George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Jul 08, 2014 6:54 am

GEORGE BUSH: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY
by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

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Table of Contents:

Introduction: American Caligula
The House of Bush: Born in a Bank
The Hitler Project
Race Hygiene: Three Bush Family Alliances
The Center of Power is in Washington
Poppy and Mommy
Bush in World War II
Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale
The Permian Basin Gang and The Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy Assassination
Bush Challenges Yarborough for the Senate
Rubbers Goes to Congress
United Nations Ambassador, Kissinger Clone
Chairman George in Watergate
Bush Attempts the Vice Presidency
Bush in Beijing
CIA Director
Campaign 1980
The Attempted Coup D-Etat of March 30, 1981
Iran-Contra
The Leveraged Buyout Mob
The Phony War on Drugs
Omaha
Bush Takes the Presidency
The End of History
The New World Order
Thyroid Storm
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

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INTRODUCTION: American Caligula

The thesis of this book is simple: if George Bush were to be re-elected in November 1992 for a second term as the president of the United States, this country and the rest of the world would face a catastrophe of gigantic proportions.

The necessity of writing this book became overwhelming in the minds of the authors in the wake of the ghastly slaughter of the Iraq war of January-February 1991. That war was an act of savage and premeditated genocide on the part of Bush, undertaken in connivance with a clique in London which has, in its historical continuity, represented both the worst enemy of the long-term interests of the American people, and the most implacable adversary of the progress of the human species.

The authors observed George Bush very carefully as the Gulf crisis and the war unfolded, and had no doubt that his enraged public outbursts constituted real psychotic episodes, indicative of a deranged mental state that was full of ominous portent for humanity. The authors were also horrified by the degree to which their fellow citizens willfully ignored the shocking reality of these public fits. A majority of the American people proved more than willing to lend its support to a despicable enterprise of killing.

By their role-call votes of January 12, 1991, the Senate and the House of Representatives gave their authorization for Bush's planned and imminent war measures to restore the Emir of Kuwait, who owns and holds chattel slaves. That vote was a crime against God's justice.

This book is part of an attempt to help them to survive anyway, both for the sake of the world and for their own sake. It is intended as a contribution to a process of education that might still save the American people from the awesome destruction of a second Bush presidency. It is further intended as a warning to all citizens that if they fail to deny Bush a second term, they will deserve what they get after 1993.

As this book goes to press in the autumn of 1991, public awareness of the long-term depression of the American economy is rapidly growing. If Bush were re-elected, he would view himself as beyond the reach of the voters and the popular will; with the federal deficit rising beyond a billion dollars a day, a second Bush administration would dictate such crushing austerity as to bring the country to the brink of civil war. Some harbingers of what might be coming are described in the last chapter of this book. Our goal has been to assemble as much of the truth about Bush as possible within the time constraints imposed by the 1992 election. Time and resources have not permitted us meticulous attention to certain matters of detail; we can say, nevertheless, that both our commitment to the truth and our final product are better than anything anyone else has been able to muster, including news organizations and intelligence agencies with capabilities that far surpass our own.

How can we hope to fight the mighty Bush power cartel with a biography, a mere book? We have no illusions of easy success, but we were encouraged in our work by the hope that a biography might stimulate opposition to Bush and his policies. It will certainly, if only by virtue of its novelty, pose a new set of problems to those seeking to get Bush reelected. For although Bush is now what journalists call a world leader, no accurate account on his actual career exists in the public domain.

The volume which we submit herewith to the court of world public opinion is, to the best of our knowledge, the first and only book- length, unauthorized biography of George Bush. It is the first approximation of the truth about his life. This is the first biography worthy of the name, a fact that says a great deal about the sinister power and obsessive secrecy of this personage. None of the other self-announced biographies (including Bush's campaign autobiography) can be taken seriously; each of these books is a pastiche of lies, distortions and banalities that run the gamut from campaign panegyric to the Goebbels Big Lie to fake but edifying stories for credulous children. Almost without exception, the available Bush literature is worthless.

But with Bush, this is only the beginning of the problem. Bush's family pedigree establishes him as a network asset of Brown Brothers, Harriman, one of the most powerful political forces in the United States during much of the twentieth century, and for many years the largest private bank in the world. It suffices in this context to think of Averell Harriman negotiating during World War II in the name of the United States with Churchill and Stalin, or of the role of Brown Brothers, Harriman partner Robert Lovett in guiding John F. Kennedy's choice of his cabinet, to begin to see the implications of Senator Prescott Bush's post as managing partner of this bank. Brown Brothers, Harriman networks pervade government and the mass media. Again and again in the course of the following pages we will see stories embarrassing to George Bush refused publication, documents embarrassing to Bush suspiciously disappear, and witnesses inculpatory to Bush be overtaken by mysterious and conveniently timed deaths. The few relevant facts which have found their way here and there into the public domain have necessarily been filtered by this gigantic apparatus. This problem has been compounded by the corruption and servility of authors, journalists, news executives and publishers who have functioned more and more as kept advocates for Bush.

George Bush wants key aspects of his life to remain covert. At the same time, he senses that his need for cover-up is a vulnerability. The need to protect this weak flank accounts for the steady stream of fake biographical and historical material concerning George, as well as the spin given to many studies of recent history that may never mention George directly. Over the past several months, we have seen a new book about Watergate that pretends to tell the public something new by fingering Al Haig as Deep Throat, but ignoring the central role of George Bush and his business partners in the Watergate affair. We have a new book by Lt. Col. Oliver North which alleges that Reagan knew everything about the Iran-contra affair, but that George Bush was not part of North's chain of command. The latter point merely paraphrases Bush's own lame excuse that he was "out of the loop" during all those illegal transactions. During the hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to become Director of Central Intelligence, nobody had anything new to add about the role of George Bush, the boss of the National Security Council's Special Situation Group crisis staff that was a command center for the whole affair. These charades are peddled to a very credulous public by operatives whose task goes beyond mere damage control to mind control-- the "MK" in the government's MK Ultra operation. Part of the free ride enjoyed by George Bush during the 1988 elections is reflected in the fact that at no point in the campaign was there any serious effort by any of the so-called news organizations to provide the public with something approaching an accurate and complete account of his political career. At least two biographies of Dukakis appeared which, although hardly critical, were not uniformly laudatory either. But in the case of Bush, all the public could turn to was Bush's old 1980 campaign biography and a newer campaign autobiography, both of them a tissue of lies.

Early in the course of our research for the present volume it became apparent that all books and most longer articles dealing with the life of George Bush had been generated from a single print-out of thoroughly sanitized, approved and canonically admitted "facts" about Bush and his family. We learned that during 1979-1980, Bush aide Pete Roussel attempted to recruit biographers to prepare a life of Bush based on a collection of press releases, news summaries, and similar pre-digested material. Most biographical writing about Bush consists merely of the points from this printout, strung out chronologically and made into a narrative through the interpretation of comments, anecdotes, embellishments, or special stylistic devices. The canonical Bush-approved printout is readily identified. One dead giveaway that became a joke among the authors of the present study was the inevitability with which the hacks out to cover up the substance of Bush's life refer to a 1947 red Studebaker which George Bush allegedly drove into Odessa, Texas in 1948. This is the sort of detail with which such hacks attempt to humanize their subject, in the same way that horseshoes, pork rinds, and country and western music have been introduced into Bush's real life in a deliberate and deceptive attempt to humanize his image. It has been our experience that any text that features a reference to Bush's red Studebaker has probably been derived from Bush's list of approved facts, and is therefore practically worthless for serious research into Bush's life. We therefore assign such texts to the "red Studebaker school" of cover-up and falsification.

Some examples? This is from Bush's campaign autobiography, Looking Forward, ghost-written by his aide Vic Gold:

Heading into Texas in my Studebaker, all I knew about the state's landscape was what I'd seen from the cockpit of a Vultee Vibrator during my training days in the Navy. [fn 1]

There is the same moment as recaptured by Bush's crony Fitzhugh Green, a friend of the Malthusian financier Russell Train, in his George Bush: An Intimate Portrait, published after Bush had won the presidency:

He [Bush] gassed up his 1948 Studebaker, arranged for his wife and son to follow, and headed for Odessa, Texas. [fn 2]

Harry Hurt III wrote the following lines in a 1983 Texas magazine article that was even decorated with a drawing of what apparently is supposed to be a Studebaker, but which does not look like a Studebaker of that vintage at all:

When George Herbert Walker Bush drove his battered red Studebaker into Odessa in the summer of 1948, the town's population, though constantly increasing with newly-arrived oil field hands, was still under 30,000. [fn 3]

We see that Harry Hurt has more imagination than many Bush biographers, and his article does provide a few useful facts. More degraded is the version offered by Richard Ben Kramer, whose biography of Bush is expected to be published during 1992, and is thus intended to serve as the campaign biography to pave the way for Bush's second election victory. God help us. Cramer was given the unenviable task of breathing life once more into the same tired old printout. But the very fact that the Bush team feels that they require another biography indicates that they still feel that they have a potential vulnerability here. Cramer has attempted to solve his problem by recasting the same old garbage into a frenetic and hyperkinetic, we would almost say hyperthyroid style. The following is from an excerpt of this forthcoming book that was published in Esquire in June, 1991:

In June, after the College World Series and graduation day in New Haven, Poppy packed up his new red Studebaker (a graduation gift from Pres), and started driving south. [fn 4]

Was that Studebaker shiny and new, or old and battered? Perhaps the printout is not specific on this point; in any case, as we see, our authorities diverge.

Joe Hyams's 1991 romance of Bush at war, the Flight of the Avenger, does not include the obligatory "red Studebaker" reference, but this is more than compensated by the most elaborate fawning over other details of our hero's war service [fn 5].

The publication of Flight of the Avenger, which concentrates on an heroic retelling of Bush's war record, and ignores all evidence that might tend to puncture this myth, was timed to coincide with the Gulf crisis and Bush's war with Iraq. This is a vile tract written with the open assistance of Bush, Barbara Bush, and the White House staff. Flight of the Avenger recalls the practice of totalitarian states according to which a war waged by the regime should be accompanied by propaganda which depicts the regime's strong man in an appropriately martial posture. In any case, this book deals with Bush's life up to the end of World War II; we never reach Odessa.

Only one of the full-length accounts produced by the Bush propaganda machine about their candidate neglects the red Studebaker story. This is Nicholas King's George Bush: A Biography, the first book-length version of Bush's life, produced as a result of Pete Roussel's efforts for the 1980 campaign. Nicholas King had served as Bush's spokesman when he was US Ambassador to the United Nations. King admits at the beginning of his book that he can be impugned for writing a work of the most transparent apologetics: "In retrospect," he says in his preface, "this book may seem open to the charge of puffery, for the view of its subject is favorable all around." [fn 6] Indeed.

Books about Barbara Bush slavishly rehearse the same details from the same printout. Here is the relevant excerpt from the warmly admiring Simply Barbara Bush: A Portrait of America's Candid First Lady, written by Donnie Radcliffe and published after Bush's 1988 election victory:

With $3,000 left over after he graduated in June, 1948, he headed for Texas in the 1947 red Studebaker his father had given him for graduation after George's car died on the highway. [fn 7]

Even foreign journalists attempting to inform their publics about conditions in the United States have fallen victim to the same old Bush printout. The German author and reporter Rainer Bonhorst, the former Washington correspondent of the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, in his 1988 book George Bush: Der neue Mann im Weissen Haus, named a chapter of this Bush political biography "Im roten Studebaker nach Texas." Bonhorst writes as follows:

Dann war da noch die Sache mit dem roten Studebaker. Sie spielt--gleich nach dem Weltkriegseinsatz-- eine zweite zentrale Rolle in der Lebensgeschichte des George Bush. Es ist die Geschichte seiner Rebellion. Der Schritt, der aus dem steifen Neuenglaender einen laessigen Texaner machte, aus dem reich geborenen Patriziersohn einen Selfmademann. [...] Also packten George und Barbara Bush, 24 und 23 Jahre alt, er gerade mit dem Studium fertig, sie vorzeitigaus ihrer Universitaet ausgeschieden und seit ein paar Monaten Mutter, ihr Baby und ihre Koffer und luden sie auf ihr knallrotes Studebaker-Coupe. "Ein supermoderner, schnittiger Wagen, allerdings etwas laut fuer den neuenglischen Geschmack," erinnerten sich die Bushs spaeter. Aber schliesslich ging es ja ab nach Texas. [fn 8]

We see that Bonhorst is acutely aware of the symbolic importance assumed by the red Studebaker in these hagiographic accounts of Bush's life.

What is finally the truth of the matter? There is good reason to believe that George Bush did not first come to Odessa, Texas, in a red Studebaker. One knowledgeable source is the well-known Texas oil man and Bush campaign contributor Oscar Wyatt of Houston. In a recent letter to the Texas Monthly, Wyatt specifies that "when people speak of Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry, it should be noted that he rode down to Texas on Dresser's private aircraft. He was accompanied by his father, who at that time was one of the directors of Dresser Industries." "I hate it when people make statements about Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry. It just didn't happen that way," writes Mr. Wyatt.

[fn 9] Dresser was a Harriman company, and Bush got his start working for one of its subsidiaries. One history of Dresser Industries contains a photograph of George Bush with his parents, wife, and infant son "in front of a Dresser company airplane in West Texas." [fn 10] Can this be a photo of Bush's arrival in Odessa during the summer of 1948? In any case, this most cherished myth of the Bush biographers is very much open to doubt.

Fawning biographies of bloodthirsty tyrants are nothing new in world literature. The red Studebaker school goes back a long way; these writers of today can be usefully compared with a certain Gaius Velleius Paterculus, who lived in the Roman Empire under the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and who thus an approximate contemporary of Jesus Christ. Velleius Paterculus was an historian and biographer who is known today, if at all, for his biographical notes on the Emperor Tiberius, which are contained within Paterculus's history of Rome from the origins down to his own time.

Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, gave a very favorable treatment of Julius Caesar, and became fulsome when he came to write of Augustus. But the worst excesses of flattery came in Velleius Paterculus's treatment of Tiberius himself. Here is part of what he writes about that tyrannical ruler:

Of the transactions of the last sixteen years, which have passed in the view, and are fresh in the memory of all, who shall presume to give a full account? [...] credit has been restored to mercantile affairs, sedition has been banished from the forum, corruption from the Campus Martius, and discord from the senate- house; justice, equity and industry, which had long lain buried in neglect, have been revived in the state; authority has been given to the magistrates, majesty to the senate, and solemnity to the courts of justice; the bloody riots in the theater have been suppressed, and all men have had either a desire excited in them, or a necessity imposed on them, of acting with integrity. Virtuous acts are honored, wicked deeds are punished. The humble respects the powerful, without dreading him; the powerful takes precedence of the humble without condemning him. When were provisions more moderate in price? When were the blessings of peace more abundant? Augustan peace, diffused over all the regions of the east and the west, and all that lies between the south and the north, preserves every corner of the world free from all dread of predatory molestation. Fortuitous losses, not only of individuals, but of cities, the munificence of the prince is ready to relieve. The cities of Asia have been repaired; the provinces have been secured from the oppression of their governors. Honor promptly rewards the deserving, and the punishment of the guilty, if slow, is certain. Interest gives place to justice, solicitation to merit. For the best of princes teaches his countrymen to act rightly by his own practice; and while he is the greatest in power, he is still greater in example.

Having exhibited a general view of the administration of Tiberius Caesar, let us now enumerate a few particulars respecting it. [...] How formidable a war, excited by the Gallic chief Sacrovir and Julius Florius, did he suppress, and with such amazing expedition and energy, that the Roman people learned that they were conquerors, before they knew that they were at war, and the news of the victory outstripped the news of the danger! The African war too, perilous as it was, and daily increasing in strength, was quickly terminated under his auspices and direction. [...] What structures has he erected in his own name, and those of his family! With what dutiful munificence, even exceeding belief, is he building a temple to his father! [...] With what perfect ease to the public does he manage the raising of troops, a business of constant and extreme apprehension, without the consternation attendant on a levy! [ fn 11 ]

All of this was written in praise of the regime that crucified Jesus Christ, and one of the worst genocidal tyrannies in the history of the world. Paterculus, we must sadly conclude, was a sycophant of the Tiberius administration. Some of his themes are close parallels to the propaganda of today's Bush machine.

In addition to feeding the personality cult of Tiberius, Paterculus also lavished praise on Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the Prefect of the Pretorian Guard and for many years Tiberius's number one favorite, second in command, and likely successor. In many respects Sejanus was not unlike James Baker III under the Bush regime. While Tiberius spent all of his time in seclusion on his island of Capri near Naples, Sejanus assumed day to day control of the vast empire and its 100,000,000 subjects. Paterculus wrote of Sejanus that he was "a most excellent coadjutor in all the toils of government...a man of pleasing gravity, and of unaffected cheerfulness...assuming nothing to himself." That was the voice of the red Studebaker school in about 30 AD. Paterculus should have limited his fawning to Tiberius himself; somewhat later the emperor, suspecting a coup plot, condemned Sejanus and had him torn limb from limb in gruesome retribution.

But why bring up Rome? Some readers, and not just registered Republicans, may be scandalized by the things that truth obliges us to record about a sitting president of the United States. Are we not disrespectful to this high office? No. One of the reasons for glancing back at Imperial Rome is to remind ourselves that in times of moral and cultural degradation like our own, rulers of great evil have inflicted incalculable suffering on humanity. In our modern time of war and depression, this is once again the case. If Caligula was possible then, who could claim that the America of the New World Order should be exempt? Let us therefore tarry for a moment with these old Romans, because they can show us much about ourselves.

In order to find Roman writers who tell us anything reliable about the first dozen emperors, we must wait until the infamous Julio-Claudian dynasty of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero and the rest had entirely passed from the scene, to be supplanted by new ruling houses. Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37 AD; Caligula, his designated successor, from 37 to 41 AD; and Nero from 54 to 68 AD. But the first accurate account of the crimes of some of these emperors comes from Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a very high Roman official, and it appeared about 115-117 AD, late in the reign of the emperor Trajan. It was feasible for Tacitus to write and publish a more realistic account of the Julio- Claudian emperors because one of the constant themes of Trajan's propaganda was to glorify himself as an enlightened emperor through comparison with the earlier series of bloody tyrants.

Tacitus is important because he manages to convey something of how the destructiveness of these emperors in their personal lives correlated with their mass executions and their genocidal economic policies. Tacitus was familiar with the machinery of Roman Imperial power: he was of senatorial rank, served as consul in Italy in 97 AD, and was the governor of the important province of western Anatolia (today's Turkey) which the Romans referred to simply as Asia. Tacitus writes of Tiberius:

...his criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types of perversions were invented. Slaves were charged to locate and procure his requirements. [...] It was like the sack of a captured city.

Tiberius was able to dominate the legislative branch of his government, the senate, by subversion and terror:

It was, indeed, a horrible feature of this period that leading senators became informers even on trivial matters-- some openly, many secretly. Friends and relatives were as suspect as strangers, old stories as damaging as new. In the Main Square, at a dinner-party, a remark on any subject might mean prosecution. Everyone competed for priority in marking down the victim. Sometimes this was self-defense, but mostly it was a sort of contagion, like an epidemic. [...] I realize that many writers omit numerous trials and condemnations, bored by repetition or afraid that catalogues they themselves have found over-long and dismal may equally depress their readers. But numerous unrecorded incidents, which have come to my attention, ought to be known.

[...] Even women were in danger. They could not be charged with aiming at supreme power. So they were charged with weeping: one old lady was executed for lamenting her son's death. The senate decided this case. [...] In the same year the high price of corn nearly caused riots. [...]

