George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography --- by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

INTRODUCTION: American Caligula

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 very carefully 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 gave their authorization for Bush's planned and imminent 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 them to survive anyway, 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 still 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 in the autumn of 1991, 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 voters and the popular will; with the federal deficit rising beyond 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 harbingers of what might be coming 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.

How can we hope to fight the mightily Bush power cartel with a biography, 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, if only by virtue of its novelty, pose a new set of problems to those seeking to get Bush re-elected. For although Bush is now what journalists call a world leader, no accurate account on his actual career exists in the public domain.

The volume which we submit herewith to the court of world public opinion is, to the best of our knowledge, the first and only 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 power and obsessive secrecy of this personage. None of the other self-announced 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.

But with Bush, this is only the beginning of the problem. 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 here and there 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 Bush.

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 and historical material concerning George, as well as the spin given to many studies of recent history 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 so-called news organizations to provide the public with something approaching 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 sanitized, approved and canonically admitted "facts" about Bush and his family. We learned that during 1979-1980, 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 that became a joke among the authors of the present study was 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 with which such hacks attempt to humanize their subject, in the same way that horseshoes, pork rinds, and country and western music have 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. [fn 1]

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. [fn 2]

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. [fn 3]

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, and is thus intended to serve as the campaign biography to pave the way for Bush's second election victory. God help us. 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 they require another biography indicates that they still feel that they have 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. [fn 4]

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, does not include the obligatory "red Studebaker" reference, but this is more than compensated by the most elaborate fawning over other details of our hero's war service [fn 5]. 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 the Gulf crisis and Bush's war with Iraq. This is a vile tract written with the open assistance of Bush, Barabara 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 an appropriately 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 about their candidate 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 US Ambassador to the United Nations. King admits at the beginning of his book that he can be impugned for writing a work of the most transparent apologetics: "In retrospect," he says in his preface, "this book may seem open to the charge of puffery, for the view of its subject is favorable all around." [fn 6] Indeed.

Books about Barbara Bush slavishly rehearse the same details from the same printout. Here is the relevant excerpt from the warmly admiring Simply Barabara 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. [fn 7]

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: Der neue Mann im Weissen Haus, named a chapter of this Bush political biography "Im roten Studebaker nach Texas." Bonhorst writes as follows:

Dann war da noch die Sache mit dem roten Studebaker. Sie spielt--gleich nach dem Weltkriegseinsatz-- eine zweite zentrale Rolle in der Lebensgeschichte des George Bush. Es ist die Geschichte seiner Rebellion. Der Schritt, der aus dem steifen Neuenglaender einen laessigen Texaner machte, aus dem reich geborenen Patriziersohn einen Selfmademann. [...] Also packten George und Barbara Bush, 24 und 23 Jahre alt, er gerade mit dem Studium fertig, sie vorzeitigaus ihrer Universitaet ausgeschieden und seit ein paar Monaten Mutter, ihr Baby und ihre Koffer und luden sie auf ihr knallrotes Studebaker-Coupe. "Ein supermoderner, schnittiger Wagen, allerdings etwas laut fuer den neuenglischen Geschmack," erinnerten sich die Bushs spaeter. Aber schliesslich ging es ja ab nach Texas. [fn 8]

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. [fn 9] 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." [fn 10 tris] 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.

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 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 from the origins down to his own time.

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 theater 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 for 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. [...] What structures has he erected in his own name, and those of his family! With what dutiful munificence, even exceeding belief, is he building a temple to his father! [...] With what perfect ease to the public does he manage the raising of troops, a business of constant and extreme apprehension, without the consternation attendant on a levy! [fn 11 ]

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 Pretorian 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 100,000,000 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 AD. 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, and not just registered Republicans, 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 AD; Caligula, his designated successor, from 37 to 41 AD; and Nero from 54 to 68 AD. But the first accurate account of the crimes of some of these emperors comes from Publius Cornelius Tacitus, a very high Roman official, and it appeared about 115-117 AD, 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 is important because he manages to convey something of 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 AD, 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. Relative 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. [fn 12]

This is the same Tiberius administration so extravagantly praised by Velleius Paterculus.

The other Latin author who writes about these Julio-Claudian emperors was Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, who is far less able than Tacitus to fathom the great issues of imperial policy which these degenerate emperors influenced. Suetonius is a tabloid version of Tacitus, and he concentrates on the horrors and perversions of the emperors in their personal sphere, as well as the bloodbaths they ordered. Since many readers over the centuries have found these chronicles highly accessible, Suetonius has always been widely read.

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 AD) derives from Suetonius's book known as The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. 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 psychological 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" towards 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 sully and 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. [fn 13]

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, apprenticeship, intrigues, 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 leitmotiv 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.

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 poloi 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 and blood line. 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, or that his wife Barbara does not wish us forget that she is in some sense a descendant of President Franklin Pierce.

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 are 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.

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 US 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 that were intellectually and morally superior to him. One such was Senator 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 1980's, by which time his opponents, as in the case of Al Haig, are no better than Bush himself.

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 for 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.

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:

SI MINUS BENE DIXERO SALTEM AD MELIUS DICENDUM PRUDENTIOREM ALTERUM EXCITABO.

BOCCACCIO, GENEALOGIA DEORUM GENTILIUM

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