place priority emphasis on what was euphemistically called "family planning services." The avowed goal was to reduce the number of children born to women on welfare.

Bush's and Schneebeli's amendments reflected the Malthusian- genocidalist views of Dr. Alan Guttmacher, then president of Planned Parenthood, and a protege of its founder, Margaret Sanger. In the years before the grisly outcome of the Nazi cult of race science and eugenics had inhibited public calls for defense of the "gene pool," Sanger had demanded the weeding out of the "unfit" and the "inferior races," and had campaigned vigorously for sterilization, infanticide and abortion, in the name of "race betterment."

Although Planned Parenthood was forced during the fascist era and immediately thereafter to tone down Sanger's racist rhetoric from "race betterment" to "family planning" for the benefit of the poor and blacks, the organization's basic goal of curbing the population growth rate among "undesirables" never really changed. Bush publicly asserted that he agreed "1,000 percent" with Planned Parenthood.

During hearings on the Social Security amendments, Bush and witness Alan Guttmacher had the following colloquy: Bush: Is there any [opposition to Planned Parenthood] from any other organizations or groups, civil rights groups?

Guttmacher: We do have problems. We are in a sensitive area in regard particularly to the Negro. There are some elements in the Negro group that feel we are trying to keep down the numbers. We are very sensitive to this. We have a community relations department headed by a most capable Negro social worker to try to handle that part of the problem. This does, of course, cause us a good bit of concern.

Bush: I appreciate that. For the record, I would like to say I am 1,000 percent in accord with the goals of your organization. I think perhaps more than any other type of organization you can do more in the field of poverty and mental health and everything else than any other group that I can think of. I commend you.

Guttmacher [to Bush]: May I use you as a public speaker?

Like his father before him, Bush supported Planned Parenthood at every opportunity. Time after time, he rose on the floor of the House to praise Planned Parenthood's work. In 1967, Bush called for "having the government agencies work even more closely with going private agencies such as Planned Parenthood." A year later, he urged those interested in "advancing the cause of family planning," to "call your local Planned Parenthood Center" to offer "help and support."

The Bush-Schneebeli amendments were aimed at reducing the number of children born to blacks and poor whites. The legislation required all welfare recipients, including mothers of young children, to seek work, and barred increases in federal aid to states where the proportion of dependent children on welfare increased.

Reducing the welfare rolls was a prime Bush concern. He frequently motivated his population-control crusade with thinly veiled appeals to Willie Horton-style racism. Talking about the rise in the welfare rolls in a July 1968 statement, Bush lamented that "our national welfare costs are rising phenomenally." Worse, he warned, there were far too many children being born to welfare mothers: "The fastest-growing part of the relief rolls everywhere is aid for dependent children--AFDC. At the end of the 1968 fiscal year, a little over $2 billion will be spent for AFDC, but by fiscal 1972 this will increase by over 75 percent."

Bush emphasized that more children are born into non-white poor families than to white ones. Blacks must recognize, he said, "that they cannot hope to acquire a larger share of American prosperity without cutting down on births...."

Forcing mothers on welfare to work was believed to be an effective means of reducing the number of black children born, and Bush sponsored a number of measures to do just that. In 1970, he helped lead the fight on the Hill for President Nixon's notorious welfare bill, the Family Assistance Program, known as FAP. Billed as a boon to the poor because it provided an income floor, the measure called on every able-bodied welfare recipient, except mothers with children under six, to take a job . This soon became known as Nixon's "workfare" slave-labor bill. Monetarist theoreticians of economic austerity were quick to see that forced labor by welfare recipients could be used to break the unions where they existed, while lowering wages and worsening working conditions for the entire labor force. Welfare recipients could even be hired as scabs to replace workers being paid according to normal pay scales. Those workers, after they had been fired, would themselves end up destitute and on welfare, and could then be forced to take workfare for even lower wages than those who had been on welfare at the outset of the process. This was known as "recycling."

Critics of the Nixon workfare bill pointed out that it contained no minimum standards regarding the kinds of jobs or the level of wages which would be forced upon welfare recipients, and that it contradicted the original purpose of welfare, which was to allow mothers to stay home with their children. Further, it would set up a pool of virtual slave- labor, which could be used to replace workers earning higher wages.

But Bush thought these tough measures were exactly what the explosion of the welfare rolls demanded. During House debate on the measure April 15, 1970, Bush said he favored FAP because it would force the lazy to work: "The family assistance plan ... is oriented toward work," he said. "The present federal-state welfare system encourages idleness by making it more profitable to be on welfare than to work, and provides no method by which the State may limit the number of individuals added to the rolls."

Bush had only "one major worry, and that is that the work incentive provisions will not be enforced.... it is essential that the program be administered as visualized by the Ways and Means Committee; namely, if an individual does not work, he will not receive funds." The Manchester School's Iron Law of Wages as expounded by George Bush, self -styled expert in the dismal science..

In 1967, Bush joined with Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.), to successfully sponsor legislation that removed prohibitions against mailing and importing contraceptive devices. More than opening the door to French-made condoms, Bush's goal here was a kind of ideological success de scandale. The zero- growth lobby deemed this a major breakthrough in making the paraphernalia for domestic population control accessible.

In rapid succession, Bush introduced legislation to create a National Center for Population and Family Planning and Welfare, and to redesignate the Department of the Interior as the Department of Resources, Environment and Population.

On the foreign policy front, he helped shift U.S. foreign assistance away from funding development projects to grapple with the problem of hunger in the world, to underwriting population control. "I propose that we totally revamp our foreign aid program to give primary emphasis to population control," he stated in the summer of 1968, adding: "In my opinion, we have made a mistake in our foreign aid by concentrating on building huge steel mills and concrete plants in underdeveloped nations...."

One of Bush's more important initiatives on the domestic side was his sponsorship of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, brainchild of Sen. Joseph Tydings of Maryland. Signed into law by President Nixon on December 24, 1970, the Tydings-Bush bill drastically increased the federal financial commitment to population control, authorizing an initial $382 million for family planning sevices, population research, population education and information through 1973. Much of this money was funneled through private institutions, particularly local clinics run by Bush's beloved Planned Parenthood. The Tydings-Bush measure mandated the notorious Title X, which explicitly provided "family planning assistance" to the poor. Bush and his zero-growth cohorts talked constantly about the importance of disseminating birth control to the poor. They claimed that there were over 5 million poor women who wanted to limit their families, but could not afford to do so.

On October 23, 1969, Bush praised the Office of Economic Opportunity for carrying out some of the "most successful" family planning projects, and said he was "pleased" that the Nixon administration "is giving them additional financial muscle by increasing their funds 50 percent--from $15 million to $22 million."

