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. Closer to our own time,
Leonid Brezhnev sought to aliment his own personality cult with a little book called
Malaya Zemlya, an 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 members of the British ruling
classes, which had occurred in the trenches of World War I on the western front. In any
event, Stimson's advice to the Andover 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 Roosevelt's secretary of state. Stimson had
been Theodore Roosevelt's anti-corruption, trust-busting US Attorney in New York City
during the first years of the FBI, then Taft's secretary of war, a colonel of artillery in
World War I, Governor General of the Philippines for Coolidge, secretary of state for
Hoover, and enunciator of the "Stimson doctrine." This last was a piece of hypocritical
posturing directed against Japan, asserting that changes in the international order brought
about by force of arms (and thus in contravention of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928)
should not be given diplomatic recognition. This amounted to a US committment to
uphold the Versailles system, the same policy upheld by Baker, Eagleburger, and
Kissinger in the Serbian war on Slovenia and Croatia during 1991. Stimson, though a
Republican, was brought into Roosevelt's war cabinet in 1940 in token of bipartisan
intentions.
But in 1942, Bush was not buying Stimson's advice. It is doubtless significant that in the
mind of young George Bush, World War Two meant exclusively the war in the Pacific,
against the Japanese. In the Bush-approved accounts of this period of his life, there is
scarcely a mention of the European theatre, despite the fact that Roosevelt and the entire
Anglo-American establishment had accorded strategic priority to the "Germany first"
scenario. Young George, it would appear, had his heart set on becoming a navy flier.
Normally the Navy required two years of college from volunteers wishing to become
naval aviators. But, for reasons, which have never been satisfactorily explained, young