But for now, let us look anew at Neil Bush, termed the "Savings & Loan Poster Boy" after his face on posters demanding Jail Neil Bush sprouted in Washington and Denver. The pundits of the press proclaimed he would be the "Democrats' Willie Horton" in the 1992 campaign before the father's Persian Gulf War, among other things, succeeded in getting the son's name out of the public view. —Nathaniel Blumberg
With special thanks to Richard Joste, John Pearson, John Paxson and Wilbur Wood SIDEBARS Both political parties share complicity in the greatest criminal fraud in American history. Michael Dukakis made a brief mention of it in the 1988 election campaign but was steered away from it as "an unpalyabel issue" by advisors who sought to protect Robert Strauss' son Richard, Jim Wright, Tony Coelho, the Democratic senators of the "Keating Five" and other vulnerable Democratic congressmen. On the day that Neil Bush testified about his part in the Denver S&L scandal, Treasury Secretary Brady announced that the bailout would cost $59 billion more than previously announced. The press was forced to choose which was the bigger story and the majority went for the Brady announcement. White House spin doctors thereby succeeded in getting the Neil Bush story off the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times; the Los Angeles Times, for example, didn't fall for it and ran the Neil story out front. Brady also orchestrated the plot to keep honest Americans from realizing how much they would have to pay for the high-flying thieves. In early 1985 we were told the bailout would be as much as $10 billion. Between 1986 and 1989 Brady boosted the estimate from $11 billion to $113 billion. The next May it was $182 billion and two months later it had spiraled to $500 billion. The latest estimate is $600 billion. For contrast, the entire foreign aid budget last year was less than $15 billion. Neil Bush was unceremoniously dumped from a Denver amateur tennis tournament for cheating this year after he and his doubles partner signed up to play opponents ranked much below their skill level. The president's son, rated 5.5 on a 10-point U.S. Tennis Association scale, entered to compete in the 4.5 category. Their opponents, after getting slaughtered, protested and Bush was disqualified.
, Issue 2, Spring 1992 BILL CLINTON (and George Bush)
When the "responsible"
members of the national news media stooped to spread a story splashed by
one of the sleaziest of supermarket rags, the orthodox press entered a
tawdry Tabloidworld.
Reports of George Bush's liaisons have circulated among journalists for more than a decade in the same way that reporters laughed about President Kennedy's dalliances back in the '60s. The New York Times in 1981 published a rumor that Bush had been nicked by a bullet while leaving the home of a mistress on Capitol Hill. The Washington Post story on the same rumor included a question from a reporter to Deputy Presidential Press Secretary Larry Speakes (from the official White House Press Briefing): Q. "Larry, I think a lot of us have heard that rumor and there's more to it. . . . Why don't you see if he was engaged in some kind of situation. . .?" [laughter]. Many members of Bush's staff have said they believe he had a longtime affair with his former appointments secretary, Jennifer Fitzgerald—who has told many fellow workers about it—and another affair with the widow of a former Midwestern congressman. The campaign staffs of both Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole and Rep. Jack Kemp pushed the "Bush mistress" story in 1988 trying to head off Bush's nomination. The late Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater boasted of defusing the widespread rumor by simply getting George Bush Jr. quoted in Newsweek saying "the answer to the Big A question is N.0." This denial astonishingly was accepted by the national news media as proof that there was no "Big A question." Bush "disappeared" frequently in 1978 and 1979, telling journalists that he was attending clandestine meetings with fellow former CIA directors. The other spookchiefs say the meetings never were held. The Associated Press has run the initials of an alleged mistress. A Nation columnist recently wrote that "Bush has supposedly made one of his mistresses an ambassador." Columnist Jack Anderson, the Washingtonian magazine and several "alternative" publications have written of the rumored philandering. Demonstrators in Washington on more than one occasion have chanted the names of the president and a woman. And then there is the famous Washington Post lead on a story announcing the appointment of one of Bush's alleged mistresses to a high State Department post: "[Her name], who has served President-elect George Bush in a variety of positions, . . ."
