Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years [Paperback]

Russ Baker (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 10, 2009

“Shocking in its disclosures, elegantly crafted, and faultlessly measured in its judgments.”—Roger Morris, author of Richard Milhous Nixon and Partners in Power

How did the deeply flawed George W. Bush ascend to the highest office in the nation, what forces abetted his rise, and—perhaps most important—have those forces really been vanquished by Obama’s election? Award-winning investigative journalist Russ Baker gives us the answers in Family of Secrets, a compelling and startling new take on the Bush dynasty and the shadowy elite that has quietly steered the American republic for the past half century and more. Baker shows how this network of figures in intelligence, the military, oil, and finance enabled—and in turn benefited handsomely from—the Bushes’ perch at the highest levels of government. As Baker reveals, this deeply entrenched elite remains in power regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

Family of Secrets offers countless disclosures that challenge the conventional accounts of such central events as the JFK assassination and Watergate. It includes an inside account of George W.’s cynical religious conversion and the untold real background to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Baker’s narrative is gripping, sobering, and deeply sourced. It will change the way we understand not just the Bush years, but a half century of postwar history—and the present.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Family of Secrets:

“One of the most important books of the past ten years.”—Gore Vidal

 

“A tour de force … Family of Secrets has made me rethink even those events I witnessed with my own eyes.”—Dan Rather

 

“Shocking in its disclosures, elegantly crafted, and faultlessly measured in its judgments, Family of Secrets is nothing less than a first historic portrait in full of the Bush dynasty and the era it shaped. From revelation to revelation, insight to insight—from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate to the oil and financial intrigues that lie behind today's headlines—this is a sweeping drama of money and power, unseen forces, and the emblematic triumph of a lineage that sowed national tragedy. Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets is sure to take its place as one of the most startling and influential works of American history and journalism.”—Roger Morris, former senior staff member, National Security Council, and author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America

 

“Left-wing paranoia? Baker, a solid investigative journalist, works hard to back up his claims – a reader could choke on the complex, interwoven details in Family of Secrets. He's a man on a mission, desperate to stop the “methods of stealth and manipulation that ... reflect a deeper ill: the American public's increasingly tenuous hold upon the levers of its own democracy.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

 

 “Prodigiously industrious investigative journalist Russ Baker…. connects the dots between the Bushes and Watergate.” —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine

 

Praise for Russ Baker:

“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)

 

“Russ Baker has the three most important attributes of any great investigative reporter: He is skeptical, he is fearless, and he is indefatigable. Whenever he examines anything—including the most allegedly wellcovered topics—he breaks important new ground.” —David Margolick, author and contributing editor, Vanity Fair

About the Author

Russ Baker is an awardwinning investigative journalist. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, and Esquire, and has served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization, operating at www.whowhatwhy.com.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (November 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1608190064
• ISBN-13: 978-1608190065
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (201 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #51,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( B ) > Bush, George
  • #73 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > United States > Executive Branch

More About the Author

Russ Baker is an awardwinning investigative journalist. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, and Esquire, and has served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization, operating at www.whowhatwhy.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

486 of 516 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential Book December 18, 2008

