-Caveat Lector-
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>>>I bought the first SoftSkull eidtion way back in early 2000. Having read about the
Shrub beforehand, watching him offers few if any surprises. A<>E<>R <<<
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FORTUNATE SON:
George W. Bush and the Making of an American President, second edition
J.H. Hatfield
List: $16.50
Want it? Buy it.
It is a volume to keep close at hand throughout these next four years, whatever
happens next, and whatever they may tell us on TV.
-Mark Crispin Miller
Paperback | 6" x 9" | 418 pgs. | ISBN: 1-887-128-75-1
Featuring:
A new Foreword by Mark Crispin Miller, media critic and NYU
Professor of Media Studies; new reports by author David Cogswell, attorney Mark
Levine and cold war historian Michael Binder; and a new Preface by Sander Hicks.
Also featuring new Political Artwork by Seth Tobocman.
>From the Book:
Foreword
by Mark Crispin Miller
If there's any future for American democracy, the trashing of Fortunate Son and its
author will eventually stand out as an important early episode in the history of the
Bush reaction. It happened all too fast back in the fall of 1999, and then people
pretty
much forgot about it (which is the way things generally happen in the culture of TV).
However, in the history textbooks of tomorrow, the fate of Hatfield and his valuable
biography will get the close attention it deserves, for what it says about America--our
politics and culture--at the end of the millennium.
But right now, let's stop thinking about tomorrow, and take a good hard look at what it
meant when Hatfield was hung out to dry, and Fortunate Son sent off for burning.1
First of all, the episode should have told us quite a lot about the Bushes' spooky way
of doing business. We must not forget, especially not now, that the House of Bush
has long been closely linked to the most anti-democratic movements of the last
century--movements not just hierarchical and secretive (like Skull & Bones at Yale),
but actively engaged in trying to subvert democracy. The President's grandfather,
Prescott Bush, was a managing partner of the great and dubious investment firm
Brown Brothers Harriman, and made a fortune doing business with the Nazis, from
1934 right through the fall of 1942, when US troops were fighting in North Africa.
Then there was Prescott's ever-loyal son, George Herbert Walker Bush, who made
his bones as a devoted younger member of the Texas oil cartel, and then went on to
join the GOP. He was a dedicated Nixon man by 1968, sticking with Tricky Dick to
the bitter end, and then served briefly--and protectively-- as Gerald Ford's director
of
the CIA, when the Agency, post- Watergate, was reeling from the many revelations
of its sordid actions all around the world. So indulgent was Director Bush towards the
Company--a permissive attitude that he maintained as President--that the CIA's
headquarters is today named after him. From there Bush soon proceeded to sign on
as Ronald Reagan's understudy (getting mired up to his eyeballs in Iran- contra), and
then to build some heavy-duty bridges to the Christian right, to get their help in
capturing the Oval Office.
For a democratic leader, this is, let's face it, not the most attractive r�sum�. From
the
start--but especially from the Eisenhower years--the CIA specialized in thwarting the
political desires of foreign populations, through propaganda, terrorism, censorship
and careful slanders that would "neutralize" key leaders of the opposition. In such
work the CIA was helped along immeasurably by countless Nazi and pro-Nazi
�migr�s, who were quietly recruited, after World War II, to help "us" fight the
Soviets.
This grand absorption of bad apples that would affect not just US intelligence, but our
domestic politics, as Christopher Simpson made clear in his classic study
Blowback.2 Starting in the Fifties, the GOP likewise cultivated all that fascist
talent,
who knew a thing or two about the art of winning hearts and minds by using the
appeal of anticommunism. That link briefly made the papers back in the summer of
1988, when it came out that the Coalition of American Nationalities, an "ethnic
outreach" arm of the Bush/Quayle campaign, was dominated by a range of infamous
pro-Nazi �migr�s, including Laszlo Pasztor (a convicted Nazi collaborator, who had
worked for Hungary's Arrow Cross regime), Florian Goldau, (who had recruited
shock troops for Rumania's Iron Guard), and Holocaust denier Jerome Brentar,
among other stand-up guys.
