Poppy Bush's Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths / History

The corporate-owned mainstream media have provided only partial truths regarding life of President George H.W. Bush, below left, whose death on Nov. 30 led to days of prominent coverage of his career and positive aspects of its lasting impact. 

Our Justice Integrity Project excerpted prominently on these pages such accolades over the past week. Now it's time for the rest of the story, which draws heavily from the three chapters about the Bush family in our 2013 book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, which documented the secret ties of America's recent presidents with the power structure.

Excerpted below is the introduction to our chapter "George H.W. Bush: Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest," which draws on the late president's nickname "Poppy." Immediately before that in the book is a chapter about his father, "Prescott Bush: Roots of the Bushes," and his son, "George W. Bush: Shameless, Heartless and Selected — Not Elected."

The "Poppy" chapter will be excerpted in several parts here over coming days.

All of efforts at historical understanding are too important to delay or leave to hand-picked courtiers of the powerful whom the major media put before us. Several major national problems afflicting the United States have direct roots to little-known aspects of the Bush dynasty and the 41st president (1989-1993) in particular, as will be seen in the last segment of our multi-part series.

These problems include ongoing Middle Eastern wars, blight in our major cities caused by Iran-Contra smuggling, and that smuggling's contribution to instability in Central America fostering immigration from there to the United States.

Another result traceable to this president and this family is a notable advance in the growing culture of "elite deviance," whereby wealthy, well-connected insiders are spared the consequences of their actions, whether it is Bush family members who helped bring on the multi-billion-dollar Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s or the Iran-Contra criminals whom the 41st president pardoned with the support of his Attorney General William P. Barr, right, whom Trump has just nominated (doubtless in hope of the same kind of gentle treatment justified by high-sounding legal principles).  

We begin with an introduction from Presidential Puppetry to "Bush 41."

An appendix excerpts major recent stories about the death, drawn primarily from major mainstream print publications but interspersed with a several independent commentaries that largely support our themes in this series. This editor is amplifying these themes also on The Midnight Writer News Show, a radio broadcast from downstate Illinois and hosted by S.T. Patrick. The show scheduled for broadcast next week was recorded as Episode 105 on Dec. 9, 2018.

Such research comes from many sources, of course. We recognize as essential for this series those dedicated researchers, law enforcers and whistleblowers who have contributed to book-length portraylals of the late president. Among those recognized below from the independent sphere are:

Texas Tech professor Peter Brewton, a former Houston Post reporter who authored The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. Among others are the following independent-spirited authors;

Russ Baker (Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means For America

Daniel Hopsicker, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, The Mob, and America's Secret History);

Robert Parry (Secrecy And Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq;

Kevin Phillips; American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush;

Barbara Honegger (October Surprise: Did the Reagan-Bush election campaign sabotage President Carter's attempts to free the American hostages in Iran?);

Peter Dale Scott (shown at right) (American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan);

Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter (The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era);

Craig Unger (House of Bush / House of Saud: The Secret Relations Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties);

Terry Reed and John Cummings (Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA); and

Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin (George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography)

 Excerpted from "Presidential Puppetry" (Updated 2015 edition):

CIA Director George H.W. Bush hears a briefing in 1976 on June 17 following the assassination of two Americans in Lebanon (David Kennerly photo now with the National Archives)

George H.W. Bush: Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest

In early 1976, Republican U.S. Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland announced on the Senate floor that he could not vote in good conscience for former Republican National Chairman George Herbert Walker Bush to become CIA director. The farsighted senator told his colleagues, “CIA power should be kept away from those who ascend to that post via partisan politics.”

Mathias [shown in a C-SPAN screenshot] lost the debate, and Bush was confirmed.

Worse, the senator’s concerns about an ever-growing and increasingly politicized national security sector have all but disappeared from the Senate discussion in both parties. Indeed, the CIA’s headquarters has been renamed “The George Bush Center for Intelligence,” and is far from the vision President Truman had of an expert resource without partisan taint and without military capabilities uncontrolled by civilian authority.

From the Mathias comments, even the senator did not seem to suspect that Bush became a CIA asset in the agency’s earliest days in the 1940s, and was enriched beginning in 1954 by running a CIA-front company undertaking Gulf of Mexico oil drilling.

