From: stoesser@alderon.corp.sgi.com (Margaret Stoesser)
Subject: The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: Part 1
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 18:31:03 GMT

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   In the case of George Bush, as many who have known him personally have
noted, the network looms much larger than George's own character and will.
The reader will search in vain for strong principled commitments in George
Bush's personality; the most that will be found is a series of characteristic
obsessions, of which the most durable are race, vanity, personal ambition,
and settling scores with adversaries.  What emerges by contrast is the
decisive importance of Bush's network of connections. His response to the
Gulf crisis of 1991 will be largely predetermined, not by any great flashes
of geopolitical insight, but rather by his connections to the British
oligarchy, to Kissinger, to Israeli and Zionist circles, to Texas oilmen in his
fundraising base, to the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal houses. If the
question is one of finance, then the opinions of J. Hugh Liedtke, Henry
Kravis, Robert Mosbacher, T. Boone Pickens, Nicholas Brady, James Baker
III and the City of London will be decisive. If covert operations and
dirty tricks are on the agenda, then there is a whole stable of CIA old boys
with whom he will consult, and so on down the line. During much of 1989,
despite his control over the presidency, Bush appeared as a weak and
passive executive, waiting for his networks to show him what it was he was
supposed to do. When German reunification and the crumbling of the
Soviet empire spurred those--primarily British--networks into action, Bush was
suddenly capable of violent and daring adventures. As his battle for a second
term approaches, Bush may be showing increasing signs of a rage-driven
self-starter capability, especially when it comes to starting new wars
designed to secure his re-election. 
   
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		George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography 
		by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin 


With this issue of the New Federalist, Vol. V, No. 39,
we begin to serialize the book, {George Bush: The Unauthorized
Biography,} by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. This book
will soon be published by {Executive Intelligence Review}. 

   At the heart of any effort at biography is the attempt to discover
the essence of the subject as a human personality. The essential character of
the subject is what the biographer must strive to capture, since this is the
indispensable ingredient that will provide coherence to the entire story
whose unity must be provided by the course of a single human life. 

   During the preparation of the present work, there was one historical
moment which more than any other delineated the character of George
Bush. The scene was the Nixon White House during the final days of the
Watergate debacle. White House officials, including George Bush, had
spent the morning of that Monday, August 5, 1974 absorbing the impact of
Nixon's notorious ``smoking gun'' tape, the recorded conversation between Nixon
and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldemann, shortly after the original Watergate
break-in, which could now no longer be withheld from the public. In that
exchange of June 23, 1972, Nixon ordered that the CIA stop the FBI from
further investigating how various sums of money found their way from Texas and
Minnesota via Mexico City to the coffers of the Committee to Re-Elect
the President (CREEP) and thence into the pockets of the ``Plumbers''
arrested in the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building.
These revelations were widely interpreted as establishing a {prima
facie} case of obstruction of justice against Nixon. That was fine with
George, who sincerely wanted his patron and benefactor Nixon to resign.
George's great concern was that the smoking gun tape called attention to a
money-laundering mechanism which he, together with Bill Liedtke of Pennzoil,
and Robert Mosbacher, had helped to set up at Nixon's request. When Nixon, in
the ``smoking gun'' tape, talked about ``the Texans'' and ``some Texas
people,'' Bush, Liedtke, and Mosbacher were among the most prominent of those
referred to. The threat to George's political ambitions was great. 
   The White House that morning was gripped by panic. Nixon would be gone
before the end of the week. In the midst of the furor, White House
Congressional liaison William Timmons wanted to know if everyone who needed
to be informed had been briefed about the smoking gun transcript. In a
roomful of officials, some of whom were already sipping Scotch to steady their
nerves, Timmons asked Dean Burch, ``Dean, does Bush know about the
transcript yet?'' ``Yes,'' responded Burch. 
   ``Well, what did he do?'' inquired Timmons. 
   ``He broke out into assholes and shit himself to death,'' replied Burch. 
   In this exchange, which is recorded in Woodward and Bernstein's
{The Final Days,} we grasp the essential George Bush, in a crisis, and
for all seasons. 
     
Introduction
 
   The thesis of this book is simple: if George Bush were to be re-elected in
November 1992 for a second term as the President of the United States, this
country and the rest of the world would face a catastrophe of gigantic
proportions. The necessity of writing this book became overwhelming in 
the minds of the authors in the wake of the ghastly slaughter of the Iraq war 
of January-February 1991. That war was an act of savage and premeditated 
genocide on the part of Bush, undertaken in connivance with a clique in London
which has, in its historical continuity, represented both the worst
enemy of the long-term interests of the American people, and the most
implacable adversary of the progress of the human species. 

   The authors observed George Bush as the Gulf crisis and the war
unfolded, and had no doubt that his enraged public outbursts constituted
real psychotic episodes, indicative of a deranged mental state that was full
of ominous portent for humanity. The authors were also horrified by the
degree to which their fellow citizens willfully ignored the shocking reality
of these public fits. A majority of the American people proved more than
willing to lend its support to a despicable enterprise of killing. 

