It's the '88 elections, end of the Reagan years.
Rob Price is a Nam vet with an attitude that cost him his Wall Street job and he's scraping along as a consultant. When a government agency recruits him to work in France, he's good with it — his mother was French and he's fluent. The job is more than expected, and he's in deep water fast, but he likes a challenge.
When he meets a Eurasian woman who teaches martial arts it's even better, until he sees what's really happening and becomes inconvenient to his employers. Not taken by surprise, he disappears himself. Then he sets about outing a big dirty Texas outfit in the arms business that's killing inconvenient people like himself. Soon it's dodgeball with live ammo and he's on the run with an attaché case full of black money.
Rob Price is a Nam vet with an attitude that cost him his Wall Street job and he's scraping along as a consultant. When a government agency recruits him to work in France, he's good with it — his mother was French and he's fluent. The job is more than expected, and he's in deep water fast, but he likes a challenge.
When he meets a Eurasian woman who teaches martial arts it's even better, until he sees what's really happening and becomes inconvenient to his employers. Not taken by surprise, he disappears himself. Then he sets about outing a big dirty Texas outfit in the arms business that's killing inconvenient people like himself. Soon it's dodgeball with live ammo and he's on the run with an attaché case full of black money.
F TRAIN SUNDAY
RG COMMENT:Hm. I don't think Trudeau missed the point about social currency or power being a political gift; he had that himself. I just don't think he gave a damn, and that (mutual) animosity went way back. In his Chautauqua interview in 2006, he said that his very first political cartoon was against George W in some student dust-up at Yale.
The PBS series on the Roosevelts reminds us that if we don’t have royalty, we do sometimes have a First Family. It’s the Clintons in the news lately, but it’s the Bushes who have staying power. Jeb Bush may be the most humane, civil and generally enlightened of his formidable clan, but as a possible president, he brings more than meets the eye. A respected Florida governor, he has executive experience (Under BushBama we’ve seen the importance of that), and his Mexican-born wife would be a political asset if his party came to its senses. But the “W” legacy is only the tip of a large unnerving iceberg. The Bush family is as prominent and powerful as the Roosevelts were, and has produced two modern presidents, but the baggage is staggering.
Researching a thriller set circa the infamous Iran/Contra “arms-for-hostages” deal, I kept coming across W’s father, G.H.W. Bush, vice president under Ronald Reagan and former head of CIA. That deal put Reagan in the White House, and Bush was a power in the CIA that concocted it. Looking into him further, I was struck by his bold move to Texas directly on graduating Yale.
Texas was new ground for a man with deep New England roots whose father was a Connecticut senator. In the land of the tumbling tumble weed, you could get a fifteen year sentence for twenty grams of that other kind of weed back in the 1950s (Candy Barr, stripper). You might drag a black man to death behind your pickup not long ago, or arrange a hit on just about anyone without worrying much about serious investigation if you were connected. Bush Senior was no carpetbagger, and he was a quick fit, moving into the oil business while working with CIA in various roles that conveniently involved prominent oil Arabs. GHW Bush, a.k.a. “Poppy” is aged, but still head of the clan. America being a country where history is no longer taught in any serious way, media lemmings have presented the retired Poppy as kind of a fun guy, be he in wheelchair or parachute. In fact he is more like the spook terrorist in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, also in a wheelchair, with a gun under his blanket.
Having recently written a novel about thoroughbred racing, I was aware of the profound respect animal breeders have for bloodlines. Heredity is huge, and we are a mammalian species. The Bushes are no exception. They have big balls, but that development is fairly recent. Poppy’s father, Senator Prescott Bush, is often seen as the man who lifted the family from relative upper middle class obscurity back in the 1930s, but it was his marriage to the daughter of a brilliant St. Louis banker-businessman, George Herbert Walker, that changed the game. Walker came from a slave-owning Missouri family, was educated at an English Jesuit school, and had a kind of talent in banking and business that was never evident in the Bush family. In thoroughbred breeding, Poppy Bush would be an “outcross,” in which two unrelated lines avoid the perils of inbreeding and create synergy.
Until marrying Dorothy Walker, Prescott Bush was a popular, athletic Yale man known for his confidence, looks, social skills, musical talent and daring. He was involved in the Skull and Bones theft of Geronimo’s skull, and a standout Whiffenpoof, a founder of the Yale Glee Club. But aside from solid success, nothing remarkable could be expected of him. The family went back to colonial times and had never greatly distinguished itself.
