Chapter -XVI- Campaign 1980
Le mercennarie et ausiliarie sono inutili e
pericolose; e, se uno tiene lo stato suo fondato in sulle arme mercennarie,
non sara' mai fermo ne' sicuro.
--Machiavelli, Il Principe
As we follow George Bush along the George
Washington Parkway as he drives away from his Langley office in January,
1977, we enter an especially shadowy and inscrutable interlude in his
career. During their superficial and dilatory 1988 inquiry into Bush's
career, Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus did establish one typical
phenomenon of Bush's activity between January, 1977 and his emergence as a
presidential candidate: Bush kept key parts of his activity a secret from
his own aides and office staff, even going so far as to manufacture alibis
which would appear to have been inventions. Woodward and Pincus described
a "mystery about Bush and the agency" which arose during the course of
their interviews about the post-1977 period. "According to those involved
in Bush's first political action committee, there were several occasions
in 1978-79, when Bush was living in Houston and traveling the country in
his first run for the presidency, that he set aside periods of up to 24
hours and told aides he had to fly to Washington for a secret meeting of
former CIA Directors. Bush told his aides that he could not divulge his
whereabouts, and that he would not be reachable."
The mystery described by Woodward and
Pincus arose when other interviews cast grave doubt on the veracity of
this cover story; "...according to former directors and other senior CIA
officials, there were no meetings of former directors during that period,
and Bush had no assignments of any kind from the CIA." Stansfield Turner
commented that he "never knew former directors had meetings and there were
none when I was there." Stephen Hart of Bush's staff told Woodward and
Pincus that the keepers of Bush's schedule could "recall no CIA activity
of any kind," but explained the absences as "personal time in Washington"
for "tennis, visits with friends, and dinners." [fn 1] Such enigmas are
typical of the 1977-1979 interlude in Bush's career.
Shortly after leaving Langley, Bush
asserted his birthright as an international financier in the way he had
indicated to his close friend Leo Cherne, that is to say by becoming a
member of the board of directors of a large bank. On February 22, 1977
Robert H. Stewart III, the chairman of the holding company for First
International Bankshares of Dallas, announced that Bush would become the
chairman of the executive committee of First International Bank in Houston
and would simultaneously become a director of First International
Bankshares Ltd. of London, a merchant bank owned by First International
Bankshares, Inc. Bush also became a director of First International
Bankshares Inc., which was the holding company for the entire
international group. Thus, less than two years before Margaret Thatcher
came to power, Bush acquired the status of investment banker in the City
of London, the home of the Eurodollar market and the home of British
imperial financial circles in which such figures as Lord Victor
Rothschild, Tiny Rowland, the Sultan of Brunei, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia,
and the Emir of Kuwait were at home. An annual fee of $75,000 as a
"consultant" also sweetened this pot. During the 1988 campaign, Bush gave
the implacable stonewall to any questions about the services he performed
for the First International Bankshares group or about any other aspects of
his business activities during the pre-1980 interlude. Interfirst was then
the largest bank in Texas and was reportedly running speculation all over
South America, China, and Europe.
Later, after the Reagan-Bush orgy of
speculation and usury had ruined the Texas economy, the Texas commercial
banks began to collapse into bankruptcy. First International of Dallas (or
"Interfirst") merged with RepublicBank during 1987 to form First
RepublicBank, which became the biggest commercial bank in Texas.
Bankruptcy overtook the new colossus just a few months later, but federal
regulators delayed their inevitable intervention until after the Texas
primary in the spring of 1988 in order to avoid a potentially acute
embarrassment for Bush. Once Bush had the nomination locked up, the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation awarded the assets of First
RepublicBank to the North Carolina National Bank in exchange for no
payment whatsoever on the part of NCNC, which is reputedly a darling of
the intelligence community.
During the heady days of Bush's
directorship at Interfirst, the bank retained a law firm in which one
Lawrence Gibbs was a partner. Two partners of Gibbs "joined three
representatives of the energy department of Interfirst Bank on a trip to
Peking, where they conducted a week-long seminar on financing the
production of natural resources for the Oil and Gas Ministry of the
People's Republic of China." [fn 2] This visit was made in the context of
trips to China by Bush for the purpose of setting up a lucrative oil
concession for J. Hugh Lietdkte of Pennzoil, Bush's old business partner.
Gibbs, a clear Bush asset, was made Commissioner of Internal Revenue on
August 4, 1986. Here he engineered the sweeheart deal for NCNB by
decreeing $1.6 billion in tax breaks for this bank. This is typical of the
massive favors and graft for pro-Bush financier interests at the expense
of the taxpayer which are the hallmark of the Bush machine. Gibbs also
approved IRS participation in the October 6, 1986 federal-state police
raid against premises and persons associated with the political movement
of Lyndon H. LaRouche in Leesburg, Virginia. This raid was a leading part
of the Bush machine's long term effort to eliminate centers of political
opposition to Bush's 1988 presidential bid. And LaRouche had been a key
adversary of Bush dating back to the 1979-80 New Hampshire primary
campaign, as we will shortly document.
Bush also joined the board of Purolator
Oil Company in Rahway, New Jersey where his crony, Wall Street raider
Nicholas Brady (later Bush's Secretary of the Treasury) was the chairman.
Bush also joined the board of Eli Lilly & Co., a very large and very
sinister pharmaceutical company. The third board Bush joined was that of
Texas Gulf Inc. Bush's total 1977 rakeoff from the four companies with
which he was involved was $112,000, according to Bush's 1977 tax return.
During this time, Bush became a director
of Baylor Medical College, a trustee of Trinity Medical College in San
Antonio, and a trustee of Philips Academy in Andover. He was also listed
as an adjunct professor at Rice University.
Bush also found time line his pockets in
a series of high-yield deals that begin to give us some flavor of what
would later be described as the "financial excesses of the 1980's" in
which Bush's circle was to play a decisive role.
A typical Bush venture of this period was
Ponderosa Forest Apartments, a highly remunerative speculative play in
real estate. Ponderosa bought up a 180-unit apartment complex near Houston
that was in financial trouble, gentrified the interiors, and hiked the
rents. Horace T. Ardinger, a Dallas real estate man who was among Bush's
partners in this deal described the transaction as "a good tax
gimmick...and a typical Texas joint venture offering." According to Bush's
tax returns from 1977 through 1985, the Ponderosa partnership accrued to
Bush a paper loss of $225,160 which allowed him to avoid payment of some
$100,000 in federal taxes alone, plus a direct profit of over $14,000 and
a capital gain of $217,278. This type of windfall represents precisely the
form of real estate swindle that contributed to the Texas real estate and
banking crisis of the mid-1980's. The deal illustrates one of the
important ways in which the federal tax base has been eroded through real
estate scams. We also see why it is no surprise that the one fiscal
innovation which has earned Bush's sustained attention is the idea of a
reduction in the capital gains tax to allow those who engage in swindles
like these to pay an even smaller federal tax bite. It is also typical of
the Bush style that Fred M. Zeder, the promoter of the Ponderosa deal, was
made US Ambassador to the Marshall Island in the South Pacific by the Bush
Administration after he had contributed over $30,000 to Bush's 1988
campaign.
