Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America
by Russ Baker
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Description
The long-hidden story of a family we thought we knew--and of a power-making apparatus that we have barely begun to comprehend. George W. Bush left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. Russ Baker asks the question that lingers even as this benighted administration winds down: Who really wanted this man at the helm, and why did his backers promote him despite his obvious liabilities and limitations? This book goes deep behind the scenes to deliver an arresting show more new look at George W. Bush, his father George H. W. Bush, their family, and the network of figures in intelligence, the military, finance, and oil who enabled the family's rise to power. Baker offers new insights into lingering mysteries, from the death of John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon's downfall in Watergate, and helps us understand why we have not known these things before.--From publisher description. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
This book kept me busy for many weeks, often taking it to lunch to share information with a liberal friend. Family of Secrets was received with great hostility by some reviewers who tried to undercut Baker's theories and conclusions by saying they were all conspiracy related. Well, the point of this book is that Bush Senior was a spook and had a role in American intelligence, especially the CIA, for decades, and many readers probably recognize that the CIA was created to protect the overseas investments of Eastern establishment families like the Bushes. I did not necessarily find his speculations about the JFK assassination compelling, but it is interesting to note, as one published review posted here reveals, that the Los Angeles Times show more reviewer who trashed the book has said that acceptance of the single-gunman theory (promoted by the FBI and the CIA) is a positive index of mental health. So obviously we should apologize and seek help if we think otherwise. For me the most compelling material was Baker's documentation of Bush Junior's early drug-and-alcohol-related escapades and as much as can be known about W.'s lengthy, unauthorized absence from the Texas Air National Guard and the desperate attempts to suppress reporting on it while he was running for re-election as president in 2004. show less
In this book, Russ Baker, an investigative journalist, reexamines the history of the Bush family in the context of the seminal events of the last 50 years: The Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassinations, Watergate, the Bush family connections with the Saudis, oil and gas intrigues, cronyism, the Iraq war, and Katrina. Baker's investigation has uncovered a myriad of new facts and documents, many of which raise questions about the conclusions previously reached during official examinations of these events.
While Baker posits plausible alternative theories in light of some of the new facts he has unearthed, most of the questions he raises are unresolved. In his afterword, Baker states that his investigation is a work in progress and is still show more on-going.
However, Baker states, his investigation has given him a 'new understanding' of how power works in America. His conclusions:
-Presidents have a lot less power and independence than he had assumed. Party affiliation is not a major factor in this regard.
-Initiating reforms or standing up to powerful interests can invite retribution of a kind he had not imagined. Presidents are subject not only to pressure, but also to entrapment, blackmail or worse.
-Constant recourse to the 'lone wolf' theory to explain assassinations and comparable national traumas is empirically challenged.
Baker recognizes that there will probably be efforts made to marginalize some of the facts and inferences he makes in this book. He states, 'Time and again, there has been a rush to bury inquiries into the most perplexing events of our time, along with a determination to subject dissenting views to ridicule. And the media weren't just enabling these efforts; they were complicit in them--not least by labeling anyone who dared to subject conventional views to a fresh and quizzical eye as a 'conspiracy theorist'.'
This is an important book to read if you are concerned about the current state of the United States of America. show less
While Baker posits plausible alternative theories in light of some of the new facts he has unearthed, most of the questions he raises are unresolved. In his afterword, Baker states that his investigation is a work in progress and is still show more on-going.
However, Baker states, his investigation has given him a 'new understanding' of how power works in America. His conclusions:
-Presidents have a lot less power and independence than he had assumed. Party affiliation is not a major factor in this regard.
-Initiating reforms or standing up to powerful interests can invite retribution of a kind he had not imagined. Presidents are subject not only to pressure, but also to entrapment, blackmail or worse.
-Constant recourse to the 'lone wolf' theory to explain assassinations and comparable national traumas is empirically challenged.
Baker recognizes that there will probably be efforts made to marginalize some of the facts and inferences he makes in this book. He states, 'Time and again, there has been a rush to bury inquiries into the most perplexing events of our time, along with a determination to subject dissenting views to ridicule. And the media weren't just enabling these efforts; they were complicit in them--not least by labeling anyone who dared to subject conventional views to a fresh and quizzical eye as a 'conspiracy theorist'.'
