Senator Ralph Yarborough, Bush televised a grainy old film which depicted young George being
rescued at sea by the crew of the submarine USS Finnback after his Avenger torpedo bomber washit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire during a bombing raid on the island of Chichi Jima on September (^)
2, 1944. That film, retrieved from the Navy archives, backfired when it was put on the air too many
times, eventually becoming something of a maladroit cliche.
Bush's campaign literature has always celebrated his alleged exploits as a naval aviator and theDistinguished Flying Cross he received. As we become increasingly familiar with the power of the (^)
Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones network working for Senator Prescott Bush, we will
learn to become increasingly skeptical of such official accolades and of the official accounts on
which they are premissed.
But George Bush has always traded shamelessly on his alleged war record. During Bush's Gulf war
adventure of 1990-91, the adulation of Bush's ostensible warrior prowess reached levels that were
previously considered characteristic of openly totalitarian and militaristic regimes. Late in 1990,
after Bush had committed himself irrevocably to his campaign of bombing and savagery against
Iraq, hack writer Joe Hyams completed an authorized account of George Bush at war. This wasentitled Flight of the Avenger (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), and appeared during (^)
the time of the Middle East conflagration that was the product of Bush's obsessions. Hyams's work
had the unmistakeable imprimatur of the regime: not just George, but also Barbara had been
interviewed during its preparation, and its adulatory tone placed this squalid text squarely within the
"red Studebaker" school of political hagiography.
The appearance of such a book at such a time is suggestive of the practice of the most infamous
twentieth-century dictatorships, in which the figure of the strong man, Fuehrer, duce, or vozhd as he
might be called, has been used for the transmission of symbolic-allegorical directives to the subject
population. Was fascist Italy seeking to assert its economic autarky in food productrade sanctions by the League of Nations? Then a film would be produced by the MINCULPOPtion in the face of
(the Ministry of Popular Culture, or propaganda) depicting Mussolini indefatigably harvesting
grain. Was Nazi Germany in the final stages of preparation of a military campaign against a
neighboring state? If so, Goebbels would orchestrate a cascade of magazine articles and best-selling
pulp evoking the glories of Hitler in the trenches of 1914-18. ClBrezhnev sought to aliment his own personality cult with a little book called Malaya Zemlya, anoser to our own time, Leonid (^)
account of his war experiences which was used by his propagandists to motivate his promotion to
Marshal of the USSR and the erection of a statue in his honor during his own lifetime. This is the
tradition to which Flight of the Avenger belongs.
Bush tells us in his campaign autobiography that he decided to enlist in the armed forces,
specifically naval aviation, shortly after he heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. About six
months later, Bush graduated from Phillips Academy, and the commencement speaker was
Secretary of War Henry Stimson, eminence grise of the US ruling elite. Stimson was possibly
mindful of the hecatomb of young mtrenches of World War I on the western front. In any event, Stimson's advice to the Andoverembers of the British ruling classes which had occurred in the
graduates was that the war would go on for a long time, and that the best way of serving the country
was to continue one's education in college. Prescott Bush supposedly asked his son if Stimson's
recommendation had altered his plan to enlist. Young Bush answered that he was still committed to
join the navy.
Henry L. Stimson was certainly an authoritative spokesman for the Eastern Liberal Establishment,
and Bushman propaganda has lately exalted him as one of the seminal influences on Bush's political
outlook. Stimson had been educated at both Yale (where he had been tapped by Skull and Bones)
and Harvard Law School. He became the law partner of Elihu Root, who was Theordore