Part of the ethos of oligarchism as practiced by George Bush is the emphasis on one's
own family pedigree and bloodline. 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