This is an important book to read if you are concerned about the current state of the United States of America. show less
A lot of interesting material but I feel like this could have been better edited. Keeps bringing up the same points over and over and a lot of seeming unrelated material is included as well.
--Picked this up today at Riverby Books on Capitol Hill. Used, perfect edition. Looking forward to it, having been reading Baker's site: http://whowhatwhy.com/.
--Very confusing beginning. WWII, 1950s and 60s, with H.W. Bush, Prescott, and G.W. bouncing around all over.
-- Still reading, taking breaks with other books. Still bouncing all over the place, but boy is this fundamentally fascinating. Now, just finished three chapters on NIXON! Turns out big connection with the Bushs.
--Very confusing beginning. WWII, 1950s and 60s, with H.W. Bush, Prescott, and G.W. bouncing around all over.
-- Still reading, taking breaks with other books. Still bouncing all over the place, but boy is this fundamentally fascinating. Now, just finished three chapters on NIXON! Turns out big connection with the Bushs.
A lot of interesting material but I feel like this could have been better edited. Keeps bringing up the same points over and over and a lot of seeming unrelated material is included as well.
This is a scarry book. Facts in here that will open many eyes - facts around the JFK assassination and more and more. One Very powerful family that I would trust as far as I can throw my car.
Ratings
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Published Reviews
ThingScore 67
How do you go about writing a book about one of the most powerful dynasties on earth?
That’s the challenge special guest Russ Baker faced when he first considered writing about the Bush family; a tribe that encompasses two U.S. Senators, one Supreme Court Justice, two Governors, two Presidents and innumerable bankers and businessmen.
The book took five years to write and is a meticulous piece show more of research (there are over a thousand footnotes). According to the late Gore Vidal, Family of Secrets is “one of the most important books of the past ten years”. Dan Rather – who you can hear right here on Radio Litopia’s Debriefer show – called it “a tour de force. ” “It’s made me rethink”, he says, “even those events I witnessed with my own eyes”. show less
That’s the challenge special guest Russ Baker faced when he first considered writing about the Bush family; a tribe that encompasses two U.S. Senators, one Supreme Court Justice, two Governors, two Presidents and innumerable bankers and businessmen.
The book took five years to write and is a meticulous piece show more of research (there are over a thousand footnotes). According to the late Gore Vidal, Family of Secrets is “one of the most important books of the past ten years”. Dan Rather – who you can hear right here on Radio Litopia’s Debriefer show – called it “a tour de force. ” “It’s made me rethink”, he says, “even those events I witnessed with my own eyes”. show less
added by davidgn
"A Brief History Of Media Cover-Ups & Self-Censorship: Who’s Afraid of Russ Baker’s Family Of Secrets"
....
Into this vortex of institutional skepticism and editorial consensus steps Russ Baker, an investigative journalist who has been published in just about every heavyweight publication, including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. His contribution to the JFK controversy show more is a 500-page, a massively footnoted history of the rise of the Bush family, titled Family of Secrets. Not only does Baker challenge the conventional wisdom that Oswald “acted alone,” he argues forcefully that the JFK assassination was a successful coup pulled off by a “globally reaching, fundamentally amoral, financial-intelligence-resource apparatus.”
....
While Baker admits that all of these facts could amount to nothing more than an incredible series of coincidences, at the very least his portrayal of the elite’s powerful and coordinated behind-the-scenes machinations to consolidate power — which reached critical mass at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, and culminated in George W. Bush’s stolen election in 2000 — reminded me of the Roman Republic’s transition to empire as described in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed, Baker’s W. seems eerily reminiscent of Gibbon’s Augustus, who “at the age of nineteen [assumed] the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside.” Augustus, Gibbon adds, “was sensible that mankind…would submit to slavery, provided they were assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedoms.”
....
After several attempts to penetrate the sheer volume of its reporting, Family of Secrets hooked me in. Baker pulls no punches in exploding the myth that the CIA performs covert operations only on foreign soil. In chapter after chapter he offers a glimpse of how power is really exercised in this country—and has been since the 1950s, when the seeds of a covert-police state were laid. While I’m not willing to swallow every connection Baker makes, there are hundreds and hundreds of well-documented and carefully footnoted facts that deserve a fair hearing. So far, they have received nothing of the sort.
....
