George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush
The Bush family tree reveals their descent from a reviled traitor and a ruthless warlord who took delight in invading other countries. Which is stronger, heredity or environment? Or does it matter?
According to an Irish artist working on a tapestry to commemorate Ireland’s Norman heritage, the Bush family is descended from a line of traitors and ruthless warlords. Ann Griffin Bernstroff was researching the history of Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, when she discovered the genealogical link to the George H. W. Bush family in the United States. Pembroke, known as Strongbow for his skill as an archer, was a power-hungry warlord who led an invasion of old Ireland. The Bush lineage can also be traced to Dermot MacMurrough, who is reviled in Irish history books as Ireland’s worst traitor for collaborating with the Normans. MacMurrough was said to be so vicious a warrior that he severed the heads of his victims and tore at the flesh of particularly hated victims with his teeth.
With President George H. W. Bush having led the United States in the Persian Gulf War and his son President George W. Bush declaring war on Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, many U.S. citizens are left to ponder how much of that ruthless warlord blood surges through the veins of the Bush dynasty. Behaviorists and social psychologists have argued for decades about whether it is our genetics or the environment in which we are reared that has more influence on our character and who we really are. Perhaps it is equal parts of both that shape our destiny.
The pathway to the White House for the Bush dynasty may have begun in 1918 when George H. W. Bush’s father, Prescott Bush Sr., stole the Apache leader Geronimo’s skull for the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale. All the connections he made through this elite brotherhood no doubt paid off in many ways.
George H. W. Bush’s maternal grandfather, George Herbert “Bert” Walker, moved his St. Louis banking and investment firm to the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street in the early 1920s and was one of Hitler’s most powerful financial supporters. Bert Walker’s sponsorship of the Nazis went back to 1924 when Fritz Thyssen, the wealthy German industrialist, was financing the fledgling Nazi Party. Averell Harriman’s W. A. Harriman & Company sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors, and Walker’s Union Banking, located in the offices of Harriman’s firm, became a virtual Nazi money-laundering machine.
In 1934 Bert Walker arranged to have his son-in-law Prescott Bush placed on the board of directors of Union Banking. About the same time, Walker took over the North American offices of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, which was smuggling German agents into the United States to bribe politicians to see things Hitler’s way. Just prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 that ignited World War II, Prescott Bush’s investment firm arranged for Hitler’s Luftwaffe to obtain tetraethyl lead for their airplanes.
A great source of revenue for Bush was terminated in 1942 when three firms with which he was associated were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. All of the shares of Union Banking were seized, and major sections of other companies were confiscated when it was determined that they were being operated on behalf of Nazi Germany. One of Bert Walker’s employees had been a double agent for Naval Intelligence and had blown the whistle on the shipping company’s deals with the Nazis. William S. Farish, one of Prescott Bush’s partners in business deals with Adolph Hitler, was grilled so intensely by the Senate about his Nazi dealings that he collapsed and died on November 29, 1942.
Seeing clearly the ominous handwriting on the wall, eighteen-year-old George H. W. Bush gave up his plans to enter Yale and entered flight school in October 1942, perhaps in an effort to salvage the family’s honor, for he was quite aware that his father was under investigation for running Nazi front groups in the United States. George H. W. Bush returned from World War II a hero, awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the youngest pilot in the Navy, who endured great risk bailing out of his torpedo bomber over the Pacific when it was hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire. Years later Chester Mierzejewski, a turret gunner on a bomber flying near Bush’s plane, claimed to have had an unobstructed view of the incident and stated that Bush’s aircraft was never on fire and that Bush never attempted a water landing, which was standard procedure and which would have given his crew, Jack Delaney and Ted White, a chance to survive.
After the war Bush entered Yale and in 1948 became a member of Skull and Bones. By 1955, he had formed Zapata Petroleum with the Liedtke brothers, Hugh and Bill, then bought them out and set up Permago, a Mexican drilling operation, through a front man to hide his ownership. Unfortunately for Bush’s go-between, he was convicted of defrauding the Mexican government and fined $58 million.
Some investigators are convinced that George Bush spent part of 1960 and 1961 in Miami organizing anti-Castro Cubans on behalf of the CIA. CIA official Fletcher Prouty has said that he delivered three navy ships for use in the Bay of Pigs invasion to a CIA agent named George Bush, who subsequently named the vessels the Barbara, the Houston, and the Zapata. The ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba became a black eye for the Kennedy administration with 115 men lost and another 1,100 imprisoned.
Many researchers place George Bush in Texas when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. An article in the Nation in 1988 quoted a memo from J. Edgar Hoover, the late former FBI chief, stating that “Mr. George Bush of the CIA” was briefed on November 23 about the reaction of anti-Castro Cubans to news of the assassination. Bush admitted that he was in Texas at the time but said that he couldn’t recall exactly where, and he stated firmly that Hoover must have been referring to “another” George Bush.
George H. W. Bush entered politics in 1964, running for Congress as a Goldwater Republican campaigning against the Civil Rights Act. He served two terms as a representative from Texas and ran twice unsuccessfully for the Senate. In 1971 President Richard Nixon named him ambassador to the United Nations.
In 1973 Bush was named the Republican Party national chair, and he brought into the GOP the Heritage Groups Council, a group with a number of Nazi sympathizers. After serving as chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People’s Republic of China, Bush was named director of the CIA by President Gerald Ford in 1976. Bush claimed that this is the first time that he had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and once again denied that he was “that George Bush” associated with either the Bay of Pigs disaster or the JFK investigation. While serving as CIA chief, Bush provided special training for the Saudi royal family’s palace guard.