   By their role-call votes of January 12, 1991, the Senate and the
House of Representatives authorized Bush's planned war measures to restore
the Emir of Kuwait, who owns and holds chattel slaves. That vote was a crime
against God's justice. This book is part of an attempt to
help the American people to survive this terrible crime, both for the sake
of the world and for their own sake. It is intended as a contribution to a
process of education that might help to save the American people from the
awesome destruction of a second Bush presidency. It is further intended as a
warning to all citizens that if they fail to deny Bush a second term, they
will deserve what they get after 1993. As this book goes to press, public
awareness of the long-term depression of the American economy is rapidly
growing. If Bush were re-elected, he would view himself as beyond the reach
of the American electorate; with the federal deficit rising over a billion
dollars a day, a second Bush administration would dictate such
crushing austerity as to bring the country to the brink of civil war. Some
examples of this point are described in the last chapter of this book. 

   Our goal has been to assemble as much of the truth about Bush as
possible within the time constraints imposed by the 1992 election. Time and
resources have not permitted us meticulous attention to certain matters
of detail; we can say, nevertheless, that both our commitment to the truth
and our final product are better than anything anyone else has been able to
muster, including news organizations and intelligence agencies with
capabilities that far surpass our own. Why do we fight the Bush power
cartel with a mere book? We have no illusions of easy success, but we were
encouraged in our work by the hope that a biography might stimulate opposition
to Bush and his policies. It will certainly pose a new set of problems
for those seeking to get Bush re-elected. For although Bush is now
what journalists call a world leader, no accurate account of his actual
career exists in the public domain. The volume which we submit to the
court of world public opinion is, to the best of our knowledge, the first
book-length, unauthorized biography of George Bush. It is the first
approximation of the truth about his life. This is the first biography
worthy of the name, a fact that says a great deal about the sinister and
obsessive secrecy of this personage.  None of the other biographies
(including Bush's campaign autobiography) can be taken seriously;
each of these books is a pastiche of lies, distortions and banalities that
run the gamut from campaign panegyric, to the Goebbels Big Lie, to fake but
edifying stories for credulous children. Almost without exception, the
available Bush literature is worthless as a portrait of the subject. 

   Bush's family pedigree establishes him as a network asset of Brown
Brothers Harriman, one of the most powerful political forces in the United
States during much of the twentieth century, and for many years the largest
private bank in the world. It suffices in this context to think of Averell
Harriman negotiating during World War II in the name of the United States
with Churchill and Stalin, or of the role of Brown Brothers Harriman partner
Robert Lovett in guiding John F.  Kennedy's choice of his cabinet, to
begin to see the implications of Senator Prescott Bush's post as
managing partner of this bank. Brown Brothers Harriman networks pervade
government and the mass media. Again and again in the course of the
following pages we will see stories embarrassing to George Bush refused
publication, documents embarrassing to Bush suspiciously disappear, and
witnesses inculpatory to Bush be overtaken by mysterious and
conveniently timed deaths. The few relevant facts which have found their
way into the public domain have necessarily been filtered by this
gigantic apparatus. This problem has been compounded by the corruption and
servility of authors, journalists, news executives and publishers who have
functioned more and more as kept advocates for a governmental regime of
which Bush has been a prominent part for a quarter-century. 

The Red Studebaker Myth
 
   George Bush wants key aspects of his life to remain covert. At the same
time, he senses that his need for coverup is a vulnerability. The need to
protect this weak flank accounts for the steady stream of fake biographical
material concerning George, as well as the spin given to many studies that may
never mention George directly. Over the past several months, we have seen a new
book about Watergate that pretends to tell the public something new by
fingering Al Haig as Deep Throat, but ignoring the central role of George
Bush and his business partners in the Watergate affair. We have a new book by
Lt. Col. Oliver North which alleges that Reagan knew everything about the
Iran-Contra affair, but that George Bush was not part of North's chain of
command. The latter point merely paraphrases Bush's own lame excuse that
he was ``out of the loop'' during all those illegal transactions. During the
hearings on the nomination of Robert Gates to become director of Central
Intelligence, nobody had anything new to add about the role of George Bush,
the boss of the National Security Council's Special Situation Group
crisis staff that was a command center for the whole affair. These charades
are peddled to a very credulous public by operatives whose task goes beyond
mere damage control to mind control--the ``MK'' in the government's
MK-Ultra operation. Part of the free ride enjoyed by George Bush during 
the 1988 elections is reflected in the fact that at no point in the 
campaign was there any serious effort by any of the news organizations 
to provide the public with an accurate and complete account of his 
political career. At least two biographies of Dukakis appeared which,
although hardly critical, were not uniformly laudatory either. But in the
case of Bush, all the public could turn to was Bush's old 1980 campaign
biography and a newer campaign autobiography, both of them a tissue of
lies. Early in the course of our research for the present volume it became 
apparent that all books and most longer articles dealing with the life of 
George Bush had been generated from a single print-out of thoroughly
approved ``facts'' about Bush and his family. We learned that during
1979-80, Bush aide Pete Roussel attempted to recruit biographers to
prepare a life of Bush based on a collection of press releases, news
summaries, and similar pre-digested material. Most biographical writing
about Bush consists merely of the points from this printout, strung out
chronologically and made into a narrative through the interpretation of
comments, anecdotes, embellishments, or special stylistic devices. 