In 1978, Bush crony and cabinet member
Robert Mosbacher, a veteran of the Lietdtke-CREEP money transfers, devised
a scheme to set up a partnership to buy some small barges to transport
petroleum products. Bush invested $50,000 in this deal, which had netted
him some $115,373 in income by 1988, when Bush's share had increased in
value to $60,000. In 1988 it was forecast that this investment would
continue to pay $20,000 per year for the foreseeable future. James Baker
III also sank $50,000 into this deal, and has been rewarded by similar
handsome payoffs. Mosbacher commented that this barge caper had turned out
to be a "very, very good investment."
But Bush's main preoccupation during
these years was to assemble a political machine with which he could
bludgeon his way to power. After his numerous frustrations of the past,
Bush was resolved to organize a campaign that would go far beyond the
innocuous exercise of appealing for citizens' votes. If such a machine
were actually to succeed in seizing power in Washington, tendencies
towards the edification of an authoritarian police state with marked
totalitarian tendencies would inevitably increase.
But first let us review some of Bush's
public activities during the pre-campaign interlude. In April, 1978 Bush
appeared along with E. Henry Knoche and William Colby at Senate hearings
on proposed legislation to modify the methods by which Congress exercised
oversight of the intelligence agencies. The bill being discussed had a
provision to outlaw assassinations of foreign officials and to punish
violations with life in prison. The measure would also have prohibited
covert operations involving "torture," "the creation of epidemics of
diseases," and "the creation of food or water shortages or floods." Bush
and Knoche both objected to the ban on assassinations (which Colby
accepted), and both were critical of the entire bill. Knoche said his fear
was that if enacted the bill might create "a web woven so tight around the
average intelligence officer that you're going to deaden his creativity."
Bush denounced the Senate bill for its
"excessive" reporting requirements. "The Congress should be informed,
fully informed, but it ought not to micro-manage the intelligence
business," protested Bush. He was especially indignant about a provision
that would have required notification of the House and Senate oversight
committees every time a US intelligence agency wanted to stipulate an
agreement with a foreign intelligence agency, or domestic security
service. "I don't believe that kind of intimate disclosure is essential,"
said Bush. Bush was convinced that "some US sources are drying up because
foreign services don't believe the US Congress can keep secrets." This,
from the man who had leaked the Team B report to the New York Times, and
then had gone on television to say that he was appalled.
Bush urged the senators to drop language
in the bill that would have severed the DCI post from the CIA. Bush warned
vehemently that an intelligence czar sitting in the White House "and
separated from his CIA troops...would be virtually isolated. He needs the
CIA as his principal source of support to be most effective. And the CIA
needs its head to be the chief foreign intelligence adviser to the
president." [fn 3]
A few months later he participated in a
singular round table organized by the Washington Quarterly of the
Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies with none other
than Michael Ledeen as moderator. (Ledeen, who vaunted intimate
connections to Israeli intelligence, was later one of the central figures
in the mid-1980's acceleration of US arms shipments to Iran.) In this
round table, Bush was joined by former DCIs Richard Helms and William
Colby as well as by Ray Cline.
According to Bush there was "an
underlying feeling on the part of the American people that we must have
clandestine services." Above all he regretted "that some of the thrust of
the legislation before the Hill is still flogging CIA for something that
was long corrected, or that never happened." Even Hollywood was against
the CIA, Bush thought, "and you get movies and television programs and it
has a very sinister kind of propagandistic overtone." Here Bush wanted to
defend his own record: "I'll give you one example that happened on my
watch: One of these rather ribald magazines described a purported
destabilization effort against [Prime Minister Michael] Manley in
Jamaica." "But," said Bush with that self-righteous whine, "it never
happened. There wasn't any truth in it."
An important question came from Ledeen:
"Is the agency penetrated?" Bush was ready to admit that it might be:
"Nobody is saying that there's nothing." "How about double agents?" Ledeen
wanted to know. "Well, obviously we've had double agents but that's not
officers of the agency," was Bush's ambiguous reply. Bush went on:
The great Soviet agents were recruited
when the Soviet represented something ideologically. When they represented
antifascism. That's when they got people like Philby. But the fact is that
we've just went [sic] through a period in which we had hundreds of
thousands of our young people out screaming against their government. Now
they were totally opposed to their government, but they weren't
pro-Soviet.
Bush and Cline joined to praise the "benign covert political action" of
the 1940's and 1950's by which the CIA sent US intellectuals to Europe to
talk to the Europeans. "We essentially won that ideological battle," said
Bush.[fn 4]
When Carter and Brzezinski played their
treacherous China card in December, 1978, Bush was quick, despite his own
miserable record on this issue, to launch a pre-election attack on Carter
with an op-ed in the Washington Post. Bush harkened back to the day in
December, 1975 (although Bush wrote October) when he, Ford, and Kissinger
had sat down with Chairman Mao. From Mao's remarks that day, Bush says, it
was clear that Red China was obsessed with the Soviet threat, and was
willing to wait indefinitely for China to be reunited with Taiwan. Now
Carter had broken diplomatic relations with Taiwan, begun the pullout of
US forces, abrogated the US-Taiwan security treaty, and was winding down
arms assistance to Taiwan. Bush was the man who had presided over the
ejection of the Republic of China from the UN. It was a cheap shot for him
to quote Peter Berger about the primieval principle of morality that "one
must not deliver one's friends to their enemies." After Bush's support for
Deng Xiao-ping after the 1989 Tein An Men massacre, the hypocrisy is even
more obvious.
But Bush had some other points to make
against Carter. One was that when "black moderates in Rhodesia arranged
with Prime Minister Ian Smith for the transfer of power and free
elections, we [meaning Carter] threw in our lot with Marxist radicals."
Then there was the Middle East, where
"the Israelis announced that they were prepared to accept a final plan
drafted with American help. But when Egypt raised the ante, we modified
our position to accept the new Egyptian proposals, and when the Israelis
refused to go along, we publicly kicked them in the shins." Even the
Carter of Camp David, who split the Arab front with a separate peace
between Israel and Egypt, was not Zionist enough for Bush.
Apart from these public pronouncements,
Bush was at work assembling a campaign machine.
One of the central figures of the Bush
effort would be James Baker III, Bush's friend of ten years' standing.
