Secrecy & Privilege

Introduction

The idea of this book was to examine how the two George Bushes intersected with important turning points of recent American history, not just what they did but how the surrounding events affected them and how they affected the course of the American democratic experiment. While other authors have examined aspects of this extraordinary family dynasty, I wanted to take a journalist’s eye view of how the Bushes fit into various scandals and other momentous political events from Watergate to Iraq.

At times, the two George Bushes were leading players; other times, they had smaller roles; sometimes, they were the beneficiaries of actions taken by others. Often the mix of these roles surprised me. In the end, however, it became clear that how George H.W. and George W. Bush blended with events of the last three decades has changed the American political process in fundamental ways, especially how information – the sustenance of democracy – is rationed to the American people and how the government leads the people.

The book also became a way to explore how the United States got to where it is today, with a political process that often is impervious to fact or driven by fear. Indeed, one interpretation of the 30 years since the Watergate scandal is that the secrecy and dirty tricks that were the hallmarks of Richard Nixon’s political style have simply become the daily routine of today’s politics. Certainly, the post-Watergate demands for greater government openness and limits on executive authority seem like a distant echo, more a memory than a legacy.

It’s perhaps ironic that the two George Bushes, who sprang from the privileged background that Nixon so disdained, would have emerged as the chief beneficiaries of the cut-throat politics that Nixonpioneered. But the Bushes’ social, economic and political connections may have been Nixon's missing ingredient. While the lowly born Nixon was a stranger to the protections afforded by Establishment credentials, the Bushes possessed important contacts from two powerful spheres of influence, the “Ivy League/Wall Street East” and the “Texas Oil/Sunbelt South.” These connections guarded the two George Bushes as they pushed – and elbowed – their way through their political careers. When the chips were down, they could count on their friends and their allies coming through.

The elder George Bush also injected another new element into American politics, his background as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His year running the spy agency earned him the allegiance of talented American spies and gave them an entrée into U.S. domestic politics that they had never had. The CIA’s tradecraft of secrecy and compartmentalization helped Bush – as Vice President and then President – shield many politically dangerous secrets from the American people, preventing anything approaching full public knowledge of historic events.

George H.W. Bush’s greatest impact on U.S. politics may have been that he infused the process with CIAtheory and practice, from covert diplomacy in dealing with other countries to “perception management” in controlling how the American people perceive events. Secrecy became a trademark, too, of George W. Bush’s administration.

Buttressing the Bush family’s political power was a potent conservative news media that took shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s, partly as a reaction to Nixon’s Watergate debacle. While this conservative infrastructure was not created with the two George Bushes in mind, it benefited them more than any other political leaders. Between the family’s own powerful connections and the conservative media’s ability to shape the news, the elder George Bush and his son enjoyed a buffer of protection that few American politicians have ever had. Investigations of their activities or challenges to their power often collapsed into retreat like an undermanned attack force charging up hill against a well-entrenched enemy with superior firepower.

This book examines, too, the strange relationship between one of the principal financiers of the conservative infrastructure – Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon – and the Bush family. Possibly more than any other figure on the Right, Moonhas lavished money on U.S. conservative causes and political leaders. Yet, the source of that money remains one of the most troubling mysteries of modern American politics though interestingly one of the least investigated. The evidence points to significant illegal activity surrounding Moon’s fortune, including first-hand accounts of money laundering and longstanding connections to organized-crime figures.

Since Moon’s conviction on tax evasion in the early 1980s, however, U.S. government investigators have turned a blind eye to this evidence of a continued criminal conspiracy. The decline in law enforcement’s interest in Moon’s financial activities has corresponded with the rise in Moon’s influence-buying among conservatives, including his funding of The Washington Timesand his funneling of speaking fees and other payments to conservative politicians, including George H.W. Bush.

By covering a 30-year swath of history, this book allows seemingly disconnected events to be placed in context, to make sense out of behavior that otherwise might appear anomalous. To understand the chip-on-the-shoulder attitude of today’s ascendant conservative movement, for instance, one must look back at the twin catastrophes of Watergateand Vietnam. Out of the bitter ashes of those defeats rose the modern American conservative movement, which has kept alive the flame of that anger even as conservatives came to dominate all branches of the U.S. government and to hold great sway over the U.S. news media.

This book also gave me the opportunity to research the Bush family’s role in some scandals, like Watergate,that I did not personally cover, as well as to revisit stories that I did cover. Those stories include the Iran-Contrascandal, which I investigated for the Associated Pressand Newsweek, and the October Surprisecontroversy, which I was asked to examine by the PBS Frontlinedocumentary program. I’ve pulled together, too, more recent material about the Clintonadministration and the second Bush administration that I developed for the Web site, Consortiumnews.com, which I have operated with two of my sons, Samand Nat, since 1995.

In recent years, a number of books have examined aspects of how the United States reached this historical juncture. Some books, such as Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty and Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud, have looked at the financial underpinnings of the Bush family. The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthaland The Hunting of the Presidentby Joe Conasonand Gene Lyonshave studied how and why the national news media went after the Clintonadministration with such ferocity. Other books, such as Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media? and David Brock’s Blinded by the Right and The Republican Noise Machine have explored the development of the conservative media infrastructure.

This book won’t try to recreate what those authors have already done. Instead it will explore a series of historical mysteries that have defined the modern political era – and will show how the two George Bushes emerged from these shadowy controversies to gain a dynastic hold over the highest office in the United States.

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