[NYTr] As Hillary Runs for Pres, Consider How Bill Helped Bush Dynasty

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News via Alternet - Oct 5, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64345

As Hillary Runs for the White House, 

Consider Bill's Refusal to Explore Bush I Scandals 

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

[Editor's Note: As Hillary Clinton has emerged as a frontrunner for the
Democratic presidential nomination, this excerpt from Consortium News
Editor Robert Parry's book, "Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush
Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq," is required reading on the issue of
how an elected Hillary Clinton may treat the eight years of crime and
scandal from the second Bush presidency.

The excerpt opens with a scene early in the second year of Bill
Clinton's presidency with him explaining to White House guests why he
didn't pursue geopolitical scandals that had implicated George H.W.
Bush in gross abuses of power and arguably criminal acts.

President Clinton made clear he saw historical truth as less important
than his hopes for Republican cooperation on his domestic agenda. But
this willingness to sweep major scandals under the rug left the White
House back door ajar for a restoration of the Bush Family dynasty a
half dozen years later -- with disastrous consequences for the American
Republic.

The relevance of this story today is that Bill Clinton's misguided
"pragmatism" seems to a characteristic of Hillary Clinton's political
persona, too, as she hedges her positions on the Iraq War and signals a
willingness to support a dangerous confrontation with Iran.]

                               *

Excerpted from the Chapter, "The Wedding"

The light from the setting sun streamed through the windows of the East
Room after the first White House wedding in more than two decades.
Guests were picking desserts from a buffet table and conversing, some
gesturing with crystal champagne flutes in hand.

Despite the formality of the surroundings, the event had a relaxed air.
Earlier, President Bill Clinton had given a gracious toast in honor of
the wedding couple -- Tony Rodham and Nicole Boxer -- and played the
saxophone to entertain their families and friends.

The groom was Clinton's brother-in-law; the bride was the daughter of
his political ally, Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Many other
guests had supported his campaign for the White House two years
earlier. Clinton, a tall man renowned for his personal magnetism and
ability to focus on each individual he meets at least for a few
fleeting seconds, was moving among the guests like a host at the latter
stages of a house party. Unlike many of the guests sipping from crystal
or drinking from coffee cups, Clinton carried in his large hands a mug
with the presidential seal.

As he came upon one knot of guests, Clinton started talking like one
might chat with neighbors about troubles at work. He complained about
how rancorous Washington had become, how beleaguered he felt, how
horribly the press was treating him.

"He was unburdening himself," recalled Stuart Sender, a Los
Angeles-based documentary filmmaker who was one of the guests.

Sixteen months into his Presidency, Clinton was learning about the
hard-knuckled realities of the new Washington where campaigns never
stop, where there is no respite for governance between elections.

Clinton was getting clobbered by the Republicans and by the news media
over an old real-estate deal in Arkansas, known as Whitewater. The
political heat had gotten so searing that Clinton had consented to the
appointment of a special prosecutor.

Philandering

There had been a firestorm, too, over allegations from Arkansas state
troopers about Clinton's philandering as governor. A woman named Paula
Jones had emerged from that controversy with claims that Clinton had
crudely propositioned her.

He also was taking flak over the firing of employees in the White House
Travel Office, and there were bizarre suspicions circulating about the
suicide of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, who had come with
the Clintons from Arkansas.

Foster shot himself in the head after growing despondent over the harsh
press criticism he had received for his role in the Travel Office
affair, but some conservatives were spreading rumors of a deeper
mystery.

Clinton felt besieged not only by aggressive Republicans but by the
national press corps. Since the last Democratic President, Jimmy
Carter, left office in 1981, a powerful conservative media had come
into its own. Every day, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh regaled his
millions of listeners with three hours of ridicule directed at Clinton
and his wife, Hillary.

Besides Limbaugh, there were scores of imitators and wannabes all over
talk radio, such as Watergate convict G. Gordon Liddy and Iran-Contra
figure, retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.