   The canonical Bush-approved printout is readily identified. One
dead giveaway is the inevitability with which the hacks out to cover up the
substance of Bush's life refer to a 1947 red Studebaker which George Bush
allegedly drove into Odessa, Texas in 1948. This is the sort of detail which
has been introduced into Bush's real life in a deliberate and deceptive
attempt to humanize his image. It has been our experience that any text that
features a reference to Bush's red Studebaker has probably been derived
from Bush's list of approved facts, and is therefore practically worthless for
serious research into Bush's life. We therefore assign such texts to the
``red Studebaker school'' of coverup and falsification. 

   Some examples? This is from Bush's campaign autobiography, {Looking
Forward,} ghost-written by his aide Vic Gold: ``Heading into Texas in my
Studebaker, all I knew about the state's landscape was what I'd seen
from the cockpit of a Vultee Vibrator during my training days in the
Navy.''@s1 Here is the same moment as recaptured by Bush's crony Fitzhugh 
Green, a friend of the Malthusian financier Russell Train, in his 
{George Bush: An Intimate Portrait,} published after Bush had won the 
presidency: ``He (Bush) gassed up his 1948 Studebaker, arranged for his wife 
and son to follow, and headed for Odessa, Texas.''@s2 Harry Hurt III wrote the 
following lines in a 1983 Texas magazine article that was even decorated with 
a drawing of what apparently is supposed to be a Studebaker, but which does 
not look like a Studebaker of that vintage at all: ``When George Herbert Walker
Bush drove his battered red Studebaker into Odessa in the summer of 1948, the
town's population, though constantly increasing with newly-arrived oil field
hands, was still under 30,000.''@s3 We see that Harry Hurt has more
imagination than many Bush biographers, and his article does provide a few
useful facts. More degraded is the version offered by Richard Ben Kramer,
whose biography of Bush is expected to be published during 1992. Cramer was
given the unenviable task of breathing life once more into the same tired old
printout. But the very fact that the Bush team feels that it requires
another biography indicates that it still feels that it has a potential
vulnerability here. Cramer has attempted to solve his problem by
recasting the same old garbage into a frenetic and hyperkinetic, we would
almost say {hyperthyroid} style. The following is from an excerpt
of this forthcoming book that was published in {Esquire} in June
1991: ``In June, after the College World Series and graduation day in New
Haven, Poppy packed up his new red Studebaker (a graduation gift from
Pres), and started driving south.''@s4 Was that Studebaker shiny and new,
or old and battered? Perhaps the printout is not specific on this point;
in any case, as we see, our authorities diverge. 

   Joe Hyams's 1991 romance of Bush at war, the {Flight of the
Avenger,}@s5 does not include the obligatory ``red Studebaker''
reference, but this is more than compensated for by the most elaborate
fawning over other details of our hero's war service. The publication of
{Flight of the Avenger,} which concentrates on an heroic retelling of
Bush's war record, and ignores all evidence that might tend to puncture
this myth, was timed to coincide with Bush's war with Iraq. This is a vile
tract written with the open assistance of Bush, Barbara Bush, and the White
House staff. {Flight of the Avenger} recalls the practice of
totalitarian states according to which a war waged by the regime should be
accompanied by propaganda which depicts the regime's strong man in a martial
posture. In any case, this book deals with Bush's life up to the end of World
War II; we never reach Odessa. Only one of the full-length
accounts produced by the Bush propaganda machine neglects the red
Studebaker story. This is Nicholas King's {George Bush: A
Biography,} the first book-length version of Bush's life, produced as a
result of Pete Roussel's efforts for the 1980 campaign. Nicholas King had
served as Bush's spokesman when he was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
King admits in his preface that he can be impugned for writing a work of the
most transparent apologetics: ``In retrospect,'' he says , ``this book may
seem open to the charge of puffery, for the view of its subject is favorable
all around.''@s6 Indeed. Books about Barbara Bush slavishly
rehearse the same details from the same printout. Here is the relevant excerpt
from the warmly admiring {Simply Barbara Bush: A Portrait of America's
Candid First Lady,} written by Donnie Radcliffe and published after
Bush's 1988 election victory: ``With $3,000 left over after he graduated in
June, 1948, he headed for Texas in the 1947 red Studebaker his father had
given him for graduation after George's car died on the highway.''@s7 

   Even foreign journalists attempting to inform their publics
about conditions in the United States have fallen victim to the same old Bush
printout. The German author and reporter Rainer Bonhorst, the former
Washington correspondent of the {Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,} in his 
1988 book {George Bush: The New Man in the White House,} named a chapter of 
this Bush political biography ``To Texas in the Red Studebaker.'' Bonhorst 
writes as follows: ``Then there was still the matter of the red Studebaker.  
It plays--right after the world war effort--a central role in the life history 
of George Bush. 

