Secret Societies
Skull & Bones
George Bush, Skull & Bones and the NWO -
part 3 of 4
BUSH IN PROFILE
Unlike Averell Harriman, who reportedly coveted personal political
power and drew sharp criticism from some of his fellow Bonesmen, George Bush has
been a long-term "project" of Skull & Bones. The Bush presidency in real and
symbolic terms represents the-effort by the Order to restore the lost spirit of
the WASP warrior Henry Stimson. With the passage of time and the decay of the
WASP elite, the Bush presidency may yet prove to be a tragic replay of past
American dreams.
George Bush's career was sponsored every step of the way by Skull
& Bones members, mostly of his father's generation. Prescott Bush (Skull
& Bones Class of 1917), a Brown Brothers Harriman partner who would serve
one term in Congress as senator from Connecticut, sent George to the traditional
private preparatory school, Phillips Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, which
grooms young New England squires for later studies at Yale.
It was while finishing his prep school training at Andover that
Bush was first exposed to Henry Stimson. Reportedly, Stimson delivered a
stirring patriotic speech to the Phillips student body in l940 arguing
forcefully for American intervention in the war in Europe. Ironically, at that
very moment on the Yale campus, the majority of Skull & Bonesmen were
leading the Ameriea First movement, which opposed any such U.S. entanglement in
Europe.
When war with Japan broke out a year later, George Bush enlisted
in the Navy and was trained as a pilot. He flew more than 50 missions before
being shot down in the Pacific. At Yale after the war, Bush captained the
baseball team and followed his father's footsteps into the Order.
Political legends have it that George Bush shunned his family's
patronage and went off on his own to launch a business career as an oil
wildcatter, or speculator, in Texas. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Bush moved to Texas to work for Dresser Industries selling oil drilling
equipment. The job was arranged for him by his father with Dresser president
Neil Mallon, who was a fellow member of Skull Bones. Desser, according to
several sources, had close ties with the CIA.
After a few years with Dresser, George Bush set up his own
company, Zapata Oil, to explore new oil fields in Texas and Mexico. Again, Bush
was heavily backed by member of his family. Uncle George Herbert Walker, also a
Skull & Bonesman, put up a large amount of capital, as did Brown Brothers
Harriman. Lazard Brothers, a Jewish brokerage house with longstanding friendly
ties to the New England WASPs, put up some money as well, at the urging of Andre
Meyer, the owner of the Washingtor. Post Corporation and the father of the
current Post publisher Kathanne Graham. Zapata Oil sunk the first offshore well
for the Kuwaiti government.
Even with that kind of backing, George Bush was less than a
success as a businessman. In 1964, a longtime Bush friend, William Farrish III
of Scotland, bought the majority of shares in Zapata for $3.2 million to keep
the business afloat, while George, in a major career shift, ran for U.S.
Congress from a wealthy district in Houston, Texas. He won.
During his three terms in Congress (Bush lost the 1970 Senate race
to Lloyd Bentsen), George Bush distinguished himself as an advocate of zero
population growth and a defender of the eugenics movement. Both of these
positions, radical for their day, were probably the result of Bush's close
friendship with William Draper Jr.-a fellow Bonesman and a longtime advocate of
population reduction schemes in the Third World.
The 1970s were for George Bush years of grooming in high-level
politics and foreign policy. During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972,
George Bush was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. He later
joined the chorus calling for Nixon's resignation. After a tour as the U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations, Bush was sent off to Communist China as the
Chief Liaison Officer prior to the formalization of diplomatic relations. Bush
shared the Beijing experience with Winston Lord, a fellow Skull & Bones
member who was the CIA station chief. Lord went on to become president of the
New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1983. (The Lord family founded
the city of Hartford, Connecticut, has a large number of Skull & Bones
members on its family tree, and set up one of the most powerful old-line Wall
Street law firms, Lord Day Lord.) In 1975, George Bush completed his "grooming"
with a brief stint as Gerald Ford's CIA director.