Right-wing print outlets also were growing in number and in influence,
the likes of the American Spectator and The Washington Times, not to
mention The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages and conservative
columnists in newspapers across the country. Many of the commentators
also appeared on TV political chat shows to reprise their opinions for
millions of more Americans nationwide.

Anti-Clinton books and videos were selling fast, too. The annual
Conservative Political Action Conference in February 1994 looked like a
trade show for "I-hate-Clinton" paraphernalia.

Many mainstream journalists at outlets such as NBC News and The New
York Times also joined in the Clinton bashing, seemingly eager to prove
that they could be tougher on a Democrat than any Republican. They were
determined to show they weren't the "liberal media" that the
conservatives had railed against since the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and
the Watergate scandal that sank Richard Nixon's presidency in 1974.

Indeed, it was The Washington Post, the newspaper credited with
unraveling the Watergate mystery, which had led the charge on the
Whitewater case with front-page stories that put Clinton in a public
relations corner, forcing him to acquiesce to a special prosecutor.

Spring Day

So, on that warm spring day of May 28, 1994, Clinton hosted the
Rodham-Boxer wedding -- the first at the White House since Nixon hosted
the nuptials of his daughter Tricia and Edward Cox in 1971.

The Boxer-Rodham wedding had started 90 minutes behind schedule because
Clinton returned late from a golf game. The anxious bride and groom
learned that nothing happens at the White House until the President is
ready.

But the nervousness was put into historical perspective by Clinton's
toast. He recalled that the last time a wedding reception was planned
for the East Room was 1814, when the event was interrupted by the
British attack on Washington and the burning of the White House.

Almost 180 years later, the White House was under siege again -- or so
it felt to Clinton - only this time the guys with the torches were the
Republicans and the target of their flames was the first Democratic
President in 12 years.

As the spring sun was setting and the wedding event was winding down,
Clinton's mind was gearing back up. He was thinking about the nasty
political battles all around him. Making the rounds at the party at his
White House home, he was looking for a sympathetic hearing.

Stuart Sender and his wife Julie Bergman Sender were admiring the
glorious scene in the ornate East Room. "All of a sudden we looked up
and there was President Clinton," Stuart Sender said.

The chitchat soon turned to Clinton's complaints about his ill
treatment at the hands of the news media.

"He started the conversation by saying how horrible the press is being
to him," said Julie Bergman Sender, a Hollywood producer, political
activist and daughter of songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman. "I was
looking around at the planters. I was thinking, 'you're not standing in
your living room, really.'"

Questions for Clinton

Stuart Sender, who had worked as a journalist on the Reagan-Bush-era
Iran-Contra and Iraqgate scandals, had a different reaction. He
wondered why Clinton had never pursued those investigations of
Republican wrongdoing when he became President in January 1993.

After all, Sender thought, those were real scandals, involving secret
dealings with unsavory regimes. Top Republicans allegedly had helped
arm Iraq's Saddam Hussein as well as the radical Islamic mullahs of
Iran, violations both of law and constitutional principles.

Those actions had then been surrounded by stout defenses by Republicans
and their media allies. The protection had taken on the look of
systematic cover-ups, sometimes even obstruction of justice, to spare
the top echelons of the Reagan-Bush administrations from
accountability. These weren't like the trivial allegations besetting
Clinton's Presidency.

Indeed, as Clinton was heading into office at the start of 1993, four
investigations were underway that implicated senior Republicans in
potential criminal wrongdoing.

The Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages case was still alive, with special
prosecutor Lawrence Walsh furious over new evidence that President
George H.W. Bush may have obstructed justice by withholding his own
notes from investigators and then ducking an interview that Walsh had
put off until after the 1992 elections.

