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

by Russ Baker

  I came to grasp why early in his presidency, George W. Bush had sought to roll back reforms designed to provide greater access to documents that shed light on America’s recent past. He seemed determined to lock the file drawers. But what did those drawers contain? Could there be clues regarding the origins of George W. Bush’s most damaging policies— the rush to war in Iraq, officially sanctioned torture, CIA destruction of evidence, spying on Americans with the collusion of private corporations, head-in-the-sand dismissal of climate change, the subprime mortgage disaster, skyrocketing oil prices? Indeed there could. None of these developments looks so surprising when one considers the untold story of what came before. This book is about that secret history, and the people and institutions that created it.

  BUSH’S MISTAKES—AND his biggest surely was the delusion that he could successfully lead the nation as its president—were only the most recent chapters in a story that goes back to his father and even his grandfather. Ultimately, it finds its origin in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when the so-called robber barons—whom Teddy Roosevelt called “malefactors of great wealth”—gained control of enormous industrial, transportation, and financial empires.

  Although George W. Bush styled himself something of a family rebel, and the media echoed this self-serving portrayal, to a remarkable degree George W. has followed a path laid out for him by his forebears. He went to the same schools, joined the same secret societies, and benefited from similarly murky financial arrangements. He has made the same kinds of friends and surrounded himself with people closely related to those who surrounded his father, his grandfather, and even his great-grandfather. Despite all the talk about his “Oedipal” relationship to his father, the younger Bush clung closely to the trunk of the family tree.

  To my surprise, I began to see that understanding George H. W. Bush (Senior, or Poppy, as his relatives and friends call him) was really the key to understanding the son—and not just in the simplistic, psychoanalytical terms to which some commentators have resorted.

  For this reason, half of this book deals principally with Poppy Bush. It lays out the ways in which the father epitomizes the intersection of oil, finance, and sub rosa intelligence that has been a shadow force in our country for the last half century and more. This background is crucial to understanding George W. Bush. As Kevin Phillips so aptly noted, “Dealing separately with the administrations of George H. W. and George W.—or worse, ignoring commonalities of behavior in office—is like considering individual planets while ignoring their place within the solar system.”

  Building on the hidden past of George Bush the elder, I reveal how and why that most improbable national leader, George Bush the younger, was essentially cleaned up, reconditioned, and then “managed” into becoming his father’s successor in the White House. Once this is understood, it becomes clear that George W., like his father, has both benefited from and faithfully served powerful interests that have remained largely hidden from the public eye and immune to public debate.

  There’s a paradox here: while serving forces that operate best in the shadows, the Bushes craved for themselves a place in the spotlight. To get what they wanted and to do what they felt they must, they had to live what amounts to double lives. Even as the Bushes gained fame and power, they managed to somehow avoid careful scrutiny of their actions and purposes. So adept were they at this game that they are almost never mentioned in their colleagues’ writings—not Senator Prescott Bush, and not United Nations representative and Republican National Committee chairman George H. W. Bush. Although Richard Nixon makes bland reference to Poppy Bush’s vice presidency and presidency in his memoirs, he does not even bother to mention that Poppy served him in two top posts and held cabinet rank. It is almost as if this clan never existed until the moment it occupied the White House.

  This book fills in the gaps. It chronicles the evolution of both the Bush clan and the powerful interests it represented over the last century. In detailing how George W. Bush rose to power, it challenges the accepted wisdom with regard to a number of seminal events in recent American history. And it does so with names, dates, and sources clearly spelled out. Wherever possible, I make clear the identities of those I interviewed; virtually every informant is named.

  Even some early biographers sensed that the Bushes’ supposedly supporting role in history was in fact something far different. Bill Minutaglio, who wrote the first biography of George W. Bush, before he became president, shared his perceptions with me in 2004. “The Bushes, when you really begin examining them and their network, back to the founding of the country and when they set foot here, they live in the gray zone. If you think of them as part of a photograph, they’re in the frame at all these watershed moments in presidential politics and at the pinnacle of finance and business power. They’re right there with the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts and the Astors, but they’re not in the middle of the frame. They’re off to the side in the sepia photo; they’re less clear. But they are perhaps the most profound political dynasty in the history of this country.”

  The reason the Bushes are relevant today, even with W.’s exit from the national stage, is that the family and its colleagues and associates represent an elite that has long succeeded in subverting our democratic institutions to their own ends. And they will continue to do so unless their agenda and methods are laid bare to public scrutiny.

  The story of the Bushes’ rise—and fall?—is a story we ignore at our peril.