KITTY KELLEY'S TWO PERTINENT PARAGRAPHS TSR does not regard Kitty Kelley's unauthorized and gossip-filled biography of Nancy Reagan as an entirely reliable source. However, since the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers put the story on the front page and the newsmagazines gleefully filled pages with the book's most intimate details in the life of the former president and his wife, it should be pointed out that they carefully avoided perhaps the most interesting—and newsworthy—two paragraphs on Page 507 of the book concerning, of course, the present president: To certain friends, Nancy had
peddled the story of "George and his girlfriend" that had been told to
her about the evening of March 18, 1981, when some of "the group" were
having dinner at Lion d' Or in Washington, D.C.
THE PRESIDENT'S DRUG PROBLEM "Our Man in Nirvana" is how the New York Times headlined an op-ed column (1/22/92) detailing the fact that President Bush has been taking benzodiazepene in the form of the prescription drug Halcion when he travels. More than a year ago Secretary of State James Baker's similar drug problem was hardly noted by the mainstream media when he admitted he was taking Halcion while engaged in overseas negotiations. Halcion is banned in England and three other countries and the side effects of the controversial tranquilizer/anti-insomniac have led to major litigation not only in this country but around the world. U.S. Food and Drug officials are frantically trying to explain their 1982 approval of the drug since the "pivotal study" they cited has been exposed as the work of a confessed fraud. The Upjohn Co. of Kalamazoo, manufacturer of Halcion, finally has acknowledged underreporting side effects such as paranoia and memory loss. "When Halcion hits you," according to the Times column, "it's as if an angel of the Lord appears in your bedroom and tells you that nothing is important, that everything you were worried about is happening on Mars and that nirvana, Lethe and the warm arms of mother are all waiting for you. People who have used heroin tell me Halcion is better than heroin for making bad thoughts simply disappear. . . . It clouds judgment and forecloses careful analysis. It makes the user alternately supremely confident and then panicky with an unnameable dread. It causes intense, truly terrifying forgetfulness, as well as a serene bliss about that forgetfulness." This news was not picked up by the Associated Press or the mainstream media despite the warning in the penultimate paragraph that a "president with a chemical between himself and reality is the last thing America needs." Journalists traveling with the president have expressed concern about Bush' s zany behavior, irritability and difficulties in syntax, all of which may be related to his drug problem. For example, the president complained to an aide over a microphone he thought had been turned off that he was tired of the snags that had embarrassed him at press conferences. His staff makes a list of questions to be asked by the audience and then hands him prepared answers. One question had been asked out of order and the president later blew his top. "We've got to get this sorted out here," he said testily. "It happened last week, too. . . . If I think it' s going to be here [on the card with the answer] I don' t listen to the question. I just look at this." One day in New Hampshire he giddily referred to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as "the Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird." He astonished reporters by responding to a question about his political problems with a non sequitur: "Don't cry for me, Argentina!" Asked about the possibility of extending unemployment benefits, he answered: "If a frog had wings, he wouldn't hit his tail on the ground. Too hypothetical." Consider the shambles of the president's recent trip to the Far East. It began with an obscene and insulting gesture the president gave demonstrators in the Australian capital as he drove by in his armored limousine-equivalent to the rude middle-finger salute in the United States. It culminated in the humiliating scene when he vomited in the lap of the Japanese prime minister at a state dinner. The media placidly accepted the official report that he was suffering from "intestinal flu," although a Des Moines Register columnist pointedly asked "when was the last time you heard of anyone fainting from the flu ? . . . Doctor friends tell me this is almost unheard of." Researchers have reported that Halcion can cause anxiety, confusion, psychosis or seizures. The president's press secretary revealed that Bush used Halcion "to fight jet lag" during his 12-day tour of Australia and Asia. The president's doctor says he will not exclude the possibility of prescribing Halcion in the future "if it is medically indicated." It was the gossip columnist, Liz Smith—not our bland syndicated establishment-oriented editorial-page columnists or broadcast commentators—who had the guts to ask: "Can our Peerless Leader possibly be the victim of unwitting substance abuse?" Months earlier she had reported that Halcion was the "drug of choice" and was "being taken in epidemic numbers on Air Force One by both an exhausted press and jet-lagged administration insiders." There are drug problems and there are drug problems, but the orthodox press picks and chooses the ones it wants to address—too often in inverse order of their importance. NEIL BUSH (AND HIS FAMILY)—II There's John E. (Jeb) Bush—Neil's brother—on CNN's "Larry King Live" (3/9/92), a trained sleek seal making like a "political analyst" as if he had never done all the unethical, illegal things the Wall Street Journal documented in an unusually long article on August 9, 1988. The AP, UPI, networks and newsmagazines covered it up. With luck, we may hear other news about the Bush family from the orthodox press before the November election, just as Neil Bush's Silverado escapades finally were forced to the surface (but alas, only after the 1988 election). EDITOR'S NOTE: The following was cut from the Premier Issue for space reasons and went into overset for this issue. But then FLASH, as we used to say in the old days, NBC Nightly News in late February did a segment on Prescott Bush's shady dealing-almost nine months after the Wall Street Journal broke the story—without adding a single significant fact and leaving out some of the best parts. Here's our story: And then there is
Prescott Bush—Neil's uncle, brother of the president of the United States.
