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| Chapters From the Book "Worse Than Watergate" by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House Lawyer |
| Chapter2 from the book worse than Watergate |
| Chapter 3 from the book Worse Than Watergate |
| ChapterFour, Worse Than Watergate |
| Part of Chapter five from John Dean's book worse than Watergate. |
| Chapter 6 |
For those of you who enjoy quality disinformation you should be in heaven listening to Bush preach democracy
in Russia. How many of you are nieve enough to believe a democratically elected socialist government in
Germany would be cutting corporate tax rates from 25% to 19%. For those who believe democracy still
exists how many of you believe a labor qovernment in Great Britain would have as its goal for Blairs third
term the objective of adding public funded private competition to the national health service. I got news for
you morons. These are the types of things US puppet governments normally do to pasify the masses while
enriching favored special interests. Its conservative US crackpots using the CIA to force their ideology on
the world. So whats new.
The GM Ford story is a lot of fun. The criminals in the energy and healthcare industry have bankrupt the
US auto industry. Bill Clinton is probaly saying I told you so. Early in Clintons first term he tried to force
the auto industry to improve automotive efficiency. They let him know whose boss and told him where he
could go. They got their jobs running the auto industry by parrotting the conservative party line. I suppose
they were obligated to tell him to take a hike. Although GM execs did back Kerry and his health care plan
their was little they could do to help get him elected against Bush CIA backed campaign.
The Parent Trap
Social Security "reform" is being touted as fiscal liberation for the young. What will young families do when
it condemns them to care for their elders? By James K. Galbraith
BUSH is selling his partial privatization plan for Social Security to young voters as a replacement for a
"won't be there"-so it's said-when they retire. But in the tortured tales of financial crisis, the effects IS
proposal on future family life haven't often been mentioned. They should be. For it is not too much to say
the Bush's plan, if enacted, would impose a "family responsibility system" for elder care. And down the road,
that would tear many American families to shreds.
Old age is a time of economic, physical, and psychological stress. People grow frail. They fall ill. They
require medicine. They require care. They deplete their savings.
And while in the American family mythology of the "good old days" the burden of coping fell on a sturdy,
middle aged farmer or shopkeeper, in truth America's old were never well treated until Social Security came
along. In great numbers, they died off, poor and alone, soon after they could no longer work. If elderly
retirees were not a great burden on their families back then, it was because, in large part, they did not
exist.
Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security in 1935, but for a generation benefits were low. Into the 1960s,
almost one-third of the elderly lived below the poverty line. Then two things changed. The first was Lyndon
Johnson's Medicare, in 1965, which lifted the capricious burden of health care costs for the aged. The
other was the Social Security amendments of 1972, the result of a curious bidding war between Richard
Nixon and Wilbur Mills (chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and a candidate for president) during
the primaries. These imendments meant that, by the early 1980~{poverty rate for seniors was below that
of the rest of the population. By the end of the 1990s, it had fallen to just 10 percent.
The compound achievement of Roosevelt, Johnson, and Nixon had a rich benefit for families.
America's elderly were no longer dependent on their adult children. This was especially terrific for seniors
who did not have children. But it was also good for those who did-they were no longer obliged to come
around, hat in hand, to their sons and daughters. And-a point often neglected-it was equally excellent for
the offspring. They no longer faced the financial hazards of needy parents in old age, or the conflicts with
siblings over who would pay for what.
Once the elderly were provided the means to enjoy long retirements, their life expectancies soared, and the
proportion of the population living above the retirement age necessarily rose. When the government started
picking up the medical bills, the health care industry also mushroomed, creating the cornucopia of services
and treatments we have today. Thus, as Social Security lightened the burden on families, the total costs of
care for the elderly shot up.
On whom did these costs fall? Answer: They were and are distributed over the entire working population by
means of the payroll tax. The spread was not even. Those with incomes above the earnings cap paid a
smaller share of income than those with lower earnings. Those with income from investments escaped
contributing on that income. Still, everyone who worked did contribute. They did so whether or not they
personally had living. parents to support, whether or not their own parents were needy at any given time.
The sharing out of the costs-one of the greatest national enterprises in history made it possible for almost
all of America's elderly to live long lives of modest comfort. Social Security helped the family in two other
important ways. It provided disability benefits for those who could no longer work. permitting them to keep
their families intact. And for those who died young, it provided survivor's benefits that help a widowed
parent raise her (or his) children. Today, about a third of Social Security benefits go to the disabled and to
surviving spouses and their minor children. Of new beneficiaries, 20 percent are survivors, and more than 15
percent are disabled. NOW COMES President Bush, with a proposal (the full details, as I write, are still
undisclosed) to cut Social Security benefits and to establish, in partial compensation, a system of personal
stock accounts into which payroll tax revenues could be funneled. This plan is being sold to young Americans
as a way of making them "self-supporting." But the effect, in many cases, would be exactly the reverse.
Under Bush's plan many of today's young working people, when they are old, will become financially dependent
on their own kids.
Nobody would argue that those who currently depend on Social Security are rich-the average new recipient
gets $895 a month.
Bush's proposal would cut everyone's baseline benefits by decoupling them from average wage increases and
linking them instead to cost of living increases, which are lower.
Under present law, the elderly enjoy some of the wider economy's productivity gains; under Bush's proposal
they would not, and baseline benefits would fall dramatically. Bush claims that these cuts will be made up for
by income generated by privatized Social Security accounts. But your return would have to beat 3 percent
after inflation for you to come out ahead. Some might do so well, many would not; there is no guarantee that
future stock returns will match past performace. On top of that, if private accounts permit investor chose.
many will make bad or unlucky choices, and accounts will be depleted by fund managers' fees. Even if the
accounts don't permit choice, they will be subject to market timing. If the accounts don’t permit choice,
they will be subjest to market timing. If the market tanks the day before you retire, your screwed. This is
not a minor consideration. As everyone has known since 1929, a market crash often precedes a recession-in
which older workers especially are permanently displaced. Think of it as a double gift: First you lose your
pension, then your job. Fun. Finally, private accounts can never provide for survivors whose parents die
before accumulating a nest egg, or the disabled.
Bush's plan is a form of Russian roulette played with the lives, not of today's elderly, nor even those in late
middle age, but of today's young Americans. Many of these future elderly will be thrown back on the mercy
of their families. But the demographic realities have changed. The future elderly will live even longer than
this generation, and their care will be more costly than ever before.
There is no way in the world that their children will be able to support them, as Bush's family responsibility
system would force many to do. Who, even now, has an attic where a mother-in-law could go?
The most likely consequence is death.
The survival rates of America's future elderly-today's working young-would drop. For those seniors who have
no families to fall back on, life will simply become nastier, more brutish, and shorter. And what about those
whose families exist, but can't or won't do enough? There will be many. Even well meaning families-as most
are-will suffer torments of conflict and guilt as they try to make hard choices between their parents and
their children. Will they choose the past or the future? The cruelty of family life under this scheme is hard
to fathom.
Why aren't young people focused on this? Why do they only hear about the supposed "financing crisis" of
Social Security?
The answer lies in the propaganda and misinformation spread by those who would profit from changes to the
system-fund managers who want the commissions and insurance companies who want to reclaim the market
that Social Security took away long ago. President Bush's proposal strives to serve these supporters (and
preserve his tax cuts)-it's that simple.
As for the so-called dependency ratio-the number of retirees per worker, another key indicator of "crisis"
for the scare mongers it's irrelevant. Yes, dependency is rising, and yes, that means that the burden of
elder care falls on fewer and fewer workers. But whatever the economic consequences, this is merely a
demographic fact. It has nothing to do with Social Security. Dependency will rise whether Social Security is
preserved, privatized, or even abolished. It will rise under all variations of the privatization scheme.
Unless they really do die sooner, the elderly will not go away.
Therefore, income will have to be set aside to meet their needs. From any rational point of view, the only
issues are how much must be set aside, and on whom will this burden fall. We can continue to share are part
of the burden. In doing so, we recognize the reality that as the costs of caring for the elderly rise, a
collective system is not only affordable, but is actually the only way we can provide decently for all.
Or we can pass the burden over to the most fragile, uncertain, uneven, at-risk institution in America today.
That's the family, in case you haven't heard.
Social Security Reform is Simply a Diversion
by Robert B. Reich
The president just ended a 60-day whirlwind tour to try to sell his Social Security plan. But almost everyone
inside the Beltway, and a growing number outside, know it's going nowhere.
Polls show most Americans don't want to tinker with Social Security. Many Republicans, facing re-election,
don't want to touch it. Why still flog it?
Because Social Security is a place holder. As long as it remains on the domestic agenda, it blocks
consideration of the real domestic crisis President Bush doesn't want to touch: the health care system.
Consider the symptoms. Medicare, the government's health care program for the elderly, is heading toward
bankruptcy faster than Social Security. Its future unfunded liabilities are seven times larger. Social Security
is projected to be in financial trouble in four decades; Medicare, within 10 years.
Medicaid, the government's health care program for the poor, is also in trouble. Its costs are rising so fast
the White House and congressional Republicans want to whack it by $10 billion over the next five years. But
governors don't want Medicaid cut. States pick up half its cost. If the feds bow out, states will have to make
up the difference.
Symptom No. 3 is the increasing number of Americans without health insurance. Ten years ago, when
President Clinton's proposal for universal health care tanked, 38 million lacked health insurance. Now, 44
million are without it at some point during the year.
Meanwhile, Americans who get health insurance through their employer are suffering sticker shock. That's
because companies are rapidly shifting the escalating costs onto their employees. They're doing it through
higher co-payments and larger deductibles and premiums.
The last symptom is the huge financial burden on companies that can't shift rising health care costs onto
employees because of union contracts. For example, every car General Motors produces costs thousands
of extra dollars because of GM's health care tab. Health care is the single most contentious labor-
management issue today.
But it's possible to control health costs and at the same time give Americans far more health security.
One step is to use the government's bargaining clout to cut the prices medical providers and suppliers
charge. Through Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. government is the biggest health purchaser in the world.
It has the heft to get pharmaceutical companies to agree to far lower drug prices. The same bargaining
power could be used to bring down prices of other health care supplies and services.
Another step is to offer every American the chance to buy basic health insurance for the family at say, a few
hundred dollars a year. The low cost would be possible because so many Americans would be in the same
plan, generating vast economies of scale. In such a uniform system, transacting with a doctor or hospital of
your choice would be as easy as using an ATM.
As a result, far more Americans would get regular checkups, and health problems could be prevented.
Chronic illnesses such as heart disease could be identified before they got out of control. And catastrophic
illnesses such as cancer could be treated early. We'd end up with lower costs and better care.
It's the perfect time to respond to America's health care crisis. With the middle class squeezed by soaring
costs, big companies reeling and governors screaming, the political momentum is there.
But the Bush administration doesn't want to tackle it. Doing so would require an active role for government,
and they're ideologically opposed. They know the nation can pay attention to only one big domestic crisis at
a time. So they're using the fake crisis of Social Security as a diversion.
That's a shame. The real crisis of health care demands the nation's real attention.
Robert B. Reich, former U.S. secretary of Labor, is professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis.
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2004
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, AlterNet. Posted January 26, 2005.
The year's most egregious price gougers, polluters, union-busters, dictator-coddlers, fraudsters, poisoners,
deceivers and general miscreants. Story Tools
It is never easy choosing the 10 Worst Corporations of the Year – there are always more deserving
nominees than we can possibly recognize. One of the greatest challenges facing the judges is the directive
not to select repeat recipients from last year's 10 Worst designation.
The no-repeat rule forbids otherwise-deserving companies – like Bayer, Boeing, Clear Channel and
Halliburton – from returning to the 10 Worst list in 2004.
Of the remaining pool of price gougers, polluters, union-busters, dictator-coddlers, fraudsters, poisoners,
deceivers and general miscreants, we chose the following – presented in alphabetical order – as the 10
Worst Corporations of 2004:
Abbott Laboratories: Drug-Pricing Chutzpah
Chutzpah. Webster's defines the Yiddish term now incorporated into English slang as: 1. unmitigated
effrontery or impudence; gall. 2. audacity; nerve.
In the next edition, they may want to add: 3. See Abbott.
In December 2003, the company raised the U.S. price of its anti-AIDS drug Norvir (generic name ritanovir) by
400 percent. That is, unless the product is used in conjunction with other Abbott products – in which case
the price increase is zero.
Norvir has become an increasingly important treatment in recent years. Scientists have discovered that
while Norvir is generally too toxic for safe use as a protease inhibitor (one category of anti-AIDS drugs), in
lower doses it works well as a booster to increase the efficacy of other protease inhibitors. As a result,
Norvir is frequently prescribed along with other protease inhibitors.
The Norvir price increase does not apply when the product is used as a booster with another Abbott
protease inhibitor (in the combined product Kaletra). Thus the impact of the Norvir price increase is to make
Kaletra far cheaper than rival combinations of Norvir and non-Abbott protease inhibitors.
Norvir is especially important for patients in need of a "salvage therapy" of new and powerful treatments
because their virus has become resistant to other medicines.
Lynda Dee, co-chair of the AIDS Treatment Activists Coalition's Drug Development Committee, called the
price increase for these patients, who may have no choice as to the medications they need to survive,
"pharma-terrorism perpetrated against the patients who need new drugs the most."
Abbott said the price spike was justified by its need to raise money for research and development. "New
medicines cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop," Jeffrey Leiden, president and chief operating
officer of Abbott's Pharmaceutical Products Group, told a National Institutes of Health meeting in May.
Moreover, Leiden said, the price increase would not deny any patients access to the drug. The price
increase does not apply to federal AIDS drug programs, which cover 54 percent of people with HIV/AIDS.
Price increases only apply to private insurers and to uninsured individuals, who Abbott says can get the
product for free under a special program it operates.
Making the Abbott price jump especially pernicious in the eyes of consumer advocates was that the drug
was invented on a grant from the U.S. federal government.
Because of the U.S. government's financing role, Essential Inventions, Inc., a nonprofit corporation created
to distribute affordable public health and other inventions, in January petitioned the government to
exercise its "march-in" rights under the federal Bayh-Dole Act and issue an open license to generic firms to
produce their own version of Norvir.
"Essential Inventions is asking the Bush administration to adopt a simple rule – U.S. consumers should not
pay more for drugs invented on government grants," said Essential Inventions president James Love.
Following the U.S.-only price increase, Norvir is 5 to 10 times more expensive in the United States than in
other high-income countries.
But NIH rejected the Essential Inventions proposal, arguing that companies that obtained licenses to
government-funded inventions have a duty only to commercialize the inventions. NIH does not have
authority to consider the price at which a product is sold and the impact of the price on access, the agency
ruled – even though the Bayh-Dole Act says government-funded inventions should be made "available to
the public on reasonable terms."
"If Secretary Thompson agrees that quadrupling the price of a life-or-death AIDS drug, rigging the market,
and discriminating against U.S. consumers is 'reasonable,' you can't help but wonder what the [s]ecretary
considers unreasonable," said Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in criticizing the NIH decision.
AIG: Deferred Prosecutions On the Rise
When the world's largest insurer, American International Group Inc. (AIG), was charged by federal
prosecutors with crimes in November, it quickly cut a deal with the Justice Department that ended a criminal
probe into its finances with a deferred prosecution agreement.
In a deferred prosecution, the corporation accepts responsibility, agrees not to contest the charges, agrees
to cooperate, usually pays a fine and implements changes in corporate structure and governance to prevent
future wrongdoing.
If the company abides by the agreement for a period of time, then the prosecutors will drop the criminal
charges.
In a non-prosecution agreement – like the one secured by Merrill Lynch's in 2003 with New York Attorney
General Eliot Spitzer – prosecutors agree not to bring criminal charges in exchange for corporate fines,
cooperation and a change in corporate structure and governance.
"This comprehensive settlement brings finality to the claims raised by the SEC and the Department of
Justice," said AIG Chair M. R. Greenberg. "The role of the independent consultant complements our own
transaction review processes. We welcome this enhancement to our overall risk management and control
mechanisms."
Under the deal with AIG, an AIG subsidiary was charged with a crime for the next 12 months, but then the
charge will be dismissed with prejudice – if AIG abides by the deferred prosecution agreement.
As part of the agreement, AIG and two subsidiaries will pay an $80 million penalty, and $46 million into a
disgorgement fund maintained by the SEC.
Federal officials in October filed a criminal complaint charging AIG-FP PAGIC Equity Holding Corp., a
subsidiary of AIG, with violating the federal securities laws, by aiding and abetting PNC Financial Services
Group, Inc. (PNC) in connection with a fraudulent transaction to transfer $750 million in mostly troubled loans
and venture capital investments from subsidiaries off of its books.
These transactions were previously the subject of a deferred criminal disposition involving PNC.
Earlier this year, the Department dismissed the criminal complaint against a PNC subsidiary, after the
company fulfilled its deferred prosecution agreement obligations.
Merrill, AIG and PNC are three of 10 major corporations that have settled serious criminal charges with
deferred prosecution, no prosecution or de facto no prosecution agreements over the last two years.
Companies are getting off the criminal hook with these agreements, which were originally intended for
minor street crimes. Now they are being used in very serious corporate crime cases.
If a crime has been committed – and there is little doubt that crimes have been committed by the
corporations in these cases – then the companies should plead guilty and pay the penalty. If prosecutors
want to impose change on the corporation, they can do this after securing a conviction through probationary
orders. Right now, corporate lawyers are teaming up with prosecutors to go after individual executives
while the company's record is wiped clean.
Coca-Cola: KillerCoke.org vs. CokeKills.org
On KillerCoke.org, you'll find a raft of information on Coke and its bottlers' operations in Colombia. There is
extensive documentation of rampant violence committed against Coke's unionized workforce by paramilitary
forces, and powerful claims of the company's complicity in the violence.
An April 2004 report from a fact-finding delegation headed by New York City Council member Hiram
Monserrate contends:
"To date, there have been a total of 179 major human rights violations of Coca-Cola's workers, including nine
murders. Family members of union activists have been abducted and tortured. Union members have been
fired for attending union meetings. The company has pressured workers to resign their union membership
and contractual rights, and fired workers who refused to do so."
"Most troubling to the delegation were the persistent allegations that paramilitary violence against workers
was done with the knowledge of and likely under the direction of company managers."
Allegations such as these formed the basis of a lawsuit filed in 2001 by the International Labor Rights Fund
and the United Steelworkers of America in U.S. courts against Coke on behalf of a Colombian trade union
and union leader victims of violence at Coke bottling facilities in Colombia.
In 2003, a federal court dismissed the claims against Coke, arguing that its relationship with the owners of
the Coke bottling plant in Colombia was too attenuated to hold the soft drink multinational responsible for
human rights abuses at the plant. The plaintiffs have since refiled their complaint – they argue the original
decision was mistaken, but that Coke's subsequent purchase of the Colombia bottlers means the company is
now clearly responsible for the bottlers' actions.
Strangely, for the response to KillerCoke.org, you can check out CokeKills.org. That site, which is operated
by Coke, redirects you to CokeFacts.org.
Here's what Coke has to say:
"The pervasive violence in Colombia, and the targeting of union members by its perpetrators, has,
unfortunately, touched The Coca-Cola Company in a very personal way. Employees of our Company and
bottling partners in Colombia have been threatened, kidnapped, and some have even been murdered ... In a
lawsuit in Colombia, the court concluded that the bottler not only took proper steps to initiate investigation
by the authorities, but went further to enhance its workers' safety by heightening security at the plant."
Leave aside for the moment the issue of Coke's legal liability. The idea that Coke can't control the behavior
of its bottlers is simply implausible. It can control them if it so chooses – just the way that clothing retailers
can control the actions of their manufacturers, but even more so.
Instructive in raising questions about Coke's good-faith concern for its workers is its unwillingness to
support an independent investigation into the Colombia allegations – even after the company's former
General Counsel, and the former assistant U.S. attorney general, Deval Patrick, had committed to one.
Coke's refusal to authorize an investigation reportedly contributed to Patrick's decision to resign from the
corporation.
Dow Chemical: Forgive Us Our Trespasses
At midnight on Dec. 2, 1984, 27 tons of lethal gases leaked from Union Carbide's pesticide factory in Bhopal,
India, immediately killing an estimated 8,000 people and poisoning thousands of others.
Today in Bhopal, at least 150,000 people, including children born to parents who survived the disaster, are
suffering from exposure-related health effects such as cancer, neurological damage, chaotic menstrual
cycles and mental illness. Over 20,000 people are forced to drink water with unsafe levels of mercury,
carbon tetrachloride and other persistent organic pollutants and heavy metals.
Activists from around the world – including human rights, legal, environmental health and other experts –
mobilized this year to demand that Dow Chemical, the current owner of Union Carbide, be held accountable.
Twenty years after this disaster, the company responsible for this catastrophe and its former executives are
still fugitives from justice. Union Carbide and its former chairman, Warren Andersen, were charged with
manslaughter for the deaths at Bhopal, but they refuse to appear before the Indian courts.
Here is part of Dow's statement on Bhopal:
While Dow has no responsibility for Bhopal, we have never forgotten the tragic event and have helped to
drive global industry performance improvements. This is why Responsible Care was created and why these
standards are essential for the protection of our employees and the communities where we live and work.
Our pledge and our commitment is the full implementation of Responsible Care everywhere we do business
around the world.
Dow has no responsibility for Bhopal? The people of Bhopal don't agree. They say Union Carbide was
responsible, and if Union Carbide is now owned by Dow, then Dow is responsible.
In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the crime of Bhopal, we present here 20 things to remember
about Dow Chemical – the company now responsible for Bhopal and a fugitive from justice.
20. Agent Orange/Napalm: The toxic herbicide and jellied gasoline used in Vietnam created horrors for young
and old alike.
19. Rocky Flats: The top secret Colorado site managed by Dow Chemical from 1952 to 1975 remains an
environmental nightmare.
18. Body burden: In March 2001, the Centers for Disease Control reported that most people in the United
States carry detectable levels of plastics, pesticides and heavy metals in their blood and urine.
17. 2,4-D: One of the key ingredients in Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant used in Vietnam, 2,4-D is still the
most widely used herbicide in the world.
16. Mercury: In Canada, Dow had been producing chlorine using the mercury cell method since 1947. Much
of the mercury was recycled, but significant quantities were discharged into the environment. In March 1970,
the governments of Ontario and Michigan detected high levels of mercury in fish in major waterways. Dow
was sued by state and local officials for mercury pollution.
15. PERC: Perchloroethylene is the hazardous substance used by dry cleaners everywhere. Dow tried to
undermine safer alternatives.
14. 2,4,5 T: One of the toxic ingredients in Agent Orange.
13. Busting unions: In 1967, unions represented almost all of Dow's production workers. But since then,
according to the Metal Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, Dow undertook an "unapologetic campaign to rid
itself of unions."
12. Silicone: The key ingredient for silicone breast implants made women sick. Litigation continues over
silicone breast implants, removed from the market more than a decade ago.
11. DBCP: The toxic active ingredient in the Dow pesticide Fumazone. Doctors who tested men who worked
with DBCP thought they had vasectomies, because no sperm was present.
10. Dursban: Trade name for chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide, proved to have nerve agent effects. It was
tested on prisoners in New York in 1971. It replaced DDT when DDT was banned in 1972. A huge seller, in
June 2000, EPA limited its use and forced it off the market at the end of 2004.
9. Dow at Christmas: "Uses of Dow plastics by the toy industry are across the board," boasted Dow Chemical
in an internal company memo one Christmas season. Among the chemicals used in these toys are
polystyrene, polyethylene, ethylene copolymer resins, saran resins, PVC resins, or vinyls and ethyl cellulose.
8.The Tittabawassee: A river and river basin polluted by Dow in its hometown, Midland, Mich.
7. Brazos River, Freeport, Texas: A February 1971 headline in the Houston Post read: "Brazos River is Dead."
In 1970 and 1971, Dow's operation there was sending more than 4.5 billion gallons of wastewater per day into
the Brazos and on into the Gulf of Mexico.
6. Toxic Trespass: From Trespass Against Us: Dow Chemical and the Toxic Century by Jack Doyle: "Dow
Chemical has been polluting property and poisoning people for nearly a century, locally and globally –
trespassing on workers, consumers, communities, and innocent bystanders – on wildlife and wild places, on
the global biota and the global genome."
5. Holmesburg Experiments: In January 1981, a Philadelphia Inquirer story revealed that Dow Chemical paid a
University of Pennsylvania dermatologist to test dioxin on prisoners at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia in
1964.
4. Worker deaths: Dow has a long history of explosions and fires at its facilities. In May 1979, an explosion
ripped through Dow's Pittsburgh facility, killing two workers and injuring more than 45 others.
3. Brain tumors: In 1980, investigators found 25 workers with brain tumors at the company's Freeport, Texas
facility – 24 of which were fatal.
2. Saran Wrap: The thin slice of plastic invaluable to our lives, Saran Wrap was produced by Dow until
consumers went looking for Dow products to boycott.
1. Bhopal.
GlaxoSmithKline: Deadly Depressing
GlaxoSmithKline, Paxil and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs): It was the story that
foreshadowed and strikingly paralleled the controversy surrounding Merck, Vioxx and Cox-2 inhibitors.
With the antidepressant Paxil (generic name: paroxetine), the story was driven primarily from the United
Kingdom, by the BBC program Panorama and a public interest group called Social Audit. They called
attention to the severe side effects from the drugs; notably that they are addictive and lead to increased
suicidality in youth.
In 2003, the evidence of dangerous side effects had piled too high for British regulators to continue to
ignore them. In June, the UK health experts advised that children should not be prescribed Paxil.
In February 2004, Panorama reported on internal documents from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) showing the
company knew that Paxil could not be proved to work in children.
In March 2004, days after the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (the UK's drug
regulatory agency) advised that Paxil dosages should be kept to low levels, an expert participating in the
Paxil review resigned, claiming the agency had possessed evidence for more than a decade suggesting that
Paxil dosages should be kept low, but failed to act on it.
By this time, the story had started to heat up in the United States. Dr. Andrew Mosholder, of the FDA Office of
Drug Safety, had conducted an analysis of clinical trials related to antidepressant use in children, and found
a heightened risk of suicidality. But his superiors refused to let him present his findings to an advisory
panel convened to look at the issue in the wake of the British action.
According to an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the FDA actually tried to get Mosholder to
present data that deceptively underrepresented the risk of suicidality.
Although Paxil is not approved by the FDA for prescription to children, doctors routinely write "off-label"
prescriptions for the product for children, a practice permitted under FDA rules. More than two million
prescriptions for Paxil were written for children and adolescents in the United States in 2002.
In April 2004, the Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, published a paper showing that clinical test
data did show problems with prescribing Paxil and other SSRIs to children.
In June, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed suit against Glaxo, charging the giant drug maker
with suppressing evidence of Paxil's harm to children, and misleading physicians.
GSK responded in a statement that it "acted responsibly in conducting clinical studies in pediatric patients
and disseminating data from those studies. All pediatric studies have been made available to the FDA and
regulatory agencies worldwide."
Spitzer's complaint cited a 1998 GSK memo which states that the company must "manage the dissemination
of these data in order to minimi[z]e any potential negative commercial impact."
Responding to Spitzer's suit, GSK claimed that, "As for the 1998 memo, it is inconsistent with the facts and
does not reflect the company position."
The New York complaint asserted as well that "GSK has repeatedly misrepresented the safety and efficacy
outcomes from its studies of paroxetine as a treatment for MDD [Major Depressive Disorder] in a pediatric
population to its employees who promote paroxetine to physicians."
In August, the company settled with Spitzer for $2.5 million, plus a commitment to maintain the policy of
posting clinical trial results, for all drugs marketed by the company.
The next month, the Star-Ledger of New Jersey reported on a Glaxo memo from the year before, instructing
the company's sales force not to talk to doctors about company data showing dangers from prescribing Paxil
to kids.
In October, the FDA ordered Glaxo and other SSRI makers to include a "black box" warning with their pills.
The warning says SSRIs double the risk of suicide in children, though some medical researchers say the
number should be higher. At least one GSK clinical trial showed 7.5 percent of youth taking Paxil suffering
from suicidality (versus zero percent among those taking a placebo).
Glaxo continues to insist that it disclosed information to appropriate authorities as soon as it discerned
important results from its clinical studies.
Hardee's: Heart Attack on a Bun
When Hardee's introduced the Thickburger this year, Jay Leno joked that it was being served in little
cardboard boxes shaped like coffins.
With other major fast food outlets moving to green salads, Hardee's revels in big beef. From Hardee's press
release of Nov. 15, 2004:
Now Hardee's is introducing the mother of all burgers – the Monster Thickburger™. Weighing in at two-
thirds of a pound, this 100 percent Angus beef burger is a monument to decadence, yet is still a throwback,
as it features lots of meat, cheese and bacon on a bun.
Clearly, Hardee's, a subsidiary of CKE Restaurants, Inc. of Carpinteria, Calif., is not worried about the public
health aspects of unleashing the monster into the marketplace.
Eating one Thickburger is like eating two Big Macs or five McDonald's hamburgers. Add 600 calories worth
of Hardee's fries and you get more than the 2,000 calories that many people should eat in a whole day,
according to Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) earlier this year charged KFC Corporation, owner of the Kentucky Fried
Chicken national restaurant chain, with making false claims in a national television advertising campaign
about the relative nutritional value and healthiness of its fried chicken.
The false claim? KFC said that eating fried chicken, specifically two Original Recipe fried chicken breasts, is
better for a consumer's health than eating a Burger King Whopper.
The FTC says that while it is true that the two fried chicken breasts have slightly less total fat and saturated
fat than a Whopper, they have more than three times the trans fat and cholesterol, more than twice the
sodium, and more calories.
KFC settled the case.
But there will be no law enforcement action brought against Hardee's. Hardee's makes no pretensions that
the Hardee's Thickburger is good for you, and has no qualms about the impact of the monster on the public's
health. The fast-food pusher's new advertising campaign is straight up: "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
As The New York Times put it in an editorial, "It is a setback for public health, but a triumph for truth in
advertising."
Merck: 55,000 Dead
It's not as if people in power didn't know about the impending disaster – what David Graham, a Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) drug safety official, calls "maybe the single greatest drug-safety catastrophe in
the history of this country.''
Testifying before a Senate committee in November, Dr. Graham put the number in United States who had
suffered heart attacks or stroke as result of taking the arthritis drug Vioxx in the range of 88,000 to 139,000.
As many as 40 percent of these people, or about 35,000-55,000, died as a result, Graham said.
The unacceptable cardiovascular risks of Vioxx were evident as early as 2000 – a full four years before the
drug was finally withdrawn from the market by its manufacturer, Merck, according to a study released by the
Lancet, the British medical journal.
"This discovery points to astonishing failures in Merck's internal systems of post-marketing surveillance, as
well as to lethal weaknesses in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's regulatory oversight," Lancet
editors wrote.
Authors of the Lancet study pooled data from 25,273 patients who participated in 18 clinical trials conducted
before 2001. They found that patients given Vioxx had 2.3 times the risk of heart attacks as those given
placebos or other pain medications.
Merck withdrew Vioxx on Sept. 30 of this year after a company-sponsored trial found a doubling of the risks
for heart attack or stroke among those who took the medicine for 18 months or more.
Merck says it disclosed all relevant evidence on Vioxx safety as soon as it acquired it, and pulled the drug
as soon as it saw conclusive evidence of the drug's dangers.
"Over the past six years," Merck CEO Raymond Gilmartin told the Senate Finance Committee at the
November hearing where Graham made his big splash, "since the time Merck submitted a New Drug
Application for Vioxx to the FDA, we have promptly disclosed the results of numerous Merck-sponsored
studies to the FDA, physicians, the scientific community and the media and participated in a balanced,
scientific discussion of its risks and benefits."
Until the September clinical trial results came in, Gilmartin said, "the combined data from randomized
controlled clinical trials showed no difference in confirmed cardiovascular event rates between Vioxx and
placebo and Vioxx and NSAIDs other than naproxen. When data from the APPROVe study [the September
results] became available, Merck acted quickly to withdraw the medicine from the market."
But there is evidence that strongly suggests a different version of the story.
The Lancet findings came in the wake of new disclosures that suggest Merck was fully aware of Vioxx's
potential risks by 2000.
The Wall Street Journal revealed emails that confirm Merck executives' knowledge of their drug's adverse
cardiovascular profile – the risk was "clearly there," according to one senior researcher.
"Given this disturbing contradiction – Merck's own understanding of Vioxx's true risk profile and its attempt
to gloss over these risks in their public statements at the time – it is hard to see how Merck's chief
executive officer, Raymond Gilmartin, can retain the confidence of the public, his company's most important
constituency," the Lancet editors wrote.
Dr. Graham, the federal drug-safety reviewer, continues to seek to publish his study demonstrating the
dangers of Vioxx, but he has been delayed and demeaned by top officials at the Food and Drug
Administration.
At the Senate hearing, Dr. Graham said that the FDA "as currently configured is incapable of protecting
America against another Vioxx," because of ties between agency reviewers and the pharmaceutical industry.
Graham says that as a result of his testimony, his bosses have threatened to toss him out of the FDA's drug
safety unit.
At the Senate hearing, Graham said that at least five medications currently on the market pose such risks
that their sale ought to be limited or stopped. Graham named the five as Meridia, Crestor, Accutane, Bextra
and Serevent.
In November 2004, Forbes.com named David Graham "face of the year."
We join with Forbes in saluting Graham "for his steadfast advocacy of drug safety and his willingness to
blow the whistle on his bosses."
McWane: Death on the Job
The New York Times ran a three-part series by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman that exposed the
egregious safety record of McWane Inc., a large, privately held Alabama-based sewer and water pipe
manufacturer.
Nine McWane employees have lost their lives in workplace accidents since 1995. More than 4,600 injuries
were recorded among the company's 5,000 employees.
According to the series, one man died when an industrial oven exploded after he was directed to use it to
incinerate highly combustible paint. Another was crushed by a conveyor belt that lacked a required
protective guard.
Three of McWane's nine deaths were the result of deliberate violations of safety standards. In five others,
safety lapses were a contributing factor.
According to the Times, McWane pulled the wool over the eyes of investigators by stalling them at the
factory gates, and then hiding defective equipment. Accident sites were altered before investigators could
inspect them, in violation of federal rules.
When government enforcement officials did find serious violations, "the punishment meted out by the
federal government was so minimal that McWane could treat it as simply a cost of doing business."
"After a worker was crushed to death by a forklift that apparently had faulty brakes, an Occupational Safety
and Health Administration investigation found defects in all 14 of the plant's forklifts, including the one
involved in the death," the Times reported. The fine was just $10,500. Employers are further protected by the
workers' compensation system, which can make it hard for victims to sue."
According to the Times, in one McWane oven explosion that killed an employee, Frank Wagner, McWane
"hired a well-connected lobbyist to lean on Dennis Vacco, then New York State's attorney general, and
ended up with a settlement in which it did not admit responsibility for the death."
The experts who looked at the case determined that the explosion that killed him was the result of reckless
criminal actions by McWane, which was operating a cast-iron foundry in Elmira, N.Y., where Wagner worked.
"The evidence compels us to act," the prosecution team wrote in a confidential memorandum to Vacco in
1996. The team urged him to ask a grand jury to indict McWane and its managers on manslaughter and other
charges. A grand jury inquiry, senior investigators believed, could have taken them up the corporate ladder,
the Times reported.
But Vacco never sought an indictment against McWane for any crime.
Only after an unusual intervention by the United States attorney in Buffalo, who threatened federal charges,
did McWane agree to plead guilty to a state felony and pay $500,000.
"But as the company and Mr. Wagner's widow are quick to note, that charge, a hazardous-waste violation,
specifically did not hold McWane accountable for Mr. Wagner's death," the Times reported.
"It was a reckless act on the part of certain individuals in that company that caused the death of that person.
I'll believe that till the day I die," says Donald Snell, who supervised the state environmental agency's
investigation. "The ends of justice were not met."
As the Times series showed, in plant after plant, year after year, "McWane workers have been maimed,
burned, sickened and killed by the same safety and health failures."
McWane says it is changing – and it's certainly paying more attention to PR after the Times series.
"Over the last several years, our Company has embarked on significant changes that are focused on setting
the industry standard in employee safety, health and environmental programs," asserts a May 2004 report
from the company on health and safety.
That doesn't exactly jibe with what company managers call "the McWane way" – what federal and state
regulators characterized to the Times as a "lawless" and "rogue" operation that ruthlessly sought profits
with disregard for worker safety and well-being.
Now, consider this:
McWane is responsible for nine worker deaths and countless injuries.
Scott Peterson was responsible for the death of his wife and unborn child.
Which one did the mass television media focus on?
Who got the death penalty?
And why?
Riggs Bank: The Pinochet Connection
Being a military dictator is not as easy as it looks.
You need suppliers of weapons. You need an army to work with you. And, if you are a crook – as most
military dictators are – you need a bank to hold on to your money.
That's where Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. comes in.
An explosive report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on
Governmental Affairs, issued in July, revealed that Riggs illegally operated bank accounts for former Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet, and routinely ignored evidence of corrupt practices in managing more than 60
accounts for the government of Equatorial Guinea.
An ongoing internal investigation by Riggs has revealed that the bank's dealing with Pinochet dates back to
1985, while the Chilean despot remained in power, according to a November Washington Post report.
Riggs has not so far been cited for civil or criminal violations in connection with the Pinochet money-
laundering scheme. In May, the bank paid $25 million in fines in connection with money-laundering violations
related to the Equatorial Guinea and Saudi Arabian governments.
The bank is the subject of ongoing criminal investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S.
Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, according to recent filings with the Securities and Exchange
Commission.
Riggs, which traces its history back to 1840, likes to brag about serving such historical figures as President
Abraham Lincoln (and 19 other presidents) and American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, and having
supplied the gold for the purchase of the state of Alaska.
It capitalized on its venerable reputation in Washington to become the banker to the embassies that dot the
city and the large foreign diplomatic corps resident in the U.S. capital.
Riggs eagerly sought to service them all, apparently even when dictators and their families requested the
bank engage in illegal activities to launder money.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report found that from 1994 until 2002, Riggs opened at
least six accounts and issued several certificates of deposit (CDs) for Pinochet while he was under house
arrest in the United Kingdom and his assets were the subject of court proceedings. The aggregate deposits
in the Pinochet accounts at Riggs ranged from $4 million to $8 million at a time.
What is now becoming apparent is that Riggs was collaborating with Pinochet even a decade earlier, with a
scale of activity not yet clear.
Riggs was not a passive or unknowing actor in this drama. According to the Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations report, high bank officials solicited Pinochet's business, the bank helped Pinochet set up
offshore shell corporations and open accounts in the names of those corporations to disguise his control of
the accounts, altered the names of his personal accounts to disguise their ownership, and otherwise
worked to help him hide his money flow.
Although these activities seem to violate U.S. banking rules, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
(OCC) did not take enforcement action against the bank after it learned of these matters in 2002. That
presumably was not unrelated to the fact that the OCC examiner at Riggs soon thereafter went to work for
Riggs.
This is not just a matter of avoiding taxes or failing to follow legalistic rules. These are the actions that
reward dictators, and help them live lavishly after stepping down from power. They come at the expense of
the dictator's victims – thousands of dead and tortured in the case of Pinochet. For those who need a
reminder of Pinochet's brutality, see www.memoriaviva.com for a moving list and pictures of victims.
Pinochet is not the only dictator for whom Riggs undertook money laundering.
Equatorial Guinea is a small, oil-rich West African country dominated by a dictator, President Teodoro Obiang
Nguema Mbasago. Obiang, his family and cronies live a life of luxury, while the rest of the country remains
desperately poor.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report found that from 1995 until 2004, Riggs Bank
administered more than 60 accounts and CDs for the government of Equatorial Guinea, Equatorial Guinea
government officials or their family members. Money laundering to cover up corruption appeared to be
routine.
Combined, these accounts represented the largest relationship at Riggs Bank, with aggregate deposits
ranging from $400 to $700 million at a time.
Riggs does not deny these activities took place, and its internal investigation is continuing. A number of
Riggs employees involved in the scandals have been fired or demoted. In July, Riggs announced that it was
going to be acquired by PNC Financial Services Group (about which see the profile of AIG above) for more
than $700 million. Ongoing legal problems at Riggs could derail the deal, which is supposed to be
consummated early in 2005, but for now both parties say it remains on.
Wal-Mart: The Workfare Company
You only have to look at the cover of Wal-Mart's 2004 Annual Report to know the company is facing trouble
unlike any it has had to handle before.
"It's my Wal-Mart," asserts the slogan on the cover of the annual report.
At the bottom are these claims: "Good Jobs * Good Works * Good Citizen * Good Investment."
Missing is any reference to "Always Low Prices."
Stepped up and novel community and legal challenges confronting the company are making the mammoth
retailer expend energy on repositioning its image. Hence the annual report, the major image-oriented
television ads, the sponsorships on National Public Radio – listened to by few of its shoppers – and the
huge surge in campaign contributions. Wal-Mart and its managers gave more than $2 million to federal
candidates in the last U.S. electoral cycle, more than any oil company, and almost triple the level the
company donated in the 2000 elections.
The company faces a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1.6 million women workers, alleging rampant
employment discrimination at Wal-Mart.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has announced plans to spend $25 million a year with the
ultimate goal of unionizing Wal-Mart, the largest private U.S. employer.
And the company – which has already lost more than 200 site fights – faces an even more-intensified
resistance to its efforts to locate new stores, as it increasingly seeks to enter markets in more urban areas.
In April, voters in the largely African-American and Latino working class town of Inglewood, California
rejected a referendum that would have allowed Wal-Mart to open a Supercenter without being subject to
normal municipal reviews.
But while on a bit of a public relations defensive, the company remains the colossus of U.S. – and
increasingly global – retailing. It registers more than a quarter trillion dollars in sales. Its revenues account
for 2 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
The company takes in more than one in five dollars spent nationally on food sales, and market researcher
Retail Forward predicts Wal-Mart will control more than a third of food store industry sales, as well as a
quarter of the drug store industry, by 2007. Wal-Mart is the largest jewelry seller in the United States,
"despite the fact that the prime target market for jewelry – high-income women from 25 to 54 years – are the
least likely of all consumers to shop for jewelry in discount channels," as Unity Marketing notes. Wal-Mart is
the largest outlet for sales of CDs, videos and DVDs. And on and on.
For two years running, Fortune has named Wal-Mart the most admired company in America. It is arguably the
defining company of the present era.
The company's business model has relied on new innovations in inventory management, focusing on
ignored markets (low-income shoppers in rural areas – though this is now changing), and squeezing
suppliers to lower their margins. But it has also relied centrally on undercompensating employees and
externalizing costs on to society.
A February 2004 report issued by Representative George Miller, D-California, encapsulated the ways that
Wal-Mart squeezes and cheats its employees, among them: blocking union organizing efforts, paying
employees an average $8.23 an hour (as compared to more than $10 for an average supermarket worker),
allegedly extracting off-the-clock work, and providing inadequate and unaffordable healthcare packages for
employees.
Miller's report's innovation was in documenting how Wal-Mart's low wages and inadequate benefits not only
hurt workers directly, but impose costs on taxpayers. The report estimated that one 200-person Wal-Mart
store may result in a cost to federal taxpayers of $420,750 per year – about $2,103 per employee. These
public costs include:
$36,000 a year for free and reduced lunches for just 50 qualifying Wal-Mart families.
$42,000 a year for Section 8 housing assistance, assuming 3 percent of the store employees qualify for such
assistance, at $6,700 per family.
$125,000 a year for federal tax credits and deductions for low-income families, assuming 50 employees are
heads of household with a child and 50 are married with two children.
$100,000 a year for the additional Title I [educational] expenses, assuming 50 Wal-Mart families qualify with
an average of two children.
$108,000 a year for the additional federal healthcare costs of moving into state children's health insurance
programs (S-CHIP), assuming 30 employees with an average of two children qualify.
"There's no question that Wal-Mart imposes a huge, often hidden, cost on its workers, our communities and
U.S. taxpayers," Miller said. "And Wal-Mart is in the driver's seat in the global race to the bottom,
suppressing wage levels, workplace protections and labor laws."
Wal-Mart's abuses are giving rise to countervailing efforts, but it is an open question whether the company
has amassed such power that it will be able to defeat such initiatives.
In California, in November, the company was able to stave off by a 51-to 49 percent margin a proposition that
would have required every large and medium employer in the state to provide decent healthcare coverage
for their workers, with the employer contribution set at a minimum of 80 percent of costs.
Wal-Mart dumped a half million dollars into the anti-Proposition 72 campaign just a week before the vote.
"As one of California's leading employers, we care about the health of our 60,000 employees here," said Wal-
Mart spokesperson Cynthia Lin, in celebrating the defeat of Proposition 72. "That's why we provide our
employees with affordable, quality health care coverage."
"Prop. 72 was never about Wal-Mart," she claimed. "It was about allowing businesses to operate without
unreasonable government mandates, it was about the survival of small businesses and it was about
consumer choice in healthcare benefits."
The biggest immediate challenge facing Wal-Mart is the class action lawsuit filed by its women workers. The
women allege that Wal-Mart pays female workers less than men, promotes men faster than women and men
above more competent women, and fosters a hostile work environment. A federal judge ruled in June that
the case could proceed as a class action.
"We strongly disagree with his decision and will seek an appeal," says company spokesperson Mona
Williams. "While we cannot comment on the specifics of the litigation, we can say we continue to evaluate
our employment practices. For example, earlier this month Wal-Mart announced a new job classification and
pay structure for hourly associates. This new pay plan was developed with the assistance of third party
consultants and is designed to ensure internal equity and external competitiveness."
Liza Featherstone, who has chronicled the claims of the women employees in her book Selling Women
Short, says women workers report "a pattern of arbitrary, very subjective decision-making by management."
They report business meetings being held at Hooter's or strip clubs.
The contradiction of a self-righteously moral company – which won't sell racy magazines or CDs with parental
advisory labels – permitting such behavior is a reflection of women employees' powerlessness. "Unlike its
female workforce," Featherstone writes, "the women who shop at Wal-Mart can't be ignored, and many of
them have conservative values."
But while Wal-Mart is willing to bend to consumer demand on marginal issues like covering over the
headlines on Cosmopolitan magazine, it is not so flexible on respect for worker rights. Nor is there any sign
of a consumer rebellion on anything like the scale necessary to make the company revisit its employment
policies.
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman are co-authors of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the
Destruction of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press). Robert Weissman is general counsel
for Essential Inventions, a nonprofit mentioned in the Abbott profile.
Kevin Phillips, Author of "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of
Bush"
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
"Now what I get a sense of from all of this -- and then topped obviously by spending all the money in 2000 to
basically buy the election -- is that this is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American
democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of
Independence or the Constitution." -- Kevin Phillips
Hey, you would expect this kind of talk from a lefty, right. But Kevin Phillips ain't no lefty. He's a former Nixon
staffer and authored "The Emerging Republican Majority" back then. He hasn't had any transformation that has
turned him into a -- God Forbid! -- Democrat. As he tells BuzzFlash, he voted for Reagan twice and would have
eagerly voted for John McCain.
He hasn't stopped being Republican. It's just that he's appalled at what the Republican Party has become under
the Bush dynasty.
In "American Dynasty," Phillips weaves evidence of the Bush family's dynastic sense of entitlement -- and
corruption -- throughout this erudite book.
"Few have looked at the facts of the family's rise, but just as important, commentators have neglected the thread --
not the mere occasion -- of special interests, biases, scandals (especially those related to arms dealing), and blatant
business cronyism" Phillips writes in his preface. "The evidence that accumulates over four generations [of the
Bush family dynasty] is really quite damning."
"Three generations of immersion in the culture of secrecy...deceit and disinformation have become Bush political
hallmarks," Phillips notes.
Entitlement, elitism, privilege, secrecy, mediocrity, corruption, financial cronyism, bailouts of family failures by the
taxpayers -- these are some of the true characteristics of the Bush Dynasty, according to Phillips.
To Phillips, however, the greatest threat to America posed by the Bush dynasty is not its inherent unfitness to rule.
What most offends and angers Phillips is the threat that the imposition of the Bush dynasty on America poses to
democracy itself. The American rebellion in 1776 represented the creation of a nation built on the foundations of a
government elected by the people, not determined by the restoration to power of corrupt bloodlines.
No book makes a stronger case against an American sitting in the White House who believes that he is in power
because of hereditary entitlement and divine choice. Patriots rebelled against King George in 1776. Phillips notes
that Americans have the opportunity to dethrone the Bush dynasty at the polls in 2004.
That is if the electronic software is not rigged in favor of the monarchy.
To buy "American Dynasty" as a BuzzFlash premium, go to:
EXCERPTS
Introduction
Concern about the first U.S. dynastic presidency first emerged in 2000, prompted by skeptics of the Bush
succession, as well as by amateur historians unnerved by analogies to the seventeenth-century English Stuart and
eighteenth-century French Bourbon restorations. The topic gained credibility when the 2002 elections confirmed
George W. Bush’s popularity and the war of early Spring 2003 displayed his personal commitment to renewing his
father’s unfinished combat with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Controversial wars and geopolitical ambitions, after all,
have frequently originated as dynastic ambitions.
Other institutional aspects warrant national concern. Dynasties tend to show continuities of policy and interest-
group bias—in the case of the Bushes, favoritism toward the energy sector, defense industries, the Pentagon and
CIA, as well as insistence on tax breaks for the investor class and upper income groups. Families restored to
power also have a history of revenge against old foes—George W. Bush’s record has included retiring such
taunters of his father as Texas Governor Ann Richards (in 1994) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Bush helped
to force him out after the 1998 elections) and apppointing former officials dating back not just to his father’s term
but to the Ford administration of 1974-76, a virtual incubator of the Republican Party’s Bush faction.
This dynasticism was hardly a phenomenon unique to the United States. In the first few years of the twenty-first
century, the restoration of old European royal houses was discussed in Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Italy. As in
the United States, the principals were political
Another questionable aspect of dynastic control is the effect of biological inheritance. History is all too familiar
with the Hapsburg nose, and the Tudor temper. Some pundits have queried whether heredity might explain certain
behavior shared by the two Bush presidents —frenetic activity, scrambled speech, the hint of dyslexic
arrangements of thought. Although the press has been reticent to pursue such matters, they do have a genuine
relevance. Three, perhaps four, generations of Bushes have displayed great capacities for remembering names,
faces and statistics. Dallas News reporter Bill Minutaglio, a biographer of the younger Bush, discovered that
George H.W. Bush, “went so far as to tell his spokesman Marlin Fitzwater to gather together the photographs of
the Washington press corps so he could memorize all their names; the Bush men were always startlingly better
than anyone else at memorizing names.” At the same time, both father and son hve shown little talent for
conceptualization or abstraction. Is it a coincidence? Dynasty, with its subordination of individual achievement to
gene pools and bloodlines, involves a gamble on the nuances of that heredity.
In the United States, as we will see, the twentieth-century rise of the Bush family was built on the five pillars of
American global sway: the international reach of U.S. investment banking, the emerging giantism of the military-
industrial complex, the ballooning of the CIA and kindred intelligence operations, the drive for U.S. control of
global oil supplies and a close alliance with Britain and the English-speaking community. This century of upward
momentum brought a sequence of controversies, albeit ones that never gained critical mass—such as the
exposure in 1942 of Prescott Bush’s corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to over-
ambitious 1920s investment banking, the Bush family’s longtime involvement with global armaments and the
military-industrial complex (that latter was big enough by 1961 that President Eisenhower warned against it) and a
web of close connections to the CIA, ones that began decades before George Bush’s brief CIA directorship in
1976. Threads like these weigh may not weigh heavily on individual presidencies; they are many times more
troubling in a dynasty.
We must be cautious here not to transmute commercial relationships into latter day conspiracy theory, a
transformation that epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter years ago called the “paranoid streak” in
American politics. (Ttry a Google internet search for “George Bush and Hitler,” for example.) On the other hand,
worries about conspiracy thinking should not be inhibit inquiries in a way that blocks sober examination, which
often more properly identifies some kind of elite behavior familiar to sociologists and political scientists alike.
The particular evolution of elites within nations that became leading world economic powers over the last four
centuries is something I have discussed in several previous books, especially Wealth and Democracy (2002). The
growth of a nation’s “establishment” to its zenith is invariably an accretive process, not a sequence of plots. Still,
“old boy” networks or their equivalents are usually important. They can—and do— help to bury inconvenient
memories or embarrassing documentation.
Treating the Bush presidencies as growing out of a four-generation interaction with the so-called U.S.
establishment is, in a word, essential. Dealing separately with the administrations of George H W. and George W.
—worse, ignoring linkages of behavior in office—is like considering individual planets while ignoring their orbits
and solar system.
Four examples are illustrative. One is the repeated use of family influence in arranging or smoothing difficulties
over the military service of three generations: Prescott, George H. W. and George W. Similarly, the involvement
of four Walker and Bush generations with finance—in several cases, the investment side of the petroleum
business—helps to explain their recurrent pre-occupation with investments, capital gains and tax shelters. George
W. Bush’s 2003 commitment to ending taxation of dividends simply extended his father’s repetitive calls for
reducing capital gains tax rates as the solution to any weakness in the national economy. Third, the family’s ties to
oil date back to Ohio steelmakere Samuel Bush’s relationship to Standard Oil a century ago, while it ultimately
dynastic connection to Enron spanned the first national Bush administration, the six years of George W. Bush’s
governorship of Texas, and the first year of his Washington No other presidential family has made such enduring
efforts for a single corporation. Finally, there is no previous parallel to the relationships betwen the Bushes and
the CIA and its predecessor organizations, which began in the invisible-ink and Ashenden, Secret Agent days of
George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush. Quite simply, analyzing separately the two Bush presidencies risks
losing sight of such essential and revealing leitmotifs.
Arguably, a clan lacking a continuity probably could not have succeeded in establishing a dynatic presidency. It
would not have developed the requisite establishment interface. The term “dynastic” is used here to describe a
fact, not a theory: the succession of 2000 in which the eldest son of a defeated president was eight years later
chosen and inaugurated as the next president of his father’s party. Such inheritance has no American precedent; it
trespasses, at least spiritually, on the governance framed by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Madison.
Hereditary rulers were to be feared, the founders knew, even when, like the 15th century Medicis of Florence,
they initially chose to keep the framework of the republic.
The election of 2000 became an obvious pivot by marking a full-fledged family restoration, which necessarily
established a dynasty. “Restoration” may—at first, probably will—seem to many Americans like a strained, overly
European analogy. Chapter 3 will flesh out the term’s appropriateness. The election of 1994, however, must then
become a secondary milestone. That year’s outcome served to anoint eldest son George W. Bush, already the
most logical to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Winning the Texas governorship made him the family political heir instead of his younger brother, who lost a
statehouse bid in Florida. Named like his father, looking eerily like him, and having a similar electoral base in
Texas, George W. produced much more of a “restoration” psychology among voters than could have been
managed by his younger brother Jeb (who had a different look, a different state and a later birth.) Also to the point,
the 1994 elections previewed the motivational potential for a restoration: the moral anger of a large portion of the
American electorate – pollster Gallup came to call them “the revulsed” -- with the new president, Bill Clinton. Not
a few voters became apologetic, survey takers found, for having turned the elder Bush out of office in 1992.
In short, the case for a “restoration” entails its own chronology. Any “Bush Era,” for better or worse, must be
defined retroactively, in essence backdated, to include George H. W. Bush’s own triumph in1988 and subsequent
four-year White House tenure. Were history to posit a Bush Era through 2008, the two family presidencies might
well name the entire two decades, turning the Clinton years into the political equivalent of sandwich filler.
Conversely, were Senator Hillary Clinton to achieve a second restoration in 2008, this one Clintonian, public
perception might well lurch toward some American equivalent of the 15th century Wars of the Roses, during which
the English crown passed back and forth between several generations of the houses of York and Lancaster. When
Democrat Albert Gore, himself a minor dynast (son of a U.S. Senator), announced that he would not make a second
run against Bush, opinion polls showed Mrs. Clinton immediately becoming the favorite of the Democratic rank
and file for 2004. Her own inclination, pundits said, was to wait for 2008 and a possible race against Jeb Bush.
National politics, in short, began to take on the aura of a great family arena. Of the four wives of the major party
presidential nominees in 1996 and 2000, two quickly gained U.S. Senate seats: Hillary Clinton in 2000 and
Elizabeth Dole in 2002. A third, Tipper Gore, decided not to make a Senate bid in Tennessee. What Laura Bush
will do on leaving the White House remains to be seen. Seats in the U.S. Senate, in the meantime, began to pass
more like membership in Britain’s House of Lords.
Republican Senator Frank Murkowski, returning to Alaska to become a governor after the 2002 election,
appointed his daughter to his open U.S Senate seat. In doing so, he took advantage of a new state law (which too
late became controversial) allowing him to appoint his own successor. In Clinton’s Arkansas, meanwhile, 36-year-
old Michael Pryor went to the Senate where his father had served for 18 years. Mrs. Dole went to the Senate
where her husband had earlier been Majority Leader, albeit from a different state.
Regionally, the prime example has been New England. In Rhode Island, Republican Lincoln Chafee took the
Senate seat of his father, John Chafee, when the latter died in1999. Next door, Edward Kennedy occupied the
Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by his brother when he became president, and just to the west in Connecticut,
Senator Christopher Dodd sits where his father sat from 1958 to 1970. Parenthetically, both senators from New
Hampshire are the sons of former governors. One of those from Maine is the wife of a former governor.
Some of the heirs have not lacked for humor. Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy, speaking at a roast,
acknowledged the new Chafee in the Senate: “Now when I hear someone talk about a Rhode Island politician
whose father was a senator and who got to Washington on his family name, used cocaine and wasn’t very smart, I
know there is only a 50-50 chance it’s me.”
Dynasticism, then, is clearly not just a matter of the Bush presidency. Deeper currents were swirling – in politics,
economics, culture and public opinion. Yet the 1996-1998 jelling among Republicans of a commitment, backstopped
by favorable national polls, to running the Bush family’s eldest heir for the presidency was a vital catalyst. It
helped to legitimize a larger trend, broadening its momentum.
Religion furnished another critical engine. To many Republicans and independents, Bush family appeal was
resurrected in 1993-1994 by the moral turpitude of Bill Clinton, deepened by ongoing by ongoing revelations and
eventual impeachment. However, despite this tide—or perhaps because of how it aroused Southern fundamental
constituencies—George W. Bush succeeded only by emphasizing and displaying unusual personal religiosity. He
became the prodigal son, brought back to God after waywardness and crisis. From 1994 to 2000, he repeatedly
used biblical language about good and evil. One could almost hear the words of Daniel and Jeremiah. So close did
he draw to evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant leaders that in 2001, the Washington Post saw him replacing
evangelist Pat Robertson as the leader of the U.S. Religious Right. To have suggested any similar role on the part
of his father would have been a joke.
Without this fortuitous politics of moral restoration, the Bush opportunity to dynasticize the presidency might well
have failed like the Kennedy attempts in 1968 (Robert F. Kennedy) and 1980 (Edward Kennedy). Still, the notion
of restoration did make more basic sense as a replanting of some form of conservatism. Indeed, by the
Millennium, new traditional, even fundamentalist, political and religious forces were at work in many parts of the
world.
For all that guides to royalty and aristocracy remained something less than required reading in U.S. politics, they
were regaining relevance in European chanceries and even in the popular press. Kings and ruling families began
their own comeback. Spain restored Juan Carlos of the House of Bourbon to its vacant throne in 1975. The major
tide of monarchical restoration in Europe, however, overlapped the Bush accession in the United States.
In late 2000, following the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, the new Serbian government allowed Crown Prince
Alexander II of Yugoslavia and Serbia to return to Belgrade, shortly thereafter allowing him use of the former
royal palace. Bulgarians, for their part, elected the claimant king, Simeon II, as prime minister in 2002. Romania’s
King Michael I, a cousin of British Queen Elizabeth, came back to Bucharest in 2001, recognized as a former head
of state and given possession of an old family chateau. In early 2003, Prince Victor Emmanuel of the House of
Savoy, his family exiled since 1945, returned to Italy for the first time in pursuit of restoration. With three-quarters
of the population favorable, the Italian parliament had already set approval in motion. Officials of the Bush
administration discussed restoring royal houses in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Meanwhile, in contrast to the sophisticated 1990s dialogue saluting globalization, Internet democracy and the
supposed end of history, much of the world’s population, especially its poor and dispossessed, was participating in
a quite dissimilar expression—a tide of fundamentalist and evangelical religion, often with a strong admixture of
nationalism. Compared to the few nations seeking restorations and kings, this larger trend, affecting Protestants,
Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists alike, dwelt on prophets and
pharaohs, awaited or feared ones (red calves, mahdis and antichrists), holy cities and desecrating unbelievers,
along with jihads, end times, raptures and ultimate Armageddon.
Well might embattled Americans, weary of warfare in the land of the Holy Sepulcher, yearn for the simple “family”
issues propounded in the cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s— mere programmatic courtship directed at low
and middle-income voters stressed by two-earner households, lengthened work hours, day care and tax pressures.
Unfortunately, by the time these humdrum issues were lost in stock market crashes, terrorism, and war in the early
2000s, little net economic progress had been made. If anything, the stress on ordinary families was greater.
Thus the irony: that the dominant “family-related” trend taking the United States into the 21st century turned out
to be a form of classic reaction. In economics, it favored aristocracies of both capital and skills, from Wall Street to
major-league baseball. Family values were brandished to save multi-millionaires from the federal inheritance tax.
In politics, “family” bred dynasties and elite entrenchment. Even more broadly, amid the fear of additional
barbarian attacks in the 9/11 vein, Americans slid towards another historical reversal: allowing the 18th century
republic to be reconceptualized as an embattled 21st century imperium, with stresses and strains not unlike those
that plagued 3rd or 4th century Rome.
The central purpose of this book is to interweave several strands of analysis and thought that ought to be
considered together. One was the political and religious fundamentalism gaining strength as the new century
unfolded. George W. Bush was part of this. A second involved the ever-changing importance within the United
States of different economic sectors and elites—from investment banking and oil to the military-industrial complex.
The third is the 20th and early 21st century emergence of the Bush family, which this volume seeks to track along
a trajectory of American wealth and power through the heydays of Wall Street investment banking, Ivy League
clubdom and Texas petropolitics into the post-World War Two emergence of the CIA and rise of the national
security state.
Until now, a different, midcentury-flavored saga has mostly been told around careers like those of Dean Acheson,
Robert Lovett and Averell Harriman, who played their starring national roles in the late 1940s, 1950s and early
1960s. Now a new dynasty warrants an updated and differently focused examination. The Bushes and their initially
more influential Walker family in-laws were also “present at the creation,” to use Acheson’s term, but in
secondary capacities. The family stepped into public visibility only in 1952, when Prescott Bush, managing partner
at Brown Brothers Harriman, for many years the nation’s biggest private investment bank, won election to the U.S.
Senate from Connecticut. He also became a favorite golf partner of President Eisenhower, also impressing the
then-Vice President Richard Nixon.
When Nixon, in turn, won the presidency in 1968, he would treat George H.W. Bush, a first-term Congressman, as
befit the son of Prescott Bush. The younger Bush had also been commended to Nixon by former Republican
presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey, probably the one man most responsible for convincing Dwight
Eisenhower to take Nixon as his running mate back in 1952. Thus did the Nixon administration became the all-
important career elevator for the little-known U.S. Representative from Houston.
Eastern patricians, even the oil-stained variety, were rare in the Nixon entourage—and for that matter, rare in
national Republican elective politics. Nixon wore them as badges of social acceptance; he had taken one, former U.
S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, as his vice-presidential running-mate in 1960. Eight years later,
he let the name of George H.W. Bush make the vice-presidential rumor mills, less because of any possible appeal
in Texas than for the socio-economic reassurance offered to New York and Connecticut Republican donors and
Ivy League clubland.
Appointments to the United Nations (1970) and Republican National Committee (1973) twice brought Bush into
Nixon’s Cabinet, maintaining the status and Washington visibility critical to his future. In both jobs, Nixon valued
Bush’s family connections, gung-ho spirit, personal likability and social outreach. Similar considerations helped to
guide President Ford’s 1975 selection of him to head the CIA, a famous repository of Yale alumni. Bush wanted to
be—and perhaps was— taken as qualified for the Cabinet in the unelected, bred-to-it, manner of a Curzon, Cecil
or Lansdowne in Edwardian England.
This, to be sure, is getting ahead of our story. The reason why Bush could be considered for vice-president in 1968,
almost out of the blue, was that some fifty years earlier, his two grandfathers—George Herbert Walker, a well-
connected St. Louis financier, and Samuel Prescott Bush, a wealthy Ohio railroad equipment manufacturer—
managed to implant themselves and their descendants in the early 20th century Eastern Establishment. This
helped Prescott Bush get ahead, much as later connections helped George H.W. and George W.
To tell the tale, the sequence and subject matter of The Dynastic Presidency is as follows: Chapter 1 presents the
Bushes as “our not-quite-royal family.” This is not an attempt to be facetious. The Bush royal connections
documented in Burke’s Peerage and elsewhere have nourished the self-image of both chief executives. However,
the founding father of the Bush clan was not a Bush, but a Walker—George H. Walker, for whom both the 41st
and 43rd presidents are named.
If Samuel P. Bush made money and connections in World War One, which he did, Walker made more of each.
Afterwards, he was wooed in 1919 by Averell Harriman to run a derring-do set of investments cobbled together in
the postwar political maelstrom of 1920s Germany and Russia. Over two decades, father-in-law Walker helped
steer Prescott Bush to the top of what became the Brown Brothers Harriman of mid-century—rich, full of Yale
Skull and Bonesmen, London-linked, politically influential and intimately wired through several of its top partners
to the postwar birthing of the CIA. Thus would Richard Nixon be awed and George H.W. Bush be appointively
maintained. During the first half of the 20th century, the United States had evolved its own version of “permanent
government” akin to the British one. Although peaking from the 1920s through the 1950s, its influence lingered,
to George H.W. Bush’s critical advantage.
Chapter 1 concludes the family portrait with the two-decade ideological and religious transformation so important
to the presidential restoration in 2000. Consummated by George W. Bush, this change from Connecticut pin
stripes and Episcopal church pews to Texas cowboy boots and fundamentalist religious alliances conveniently
mirrored the late twentieth-century migration of U.S. population and political power. It must be counted as one of
the most successful makeovers in modern history.
Chapter 2 goes on to examine the underlying cultural and economic forces that helped to make dynastization of
wealth and politics a turn-of-the-21st-century reality. Pseudo-aristocratic taste caught hold in the United States of
the 1980s through the ersatz British clothing and furnishings of Ralph Lauren and the success of magazines like
Architectural Digest and Yachting, as well as the chic of the Bloomingdale’s-Metropolitan Museum-Diana
Vreeland Chinese and French fashion party circuit patronized and promoted by President and Mrs. Reagan.
Celebrity culture sought out stardom in everything from baseball and rock music to the corporate executive suite,
while in economics, a kindred winner-take-all premium widened the chasm between top and middle earners.
The bull market in stocks between 1982 and 1999, in which the Dow-Jones Industrial Average pole-vaulted by
some 1300 percent, gilded the fortunes of the top 1% of American families by tying the escalation of wealth to
stock ownership. This convergence of economic and cultural favoritism furthered the rise of great family politics
in the United States, while in Europe promoting the restoration of royal houses exiled in the egalitarian heyday
after World War Two.
Chapter 3 considers the Bush restoration in the election of 2000 on two separate dimensions: its genesis in U.S.
domestic politics and its European historical analogies. The similarities between the United States at the end of the
Clinton years and the England of 1660-61 and France of 1814-15, serve to point out the similar forces at work. The
English in the 1640s and the French in the 1790s had expelled their ruling houses and executed their kings. Within
two decades or so, the regicides in each nation had worn out their moral and political welcome, creating support for
bringing back the old royal houses.
The American electorate’s overthrow of George Bush in 1992 brought in Bill Clinton. However, Clinton’s 1993-94
moral disrepute, peaking with his 1998-99 impeachment, enabled a Republican restorationist campaign, strongest
in the evangelical and fundamentalist South, that rallied just enough voters to inaugurate the born-again George
W. Bush. Economic conservatives, meanwhile, supported a Bush reinstatement for oil, defense and Wall Street-
based reasons. When Bush took office in 2001, a parallel to Stuart and Bourbon arrogance quickly emerged in the
new regime’s insistence on ideological conservatism despite the lack of any such national mandate. Restoration
drinks from its own special psychological well.
The first three chapters lay out Part One’s framework of family, dynasty, and restoration. Part Two turns to the
origins, nature and bias of Bush economics. Chapter 4 begins with a portrait of Texanomics—its cultural harshness
and fiscal regressivity. It also plumbs the irony of how the state manages to blend prominence in free market
mythology with world famous crony capitalism and pre-eminence in pressing for federal bail-outs in the 1980s and
1990s.
The four-generation Bush and Walker involvement in the investment business antedates Texas, but since George
H. W. Bush and his family moved to oil country, their business behavior has increasingly imitated the stereotype,
thriving on family connections, cronyism, paper entrepreneurialism, tax shelters and government influence. On a
national basis, however, the harsh reputation of Lone Star State economics—confirmed by official data on
environmental quality, education and income distribution—has obliged the family’s presidential candidates office-
seekers to wear “kinder and gentler” policies and “compassionate conservatism” as velvet cloaking.
Chapter 5 moves from the duality of harshness-cum-compassion to the 2001-2004 mindset of a regime headed by
two former Texas-based energy company chief executives, captaining the most energy-dominated national
administration in U.S. history. A survey of the mutual assistance of the Bush family and Enron since 1985 is
followed by a look at the crony capitalism unfurled during Cheney’s stewardship of the Halliburton Corporation. As
we will see, Enron and Halliburton shared many interests and biases.
Chapter 6, the last economic profile in Part Two, returns to the inter-relationship of the Bush dynasty with the rise
of the military-national security industrial complex – from World War One through the tumult of the 20th century
to its early 21st century metamorphosis in the upthrust of terrorism and homeland security issues. This is a
chapter in which many forces come together. One subsection focuses on World War Two and the enlargement and
mutation of the early military-industrial complex, including the absorption of Germany-savvy U.S. business elites
into the OSS, CIA and kindred agencies in the 1940s. George H. Walker, Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers
Harriman and their Yale and Wall Street colleagues were important movers and shakers.
Another section of Chapter 6 looks at the first three generations of Bush dynasty—from Samuel Bush, George
Walker and Prescott Bush through George H. W. Bush—and their involvements with the national security
establishment. Too little attention has been paid to the strong connections developed between the Bush family and
the CIA many years before George H. W. Bush ran it. Under George W. Bush, the CIA has become more powerful
than ever.
Part three turns to another dimension: the politics, geopolitics and wars that have arisen, at least in part, with
assistance from the restoration psychology and fundamentalist theology of George W. Bush. The implications here
are still taking shape.
Part of what restored the Bushes to the White House in 2000 through a southern-dominated electoral coalition was
the emergence of George W. Bush during the 1990s as a born-again favorite of conservative Christian evangelical
and fundamentalist voters. His 2001-2004 policies and rhetoric confirmed that bond. The idea that the head of the
Religious Right and the President of the United States can be the same person is a precedent-shattering
circumstance that had barely crept into national political discussion. Chapter 7 looks at the thirty-year rise of the
religious right in U.S. politics and how the Bush family has shifted its religious intensity and denominational
identifications to ride that trend.
The caution, however, was that the United States was by no means alone in undergoing a 1980s and 1990s surge in
religious fundamentalism and nationalism. Chapter 7 capsules related trends in many other nations and cultures:
Islam from North Africa through the Middle East to Indonesia and the Philippines, nationalistic Buddhism in
Japan, right wing Hinduism in India, militant Judaism, in Israel and the icons-and-incense Orthodox Christianity
of Eastern Europe and Russia. The apparent intensity in the United States—polls reported that almost half of U.
S. Christians believe in Armageddon and the states of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado asked Washington to
renumber U.S. Highway 66 because fundamentalist Christians worried about its devil symbolism – underscores
that by no means all of the world’s religious radicalism has a locus in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Chapter 8, in turn, takes some of the religious and political interactions profiled in Chapter 7 and examines their
role, along with oil, armaments and domestic political considerations, in the emergence of a new U.S. foreign
policy blending biblical bluntness about evil and an “Axis of Evil’ with skepticism, if not hostility, to the United
Nations and an embrace of pre-emptive warfare. However, any emergence of a U.S. “crusader state” stands to
profit important economic interests even as it pleases religious fundamentalists.
Chapter 9, on “The War of the Texas Succession,” pursues the first and second wars with Iraq from a Bush
dynastic standpoint. Texas presidents now have launched the last three U.S. wars: Vietnam, the Gulf War of 1991
and the 2003 war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The last two reflect a unique set of circumstances. They are the
first pair of U.S. wars to be fought by father-and-son presidents, in part arising out of a misconceived U.S. arms
build-up for Iraq undertaken by the father. They also reflected a two-generation Texan pre-occupation with U.S.
Middle Eastern and Caspian oil interests. “The War of the Texas Succession” is a geopolitical as well as family-
based concept.
Finally, Chapter 10 provides a short conclusion, which recalls the ways in which the founding fathers thought the
American Republic might go astray. That the object of their labors might follow the pathway of the Florentine,
Dutch and other republics toward great family and dynastic leadership was a real concern.
Just how dynastic the U.S. future will be, and with what consequences, is a work in progress. The tendencies may
be nipped in the bud; the first decade of the 21st Century may turn out to be an anomaly. What can be said today
is that the circumstances of the United States in these tumultuous years have taken a turn that would have
surprised and presumably appalled the nation’s founding fathers. As was the development of the so-called imperial
presidency in the 1960s, the emergence of a dynastic presidency is contrary to the American political tradition, and
the shorter its duration the better.
Kevin Phillips
West Goshen, Connecticut
June, 2003
Chapter I: The Not-Quite-Royal Family
The power of the American presidency – and for that matter, its awesome centrality in the world – burgeoned in
the first years of the 21st century, especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. An earlier muscle-
flexing during the peak years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union had culminated in the so-called Imperial
Presidency of the 1960s. That power led to Watergate, but it weakened after the scandal.
The unnerving 21st century crisis led the United States to a new sense of empire and disdain for international
restraints. Sweeping doctrine was involved, going beyond the ad hoc White House grasping of the sixties.
Another part of what made the turn-of-the-century mood different was its sudden turn to family and inheritance –
the election of a man with the same looks, name, manner and party of his ex-presidential father, chosen through a
process that wound up de-emphasizing the democratic will of the American electorate. In 2000, George W. Bush
became the first president since 1888 who had not won at least a plurality of the popular votes. After losing by
over 500,000, he was chosen by a four-vote margin in the Electoral College, courtesy of a 5-4 decision by the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Most 20th century presidents put in office by tight margins sought to be conciliatory to make up for want of a
popular mandate. Not the Bush administration. Eschewing any inhibition based on want of popular consent or
legitimacy, it governed from the start with an ideological edge. Family credentials and a powerful financial donor
network had been the basis of the new president’s nomination, and family connection quickly became a fount of
federal appointments, including two for children of the five pro-Bush Supreme Court justices. Janet Rehnquist,
daughter of the Chief Justice, became Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services,
Eugene Scalia, son of the Justice Antonin Scalia, became Solicitor of the Department of Labor.
Other important party families enjoyed favor. The Bush White House helped to anoint Elizabeth Dole, wife of the
GOP’s 1996 presidential nominee, for nomination and election as U.S. Senator from North Carolina. Colin Powell,
who might have contended for the 2000 nomination himself, became Secretary of State and saw his son made
Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The 28-year-old son of Senator Strom Thurmond of South
Carolina was nominated for U.S. Attorney in that state, despite being just three years out of law school.
Old Bush loyalists returned to Washington like exiled Stuarts flocking back to the London of Charles II in 1660.
Richard Cheney, defense secretary in the previous Bush regime, came back as Vice President. Donald Rumsfeld
and Cheney had, respectively, been Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff in the Ford White House of 1975.
Rumsfeld, who had been Secretary of Defense in 1976, went back to the Pentagon a quarter century later.
Andrew Card, whose relations with the senior George Bush dated to the Republican National Committee of 1972,
came back as White House Chief of Staff. Karl Rove, a political aide to the Bushes over the same period, took up
the post of chief White House political advisor.
The Imperial Presidency of the 1960s had also bred dynastic thinking. John F. Kennedy was scarcely in office
before he named his brother Robert as U.S. Attorney General and managed to pass his Massachusetts Senate
seat to his youngest brother, Edward, who just met the age requirement. But neither of the brothers succeeded in
their own later presidential bids – Robert Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet in 1968, Edward Kennedy was
defeated by incumbent Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries, Lyndon Johnson and Richard
Nixon, the other two incumbents sharing the Imperial zenith, might have been tempted, save that their brothers
were ne’er-do-wells and their only children were daughters.
The result was to leave the Dynastic Presidency to come suddenly, on cat’s feet, to a nation preoccupied with the
Millennium and a bursting stock market bubble.
A Confusion of Dynasties
George W. Bush doubtless found renewed discussion of the dynasty issue an acceptable price tag of his political
victory in the 2002 elections. But a probing spotlight had been turned on. The New York Times, above the fold on
the front of its November 10 Week in Review section, blazoned a half-page color picture of Air Force One with the
simple, stark legend: “Defying Expectations, A Bush Dynasty Begins to Look Real.”
Not so, replied Republican pollsters. Instead of perceiving a dynasty, the public sees presidents No. 41 and No. 43
as separate entities. More candor had come from the Bushes, pere et fils, almost two years earlier. On
Inauguration Day, George H.W. Bush had joshingly referred to his son as “Quincy,” reminding everyone that he
was not the first president’s son to succeed to the republican purple. The former president later furnished a
laudatory quote for a book conveniently entitled The Adamses, 1735-1918: America’s First Dynasty.”
The Adamses do not furnish a meaningful analogy. A quarter of a century separated the two presidents, and
Quincy, to use the familiar diminutive, was put in office by a different political party. Nothing about his
controversial accession fortified his office, which he lost after one term. Still, the Adams example was welcomed in
Bush Era Washington: see, father and son presidencies are as American as apple pie. A Kennedy analogy was also
at hand. Early in 2001, George W. Bush invited the Kennedy family to a preview of “Thirteen Days,” a movie
about the 1961 Cuban missile crisis. In November he dedicated the new U.S. Justice Department building named
for former Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Senator Edward Kennedy, in attendance, expressed his pleasure.
The message was unsubtle: Democrats, too, have dynasties.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would not have rested that easy in 1789 or in 1800, when memory was fresh
of overthrowing a king in the American Revolution. The hint of a hereditary chief executive would have been
inflammatory. But in 2001, ten generations had passed since the debates of the early Republic.
By the late 20th century, thinkers had begun to posit that American voters, in ceremoniously choosing and
inducting a president, were actually in psychological hot pursuit of a king. Public opinion had been further
conditioned by the familiarity of media-bestowed democratic “royalty”—dukes of the baseball diamond and
queens of country music. The loss of John F. Kennedy Jr. in a 1999 airplane crash was treated as the death of a
royal prince. The peril that this popular culture might carry over into the selection of leaders was ignored
beyond political science seminars.
The 2000 election pumped new yeast into the dynastic equation. Besides the Supreme Court’s role and the
implications of the second Bush being chosen just eight years after his father and by the same party
establishment, genealogy had become a national hobby. Americans looking for great great-grandparents were
thronging records offices from Donegal and East Anglia to Palermo. The Bushes proudly drew attention to their
English royal blood, a lineage upheld by the arbiters in London. John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of
Independence, would have choked; John F. Kennedy, grandson of a Boston saloon keeper, would have heard
Irish ghosts laughing uproariously.
The two Georges, however, cherished their Plantagenets and Tudors. Early biographies of George H.W. Bush
stressed the 17th century New England roots on both the Bush and Walker families, noting that Senator Prescott
Bush and his family descended from English King Henry III. Then, after George H.W. had won the 1988
presidential election, London-based Burke’s Peerage, the world’s authority on royal lineage, all but bowed.
Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke’s, allowed that some other U.S. presidents had royal
connections, “but none as royal as George Bush.” He traced Bush’s family history to Mary Tudor, the sister of
King Henry VIII. She became part of the Bush family tree by wedding the Duke of Suffolk. Queen Elizabeth,
Baker pronounced, was the president’s distant cousin.
In 2002, an American company, MyFamily.com, also traced George W. Bush and Winston Churchill to a common
ancestor, 15th century Northamptonshire squire Henry Spencer. This pleased the second President Bush, who
had put a bust of Churchill on his desk in 2001.
To call the Bushes a not-quite-royal family captures the between-ness of their position. No American presidential
family can be royal—the Constitution, to begin with, specifies that “No title of nobility shall be granted by the
United States.” However, the family’s triple predilection for royal genealogy, restoration and de facto dynasty is
an extraordinary coincidence. Biographers have also been reminded that Barbara (Pierce) Bush, is descended
from the 14th president, Franklin Pierce. That gives her son presidential genes on both sides of his family.
Descent is at least implied as a credential; Barbara Bush said of her eldest son in 2000 that “he should be
president” in a way that did not seem to cry out for electoral adjudication.
The chairman of the 2000 Republican presidential campaign, Donald Evans, went so far as to call the Bushes
“America’s Family.” A presumption of entitlement did seem to have been creeping in. Before Prescott Bush was
elected to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut in 1952, he had decided that a seat in the House of Representatives
was not worth giving up his managing partnership at Brown Brothers Harriman. Five or so years after Prescott
Bush went to the Senate, however, George H. W. Bush’s nascent ambitions seem to have locked in on that same
upper house, hoping for a family continuity. Whether he privately yearned for a hereditary Senate in the long-ago
Roman manner is unknowable. Chapter 3 will expand on the watershed: how the restoration in 2000, displaying
dynamics unprecedented for the United States, took the Bushes from the company of lesser dynasties and began
a flirtation with some of European’s history’s notable cautions.
Stephen Hess, who in 1966 published the book America’s Political Dynasties, thirty-six years later agreed that the
Bushes were a dynasty, but an “accidental” one. True enough, in the sense that the accident of Bill Clinton’s
moral shortcomings and impeachment may have been a precondition for Bush’s accession in 2000. Even so, the
speed and seriousness of the family’s efforts to make George W. Bush governor of Texas in 1994 and do likewise
for his brother in Florida more than hinted higher goals. George H.W. Bush’s rough treatment at the hands of the
electorate in 1992, in a republic arguably the equivalent of dethronement, was the goad. The next generation of
Bushes laid plans to come back.
The Founding Father – George Herbert Walker
There is more of George Herbert Walker than anyone else in the names of both George Herbert Walker Bush,
his grandson, and George Walker Bush, his great-grandson. We may say the same of his role in the Bush family’s
mid-century success. In 2003, George H.W. Bush provided the material for a laudatory book about his father,
Prescott Bush, identifying him as the first U.S. Senator to be both father and grandfather of a president. “Legacy”
was the term he preferred to dynasty. Financially, however, George H. Walker, a generation older, was the clan’s
founding father, much as Joseph P. Kennedy was the economic enabler of his political brood. Some in the Walker
family implied the same, emphasizing how much attention and career assistance George Herbert Walker and
George Herbert Walker II gave to two generations of Bushes.
Both the Walkers and Bushes were old and prosperous families even in the mid-19th century. The first Bush to
attend Yale was the forty-third president’s great-great-grandfather, James Smith Bush, in the 1850s. He went on
to become an Episcopalian minister in Staten Island, New York, and his son, Samuel Prescott Bush, learned
engineering at nearby Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. The Walkers were wealthier, though. Great
great-grandfather David Walker had built the largest dry goods import firm west of the Mississippi. Much of his
business was with Britain, where he also sent his son, George Herbert Walker, to school during the 1880s.
For political reasons, office-seekers in the Bush family have frequently poor-mouthed their antecedents. Senator
Prescott Bush pretended that modest income kept his father from sending him to law school after he graduated
from Yale in 1913. George H.W. Bush purported to have “interviewed” for his first job. George W. Bush chose to
picture himself as a young man molded and Texified by San Jacinto Junior High School. The historian Herbert
Parmet, in his biography George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee, described the tactical genesis:
Prescott’s recorded reminiscences, given in 1966, presents, somewhat disingenuously, a hint of genteel poverty,
undoubtedly a habit cultivated by one who had spent the bulk of his previous two decades canvassing for votes
among ordinary people. To deny the realities of his background, the stature of his father as a leading industrialist
of the day, was consistent with perpetuating the myth of the self-made man. Prescott had been a U.S. Senator from
Connecticut at the time he gave the interview and was practiced at minimizing his pedigree. He claimed that his
father did not have enough money to put him through law school, a notion of financial limitations not only at
variance with his career and lifestyle but also one strongly rejected by those who knew anything about him.
(Parmet, p. 21)
In fact, Samuel Bush had become wealthy as the president of Buckeye Steel Castings, a railroad equipment
manufacturing firm, which he headed from 1908 until his retirement in 1927. It was a fair-sized steel plant,
sprawling across many acres and specializing in railroad couplings and other steel castings needed by the large
Morgan, Harriman and Rockefeller-controlled rail systems. Frank Rockefeller, the brother of John D. and
William who went into Great Lakes iron ore and steel, preceded Samuel Bush as Buckeye’s president from 1905 to
1908, which gave Bush a tie to the Rockefeller family, with its Standard Oil and National City Bank holdings.
Prominent in Ohio railroading as well as steel, Bush became a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Ohio
subsidiaries, of the Hocking Valley Railway and Norfolk and Western Railway, and of the Huntington National
Bank. From 1917-18, he served on the War Industries Board in charge of the forgings, guns, small arms and
ammunition section and later the facilities division. Besides founding the Ohio Tax League, Bush became the first
President of the National Association of Manufacturer and a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
He built a big house in the Columbus suburb of Bexley, known for its lavish gardens, and sent his children east to
boarding school – the girls to Connecticut’s Westover, the boys (including Prescott) to Episcopalian St. George’s in
Newport, Rhode Island. The family spent summers in fashionable seaside Watch Hill, Rhode Island.
Several hundred miles away in St. Louis, George H. Walker was becoming richer. By 1914, his investment firm, G.
H. Walker & Co, founded in 1900, had become one of the more important in the Mississippi Valley. The principal
history of U.S. investment banking has described the forces involved: “During the first decade or so of the 20th
century the supply of domestic capital seeking investment also grew rapidly. Between 1900 and 1910, banking
assets more than doubled, increasing from $10.7 billion to $22.4 billion, and many country banks in the Middle and
Far West, which previously had invested almost exclusively in farm mortgages, started buying railroad, industrial
and utility bonds...the increase in funds for investment led to a growing interest in securities throughout the
country.”
Walker got off to a high-powered start by buying and reselling companies like Laclede Gas and the New Orleans,
Texas and Mexico Railroad. Success with various railroads in and around Texas—also including the St. Louis,
Brownsville and Mexican, as well as several local lines absorbed into the Burlington and Santa Fe systems—
brought Walker to the notice of E. H. Harriman, owner of the vast Union Pacific system , his son Averell, and
Texas Judge Robert S. Lovett, who took charge of the UP after E.H. Harriman’s death in 1909. Walker’s English
schooling and relationships also piqued the interest of J.P. Morgan and Company, which took some of his
underwritings and used his firm in securities syndicates. St. Louis, at that time, was the major financial center in
the south-central United States and the nation’s fifth-ranked city in investment banking.
The Republican Party preference Walker would display during the 1920s was hidden in his earlier St. Louis
career. He was involved in business deals, including the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and Democratic mayoral
politics alongside two other well-known figures— ex-Missouri Governor David Francis, later (1893-96) Secretary
of the Interior, and millionaire St. Louis businessman Robert Brookings, who would go on to found Washington’s
Brookings Institution. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, and in a Washington vein after the U.S. entered the
fighting in 1917, connections to Francis, Brookings, Harriman, Lovett and the House of Morgan became
invaluable.
Steadfastly isolationist, parts of Missouri remained opposed to entering the conflict even after Washington
declared war. Dozens of townships were still German-speaking. Not a few banks refused to participate in
marketing British bonds. Such views were not shared by Walker and his pro-British friends. J.P. Morgan & Co.,
chosen in 1914 by Britain and France as their commercial agent for purchasing war supplies in the United States,
carried out this function by establishing within the firm its famous Export Department under Morgan partner
Edward Stettinius, Senior. George H. Walker, with his knowledge of Midwest industrial production and railroad
transportation, took on a minor but lucrative, regional advisory role on what to buy where and from whom. Allied
wartime purchases through Morgan’s came to $3.2 billion, a staggering sum more than four times the entire U.S.
federal budget in 1914.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, British purchases no longer went through Morgan’s, but came
under the Allied Purchasing Commission affiliated with the War Industries Board. Walker’s luck was such that
Robert Brookings went to Washington to become chairman of the Price-Fixing Committee of the War Industries
Board. Judge Lovett, in turn, took over as the Board’s priorities commissioner. In addition, Brookings and
Lovett also served as two of the three board members of the Allied Purchasing Commission. Chairman Bernard
Baruch was the third.
David Francis, chosen in 1916 as Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to Russia, occupied another catbird’s seat in the
maelstrom of wartime information and munitions contracts. The title of a recent biography of Francis, Standing on
a Volcano, referred to his task of hammering out a commercial treaty with Russia, as well as advising on U.S.
bank loans to the Russian government. In 1917, on his advice, the U.S. gave the Russian revolutionary
government under Alexander Kerensky a $325 million credit to be spent on war materiel from the United States.
George Walker kept in touch with Brookings, Lovett and Francis, exchanging information, influencing war
contracts and placing friends and acquaintances in jobs from Washington to St. Petersburg . Future partner
Averell Harriman, for his part, put aside railroading to build ships for the war effort, setting up near Philadelphia
with a contract to construct forty freighters for the federal Emergency Shipping Corporation. Not surprisingly, he
kept up with his fellow wheeler-dealer.
In 1919, convinced to point his postwar ambitions towards Germany and Russia, Harriman persuaded the
ubiquitous “Bert” Walker to become president of a new Wall Street investment banking firm, W. Harriman &
Company, being organized by the Harriman family with the collaboration of the Rockefeller-headed National City
Bank and the Morgan-connected Guaranty Trust. Besides helping to guide the Harriman railroad interests,
Walker would backstop Averell Harriman’s own grand plans, which ranged from taking over Germany’s once-
proud Hamburg-Amerika steamship line to oil and manganese ambitions in the Russian Caucasus. Walker moved
to New York, and for more than a decade not only ran W.A. Harriman & Company but helped to direct separate
Harriman personal and family investment vehicles like the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, Silesian-American
Corporation and Harriman International. These, it would turn out, would be the more controversial enterprises. St.
Louis newspapers described Walker in awed terms as the man responsible for assembling Harriman’s overseas
empire..
In 1904, he and his father had built a summer house on what became Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport, Maine,
where they had begun vacationing in the 1890s. George Walker’s eldest and favorite child, Dorothy, was born
there in 1901. By the end of the 1920s – at his peak a director of 17 corporations—he also had a home in Santa
Barbara, California, an opulent residence at One Sutton Place in Manhattan, a country mansion in Long Island
and “Duncannon,” a ten thousand acre South Carolina lodge and preserve where the younger Bushes would hunt
doves and quail and shoot skeet. Some winters saw him take a house in Aiken, South Carolina, just a few miles
from the polo field where Averell Harriman – a dedicated, eight-goal player—ran his string of ponies. (For a short
time, Walker and Harriman had a stable together in Long Island, racing horses under their own colors.)
Like Harriman, Walker sometimes took his extended family south on a private railroad car. One Bush grand-
daughter described the particularly happy times at Duncannon, remembering “the wonderful food and the care
taken over the slightest things, like the trimmed edges of the grapefruit. We were waited on by the most wonderful
black servants who would come into the bedrooms early in the morning and light those crackling pine-wood fires.”
Walker was flinty—an amateur heavyweight boxing champion in his youth—and something of a pirate in business.
He was a lover of racehorses, golf and Scotch whiskey, a ladies’ man – he courted and married Lucretia Wear, a
famous beauty of the 1890s who had already attracted the St. Louis-bred fashion writer Conde Nast -- and a bear
to members of his family. Years later, grand-daughter Elsie Walker called him “a tough father, a tough old
bastard...There really wasn’t a lot of love on the part of the boys {her father and uncles} for their father.”
When his daughter Dorothy—the apple of his eye and like her father a hard-charging athlete—met Prescott Bush
in St. Louis in 1919, Walker warmed to him as a golfer and sportsman, who was also handsome, smooth and
polished in an Ivy League way, which Walker was not. Dorothy and Prescott married in 1921. After Prescott Bush
had several years experience elsewhere, he came to work for his father-in-law at W.A. Harriman & Co. as a vice
president in 1926. With the added assistance of his own Yale and Harriman connections, he became Walker’s heir
apparent by the early 1930s, taking over as managing partner in the merged firm of Brown Brothers Harriman by
mid-decade.
If George H. Walker was something of a second father to Prescott Bush, the same and perhaps more can be said
of the relationship of his son, George Herbert (“Uncle Herbie”) Walker Jr. to Prescott’s son, George H.W.
Bush. While the successful public careers came on the Bush side of the family, the financial assistance and
business mentoring was disproportionately on the Walker side. In 1997, when his uncle was dying, George H.W.
sent an emotional letter telling him how much he had needed him “as my father, my brother and my best friend.”
This cannot always have been easy for Samuel Bush and then for Prescott Bush Sr. The influence and money of
two Walker generations must have taken some of their place. In Greenwich, when Prescott and Dorothy Bush had
been married for almost two decades, the title to the big house on Grove Lane was in the name of Dorothy Walker
Bush. Only in 1981, when George H.W. Bush became vice president, did the Walkers, prompted by the security-
minded invasiveness of the Secret Service, suggest that he purchase and move into the big family house on
Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport. One can easily imagine this longtime economic subordination spurring a
compensating Bush drive for office and political position.
At the same time, however, the Bushes rode steadily higher as the main currents of 1917-60 created a new U.S.
global hegemony and domestic military-national security complex. This meshed with the almost simultaneous
zenith of an American establishment drawn in part from the management of two world wars but also reflecting
the between-the-wars golden era of the preparatory school, Harvard-Yale-Princeton, investment banking,
diplomatic service and Wall Street legal axis that columnist Joseph Alsop rightly called the WASP Ascendancy.
The 20th Century Heyday of the Old Boy Network
Exaggerated or not, the early and mid-20th century saw a partial American equivalent—in some ways, a
transatlantic imitation—of the prior British Ascendancy rooted in Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the
Guards, the Foreign Office and the like. Over the years, dozens of participants have described everything from
the cutlery at Harvard’s Porcellian Club to the portions of the Connecticut Gold Coast deemed most acceptable by
Henry James. During the fifties and sixties, the name Bush did not show up in these various memoirs,
recollections and chronicles of white shoe America. In the seventies, “Bush” crept into sentences and footnotes,
and in the eighties it commanded paragraphs and pages
The white shoe racks in the Bush closet are now a literary staple. Multiple books portray Skull and Bones, the
Yale secret society, as a dynastic incubator. Owen Johnson’s 1913 classic Stover at Yale has re-emerged as
outside reading in cultural anthropology. The mingled history of the Bush family and the Central Intelligence
Agency, demanding a sub-chapter even in this otherwise directed manuscript, could fill its own tome. Dynasties,
by definition, require attention to multi-generational ties.
George H.W. Bush’s first biographer, Nicholas King, a Harvard man who worked for Charles Bohlen at the U.S.
Embassy in France and then for GHWB himself at the United Nations, may have reflected the family’s own 1980
perceptions of their network’s heyday: “At the close of the 1930s and on the eve of the Second World War, these
schools were at their apogee. They set the academic standards and their graduates dominated the major Eastern
colleges, especially the Ivy League. They also brought the famous ‘old boy networks’ to the peak of their power.
To be a graduate of Andover is no doubt still of some importance to the world, but then it had special significance.”
Clubs and secret societies were the innermost sanctum. Andover’s A.U.V (Auctoritas, Unitas, Veritas – Authority,
Unity, Truth), to which George H.W. Bush belonged, was the acme at that school until the secret societies were
abolished after World War Two Its code of secrecy was a teen-ager’s preparation for what might follow at Skull
and Bones. At Harvard, so important was Porcellian that rejection provided Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unhappiest
recollection. Theodore Roosevelt was so proud of being in the “Porc” that he boasted of it to Germany’s Kaiser
Wilhelm. In this same decade, Grotonian Averell Harriman helped lead a move to Yale as a protest against
Groton-Porcellian clique-ism at Harvard. In the new era, “the most legendary of all college clubs was Skull and
Bones. To be tapped by Bones in that era was akin to canonization...the clocks (at Bones) were set five minutes
fast to symbolize that Bonesmen started life a leg up.”
Columnist Joseph Alsop, in Porcellian at Harvard, still upheld that era’s WASP schools ascendancy in a late
1980s retrospect: “I don’t know quite how to define it without sounding a fool except to say that it really was an
ascendancy – in fact, an inner group that was recognizable as a group...” John McCloy, Chairman of the Chase
Bank and prominent enough in the 1950s to be thought of as the Establishment’s unofficial chairman, said he really
wasn’t because of his middle-class origins. “Yes, of course,” there was an Establishment. “They were Skull and
Bones, Groton, that sort of thing. That was the elite...I always had it in mind, even to this day, that I was not really
a part of that.” That three generations of Bushes have been “part of that” is central to the family’s ascent.
Friend and foe alike have tied success at the network’s schools to three essential underpinnings: good family,
good attitude (loyalty to the school and to one’s peers ) and good skill at sports. Rough edges made for a poor fit.
Prescott Bush (St. George’s 1913, Yale 1917, Skull & Bones) and George H.W. Bush (Andover 1942, Yale 1948,
Skull & Bones) fit well, thereby unfolding a kind of red carpet on which they could later walk through significant
portions of Upper America.
Sports were often a prerequisite, always a display case. Prescott Bush’s athletics – tennis, captain of baseball and
a championship-level golf game—made him stand out in his class, impressed his future father in law and aided his
subsequent career. Imposing at 6' 4", polished and courtly, he was a man who conveyed integrity and did well with
clients and customers—more a meeter-and-greeter than the clever sort who pioneered innovative transactions
or strategems. “Movie-star handsome, tall and athletic,” in the words of his biographer, “he was a rain-maker,
earning his money primarily by charming and snaring potential clients.” As managing partner of Brown Brothers
Harriman, he sat on an impressive array of corporate boards—Prudential Insurance, Pan American Airlines, CBS,
the Simmons Company, Dresser Industries, U.S. Guaranty, Pennsylvania Water and Power and the Vanadium
Corporation of America—where his business, social and government connections were valued.
Besides golf, though, what Prescott Bush seemed to like most of all was singing. At Harvard’s Porcellian, Alsop
also recalled many hours of choruses and bothy ballads. But Yale particularly emphasized song as a facet of male
bonding, witness the prominence of the Whiffenpoofs and a host of lesser imitators with names like the Grill
Room Grizzlies. Through Bush’s busy investment career, he sang in different clubs and quartets, often traveling
to do so. According to one former Yale Glee Club president, “it was his ear, his enthusiasm and his concept of a
second bass part in a quartet which revolutionized barbershop singing.” Besides singing with the Whiffenpoofs, he
brought them along on the Senate campaign trail. For many Connecticut voters, it was too much Old Blue.
As a senator, Bush enjoyed his ten years, but made no little legislative mark, a charge akin to the one later
directed at his son. Fitzhugh Green, another George Bush biographer, summed up that the elder Bush “believed
in principles, but left no substantive footprints. He offered no particular vision, except that of a life of rectitude and
of music – always music, shared with the young.” Still, fellow legislators respected the influence he had both in
Wall Street circles and as one of President Eisenhower’s favorite golfing partners. It also helped, as one colleague
observed, that he looked like “a Roman Senator.”
The career benefits of Groton, A.U.V at Andover or Skull and Bones were enormous, as the Bushes would find
through everything from bull and bear to cloak and dagger. Yet in some ways, the products of such schools were
unsuited for the battlefields of elective politics. Cyril Connolly, an English Old Etonian, observed that such schools
tend to instill permanent adolescence, arresting aspects of personal development and extending a taste for wine,
song, pranks, initiations, oaths of secrecy, inner sanctums and other rites far into middle age.
Prescott Bush, as a 23-year-old new Army captain in 1918, foolishly sent an absurd letter to his home-town
newspaper, the Columbus State-Journal, announcing that he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross,
Victoria Cross and Legion of Honor on World War One’s Western Front for saving the lives of generals Pershing,
Foch and Haig by bringing down an almost-fatal artillery shell with his bolo knife. His parents had more than a
little explaining to do. Earlier that year, together with four other officers-cum-Bonesmen, he was said to have
plundered Geronimo’s grave near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to take the Apache chief’s skull back to the Vault at
Yale. Even at age 57 in 1952, introducing presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower at Yale, he wore a collegian’s
raccoon coat, acting like a cheerleader until students started calling “Down, Bush.”
George H. W. Bush’s so-called preppie streak, if not in his genes, may come from similar breeding. In addition to
his famous narration while playing horseshoes—a triumphant “Mr. Smooth does it again,” with each ringer—his
recurrent bursts of enthusiastic schoolboy phraseology even as president were sometimes described as “Bush-
speak.” The U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Robinson McIlvaine, after a 1971 visit by the Bushes to Nairobi, recalled
how Bush would sit down with his niece and her youthful friends to play “thumper,” a game like Slap Jack in
which players had to bang on the carpet when a particular card turned up. The slow thumper lost the hand. Bush,
captivated, would ask in subsequent Christmas cards who had been the best Thumper recently. One year, said
McIlvaine, he enclosed a picture of Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the Soviet desk in the U.N. General
Assembly with a note: “You see, we play Thumper at the United Nations, too.”
A study of the first Bush administration by two Time reporters further embellished that school-boy streak. “He
cued up exploding golf balls made of chalk for unsuspecting visitors at Kennebunkport. On Halloween 1988 he
donned a rubber George Bush mask and walked through his campaign plane exhorting passengers to ‘Read my
lips! Read my lips.” He was also a man who “howled with laughter when he played the twenty-dollar-bill-on-the-
end-of-a-string trick on unsuspecting waiters at the Chinese embassy; who would greet visitors to the Oval Office
by placing a wind-up mechanical bumblebee on the floor and letting it buzz around; who walked around the White
House with a voice-activated stuffed monkey that socked itself on the head whenever the commander in chief
began to talk.”
George W. Bush, in turn, is sometimes portrayed as developing such tendencies in a fraternity-boy vacuum
without this larger family heritage—for example, his penchant during the 2000 campaign for doing imitations of
Dr. Evil, the campy villain in the movie “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.” Journalist Frank Bruni, in
his 2000 campaign book Ambling Into History, referred to him as “part scamp and part bumbler, a timeless
fraternity boy and heedless cut up,”and recalled one campaign episode in which Bush “took his {airplane hot
towel}, cleaned his hands with it, and then did something less expected: draped it over his entire face and then
turned abruptly toward me. He was, at this point, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee...and he was
playing a toddler’s game of peek-a-boo.” Such antics were third generation stuff by then, not first generation.
None of this seems to have inhibited family ambition. Prescott Bush’s political career was both gentlemanly and, in
its way, successful. His wife later said he had wanted to be president, believing that if he had started in politics at
an earlier age, he might have been. More likely, such an effort would have failed, because of his mannerisms and
certain World War Two controversies, to which we will return. Perhaps his son knew, understood and internalized
what his father had privately hoped for.
Certainly George H.W. Bush’s political career and style had similarities to his father’s. He held off running for
office to accumulate enough money to be independent and bear the expense of holding office yet maintaining
personal comfort. Like his father, he made his first political bid for a U.S. Senate seat, starting close to the top. It
is not even clear that he cared much about politics before his father went to the Senate in 1952. But as Prescott
Bush’s second term passed the halfway mark in 1959-60, his son was beginning to prepare for a political career in
Texas. This is the period that may have inculcated dynastic hopes.
Like his father, Bush had been a notable athlete, both at Andover and Yale. He captained baseball teams in both
places and, in his own words, later half-considered being “a tennis bum.” He became a big man on campus at
Andover—one might call the two columns of membership and activities under his picture in the 1942 Phillips
Andover yearbook his first resume —by epitomizing popularity, good attitude and school spirit. He would do so
again at Yale, albeit attending after World War two as a married man made him less of a joiner.
Burning issues or ideological commitments did not spark his early political ignition.That came from a call to public
service—the arena where motivation ranges from selfless duty (the insistence of half the school mottoes in New
England) to objectives of a more ego-driven or Machiavellian nature. Bush’s 1964 and 1966 election campaigns
employed heavy advertising to sidestep issues and elevate personal appeal, casting the candidate as a young
family man on the go, in shirtsleeves and tie with a suit jacket carelessly thrown over his shoulder, Kennedy-style.
Ironically, it was a fair clue to what Bush would be in office: lithe, athletic, handsome, personable and ambitious—
always seeking friends and striding purposefully toward the approval of authority figures able to bestow his next
nomination or appointive office.*
________________________________________________
* Cousin Ray Walker, a psychiatrist, described George H.W. Bush this way. “He always placated his father. Then,
later on, he placated his bosses. That is how he relates – by never defining himself against authority.”
In the more cynical seventies and eighties, assessments of the legislative and policy achievements in George H.
W. Bush’s resume generally came up short. His preppie watchband would become the stuff of caricature
assassination. His reputation for glad-handing and promoting the political equivalent of school spirit became a
stereotype. After Bush’s 1971-72 service as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, even sympathetic biographer
Green described him as “so enthusiastic and thorough in his official entertaining that the mission protocol officer
called him ‘the Perle Mesta of the U.N.’ He didn’t stop with the big ceremonial parties. He took a dozen or so
members of the U.S. Economic and Social Council with him one night to sit in his Uncle Herbert Walker’s box at
Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play baseball. He took others for Sunday meals at his parents’ house in
Greenwich, Connecticut.” Wordy speeches in the U.N. General Assembly often found the U.S. Ambassador at
work penning his trademark short “thank you” notes to fellow delegates and others.
When he was Chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973-74, his behavior was much the same, as he
covered “like a Republican brush salesman for a total of 124,000 miles, giving 118 speeches and 84 press
conferences. Wherever he went he passionately insisted that no White House hand had been in the Watergate jam
pot.” Like his father, he was more salesman and charmer than thinker.
By now his image had begun to suffer. In 1972, New York magazine included Bush in its list of “The Most Over-
Rated Men in New York.” In 1974, Bryce Harlow, an old Washington hand helping Gerald Ford to pick a vice
president, felt obliged to present George Bush’s essential duality. On one hand, Bush had shown the most
popularity and support in an informal survey of Republicans in Congress, the GOP National Committee, the
Cabinet and White House staff. The counter, said Harlow, was that many of the nation’s top leaders “regarded him
as intellectually ‘light’.”
It was no longer enough, apparently, to be Poppy Bush, “the greatest kid in school,” Navy combat pilot at 20, son
of a United States Senator who had headed an major Wall Street investment bank. Vietnam and Watergate had
changed the nation’s political and cultural yardsticks. The up-elevator of the old establishment—of the World
War Two “Wise Men” and the newer “Best and Brightest” of the Kennedy Era—had lost its power.
Perhaps surprisingly, it turned out not to matter. Bush served two additional short stints in high offices—as chief
of the U.S. Mission to the Chinese government in Beijing (1974-75) and then as Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (1976). There, he helped to convince his old associates in Congress to stop investigating the
CIA. Just as importantly, his appointment reassured senior CIA officialdom: No Bonesman from Yale, whose
father had been an intimate associate of both Allen Dulles and Robert Lovett, would let them down. Yale history
professor Gaddis Smith had pointed out that “Yale has influenced the CIA more than any other university, giving
the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.” Bush kept the faith, although some faulted him for picking agreeable
rather than talented top aides.
By 1978, he had decided to run for president. Biographers have acknowledged how some individuals and
audiences he told in 1977-78 were taken aback: president of what, they asked—what corporation? No, the reply
came: President of the United States.(Green, pp. 168-69, ) He lacked the usual election victories and obvious
geographic bases. His base was more diffused and establishmentarian: old friends and old fortunes. One friend
admitted that “We had a terrible time keeping the UN ambassadors from forming a club for George Bush, or
keeping the CIA from organizing support for him. That would not have been very helpful.” What he also had,
besides his resume and social cachet, was the support of much of Gerald Ford’s 1976 organization, including
campaign manager James A. Baker III, Bush’s old Houston chum. Despite the skepticism at bourbon-and-sirloin
venues like the Republican Men’s Club of Texas, his candidacy was a long way from fanciful.
True, Ronald Reagan absolutely drubbed George H. W. Bush in the 1980 nomination race. The former California
governor also accumulated enough distaste for his challenger to refuse at first to consider him for vice president.
Yet Bush, who had won a pivotal early caucus in Iowa, also won Connecticut and Massachusetts in mid-season.
Thereafter, he managed to win two late primaries in Pennsylvania and Michigan with the help of Ford-connected
state party organizations. Reagan, after spending heavily in the early contests to overwhelm his multiple
nomination foes—Bush, John Connally, John Anderson, Howard Baker, Bob Dole and Philip Crane—was drained
of cash by late April. A relative handful of primary and caucus victories and several hundred delegates were
enough to make Bush the runner-up. Thereafter, the need to mend a breach with the GOP’s old Eastern
Establishment wing obliged a reluctant Reagan to turn to him for vice president.
The real prize, of course, lay in the political and governmental succession. Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard
Nixon, had gone on to be the next Republican chief executive. Nixon, in turn, was succeeded by his last vice
president, Gerald Ford. Never elected to anything more than two terms in the House of Representatives from the
Seventh District of Texas, George H. W. Bush, was now in place to achieve the same ultimate promotion. If the
old establishment of mid-century was fading, its credentials had lasted just long enough.
The American Politico-Economic Establishment and the Two World Wars
The changing power structure that took early outline in World War One and reached its zenith of prestige during
the Second World War and the two following decades was obviously far more than a social phenomenon. Groups
like Skull and Bones were a clubby symptom, but hardly a driving force. Part of the new establishment came from
the organization and hierarchies of national mobilization in two wartimes that, quite simply, had realigned the
world.
These were the broad tracks along which the Walker and Bush families climbed, financially and politically. Over
the years they led the family to an involvement with the mainstays of the 20th century American National
Security State: finance, oil and energy, the so-called military-industrial (defense production) complex, and the
CIA, National Security Agency and the rest of the intelligence community. From just 5-10% of U.S. Gross
Domestic Product in 1914, the four sectors’ share in 1950 might have reached 30%, bringing a parallel
transformation of America’s interest-group and power structures.
Some scholars of the U.S. military-industrial complex take its ancestry back to the construction of a large, steel-
clad navy in the 1880s and 1890s, which made real demands on government spending, heavy industry and
metallurgy. Most agree that the future complex took brief, definable shape during the First World War, even
though the disarmament treaties of the 1920s and neutrality sentiments of the1930s kept military outlays too low
to sustain preparedness until rearmament began in 1939-40. After Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, many who
had cut their teeth on 1917-18 mobilization were given much larger war-related responsibilities, cementing earlier
elite credentials.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own role in 1917-18 as Assistant Secretary of the Navy had included a lot of hard
bargaining over war contracts. FDR had been caught up in, if not always impressed by, that mobilization. As
president, if he didn’t know those involved from his years at Groton and Harvard, many were familiar from
Woodrow Wilson’s wartime Washington. Both wartime mobilizations created lasting networks.
Bernard Baruch, who had run the War Industries Board in which Samuel Bush, Judge Robert Lovett Sr., Clarence
Dillon and Robert Brookings had all worked, renewed his engagement in the early 1930s, helping to brainstorm the
National Recovery Administration and drawing up FDR’s Interwar Industrial Mobilization plan. He came out of
retirement on a limited basis in 1943 to become chief policy consultant to the federal Office of War Management
(OWM) and FDR at one point flirted with re-installing him in the top job.
Averell Harriman, finished with shipbuilding, kept his financial stakes in Brown Brothers Harriman and his other
investments, but jumped into the New Deal years working with two former WIB officials, Hugh Johnson and
Herbert Bayard Swope, in the National Recovery Administration in New York. He went on to become FDR’s
emissary to Churchill, Lend Lease Administrator, then Ambassador to Russia, Ambassador to Britain and after
World War Two, Secretary of Commerce and Mutual Security Administrator.
When World War Two came, well-connected investment firms virtually doubled as Washington placement
bureaus. Judge Lovett’s son Robert, Jr., one of Prescott Bush’s partners at Brown Brothers Harriman, became
Assistant Secretary of War for Air under Secretary Stimson. Another Brown Brothers Harriman alumnus,
Artemus Gates, took over as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air. At Dillon Read, the Wall Street firm that
Clarence Dillon had turned into a powerhouse after his War Industries Board service, James Forrestal became
Undersecretary of the Navy in charge of its economic activities and procurement. Others at Dillon Read who
joined the mobilization included Paul Nitze (later National Security Adviser), William Draper (later chief of the
economic section for the postwar U.S. Military Government of Germany) Ferdinand Eberstadt (later vice-chairman
of the War Production Board and a founding father of the CIA) and C. Douglas Dillon.
Harriman was not the only high climber. Forrestal became Secretary of the Navy in 1944 and Secretary of
Defense in 1947. Edward Stettinius, Jr, whose father had been the Morgan partner in charge of the 1914-17
purchase of U.S. arms and munitions for the French and British, had a series of key jobs: head of the War
Resources Board in 1939, director of the Priorities Division of the Office of Production Management in 1941,
Undersecretary of State in 1943 and finally Secretary in 1944. Lovett was named Undersecretary of State, then
Undersecretary of Defense and finally became Secretary of Defense in 1951. So much did he come to epitomize
establishment thinking that in 1961 John F. Kennedy, seeking exactly that symbolism after his hair-breadth
victory, offered Lovett his choice of Cabinet positions – State, Defense or Treasury. When Lovett declined for
health reasons, Kennedy took as Treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon, the son of the War Industries Board’s
Clarence Dillon.
Some chroniclers have profiled the 1917-1960 emergence of “The Wise Men” and others in terms of universities
and clubs, not least the Skull and Bones hegemony at Brown Brothers Harriman (Averell Harriman, E. Roland
Harriman, Robert Lovett Jr., Artemus Gates, Prescott Bush and several others). However, the idea of an elite
partly shaped by war priorities and mobilization service seems almost as compelling. In later years, Lovett
reminisced about his father’s “Manhattan and Locust Valley dinner parties attended by old friends from the War
Industries Board, where he heard discussions about industrial mobilization and offered his own ideas to the
importance of airplanes to the nation’s transportation and defense.” Professor Robert Sobel, in The Life and
Times of Dillon Read, noted that for Clarence Dillon, “the WIB experience was a watershed event...creating a
community of interests and shared experiences second in Dillon’s case only to that of Harvard.” Grosvenor
Clarkson, Secretary of the Council of National Defense, an early federal forerunner of the WIB, later recalled,
with only some exaggeration, that “the War Industries Board of the United States had in the end a system of
concentration of commerce, industry, and all the powers of government that was without compare among all the
other nations, friend or enemy, involved in the World War.”
In any event, Wall Street’s post-World War One opportunities were little short of mind-boggling. Britain’s
Manchester Guardian had seen the change coming even in 1917: “The war has radically transformed the relations
between the United States and Europe...The United States by the end of this war will have wiped out most of its
debt to foreign investors. It will have a currency of unimpeachable magnitude. The American bankers will have
acquired the experience they have hitherto lacked in the international money market...It can hardly be doubted
that under these circumstances, New York will enter the lists for the financial leadership of the world.” By 1919,
the transfer was speeding up. Sterling’s postwar weakness had obliged the British Treasury to impose an informal
embargo on British merchant banks making foreign loans, moving business to New York . The world was about to
become America’s financial oyster.
As U.S. bankers and businessmen cast their eyes overseas, shrewd law firms took on attorneys with war-era
experience. Dean Acheson, who would mount the ladder from Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs
in 1941 to Secretary of State in 1949 wrote his own first book about the legal concepts developed by the War
Labor Board. The name partners of the new Washington law firm he joined in 1922, Covington, Burling and
Rublee, were respectively a well-connected Maryland Congressman, the general counsel of the wartime Shipping
Board and an attorney who had worked with the Council of National Defense and with the French on the Allied
Maritime Transport Council.
On Wall Street, the three principal law firms gestating the future military-industrial and national security
complexes were Cravath, Henderson and de Gersdorff, Sullivan and Cromwell and Donovan, Leisure. The latter
had “Wild Bill” Donovan, the World War One Congressional Medal of Honor winner who would go on to organize
the World War Two Office of Strategic Services (OSS). That, in turn, furnished the embryo of the CIA. The
Cravath firm, meanwhile, drew its momentum from Paul Cravath’s 1914-17 prominent drum-beating alongside the
Morgan interests on behalf of the allies, followed by his visibility in bankrolling the new Council on Foreign
Relations in 1919.
At Sullivan and Cromwell, the moving force was John Foster Dulles, soon to be joined by his younger brother
Allen. Both were grandsons of Secretary of State John Foster and nephews of Woodrow Wilson’s wartime
Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. John Foster Dulles worked for the War Trade Board, thereafter attending the
Versailles peace negotiations of 1919 as counsel to the U.S. Reparations Committee. A little later, Bernard
Baruch, with whom Dulles had served on the Reparations Committee, arranged for the young lawyer to ghostwrite
a book on the Versailles treaty. Brother Allen also went to Versailles as a State Department representative
assigned to the redrawing of central European boundaries. (A Law Unto Itself, pp. 64-86). After the New Deal,
when the Republicans took the White House back in 1952, John Foster Dulles would become Secretary of State
and Allen Dulles director of the CIA.
During this period some of the most ambitious men on Wall Street spent months or years in Europe, drumming up
bond issues (to sell in the cash-flush United States) and potential industrial participations or acquisitions for
American companies. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas described the up-Rhine and down-Danube commercial
treasure hunt in The Wise Men, their study of Harriman, Lovett, Acheson, McCloy et al: “While the rest of the
country slept in deep isolation, a close knit clique of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, most of whom had traveled
through Europe as children, met in the clubs of London and Paris and Berlin as friendly competitors putting
together suitable investments for their firms. In a private and profit-seeking capacity, they were rebuilding a war-
ravaged Europe in a manner as grandiose as many of these men would employ a world war later with the Marshall
Plan.” The House of Morgan had a strong residual advantage in Britain and a lesser one in France, but indulged a
wartime legacy of distaste for Germany. Thus it was to Germany, the postwar republic, that an important group of
Wall Streeters turned their particular attentions.
The most prominent were Averell Harriman and George H. Walker of what in 1920 was still W. A. Harriman &
Company, Clarence Dillon of Dillon Read, and the Dulles brothers of Sullivan and Cromwell. They often worked
together in the 1920s, when ambitions were most grandiose, and in the 1930s, when embarrassing German
relationships had to be sorted out, restructured and even hidden. It is an irony, but not a coincidence, that so many
men with these involvements – which, of course, brought unusual contacts and expertise – went on, or family
members did, to become pillars of the U.S. national security and intelligence establishments during and after
World War Two.
Almost from the start, American investments of the 1920s in both Germany and Russia were controversial.
Harriman, Walker, Dillon and Dulles were variously criticized for customer chasing, reckless lending ( many of the
German redevelopment bonds underwritten went bad in 1929-32) and even for aiding previous or potential
enemies. Harriman, through one or another investment vehicles, arranged a major shareholding in the Hamburg-
Amerika line, set up a U.S. bank to serve the German Thyssen steel interests, bought a one-third interest in
German-owned coal and zinc mines in Poland through a holding company called Silesian-American and took a
position in Germany’s trans-Atlantic cable company.
Their friendly rival, Dillon Read, in 1925 helped to refinance the Thyssen steel interests with a $15 million bond
issue and then followed in 1926-27 with $70 million in bond issues for the United Steelworks (Vereinigte
Stahlwerke), a massive cartel of German coke, coal, iron and steel producers. During World War Two, it would
produce some 40% of Germany’s steel plate, sheeting, pipes and tubes.
John Foster Dulles, deftly, managed to wear two hats. Through his family connections to U.S. foreign policy, he
conducted, to give one example, private negotiations among the Germans, French and Belgians to end the Allied
occupation of the Ruhr industrial district. Then, in his U.S. legal capacity, between 1924 and 1931 he advised on
more than $l billion in U.S. loans to German government, cities and companies. Allen Dulles, who joined his
brother at Sullivan and Cromwell in 1926, had good German contacts—introducing his brother to future
Reichsbank head Hjalmar Schacht, among others—dating back to his early 1920s State Department posting in
Berlin.
