I have been studying the history of the "House of Bush" for many years. It hasn't been as easy as one might think, researching the history of such a famous family. Eventually, one comes to understand why: It is by their design. This important trait of keeping secrets was learned from the robber barons who were their models and benefactors--even though the last three generations of Bush men chose political life over the banking/munitions-oil/intelligence sphere which was the basis of their wealth and international influence. Although that also was very much by design .
I suppose secrecy is paramount if such a family is grooming sons for national office. This is surely true when the family "interests" range from selling arms and munitions to all sides in the revolutions and conflicts that afflicted Europe, Asia and the Americas in the early 20th Century, to actively supporting, organizing and financing the eugenics movement that was popular in America during the years directly after World War One. Publicly popular that is until Adolph Hitler started giving the eugenics movement a public relations problem--stamping out the "bad genes" of retardation, homosexuality and criminality was then politically acceptable goals, whole races was a different matter to many. Not the House of Bush, however; Prescott Bush, Dubya's grandfather, and Prescott's in-laws, the Walkers, and their close friends, the Harriman and Dulles families, quietly went about providing the rising Hitler with the munitions and financing that ensured the ascendancy of the Third Reich. Prescott Bush would continue being Hitler's American banker a year into World War Two, until Congress censured him and stripped him of his Nazi-supporting companies under the Trading With the Enemies Act.
There are so many really shocking "secrets" in the Bush family closet, it is one of the reasons it is difficult to get them known by the public. The truth is so thickly sordid that many journalists, and reviewers of the few serious books that do get published, jump to the conclusion that this much dirt surely signifies a hatchet job done on a family that came to America on the Mayflower. All of this evilness can not possibly come from one of the original American families, one that is related by blood to English kings and queens of famous lore, and an astonishing number of American presidents--which is understandable when you grasp what it means to be from a family that reallydid come over with the first pilgrims. Their blood truly is part of the root blood-stock that is at the bluest heart of anglophile American aristocracy, which also then is related to many of the other royal families of Europe. This frustrating "crystal glass wall" put up by journalists and reviewers of books and "rumor" articles about the Bush family has finally become visible to all, and no longer ipso facto part of the "conspiracy buff" label that has served to discredit others, with the publishing of at least two recent books.
Kevin Phillips' AMERICAN DYNASTY: Aristocracy, Fortune, And The Politics Of Deceit In The House Of Bush, Viking, New York, 2004, is an important book and has sold very well. But even though Mr. Phillips is one of the most established, mainstream authors of political books, a life-long Republican who at times was an activist with the party, the "shocking" truths he writes of almost never make it from the book review pages onto the news pages of the nation's major dailies. The same thing is being done, a bit more viciously though, to a new book by Craig Unger, ''HOUSE OF BUSH, HOUSE OF SAUD: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties,'' Scribners, New York, 2004. While Jonathan D. Tepperman, who reviews the book for The New York Times, obviously has some kind of axe to grind, he does not attack Mr. Unger on his facts, he simply sprinkles the "conspiracy theories" phrase in enough places to discredit the book as much as he can get away with. Even this heavy-handed approach however cannot completely hold sway, and he is forced to write enough truth about the book to assure those of us doing serious work on the only "Dynastic Restoration" in the republic's history that an important resource is coming our way.
There are a couple of facts and the questions they raise that I want to leave you with before sending you on to a few paragraphs from Mr. Tepperman's flawed review of "House of Bush, House of Saud." George W. Bush's partner in his jack-of-all-trades oil services company formed in the late 70's, Arbusto, was and is the brother of Osama bin Laden--that's a 25 year relationship with the brother of the "Great Evil One"! Of course, in the 80's, even Osama himself was a "partner" of sorts with Dubya's father, who was greatly involved with equipping Osama's boys in their Jihad against the Soviet Union in his position within the intelligence community--which was much more extensive than his short public stint as CIA director--and as vice president.
The question is simple, the answer I'm afraid is complex and frightening: It is widely known that the entire bin Laden clan in the United States at the time of the 9/11 attacks, perhaps close to a score of them, was allowed to fly home to Saudi Arabia in a chartered airliner immediately after the attacks when no other non-military air craft were allowed to fly. Nothing new there: but why were they not aggressively interrogated before being given such royal treatment? In the criminal justice business, the family of a murder suspect, no matter how estranged their relations might be with the suspect at the time, is considered as valuable as gold as sources of information that might lead to the suspect. Often they are threatened with being named material witnesses if they are deemed to be less than cooperative. Why? Because family is family, and all good homicide detectives know that almost always someone in a suspect's family keeps in touch with the "bad seed." But even if that proves not to be the case, something they know, perhaps the most innocent detail that only a family member might know, can lead to a hot trail. This is Detective work 101. Why was it totally absent in the worst murder case in American history?
Unger, a former deputy editor of The New York Observer who has written for The New Yorker, Esquire and Vanity Fair, goes to great lengths to outline just how attached the two clans have grown over the years. The Bushes and al-Sauds do indeed share a close (if complicated) relationship; in fact, these connections have already been extensively documented elsewhere. Yet the stakes in the relationship are so high that it is probably worth reading about them one more time. For this reason, Unger's muckraking impulse to explain the awkward United States-Saudi alliance should be applauded.
There's certainly plenty of muck for him to uncover. As he meticulously details, both George Bushes have made fortunes over the years by trading on their famous name to persuade rich backers to invest in their various (usually oil-related) businesses. Sometimes these backers have been Saudi, sometimes even members of the royal family. And a few have come from another Saudi clan: the bin Ladens.
Although Unger relies too heavily on other people's work in sketching the Bush-Saudi links, he does provide a valuable service in highlighting the enormous amounts of money involved. He even puts a price tag on the Saudis' contributions to the Bush family: a staggering $1.476 billion, paid out over 30 years as gifts to Bush-related charities, as generous perks (including a Saudi-sponsored European hunting trip for George H. W. Bush and his 1991 gulf war cabinet just after the November 2000 general election) and as investments in Bush-related businesses like Harken Energy or the Carlyle Group.