Bush also had sabotaged the investigation by pardoning six Iran-Contra
defendants on Christmas Eve 1992, possibly the first presidential
pardon ever issued to protect the same President from criminal
liability. In granting the pardons, Bush had denigrated the Iran-Contra
charges as the "criminalization of policy differences." In late 1992,
Congress also was investigating Bush's alleged role in secretly aiding
Iraq's Saddam Hussein during and after Hussein's eight-year-long war
with Iran.

Representative Henry Gonzalez, a Democrat from Texas who had served
three decades in Congress, led the charge in exposing intricate
financial schemes that the Reagan-Bush administrations had employed to
assist Hussein.

There also were allegations of indirect U.S. military aid through third
countries, claims that Bush and other Republican leaders emphatically
denied.

Lesser known investigations were examining two other sets of alleged
wrongdoing: the so-called October Surprise issue (allegations that Bush
and other Republicans had interfered with Jimmy Carter's hostage
negotiations with Iran during the 1980 campaign) and the Passportgate
affair (evidence that Bush operatives had improperly searched Clinton's
passport file in 1992, looking for dirt that could be used to discredit
his patriotism and secure reelection for Bush).

All told, the four sets of allegations, if true, would paint an
unflattering portrait of the 12-year Republican rule, with two illegal
dirty tricks (October Surprise and Passportgate) book-ending
ill-considered national security schemes in the Middle East
(Iran-Contra and Iraqgate).

Had the full stories been told, the American people might have
perceived the legacies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush quite
differently than they do today.

Dropped Investigations

But the Clinton administration and congressional Democrats dropped all
four investigations beginning in early 1993, either through benign
neglect -- by failing to hold hearings and keeping the issues alive in
the news media -- or by actively closing the door on investigative
leads.

Clinton's disinterest in these scandals had mystified some activists in
the Democratic base and some investigators who, like Stuart Sender, had
watched as the rug was pulled from under these historic inquiries.

After the investigations died, some Democrats in Congress, who had
participated in the aborted probes, came under nasty Republican attacks
as did journalists who had pursued the stories.

Gonzalez had raised the ire of George H.W. Bush's administration by
revealing that Bush and other senior Republicans had followed an
ill-fated covert policy of coddling Saddam Hussein, disclosures that
had rained on Bush's parade after the U.S. military victory over Iraq
in the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Now, Gonzalez was left looking like a foolish old man, a kind of
modern-day Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

The same could be said of Lawrence Walsh, a lifelong Republican who
crossed his own party by challenging the cover stories that had
shielded top Republicans caught up in the Iran-Contra Affair.

In pressing investigations into alleged obstructions of justice, Walsh
had found his reputation under ad hominem attacks from The Washington
Times and other parts of the conservative news media for petty matters
such as ordering room-service meals and flying first-class.

Walsh was so stunned by the ferocity of the Republican defensive
strategy that he entitled his memoirs Firewall in recognition of the
impenetrable barrier that was built to keep the Iran-Contra scandal
away from Reagan and Bush.

Walsh, too, was dismissed by many Washington insiders as a foolish old
man, though the literary metaphor for Walsh was Moby Dick's Captain
Ahab, obsessively pursuing the white whale. But letting the outgoing
Reagan-Bush team off the hook hadn't earned the Democrats any measure
of bipartisan reciprocity.

In spring 1994, in the weeks before the Rodham-Boxer wedding, Clinton
had begun to sense the rising tide of political danger that the
non-stop attacks against him represented.

By damaging Clinton's public image, the Republicans were also
undercutting his legislative plans on economic, budget and health-care
policies. He was looking for allies and some sympathy.

Clinton's Thinking

As waiters poured coffee at the wedding reception and Clinton voiced
his complaints about the media hostility, Stuart Sender saw his chance
to ask Clinton why he hadn't pursued leads about the Reagan-Bush secret
initiatives in the Middle East.

"I had this moment to say to him, 'What are you going to do about this?
Why aren't you going after them about Iran-Contra and Iraqgate?'"
Sender said. "If the shoe were on the other foot, they'd sure be going
after our side. ... Why don't you go back after them, their high crimes
and misdemeanors?"

