Com­ment: Jour­nal­ist Russ Baker has writ­ten a land­mark vol­ume about the deep polit­i­cal his­tory of the Bush fam­ily, George H.W. (“Poppy”) Bush in par­tic­u­lar. Fam­ily of Secrets (Blooms­bury Press [SC]; Copy­right 2009 by Russ Baker) is a must for seri­ous stu­dents of the real­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary power struc­ture.

Painstak­ingly trac­ing evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries  run­ning through decades of power polit­i­cal intrigue, Baker high­lights the unwa­ver­ing, Machi­avel­lian maneu­ver­ing of gen­er­a­tions of Bushes–operations dom­i­nat­ing  much of the his­tory of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Pre­sent­ing com­pelling evi­dence of Bush fam­ily involve­ment with intel­li­gence mat­ters dat­ing back decades, the author has “con­nected the dots” link­ing Poppy Bush to events as seem­ingly dis­parate as the JFK assas­si­na­tion, the Viet­nam War, Water­gate and the ascent of his son to the White House. (Although vet­eran lis­ten­ers to these broad­casts and users of this web­site will be famil­iar with much of what Baker presents, there is a wealth of infor­ma­tion that will open the eyes of even rel­a­tively knowledgable–and jaded–Emory listeners.)

Under­ly­ing many of the fas­ci­nat­ing, tragic and (in many cases) bloody events detailed in this chron­i­cle is what Tex­ans refer to as the “Ahl Bid­ness.” Much of Poppy Bush’s career as an intel­li­gence offi­cer has involved a rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ship between intel­li­gence mat­ters and the petro­leum indus­try, with his petro­leum ven­tures serv­ing as “cover” for covert oper­a­tions,  many of which, in turn, fur­thered the inter­ests and prof­its of the mer­chants of black gold.

Read­ers will come away with a bet­ter under­stand­ing of why the res­i­dents of Khaz­a­khstan refer to oil as “the Devil’s tears.“

Over the years, many have asked the ques­tion, “What can I do about it?!” One thing every­one can “do about it” is to buy and read this remark­able book, and dis­sem­i­nate the infor­ma­tion in it via any and all means avail­able. “Get­ting the word out” via the Inter­net is par­tic­u­larly important.

Exem­pli­fy­ing the dis­clo­sures that typ­ify this book is Baker’s dis­cus­sion of Poppy Bush’s selec­tion of a man­ager to run Zap­ata Petroleum’s  facil­ity at Medellin, Colom­bia. (Baker presents com­pelling evi­dence that Zap­ata had been, to a large extent, a cover for global CIA oper­a­tions.) One of the inter­est­ing things about select­ing this site is that Zap­ata was an off­shore oil drilling facil­ity. Medellin isn’t on the shore!

” . . . In any case, while in Wash­ing­ton, Poppy had a warm rela­tion­ship with [Lyn­don Baines] John­son. . . . One of the more pecu­liar rela­tion­ships in an already bizarre enter­prise resulted from Bush’s choice of a sur­ro­gate to run Zap­ata Offshore’s office in Medellin, Colom­bia. To begin with, there was the ques­tion of why a small, unprof­itable com­pany needed such far-flung out­posts. Why, in par­tic­u­lar, did it need one in Medellin, 150 miles from any off­shore drilling locale–a city whose very name would later become syn­ony­mous with the cocaine trade? Bush’s choice to rep­re­sent Zap­ata in Colom­bia was Judge Manuel B. Bravo, of Zap­ata County, Texas.

Judge Bravo’s sin­gu­lar claim to fame was his role in Lyn­don Johnson’s fraud-ridden elec­tion to the U.S. Sen­ate in 1948. As reports of an extra­or­di­nar­ily close race came in on elec­tion night, Bravo con­tin­u­ally revised upward the John­son count from Zap­ata County’s Bal­lot Box 3, until LBJ was assured vic­tory.  A fed­eral inves­ti­ga­tion led to a trial, but by that time the bal­lots from Box 13 in Jim Wells County had con­ve­niently dis­ap­peared from the judge’s office. The lack of evi­dence effec­tively ended Johnson’s peril. John­son won by eighty-seven votes. . . .” (Fam­ily of Secrets, pp. 132–133.)