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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. This sixth and con­clud­ing inter­view in the series high­lights the polit­i­cal ascen­dancy and reign of Dubya.

Essen­tial to Bush’s polit­i­cal career was his stint as an owner of the Texas Rangers base­ball team, a posi­tion that gave him name recog­ni­tion and pop­u­lar­ity. In FTR #715, we exam­ined Harken Energy, one of Bush’s many mys­te­ri­ous busi­ness ven­tures and a com­pany that appears to have been largely a money-laundering front. Bush’s Harken stock was par­layed into his part-ownership of the Rangers.

Fol­low­ing his ascen­sion, Dubya presided over the events of 9/11. (Given the volu­mi­nous dis­cus­sion of 9/11 in the For The Record archives, that sub­ject is not dis­cussed at great length here.) Suf­fice it to say that Bush repaid the pow­er­ful Saudi investors, who had under­writ­ten his busi­ness activ­i­ties (includ­ing mem­bers of the Bin Laden fam­ily) by fly­ing them out of the coun­try before the FBI could inter­view them. Con­trary to press reports at the time, some Bin Laden fam­ily mem­bers were involved with ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties, includ­ing Al Qaeda.)

Char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally, the phe­nom­e­non of “net­work­ing” is cen­tral to the Bush/Rangers story. An investor in Spec­trum 7 (which became Harken), Mr. DeWitt was instru­men­tal in help­ing Dubya acquire part of the Rangers. (DeWitt was also part owner of the Cincin­natti Reds base­ball team. The DeWitts were also seen as hav­ing done much to carry the state of Ohio for Bush in 2004.)

In addi­tion to Bush’s sport­ing career, the pro­gram touches on a cou­ple of other Bush ventures–Lucky Chance Min­ing and Sil­ver Screen Man­age­ment. A “penny stock” com­pany that expe­ri­enced irreg­u­lar­i­ties, Lucky Chance was aban­doned by Bush when he dis­cerned that the firm’s dif­fi­cul­ties might draw dam­ag­ing press scrutiny.

Once again man­i­fest­ing the “net­work­ing” that is the core and essence of the Bush family’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tions, Sil­ver Screen Man­age­ment drew heav­ily on the largess of the pow­er­ful Bass broth­ers of Texas and Bush fam­ily asso­ciate Ken Betts. Bush’s posi­tion with Sil­ver Screen Man­age­ment in turn, put Bush in the sphere of influ­ence of the Dis­ney oper­a­tions. After becom­ing Pres­i­dent, Bush’s Dis­ney con­nec­tions served him well when Dis­ney atten­u­ated the dis­tri­b­u­tion of Michael Moore’s film “Fahren­heit 9/11.”

Turn­ing to the sub­ject of Dubya’s reli­gious ori­en­ta­tion, Baker notes that Bush’s polit­i­cal grav­i­tas gained sig­nif­i­cantly from his becom­ing “Born Again”–a cyn­i­cal polit­i­cal ploy that helped Dubya in sev­eral ways. Baker observes that Bush’s Chris­t­ian rebirth not only placed him in res­o­nance with the pow­er­ful Evan­gel­i­cal base of the GOP, but his dis­cov­ery of Jesus also helped to cover the hints of scan­dal and wrong­do­ing in his past. In addi­tion, Baker feels that the Bush con­ver­sion also gave the future Pres­i­dent a degree of polit­i­cal res­o­nance with “Good Ole Boys,” who would be able to iden­tify with Bush’s pre-conversion fond­ness for alcohol.

Before dis­cussing the George W. Bush pres­i­dency, Baker sets forth infor­ma­tion about his time as Gov­er­nor of Texas. While  sound­ing cer­tain super­fi­cial pop­ulist themes, Bush catered to his wealthy, right-wing base by con­cen­trat­ing on issues like tort reform, and the gut­ting of envi­ron­men­tal and con­sumer pro­tec­tion reg­u­la­tions. In many ways, Bush’s gov­er­nor­ship antic­i­pated his terms as Pres­i­dent, pro­ject­ing a pop­ulist, Good Ole Boy image while enact­ing an elite, cor­po­ratist polit­i­cal agenda.

While Gov­er­nor, Bush con­versed reg­u­larly with a Bush-friendly jour­nal­ist named Mickey Her­skowitz, who had been recruited to do a puff-piece biog­ra­phy of Dubya as part of his run-up to the Pres­i­dency. In his dis­cus­sion with Her­skowitz, Bush revealed that he felt it essen­tial for a Pres­i­dent to pros­e­cute a vic­to­ri­ous war in order to be pop­u­lar. In that con­text, he dis­closed that he intended to invade Iraq and top­ple Sadaam Hus­sein, if given the opportunity.