But Clinton brushed aside the suggestion.

"It was very clear that that wasn't what he had in mind at all," Sender
said. "He said he felt that Judge Walsh had been too strident and had
probably been a bit too extreme in how he had pursued Iran-Contra.
Clinton didn't feel that it was a good idea to pursue these
investigations because he was going to have to work with these people.

"To me what was amazingly telling was his dig at Walsh, this patrician
Republican jurist who had been put in charge of this but even the
Democratic President had decided that this was somewhere that he
couldn't go. He was going to try to work with these guys, compromise,
build working relationships."

Sender, like others who had been in the trenches of the national
security scandals of the 1980s, thought the retreat on the
investigations by Clinton and the Democrats after they won the 1992
elections was wrong for a host of reasons.

Most importantly, it allowed an incomplete, even false history to be
written about the Reagan-Bush era, glossing over many of the worst
mistakes.

The bogus history denied the American people the knowledge needed to
assess how relationships had evolved between the United States and
Middle East leaders, including Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the Saudi royal
family and the Iranian mullahs. The corruption was left to fester.

Though the Middle East crises had receded by the time Clinton took
office in 1993, the troubles had not gone away and were sure to worsen
again. When that time came, the American people would have only a
sanitized version of how the country got where it was.

Even government officials responsible for the policies would have only
a partial history of how these entangling alliances crisscrossed
through the deals and betrayals of the prior two decades.

Dynastic Revival

The Democratic retreat from the investigative battles in 1993 would
have another profound effect on the future of American politics. By
letting George H.W. Bush leave the White House with his reputation
intact -- and even helping Bush fend off accusations of serious
wrongdoing -- the Democrats unwittingly cleared the way for a
restoration of the Bush political dynasty eight years later.

If investigators had dug out the full truth about alleged secret
operations involving George H.W. Bush, the family's reputation would
have been badly tarnished, if not destroyed.

Since that reputation served as the foundation for George W. Bush's
political career, it's unlikely that he ever would have gained the
momentum to propel him to the Republican presidential nomination, let
alone to the White House.

The political future of the Bush family was at a crossroads as Bill
Clinton was taking office in January 1993. The Bushes' fate also was
largely in the hands of Democrats who controlled both houses of
Congress, the White House and the Justice Department.

Beyond that, the Democrats had a potential Republican ally in
Iran-Contra special prosecutor Walsh.

A different set of decisions by the Democrats in those months could
have set the nation on a very different course. The Democratic control
of the Executive Branch might not have ended after eight years.
Conceivably, the calamities of the last four years, including a renewed
war in Iraq, might have been averted.

But, in 1993, Clinton and the Democratic congressional leadership
concluded that pursuit of these "old" scandals would only embitter the
Republicans, make the Democratic Party look vindictive and endanger the
bipartisanship that Clinton saw as essential for his domestic policy
agenda.

The scandals also were complicated affairs, requiring detailed
understanding of the underlying facts. Much of what happened had
occurred in secret and involved foreign witnesses spread over several
continents. The events covered more than a decade in time.

Washington Outsider

An outsider to Washington, Clinton also didn't comprehend how the
nation's capital had changed, how nasty the partisan conflict had
become, and how effectively the Republicans were building a media
machine that could churn out a coordinated message day-in, day-out, 365
days a year.

Besides serving Republican political interests, this machine had taken
on a life of its own. With 24-hour news cycles and endless hours to
fill on talk radio shows, it needed controversy to survive.

When no longer playing defense for the Republicans, the conservative
media machine was freed up to go on the offensive. Clinton and his wife
would become its primary targets.

Rather than his hoped-for bipartisan cooperation on domestic issues,
Clinton soon encountered a solid wall of Republican opposition. In a
break with tradition, every Republican in the House and Senate voted
against Clinton's budget plan, which included tax increases aimed
mostly at the wealthy.

