Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (76 page)

Afterword

Research that led to
Family of Secrets
convinced me that some of our most entrenched national narratives are simply wrong. This includes specific episodes—such as the Kennedy assassination and Watergate—as well as subtexts concerning the nature of our democracy and of power itself in the twenty-first century.

In the year since the hardcover edition of
Family of Secrets
went to press, many individuals have come forward to validate my thesis that self-serving elements have shaped this country’s trajectory in hidden and significant ways. Even the most casual followers of recent events such as the financial meltdown and the stymied state of President Barack Obama’s early initiatives on medical insurance and climate change understand the urgent need to go beyond surface explanations, and to question why it is still so difficult to achieve substantive reform.

The research that goes into a book like this is enormously difficult and time-consuming. To put this simply, I need your help. Please visit the nonprofit journalism site
www.whowhatwhy.com
and become a part of this ongoing project. Your financial support will enable my colleagues and me to produce paradigm-shifting journalism on a regular basis.

With your help, we will continue to unravel the mysteries of power and democracy in America.

Author’s Note

The research for this book, by definition, is a work in progress. You are invited to visit
www.familyofsecrets.com
for more detailed background information and for updates.

Acknowledgments

My agent, Andrew Stuart, understood the project and helped find it a great home. My editor, Peter Ginna, publisher and editorial director of Bloomsbury Press, saw the possibilities immediately, and has been unfailingly thoughtful and supportive. Also, thanks to all of the people at Bloomsbury, including managing editor Mike O’Connor, who handled my endless changes to the manuscript with dexterity and grace; Peter Miller and Sabrina Farber, who enthusiastically went forth to sell the book and the ideas in it; Pete Beatty; publicist Gene Taft; counsel Alan Kaufman; and copy editor Maureen Klier, who edited with enthusiasm and offered many good suggestions.

The book likely would not have come to fruition without the central role of Jonathan Z. Larsen, a former editor of mine, who talked through the concept extensively, helped me get the operation off the ground, traveled with me to conduct research, and provided invaluable guidance, assistance, and substantial material support. Jon has been a valuable sounding board, advisor, and friend for many years. My aide-de-camp during the final year, Akiva Gottlieb, served efficiently, amiably and capably, and had his hand in everything: research, brainstorming, coordinating fact-checking, editing. Jonathan Rowe, an old friend and one of the more contemplative journalists I know, played a crucial role in helping me work out my thinking on matters large and small, and suggested improvements in how I told this story. Jon devoted hundreds of hours to this, and I am deeply grateful to him for this and for his ongoing counsel. I also cannot offer enough thanks to Gerald Jonas, with whom I go way back, who looked at the manuscript through endless iterations over several years, offering superb suggestions for clarifying and styling sprawling, difficult material. Charlotte Dennett extensively researched several key topics with enthusiasm, and, with her husband Gerard Colby, offered advice from their years as serious biographers. A critique from my good friend David Margolick markedly improved the manuscript; David has long counseled me on the vagaries of the publishing world. Inez Baker uncomplainingly and skillfully transcribed hundreds of hours of interviews and provided a steady stream of amusing e-mails. Photo researcher Nancy Novick worked quickly and effectively to put together a picture gallery that does justice to this story. John Beckham, Eric Stoner, Lyle Deixler, and Mark Levey helped with research. Tanya Elder organized my files and books. Linda Minor offered me her vast knowledge of financial intrigue and Texas history. Joseph Coscarelli, Juliet Linderman, and Susan-nah Vila were dedicated and professional fact-checkers; Joe also made sure that the footnotes were right. Adam Federman served as a savvy and even-keeled assistant in earlier stages of the book. There are many other people to thank for providing help of all kinds, large and small.

With apologies to anyone whom I may have overlooked, my appreciation goes, in no particular order, to: David Callahan, Steve Weinberg, James Rosen, James Moore, Len Colodny, Jonathan Beaty, Jim Hougan, Bill Moyers, Richard Cummings, Jim Baldauf, David Smallman, John Moscow, Sam Smith, David Cay Johnston, Corey Pein, Rex Bradford, John Connolly, Peter Dale Scott, Jo Thomas, Randall Henriksen, Mark Dowie, Anthony Lappé, Jonathan Wimpenny, Nadine Eckhardt, James Huang, Tom Zoellner, John Hawkins, Louis Wolf, John Labbé, Roger Morris, Alice Concari, Tom “Smitty” Smith, Jack Blum, Nicholas von Hoffman, David Armstrong, Harvey Gough, Jonathan Winer, Michael Klare, Victor Navasky, Richard Gooding, Hendrik Hertzberg, Sissy Farenthold, Paul Lukasiak, Bruce Shapiro, Paul Myers, Bob Fertik, David MacMichael, Dan Arshack, Ann Louise Bardach, Dave Block, Neil Reisner, Jim Mulvaney, Ben and Coco van Meerendonk, James Hamilton-Paterson, Roane Carey, Melanie Einzig, Craig McDonald, Herbert Parmet, James Lesar, John McGarvey, Adam Davids, Ron Baker, George Knapp, Hamilton Fish, Mike Hoyt, Wim Dankbaar, Jerry Shinley, Dusty Martin, Frosty Troy, George Shipley, Erika Mayo, Dan Alcorn, Jim Norman, Ron Brynaert, Ryan Wadle, Steve Wasserman, John Fine, Bob Mahlburg, Dan Moldea, Robert Dreyfuss, Ellen Hopkins, Todd Gitlin, Steve Ross, Steve Rose, Bryan Farrell, and Steven Aftergood.