The pages ahead illuminate George H.W. Bush’s past in ways that many readers will find surprising. The scandals include Iran-Contra and a long-running Bush romantic affair. True, it is nearly impossible to know with certainty all the specific details of scandals, but official follow-ups were far less aggressive than warranted. This illustrates how a selective, politically biased justice system affects news coverage, elections and the rest of governance.

The nation’s 41st president has many attractive personal qualities, to be sure. Among them are an ethic of hard work, strong loyalty to family, and instinctive graciousness to most of those whom he encounters, high and low. I accept the view of trusted friends that he is considerate on a personal basis above the norm. His published letters from 1942 to 1998 reflect that quality.

Nonetheless, his admirable qualities do not foreclose a sense of entitlement, a willingness to exploit others outside the inner circle, and a potential for evil deeds in secret on occasion. Successful politicians are often attractive, both superficially and personally. And even those with good manners can sometimes exploit those outside the inner circle of family, friends, and the powerful.

Coming Next at the Justice Integrity Project:

Other George H. W. Bush Series Segments In This Series

Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths and History (Part 1)

• Introduction and Recent News Clippings On Death and Legacy of George H. W. Bush

Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths and History (Part 2)

• Poppy's Progress (Published on Dec. 11)

Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths and History (Part 3) (This column, Published on Dec. 13)

• Texas Politics, Bush-Style
• Deep In the Heart of Washington Intrigue
• Refueling in Houston
• White House Years and Fears
• Iran-Contra

Poppy's Seed and Bitter Harvest: Half Truths and History (Part 4) (Published on Dec. 14)

• Deregulation
• Iraq War
• The Rest of the Story

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Related News Coverage

Dec. 19

Future of Freedom Foundation, Opinion: The Change of Official Enemies under George H.W. Bush, Jacob G. Hornberger, right, Dec. 19, 2018. Missing from all the accolades heaped on former President H.W. Bush, who passed away a few weeks ago, was the fact that Bush presided over the biggest transition of official enemies of our country in the 70-year-old history of the U.S. national-security state.

From the time the U.S. government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state after World War II, the official enemy of the United States was the Soviet Union, a confederation of nations led by Russia. The reason given for selecting the Soviet Union as America’s official enemy was that it was led by a communist regime that was supposedly hell-bent on conquering and ruling the world, including the United States.

Not surprisingly, during the 45 years of the Cold War, the tax-funded largess flowed into the coffers of the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and FBI. No amount of tax-money largess was too much to prevent America from falling to the Reds.

In 1989, however, the Soviet Union suddenly and unexpectedly declared an end to the Cold War. In 1989, the U.S. national-security establishment lost its official enemy, and it was panicked. It knew that it needed an official enemy to keep Americans scared. If Americans weren’t scared of some official enemy, they might start asking an uncomfortable question: Why do we need a national-security state and why can’t we have our limited-government republic back?

That’s when H.W. came to the rescue. When Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait to settle an oil-drilling dispute, Bush declared that the United States now had a new official enemy, one who Bush and his national-security establishment said was as another Adolf Hitler. Amidst much pomp, fanfare, and fear, Bush ordered his army to invade Iraq to reverse Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

But Bush stopped short of removing Saddam from power, which enabled the U.S. national-security establishment to have a new official enemy for the next 11 years. “Saddam! Saddam! Saddam!” That’s all that Americans exclaimed during the entire 1990s. U.S. officials made certain that Americans were convinced that Saddam was coming to get them, especially with mustard gas, Anthrax, mushroom clouds, and other weapons of mass destruction. Americans were as afraid of Saddam as they had been of the communists.

Of course, in the process everyone forgot that Saddam had been a close partner and ally of the Pentagon and the CIA during the 1980s, when they were partnering together to kill Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War. Everyone also forgot that it was the United States that furnished Saddam with those WMDs in the first place, so that he could kill Iranians with them.

Dec. 10

GregPalast.com, Bush Sr. Made a Killing – 50 Miners Buried Alive, Greg Palast, Dec. 10, 2018. While pundits were falling all over themselves spewing about the “civility” of the patrician George H. W. Bush, l must honor the memory of those 50 men who were buried alive in a gold field in Africa so Bush Sr. could cash in.

