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<conspiracyFile>Article 15189 of alt.activism:
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From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
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Newsgroups: alt.activism
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Subject: Part 1: Unauthorized Biography Of George Bush
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Message-ID: <1RokeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com>
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Date: 15 Jan 92 <data type="time" timezone="GMT">03:55:59</data>
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Organization: Covici Computer Systems
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Lines: 1361
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George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
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by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin
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With this issue of the New Federalist, Vol. V, No. 39, we begin
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to serialize the book, {George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,}
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by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. This book will
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soon be published by {Executive Intelligence Review}.
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At the heart of any effort at biography is the attempt to
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discover the essence of the subject as a human personality. The
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essential character of the subject is what the biographer must
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strive to capture, since this is the indispensable ingredient
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that will provide coherence to the entire story whose unity must
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be provided by the course of a single human life.
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During the preparation of the present work, there was one
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historical moment which more than any other delineated the
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character of George Bush. The scene was the Nixon White House
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during the final days of the Watergate debacle. White House
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officials, including George Bush, had spent the morning of that
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Monday, August 5, 1974 absorbing the impact of Nixon's notorious
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``smoking gun'' tape, the recorded conversation between Nixon and
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his chief of staff, H.R. Haldemann, shortly after the original
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Watergate break-in, which could now no longer be withheld from
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the public. In that exchange of June 23, 1972, Nixon ordered
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that the CIA stop the FBI from further investigating how various
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sums of money found their way from Texas and Minnesota via Mexico
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City to the coffers of the Committee to Re-Elect the President
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(CREEP) and thence into the pockets of the ``Plumbers'' arrested
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in the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building.
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These revelations were widely interpreted as establishing a
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{prima facie} case of obstruction of justice against Nixon. That
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was fine with George, who sincerely wanted his patron and
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benefactor Nixon to resign. George's great concern was that the
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smoking gun tape called attention to a money-laundering mechanism
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which he, together with Bill Liedtke of Pennzoil, and Robert
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Mosbacher, had helped to set up at Nixon's request. When Nixon,
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in the ``smoking gun'' tape, talked about ``the Texans'' and
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``some Texas people,'' Bush, Liedtke, and Mosbacher were among
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the most prominent of those referred to. The threat to George's
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political ambitions was great.
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The White House that morning was gripped by panic. Nixon
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would be gone before the end of the week. In the midst of the
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furor, White House Congressional liaison William Timmons wanted
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to know if everyone who needed to be informed had been briefed
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about the smoking gun transcript. In a roomful of officials,
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some of whom were already sipping Scotch to steady their nerves,
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Timmons asked Dean Burch,
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``Dean, does Bush know about the transcript yet?''
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``Yes,'' responded Burch.
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``Well, what did he do?'' inquired Timmons.
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``He broke out into assholes and shit himself to death,''
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replied Burch.
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In this exchange, which is recorded in Woodward and
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Bernstein's {The Final Days,} we grasp the essential George Bush,
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in a crisis, and for all seasons.
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Introduction
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The thesis of this book is simple: if George Bush were to be
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re-elected in November 1992 for a second term as the President of
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the United States, this country and the rest of the world would
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face a catastrophe of gigantic proportions.
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The necessity of writing this book became overwhelming in the
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minds of the authors in the wake of the ghastly slaughter of the
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Iraq war of January-February 1991. That war was an act of savage
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and premeditated genocide on the part of Bush, undertaken in
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connivance with a clique in London which has, in its historical
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continuity, represented both the worst enemy of the long-term
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interests of the American people, and the most implacable
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adversary of the progress of the human species.
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The authors observed George Bush as the Gulf crisis and the
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war unfolded, and had no doubt that his enraged public outbursts
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constituted real psychotic episodes, indicative of a deranged
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mental state that was full of ominous portent for humanity. The
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authors were also horrified by the degree to which their fellow
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citizens willfully ignored the shocking reality of these public
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fits. A majority of the American people proved more than willing
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to lend its support to a despicable enterprise of killing.
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By their role-call votes of January 12, 1991, the Senate and
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the House of Representatives authorized Bush's planned war
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measures to restore the Emir of Kuwait, who owns and holds
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chattel slaves. That vote was a crime against God's justice.
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This book is part of an attempt to help the American people to
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survive this terrible crime, both for the sake of the world and
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for their own sake. It is intended as a contribution to a
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process of education that might help to save the American people
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from the awesome destruction of a second Bush presidency. It is
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further intended as a warning to all citizens that if they fail
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to deny Bush a second term, they will deserve what they get after
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1993.
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As this book goes to press, public awareness of the long-term
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depression of the American economy is rapidly growing. If Bush
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were re-elected, he would view himself as beyond the reach of the
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American electorate; with the federal deficit rising over a
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billion dollars a day, a second Bush administration would dictate
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such crushing austerity as to bring the country to the brink of
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civil war. Some examples of this point are described in the last
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chapter of this book.
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Our goal has been to assemble as much of the truth about Bush
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as possible within the time constraints imposed by the 1992
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election. Time and resources have not permitted us meticulous
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attention to certain matters of detail; we can say, nevertheless,
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that both our commitment to the truth and our final product are
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better than anything anyone else has been able to muster,
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including news organizations and intelligence agencies with
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capabilities that far surpass our own.
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Why do we fight the Bush power cartel with a mere book? We
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have no illusions of easy success, but we were encouraged in our
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work by the hope that a biography might stimulate opposition to
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Bush and his policies. It will certainly pose a new set of
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problems for those seeking to get Bush re-elected. For although
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Bush is now what journalists call a world leader, no accurate
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account of his actual career exists in the public domain.
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The volume which we submit to the court of world public
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opinion is, to the best of our knowledge, the first book-length,
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unauthorized biography of George Bush. It is the first
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approximation of the truth about his life. This is the first
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biography worthy of the name, a fact that says a great deal about
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the sinister and obsessive secrecy of this personage. None of
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the other biographies (including Bush's campaign autobiography)
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can be taken seriously; each of these books is a pastiche of
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lies, distortions and banalities that run the gamut from campaign
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panegyric, to the Goebbels Big Lie, to fake but edifying stories
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for credulous children. Almost without exception, the available
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Bush literature is worthless as a portrait of the subject.
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Bush's family pedigree establishes him as a network asset of
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Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the most powerful political
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forces in the United States during much of the twentieth century,
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and for many years the largest private bank in the world. It
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suffices in this context to think of Averell Harriman negotiating
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during World War II in the name of the United States with
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Churchill and Stalin, or of the role of Brown Brothers Harriman
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partner Robert Lovett in guiding John F. Kennedy's choice of his
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cabinet, to begin to see the implications of Senator Prescott
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Bush's post as managing partner of this bank. Brown Brothers
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Harriman networks pervade government and the mass media. Again
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and again in the course of the following pages we will see
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stories embarrassing to George Bush refused publication,
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documents embarrassing to Bush suspiciously disappear, and
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witnesses inculpatory to Bush be overtaken by mysterious and
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conveniently timed deaths. The few relevant facts which have
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found their way into the public domain have necessarily been
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filtered by this gigantic apparatus. This problem has been
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compounded by the corruption and servility of authors,
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journalists, news executives and publishers who have functioned
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more and more as kept advocates for a governmental regime of
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which Bush has been a prominent part for a quarter-century.
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The Red Studebaker Myth
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George Bush wants key aspects of his life to remain covert.
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At the same time, he senses that his need for coverup is a
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vulnerability. The need to protect this weak flank accounts for
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the steady stream of fake biographical material concerning
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George, as well as the spin given to many studies that may never
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mention George directly. Over the past several months, we have
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seen a new book about Watergate that pretends to tell the public
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something new by fingering Al Haig as Deep Throat, but ignoring
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the central role of George Bush and his business partners in the
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Watergate affair. We have a new book by Lt. Col. Oliver North
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which alleges that Reagan knew everything about the Iran-Contra
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affair, but that George Bush was not part of North's chain of
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command. The latter point merely paraphrases Bush's own lame
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excuse that he was ``out of the loop'' during all those illegal
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transactions. During the hearings on the nomination of Robert
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Gates to become director of Central Intelligence, nobody had
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anything new to add about the role of George Bush, the boss of
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the National Security Council's Special Situation Group crisis
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staff that was a command center for the whole affair. These
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charades are peddled to a very credulous public by operatives
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whose task goes beyond mere damage control to mind control--the
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``MK'' in the government's MK-Ultra operation.
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Part of the free ride enjoyed by George Bush during the 1988
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elections is reflected in the fact that at no point in the
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campaign was there any serious effort by any of the news
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organizations to provide the public with an accurate and complete
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account of his political career. At least two biographies of
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Dukakis appeared which, although hardly critical, were not
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uniformly laudatory either. But in the case of Bush, all the
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public could turn to was Bush's old 1980 campaign biography and a
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newer campaign autobiography, both of them a tissue of lies.
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Early in the course of our research for the present volume it
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became apparent that all books and most longer articles dealing
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with the life of George Bush had been generated from a single
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print-out of thoroughly approved ``facts'' about Bush and his
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family. We learned that during 1979-80, Bush aide Pete Roussel
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attempted to recruit biographers to prepare a life of Bush based
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on a collection of press releases, news summaries, and similar
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pre-digested material. Most biographical writing about Bush
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consists merely of the points from this printout, strung out
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chronologically and made into a narrative through the
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interpretation of comments, anecdotes, embellishments, or special
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stylistic devices.
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The canonical Bush-approved printout is readily identified.
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One dead giveaway is the inevitability with which the hacks out
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to cover up the substance of Bush's life refer to a 1947 red
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Studebaker which George Bush allegedly drove into Odessa, Texas
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in 1948. This is the sort of detail which has been introduced
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into Bush's real life in a deliberate and deceptive attempt to
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humanize his image. It has been our experience that any text
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that features a reference to Bush's red Studebaker has probably
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been derived from Bush's list of approved facts, and is therefore
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practically worthless for serious research into Bush's life. We
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therefore assign such texts to the ``red Studebaker school'' of
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coverup and falsification.
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Some examples? This is from Bush's campaign autobiography,
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{Looking Forward,} ghost-written by his aide Vic Gold: ``Heading
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into Texas in my Studebaker, all I knew about the state's
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landscape was what I'd seen from the cockpit of a Vultee Vibrator
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during my training days in the Navy.''s1
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Here is the same moment as recaptured by Bush's crony Fitzhugh
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Green, a friend of the Malthusian financier Russell Train, in his
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{George Bush: An Intimate Portrait,} published after Bush had won
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the presidency: ``He (Bush) gassed up his 1948 Studebaker,
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arranged for his wife and son to follow, and headed for Odessa,
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Texas.''s2
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Harry Hurt III wrote the following lines in a 1983 Texas
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magazine article that was even decorated with a drawing of what
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apparently is supposed to be a Studebaker, but which does not
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look like a Studebaker of that vintage at all: ``When George
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Herbert Walker Bush drove his battered red Studebaker into Odessa
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in the summer of 1948, the town's population, though constantly
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increasing with newly-arrived oil field hands, was still under
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30000.''s3
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We see that Harry Hurt has more imagination than many Bush
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biographers, and his article does provide a few useful facts.
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More degraded is the version offered by Richard Ben Kramer, whose
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biography of Bush is expected to be published during 1992. Cramer
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was given the unenviable task of breathing life once more into
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the same tired old printout. But the very fact that the Bush
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team feels that it requires another biography indicates that it
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still feels that it has a potential vulnerability here. Cramer
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has attempted to solve his problem by recasting the same old
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garbage into a frenetic and hyperkinetic, we would almost say
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{hyperthyroid} style. The following is from an excerpt of this
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forthcoming book that was published in {Esquire} in June 1991:
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``In June, after the College World Series and graduation day in
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New Haven, Poppy packed up his new red Studebaker (a graduation
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gift from Pres), and started driving south.''s4
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Was that Studebaker shiny and new, or old and battered?
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Perhaps the printout is not specific on this point; in any case,
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as we see, our authorities diverge.
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Joe Hyams's 1991 romance of Bush at war, the {Flight of the
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Avenger,}s5 does not include the obligatory ``red Studebaker''
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reference, but this is more than compensated for by the most
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elaborate fawning over other details of our hero's war service.
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The publication of {Flight of the Avenger,} which concentrates on
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an heroic retelling of Bush's war record, and ignores all
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evidence that might tend to puncture this myth, was timed to
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coincide with Bush's war with Iraq. This is a vile tract written
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with the open assistance of Bush, Barbara Bush, and the White
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House staff. {Flight of the Avenger} recalls the practice of
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totalitarian states according to which a war waged by the regime
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should be accompanied by propaganda which depicts the regime's
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strong man in a martial posture. In any case, this book deals
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with Bush's life up to the end of World War II; we never reach
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Odessa.
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Only one of the full-length accounts produced by the Bush
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propaganda machine neglects the red Studebaker story. This is
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Nicholas King's {George Bush: A Biography,} the first book-length
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version of Bush's life, produced as a result of Pete Roussel's
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efforts for the 1980 campaign. Nicholas King had served as
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Bush's spokesman when he was U.S. Ambassador to the United
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Nations. King admits in his preface that he can be impugned for
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writing a work of the most transparent apologetics: ``In
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retrospect,'' he says , ``this book may seem open to the charge
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of puffery, for the view of its subject is favorable all
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around.''s6 Indeed.
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Books about Barbara Bush slavishly rehearse the same details
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from the same printout. Here is the relevant excerpt from the
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warmly admiring {Simply Barbara Bush: A Portrait of America's
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Candid First Lady,} written by Donnie Radcliffe and published
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after Bush's 1988 election victory: ``With $3000 left over after
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he graduated in June, 1948, he headed for Texas in the 1947 red
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Studebaker his father had given him for graduation after George's
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car died on the highway.''s7
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Even foreign journalists attempting to inform their publics
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about conditions in the United States have fallen victim to the
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same old Bush printout. The German author and reporter Rainer
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Bonhorst, the former Washington correspondent of the
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{Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,} in his 1988 book {George Bush:
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The New Man in the White House,} named a chapter of this Bush
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political biography ``To Texas in the Red Studebaker.'' Bonhorst
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writes as follows: ``Then there was still the matter of the red
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Studebaker. It plays--right after the world war effort--a
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central role in the life history of George Bush. It is the
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history of his rebellion. The step which made a careless Texan
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out of a stiff New Englander, a self-made man out of a
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patrician's son, born into wealth.... Thus, George and Barbara
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Bush, 24 and 23 years old, he having just finished with his
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studies, she having prematurely withdrawn from her university and
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become a mother a few months earlier, packed their baby and their
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suitcases and loaded them into their glaring red Studebaker
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coupe.
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``A supermodern, smart car, certainly somewhat loud for the
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New England taste,' the Bushes later recalled. But finally it
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departed towards Texas.''s8
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We see that Bonhorst is acutely aware of the symbolic
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importance assumed by the red Studebaker in these hagiographic
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accounts of Bush's life.
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What is finally the truth of the matter? There is good reason
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to believe that George Bush did not first come to Odessa, Texas,
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in a red Studebaker. One knowledgeable source is the well-known
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Texas oil man and Bush campaign contributor Oscar Wyatt of
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Houston. In a recent letter to the {Texas Monthly,} Wyatt
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specifies that ``when people speak of Mr. Bush's humble
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beginnings in the oil industry, it should be noted that he rode
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down to Texas on Dresser's private aircraft. He was accompanied
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by his father, who at that time was one of the directors of
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Dresser Industries.... I hate it when people make statements
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about Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry. It just
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didn't happen that way,'' writes Mr. Wyatt.s9 Dresser was a
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Harriman company, and Bush got his start working for one of its
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subsidiaries. One history of Dresser Industries contains a
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photograph of George Bush with his parents, wife, and infant son
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``in front of a Dresser company airplane in West Texas.''s1s0 Can
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this be a photo of Bush's arrival in Odessa during the summer of
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1948? In any case, this most cherished myth of the Bush
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biographers is very much open to doubt.
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The Roman Propaganda Machine
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Fawning biographies of bloodthirsty tyrants are nothing new in
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world literature. The red Studebaker school goes back a long
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way; these writers of today can be usefully compared with a
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certain Gaius Velleius Paterculus, who lived in the Roman Empire
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under the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, and who was thus an
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approximate contemporary of Jesus Christ. Velleius Paterculus was
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an historian and biographer who is known today, if at all, for
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his biographical notes on the Emperor Tiberius, which are
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contained within Paterculus's history of Rome.