  CHAPTER 2

  Poppy’s Secret

  WHEN JOSEPH MCBRIDE CAME upon the document about George H. W. Bush’s double life, he was not looking for it. It was 1985, and McBride, a former Daily Variety writer, was in the library of California State University San Bernardino, researching a book about the movie director Frank Capra.1 Like many good reporters, McBride took off on a “slight,” if time-consuming, tangent—spending day after day poring over reels of microfilmed documents related to the FBI and the JFK assassination. McBride had been a volunteer on Kennedy’s campaign, and since 1963 had been intrigued by the unanswered questions surrounding that most singular of American tragedies.

  A particular memo caught his eye, and he leaned in for a closer look. Practically jumping off the screen was a memorandum from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963. Under the subject heading “Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” Hoover reported that, on the day after JFK’s murder, the bureau had provided two individuals with briefings. One was “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.” The other: “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.”2

  To:

  Director

  Bureau of Intelligence and Research

  Department of State

  [We have been] advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U.S. policy . . . [Our] sources know of no [such] plans . . . The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  McBride shook his head. George H. W. Bush? In the CIA in 1963? Dealing with Cubans and the JFK assassination? Could this be the same man who was now vice president of the United States? Even when Bush was named CIA director in 1976 amid much agency-bashing, his primary asset had been the fact that he was not a part of the agency during the coups, attempted coups, and murder plots in Iran, Cuba, Chile, and other hot spots, embarrassing information about which was being disclosed every day in Senate hearings.3

  For CIA director Bush, there had been much damage to control. The decade from 1963 to 1973 had seen one confidence-shaking crisis after another. There was the Kennedy assassination and the dubious accounting of it by the Warren Commission. Then came the revelations of how the CIA had used private foundations to channe
l funds to organizations inside the United States, such as the National Student Association. Then came Watergate, with its penumbra of CIA operatives such as E. Howard Hunt and their shadowy misdoings. Americans were getting the sense of a kind of sanctioned underground organization, operating outside the law and yet protected by it. Then President Gerald Ford, who had ascended to that office when Richard Nixon resigned, fired William Colby, the director of the CIA, who was perceived by hard-liners as too accommodating to congressional investigators and would-be intelligence reformers.

  Now Ford had named George H. W. Bush to take over the CIA. But Bush seemed wholly unqualified for such a position—especially at a time when the agency was under maximum scrutiny. He had been U.N. ambassador, Republican National Committee chairman, and then U.S. envoy to Beijing, where both Nixon and Henry Kissinger had regarded him as a lightweight and worked around him. What experience did he have in the world of intelligence and spying? How would he restore public confidence in a tarnished spy agency? No one seemed to know. Or did Gerald Ford realize something most others didn’t?

  Bush served at the CIA for one year, from early 1976 to early 1977. He worked quietly to reverse the Watergate-era reforms of CIA practices, moving as many operations as possible offshore and beyond any accountability. Although a short stint, it nevertheless created an image problem in 1980 when Bush ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination against former California governor Ronald Reagan. Some critics warned of the dangerous precedent in elevating someone who had led the CIA, with its legacy of dark secrets and covert plots, blackmail and murder, to preside over the United States government.

  Calling the Vice President

  In 1985, when McBride found the FBI memo apparently relating to Bush’s past, the reporter did not immediately follow up this curious lead. Bush was now a recently reelected vice president (a famously powerless position), and McBride himself was busy with other things. He had remarried, he continued to cover the Hollywood scene, and he had a book to finish.

  By 1988, however, the true identity of “Mr. George Bush of the CIA” took on new meaning, as George H. W. Bush prepared to assume his role as Reagan’s heir to the presidency. Joe McBride decided to make the leap from entertainment reportage to politics. He picked up the phone and called the White House.

  “May I speak with the vice president?” he asked.

  McBride had to settle for Stephen Hart, a vice presidential spokesman. Hart denied that his boss had been the man mentioned in the memo, quoting Bush directly: “I was in Houston, Texas, at the time and involved in the independent oil drilling business. And I was running for the Senate in late ’63. I don’t have any idea of what he’s talking about.” Hart concluded with this suggestion: “Must be another George Bush.”

  McBride found the response troubling—rather detailed for a ritual non-denial. It almost felt like a cover story that Bush was a bit too eager to trot out. He returned to Hart with more questions for Bush:

  • Did you do any work with or for the CIA prior to the time you became its director?

  • If so, what was the nature of your relationship with the agency, and how long did it last?

  • Did you receive a briefing by a member of the FBI on anti-Castro Cuban activities in the aftermath [of ] the assassination of President Kennedy?

  Within half an hour, Hart called him back. The spokesman now declared that, though he had not spoken with Bush, he would nevertheless answer the questions himself. Hart said that the answer to the first question was no, and, therefore, the other two were moot.