This increased effort he attributed to the Nixon administration's "goal to reach in the next five years the 5 million women in need of these services"--all of them poor, many of them from racial or ethnic minorities. He added: "One needs only to look quickly at the report prepared by the Planned Parenthood-World Population Research Department to see how ineffective federal, state, and local governments have been in providing such necessary services. There is certainly nothing new about the fact that unwanted pregnancies of our poor and near-poor women keep the incidence of infant mortality and mental retardation in America at one of the highest levels of all the developed countries."

The rates of infant mortality and mental retardation Bush was so concerned about, could have been significantly reduced, had the government provided sufficient financing to pre-natal care, nutrition, and other factors contributing to the health of infants and children. On the same day he signed the Tydings-Bush bill, Nixon vetoed--with Bush's support- -legislation that would have set up a three-year, $225 million program to train family doctors.

Bush seemed to be convinced that mental retardation, in particular, was a matter of heredity. The eugenicists of the 1920's had spun their pseudoscientific theories around "hereditary feeble- mindedness," and claimed that the "Kallikaks and the Jukes" by reproducing successive "feeble-minded" generations had cost New York state tens of millions of dollars over decades. But what about learning disorders like dyslexia, which has been known to afflict oligarchical families Bush would consider wealthy, well-bred, and able? Nelson Rockefeller, Bush's friend Nick Brady, and Bush's own son Neal have suffered from dyslexia, a reading disorder. But these oligarchs are not likely to fall victim to the involuntary sterilization as "mental defectives" which they wish to inflict on those they term the lower orders.

In introducing the House version of the Tydings bill on behalf of himself and Bush, Rep. James Scheuer (D-N.Y.) ranted that while middle-class women "have been limiting the number of offspring for years ... women of low-income families" did not. "If poverty and family size are so closely related we ask, `Why don't poor women stop having babies?'" The Bush-Tydings bill took a giant step toward forcing them to do so.

Among Bush's most important contributions to the neo-Malthusian cause while in Congress was his role in the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. The task force, which Bush helped found and then chaired, churned out a steady stream of propaganda claiming that the world was already seriously overpopulated; that there was a fixed limit to natural resources and that this limit was rapidly being reached; and that the environment and natural species were being sacrificed to human progress. Bush's task force sought to accredit the idea that the human race was being "down bred," or reduced in genetic quality by the population growth among blacks and other non-white and hence allegedly inferior races at a time when the Anglo- Saxons were hardly able to prevent their numbers from shrinking.

Comprised of over 20 Republican congressmen, Bush's Task Force was a kind of Malthusian vanguard organization which heard testimony from assorted "race scientists, sponsored legislation and otherwise propagandized the zero- growth outlook. In its 50-odd hearings during these years, the task force provided a public forum to nearly every well-known zero-growth fanatic, from Paul Ehrlich, founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), to race scientist William Shockley to the key zero-growth advocates infesting the federal bureaucracy.

Giving a prestigious Congressional platform to a discredited racist charlatan like William Shockley in the year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King points up the arrogance of Bush's commitment to eugenics. Shockley, like his co-thinker Arthur Jensen, had caused a furor during the 1960's by advancing his thesis, already repeatedly disproven, that blacks were genetically inferior to whites in cognitive faculties and intelligence. In the same year in which Bush invited him to appear before the GOP task force, Shockley had written: "Our nobly intended welfare programs may be encouraging dysgenics--retrogressive evolution through disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged...We fear that 'fatuous beliefs' in the power of welfare money, unaided by eugenic foresight, may contribute to a decline of human quality for all segments of society."

To halt what he saw as pervasive down breeding of the quality of the US gene pool, Shockley advocated a program of mass sterilization of the unfit and mentally defective which he called his "Bonus Sterilization Plan." Money bonuses for allowing oneself to be sterilized would be paid to any person not paying income tax who had a genetic deficiency or chronic disease, such as diabetes or epilepsy, or who could be shown to be a drug addict. "If [the government paid] a bonus rate of $1,000 for each point below 100 IQ, $30,000 put in trust for some 70 IQ moron of 20- child potential, it might return $250,000 to taxpayers in reduced cost of mental retardation care, " Shockley said.

The special target of Shockley's prescriptions for mass sterilizations were blacks, whom he saw as reproducing too fast. "If those blacks with the least amount of Caucasian genes are in fact the most prolific and the least intelligent, then genetic enslavement will be the destiny of their next generation," he wrote. Looking at the recent past, Shockley said in 1967: "The lesson to be drawn from Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that eugenics is intolerable."

As for Paul Ehrlich, his program for genocide included a call to he US government to prepare "the addition of...mass sterilization agents" to the US food and water supply, and a "tough foreign policy" including termination of food aid to starving nations. As radical as Ehrlich might have sounded then, this latter point has become a staple of foreign policy under the Bush Administration.

On July 24, 1969, the task force heard from Gen. William Draper, then national chairman of the Population Crisis Committee, and a close friend of Bush's father, Prescott. According to Bush' resume of his family friend's testimony, Draper warned that the population explosion was like a "rising tide," and asserted that "our strivings for the individual good will become a scourge to the community unless we use our God- given brain power to bring back a balance between the birth rate and the death rate." Draper lashed out at the Catholic Church, charging that its opposition to contraception and sterilization was frustrating population -control efforts in Latin America.

A week later, Bush invited Oscar Harkavy, chief of the Ford Foundation's population program, to testify. In summarizing Harkavy's remarks for the August 4 Congressional Record, Bush commented: "The population explosion is commonly recognized as one of the most serious problems now facing the nation and the world. Mr. Harkavy suggested, therefore, that we more adequately fund population research. It seems inconsistent that cancer research funds total $250-275 million annually, more than eight times the amount spent on reproductive biology research."

In reporting on testimony by Dr. William McElroy of the National Science Foundation, Bush stressed that "One of the crises the world will face as a result of present population growth rates is that, assuming the world population increases 2 percent annually, urban population will increase by 6 percent, and ghetto population will increase by 12 percent."

In February 1969, Bush and other members proposed legislation to establish a Select Joint Committee on Population and Family Planning, that would, Bush said, "seek to focus national attention on the domestic and foreign need for family planning.' We need to make population and family planning household words," Bush told his House colleagues. "We need to take the sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather, are using it as a political steppingstone." "A thorough investigation into birth control and a collection of data which would give the Congress the criteria to determine the effectiveness of its programs must come swiftly to stave off the number of future mouths which will feed on an ever -decreasing proportion of food," Bush continued. "We need an emphasis on this critical problem... we need a massive program in Congress with hearings to emphasize the problem, and earmarked appropriations to do something about it. We need massive cooperation from the White House like we have never had before and we need a determination by the executive branch that these funds will be spent as earmarked."