Backed with only Democratic votes, Clinton managed to push through his
plan by the narrowest of margins. Some Democrats sacrificed their
political careers in the House by supporting the tax provisions and
Vice President Al Gore was needed to break a tie vote in the Senate.

By spring 1994, Clinton's health care plan also was under fierce
Republican attack.

"He really did have this idea that he'd be able to work with these
guys," Sender recalled about his White House encounter with Clinton.
"It seemed even at the time terribly naïve that these same Republicans
were going to work with him if he backed off on congressional hearings
or possible independent prosecutor investigations.

"How ironic that he decides he's not going to pursue this when later on
they impeach him for the Monica Lewinsky scandal."

Attack Machine

Though the Bush family wasn't intimately associated with the building
of the Republican attack machine that so bedeviled Clinton in the
1990s, the rise of the Bush Dynasty paralleled the growth of what some
observers have called the conservative Counter-Establishment.

Pieces of this Counter-Establishment date back to the 1950s and 1960s,
but it gained powerful motivation from the political disasters of the
1970s.

By the middle of that decade, embattled conservatives were cursing the
fates that had plagued them through the Watergate scandal, the U.S.
defeat in Vietnam and the exposure of intelligence abuses inside the
CIA.

Those reversals, particularly the forced resignation of Richard Nixon
over Watergate, had devastated the Republican Party. By 1977,
Republicans were shut out of the White House and both houses of
Congress.

Conservatives also viewed the federal courts and the national news
media as bastions of liberalism that had aided and abetted the
Republican reversals of the mid-1970s.

Watergate also was where George H.W. Bush entered this picture, as
Republican National Committee chairman during the latter half of the
scandal.

A clean-cut former Texas congressman with ties both to Texas oil money
and Wall Street financiers, Bush was given the task of containing the
spreading political cancer of Watergate after the initial cover-up of
the White House role in the break-in had bought Nixon enough time to
secure his reelection in 1972.

In his RNC post, Bush tested out some of the tactics that would recur
throughout his career.

He used counter-disclosures to throw Democratic investigators on the
defensive. He pushed Nixon's argument that there was nothing new about
the covert political espionage at the heart of the Watergate scandal.
Bush also tried to cajole members of the Washington Establishment into
agreeing that the disorder from Nixon's impeachment would hurt the
nation.

But eventually the evidence of Nixon's guilt grew too overwhelming even
for the cleverest of tricks to overcome. Bush was one of Nixon's last
loyalists to conclude that the President had no choice but to resign
and hand over the White House to Vice President Gerald Ford on August
9, 1974.

CIA Scandals

A little more than a year later, as another flood of scandals lapped
around the foundations of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bush got the
call again to perform damage control.

This time, to keep the dikes around the CIA's most sensitive secrets
from giving way, Bush alternately cooperated with Congress in limited
oversight and attacked the spy agency's critics for jeopardizing the
nation's security.

When new scandals emerged on his watch, such as the Chilean junta's
assassination of political opponent Orlando Letelier on the streets of
Washington in September 1976, Bush again demonstrated his skills,
stonewalling investigators and diverting the worst of the damage away
from the CIA.

His performance during the year made Bush something of a hero to the
beleaguered intelligence officers at Langley, Virginia. 
With the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, conservatives
surveyed a bleak landscape left by the rubble of the Nixon resignation
and the Vietnam defeat. Some felt desperation that -- like a hangman's
noose -- concentrated their minds. Others saw opportunities.

Whatever the motivations, the next four years marked the start of a
historic comeback for American conservatism, both in the construction
of a new political infrastructure and the emergence of a fighting style
that would transform the tone of the nation's political discourse.

Led by former Treasury Secretary William Simon, conservative
foundations banded together to direct tens of millions of dollars into
strategic investments in a network of think tanks, media outlets and
pressure groups that went after perceived enemies in the news media,
academia and politics.