[T]he sleaziest attempts to undercut Baker’s book came from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post—the papers notorious for their campaign to discredit and destroy Pulitzer Prize journalist Gary Webb–the heroic San Jose Mercury reporter who exposed the CIA’s connection to the ghetto crack epidemic in 1996. Their campaign worked—Webb was eventually demoted and finally committed suicide. With Baker’s book, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post went back to work discrediting their colleagues who dare to get out of line. Tim Rutten, a bearded LA Times metro-desk tool, filed his handiwork on January 7, 2009. After framing his attack by quoting long passages of Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Rutten goes after Baker with bizarre language that reads like some fanatical Bolshevik. He decries the very existence of Family of Secrets as a “reprehensible calumny” and denounces Baker’s reliance on “mind-numbing accretion of names, dates and places”– in other words, too many facts. That any American would even question the findings of the Warren Commission makes Rutten sputter with rage: “I regard the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as an important indicium of mental health,” he writes. Two months earlier, Rutten had been the proud recipient of the Anti-Defamation League’s Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. The last time I looked, the First Amendment was about encouraging freedom of speech, not vilifying the bearer of unpopular opinions
“Rutten actually did me a favor.” Baker says, a rare smile passing over his face. “It was so over the top that people in LA started to pay attention.”
.... show less
....
Into this vortex of institutional skepticism and editorial consensus steps Russ Baker, an investigative journalist who has been published in just about every heavyweight publication, including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. His contribution to the JFK controversy show more is a 500-page, a massively footnoted history of the rise of the Bush family, titled Family of Secrets. Not only does Baker challenge the conventional wisdom that Oswald “acted alone,” he argues forcefully that the JFK assassination was a successful coup pulled off by a “globally reaching, fundamentally amoral, financial-intelligence-resource apparatus.”
....
While Baker admits that all of these facts could amount to nothing more than an incredible series of coincidences, at the very least his portrayal of the elite’s powerful and coordinated behind-the-scenes machinations to consolidate power — which reached critical mass at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, and culminated in George W. Bush’s stolen election in 2000 — reminded me of the Roman Republic’s transition to empire as described in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed, Baker’s W. seems eerily reminiscent of Gibbon’s Augustus, who “at the age of nineteen [assumed] the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside.” Augustus, Gibbon adds, “was sensible that mankind…would submit to slavery, provided they were assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedoms.”
....
After several attempts to penetrate the sheer volume of its reporting, Family of Secrets hooked me in. Baker pulls no punches in exploding the myth that the CIA performs covert operations only on foreign soil. In chapter after chapter he offers a glimpse of how power is really exercised in this country—and has been since the 1950s, when the seeds of a covert-police state were laid. While I’m not willing to swallow every connection Baker makes, there are hundreds and hundreds of well-documented and carefully footnoted facts that deserve a fair hearing. So far, they have received nothing of the sort.
....
[T]he sleaziest attempts to undercut Baker’s book came from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post—the papers notorious for their campaign to discredit and destroy Pulitzer Prize journalist Gary Webb–the heroic San Jose Mercury reporter who exposed the CIA’s connection to the ghetto crack epidemic in 1996. Their campaign worked—Webb was eventually demoted and finally committed suicide. With Baker’s book, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post went back to work discrediting their colleagues who dare to get out of line. Tim Rutten, a bearded LA Times metro-desk tool, filed his handiwork on January 7, 2009. After framing his attack by quoting long passages of Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Rutten goes after Baker with bizarre language that reads like some fanatical Bolshevik. He decries the very existence of Family of Secrets as a “reprehensible calumny” and denounces Baker’s reliance on “mind-numbing accretion of names, dates and places”– in other words, too many facts. That any American would even question the findings of the Warren Commission makes Rutten sputter with rage: “I regard the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as an important indicium of mental health,” he writes. Two months earlier, Rutten had been the proud recipient of the Anti-Defamation League’s Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. The last time I looked, the First Amendment was about encouraging freedom of speech, not vilifying the bearer of unpopular opinions
“Rutten actually did me a favor.” Baker says, a rare smile passing over his face. “It was so over the top that people in LA started to pay attention.”
.... show less
added by davidgn
Author Russ Baker shows, among other things, that Poppy Bush’s well-known service as a Navy pilot in World War II was also part of his work for Naval Intelligence. This set the stage for an astonishing double life participating in covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency throughout his career. .... Baker’s discussion of how a prominent political family applied the tools of the show more spy trade to their religious transformation and political strategy is a story that merits attention as religious faith becomes an increasingly popular political commodity.