Many archives, libraries, and newsrooms provided access to and copies of articles and files, including the
Palm Beach Post
; Sixth Floor Museum; Richard M. Nixon and George H. W. Bush presidential libraries; National Archives; Texas State Archives; Texas Secretary of State’s office; Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and New York University. Thanks to David Smith of the New York Public Library for helping obtain unusual materials through interlibrary loan. With appreciation to the remarkable Strand Bookstore, which invariably had most of the out-of-print books I needed. I would also like to acknowledge Dragon Naturally Speaking, a voice dictation program that allowed me to continue writing when the endless typing began to take its toll on my hands and elbows.

The opinions in this book are not necessarily shared in whole or in part by anyone on this list, and of course any errors or omissions are mine alone, and unintended.

Finally, special thanks to my family and friends for their support and forbearance.

Notes

Note: For the Mary Ferrell Foundation, visit
www.maryferrell.org
.

2: POPPY’S SECRET

1
. Joseph McBride,
Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1992).

2
. Joseph McBride, “The Man Who Wasn’t There, ‘George Bush,’ C.I.A. Operative, ”
Nation
, July 16, 1988.

3
. The Rowland Evans and Robert Novak column, appearing January 1, 1976, in the Syracuse
Post-Standard
under the title “CIA: Maxi vs. Mini,” in the same month Bush’s nomination went to the Senate, quoted one CIA insider as saying: “We have to get rid of those three little letters, C-I-A. Sure, it’s a cosmetic change, but the CIA won’t ever overcome its unfair stigma as a government-sanctioned international murder organization until it gets a new name.”

4
. Actually, the memo had been written twenty-five years previous, not twenty-seven.

5
. Joseph McBride, “Where Was George?”
Nation,
August 13, 1988.

6
. George William Bush’s affidavit had been filed as evidence in a suit brought by the nonprofit Assassination Archives and Research Center that sought an emergency injunction compelling, before the 1988 election, release of records on Bush’s past (
AARC v. CIA
). Judge Charles Revercomb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia declined the request, and the CIA continued its refusal to confirm or deny a relationship with George Herbert Walker Bush.

7
. The Mary Ferrell Foundation, founded in the name of JFK researcher Mary Ferrell, has for the past few years been scanning and making available online documents from her collection and that of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, History Matters, and others, most of them obtained over the years under the Freedom of Information Act. They can be accessed online at
www.maryferrell.org
. Not insignificantly, the documents regarding the Bush memo were declassified under the Clinton administration in 1997. Few, if any, documents that shed light on these activities were declassified under either George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush.

8
. Jim Hougan,
Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA
(New York: Random House, 1984).

9
. An article by Richard Cummings (“An American in Paris,”
American Conservative
, February 16, 2004) asserts that
Paris Review
cofounder and editor Peter Matthiessen was a CIA agent whose literary activities served as cover for intelligence work. Also, the
Review
’s longtime editor George Plimpton “was an ‘agent of influence’ for the CIA . . . invariably paid for [his] services.” Also see Hugh Wilford,
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 106; and Frances Stonor Saunders,
Who Paid the Piper?
The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
(London: Granta, 1999).

10
. Joseph J. Trento,
Prelude to Terror: Edwin P. Wilson and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence
Network
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), p. 16.

11
. John A. Kouwenhoven,
Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank,
Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 1818–1968
(New York: Doubleday & Company, 1983 reprint), p. 189.

12
. Kevin Phillips,
American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of
Bush
(New York: Penguin Books, 2004), pp. 19–20.

13
. Ibid., pp. 38–39.

14
. Thomas Petzinger Jr.,
Oil & Honor: The Texaco-Pennzoil Wars
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987), p. 93.

15
. George H. W. Bush’s nickname became a way to distinguish him from his son George W. Bush. But H. W. had long been known as “Poppy” to relatives and close friends. His older brother, Prescott Bush Jr., became known as “Pressy.” As the second son, H. W. had been named George Herbert Walker Bush, after his maternal grandfather. Because his Walker uncles called their father “Pop,” they decided to call his young namesake grandson “Poppy,” and the name stuck. See Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer,
The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty
(New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 37.

16
. Robert B. Stinnett
, George Bush: His World War II Years
(New York: Brassey’s, 1992), p. 89.