   It is the history of his rebellion. The step which made a careless Texan 
out of a stiff New Englander, a self-made man out of a patrician's son, born 
into wealth.... Thus, George and Barbara Bush, 24 and 23 years old, he having
just finished with his studies, she having prematurely withdrawn from her
university and become a mother a few months earlier, packed their baby and
their suitcases and loaded them into their glaring red Studebaker coupe. 

   ``|`A supermodern, smart car, certainly somewhat loud for the New
England taste,' the Bushes later recalled. But finally it departed
towards Texas.''@s8 We see that Bonhorst is acutely aware of the symbolic 
importance assumed by the red Studebaker in these hagiographic accounts of 
Bush's life. What is finally the truth of the matter? There is good reason 
to believe that George Bush did not first come to Odessa, Texas, in a red 
Studebaker. One knowledgeable source is the well-known Texas oil man and 
Bush campaign contributor Oscar Wyatt of Houston. In a recent letter to  
the {Texas Monthly,} Wyatt specifies that ``when people speak of Mr. Bush's
humble beginnings in the oil industry, it should be noted that he rode down to
Texas on Dresser's private aircraft. He was accompanied by his father, who at
that time was one of the directors of Dresser Industries.... I hate it when
people make statements about Mr. Bush's humble beginnings in the oil industry.
It just didn't happen that way,'' writes Mr. Wyatt.@s9 Dresser was a
Harriman company, and Bush got his start working for one of its
subsidiaries. One history of Dresser Industries contains a photograph of
George Bush with his parents, wife, and infant son ``in front of a Dresser
company airplane in West Texas.''@s1@s0 Can this be a photo of Bush's arrival
in Odessa during the summer of 1948? In any case, this most cherished myth of
the Bush biographers is very much open to doubt. 

The Roman Propaganda Machine
 
   Fawning biographies of bloodthirsty tyrants are nothing new in
world literature. The red Studebaker school goes back a long way; these
writers of today can be usefully compared with a certain Gaius Velleius
Paterculus, who lived in the Roman Empire under the emperors Augustus and
Tiberius, and who was thus an approximate contemporary of Jesus
Christ. Velleius Paterculus was an historian and biographer who is known
today, if at all, for his biographical notes on the Emperor Tiberius, which
are contained within Paterculus's history of Rome. 

   Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, gave a very favorable
treatment of Julius Caesar, and became fulsome when he came to write of
Augustus. But the worst excesses of flattery came in Velleius Paterculus's
treatment of Tiberius himself. Here is part of what he writes about that
tyrannical ruler: ``Of the transactions of the last
sixteen years, which have passed in the view, and are fresh in the memory of
all, who shall presume to give a full account? ... credit has been restored
to mercantile affairs, sedition has been banished from the forum,
corruption from the Campus Martius, and discord from the senate-house; justice,
equity and industry, which had long lain buried in neglect, have been
revived in the state; authority has been given to the magistrates, majesty
to the senate, and solemnity to the courts of justice; the bloody riots in
the theatre have been suppressed, and all men have had either a desire
excited in them, or a necessity imposed on them, of acting with integrity.
Virtuous acts are honored, wicked deeds are punished. The humble respects the
powerful, without dreading him; the powerful takes precedence of the humble
without condemning him. When were provisions more moderate in price? When
were the blessings of peace more abundant? Augustan peace, diffused over
all the regions of the east and the west, and all that lies between the
south and the north, preserves every corner of the world free from all dread
of predatory molestation. Fortuitous losses, not only of individuals, but of
cities, the munificence of the prince is ready to relieve. The cities of Asia
have been repaired; the provinces have been secured from the oppression of
their governors. Honor promptly rewards the deserving, and the punishment of
the guilty, if slow, is certain.  Interest gives place to justice,
solicitation to merit. For the best of princes teaches his countrymen to act
rightly by his own practice; and while he is the greatest in power, he is
still greater in example. ``Having exhibited a general view
of the administration of Tiberius Caesar, let us now enumerate a few
particulars respecting it.... How formidable a war, excited by the Gallic
chief Sacrovir and Julius Florius, did he suppress, and with such amazing
expedition and energy, that the Roman people learned that they were
conquerors, before they knew that they were at war, and the news of the
victory outstripped the news of the danger! The African war too, perilous
as it was, and daily increasing in strength, was quickly terminated under
his auspices and direction....''@s1@s1 All of this was written in praise
of the regime that crucified Jesus Christ, and one of the worst genocidal
tyrannies in the history of the world.  Paterculus, we must sadly conclude, was
a sycophant of the Tiberius administration. Some of his themes are
close parallels to the propaganda of today's Bush machine. 