The Bush/Quayle team was quick to dump those agents named (and soon quietly
took a few of them back in). That swift purge notwithstanding, the scandal shed a bit
of light on how the Bush team worked. George Bush Sr. never got the hang of
democratic practice--as Iran-contra made all too clear, and as his own term in office
reconfirmed, from the kidnapping of Manuel Noriega to the propaganda coup of
Operation Desert Storm, and then the indefensible appointment of the
undistinguished ultra-rightist Clarence Thomas to the nation's highest court. Every
one of Bush's most remarkable achievements was a victory for propaganda,
censorship and slander, and only for the sake of the defense contractors, US oil
cartel, and other subgroups of the privileged few.
And this brings us to George W. Bush. Poppy's eldest son was never CIA material.
On the other hand, he makes up in vindictiveness what he has lacked in formal
training, and has the crucial instincts for a dirty fight--as Hatfield, alone among
biographers, has taken pains to show. It was W. who, working closely with Lee
Atwater, urged his Dad to counter-blast Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, when
the anchor tried to get that unindicted co-conspirator to come clean on Iran-contra. It
was also W. who got the elder Bush to do the Willie Horton thing--and W. who
engineered the smear that sidelined Jimmy Swaggart, whose loud support for
presidential aspirant Pat Robertson was interfering with the Bush family's program.
(See pp. 80-1.) W. was not, and is not, the hapless imbecile derided by the late-night
wits and cable clowns. He is, of course, completely ignorant, often incoherent and,
on abstract matters, perfectly illogical. But he is also very, very shrewd--a highly
gifted "political campaign terrorist," as his comrade Mary Matalin has noted with
affection.
In his own bid for the White House, and in the daily propaganda drive that his cabal
has been conducting since he was inaugurated, Bush has been abetted by some
veteran dirty tricksters, such as the old ex-Nixonite Karl Rove, the true believer
Karen
Hughes, the rabid Matalin, and others. These are people who, like Nixon, have no
qualms about whatever action it might take to win--which is, in their wild eyes, the
only thing that matters. Thus they did not hesitate to kill this book when it came out
in
1999, which they accomplished by discrediting the author. The ad hominem
approach was, throughout the Cold War, standard practice for the CIA (and for the
KGB), just as it was standard practice for the Bush/Quayle operation in its drive to
take the White House: Jimmy Swaggart's fate foretold Jim Hatfield's.
Such a step was necessary to maintain the all-important fiction that George W. Bush
is not a lazy and immoral child of privilege, not an utter hypocrite who sticks it to
the
poor for doing things that he did without penalty. To launder Bush's past, the
campaign had to dirty Hatfield--not because the charges in that afterword were false:
on the contrary. Just like the CIA in (say) Chile and Ecuador, and like the Nazis (and
the Stalinists) before the Agency was born, Bush/Cheney shot down an inconvenient
truth by slandering the reporter, treating him as the transgressor, so that the real
perp could get off scot-free.
Ironically enough, the truth of Hatfield's charge has been all but confirmed by Bush
himself, who, like his father, often gives the game away by saying just a bit too much.
In a long interview with Brill's Content in September, 2000, the Governor was asked
by the reporter, Seth Mnookin, if he didn't think that there should be some legal
"recourse" for those candidates who are smeared as Bush, presumably, was
smeared in Fortunate Son.
Bush replied as follows (emphasis added):
Well, I don't know that, I don't know that question. You know, I would hope there
would--to save--to protect the innocent, but the problem is I'm a public figure, and
the
question is, where do you draw the line?
I think there ought to be some--I think the press corps ought to self-police, and I
think
there ought to be--in order to enhance the integrity of the press corps, it seems like
to me that when they catch, when they catch these fraudulent acts, these scurrilous
attacks, they ought to rise up in indignation, and I don't know if that--you know, I
think
that maybe might have occurred when they started condemning this guy for writing
the story.
