Date: Mon Jan  4 03:34:59 est 1993
From: "John Covici" <covici@ccs.covici.com>
Message-Id: <2b47f6bc.ccs@ccs.covici.com>
Reply-To: "John Covici" <covici@ccs.covici.com>
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET
Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: Part 1
Status: O
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.     

----         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com