|
The Bush Family Tree : Consider Again For The First Time
"The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past." - William Faulkner
Robert L. Knowles
10/26/04 "ICH" --
"Like father, like son." "The fruit does not fall
far from the tree." We've heard phrases like these before.
But beyond this all-too-easy language, there is an ancient
truth, one that hides in plain site.
The writers of the Bible, as they observed and understood
the work of God and the function of the family, suggested at least
three times that,
"the iniquities of
the fathers would be visited upon the children
and their children's
children to the third and fourth generations". (Ex.20:5,
34:7, Numbers 14:18)
The practical
importance of this observation was common knowledge that the evil
men do is projected, that is, passed on, to their
progeny and that this then becomes the environment in which these
children are reared. Some understand this issue from the wrong direction, though,
that children should not be punished for what their parents do.
True, but this is not what was meant.
After all, we are only where we come from, for good and/or
ill. Now, some
four-five millennia hence from Biblical wisdoms, we know we are
the recipients of DNA, the memories and the history of our family
and our culture. All
the information that resides in our DNA, from both our parents and
all of their parents, plus all of our own experiences, collude to
make us who we are.
In family therapy research, we have a clearer understanding
of the structures and workings of this phenomenon, this
"passing on of information" from generation to
generation. In family therapy this is called the "family
constellation," or more specifically the
"multigenerational transmission process."
We all observe that some members of a family might look or
act like somebody else in that same family.
A far more interesting and complex picture emerges when the
family is studied with a "genogram" - a truncated
geneology covering 3 to 5 generations.
It is by this method that we see the transmissions from the
parents to children and from cultural institutions to all of
society, a vast flowing river in which we all "live and move
and have our being." What a great thing it would be if the
Biblical knowing lasted for only 3-4 generations! Then, the slate
could be wiped clean and we could start over. Alas, the fact is
that all components of DNA and experience continue being
intensified and modified through time. We are elements of all that
came before and we will pass on to our children what and who we
are. In order to
better study these truths, we would want to know certain basics
such as birth order, when and where born, schooling, hobbies,
developmental processes, illness, religion, issues of money,
marriage, divorce, deaths, and many other issues. We find
ourselves where we are, not because of our intelligence and
rationality, but largely because of our past, our DNA. To some
extent, the genogram could be seen as a kind of hologram,
in that even a fragment will represent the whole.
Having been a family psychotherapist for 35 years, and
teaching Marriage and Family Systems at the University level for
25 years, I have done thousands of these genograms.
Both clients and students are often greatly surprised
discovering things they did not know, both about themselves and
their families, and this process going back for several
generations. These explorations and discoveries, undertaken by
what might be termed student detectives, are often
shockingly revelatory when family patterns suddenly appear, almost
as latent images that arise on the paper during photographic
development. Is
it a surprise that many of our scientific researches are bringing
us back to where we started with ancient insights, revealing that
it is indeed a ghost-haunted world?
And now, we come to the quadrennial election year.
Who are the people we elect, beyond looks and sales
personalities? What
are their family patterns? Do
these patterns tend toward leadership that will be effective, or
ineffective? If we do
not care to evaluate our politicians, then it is true that we well
deserve who we get. Mistaking
the public persona (images/words) with policy (actions) is no more
valuable to understanding than it would be for the obtuse person
looking at a tree from 18-inches declaring that he knows it, from
boughs to roots.
During the last four years, we have come to learn much about
President George Walker Bush, both from his own words and actions,
from accounts of friends and associates, and from volumes of other
sources. If we choose
to, there is a good hundred years, plus, of “just the facts”
public data open to investigation regarding the Bush/Walker
family. (We can obviously make no comments on that which has been
sequestered, or ‘buried’.)
Volumes continue to grow – now in excess of 50 –
examining Bush the politician, and Bush the family man.