What is most significant here is Bush's final phrase: the press attacked Hatfield for
"writing the story"--not for "making that stuff up," or "telling those lies," or
whatever
other phrase he would have used if he were innocent of Hatfield's charges. (Similarly:
"That woman who knew I had dyslexia--I never interviewed her," Bush said
dyslexically about Gail Sheehy, who did interview the candidate for her profile in
Vanity Fair--and, note well, who, Bush admitted, did not "claim" or "say" but knew I
had dyslexia.") What Bush began to say is also as revealing as what he finally said:
"to save--to protect the innocent." An innocent party has no need of being "saved"
from a destructive allegation. It is the true report that you're in need of being saved
from--whereas "the innocent" might need to be protected from a smear. Throughout
the controversy, Bush himself never actually came out and said that Hatfield's charge
per se was false, but just that it was "scurrilous," and that the author was himself "a
convicted felon," as if that alone proved anything. It was-- typically--a deft way to
dodge the whole messy question of whether Hatfield's charge was true. Although
transparent in his stammerings and "misstatements," Bush was sharp enough to kill
the story, and go on (with lots of help) to steal the presidency from the Democrats.3
The Hatfield episode would be historically important if it pointed only to the tricky
methods of Bush/Cheney and the GOP. The overt installation of an unelected
President--let's call it the Rehnquist Putsch--is no mean feat; and the campaign's
sharp handling of the Hatfield threat anticipated their achievement down in Florida.
First of all, they managed to impugn the standard process of a manual vote recount,
and so buy time to let the Supreme Court (long since corrupted by the Reagan/Bush
regime) subvert democracy. The propagandists then worked hard to change the
subject after Florida: by playing up the President-select's "bipartisan" intentions and
fictitious "charm," by making earnest noises about the great need (now) for electoral
reform, and by turning up the heat on the departed Clinton, for his dubious pardon of
the fugitive financier Marc Rich and for hauling gifts out of the White House. As if
exonerating a rich con-man, whose wife gave money to the Democrats, were a
greater sin than clearing all the principals in Iran-contra (as George Bush did--on
Christmas Eve of 1992--to save himself from prosecution). As if taking a dinette set
were a greater sin than stealing an election. It is also likely that the smearing of
the
Rev. Jesse Jackson was a Karl Rove operation, the news of Jackson's love child
coming just in time to shut him up, since he was certainly the most outspoken
champion of a post-inaugural reckoning in Florida.
The fact that Pres. Bush was not elected President is the truth most dangerous to his
regime, and so his team behaves accordingly: dealing with reminders of it just as
ruthlessly as they once dealt with Hatfield, whose story threatened the Republican
campaign with (what might have been) an equally destructive truth.
And yet, as hard and canny as they are, this Bush and his operatives could not have
done the job they did--both on Hatfield's book and on the national electorate--if they
were not abetted all the way by the editors and producers, anchors, pundits and
reporters of the so-called "liberal media." As the Brookings Institution demonstrated
in a study published soon after Election Day, the coverage of the race was
overwhelmingly pro-Bush.4 Al Gore's whole campaign was handled only as a faulty
exercise in style, with much sarcastic commentary on his clothes and sighs and
make-up, while Bush's patent inexperience, his abysmal record down in Texas
(including his disastrous impact on the environment), his dubious military history, his
several crooked business deals and his tight links to the Christian ultra-right were
all
ignored--as, for that matter, were his severe stylistic lapses, which included a strong
tendency to zone out right on camera, and (of course) an inability to speak his native
language. In short, the media--for various reasons of its own--was complicit in the
Rehnquist Putsch; and that complicity was evident in their all-but- unanimous
participation in the GOP attack on Fortunate Son.
As Bush himself told Brill's Content, the mainstream press responded to the book's
important charges by doing the job that he thinks they should always do (at least
when dealing with his own affairs): i.e., "self-police." Without even bothering to look
into it, the members of the Fourth Estate piled on, as if they were not unaffiliated
journalists but Karl Rove's deputies. The media's participation started with Pete
Slover of the Dallas Morning News, who broke the story of Hatfield's criminal past--a
distracting (and irrelevant) fact that had to come to Slover from a source inside the
Bush campaign (unless Slover was a fiercely zealous advocate for the Republicans).