Dec. 9

 WhoWhatWhy, Opinion: Fawning Coverage of Bush 41 Discredits the Media, Russ Baker (founder of WhoWhatWhy, author of Family of Secrets and frequent contributor to the Columbia Journalism Review), Dec. 9, 2018. Yes, we all know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the recently departed. But seriously, the recent Bush coverage by so-called professional journalists has been ridiculously obsequious.

George W. Bush delivered a eulogy for his father, the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush. OK, not unusual. But someone else did too: Jon Meacham, the former editor of Newsweek, a major US news organization. That’s more unusual.

Meacham, who at one point ran an ostensibly hard-hitting magazine, went on to write a biography of the elder Bush so fawning and uncritical that he became like family for the Bushes. And then he delivered the tribute.

Yet hardly any media —none?— even noted the conflict of interest. And why should they? The vast majority of news organizations abdicated their roles as honest brokers for “Bush Week,” rushing to outdo each other in gushing with exaggerated and ill-founded praise for a former president once criticized for a broad range of transgressions — legal, moral, and otherwise.

Dec. 7

George H.W. Bush In Perspective

Chief Justice William Rehnquist swears in President George H. W. Bush in 1989 as Barbara Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle (above her) look on.

WhoWhatWhy, Bush 41: The Triumph of Manners Over Truth, Jeff Schechtman, Dec. 7, 2018. Russ Baker looks into the telltale heart of George H.W. Bush and the real (and tragically under-investigated) legacy of the Bush family. While President Donald Trump has used truculence, bluster, populism, and manufactured division to hide the true nature of his agenda, George Herbert Walker Bush used manners, civility, and grace to hide the truth of his and his family’s agenda.

Both are very similar in their objectives. Both have enabled the continued transfer of wealth to the upper echelons of society. Both have sought to protect the interests of corporations and rich friends. But as we witnessed this week, Bush and the Bush family were far more effective with honey than with vinegar.

To wrap up this week of seemingly non-stop hagiographic coverage of George H.W. Bush, Jeff Schechtman talks with Russ Baker about the Bush family and Baker’s blockbuster book Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years.

Dec. 6

Texas Funeral For Bush

Washington Post, Bush’s pastor describes his faith, service at Texas memorial, Stephanie Kuzydym and Mark Berman, Dec. 6, 2018. The 41st president, shown in a 1989 photo, is being honored once more in Texas, the state he adopted as his own, during a memorial service at the Houston church where he and his late wife, Barbara, worshiped for half a century. He will be buried today at his presidential library in College Station, Tex.

Huffington Post, Every President Recited The Apostles’ Creed Except Trump, And People Definitely Noticed, Ed Mazza, Dec. 6, 2018. Trump didn’t recite the profession of faith during the funeral for former President George H.W. Bush.

People on Twitter are calling out President Donald Trump for failing to recite the Apostles’ Creed at the funeral for former President George H. W. Bush on Wednesday. Footage from the event (shown above) shows much of the church, including the former presidents seated with Trump, standing to recite the profession of faith.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump stood, but did not recite the creed, which was written in the program, nor did they sing the hymns. Given Trump’s widespread support among evangelical Christians, that led to plenty of criticism on social media.

Dec. 5

Bush Funeral

Washington Post, Trump sits with fellow presidents but still stands alone, Philip Rucker, Dec. 5, 2018. The state funeral was orchestrated to be about one man and his milestones, but it was impossible to pay tribute to the 41st president without drawing implicit contrasts with the 45th.

Washington Post, George H.W. Bush / 1924–2018: Historian pays tribute to Bush during state funeral, John Wagner, Dec. 5, 2018. The 41st president’s son, former president George W. Bush, is among those scheduled to offer eulogies at the services at Washington National Cathedral. Also in attendance are President Trump and the three other living former presidents.

New York Times, George Bush’s Legacy: Revisiting Past Claims, Linda Qiu, Dec. 5, 2018 (print edition). After his defeat in the 1992 election, former President George Bush concluded that he lost his bid for a second term because he “just wasn’t a good enough communicator” and blamed the news media for the perception that he was out of touch with the average American. Certain claims are again abounding as the country prepares to bury Mr. Bush after his death on Friday. Here’s a look at some of them.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump can’t even do a funeral without screwing it up, Bill Palmer, Dec. 5, 2018. Earlier this year, the late Senator John McCain made it clear that he didn’t want Donald Trump at his funeral, and then further drove the point home by inviting former President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush to deliver the eulogies. Today, former President George H.W. Bush was laid to rest, and let’s just say that we were reminded why Trump doesn’t belong at these kinds of things.

