By far the best exposé of the way the US-UK governments have been taken over by rich, powerful families. — S. Felton, Amazon.com, Jan. 2003
Incredibly well-referenced… You will quickly realize that this is not ancient history, but pertains to today’s America. — Al DeReu, keepgoing.org, Spring 2003
Massive, often revelatory research. —Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty, January 2004
Amazon Reviews
This book is amazing, and frightening
Wow. I can’t believe I didn’t read this when it first came out (1994), but perhaps I wasn’t as much into knowing everything about my politicians back then. I did follow GHW Bush’s career, but this book is amazing, and frightening. It is really well researched, documented, and in depth. Just confirms what I already thought I knew about the Bushes, and a whole lot more! I was especially struck by what I perceive to be the parallels between Poppy Bush’s hyperthryroid-induced wildly erratic behavior during his term as President, and Donald Trump’s behavior throughout his presidential campaign, and beyond.
Eye opening
Tarpley was definitely first to write coherently and comprehensively about the Bush family legacy – at a time when Americans were scratching their heads trying to figure out how his son George W. could wind up in the presidency with so little experience running anything – much less the most powerful country in the world.
The author, like Russ Baker in his more recent book about the Bush family, stresses how extremely secretive Bush senior has been about his past – which as Tarpley points out is pretty typical for someone with an extensive history as a covert CIA (before he became CIA director in 1975).
Tarpley starts back with grandfather Prescott Bush and his Nazi connections and the initiation of three generations of Bushes into the secretive Skull and Bones society at Yale – a club for elite families that guarantees them a free pass to either Wall Street or high governmental positions. He goes onto describe the extremely secretive and compex CIA front Bush ran called Zapata Offshore – which according to its charter was an oil exploration and drilling company. However for some reason it seems to have been involved with the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected president of Guatemala in 1954 and other covert operations in Central America and Cuba. Zapata also had the misfortunate of having a lot of its SEC and government filings destroyed in a series of fires.
Tarpley also covers Irangate and evidence suggesting Bush himself was running Iran Contra.
There is a final chapter devoted to Bush senior’s thyroid illness and the sense of the people around him that this explains a period of years (1988 until 1991 when he underwent treatment – he was president for most of this time) when he suffered from uncontrollable rages and extreme emotional volatility.
By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, author of THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE
