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Jour­nal­ist Russ Baker has authored Fam­ily of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invis­i­ble Gov­ern­ment and the Hid­den His­tory of the Last 50 Years–a poten­tially deci­sive, multi-generational polit­i­cal his­tory and analy­sis of the Bush fam­ily. This first inter­view of six con­ducted with the author chron­i­cles the gen­e­sis of the Bush dynasty, high­light­ing the family’s busi­ness and polit­i­cal rela­tion­ships with pow­er­ful Wall Street inter­ests, the Har­ri­man busi­ness empire, in par­tic­u­lar. Russ Baker, Fam­ily of Secrets, and this series of six inter­views illus­trate and ana­lyze the net­works of pow­er­ful cor­po­rate and national secu­rity inter­ests that have man­i­fested the Bush fam­ily and, in turn, been advanced by them.

Through­out the deal­ings of gen­er­a­tions of Bushes, one finds the petro­leum busi­ness, spy­craft and the syn­the­sis of pop­u­lar elec­toral pol­i­tics with covert oper­a­tions. Set­ting forth impor­tant episodes in the ascent of George H.W. (“Poppy”) Bush, this pro­gram notes his pro­found involve­ment with the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and the fun­da­men­tal, sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship between his busi­ness ven­tures and an appar­ent life­long career as an intel­li­gence offi­cer. After recount­ing Prescott Bush’s work for pow­er­ful invest­ment bank­ing firm Brown Broth­ers Har­ri­man, the pro­gram under­scores his son George’s involve­ment with intel­li­gence going back to his work for an ONI photo analy­sis unit dur­ing World War II. After the war, “Poppy” (George H.W.) Bush uses fam­ily pro­fes­sional con­nec­tions to become estab­lished in Texas.

From work with oil drilling firm Dresser Industries–headed by Har­ri­man crony and fel­low Yale “Bones­man” Henry Neil Mal­lon–Poppy moves on to head his own out­fit, Zap­ata Off­shore Petro­leum. Launched with the aid of CIA vet­eran Thomas Devine, Zap­ata appears to have been lit­tle more than an intel­li­gence front. Not prof­itable, Zap­ata encom­passed a range of oper­a­tions and ven­tures that appear to have advanced the inter­ests of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency and pow­er­ful eco­nomic forces it serves. Among the sig­nif­i­cant areas of involve­ment for Zap­ata was Latin Amer­ica, espe­cially Cuba and the anti-Castro efforts of the CIA.

Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance is Baker’s analy­sis of Poppy’s behav­ior vis a vis the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy. At loss to explain his exact where­abouts and activ­ity at the time Pres­i­dent Kennedy was assas­si­nated, the elder George Bush appears to have been involved with the assas­si­na­tion. Closely asso­ci­ated with the intel­li­gence and cor­po­rate milieu that dis­patched JFK, Poppy was cer­tainly in Dal­las the evening before the assas­si­na­tion and may very well have been there on the very day of the killing. His inabil­ity to account for his behav­ior on that fate­ful day and his evi­dent and sophis­ti­cated efforts to obscure his tracks are sug­ges­tive of guilt.

Close to Richard Nixon through­out his polit­i­cal career, Poppy Bush appears to have been piv­otally involved with the intel­li­gence forces that delib­er­ately ousted Nixon in the Water­gate affair, itself inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the events of 11/22/1963 and the Bay of Pigs milieu.

The saga of the Bush clan, as well as the evo­lu­tion of the power elite struc­ture to which they belong, have imprinted that fam­ily with cer­tain his­tor­i­cal and polit­i­cal “themes”–themes that can be clearly iden­ti­fied in the nature and legacy of the polit­i­cal career of George W. Bush. Read a Mini-Review of the Book.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Analy­sis of the use of the rhetor­i­cal cliche “con­spir­acy the­ory” to actively sup­press dis­cus­sion of clan­des­tine oper­a­tions; syn­op­sis of key ele­ments of the “Old Boy Net­work” and East­ern Estab­lish­ment; Henry Neil Mallon’s involve­ment with intel­li­gence and national mat­ters; Mallon’s close rela­tion­ship with CIA direc­tor and Sul­li­van and Cromwell asso­ciate Allen Dulles; Dulles’s pedi­gree in the Wall Street and intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment; Poppy Bush’s rela­tion­ship to Oswald intel­li­gence babysit­ter George De Mohren­schildt; Poppy’s use of a memo to the FBI to pro­vide him­self with a con­ve­nient cover for his activ­i­ties on 11/22/1963; the evo­lu­tion of Dresser Indus­tries into Hal­libur­ton (headed for a time by Dick Cheney, polit­i­cal crony of both Poppy and Dubya); syn­op­sis of the close polit­i­cal rela­tion­ship between LBJ and Poppy; Poppy’s selec­tion of Judge Manuel Bravo, a close LBJ asso­ciate, to head Zap­ata Off­shore Petroleum’s (land­locked) Medellin, Colum­bia office; the role of Hal­libur­ton the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon blowout in the Gulf of Mex­ico; the pro­fes­sional and his­tor­i­cal links between the Bush fam­ily and the Gam­mells, a pow­er­ful Scot­tish bank­ing fam­ily who are, in turn, closely con­nected to the milieu of for­mer British PM Tony Blair and BP; the role of the milieu of narcotics-smuggling and intelligence-connected banks to the pro­fes­sional ascent of the younger George Bush; George W. Bush’s dec­la­ra­tion to a Texas in jour­nal­ist that if affored the oppor­tu­nity, he intended to invade Iraq.