By the l930s, as Hitler consolidated power, Americans were increasingly embarrassed to be involved with
Germany companies and financiers under the Nazi thumb. The Berlin office of Sullivan & Cromwell, until it shut in
1935, was obliged to begin cables to the New York office with the salutation “Heil Hitler.” In the meantime, John
Foster Dulles, as a director and member of the executive committee of Inco (International Nickel Company), in
1934 and 1937 helped to arrange and then amend Inco’s cartel agreement with I.G. Farben to provide Germany
with a steady supply of nickel, essential for armor plating. He also served as a director of the American I.G.
Farben subsidiary, later renamed General Aniline and Film. In 1937, Allen Dulles became a director of J. Henry
Schroder, the American subsidiary of the German-connected London bank by that name, described in 1939 by
Time magazine as “an economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.”
Dillon, Read, in turn, while dropping some German clients after Hitler took power, retained its two biggest –
Siemens and Thyssen’s United Steel Works. James Forrestal, who became the firm’s president in 1938, also
served for awhile as an officer of General Aniline. Partner William Draper, who handled some of the German
business, was also co-director of a subsidiary, the German Credit and Investor Corporation of New Jersey, which
specialized in U.S. investments in Germany
Averell Harriman and his company, which in 1931 merged to become Brown Brothers Harriman, carried its own
set of un-divested and embarrassing relationships into the 1930s and even the 1940s. Harriman and George
Walker had set them up, for the most part, but the man charged with administering several by the mid-1930s was
the Walker son-in-law who had become the firm’s managing partner—Prescott Sheldon Bush. For legal assistance,
he turned to Wall Street’s number one advisors on Germany: the Dulles brothers. Harriman, Walker and Bush
were hardly alone; Standard Oil of New Jersey had troublesome Nazi-era German connections, as did General
Aniline and Film, Texaco, I.T.T, Ford and the Chase Bank. Allen Dulles represented several of these firms. In
his notes of January 1937 the group of clients requiring cloaking of assets were short-handed as “Brown
Brothers Harriman–Schroeder–Rock.” The U.S. Justice Department had begun probing in 1941, but Pearl Harbor
and the U.S. declaration of war against both Germany and Japan put government investigations into overdrive. In
early March 1942, a special Senate committee began public hearings on cartel agreements between U.S. and
German firms. Later that month, Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced that William S. Farish,
the Chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, had pleaded “no contest” to charges of criminal conspiracy between
his company and I.G. Farben. Because of cartel agreements, Standard had withheld from U.S. authorities
information on the production of artificial rubber.
In the meantime, Secretary of War Stimson, whose establishment ties were strong, —Andover, Yale, Skull and
Bones and service in both Republican and Democratic cabinets—had asked President Roosevelt to stop the
investigations because they would interfere with companies engaged in the war effort. However, that didn’t stop
the pursuits already underway. In June, acting under the Trading with the Enemy Act of December, 1941. the
federal Alien Property Custodian seized General Aniline, the I.G. Farben subsidiary.
At 59 Wall Street, Prescott Bush was doubtless feeling some chill in the Spring air. One of Farish’s son-in-laws
was at Brown Brothers Harriman, and in 1938 the firm had been collaterally involved in a German transaction—
shipping tetraethyl lead needed by the Luftwaffe—by the Ethyl Corporation, which had Farish as a director and
was half owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey. Government investigations were still proceeding, and a year
earlier, the New York Herald Tribune had front-paged a story headlined “Hitler’s Angel Has $3 Million in US
Bank,” reporting that steel baron Fritz Thyssen had channeled the money into the Union Banking Corporation,
possibly to be held for “Nazi bigwigs.”
In the meantime, government investigators were sifting through the U.S. affairs of the Hamburg-Amerika line, in
which the Harriman-Walker American Ship and Commerce Corporation still had a major shareholding. In August,
its property was seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. On October 20, the Alien Property Custodian
seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation. Eight days later, with UBC’s books in hand, the government
acted against two organizations connected to it—the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless
Steel Equipment Corporation. In November, the government seized the assets of the last major entity connected to
Harriman, Walker and Bush—the Silesian-American Corporation.
Politically, the significance—the great surprise—is that none of this seemed to matter much over the next decade
or so. A few questions would be raised, but Democrat Averell Harriman would not be stopped from becoming
federal Mutual Security Administrator in 1951 or winning election as Governor of New York in 1954. No innuendo
would keep John Foster Dulles from being appointed a U.S. Senate seat in 1949 or becoming U.S. Secretary of
State in 1953. Nor would Republican Prescott Bush and his presidential descendants be hurt in any of their future
elections.
It is almost as if these various German embroilments, despite their potential for scandal, were regarded as
unfortunate, but business as usual. Or more plausibly, that at a high governmental level, such roles were
unofficially reclassified into an intelligence function – a “tell us what you know about Germany” obligation. The
leaders of the American legal and financial community with decades of knowledge about Germany and well-placed
connections doubtless became important wartime national security assets, even if their previous behavior had
been less sterling. In any event, a surprising number of their descendants – William S. Farish III, William Draper
III and Joseph Verner Reed Jr. (grandson of Remington Arms chairman Samuel Pryor, earlier a director of both
UBC and American Ship and Commerce) – turned up as close personal advisers or high-level appointees in the
George H.W. Bush administration.
Chapter 6 will revisit and amplify these evolutions. For now, suffice it to say that besides dynastic roots in the
formative years of the military-industrial complex, the Bush family and circle were quietly important in the mid-
century emergence of the U.S. intelligence community. These connections go back more than three decades
before George H.W. Bush’s thirteen brief months as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from December,
1975 to January, 1977. National security as well as political connections would be vital to the family’s success and
standing over the quarter century following the end of World War Two.
Paternal Footsteps Followed and Rejected:
The Four Generation Making of The Bush Dynasty
Dynastic persistence usually depends more on heredity than affection. The pattern among England’s 18th century
Hanoverian kings, for example, was for eldest sons to dislike their fathers. George II and George IV, exemplars
of that inter-generational emnity, each set up rival courts as Prince of Wales or Prince Regent before their
fathers died. Three centuries earlier, English and French kings and Turkish sultans executed siblings, nephews
and cousins with hardly a thought.
By contrast, the dynastic houses in the United States, particularly the Kennedys and Bushes, have surrounded
themselves with benign imagery: handsome and large extended families interrupting happy barbecues and brisk
touch-football games to campaign for one another, burbling with a civic enthusiasm that might have been scripted
by the Hollywood of the 1950s or drawn by Norman Rockwell as a Saturday Evening Post cover. Little press
attention, by contrast, is ever paid to a dark side: the hereditary dysfunctions, crowds of old retainers, allied
families and networks, supplicants for a second or third generation of favors and persisting domestic or
international vendettas that spice the histories of the royal houses of Europe.
Serious purpose requires that the Bush succession be viewed through these lenses. After four generations of
wealth, the family has lost whatever nodding acquaintance great-grandfathers born in the 1860s might have had
with Horatio Alger. By the mid-20th century, family connections and crony capitalism had become the economic
staple, with emphasis on the rewards of finance and instinctive policymaking fealty to the investment business. The
Bushes have produced no college presidents and no stone masons, no scientists or plumbing contractors—
generally speaking, their progeny have become financial entrepreneurs.
These recurrent economic biases are part of the subject matter of Chapter 4.
This chapter’s focus, keyed to dynastic success itself, is on how four generations have sought to implant the
family, and the degree to which the heir in each generation, Prescott Bush Sr., George H.W. Bush and George W.
Bush, has imitated (or not imitated) the career path of his father’s career. The seeming answers begin to fill in
some interpretive gaps. Fathers and sons were not always as supportive as appearances suggested.
George H. Walker and Samuel Bush, great grand-fathers of the second Bush president, made their respective
successes by leaving their fathers’ vocations – dry goods and the Episcopal ministry – and striking out on their
own. Neither was a particular role model for his own sons; both provoked some filial resentment or distance.
Prescott Bush talked about his father not having money for him, and did not go back to Columbus, Ohio, to work
(save for awhile when his father was bereaved after his mother died in an auto accident ). He may have found
more of an economic, political and athletic authority figure in father-in-law George Herbert Walker. On the other
hand, Prescott Bush may have resented, by 1938 or 1942, the nest of cobra eggs that his father-in-law had left
under the names of Union Banking Corporation, American Ship and Commerce, Silesian American, Harriman
Fifteen and the rest. Former Justice Department official John Loftus suggests such disillusionment in his book
The Secret War Against the Jews. Other chroniclers have shunned the subject.
What George H.W. Bush, in turn, was trying to do when he went from Andover into naval aviation training rather
than Yale—and then when he went with Dresser Industries, an oil services company, rather than stay in New York
with Brown Brothers Harriman—is also grist for interpretation. Was he rejecting that world or just trying to get
out of his father’s long Eastern and Ivy League shadow?
Loftus, citing unnamed sources in the intelligence community, contends that the eighteen-year-old George H. W.
Bush, in becoming a naval aviator, was trying to redeem the family honor. The greater weight of evidence, judged
by the views of biographers, is that
he had a great respect for his father, proudly following his path through Yale and Skull & Bones. Besides, at age
eighteen, just out of Andover and with no college under his belt, he depended on his father’s help to arrange an
under-age and unqualified entrance to the naval air program. while nominally impossible, this might have been
quite manageable by a telephone call from Prescott Bush to one of three fellow Yale and Skull & Bones men (the
Secretary of War, the Assistant Secretary of War for Air or the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air).
Indeed, when the new Yale graduate went to Dresser in 1948 instead of investment banking, supposedly wanting
no part of “getting a job with Dad’s help and through Dad’s friends,” implantation was once again a mere paternal
word away—a conversation by Prescott Bush, then a Dresser board member for 18 years, with Dresser Chairman
Neil Mallon, yet another Bones comrade, whose own posting had originated two decades earlier on the whim of
the management group at Brown Brothers Harriman. They had just bought and refinanced Dresser, and were
looking for someone to run it. In neither case, military aviation or Dresser, was the Bush acorn falling too far from
the tree.
The official history of Dresser Industries (1979) does not sustain the legend that Bush struck out boldly for the
wilds of Texas: “[Prescott] Bush’s own regard for Dresser had been passed to his son, George, who following
World War Two, had worked for [company treasurer Rudolph] Reimer in the Cleveland headquarters, then for
Pacific Pumps and Ideco [two subsidiaries] before becoming an independent oil producer in Texas.” Besides, the
upscale side of Midland, where he wound up living, quickly became a kind of Cambridge or New Haven West.
Half of his oil-focused friends were transplanted Ivy Leaguers. Newly paved streets were named after Ivy League
colleges. Millionaires lived along Princeton and Harvard streets (as George W. later would). Small Midland, by
itself, supported Harvard, Yale and Princeton clubs.
Interestingly, although Bush’s independent oil ventures in Texas were family funded, only a relatively small stake
($50,000) came from his father. The larger flow, another $350,000 in 1950 and $500,000 in 1953, came from the
friends and resources of George Herbert Walker Jr.—Uncle Herbie—whose own children resented how much
attention he (like his own father) seemed to concentrate on the Bushes. Where George H. W. Bush clearly took
after his own father, not after his Walker relations, was in preferring public office and heading off toward politics
once he had enough money to be independent. He also re-iterated his father’s national security interests in taking
up the CIA directorship in 1975, as well as by (usually) being a New England-type Republican fiscal conservative
and social moderate disinclined to wear ideological cowboy boots. His initial presidential nomination bid in 1980,
instead of counting on the oil states or the South, looked hopefully toward early voting Iowa and beyond to
Northeastern states.
Despite a much-advertised taste for pork rinds and country music, George Herbert Walker Bush wound up even
more of a Yale caricature than his father had been in 1952, in his raccoon coat cheerleading for Eisenhower. In
1988, after George H. W. lost the Republican caucuses in Iowa, he made the extraordinary excuse that his
supporters were busy on the golf course or at air shows or debutante parties. That same year, Washington’s
Gridiron Club spoofed him with not- inappropriate lyrics: “If your daughter’s in cotillion and your son’s enrolled at
Choate and your wife is worth a million, I’m sure to get your vote.”
Son George W. Bush, despite making the Connecticut-to-Texas transformation with sagebrush panache, took his
father as a role model. In 2000, Elizabeth Mitchell, executive editor at George, the magazine begun by John F.
Kennedy, Jr., published a book “W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty. Her principal thread was a pursuit not only of
how much he resembled his father, but of how he had sought to imitate him and follow in his career footsteps:
“Some of the twinning of mannerisms could be downright spooky to friends. Of course, they shared the same first
and last names. Always people would be doing somersaults to distinguish between them. George and Georgie.
George Senior and Junior. Big George and Little George. George and George W.”
Besides their physical resemblance, George W. shared his tendency to play golf for speed and to mix up his
sentences with something resembling verbal dyslexia.. Actual dyslexia ran in their family, and in 2000, writer Gail
Sheehy marshaled a case that George W. had it, like his brother Neil. However, the Sheehy hypothesis was never
really pursued. Father and son also had a striking ability to remember people names and faces and memorize
things, especially baseball batting orders, starting line-ups and fraternity members.. At one point, President
George H.W. Bush was going to try to solve his problem with journalists by memorizing the names and photos of
the entire White House press corps. For both—and apparently for Prescott Bush and great-grandfather Bush,
too—unusual memory was a great asset, both in retail politicking and in retaining data and information.
Like his father, George H.W. Bush went to Andover, and like his father and grandfather, he attended Yale. Like
his grandfather, who played first base, and his father, who did likewise, George W. also made Yale’s varsity
baseball team, albeit only as a third-string pitcher. Also like his father, he became president of Yale’s Delta
Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Chronicler Mitchell likewise noted that his engagement to a Houston girl named Cathy
Wolfman “so echoed George W,”s parents history that even some of his friends noticed. Cathy had been a Smith
girl, as Barbara was, although she transferred to Rice University for her last years. George W. was 20 years old,
the same age his father had been when he married...They made the decision over Christmas vacation, the same
holiday season when his parents wed. They planned to spend senior year in New Haven together just like his
parents had.” However, the engagement was later ended.
At Yale, both his grandfather and father were tapped by Skull and Bones, and so was George W. After graduating,
he became a military pilot like his father, with some similar help from family influence. In early 1968, before his
graduation, a friend of his father’s spoke to Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes. The lieutenant-governor, in
turn, contacted the commander of the Texas Air National Guard, Brigadier General James M. Rose, with the
result that George W. jumped the several waiting lists involved. After taking five weeks of basic training, he was
discharged as an enlisted man, recommended for a second lieutenancy the next day, and given pre-training
permission to spend September to November working in the campaign of successful GOP Florida Senate
candidate Edward J. Gurney.
It had been against navy regulations in 1942 to place eighteen-year-old George Bush in flight training, and the Los
Angeles Times found a similar bending of the rules twenty-six years later. George W. did not qualify for either a
direct commission or flight training. Tom Hail, the historian of the Texas National Guard, said that direct
commissions were “for doctors only, mostly because we needed extra flight surgeons.” The air force flight-
instruction program was also a favor, because expensive training would not be given to a green candidate who had
shown no professional commitment. The Texas Air National Guard arranged for George W. to train on F-102
fighters, dated aircraft being phased out of front-line service. He knew that he would not go to Vietnam; indeed his
own unit in Texas was being shut down even as he finished flight training.
George W. thereupon went to work in his father’s unsuccessful 1970 Senate campaign. When it was over, he found
a job traveling for Stratford of Texas, an agribusiness firm run by fellow Yale Skull and Bonesman Richard Gow,
who had been with his father at Zapata Petroleum. In 1972, he attached himself to another family friend, former
Republican Deputy National Chairman James Allison, Jr., in another losing effort—the Alabama U.S. Senate
campaign of former postmaster general Winton M. Blount. Thirty-six years old in mid-1972, George W. was
stumbling, falling far behind in his effort to walk in his father’s footsteps.
At some point late in 1972, his father got him a different kind of job, working with minority children in PULL
(Professionals United for Leadership), which the elder Bush chaired. George W. seems to have stayed in this job
through the summer of 1973 until he went off to Harvard Business School. Few explanations have been offered
for this unusual employment, but J.H. Hatfield, in a hostile 2000 biography entitled Fortunate Son, made a charge
never substantiated (or, for that matter, comprehensively refuted): that after a 1972 arrest in Texas for
possession of cocaine, George W. worked at PULL for some months as part of a deal by which his record was later
expunged by the court.
A degree from Harvard Business School put Bush back on a meaningful career trajectory, and shortly after
graduating in 1975, he got back on his father’s old track by deciding to seek his fortune in familiar Midland. A few
years later, the 1980 census would peg Midland as the richest town in America, with the highest per capita income
and the highest level of Rolls Royce sales. Like his father teaming with Jim Overbey in 1950, George W. decided
to begin on his own by being a landman—the person who prowls the maps and records at the county court house for
potentially oil-productive land rights and then locates the owner to strike a deal.
In 1977, he named his mini-enterprise Arbusto—Spanish for Bush—taking the other alphabetic end of the A or Z
choice that his father had made a quarter century earlier in naming his firm Zapata. However, after getting
married in 1977, he wound up doing no drilling until 1979. Once again, he was thrown off his father’s vocational
track in 1978 by a local opening for the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead of waiting to make enough money
to become independent before going into politics, he launched a campaign for the West Texas seat being vacated
by longtime conservative Democrat George Mahon.
He won the nomination, defeating a Reagan supporter, Odessa Mayor Jim Reese, who then declined to back him
in the general election. Bush lost in November to conservative Democrat Kent Hance, but took a respectable
47% to Hance’s 53%. Battle lines for the 1980 Republican presidential race were already being drawn, and some
pro-Reagan Republicans tried to tie George W. to his father’s internationalist and Eastern establishment
connections. Like his father in the Senate races of 1964 and to a lesser extent 1970, George W. was called too
preppie, too Yalie, to be truly Texan.
In 1979, his Uncle Jonathan, who headed a small New York investment firm named J. Bush & Co., put together a
drilling fund for his nephew at the same time as he was raising money for the accelerating presidential bid of
George W.’s father. Arbusto, now headquartered in the same Midland Petroleum Building where George H.W.
Bush had started Zapata a generation earlier, got a pot of $565,000 from Uncle Jonathan’s investors. However, the
wildcatting didn’t go well, and oil prices, after peaking in 1980, dropped in 1981 and 1982. As his father’s
prominence increased, George W. renamed the company Bush Exporation. He went back to family friends for
more money—oil investments, even ones with empty holes, were useful as tax shelters—and came up with $4.7
million, including $1 million from Philip Uzielli, an investor with several Bush connections, and $172,550 from
William H. Draper III, a fellow Bonesman.
Arbusto, the joke went, had turned into Ar-Bust-o. Its investors took big nominal losses (in the $3 million range)
even while Bush got salary and office operations money. In 1984, a Cincinnati-based group, including a Yale
classmate, decided to buy out Arbusto and hire George W. to run their oil interests in Midland. The vice president’
s son—his father was now laboring in Washington for energy deregulation—became chairman and third-largest
owner of the company, Spectrum 7, with 16% of the stock.
By 1986, oil prices had plummeted; the oil business was a disaster and so were the finances of Spectrum 7. A
major outlay for stripper wells had failed, and Bush started looking for another financial angel. As The Observer of
London would later note, “whenever he’s struck a dry well, someone has always been willing to fill it with money
for him.” In fulfillment, along came Harken Energy, a small Texas firm with high-powered connections, that was
gobbling up other small oil companies on the verge of bankruptcy. Harken offered a swap: one of its shares for
every five of Spectrum 7. None of the Cincinnati investors seemed to mind, so the deal closed on September 30,
1986. George W. got stock worth about $530,000, a Harken directorship and a two-year consulting arrangement at
$80,000 per year, which later rose to $120,000 a year. Bush Senior now being within hailing distance of the White
House, the hopeful influence-wielders grew bigger: Over the next few years, Harken would turn out to include
Saudi money, Philippine CIA ties, the Harvard Endowment, the Emir of Bahrein, and links to the shadowy Bank
of Commerce and Credit International.
The Harken deal also gave George W. something else: freedom to do what he wanted beyond from the occasional
Harken board meeting. His choice was to help in the campaign his father, about to finish a second term as Reagan’
s vice president, was beginning for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. By this point, George W. Bush
had spent almost two decades as an adult trying to follow in his father’s footsteps and generally lacking the
necessary luck or skills. Between 1986, when his father began running for the presidency, and 1992 when he was
driven from it, the equation changed. So did George W. Bush.