On August 6, 1969, Bush's GOP task force introduced a bill to create a Commission on Population and the American Future which, Bush said, would "allow the leadership of this country to properly establish criteria which can be the basis for a national policy on population." The move came in response to President Nixon's call of July 18 to create a blue-ribbon commission to draft a U.S. population policy. Bush was triumphant over this development, having repeatedly urged such a step at various points in the preceding few years. On July 21, he made a statement on the floor of the House to "commend the President" for his action. "We now know," he intoned, "that the fantastic rate of population growth we have witnessed these past 20 years continues with no letup in sight. If this growth rate is not checked now-- in this next decade--we face a danger that is as defenseless as nuclear war."

Headed by John D. Rockefeller III, the commission represented a radical, government-sanctioned attack on human life. Its final report, issued in 1972, asserted that "the time has come to challenge the tradition that population growth is desirable: What was unintended may turn out to be unwanted, in the society as in the family." Not only did the commission demand an end to population growth and economic progress, it also attacked the foundations of Western civilization by insisting that man's reason had become a major impediment to right living. "Mass urban industrialism is based on science and technology, efficiency, acquisition, and domination through rationality," raved the commission's report. "The exercise of these same values now contain the potential for the destruction of our humanity. Man is losing that balance with nature which is an essential condition of human existence."

The commission's principal conclusion was that "there are no substantial benefits to be gained from continued population growth," Chairman Rockefeller explained to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The commission made a host of recommendations to curb both population expansion and economic growth. These included: liberalizing laws restricting abortion and sterilization; having the government fund abortions; and providing birth control to teenagers. The commission had a profound impact on American attitudes toward the population issue, and helped accelerate the plunge into outright genocide. Commission Executive director Charles Westoff wrote in 1975 that the group "represented an important effort by an advanced country to develop a national population policy--the basic thrust of which was to slow growth in order to maximize the "quality of life." The collapse of the traditional family-centered form of society during the 1970's and 1990's was but one consequence of such recommendations. It also is widely acknowledged that the commission Bush fought so long and so hard to create broke down the last barriers to legalized abortion on demand. Indeed, just one year after the commission's final report was issued, the Supreme Court delivered the Roe v. Wade decision which did just that.

Aware that many blacks and other minorities had noticed that the population control movement was a genocide program aimed at reducing their numbers, the commission went out of its way to cover its real intent by stipulating that all races should cut back on their birth rates. But the racist animus of their conclusions could not be hidden. Commission Executive Director Westoff, who owed his job and his funding to Bush gave a hint of this in a book he had written in 1966, before joining the commission staff, which was entitled From Now to Zero, and in which he bemoaned the fact that the black fertility rate was so much higher than the white.

The population control or zero population growth movement which grew rapidly in the late 1960s thanks to free media exposure and foundation grants for a stream of pseudoscientific propaganda about the alleged "population bomb" and the "limits to growth," was a continuation of the old prewar protofascist eugenics movement, which had been forced to go into temporary eclipse when the world recoiled in horror at the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of eugenics. By the mid-1960s, the same old crackpot eugenicists had resurrected themselves as the population- control and environmentalist movement. Planned Parenthood was a perfect example of the transmogrification. Now, instead of demanding the sterilization of the inferior races, the newly packaged eugenicists talked about the population bomb, and giving the poor "equal access" to birth control, and "freedom of choice." But nothing had substantively changed--including the use of coercion. While Bush and other advocates of government "family planning" programs insisted these were strictly voluntary, the reality was far different. By the mid-1970s, the number of involuntary sterilizations carried out by programs which Bush helped bring into being, had reached huge proportions. Within the black and minority communities, where most of the sterilizations were being done, protests arose which culminated in federal litigation as a suit was brought.

In his 1974 ruling on this suit, Federal District Judge Gerhard Gesell found that, "Over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs. Although Congress has been insistent that all family planning programs function on a purely voluntary basis," Judge Gesell wrote, "there is uncontroverted evidence ... that an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization." Gesell concluded from the evidence that the "dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky."

As we have seen, George Bush inherited his obsession with population control and racial "down breeding" from his father, Prescott, who staunchly supported Planned Parenthood dating back at least to the 1940s. In fact, Prescott's affiliation with Margaret Sanger's organization cost him the Senate race in 1950, a defeat his son has always blamed on the Catholic Church, and which is at the root of George's lifelong vendetta against the Papacy.

Prescott's 1950 defeat still rankled, as shown by Bush's extraordinary gesture in evoking it during testimony he gave on the other side of Capitol Hill before Senator Gruening's subcommittee of the Senate Government Operations Committee on November 2, 1967. Bush's vengeful tirade is worth quoting at length:

"I get the felling that it is a little less unfashionable to be in favor of birth control and planned parenthood today than it used to be. If you will excuse one personal reference here: My father, when he ran for the US Senate in 1950, was defeated by 600 or 700 votes. On the steps of several Catholic Churches in Connecticut, the Sunday before the election, people stood there passing out pamphlets saying, 'Listen to what this commentator has to say tonight. Listen to what this commentator has to say.' That night on the radio, the commentator came on and said, "Of interest to voters in Connecticut, Prescott Bush is head of the Planned Parenthood Birth Control League,' or something like this. Well, he lost by about 600 votes and there are some us who feel that this had something to do with it. I do not think that anybody can get away with that type of thing any more."

The Harriman family sponsored the creation of the eugenics movement in the United States, which successfully campaigned for the mass sterilization of the "feeble-minded" and "racially inferior" during the 1920s--practices later copied, not originated, by the Nazis. As part of this campaign, the Harrimans helped organize a series of international eugenics conferences. At the 1932 conference, held at the Museum of Natural History in New York, the guest of honor was none other than Dr. Ernst Rudin, the head of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, who, just a few years later, drafted the Nazi miscegenation laws against the Jews, gypsies, and Slavs.

Among the Americans who rubbed shoulders with Rudin at the 1932 conference was Gen. William Draper, a New York investment banker and close personal friend of Prescott Bush, who became one of the most influential crusaders for radical population control measures. He campaigned endlessly for zero population growth, and praised the Chinese Communists for their "innovative" methods of achieving that goal. Draper's most influential outlet was the Population Crisis Committee (PCC)-Draper Fund, set up in 1965 by Hugh Moore, who had taken over the Human Betterment Association, a leading eugenics outfit, in 1937, renaming it the Association for Voluntary Sterilization.

