BAD COMPANY: Part 1
May 4, 1992

by Curtis Lang		print version
		print version (graphics)

      5/05/1992 -- "It's a question of knowing right from wrong, avoiding conflicts of interest, bending over backwards to see that there's not even a perception of conflict of interest,"  George Bush explained in his first week as president, while promising that he would oversee a new age of squeaky clean White House ethics.

     Within a month of his inauguration, Bush had to face a disclosure that, in direct violation of White House policy, ethics czar C. Boyden Gray was receiving a salary from a family business.  The New York Times editorialized that "the commission he [Bush] appointed to tighten standards seems to have spent three weeks loosening them." 

        Throughout the spring of 1989, President Bush entertained America with stern lectures on morality delivered to government bureaucrats and politicians alike. When Bush's nomination of John Tower for secretary of defense ran aground, The Economist commented sarcastically that "after preaching to the nation about ethics and the end of greed, he [Bush] has to spend all his energy denying charges that one of his senior appointees was a drunken womanizer who accepted large sums for peddling influence."

        Since then, presidential son Neil Bush has become the personification of the looting of America's S&Ls.  Another presidential son, Jeb Bush, Republican fundraiser and unofficial White House liason to Miami's Cuban exile community, did business with, socialized with, and got campaign contributions from a cast of characters who are a living commercial for the Miami Vice lifestyle.  First son George Bush, Jr. recently imported from Texas to Washington to kick-start the Bush reelection campaign, has been up to his eyeballs in business dealings with members of the CIA-connected BCCI Arab mafia.

        These persistent White House scandals would be bad enough even if George Herbert Walker Bush could maintain an appearance of personal honesty--as Ronald Reagan did during the Iran-contra debacle. But in fact, George Bush has proven himself to be a liar.  Look it up in the record; George Bush has lied about ethics reform, about taxes, education, and the environment.

        Bush's legendary talent for moral flexibility and political spinelessness, which surfaced in a career built on professional coattailing, appears to be a family trait, an identifying characteristic--the way the Kennedy clan will always be associated with hot sex and rum-running.

        As early as World War II, the U.S. government seized several businesses that George Bush's father, Prescott Bush, helped run, for trading with the enemy.  Much evidence has surfaced linking George Bush with secret deals to arm America's most fanatical enemy, Iran, as part of the Iran-contra arms-and-drugs network.  Village Voice writer Murray Waas has written numerous stories revealing how George Bush helped Saddam Hussein build up his military machine, only to later declare war on Iraq, reaping tremendous public relations benefits in the process.  Presidential sons Neil, George, and Jeb have all been involved in business dealings with members of the worldwide financial underworld that spawned the characters that peopled the October Surprise and Iran-contra scandals.

        To uncover the forces that shaped George Bush's character, and to understand how as vice-president he could simultaneously act as "lapdog" to Ronald Reagan and as a covert warrior be implicated in dirty little wars around the world, the diligent Bush-watcher must start at the beginning.

        In this issue, the Voice begins a series on the Bush family tree, starting with Prescott Bush, the president's father.  We will explore the questionable dealings of three generations of the family, for whom no business practice is beneath contempt, and no business partner is beyond the pale.