Frenzied with bloodshed, [Tiberius] now ordered the execution of all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus. It was a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence or obscurity, there they lay, strewn about -- or in heaps. Relative and friends were forbidden to stand by or lament them, or even gaze for long. Guards surrounded them, spying on their sorrow, and escorted the rotting bodies until, dragged to the Tiber, they floated away or grounded -- with none to cremate or touch them. Terror had paralyzed human sympathy. The rising surge of brutality drove compassion away. [fn 12]

This is the same Tiberius administration so extravagantly praised by Velleius Paterculus.

The other Latin author who writes about these Julio-Claudian emperors was Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, who is far less able than Tacitus to fathom the great issues of imperial policy which these degenerate emperors influenced. Suetonius is a tabloid version of Tacitus, and he concentrates on the horrors and perversions of the emperors in their personal sphere, as well as the bloodbaths they ordered. Since many readers over the centuries have found these chronicles highly accessible, Suetonius has always been widely read.

Because of lacunae in the manuscripts of Tacitus's work that have come down to us, much of what we know of the rule of Caligula (Gaius Caesar, in power from 37 to 41 AD) derives from Suetonius's book known as The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. The character and administration of Caligula present some striking parallels with the subject of the present book.

As a stoic, Caligula was a great admirer of his own "immovable rigor." His motto was "Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody." He made no secret of his bloodthirsty vindictiveness. Caligula was a fan of the green team in the Roman arena, and when the crowd applauded a charioteer who wore a different color, Caligula cried out, "I wish the Roman people had but a single neck." At one of his state dinners Caligula burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, and when a consul asked him what was so funny, he replied that it was the thought that as emperor Caligula had the power to have the throats of the top officials cut at any time he chose. Caligula carried this same attitude into his personal life: whenever he kissed or caressed the neck of his wife or one of his mistresses, he liked to remark: "Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word."

Above all, Caligula was vindictive. After his death, two notebooks were found among his personal papers, one labelled "The Sword" and the other labelled "The Dagger." These were lists of the persons he had proscribed and liquidated, and were the forerunners of the enemies' lists and discrediting committee of today. Suetonius frankly calls Caligula "a monster," and speculates on the psychological roots of his criminal disposition: "I think I may attribute to mental weakness the existence of two exactly opposite faults in the same person, extreme assurance and, on the other hand, excessive timorousness." Caligula was "full of threats" against "the barbarians," but at the same time prone to precipitous retreats and flights of panic. Caligula worked on his "body language" by "practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror."

Caligula built an extension of his palace to connect with the Temple of Castor and Pollux, and often went there to exhibit himself as an object of public worship, delighting in being hailed as "Jupiter Latiaris" by the populace. Later Caligula would officially open temples in his own name. Caligula was brutal in his intimidation of the senate, whose members he subjected to open humiliations and covert attacks; many senators were "secretly put to death." "He often inveighed against all the Senators alike." "He treated the other orders with like insolence and cruelty." Suetonius recites whole catalogues of "special instances of his innate brutality" towards persons of all walks of life. He enjoyed inflicting torture, and revelled in liquidating political opponents or those who had insulted or snubbed him in some way. He had a taste for capital executions as the perfect backdrop for parties and banquets. Caligula also did everything he could to sully and denigrate the memory of the great men of past epochs, so that their fame could not eclipse his own: "He assailed mankind of almost every epoch with no less envy and malice than insolence and cruelty. He threw down the statues of famous men...," and tried to destroy all the texts of Homer.

Caligula "respected neither his own chastity nor that of any one else." He was reckless in his extravagance, and soon emptied out the imperial treasury of all the funds that old Tiberius had squirreled away there. After that, Caligula tried to replenish his coffers through a system of spies, false accusations, property seizures, and public auctions. He also "levied new and unheard- of taxes," to the point that "no class of commodities was exempt from some kind of tax or other." Caligula taxed all foodstuffs, took a fortieth of the award in any lawsuit, an eighth of the daily wages of the porters, and demanded that the prostitutes pay him a daily fee equal to the average price charged to each individual customer. It is rumored that this part of Caligula's career is under study by those planning George Bush's second term. Caligula also opened a brothel in his palace as an additional source of income, which may prefigure today's White House staff. Among Caligula's more singular hobbies Suetonius includes his love of rolling and wallowing in piles of gold coins.

Caligula kept his wife, Caesonia (described by Suetonius as "neither beautiful nor young") with him until the very end. But his greatest devotion was to his horse, whom he made consul of the Roman state. Ultimately Caligula fell victim to a conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard, led by the tribune Gaius Chaerea, a man whom Caligula had taken special delight in humiliating. [fn 13]

The authors of the present study are convinced that these references to the depravity of the Roman Emperors, and to the records of that depravity provided by such authors as Tacitus and Suetonius, are directly germane to our present task of following the career of a member of the senatorial class of the Anglo-American elite through the various stages of his formation, apprenticeship, intrigues, and ultimate ascent to imperial power. The Roman Imperial model is germane because the American ruling elite of today is far closer to the world of Tiberius and Caligula than it is to the world of the American Revolution or the Constitutional Convention of 1789. The leitmotiv of modern American presidential politics is unquestionably an imperial theme, most blatantly expressed by Bush in his slogan for 1990, "The New World Order," and for 1991, the "pax universalis." The central project of the Bush presidency is the creation and consolidation of a single, universal Anglo-American (or Anglo-Saxon) empire very directly modelled on the various phases of the Roman Empire.

There is one other aspect of the biographical-historical method of the Graeco-Roman world which we have sought to borrow. Ever since Thucydides composed his monumental work on the Peloponnesian war, those who have sought to imitate his style --with the Roman historian Titus Livius prominent among them-- have employed the device of attributing long speeches to historical personages, even when it appears very unlikely that such lengthy orations could have been made by the protagonists at the time. This has nothing to do with the synthetic dialogue of current American political writing, which attempts to present historical events as a series of trivial and banal soap-opera exchanges which carry on for such interminable lengths as to suggest that the authors are getting paid by the word. Our idea of fidelity to the classical style has simply been to let George Bush speak for himself wherever possible, through direct quotation. We are convinced that by letting Bush express himself directly in this way, we afford the reader a more faithful-- and damning-- account of Bush's actions.

George Bush might agree that "history is biography," although we suspect that he would not agree with any of our other conclusions. There may be a few peculiarities of the present work as biography that are worthy of explanation at the outset.

One of our basic theses is that George Bush is, and considers himself to be, an oligarch. The notion of oligarchy includes first of all the idea of a patrician and wealthy family capable of introducing its offspring into such elite institutions as Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones. Oligarchy also subsumes the self- conception of the oligarch as belonging to a special, exalted breed of mankind, one that is superior to the common run of mankind as a matter of hereditary genetic superiority. This mentality generally goes together with a fascination for eugenics, race science and just plain racism as a means of building a case that one's own family tree and racial stock are indeed superior. These notions of "breeding" are a constant in the history of the titled feudal aristocracy of Europe, especially Britain, towards inclusion in which an individual like Bush must necessarily strive. At the very least, oligarchs like Bush see themselves as demigods occupying a middle ground between the immortals above and the hoi poloi below. The culmination of this insane delusion, which Bush has demonstrably long since attained, is the obsessive belief that the principal families of the Anglo-American elite, assembled in their freemasonic orders, by themselves directly constitute an Olympian Pantheon of living deities who have the capability of abrogating and disregarding the laws of the universe according to their own irrational caprice. If we do not take into account this element of fatal and megalomaniac hubris, the lunatic Anglo-American policies in regard to the Gulf war, international finance, or the AIDS epidemic must defy all comprehension.

Part of the ethos of oligarchism as practiced by George Bush is the emphasis on one's own family pedigree and blood line. This accounts for the attention we dedicate in the opening chapters of this book to Bush's family tree, reaching back to the nineteenth century and beyond. It is impossible to gain insight into Bush's mentality unless we realize that it is important for him to be considered a cousin, however distant, of Queen Elizabeth II of the House of Mountbatten-Windsor, or that his wife Barbara does not wish us forget that she is in some sense a descendant of President Franklin Pierce.

For related reasons, it is our special duty to illustrate the role played in the formation of George Bush as a personality by his maternal grandfather and uncle, George Herbert Walker and George Herbert Walker, Jr., and by George H.W. Bush's father, the late Senator Prescott Bush. In the course of this task, we must speak at length about the institution to which George Bush owes the most, the Wall Street international investment bank of Brown Brothers, Harriman, the political and financial powerhouse mentioned above. For George Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman was and remains the family firm in the deepest sense. The formidable power of this bank and its ubiquitous network, wielded by Senator Prescott Bush up through the time of his death in 1972, and still active on George's behalf down to the present day, is the single most important key to every step of George's business, covert operations, and political career.

In the case of George Bush, as many who have known him personally have noted, the network looms much larger than George's own character and will. The reader will search in vain for strong principled commitments in George Bush's personality; the most that will be found are a series of characteristic obsessions, of which the most durable are race, vanity, personal ambition, and settling scores with adversaries. What emerges by contrast is the decisive importance of Bush's network of connections. His response to the Gulf crisis of 1991 will be largely predetermined, not by any great flashes of geopolitical insight, but rather by his connections to the British oligarchy, to Kissinger, to Israeli and Zionist circles, to Texas oilmen in his fundraising base, to the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal houses. If the question is one of finance, then the opinions of J. Hugh Liedtke, Henry Kravis, Robert Mosbacher, T. Boone Pickens, Nicholas Brady, James Baker III and the City of London will be decisive. If covert operations and dirty tricks are on the agenda, then there is a whole stable of CIA old boys with whom he will consult, and so on down the line. During much of 1989, despite his control over the presidency, Bush appeared as a weak and passive executive waiting for his networks to show him what it was he was supposed to do. When German reunification and the crumbling of the Soviet empire spurred those --primarily British- networks into action, Bush was suddenly capable of violent and daring adventures. As his battle for a second term approaches, Bush may be showing increasing signs of a rage-driven self-starter capability, especially when it comes to starting new wars designed to secure his re-election.

Biography has its own inherent discipline: it must be concerned with the life of its protagonist, and cannot stray too far away. In no way has it been our intention to offer an account of American history during the lifetime of George Bush. The present study nevertheless reflects many aspects of that recent history of US decline. It will be noted that Bush has succeeded in proportion as the country has failed, and that Bush's advancement has proceeded pari passu with the degradation of the national stage upon which he has operated and which he has come to dominate. At various phases in his career, Bush has come into conflict with persons that were intellectually and morally superior to him. One such was Senator Yarborough, and another was Senator Frank Church. Our study will be found to catalogue the constant decline in the qualities of Bush's adversaries as human types until the 1980's, by which time his opponents, as in the case of Al Haig, are no better than Bush himself.

The exception to this trend is Bush's long-standing personal vendetta against Lyndon LaRouche, his most consistent and capable adversary. LaRouche was jailed seven days after Bush's inauguration in the most infamous political frameup of recent US history. As our study will document, at critical moments in Bush's career, LaRouche's political interventions have frustrated some of Bush's best-laid political plans: a very clear example is LaRouche's role in defeating Bush's 1980 presidential bid in the New Hampshire primary. Over the intervening years, LaRouche has become George Bush's man in the iron mask, the principled political adversary whom Bush seeks to jail and silence at all costs. The restoration of justice in this country must include the freeing of Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche's political associates, and all the other political prisoners of the Bush regime.

As for the political relevance of our project, we think that it is very real. During the Gulf crisis, it would have been important for the public to know more about Bush's business dealings with the Royal Family of Kuwait. During the 1992 presidential campaign, as Wall Street's recent crop of junk-bond assisted leveraged buyouts line up at the entrance to bankruptcy court, and state workers all across the United States are informed that the retirement pensions they had been promised will never be paid, the relations between George Bush and Henry Kravis will surely constitute an explosive political issue. Similarly, once Bush's British and Kissingerian pedigree is recognized, the methods he is likely to pursue in regard to situations such as the planned Romanian-style overthrow of the Castro regime in Cuba, or the provocation of a splendid little nuclear war involving North Korea, or of a new Indo-Pakistani war, will hardly be mysterious.

The authors have been at some pains to make this work intelligible to readers around the world. We offer this book to those who share our aversion to the imperialist-colonialist New World Order, and our profound horror at the concept of a return to a single, worldwide Roman Empire as suggested by Bush's "pax universalis" slogan. This work is tangible evidence that there is an opposition to Bush inside the United States, and that the new Caligula is very vulnerable indeed on the level of the exposure of his own misdeeds.

It will be argued that this book should have been published before the 1988 election, when a Bush presidency might have been avoided. That is certainly true, but it is an objection which should also be directed to many institutions and agencies whose resources far surpass our modest capabilities. We can only remind our fellow citizens that when he asks for their votes for his re-election, George Bush also enters that court of public opinion in which he is obliged to answer their questions. They should not waste this opportunity to grill him on all aspects of his career and future intentions, since it is Bush who comes forward appealing for their support.

We do not delude ourselves that we have said the last word about George Bush. But we have for the first time sketched out at least some of the most salient features and gathered them into a comprehensible whole. We encourage an aroused citizenry, as well as specialized researchers, to improve upon what we have been able to accomplish. In so doing, we recall the words of the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio when he reluctantly accepted the order of a powerful king to produce an account of the old Roman Pantheon:

SI MINUS BENE DIXERO SALTEM AD MELIUS DICENDUM PRUDENTIOREM ALTERUM EXCITABO.

OCCACCIO, GENEALOGIA DEORUM GENTILIUM

_______________

Notes:

1. George Bush and Vic Gold, Looking Forward, (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 47.

2. Fitzhugh Green, Looking Forward, (New York: & Hippocrene, 1989), p. 53.

3. Harry Hurt III, "George Bush, Plucky Lad," Texas Monthly, June, 1983, p. 142.

4. Richard Ben Cramer, "How He Got Here," Esquire, June, 1991, p. 84.

5. Joe Hyams, Flight of the Avenger (New York, 1991), p. .

6. Nicholas King, George Bush: A Biography (New York, Dodd, Mead, 1980), p. xi.

7. Donnie Radcliffe, Simply Barbara Bush, (New York: Warner, 1989), p. 103.

8. Rainer Bonhorst,George Bush, Der neue Mann im Weissen Haus, (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Luebbe Verlag, 1988), pp. 80- 81.

9. See "The Roar of the Crowd," Texas Monthly, November, 1991. See also Jan Jarboe, "Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog," Texas Monthly, April 1991, p. 122 ff. Here Wyatt observes: "I knew from the beginning George Bush came to Texas only because he was politically ambitious. He flew out here on an airplane owned by Dresser Industries. His daddy was a member of the board of Dresser."

10. Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1979), p. 233.

11. John Selby Watson (translator), Sallust, Florus, and Velleius Paterculus (London: George Bell and Son, 1879), pp. 542-546.

12. Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome (Penguin, 1962), pp. 193-221.

13. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (New York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 165-204, passim.
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

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Chapter I -- THE HOUSE OF BUSH: BORN IN A BANK

Who is George Bush? How did he become the 41st U.S. President?

He is said to be a man of the "old establishment," who "chose to seek his fortune as an independent oilman...." [1]

In fact, Bush was never "independent." Every career step in his upward climb relied on his family's powerful associations. The Bush family joined the Eastern Establishment comparatively recently, and only as servitors. Their wealth and influence resulted from their loyalty to another, more powerful family, and their willingness to do anything to get ahead.

For what they did, Bush's forebears should have become very famous, or infamous. They remained obscure figures, managers from behind the scenes. But their actions--including his father's role as banker for Adolf Hitler -- had tragic effects for the whole planet.

It was these services to his family's benefactors, which propelled George Bush to the top.

Prescott Goes to War

President George Herbert Walker Bush was born in 1924, the son of Prescott S. Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. We will begin the George Bush story about a decade before his birth, on the eve of World War I. We will follow the career of his father, Prescott Bush, through his marriage with Dorothy Walker, on the path to fortune, elegance and power.

Prescott Bush entered Yale University in 1913. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Prescott had spent the last five years before college in St. George's Episcopal preparatory school in Newport, Rhode Island.

Prescott Bush's first college year, 1913, was also the freshman year at Yale for E. Roland ( "Bunny" ) Harriman, whose older brother (Wm.) Averell Harriman had just graduated from Yale. This is the Averell Harriman who went on to fame as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II, as a governor of New York State, and as a presidential advisor who was greatly responsible for starting the Vietnam War.

The Harrimans would become the sponsors of the Bushes, to lift them onto the stage of world history.

In the spring of 1916, Prescott Bush and "Bunny" Harriman were chosen for membership in an elite Yale senior-year secret society known as Skull and Bones. This unusually morbid, death-celebrating group helped Wall Street financiers find active young men of "good birth" to form a kind of imitation British aristocracy in America.

World War I was then raging in Europe. With the prospect that the U.S.A. would soon join the war, two Skull and Bones "Patriarchs" , Averell Harriman (class of 1913) and Percy A. Rockefeller (class of 1900), paid special attention to Prescott's class of 1917. They wanted reliable cadres to help them play the Great Game, in the lucrative new imperial era that the war was opening up for London and New York moneycrats. Prescott Bush, by then a close friend of "Bunny" Harriman, and several other Bonesmen from their class of 1917 would later comprise the core partners in Brown Brothers Harriman, the world's largest private investment bank.

World War I did make an immense amount of money for the clan of stock speculators and British bankers who had just taken over U.S. industry. The Harrimans were stars of this new Anglo-American elite.

Averell's father, stock broker E.H. Harriman, had gained control of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1898 with credit arranged by William Rockefeller, Percy's father, and by Kuhn Loeb & Co.'s British-affiliated private bankers, Otto Kahn, Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg.

William Rockefeller, treasurer of Standard Oil and brother of Standard founder John D. Rockefeller, owned National City Bank (later "Citibank" ) together with Texas-based James Stillman. In return for their backing, E.H. Harriman deposited in City Bank the vast receipts from his railroad lines. When he issued tens of millions of dollars of "watered" (fraudulent) railroad stock, Harriman sold most of the shares through the Kuhn Loeb company.

The First World War elevated Prescott Bush and his father, Samuel P. Bush, into the lower ranks of the Eastern Establishment.

As war loomed in 1914, National City Bank began reorganizing the U.S. arms industry. Percy A. Rockefeller took direct control of the Remington Arms company, appointing his own man, Samuel F. Pryor, as the new chief executive of Remington.

The U.S entered World War I in 1917. In the spring of 1918, Prescott's father, Samuel P. Bush, became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board. [2] The senior Bush took national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with Remington and other weapons companies.

This was an unusual appointment, as Prescott's father seemed to have no background in munitions. Samuel Bush had been president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Co. in Columbus, Ohio, makers of railcar parts. His entire career had been in the railroad business-- supplying equipment to the Wall Street-owned railroad systems.

The War Industries Board was run by Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street speculator with close personal and business ties to old E.H. Harriman. Baruch's brokerage firm had handled Harriman speculations of all kinds. [3]

In 1918, Samuel Bush became director of the Facilities Division of the War Industries Board. Prescott's father reported to the Board's Chairman, Bernard Baruch, and to Baruch's assistant, Wall Street private banker Clarence Dillon.

Robert S. Lovett, President of Union Pacific Railroad, chief counsel to E.H. Harriman and executor of his will, was in charge of national production and purchase "priorities" for Baruch's board.

With the war mobilization conducted under the supervision of the War Industries Board, U.S. consumers and taxpayers showered unprecedented fortunes on war producers and certain holders of raw materials and patents. Hearings in 1934 by the committee of U.S. Senator Gerald Nye attacked the "Merchants of Death" -- war profiteers such as Remington Arms and the British Vickers company --whose salesmen had manipulated many nations into wars, and then supplied all sides with the weapons to fight them.