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Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, gave a very favorable
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treatment of Julius Caesar, and became fulsome when he came to
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write of Augustus. But the worst excesses of flattery came in
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Velleius Paterculus's treatment of Tiberius himself. Here is
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part of what he writes about that tyrannical ruler:
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``Of the transactions of the last sixteen years, which have
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passed in the view, and are fresh in the memory of all, who shall
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presume to give a full account? ... credit has been restored to
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mercantile affairs, sedition has been banished from the forum,
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corruption from the Campus Martius, and discord from the
|
||
|
senate-house; justice, equity and industry, which had long lain
|
||
|
buried in neglect, have been revived in the state; authority has
|
||
|
been given to the magistrates, majesty to the senate, and
|
||
|
solemnity to the courts of justice; the bloody riots in the
|
||
|
theatre have been suppressed, and all men have had either a
|
||
|
desire excited in them, or a necessity imposed on them, of acting
|
||
|
with integrity. Virtuous acts are honored, wicked deeds are
|
||
|
punished. The humble respects the powerful, without dreading
|
||
|
him; the powerful takes precedence of the humble without
|
||
|
condemning him. When were provisions more moderate in price?
|
||
|
When were 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....''s1s1
|
||
|
All of this was written in praise of the regime that crucified
|
||
|
Jesus Christ, and one of the worst genocidal tyrannies in the
|
||
|
history of the world. Paterculus, we must sadly conclude, was a
|
||
|
sycophant of the Tiberius administration. Some of his themes are
|
||
|
close parallels to the propaganda of today's Bush machine.
|
||
|
In addition to feeding the personality cult of Tiberius,
|
||
|
Paterculus also lavished praise on Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the
|
||
|
Prefect of the Praetorian Guard and for many years Tiberius's
|
||
|
number one favorite, second in command, and likely successor. In
|
||
|
many respects Sejanus was not unlike James Baker III under the
|
||
|
Bush regime. While Tiberius spent all of his time in seclusion
|
||
|
on his island of Capri near Naples, Sejanus assumed day to day
|
||
|
control of the vast empire and its 100000000 subjects.
|
||
|
Paterculus wrote of Sejanus that he was ``a most excellent
|
||
|
coadjutor in all the toils of government ... a man of pleasing
|
||
|
gravity, and of unaffected cheerfulness ... assuming nothing to
|
||
|
himself.'' That was the voice of the red Studebaker school in
|
||
|
about 30 A.D. Paterculus should have limited his fawning to
|
||
|
Tiberius himself; somewhat later, the emperor, suspecting a coup
|
||
|
plot, condemned Sejanus and had him torn limb from limb in
|
||
|
gruesome retribution.
|
||
|
But why bring up Rome? Some readers may be scandalized by the
|
||
|
things that truth obliges us to record about a sitting president
|
||
|
of the United States. Are we not disrespectful to this high
|
||
|
office? No. One of the reasons for glancing back at Imperial
|
||
|
Rome is to remind ourselves that in times of moral and cultural
|
||
|
degradation like our own, rulers of great evil have inflicted
|
||
|
incalculable suffering on humanity. In our modern time of war
|
||
|
and depression, this is once again the case. If Caligula was
|
||
|
possible then, who could claim that the America of the New World
|
||
|
Order should be exempt? Let us therefore tarry for a moment with
|
||
|
these old Romans, because they can show us much about ourselves.
|
||
|
In order to find Roman writers who tell us anything reliable
|
||
|
about the first dozen emperors, we must wait until the infamous
|
||
|
Julio-Claudian dynasty of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius,
|
||
|
Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and the rest had entirely passed from
|
||
|
the scene, to be supplanted by new ruling houses. Tiberius
|
||
|
reigned from 14 to 37 A.D.; Caligula, his designated successor,
|
||
|
from 37 to 41 A.D.; and Nero from 54 to 68 A.D. But the first
|
||
|
accurate account of the crimes of some of these emperors comes
|
||
|
from Publius Cornelius Tacitus in about 115-17 A.D., late in the
|
||
|
reign of the emperor Trajan. It was feasible for Tacitus to write
|
||
|
and publish a more realistic account of the Julio-Claudian
|
||
|
emperors because one of the constant themes of Trajan's
|
||
|
propaganda was to glorify himself as an enlightened emperor
|
||
|
through comparison with the earlier series of bloody tyrants.
|
||
|
Tacitus manages to convey how the destructiveness of these
|
||
|
emperors in their 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 A.D., and was
|
||
|
the governor of the important province of western Anatolia
|
||
|
(today's Turkey) which the Romans referred to simply as Asia.
|
||
|
Tacitus writes of Tiberius: ``... his criminal lusts shamed him.
|
||
|
Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of an oriental tyrant.
|
||
|
Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by
|
||
|
beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names
|
||
|
for types of perversions were invented. Slaves were charged to
|
||
|
locate and procure his requirements.... It was like the sack of
|
||
|
a captured city.''
|
||
|
Tiberius was able to dominate the legislative branch of his
|
||
|
government, the senate, by subversion and terror: ``It was,
|
||
|
indeed, a horrible feature of this period that leading senators
|
||
|
became informers even on trivial matters--some openly, many
|
||
|
secretly. Friends and relatives were as suspect as strangers,
|
||
|
old stories as damaging as new. In the Main Square, at a
|
||
|
dinner-party, a remark on any subject might mean prosecution.
|
||
|
Everyone competed for priority in marking down the victim.
|
||
|
Sometimes this was self-defense, but mostly it was a sort of
|
||
|
contagion, like an epidemic.... I realize that many writers omit
|
||
|
numerous trials and condemnations, bored by repetition or afraid
|
||
|
that catalogues they themselves have found over-long and dismal
|
||
|
may equally depress their readers. But numerous unrecorded
|
||
|
incidents, which have come to my attention, ought to be known.
|
||
|
``... Even women were in danger. They could not be charged
|
||
|
with aiming at supreme power. So they were charged with weeping:
|
||
|
one old lady was executed for lamenting her son's death. The
|
||
|
senate decided this case.... In the same year the high price of
|
||
|
corn nearly caused riots....
|
||
|
``Frenzied with bloodshed, (Tiberius) now ordered the
|
||
|
execution of all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus. It
|
||
|
was a massacre. Without discrimination of sex or age, eminence
|
||
|
or obscurity, there they lay, strewn about--or in heaps.
|
||
|
Relatives and friends were forbidden to stand by or lament them,
|
||
|
or even gaze for long. Guards surrounded them, spying on their
|
||
|
sorrow, and escorted the rotting bodies until, dragged to the
|
||
|
Tiber, they floated away or grounded--with none to cremate or
|
||
|
touch them. Terror had paralyzed human sympathy. The rising
|
||
|
surge of brutality drove compassion away.''s1s2
|
||
|
This is the same Tiberius administration so extravagantly
|
||
|
praised by Velleius Paterculus.
|
||
|
Because of lacunae in the manuscripts of Tacitus's work that
|
||
|
have come down to us, much of what we know of the rule of
|
||
|
Caligula (Gaius Caesar, in power from 37 to 41 A.D.) derives from
|
||
|
{The Lives of the Twelve Caesars,} a book by Gaius Suetonius
|
||
|
Tranquillus. The character and administration of Caligula present
|
||
|
some striking parallels with the subject of the present book.
|
||
|
As a stoic, Caligula was a great admirer of his own
|
||
|
``immovable rigor.'' His motto was ``Remember that I have the
|
||
|
right to do anything to anybody.'' He made no secret of his
|
||
|
bloodthirsty vindictiveness. Caligula was a fan of the green
|
||
|
team in the Roman arena, and when the crowd applauded a
|
||
|
charioteer who wore a different color, Caligula cried out, ``I
|
||
|
wish the Roman people had but a single neck.'' At one of his
|
||
|
state dinners Caligula burst into a fit of uncontrollable
|
||
|
laughter, and when a consul asked him what was so funny, he
|
||
|
replied that it was the thought that as emperor Caligula had the
|
||
|
power to have the throats of the top officials cut at any time he
|
||
|
chose. Caligula carried this same attitude into his personal
|
||
|
life: whenever he kissed or caressed the neck of his wife or one
|
||
|
of his mistresses, he liked to remark: ``Off comes this beautiful
|
||
|
head whenever I give the word.''
|
||
|
Above all, Caligula was vindictive. After his death, two
|
||
|
notebooks were found among his 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 pyschological roots of his criminal
|
||
|
disposition: ``I think I may attribute to mental weakness the
|
||
|
existence of two exactly opposite faults in the same person,
|
||
|
extreme assurance and, on the other hand, excessive
|
||
|
timorousness.'' Caligula was ``full of threats'' against ``the
|
||
|
barbarians,'' but at the same time prone to precipitous retreats
|
||
|
and flights of panic. Caligula worked on his ``body language''
|
||
|
by ``practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions
|
||
|
before a mirror.''
|
||
|
Caligula built an extension of his palace to connect with the
|
||
|
Temple of Castor and Pollux, and often went there to exhibit
|
||
|
himself as an object of public worship, delighting in being
|
||
|
hailed as ``Jupiter Latiaris'' by the populace. Later Caligula
|
||
|
would officially open temples in his own name. Caligula was
|
||
|
brutal in his intimidation of the senate, whose members he
|
||
|
subjected to open humiliations and covert attacks; many senators
|
||
|
were ``secretly put to death.'' ``He often inveighed against all
|
||
|
the Senators alike.... He treated the other orders with like
|
||
|
insolence and cruelty.'' Suetonius recites whole catalogues of
|
||
|
``special instances of his innate brutality'' toward persons of
|
||
|
all walks of life. He enjoyed inflicting torture, and revelled
|
||
|
in liquidating political opponents or those who had insulted or
|
||
|
snubbed him in some way. He had a taste for capital executions
|
||
|
as the perfect backdrop for parties and banquets. Caligula also
|
||
|
did everything he could to denigrate the memory of the great men
|
||
|
of past epochs, so that their fame could not eclipse his own:
|
||
|
``He assailed mankind of almost every epoch with no less envy and
|
||
|
malice than insolence and cruelty. He threw down the statues of
|
||
|
famous men'' and tried to destroy all the texts of Homer.
|
||
|
Caligula ``respected neither his own chastity nor that of any
|
||
|
one else.'' He was reckless in his extravagance, and soon emptied
|
||
|
out the imperial treasury of all the funds that old Tiberius had
|
||
|
squirreled away there. After that, Caligula tried to replenish
|
||
|
his coffers through a system of spies, false accusations,
|
||
|
property seizures, and public auctions. He also ``levied new and
|
||
|
unheard-of taxes,'' to the point that ``no class of commodities
|
||
|
was exempt from some kind of tax or other.'' Caligula taxed all
|
||
|
foodstuffs, took a fortieth of the award in any lawsuit, an
|
||
|
eighth of the daily wages of the porters, and demanded that the
|
||
|
prostitutes pay him a daily fee equal to the average price
|
||
|
charged to each individual customer. (It is rumored that this
|
||
|
part of Caligula's career is under study by those planning George
|
||
|
Bush's second term.) Caligula also opened a brothel in his palace
|
||
|
as an additional source of income, which may prefigure today's
|
||
|
White House staff. Among Caligula's more singular hobbies
|
||
|
Suetonius includes his love of rolling and wallowing in piles of
|
||
|
gold coins.
|
||
|
Caligula kept his wife, Caesonia (described by Suetonius as
|
||
|
``neither beautiful nor young'') with him until the very end.
|
||
|
But his greatest devotion was to his horse, whom he made consul
|
||
|
of the Roman state. Ultimately Caligula fell victim to a
|
||
|
conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard, led by the tribune Gaius
|
||
|
Chaerea, a man whom Caligula had taken special delight in
|
||
|
humiliating.s1s3
|
||
|
The authors of the present study are convinced that these
|
||
|
references to the depravity of the Roman emperors, and to the
|
||
|
records of that depravity provided by such authors as Tacitus and
|
||
|
Suetonius, are directly germane to our present task of following
|
||
|
the career of a member of the senatorial class of the
|
||
|
Anglo-American elite through the various stages of his formation
|
||
|
and ultimate ascent to imperial power. The Roman Imperial model
|
||
|
is germane because the American ruling elite of today is far
|
||
|
closer to the world of Tiberius and Caligula than it is to the
|
||
|
world of the American Revolution or the Constitutional Convention
|
||
|
of 1789. The leitmotif 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.
|
||
|
The Olympian Delusion
|
||
|
There is one other aspect of the biographical-historical
|
||
|
method of the Graeco-Roman world which we have sought to borrow.
|
||
|
Ever since Thucydides composed his monumental work on the
|
||
|
Peloponnesian War, those who have sought to imitate his
|
||
|
style--with the Roman historian Titus Livius prominent among
|
||
|
them--have employed the device of attributing long speeches to
|
||
|
historical personages, even when it appears very unlikely that
|
||
|
such lengthy orations could have been made by the protagonists at
|
||
|
the time. This has nothing to do with the synthetic dialogue of
|
||
|
current American political writing, which attempts to present
|
||
|
historical events as a series of trivial and banal soap-opera
|
||
|
exchanges, which carry on for such interminable lengths as to
|
||
|
suggest that the authors are getting paid by the word. Our idea
|
||
|
of fidelity to the classical style has simply been to let George
|
||
|
Bush speak for himself wherever possible, through direct
|
||
|
quotation. We are convinced that by letting Bush express himself
|
||
|
directly in this way, we afford the reader a more faithful--and
|
||
|
damning--account of Bush's actions.
|
||
|
George Bush might agree that ``history is biography,''
|
||
|
although we suspect that he would not agree with any of our other
|
||
|
conclusions. There may be a few peculiarities of the present
|
||
|
work as biography that are worthy of explanation at the outset.
|
||
|
One of our basic theses is that George Bush is, and considers
|
||
|
himself to be, an oligarch. The notion of oligarchy includes
|
||
|
first of all the idea of a patrician and wealthy family capable
|
||
|
of introducing its offspring into such elite institutions as
|
||
|
Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones. Oligarchy also subsumes the
|
||
|
self-conception of the oligarch as belonging to a special,
|
||
|
exalted breed of mankind, one that is superior to the common run
|
||
|
of mankind as a matter of hereditary genetic superiority. This
|
||
|
mentality generally goes together with a fascination for
|
||
|
eugenics, race science and just plain racism as a means of
|
||
|
building a case that one's own family tree and racial stock are
|
||
|
indeed superior. These notions of ``breeding'' are a constant in
|
||
|
the history of the titled feudal aristocracy of Europe,
|
||
|
especially Britain, towards inclusion in which an individual like
|
||
|
Bush must necessarily strive. At the very least, oligarchs like
|
||
|
Bush see themselves as demigods occupying a middle ground between
|
||
|
the immortals above and the {hoi polloi} below. The culmination
|
||
|
of this insane delusion, which Bush has demonstrably long since
|
||
|
attained, is the obsessive belief that the principal families of
|
||
|
the Anglo-American elite, assembled in their freemasonic orders,
|
||
|
by themselves directly constitute an Olympian Pantheon of living
|
||
|
deities who have the capability of abrogating and disregarding
|
||
|
the laws of the universe according to their own irrational
|
||
|
caprice. If we do not take into account this element of fatal
|
||
|
and megalomaniac hubris, the lunatic Anglo-American policies in
|
||
|
regard to the Gulf War, international finance, or the AIDS
|
||
|
epidemic must defy all comprehension.
|
||
|
Part of the ethos of oligarchism as practiced by George Bush
|
||
|
is the emphasis on one's own family pedigree. This accounts for
|
||
|
the attention we dedicate in the opening chapters of this book to
|
||
|
Bush's family tree, reaching back to the nineteenth century and
|
||
|
beyond. It is impossible to gain insight into Bush's mentality
|
||
|
unless we realize that it is important for him to be considered a
|
||
|
cousin, however distant, of Queen Elizabeth II of the House of
|
||
|
Mountbatten-Windsor and for his wife Barbara to be viewed in some
|
||
|
sense a descendant of President Franklin Pierce.
|
||
|
The Family Firm
|
||
|
For related reasons, it is our special duty to illustrate the
|
||
|
role played in the formation of George Bush as a personality by
|
||
|
his maternal grandfather and uncle, George Herbert Walker and
|
||
|
George Herbert Walker, Jr., and by George H.W. Bush's father, the
|
||
|
late Senator Prescott Bush. In the course of this task, we must
|
||
|
speak at length about the institution to which George Bush owes
|
||
|
the most, the Wall Street international investment bank of Brown
|
||
|
Brothers Harriman, the political and financial powerhouse
|
||
|
mentioned above. For George Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman was
|
||
|
and remains the family firm in the deepest sense. The formidable
|
||
|
power of this bank and its ubiquitous network, wielded by Senator
|
||
|
Prescott Bush up through the time of his death in 1972, and still
|
||
|
active on George's behalf down to the present day, is the single
|
||
|
most important key to every step of George's business, covert
|
||
|
operations, and political career.
|
||
|
In the case of George Bush, as many who have known him
|
||
|
personally have noted, the network looms much larger than
|
||
|
George's own character and will. The reader will search in vain
|
||
|
for strong principled commitments in George Bush's personality;
|
||
|
the most that will be found is a series of characteristic
|
||
|
obsessions, of which the most durable are race, vanity, personal
|
||
|
ambition, and settling scores with adversaries. What emerges by
|
||
|
contrast is the decisive importance of Bush's network of
|
||
|
connections. His response to the Gulf crisis of 1991 will be
|
||
|
largely predetermined, not by any great flashes of geopolitical
|
||
|
insight, but rather by his connections to the British oligarchy,
|
||
|
to Kissinger, to Israeli and Zionist circles, to Texas oilmen in
|
||
|
his fundraising base, to the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal
|
||
|
houses. If the question is one of finance, then the opinions of
|
||
|
J. Hugh Liedtke, Henry Kravis, Robert Mosbacher, T. Boone
|
||
|
Pickens, Nicholas Brady, James Baker III and the City of London
|
||
|
will be decisive. If covert operations and dirty tricks are on
|
||
|
the agenda, then there is a whole stable of CIA old boys with
|
||
|
whom he will consult, and so on down the line. During much of
|
||
|
1989, despite his control over the presidency, Bush appeared as a
|
||
|
weak and passive executive, waiting for his networks to show him
|
||
|
what it was he was supposed to do. When German reunification and
|
||
|
the crumbling of the Soviet empire spurred those--primarily
|
||
|
British--networks into action, Bush was suddenly capable of
|
||
|
violent and daring adventures. As his battle for a second term
|
||
|
approaches, Bush may be showing increasing signs of a rage-driven
|
||
|
self-starter capability, especially when it comes to starting new
|
||
|
wars designed to secure his re-election.
|
||
|
The United States in Decline
|
||
|
Biography has its own inherent discipline: It must be
|
||
|
concerned with the life of its protagonist, and cannot stray too
|
||
|
far away. In no way has it been our intention to offer an
|
||
|
account of American history during the lifetime of George Bush.
|
||
|
The present study nevertheless reflects many aspects of that
|
||
|
recent history of U.S. decline. It will be noted that Bush has
|
||
|
succeeded in proportion as the country has failed, and that
|
||
|
Bush's advancement has proceeded {pari passu} with the
|
||
|
degradation of the national stage upon which he has operated and
|
||
|
which he has come to dominate. At various phases in his career,
|
||
|
Bush has come into conflict with persons who were intellectually
|
||
|
and morally superior to him. One such was Senator Ralph
|
||
|
Yarborough, and another was Senator Frank Church. Our study will
|
||
|
be found to catalogue the constant decline in the qualities of
|
||
|
Bush's adversaries as human types until the 1980s, by which time
|
||
|
his opponents, as in the case of Al Haig, are no better than Bush
|
||
|
himself.
|
||
|
The exception to this trend is Bush's long-standing personal
|
||
|
vendetta against Lyndon LaRouche, his most consistent and capable
|
||
|
adversary. LaRouche was jailed seven days after Bush's
|
||
|
inauguration in the most infamous political frameup of recent
|
||
|
U.S. history. As our study will document, at critical moments in
|
||
|
Bush's career, LaRouche's political interventions have frustrated
|
||
|
some of Bush's best-laid political plans: A very clear example is
|
||
|
LaRouche's role in defeating Bush's 1980 presidential bid in the
|
||
|
New Hampshire primary. Over the intervening years, LaRouche has
|
||
|
become George Bush's ``man in the iron mask,'' the principled
|
||
|
political adversary whom Bush seeks to jail and silence at all
|
||
|
costs. The restoration of justice in this country must include
|
||
|
the freeing of Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche's political associates,
|
||
|
and all the other political prisoners of the Bush regime.