George H.W. Bush hated Donald Trump, and certainly didn’t want to invite him to his funeral. He thought Trump was such a disaster, he famously crossed party lines to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But President Bush was a protocol kind of guy, so he told his family to go ahead and invite Trump to the funeral anyway. Even though Trump seemed to be trying to behave himself, he still managed to make a mess of things just by being there.

Every former President and First Lady in attendance dutifully got out their book and recited The Apostles’ Creed when the time came. Then there was Donald Trump, sitting next to them, holding the book down by his waist, not looking at it, not bothering to participate in the memorial process, even as Melania stared at the floor in seeming embarrassment. Isn’t Trump supposed to be the evangelical candidate? It may have been a small moment, but it’s a reminder that this guy Trump either refuses to – or simply can’t – function in public.

Then there were the reminders that no one wanted him there, because he’s a psychopath and a racist and a career criminal who committed treason to rig the election in his favor, and is therefore not the President of the United States. We saw George W. Bush stop and shake hands with Trump, but then we realized he’d only reluctantly done it so he could get to the Obamas on the other side, and give Michelle a piece of candy.

Consortium News, Opinion: The Bushes’ ‘Death Squads,’ Robert Parry, Dec. 5, 2018. George H.W. Bush was laid to rest on Wednesday but some of his murderous policies lived on through his son’s administration and until this day, as Robert Parry, right, reported on January 11, 2005 in How George W. Bush Learned From His Father.

By refusing to admit personal misjudgments on Iraq, George W. Bush instead is pushing the United States toward becoming what might be called a permanent “counter-terrorist” state, which uses torture, cross-border death squads and even collective punishments to defeat perceived enemies in Iraq and around the world.Since securing a second term, Bush has pressed ahead with this hard-line strategy, in part by removing dissidents inside his administration while retaining or promoting his protégés. Bush also has started prepping his younger brother Jeb as a possible successor in 2008, which could help extend George W.’s war policies while keeping any damaging secrets under the Bush family’s control.

As a centerpiece of this tougher strategy to pacify Iraq, Bush is contemplating the adoption of the brutal practices that were used to suppress leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s. The Pentagon is “intensively debating” a new policy for Iraq called the “Salvador option,” Newsweek magazine reported on Jan. 9.

The strategy is named after the Reagan-Bush administration’s “still-secret strategy” of supporting El Salvador’s right-wing security forces, which operated clandestine “death squads” to eliminate both leftist guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers, Newsweek reported. “Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians,” Newsweek wrote.

Dec. 4

New York Times, Opinion: George Bush and the Obituary Wars, Frank Bruni, Dec. 4, 2018. We like our villains without redemption and our heroes without blemish. What happened to shades of gray?

President Bush is shown at his Inauguration with his wife, Barbara, and Vice President Dan Quayle, among others.

Truthout, Opinion: George H.W. Bush Empowered Atrocity Abroad and Fascists at Home, William Rivers Pitt, Dec. 4, 2018. The television spent the entire weekend reminding me that George Herbert Walker Bush loved his country, his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, his dog, the city of Houston, the town of Kennebunkport, baseball, football, golf and so very much else besides.

Our 41st US president, the talking heads assured me, was a veritable ocean of love. The newspaper folks did their part to paint this picture, as well; stealing a leaf from Jesus of Nazareth over the weekend, Bush Sr. died and rose again on the warm updraft of early 1990s B-roll footage and gushing headlines from all corners of the country.

The hagiography festival made a particularly grand to-do about the fact that George H.W. Bush was president when the Cold War ended. What the glowing obituaries obscured, however, was that Bush Sr. was a Cold Warrior of the first order, actively involved in a number of genuine atrocities that spanned the globe.

Most of Bush Sr.’s biography has been well documented for good and ill, but his time at the helm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is seldom discussed in this hemisphere. He spent only a year in that job, but it was one of the bloodiest years South America has ever known. Fifteen years later, he personally, if inadvertently, opened the door for the proto-fascist takeover of his own party. Those two tales, combined with some other dark chapters of Bush Sr.’s life, frame a career in power and politics that did damage most everywhere it went.