In 1980, Bush ran a short-lived campaign against Ronald Reagan for
the Republican Party's presidential nomination. Future running mate Reagan cut
short Bush's 1980 presidential hopes by defeating him soundly in the primary
election in New Hampshire, in the heart of New England. Reagan blasted Bush for
his membership in the internationalist Trilateral Commission, which had attained
notoriety because 20 members of the unpopular Carter administration had served
on the commission. Bush's campaign was otherwise noteworthy beceause a
significant number of his campaign volunteers were CIA officials; his campaign
organization was directed by six top Agency and Pentagon retirees.
THE ORDER'S NETWORK
With Bush in the White House, the WASP Establishment is seeking to
reconquer lost territory, not only within the domain of national politics, but
within the financial community, the legal profession and big business. A
struggle between some elements of the WASP crowd and the Jewish "New Crowd" on
Wall Street has been playing out in the newspapers and federal courts for the
past six years, beginning with the criminal indictments of junk bond dealers
Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and the bankrupting and criminal prosecuting of
the powerful Zionist-run brokerage house Drexel Rurnham Lambert.
To some extent these wars reflect the kind of scramble that always
takes place during a financial crisis and shakeout, when certain formerly
powerful financial institutions are wiped out and others profit from their
rivals' adversity. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the House of Morgan
came out on top. Not coincidentally, Morgan Guaranty Trust and Morgan Stanley
have been cornerstones of the Skull & Bones grouping on Wall Street since
their founding duling the last century. Founding partner Harold Stanley was a
Bonesman.
One hub of the Order's postwar economic power, the major
multinational oil corporations, have clearly benefited greatly from President
Bush's "charming little colonial war" in the Persian Gulf. The leading oil
companies which are linked to the Order are: Standard Oil Trust Corporation,
Shell Oil of America, Creole Petroleum Corporation and Pennzoil Corporation. The
founder and present chairman of the board of Pennzoil started out in the oil
business in partnership with George Bush in Zapata Oil. It is interesting to
note in the context of the Bonesmen's deep involvement in the world petroleum
business that George Bush, during his early days as a Texas oilman, had worked
closely with the Kuwaitis.
Eight major Wall Street and Washington, D.C. law firms stand out
as practically wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Order of Skull & Bones. Each
of these firms was founded by members of the Order, and each of these firms
continues to provide up-and-coming- Order initiates in the legal community with
training, credentials and connections. A review of the major corporate clients
of these firms would reveal many of the most powerful companies among the
Fortune 500.
The Skull & Bones law firms are:
* Lord Day Lord In addition to their corporate clientele and their direct
involvement in government through the frequent appointment of partners to
Cabinet posts, these firms also specialize in handling the personal financial
affairs and investment portfolios of the leading WASP families. In this respect,
the Skull & Bones-centered WASP Establishment imitates the Venetian model.
During'the height of power of Venice, which was the trading capital of the
Byzantine Empire, the leading families used their personal wealth to establish
insurance companies, family funds and cultural programs through which they
extended their political power.
Today, the prominent law firms listed above play a speclialrole in
directing the affairs of the leading tax-exempt foundations which shape the
culture and public opinion of the United States and many foreign countries. We
have already-seen that McGeorge Bundy, a leading Bonesman, left his position as
National Security Adviser to President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 assume the
presidency of the Ford Foundation. During the nearly two decades that
Bundy'spent directing the $3 billion tax-exempt fund, he arguably wielded more
power than he did during his six years as the National Security Adviser to two
presidents. Under the Bundy reign the Ford Foundation spent hundreds'of millions
of dollars to launch the environmentalist' movement and funded scores of
projects devoted to population reduction in the Third World.