  Undeterred, McBride called the CIA. A spokesman for the agency, Bill Devine, responded: “This is the first time I’ve ever heard this . . . I’ll see what I can find out and call you back.”

  The following day, the PR man was tersely formal and opaque: “I can neither confirm nor deny.” It was the standard response the agency gave when it dealt with its sources and methods. Could the agency reveal whether there had been another George Bush in the CIA? Devine replied: “Twenty-seven years ago? I doubt that very much. In any event, we have a standard policy of not confirming that anyone is involved in the CIA.”4

  But it appears this standard policy was made to be broken. McBride’s revelations appeared in the July 16, 1988, issue of the liberal magazine the Nation, under the headline “The Man Who Wasn’t There, ‘George Bush,’ C.I.A. Operative.” Shortly thereafter, Central Intelligence Agency spokeswoman Sharron Basso told the Associated Press that the CIA believed that “the record should be clarified.” She said that the FBI document “apparently” referred to a George William Bush who had worked in 1963 on the night shift at the Langley, Virginia, headquarters, and that “would have been the appropriate place to have received such an FBI report.” George William Bush, she said, had left the CIA in 1964 to join the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  Certainly, the article caused George H. W. Bush no major headaches. By the following month, he was triumphantly accepting the GOP’s presidential nomination at its New Orleans convention, unencumbered by tough questions about his past.

  Meanwhile, the CIA’s Basso told reporters that the agency had been unable to locate the “other” George Bush. The assertion was reported by several news outlets, with no comment about the irony of a vaunted intelligence agency—with a staff of thousands and a Budget of billions—being unable to locate a former employee within American borders.

  Perhaps what the CIA really needed was someone like Joseph McBride. Though not an investigative journalist, McBride had no trouble finding George William Bush. Not only was the man findable; he was still on the U.S. government payroll. By 1988 this George Bush was working as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration. He explained to McBride that he had worked only briefly at the CIA, as a GS-5 probationary civil servant, analyzing documents and photos during the night shift. Moreover, he said, he had never received interagency briefings.

  Several years later, in 1991, former Texas Observer editor David Armstrong would track down the other person listed on the Hoover memo, Captain William Edwards. Edwards would confirm that he had been on duty at the Defense Intelligence Agency the day in question. He said he did not remember this briefing, but that he found the memo plausible in reference to a briefing he might have received over the phone while at his desk. While he said he had no idea who the George Bush was who also was briefed, Edwards’s rank and experience was certainly far above that of the night clerk George William Bush.

  Shortly after McBride’s article appeared in the Nation, the magazine ran a follow-up op-ed, in which the author provided evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency had foisted a lie on the American people.5 The piece appeared while everyone else was focusing on Bush’s coronation at the Louisiana Superdome. As with McBride’s previous story, this disclosure was greeted with the equivalent of a collective media yawn. An opportunity was bungled, not only to learn about the true history of the man who would be president, but also to recognize the “George William Bush” diversion for what it was: one in a long series of calculated distractions and disinformation episodes that run through the Bush family history.

  With the election only two months away, and a growing sense of urgency in some quarters, George William Bush acknowledged under oath—as part of a deposition in a lawsuit brought by a nonprofit group seeking records on Bush’s past—that he was the junior officer on a three-to four-man watch shift at CIA headquarters between September 1963 and February 1964, which was on duty when Kennedy was shot.6 “I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the CIA,” he said. “In fact, during my time at the CIA, I did not receive any oral communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the CIA from the FBI. Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memor
andum.”

  Indeed, George William Bush was so low-level that he was not even allowed to talk on the telephone or perform any substantive activities. He referred to his role as that of a “gofer.” After his short probationary period, George William Bush left the agency, raising the question of whether his hiring could have been designed to provide the other George Bush with cover during a particularly sensitive period. Though that scenario appears far-fetched on first blush, such techniques are a standard part of spy tradecraft. And they can be quite successful: years later, when questions arose about the famous George Bush, there was this other nonentity, providing crucial, if flimsy, cover.

  Poppy’s Briny Past

  Almost a decade would pass between Bush’s election in 1988 and the declassification and release in 1996 of another government document that shed further light on the matter. This declassified document would help to answer some of the questions raised by the ’63 Hoover memo—questions such as, “If George Herbert Walker Bush was already connected with the CIA in 1963, how far back did the relationship go?”

  But yet another decade would pass before this second document would be found, read, and revealed to the public. Fast-forward to December 2006, on a day when JFK assassination researcher Jerry Shinley sat, as he did on so many days, glued to his computer, browsing through the digitized database of documents on the Web site of the Mary Ferrell Foundation.7