Percy Rockefeller and Samuel Pryor's Remington Arms supplied machine guns and Colt automatic pistols; millions of rifles to Czarist Russia; over half of the small-arms ammunition used by the Anglo-American allies in World War I; and 69 percent of the rifles used by the United States in that conflict. [4]

Samuel Bush's wartime relationship to these businessmen would continue after the war, and would especially aid his son Prescott's career of service to the Harrimans.

Most of the records and correspondence of Samuel Bush's arms- related section of the government have been burned, "to save space" in the National Archives. This matter of destroyed or misplaced records should be of concern to citizens of a constitutional republic. Unfortunately, it is a rather constant impediment with regard to researching George Bush's background: He is certainly the most "covert" American chief executive.

Now, arms production in wartime is by necessity carried on with great security precautions. The public need not know details of the private lives of the government or industry executives involved, and a broad interrelationship between government and private-sector personnel is normal and useful.

But during the period preceding World War I, and in the war years 1914-1917 when the U.S. was still neutral, interlocking Wall Street financiers subservient to British strategy lobbied heavily, and twisted U.S. government and domestic police functions. Led by the J.P. Morgan concern, Britain's overall purchasing agent in America, these financiers wanted a world war and they wanted the United States in it as Britain's ally. The U.S. and British arms companies, owned by these international financiers, poured out weapons abroad in deals not subject to the scrutiny of any electorate back home. The same gentlemen, as we shall see, later supplied weapons and money to Hitler's Nazis.

That this problem persists today, is in some respect due to the "control" over the documentation and the history of the arms traffickers.

World War I was a disaster for civilized humanity. It had terrible, unprecedented casualties, and shattering effects on the moral philosophy of Europeans and Americans.

But for a brief period, the war treated Prescott Bush rather well.

In June, 1918, just as his father took over responsibility for relations of the government with the private arms producers, Prescott went to Europe with the U.S. Army. His unit did not come near any fire until September. But on August 8, 1918, the following item appeared on the front page of Bush's home-town newspaper:

High Military Honors Conferred on Capt. Bush

For Notable Gallantry, When Leading Allied Commanders Were Endangered, Local Man is Awarded French, English and U.S. Crosses.

International Honors, perhaps unprecedented in the life of an American soldier, have been conferred upon Captain Prescott Sheldon Bush, son of Mr. and Mrs. S.P. Bush of Columbus.

Upon young Bush ... were conferred: Cross of the Legion of Honor, ... Victoria Cross, ... Distinguished Service Cross....

Conferring of the three decorations upon one man at one time implies recognition of a deed of rare valor and probably of great military importance as well.

From word which has reached Columbus during the last few days, it appears as if the achievement of Captain Bush well measures up to these requirements.

The incident occurred on the western front about the time the Germans were launching their great offensive of July 15.... The history of the remarkable victory scored later by the allies might have been written in another vein, but for the heroic and quick action of Captain Bush.

The ... three allied leaders, Gen. [Ferdinand] Foch, Sir Douglas Haig and Gen. [John J.] Pershing ... were making an inspection of American positions. Gen. Pershing had sent for Captain Bush to guide them about one sector.... Suddenly Captain Bush noticed a shell coming directly for them. He shouted a warning, suddenly drew his bolo knife, stuck it up as he would a ball bat, and parried the blow, causing the shell to glance off to the right....

Within 24 hours young Bush was notified ... [that] the three allied commanders had recommended him for practically the highest honors within their gift.... Captain Bush is 23 years old, a graduate of Yale in the class of 1917. He was one of Yale's best- known athletes ... was leader of the glee club ... and in his senior year was elected to the famous Skull and Bones Society.... [5]

The day after this astonishing story appeared, there was a large cartoon on the editorial page. It depicted Prescott Bush as a small boy, reading a story-book about military heroism, and saying: "Gee! I wonder if anything like that could ever truly happen to a boy." The caption below was a rehash of the batting- away- the-deadly-shell exploit, written in storybook style. [6]

Local excitement about the military "Babe Ruth" lasted just four weeks. Then this somber little box appeared on the front page:

Editor State Journal:

A cable received from my son, Prescott S. Bush, brings word that he has not been decorated, as published in the papers a month ago. He feels dreadfully troubled that a letter, written in a spirit of fun, should have been misinterpreted. He says he is no hero and asks me to make explanations. I will appreciate your kindness in publishing this letter....

Flora Sheldon Bush.

Columbus, Sept. 5. [7]

Prescott Bush later claimed that he spent "about 10 or 11 weeks" in the area of combat in France. "We were under fire there.... It was quite exciting, and of course a wonderful experience." [8]

Prescott Bush was discharged in mid-1919, and returned for a short time to Columbus, Ohio. But his humiliation in his home town was so intense that he could no longer live there. The "war hero" story was henceforth not spoken of in his presence. Decades later, when he was an important, rich U.S. Senator, the story was whispered and puzzled over among the Congressmen.

Looking to be rescued from this ugly situation, Captain Bush went to the 1919 reunion of his Yale class in New Haven, Connecticut. Skull and Bones Patriarch Wallace Simmons, closely tied to the arms manufacturers, offered Prescott Bush a job in his St. Louis railroad equipment company. Bush took the offer and moved to St. Louis--and his destiny.

A Thoroughbred Marriage

Prescott Bush went to St. Louis to repair his troubled life. Sometime that same year, Averell Harriman made a trip there on a project which would have great consequences for Prescott. The 28- year-old Harriman, until then something of a playboy, wanted to bring his inherited money and contacts into action in the arena of world affairs.

President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced Harriman's father for "cynicism and deep-seated corruption" and called him an "undesirable citizen." [9] For the still- smarting Averell to take his place among the makers and breakers of nations, he needed a financial and intelligence-gathering organization of his own. The man Harriman sought to create such an institution for him was Bert Walker, a Missouri stock broker and corporate wheeler- dealer.

George Herbert ( "Bert" ) Walker, for whom President George H.W. Bush was named, did not immediately accept Harriman's proposal. Would Walker leave his little St. Louis empire, to try his influence in New York and Europe?

Bert was the son of a dry goods wholesaler who had thrived on imports from England. [10] The British connection had paid for Walker summer houses in Santa Barbara, California, and in Maine-- "Walker's Point" at Kennebunkport. Bert Walker had been sent to England for his prep school and college education.

By 1919 Bert Walker had strong ties to the Guaranty Trust Company in New York and to the British-American banking house J.P. Morgan and Co. These Wall Street concerns represented all the important owners of American railroads: the Morgan partners and their associates or cousins in the intermarried Rockefeller, Whitney, Harriman and Vanderbilt families.

Bert Walker was known as the midwest's premier deal-arranger, awarding the investment capital of his international-banker contacts to the many railroads, utilities and other midwestern industries of which he and his St. Louis friends were executives or board members.

Walker's operations were always quiet, or mysterious, whether in local or global affairs. He had long been the "power behind the throne" in the St. Louis Democratic Party, along with his crony, former Missouri Governor David R. Francis. Walker and Francis together had sufficient influence to select the party's candidates. [11]

Back in 1904, Bert Walker, David Francis, Washington University President Robert Brookings and their banker/broker circle had organized a world's fair in St. Louis, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. In line with the old Southern Confederacy family backgrounds of many of these sponsors, the fair featured a "Human Zoo" : live natives from backward jungle regions were exhibited in special cages under the supervision of anthropologist William J. McGee.

So Averell Harriman was a natural patron for Bert Walker. Bert shared Averell's passion for horse breeding and horse racing, and easily accommodated the Harriman family's related social philosophy. They believed that the horses and racing stables they owned showed the way toward a sharp upgrading of the human stock--just select and mate thoroughbreds, and spurn or eliminate inferior animals.

The First World War had brought the little St. Louis oligarchy into the Confederate-slaveowner-oriented administration of President Woodrow Wilson and his advisors, Col. Edward House and Bernard Baruch.

Walker's friend Robert Brookings got into Bernard Baruch's War Industries Board as director of national Price Fixing (sic). David R. Francis became U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1916. As the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, we find Bert Walker busy appointing people to Francis's staff in Petrograd. [12]

Walker's earliest activities in relation to the Soviet state are of significant interest to historians, given the activist role he was to play there together with Harriman. But Walker's life is as covert as the rest of the Bush clan's, and the surviving public record is extremely thin.

The 1919 Versailles peace conference brought together British imperial strategists and their American friends to make postwar global arrangements. For his own intended international adventures, Harriman needed Bert Walker the seasoned intriguer, who quietly represented many of the British-designated rulers of American politics and finance.

After two persuasion trips west by Harriman, [13] Walker at length agreed to move to New York. But he kept his father's summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Bert Walker formally organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November 1919. Walker became the bank's president and chief executive; Averell Harriman was chairman and controlling co-owner with his brother Roland ( "Bunny" ), Prescott Bush's close friend from Yale; and Percy Rockefeller was a director and a founding financial sponsor.

In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert Walker's daughter Dorothy. They were engaged the following year, and were married in August, 1921. [14] Among the ushers and grooms at the elaborate wedding were Ellery S. James, Knight Woolley and four other fellow Skull and Bonesmen from the Yale Class of 1917. [15] The Bush-Walker extended family has gathered each summer at the "Walker country home" in Kennebunkport, from this marriage of President Bush's parents down to the present day.

When Prescott married Dorothy, he was only a minor executive of the Simmons Co., railroad equipment suppliers, while his wife's father was building one of the most gigantic businesses in the world. The following year the couple tried to move back to Columbus, Ohio; there Prescott worked for a short time in a rubber products company owned by his father. But they soon moved again to Milton, Mass., after outsiders bought the little family business and moved it near there.

Thus Prescott Bush was going nowhere fast, when his son George Herbert Walker Bush--the future U.S. President--was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924.

Perhaps it was as a birthday gift for George, that "Bunny" Harriman stepped in to rescue his father Prescott from oblivion, bringing him into the Harriman-controlled U.S. Rubber Co. in New York City. In 1925 the young family moved to the town where George was to grow up: Greenwich, Connecticut, a suburb both of New York and of New Haven/Yale.

Then on May 1, 1926, Prescott Bush joined W.A. Harriman & Co. as its vice president, under the bank's president, Bert Walker, his father-in-law and George's maternal grandfather--the head of the family. [16]

The Great Game

Prescott Bush would demonstrate strong loyalty to the firm he joined in 1926. And the bank, with the scope and power of many ordinary nations, could amply reward its agents. George Bush's Grandfather Walker had put the enterprise together, quietly, secretly, using all the international connections at his disposal. Let us briefly look back at the beginning of the Harriman firm--the Bush family enterprise--and follow its course into one of history's darkest projects.

The firm's first global lever was its successful arrangement to get into Germany by dominating that country's shipping. Averell Harriman announced in 1920 that he would re-start Germany's Hamburg- Amerika Line, after many months of scheming and arm-twisting. Hamburg-Amerika's commercial steamships had been confiscated by the United States at the end of the First World War. These ships had then become the property of the Harriman enterprise, by some arrangements with the U.S. authorities that were never made public.

The deal was breathtaking; it would create the world's largest private shipping line. Hamburg-Amerika Line regained its confiscated vessels, for a heavy price. The Harriman enterprise took "the right to participate in 50 percent of all business originated in Hamburg" ; and for the next twenty years (1920-1940), the Harriman enterprise had "complete control of all activities of the Hamburg line in the United States." [17]

Harriman became co-owner of Hamburg-Amerika. The Harriman-Walker firm gained a tight hold on its management, with the not-so-subtle backing of the post-World War I occupation of Germany by the armies of England and America.

Just after Harriman's public statement, the St. Louis press celebrated Bert Walker's role in assembling the money to consummate the deal:

"Ex-St. Louisan Forms Giant Ship Merger"

"G. H. Walker is Moving Power Behind Harriman-Morton Shipping Combine...."

The story celebrated a "merger of two big financial houses in New York, which will place practically unlimited capital at the disposal of the new American-German shipping combine...." [18]

Bert Walker had arranged a "marriage" of J.P. Morgan credit and Harriman family inherited wealth.

W.A. Harriman & Co., of which Walker was president and founder, was merging with the Morton & Co. private bank--and Walker was "[p]rominent in the affairs of Morton & Co.," which was interlocked with the Morgan-controlled Guaranty Trust Co.

The Hamburg-Amerika takeover created an effective instrument for the manipulation and fatal subversion of Germany. One of the great "merchants of death," Samuel Pryor, was in it from the beginning. Pryor, then chairman of the executive committee of Remington Arms, helped arrange the deal and served with Walker on the board of Harriman's shipping front organization, the American Ship and Commerce Co.

Walker and Harriman took the next giant step in 1922, setting up their European headquarters office in Berlin. With the aid of the Hamburg-based Warburg bank, W.A. Harriman & Co. began spreading an investment net over German industry and raw materials.

From the Berlin base, Walker and Harriman then plunged into deals with the new dictatorship of the Soviet Union. They led a select group of Wall Street and British Empire speculators who re-started the Russian oil industry, which had been devastated by the Bolshevik Revolution. They contracted to mine Soviet manganese, an element essential to modern steelmaking. These concessions were arranged directly with Leon Trotsky, then with Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet dictatorship's secret intelligence service (K.G.B), whose huge statue was finally pulled down by pro-democracy demonstrators in 1991.

These speculations created both channels of communication, and the style of accomodation, with the communist dictatorship, that have continued in the family down to President Bush.

With the bank launched, Bert Walker found New York the ideal place to satisfy his passion for sports, games and gambling. Walker was elected president of the U.S. Golf Association in 1920. He negotiated new international rules for the game with the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland. After these talks he contributed the three-foot-high silver Walker Cup, for which British and American teams have since competed every two years.

Bert's son-in-law Prescott Bush was later secretary of the U.S. Golf Association, during the grave political and economic crises of the early 1930s. Prescott became USGA President in 1935, while he was otherwise embroiled in the family firm's work with Nazi Germany.

When George was one year old, in 1925, Bert Walker and Averell Harriman headed a syndicate which rebuilt Madison Square Garden as the modern Palace of Sport. Walker was at the center of New York's gambling scene in its heyday, in that Prohibition era of colorful and bloody gangsters. The Garden bloomed with million-dollar prize fights; bookies and their clients pooled more millions, trying to match the pace of the speculation-crazed stock and bond men. This was the era of "organized" crime--the national gambling and bootleg syndicate structured on the New York corporate model.

By 1930, when George was a boy of six, Grandpa Walker was New York State Racing Commissioner. The vivid colors and sounds of the racing scene must have impressed little George as much as his grandfather. Bert Walker bred race horses at his own stable, the Log Cabin Stud. He was president of the Belmont Park race track. Bert also personally managed most aspects of Averell's racing interests-- down to picking the colors and fabrics for the Harriman racing gear. [19]

From 1926, George's father Prescott Bush showed a fierce loyalty to the Harrimans and a dogged determination to advance himself; he gradually came to run the day-to-day operations of W.A. Harriman & Co. After the firm's 1931 merger with the British-American banking house Brown Brothers, Prescott Bush became managing partner of the resulting company: Brown Brothers Harriman. This was ultimately the largest and politically the most important private banking house in America.

Financial collapse, world depression and social upheaval followed the fevered speculation of the 1920s. The 1929-31 crash of securities values wiped out the small fortune Prescott Bush had gained since 1926. But because of his devotion to the Harrimans, they "did a very generous thing," as Bush later put it. They staked him to what he had lost and put him back on his feet.

Prescott Bush described his own role, from 1931 through the 1940s, in a confidential interview:

I emphasize ... that the Harrimans showed great courage and loyalty and confidence in us, because three or four of us were really running the business, the day to day business. Averell was all over the place in those days ... and Roland was involved in a lot of directorships, and he didn't get down into the "lift- up-and-bear-down" activity of the bank, you see-- the day- to-day decisions ... we were really running the business, the day to day business, all the administrative decisions and the executive decisions. We were the ones that did it. We were the managing partners, let's say. [20]
But of the "three or four" partners in charge, Prescott was effectively at the head of the firm, because he had taken over management of the gigantic personal investment funds of Averell and E. Roland "Bunny" Harriman.

In those interwar years, Prescott Bush made the family fortune which George Bush inherited. He piled up the money from an international project which continued until a new world war, and the action of the U.S. government, intervened to stop him.

_______________

Notes:

1. Washington Post, Aug. 16, 1991, p. A1.

2. Gen. Hugh S. Johnson to Major J.H.K. Davis, June 6, 1918, file no. 334.8/168 or 334.8/451 in U.S. National Archives, Suitland, Maryland.

3. Bernard M. Baruch, My Own Story (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1957), pp. 138-39. Baruch related that "our firm did a large business for Mr. Harriman.... In 1906 Harriman had [us] place heavy bets on Charles Evans Hughes in his race for Governor of New York against William Randolph Hearst. After several hundred thousand dollars had been wagered, [our firm] stopped. Hearing of this, Harriman called ... up. `Didn't I tell you to bet?' he demanded. `Now go on.'|"

4. Alden Hatch, Remington Arms: An American History, 1956, copyright by the Remington Arms Co., pp. 224-25.

5. The Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio, Thursday, Aug. 8, 1918.

6. The Ohio State Journal, Friday, Aug. 9, 1918.

7. The Ohio State Journal, Friday, Sept. 6, 1918.

8. Interview with Prescott Bush in the Oral History Research Project conducted by Columbia University in 1966, Eisenhower Administration Part II; pp. 5-6. The interview was supposed to be kept confidential and was never published, but Columbia later sold microfilms of the transcript to certain libraries, including Arizona State University.

9. Theodore Roosevelt to James S. Sherman, Oct. 6, 1906, made public by Roosevelt at a press conference April 2, 1907. Quoted in Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), p. 452. Roosevelt later confided to Harriman lawyer Robert S. Lovett that his views on Harriman were based on what J.P. Morgan had told him.

10. See The Industries of St. Louis, published 1885 by J.M. Elstner & Co., pp. 61-62 for Crow, Hagardine & Co., David Walker's first business; and p. 86 for Ely & Walker.

11. See Letter of G.H. Walker to D.R. Francis, March 20, 1905, in the Francis collection of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri, on the organization of the Republicans and Democrats to run the election of the mayor, a Democrat acceptable to the socially prominent. The next day Walker became the treasurer and Francis the president of this "Committee of 1000." See also George H. Walker obituary, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 25, 1953.

12. Letter of Perry Francis to his father, Ambassador David R. Francis, Oct. 15, 1917, Francis collection of the Missouri Historical Society. "... Joe Miller left for San Francisco last Tuesday night, where he will receive orders to continue to Petrograd. I was told by Mildred Kotany [Walker's sister-in-law] that Bert Walker got him his appointment through Breck Long. I didn't know Joe was after it, or could have helped him myself. He will be good company for you when he gets there...."

13. Private interview with a Walker family member, cousin of President Bush.

14. Prescott Bush, Columbia University, op. cit., p. 7.

15. St. Louis Globe Democrat, Aug. 7, 1921. 16. This is the sequence of events, from Simmons to U.S. Rubber, which Prescott Bush gave in his Columbia University interview, op. cit.,) pp. 7-8.

17. Public statement of Averell Harriman, New York Times, Oct. 6, 1920, p. 1.

18. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Oct. 12, 1920, p. 1.

19. Sports-as-business has continued in the family up through George Bush's adult life. Bert's son George Walker, Jr.--President Bush's uncle and financial angel in Texas--co-founded the New York Mets and was the baseball club's vice president and treasurer for 17 years until his death in 1977. The President's son, George Walker Bush, was co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball club during his father's presidency.

20. Prescott Bush, Columbia University, op. cit., pp. 16-22.
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

Postby admin » Tue Jul 08, 2014 6:58 am

Chapter II -- The Hitler Project

Bush Property Seized--Trading with the Enemy


In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot. On Oct. 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.

Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland "Bunny'' Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush. [fn1]

The order seizing the bank "vests'' (seizes) "all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York corporation,'' and names the holders of its shares as:

"E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares''
[chairman and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is "Bunny'' Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn't get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal investments]

"Cornelis Lievense--4 shares''
[president and director of UBC; New York resident banking functionary for the Nazis]

"Harold D. Pennington--1 share''
[treasurer and director of UBC; an office manager employed by Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman]

"Ray Morris--1 share''

[director of UBC; partner of Bush and the Harrimans]

"Prescott S. Bush--1 share''
[director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George Walker; senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman]

"H.J. Kouwenhoven--1 share''
[director of UBC; organized UBC as the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; managing director of UBC's Netherlands affiliate under Nazi occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany; director and chief foreign financial executive of the German Steel Trust]

"Johann G. Groeninger--1 share''
[director of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; industrial executive in Nazi Germany]

"all of which shares are held for the benefit of ... members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals ... of a designated enemy country....''

By Oct. 26, 1942, U.S. troops were under way for North Africa. On Oct. 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. [fn2]

U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on Nov. 8, 1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on the business. [fn3]

These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were, tragically, too little and too late. President Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results.

The facts presented here must be known, and their implications reflected upon, for a proper understanding of President George Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to mankind that he represents. The President's family fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's partners in the Hitler project.

President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, fn4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the "Thyssen family'' of "Germany and/or Hungary''-- "nationals ... of a designated enemy country.''

By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corp. were legally front men for the Nazis, the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed and instructed by the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer for that question.

Origin and Extent of the Project

Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf Hitler's takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had already published his famous book, I Paid Hitler, [fn5] admitting that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923. Thyssen's role as the leading early backer of Hitler's grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932. [fn6] The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed.

But two weeks before the official order, government investigators had reported secretly that "W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist.'' Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. "[C]ertain of [Harriman's] associates would serve as directors....'' Thyssen agent "H. J. Kouwenhoven ... came to the United States ... prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection.... '' [fn7]

When exactly was "Harriman in Europe sometime prior to 1924''? In fact, he was in Berlin in 1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker's presidency.

The Union Banking Corporation was established formally in 1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co., interlocking with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands. The investigators concluded that "the Union Banking Corporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment.''

Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in 1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the "Thyssen interests'' in Germany. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization would be joint owner and manager of Thyssen's banking operations outside of Germany.

How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President Bush's father was the New York banker?

The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or German Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, Congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following approximate proportions of total German national output:

50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron
41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate
36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate
38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet
45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes
22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire
35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives. fn8

Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new German Steel Trust, Germany's largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade of Prescott Bush's father Sam Bush from the "Merchants of Death'' bureau in World War I.

In return for putting up $70 million to create his organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company two or more representatives on the board of the new Steel Trust. [fn9]

Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen's own confidential accounts, for political and related purposes, were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the German Steel Trust did its corporate banking through Dillon Read.

The Walker-Bush firm's banking activities were not just politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm's European business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political forces.

In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to Averell Harriman: "It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent.... I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it.'' [fn10 ]

Averell Harriman met with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker: "... During these last days ... Mussolini ... has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15 June.'' [fn11]

The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America, Germany and Britain, weakening all governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.

W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets from their German and Russian business, merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker & Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush and Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm continued operating under its historic name -- Brown, Shipley.)

Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman's lawyer and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott's father. Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the junior Lovett soon replaced his father as chief executive of Union Pacific Railroad.

Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for the Hitler project! American patriots had cursed its name back in U.S. Civil War days. Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A. and in England, had carried on their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill owners. Now in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as the most avid of Hitler's supporters within British ruling circles, and Norman's intimacy with this firm was essential to his management of the Hitler project.

In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's partner was Montagu Norman's intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of England chief always stayed at the home of Prescott's partner on his hush-hush trips to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm's German activities, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman. fn12

Hitler's Ladder to Power

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933, and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive and violent lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal undertaking: Thyssen's German Steel Trust; and the Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives. fn13

Let us look more closely at the Bush family's German partners.

Fritz Thyssen told Allied interrogators after the war about some of his financial support for the Nazi Party: "In 1930 or 1931 ... I told [Hitler's deputy Rudolph] Hess ... I would arrange a credit for him with a Dutch bank in Rotterdam, the Bank fur Handel und Schiff [i.e. Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate]. I arranged the credit ... he would pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank because I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my position, and because I thought it was better to do business with a Dutch bank, and I thought I would have the Nazis a little more in my hands... .

"The credit was about 250-300,000 [gold] marks -- about the sum I had given before. The loan has been repaid in part to the Dutch bank, but I think some money is still owing on it....'' [fn14 ]

The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including funds he raised from others - -in a period of terrible money shortage in Germany.

Friedrich Flick was the major co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's long-time collaborator and occasional competitor. In preparation for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. government said that Flick was "one of leading financiers and industrialists who from 1932 contributed large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of 'Circle of Friends' of Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS.'' [fn15]

Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their private armies called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).

The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker, President Bush's grandfather.

The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements for the German Steel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast operations in Germany by no later than 1926.

The Harriman Fifteen Corporation (George Walker, president, Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman, sole directors) held a substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the merger with Brown Brothers, Jan. 1, 1931. This holding correlated to Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the American group owning one-third of a complex of steel-making, coal-mining and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds. [fn16]

The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:

"Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating plants) ... 'Wehrwirtschaftsfuhrer', 1938 [title awarded to prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive--`Military Economy Leader']....'' [fn17]

For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel and arms production, using slave laborers, the Nazi Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials; he served three years. With friends in New York and London, however, Flick lived into the 1970s and died a billionaire.

On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush -- then director of the German Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation -- initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman about a problem which had developed in the Flick partnership. fn18 Bush sent Harriman a clipping from the New York Times of that day, which reported that the Polish government was fighting back against American and German stockholders who controlled "Poland's largest industrial unit, the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company....''

The Times article continued: "The company has long been accused of mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued in December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German citizens and they fled. They were replaced by Poles. Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt to make the company's board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workmen regularly.''

The Times noted that the company's mines and mills "employ 25,000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland's total steel output and 12 percent of her coal production. Two-thirds of the company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel industrialist, and the remainder is owned by interests in the United States.''

In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported to Hitler Germany under depression conditions, the Polish government thought that Prescott Bush, Harriman and their Nazi partners should at least pay full taxes on their Polish holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout. The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their European representative: "Have undertaken new steps London Berlin ... please establish friendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington].''

A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had been made "in Berlin'' to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel. fn19 But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from continuing its partnership with Flick.

Nazi tanks and bombs "settled'' this dispute in September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman, Walker and Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.

There were probably few people at the time who could appreciate the irony, that when the Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were fueled by oil pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush enterprise.

Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazis' share in the Silesian-American Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49 percent of the common stock and 41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company.

The order characterized the company as a "business enterprise within the United States, owned by [a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation....'' [fn20]

Bert Walker was still the senior director of the company, which he had founded back in 1926 simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris, Prescott's partner from Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman, was also a director.

The investigative report prior to the government crackdown explained the "NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries, which own large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort.'' [fn21]

The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control of the European properties after the war.

Control of Nazi Commerce

Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the American Ship and Commerce Corp. as a unit of the W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over Hamburg-Amerika's affairs.

As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker. [fn22]

It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic, handsome Prescott Bush: From the Brown Brothers Harriman skyscraper at 59 Wall Street--where he was senior managing partner, confidential investments manager and adviser to Averell and his brother "Bunny''--he walked across to the Harriman Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H. Walker & Co.--and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at 39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman & Co., and still the offices for American Ship and Commerce Corp., and of the Union Banking Corporation.

In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire Hitler project.

Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, Wilhelm Cuno, and with the line's bankers, M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party. [fn23]

Albert Voegler was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick German Steel Trust for which Bush's Union Banking Corp. was the New York office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined Thyssen and Flick in their heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped organize the final Nazi leap into national power. [fn24]

The Schroeder family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities of Harriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.

Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Hutte foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush's New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies, to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and Montagu Norman's protege Hjalmar Schacht together made the final arrangements for Hitler to enter the government. [fn25]

Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Long an intimate contact of Averell Harriman's in Germany, Baron Rudolph sent his grandson Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932--on the eve of their Hitler-triumph. [fn26]

Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932 must be ranked among the gravest acts of treason in this century.

The U.S. embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the "costly election campaigns'' and "the cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men'' had raised questions as to the Nazis' financial backers. The constitutional government of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. embassy reported that the Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler's forces. [fn27]

Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this connection we note that the original "Merchant of Death,'' Samuel Pryor, was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world's private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler project was enhanced as the Bush family's partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.

The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading up to Hitler's seizure of power, the Senators found that "German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great.'' [fn28]

The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line--and more betrayals.

Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to be the corporation's official, designated representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika. [fn29]

Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors that the Hitler government was good for Germany: "For the last few years business was considerably better than we had anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some months. We are actually suffering also under the very active propaganda against Germany, caused by some unpleasant circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever.'' [fn30]

This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew, was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated rather serious "alarm'' inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi operations.

On March 29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman, Max's son, Erich Warburg, sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick to "use all your influence '' to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including "atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc.'' Frederick cabled back to Erich: "No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of] German goods[,] merely excited individuals.'' Two days after that, On March 31, 1933, the American-Jewish Committee, controlled by the Warburgs, and the B'nai B'rith, heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers (New York Times), issued a formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counseling "that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged,'' and advising "that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed.'' [fn31]

The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith (mother of the "Anti-Defamation League'') continued with this hardline, no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the fight mounted by many Jews and other anti-fascists.

Thus the decisive interchange reproduced above, taking place entirely within the orbit of the Harriman/Bush firm, may explain something of the relationship of George Bush to American Jewish and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his family, played an ugly part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why "professional Nazi-hunters'' have never discovered how the Bush family made its money?

The executive board of the Hamburg Amerika Line (Hapag) met jointly with the North German Lloyd Company board in Hamburg on Sept. 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two firms were merged. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a long-time Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines (Hapag-Lloyd) on Nov. 4, 1933.

According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the Nazi Labor Front rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany against the constitutional German government. [fn32]

In mid-1936, Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. cabled M.M. Warburg, asking Warburg to represent the company's heavy share interest at the forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika stockholders meeting. The Warburg office replied with the information that "we represented you'' at the stockholders meeting and "exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm [gold marks] 3,509,600 Hapag stock deposited with us.''

The Warburgs transmitted a letter received from Emil Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd and of the Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: "It is the intention to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as heretofore....'' In a colorful gesture, Hapag's Nazi chairman Helfferich sent the line's president across the Atlantic on a Zeppelin to confer with their New York string-pullers.

After the meeting with the Zeppelin passenger, the Harriman-Bush office replied: "I am glad to learn that Mr. Hellferich [sic] has stated that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be continued on the same basis as heretofore.'' [fn33]

Two months before moving against Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corporation, the U. S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney representing the Nazi firm. [fn34]

In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Co., led by Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States. [fn35]

This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler's economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.

John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster's friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the Republican U.S. Senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of "covert action government,'' that both of these Dulles brothers were the lawyers for the Bush family's far-flung enterprise.

Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between the interest owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of the growing Nazi war-making apparatus for producing tanks, poison gas, etc.

Dulles wrote to Prescott Bush in 1937 concerning one such arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi Germany's only telegraph channel to the United States, had made debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements, which had originally been reached with non-Nazi corporate officials. Dulles asked Bush, who managed these affairs for Averell Harriman, to get Averell's signature on a letter to Nazi officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote:

Sept. 22, 1937

Mr. Prescott S. Bush

59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.

Dear Press,

I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic] Cable Company to Averell Harriman.... It would appear that the only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the modification of the bankers' agreement.

Sincerely yours,

John Foster Dulles

Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman's signature, and the changes went through. [fn36]

In conjunction with these arrangements, the German Atlantic Cable Company attempted to stop payment on its debts to smaller American bondholders. The money was to be used instead for arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government.

Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court decided that this particular Hitler "law'' was invalid in the United States; small bondholders, not parties to deals between the bankers and the Nazis, were entitled to get paid. [fn37]

In this and a few other of the attempted swindles, the intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi financial and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic climax.

For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune.

This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush.

An Important Historical Note: How the Harrimans Hired Hitler

It was not inevitable that millions would be slaughtered under fascism and in World War II. At certain moments of crisis, crucial pro-Nazi decisions were made outside of Germany. These decisions for pro-Nazi actions were more aggressive than the mere "appeasement'' which Anglo-American historians later preferred to discuss.

Private armies of 300,000 to 400,000 terrorists aided the Nazis' rise to power. W.A. Harriman's Hamburg-Amerika Line intervened against Germany's 1932 attempt to break them up.

The 1929-31 economic collapse bankrupted the Wall-Street-backed German Steel Trust. When the German government took over the Trust's stock shares, interests associated with Konrad Adenauer and the anti-Nazi Catholic Center Party attempted to acquire the shares. But the Anglo-Americans--Montagu Norman, and the Harriman-Bush bank--made sure that their Nazi puppet Fritz Thyssen regained control over the shares and the Trust. Thyssen's bankrolling of Hitler could then continue unhindered.

Unpayable debts crushed Germany in the 1920s, reparations required by the Versailles agreements. Germany was looted by the London-New York banking system, and Hitler's propaganda exploited this German debt burden.

But immediately after Germany came under Hitler's dictatorship, the Anglo-American financiers granted debt relief, which freed funds to be used for arming the Nazi state.

The North German Lloyd steamship line, which was merged with Hamburg-Amerika Line, was one of the companies which stopped debt payments under a Hitler decree arranged by John Foster Dulles and Hjalmar Schacht.

Kuhn Loeb and Co.'s Felix Warburg carried out the Hitler finance plan in New York. Kuhn Loeb asked North German Lloyd bondholders to accept new lower interest steamship bonds, issued by Kuhn Loeb, in place of the better pre-Hitler bonds.

The Opposition

New York attorney Jacob Chaitkin, father of coauthor Anton Chaitkin, took the cases of many different bondholders who rejected the swindle by Harriman, Bush, Warburg, and Hitler. Representing a women who was owed $30 on an old steamship bond--and opposing John Foster Dulles in New York municipal court -- Chaitkin threatened a writ from the sheriff, tying up the 30,000 ton transatlantic liner Europa until the client received her $30. (New York Times, January 10, 1934, p. 31 col. 3).

The American Jewish Congress hired Jacob Chaitkin as the legal director of the boycott against Nazi Germany. The American Federation of Labor cooperated with Jewish and other groups in the anti-import boycott. On the other side, virtually all the Nazi trade with the United States was under the supervision of the Harriman interests and functionaries such as Prescott Bush, father of President George Bush.

Meanwhile, the Warburgs demanded that American Jews not "agitate'' against the Hitler government, or join the organized boycott. The Warburgs' decision was carried out by the American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith, who opposed the boycott as the Nazi military state grew increasingly powerful.

The historical coverup on these events is so tight that virtually the only expose of the Warburgs came in journalist John L. Spivak's "Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy,'' in the pro-communist New Masses periodical (Jan. 29 and Feb. 5, 1934). Spivak pointed out that the Warburgs controlled the American Jewish Committee, which opposed the anti-Nazi boycott, while their Kuhn Loeb and Co. had underwritten Nazi shipping; and he exposed the financing of pro-fascist political activities by the Warburgs and their partners and allies, many of whom were bigwigs in the American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith.

Given where the Spivak piece appeared, it is not surprising that Spivak called Warburg an ally of the Morgan Bank, but made no mention of Averell Harriman. Mr. Harriman, after all, was a permanent hero of the Soviet Union.

John L. Spivak later underwent a curious transformation, himself joining the coverup. In 1967, he wrote an autobiography (A Man in His Time, New York: Horizon Press), which praises the American Jewish Committee. The pro-fascism of the Warburgs does not appear in the book. The former "rebel'' Spivak also praises the action arm of the B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Defamation League. Pathetically, he comments favorably that the League has spy files on the American populace which it shares with government agencies.

Thus is history erased; and those decisions, which direct history into one course or another, are lost to the knowledge of the current generation.

_______________

Notes:

1. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 248. The order was signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568; Filed, November 6, 1942, 11:31 A.M.; 7 Fed. Reg. 9097 (Nov. 7, 1942). See also the New York City Directory of Directors (available at the Library of Congress). The volumes for the 1930s and 1940s list Prescott Bush as a director of Union Banking Corporation for the years 1934 through 1943.

2. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order No. 261: Holland-American Trading Corp.

3. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp.

4. The New York Times on December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: "The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.''

The Times omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and even the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian.

5. Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler, 1941, reprinted in (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says his contributions began with 100,000 marks given in October 1923, for Hitler's attempted "putsch'' against the constitutional government.

6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, to the U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932, on microfilm in Confidential Reports of U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany, at major U.S. libraries.

7. Oct. 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 248.

8. Elimination of German Resources for War: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5, Testimony of [the United States] Treasury Department, July 2, 1945. P. 507: Table of Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German total as of 1938; Thyssen organization including Union Banking Corporation pp. 727-31.

9. Robert Sobel, The Life and Times of Dillon Read (New York: Dutton-Penguin, 1991), pp. 92-111. The Dillon Read firm cooperated in the development of Sobel's book.

10. George Walker to Averell Harriman, Aug. 11, 1927, in the W. Averell Harriman papers at the Library of Congress (designated hereafter WAH papers).

11. "Iaccarino'' to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12, 1927. The specific nature of their business with Mussolini is not explained in correspondence available for public access.

12. Andrew Boyle, Montagu Norman (London: Cassell, 1967).

Sir Henry Clay, Lord Norman (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957), pp. 18, 57, 70-71.

John A. Kouwenhouven, Partners in Banking ... Brown Brothers Harriman (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969).

13. Coordination of much of the Hitler project took place at a single New York address. The Union Banking Corporation had been set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, carried out through Harriman's American Ship and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway.

14. Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in U.S. Control Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony Sutton, An Introduction to The Order (Billings, Mt.: Liberty House Press, 1986).

15. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, by the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, United States Government Printing Office, (Washington: 1948), pp. 1597, 1686.

16. "Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation - [minutes of the] Meeting of Board of Directors,'' Oct. 31, 1930 (Harriman papers, Library of Congress), shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board.

Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum Dec. 19, 1930 on their Harriman Fifteen Corp.

Annual Report of United Konigs and Laura Steel and Iron Works for the year 1930 (Harriman papers, Library of Congress) lists "Dr. Friedrich Flick ... Berlin'' and "William Averell Harriman ... New York'' on the Board of Directors.

"Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931,'' Harriman papers, Library of Congress. This report shows Harriman Fifteen Corporation holding 32,576 shares in Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C. worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1,628,800, just over half the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's total holdings.

The New York City Directory of Directors volumes for the 1930s (available at the Library of Congress) show Prescott Sheldon Bush and W. Averell Harriman as the directors of Harriman Fifteen Corp.

"Appointments, '' (three typed pages) marked "Noted May 18 1931 W.A.H.,'' (among the papers from Prescott Bush's New York Office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Harriman papers, Library of Congress), lists a meeting between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00 P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by a meeting with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.

The "Report To the Stockholders of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, ''Oct. 19, 1933 (in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress) names G.H. Walker as president of the corporation. It shows the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's address as 1 Wall Street--the location of G.H. Walker and Co.

17. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., p. 1686.

18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush's employee), March 19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman.

"Dear Averell:

In Roland's absence Pres[cott] thought it advisable for me to let you know that we received the following cable from [our European representative] Rossi dated March 17th [relating to conflict with the Polish government]....''