From its early decades, the Order has concentrated much of its
efforts at establishing, controlling and, in some instances, capturing the major
tax-exempt philanthropic foundations of America. The Russell Sage Foundation,
which specializes in "social control" programs, was founded by Bonesmen. Among
the leading functions of the Russell Sage Foundation today is the maintaining of
a centralized tracking of the finances of all the large tax-exempt foundations
in the United States. The Peabody Foundation, the Slater Foundation and several
of the Rockefeller foundations were all either started by members of the Order
or haw been dominated by Bonesmen from their inception. Other major family
funds, like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, were wrestled from
family control by the Skull & Bones apparatus. During the tenure of McGeorge
Bundy, two members of the Ford family resigned from the Ford Foundation in
disgust over the direction in which Bundy had taken the philanthropic agency.
THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Between 1983-1986, the British-born conspiracy theorist Antony
Sutton wrote a series of pamphlets about the Order of Skull & Bones.
According to informed sources, Sutton was one of several historians who were
provided with a large file of the Order's internal documents, including minutes
of some meetings, descriptions of rituals, and what would appear to be a rather
complete list of its members from its founding through to the early 1980s. The
short pamphlets were compiled into one volume and published as a book in 1986.
For someone closely following the just-concluded Persian Gulf War
and attempting to gain some insight into George Bush's performance during that
largely orchestrated affair, one recurring theme in the Sutton volume stands out
like a sore thumb: the New World Order.
According to the Skull & Bones documents used by Sutton in his
somewhat flawed profile of the Order, the creation of a New World Order is a
primary goal of the Bonesmen and has been for decades. For the initiates into
the Order, the term New World Order has a very specific meaning.
It is a world dominated by American military power and American
control over all strategic raw materials. Just as the Greek city-state of Sparta
provided the Skull & Bones with the image of a WASP warrior caste, the
Persiain Empire, with its system of coalitions of satrap armies, provides the
model for the Bonesmen's New World Order. The image of Secretary of State James
A. Baker III traveling from foreign capital to foreign capital-demanding
military legions or chests of gold to finance the war for a New World Order is
an image straight out of the chronicles of the Persian Empire.
According to the recent biography of Henry Stimson, the man who
inspired President Bush was firmly convinced, that it was essential for America
to go to war once every generation or so. It was, for Stimson, a spiritually
cleansing process which enables the nation to rally behind a cause and overcome
its weaknesses and shortcomings in one grand burst of military fervor. The
romantic mystique of the purgative powers of combat is key to understanding the
politcal philosophy of Skull & Bones.
Although America's Vietnam debacle remains a bitter memory of the
Bonesmen's failure in war, the recent Persian Gulf conflict, with its massive
overkill and the use of highly advanced weapons and technologies, is now the new
glorious symbol of the WASP warrior caste's reincarnation. When President Bush
vowed that the Gulf War would not be another Vietnam," he was speaking first and
foremost to his fellow Bonesmen-not to the American people..If such thinking
smacks of dangerous fantasy on the part of a major world power in the modern
era, it is indeed.
On a more practical political level, the Gulf War was a gambit to
save the Bush presidency from a mountinng pile of domestic financial woes, not
the least of which was the savings andloan (S&L) crisis and a pending series
of failures of major commercial banks. In the months preceding the gulf
showdown, the prsident's own son, Neil Bush, came under intense media scrutiny
for his role in the failure of a large S&L in Colorado. Neil's photograph,
testifying under oath before a congressional committee probing fraud among top
S&L manager's, became a familiar front-page feature in every major newspaper
in America, threatening dangerous popular disillusion with the Yale Bonesman in
the White House. With a U.S. federal government deficit projected at nearly a
half a trillion dollars for Fiscal Year 1991, in large part because of the
S&L crisis and a shrinking business tax base, the Democratic Party majority
in the U S Congress was pressing for deep cutbacks in defense spending now that
the Cold War had ended.
On the international stage, the reunification of Germany, clearly
the most dramatic event of 1990, posed new challenges to the Bush team. Germany
was about to emerge as the dominant power in continental Europe by virtue of its
advanced industrial infrastructure and its long tradition of independent
political dealings with Moscow. Just months before the outbreak of the gulf
crisis, Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl had met with Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev and signed a long term economic assistance pact. As a result,
Gorbachev dropped all remaining objections to the immediate reunification of
Germany.