The connection to the old establishment, whose red carpet his father had walked so successfully through potentially
hostile Nixon and Reagan administrations, had become a liability. The mocking Gridiron stanzas would be
paralleled in newsmagazine covers about the “wimp factor,” and in scathing 1991 public resentment of George H.
W. Bush’s inability to relate to grocery prices or check-out counters. Such themes would recur in the 1992 New
Hampshire GOP presidential primary taunts hurled by challenger Patrick Buchanan at “King George” and the
“Walker’s Point” elites. The presidential vote share that Bush received that November was the worst for a sitting
president in eight decades
But only a little more than a year after the dust of 1992 had settled, George W. Bush was running for governor of
Texas in the 1994 election. Moreover, he was displaying a cultural and political persona quite unlike his father’s,
one that promised a real chance to restore both his family and the Republican Party to power in 2000.
The four mainstays of the old mid-century establishment – finance, oil and energy, the military-industrial complex
and the national security/intelligence community – still enjoyed their centrality of influence. If anything, the Texas
leadership, the increasingly Southern base and the conservative ideological evolution of the Republican Party
deepened and enlarged it. What was new in Bush demeanor was the cow country accent, the clothing, the chawing
tobacco, the style of religiosity, the moral fundamentalism, the outsider language, the disdain for the Harvards and
Yales, the six-gun geopolitics, and not least the garb of a sinner rescued from drink and brought to God by none
other than evangelist Billy Graham.
To understand this transformation, consider the tale of George W. Bush not following in his father’s footsteps.
From a fairly early age, he was more of a rascal and less of an Ivy League gentleman in training, a Texas cut-up
with a Texas drawl. At Andover, he could only manage to become a Big Man On Campus type by rowdy wit—his
nickname was “the Lip”—and by postures like making himself “Stickball Commissioner.” One of the few
unassigned books he read was Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. As president of the DKE house
at Yale, he got in trouble for lifting a Christmas wreath from a store and for branding pledges as an initiation.
In contrast to his father’s fond memories, he came away from Yale with a grudge against its fashionable campus
liberalism. At Harvard Business School, one girlfriend recalled , he didn’t like the Charles River MBA norm:
“While they were drinking Chivas Regal, he was drinking Wild Turkey. They were smoking Benson and Hedges,
and he’s dipping Copenhagen, and while they were going to the opera, he would listen to Johnny Rodriguez over
and over and over and over.”
Friends recalled several years of bombast and wastrelism after he returned to Texas in 1975. Before he got
married in 1977, a worst dressed award was named after him at the local country club. He had been an
Episcopalian as a youth, but after being wed in Midland’s First Methodist church, he began going there. The
worse things got in the oil business and with his bourbon habit, the more attention he paid to bible study classes. “I
believe my spiritual awakening started well before the price of oil went below $9 [per barrel],” he told one
interviewer, but 1986 was “a year of change when I look back at it.” That was when he found God and, right after
his 40th birthday, put away the Wild Turkey bottle.
An ivied Episcopal faith had not helped George H.W. Bush get along with the Southern Baptist rural Democrats
of Texas any more than it had endeared him to the fundamentalists, evangelicals, pentacostals and pre-
millennialists who filled the battalions of the Religious Right critical to the national GOP of the Reagan Era. An
evangelized and fundamentalist-leaning George W., by contrast, a decade after being saved by Billy Graham,
would reply “Jesus Christ” when asked what philosopher had most influenced him. Bible Belt televangelists, some
of them his father’s persecutors, became his proud hosts from Longview to Lubbock.
Whereas George H.W. Bush had spent life garnering his best receptions in places with a high ratio of Yale alumni
and subscribers to publications like Foreign Affairs, George W. disliked the Ivy League and read fewer books
than his father. In New Hampshire and other Yankee states in 1988, he frequently made a bad impression with his
Texas twang, cowboy boots and wad of chewing tobacco dribbling a small brown stream out of the side of his mouth.
He was, in short, almost a caricature over-correction of several of his father’s greatest political weaknesses. But
party power brokers knew the roughness could be polished. By 1997, a considerable number of the big donors,
business and financial magnates, powerful lobbyists and Republican hierarchs who had supported his father were
concluding that with a George W. Bush matured by six years as governor of Texas, they could pre-empt the
Republican nomination in 2000. Then by tapping the public’s moral hunger and Clinton fatigue, they could win the
presidential election and govern the United States farther to the right than George H.W. Bush would have
imagined. Finance, oil, the military-industrial complex and the national security/intelligence community would
return to the nation’s highest councils.
Fulfilment of this strategy would mark one the most most extraordinary role changes by a major American
political family. George H.W. Bush had lost the presidency in 1992 partly because he struck voters as an upper-
class man with little sense of the rest of the country, never a winning position in U.S. politics. Voters have
responded best to more interesting or complicated politicians, witness the dualities posited by mid-20th century
historian Richard Hofstadter in many of the most successful: Thomas Jefferson (“the aristocrat as a democrat”),
William Jennings Bryan (“the democrat as a revivalist”) , Theodore Roosevelt (“the conservative as a
progressive”) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (“the patrician as an opportunist”).
It’s not hard to pick a similar duality for Bush. Because of his family, his starting characterization must be
conservative, aristocrat or patrician, although his demeanor from boyhood revealed practically nothing of the
patrician. His change will be further examined in Chapters 4, 7 and 8 with respect to the religious aspect of his
economics and the biblical coloration of his foreign policy. For now, suffice it to suggest three possible post-
transformation nouns: revivalist, evangelist or fundamentalist. Taken together, the combination of his self-
certainty, religious conviction touched with messianic hints and a tendency to both doctrinal extremes and black-
versus-white simplicities suggested a new pairing on the Hofstadter chart: the aristocrat as a fundamentalist.
But we are getting ahead of our story. It is the presidential election year of 2000, and the modern United States is
on the brink of an entirely unprecedented threshold : American political and economic dynastization.
Comments by Kevin Phillips, April 10, 2004
The essence of Schweizer’s fairly short analysis seems to be that he would never quote the people that I have used
for some minor citations, some of them quoting somebody else. In his piece, he takes clear, direct issue with only
five of the circumstances I discuss. These are a good place to begin, and the “source” stuff will follow:
§ Prior to World War Two, says Schweizer, it was Averell Harriman, not presidential grandfather Prescott
Bush, who handled their partnerships commercial and financial relations with Russia and Germany;
§ During World War One, presidential great-grandfather Samuel Bush’s firm, Buckeye Steel Castings, did not
make unusual profits from its war business (artillery barrels and shell casings);
§ Prescott Bush had no World War One intelligence ties and was not an eminence grise in the mid-20th
century U.S. intelligence community;
§ George H.W. Bush was not an asset of the CIA before he became CIA director in 1976 (Schweizer implies
this, at least—although it is not clear that he actually intends to make a concrete statement); and
§ There is nothing, says Schweizer, to the “October Surprise” thesis that the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign
and perhaps George H. W. Bush himself were involved in mid- and late-1980 negotiations with the revolutionary
government of the Iranian ayatollahs to keep the Iranians from releasing the 52 Americans they held hostage in
time for the November election. The supposed objective was to keep President Jimmy Carter from being able to
get the hostages released in time to win the election.
In the first matter, here are Schweizer’s 9th and 10th paragraphs:
“One of Phillips’s most attention-grabbing chapters posits the theory that the Bushes were involved with the rise of
Adolf Hitler. While he correctly notes that Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment banking firm employing
Prescott Bush and George H. Walker (George W’s great-grandfather) invested in Nazi-era German companies,
Phillips fails to note that it was Averell Harriman, later FDR’s ambassador to Moscow and Truman’s commerce
secretary, who initiated these investments (and some in Soviet Russia) before either of the Bushes joined the firm.
Prescott Bush did not oversee these investments; the reality is that he was involved almost exclusively in
managing the firm’s domestic portfolio. It was Harriman who largely managed the foreign investments and,
accordingly, it was he who met German and Soviet leaders.”
“Phillips also makes much of the fact that Prescott Bush was involved with the Union Banking Corporation, which
was seized by federal authorities in 1942 under the Trading With The Enemy Act, a story frequently cited on left-
wing web sites. But what Phillips fails to mention is that Bush had only a token role in the bank: Of the more than
four thousand shares, Prescott Bush owned only one – urged on him by Harriman. Moreover, despite the
conspiratorial argument that members of the WASP elite always work together hand in glove, Bush and Harriman
were never as close as Phillips leads one to believe: Harriman actually campaigned aggressively against Bush in
his 1952 Senate race.”
Unfortunately, Schweizer must know nothing about the period or the Harriman-Walker-Bush business
relationships. And, of course, this is not material that his patrons would have fed him. Turning to his comments set
out above, there were never two Bushes involved with Harriman; there was George Herbert Walker, who became
president of W. A. Harriman & Co. in 1919, and Prescott Bush, who became its vice president in 1926. Most, but
not all, of the German-linked companies were established by Walker and Harriman between 1920 and 1926,
including the Union Banking Corporation, set up for Germany’s Thyssen steel interests, In the early 1930s, after
W.A. Harriman & Co. became Brown Brothers Harriman through a merger, Walker semi-retired and Bush took
over some of his responsibilities. Harriman did not manage the firm’s foreign investments; underlings did.
Harriman had some of his foreign investments run through other corporate frameworks, and Prescott Bush was
close enough to him to become a director of several.The current president’s grandfather was a director of both
Union Banking Corporation and the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, which managed several foreign holdings during
the 1930s. Prescott Bush was a director of Harriman Fifteen from 1931 through at least 1938, and he was a director
of Union Banking Corporation from 1934 to 1942. A measure of how closely this Bush worked with Averell
Harriman can be found in the list of directors of another unit, Harriman Thirty Corporation, for 1931-32: Averell
Harriman and Prescott Bush were the sole names listed. George H. Walker, in turn, remained a director of
Silesian-American and Silesian Holding Co., with Averell Harriman also a director off and on through the 1930s.
These directorships may be confirmed in The Directory of Directors in the City of New York for the years in
question. While Prescott Bush was a director of Union Banking (which had several trading affiliates), two of his
fellow directors were H.J. Koewenhoven and J.G. Groeninger. They were described in the New York Herald-
Tribune of July 31, 1941 as principal assistants to Fritz Thyssen and his war-mobilized German steel and
transportation empire. Much more information can about these links can be found in appendices A and B of
American Dynasty. Blaming Harriman (who was rarely at his investment firm) for everything is as phoney as a
three-dollar bill. This is only the beginning.
In the second matter, here are Schweizer’s (combined) eleventh and twelfth paragraphs:
“Likewise, Phillips tries to paint great grandfather S.P. Bush as a war profiteer. His sin? S.P. served on the War
Industries Board, later criticized for approving lucrative deals with American companies. But Bushed joined the
WIB on June 1, 1918, barely five months before the armistice. While companies like U.S. Steel and Remington
eventually made a bundle based on contracts before his arrival, Bush’s Buckeye didn’t make out well. A look at
Buckeye records at the Ohio Historical Society (the kind of basic research Phillips didn’t do) reveals that profits
grew only slightly faster than volume; there was no Bush war profits windfall.”
Not quite. Buckeye did do well, because it had strong Rockefeller/Standard Oil connections (more on these some
other time). John D. Rockefeller’s youngest brother, Frank, was the president of Buckeye in 1906-1908 just before
Sam Bush took over (1908 through 1927). The information on Buckeye’s gun-barrel and shell-casing-fattened war
profits – high enough that the company had “dividends averaging 27 percent for the period 1916-1920" – comes
from Mansel G. Blackford, a Portrait Cast in Steel: Buckeye International and Columbus, Ohio, 1881-1980, p. 31.
Blackford is a business historian at Ohio State. Buckeye did not profit in the extreme like Bethlehem Steel, but
27% dividends were sweet. As for Sam Bush’s 1917-1919 involvement with the War Industries Board, Grosvenor
B. Clarkson of the U.S. Council of National Defense described Bush’s WIB role as follows in his 1923 book
Industrial America in the World War (p. 247): “He was drafted into Mr. Vauclain’s subcommittee of the Council of
National Defense on army and navy artillery, was subsequently at the head of the War Industries Board’s section
on forging, guns, small arms and ammunition for the last; and in the last months of the war became chief of the
facilities division.” I guess this wasn’t in the family hand-outs, either.
In the third matter, Schweizer contends that I say Prescott Bush “was recruited in world of intelligence by a British
spy” and that “Prescott Bush might have served as a shadow CIA director.”
My two actual quotations are as follows. For the first one (p. 198), I said “Author John Loftus, with his compendia
of anonymous intelligence interviews, put the finger on London’s Whitehall, which hardly excluded New Haven:
‘Prescott himself had served in military intelligence during World War One, liaising with the British. According to
our [Loftus’s] sources, he was trained by Stuart Menzies, later the head of the British secret service during World
War Two.” Loftus’s thesis is not implausible, because U.S.-British intelligence cooperation in the First World War
was very close. However, I certainly don’t know whether it’s correct. I cited it in a group of scenarios.
The second reference to Prescott Bush cited by Schweizer was a comment by me that followed wide-ranging
descriptions of the man’s connections, “the intrigued researcher, connecting these dots and many others, starts to
assume that Prescott Bush of Yale, Skull and Bones, and Brown Brothers Harriman was an off-the-books
eminence grise, a Man Who Could Be Trusted, perhaps even a shadow CIA director” (p.198). This is hardly a
firmly expressed conclusion. I agree—as many in Connecticut have told me—that the current president’s
grandfather was not exactly the heaviest thinker in the Congress, but he knew so many key people and where so
many secrets were buried that he was a Made Man, so to speak.
In the next matter, Schweizer – in his fourth paragraph – seems to say that George H.W. Bush was not a CIA asset
in the late 1950s and 60s before actually becoming CIA director in 1976, and contends that I cite only two sources
to make the affirmative case, The Nation and the Adamson Report.
Actually, Schweizer doesn’t flat out say that Bush wasn’t and I don’t flat out say that he was. Dozens of sources
have speculated on different ways in which Bush Senior might have developed his pre-1976 CIA connection or
asset status. The Adamson Report, to take one, can fairly be said to be something of a fringe publication, but
somehow or other Adamson got hold of a box of some papers that had revealing correspondence between Bush
chum Neil Mallon, the head of Texas-based Dresser Industries, CIA chief Allen Dulles and Prescott Bush. Several
of the photocopied letters are fascinating. On p. 204, distilling the conflicting allegations of how and when, I wrote
that “Adamson, Loftus, The Nation magazine, and the U.S. journalism effort named Project Censored all posited
some direct George H.W. Bush-CIA connection emerging between 1954 and 1963. Related hints of a Mexican-
connected Bush initiation also came from reporter Jonathan Kwitny in his 1988 Barron’s article ‘The Mexican
Connection.’ The implications are considerable; concrete proof is minimal.” That about sums it up, but anyone who
wants to read a cross-section of the various Bush-in-the-CIA analyses can turn to pp.200-208. I realize that there is
an element of conspiracy theory there, but the George W. Bush has a personal press spokesman, Scott McClellan,
from Texas’s first family of conspiracy theorists. So obviously, Bushdom, too, keeps up.
As for the last matter, in paragraph seven of his commentary, Schweizer says “In another chapter Phillips revives
the tired old story that the Reagan-Bush campaign planned an ‘October Surprise’to prevent the release of
American hostages in Iran before 1980 presidential election. Although long since abandoned by Democrats who,
after an official inquiry headed by Rep. Lee Hamilton, admitted there was no evidence for it, Phillips says that the
theory should be taken seriously, based on new evidence. His sources? A series of overheated stories on the left-
wing web site, consortium news.org. written by Robert Parry, an obsessive pursuer of this theory whose work has
been repudiated by the New Republic, Newsweek, American Journalism Review and even the Village Voice.”
The alleged October Surprise is an intriguing enigma. Former President Jimmy Carter has said he believed it
happened. In some form, I think it did, too. Moreover, the Congressional investigation in which Hamilton was
involved closed up shop after George H.W. Bush was defeated for re-election in 1992 without ever publishing
numerous of its ultimate investigative discoveries. These had not yet been collected when Newsweek and the New
Republic in 1991 published their debunking analyses of October Surprise, the book by Carter National Security
Council aide Gary Sick. But by early 1993, the investigators had received additional material from the French and
the Russians confirming that the GOP had in fact met with the Iranians in Paris to negotiate a delay in the
hostages’ release until after the 1980 election. This material was not disseminated. Ex-Newsweek and AP reporter
Parry has been the prime chronicler. But new testimony in the same vein came in the French edition of the memoirs
of ABC News’ Pierre Salinger in 1996 (see American Dynasty, p. 287). Since I wrote my book, I came across
another volume by British writer Gordon Thomas entitled Gideon’s Spies – a history of Israel’s Mossad published
in 1999. It concluded that Ari ben-Menashe, an Israeli agent who wrote his own account arguing that the GOP-
Iranian meetings did in fact take place, actually was a highly placed Israeli agent. Back in the early 1990s, said the
author, Israeli intelligence had mounted a campaign to discredit Ben-Menashe in order to help U.S. politicians bury
his allegations. Do I expect the media to pay any serious attention to the idea of having to correct this history? No.
But after what happened in Florida in 2000, I do expect the 1980 issue to linger and be revisited.
Before I conclude, it is also worth pointing out a couple of my supposed “sources” that Schweizer deceptively gets
excited over. In paragraph eight, he says “Phillips also relies on J.H. Hatfield’s Fortunate Son, a now discredited
book about George W. Bush, which was pulled by its publisher. He also accepts the reporting of Victor Thorn,
writing in Imagazine.com, concerning the Bush’s relationships to Saudi Arabia. (Thorn’s other credits include the
books, The New World Order and The Real Reason Jesus Was Crucified.)
My reference to J.H. Hatfield is hardly an example of reliance. I said on p. 88 that “the writer who published the
allegations in a book, J.H. Hatfield, had a criminal record which discredited both him and his story.” As for Thorn,
whose name did not ring a bell, the citation on p. 315 was for the following quote “Charles Freeman, president of
the Middle East Policy Council and a former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, has said of this relationship, ‘if
ever there were any company closely connected to the U.S. and its presence in Iraq, it’s the bin Laden group. They’
re the establishment Osama’s trying to overthrow.’” Thorn – who may very well be an odd duck – just happened to
use a perceptive Freeman quote originating in the Wall Street Journal and cited it correctly. Finally, in his 7th
paragraph, Schweizer says that I “claim the Bushes have obstructed Justice Department investigations into CIA
activities.” The actual quote on p. 280 of American Dynasty, going back to 1976, is that “In the eyes of Attorney
General Edward Levi, [George H.W.] Bush’s actions [as CIA director at the time] verged on obstructing Justice
Department investigations.” Well-reported at the time, Levi was angry about CIA director Bush stonewalling in
the investigation of whether ex-CIA director Richard Helms lied to Congress. Apparently Schweizer can’t even
read.
If the Bushies wants to take issue with the allegations I get into, they better line up a more sophisticated
hatchetman. Perhaps they might employ Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary. McClellan should
have a nose for conspiracy theory, because his father, Texas attorney Barr McClellan, is the author of a book
published in 2003 called Blood, Money and Power: How L.B.J. killed J.F.K. It is a seriously intended, detailed
tome with exhibits, pictures and documents. On the back cover of the book, the publishers quote this passage from
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Former U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, according to the father of the current White House press secretary. McClellan is the
father of White House press secretary Scott McClellan and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Mark
McClellan. He says he has photographs, letters and fingerprint samples – that the ambitious Johnson was behind
the 1963 assassination in Dallas, Texas.” Really?
Indeed, one friendly Bush biographer, Herbert Parmet, noted in his George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee
(pp. 106-107), how on Nov. 22, 1963, George H.W. Bush had called the Houston office of the FBI to report that a
James Parrot had been recently been talking about killing the president [Kennedy had just been assassinated]
when he came to Texas. Parrot, quickly cleared, was a member of the Young Republicans and Bush had just been
Harris County (Houston) Republican chairman. Why would Bush Senior have called in something about a Young
Republican...disinformation or what? Maybe Scott McClellan can ask his dad.
Over to you, American investigative journalists.
{1}