19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation notice to stockholders Jan. 7, 1935, under the name of George Walker, President.

20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed Nov. 17, 1942. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian. F.R. Doc. 42-14183; Filed Dec. 31, 1942, 11:28 A.M.; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1, 1943).
The order confiscated the Nazis' holdings of 98,000 shares of common and 50,000 shares of preferred stock in Silesian-American.
The Nazi parent company in Breslau, Germany wrote directly to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with "an invitation to take part in the regular meeting of the members of the Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft Georg von Giesche's Erben....'' WAH papers.

21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 370.

22. George Walker was a director of American Ship and Commerce from its organization through 1928. Consult New York City Directory of Directors.

"Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931,'' op. cit. The report lists 46,861 shares in the American Ship & Commerce Corp.

See "Message from Mr. Bullfin,'' Aug. 30, 1934 (Harriman Fifteen section, Harriman papers, Library of Congress) for the joint supervision of Bush and Walker, respectively director and president of the corporation.

23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk, Third Reich Press Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk's postwar jail cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking power. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., p. 1688.

24. See "Elimination of German Resources for War,'' op. cit., pp. 881-82 on Voegler.

See Annual Report of the (Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (Hapag or Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors. A copy is in the New York Public Library Annex at 11th Avenue, Manhattan.

25. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B, op. cit., pp. 1178, 1453-54, 1597, 1599.

See "Elimination of German Resources for War,'' op. cit., pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger.

26. Annual Report of Hamburg-Amerika, op. cit.

Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell Harriman, Nov. 14, 1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft reply letter, Dec. 9, 1932.

In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to the family's American affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of which Allen Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was the principal attorney.

Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was adviser to Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, and Baron Bruno's partner Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman's co-director of the Bank of England throughout Norman's career. Kurt von Schroeder was Hjalmar Schacht's delegate to the Bank for International Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial arrangements for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and the Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the outbreak of World War II.

27. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, op. cit.

28. U.S. Senate "Nye Committee'' hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp. 1197-98, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated June 27, 1932 and Jan. 9, 1933.

29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation to Dr. Max Warburg, March 7, 1933.

Max Warburg had brokered the sale of Hamburg-Amerika to Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max's brothers controlled the Kuhn Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union Pacific Railroad.

Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa and Eastern Europe. He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for several decades and was a top executive of Hitler's Reichsbank. The reader may consult David Farrer, The Warburgs: The Story of A Family (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).

30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill [sic] Harriman, c/o Messrs. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., March 27, 1933.

31. This correspondence, and the joint statement of the Jewish organizations, are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982).

32. Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities: Public Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives, Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934 -- Hearings No. 73-NY-7 (Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1934). See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John Schroeder, Paul von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members.

See New York Times, July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of Nazi Labor Front at North German Lloyd, leading to Hamburg-Amerika after merger.

33. American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph Brinckmann at M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936.

Rudolph Brinckmann to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St., June 20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helfferich's letter.

Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinckmann c/o M.M. Warburg and Co, July 6, 1936, in the Harriman papers at the Library of Congress. The file copy of this letter carries no signature, but is presumably from Averell Harriman.

34. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 126. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc. 42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942, 10:55 A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (No. 176, Sept. 5, 1942.) July 18, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 126.

35. New York Times, May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement is a telegram which somehow escaped the shredder and may be seen in the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress. It is addressed to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: "Much disappointed to have missed seeing you Tuesday afternoon.... I hope to see you either in Washington or New York before you sail.

with my regards W.A. Harriman''

36. Dulles to Bush letter and draft reply in WAH papers.

37. New York Times, Jan. 19, 1938.
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

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Chapter III -- Race Hygiene: Three Bush Family Alliances

"The [government] must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children.... The prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only 600 years, would ... free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune.''

"The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people--how should we tackle these problems?.... It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be to curb the world's fertility.''


These two quotations are alike in their mock show of concern for human suffering, and in their cynical remedy for it: Big Brother must prevent the "unworthy'' or "unwanted'' people from living.

Let us now further inquire into the family background of our President, so as to help illustrate how the second quoted author, George Bush fn1 came to share the outlook of the first, Adolf Hitler. [fn2]

We shall examine here the alliance of the Bush family with three other families: Farish, Draper and Gray.

The private associations among these families have led to the President's relationship to his closest, most confidential advisers. These alliances were forged in the earlier Hitler project and its immediate aftermath. Understanding them will help us to explain George Bush's obsession with the supposed overpopulation of the world's non-Anglo-Saxons, and the dangerous means he has adopted to deal with this "problem.''

Bush and Farish

When George Bush was elected Vice President in 1980, Texas mystery man William ("Will'') Stamps Farish III took over management of all of George Bush's personal wealth in a "blind trust.'' Known as one of the richest men in Texas, Will Farish keeps his business affairs under the most intense secrecy. Only the source of his immense wealth is known, not its employment. [fn3]

Will Farish has long been Bush's closest friend and confidante. He is also the unique private host to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II: Farish owns and boards the studs which mate with the Queen's mares. That is her public rationale when she comes to America and stays in Farish's house. It is a vital link in the mind of our Anglophile President.

President Bush can count on Will Farish not to betray the violent secrets surrounding the Bush family money. For Farish's own family fortune was made in the same Hitler project, in a nightmarish partnership with George Bush's father.

On March 25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced that William Stamps Farish (grandfather of the President's money manager) had pled "no contest'' to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Farish was the principal manager of a worldwide cartel between Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey and the I.G. Farben concern. The merged enterprise had opened the Auschwitz slave labor camp on June 14, 1940, to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government supplied political opponents and Jews as the slaves, who were worked to near death and then murdered.

Arnold disclosed that Standard Oil of N.J. (later known as Exxon), of which Farish was president and chief executive, had agreed to stop hiding from the United States patents for artificial rubber which the company had provided to the Nazis. [fn4]

A Senate investigating committee under Senator (later U.S. President) Harry Truman of Missouri had called Arnold to testify at hearings on U.S. corporations' collaboration with the Nazis. The Senators expressed outrage at the cynical way Farish was continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that had begun back in 1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn't he know there was a war on?

The Justice Department laid before the committee a letter, written to Standard president Farish by his vice president, shortly after the beginning of World War II (Sept. 1, 1939) in Europe. The letter concerned a renewal of their earlier agreements with the Nazis:

Report on European Trip
Oct. 12, 1939
Mr. W.S. Farish
30 Rockefeller Plaza

Dear Mr. Farish: ... I stayed in France until Sept. 17th.... In England I met by appointment the Royal Dutch [Shell Oil Co.] gentlemen from Holland, and ... a general agreement was reached on the necessary changes in our relations with the I.G. [Farben], in view of the state of war.... [T]he Royal Dutch Shell group is essentially British.... I also had several meetings with ... the [British] Air Ministry....

I required help to obtain the necessary permission to go to Holland.... After discussions with the [American] Ambassador [Joseph Kennedy] ... the situation was cleared completely.... The gentlemen in the Air Ministry ... very kindly offered to assist me [later] in reentering England....

Pursuant to these arrangements, I was able to keep my appointments in Holland [having flown there on a British Royal Air Force bomber], where I had three days of discussion with the representatives of I.G. They delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which could operate through the term of the war, whether or not the U.S. came in.... [emphasis added]

Very truly yours, F[rank] A. Howard [fn5]

Here are some cold realities behind the tragedy of World War II, which help explain the Bush-Farish family alliance--and their peculiar closeness to the Queen of England:

Shell Oil is principally owned by the British royal family. Shell's chairman, Sir Henri Deterding, helped sponsor Hitler's rise to power, [fn6] by arrangement with the royal family's Bank of England Governor, Montagu Norman. Their ally Standard Oil would take part in the Hitler project right up to the bloody, gruesome end.

When grandfather Farish signed the Justice Department's consent decree in March 1942, the government had already started picking its way through the tangled web of world-monopoly oil and chemical agreements between Standard Oil and the Nazis. Many patents and other Nazi-owned aspects of the partnership had been seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian.

Uncle Sam would not seize Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corporation for another seven months.


The Bush-Farish axis had begun back in 1929. In that year the Harriman bank bought Dresser Industries, supplier of oil-pipeline couplers to Standard and other companies. Prescott Bush became a director and financial czar of Dresser, installing his Yale classmate Neil Mahlon as chairman. fn7 George Bush would later name one of his sons after the Dresser executive.

William S. Farish was the main organizer of the Humble Oil Co. of Texas, which Farish merged into the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Farish built up the Humble-Standard empire of pipelines and refineries in Texas. fn8

The stock market crashed just after the Bush family got into the oil business. The world financial crisis led to the merger of the Walker-Harriman bank with Brown Brothers in 1931. Former Brown partner Montagu Norman and his protege Hjalmar Schacht paid frantic visits to New York that year and the next, preparing the new Hitler regime for Germany.

The most important American political event in those preparations for Hitler was the infamous "Third International Congress on Eugenics,'' held at New York's American Museum of Natural History August 21-23, 1932, supervised by the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. fn9 This meeting took up the stubborn persistence of African-Americans and other allegedly "inferior'' and "socially inadequate'' groups in reproducing, expanding their numbers, and amalgamating with others. It was recommended that these "dangers'' to the "better'' ethnic groups and to the "well-born,'' could be dealt with by sterilization or "cutting off the bad stock'' of the "unfit. ''

Italy's fascist government sent an official representative. Averell Harriman's sister Mary, director of "Entertainment'' for the Congress, lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her state supplied the speaker on "racial purity,'' W.A. Plecker, Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker reportedly held the delegates spellbound with his account of the struggle to stop race-mixing and inter-racial sex in Virginia.

The Congress proceedings were dedicated to Averell Harriman's mother; she had paid for the founding of the race-science movement in America back in 1910, building the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of the Galton National Laboratory in London. She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races by old George Herbert Walker--they shared with the Bushes and the Farishes a fascination with `` breeding thoroughbreds '' among horses and humans. [fn10]

Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line to transport Nazi ideologues from Germany to New York for this meeting. [fn11] The most famous among those transported was Dr. Ernst Rudin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin, where the Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Rudin to occupy an entire floor with his eugenics "research.'' Dr. Rudin had addressed the International Federation's 1928 Munich meeting, speaking on "Mental Aberration and Race Hygiene,'' while others (Germans and Americans) spoke on race-mixing and sterilization of the unfit. Rudin had also led the German delegation to the 1930 Mental Hygiene Congress in Washington, D.C.

At the Harrimans' 1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Rudin was unanimously elected president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. This was recognition of Rudin as founder of the German Society for Race Hygiene, with his co-founder, Eugenics Federation vice president Alfred Ploetz.

As depression-maddened financiers schemed in Berlin and New York, Rudin was now official leader of the world eugenics movement. Components of his movement included groups with overlapping leadership, dedicated to:

sterilization of mental patients ("mental hygiene societies'');

execution of the insane, criminals and the terminally ill (`` euthanasia societies ''); and

eugenical race-purification by prevention of births to parents from "inferior'' blood stocks ("birth control societies'').


Before the Auschwitz death camp became a household word, these British-American-European groups called openly for the elimination of the "unfit'' by means including force and violence. [fn12]

Ten months later, in June 1933, Hitler's interior minister Wilhelm Frick spoke to a eugenics meeting in the new Third Reich. Frick called the Germans a "degenerate'' race, denouncing one-fifth of Germany's parents for producing "feeble-minded'' and "defective'' children. The following month, on a commission by Frick, Dr. Ernst Rudin wrote the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity,'' the sterilization law modeled on previous U.S. statutes in Virginia and other states.

Special courts were soon established for the sterilization of German mental patients, the blind, the deaf and alcoholics. A quarter million people in these categories were sterilized. Rudin, Ploetz and their colleagues trained a whole generation of physicians and psychiatrists--as sterilizers and as killers.

When the war started, the eugenicists, doctors and psychiatrists staffed the new "T4'' agency, which planned and supervised the mass killings: first at "euthanasia centers,'' where the same categories which had first been subject to sterilization were now to be murdered, their brains sent in lots of 200 to experimental psychiatrists; then at slave camps such as Auschwitz; and finally, for Jews and other race victims, at straight extermination camps in Poland, such as Treblinka and Belsen. [fn13]

In 1933, as what Hitler called his "New Order'' appeared, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. appointed William S. Farish the chairman of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (in 1937 he was made president and chief executive). Farish moved his offices to Rockefeller Center, New York, where he spent a good deal of time with Hermann Schmitz, chairman of I.G. Farben; his company paid a publicity man, Ivy Lee, to write pro-I.G. Farben and pro-Nazi propaganda and get it into the U.S. press.

Now that he was outside of Texas, Farish found himself in the shipping business--like the Bush family. He hired Nazi German crews for Standard Oil tankers. And he hired Emil Helfferich, chairman of the Walker/Bush/Harriman Hamburg-Amerika Line, as chairman also of the Standard Oil Company subsidiary in Germany. Karl Lindemann, board member of Hamburg-Amerika, also became a top Farish-Standard executive in Germany. [fn14]

This interlock between their Nazi German operations put Farish together with Prescott Bush in a small, select group of men operating from abroad through Hitler's "revolution,'' and calculating that they would never be punished.

In 1939, Farish's daughter Martha married Averell Harriman's nephew, Edward Harriman Gerry, and Farish in-laws became Prescott Bush's partners at 59 Broadway. [fn15]

Both Emil Helfferich and Karl Lindemann were authorized to write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi S.S., on a special Standard Oil account. This account was managed by the German-British-American banker, Kurt von Schroeder. According to U.S. intelligence documents reviewed by author Anthony Sutton, Emil Helfferich continued his payments to the S.S. into 1944, when the S.S. was supervising the mass murder at the Standard-I.G. Farben Auschwitz and other death camps. Helfferich told Allied interrogators after the war that these were not his personal contributions--they were corporate Standard Oil funds. [fn16]

After pleading "no contest'' to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis, William Stamps Farish was fined $5,000. (Similar fines were levied against Standard Oil--$5,000 each for the parent company and for several subsidiaries.) This of course did not interfere with the millions of dollars that Farish had acquired in conjunction with Hitler's New Order, as a large stockholder, chairman and president of Standard Oil. All the government sought was the use of patents which his company had given to the Nazis--the Auschwitz patents--but had withheld from the U.S. military and industry.

But a war was on, and if young men were to be asked to die fighting Hitler ... something more was needed. Farish was hauled before the Senate committee investigating the national defense program. The committee chairman, Senator Harry Truman, told newsmen before Farish testified: "I think this approaches treason.'' [fn17]

Farish began breaking apart at these hearings. He shouted his "indignation'' at the Senators, and claimed he was not "disloyal. ''

After the March-April hearings ended, more dirt came gushing out of the Justice Department and the Congress on Farish and Standard Oil. Farish had deceived the U.S. Navy to prevent the Navy from acquiring certain patents, while supplying them to the Nazi war machine; meanwhile, he was supplying gasoline and tetraethyl lead to Germany's submarines and air force. Communications between Standard and I.G. Farben from the outbreak of World War II were released to the Senate, showing that Farish's organization had arranged to deceive the U.S. government into passing over Nazi-owned assets: They would nominally buy I.G.'s share in certain patents because "in the event of war between ourselves and Germany ... it would certainly be very undesirable to have this 20 percent Standard-I.G. pass to an alien property custodian of the U.S. who might sell it to an unfriendly interest.'' [fn18]

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (father of David, Nelson and John D. Rockefeller III), controlling owner of Standard Oil, told the Roosevelt administration that he knew nothing of the day-to-day affairs of his company, that all these matters were handled by Farish and other executives. [fn19]

In August, Farish was brought back for more testimony. He was now frequently accused of lying. Farish was crushed under the intense, public grilling; he became morose, ashen. While Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the government seized his Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had been nailed. He collapsed and died of a heart attack on Nov. 29, 1942.

The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six months later. [fn20]

With this double death, the fortune comprising much of Standard Oil's profits from Texas and Nazi Germany was now to be settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William ("Will'') Stamps Farish III. Will Farish grew up a recluse, the most secretive multi-millionaire in Texas, with investments of "that money'' in a multitude of foreign countries, and a host of exotic contacts overlapping the intelligence and financial worlds--particularly in Britain.

The Bush-Farish axis started George Bush's career. After his 1948 graduation from Yale (and Skull and Bones), George Bush flew down to Texas on a corporate airplane and was employed by his father's Dresser Industries. In a couple of years he got help from his uncle, George Walker, Jr., and Farish's British banker friends, to set him up in the oil property speculation business. Soon thereafter, George Bush founded the Zapata Oil Company, which put oil drilling rigs into certain locations of great strategic interest to the Anglo-American intelligence community.

Will Farish at 25 years old was a personal aide to Zapata chairman George Bush in Bush's unsuccessful 1964 campaign for Senate. Will Farish used "that Auschwitz money'' to back George Bush financially, investing in Zapata. When Bush was elected to Congress in 1966, Farish joined the Zapata board. [fn21]

When George Bush became U.S. Vice President in 1980, the Farish and Bush family fortunes were again completely, secretly commingled. As we shall see, the old projects were now being revived on a breathtaking scale.

Bush and Draper

Twenty years before he was U.S. President, George Bush brought two "race-science'' professors in front of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. As chairman of the Task Force, then-Congressman Bush invited Professors William Shockley and Arthur Jensen to explain to the committee how allegedly runaway birth-rates for African-Americans were "down-breeding'' the American population.

Afterwards Bush personally summed up for the Congress the testimony his black-inferiority advocates had given to the Task Force. [fn22] George Bush held his hearings on the threat posed by black babies on August 5, 1969, while much of the world was in a better frame of mind--celebrating mankind's progress from the first moon landing 16 days earlier. Bush's obsessive thinking on this subject was guided by his family's friend, Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., the founder and chairman of the Population Crisis Committee, and vice chairman of the Planned Parenthood Federation. Draper had long been steering U.S. public discussion about the so-called "population bomb'' in the non-white areas of the world.

If Congressman Bush had explained to his colleagues how his family had come to know General Draper, they would perhaps have felt some alarm, or even panic, and paid more healthy attention to Bush's presentation. Unfortunately, the Draper-Bush population doctrine is now official U.S. foreign policy.

William H. Draper, Jr. had joined the Bush team in 1927, when he was hired by Dillon Read & Co., New York investment bankers. Draper was put into a new job slot at the firm: handling the Thyssen account.

We recall that in 1924, Fritz Thyssen set up his Union Banking Corporation in George Herbert Walker's bank at 39 Broadway, Manhattan. Dillon Read & Co.'s boss, Clarence Dillon, had begun working with Fritz Thyssen sometime after Averell Harriman first met with Thyssen--at about the time Thyssen began financing Adolf Hitler's political career.

In January 1926, Dillon Read created the German Credit and Investment Corporation in Newark, New Jersey and Berlin, Germany, as Thyssen's short-term banker. That same year Dillon Read created the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (German Steel Trust), incorporating the Thyssen family interests under the direction of New York and London finance. [fn23]

William H. Draper, Jr. was made director, vice president and assistant treasurer of the German Credit and Investment Corp. His business was short-term loans and financial management tricks for Thyssen and the German Steel Trust. Draper's clients sponsored Hitler's terroristic takeover; his clients led the buildup of the Nazi war industry; his clients made war against the United States. The Nazis were Draper's direct partners in Berlin and New Jersey: Alexander Kreuter, residing in Berlin, was president; Frederic Brandi, whose father was a top coal executive in the German Steel Trust, moved to the U.S. in 1926 and served as Draper's co-director in Newark.