After marrying Walker’s daughter, and guided by his father in law, Prescott Bush quickly rose to a dominant role in several large banks, and if anything his college daring was enhanced. In 1933 he led a failed coup to remove FDR from office. This amazing scheme was outed by Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who was wanted as a front man. He did the right thing, and exposed it. A congressional investigation found Butler’s allegations “credible” but he paid whistleblower dues and his career did not prosper.
The lesson is this: discreet and meticulous over generations (“W” excepted) the Bushes stay out of trouble, even when playing with fire at the highest level. Prescott Bush was also daring in finance: his banks aided Hitler in his rise to power, and continued doing business with members the Nazi party into WW2, until FDR ended it in 1942. The Dulles brother's law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, handled the problem for Bush, and he emerged unharmed to be elected to the Senate ten years later.
His son, the lovable Poppy, brought that same smooth bankerly style to his oil/banking/intelligence career. Even as the father was continuing with the Nazis, his son, fresh out of Andover, volunteered for military service and saw action in a torpedo bomber. After the war he attended Yale and followed his father into Skull and Bones, which helped staff the OSS, then CIA, of which he was later head. He remained involved in intelligence most of his life, profitably combining oil, banking and espionage activities, and forming Zapata Oil with a CIA associate. An effective, hard working bureaucrat and vice president, Poppy succeeded Reagan as President, but was tainted by the Iran-Contra scandal, re which only Dan Rather of CBS dared confront him. (Like General Butler, he paid for that.) But Poppy’s long close involvement with the bin Laden family and other prominent oil-Muslims, Saudis in particular remained largely unknown.
Most damning, Poppy also played a crucial role forming legendary BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), working with a variety of Muslims, as documented by Joseph Trento, multiple Pulitzer nominee. (“ . . . with the official blessing of George H.W. Bush as head of the CIA...”) BCCI was a money laundry for CIA and drug merchants, toppled only after years of international effort. In the process, French investigators discovered Poppy had a personal account with them, and long-term connections with its founders and owners, notably a former head of Saudi intelligence. His ability to combine government service with self-interest was remarkable and probably unique.
His son “W” was less adroit, but became president after failing, first in the oil business (bailed out by Saudi friends) and then as a ball-club owner. Despite this thin record, he was elected Governor of Texas, because he was politically gifted, a cheerleader and social power at Yale. Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau, who overlapped him at Yale, described him in Rolling Stone as “another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries.” W was head of the Armour Council, to which Trudeau was elected as a freshman “under the mistaken impression it had something to do with student government. In fact, it was the social committee… ”
Trudeau didn’t quite grasp that social power is a political gift. Lacking the Bush work ethic, W came off as an easy-going good old boy, and he had a real talent for getting elected. A slow-tracker in a fast-track family, he knew his place and took directions from smarter and more ambitious men, willing to lie about serious matters and start an oil war. It was hugely profitable for certain corporations, and the war debt was concealed by creative bookkeeping. It also led to an unprecedented collapse of US prestige abroad, and internal legal and economic consequences we are still living with.
This then is some of the baggage that Jeb Bush brings. And the sad fact is, he may be the pick of the litter in 2016, simply because he is not a fool. Would he be very different from Hillary? Maybe not. Both of them are far superior to Mr. Obama when it comes to cutting a deal without giving away the farm, both are centrists, and if anything, Mrs. Clinton is suspect in foreign affairs, and not only for aggressiveness.
Not because of Benghazi, which was the usual screw-up followed by cover-up, but because of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. It was amusing that she was caught saying “Fuck the EU”. It’s the 21st century, people say these things. It’s not amusing that she’s married to a dual-citizenship neocon billionaire said to have an interest in Ukraine. It is nothing less than amazing that Mrs. Clinton stuck with her despite her association with Dick Cheney, and truly awesome that she’s still around after her truly incredible blunder into Ukraine just when we needed Russian cooperation in the mid-east.
Looking at Mrs. Clinton and Jeb Bush, I don’t see a lot of difference, unless he continues the silly Republican Children’s Crusade against women’s rights. Not much to choose from there. How do we get candidates like this? Or McCain, or Romney, or Palin? Gresham’s Law states that the bad money drives out the good. With SCOTUS opening the floodgates to unlimited political money, we have finalized a kind of political Gresham’s law, by which the bad candidates drive out the good.