By Richard Cummings

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said that "words are loaded pistols." In the hands of Russ Baker, they are hydrogen bombs. On each and every page of his masterpiece, "Family of Secrets," he exploses the myths and lies that powerful forces have perpetratred on the American consciousness. He digs beneath the surface in a form of journalistic archeology to reveal the hidden history of one of America's most powerful families, leaving no stone unturned. Moreover, he names all of his sources and documents the materials he relies on to unmask the hypocrisy behind the myth. From Prescott Bush's ties to Nazi Germany to Poppy Bush's secret role in the Watergate scandal that ousted Richard Nixon, which was, in fact, a "silent coup," to George W. Bush's deceit in launching the war in Iraq, Russ Baker unmasks the truth with a relentless brilliance unmatched by his peers. His publisher, Bloomsberry, is to be congratulated for its confidence in Russ Baker at a time when most publishers are hedging their bets and looking over their shoulders in acts of self-censorship. Baker's revelations about George W. Bush's private life is worth the price of the book alone. Here is Bush, forcing himself on a Danish beauty, stripping to the nude, while getting another girl friend he knocks up an abortion, and then later, as president, opposing abortion and cutting funding for organizations that provide information about birth control. How he managed to get the Danish beauty to go on record, as he does with other key players in Watergate and the Kennedy assassination, is nothing short of astonishing. He traces the true history of Poppy Bush's career, from his early ties to the CIA he pretended never existed while declaring himself "out of the loop," to his strange phone call from Dallas to the FBI on the day of Kennedy's assassination, pointing a finger at a suspect who was in fact totally innocent, to his manipulation of Watergate to get rid of Nixon, is a secret story forced out of the shadows by the powerful documentation by Baker in this tour de force that keeps you turning the pages in asonishment. What he discloses is America's War of the Roses, as powerful families fight to the death for ultimate power. The history of Lee Harvey Osward in the world of wealth, power and intelligence that was Dallas, Texas at the time, is amazing. The anodyne courses in political science and history at American colleges and universities need very much to inject Family of Secrets into the curriculum so that young Americans can be more able to understand what America is truly about as a new president strives to change and reform it. It puts the dots together in a way that makes any further naivety amongst Americans impossible. What he tells us simply cannot be ignored. One can fully expect the Establishment media to go after this book in typical fashion, as they make their usual attempt to cover up what can no longer be denied. Family of Secrets takes to what Cyril Connolly so aptly descibed as the "blood crossroads of literature and politics." After Family of Secrets, neither will ever be the same.

217 of 231 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Tantalizing clues of covert operations, oil and America's position in the world March 16, 2009

By Christopher K. Halbower

Format:Hardcover

Russ Baker's book "Family of Secrets" takes the reader on a tantalizing journey into the Bush family. Baker's unabashed goal was to answer the question "How did Bush happen?"

As Baker began his intensive research into George W Bush, he found that in order to understand George Jr., one must first look at George Sr. This led him to inquire about the Bush clan in general, raising the blinds on this most secretive of families.

The book is comprised of 23 chapters. Of these, Baker spends the first 16 discussing George H W Bush (called Poppy by those close to him). The remaining 7 chapters are about George W Bush and those in his specific orbit.

Russ Baker makes a strong circumstantial case that George H W Bush was involved in intelligence work long before his 1974 CIA stint appointment. The actual evidence that would verify this is unavailable to the public in general as the CIA does not like inquiries.

Those who surround Poppy Bush seemed to be tinged by covert, intelligence operations. A few examples are: his father Prescott Bush, Neil Mallon and George DeMohrenschildt. The intelligence apparatus that evolved from WWII (the OSS) would become known as the CIA. And many in Bush's orbit were somehow connected to the OSS, the CIA or to covert missions in WWII.

Building upon this, Baker argues that the world of covert operations, including propaganda and psyops, is able and willing to suppress information and diseminate disinformation. The gatekeepers of knowledge tend to have ties to the CIA--including the Watergate journalist Bob Woodward.

The world of covert operations goes hand in hand with the oil industry and the world of international finance. The oil industry has acted as a kind of vanguard for US covert operations. This includes Poppy's oil rigs in the Caribbean that would be the training grounds for Cuban exiles before the Bay of Pigs. To fund covert operations, an intelligence agency needs funding. This is where international financial institutions play a role. The motivation: when a covert operation topples a regime, the financial institute gets first crack at exploiting the resources of the country.

Baker discusses the forces that brought Poppy Bush into the Nixon White House. Prescott Bush, he suggests, was the one who arranged for Nixon to first run for the open Republican Congressional seat in California in 1946. And George and Prescott are visible in the shadows during Nixon's rise to power--Prescott as a US Senator from Connecticut and George as a covert operative in several strategic regions around the world.

During his two terms as VP under Eisenhower, Nixon was in charge of several covert operations. And those in George Bush's close knit circle left their fingerprints all over these operations.