At that point, the Bush administration changed its tactics.
Previously, in sharp contrast to the Thatcher government in Great Britain, it
had been nominally in favor of German reunification. But at the Houston economic
summit of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries in the summer of 1990, the
United States blocked (with Britain) Germany's plan of unconditional economic
aid to the Soviet Union. President Bush took the position that the Soviet Union
must submit to International Monetary Fund requisites as a precondition for any
substantive economic assistance.
In the Far East, Japan's continuing growth in manufacturing also
posed a threat to Washington's desire to retain superpower status If President
Bush and his Bonesmen coterie were unaware of a stunning historical analogy,
their British "cousins" were quick to pick up on the parallels between the
global strategic situation in July 1990 and the identical intemational situation
that existed 100 years earlier.
In the 1890s, France, under the brilliant political leadership of
Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanataux, was attempting to forge a Eurasian alliance
with Germany, Russia and Meiji Japan. The idea was to-link continental Europe
with Japan and China through a series of large overland infrastructure projects,
beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Through treaties covering key areas
of economic and security matters, Hanataux hoped to create a zone of prosperity,
built on a foundation of rapid economic growth and extensive trade.
Such a politlcal-economic common interest alliance threatened the
imperial hegemony of Great Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Britian
looked to the United States (as its English-speaking ally) to join in sabotaging
the Hanataux plan. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the
Russo-Japanese War of1905, Britain and her American junior partner (by then led
by Henry Stimson's old mentor Teddy Roosevelt) managed to disrupt the
French-German-Russian-Japanese econornic axis. Two world wars and the Great
Depression were the consequences of that interference.
THE PERSIAN GULF WAR
It was against this historical backdrop that President Bush,
invoking the World War II imagery of his Skull & Bones idol Henry Stimson,
went to war against Iraq. There is even speculation that President Bush was
personally instrumental in luring Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, thereby,
provoking the American-led military response. Many news accounts have emphasized
that a two-hour private meeting between the president and Margaret Thatcher in
the Aspen, Colorado vacation chalet of U.S. Ambassador Henry Catto on August 2,
1990 helped finalize Bush's decision to immediately deploy military force.
Recently, an astute Japanese analyst drew a disturbing parallel
between Bush and FDR, who was gready influenced by Stimson. According to the
wtiter, FDR lured Japan into World War II through an intricate series of
economic warfare maneuvers which left Japan with little choice but to
strike-back. In much the same way, said the analyst, Bush had lured Saddam
Hussein into Kuwait in order to launch a new Gulf War that would have
consequences reaching far beyond Iraq and the Middle East.
As a result of the military victory over Iraq, the United States
is in the process of establishing a string of permanent military bases
throughout the Persian Gulf and Near East. The oil sheikdoms of the region, led
by Saudi Arabia, are now thoroughly dependent on the American military presence
to ensure the survival of their regimes. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries:(OPEC) is effectively captured by Washington. American bankers aided
by U.S. gunboats now are setting world oil prices. Thus, one consequence of the
Persian Gulf War is that the United States now has an oil weapon-pointed
principally at Germany and Japan. Ironically, America's two chief economic
rivals have paid out a total of $27 billion to date to help finance a Bush
administration military adventure which put the oil weapon in Washington's hand.
Another telling example of how the Order's man in the Oval Office
intends to administer a crmubling U.S. domestic economy while imposing the New
World Order on the rest of the world is to be found in the recent buyout of the
majority of stock in Citicorp, the largest U.S. commercial bank, by Saudi Prince
Talal bin Abdul Aziz. Citicorp is one of the major American commercial banks on
the verge of collapse, but which is considered by the Bush administration and
the Federal Reserve System to be "too big to fall." The stock purchase amounted
to a Saudi Royal Family bail-out of Citicorp, using the increased profits being
enjoyed by the House of Saud as a result of the massive jump in Saudi oil
production since the beginning of the gulf crisis in August 1990.
