Lis­ten:
MP3 Side 1 | Side 2

Intro­duc­tion: 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. Sadly–as Russ dis­cusses in the interview–he has not been able to get on more main­stream talk shows to pro­mote his land­mark text; they are fod­der for the puff piece mem­oirs of Laura and George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their ilk. For The Record gives the book its due.

In this third of six inter­views, Baker high­lights the after­math of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion, in which Poppy Bush appears to have been involved, as well as detail­ing the polit­i­cal accel­er­a­tion of his career in the mid-1960’s.

JFK angered the petro­leum indus­try and asso­ci­ated Tex­ans by attempt­ing to remove the oil deple­tion allowance, a major tax wind­fall for the oil com­pa­nies. With Kennedy out of the way, it was busi­ness as usual for the elders of oil. Poppy Bush was elected to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, where, thanks to the influ­ence of his father Prescott (Senior), he obtained a key posi­tion on the House Ways and Means Committee–highly unusual for a fresh­man con­gress­man. In that capac­ity, he was ide­ally posi­tioned to safe­guard the oil deple­tion allowance and to run inter­fer­ence for the inter­ests of the petro­leum industry.

With JFK dead and peo­ple like Poppy Bush in place, the inter­ests of the “Texas Raj” were pre­served, and the threat Kennedy posed to petro­leum and defense inter­ests were eliminated.

While in Con­gress, Poppy Bush remained close to then Pres­i­dent Lyn­don Baines John­son. Although a Demo­c­rat, LBJ was con­ser­v­a­tive and polit­i­cally beholden unto many of the same petro­leum and defense indus­try related inter­ests that backed Bush, and on whose behalf Poppy acted. Such was the close­ness between the two that, dur­ing the inau­gural events sur­round­ing Richard Nixon’s elec­tion, Poppy took time off from the fes­tiv­i­ties to bid LBJ farewell from Washington.

Poppy’s rela­tion­ship with the then-incoming Pres­i­dent was even closer (a sub­ject that will be cov­ered at greater length in FTR #714.) Baker relates how Prescott Bush appears to have launched Nixon’s polit­i­cal career with a visit to Los Ange­les. Prescott appears to have trav­eled to LA in order to recruit a GOP can­di­date to defeat Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jerry Voorhees, who was push­ing to reg­u­late Wall Street. (At the time, Brown Broth­ers, Harriman–Prescott’s employer–was heav­ily involved with the pur­chase of defense indus­tries in the L.A. area. Dresser Indus­tries, also close to the Harriman/Bush axis, was active in the petro­leum busi­ness in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. These rela­tion­ships were the foun­da­tion of Prescott’s polit­i­cal con­nec­tions to the pow­er­ful, reac­tionary Chan­dler fam­ily [pub­lish­ers of The Los Ange­les Times]. The Chan­dlers, in turn, were deci­sive sup­port­ers of Nixon’s cam­paign to defeat Voorhees.)

This debt of Nixon’s to the Bush fam­ily may well explain why, despite his antipa­thy toward the East­ern Estab­lish­ment, Nixon appointed Poppy to posi­tions that bur­nished his pro­fes­sional resume for future con­sid­er­a­tion. Nixon named Poppy Ambas­sador to the United Nations and, later, chair­man of the Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee. Bush would later play a fun­da­men­tal role in the removal of Richard Nixon from power, after he began to turn away from the inter­ests who had pro­moted him to the White House in the first place.

(Like Poppy, Nixon was in Dal­las, Texas on 11/22/1963 and had dif­fi­culty recall­ing just what he was doing, despite the fact that he called a press con­fer­ence in his hotel room the day before Kennedy was killed.)

In Decem­ber of 1967, Poppy made a trip to Viet­nam, accom­pa­nied by his old part­ner from Zap­ata Petro­leum, Thomas J. Devine (widely believed to have been a career CIA offi­cer.) Baker spec­u­lates that Bush’s trip may well have been con­nected to the Phoenix Pro­gram, an assas­si­na­tion pro­gram that the Agency car­ried out in what was then South Viet­nam that resulted in the liq­ui­da­tion of tens of thousands.

Recorded on Memo­r­ial Day of 2010, the pro­gram focuses on George W. Bush’s mil­i­tary ser­vice in the 1960’s. While George H.W. Bush was going to Viet­nam, his son George W. was point­edly avoid­ing going there. With the war devel­op­ing into what Baker describes as “a char­nel house,” the sons of the GOP and Texas elite (many of whom sup­ported the war polit­i­cally) were look­ing for ways to avoid combat.

Appar­ently uti­liz­ing the family’s pow­er­ful con­nec­tions, George W. Bush got into a Texas Air National Guard fighter squadron. Its ranks includ­ing sons of priv­i­lege (includ­ing mem­bers of the Dal­las Cow­boys NFL fran­chise), the unit was known as “the Cham­pagne Unit.” It appears that the younger George Bush didn’t even ful­fill his National Guard responsibility.

Ana­lyz­ing records and inter­view­ing peo­ple asso­ci­ated with Bush in this period, Baker presents a com­pelling case that the future Commander-in-Chief went AWOL from the Guard, gen­er­at­ing a rep­u­ta­tion as imma­ture and some­thing of a party ani­mal. Just as his entry into the guard appears to have been effected cour­tesy of his father’s con­nec­tions, so, too, the eclips­ing of the records of Dubya’s dere­lic­tion of duty appears to have stemmed from Poppy’s “pull.” Osten­si­bly in Alabama to work on a polit­i­cal cam­paign, Dubya actu­ally appears to have been sequestered there by his father, in order to elude the con­se­quences of scan­dal or wrongdoing.

Dubya appears to have suc­cess­fully avoided the con­se­quences of his actions in this period (in part) because his father had assigned him a “han­dler” –James R. Bath, who was set­ting up appar­ent intel­li­gence pro­pri­etaries while serv­ing as the busi­ness rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the pow­er­ful Saudi Bin Laden and Bin Mah­fouz fam­i­lies. (Bath will be dis­cussed at greater length in future interviews.)

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Jack Ruby’s remarks to the press that his motives for slay­ing Oswald would never become pub­lic, due to the influ­ence of “peo­ple in high places”; the influ­ence of Brown and Root on LBJ’s polit­i­cal career; the company’s even­tual incor­po­ra­tion into Hal­libur­ton, headed for years by Dick Cheney; Brown and Root’s lucra­tive fed­eral con­tracts for con­struc­tion projects in South­east Asia dur­ing the Viet­nam War; reiew of Poppy’s appoint­ment of LBJ crony Judge Manuel Bravo to head up Zapata’s [land­locked] Medellin, Colum­bia branch; the CIA’s use of anti-Castro Cubans in the Phoenix pro­gram; Nixon’s unsuc­cess­ful attempt to get the CIA to give the White House its file on the JFK assas­si­na­tion; the poor train­ing and equip­ment given to National Guard Per­son­nel who had to serve in Iraq.