As director of the CIA from 1976 to 1977, Bush Sr. was an integral part of a US government covert terrorism/torture program in South America. Known as Operation Condor by the participants, the program was aimed at destroying left-leaning governments and organizations they feared might come to support the Soviet Union. Forty years later, the horror and chaos unleashed by Operation Condor still plagues that region, and is a fair explanation for why massive caravans of asylum-seeking migrants continue to arrive at the US-Mexico border.

Documents that were recently declassified reveal that the “Dirty War” in Argentina, the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile, Alfredo Stoessner’s dictatorship in Paraguay and other atrocities across the continent were actively supported by the US government. Thousands of leftist peasants, union leaders, teachers, students, priests, and nuns were slaughtered, imprisoned and tortured, and George Herbert Walker Bush went to work every day at CIA headquarters to make sure it happened.

Many years later, when Bush Sr. rose to accept the Republican nomination for president in 1988, he made a fateful promise. “Read my lips,” he told the enthusiastic crowd, “no new taxes.” He broke that pledge in 1990, and in doing so dropped an atomic bomb on politics in the United States. Breaking that pledge infuriated the conservative wing of his party, which was deeply suspicious of Bush’s internationalist leanings to begin with.

The fascist upswelling that came in the wake of his broken campaign promise is as much a part of Bush Sr.’s legacy as the crisis at the southern border. Operation Condor happened even though the TV people this weekend chose to leave it off the script. The GOP’s neo-fascist twist erupted during Sr.’s administration. Both are side effects of the Cold War that will be with us for many years to come, and deserve their own wing in Bush Sr.’s library down in College Station.

Dec. 3

Bush, CIA, Deep State

Washington Post, Opinion: Bush practiced a CIA omerta that may have died with him, Tim Weiner, Dec. 3, 2018.  It was his spy service, right or wrong, and he protected it at all costs. George H.W. Bush loved the CIA. It was “part of my heartbeat,” he once said. He was the only president who ever ran the agency, and the last president who truly believed in its Cold War code: Admit nothing, deny everything.

The wall of silence cracked during the administration of Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, when the FBI’s arrest of Aldrich Ames, a Russian mole who went undetected by the CIA for nine years, led the agency’s directors to denounce systemic flaws in the CIA’s integrity. The wall crumbled when the 9/11 Commission disclosed the CIA’s dead-wrong reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a false case for a brutal war led by Bush’s son. By the time reporters brought to light the CIA’s secret prisons and its torture of terrorism suspects — the torture authorized by that son — the wall was dust.

Everything we know about the late president suggests that he might have been privately appalled by these failures of common law and common sense. But he never said anything — not in public. The CIA was his spy service, right or wrong. He protected it at all costs. Tim Weiner's reporting and writing on national security have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He is the author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI” and “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.”

 Dec. 1

Bush Death, Legacy, Criticism

New York Times, George H.W. Bush, Who Steered Nation Through Turbulent Era, Dies at 94, Adam Nagourney, Dec. 1, 2018 (print edition). Mr. Bush, a Republican, was the 41st president of the United States and the father of the 43rd [shown together above in a 2001 photo in the White House Oval Officie]. He was the last of the World War II generation to occupy the Oval Office. His one-term presidency during the tumultuous period at the end of the Cold War capped four decades in public service.

Mr. Bush (shown at right in a 1989 photo) had a form of Parkinson’s disease that forced him to use a wheelchair or motorized scooter in recent years, and he had been in and out of hospitals during that time as his health declined. In April, a day after attending Mrs. Bush’s funeral, he was treated for an infection that had spread to his blood. In 2013, he was in dire enough shape with bronchitis that former President George W. Bush, his son, solicited ideas for a eulogy.

But he proved resilient each time. In 2013 he told well-wishers, through an aide, to “put the harps back in the closet.”

Roll Call, A Life in Photos: George H.W. Bush, Gillian Roberts, Dec 1, 2018. The 41st president died Friday at 94. George H.W. Bush died Friday at 94. The 41st president — and 43rd vice president, and onetime congressman, CIA director, United Nations ambassador, Republican National Committee chairman, oil tycoon and World War II naval pilot — was also father to the 43rd president, George W. Bush.

The younger Bush in a statement Friday remembered Bush Sr. as “a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for.”

Roll Call delved into its archives to remember the former president’s days in D.C.