|
||
|
As for the political relevance of our project, we think that
|
||
|
it is very real. During the Gulf crisis, it would have been
|
||
|
important for the public to know more about Bush's business
|
||
|
dealings with the Royal Family of Kuwait. During the 1992
|
||
|
presidential campaign, as Wall Street's recent crop of junk-bond
|
||
|
assisted leveraged buyouts line up at the entrance to bankruptcy
|
||
|
court, and state workers all across the United States are
|
||
|
informed that the retirement pensions they had been promised will
|
||
|
never be paid, the relations between George Bush and Henry Kravis
|
||
|
will surely constitute an explosive political issue. Similarly,
|
||
|
once Bush's British and Kissingerian pedigree is recognized, the
|
||
|
methods he is likely to pursue in regard to situations such as
|
||
|
the planned Romanian-style overthrow of the Castro regime in
|
||
|
Cuba, or the provocation of a splendid little nuclear war
|
||
|
involving North Korea, or of a new Indo-Pakistani war, will
|
||
|
hardly be mysterious.
|
||
|
The authors have been at some pains to make this work
|
||
|
intelligible to readers around the world. We offer this book to
|
||
|
those who share our aversion to the imperialist-colonialist New
|
||
|
World Order, and our profound horror at the concept of a return
|
||
|
to a single, worldwide Roman Empire as suggested by Bush's ``pax
|
||
|
universalis'' slogan. This work is tangible evidence that there
|
||
|
is an opposition to Bush inside the United States, and that the
|
||
|
new Caligula is very vulnerable indeed on the level of the
|
||
|
exposure of his own misdeeds.
|
||
|
It will be argued that this book should have been published
|
||
|
before the 1988 election, when a Bush presidency might have been
|
||
|
avoided. That is certainly true, but it is an objection which
|
||
|
should also be directed to many institutions and agencies whose
|
||
|
resources far surpass our modest capabilities. We can only
|
||
|
remind our fellow citizens that when he asks for their votes for
|
||
|
his re-election, George Bush also enters that court of public
|
||
|
opinion in which he is obliged to answer their questions. They
|
||
|
should not waste this opportunity to grill him on all aspects of
|
||
|
his career and future intentions, since it is Bush who comes
|
||
|
forward appealing for their support. To aid in this process, we
|
||
|
have provided a list of Twenty Questions for Candidate George
|
||
|
Bush on the campaign trail, and this will be found in the
|
||
|
appendix.
|
||
|
We do not delude ourselves that we have said the last word
|
||
|
about George Bush. But we have for the first time sketched out at
|
||
|
least some of the most salient features and gathered them into a
|
||
|
comprehensible whole. We encourage an aroused citizenry, as well
|
||
|
as specialized researchers, to improve upon what we have been
|
||
|
able to accomplish. In so doing, we recall the words of the
|
||
|
Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio when he reluctantly accepted the
|
||
|
order of a powerful king to produce an account of the old Roman
|
||
|
Pantheon: ``If I don't succeed completely in this exposition, at
|
||
|
least I will provide a stimulus for the better work of others who
|
||
|
are wiser.''--Boccaccio, {Genealogy of the National Gods}
|
||
|
{To be continued.}
|
||
|
Notes
|
||
|
1. George Bush and Vic Gold, {Looking Forward,} (New York:
|
||
|
Doubleday, 1987), p. 47.
|
||
|
2.
|
||
|
Fitzhugh Green, {Looking Forward,} (New York: Hippocrene, 1989),
|
||
|
p. 53.
|
||
|
3. Harry Hurt III, ``George Bush, Plucky Lad,'' {Texas Monthly,}
|
||
|
June, 1983, p. 142.
|
||
|
4. Richard Ben Cramer, ``How He Got Here,'' {Esquire,} June,
|
||
|
1991, p. 84.
|
||
|
5. Joe Hyams, {Flight of the Avenger} (New York, 1991).
|
||
|
6.
|
||
|
Nicholas King, {George Bush: A Biography} (New York, Dodd, Mead,
|
||
|
1980), p. xi.
|
||
|
7. Donnie Radcliffe, {Simply Barbara Bush,} (New York: Warner,
|
||
|
1989), p. 103.
|
||
|
8. Rainer Bonhorst, {George Bush, Der Neue Mann im Weissen Haus,}
|
||
|
(Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Luebbe Verlag, 1988), pp. 80-81.
|
||
|
9. See ``The Roar of the Crowd,'' {Texas Monthly,} November,
|
||
|
1991. See also Jan Jarboe, ``Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog,'' {Texas
|
||
|
Monthly,} April 1991, p. 122 ff. Here Wyatt observes: ``I knew
|
||
|
from the beginning George Bush came to Texas only because he was
|
||
|
politically ambitious. He flew out here on an airplane owned by
|
||
|
Dresser Industries. His daddy was a member of the board of
|
||
|
Dresser.''
|
||
|
10. Darwin Payne, {Initiative in Energy} (New York: Simon and
|
||
|
Shuster, 1979), p. 233.
|
||
|
11. John Selby Watson (translator), {Sallust, Florus, and
|
||
|
Velleius Paterculus} (London: George Bell and Son, 1879), pp.
|
||
|
542-46.
|
||
|
12. Cornelius Tacitus, {The Annals of Imperial Rome} (Penguin,
|
||
|
1962), pp. 193-221.
|
||
|
13. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, {The Lives of the Twelve
|
||
|
Caesars} (New York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 165-204, {
|
||
|
passim.
|
||
|
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on
|
||
|
this group.
|
||
|
Thanks.
|
||
|
John Covici
|
||
|
coviciccs.covici.com
|
||
|
Article 15244 of alt.activism:
|
||
|
From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
|
||
|
Newsgroups: alt.activism
|
||
|
Subject: Part 2: George Bush Unauthorized Biography
|
||
|
Message-ID: <mV3LeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com>
|
||
|
Date: 15 Jan 92 <data type="time" timezone="GMT">21:58:09</data>
|
||
|
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
|
||
|
Lines: 1495
|
||
|
The following is from the New Federalist serialization of a
|
||
|
forthcoming book concerning George Bush.
|
||
|
For further information or to subscribe to New Federalist, please
|
||
|
contact me by e-mail.
|
||
|
CHAPTER 2 THE HITLER PROJECT
|
||
|
1. Bush Property Seized--Trading with the Enemy
|
||
|
In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America
|
||
|
was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces.
|
||
|
Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman.
|
||
|
His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just
|
||
|
begun training to become a naval pilot.
|
||
|
On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure
|
||
|
of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were
|
||
|
being conducted by Prescott Bush.
|
||
|
Under the {Trading with the Enemy Act}, the government took
|
||
|
over the {Union Banking Corporation,} in which Bush was a
|
||
|
director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking
|
||
|
Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush,
|
||
|
E. Roland ``Bunny'' Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two
|
||
|
other associates of Bush.s1
|
||
|
The order seizing the bank ``vest[ed] [seized] all of the
|
||
|
capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York
|
||
|
corporation,'' and named the holders of its shares as:
|
||
|
sb``E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares.'' Harriman was chairman
|
||
|
and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is ``Bunny''
|
||
|
Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn't
|
||
|
get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal
|
||
|
investments.
|
||
|
sb``Cornelis Lievense--4 shares.'' Lievense was president and
|
||
|
director of UBC, and a New York resident banking functionary for
|
||
|
the Nazis.
|
||
|
sb``Harold D. Pennington--1 share.'' Pennington was treasurer
|
||
|
and director of UBC, and an office manager employed by Bush at
|
||
|
Brown Brothers Harriman.
|
||
|
sb``Ray Morris--1 share.'' Morris was director of UBC, and a
|
||
|
partner of Bush and the Harrimans.
|
||
|
sb``Prescott S. Bush--1 share.'' Bush was director of UBC,
|
||
|
which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George
|
||
|
Walker; he was senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and
|
||
|
Averell Harriman.
|
||
|
sb``H.J. Kouwenhoven--1 share'' Kouwenhoven was director of
|
||
|
UBC; he organized UBC as the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in
|
||
|
negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; he was also
|
||
|
managing director of UBC's Netherlands affiliate under Nazi
|
||
|
occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany, and also
|
||
|
director and chief foreign financial executive of the German
|
||
|
Steel Trust.
|
||
|
sb``Johann G. Groeninger--1 share.'' Groeninger was director
|
||
|
of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; he was an industrial
|
||
|
executive in Nazi Germany.
|
||
|
The order also specified: ``all of which shares are held for
|
||
|
the benefit of ... members of the Thyssen family, [and] is
|
||
|
property of nationals ... of a designated enemy country....''
|
||
|
By October 26, 1942, U.S. troops were underway for North
|
||
|
Africa. On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two
|
||
|
Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the
|
||
|
{Holland-American Trading Corporation} and the {Seamless Steel
|
||
|
Equipment Corporation.}s2
|
||
|
U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on November 8,
|
||
|
1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in
|
||
|
the {Silesian-American Corporation,} long managed by Prescott
|
||
|
Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized
|
||
|
under the Trading with the Enemy Act on November 17, 1942. In
|
||
|
this action, the government announced that it was seizing only
|
||
|
the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on
|
||
|
the business.s3
|
||
|
These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in
|
||
|
wartime were, tragically, too little and too late. President
|
||
|
Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and
|
||
|
arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and
|
||
|
managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of
|
||
|
Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi
|
||
|
genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known
|
||
|
results.
|
||
|
The facts presented here must be known, and their implications
|
||
|
reflected upon, for a proper understanding of President George
|
||
|
Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to mankind that he
|
||
|
represents. The President's family fortune was largely a result
|
||
|
of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family
|
||
|
associations, which later boosted him into the Central
|
||
|
Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father's
|
||
|
partners in the Hitler project.
|
||
|
President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo
|
||
|
T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property
|
||
|
of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act. The order,
|
||
|
published in obscure government record books and kept out of the
|
||
|
news,s4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the
|
||
|
Union Banking Corporation was run for the ``Thyssen family'' of
|
||
|
``Germany and/or Hungary''--``nationals ... of a designated enemy
|
||
|
country.''
|
||
|
By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the
|
||
|
Union Banking Corp. were legally {front men for the Nazis}, the
|
||
|
government avoided the more important historical issue: In what
|
||
|
way {were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed, and instructed
|
||
|
by} the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an
|
||
|
executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler
|
||
|
project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek
|
||
|
an answer for that question.
|
||
|
2. Origin and Extent of the Project
|
||
|
Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally
|
||
|
recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf
|
||
|
Hitler's takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing
|
||
|
the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had
|
||
|
already published his famous book, {I Paid Hitler},s5 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.s6 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....''s7
|
||
|
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 $400000 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.''s8
|
||
|
This accounts for many, many Nazi submarines, bombs, rifles,
|
||
|
gas chambers, etc.
|
||
|
Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in
|
||
|
1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a
|
||
|
giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime
|
||
|
sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new {German Steel Trust,}
|
||
|
Germany's largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926
|
||
|
by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade
|
||
|
of Prescott Bush's father Sam Bush from the ``Merchants of
|
||
|
Death'' bureau in World War I.
|
||
|
In return for putting up $70000000 to create his
|
||
|
organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company
|
||
|
two or more representatives on the board of the new Steel
|
||
|
Trust.s9
|
||
|
Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen's own confidential
|
||
|
accounts, for political and related purposes, were run through
|
||
|
the Walker-Bush organization; the Steel Trust did its corporate
|
||
|
banking through Dillon Read.
|
||
|
The Walker-Bush firm's banking activities were not just
|
||
|
politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to
|
||
|
coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm's
|
||
|
European business in those days was organized around
|
||
|
anti-democratic political forces.
|
||
|
In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew
|
||
|
this retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to
|
||
|
Averell Harriman: ``It seems to me that the suggestion in
|
||
|
connection with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from
|
||
|
Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent.... I think that we
|
||
|
have drawn our line and should hew to it.''s1s0
|
||
|
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.''s1s1
|
||
|
The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America,
|
||
|
Germany, and Britain, weakening all governments. It also made
|
||
|
the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever
|
||
|
was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in
|
||
|
this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the
|
||
|
installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.
|
||
|
W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and
|
||
|
rich in assets from their German and Russian business, merged
|
||
|
with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on
|
||
|
January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker &
|
||
|
Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush, and Thatcher
|
||
|
M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers
|
||
|
Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family
|
||
|
firm continued operating under its historic name--Brown,
|
||
|
Shipley.)
|
||
|
Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown
|
||
|
Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman's lawyer and railroad chief,
|
||
|
had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott's father.
|
||
|
Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the
|
||
|
junior Lovett soon replaced his father as chief exexcutive of
|
||
|
Union Pacific Railroad.
|
||
|
Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for
|
||
|
the Hitler project. American patriots had cursed its name back
|
||
|
in Civil War days. Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A.
|
||
|
and in England, had carried on their ships fully <data type="percent" unit="%">75%</data> of
|
||
|
the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill
|
||
|
owners; through their usurious credit they controlled and
|
||
|
manipulated the slave-owners.
|
||
|
Now, in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of
|
||
|
England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown
|
||
|
Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown
|
||
|
Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as
|
||
|
the most avid of Hitler's supporters within British ruling
|
||
|
circles, and Norman's intimacy with this firm was essential to
|
||
|
his management of the Hitler project.
|
||
|
In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown
|
||
|
Brothers Harriman, Prescott's partner was Montagu Norman's
|
||
|
intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of England chief always
|
||
|
stayed at the home of Prescott's partner on his hush-hush trips
|
||
|
to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm's German
|
||
|
actitivites, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old
|
||
|
England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman.s1s2
|
||
|
3. Hitler's Ladder to Power
|
||
|
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933,
|
||
|
and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive
|
||
|
and violent lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the
|
||
|
Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal
|
||
|
undertaking: Thyssen's German Steel Trust; and the
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives.s1s3
|
||
|
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
|
||
|
fuaur 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 250-300000 [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....''s1s4
|
||
|
The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans
|
||
|
to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including funds he
|
||
|
raised from others--in a period of terrible money-shortage in
|
||
|
Germany.
|
||
|
{Friedrich Flick} was the major co-owner of the German Steel
|
||
|
Trust with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's longtime collaborator and
|
||
|
sometime competitor. In preparation for the war crimes tribunal
|
||
|
at Nuremberg, the U.S. government said that Flick was ``one of
|
||
|
leading financiers and industrialists who from 1932 contributed
|
||
|
large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of `Circle of Friends' of
|
||
|
Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS.''s1s5
|
||
|
Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their
|
||
|
private armies called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and
|
||
|
Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).
|
||
|
The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by
|
||
|
Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker,
|
||
|
President Bush's grandfather.
|
||
|
The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements for the
|
||
|
German Steel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast
|
||
|
operations in Germany by no later than 1926.
|
||
|
The {Harriman Fifteen Corporation} (George Walker, president,
|
||
|
Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman, sole directors) held a
|
||
|
substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the
|
||
|
merger with Brown Brothers, January 1, 1931. This holding
|
||
|
correlated to Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the
|
||
|
{Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation,} the American group
|
||
|
owning one-third of a complex of steelmaking, coal-mining and
|
||
|
zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich
|
||
|
Flick owned two-thirds.s1s6
|
||
|
The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:
|
||
|
``Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial
|
||
|
enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating
|
||
|
plants) ... `Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer,' 1938 [title awarded to
|
||
|
prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive--`Military
|
||
|
Economy Leader']....''s1s7
|
||
|
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.s1s8 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
|
||
|
25000 men and account for <data type="percent" unit="%">45%</data> of Poland's total steel
|
||
|
output and <data type="percent" unit="%">12%</data> of her coal production. Two-thirds of the
|
||
|
company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German
|
||
|
steel industrialist, and the remainder is owned by interests in
|
||
|
the United States.''
|
||
|
In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was
|
||
|
being exported to Hitler's Germany under depression conditions,
|
||
|
the Polish government thought that Bush, Harriman, and their Nazi
|
||
|
partners should at least pay full taxes on their Polish
|
||
|
holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout.
|
||
|
The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their
|
||
|
European representative: ``Have undertaken new steps London
|
||
|
Berlin ... please establish friendly relations with Polish
|
||
|
Ambassador [in Washington].''
|
||
|
A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker
|
||
|
announced an agreement had been made ``in Berlin'' to sell an
|
||
|
8000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel.s1s9
|
||
|
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 <data type="percent" unit="%">49%</data> of the common stock and <data type="percent" unit="%">41.67%</data> 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....''s2s0
|
||
|
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.''s2s1
|
||
|
The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to
|
||
|
regain control of the European properties after the war.
|
||
|
4. Control of Nazi Commerce
|
||
|
Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take
|
||
|
control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had
|
||
|
organized the {American Ship and Commerce Corp.} as a unit of the
|
||
|
W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika's affairs.
|
||
|
As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush
|
||
|
shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the
|
||
|
Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker.s2s2
|
||
|
It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic,
|
||
|
handsome Prescott Bush. From the Brown Brothers Harriman
|
||
|
skyscraper at 59 Wall Street--where he was senior managing
|
||
|
partner, confidential investments manager and advisor to Averell
|
||
|
and his brother ``Bunny''--he walked across to the Harriman
|
||
|
Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H.
|
||
|
Walker & Co.--and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at
|
||
|
39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman & Co., and
|
||
|
still the offices for American Ship and Commerce, and of the
|
||
|
Union Banking Corporation.
|
||
|
In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for
|
||
|
the entire Hitler project.
|
||
|
Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the
|
||
|
steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War
|
||
|
I chief executive, {Wilhelm Cuno}, and with the line's bankers,
|
||
|
M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the
|
||
|
Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German
|
||
|
Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler
|
||
|
dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi
|
||
|
Party.s2s3
|
||
|
{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.s2s4
|
||
|
The {Schroeder} family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi
|
||
|
activities of Harriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their
|
||
|
lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.
|
||
|
Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive
|
||
|
Thyssen-Huette foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott
|
||
|
Bush's New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer
|
||
|
of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies,
|
||
|
to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and
|
||
|
Montagu Norman's proteaageaa Hjalmar Schacht together made the
|
||
|
final arrangments for Hitler to enter the government.s2s5
|
||
|
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.s2s6
|
||
|
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 300000 to 400000 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.}s2s7
|
||
|
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.''s2s8
|
||
|
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.s2s9
|
||
|
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.''s3s0
|
||
|
This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew,
|
||
|
was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated
|
||
|
rather serious ``alarm'' inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi
|
||
|
operations.
|
||
|
On March 29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman,
|
||
|
Max's son Erich sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg,
|
||
|
a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick
|
||
|
to ``use all your influence'' to stop all anti-Nazi activity in
|
||
|
America, including ``atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in
|
||
|
foreign press, mass meetings, etc.'' Frederick cabled back to
|
||
|
Erich: ``No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of]
|
||
|
German goods[,] merely excited individuals.'' Two days after
|
||
|
that, On March 31, 1933, the {American-Jewish Committee,}
|
||
|
controlled by the Warburgs, and the {B'nai B'rith,} heavily
|
||
|
influenced by the Sulzbergers' ({New York Times}), issued a
|
||
|
formal, official joint statement of the two organizations,
|
||
|
counselling ``that no American boycott against Germany be
|
||
|
encouraged, [and advising] ... that no further mass meetings be
|
||
|
held or similar forms of agitation be employed.''s3s1
|
||
|
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 September 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two
|
||
|
firms were merged. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce
|
||
|
Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a longtime Harriman
|
||
|
executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America
|
||
|
for the new joint Nazi shipping lines {(Hapag-Lloyd)}) on
|
||
|
November 4, 1933.