   In addition to feeding the personality cult of Tiberius,
Paterculus also lavished praise on Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the Prefect of
the Praetorian Guard and for many years Tiberius's number one favorite, second
in command, and likely successor. In many respects Sejanus was not unlike
James Baker III under the Bush regime.  While Tiberius spent all of his time in
seclusion on his island of Capri near Naples, Sejanus assumed day to day
control of the vast empire and its 100 million subjects. Paterculus wrote
of Sejanus that he was ``a most excellent coadjutor in all the toils of
government ... a man of pleasing gravity, and of unaffected cheerfulness ...
assuming nothing to himself.'' That was the voice of the red Studebaker school
in about 30 A.D. Paterculus should have limited his fawning to Tiberius
himself; somewhat later, the emperor, suspecting a coup plot, condemned
Sejanus and had him torn limb from limb in gruesome retribution. 

   But why bring up Rome? Some readers may be scandalized by the
things that truth obliges us to record about a sitting president of the United
States. Are we not disrespectful to this high office? No. One of the
reasons for glancing back at Imperial Rome is to remind ourselves that in
times of moral and cultural degradation like our own, rulers of great evil have
inflicted incalculable suffering on humanity. In our modern time of war and
depression, this is once again the case. If Caligula was possible then,
who could claim that the America of the New World Order should be exempt? Let
us therefore tarry for a moment with these old Romans, because they can show
us much about ourselves. In order to find Roman writers who
tell us anything reliable about the first dozen emperors, we must wait
until the infamous Julio-Claudian dynasty of Julius Caesar, Augustus,
Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and the rest had entirely passed from the
scene, to be supplanted by new ruling houses. Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37
A.D.; Caligula, his designated successor, from 37 to 41 A.D.; and Nero
from 54 to 68 A.D. But the first accurate account of the crimes of some
of these emperors comes from Publius Cornelius Tacitus in about 115-17
A.D., late in the reign of the emperor Trajan. It was feasible for Tacitus to
write and publish a more realistic account of the Julio-Claudian emperors
because one of the constant themes of Trajan's propaganda was to glorify
himself as an enlightened emperor through comparison with the earlier
series of bloody tyrants. Tacitus manages to convey how the
destructiveness of these emperors in their personal lives correlated with
their mass executions and their genocidal economic policies. Tacitus
was familiar with the machinery of Roman Imperial power: he was of
senatorial rank, served as consul in Italy in 97 A.D., and was the governor
of the important province of western Anatolia (today's Turkey) which the
Romans referred to simply as Asia.  Tacitus writes of Tiberius: ``... his
criminal lusts shamed him. Their uncontrollable activity was worthy of
an oriental tyrant. Free-born children were his victims. He was fascinated by
beauty, youthful innocence, and aristocratic birth. New names for types
of perversions were invented. Slaves were charged to locate and procure his
requirements.... It was like the sack of a captured city.'' 

   Tiberius was able to dominate the legislative branch of his government,
the senate, by subversion and terror: ``It was, indeed, a horrible feature of
this period that leading senators became informers even on trivial
matters--some openly, many secretly.  Friends and relatives were as suspect
as strangers, old stories as damaging as new. In the Main Square, at a
dinner-party, a remark on any subject might mean prosecution. Everyone
competed for priority in marking down the victim. Sometimes this was
self-defense, but mostly it was a sort of contagion, like an epidemic.... I
realize that many writers omit numerous trials and condemnations, bored by
repetition or afraid that catalogues they themselves have found over-long
and dismal may equally depress their readers. But numerous unrecorded
incidents, which have come to my attention, ought to be known. 

   ``... Even women were in danger.  They could not be charged with aiming
at supreme power. So they were charged with weeping: one old lady was executed
for lamenting her son's death. The senate decided this case.... In the
same year the high price of corn nearly caused riots.... 

   ``Frenzied with bloodshed, (Tiberius) now ordered the execution of
all those arrested for complicity with Sejanus. It was a massacre. Without
discrimination of sex or age, eminence or obscurity, there they lay, strewn
about--or in heaps. Relatives and friends were forbidden to stand by or
lament them, or even gaze for long.  Guards surrounded them, spying on their
sorrow, and escorted the rotting bodies until, dragged to the Tiber, they
floated away or grounded--with none to cremate or touch them. Terror had
paralyzed human sympathy. The rising surge of brutality drove compassion
away.''@s1@s2 This is the same Tiberius administration so extravagantly 
praised by Velleius Paterculus. 

