Family of Secrets

I want to think/hope that more than a few of you are either already processing, or contemplating soon exploring Russ Baker's Bush family expose Family of Secrets. If not, why not?

The praise for this author (and book) is very persuasive, this being merely one snippet from the comments at Amazon:

“In an era dominated by corporate journalism and an ideological right-wing media, Russ Baker’s work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy…A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn’t know.” —Bill Moyers, author and host, Bill Moyers’ Journal (PBS)

I suppose I might lend you my excuse for being late to the game, including 18 library books checked out, 12 holds that will come in any day now, and countless owned books that are also queued up.

One of the former is JFK and the Unspeakable, which I started a good while ago, had to relinquish, and am now fighting to find time to continue on. This is a dark account of how Kennedy got sideways with the warmongering hegemonists in our nation's "security" industry/cartel (including more than one named "bush") when he started down a path that involved too much pursuit of peace and disarmament. The denouement we know - but backfilling the details is an essential if potentially painful process, ably aided by books such as these. We're past the point where brandishing the "conspiracy nut" term should erase the blackboard yet again. That convenient cliche should be dustbinned with "fellow traveler" and the like. Thinking folks who actually care about Democracy and our democracy in particular need to be working over this material. From what I can tell, Family would be a great place to start.

But I'll go you one better if you've got the nerve. Okay, as long as we're at it, given the near-coincidence in time, let's finish that Jan and Dean - let's race all the way to Dean Man's Curve.

It's no place to play.

Down With Tyranny has a great series of posts on Family which should help pique your interest and stimulate out-of-the-box. And, for the truly lazy or incorrigible, those posts include what amounts to Cliff's notes:

I don't know which single book I liked most in 2009. The DWT Bookstore has pages of my faves-- the ones Ken and I are always referring to-- from Idiot America, Nixonland, Dateline Havana, Bloggers on the Bus and Turkmeniscam to The Progressive Revolution, The Eliminationists and, of course, Russ Baker's Family of Secrets, a 600 page thriller that digs more deeply into the Bush Family than anyone has ever done. The paperback is now in its third edition and I've been urging Russ to work with someone on doing a synopsis that we could use to turn people on who are intimidated by books with hundreds of pages. Yesterday he finally sent me something that can be used here at DWT. He starts with the questions many of us have asked over and over again: "How did the spectacularly unqualified George W. Bush come to be the President of the United States, and arguably the most powerful person in the world? What lay behind his improbable rise and disastrous policies? Was there more to his controversial reign than the pundits’ standard bromides?"

These are the questions that launched Russ Baker into five years of research. The answers, based on hundreds of interviews, including with persons close to the Bush family who had never talked with reporters, proved astounding.


Not only, Baker found, had we missed the very essence of W., but also of his father and grandfather and in fact the entire clan. Moreover, behind the secrets of the Bushes and their circle lay larger ones that cast decades of American history in a new and revealing light.


The Bushes have been portrayed as everything from incompetents to ideologues to outright crooks. Many of their transgressions are now well known-- from grandfather Prescott’s involvement with Nazi-era financiers to W.’s initiatives that weakened Americans’ constitutional rights at every turn.


But Baker’s research took him to far deeper levels of insight into the American power machine, as it unearthed material of the sort more commonly identified with shady foreign regimes or Hollywood thrillers than with the still-hallowed U.S. presidency.

Baker explained this in a post-publication interview: “As I discovered, there was an entire hidden stratum of truth underlying the rise of the Bushes-- a truth that, if not reckoned with, threatens to derail the reforms we all hope are on the horizon.”


The copious evidence Baker assembles points to one jarring conclusion: that the parade of faces in the Bush White House were in fact bit players in a long-playing “shadow government” establishment that continues to influence events regardless of who-- or what party-- occupies the White House. Power cliques in this country, it turns out, function much as they do elsewhere in the world. Here, however, they are better hidden, in part-- paradoxically-- because we think our society is so open that hidden centers of power could not exist.

There is a tendency in America to tar anyone who sees larger configurations and coalescences of interests, irrespective of the quality of their research, as "conspiracy nuts." Yet the revelations and lessons of Family of Secrets come at us on practically every page, and with sourcing and documentation that have stood up to scrutiny. Moreover, they offer us a glimpse into something deeply embedded in our body politic, and profoundly dangerous to our democratic traditions.


Below are brief summaries of the first seven chapters, hopefully enough to mkae you want to buy a copy of the whole thing.

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The second DWT post is here:
 
Last week we ran a synopsis of the first few chapters of Russ Baker's riveting book, Family of Secrets, the fullest story of the Bush dynasty that anyone has been able to piece together. We delved into the first 7 chapters and there have been so many requests for explanantions of the rest of the chapters, that we'll give away another 7 today-- and then the rest tomorrow. The book really is phenomenal and the paperback is inexpensive, so it makes essential reading-- and a great gift.

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