There is increasingly more talk, commentary and recognition
about the Bush family tree from people with long Conservative
Republican credentials. (American Dynasty, by Kevin
Phillips, for instance.) We
quickly find that this family is not so good as claimed, nor so
bad as accused. We
use these data and methods of investigation to cut through the fog
of cultural “chatter” that has substituted for reasoned debate
and understanding. This “chatter” often relegates the unobservant to
outposts bordering on the deaf and the blind.
Each of the following items is no more than a fragmentary
look at the Bush family history.
Each topic alone could be expanded to produce volumes of
information. We know
that the Bush family organizes around: money, power, loyalty,
politics, business, secretiveness, family name repetition,
religiosity, and so on. The
following may appear surprising, perhaps even dark, both to
supporters and dissenters. But,
we know some of the “boughs” of the tree as they are on public
display. What we
mostly do not know are the “roots,” and getting to the roots
necessarily involves contact with soil.
This, therefore, may be thought a necessary counterbalance
to the standard and authorized public line of the family,
which might as well be, “Out of sight, out of mind.” (For ease of reference, George W. Bush is referred to as
“43,” and his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, as “41,”
and his father, Prescott Sheldon Bush, as Prescott):
Great sociality
– 43, a cheerleader, a Good Time Charley, remembers names
and makes diminutives of them that are more humiliating than
endearing (e.g., “Kenny Boy” for Ken Lay, etc.), a fellow you
might “like to have a beer with,” his openly recognized
dependency on liquor to fortify himself on college dates was well
known; 41, an outstanding athlete in a number of sports, remembers
names, thus cementing his wide social web; Prescott, great
socializer, dancer, walker, runner, sportsman, and said to simply
look more senatorial than any Senator
(At his insistence, the children were not to call him,
“Father,” or “Dad.”
Only one salutation was acceptable: “Senator.”); George
Herbert Walker, 43’s great, grand-father, was president
of the United States Golf Association (USGA) in 1920, “The
Walker Cup,” is named after him.
Religion
- piety and moralism bordering on the Puritanical and recently,
beyond the merely Fundamental.
This extends from James Smith Bush (Episcopal minister, New
York, late 1800’s, great, great-grandfather of 43), to Prescott,
who let it be known he had changed his frequent curse of “By
God” to “By Gosh,” and finally to 43’s Messianic crusade.
Three
generations in Yale and "Skull & Bones" – A Yale University secret society, a coterie of the politically
elite, and the fountain for many in American leadership; 43 was
tapped to join, being a legacy of 41. (Prescott preceeded them
both.) Often, S&B is called the recruiter of choice for the CIA.
A list of members includes some of the most recognized
names in American finance, industry, and politics for well over
the last one hundred years.
Extremely
competitive behavior
- George H. W. Bush, sky diving for his 80th birthday;
great-grandmother to 43, Flora Sheldon Bush (mother of Prescott),
was so intensely devoted to her tennis game that when it was time
to give birth to her baby she went directly from the playing court
to the delivery room.
Foreign
financial intrigues –
Prescott Bush sold bonds and raised funds for the nascent
Nazi party. Aligned
with the Bush family in these ripe business opportunities in
Germany were also many powerful American corporations, law firms,
banks, media, etc., e.g., Ford, General Motors, ITT, Reader’s
Digest (the largest circulation magazine in the U.S.), Remington
Arms Company, Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon), Rockefeller,
Du Pont, Sullivan & Cromwell law firm,
Charles Schwab, the up and coming IBM, etc., etc.
From 1926 until November 1942, this lucrative venture
proceeded for Prescott and partners until, nearly an entire
generation after its birth, the Union Banking Corporation was shut
down by the U.S. Congress under the, “Trading with the Enemy
Act.” Financial
associations had been made with German industrialist Fritz
Thyssen, the party’s most significant financier (his personal
memoir was entitled, I
Paid Hitler),
I.G. Farben,
the largest company in Germany at the time and the developer of
poison gas and the Auschwitz extermination camp, among
others, etc., the house of Krupp, arms and munitions
manufacturer par excellence, many other oil and gas interests,
etc. The assorted
connections to the budding party, and eventual Nazi war machine,
were substantial.