This dimension of the story of the Bush family dynasty emerges in the wake of the growth of the religious right political movement within the GOP in the early ’80s. In this context, what was a starchy, Episcopalian heir to a blue-blooded Yankee political pedigree to do? And what of his reckless, apparently non-religious, playboy son? ....
Baker’s chapter titled “The Conversion” features startling revelations that challenge the well-known narratives of the Bush family’s religious history— including the way they crafted a strategy for winning over the religious right, and the creation of a conversion legend for George W. Bush. The purpose of the latter was not only to position him as a religious and political man of his time, but to neutralize the many issues from his past that threatened to undermine his future in politics (and possibly that of his father as well). The plan probably worked far better than anyone could have hoped. “I’m still amazed,” Doug Wead, a key architect of the Bush family’s evangelical outreach strategy told Baker, “how naïve so many journalists are who have covered politics all of their life.” show less
This dimension of the story of the Bush family dynasty emerges in the wake of the growth of the religious right political movement within the GOP in the early ’80s. In this context, what was a starchy, Episcopalian heir to a blue-blooded Yankee political pedigree to do? And what of his reckless, apparently non-religious, playboy son? ....
Baker’s chapter titled “The Conversion” features startling revelations that challenge the well-known narratives of the Bush family’s religious history— including the way they crafted a strategy for winning over the religious right, and the creation of a conversion legend for George W. Bush. The purpose of the latter was not only to position him as a religious and political man of his time, but to neutralize the many issues from his past that threatened to undermine his future in politics (and possibly that of his father as well). The plan probably worked far better than anyone could have hoped. “I’m still amazed,” Doug Wead, a key architect of the Bush family’s evangelical outreach strategy told Baker, “how naïve so many journalists are who have covered politics all of their life.” show less
added by davidgn
Lists
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5,164 works; 112 members
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Author Information
2 Works 350 Members
Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative journalist who has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, and Esquire, and has served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. He is the founder of www.whowhatwhy.com, a nonpartisan, show more nonprofit news Web site. show less
Some Editions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 2009
- People/Characters
- George H. W. Bush; George W. Bush; Prescott Bush; Barbara Bush; John F. Kennedy; Lee Harvey Oswald (show all 31); Richard M. Nixon; Lyndon Baines Johnson; Allen Dulles; John Dean; Jim Bath; Winton Blount; Neil Bush; Laura Bush; Jimmy Carter; Dick Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld; Bill Clinton; George de Mohrenschildt; Jeanne de Mohrenschildt; H.R. Haldeman; H. Neil Mallon; Alan Quasha; Alfred Ulmer; Salem bin Laden; Khalid bin Mahfouz; Carl Bernstein; Lowell Weicker; Doug Wead; Charles W. White; Karl Rove
- Important places
- Washington, D.C., USA; Houston, Texas, USA; Dallas, Texas, USA; Midland, Texas, USA; Tyler, Texas, USA; Saudi Arabia
- Important events
- Assassination of John F. Kennedy; Watergate Scandal; Iran-Contra Affair; Iraq War; Hurricane Katrina
- Epigraph
- The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt to Colonel Edward House, October ... (show all)21, 1933
History is not history unless it is the truth.
—Abraham Lincoln - Dedication
- For my mother and in memory of my father
- First words
- This is the true story of a family we thought we knew—and a country we have barely begun to comprehend.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Under the aegis of the Bush enterprise, we have seen constant efforts to circumvent, ignore, and even repeal constitutional protections for free speech and inquiry. I hope this book has helped demonstrate why some people work so hard at such repression—and why we cannot allow them to prevail. It is not simply a matter of arcane legal disputes in Washington, but of the determination of powerful and secretive forces to twist our national story to their own ends.
- Blurbers
- Vidal, Gore; Rather, Dan; Moyers, Bill; Morris, Roger
Classifications
- Genres
- History, Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir, Politics and Government, Business
- DDC/MDS
- 973.931092 — History & geography History of North America United States 1901- New Millennium, Post 9/11 (2001-Present) George W. Bush (2001-2009) Sept 11 Attacks, Iraq War, Patriot Act
- LCC
- E904 .B35 — History of the United States George W. Bush's administrations, 2001-2009
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 342
- Popularity
- 92,149
- Reviews
- 6
- Rating
- (4.09)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 7
