Obama Should Worry About the Bush Family Tentacles Undermining His Plans

As George W. Bush leaves office and Barack Obama takes over, we are in danger of missing the opportunity for change our new president has promised -- unless we come to grips with what the great historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin called our "hidden history," not just of the past eight years but of the past half-century and more. 

President Obama will face a staggering array of challenges, most, if not all, of which stem from the policies of Bush. But efforts at reform will fall short if we fail to probe and confront the powerful forces that wanted this disastrous administration in the White House in the first place -- and that remain ready and able to maintain their influence behind the scenes today.

Like most people, I took the failings of George W. Bush at face value: an inattentive, poorly prepared man full of hubris, who committed colossal blunders as a result. Then I spent five years researching my new book, Family of Secrets and came to see that the origins go much deeper. This backstory is getting almost no attention in the talking-heads debate over the Bush legacy. Yet it will continue to play, affecting our country and our lives, long after Bush leaves office.

A more profound explanation for the rise of George W. Bush came as I studied the concerted effort  to convince the public that he was  independent of, and often in disagreement with, his father. The reason for this, it turned out, was that exactly the opposite was true. W. may have been bumptious where his father was discreet, but in fact the son hewed closely to a playbook that guided his father and even his grandfather.

Over much of the last century, the Bushes have been serving the aims of a very narrow segment from within America's wealthiest interests and families -- typically through involvement in the most anti-New Deal investment banking circles, in the creation of a civilian intelligence service after World War II, and in some of that service's most secretive and still-unacknowledged operations.

Through declassified documents and interviews, I unearthed evidence that George W. Bush's father, the 41st president of the United States, had been working for the intelligence services no less than two decades before he was named CIA director in 1976. Time and again, Bush 41 and his allies have participated in clandestine operations to force presidents to do the bidding of oil and other resource-extraction interests, military contractors and financiers. Whenever a president showed  independence or sought reforms that threatened entrenched interests, this group helped to ensure that he was politically attacked and neutralized, or even removed from office, through one means or another.

We are not dealing here with what are commonly dismissed as "conspiracy theories."  We are dealing with a reality that is much more subtle, layered and pervasive -- a matrix of power in which crude conspiracies are rarely necessary and in which the execution or subsequent cover-up of anti-democratic acts become practically a norm.

In 1953, 23 years before he became CIA director as a supposed neophyte, George H.W. Bush began preparing to launch an oil-exploration company called Zapata Offshore. His father, investment banker Prescott Bush, had just taken a Senate seat from Connecticut; and his father's close friend Allen Dulles had just taken over the CIA. A staff CIA officer, Thomas J. Devine, purportedly "resigned" to go into the oil business with young George.

Bush then began to travel around the world. His itineraries had little apparent relationship to his limited and perennially unprofitable business enterprises.  But they do make sense if the object was intelligence work. When his company at last  put a few oil rigs in place, they ended up in highly sensitive spots, such as just off Castro's Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

As part of his travels, Bush senior even appeared in Dallas on the morning of the Kennedy assassination, although he would famously claim that he could not recall where he was at that historic moment. After leaving the city, he called the FBI with a false tip about a possible assassin, pointedly emphasizing that he was calling from outside Dallas. It is also intriguing to learn that an old friend of Bush's, a White Russian émigré with intelligence connections, shepherded Lee Harvey Oswald upon his return to America in the year preceding the assassination. In any event, when Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy, the oilmen and the intelligence-military establishment once again had a friend in the White House.

The pattern continued. New evidence suggests that Bush senior and his associates in the intelligence services, far from being the loyalists to Richard Nixon they claimed to be, had turned on the 35th president early in his administration, unceasingly working to weaken and eventually force him out. These efforts culminated in what appears to have been a deliberately botched Watergate office burglary -- led by former CIA officers.