, Issue 3, Autumn 1992 'FAMILY VALUES'IS AN ISSUE SEVERAL OF THE underreported stories of the 1980s involved the continuing cover-up by the national news media of unethical and illegal activities by George Bush and members of his family. The failure to report the many " coincidences," "bizarre happenstances" and fully documented evidence linking the Bush family to the Hinckley family in the wake of an assassination attempt that missed making Bush president by less than an inch remains one of the blackest marks against the orthodox press in this century. Subsequently, the series of cover-ups of Bush lies—of which "Read my lips: No new taxes" was a well-reported and relatively minor lie—is a powerful indictment of a mainstream press that also has refused to investigate other assassination attempts and successful assassinations, the running of cocaine into this country and the defiant violations of the laws of the land by those in the highest echelons of government. One can only express awe at the ability of all the Bushes to lie through their teeth and stare, sometimes shifty-eyed, sometimes unblinking, into the cameras. The lead story of TSR in April, contrasting the treatment by the "responsible" press of Bill Clinton and his alleged mistress with the cover-up of George Bush and his alleged mistresses, had repercussions beyond expectations. In their July /August issues, Spy magazine obviously enjoyed TSR's revelations and Mother Jones called the Bush mistress story "the longest-running in-joke in presidential political reporting" while taking Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes to task for backing off the story. Other unorthodox publications joined in condemning the establishment press for its double standard in reporting on alleged mistresses of presidential candidates, including the aggressive way it sought out the "smoking bimbo" of Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart in 1988. FULL CREDIT
SHOULD GO to the L.A. Weekly, an alternative paper that broke the
Bush mistress story in 1988, leading five days later to a 43-point plunge
in the stock market based on the rumor that the Washington Post
was ready to publish a confirming story. USA Today had an item and
the Wall Street Journal said flatly that the Post was going
to report that Bush "had carried on an extramarital affair [with] a mistress
for several years." WSJ also said the Post story would include
a reference to another woman with whom Bush allegedly had an extramarital
affair in the mid-1970s. The story on Bush's personal life shortly thereafter
was published with no reference to the rumored mistresses.
In 1984 Vice President Bush and his appointments secretary, Jennifer Fitzgerald, enjoyed adjoining bedrooms in a Swiss chateau on Lake Geneva belonging to the Aga Khan's son, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, a classmate of Bush at Yale. Ambassador Fields said there was no household staff for the couple and "that' s why I had to help make certain arrangements for the laundry, that sort of thing." He said it "became clear to me that the Vice President and Ms. Fitzgerald were romantically involved and this was not a business visit. . . . It made me very uncomfortable. . . . I know Barbara and I like her; it was just so heavy-handed." The romantic interlude allegedly took place while Barbara Bush was on a tour promoting her book about C. Fred, the family dog before Millie. In 1985, a member of Bush's office staff was "distraught over what the staffer said was Bush's long-running affair with his appointments secretary, Jennifer Fitzgerald." The staffer said that "she and other office workers knew about the affair not only from the behavior of Bush and Fitzgerald at the office, but because Fitzgerald had referred openly, even boastfully on occasion, to it." Admiral Daniel J. Murphy, Bush's chief of staff, "had a worldwide address book worthy of any sailor" and a relationship with the vice president that offended Barbara Bush. A "high level Reagan official" said that when Bush decided to seek the presidency, Barbara Bush put the law down, and it concerned Jennifer, and it concerned Murphy's black book." Murphy and Fitzgerald soon were gone from the White House. (Jennifer eventually was given a $112,000-a-year State Department job.) THE NEW YORK POST
reminded its readers that Jennifer Fitzgerald was fined $648 by Customs
for smuggling two fur coats into the United States from Argentina in 1990.
