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munitions, chemicals, and firearms.
/ Note #b|"A.L. Cole" was useful to the Jupiter Islanders as an executive
of "Readers Digest." In 1965, just after performing a rather dirty favor
for George Bush [which will be discussed in a coming chapter -- ed.], Cole
became chairman of the executive committee of the "Digest," the world's
largest-circulation periodical.
>From the late 1940s, Jupiter Island has served as a center for the
direction of covert action by the U.S. government and, indeed, for the
covert management of the government. Jupiter Island will reappear later on,
in our account of George Bush in the Iran-Contra affair.
======
Target: Washington
George Bush graduated from Yale in 1948. He soon entered the family's
Dresser oil supply concern in Texas. We shall now briefly describe the
forces that descended on Washington, D.C. during those years when Bush,
with the assistance of family and powerful friends, was becoming
"established in business on his own."
>From 1948 to 1950, Prescott Bush's boss Averell Harriman was U.S.
"ambassador-at-large" to Europe. He was a non-military "Theater Commander,"
the administrator of the multi-billion-dollar Marshall Plan, participating
in all military/strategic decision-making by the Anglo-American alliance.
The U.S. secretary of defense, James Forrestal, had become a problem to the
Harrimanites. Forrestal had long been an executive at Dillon Read on Wall
Street. But in recent years he had gone astray. As secretary of the navy in
1944, Forrestal proposed the racial integration of the Navy. As defense
secretary, he pressed for integration in the armed forces and this
eventually became the U.S. policy.
Forrestal opposed the utopians' strategy of appeasement coupled with
brinkmanship. He was simply opposed to communism. On March 28, 1949,
Forrestal was forced out of office and flown on an Air Force plane to
Florida. He was taken to "Hobe Sound" (Jupiter Island), where Robert Lovett
and an army psychiatrist dealt with him. / Note #8
He was flown back to Washington, locked in Walter Reed Army Hospital and
given insulin shock treatments for alleged "mental exhaustion." He was
denied all visitors except his estranged wife and children -- his son had
been Averell Harriman's aide in Moscow. On May 22, Forrestal's body was
found, his bathrobe cord tied tightly around his neck, after he had plunged
from a sixteenth-story hospital window. The chief psychiatrist called the
death a suicide even before any investigation was started. The results of
the Army's inquest were kept secret. Forrestal's diaries were published, 80
percent deleted, after a year of direct government censorship and
rewriting.
- * * * -
North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June 1950, after U.S. Secretary
of State Dean Acheson (Harriman's very close friend) publicly specified
that Korea would not be defended. With a new war on, Harriman came back to
serve as President Truman's adviser, to "oversee national security
affairs."
Harriman replaced Clark Clifford, who had been special counsel to Truman.
Clifford, however, remained close to Harriman and his partners as they
gained more and more power. Clifford later wrote about his cordial
relations with Prescott Bush:
"Prescott Bush ... had become one of my frequent golfing partners in the
fifties, and I had both liked and respected him.... Bush had a splendid
singing voice, and particularly loved quartet singing. In the fifties, he
organized a quartet that included my daughter Joyce.... They would sing in
Washington, and, on occasion, he invited the group to Hobe Sound in Florida
to perform. His son [George], though, had never struck me as a strong or
forceful person. In 1988, he presented himself successfully to the voters
as an outsider -- no small trick for a man whose roots wound through
Connecticut, Yale, Texas oil, the CIA, a patrician background, wealth, and
the Vice Presidency." / Note #9
With Forrestal out of the way, Averell Harriman and Dean Acheson drove to
Leesburg, Virginia, on July 1, 1950, to hire the British-backed U.S. Gen.
George C. Marshall as secretary of defense. At the same time, Prescott's
partner, Robert Lovett, himself became assistant secretary of defense.
Lovett, Marshall, Harriman, and Acheson went to work to unhorse Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in Asia. MacArthur kept Wall
Street's intelligence agencies away from his command, and favored real
independence for the non-white nations. Lovett called for MacArthur's
firing on March 23, 1951, citing MacArthur's insistence on defeating the
Communist Chinese invaders in Korea. MacArthur's famous message, that there
was "no substitute for victory," was read in Congress on April 5; MacArthur
was fired on April 10, 1951.
That September, Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary of defense.
Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual Security Agency, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]