Roll Call, Shunned by McCain, Trumps Will Attend George H.W. Bush’s State Funeral, John T. Bennett, Dec. 1, 2018. 45th president will speak to former President George W. Bush on Saturday call. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will attend the funeral of former President George H.W. Bush, who died Friday night, the White House announced Saturday.

The Trumps were not invited to the National Cathedral funeral of Sen. John McCain, who died earlier this year. The late 41st president had been critical of Trump, once calling him a “blowhard.”

“A state funeral is being arranged with all of the accompanying support and honors. The President will designate Wednesday, Dec. 5 as a National Day Of Mourning,” she added. “He and the first lady will attend the funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.”

The Trumps hailed Bush in a statement released early Saturday morning.

“Through his essential authenticity, disarming wit, and unwavering commitment to faith, family, and country, President Bush inspired generations of his fellow Americans to public service—to be, in his words, ‘a thousand points of light’ illuminating the greatness, hope, and opportunity of America to the world,” the first couple said.

LewRockwell.com, Opinion: George Herbert Walker Bush, Charles Burris, Dec. 1, 2018. George H. W. Bush is dead. Regime journalists across the nation are scrambling to compose obituary prose concerning the late president. Here are hard cold facts which will not be included in such puerile accounts.

“Former reporter for the Houston Post, Pete Brewton [right, now a professor of journalism and law at Texas Tech University], tells of one of the most momentous stories of the past 50 years and how it has been suppressed by the establishment media and the Congress. Pete’s book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, shows the incredible complexity of the relationships in the operation of the destruction of hundreds of Savings and Loans at the hands of the CIA and the Mafia, stealing many billions of dollars in the process, and leaving the taxpayers to bailout the banks.

Big names at the state and national levels of power are involved, including Lloyd Bentsen, the Bush family, and power brokers in Houston. People such as Charles Keating and Don Dixon, who are mentioned prominently in the press in connection with the S & L debacle, were merely front men or “cutouts” for the main movers. Keating and his ilk only took millions; the CIA and the Mafia looted billions.”

In his classic book on power elite analysis, The Yankee and Cowboy War, researcher Carl Oglesby divided up the Post-WWII American ruling class into two internecine factions: the northeastern seaboard Yankees versus the Sunbelt nouveau riche Cowboys. The amazing political success of George Herbert Walker Bush was his uncanny ability to stand astride and have one foot firmly planted in each of these competing factions.

Essential to understanding the Bush legacy is the historical background of the 1980 October Surprise when key individuals of the Reagan/Bush campaign covertly met with top members of the Iranian government to prevent the release of the 55 Americans held hostage in Tehran before the November election, ensuring the defeat of Democrat incumbent Jimmy Carter. The hostages were released on the day Ronald Reagan took office. Critical arm shipments, materiel and military supplies soon began flowing to the Khomeini regime, years before the more widely known Iran-Contra Scandal, which almost brought down the Reagan administration.

Barbara Honegger worked as a researcher at the Hoover Institution before joining the Ronald Reagan administration as a researcher and policy analyst in 1980. She was the Director of the Attorney General’s Anti-Discrimination Law Review at the Department of Justice. After leaving Washington, she became the Senior Military Affairs Journalist for the Naval Postgraduate School.

While working for Reagan, she discovered information that convinced her that George H. W. Bush and William Casey had conspired to make sure that Iran did not release the U.S. hostages until Jimmy Carter had been defeated in the 1980 presidential election.

In 1987, Honegger began leaking information to journalists about the Reagan administration.

However, it was not until Reagan left office that Honegger published October Surprise (1989). In her book, Honegger claimed that in 1980 William Casey and other representatives of the Reagan presidential campaign made a deal at two sets of meetings in July and August at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid with Iranians to delay the release of Americans held hostage in Iran until after the November 1980 presidential elections. Reagan’s aides promised that they would get a better deal if they waited until Carter was defeated.

For more on the sordid backstory of epic criminality of Bush see the following volumes:

The Mafia, CIA & George Bush, by Pete Brewton; Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, And What Their Influence Means For America, by Russ Baker; American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips; Secrecy And Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, by Robert Parry; American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan, by Peter Dale Scott (shown at right); Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, by Terry Reed and John Cummings; and The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era, by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter.

[See also: George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin.]