Draper's role was crucial for Dillon Read & Co., for whom Draper was a partner and eventually vice president. The German Credit and Investment Corp. (GCI) was a "front'' for Dillon Read: It had the same New Jersey address as U.S. & International Securities Corp. (USIS), and the same man served as treasurer of both firms. [fn24]

Clarence Dillon and his son C. Douglas Dillon were directors of USIS, which was spotlighted when Clarence Dillon was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee's famous "Pecora'' hearings in 1933. USIS was shown to be one of the great speculative pyramid schemes which had swindled stockholders of hundreds of millions of dollars. These investment policies had rotted the U.S. economy to the core, and led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But William H. Draper, Jr.'s GCI "front'' was not apparently affiliated with the USIS "front'' or with Dillon, and the GCI escaped the Congressmen's limited scrutiny. This oversight was to prove most unfortunate, particularly to the 50 million people who subsequently died in World War II.

Dillon Read hired public relations man Ivy Lee to prepare their executives for their testimony and to confuse and further baffle the Congressmen. [fn25] Lee apparently took enough time out from his duties as image-maker for William S. Farish and the Nazi I.G. Farben Co.; he managed the congressional thinking so that the Congressmen did not disturb the Draper operation in Germany--and did not meddle with Thyssen, or interfere with Hitler's U.S. moneymen.

Thus in 1932, William H. Draper, Jr. was free to finance the International Eugenics Congress as a "Supporting Member''. [fn26] Was he using his own income as a Thyssen trust banker? Or did the funds come from Dillon Read corporate accounts, perhaps to be written off income tax as "expenses for German project: race purification''? Draper helped select Ernst Rudin as chief of the world eugenics movement, who used his office to promote what he called Adolf Hitler's "holy, national and international racial hygienic mission.'' [fn27]

W.S. Farish, as we have seen, was publicly exposed in 1942, humiliated and destroyed. Just before Farish died, Prescott Bush's Nazi banking office was quietly seized and shut down. But Prescott's close friend and partner in the Thyssen-Hitler business, William H. Draper, Jr., neither died nor moved out of German affairs. Draper listed himself as a director of the German Credit and Investment Corp. through 1942, and the firm was not liquidated until November 1943. [fn28] But a war was on; Draper, a colonel from previous military service, went off to the Pacific theater and became a general.

General Draper apparently had a hobby: magic--illusions, sleight of hand, etc.--and he was a member of the Society of American Magicians. This is not irrelevant to his subsequent career.

The Nazi regime surrendered in May 1945. In July 1945, General Draper was called to Europe by the American military government authorities in Germany. Draper was appointed head of the Economics Division of the U.S. Control Commission. He was assigned to take apart the Nazi corporate cartels. There is an astonishing but perfectly logical rationale to this--Draper knew a lot about the subject! General Draper, who had spent about 15 years financing and managing the dirtiest of the Nazi enterprises, was now authorized to decide who was exposed, who lost and who kept his business, and in practical effect, who was prosecuted for war crimes. [fn29]

(Draper was not unique within the postwar occupation government. Consider the case of John J. McCloy, U.S. Military Governor and High Commissioner of Germany, 1949-1952. Under instructions from his Wall Street law firm, McCloy had lived for a year in Italy, serving as an advisor to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. An intimate collaborator of the Harriman/Bush bank, McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, at the invitation of Nazi chieftains Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering.) [fn30]

William H. Draper, Jr., as a "conservative,'' was paired with the "liberal'' U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in a vicious game. Morgenthau demanded that Germany be utterly destroyed as a nation, that its industry be dismantled and it be reduced to a purely rural country. As the economic boss in 1945 and 1946, Draper "protected'' Germany from the Morgenthau Plan ... but at a price.

Draper and his colleagues demanded that Germany and the world accept the collective guilt of the German people as the explanation for the rise of Hitler's New Order, and the Nazi war crimes. This, of course, was rather convenient for General Draper himself, as it was for the Bush family. It is still convenient decades later, allowing Prescott's son, President Bush, to lecture Germany on the danger of Hitlerism. Germans are too slow, it seems, to accept his New World Order.

After several years of government service (often working directly for Averell Harriman in the North Atlantic Alliance), General Draper was appointed in 1958 chairman of a committee which was to advise President Dwight Eisenhower on the proper course for U.S. military aid to other countries. At that time, Prescott Bush was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, a confidential friend and golf partner with National Security Director Gordon Gray, and an important golf partner with Dwight Eisenhower as well. Prescott's old lawyer from the Nazi days, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles, formerly of the Schroder bank, was head of the CIA.

This friendly environment emboldened General Draper to pull off a stunt with his military aid advisory committee. He changed the subject under study. The following year the Draper committee recommended that the U.S. government react to the supposed threat of the "population explosion'' by formulating plans to depopulate the poorer countries. The growth of the world's non-white population, he proposed, should be regarded as dangerous to the national security of the United States! [fn31]

President Eisenhower rejected the recommendation. But in the next decade, General Draper founded the "Population Crisis Committee'' and the "Draper Fund,'' joining with the Rockefeller and Du Pont families to promote eugenics as "population control.'' The administration of President Lyndon Johnson, advised by General Draper on the subject, began financing birth control in the tropical countries through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

General Draper was George Bush's guru on the population question. [fn32] But there was also Draper's money--from that uniquely horrible source--and Draper's connections on Wall Street and abroad. Draper's son and heir, William H. Draper III, was co-chairman for finance (chief of fundraising) of the Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980. With George Bush in the White House, the younger Draper heads up the depopulation activities of the United Nations throughout the world.

General Draper was vice president of Dillon Read until 1953. During the 1950s and 1960s, the chief executive there was Frederic Brandi, the German who was Draper's co-director for the Nazi investments and his personal contact man with the Nazi German Steel Trust. Nicholas Brady was Brandi's partner from 1954, and replaced him as the firm's chief executive in 1971. Nicholas Brady, who knows where all the bodies are buried, was chairman of his friend George Bush's 1980 election campaign in New Jersey, and has been United States Treasury Secretary throughout Bush's presidency. [fn33]

Bush and Gray

The U.S. Agency for International Development says that surgical sterilization is the Bush administration's "first choice'' method of population reduction in the Third World. [fn34]

The United Nations Population Fund claims that 37 percent of contraception users in Ibero-America and the Caribbean have already been surgically sterilized. In a 1991 report, William H. Draper III's agency asserts that 254 million couples will be surgically sterilized over the course of the 1990s; and that if present trends continue, 80 percent of the women in Puerto Rico and Panama will be surgically sterilized. [fn35]

The U.S. government pays directly for these sterilizations.

Mexico is first among targeted nations, on a list which was drawn up in July 1991, at a USAID strategy session. India and Brazil are second and third priorities, respectively.

On contract with the Bush administration, U.S. personnel are working from bases in Mexico to perform surgery on millions of Mexican men and women. The acknowledged strategy in this program is to sterilize those young adults who have not already completed their families.

George Bush has a rather deep-seated personal feeling about this project, in particular as it pits him against Pope John Paul II in Catholic countries such as Mexico. (See Chapter 4 below, on the origin of a Bush family grudge in this regard.)

The spending for birth control in the non-white countries is one of the few items that is headed upwards in the Bush administration budget. As its 1992 budget was being set, USAID said its Population Account would receive $300 million, a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Within this project, a significant sum is spent on political and psychological manipulations of target nations, and rather blatant subversion of their religions and governments. [fn36]

These activities might be expected to cause serious objections from the victimized nationalities, or from U.S. taxpayers, especially if the program is somehow given widespread publicity.

Quite aside from moral considerations, legal questions would naturally arise, which could be summed up: How does George Bush think he can get away with this?

In this matter the President has expert advice. Mr. (Clayland) Boyden Gray has been counsel to George Bush since the 1980 election. As chief legal officer in the White House, Boyden Gray can walk the President through the dangers and complexities of waging such unusual warfare against Third World populations. Gray knows how these things are done.

When Boyden Gray was four and five years old, his father organized the pilot project for the present worldwide sterilization program, from the Gray family household in North Carolina.

It started in 1946. The eugenics movement was looking for a way to begin again in America.

Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz had just then seared the conscience of the world. The Sterilization League of America, which had changed its name during the war to "Birthright, Inc.,'' wanted to start up again. First they had to overcome public nervousness about crackpots proposing to eliminate "inferior'' and "defective'' people. The League tried to surface in Iowa, but had to back off because of negative publicity: A little boy had recently been sterilized there and had died from the operation.

They decided on North Carolina, where the Gray family could play the perfect host. Through British imperial contacts, Boyden Gray's grandfather, Bowman Gray, had become principal owner of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Boyden's father, Gordon Gray, had recently founded the Bowman Gray (memorial) Medical School in Winston-Salem, using his inherited cigarette stock shares. The medical school was already a eugenics center.

As the experiment began, Gordon Gray's great aunt, Alice Shelton Gray, who had raised him from childhood, was living in his household. Aunt Alice had founded the "Human Betterment League,'' the North Carolina branch of the national eugenical sterilization movement.

Aunt Alice was the official supervisor of the 1946-47 experiment. Working under Miss Gray was Dr. Claude Nash Herndon, whom Gordon Gray had made assistant professor of "medical genetics'' at Bowman Gray Medical School.

Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble soap fortune, was the sterilizers' national field operations chief.

The experiment worked as follows. All children enrolled in the school district of Winston-Salem, N.C., were given a special "ntelligence test." Those children who scored below a certain arbitrary low mark were then cut open and surgically sterilized.

We quote now from the official story of the project: [fn37]

In Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County, North Carolina, the [Sterilization League's] field committee had participated in testing projects to identify school age children who should be considered for sterilization. The project in Orange County was conducted by the University of North Carolina and was financed by a 'Mr. Hanes,' a friend of Clarence Gamble and supporter of the field work project in North Carolina. The Winston-Salem project was also financed by Hanes.'' ["Hanes'' was underwear mogul James Gordon Hanes, a trustee of Bowman Gray Medical School and treasurer of Alice Gray's group]....


The medical school had a long history of interest in eugenics and had compiled extensive histories of families carrying inheritable disease. In 1946, Dr. C. Nash Herndon ... made a statement to the press on the use of sterilization to prevent the spread of inheritable diseases....

The first step after giving the mental tests to grade school children was to interpret and make public the results. In Orange County the results indicated that three percent of the school age children were either insane or feebleminded.... [Then] the field committee hired a social worker to review each case ... and to present any cases in which sterilization was indicated to the State Eugenics Board, which under North Carolina law had the authority to order sterilization....

Race science experimenter Dr. Claude Nash Herndon provided more details in an interview in 1990. [fn38]

Alice Gray was the general supervisor of the project. She and Hanes sent out letters promoting the program to the commissioners of all 100 counties in North Carolina.... What did I do? Nothing besides riding herd on the whole thing! The social workers operated out of my office. I was at the time also director of outpatient services at North Carolina Baptist Hospital. We would see the [targeted] parents and children there.... I.Q. tests were run on all the children in the Winston-Salem public school system. Only the ones who scored really low [were targeted for sterilization], the real bottom of the barrel, like below 70.

Did we do sterilizations on young children? Yes. This was a relatively minor operation.... It was usually not until the child was eight or ten years old. For the boys, you just make an incision and tie the tube.... We more often performed the operation on girls than with boys. Of course, you have to cut open the abdomen, but again, it is relatively minor.

Dr. Herndon remarked coolly that "we had a very good relationship with the press'' for the project. This is not surprising, since Gordon Gray owned the Winston-Salem Journal, the Twin City Sentinel and radio station WSJS.

In 1950 and 1951, John Foster Dulles, then chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, led John D. Rockefeller III on a series of world tours, focusing on the need to stop the expansion of the non-white populations. In November 1952, Dulles and Rockefeller set up the Population Council, with tens of millions of dollars from the Rockefeller family.

At that point, the American Eugenics Society, still cautious from the recent bad publicity vis-a-vis Hitler, left its old headquarters at Yale University. The Society moved its headquarters into the office of the Population Council, and the two groups melded together. The long-time secretary of the American Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborne, became the first president of the Population Council. The Gray family's child-sterilizer, Dr. Claude Nash Herndon, became president of the American Eugenics Society in 1953, as its work expanded under Rockefeller patronage.

Meanwhile, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in London, in the offices of the British Eugenics Society.

The undead enemy from World War II, renamed "Population Control,'' had now been revived.

George Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972, when with prodding from Bush and his friends, the U.S. Agency for International Development first made an official contract with the old Sterilization League of America. The League had changed its name twice again, and was now called the "Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception.'' The U.S. government began paying the old fascist group to sterilize non-whites in foreign countries.

The Gray family experiment had succeeded.

In 1988, the U.S. Agency for International Development signed its latest contract with the old Sterilization League (a.k.a. Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception), committing the U.S. government to spend $80 million over five years.

Having gotten away with sterilizing several hundred North Carolina school children, "not usually less than eight to ten years old,'' the identical group is now authorized by President Bush to do it to 58 countries in Asia, Africa and Ibero-America. The group modestly claims it has directly sterilized "only'' two million people, with 87 percent of the bill paid by U.S. taxpayers.

Meanwhile, Dr. Clarence Gamble, Boyden Gray's favorite soap manufacturer, formed his own "Pathfinder Fund'' as a split-off from the Sterilization League. Gamble's Pathfinder Fund, with additional millions from USAID, concentrates on penetration of local social groups in the non-white countries, to break down psychological resistance to the surgical sterilization teams.

_______________

Notes:

1. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, World Population Crisis: The United States Response (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), "Forward'' by George H.W. Bush, pp. vii-viii.

2.Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971), p. 404.

3."The Ten Richest People in Houston,'' in Houston Post Magazine, March 11, 1984. "$150 million to $250 million from ... inheritance, plus subsequent investments ... chief heir to a family fortune in oil stock.... As to his financial interests, he is ... coy. He once described one of his businesses as a company that `invests in and oversees a lot of smaller companies ... in a lot of foreign countries.'''

4. The announcements were made in testimony before a Special Committee of the U.S. Senate Investigating the National Defense Program. The hearings on Standard Oil were held March 5, 24, 26, 27, 31, and April 1, 2, 3 and 7, 1942. Available on microfiche, law section, Library of Congress. See also New York Times, March 26 and March 27, 1942, and Washington Evening Star, March 26 and March 27, 1942.

5. Ibid., Exhibit No. 368, printed on pp. 4584-87 of the hearing record. See also Charles Higham, Trading With The Enemy (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), p. 36.

6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, op. cit., chapter 2. Sir Henri Deterding was among the most notorious pro-Nazis of the early war period.

7. See sections on Prescott Bush in Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc. (New York: Distributed by Simon and Schuster, 1979) (published by the Dresser Company).

8. William Stamps Farish obituary, New York Times, Nov. 30, 1942.

9. A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics held at American Museum of Natural History New York, Aug. 21-23, 1932. (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company, Sept., 1934).

The term "eugenics'' is taken from the Greek to signify "good birth'' or "well-born,'' as in aristocrat. Its basic assumption is that those who are not "well-born'' should not exist.

10. See among other such letters, George Herbert Walker, 39 Broadway, N.Y., to W. A. Harriman, London, Feb. 21, 1925, in WAH papers.

11. Averell Harriman to Dr. Charles B. Davenport, President, The International Congress of Eugenics, Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., N.Y.

January 21, 1932

Dear Dr. Davenport:

I will be only too glad to put you in touch with the Hamburg-American Line ... they may be able to co-operate in making suggestions which will keep the expenses to a minimum. I have referred your letter to Mr. Emil Lederer [of the Hamburg-Amerika executive board in New York] with the request that he communicate with you.

Davenport to Mr. W.A. Harriman,

59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.


January 23, 1932

Dear Mr. Harriman:

Thank you very much for your kind letter of January 21st and the action you took which has resulted at once in a letter from Mr. Emil Lederer. This letter will serve as a starting point for correspondence, which I hope will enable more of our German colleagues to come to America on the occasion of the congresses of eugenics and genetics, than otherwise.

Congressional hearings in 1934 established that Hamburg-Amerika routinely provided free transatlantic passage for those carrying out Nazi propaganda chores. See Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities, op. cit., chapter 2.

12. Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown (New York: Halcyon House, published by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, 1935), pp. 318-19.

The battle cry of the New Order was sounded in 1935 with the publication of Man the Unknown, by Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute in New York. This Nobel Prize-winner said "enormous sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums.... Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner? ... The community must be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements.... Perhaps prisons should be abolished.... The conditioning of the petty criminal with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. [Criminals including those] who have ... misled the public on important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.''

Carrel claimed to have transplanted the head of a dog to another dog and kept it alive for quite some time.

13. Bernhard Schreiber, The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to the World, France: La Hay-Mureaux, ca. 1975), English language edition supplied by H & P. Tadeusz, 369 Edgewere Road, London W2. A copy of this book is now held by Union College Library, Syracuse, N.Y.

14. Higham, op. cit., p. 35.

15. Engagement announced Feb. 10, 1939, New York Times, p. 20. See also Directory of Directors for New York City, 1930s and 1940s.

16. Higham, op. cit., pp. 20, 22 and other references to Schroeder and Lindemann.

Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (Seal Beach: '76 Press, 1976). Sutton is also a good source on the Harrimans.

17. Washington Evening Star, March 27, 1942, p. 1.

18. Higham, op. cit. p. 50.

19. Ibid., p. 48.

20. Washington Post, April 29, 1990, p. F4. Higham, op. cit., pp. 52-53.

21. Zapata annual reports, 1950s-60s, Library of Congress microforms.

22. See Congressional Record for Bush speech in the House of Representatives, Sept. 4, 1969. Bush inserted in the record the testimony given before his Task Force on Aug. 5, 1969.

23. Sobel, op. cit., pp. 92-111. See also Boyle, op. cit., chapter 1, concerning the Morgan-led Dawes Committee of Germany's foreign creditors.

Like Harriman, Dillon used the Schroeder and Warburg banks to strike his German bargains. All Dillon Read & Co. affairs in Germany were supervised by J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Thomas Lamont, and were authorized by Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman.

24. See Poor's Register of Directors and Executives, (New York: Poor's Publishing Company, late 1920s, '30s and '40s). See also Standard Corporation Records (New York: Standard & Poor), 1935 edition pp. 2571-25, and 1938 edition pp. 7436-38, for description and history of the German Credit and Investment Corporation. For Frederic Brandi, See also Sobel, op. cit., pp. 213-14.

25. Sobel, op. cit., pp. 180, 186. Ivy Lee had been hired to improve the Rockefeller family image, particularly difficult after their 1914 massacre of striking miners and pregnant women in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee got old John D. Rockefeller to pass out dimes to poor people lined up at his porch.

26. Third International Eugenics Congress papers op. cit., footnote 7, p. 512, "Supporting Members. ''

27. Schreiber, op. cit., p. 160. The Third Int. Eugenics Congress papers, p. 526, lists the officers of the International Federation as of publication date in September, 1934. Rudin is listed as president--a year after he has written the sterilization law for Hitler.

28. Directory of Directors for New York City, 1942. Interview with Nancy Bowles, librarian of Dillon Read & Co.

29. Higham, op. cit., p. 129, 212-15, 219-23.

30. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 122, 305.

31. Piotrow, op. cit., pp. 36-42.

32. Ibid., p. viii. "As chairman of the special Republican Task Force on Population and Earth Resources, I was impressed by the arguments of William H. Draper, Jr.... Gen. Draper continues to lead through his tireless work for the U.N. Population Fund.''

33. Sobel, op. cit., pp. 298, 354.

34. Interview July 16, 1991, with Joanne Grossi, an official with the USAID's Population Office.

35. Dr. Nafis Sadik, "The State of World Population,'' 1991, New York, United Nations Population Fund.

36. See User's Guide to the Office of Population, 1991, Office of Population, Bureau for Science and Technology, United States Agency for International Development. Available from S&T/POP, Room 811 SA-18, USAID, Washington D.C. 20523-1819.