   Because of lacunae in the manuscripts of Tacitus's work that have
come down to us, much of what we know of the rule of Caligula (Gaius Caesar,
in power from 37 to 41 A.D.) derives from {The Lives of the Twelve
Caesars,} a book by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus. The character and
administration of Caligula present some striking parallels with the subject of
the present book. As a stoic, Caligula was a great
admirer of his own ``immovable rigor.'' His motto was ``Remember that I have
the right to do anything to anybody.'' He made no secret of his bloodthirsty
vindictiveness. Caligula was a fan of the green team in the Roman arena, and
when the crowd applauded a charioteer who wore a different color, Caligula
cried out, ``I wish the Roman people had but a single neck.'' At one of his
state dinners Caligula burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, and when a
consul asked him what was so funny, he replied that it was the thought that as
emperor Caligula had the power to have the throats of the top officials cut at
any time he chose. Caligula carried this same attitude into his personal
life: whenever he kissed or caressed the neck of his wife or one of his
mistresses, he liked to remark: ``Off comes this beautiful head whenever I
give the word.'' Above all, Caligula was vindictive. After his death, two 
notebooks were found among his personal papers, one labelled ``The Sword'' 
and the other labelled ``The Dagger.'' These were lists of the persons he 
had proscribed and liquidated, and were the forerunners of the enemies lists 
and discrediting committee of today.  Suetonius frankly calls Caligula ``a
monster,'' and speculates on the pyschological roots of his criminal
disposition: ``I think I may attribute to mental weakness the existence of two
exactly opposite faults in the same person, extreme assurance and, on the
other hand, excessive timorousness.'' Caligula was ``full of threats''
against ``the barbarians,'' but at the same time prone to precipitous retreats
and flights of panic. Caligula worked on his ``body language'' by
``practicing all kinds of terrible and fearsome expressions before a mirror.'' 

   Caligula built an extension of his palace to connect with the Temple of
Castor and Pollux, and often went there to exhibit himself as an object of
public worship, delighting in being hailed as ``Jupiter Latiaris'' by the
populace. Later Caligula would officially open temples in his own
name. Caligula was brutal in his intimidation of the senate, whose
members he subjected to open humiliations and covert attacks; many
senators were ``secretly put to death.'' ``He often inveighed against
all the Senators alike.... He treated the other orders with like insolence
and cruelty.'' Suetonius recites whole catalogues of ``special instances of
his innate brutality'' toward persons of all walks of life. He enjoyed
inflicting torture, and revelled in liquidating political opponents or
those who had insulted or snubbed him in some way. He had a taste for capital
executions as the perfect backdrop for parties and banquets. Caligula also did
everything he could to denigrate the memory of the great men of past epochs,
so that their fame could not eclipse his own: ``He assailed mankind of
almost every epoch with no less envy and malice than insolence and cruelty.
He threw down the statues of famous men'' and tried to destroy all the
texts of Homer. Caligula ``respected neither his
own chastity nor that of any one else.'' He was reckless in his
extravagance, and soon emptied out the imperial treasury of all the funds that
old Tiberius had squirreled away there.  After that, Caligula tried to replenish
his coffers through a system of spies, false accusations, property seizures,
and public auctions. He also ``levied new and unheard-of taxes,'' to the
point that ``no class of commodities was exempt from some kind of tax or
other.'' Caligula taxed all foodstuffs, took a fortieth of the award in any
lawsuit, an eighth of the daily wages of the porters, and demanded that the
prostitutes pay him a daily fee equal to the average price charged to each
individual customer. (It is rumored that this part of Caligula's career is under
study by those planning George Bush's second term.) Caligula also opened a
brothel in his palace as an additional source of income, which may prefigure
today's White House staff. Among Caligula's more singular hobbies
Suetonius includes his love of rolling and wallowing in piles of gold coins. 

   Caligula kept his wife, Caesonia (described by Suetonius as ``neither
beautiful nor young'') with him until the very end. But his greatest devotion
was to his horse, whom he made consul of the Roman state. Ultimately Caligula
fell victim to a conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard, led by the tribune
Gaius Chaerea, a man whom Caligula had taken special delight in
humiliating.@s1@s3 The authors of the present study are convinced that 
these references to the depravity of the Roman emperors, and to the records 
of that depravity provided by such authors as Tacitus and Suetonius, are 
directly germane to our present task of following the career of
a member of the senatorial class of the Anglo-American elite through the
various stages of his formation and ultimate ascent to imperial power. The
Roman Imperial model is germane because the American ruling elite of today is
far closer to the world of Tiberius and Caligula than it is to the world of the
American Revolution or the Constitutional Convention of 1789. The
leitmotif of modern American presidential politics is unquestionably
an imperial theme, most blatantly expressed by Bush in his slogan for
1990, ``The New World Order,'' and for 1991, the ``pax universalis.'' The
central project of the Bush presidency is the creation and consolidation of a
single, universal Anglo-American (or Anglo-Saxon) empire very directly
modelled on the various phases of the Roman Empire. 

The Olympian Delusion
 
   There is one other aspect of the biographical-historical method of the
Graeco-Roman world which we have sought to borrow. Ever since Thucydides
composed his monumental work on the Peloponnesian War, those who have
sought to imitate his style--with the Roman historian Titus Livius prominent
among them--have employed the device of attributing long speeches to historical
personages, even when it appears very unlikely that such lengthy orations
could have been made by the protagonists at the time. This has
nothing to do with the synthetic dialogue of current American political
writing, which attempts to present historical events as a series of
trivial and banal soap-opera exchanges, which carry on for such interminable
lengths as to suggest that the authors are getting paid by the word. Our idea
of fidelity to the classical style has simply been to let George Bush speak
for himself wherever possible, through direct quotation. We are convinced that
by letting Bush express himself directly in this way, we afford the
reader a more faithful--and damning--account of Bush's actions. 