A State Department personnel division cited her for "gross misconduct,"
but a recommendation that she be given 15 days leave without pay had never
been carried out.
WE ARE LEFT with a
man who dares to invoke the name of Harry Truman, a president who despised
everything that Bush and his family stand for. A man who, while making
his home in Maine, rents a hotel suite in Houston and even buys a little
vacant lot there to satisfy the law and fake being a resident of Texas,
which has no state income tax. A man who poses as "the environmental president"
while sabotaging the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June, a fiasco in
which the United States stood as the only anti-environment voice among
the nations of the world. A man who, while at the helm of the CIA for 356
days, put Manuel Noriega back on the CIA's payroll after his predecessor,
Stansfield Turner, had fired the Panamanian cocaine-runner. A man who suppressed
€evidence concerning the assassination on the streets of Washington
of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States, thereby
protecting his and the CIA' s suspected complicity. A man who talks of
his "honorable family" but raises sons guilty of mulcting the taxpayers
of millions of dollars, using the presidential name with corporate gangsters
to enrich themselves, and generally possessing, in the memorable words
of Molly Ivins, "the ethical sensitivity of a walnut."
NEIL BUSH (AND HIS FAMILY)—III The barriers erected by the national news media to protect George Bush and his family from exposure are falling one by one. The mainstream press finally was forced in August to tell a portion of the story it has known for more than a decade about the Jennifer Fitzgerald/ George Bush relationship. Then a television network on September 15 finally broke through the protective curtain erected around Neil Bush and his most recent scam. Just as Neil's Silverado Savings & Loan scandal was kept under wraps until after the 1988 election, the Bush campaign strategists hoped to keep the story of Neil's Apex Energy $2-million rip-off out of the major media until the November election was history. That hope was partially dashed when NBC's Dateline explored the Apex story that had been lying around for more than 21 months, waiting for the Associated Press to pick it up. One important fact Dateline left out is that Neil was able to get the taxpayers to pay his Apex $160,000 annual salary after his major investor contributed more than $100,000 to the presidential campaign of Neil's father. But as TSR pointed out in its premier issue, there's an infinitely more significant Neil Bush (and his family) story waiting for the orthodox press to report: On the afternoon of March 30, 1981, most of us were watching television replays of John W. Hinckley Jr. firing bullets that felled four men, including the president of the United States. Then on came NBC's John Chancellor, looking amazed, to read a United Press International report that Scott Hinckley, brother of the suspected assassin, was scheduled to have dinner the next night with Neil Bush, the son of the man who would become president if Ronald Reagan died of his wounds. BUT A PECULIAR THING
happened. The dinner, "along with other scheduled family activities," as
the Denver Rocky Mountain News put it, was canceled. And then the story
vanished. It never was reported in many metropolitan newspapers, never
again mentioned by the television news networks, never seriously reported
by the three newsmagazines. While the AP engaged in extensive speculation
for several days on a "possible Hinckley-Richardson conspiracy," based
on flimsy evidence that turned out to have no basis whatsoever, it refused
to report the remarkable friendship of Neil Bush and Scott Hinckley.