In 1967-68, a PCC-Draper Fund offshoot, the Campaign to Check the Population Explosion, ran a nationwide advertising campaign hyping the population explosion fraud, and attacking those--particularly at the Vatican--who stood in the way of radical population control.

In a 1971 article, Draper likened the developing nations to an "animal reserve,'' where, when the animals become too numerous, the park rangers "arbitrarily reduce one or another species as necessary to preserve the balanced environment for all other animals. "But who will be the park ranger for the human race?,'' he asked. "Who will cull out the surplus in this country or that country when the pressure of too many people and too few resources increases beyond endurance? Will the death-dealing Horsemen of the Apocalypse--war in its modern nuclear dress, hunger haunting half the human race, and disease--will the gaunt and forbidding Horsemen become Park Ranger for the two-legged animal called man?''

Draper collaborated closely with George Bush during the latter's congressional career. As noted above, Bush invited Draper to testify to his Task Force on Earth Resources and Population; reportedly, Draper helped draft the Bush-Tydings bill.

Bush felt an overwhelming affinity for the bestial and degraded image of man reflected in the raving statements of Draper. In September 1969, Bush gave a glowing tribute to Draper that was published in the cf2 Congressional Record cf1 . "I wish to pay tribute to a great American,'' said Bush. "I am very much aware of the significant leadership that General Draper has executed throughout the world in assisting governments in their efforts to solve the awesome problems of rapid population growth. No other person in the past five years has shown more initiative in creating the awareness of the world's leaders in recognizing the economic consequences of our population explosion.''

In a 1973 publication, Bush praised the PCC itself for having played a "major role in assisting government policy makers and in mobilizing the United States' response to the world population challenge....'' The PCC made no bones about its admiration for Bush; its newsletters from the late 1960s-early 1970s feature numerous articles highlighting Bush's role in the congressional population-control campaign. In a 1979 report assessing the history of Congressional action on population control, the PCC/Draper Fund placed Bush squarely with the "most conspicuous activists,'' on population-control issues, and lauded him for "proposing all of the major or controversial recommendations'' in this arena which came before the U.S. Congress in the late 1960s.

Draper's son, William III, has enthusiastically carried out his father's genocidal legacy--frequently with the help of Bush. In 1980, Draper, an enthusiastic backer of the Carter administration's notorious cf2 Global 2000 cf1 report, served as national chairman of the Bush presidential campaign's finance committee; in early 1981, Bush convinced Reagan to appoint Draper to head the U.S. Export-Import Bank. At the time, a Draper aide, Sharon Camp, disclosed that Draper intended to reorient the bank's functions toward emphasizing population control projects.

In 1987, again at Bush's behest, Draper was named by Reagan as administrator of the United Nations Development Program, which functions as an adjunct of the World Bank, and has historically pushed population reduction among Third World nations. In late January of 1991, Draper gave a speech to a conference in Washington, in which he stated that the core of Bush's "new world order'' should be population reduction.

Bush was not reluctant to feature anti-black backlash themes in other parts of his political repertoire. In the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in April, 1968, large scale riots and looting broke out in Washington and other cities. Bush was quick to introduce a bill which provided that any person convicted of breaking the law during civil disorders would be henceforth prohibited from retaining or getting federal jobs. Bush claimed that during the Washington riot that followed the murder of King, of the first 119 riot suspects brought to court, 10% said they worked for the federal government. [fn 15]

PART 3 OF 3

Bush's campaign autobiography and the authorized and adulatory campaign biography by Fitzhugh Green make virtually no mention of these Congressional activities in the service of racism, Malthusianism, and depopulation. Instead, Bush and his image-mongers prefer to focus on the Congressman's heroic fight against racism as expressed in an April, 1968 opposition in Bush's district against the bill that was later to become the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This bill contained "open housing" provisions prohibiting the discrimination in the sale, renting, or financing of housing on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Bush decided to vote for the bill. "Letters from the district were overwhelmingly against the bill. After I voted for it, the mail got heavier. And uglier," he wrote later. "Threats were directed not only against me but against members of my staff."

As Bush tells it, he then decided to confront his critics at a rally scheduled to be held in the Memorial-West section of his district. "The place was jammed. Judging from the boos and catcalls when I was introduced, it was also seething. The tone was set by another speaker on the program, who predicted that the open housing bill 'will lead to government control of private property, the Communists' number one goal.'"

In order to reduce the seething masses to docility, Bush began by citing the British Empire liberal, cultural relativism, and theoretician of "organic change," Edmund Burke: "Your representative owes you not only his industry, but his judgment," Burke had said. Bush then recalled that blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities were risking their lives in the Vietnam war. How could they be denied open housing? "Somehow it seems fundamental that a man should not have a door slammed in his face because he is a Negro or speaks with a Latin American accent." Open housing would be a ray of hope for blacks and other minorities "locked out by habit and discrimination," Bush concluded. Bush says he looked at the now silent faces of the audience, and then turned to thank the moderator. ""It was then that the applause began, growing louder until there was a standing ovation. All the ugliness that had gone before seemed to wash away, and I sensed that something special had happened." Conjuring up the vision of this alleged triumph in the late 1980's, Bush had the gall to write: "More than twenty years later I can truthfully say that nothing I've experienced in public life, before or since, has measured up to the feeling I had when I went home that night." His sycophant, the mythograph Fitzhugh Green, adds: "Bush had spoken from his personally held values. He clearly had found the decent core of those who had heard him. Complaints against his vote on this issue slowed to a trickle. This matter was another marker on his trail toward the acceptance of black Americans." [fn 16]

These accounts have nothing to do with a true historical record, but rather illustrate the blatant, Goebbels-style big lies which are shamelessly dished up by the Bush propagandists. The mythologized accounts of this episode wish to leave the distinct impression of Bush as a 1960's fighter for civil rights, in contradiction to his entire political career, from the 1964 civil rights bill to racist eugenics to Willie Horton. Comparing these fantastic accounts to the reality of Bush's genocidal daily work in the Congress, we also obtain the proper framework in which to evaluate the truth of Bush's public explanations of his role in Iran-contra and other scandals. Bush stands out as one of the most accomplished liars in the highly competitive field of postwar American politics.

But we shall not conclude that Bush devoted the entirety of his Congressional career to the promotion of race science and global depopulation. He was also concerned with providing constituent service. This service came in the form of Bush's central role in the implementation of a sophisticated strategy by the oil cartel to maintain its ground-rent tax privileges at the highest rate that the climate of public opinion would permit. Within this strategy, Bush worked to protect the oil depletion allowance as the principal tax giveaway enjoyed by the cartel.