   George Bush might agree that ``history is biography,'' although we
suspect that he would not agree with any of our other conclusions. There may
be a few peculiarities of the present work as biography that are worthy of
explanation at the outset. One of our basic theses is that
George Bush is, and considers himself to be, an oligarch. The notion of
oligarchy includes first of all the idea of a patrician and wealthy family
capable of introducing its offspring into such elite institutions as
Andover, Yale, and Skull and Bones.  Oligarchy also subsumes the
self-conception of the oligarch as belonging to a special, exalted breed
of mankind, one that is superior to the common run of mankind as a matter of
hereditary genetic superiority. This mentality generally goes together with
a fascination for eugenics, race science and just plain racism as a
means of building a case that one's own family tree and racial stock are indeed
superior. These notions of ``breeding'' are a constant in the history of the
titled feudal aristocracy of Europe, especially Britain, towards inclusion
in which an individual like Bush must necessarily strive. At the very least,
oligarchs like Bush see themselves as demigods occupying a middle ground
between the immortals above and the {hoi polloi} below. The
culmination of this insane delusion, which Bush has demonstrably long since
attained, is the obsessive belief that the principal families of the
Anglo-American elite, assembled in their freemasonic orders, by themselves
directly constitute an Olympian Pantheon of living deities who have the
capability of abrogating and disregarding the laws of the universe
according to their own irrational caprice. If we do not take into account
this element of fatal and megalomaniac hubris, the lunatic Anglo-American
policies in regard to the Gulf War, international finance, or the AIDS
epidemic must defy all comprehension. Part of the ethos of oligarchism
as practiced by George Bush is the emphasis on one's own family pedigree.
This accounts for the attention we dedicate in the opening chapters of
this book to Bush's family tree, reaching back to the nineteenth century
and beyond. It is impossible to gain insight into Bush's mentality unless we
realize that it is important for him to be considered a cousin, however
distant, of Queen Elizabeth II of the House of Mountbatten-Windsor and for
his wife Barbara to be viewed in some sense a descendant of President
Franklin Pierce. 
   
The Family Firm
 
   For related reasons, it is our special duty to illustrate the role
played in the formation of George Bush as a personality by his maternal
grandfather and uncle, George Herbert Walker and George Herbert Walker, Jr.,
and by George H.W. Bush's father, the late Senator Prescott Bush. In the
course of this task, we must speak at length about the institution to which
George Bush owes the most, the Wall Street international investment bank of
Brown Brothers Harriman, the political and financial powerhouse mentioned
above. For George Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman was and remains the family
firm in the deepest sense. The formidable power of this bank and its
ubiquitous network, wielded by Senator Prescott Bush up through the time of
his death in 1972, and still active on George's behalf down to the present
day, is the single most important key to every step of George's business,
covert operations, and political career. 

   In the case of George Bush, as many who have known him personally have
noted, the network looms much larger than George's own character and will.
The reader will search in vain for strong principled commitments in George
Bush's personality; the most that will be found is a series of characteristic
obsessions, of which the most durable are race, vanity, personal ambition,
and settling scores with adversaries.  What emerges by contrast is the
decisive importance of Bush's network of connections. His response to the
Gulf crisis of 1991 will be largely predetermined, not by any great flashes
of geopolitical insight, but rather by his connections to the British
oligarchy, to Kissinger, to Israeli and Zionist circles, to Texas oilmen in his
fundraising base, to the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal houses. If the
question is one of finance, then the opinions of J. Hugh Liedtke, Henry
Kravis, Robert Mosbacher, T. Boone Pickens, Nicholas Brady, James Baker
III and the City of London will be decisive. If covert operations and
dirty tricks are on the agenda, then there is a whole stable of CIA old boys
with whom he will consult, and so on down the line. During much of 1989,
despite his control over the presidency, Bush appeared as a weak and
passive executive, waiting for his networks to show him what it was he was
supposed to do. When German reunification and the crumbling of the
Soviet empire spurred those--primarily British--networks into action, Bush was
suddenly capable of violent and daring adventures. As his battle for a second
term approaches, Bush may be showing increasing signs of a rage-driven
self-starter capability, especially when it comes to starting new wars
designed to secure his re-election. 
   
The United States in Decline
 
   Biography has its own inherent discipline: It must be concerned with
the life of its protagonist, and cannot stray too far away. In no way has it
been our intention to offer an account of American history during the lifetime
of George Bush. The present study nevertheless reflects many aspects of
that recent history of U.S. decline. It will be noted that Bush has succeeded
in proportion as the country has failed, and that Bush's advancement has
proceeded {pari passu} with the degradation of the national stage upon
which he has operated and which he has come to dominate. At various phases in
his career, Bush has come into conflict with persons who were intellectually
and morally superior to him. One such was Senator Ralph Yarborough, and
another was Senator Frank Church. Our study will be found to catalogue the
constant decline in the qualities of Bush's adversaries as human types until
the 1980s, by which time his opponents, as in the case of Al Haig, are no
better than Bush himself. The exception to this trend is
Bush's long-standing personal vendetta against Lyndon LaRouche, his most
consistent and capable adversary.  LaRouche was jailed seven days after
Bush's inauguration in the most infamous political frameup of recent
U.S. history. As our study will document, at critical moments in Bush's
career, LaRouche's political interventions have frustrated some of
Bush's best-laid political plans: A very clear example is LaRouche's role
in defeating Bush's 1980 presidential bid in the New Hampshire primary. Over
the intervening years, LaRouche has become George Bush's ``man in the iron
mask,'' the principled political adversary whom Bush seeks to jail and
silence at all costs. The restoration of justice in this country must include
the freeing of Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche's political associates, and
all the other political prisoners of the Bush regime. 