Baker's power base derived first of all from his family's Houston law
firm, Baker & Botts, which was founded just after the end of the Civil War
by defeated partisans of the Confederate cause. Judge Peter Gray and
Walter Browne Botts established a law partnership in 1866, and this became
Baker & Botts during the 1870's when James Baker (the great-grandfather of
Bush's Secretary of State) joined the firm.
Baker & Botts founder Peter Gray had been
Assistant Treasurer of the Confederate States of America and financial
supervisor of the CSA's "Trans-Mississippi Department." Gray, acting on
orders of Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs, financed the
subversive work of Confederate general Albert Pike among the Indian tribes
of the southwest. The close of the war in 1865 had found Pike hiding in
Canada, and Toombs in exile in England. Pike was excluded from the general
US amnesty for rebels because he was thought to have induced Indians to
commit massacres and war crimes.
Pike and Toombs re-established the
"Southern Jurisdiction" of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, of which Pike
had been the leader in the slave states before the war of the rebellion.
Pike's deputy, one Phillip C. Tucker, returned from Scottish Rite
indoctrination in Great Britain to set up a Scottish rite lodge in Houston
in the spring of 1867. Tucker designated Walter Browne Botts and his
relative Benjamin Botts as the leaders of this new Scottish Rite lodge.
[fn 5]
The policy of the Scottish Rite was to
regroup unreconstructed Confederates to secure the disenfranchisement of
black citizens and to promote Anglophile domination of finance and
business. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were two great
powers dominating Texas: on the one hand, the railroad empire of E.H.
Harriman, served by the law firm of Baker & Botts; and on the other, the
British-trained political operative Colonel Edward M. House, the
controller of President Woodrow Wilson. The close relation between Baker &
Botts and the Harriman interests has remained in place down to the
present. And since the time that Captain Baker founded the Texas Commerce
Bank, the Baker family has helped the London-New York axis run the Texas
banking system.
In 1901, the discovery of large oil
deposits in Texas offered great promise for the future economic
development of the state, but also attracted the Anglo-American oil
cartel. The Baker family law firm in Texas, like the Bush and Dulles
families in New York, was aligned with the Harriman-Rockefeller cartel.
Robert S. Lovett, a Baker & Botts partner from 1882 on, later became the
chairman of Harriman's Union Pacific Railroad and chief counsel to E.H.
Harriman. The Bakers were prominent in supporting eugenics and
utopian-feudalist social engineering.
Captain James A. Baker, so the story
goes, the grandfather of the current boss of Foggy Bottom, solved the
murder of his client William Marsh Rice and took control of Rice's huge
estate. Baker used the money to start Rice University and became the
chairman of the school's board of trustees. Baker sought to create a
center of diffusion of racist eugenics, and for this purpose brought in
Julian Huxley of the infamous British oligarchical family to found the
biology program at Rice starting in 1912. [fn 6] Huxley was the vice
president of the British Eugenics Society and actually helped to organize
"race science" programs for the Nazi Interior Ministry, before becoming
the founding Director General of UNESCO in 1946-48.
James A. Baker III was born April 28,
1930, in the fourth generation of his family's wealth. Baker holdings have
included Exxon, Mobil, Atlantic Richfield, Standard Oil of California,
Standard Oil of Indiana, Kerr-McGee, Merck, and Freeport Minerals. Baker
also held stock in some large New York banks during the time that he was
negotiating the Latin American debt crisis in his capacity as Secretary of
the Treasury. [fn 7]
Baker grew up in patrician surroundings.
His social profile has been described as "Tex-prep." Like his father,
James III attended the Hill School near Philadelphia, and then went on to
Princeton, where he was a member of Ivy Club, a traditional preserve of
Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment oligarchs. Nancy Reagan was
enchanted by Baker's sartorial elegance and smooth savoir-faire. Nancy
liked Baker far more than she ever did Bush, and this was a key advantage
for Bush-Baker during the factional struggles of the Reagan years.
Baker & Botts maintains an
"anti-nepotism" policy, so James III became a boss of Houston's Andrews,
Kurth, Campbell, & Jones law firm, a satellite of Baker & Botts. Baker's
relation to Bush extends across both law firms: in 1977, Baker & Botts
partner Blaine Kerr became president of Pennzoil, and in 1979, Baker &
Botts partner B. J. Mackin became chairman of Zapata Corporation. Baker &
Botts have always represented Zapata, and are often listed as counsel for
Schlumberger, the oil services firm. James Baker and his Andrews, Kurth
partners were the Houston attorneys for First International Bank of
Houston when George Bush was chairman of the bank's executive committee.
During the 1980 campaign, Baker became
the chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign committee, while fellow Texan Bob
Strauss was chairman of the Carter-Mondale campaign. But Baker and Strauss
were at the very same time business partners in Herman Brothers, one of
America's largest beer distributors. Bush Democrat Strauss later went to
Moscow as Bush's ambassador to the USSR and later, to Russia.
In 1990, the New York Times offered a
comparison of Bush and Baker, and sought to convey the impression that
Baker was the far more devious of the duo:
When you sit across from the President,
it is like holding an X-ray plate up to the light. You can see if he feels
defensive or annoyed or amused. He is often distracted, toying with
something on his desk. His thoughts start and stop and start again, as
though he had call-waiting in his brain. There is a spontaneity and warmth
about him.
When you sit across from Baker, it is
like looking at a length of black silk. There is a stillness, as Baker
holds you locked in his gaze and Southern comfort voice, occasionally
flashing a rather wintry smile...He has a compelling presence, but he is
such a fox that you feel the impulse to check your wallet when you leave
his office. [fn 8]
Another leading Bush supporter was Ray
Cline. During 1979 it was Ray Cline who had gone virtually public with a
loose and informal but highly effective campaign network mainly composed
of former intelligence officers. Cline had been the CIA Station Chief in
Taiwan from 1958 to 1962. He had been Deputy Director of Central
Intelligence from 1962 to 1966, and had then gone on to direct the
intelligence gathering operation at the State Department. Cline became a
de facto White House official during the first Bush Administration, and
wrote the White House boiler plate entitled "National Security Strategy of
the United States" under which the Gulf war was carried out.
Cline later said that his approach to
Bush's 1979-80 primary campaign was to "organize something like one of my
old CIA staffs." "I found there was a tremendous constituency for the CIA
when everyone in Washington was still urinating all over it," commented
Cline to the Washington Post of March 1, 1980. "It's panned out almost too
good to be true. The country is waking up just in time for George's
candidacy."
Heading up the Bush campaign muck-raking
"research" staff was Stefan Halper, Ray Cline's son in law and a former
official of the Nixon White House.
