Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House,<br> and What Their Influence Means for America

Monday, January 5 2009 - Resources and Materials

Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House,
and What Their Influence Means for America

Amazing book! I've just received a review copy and can tell you all, even having just begun to dig in to this massive volume, this is a serious piece of journalism! Not just a deep investigation into the Bush's themselves, but a peak into present and historical power structures of the nation (and thus the world). --Janice

– Ed.

BLOOMSBURY PRESS

FAMILY OF SECRETS:
The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House,
and What Their Influence Means for America

By award-winning investigative journalist Russ Baker

ISBN: 1-59691-557-9; $30.00; Pub January 2009, >a href="http://familyofsecrets.com" target="_blank">familyofsecrets.com

Contact:
Gene Taft, GeneTaftPR@aol.com, m: 917/701-4072, p: 301/593-0766
Peter Miller, Peter.Miller@bloomsburyusa.com, 646-307-5579

Revelatory new book on Bush family
publishing January 2009

How did Bush happen? How did George W. Bush, of all people, rise to the most powerful position in the world? This simple question sparked a five-year investigative odyssey by Russ Baker. What he found will force us to rethink virtually everything we thought we knew about the Bush family and its role in shaping recent American history.

In FAMILY OF SECRETS, Baker reveals that Bush, the people around him, and his policies are but an extreme, very public manifestation of what his family and its circle have always been about: an interlocking web of covert and overt machinations on behalf of a small cluster of elites-social, financial, industrial, military, intelligence-that enabled the Bush dynasty and propelled George W. Bush to the top.

Russ Baker's deep background profile of the Bushes reveals a family with ongoing connections to the shadow world of intelligence, utilizing the dark arts of the trade to achieve their positions at the pinnacle of America's political elite. Baker lays bare the stealth substructure that created the Bush dynasty, powered its rise, and brought America to its current state of crisis. Given the disastrous results of the last eight years, the story Baker has uncovered is must reading today-because the forces that shaped the Bush dynasty remain powerful and capable of exerting enormous influence on the fate of the country and the world

FAMILY OF SECRETS reads like a spy thriller. At the center stands George W.'s father, George H.W. "Poppy" Bush, whose public persona has always been that of a bland, patrician "genial bumbler." In chapter after chapter, Baker unveils another "Poppy," this one a ruthless master of elaborate covert operations and perception-management campaigns. Although the Bushes went to great lengths to create the notion of a substantial divide between father and son, the truth is that W. was essentially a bumptious and indiscreet version of his father.

Baker's meticulously researched investigative history includes these revelations:

* George H.W. "Poppy" Bush's role in covert operations that profoundly affected America's history long before he became CIA Director or President.
* Personal secrets that George W. Bush and his handlers worked for decades to suppress.
* The untold story behind George W. Bush's religious "awakening."
* Why Bush Sr. cannot recall where he was the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
* The little-known Russian émigré who was linked to Bush Sr., the CIA, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Kennedy assassination and who met an untimely demise.
* The most authoritative case ever presented that George W. Bush walked away from his US military obligations, an act with potentially serious legal consequences and no statute of limitations.
* How the CIA monitors the White House and its occupants.
* The story of the Bush family operative who graduated from babysitting an adult W. to fronting for a vast Saudi money pipeline into Texas.
* The hidden connections between the investment funds of America's most prestigious universities and covert intelligence operations connected to Bush family businesses.

Baker systematically follows previously invisible threads that reveal Watergate to be a bloodless coup in three parts: creating the crime, implicating Nixon, and then ensuring that an aggressive effort would be mounted to use the ‘facts' of the case to force him from office. Baker provides gripping new information about how Poppy Bush, Bob Woodward and White House counsel John Dean were connected to this still-mysterious American epic.

Baker's research led him into even deeper waters. While reporting on Bush Sr.'s activities in the early 60's, Baker discovered curious inconsistencies in Poppy's account of his activities on the day John F. Kennedy was shot. "At 1:45 pm on November 22," Baker reports, Bush Sr. "called the FBI to identify James Parrott as a possible suspect in the president's murder, and to mention that he, George H.W. Bush, happened to be in Tyler, Texas." As Poppy was making the call, Baker writes, Poppy's own assistant was visiting Mr. Parrott at home. Baker goes on to describe what appears to be a virtuoso performance on Bush Sr.'s part at the time, creating a misleading paper trail regarding his own whereabouts that day while protecting his business interests and political future.

But Bush Sr.'s biggest operation was engineering his son's rise to the presidency. Baker's reporting presents Bush Jr. as an unruly scion who nevertheless relied heavily on his father's extensive contacts and CIA expertise to erase all records of his misdoings and build a resume befitting a future president. Digging deep into Bush Jr.'s still-murky National Guard service record, Baker provides the most thorough account yet of what really happened. He also documents how W's long track record as a womanizer and party animal was sanitized via a carefully calculated born-again Christian conversion that few dared question. Baker interviews the man who wrote the memos to the Bush family on how to gain the vast evangelical vote that put him in the White House.

When George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2003, one Texas journalist, Mickey Herskowitz, was not surprised. "He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," Herskowitz told Baker. "He said to me, ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade... I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed, and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"

Combining gripping stories, explosive revelations and trenchant analysis, Family of Secrets is nothing less than a secret history of the elites that have shaped American politics over the last century.

Russ Baker

Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter with a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush's military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.

Praise for Family of Secrets
"Shocking in its disclosures, elegantly crafted, and faultlessly measured in its judgments, Family of Secrets is nothing less than a first historic portrait in full of the Bush dynasty and the era it shaped. From revelation to revelation, insight to insight-from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate to the oil and financial intrigues that lie behind today's headlines-this is a sweeping drama of money and power, unseen forces, and the emblematic triumph of a lineage that sowed national tragedy. Russ Baker's Family of Secrets is sure to take its place as one of the most startling and influential works of American history and journalism."
--Roger Morris, author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America

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Praise for Russ Baker
"In an era dominated by corporate journalism and an ideological right-wing media, Russ Baker's work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy... A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn't know."
--Bill Moyers, author and host, Bill Moyers' Journal (PBS)

"If Russ Baker's proposed book does nothing more than catalog, analyze, amplify, and contextualize the bewildering array of Bush II crimes and misdemeanors that we already know about, it will perform a needed and valuable service. I'm betting that it will show us a good deal more than that-that what we've seen so far is smoke, and that Baker will expose the fire."
--Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor, the New Yorker

"Russ Baker has the three most important attributes of any great investigative reporter: He is skeptical, he is fearless, and he is indefatigable. Whenever he examines anything-including the most allegedly wellcovered topics-he breaks important new ground."
--David Margolick, author and contributing editor, Vanity Fair

"This is the right moment for just such a project, I think. The country is waking up asking itself who is this Bush guy and how did he do this number on us. It seems to me that we need a book that narrates what happened and how. As to Russ Baker, he doesn't need me to say that he is not only among the best at his craft but also a man of rock-solid integrity. I look forward to reading this book."
--Nicholas von Hoffman, author, columnist, and former Washington Post journalist

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BUY NOW

Family of Secrets is available from the following book sellers:

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For media inquiries, please contact Gene Taft at GT/PR, LLC
Email: GeneTaftPR@aol.com
Cell: 917/701-4072
Land line: 301/593-0766

Or Peter Miller, Director of Publicity, Bloomsbury
Email: Peter.Miller@bloomsburyusa.com
Phone: 646-307-5579

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Book Information:
Hardcover: 592 pages