|
||
|
According to testimony of officials of the companies before
|
||
|
Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the {Nazi Labor Front} rode
|
||
|
with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New
|
||
|
York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front
|
||
|
organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to
|
||
|
individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the
|
||
|
line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done
|
||
|
in Germany against the constitutional German government.s3s2
|
||
|
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] 3509600 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.''s3s3
|
||
|
Two months before moving against Bush's Union Banking Corp.,
|
||
|
the U.S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading
|
||
|
with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure
|
||
|
report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney
|
||
|
representing the Nazi firm.s3s4
|
||
|
In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an
|
||
|
agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi
|
||
|
commerce with the U.S.A. The {Harriman International Co.,} led by
|
||
|
Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate
|
||
|
of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct {all exports from
|
||
|
Hitler's Germany to the United States}.s3s5
|
||
|
This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler's
|
||
|
economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles,
|
||
|
international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the
|
||
|
counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.
|
||
|
John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and
|
||
|
the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster's
|
||
|
friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central
|
||
|
Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the
|
||
|
Republican U.S. senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of
|
||
|
inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of
|
||
|
``covert action government,'' that both of these Dulles brothers
|
||
|
were the lawyers for the Bush family's far-flung enterprise.
|
||
|
Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt
|
||
|
restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued
|
||
|
by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between
|
||
|
the interest owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of
|
||
|
the growing Nazi warmaking apparatus for producing tanks, poison
|
||
|
gas, etc.
|
||
|
Dulles wrote to Prescott Bush in 1937 concerning one such
|
||
|
arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi
|
||
|
Germany's only telegraph channel to the United States, had made
|
||
|
debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank
|
||
|
during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements,
|
||
|
which had originally been reached with non-Nazi corporate
|
||
|
officials. Dulles asked Bush, who managed these affairs for
|
||
|
Averell Harriman, to get Averell's signature on a letter to Nazi
|
||
|
officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote:
|
||
|
``Sept. 22, 1937
|
||
|
``Mr. Prescott S. Bush
|
||
|
``59 Wall Street, New
|
||
|
York, N.Y.
|
||
|
``Dear Press,
|
||
|
``I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic]
|
||
|
Cable Company to Averell Harriman.... It would appear that the
|
||
|
only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers
|
||
|
and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the
|
||
|
bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the
|
||
|
modification of the bankers' agreement.
|
||
|
``Sincerely yours,
|
||
|
``John Foster Dulles''
|
||
|
Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman's
|
||
|
signature, and the changes went through.s3s6
|
||
|
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.s3s7
|
||
|
In this and a few other of the attempted swindles, the
|
||
|
intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi
|
||
|
financial and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic
|
||
|
climax.
|
||
|
For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid
|
||
|
a fortune.
|
||
|
This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush.
|
||
|
Notes
|
||
|
1. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 248.
|
||
|
Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed
|
||
|
October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568; Filed, November 6, 1942. 7
|
||
|
Fed. Reg. 9097 (November 7, 1942).
|
||
|
The {New York City Directory of Directors}, 1930s-40s, list
|
||
|
Prescott Bush as a director of Union Banking Corp. from 1934
|
||
|
through 1943.
|
||
|
2.
|
||
|
Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel
|
||
|
Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order Number 261: Holland-American
|
||
|
Trading Corp.
|
||
|
3. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 370:
|
||
|
Silesian-American Corp.
|
||
|
4. {New York Times,} December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page
|
||
|
25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department.
|
||
|
Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: ``The
|
||
|
Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received
|
||
|
authority to change its principal place of business to 120
|
||
|
Broadway.''
|
||
|
The {Times} omitted the fact that the Union Banking
|
||
|
Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with
|
||
|
the enemy, and the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the
|
||
|
government's Alien Property Custodian.
|
||
|
5.
|
||
|
Fritz Thyssen, {I Paid Hitler}, 1941, reprinted in (Port
|
||
|
Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says
|
||
|
his contributions began with 100000 marks given in October 1923,
|
||
|
for Hitler's attempted ``putsch'' against the constitutional
|
||
|
government.
|
||
|
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, to the
|
||
|
U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932, on microfilm in
|
||
|
{Confidential Reports of U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany,} at
|
||
|
major U.S. libraries.
|
||
|
7. October 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive Committee of the
|
||
|
Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from
|
||
|
the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief.
|
||
|
Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland,
|
||
|
Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian,
|
||
|
investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order
|
||
|
Number 248.
|
||
|
8. {Elimination of German Resources for War}: Hearings Before a
|
||
|
Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States
|
||
|
Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5, Testimony of [the United
|
||
|
States] Treasury Department, July 2, 1945. Page 507: Table of
|
||
|
Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German total
|
||
|
as of 1938; Thyssen organization including Union Banking
|
||
|
Corporation pp. 727-731.
|
||
|
9. Robert Sobel, {The Life and Times of Dillon Read} (New York:
|
||
|
Dutton-Penguin, 1991), pp. 92-111. The Dillon Read firm
|
||
|
cooperated in the development of Sobel's book.
|
||
|
10. George Walker to Averell Harriman, August 11, 1927, in W.
|
||
|
Averell Harriman papers, Library of Congress (hereafter ``WAH
|
||
|
papers'').
|
||
|
11. ``Iaccarino'' to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12, 1927.
|
||
|
12. Andrew Boyle, {Montagu Norman} (London: Cassell, 1967).
|
||
|
Sir Henry Clay, {Lord Norman} (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957),
|
||
|
pp. 18, 57, 70-71.
|
||
|
John A. Kouwenhouven, {Partners in Banking ... Brown Brothers
|
||
|
Harriman} (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969).
|
||
|
13.
|
||
|
Coordination of much of the Hitler project took place at a
|
||
|
single New York address. The Union Banking Corporation had been
|
||
|
set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management of the
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika Line, carried out through Harriman's American
|
||
|
Ship and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39
|
||
|
Broadway.
|
||
|
14. Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in
|
||
|
U.S. Control Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony
|
||
|
Sutton, {An Introduction to The Order} (Billings, Mt.: Liberty
|
||
|
House Press, 1986).
|
||
|
15. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, by the Office
|
||
|
of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis
|
||
|
Criminality, U. S. Government Printing Office, (Washington, D.C.,
|
||
|
1948), pp. 1597, 1686.
|
||
|
16. ``Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation - [minutes of the]
|
||
|
Meeting of Board of Directors,'' October 31, 1930 (WAH papers),
|
||
|
shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board.
|
||
|
Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum December 19, 1930
|
||
|
on their Harriman Fifteen Corp.
|
||
|
Annual Report of United Konigs and Laura Steel and Iron Works
|
||
|
for the year 1930 (WAH papers) lists ``Dr. Friedrich Flick ...
|
||
|
Berlin'' and ``William Averell Harriman ... New York'' on the
|
||
|
Board of Directors.
|
||
|
``Harriman Fifteen Coporation Securities Position February
|
||
|
28, 1931,'' WAH papers. This report shows Harriman Fifteen
|
||
|
Corporation holding 32576 shares in Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C.
|
||
|
worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1628800, just over half
|
||
|
the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation's total holdings.
|
||
|
The {New York City Directory of Directors} volumes for the
|
||
|
1930s (available at the Library of Congress) show Prescott
|
||
|
Sheldon Bush and W. Averell Harriman as the directors of
|
||
|
Harriman Fifteen Corp.
|
||
|
``Appointments,'' (three typed pages) marked ``Noted May 18
|
||
|
1931 W.A.H.,'' (among the papers from Prescott Bush's New York
|
||
|
Office of Brown Brothers Harriman, WAH papers), lists a meeting
|
||
|
between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00
|
||
|
P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by
|
||
|
a meeting with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika Line.
|
||
|
The ``Report To the Stockholders of the Harriman Fifteen
|
||
|
Corporation,'' October 19, 1933 (WAH papers) names G.H. Walker
|
||
|
as president of the corporation. It shows the Harriman Fifteen
|
||
|
Corp.'s address as 1 Wall Street--the location of G.H. Walker and
|
||
|
Co.
|
||
|
17. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, {op. cit.,}
|
||
|
p. 1686.
|
||
|
18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush's employee), March
|
||
|
19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman.
|
||
|
``Dear Averell:
|
||
|
``In Roland's absence Pres[cott] thought it adviseable for me
|
||
|
to let you know that we received the following cable from [our
|
||
|
European representative] Rossi dated March 17th [relating to
|
||
|
conflict with the Polish government]....''
|
||
|
19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation notice to stockholders January
|
||
|
7, 1935, under the name of George Walker, President.
|
||
|
20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed November 17,
|
||
|
1942. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Prop. Custodian. F.R. Doc.
|
||
|
42-14183; Filed, December 31, 1942; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1,
|
||
|
1943).
|
||
|
The order confiscated the Nazis' holdings of 98000 shares of
|
||
|
common and 50000 shares of preferred stock in Silesian-American.
|
||
|
The Nazi parent company in Breslau, Germany wrote to Averell
|
||
|
Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with ``an invitation to
|
||
|
take part in the regular meeting of the members of the
|
||
|
Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft Georg von Giesche's Erben....'' WAH
|
||
|
papers.
|
||
|
21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the
|
||
|
Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from
|
||
|
the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief.
|
||
|
Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland,
|
||
|
Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian,
|
||
|
investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order
|
||
|
Number 370.
|
||
|
22. George Walker was a director of American Ship and Commerce
|
||
|
from its organization through 1928. Consult {New York City
|
||
|
Directory of Directors}.
|
||
|
``Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February
|
||
|
28, 1931,'' {op. cit.} The report lists 46861 shares in the
|
||
|
American Ship & Commerce Corp.
|
||
|
See ``Message from Mr. Bullfin,'' August 30, 1934 (Harriman
|
||
|
Fifteen section, WAH papers) for the joint supervision of Bush
|
||
|
and Walker, respectively director and president of the
|
||
|
corporation.
|
||
|
23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk, Third Reich Press
|
||
|
Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk's postwar jail
|
||
|
cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking
|
||
|
power. William L. Shirer, L., {The Rise and Fall of the Third
|
||
|
Reich} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. {Nazi
|
||
|
Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B}, {op. cit.,} p. 1688.
|
||
|
24. See ``Elimination of German Resources for War,'' {op. cit.,}
|
||
|
pages 881-882 on Voegler.
|
||
|
See Annual Report of the
|
||
|
(Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesel schaft (Hapag or
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors. A
|
||
|
copy is in the New York Public Library Annex at 11th Avenue,
|
||
|
Manhattan.
|
||
|
25. {Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression--Supplement B,} {op. cit.,}
|
||
|
pp. 1178, 1453-1454, 1597, 1599.
|
||
|
See ``Elimination of German Resources for War,'' {op. cit.,}
|
||
|
pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger.
|
||
|
26. Annual Report of Hamburg-Amerika, {op. cit.}
|
||
|
Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell Harriman, November 14,
|
||
|
1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft reply letter,
|
||
|
December 9, 1932.
|
||
|
In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to the family's American
|
||
|
affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of which Allen
|
||
|
Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was the
|
||
|
principal attorney.
|
||
|
Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was adviser to Bank
|
||
|
of England Governor Montagu Norman, and Baron Bruno's partner
|
||
|
Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman's co-director of the Bank of
|
||
|
England throughout Norman's career. Kurt von Schroeder was
|
||
|
Hjalmar Schacht's delegate to the Bank for International
|
||
|
Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial arrangements
|
||
|
for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and the
|
||
|
Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the
|
||
|
outbreak of World War II.
|
||
|
27.
|
||
|
Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, {op. cit.}
|
||
|
28. U.S. Senate ``Nye Committee'' hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp.
|
||
|
1197-1198, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated
|
||
|
June 27, 1932 and January 9, 1933.
|
||
|
29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation to Dr. Max Warburg,
|
||
|
March 7, 1933.
|
||
|
Max Warburg had brokered the sale of Hamburg-Amerika to
|
||
|
Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max's brothers controlled the Kuhn
|
||
|
Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had
|
||
|
staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union
|
||
|
Pacific Railroad.
|
||
|
Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the
|
||
|
racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa
|
||
|
and Eastern Europe. He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for
|
||
|
several decades and was a top executive of Hitler's Reichsbank.
|
||
|
The reader may consult David Farrer, {The Warburgs: The Story of
|
||
|
A Family} (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).
|
||
|
30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill
|
||
|
[sic] Harriman, c/o Messrs. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59
|
||
|
Wall Street, New York, N.Y., March 27, 1933.
|
||
|
31. This correspondence, and the joint statement of the Jewish
|
||
|
organizations, are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, {American
|
||
|
Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis} (New York:
|
||
|
Ktav Publishing House, 1982).
|
||
|
32. {Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and
|
||
|
Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities}: Public
|
||
|
Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on
|
||
|
Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives,
|
||
|
Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934--Hearings
|
||
|
No. 73-NY-7 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1934).
|
||
|
See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John Schroeder, Paul
|
||
|
von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members.
|
||
|
See {New York Times,} July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of
|
||
|
Nazi Labor Front at North German Lloyd, leading to
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika after merger.
|
||
|
33. American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph
|
||
|
Brinckmann at M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936.
|
||
|
Rudolph Brinckmann to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St., June
|
||
|
20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helferrich's letter.
|
||
|
Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinkmann c/o M.M. Warburg and Co, July
|
||
|
6, 1936, WAH papers. The file copy of this letter carries no
|
||
|
signature, but is presumably from Averell Harriman.
|
||
|
34. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order Number 126.
|
||
|
Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed
|
||
|
August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc. 42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942,
|
||
|
10:55 A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (Number 176, Sept. 5, 1942.)
|
||
|
July 18, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the
|
||
|
Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from
|
||
|
the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief.
|
||
|
Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland,
|
||
|
Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian,
|
||
|
investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order
|
||
|
Number 126.
|
||
|
35. {New York Times,} May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement
|
||
|
is a telegram which somehow escaped the shredder. It is
|
||
|
addressed to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower
|
||
|
Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: ``Much disappointed to
|
||
|
have missed seeing you Tueday afternoon.... I hope to see you
|
||
|
either in Washington or New York before you sail.
|
||
|
with my regards W.A. Harriman'' (WAH papers).
|
||
|
36. Dulles to Bush, letter and draft reply in WAH papers.
|
||
|
37. {New York Times,} Jan. 19, 1938.
|
||
|
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on
|
||
|
this group.
|
||
|
Thanks.
|
||
|
John Covici
|
||
|
coviciccs.covici.com
|
||
|
Article 15394 of alt.activism:
|
||
|
From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
|
||
|
Newsgroups: alt.activism
|
||
|
Subject: Part 3: George bush Unauthorized Biography
|
||
|
Message-ID: <1VVReB1w164w@ccs.covici.com>
|
||
|
Date: 19 Jan 92 <data type="time" timezone="GMT">01:12:47</data>
|
||
|
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
|
||
|
Lines: 1544
|
||
|
The following is part 3 of an unauthorized biography of George Bush
|
||
|
-- a forthcoming book serialized in New Federalist. This article is
|
||
|
from Issue 1 V6.
|
||
|
For further information, or to subscribe, please contact me by
|
||
|
e-mail.
|
||
|
Chapter 3 RACE HYGIENE: Three Bush Family Alliances ``The
|
||
|
[government] must put the most modern medical means in the
|
||
|
service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and
|
||
|
mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their
|
||
|
suffering in the body of their children.... The prevention of
|
||
|
the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the
|
||
|
physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only
|
||
|
600 years, would ... free humanity from an immeasurable
|
||
|
misfortune.''s1
|
||
|
``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}s1 came to share the outlook of the first, {Adolf
|
||
|
Hitler}.s2
|
||
|
We shall examine here the alliance of the Bush family with
|
||
|
three other families: {Farish, Draper} and {Gray.}
|
||
|
The private associations among these families have led to the
|
||
|
President's relationship to his closest, most confidential
|
||
|
advisers. These alliances were forged in the earlier Hitler
|
||
|
project and its immediate aftermath. Understanding them will
|
||
|
help us to explain George Bush's obsession with the supposed
|
||
|
overpopulation of the world's non-Anglo-Saxons, and the dangerous
|
||
|
means he has adopted to deal with this ``problem.''
|
||
|
Bush and Farish
|
||
|
When George Bush was elected vice president in 1980, Texas
|
||
|
mystery man William Stamps Farish III took over management of all
|
||
|
of George Bush's personal wealth in a ``blind trust.'' Known as
|
||
|
one of the richest men in Texas, Will Farish keeps his business
|
||
|
affairs under the most intense secrecy. Only the source of his
|
||
|
immense wealth is known, not its employment.s3
|
||
|
Will Farish has long been Bush's closest friend and
|
||
|
confidante. He is also the unique private host to Britain's
|
||
|
Queen Elizabeth: Farish owns and boards the studs which mate with
|
||
|
the Queen's mares. That is her public rationale when she comes
|
||
|
to America and stays in Farish's house. It is a vital link in
|
||
|
the mind of our Anglophile President.
|
||
|
President Bush can count on Farish not to betray the violent
|
||
|
secrets surrounding the Bush family money. For Farish's own
|
||
|
family fortune was made in the same Hitler project, in a
|
||
|
nightmarish partnership with George Bush's father.
|
||
|
On March 25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman
|
||
|
Arnold announced that William Stamps Farish (grandfather of the
|
||
|
President's money manager) had pleaded ``no contest'' to charges
|
||
|
of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Farish was the principal
|
||
|
manager of a worldwide cartel between Standard Oil Co. of New
|
||
|
Jersey and the I.G. Farben concern. The merged enterprise had
|
||
|
opened the Auschwitz slave labor camp on June 14, 1940, to
|
||
|
produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler
|
||
|
government supplied political opponents and Jews as the slaves,
|
||
|
who were worked to near death and then murdered.
|
||
|
Arnold disclosed that Standard Oil of New Jersey (later known
|
||
|
as Exxon), of which Farish was president and chief executive, had
|
||
|
agreed to stop hiding from the United States patents for
|
||
|
artificial rubber which the company had provided to the Nazis.s4
|
||
|
A Senate investigating committee under Senator (later U.S.