A member of Halper's staff was a CIA
veteran named Robert Gambino. Gambino had held the sensitive post of
director of the CIA's Office of Security. It will be recalled that the
Office of Security constitutes the interface between Langley and state and
local police departments all across the United States with whom it must
cooperate to protect the security of CIA buildings and CIA personnel, as
for example in cases in which these latter may run afoul of the law. The
Office of Security is reputed to possess extensive files on the domestic
activities of American citizens. David Aaron, Brzezinski's deputy at the
Carter National Security Council, recalled that some high Carter officials
were "upset" that Gambino had gone to work for the Bush camp. According to
Aaron, "several [CIA] people took early retirement and went to work for
Bush's so-called security staff. The thing that upset us, was that a guy
who has been head of security for the CIA has been privy to a lot of
dossiers, and the possibility of abuse was quite high, although we never
heard of any occasion when Gambino called someone up and forced them to do
something for the campaign." [fn 9]
Other high-level spooks active in the
Bush campaign included Lt. General Sam V. Wilson and Lt. General Harold A.
Aaron, both former directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Another
enthusiastic Bushman was retired General Richard Stillwell, formerly the
CIA's Chief of Covert Operations for the Far East. The former Deputy
Director for Operations Theodore Shackley was also on board, reportedly as
a speechwriter, but more likely for somewhat heavier work.
According to one estimate, at least 25
former intelligence officials worked directly for the Bush campaign. As
Bill Peterson of the Washington Post wrote on March 1, 1980, "Simply put,
no presidential campaign in recent memory--perhaps ever--has attracted as
much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA
Director George Bush."
Further intelligence veterans among the
Bushmen were Daniel C. Arnold, the former CIA Station chief in Bangkok,
Thailand, who retired early to join the campaign during 1979. Harry
Webster, a former clandestine agent, became a member of Bush's paid staff
for the Florida primary. CIA veteran Bruce Rounds was Bush's "director of
operations" during the key New Hampshire primary. Also on board with the
Bushmen was Jon R. Thomas, a former clandestine operative who had been
listed as a State Department official during a tour of duty in Spain, and
who later worked on terrorism and drug trafficking at the State
Department. Andrew Falkiewicz, the former spokesman of the CIA in Langley,
attended some of Bush's pre-campaign brainstorming sessions as a
consultant on foreign policy matters. According to an unnamed former CIA
deputy director for intelligence who allegedly talked to Rolling Stone
magazine in March, 1980, "the Bush campaign is, I think, embarrassed by
all the crazy spooks running around trying to help them." Another retired
top spook told the Washington Post that "there is a very high level of
support for George Bush among current and former CIA employees."
Some worried that all this intelligence
community support might have damaging by-products for Bush. "I can see the
headlines [now]," said one former clandestine officer during the
primaries: "BUSH SPRINKLES CAMPAIGN WITH FORMER SPOOKS."
One leading bastion of the Bushmen was
predictably David Atlee Philip's AFIO, the Association of Former
Intelligence Officers. Jack Coakley was a former director and Bush's
campaign coordinator for Virginia. He certified that at the AFIO annual
meeting in the fall of 1979, he counted 190 "Bush for President" buttons
among 240 delegates to the convention. [fn 10]
During the course of the 1984 Debategate
investigation, a number of Bush campaign activists were depositioned about
possible abuses in the course of this campaign. Most revealing was the
sworn statement of Angelo Codevilla, a former naval intelligence officer
who was a fixture for a number of years on the staff of the Senate
Intelligence Committee. Under questioning by John Fitzgerald, who was
acting as counsel for the House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Don Albosta,
Codevilla responded:
I am aware that active duty agents of the
Central Intelligence Agency worked for the George Bush primary campaign.
However, I cannot now remember some of these persons and I am not at
liberty to identify others by names or positions because to do so would
compromise their cover. [fn 11]
But before signing this as an affidavit,
Codevilla crossed out "am aware" to "have heard" in the first sentence. In
the second sentence, he cancelled "identify others" and put in "discuss
these rumors." Active intelligence community officers who might have
worked for the Bush campaign while still drawing their federal payroll
checks were likely to have been in violation the Hatch Act, which
prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.
Baker was the obvious choice to be Bush's
campaign manager. He had served Bush in this function in the failed senate
campaign of 1970. During the Ford years, Baker had advanced to become
Deputy Secretary of Commerce. Baker had been the manager of Ford's failed
1976 campaign. Bringing Baker into the Bush campaign meant that he could
bring with him many of the Ford political operatives and much of the Ford
political apparatus and volunteers in a number of states. In the 1978,
Baker had attempted to get himself elected attorney general of Texas, but
had been defeated. David Keene was political advisor. As always, no Bush
campaign would be complete without Robert Mosbacher heading up the
national finance operation. Mosbacher's experience, as we have seen,
reached back to the Bill Lietdke conveyances to Maurice Stans of the CREEP
in 1972. Teaming up with Mosbacher were Fred Bush in Houston and Jack
Sloat in Washington.
With the help of Baker and Mosbacher,
Bush began to set up political campaign committees that could be used to
convoy quasi-legal "soft money" into his campaign coffers. This is the
classic stratagem of setting up political action committees that are
registered with the Federal Election Commission for the alleged purpose of
channeling funds into the campaigns of deserving Republican (or
Democratic) candidates. In reality, almost all of the money is used for
the presidential candidate's own staff, office, mailings, travel, and
related expenses. Bush's principal vehicle for this type of funding was
called the Fund for Limited Government. During the first 6 months of 1987,
this group collected $99,000 and spent $46,000, of which only $2,500 went
to other candidates. The rest was in effect spent to finance Bush's
campaign preparations. Bush had a second PAC called the Congressional
Leadership Committee, with Senator Howard Baker and Congressman John
Rhodes on the board, which did manage to dole out the princely sum of $500
to each of 21 GOP office-seekers.
The cash for the Fund for Limited
Government came from 54 fat cat contributors, half of them in Texas,
including Pennzoil, Haggar Slacks, McCormick Oil and Gas, Houston Oil and
Minerals, and Texas Instruments. Money also came in from Exxon,
McDonnell-Douglas, and Clairol cosmetics. [fn 12]
Despite the happy facade, Bush's campaign
staff was plagued by turmoil and morale problems, leading to a high rate
of turnover in key posts. One who has stayed on all along has been
Jennifer Fitzgerald, a British woman born in 1932 who had been with Bush
since at least Beijing. Fitzgerald later worked in Bush's
vice-presidential office, first as appointments secretary, and later as
executive assistant. According to some Washington wags, she controlled
access to Bush in the same way that Martin Bormann controlled access to
Hitler. According to Harry Hurt, among former Bush staffers "Fitzgerald
gets vituperative reviews. She has been accused of bungling the 1980
presidential campaign by canceling Bush appearances at factory sites in
favor of luncheon club speeches. Critics of her performance say she
misrepresents staff scheduling requests and blocks access to her boss." "A
number of the vice president's close friends worry that 'the Jennifer
problem' --or the appearance of one-- may inhibit Bush's future political
career. 'There's just something about her that makes him feel good,' says
one trusted Bush confidant. 'I don't think it's sexual. I don't know what
it is. But if Bush ever runs for president again, I think he's going to
have to make a change on that score.'" [fn 13]
Bush formally announced his presidential
candidacy on May 1, 1979. One of Bush's themes was the idea of a "Union of
the English-Speaking Peoples." Bush was asked later in his campaign by a
reporter to elaborate on this. Bush stated at that time that "the British
are the best friend America has in the world today. I believe we can
benefit greatly from much close collaboration in the economic, military,
and political spheres. Sure I am an Anglophile. We should all be. Britain
has never done anything bad to the United States." [fn 14]
Jules Witcover and Jack Germond, two
experienced observers of presidential campaigns, observed that Bush's was
the first campaign in history to have peaked before it ever started.