Neil Bush told Denver reporters that he met the brother of John Hinckley Jr. at a surprise party at the Bush home two months before the assassination attempt, which was approximately three weeks after the U.S. Department of Energy had begun a "routine audit" of the books of the Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, the Hinckley oil company. On the morning of March 30, 1981, three representatives of the U.S. Department of Energy told Scott Hinckley, vice president for operations of Vanderbilt Energy , that auditors had uncovered evidence of pricing violations on crude oil sold by the company from 1977 through 1980. The auditors said the government was considering a penalty of $2 million. The meeting ended a little more than an hour before President Reagan was shot. Still unanswered is whether John Hinckley Jr. knew that an audit of his father's company was under way while he was living in the Hinckley home near Denver. After Sharon Bush, Neil's wife, had told reporters that the Bush family knew the Hinckley family because of their contributions to the Bush campaign, both the Washington and Houston offices of Vice President Bush said they had checked the records and found "no evidence of contributions to Bush from the Hinckley family ." The truth, however, is that John Hinckley Sr. had contributed to Bush as early as his 1970 campaign for the U.S. Senate. John Hinckley Sr. was repeatedly characterized in the press as " a strong supporter of President Reagan" although there is no record of contributions to Reagan. To the contrary, the senior Hinckley and Scott Hinckley separately contributed to John Connally in late 1979 when Connally was leading the campaign to stop Reagan from gaining the 1980 presidential nomination. Neil Bush lived throughout most of 1978 in Lubbock, where he served as campaign manager for his oldest brother, George W. Bush, in an unsuccessful race for a U.S. congressional seat and where young Hinckley also lived while attending Texas Tech University. Both Neil and George have admitted that it was "certainly conceivable" they had met Hinckley in Lubbock. In addition to many other BushHinckley connections, several "coincidences" involve the family of the late H.L. Hunt, a prominent name in all studies of the assassination of President Kennedy. Jack and Jo Ann Hinckley conned the press into portraying them as ordinary middle-class people, but in fact they were millionaires who once were neighbors of the Hunts in the most exclusive suburb of Dallas. The Hinckley children were graduated along with Hunt children from Highland Park High School, the most prestigious public school in the Dallas area. Especially pertinent was a spectacular trial of Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt in Lubbock which could not have escaped the attention of young Hinckley while he was living there. None of the extensive Hinckley-Bush-Hunt ties have been explored in the national media. THESE ARE ONLY
a few examples of unanswered questions surrounding the assassination attempt
and the farcical "trial" conducted by the CIA' s favorite judge which did
nothing to answer questions of legitimate concern.
George Bush's other brother, Jonathan J., the only principal in the New York firm of J. Bush & Co., was barred from trading with the general public for one year for violating Massachusetts registration laws, fined $30,000 and ordered to buy back stocks sold to clients during the preceding 43 months. A "dismayed" regulator told a reporter that "anyone who has been notified that he is violating state law and continues to do so certainly exemplifies a cavalier attitude." Jeffrey
Dahmer, a necrophiliac who killed and dismembered 15 young men, ate a heart
and other body parts and had sex with corpses, is judged sane and found
guilty. John Hinckley Jr., a smart brat with several excellent reasons
for wanting George Bush to be president, is judged insane and found not
guilty of attempting to Assassinate the president of the United States.
As Mike Royko summed up recent acts in the judicial theater of the absurd:
"You go up to 100 normal people and ask them if some savings and loan swindler
is nuts. They'll all say that he' s just a crook. Then you say: 'By the
way, you mind if I eat your leg?' And they'll say: 'You must be nuts.'
See? It's real simple."
, Issue 4, February 1993 NEIL BUSH (AND HIS FAMILY)—IV No
need to dwell on George Bush' s unpardonable pardons, a Christmas Eve gift
to the American people on a par with his other unethical decisions, accompanied
by illegal activities, during the cynical and conspiratorial Reagan-Bush
administrations.
, Issue 6, Autumn 1993 NEIL BUSH (AND HIS FAMILY)—V, SEYMOUR HERSH AND ME Back
in 1983, I spent a contentious hour with Seymour Hersh in Missoula after
he had met with one of my classes at the Montana School of Journalism.
SEYMOUR HERSH,
besides being a world-class investigative reporter, is famous for his arrogance.
"Do you have a smoking gun?" he asked me three or four times. "Of course
not," I repeatedly said. "How could I have a smoking gun? The smoking gun
was so hot the FBI tossed it in the Potomac." I explained that I had a
thoroughly documented account of how one of the biggest stories of our
time had been turned into a cover-up by the government with the aid of
a compliant press. They had even succeeded in establishing as historical
fact the patently ludicrous conclusion that Hinckley had tried to kill
the president "to impress Jodie Foster."