Though this network would eventually become famous for taking the fight
to its adversaries, particularly Bill and Hillary Clinton, its original
purpose was essentially defensive. It was built to ensure that the
Republican Party would never suffer another catastrophe like Watergate.

By 1980, the Republicans were fighting fiercely to regain the White
House that many conservatives felt was unjustly taken from them in 1976.

President Carter struggled with a slumping economy, rising inflation
and energy shortages. His reelection campaign also played out against
the backdrop of an international crisis with Islamic fundamentalists in
Iran holding 52 Americans hostage.

This early experience with Islamic extremism captivated the interest of
the American people -- and incited their anger.

Every day, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reported the number of days
that America had been "held hostage." ABC's Ted Koppel launched a
nightly news show about the hostage crisis that would later turn into
Nightline.

Many world leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and
the Saudi royal family, felt that Carter was making a mess of policy in
the Middle East and elsewhere.

Angry Agency

Carter was unpopular at the CIA, too, where his CIA Director Stansfield
Turner had cashiered scores of covert operatives. Longtime CIA
officers, such as associate deputy director for operations Ted
Shackley, saw their careers abruptly come to an end.

Shackley and other former CIA officers saw a hope for redemption in
Election 1980 as their ex-boss, George H.W. Bush, sought the Republican
presidential nomination.

Though Bush lost to Ronald Reagan in the Republican primaries, Bush
accepted the second spot on the ticket at the GOP convention in
Detroit. In merging the two campaigns, Bush brought into the
Reagan-Bush team many retired CIA officers who had been part of Bush's
political operation.

They began putting to use their intelligence skills against Carter.
Former CIA officers took on the job of monitoring Carter's attempts to
gain the release of the hostages before Election Day. Some of their
intelligence reports went through Bush.

In the months before the 1980 election, Carter failed to gain the
hostages' freedom. The public's frustration over the humiliating
standoff helped turn a close race in October into a Reagan landslide in
November.

The hostages were finally released just as Reagan was sworn in as the
nation's 40th President on January 20, 1981. Bush became Vice President
and served as the administration's chief national security expert.

Over the next decade, a mixed bag of intelligence operatives, arms
dealers and Iranian officials began to allege that the Republicans had
gone beyond monitoring Carter's hostage negotiations and had engaged in
parallel negotiations behind Carter's back.

Some witnesses claimed that Bush had personally participated in these
so-called "October Surprise" contacts. Those clandestine
Republican-Iranian relationships allegedly merged by the mid-1980s with
the secret Iran-Contra deals.

When those Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage swaps surfaced in late 1986,
the Reagan-Bush team suffered its worst scandal of its 12-year reign.
Some investigators viewed Bush as the well-protected eminence grise
behind the secret operations.

Saddam Suspicions

New suspicions about Bush arose in 1991 as other allegations bubbled to
the surface about secret dealings with Iraq's Saddam Hussein during the
1980s. Faced with these investigative threats to continued Republican
rule, conservatives mounted powerful rearguard defenses, made possible
by the new infrastructure that had been built in the years since
Watergate.

Soon, it was the investigators who found themselves on the defensive,
often labeled "conspiracy theorists" or worse. 
The other Bush-related scandal pending at the start of the Clinton
Presidency came directly from Campaign 1992. It had the look of a
classic dirty trick out of Richard Nixon's playbook.

Desperate for a "silver bullet" to kill Clinton's electoral viability,
State Department political appointees pawed through the passport files
of Clinton and his mother, looking for information that could be used
to challenge Clinton's patriotism.

The goal of the search was a rumored letter in which Clinton supposedly
sought to renounce his citizenship during the Vietnam War.

The search failed to find such a letter but administration officials
noticed a torn corner of Clinton's passport application and cited that
to fashion a criminal referral to the FBI, suggesting that someone may
have tampered with the file to remove the supposed letter.