During the summer of 1979, Bush grappled
with what has since been called "the Vision Thing." What could he tell the
voters when he was asked why he wanted to be president? During that summer
Bush invited experts on various areas of policy to come to Kennebunkport
and give him the benefit of their views. Bush met with these experts from
business, academia, and government in seminars three days a week from 9 to
5 over a period of six weeks. Many were invited to the family house at
Walker's Point for lunch. In the evenings there were barbecues and
cocktails on the ocean front.
It is an indication of the extraordinary
intellectual aridity of George Bush that these blab sessions produced
almost no identifiable policy ideas for Bush's 1980 campaign. Bush had
wanted to avoid the fate of Ted Kennedy had been widely ridiculed when he
had proven unable to respond to the question of why he wanted to be
president. But Bush never developed an answer to this question either.
Or, more precisely, it was the imperative
to avoid any identifiable idea content that emerged as Bush's strategy.
For, just as much as Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, George Bush was one
of the pioneers of the hollow, demagogic, television-based campaign style
that had become dominant during the 1980's, greasing the skids to
political atrophy and national decline.
Together with James Baker III, always the
idea man of the Bush-Baker combo, the Bush campaign studied Jimmy Carter's
success story of 1980. They knew they were starting with a "George Who?",
virtually unknown to most voters. First of all, Bush would ape the Carter
strategy of showing up in Iowa and New Hampshire early and offer,
attempting to ingratiate himself with the little people by assiduous
cultivation. Bush spent 27 days in Iowa before the caucuses there, and 54
days in New Hampshire.
During this period, Bush was overheard
telling a New York Times reporter that he didn't want to "resist the
Carter analogy." Bush readily admitted that he was "an elitist candidate."
"If Carter could do it with no credentials, I can do it with fantastic
credentials," Bush blurted out. He conceded that the fact that nobody knew
anything about his "fantastic credentials" was a little discouraging. "But
they will! They will!"
Thanks to Mosbacher's operation, the Bush
campaign would advance on a cushion of money-- he spent $1.3 million for
the Illinois primary alone. The biggest item would be media buys- above
all television. This time Bush brought in Baltimore media expert Robert
Goodman, who designed a series of television shorts that were described as
"fast-moving, newsfilmlike portraits of an energetic, dynamic Bush
creating excitement and moving through crowds, with an upbeat musical
track behind him. Each of the advertisements used a slogan that attempted
to capitalize on Bush's experience, while hitting Carter's wretched
on-the-job performance and Ronald Reagan's inexperience on the national
scene: 'George Bush,' the announcer intoned, 'a President we won't have to
train.'" [fn 15] One of these shorts showed Bush talking about inflation
to a group of approving factory workers. In another, Bush climbed out of a
private plane at a small airport, surrounded by supporters with straw hats
and placards and yelled "We're going all the way" to the accompaniment of
applause and music Goodman hoped would sound "presidential." The
inevitable footage of Bush getting fished out of the drink off Chichi Jima
shootdown was also aired.
Network camera crews were offered
repeated chances to film Bush while he was jogging. This was an oblique
way of pointing out that Reagan would be 70 years old by the beginning of
the primary season. "I'm up for the 1980's," was a favorite Bush quote for
interviews. There were no attacks on Reagan; indeed Bush was seeking to
come across as a moderate conservative, in order first to fend off the
challenge of Sen. Howard Baker, who was also running, and to gain on
Reagan.
In a rather slavish imitation of the
Carter victory scenario, Bush also chose to imitate what had been called
Carter's "fuzziness," or unwillingness to say anything of substance about
issues. Bush was the unabashed demagogue, telling Diane Sawyer of CBS when
he would finally talk about the issues: "if they can show me how it will
get me more votes someplace, I'll be glad to do it."
Bush talked vaguely about tax cuts to
spur business and investment; he was unhappy about the "decline in
America's stature overseas" due to Carter; he was against excessive
government regulation. Military aggression overseas has never been far
below the surface of Bush's psyche; in 1979 he talked about the need to
overcome the post-Vietnam guilt syndrome. He was, he proclaimed, "sick and
tired of hearing people apologize for America." Bush was striving to
appear as similar to Reagan, but more moderate in packaging, younger and
more dynamic, and above all, a Winner.
But in the midst of Bush's summer, 1979
preparations for his presidential bid, there was one very serious moment
of preparation that addressed the some real issues, albeit in a way
virtually invisible from the campaign trail. This was a conference Bush
attended at the Jonathan Institute in Jerusalem on July 2-5. Instead of
mugging for the television cameras while eating hotdogs on the Fourth of
July at a picnic in Iowa or New Hampshire, Bush journeyed to Israel for
what was billed as the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism.
The Jonathan Institute had been founded
earlier the same year by Benjamin Netanyahu, a young crazy of the Likud
block, in memory of his brother Jonathan, who had been killed during the
Israeli raid on Entebbe in 1976. The Jonathan Institute was a semi-covert
propaganda operation and could only be defined as a branch of the Israeli
government. The committee sponsoring this conference on terrorism was
headed up by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, followed by Moshe Dayan and
many other prominent Israeli politicians and generals.
The US delegation to the conference was
divided according to partisan lines, but was generally united by sympathy
for the ideas and outlook of the Bush-Cherne Team B. The Democratic
delegation was led by the late Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. This
group included civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, plus Norman Podhoretz
and Midge Decter of Commentary Magazine, two of the most militant and
influential Zionist neoconservatives. Ben Wattenberg of the American
Enterprise Institute was also on hand. Although the group that arrived
with Scoop Jackson were supposedly Democrats, most of them would support
Reagan-Bush in the November, 1980 election.