The oil depletion allowance was a 27.5% tax writeoff for oil producers that had been introduced in 1926, allegedly to strengthen the US petroleum industry. The impact of a 27.5% depletion allowance was that many of the largest oil companies, including some of the wealthiest corporate giants, paid a very low rate of corporate income tax. On July 10, 1969, Congressman Bertram Podell of New York wrote an open letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills in which he pointed out that, primarily as a result of the high oil depletion allowance, Gulf oil had paid an effective tax rate of only .81% on more than a billion dollars of 1968 income, while Mobil had paid 3.3%, and Atlantic Richfield had paid 1.2%. In his letter, Podell paid ironic tribute to the oil cartel's "passionate devotion to old- fashioned virtues, such as greed" to the point that the "oil industry makes the mafia look like a pushcart operation" while "through our various tax loopholes, professional tax evaders like the oil industry churn like panzers over foot soldiers." [fn 17]

In 1950, President Truman had declared that no tax loophole was "so inequitable" as the depletion allowance, and cited the example of one oilman who enjoyed a tax-free income of almost $5 million thanks to this provision. Truman claimed that he wanted to cut the depletion allowance to 15%, but Congressmen opposed to the high depletion allowance later claimed that he had done very little to carry out this pledge. Senators of the stripe of Humphrey, Douglas, Williams of Delaware and other offered amendments to reduce the depletion allowance to 15%, or to restrict the 27.5% to oil producers with incomes below a certain level, but these efforts were defeated in 1951, 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, and 1967. But in 1969 the issue was back in the form of a clamor for tax reform as the economy deteriorated, and a great deal of public heat was focused on the 27.5% for Rockefeller's oil cartel.

Congressman Charles Vanick of Ohio, who was profiling himself as a leading tax reformer, calculated that the oil depletion allowance had resulted in the loss of over $140 billion in tax revenues since the time it was instituted.

In response to this public hue and cry against the 27.5%, the public relations men of the oil cartel devised an elaborate public charade, with the depletion allowance to be cut slightly in order to turn off the public pressure and save the bulk of the write-off. In May of 1969 chairman Mills said that the 27.5% was a "symbolic" figure and could be slightly trimmed.

In July, the Ways and Means Committee reported out a measure to cut the depletion allowance to 20%. Congressman Vanick was happy to have something to show for his efforts: "We've really got a reform bill now," he told the press. Bush was going along with the 20%, but defended the principle of a substantial depletion allowance. According to Bush, "unrefuted" expert testimony had proven that a tax incentive was necessary for oil and gas exploration "due to the serious gas reserve shortages in this country." "Depletion," said Bush, "has become a symbol to some people and without examining the reasons for its existence or its fundamental importance to this country, some want to slug away at it." [fn 18]

On August 28, 1969 Congressman George Bush and Texas Senator John Tower flew to San Clemente to meet with President Nixon on this issue. Nixon had said during the 1968 campaign that he favored the 27.5% allowance, but he was willing to play ball with the oil cartel. Nixon, Bush and Tower were joined in San Clemente by Treasury Secretary David Kennedy, who was preparing to testify on oil taxes before the Russell Long's Senate Finance Committee. Tower and Bush instructed Nixon that the oil cartel was willing to accept some reduction of the depletion allowance, and that the Administration should merely state that it was willing to accept whatever the Congress approved. According to one historian of the oil industry, "This was the first step in preparation for the 'sting.' But there was one slight stumble before the con men got their signals worked out perfectly." [fn 19]

Kennedy got confused by the 20% figure that had been bandied about in the public debate. He told the Senate that while Nixon would prefer to keep the 27.5% figure, he was also willing to come down to 20%. This was more than the token concession that the oil cartel had been prepared to make. On October 7 the House passed the 20% figure by a vote of 394 to 30, with Bush voting for the cut. This entailed very little risk, since Senator Russell Long of the Senate Finance Committee, himself an oil producer through his participation in the Long family Win or Lose Corporation, was unwilling to reduce the depletion allowance below 23%. Nixon's deputy White House counsel Harry S. Dent wrote a letter to a county judge in Midland, Texas, of all places, which stated that Treasury Secretary Kennedy had been in error about Nixon seeing two alternatives, 27.5% or 20%, and that "the President will abide by the judgment of Congress." An aide of Senator Proxmire complained: "If the committee cuts back the depletion allowance by a modest amount--say to 23%--it may represent a low enough profile that Senate liberals will have a more difficult time cutting it further." The 23% figure was the one that was ultimately accepted, and the reduction in the depletion allowance thus accomplished was calculated to have increased the tax bill of the domestic US oil and gas companies by the trifling sum of $175 million per year. The issue had been defused, and the cartel could resume its normal operations, thanks in part to the stewardship of George Bush.

By the time of the House Ways and Means Committee vote of July, 1969, referenced above, the New York Times was already touting Bush as a likely Senate candidate, and Bush was indeed to be a candidate for the Senate from Texas in 1970. In Bush's campaign autobiography, he attempts to portray his decision to run for the Senate a second time as a decision assisted by former President Lyndon B. Johnson. That, we should say, is already bad enough. But in reality, the decisive encouragement, funds, and the promise of future advancement that moved Bush to attempt the leap into the Senate once again came from one Richard Milhous Nixon, and the money involved came from the circles of Nixon's CREEP.

Nixon, it will be recalled, had campaigned for Bush in 1964 and 1966, and would do so also in 1970. During these years, Bush's positions came to be almost perfectly aligned with the the line of the Imperial Presidency. And, thanks in large part to the workings of his father's Brown Brothers, Harriman networks--Prescott had been a fixture in the Eisenhower White House where Nixon worked, and in the Senate over which Nixon from time to time presided-- Bush became a Nixon ally and crony. Bush's Nixon connection, which pro-Bush propaganda tends to minimize, was in fact the key to Bush's career choices in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

Bush's intimate relations with Tricky Dick are best illustrated in Bush's close brush with the 1968 GOP vice-presidential nomination at the Miami convention of that year.