The existence of the criminal referral was then leaked to the press
allowing President Bush to question Clinton's loyalty. However, when
the weakness of Bush's case was revealed, the passport search
boomeranged on Bush, creating political embarrassment and leading to
appointment of a special prosecutor.

Failed Strategy
 

If President Clinton's motive for turning his back on those four
investigations -- October Surprise, Iran-Contra, Iraqgate and
Passportgate - was to curry favor with the Republicans, it didn't work.

Senator Bob Dole and other Republicans even cited a lack of
incriminating findings against Reagan and Bush as justification for
aggressively investigating the Clinton administration.

The reasoning went that since the Democrats had investigated "bogus"
scandals and found no wrongdoing, Republican probes of seemingly minor
infractions by the Clinton administration were only a fair turnabout.

The conservative news media, which had lambasted investigations of the
Republicans as excessive, also flipped sides, arguing that it was the
duty of journalists to explore every suspicion raised about the
Clintons.

Those investigations of Clinton would consume the next eight years,
although ultimately the Whitewater probe would be closed with no
charges against either Bill or Hillary Clinton.

The suspicions about Vincent Foster's death also would come to nothing.
But the confluence of Clinton scandals eventually led to Clinton's
deceptive testimony in a civil lawsuit that delved into his dalliance
with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The House Republican leadership then pushed through an impeachment
resolution against Clinton in December 1998, making him the first U.S.
President to be impeached since Andrew Johnson after the Civil War.
Like Johnson, Clinton prevailed in a trial before the U.S. Senate. But
the impeachment will forever stain his legacy.

The so-called "Clinton fatigue" that the nation felt from the eight
years of "scandal" also would take a toll on the candidacy of Vice
President Al Gore, who stood behind Clinton during the impeachment but
tried to distance himself from the tainted President during Campaign
2000.

Dynastic Comeback

The Clinton "scandals" -- and the damage they inflicted on the
Democratic Party -- set the stage for the most remarkable dynastic
comeback in American history, the ascension of George W. Bush, the
eldest son of the 41st President.

During his early adulthood, the younger George Bush epitomized the
wastrel son of a successful father. Given every opportunity at elite
schools and spared a tour in Vietnam by latching onto a prized spot in
the Texas Air National Guard, Bush was better known for his partying
than for any accomplishments.

He drank heavily though he denied he was an alcoholic. In business, as
an oil man, Bush squandered the financial backing of his patrons but
always failed up, with new investors -- including some from Saudi
Arabia - arriving to bail him out of one foundering business after
another.

Bush also dabbled in politics, losing a congressional race and working
on some of his father's campaigns.

When Bush did set his sights on his own political career after his
father's 1992 defeat, the younger Bush's  principal qualification for
office -- one might say his only qualification -- was his family
pedigree.

When people had doubts about the younger George Bush, they would
comfort themselves with the knowledge that his father was a decent man
who could give his son guidance as needed.

George W. Bush's rise also tracked with the arc of the Clinton
"scandals."

By November 1994, after months of sordid allegations about Clinton's
personal life, there was already a public longing for the good old days
of the first Bush administration, a kind of buyer's regret for making
the switch to the Democrat.

That attitude helped Republicans across the country score major
victories in the mid-term elections. Bush won the Texas governorship in
a surprise landslide over the popular Democratic Governor Ann Richards.
National Republicans also gained control of the House and Senate.

In 1998, Governor Bush won a resounding reelection amid the
congressional Republican drive to impeach Clinton. Bush soon was aiming
at the Presidency with a promise that he would restore "honor and
dignity" to the White House.

Everyone understood that the pledge was a coded reference to Clinton's
sexual shenanigans with Monica Lewinsky.

Goring Gore

In Campaign 2000, the increasingly powerful conservative news media --
now bolstered by Rupert Murdoch's highly rated Fox News cable network
-- would again play a decisive role, often aided and abetted by
mainstream journalists who intuitively understood that their careers
could be helped by slapping around Democrats.