Bush met with Manuel Noriega and guaranteed him a stipend of $100,000 a year, even though the Panamanian dictator was known to be working for Fidel Castro as well. It was at this time that Bush established Team B within the CIA, a group of neoconservative special agents and generals.
In 1978 Bush, Robert Mosbacher, and Jim Baker became partners in an oil firm, Arbusto Energy. In 1980 Bush was named Ronald Reagan’s vice presidential candidate. Mosbacher, as chief fund-raiser for Bush, developed a millionaires’ club of 250 contributors, each of whom was assessed $100,000 for membership fees. In 1981 the Reagan-Bush team was inaugurated.
Some investigators state that after Bush became vice president and drug czar, cocaine flow into the United States increased by over 2,000 percent. Through the militarization of a phony drug war, the researchers claim, Bush declared war on the American people and the Bill of Rights.
In 1988 Bush campaigned for the presidency and assigned Stuart Spencer to improve the image of his running mate, Dan Quayle, who always seemed to be suffering from “foot in mouth disease.” A drug dealer who claimed to have sold marijuana to Quayle was put in solitary confinement by the head of federal prisons.
In the midst of a heated presidential campaign, Bush had to contend with the uncomfortable circumstances of his son Neil getting caught up in the savings and loan scandal. Neil’s Silverado Savings and Loan in Denver was shut down after receiving 126 cease and desist orders in four years at a taxpayer cost of $1 billion.
Political pressure was placed on Bush to disassociate himself from the GOP Coalition of America after many of the leaders were accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Fred Malek, a former Nixon aide, was asked to leave the presidential campaign when it was revealed that he was compiling a list of Jews in the Labor Department and investigating a possible “Jewish cabal” on orders from former president Nixon. The offensive Willie Norton political ad was telecast, suggesting that Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, would be soft on rapists, drug pushers, and child molesters.
In 1989 Bush was inaugurated as the forty-first president of the United States. He denied knowing that Noriega was a drug dealer and authorized CIA support to the dictator’s opposition, thereby providing Noriega with an opportunity to annul Panama’s elections. In Operation Just Cause, Bush sent troops to Panama with orders to overthrow the corrupt regime. Noriega was brought back to the United States to stand trial as a drug trafficker. He was imprisoned in 1992 and remained in a federal prison in Miami until he suffered a minor stroke in December 2004 and was removed to an undisclosed hospital.
Bush also claimed executive privilege to escape testifying in the Oliver North trial, thereby becoming the first U.S. president to seal his former activities as a vice president. William Casey, CIA director during the Reagan-Bush administration, died two days before he was to testify. Banker Edmond J. Safra, whose banks had been used for laundering money for the Iran-Contra affair, died mysteriously when a fire swept through his Monaco penthouse apartment.
George Bush signed the savings and loan bailout bill, and in 1990, federal regulators gave Neil Bush a seemingly impossible mild penalty, overlooking the fact that he, as Silverado’s director, voted to approve over $100 million in loans to his partners. Neil soon formed Apex Energy with a personal investment of $3,000, receiving $2.7 million from a small business loan program. Apex failed, and Neil ducked out after receiving a $320,000 salary. The entire savings and loan industry was said to be losing investors’ money at the rate of $3 million a minute. Estimates for the total cost for a federal bailout exceeded $500 billion. Bush’s son Jeb convinced the federal government to pay off the $4 million he owed to a failed Florida thrift. George’s brother Jonathan’s brokerage firm was fined in two states for violations and barred in Massachusetts.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Bush was determined to turn the dictator of Iraq away from the oil fields and keep him from obtaining an even stronger control of world oil markets. Osama bin Laden urged the Saudi royal family to fight Hussein on their own and to raise a mighty Arab army. Already uncertain of bin Laden’s motives, the Saudi royals requested that the United States assume the task of driving Hussein’s million-man army back to Iraq. Bush received UN approval to free Kuwait, and the 425,000 American troops were joined by 118,000 soldiers from allied nations. After several weeks of air and missile strikes, the hundred-hour land battle called Desert Storm turned Hussein’s army conquest of Kuwait into a rapid defeat. Conspiracy theorists believe that Bush and the leaders of Kuwait tricked former ally Hussein into attacking Kuwait so Bush could declare war under a UN mandate, strengthen the UN, and hike up petroleum prices in order to protect his own oil investments.
In 1992 George H. W. Bush lost his run for another term in the White House to Bill Clinton. After a time Bush became an adviser to the powerful Washington-based investment firm known as the Carlyle Group. Among his duties, Bush set about strengthening Carlyle’s defense ties to the Saudi royal family. Bush visited the bin Laden family compound and solicited their investment in the Carlyle Group.
In 1993 the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York occurred. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have been linked to the initial bombing of the WTC, as well as to the destruction of the WTC and the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
With all the theories accusing the George W. Bush administration of having known in advance that the September 11 attacks would occur, it only throws fuel on the fire to learn that as the World Trade Center was collapsing and thousands of lives were being lost, the news interrupted a Carlyle business meeting that was being held at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. Attending that conference was former president George H. W. Bush and a brother of Osama bin Laden, a fellow Carlyle investor. Neither claimed to have any advance information about the attacks on the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.