37. "History of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization [formerly Sterilization League of America], 1935-64,'' thesis submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of the University of Minnesota by William Ray Van Essendelft, March, 1978, available on microfilm, Library of Congress. This is the official history, written with full cooperation of the Sterilization League.

38. Interview with Dr. C. Nash Herndon, June 20, 1990.
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

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Chapter IV -- The Center of Power is in Washington

Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.
59 Wall Street, New York
Cable Address "Shipley-New York''
Business Established 1818
Private Bankers
September 5, 1944

The Honorable W.A. Harriman
American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R.
American Embassy,
Moscow, Russia

Dear Averell:

Thinking that possibly Bullitt's article in the recent issue
of "LIFE'' may not have come to your attention, I have clipped
it and am sending it to you, feeling that it will interest you.
At present writing all well here.
With warm regards, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Pres----


"At present writing all is well here.'' Thus the ambassador to Russia was reassured by the managing partner of his firm, Prescott Bush. Only 22-1/2 months before, the U.S. government had seized and shut down the Union Banking Corp., which had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany by Bush and the Harrimans (see Chapter 2). But that was behind them now and they were safe. There would be no publicity on the Harriman-Bush sponsorship of Hitlerism.

Prescott's son George, the future U.S. President, was also safe. Three days before this note to Moscow was written, George Bush had parachuted from a Navy bomber airplane over the Pacific Ocean, killing his two crew members when the unpiloted plane crashed.

Five months later, in February 1945, Prescott's boss, Averell Harriman, escorted President Franklin Roosevelt to the fateful summit meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. In April Roosevelt died. The agreement reached at Yalta, calling for free elections in Poland once the war ended, was never enforced.

Over the next eight years (1945 through 1952), Prescott Bush was Harriman's anchor in the New York financial world. The increasingly powerful Mr. Harriman and his allies gave Eastern Europe over to Soviet dictatorship. A Cold War was then undertaken, to "counterbalance '' the Soviets.

This British-inspired strategy paid several nightmarish dividends. Eastern Europe was to remain enslaved. Germany was "permanently '' divided. Anglo-American power was jointly exercised over the non-Soviet "Free World. '' The confidential functions of the British and American governments were merged. The Harriman clique took possession of the U.S. national security apparatus, and in doing so, they opened the gate and let the Bush family in.

Following his services to Germany's Nazi Party, Averell Harriman spent several years mediating between the British, American and Soviet governments in the war to stop the Nazis. He was ambassador to Moscow from 1943 to 1946.

President Harry Truman, whom Harriman and his friends held in amused contempt, appointed Harriman U.S. ambassador to Britain in 1946.

Harriman was at lunch with former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill one day in 1946, when Truman telephoned. Harriman asked Churchill if he should accept Truman's offer to come back to the U.S. as Secretary of Commerce. According to Harriman's account, Churchill told him: "Absolutely. The center of power is in Washington. '' [fn1]

Jupiter Island

The reorganization of the American government after World War II--the creation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency along British lines, for example--had devastating consequences. We are concerned here with only certain aspects of that overall transformation, those matters of policy and family which gave shape to the life and mind of George Bush, and gave him access to power.

It was in these postwar years that George Bush attended Yale University, and was inducted into the Skull and Bones society. The Bush family's home at that time was in Greenwich, Connecticut. But it was just then that George's parents, Prescott and Dorothy Walker Bush, were wintering in a peculiar spot in Florida, a place that is excluded from mention in literature originating from Bush circles.

Certain national news accounts early in 1991 featured the observations on President Bush's childhood by his elderly mother Dorothy. She was said to be a resident of Hobe Sound, Florida. More precisely, the President's mother lived in a hyper-security arrangement created a half-century earlier by Averell Harriman, adjacent to Hobe Sound. Its correct name is Jupiter Island.

During his political career, George Bush has claimed many different "home'' states, including Texas, Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut. It has not been expedient for him to claim Florida, though that state has a vital link to his role in the world, as we shall see. And George Bush's home base in Florida, throughout his adult life, has been Jupiter Island.

The unique, bizarre setup on Jupiter Island began in 1931, following the merger of W.A. Harriman & Co. with the British-American firm Brown Brothers.

The reader will recall Mr. Samuel Pryor, the "Merchant of Death.'' A partner with the Harrimans, Prescott Bush, George Walker and Nazi boss Fritz Thyssen in banking and shipping enterprises, Sam Pryor remained executive committee chairman of Remington Arms. In this period, the Nazi private armies (S.A. and S.S.) were supplied with American arms--most likely by Pryor and his company--as they moved to overthrow the German republic. Such gun-running as an instrument of national policy would later become notorious in the "Iran-Contra '' affair.

Samuel Pryor's daughter Permelia married Yale graduate Joseph V. Reed on the last day of 1927. Reed immediately went to work for Prescott Bush and George Walker as an apprentice at W.A. Harriman & Co.

During World War II, Joseph V. Reed had served in the "special services'' section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. A specialist in security, codes and espionage, Reed later wrote a book entitled Fun with Cryptograms. [fn2]

Now, Sam Pryor had had property around Hobe Sound, Florida, for some time. In 1931, Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed bought the entirety of Jupiter Island.

This is a typically beautiful Atlantic coast "barrier island, '' a half-mile wide and nine miles long. The middle of Jupiter Island lies just off Hobe Sound. The south bridge connects the island with the town of Jupiter, to the north of Palm Beach. It is about 90 minutes by auto from Miami--today, a few minutes by helicopter.

Early in 1991, a newspaper reporter asked a friend of the Bush family about security arrangements on Jupiter Island. He responded, "If you called up the White House, would they tell you how many security people they had? It's not that Jupiter Island is the White House, although he [George Bush] does come down frequently.''

But for several decades before Bush was President, Jupiter Island had an ordinance requiring the registration and fingerprinting of all housekeepers, gardeners and other non-residents working on the island. The Jupiter Island police department says that there are sensors in the two main roads that can track every automobile on the island. If a car stops in the street, the police will be there within one or two minutes. Surveillance is a duty of all employees of the town of Jupiter Island. News reporters are to be prevented from visiting the island. [fn3]

To create this astonishing private club, Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed sold land only to those who would fit in. Permelia Reed was still the grande dame of the island when George Bush was inaugurated President in 1989. In recognition of the fact that the Reeds know where all the bodies are buried, President Bush appointed Permelia's son, Joseph V. Reed, Jr., chief of protocol for the U.S. State Department, in charge of private arrangements with foreign dignitaries.

Averell Harriman made Jupiter Island a staging ground for his 1940s takeover of the U.S. national security apparatus. It was in that connection that the island became possibly the most secretive private place in America.

Let us briefly survey the neighborhood, back then in 1946-48, to see some of the uses various of the residents had for the Harriman clique.

Residents on Jupiter Island

Jupiter Islander Robert A. Lovett, [fn4], Prescott Bush's partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, had been Assistant Secretary of War for Air from 1941 to 1945. Lovett was the leading American advocate of the policy of terror-bombing of civilians. He organized the Strategic Bombing Survey, carried out for the American and British governments by the staff of the Prudential Insurance Company, guided by London's Tavistock Psychiatric Clinic.

In the postwar period, Prescott Bush was associated with Prudential Insurance, one of Lovett's intelligence channels to the British secret services. Prescott was listed by Prudential as a director of the company for about two years in the early 1950s.

Their Strategic Bombing Survey failed to demonstrate any real military advantage accruing from such outrages as the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. But the Harrimanites nevertheless persisted in the advocacy of terror from the air. They glorified this as "psychological warfare, '' a part of the utopian military doctrine opposed to the views of military traditionalists such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Robert Lovett later advised President Lyndon Johnson to terror-bomb Vietnam. President George Bush revived the doctrine with the bombing of civilian areas in Panama, and the destruction of Baghdad.

On Oct. 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of U.S. intelligence activities. The existence of this committee was unknown to the public until an official CIA history was released from secrecy in 1989. But the CIA's author (who was President Bush's prep school history teacher; see chapter 5) gives no real details of the Lovett Committee's functioning, claiming: "The record of the testimony of the Lovett Committee, unfortunately, was not in the archives of the agency when this account was written.'' [fn5]

The CIA's self-history does inform us of the advice that Lovett provided to the Truman cabinet, as the official War Department intelligence proposal.

Lovett decided that there should be a separate Central Intelligence Agency. The new agency would "consult '' with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings.

Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War and Navy on November 14, 1945. He spoke highly of the FBI's work because it had "the best personality file in the world. '' Lovett said the FBI was expert at producing false documents, an art "which we developed so successfully during the war and at which we became outstandingly adept.'' Lovett pressed for a virtual resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in a new CIA.

U.S. military traditionalists centered around Gen. Douglas MacArthur opposed Lovett's proposal.

The continuation of the OSS had been attacked at the end of the war on the grounds that the OSS was entirely under British control, and that it would constitute an American Gestapo. [fn6]

But the CIA was established in 1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter Island.

Charles Payson and his wife, Joan Whitney Payson, were extended family members of Harriman's and business associates of the Bush family.

Joan's aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a relative of the Harrimans. Gertrude's son, Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny'') Whitney, long-time chairman of Pan American Airways (Prescott was a Pan Am director), became Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Air Force in 1947. Sonny's wife Marie had divorced him and married Averell Harriman in 1930. Joan and Sonny's uncle, Air Marshall Sir Thomas Elmhirst, was director of intelligence for the British Air Force from 1945 to 1947.

Joan's brother, John Hay ("Jock'') Whitney, was to be ambassador to Great Britain from 1955 to 1961--when it would be vital for Prescott and George Bush to have such a friend. Joan's father, grandfather and uncle were members of the Skull and Bones secret society.

Charles Payson organized a uranium refinery in 1948. Later he was chairman of Vitro Corp., makers of parts for submarine-launched ballistic missiles, equipment for frequency surveillance and torpedo guidance, and other subsurface weaponry.

Naval warfare has long been a preoccupation of the British Empire. British penetration of the U.S. Naval Intelligence service has been particularly heavy since the tenure of Joan's Anglophile grandfather, William C. Whitney, as Secretary of the Navy for President Grover Cleveland. This traditional covert British orientation in the U.S. Navy, Naval Intelligence and the Navy's included service, the Marine Corps, forms a backdrop to the career of George Bush--and to the whole neighborhood on Jupiter Island. Naval Intelligence maintained direct relations with gangster boss Meyer Lansky for Anglo-American political operations in Cuba during World War II, well before the establishment of the CIA. Lansky officially moved to Florida in 1953. [fn7]

George Herbert Walker, Jr. (Skull and Bones 1927), was extremely close to his nephew George Bush, helping to sponsor his entry into the oil business in the 1950s. "Uncle Herbie'' was also a partner of Joan Whitney Payson when they co-founded the New York Mets baseball team in 1960. His son, G.H. Walker III, was a Yale classmate of Nicholas Brady and Moreau D. Brown (Thatcher Brown's grandson), forming what was called the "Yale Mafia'' on Wall Street.

Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. had been chairman of the finance committee of the Du Pont Corporation (1930-40). In 1933, Carpenter oversaw Du Pont's purchase of Remington Arms from Sam Pryor and the Rockefellers, and led Du Pont into partnership with the Nazi I.G. Farben Company for the manufacture of explosives. Carpenter became Du Pont's president in 1940. His cartel with the Nazis was broken up by the U.S. government. Nevertheless, Carpenter remained Du Pont's president as the company's technicians participated massively in the Manhattan Project to produce the first atomic bomb. He was chairman of Du Pont from 1948 to 1962, retaining high-level access to U.S. strategic activities.


Walter Carpenter and Prescott Bush were fellow activists in the Mental Hygiene Society. Originating at Yale University in 1908, the movement had been organized into the World Federation of Mental Health by Montagu Norman, himself a frequent mental patient, former Brown Brothers partner and Bank of England Governor. Norman had appointed as the federation's chairman, Brigadier John Rawlings Rees, director of the Tavistock Psychiatric Clinic, chief psychiatrist and psychological warfare expert for the British intelligence services. Prescott was a director of the society in Connecticut; Carpenter was a director in Delaware.

Paul Mellon was the leading heir to the Mellon fortune, and a long-time neighbor of Averell Harriman's in Middleburg, Virginia, as well as Jupiter Island, Florida. Paul's father, Andrew Mellon, U.S. Treasury Secretary 1921-32, had approved the transactions of Harriman, Pryor and Bush with the Warburgs and the Nazis. Paul Mellon's son-in-law, David K.E. Bruce, worked in Prescott Bush's W.A. Harriman & Co. during the late 1920s; was head of the London branch of U.S. intelligence during World War II; and was Averell Harriman's Assistant Secretary of Commerce in 1947-48. Mellon family money and participation would be instrumental in many domestic U.S. projects of the new Central Intelligence Agency.

Carl Tucker manufactured electronic guidance equipment for the Navy. With the Mellons, Tucker was an owner of South American oil properties. Mrs. Tucker was the great aunt of Nicholas Brady, later George Bush's Iran-Contra partner and U.S. Treasury Secretary. Their son Carll Tucker, Jr. (Skull and Bones 1947), was among the 15 Bonesmen who selected George Bush for induction in the class of 1948.

C.Douglas Dillon was the boss of William H. Draper, Jr. in the Draper-Prescott Bush-Fritz Thyssen Nazi banking scheme of the 1930s and 40s. His father, Clarence Dillon, created the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (Thyssen's German Steel Trust) in 1926. C. Douglas Dillon made Nicholas Brady the chairman of the Dillon Read firm in 1971 and himself continued as chairman of the executive committee. C. Douglas Dillon would be a vital ally of his neighbor Prescott Bush during the Eisenhower administration.

Publisher Nelson Doubleday headed his family's publishing firm, founded under the auspices of J.P. Morgan and other British Empire representatives. When George Bush's "Uncle Herbie'' died, Doubleday took over as majority owner and chief executive of the New York Mets baseball team.

George W. Merck, chairman of Merck & Co., drug and chemical manufacturers, was director of the War Research Service: Merck was the official chief of all U.S. research into biological warfare from 1942 until at least the end of World War II. After 1944, Merck's organization was placed under the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service. His family firm in Germany and the U.S. was famous for its manufacture of morphine.

A.L. Cole was useful to the Jupiter Islanders as an executive of Readers Digest. In 1965, just after performing a rather dirty favor for George Bush (see Chapter 9), Cole became chairman of the executive committee of the Digest, the world's largest-circulation periodical.


From the late 1940s, Jupiter Island has served as a center for the direction of covert action by the U.S. government and, indeed, for the covert management of the government. Jupiter Island will reappear later on, in our account of George Bush in the Iran-Contra affair.

Target: Washington

George Bush graduated from Yale in 1948. He soon entered the family's Dresser oil supply concern in Texas. We shall now briefly describe the forces that descended on Washington, D.C. during those years when Bush, with the assistance of family and powerful friends, was becoming "established in business on his own.''

From 1948 to 1950, Prescott Bush's boss Averell Harriman was U.S. "ambassador-at-large'' to Europe. He was a non-military "theater commander,'' the administrator of the multi-billion-dollar Marshall Plan, participating in all military/strategic decision-making by the Anglo-American alliance.

The U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, had become a problem to the Harrimanites. Forrestal had long been an executive at Dillon Read on Wall Street. But in recent years he had gone astray. As Secretary of the Navy in 1944, Forrestal proposed the racial integration of the Navy. As Defense Secretary he pressed for integration in the armed forces and this eventually became the U.S. policy.

Forrestal opposed the utopians' strategy of appeasement coupled with brinkmanship. He was simply opposed to communism. On March 28, 1949, Forrestal was forced out of office and flown on an Air Force plane to Florida. He was taken to "Hobe Sound'' (Jupiter Island), where Robert Lovett and an army psychiatrist dealt with him. [fn8]

He was flown back to Washington, locked in Walter Reed Army Hospital and given insulin shock treatments for alleged "mental exhaustion.'' He was denied all visitors except his estranged wife and children--his son had been Averell Harriman's aide in Moscow. On May 22, James Forrestal's body was found, his bathrobe cord tied tightly around his neck, after he had plunged from a sixteenth-story hospital window. The chief psychiatrist called the death a suicide even before any investigation was started. The results of the Army's inquest were kept secret. Forrestal's diaries were published, 80 percent deleted, after a year of direct government censorship and rewriting.

North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June 1950, after U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Harriman's very close friend) publicly specified that Korea would not be defended. With a new war on, Harriman came back to serve as President Truman's adviser, to "oversee national security affairs.''

Harriman replaced Clark Clifford, who had been special counsel to Truman. Clifford, however, remained close to Harriman and his partners as they gained more and more power. Clifford later wrote about his cordial relations with Prescott Bush:

Prescott Bush ... had become one of my frequent golfing partners in the fifties, and I had both liked and respected him.... Bush had a splendid singing voice, and particularly loved quartet singing. In the fifties, he organized a quartet that included my daughter Joyce.... They would sing in Washington, and, on occasion, he invited the group to Hobe Sound in Florida to perform. His son [George], though, had never struck me as a strong or forceful person. In 1988, he presented himself successfully to the voters as an outsider--no small trick for a man whose roots wound through Connecticut, Yale, Texas oil, the CIA, a patrician background, wealth, and the Vice-Presidency. [fn9 ]
With James Forrestal out of the way, Averell Harriman and Dean Acheson drove to Leesburg, Virginia, on July 1, 1950, to hire the British-backed U.S. Gen. George C. Marshall as Secretary of Defense. At the same time, Prescott's partner, Robert Lovett, himself became Assistant Secretary of Defense.


Lovett, Marshall, Harriman and Acheson went to work to unhorse Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in Asia. MacArthur kept Wall Street's intelligence agencies away from his command, and favored real independence for the non-white nations. Lovett called for MacArthur's firing on March 23, 1951, citing MacArthur's insistence on defeating the Communist Chinese invaders in Korea. MacArthur's famous message, that there was "no substitute for victory,'' was read in Congress on April 5; MacArthur was fired on April 10, 1951.

That September, Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as Secretary of Defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual Security Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American military alliance. By now, Brown Brothers Harriman was everything but Commander-in-Chief.

These were, of course exciting times for the Bush family, whose wagon was hitched to the financial gods of Olympus--to Jupiter, that is.

Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.
59 Wall Street, New York 5, N.Y.
Business Established 1818
Cable Address "Shipley-New York''
Private Bankers
April 2, 1951

The Honorable W.A. Harriman,
The White House,
Washington, D.C.

Dear Averell:

I was sorry to miss you in Washington but appreciate your cordial note.
I shall hope for better luck another time. I hope you had a good rest at Hobe Sound.

With affectionate regard, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Pres [signed]
Prescott S. Bush.


A central focus of the Harriman security regime in Washington (1950-53) was the organization of covert operations, and "psychological warfare.'' Harriman, together with his lawyers and business partners, Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, wanted the government's secret services to conduct extensive propaganda campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and paramilitary campaigns abroad. This would supposedly ensure a stable world-wide environment favorable to Anglo-American financial and political interests.

The Harriman security regime created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the PSB, Gordon Gray, is familiar to the reader as the sponsor of the child sterilization experiments, carried out by the Harrimanite eugenics movement in North Carolina following World War II (see Chapter 3).

Gordon Gray was an avid Anglophile, whose father had gotten controlling ownership of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company through alliance with the British Imperial Tobacco cartel's U.S. representatives, the Duke family of North Carolina. Gordon's brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray, Jr., was also a Naval Intelligence officer, known around Washington as the "founder of operational intelligence.'' Gordon Gray became a close friend and political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's son became for Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert policy.

But President Harry Truman, as malleable as he was, constituted an obstacle to the covert warriors. An insular Missouri politician vaguely favorable to the U.S. Constitution, he remained skeptical about secret service activities that reminded him of the Nazi Gestapo.