17
. Terence Hunt, Associated Press, “Bush Praised for War Heroism,” September 2, 1984.

18
. James Bradley,
Flyboys: A True Story of Courage
(New York: Back Bay, 2002), p. 182.

19
. George Bush with Doug Wead,
George Bush: Man of Integrity
(Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1988), pp. 4–5.

20
. Associated Press, “Gunner in Squadron Disputes Bush on Downing of Bomber,”
New York
Times
, August 13, 1988.

21
. The closest he came was
Looking Forward: An Autobiography
(New York: Doubleday, 1987), co-written with longtime Washington PR man Victor Gold, which was styled as an autobiography but was notably brief and episodic. It was also full of self-serving inaccuracies.

3: VIVA ZAPATA

1
. Kitty Kelley,
The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
(New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 342–43.

2
. Robin Winks,
Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961
(New York: William Morrow, 1987), p. 247. According to Winks, both the war time Office of Strategic Services and its successor, the CIA, wanted “young men with high grades, a sense of grace, with previous knowledge of Europe . . . and ease with themselves, a certain healthy self-respect and independent means . . . Oh yes, and good social connections.” That was one reason that the “OSS” was said to stand for “Oh So Social.” Winks, himself a former Yale professor, says the university’s crew coach even received ten thousand dollars annually from the CIA for his efforts to direct team members to the agency, though by all indications, many recruiters were unpaid.

3
. For the job, Pearson tasked Yale graduate Richard W. Cutler. See Richard W. Cutler,
Counterspy:
Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War
(Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2004).

4
. Alexandra Robbins,
Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of
Power
(New York: Back Bay, 2002), p. 53.

5
. Ibid., p. 187.

6
. Besides Bush, two other CIA directors, Porter Goss and R. James Woolsey, are Yale alumni. Soare top CIA Operations Division directors Richard M. Bissell Jr. and Tracy Barnes, engineers of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Walter L. Pforzheimer, who headed several key OSS operations and helped draft the act that created the CIA in 1947.

7
. The Edward Wilson character was in reality a loose composite of several CIA figures, in particular the agency’s longtime counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, Yale ’41.

8
. In a November 1, 2005, editorial for the
National Review
, Buckley recounted: “When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? ‘I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President.’ ”

Another graduate, Jack Downey, Yale ’51, was convicted of espionage in China a year after graduation, charged with secretly air-dropping supplies and agents in a CIA attempt to foment an uprising. See Jerome Alan Cohen, “Will Jack Make His 25th Reunion,”
New York Times
, July 7, 1971.

9
. Darwin Payne,
Initiative in Energy: The Story of Dresser Industries
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 114.

10
. The stories of characters throughout the Bush saga are full of unexplained, lengthy hikingtrips, circumnavigations, and the like, all preceding important new assignments.

11
. Randall Rothenberg, “In Search of George Bush,”
New York Times
, March 6, 1988.

12
. Mallon’s brother-in-law Alan Tower Waterman served as the Navy’s technology purchasing liaison. Later Waterman became the first head of the National Science Foundation, created by Congress in 1950 to fund basic research with a statutory mandate “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense” (National Science Foundation Web site,
www.nsf.gov/about
). Such a mission, paralleling as it does the lofty language of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, captures the sense of importance that men like Mallon brought to their government service, and which they carried with them into their private business endeavors.

13
. Over the years, board members would include the publisher of the
Los Angeles Times
, a former Texas governor, an official of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an executive of the predecessor to Citibank, and President Eisenhower’s treasury secretary. Several were Bonesmen.

14
. Prescott Bush, interview for the Columbia University Oral History Research Project, 1966.

15
. Daniel Yergin,
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power
(New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 395.

16
. Author interview with Valta Ree Casselman, August 14, 2006.

17
. George Bush with Victor Gold,
Looking Forward: An Autobiography
(New York: Doubleday, 1987), pp. 49–50.

18
. National Security Council policy papers, NSC 18/2, published February 17, 1949; and NSC18/4, published November 17, 1949 (both declassified October 1, 1987).

19
. Joseph J. Trento,
Prelude to Terror: Edwin P. Wilson and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence
Network
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), pp. 13–14.

20
. Gerald M. Boyd, “Bush Gets Harsh Reception at Shipyard in Oregon,”
New York Times
, September 7, 1988. Bush, confronted by boos and obscenities from shipyard union members critical of Reagan’s economic policies, got out his wallet and had a supporter wave his old union card in front of the crowd. “How many guys running for President of the United States has been a member of the C.I.O. steelworkers?” Bush asked. “You are looking at one.”

21
. Payne,
Initiative in Energy
, pp. 176–77.

22
. Trento,
Prelude to Terror
, p. 13.

23
. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, “Bush Opened Up to Secret Yale Society; Turning Points in a Life Built on Alliances,”
Washington Post
, August 7, 1988.