|
||
|
President) Harry Truman of Missouri had called Arnold to testify
|
||
|
at hearings on corporations' collaboration with the Nazis. The
|
||
|
Senators expressed outrage at the cynical way Farish was
|
||
|
continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that had begun back
|
||
|
in 1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn't he
|
||
|
know there was a war on?
|
||
|
The Justice Department laid before the committee a letter,
|
||
|
written to Standard president Farish by his vice president,
|
||
|
shortly after the beginning of World War II (September 1, 1939)
|
||
|
in Europe. The letter concerned a renewal of their earlier
|
||
|
agreements with the Nazis:
|
||
|
Report on European Trip Oct. 12, 1939 Mr. W.S. Farish 30
|
||
|
Rockefeller Plaza
|
||
|
Dear Mr. Farish:
|
||
|
... I stayed in France until Sept. 17th.... In England I met
|
||
|
by appointment the Royal Dutch [Shell Oil Co.] gentlemen from
|
||
|
Holland, and ... a general agreement was reached on the necessary
|
||
|
changes in our relations with the I.G. [Farben], in view of the
|
||
|
state of war.... [T]he Royal Dutch Shell group is essentially
|
||
|
British.... I also had several meetings with ... the [British]
|
||
|
Air Ministry....
|
||
|
I required help to obtain the necessary permission to go to
|
||
|
Holland.... After discussions with the [American] Ambassador
|
||
|
[Joseph Kennedy] the situation was cleared completely.... The
|
||
|
gentlemen in the Air Ministry ... very kindly offered to assist
|
||
|
me [later] in reentering England....
|
||
|
Pursuant to these arrangements, I was able to keep my
|
||
|
appointments in Holland [having flown there on a British Royal
|
||
|
Air Force bomber], where I had three days of discussion with the
|
||
|
representatives of I.G. They delivered to me assignments of some
|
||
|
2000 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. Howards5
|
||
|
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:
|
||
|
sbShell Oil is principally owned by the British Royal
|
||
|
family. Shell's chairman, Sir Henri Deterding, helped sponsor
|
||
|
Hitler's rise to power,s6 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.
|
||
|
sbWhen grandfather Farish signed the Justice Department's
|
||
|
consent decree in March 1942, the government had already started
|
||
|
picking its way through the tangled web of world-monopoly oil and
|
||
|
chemical agreements between Standard Oil and the Nazis. Many
|
||
|
patents and other Nazi-owned aspects of the partnership had been
|
||
|
seized by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian.
|
||
|
Uncle Sam would not seize Prescott Bush's Union Banking
|
||
|
Corporation for another seven months.
|
||
|
The Bush-Farish axis had begun back in 1929. In that year, the
|
||
|
Harriman bank bought Dresser Industries, supplier of oil-pipeline
|
||
|
couplers to Standard and other companies. Prescott Bush became a
|
||
|
director and financial czar of Dresser, installing his Yale
|
||
|
classmate Neil Mallon as chairman.s7 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.s8
|
||
|
The stock market crashed just after the Bush family got into
|
||
|
the oil business. The world financial crisis led to the merger
|
||
|
of the Walker-Harriman bank with Brown Brothers in 1931. Former
|
||
|
Brown partner Montagu Norman and his protege Hjalmar Schacht, who
|
||
|
was to become Hitler's economics minister, paid frantic visits to
|
||
|
New York that year and the next, preparing the new Hitler regime
|
||
|
for Germany.
|
||
|
The Congress on Eugenics
|
||
|
The most important American political event in those
|
||
|
preparations for Hitler was the infamous Third International
|
||
|
Congress on Eugenics, held at New York's American Museum of
|
||
|
Natural History August 21-23, 1932, supervised by the
|
||
|
International Federation of Eugenics Societies.s9 This meeting
|
||
|
took up the stubborn persistence of African-Americans and other
|
||
|
allegedly ``inferior'' and ``socially inadequate'' groups in
|
||
|
reproducing, expanding their numbers, and ``amalgamating'' with
|
||
|
others. It was recommended that these ``dangers'' to the
|
||
|
``better'' ethnic groups and to the ``well-born,'' could be dealt
|
||
|
with by sterilization or ``cutting off the bad stock'' of the
|
||
|
``unfit.''
|
||
|
Italy's fascist government sent an official representative.
|
||
|
Averell Harriman's sister Mary, director of ``entertainment'' for
|
||
|
the Congress, lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her
|
||
|
state supplied the speaker on ``racial purity,'' W.A. Plecker,
|
||
|
Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker reportedly
|
||
|
held the delegates spellbound with his account of the struggle to
|
||
|
stop race-mixing and interracial sex in Virginia.
|
||
|
The Congress proceedings were dedicated to Averell Harriman's
|
||
|
mother; she had paid for the founding of the race-science
|
||
|
movement in America back in 1910, building the Eugenics Record
|
||
|
Office as a branch of the Galton National Laboratory in London.
|
||
|
She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races
|
||
|
by old George Herbert Walker--they shared with the Bushes and the
|
||
|
Farishes a fascination with ``breeding thoroughbreds'' among
|
||
|
horses and humans.s1s0
|
||
|
Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika Line to transport Nazi ideologues from Germany to
|
||
|
New York for this meeting.s1s1 The most famous among those
|
||
|
transported was Dr. Ernst Rudin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser
|
||
|
Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin, where
|
||
|
the Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Rudin to occupy an entire
|
||
|
floor with his eugenics ``research.'' Dr. Rudin had addressed the
|
||
|
International Federation's 1928 Munich meeting, speaking on
|
||
|
``Mental Aberration and Race Hygiene,'' while others (Germans and
|
||
|
Americans) spoke on race-mixing and sterilization of the unfit.
|
||
|
Rudin had led the German delegation to the 1930 Mental Hygiene
|
||
|
Congress in Washington, D.C.
|
||
|
At the Harrimans' 1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Rudin
|
||
|
was unanimously elected President of the International Federation
|
||
|
of Eugenics Societies. This was recognition of Rudin as founder
|
||
|
of the German Society for Race Hygiene, with his co-founder,
|
||
|
Eugenics Federation vice president Alfred Ploetz.
|
||
|
As depression-maddened financiers schemed in Berlin and New
|
||
|
York, Rudin was now official leader of the world eugenics
|
||
|
movement. Components of his movement included groups with
|
||
|
overlapping leadership, dedicated to:
|
||
|
sbsterilization of mental patients (``mental hygiene
|
||
|
societies'');
|
||
|
sbexecution of the insane, criminals and the terminally ill
|
||
|
(``euthanasia societies''); and
|
||
|
sbeugenical 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.s1s2
|
||
|
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.s1s3
|
||
|
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.s1s4
|
||
|
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.s1s5
|
||
|
Both Emil Helfferich and Karl Lindemann were authorized to
|
||
|
write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi SS, on a
|
||
|
special Standard Oil account. This account was managed by the
|
||
|
German-British-American banker, Kurt von Schroeder. According to
|
||
|
U.S. intelligence documents reviewed by author Anthony Sutton,
|
||
|
Helfferich continued his payments to the SS into 1944, when the
|
||
|
SS was supervising the mass murder at the Standard-I.G. Farben
|
||
|
Auschwitz and other death camps. Helfferich told Allied
|
||
|
interrogators after the war that these were not his personal
|
||
|
contributions--they were corporate Standard Oil funds.s1s6
|
||
|
After pleading ``no contest'' to charges of criminal
|
||
|
conspiracy with the Nazis, William Stamps Farish was fined
|
||
|
$5000. (Similar fines were levied against Standard Oil--$5000
|
||
|
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.''s1s7
|
||
|
Farish began breaking apart at these hearings. He shouted his
|
||
|
``indignation'' at the senators, and claimed he was not
|
||
|
``disloyal.''
|
||
|
After the March-April hearings ended, more dirt came gushing
|
||
|
out of the Justice Department and the Congress on Farish and
|
||
|
Standard Oil. Farish had deceived the U.S. Navy to prevent the
|
||
|
Navy from acquiring certain patents, while supplying them to the
|
||
|
Nazi war machine; meanwhile, he was supplying gasoline and
|
||
|
tetraethyl lead to Germany's submarines and air force.
|
||
|
Communications between Standard and I.G. Farben from the outbreak
|
||
|
of World War II were released to the Senate, showing that
|
||
|
Farish's organization had arranged to deceive the U.S. government
|
||
|
into passing over Nazi-owned assets: They would nominally buy
|
||
|
I.G.'s share in certain patents because ``in the event of war
|
||
|
between ourselves and Germany ... it would certainly be very
|
||
|
undesireable to have this <data type="percent" unit="%">20%</data> Standard-I.G. pass to an
|
||
|
alien property custodian of the U.S. who might sell it to an
|
||
|
unfriendly interest.''s1s8
|
||
|
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (father of David, Nelson, and John
|
||
|
D. Rockefeller III), the controlling owner of Standard Oil, told
|
||
|
the Roosevelt administration that he knew nothing of the
|
||
|
day-to-day affairs of his company, that all these matters were
|
||
|
handled by Farish and other executives.s1s9
|
||
|
In August, Farish was brought back for more testimony. He was
|
||
|
now frequently accused of lying. Farish was crushed under the
|
||
|
intense, public grilling; he became morose, ashen. While
|
||
|
Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the government seized his
|
||
|
Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had been nailed. He
|
||
|
collapsed and died of a heart attack on November 29, 1942.
|
||
|
The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William
|
||
|
Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was
|
||
|
humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling
|
||
|
the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six
|
||
|
months later.s2s0
|
||
|
With this double death, the fortune comprising much of
|
||
|
Standard Oil's profits from Texas and Nazi Germany was now to be
|
||
|
settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William
|
||
|
(``Will'') Stamps Farish III. Will Farish grew up a recluse, the
|
||
|
most secretive multimillionaire in Texas, with investments of
|
||
|
``that money'' in a multitude of foreign countries, and a host of
|
||
|
exotic contacts overlapping the intelligence and financial
|
||
|
worlds--particularly in Britain.
|
||
|
The Bush-Farish axis started George Bush's career. After his
|
||
|
1948 graduation from Yale (and the Skull and Bones secret
|
||
|
society), George Bush flew down to Texas on a corporate jet and
|
||
|
was employed by his father's Dresser Industries. In a couple of
|
||
|
years he got help from his uncle, George Walker, Jr., and
|
||
|
Farish's British banker friends, to set him up in the oil
|
||
|
property speculation business. Soon thereafter, George Bush
|
||
|
founded the Zapata Oil Company, which put oil drilling rigs into
|
||
|
certain locations of great strategic interest to the
|
||
|
Anglo-American intelligence community.
|
||
|
Twenty-five-year-old Will Farish was personal aide to Zapata
|
||
|
chairman George Bush in Bush's unsuccessful 1964 campaign for
|
||
|
Senate. Farish used ``that Auschwitz money'' to back George Bush
|
||
|
financially, investing in Zapata. When Bush was elected to
|
||
|
Congress in 1966, Farish joined the Zapata board.s2s1
|
||
|
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.s2s2 George Bush held his hearings on the threat posed by
|
||
|
black babies on August 5, 1969, while much of the world was in a
|
||
|
better frame of mind--celebrating mankind's progress from the
|
||
|
first moon landing 16 days earlier. Bush's obsessive thinking on
|
||
|
this subject was guided by his family's friend, Gen. William H.
|
||
|
Draper, Jr., the founder and chairman of the Population Crisis
|
||
|
Committee, and vice chairman of the Planned Parenthood
|
||
|
Federation. Draper had long been steering U.S. public discussion
|
||
|
about the so-called ``population bomb'' in the non-white areas of
|
||
|
the world.
|
||
|
If Congressman Bush had explained to his colleagues {how his
|
||
|
family had come to know General Draper,} they would perhaps have
|
||
|
felt some alarm, or even panic, and paid more healthy attention
|
||
|
to Bush's presentation. Unfortunately, the Draper-Bush
|
||
|
population doctrine is now official U.S. foreign policy.
|
||
|
William H. Draper, Jr. had joined the Bush team in 1927, when
|
||
|
he was hired by Dillon Read & Co., New York investment bankers.
|
||
|
Draper was put into a new job slot at the firm: handling the
|
||
|
Thyssen account.
|
||
|
We recall that in 1924, Fritz Thyssen set up his Union Banking
|
||
|
Corporation in George Herbert Walker's bank at 39 Broadway,
|
||
|
Manhattan. Dillon Read & Co.'s boss, Clarence Dillon, had begun
|
||
|
working with Fritz Thyssen some time after Averell Harriman first
|
||
|
met with Thyssen--at about the time Thyssen began financing Adolf
|
||
|
Hitler's political career.
|
||
|
In January 1926, Dillon Read created the {German Credit and
|
||
|
Investment Corporation} in Newark, New Jersey and Berlin,
|
||
|
Germany, as Thyssen's short-term banker. That same year, Dillon
|
||
|
Read created the {Vereinigte Stahlwerke} (German Steel Trust),
|
||
|
incorporating the Thyssen family interests under the direction of
|
||
|
New York and London finance.s2s3
|
||
|
William H. Draper, Jr. was made director, vice president, and
|
||
|
assistant treasurer of the German Credit and Investment Corp. His
|
||
|
business was short-term loans and financial management tricks for
|
||
|
Thyssen and the German Steel Trust. Draper's clients sponsored
|
||
|
Hitler's terroristic takeover; his clients led the buildup of the
|
||
|
Nazi war industry; his clients made war against the United
|
||
|
States. The Nazis were Draper's direct partners in Berlin and New
|
||
|
Jersey: Alexander Kreuter, residing in Berlin, was president;
|
||
|
Frederic Brandi, whose father was a top coal executive in the
|
||
|
German Steel Trust, moved to the United States in 1926 and served
|
||
|
as Draper's co-director in Newark.
|
||
|
Draper's role was crucial for Dillon Read & Co., for whom
|
||
|
Draper was a partner and eventually vice president. The German
|
||
|
Credit and Investment Corp. (GCI) was a ``front'' for Dillon
|
||
|
Read: It had the same New Jersey address as U.S. & International
|
||
|
Securities Corp. (USIS), and the same man served as treasurer of
|
||
|
both firms.s2s4
|
||
|
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 50000000
|
||
|
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.s2s5 Lee apparently took enough time out
|
||
|
from his duties as image-maker for William S. Farish and the Nazi
|
||
|
I.G. Farben Co.; he managed the congressional thinking so that
|
||
|
the congressmen did not disturb the Draper operation in
|
||
|
Germany--and did not meddle with Thyssen, or interfere with
|
||
|
Hitler's U.S. moneymen.
|
||
|
Thus, in 1932, Willam H. Draper, Jr. was free to finance the
|
||
|
International Eugenics Congress as a ``Supporting Member.''s2s6
|
||
|
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.''s2s7
|
||
|
W.S. Farish was publicly exposed in 1942, humiliated and
|
||
|
destroyed. Just before Farish died, Prescott Bush's Nazi banking
|
||
|
office was quietly seized and shut down. But Prescott's close
|
||
|
friend and partner in the Thyssen-Hitler business, William H.
|
||
|
Draper, Jr., {neither died nor moved out of German affairs.}
|
||
|
Draper listed himself as a director of the German Credit and
|
||
|
Investment Corp. through 1942, and the firm was not liquidated
|
||
|
until November 1943.s2s8 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.}s2s9
|
||
|
(Draper was not unique within the postwar occupation
|
||
|
government. Consider the case of John J. McCloy, U.S. Military
|
||
|
Governor and High Commissioner of Germany, 1949-1952. Under
|
||
|
instructions from his Wall Street law firm, McCloy had lived for
|
||
|
a year in Italy, serving as an adviser to the fascist government
|
||
|
of Benito Mussolini. An intimate collaborator of the
|
||
|
Harriman/Bush bank, McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the
|
||
|
1936 Olympic games in Berlin, at the invitation of Nazi
|
||
|
chieftains Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering.)s3s0
|
||
|
William H. Draper, Jr., as a ``conservative,'' was paired with
|
||
|
the ``liberal'' U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in a
|
||
|
vicious game. Morgenthau demanded that Germany be utterly
|
||
|
destroyed as a nation, that its industry be dismantled and it be
|
||
|
reduced to a purely rural country. As the economic boss in 1945
|
||
|
and 1946, Draper ``protected'' Germany from the Morgenthau Plan
|
||
|
... but at a price.
|
||
|
Draper and his colleagues demanded that Germany and the world
|
||
|
accept the {collective guilt of the German people} as {the
|
||
|
}explanation for the rise of Hitler's New Order, and the Nazi war
|
||
|
crimes. This, of course, was rather convenient for General
|
||
|
Draper himself, as it was for the Bush family. It is still
|
||
|
convenient decades later, allowing Prescott's son, President
|
||
|
Bush, to lecture Germany on the danger of Hitlerism. Germans are
|
||
|
too slow, it seems, to accept his New World Order.
|
||
|
After several years of government service (often working
|
||
|
directly for Averell Harriman in the North Atlantic Alliance),
|
||
|
Draper was appointed in 1958 chairman of a committee which was to
|
||
|
advise President Dwight Eisenhower on the proper course for U.S.
|
||
|
military aid to other countries. At that time, Prescott Bush was
|
||
|
a U.S. senator from Connecticut, a confidential friend and golf
|
||
|
partner with National Security Director Gordon Gray, and an
|
||
|
important golf partner with Dwight Eisenhower as well.
|
||
|
Prescott's old lawyer from the Nazi days, John Foster Dulles, was
|
||
|
Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles, formerly of the
|
||
|
Schroder bank, was head of the CIA.
|
||
|
This friendly environment emboldened our General Draper to
|
||
|
pull off a stunt with his military aid advisery committee. He
|
||
|
changed the subject under study. The following year, the Draper
|
||
|
committee recommended that the U.S. government react to the
|
||
|
supposed threat of the ``population explosion'' by formulating
|
||
|
plans to depopulate the poorer countries. The growth of the
|
||
|
world's non-white population, he proposed, should be regarded as
|
||
|
dangerous to the national security of the United States!s3s1
|
||
|
President Eisenhower rejected the recommendation. But in the
|
||
|
next decade, General Draper founded the ``Population Crisis
|
||
|
Committee'' and the ``Draper Fund,'' joining with the Rockefeller
|
||
|
and DuPont families to promote eugenics as ``population
|
||
|
control.'' The administration of President Lyndon Johnson,
|
||
|
advised by Draper on the subject, began financing birth control
|
||
|
in the tropical countries through the Agency for International
|
||
|
Development.
|
||
|
General William Draper was George Bush's guru on the
|
||
|
population question.s3s2 But there was also Draper's money--from
|
||
|
that uniquely horrible source--and Draper's connections on Wall
|
||
|
Street and abroad. Draper's son and heir, William H. Draper III,
|
||
|
was co-chairman for finance (chief of fundraising) of the
|
||
|
Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980. With
|
||
|
George Bush in the White House, the younger Draper heads up the
|
||
|
depopulation activities of the United Nations throughout the
|
||
|
world.
