How do you go about writing a book about one of the most powerful dynasties on earth?

That’s the challenge special guest Russ Baker faced when he first considered writing about the Bush family; a tribe that encompasses two U.S. Senators, one Supreme Court Justice, two Governors, two Presidents and innumerable bankers and businessmen.

The book took five years to write and is a meticulous piece of research (there are over a thousand footnotes). According to the late Gore Vidal, Family of Secrets is “one of the most important books of the past ten years”. Dan Rather – who you can hear right here on Radio Litopia’s Debriefer show – called it “a tour de force. ” “It’s made me rethink”, he says, “even those events I witnessed with my own eyes”.

"A Brief History Of Media Cover-Ups & Self-Censorship: Who’s Afraid of Russ Baker’s Family Of Secrets"

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Into this vortex of institutional skepticism and editorial consensus steps Russ Baker, an investigative journalist who has been published in just about every heavyweight publication, including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times. His contribution to the JFK controversy is a 500-page, a massively footnoted history of the rise of the Bush family, titled Family of Secrets. Not only does Baker challenge the conventional wisdom that Oswald “acted alone,” he argues forcefully that the JFK assassination was a successful coup pulled off by a “globally reaching, fundamentally amoral, financial-intelligence-resource apparatus.”
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While Baker admits that all of these facts could amount to nothing more than an incredible series of coincidences, at the very least his portrayal of the elite’s powerful and coordinated behind-the-scenes machinations to consolidate power — which reached critical mass at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, and culminated in George W. Bush’s stolen election in 2000 — reminded me of the Roman Republic’s transition to empire as described in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Indeed, Baker’s W. seems eerily reminiscent of Gibbon’s Augustus, who “at the age of nineteen [assumed] the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside.” Augustus, Gibbon adds, “was sensible that mankind…would submit to slavery, provided they were assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedoms.”
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After several attempts to penetrate the sheer volume of its reporting, Family of Secrets hooked me in. Baker pulls no punches in exploding the myth that the CIA performs covert operations only on foreign soil. In chapter after chapter he offers a glimpse of how power is really exercised in this country—and has been since the 1950s, when the seeds of a covert-police state were laid. While I’m not willing to swallow every connection Baker makes, there are hundreds and hundreds of well-documented and carefully footnoted facts that deserve a fair hearing. So far, they have received nothing of the sort.
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[T]he sleaziest attempts to undercut Baker’s book came from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post—the papers notorious for their campaign to discredit and destroy Pulitzer Prize journalist Gary Webb–the heroic San Jose Mercury reporter who exposed the CIA’s connection to the ghetto crack epidemic in 1996. Their campaign worked—Webb was eventually demoted and finally committed suicide. With Baker’s book, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post went back to work discrediting their colleagues who dare to get out of line. Tim Rutten, a bearded LA Times metro-desk tool, filed his handiwork on January 7, 2009. After framing his attack by quoting long passages of Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Rutten goes after Baker with bizarre language that reads like some fanatical Bolshevik. He decries the very existence of Family of Secrets as a “reprehensible calumny” and denounces Baker’s reliance on “mind-numbing accretion of names, dates and places”– in other words, too many facts. That any American would even question the findings of the Warren Commission makes Rutten sputter with rage: “I regard the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as an important indicium of mental health,” he writes. Two months earlier, Rutten had been the proud recipient of the Anti-Defamation League’s Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. The last time I looked, the First Amendment was about encouraging freedom of speech, not vilifying the bearer of unpopular opinions

“Rutten actually did me a favor.” Baker says, a rare smile passing over his face. “It was so over the top that people in LA started to pay attention.”
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Author Russ Baker shows, among other things, that Poppy Bush’s well-known service as a Navy pilot in World War II was also part of his work for Naval Intelligence. This set the stage for an astonishing double life participating in covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency throughout his career. .... Baker’s discussion of how a prominent political family applied the tools of the spy trade to their religious transformation and political strategy is a story that merits attention as religious faith becomes an increasingly popular political commodity.

This dimension of the story of the Bush family dynasty emerges in the wake of the growth of the religious right political movement within the GOP in the early ’80s. In this context, what was a starchy, Episcopalian heir to a blue-blooded Yankee political pedigree to do? And what of his reckless, apparently non-religious, playboy son? ....
Baker’s chapter titled “The Conversion” features startling revelations that challenge the well-known narratives of the Bush family’s religious history— including the way they crafted a strategy for winning over the religious right, and the creation of a conversion legend for George W. Bush. The purpose of the latter was not only to position him as a religious and political man of his time, but to neutralize the many issues from his past that threatened to undermine his future in politics (and possibly that of his father as well). The plan probably worked far better than anyone could have hoped. “I’m still amazed,” Doug Wead, a key architect of the Bush family’s evangelical outreach strategy told Baker, “how naïve so many journalists are who have covered politics all of their life.”

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Russ Baker’s massive tome, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces that Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America, is a taxing and multifaceted read that is ultimately gratifying due to its sheer scope and staggering implications.

We cannot easily undo our failures as a democracy. We can, however, reduce the odds of repeating them, and the best place to start that process is by reading Russ Baker’s epic new book Family of Secrets. Baker is independent and unafraid, two characteristics needed for unfettered journalism, and he has been relentless in pursuing the damning details that other reporters have either misunderstood or ignored. Baker’s investigation into the Bush family and its self-serving influence over American policy is profoundly disturbing and immediately important as the spinners try to reframe the disaster of George W. Bush’s tenure in the White House. As an investigator and as a writer of compelling narrative, Baker has created, in my estimation, an almost unequaled standard in political reportage. He has refused to accept conventional wisdom regarding the Bush family and the failed son they made president. There is no way any reasonable person can reject what Baker reports.