And over the last few decades we’ve had the Bush clan rather than the Roosevelts, and they may well become the first family to put three people into the Oval Office. All men, of course. Texans.
Researching a thriller set circa the infamous Iran/Contra “arms-for-hostages” deal, I kept coming across W’s father, G.H.W. Bush, vice president under Ronald Reagan and former head of CIA. That deal put Reagan in the White House, and Bush was a power in the CIA that concocted it. Looking into him further, I was struck by his bold move to Texas directly on graduating Yale.
Texas was new ground for a man with deep New England roots whose father was a Connecticut senator. In the land of the tumbling tumble weed, you could get a fifteen year sentence for twenty grams of that other kind of weed back in the 1950s (Candy Barr, stripper). You might drag a black man to death behind your pickup not long ago, or arrange a hit on just about anyone without worrying much about serious investigation if you were connected. Bush Senior was no carpetbagger, and he was a quick fit, moving into the oil business while working with CIA in various roles that conveniently involved prominent oil Arabs. GHW Bush, a.k.a. “Poppy” is aged, but still head of the clan. America being a country where history is no longer taught in any serious way, media lemmings have presented the retired Poppy as kind of a fun guy, be he in wheelchair or parachute. In fact he is more like the spook terrorist in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, also in a wheelchair, with a gun under his blanket.
Having recently written a novel about thoroughbred racing, I was aware of the profound respect animal breeders have for bloodlines. Heredity is huge, and we are a mammalian species. The Bushes are no exception. They have big balls, but that development is fairly recent. Poppy’s father, Senator Prescott Bush, is often seen as the man who lifted the family from relative upper middle class obscurity back in the 1930s, but it was his marriage to the daughter of a brilliant St. Louis banker-businessman, George Herbert Walker, that changed the game. Walker came from a slave-owning Missouri family, was educated at an English Jesuit school, and had a kind of talent in banking and business that was never evident in the Bush family. In thoroughbred breeding, Poppy Bush would be an “outcross,” in which two unrelated lines avoid the perils of inbreeding and create synergy.
Until marrying Dorothy Walker, Prescott Bush was a popular, athletic Yale man known for his confidence, looks, social skills, musical talent and daring. He was involved in the Skull and Bones theft of Geronimo’s skull, and a standout Whiffenpoof, a founder of the Yale Glee Club. But aside from solid success, nothing remarkable could be expected of him. The family went back to colonial times and had never greatly distinguished itself.
After marrying Walker’s daughter, and guided by his father in law, Prescott Bush quickly rose to a dominant role in several large banks, and if anything his college daring was enhanced. In 1933 he led a failed coup to remove FDR from office. This amazing scheme was outed by Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who was wanted as a front man. He did the right thing, and exposed it. A congressional investigation found Butler’s allegations “credible” but he paid whistleblower dues and his career did not prosper.
The lesson is this: discreet and meticulous over generations (“W” excepted) the Bushes stay out of trouble, even when playing with fire at the highest level. Prescott Bush was also daring in finance: his banks aided Hitler in his rise to power, and continued doing business with members the Nazi party into WW2, until FDR ended it in 1942. The Dulles brother's law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, handled the problem for Bush, and he emerged unharmed to be elected to the Senate ten years later.
His son, the lovable Poppy, brought that same smooth bankerly style to his oil/banking/intelligence career. Even as the father was continuing with the Nazis, his son, fresh out of Andover, volunteered for military service and saw action in a torpedo bomber. After the war he attended Yale and followed his father into Skull and Bones, which helped staff the OSS, then CIA, of which he was later head. He remained involved in intelligence most of his life, profitably combining oil, banking and espionage activities, and forming Zapata Oil with a CIA associate. An effective, hard working bureaucrat and vice president, Poppy succeeded Reagan as President, but was tainted by the Iran-Contra scandal, re which only Dan Rather of CBS dared confront him. (Like General Butler, he paid for that.) But Poppy’s long close involvement with the bin Laden family and other prominent oil-Muslims, Saudis in particular remained largely unknown.
Most damning, Poppy also played a crucial role forming legendary BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), working with a variety of Muslims, as documented by Joseph Trento, multiple Pulitzer nominee. (“ . . . with the official blessing of George H.W. Bush as head of the CIA...”) BCCI was a money laundry for CIA and drug merchants, toppled only after years of international effort. In the process, French investigators discovered Poppy had a personal account with them, and long-term connections with its founders and owners, notably a former head of Saudi intelligence. His ability to combine government service with self-interest was remarkable and probably unique.