Richard Nixon came into Miami ahead of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and California Governor Ronald Reagan in the delegate count, but just before the convention Reagan, encouraged by his growing support, announced that he was switching from being a favorite son of California to the status of an all-out candidate for the presidential nomination. Reagan attempted to convince many conservative southern delegations to switch from Nixon to himself, since he was the purer ideological conservative and better loved in the south than the new (or old) Tricky Dick. Nixon's defense of his southern delegate base was spearheaded by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who kept the vast majority of the delegates in line, sometimes with the help of the unit rule. "Thurmond's point of reasoning with Southern delegates was that Nixon was the best conservative they could get and still win, and that he had obtained assurances from Nixon that no vice-presidential candidate intolerable to the South would be selected," wrote one observer of the Miami convention. [fn 20] With the southern conservatives guaranteed a veto power over the second spot on the ticket, Thurmond's efforts were successful; a leader of the Louisiana caucus was heard to remark: "It breaks my heart that we can't get behind a fine man like Governor Reagan, but Mr. Nixon is deserving of our choice, and he must receive it."

These were the circumstances in which Nixon, having won the nomination on the first ballot, met with his advisers amidst the grotesque architecture of the fifteenth floor of the Miami Plaza-Hilton in the early morning of August 9, 1968. The way Nixon tells the story in his memoirs, he had already pretty much settled on Gov. Spiro Agnew of Maryland, reasoning that "with George Wallace in the race, I could not hope to sweep the South. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, to win the entire rimland of the South--the border states--as well as the major states of the Midwest and West." Therefore, says Nixon, he let his advisors mention names without telling them what he had already largely decided. "The names most mentioned by those attending were the familiar ones: Romney, Reagan, John Lindsay, Percy, Mark Hatfield, John Tower, George Bush, John Volpe, Rockefeller, with only an occasional mention of Agnew, sometimes along with Governors John Love of Colorado and Daniel Evans of Washington." [fn 21] Nixon also says that he offered the vice presidency to his close friends Robert Finch and Rogers Morton, and then told his people that he wanted Agnew.

But this account disingenuously underestimates how close Bush came to the vice-presidency in 1968. According to a well-informed, but favorable, short biography of Bush published as he was about to take over the White House, "at the 1968 GOP convention that nominated Nixon for President, Bush was said to be on the four-name short list for vice president. He attributed that to the campaigning of his friends, but the seriousness of Nixon's consideration was widely attested. Certainly Nixon wanted to promote Bush in one way or another." [fn 22] Theodore H. White puts Bush on Nixon's conservative list along with Tower and Howard Baker, with a separate category of liberals and also "political eunuchs" like Agnew and Massachusetts Governor John Volpe. [fn 23] Jules Witcover thought the reason that Bush had been eliminated was that he "was too young, only a House member, and his selection would cause trouble with John Tower," who was also an aspirant. [fn 24] The accepted wisdom is that Nixon decided not to choose Bush because, after all, he was only a one -term Congressman. Most likely, Nixon was concerned with comparisons that could be drawn with Barry Goldwater's 1964 choice of New York Congressman Bill Miller for his running mate. Nixon feared that if he, only four years later, were to choose a Congressman without a national profile, the hostile press would compare him to Goldwater and brand him as yet another Republican loser.

Later in August, Bush traveled to Nixon's beachfront motel suite at Mission Bay, California to discuss campaign strategy. It was decided that Bush, Howard Baker, Rep. Clark MacGregor of Minnesota, and Gov. Volpe would all function as "surrogate candidates," campaigning and standing in for Nixon at engagements Nixon could not fill. And there is George, in a picture on the top of the front page of the New York Times of August 17, 1968, joining with the other three to slap a grinning and euphoric Nixon on the back and shake his hand before they went forth to the hustings.

Bush had no problems of his own with the 1968 election, since he was running unopposed -- a neat trick for a Republican in Houston, even taking the designer gerrymandering into account. Running unopposed seems to be Bush's idea of an ideal election. According to the Houston Chronicle, "Bush ha[d] become so politically formidable nobody cared to take him on," which should have become required reading for Gary Hart some years later. Bush had great hopes that he could help deliver the Texas electoral votes into the Nixon column. The GOP was counting on further open warfare between Yarborough and Connally, but these divisions proved to be insufficient to prevent Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, from carrying Texas as he went down to defeat. As one account of the 1968 vote puts it: Texas "is a large and exhausting state to campaign in, but here special emphasis was laid on 'surrogate candidates': notably Congressman George Bush, a fit-looking fellow of excellent birth who represented the space-town suburbs of Houston and was not opposed in his district--an indication of the strength of the Republican technocracy in Texas." (Perhaps, if technocracy is a synonym for "plumbers.") Winning a second term was no problem; Bush was, however mightily embarrassed by his inability to deliver Texas for Tricky Dick. "'I don't know what went wrong,' Bush muttered when interviewed in December. 'There was a hell of a lot of money spent,'" much of it coming from the predecessor organizations to the CREEP. [fn 25] As usual, Bush had a post festum theory of what had gone wrong: he blamed it on the black voters. In Houston, Bush found, there were 58,000 voters, and Nixon only got 800 of them. "You'd think," said Bush, "that there would have been more people just come in there and make a mistake!" [fn 26]

When in 1974 Bush briefly appeared to be the front-runner to be chosen for the vice presidency by the new President Gerald Ford, the Washington Post pointed out that although Bush was making a serious bid, he had almost no qualifications for the post. That criticism applied even more in 1968: for most people, Bush was a rather obscure Texas pol, and he had one lost statewide race previous to the election that got him into Congress. The fact that he made it into the final round at the Miami Hilton was another tribute to the network mobilizing power of Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers, Harriman, and Skull and Bones.

As the 1970 election approached, Nixon made Bush an attractive offer. If Bush were willing to give up his apparently safe Congressional seat and his place on the Ways and Means Committee, Nixon would be happy to help finance the senate race. If Bush won a Senate seat, he would be a front-runner to replace Spiro Agnew in the vice-presidential spot for 1972. If Bush were to lose the election, he would then be in line for an appointment to an important post in the Executive Branch, most likely a cabinet position. This deal was enough of an open secret to be discussed in the Texas press during the fall of 1970: at the time, the Houston Post quoted Bush in response to persistent Washington newspaper reports that Bush would replace Agnew on the 1972 ticket. Bush said that was "the most wildly speculative piece I've seen in a long time." "I hate to waste time talking about such wild speculation," Bush said in Austin. "I ought to be out there shaking hands with those people who stood in the rain to support me." [fn 27]

At this time Bush calculated that a second challenge to Yarborough would have a greater chance for success than his first attempt. True, 1970 was another off-year election in which Democrats running against the Republican Nixon White House would have a certain statistical advantage. 1970 was also the great year of the Silent Majority, Middle America backlash against the Vietnam war protesters. This was to be the year in which Pat Buchanan and William Safire of the Nixon White House would arm Agnew with a series of vulcanized, one-line zingers which the vice president would then take on the political low road: "pusillanimous pussyfooters," "vicars of vacillation," "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs," "nattering nabobs of negativism," "radic-libs" and "effete snobs," so went the alliterating Agnew sound bites. This was the Congressional election year that peaked in the near- insurrection against Nixon in San Jose, California on October 29, 1970, when Nixon, Governor Reagan, and Senator George Murphy came close to being lapidated by and angry crowd in an incident so perfect for Nixon's propaganda needs that perhaps only the most accomplished agents provocateurs could have carried it off. In such an atmosphere, Bush could see himself veering off sharply to hard-hat rhetoric, attacking Yarborough for being in league with violent and obscene demonstrators after Yarborough's endorsement of the very tame October, 1970 Moratorium demonstrations against the war in Washington.