Then there was the GOP delegation, which
was led by George Bush. Here were Bush activist Ray Cline, Major General
George Keegan, a stalwart supporter of Team B, and Professor Richard Pipes
of Harvard, the leader of Team B. Here were Senator John Danforth of
Missouri and Brian Crozier, a "terrorism expert." Pseudo-intellectual
columnist George Will ("Will the Shill") was also on hand, as was
Rome-based journalist Claire Sterling, who had been active in covering up
the role of Henry Kissinger in the 1978 assassination of Italian Prime
Minister Aldo Moro, and who would later be blind to indications of an
Anglo-American role in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.
International participation was also
notable: Annie Kriegel and Jacques Soustelle of France, Lord Alun
Chalfont, Paul Johnson, and Robert Moss of the United Kingdom, and many
leading Israelis.
The keynote statement was made by Prime
Minister Begin, who told the participants that they should spread through
the world the main idea of the conference, which was that all terrorism in
the world, whatever its origin, is controlled by the Soviet Union. Ray
Cline made a major presentation, developing his theory that terrorism
should not be seen as a spontaneous response to oppression by frustrated
minorities, but rather only as the preferred tool of Soviet bloc
subversion. For Cline, the great watershed was an alleged 1969 decision by
the Poliburo in Moscow to use the Palestine Liberation Organization as the
Kremlin's fifth column in the Middle East, and specifically to subsidize
PLO terrorist attacks with money, training, and communications provided by
the KGB. For Cline, the PLO, despite the fact that it enjoyed the support
of the vast majority of Palestinians, was merely a synthetic tool of
Soviet intelligence. It was a very convenient argument for Zionist
hardliners.
Richard Pipes then drew on Russian
history to illustrate the singular thesis that terrorism was a product of
Russian history, and of no other history. "The roots of Soviet terrorism,
indeed of modern terrorism," according to Pipes, "date back to 1879...It
marks the beginning of that organization which is the source of all modern
terrorist groups, whether they be named the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhof
group, the Weathermen, Red Brigades or PLO. I refer you to the
establishment in 1879 of a Congress in the small Russian town of Lipesk,
of an organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or the People's Will."
There is no doubt that the KGB and its
east bloc satellite agencies were massively involved in running terrorism,
as former Soviet bloc archives opened after 1989 definitively show. But is
it really true that terrorism was invented in Lipesk in 1879? And is
terrorism really the absolute monopoly of the KGB? Did that include
Menachem Begin, who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem? Did it
include other members of the Irgun and Stern gangs? Everyone present seems
to have found good reasons for believing that the ludicrous thesis of the
conference was true. For the Israelis, it was a new reason not to
negotiate with the PLO, who could be classed as Soviet terrorist puppets.
For the immediate needs of Bush's election-year demagogy, it was an
argument that could be used against Carter's equally demagogic "human
rights" sloganeering. More broadly, it could be used to allege a clear and
present universal danger that made it mandatory to close the book once and
for all on the old Church committee-Pike committee mentality. All the
participants, from CIA, MI-6, SDECE, Mossad, and so on down the line could
readily agree that only the KGB, and never they themselves ran terrorism.
Hardly ever.
Begin had been a terrorist himself;
Soustelle had been in the French OAS during the Algerian war where the
SDECE had committed monumental crimes against humanity; Bush and Cline
were godfathers of the Enterprise; the Mossad was reputed to have an agent
on the Abu Nidal central committee, and also exercised influence over the
Italian Red Brigades; while the chaps from MI-6 had the longest and
bloodiest imperial records. But Ian Black wrote in the Jerusalem Post
wrote that "the conference organizers expect the event to initiate a major
anti-terrorist offensive." In Paris, the right-wing L'Aurore ran an
article under the headline "Toujours le KGB," which praised the conference
for having confirmed that when it comes to international terrorism, the
Soviets pull all the strings. [fn 16]
There were skeptics, even in the US
intelligence community, where Ray Cline's monomania was recognized. At the
1980 meeting of AFIO, Cline was criticized by Howard Bane, the former CIA
station chief in Moscow, who suggested "We've got to get Cline off this
Moscow control of terrorists. It's divisive. It's not true. There's not
one single but of truth to it." A retired CIA officer named Harry Rostizke
put in: "It's that far-right stuff, that's all. It's horseshit."
Nevertheless, the absurd thesis of the
Jerusalem Conference was soon regurgitated by several new top officials of
the Reagan Administration. In Alexander Haig's first news conference as
Secretary of State on January 28, 1981, Haig thundered that the Kremlin
was trying to "foster, support, and expand" terrorist activity worldwide
through the "training, funding, and equipping" of terrorist armies. Haig
made it official that "international terrorism will take the place of
human rights" as the central international concern of the Reagan
Administration. And that meant the KGB.
During 1978 and 1979, the Carter
Administration deliberately toppled the Shah of Iran, and deliberately
replaced him with Khomeini. The US had shipped arms to the Shah, and never
stopped such shipments, despite the advent of Khomeini and the taking of
US hostages. The continuity of the arms deliveries, sometimes mediated
through Israel, would later lead into the Iran-contra affair. In the
meantime Bush and his partners in the Israeli Mossad had sealed a pact and
signaled it in public with a new ideological smoke-screen that, they
hoped, would cover a new world-wide upsurge in covert operations during
the 1980's.
On November 3, 1979, Bush bested Sen.
Howard Baker in a "beauty contest" straw poll taken at the Maine
Republican convention in Portland. Bush won by a paper-thin margin of 20
votes out of 1,336 cast, and Maine was really his home state, but the
Brown Brothers, Harriman networks at the New York Times delivered a
frontpage lead story with a subhead that read "Bush gaining stature as '80
contender."
Bush's biggest lift of the 1980 campaign
came when he won a plurality in the January 21 Iowa caucuses, narrowly
besting Reagan, who had not put any effort into the state. At this point
the Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones media operation went into
high gear. That same night Walter Cronkite told viewers: "George Bush has
apparently done what he hoped to do, coming out of the pack as the
principal challenger to front-runner Ronald Reagan."
In the interval between January 21 and
the New Hampshire primary of February 26, the Eastern Liberal
Establishment labored mightily to put George Bush into power as president
that same year. The press hype in favor of Bush was overwhelming.
Newsweek's cover featured a happy and smiling Bush talking with his
supporters: "BUSH BREAKS OUT OF THE PACK," went the headline. Smaller
pictures showed a scowling Senator Baker and a decidedly un-telegenic
Reagan grimacing before a microphone. The Newsweek reporters played up
Bush's plan to redo the Carter script from 1976, and went on to assert
that Bush's triumph in Iowa "raised the serious possibility that he could
accomplish on the Republican side this year what Carter did in
1976--parlay a well-tuned personal appetite for on-the-ground campaigning
into a Long March to his party's Presidential nomination." So wrote the
magazine controlled by the family money of Bush's old business associate
Eugene Meyer, and Bush was appreciative; doubly so for the reference to
his old friend Mao.