His son “W” was less adroit, but became president after failing, first in the oil business (bailed out by Saudi friends) and then as a ball-club owner. Despite this thin record, he was elected Governor of Texas, because he was politically gifted, a cheerleader and social power at Yale. Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau, who overlapped him at Yale, described him in Rolling Stone as “another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries.” W was head of the Armour Council, to which Trudeau was elected as a freshman “under the mistaken impression it had something to do with student government. In fact, it was the social committee… ”
Trudeau didn’t quite grasp that social power is a political gift. Lacking the Bush work ethic, W came off as an easy-going good old boy, and he had a real talent for getting elected. A slow-tracker in a fast-track family, he knew his place and took directions from smarter and more ambitious men, willing to lie about serious matters and start an oil war. It was hugely profitable for certain corporations, and the war debt was concealed by creative bookkeeping. It also led to an unprecedented collapse of US prestige abroad, and internal legal and economic consequences we are still living with.
This then is some of the baggage that Jeb Bush brings. And the sad fact is, he may be the pick of the litter in 2016, simply because he is not a fool. Would he be very different from Hillary? Maybe not. Both of them are far superior to Mr. Obama when it comes to cutting a deal without giving away the farm, both are centrists, and if anything, Mrs. Clinton is suspect in foreign affairs, and not only for aggressiveness.
Not because of Benghazi, which was the usual screw-up followed by cover-up, but because of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. It was amusing that she was caught saying “Fuck the EU”. It’s the 21st century, people say these things. It’s not amusing that she’s married to a dual-citizenship neocon billionaire said to have an interest in Ukraine. It is nothing less than amazing that Mrs. Clinton stuck with her despite her association with Dick Cheney, and truly awesome that she’s still around after her truly incredible blunder into Ukraine just when we needed Russian cooperation in the mid-east.
Looking at Mrs. Clinton and Jeb Bush, I don’t see a lot of difference, unless he continues the silly Republican Children’s Crusade against women’s rights. Not much to choose from there. How do we get candidates like this? Or McCain, or Romney, or Palin? Gresham’s Law states that the bad money drives out the good. With SCOTUS opening the floodgates to unlimited political money, we have finalized a kind of political Gresham’s law, by which the bad candidates drive out the good.
And over the last few decades we’ve had the Bush clan rather than the Roosevelts, and they may well become the first family to put three people into the Oval Office. All men, of course. Texans.
Triumphs Tainted With Blood
Revelations of blood doping at the Games in Los Angeles last summer marred the achievements
of some of America's best Olympic cyclists
BY BJARNE ROSTAING; ROBERT SULLIVAN
"Anybody who tells me that removing athletes' blood or giving someone else's blood for transfusion
into an athlete to try to improve performance is an O.K. thing to do—he's just nuts."
Originally Posted: January 21, 1985
Revelations of blood doping at the Games in Los Angeles last summer marred the achievements
of some of America's best Olympic cyclists
BY BJARNE ROSTAING; ROBERT SULLIVAN
"Anybody who tells me that removing athletes' blood or giving someone else's blood for transfusion
into an athlete to try to improve performance is an O.K. thing to do—he's just nuts."
Originally Posted: January 21, 1985
Bjarne (Barney) Rostaing grew up in Connecticut with leftist parents but his later thinking was formed by free jazz and the sixties. He has taught at two universities, worked in Army intelligence, and was an editor at The Soho Weekly News.
As a journalist he exposed the 1984 U.S. Olympic blood doping scandal in Sports Illustrated and travelled Europe extensively. Later he worked with Uma Thurman in KISS DADDY GOODNIGHT and won an AFI first place award for a sports video. After a decade in financial software he returned to writing.
Previous books include PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (with Brian De Palma, Dell) and BREEDERS (Coolgrove). He recently finished IRON CROSSING, a historical thriller based on the mysterious final voyage of Germany ’s flagship liner Bremen in 1939.
As a journalist he exposed the 1984 U.S. Olympic blood doping scandal in Sports Illustrated and travelled Europe extensively. Later he worked with Uma Thurman in KISS DADDY GOODNIGHT and won an AFI first place award for a sports video. After a decade in financial software he returned to writing.
Previous books include PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (with Brian De Palma, Dell) and BREEDERS (Coolgrove). He recently finished IRON CROSSING, a historical thriller based on the mysterious final voyage of Germany ’s flagship liner Bremen in 1939.