>From there, the media reaction was, at best, mere sheepish acquiescence, as all
accepted, at face value, the candidate's indignant self-defense. Soon St. Martins,
quickly knuckling under to whatever pressure was exerted on them, pulled the book--
promising to turn it into "furnace fodder"--and dumped the author, leaving him with
nothing but humiliation. Even such First Amendment champions as Nat Hentoff
shrugged off that unprecedented act of corporate censorship. Burning, God help us,
is not how we deal with problematic books here in the USA; and yet the stalwarts of
the media were unimpressed, and simply let it go.
The Hatfield episode, then, tells us something not only about the power and influence
of one rich right-wing family, but about the cynicism that pervades the culture of TV,
particularly toward the top. Hatfield's treatment by St. Martins was exemplary of how
the media corporations all too often treat their hardest-working people. It was
Hatfield's editors who had insisted that he play up the cocaine bust in the first
place--
instructing him to put the story in a special Afterword for maximum effect, pushing
him to make the prose more lurid, (and inserting over-heated touches of their own),
and refusing to allow him a few extra days to go down to Texas for some on-the-
record confirmation.5 But when the shit hit the fan, those editors all ran for cover,
cutting Hatfield loose and promising to turn the book to cinders. The episode recalled
the very similar treatment meted out by CNN to Producers April Oliver and Jack
Smith for their the CNN report "Valley of Death." The network caved into Defense
Department and other government pressure and pulled their controversial
documentary on Operation Tailwind--a secret U.S. military mission in Vietnam to
track down and gas American deserters fighting on the other side. Like St. Martins,
CNN hyped the shocker heavily beforehand, and then--also like St. Martins-- killed
the product, and swiftly axed its authors: Oliver and Smith were fired for having made
the documentary. They were let go to placate those (Henry Kissinger among them)
who roared in outrage at the very thought of such a show. Whether the documentary
was sound or spurious, the hasty burial of the offending work and the dismissal of its
authors, bespeak a grave new turn in the corporate practice of the culture industries.
No longer is the journalist automatically protected by the company--as, for example,
CBS producer George Crile was when the network was sued over his documentary
on Gen. William Westmoreland's body counts in Vietnam. (Crile was suspended for
ethical lapses, but not fired.) Now that the news media are wholly owned by
multinational corporations, whose managers have everything to gain from catering to
the government (and vice versa), it is a very risky business to go after those in
power.
And so Fortunate Son is a most important book--and not just for its many revelations.
(Readers should pay special heed to Hatfield's prescient outline of the Bush plan to
secure the presidency: see p. 303.) The book is just as edifying for the painful
history
of its publication as it is for all that it reveals to us about our unelected
President. It is
a volume to keep close at hand throughout these next four years, whatever happens
next, and whatever they may tell us on TV.
1. In fact, St. Martins didn't burn the book, as they had vowed to do. The publisher
remaindered many of the unsold copies of Fortunate Son, to recoup a few extra
bucks. Hatfield and Soft Skull received reports that cases of them had appeared in
the Half Price Books chain throughout Texas.
2. Blowback: America's Recruitment Of Nazis And Its Effects On The Cold War (New
York: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1988).
3. Still more interesting than Bush's recent verbal slips is his long public silence on
the subject of his stint at Project P.U.L.L. in inner-city Houston. (see below, pp. 47,
309-10) Such an altruistic episode-a period of youthful service to the poor-would
seem to offer any politician, especially a "compassionate conservative," material for
endless public reminiscences: e.g., "When I was working with those fine young men
in inner-city Houston," etc. But Bush, whether running for the Austin Statehouse or
the White House, seldom mentioned Project P.U.L.L. If, as the official story has it, he
briefly worked at that non-profit just because his father thought it might be good for
him, such reticence seems odd. If, on the other hand, he had to work there as a form
of punishment, his failure to exploit the episode is fully understandable.
4. This judgement was confirmed by the Brookings Institution, which, on 11/13/00,
released a useful overview: "How the Television Networks Covered the 2000
Presidential Campaign." (Parts of the report are available on-line, here.)
5. The editors also allowed no time to do an index, which made the book seem less
serious.
Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University. His books
include Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988) and Seeing Through Movies (1990). He
is the author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder,
published by W.W. Norton in 2001.
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