Time, which had been founded by Henry
Luce of Skull and Bones, showed a huge, grinning Bush and a smaller, very
cross Reagan, headlined: "BUSH SOARS." The leading polls, always doctored
by the intelligence agencies and other interests, showed a Bush boom: Lou
Harris found that whereas Reagan had led Bush into Iowa by 32-6
nationwide, Bush had pulled even with Reagan at 27-27 within 24 hours
after the Iowa result had become known.
Savvy Republican operatives were reported
to be flocking to the Bush bandwagon. Even seasoned observers stuck their
necks out; Witcover and Germond wrote in their column of February 22 that
"a rough consensus is taking shape among moderate Republican politicians
that George Bush may achieve a commanding position within the next three
weeks in the contest for the Republican nomination. And those with
unresolved reservations about Bush are beginning to wonder privately if it
is even possible to keep an alternative politically alive for the late
primaries."
Robert Healy of the Boston Globe stuck
his neck out even further for the neo-Harrimanite cause with a forecast
that "even though he is still called leading candidate in some places,
Reagan does not look like he'll be on the Presidential stage much longer."
It was even possible, Healy gushed that Bush "will go through
1980...without losing an important Presidential primary." William Safire
of the New York Times claimed that his contacts with Republican insiders
across the country had yielded "a growing suspicion that Reagan may once
again be bypassed for the historic role...a general feeling that he may be
a man whose cause may triumph, but whose own time may never come." [fn 17]
NBC's Brokaw started calling Reagan the
"former front-runner." Tom Petit of the same network was more direct: "I
would like to suggest that Ronald Reagan is politically dead." Once again
the choice of pictures made Bush look good, Reagan bad.
The Eastern Liberal establishment had
left no doubt who its darling was: Bush, and not Reagan. In their
arrogance, the Olympians had once again committed the error of confusing
their collective patrician whim with real processes ongoing in the real
world. The New Hampshire primary was to prove a devastating setback for
Bush, in spite of all the hype the Bushman networks were able to crank
out. How did it happen?
George Bush was of course a life-long
member of the Skull and Bones secret society of Yale University, through
which he advanced towards the freemasonic upper reaches of the
Anglo-American establishment, towards those exalted circles of London, New
York, and Washington in which the transatlantic destiny of the self-styled
Anglo-Saxon master race is elaborated. The entrees provided by Skull and
Bones membership would always be, for Bush, the most vital ones. But, in
addition to such exalted feudal brotherhoods as Skull and Bones, the
Anglo-American Establishment also maintains a series of broader-based
elite organizations whose function is to manifest the hegemonic
Anglo-American policy line to the broader layers of the establishment,
including bureaucrats, businessmen, bankers, journalists, professors, and
other such assorted retainers and stewards of power.
George Bush had thus found it politic
over the years to become a member of the New York Council on Foreign
Relations. By 1979, Bush was a member of the board of the CFR, where he
sat next to his old patron Henry Kissinger. The President of the CFR
during this period was Kissinger clone Winston Lord of the traditional
Skull and Bones family.
George was also a member of the Bohemian
Club of San Francisco, which had been founded by Ambrose Bierce after the
Civil War to cater to the Stanfords, Huntingtons, Crockers, Hopkins, and
the other nouveau-riche tycoons that had emerged from the gold rush. The
Bohemian Club made a summer outing every year to its camp at Bohemian
Grove, a secluded, 2,700 acre stand of majestic redwoods about 75 miles
from San Francisco. A sign over the gate advises: "Spiders Weave Not
Here." Up to 1,600 members, with the occasional foreign guest like German
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, gather in mid-summer for freemasonic ceremonies
featuring the ritual interment of "dull care", cavort in women's panty
hose in femme impersonatuer theatricals, or better yet frolic in the nude
near the banks of the Russian River. Herbert Hoover was a devoted regular,
Eisenhower and Allen Dulles made cold war speeches there; Nixon and Reagan
had discussed prospects for the 1968 election; Bechtel was always big; and
Henry Kissinger loved to pontificate, all at the Grove.
Then there was the Trilateral Commission,
founded by David Rockefeller in 1973-74. One branch from North America,
one branch from Europe, one branch from Japan, with the resulting organism
a kind of policy forum aiming at an international consensus among
financier factions, under overall Anglo-American domination. The
Trilateral Commission emerged at the same time that the
Rockefeller-Kissinger interests perpetrated the first oil hoax. Some of
its first studies were devoted to the mechanics of imposing
authoritarian-totalitarian forms of government in the US, Europe, and
Japan to manage the austerity and economic decay that would be the results
of Trilateral policies. The Carter Administration was very overtly a
Trilateral Administration. Popular hatred of Carter and his crew made the
Trilaterals an attractive target; their existence had been publicized by
Lyndon LaRouche's newspaper New Solidarity during 1973-74 in the context
of a highly effective anti-Rockefeller campaign. Reagan promised that he
would change all that, but his government was also dominated by the
Trilateraloids.
Bush was also a member of the Alibi Club,
a society of Washington insiders who gather periodically to assert the
primacy of oligarchism over such partisan or other divisions that have
been concocted to divert the masses. Bush had also joined another
Washington association, the Alfalfa Club, with much the same ethos and a
slightly different cast of characters. Bush was clearly a joiner. Later,
in 1990, he would accept a bid to join Britain's Royal and Ancient Golf
Club of St. Andrew's in Scotland as the ninth honorary member in the
history of that august body. This was also a tribute to George Herbert
Walker, a past president of the US Golf Association, and to Prescott Bush,
who was also president of the USGA.
As we saw briefly during Bush's senate
campaign, the combination of bankruptcy and arrogance which was the
hallmark of Eastern Liberal Establishment rule over the United States
generated resentments which could make membership in such organizations a
distinct political liability. That the issue exploded in New Hampshire
during the 1979-80 campaign in such a way as to wreck the Bush campaign
was largely the merit of Lyndon LaRouche, who had launched an outsider bid
in the Democratic primary.
LaRouche conducted a vigorous campaign in
New Hampshire during late 1979, focusing on the need to put forward an
economic policy to undo the devastation being wrought by the 22% prime
rate being charged by many banks as a result of the high-interest and
usury policies of Paul Volcker, whom Carter had made the head of the
Federal Reserve. But in addition to contesting Carter, Ted Kennedy, and
Jerry Brown on the Democratic side, LaRouche's also noticed George Bush,
whom LaRouche correctly identified as a liberal Republican in the Theodore
Roosevelt-House of Morgan "Bull Moose" tradition of 1912. LaRouche also
noticed that a majority of the wealthy "blue-blood" families who dominated
New Hampshire political life were Bush backers. These were the families
who could-- and often did-- organize ballot-box fraud on a vast scale.