In an obvious sleight of hand, Bush uses his campaign autobiography to make it look like it was LBJ, not Nixon, who urged him to run. He tells of how he had been the only Republican at Andrews Air Force Base to see LBJ off after Nixon was inaugurated. He tells us that he visited LBJ on his celebrated ranch on the banks of the Pedernales River, and was driven by the former President over dirt roads in LBJ's Lincoln Continental at speeds of 80 miles per hour. All a cliche, as is the scene where Bush asks LBJ whether he should try to unseat Yarborough. Bush has LBJ answer with the little story that every schoolboy knew in the late 1960's, and which LBJ must have recounted ten thousand times over his career, which was that he had served in both the House and the Senate, and that "the difference between being a member of the Senate and a member of the House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit." [fn 30] We should also recall that poor old LBJ in these declining years was a hated recluse, so desperate for companionship that he eagerly even welcomed the psychosexual analytic sessions of Doris Kearns of the Kennedy School of Government. Of course, Bush was angling to ingratiate himself wherever he could, of course LBJ still had some assets that might make a difference in a Texas senate race, and Bush would never be indifferent to marginal advantage. Part of it was George's instinctive ploy of trading on Prescott's old friendships: LBJ and Prescott had served together on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1950's. But Bush's account is ultimately, as is typical of him, a calculated deception. No, no, George: LBJ resented Yarborough for having opposed him on Vietnam, but LBJ was a has-been in 1970, and it was Tricky Dick who told you to make your senate bid in 1970, and who sweetened the pot with big bucks and the promise of prestigious posts if you failed.

In September, the New York Times reported that Nixon was actively recruiting Republican candidates for the Senate. "Implies He Will Participate in Their Campaigns and Offer Jobs to Losers"; "Financial Aid is Hinted," said the subtitles [fn 28]. It was more than hinted, and the article listed George Bush as first on the list. As it turned out, Bush's senate race was the single most important focus of Nixon's efforts in the entire country, with both the President and Agnew actively engaged on the ground. Bush would receive money from a Nixon slush fund called the "Townhouse" fund, an operation in the CREEP orbit. Bush was also the recipient of the largesse of W. Clement Stone, a Chicago insurance tycoon who had donated heavily to Nixon's 1968 campaign. Bush's friend Tower was the chairman of the GOP Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Bush's former campaign aide, Jim Allison, was now the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Bush himself was ensconced in the coils of the GOP fund-raising bureaucracy. When in May, 1969, Nixon's crony Robert Finch, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare met with members of the Republican Boosters Club, 1969, Bush was with him, along with Tower, Rogers Morton, and Congressman Bob Wilson of California. The Boosters alone were estimated to be good for about $1 million in funding for GOP candidates in 1970. [fn 29]

By December of 1969 it was clear to all that Bush would get almost all of the cash in the Texas GOP coffers, and that Eggers, the party's candidate for governor, would get short shrift indeed. On December 29 the Houston Chronicle front page opined: "GOP Money To Back Bush, Not Eggers." The Democratic Senate candidate would later accuse Nixon's crowd of "trying to buy" the Senate election for Bush: "Washington has been shoveling so much money into the George Bush campaign that now other Republican candidates around the country are demanding an accounting," said Bush's opponent. [fn 31]

But that opponent was Lloyd Bentsen, not Ralph Yarborough. All calculations about the 1970 Senate race had been upset when, at a relatively late hour, Bentsen, urged on by John Connally, announced his candidacy in the Democratic primary. Yarborough, busy with his work as Chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, started his campaigning late. Bentsen's pitch was to attack anti-war protesters and radicals, portraying Yarborough as being a ringleader of the extremists.

Yarborough had lost some of his vim over the years since 1964, and had veered into support for more ecological legislation and even for some of the anti-human "population planning" measures that Bush and his circles had been proposing. But he fought back gamely against Bentsen. When Bentsen boasted of having done a lot for the Chicanos of the Rio Grande Valley, Yarborough countered: "What has Lloyd Bentsen ever done for the valley? The valley is not for sale. You can't buy people. I never heard of him doing anything for migrant labor. All I ever heard about was his father working these wetbacks. All I ever heard was them exploiting wetbacks," said Yarborough. When Bentsen boasted of his record of experience, Yarborough counter-attacked: "The only experience that my opponents have had is in representing the financial interest of big business. They have both shown marked insensitivity to the needs of the average citizen of our state."

But, on May 2, Bentsen defeated Yarborough, and an era came to an end in Texas politics. Bush's 10 to 1 win in his own primary over his old rival from 1964, Robert Morris, was scant consolation. Whereas it had been clear how Bush would have run against Yarborough, it was not at all clear how he could differentiate himself from Bentsen. Indeed, to many people the two seemed to be twins: each was a plutocrat oilman from Houston, each one was aggressively Anglo-Saxon, each one had been in the House of Representatives, each one flaunted a record as a World War II airman. In fact, all Bentsen needed to do for the rest of the race was to appear plausible and polite, and let the overwhelming Democratic advantage in registered voters, especially in the yellow-dog Democrat rural areas, do his work for him. This Bentsen posture was punctuated from time to time by appeals to conservatives who thought that Bush was too liberal for their tastes.

Bush hoped for a time that his slick television packaging could save him. His man Harry Treleaven was once more brought in. Bush paid more than half a million dollars, a tidy sum at that time, to Glenn Advertising for a series of Kennedyesque "natural look" campaign spots. Soon Bush was cavorting on the tube in all of his arid vapidity, jogging across the street, trotting down the steps, bounding around Washington and playing touch football, always filled with youth, vigor, action, and thryoxin. The Plain Folks praised Bush as "Just fantastic" in these spots. Suffering the voters to come unto him, Bush responded to all comers that he "understands," with the shot fading out before he could say what it was he understood or what he might propose to do. [fn 32] "Sure, it's tough to be up against the machine, the big boys," said the Skull and Bones candidate in these spots; Bush actually had more money to spend than even the well-heeled Bentsen. The unifying slogan for imparting the proper spin to Bush was "He can do more." "He can do more" had problems that were evident even to some of the 1970 Bushmen: "A few in the Bush camp questioned that general approach because once advertising programs are set into motion they are extremely difficult to change and there was the concern that if Nixon should be unpopular at campaign's end, the theme line would become, 'He can do more for Nixon,' with obvious downsides. [fn 33] Although Bentsen's spots were said to give him "all the animation of a cadaver," he was more substantive than Bush, and he was moving ahead.