The news media's hostility toward Vice President Al Gore also may have
reflected a residual frustration over Clinton somehow surviving all the
scandal reporting of the prior eight years. The press corps' tilt
toward Bush continued through the disputed Florida election even though
Gore built a lead in the national popular vote of more than 500,000.

Little media outrage was expressed when national Republicans dispatched
to Florida demonstrators who staged a minor riot in Miami that
apparently intimidated voting officials into scrapping their recount
plans.

Led by Bush family lawyer James Baker III, the Bush-Cheney campaign
also took its hardball strategies into the federal courts to stop
Florida state courts from ordering a recount to determine who actually
got the most legally cast ballots.

Five conservative Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to stop
the vote counting, effectively handing Florida's 25 electoral votes and
the Presidency to George W. Bush.

Upon taking office, one of Bush's first acts was to clamp down on
release of historic records from the 12 years when his father was Vice
President and then President.

Lack of Competence

The second Bush administration didn't work out with the smoothness and
competence that many Washington commentators had expected.

On Sept. 11, 2001, just short of nine months into the second Bush
Presidency, 19 terrorists working with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
organization hijacked four commercial jets.

The terrorists then crashed two jetliners into the World Trade Center
towers, one into the Pentagon and one into a field in Pennsylvania,
after passengers apparently battled the hijackers for control.

The attacks, which killed about 3,000 people, again turned the nation's
attention to the Middle East, but Americans had only a limited
understanding of the cross-currents of secret history that connected
the new President's family to the region's dangerous intrigue.

Few citizens had more than an inkling about the Bush family ties to
Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia - even to Osama bin Laden's family.

By 2001, many chapters of that history had been lost in a haze of
conflicting claims, withheld documents and failed investigations.

Out of that confusion, it wasn't hard for George W. Bush and his
administration to persuade large numbers of Americans to merge the
images of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden into a
composite enemy, even though the two men were themselves bitter
adversaries in the Arab world.

After attacking al-Qaeda base of operation in Afghanistan, the Bush
administration turned its attention to Saddam Hussein and Iraq with
Bush ordering a U.S.-led invasion on March 19, 2003.

Lingering Questions

Today, as U.S. and Iraqi casualties from the Iraq War continue to
mount, the historical questions still hang in the air:

Did the Reagan-Bush administration help Hussein get the chemical
weapons that George W. Bush would later cite to justify an invasion?

Were secret Republican-Iranian negotiations in 1980 the start of
entangling relationships that drew the United States deeper into the
Middle East violence?

Did the subterranean financial tunnels connecting the Bush family and
the Saudi royal family contribute to al-Qaeda's determination to strike
at the United States in 2001?

Would American history have taken a very different course if the
investigations of the Reagan-Bush era had gone forward and the archives
of secret documents been thrown open?

Did the pattern of suppressing fair-minded inquiry in the 1980s and
1990s contribute to the shallowness of the Iraq War debate in 2002 and
2003?

In a May 23, 2004, article, Washington Post associate editor Robert
Kaiser observed that the catastrophic developments in the Iraq War,
including the international opprobrium from photographs of U.S.
soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, had finally
brought unease to the Washington Establishment.

"We have come to a delicate moment in an absorbing drama," Kaiser
wrote. "The actors seem unsure of their roles. The audience is becoming
restless with the confusion on stage. But the scriptwriters keep trying
to convince the crowd that the ending they imagined can still, somehow,
come to pass.

"The authors stick to their plotline even as its plausibility melts
away, and why not? For months the audience kept applauding, many of the
reviewers were admiring, while many others kept still."

A goal of this book is to explain why so many of Kaiser's reviewers
swooned over the second Bush administration's policies for so long
while so many other Americans who should have joined a critical debate
about war and peace stayed silent.

Those reasons can only be understood if viewed in the sweep of events
over the past three decades and by examining the secret history of the
Bush family dynasty.

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com.]

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.