George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

institutionalized during the previous eight years, the regime became more and more rigid
and inflexible. Active opposition, or even the dislocations occasioned by administration
policies were therefore dealt with by the repressive means of the police state. The Bush
regime could not govern, but it could indict, and the Discrediting Committee was aways
ready to vilify. Some observers spoke of a new form of bonapartism sui generis, but the
most accurate description for the Bush combination was the "administrative fascism".
Bush's cabinet reflected several sets of optimizing criteria.
The best way to attain a top cabinet post was to belong to a family that had been allied
with the Bush-Walker clan over a period of at least half a century, and to have served as a
functionary or fund-raiser for the Bush campaign. This applied to Secretary of State
James Baker III, Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady, Secretary of Commerce
Robert Mosbacher, and Bush's White House counsel and top political adviser, C. Boyden
Gray.
A second royal road to high office was to have been an officer of Kissinger Associates,
the international consulting firm set up by Bush's lifelong patron, Henry Kissinger. In this
category we find Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the former chief of the Kiss Ass Washington
office, and Lawrence Eagleburger, the dissipated wreck who was named to the number
two post in the State Department, Undersecretary of State. Eagleburger had been the
president of Kissinger Associates. The ambassadorial (or proconsul) list was also rife
with Kissingerian pedigrees: a prominent one was John Negroponte, Bush's ambassador
to Mexico.
Overlapping with this last group were the veterans of the 1974-77 Ford Administration,
one of the most freemasonic in recent US history. National Security Council Director
Brent Scowcroft, for example, was simply returning to the job that he had held under
Ford as Kissinger's alter ego inside the White House. Dick Cheney, who eventually
became Secretary of Defense, had been Ford's White House chief of staff. Cheney had
been Executive Assistant to the Director of Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity way
back in 1969. In 1971 he had joined Nixon's White House staff as Don Rumsfeld's
deputy. From 1971 to 1973, Cheney was at the Cost of Living Council, working as an
enforcer for the infamous Phase II wage freeze in Nixon's "Economic Stabilization
Program." The charming Carla Hills, who became Bush's Trade Representative, had been
Ford's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. William Seidman and James Baker
(and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, a Reagan holdover who was the
chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers) had also been in the picture under
Jerry Ford.
Bush also extended largesse to those who had assisted him in the election campaign just
concluded. At the top of this list was Governor John Sununu of New Hampshire, who
would have qualified as the modern Nostradamus for his exact prediction of Bush's 9%
margin of victory over Dole in the New Hampshire primary --unless he had helped to
arrange it with vote fraud.