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already been made that he would join the service and get quite far away
from where he had been. For reasons of family (which will be discussed in
Chapter 7 on Skull and Bones) there was a very special niche waiting for
him in naval aviation.
There was one serious hitch in this plan. It was illegal. Though he would
be 18 years old on June 12, he would not have the two years of college the
Navy required for its aviators.
Well, if you had an "urgent" problem, perhaps the law could be simply "set
aside, for you and you alone," ahead of all the 5 million poor slobs who
had to go in the mud with the infantry or swab some stinking deck --
especially if your private school's president was currently Secretary of
War (Henry Stimson), if your father's banking partner was currently
Assistant Secretary of War for Air (Robert Lovett), and if your father had
launched the career of the current Assistant Navy Secretary for Air
(Artemus Gates).
And it was done.
As a Bush-authorized version puts it, "One wonders why the Navy relaxed its
two years of college requirement for flight training in George Bush's case.
He had built an outstanding record at school as a scholar [sic], athlete
and campus leader, but so had countless thousands of other youths.
"Yet it was George Bush who appeared to be the only beneficiary of this
rule-waiving, and thus he eventually emerged as the youngest pilot in the
Navy -- a fact that he can still boast about and because of which he
enjoyed a certain celebrity during the war." / Note #3 / Note #4
Notes
21. Spoke on condition of non-attribution.
22. Hyams, "op. cit.," pp. 23-24.
30. See "New York Times," Nov. 29, 1971.
32. Allis, "op. cit.," p. 512.
33. "Newsweek," August 9, 1943; "Boston Globe," July 22, 1943.
34. Green, "op. cit.," page 28.
"Plut aux dieux que ce fut le dernier de ses crimes!
-- Racine, "Britannicus"
George Bush has always traded shamelessly on his alleged record as a naval
aviator during the Second World War in the Pacific theatre. During the 1964
Senate campaign in Texas against Senator Ralph Yarborough, Bush televised a
grainy old film which depicted young George being rescued at sea by the
crew of the submarine "USS Finnback" after his Avenger torpedo bomber was
hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire during a bombing raid on the island of
Chichi Jima on September 2, 1944. That film, retrieved from the Navy
archives, backfired when it was put on the air too many times, eventually
becoming something of a maladroit cliche.
Bush's campaign literature has always celebrated his alleged military
exploits and the Distinguished Flying Cross he received. As we become
increasingly familiar with the power of the Brown Brothers Harriman/Skull
and Bones network working for Senator Prescott Bush, we will learn to
become increasingly skeptical of such official accolades and of the
official accounts on which they are premised.
During Bush's Gulf war adventure of 1990-91, the adulation of Bush's
ostensible warrior prowess reached levels that were previously considered
characteristic of openly totalitarian and militaristic regimes. Late in
1990, after Bush had committed himself irrevocably to his campaign of
bombing and savagery against Iraq, hack writer Joe Hyams completed an
authorized account of George Bush at war. This was entitled "Flight of the
Avenger," and appeared during the time of the Middle East conflagration
that was the product of Bush's obsessions.
Hyams's work had the unmistakeable imprimatur of the regime: Not just
George, but also Barbara had been interviewed during its preparation, and
its adulatory tone placed this squalid text squarely within the "red
Studebaker" school of political hagiography.
The appearance of such a book at such a time is suggestive of the practice
of the most infamous twentieth-century dictatorships, in which the figure
of the strong man, Fuehrer, duce, or vozhd as he might be called, has been
used for the transmission of symbolic-allegorical directives to the subject
population. Was fascist Italy seeking to assert its economic autarky in
food production in the face of trade sanctions by the League of Nations?
Then a film would be produced by the MINCULPOP (the Ministry of Popular
Culture, or propaganda) depicting Mussolini indefatigably harvesting grain.
Was Nazi Germany in the final stages of preparation of a military campaign
against a neighboring state? If so, Goebbels would orchestrate a cascade of
magazine articles and best-selling pulp evoking the glories of Hitler in
the trenches of 1914-18. Closer to our own time, Leonid Brezhnev sought to
aliment his own personality cult with a little book called "Malaya Zemlya,"
an account of his war experiences which was used by his propagandists to
motivate his promotion to Marshal of the U.S.S.R. and the erection of a
statue in his honor during his own lifetime. This is the tradition to which [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]