|
||
|
Draper was vice president of Dillon Read until 1953. During
|
||
|
the 1950s and 1960s, the chief executive there was Frederic
|
||
|
Brandi, the German who was Draper's co-director for the Nazi
|
||
|
investments and his personal contact man with the Nazi Steel
|
||
|
Trust. Nicholas Brady was Brandi's partner from 1954, and
|
||
|
replaced him as the firm's chief executive in 1971. Nicholas
|
||
|
Brady, who knows where all the bodies are buried, was chairman of
|
||
|
his friend George Bush's 1980 election campaign in New Jersey,
|
||
|
and has been United States Treasury Secretary throughout Bush's
|
||
|
presidency.s3s3
|
||
|
Bush and Grey
|
||
|
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) says
|
||
|
that surgical sterilization is the Bush administration's ``first
|
||
|
choice'' method of population reduction in the Third World.s3s4
|
||
|
The United Nations Population Fund claims that <data type="percent" unit="%">37%</data> of
|
||
|
contraception users in Ibero-America and the Caribbean have
|
||
|
already been surgically sterilized. In a 1991 report, William H.
|
||
|
Draper III's U.N. agency asserts that 254000000 couples will be
|
||
|
surgically sterilized over the course of the 1990s; and that if
|
||
|
present trends continue, <data type="percent" unit="%">80%</data> of the women in Puerto Rico
|
||
|
and Panama will be surgically sterilized.s3s5
|
||
|
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 $300000000, a <data type="percent" unit="%">20%</data> 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.s3s6
|
||
|
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.s3s7 Through British imperial contacts,
|
||
|
Boyden Gray's grandfather Bowman Gray had become principal owner
|
||
|
of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Boyden's father, Gordon Gray,
|
||
|
had recently founded the Bowman Gray (memorial) Medical School in
|
||
|
Winston-Salem, using his inherited cigarette stock shares. The
|
||
|
medical school was already a eugenics center.
|
||
|
As the experiment began, Gordon Gray's great aunt, Alice
|
||
|
Shelton Gray, who had raised him from childhood, was living in
|
||
|
his household. Aunt Alice had founded the ``Human Betterment
|
||
|
League,'' the North Carolina branch of the national eugenical
|
||
|
sterilization movement.
|
||
|
Aunt Alice was the official supervisor of the 1946-47
|
||
|
experiment. Working under Miss Gray was Dr. Claude Nash Herndon,
|
||
|
whom Gordon Gray had made assistant professor of ``medical
|
||
|
genetics'' at Bowman Gray medical school.
|
||
|
Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble soap
|
||
|
fortune, was the sterilizers' national field operations chief.
|
||
|
The experiment worked as follows. {All children enrolled in
|
||
|
the school district of Winston-Salem, N.C., were given a special
|
||
|
``intelligence test.'' Those children who scored below a certain
|
||
|
arbitrary low mark were then cut open and surgically sterilized.}
|
||
|
We quote now from the official story of the project: ``In
|
||
|
Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County, North Carolina, the
|
||
|
[Sterilization League's] field committee had participated in
|
||
|
testing projects to identify school age children who should be
|
||
|
considered for sterilization. The project in Orange County was
|
||
|
conducted by the University of North Carolina and 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:s3s8
|
||
|
``Alice Gray was the general supervisor of the project. She
|
||
|
and Hanes sent out letters promoting the program to the
|
||
|
commissioners of all 100 counties in North Carolina.... What did
|
||
|
I do? Nothing besides riding herd on the whole thing! The
|
||
|
social workers operated out of my office. I was at the time also
|
||
|
director of outpatient services at North Carolina Baptist
|
||
|
Hospital. We would see the [targeted] parents and children
|
||
|
there.... I.Q. tests were run on all the children in the
|
||
|
Winston-Salem public school system. Only the ones who scored
|
||
|
really low [were targeted for sterilization], the real bottom of
|
||
|
the barrel, like below 70.
|
||
|
``Did we do sterilizations on young children? Yes. This was a
|
||
|
relatively minor operation.... It was usually not until the
|
||
|
child was eight or ten years old. For the boys, you just make an
|
||
|
incision and tie the tube.... We more often performed the
|
||
|
operation on girls than with boys. Of course, you have to cut
|
||
|
open the abdomen, but again, it is relatively minor.''
|
||
|
Dr. Herndon remarked coolly that ``we had a very good
|
||
|
relationship with the press'' for the project. This is not
|
||
|
surprising, since Gordon Gray owned the {Winston-Salem Journal,}
|
||
|
the {Twin City Sentinel,} and radio station WSJS.
|
||
|
In 1950 and 1951, John Foster Dulles, then chairman of the
|
||
|
Rockefeller Foundation, led John D. Rockefeller III on a series
|
||
|
of world tours, focusing on the need to stop the expansion of the
|
||
|
non-white populations. In November 1952, Dulles and Rockefeller
|
||
|
set up the Population Council, with tens of millions of dollars
|
||
|
from the Rockefeller family.
|
||
|
At that point, the American Eugenics Society, still cautious
|
||
|
from the recent bad publicity vis-a-vis Hitler, left its old
|
||
|
headquarters at Yale University. The Society moved its
|
||
|
headquarters into the office of the Population Council, and the
|
||
|
two groups melded together. The long-time secretary of the
|
||
|
Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborne, became the first president
|
||
|
of the Population Council. The Gray family's child-sterilizer,
|
||
|
Dr. C. Nash Herndon, became president of the American Eugenics
|
||
|
Society in 1953, as its work expanded under Rockefeller
|
||
|
patronage.
|
||
|
Meanwhile, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was
|
||
|
founded in London, in the offices of the British Eugenics
|
||
|
Society.
|
||
|
The undead enemy from World War II, renamed ``Population
|
||
|
Control,'' had now been revived.
|
||
|
George Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972,
|
||
|
when with prodding from Bush and his friends, the United States
|
||
|
Agency for International Development first made an official
|
||
|
contract with the old Sterilization League of America. The league
|
||
|
had changed its name twice again, and was now called the
|
||
|
``Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception.'' The U.S.
|
||
|
government began paying the old fascist group to 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 Sterilization''), committing the
|
||
|
U.S. government to spend $80000000 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 2000000
|
||
|
people, with <data type="percent" unit="%">87%</data> of the bill paid by U.S.
|
||
|
taxpayers.
|
||
|
Meanwhile, Dr. Clarence Gamble, Boyden Gray's favorite soap
|
||
|
manufacturer, formed his own ``Pathfinder Fund'' as a split-off
|
||
|
from the Sterlization League. Gamble's Pathfinder Fund, with
|
||
|
additional millions from USAID, concentrates on penetration of
|
||
|
local social groups in the non-white countries, to break down
|
||
|
psychological resistance to the surgical sterilization teams.
|
||
|
Notes
|
||
|
1. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, {World Population Crisis: The United
|
||
|
States Response} (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973),
|
||
|
``Forward'' by George H.W. Bush, pp. vii-viii.
|
||
|
2.
|
||
|
Adolf Hitler, {Mein Kampf} (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company,
|
||
|
1971), p. 404.
|
||
|
3. ``The Ten Richest People in Houston,'' in {Houston Post
|
||
|
Magazine,} March 11, 1984. ``$150 milion to $250000000 from ...
|
||
|
inheritance, plus subsequent investments ... chief heir to a
|
||
|
family fortune in oil stock.... As to his financial interests,
|
||
|
he is ... coy. He once described one of his businesses as a
|
||
|
company that `invests in and oversees a lot of smaller companies
|
||
|
... in a lot of foreign countries.'''
|
||
|
4. The announcements were made in testimony before a Special
|
||
|
Committee of the U.S. Senate Investigating the National Defense
|
||
|
Program. The hearings on Standard Oil were held March 5, 24, 26,
|
||
|
27, 31, and April 1, 2, 3 and 7, 1942. Available on microfiche,
|
||
|
law section, Library of Congress. See also {New York Times,}
|
||
|
March 26 and March 27, 1942, and {Washington Evening Star,} March
|
||
|
26 and March 27, 1942.
|
||
|
5. {Ibid.,} Exhibit No. 368, printed on pp. 4584-87 of the
|
||
|
hearing record. See also Charles Higham, {Trading With The
|
||
|
Enemy} (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), p. 36.
|
||
|
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. Embassy, Berlin, {op.
|
||
|
cit.,} chapter 2. Sir Henri Deterding was among the most
|
||
|
notorious pro-Nazis of the early war period.
|
||
|
7. See sections on Prescott Bush in Darwin Payne, {Initiative in
|
||
|
Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc.} (New York: Distributed by Simon
|
||
|
and Schuster, 1979) (published by the Dresser Company).
|
||
|
8. William Stamps Farish obituary, {New York Times,} Nov. 30,
|
||
|
1942.
|
||
|
9. {A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the
|
||
|
Third International Congress of Eugenics held at American Museum
|
||
|
of Natural History New York, August 21-23, 1932.} (Baltimore:
|
||
|
Williams & Wilkins Company, September, 1934).
|
||
|
The term ``eugenics'' is taken from the Greek to signify
|
||
|
``good birth'' or ``well-born,'' as in aristocrat. Its basic
|
||
|
assumption is that those who are not ``well-born'' should not
|
||
|
exist.
|
||
|
10.
|
||
|
See among other such letters, George Herbert Walker, 39
|
||
|
Broadway, N.Y., to W. A. Harriman, London, February 21, 1925, in
|
||
|
W.A. Harriman papers.
|
||
|
11.
|
||
|
Averell Harriman to Dr. Charles B. Davenport, President, The
|
||
|
International Congress of Eugenics, Cold Spring Harbor, L.I.,
|
||
|
N.Y.:
|
||
|
January 21, 1932
|
||
|
Dear Dr. Davenport:
|
||
|
I will be only too glad to put you in touch with the
|
||
|
Hamburg-American Line they may be able to co-operate in making
|
||
|
suggestions which will keep the expenses to a minimum. I have
|
||
|
referred your letter to Mr. Emil Lederer [of the Hamburg-Amerika
|
||
|
executive board in New York] with the request that he communicate
|
||
|
with you.
|
||
|
Davenport to Mr. W.A. Harriman, 59 Wall Street, New York,
|
||
|
N.Y.
|
||
|
January 23, 1932
|
||
|
Dear Mr. Harriman:
|
||
|
Thank you very much for your kind letter of January 21st and
|
||
|
the action you took which has resulted at once in a letter from
|
||
|
Mr. Emil Lederer. This letter will serve as a starting point for
|
||
|
correspondence, which I hope will enable more of our German
|
||
|
colleagues to come to America on the occasion of the congresses
|
||
|
of eugenics and genetics, than otherwise.
|
||
|
Congressional hearings in 1934 established that
|
||
|
Hamburg-Amerika routinely provided free transatlantic passage for
|
||
|
those carrying out Nazi propaganda chores. See {Investigation of
|
||
|
Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other
|
||
|
Propaganda Activities,} {op. cit.,} chapter 2.
|
||
|
12.
|
||
|
Alexis Carrel, {Man the Unknown} (New York: Halcyon House,
|
||
|
published by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, 1935), pp.
|
||
|
318-19.
|
||
|
The battle cry of the New Order was sounded in 1935 with the
|
||
|
publication of {Man the Unknown,} by Dr. Alexis Carrel of the
|
||
|
Rockefeller Institute in New York. This Nobel Prize-winner said
|
||
|
``enormous sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane
|
||
|
asylums.... Why do we preserve these useless and harmful
|
||
|
beings? This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society
|
||
|
not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical
|
||
|
manner? ... The community must be protected against troublesome
|
||
|
and dangerous elements.... Perhaps prisons should be
|
||
|
abolished.... The conditioning of the petty criminal with the
|
||
|
whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay
|
||
|
in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. [Criminals,
|
||
|
including those] who have ... misled the public on important
|
||
|
matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small
|
||
|
euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar
|
||
|
treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty
|
||
|
of criminal acts.''
|
||
|
Carrel claimed to have transplanted the head of a dog to
|
||
|
another dog and kept it alive for quite some time.
|
||
|
13.
|
||
|
Bernhard Schreiber, {The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to
|
||
|
the World,} France: La Hay-Mureaux, ca. 1975), English language
|
||
|
edition supplied by H. & P. Tadeusz, 369 Edgewere Road, London
|
||
|
W2. A copy of this book is now held by Union College Library,
|
||
|
Syracuse, N.Y.
|
||
|
14.
|
||
|
Higham, {op. cit.,} p. 35.
|
||
|
15.
|
||
|
Engagement announced Feb. 10, 1939, {New York Times,} p. 20.
|
||
|
See also {Directory of Directors} for New York City, 1930s and
|
||
|
1940s.
|
||
|
16.
|
||
|
Higham, {op. cit.,} pp. 20, 22 and other references to
|
||
|
Schroeder and Lindemann.
|
||
|
Anthony Sutton, {Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler} (Seal
|
||
|
Beach: '76 Press, 1976). Sutton is also a good source on the
|
||
|
Harrimans.
|
||
|
17.
|
||
|
{Washington Evening Star,} March 27, 1942, p. 1.
|
||
|
18. Higham, {op. cit.} p. 50.
|
||
|
19.
|
||
|
{Ibid.,} p. 48.
|
||
|
20.
|
||
|
{Washington Post,} April 29, 1990, p. F4. Higham, {op. cit.,}
|
||
|
pp. 52-53.
|
||
|
21.
|
||
|
Zapata annual reports, 1950s-1960s, Library of Congress
|
||
|
microforms.
|
||
|
22.
|
||
|
See {Congressional Record} for Bush speech in the House of
|
||
|
Representatives, Sept. 4, 1969. Bush inserted in the record the
|
||
|
testimony given before his Task Force on August 5, 1969.
|
||
|
23. Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 92-111. See also Boyle, {op. cit.,}
|
||
|
chapter 1, concerning the Morgan-led Dawes Committee of Germany's
|
||
|
foreign creditors.
|
||
|
Like Harriman, Dillon used the Schroeder and Warburg banks to
|
||
|
strike his German bargains. All Dillon Read & Co. affairs in
|
||
|
Germany were supervised by J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Thomas
|
||
|
Lamont, and were authorized by Bank of England Governor Montagu
|
||
|
Norman.
|
||
|
24. See {Poor's Register of Directors and Executives,} (New York:
|
||
|
Poor's Publishing Company, late 1920s, '30s and '40s). See also
|
||
|
{Standard Corporation Records} (New York: Standard & Poor), 1935
|
||
|
edition pp. 2571-25, and 1938 edition pp. 7436-38, for
|
||
|
description and history of the German Credit and Investment
|
||
|
Corporation. For Frederic Brandi, See also Sobel, {op. cit.,} p.
|
||
|
213-214.
|
||
|
25. Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 180, 186. Ivy Lee had been hired to
|
||
|
improve the Rockefeller family image, particularly difficult
|
||
|
after their 1914 massacre of striking miners and pregnant women
|
||
|
in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee got old John D. Rockefeller to pass out
|
||
|
dimes to poor people lined up at his porch.
|
||
|
26.
|
||
|
Third International Eugenics Congress papers {op. cit.,}
|
||
|
footnote 7, p. 512, ``Supporting Members.''
|
||
|
27.
|
||
|
Schreiber, {op. cit.,} p. 160. The Third Int. Eugenics Congress
|
||
|
papers, p. 526, lists the officers of the International
|
||
|
Federation as of publication date in September, 1934. Rudin is
|
||
|
listed as president--a year after he has written the
|
||
|
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.... General Draper continues
|
||
|
to lead through his tireless work for the U.N. Population Fund.''
|
||
|
33.
|
||
|
Sobel, {op. cit.,} pp. 298, 354.
|
||
|
34.
|
||
|
Interview July 16, 1991, with Joanne Grossi, an official with
|
||
|
the USAID's Population Office.
|
||
|
35. Dr. Nafis Sadik, ``The State of World Population,'' 1991, New
|
||
|
York, United Nations Population Fund.
|
||
|
36.
|
||
|
See {User's Guide to the Office of Population,} 1991, Office of
|
||
|
Population, Bureau for Science and Technology, United States
|
||
|
Agency for International Development. Available from S&T/POP,
|
||
|
Room 811 SA-18, USAID, Washington D.C. 20523-1819.
|
||
|
37. ``History of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization
|
||
|
[formerly Sterilization League of America], 1935-64,'' thesis
|
||
|
submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of the University
|
||
|
of Minnesota by William Ray Van Essendelft, March, 1978,
|
||
|
available on microfilm, Library of Congress. This is the official
|
||
|
history, written with full cooperation of the Sterilization
|
||
|
League.
|
||
|
38.
|
||
|
Interview with Dr. C. Nash Herndon, June 20, 1990.
|
||
|
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on
|
||
|
this group.
|
||
|
Thanks.
|
||
|
John Covici
|
||
|
coviciccs.covici.com
|
||
|
Article 15412 of alt.activism:
|
||
|
From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
|
||
|
Newsgroups: alt.activism
|
||
|
Subject: Part 4: George Bush Unauthorized Biography
|
||
|
Message-ID: <uNcTeB1w164w@ccs.covici.com>
|
||
|
Date: 19 Jan 92 <data type="time" timezone="GMT">20:12:41</data>
|
||
|
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
|
||
|
Lines: 1271
|
||
|
The following is part of a not yet published book being serialized in
|
||
|
New Federalist. For further information, or to subscribe, please
|
||
|
contact me by e-mail.
|
||
|
CHAPTER 4: ``THE CENTER OF POWER IS IN WASHINGTON'' Brown
|
||
|
Brothers Harriman & Co. 59 Wall Street, New York Cable Address
|
||
|
``Shipley-New York'' Business Established 1818
|
||
|
Private Bankers
|
||
|
September 5, 1944
|
||
|
The Honorable W. A. Harriman American Ambassador to the U.S.S.R.
|
||
|
American Embassy, Moscow, Russia
|
||
|
Dear Averell:
|
||
|
Thinking that possibly Bullitt's article in the recent issue
|
||
|
of ``LIFE'' may not have come to your attention, I have clipped
|
||
|
it and am sending it to you, feeling that it will interest you.
|
||
|
At present writing all is well here.
|
||
|
With warm regards, I am, Sincerely yours,
|
||
|
Pres
|
||
|
`At present writing all is well here.'' Thus the ambassador to
|
||
|
Russia was reassured by the managing partner of his firm,
|
||
|
Prescott Bush. Only 22 and a half months before, the U.S.
|
||
|
government had seized and shut down the Union Banking
|
||
|
Corporation, which had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany by
|
||
|
Bush and the Harrimans. But that was behind them now, and they
|
||
|
were safe. There would be no publicity on the Harriman-Bush
|
||
|
sponsorship of Hitlerism.