So, "covert operations'' could not fully take off without a change of the Washington regime. And it was with the Republican Party that Prescott Bush was to get his turn.

Prescott had made his first attempt to enter national politics in 1950, as his partners took control of the levers of governmental power. Remaining in charge of Brown Brothers Harriman, he ran against Connecticut's William Benton for a seat in the U.S. Senate. (The race was for a two-year unexpired term, left empty by the death of the previous Senator.)

In those days, Wisconsin's drunken Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was making a circus-like crusade against communist influence in Washington. McCarthy attacked liberals and leftists, State Department personnel, politicians and Hollywood figures. He generally left unscathed the Wall Street and London strategists who donated Eastern Europe and China to communist dictatorship--like George Bush, their geopolitics was beyond left and right.

Prescott Bush had no public ties to the notorious Joe McCarthy, and appeared to be neutral about his crusade. But the Wisconsin Senator had his uses. Joe McCarthy came into Connecticut three times that year to campaign for Bush and against the Democrats. Bush himself made charges of `` Korea, Communism and Corruption '' into a slick campaign phrase against Benton, which then turned up as a national Republican slogan.

The response was disappointing. Only small crowds turned out to hear Joe McCarthy, and Benton was not hurt. McCarthy's pro-Bush rally in New Haven, in a hall that seated 6,000, drew only 376 people. Benton joked on the radio that "200 of them were my spies.''

Prescott Bush resigned from the Yale Board of Fellows for his campaign, and the board published a statement to the effect that the "Yale vote'' should support Bush--despite the fact that William Benton was a Yale man, and in many ways identical in outlook to Bush. Yale's Whiffenpoof singers appeared regularly for Prescott's campaign. None of this was particularly effective, however, with the voting population. [fn10]

Then Prescott Bush ran into a completely unexpected problem. At that time, the old Harriman eugenics movement was centered at Yale University. Prescott Bush was a Yale trustee, and his former Brown Brothers Harriman partner, Lawrence Tighe, was Yale's treasurer. In that connection, a slight glimmer of the truth about the Bush-Harriman firm's Nazi activities now made its way into the campaign.

Not only was the American Eugenics Society itself headquartered at Yale, but all parts of this undead fascist movement had a busy home at Yale. The coercive psychiatry and sterilization advocates had made the Yale/New Haven Hospital and Yale Medical School their laboratories for hands-on practice in brain surgery and psychological experimentation. And the Birth Control League was there, which had long trumpeted the need for eugenical births--fewer births for parents with "inferior'' bloodlines. Prescott's partner Tighe was a Connecticut director of the league, and the Connecticut league's medical advisor was eugenics advocate Dr. Winternitz of Yale Medical School.

Now in 1950, people who knew something about Prescott Bush knew that he had very unsavory roots in the eugenics movement. There were then, just after the anti-Hitler war, few open advocates of sterilization of "unfit'' or "unnecessary'' people. (That would be revived later, with the help of General Draper and his friend George Bush.) But the Birth Control League was public--just about then it was changing its name to the euphemistic "Planned Parenthood.''

Then, very late in the 1950 senatorial campaign, Prescott Bush was publicly exposed for being an activist in that section of the old fascist eugenics movement. Prescott Bush lost the election by about 1,000 out of 862,000 votes. He and his family blamed the defeat on the expose. The defeat was burned into the family's memory, leaving a bitterness and perhaps a desire for revenge.

In his foreword to a population control propaganda book, George Bush wrote about that 1950 election: `` My own first awareness of birth control as a public policy issue came with a jolt in 1950 when my father was running for United States Senate in Connecticut. Drew Pearson, on the Sunday before Election day, 'revealed' that my father was involved with Planned Parenthood.... Many political observers felt a sufficient number of voters were swayed by his alleged contacts with the birth controllers to cost him the election....'' [fn11]

Prescott Bush was defeated, while the other Republican candidates fared well in Connecticut. When he tried again, Prescott Bush would not leave the outcome to the blind whims of the public.

Prescott Bush moved into action again in 1952 as a national leader of the push to give the Republican presidential nomination to Gen. Dwight D. ("Ike'') Eisenhower. Among the other team members were Bush's Hitler-era lawyer John Foster Dulles, and Jupiter Islander C. Douglas Dillon.

Dillon and his father were the pivots as the Harriman-Dulles combination readied Ike for the presidency. As a friend put it: "When the Dillons ... invited [Eisenhower] to dinner it was to introduce him to Wall Street bankers and lawyers.'' [fn12]

Ike's higher-level backers believed, correctly, that Ike would not interfere with even the dirtiest of their covert action programs. The bland, pleasant Prescott Bush was in from the beginning: a friend to Ike, and an original backer of his presidency.

On July 28, 1952, as the election approached, Connecticut's senior U.S. Senator, James O'Brien McMahon, died at the age of 48.*

This was extremely convenient for Prescott. He got the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator at a special delegated meeting, with backing by the Yale-dominated state party leadership. Now he would run in a special election for the suddenly vacant Senate seat. He could expect to be swept into office, since he would be on the same electoral ticket as the popular war hero, General Ike. By a technicality, he would instantly become Connecticut's senior Senator, with extra power in Congress. And the next regularly scheduled senatorial race would be in 1956 (when McMahon's term would have ended), so Prescott could run again in that presidential election year--once again on Ike's coattails!

With this arrangement, things worked out very smoothly. In Eisenhower's 1952 election victory, Ike won Connecticut by a margin of 129,507 votes out of 1,092,471. Prescott Bush came in last among the statewide Republicans, but managed to win by 30,373 out of 1,088,799 votes case, his margin nearly 100,000 behind Eisenhower. He took the traditionally Republican towns.

In Eisenhower's 1956 reelection, Ike won Connecticut by 303,036 out of 1,114,954 votes, the largest presidential margin in Connecticut's history. Prescott Bush managed to win again, by 129,544 votes out of 1,085,206--his margin this time 290,082 smaller than Eisenhower's. [fn13]

In January 1963, when this electoral strategy had been played out and his second term expired, Prescott Bush retired from government and returned to Brown Brothers Harriman.

The 1952 Eisenhower victory made John Foster Dulles Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles head of the CIA. The reigning Dulles brothers were the "Republican'' replacements for their client and business partner, "Democrat'' Averell Harriman. Occasional public posturings aside, their strategic commitments were identical to his.

Undoubtedly the most important work accomplished by Prescott Bush in the new regime was on the golf links, where he was Ike's favorite partner.

Toward the "National Security State''

Prescott Bush was a most elusive, secretive Senator. By diligent research, his views on some issues may be traced: He was opposed to the development of public power projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority; he opposed the constitutional amendment introduced by Ohio Senator John W. Bricker, which would have required congressional approval of international agreements by the executive branch.

But Prescott Bush was essentially a covert operative in Washington.

On June 10, 1954, Bush received a letter from Connecticut resident H. Smith Richardson, owner of Vick Chemical Company (cough drops, Vapo-Rub):

" ... At some time before Fall, Senator, I want to get your advice and counsel on a [new] subject--namely what should be done with the income from a foundation which my brother and I set up, and which will begin its operation in 1956....'' [fn14 ]


This letter presages the establishment of the H. Smith Richardson Foundation, a Bush family-dictated private slush fund which was to be utilized by the Central Intelligence Agency, and by Vice President Bush, for the conduct of his Iran-Contra adventures.

The Bush family knew Richardson and his wife through their mutual friendship with Sears Roebuck's chairman, Gen. Robert E. Wood. General Wood had been president of the America First organization, which had lobbied against war with Hitler Germany. H. Smith Richardson had contributed the start-up money for America First and had spoken out against the U.S. "joining the Communists'' by fighting Hitler. Richardson's wife was a proud relative of Nancy Langehorne from Virginia, who married Lord Astor and backed the Nazis from their Cliveden Estate.

General Wood's daughter Mary had married the son of Standard Oil president William Stamps Farish. The Bushes had stuck with the Farishes through their disastrous exposure during World War II (see Chapter 3). Young George Bush and his bride Barbara were especially close to Mary Farish, and to her son W.S. Farish III, who would be the great confidante of George's presidency. [fn15]

The H. Smith Richardson Foundation was organized by Eugene Stetson, Jr., Richardson's son-in-law. Stetson (Skull and Bones, 1934) had worked for Prescott Bush as assistant manager of the New York branch of Brown Brothers Harriman.

In the late 1950s, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation took part in the "psychological warfare'' of the CIA. This was not a foreign, but a domestic, covert operation, carried out mainly against unwitting U.S. citizens. CIA Director Allen Dulles and his British allies organized "MK-Ultra,'' the testing of psychotropic drugs including LSD on a very large scale, allegedly to evaluate "chemical warfare'' possibilities. In this period, the Richardson Foundation helped finance experiments at Bridgewater Hospital in Massachusetts, the center of some of the most brutal MK-Ultra tortures. These outrages have been graphically portrayed in the movie, Titticut Follies.

During 1990, an investigator for this book toured H. Smith Richardson's Center for Creative Leadership just north of Greensboro, North Carolina. The tour guide said that in these rooms, agents of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Secret Service are trained. He demonstrated the two-way mirrors through which the government employees are watched, while they are put through mind-bending psychodramas. The guide explained that "virtually everyone who becomes a general'' in the U.S. armed forces also goes through this `` training '' at the Richardson Center.

Another office of the Center for Creative Leadership is in Langley, Virginia, at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. Here also, Richardson's Center trains leaders of the CIA.

Prescott Bush worked throughout the Eisenhower years as a confidential ally of the Dulles brothers. In July 1956, Egypt's President Gamel Abdul Nasser announced he would accept the U.S. offer of a loan for the construction of the Aswan Dam project. John Foster Dulles then prepared a statement telling the Egyptian ambassador that the U.S.A. had decided to retract its offer. Dulles gave the explosive statement in advance to Prescott Bush for his approval. Dulles also gave the statement to President Eisenhower, and to the British government. [fn16]

Nasser reacted to the Dulles brush-off by nationalizing the Suez Canal to pay for the dam. Israel, then Britain and France, invaded Egypt to try to overthrow Nasser, leader of the anti-imperial Arab nationalists. However, Eisenhower refused (for once) to play the Dulles-British game, and the invaders had to leave Egypt when Britain was threatened with U.S. economic sanctions.

During 1956, Senator Prescott Bush's value to the Harriman-Dulles political group increased when he was put on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Bush toured U.S. and allied military bases throughout the world, and had increased access to the national security decision-making process.

In the later years of the Eisenhower presidency, Gordon Gray rejoined the government. As an intimate friend and golfing partner of Prescott Bush, Gray complemented the Bush influence on Ike. The Bush-Gray family partnership in the "secret government'' continues up through the George Bush presidency.

Gordon Gray had been appointed head of the new Psychological Strategy Board in 1951 under Averell Harriman's rule as assistant to President Truman for national security affairs. From 1958 to 1961, Gordon Gray was national security chief under President Eisenhower. Gray acted as Ike's intermediary, strategist and hand-holder, in the President's relations with the CIA and the U.S. and allied military forces.

Eisenhower did not oppose the CIA's covert action projects; he only wanted to be protected from the consequences of their failure or exposure. Gray's primary task, in the guise of "oversight'' on all U.S. covert action, was to protect and hide the growing mass of CIA and related secret government activities.

It was not only covert projects which were developed by the Gray-Bush-Dulles combination; it was also new, hidden structures of the United States government.

Senator Henry Jackson challenged these arrangements in 1959 and 1960. Jackson created a Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery of the Senate Committee on Governmental Operations, which investigated Gordon Gray's reign at the National Security Council. On January 26, 1960, Gordon Gray warned President Eisenhower that a document revealing the existence of a secret part of the U.S. government had somehow gotten into the bibliography being used by Senator Jackson. The unit was Gray's "5412 Group'' within the administration, officially but secretly in charge of approving covert action. Under Gray's guidance, Ike "'It was clear and firm in his response' that Jackson's staff not be informed of the existence of this unit [emphasis in the original].'' [fn17]

Several figures of the Eisenhower administration must be considered the fathers of this permanent covert action monolith, men who continued shepherding the monster after its birth in the Eisenhower era:

Gordon Gray, the shadowy assistant to the President for national security affairs, Prescott Bush's closest executive branch crony and golf partner along with Eisenhower. By 1959-60, Gray had Ike's total confidence and served as the Harrimanites' monitor on all U.S. military and non-military projects.


British intelligence agent Kim Philby defected to the Russians in 1963. Philby had gained virtually total access to U.S. intelligence activities beginning in 1949, as the British secret services' liaison to the Harriman-dominated CIA. After Philby's defection, it seemed obvious that the aristocratic British intelligence service was in fact a menace to the western cause. In the 1960s, a small team of U.S. counterintelligence specialists went to England to investigate the situation. They reported back that the British secret service could be thoroughly trusted. The leader of this "expert'' team, Gordon Gray, was the head of the counterespionage section of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board for Presidents John Kennedy through Gerald Ford.

Robert Lovett, Bush's Jupiter Island neighbor and Brown Brothers Harriman partner, from 1956 on a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Lovett later claimed to have criticized--from the "inside''--the plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Lovett was asked to choose the cabinet for John Kennedy in 1961.

CIA Director Allen Dulles, Bush's former international attorney. Kennedy fired Dulles after the Bay of Pigs invasion, but Dulles served on the Warren Commission, which whitewashed President Kennedy's murder.

C. Douglas Dillon, neighbor of Bush on Jupiter Island, became Undersecretary of State in 1958 after the death of John Foster Dulles. Dillon had been John Foster Dulles's ambassador to France (1953-57), coordinating the original U.S. covert backing for the French imperial effort in Vietnam, with catastrophic results for the world. Dillon was Treasury Secretary for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Ambassador to Britain Jock Whitney, extended family member of the Harrimans and neighbor of Prescott Bush on Jupiter Island. Whitney set up a press service in London called Forum World Features, which published propaganda furnished directly by the CIA and the British intelligence services. Beginning in 1961, Whitney was chairman of the British Empire's "English Speaking Union.''

Senator Prescott Bush, friend and counselor of President Eisenhower.


Bush's term continued on in the Senate after the Eisenhower years, throughout most of the aborted Kennedy presidency.

In 1962, the National Strategy Information Center was founded by Prescott Bush and his son Prescott, Jr., William Casey (the future CIA chief) and Leo Cherne. The center came to be directed by Frank Barnett, former program officer of the Bush family's H. Smith Richardson Foundation. The center conduited funds to the London-Based Forum World Features, for the circulation of CIA-authored "news stories'' to some 300 newspapers internationally. [fn18]

"Democrat'' Averell Harriman rotated back into official government in the Kennedy administration. As Assistant Secretary and Undersecretary of State, Harriman helped push the United States into the Vietnam War. Harriman had no post in the Eisenhower administration. Yet he was perhaps more than anyone the leader and the glue for the incredible evil that was hatched by the CIA in the final Eisenhower years: a half-public, half-private Harrimanite army, never since demobilized, and increasingly associated with the name of Bush.

Following the rise of Castro, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency contracted with the organization of Mafia boss Meyer Lansky to organize and train assassination squads for use against the Cuban government. Among those employed were John Rosselli, Santos Trafficante and Sam Giancana. Uncontested public documentation of these facts has been published by congressional bodies and by leading Establishment academics. [fn19]

But the disturbing implications and later consequences of this engagement are a crucial matter for further study by the citizens of every nation. This much is established:

On Aug. 18, 1960, President Eisenhower approved a $13 million official budget for a secret CIA-run guerrilla war against Castro. It is known that Vice President Richard M. Nixon took a hand in the promotion of this initiative. The U.S. military was kept out of the covert action plans until very late in the game.

The first of eight admitted assassination attempts against Castro took place in 1960.

The program was, of course, a failure, if not a circus. The invasion of Cuba by the CIA's anti-Castro exiles was put off until after John Kennedy took over the presidency. The invasion at the Bay of Pigs was a fiasco, and Castro's forces easily prevailed. But the program continued.

In 1960, Felix Rodriguez, Luis Posada Carriles, Rafael "Chi Chi'' Quintero, Frank Sturgis (or `` Frank Fiorini '') and other Florida-based Cuban exiles were trained as killers and drug-traffickers in the Cuban initiative; their supervisor was E. Howard Hunt. Their overall CIA boss was Miami station chief Theodore G. Shackley, seconded by Thomas Clines. In later chapters we will follow the subsequent careers of these characters--increasingly identified with George Bush--through the Watergate coup, and the Iran-Contra scandal.

_______________

Notes:

1. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 377.

2. Reed was better known in high society as a minor diplomat, the founder of the Triton Press and the president of the American Shakespeare Theater.

3. Palm Beach Post, Jan. 13, 1991.

4. For Lovett's residency there see Isaacson and Thomas, op. cit., p. 417. Some Jupiter Island residencies were verified by their inclusion in the 1947 membership list of the Hobe Sound Yacht Club, in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress; others were established from interviews with long-time Jupiter Islanders.

5. Arthur Burr Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950 (College Station: Pennsylvania State University, 1990), p. 59.

6. The Chicago Tribune, Feb. 9, 1945, for example, warned of "Creation of an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home.'' Cf. Anthony Cave Brown, Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero (New York: Times Books, 1982), p. 625, on warnings to FDR about the British control of U.S. intelligence.

7. Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, Eli Landau, Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob (New York: Paddington Press, 1979) pp. 227-28.

8. See John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 131-32.

9. Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President (New York: Random House, 1991).

10. Sidney Hyman, The Lives of William Benton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 438-41.

11. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, World Population Crisis: The United States Response (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), "Foreward,'' by George H.W. Bush, p. vii.

12. Herbert S. Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), p. 14.

13. New York Times, Sept. 6, 1952, Nov. 5, 1952, Nov. 7, 1956.

14. Richardson to Prescott Bush, H. Smith Richardson Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

15. Wayne S. Cole, America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941 (Madison: the University of Wisconsin Press, 1953); interviews with Richardson family employees; H. Smith Richardson Foundation annual reports; Richardson to Prescott Bush, March 26, 1954, Richardson Papers. Washington Post, April 29, 1990.

16. Parmet, op. cit., p. 481.

17. John Prados, Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (New York: William Morrow, 1991) pp. 92-95.

18. Robert Callaghan in Covert Action, No. 33, Winter 1990. Prescott, Jr. was a board member of the National Strategy Information Center as of 1991. Both Prescott Sr. and Jr. were deeply involved along with Casey in the circles of Pan American Airlines, Pan Am's owners the Grace family, and the CIA's Latin American affairs. The center, based in Washington, D.C., declines public inquiries about its founding.

See also EIR Special Report: "American Leviathan: Administrative Fascism under the Bush Regime'' (Wiesbaden, Germany: Executive Intelligence Review Nachrichtenagentur, April 1990), p. 192.

19. For example, see Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1987), pp. 55-56, 89-90.

Unverified information on the squads is provided in the affidavit of Daniel P. Sheehan, attorney for the Christic Institute, reproduced in EIR Special Report:, "Project Democracy: The 'Parallel Government' behind the Iran-Contra Affair'' (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1987), pp. 249-50.

Some of the hired assassins have published their memoirs. See, for example, Felix Rodriguez and John Weisman, Secret Warrior (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); and E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1974).

* McMahon had been Assistant U.S. Attorney General, in charge of the Criminal Division, from 1935 to 1939. Was there a chance he might someday speak out about the unpunished Nazi-era crimes of the wealthy and powerful?
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

Postby admin » Tue Jul 08, 2014 7:08 am

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.
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

Postby admin » Tue Jul 08, 2014 7:10 am

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
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

Postby admin » Tue Jul 08, 2014 7:13 am

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.
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Re: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarp

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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.
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