Were there issues that could help George? His ads put his opposition to school busing to achieve racial balance at the top of the list, but this wedge-mongering got him nowhere. Because of his servility to Nixon, Bush had to support the buzz-word of a "guaranteed annual income," which was the label under which Nixon was marketing the workfare slave labor program already described, but to many in Texas that sounded like a new give-away, and Bentsen was quick to take advantage. Bush bragged that he had been one of the original sponsors of the bill that had just semi-privatized the US Post Office Department as the Postal Service. Bush came on as a "fiscal conservative," but this also was of little help against Bentsen.

In an interview on women's issues, Bush first joked that there really was no consensus among women -- "the concept of a women's movement is unreal--you can't get two women to agree on anything." On abortion he commented: "I realize this is a politically sensitive area. But I believe in a woman's right to chose. It should be an individual matter. I think ultimately it will be a constitutional question. I don't favor a federal abortion law as such." After 1980, for those who choose to believe him, this changed to strong opposition to abortion.

One issue that helped Bentsen was "inflationary recession," also called stagflation. "I think [the President] should use the moral persuasion of the White House to help keep wages and prices within reason, instead of following policies which have put nearly 2 million Americans out of jobs without stopping inflation," said Bentsen. Bush was stuck with parroting the lines of the 1970 model Nixon, which was about ready for a closeout.

Could Nixon and Agnew help Bush? Agnew's message fell flat in Texas, since he knew it was too dangerous to try to get to the right of Bentsen and attack him from there. Instead, Agnew went through the following contortion: a vote for Bentsen, Agnew told audiences in Lubbock and Amarillo, "is a vote to keep William Fulbright chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee," and that was not what "Texans want at all." Agnew tried to put Bentsen in the same boat with "radical liberals" like Yarborough, Fulbright, McGovern, and Kennedy. Bentsen invited Agnew to move on to Arkansas and fight it out with Fulbright, and that was that.

Could Nixon himself help Bush? Nixon did campaign in the state. Bentsen then told a group of "Anglo-American" businessmen: Texans want "a man who can stand alone without being propped up by the White House."

In the end Bentsen defeated Bush by a vote of 1,197,726 to Bush's 1,035,794, about 53% to 47%. The official Bushman explanation was that there were two proposed amendments to the Texas constitution on the ballot, one to allow saloons, and one to allow all undeveloped land to be taxed at the same rate as farmland. According to Bushman apologetics, these two propositions attracted so much interest among "yellow dog" rural conservatives that 300,000 extra voters came out, and this gave Bentsen his critical margin of victory. There was also speculation that Nixon and Agnew had attracted so much attention that more voters had come out, but many of these were Bentsen supporters. On the night of the election, Bush said that he "felt like General Custer. They asked him why he had lost and he said "There were too many Indians.' All I can say at this point is that there were too many Democrats," said the fresh two-time loser. Bentsen suggested that it was time for Bush to be appointed to a high position in the government. [fn 34]

Bush's other consolation was a telegram dated November 5, 1970:

FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE I KNOW THE DISAPPOINTMENT THAT YOU AND YOUR FAMILY MUST FEEL AT THIS TIME. I AM SURE, HOWEVER, THAT YOU WILL NOT ALLOW THIS DEFEAT TO DISCOURAGE YOU IN YOUR EFFORTS TO CONTINUE TO PROVIDE LEADERSHIP FOR OUR PARTY AND THE NATION.

RICHARD NIXON

This was Nixon's euphemistic way of reassuring Bush that they still had a deal. [fn 35]

_______________

Notes:

1. See Fitzhugh Green, George Bush, p. 92, and Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 90.

2. Stevens' remarks were part of a Public Broadcasting System "Frontline" documentary program entitled "Campaign: The Choice," of November 24, 1988. Cited by Fitzhugh Green, p. 91.

3. For the chronicles of the Harris County GOP, see local press articles available on microfiche at the Texas Historical Society in Houston.

4. "George Bush vs. Observer Editor," The Texas Observer, July 23, 1965.

5. Texas Observer, October 14, 1966.

6. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, p. 91.

7. Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President 1968 (New York, 1968), pp. 42-45.

8. See Knaggs, Two-Party Texas, p. 111.

9. Congressional Quarterly, President Bush: The Challenge Ahead ( Washington, 1989), p. 94.

10. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," in Texas Monthly, June 1983.

11. New York Times, January 24, 1968.

12. New York Times, May 7, 1968.

13. The developments just summarized had been accurately forecast by economist Lyndon H. LaRouche in 1957.

14. The following account of Bush's Congressional record on population and related is issues is derived from the ground-breaking research of Kathleen Klenetsky, to whom the authors are pleased to acknowledge their indebtedness. The material that follows incorporates sections of Kathleen Klenetsky, "Bush Backed Nazi 'Race Science,'" Executive Intelligence Review, May 3, 1991 and New Federalist, April 29, 1991.

15. New York Times, April 11, 1968.

16. Bush, Looking Forward, pp. 92-93, and Green, George Bush, pp. 106- 107.

17. See Robert Sherrill, The Oil Follies of 1970-1980 (New York, 1983) , pp. 61-65.

18. New York Times, July 22, 1969.

19. Sherrill, p. 64.

20. Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1968), pp. 72-73.

21. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, p. 312.

22. Congressional Quarterly, President Bush (Washington, 1989), p. 94.

23. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968 (New York, 1969), p. 251.

24. Jules Witcover, The Resurrection of Richard Nixon, p. 352.

25. Lewis Chester et al., The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (London: Deutch, 1969), p. 622.

26. Chester et al., p. 763.

27. Houston Post, October 29, 1970.

28. New York Times, May 13, 1969.

29. New York Times, Sept, 27, 1969.

30. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, pp. 98-103.

31. Houston Chronicle, October 6, 1970.

32. See "Tubing with Lloyd/George," The Texas Observer, October 30, 1970.

33. Knaggs, Two-Party Texas, p. 148.

34. Houston Post, November 5, 1970.

35. Bush and Gold, Looking Forward, page 102.