|
||
|
Prescott's son George, the future U.S. President, was also
|
||
|
safe. Three days before this note to Moscow was written, George
|
||
|
Bush had parachuted from a Navy bomber airplane over the Pacific
|
||
|
Ocean, killing his two crew members when the unpiloted plane
|
||
|
crashed.
|
||
|
Five months later, in February 1945, Prescott's boss Averell
|
||
|
Harriman escorted President Franklin Roosevelt to the fateful
|
||
|
summit meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Yalta. In
|
||
|
April Roosevelt died. The agreement reached at Yalta, calling
|
||
|
for free elections in Poland once the war ended, was never
|
||
|
enforced.
|
||
|
Over the next eight years (1945 through 1952), Prescott Bush
|
||
|
was Harriman's anchor in the New York financial world. The
|
||
|
increasingly powerful Mr. Harriman and his allies gave Eastern
|
||
|
Europe over to Soviet dictatorship. A Cold War was then
|
||
|
undertaken, to ``counterbalance'' the Soviets.
|
||
|
This British-inspired strategy paid several nightmarish
|
||
|
dividends. Eastern Europe was to remain enslaved. Germany was
|
||
|
``permanently'' divided. Anglo-American power was jointly
|
||
|
exercised over the non-Soviet ``Free World.'' The confidential
|
||
|
functions of the British and American governments were merged.
|
||
|
The Harriman clique took possession of the U.S. national security
|
||
|
apparatus, and in doing so, they opened the gate and let the Bush
|
||
|
family in.
|
||
|
- * * * -
|
||
|
Following his services to Germany's Nazi Party, Averell
|
||
|
Harriman spent several years mediating between the British,
|
||
|
American, and Soviet governments 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.''s1
|
||
|
Jupiter Island
|
||
|
The reorganization of the American government after World War
|
||
|
II--the creation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency along
|
||
|
British lines, for example--had devastating consequences. We are
|
||
|
concerned here with only certain aspects of that overall
|
||
|
transformation, those matters of policy and family which gave
|
||
|
shape to the life and mind of George Bush, and gave him access to
|
||
|
power.
|
||
|
It was in these postwar years that George Bush attended Yale
|
||
|
University, and was inducted into the Skull and Bones society.
|
||
|
The Bush family's home at that time was in Greenwich,
|
||
|
Connecticut. But it was just then that George's parents, Prescott
|
||
|
and Dorothy Walker Bush, were wintering in a peculiar spot in
|
||
|
Florida, a place that is excluded from mention in literature
|
||
|
originating from Bush circles.
|
||
|
Certain national news accounts early in 1991 featured the
|
||
|
observations on President Bush's childhood by his elderly mother
|
||
|
Dorothy. She was said to be a resident of Hobe Sound, Florida.
|
||
|
More precisely, the President's mother lived in a hyper-security
|
||
|
arrangement created a half-century earlier by Averell Harriman,
|
||
|
adjacent to Hobe Sound. Its correct name is Jupiter Island.
|
||
|
During his political career, George Bush has claimed many
|
||
|
different ``home'' states, including Texas, Maine, Massachusetts,
|
||
|
and Connecticut. It has not been expedient for him to claim
|
||
|
Florida, though that state has a vital link to his role in the
|
||
|
world, as we shall see. And George Bush's home base in Florida,
|
||
|
throughout his adult life, has been Jupiter Island.
|
||
|
The unique, bizarre setup on Jupiter Island began in 1931,
|
||
|
following the merger of W.A. Harriman and Co. with the
|
||
|
British-American firm Brown Brothers.
|
||
|
The reader will recall Mr. Samuel Pryor, the ``Merchant of
|
||
|
Death.'' A partner with the Harrimans, Prescott Bush, George
|
||
|
Walker, and Nazi boss Fritz Thyssen in banking and shipping
|
||
|
enterprises, Sam Pryor remained executive committee chairman of
|
||
|
Remington Arms. In this period, the Nazi private armies (SA and
|
||
|
SS) were supplied with American arms--most likely by Pryor and
|
||
|
his company--as they moved to overthrow the German republic.
|
||
|
Such gun-running as an instrument of national policy would later
|
||
|
become notorious in the ``Iran-Contra'' affair.
|
||
|
Sam Pryor's daughter Permelia married Yale graduate Joseph V.
|
||
|
Reed on the last day of 1927. Reed immediately went to work for
|
||
|
Prescott Bush and George Walker, as an apprentice at W.A.
|
||
|
Harriman and Co.
|
||
|
During World War II, Joseph V. Reed had served in the
|
||
|
``special services'' section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. A
|
||
|
specialist in security, codes and espionage, Reed later wrote a
|
||
|
book entitled {Fun with Cryptograms}.s2
|
||
|
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.s3
|
||
|
To create this astonishing private club, Joseph and Permelia
|
||
|
Pryor Reed sold land only to those who would fit in. Permelia
|
||
|
Reed was still the grande dame of the island when George Bush was
|
||
|
inaugurated President in 1989. In recognition of the fact that
|
||
|
the Reeds know where {all} the bodies are buried, President Bush
|
||
|
appointed Permelia's son, Joseph V. Reed, Jr., chief of protocol
|
||
|
for the U.S. State Dept., in charge of private arrangements with
|
||
|
foreign dignitaries.
|
||
|
Averell Harriman made Jupiter Island a staging ground for his
|
||
|
1940s takeover of the U.S. national security apparatus. It was
|
||
|
in that connection that the island became possibly the most
|
||
|
secretive private place in America.
|
||
|
Let us briefly survey the neighborhood, back then in 1946-48,
|
||
|
to see some of the uses various of the residents had for the
|
||
|
Harriman clique.
|
||
|
Residence on Jupiter Island
|
||
|
sbJupiter Islander {Robert A. Lovett,}s4, Prescott Bush's
|
||
|
partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, had been Assistant Secretary
|
||
|
of War for Air from 1941 to 1945. Lovett was the leading American
|
||
|
advocate of the policy of terror-bombing of civilians. He
|
||
|
organized the Strategic Bombing Survey, carried out for the
|
||
|
American and British governments by the staff of the Prudential
|
||
|
Insurance Company, guided by London's Tavistock Psychiatric
|
||
|
Clinic.
|
||
|
In the postwar period, Prescott Bush was associated with
|
||
|
Prudential Insurance, one of Lovett's intelligence channels to
|
||
|
the British secret services. Prescott was listed by Prudential
|
||
|
as a director of the company for about two years in the early
|
||
|
1950s.
|
||
|
Their Strategic Bombing Survey failed to demonstrate any real
|
||
|
military advantage accruing from such outrages as the
|
||
|
fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany. But the Harrimanites
|
||
|
nevertheless persisted in the advocacy of terror from the air.
|
||
|
They glorified this as ``psychological warfare,'' a part of the
|
||
|
utopian military doctrine opposed to the views of military
|
||
|
traditionalists such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
|
||
|
Robert Lovett later advised President Lyndon Johnson to
|
||
|
terror-bomb Vietnam. President George Bush revived the doctrine
|
||
|
with the bombing of civilian areas in Panama, and the destruction
|
||
|
of Baghdad.
|
||
|
On October 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created
|
||
|
the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the
|
||
|
government on the post-World War II organization of U.S.
|
||
|
intelligence activities. The existence of this committee was
|
||
|
unknown to the public until an official CIA history was released
|
||
|
from secrecy in 1989. But the CIA's author (who was President
|
||
|
Bush's prep school history teacher; see chapter 5) gives no real
|
||
|
details of the Lovett Committee's functioning, claiming: ``The
|
||
|
record of the testimony of the Lovett Committee, unfortunately,
|
||
|
was not in the archives of the agency when this account was
|
||
|
written.''s5
|
||
|
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.s6 But the CIA was established in
|
||
|
1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter
|
||
|
Island.
|
||
|
sb{Charles Payson} and his wife, {Joan Whitney Payson,} were
|
||
|
extended family members of Harriman's and business associates of
|
||
|
the Bush family.
|
||
|
Joan's aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a relative of
|
||
|
the Harrimans. Gertrude's son, Cornelius Vanderbilt (``Sonny'')
|
||
|
Whitney, long-time chairman of Pan American Airways (Prescott was
|
||
|
a Pan Am director), became assistant secretary of the U.S. Air
|
||
|
Force in 1947. Sonny's wife Marie had divorced him and married
|
||
|
Averell Harriman in 1930. Joan and Sonny's uncle, Air Marshal Sir
|
||
|
Thomas Elmhirst, was director of intelligence for the British Air
|
||
|
Force from 1945 to 1947.
|
||
|
Joan's brother, John Hay (``Jock'') Whitney, was to be
|
||
|
ambassador to Great Britain from 1955 to 1961 ... when it would
|
||
|
be vital for Prescott and George Bush to have such a friend.
|
||
|
Joan's father, grandfather, and uncle were members of the Skull
|
||
|
and Bones secret society.
|
||
|
Charles Payson organized a uranium refinery in 1948. Later, he
|
||
|
was chairman of Vitro Corporation, makers of parts for
|
||
|
submarine-launched ballistic missiles, equipment for frequency
|
||
|
surveillance and torpedo guidance, and other subsurface
|
||
|
weaponry.
|
||
|
Naval warfare has long been a preoccupation of the British
|
||
|
Empire. British penetration of the U.S. Naval Intelligence
|
||
|
service has been particularly heavy since the tenure of Joan's
|
||
|
Anglophile grandfather, William C. Whitney, as secretary of the
|
||
|
Navy for President Grover Cleveland. This traditional covert
|
||
|
British orientation in the U.S. Navy, Naval Intelligence and the
|
||
|
Navy's included service, the Marine Corps, forms a backdrop to
|
||
|
the career of George Bush--and to the whole neighborhood on
|
||
|
Jupiter Island. Naval Intelligence maintained direct relations
|
||
|
with gangster boss Meyer Lansky for Anglo-American political
|
||
|
operations in Cuba during World War II, well before the
|
||
|
establishment of the CIA. Lansky officially moved to Florida in
|
||
|
1953.s7
|
||
|
sb{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.
|
||
|
sb{Walter S. Carpenter, Jr.} had been chairman of the finance
|
||
|
committee of the Du Pont Corporation (1930-40). In 1933,
|
||
|
Carpenter oversaw Du Pont's purchase of Remington Arms from Sam
|
||
|
Pryor and the Rockefellers, and led Du Pont into partnership with
|
||
|
the Nazi I.G. Farben company for the manufacture of explosives.
|
||
|
Carpenter became Du Pont's president in 1940. His cartel with the
|
||
|
Nazis was broken up by the U.S. government. Nevertheless,
|
||
|
Carpenter remained Du Pont's president, as the company's
|
||
|
technicians participated massively in the Manhattan Project to
|
||
|
produce the first atomic bomb. He was chairman of Du Pont from
|
||
|
1948 to 1962, retaining high-level access to U.S. strategic
|
||
|
activities.
|
||
|
Walter Carpenter and Prescott Bush were fellow activists in
|
||
|
the Mental Hygiene Society. Originating at Yale University in
|
||
|
1908, the movement had been organized into the World Federation
|
||
|
of Mental Health by Montague Norman, himself a 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 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.
|
||
|
sb{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.
|
||
|
sb{Carll Tucker} manufactured electronic guidance equipment
|
||
|
for the Navy. With the Mellons, Tucker was an owner of South
|
||
|
American oil properties. Mrs. Tucker was the great-aunt of
|
||
|
{Nicholas Brady,} later George Bush's Iran-Contra partner and
|
||
|
U.S. treasury secretary. Their son Carll Tucker, Jr. (Skull and
|
||
|
Bones, 1947), was among the 15 Bonesmen who selected George Bush
|
||
|
for induction in the class of 1948.
|
||
|
sb{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.
|
||
|
sb{Publisher Nelson Doubleday} headed his family's publishing
|
||
|
firm, founded under the auspices of J.P. Morgan and other British
|
||
|
Empire representatives. When George Bush's ``Uncle Herbie''
|
||
|
died, Doubleday took over as majority owner and chief executive
|
||
|
of the New York Mets baseball team.
|
||
|
Some other specialized corporate owners had their place in
|
||
|
Harriman's strange club.
|
||
|
sb{George W. Merck,} chairman of Merck & Co., drug and
|
||
|
chemical manufacturers, was director of the War Research Service:
|
||
|
Merck was the official chief of all U.S. research into biological
|
||
|
warfare from 1942 until at least the end of World War II. After
|
||
|
1944, Merck's organization was placed under the U.S. Chemical
|
||
|
Warfare Service. His family firm in Germany and the United States
|
||
|
was famous for its manufacture of morphine.
|
||
|
sb{James H. McGraw, Jr.,} chairman of McGraw Hill Publishing
|
||
|
Company, was a member of the advisory board to the U.S. Chemical
|
||
|
Warfare Service and a member of the Army Ordnance Association
|
||
|
Committee on Endowment.
|
||
|
sb{Fred H. Haggerson,} chairman of Union Carbide Corp.,
|
||
|
produced munitions, chemicals, and firearms.
|
||
|
sb{A.L. Cole} was useful to the Jupiter Islanders as an
|
||
|
executive of {Readers Digest.} In 1965, just after performing a
|
||
|
rather dirty favor for George Bush [which will be discussed in a
|
||
|
coming chapter--ed.], Cole became chairman of the executive
|
||
|
committee of the {Digest,} the world's largest-circulation
|
||
|
periodical.
|
||
|
From the late 1940s, Jupiter Island has served as a center for
|
||
|
the direction of covert action by the U.S. government and,
|
||
|
indeed, for the covert management of the government. Jupiter
|
||
|
Island will reappear later on, in our account of George Bush in
|
||
|
the Iran-Contra affair.
|
||
|
Target: Washington
|
||
|
George Bush graduated from Yale in 1948. He soon entered the
|
||
|
family's Dresser oil supply concern in Texas. We shall now
|
||
|
briefly describe the forces that descended on Washington, D.C.
|
||
|
during those years when Bush, with the assistance of family and
|
||
|
powerful friends, was becoming ``established in business on his
|
||
|
own.''
|
||
|
From 1948 to 1950, Prescott Bush's boss Averell Harriman was
|
||
|
U.S. ``ambassador-at-large'' to Europe. He was a non-military
|
||
|
``Theater Commander,'' the administrator of the
|
||
|
multi-billion-dollar Marshall Plan, participating in all
|
||
|
military/strategic decision-making by the Anglo-American
|
||
|
alliance.
|
||
|
The U.S. secretary of defense, James Forrestal, had become a
|
||
|
problem to the Harrimanites. Forrestal had long been an executive
|
||
|
at Dillon Read on Wall Street. But in recent years he had gone
|
||
|
astray. As secretary of the navy in 1944, Forrestal proposed the
|
||
|
racial integration of the Navy. As defense secretary, he pressed
|
||
|
for integration in the armed forces and this eventually became
|
||
|
the U.S. policy.
|
||
|
Forrestal opposed the utopians' strategy of appeasement
|
||
|
coupled with brinkmanship. He was simply opposed to communism.
|
||
|
On March 28, 1949, Forrestal was forced out of office and flown
|
||
|
on an Air Force plane to Florida. He was taken to ``Hobe Sound''
|
||
|
(Jupiter Island), where Robert Lovett and an army psychiatrist
|
||
|
dealt with him.s8
|
||
|
He was flown back to Washington, locked in Walter Reed Army
|
||
|
Hospital and given insulin shock treatments for alleged ``mental
|
||
|
exhaustion.'' He was denied all visitors except his estranged
|
||
|
wife and children--his son had been Averell Harriman's aide in
|
||
|
Moscow. On May 22, Forrestal's body was found, his bathrobe cord
|
||
|
tied tightly around his neck, after he had plunged from a
|
||
|
sixteenth-story hospital window. The chief psychiatrist called
|
||
|
the death a suicide even before any investigation was started.
|
||
|
The results of the Army's inquest were kept secret. Forrestal's
|
||
|
diaries were published, <data type="percent" unit="%">80%</data> 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.''s9
|
||
|
With Forrestal out of the way, Averell Harriman and Dean
|
||
|
Acheson drove to Leesburg, Virginia, on July 1, 1950, to hire the
|
||
|
British-backed U.S. Gen. George C. Marshall as secretary of
|
||
|
defense. At the same time, Prescott's partner, Robert Lovett,
|
||
|
himself became assistant secretary of defense.
|
||
|
Lovett, Marshall, Harriman, and Acheson went to work to
|
||
|
unhorse Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in
|
||
|
Asia. MacArthur kept Wall Street's intelligence agencies away
|
||
|
from his command, and favored real independence for the non-white
|
||
|
nations. Lovett called for MacArthur's firing on March 23, 1951,
|
||
|
citing MacArthur's insistence on defeating the Communist Chinese
|
||
|
invaders in Korea. MacArthur's famous message, that there was
|
||
|
``no substitute for victory,'' was read in Congress on April 5;
|
||
|
MacArthur was fired on April 10, 1951.
|
||
|
That September, Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary
|
||
|
of defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual
|
||
|
Security Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American
|
||
|
military alliance. By now, Brown Brothers Harriman was
|
||
|
everything but commander-in-chief.
|
||
|
- * * * -
|
||
|
These were, of course, exciting times for the Bush family,
|
||
|
whose wagon was hitched to the financial gods of Olympus--to
|
||
|
Jupiter, that is.
|
||
|
Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. 59 Wall Street, New York 5, N.Y.
|
||
|
Business Established 1818 Cable Address ``Shipley-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 and John Foster Dulles, wanted the
|
||
|
government's secret services to conduct extensive propaganda
|
||
|
campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and
|
||
|
paramilitary campaigns abroad. This would supposedly ensure a
|
||
|
stable world-wide environment favorable to Anglo-American
|
||
|
financial and political interests.
|
||
|
The Harriman security regime created the Psychological
|
||
|
Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the
|
||
|
PSB, Gordon Gray, is familiar to the reader as the sponsor of the
|
||
|
child sterilization experiments, carried out by the Harrimanite
|
||
|
eugenics movement in North Carolina following World War II.
|
||
|
Gordon Gray was an avid Anglophile, whose father had gotten
|
||
|
controlling ownership of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company
|
||
|
through alliance with the British Imperial tobacco cartel's U.S.
|
||
|
representatives, the Duke family of North Carolina. Gordon's
|
||
|
brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray Jr., was also a naval
|
||
|
intelligence officer, known around Washington as the ``founder of
|
||
|
operational intelligence.'' Gordon Gray became a close friend and
|
||
|
political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's son became for
|
||
|
Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert
|
||
|
policy.