There points up a striking difference between the role of the
United States in World War II and the Bush administration's handling to date of
the Middle East crisis. During World War II, the United States went through a
genuine economic revival. Skull & Bones historian Samuel Huntington
described it as a "neo Hamiltonian" policy, a reference to the first United
States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Beginning in 1939, America
became a major supplier of military and industrial goods under the Lend-Lease
program to the European states fighting Hitler. At the same time, the federal
government began issuing low interest credits to revive the nation's
manufacturing base which had been gutted by a decade of economic depression. The
industrial buildup accelerated once the United States formally entered ..World
War II, leading to the establishing of entirely new industrial sectors, such as
aerospace and petrochemicals.
This time around-at least to date-there has been no such
marshaling of the U.S. domestic industrial base. Despite moderate increases in
the production of certain high-tech weapons systems, the U.S. economy continues
its gradual slide into what could be a new depression. Unemployment is greater
than at any point in the last decade. Some sociologists fear that the complete
disintegration of America's urban centers could produce new race-riots as early
as the summer of1991.
The single greatest challenge to George Bush and the.Order is: Can
they capitalize on-the current revival of the American spirit to reverse
the..disastrous post industrial society dogmas, and launch their own version of
the World WarII neo Hamiltonian industrial recovery? So far, some doomsayers
claim, it appears that Bush and his administratlon plan instead to direct
their.efforts at looting and blackmailing the rest of the world-especially the
gulf oil sheikdoms, Japan and Germany into bailing out the bankrupt U.S.
financial houses and federal government and financing the posting of
American-led foreign legions at every corner of the globe where there are large
deposits of strategic raw materials. If this policy is not altered, George Bush
may soon find himself presiding over a new disaster that will make the Vietnam
debacle appear insignificant in comparison.
The politics of the New World Order appear to be borrowed largely
from the pages of the decline and fall of the British Empire. Political
columnist Patrick Buchanan, an early vocal opponent of the Bush Persian Gulf
strategy, warned as early as August 1990 that the White House was falling into
the trap of British "balance of power" politics, the very politics that left
Great Britain on the scrap heap of world powers at the close of World War II,
and put Winston Churchill, the architect of World War II and the Cold War, out
of a job.
Since the crushing military defeat of Iraq by a technologically
far superior American-led coalition, the Bush administration has vacillated on a
postwar policy - for the region. It has pursued a pragmatic power balancing game
which is rife with potential problems. The two key elements of the American
balance-of-power politics in the region are the preservation of a weakened but
territorialy whole Iraq to offset the other would be regional powers Iran and
Syria. At the same time, it is tilting toward a nominally more "pro-Arab"
position with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
While the harsh reparations terms being imposed upon a
war-devastated Iraq, are probably, in the mind of Bush, aimed at dissuading any
future regional military power from launching-cross-border aggressions, they
amount to the slow, excruciating extermination of the population of that
country. As one seasoned observer noted recently, earlier air wars had caused
greater immediate losses of life, due to the inaccuracy of bombs and rockets but
had generally left basic infrastructures intact. The precision bombing of Iraq's
entire infrastructure has caused what a United Nations team has called
an-"apocalypse."The greater loss of life, will occur in the aftermath of the
combat as a country with 16 million inhabitants is suddenly thrown into a
"pre-industial" state with no electricity, no water or other necessities.
American humanitarian aid, administered by occupying troops will not offset this
apocalypse-especially if harsh war reparations and asset seizures deprive Iraq
of the financial resources needed to begin a rebuilding process.
Regardless of the fact that the United States has not thrown the
full weight of its military presence behind the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein
regime, the shortsightedness of the present Bush policy may very well lead to a
Lebanon-type protracted civil war in Iraq. Such a war could potentially spread
throughout the region.
(end of part 3)
* Davis Polk Wardwell
* Simpson Thacher
Bartlett
* Debevoise Pli,npton Lyons & Gates
* Cravath Swaine &
Moore
* Covington & Burling
* Dewey Ballantine Palmer & Woods
*
Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy.
