To create this astonishing private club, Joseph and Permelia Pryor Reed sold land only to
those who would fit in. Permelia Reed was still the Grande dame of the island when
George Bush was inaugurated President in 1989. In recognition of the fact that the Reeds
know where all the bodies are buried, President Bush appointed Permelia's son, Joseph V.
Reed, Jr., chief of protocol for the U.S. State Department, in charge of private
arrangements with foreign dignitaries.
Averell Harriman made Jupiter Island a staging ground for his 1940s takeover of the U.S.
national security apparatus. It was in that connection that the island became possibly the
most secretive private place in America.
Let us briefly survey the neighborhood, back then in 1946-48, to see some of the uses
several of the residents had for the Harriman clique.
Residents on Jupiter Island
Jupiter Islander Robert A. Lovett, Prescott Bush's partner at Brown Brothers Harriman,
had been Assistant Secretary of War for Air from 1941 to 1945. Lovett was the leading
American advocate of the policy of terror bombing of civilians. He organized the
Strategic Bombing Survey, carried out for the American and British governments by the
staff of the Prudential Insurance Company, guided by London's Tavistock Psychiatric
Clinic.
In the postwar period, Prescott Bush was associated with Prudential Insurance, one of
Lovett's intelligence channels to the British secret services. Prescott was listed by
Prudential as a director of the company for about two years in the early 1950s.
Their Strategic Bombing Survey failed to demonstrate any real military advantage
accruing from such outrages as the firebombing of Dresden, Germany. But the
Harrimanites nevertheless persisted in the advocacy of terror from the air. They glorified
this as `` psychological warfare, '' a part of the utopian military doctrine opposed to the
views of military traditionalists such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Robert Lovett later advised President Lyndon Johnson to terror-bomb Vietnam. President
George Bush revived the doctrine with the bombing of civilian areas in Panama, and the
destruction of Baghdad.
On Oct. 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee,
chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II
organization of U.S. intelligence activities. The existence of this committee was unknown
to the public until an official CIA history was released from secrecy in 1989. But the
CIA's author (who was President Bush's prep school history teacher; see chapter 5) gives
no real details of the Lovett Committee's functioning, claiming: `` The record of the
testimony of the Lovett Committee, unfortunately, was not in the archives of the agency
when this account was written. ''