|
||
|
But President Harry Truman, as malleable as he was,
|
||
|
constituted an obstacle to the covert warriors. An insular
|
||
|
Missouri politician vaguely favorable to the U.S. Constitution,
|
||
|
he remained skeptical about secret service activities that
|
||
|
reminded him of the Nazi Gestapo.
|
||
|
So, ``covert operations'' could not fully take off without a
|
||
|
change of the Washington regime. And it was with the Republican
|
||
|
Party that Prescott Bush was to get his turn.
|
||
|
Prescott Runs for Senate
|
||
|
Prescott had made his first attempt to enter national politics
|
||
|
in 1950, as his partners took control of the levers of
|
||
|
governmental power. Remaining in charge of Brown Brothers
|
||
|
Harriman, he ran against Connecticut's William Benton for his
|
||
|
seat in the U.S. Senate. (The race was actually for a two-year
|
||
|
unexpired term, left empty by the death of the previous
|
||
|
senator).
|
||
|
In those days, Wisconsin's drunken Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
|
||
|
was making a circus-like crusade against communist influence in
|
||
|
Washington. McCarthy attacked liberals and leftists, State
|
||
|
Department personnel, politicians, and Hollywood figures. He
|
||
|
generally left unscathed the Wall Street and London strategists
|
||
|
who donated Eastern Europe and China to communist
|
||
|
dictatorship--like George Bush, their geopolitics was beyond left
|
||
|
and right.
|
||
|
Prescott Bush had no public ties to the notorious Joe
|
||
|
McCarthy, and appeared to be neutral about his crusade. But the
|
||
|
Wisconsin senator had his uses. Joe McCarthy came into
|
||
|
Connecticut three times that year to campaign for Bush and
|
||
|
against the Democrats. Bush himself made charges of ``Korea,
|
||
|
Communism and Corruption'' into a slick campaign phrase against
|
||
|
Benton, which then turned up as a national Republican slogan.
|
||
|
The response was disappointing. Only small crowds turned out
|
||
|
to hear Joe McCarthy, and Benton was not hurt. McCarthy's
|
||
|
pro-Bush rally in New Haven, in a hall that seated 6000 drew
|
||
|
only 376 people. Benton joked on the radio that ``200 of them
|
||
|
were my spies.''
|
||
|
Prescott Bush resigned from the Yale Board of Fellows for his
|
||
|
campaign, and the board published a statement to the effect that
|
||
|
the ``Yale vote'' should support Bush--despite the fact that
|
||
|
Benton was a Yale man, and in many ways identical in outlook to
|
||
|
Bush. Yale's Whiffenpoof singers appeared regularly for
|
||
|
Prescott's campaign. None of this was particularly effective,
|
||
|
however, with the voting population.s1s0
|
||
|
Then Papa Bush ran into a completely unexpected problem. At
|
||
|
that time, the old Harriman eugenics movement was centered at
|
||
|
Yale University. Prescott Bush was a Yale trustee, and his former
|
||
|
Brown Brothers Harriman partner, Lawrence Tighe, was Yale's
|
||
|
treasurer. In that connection, a slight glimmer of the truth
|
||
|
about the Bush-Harriman firm's Nazi activities now made its way
|
||
|
into the campaign.
|
||
|
Not only was the American Eugenics Society itself
|
||
|
headquartered at Yale, but all parts of this undead fascist
|
||
|
movement had a busy home at Yale. The coercive psychiatry and
|
||
|
sterilization advocates had made the Yale/New Haven Hospital and
|
||
|
Yale Medical School their laboratories for hands-on practice in
|
||
|
brain surgery and psychological experimentation. And the Birth
|
||
|
Control League was there, which had long trumpeted the need for
|
||
|
eugenical births--fewer births for parents with ``inferior''
|
||
|
bloodlines. Prescott's partner Tighe was a Connecticut director
|
||
|
of the league, and the Connecticut league's medical advisor was
|
||
|
the eugenics advocate, Dr. Winternitz of Yale Medical School.
|
||
|
Now in 1950, people who knew something about Prescott Bush
|
||
|
knew that he had very unsavory roots in the eugenics movement.
|
||
|
There were then, just after the anti-Hitler war, few open
|
||
|
advocates of sterilization of ``unfit'' or ``unnecessary''
|
||
|
people. (That would be revived later, with the help of General
|
||
|
Draper and his friend George Bush.) But the Birth Control League
|
||
|
was public--just about then it was changing its name to the
|
||
|
euphemistic ``Planned Parenthood.''
|
||
|
Then, very late in the 1950 senatorial campaign, Prescott Bush
|
||
|
was publicly exposed for being an activist in that section of the
|
||
|
old fascist eugenics movement. Prescott Bush lost the election
|
||
|
by about 1000 out of 862000 votes. He and his family blamed
|
||
|
the defeat on the exposeaa. The defeat was burned into the
|
||
|
family's memory, leaving a bitterness and perhaps a desire for
|
||
|
revenge.
|
||
|
In his foreword to a population control propaganda book,
|
||
|
George Bush wrote about that 1950 election: ``My own first
|
||
|
awareness of birth control as a public policy issue came with a
|
||
|
jolt in 1950 when my father was running for United States Senate
|
||
|
in Connecticut. Drew Pearson, on the Sunday before Election day,
|
||
|
`revealed' that my father was involved with Planned
|
||
|
Parenthod.... Many political observers felt a sufficient number
|
||
|
of voters were swayed by his alleged contacts with the birth
|
||
|
controllers to cost him the election....''s1s1
|
||
|
Prescott Bush gave a graphic description of these events in
|
||
|
his ``oral history'' interview at Columbia University: ``In the
|
||
|
1950 campaign, when I ran against Benton, the very last week,
|
||
|
Drew Pearson, famous columnist, was running a radio program at
|
||
|
that time.... In this particular broadcast, just at the end of
|
||
|
our campaign [Pearson said]: ``I predict that Benton will retain
|
||
|
his seat in the United States Senate, because it has just been
|
||
|
made known that Prescott Bush, his opponent, is president of the
|
||
|
Birth Control Society'' or chairman, member of the board of
|
||
|
directors, or something, ``of the Birth Control Society. In this
|
||
|
country, and of course with Connecticut's heavy Catholic
|
||
|
population, and its laws against birth control ... this is going
|
||
|
to be too much for Bush to rise above. Benton will be elected.
|
||
|
I predict.''
|
||
|
The next Sunday, they handed out, at these Catholic Churches
|
||
|
in Waterbury and Torrington and Bridgeport, handbills, quoting
|
||
|
Drew Pearson's statement on the radio about Prescott Bush, you
|
||
|
see--I predict. Well, my telephone started ringing that Sunday
|
||
|
at home, and when I'd answer, or Dotty [Prescott's wife, George's
|
||
|
mother] would answer--``Is this true, what they say about
|
||
|
Prescott Bush? This can't be true. Is it true?''
|
||
|
She'd say, ``No, it isn't true.'' Of course, it wasn't true.
|
||
|
But you never catch up with a thing like this--the election's
|
||
|
just day after tomorrow, you see? So there's no doubt, in the
|
||
|
estimate of our political leaders, that this one thing cost me
|
||
|
many thousand votes--whether it was 1, 3, 5 or 10000
|
||
|
we
|
||
|
don't know, we can't possibly tell, but it was enough. To have
|
||
|
overcome that thousand vote, it would only have had to be 600
|
||
|
switch [sic].
|
||
|
[Mrs. Bush then corrected the timing in Prescott Bush's
|
||
|
recollections.]
|
||
|
``I'd forgotten the exact sequence, but that was it.... The
|
||
|
state then--and I think still is--probably about <data type="percent" unit="%">55%</data>
|
||
|
Catholic population, with all the Italian derivation people
|
||
|
[sic], and Polish is very heavy, and the Catholic church is very
|
||
|
dominant here, and the archbishop was death on this birth control
|
||
|
thing. They fought repeal every time it came up in the
|
||
|
legislature, and {we never did get rid of that prohibition until
|
||
|
just a year or two ago,} as I recall it [emphasis added].s1s2
|
||
|
Prescott Bush was defeated, while the other Republican
|
||
|
candidates fared well in Connecticut. He attributed his loss to
|
||
|
the Catholic Church. After all, he had dependable friends in the
|
||
|
news media. The {New York Times} loved him for his bland
|
||
|
pleasantness. He just about owned CBS. Twenty years earlier,
|
||
|
Prescott Bush had personally organized the credit to allow
|
||
|
William S. Paley to buy the CBS (radio, later television) network
|
||
|
outright. In return, Prescott was made a director and the
|
||
|
financial leader of CBS; Paley himself became a devoted follower
|
||
|
and servitor of Averell Harriman.
|
||
|
Well, when he tried again, Prescott Bush would not leave the
|
||
|
outcome to the blind whims of the public.
|
||
|
Prescott Bush moved into action in 1952 as a national leader
|
||
|
of the push to give the Republican presidential nomination to
|
||
|
Gen. Dwight D. (``Ike'') Eisenhower. Among the other team members
|
||
|
were Bush's Hitler-era lawyer John Foster Dulles, and Jupiter
|
||
|
Islander C. Douglas Dillon.
|
||
|
Dillon and his father were the pivots as the Harriman-Dulles
|
||
|
combination readied Ike for the presidency. As a friend put it:
|
||
|
``When the Dillons ... invited [Eisenhower] to dinner it was to
|
||
|
introduce him to Wall Street bankers and lawyers.''s1s3
|
||
|
Ike's higher level backers believed, correctly, that Ike would
|
||
|
not interfere with even the dirtiest of their covert action
|
||
|
programs. The bland, pleasant Prescott Bush was in from the
|
||
|
beginning: a friend to Ike, and an original backer of his
|
||
|
presidency.
|
||
|
On July 28, 1952, as the election approached, Connecticut's
|
||
|
senior U.S. senator, James O'Brien McMahon, died at the age of
|
||
|
48. (McMahon had been Assistant U.S. Attorney General, in charge
|
||
|
of the Criminal Division, from 1935 to 1939. Was there a chance
|
||
|
he might someday speak out about the unpunished Nazi-era crimes
|
||
|
of the wealthy and powerful?)
|
||
|
This was {extremely} convenient for Prescott. He got the
|
||
|
Republican nomination for U.S. senator at a special delegated
|
||
|
meeting, with backing by the Yale-dominated state party
|
||
|
leadership. Now he would run in a special election for the
|
||
|
suddenly vacant Senate seat. He could expect to be swept into
|
||
|
office, since he would be on the same electoral ticket as the
|
||
|
popular war hero, General Ike. By a technicality, he would
|
||
|
instantly become Connecticut's senior senator, with extra power
|
||
|
in Congress. And the next regularly scheduled senatorial race
|
||
|
would be in 1956 (when McMahon's term would have ended), so
|
||
|
Prescott could run again in that presidential election year ...
|
||
|
once again on Ike's coattails!
|
||
|
With this arrangement, things worked out very smoothly. In
|
||
|
Eisenhower's 1952 election victory, Ike won Connecticut by a
|
||
|
margin of 129507 votes out of 1092471. Prescott Bush came in
|
||
|
last among the statewide Republicans, but managed to win by
|
||
|
30373 out of 1088799, his margin nearly 100000 behind
|
||
|
Eisenhower. He took the traditionally Republican towns.
|
||
|
In Eisenhower's 1956 re-election, Ike won Connecticut by
|
||
|
303036 out of 1114954 votes, the largest presidential margin
|
||
|
in Connecticut's history. Prescott Bush managed to win again, by
|
||
|
129544 votes out of 1085206--his margin this time 290082
|
||
|
smaller than Eisenhower's.s1s4
|
||
|
In January 1963, when this electoral strategy had been played
|
||
|
out and his second term expired, Prescott Bush retired from
|
||
|
government and returned to Brown Brothers Harriman.
|
||
|
The 1952 Eisenhower victory made John Foster Dulles Secretary
|
||
|
of State, and his brother Allen Dulles head of the CIA. The
|
||
|
reigning Dulles brothers were the ``Republican'' replacements for
|
||
|
their client and business partner, ``Democrat'' Averell
|
||
|
Harriman. Occasional public posturings aside, their strategic
|
||
|
commitments were identical to his.
|
||
|
Undoubtedly the most important work accomplished by Prescott
|
||
|
Bush in the new regime was on the golf links.
|
||
|
Those who remember the Eisenhower presidency know that Ike
|
||
|
played ... quite a bit of golf! Democrats sneered at him for
|
||
|
mindlessness, Republicans defended him for taking this healthy
|
||
|
recreation. Golf was Ike's ruling passion. And there at his
|
||
|
side was the loyal, bland, pleasant Senator Prescott Bush, former
|
||
|
president of the U.S. Golf Association, son-in-law of the very
|
||
|
man who had reformulated the rules of the game.
|
||
|
Prescott Bush was Dwight Eisenhower's favorite golf partner.
|
||
|
Prescott could reassure Ike about his counselors, allay his
|
||
|
concerns, and monitor his moods. Ike was very grateful to
|
||
|
Prescott, who never revealed the President's scores.
|
||
|
The public image of his relationship to the President may be
|
||
|
gleaned from a 1956 newspaper profile of Prescott Bush's role in
|
||
|
the party. The {New York Times,} which 11 years before had
|
||
|
consciously protected him from public exposure as a Nazi banker,
|
||
|
fawned over him in an article entitled, ``His Platform:
|
||
|
Eisenhower'':``A tall, lean, well-dressed man who looks exactly
|
||
|
like what he is--a wealthy product of the Ivy League--is chairman
|
||
|
of the Republican Convention's platform committee. As such,
|
||
|
Prescott Bush, Connecticut's senior United States Senator, has a
|
||
|
difficult task: he has to take one word and expand it to about
|
||
|
5000.
|
||
|
``The one word, of course, is `Ike'--but no party platform
|
||
|
could ever be so simple and direct....
|
||
|
``Thus it is that Senator Bush and his fellow committee
|
||
|
members ... find themselves confronted with the job of wrapping
|
||
|
around the name Eisenhower sufficient verbiage to persuade the
|
||
|
public that it is the principles of the party, and not the grin
|
||
|
of the man at the head of it, which makes it worthy of
|
||
|
endorsement in [the] November [election].
|
||
|
``For this task Prescott Bush, a singularly practical and
|
||
|
direct conservative, may not be entirely fitted. It is likely
|
||
|
that left to his own devices he would simply offer the country
|
||
|
the one word and let it go at that.
|
||
|
``He is ... convinced that this would be enough to do the
|
||
|
trick ... if only the game were played that way.
|
||
|
``Since it is not, he can be expected to preside with dignity,
|
||
|
fairness and dispatch over the sessions that will prepare the
|
||
|
party credo for the 1956 campaign.
|
||
|
``If by chance there should be any conflicts within the
|
||
|
committee ... the Senator's past can offer a clue to his
|
||
|
conduct.
|
||
|
``A former Yale Glee Club and second bass in the All-Time
|
||
|
Whiffenpoofs Quartet, he is ... [called] `the hottest
|
||
|
close-harmony man at Yale in a span of twenty-five years.'
|
||
|
``Close harmony being a Republican specialty under President
|
||
|
Eisenhower, the hottest close-harmony man at Yale in twenty-five
|
||
|
years would seem to be an ideal choice for the convention job he
|
||
|
holds at San Francisco....
|
||
|
``[In addition to his business background, he] also played
|
||
|
golf, competing in a number of tournaments. For eight years he
|
||
|
was a member of the executive committee of the United States Golf
|
||
|
Association....
|
||
|
``As a Senator, Connecticut's senior spokeman in the upper
|
||
|
house has followed conservative policies consistent with his
|
||
|
business background.
|
||
|
He resigned all his corporate directorships, took a leave from
|
||
|
Brown Brothers, Harriman, and proceeded to go down the line for
|
||
|
the Eisenhower program....
|
||
|
``Around the Senate, he is known as a man who does his
|
||
|
committee work faithfully, defends the Administration stoutly,
|
||
|
and fits well into the clublike atmosphere of Capitol
|
||
|
Hill....''s1s5
|
||
|
{To be continued.}
|
||
|
Notes
|
||
|
1.
|
||
|
Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, {The Wise Men}: Six Friends and
|
||
|
the World They Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett,
|
||
|
McCloy} (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 377.
|
||
|
2.
|
||
|
Reed was better known in high society as a minor diplomat, the
|
||
|
founder of the Triton Press and the president of the American
|
||
|
Shakespeare Theater.
|
||
|
3.
|
||
|
{Palm Beach Post,} January 13, 1991.
|
||
|
4.
|
||
|
For Lovett's residency there see Isaacson and Thomas, {op.
|
||
|
cit.,} p. 417. Some Jupiter Island residencies were verified by
|
||
|
their inclusion in the 1947 membership list of the Hobe Sound
|
||
|
Yacht Club, in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress; others
|
||
|
were established from interviews with long-time Jupiter
|
||
|
Islanders.
|
||
|
5.
|
||
|
Arthur Burr Darling, {The Central Intelligence Agency: An
|
||
|
Instrument of Government, to 1950}, (College Station:
|
||
|
Pennsylvania State University, 1990), p. 59.
|
||
|
6. The {Chicago Tribune}, Feb 9, 1945, for example, warned of
|
||
|
``Creation of an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the
|
||
|
postwar world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home.
|
||
|
{Cf. Anthony Cave Brown, {Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero}, (New
|
||
|
York: Times Books, 1982), p. 625, on warnings to FDR about the
|
||
|
British control of U.S. intelligence.
|
||
|
7. Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, Eli Landau, {Meyer Lansky: Mogul of
|
||
|
the Mob} (New York: Paddington Press, 1979) pp. 227-28.
|
||
|
8. See John Ranelagh, {The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the
|
||
|
CIA}, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 131-32.
|
||
|
9. Clark Clifford, {Counsel to the President} (New York: Random
|
||
|
House, 1991).
|
||
|
10. Sidney Hyman, {The Life of William Benton} (Chicago: The
|
||
|
University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 438-41.
|
||
|
11. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, {World Population Crisis: The United
|
||
|
States Response} (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973),
|
||
|
``Forward'' by George H.W. Bush, p. vii.
|
||
|
12. Interview with Prescott Bush in the Oral History Research
|
||
|
Project conducted by Columbia University in 1966, Eisenhower
|
||
|
Administration Part II; pp. 62-4.
|
||
|
13. Herbert S. Parmet, {Eisenhower and the American Crusades}
|
||
|
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), p. 14.
|
||
|
14. {New York Times}, Sept. 6, 1952, Nov. 5, 1952, Nov. 7, 1956.
|
||
|
15. {New York Times}, Aug. 21, 1956.
|
||
|
Any comments, please send by email, as I get very far behind on
|
||
|
this group.
|
||
|
Thanks.
|
||
|
John Covici
|
||
|
coviciccs.covici.com</conspiracyFile>
|