During late 1980, the LaRouche campaign
began to call attention to Bush as a threat against which other
candidates, Republicans and Democrats, ought to unite. LaRouche attacked
Bush as the spokesman for "the folks who live on the hill," for petty
oligarchs and bluebloods who think that it is up to them to dictate
political decisions to the average citizen. These broadsides were the
first to raise the issue of Bush's membership in David Rockefeller's
Trilateral Commission and in the New York Council on Foreign Relations.
Soon Bush's membership in the Trilateral Commission became for many voters
a symbol of Bush's plutocratic and arrogant claim on high public office as
some kind of a "birthright," quite independent of the judgment of the
voters.
While on the hustings in New Hampshire,
especially in the Connecticut River valley in the western part of the
state, LaRouche observed the high correlation between preppy, liberal
Republican blue-blood support for Bush and mental pathology. As LaRouche
wrote, "In the course of campaigning in New Hampshire during 1979 and
1980, I have encountered minds, especially in western New Hampshire, who
represent, in a decayed sort of way, exactly the treasonous outlook our
patriotic forefathers combated more than a century or more ago. Naturally,
since I am an American Whig by family ancestry stretching back into the
early 19th century, born a New Hampshire Whig, and a Whig Democrat by
profession today, the blue-blooded kooks of certain "respected"
Connecticut River Valley families get my dander up."
LaRouche's principal charge was that
George Bush was a "cult-ridden kook, and more besides." He cited Bush's
membership in "the secret society which largely controls George Bush's
personal destiny, the Russell Trust Association, otherwise known as 'Skull
and Bones.'" "Understanding the importance of the Russell Trust
Association in Bush's adult life will help the ordinary citizen to
understand why one must place a question mark on Bush's political
candidacy today. Is George Bush a 'Manchurian candidate' ?"
After noting that the wealth of many of
the Skull and Bones families was derived from the British East India
Company's trade in black slaves and in opium, LaRouche went on to discuss
"How Yale Turned 'Gay:'"
Today, visiting Yale, one sees male
students walking hand in hand, lovers, blatantly, on the streets. One does
not permit one's boy children to visit certain of the residences on or
around that campus. There have been too many incidents to be overlooked.
One is reminded of the naked wrestling in the mud which initiates to the
Yale Skull and Bones society practice. One thinks of 'Skull and Boneser'
William F. Buckley's advocacy of the dangerous, mind-wrecking subnstance,
marijuana, and of Buckley's recent, publicly expressed sympathies for
sodomy between male public school teachers and students. [...]
As the anglophile commitments [of the
blueblood families] deepened and decayed, the families reflected this in
part by a growth of the incidence of "homosexuality" for which British
public schools and universities are rightly notorious. Skull and Bones is
a concentrated expression of that moral and intellectual degeneration.
LaRouche pointed out that the symbol of
Skull and Bones is the skull and crossbones of the pirate Jolly Roger with
"322" placed under the crossbones. The 322 is thought to refer to 322 BC,
the year of the death of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, whom LaRouche
identified as a traitor to Athens and an agent provocateur in the service
of King Philip of Macedonia. The Skull and Bones ceremony of induction and
initiation is modeled on the death and resurrection fetish of the cult of
Osiris in ancient Egypt. LaRouche described the so-called "Persian model"
of oligarchical rule sought by Skull and Bones: "The 'oligarchical' or
'Persian' model was what might be called today a 'neo-Malthusian' sort of
'One World' scheme. Science and technological progress were to be
essentially crushed and most of the world turned back into
labor-intensive, 'appropriate' technologies. By driving civilization back
towards barbarism in that way, the sponsors of the 'oligarchical model'
proposed to ensure the perpetuation of a kind of 'one world' rule by what
we would term today a 'feudal landlord' class. To aid in bringing about
that 'ONE WORLD ORDER,' the sponsors of the project utilized a variety of
religious cults. Some of these cults were designed for the most illiterate
strata of the population, and, at the other extreme, other cults were
designed for the indoctrination and control of the ruling elite
themselves. The cult-organization under the Roman Empire is an excellent
example of what was intended."
LaRouche went on:
Skull and Bones is no mere fraternity, no
special alumni association with added mumbo-jumbo. It is a very serious,
very dedicated cult-conspiracy against the US Constitution. Like the
Cambridge Apostles, the initiate to the Skull and Bones is a dedicated
agent of British secret intelligence for life. The fifteen Yale recruits
added each year function as a powerful secret intelligence association for
life, penetrating into our nation's intelligence services as well as
related high levels of national policy-making.
Representatives of the cult who have functioned in that way include
Averell Harriman, Henry Luce, Henry Stimson, Justice Potter Stewart,
McGeorge Bundy, Rev. William Sloane Coffin (who recruited William F.
Buckley), William Bundy, J. Richardson Dilworth, and George Bush...and
many more notables. The list of related Yalies in the history of the CIA
accounts for many of the CIA's failures and ultimate destruction by the
Kennedy machine, including the reason Yalie James Jesus Angleton failed to
uncover H. "Kim" Philby's passing of CIA secrets to Moscow.
Now, the ordinary citizen should begin to
realize how George Bush became a kook-cultist, and also how so incompetent
a figure as Bush was appointed for a while Director of Central
Intelligence for the CIA. [...]
On the record, the ordinary citizen who
knew something of Bush's policies and sympathies would class him as a
"Peking sympathizer," hence a Communist sympathizer." [...]
Focusing on Bush's links with the Maoist
regime, LaRouche stressed the recent genocide in Cambodia:
The genocide of three out of seven
million Cambodians by the Peking puppet regime of Pol Pot (1975-78) was
done under the direction of battalions of Peking bureaucrats controlling
every detail of the genocide--the worst genocide of the present century to
date. This genocide, which was aimed especially against all merely
literate Cambodians as well as professional strata, had the purpose of
sending all of Southeast Asia back into a "dark age." That "dark age"
policy is the policy of the present Peking regime. That is the regime
which Kissinger, Bush and Brzezinski admire so much as an "ally." [...]
The leading circles of London have no
difficulty in recognizing what "Peking Communism" is. It is their
philosophy, their policy in a Chinese mandarin culture form. To the extent
that Yalies of the Skull and Bones sort are brought into the same culture
as their superiors in London, such Yalies, like Bush, also have deep
affection for "Peking Communism."
Like Bush, who supports neo-Malthusian
doctrines and zero-growth and anti-nuclear policies, the Peking rulers are
dedicated to a "one world" order in which the population is halved over
the next twenty years (i.e. genocide far greater than Hitler's), and most
of the survivors are driven into barbarism and cultism under the rule of
parasitical blue blood families of the sort represented in the membership
of the Skull and Bones.
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