SO YOU
WILL understand, I trust, why Seymour's long article in the September 6
New
Yorker brought a wry smile to the face of your obedient servant. There
he was, telling the world that Neil Bush and his family, and the people
who consorted with the family, were outrageously corrupt. And Seymour,
in his outstanding investigatory fashion, now was documenting the fact
that after George Bush was lavished with gifts of appreciation for three
days last April by the Kuwaitis, Neil and his brother Marvin, seeking the
spoils of war, turned to lobbying Kuwaiti officials on behalf of American
corporations.
, Issue 7, Winter 1993/1994 NEIL BUSH(AND HIS FAMILY)—VI The establishment press continues to behave more like the supermarket sheets. While anonymous Arkansas state troopers with questionable backgrounds are quoted at length in our current news media, Neil Bush and his family continue on their merry, merry way: The orthodox press covered up the story of a Navy document that offers evidence George Bush strafed Japanese sailors in a lifeboat when he was a Navy pilot in World War II. Firmly documented in a new book, "Spider's Web," is that Bush agreed to the secret arming of Iraq before the Gulf War, about which he has lied consistently, and that he and Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, were "the driving force behind the efforts to keep Congress from gaining access to the Iraq-related documents" in 1991 and 1992, about which he has lied consistently. (The author of "Spider's Web" was provided armed guards by the New York district attorney's office in the final weeks of work on the book after two break-ins and numerous death threats.) More evidence also surfaced that Bush knew about the secret arms-for-hostages deal made before the 1980 election, about which he has lied repeatedly. The national news media gave these stories little or no play. L. William Seidman former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, tells in his recently published memoirs that he timed the filing of a lawsuit to minimize embarrassment to Neil Bush (and Neil's father), and communicated with Barbara Bush about her son's S&L predicament—both of which charges at the time were repeatedly denied by the president, by his wife and by his aides. "Here was a neat little story for some investigative reporter," Seidman wrote, "and I could even write the headline: 'White House Tries to Influence Neil Bush Case."' Of course, nothing like that headline ever appeared. More than 12,000 classified documents, finally released in Washington in November, detailed the political violence committed by right-wing death squads in El Salvador with the full knowledge of President Bush and his predecessor. [Also see the Dec. 6, 1993, issue of the New Yorker.] (This is additional evidence that the classification of documents, supposedly to keep our enemies from valuable intelligence, is far more often a device to keep the citizens of the United States from knowing what their government is doing.) Ex-President Bush received $100,000 for an Amway convention speech, putting him almost in a class with ex-President Reagan for venality after leaving office. Spy magazine looked at the record and asked the pertinent question in its January 1994 issue—"George Bush: Why Isn't This Man in Jail?" British author Salman Rushdie, condemned to death by the Iranian government for his book, "The Satanic Verses," said his invitation to the White House and warm greeting from President Clinton was a political act that showed "the most dramatic and public affirmation" of the United States commitment to First Amendment freedoms. Two years ago, when Rushdie met with members of Congress, President Bush refused to see him. Two of Neil Bush's brothers are candidates for governor, their records of unethical and illegal activities (TSR 1-6) ignored by the media in Florida, where Jeb is running, and Texas, where George W. seeks the nomination. Jeb established a claim for the Chutzpah Award of the 1990s by announcing that if elected he would abolish the state's department of education and—get this from him—build more prisons to fight crime. No wonder that "bush," as applied in the jargon of baseball, so perfectly describes the character of the former president and his family. Reporters covering the gubernatorial campaigns privately refer to the two candidates as "the shrubs," but publicly gloss over their records.
, Issue 8, Spring 1994 NEIL BUSH(AND HIS FAMILY)—VII At
an April seminar on "Privacy and the Press" at the Montana School of Journalism,
it was clear that journalists and academics in Montana are thoroughly embarrassed
by the shallow coverage and sleazy tactics pursued by the national news
media against President Clinton and his wife.
Treasure
State Review || Charlie
of 666 || The Afternoon
of March 30 || TSR
Internet Issue #1 ||
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