Financial
connections –
In
1919, George Herbert Walker, a pugilist with a pugilistic
personality, and wealthy businessman and clothier from St. Louis,
joined
W.A. Harriman & Co. Bank, with Averell Harriman; family
connections entwine with Brown Brothers, Harriman, the
largest private investment bank in America and a partner in the
Union Banking Corporation; Harriman was directly involved with the
Hamburg-Amerika
Line (a Nazi front group), Soviet oil and military interests of
the U.S.S.R; before and during the presidential campaign of 43,
Enron was, and had been since the mid-1980’s, his biggest
contributor.
Secrecy
and deceit
– Prescott associated with funding the Nazi war machine
while his son was in combat in the Pacific War theatre; soon after
UBC was seized, Prescott took to the patriotic front by managing the USO; though
Prescott was at times a “falling down drunk,” this was not to
be noticed by the family; 41, a Director of the CIA, claimed to
have been “out of the loop” when questions arose regarding
Iran-Contra; 43 permanently sequestered material of his own in his
father’s library making it unavailable even under the “Freedom
of Information Act;” concealments and silence in the family
verge upon ‘omerta.’
Railroad
ties develop into arms industry - Samuel
Prescott Bush, president of Buckeye Steel Castings, and a
“railroad buccaneer,” was first president of the National
Association of Manufacturers (NAM was sited by Senator La Follette
as working “in secrecy and by deceit.”), close advisor to
Herbert Hoover, made railway parts for Harriman’s railroad
companies, chief
of the “Ordnance, Small Arms, and Ammunition Section of the War
Industries Board” (First World War);
41 and 43 have both had ties
to The Carlyle Group.
Family
and professional loyalty –
Even a truncated list of the many business colleagues and
associates of Prescott Bush and 41, alone, are little shy of
staggering. They are
among the great business and political names in the 20th
century, and constitute their own world wide web:
Allen
Dulles – brother to John Foster Dulles, lawyer at
Sullivan & Cromwell, OSS operative, lawyer for Union Banking
Corporation, Director of the CIA during the removal of heads of
state in the 1950’s, 1960’s, fired by Kennedy after the Bay of
Pigs debacle, member of the Warren Commission, etc.
John
Foster Dulles - lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, lawyer for
Union Banking Corporation, lawyer for subsidiaries of I.G. Farben,
as well as a member of their board of directors, primary
shareholder in the United Fruit Company, diplomat, Secretary of
State, Dulles International Airport named after him, etc.
Averell
Harriman - son of E.H. Harriman, the president of Union Pacific
Railroad, brother to Roland, member Skull & Bones, U.S.
Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., U.S. Secretary of Commerce, member of the Council on Foreign Relations,
Governor of New York State, etc.
Roland
Harriman – member Skull & Bones, an inspector
with the U. S. Army Ordnance Department, vice president with Brown
Brothers, Harriman, philanthropist, succeeded General George
Marshall, etc.
We leave mostly unmentioned such things as national security
connections, low levels of intellectual curiosity, verbal
communication difficulties, broad repetition of names in family (a
model that is set, in part, for succeeding
generations), marital infidelity, alcoholism and drug addictions,
penuriousness, and oil, etc. (Unhappily, “et cetera” is a feeble phrase that must
needs cover a lot of ground.)
These roots brought up to be seen are only some of
the Bush family’s genetic hologram.
The foibles, frailties, integrity and intelligent wisdom of our
leaders cascade down to us, the citizens of this country, just as
they would for a family, and for generations to come. We
owe it to ourselves, our children, our nation, and the world
family, to study seriously these factors.
The Biblical injunction regarding the sins of the father
was, we now understand, insufficient to embrace the scope and
effect of such insight. This
will remain unaltered if we do not observe and act upon the
oft-repeated maxim of George Santayana:
“…Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it.
In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily
distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and
persistence. This is
the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has
learned nothing from experience.”
Robert L. Knowles, Ph.D., is a
psychotherapist. He
served for many years as a minister in his church. Email - knowles954@yahoo.com
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