When Nixon became president, the name George H W Bush was considered for the VP slot. Nixon went with his own choice instead. Then Nixon wanted Helms at the CIA to give him all the materials regarding the covert actions Nixon had taken during the 50's. Helms balked. The result: Watergate.

The Watergate scandal, which undid the Nixon presidency, was perpetrated by CIA agents. All the major books on Watergate to come out in the past two decades confirm that Nixon was set up. And Baker concurs. But Baker goes on to implicate Bush as being complicit in this. Bush, along with Kissinger and Haig, was one of the few to survive the scandal. And with Nixon gone, the US got a new president: Gerald Ford.

The Ford adminstration saw the commission of what was to be called the "Halloween Massacre"--the elimination of several staffers and cabinet members who were loyal to Nixon. And Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld oversaw and coordinated this "massacre".

How do you explain many strange events in American history without resorting to covert/intelligence operations? Bush's fingerprints can be found on the Iran/Contra scandal: a covert operation if ever there was one. Bush support for 3rd world dictators (Noriega, Hussein, Marcos) can easily be explained if you look for the web of intelligence.

And riding on his dad's coattails is young George W Bush. Where Poppy went wrong, George W seemed to correct: managing the media to spin all inquiries; politicizing every government agency; handing out juicy contracts to cronies.

Baker's book is filled with innuendos and suggestions. This is its greatest failing. The circumstantial evidence in many cases is compeling. However, in some cases it is lacking. The true value of Baker's research will be seen in the years to come. Future researchers can use his book and fill in the gaps where he was only able to provide circumstantial evidence.

Baker's narrative is fun but difficult to read. His prose is strong but this is not a book to be taken lightly. It weighs in at over 500 pages but reads like a book twice that length. If you are interested in American history, the Bush clan or the power of covert/intelligence operations, Baker's "Family of Secrets" receives my firm recommendation.

247 of 269 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Right is still right, even when nobody's doing it. Wrong is still wrong, even when everybody's doing it. December 31, 2008

By James C. Moore

Format:Hardcover

"All great accomplishments are the products of discipline and the force of will. To write a lasting and important book, a journalist must be relentless in pursuing detail that others have misunderstood or even ignored. The commitment to discerning the facts can never waver, regardless of the obstacles placed before the reporter. We see such non-fiction narratives too infrequently in American publishing but we have a great one before us now in Russ Baker's phenomenal `Family of Secrets.' As an investigator and as a writer of compelling narrative, Baker has created, in my estimation, an almost unequalled standard in political reportage. He has refused to accept conventional wisdom regarding the Bush family and the failed son they made president. There is no way any reasonable person can reject what Baker reports and the conclusions are profoundly disturbing. The reader becomes convinced, page after page, footnote after footnote, quote after quote, that everything we thought we knew about American history in the past 50 years was wrong. I confess that I was prepared to be dismissive. When Baker first approached me about an interview and to offer what little insight I had on years of covering the Bushes in Texas, my reaction was that he was too late and that the public had been worn out by the publishing deluge prompted by George W's incompetence and lying. Why did we need another book on the Bushes? After reading `Family of Secrets' that answer is abundantly obvious: we did not know the truth. I think we do now and Russ Baker has given it to us in a brilliant book that that will be impossible for any sensible American to ignore. I considered myself well informed on both Presidents Bush but Baker has proved that even those of us close to the subject need to reconsider the facts and to do otherwise is to jeopardize the value and purpose of our democracy. As Karl Rove, Joe Allbaugh, Karen Hughes, Mark McKinnon, Dan Bartlett, Condoleeza Rice and the rest of the outgoing administration go about their immoral task of trying to spin a more positive Bush legacy, let them confront the truths as revealed in `Family of Secrets." History will not abide any further distortions of the Bush record and when researchers seek to understand what happened to our country under the Bush family regime, let's hope they find their way to the epic work of Russ Baker. `Family of Secrets' is much more than a non-fiction narrative of political history; Baker has created an historical document that is an act of patriotism for a nation in need of self-examination and the truth."

James C. Moore - Author: "Bush's Brain," "Bush's War for Reelection," and "The Architect."