   As for the political relevance of our project, we think that it is very
real. During the Gulf crisis, it would have been important for the public to
know more about Bush's business dealings with the Royal Family of
Kuwait. During the 1992 presidential campaign, as Wall Street's recent crop
of junk-bond assisted leveraged buyouts line up at the entrance to bankruptcy
court, and state workers all across the United States are informed that the
retirement pensions they had been promised will never be paid, the
relations between George Bush and Henry Kravis will surely constitute an
explosive political issue. Similarly, once Bush's British and Kissingerian
pedigree is recognized, the methods he is likely to pursue in regard to
situations such as the planned Romanian-style overthrow of the Castro
regime in Cuba, or the provocation of a splendid little nuclear war involving
North Korea, or of a new Indo-Pakistani war, will hardly be mysterious. 

   The authors have been at some pains to make this work intelligible to
readers around the world. We offer this book to those who share our aversion to
the imperialist-colonialist New World Order, and our profound horror at the
concept of a return to a single, worldwide Roman Empire as suggested by
Bush's ``pax universalis'' slogan. This work is tangible evidence that there is
an opposition to Bush inside the United States, and that the new Caligula is
very vulnerable indeed on the level of the exposure of his own misdeeds. 

   It will be argued that this book should have been published before the
1988 election, when a Bush presidency might have been avoided. That is
certainly true, but it is an objection which should also be directed to many
institutions and agencies whose resources far surpass our modest
capabilities. We can only remind our fellow citizens that when he asks for
their votes for his re-election, George Bush also enters that court of public
opinion in which he is obliged to answer their questions. They should not
waste this opportunity to grill him on all aspects of his career and future
intentions, since it is Bush who comes forward appealing for their support. To
aid in this process, we have provided a list of Twenty Questions for Candidate
George Bush on the campaign trail, and this will be found in the appendix. 

   We do not delude ourselves that we have said the last word about George
Bush. But we have for the first time sketched out at least some of the most
salient features and gathered them into a comprehensible whole. We encourage an
aroused citizenry, as well as specialized researchers, to improve
upon what we have been able to accomplish. In so doing, we recall the
words of the Florentine Giovanni Boccaccio when he reluctantly accepted
the order of a powerful king to produce an account of the old Roman Pantheon:
``If I don't succeed completely in this exposition, at least I will provide a
stimulus for the better work of others who are wiser.''--Boccaccio,
{Genealogy of the National Gods} 
   {To be continued.}

   Notes
 

 1. George Bush and Vic Gold, {Looking Forward,} (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 
p. 47. 
 

2.  Fitzhugh Green, {Looking Forward,} (New York: Hippocrene, 1989), p. 53. 
 

3. Harry Hurt III, ``George Bush, Plucky Lad,'' {Texas Monthly,} June, 1983, 
p. 142. 
 

4. Richard Ben Cramer, ``How He Got Here,'' {Esquire,} June, 1991, p. 84.
 

5. Joe Hyams, {Flight of the Avenger} (New York, 1991).
 

6.  Nicholas King, {George Bush: A Biography} (New York, Dodd, Mead, 1980), 
p. xi. 
 

7. Donnie Radcliffe, {Simply Barbara Bush,} (New York: Warner, 1989), p. 103. 
 

8. Rainer Bonhorst, {George Bush, Der Neue Mann im Weissen Haus,} 
(Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Luebbe Verlag, 1988), pp. 80-81. 
 

9. See ``The Roar of the Crowd,'' {Texas Monthly,} November, 1991. See also 
Jan Jarboe, ``Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog,'' {Texas Monthly,} April 1991, p. 122
ff.  Here Wyatt observes: ``I knew from the beginning George Bush came to Texas
only because he was politically ambitious. He flew out here on an airplane 
owned by Dresser Industries.  His daddy was a member of the board of Dresser.'' 
 

10. Darwin Payne, {Initiative in Energy} (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1979), 
p. 233.
 

11. John Selby Watson (translator), {Sallust, Florus, and Velleius Paterculus} 
(London: George Bell and Son, 1879), pp. 542-46. 
 

12. Cornelius Tacitus, {The Annals of Imperial Rome} (Penguin, 1962), pp. 
193-221.
 

13. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, {The Lives of the Twelve Caesars} 
(New York: Modern Library, 1931), pp. 165-204, { passim.     






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