While the Economy Crashes and Burns, Bush Loyalists Are Making a Killing

By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 19, 2009.

In April, chemical giant DuPont announced that Samuel Bodman, Secretary of Energy from 2005-2009 (and before that, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, 2004-2005, and Deputy Secretary of the Department of Commerce, 2001-2004) had been elected to its board of directors.

That same month, former CIA chief Michael Hayden became a member of the Board of Directors of the National Interest Security Company, an "information technology, information management, and management technology consulting services" provider serving the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy. There, Hayden joined fellow former administration cronies Henry A. Crumpton (Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department, 2005-2007) and Donald Kerr (Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, 2007-2009).

Meanwhile, Andrew Card not only serves on the board of directors of railroad giant Union Pacific, but has also turned up on the board of directors of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

In the Tank

If you can't get a gig at a law firm, a PR agency, or on a corporate board of directors, there are always the nation's think-tanks to fall back into -- and they've become a shelter for more than a few Bush administration refugees in the Obama era. For example, after serving as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser in the Bush administration, Elliott Abrams has now joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies.

Alongside Abrams at CFR are a number of officials who served during the Bush years, including Evan Feigenbaum, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives; Paul Lettow, former senior adviser to the Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs and the Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council staff; and Dan Senor, an administration foreign policy advisor and senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation is not surprisingly housing a large contingent of Bush loyalists, including Becky Norton Dunlop, who served as the chairperson of the Federal Services Impasse Panel (which handles disputes between government agencies and labor unions); Kim R. Holmes, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs; Terry Miller, ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council; Peter Brookes, Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for Asian and Pacific Affairs; and Mike Gonzalez who, in 2005, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Bush administration where, according to his Heritage Foundation bio, he "wrote speeches for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, then moved to the State Department in 2006 as communications adviser and speechwriter on European and Eurasian affairs" and even "helped craft an op-ed column… which appeared throughout Europe under the bylines of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates."

Ivory Tower Power

While Gates stayed on to work for President Barack Obama, Rice is pursuing many different career paths. In addition to the lucrative book contracts and the speakers bureau gigs, she inked a deal for the William Morris Agency to represent her for "business initiatives in media, sports and communications." Rice also returned, as a professor of political science, to her old stomping grounds at Stanford University, where she had long taught and also, from 1993-1999, served as provost. Presumably in her spare time, she serves as the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution.

Rice is actually following in the footsteps of Rumsfeld who served a stint, beginning in 2007, as "a distinguished visiting fellow" at the Hoover Institution. But Stanford is hardly the only academic bastion of former Bush-ites. For example, this year, John Negroponte headed back to his old alma mater, Yale University, to become the "Brady-Johnson Distinguished Senior Research Fellow in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in International Affairs at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies."

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Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published by Metropolitan Books. His website is Nick Turse.com.

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