In the same inter­view in which he voiced his inten­tions vis a vis Iraq, Bush told Her­skowitz that he “had been excused” from his National Guard Duty–a bla­tant lie given all the more sig­nif­i­cance by the fact that Dubya, as Com­man­der in Chief, sent many troops (includ­ing poorly trained and equipped Guard units) into harm’s way.

Ascend­ing to the White House with assis­tance from the same pow­er­ful forces that had advanced Bush fam­ily for­tunes over the decades, Dubya ben­e­fit­ted from gen­tle han­dling from a media estab­lish­ment more obsessed with Al Gore’s lack of grace than with the issues. The GOP-appointee-dominated Supreme Court pro­vided Bush with a sat­is­fac­tory out­come to the strug­gle over th Florida vote. Aided in the street and media agi­ta­tion by the same Bay of Pigs-connected intel­li­gence ele­ments that fig­ure so promi­nently in Fam­ily of Secrets, the Bush cam­paign drew on the legal and finan­cial abil­i­ties of Poppy Bush’s for­mi­da­ble con­nec­tions dur­ing the strug­gle over the Florida vote.

After his ascent, Bush repaid the pow­er­ful Saudi investors who had under­writ­ten some of his past busi­ness ven­tures, includ­ing mem­bers of the Bin Laden fam­ily, by fly­ing them out of the coun­try before the FBI could inter­view them. (Con­trary to press reports at the time, some mem­bers of the Bin Laden fam­ily had been involved with ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties, includ­ing Al Qaeda.)

Of course, the Bush/Saudi con­nec­tion evolved from the fam­ily of secrets’ involve­ment with the petro­leum busi­ness. The Bush/oil con­nec­tions loom large in the back­ground of the envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter unfold­ing in the Gulf of Mex­ico. In addi­tion to the involve­ment of Hal­libur­ton in the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon plat­form that resulted in the dis­as­ter, BP is very close to the milieu of the Gam­mells, a con­sum­mately pow­er­ful Scot­tish bank­ing fam­ily.  The Gam­mells, in turn, are very close to the Bush fam­ily and wielded pro­found influ­ence in the admin­is­tra­tion of Tony Blair in the United Kingdom.

Hal­libur­ton, of course, was for­merly headed by Dick Cheney, the Impe­r­ial Vice-President and an indi­vid­ual who used his pro­found gov­ern­ment con­nec­tions to direct lucra­tive busi­ness con­tracts to Hal­libur­ton and its sub­sidiary Kel­logg, Brown and Root.

It was another deba­cle in the Gulf of Mexico–Hurricane Katrina–that proved to be the undo­ing of the Bush regime. View­ing FEMA as a ves­ti­gial organ of gov­ern­ment to be milked for the pur­poses of crony­ism and per­sonal profit, Bush assigned the agency to Joe Albaugh, a long-time Texas crony who had served as his “enforcer” when he was Gov­er­nor. Albaugh, in turn, appointed Michael Brown–“Heckuva Job, Brownie”–to a posi­tion within the agency. Brown–like Albaugh totally unqual­i­fied to effec­tively over­see such an agency–presided over Kat­rina and the ruin of New Orleans.

Much of the pro­gram fea­tures analy­sis of the cyn­i­cal, Machi­avel­lian destruc­tion of the rep­u­ta­tions of Sen­a­tor John Kerry and jour­nal­ist Dan Rather dur­ing the 2004 elec­tion cam­paign. Uti­liz­ing dis­torted infor­ma­tion, both of these cam­paigns embod­ied Karl Rove’s pri­mary cam­paign method of using “psy-ops” to defeat an enemy on the elec­toral battlefield.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: the staffing of Bush’s For­eign Intel­li­gence Advi­sory Board with pro­fes­sional cronies; Texas High-Roller Ray Hunt’s par­tic­i­pa­tion on the FIAB; Hunt Oil’s secur­ing of a lucra­tive oil con­tract in Iraq fol­low­ing the war; BP’s secur­ing of a lucra­tive con­tract in Iraq after the war; the large num­ber of Texas Rangers ballplay­ers accused of using steroids while Bush was an owner of the team; Joe AlBaugh’s Great Amer­i­can Resources and its busi­ness con­ducted solely in cash; sus­pi­cions that Albaugh may have worked for CIA; the his­tory and lin­eage of the asso­ci­a­tion between the Bush and Gam­mell fam­i­lies;  appar­ent intel­li­gence con­nec­tions of the Gam­mell family.